text,label
"Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. 
In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI. 
The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI. 
But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election. 
The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI. 
The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton. 
The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public. 
The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women. 
James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch. 
Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server. 
Senator Harry Reid has sent Comey a letter accusing him of violating the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is a nice idea that has as much relevance in the age of Obama as the Tenth Amendment. But the cable news spectrum quickly filled with media hacks glancing at the Wikipedia article on the Hatch Act under the table while accusing the FBI director of one of the most awkward conspiracies against Hillary ever. 
If James Comey is really out to hurt Hillary, he picked one hell of a strange way to do it. 
Not too long ago Democrats were breathing a sigh of relief when he gave Hillary Clinton a pass in a prominent public statement. If he really were out to elect Trump by keeping the email scandal going, why did he trash the investigation? Was he on the payroll of House Republicans and the KGB back then and playing it coy or was it a sudden development where Vladimir Putin and Paul Ryan talked him into taking a look at Anthony Weiner’s computer? 
Either Comey is the most cunning FBI director that ever lived or he’s just awkwardly trying to navigate a political mess that has trapped him between a DOJ leadership whose political futures are tied to Hillary’s victory and his own bureau whose apolitical agents just want to be allowed to do their jobs. 
The only truly mysterious thing is why Hillary and her associates decided to go to war with a respected Federal agency. Most Americans like the FBI while Hillary Clinton enjoys a 60% unfavorable rating. 
And it’s an interesting question. 
Hillary’s old strategy was to lie and deny that the FBI even had a criminal investigation underway. Instead her associates insisted that it was a security review. The FBI corrected her and she shrugged it off. But the old breezy denial approach has given way to a savage assault on the FBI. 
Pretending that nothing was wrong was a bad strategy, but it was a better one that picking a fight with the FBI while lunatic Clinton associates try to claim that the FBI is really the KGB. 
There are two possible explanations. 
Hillary Clinton might be arrogant enough to lash out at the FBI now that she believes that victory is near. The same kind of hubris that led her to plan her victory fireworks display could lead her to declare a war on the FBI for irritating her during the final miles of her campaign. 
But the other explanation is that her people panicked. 
Going to war with the FBI is not the behavior of a smart and focused presidential campaign. It’s an act of desperation. When a presidential candidate decides that her only option is to try and destroy the credibility of the FBI, that’s not hubris, it’s fear of what the FBI might be about to reveal about her. 
During the original FBI investigation, Hillary Clinton was confident that she could ride it out. And she had good reason for believing that. But that Hillary Clinton is gone. In her place is a paranoid wreck. Within a short space of time the “positive” Clinton campaign promising to unite the country has been replaced by a desperate and flailing operation that has focused all its energy on fighting the FBI. 
There’s only one reason for such bizarre behavior. 
The Clinton campaign has decided that an FBI investigation of the latest batch of emails poses a threat to its survival. And so it’s gone all in on fighting the FBI. It’s an unprecedented step born of fear. It’s hard to know whether that fear is justified. But the existence of that fear already tells us a whole lot. 
Clinton loyalists rigged the old investigation. They knew the outcome ahead of time as well as they knew the debate questions. Now suddenly they are no longer in control. And they are afraid. 
You can smell the fear. 
The FBI has wiretaps from the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. It’s finding new emails all the time. And Clintonworld panicked. The spinmeisters of Clintonworld have claimed that the email scandal is just so much smoke without fire. All that’s here is the appearance of impropriety without any of the substance. But this isn’t how you react to smoke. It’s how you respond to a fire. 
The misguided assault on the FBI tells us that Hillary Clinton and her allies are afraid of a revelation bigger than the fundamental illegality of her email setup. The email setup was a preemptive cover up. The Clinton campaign has panicked badly out of the belief, right or wrong, that whatever crime the illegal setup was meant to cover up is at risk of being exposed. 
The Clintons have weathered countless scandals over the years. Whatever they are protecting this time around is bigger than the usual corruption, bribery, sexual assaults and abuses of power that have followed them around throughout the years. This is bigger and more damaging than any of the allegations that have already come out. And they don’t want FBI investigators anywhere near it. 
The campaign against Comey is pure intimidation. It’s also a warning. Any senior FBI people who value their careers are being warned to stay away. The Democrats are closing ranks around their nominee against the FBI. It’s an ugly and unprecedented scene. It may also be their last stand. 
Hillary Clinton has awkwardly wound her way through numerous scandals in just this election cycle. But she’s never shown fear or desperation before. Now that has changed. Whatever she is afraid of, it lies buried in her emails with Huma Abedin. And it can bring her down like nothing else has.  ",FAKE
"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
There are two fundamental truths in this world: Paul Ryan desperately wants to be president. And Paul Ryan will never be president. Today proved it. 
In a particularly staggering example of political cowardice, Paul Ryan re-re-re-reversed course and announced that he was back on the Trump Train after all. This was an aboutface from where he was a few weeks ago. He had previously declared he would not be supporting or defending Trump after a tape was made public in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. Suddenly, Ryan was appearing at a pro-Trump rally and boldly declaring that he already sent in his vote to make him President of the United States. It was a surreal moment. The figurehead of the Republican Party dosed himself in gasoline, got up on a stage on a chilly afternoon in Wisconsin, and lit a match. . @SpeakerRyan says he voted for @realDonaldTrump : “Republicans, it is time to come home” https://t.co/VyTT49YvoE pic.twitter.com/wCvSCg4a5I 
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 5, 2016 
The Democratic Party couldn’t have asked for a better moment of film. Ryan’s chances of ever becoming president went down to zero in an instant. In the wreckage Trump is to leave behind in his wake, those who cravenly backed his campaign will not recover. If Ryan’s career manages to limp all the way to 2020, then the DNC will have this tape locked and loaded to be used in every ad until Election Day. 
The ringing endorsement of the man he clearly hates on a personal level speaks volumes about his own spinelessness. Ryan has postured himself as a “principled” conservative, and one uncomfortable with Trump’s unapologetic bigotry and sexism. However, when push came to shove, Paul Ryan – like many of his colleagues – turned into a sniveling appeaser. After all his lofty tak about conviction, his principles were a house of cards and collapsed with the slightest breeze. 
What’s especially bizarre is how close Ryan came to making it through unscathed. For months the Speaker of the House refused to comment on Trump at all. His strategy seemed to be to keep his head down, pretend Trump didn’t exist, and hope that nobody remembered what happened in 2016. Now, just days away from the election, he screwed it all up. 
If 2016’s very ugly election has done any good it’s by exposing the utter cowardice of the Republicans who once feigned moral courage. A reality television star spit on them, hijacked their party, insulted their wives, and got every last one of them to kneel before him. What a turn of events. 
Featured image via Twitter",FAKE
"U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Monday that he will stop in Paris later this week, amid criticism that no top American officials attended Sunday’s unity march against terrorism.

Kerry said he expects to arrive in Paris Thursday evening, as he heads home after a week abroad. He said he will fly to France at the conclusion of a series of meetings scheduled for Thursday in Sofia, Bulgaria. He plans to meet the next day with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and President Francois Hollande, then return to Washington.

The visit by Kerry, who has family and childhood ties to the country and speaks fluent French, could address some of the criticism that the United States snubbed France in its darkest hour in many years.

The French press on Monday was filled with questions about why neither President Obama nor Kerry attended Sunday’s march, as about 40 leaders of other nations did. Obama was said to have stayed away because his own security needs can be taxing on a country, and Kerry had prior commitments.

Among roughly 40 leaders who did attend was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no stranger to intense security, who marched beside Hollande through the city streets. The highest ranking U.S. officials attending the march were Jane Hartley, the ambassador to France, and Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was in Paris for meetings with law enforcement officials but did not participate in the march.

Kerry spent Sunday at a business summit hosted by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. The United States is eager for India to relax stringent laws that function as barriers to foreign investment and hopes Modi’s government will act to open the huge Indian market for more American businesses.

In a news conference, Kerry brushed aside criticism that the United States had not sent a more senior official to Paris as “quibbling a little bit.” He noted that many staffers of the American Embassy in Paris attended the march, including the ambassador. He said he had wanted to be present at the march himself but could not because of his prior commitments in India.

“But that is why I am going there on the way home, to make it crystal clear how passionately we feel about the events that have taken place there,” he said.

“And I don’t think the people of France have any doubts about America’s understanding of what happened, of our personal sense of loss and our deep commitment to the people of France in this moment of trauma.”",REAL
"— Kaydee King (@KaydeeKing) November 9, 2016 The lesson from tonight's Dem losses: Time for Democrats to start listening to the voters. Stop running the same establishment candidates. 
— People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) November 9, 2016 If Dems didn't want a tight race they shouldn't have worked against Bernie. 
— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) November 9, 2016 
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who was one of Hillary Clinton’s most outspoken surrogates during the contentious Democratic primary, blamed Clinton’s poor performance on Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has so far received a negligible number of votes nationally, saying Stein was the Ralph Nader of 2016 in preventing a Clinton victory. The account @BerniesTeachers threw Krugman’s analysis back in his face. Your candidate was the issue. Take responsibility. https://t.co/KHyOuUSrFS 
— Teachers for Bernie (@BerniesTeachers) November 9, 2016 
Ana Navarro, a Republican who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, summed up the preposterous nature of the 2016 presidential election in this tweet: GOP nominated the only damn candidate who could lose to Hillary Clinton. Democrats nominated the only damn candidate who could lose to Trump 
— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) November 9, 2016 
Popular left-wing Facebook page The Other 98%, which was pro-Sanders during the primary, responded to Trump’s surge by simply posting a meme of Sanders’ face with the text “All this could’ve been avoided. Thanks for nothing, DNC!” The meme has been shared almost 15,000 times in less than an hour: 
Posted by The Other 98% on Tuesday, November 8, 2016 
While Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton just before the Democratic National Convention in July, many of his supporters remained adamant in their refusal to support the DNC-anointed candidate, pointing to WikiLeaks’ revelations that top officials at the DNC had been working behind the scenes to tip the scales in Clinton’s favor by coordinating with media figures to circulate anti-Sanders narratives. 
Rather than attribute a potential Trump presidency to the GOP nominee’s perceived popularity among voters, the closeness of this election could be credited to Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable ratings. According to RealClearPolitics, anywhere between 51 and 57 percent of voters had a negative opinion of the Democratic nominee. 
As of 11 PM Eastern, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin remain too close to call. Clinton has 197 electoral votes to Trump’s 187. 

Zach Cartwright is an activist and author from Richmond, Virginia. He enjoys writing about politics, government, and the media. Send him an email at [email protected]",FAKE
"It's primary day in New York and front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are leading in the polls.

Trump is now vowing to win enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination and prevent a contested convention. But Sens.Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Ohio Gov. John Kasich and aren't giving up just yet.

A big win in New York could tip the scales for both the Republican and Democratic front-runners in this year's race for the White House. Clinton and Trump have each suffered losses in recent contests, shifting the momentum to their rivals.

""We have won eight out of the last nine caucuses and primaries! Cheer!"" Sanders recently told supporters.

While wins in New York for Trump and Clinton are expected, the margins of those victories are also important.

Trump needs to capture more than 50 percent of the vote statewide if he wants to be positioned to win all of the state's 95 GOP delegates. That would put him one step closer to avoiding a contested convention.

""We've got to vote and you know Cruz is way, way down in the polls,"" Trump urged supporters.

Meanwhile, Sanders is hoping for a close race in the Empire State. A loss by 10 points means he'll need to win 80 percent of the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination.

Despite a predicted loss in New York, Cruz hasn't lost momentum. He's hoping to sweep up more delegates this weekend while he's talking about how he can win in November.

""Because if I'm the nominee, we win the General Election,"" Cruz promised his supporters. ""We're beating Hillary in the key swing states, we're beating Hillary with Independents, we're beating Hillary with young people.""

For now, Cruz, Kasich, and Sanders have all moved on from New York to other states. Trump and Clinton are the only two staying in their home state to watch the results come in.",REAL
"Share This Baylee Luciani (left), Screenshot of what Baylee caught on FaceTime (right) 
The closest Baylee Luciani could get to her boyfriend, who’s attending college in Austin, was through video online chat. The couple had regular “dates” this way to bridge the 200-mile distance between them. However, the endearing arrangement quickly came to an end after his FaceTime was left on and caught something that left his girlfriend horrified. 
Baylee had been discussing regular things with her boyfriend, Yale Gerstein, who was on the other side of the screen on an otherwise average evening. This video chat was not unlike all the others she had with Yale from his apartment near Austin Community College until the 19-year-old girlfriend heard some scratching sounds after FaceTime had been left on. 
According to KRON , Baylee was mid-conversation with Yale when scratches at the door caught both of their attention and he got up from his bed, where the computer was, to see who was at his door. He barely turned the handle to open in when masked men entered the room and beat Yale’s face in and slammed him down on his bed while shoving a pistol in his cheek. The intruders didn’t seem to know or care that FaceTime was still on and Baylee’s face, seen in the corner, was watching everything, terrified that she was about to see her boyfriend murdered in front of her, as she watched him fight for his life. 
Admitting that she first thought it was a joke, seconds later, she came to the horrid realization that he was being robbed and called her dad, who was at home with her in Dallas, into the room. “I was scared, because they were saying I’m going to blow your head off, I’m going to kill you,” Baylee explained along with the chilling feeling she got when the intruder finally realized the video chat was running and looked right at her in the camera. “I’m like wow… seriously watching an armed robbery happen to somebody that I care about,” she added. Screengrabs of intruder forcing Yale down on his bed while Baylee and her father watch on FaceTime in horror 
With a clear view of at least one intruder’s face, Baylee began taking screenshots of the suspect in the act as she and her dad called the police to report what was going on. She got the pictures right in time since, seconds later, the intruder decided to disconnect the computer as he and the suspects took off with thousands of dollars worth of Yale’s music equipment. Although the boyfriend’s life was spared in the traumatizing ordeal for the two of them, he said that the thieves took something from him that can’t be replaced. 
“I had just finished my first album as a solo artist,” Yale said. “That’s all lost,” since they took the recordings on the equipment, which means nothing to the thieves and everything to the victim. It’s not often that you hear of FaceTime solving crimes or potentially saving lives, which is what happened in this case. Although it was difficult to watch, Baylee, being there through technology, was an instrumental part in protecting Yale, who hopefully learned that he better take advantage of Texas’ great gun laws and arm himself with more than just a computer.",FAKE
"A Czech stockbroker who saved more than 650 Jewish children from Nazi Germany has died at the age of 106. Dubbed “Britain’s Schindler,” Nicholas Winton arranged to transport Jewish youngsters from Prague after Germany annexed Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Though the children were originally set to arrive in Britain by plane, the German invasion forced Winton to transport them by train through Germany before they eventually reached England by boat. Winton arranged eight trains, known as the Kindertransports (children’s transports), to evacuate the children, and died on the anniversary of the 1939 departure of the one carrying the largest number of children: 241. Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for his efforts, despite keeping it secret for nearly 50 years.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made some inaccurate claims during an NBC “commander-in-chief” forum on military and veterans issues:

• Clinton wrongly claimed Trump supported the war in Iraq after it started, while Trump was wrong, once again, in saying he was against the war before it started.

• Trump said that President Obama set a “certain date” for withdrawing troops from Iraq, when that date was set before Obama was sworn in.

• Trump said that Obama’s visits to China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba were “the first time in the history, the storied history of Air Force One” when “high officials” of a host country did not appear to greet the president. Not true.

• Clinton said that Trump supports privatizing the Veterans Health Administration. That’s false. Trump said he supports allowing veterans to seek care at either public or private hospitals.

• Trump said Clinton made “a terrible mistake on Libya” when she was secretary of State. But, at the time, Trump also supported U.S. action that led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power.

• Trump cherry-picked Clinton’s words when he claimed Clinton said “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” Clinton had said the problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs were not as “widespread” as some Republicans claimed, but she went on to acknowledge problems, including the issue of wait times for doctors.

The forum, sponsored by NBC News and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, was held Sept. 7 at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. Today show host Matt Lauer, and members of the military and veterans in the audience, questioned the candidates separately.

Trump said he “was totally against the war in Iraq,” while Clinton claimed that he supported the Iraq War before and after it started. The facts don’t support either candidate’s strong assertions.

Our review of Trump’s statements before and after the Iraq War started found no evidence that Trump opposed the war before it started. In fact, he expressed mild support for invading Iraq when asked about it on the Howard Stern radio show on Sept. 11, 2002 — about six months before the war started.

Stern asked Trump if he supported a war with Iraq, and Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so.”

In the NBC commander in chief forum, Trump cited an Esquire article that appeared in August 2004 to show his opposition to the war. But that article appeared 17 months after the war started.

As for Clinton, who as a senator voted in October 2002 to authorize the war in Iraq, the Democratic nominee claimed that Trump “supported it before it happened, he supported it as it was happening and he is on record as supporting it after it happened.”

But just as there is no evidence that Trump opposed the Iraq War before it started, the Clinton campaign offered no evidence that Trump supported the war “after it happened.”

The Clinton campaign cited Trump’s interview on March 21, 2003, with Neil Cavuto of Fox Business just two days after the war started.

Cavuto asked Trump about the impact of the war on the stock market. Trump said the war “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint,” and he predicted the market will “go up like a rocket” after the war. But Cavuto does not ask Trump whether the U.S. should have gone to war with Iraq or whether he supports the war, and Trump doesn’t offer an opinion.

As early as July 2003, Trump expressed concern on Hardball with Chris Matthews about money being spent in Iraq rather than in the U.S. Two months later, Trump told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, “I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq.”

Clinton invited her audience to read Trump’s comments on the Iraq War. They can read our timeline, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War.”

Trump said President Obama set a “certain date” for withdrawing troops from Iraq, but that date was actually set by President George W. Bush.

NBC’s Matt Lauer asked Trump about his tendency to respond, when pushed for details on his military proposals, that he’s not going to give details because he wants to be “unpredictable.” Trump responded, “Absolutely,” and went on to criticize Obama for revealing the withdrawal date.

As we said then, Republicans and Democrats disagree on whether Obama or Bush is to blame for withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. But that date was set when Bush signed the Status of Forces Agreement on Dec. 14, 2008. It said: “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

In the NBC forum, Trump also called the withdrawal of troops “a terrible decision.” As we’ve explained before, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of State, later wrote that Bush wanted an agreement for a residual force to remain, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki objected.

Once Obama took office in January 2009, he had three years to renegotiate the deal, which his administration tried to do, to leave a residual American troop force. But Maliki still didn’t agree. Negotiations broke down in October 2011 over the issue of whether U.S. troops would be shielded from criminal prosecution by Iraqi authorities. Whether Obama did enough is a matter of opinion: His then defense secretary, Leon Panetta, later wrote that the president didn’t press hard enough for a deal. But some experts say Iraq was more closely aligned at the time with Iran and there wasn’t a deal to be made with Maliki.

So, both presidents had a role in the withdrawal of troops. But Trump wrongly said that Obama was the one who set a “certain date” for withdrawal and let U.S. enemies know about it, when that date was set before Obama was sworn in.

It’s worth noting that Trump said in a March 16, 2007, interview on CNN that the troops should be withdrawn quickly from Iraq.

Trump said that Obama’s visits to China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba were “the first time in the history, the storied history of Air Force One” when “high officials” of a host country did not appear to greet the president.

That’s not true. Other presidents have encountered similar low-key greetings on foreign trips aboard the presidential aircraft.

Trump referred to the fact that Cuba’s president, Raul Castro, did not greet Obama at the airport on his historic visit to Cuba in March, that Saudi Arabia’s King Salman did not meet Air Force One at the start of Obama’s trip to Riyadh in April, and he referred to China’s handling of the president’s arrival in Hangzhou last Saturday for a Group of 20 meeting.

Whether or not those arrivals constituted snubs of a U.S. president as Trump claims is a matter of debate. But Trump is wrong on the facts when he claims it has not happened before. It has.

In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan landed in Beijing and was received by China’s foreign minister rather than the president, whom he met only later. Similarly, on a 1985 trip to West Germany, Reagan was met by the foreign minister and not Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

These and other examples were dug up by our friend Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker,” who researched a Trump claim in April that Cuba’s and Saudi Arabia’s handling of Obama’s visits were “without precedent.” Kessler said of Trump, “once again he’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Kessler also noted that during Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China he was greeted at the airport by the country’s number two man, Premier Zhou Enlai. His boss, Chairman Mao, didn’t even agree to meet with Nixon until after he had arrived at a guest house.

Clinton said that her plan to overhaul the Veterans Health Administration would not include privatization, which she said Trump supports.

But Trump refuted that statement when it was his turn to discuss his plan to help veterans. “I would not do that,” Trump said, referring to Clinton’s claim that he supports privatization.

Trump’s campaign published “The Goals Of Donald J. Trump’s Veterans Plan” on its website last October. It doesn’t call for the VA to be completely privatized.

One of the biggest changes that plan would make to the current VA health care system is allowing veterans to get care at any non-VA medical center that accepts Medicare.

“Under a Trump Administration, all veterans eligible for VA health care can bring their veteran’s ID card to any doctor or care facility that accepts Medicare to get the care they need immediately,” the plan states.

“The power to choose will stop the wait time backlogs and force the VA to improve and compete if the department wants to keep receiving veterans’ healthcare dollars,” the plan says.

Trump’s proposal would seemingly go further than the Non-VA Medical Care Program, which allows eligible veterans to access care outside of the VA under certain circumstances, such as when VA medical centers cannot provide services. The program requires pre-approval for veterans to receive care at a non-VA facility in non-emergency situations.

Trump’s proposal would also go further than the bipartisan Veterans Choice Act of 2014 that President Obama signed into law, creating a temporary program, separate from the Non-VA Medical Care Program, that allows eligible veterans to receive health care at a non-VA facility if they would have to wait more than 30 days for an appointment at a VA medical center, or if they live more than 40 miles from the nearest VA hospital.

Trump stuck to the idea of allowing veterans to choose between public and private hospitals when he released his most recent “Ten Point Plan To Reform The VA” in July.

Point 10 of the plan says: “Mr. Trump will ensure every veteran has the choice to seek care at the VA or at a private service provider of their own choice. Under a Trump Administration, no veteran will die waiting for service.”

Trump reinforced that part of his plan during the NBC News forum as well.

To be clear, Trump supports giving veterans a choice between VA hospitals and private ones. That’s not the same thing as supporting the complete privatization of the system that provides care to veterans.

Trump criticized Clinton for making “a terrible mistake on Libya” when she was secretary of State. But, at the time, Trump also supported U.S. action that led to the removal of Moammar Gadhafi from power.

Trump made his claim in response to a question posed by Lauer on whether Trump will be “prepared on Day One,” if elected president, to tackle “complex national security issues.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has ignored his past support for the U.S. intervention in Libya.

During the 10th GOP debate, Trump said he had “never discussed that subject” when Sen. Ted Cruz called him out on supporting U.S. action in the country. But, as we wrote, Trump said in 2011 that the U.S. should go into Libya “on a humanitarian basis” and “knock [Gadhafi] out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively and save the lives.”

Trump made that comment in a video posted to his YouTube channel in February 2011:

Even though Trump now says Clinton’s support for intervention in Libya was a “terrible mistake,” it doesn’t change the fact that five years ago he supported Gadhafi’s removal.

Trump twisted Clinton’s words when he claimed Clinton said “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” Clinton said the problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs were not as “widespread” as some Republican supporters of privatization of the VA claim, but she went on to acknowledge problems in the VA system — including the issue of wait times for doctors — and what she would do to address them.

Trump highlighted the issue of wait times to see a doctor as “one of the big problems” in the VA, and then suggested Clinton doesn’t think the VA has problems.

Lauer interrupted, noting that Clinton “went on after that and laid out a litany of problems within the VA.”

Trump insisted his version was accurate, adding, “I’m telling you … she said she was satisfied with what was going on in the Veterans Administration.”

That’s not accurate. The comments in question from Clinton came during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Oct. 23, 2015. Maddow asked about talk among some Republicans of abolishing the VA and privatizing it. “The reason they are able to propose something that radical is because the problems at the VA seem so intractable,” Maddow said.

Maddow asked if Clinton had any “new ideas for trying to fix” the VA. Here was Clinton’s response, with the part Trump is referring to in bold.

Clinton accused Republicans of underfunding the VA because they “want it to fail” so they can privatize it.

Clinton added, “But we have to be more creative about trying to fix the problems that are the legitimate concern, so that we can try to stymie the Republican assault.”

Indeed, the Clinton campaign website states that Clinton wants to “fundamentally reform veterans’ health care to ensure access to timely and high quality care.” The campaign says Clinton “was outraged by the recent scandals at the VA, and as president, she will demand accountability and performance from VA leadership.” The site specifically mentions Clinton’s dissatisfaction that “[m]any veterans have to wait an unacceptably long time to see a doctor or to process disability claims and appeals” and promises she will “[b]uild a 21st-century Department of Veterans Affairs to deliver world-class care.”

Trump cherry-picked the part of Clinton’s response that said problems in the VA have “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be,” to make the blanket claim that Clinton is “satisfied with what was going on in the Veterans Administration” and that “vets are being treated, essentially, just fine.” But Trump is leaving out the parts of Clinton’s answer that acknowledged problems in the VA — including the wait time issue Trump highlighted as one of his biggest concerns.",REAL
"Iranian negotiators reportedly have made a last-ditch push for more concessions from the U.S. and five other world powers as talks on the fate of Iran's nuclear program come down to the final days before a crucial deadline.

The New York Times reported late Sunday that Tehran had backed away from a tentative promise to ship a large portion of its uranium stockpile to Russia, where it could not be used as part of any future weapons program. Western officials insisted to the paper that the uranium did not have to be sent overseas, but could be disposed of in other ways.

The new twist in the talks comes just two days before the deadline for both sides to agree on a framework for a permanent deal. The final deadline for a permanent deal would not arrive until the end of June.

However, if Iran insists on keeping its uranium in the country, it would undermine a key argument made in favor of the deal by the Obama administration. The Times reports that if the uranium had gone to Russia, it would have been converted into fuel rods, which are difficult to use in nuclear weapons. It is not clear what would happen to the uranium if it remained in Iran.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that Iran's position had shifted from from demanding that it be allowed to keep nearly 10,000 centrifuges enriching uranium, to agreeing to keep 6,000. Western officials involved in the talks told the Associated Press that Tehran may be ready to accept an even lower number.

The United States and its allies want a deal that extends the time Iran would need to make a nuclear weapon from the present two months to three months to at least a year. However, The Times reported Sunday that a paper published by Olli Heinonen, former head of inspections for the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, estimated that Iran could still develop a nuclear weapon in seven or eight months with around 6,500 centrifuges.

Tehran says it wants to enrich uranium only for energy, science, industry and medicine. But many countries fear Iran could use the technology to make weapons-grade uranium.

Officials told the Associated Press that another main dispute involved the length of an agreement. Iran, they said, wants a total lifting of all caps on its activities after 10 years, while the U.S. and the five other nations at the talks — Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — insist on progressive removal after a decade.

A senior U.S. official characterized the issue as lack of agreement on what happens in years 11 to 15. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with State Department rules on briefing about the closed-door talks.

Limits on Iran's research and development of centrifuges also were unresolved, the Western officials said.

Tehran has created a prototype centrifuge that it says enriches uranium 16 times faster than its present mainstay model. The U.S. and its partners want to constrain research that would increase greatly the speed of making enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb, once limits on Iran's programs are lifted.

One official said Russia opposed the U.S. position that any U.N. penalties lifted in the course of a deal should be reimposed quickly if Tehran reneged on any commitments.

Both Western officials said Iran was resisting attempts to make inspections and other ways of verification as intrusive as possible.

There was tentative agreement on turning a nearly-finished reactor into a model that gives off less plutonium waste than originally envisaged. Plutonium, like enriched uranium, is a path to nuclear weapons.

Iran and the U.S. were discussing letting Iran run centrifuges at an underground bunker that has been used to enrich uranium. The machines would produce isotopes for peaceful applications, the officials said.

With the Tuesday deadline approaching and problems remaining, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry canceled plans Sunday to return to the United States for an event honoring the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, his German counterpart, scratched planned trips to Kazakhstan.

Kerry has been in discussions with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif since Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The New York Times.",REAL
"CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — “I had one of the most wonderful rallies of my entire career right here in 1992,” Bill Clinton said by way of opening to the crowd of more than 1,100 on Saturday night.

Two days before the Iowa caucuses, Cedar Rapids tried to deliver that same old feeling to his wife, Hillary Clinton.

In the crowd, one woman held a sign that said “227 years of men. It’s HER turn!"" Some carried signs and books. Others had traveled from as far as Missouri. They had waited hours, even after the fire marshal told them there was no more room inside the high school gymnasium.

The restive crowd chanted slogans and buzzed with anticipation until finally Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton all appeared on stage hand-in-hand, an hour behind schedule. As they roared, Hillary Clinton beamed.

It has been a long slog in Iowa for the Clinton campaign, which has struggled mightily to shake the label that its supporters can’t muster the enthusiasm of its rival’s backers. As the caucuses near, and with the help of a former president, the energy level at her events are notably dialing up.

""He's a charismatic speaker,"" said Cigi Ross, 31. ""In general, I'd say he's a bigger draw for people.""

Monday night will put the campaign's months of their work to the test. Can the campaign’s organization bring out their supporters? Can the candidate energize voters?

Clinton, who seemed to draw on the higher-than-usual energy, stood at the center of it all and delivered a confident closing statement.

“What we need is a plan, and a commitment,” Clinton said at the top of her voice.

“And me, yes, thank you,” Clinton finished.

Eight years later, Clinton is in Iowa once again facing what could be a nail-biting conclusion of a hard-fought campaign. Clinton acknowledges that it isn’t just her campaign that has changed since her devastating loss here in her last run, she too has changed — and improved, she told CNN on Saturday.

""I think I am a different, and perhaps a better, candidate, so I hope that also shows,"" Clinton said in an interview with the network that morning.

Days ago, Iowa seemed to be slipping from her grasp, but campaign aides are feeling more confident now. A slew of positive news, endorsements, and the latest poll from the Des Moines Register and Bloomberg News indicate the bleeding has at least slowed. That poll -- considered the gold standard in Iowa -- gave Clinton a slim lead over her rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

If Democrats are wary of political dynasties, they didn’t show it. Spotting someone in the audience carrying Chelsea Clinton's book, her father remarked: ""Thank you, young woman, for holding up her book.""

Bill Clinton, who has spent days crisscrossing the state on his wife's behalf, has settled easily into this role as booster-in-chief. He lays off the policy, leaving that to his wife. He focuses instead on what he knows ""about the job.""

“There are certain, almost intangible qualities that determine whether a president succeeds or not,” Clinton said, his voice raspy, even and low. ""You need a sticker. A sticker: someone who won’t quit on you.”

""She’s the best at that I’ve ever known,” he added.",REAL
"Donald Trump’s organizational problems have gone from bad to worse to flat-out embarrassing. Here’s Politico with the play-by-play from this weekend’s Colorado GOP convention, the latest scene of Trump’s delegate-securing failure:

Unlike in most other states, Republicans in Colorado scrapped plans for a more traditional primary or caucus to award its delegates to this summer’s national convention in Cleveland. Instead, the state GOP selected three delegates from each of the state’s seven congressional districts at individual contests in the days leading up to the state convention, and then the remaining 13 delegates at the statewide event this past weekend. It was a rather convoluted process that favored campaigns that understood the rules and that had the ground game necessary to take advantage of them—or, put another way, not the Trump campaign.

At the first two district-level contests, the billionaire’s team showed up without an approved list of delegates to pass out to attendees, leaving supporters unsure of whom to back. And then at last Thursday’s contest, two of the three delegates on the Trump campaign’s list weren’t actually on the official ballot since they failed to pay the necessary registration fees.

This past weekend’s mix-up, though, was an even bigger embarrassment since at least one of the seven misnumbered names on the Trump-sanctioned list lined up with a Cruz-supporting delegate, according to NBC News. (Even without that mix-up, though, Cruz would have likely swept the contest anyway given his well-oiled delegate-selecting machine.) The Trump camp, though, appeared to blame the state GOP for the mistake, pointing to discrepancies between the delegate guides posted on the party's website and the printed materials distributed at the event. “We'll do whatever it takes to protect the legitimacy of our support in Colorado,” Trump aide Alan Cobb told NBC, suggesting the campaign may challenge the results. “Clearly there are some serious issues with the ballot and balloting.”

Trump remains the favorite to arrive at the convention with the most delegates to his name, but he’s far from assured of the majority of delegates he’d need to win the nomination on the first ballot. Given that reality, the GOP front-runner recently retooled his campaign to address his clear weaknesses in the under-the-radar battle to send loyal delegates to the convention. If those efforts don't start paying dividends soon, though, Trump very well may arrive in Cleveland with the most delegates—and leave without the nomination.",REAL
"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
Privacy Policy 
By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
"October 31, 2016 at 4:52 am 
Pretty factual except for women in the selective service. American military is still voluntary only and hasn't been a draft since Vietnam war. The comment was made by a 4 star general of the army about drafting women and he said it to shut up liberal yahoos.",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"As more women move into high offices, they often bring a style and approach that is distinct from men. But do they make better leaders?

Democratic women of the US Senate stand on stage during the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia (top). There are 20 women in the Senate – 14 Democrats and six Republicans.

Kelly Ayotte and Joni Ernst take the floor, two dynamic young US senators before a town hall of older military veterans. Between them, they represent a raft of firsts: Senator Ayotte is New Hampshire’s first female attorney general and first female Republican senator. Senator Ernst is Iowa’s first woman ever elected to either house of Congress and the first female military veteran to serve in the Senate.

The gender dimension does not go unnoticed. Please welcome “our beautiful senators,” says the veteran who introduces them. Ayotte mentions Ernst’s military service – she’s also a war veteran. But in most ways, the woman thing doesn’t matter. This is just like any other political town hall in campaign season – one senator trying to help another who’s locked in a tight reelection race.

Yet the stakes are high. Republican control of the US Senate could hinge on Ayotte’s ability to fend off her Democratic challenger, Gov. Maggie Hassan. And across the country, women figure prominently in the Democrats’ strategy to retake the Senate, nominating women in six of the 11 competitive races.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination in the United States.

It’s enough to call 2016 Year of the Woman 2.0, following the original, 1992, when female representation in the Senate jumped from two to six. Today, female senators number 20 out of 100, with potential to reach 24, depending on how the political winds are blowing by Election Day.

Gender diversity among major world powers is also rising, with the ascension of Theresa May to the British prime ministership. If Mrs. Clinton wins in November, three of the world’s top five economies will be headed by women. (German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the other.)

But the numbers and the “firsts” invite a deeper question: Do women really lead differently? From the halls of government to corporate boardrooms, it’s a burning question.

“I think we’re good listeners, and I think that helps,” says Ayotte in an interview. “I don’t want to say my male colleagues aren’t, because plenty of them are. But I think that we listen, and so we’re picking up on where we see the common ground with other people.”

On that point, there is bipartisan agreement.

“There is good research that shows women tend to have different leadership styles,” Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire’s other senator, says in an interview. “We tend to be more inclusive, we’re less autocratic in our decisionmaking. We like consensus, we like to get people around the table, and so I think that has made a difference.”

Of course, there’s also the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D) of California, the first woman speaker of the House (2007-11). During her tenure, she was known for her ability to wield power – and in a highly partisan way. More than with previous speakers, major legislation came out of her office, not the committees. She was (and is) a master fundraiser for Democrats writ large, a skill she has used to great effect in keeping her members in line.

And as a Roman Catholic woman, Congresswoman Pelosi demonstrated at a crucial moment the power of networking. In 2010, when House passage of the Affordable Care Act appeared in doubt over the abortion issue, she tapped connections her male colleagues had never heard of – two associations of nuns, whose support for the bill proved pivotal.

The research on women’s leadership style has been extensive – and mixed. One academic study, released in 2013, found that women are more attracted to cooperation than men. The reason is that men tend to have greater confidence in their abilities, while women tend to be more optimistic about their prospective teammates’ abilities, according to the study by Peter Kuhn and Marie-Claire Villeval.

New research, released in August, looked specifically at gender differences in the US House of Representatives and found “little evidence to suggest women are inherently more cooperative or bipartisan.” The only difference came with Republican women, who tend to recruit more cosponsors on legislation, including more from the opposite party. That tendency was most pronounced on so-called women’s issues, such as education and social welfare.

“We interpret these results as evidence that cooperation is mostly driven by a commonality of interest, rather than gender per se,” write the authors, Stefano Gagliarducci and M. Daniele Paserman.

The study examined 20 years of data ending in 2008. Since then, female representation in Congress has ticked up a notch, reaching 20 percent in the Senate and nearly that in the House – the rough threshold for a perceived “critical mass” of representation in which women can show perceptible influence.

Indeed, since 2013, female legislators point to multiple examples of how the women of the Senate, in particular, have been instrumental in breaking through congressional gridlock. The best-known example is the end of the 2013 government shutdown, when women senators from both parties met privately over dinner and fashioned a compromise that would form the nucleus of the final deal.

More recently, the women of the Senate – all 20 of them, dubbed “the sisterhood” – backed landmark legislation aimed at combating sex trafficking, which President Obama signed into law in May 2015.

When asked for other examples, Senator Shaheen cites the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. “It was considered dead,” she says, “and because all the women [senators] got on board and pushed it, we were able to get it through.”

Shaheen also notes the growing number of women who serve in top spots on committees, such as the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) of Alaska as chair and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington as the ranking member. “It looks like we may get an energy bill done this year, and I think that speaks to their ability to work together, and to be flexible, and move our colleagues in the House,” Shaheen says.

Behind all this female power are the women senators’ regular dinners, a chance to kick back and talk about whatever – their lives, their work, their male colleagues.

“We go by Mikulski’s rules – that what happens in those dinners stays in those dinners,” says Shaheen, referring to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D) of Maryland, the longest-serving woman in congressional history, who is about to retire. “But yeah, they’ve proved to be a great opportunity to build relationships.”

As it happens, Shaheen had hosted 12 of her female colleagues the night before at her office. On the menu: lobsters and clam chowder. That much she will reveal. Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine was there, Shaheen says, “and we had a back and forth about whether the lobsters came from Maine or New Hampshire.”

In 2013, after the Senate’s 20 women helped end the government shutdown, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona wondered out loud: “Imagine what they could do if there were 50 of them.”

That may sound logical, but the reality isn’t so simple. While women do bring a distinctive perspective to policy, based on their life experiences, that doesn’t necessarily make them less partisan, experts say. Some of the most polarizing issues are so-called women’s issues, including health care, abortion, and equal pay.

“As long as women’s issues constitute a prominent division between the parties, there will be little bipartisan collaboration among women on these policies,” Michele Swers, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote in The Washington Post in 2014.

Ms. Swers also notes that partisan sorting has made the South – a region less hospitable to women candidates – the stronghold of the Republican Party, while the more moderate brand of Republicanism that predominates in parts of the country more willing to elect women has declined.

And because women tend to occupy the “leftward wing” of their respective parties, Democratic women in particular are less inclined to compromise, the Gagliarducci-Paserman study found.

Still, none of this means women shouldn’t be more rigorously recruited for public office, say leaders of both parties.

“What you need is more good people, and the process of excluding women has excluded good people from service,” says former Gov. John Sununu (R) of New Hampshire. “So what you need to do is level the playing field.”

In the business world, boosting female representation on corporate boards – now near 20 percent – has been a long-held goal. Advocates cite benefits to the bottom line. In a famous study, Catalyst Inc., a nonprofit that promotes women leaders in the workplace, found that corporate boards with the highest female representation attained “significantly higher financial performance” than those with the lowest representation.

But whether in the private sector or in government, women as top executives are even rarer than women legislators. Only six of the nation’s 50 governors are women, three Republicans and three Democrats. Among world leaders, fewer than two dozen are female. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 21 chief executive officers – or 4.2 percent – are women.

While legislating is an inherently collaborative process, and therefore seems to play to women’s strength, executive roles hew more toward public expectations of how men should behave, i.e., authoritatively.

“I think the more people see women in executive positions, the more they will see that as a normal course of business, and it’s taken longer for that not just in politics but in the boardroom,” says Shaheen.

But that becomes a Catch-22: Women don’t step up because they don’t see other women in those positions. “Some would call it a confidence gap,” says Liz Shuler, the No. 2 leader at the AFL-CIO. “We need to do more to increase the leadership skills-building opportunities, so that it becomes second nature for women to step up.” (See interview with Ms. Shuler here.)

But do women executives really lead differently from men? Clinton echoes other women leaders on this point: “I just think women in general are better listeners, are more collegial, more open to new ideas and how to make things work in a way that looks for a win-win outcome,” she told Time magazine in January.

Meta-analyses have found that women leaders, on average, are “more likely to be democratic, collaborative, and participative” than their male counterparts, who are more likely to be “autocratic and directive” in their approach, writes Alice H. Eagly at TheConversation.com.

Of course, there are exceptions. Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Golda Meir of Israel were both known for being tough and assertive. Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook is known for his team-oriented style. But for women aspiring to leadership posts, the challenge is to overcome societal expectations for how women are “supposed to” act – i.e., nice and nonconfrontational – while still projecting authority. Clinton has faced this “double bind” in both of her presidential campaigns.

New Hampshire has a strong record of female leadership. The governor, both US senators, and one of the state’s two House members are women. The chief justice of the state Supreme Court is a woman. The chair of the state GOP is a woman.

In 2008, Granite Staters made history by electing the nation’s first majority-female state legislative body, in the state Senate. In 2013, the state made history again by sending an all-female congressional delegation to Washington. That could happen again in January.

What is it about New Hampshire that breeds women leaders? Start with a culture of independent-mindedness, and an enormous “citizens legislature” – 400 in the House, 24 in the Senate – in a state with only 1.3 million people. Members are paid just $100 a year, plus mileage. Sooner or later, the joke goes, everybody ends up serving.

“We have so much local self-governance, women have the opportunity to try things out, to see how they like public service, and then they discover that they like it and that they’re good at it, and one thing leads to the next,” says Governor Hassan in an interview in the State House.

Hassan got her start advocating for her disabled son, which caught the notice of then-Governor Shaheen, who appointed her to a state educational funding commission. That led to regular interactions with state legislators – and an introduction to her next mentor, state Sen. Sylvia Larsen, who encouraged Hassan to run for state Senate. She spent six years there, eventually rising to majority leader, losing reelection, then staging a comeback by winning the governorship.

The common denominator for most women in politics, it seems, is mentors. Ask Ayotte, New Hampshire’s junior senator, about Ruth Griffin, and her eyes light up. “I love Ruth Griffin. She’s my mentor!” Ayotte gushes, referring to the nonagenarian grand dame of the New Hampshire Republican Party. (See interview with Mrs. Griffin here.)

When Griffin served on the state Executive Council – an elected board that serves as a check on the governor – she advocated strongly for Ayotte, insisting the Democratic governor reappoint the Republican Ayotte as attorney general.

Shaheen, now a mentor to others, cites as her inspiration Marilla Ricker, the first woman to run for governor of New Hampshire – before women even had the right to vote. Shaheen also speaks fondly of the late Susan McLane, a Republican state senator “who was always very good to me.” (Ms. McLane’s daughter is Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D) of New Hampshire.) Shaheen broke two gender barriers in N.H., first with her election as governor (1996), then as a US senator (2008).

Men, too, have championed women politicians here. At a recent Republican women’s chili fest in Stratham, N.H., Mr. Sununu recalls fighting to make Vesta Roy the first woman state Senate president, in 1983. “There’s that classic picture of me standing at the state Senate door, cracked open, peeking in to make sure the 13 votes I had lined up for her stayed with her,” Sununu says.

Whether New Hampshire’s success at electing women to higher office can be duplicated elsewhere remains an open question. Only two other states have two female US senators, and five others have female governors. New Hampshire is no longer the champ at electing women state legislators; that crown belongs to Colorado, with 42 percent. The top 10 states for female representation in state legislatures are mostly Northern, and the bottom 10 mostly Southern, suggesting cultural factors.

Overall, women hold a higher percentage of state legislative seats (24.6 percent) than seats in Congress (19.4 percent, House and Senate combined). At least the female “farm team” has more players than the “major league,” though those numbers still fall far short of matching the overall female population of the country, 50.8 percent.

For many women, reaching parity with men in government – and in business, the judiciary, the labor movement, and other spheres of life – is a deeply held goal. But a quick glance at the graphs charting female representation in state and national legislatures reveals a stark truth: Growth has nearly hit a plateau.

If progress continues at the current rate of change since 1960, women will not achieve equal representation in Congress until 2117, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Women’s representation in state legislatures, which more than quintupled between 1971 and 2015, has also essentially plateaued. What’s going on?

“It’s not that women are running in droves and losing,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “We know that when women run, they win at about the same rate as men do.”

Women also do just as well in fundraising as men, even if they have to work harder to raise the same amount. Part of the problem, Ms. Walsh says, comes in the recruitment process. Much of the recruiting is done by white men, and they recruit who they know – other white men.

That is particularly so among Republicans: Only 17 percent of Republican state lawmakers are women, a rate that hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. In contrast, Democrats doubled their rate of female state representation during the same period from 15 percent to 30 percent.

In Congress (both houses), the disparity is even more stark: Only 9 percent of Republicans are female, versus 33 percent of Democrats. In the Senate alone, only six of the 20 women members are Republican.

Walsh cites several factors behind this gap: Republican women are perceived to be more moderate than their male counterparts, and can have a harder time making it out of the primaries, where turnout is low and skews conservative. The GOP also has no counterpart to Emily’s List – a well-funded political action committee that helps pro-abortion-rights Democratic women get elected. And then there’s the simple fact that more women identify as Democrats, so their recruitment pool is bigger.

In New Hampshire, where both legislative chambers are controlled by the Republicans, Democratic women legislators still outnumber Republican women legislators, 73 to 49. State GOP chair Jennifer Horn says the party – nationally, not just in New Hampshire – needs a message that’s more inclusive.

“I’m being diplomatic – I think there are times when some of the folks in our party are not as sensitive to the fact that men and women see the world differently,” says Ms. Horn. “When we’re talking about jobs and the economy, for example, we need to be cognizant of the fact that women are an economic engine in and of themselves.”

And then there’s the fact that, in both parties, women are less likely than men to run for office without being recruited.

In the Monitor’s conversations with Ernst and Ayotte, both mentioned how they were asked several times to run for the Senate before saying yes – and both brought up family issues. Without using the word “multitasking,” they both show that they have mastered that classic skill of the working mom.

“It’s about getting the message out about empowering women and saying, you can do this,” says Ernst. “It is important that you have a supportive family, even more so for women. I have a teenage daughter right now – we’re looking at colleges – and sometimes it’s hard for a woman to be away. But there are ways of making it work.”

Before running for Senate, Ayotte had been asked a couple of times to run for Congress, but declined – in part, she says, because she was pregnant, but also because she had plans in her work as a prosecutor.

Ayotte then excuses herself. “I’ve got to pick up my daughter before 5:30 or I’m in trouble!”",REAL
"Shocking! Michele Obama & Hillary Caught Glamorizing Date Rape Promoters First lady claims moral high ground while befriending rape-glorifying rappers Infowars.com - October 27, 2016 Comments 
Alex Jones breaks down the complete hypocrisy of Michele Obama and Hillary Clinton attacking Trump for comments he made over a decade ago while The White House is hosting and promoting rappers who boast about date raping women and selling drugs in their music. 
Rappers who have been welcomed to the White House by the Obama’s include “Rick Ross,” who promotes drugging and raping woman in his song “U.O.N.E.O.” 
While attacking Trump as a sexual predator, Michelle and Hillary have further mainstreamed the degradation of women through their support of so-called musicians who attempt to normalize rape. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) For months, the White House and Congress have wrangled over a bill that would give lawmakers a greater say in the Iran nuclear deal the administration is hammering out along with other world powers.

And now, less than two weeks after a framework agreement with Tehran was reached, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is planning to take up the measure.

On Tuesday, the committee will consider amendments to Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker's Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act before deciding whether to have the full Senate vote on it.

For many in Congress, it's a very simple premise: Congress should weigh in on the terms of a final nuclear deal with Iran.

But for the White House, and some Democrats in Congress, that's an explosive idea that could derail the talks — and therefore must be stopped.

So what's in the bill?

Supporters of the legislation have emphasized that it would allow Congress to give a thumbs up or down on the deal President Barack Obama is aiming to finalize with Iran by the negotiations' June 30 deadline. Backers think that's only fair since the United States is contemplating a major nuclear pact with a decadeslong enemy.

The bill would give Congress a chance to hold hearings, host briefings and pave the way to a vote on a joint resolution that could express approval or disapproval of the deal. It also requires the Obama administration to quickly report to Congress on details of the deal and regularly assess whether Iran is keeping its commitments. And it spells out what the President needs to do vis-a-vis Congress if Iran is found violating the terms.

But most important, it would keep Obama from waiving any congressional sanctions on Iran during Congress' 60-day review period. And if Congress passes a joint resolution of disapproval, then sanctions could not be lifted even after that time.

Does this hurt the diplomatic effort to reach a final deal?

Iran's primary reason for agreeing to the deal's limits on its nuclear program is to get sanctions relief.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have insisted sanctions must be lifted on Day One of the deal. While the Obama administration has said it would wait several months before lifting sanctions -- to verify that Iran has taken major steps to roll back its program — the President is counting on having some latitude to waive sanctions in order to give Iran an incentive to sign the deal and then keep its commitments.

The Corker bill makes it less likely sanctions would be lifted, and lifted in a timely way, which gives less encouragement to Iran.

Without the bill, could Obama lift all sanctions on Iran?

Not all, but most — at least for a limited time.

Without the Corker-Menendez bill (named after Corker and lead Democratic co-sponsor Sen. Bob Menendez), Iran could see nearly all nuclear-related sanctions at least temporarily lifted. Those enacted through the United Nations and by presidential executive order could be fully removed, and most of those passed by Congress could be waived by Obama until he leaves office, when they would go back into effect unless the next president continues to waive them.

If the Corker-Menendez bill becomes law and a deal is finalized, Obama wouldn't be able to lift the congressional sanctions for at least 60 days.

During that 60-day review phase, the bill says Obama can't ""waive, suspend, reduce, provide relief from, or otherwise limit the application of statutory sanctions.""

How can Obama waive sanctions passed by Congress anyway?

The biggest sanctions package approved by Congress, widely credited with crippling Iran's economy and bringing the country to the negotiating table, was the 2010 Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act.

It included a provision that gives the President leverage to waive sanctions for a limited time if he determines it's in the U.S. national security interest.

He wouldn't be able to permanently sunset the sanctions, though, unless Iran cuts its ties with and stops funding terror organizations around the world, an aspect not being addressed in the current negotiations with Iran and not predicted to happen any time soon.

The administration says sanctions are where Congress could eventually weigh in on the Iran deal -- by repealing them -- but that would only happen if lawmakers deem the deal a good one.

How would Congress weigh in during the 60-day review period?

Congress could pass a joint resolution approving of the deal or disapproving of the deal and forbidding any sanctions relief. Or it could do nothing, allowing Obama to implement the sanctions, and by implication the deal, after the 60 days are up.

A joint resolution disapproving of the deal would need to muster a two-thirds majority, though, to override the veto Obama has promised -- an unlikely, but not entirely unthinkable, scenario.

Are there other reasons that Obama opposes this bill?

First, he's facing a combative, Republican majority in both houses of Congress. Those Republicans have sought to undermine his negotiations with Iran at every turn. Giving those lawmakers a legislative avenue to slam the terms of an eventual deal would, at best, be a political blow to Obama and his administration's efforts to broker an agreement.

There's also the White House's argument that the executive branch has the power to broker international agreements without Congress meddling, while congressional oversight of the Iran deal would set a dangerous precedent. Most international agreements aren't treaties ratified by Congress, and Obama has argued that U.S. allies need to know they can count on those agreements holding up.

Virtually every Senate Republican supports the bill and nine Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors, including independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats. Several more on the left are leaning toward supporting the bill.

That means backers will likely pass the bill with a filibuster-proof majority. It's unclear, though, if they can muster enough Democrats willing to vote to override Obama's veto.

It's not just the numbers, though. Some powerful Democrats are supporting the legislation. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, who will become the chamber's Democratic leader when Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada retires at the end of his term, is a big proponent of the legislation.

Menendez, of New Jersey, who has been working to rally Democrats around legislation on Iran throughout the negotiations, remains the most vocal Democrat on the issue. He was the top-ranked Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee until stepping aside to face corruption charges handed down earlier in the month.

Also, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, one of the earliest Obama backers during the 2008 campaign, has been insistent on the need for Congress to weigh in and has worked behind the scenes to make Corker's bill more palatable to Democrats -- and the White House. But so far that effort hasn't succeeded, as the White House remains opposed.",REAL
"While paging through Pew's best data visualizations of 2014 (it's awesome), I came across what I believe to be one of the best and most revealing charts about the state of American politics. Here it is:

The chart, which comes from Pew's amazing political polarization project, shows how partisans of both parties have grown both increasingly unified amongst themselves and increasingly far apart from their partisan others over just the last 20 years. As recently as 1994, seven in 10 Democrats were more consistently liberal than the median Republican.  As of 2014, it's a whopping 94 percent. Same goes for Republicans; 64 percent of GOPers were more consistently conservative than the median Democrat in 1994 while 92 percent are today. In addition, ""the overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades from 10 percent to 21 percent,"" according to Pew.

To me, this chart is so important -- particularly in a week where a new Congress arrives in Washington -- because it reveals that the polarization of our elected officials isn't some sort of ""only in Washington"" thing.  The increasing partisanship of Congress is a direct reflection of the increasing partisanship of the country. After all, that's who elects these people to Congress, right?

So, when you hear people decry the partisanship of their elected officials in Washington, don't believe it.  We have the Congress we want -- even if we aren't totally honest with ourselves all the time about what that is.  And, we get the results -- not many -- from our elected officials that you have to expect when you have a country as polarized as ours.",REAL
"With little fanfare this fall, the New York developer who had planned to build an Islamic community center north of the World Trade Center announced that he would instead use the site for a 70-story tower of luxury condos.

Those who had rallied in opposition to the building because of its religious affiliation back in 2010 were exultant. “The importance of the defeat of the Ground Zero Mosque cannot be overstated,” Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, wrote on the website Breitbart in September. “The Ground Zero Mosque became a watershed issue in our effort to raise awareness of and ultimately halt and roll back the advance of Islamic law and Islamic supremacism in America.”

It’s all well and good that so many Republicans have condemned Donald Trump’s reprehensible call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) was particularly forceful, calling proper attention to the “many Muslims serving in our armed forces, dying for this country.”

When he was president, George W. Bush honorably put a lid on right-wing Islamophobia. He regularly praised American Muslims and stressed that the United States needed Muslim allies to fight violent extremism. Once Bush was gone, restraint on his side of politics fell away.

Thus, Trump’s embrace of a religious test for entry to our country did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it simply brought us to the bottom of a slippery slope created by the ongoing exploitation of anti-Muslim feeling for political purposes.

You don’t have to reach far back in time to see why Trump figured he had the ideological space for his Muslim ban. Last month, it was Jeb Bush who introduced the idea of linking the rights of Syrian refugees to their religion. He said he was comfortable granting admission to “people like orphans and people who are clearly not going to be terrorists. Or Christians.” Asked how he’d determine who was Christian, he explained that “you can prove you’re a Christian.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) took a similar view, saying , “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”

Trump took limits on Muslim access to our country to their logical — if un-American and odious — conclusion. Vice President Biden said that Trump was serving up “a very, very dangerous brew,” but the brew has been steeping for a long time. This is why the “Ground Zero Mosque” episode is so instructive.

The demagoguery began with the labeling of the controversy itself. As PolitiFact pointed out, “the proposed mosque is not at or on Ground Zero. It does not directly abut it or overlook it.” It was “two long blocks” away. And while a mosque was part of the proposed cultural center, the plans also included “a swimming pool, gym and basketball court, a 500-seat auditorium, a restaurant and culinary school, a library and art studios.”

This didn’t stop opponents from going over the top, and Newt Gingrich deserved some kind of award for the most incendiary comment of all. “Nazis,” he said, “don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.”

When President Obama defended the right of developers to build the project, he was — surprise, surprise — accused of being out of touch, and Republicans were happy to make the Muslim center and Obama’s defense of religious rights an issue in the 2010 campaign.

“I think it does speak to the lack of connection between the administration and Washington and folks inside the Beltway and mainstream America,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), who was then chairman of the committee in charge of electing Republicans to the Senate. Voters, he said, felt they were “being lectured to, not listened to.” Sound familiar?

At the time, John Feehery, the veteran Republican strategist, put his finger on why Republicans were so eager to lambaste Obama’s response to the Ground Zero issue. “This will help drive turnout for the GOP base,” he said.

The Republican establishment is now all upset with Trump, but he is simply the revenge of a Republican base that took its leaders’ pandering — on Islam and a host of other issues — seriously.

You can’t be “just a little” intolerant of Muslims, any more than you can be “just a little” prejudiced against Catholics or Jews. Once the door to bigotry is opened, it is very hard to shut.

Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"November 13, 2016 By 21wire Leave a Comment 
Episode #160 of SUNDAY WIRE SHOW resumes this November 13, 2016 as host Patrick Henningsen brings a 3 HOURS special broadcast of LIVE power-packed talk radio on ACR… 
LISTEN LIVE ON THIS PAGE AT THE FOLLOWING SCHEDULED SHOW TIMES: 
SUNDAYS – 5pm-8pm UK Time | 12pm-3pm ET (US) | 9am-12pm PT (US) 
This week’s edition of THE SUNDAY WIRE is on the road broadcasting LIVE from the Valley of the Sun. This week host Patrick Henningsen covers this week’s top stories in the US and internationally. In the first hour we’ll conduct a post-mortem on the incredible US Election which has produced President Elect Donald J Trump , and the aftermath – a nation divided punctuated by numerous street protests in part fuelled by Soros and the Democratic Party Machine . Later, we’re joined by our roving everyman , ACR Boiler Room contributor, Randy J , for an on the ground take on Election events from the West Coast, and beyond… 
SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV 
Strap yourselves in and lower the blast shield – this is your brave new world… 
*NOTE: THIS EPISODE MAY CONTAIN STRONG LANGUAGE AND MATURE THEMES* ",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton told a Staten Island crowd today that she was the candidate who could reach across party lines to get things done as president—pointing to her experience representing the borough in the Senate and even giving public thanks to Republican President George W. Bush.

“I have no time for people who are partisan for the sake of being partisan,” Ms. Clinton, a Democrat and former secretary of state, told a crowd that welcomed her enthusiastically in a historic building at Snug Harbor Cultural Center.

Ms. Clinton was the second leading presidential candidate to speak on Staten Island today, after Republican Donald Trump delivered a typical stump speech at a Republican brunch. But Ms. Clinton, perhaps sensing or recalling Staten Island’s ever-present desire for politicians to pay attention to the forgotten borough, delivered a speech that seemed to be especially tailored for the borough, which is more conservative than the rest of New York City. The majority of its voters are registered Democrats, but the borough routinely swings Republican.

“When I ran in 2000, I didn’t carry Staten Island. When I ran in 2006, I did,” Ms. Clinton said today. “I’ve got no problem with people having political disagreements. That’s in America’s DNA, isn’t it?”

Instead, Ms. Clinton decried “deliberate efforts to set Americans against each other.” She harkened back to representing the borough of cops and firefighters on September 11, 20001, when nearly 300 Staten Islanders were killed in the terror attacks. She noted the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, and the president were all Republicans.

“I did not for one minute stop and say to myself: ‘Well, I don’t know, can we work together?'” Ms. Clinton said. “How absurd is that?”

Ms. Clinton said with 3,000 people murdered, people “pulled together” and “politics was totally left behind.” She had criticized President Bush for his handling of a strong economy he “inherited” from her husband, President Bill Clinton, and for other reasons. But she praised him for approving billions of dollars to rebuild lower Manhattan after the terror attacks, even as others in Washington didn’t want to spend it.

“I publicly say, ‘Thank you President George W. Bush,’ for making sure that we got the money that we needed to rebuild our city,” Ms. Clinton said.

She also touted her record working for the borough after the attacks, including sounding the alarm on air quality and pushing for the passage of the Zadroga Act. Ms. Clinton went on to discuss her foreign policy experience, saying anyone who wants to president has to be able to offer specifics on what they would do—an allusion to her Democratic rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—but also has to be able to keep people safe.

“Maybe we take that more seriously here in New York, but we should,” she said. “And we are going to do everything we can to keep America safe.”

She cited her work building a coalition that “brought Iran to the negotiating table,” without mentioning how controversial that final Iran deal was for President Barack Obama.

Ms. Clinton’s rally had little in common with Mr. Trump’s Staten Island event, except one thing: the crowd at both seemed to hate Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Ms. Clinton mentioned his plan to spy on Muslim neighborhoods, which has also been dismissed by Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

At the mention of Mr. Cruz’s name, the crowd offered a chorus of boos.

The crowd had been hyped up for Ms. Clinton before she even arrived, and gave a nice response to several local pols as they urged people to get out the vote on Tuesday.

“Hillary is the only one with the experience,” said Councilwoman Debi Rose, a Democrat who represents the borough’s North Shore. “She knows what it’s like to be in the White House. She knows the realities. She knows that living and running the White House in this country is not a reality show.”

Ms. Clinton, at the end of her speech, offered the kind of promise Staten Island always loves—and the kind it holds politicians to, if the way the Staten Island Advance repeatedly agitated and inquired about a town hall Mayor Bill de Blasio will finally hold here on Wednesday night is any indication.

“I want you to hold me accountable,” Ms. Clinton said. “I will be coming back to Staten Island when I am your president.”",REAL
"Mitch McConnell has an unusual admonition for the new Republican majority as it takes over the Senate this week: Don’t be “scary.”

The incoming Senate majority leader has set a political goal for the next two years of overseeing a functioning, reasonable majority on Capitol Hill that scores some measured conservative wins, particularly against environmental regulations, but probably not big victories such as a full repeal of the health-care law. McConnell’s priority is to set the stage for a potential GOP presidential victory in 2016.

“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome. I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority,” the Kentucky Republican said in a broad interview just before Christmas in his Capitol office.

It’s a far cry from his defiant declaration in 2010 that his “single most important” goal was to make President Obama a one-term president, an antagonizing oath that Democrats frequently invoke to embarrass the GOP leader — Obama won reelection comfortably in 2012, and McConnell’s party lost seats.

Now in charge at both ends of the Capitol, Republicans aim to avoid the worst excesses of the past four years and make sure the public isn’t fearful of the GOP’s course.

“There would be nothing frightening about adding a Republican president to that governing majority,” McConnell said, explaining how he wants voters to view the party on the eve of the 2016 election. “I think that’s the single best thing we can do, is to not mess up the playing field, if you will, for whoever the nominee ultimately is.”

But McConnell, who will become majority leader Tuesday, is not planning to avoid conflict altogether. He wants to use the annual spending bills to compel Obama to accept conservative policy riders that will divide Democrats, similar to the December spending bill’s inclusion of a provision benefiting Wall Street firms involved in risky derivative trades. That rider brought a liberal outcry but did not end up torpedoing the bill, which had Obama’s support.

McConnell has been coaching his members to understand that, in the initial rounds, they will have to almost unanimously support the budget outline and the spending bills, because few Democrats will support their policy riders.

With 54 Republicans in his caucus, McConnell knows that he’s a long way from getting 67 votes to override an Obama veto and that it won’t even be easy getting six Democrats to regularly support legislation so that he can overcome likely filibusters led by the incoming minority leader, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). Still, on some issues, such as energy and taxes on the health industry, McConnell thinks there’s enough bipartisan support to get bills onto Obama’s desk.

“They’d like to be relevant. They’d like to be part of the process,” he said of discussions with some rank-and-file Democrats. “Assuming we will have on most issues a largely unified conference — I don’t expect that on everything — it wouldn’t take a whole lot of Democrats to actually pass legislation in the Senate.”

But McConnell said those who are “craving some grand deal as a way to measure the next two years” should lower their expectations. He’s very skeptical of such bargains with Democrats on tough issues such as immigration and entitlement reform. Instead, he believes three issues have potential common ground: international trade deals, an overhaul of the tax code and new revenue streams for infrastructure projects.

“Could the country use a lot more? You bet. But there’s no way you can overcome a reluctant president on something really large,” McConnell said. The best he can do on some of those bigger issues is force Obama to break out his veto pen so there is a clear set of Democratic policy stances Republicans can campaign against in 2016.

Democrats are dubious of McConnell’s pledge to avert edge-of-the-cliff moments. They believe he will run into the same problems that have bedeviled House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) during the past four years — including the inability to corral rabble-rousers such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to support an agenda that conservative critics will probably view as not bold enough in challenging Obama. Appeasing those far-right conservatives will lead to an agenda that Democrats hope to exploit in 2016.

“What Senator McConnell wants people to think and what they will think when they see the results for themselves are two very different things,” said Reid’s spokesman, Adam Jentleson. “Senator McConnell heads a caucus that is obsessed with rigging the game against working people in favor of wealthy special interests. That’s a scary fact indeed, and he won’t be able to hide it.”

While McConnell’s office is adorned with a portrait of Kentucky’s only other Senate majority leader — Alben W. Barkley, whose tenure was often marked by clashes with his own party’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt — his model more resembles that of George Mitchell, the Democratic majority leader from 1989 through 1994.

Without ever shutting down the government, Mitchell stared down a president of the opposite party, George H.W. Bush, and won several liberal victories in a 1990 budget showdown. Mitchell also delivered a slew of legislation to Bush’s desk that drew a veto, helping frame the debate for the 1992 election on domestic policy.

McConnell has recently studied other two-term presidents on how often they vetoed legislation in their last two years in office. Obama has issued only two minor vetoes over technical matters, largely because the previously Democratic-run Senate prevented anything from reaching his desk that he opposed.

McConnell suggested that a veto strategy would help clarify issues for voters. “I think his bureaucracy across the board has done a lot of damage to the country. . . . I’d at least like for him to have to personally take responsibility for it, even if he in the end decides to veto the bill over some restriction on EPA regulations.”

McConnell is keenly aware of the challenges of reining in some of the impulses that his fellow Republican lawmakers have developed over eight straight years in the minority.

The first test will come on an energy debate, which could begin by the end of this week. McConnell is trying to keep his side from offering amendments not related to energy issues. In recent years, when some rank-and-file Republicans wanted to stop the Senate in its tracks, they would threaten amendments related to how Congress gets its health care.

“I’ve asked my members to restrain themselves,” he said.

Restraint has been hard to come by in this political era, particularly because a small army of conservative groups has made it a mission to push Republicans to the most strident stands, even if it means shutting down the government or risking default on the national debt.

McConnell faced some of those groups firsthand when they supported his 2014 primary challenger, and he faced a grinding general election against a Democrat who was well financed.

It cost nearly $30 million from his campaign war chest and tens of millions of dollars more from outside groups. Winning both races handily, McConnell is delivering a message to Republicans on how to behave heading into 2016.

“Don’t try to reinvent yourself. Be yourself, number one. And don’t be afraid of a primary. We will win all the primaries. We did it in ’14. We will do it in ’16,” McConnell said.

Shortly after Election Day this fall, McConnell sat down with Obama for a rare one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office, a huddle that both sides kept largely secret. In the pre-Christmas interview, McConnell acknowledged that the meeting’s purpose was only to discuss areas where the president and Republicans might find bipartisan agreement — because their disagreements on other issues were too in­trac­table.

That meeting, he said, focused on trade deals, a tax code overhaul and infrastructure funding. “Can we get there on tax reform, trade, infrastructure?” he said.

He eschewed the idea of holding the debt ceiling hostage to gain spending-cut concessions from Obama, a tool Republicans had to use before because they were in the minority.

“We are in the majority. We can pass a budget. We can determine how much we’re going to spend,” he said.

Avoiding those moments could make for a less “scary” Congress, giving the Republicans a better chance in 2016 to hit the trifecta and gain the White House. His own horse is already chosen, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), but don’t expect McConnell to be out on the campaign trail or doing any other favors for his home-state colleague.

“I’m going to be supporting Rand Paul. But he knows that beyond that, I won’t be involved in presidential politics. I’ve got a big job here,” he said.",REAL
"Mises.org November 1, 2016 Inferno is a great thriller, featuring Tom Hanks reprising his role as Professor Robert Langdon. The previous movie adaptations of Dan Brown’s books ( Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code ) were a success, and I expect Inferno will do well in theaters, too. Langdon is a professor of symbology whose puzzle solving skills and knowledge of history come in high demand when a billionaire leaves a trail of clues based on Dante’s Inferno to a biological weapon that would halve the world’s population. The villain, however, has good motives. As a radical Malthusian, he believes that the human race needs halving if it is to survive at all, even if through a plague. Malthus’s name is not mentioned in the movie, but his ideas are certainly there. Inferno provides us an opportunity to unpack this overpopulation fear, and see where it stands today. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) thought that the potential exponential growth of population was a problem. If the population increases faster than the means of subsistence, then, “The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.” Is overpopulation a problem? The economics of population size tell a different, less scary, story. While it is certainly possible that some areas can become too crowded for some people’s preferences, as long as people are free to buy and sell land for a mutually agreeable price, overcrowding will fix itself. As an introvert who enjoys nature and peace and quiet, I am certainly less willing to rent an apartment in the middle of a busy, crowded city. The prices I’m willing to pay for country living versus city living reflect my preferences. And, to the extent that others share my preferences or even have the opposite preferences, the use and construction of homes and apartments will economize in both locations. Our demands and the profitability of the varied real estate offerings keep local populations in check. But what about on a global scale? The Inferno villain was concerned with world population. He stressed the urgency of the situation, but I don’t see any reason to worry. Google tells me that we could fit the entire world population in Texas and everybody would have a small, 100 square meter plot to themselves. Indeed, there are vast stretches of land across the globe with little to no human inhabitants. Malthus and his ideological followers must have a biased perspective, only looking at the crowded streets of a big city. If it’s not land that’s a problem, what about the “means of subsistence”? Are we at risk of running out of food, medicine, or other resources because of our growing population? No. A larger population not only means more mouths to feed, but also more heads, hands, and feet to do the producing. Also, as populations increase, so does the variety of skills available to make production even more efficient. More people means everybody can specialize in a more specific and more productive comparative advantage and participate in a division of labor. Perhaps this question will drive the point home: Would you rather be stranded on an island with two other people or 20 other people? Malthus wouldn’t be a Malthusian if he could see this data The empirical evidence is compelling, too. In the graph below, we can see the sort of world Malthus saw: one in which most people were barely surviving, especially compared to our current situation. Our 21st-century world tells a different story. Extreme poverty is on the decline even while world population is increasing. Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor and “celebrity statistician,” is famous for his “Don’t Panic” message about population growth. He sees that as populations and economies grow, more have access to birth control and limit the size of their families. In this video , he shows that all countries are heading toward longer lifespans and greater standards of living. Finally, there’s the hockey stick of human prosperity. Estimates of GDP per capita on a global, millennial scale reveal a recent dramatic turn. The inflection point coincides with the industrial revolution. Embracing the productivity of steam-powered capital goods and other technologies sparked a revolution in human well-being across the globe. Since then, new sources of energy have been harnessed and computers entered the scene. Now, computers across the world are connected through the internet and have been made small enough to fit in our pockets. Goods, services, and ideas zip across the globe, while human productivity increases beyond what anybody could have imagined just 50 years ago. 
I don’t think Malthus himself would be a Malthusian if he could see the world today. 
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The Best of Jonathan Newman Tags: Jonathan Newman was a 2013 and 2014 Summer Fellow at the Mises Institute and teaches economics at Auburn University.",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) The faction of the GOP that is unhappy with Donald Trump as the party's presumptive nominee has one last plan to stop the mogul: staging an all-out delegate revolt at the Republican National Convention.

The far-fetched idea is the latest reflection of a campaign cycle that has been anything but ordinary, and stems from a continuing dissatisfaction among some conservative stalwarts with how Trump is behaving and running his campaign. But two longtime GOP veterans says they wouldn't bet on the effort working.

The effort comes at a rough time for the GOP. As the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters, including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, line up behind Hillary Clinton and against Trump, Republicans have been forced to criticize their own nominee. Recent comments from Trump about a federal judge's Mexican heritage have drawn widespread rebuke and put GOP leaders in a corner as they defend their endorsement of Trump while disavowing his comments.

One of the vocal advocates for a delegate revolt is conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who has also been actively seeking a candidate to mount an independent bid against Trump, thus far to no avail.

Kristol tweeted late Thursday that the idea of a ""conscience convention,"" where delegates are free to vote for whomever they want to, is also appealing.

""I've been focused on independent candidacy, & still am. But struck by sudden level of interest in possible delegate revolt at convention,"" Kristol tweeted. He added: ""A Convention of Conscience in Cleveland would be quite something. Made easier by fact Trump only won minority of total primary votes anyway.""

Bob Vander Plaats, the head of The Family Leader, an influential social conservative group in Iowa, told CNN's Kate Bolduan Friday morning that ""everything does need to be on the table"" at the convention, though he stopped short of calling for a revolt on the convention floor.

""We want a principled conservative and disciplined candidate who is the standard-bearer of this party,"" said Vander Plaats, who backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during the primaries. He said Trump has time before the convention to ""have the concerns laid to rest.""

""All I'm doing is adapting to the circumstances,"" Kendal Unruh told ABC. ""I certainly believe Trump's demagogic racist comments are hurting him.""

The rules enacted by the previous convention, which govern in 2016 until delegates pass a new set of rules, state that even if a delegate casts a ballot for a candidate other than one they are bound to, the convention secretary will record their bound vote.

In order to change that rule, the 112 delegates (two from each state and territory) on the Rules Committee would have to pass different rules and bring those to the floor of the convention, where a majority of delegates present would have to approve them.

Rules expert and RNC veteran Jim Bopp, an Indiana delegate who serves as special counsel to the RNC Rules Committee, said he has spoken with people who want to ""keep the option open to manipulate the rules in some way to deny Trump the nomination,"" but he said he wouldn't bet on any changes.

""I would put money on no rules changes that would affect the outcome of the nominating process,"" Bopp told CNN. ""I think it's highly likely that no rules changes would be adopted that would affect the nomination.""

Bopp said there's also a counter movement within Rules insiders to pass a rule that would prevent any other rules changes from going into effect until the close of the convention.

Rules Committee and Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue is behind that effort, and has been pushing the RNC this year to adopt rules that give less power to the party and more to the delegates. He tried but failed to get the party to adopt rules that would require bigger majorities to pass business at the convention.

Yue says with roughly 80% of the convention delegates being either Trump or Cruz backers, the anti-Trump forces don't have much strength.

""The common denominator of the delegates is anti-establishment, anti-Washington,"" Yue said. ""And if you think about 'Never Trump' people, they are representing Washington and the establishment.""

Part of the philosophy for a delegate revolt comes from longtime RNC veteran Curly Haugland, from North Dakota, and a book he co-wrote with public policy consultant Sean Parnell. ""Unbound"" uses the history of the RNC to make the case that RNC rules dictate that delegates be allowed to vote their conscience.

""What Curly and I are contending is that because of RNC rules, there is no such thing as binding,"" Parnell told CNN, saying the binding rules that currently are in place are in a part of the rules package that govern pre-convention during the delegate selection process.

But Parnell also acknowledged that any effort to make the interpretation stick would require at the very least a handful of state delegations if not a majority of delegates on the floor.

""It would be messy. Good television though,"" Parnell said. ""I would not call it likely. My hope is that delegates are free to vote however they want to vote, and it's going to be up to the chair whether or not to allow that. But I think unless Donald Trump actually does go shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, I don't think this is going to cost him the nomination.""

Neither the Trump campaign nor Republican National Committee immediately responded to a request for comment on the chatter about a delegate revolt.

There has been intense focus on the Rules Committee for months, going back to when there was a possibility of no Republican candidate getting enough delegates to clinch the nomination outright. With the prospect of a contested convention, the Cruz campaign made a concerted effort to stock the Rules Committee and state delegations with loyalists who would support Rules that would benefit Cruz in a bid to win the nomination on multiple ballots.

But after Cruz lost Indiana soundly and suspended his campaign, the prospect of a contested convention vanished and Trump rolled to the magic number to clinch the nomination.

Meanwhile, the Cruz campaign urged supporters to continue to become delegates and earn leadership spots to influence the platform at the convention.

Though some in the party have never warmed to Trump, the intensity of finding a way to prevent his formal nomination has grown in recent days after Trump's comments about a federal judge inflamed even the leaders of his own party.

Trump questioned the impartiality of the district court judge overseeing a lawsuit related to his venture Trump University, saying the Indiana-born judge's Mexican ancestry could bias him against Trump. The mogul cited his campaign promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico in making the comments.

Though the presumptive nominee has repeatedly stood behind and doubled down on the comments, his stance has drawn outrage from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called the remarks ""the textbook definition of a racist comment.""

Still, only a small handful of Republicans have withdrawn or withheld their endorsements of Trump. Vulnerable Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk disavowed Trump this week and said he could not endorse the party's nominee after all, but Ryan, McConnell and others have stood by their endorsements, saying Clinton would be a worse choice.",REAL
"Meanwhile, Democrat Bernie Sanders picked up more delegates in the two states than Hillary Clinton.

The Vermont senator's still way behind, but says he's not giving up, calling his win in West Virginia ""tremendous.""

Clinton still holds a commanding delegate lead, but Sanders still has the fight in him.

""We are in this campaign to win the Democratic nomination!"" he declared.

But Sanders' quest appears to be almost impossible, with Clinton 94 percent of the way to winning the nomination.

""I am, if I am so fortunate enough as to be the nominee - I am looking forward to debating Donald Trump come the fall,"" she said.

Still, Clinton faces the FBI investigation of her email scandal.

In addition, her loss in West Virginia, a state she took in 2008, was payback for her statements in March that a lot of coal miners and coal companies would be out of business.

She's also polling badly among whites, men, and young people, with many loyal Sanders supporters vowing to never vote for her.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, Trump kept rolling, winning West Virginia and Nebraska.

The billionaire told the Associated Press he's looking at five or six people as his running mate, all with deep political experience.

One person that Trump will likely not be considering is Sen. Marco Rubio, who told CNN he disagrees with Trump's ""America first"" foreign policy.

""I have well defined differences with the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party,"" Rubio said. ""And like millions of Republicans, you try to reconcile those two things.""

Trump will be meeting on Capitol Hill Thursday with Republican leaders, a group he has railed against, to try to patch up the public differences they've had.

Unifying the Democrats is going to be an issue for Clinton too, as many Sanders voters have said they wouldn't vote for her.

So, after tough primary battles, both parties are facing the question of how to work together against each in the general election this fall.",REAL
"After a week of nonstop criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike for comments many condemned as racially charged, Donald Trump claims to be altering his campaign to be a little more inclusive. While the presumptive G.O.P. has long promised to “make America great again,” Trump now says he’s adding two words to slogan to illustrate just how non-racist he really is.

“You know, I have the theme ‘make America great again,’ and I've added a couple of things,” Trump announced to supporters at a campaign rally in Richmond, Virginia, on Friday night. “Right now I’m adding make America great again—I’m adding ‘for everyone,’ because it’s really going to be for everyone. It’s not going to be for a group of people, it’s going to be for everyone. It’s true.”

The allegedly amended slogan, which has yet to appear on any official signage or Trump merchandise, comes after the presidential candidate spent the first half of June repeatedly denouncing Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over the Trump University class action lawsuit, as inherently biased against him. (Curiel was born in Indiana.) His comments were widely condemned by the Washington political establishment, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who suggested he may be an idiot, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called Trump’s statement the “textbook definition of a racist comment.”

Trump, who hasn’t apologized or taken back any of his comments, indicated on Friday that he realized his words have had a negative effect on his campaign and declared he is not a racist.

“I am the least racist person. The least racist person that you’ve ever seen. I mean give me a break,” he said at the rally. “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever looked at, believe me.”",REAL
"If you want a glimpse into a presidential candidate’s governing style, take a look at his campaign. How does he build an organization? How does he manage personnel? How does he delegate responsibility? Does he value loyalty or honesty in advisers? It’s hardly conclusive, but how a candidate deals with these challenges says a lot about what they’d prioritize as president.

The presumptive Republican nominee has managed his campaign the way he manages his casinos or his realty TV program: haphazardly and with an unearned arrogance. Everything’s about the brand and non-sycophants are cast aside. Getting it right is far less important than being right. Thus, when prompted by advisers to dial down the rhetoric and think more about his long-term viability, Trump has resisted. He’s yet to understand how different a primary and a general election are, and he’s too cocksure to listen to anyone who tries to explain it.

Trump isn’t as stupid as he pretends to be, but his confidence seems to scale with his ignorance, and that’s a dangerous trait in a president, given how consequential each decision can be. As a candidate, a confident idiot can make a lot of noise and fool a lot of voters. But you can’t lead that way. As president, Trump would need the sober advice of serious professionals. Considering how little he understands about the job and the world, this is especially true in his case.

Based on the latest behind-the-scenes reports on Trump’s campaign (as well as his entire history in real estate and television), it’s unlikely he would govern with the humility and self-awareness required. The campaign has undergone several shake-ups in recent months, with key staffers like Corey Lewandowski being demoted to make way for veteran operatives like Paul Manafort. Trump’s approach has remained very much the same, however. Everyone he brings in bends to his will or is replaced by someone who does.

Things have gotten more chaotic in the last week or so, as Rick Wiley was fired as the campaign’s national political director. Wiley was known to assert himself in ways that alienated Trump and his loyalists. The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan and Robert Costa summarized the broader situation over the weekend: “For the last two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers. But tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.” These are the management techniques of a brand-hustling magnate, not a president of the United States. Trump’s dictatorial approach works well on the campaign trail, but it’d be a disaster in office. A president has to persuade and compromise. The capacity to admit ignorance is equally important. Trump, by all accounts, has no interest in any of these things. Trump doesn’t know what he needs to know in order to be president, nor does he care that he doesn’t know. If his campaign is any indication, he’ll hire people to ensure his veil of ignorance is never cracked. That kind of megalomania is why Trump is who he is – it’s part of his outsized persona. It’s also the clearest indicator we have of the kind of president he’d be.",REAL
"Syrian War Report – October 31, 2016: Al-Nusra-led Forces Failed to Break Aleppo Siege ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – November 1, 2016: Syrian Military Deploys Advanced T-90 Battle Tanks to Aleppo By South Front on November 1, 2016 …from SouthFront 
The Syrian military has deployed advanced Russian-made T-90 main battle tanks to western Aleppo, according to the video released on October 31. T-90 MBTs were observed in the Minyan area where they were participating in operations against Jaish al-Fatah, a Jabhat al-Nusra-led coalition of militant groups. Last weekend, elite units of the Syrian Army’s Tiger Forces and the Desert Hawks Brigade were deployed in Aleppo to counter the militants’ offensive operation to capture the al-Assad Military Academy and the nearby areas. Both formations operate T-90 MBTs supplied by Moscow over the last year. The government forces massively use tanks, artillery, warplanes and helicopters to attrit Jaish al-Fatah’s manpower in non-populated urban areas. 
Experts note that the jihadists have also concentrated a high number of experienced troops, artillery, rocket launchers and military equipment at a restricted front in western Aleppo. To do this, they had been pushed to use almost all their resources from the rear bases in Idlib province. If Jabhat al-Nusra is not able to achieve a decided success in clashes with the government forces soon, this will lead to its total collapse as a powerbroker in the war. The group’s material and technical base will be destroyed and experienced troops and field commanders killed in the clashes. We’ve been already able to observe signs of this tendency since the failed al-Nusra attempt to dig in the Ramouseh Artillery Acandemy in southern Aleppo. 
The Kurdish YPG and the Ankara-led forces (Turkish-backed militant groups and the Turkish Armed Forces) have been competing in the northeastern countryside of Aleppo city. Both forces recently captured a bunch of villages from ISIS in the direction of Al-Bab. In this case, the ongoing coordination between the Syrian army and the YPG has once again become reality on the ground. The recent Kurdish operations were coordinated and supported by the Russian and Syrian military and military sources say that Moscow increased military supplies to the YPG in the area. Moscow and Domascus believe that the Kurdish buffer zone plays an important role, preventing Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki and other pro-Turkish groups from attacking the Syrian army and its allies in Aleppo city. In mid-October Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki officially announced that the next stage of Turkey’s Operation Euphrates Shield will include an advance on the ‘regime forces’ in Aleppo. 
Dozens of al-Nusra Front and linked-groups members were killed during their failed attempt to break the Syrian army’s defenses at the abandoned al-Mahjoorah Battalion military camp near the militant-controlled town of Ibtaa in the province of Daraa on October 31. According to pro-government forces over 40 militants were killed. Pro-militant media outlets confirm 26 killed in action terrorists. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on November 1, 2016, With 727 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
"Randy Maugans & Jeffrey Sewell | Metabiology face to face with Artificial Intelligence Published on Sep 20, 2016 We are speaking on a subject that is vital for humanity to comprehend, AI or artificial intelligence, our objective is to further disclose how this is influencing humanity in subtle and not so subtle ways, for without knowledge of its existence or comprehension of its prevalence humanity is easily being led into more sophisticated technological control mechanisms. 
Jeffrey Sewell has spent many years in deep study of biology, in the process he introduces us to Metabiology, the tenants are simple, ‘As above, so below’ holds true from the nucleus of a cell to the furthest reaches of distant galaxies, life begets life. And it does so in a miraculous pattern that is reflected from the cosmos to the super organism, our Earth and to each of us in our divine vessel, the human body. From his website: http://cytocosmos.com 
“Metabiology is a study of the invisible systems of life spanning from the subatomic to the celestial. […] By using cell biology as a template, we are able to map elements within the cell to elements of unseen systems. The latter elements are obtained by cross referencing multiple sources of material from the OBE/LBL/NDE experiencer community. These so-called astral systems map quite nicely to systems in the cell, and they tell the same narrative, albeit the complexity and sophistication of cellular earth is many times that of the cell. 
Much of the understandings derived from such mappings are echoed in the deeper cosmologies and teachings of the ancient world religions. Examples include; Sumerian, Egyptian, Kabbalah, Gnostic, Kashmir Shivaism, and Vedanta. Jungian Psychology has also proven to be useful in mapping out the cellular psyche. 
This is the science of “as above, so below” in a very literal sense. The invisible is inner visible within the generalized cell itself. We can therefore grasp and ground the unseen systems of life by mapping them to the empirical biology of the cell. The implications of what this science has to offer reach all the way from psychology to cosmology and particle physics. 
The primary tenet of Metabiology is that we have inherited biology from systems of life that exist both above and before us. Should it be surprising? After all, we are children of the living universe. The Cytocosmos is a multidimensional living fractal, a cellular holarchy that has hitherto been called the universe.” 
Randy Maugans is the beloved radio show host of ‘Offplanet Radio’ http://radio.offplanetmedia.net/ Who doesn’t pull his punches speaking his truth. His many years in the medium of the the alternative media and on the internet has given him an ample arena to study the affects of the infiltration of AI and its interface with human consciousness. 
claudia and christine co-founded “Earth Empaths” and this YouTube channel “Not In Our Name.”… The truth no matter where it leads us. 
http://earthempaths.net 
“Listen to your inner voice. Don’t listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry. Listen to that deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on, the voice that is laughing. Listen to it! And laugh with it. Laugh! Laugh!”– Don Juan Matus Share:",FAKE
"In a previous article , I discussed stretching—namely, why stretching is important for the masculine man, and several stretches that you should use in your training to maximize your physical fitness. And while that advice is still valid, I neglected a very important concept in that first article: the techniques that detail how to stretch.
I am not referring to a specific stretch or some sort of hypothetical “stretching mindset,” but rather a set of techniques that can be utilized for any stretch to increase ones flexibility immediately. But before I can discuss those, I have to discuss the incorrect way of stretching that many people still use.
How Not To Stretch Many people believe that stretching is a literal act of forcing the muscles and connective tissue to stretch— avoid this at all costs ! First and foremost, as I have discussed previously in these pages, you should never apply any stretching pressure to the connective tissue. They evolved solely to “hold fast” and keep things in one piece, they should never be stretched at all!
The muscles are the anatomical feature that stretches, as they evolved to do. When stretching, your body should always be positioned in a way where the connective tissues are stable and the muscles are moving.
Even when you are positioned properly, no part of stretching should involve the athlete forcing his muscles to stretch, as that risks muscular tearing which is a nagging injury that never truly goes away. This is because the human body has naturally evolved what is referred to as the “ anti-stretch reflex ” to prevent muscular tearing-stretching the muscles increases in difficulty the farther and deeper the stretch is, and your body responds to this stress with pain. This is a biological sign telling you that if you go further you’ll be risking muscle tears, and should normally be a heeded warning.
However, if you want to do advanced stretching (such as that nigh-impossible benchmark of fitness the splits), you will have to find a way to overcome this reflex without hurting yourself. And as luck would have it, there is!

Relax Into Stretching Reflexes can be overcome with gradual and repeated practice—just ask your friendly neighborhood hooker about how she overcame her gag reflex! Similarly, your anti-stretch reflex that keeps your “joints” (actually your muscles) stiff and immobile can be overcome with a few techniques.
The most basic of these techniques is the one that I have had the best results with (as usual, the simple but difficult answer is usually the correct one), and that is the titular concept of “relaxing into a stretch”—with thanks to Pavel Tsatsouline for naming the concept.
To use this technique, take an easy form of the stretch you want to do: using the splits as an example, you would do a seated groin stretch. Engage the stretch just to the point where you feel tension in the target muscle, and then…sit and wait.

Yes, paradoxically, relaxation is the key to increasing your physical fitness in this context. You are literally going to sit there and wait for your muscles to stop fighting the stretch—in other words, you’re going to exhaust your reflex until it stops being reflexive.
This is not something that happens quickly—from my experience, it will take 5-10 minutes per stretch, so it is perfectly acceptable for you to get a book or watch TV while doing this. As a side note, this is literally the only time where it’s acceptable to have a visual distraction during exercise, in my opinion.
As you might expect, once your muscles have relaxed and the pain has melted away, you can increase the stretch a little bit more, and hold it for another 10 minutes. Repeat this process until your muscles are in pain and you judge that you can’t go any further—this is a personal call that you will have to decide for yourself, as I can’t judge when your muscles are demanding you to stop.
This technique can be utilized for any stretch, and in many cases will give you the progress that you so desire. However, there are other methods in the “Relax Into Stretch” family of exercises that can be utilized as well, such as meditation—mentally relaxing will lead to muscular relaxation.
Or you can try “forced relaxation”, where you flex the muscle simultaneously while stretching, forcing the muscle to relax.

Either way you slice it, don’t just brute force your stretching, utilize these techniques for better results.
Read More: Why Stretching Is Essential For The Body (With 6 Beginner Stretches To Get You Started) 
",FAKE
"Britain and EU After Brexit ( 31 ) 0 13 0 0 Brexit prompts the Unietd Kingdom to facilitate trade relations with non-EU states including Russia, the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce (RBCC) chairman told Sputnik. 
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Leaving the European Union and losing access to the single market encourages Britain to develop trade with Russia and other non-EU states, Roger Munnings, the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce (RBCC) chairman, told Sputnik on Wednesday. ""There are at least two years to go before we leave the European Union, but I think the way Britain is looking at it is that it gives us a chance to be completely open to all countries in the world, including Russia. We’ll need to look for other trading partners rather than being confined to the European Union by virtue of the free trade arrangement, so we will be very keen to do trade with Russia,"" Munnings said on the sidelines of the RBCC RussiaTALK Investment Forum in Moscow. 
He added that although there was sanctions regime in place against Moscow, at the same time the British government encourages trade with Russia. © Photo: PIxabay UK FinMin Upholds Economic Stimuli to Quell Concerns Over ‘Hard Brexit’ On June 23, the United Kingdom voted on referendum to leave the European Union . On October 2, UK Prime Minister Theresa May said that the country would trigger Article 50 of the EU Lisbon Treaty by the end of March 2017 to start the official procedures to cease its EU membership.
A number of EU leaders have already stated that the United Kingdom will lose its access to the single market unless it keeps freedom of movement rules. May, meanwhile, suggested at the Conservative party conference in early October that the country’s exit from the European Union would be a ""hard"" rather than ""soft"" Brexit, meaning that control over immigration would be prioritized over the access to the European single market. ...",FAKE
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Carl Herman 
“It is no use trying to escape their (Empire’s) arrogance by submission or good behavior. Robbers of the world, having by universal plunder exhausted the land, their drive is greed. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if poor, they lust for domination. Neither rule of the East nor West can satisfy them. Alone among men, they crave with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To plunder, slaughter, seize with false pretenses, they give the lying name ‘empire.’ And where nothing remains but a desert, they call that ‘peace.’ ” – Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (analyses here , here ). Tacitus wrote ~ 100 AD, a century into empire. Emperors proclaimed to the public that their government still upheld the highest ideals of their Republic, claiming expanding empire was only and always in “self-defense.” 
“One Love! Let’s get together and feel all right. Hear the children cryin’ Hear the children cryin’ (One Heart! )” ~ Bob Marley, One Love 
language warning: Socrates and I speak in the same direct language that caused his execution for “corrupting the young.” 
Socrates: Carl! 
Carl: Soc! (bro hug) 
S: How may I be of service? (genuine smile) 
C: I just want to talk with an honest person, bro. We last talked 6 months ago . I don’t know if I have anything new to say, but I want to talk with someone who can hear. 
S: I’ll try. What about? 
C: We’re finishing a so-called “election” season that’s “jumped the shark” (and here ) with the Left-wing candidate a proven criminal, and Right-wing candidate a depraved Roman Emperor wanna-be . These are Left and Right arms of one illegal rogue state US empire , of course. 
S: Of course. 
C: So I keep feeling that we have to be near an endgame, Soc. We have to be, given the open floodgates of evidence about s much criminal activity by the .01% centered in war , looting , and lying . 
I mean, really, how much longer can this go on?! 
S: (smiling) Are you asking me, or just pausing for dramatic effect? 
C: I’m asking if you have any answers. 
S: (shrugs) I went through a 27-year civil war after almost 50 years of Athenian “leaders” concentrating an empire under their dominion. As we discussed in some detail , Athen’s “love of freedom” and spin that foreign barbarians “hate us for our freedoms” was total inversion of the facts because “freedom” was only meant for us, and not anyone else. Everyone else had to pay tribute or face military invasion. 
This hypocrisy in my time produced civil war. Those of us voicing the facts were insufficient to prevent it, or stop it once started. (Pauses to look intensely into my eyes) 
So you tell me: how much longer could your struggle go on? 
C: Fuck. 
I really don’t want a civil war. 
S: Fuck, indeed. If it comes, maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe it won’t last 27 years. 
C: Fuck. 
S: But I do have a brighter perspective. I mean, how many of the non-sheeple would care to talk with me if all I ever did is leave them discouraged? (chuckles) Who would converse with Socrates if those who did were asked, ‘Hey, how did your conversation with Socrates go?’ and the responses were all disheartened, ‘Fuck!’ (laughs) 
C: Alright, go. What’s the higher light? 
S: You already know it. You tell me. 
C: Ok, you’re right. Maybe my being on Earth is all about growth, truth, and service, and I have to exercise real-world Faith to the One Life. It’s my job as a guest on this planet to harmonize in service to the Goddess ’ plan for Earth. Those of us who are relative beacons of light are isolated by design, obviously, by the facts of our relative leadership and lack of response from the public. 
(smile) At least I haven’t been voted by my peers for execution, as you were, Soc, for standing for truth. 
S: Not yet, anyway. If you had taken other pathways, you would have been assassinated by your oligarchs, such as Martin King , President Kennedy , and others . 
C: (sigh) I guess I don’t really have anything new to discuss. I just want to win this game. End the empire. Have truth and love. 
It’s been a long war, bro. 
S: Indeed it has. Longer than you know. 
C: So much bullshit . 
S: Only bullshit. Any truth has been co-opted, controlled, and used to mask the empire. The only reason I’m allowed onto your history pages is pretense that humanity lives on a planet operated from ideals of virtue. 
It’s the same with religious ideals of love. 
C: I’m ready to win. 
S: So was I. 
C: (sigh) Alright. So another day in the empire. Ok. Fine. Real-world exercise of Faith. The Goddess has more evolution to oversee with love and wisdom before we see a breakthrough. I can embrace that. 
It’s really stupid to argue with reality. 
Really stupid. 
S: (smiling) Apparently, yes. 
We have to work with what we have, assuredly. There is no other option. 
C: We discussed in our previous conversations linked for readers below that the US today compares to your empire in Athens, and the case that perhaps, just maybe, the US is on the verge of breakthrough for Truth and Love. 
S: Perhaps my history can allow perspective on your world of the present, and encourage Americans today to best use their voice and virtue for a brighter path than the civil war we endured. 
Certainly for all interested, this consideration is worthy of investing time and attention. History is literally all we know, and what drives our understanding of the present. History is what informs our direction for building the future. 
America’s history is at war between an awakening We the People and a deeply evil .01% committed to undisclosed vicious empire. 
Your history could devolve into civil war. (chuckles) As would-be Emperor Trump might say: “Sad.” 
C: (shaking my head, slight smile). Ok, I gotta’ go to work. Another day in the empire. My vote still stands to planetary management for full fucking truth in a breakthrough. I like a potential trend with revealing e-mails, but want a breakthrough that causes arrests of our .01% leaders in elegant endgame. 
S: Yes, and I’d like to fly, breath underwater swimming like a dolphin, and have daily dinner parties with wine, music and women! 
C: (mock agreement) Me, too! 
Ok, our wants aren’t our best guides, necessarily. 
I do have to go to work. Back to “earning a living.” 
S: Make the most of it. It’s your given area of self-expression. 
C: I promise. I’ll lead by example of my best good-faith expression and experience of virtue. 
Another day. 
S: Perhaps just another day. Perhaps you can’t imagine what’s coming. 
C: Human limitations. I’ll work with what I see. 
S: That’s all I concluded was possible. That’s all I got for wisdom. I didn’t teach anything other than look for yourself what’s right there in front of you to see. Listen to your small voice within for your best call of virtue. 
Step-by-step, my brother. In all empathy, live your Faith that you’re loved and guided more than you’re able to imagine. 
(bro hug) 
We’ll do our best. 
“Interview” series:",FAKE
"Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section ",FAKE
"First ever Hindu was elected to the US House of Representatives. She will take the oath of office over the Bhagavad Gita. 

During election, Hawaii elected Japan-born Mazie Hirono to be the first ever Asian-American woman elected to the Senate. Hawaii also elected Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as the first ever practicing Hindu to the US House of Representatives. Because of this, Fox News have declare Hawaii a “disaster zone”. 

Gabbard is the daughter of two conservative Hawaii politicians. She first ran, and was elected into office at the age of 21. After her first term, she served on a 12 month tour of duty with Hawaii’s National Guard, and then became the first woman in history of the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy to be designated a “distinguished honor graduate”. 

She was then deployed to Baghdad as a medical operations specialist in 2004, and she was deployed to Kuwait in 2008. 

History has proven that not everyone is comfortable with a Hindu elect. When Hindu statesman Rajan Zed was asked by the Senate to open with a prayer in 2007, the American Family Association called the prayer “gross idolatry” and urged people to protest. Three protesters interrupted the prayer with shouts from the gallery. 

When she is sworn this January, Gabbard will take her oath of office over the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred text for Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma. 

Gabbard hopes to assist the US in fostering a better relationship with India, the world’s largest democracy with a growing economic and nuclear power. She also hopes to work on veteran’s affairs, and environmental issues. 

Other non-Christian people in Congress include Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who took his oath of office over the Qu-ran. 

Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
"Topics: anthony weiner , presidential politics , American Politics , Donald J. Trump , Groping , Clinton's emails Friday, 4 November 2016 
[ Associated Press, Washington, D.C. ] FBI Director James Comey informed members of Congress this morning that he was expanding his investigation into e-mails, based on materials found on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner. 
The materials include an e-mail from Trump to ""Carlos Danger,"" the on-line pseudonym which Weiner used, in which Trump bragged about groping then-Senator Clinton when she and former President Bill Clinton attended Trump's third wedding, to Melania Trump, at the billionaire's Mar-a-Lago estate in 2005. 
""There she was, her and Bill, smiling for the cameras, and all the time I had my hand on her ass,"" boasted Trump, according to Comey. 
Comey went on to state that Weiner's laptop contained ""sext"" messages from Weiner to Trump, containing photos of a bulge in the former Congressman's tidy whiteys, and messages back from Trump to Weiner, containing photos showing Trump's tiny hands gripping a large zucchini. 
Comey added that he, also, would be a subject of the ever-expanding investigation, because there were several selfies of himself on the laptop, including one in which he is posed sitting naked on a white horse with a garland of laurel on his brow, one of him dressed up to look like J. Edgar Hoover, in a dress, with the caption, ""Infallible ME!"" and a third one of him engaged in self-flagellation with a Cat'o Nine Tails. 
""I deserved it,"" Comey explained. Make Philip J. Moss's  ",FAKE
"Ex-Assistant FBI Director: Clintons Are a Crime Family October   
That's quite an endorsement . And if there's anything top FBI officials now, it's crime families. Certainly this is probably the first serious level of experience that Hillary can claim in any field. 
“The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically,” former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said. “It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool.” 
“Kallstrom, best known for leading the investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800 in the late '90s, said that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, was a “pathological liar.” 
He also blasted Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that she impeded the investigation into Clinton’s private server. 
“The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation,” he said. “That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that.” 
Kallstrom also said that FBI Director James Comey and the rest of the FBI’s leadership were responsible for holding back the investigation, not the rest of the bureau. 
“The agents are furious with what’s going on, I know that for a fact,” he said. 
But according to the media, the FBI investigating Hillary is the real crime.",FAKE
"10-27-1 6 The first Bill and Hillary Clinton co-presidency included eight years of Balkan and other wars of aggression. Bush/Cheney exceeded their lawlessness. Obama outdid the worst of both previous administrations - attacking seven countries, destabilizing others, orchestrating coups in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil, threatening Venezuelan democracy, enforcing puppet rule in Haiti, continuing Plan Colombia aid, responsible for massacres, disappearances and torture of regime opponents, along with instituting increasingly anti-Sino/Russia policies, risking confrontation with both countries. On October 27, the Wall Street Journal said 2016 electoral politics “scrambled traditional positions on foreign policy and international intervention, obliterating many of the usual partisan distinctions and presenting political challenges for whoever wins in November.” Hillary will likely exceed the worst of Obama’s aggressiveness “on the international stage, according to her public statements and (what) top aides” say. She’ll be more hardline on Russia, China and Iran, risking direct confrontation. Earlier she said “I think I’ve been very clear that my position is in favor of what I called smart power that uses all the tools at our disposal, and military power always should be a last resort.” Her views as first lady, US senator and secretary of state show how often she favors it aggressively, her rage for wars insatiable. As president and commander-in-chief, she’ll likely circumvent international and constitutional law like her predecessors, waging war on any nation she chooses. Former acting CIA director Michael Morell, a likely Hillary administration appointee, urges a more muscular US geopolitical role, including new sanctions on Russia and Iran, earlier saying: “Ships leave Iran on a regular basis carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen. I would have no problem from a policy perspective of having the US Navy boarding their ships and if there are weapons on them to turn those ships around.” This type aggressiveness would risk greater Middle East war than already, maybe involving Russia and China, challenging US interventionism - knowing their nations are next if it’s not stopped. Earlier, Hillary’s top national security advisor Jake Sullivan said “(w)e need to be raising the costs to Iran for its destabilizing behavior, and we need to be raising the confidence of our Sunni partners.” Last year’s nuclear deal failed to change overall US policy toward Iran - wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing its sovereign independence. Instead of cooperating with Iran in furthering regional peace and stability, a Hillary administration appears planning to challenge it confrontationally - perhaps with another war in mind, a far greater challenge than against other Middle East states, especially with Russia likely to intervene if asked. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled ""Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."" http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. Donate to Rense.com Support Free & Honest Journalism At Rense.com Subscribe To RenseRadio! Enormous Online Archives, MP3s, Streaming Audio Files, Highest Quality Live Programs",FAKE
"Presidential hopefuls in both parties agree on at least one thing: Economic mobility, and the feeling of many Americans that they are being shut out from the nation’s prosperity, will be a defining theme of the 2016 campaign.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush last week became the latest Republican to signal a readiness to engage Democrats on what historically has been their turf, putting issues of middle-class wage stagnation, poverty and shared prosperity at the forefront of their political messages.

Bush’s framing of the economic and social challenges facing the country nearly mirrors that of likely Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as other possible contenders on the left. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has written a book on the subject, “American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone,” to be published this week, while Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has proposed policies for distressed communities that he sees as “the ticket to the middle class.”

And Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee who was portrayed by Democrats as insensitive to and out of touch with the lives of middle- and working-class Americans, has told friends he considers poverty a topic du jour as he weighs another run in 2016.

“You talk to any pollster, on the Democratic side or the Republican side, they’re in complete agreement on the idea that there has to be an economic populist message,” said Matthew Dowd, a top strategist for former president George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns. “Then it comes down to ‘Are there credible solutions and is there a credible candidate?’ ”

About 45 million Americans live at or below the poverty line, according to last fall’s census estimates, while the median household income in the United States in 2013 was just under $52,000. Adjusted for inflation, the median is 8 percent lower than it was in 2007, the last full year before the recession, and 11 percent below what it was in 2000.

Wage stagnation has been a persistent problem for low- and middle-income workers. “Since the late 1970s, wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real ­wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution,” Lawrence Mishel of the liberal Economic Policy Institute wrote in a paper published this month.

Launching his new political action committee, Right to Rise, Jeb Bush asserted last week in the PAC’s mission statement that President Obama’s tenure has been “pretty good” for those at the top of the income scale but a “lost decade” for everyone else.

“Millions of our fellow citizens across the broad middle class feel as if the American Dream is now out of their reach; that our politics are petty and broken; that opportunities are elusive; and that the playing field is no longer fair or level,” Bush wrote. “Too many of the poor have lost hope that a path to a better life is within their grasp.”

Bush’s focus adds an unexpected element to the coming debate and puts pressure on the entire field, himself included, to come forward with fresh policies that address the nation’s core economic problems.

The shift also highlights a potential vulnerability for Democrats. In his campaigns, Obama twice promised to focus on wealth inequality and middle-class stagnation, but those problems persist even as the economy revs up and unemployment falls.

Clinton could be challenged now from both the right and the left to lay out solutions that go beyond Obama’s — and also to develop a political voice of her own to articulate them. Democrats conceded after last fall’s midterm elections that they had not found a compelling economic message.

Democrats will look to Clinton, should she run, to take the lead in doing that — although they also are looking to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and her harder-edged populist rhetoric.

Clinton tested such a message last year. In a major speech at the New America Foundation in May, she said that Americans are “finding it harder than ever to get their footing in our changing economy. The dream of upward mobility that made this country a model for the world feels further and further out of reach.”

The language of Bush, Rubio and other Republicans appears aimed at avoiding the problem that bedeviled Romney throughout his 2012 campaign. The former Massachusetts governor’s memorable comment about the “47 percent” of the population who he said depend on government and feel like victims haunted him during the final months before the election.

Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative journal National Affairs, said the overall shift in emphasis by Republicans is an effort to move away from Romney’s more abstract message of job growth and to focus more specifically on social mobility and solutions for those at or near the bottom.

“It’s a process of letting the light out from under the bushel,” Levin said. Citing past conservative leadership in reforming welfare, he added: “I think Republican ideas have always held this promise, but conservatives have not always emphasized these elements. . . . A difference in emphasis is not insignificant.”

Democrats, however, argue that revising their rhetoric will not be enough for Republicans — especially if Jeb Bush becomes the GOP nominee — to gloss over former president George W. Bush’s legacy, which Democrats say tightened the middle-class squeeze.

“It’s not like the Republican Party has clean hands on the issue of rising inequality,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and an adviser to Clinton on economic policy. “It’s a weird thing to say, ‘I care about how the rest of the country is doing, not just the top earners,’ when your brother cut taxes for the wealthy and your party’s economic position starts with undoing Dodd-Frank,” the 2010 law that tightened regulation of Wall Street.

Obama hit the road last week to highlight economic successes of his presidency, from the auto industry bailout to more robust overall growth in the last half of 2014. Still, many Democrats acknowledge that there is a large gap between promise and results on issues of middle-class insecurities.

That is where Bush and some other Republicans are taking aim. Two factors have contributed to the opening they see.

One is the continued problem of stagnating wages for the broad middle class and the income gap between rich and non-rich. The other is new evidence that it has become harder for those at the bottom to rise into the middle class, and that the risk of some born into the middle class — particularly minorities — falling out of it is growing.

Democrats long have been seen as the party more trusted to deal with middle-class economic issues. Republicans long have resisted policies that smack of economic redistribution. Could that be changing?

“How do you tell the middle class, ‘We’re your guy?’ ” said Grover Norquist, a conservative anti-tax advocate. “Republicans feel comfortable saying that now because they feel the guys they’re running against are sufficiently discredited.”

William Galston of the Brookings Institution said that the issue of blocked social mobility is one Republicans will feel more comfortable engaging — and on their own terms. “That’s what Jeb Bush is saying: ‘We can accept a definition of a problem . . . but give unabashedly conservative responses to those challenges,’ ” he said.

But Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said Bush’s framing of the issue this way means he has put down a marker that he will be expected to meet.

“I would expect to hear from him over the coming months some of the best and most innovative conservative thinking on opportunity and upward mobility,” he said. “That will be a fair test on how much gas there is in the conservative ideas tank.”

Other Republicans have been working to reorient their party toward blue-collar economics and to put forward fresh economic ideas. Former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, two former presidential candidates who are looking at running in 2016, long have talked about the GOP’s need to recognize the problems of working families.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has focused on policies designed to lift people out of poverty. In 2012, as Romney’s running mate, Ryan wanted to campaign in inner cities and give speeches promoting individual empowerment. He was frustrated that Romney’s campaign team directed him to talk about other topics.

Rubio has proposed a fundamental shift in anti-poverty programs. He has suggested devolving power and responsibility from Washington to the states by consolidating federal monies into a “flex fund.” The senator from Florida has called for significant reductions in federal regulations that he says will spur creation of better jobs. On education, he has offered a series of reforms designed to lessen the burden of student loan debt and expand access to apprenticeship programs. Rubio and others also have proposed changes in the earned-income tax credit to extend its reach to more people.

Democrats are skeptical that Republicans can meet the challenge with policy proposals that are much beyond calls for tax cuts to spur economic growth and further efforts to scale back the size of government.

“It sounds to me like a ­traditional Romney Republican ­trickle-down agenda but with a willingness to engage on inequality and mobility,” said Jared Bernstein, a former adviser to Vice President Biden who works at the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities.

Democrats say it’s too early to draw conclusions, but they note that if Bush and other Republicans find new ways to engage middle-class voters with populist themes, the pressures on Clinton will mount significantly.

“Voters are going to [say], ‘Okay, thank you for acknowledging this problem, but what are you going to do about it?’ ” Bernstein said. “I would argue that Democrats are going to have to have more in their toolbox than [raising the] minimum wage and universal pre-K.”",REAL
"NEW YORK -- Bye bye June rate hike. That was the billboard-size headline from Wall Street trading desks after the U.S. job-creation machine hit the wall in May. The government said 38,000 jobs were created in May, way, way, way  below the roughly 160,000 new positions Wall Street economists had been expecting.

It was the worst month for job creation since September 2010.

The Janet Yellen-led Federal Reserve had been driving home the message that it was ""appropriate"" to hike interest rates in coming months – and perhaps as early as June – IF the job market and economy continued to perform well and meet their more upbeat forecast.

But the May jobs report was bad. Really bad.

""Horrible,"" is the word used by Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at MSUSA. ""Very weak,"" chimed in Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at EverBank. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, tweeted out that the lousy jobs number amounted to a  ""bombshell.""

A bombshell, indeed. So weak was the 38,000 May job count, that Wall Street now sees virtually a zero chance of the Fed moving at its June meeting, which breaks up on June 15.

""This is the weakest number of workers added in almost six years,"" Gaffney told USA TODAY via e-mail.

After the dreadful jobs report was released, the odds of a June hike plunged to about 4%, down sharply from 19% before the data were released, according to futures markets tracked by the CME Group.

""Just when they thought it was safe to go back into the water,"" the Fed gets hit with this less-than-stellar data point on jobs, Ricchiuto told clients in a report. ""This now assures that June is off the table, but may not rule out July.""

But professional investors are still not willing to rule out a hike in July – at least not yet as there is a lot of economic data to come between now and July. The chances of a July hike plunged to 34% from close to 60%.

The market reaction was swift. Stocks dipped as investors now have to worry about a possible slowdown in job creation, which is a negative for the economy. ""Risks about the strength of the U.S. economy outweigh the positive impacts of lower interest rates,"" Gaffney said.

Bond yields fell, as investors piled back into U.S. government bonds as the threat of an imminent Fed rate hike fade. The U.S. dollar weakened as the Fed's rate-hike timetable gets pushed back.

Sure the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.7%. But while that number sounds good it is mainly due to ""another big drop in the labor force,"" says Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics.

Yellen is scheduled to speak on Monday, Ashworth adds. Wall Street will be listening – closely.

""Yellen should provide more insight on the Fed's thinking Monday,"" he said via e-mail.",REAL
"Real Disclosure! Secret Alien Base Found In Moon's Tycho Crater # Grey 52 
Real Disclosure is where you find something on the lunar surface that cannot possibly exist unless someone built it. NO WAY it's a natural formation --- SOMETHING constructed that ---- 90° angles are just not possible without alien/man-made interaction. More 'smoking gun' irrefutable proof of intelligence from abroad. Tags",FAKE
"Homeless Woman Protects Trump’s Walk of Fame Star From Violent Leftists ""I'm gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it."" Chris Menahan | Information Liberation - October 28, 2016 Comments 
Powerful video shows a homeless woman protecting Donald Trump’s Walk of Fame Star after it was smashed by a criminal leftist. 
As The Gateway Pundit reports , the woman was seen holding up a sign reading: “20 Million Illegals and Americans Sleep on the Streets in Tents. Vote Trump.” 
It was repaired on the same day. 
The day after, this homeless Trump supporter went to protect it. 
“I’m gonna stay here and watch this, and make sure nobody touches it,” she was heard saying. Homeless Trump supporter guards @realDonaldTrump 's star on Hollywood Blvd. against all SJWs #BasedSentinel #MAGA3X https://t.co/BjGcFO0du5 ? pic.twitter.com/nrMqnbW5UK 
— PeterDuke MAGA3X🇺🇸 (@peterdukephoto) October 27, 2016 
Video shared on Periscope shows hordes of disgusting leftists insult and attack the woman for supporting Trump. 
In this short video posted to YouTube, one angry black man is seen screaming in her face and asking her: “Do you know your federal government is not even party of the f***ing government?” 
“Do you know that?” he asks. “No, I didn’t think so,” he says. 
“Hello,” another woman in the crowd shouts in agreement. “Open your eyes,” she says. 
In case anyone is not aware, the federal government is part of the government. 
While Hillary Clinton wants to bring in millions of foreigners to take jobs and welfare from the poorest of Americans, Donald Trump wants to help our own and put the needs of Americans first. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Not to be outdone by her Republican rival, Hillary Clinton fired off a series of early-morning messages Saturday  on Twitter.

Only the tweets sent over the Democratic presidential nominee’s account dealt with a very different subject matter than those blasted about a former beauty-pageant winner by Donald Trump 24 hours before.

[Trump under fire after sending nasty tweets about ‘disgusting’ ex-Miss Universe]

Clinton instead focused on national service, a subject to which she had devoted a speech in Florida on Friday.

“It's 3:20am. As good a time as any to tweet about national service,” said the first one, coming at the same time that Trump started his storm of disparaging tweets about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

The next Clinton tweet borrowed a favorite word of Trump.

“There are hundreds of thousands more @AmeriCorps applications than spots. Horrible!” it read. “Let's expand it from 75,000 annual members to 250,000.”

The tweets — several more followed — were the latest bid by Clinton to keep a spotlight on what she described Friday as Trump coming “unhinged.”

In his tweets, the Republican presidential nominee called Machado “disgusting” and a “con” and raised questions about her past, alleging she had been in a sex tape.

[Clinton calls for new National Service Reserve during Florida swing]

The former Miss Universe’s story has dominated media coverage of the election since Clinton brought her up at Monday’s debate, when she criticized Trump for denigrating comments he made in 1996 about Machado’s weight.

Unlike Trump, who often tweets himself, many of those sent out over Clinton’s official campaign account are composed by aides.

On Friday, there were a series mocking Trump’s behavior, and at a rally in Coral Springs, Fla., she accused her rival of having a “meltdown.”

Trump’s twitter account appeared to have been silent in the early-morning hours on Saturday.",REAL
"By Dan Zukowski
Three major U.S. pipeline spills within the last month are just a small part of the 220 significant incidents reported so far this year—and 3,032 since 2006—that provide a stark reminder of the environmental hazards of an aging pipeline infrastructure carrying fossil fuels. The costs of these leaks since 2006 has amounted to $4.7 billion.
1. Oklahoma: On Oct. 24, the 30-inch S-1 pipeline carrying crude oil from the critical Cushing, Oklahoma hub to refineries and chemical plants on the Gulf Coast began to leak and was shut down overnight. It was the second release connected with the Cushing storage facility in less than a month.
2. Pennsylvania: On Oct. 21, 55,000 gallons of gasoline gushed from a ruptured Sunoco Logistics pipeline in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, just upstream from the Susquehanna River. Carol Parenzan, Middle Susquehanna Riverkeeper , said that witnesses who contacted her office reported that the “smell of petroleum is so thick you can taste it.” The 80-year old pipeline was damaged by a heavy storm that dumped seven inches of rain on the area.
3. Alabama: Last month, the Colonial Pipeline in Alabama leaked an estimated 336,000 gallons of gasoline and triggered concerns about gas shortages for drivers in the East. That spill was Colonial’s fifth in the state this year and occurred on a 43-year old section of the pipeline.
Based on data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), an arm of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of significant pipeline incidents grew 26.8 percent from 2006 to 2015. A significant incident is defined as one that results in serious injury or fatality, costs more than $50,000, releases more than five barrels of volatile fluids such as gasoline or 50 barrels of other liquids, or results in a fire or explosion. In 2015, there were 326 such incidents—almost one per day.
Some 55 percent of the U.S. network of 135,000 miles of pipeline is more than 45 years old. Technology designed to detect pipeline leaks is highly unreliable, even though companies like Colonial Pipeline tout their use as a way “to insure safe operations.” But a recent Reuters report found that these technologies are “about as successful as a random member of the public” finding a leak. Of 466 incidents studied by Reuters, only 22 percent, or 105, were detected by advanced detection systems. The others were found in different ways, with the public finding 99 of the leaks.
In testimony before a House subcommittee earlier this year, Carl Weimer, executive director of the watchdog group Pipeline Safety Trust , said, “Under the current statutes there is no requirement that a pipeline company obtain any permit or permission to operate a pipeline in this country.” Weimer called on Congress to require PHMSA to issue permits for interstate transmission pipelines and ensure that the company follow all rules and regulations.
“It is important that we not only maintain our aging energy infrastructure, but that we also remain vigilant about new pipelines and energy interests that threaten water quality,” said Parenzan.
Dan Zukowski — Environmental journalist and nature photographer. Member, Society of Environmental Journalists. Follow me on Twitter @DanZukowski and visit DBZ Photo 
Source: EcoWatch 
",FAKE
"The president now plans to continue a U.S. ground force presence in Afghanistan to help hold off the Taliban until he leaves office. This is an uncommon turnaround for a president who hasn’t changed his mind on foreign policy since drawing his (much-ballyhooed and promptly ignored) “red line” in Syria.

So what does this rare shift have to say about Obama’s foreign policy and America’s future role in Afghanistan? Not much.

Mr. Obama started his presidency hoping to use Afghanistan to demonstrate his willingness to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty in the national security business. He asserted that, unlike “Bush’s War” in Iraq, fighting in the place where the 9/11 attacks were concocted was worth it.

In approving a surge in Afghanistan, the president made much of his role as decider-in-chief. Yet, even as he sent in more troops, he tipped his hand that Afghanistan was not as much an exception to the talk-don’t-fight Obama Doctrine as the tough-guy image he sought to cultivate.

The president gave commanders only half the force and half the time they requested to do the job right. It turned out, the commanders were right.  Mr. Obama, however, had his eye on the next election and wanted to go into the race showing he had put the war on a glide-path to wind down and pull out.

Signaling a limited-time interest in fighting an enemy rarely ends well. The Taliban adopted the logical and predictable strategy of simply waiting out Mr. Obama. Also predictably, the half-measure surge and overly ambitious transfer of responsibility to the Afghan military resulted in unnecessarily heavy casualties for Afghan security forces, a persistent Taliban, and a shaky security situation.

Nevertheless, Afghanistan is far from a total failure. Indeed,  compared to the president’s other foreign policy dalliances—from the Russian “reset” to Libya to Syria to Iraq to Ukraine— it ranks as his best achievement yet.

Which is why Mr. Obama is reportedly backing away from his plan to yank virtually all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next year. Instead, he has agreed to leave the current force of 9,800 troops in place throughout “most” of next year, and keep 5,500 in theater thereafter.

It’s a good call. With the Taliban flexing its muscles anew and the Islamic State making inroads there, completely pulling out makes little sense. Mr. Obama can ill afford another complete foreign policy disaster on his watch.  Further, virtually everyone –the U.S. military, the Afghans, Pakistan, India, our NATO allies— wants the U.S. to stay and see the job through.

In addition, there is zero domestic pressure for the president to make good on his campaign promise. An appearance of Code Pink is about as common as a Yeti sighting. And in the debates thus far, presidential candidates have devoted about as much time to Afghanistan as they have to defunding Public Television.

It makes complete sense for Mr. Obama to tough it out in Afghanistan, but don’t expect the change in plans to make things better for the Afghans or the larger security picture. The U.S. presence is the bare minimum to hold on. More forces with loser rules of engagement would make the country much safer, much faster.

But holding on is probably the best we can hope for with this president.  Here’s hoping the next Commander in Chief’s attitude toward Afghanistan will focus more on solving problems than just wishing they would go away.

James Jay Carafano is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies  The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JJCarafano.",REAL
The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
"By INDRA WARNES 
In a truly shocking twist the Suptreme Court decided the grown Iraqi man may not have realised the 10-year-old did not want to be sexually abused by him. 
Amir A, 20, was visiting the Theresienbad pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna last December as part of a trip to encourage integration. 
When the youngster went to the showers, Amir A. allegedly followed him, pushed him into a toilet cubicle, and violently sexually assaulted him. 
Following the attack, the accused rapist returned to the pool and was practising on the diving board when police arrived, after the 10-year-old raised the alarm with the lifeguard. 
The child suffered severe anal injuries which had to be treated at a local children’s hospital, and is still plagued by serious post-traumatic stress disorder. 
In a police interview, Amir A. confessed to the crime; telling officers the incident had been “a sexual emergency”, as his wife had remained in Iraq and he “had not had sex in four months”. 
A court found Amir guilty of serious sexual assault and rape of a minor, and sentenced him to six years in jail. 
However, in",FAKE
"Breaking News Pieczenik “Rogue FBI Agents and Wikileaks are Spearheading a Movement to Stop the Clintons from Stealing the White House” Pieczenik “Rogue FBI Agents and Wikileaks are Spearheading a Movement to Stop the Clintons from Stealing the White House” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 2, 2016 
The world is teaming up to stop crooked Hillary from taking the White House. 
From Wikileaks to rogue FBI agents, everyone is doing their part to stop the sinister Clinton Machine. 
It’s a joint effort from patriots hailing from every corner of the world. 
Watch the video: Breaking:Twitter Friendly Version A soft coup has been launched by FBI to overthrow the Clinton’s hostile takeover of the White House. pic.twitter.com/MrPUlSO1OE 
— OakTown ☢MAGA O.G☢ (@hrtablaze) November 2, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"For a long time in American politics, we've been trapped in a cycle of ever-escalating political polarization. As measured by voting patterns in the US Congress, the two parties have pulled apart to distances we've never seen before. As measured by consistent partisan positioning among voters, the split in the electorate has reached a historic level of divisiveness.

But this is about to end. We've now hit peak polarization. The forces that have fueled the widening gap between the two political parties are now fueling fights within the two political parties, fights that will lead to new coalitions in American politics, eventually realigning the two parties. A new era of American politics is about to emerge.

The tautological reason polarization has increased in American politics is that over the past four decades, conflict in American politics has increasingly operated along a single dimension: Republican versus Democrat. A large number of issues that were once nonpartisan or non-ideological have become partisan issues. Almost every policy has now been swept into the maw of partisan jockeying, leaving almost no space for the cross-partisan cooperation our political system relies on to function.

In order for congressional polarization to persist, both parties have to maintain tight enough discipline over their members and the political agenda to ensure consistent party voting. And in order for public polarization to persist, parties have to maintain tight enough message discipline among their elites to ensure that their voters only hear one main message.

This is breaking down. Republicans are now in open warfare between Trump supporters and #NeverTrumpers. Democrats are far less divided, but internal rifts between their ""establishment"" (Hillary Clinton) and ""insurgent"" (Bernie Sanders) wings are also real and likely lasting.

This conflict is emerging on issues of international trade, on questions of corporate (especially Wall Street) power, and in growing anger over money in politics and corruption generally. In short, parties are increasingly divided on a growing range of issues that pit their less-educated, lower-income voters who feel left behind by the current political-economic system against their better-educated, higher-income voter who don't want to mess too much with the status quo. These conflicts are not going away anytime soon.

This moment is the culmination of four interconnected but ultimately unsustainable trends that have turbocharged polarization over the last two decades:

Close competition fueled partisan nastiness and increased the demand for campaign money. The demand for campaign money made the parties more dependent on wealthy donors, which made them less responsive to their voters. This lack of responsiveness provided plenty of evidence for corruption and the felt sense that politics was broken, which fueled anger. Both parties attempted to channel this anger against the other party to distract from their own failures and contradictions and win elections by rendering the other party toxic. This exacerbated the sense that politics was broken and corrupt.

These trends created contradictions, and now these contradictions have created openings. Ambitious candidates who could get past their parties' campaign finance gatekeepers had a lot of angry and left-behind voters eager for their message. And this is precisely what Sanders and especially Donald Trump have accomplished. Now there is no going back.

These are big claims. So let's flesh this story out a little more, this time with expanded detail.

The story could go all the way back to the decisive election of 1932, when Democrats became the dominant party in American politics for a generation, holding together a big-tent New Deal coalition that included Southern pro-segregationists with Northern urban progressives. But it was an uneasy alliance that could only last as long as civil rights legislation was bottled up. Then in 1964, the Democrats decidedly became the party of civil rights. And as Lyndon Johnson allegedly acknowledged upon signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democrats ""have lost the South for a generation.""

Democrats had controlled the South ever since Republican-led Reconstruction (since Republicans were the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction). But as Republicans came to be the party better aligned with the South on issues of race, conservative Republicans replaced conservative Democrats in Southern House and Senate seats, starting in the 1980s. By 1995, when Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years, this transition was mostly complete. By 2011, it was absolute and total.

As this all happened, the ideological center of the Republican Party moved to the South, fusing social and economic conservatism. Northern liberal Republicans were marginalized and soon endangered. Democrats, meanwhile, lost their Southern, conservative wing, and the ideological center of the Democratic Party moved to the coasts and big cities, fusing social and economic liberalism.

As the parties became less internally diverse, individual members of Congress delegated more power to their party leaders. After all, they all now basically agreed on the issues. And they wanted leaders who could punish disloyal dissenters and control the agenda. So when Newt Gingrich took over the speakership in 1995, he centralized power in the position in a way it had not been centralized since 1910.

In the 1990s, American politics entered a somewhat unusual period of remarkably close two-party competition for control of the House and the Senate.

This, as political scientist Frances Lee explains, has been the catalyst for a very nasty brand of partisan fighting.

This seems exactly right to me, and there's lots of evidence to prove it.

But not only has this close competition fueled partisanship by turning legislating into zero-sum trench warfare, it has also turbocharged the fundraising dimension of political campaigning.

Parties are campaigning harder than ever to win over those swing seats, and this has meant raising ever-expanding sums of money. And in order to raise this money, both parties have had to lean more and more on their wealthiest donors.

But relying on these wealthy donors created a problem for both parties. On many issues, particularly economic issues, wealthy elites hold separate opinions from most voters.

Major Republican donors generally want fiscal austerity, and particularly a rolled-back welfare state. They also tend to be much more pro-immigration and pro–free trade than Republican voters, and not particularly worried about social issues. But schemes like privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare have never been all that popular with actual Republican voters. And as the middle classes' wages have stagnated, especially for those without college degrees, and the share of foreign-born residents in the US has reached levels not seen since the 1920s (it hit 13.9 percent in 2015), the voting constituency for anti-immigration populism has grown considerably.

Democratic donors are somewhat more economically liberal. But they are not about to support Sanders-style socialism. They prefer Clinton's generally pro-market views. They will tolerate some regulation of business, but not that much, particularly when it's the tech and new economy businesses that they run and invest in.

Whereas Democrats once relied on labor unions to get out the vote, by the 1990s unions could no longer provide the support Democrats needed. Democrats instead moved to depend on the ""professional class,"" deprioritizing workers' concerns to focus instead on the social and environmental concerns that went over much better in Hollywood and San Francisco and Manhattan fundraisers.

For a while, both parties could manage these contradictions, being responsive to their donors while pooh-poohing the economic concerns of their less affluent voters on the bland promise that a thriving economy was good for everyone. And for much of the 1990s and 2000s, the economy was doing okay, which generally kept voters from feeling too angry. And to the extent that individual voters weren't benefiting, it was, of course, the other party's fault.

As long as both sides were focused on the evils of the other side, and the economy was not in a major recession, party leaders could get away with ignoring many of their voters, and using the campaign contribution proceeds to make their case through more and more negative political advertising and aggressive media messaging.

This negativity translated into what political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster call ""negative partisanship."" As they explain:

All these interrelated trends have turbocharged polarization over the last two decades. But they relied on both sides being able to control the anger that they were stoking, and on both sides being able to convince their voters that all of the corruption and fecklessness in Washington was because of the other party. This could not go on indefinitely.

In fall 2008 the financial crisis hit, and the government bailed out the big Wall Street banks in a very public way. For many, this served as the decisive proof that things really were rigged: Washington and Wall Street were in a corrupt alliance, a conspiracy of career politicians and crony capitalists and lobbyists who were rolling in the money and laughing about it while everyone else was living paycheck to paycheck. As the economy stumbled through recession and then a jobless recovery, economic insecurity and political resentment increased.

Obama and the Democrats swept the 2008 election on the strength of anti-Bush feeling and the timeless energy of hope and change. For the first time since 1992, Democrats had unified control in Washington; Republicans were now out in the cold.

With their backs against the wall and Democrats as the new Washington establishment, Republicans now turned their anti-government rhetoric up to 11. Obama was Stalin. Obama was Hitler. Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim bent on destroying America. Democrats responded to the charges with signature big-government legislation that taxed the middle class so that poor people could have government-subsidized health care. The Republican base went crazy. All their worst fears were confirmed.

In 2009, the Tea Party emerged, representing what felt like new anti-establishment radicalism but was really just the culmination of decades of Republican anti-government rhetoric now freed from any institutional responsibility for actually governing. In 2010, on the strength of Tea Party anti-Obama energy (and the fact that Democrats had won a bunch of majority Republican House districts in 2006 and 2008), Republicans swept back into control of the House. In the 2014 election, they finally won back the Senate.

But then nothing happened. Obamacare, the devil piñata of every Republican attack, was neither repealed nor replaced. Worse, Republican leaders were negotiating with Obama, Satan himself. They were letting Obama get away with an executive order on immigration. Here was the most corrupt, most crony capitalist administration in history, and what were Republicans in Congress doing? They were rolling over and being just as corrupt!

In June 2015, Donald Trump announced he was running for president and became the immediate frontrunner on the strength of his aggressive anti-immigration stance. Because he had his own money and his own media celebrity, Trump did not need to do the pro-austerity, pro-immigration, pro-free trade dance that other potential frontrunners had done to shake the big donor GOP money tree. He could just run for president, declaring everything was corrupt and he was the only one you could trust because he was the only one who didn't have a super PAC. And he could speak to the working-class Republican voters who had been left behind in this economy, by saying he'd go after China and give them Social Security and Medicare and go after the corrupt hedge fund rip-off artists.

And they loved it. For decades, they had been told, for partisan reasons, to be angry; they had been told, for partisan reasons, that Washington was corrupt, and that all Washington politicians were evil. Now they finally had somebody who could say those things while actually not embodying any telltale signs of the sins. They also had somebody who could finally and authentically call out all the ""corrupt"" things Republican establishment types themselves were doing.

A few months later, in September, Republican Speaker John Boehner announced he would resign from Congress, responding to efforts by the House Freedom Caucus to force him out. This was the first time since 1910 that an insurgent faction in the House had successfully challenged a sitting speaker. The anti-establishment anger that Republicans had courted had now finally turned on its leaders.

On the Democratic side, anti-Clinton progressives were hoping to draft Elizabeth Warren, who had demonstrated her anti-establishment bona fides in December 2014, sinking Obama's appointment of Wall Street banker Antonio Weiss for a top Treasury position (Weiss withdrew his nomination, instead accepting a counselor position to Secretary Jack Lew). Warren had also been a prominent opponent of Obama's major Asian free trade agreement.

But Warren didn't run. Instead, it was self-identified socialist Bernie Sanders who found the opening. Democratic donor gatekeepers had cleared the field for Hillary. This meant Sanders could get attention just for being the only real alternative, attention that he was able to snowball into a following. Sanders won't win the nomination. But he has done far, far better than anybody ever expected, because a sizable number of Democrat voters share his view that politics is a rigged game where the billionaires and the crony capitalists always win. And like Sanders, they are sick and tired of it.

If you briefly scroll back to the top of this article and look at the graph of polarization over time, you'll see a previous peak around 1910 or so. While historical analogies are never perfect, there are some notable similarities between now and around 1910.

For one, 1910 was the last time a sitting speaker of the US House had been effectively challenged from within the party. Second, in 1912 the Republican Party was so divided over its presidential nomination that the party splintered, with about half of Republicans supporting Howard Taft (the incumbent) and about half supporting Teddy Roosevelt (the previous incumbent). Democrat Woodrow Wilson won in a landslide.

Around 1910 was also when the last great anti-establishment movement in America, the progressive movement, emerged in response to growing concentrations of wealth and political power, concentrations that many Americans felt had left them behind. As political scientist Grant McConnell once wrote of ""the progressive legacy,"" it consisted of a ""charges made against virtually all the institutions of American society"" with ""one common theme — corruption. ... Corruption of such prevalence, disorder of such magnitude could only be explained by something more than the assumption of a slow-spreading decay. The theory of conspiracy was ready at hand and in one way or another it was invoked as an explanation."" This resonates with today's anti-establishment mood.

Political scientist Hans Noel has argued that the emergence of the progressive movement ""crosscut the parties and eventually reshaped them."" Noel notes that progressives opposed existing authority structures, both economically (e.g., the ""trusts"") and politically (they disliked political parties and other authority structures).

In 1910, it was progressive Republican George Norris who led the internal House revolt against Speaker Joe Cannon, stripping Cannon of most of his authority and devolving considerable powers back to individual members, who had increasingly chafed under their marginalization. Like John Boehner in 2015, Cannon in 1910 represented the culmination of exactly 20 years of increasingly centralized leadership control in the House speakership. Just as Gingrich had radically centralized control in 1995, Speaker Thomas Reed had radically centralized control in 1890.

Parties depolarized in the 1910s and 1920s because, freed of centralized leadership structures, more legislating happened in committees, where a cross-cutting progressive coalition could more freely operate independently of the two parties. Interestingly, trade policy also became much less polarized in the 1920s, with cross-party coalitions on tariff issues.

Most likely, Trump will be the Republican nominee. Even if the #NeverTrump forces somehow wrest the nomination from him (unlikely, but possible), the anti-establishment forces in the Republican Party are not going away. If not Trump (though my guess is he will stick around for a while longer), somebody in the Tea Party, or possibly even Ted Cruz, will find a way to harness the Trump voters by following the Trump issues playbook. Where there are voters to be had, there are politicians to have them.

Meanwhile, in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan is already having difficulty building consensus around a budget process. No matter how many speeches he gives about the importance of decorum in politics, it seems increasingly unlikely that he can reconcile the conflicts that Boehner failed to resolve, which means he will have to eventually lean on Democrats to pass a budget and, like Boehner before him, alienate some of his party. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, much less beloved even within his party, will face similar problems.

Most likely, Hillary Clinton will become the 45th US president (she has led in every single head-to-head poll against Trump). And most likely she will use her agenda-setting powers to try to force the Republicans into open civil war by pushing many of the issues that already divide them, especially immigration and trade. Clinton's natural home is in the pro-business center, a position that will be advantageous to her and Democrats in the short term at least. But she has to be cautious. Emboldened by Sanders and by Elizabeth Warren, the progressive wing of the Democrats is growing, and will be unhappy with Clinton's pro-business instincts.

The internal fights will continue in both parties. The competing wings of both parties will feel that they are the true Republicans/Democrats. The growing importance of outside, non-party groups in elections will also force ideological diversity onto the parties. Party leaders might instinctually want to wrest power back from these outside groups, but they'd be wiser to open up their tent to allow for different ideas. After all, the party that does best in American politics is always the one that can build the broadest coalition, which means accepting ideological diversity.

Eventually, congressional leaders will realize (or be forced to realize) that the only leadership style that works is a less centralized, more committee-driven approach. This is the only way ideologically heterogeneous parties can effectively govern. A more decentralized Congress, with more fluid coalitions, will function better, assuming that a more committee-driven process is also accompanied by increases in congressional staffing capacity. Partisan control of Congress will mean less, since there will be more cross-party coalitions.

Many issues, like gun rights or affirmative action, will remain very partisan. But other issues, especially those of corporate/Wall Street power, antitrust, interventionist foreign policy, will likely split the parties. Trump Republicans and Sanders Democrats will find common cause against establishment centrists. Big organized interests, like the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups, will align less closely with Republicans, realizing that their future success will require the right mix of Republicans and Democrats to advance their agendas.

And as the parties become more ideological diverse, voters, who are generally more ideologically all over the place than the current party alignment would suggest, will identify less reliably with one or the other, since there will be more for them in both parties. They will again sometimes split their tickets, depending on who is running. Many will feel more passionate about individual issues and will align themselves with supporters of those issues in both parties, especially as individual interest groups become cross-partisan in order to achieve policy outcomes. In that respect, politics will come to look more like it did in the 1950s and 1970s, when liberal Republicans existed alongside conservative Democrats.

This is an optimistic scenario.

But it only works if party leaders tolerate diversity within their party and allow disagreements.

Another scenario is that establishment Republicans banish the Trump faction and Democrats banish the Sanders faction after the 2016 elections, and both parties go back to the predictable and intractable trench warfare battle lines that have become increasingly dug in over the past two decades, using nastier and nastier tactics to subvert internal divisions in service of the larger fight against a common enemy. This may be possible for a little while longer (especially if the economy improves significantly), but it is still probably long-term unsustainable for reasons I've described above. It also may mean that 2020 becomes an even more violent and nasty election.

Another possibility is that the parties realign quickly, with the Trump/Tea Party faction effecting a rapid transformation of the Republican Party into a downscale nationalist populist party, pushing the remaining upper-class moderate Republicans into a more pro-business Democratic Party, which in turn pushes some disaffected Sanders voters into the Republican Party. If this realignment happens too quickly, there is no period of depolarization. But this seems unlikely, given the stickiness of partisan identity and the strong disagreements between the two parties on a whole range of other issues.

Other scenarios are possible as well, especially if there are significant global crises.

But here's the bottom line: Something is different this year in American politics. The logic that has operated for the past two decades or so is breaking down, largely because the factors and trends that propelled it produced unsustainable contradictions. American politics is now entering a new logic, with new trends and forces that will push the lines of political conflict in directions we are only beginning to understand.

This feels like chaos, and it is. But it is also good news, because chaos scrambles the rules. We've hit peak polarization. Politics is slowly coming unstuck. A period of new possibilities awaits.

This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.",REAL
"Sponsors say that the shootings in Garland, Texas, confirm their view of Islam as violence-prone. But critics say the event was designed to be incendiary and to poison relations at a volatile time.

When Pamela Geller and her controversial organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, announced it would hold a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, their plan to satirize and lampoon the founder of Islam was intended to have both a defiant and provocative free-speech edge.

Sunday’s contest and its $10,000 prize were prompted in part by the Paris Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, Ms. Geller said in March, as well as the riots in Muslim countries sparked by the publication of satirical anti-Muhammad cartoons by a Danish newspaper in 2005. And indeed, as if on cue, two gunmen with apparent ties to Islamic militants overseas tried to storm the heavily secured event in a similar fashion, before being shot dead by a local police officer Sunday night.

The incident comes at a time when tensions between some segments of American society and Muslims appear to be becoming more fraught – with protests against Muslims in Texas and anti-Muslim social-media attacks after the release of the film ""American Sniper."" In that context, Geller's actions raise questions about speech seen by many as motivated to incite anger and hatred.

It is an issue Geller has faced before. Two weeks ago, she won a federal free-speech case against New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had refused to put up one of her ads: “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah” – a quote the ad attributes to “Hamas MTV.”

Geller’s organization has often clashed with officials in other cities, including Philadelphia and Washington, over their incendiary ads, some of which compare Islam to Nazism. In 2012, another federal judge ruled that cities could not refuse to post her subway poster that read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Many supporters of Geller and her organization view the violence on Sunday as a vindication of their views of Islam as an inherently violence-prone religion. But for others, her relentless campaign to push the boundaries of free speech with intentionally incendiary messages is only poisoning public discourse at a particularly volatile time.

“And coming as it did right when we, the United States of America, are really facing a time when we have to question what it is that holds us together, I can see this potentially aggravating the already-challenging times for dealing with some of these questions about cultural difference, diversity, and what kind of society we want to be,” says Gordon Coonfield, director of graduate studies in communication at Villanova University near Philadelphia.

After analyzing some of the submissions to the American Freedom Defense Initiative’s “Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest,” Professor Coonfield pointed out the similarities of some of the depictions of the prophet Muhammad to posters for “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew,” a notorious Nazi propaganda “documentary.”

In one of the cartoons, the prophet is depicted as contorted and snarling and as a hook-nosed man in a turban holding a bloody knife. The caption reads, “When it comes to religion ... I’ve got the edge.” The face, Coonfield notes, is nearly identical to the contorted face of “The Eternal Jew” poster.

“That strategy for creating a sense of ‘unity’ by lifting up this internal enemy is as old as human civilization and culture,” he says. “It’s ironic that the kind of thinking that Hitler used, and the Nazis have become famous for using – propaganda to try to create this sense of a collective by creating a strong unquestionably evil Other who is right here in our midst ... so it’s kind of ironic that she’s trying to link some of these things together, when that is in fact her message.”

Despite the fact that images depicting the prophet Muhammad cut deeply to the heart of Muslim identity, Muslim leaders in Texas told their followers not to picket or protest the event on Sunday.

“Her words are not just free speech,” says Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. “They are inciteful; they incite hate against our whole community. I was very dismayed by the shooting in Garland, Texas, but at the same time, Pamela Geller is not the victim in this situation that we’re in right now.”

“She intentionally put that event together in hopes that she’d get the response that she received,” Ms. Sarsour says.

“We prayed, but not one Muslim from the state of Texas went out to protest her,” she added. “Muslim leaders specifically told people, do not go anywhere near her. Let her do whatever she does. We don’t care. And there was no protesting outside – unfortunately, except for these two guys from Arizona, who were already on the radar of the FBI anyway.”

Advocates have tried to counter Geller’s free political expressions with ad campaigns of a different tone. In 2012, a coalition called Rabbis for Human Rights responded to her “support the civilized man” poster with an opposing message that read, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”

And last week, the makers of the satirical film “The Muslims Are Coming!” launched a humorous series of subway and bus ads to counter Geller's. “The Muslims are coming, and they shall strike with hugs so fierce, you’ll end up calling your grandmother and telling her that you love her.”

But in an era in which the Islamic State, the Tsarnaev trial, and the lingering aftermath of 9/11 still inflame fears about Islam, many worry that Sunday’s violence will exacerbate the current tensions.

“Free speech is about being open to listening to the ideas you hate the most, that you disagree with the most, and I feel this group in particular is hiding behind this free speech rhetoric,” Coonfield says. “This can’t become the poster child for Christianity versus Islam or the West versus the Middle East. We have to maintain a space where groups that have very different ways of thinking and viewing the world can still come together to talk about it, without resorting to this kind of craziness.”",REAL
"Drug and substance abuse has ruined and taken the lives of many. Substance addiction or abuse happens to be a complicated and complex disease which gradually gnaws the addict of their physical,... ",FAKE
"By Amanda Froelich This tree-like skyscraper is capable of growing 24 acres-worth of crops and will be powered entirely by renewable resources. By 2050, the world’s population is estimated to reach... ",FAKE
"Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles",FAKE
"The world watched in shock on Wednesday as French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo became the site of a grisly terror attack. Gunmen opened fire on a second-floor editorial meeting, killing 12 people in total. Among them were eight journalists and two police officers.

Journalists felt their profession under fire, and several newspapers are taking to their front pages to react. Editorial cartoons, somber black covers and powerful photos from the attack are seen on pages around the world.

The Independent covers their paper with a fictional cover of Charlie Hebdo.

Libération in Paris said ""We are all Charlie.""

The Times of London's calls it ""attack on freedom.""",REAL
"Ying and Yang (the Gold and Silver Set-Up) Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Ying and Yang (the Gold and Silver Set-Up) No, this is not a post about some new Chinese law firm. Instead, it’s just an update on the gold and silver markets which, while refusing to go further down, aren’t making much progress to the upside, either. From Craig Hemke, TFMetalsReport : Today’s message: A few more slightly positive US economic datapoints and these are likely enough to make a December FF rate hike a fait accompli. Again, though…and I can’t stress this enough… we have traced out a pattern that is remarkably similar to last October and November in the run up to the most recent FF rate hike. And what happened beginning the very next day? Well, by now you know the story. The week of the October 2o15 FOMC produced a high trade in the Dec15 contract of $1183. As the Fedlines were digested later that week, it became clear that the Fed was going to raise the FF rate at the December 2015 meeting come hell or high water. And they did. However, take a close look at how gold traded in the days and weeks between the Oct15 FOMC and the December rate hike. Price fell from $1180 to $1050 in about five weeks but note that it bottomed well in advance of the actual “news” of the FF rate hike. This 10+% drop was fueled by a near panic level liquidation of the Specs at the Comex. How bad was it? From the CoT survey of 10/27/15, just one day before that fateful FOMC and Fedlines, the Large Specs in gold were NET long more than 157,000 contracts while the Commercials were NET short nearly 166,000. Just five weeks later, the NET position of the Large Specs was down to only 10,000 contracts with the Commercial position reaching an alltime low of just 2,911 contracts NET short. We even speculated at the time that there were some days, intraweek, where the Gold Commercials were actually and historically NET LONG. Well now compare last autumn to our current situation. Just as back then, a FF rate hike is a near certainty at the FOMC in December. However, as you know, the anticipatory move in gold began a few weeks ago with the beatdown and purposeful break of both the 50-day and 100-day moving averages in late September. Take a look at the current chart and compare it to the one posted above: In 2015, we had the October FOMC and then two stout down weeks. Before price turned, we slogged through 5-6 weeks of consolidation and CoT improvement before the blast higher began. In 2016, we had the September FOMC and then two stout down weeks. Price is attempting to bottom and turn while the CoT improves, but it doesn’t seem ready just yet to begin moving consistently higher. In 2015, the turn in gold began once the actual rate hike took place. The rate hike and forecast for 3 or 4 more in 2016 led to dollar strength, which led to Chinese devaluations, which led to emerging market crises, which led to equity selloffs and the gold price was already 5-10% off its lows by late January before the real fun began with the USDJPY falling 10% in early February. Are we headed down that same path again? It certainly appears so as the first major salvos of Chinese yuan devaluation were fired last week: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-20/dear-janet-china-devalues-most-august-yuan-tumbles-lowest-sept-2010 And, just as in 2015, the CoT is certainly undergoing a makeover, too. From the survey of 9/27/16, the Large Specs in gold were NET long 292,000 contracts while the Commercials were NET short 325,000. As of last Tuesday and just three weeks later, the Large Specs were down to 180,000 NET long for a reduction of 38% and the Commercials were NET short 203,000. To be sure, these are still hefty positions but much more “bullish” than the levels seen through the past summer. And now check the full long-term chart. You can see again the similarities between now and last fall. Also be sure to note, however, that the trend has clearly changed and that price is pointed higher. So while we must still deal with the consolidation for a while longer…the Ying and Yang mentioned in the title of this post…it is clear to me that the trend remains higher and that the now-expected FOMC FF rate hike will be simply another “sell-the-rumor, buy-the-news” type of event for gold and silver. This current period of relative quiet should be used to prepare for the next leg UP, not some sort of new bear market where paper prices are sharply falling. Use your time wisely and continue to prepare/stack accordingly. TF On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only… This entry was posted in Gold News , Silver News and tagged Craig Hemke , December Rate Hike , gold update , silver update , TFMetals Report . Bookmark the permalink . Post navigation",FAKE
"Political parties choose their presidential nominees. But with more Americans opting out of parties, is the process representative of what America wants? The New York primary – and others ahead – offer insights.

How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to supporter Michael Cantalupo while taking a walk in New York's Times Square Tuesday. Mr. Cantalupo said he is unable to vote in the New York primaries

Denise Guardascione, a waitress for nearly three decades at the Shalimar Diner in Queens, thinks the New York primary process was rigged.

She’s a vocal supporter of Republican front-runner Donald Trump, but as a registered Democrat, Ms. Guardascione missed the deadline to switch her registration to become a Republican – which, shocking to her, was more than six months ago.

And now, the independent-minded waitress has become bewildered by what seems to be the complicated, back-room system of electing party delegates both in her own state and across the country.

“It’s antiquated, it belongs in the Smithsonian, next to Archie Bunker’s chair!” says Ms. Guardascione, a Queens native who works six days a week slinging eggs and coffee for this well-known political haunt. “It’s just for the [expletive] bigwigs and muckety mucks, not us, not the people who just want to vote.”

In truth, presidential primaries have never been more open. Since 1972, primaries have gone from being the province of party bosses to vibrant voter-driven contests. But in this year of populist revolt in both parties, “more open” looks to many voters like “still pretty antiquated.”

That is by design. Parties, after all, are not democratic. They can choose their nominees in whichever way they think is best. But at a time when Democrats and Republicans are a shrinking share of the population, closed primaries are shutting more and more of America out.

The irony is that America is no less partisan. Research suggests the growing ranks of independents are just as partisan as the parties. These voters have just abandoned parties because they are ashamed by how the parties act.

The anger over closed primaries, superdelegates, and convention arcana isn’t likely to help. (Nor are allegations of irregularities in the New York primary. On Thursday, the state's Elections Board suspended the top official in charge of Brooklyn after numerous allegations, the most serious of which is that 125,000 Democratic voters were incorrectly purged from the rolls before polls opened.)

The question is, whether the spotlight of this election could force further change ahead, both in states and in the nation.

“New York and other states have long given power to the parties and to the establishment,” says Jeanne Zaino, a political scientist at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. “But who has higher voting turnout? States that have early voting, states that have mail in ballots and same day registration. We in New York allow none of that. This was not just a closed primary, this was an ultra-closed primary. Whether you’re running for office or voting, you had to be on top of your game to be a part of it.”

The knock against closed primaries in this election season has been that they hurt insurgent candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders. But the picture isn’t so simple.

Yes, Senator Sanders of Vermont has done much better among independents. But his biggest wins – in Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington state – all came in closed primaries or caucuses.

Trump, meanwhile, has in many cases actually done better among Republicans than independents.

What is clear is that the primary rules disenfranchise those who most dislike the parties. “So why is Sanders doing so well among independents?” asks Dan Hopkins of the FiveThirtyEight data journalism website. “It appears to be driven not by their ideology so much as their dislike of partisan politics.”

In one respect, that makes sense. Why would parties give vote to someone who doesn’t like them?

Yet those people are a growing share of the American electorate. Some 39 percent Americans now identify as independents; 32 percent say they’re Democrats, and 23 percent say they’re Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year.

In 2000, 29 percent were independents, 33 percent were Democrats, and 28 percent were Republicans, Pew found

In Tuesday’s closed primary, “three million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary,” Sanders said. “That’s wrong.”

It almost certainly hurt Sanders. In Michigan, for example, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic vote by 58 to 40 percent – similar to the 58 to 42 percent margin in New York. But since Michigan was an open primary where independents could vote, Sanders won the state by taking 71 percent of independent voters.

Eight of the 16 remaining primary contests – including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland – are closed contests.

Sanders and his supporters have also complained about the fact that 15 percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention – 712 out of 4,763 – are party leaders known as “superdelegates,” who overwhelmingly support Mrs. Clinton.

In short, the deck is stacked against Sanders. And intentionally so.

Sanders isn’t a Democrat; he’s an independent who describes himself as a democratic socialist. It is not illogical that Democratic primaries should favor an actual Democrat.

The same is true, in different ways, for Trump. The GOP front-runner won a solid victory in New York. But he's getting little help from the establishment in navigating the complex delegate rules – rules that he says are rigged. Meanwhile, the well-organized campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz outmaneuvered him in Louisiana and swept Colorado’s state convention contest.

Presidents have always gone through a complex, multilayered processes in which voters, local officials, and party leaders each have their role, scholars say. Party leaders should have no small say in choosing their party’s presidential nominee, the thinking goes.

But even within the parties, there is some restlessness for change. “Closed primaries poison the health of that system and warp its natural balance,” said Charles Schumer (D) of New York, now the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, to The New York Times in 2014.

As America’s political balance increasingly settles outside either of the two parties, 2016 is showing how even a more open system can be warped.

“And if part of that story is about disenfranchisement, it is about these younger voters, people who are new to the process, or who disengaged from it and didn’t register, or registered as independent and couldn’t vote,” says Professor Zaino.

“You’re talking about Sanders supporters who are going to be on the losing end of that.”",REAL
It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protestors supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and... ,FAKE
"Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has a new attack line against Hillary Clinton: ""She has caused death.""

Trump raised the stakes against Clinton on CBS' ""Face the Nation"" Sunday, insisting that as secretary of State in President Obama's first term, Clinton's decisions led to unnecessary deaths on both sides in the Middle East.

""She has caused tremendous death with incompetent decisions,"" Trump said. ""She caused a lot of the problems that we have right now. You could say she caused the migration.

""The entire world has been upset. The entire world, it's a different place. During Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's term, she's done a horrible job.""

As he has said before, Trump argued that getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- a policy of Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush -- has led to the rise of the Islamic State. ""All of this has led to tremendous death and destruction,"" he said. ""And she, for the most part, was in charge of it, along with Obama.""

Trump acknowledged that by calling for a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, he was giving radical Islam a rallying cry. The terrorist group al-Shabaab is now using  a clip of Trump in calling for Muslims to join jihad or leave the U.S.

""What am I going to do? I have to say what I have to say,"" Trump said. ""And you know what I have to say? There's a problem. We have to find out what is the problem. And we have to solve that problem.""

During the interview, Trump also disagreed with Obama on the need for more gun control -- particularly if the president tries to move the issue by executive action rather than working with a recalcitrant Congress. ""All they want to do is blame the guns. And it's not the gun that pulls the trigger,"" he said. ""So I don't like it. I don't like what he's doing.""

Rather than fiddle with the Second Amendment, Trump said mental health is the problem. ""We should build, like, institutions for people that are sickos,"" he said. ""We have sickos all over the place. And that's the problem.""

Despite his lead in national polls, Trump said he will spend about $2 million per week on advertising in the coming weeks leading to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. ""I think I'm probably wasting the money,"" he said. ""But I'm $35 million under budget.... I almost feel guilty.""",REAL
"Print 
[Ed. – How to take the fun out of Halloween.] 
As Halloween approaches, hair-raising yard displays can often cause people to stop, gawk and whip out their cellphones. 
Larethia Haddon is well aware of that, and is using it to shine some light on real-life horrors, rather than typical Halloween themes. 
In her yard at the corner of Mendota and Santa Maria avenues in Detroit, there are six dummies portraying police shootings, slain children, the Flint water crisis, and other horrors. 
Last year, a single dummy placed face-down in the grass, realistically depicting a dead body in her yard, shocked passersby and caused fearful calls to the police. 
This time around, Haddon wants to inspire a broader range of thought, rather than just shock. 
“We’re trying to do something positive instead of just having a dead body laying in the yard,” she said. “Want to get people to be a little more focused on the issues, what’s going on in the world. We need to stick together more. We need to come together. And if we don’t, this scene in my yard is going to be reality every single day.”",FAKE
"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
"Buried beneath Wednesday's eye-popping headlines about Hillary Clinton's sinking favorability ratings, you'll find the reason that she's still on course to win the Democratic primary.

First, the headline number: A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Clinton, an 8 percentage point increase since July. Her favorable rating has declined by 7 percentage points to 45 percent over the same period of time, and the split among registered voters is even worse for her, at 56 percent unfavorable to 43 percent favorable. A majority of women (51 percent) now view her unfavorably. None of that is good news for Clinton.

She's been on a pretty steady drop from the moment she left the State Department in early 2013. That was a foreseeable outcome of Clinton moving back into domestic partisan politics after four years of representing America's interests abroad. Ellen Tauscher, a former member of Congress and undersecretary of state, warned Clinton that would happen in a private conversation about Clinton's political future in September 2011, when about two-thirds of Americans rated her favorably.

But what's apparent — and of more immediate interest to Clinton — is that she's still better regarded among Democrats than Vice President Joe Biden, who is still weighing whether to run against her. Biden's dead-even 46 percent to 46 percent favorable/unfavorable rating is better than Clinton's, but the edge is based on him having higher numbers with Republicans and independents, the vast majority of whom won't vote in the Democratic primaries.

A full 80 percent of Democrats view Clinton favorably, compared with 70 percent who feel that way about Biden. Her number among African Americans is 79 percent, and it's 68 percent among Hispanics. By comparison, Biden is viewed favorably by just 67 percent of African Americans and 49 percent of Hispanics.

That helps explain why Clinton is blowing her Democratic competition out of the water in national horse-race polls. She was up 35 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a PPP poll conducted August 28 to 30 and held a 45-22-18 lead over Sanders and Biden in a Quinnipiac survey conducted from August 20 to 25.

She's also doing much better on the favorability scale than either Republican frontrunner Donald Trump or former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Trump checked in with a favorable number that has risen to 37 percent, about the same as Bush's 38 percent. Trump had an unfavorable score of 59 percent, while Bush was at 55 percent.

The Clinton ship has taken on water. But, along with other recent surveys, this poll tell us that Clinton is still running away with her party's nomination and remains in better position than any of her Republican or Democratic rivals to advance to the all-important second round of the presidential race. For someone who lost the 2008 primary in part because she looked ahead to the general election, it makes sense to focus on winning the primary first in 2016. On that score, she's still in great shape.",REAL
"New Wikileaks email dumps have revealed massive corruption surrounding Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta . In one email dated February 29, 2016, an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan indicates that the Clinton campaign is considering House Speaker Paul Ryan’s relative for the Supreme Court . 
Ketanji Brown is the subject of the article. She is related to Paul Ryan by marriage and is a judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia. 
The email reads, “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair).” 
“Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show * The Wire *) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” 
Earlier this month, he even said he would not campaign for nor support his party’s nominee, Donald Trump . In fact, some supporters of Trump have theorized that Ryan was somehow behind or involved in the leak of the tape in which Trump made sexually crude comments about women. 
If you claim this is merely circumstantial, then I think there is no hope for you understanding just how corrupt DC has gotten, and this is the very Paul Ryan I warned you about in 2012, which everyone said was “so conservative.” Sadly, many didn’t listen and voted for liberal Mitt Romney and him. Perhaps Paul Ryan’s records and emails should be leaked and maybe we just might see that he’s willing to engage Hillary in a pay-to-play scheme . 
Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
Tim Brown is an author and Editor at FreedomOutpost.com , SonsOfLibertyMedia.com , GunsInTheNews.com and TheWashingtonStandard.com . He is husband to his “more precious than rubies” wife, father of 10 “mighty arrows”, jack of all trades, Christian and lover of liberty. He resides in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Tim is also an affiliate for the Joshua Mark 5 AR/AK hybrid semi-automatic rifle . Follow Tim on Twitter . Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"While the country has been fixated on Donald Trump's tormenting his Republican primary opponents and deeply concerned about the government’s efforts to identify any confederates in the San Bernardino, California, killings, a team of federal prosecutors and FBI agents continues to examine Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state in order to determine whether she committed any crimes and, if so, whether there is sufficient evidence to prove her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

What began as an innocent Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, a D.C.-based public advocacy group promoting transparency in the executive branch, has now become a full criminal investigation, with Clinton as the likely target.

The basic facts are well-known, but the revealed nuances are important, as well. When the State Department responded to the Judicial Watch FOIA request by telling Judicial Watch that it had no emails from Clinton, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit. When the State Department made the same representation to the court -- as incredible as it seemed at the time -- the judge accepted that representation, and the case was dismissed.

Then The New York Times revealed that Clinton used a private email server instead of the government’s server for all of her work-related and personal emails during her four years as secretary of state. After that, the Judicial Watch FOIA case was reinstated, and then the judge in the case demanded of State that it produce Clinton’s emails.

When Judicial Watch expressed frustration to the judge about the pace at which it was getting emails, the judge ordered Clinton, “under penalty of perjury,” to certify that she had surrendered all her governmental emails to the State Department.

Eventually, Clinton did certify to the court that she did surrender all of her governmental emails to the State Department. She did so by sending paper copies of selected emails, because she had wiped clean her server. She acknowledged that she decided which emails were personal and which were selected as governmental and returned the governmental ones to the State Department. She has denied steadfastly and consistently that she ever sent or received any materials marked ""classified” while secretary of state using her private server.

All of her behavior has triggered the FBI investigation because she may have committed serious federal crimes. For example, it is a crime to steal federal property. What did she steal? By diverting to her own venue the digital metadata that accompany all emails -- metadata that, when attached to the work-related emails of a government employee, belong to the government -- she stole that data. The metadata do not appear on her paper copies -- hence the argument that she stole and destroyed the government-owned metadata.

This is particularly troublesome for her present political ambitions because of a federal statute that disqualifies from public office all who have stolen federal property. (She is probably already barred from public office -- though this was not prominently raised when she entered the U.S. Senate or the Department of State -- because of the china, silverware and furniture that she and her husband took from the White House in January 2001.)

Clinton may also have committed espionage by failing to secure the government secrets entrusted to her. She did that by diverting those secrets to an unprotected, nongovernmental venue -- her own server -- and again by emailing those secrets to other unprotected and nongovernmental venues. The reason she can deny sending or receiving anything marked ""classified” is that protected government secrets are not marked “classified.”

So her statement, though technically true, is highly misleading. The governmental designations of protected secrets are “confidential,” “secret” and “top secret” -- not “classified.” State Department investigators have found 999 emails sent or received by Clinton in at least one of those three categories of protected secrets.

Back when Clinton became secretary of state, on her first day in office, she had an hourlong FBI briefing on the proper and lawfully required care of government secrets. She signed a statement, under penalty of perjury, acknowledging that she knew the law and that it is the content of emails, not any stamped markings, that makes them secret.

Earlier this week, my Fox News colleagues confirmed the certain presence of top-secret materials among the 999 emails. Intelligence from foreign sources or about foreign governments is always top-secret, whether designated as such or not. And she knows that.

As well, she may have committed perjury in the FOIA case. When the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in its investigation of her role in the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, gathered emails, it found emails she did not surrender to the State Department.

Last week, the State Department released emails that give the FBI more areas to investigate. These emails may show a pattern of official behavior by Clinton designed to benefit the financial interests of her family's foundation, her husband and her son-in-law. Moreover, the FBI knows of a treasure-trove of documents that may demonstrate that the Clinton Foundation skirted the law and illegally raised and spent contributions.

Two months ago, a group of FBI agents sat around a conference table and reviewed the evidence gathered thus far. Each agent was given the opportunity to make or detract from the case for moving forward. At the end of the meeting, it was the consensus of the group to pursue a criminal investigation.

And Clinton is the likely target.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
"It was not supposed to end like this for Marco Rubio.

Eleven months ago, he launched his presidential campaign in front of Miami’s Freedom Tower, the Ellis Island for his and other Cuban families. In his rapid rise, young Rubio had been a darling of both the tea party movement and the conservative intelligentsia — the Republicans’ best hope of attracting nonwhite voters.

But then came vulgar Donald Trump. Rubio was savaged on everything from immigration to his height. On Tuesday night, Rubio, his campaign fading, lost his home state of Florida to the bigoted demagogue who makes scapegoats of foreigners and minorities. Bowing to the inevitable, Rubio ended his candidacy.

By the time Rubio’s campaign bus rolled to its final pre-primary stop — an outdoor basketball court here where he played as a boy — only a couple-hundred supporters were on hand, nearly equaled by the number of journalists on death watch.

Before Rubio arrived, a prankster hijacked the microphone and was chased off by campaign aides. When Rubio himself spoke, the sound system failed, so he delivered his valedictory with a bullhorn.

[The GOP establishment has failed. It’s up to voters to deny Trump.]

Rubio’s voice sounded tinny, but his words were rich with nostalgia as he recalled knocking on doors when he ran for city commissioner here. “In between sips of sweet Cuban coffee, I heard the stories of their youth, of the dreams they lost,” he said. “That has carried me every single day throughout this campaign, knowing that my worst days are better than some of the best days that many people in this community have had.”

These are not the best days for Rubio, or for anybody who cares about American democracy. The 44-year-old made mistakes during his campaign: freezing in the New Hampshire debate, failing to take on Trump earlier, then finally attacking Trump by joking about genitalia.

Yet he finished honorably. He spoke reflectively Monday about Trump’s brutal transformation of politics. This message should have been delivered much earlier, but it deserves to be heard even now.

“Leadership is not about going to an angry and frustrated people and saying you should be even angrier and more frustrated, and you should be angry and frustrated at each other,” Rubio told a gym full of Christian college students in West Palm Beach. “That’s called demagoguery. And it’s dangerous.” It leads, he said, to “where we are today, a nation where people literally hate each other because they’re voting for different candidates. . . . And it leaves us incapable of solving problems.”

Trump tore up the norms of decency that remained in American politics, and Rubio expressed puzzlement that it worked. “My whole life I’ve been told being humble is a virtue, and now being humble is a weakness and being vain and self-absorbed is somehow a virtue,” he said. “My whole life I’ve been told no matter how you feel about someone, you respect everyone because we are all children of the same God — and now being respectful to one another is considered political correctness.”

Rubio voiced regret for his own role in the vulgarity, saying he “felt terrible” for joking about Trump’s penis size. Such remorse separates Rubio from Trump, who seems to have no shame as he blurts obscenities, delivers insults and winks at violence. “There are people, I know, who like this stuff because he says what they want to be able to say, [but] presidents can’t say whatever they want to say,” Rubio told the students, mentioning the harm to America’s reputation that Trump has already done. “We’re not a Third World country. We’re the United States of America.”

[Donald Trump just threatened more violence. Only this time, it’s directed at the GOP.]

That’s the welcoming country to which Rubio’s parents immigrated, settling among the shoe-box homes here in Cuban West Miami. “Everywhere I go I tell the story of this community of people, many of whom lost their country in their youth,” Rubio said Monday night in his boyhood park, his kids beside him in the bed of his Dodge pickup.

He spoke, in English, then in Spanish, with the requisite optimism, telling supporters he looked forward to moving his “caja china” — Cuban barbecue — to the White House.

“If there’s no car, we’ll go in a raft!” a supporter said in Spanish.

Another said in English: “Don’t give up, man!”

But Rubio’s speech to his modest band had the ring of a farewell. “I will always be a son of this community. I will always carry with me the hopes and dreams of generations that made possible the dreams of mine,” he said. His candidacy, he said, “was possible because you and I happen to live in the one place on Earth where even the son of a bartender and a maid from West Miami can be president.”

Or at least he can lose to a trash-talking rich guy from Queens.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the new U.S. attorney general on Monday, replacing Eric Holder. Lynch, the country's first African-American woman to serve in the role, had her nomination held up more than five months over politicking in the Senate.

""Ladies and gentlemen, it's about time,"" said Vice President Joe Biden at the swearing in ceremony.

The highly politicized five-month battle to choose Obama's next attorney general came to a close Thursday when the Senate finally voted 56-43 to confirm Lynch

But the delay of her nomination neared record-breaking proportions. Republicans leading the Senate refused to bring her nomination up for a vote until Democrats cut a deal on abortion language in an unrelated bill. That legislation passed Wednesday, setting up Thursday's vote and ending the latest partisan Washington standoff.

Ten Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the only senator not to vote.

Obama tapped Lynch to replace Attorney General Eric Holder in November and her nomination cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. Still, she waited longer than the seven most recent U.S. attorneys general combined for a vote on the Senate floor, after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted on first finishing work on an unrelated bill.

Loretta Lynch's father, Lorenzo A. Lynch, was in the Senate gallery watching when the historic vote took place confirming her daughter as the first African American female attorney general.

""The good guys won. That's what has happened in this country all along,"" Lorenzo Lynch told reporters. ""Even during slavery. Levi Coffin was a founder of the Underground Railroad. Even during slavery. A white man fought against slavery. So all over this land good folks have stood in the right lane, in the right path.""

A two-time U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Lynch takes on the high-profile job at time when America faces a series of challenges, from dealing with strained relations and deep distrust in some cities between the police and the communities they serve, to criminal justice reform, to confronting the ongoing threat of terrorism.

Lynch, 55, has earned a reputation as a highly qualified, but low-profile prosecutor who has a good relationship with law enforcement and a history of handling tough cases well.

She is a good listener and a skilled consensus builder, qualities that will help her succeed at Justice, said Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who served under Lynch on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, a group that meets regularly to advise the Justice department on policy matters.

""In that [attorney general] job you are at the center of so many of the emerging, significant, pressing issues not only in this country but around the world. There's probably no job in government as diverse and challenging as being attorney general of the United States,"" Heaphy said. He added that building support for initiatives both within and outside the department is an important part of the job.

""She will be good at getting people to work well together. I think that's a strength of hers. I saw that on the committee,"" Heaphy said.

Lynch's portfolio will include addressing voting rights, white-collar crime and policy reviews, as well as public corruption, an area in which she has vast experience.

In a statement, Obama said America will be better off with Lynch leading the Department of Jusice.

""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law,"" Obama said in a statement shortly after the vote.

Lynch's experience on civil rights case, like helping win the convictions of New York City police officers who sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, will be important as her office tackles closely watched investigations in recent police conduct cases, including the still unexplained death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man while in police custody.

""She's seen and understands the injustices that have taken place in the past and so therefore she's uniquely also equipped to deal with what's going on and do the kinds of investigations that will restore faith to Americans in their justice system,"" said Rep. Greg Meeks, D-New York.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lynch grew up 60 miles to the east in Durham, North Carolina. Her father was a fourth-generation Baptist minister; her mother, an English teacher and school librarian. As a child, Lynch rode on her father's shoulders to his church, which served a meeting place for students organizing anti-segregation boycotts in the early 1960s, she told the Judiciary panel at her January confirmation hearing. Lynch eventually graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Speaking at her nomination announcement in November, Lynch highlighted the fact that the Justice Department is named for an ideal.

""This is actually appropriate, because our work is both aspirational, and grounded in gritty reality,"" she said. ""Today, I stand before you so thrilled, and, frankly, so humbled to have the opportunity to lead this group of wonderful people who work all day and well into the night to make that ideal a manifest reality.""

At a conference meeting with all the nation's U.S. attorneys a few years ago, Heaphy was put in charge of organizing a presentation showing the attorneys as they were 20 years before. Lynch shared a picture of herself with her college cheerleading squad.

""Loretta sent me a picture of her as a Harvard cheerleader in a pyramid,"" he said. ""She was comfortable sharing this with Eric Holder and other department leaders. She laughed at herself.""

""I don't think she's just tough, there's a humanity, there's a human touch that she has that will also serve her well,"" he said. ""Nobody is going to mistake that she's in charge, but her humility and sense of humor will come through.""",REAL
"GOP opposes the kind of antitrust regulation that would preserve freedom of expression online.

America’s right wing is in a froth about allegations that Facebook has tweaked its “trending news” feed to reduce the visibility of conservative news sites.

It’s not clear if the allegations, from a Gizmodo report based on anonymous sources, are true and Facebook denies them. But the deeper problem is undeniably real: Facebook is the dominant member of a small number of giant entities — corporate and governmental — that are gaining control over news, freedom of expression and much of our digital lives. The irony is that the conservatives and business-backed Republicans in Congress who howl about Facebook are the same people who have thwarted policies that would encourage the competition we need to challenge that increasingly centralized control.

Almost no one wants to address the fact that Facebook is becoming a monopoly in the antitrust sense of the word. Along with Google, it dominates online advertising; Facebook especially does so on mobile devices, which are the way many people connect to the Internet. If you offer news and information online, you have almost no choice but to play on Facebook’s field because so much of your audience is there. (In some parts of the world, Facebook essentially is the Internet, because mobile devices are pretty much the sole means of online access and in some cases the company has made deals with local telecommunications companies and, or governments.)

Facebook has been buying everything that presents even a whiff of competition: Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. This is smart — no one can dispute that Mark Zuckerberg and the others on his team are brilliant technologists and strategists — but it’s also a red flag. As Zuckerberg famously said several years ago, he wants Facebook to be “like electricity.” Well, electricity is a utility. And we regulate utilities.

Monopolies and cozy oligopolies never turn out well in the long run for anyone but the monopolists or cartel members. They end up controlling markets and do their best to thwart genuine competition. It’s their nature. Which is why capitalism, plainly the best system when it’s working right, needs rules to promote competition.

Yet Republicans, in general, think the government should play little to no role in promoting competition. They consider antitrust inquiry and enforcement to be counterproductive, at best — except, of course, when a powerful constituent (a corporation, usually) is in danger from predatory behavior.

That attitude accounts for the GOP’s cheerleading for corporate dominance of Internet access. Republicans, in general, are fine with the idea that one or two companies (say the leading cable provider and another telecom) should control access in most communities, and utterly opposed to a remedy — what we call network neutrality — to ensure that people at the edges of networks, not dominant Internet service providers, should decide what information they want and at what priority.

I don’t want the government to tell Facebook what it can publish and don’t look forward to much more than posturing from Congress. But I do want the government to start paying extremely close attention to the way the company is becoming a monopoly and to what it means for freedom of expression when a single company has so much power over what people say online. I want government to use antitrust and other pro-competition laws to ensure that Facebook doesn’t abuse its dominance in a business sense. I want government(s) to promote open technology and communications, and fierce competition at every level. Kudos to Zuckerberg for making Facebook so appealing to millions of users; that’s an amazing achievement. But we can’t allow Facebook to leverage that success to block the emergence of alternatives to its service, or use its market power to influence or alter the content of publications and others trying to communicate with Facebook users.

We all need to wake up to the potential threat Facebook poses to freedom of expression. Once you are in its enclosed online space, it is the corporation’s terms of service, not the First Amendment, that determines what you can say. If it decides to downplay speech it doesn’t like, Facebook has the right to do so.

So I’m glad that conservatives are concerned, even if the allegations prove overblown. (Facebook has modified its outright denial to a “we’re looking into it” stance; stay tuned.) I’d be even happier if conservatives realized that government does have a role in promoting genuine competition — and that we’re in uncharted information-freedom territory under the new control freaks of Silicon Valley.

Dan Gillmor teaches digital media literacy at Arizona State University. He is the author of Mediactive. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page and follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion.",REAL
"The wife of the gunman who carried out the deadliest mass shooting on American soil could face criminal charges if investigators conclude that she knew of the attack in advance but failed to warn police.

Noor Zahi Salman told that FBI that her husband, Omar Mateen, had said he was going out to see friends, but she feared he was going to attack a gay nightclub, NBC News reported on Wednesday. She tried to talk him out of it but did not contact law enforcement agencies.

Wielding an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and a handgun, Mateen opened fire at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida, early on Sunday in a three-hour shooting rampage and hostage siege that ended when a Swat team smashed its way in and killed him. There were 49 people killed and 53 were injured.

Angus King, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, which received a briefing on the attack, told CNN: “It appears she [Salman] had some knowledge of what was going on. She definitely is, I guess you would say, a person of interest right now and appears to be cooperating and can provide us with some important information.”

Peter King, chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee on counterintelligence and terrorism, told MSNBC: “If it’s true that she did know that it was going to happen and she tried to talk him out of it, then it’s possible criminal action (could be taken) against her, and again there might be more involvement by her, so all that has to be investigated.”

The possibility that Mateen, 29, did not act alone but received support from other individuals or groups is now central to the FBI’s inquiry, King added. “If there’s anybody else that he was dealing with, anyone else he was talking with, anyone else who may have known about this, this is all where the investigation is going now.”

Media reports also suggested that Salman was with her husband when he bought ammunition and a holster. She allegedly told the FBI that she once drove him to Pulse, nearly a two-hour drive from their home in Fort Pierce, Florida, because he wanted to scope it out. Mateen is said to have browsed militant Islamist material on the internet for at least two years before the mass shooting.

As detectives tried to piece together Mateen’s last movements on Saturday night, Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer, who opened a family assistance centre in a stadium on Wednesday, said: “What I know concretely is that he was driving around that evening and visited several locations.”

The FBI director, James Comey, has said the agency is trying to determine whether Mateen had recently visited Disney World, one of the Orlando’s celebrated theme parks, to consider it as a potential target.

Disney, which is donating $1m to an official fund for victims of the shooting, installed metal detectors last December but declined to comment on the Mateen case. A spokesperson said: “Unfortunately we’ve all been living in a world of uncertainty, and we have been increasing our security measures across our properties for some time, adding such visible safeguards as magnetometers, additional canine units, and law enforcement officers on site, as well as less visible systems that employ state-of-the-art security technologies.”

Salman will be key to the ongoing investigation as conflicting narratives emerge, including evidence he had been influenced by militant Islamist ideas and reports he might have struggled with his own sexual identity.

A survivor of the massacre, Patience Carter, suggested on Tuesday that Mateen had an overt political motive. Cowering in a bathroom, she heard him demand that Americans “stop bombing his country” and pledge allegiance to Islamic State, she said.

Carter, 20, who is African American, told reporters at Florida Hospital: “He even spoke to us directly in the bathroom. He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer but there was an African American male in the stall, where the majority of my body was, who had answered and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us,’ and the gunman responded back to him and said: ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people. This is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’”

The account chimed with previous FBI statements that Mateen had called the 911 emergency service and made reference to both Isis and the Tsarnaev brothers, who were responsible for the Boston bombings. Investigators have said Mateen was probably self-radicalised and there is no evidence that he received any instruction or aid from outside groups such as Isis.

Mateen also called a local 24-hour cable news channel, News 13, the station revealed on its website on Wednesday. Matthew Gentili, who was the producer on duty at the time, recalled that Mateen said: “I’m the shooter. It’s me. I am the shooter ... I did it for Isis. I did it for the Islamic State.”

Soon after the attack, Mateen’s father indicated that his son had strong anti-gay feelings. He recounted an incident when his son became angry when he saw two men kissing in downtown Miami while out with his wife and young son.

Several media reports quoted men as saying they had seen Mateen at Pulse many times or that he had contacted them via gay dating apps, such as Grindr and Jack’d. But Pulse denied that he had ever been a patron. “Untrue and totally ridiculous,” spokeswoman Sara Brady said in an email to Reuters.

Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told CNN she did not know if he was gay but added: “Well, when we had gotten married, he confessed to me about his past that was recent at that time and that he very much enjoyed going to clubs and the nightlife and there was a lot of pictures of him.”

“I feel like it’s a side of him or a part of him that he lived but probably didn’t want everybody to know about.”

Asked by the Guardian about rumours his son was gay, Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen said: “It’s not true. Why, if he was gay, would he do this?”

Seddique Mateen declined to comment specifically on the investigation on Wednesday, saying: “The FBI, they always do a professional job and to the maximum extent of my ability I will support them.”

Mateen, investigated twice by the FBI, was on the government’s terrorist watchlist for 10 months before being taken off. G4S, the security company that employed Mateen, only psychologically evaluated him once, at the start of his nine-year employment with the company and not again after the company was made aware he had been interviewed by the FBI.

Thirty-three people remain in hospital, including six in critical condition. On Tuesday, the first of the seriously injured to speak of their trauma was Angel Colon at the Orlando Regional Medical Center. “He’s shooting everyone that’s already dead on the floor, making sure they’re dead,” he said, speaking from a wheelchair. “I look over, and he shoots the girl next to me. And I’m just there laying down and I’m thinking: ‘I’m next, I’m dead.’



“So I don’t know how, but by the glory of God, he shoots toward my head but it hits my hand, and then he shoots me again and it hits the side of my hip. I had no reaction. I was just prepared to just stay there laying down so he won’t know that I’m alive.”

The attending trauma surgeon on call that night, Dr Chadwick Smith, said: “It was singularly the worst day of my career and the best day of my career. And I think you can say that of pretty much every person standing up here.”

The atrocity continued to reverberate in Washington DC, where Senate Democrats demanded tighter gun controls. Donald Trump, the Republican presumptive nominee, broke ranks with the party by saying he would meet the influential National Rifle Association lobbying group, which has endorsed him, to discuss an idea for restricting gun purchases by people on terrorism watchlists.

Barack Obama, who will visit Orlando on Thursday, launched a blistering assault against Trump over the candidate’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, which the president described as dangerous and contrary to American values.

“Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer, [they] were all US citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? ... Putting them under surveillance?”",REAL
"Is google and YouTube in the Hillary’s purse? page: 1 link After I posted my opening post (OP) on “Hillary Clinton Wants a Strong Russia. Wait, what did she say?” , mysteriously, my YouTube account gets wiped out. The next thing I notice, is that the youtube video that I used in my OP, www.abovetopsecret.com... suddenly won’t work. Has anyone else experienced this bizarre behavior before? Is this what we are to expect if Hillary becomes POTUS? I went to the Youtube site and the video is available. www.youtube.com... I frankly, don't know what to think about this. link a reply to: Violater1 yes, so is almost all the major media, magazines (that are left), most of hollywood, GOP kinda, most of the bush's. Who else? Google is pro clinton like drudge is pro trump without a doubt Just about every news story under google news is pro hillary and negative towards trump. If I recall correctly they even advice her campaign edit on 511031America/ChicagoThu, 27 Oct 2016 21:51:09 -05 p3142 by interupt42 because: (no reason given) Is the dead link the same as the good one in the following reply? Same vid#? No errors? link I'm getting the feeling that the gun control,Hillary as dictator,is not unlike Obamacare,forced on us,this is socialism and being the Corporations own the candidates,they want this we have no choice,they have the UN,plus a bunch of immigrants to join the UN forces to attack the american freedom fighters,you may think I'm crazy but they said I was crazy when I said 9/11 was a controlled demolition,look at the past,put common sense to it,the big ball is rolling,too much money at stake here thats the goal rich get richer,no more middle class,upper middle class,those making like 1 or 2 million a year,will be joining the crowd,unless your a member of the party,Known many an immigrant who lived under communist rule,all storys kind of same,all bad,no sense of identity",FAKE
"The last Texas Republican to occupy the Oval Office, George W. Bush, took 49 percent of the state’s Hispanic vote in his 2004 presidential re-election, setting a relatively high bar for the handful of Texas-born or -raised Republicans who might be hoping to follow in his footsteps in 2016.

Republican presidential aspirants with ties to the Lone Star State must figure out how to hold the GOP base and attract conservative Hispanics if they want to be successful in Texas, political observers say.

So how do the party's four most prominent Texas affiliated might-be candidates — former Gov. Rick Perry; Jeb Bush, the son and brother of two former presidents from the state; Texas’ junior U.S. senator, Ted Cruz; and U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — stack up in the early going?

For Republicans to avoid a repeat of 2012, when presidential nominee Mitt Romney took only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide, they need to nominate a conservative candidate who can go into Hispanic communities and truly connect with voters, said Hector De Leon, co-chairman of the Associated Republicans of Texas, which reaches out to Hispanic voters.

“It’s all about paying attention,” De Leon said.

Hispanics made up 10 percent of the national electorate in the 2012 presidential election. But in Texas, they make up almost one-third of eligible voters. And there’s plenty room for improvement when it comes to voter turnout. Only 39 percent of Texas Hispanics eligible to vote cast ballots in 2012.

Political observers say candidates would be right to take a page out of George W. Bush’s playbook on Hispanic outreach. He solidified his winning record with Hispanics with help from Latino-media guru Lionel Sosa, who told The Texas Tribune he has been in talks with Jeb Bush about his possible presidential bid.

Sosa helped George W. Bush’s campaign craft several television ads that painted him as the candidate who understood Hispanic culture. The candidate who can mobilize on-the-fence Hispanic voters who usually do not turn out to vote could win the state.

“I do think the primaries will include a concerted effort by some candidates to speak to that constituency,” said Sylvia Manzano, a senior analyst for the nonpartisan political polling organization Latino Decisions. “In Texas, that’s 10 million people. That’s a number that cannot be ignored.”

Though it's still early in the game, many political observers say Jeb Bush is best positioned at the moment. He grew up in Midland, spent much of his childhood in Houston and is considered friendly to the Hispanic community, both personally and politically.

“Jeb Bush is not going to come in and play mariachi politics,” Manzano said. “He knows better than that.”

But this far out, all is speculation. As the candidates tiptoe toward the starting gate, here's how several political experts handicap the field.

Already holding a political advantage because he is fluent in Spanish, the former Florida governor has experience winning over Hispanics in a state where they make up a large part of the population. During his 1998 re-election campaign, Bush won an impressive 61 percent of Florida's Hispanic electorate. It's worth noting, though, that Florida’s mostly Cuban Hispanic population differs from Texas, where a majority of Hispanics have roots in Mexico.

What the experts say:

For Bush, reaching out to Texas Hispanics would be an extended family affair. Aside from benefiting from the groundwork his family has done in the state, expect to see Bush campaigning with his Mexican-born wife, Columba, and his son, Texas Land CommissionerGeorge P. Bush, at his side. George P. is also fluent in Spanish and helped found Hispanic Republicans of Texas, a political group that recruits and supports Hispanic Republicans running for public office.

Bush’s record on issues that resonate with Texas Hispanics, particularly immigration reform, could prove attractive to this voting group. He has urged Congress to pass immigration reform and has highlighted it as a key issue in helping Republicans win Hispanics. He also gained national attention last year when he said many of those entering the country illegally do so out of an “act of love” for their families.

As the state’s longest-serving governor, Perry has long courted Texas Hispanics. He has steadily improved his standing since winning only 13 percent of the Hispanic vote when he defeated Hispanic businessman Tony Sanchez of Laredo in 2002. By the time he was re-elected in 2010, Perry pulled in 38 percent of Hispanic voters.

What the experts say:

Perry’s efforts to broaden his appeal were buoyed by the passage of the Texas Dream Act during his 14-year tenure. Though the future of the law granting in-state tuition to some undocumented immigrants is unclear, Perry has stood by it both on the national stage and at home. During a 2011 presidential debate, Perry famously told opponents who challenged his support of the law that they had no heart. More recently, as the state’s new GOP leadership works to overturn the law, Perry has been vocal about his continued support for it.

Because he presided over the state’s economic boom in the last decade, Perry has a unique opportunity to appeal to Hispanics on economic issues. If Perry can convince Hispanic voters that they benefited from the so-called Texas Miracle, he may be able to sway some on-the-fence voters his way.

Though he is the only Hispanic in the group — and the first Hispanic senator from Texas — Cruz has largely avoided making heritage part of his political persona beyond recounting his father’s journey to the United States from Cuban as an exile in 1957. Still, he has done well with Texas Hispanics. In 2012, he outperformed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, taking 35 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to a Latino Decisions poll.

What the experts say:

Cruz arguably faces the toughest challenge courting Texas Hispanics given his divisive tone on immigration and health care. He has been vocal in his opposition to President Obama’s executive order on immigration, which will grant millions of undocumented immigrants work permits and reprieve from deportation proceedings. The order is widely popular among Hispanics. On health care, Cruz has been one of the biggest foes of the federal Affordable Care Act. Texas Hispanics — who make up a large portion of the state’s uninsured population —overwhelmingly support the health law.

Though Paul was elected to the Senate from Kentucky, where Hispanics make up only 3 percent of the population, he grew up in Lake Jackson, Texas, where Hispanics are one-fifth of the population. Paul has spent the last few months preaching a message of Hispanic inclusion within the Republican ranks.

What the experts say:

Paul is someone to watch in the upcoming election when it comes to appealing to Texas Hispanics because of his views on growing the GOP’s number of Hispanic supporters. Because he is largely unknown among Texas Hispanics, Paul also has some room to improve his standing. A November 2014 poll by Latino Decisions found that almost a third of Texas Latino voters have no opinion of Paul.",REAL
"Radio Aryan October 28, 2016 
Sven Longshanks , Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt bring us another episode of Truth Will Out Radio, this week looking at the Laconia incident and the British Freikorps. 
Messerschmitt deviates somewhat with his Axis War Heroes series in that the main subject is not a person but the so-called “Laconia Incident”. In September 1942 a German U-boat under the Command of Werner Hartenstein torpedoed the British troopship Laconia. As Hartenstein realized that a lot of Italian prisoners of war and even civilians including women and children were among the survivors struggling for their lives he ordered that as many as possible were to be taken on board the U-boat. Even though he radioed his intentions to all surrounding vessels in plain English and had a Red Cross flag draped across the U-boat he and the survivors they were carrying were attacked by an American B-24. What happened to the survivors and what the response of the German Navy was when it learned of this atrocity is elaborated on by Schmitt and the presentation ends with a letter from a relative of one of the casualties, thanking the U-boat commanders for their courageous and honourable behaviour. 
This presentation shows how the Allies were breaking the rules of war while the Germans were keeping to their treaties. During the Nuremberg trials this incident was brought up in the hopes of convicting Admiral Doenitz for advising the U-boats not to pick up survivors, but it had the inadvertent effect of exposing the British and Americans of waging unrestricted submarine warfare, in itself a possible war crime as it breaks the law of the sea that any shipwrecked mariners must be rescued, no matter who they are. Dennis points out the hypocrisy of the British and Americans in this before reminding us that not all the British behaved like this during the war. Some became members of the Freikorps and fought to defend Europe from the Bolshevik menace alongside the other SS Volunteer Legions. These heroes were called traitors by the British establishment, yet their oath was to protect Europe from Communism, not to fight against Britain. It is a testament to the truthful ideology of National Socialism that prisoners of war could be set free to fight against Communism once they had heard the truth about it from their kinsmen in the League of St George. 
After giving us a brief history of these brave young British men, Dennis and Sven conclude the podcast by talking about the importance of race and how the Freikorps highlighted this in their propaganda. 
Presented by Sven Longshanks, Dennis Wise and Messerschmitt 
Truth Will Out Radio: The Laconia Incident – TWOR 102816",FAKE
"Watch the CNN Republican debate Tuesday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m. ET and 8:30 p.m. ET.

The GOP establishment, confronted by a recalcitrant electorate that refuses to leave Donald Trump, is being forced to take a fresh look at Ted Cruz , a man with grassroots strength in key early primary states and few friends in Washington.

Suddenly, the Republican Party's best hope could be a man hell-bent on transforming it: a senator who openly spars with fellow GOP colleagues, and has campaigned by painting its leaders as spineless and feeble.

Headed into Tuesday's CNN Republican presidential debate, Cruz and Trump have turned Iowa into a two-man race, with the Texan leading in two new polls. Cruz is up 31% to Trump's 21% among likely GOP caucus-goers, according to the Bloomberg Politics-Des Moines Register poll released Saturday. A Fox News poll Sunday has Cruz leading Trump 28% to 26%.

A small and growing number of Republicans allied with the establishment -- the force long thought to quickly consolidate against a surging Cruz bid -- are coming to terms with the idea that he may be palatable in an election cycle where Trump has pushed the envelope well beyond what they considered acceptable.

""Oh God, yes,"" said Ed Rogers, a top Republican lobbyist, when asked if he'd prefer Cruz. ""Compared to Trump, he's OK.""

Establishment Republicans had enough of a problem when Trump began his populist-fueled move to the top of national polls, where he has stubbornly remained for five months. But Cruz's steady rise means that even if Trump were taken out by a well-financed negative campaign, they might have to deal with a stronger Cruz, who has more political polish than the more improvisational Trump.

""If you talk to my peers around town, collectively it's an appreciation the guy is smart as hell,"" explained a senior Washington Republican who is backing another candidate. ""He can be a more acceptable alternative to Trump, if it comes to that.""

The irony hasn't escaped them. Said the Republican: ""It's an interesting life -- and everything's relative.""

""The second he starts to look like a winner in Washington,"" Rogers said, ""he's going to have a bunch of new friends.""

It's a dilemma swatted away on Capitol Hill -- perhaps optimistically.

Asked about choosing Trump or Cruz, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain would only allow that they are ""smart people."" Bush backer Sen. Susan Collins would just offer that they are ""obviously not my choice.""

And there's no guarantee either one can beat Hillary Clinton.

""He's not as outrageous as Trump, but I don't know that he's any more electable than Trump,"" said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Republican presidential campaigns for over two decades.

Brian Walsh, a longtime Senate campaign aide, said it's an out-of-control Trump -- not an in-control Cruz -- that explains the Texan's growing appeal.

""Trump has gone so far that it has in some ways masked how problematic Cruz would be as the nominee as well,"" he said.

Despite his background as an Ivy League-educated attorney and his time in the Bush administration, Cruz rose to prominence as a tea party darling who became the national face of the 2013 government shutdown. Cruz has spent the two years since working to salvage his relationship with some potential investors in his campaign, but he has reveled in his image as a Washington bad boy, the only senator willing to do on Capitol Hill what he campaigned on back at home.

It's something that has made him enemies in Washington, where he has not convinced a single Senate colleague to back his campaign. Cruz helped push Republicans to shut down the government in a high-stakes fight over Obamacare, a strategy that failed to get results but didn't cause a predicted electoral meltdown.

On the trail, he has shown no willingness to moderate his positions, bragging about his conservative purity and his rabble-rousing reputation in the Capitol.

But even compared to Cruz's burn-it-down rhetoric, Trump's campaign has been more incendiary and worrisome for party elders determined to beat likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The mogul had harsh things to say about Hispanics, prisoners of war, women in the media, the disabled, and most recently, Muslims, who he thinks temporarily should not be allowed to enter the United States.

And most concerning for GOP leaders, Trump has frequently floated leaving the Republican Party altogether to mount an independent bid, which would significantly increase Clinton's chances of winning the White House.

The pair appears to be heading toward a clash that Cruz, at least, long sought to delay. On Friday evening, about 24 hours after audio leaked of Cruz questioning Trump's judgment at a private fundraiser, the real estate mogul launched his first attacks on Cruz.

Cruz had attempted to head that off by alleging that mainstream Republicans were trying to sow discord.

""The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match,"" he tweeted Friday morning. ""Sorry to disappoint — @realdonaldtrump is terrific. #DealWithIt""

Cruz has done little to woo the Republicans he used as his bogeyman: He has raised the lion's share of his money far from the New York-to-Washington corridor, raced to the party's right flank on every issue of the day, and campaigned loudly on the polarizing social issues that one well-placed Republican said puts some contributors permanently out of reach.

Cruz, on paper, should not be as repellent to the GOP political class as he is. Nurtured by the George W. Bush network in Texas, he served as solicitor general before winning an upset bid in the 2012 Republican U.S. Senate primary.

To Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, that resume should theoretically make him attractive to the party's elite.

""At a core of Cruz's candidacy is a great phonyism,"" Stevens said of the self-stylized insurgent. ""You can wear all the plaid shirts and shoot off all the automatic weapons you want, but you're an insider.""

And some of his positions, such as on national security, do hew closely to the party's center. As Cruz held court on MSNBC's ""Morning Joe"" last week, ""you could've sworn he was working for George Herbert Walker Bush on his foreign policy,"" a senior Republican said.

But a leading Republican in frequent touch with high-level donors, said even though those contributors may despise Cruz, they are learning to live with him. ""If that's what we need to do to beat Trump,"" the Republican said, ""then that's what you get.""",REAL
"Hillary Clinton didn't just take the vast majority of the available delegates in South Carolina on Saturday night. She also took away one of Bernie Sanders's strongest arguments — that he's the candidate who has the most working-class support.

In Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders had done better than Clinton among voters in the lowest income brackets. That seemed to bolster his claim that his ""political revolution"" could energize millions of new low-income voters who typically don't turn out to vote.

This argument, however, is much less tenable after tonight. Clinton did best among poor voters in South Carolina, taking 82 percent of those who earn under $30,000 on her way to a 37-point victory, according to exit polling by the New York Times.

Here are the results by income, according to the Times:

Of course, this discrepancy is largely driven by Clinton's huge 87-13 margin of victory over black voters. But that's the point — outside of states like Iowa and New Hampshire, many low-income and working-class voters aren't white. Unless Sanders is able to win working-class voters beyond the whitest electorates in the country, his revolution may be over almost as soon as it started.",REAL
"Support Us Should I Get Botox? 
source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments November 1, 2016 at 6:25 am 
I think that maybe she can use a very natural makeup as an enhancement for her features to make her skin look softer and fresher. More than those lines her skin looks tired. Exfoliation, hydration, and a natural makeup will do a great difference in her. November 1, 2016 at 6:25 am 
Botox is a toxin, it's not for ""taking care of your skin"". If you want to actually take care of your skin and reduce the appearance of your wrinkles, you should do a deep chemical peel once a year, derma roll every month, and use prescription Retin-A in between those things. Keeping the skin hydrated and nourished with consistent exfoliation is the key to young skin. So vitamin e oil, steam facials and natural moisturizers on the regular. As far as feminism and skincare/plastic surgery, I think it's less a gender issue than a reach to maintain biological attraction. Youth equals fertility, and – because we're animals – to attract a mate, generally it's about how ""fertile"" you appear. Call it peacocking or whatever you will, it's not anti-feminist to care about how you look.",FAKE
"Former GOP presidential hopeful Linsdey Graham has announced his endorsement of Jeb Bush for president.

Graham's presidential campaign went nowhere, but as a senator from the early voting state of South Carolina he hopes to still have some clout.

Graham praised Bush's temperament Friday morning, following Thursday night's GOP debate. ""He hasn't tried to get ahead in a contested primary by embracing demagoguery ... he's not running to be commander-in-chief by running people down,"" he said.

That was clearly a reference to Donald Trump. Bush returned the admiration, calling Graham a ""patriot.""

""He loves this country. You just hear it how he spoke from his heart about what's at stake here. What's at stake is our way of life,"" Bush said.

Jeb Bush — still slumping in polls — has been looking for a way to jump-start his campaign, but an endorsement from a former candidate who couldn't break through either probably won't give Bush the upswing he needs.

With the Iowa caucuses fewer than three weeks away, he's polling behind Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson both nationally and in Iowa. Bush was unable to stand out from the field once again at Thursday's Republican presidential debate. And Bush's donors are reportedly getting skittish, saying it's only a matter of time before he drops out. Politico reported that several donors said they are now waiting for what one former George W. Bush administration appointee described as a ""family hall pass"" to switch to another campaign after the New Hampshire primary.",REAL
"The fight for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination appears to be moving into a new, more fluid phase.

No longer is the question merely whether or how Donald Trump can be stopped.

The recent rise in the polls of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — Trump’s low-key stylistic opposite — has shown that the celebrity billionaire may not be the only one who can tap the appetite of many in the party’s angry base for an outsider.

And after Wednesday’s chaotic and freewheeling debate, there also is a new dynamic on the establishment side of the race.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s once-formidable campaign appears to be nearing a state of collapse, made worse by his flailing on the stage in Colorado.

That has provided an opening to his onetime ally, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is getting a new look from the party establishment — an ironic situation, given Rubio’s roots as an insurgent tea party favorite in 2010.

“Marco Rubio now has probably the best shot to emerge as the mainstream alternative to Trump and Carson,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary for President George W. Bush.

More broadly, Fleischer, who is not committed to any of the 2016 candidates, predicted that the GOP is about to enter “a condensed version of where it was four years ago, where the party is volatile and shopping around.”

That could help Ted Cruz, who also made a strong showing in the debate. The firebrand senator from Texas, widely despised by the Washington Republican hierarchy, is looking to nudge out Trump and Carson among voters who are looking for a candidate to supplant the old order.

“I don’t think the party is going to nominate anybody who has not been elected before,” said Stuart Stevens, who was a top strategist for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

Also likely to force some clarity in the coming weeks is the calendar. The first contest, in Iowa, is barely more than three months away.

So the focus for all the leading contenders will have to shift, from raising their profiles nationally to refining the strategies and organization it will take to put specific states in their column.

“The campaign is really in a nuts-and-bolts stage,” said Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. “It’s about getting on the ballot, organizing, and making sure people understand what caucuses are in Iowa and other states and teach them how to participate. It’s about getting people committed and ready.”

Lewandowski said Trump’s campaign is already hiring staff for states that do not hold their primaries until March.

“Our approach is to execute and meet the criteria to get on the ballot in all 50 states, in five territories and in the District of Columbia. That’s a full-time job,” he added. “This campaign is doing all of the things necessary for long-term success.”

At the same time, Trump seemed to be moderating and refining his message as he campaigned outside Reno, Nev., Thursday afternoon.

Where he previously has devoted his rallies to slinging insults at his opponents and boasting about his poll numbers, Trump focused instead on describing the professional and life experience he would bring to the White House.

He also cited issues where he claimed to have led before it was a popular thing to do — including opposing the Iraq war and aggressively combating illegal immigration.

“That’s the kind of thinking we need in the country,” Trump said. “A lot of the people in the audience, maybe in your small way you have that same thinking.”

Bush, campaigning in New Hampshire, insisted that his struggling candidacy should not be counted out. The former Florida governor, who is polling in the single digits almost everywhere, insisted, “We’re doing fine.”

But he appeared to acknowledge that he had not helped his prospects with his showing in the debate.

“Look, there are two types of politicians. There are the talkers and there are the doers,” Bush told the crowd. “I wish I could talk as well as some of the people on the stage, the big personalities on the stage, but I’m a doer.”

Rubio, meanwhile, must capi­tal­ize — quickly — on whatever interest and momentum may be generated by his debate performance. He spent the morning making the rounds of six network and cable television shows and the remainder of the day fundraising in Denver and Chicago. He will be in Iowa on Friday.

On “CBS This Morning,” Rubio declined to criticize Bush personally and said the differences between the two will be fleshed out in terms of policy.

“I’m going to continue to tell people who I am, what I’m for. There are policy differences between us — we’ll discuss those. Americans deserve to hear those. But I’m not going to change my campaign,” he said.

“Jeb is my friend, I have admiration for him. I’m not running against him. I’m running for president.”

Cruz, meanwhile, is building what GOP insiders say is a strong organization. The campaign says that it has 77,000 volunteers on the ground, with 6,000 in the first four voting states.

Fundraising has also been robust — and was reignited by the debate, during which the senator trained his fire on the CNBC moderators and the media. A Cruz aide said more than $1 million had poured in since Wednesday night’s debate.

There will be growing pressure on candidates who are getting no traction to get out of the race. On Thursday, for instance, the New York Times editorial board called upon New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to abandon his bid.

“New Jersey is in trouble, and the governor is off pursuing a presidential run that’s turned out to be nothing more than a vanity project,” the paper wrote. “Mr. Christie’s numbers are in the basement, and he’s nearly out of campaign cash. This is his moment, all right: to go home and use the rest of his term to clean out the barn, as Speaker John Boehner would say.”

Christie, for his part, tweeted, “Can’t read the article because I don’t have a subscription, but I can tell you this — I am not going anywhere.”

Robert Costa in Colorado and Jenna Johnson in Nevada contributed to this report.",REAL
"The late evening of Aug. 9, 2014, I couldn’t sleep. I was due to substitute-anchor MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki” and should have been asleep. But after looking at my Twitter feed and reading the rage under #Ferguson, I felt compelled to type a reaction to the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. Tying the shooting to the inane whine of certain politicians about a “war on whites,”  I decried the next morning the death of yet another unarmed black man at the hands of a white police officer.

In those early hours and early days, there was more unknown than known. But this month, the Justice Department released two must-read investigations connected to the killing of Brown that filled in blanks, corrected the record and brought sunlight to dark places by revealing ugly practices that institutionalized racism and hardship. They have also forced me to deal with two uncomfortable truths: Brown never surrendered with his hands up, and Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.

The report on the Ferguson police department detailed abuse and blatant trampling of the constitutional rights of people, mostly African Americans, in Ferguson. Years of mistreatment by the police, the courts and the municipal government, including evidence that all three balanced their books on the backs of the people of Ferguson, were laid bare in 102 damning pages. The overwhelming data from DOJ provided background and much-needed context for why a small St. Louis suburb most had never heard of exploded the moment Brown was killed. His death gave voice to many who suffered in silence.

The unarmed 18-year-old also became a potent symbol of the lack of trust between African Americans and law enforcement. Not just in Ferguson, but in the rest of the country. Lord knows there have been plenty of recent examples. And the militarized response to protesters by local police put an exclamation point on demonstrators’ concerns. But the other DOJ report, the one on the actual shooting of Michael Brown, shows him to be an inappropriate symbol.

Through exhaustive interviews with witnesses, cross-checking their statements with previous statements to authorities and the media, ballistics, DNA evidence and results from three autopsies, the Justice Department was able to present a credible and troubling picture of what happened on Canfield Drive. More credible than the grand jury decision to not indict Wilson. The transcript of his grand jury testimony read like so much hand-holding by the prosecution.

What DOJ found made me ill. Wilson knew about the theft of the cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects. Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. And the popular hands-up storyline, which isn’t corroborated by ballistic and DNA evidence and multiple witness statements, was perpetuated by Witness 101. In fact, just about everything said to the media by Witness 101, whom we all know as Dorian Johnson, the friend with Brown that day, was not supported by the evidence and other witness statements.

Page 6: Brown then grabbed the weapon and struggled with Wilson to gain control of it. Wilson fired, striking Brown in the hand. Autopsy results and bullet trajectory, skin from Brown’s palm on the outside of the SUV door as well as Brown’s DNA on the inside of the driver’s door corroborate Wilson’s account that during the struggle, Brown used his right hand to grab and attempt to control Wilson’s gun. According to three autopsies, Brown sustained a close range gunshot wound to the fleshy portion of his right hand at the base of his right thumb. Soot from the muzzle of the gun found embedded in the tissue of this wound coupled with indicia of thermal change from the heat of the muzzle indicate that Brown’s hand was within inches of the muzzle of Wilson’s gun when it was fired. The location of the recovered bullet in the side panel of the driver’s door, just above Wilson’s lap, also corroborates Wilson’s account of the struggle over the gun and when the gun was fired, as do witness accounts that Wilson fired at least one shot from inside the SUV.

Page 8: Although there are several individuals who have stated that Brown held his hands up in an unambiguous sign of surrender prior to Wilson shooting him dead, their accounts do not support a prosecution of Wilson. As detailed throughout this report, some of those accounts are inaccurate because they are inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence; some of those accounts are materially inconsistent with that witness’s own prior statements with no explanation, credible [or] otherwise, as to why those accounts changed over time. Certain other witnesses who originally stated Brown had his hands up in surrender recanted their original accounts, admitting that they did not witness the shooting or parts of it, despite what they initially reported either to federal or local law enforcement or to the media. Prosecutors did not rely on those accounts when making a prosecutive decision. While credible witnesses gave varying accounts of exactly what Brown was doing with his hands as he moved toward Wilson – i.e., balling them, holding them out, or pulling up his pants up – and varying accounts of how he was moving – i.e., “charging,” moving in “slow motion,” or “running” – they all establish that Brown was moving toward Wilson when Wilson shot him. Although some witnesses state that Brown held his hands up at shoulder level with his palms facing outward for a brief moment, these same witnesses describe Brown then dropping his hands and “charging” at Wilson.

The DOJ report notes on page 44 that Johnson “made multiple statements to the media immediately following the incident that spawned the popular narrative that Wilson shot Brown execution-style as he held up his hands in surrender.” In one of those interviews, Johnson told MSNBC that Brown was shot in the back by Wilson. It was then that Johnson said Brown stopped, turned around with his hands up and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” And, like that, “hands up, don’t shoot” became the mantra of a movement. But it was wrong, built on a lie.

Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger “Black Lives Matter.” In fact, the false Ferguson narrative stuck because of concern over a distressing pattern of other police killings of unarmed African American men and boys around the time of Brown’s death. Eric Garner was killed on a Staten Island street on July 17. John Crawford III was killed in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on Aug. 5, four days before Brown. Levar Jones survived being shot by a South Carolina state trooper on Sept. 4. Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was killed in a Cleveland park on Nov. 23, the day before the Ferguson grand jury opted not to indict Wilson. Sadly, the list has grown longer.

Now that black lives matter to everyone, it is imperative that we continue marching for and giving voice to those killed in racially charged incidents at the hands of police and others. But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong. And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.",REAL
"Lavrov and Kerry discuss Syrian settlement October 28, 2016 TASS 
Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Syrian settlement as well as the situation in Yemen and Libya by telephone on Oct. 28. 
The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the conversation had taken place at the U.S. side’s request. 
""The foreign policy chiefs continued discussing ways of settling the Syrian conflict, including the normalization of the situation around Aleppo, with account taken of fundamental approaches contained in the previously reached Russian-U.S. agreements. For that, the United States should ultimately separate moderate opposition (in Syria) from terror groups,"" the Russian Foreign Ministry said. 
""Lavrov and Kerry also discussed assistance to the solution of crises in Yemen and Libya as well as separate issues of bilateral agenda,"" the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed.",FAKE
"BREAKING : DOJ Says They Will “HELP” Review the 650K Emails BREAKING : DOJ Says They Will “HELP” Review the 650K Emails Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 31, 2016 
Oh great, now the biased DOJ is going to “help” the FBI go through the 650K emails because they want to “HURRY THROUGH” it? 
That’s unsettling and smells of more “rigged favors” from Loretta Lynch. 
On Friday the FBI announced they were reopening the email investigation into Hillary’s mishandling of classified information. 
In a statement, the FBI said that they discovered “new emails” pertinent to the earlier investigation on “several devices.” 
We now know there were 650K emails found on Huma and Anthony’s private computer. 
How do you feel about the DOJ “helping” sift through the emails? 
I say, HELL NO! BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it’ll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case – AP This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"Democratic National Committee officials on Saturday turned down Bernie Sanders' formal request for the ouster of “aggressive attack surrogates” for Hillary Clinton from key national convention committees.

The campaign announced earlier that it wanted to remove Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy as a co-chairman of the Platform Committee and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank as head of the Rules Committee. Frank has sharply criticized Sanders’ positions on breaking up big banks and Malloy has criticized Sanders on guns.

“Governor Malloy and Mr. Frank have both been aggressive attack surrogates for the Clinton campaign,” Sanders campaign counsel Brad Deutsch wrote in a letter to the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee. “Their criticisms of Sen. Sanders have gone beyond dispassionate ideological disagreement and have exposed a deeper professional, political and personal hostility toward the senator and his campaign.""

But committee co-chairs Jim Roosevelt and Lorraine Miller responded that his challenge ""fails to meet the criteria"" for their dismissal. It did not allege any violations in the conduct of their elections to their posts by the DNC executive committee in January, they wrote.

The Sanders campaign’s Friday letter to Democratic National Committee rules officials marks the latest turn in Sanders’ feud with party officials. It comes a week after Sanders said he would make sure Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida isn’t reappointed to her role as head of the DNC if he becomes president and he began fundraising for her primary opponent, Tim Canova.

Most members of the convention standing committees — rules, platform and credentials — are awarded to candidates based on the results of those primaries and caucuses. But under party rules, Wasserman Schultz recommended co-chairs and a slate of 25 at-large appointments per committee for approval by the party’s executive committee.

In a May 6 letter to Wasserman Schultz, Sanders complained she selected only three of his more than 40 recommendations for committee appointments, and he expressed no confidence in Malloy or Frank, writing their appointments suggest the committees are being established “in an overtly partisan way.”

Deutsch argued Friday that Frank and Malloy can’t be relied upon to perform convention duties fairly “while laboring under such deeply held bias.”

“The appointment of two individuals so outspokenly critical of Sen. Sanders, and so closely affiliated with Secretary Clinton's campaign, raises concerns that two of the three Convention Standing Committees are being constituted in an overtly partisan way designed to exclude meaningful input from supporters of Sen. Sanders' candidacy,” Deutsch wrote.

In April, Tad Devine, Sanders’ senior adviser, said Frank is among surrogates for Hillary Clinton who used Sanders’ remarks to a New York Daily News editorial board on April 1 to promote a story line that questions Sanders’ capacity to be president. Devine pointed to Frank’s April 6 statements on MSNBC that Sanders “confused several things” in his responses to questions about his core issue of breaking up big banks. Frank also said Sanders’ responses to the editorial board were not “coherent.”

Frank said in an April interview with USA TODAY that he would step aside from his co-chairmanship if the Democratic nomination is still uncertain in June and if a Rules Committee decision could be the deciding factor. With Clinton's decisive lead in delegates, that appears unlikely.

A Connecticut Democratic Party spokesman told USA TODAY earlier this month that Malloy agrees with Sanders on many issues. On Saturday, Leigh Appleby said Malloy is committed to a platform and process reflective of the party's diverse viewpoints.

""This year's Democratic platform process is making an unprecedented effort to ensure the process is reflective of the entire party and that every Democrat has an opportunity to have their voice heard in a meaningful way,"" Appleby said in a statement. ""And at the end of the day, Democats will put forward a platform that stands in stark contrast to the hateful, divisive, and dangerous policies of Donald Trump.""",REAL
"NEW YORK, N.Y. — If Hillary Clinton is winning the Democratic presidential race, why has it felt like she’s losing? Yes, Mrs. Clinton scored an important victory in New York Tuesday, winning her adopted home state in the primary. But should the outcome ever have been in doubt?As a former senator from New York she […]",REAL
"WASHINGTON — President Obama has quietly racked up a series of legislative victories during the past few months as lawmakers have enthusiastically embraced his calls for a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave and universal pre-kindergarten.

Instead of Capitol Hill, those victories happened in city halls, state houses and county buildings far from Washington.

At least six major cities — Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Washington, D.C. — have passed paid sick leave laws in the four months since Obama called for state and local action in this year's State of the Union Address. Since the 2013 address when Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, 17 states and six major cities have taken action, including Los Angeles last week.

Obama's state-and-local strategy may be unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Though previous administrations have appointed top advisers to listen to concerns of state and local officials, the Obama White House appears to be the first to aggressively use those same channels to encourage them to adopt Obama's policies.

""It is a change in the paradigm, where we used to sit passively by waiting for elected officials to come to us. We think we can have a more substantial impact if we collaborate,"" said Valerie Jarrett, the assistant to the president for public engagement and intergovernmental affairs.

""I think the president has always had the perspective that change always happens from the ground up, and our state and local officials are oftentimes more influenced by the will of the American people than the politics in Washington would seem to indicate,"" Jarrett said in an interview.

Obama has no formal authority over state and local lawmakers, so his persuasion is a form of soft power — the ""phone"" part of what Obama has described as a ""pen-and-phone"" strategy to take action in the absence of congressional cooperation.

He's found fertile ground in Democratic-run cities such as Seattle, where Mayor Ed Murray helped push for a minimum wage and paid leave laws that have gone into effect since April.

""President Obama recognizes that good ideas are being incubated at the local level, and those are ideas that are going to go to scale nationally,"" Murray said. That recognition can go a long way in a city such as Seattle, which often doesn't get the national attention East Coast cities do. ""The president of the United States recognizing us only helps us. We do other things beside e-commerce and coffee,"" Murray said.

There's also resistance. Jon Russell is a councilman in Culpeper, Va., and the director of the American City County Exchange, a year-old initiative of the small-government American Legislative Exchange Council.

Russell said states — not cities, not Congress and not the president — should be the primary regulator of labor conditions. Obama, he said, is ""hop-skipping over the states.""

""With the number of states that have now turned to the opposite political party, he doesn't have the allies there that he used to,"" Russell said. ""To work with the urban areas to push his agenda is not surprising. It's the only allies he really has.""

The strategy has been more effective on some policies than others. Since last September, more than 200 mayors have signed on to the My Brother's Keeper initiative, a commitment to help boys and young men of color. But since Obama called for states to offer free community college in January, only a handful have moved in that direction.

The state-and-local strategy effort has been particularly effective on paid leave policies, which Obama championed in his State of the Union Address this year. ""Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave — 43 million. Think about that,"" Obama said. ""So I'll be taking new action to help states adopt paid leave laws of their own.""

That pledge came with a $1 million budget from the Department of Labor to help fund feasibility studies for state and local governments, which will begin to be awarded this summer.

Obama dispatched Jarrett and Labor Secretary Tom Perez on a ""Lead on Leave"" tour of cities that have adopted paid leave policies. Jarrett went to Philadelphia and Chicago; Perez has been to Portland, Ore., Pawtucket, R.I., St. Petersburg, Fla., and Seattle.

Tuesday, Perez will be in Minneapolis, which just adopted a paid leave policy for city employees this month.

Perez said it's a mistake to view the state-and-local strategy as separate from a larger effort. ""Our strategy is an all-of-the-above-and-then-some strategy,"" he said.

He said Obama will continue to use executive orders, as he did when he increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 an hour.

""We want Congress to act, and I'm confident that it's a when question, not an if question. But we're also not going to wait around for Congress to act,"" Perez said.

Although focusing on city councils may seem small compared with the sweeping congressional legislation early in Obama's presidency, state minimum wage laws will raise the pay of more than 7 million people by 2017. (That number, which comes from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, includes people making just above minimum wage who were helped indirectly because their wages are increased accordingly.)

""That's nothing to sneeze at. That's progress,"" Jarrett said.

San Francisco passed the first paid sick time law in the nation in 2006, requiring all employers to grant one hour of paid sick time for every 30 hours worked. Three states and 18 cities now have paid sick leave laws on the books, according to A Better Balance, a New York-based legal advocacy group that tracks such laws.

A year ago, advocates had a hard time breaking through the public consciousness on the issue, said the group's co-president, Sherry Leiwant. After a White House Working Families Summit last year, and again after January's State of the Union Address, there's been an ""explosion"" of interest by state and local lawmakers, she said.

""The White House leadership on this issue has been huge. It's had a real impact,"" Leiwant said. ""That influence on mayors or governors, who are Democrats but haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue, or they want to be pro-business Democrats, this gives them a lot of cover.""

A Better Balance still favors a national law that would cover everyone, but while the government is divided at the national level, ""the best strategy is to go to localities and states.""

A city-by-city strategy can be painstaking and legally complicated. Every state grants different home rule powers to cities — and even different powers to different-sized cities in the same state.

Philadelphia was able to pass a paid leave bill applying to private-sector workers, but Pittsburgh's law applies only to some non-union city workers. Pittsburgh City Councilwoman Natalia Rudiak credits Obama for giving her city's effort ""a lot of momentum,"" but she said more cities need to put pressure on the state Legislature to adopt statewide law.

There's also pushback from the opposite direction. Last month, the Pennsylvania Senate voted 37-12 to preempt the Philadelphia law, taking the power to regulate sick leave out of the hands of local governments.

That bill's sponsor, state Sen. John Eichelberger Jr., said it's untenable to have 2,562 municipalities with different labor standards, forcing businesses to comply with a patchwork of rules.

""Philosophically, I have a real problem with President Obama going to a municipality and trying to accomplish an agenda, whether it's liberal or conservative or otherwise,"" he said. ""It's just not the place to adopt these policies.""

Obama has opened an entirely new frontier of presidential power by turning to state and local governments, said Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, who studies the effect of presidential persuasion at the University of North Texas.

""I'm really struck by, one, why hasn't anybody thought of this before? And two, this could be a very effective strategy,"" Eshbaugh-Soha said. ""At a time when executive orders are becoming particularly controversial and you're not able to break through the gridlock of Congress, I think it's ingenious.""

He's skeptical that the effort will put much pressure on members of Congress who don't support Obama's policies.

Jarrett said the effort is starting to snowball. She said some city leaders agreed with paid leave on principle but were reluctant to pass what could be seen as burdensome regulations in a difficult economy. As more cities and states have passed those policies, it's emboldened others.

""Success begets success,"" she said. ""What the evidence has begun to show is it's not a burden but an investment that is starting to pay off.""

Indeed, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter vetoed two paid leave bills in 2011 and 2013. But three weeks after Obama's State of the Union Address this year, Nutter reversed course.

What changed? Nutter said the economy was better, and the bill contained key compromises to accommodate small businesses. Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald said he was unaware of any role Obama had in getting the bill passed.

Bill Greenlee, the councilman who sponsored the measure, said Nutter ""completely turned a corner"" on paid leave when the president put it on his agenda. ""I gotta think that when the president mentions sick leave in his State of the Union, and if you're a Democrat and a supporter of the president's agenda in general, that's gotta have an effect,"" Greenlee said.

Nutter did make a symbolic nod to Obama's influence in signing the paid leave bill: He signed it with a pen Obama gave him — after the president used it to sign an unemployment compensation bill. The only other time Nutter used that pen was on an executive order raising the minimum wage for city contractors to $12 an hour.",REAL
"Is Trump the lesser of two evils or are both candidates equally unelectable? 
THE GREAT DEBATE BEGINS: We’ll know who is right tomorrow! 
SARDONICUS (to Flopot) : I know it makes your blood boil to consider the “lesser of two evils” scenario. But LD has always been a conscientious non-voter and is therefore unlikely to be voting for either Trump or Hillary. Nor am I for that matter, since I am a UK resident and do not get to vote in the American elections. 
You really must reconcile yourself, Flopot, to the fact that Hillary is held in such visceral loathing that her millions of haters feel they have no option but to vote for her opponent, Donald Trump, even though they are aware of the Donald’s many faults and his Zionist connections. 
It’s either not voting at all or voting for the lesser of two evils. 
FLOPOT : You don’t understand the meaning of “lesser of two evils”. It is a con trick; it doesn’t exist. Donald will pursue the same globalist wars and cultural revolutions as any other Zionist puppet. It is a meme that exists to get your consent to continue the same evil. 
HARBINGER: Hear hear. Exactly Flopot. As I’ve stated umpteen times, Trump is good cop, Hillary is bad. But sadly, Sardonicus does not see the ‘grand plan’ even though the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carroll Quigley do, both very much part of that process. 
There is not one politician in the west who becomes what they are, without a careful vetting procedure. Classic example is Jeremy Corbin , whom many thought was going to be the saviour of Labour and take it to the Zionists, when he has proven without any shadow of a doubt that he’s a rampant Zionist, even though who goes on pro Palestine marches. 
Trump is a puppet. Clinton is a puppet. May is a puppet. Merkel is a puppet….. There is not ONE politician in the west who isn’t part of the ‘grand plan’ and it’s why everything works according to plan. 
SARDONICUS (to Flopot and Harbinger) : Yes, I understand exactly what both you and Harbinger are saying and I can sympathize with your viewpoint. You are saying there is NO LESSER OF TWO EVILS here since both candidates are EQUALLY EVIL. Because both are Zionists and will deliver a program to further Jewish interests. That’s what you’re saying, right? 
The only difference, as Harbie indicates, is that one of these two candidates is playing the “bad cop” (Hillary) and the other is playing the “good cop” (Trump). So it’s nonsense to vote for the “good cop” as the “lesser of two evils” when both cops are equally evil when the chips are down. 
This is your argument and I can sympathize with it only if you are correct in your initial assumption that Trump has no redeeming features whatever and is a total charlatan and liar who will break every single promise of his if he gets into the White House. 
You are entitled to that assumption, but you are NOT entitled to believe that your assumption is universally shared. Kevin MacDonald certainly doesn’t believe that Trump is a thorough scoundrel who will sell all White America down the river as soon as he is elected. Nor do the thousands of White Nationalists and other White Americans who share MacDonald’s perfectly acceptable and intellectually defensible views. 
These millions of Trump supporters do NOT believe that Trump is an unmitigated scoundrel who will break his promise to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Trump has said he has no intention of starting a war with Russia. Hillary has made no such promise. Trump has said he will crack down on illegal immigrants, especially Muslim immigrants from hostile Muslim states. Well, MacDonald and his White Nationalists are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. 
I for one refuse to think that Kevin MacDonald and the millions who are hoping for a resurgence of White ethnic interests are deluded and mistaken in their advocacy of Donald Trump. They could be right. Trump could be their man and actually deliver the goods, i.e., improve the lives of millions of White Americans who are now suffering under Jewish hegemony and a multiculturalism that has gone mad. 
The pessimism both of you share in regard to the irredeemable character of Donald Trump is simply a subjective state of mind. It’s an opinion, not a fact. 
I may choose to say, “I can’t stand garlic and onions.” This makes me a garlic-and-onion pessimist. My subjective viewpoint that garlic and onions are horrible vegetables does not make it a scientific fact that garlic and onions are horrible vegetables. The garlic and onion eaters of the world are entitled to tell me to get lost if I told everyone to give up eating garlic and onions. 
So it is with Flopot and Harbinger with their Trump pessimism. They are making a logical mistake in confusing impressions with facts. It is not a FACT that Trump is a scoundrel; at the most it is a subjective opinion. 
HP : Trump is not a politician who has been a politician who grew up a politician and lived and breathed politics all his adult life. Apart from business/social, of course. 
He’s an Alpha businessman who just happens to be waaay more intelligent and personally powerful than 99% of the political mediocres who envy and hate him. 
He came from out of nowhere and like a freight train rolled right over them before they could even cry foul or man an offense against him based on their default slime factor M.O. 
Hell, he vetted them ! Even as the entire weight of the political, M$M, Hollywood, Academia, foreigners, etc., etc., set upon him like no other in memory near or far. But they couldn’t even put a dent in him, or scare him off, and you know the vile demons tried very hard. 
He didn’t scare. But he did and does scare them. A lot. 
Being a uber-quick study, he easily overtook and surpassed the half-bright bureaucrat politicians and within one solitary year he IS The Alpha Politician. 
Putin (and his 12 time zones full of natural resources) will no doubt enjoy Trump. Putin will respect his intelligence, embrace his personality, utilize his uber-business talents and skills, and very very importantly, hugely importantly.. share their big big patriotism for their nations, their citizens.. 
In other words: The world gets an early Christmas present this year! 
UNGENIUS: Well said, HP! I would add only one statement: Trump is not a murderer, but Killery is a murderer of long standing which should make a choice simple between the two. 
GILBERT HUNTLY: Sardonicus, thanks for your healthy and sane perspective! Well said! 🙂 
LOBRO: Seconding that. And add HP’s perceptive comment [ above ] to the score for level headed reason. 
ARIADNATHEO: Sardonicus, Harbinger and Flopot: You are all wrong, as I used to be, I admit. 
“Jewish hegemony,” “zionism” …. are nothing but red herrings that distract our attention from the real enemy. It’s not “Jews, Jews, Jews,” it’s Goyim, goyim, goyim. I owe it to Amy Martin to have finally understood who are, to cite her “the two more powerful lobbyists in the US” — the Podesta brothers! 
Also who are the real rulers whose vast web of corruption brought them virtually absolute power: the Clintons! No Jews are involved anywhere. 
Amy is really good (AND good looking). Why did RT get rid of her? 
KAREN: Ariadnatheo, great satire! 
FLOPOT: Satire reveals truth, though. We’re our own worst enemy — gullible goy; the malleable toy. 
ARIADNATHEO: This is a prediction I trust [ short amusing video ]. 
If you watch, make sure it is BEFORE lunch. 
JOHN KIRBY: Sounds like the usual shakedown. 
THE DOT (having the last word, unedited) : 
@ darkmooners charlatans 
you have been supporting the cretin clown d j dumpy from day one just because that you are sick and mentaly diseased racist pigs just like him your lunatic drivel is just like his . guess what Adriana you sick horny hog ,your Donny will not win ,loser I seen a gifted seer and some mysterious unseen someone ,she can look at the future do some kind of time travel ,I was told that ,but my mind couldn’t accept it ,so i asked for a proof ,the future winning lottery numbers.she asked for my soul then i ran away . before that she said that she visited tomorrow and Donny lost the election . now Adriana and the rest of you dark spirited hyenas ,who is crazier you or me or that witch We’ll know tomorrow (Ed) Like this? Share it now. 7 thoughts on “ Celebrity Deathmatch: Darkmoon Sages Make Their Final Predictions on US Election ” Flopot says:",FAKE
"(CNN) Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that the United States has determined that ISIS' action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide .

Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.

Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.

A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.

A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.

Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.

Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.

Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.

Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.

Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.

A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.

A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.

Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.

Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.

A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.

A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.

Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.

Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.

Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.

Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.

Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.

Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.

Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.

Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.

Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.

Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.

ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.

ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.

Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.

Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.

A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.

A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.

Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.

Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.

Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.

An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.

An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.

ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.

ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.

Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.

Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.

Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.

Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.

Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.

Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.

A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.

A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.

Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on Wednesday, February 4. Al-Kasasbeh's son, Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was recently released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS.

Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria.

Displaced Assyrian women who fled their homes due to ISIS attacks pray at a church on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, on Sunday, March 1. ISIS militants abducted at least 220 Assyrians in Syria.

Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9.

Iraqi Shiite fighters cover their ears as a rocket is launched during a clash with ISIS militants in the town of Al-Alam, Iraq, on Monday, March 9.

The parents of 19-year-old Mohammed Musallam react at the family's home in the East Jerusalem Jewish settlement of Neve Yaakov on Tuesday, March 10. ISIS released a video purportedly showing a young boy executing Musallam, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian descent who ISIS claimed infiltrated the group in Syria to spy for the Jewish state. Musallam's family told CNN that he had no ties with the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, and had, in fact, been recruited by ISIS.

On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.

On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.

People in Tikrit inspect what used to be a palace of former President Saddam Hussein on April 3.

People in Tikrit inspect what used to be a palace of former President Saddam Hussein on April 3.

A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.

A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces help Yazidis as they arrive at a medical center in Altun Kupri, Iraq, on April 8.

Kurdish Peshmerga forces help Yazidis as they arrive at a medical center in Altun Kupri, Iraq, on April 8.

Yazidis embrace after being released by ISIS south of Kirkuk, Iraq, on Wednesday, April 8. ISIS released more than 200 Yazidis , a minority group whose members were killed, captured and displaced when the Islamist terror organization overtook their towns in northern Iraq last summer, officials said.

Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad as they flee Ramadi on Friday, April 17.

Thousands of Iraqis cross a bridge over the Euphrates River to Baghdad as they flee Ramadi on Friday, April 17.

A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.

A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.

Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.

Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.

People search through debris after an explosion at a Shiite mosque in Qatif, Saudi Arabia, on Friday, May 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to tweets from ISIS supporters, which included a formal statement from ISIS detailing the operation.

Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.

Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.

Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.

Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.

People in Ashmoun, Egypt, carry the coffin for 1st Lt. Mohammed Ashraf, who was killed when the ISIS militant group attacked Egyptian military checkpoints on Wednesday, July 1. At least 17 soldiers were reportedly killed, and 30 were injured.

Protesters in Istanbul carry anti-ISIS banners and flags to show support for victims of the Suruc suicide blast during a demonstration on Monday, July 20.

Protesters in Istanbul carry anti-ISIS banners and flags to show support for victims of the Suruc suicide blast during a demonstration on Monday, July 20.

Mourners in Gaziantep, Turkey, grieve over a coffin Tuesday, July 21, during a funeral ceremony for the victims of a suspected ISIS suicide bomb attack. That bombing killed at least 31 people in Suruc, a Turkish town that borders Syria. Turkish authorities blamed ISIS for the attack.

Saudi officials and investigators check the inside of the mosque on August 6.

Saudi officials and investigators check the inside of the mosque on August 6.

The governor of the Asir region in Saudi Arabia, Prince Faisal bin Khaled bin Abdulaziz, left, visits a man who was wounded in a suicide bombing attack on a mosque in Abha, Saudi Arabia, on August 6. ISIS claimed responsibility for the explosion, which killed at least 13 people and injured nine others.

Buildings reduced to piles of debris can be seen in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi on August 6.

Buildings reduced to piles of debris can be seen in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi on August 6.

Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces bomb ISIS positions in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi, Iraq, on August 6.

Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces bomb ISIS positions in the eastern suburbs of Ramadi, Iraq, on August 6.

An ISIS fighter poses with spoils purportedly taken after capturing the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn.

An ISIS fighter poses with spoils purportedly taken after capturing the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn.

In this image taken from social media, an ISIS fighter holds the group's flag after the militant group overran the Syrian town of al-Qaryatayn on Thursday, August 6, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. ISIS uses modern tools such as social media to promote reactionary politics and religious fundamentalism. Fighters are destroying holy sites and valuable antiquities even as their leaders propagate a return to the early days of Islam.

Iraqi men look at damage following a bomb explosion that targeted a vegetable market in Baghdad on Thursday, August 13. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

Iraqi men look at damage following a bomb explosion that targeted a vegetable market in Baghdad on Thursday, August 13. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.

Smoke rises above a damaged building in Ramadi, Iraq, following a coalition airstrike against ISIS positions on Saturday, August 15.

Smoke rises above a damaged building in Ramadi, Iraq, following a coalition airstrike against ISIS positions on Saturday, August 15.

Shiite fighters, fighting alongside Iraqi government forces, fire a rocket at ISIS militants as they advance toward the center of Baiji, Iraq, on Monday, October 19.

Shiite fighters, fighting alongside Iraqi government forces, fire a rocket at ISIS militants as they advance toward the center of Baiji, Iraq, on Monday, October 19.

Members of the Egyptian military approach the wreckage of a Russian passenger plane Sunday, November 1, in Hassana, Egypt. The plane crashed the day before, killing all 224 people on board. ISIS claimed responsibility for downing the plane, but the group's claim wasn't immediately verified.

Syrian government troops walk inside the Kweiras air base on Wednesday, November 11, after they broke a siege imposed by ISIS militants.

Syrian government troops walk inside the Kweiras air base on Wednesday, November 11, after they broke a siege imposed by ISIS militants.

Smoke rises over the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar on November 12. Kurdish Iraqi fighters, backed by a U.S.-led air campaign, retook the strategic town, which ISIS militants overran last year. ISIS wants to create an Islamic state across Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria.

Emergency personnel and civilians gather at the site of a twin suicide bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, on Thursday, November 12. The bombings killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 200 more. ISIS appeared to claim responsibility in a statement posted on social media.

Wounded people are helped outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris following a series of coordinated attacks in the city on Friday, November 13. The militant group ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least 130 people and wounded hundreds more.

Investigators check the scene of a mosque attack Friday, November 27, in northern Bangladesh's Bogra district. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack that left at least one person dead and three more wounded.

Yemenis check the scene of a car bomb attack Sunday, December 6, in Aden, Yemen. Aden Gov. Jaafar Saad and six bodyguards died in the attack , for which the terror group ISIS claimed responsibility.

Syrian pro-government forces gather at the site of a deadly triple bombing Sunday, January 31, in the Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeynab . ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a statement circulating online from supporters of the terrorist group.

Syrians gather at the site of a double car bomb attack in the Al-Zahraa neighborhood of the Homs, Syria, on February 21, 2016. Multiple attacks in Homs and southern Damascus kill at least 122 and injure scores, according to the state-run SANA news agency. ISIS claimed responsibility.

Wounded passengers are treated following a suicide bombing at the Brussels Airport on March 22, 2016. The attacks on the airport and a subway killed 32 people and wounded more than 300. ISIS claims its ""fighters"" launched the attacks in the Belgian capital.

""My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims,"" he said, during a news conference at the State Department.

Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "" selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations,"" executed Christians ""solely for their faith"" and also ""forced Christian women and girls into slavery.""

""Without our intervention, it is clear that those people would have been slaughtered,"" he said.

This is the first time that the United States has declared a genocide since Darfur in 2004.

The House of Representatives on Monday unanimously passed a resolution labeling the ISIS atrocities against Christian groups in Syria and Iraq ""genocide,"" a term the State Department had been reluctant to use about the attacks and mass murders by the terror group.

The move, aimed at ramping up pressure on the Obama administration, appears to have worked.

The measure was non-binding, but both Republicans and Democrats in the House joined together 393-0 to back a ""sense of Congress"" saying the crimes committed against Christians, Yazidis and other ethnic and religious minorities in the region amount to war crimes and, in some cases, genocide.

Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, whose Nebraska district is home to the largest group of resettled Yazidis in the U.S., authored the resolution with California Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo.

During debate on Monday, Fortenberry noted it was a rare instance of an issue that has ""risen above the petty and difficult differences we often work out on the floor of the House of Representatives.""

Under a deadline set by Congress, the State Department had until Thursday to formally to decide whether it would issue a comprehensive genocide designation.

Kerry, though, had previously alluded to the possibility that the actions of ISIS, also know as ISIL, were genocide.

""ISIL's campaign of terror against the innocent, including the Yazidi and Christian minorities, and its grotesque targeted acts of violence, show all the warning signs of genocide,"" Kerry said in August 2014. ""For anyone who needed a wakeup call, this is it.""

Fortenberry praised the State Department for its decision Thursday.

""I commend Secretary Kerry and the State Department for making this important designation. The genocide against Christians, Yazidis and others is not only a grave injustice to theses ancient faith communities -- it is an assault on human dignity and an attack on civilization itself,"" he said. ""The United States has now spoken with clarity and moral authority.""

""That it took so long for the administration to arrive at this conclusion, in the face of unspeakable human suffering, defies explanation,"" Rubio, who until Tuesday was a GOP presidential candidate, said in a statement. ""At long last the United States is no longer silent in the face of this evil, but it would be travesty if we were to mistakenly take solace in this designation, if the designation did not then yield some sort of action.""

""I am very happy to hear that (the U.S.) will recognize the genocide of Yezidi and Christian minorities,"" he told CNN in an email. ""This is an important step to stop the suffering of the persecuted people under the control of the extremist islamic groups, specially ISIS. And this is also important for my community to trust the international community again, because we were left in the hands of Islamic State.""

He called on the State Department to push the U.N. to establish an international criminal court case on genocide against the Yazidis and Christians in Iraq and Syria.

""Furthermore,"" he said, ""it is necessary to give the minorities more support to be sure that (these) crimes will not happen again.""

An international center advocating against hate, terrorism and anti-Semitism was one to join the chorus.

""The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauds Secretary Kerry's acknowledgement that Christians and Yazidis are targets of Genocide,"" the organization said in a statement. ""We reiterate our call that the U.S put these two groups at the front of the line for consideration for immigration to our country and to redouble our efforts to destroy ISIS.""

In Defense of Christians, a group that has heavily lobbied for recognizing what is happening as genocide, put out a statement from its president Toufic Baaklini.

""IDC extends our deepest gratitude to Secretary Kerry and to the Obama administration for carefully reviewing the overwhelming evidence of the genocide against Christians, Yazidis, Shia Muslims and other religious minorities and for proclaiming the irrefutable truth that the crimes they have suffered constitute genocide,"" Baaklini said.

And the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, put out a statement of ""appreciation.""

""For some time, the world has witnessed the deliberate and organized effort by ISIS to eliminate Christians from the Middle East. For the U.S. government to call this savagery by its proper name -- genocide -- is a welcome step in what must now be a more committed effort at bringing peace and security to that beleaguered land,"" Wuerl said. ""These words must now be translated into action.""",REAL
"With the shake of an Etch-A-Sketch, Mitt Romney reintroduced himself to the Republican Party on Friday as a man interested in running for president because of his desire to address poverty and income inequality. One only wonders why the former governor of Massachusetts neglected to focus on the growing problems the last time he held the title of GOP standard bearer.

Addressing a gathering of Republican National Committee officials below deck of the decommissioned U.S.S. Midway aircraft carrier in San Diego, California, Romney ticked off three priorities crucial to what he called the ""post-Obama era"": making the world safer with a more muscular foreign policy, providing opportunity to all Americans, and lifting people out of poverty.

""It's a tragedy, a human tragedy, that the middle class in this country by and large doesn't believe that the future will be better than the past,"" he said. ""We haven't seen rising incomes over decades.""

""The rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before under this president,"" he added.

Romney stressed his years as an LDS pastor, a topic he and his campaign rarely broached in 2012, and described working ""with people who are very poor to help them get help.""

The governor isn't the only potential Republican presidential candidate to embrace a more populist tone as wage growth continues to lag in an accelerating economic recovery. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recently lamented that ""while the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top-earners, they've been a lost decade for the rest of America."" Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has emphasized reconnecting with blue collar Americans. Even die-hard conservatives like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) paid lip service to the matter at the Heritage Foundation policy summit, an annual gathering of conservatives in Washington.

While he may be sincere in his pursuit to eliminate poverty, the notion that Romney would be the best candidate to lead his party in doing so is puzzling at best. The former Massachusetts governor didn't have just one misstep that allowed Democrats and Republican primary opponents to paint him as an obscenely wealthy, out-of-touch plutocrat in the 2012 election -- he had a dozen. Here's just a brief sampling:

""I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it,"" he said inelegantly following his victory in the Florida primary. ""I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.""

""Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people,"" he said before the Iowa Ames straw poll.

And his infamous remarks about ""47 percent"" of Americans: ""My job is not to worry about those people -- I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.""

But it's not just the gaffes. Romney embraced the Paul Ryan budget in 2012 -- a sweeping plan that, if enacted, would have instituted draconian cuts to programs affecting the poor. Millions of low-income Americans benefiting from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as other retirement funding, would have been affected under a Romney presidency. Added to his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its subsidies for the poor, it's not hard to see how Romney wouldn't be vexed by some of the same problems should he ultimately decide to run for president.",REAL
"""We've got an opening on the court. I think Sandra Day O'Connor made a very practical point. Let's fill the vacancy so the court can fully function and get on with it,"" he told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day.""

""I don't agree (with Republicans),"" said O'Connor. ""We need somebody in there to do the job and just get on with it.""

King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he is surprised that some Republicans have decided to reject a nominee before even having a candidate to evaluate.

""I'm surprised people can make that judgment before they even know who the nominee is,"" he said. ""It may be that he picks a nominee that's so eminently qualified that it would be very hard to explain a vote against him, other than politics."" King acknowledged that the Senate doesn't have to support the nominee, but thinks there should be a vote. ""Of course, we have these debates. And of course, politics are involved,"" King said. ""The politics are important. And I'm not saying a Republican senator has to vote for whoever Obama nominates. I would never say that."" But a refusal to hold a process could leave the vacancy for more than a year and that would be ""pretty troublesome,"" King said. The senator, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also expressed concern about a judge's order that Apple help the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. ""They're asking Apple to create a key that does not currently exist. And I've got a problem with that. This is a very complicated issue,"" he said. Forcing Apple to do this could set ""a serious precedent"" that could lead to other citizens having their privacy invaded, he said. ""Once that key is made, it can end up in the hands of hackers,"" King said. ""There's no end to complications of this."" ""I think we need to slow down and really consider the policy,"" he added.",REAL
"I’m not sure when it started, but at some point the Republican Party ceded the business of governance to the Democrats. Maybe it began with the Tea Party movement or Fox News or the larger conservative media-industrial complex – I honestly don’t know. But it’s clear now that the GOP is no longer a legitimate governing party. A party that allows rank neophytes like Herman Cain and Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina to run for the highest office in the country has lost its way.

If you look at how the Republican Party operates today, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that governing just isn’t a priority – or internal pressures within the party make it impossible. Instead, the GOP has become what I previously called a self-perpetuating hype machine for conservative political entrepreneurs. Particularly at the national level, Republican candidates and legislators (many of them, at least) show no interest in compromise or serious policymaking, which is what you’d expect from a party of and for purists.

While the new GOP has been bad for the country, it’s been great for political celebrities, people looking to promote their personal brands. Ted Cruz is the most recent and obvious example of this approach to politics. Cruz has been a remarkably ineffective Senator. He has done nothing but bloviate and showboat on the Senate floor. He’s accomplished zero legislatively. His only practical contribution has been to obstruct and draw attention to his martyrdom (read: presidential) campaign.

Ted Cruz will never be elected president. If he manages to win the Republican nomination, he’ll lose in a landslide to a Democrat, whoever that happens to be. And because he’s so eagerly made a spectacle of himself in the Senate, he’s alienated all but the tiniest segment of his own party. Which means he has no political capital in Congress – hardly a concern for someone uninterested in legislating, however.

Cruz’s latest squabble with Rand Paul helps to illustrate Cruz’s intentions. In an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade, Paul basically wrote Cruz’s political obituary:

Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem. I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing , I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result.

Paul is right, of course, but he omits an essential point: Cruz has been ineffective by design. Managing relationships and respecting decorum only matter to people trying to accomplish things in the Senate – that’s not what Cruz is up to. Like the fanatical Tea Party wing of the House, Cruz is there to obstruct and self-promote. In all likelihood, Cruz will retire after a single term in the Senate. Now that he’s boosted his national profile and endeared himself to the insurgent elements of the base, he can pivot to the private sector and make more money as a professional conservative activist – as, for example, Jim DeMint did in 2012. Cruz ought to be seen as the grifter that he is. It was never about policy for him. When he leaves the Senate, he’ll be a hero to the fringe right. He’ll make a fortune on the conservative lecture circuit, telling rapturous audiences about his willingness to challenge the “Washington cartel.” It won’t matter that he accomplished nothing, changed nothing – it’ll be enough that he pretended to while he was there. The same is true of Carson and Trump and Fiorina and even politicians like Huckabee and Jindal: None of them will be president, but their over-the-top activism will ensure them a profitable career after politics. And that, I assume, is the whole point. The Democrats have their share of bad politicians, but you don’t see this kind of faux activism and exploitation in their party.",REAL
"President Obama's supporters sometimes wonder where the inspirational candidate of 2008 has gone. The answer is to the White House. Obama's presidency is about smaller, less inspiring questions than his 2008 campaign.

Obama's presidency is bounded by the limits of the office and the demands of the moment. It is about what America needs to do right now — the next budget, the next bill, next year's taxes, the last war. Candidates can muse. Presidents must govern.

Obama's 2008 campaign was about what kind of country America is; how to read its past to best guide its future. His speech in Selma — which is really worth reading in its entirety — was among the best of his presidency precisely because it had almost nothing to do with his presidency; it was a return to the central topic of his campaign.

Historians who want to understand Obama will find few better summations than the two paragraphs at the core of this speech:

We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing's changed in the past fifty years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or L.A. of the Fifties. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing's changed. Ask your gay friend if it's easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency; our responsibility to do what we can to make America better. Of course, a more common mistake is to suggest that racism is banished, that the work that drew men and women to Selma is complete, and that whatever racial tensions remain are a consequence of those seeking to play the ""race card"" for their own purposes. We don't need the Ferguson report to know that's not true. We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.

Those 230 words are a precise distillation of Obama's view of America, and the role politics must play in it.

The first paragraph is Obama's case for hope: America is improving; it has always been improving, and to deny that improvement is to steal from Americans a belief in their country that they have more than earned. ""To deny this progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency,"" he said.

The second paragraph is Obama's case for change: America's sins are not vanquished; its hatreds remain real; its racism still breathes. ""We know the march is not yet over,"" Obama said, ""the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.""

Hope and change. These are the two ideas that form the steady core of Obama's politics. But, more than that, they are the two ideas that define, for Obama, what kind of country America is — and what it means to serve it.

Obama's critics question his love for the country he governs. ""I do not believe — and I know this is a horrible thing to say — but I do not believe that the president loves America,"" former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in February. They look at Obama's steady belief that America is not yet good enough, not yet pure enough, not yet perfect enough, and they see a skeptic, not a patriot.

In this speech, Obama's answer to this criticism was direct:

Fellow marchers, so much has changed in fifty years. We've endured war, and fashioned peace. We've seen technological wonders that touch every aspect of our lives, and take for granted convenience our parents might scarcely imagine. But what has not changed is the imperative of citizenship, that willingness of a 26 year-old deacon, or a Unitarian minister, or a young mother of five, to decide they loved this country so much that they'd risk everything to realize its promise. That's what it means to love America. That's what it means to believe in America. That's what it means when we say America is exceptional.

There is an implicit radicalism in what Obama is saying here. To believe America is good enough is to abandon the tradition of criticism and activism that has made America great.

Obama's answer to Giuliani is that Giuliani has mistaken uncritical adoration for the hard work required of true love. Patriotism is active, not passive. Those who love America prove it by working to perfect America. They continue marching.",REAL
"NEW YORK - Bernie Sanders is at a crossroads.

The Vermont senator took Wednesday off the campaign trail at home alone with his wife, leaving his top aides behind in Washington to cool their heels.

""He wanted an opportunity to think,"" said Sanders senior strategist Tad Devine. ""It's affording him an opportunity to think about where we are in the campaign, what he wants to say in the weeks ahead. He hasn't had a real chance to do that"" in weeks.

The Sanders campaign poured itself into New York, throwing a hail mary pass to try to change the delegate math while they could. They spent $5.6 million (twice what Hillary Clinton did), made 3 million phone calls in the final weekend alone, and organized the biggest rallies of a campaign defined by big rallies.

But in the end Sanders came up short - not just of winning, but of the delegate target allies had aimed to hit, which might set them up for a path through California, the campaign's final hope.

Now, with the nomination even further out of reach, Sanders faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to actually win the Democratic nomination? Or does he return to the message campaign his long-shot White House bid was originally seen as?

There's no question that Sanders will stay in the race either way. ""Bernie made a decision after Nevada that he was going to go through this process and finish it up by letting everybody who wanted to vote, vote,"" Devine said.

Democratic primary voters have shown no sign they're in a rush for the race to settle down, and seem hungry for Sanders' message, if not his presidency.

He'll continue to draw massive crowds from zealous fans, who have almost literally given his campaign a blank check to do as they wish. On Wednesday night, the campaign announced raising $15 million more than Clinton in March, though they also spent much more.

But even some Sanders allies cringed at parts of the candidate's message in New York, where his agenda was sometimes obscured by a focus on Clinton and issues with the election process.

""Going forward, what we're encouraging Senator Sanders to do is to continue to keep the campaign focused on the issues,"" said Neil Sroka, the communications director of Democracy for America, which backs Sanders.

The campaign says they want to return to more substantive issues - but only as long as the Clinton campaign joins them. So far, at least, they believe Clinton forces are keeping up the heat and see it as sign Clinton still views Sanders as a threat.

Privately, some Sanders allies say it's time for the candidate to start to thinking more about how he maximizes his leverage at the Democratic National Convention, and afterwards, and less about beating Clinton at all costs.

One indicator of which kind of campaign Sanders wants to run is how much he and his aides continue to talk about relying on super delegates to hand them the nomination.

The strategy, which calls for wooing the unelected delegates even if Sanders loses more primaries and caucuses, was floated by campaign manager Jeff Weaver with MSNBC's Steve Kornacki late Tuesday night.

MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, both of which have endorsed Sanders, have since 2008 been pressuring super delegates to support whichever candidate gets the most votes.

More than 380,000 people signed petitions from the group agreeing that ""the race for the Democratic Party nomination should be decided by who gets the most votes, and not who has the most support from party insiders.""

Both groups confirmed to MSNBC Wednesday that they still hold that position.

""MoveOn members overwhelmingly endorsed Sanders for president, and we want him to win the most pledged delegates, become the nominee, and become president. But superdelegates shouldn't overrule the will of the Democratic grassroots,"" said MoveOn Washington Director Ben Wikler. ""If the primary and caucus winner is Hillary Clinton, then Clinton should be the nominee.""

Devine said the campaign's main focus is still to win pledged delegates. But if Sanders falls just short of a majority, it's negligible - ""de minims,"" Devine said - and the campaign will pitch super delegates that Sanders is the stronger general election candidate.

Another indication of Sanders' intentions will be where he devotes his precious time in the days leading up to Tuesday's contests.

Five states are voting and Maryland is expected to be Sanders' worst showing.

If he invests heavily there it's a sign his campaign is still focused on winning and scraping together delegates. If he spends time in states like Connecticut and Delaware to try to eek out wins despite limited delegate opportunities, it's a sign he's more focused on moral victories than ones that lead to the nomination.

What Sanders decides to do, and how aggressively he decides to continuing pursuing Clinton, will help determine the shape of the rest of the primary and how quickly Clinton, the odds-on nominee, can unite the party.

Clinton's favorability rating has tumbled during the primary, especially among Sanders voters, presumably at least in part due to his attacks.

But as Democratic leaders worry about the damage, the party seem to be enjoying the contest.

National polling between Clinton and Sanders has tightened to a virtual dead heat, suggesting voters are not ready to settle on Clinton. Exit polls showed two-thirds of New York primary voters found the heated contest in the state to be energizing, not divisive.

""Mr. Sanders's presence has made this an immeasurably more substantive race,"" The New York Times wrote in an editorial Wednesday calling on Sanders to ignore calls to leave the race, which was shared by the Sanders campaign. The enthusiasm of his supporters ""should be a wake-up call to leaders of both parties. They are missing something big about their own members' priorities, and their mood.""

Still, Sanders' entire campaign has been about bringing new people into politics and the Democratic party. At some point, he might risk pushing them back out again.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"  Revelation Unleashed: Unlocking The Mysteries Of The Bible’s Most Mysterious Book On this episode of Rightly Dividing, join us as we drop some pins and create an easy to understand roadmap to the amazing, awesome, and very much knowable book of Revelation!   Join us as we apply Paul’s command found in 2 Timothy 2:15 to ‘rightly divide’ our Bible and put everything in it’s proper perspective and place. 
“ And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.” Revelation 5:5 (KJV) 
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE when the show starts Sunday night at 9:00PM EST! 
For centuries, the Catholic Church had locked up the Bible and kept it out of reach of the common man. As a result, when the Protestant Reformation ended the Dark Ages and removed the Bible from its Vatican shackles, it was a book that remained quite a mystery to most people. Out of all of its 66 books, the most misunderstood, most debated over and most feared book is, ironically and undoubtedly, the book of Revelation. 
On this episode of Rightly Dividing , we apply Paul’s command to “rightly divide” to the book of Revelation, and in the process of doing so remove much of the mystery in the process. God didn’t write any part of the Bible to be out of reach of anyone who, by faith, wanted to plumb its depths and unlock its mysteries. Join us as we drop some pins and create an easy to understand roadmap to the amazing, awesome, and very much knowable book of Revelation! 
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE when the show starts Sunday night at 9:00PM EST!  ",FAKE
"Leave a reply 
Bill Still – Good evening, I’m still reporting on an ongoing counter-coup being run by patriotic members of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to stop the Clinton Crime syndicate from proceeding with the rigging of the coming election. 
According to a 4 minute video, done by Dr. Steve Pieczenik, a Harvard and MIT-educated psychiatrist who has written 26 New York Times Best Sellers, the Clinton coup has been put down by an intelligence community counter-coup, effective at noon today. 
Dr. Pieczenik has great contacts in the American intelligence community. He put the following video up on his YouTube channel at noon today and says that the channel was down twenty minutes later. 
Currently, that channel is up, so perhaps our channel will not be harmed. 
I believe what you are about to see is true because of the nature of the recent WikiLeaks revelations. To me, hackers could not have done this. To me, white hats at NSA had to have been involved. 
Having spent my adult life working around the community, I knew that folks who were at most of these agencies – exempting DHS and CIA – are American patriots who would not allow this nation to be destroyed by the Clinton Crime Syndicate. 
[insert] 
This may well be the reason President Obama yesterday had his press secretary praise the work of Jim Comey, head of the FBI, at the very moment that Hillary Clinton was speaking in Florida deriding Comey. Let us all pray that Comey has actually turned away from being subservient to Obama and the Clintons and has now joined forces with the vast majority of the American military/intelligence community and Obama has decided – for his own preservation – to not fight them. I’m still reporting from Washington; good evening. 
Bill Still is a former newspaper editor and publisher. He has written for USA Today, The Saturday Evening Post, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, OMNI magazine, and has also produced the syndicated radio program, Health News. He has written 22 books and two documentary videos and is the host of his wildly popular daily YouTube Channel the “Still Report”, the quintessential report on the economy and Washington. Share this:",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.

Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.

In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.

Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""

After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""

Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.",REAL
"A third suspect has turned himself in. Prime Minister Valls said several arrests had been made overnight in connection with the deadliest terror attack in France in a generation.

French President Francois Hollande, right, and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, left, listen to the explanations of high ranking police officer Jacques Meric, center, during a visit at Paris Prefecture control room in Paris, Thursday Jan. 8, 2015. French police hunted Thursday for two heavily armed men, one with a terrorism conviction and a history in jihadi networks, in the methodical killing of 12 people at a satirical newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. The prime minister announced several overnight arrests and said the possibility of a new attack “is our main concern.”

French authorities are searching for two chief suspects in Wednesday's deadly attack in Paris on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, which left 12 people dead in France's deadliest terrorist incident in a generation.

Thousands of police and counter-terrorism officers are searching in northern France for the two armed suspects, Said and Chérif Kouachi, who are brothers, remain at large. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, turned himself in at a police station in a small town about 145 miles northeast of Paris after learning his name was linked to the attack.

Speaking on RTL radio, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities had made several overnight arrests and that the possibility of a new attack by the two suspects “is our main concern,” The New York Times reports. An unnamed security official put the arrest total at seven.

“We are facing an unprecedented terrorist threat, both internally and externally,” Mr. Valls said, adding that, “there was not zero risk.”

In an incident likely to rattle nerves in Paris, a policewoman was killed in a shootout in southern Paris on Thursday morning. The shooting set off searches in the area as the manhunt for the two brothers expanded, but police didn't immediately link it to the Charlie Hebdo attack, Reuters reports. The policewoman wasn't involved in the manhunt for the suspects and had been called to a routine traffic incident.

Valls said the suspects in the attack on Charlie Hebdo were known to French authorities and had been tracked before. Chérif Kouachi was convicted of abetting terrorism in 2008 for recruiting jihadists to fight in Iraq, the Associated Press reports. Both brothers were also named in connection with a plot to help an Islamic extremist, who bombed a Paris metro station in 1995, escape from jail.

The brothers are Algerian-origin French citizens who lived in Paris, the BBC reports.

Given his track record, the fact that Chérif Kouachi allegedly pulled off such a brazen attack may raise concerns in France and across Europe. It's still unclear whether the brothers had any foreign support or trained abroad. European security agencies fear that militants from Europe who fight in Iraq and Syria could in future stage attacks at home.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that France has Europe’s largest Muslim population and the largest number of citizens who have joined groups such as the self-described Islamic State. Some 1,000 French have traveled to fight in Syria, according to authorities.

Charlie Hebdo, which directs its irrelevant satire at almost everyone, has repeatedly offended Muslims for its caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. The magazine’s editor and two police officers were among those killed on Wednesday.",REAL
"link There is simply no more denying, for millions of people across whatever planet we are actually on now, that the Mandela Effect is the greatest and most important single event in the history of all mankind on every possible level. That's not in question anymore, the only remaining question left is ""Who done it?"". Will the real one responsible for this, please stand up? Now, because this is the biggest display of sheer Power, there are a lot of government agencies whose only job is to make you think that they have power who are sitting down and yelling ""we did it, we are the ones and we did it with our collider!"" And there's others sitting down and yelling ""we did it, with our d computers!"" These collider and d computers are jokes, they can't do anything, you can barely play pacman on them - they are just impressive looking things to you which make you scared of the people who want to control you. That's all they are. You people need to stop being scared of your bullies. Your bully who took you lunch money every day in the 2nd grade - is not the same person who caused a universal-earth-ending-space-time-continuum-Shift. This is real power. Whoever can do this, isn't the same bully who took your lunch money in the 2nd grade. Your government and Nasa and Cern are all a bunch of bullies, who throw water bottles at your head then when you turn around they point to the person next to them and call them a terrorist. That's all they have done throughout the years. But whoever did the Mandela Effect is entirely different from them, whoever did that has True and Real Light. I'll just go ahead and flatly state it for the whole world to hear - I, Pyron, created the Mandela Effect through metaphysical sciences through writing. No computers no colliders, only my mind and heart. It was my true desire to create a new world where those who control you will lose control. I wrote from age 12 to age 32, obsessively for 20 years in a row without break, I've been rejected by everyone the whole time, no one out there has been continuously rejected like I have, so I just kept on continuously going into my own space and writing more and more. Not caring about money or controlling people for selfish gain or any of that, I was just going on a self-journey. And in doing that, I cracked the code for the fabric of the Space Time continuum and opened up the Stargate. And I recorded every last thing that I did, and tell the whole world exactly how I did it and how everything occurred in a 50 page book - that I've put up for free on Youtube. This 50 page book is the liberation and the Revolution for every soul in all of existence, and I offer it for free here www.youtube.com...",FAKE
"Channel list 
Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
World ends; S&P soars 
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
Obama attends church service, worships self 
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter:""Too few words"" 
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
"(CNN) On Veterans Day we recognize and honor the sacrifices our service members and their families make for our country. We owe our service members the very best, but unless Congress acts, on January 1 more than 9 million veterans who rely on Social Security benefits or pension and compensation benefits will not get their annual cost of living increase.

This freeze in funds, which has happened only two other times since 1975, will be really tough on veterans among the 71 million Americans who depend on Social Security and other benefits to help make ends meet. Two-thirds of seniors depend on Social Security for the majority of their income, and for 15 million Americans, Social Security is all that stands between them and poverty.

While vets and seniors get no raise, CEOs at the top 350 American companies received, on average, a 3.9% pay increase last year. That's a lot of money. The average CEO at one of the top 350 American companies made $16.3 million and got more than half a million in pay raises. So CEOs get huge raises, while seniors, veterans and others who've worked hard don't get an extra dime. Why? It's not an accident. It's not inevitable. It's the result of deliberate policies set by Congress.

Social Security is supposed to be indexed to inflation so that when prices go up, benefits go up, too. But Congress' formula samples the spending patterns of about a quarter of the country, and the formula isn't geared to what older Americans actually spend.

Projections for the costs of core goods and services show inflation is up about 2%, but seniors won't get a cost of living increase -- mostly because of falling gasoline prices, which don't mean as much to millions of seniors who don't commute to work. So seniors, who are already struggling to scrape by to cover rent and exploding prescription drug prices , will be left scrambling.

Sure, companies should make their own decisions about how much to compensate executives, but because of the laws Congress has passed, American taxpayers are forced to subsidize these multimillion-dollar pay packages.

It's time for Congress to make different choices. That's why last week I introduced the Seniors And Veterans Emergency (SAVE) Benefits Act. The SAVE Benefits Act will give seniors on Social Security, veterans, those with disabilities and others a one-time payment in 2016 equivalent to an average increase of 3.9% -- the same as the taxpayer-subsidized raise that CEOs received last year.

We can afford to give seniors and vets a raise. In fact, we can increase pay for seniors and vets without adding a single penny to the deficit simply by closing the bonus loophole for corporate executives. According to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, closing this loophole will create enough revenue to help millions of Americans and still have enough left over to help extend the life of the Social Security trust fund.

Seniors and vets would get an increase of about $581 next year — a little less than $50 a month. That $581 increase would cover almost three months of groceries for seniors or a year's worth of out-of-pocket costs on critical prescription drugs for the average Medicare beneficiary. That $50 a month is worth a lot to those 71 million Americans. According to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, that little boost could lift more than 1 million Americans out of poverty.

Giving vets and seniors a little help and stitching up these corporate tax write-offs isn't just about economics; it's about our values. For too long, we've listened to a handful of people with money and power who say: Cut taxes for those at the top, cut rules and regulations that keep everyone honest, and let everyone else fight over the scraps. We tried trickle-down economics, and it failed.

But we can make different choices -- choices that reflect our values. We don't have to ignore this problem. We can give a small boost to 71 million Americans who have earned it and who need it.

We can lift over 1 million people out of poverty. We can extend the life of Social Security. And we can do it by shutting down taxpayer giveaways to a handful of wealthy corporations that will do fine without them. For me, this is simple. Our spending should reflect our values, and that means passing the SAVE Benefits Act.",REAL
"Sparks flew at the toughest and liveliest GOP primary debate yet Saturday night, as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush clashed over the Middle East and George W. Bush’s legacy, trading insults at a rapid clip – and the two Cuban-American senators in the race accused each other of lying on immigration and even questioned each other’s Spanish-speaking skills.

And just when it seemed Trump and Ted Cruz might steer clear of each other, the two leading Republican candidates entered the ring toward the end of the debate when the Texas senator questioned the billionaire businessman’s pro-life credentials.

“You are the single biggest liar. You’re probably worse than Jeb Bush,” Trump said.

Cruz stood his ground, charging that Trump would “appoint liberals” to the Supreme Court if elected.

The issue of judicial appointments was front and center at the CBS News-hosted debate in Greenville, S.C., in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, with candidates like Cruz saying it underscores the high stakes in this election. Several candidates called for a delay in any high court appointment or confirmation.

But the barbed and often personal exchanges Saturday marked a new phase of the race, as the candidates charge into next week’s critical South Carolina primary. The clashes left Ohio Gov. John Kasich – the affable, second-place finisher in the New Hampshire primary – making an appeal for peace in the GOP field, albeit one unlikely to be heeded.

“I think we’re fixing to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this,” Kasich said.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, too, warned about the coming general election and said, “We cannot be tearing each other down.”

The appeals came shortly after Cruz and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio accused each other of being soft on illegal immigration. It’s an argument they’ve had before – Cruz faults Rubio for backing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that included a path to legal status, and Rubio says Cruz was on board with that effort – but this time, it became more heated. And after Cruz accused Rubio of saying on Univision he wouldn’t rescind President Obama’s immigration executive orders on day one, Rubio quipped:

“I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish,” Rubio said.

Cruz, then, immediately began debating Rubio in Spanish. Rubio continued, saying Cruz “lies about all sorts of things” and indeed supports legalizing illegal immigrants.

As the Rubio-Cruz battle heated up, so did the long-simmering feud between Trump and Bush.

“This is a man who insults his way to the nomination,” Bush said of Trump.

With Bush attempting a comeback in the race after a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, Trump faced a feistier debate rival on stage Saturday night than he has before – boosted in part by what seemed to be a sympathetic audience.

The audience often booed Trump when he took on Bush, though Trump once again accused them of representing Bush’s “special interests and lobbyists.”

Their most personal dispute came when Trump accused Bush of promoting a policy that would get the U.S. mired more deeply in the Middle East – and blamed the former Florida governor’s brother for the problems there.

Trump initially took issue with Jeb Bush’s call to confront ISIS while also taking on Syria’s Bashar Assad and sidelining Russia.

“Jeb is so wrong,” Trump said. “You have to knock out ISIS. .... You decide what you have to do after. You can’t fight two wars at one time.”

Bush, though, said Russia is not a U.S. ally, and Assad’s hold on power prevents a resolution in the war. Trump then went on to repeatedly slam the decision under the George W. Bush administration to enter Iraq in the first place, calling it a “big fat mistake” that “destabilized the Middle East.”

“They lied” about WMDs, he said.

“I am sick and tired of him going after my family,” Jeb Bush countered, saying he’s proud of his brother’s efforts to keep the country safe.

Trump then invoked 9/11: “The World Trade Center came down … That’s not keeping us safe.”

Rubio, who has often been at odds with Bush, leapt to his brother’s defense, saying the Bush administration “kept us safe.”

Jeb Bush joked that he was rescinding Trump’s invitation to an upcoming rally with George W. Bush on the campaign trail.

The fireworks flew after the debate started on a somber note, discussing the legacy of Supreme Court Justice Scalia and the impact his death Saturday will have.

Several candidates urged President Obama to refrain from nominating anybody to fill the vacancy, and wait for the next president to make that decision. Trump, though, said he doesn’t expect Obama to wait, and called on Senate Republicans to hold up any nomination.

Kasich urged Obama to put the “country first” and not move forward with a nomination, a plea echoed by Rubio. Obama, though, said minutes before the start of the debate that he indeed plans to nominate a successor.

The GOP candidates, meanwhile, used opening remarks to honor Scalia’s legacy.

Cruz called him a “legal giant” who “changed the arc of American legal history.” He said Scalia’s death also “underscores the stakes of this election.”

“We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that will strike down every restriction on abortion” by states, threaten gun rights and “undermine” religious liberty, Cruz said. He said he would appoint a strict constitutionalist if elected.

Scalia’s death thrusts the issue of judicial appointments into the 2016 race, raising the possibility that the next president immediately will have to fill a high court vacancy. While Obama vowed Saturday to nominate a successor, it’s unclear whether he can get any appointee confirmed in the Republican-led Senate.

While the prospect of a Supreme Court vacancy now looms over the race, the South Carolina primary already was heating up on several fronts in recent days, with the candidates trading accusations on immigration and other issues.

The debate Saturday reflects that tougher tone, in a state notorious for bare-knuckle primary battles. Trump at one point accused Cruz of trying to spread rumors in the state that he’s not running in South Carolina – likening that to his campaign’s actions in Iowa, where representatives spread false rumors that Carson was dropping out.

“Nasty guy, now I know why he doesn’t have one endorsement from any of his colleagues,” Trump said.

Even Kasich struggled to avoid the fray, as Bush criticized him for expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare and said that would create more debt.

“He knows that I’m not for ObamaCare,” Kasich said, before vowing to stay “positive. “

The GOP field is now down to six candidates -- after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina dropped out following low finishes Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary.

A big question Saturday night, and going forward, was whether Rubio could regain his momentum – following last weekend’s lackluster performance. A withering attack by Christie on Rubio, which had the Florida senator repeating himself, appeared to hurt him in the New Hampshire primary. Rubio himself blamed his debate performance in part for his fifth-place finish in the state. He finished behind Trump, Kasich, Cruz and Bush. Christie, though, is no longer on stage or in the race.

Most polling in South Carolina still shows Rubio third, with Trump and Cruz in the top two positions, respectively.",REAL
The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
"In 2008, in the high-profile Supreme Court gun-rights case called District of Columbia v. Heller, a brief was filed from the eighth floor of the Price Daniel Sr. State Office Building in Austin, Texas, specifically from the corner office of the man who was then the state’s solicitor general, Ted Cruz.

The brief took a strong stance on the divisive question of whether the Second Amendment establishes an individual right to own guns, or just protects state and local militias. The brief argued forcefully for the first view, writing that “the individual right to keep and bear arms” is a “fundamental right” and that “an individual right that can be altogether abrogated is no right at all.” Thirty attorneys general from other states signed on.

Today, with the White House pushing new gun restrictions and Cruz's candidacy riding on next month's Iowa caucuses, it's no surprise that the Texas Republican would embrace gun rights as a defining issue, holding an event at a firing range and even raffling off an engraved 12-gauge shotgun as a campaign promotion.

In 2008, the situation was very different: he was wading into a case that had no immediate connection to Texas at all. But to see the signature of R. Ted Cruz on the brief would not have surprised the nine Supreme Court justices in the least. By that time, Cruz had been solicitor general for five years, and inserting himself into a case of wide prominence and importance regardless of any direct tie to Texas had become part of his playbook. He clearly saw the Heller case as a watershed in gun rights, writing that it would “determine whether the Second Amendment has any modern relevance.” And he was right. The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision shot down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban and ruled for the first time in the history of this country that the amendment ensures an individual person’s right to have a gun for self-defense. The National Rifle Association recognized Cruz’s role with a resolution.

As Cruz climbs to the top of the Republican presidential field, the five-plus years he served as the solicitor general of Texas remain the most important period in his public résumé. They’re the record he ran on when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012—and they represent significantly more of his working life than the three years he has served so far in the Senate. They're also a prime source of fodder for liberal and moderate critics, should be become the Republican presidential nominee.

A Politico review of Cruz’s record as solicitor general shows he used the role in a new and far more ideological way than his predecessors, taking a relatively low-profile job that had traditionally been used mostly to defend the state government and turning it into a stage for pushing national conservative causes. Cruz argued eight cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court—far more than his predecessors and successors—using each of them to advance a position endorsed by conservative thinkers. He also was the counsel of record on some 70 friend-of-the-court briefs, or amicus briefs, weighing in on cases across the country, like Heller, in which Texas had no direct stake, but which similarly offered a chance to argue ideological points.

“He really turned the office into a platform,” David Bernstein, a George Mason law professor who recently wrote a book about the Obama administration for which Cruz wrote the foreword, said in an interview.

“He built up the national aura of the office,” said Tom Phillips, who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas at the start of Cruz’s run as solicitor general.

Cruz’s zealous work served the ambitions of the conservative movement, but he also personally used it to build a bridge between what he was (an elite constitutional law nerd) to what he is today (an ascendant right-wing politician). Yet while pleasing to conservatives, other aspects of his record are sure to attract critics. He argued against leniency for an unjustly sentenced man whose lawyer had made a technical mistake; he invoked 13th-century “Saxon law” and the practice of cutting off testicles to justify harsher punishments in a rape case; and he referred to a late-term abortion technique as “infanticide.”

Although little examined in the race so far, Cruz’s time as solicitor general built him a powerful allegiance among the conservative donors necessary to launch a national campaign. Heading into Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond, he has more money at his disposal than any candidate besides Jeb Bush. And the way he used that Texas office is part of the reason. Toby Neugebauer, who wrote a $10 million check to the Cruz super PAC called Keep the Promise II, told me the reason he did that—the single reason—is what Cruz did as solicitor general. He said other major donors feel the same way.

“We’re backing someone,” Neugebauer told me, “that had a worldview and went out and executed on it.”

Cruz took the solicitor job as a reboot of sorts after his initial foray into politics had fizzled.

As a debater at Princeton, as a law school student at Harvard, and as a clerk to then-Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz was widely considered brilliant—but he left his first real job as a promising appellate attorney in private practice in Washington to instead toil in 2000 as a domestic policy analyst in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, then as a legal hand for Bush’s team in the frantic recount in Florida that ultimately won Bush the election.

In return, Cruz “desperately” wanted “a senior post” in the White House, he wrote in his autobiography. On the campaign, though, he had earned a reputation for his outsized ego as much as for his obvious intelligence, and the post-election jobs he got were out-of-the-way roles at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. “I just don’t like the guy,” Bush has said since. The solicitor general role in his home state of Texas, offered to him by Greg Abbott—then the attorney general of Texas, now the governor—was a political lifeline.

From the start, it offered a chance to turn his legal acumen into political potential, because it came with a green light to advance conservative aims in the courts. Abbott’s directive for the solicitor general of Texas, Cruz said in his book, was to “look across the country” and “identify chances to defend conservative principles.”

This is not the traditional definition of a solicitor general’s job, which comes with two main duties. The first: States get sued, attorneys general and their staffs respond, and some of the cases get appealed—and that’s where the solicitor general comes in, representing the state in higher courts, where the cases are the most legalistic and complex. The second: the writing of amicus briefs in cases elsewhere in which a state believes it has an interest even though it’s not a party.

The first part can be seen as defense. The second part is more like offense, selectively advancing the interests of the state. The way Cruz did the job? Even the defense was offense, and the interests being asserted were less those of the state than its conservative leaders.

“Texas is a huge state, and there’s plenty of work for the attorney general’s office to do,” said Jim Ho, an attorney in Dallas who succeeded Cruz as solicitor general and is a friend and supporter. Cruz, though, “was not content to simply do what was asked and go home.”

When it came to cases that allowed him to argue for things like the forceful application of the death penalty and expressions of religion in the public arena and against things like abortion and gun control, Ho told me, Cruz “was on constant watch for opportunities to press a conservative vision of the Constitution.”",REAL
"Late last week, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved two new strains of genetically engineered potatoes. The potatoes, created by JR Simplot, have been engineered to resist potato blight,... ",FAKE
"The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee on Friday, arguing that the party had unfairly suspended the campaign’s access to key voter information. After several tense hours, both sides announced a deal had been reached.

The suit came shortly after campaign manager Jeff Weaver acknowledged at a Washington news conference that Sanders staffers had improperly reviewed information gathered by rival Hillary Clinton earlier in the week. But he accused the DNC of over­reacting to the breach by suspending the Sanders campaign’s ability to access the computer system containing information about Democratic-leaning voters, including data the campaign has gathered about its own supporters.

After midnight, Sanders and the DNC put out statements that both indicated the impasse had been resolved but that put remarkably different spins on the outcome. Sanders’s campaign said the DNC had “capitulated” and that Sanders would soon regain access to the data. The DNC said what happened was “completely unacceptable” and that it would continue to investigate the circumstances even as Sanders regained access to the valuable information.

Without a quick resolution, the messy public brawl threatened to overshadow Saturday’s third Democratic presidential debate and cast doubt on the DNC’s ability to manage the sophisticated data tools necessary for the party to win the White House next year. And it sparked significant suspicions among Sanders supporters that the party was conspiring to give a boost to Clinton.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz rejected that allegation Friday, alleging that Sanders staffers had exploited a software error to essentially “steal” data from Clinton’s campaign. Wasserman Schultz said the party would not allow Sanders access to the critical database again until his campaign agreed to an independent audit of what happened.

The suit, filed in federal court in Washington, argued that under a contract between the DNC and the campaign governing the data system’s use, formal notice in writing is required if either side believes the other has violated the deal. In addition, each side is supposed to be allowed 10 days to address any concerns, the suit said.

“The DNC may not suspend the Campaign’s access to critical Voter Data out of haste or desperation to clean up after the DNC’s own mistakes,” the suit says.

The voter data is heavily used to raise money, and the Sanders campaign estimated that it is losing $600,000 a day in “critical fundraising and publicity opportunities” without access to the files.

The incident strained the relationship between the campaign of an upstart Vermont senator who until this year has run as an independent and a national party his supporters have long accused of favoring Clinton.

Weaver accused the party of purposely sabotaging Sanders by refusing to restore access to the voter information.

“By their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign,” Weaver said. “I think if you look at the pattern of conduct . . . it looks like in this case they’re trying to help the Clinton campaign.”

NGP-VAN, the computer vendor that provides Democrats with detailed information about voters, has said that a computer error on Wednesday briefly allowed the campaigns to review information that had been gathered by their rivals.

The company maintains a master voter list for the DNC and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by rival campaigns.

The Sanders campaign has acknowledged that several of its staffers probed the system during the time of the error cited by NGP-VAN. One operative, data director Josh Uretsky, was fired as a result of the incident. Weaver said the actions of several others are being reviewed.

Landing at the airport in Manchester, N.H., ahead of Saturday’s debate, Wasserman Schultz said that Sanders himself was unaware of the breach until she called to discuss it 24 hours after it took place. “He was stunned,” she said. “I know that Sen. Sanders had absolutely nothing to do with this. . . . Unfortunately, he has staff who acted inappropriately, and they need to be held accountable.”

The severity of the data breach itself remained an issue of serious dispute Friday.

Audit data from NGP-VAN and provided to The Washington Post by the Clinton campaign showed that four Sanders staffers conducted 24 separate searches of Clinton data during a 40-minute window Wednesday, targeting early voting states and searching for lists of voters most and least likely to support Clinton. The logs show that in some cases, the staffers saved the search results in new folders created within the system.

“This was a very egregious breach and our data was stolen. This was not an inadvertent glimpse into our data,” Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, told reporters.

On CNN, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon accused the Sanders staffers of acting “like kids in the candy store.”

“They went hog wild, downloading as much data as they could,” he said.

Later Friday, the Clinton camp struck a more conciliatory tone, issuing a statement in which Fallon said that his campaign was hopeful the matter would be resolved Friday night and that the Sanders team would get access to its voter files “right away.”

Uretsky told The Post that he and the others conducted the searches of Clinton data after they discovered the software glitch only in an effort to discover the extent of their own data exposure. “We intentionally did it in a way that was trackable and traceable so that when they did an audit they would be able to see exactly what we did,” he said.

Uretsky said there was no attempt to take Clinton information out of the software system.

Weaver blamed the software vendor for the breach, which allowed all campaigns to access one another’s data for a time, insisting that the Sanders campaign had actually quietly alerted the DNC to problems with another vendor system in October.

In the lawsuit, the campaign argued that a “similar security incident” during the 2008 presidential campaign resulted in “unintentional transmission of confidential information” to Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign against Barack Obama.

Weaver said a tick-tock provided to the Sanders campaign by the computer vendor confirmed that staffers were not attempting to remove significant Clinton data from the system.

“We are running a clean campaign,” he said. “We don’t need dirty tricks.”

Even before this week, Sanders backers had accused the DNC of trying to protect Clinton by limiting the number and prominence of debates — a narrative that plays into his anti-establishment appeal.

“They’ve been sabotaging Bernie’s campaign all along,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, an 185,000-member union that is backing Sanders.

News of the data breach broke just as Sanders was enjoying a fresh burst of momentum after months in which his campaign appeared to have stalled.

On Thursday, Sanders received his biggest union endorsement to date, from the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America. He also was endorsed by Democracy for America, a progressive group that claims 1 million members nationwide. That group, founded by former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who is backing Clinton, said it had surveyed its membership and found 88 percent favored endorsing Sanders.

Sanders, who has raised most of his money from small donors over the Internet, also this week celebrated a fundraising milestone: more than 2 million contributions to his campaign. That figure made him competitive with the effort of President Obama’s 2012 re-election effort during the same stretch.",REAL
"Recent debates over US government spying have focused on one specific program: the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records — and the Patriot Act provision that supplied the program's legal justification. From that perspective, the partial expiration of the Patriot Act a week ago and the subsequent passage of surveillance reform legislation might seem like a decisive victory against mass surveillance.

But the surveillance debate is actually a lot bigger than the phone records program and the Patriot Act. The NSA has other spying programs with other legal foundations. And the USA Freedom Act, which President Obama signed on Tuesday, doesn't do anything to rein them in.

On Friday, I talked to John Napier Tye, a former State Department official who resigned last year over what he regards as unconstitutional surveillance by the US federal government. He sees the USA Freedom Act as ""a small step in the right direction,"" but he's hoping the next step will be a broader debate about other ways the US government spies on innocent Americans.

Most people have heard about the Patriot Act, which was signed just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and was reformed this week by the USA Freedom Act. But Tye argues the real action is elsewhere.

""You have to keep in mind that most NSA collection on Americans was not under the Patriot Act. It was under other legal authorities. And none of that surveillance is affected by this new law,"" he says. ""When you think about all the collection that the NSA has been doing on Americans, a small percentage — 5 or 10 percent, maybe less — was under the Patriot Act.""

Tye points to two other sources of authority for government spying. One is the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which is the legal basis for a controversial NSA program called PRISM that collects private data from major internet companies like Google and Facebook. The other is Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era directive that has become the basis for a lot of NSA spying.

Tye says that EO 12333 is ""an executive order, it's not a statute. It was never passed by Congress. It was originally issued by President Reagan in 1981 and has been amended several times since then — including by George W. Bush.""

A huge amount of our data is collected: Gmails and Yahoo messages, Facebook messages, Apple iMessages

EO 12333 ""gives a very broad grant of authority to intelligence agencies to do all kinds of things,"" Tye says. ""There's one section in there that allows the NSA to collect data on US persons as part of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. That provision is being used to collect a huge amount of Americans' communications and data.""

When the government collects information overseas, it isn't bound by most US surveillance laws. The NSA has reserved the right to ""incidentally"" collect Americans' private communications overseas so long as Americans are not the target of a particular surveillance effort. But Tye argues that this is a huge loophole in practice.

""I don't think most Americans understand that almost all of their internet and phone data is either stored on backup servers overseas or transits outside of our borders,"" he says. ""A huge amount of our data is collected under this authority outside the borders of the US — Gmails and Yahoo messages, Facebook messages, Apple iMessages, Twitter, every service you can think of.""

Tye says he has firsthand knowledge of the extent of NSA spying programs. That's because he was an official in the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in 2013 when Edward Snowden's revelations became public.

""My jobs was internet freedom, promoting free and open internet around the world,"" Tye says. ""When the Snowden leaks happened in June of 2013, I was not surprised. I knew that a lot of stuff had been happening. I knew that a lot of surveillance was going on that no one knew about. And it didn't surprise me that this was finally front-page news.""

Congress should take a more active role in overseeing executive branch activity

Tye says that after the Snowden leaks, ""part of my job was to help develop responses to initiatives within the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly by Germany, Brazil, and other countries that were very concerned with online privacy. To be able to properly negotiate those efforts, I was briefed on the scope of US intelligence practices. In two different classified briefings, one in the fall of 2013 and one in the first part of 2014, I learned about activities under 12333.""

Tye believed these programs were unconstitutional and began filing complaints inside the government about them. He met with the intelligence committees in both the House and the Senate and filed complaints with the inspectors general of both the State Department and the National Security Agency. He says none of them were very interested in the issue.

So last summer, Tye quit his job and went public with his concerns in an op-ed for the Washington Post. He says he ran the op-ed through government censors to make sure it didn't disclose any classified information. Tye has spent the last year at the public interest group Avaaz and is now starting his own law firm that will focus on civil rights and human rights issues.

Tye would like President Obama to unilaterally revise Executive Order 12333 to better protect the privacy of Americans. If Obama doesn't, Tye would like Congress to hold hearings on the issue. ""I think that Congress should take a more active role in overseeing executive branch activity under 12333,"" Tye says. ""Congress should hold hearings and find out what protections really exist for Americans and how much our data is being collected.""

He also favors reforms to the FISA Amendments Act, which was passed by Congress in 2008. Whereas some provisions of the Patriot Act were set to expire this year — and have now been renewed until 2019 — the FISA Amendments Act is permanent. The most controversial part of the FISA Amendments Act is Section 702, which allows warrantless surveillance to collect Americans' communications so long as the target is a foreigner located overseas.

""Under Section 702, the NSA is collecting a lot of stuff inside the United States that's nominally targeting foreigners but in fact is scooping up innocent communications from hundreds of millions of Americans,"" Tye says. Even worse, ""the FBI has access to that database and can search it for domestic criminal reasons. So the purpose of the law nominally was to allow the NSA to conduct foreign intelligence investigations. But as it's currently being used, the FBI is using this data for domestic criminal investigations. The protections that we normally want in place for domestic criminal investigations are not necessarily there.""",REAL
"The FBI has expanded its probe of Hillary Clinton's emails, with agents exploring whether multiple statements violate a federal false statements statute, according to intelligence sources familiar with the ongoing case.

Fox News is told agents are looking at U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, which pertains to ""materially false"" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party. Violations also include pressuring a third party to conspire in a cover-up. Each felony violation is subject to five years in prison.

This phase represents an expansion of the FBI probe, which is also exploring potential violations of an Espionage Act provision relating to ""gross negligence"" in the handling of national defense information.

""The agents involved are under a lot of pressure and are busting a--,"" an intelligence source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Fox News.

The section of the criminal code being explored is known as ""statements or entries generally,"" and can be applied when an individual makes misleading or false statements causing federal agents to expend additional resources and time. In this case, legal experts as well as a former FBI agent said, Section 1001 could apply if Clinton, her aides or attorney were not forthcoming with FBI agents about her emails, classification and whether only non-government records were destroyed. It is not publicly known who may have been interviewed.

Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said the same section got Martha Stewart in trouble with the FBI. To be a violation, the statements do not need to be given under oath.

""This is a broad, brush statute that punishes individuals who are not direct and fulsome in their answers,"" former FBI intelligence officer Timothy Gill told Fox News. Gill is not connected to the email investigation, but spent 16 years as part of the bureau's national security branch, and worked the post 9/11 anthrax case where considerable time was spent resolving discrepancies in Bruce Ivins' statements and his unusual work activities at Fort Detrick, Md.

""It is a cover-all. The problem for a defendant is when their statements cause the bureau to expend more time, energy, resources to de-conflict their statements with the evidence,"" he said.

Separately, two U.S. government officials told Fox News that the FBI is doing its own classification review of the Clinton emails, effectively cutting out what has become a grinding process at the State Department. Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy has argued to both Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Congress that the ""Top Secret"" emails on Clinton's server could have been pulled from unclassified sources including news reports.

""You want to go right to the source,"" Gill said. ""Go to the originating, not the collateral, authority. Investigative protocol would demand that.""

On Friday, Clapper spokesman Brian Hale confirmed that no change has been made to the two ""Top Secrets"" emails after a Politico report said the intelligence community was retreating from the finding.

""ODNI has made no such determination and the review is ongoing,"" Hale said. Andrea G. Williams, spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general, said she had the same information. Kennedy is seeking an appeal, but no one can explain what statute or executive order would give Clapper that authority.

A U.S. government official who was not authorized to speak on the record said the FBI is identifying suspect emails, and then going directly to the agencies who originated them and therefore own the intelligence -- and who, under the regulations, have final say on the classification.

As Fox News previously reported, at least four classified Clinton emails had their markings changed to a category that shields the content from Congress and the public, in what State Department whistleblowers believed to be an effort to hide the true extent of classified information on the former secretary of state's server.

One State Department lawyer involved in the alleged re-categorization was Kate Duval. Duval once worked in the same law firm as Clinton's current and long-time lawyer David Kendall and at the IRS during the Lois Lerner email controversy. Duval left government service for private practice in mid-September.

Pamela K. Browne is Senior Executive Producer at the FOX News Channel (FNC) and is Director of Long-Form Series and Specials. Her journalism has been recognized with several awards. Browne first joined FOX in 1997 to launch the news magazine “Fox Files” and later, “War Stories.”

Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
"(CNN) Conservatives dissatisfied with Donald Trump have given the Libertarian presidential nominee a chance to take his third party to center stage, but Gary Johnson has not exactly been a fixture on the campaign trail.

Largely eschewing traditional campaign events, the former New Mexico governor has instead opted to appear almost daily on multiple news programs and appeal to his solid core of online support.

That could soon change as the campaign considers more regular appearances in the real world.

Johnson campaign spokesperson Joe Hunter told CNN Monday the campaign is now undergoing a ""natural evolution,"" having recently ramped up its fundraising efforts with the stated intention of buying advertisements in key states and beginning to hold rallies across the country.

Despite enjoying a brief surge in the lead-up to the major party conventions, Johnson has generally hovered in the high single digits in national polls. The latest CNN Poll of Polls showed Johnson at 9% support nationwide.

In a race where the majority of voters say they are dissatisfied with their mainstream offerings for president, where the Republican nominee has secured little support from the nation's largest generation -- millennials -- and where digital media has taken an unprecedented place in the political landscape, here's what Johnson is -- and isn't -- doing to make his long shot candidacy a viable bet.

Hunter called the constant interviews ""a critical"" component of the campaign, and after taking scheduling into account, ""We take every opportunity we get.""

Similar to Trump, Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld, have relied on ""earned media"" in the form of appearances in the press.

Unlike Trump, the two almost always stay on message.

Since winning the nomination at the Libertarian Party's convention in May, Johnson and Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, have used their appearances to cast themselves as the centrist candidates between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

They point out their experience as Republican governors in traditionally Democratic-leaning states. Johnson often touts his laissez-faire approach to drugs and immigration, while Weld has pointed to his record on LGBT rights and his cordial relationship with both sides of the aisle, including the Clintons. Both champion their conservative credos on matters of spending.

But the live television appearances, including two prime-time town hall events on CNN, have not yet afforded the Libertarian ticket national recognition or a strong showing in the polls.

On the digital side, the Johnson campaign has largely stuck to its roots by embracing the Libertarian community online. Reaching supporters through social media and email, the campaign has kept its base abreast of its progress -- and appealed for funds.

The Johnson campaign said Tuesday its August ""money bomb"" fundraising campaign surpassed its goal of $1.5 million based off ""entirely digital"" appeals for money. The campaign said it raised $840,000 on Monday alone, totaling $2.9 million in donations in the first two weeks of the month.

A number of groups have fallen into place doing some of the heavy lifting that the long shot bid needs doing.

Among the most standout recent entries into the Johnson orbit is a newly minted group called Republicans for Johnson/Weld. The group formed this month to bring the GOP leaders and voters Trump had alienated into the Libertarian fold.

Republican strategist and group spokesperson Liz Mair told CNN Monday the pro-Johnson forces seeking to convert Republicans from a divisive nominee were in uncharted waters.

""I don't think anybody's tried to launch an effort like this,"" Mair said.

Despite the lack of an established path, Johnson has notched a few victories. Rep. Scott Rigell said he will support Johnson in November, and Reps. Reid Ribble and Mike Coffman have said they are considering it.

In separate interviews, Hunter and Mair both said they had heard supportive words from Republican politicians but that many were not ready to come out into the open against their party.

The outside group could be a key factor in the mainstreaming of Johnson. It already holds several well-known Republican staffers. On Monday, it added Joseph Russo III, a former Sarah Palin aide, Mair said.

Given the nature of the group, Mair said a ""number of us have better connections"" to GOP Capitol Hill figures than the Libertarian campaign.

What will Mitt Romney do?

Within the Johnson campaign, Weld has taken the lead on outreach to Republicans. However, his biggest prize still eludes him: 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Romney served as governor of Massachusetts after Weld and has said if Weld were topping the ticket, he would be supporting them, but he still needed to hear what Johnson had to say. Months have passed since then without a Romney endorsement.

The Libertarian efforts to sway Republicans have also had to push back against the notion they are helping Clinton.

Johnson has said he is pulling about evenly from both sides and been forceful in his condemnation of Trump.

Mair said Trump was doing the work of helping Clinton on his own and that Clinton's win was at this point ""overwhelming likely,"" although Johnson still had a chance in an unpredictable cycle.

""The Republicans screwed up. That's not Gary Johnson's fault,"" she said.

Up in the air

Hunter said many people would not come to their side until the Johnson candidacy had reached a ""critical mass,"" which they hope to achieve by ramping up their campaign efforts and their ad spending.

In addition to television ads, the campaign said it was looking at radio, billboards and continuing its online efforts.

As with the major party candidates, outside spending groups have also taken it upon themselves to launch ads in support of Johnson. A Libertarian spending group called Americans Deserve Better PAC has put together a few spots hailing the former governors as the ""adults"" in the race.

Republicans for Johnson/Weld, meanwhile, said its focus is less on traditional advertising than generating viral content. So far, however, one of the group's most viral moments came not from distributed content, but from an appearance on CNN. Ahead of the second Libertarian town hall, Mair told CNN's Anderson Cooper that Trump's message ""is being a loud-mouthed d---, basically.""

All told, this third party effort has so far expounded more resources on general election advertisements than Trump's campaign, which has yet to join in the air wars.

All of these efforts have so far been dwarfed by Clinton and her allied super PACs, which have spent exponentially more than the three other presidential campaigns.

Johnson has not been able to draw the kind of rock star crowd sizes that Trump or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders attracted earlier this year.

The former New Mexico governor held one rally in Utah on a Saturday earlier this month and another in Reno, Nevada. After rescheduling, he is set to hold another in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this Saturday.

His campaign said it was still working out specifics on other rallies in the near future but that it planned to host public events soon in Florida and New England.

Meanwhile, fundraising efforts have come largely from the digital side, although the campaign said the governors have appealed directly for funds, with a planned event in Miami on Wednesday.

Their most prominent fundraising event so far came in late July at a Hollywood event hosted by Drew Carey, the Libertarian host of ""The Price is Right.""",REAL
"Report Copyright Violation nuclear weapons question Hello all.. I have been a longtime lurker on this board but this is my first time posting. I have many questions that I'm hoping someone can help me with since you all seem to be very knowledgeable in this area..In terms of nuclear weapons I know we have tested over 1000 and I know the radiation has increased cases of cancer and killed livestock but shouldn't there be more of an impact? I know the theory with nuclear war ending life as we know it derives from the fact that it would cause a nuclear winter there for beginning some sort of ice age on earth.. with all the weapons that have been tested should we not have already brought ourselves to this or does it more have to do with all weapons going off all at once? Another question being I heard that radiation dissipates quickly (with the most dangerous time being the first 48 hours) if so then how would it cause a nuclear winter? I know these are silly questions I am pretty bad with science so I am hoping someone can explain better.Another question.. I am very sure this article has been linked here before but wondering if someone can give me their thoughts and either disprove the article or explain why it's true. [ link to heiwaco.tripod.com ] Personally I find it's safer to believe they work, if a crazy person threatens you saying they have a gun you take it for face value. You don't want to question them about it or dare them to prove it!In terms of world 3... have all biblical prophecies been fulfilled already to believe world war 3 is next on the timeline? I would be lying if I said I'm not scared. When it comes to death. .it sucks sure but I'm not afraid for myself.. I'm afraid for my one year old! I will do ANYTHING to protect her even if it means giving up my life so she can have a beautiful, healthy, long life! I do believe in God and I find myself turning a lot to him these last few days but I can't help but be angry and feel so guilty bringing this beautiful soul into this world.. for what? So she can suffer and die before she even turns 3? I just feel so lost and hurt. If anyone can give me advice or guidance I would appreciate it more than you know. The aspect of the end being at our door isn't too much a problem for me.. it's more the aspect that I don't want this for my child! I want her to live her life! Fall in love! See the world!I don't know.. maybe the time isn't here.. we've been close to a nuclear war once before maybe just maybe we can dodge this again. Page 1",FAKE
"“WE ARE THE FUTURE.” — Kevin MacDonald 
This is an amazing victory. The stars were aligned. First, the very long shot of Trump being nominated. Then he gets to run against the most corrupt, least charismatic candidate in history (I think Joe Biden would have beaten Trump, and maybe even Bernie Sanders) at a time when Americans naturally want change after 8 years of Obama. 
Fundamentally, it is a victory of White Americans over the oligarchic, hostile elites what have run this country for decades. Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and won without the support or with only lukewarm and vacillating support from much of the GOP elite. 
In May of 2015 I was very despondent about our prospects. It just didn’t seem like we could break through the elite consensus dominating all the high ground—and all the moral high ground—of the U.S., including the media (print, television, and the Hollywood movie industry), the academic world, politics, Wall St., and the CEOs of major corporations. We were systematically shut out and it was obvious that the powers that be were not going to let the Alt Right get a seat at the table. Then Trump announced, it was hard to take it seriously, but his comments on immigration, American nationalism, political correctness and trade certainly struck a chord. My immediate reaction (July 10, 2015), however, was that he had two things going for him that were absolutely unique — he is a celebrity and he is very, very rich (“ How it could happen “). Such a person is in a position to be heard; he can’t be shut out of the media, and he doesn’t need the money of the corrupt donor class. In fact, the media, eager for ratings, gave him countless opportunities to get his message out. Anyone on the Alt Right could have said the exact same things, but we would be speaking into our closets. 
Even back in July of 2015, it was obvious Trump was not your usual GOP candidate: 
[Trump] certainly did not fall in my estimation when he attacked two prominent operatives of the Republican Party/Israel Lobby nexus hostile to his candidacy, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg. Then there’s the Twitter incident : “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz — I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow,” tweeted Trump , adding, “Who, by the way, is totally overrated.” It is, of course, considered “anti-Semitic” to ever call attention to the fact that someone is Jewish because of the absolutely outrageous suggestion that the Jewish identity of someone like Stewart/Leibowitz might influence his opinions. As we all know, Jews are just like everybody else. 
And it quickly turned out that he understood the anger in White America far better than anyone else and he was willing to say what they wanted to hear — most of all the White working class (72-23!), but also White women(53-43), and his deficit among White educated women was only 51-45 ( CBS exit polls ). Looks like quite a few college-educated women ignored what they heard in their gender studies courses and those mandatory credits in Black Studies. 
While obviously a lot of work needs to be done, this is a glorious day. 
The following is an expanded version of my article in Radix Journal’s series on the meaning of Trump. 
The Alt Right has gravitated to Trump’s candidacy, and for good reason. Much of what the Alt Right wants will be difficult or impossible to bring about even with a president who is entirely on board with the idea that America should start thinking about the interests of its traditional White majority. But win or lose, Trump has already had a huge effect on American politics in a way that benefits the Alt Right, and his victory will be even more so: Trump has made statements on immigration that have been banned from polite society for 50 years — deport illegals, seal the border, end birthright citizenship, place a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and make immigration serve actual labor needs rather than a moral imperative (ideally with guest workers not given citizenship). He has deplored Angela Merkel’s policies in Germany and has made statements indicating he opposes the transformation of Western societies via immigration and multiculturalism (“ Paris isn’t Paris anymore .”) Trump’s victory will encourage and energize the right in Europe. It is Brexit on steroids — a scream by voters to stop the way things are going. To stop the destruction of their traditional ways of life. If nothing else, it is throwing a monkey wrench into the system. Tear it down! We can’t keep going on like this! Voters want an end to meaningless wars, an end to importing people who hate us and will never assimilate to our way of life. Trump has unmasked the neocons. The neocons have dominated the intellectual and foreign policy establishment of the Republican Party since the 1980s. From the beginning of Trump’s candidacy, neocons have been leading the #NeverTrump movement, despite the catastrophic effects of a Hillary Clinton presidency on the GOP. A Clinton presidency would ensure a liberal/left voting majority into the foreseeable future given that she would amnesty millions of illegals and dramatically raise total numbers of immigrants and refugees. Clinton Supreme Court appointments would likely gut the First Amendment by enabling “hate speech” laws and they would gut the Second Amendment as well. No one on the right, from traditional “limited government” conservatives to the Alt Right, would want this, and it’s difficult to believe that the Jewish identities and pro-Israel commitments of the most important neocons are lost on non-Jewish Republicans. The treason of the neocons will be long remembered in GOP circles and will compromise their influence in the future. 
I notice on Twitter that Bill Kristol says that the #NeverTrumpers should be magnanimous in losing, but I would be shocked if neocons were given any role in the GOP. This is Trump’s party now. It is incredibly heartening that he wants a good relationship with Russia at a time when neocons and NATO have been clamoring for confrontation and aggression. It is incredibly heartening that he supports the legitimate Assad government in Syria. I have no doubt that he will act in concert with Russia to end the rebellion and bring peace and stability to the region. Trump has highlighted the chasm between the overwhelmingly White Republican voting base and the GOP donor class intent on globalist policies of mass immigration, free trade, and a bellicose pro-Israel, anti-Russian foreign policy. The pre-Trump GOP was dominated by a neocon foreign policy establishment and a pro-Chamber of Commerce, pro-big business economic policy. This party did not represent the interests of GOP voters and can’t be resurrected. Even if Trump had lost, his energized supporters would be a new and important force within the GOP. His victory will ensure that the GOP will be a populist party for the foreseeable future. Trump has unmasked the media. The media have always been liberal, but this time around, even much of the usual pro-Republican media has been hostile to Trump, and a survey by the Media Research Center found an astounding 91% of media coverage hostile to his candidacy. Who can forget the hostility from mainstream conservative media like National Review , The Weekly Standard , and other neocon outlets? This feeds into the narrative that there has been a unified establishment from the far left to the neoconservative right that has opposed Trump’s populist policies favoring the middle class and the traditional White majority. 
The media is a pillar of the establishment, and it is heartening indeed that people ignored the deluge of talk of Trump being a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist. The media is a huge loser in Trump’s victory. 
As we have commented many times, the media is under very powerful Jewish influence. Trump’s victory is a blow to the entire Jewish power structure. I have written 6 articles on Jewish hostility toward Trump, much of this hostility bordering on the clinically paranoid. Jews understand that they do indeed have a great deal of power in the U.S. and throughout the West and that they have used that power to destroy the traditional homogeneity of these societies and to do all they can to make Whites minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, many thousands of years. We are a long way from really putting a dent in that power structure, but Trump’s victory is a great first step. Trump has put the Alt Right on the map. There have been numerous articles and commentary on the Alt Right because of Trump’s candidacy. The Alt Right has been the only identifiable intellectual perspective supporting Trump, although we understand that he is not one of us and would not attempt to do much what we would like to see in our ideal world. We are the only intellectual perspective that takes race seriously and accepts the social science research not only on race but on the disastrous costs of imposed multiculturalism for White majorities and the horrifying future awaiting Whites if indeed they do become hated, despised minorities. Traditional conservative intellectuals simply cannot explain what is happening with their usual intellectual toolkit. They can’t explain the anger and the very legitimate fears of the White majority. They can’t understand the racialization of politics. We understand it and are able to analyze it in very sophisticated ways that are entirely within the scientific mainstream. 
Much of the media coverage of the Alt Right was motivated by attempting to tar Trump as a “racist,” and after the election, win or lose, the media will likely attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube by ceasing coverage. However, a Trump victory makes that all but impossible. Our increased visibility has meant a very large surge in support for the Alt Right. Meeting attendance is way up, and readership on Alt Right sites is skyrocketing. The future is bright, and a very large amount of the credit for that has to go to Donald Trump. 
We are the future.",FAKE
"Erin Brockovich: Millions of Americans' tap water posioned due to EPA standards About the author: Mike Adams (aka the "" Health Ranger "") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs . There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation. Adams is a person of color whose descendents include Africans and American Indians. He self-identifies as being of American Indian heritage , which he credits as inspiring his ""Health Ranger"" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution. Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal , the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books. In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten . Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods . He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder , and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products. In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue , a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories. With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software . Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com , a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies. Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed ""strange fibers"" found in Chicken McNuggets , fake academic credentials of so-called health ""gurus,"" dangerous ""detox"" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams , the California raw milk raids , the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics. Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents . Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness. In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.",FAKE
"Whether an October surprise may have come a month early, it’s too soon to say.

But Hillary Clinton’s weekend health scare already has started to stir speculation about whether Democratic officials should be discussing the possibility of a Plan B, in case they need to hastily arrange for a replacement nominee.

Which raises a basic question: How does that work?

Democratic Party bylaws say the DNC has the power to fill “vacancies in the nominations for the office of the president and vice president” when the national convention is not in session.

Under party rules, the DNC chair – currently Donna Brazile – could call a special meeting, and fill the vacancy by a majority vote of those present.

Analysts still see this scenario as exceedingly unlikely. It appears party leaders have no authority to sideline Clinton, meaning the special meeting would kick in only if she were to step aside voluntarily. The nominee and her aides say she's recovering and feeling much better now.

But after Clinton left a 9/11 memorial Sunday stumbling and being helped into an SUV by multiple aides -- an incident the campaign tied to a recent pneumonia diagnosis and other factors -- some Democrats are at least thinking about that process.

Former DNC Chairman Don Fowler told Politico that the party needs to develop a plan immediately for finding a potential successor candidate.

Former Al Jazeera and MSNBC anchor David Shuster tweeted Sunday that the DNC was considering an “emergency meeting” to talk about a Clinton replacement, although his source emphasized her status as nominee was up to her, not the party.

NPR’s Cokie Roberts said Monday that Democrats already are considering another candidate.

“It has them very nervously beginning to whisper about having her step aside and finding another candidate,” Roberts said, adding that “it’s unlikely to be a real thing” and describing the talk as likely “an overreaction.”

Perhaps inadvertently feeding that frenzy, former Ohio Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland introduced Clinton running mate Tim Kaine at an event Monday by describing him as “ready to become the president” if necessary, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

But in the, albeit unlikely, scenario of a replacement scramble, Kaine isn’t necessarily a shoo-in.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others could all be possible candidates.

Historian Doug Wead told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that the votes would tend to go toward whomever the top of the ticket endorses, though it’s not guaranteed.

“Whatever [Clinton] says will likely hold sway, but legally, technically they have their own vote,” he said.

Replacing a member of a major-party ticket would be exceedingly rare, though not unprecedented. This happened in 1972 when Democratic nominee George McGovern’s running mate -- Sen. Thomas Eagleton -- withdrew from the race in July after it was revealed he had undergone electric shock treatment for mental health issues.

Eagleton was replaced in August by Sargent Shriver as the new vice presidential nominee. The McGovern/Shriver ticket went on to lose the race in a landslide to incumbent President Richard Nixon.

Rick Hasen, who runs the Election Law Blog, told FoxNews.com that the situation could become significantly more complicated if it were to play out later in the calendar.

“The more complicated problem would arise if ballots have already been printed, and people would have started voting. There, the Electoral College would come into play, and electors from the party would be expected to vote for the replacement nominee,” Hasen said.

The first absentee ballots were mailed out in Sept. 9 in North Carolina, and many other states will soon follow. By mid-September the deadlines for both parties to certify candidates for the general election will have passed in every state – meaning lawsuits might have to be filed to try and get a replacement on the ballot.

The DNC did not respond to a request for comment from FoxNews.com.

This isn’t the first time this election cycle there has been talk of a candidate dropping out. In August, during a particularly rough patch of poll numbers for Trump, some GOP officials were reportedly considering contingency plans in case the Republican nominee dropped out.

Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter and occasional Opinion writer for FoxNews.com. He can be reached here or on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.",REAL
"(CNN) Several bombers are dead. At least one alleged attacker is still on the loose.

And a key question looms as investigators race to piece together details about the attackers behind Tuesday's deadly bombings in Belgium's capital: Were these men acting alone, or were other members of a terror cell supporting them?

Raids, arrests and forensic analysis are some of the tools investigators are using to get to the bottom of who was behind the attacks in Brussels, which killed 31 people and wounded 270 others.

Two of the bombers were brothers. And one of the bombers at the airport appears to be a man authorities named as a suspect in the Paris terror attacks.

But the investigation is far from finished. With at least one suspect on the run, the stakes are high, Belgian counterterrorism official Paul Van Tigchelt said Wednesday.

""There are still a number of people, possibly involved in the attacks still in our country ... who still pose a threat,"" he said.

Here's a look at the latest developments in the investigation, and the questions they raise.

Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw identified Ibrahim El Bakraoui as one of two suicide bombers at the Brussels airport and his brother, Khalid El Bakraoui, as the man behind a deadly suicide blast about an hour later on a train near the Maelbeek metro station.

This isn't the first time they've come across authorities' radar.

Ibrahim El Bakraoui was deported by Turkey to the Netherlands last year, a senior Turkish official told CNN. The Turkish presidency's office said authorities there captured him in July 2015 and flagged him to Belgian authorities.

Belgian authorities, the Turkish official said, responded soon after saying he had a criminal record but no known ties to terrorism.

""These two deceased suicide bombers had lengthy criminal records,"" he said, ""but (were) not linked to terrorism.""

Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been sentenced in October 2010 by a Brussels criminal court to nine years behind bars for opening fire on police officers with a Kalashnikov during a robbery, according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF and CNN affiliate RTL.

Interpol had issued a ""red notice"" for Khalid El Bakraoui, the subway bomber, that noted Belgian authorities wanted him in connection with terrorism. But it wasn't clear when that notice was issued or why Belgian authorities now say he had no ties to terrorism.

Question to consider: If they were already on authorities' radar, how did the brothers manage to slip through the cracks and carry out the deadly attacks?

Surveillance images showing three men pushing luggage carts through the airport have played an important role as authorities work to pinpoint the suspects.

Authorities say bomber Ibrahim El Bakraoui is the man in the middle. Najim Laachraoui, an ISIS bomb-maker, is the man on the left in the picture, a Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN's Paul Cruickshank.

Investigators believe both were killed in the airport blast. But authorities are looking for the third man in the photo, walking on the right and wearing light-colored clothing and a hat.

Belgium's interior minister said that man placed a bomb at the airport and left.

While two explosives went off within 37 seconds of each other shortly before 8 a.m., this third bomb -- described as the ""heaviest"" by Van Leeuw -- did not, instead being detonated by authorities later in a controlled explosion.

Questions to consider: Where did the man in light-colored clothing go? Is anyone helping him hide out from authorities, and could he be plotting another attack?

Two people were arrested in Brussels in connection with the attacks -- one in Schaerbeek and the other in Haren, Van Leeuw said.

One was released later that day, according to the prosecutor.

Another person was detained Wednesday, according to Belgian public broadcaster RTBF.

One raid, officials said, came after a tip from a taxi driver led them to the northeast Brussels area of Schaerbeek.

The driver recognized the men shown in surveillance footage and told authorities he'd driven the men to the airport before the attacks. Police raided the area where the driver told them he'd picked up the men.

On Wednesday, they made another significant find: Ibrahim El Bakraoui's will.

Police found the airport bomber's will on a computer in a trash can in Schaerbeek, Van Leeuw said.

The will indicated Bakraoui ""needs to rush"" and ""no longer feels safe.""

Questions to consider: Who are the people who were arrested, and what was their alleged role in the attacks?

The latest connection: Laachraoui, a suspect in the Paris attacks who authorities now say they believe was one of the Brussels airport bombers.

Investigators believe Abdeslam likely planned to be part of an attack orchestrated by the same ISIS cell that carried out Tuesday's attacks, a senior Belgian counterterrorism official told Cruickshank.

The Brussels attackers likely accelerated their plans when police discovered Abdeslam's hideout, investigators believe.

And one of the apartments where he hid before his capture, located in the southern Brussels district of Forest, allegedly has ties to one of the Bakraoui brothers.

Questions to consider: What role, if any, did Abeslam's arrest play in the Brussels attacks? Are there other links between the Paris and Brussels attacks?

Another piece of evidence authorities found during the Brussels raids could help in their investigation: unused explosives.

In the Schaerbeek residence, authorities found 15 kilograms of the explosive TATP and screws among the bomb-making materials there, Van Leeuw said.

""Such bombs have been a signature of jihadist terrorists in the West for more than a decade because the materials are so easy to acquire, unlike military-grade explosives, which are tightly controlled in much of the West,"" CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen said.

TATP-based bombs require technical know-how and bulk purchases of hydrogen peroxide or hair bleach. That helps authorities narrow down potential bomb-making suspects, because making the explosives can sometimes bleach hair. So authorities can identify bomb-makers in part by recognizing unusually bleached hair or asking sellers to report any suspiciously large purchases of hydrogen peroxide.

Questions to consider: Will the bomb-making materials lead investigators to any new suspects or help them dismantle a terror cell?",REAL
"opednews.com - Advertisement - The news in the Guardian (June 18) that 'The government has been secretly awarding honours to senior figures in the US military and foreign businessmen ' shows the importance we Brits attach to honoring people. Arise Sir George There is also a lot in the news just now about 'glorifying violence ' and I assume it mainly concerns anyone else who glorifies it, because we Brits have been at it for hundreds of years and do it better than most.I heard a story about the youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross a century ago. He was eighteen and when his maxim gun had jammed had bravely relied on a standard high velocity rifle to continue shooting the unfortunate Pathans, or whoever we were ""supporting"" at the time. He was cashiered for insubordination. He could cope with third world guys with spears, but not being told to get his flippin ' 'air cut. You are more likely to do your bravery when you are young and vulnerable and fear of a sergeant outweighs any feelings of fear of, or sympathy towards, your fellow human beings. ""Right lads we are about to walk across no man 's land, and I would like you chaps to consider coming with me. "" will not get results. ""OK, you shower of girl 's blouses, I will personally shoot the last mincer out of this trench. "" is likely to work, as long as the last guy who dared to debate the proposal, has not yet been removed from the barbed wire. Do we make ploughshares or wait until the next generation comes along, all spots and trying not to look like a female article of clothing in front of their mates and start all over?We glorify violence all the time, we promote people who are adept at slaughtering the biggest number in the best way and we give them medals as if their promotion was not enough. We make war movies shamelessly and don 't think this is weird. We sometimes give the movies medals as well. That 's glorifying violence. - Advertisement -",FAKE
"Russia may run out of patience and respond to USA's rudeness 28.10.2016 AP photo Russian President Putin said at the meeting of the Valdai Club in Sochi that Washington has not been able to distinguish between terrorists and moderate opposition in Syria, despite many promises to do so. As a result, the truce was terminated, and the White House accuses the Kremlin of all mortal sins. ""This is simply a disgrace. We behave with restraint and we do not respond in such a rude way to our partners, but everything has its limits. We may respond,"" Putin warned. Pravda.Ru asked an expert opinion about the possible development of events from specialist on US-Russia relations, Victor Olevich. ""How can Putin respond?"" ""Russia has a whole arsenal of potential responses. At the moment, Russia is keeping a pause in the Syrian Arab Republic. The Russian Federation is not using its full military capability to resolve the Syrian crisis. ""If the United States continues to engage in further provocations against Russia and Russian interests , then, of course, Moscow will take more active measures to counter what remains, in fact, a terrorist threat in Syria."" Print version Font Size ""Putin mentioned during his speech that ""our personal agreements with the US president did not work."" He added that there were forces in Washington that did their best not to let them work. What kind of forces are they?"" ""First of all, this is the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies: the CIA and some others that have, indeed, made every effort to bury the agreements between Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry that they had reached in Geneva. ""As you know, a few days after the agreement on Syria between Moscow and Washington was reached, the US military accidentally bombed one of the most combat-ready Syrian military bases near Deir ez-Zor. The bombing continued for an hour. Up to 80 Syrian military men were killed, and many more were injured. Of course, one could not talk about any agreements afterwards. ""Moreover, when Russia raised the issue at the UN Security Council, US Representative Samantha Power reacted very sharply, and, indeed, in a rude way. A few days later, a humanitarian convoy in Aleppo was attacked, and the United States and their Western allies presented totally unsubstantiated and groundless accusations against Russia again. ""It was clear that Pentagon chief Ashton Carter, a number of American generals and the CIA were not interested in a joint struggle against the terrorist threat in Syria. Jabhat en-Nusra serves as a reserve of the United States that the country uses when necessary to topple Syrian President Assad. ""These non-constructive forces in the United States want to see Hillary Clinton as president to have a more aggressive approach both to Russia and to the settlement of the Syrian crisis."" Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru US gets ready for war with Russia because of Assad",FAKE
"David Duke October 27, 2016 
Today Dr. Duke and Dr. Slattery talked about Hillary’s clear acts of treason against the United States by providing massive shipments of weapons to Saudi Arabia at a time that she knew they were providing support to ISIS. Dr. Duke, if elected to the Senate, would be in a position to expose Hillary and push for her impeachment should she win (steal) the election. 
Dr. Slattery discussed post-election scenarios. He noted that if Trump wins in a close election, a small number of Republican electors could be bribed to vote for Hillary, throwing the election to her, or even vote for Pence, throwing the election to the House of Representatives to decide from amongst Trump, Hillary, and Pence. Should Hillary win and Trump supporters feel the election was illegitimate, impeachment would be more likely. 
This is an extremely educating and enlightening show. Please share it widely.",FAKE
"Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors. Follow him on Twitter @RaulAReyes . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) As the nation was preparing for the July Fourth weekend, there was grim news from San Francisco. On Wednesday night, Kate Steinle , 31, was fatally shot, apparently randomly, while walking with her father on a busy pier. A Mexican immigrant, who CNN reported was in the country without documentation, was arrested in her death.

Illegally re-entering the country after being deported, as Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is said to have done, is a federal felony . He has also been accused of a horrific, violent crime. And according to immigration authorities, he has seven other felony convictions, including four for drug offenses.

But that doesn't make him a symbol of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Nor is he the poster boy for out-of-control illegal immigration across our southern border (illegal immigration from Mexico is at a 40-year low). He does not represent the overwhelming majority of immigrants in this country -- legal or otherwise -- who are productive members of society.

Lopez-Sanchez is simply a dangerous individual who should not have been free and among us.

It is a myth that increased illegal immigration leads to more crime. Research from the Immigration Policy Center shows that crime rates fell in the United States as the size of our immigrant population, including undocumented immigrants, grew from 1990 to 2010.

Most undocumented immigrants come to the United States to work and provide a better life for themselves and their families.

Consider that several mass shootings, from Aurora to Newtown to Charleston, were committed by young white men. Does that mean that all young white men are potential mass murderers? Of course not.

The same news outlets that are now trumpeting Wednesday's murder as proof that undocumented immigrants are criminals often overlook or ignore other stories of undocumented immigrants who are genuine heroes. In 2013, an undocumented immigrant rescued a mother and her child on Staten Island, New York, amidst the storm surge of Superstorm Sandy.

One takeaway from this episode is that deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible is not the answer to our immigration problems. Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times, and yet he was still here in the country without authorization.

Back in 2011, the deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement told an immigration subcommittee of Congress that it costs $12,500 to deport a person. Multiply this by five and that is how much taxpayer money was wasted on a criminal who remained at large to randomly take the life of an innocent young woman.

Another lesson here is our country does not need more immigration enforcement; our country needs smarter and better immigration enforcement. Up to now, immigration authorities have wasted time, manpower and money chasing after people working productively in their communities as, say, gardeners and maids, while felons like Lopez-Sanchez slipped through the cracks.

That's why it was good news last week that the Department of Homeland Security announced it is rethinking its deportation priorities to focus on recent arrivals and serious criminals.

This move is a step in the right direction, because it is time to start seriously targeting those immigrants who are a real threat to public safety. The government will be focusing its enforcement efforts on three categories of people: convicted criminals, recent border crossers and terrorism threats.

True, Lopez-Sanchez should not have been in the country, or he should have at least been behind bars. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement erred in not seeking a warrant or court order for his arrest and he was released in accordance with city law in March.

What's more, President Barack Obama's proposed executive action on immigration, currently tied up in a legal battle, might also have made a difference because it would have freed up resources to go after people like Lopez-Sanchez.

Although Steinle's death was a tragedy, it was the alleged action of one man. All undocumented immigrants do not deserve to be vilified by false association.",REAL
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said he would not allow Israel to be ""submerged"" by refugees after calls for the Jewish state to take in those fleeing Syria's war.

Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu also announced the start of construction of a fence along Israel's border with Jordan, according to his office.

""We will not allow Israel to be submerged by a wave of illegal migrants and terrorist activists,"" Netanyahu said.

""Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of Syrian and African refugees... but Israel is a small country — very small — without demographic or geographic depth. That is why we must control our borders.""

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog on Saturday said Israel should take in Syrian refugees, recalling the plight of Jews who sought refuge from past conflicts.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas also called for Israel to allow Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria to travel to the Palestinian territories, whose external borders are controlled by the Jewish state.

There is already hostility in Israel toward asylum-seekers from Africa and a concerted government effort to repatriate them.

Rights groups say thousands of African asylum seekers have been coerced into ""voluntary"" departures.

Official figures show 45,000 illegal immigrants are in Israel, almost all from Eritrea and Sudan. Most of those not in detention live in poor areas of southern Tel Aviv, where there have been several protests against them.

The start of construction of the 30-kilometer (19-mile) fence announced by Netanyahu involves extension of a security barrier to part of its eastern border with Jordan in a bid to keep out militants and illegal migrants.

Netanyahu said when it was approved in June that the new fence was a continuation of a 240-kilometer barrier built along the Egyptian border which ""blocked the entry of illegal migrants into Israel and the various terrorist movements"".

In its first stage, the new fence is being built along Israel's eastern border between Eilat and where a new airport will be built in the Timna Valley.

""We will continue the fence up to the Golan Heights,"" Netanyahu said.

That would take it into the Israeli-occupied West Bank along the Jordan Valley, an area which is already under Israeli military control but is claimed by the Palestinians as part of their state.

Israel has insisted on maintaining troops in the area in any final peace agreement, a stance completely rejected by the Palestinians who say it would be a violation of their sovereignty and merely perpetuate the occupation.

Israel also has a fence that runs along the Syrian frontier through the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Those fences are in addition to a barrier that runs through the West Bank, which Israel began building during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which lasted from 2000-2005.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed it 14 years later, in a move never recognized by the international community.",REAL
"APOCALYPSE NOW: Trump Voters Warn Of ‘Revolution’ If Clinton Wins By Andrew Bradford on October 28, 2016 Subscribe 
There’s nothing wrong with being passionate when it comes to your political beliefs and the candidate you support. In an electorate as deeply divided as we currently see in this country, you expect no less. But ask yourself this question: If your candidate loses, are you ready to take up arms and try to overthrow the government? For some who ardently support GOP nominee Donald Trump, the answer is a resounding yes. 
Take for example Jared Halbrook, who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and told the New York Times : “People are going to march on the capitols. They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there. “If push comes to shove, (Clinton) has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” 
Roger Pillath said he also sees violence on the horizon if Clinton is elected: “It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot. I’ve never seen the country so divided, just black and white — there’s no compromise whatsoever. The Clinton campaign says together we are stronger, but there’s no together. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.” 
As Trump continues to talk of the election being “rigged,” his words are having an effect on people like Paul Swick, who had this ominous warning: “If she comes after the guns, it’s going to be a rough, bumpy road. I hope to God I never have to fire a round, but I won’t hesitate to. As a Christian, I want reformation. But sometimes reformation comes through bloodshed.” 
Retired truck driver Alan Weegens envisions a very dark future for the United States and says he’s ready to do whatever is necessary: “I am not going to take my weapon to go out into the streets to protest an election I did not win. But I think that if certain events came about, a person would need to protect themselves, depending on where they lived, when your neighborhood goes up in flames.” 
See if you can recall the last time we heard this kind of violent talk which led to actions by far right nuts who were inspired to be “heroes” in their own minds. The year was 1995 and Bill Clinton was President. Timothy McVeigh parked a rental truck loaded with explosives outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 innocent Americans, including children. Words can have consequences. 
Featured Image Via PBS About Andrew Bradford 
Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
"Geo-Engineering Unlikely to Work, Conservation Group Says Posted on Nov 3, 2016 
By Alex Kirby / Climate News Network Biofilm used in research into carbon capture: Doubts persist about geo-engineering. (ENERGY.GOV via Wikimedia Commons) 
LONDON—The global watchdog responsible for protecting the world ’ s wealth of species, the UN ’ s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), has looked at the hopes for reining in climate change through geo-engineering. Its bleak conclusion, echoing that reached by many independent scientists, is that the chances are “highly uncertain”. “Novel means”, in this context, describes trying to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by removing them from the atmosphere, and altering the amount of heat from the Sun that reaches the Earth. Some scientists and policymakers say geo-engineering, as these strategies are collectively known, is essential if the world is to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement . This is because current attempts to reduce emissions cannot make big enough cuts fast enough to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C above their pre-industrial levels, the Agreement’s basic goal. But the CBD says in a report that geo-engineering, while it could possibly help to prevent the world overheating, might endanger global biodiversity and have other unpredictable effects. Many independent analysts have raised similar concerns.Attempts to increase the amount of carbon in the oceans, in order to remove GHGs, have so far shown disappointing results. One report doubted that geo-engineering could slow sea-level rise . Another said it could not arrest the melting of Arctic ice . A third study found that geo-engineering would make things little better and might even make global warming worse . Transboundary impacts The lead author of the CBD geo-engineering report is a British scientist, Dr Phillip Williamson, of the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council . He is an associate fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia , UK. The CBD originally became involved in climate geo-engineering in 2008, because member governments were concerned that experiments to fertilise the oceans could pose unknown risks to the environment (they were then unregulated when carried out in international waters). The CBD’s concern expanded to include other geo-engineering techniques, especially atmospheric methods which could have uncertain transboundary impacts. Some scientists argue that “geo-engineering” is a hazily-defined term and prefer to speak instead simply of “greenhouse gas removal”. Dr Williamson and his colleagues say assessment of the impacts of geo-engineering on biodiversity “is not straightforward and is subject to many uncertainties”. On greenhouse gas removal they warn that removing a given quantity of a greenhouse gas would not fully compensate for an earlier ‘overshoot’ of emissions. New risks In some cases, they say, the cure may be worse than the disease: “The large-scale deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) seems likely to have significant negative impacts on biodiversity through land use change.” When it comes to attempts to reflect sunlight back out into space or to manage solar radiation, a familiar theme recurs: “There are high levels of uncertainty about the impacts of SRM [solar radiation management] techniques, which could present significant new risks to biodiversity.” Time and again, it seems, a potential advance is liable to be cancelled by an equally likely reverse: if SRM benefits coral reefs by decreasing temperature-induced bleaching (as it may), in certain conditions “it may also increase, indirectly, the impacts of ocean acidification.” There could even be a risk in some circumstances of loss to the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Dr Williamson and his colleagues believe that geo-engineering is essential—if it can be made to work—because of the diminishing chances that anything else will. “I’m sceptical. That’s not to say bio-energy with carbon capture and storage is impossible, but it seems extremely unlikely to be feasible” They write: “It may still be possible that deep and very rapid decarbonisation by all countries might allow climate change to be kept within a 2°C limit by emission reduction alone. However, any such window of opportunity is rapidly closing.” Repeatedly, those two words recur: a suggested technique or development will be “highly uncertain”. Most of the report amounts to a very cautious call for more research, coupled with an implicit acceptance that in the end geo-engineering is unlikely to prove capable of contributing much to climate mitigation. Dr Williamson told the Climate News Network: “I’m sceptical. That’s not to say bio-energy with carbon capture and storage is impossible, but it seems extremely unlikely to be feasible (for all sorts of reasons)” at the scale needed. When the CBD member governments meet in December they are expected to call for more research: a safe option in most circumstances, but far from a ringing endorsement of a technology once seen as very promising. 
Alex Kirby is a former BBC journalist and environment correspondent. He now works with universities, charities and international agencies to improve their media skills, and with journalists in the developing world keen to specialise in environmental reporting. 
Advertisement",FAKE
"Sunday night's Democratic debate comes at a crucial moment. The two front-runners — Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — are closer in the polls than ever, and the Iowa caucus is only two weeks away.

Up until now, Clinton has done well in debates; it's a format that suits her. But Sanders' message is breaking through, and he's gaining in the polls nationally, leads in New Hampshire and is neck and neck with Clinton in Iowa. That means the pressure is on for both candidates Sunday night. The debate, taking place in Charleston, S.C., begins at 9 p.m. EST. The NBC/YouTube/Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate will air on NBC broadcast stations and livestreamed on NBC digital platforms, including its YouTube channel.

Here's what the candidates need to do — and avoid:

Needs: Show why her plans are pragmatic solutions that work for the progressive base, while still respecting Sanders supporters. She's gotten away from her answer in the first debate that she's ""a progressive who likes to get things done."" Then again, it's tough to make that argument to primary voters

Avoid: Lawyerly, unclear answers that play into an inauthentic narrative, especially paired against Sanders, whose authenticity has been key; attacks that could be seen as cheap shots, like on health care

Needs: Convince Democratic voters, who are skeptical he's presidential material, that he can win; show a facility with issues beyond his core message

Avoid: Pulling punches like he's done in past debates

Needs: Somehow appear relevant; as it is, he barely made it onto the debate stage. His poll numbers had to be rounded up to qualify

Avoid: Being dismissed, especially after the question on the investigation into his discounted purchase of furniture from the governor's office when he left.

1. Where does the race stand? Hillary Clinton seemed to have a comfortable lead on Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders last year, but that has slipped considerably and they are in a neck-and-neck race.

Sanders has picked up momentum with his message and his passion — and Democratic voters like him. He continues to lead in New Hampshire, where he's been in the top spot for the better part of the last five months. He's also closing in Iowa, which is perhaps more surprising, but that's a place where passion counts, because of how the caucuses are conducted.

Beyond the first two states, Clinton still has leads with non-white voters, who are critical to Clinton's ""firewall"" in the South. But that firewall might not look as insurmountable if she loses one or both of these first crucial contests.

2. What about the issues — what's dividing these two? Sanders has gained steam because of his clear message on Wall Street and income inequality. He's tried to tie Clinton to big financial institutions, and Clinton has struggled in defending those ties, as Sanders has labeled her the ""status quo.""

Lately, it's been health care and guns. Sanders voted for Obamacare, but he prefers a single-payer system; Clinton wants more modest tweaks. It may have been a bad tactic for Clinton's daughter Chelsea to try and go after Sanders from the left and accuse him of wanting to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Clinton stood by her daughter. Bigger picture: Clinton has criticized Sanders for how to pay all of the reforms he wants. Sanders has not been completely forthcoming on a financial and tax plan, though he promises to explain later.

Clinton has harped on Sanders' past support for more moderate gun measures, including his support for a 2005 law that protects gun manufacturers from liability if a gun made by one of them is used in a killing. On Saturday, the day before the debate, Sanders came out in favor of a measure to amend the law.

3. So, with these dividing lines, do they go negative in the debate? There's a risk in going negative, but more so for Clinton. Sanders' voters are very loyal. Clinton is losing ground and can't afford to be completely positive. But how to attack Sanders in a way that resonates and seems authentic will be a challenge. Clinton's making the case she's the more electable — and certainly most Democratic voters would do anything to make sure a Republican isn't elected, especially Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.",REAL
"It is increasingly apparent that the U.S. war against Islamic extremism has been put on hold by President Obama and his national security team.

President Obama failed to even mention Al Qaeda during his State of the Union address. In early January, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket gave us a glimpse of what the future of terrorism looks like, and what the civilized world will have to defend against.

At the same time, the unfolding chaos in Yemen and loss of a U.S. partner in the fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) raises serious concerns about the future of a country that four months ago President Obama cited as a successful model for U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).



 

 ISIL and AQAP are two faces of the same enemy, radical violent Islam, which is on the march around the world.

In 2013, ISIL was confined to Syria and Iraq. As the Syria civil war dragged on, and in the absence of early, forceful intervention on the part of the United States or European nations, the chaotic situation spread to Iraq, where weak security services were no match for an emboldened terrorist army.

In 2014, global support to the Islamic State blossomed as it began to supplant likeminded terrorist groups, and the Islamic State counted affiliates in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.  ISIL even has begun to make inroads in Yemen, where the United States has been involved in efforts to degrade AQAP's capabilities, but have been unable to eliminate AQAP's ability to conduct attacks on us and our allies.  AQAP remains one of the most pressing security threats America currently faces as the recent attacks in Paris show.

 

 In the wake of the Paris attacks and plots disrupted elsewhere in Europe, European capitals are rightfully defiant in the face of terror. But without a change in our strategy, the task of defending against the triple threat of home grown extremism, jihadists who have easy access to hotbeds of radicalization in places like Yemen and Syria, and the expansion of the Islamic State, will be nearly impossible.

 

 The Islamic State continues to recruit extremists in Europe, the Middle East, and as far away as southeast Asia, using targeted, high quality videos, magazines and literature copied in several languages to spread their message around the world.  They trumpet their successes on the battlefield, and try to portray a welcoming environment centered on family and Islam as a means to attract terrorists and their families as subjects of their caliphate.

The United States and all civilized countries need to coordinate our efforts to fight the Islamic State first by cutting them off.  We must counter their message on social media; bolster allies like Iraq and Jordan; and ensure that we prevent suspected terrorists from traveling back and forth between their homelands and places like Syria, Libya, and Yemen.  Perhaps most importantly, we have to help governments eliminate the safe havens that the Islamic State relies on to gather strength.  

 

 Syria, Yemen, and Libya are all examples of our failure to learn one of the fundamental lessons of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- that failed and failing states breed instability and are potential safe havens for terrorists who will eventually turn their attention toward us.

 

 We also cannot afford to ignore another lesson of 9/11 and curtail intelligence gathering capabilities that have been legally and painstakingly established following those horrific attacks.

The U.S. government should implore American technology companies to cooperate with authorities so that we can better track terrorist activity and monitor terrorist communications as we face the increasing challenge of homegrown terrorists radicalized by little more than what they see on the Internet.

This year, a new Republican majority in both houses of Congress will have to extend current authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and I urge my colleagues to consider a permanent extension of the counterterrorism tools our intelligence community relies on to keep the American people safe.

 

 The challenge we face as free societies is unlike anything we have seen in recent decades.  As we look at this moment in the long war against terrorism, it is encouraging to see Europeans aggressively moving to defend the continent following a horrific attack.  But one need look no further than the setbacks in Yemen and the stalemate in Syria and Iraq to see the limitations of President Obama's current strategy.  

 

 Lofty speeches and half measures do not defeat terrorist groups.  They also do not keep Americans safe in the long term.  The threat from Islamic extremism is only growing and without greater leadership from the United States, I fear that it will only be a matter of time before innocent Americans pay the ultimate price if we continue to underestimate our enemies and not develop a strategy that is commensurate to the threat.

Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
"Koch Brothers Secretly Allied w. George Soros for Hillary Clinton → Jay Kurtz 
Why would Bernie supporters vote Clinton? Because if she wins, his movement will be finished, and she will see to it that it is. 
On the other hand, if Trump wins, Hillary is finished, and Bernie will become the driving force in the Democratic Party, and will crush Trump in 2020. 
I just don’t understand why ANY Bernie supporter would be DUMB ENOUGH to vote for Hillary. gmatch 
There are many reasons not to vote for Hillary. Bernie is a proven fraud and should go away. If Trump wins – the DNC will have to change or it will not survive. kimyo 
while we’re talking about podesta emails, what is your interpretation of the following email from podesta re: a 2015 cnbc interview in which sanders stated “When you hustle money like that, you don’t sit in restaurants like this” and “That type of wealth has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.” 
podesta: This isn’t in keeping w the agreement. Since we clearly have some leverage, would be good to flag this for him. I could send a signal via Welch–or did you establish a direct line w him? 
my interpretation: you fell for sanders’ schtick like an egg from a tall chicken. he was never for real. you’ve been reporting on wrestlemania 2016 without comprehending that the whole thing is staged. 
you never said a single word about the theft of california, brooklyn and beyond. WHY? 
the word ‘agreement’, that doesn’t raise any red flags for you? Donate",FAKE
"Watch live coverage of ceremonies in Selma commemorating 50 years since ""Bloody Sunday"" starting at 11 a.m. ET Saturday on CNN and CNNgo

(CNN) Fifty years ago this weekend, a 25-year-old John Lewis was beaten so badly by Alabama state troopers that they fractured his skull.

Lewis calls the Edmund Pettus Bridge -- where the troopers and and a group of white men deputized into a posse by the sheriff attacked hundreds of peaceful protesters on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 -- an ""almost holy place.""

Now a Democratic U.S. congressman, Lewis is returning to Selma -- as he has nearly every year since that historic march -- to remember the fight for voting rights and to push voters across the country to participate in the political process. He also wants people to continue to speak up about the problems of racial injustice and poverty that persist in American society.

""It is important to come back to remember Selma,"" Lewis told CNN in an interview at First Baptist Church. ""The vote is powerful. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society and I don't want people to forget that people paid a price.

""Selma, these churches and these people, gave it everything they had. We wouldn't be where we are today as a nation and as a people (if it) hadn't been for this community.""

Churches -- like Selma's First Baptist and Brown Chapel -- served as important meeting places during the movement, in part because they were run by the black community.

And music was vital as a unifying force.

""Without music, the movement would have been like a bird without wings,"" Lewis said.

He recalled how people would often sing during the marches, sometimes making up songs along the way.

""Music helped create a sense of solidarity, and there were people in some communities, in some towns and cities like Selma, saying if the meetings are being held at the church, it must be all right. That's the house of the Lord. They must be doing something that is right.""

Activists had been working for years in and around Selma trying to help people register to vote. At the time, only 2.1% of blacks in Dallas County were registered, Lewis said. When blacks attempted to register, they were often given impossible tasks, like counting the number of jelly beans in a jar or the number of bubbles on a bar of soap, to complete before being allowed to sign up. Black lawyers, doctors, business people, public school teachers and college professors were told they could not read and write well enough to pass the so-called literacy test.

As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis -- along with many others -- would spill blood to change that, not only as a leader of the Bloody Sunday march but in other confrontations across the South.

Lewis was arrested some 40 times during the 1960s as he challenged the segregationist Jim Crow laws that kept blacks oppressed. He spent 44 days imprisoned in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides in 1961. As a student at Fisk University, he organized sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee, even spending his birthday in jail there in 1961 -- so Lewis was no stranger to run-ins with the law. But the events of Bloody Sunday would prove fateful for the movement.

Television cameras and photographers captured the troopers attacking the marchers with night sticks and whips -- one man in the posse even had a rubber hose wrapped with barbed wire, Lewis wrote in his memoir ""Walking with the Wind.""

The troopers trampled the crowd with their horses and released nauseating tear gas. The pictures horrified citizens across the country. Eight days after the march, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke before Congress about voting rights. He signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6 to ensure that all citizens would be able to vote regardless of their skin color.

Five decades later, Lewis said a great deal of progress has been made in the struggle for equality. But he added that, despite having twice elected a black man to the nation's highest office, the country still has a long way to go to become the so-called ""Beloved Community"" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned ""where we can lay down the burden of race.""

""We have a black president. We've made a lot of progress, but we're not a post-racial society yet,"" he said. ""We still have a distance to go. The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society.""

The need for 'righteous indignation'

Lewis, who has written a trilogy of graphic novels for young adults about his life called ""March,"" said it was important not to sweep the problems that still plague America under the rug and to instead speak up with a sense of ""righteous indignation.""

""You cannot be quiet. You have to speak up. You have to speak out. You have to find a way to get in the way and make some noise,"" he said, referring in particular to the killings of unarmed black men by police last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City.

He urged those demonstrating against police brutality and racial injustice to study and model the nonviolent methods of the civil rights activists of the 1950s and '60s.

The poverty affecting people of all races across the country still gnaws at Lewis, as does a lack of access to a good education. He believes people should be outraged about hunger and violence, and fired up to renew and strengthen the Voting Rights Act after a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the key provision requiring certain states with a history of racial discrimination at the polls to ""pre-clear"" any changes to voting laws with the federal government before implementing them.

On Saturday, Lewis and nearly 100 members of Congress from both parties will join President Barack Obama at the bridge in Selma -- a bridge that still bears the name of a Confederate general who was also a Ku Klux Klan leader -- to mark the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. The bipartisan event comes as efforts to update to the Voting Rights Act have stalled in Congress. Still, Lewis is optimistic both parties can come together to fix it.

""We must do it. It's the right thing to do,"" he said. ""There is a deliberate, systematic effort to take us back. We've made too much progress to go back."" He was referring to efforts in some states to do away with early voting and voting on Sunday or on weekends and to require photo IDs, moves he said make it harder for young people, seniors and minorities to vote.

""I'm afraid that if we fail to fix it, many of our fellow citizens will not be able to become participants in the democratic process,"" he concluded.",REAL
"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] “We Were Long Overdue A Presidential Assassination Anyway” November 9, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS Share 0 Add Comment 
AMERICANS still coming to terms with the surprising outcome of the 2016 US elections have sought solace in the fact that the country was long overdue a presidential assassination anyway. 
“It’s been what, 50 odd years since the last one?” queried disgruntled Florida native Toby Hartford, “I mean Reagan doesn’t count since he survived it”. 
Citing the perfect societal conditions for a swell in dissatisfaction and disquiet brought on by divisive rhetoric, isolation and amplified fears to fester, much of the American population was in agreement that ‘yes, an assassination is something that could conceivably happen’. 
“I wouldn’t not celebrate it, were it to happen, which is really fucking depressing when I think about it. I thought I was a decent human being, and this was a decent country, but fuck it, this is where we’re at now,” shared New Yorker Bernice Stewart. 
“I’m not saying it’s something I want, I abhor murder, but give it a few months and when Trump hasn’t made America great again by placing US Muslims in internment camps, I’ve every faith in him stirring the sorts of emotions in a mentally unstable individual required to break our 53-year streak,” another voter remarked. 
Experts in slowly unraveling individuals with access to guns even speculated that the ultimate cause of the assassination may be seemingly insignificant. 
“Right now, no one is focused enough to remember Trump said he would release his tax returns, but when he delays that disclosure again and again, someone who never really gave a shit about that might start studying a map of tall buildings surrounding his victory parade route in New York. It could be one of those very people Trump mobilised to vote; working class, jobless and perennially ignored by the political establishment that will pull the trigger, ironic really,” isolated loner expert Condie Matthews explained. 
Secret Service personnel, tasked with bodyguarding and protecting the president, resigned en masse this morning stating they ‘don’t get paid enough for this shit’.",FAKE
"Flip-flop: Vox warns of serious risk of Election Day violence, and not the good kind either Posted at 9:24   Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
Those playing along at home probably noticed that the flood of groping and sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, whether true or false, receded awfully quickly once the media and the Clinton campaign decided to clear the decks for a new batch of think pieces about Trump’s allegations that the election was rigged. 
In case the public missed the hint that, by questioning the integrity of America’s electoral process, Trump was sowing the seeds of Election Day violence, a new wave of think pieces emerged to make the threat that much more explicit. They’re not saying there’s gonna be violence; they’re just strongly implying there’s gonna be violence. If there is unrest and violence after election day, I think we now know why. https://t.co/P6WNdG36f5 
CNN … isn’t that the network that “shorthanded” a girl’s call for rioters to burn down the Milwaukee suburbs until it could be reported as a condemnation of violence? Election officials and parties are preparing for possible violence on Election Day and long battle over legitimacy https://t.co/n21U1MfHYO 
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) October 17, 2016 Trump's attack on the foundation of democracy makes violence on Election Day more likely. https://t.co/rGADYMG5Op",FAKE
"The former Republican, marijuana-smoking, Everest mountaineering ex-governor of New Mexico and presidential nominee of the Libertarian party has a problem: he’s barred from the presidential debates. To appear on stage with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump this autumn, Gary Johnson needs to boost his national polling numbers to 15% from around 8% now.

Without that national exposure, and the blockbuster ratings the three scheduled Clinton-Trump dust-ups are likely to produce, it’s hard for anyone to see how Johnson, 63, or either of two other minor-party candidates, the Green party’s Jill Stein or even Evan McMullin, a 40-year-old former CIA counterterrorism officer, could ever become more than mere electoral curiosities.

But the emergence of three independent candidates, during a year of record dissatisfaction with the major party candidates, may still make for an unpredictable twist to the story. Polling data suggests libertarians on both sides of the political divide are giving independent candidates a second look, and in Las Vegas on Friday, Johnson and Stein spoke before a gathering of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters to press their cases.

Soft-spoken and wearing Nikes, Johnson presented a platform of social libertarianism, fiscal conservatism and non-interventionism in foreign affairs. He argued at the gathering that in this, “the craziest election of all time”, he had a chance: “I might be the next president of the United States.”

A just-released WSJ-NBC poll gave Johnson 15% in the crucial swing state of Colorado, and Stein 6%. In Las Vegas, he was asked repeatedly if a vote for him or any third-party candidate was somehow wasted.

“A wasted vote is voting for somebody you don’t believe in. That’s a wasted vote,” Johnson said. “Vote for the person you believe in – that’s how you bring about change. I hope after having made my pitch today that you’ll realize, if you want to waste your vote on Clinton or Trump, have at it.”

Stein, who spoke separately at the event, similarly argued that many Americans were looking for an alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton, whom she dubbed as “the most disliked and untrusted” major-party nominees in US history. 

“Democracy needs a moral compass,” she told a gathering of Asian American and Pacific Island groups. “It’s not just about who you don’t like the most or who you are most afraid of.” 



Stein, who like Johnson represented her party in 2012, has outlined policy positions that include a “Green New Deal”, focused on renewable energy jobs and aimed at making the United States transition to 100% renewable energy complete by 2030. Stein has also proposed a reduction in the military budget by a third and the creation of a regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture.



On the Republican side, Evan McMullin, a beneficiary of the grounded “Never Trump” movement, failed to get on the ballot in 26 states before he’d even sent out his first campaign release. McMullin nonetheless tried to give disaffected conservatives an alternative to the Republican nominee who, he says, has tapped into “people’s darkest prejudices and deepest fears”.

McMullin’s best hope – and likely his only one – to make an electoral dent would require Trump’s departure from the race, though the nominee has made no overt sign that he wants to quit. “Like millions of Americans, I had hoped this year would bring us better nominees who, despite party differences, could offer compelling visions of a better future,” McMullin said in his announcement.

“Instead, we have been left with two candidates who are fundamentally unfit for the profound responsibilities they seek.”

But can they begin to make a difference? Only once in recent election cycles have third party candidates had any significant influence, when in 1992, Texan businessman Ross Perot took 18% of the vote, carving into the support for incumbent Republican George HW Bush and helping Arkansas governor Bill Clinton to victory. Some Democrats blamed third-party candidate Ralph Nader for delivering George W Bush the election in 2000, but the third-party candidate won a paltry 2.74% of the vote, and his supporters were split between Republicans and Democrats.

Johnson’s running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld, said he’d seen interest and fundraising pick up as Trump’s campaign has floundered. Their campaign recently reported a $1m one-week fundraising haul and has reported that more than 40,000 people have pledged to donate at least $15 to his campaign on 15 August.

But that was in a relatively tight race. With Clinton now leading Trump by double digits in some key battleground states, the impact of any third-party candidate could be limited.

“At the moment it doesn’t look like they can have much impact at all,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic adviser. “But if the race gets closer, they could throw it either way.”

Sheinkopf reasoned that this election has become more about personalities and less about what party leaders want. The long-term impact may be a significant shift in how people view Democrats and Republicans, he said. As it now stands, Stein, Johnson and McMullin could act as a convenient parking spot for voters disgusted with both candidates.

Earlier this month, a federal judge rejected a challenge brought by Johnson and Stein arguing that the bar for inclusion is set artificially high. Yet there are signs the ground could be shifting. Mike McCurry, now co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates and a former press secretary for Bill Clinton, hinted that a third podium might be needed.

“Some of our production people may have said, ‘Just in case, you need to plan out what that might look like,’’ McCurry told Politico. “We won’t know the number of invitations we extend until mid-September.”

Ron Faucheux, president of Clarus Research Group, a nonpartisan polling company, said there was broad support for including even minor candidates. “Polls show that voters think third party candidates should be included,” he said, “and in an election like this, where polls show a majority of voters dislike both main party candidates, there is a good reason to give them the opportunity to at least look at other options.”

But even Johnson and Stein were somewhat wistful about their prospects, casting themselves as agents of change who, at best, could represent the beginning of a break with the current two-party system.

“The biggest message is ‘consider us’ as a very, very viable alternative to this two-party system that has become so polarized that they’re not able to do anything,” Johnson has said.

Stein advanced a similar argument. “We’re having a political reorganization in this election because the Republicans are kind of falling apart,” she said, “and the Democrats have kind of split with a lot of the Bernie Sanders supporters just not happy with the alternative.”

She argued that it was by elections about “the lesser of two evils” that the country inherited many of its problems.

But first, the two have to get on TV.

“There’s no way I’m going to win the presidency if I’m not in the presidential debates,” Johnson said. “I do believe anything is possible given that right now, arguably the two most polarizing figures in American politics today are running for office.”",REAL
"The Republican presidential contest is not, regardless of what it seems some days, all about Donald Trump. There’s another dynamic unfolding that has almost nothing to do with the businessman-politician currently atop the polls but that will have a major influence on who becomes the party’s nominee.

This other struggle involves the competition among former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. History suggests that whoever emerges triumphant in this three-way rivalry will be in a strong position to claim the nomination, though admittedly the past has been a poor predictor of events so far in this campaign.

Ever since Trump surged to the top of the polls, the other candidates have been trying to assess both his staying power and the cost-benefit analysis of engaging him. Trump and Bush have clashed almost from the start, with growing intensity. More recently, as Rubio has risen, Trump has taken aim at him, and Rubio has responded in kind.

None of the other candidates has a clear strategy for taking down Trump. But they all think he will look like a different candidate — and in their assessments, a less formidable candidate — once the field narrows to three or four finalists after the voting begins. So they are beginning to focus on one another as much as they are worrying about him.

With the first contests still months away, none of the three yet looks like a front-runner. In the average of recent national polls, Rubio and Bush run fourth and fifth behind Trump, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina. Neither Bush nor Rubio breaks double digits. Kasich doesn’t even break 5 percent.

National polls at this stage are less meaningful than state polls. In Iowa, where the first caucus will take place in early February, Trump and Carson lead, with Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) currently third. Bush and Rubio trail the first three, and Kasich is even deeper in the pack. In New Hampshire, Trump also has a big lead, but Kasich is jockeying with Fiorina for second, with Carson and Bush next and Rubio farther back.

[Trump and Bush take on Rubio in New Hampshire]

In recent days, Bush, Rubio and Kasich have shown how much they’re worrying about one another. They’ve been sniping at each other and making other moves that underscore the significance of their competition.

Rubio has long emphasized that the party needs a fresh candidate, not one tied to the past, an implicit criticism of his fellow Floridian who is part of an American political dynasty. Bush, a two-term former governor, has belittled Rubio’s experience, or lack thereof. Kasich, a two-term governor and longtime House member, has claimed that his experience and record are unmatched by any of the other candidates.

Advisers to the three anticipate more attacks ahead. “The Bush campaign is feverishly doing their opposition research on Governor Kasich and Senator Rubio,” said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist. “An empire like that is not going to go quietly into the night. We’re expecting pretty sharp elbows to be thrown. We’re going to handle it head on.”

Past Republican nomination contests often have devolved into competition between a candidate from the center-right or mainstream conservative wing of the party and a candidate from the hard right or populist conservative wing. Most times, the candidate from the mainstream conservative wing becomes the nominee.

This year, the race is more scrambled because of the added factor of the apparent desire by many Republicans for an outsider or non-politician. That has elevated Trump, Carson and Fiorina and has forced the others to adapt. Rubio has been stressing that, despite being in the Senate, he’s really not of Washington.

Instead of establishment vs. tea party, one GOP strategist describes the race this time as a competition between those in the anger, or anti-Washington, lane, vs. those in the aspirational lane. Bush, Rubio and Kasich all fall more into the aspirational lane.

What will make the difference? Based on how the three candidates are running, it’s clear that they see the path ahead in slightly different ways, though each has handicaps he must overcome to win.

Bush has repeatedly pushed back at Trump by arguing that anger and insults cannot win the presidency. He seeks to be the aspirational candidate, conservative enough because of his record in Florida to be acceptable to a conservative party, while offering a positive and inclusive message that reaches beyond the GOP coalition.

But many Republicans see Bush as least able to appeal across the entire party — not much more able to appeal to the hard right than Cruz would be able to attract mainstream conservatives.

Lodged firmly in the establishment wing as the son and brother of former presidents, he faces resistance on the far right and among those yearning for an outsider. His hope is that he can change perceptions of himself, outlast his rivals with superior resources and persuade Republicans that he’s their best hope to win a general election.

Sally Bradshaw, Bush’s senior adviser, said the key remains what it has been from the start of the campaign: to portray Bush as a conservative reformer by stressing what he did in Florida. “People don’t know that yet,” she said. “When that message burns in, his numbers are going to change. That’s his path.”

[What the pundits said then and now about Donald Trump]

Kasich is looking to the traditional model. He is the compassionate conservative of 2016 who hopes to strike first in New Hampshire and build from there. His advisers believe that, eventually, he can reach across the divide in the party to become the nominee.

But the party has not only moved right in the past decade, it also has developed a harder edge than when George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000. Kasich’s support for expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is just one example of a position that will not sit well with many conservatives.

Rubio’s team sees crosscutting appeal as vital, a race that will favor a candidate who can best unite a fractured party. The senator’s goal is to demonstrate skills as a communicator, to show depth on the issues, to turn his personal story into a positive message for the party, to make as few errors as possible and over time generate enthusiasm across the GOP coalition.

Rubio, too, has vulnerabilities. His past support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, from which he has backed away, remains an obstacle in his path. So too does his personal profile, that of a youthful first-term senator with limited experience trying to become president — a profile not unlike that of President Obama when he first ran eight years ago.

David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief strategist in both campaigns, often has said that voters look for a replacement rather than a replica in picking a new president. The adviser to one of Rubio’s rivals put it this way: “When was the last time this country elected two presidents with similar attributes?” Rubio will be trying to dissuade his fellow Republicans that he isn’t another Obama.

There are wild cards in the calculations of all three camps. Maybe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who occupies similar space, will catch fire in New Hampshire and elsewhere, although the resistance to him within the party is significant. Fiorina has demonstrated fearlessness that has jarred even Trump and can appeal across the party. Carson remains a candidate of unknown potential.

Last, there is the Trump factor and what his support represents. For now, he remains the dominant force in the GOP race. But the advisers to Bush, Rubio and Kasich see a turn in the campaign heading into the final months of the year, one that will heighten the competition among them with significant consequences for their party.",REAL
"By Sarah Jones on Tue, Nov 1st, 2016 at 1:26 pm Comey struggled with not wanting to appear biased as the FBI investigated Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election, and so he told the Obama administration not to accuse Russia of the DNC hackings lest they be seen as ""partisan"". Share on Twitter Print This Post 
Russia did hack the Democrats. So all of that email information that the media has been reporting came from a foreign entity that seeks to alter the outcome of the U.S. election. 
But FBI Director James Comey struggled with not wanting to appear biased as the FBI investigated Russian interference with the U.S. presidential election, and so he told the Obama administration not to accuse Russia of the DNC hackings lest they be seen as “partisan”. 
Republican FBI Director James Comey advised the Obama administration not to publicly accuse Russia of hacking the DNC and more “on the grounds that it would make the administration appear unduly partisan too close to the Nov. 8 election,” officials “familiar with the deliberations” told the Washington Post. 
These sources with knowledge of the internal discussions spoke to the Post on the condition of anonymity. 
There are a few reasons why Comey might want to keep his agency’s investigation of Russian interference under the radar, but given his choice to publicly suggest that his agency might be re-opening its exhaustive investigation of Clinton’s emails, which resulted from a Republican-led, bogus, overreaching and seemingly endless Benghazi investigation that also cleared Clinton, it seems odd that Comey was going to stay silent on the Russia matter. 
Comey’s decisions is especially odd given the reports that the Russians have been communicating and coordinating with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to the point that he is already “compromised.” 
Only one of these matters might allow a foreign power control over the United States president. 
The same sources tell the Post that Comey made the decision to reveal the Clinton emails to Congress because he had already testified in that matter and said the investigation was closed, which suggests that he was concerned with his own reputation. 
Not sure I’m buying that because if Comey really only cared about his own reputation ahead of not appearing partisan he wouldn’t have said anything at all, but that doesn’t mean that his motives were nefarious. 
There might well be good reason for this – after all, this is the FBI and they can’t tell us everything, but as of right now Comey has mishandled this `and appears to be trying to influence an election to help Republicans. Just because he is a Republican and just because he has donated to Republicans doesn’t mean he isn’t doing his job properly. 
But Comey has a lot of explaining to do right now. He is under fire for good reason, as the explanations he’s giving for these decisions don’t make sense and are contradictory.",FAKE
"1 Reply 
Tyler Durden – Perhaps the most beneficial outcome resulting from last night’s loss of the Clinton Clan, whose “charitable” donations from generous donors such as Saudi Arabia to the Clinton Foundation just ended, is that with Hillary not in charge, the probability of World War III has been taken off the table. 
This was confirmed early this morning, When Russian President Vladimir Putin – whose relations with the US and Barack Obama have deteriorated to Cold War levels – congratulated Donald Trump for his election victory on Wednesday, and said he expected relations between the Kremlin and Washington to improve. 
The Kremlin announced that Putin had sent a telegram to Trump on Wednesday morning expressing “ his hope they can work together toward the end of the crisis in Russian-American relations, as well address the pressing issues of the international agenda and the search for effective responses to global security challenges .” 
Additionally, speaking at the presentation ceremony of foreign ambassadors’ letters of credentials in Moscow, President Putin said that Russia is ready and looks forward to restoring bilateral relations with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin said, commenting on the news of Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election. 
“We heard Trump’s campaign rhetoric while still a candidate for the US presidency, which was focused on restoring the relations between Russia and the United States.” 
He added that “we understand and are aware that it will be a difficult path in the light of the degradation in which, unfortunately, the relationship between Russia and the US are at the moment.” 
Speaking about the degraded state of relations between the countries, the Russian president once again stressed that “it is not our fault that Russia-US relations are as you see them.” 
Other Russian politicians joined in. 
Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has also expressed hope that Trump’s victory in the presidential election will help pave the way for a more constructive dialogue between Moscow and Washington. 
“The current US-Russian relations cannot be called friendly. Hopefully, with the new US president a more constructive dialogue will be possible between our countries,” he said. “The Russian Parliament will welcome and support any steps in this direction,” Volodin added on Wednesday. 
Commenting on Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia will judge the new US administration by its actions and take appropriate steps in response. “We are ready to work with any US leader elected by the US people,” the minister said on Wednesday. 
“I can’t say that all the previous US leaders were always predictable. This is life, this is politics. I have heard many words but we will judge by actions.” 
Sergey Zheleznyak, member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in parliament, hailed Trump’s “deserved victory” in a statement on the party’s website. 
“Despite all the intrigues and provocations that the current U.S. government put in front of Trump, people supported his intention to address the serious problems that have accumulated in America, and to move from confrontation to cooperation with Russia and the world, ” Zheleznyak said. “I hope that between now and [his] entry into office as the new president of the United States there will be no tragic events and the new U.S. administration will have enough political will and wisdom for civilized solutions to existing problems.” 
Russia’s second biggest party the Communist Party also issued a statement Wednesday morning, expressing hope for more cooperation and calling Trump’s win “astounding” and against the “elite clans” in the United States. The party leader was more lukewarm on the news, noting that U.S. imperialism was unlikely to change. 
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the right-wing nationalist leader of the Liberal Democratic Party who has previously been nicknamed the Russian Donald Trump, called Clinton a “mindless old woman” and praised U.S. voters for “coming to their senses” after eight years of President Barack Obama, whom he referred to as “the Afro-American.” SF Source Zerohedge  ",FAKE
"Region: Europe A recently published article titled with the words of a popular French song “ Marlbrough s’en va-t-en Guerre ” has attracted much attention around the background of Francois Hollande’s “achievements” Now that Donald Trump has been elected as the next President of the United States, a string of European politicians have started voicing their discontent, including the current French President. He has failed to hide such discontent with the decision Americans have made. However, he described Trump’s victory as a “lesson learnt,” the importance of which “goes far beyond the borders of the United States.” Little did he know, French politicians have interpreted this passage in their own reserved way. On November 10, the lower house of the Assemblée nationale has passed the vote to impeach Hollande, passing the bill with 152 votes out of the total of 199, resulting in the president of the Assemblée Nationale, Claude Bartolone, officially submitting a draft resolution for Hollande’s impeachment. The impeachment procedure has only been introduced in 2014 in accordance with Article 68 of the French Constitution. According to the laws of the Fifth Republic, a president can only be impeached if he blatantly ignored his duties. To start this procedure, one would have to obtain 58 votes in the Assemblée Nationale, where the Republicans are now holding a total of 193 seats. The demand for Hollande to leave was signed by a total 152 deputies, including the Republican Spokesperson in the Assembly, Christian Jacob and the former Prime-Minister Fran ç ois Fillon. The Right are convinced that Hollande should be held liable for disclosing state secrets in his book with the telling title “ A President Shouldn’t Say This “ (U n pr é sident ne devrait pas dire ç a …). They are convinced that a president should know better than putting down all the details of French secret service operations aimed at assassinating terrorist leaders abroad. If the draft is to be found valid, it will be handed over to a special judicial committee of the the lower house of the the Assemblée Nationale. Finally, when everything is said and done, the two houses will form the Republican High Court that will decide the fate of the sitting president. But regardless of how the impeachment procedure turns out in the end, this whole affairs has literally ended Hollande’s political career, since he has no chance to get reelected. Therefore, one could use the words of the above mentioned song : « Monsieur Malbrough est mort » ( Malbrough is now dead ). However, this wasn’t much of a surprise for anyone who has been following French politics, since, according to Le Figaro , Hollande’s approval rating has hit an all time low of 11%. No President in French history enjoyed less support from the population, with even the Socialist party reluctant to back up Hollande’s policies, with only 34% supporting him. However, it seems unlikely that Hollande will be the only European leader that will have to face the consequences of his mindless support of US President Obama’s warmongering policies that have, at the end of the day, inflicted serious damage to EU interests. Jean P é rier is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East , exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” Popular Articles ",FAKE
"Two days after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in remote West Texas, a former D.C. homicide commander is raising questions about how the death was handled by local and federal authorities.

“As a former homicide commander, I am stunned that no autopsy was ordered for Justice Scalia,” William O. Ritchie, former head of criminal investigations for D.C. police, wrote in a post on Facebook on Sunday.

[The death of Antonin Scalia: Chaos, confusion and conflicting reports]

Scalia was found dead in his room at a luxury hunting resort in the state’s Big Bend region by the resort’s owner. It took hours for authorities to find a justice of the peace. When they did, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body — which is permissible under Texas law — and without ordering an autopsy.

On Sunday, the U.S. Marshals Service, which provides security for Supreme Court justices, said that Scalia had declined a security detail while at the ranch, so marshals were not present when he died. When the marshals were notified, deputy marshals from the Western District of Texas went to the scene, the service said in a statement.

Guevara said she declared Scalia dead based on information from law enforcement officials on the scene, who assured her that “there were no signs of foul play.” She also spoke to Scalia’s doctor, who told her that the justice had been to see him Wednesday and Thursday last week for a shoulder injury and that he had ordered an MRI for Scalia, according to WFAA-TV in Dallas. The 79-year-old justice also suffered from several chronic conditions, Guevara said. She said she was awaiting a statement from the physician to complete Scalia’s death certificate.

The manager of the El Paso funeral home that handled Scalia’s body said Scalia’s family insisted on not having an autopsy done. But the decision has spawned a host of conspiracy theories online, as well as skeptical questions from law enforcement experts such as Ritchie.

“You have a Supreme Court Justice who died, not in attendance of a physician,” he wrote. “You have a non-homicide trained US Marshal tell the justice of peace that no foul play was observed. You have a justice of the peace pronounce death while not being on the scene and without any medical training opining that the justice died of a heart attack. What medical proof exists of a myocardial Infarction? Why not a cerebral hemorrhage?”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Guevara has said she rebutted a report by a Dallas TV station that Scalia had died of “myocardial infarction.” She said she meant only that his heart had stopped.

Ritchie also raised questions about the marshals’ actions:

“How can the Marshal say, without a thorough post mortem, that he was not injected with an illegal substance that would simulate a heart attack…” “Did the US Marshal check for petechial hemorrhage in his eyes or under his lips that would have suggested suffocation? Did the US Marshal smell his breath for any unusual odor that might suggest poisoning? My gut tells me there is something fishy going on in Texas.”

A spokesman for the marshals service said Monday that the marshals did not make a formal determination of death. He directed questions to the county judge who made the call.

Scalia’s physician, Brian Monahan, is a U.S. Navy rear admiral and the attending physician for the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court. He declined to comment on Scalia’s health when reached by telephone Monday at his home in Maryland.

“Patient confidentiality forbids me to make any comment on the subject,” he said.

When asked whether he planned to make public the statement he’s preparing for Guevara, Monahan repeated the same statement and hung up on a reporter.

Eva Ruth Moravec in Austin contributed to this report.

This post has been updated.

Why blocking Obama’s pick could backfire on Republicans

Supreme Court nomination process sure to be epic debate",REAL
"a reply to: kruphix Theocracy? Tim Kaine? In September 1980, as violence and civil war erupted throughout Central America, a quiet American left Harvard Law School to volunteer with Jesuit missionaries in northern Honduras. Around him, the United States-backed military dictatorship hunted Marxists and cracked down on the Catholic clergy for preaching empowerment to peasant farmers. But some locals also looked warily on the bearded and mop-haired Midwesterner in their midst. Just a few hours south, the Central Intelligence Agency was using Honduras as a staging ground in its covert war against Latin American communism, with right-wing forces training for operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. “Some of the people were wondering what’s going on, who is this guy?” Tim Kaine, then a 22-year-old volunteer and now the Democratic nominee for vice president, said in an interview. He understood why. His mentors in the priesthood had also urged him to be wary of friendly American faces. Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It was a time of such intrigue and suspicion,” Mr. Kaine said. Far from being a C.I.A. operative, Mr. Kaine was a young Catholic at a crossroads, undergoing a spiritual shift as he awakened to the plight of the deeply poor in Honduras. In its far-flung pueblos, banana plantation company towns and dusty cities, Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel, known as liberation theology, that championed social change to improve the lives of the downtrodden. In Honduras, his recitation of the traditional Catholic mealtime blessing changed to “Lord give bread to those who hunger, and hunger for justice to those who have bread.” Honduran military leaders, American officials and even Pope John Paul II viewed liberation theology suspiciously, as dangerously injecting Marxist beliefs into religious teaching. But the strong social-justice message of liberation theology helped set Mr. Kaine on a left-veering career path in which he fought as a lawyer against housing discrimination, became a liberal mayor, and rose as a Spanish-speaking governor and senator with an enduring focus on Latin America.",FAKE
"""I don't think he understands very well the situation. And he's entitled to his opinion,"" the Arizona Republican said Sunday in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on ""State of the Union.""

McCain was pushing back against Trump's assertion last week that the United States should let ISIS and Syria's army fight -- and let Russia worry about ISIS there. Trump's comment came as Russia launched air strikes in the region.

""Do we want to keep slaughtering people in Syria that are fighting for freedom?"" McCain said. ""Do we want to continue the barrel bombing, which is one of the reasons why 240,000 Syrians have been murdered? Do we want this flood of refugees to continue?""

In the interview, McCain also prodded Republican presidential candidates to ""think about Ronald Reagan and the way he conducted his campaigns.""

""To impugn each other's characters and integrity is very harmful to each other, ourselves, and our chances of winning a general election,"" he said, without naming any specific candidates. ""I think there's a lot of people in the party that are not happy about the tenor of some of the remarks and the allegations about each other,"" McCain said. ""I'm afraid we will pay a price for it at the polls, and I hope we'll change.""",REAL
"The Donald Trump campaign is counting on “undercover voters” to win in November.

Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway outlined her vision of how the Republican nominee could win in November despite consistently trailing in polls, during an interview with Channel 4 in the United Kingdom for the documentary President Trump: Can He Really Win?

Conway insisted that Trump’s support was not reflected in polls because of the perceived social stigma of supporting the Republican nominee. “Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the elections … it’s become socially desirable, especially if you’re a college educated person in the US, to say that you’re against Donald Trump,” said Conway.

“People who are supporting Donald Trump, who have not voted Republican in the past, who have not voted in quite a while, are so tired of arguing with family and friends and colleagues about their support of Donald Trump that they just decided not to discuss it.”

Conway insisted: “We give people a comfortable way to express that maybe they don’t want to vote this year and why that is.” She described her method as “proprietary”. She said that as a result, she could reach these undercover voters “in many different ways”. She said: “We go to them where they live, literally.”

Conway’s statement echoes what in American politics is known as the Bradley effect, a phenomenon that describes the willingness of some white voters to tell pollsters that they are voting for an African American candidate while preferring the white candidate in the voting booth.

It is named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who was favored in polls in California’s 1982 gubernatorial election over his white Republican opponent, George Deukmejian, before suffering a narrow shock loss on election day. However, while its existence is disputed, anecdotal evidence for the phenomenon is mostly concentrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Conway’s argument is that something fundamentally similar is happening in the US in 2016.

Speaking to Channel 4 earlier this month, Conway buoyed her claims by citing the UK’s experience of the EU referendum vote.

Polling suggested the UK would remain in the European Union, but it became clear on election night that the vote was going the other way.

Conway said: “Voices are silenced in polls that really should be included because people are too reliant on lists, and they’re excluding people who maybe feel so passionately about that issue, Brexit, or so passionately about this candidate, Donald Trump, that they’re going to vote for the first time ever in many, many, many cycles.”



In the past week, Trump has begun to ditch his previous unscripted style, using teleprompters on stage at every rally. That is despite repeatedly bashing the technology in the past, saying in August 2015: “I say we should outlaw teleprompters … for anybody running for president.”

The shift toward making Trump a more predictable candidate came as Conway took control of the campaign. The top aide outlined the message she thought Trump should continue to emphasize: “The best Donald Trump is the Donald Trump who is talking about national and homeland security, economic growth and prosperity, ethics and why so many Americans dislike and distrust Washington and all its adjuncts, its consultants, its donors, its lobbyists, its politicians, its way of doing business.”

However, despite his adoption of teleprompters, Trump still veered badly off script in a rally in Akron, Ohio, on Monday night. The Republican nominee said: “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”

He continued to claim that if he were elected, “we’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”

Just as there may be a cohort of undercover Trump voters waiting to emerge in November, it seems that despite Conway’s best efforts, there is an undercover candidate who won’t let a teleprompter keep his penchant for controversial statements hidden.",REAL
"WikiLeaks: ‘How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did?’ #PodestaEmails20 Posted at 10:29 am on October 27, 2016 by Greg P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
WikiLeaks’ 20th release of John Podesta’s email is out, and this one caught our eye . Apparently team Clinton was discussing how they could answer questions on Bill Clinton’s past, including comparisons of his behavior to accused rapist Bill Cosby: 
Yeah, John … how do you handle question No. 4? Trending",FAKE
"WikiLeaks Destroys Hillary Mouthpiece Donna Brazile… Iron-Clad Proof 
“I am sick and tired of people like you using that language. That is inflammatory, that is not true,” Gingrich said during the interview. “When you use those words, you take a position, and it is very unfair of you to do that, Megyn.” 
“I think your defensiveness on this may speak volumes, sir,” Kelly told Gingrich. “If Mr. Trump is a sexual predator, then it is a big story. And what we saw on that tape was Trump saying himself he likes to grab women by their genitals and kiss them against their will. That’s what we saw. And then we saw 10 women come forward after he denied actually doing it.” 
“You are fascinated with sex and you don’t care about public policy,” Gingrich countered. Advertisement - story continues below 
You can watch the interview here: 
Now, it seems the chickens from that encounter might be coming home to roost. 
“Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed ‘very soon,’ but noted, ‘it’s up to her,’” The Wall Street Journal reported. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
"Suspect captured in ‘ambush-style’ killings of two Iowa cops 11/02/2016 
USA TODAY 
Authorities captured a 46-year-old male suspect without incident Wednesday, hours after an early-morning “ambush-style” killing of two police officers in the Des Moines metro area. 
The suspect in the back-to-back killings was identified as Scott Michael Greene, said Urbandale police spokesman Sgt. Chad Underwood. Before capturing him, police had described Greene, who was last seen driving a blue Ford F-150 with an Iowa license plate, as armed and dangerous. 
Greene was taken into custody by the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department while walking along a rural road in Redfield, about 35 miles west of where the shootings occurred. 
According to police, Greene flagged down a passing Department of Natural Resources officer, handed over his ID and told the officer to call police. No shots were fired and there was no struggle, according to police. 
The suspect was taken by ambulance to a Des Moines hospital with an unknown injury. 
In a late morning news conference, police identified the slain officers as Urbandale Police Officer Justin Martin and Des Moines police Sgt. Anthony “Tony” Beminio. 
The attacks began around 1:06 a.m. CT, when police departments from both cities responded to reports of gunfire at the intersection of 70th Street and Aurora Avenue in Urbandale. 
The first officers arriving on the scene found Martin fatally wounded. About 20 minutes later, some two miles away, Beminio was was shot near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Ave. while responding to reports of the first officer’s shooting. Beminio was transported to Iowa Methodist Medical Center, where he died. Scott Michael Greene (Photo: Des Moines Police) 
Both officers were gunned down in their patrol cars. 
“It doesn’t look like there was any interaction between these officers and whoever the coward is that shot them while they sat in their cars,” a visibly emotional Parizek told reporters. 
“In all appearances it looks … that these officers were ambushed,” he added. Officer from Des Moines and another from Urbandale were shot and killed in their cars, @dmpolice said. #officersdown 
— Daniel P. Finney (@newsmanone) November 2, 2016 
Des Moines police, fearing officers were being singled out, paired up its patrol officers so none were on the street alone, Parizek said. 
“There’s literally a clear and present danger if you’re a police officer,” he said. 
Police did not offer many details on how investigators identified Greene as a suspect. Underwood said he was identified “through a series of leads and a series of investigative tips.” 
As of an early-morning news conference, police were still notifying the family members of the slain officers and planned to withhold the officers’ names, years of service and other details until later in the day, Parizek said. 
Attorney General Loretta Lynch condemned the killings, saying “violence has no place in the United States of America.’’ 
“Let me be clear, there is no message in murder,’’ the attorney general said, referring to simmering distrust between law enforcement and many communities across the country. “Violence creates nothing; it only destroys.’’ A Des Moines police officer was found fatally shot in a vehicle near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Avenue in Des Moines on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016. (Photo: Brian Powers, The Des Moines Register) 
It’s the first time Des Moines has seen a police officer shot and killed in the line of duty since two officers were gunned down in separate incidents in 1977. 
Two Des Moines officers, Susan Farrell and Carlos Puente-Morales, died earlier this year when their vehicle was struck head-on by a wrong-way drunk driver. 
The killing of the Urbandale officer appeared to be the city’s first for an officer shot in the line of duty, Underwood said at the news conference. 
Parizek thanked the community for its support when the department lost Farrell and Puente-Morales, as well as with this tragedy. 
“I don’t even know where to begin on how bad this year is,” he said. But, “this is what we do. We come in day in and day out, we go out there and provide the same level of service regardless of what’s going on in our personal and professional lives.” Officers investigate the scene at Merle Hay and Sheridan ave. where an officer was found shot at about 1:26 A.M. on on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016, in Urbandale. 
In a statement, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad called the attack on the officers “an attack on the public safety of all Iowans.” 
“We call on Iowans to support our law enforcement officials in bringing this suspect to justice,” he said. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the police officers who were tragically killed in the line of duty as well as the officers who continue to put themselves in harm’s way.” 
Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst extended her thoughts and prayers to the families of the officers killed. 
“Although the investigation is still unfolding, what appears to be an ambush attack of police in the line of duty is an attack on the community at large and all of the men and women who risk their lives every day to protect us,” Ernst said. “This was a senseless act of violence and it cannot be tolerated.” 
Finney and Haley report for The Des Moines Register. Follow them on Twitter: @newsmanone and @charlyhaley . Stanglin reports for USA TODAY in McLean, Va.",FAKE
"Archives Michael On Television 10 Things That Every American Should Know About Donald Trump’s Plan To Save The U.S. Economy By Michael Snyder, on September 15th, 2016 
Can Donald Trump turn the U.S. economy around? This week Trump unveiled details of his new economic plan, and the mainstream media is having a field day criticizing it . But the truth is that we simply cannot afford to stay on the same path that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have us on right now. Millions of jobs are being shipped out of the country , the middle class is dying , poverty is exploding , millions of children in America don’t have enough food , and our reckless spending has created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the planet . Something must be done or else we will continue to steamroll toward economic oblivion. So is Donald Trump the man for the hour? 
If you would like to read his full economic plan, you can find it on his official campaign website . His plan starts off by pointing out that this has been the weakest “economic recovery” since the Great Depression… 
Last week’s GDP report showed that the economy grew a mere 1.2% in the second quarter and 1.2% over the last year. It’s the weakest recovery since the Great Depression – the predictable consequence of massive taxation, regulation, one-side trade deals and onerous energy restrictions. 
And Trump is exactly right about how weak this economic recovery has been. 
So how would he fix things? 
The following are 10 things that every American should know about Donald Trump’s plan to save the U.S. economy… 
#1 Donald Trump would lower taxes on the middle class 
The tax savings under Trump’s plan would actually be quite substantial for middle class families. The following numbers come from a recent Charisma article … 
• A married couple earning $50,000 per year with two children and $8,000 in child care expenses will save 35% from their current tax bill. 
• A married couple earning $75,000 per year with two children and $10,000 in child care expenses will receive a 30% reduction in their tax bill. 
• Married couple earning $5 million per year with two children and $12,000 in child care expenses will get only a 3% reduction in their tax bill. 
#2 Donald Trump would lower taxes on businesses 
Under his plan, no business in America would be taxed more than 15 percent. Alternatively, Hillary Clinton’s plan would tax some small businesses at a rate of close to 50 percent. So Trump’s plan would undoubtedly be good for businesses, and it would encourage many that have left the country to return. 
But where would the lost tax revenue be made up? 
#3 Childcare expenses would be exempt from taxation 
For working families with children this would be a great blessing. Without a doubt this is an effort to win over more working women, and this is a demographic that Trump has been struggling with. 
It is definitely an idea that I support, but once again where will the money come from to pay for this? 
#4 U.S. manufacturers will be allowed to immediately fully expense new plants and equipment 
This would undoubtedly lead to a boom in capital investment, but it would also reduce tax revenue. As an emergency measure this would be very good for encouraging manufacturers to stay in America , but it would also likely increase the budget deficit. 
#5 A temporary freeze on new regulations 
Red tape is one of my big pet peeves, and so I greatly applaud Trump for this proposal. I think that Bob Eschliman put it very well when he wrote the following about Trump’s planned freeze on new regulations… 
In 2015 alone, federal agencies issued over 3,300 final rules and regulations, up from 2,400 the prior year. Studies show that small manufacturers face more than three times the burden of the average U.S. business, and the hidden tax from ineffective regulations amounts to “nearly $15,000 per U.S. household” annually. Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as $2 trillion dollars per year, and Trump will end it. 
#6 All existing regulations would be reviewed and unnecessary regulations would be eliminated 
In particular, Trump’s plan would focus on getting rid of regulations that inhibit hiring. The following are some of the specific areas that he identifies on his official campaign website … The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which forces investment in renewable energy at the expense of coal and natural gas, raising electricity rates; The EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which gives the EPA the ability to regulate the smallest streams on private land, limiting land use; and The Department of Interior’s moratorium on coal mining permits, which put tens of thousands of coal miners out of work. 
#7 Donald Trump would fundamentally alter our trade relationships with the rest of the globe 
Donald Trump is the first major party nominee in decades to recognize that our trade deficit is absolutely killing our economy. I write about this all the time , and it is a hot button issue for me. So I definitely applaud Trump for proposing the following … Appoint trade negotiators whose goal will be to win for America: narrowing our trade deficit, increasing domestic production, and getting a fair deal for our workers. Renegotiate NAFTA. Bring trade relief cases to the world trade organization. Label China a currency manipulator. Apply tariffs and duties to countries that cheat. Direct the Commerce Department to use all legal tools to respond to trade violations. 
#8 Donald Trump’s plan would be a tremendous boost for the U.S. energy industry 
Barack Obama promised to kill the coal industry, and that is one of the few promises that he has actually kept. Obama also killed the Keystone Pipeline, and right now the energy industry as a whole is enduring their worst stretch since the last recession. To turn things around, Trump would do the following … Rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule. Save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda. Ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline. Make land in the Outer Continental Shelf available to produce oil and natural gas. Cancel the Paris Climate Agreement (limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius) and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs. 
#9 Trump would repeal Obamacare 
Trump claims that Obamacare would cost our economy two million jobs over the next ten years. And without a doubt, it has already cost the U.S. economy a lot of jobs . 
Not only that, but Obamacare has also sent health insurance premiums soaring, and this is putting a tremendous amount of financial pressure on many families. 
Trump says that he would “replace” Obamacare, but that is a rather vague statement. 
What exactly would he replace it with? 
#10 Trump’s plan says nothing about the Federal Reserve 
This is a great concern, because the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does. It is at the very heart of our debt-based system, and unless something is done about the Fed our debt bubble will continue to get even larger. 
Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by more than 96 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger. For Trump to not even mention the Federal Reserve in his economic plan is a tremendous oversight. 
We are in the midst of a long-term economic decline, and things have not gotten better during the Obama years. If you can believe it, a study that was just released by Harvard even acknowledges this … 
America’s economic performance peaked in the late 1990s, and erosion in crucial economic indicators such as the rate of economic growth, productivity growth, job growth, and investment began well before the Great Recession. 
Workforce participation, the proportion of Americans in the productive workforce, peaked in 1997. With fewer working-age men and women in the workforce, per-capita income for the U.S. is reduced. 
Median real household income has declined since 1999, with incomes stagnating across virtually all income levels. Despite a welcome jump in 2015, median household income remains below the peak attained in 1999, 17 years ago. Moreover, stagnating income and limited job prospects have disproportionately affected lower-income and lower-skilled Americans, leading inequality to rise. 
That same study found that the percentage of Americans participating in the labor force peaked back in 1997 and has been steadily declining since that time… 
If we continue to do the same things, we will continue to get the same results. 
Donald Trump is promising change, and many of his proposals sound good, but there are also some areas to be concerned about. 
Ultimately, just tinkering with the tax code and reducing regulations is not going to be enough to turn the U.S. economy around. We need a fundamental overhaul of our economic and financial systems, and Trump’s plan stops well short of that. But without a doubt what he is proposing is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s plan, and so he should definitely be applauded for at least moving in the right direction. More Jobs Shipped Out Of The Country: Ford Moves All Small Car Production To Mexico » trump will have an “accident” 
but,but,but but ,but obammy mammy said “Donald trump will never (ever) become president”,his words ver batem.bawok also said “Donald trump will never replace me in the WH”,ominous ,disturbing words from el president,what exactly did baaaarak mean obamas red line 2.0 
Obama did say trump will “never” become president,not on his watch,for him that was a” red line’,but let’s face it we all know barry’s track record when it comes to red lines lol JC Teecher 
It will only happen the way the Obominable One says it will happen, “IF”, the Creator on the Throne, says it will. barry oldwater 
Hopefully his changes will spur economic growth which will bring in more revenue as more jobs are created, not saying it will, just speculating that this is his plan. SnodtBlossom 
he won’t be elected anonymous 
Nobody is elected, they are selected. Elections are just a way to keep dumb-downed masses in check. So keep voting Lazarovic 
You’re stupid, that’s why you’re anonymous. Coward too. anonymous 
You must be responding out of shameful ignorance. It’s not your fault you are dumb-downed. It is ironic that you are calling me out for posting anonymously, when you are doing the same. Resorting to name calling though, really? LIZ THE SHIZ 
just like in Ancient Rome election season is bread and circus , keep the masses entertained so they won’t notice they’re powerless and gullible BS1986 
She’ll use that in the debate. BS1986 
he wants to be coronated , all hail Trumpus Maximus ThePeanut995 
You are in for a rude awakening GSOB 
We all are, if either one is elected. I’ve done my research. No choice is without risk. Trump is who I’d like to see. It’s time to think outside the box. 
If he gets in, perhaps in a 2nd term, the Fed Reserve get’s axed. 
I can’t stop thinking big with Mr. Trump. I can’t stop thinking small with the leftist. GSOB 
With more than 50% leftist population….it does look like the final nail. Alan Cecil 
Bwah ha ha ha…another twist on the “trickle-down” theory. It works great…for the top 1%. hillery comin for your guns 
then there’s hillery’s economic “plan”, massive across the board tax increases,massive increases in the size of gov’t,staggering draw droppin deficits,massive increases in entitlements (handouts),after all she did say she was continuing beewok obambi failed policies Mondobeyondo 
I have never felt as depressed – about my own future, about the future of my friends, my family and my country- as I do at this very moment. William Lutz 
Mondo I’m feeling the same way. Everyday the life is being sucked out of our wonderful nation with each passing day. I’ve noticed it ever since the 2008 crisis, but even more so after Obama got reelected. The only thing we have to do now is hope for the best of our personal lives in the next few years. This downfall is inevitable. anonymous 
You’re not the only one. Jerry C 
Most of us felt that way almost 8 years ago. rat28 
Another stupid tickle down economy by the GOP.. We should be taxing the rich . Obama regulation and energy policies protect us from global warming Obama health care help the poor and sick .. repealing Obamacare will hurt all the economy gains we seen the last 8 years.. Bad deal from Donald Trump. libs credit card economics 
yeah just let the 35 year old “kids” livin in their parents basement worry bout the 12T of red ink,and that’s just in 8 years GSOB 
Which is impossible to pay off. South Texas 
The stupid in your comment just burns. I’ve not met one person who is retired who has benefited from the wonders of Obummacare. Their cost went way up for less choice and service. Maybe you could go get a medical degree and offer our services for free and help out with the problem. 
As for GW, another money sucking joke pushed by scum who live in opulate homes and waste more energy than any working class family. Speaking of which, how big is your home? SnodtBlossom 
Sleep with Trump in 2016! BS1986 
You do have your moments. LIZ THE SHIZ 
oh Snotty, you just want to rub your fingers through his thick blond weave, don’t you SnodtBlossom 
What I’m saying is.. If you vote for Trump and you’re single and admit to voting for him,.. a lot of women won’t want you. GSOB 
Let me be blunt – God called women into spiritual leadership roles, as an exception to His design, in order to shame the men into bringing the nation back to God, and into exercising their God given responsibility to lead in the church, the home and in the nation. 
In no way does the Bible EVER paint women in leadership roles as a positive thing, but it is something God uses to shame the men into action. SnodtBlossom 
Be SHAMED.. be very SHAMED G SOB LIZ THE SHIZ 
and you wonder why your single LIZ THE SHIZ 
but they’ll be the ugly women, not the mindless bleach blond Fox News types Satirist 1976 
Michael this is one of the best articles you have ever written. You presented Trump’s solutions to issues that plague everyday Americans. Well done. This is not satire. 
Trump should replace Ocare with the free market and nothing else. William Lutz 
Replace Obamacare with individual Health Savings Accounts based on investments. Public hospitals with vouchers is also a great idea. South Texas 
No, the government needs to get out of looting me with a ‘savings account’ and make it free market all the way. GSOB 
You don’t understand how it works. They don’t tax those dollars you put into a HSA. Orange Jean 
Except that in most of them… you select a certain $$ amount each year… and if you don’t use it, you lose it. Who do you think ends up with the money then? GSOB 
Don’t expect a reward for being careless. No system can sustain carelessness South Texas 
Exactly my point. Why do we have to put up with some over compensated elected person to ‘let’ me do something with my money? 
I’ve never had a use for an HSA but known people who do. But hey, at least the scum implicitly acknowledge they are cheating us by ‘giving’ us the privilege to use our money pre-tax. 
If some of us were not working almost 5 months of the year to support government and we had a real private health insurance and health care sector, this would be a non issue. SnodtBlossom 
Hillary will win Peanut 
NO SHE WON’T … HE IS NOW NECK AND NECK WITH HER AND WILL EXCEED HER… MORE STUFF ABOUT HER WILL BE COMING OUT! SnodtBlossom 
How much prior political experience does Trump have? NADA!!! ZIP!!!! ZILCH!!! ZERO!!! He talks the talk, but never walked the walk. But hey.. it’s only THE PRESIDENCY! Maybe next we’ll grab people off the street w/no medical training to do surgery! 
Neither did Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower have a prior politcal position, though both had a strong military background. Dwight being ” The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II” and Grant “Commanding General of the United States Army” How much military background does Trump have? NADA!!! ZIP!!!! ZILCH!!! ZERO!!! 
“no major U.S. company has filed for Chapter 11 more than Trump’s casino empire in the last 30 years.” He has filed four business bankruptcies. Maybe he thinks it’s just as easy to file bankruptcy w/the entire government and walk away. Raymond Chow 
Political experience means nothing especially when someones political experience means the detriment of the nation. Cobbett 
”How much prior political experience does Trump have” 
Oh yes…there’s Iraq, Libya, Syria(she was also instrumental in convincing Bill to bomb Serbia….all resounding success stories…politics just equal BS. turee60 
How much military experience does Hillary and Obama have zilch none! jonodough 
you mean like the idiot obama? Mondobeyondo 
If she doesn’t have a coughing epileptic seizure before the election. LIZ THE SHIZ 
yup, the fix is in just watch the electoral college , your vote don’t mean squat!!! GSOB 
Not yet it don’t Raymond Chow 
Why do people always mention electoral college when they don’t understand what electoral college is? 
When looking at the map of blue or red those are just projections where Democrats or Republican voted favorably in the past it doesn’t mean electoral college. Electoral college delegates are pick by the winning candidate in the state. All states in the national election are winner take all. So if the candidate wins in majority of the district in the state he wins all the state electoral college. LIZ THE SHIZ 
just like super delegates, seems fishy budman 
nebraska is not winner take all. each congressional districts electoral vote depends on the vote within that district. GSOB 
And the minimum wage will go up. And unemployment will rise, and government will spend even more. Orange Jean 
… yeah, and little pink pigs will fly away from Smithfield Foods and not get turned into hams! ISA41:10 
Yep! krinks 
Hey Genius. A Free Market solution led people to be denied coverage for nearly every malady under the guise of a pre existing condition. A Whistle Blower for/from the Health Insurance Industry admitted as much. The more she came up with creative reasons to deny payment/coverage the higher she was promoted. GSOB 
The free market is the best thing going! Because it has some level of risk, non hackers despise and envy this good system. What makes it good is that it benefits the majority of the people, not all. No system can. What happens if the majority are non hackers? Non hackers default to handout mode by finding fault with reality and cry, they depend on a leftist government to provide a silver spoon for everyone. The market then is no longer free. krinks 
Weren’t you paying attention? They take your premiums and then when you need to use it deny payment. GSOB 
Appeal it then. krinks 
Appeal? To who? The same person who gets a bigger bonus for telling you no? Are you an idiot? GSOB 
You sound like a confident young man. Just ignore me. Stick with your leftist ideas. Your choice. Jace Tate 
the once estudious michael snider is now drowned by drivel. LIZ THE SHIZ 
well he opened it up to a Trollathon Raymond Chow 
When people runs out of argument or loses they start calling names which is exactly what you are. Yes, you sue or appeal your case. krinks 
I explained that a big bonus follows when you tell people NO in the private industry. If you don’t understand this YES you are an IDIOT. Jerry C 
Then payers should be free to leave and go to a provider who says yes in a fair market. LIZ THE SHIZ 
meanwhile you die waiting for the appeal Raymond Chow 
Then sue them or perhaps you didn’t sign up for the coverage. It’s like you got liability for your car insurance but you wanna be cover for medical when you get into an accident. joe 
That’s how “insurance” works. Simply banking in reverse and how the inventors, IE banksters intended. Raymond Chow 
Yes, a free market system where you can acquire health insurance across state boundaries. I.e., wish to buy health insurance in Iowa where it’s lower even though I live in California. Cobbett 
Why are people so obsessed with their health? Why paying endless 10000s on the chance I ”might” get ill…rather spend it on women and booze. Lillian DeVore 
I think it’s more of an obsession with the pre-existing conditions people’s health. Cobbett 
I had my appendix whipped out when I was 14(some time ago)…even though I’m a heavy boozer(although not now)…I Feel Fine. Why worry…what will be will be. GeneP54 
He should, but he said that he wants universal healthcare. turee60 
I agree our medical the way it was was still the best in the world. People from Canada were coming here for medical cause it was so much better. The government doesn’t need to get into our medical. Years ago like in 1986 I was out of work and had no medical and went to a free clinic in my area and got waited on quickly and it didn’t cost me anything. William Lutz 
I agree. On one hand, some of Trump’s policies sound alright, but a lot of his proposals are dubious and a few are unrealistic. First of all, building a YUGE wall on the border is going to be very expensive and not very effective. Furthermore: 
1) He never really mentions how he is going to deal with Planned Parenthood. 2) He obviously has no full intention of abolishing some bureaucratic agencies such as the Fed Reserve, the FDA, the USDA, Department of Energy, etc. 3) Reckless spending and debt is going to continue, and tax revenue will never keep up with the expenses. 4) I am not sure how he is going to replace Obamacare. 5) His idea on how to combat ISIS is not practical. It would mean extorting the Middle East out of their oil and having a costly militarist operation in various countries. It’s a recipe for World War 3. 6) Even though he is anti establismhment at heart, he is running on a major party platform, which is rigged and corrupt. He should’ve refused to participate within the Republican Party and join an alternative political party. Jace Tate 
Isis took the oil didn’t they William Lutz 
Yeah they probably took it, but my point is that you don’t easily defeat ISIS by confiscating the oil and having a double version of the Iraq War. By the way, I forgot to mention that DJ Trump never spoke openly about civil liberties or mass surveillance either. Hence, I suspect that he will strengthen the so called “war on terror”, which God forbid he would do. No more George Dubya Bush please. Christopher Privett 
Obama expanded Bush’s programs of surveillance, and just paid Mexico 75 Million dollars. For a WALL built across their southern border. John Francis 
You are right, some things don’t add up, but I’ll take him over Hillary any day of the week. I’m still struggling with whether to vote in the presidential at all, having a very hard time with Trump’s torture advocacy and his call for the execution of Edward Snowden. Jessy Scholl 
Seriously, Donald Trump can’t talk about abolishing federal agencies because he would be killed on the spot. Jace Tate 
how are lower taxes going to help zero growth? How is income in the middle class going to aid the systems recovery? Once you go off the cliff of a set system in a fixed economy, you don’t think there is any fixing it. I think higher taxes and lower barriers to growth are the answer. However the way the apple is peeled can only be determined post collapse, after the decision makers have decided the direction the country takes. That is why even if you take out the true deplorables ruining everything, the best you can do is elect someone who identifies with the American way of life and our decisions. themacabre 
How are higher taxes for failed government programs going to help?…we need to cut federal spending not give it more money. That’s like giving a lazy bum watching tv and drinking beer another six pack. ISA41:10 
” I think higher taxes and lower barriers to growth are the answer. ” 
How stupid can you be?!?!? Explain to me how taking more money from the private sector (businesses and people) improves growth and the economy? 
Waiting .. JC Teecher 
You are proof of how well mind control by the elite liberals is working. It is this mentality that is meant to destroy the God induced US Constitution. 
When a nation has allowed four scotus to take the whole nation down a rat hole of sin, then the nation either digs back out or it gets drowned in darkness. 
There is a slim…very slim chance that America can dig out of the rat hole for a few years, but ultimately sin will drown this nation into the abyss. 
Don’t believe it? It is in the book; the only book that matters. sister soldier 
Amen and amen again. LIZ THE SHIZ 
we will wind up with a one world government just like in Star Trek Next Generation , the united federation of planets GSOB 
Leftist 1. A member of an ideological camp that defines socialism as a form of totalitarian secular feudalism; an advocate for the management of non-Leftist people as farm animals. 
“When the Leftist tried to convince me that North Korea had the only true and just form of socialism on earth, I gave up on trying to talk rationally with him and just walked away.” Jace Tate 
if you would all stop patting each other on the back you’d find the diversity among yourselves deplorable in the face of true knowledge. Jace Tate 
you changed your comment you liberal demagogues. William Lutz 
But I give Donald credit where it’s due. At least he is better than Hillary and not as conniving and deceiving as she is. However, I refuse to pick the least of two bad apples. GSOB 
.. vizeet 
Removing Obamacare and reducing Defense budget will be huge saving for US. And will be good for rest of the world…. William Lutz 
Trump however, will not reduce military spending and his idea of replacing ACA is only a secret plan. SnodtBlossom 
Do you think he will help you when you are homeless? GSOB 
It is not the POTUS job to do that. LIZ THE SHIZ 
if he has any rooms empty in his crappy hotels he can rent them to the homeless and get refunded through section 8 housing Raymond Chow 
You can’t even afford to step into his hotel lobby. I don’t think they allow vagrants there. sister soldier 
Didn’t the current sitting president already reduce the defense budget? My bad…. he reduced our defenses. turee60 
You can’t reduce the defense budget you need to raise the defense to protect our country from terrorist! Ye Deplorable Uncucker 
I would hope that after he is elected he will go after the Fed. Shut them down. Paleface 
and let the treasury print the US$. that way avoiding paying interest to a private bunch of parasites. LIZ THE SHIZ 
ask JFK what happens when you try to go after the fed, you can’t can you? Priszilla",FAKE
"Given that Congress has become so utterly dysfunctional in recent years, it's tempting to think the upcoming presidential election will be fairly low-stakes. Does it even matter what Jeb Bush thinks about tax policy or what Hillary Clinton is proposing on paid leave? Hardly anything will pass.

The next president won't need Congress to tackle global warming

But on global warming, it's a rather different story. Whoever gets elected to the White House in 2016 will have an enormous amount of influence over America’s climate policies — and they won't need Congress to act.

For that, you can thank (or blame) President Obama. Over the past six years, the Environmental Protection Agency has acquired unprecedented authority to regulate the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions. Obama has used that power to enact a slew of new pollution rules, including CO2 regulations on coal plants, all with the aim of cutting US greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025.

The EPA will likely keep this authority to regulate carbon dioxide for the foreseeable future — unless it gets altered by courts or repealed by Congress. And many of the biggest decisions on how to use it will be left to the next president.

If, say, Hillary Clinton wanted to expand Obama’s carbon rules to oil refineries or cement plants, she could. Conversely, if a Republican president skeptical of climate change wanted to bog down implementation of Obama’s CO2 rules for coal plants, he'd be able to do that, too. (Though, as we'll see, Republicans may not have unlimited power to scuttle Obama's climate policies.)

""Any future administration will have a lot of room to be either more ambitious or less ambitious,"" explains Michael Wara, an expert on energy and environmental law at Stanford. And how the next president uses the EPA could have ripple effects around the world — and even decide the fate of ongoing international climate talks with China, India, and other countries.

So far, the 2016 candidates have been vague about which way they'd steer the EPA. Clinton has said Obama's climate rules should be ""protected at all cost,"" but she's given little sign of whether she might expand them further. Meanwhile, Republicans like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush sound skeptical about tackling global warming, but they haven't said whether they might try to relax or even dismantle Obama's climate policies. So here's a look at what they could do.

First, a recap of how the executive branch acquired so much power over US climate policy. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the existing Clean Air Act — if there's evidence that they endanger public health and welfare.

In 2009, Obama's EPA laid out this evidence, and that ""endangerment finding"" set in motion a series of rules to curtail US greenhouse gas emissions. Since this was being done under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, a law Congress had passed in 1970, no new legislation was required. The EPA could act on its own. The big actions so far:

Add it all up, and the White House claims these rules put the US on pace to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025. But whether that actually happens will depend on the next president.

Okay, now let's assume it's 2017. There's a new president, and Congress is still totally gridlocked on climate change. What happens next?

The next president likely won't be able to dismantle Obama's climate policies entirely — not on his or her own. After all, the Supreme Court has effectively ordered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases so long as there's evidence that they cause harm, and that evidence is quite solid. Only Congress could undo everything Obama's done, by revising the Clean Air Act.

Still, whoever occupies the White House and EPA will have a lot of say in how to implement Obama's climate rules. That sounds boring, but it's actually a key step. There's tons of leeway to strengthen or weaken these rules. Here are a few ways this could play out:

1) Fuel-economy standards could be tightened (or weakened) in 2017. Remember, the EPA's fuel-economy standards for new cars and light trucks are on pace to rise from their current 35 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Automakers may push to relax the CAFE standards in the midterm review

Yet those numbers aren't set in stone. These CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) rules are scheduled to come up for a midterm review in 2017. At that point, automakers may lobby to allow the standards to rise more slowly — particularly if sales of fuel-efficient vehicles have been sluggish due to low oil prices. Green groups, meanwhile, could push to make the standards stricter, or to have them keep increasing past 2025, to push vehicle emissions down even further.

So the next administration will have to decide. Leave the vehicle standards alone? Make them stricter? Weaker?

The one twist here is that due to a longstanding quirk of the Clean Air Act, California can threaten to create its own stricter standards if it's not happy with what the federal government is doing (and other states can join). Automakers really hate the idea of multiple sets of vehicle standards around the country, so they may prefer not to weaken the federal rules too much and risk having California go it alone.

2) The Clean Power Plan will live or die based on implementation. The EPA will finalize its rules for reducing carbon dioxide from existing power plants in the summer of 2015. It's a core component of Obama's climate policy — power plants are responsible for 31 percent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. But the next president will have enormous influence over how this plan actually works.

Assuming the rule holds up in court, it could prove difficult for the next president to simply hit the kill switch on the plan and start all over. But he or she will get to decide how to implement it — and that's arguably just as significant. After the rule is finalized, states will have another 14 months to submit plans for cutting emissions, though some will request extensions. That process could drag on until 2017 or 2018.

""There's a lot of latitude in the review process""

At that point, the EPA will review each state's plans for reducing emissions from its power plants and decide whether the plans are acceptable. An administration that really wants to tackle climate change can make sure states are doing as much as is feasible. By contrast, a president who was less concerned about global warming could allow states that wanted to, like Texas, to submit less-aggressive plans.

""There’s a lot of latitude in the review process,"" says Stanford's Michael Wara. ""The history of the Clean Air Act shows this. If you have a president who doesn’t like climate policy, they could basically signal to the states that they’re going to give a lot of compliance flexibility and allow states to make assumptions in their plan that reduce their costs."" This would likely involve seemingly arcane tweaks to models and baselines that would be harder for green groups to challenge in court.

Meanwhile, some states may outright refuse to submit any plans for reducing emissions. (Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is already urging states to do exactly this.) If that happens, the EPA has the authority to impose its own federal plan on the states. The agency will unveil the details of this federal plan in 2015, though, again, implementation would be left to the next president.

Meanwhile, industry groups are almost certain to challenge aspects of the rule in court. Adele Morris, the policy director for the Climate and Energy Economics Project at the Brookings Institution, points out that an administration hostile to Obama's EPA rule could defend it weakly in court. And if any parts of the rule get struck down, the next administration will get to decide how to redo it.

It all comes down to preference. ""If you have an administration that's friendly to [Obama's] policy, then you'd have continuity in implementation,"" says David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate and clear air program. ""But if you had an administration that wasn't as friendly, they could try to drag their feet or change the rules.""

3) The next president will decide whether to regulate other sectors — like refineries. The Clean Air Act doesn't just cover vehicles and power plants. Technically the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from other sources, as well. Oil refineries. Cement plants. Trucks. Airplanes. The agency is regulating methane leaks from new oil and gas wells, but it hasn't touched existing wells. And so on. These sources all add up.

The Obama administration is leaving most of the decisions about what to do with these sectors to the next president. If Hillary Clinton comes in and wants to expand the EPA's authority here, she can. If Marco Rubio comes in and doesn't, he may have to fend off lawsuits, but he can likely hold off on doing this for a long time.

At this point, we only have a hazy sense for what most US presidential candidates think about global warming. But given how much power they have at their disposal, they should give more detailed answers.

For instance, Hillary Clinton's campaign chair, John Podesta, claims that she'll put climate change and clean energy at the ""top of the agenda."" And Clinton has said the EPA's climate rules should be ""protected at all cost.""

Hillary says the EPA rules should be ""protected"" — but would she expand them?

Fine. So we know she'll veto any attempts by congressional Republicans to repeal the EPA rules altogether. But what else? Would she try to strengthen the fuel-economy rules during the 2017 midterm review? Would she want to expand the EPA's carbon regulations to oil refineries and chemical plants? Would she try to beat Obama's goal of cutting emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025?

On the other end of the spectrum, there's Marco Rubio, who says, ""I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it."" But what does that mean in practice? Would he weaken the vehicle rules? Abandon the US goal of cutting emissions 26 percent?

Then there's Jeb Bush, who says he's ""concerned"" about climate change and that ""we need to work with the rest of the world to negotiate a way to reduce carbon emissions."" But, again, what does this mean? Would he keep Obama's climate rules in place? Strengthen them? Weaken them?

Some green groups have started to focus on these questions. ""We definitely want to ensure that the next president is actually committed on building progress through the Clean Power Plan,"" Tiernan Sittenfield, senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, told me.

For now, many environmentalists have mainly been pressing Clinton on what she thinks of the Keystone XL pipeline. Yet that issue will probably be resolved before Obama leaves office. The EPA rules are far more relevant for the next administration.

It's worth being precise about what the EPA can and can't do here. The executive branch has acquired sweeping authority over the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. The Obama administration estimates that this authority alone could push emissions down 26 to 28 percent between 2005 and 2025.

truly drastic changes to our energy system would likely require Congress

Looked at one way, that's a huge deal — a decisive break from the past, when emissions would go up and up seemingly without end. Looked at another way, it's a pittance.

To help avoid drastic global warming, the United States will probably need to push down emissions 80 percent or more by midcentury. That would require truly staggering changes. It wouldn't be enough for coal and gas plants to get slightly more efficient under EPA rules. We'd have to replace virtually our entire energy system with a new, cleaner one.

That's the sort of thing that only Congress can really do. Only Congress can fund R&D for new technologies or offer subsidies for clean energy. Only Congress can bring about dramatic changes to our grid infrastructure. Only Congress can enact an economy-wide carbon tax. Barring some creative flexibility on regulations, these are things the next president just can't accomplish without cooperation from the House and Senate.

Where the EPA rules could have a more important effect is on the international stage — at least in the near term. Remember, the United States only accounts for about 17 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. There's also China, India, Brazil, Europe, Russia, and so on. That's why international cooperation on climate change is so crucial.

Right now, the world is groping toward a very, very weak international agreement. The US put forward its pledge to cut emissions at least 26 percent between 2005 and 2025. That spurred China to respond by vowing to get its emissions to peak around 2030. Other countries have started to pitch in, too.

Add all these pledges up, and we're still not close to tackling global warming. The Climate Action Tracker estimates that we're on pace for global average temperatures to rise 3.1°C (or 5.6°F) above pre-industrial levels, give or take — a seriously disruptive change.

""What the US has done with China is a big step in changing the dynamics""

Even so, some experts think even these weak promises could lead, iteratively, to stronger action over time. ""You can see how those plans could start to connect together and create a positive negotiating dynamic,"" David Victor, a political scientist at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, told me. ""The encouraging precedent here is in trade ... You build credibility and trust over time and then move to bigger issues.""

The next US president can help decide how this agreement continues to evolve in the years to come. The US can keep pushing its own emissions down and try to persuade countries like China and India to respond in kind. Or it could abandon this budding framework entirely.

Abandoning the US climate targets, says Wara, ""would do real damage to whatever credibility the US has left on the international stage. What Obama has done with China is a big step in changing the dynamics in a very positive way. And if the US were to walk away from that, that would be very damaging for future climate negotiations and commitments.""",REAL
"You are here: Home / US / Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 Look at the SHOCKING Number of Kids Born To Illegals in 2014 October 27, 2016 
According to the Pew Research Center’s latest numbers, in 2014, 275,000 anchor babies were born in the United States — enough to fill Orlando, Florida. 
The Washington Examiner reported : 
Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics. 
The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center. 
The report reviews births to unmarried foreign-born and American born women. Those who are foreign born, including illegals, are seeing their birthrate drop, though it is still making up for the decline in births by American women. 
Pew’s recently-released report read: “In 2014, about 275,000 babies were born to unauthorized-immigrant parents in the U.S., accounting for about 7 percent of all U.S. births, and 32 percent of all U.S. births to foreign-born mothers.” The share of new mothers who are teenagers is higher among the U.S. born (6%) than among the foreign born (2%) https://t.co/d6f9C9ALoR pic.twitter.com/ydJpV2NgXh 
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016 
“A third of all births to foreign-born mothers were to unmarried women – down from a peak of 37 percent in 2008. At the same time, the rate has held steady for U.S.-born women and now stands at 42 percent,” the study continued. 
According to Pew, the birthrate among U.S.-born women has declined, so the rise in the birthrate is solely because of immigrant mothers. The growth in annual U.S. births since 1970 has been driven entirely by immigrant moms https://t.co/bhzGRzgimg pic.twitter.com/dozNVXXVgT 
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2016 
While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years – most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide – the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970. 
This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014. 
So, do you think that all these people coming here, in many cases illegally, have assimilated to our culture and/or are planning on doing so? Take a look around and it’s easy to see that the answer is no. 
If Hillary Clinton is elected, she plans to greatly increase refugee flows and give amnesty to illegal immigrants who broke our laws. In contrast, Donald Trump has pledged to restore law and order, build a wall, enforce immigration laws, and put the safety and interests of American citizens first. 
Which one sounds better to you at this critical point in our country’s history?",FAKE
"Sharpton Attacks O’Keefe, So O’Keefe Releases Brutal Expose on Sharpton… BOOM! 
If you are going to wallow in the liberal media mire, though, MSNBC is by far my favorite — and trust me, a year-and-a-half of observing presidential campaigns has made me quite a connoisseur of the left-slanting morass. 
MSNBC pretends that conservatives and Trump supporters are from another planet — or, at the very least, another culture, a sort of cargo cult that is to be studied anthropologically but never taken with any seriousness. 
This interaction with MSNBC reporter Jacob Rascon on Wednesday proved what I’m talking about perfectly. He had found a mother and daughter in line, apparently for early voting. They were also African-American, which made them a cargo cult on top of a cargo cult, by liberal media standards.   
However, when he asked them about criticism of Trump’s African-American outreach, the mother and daughter blew him out of the water. 
“Well, I think Trump is reaching out to all citizens, including African-Americans,” Trina, the daughter, told MSNBC. “He’s trying to address a problem. It should not be a problem if you address there is something wrong, and you have a plan that wants to help people.” 
“That’s what a president should do for us. He should reach out and try to help people and address problems that’s going on in our country.” 
“Some of the criticisms have been about (Trump’s pitch to minority voters) ‘What do you have to lose?’” Rascon said to Gloria, the mother. “What do you think about that criticism?”  ",FAKE
"More than 500 staffers from the Justice Department will be monitoring polling stations across 28 states Tuesday.

Those staffers have been dispatched to 67 jurisdictions and will be watching for civil rights violations, including racial discrimination.

""As always, our personnel will perform these duties impartially with one goal in mind: to see to it that every eligible voter can participate in our elections to the full extent that federal law provides,"" Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday.

     

 The announcement comes amid rising concerns about voter intimidation.

""Observation at the polls should not cross the line into intimidation, that's key,"" The Christian Science Monitor quoted Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University's Moritz School of Law.

On the other hand, there have also been concerns about voter fraud, with some 41 percent of Americans believing the election could be stolen, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.

Speaking at a restaurant and bar in Anderson Township, Ohio, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin defended recent claims by Donald Trump that the election could be rigged.

""Of course he gets crucified by the press saying he's conspiratorial or something, saying there could be voter fraud,"" she said. ""Well, primaries can be fixed, and debate questions can be fixed, and dead people can vote.""

     

 In 2012, about 780 monitors were dispatched. This year, that number is down by about 35 percent.

     

 Justice Department officials say they hope voters will not detect any difference in the federal presence.

""In most cases, voters on the ground will see very little practical difference between monitors and observers,"" Vanita Gupta, head of the agency's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement Monday.

""We work closely and cooperatively with jurisdictions around the country to ensure that trained personnel are able to keep an eye on the proceedings from an immediate vantage point."" she said.",REAL
"Comments 
In the wake of a string of completely extraordinary revelations starting this summer by FBI Director James Comey, Senator Warren is now demanding that the FBI release investigatory details about the 14 corporations and 11 individuals which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) referred for criminal prosecution in 2010; 
“Your recent actions with regard to the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provide a clear precedent for releasing additional information about the investigation of the parties responsible for the financial crisis. 
These new standards present a compelling case for public transparency around the fate of the FCIC referrals. If Secretary Clinton’s email server was of sufficient interest to establish a new FBI standard of transparency, then surely the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis should be subject to the same level of transparency. 
As a consequence of the 2008 crash, trillions of dollars in American housing wealth was destroyed. Millions of Americans were touched personally as they lost their homes, their jobs, or both. Hundreds of pension funds were eviscerated, and millions of retirees saw their financial futures wiped out. Congress created the FCIC to examine what went wrong and to determine Whether any individuals or entities deserved law enforcement scrutiny as a result of their actions in this crisis. The FCIC followed the law and sent such referrals to the DOJ, yet not a single senior Wall Street executive has ever been criminally prosecuted. 
For the uncounted millions of Americans whose lives were changed forever and for those who are still dealing with the consequences of the crash, I can think of no matter of intense public interest about which the American people deserve the details than the issue of what precisely happened to the criminal referrals that followed the 2008 crash.” 
Until now, the FBI has never, ever released the investigatory file of anyone or any institution it has targeted. However, if the Democratic nominee herself was a bank, then she would have nothing to fear from the FBI. 
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is laser focused on protecting the American people from shady banks and financial scams, but the newly transparent FBI apparently doesn’t share her concern since those investigations don’t involve Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. To date, no executive has been criminally prosecuted for financial crimes by banks, Wall Street firms and lending institutions which caused the Great Bush Recession’s mass unemployment and foreclosure epidemic. 
Of 25 entities named by the FCIC to be criminally investigated , only one actual person has paid a civil penalty, and another person – none other than Daniel Mudd, former CEO of mortgage giant Fannie Mae, was fined — but had his $100,000 penalty paid by the government sponsored enterprise that employed him. 
FBI Director James Comey has deployed a massive double standard to protect the criminal financial institutions, handing them a free pass and complete secrecy for collapsing our national economy and wiping out $3 Trillion dollars in home equity, stock equity and savings, while dragging Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton through the mud for Comey’s partisan predilections for transparency when she’s demonstrably done absolutely nothing wrong. 
The FBI Director himself admitted in July that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Democratic nominee, yet he himself cannot resist rehashing and releasing the investigatory details in public over and over. Releasing anything about an investigation, or even delivering an actual indictment, actually violates Department of Justice policy to remain silent in the 60 days before an election. It’s been described by former top Justice Department officials as the “difference between being independent and flying solo.” 
Elizabeth is right. How long will the FBI wait to deliver transparency to the American people eight years after their jobs, homes and savings were attacked by irresponsible bankers? 
Once the FBI completes disclosing those investigatory files, then how long will it take for them to deliver indictments and justice to the men and women who caused the Great Recession? 
Neither can happen soon enough. For now, he needs to stop his partisan witch-hunt against Hillary and start going after the real crook.s",FAKE
"A strong majority of Democratic voters think Hillary Clinton should keep running for president even if she is charged with a felony in connection with her private email use while secretary of state, according to a new poll.

Clinton was strongly criticized in a State Department inspector general report last week about her email use.

The report found repeated warnings about cybersecurity were ignored and staffers who expressed concerns were told “never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”

Yet, this seems not to be a big issue among Democrats. The Rasmussen poll released Tuesday found 71 percent of Democratic voters believe she should keep running even if indicted, a view shared by only 30 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of unaffiliated voters. Overall, 50 percent of those polled said she should keep running.

The FBI investigation into her email practices is still ongoing. Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders has avoided commenting specifically on that probe, but campaign manager Jeff Weaver on Wednesday questioned whether she could keep going if an indictment comes down.

""That would be difficult to continue running a race,"" Weaver told Fox News on Wednesday, when asked about the poll.

The email scandal could still be problematic for Clinton's general election hopes, with 40 percent of all voters saying they are less likely to vote for Clinton because of it -- though 48 percent of voters said it would have no impact on their vote.

The Democratic primary frontrunner’s argument that she did nothing illegal with her email use is also apparently failing to sway many voters. According to the poll, 65 percent of voters consider it likely that Clinton broke the law with her email use, with 47 percent saying it’s very likely.

The poll of 1,000 likely voters was conducted May 29-30. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.",REAL
"Finally, the political revolt we’ve all been waiting for, David Stockman tells Lew Rockwell. October 28, 2016",FAKE
"Are the wheels coming off the Iran deal? Less than a year after Iran, America, and five other world powers inked a comprehensive nuclear accord, a debate over its terms has erupted anew.

In Washington, the braggadocio of a prominent White House aide is fueling Republican accusations that President Obama deliberately deceived the Congress and the country about Iran and the deal. And in Tehran, frustration over the residual impact of American sanctions has prompted increasingly resentful accusations from Iranian leaders that the United States has failed to live up to its end of the bargain. As a result, some are fretting that the deal is “at risk” and are laying blame on the White House doorstep.

Both claims are spurious, and deserve a more forceful rebuttal from the Obama administration. In the end, however, the ruckus over recent comments by Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes is largely an inside-the-Beltway drama—one that provides endless entertainment for Washington insiders but has little real significance for deal or American diplomacy.

By contrast, Iran’s dissatisfaction presents a serious diplomatic dilemma for Washington. But it should not be interpreted as evidence that the deal is “unraveling.” Rather, the chorus of complaints from Tehran demonstrates the accord signed in July 2015 is working exactly as it was intended—forestalling Iranian nuclear ambitions while amplifying the incentives for further reintegration into the global economy.

Obama’s handling of this first real test of the nuclear agreement will be crucial for sustaining its credibility. For the sake of the deal, and for any prospect of a durable Thermidor for the revolutionary state, Washington should resist the temptation to assuage Iran’s post-deal growing pains. If Iranians wants wholesale economic rehabilitation, their leadership needs to embrace the kind of policies that would yield that—in other words, meaningful political, economic, and foreign policy reform.

Not surprisingly, Iranian officials are seeking a quicker fix, and they have mounted an intense campaign to wrest supplementary sanctions relief from Washington. Their principal argument is that the theocracy has been stiffed. On an April visit to Washington, Valiollah Seif, the head of Iran’s Central Bank, questioned the benefits of the nuclear agreement, insisting that Tehran has received “almost nothing” of the sanctions relief that was promised as part of the deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Mohammad Javad Zarif, the country’s smooth-spoken foreign minister, has contended that “the United States needs to do way more,” warning that “if one side does not comply with the agreement then the agreement will start to falter.”

And Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, charged recently that “the Americans are engaged in obstruction and deception, adding: “on paper, the Americans say banks can trade with Iran but in practice they act in such an Iranophobic way that no trade can take place with Iran.”

Adding fuel to the fire are changes to U.S. visa policies that are perceived at constraining Iran’s economic rebound, deliberately inflammatory rhetoric from the U.S. Congress, and a recent Supreme Court verdict that paves the way for a $2 billion payout to victims of terrorist attacks attributed to Tehran or its proxies. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has described the decision as “flagrant theft” and evidence of enduring American hostility toward Tehran.

Tehran’s narrative plays equally well to its essential constituencies: the revolution’s power brokers, steeped in official narratives of American treachery; an Iranian citizenry impatient for its long overdue peace dividend; and a European business community anxious to reclaim its piece of the pie after an unwelcome five years of having to forgo a lucrative market.

And it wouldn’t be the first time Tehran got cold feet about its nuclear obligations out of an unfortunate sense of that the payoff was insufficient. In 2005, two years after a deal with Britain, France, and Germany to suspend core aspects of its nuclear program, Iran’s leadership soured on that deal and reneged. Anxiety about a repeat performance is prompting new U.S. efforts to facilitate business in Iran and a mounting debate in the press and on Capitol Hill around additional American sanctions relief.

But Iran’s campaign is grounded in a fundamental falsehood: that Washington has failed to live up to its end of the bargain. In fact, Washington has delivered fully on the sanctions relief pledged under the JCPOA, and officials in the White House, State Department, and even the enforcement office of the Treasury Department have engaged in extraordinary outreach to clarify remaining restrictions and underscore American commitment to the terms of the deal.

Moreover, the rewards of Iran’s nuclear concessions are actually widely evident—in the volume of new trade and investment that is already underway; in the scope and velocity of diplomatic and commercial reengagement with Iran; in the swifter-than-anticipated revival of oil exports. Heads of state from Italy and India, from South Korea to South Africa are beating a path to Tehran, accompanied by contingents of eager investors. Meanwhile, Iranian officials including Seif—chief of the same Central Bank that was formerly barred by sanctions—headline swanky conferences aimed at wooing European business players. The great Iranian gold rush is on.

The catch is that the money is moving more slowly than Iranian officials seem to have anticipated—and the trickle-down effect has been almost nonexistent for the average Iranian. The explanation for this lag is complex and multi-dimensional.

First and foremost, Iran is hard hit by the decline in oil prices, which have fallen by roughly 60 percent since the interim nuclear deal was signed in November 2013. Even in the best of times, the Islamic Republic was never a particularly easy place to do business, and many of its structural economic problems have been exacerbated by a decade of sanctions and the particularly egregious mismanagement of the 2005 to 2013 tenure of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran’s designation since 2008 as a “high-risk and non-cooperative” jurisdiction by Financial Action Task Force, a multilateral body established to combat money laundering and terrorist finance, poses additional hurdles for banks. In addition, a host of other market distortions induce investor caution: corruption, a bloated and opaque banking system, an inflexible labor market, unattractive contract terms for energy investments, the traditional dominance of the public sector.

Tehran’s challenges in luring capital is further complicated by its reputation for provocative domestic and regional behavior. Torching embassies, arresting tourists and dual-national businessmen, testing ballistic missiles—none of this provides a conducive context for Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. As the old adage goes, capital is a coward, and the Islamic Republic is a haunted house.

Iran has seen this all before. Similar factors undercut Tehran’s previous efforts to open up to the global economy. In the early 1990s, after the long war with Iraq, then-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought foreign trade and investment as part of his massive reconstruction program. Initial outcomes were encouraging, but falling oil prices, excessive short-term debt, and the perpetuation of an ideological foreign policy drove away investors and undermined his economic reforms.

This time around, American sanctions have cast a long shadow. The nuclear deal left intact an array of restrictions: the primary U.S. embargo on Iran as well as financial measures that preclude access to the U.S. dollar and penalize third countries for doing business with Iranian individuals and entities that are involved with terrorism or other malfeasance. The vestiges of the sanctions regime create truly epic compliance issues for any international investor. And the hangover effect of a decade of stringent (and costly) enforcement has generated a culture of overcompliance in the international financial sector, since institutional due diligence is an integral dimension of the industry’s viability.

None of this should come as a surprise to Tehran; American officials were crystal clear throughout the negotiations and in advocating on behalf of the deal that the deal only removed the nuclear-related sanctions and that U.S. measures imposed as a result of Iran’s support for terrorism, its human rights abuses, or other issues would remain intact. And every sensible analyst looked past the inflated rhetoric of the deal’s opponents, who brayed against the deal as a massive “cash bonanza,” to recognize that the residual sanctions regime would remain a significant factor in Iran’s post-deal economic picture. As I wrote at the time:

So if this was entirely predictable, why is Tehran crying foul now? Unlike in the United States—where the agreement’s shortcomings were oversold (if anything) rather than downplayed—in Iran there was a triumphalism with which the deal was sold domestically. This was mostly because of the peculiarities of Iran’s political system. To avoid the appearance of contravening the “red lines” articulated by Khamenei, the country’s ultimate authority, Iranian negotiators depicted the JCPOA as delivering wholesale sanctions relief. Rouhani described the outcome as a “legal, technical, and political victory” for the country, emphasizing that Tehran achieved “more than what was imagined.”

Iran’s politically motivated embellishments were exacerbated by the hype surrounding the deal, cultivated by entrepreneurs and aspiring middlemen who presented Iran in hyperbolic terms as “the best emerging market for years to come” and “one of the hottest opportunities of the decade.” But while it may offend the Iranian ego, the relative scale of the opportunity in Iran is more modest than other much-heralded economic openings, such as China. It is hardly inconceivable that many banks and other firms have simply chosen to sit this first round out.

Neither Iran’s economic challenges nor the grievances of its leadership are “fraying” the nuclear accord; in fact, they only highlight its underlying logic. While the deal’s scope was finite—it was not a wholesale rapprochement or rehabilitation—many of its supporters argued that its logic would prove self-reinforcing. Iran’s gradual reintegration into the global economy would bolster the case among its leadership for a broader moderation of its domestic and foreign policies precisely in order to boost their benefits.

Tehran’s dissatisfaction with the payout to date suggests this formula is working. A little bit of sanctions relief has whetted the entrepreneurial appetites of the clerical state. Despite official invocations proclaiming a “resistance economy,” the trickle of new trade and investment from Europe and Asia into Iran since the deal was signed has only intensified pressure for more—and for more tangible dissemination of its benefits among the Iranian population. In other words, it is the success of the nuclear deal—rather than its shortcomings—that is driving the complaints that have emanated from Iran.

The United States is not responsible for the hesitancy of international capital and other economic hiccups that Tehran has experienced in the aftermath of the nuclear agreement. The culpability resides, as it always has, with Iran and the risks that its government’s policies pose for international business. If Iranians want to see their nascent opening to the international community expanded—if they want the peace dividend they have been promised, they need to look to their own leadership and its policies. If Iran’s Central Bank governor wants “normal conditions” and “access to the U.S. financial system,” as he demanded during his Washington visit, let him return to Tehran and help instill the kind of reforms that would make those goals possible.

There are sensible steps that Washington can take to ensure that the provisions of the nuclear deal are fully feasible, including limited mechanisms for enabling transactions, such as the repatriation of previously frozen assets, that are specifically permitted under the deal. Such exceptional measures are reasonable—not because they help Tehran, but because they help sustain consensus between Washington and its European partners and help preserve the West’s negotiating leverage with any future targets of American or multilateral financial sanctions.

However, it would be profoundly detrimental for Washington to provide significant unilateral relief to Tehran without reciprocal additional Iranian concessions. And the PR blitz by senior U.S. officials to reassure Iran’s prospective foreign investors has taken on an unseemly tone, especially since existing sanctions prohibit U.S. persons from facilitating transactions with Iran by foreign entities.

These measures may be aimed at building confidence, but they ultimately have the opposite effect—eroding Iran’s incentives to abide by the deal, undermining any rationale for broader changes. Iran remains a risky place to do business, and it is in Washington’s interests—as well as those of Iranians and the broader international community—that Tehran focuses on mitigating those risks rather than seeking to subvert their penalties.

The nuclear deal is working; Iran’s nascent reintegration into the global economy is intensifying internal debates and popular expectations. This is all to the good. But to get more, Tehran will have to give more.",REAL
"NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered a static hexagonal storm four times the size of Earth crowning Saturn’s north pole, including a clearly defined eyewall. Based on its size and movements, scientists have concluded that it’s a vast cloud pattern generated by a gigantic, perpetual hurricane spinning at the center of the planet’s north pole. Scientists estimate that this storm has been raging for decades – maybe even centuries.
Each side on the northern polar hexagon is approximately 13,800 km long, and the whole structure rotates once every 10 hours and 39 minutes -a day on Saturn. In just four years, Saturn’s hexagon has changed its color from blue to gold when Saturn’s north pole gears up for next year’s summer solstice.Saturn’s hexagon is a six-sided structure that spans roughly 32,000 km (20,000 miles) in diameter, and extends about 100 km (60 miles) down into the planet’s dense atmosphere. Because Saturn does not have land masses or oceans on its surface to complicate weather the way Earth does, its conditions should give scientists a more elementary model to study the physics of circulation patterns and atmosphere, said Kevin Baines, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who has studied the hexagon with Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. The last visible-light images of the entire hexagon were captured by NASA’s Voyager spacecraft nearly 30 years ago, the last time spring began on Saturn. After the sunlight faded, darkness shrouded the north pole for 15 years. Much to the delight and bafflement of Cassini scientists, the location and shape of the hexagon in the latest images match up with what they saw in the Voyager pictures.
“The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology. “It’s a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter.”
The hexagon was originally discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s. It encircles Saturn at about 77 degrees north latitude and has been estimated to have a diameter wider than two Earths. The jet stream is believed to whip along the hexagon at around 100 meters per second (220 miles per hour).
Early hexagon images from Voyager and ground-based telescopes suffered from poor viewing perspectives. Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, has a better angle for viewing the north pole. But the long darkness of Saturnian winter hid the hexagon from Cassini’s visible-light cameras for years. Infrared instruments, however, were able to obtain images by using heat patterns. Those images showed the hexagon is nearly stationary and extends deep into the atmosphere. They also discovered a hotspot and cyclone in the same region.
As observed by NASA’s Voyager and Cassini spacecraft, each point of the hexagon appears to rotate at its center at nearly the same rate that Saturn rotates on its axis. Along the rim of the hexagon, a jet stream of air is blasting eastward at speeds of 321 km/h (200 mph).
While we’re pretty confident that we know what Saturn’s hexagon is, the big mystery is how it got there in the first place. Once you have a giant whirlpool of air, it’s relatively easy to keep it spinning – but the force you need to get it wound up in the first place is a whole lot more difficult to explain.
It’s fascinating that the Cassini spacecraft could have observed two completely different colors in the hexagon between November 2012 and September 2016:

The best hypothesis is that this is what it looks like when Saturn changes seasons. With a year that lasts 29 Earth years, Saturn changes seasons only once every seven years, and the increased sunlight over the past three years could explain the golden haze.
“The color change is thought to be an effect of Saturn’s seasons. In particular, the change from a bluish colour to a more golden hue may be due to the increased production of photochemical hazes in the atmosphere as the north pole approaches summer solstice in May 2017.”
“Inside the hexagon, there are fewer large haze particles and a concentration of small haze particles, while outside the hexagon, the opposite is true,” Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University, explained back in 2013. “The hexagonal jet stream is acting like a barrier, which results in something like Earth’s Antarctic ozone hole.”
But since Saturn reached its equinox in August 2009 – the point where the Sun is directly over Saturn’s equator – it’s been gradually exposed to more and more sunlight, which means that for the past three years, aerosols have been produced inside of the hexagon and around the north pole, making the polar atmosphere appear hazy and golden when photographed last month.
“Other effects, including changes in atmospheric circulation, could also be playing a role,” NASA explained this week. “Scientists think seasonally shifting patterns of solar heating probably influence the winds in the polar regions.”
NASA scientists have an investigation underway to figure out what’s actually going.
The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Hampton University 
Source: The Daily Galaxy 
",FAKE
"Cyrus Mistry renames himself Rohit Sharma-Mistry, gets job back Posted on Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
Deposed chairman of Tata Group, Cyrus Mistry, has hit upon a great idea to get back his job. At a press conference earlier in the day, Mistry announced that he shall no longer be known as Cyrus Mistry, and instead asked everyone to call him Rohit Sharma-Mistry. 
Fifteen minutes after Sharma-Mistry’s press conference, Ratan Rata called for a press conference and announced the group’s decision to reinstate Cyrus Mistry as the chairman of Tata Group. 
“Mr. Sharma-Mistry is a rare talent who will be groomed for the future,” said Tata. “The Trustees and other directors of Tata Sons are convinced about Mr. Sharma-Mistry’s ability and firmly believe that when he gets going, he can turn around any business within one quarter.” 
Later, our correspondent reached out to the jubilant Sharma-Mistry and asked him what gave him this idea. Sharma-Mistry said that the emotional atyachar at Tata Sons was irking him, but then he met an inspired god man from Chennai, Cheeni Mama, who gave him guidance. 
Mr Sharma-Mistry is now considering building a temple for Cheeni Mama. “After all, our organization is known for its charitable acts, and in TN it is accepted practice to build a temple for actors, so this is very well in line with our organizational ethos,” Sharma-Mistry was quoted as saying. 
(Submitted by Citizen Satirist Badri Narayanan )",FAKE
"License DMCA 
In an extraordinary and unprecedented action, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped into the 2016 presidential campaign only 11 days before Election Day, sending a letter to Congress announcing new ""investigative steps"" related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. 
The three-paragraph letter by FBI Director James Comey to eight congressional committees on Friday is remarkably vague. It states that ""in connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation"" of Clinton's personal email server, which, Comey notes, he had previously told Congress was ""completed."" 
He states that he has agreed to ""allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation."" He acknowledges that the FBI ""cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant."" 
The obvious question that arises is why, given the fact that the FBI has no idea whether these additional emails contain any significant information relative to the Clinton email case, the agency should make them a public issue within days of the election. Media commentators noted that the letter violates a longstanding informal FBI ban on making politically sensitive announcements within 60 days of a US election. 
Following the report of Comey's letter, the news media, citing unnamed federal law enforcement officials, said the emails in question were found on a laptop computer shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her husband, former Representative Anthony Weiner. - Advertisement - 
Weiner is under FBI investigation for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to an underage girl. Abedin announced her separation from Weiner earlier this year after the latest episode involving Weiner and sexually explicit Internet activity became public. 
Comey's letter was hailed by Donald Trump and Republican Party spokesmen as tantamount to an official reopening of the FBI investigation and rescinding of the decision announced by Comey in July that no charges would be brought against the Democratic presidential candidate. 
Clinton spoke to the press briefly Friday evening, demanding that the FBI provide more information about the substance of what it was reviewing, including whether there was any connection to her use of a private email server. She pointed out that more than 15 million people have already voted and that many millions more will be going to the polls over the next week as early voting continues. In response to questions, she indicated that the FBI has not contacted her and that she first learned of the letter through the media. 
It is at this point impossible to determine with precision the motivation behind Comey's letter and the political forces for which he is speaking. However, his attempt to present the letter as a politically disinterested response to the discovery of new information lacks any credibility. 
This direct intervention into the election by the top police-intelligence agency can only be an expression of deep crisis and profound tensions within the American ruling class and the state. The election as a whole has been dominated by the growth of social anger and anti-establishment sentiment, yet it has ended in a contest between two right-wing representatives of the richest 1 percent who are despised by huge sections of the electorate. - Advertisement - 
It has plumbed the depths of political debasement on the part of both candidates -- the fascistic billionaire Trump seeking to channel discontent along the most right-wing, chauvinist and racist channels; the multimillionaire Clinton relying on sex scandals and a McCarthyite attack on Trump as an agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin to bury incriminating revelations of corruption and lying and to swing public opinion behind a policy of military escalation and confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. 
The entire process has been surrounded by an aura of violence and a breakdown of public confidence in the political system. It has unfolded under conditions of deepening economic crisis, mounting international tensions and worsening crises for US imperialism around the world, i.e., the ongoing debacle of Washington's war for regime change in Syria, the signs of disarray in the anti-Chinese ""pivot to Asia,"" the emergence of open conflicts with imperialist ""allies"" in Europe, particularly Germany. 
The convergence of these crises is generating bitter conflicts within the American ruling class over policy questions, magnified by fears of a rising tide of social opposition at home. 
Whether the intention of Comey's letter was to inflict fatal damage to Clinton's candidacy, shore up endangered Republican majorities in the Senate and House, or fire a shot across the bow against an incoming Clinton administration, it makes clear that the next administration will be mired in crisis from the day it takes office.",FAKE
"Archives Michael On Television If Donald Trump Wins, He Will Be 70 Years, 7 Months And 7 Days Old On His First Full Day In Office By Michael Snyder, on November 1st, 2016 
A couple of weeks ago, it looked like Hillary Clinton was all set to cruise to victory , but now the FBI has delivered an election miracle in the nick of time. A few of my readers had criticized me for suggesting that Trump might lose, but I don’t know who is going to win the election, and so all I had to go on was the cold, hard numbers. And a couple of weeks ago the cold, hard numbers were telling me that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Of course it is entirely possible that the national polls might have been seriously wrong, but even the state polls in the most important battleground states consistently had bad news for Trump. So things didn’t look good for Trump at the time, but now that the FBI has renewed their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails the poll numbers have shifted dramatically in Trump’s favor . 
As I write this article, the national polls have really tightened up. In fact, the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll puts Trump 1 point ahead of Clinton. Trump has all of the momentum at the moment, but that does not mean that he is going to win. As we have seen already in this race, one day can literally change everything. 
And as I noted yesterday , more than 23 million Americans have already voted, and most of that voting was done during a period of time when Hillary Clinton was doing very well in the polls. 
So we shall see what happens. But if Trump does win on November 8th, there is a fact about his birthday which will start to get a lot of attention. 
Donald Trump was born on June 14th, 1946. If you move ahead 70 years from that date, that brings you to June 14th, 2016. Moving forward another 7 months brings you to January 14th, 2017, and moving forward another 7 days brings you to January 21st, 2017. 
And if Donald Trump wins the election, January 21st will be his first full day in office. 
Of course Trump would be inaugurated on January 20th, but he would only be president for part of that day. 
So that means that Donald Trump would be 70 years, 7 months and 7 days old on his first full day as president of the United States. 
And this would happen during year 5777 on the Hebrew calendar. 
These amazing “coincidences” were first pointed out on Facebook by a user named Alyson Kelly. Some may take these numbers as a sign that Donald Trump is supposed to become the next president, but I want to make it exceedingly clear that I do not know what is going to happen, nor am I making any sort of prediction about what is going to happen. 
I just thought that this information was “interesting” and so I thought that I would share it. 
Someone that does believe that Trump is going to win is Glenn Beck. He was been virulently anti-Trump throughout this campaign, but now he is convinced that Clinton will be unable to overcome this new email scandal, and he is calling this renewed investigation by the FBI “the greatest gift given to any candidate of all time in the history of America.” 
Beck also says that if Clinton wins now it will be evidence that “magic exists”, and he is currently projecting that Trump should win the national vote by 5 points … 
“Let’s just say he was 8 points, that was fair to say, 8 points behind last week,” Beck said, according to a transcript posted on his website . “He should win by 5 points.” 
Beck later added: “How can the next president face a possible collapsing economy, possible war with Russia, and a current war with ISIS? Oh, and also, be under FBI investigation and indictment? Can’t. Can’t.” 
The conservative personality called the latest FBI revelation “the greatest gift given to any candidate of all time in the history of America” and added that if Clinton still managed to win, it would be akin to proof “magic exists.” 
Hopefully Glenn Beck is right, because none of us should want to see Hillary Clinton in the White House. 
She is the most evil, corrupt and scandal-ridden politician of this generation, and I can’t understand how any American in their right mind could possibly vote for her. 
And the hits just keep on coming. Wikileaks has just released an email in which John Podesta told Clinton “fixer” Cheryl Mills that they were “going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later” … 
It was not entirely clear what Podesta meant by that phrase, but it could potentially be smoking gun evidence of obstruction of justice . 
Back in 2008, Barack Obama was new, intriguing and mysterious. We didn’t know a lot about him, and so one can almost understand how the American people could have been fooled by him. 
But in 2016, Americans know more about Hillary Clinton than they have ever known about any candidate in modern American history. 
The Clintons have a history of crimes and scandals that goes all the way back to the 1980s, but about half the country is choosing to ignore all of that history and vote for her anyway. 
I believe that this election is America’s final exam. Originally there were 17 Republicans and 5 Democrats running for the presidency. When you throw in the major third party candidates, that brings us to a total of approximately 25 people that the American public could have chosen from. 
If the American people willingly choose the most wicked candidate out of all of them after everything that has been revealed, I don’t think that anyone will be able to say that we don’t deserve the bitter consequences that follow that decision. 
The time for talking is almost over, and shortly we shall find out which path the American people have chosen. 
If that choice turns out to be Hillary Clinton after everything that we have seen during this election cycle, I truly believe that we will have reached the point of no return as a nation.",FAKE
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"  Paul Joseph Watson Yet another report of vote flipping 
A woman in Hollywood, Maryland is the latest in a number of early voters to claim that her ballot was switched to Hillary Clinton after she had tried to vote for Donald Trump. Maryland Trump Supporter: They Switched My Vote to Hillary – https://t.co/FkNiEUOZHH pic.twitter.com/dalY9KBWtj 
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 28, 2016 Noting that she had seen reports on the news of votes being flipped, the woman said, “I went in and voted a straight Republican ticket and thank God I went back and checked and they had switched my vote from Trump to (Hillary).” She said that she had to get the vote changed back by alerting election officials, who simply told her to vote for a second time. “I went back the second time and made sure they didn’t change it,” she concluded. As we reported earlier this week, voters in numerous areas of Texas have made a series of complaints that votes are being switched from Trump to Clinton . One election official responded by claiming the problems were caused by voters not understanding how to use the machines properly. “Typically, we’ve found it’s voter error with the equipment,” Frank Phillips, Tarrant County’s election administrator, told WFAA . “Sometimes they vote straight party and then click on other candidates … or do something with the wheel….There is not an issue with the equipment.” However, Trump supporters continue to point to the reports as evidence that vote fraud may be taking place.",FAKE
"Email This Week in the News 
You wouldn’t know it by watching the news, but there are actually important things going on in the world that have nothing to do with the Presidential election. Today, we’ll talk about some of these non-election-related events on Survival Saturday, like the Dakota access pipeline, Russia, Venezuela, and our dystopian future. 
For election coverage, go on over to my other website, DaisyLuther.com , which is all Hillary, all the time, right up until the election. (My goal there is to cover the stuff that the MSM is trying to sweep under the rug about their darling.) The Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters Are Being Brutally Attacked by Law Enforcement 
Have you been aware of the ongoing protests by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe about a pipeline being forcibly built across their watershed via eminent domain? They have been joined by other tribes to form a coalition of water protectors who say that the pipeline is a violation of a treaty established between the Sioux and the federal government. ( Here are the important things to know about the protest . Trust me, you’ll want to read this.) 
Everyone who was paying attention breathed a sigh of relief when the US Government for once took a stand on behalf of the little guys back in September. 
“The federal government ordered a halt to work on a $3.8 billion four-state oil pipeline in the Upper Midwest on Friday, handing a temporary victory to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other opponents of the project… 
…The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it wouldn’t authorize construction near Lake Oahe, a culturally important location to the tribe, until the agency determines if it needs to reconsider its previous approvals under the National Environmental Policy Act.” ( source ) 
Unfortunately, the government’s willingness to do the right thing was short-lived. Work has resumed on the pipeline and all hell is breaking loose – but not by who you might think. Protestors have been non-violent, but law enforcement has been absolutely brutal. They’ve beaten up on young people, old people, and independent journalists covering the story. Hundreds have been arrested. 
These people are protecting their water sources and their way of life, and they are being brutalized by our own government. The story you’re getting on the mainstream is that the water protectors are standing there and that the police are standing there and that it is a relatively calm affair. 
That couldn’t be further from the truth. The AntiMedia (who would get a major journalism award if real journalists got such awards) has provided truthful coverage, and it is ugly. Every single person who is against government overreach should be supporting the water protectors. Right now, this affects some people up in North Dakota. But what about when someone wants to build something across your land? What about when someone wants to seize your home? What about when Agenda 21 comes to your back yard? 
Here’s what really happened at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests . It’s on film. It’s ugly. You owe it to your fellow human beings to witness this and be outraged. Go here to learn what you can do to help . With all of this “progress,” is humanity at risk of becoming obsolete? 
Thousands of jobs each year are being turned over to computers as humans demand higher wages and better benefits for unskilled labor. We’ve all ended up on the endless loop of talking to customer service robots on the phone or going to a checkout counter and discovering it is push button and digital. 
Is this all part of a greater plan to make the bulk of humanity utterly dependent on the whims of a few? 
I don’t watch a lot of documentaries, but last night my daughter and I watched Obsolete . This film is available for free on Amazon , and it isn’t one of those dry, boring ones that keep you shifting in your seat in order to stay awake. It’s fascinating from the moment you hit play. When it was over, we sat there in silence for at least a minute, aghast that we could see the whole thing happening around us right now. 
I can’t recommend this highly enough. Everyone should watch it. Let me quote Morpheus (from the Matrix ) for a moment here. “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” 
This documentary is the red pill. Take it if you want to survive the future that is coming for us all. 
Watch Obsolete then come back over here and let’s talk about it. I think this will spark a very interesting conversation. How will you prepare for a future in which humanity is largely obsolete? Meanwhile in Venezuela… 
Things are still awful there, although there hasn’t been as much news coverage. Basically, this is how life is now for Venezuelans, and recovering from this collapse could take decades. 
Currently, the people of the country are revolting against the unpopular president, Nicholas Maduro. A campaign had begun for a recall election in order to replace Maduro, but authorities halted the process. The electoral council cited fraud when faced with huge numbers of signatures on a petition. Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets. Source: Federico Parra /AFP/Getty Images 
NPR reports : 
The demonstrators were protesting “what they call a sharp turn towards authoritarianism. The Maduro government has jailed opposition leaders, stripped Congress of its powers and cracked down on the press.” 
As for Maduro, he has blatantly threatened to jail anyone who tries to remove him from power, via elections or legal means, ironically citing the Venezuelan constitution : 
“If they launch a supposed political trial, which is not in our constitution, the state prosecution service must bring legal action in the courts and put in jail anyone who violates the constitution, even if they are members of Congress.” 
What’s more, in a conversation with the American DEA, Maduro’s nephew says that Venezuela is at war with the US, which is news to most Americans. Efrain Campo was busted doing a quick cocaine deal in order to make money for the Venezuelan First Family. He was caught attempting to smuggle $5 million of Columbian cocaine into the US. The Charlotte Observer reported : 
Efrain Campo…was recorded saying “we’re at war” with the Americans and laughing about sending opposition leaders to jail, according to the transcript, which was filed in federal district court in New York. 
“We need the money,” Campo said, according to the transcript. “Why? Because the Americans are hitting us hard with money. Do you understand? The opposition . . . is getting an infusion of a lot of money.” 
…The defense has sought to paint Campo and his cousin as victims of a U.S. political plot against the Venezuelan government and has asserted that they didn’t have the knowledge or capability to pull off such a complicated transaction. We’re irritating the snot out of Russia… 
Lately, the Powers That Shouldn’t Be (great phrase borrowed from my friend Mel at Truthstream Media ) have been going out of their way to paint Russia and Vladimir Putin as the biggest threat to America. A bigger threat, even, than Hillary Clinton, and boy, that’s a stretch. I’m pretty sure you can put all of these recent headlines together and get a picture of where this is headed. ( Hint .) There are many more, but I don’t want this post to be a lengthy novel about idiocy.",FAKE
"This has turned into the whiplash election, and it’s virtually impossible to keep up with the head-snapping revelations.

Even the most diligent journalist can get vertigo trying to investigate and evaluate each disclosure, which damages Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and spawns dire predictions that their campaign is toast, only to fade in a news cycle or two.

Some developments that in a “normal” election would badly wound a presidential candidate get meager exposure in the rest of the media because they are overshadowed by other mega-stories. No one has the bandwidth to do it all.

This is more than a mere campaign; its craziness has become the beating heart of American culture, debated in every cubicle and coffee shop and at every level of the increasingly toxic stew of social media.

Just look at the last few weeks:

Democrats and many members of the media have taken up weapons and stormed a place called Comey Island.

The FBI director shook up the race by revealing a probe of emails that wound up on the laptop of a top aide’s estranged husband under investigation for sending illicit messages to an underage girl.

The New York Times reported that Trump avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in income taxes through a loophole scheme so dubious his own lawyers advised him that the IRS could declare it improper.

The Clinton campaign got advance questions before CNN town halls from a top Democratic Party official who was also a paid contributor at the network, which booted her.

The Washington Post reported that Donald Trump has repeatedly “sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people’s giving as his own.”

Back on Comey Island, the FBI chief was reported to have argued that the administration shouldn’t accuse Russia of using cyberwarfare to interfere with the presidential campaign because—yes--it would look partisan so close to the election.

Hacked emails revealed that the daughter of the Democratic nominee’s husband, himself a former president, complained that his aides were cashing in on the Clinton Foundation and siphoning money from her parents.

The Trump Foundation was ordered to stop fundraising by the New York attorney general, a Democrat and Clinton supporter.

Clinton’s top advisers, reeling after the email scandal broke, complained that said she had terrible instincts and a pathological aversion to apologizing, according to hacked emails.

Back on Comey Island, the FBI looked into whether Trump’s company had a secret email server communicating with a Russian bank but found no direct link.

A Clinton aide complained in a hacked email that “we…speak in such a tortured, nuanced way when we don’t get any advantage from the nuance, and just wind up looking political.”

Back on Comey Island, the FBI opened a preliminary investigation of Trump’s former campaign manager and his ties to Russian interests, which Paul Manafort said he knew nothing about.

Trump boasted a decade ago on a Hollywood entertainment show that as a celebrity he could grab women by the genitals, which he now dismisses as locker-room talk.

Back on Comey Island, FBI agents were investigating financial and ethical issues at the Clinton Foundation but were told to stand down by top law-enforcement officials, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Eleven women accused Trump of sexually propositioning them or unwanted kissing or touching, all of which he denounced as lies.

Trump held a news conference before a debate with Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey, who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, and Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused him of rape, which he has denied.

Hillary Clinton nearly collapsed while getting into a car and belatedly revealed that she had pneumonia.

And, well, I could go on.

Many of these cases prompted media firestorms, complete with predictions that Trump or Clinton would be seriously or even fatally damaged. But then the stories were overtaken by some new allegation or outrage.

In the case of Comey’s renewed email investigation, polls so far suggest that it hasn’t moved the needle much beyond the tightening that was already taking place in the race.

It may well be that we’ve all become numb in this whiplash campaign. The race is so polarized, and public attitudes toward Trump and Clinton so firmly established, that each new front-page headline or cable obsession changes few minds.

Perhaps the only consensus is a sense of relief that this long, strange trip is finally coming to an end.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"Posted on October 30, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
Zero Hedge reports that Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed and Snapchat appear to be censoring the biggest bombshell of this election cycle … that the FBI re-opened its investigation of Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election. 
I can add that I’ve been checking Reddit’s front page – the top 25 stories – every day, and there hasn’t been a single reference to the FBI, Clinton or emails since the FBI made its announcement. 
As we’ve documented for years , social media is manipulated by the powers-that-be to prevent news that challenges the status quo from going viral.",FAKE
"Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said he will vote to support the Iran nuclear deal, a pledge that puts President Barack Obama only three votes short of protecting the pact in Congress.

Merkley issued a statement Sunday calling the accord “the best available strategy to block Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

Merkley’s support brings to 31 the number of senators publicly favoring the deal, which would ease economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbs on the country’s nuclear program.

Barring defections, Obama needs three more votes from 13 Senate Democrats who have yet to declare their position, to sustain a likely veto of legislation aimed at killing the pact.

If Obama can assemble 41 Senate votes by getting most of the remaining Democrats on board, the Senate may not vote on the agreement at all.

The Republican-controlled Congress has until Sept. 17 to pass a resolution disapproving the deal reached in July between six world powers and Iran. Obama has pledged to veto that resolution if it gets to his desk.

While Republicans have been united in opposing the deal, only two Democratic senators -- Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber, and Robert Menendez of New Jersey -- have joined them so far.

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, plans to announce his decision on Tuesday. Among other Democrats yet to disclose a position are Maryland’s Ben Cardin and New Jersey’s Cory Booker.

The only uncertain Senate Republican vote is that of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who remains undecided and is expected to make her decision after Sept. 7.

Merkley, in a statement on his website, pledged to vote for the deal even while pointing to “significant shortcomings” that he said the U.S. must address with “a massive intelligence program” and monitoring.

Merkley said he was troubled that the deal allows Iran to import conventional arms after five years and ballistic missile technology after eight years, and sets no restrictions on how Iran can use money it reclaims when sanctions are lifted.

But he rejected a proposal from deal opponents to try to renegotiate the accord for better terms.

If the U.S. rejects the deal and Iran resumes its nuclear program, “the United States would be viewed by the international community as undermining a strong framework for peacefully blocking a potential Iranian bomb,” Merkley said.

While the Republican-controlled House has enough votes to pass a resolution rejecting the deal, it’s unclear whether the Senate does. Assuming all 54 Senate Republicans oppose the accord, they would need support from six Democrats to get the 60 votes necessary to advance a resolution.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"MANCHESTER, N.H.—Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on Wednesday praised Senate Democrats for blocking, at least temporarily, a bill that would give President Barack Obama authority to move trade deals through Congress.

Mr. O’Malley, who is expected to jump into the Democratic race for president later this month, renewed his criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Approval of the big trade deal between the U.S. and 11 Pacific nations would be eased by the so-called fast-track legislation.

“I’m glad the Senate slowed it down and I hope Congress will reject it if we can’t see it, read it and be assured this is good for workers and also good for our country,” he told reporters after chatting up the breakfast crowd at Chez Vachon, a restaurant that has long been a regular stop for White House aspirants.",REAL
"Militia Fighters to Advance on Areas West of City by Jason Ditz, October 28, 2016 Share This 
After a week and a half of assuring everyone that their role in the invasion of Mosul would be very limited, and removed from the Sunni population, Iraq’s Shi’ite militias have been announced to have launched an offensive west of Mosul, advancing on Tal Afar . 
According to officials, the main goal of this offensive is to cut the city of Mosul off from ISIS territory in Syria, preventing the ISIS fighters within the city from fleeing west if the battle begins to turn sour. The offensive is said to start “within a few days or hours.” 
The involvement of Shi’ite militias in the “liberation” of Sunni Arab cities in Iraq has been controversial because they often end up carrying out extrajudicial executions, looting and torture of locals they suspect of being secretly in league with ISIS. 
An effort to block flight from Mosul to ISIS territory is Syria would be an obvious step, but the militias’ involvement again risks targeting of civilians, as the population of from Mosul is already overrunning the minimal camps set up for the displaced. 
Civilians fleeing these cities are usually not welcomed in Iraqi government-held territory, and wind up fleeing into other ISIS-held territory. With little left in Iraq, this likely means fleeing into Syria, and the militias’ presence means the civilians displaced by the attack are likely to be targeted for fleeing “with” ISIS. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"In the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Mitch Stewart devoted himself to defeating Hillary Rodham Clinton, overcoming the advantages of a well-funded Democratic front-runner through grass-roots organizing, and propelling Barack Obama to victory.

On Tuesday, Mr. Stewart and a dozen or so other political operatives and 170 donors will gather in New York to plot how to help Mrs. Clinton win in 2016. The meeting is the first national finance council strategy meeting of Ready for Hillary, a “super PAC” devoted to building a network to support Mrs. Clinton’s potential presidential ambitions.

“We’re coming up with plans on how to engage emerging constituencies that will be incredibly important if there’s a primary and in a general — whether that’s women, African-Americans, Latinos, L.G.B.T.,” said Mr. Stewart, who went on to run Mr. Obama’s battleground-state strategy in 2012.

The all-day meeting at the Parker Meridien hotel will be closed to the news media, but a preview of the day, with panel discussions like “What America Will Look Like in 2016,” about changing demographics, and “Building the Resources to Win,” about developing a campaign infrastructure, provided an early look into what supporters consider Mrs. Clinton’s strengths and potential pitfalls in 2016.

Mrs. Clinton has never had a problem raising money from deep-pocketed donors, but her 2008 campaign lacked the grass-roots enthusiasm and modest Internet donations that buoyed Mr. Obama. Ready for Hillary hopes to build that kind of support.

A grass-roots super PAC may seem an oxymoron: such groups can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political races as long as they do not coordinate with a candidate. But rather than invest in expensive television ads, Ready for Hillary puts all of its donations into building its email list of supporters.

For every $25,0000 the group raises, it cuts a payment to Rising Tide Interactive, a firm that helps build online lists of supporters. A social media tool on the website will allow supporters to work together to organize to plan rallies and small-dollar fund-raising events. With no candidate and over a year before a potential campaign, Ready for Hillary has roughly a million names on its email list, about half the size of the Hillary for President campaign list at the time Mrs. Clinton suspended her campaign in 2008.

“It’s not our job to be a campaign and it’s not our job to make decisions to tie any potential candidate’s hands,” said Craig T. Smith, an aide in the administration of President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Ready for Hillary. “The goal is to build a list.”

The strategy is an acknowledgment of mistakes made by Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, but also a recognition that she cannot simply run as the establishment candidate with inside-the-Beltway support without also inspiring young and minority voters who largely favored Mr. Obama in 2008. Mr. Stewart helped Mr. Obama pick up delegates in small but important caucus states and turn states like Arizona, New Mexico and Virginia into battlegrounds by tapping into changing demographics.

A lineup of longtime Clinton backers and aides will attend Tuesday’s meeting, including Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco; Ann Lewis, a former adviser to both Clintons; Jennifer M. Granholm, the former governor of Michigan; and Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. Along with Ms. Sefl, two young Ready for Hillary volunteers, Taj Magruder, 23, of Philadelphia, and Haley Adams, a student at Yale, will open the event, signaling that the Clinton world intends to bring in fresh voices, even if it means edging some loyal aides out.

The event signals a turning point for Ready for Hillary. The group, registered just before Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in February by young staff members who worked in junior roles on her 2008 campaign, was largely viewed as a makeshift organization that sold Hillary Clinton buttons and iPhone cases online.

Some longtime supporters had worried that the group emerged too soon and that if it were not well run, it could hurt Mrs. Clinton’s prospects, even though she is not involved or in contact with its organizers. But veteran aides like Mr. Smith, Ms. Sefl and Harold Ickes, a former deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House, are now signed on as advisers. In recent months, the group has held events in several cities from San Francisco to Houston and has become among the dominant — if not best financed — political action committees on the Democratic side.

The sessions in New York will point to several advantages favoring a Democrat in 2016. “Democrats do have a series of advantages baked into the cake in terms of demographics and the electoral map,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster who succeeded Mark Penn as chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Fresh off working on behalf of Terry McAuliffe in his successful campaign for governor of Virginia, Mr. Garin will talk about reaching the growing numbers of Hispanics and college-educated white women, and the decline in non-college-educated white male voters, one of the most challenging demographics for Mrs. Clinton. But, he added that some very big odds will work against any Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. “Since World War II, the only time the same party won a third term in the White House was 1988,” Mr. Garin said.

Supporters are also well aware of the attacks Mrs. Clinton would face. During a lunch session, David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, will lead the “Ready for the Right Wing” tutorial on how to combat conservative attacks and misinformation in the media.

The future of Ready for Hillary is unclear. Should Mrs. Clinton run, the group would most likely dissolve, after encouraging those on its email list to transfer their support to the official Clinton campaign. The widespread belief is that several Ready for Hillary staff members would take up positions on the campaign, which has made the group somewhat of a way station for hopeful aides. If Mrs. Clinton does not run, the group would likely throw its support behind whoever becomes the Democratic nominee.

Either way, this type of early unity and strategizing around a single candidate is a good thing and a rarity in Democratic politics, said Ronald Feldman, a Ready for Hillary national finance council co-chairman who supported John Edwards in 2008.

“We’ve never been paying this much attention this early on, but this time it seemed like a necessity,” Mr. Feldman said.",REAL
"Throughout the Middle East and North Africa today, Christianity is under attack.  Terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are destroying some of the oldest and most sacred Christian communities and relics in the world on the very lands where Christianity was born and first took root. They are committing brutal atrocities against Christian communities in Syria and Iraq, persecuting religious minorities and destroying entire towns and local economies. Christians are fleeing their homes in increasing numbers, creating an exploding refugee crisis that will have grave ramifications on the stability and security of the entire region.

While the world has been rightly outraged by the violence waged by ISIS against people of all sects, ethnicities, and religions, the United States, Europe and other key allies have done little to end ISIS’s systematic efforts to drive-out and eradicate entire religious communities from their historic and sacred homelands. The Obama Administration has repeatedly refused to defend religious freedom abroad and continues to ignore its devastating cost to those religious communities targeted by terrorists because of their religious beliefs.

As a nation founded in the pursuit of religious freedom, America can and must do more to root-out the religious intolerance that is helping to foster much of the political instability and violence we see today. Specifically, we believe the Obama Administration should integrate the protection of religious freedom into its overall response to growing terrorist threats and development efforts around the world. Doing so would help to eliminate the underlying causes of violent extremism, promote increased international economic stability, and foster greater respect for human rights.

Promoting religious freedom would, first and foremost, undermine the efforts of terrorist organizations such as ISIS to capitalize on simmering religious intolerance to build influence and wield power. ISIS has succeeded in tearing apart the social fabric of local communities and exacerbating sectarian and ethnic divisions to recruit supporters from disaffected populations and assert control over wide swaths of otherwise insecure territory. As a result, they have precipitated a breakdown of basic order that has allowed new and unprecedented security threats to the United States and our allies to fester and grow.

The Obama administration can counter this strategy by building alliances with popular local and regional leaders who can expose these radical ideologies’ moral bankruptcy and champion pluralism and tolerance. The Administration should also combat terrorist propaganda about religious minorities and develop programs that promote tolerance and empower minorities to better advocate for their rights and interests. Only by reaffirming the importance of religious freedom and working closely with communities and their governments will we be able to strip away sympathy and support for ISIS and other extremist groups that is bred from deeper political, economic, and social grievances.

Properly designed and implemented, a U.S. foreign policy committed to religious freedom can advance our national security interests, stabilize and consolidate the spread of democracy across the globe, help sustain economic growth, and promote the equality of men and women.

Most importantly, it can help prevent religiously-motivated terrorism and undermine the conditions that have helped spur the rise of groups like ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Shuddhikaran Movement.

Promoting religious freedom would also support the governance structures necessary for economic and political security in developing nations. As recent studies by groups such as the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation have found, higher levels of religious freedom are associated with higher levels of economic productivity and growth. Clearly, sustainable political and economic development is only possible when religious freedom and equal opportunity contributes to a secure environment in which citizens and businesses can operate freely.

Finally, we must remain committed to religious freedom because of the special distinction religious freedom holds as a fundamental human right—a belief that is shared by democratic countries across the globe and protected by numerous international treaties and agreements.

American support for religious liberty sends a potent and unmistakable message to threatened communities around the world: America is your friend. Such support builds enduring good will towards our country among those who could be leading their own nations in the years ahead. And it reminds all observers, whether friendly or hostile, that the U.S. remains committed to a world where justice and human dignity are central to legitimate governance.

Republican John McCain is a Navy veteran. He represents Arizona in the United States Senate.

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.",REAL
"at 10:41 am 2 Comments 
On Monday, The Daily Beast published a hugely important story about AT&T’s in house, for profit surveillance operation called Project Hemisphere. The program has nothing to do with information sharing legally required under a warrant, but rather consists of a business line through which the telecom giant stores customer data longer than peers in order to turn around and sell it to government agencies (no warrant required). This allows law enforcement to use secret and never disclosed evidence to build a cases against citizens via a shady and unaccountable practice known as parallel construction. 
The article is titled, AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal , and is a must read. 
Here are some key excerpts: 
In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration . The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool. 
However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. 
Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. 
These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers . Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged regulators to scrutinize the deal. 
The fact that this deal is even being considered shows what a giant joke this county has become. 
As I noted on Twitter earlier this week: Why don’t we just merge the entire S&P 500 into one company called Oligarchy Inc. and get it over with. 
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) October 24, 2016 
While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian. 
AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast. 
The disclosure of Hemisphere was not the first time AT&T has been caught working with law enforcement above and beyond what the law requires. 
A statement of work from 2014 shows how hush-hush AT&T wants to keep Hemisphere. 
“The Government agency agrees not to use the data as evidence in any judicial or administrative proceedings unless there is no other available and admissible probative evidence,” it says. 
But those charged with a crime are entitled to know the evidence against them come trial. Adam Schwartz, staff attorney for activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that means AT&T leaves investigators no choice but to construct a false investigative narrative to hide how they use Hemisphere if they plan to prosecute anyone. 
Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction.” 
Parallel construction is a pernicious side effect of all this spying. It’s a very important topic I covered last year in the post, How the DEA Uses “Parallel Construction” to Hide Unconstitutional Investigations . 
“This document here is striking,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.” 
The federal government reimburses municipalities for the expense of Hemisphere through the same grant program that is blamed for police militarization by paying for military gear like Bearcat vehicles. 
There’s your government again. Tirelessly working against you from behind the scenes. 
“At a minimum there is a very serious question whether they should be doing it without a warrant. A benefit to the parallel construction is they never have to face that crucible. Then the judge, the defendant, the general public, the media, and elected officials never know that AT&T and police across America funded by the White House are using the world’s largest metadata database to surveil people,” Schwartz said. 
Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for Hemisphere access. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, made its inaugural payment to AT&T of $77,924 in 2007, according to a contract reviewed by The Daily Beast. Four years later, the county’s Hemisphere bill had increased more than tenfold to $940,000. 
AT&T documents state law enforcement doesn’t need a search warrant to use Hemisphere, just an administrative subpoena, which does not require probable cause . The DEA was granted administrative subpoena power in 1970. 
Just another reason to end the failed war on drugs and close down the DEA. Recall, unconstitutional surveillance was actually pioneered by the DEA a decade before the 9/11 attacks. See: How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11 . 
AT&T stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure, retaining many records dating back to 1987, according to the Times 2013 Hemisphere report. The scope and length of the collection has accumulated trillions of records and is believed to be larger than any phone record database collected by the NSA under the Patriot Act, the Times reported. 
This summer, I switched my cellphone service away from AT&T and was able to reduce my monthly bill by nearly 50%. You should consider doing the same. 
In Liberty,",FAKE
"jkbj
I was shot by militarized police WHILE interviewing a man on camera at #StandingRock …and here’s the footage. #NoDAPL https://t.co/FfWiSCbiKf pic.twitter.com/4DRwNPkfZ9 
— Erin Schrode (@ErinSchrode) November 3, 2016 
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
Contributed by Ryan Banister of The Daily Sheeple . ",FAKE
"""I probably wouldn't do much,"" Buffett said when asked what he would do if he ran the Fed. ""Things are working pretty well, and I would be worried that if I raised rates significantly with negative interest rates in Europe, I would be very worried about what that would do to the flow of funds.""

He also noted that the economy ""is improving month by month.""

Buffett spoke at an automotive industry conference in New York, along with the chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway automotive dealer group, Larry Van Tuyl.

Buffett and Van Tuyl said that Berkshire Hathaway Automotive is actively looking to purchase more dealerships to add to the 81 auto dealerships it now owns in 10 states. Van Tuyl said that the company will look to expand in the United States and not internationally, at least for now.

Buffett said that Berkshire Hathaway will price auto dealerships for possible acquisition by using a long-term outlook and not allow short-term swings of the U.S. auto market to affect purchase decisions.

He also said those purchase decisions will not be related to changes in interest rates.

""If (Federal Reserve Chair) Janet Yellen came up and whispered in my ear what she was going to do for the next two years, it wouldn't make any difference what we do. If we got a chance to buy a dealership at a sensible price with the right people, we'd buy it. We'd buy it in five minutes.""

Buffett and Van Tuyl both said that while Tesla Motors Inc. has a model of selling cars directly to consumers, the volume is too low to affect the U.S. auto distribution system.

""Usually when a distribution system becomes that firmly established, there is a reason for it. I just don't see that changing,"" said Buffett.

He said that self-driving cars will ""be a reality"" but that he expects autonomous cars to be less than 10 percent of the auto market by 2030.

Earlier Tuesday, at the same National Automobile Dealers Association-J.D. Power conference in New York, Buffett said a Greek exit could be constructive for the eurozone.",REAL
"10-26-16 In September 2015, at the behest of its legitimate government, Russia began aerial operations to combat ISIS and al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. Numerous other likeminded groups are involved, just as cutthroat, just as ruthless, just as extremist, masquerading as “moderate rebels” when none exist - supported by Washington, NATO, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf States, Jordan, Israel and Turkey.They’re massacring civilians, killing government soldiers defending them, using chemical and other banned weapons, committing gruesome atrocities.Why does Russia pretend conflict is civil when Syria was invaded by terrorists, imported from scores of countries, serving as US imperial foot soldiers? Why does it pretend “moderate” fighters are involved when none exist? Why does it insist on separating nonexistent “moderates” from terrorist groups it’s combating when all anti-government forces are the same?Why isn’t it targeting all armed groups wanting Assad toppled and Syrian sovereign independence destroyed? It’s the only way to free the country from the scourge its facing - supported by Washington and its rogue allies, NATO and regional ones.Why did it halt its aerial operations to liberate eastern Aleppo, declaring a unilateral ceasefire, a so-called humanitarian pause - a major blunder, accomplishing nothing? Ongoing since October 18, it’s letting US-supported terrorists infesting the city replenish their ranks, regroup and mobilize for heavy attacks, largely harming civilians Moscow says it wants protected.Last Saturday evening, Russia ended its humanitarian pause because US-supported terrorists in eastern Aleppo prevent civilians from leaving, holding thousands hostage as human shields, including the sick and wounded.Yet it ceased aerial attacks, yielding the advantage to dark forces it’s sworn to eliminate. What kind of strategy gives them the upper hand? It gets worse.On October 26, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov issued the following statement:“The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian Air Force have been sticking to a moratorium on air strikes for the past eight days. They are staying out of a 10-km (six-mile) zone around Aleppo.”“Six humanitarian corridors, field kitchens and first aid stations are open for civilians leaving eastern Aleppo 24 hours a day.”“Russia and the Syrian government are ready to resume ‘humanitarian pauses’ in Aleppo if they receive guarantees from international organizations confirming readiness to evacuate the sick and the wounded as well as civilian population from the rebel-held areas.”Fact: Maintaining an airstrike moratorium aids Washington, its rogue allies and terrorists in eastern Aleppo they support.Fact: What good are humanitarian corridors if eastern Aleppo residents are prevented from using them, risking death or serious injury if they try.Fact: International organizations have no control over terrorists in eastern Aleppo - or anywhere else in the country. So what good are their “guarantees” if made?Fact: As long as Russia continues making the same mistakes repeatedly, the struggle to liberate Syria will likely go on interminably without resolution - a forever war, while countless thousands more civilians will die, be seriously injured and endure hardships people in Western societies can’t imagine, victims of US imperial ruthlessness.A handful of eastern Aleppo civilians alone escaped via a humanitarian corridor. According to one now free, their relatives were seized, imprisoned and tortured.The only way to liberate thousands of others is by relentlessly smashing their terrorist captors, eliminating them - not giving them breathing room to mobilize for greater attacks.Washington is delighted with Moscow’s ceasefire and humanitarian pause, serving US imperial interests, State Department spokesman admiral John Kirby saying:“We welcome the stated intention to extend this pause, and we hope that this extension will be more successful than it has been thus far” - meaning the longer it continues, the greater the benefit to US-led dark forces, the worse off trapped Syrians in eastern Aleppo will be, the longer the struggle to liberate Syria will go on.Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at . Logged",FAKE
"Iran agreed in principle to accept significant restrictions on its nuclear facilities for at least a decade and submit to international inspections under a framework deal announced Thursday after months of contentious negotiations with the United States and other world powers.

In return, international sanctions that have battered Iran’s economy would be lifted in phases if it meets its commitments, meaning it could take a year or less for relief from the penalties to kick in.

The framework agreement, a milestone in negotiations that began 12 years ago, is not a final deal. But it creates parameters for three more months of negotiations over technical details and some matters that remain unresolved. Any one of those issues could doom a comprehensive agreement. Among them is the pace at which sanctions will be suspended.

“The political understanding with details that we have reached is a solid foundation for the good deal we are seeking,” said Secretary of State John F. Kerry, sounding hoarse after an all-night negotiation session.

The key moments in the long history of U.S.-Iran tensions

The agreement includes almost all the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear facilities, laboratories, mines and mills that the United States had sought in recent months, although it initially aimed for even tougher restrictions.

But Iran would get several benefits that may make the deal more palatable to politicians and the public in Tehran. It would not have to close any of its three nuclear facilities, though it would be left with only one that would enrich uranium — at levels low enough to create fuel for power plants but not high enough to create weapons-grade material.

The limitations would produce a one-year “breakout” period, meaning it would take Iran a full year to build up enough material to build one nuclear warhead, compared with current estimates of two to three months, officials said.

Many sanctions initially would be suspended, rather than lifted permanently as Iran sought, so they could be “snapped back” into place if Iran was discovered to be cheating, the officials said.

Iran’s apparent acceptance of so many conditions sought by the United States could give the Obama administration a tool to fend off critics in Congress who want to impose new sanctions to wring more concessions from the Iranians.

The White House fears such steps could scuttle the talks and prompt Tehran to resume its nuclear program at full tilt. Iran claims its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian uses.

While the negotiations will continue through June, much of the attention will now shift to the White House and its defense of the negotiations, both in classified briefings to Congress and in public arenas.

Obama hailed the agreement as a “historic understanding” and asked whether anyone really thinks that the deal is “a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a persistent critic of the negotiations, told Obama by telephone that a final deal based on the parameters announced Thursday “would threaten the survival of Israel,” according to an Israeli statement.

Kerry’s predecessor at the State Department, Hillary Rodham Clinton, called the framework agreement an “understanding,” saying it was an “important step toward a comprehensive agreement that would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and strengthen the security of the United States, Israel, and the region.”

The announcement of the agreement was made by weary-looking diplomats from Iran, the European Union, the United States and five other nations. Most had slept only one or two hours after the previous day’s talks, which stretched nearly through the night.

They sounded exuberant even before they arrived at a Lausanne school a few miles from the hotel where the last rounds of talks had been held. Many diplomats had been cautious after the negotiations failed to meet a March 31 deadline. But once the bargaining ended Thursday, there was a flurry of excited tweets.

“Big day,” wrote Kerry, who shouldered most of the direct negotiations with Iran.

Once the agreement was reached, the diplomats walked onto a stage bearing the flags of the nations involved in the talks — Iran, Germany, France, Britain, Russia, China and the United States.

Then Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister and chief negotiator in the talks, and the European foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, made statements.

Mogherini said Iran and the world powers were taking a “decisive step” before she listed the main parameters for an eventual deal in which Iran would be permitted to pursue the civilian use of nuclear technology.

[A step-by-step guide to what the Iran agreement actually means]

Under the agreement, Iran’s heavy-water reactor in Arak would be rebuilt so it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium. No nuclear fuel would be reprocessed, and spent fuel would be exported or diluted.

Iran’s underground plant at Fordow would be converted from a uranium-enrichment site into a nuclear physics and technology center. The site was built secretly deep inside a mountain near Qom and would be difficult to destroy by military attack.

As Mogherini was speaking, the State Department was

e-mailing reporters a “fact sheet” outlining more details that it said Iran had agreed to, though it could not immediately be confirmed that Iran was indeed on board with every item.

In one of the most significant points, the number of Iran’s centrifuges would be cut by two-thirds, to about 6,000, according to the statement. It said they would be first-generation machines, not the more advanced ones that Iran has sought. Keeping the old centrifuges is a key element in establishing the one-year breakout period, a red line for Washington.

The fact sheet said Iran further agreed not to enrich uranium above the level of 3.67 percent for at least 15 years. That level of low-enriched uranium is suitable as fuel for nuclear power plants but not as fissile material for nuclear weapons, which require uranium enriched to about 90 percent purity.

Iran has agreed to reduce its stockpile of about 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of low-enriched uranium to 300 kilograms (660 pounds) for 15 years, the fact sheet said.

The restrictions would be monitored through inspections conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and some of them would last 25 years under the accord.

Zarif seemed to go out of his way to thank Kerry for investing so much time and effort in the negotiations, which he said had been conducted with “mutual respect.”

The preliminary agreement could foretell the beginning of a new chapter in Iran’s relationship with the world, and particularly the United States.

Though six nations negotiated with Iran, much of the heavy lifting was done in meetings between the United States and Iran. The countries have been hostile toward each other for decades, particularly since the 1979 revolution and the seizure of dozens of American diplomats who were held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

But the United States and Iran will remain at odds on many issues.

“We have serious differences with the United States,” Zarif said. “We have built mutual distrust in the past. . . . So what I hope is that through courageous implementation of this, some of that trust could be remedied. But that is for us all to wait and see.”

William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

The key moments in the long history of U.S.-Iran tensions

Transcript: Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif on the ‘framework’ for a nuclear deal

Another nation blazed the trail for Iran in developing a nuclear program",REAL
"  Big pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know that some of the artificial medication for constipation significantly reduce the effectiveness of the intestines. As a result, some people report that without taking certain medication, they can’t visit the toilet. The good news is, you can solve constipation quite easily. But let’s delve deeply into what constipation can do to the body first. Bad Breath Firstly, constipation can cause bad breath (halitosis). Unfortunately, people who suffer from bad breath don’t always realize that they have a problem. People are unlikely to point out to a person that their breath stinks; therefore, they might miss out on social events and job opportunities due to bad breath. Constipation can cause bad breath because there is a build up of toxic waste and the gasses rise up through the body. Rectal Issues & Infection As stools spend more time in the bowels, water is reabsorbed. As a result, stools get hard and dry. Some constipation suffers report that passing bowels becomes very painful and can take many hours. As a result, the rectum is stretched beyond its limits. This can lead to rectal prolapse, which is a rectum which fails to close. Rectal prolapse sufferers usually wear diapers because stool leaks out of them. Moreover, they are more prone to infection. Increase Toxins The skin is the largest organ in the body and is a reflection of a person’s general health. Constipation typically increases the buildup of toxins in the body. As a result, the skin has to work harder to eliminate toxins. This can cause acne, skin discoloration etc. Therefore, if your skin is bad, don’t buy an expensive beauty product. Take a look at your diet, and whether you suffer from constipation. The skin is a reflection of inner health.   Colon Cancer Constipation can also cause colon cancer. The colon is designed to hold a few pounds of stools. Think of it like a plastic bag. Overload with heavy items and it rips. It’s primary function is to transport stool. However, when an individual is constipated, it has to store stool. This puts a strain on the inner membrane and can cause ruptures and internal infections. Invasive surgery may be required in such instances. Loss Of Healthy Bacteria The intestines contain flora (healthy bacteria) which help with immunity and vitamin production. Constipation reduces the concentration of flora, thereby leaving sufferers more susceptible to infection and illness. Moreover, they help to keep stools soft. Therefore, constipation sufferers can go through a downward spiral whereby their condition worsens over time. As people age, they are more likely to get constipated. Moreover, it is more likely to have a serious effect on their health. This is because the body isn’t as resilient. Notably, constipation can have a big effect on quality of life; especially if it comes with one of the serious conditions above. Fortunately, there is a natural cure. Sufferers no longer have to be on a path to deteriorating health. What You Can Do A majority of constipation medication are filled with chemicals which can harm the body, and make constipation worse. Even a product like Metamucil contains ingredients no person should consume, like aspartame. Change your diet! This is one of the best ways to end constipation. Eat plenty of healthy fruits and vegetables and cut out processed foods as much as you can. Eating rancid fats (cooked meat) also doesn’t help with constipation and your digestive system so limiting that as much as possible is important. There are also some great products on the market that can assist you in ending constipation while you spend time changing your diet over time. Wholey Shit is a great example as it contains only a few natural, high quality ingredients -and it works great! You can get a free sample of Wholey Shit here. These types of remedies are a great way to get started and relief naturally and quickly while you further discover how to adjust your diet and lifestyle to reflect better digestion, eating habits and so forth. 
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"ARJUN WALIA OCTOBER 18, 2016 Tensions between the United States, their allies, and Russia continue to rise. It seems, as always, that we are on the brink of global war. The Western military industrial complex continues to take over the Middle East and arm ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as establish and solidify their military presence throughout the world. The sheer number of United States military bases around the globe is astonishing. 
For more, unbiased information on the current state of affairs between the United States and Russia, I recommend visiting theantimedia.org. 
Mainstream media outlets continue to spread propaganda , and have been doing so for years, claiming that there are terrorists, that they threaten national security, and that we must go after them. At the same time, an inflated sense of patriotism is encouraged in American citizens, so they believe their soldiers are fighting for freedom, despite doing the precise opposite. 
A great quote by Edward Bernays, who was known as the father of public relations, comes to mind here: 
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society . Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ( source ) 
A number of politicians and academics from around the world have been trying to create awareness on this issue for decades, and although we’ve come a long way, our relatively slow progress demonstrates the stranglehold mainstream media has on the minds of the masses. 
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” 
– Mark Twain ( source ) 
Below, you’ll find 15 quotes on false flag terrorism and the secret government. False flag terrorism refers to the idea that terrorist attacks are created, perpetuated, and/or funded by Western governments and their allies in order to justify the infiltration of other countries for ulterior motives. Quotes on False Flag Terrorism and the Secret Government 
1. The Dalia Lama 
“Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous – an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.” 
“Modern warfare waged primarily with different forms of fire, but we are so conditioned to see it as thrilling that we talk about this or that marvelous weapon as a remarkable piece of technology without remembering that, if it is actually used, it will burn living people. War also strongly resembles a fire in the way it spreads. If one area gets weak, the commanding officer sends in reinforcements. This is throwing live people onto a fire. But because we have been brainwashed to think this way, we do not consider the suffering of individual soldiers. No soldiers want to be wounded or die. None of his loved ones wants any harm to come to him. If one soldier is killed, or maimed for life, at least another five or ten people – his relatives and friends – suffer as well. We should all be horrified by the extent of this tragedy, but we are too confused.” 
“But no matter how malevolent or evil are the many murderous dictators who can currently oppress their nations and cause international problems, it is obvious that they cannot harm others or destroy countless human lives if they don’t have a military organisation accepted and condoned by society.” ( source ) 
2. Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, Canadian economist, the University of Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics 
“We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level . . . and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington . . . The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. . . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.” 
“Al Qaeda and the Al Qaeda affiliated organizations, including the Islamic State, are not independent organizations, they are sponsored, and they are sponsored by the United States and its allies. It is documented that prior to 2011, there was a process of recruitment of mujahideen to fight in Syria, and this was coordinated by NATO and the Turkish high command. This report is confirmed by Israeli news sources and unequivocally, we are dealing with a state-sponsorship of terrorism, the recruitment of mercenaries, the training and the financing of terrorism.” ( source )( source ) 
3. Paul Hellyer 
“It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction, when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard. It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy, when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which both the Congress and the Commander in Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.” ( source ) 
4. John C. Calhoun, The 7th Vice President of the United States 
“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many, and various, and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.” ( source ) 
5. Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary 
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” ( source ) 
6. John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925 
“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.” ( source )( source ) 
7. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, highest ranking Asian-American politician in United States history 
“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” ( source ) 
8. David Steele, the second-highest ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence and a former CIA clandestine services officer 
“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.” ( source ) 
9. Theodore Roosevelt. former President of the United States 
“Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. 
From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. 
To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” ( source ) 
10. Benjamin Disraeli, First British MP 
“The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” ( Coningsby, Book 4, Chap. 15 , Page 131) 
11. Senator William Jenner 
“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means … We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state … It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government … This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.” ( source ) 
12. Woodrow Wilson, former President of the United States 
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ( source ) 
13. Eric H. May, a former U.S. Army military intelligence and public affairs officer 
“The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out. As I’ll detail below, this is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 “terror” attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on ‘terrorists.’ ” ( source ) 
14. Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University 
“SCADs [which refers to State Crimes Against Democracy] involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power.” ( source )( source ) 
15. President John F. Kennedy 
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. . . . 
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. 
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” ( source ) Share:",FAKE
"Something interesting happened for Hillary Clinton in the third quarter of fundraising: Her fundraising centers softened.

During the second quarter, Clinton outraised Bernie Sanders handily, thanks to a lot of big-dollar donors. In the third quarter, the two were about tied. But look at how Clinton's donors were arrayed during the third quarter versus the second.

In the second quarter, Clinton received donations from about 5,300 ZIP codes. In the third quarter, that increased to 6,300.

That second quarter, when Clinton wrung a lot of money out of a lot of people, she pulled in a lot of money from Manhattan's wealthiest ZIP codes. In those ZIPs, roughly 10021 through 10028, Clinton raised $2 million from individuals in the second quarter. In the third quarter, she raised $725,000 -- a $1.3 million drop. (The densest area of circles below is Manhattan; you can also see the outline of Long Island to New York City's east.)

Notice how centralized her donations were in the second quarter compared to Sanders's. He got a lot more contributions from outlying ZIP codes.

This is what you'd expect to see from a candidate who got a lot of donors to max out early. Those areas subsequently have fewer donors to hit up.

But you might also have noticed how much better Sanders is doing in the lucrative New York market. Across the country, Sanders dramatically expanded the number of places from which he generated contributions, more than doubling the number of ZIP codes from which he got money from 3,400 to 8,400.

Sanders also saw an increase in how much he raised, versus the decrease Clinton experienced. We return to this chart that we published earlier this month.

Sanders has a lot more people now to whom he can go back for more money.",REAL
"VIDEOS Former Ambassador Andrew Young calls for end to water fluoridation, “Civil Rights Issue” A letter has been sent demanding hearings to investigate why water fluoridation is being continued in the state despite all the reasons to end it By Brandon Turbeville - October 31, 2016 
Anti-fluoridation activists in Georgia received a major boost of support when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, sent a letter to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and House Speaker David Ralston demanding hearings to investigate why water fluoridation is being continued in the state despite all the reasons to end it. 
Ambassador Young is asking for a written response. His letter was also sent to the CEO of the American Water Works Association, David LaFrance. 
“What’s clear to me is that we need a repeal of Georgia’s water fluoridation law, and hearings to look into how fluoridation has continued all these years, long after there were plenty of reasons to end it,” Ambassador Young wrote. 
“This is a civil rights issue, and the people have the right to have the full story given to them, rather than highly edited, misleading talking points.” 
Young also addressed the sketchy nature of the pro-fluoridation argument when he wrote, When someone’s story keeps changing, there are quite often motivations behind their changed stance that may not be aligned with the best interests of the public. The story offered by water fluoridation promoters keeps changing…and changing…and changing. There are key groups such as seniors, kidney patients, diabetics, communities of color, thyroid patients and people who drink a lot of water due to their occupation that are especially effected by Fluoridegate. 
“I am calling for Fluoridegate hearings, here, in Georgia and I am calling for a repeal of Georgia’s fluoridation law, immediately,” Young added. 
You can read the full text of Young’s letter here . We congratulate Ambassador Young on having the courage to speak out on this issue and we eagerly await the written response to it. Even more important, we are looking for an end to water fluoridation in Georgia.",FAKE
"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
In a campaign ad for Donald Trump, Laura Wilkerson talks about her horrific experience of her son being doused with gasoline and set on fire by an illegal alien. In the ad called “Laura,” she explains why Hillary Clinton's policies are harmful for America. ",FAKE
"Undercover Video Exposes Obama’s Plan to Make American “Gun Laws” More Like Britain Undercover Video Exposes Obama’s Plan to Make American “Gun Laws” More Like Britain Videos By Amy Moreno October 26, 2016 
We know that Obama and Hillary want to take away of Second Amendment right. 
They say we’re just paranoid freaks for thinking that way. 
But we know, right? 
This undercover video exposes a close Obama advisor speaking about Obama’s “issue” which is to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence. 
FYI, HANDGUNS ARE ILLEGAL IN BRITAIN – YOU CAN ONLY OWN “SPORTING RIFLES” AND THAT’S SUBJECT TO LICENSING. 
Don’t think it can happen here? 
Elect Hillary and a liberal Supreme Court and watch. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"So, that happened: This week, the early stages of the 2016 presidential election collided headlong with the phenomenon of vaccine denialism, with two candidates ending up in intensive care for foot-in-mouth disease. We'll talk about who took a hit and who managed to avoid this nonsense.

Are you a regular ""So, That Happened"" listener? Let us know! Tell us what you think of the show, what we're messing up and who we need to hear more from. Send us an electronic communication at sothathappened@huffingtonpost.com.

""It's a world in which we need sanity. And this week, we didn't get it."" -- Jason Linkins

Meanwhile, the Obama budget is out, and from the looks of it, it seems the president wants to swing for the fences on infrastructure, early childhood care and increased federal spending. But did he notice that Congress is controlled by the GOP? We'll discuss what compromises are possible.

""It's as though Democrats control both chambers of Congress. There is not an effort which he's made in previous budgets to meet them halfway, or more than halfway."" -- Sabrina Siddiqui

Finally, this was a big week for Downton Abbey-inspired congressional interior decoration scandals. We'll explain how it came to pass that we could put all those words in that previous sentence.

""Washington elites decorate their environs with track lighting, chrome appliances and granite countertops -- a very modern, spare look with open floor plans, and [Aaron] Schock is going in the other direction."" -- Arthur Delaney

We're very happy to let you know that ""So, That Happened"" is now available on iTunes. We've been working to create an eclectic and informative panel show that's constantly evolving, a show that's as in touch with the top stories of the week as it is with important stories that go underreported. We'll be here on a weekly basis, bringing you the goods.

Never miss an episode: Subscribe to ""So, That Happened"" on iTunes, and if you like what you hear, please leave a review. We also encourage you to check out other HuffPost podcasts: HuffPost Comedy's ""Too Long; Didn't Listen,"" the HuffPost Weird News podcast, HuffPost Politics' ""Drinking and Talking,"" HuffPost Live's ""Fine Print"" and HuffPost Entertainment's podcast.",REAL
"Trump Whistles His Dogs ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – November 2, 2016: ISIS and Al-Nusra Attempt to Cut Off Govt Supply Line to Aleppo By South Front on November 2, 2016 …from SouthFront 
The Syrian Air Force has delivered a high number of air strikes in western Aleppo, targeting militants in in Al-Assad, Rashidin 4, Rashidin 5, the 1070 Apartment Project (1070 AP), Southern Sawmills and along the road to Khan Tuman. 
Since November 1, the fighting in the area has become stationary. The western part of the al-Assad Neighborhood is contested. The al-Nusra led coalition, Jaish al-Fatah, controls the southwestern part of the 1070 AP. The militants’ attacks on the 3000 Apartment Project have failed. 
In the 1070 AP, the government forces keep control of 3 groups of buildings. The supply line #1 has been cut off by Jaish al-Fatah. The supply line #2 is vulnerable to fire by militants. The government-controlled sector is separated from Jaish al-Fatah units by an open ground. This is why the militants are not able to take control of these building blocks. 
Clashes in this non-populated area allow the Syrian military to use its advantage in firepower to whittle the jihadist manpower and military equipment, repelling their frontal attacks. Jaish al-Fatah suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices remain the main threat to the army’s defenses. 
While Jaish al-Fatah cannot take control of the 1070 AP, the alliance’s attacks on the 3000 Apartment Project will hardly be able to lead to any success. 
Syrian troops have repelled an ISIS attack on the government only supply line to Aleppo in the sector between Ithriyah and al-Salamiyah. ISIS attacked the Syrian army in the Wadi al-Adhib region but was forced to retreat after a fierce battle. Last weekend, al-Nusra Front, the leading force of Jaish al-Fatah, attacked the supply line in the sector between Ithriyah and Aleppo, but also failed. 
This clearly shows that despite all controversies, ISIS and the so-called ‘moderate opposition’ are playing in the same game, attempting to prevent liberation of Aleppo by the government forces. 
Turkey’s engineer units are currently building a military base, with an airfield, in the area of Ziyar, south of the Syrian border town of al-Rai, the As Safir newspaper revealed. The newspaper believes that the Turkish regime is going implement the Iraq-like strategy in Syria and set a series of military installations in order to project the military power in the area. 
On November 1, Iraqi security forces (ISF) liberated the strategic Kurdish village of Gogjali in the eastern outskirts of Mosul and seized the nearby state-TV building. By doing this, the ISF has entered the ISIS-controlled city for the first time since it was occupied by ISIS in 2014. Related Posts:",FAKE
"Whether or not Christians should celebrate Halloween has been a controversial topic for decades. Some view dressing up, eating candy and enjoying the festivities harmless and innocent, while others view it as an offense to their faith. Americans spend nearly $6.9 billion yearly making it the second largest commercial holiday in the country. As commercialized as the celebration has become, many of its roots are completely paganist. Is this a cause for Christians to avoid the entire celebration?
This is a time of year filled with debate, but not necessarily politics. Many Christians are convinced that Halloween is a satanic holiday while the rest of the world has found their sweet spot complete with costumes and candy. Children and adults have the opportunity to dress in accordance with their imagination, confirming from its haunted history to modern festivities, this holiday is a big deal. With decorations, candy, parties, and costumes, the average American spends up to $75 in the spirit of celebration.
Halloween is the holiday that links the seasons of fall and winter. Reportedly, it originated with one of the ancient Celtic festivals; an event where people would wear various costumes and light bonfires in hopes of warding off roaming ghosts. However, by the late 1800s, Americans shifted the theory of Halloween into a holiday centered on community and fun events. The focus, for many, has transitioned from witchcraft and ghosts to neighborhood celebratory events. With the evolving of the focal point, should Christians change their stance to celebrate the holiday?
Despite having at least partial roots from a Christian tradition, the relationship between Halloween and Christians has long been complicated. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther essentially started the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg, Germany, when he nailed his 95 Theses to a door. Many of the early Christian groups that came to America rejected this holiday as pagan. The Protestant Reformation heavily influenced the Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, and Baptists causing the great majority to frown upon it. However, that did not prevent Halloween from finding its way to American shores.
In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III dedicated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs. The holiday became widely recognized as All Saints’ Day. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve, which later became Halloween. The word “hallow” originated from the Old English word for “holy” and “e’en” is an abbreviation of “evening.” As such, Halloween represented the night before All Saints Day.
Over time, Halloween advanced into a secular, community-based holiday branded by child-friendly activities that include costumes, neighborhood trick-or-treating, and more recently, trunk-or-treating. Along with a variety of pumpkin-flavored foods, Parties for both children and adults have become a very common way to celebrate the holiday. Some Christians still choose to lock themselves indoors with the lights off, but others have found freedom in their faith and are at liberty to decide when and how to participate.
In multiple countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to escort the winter season in with candy-coated gatherings and a wide range of costumes. Halloween is a celebration that allows people of all ages to participate. Nonetheless, the question remains, “Should Christians celebrate?”
Due to the efforts of community leaders and parents, Halloween has lost most of its illogical and religious undertones and is now more about imagination than spooky interpretation. There is nothing sinful about a Christian dressing up and participating in fun, non-threatening, celebrations. As a result, many Christians find no harm in dressing in costumes, attending parties and festivals as well as allowing their children to participate in school and local activities.
By Cherese Jackson (Virginia)
Sources:
History: Halloween
Kidsville News: Around the World – October 2015
Grace to You: Christians and Halloween
Photo Credits:
Top Image Courtesy of Billy Wilson – Flickr License
Inline Image (1) Courtesy of Richard Vignola – Flickr License
Inline Image (2) Courtesy of The Forum News – Flickr License
Featured Image Courtesy of John Nakamura – Flickr License christianity , halloween",FAKE
"(CNN) The site of a horrific mass killing will become a house of worship again.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, will hold a service at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, according to CNN affiliate WCSC.

Nine people were shot to death Wednesday night at the church.

Authorities said Dylann Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina, admits he shot and killed the people he'd sat with for Bible study at the historicall y black church, two law enforcement officials said.

Roof is white and all the victims are black. He told investigators he did it to start a race war, according to one of the officials.

The church premises remained a crime scene, and thus off-limits to church members, until Charleston police released it Saturday.

One of the victims was the church's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. The Rev. Norvel Goff, presiding elder of Emanuel AME, told CNN he will give the sermon at the service.

Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City because it has so many churches, will remember the shooting victims in other ways.

On Sunday night, a unity chain will be held on the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Organizers hope to attract enough people to hold hands and stretch from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant on the other side of the Cooper River.

That message was echoed by Arthur Hurd, the husband of victim Cynthia Hurd. He's in the Merchant Marines and arrived in Charleston on Saturday.

'Hate's not in me'

""This is all surreal but what I can say to that young man is that in time I will forgive you,"" Hurd told CNN affiliate WCIV. ""I won't move past this but I will forgive you. But I hope for the rest of your life, however long or short that may be, you stop and play that tape over and over and over again in your head and see the sheer terror and pain you put purely innocent people through. ...""

""I would love to hate you but hate's not in me. If I hate you I'm no better than you.""

People angry about the killings took to the streets Saturday.

In Charleston, hundreds joined the March for Black Lives.

The group began the march in total silence as they walked to Emanuel AME Church from a nearby park, stopping outside the church to lay flowers at the makeshift memorial.

Once they passed the church, the group filled Charleston's iconic King Street, usually packed with tourists this time of year. Many carried signs of support for the victims of the Charleston shooting and the black community: ""STILL WE RISE,"" ""Hand in Hand,"" ""Do the right thing,"" ""Black Lives Matter,"" signs read.

The march ended with a rally outside the historic Daughters of the Confederacy building.

'Take it down'

""That terrorist did not win. He wanted to invoke terror and fear in our community, but we are not for that,"" an organizer said to the crowd. ""We are standing up together, arm in arm... We will not bow down, but we will stand up.""

Despite the sweltering heat, a large crowd filled the front grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia calling for the Confederate flag to be removed.

""Take it down, take it down,"" chanted the crowd filled with people of all races and ages holding signs.

One woman's sign said, ""Love breeds love, hate breeds hate"" and another man's sign says, ""Remove my ancestors sign.""

Organizers of the event, the South Carolina Progressive Network, estimates between 1,500 and 1,700 people attended.

The 2,000-word text explains the writer's philosophy of white superiority, saying the Trayvon Martin case ""truly awakened me"" and that ""I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country.""

Motive has become the biggest question as state and federal investigators work on the case -- and statements and photos on the website match what investigators have determined so far.

For instance, CNN Charlotte affiliate WBTV, citing a source, says Roof told investigators in Shelby, North Carolina, where he was arrested, that he researched the church and targeted it because it turned out to be a ""historic African-American church.""

Three photos show Roof posing with a pistol. One closeup shows a gun that can be identified as a.45-caliber Glock -- the model of gun investigators say was used in the church shooting. Those photos were taken in April, after his 21st birthday, when his family said he purchased a .45-caliber gun.

The website, called the Last Rhodesian, is bare bones. Roof's name doesn't appear anywhere on the site but he is shown in many of the photos. An Internet ownership search shows the website was registered to Roof and listed as the administrator.

While the nation rallies behind Charleston, an insight into Roof's state of mind came from Charleston County Sheriff's Office spokesman Maj. Eric Watson.

Roof, he said, ""is in protective custody. He is currently sitting on his bed being monitored by two detention officers. He is on suicide watch.""

Roof may be prosecuted by federal authorities if it's determined he committed a hate crime. The Justice Department said ""it is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.""

Funeral plans for Pinckney, who was a state senator, were announced Saturday.

Pinckney's casket will be at the State House rotunda lobby from 1-5 p.m. Wednesday. Public viewings will also be held Thursday at St. John AMC Church in Ridgeland and Emanuel AME Church.

The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at TD Arena on the College of Charleston campus. The service is open to the public.",REAL
"Only Making Matters Worse in Syria October 28, 2016 
Exclusive: Washington’s foreign policy establishment is determined to escalate U.S. military attacks in Syria even though that won’t resolve the conflict and will only get more people killed, a dilemma addressed by Daniel Lazare. 
By Daniel Lazare 
Middle East policy has reached an inflexion point, a moment when Official Washington seems to be caught in the middle between escalation and retreat. 
On one hand, the rhetoric has not been more militant since Hillary Clinton’s famous “we came, we saw, he died” moment in October 2011. With Barack Obama halfway out the door and Clinton all but crowned, Washington’s laptop bombardiers are rejoicing that the half-measures are over and judgment day nearly at hand. Samantha Power, Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN, addresses the Security Council meeting on Syria, Sept. 25, 2016. Power has been an advocate for escalating U.S. military involvement in Syria. (UN Photo) 
Thus, The New York Times assures us that that the Middle East is “desperate for American leadership” while the Washington Post reports that “the Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the ground work for a more assertive American foreign policy.” 
Leading think tanks are publishing “a flurry of reports” urging stepped-up intervention, including U.S.-backed “safe zones to protect moderate rebels from Syrian and Russian forces” and even “limited” cruise-missile strikes. But while differing on the details, all agree something must be done. The time to act is now. 
As Vox puts it: “The hot new policy idea in Washington is the hottest old idea: direct US military intervention in Syria’s civil war.” 
But reading between the lines, a very different picture emerges, a realization that the U.S. has painted itself into a corner and that there is little it can do after all. Thus, the Times observes that while the Middle East is clamoring for U.S. leadership, it is not clamoring for Bush-style intervention but for some mythical “middle ground” in between him and Obama. 
While reporting that pro-escalation sentiment is unanimous in Washington’s vast foreign-policy establishment – sometimes known as “ the blob ” – the Washington Post notes that “even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the Syrian air force or punish [President Bashar al-]Assad would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces” and wonders whether a war-weary public will support any intervention at all. 
“My concern is that we may be talking to each other and agreeing with each other,” it quotes one expert as saying, “but that these discussions are isolated from where the public may be right now.” 
Official Washington in a Bubble 
Thus, even the Establishment worries that it lives in a bubble. Washington wants war, it needs war, and yet it admits in practically the same breath that it can’t have it. So what will it do? A heart-rending propaganda image designed to justify a major U.S. military operation inside Syria against the Syrian military. 
Then there are the mild liberals over at Vox, the hip and successful Washington website founded by journalistic wunderkind Ezra Klein. Voxers pride themselves on being sharp and practical yet in the end they are sealed off as well. The poster boy for this tendency is Zack Beauchamp, a young writer who stars in a recent Vox video entitled, “ The crisis in Aleppo, explained in 4 minutes .” 
As Beauchamp lectures away amid fancy graphics and cool background music, the video faithfully toes the Washington line, both the stirring gung-ho part and the downbeat refrain that inevitably follows. Thus, he describes the Syrian civil war as a “story of flip-flops,” with Assad seemingly on the ropes until Iran and Russia put him back on his feet, at which point the Saudis and Qataris put the rebels back on their feet so the game can continue. 
But the real turning point, he says, occurred in September 2015 when Russia stepped in with airstrikes that allowed the government to besiege the Salafists in eastern Aleppo. 
“A siege,” Beauchamp then explains, “involves trapping a group of people, civilians and fighters both, inside a certain territory and denying them supplies until they can no longer fight. Assad’s strategy has a vicious logic to it. When you deprive people of food and you bomb them over and over again, they’re likely to give in just to make the fighting stop.” 
The upshot, he says, is “a humanitarian crisis … roughly 250,000 people trapped in the city … running dangerously low on supplies, access to clean water and medicine.” So what should the U.S. do in response? The video’s tone at this point turns pessimistic and then pitch black: 
“The United States has the military power to break the siege of Aleppo,” Beauchamp says, “but doing so would be extremely dangerous. For one thing, it would need to coordinate with rebels on the ground, some of whom are extremists. For another, it means that the US would be operating in hostile air space with Russian planes.If the US were to engage with Russian planes, that could theoretically mean direct fire between two nuclear-armed superpowers, a risk that very few people in the United States are willing to take. And three, even if the US did temporarily break the siege, it would have to maintain a commitment to insure that things didn’t get worse. That could mean an open-ended war. And there’s no guarantee that this would make anything better, but, rather, it might just get more people killed over the long run.” 
So U.S. options are zero: “Every diplomatic solution tried so far has failed, and failed miserably, and there’s simply no economic tool that can be used to end the fighting or ease the suffering of the people inside besieged territories. There’s no good answer. There’s nothing that anyone has that could simply solve the crisis. It’s a disaster and a disaster without any end in sight.” 
Falsehoods and Obfuscations 
Beauchamp’s explanation – which is really not an explanation at all, merely an assertion – is studded with falsehoods and obfuscations. By describing Assad’s strategy as uniquely “vicious,” he ignores obvious parallels between the Russian air campaign in Aleppo and U.S. air assaults on Fallujah , Tikrit , and Ramadi , all in central Iraq and all largely destroyed in the course of “liberating” them from ISIS. U.S.-backed Syrian “moderate” rebels smile as they prepare to behead a 12-year-old boy (left), whose severed head is held aloft triumphantly in a later part of the video. [Screenshot from the YouTube video] By referring to the events in Syria as a civil war, he fails to acknowledge the degree to which it is actually a foreign invasion by the U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf states. By repeatedly referring to the Salafists as “rebels” – which suggests that they are Syrians rising up from within – he ignores the fact that large numbers – 36,500, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper – are foreign-born.
While asserting that 250,000 people are trapped inside east Aleppo, he ignores reports that the real figure is far lower. The Guardian ’s Martin Chulov, for example, estimated in March 2015 that only 40,000 people remained in rebel-held areas while Vice News reported last July that “most of Aleppo’s residents have fled the city. There are just a handful of civilians and rebel fighters holding on in the shattered ruins.” 
Beauchamp also implies that it is the government that has “trapped” people in east Aleppo when reports in the London Independent and elsewhere indicate that Salafists are firing on anyone trying to take the government up on its offer of safe passage. While acknowledging that “some” fighters are “extremists,” he ignores the fact that the U.S. military has admitted that Al Nusra, the local branch of Al Qaeda, is firmly in charge. 
When Salafists launched a short-lived offensive in east Aleppo last summer, for instance, The New York Times reported that they named it in honor of Ibrahim al-Yousef, a Muslim Brotherhood member who led a horrendous massacre of Alawite military cadets in 1979. It was indicative of how anti-Alawite sectarianism of the most bloodthirsty sort is the common denominator underlying all anti-government factions. 
One could go on, but the point is clear. The foreign-policy establishment has not only cut itself off from the public but, with the help of sympathetic media outlets like Vox, has cut itself off from its own intellectual history. Incapable of examining the U.S. role in the Syrian debacle in an honest and straightforward way, it can only blunder about in the dark, staggering backward or forward as circumstances dictate. Now seems to be the moment when it is poised between the two. 
So how will the United States respond now that Washington is preparing for a transition between Obama-style abstention and Hillary-style neo-conservatism? Here’s is one reporter’s modest attempt at reading the tea leaves: 
Washington will continue to fume as the catastrophe deepens in both Syria and Iraq. As the drive to push ISIS (also known as ISIL, Islamic State, and Daesh) out of Mosul in northern Iraq degenerates into ethno-sectarian warfare among Turks, Sunni Arabs, Shi‘ites, and Kurds, the drive to take back Raqqa, ISIS’s capital in north-central Syria will similarly falter as fighting breaks out between pro-Turkish forces and Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG. 
The fall of east Aleppo, which now seems to be a foregone conclusion, will drive the foreign-policy establishment to a fury. Obama may be able to hold the hawks off. But by the time he leaves office, “the blob” will be in an uproar and demanding that something be done. Map of Syria. 
With that, Zack Beauchamp will star in another Vox video entitled, “U.S. military intervention in Syria, explained in 4 minutes.” In it, he’ll tell how Russian atrocities in Aleppo, plus backhanded Syrian government support for ISIS, leave the U.S. no choice but to launch a swarm of cruise missiles at Syrian military facilities. 
When Russian soldiers are killed, he’ll try to shift blame to Vladimir Putin for stirring up trouble in the eastern Ukraine or the Baltics. He’ll note that dissent is limited to a few cranky websites and far-left groups, all of which can be safely ignored since they’re not part of the mainstream. Russia will then counter-attack, leading to … no one knows. 
While anything can go wrong with this scenario, one thing is clear. The mood in Official Washington is the opposite of 2003 when all the “experts” agreed that an invasion of Iraq would be a walk in the park. Now they’re filled with trepidation. But they’re still trying to talk themselves into an escalation and may succeed. If the election goes as expected, the Clinton II presidency will be an interesting one. 
Daniel Lazare is the author of several books including The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace).",FAKE
"Editor's note: This has been updated at 1:25 p.m. ET Friday with additional fact-checking information.

Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for president Thursday night, delivering a speech that lays out her plan to address terrorist threats and create jobs.

NPR's politics team annotated Clinton's speech below. Portions commented on are highlighted, followed by analysis, context and fact check in italics.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all so so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for that amazing welcome. Thank you all for the great convention that we've had.

And Chelsea, thank you.

I'm so proud to be your mother and so proud of the woman you've become.

Thank you for bringing Marc into our family, and Charlotte and Aidan into the world.

And Bill, that conversation we started in the law library 45 years ago, it is still going strong.

You know, that conversation has lasted through good times that filled us with joy, and hard times that tested us.

And I've even gotten a few words in along the way.

On Tuesday night, I was so happy to see that my explainer-in-chief is still on the job.

I'm also grateful to the rest of my family and to the friends of a lifetime.

For all of you whose hard work brought us here tonight, and to those of you who joined this campaign this week. Thank you.

What a remarkable week it's been.

We heard the man from Hope, Bill Clinton.

And the man of Hope, Barack Obama.

America is stronger because of President Obama's leadership, and I'm better because of his friendship.

We heard from our terrific vice president, the one and only Joe Biden. He spoke from his big heart about our party's commitment to working people, as only he can do.

And first lady Michelle Obama reminded us that our children are watching, and the president we elect is going to be their president, too.

And for those of you out there who are just getting to know Tim Kaine — you will soon understand why the people of Virginia keep promoting him: from city council and mayor, to governor, and now senator.

And he will make the whole country proud as our vice president.

And ... I want to thank Bernie Sanders.

Bernie, Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary.

You've put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong.

And to all of your supporters here and around the country: I want you to know, I've heard you. Your cause is our cause.

Our country needs your ideas, energy and passion.

That is the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America.

We wrote it together — now let's go out and make it happen together.

My friends, we've come to Philadelphia — the birthplace of our nation — because what happened in this city 240 years ago still has something to teach us today.

We all know the story. But we usually focus on how it turned out — and not enough on how close that story came to never being written at all.

When representatives from 13 unruly colonies met just down the road from here, some wanted to stick with the king. And some wanted to stick it to the king.

The revolution hung in the balance.

Then somehow, they began listening to each other, compromising, finding common purpose.

And by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation.

That's what made it possible to stand up to a king.

That took courage. They had courage.

Our Founders embraced the enduring truth that we are stronger together.

Now, now America is once again at a moment of reckoning. Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart. Bonds of trust and respect are fraying.

And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we all will work together so we can all rise together.

Our country's motto is ""e pluribus unum"": out of many, we are one. Will we stay true to that motto?

Well, we heard Donald Trump's answer last week at his convention. He wants to divide us from the rest of the world, and from each other.

He's betting that the perils of today's world will blind us to its unlimited promise. He's taken the Republican Party a long way from ""Morning in America"" to ""Midnight in America."" He wants us to fear the future and fear each other.

Well, you know, a great Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than 80 years ago, during a much more perilous time: ""The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.""

Now we are clear-eyed about what our country is up against. But we are not afraid. We will rise to the challenge, just as we always have. We will not build a wall. Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good job can get one.

And we'll build a path to citizenship for millions of immigrants who are already contributing to our economy!

We, we will not ban a religion. We will work with all Americans and our allies to fight and defeat terrorism.

There's a lot of work to do.

Too many people haven't had a pay raise since the crash.

There's too much inequality. Too little social mobility. Too much paralysis in Washington. Too many threats at home and abroad.

But just look for a minute at the strengths we bring as Americans to meet these challenges. We have the most dynamic and diverse people in the world. We have the most tolerant and generous young people we've ever had. We have the most powerful military. The most innovative entrepreneurs. The most enduring values: freedom and equality, justice and opportunity.

We should be so proud that those words are associated with us. I have to tell you, as your secretary of state, I went to 112 countries. When people hear those words, they hear America.

So don't let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We're not.

Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes. We do.

And most of all, don't believe anyone who says, ""I alone can fix it.""

Yes, those were actually Donald Trump's words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us.

Really? I alone can fix it? Isn't he forgetting?

Troops on the front lines. Police officers and firefighters who run toward danger. Doctors and nurses who care for us. Teachers who change lives. Entrepreneurs who see possibilities in every problem. Mothers who lost children to violence and are building a movement to keep other kids safe.

He's forgetting every last one of us.

Americans don't say, ""I alone can fix it."" We say, ""We'll fix it together.""

And remember, remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Two-hundred-and-forty years later, we still put our faith in each other.

Look at what happened in Dallas after the assassinations of five brave police officers. Police Chief David Brown asked the community to support his force, maybe even join them.

And you know how the community responded? Nearly 500 people applied in just 12 days.

That's how Americans answer when the call for help goes out.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called It Takes a Village. And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ""What the heck do you mean by that?""

This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.

America needs every one of us to lend our energy, our talents, our ambition to making our nation better and stronger. I believe that with all my heart.

That's why ""Stronger Together"" is not just a lesson from our history. It's not just a slogan for our campaign.

It's a guiding principle for the country we've always been and the future we're going to build.

A country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter what zip code you live in.

A country where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach. Where families are strong, communities are safe, and yes, where love trumps hate.

That's the country we're fighting for. That's the future we're working toward. And so, my friends, it is with humility, determination and boundless confidence in America's promise that I accept your nomination for president of the United States!

Now, sometimes, sometimes the people at this podium are new to the national stage.

As you know, I'm not one of those people.

I've been your First Lady, served eight years as a senator from the great state of New York.

Then I represented all of you as secretary of state.

But my job titles only tell you what I've done.

They don't tell you why.

The truth is, through all these years of public service, the ""service"" part has always come easier to me than the ""public"" part.

I get it that some people just don't know what to make of me. So let me tell you.

The family I'm from, well, no one had their name on big buildings. My family were builders of a different kind. Builders in the way most American families are.

They used whatever tools they had — whatever God gave them — and whatever life in America provided — and built better lives and better futures for their kids.

My grandfather worked in the same Scranton lace mill for 50 years. Because he believed that if he gave everything he had, his children would have a better life than he did. And he was right.

My dad, Hugh, made it to college. He played football at Penn State and enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor.

When the war was over, he started his own small business, printing fabric for draperies. I remember watching him stand for hours over silk screens.

He wanted to give my brothers and me opportunities he never had. And he did.

My mother, Dorothy, was abandoned by her parents as a young girl. She

ended up on her own at 14, working as a housemaid. She was saved by the kindness of others.

Her first-grade teacher saw she had nothing to eat at lunch and brought extra food to share the entire year. The lesson she passed on to me, years later, stuck with me: No one gets through life alone. We have to look out for each other and lift each other up.

And she made sure I learned the words from our Methodist faith: ""Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.""

So, I went to work for the Children's Defense Fund, going door-to-door in New Bedford, Mass., on behalf of children with disabilities who were denied the chance to go to school.

I remember meeting a young girl in a wheelchair on the small back porch of her house. She told me how badly she wanted to go to school — it just didn't seem possible in those days. And I couldn't stop thinking of my mother and what she'd gone through as a child.

It became clear to me that simply caring is not enough. To drive real progress, you have to change both hearts and laws. You need both understanding and action.

So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities.

It's a big idea, isn't it? Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school.

But how, how do you make an idea like that real? You do it step-by-step, year-by-year, sometimes even door-by-door.

My heart just swelled when I saw Anastasia Somoza representing millions of young people on this stage — because we changed our law to make sure she got an education.

So it's true. I sweat the details of policy — whether we're talking about the exact level of lead in the drinking water in Flint, Mich., the number of mental health facilities in Iowa, or the cost of your prescription drugs.

Because it's not just a detail if it's your kid — if it's your family. It's a big deal. And it should be a big deal to your president, too.

After the four days of this convention, you've seen some of the people who've inspired me. People who let me into their lives, and became a part of mine.

People like Ryan Moore and Lauren Manning. They told their stories Tuesday night.

I first met Ryan as a 7-year-old. He was wearing a full body brace that must have weighed 40 pounds, because I leaned over to lift him up.

Children like Ryan kept me going when our plan for universal health care failed and kept me working with leaders of both parties to help create the Children's Health Insurance Program that covers 8 million kids in our country.

Lauren Manning, who stood here with such grace and power, was gravely injured on 9/11. It was the thought of her, and Debbie St. John who you saw in the movie, and John Dolan and Joe Sweeney, and all the victims and survivors, that kept me working as hard as I could in the Senate on behalf of 9/11 families, and our first responders who got sick from their time at Ground Zero.

I was thinking of Lauren, Debbie and all the others 10 years later in the White House Situation Room when President Obama made the courageous decision that finally brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

And in this campaign, I've met many more people who motivate me to keep fighting for change. And, with your help, I will carry all of your voices and stories with me to the White House.

And you heard, you heard from, from Republicans and Independents who are supporting our campaign. Well, I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans and independents, for the struggling, the striving, the successful, for all those who vote for me and for those who don't. For all Americans together.

Tonight, tonight we've reached a milestone in our nation's march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.

Standing here, standing here as my mother's daughter, and my daughter's mother, I'm so happy this day has come.

I'm happy for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.

I'm happy for boys and men, too — because when any barrier falls in America, it clears the way for everyone. After all, when there are no ceilings, the sky's the limit.

So let's keep going, let's keep going until every one of the 161 million women and girls across America has the opportunity she deserves to have.

But even more important than the history we make tonight, is the history we will write together in the years ahead.

Let's begin with what we're going to do to help working people in our country get ahead and stay ahead.

Now, I don't think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes.

Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office. Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs. Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. And an auto industry that just had its best year ever.

Now that's real progress, but none of us can be satisfied with the status quo. Not by a long shot.

We're still facing deep-seated problems that developed long before the recession and have stayed with us through the recovery.

I've gone around our country talking to working families. And I've heard from many who feel like the economy sure isn't working for them.

Some of you are frustrated — even furious. And you know what? You're right. It's not yet working the way it should.

Americans are willing to work — and work hard. But right now, an awful lot of people feel there is less and less respect for the work they do. And less respect for them, period.

Democrats, we are the party of working people. But we haven't done a good enough job showing we get what you're going through, and we're going to do something to help.

So tonight I want to tell you tonight how we will empower Americans to live better lives.

My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States. From my first day in office to my last, especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind.

From our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian Country to Coal Country. From communities ravaged by addiction to regions hollowed out by plant closures.

And here's what I believe. I believe America thrives when the middle class thrives. I believe that our economy isn't working the way it should because our democracy isn't working the way it should.

That's why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them.

And if necessary, we will pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

I believe American corporations that have gotten so much from our country should be just as patriotic in return. Many of them are. But too many aren't. It's wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other.

And I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again.

And I believe in science. I believe climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs.

I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to try to kick them out.

Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together — and it's the right thing to do.

So, whatever party you belong to, or if you belong to no party at all, if you share these beliefs, this is your campaign.

If you believe that companies should share profits with their workers, not pad executive bonuses, join us.

If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage, and no one working full time should have to raise their children in poverty, join us.

If you believe that every man, woman and child in America has the right to affordable health care, join us.

If you believe that we should say ""no"" to unfair trade deals, that we should stand up to China, that we should support our steelworkers and autoworkers and homegrown manufacturers, then join us.

If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman's right to make her own health care decisions, then join us.

And yes, yes, if you believe that your working mother, wife, sister or daughter deserves equal pay, join us.

That's how we're going to sure this economy works for everyone, not just those at the top.

Now, you didn't hear any of this, did you, from Donald Trump at his convention. He spoke for 70-odd minutes — and I do mean odd.

And he offered zero solutions.

But we already know he doesn't believe these things. No wonder he doesn't like talking about his plans. You might have noticed, I love talking about mine.

In my first hundred days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II. Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business, and infrastructure.

If we invest in infrastructure now, we'll not only create jobs today, but lay the foundation for the jobs of the future.

And we will also transform the way we prepare our young people for those jobs.

Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all!

We will also, we will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt.

It's just not right that Donald Trump can ignore his debts, and students and families can't refinance their debts.

And something we don't say often enough: Sure, college is crucial, but a four-year degree should not be the only path to a good job.

We will help more people learn a skill or practice a trade and make a good living doing it.

We will give small businesses like my dad's a boost. Make it easier to get credit. Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks.

In America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it.

And we will help you balance family and work. And you know what, if fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the ""woman card,"" then deal me in.

Now, here's the other thing, we're not only going to make all these investments, we're going to pay for every single one of them.

And here's how: Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.

This is not because we resent success, because when more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, that's where the money is, and we are going to follow the money.

And if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we'll make them pay us back. And we'll put that money to work where it belongs, creating jobs here at home!

Now, now I imagine some of you are sitting at home thinking, well, that all sounds pretty good. But how are you going to get it done? How are you going to break through the gridlock in Washington?

Well, look at my record. I've worked across the aisle to pass laws and treaties and to launch new programs that help millions of people. And if you give me the chance, that's what I'll do as president.

But then I also imagine people are thinking out there, but Trump, he's a businessman. He must know something about the economy.

Well, let's take a closer look.

In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you will find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills.

Now, remember what the president said last night: ""Don't boo, vote."" People who did the work and needed the money, and didn't get it — not because he couldn't pay them, but because he wouldn't pay them. He just stiffed them.

And you know that sales pitch he's making to be president? Put your faith in him — and you'll win big? That's the same sales pitch he made to all those small businesses. Then Trump walked away, and left working people holding the bag.

He also talks a big game about putting America first. Well, please explain what part of ""America First"" leads him to make Trump ties in China, not Colorado. Trump suits in Mexico, not Michigan. Trump furniture in Turkey, not Ohio. Trump picture frames in India, not Wisconsin.

Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again — well, he could start by actually making things in America again.

Now, the choice we face in this election is just as stark when it comes to our national security.

You know, anyone, anyone reading the news can see the threats and turbulence we face.

From Baghdad to Kabul, to Nice and Paris and Brussels, from San Bernardino to Orlando, we're dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated.

So, it's no wonder that people are anxious and looking for reassurance. Looking for steady leadership, wanting a leader who understands we are stronger when we work with our allies around the world and care for our veterans here at home. Keeping our nation safe and honoring the people who do that work will be my highest priority.

I'm proud that we put a lid on Iran's nuclear program without firing a single shot — now we have to enforce it. And we must keep supporting Israel's security.

I'm proud that we shaped a global climate agreement — now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves.

And I'm proud to stand by our allies in NATO against any threat they face, including from Russia.

I've laid out my strategy for defeating ISIS. We will strike their sanctuaries from the air, and support local forces taking them out on the ground. We will surge our intelligence so that we detect and prevent attacks before they happen.

We will disrupt their efforts online to reach and radicalize young people in our country.

It won't be easy or quick, but make no mistake — we will prevail.

Now Donald Trump, Donald Trump says, and this is a quote, ""I know more about ISIS than the generals do."" No, Donald, you don't.

He thinks, he thinks that he knows more than our military because he claimed our armed forces are ""a disaster.""

Well, I've had the privilege to work closely with our troops and our veterans for many years, including as a senator on the Armed Services Committee, and I know how wrong he is. Our military is a national treasure.

We entrust our commander in chief to make the hardest decisions our nation faces, decisions about war and peace, life and death.

A president should respect the men and women who risk their lives to serve our country — including Captain Khan and the sons of Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, both Marines.

So just ask yourself: Do you really think Donald Trump has the temperament to be commander in chief?

Donald Trump can't even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign. He loses his cool at the slightest provocation. When he's gotten a tough question from a reporter. When he's challenged in a debate. When he sees a protester at a rally.

Imagine, if you dare, imagine, imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis. A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.

I can't put it, I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started, not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men — the ones moved by fear and pride.

America's strength doesn't come from lashing out. It relies on smarts, judgment, cool resolve, and the precise and strategic application of power. And that's the kind of commander in chief I pledge to be.

And if we're serious about keeping our country safe, we also can't afford to have a president who's in the pocket of the gun lobby.

I'm not here to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not here to take away your guns. I just don't want you to be shot by someone who shouldn't have a gun in the first place.

We will work tirelessly with responsible gun owners to pass common-sense reforms and keep guns out of the hands of criminals, terrorists and all others who would do us harm.

You know, for decades, people have said this issue was too hard to solve and the politics too hot to touch. But I ask you: How can we just stand by and do nothing?

You heard, you saw, family members of people killed by gun violence on this stage.

You heard, you saw, family members of police officers killed in the line of duty because they were outgunned by criminals.

I refuse to believe we can't find common ground here.

We have to heal the divides in our country. Not just on guns. But on race. Immigration. And more.

And that starts with listening, listening to each other. Trying, as best we can, to walk in each other's shoes.

So let's put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism, and are made to feel like their lives are disposable.

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of police officers, kissing their kids and spouses goodbye every day, heading off to do a dangerous and necessary job.

We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

And we will defend, we will defend all our rights — civil rights, human rights and voting rights, women's rights and workers' rights, LGBT rights and the rights of people with disabilities!

And we will stand up against mean and divisive rhetoric wherever it comes from.

You know, for the past year, many people made the mistake of laughing off Donald Trump's comments — excusing him as an entertainer just putting on a show.

They thought he couldn't possibly mean all the horrible things he says — like when he called women ""pigs."" Or said that an American judge couldn't be fair because of his Mexican heritage.

Or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability. Or insults prisoners of war like John McCain — a true hero and patriot who deserves our respect.

Now, at first, at first, I admit, I couldn't believe he meant it either. It was just too hard to fathom — that someone who wants to lead our nation could say those things. Could be like that.

But here's the sad truth: There is no other Donald Trump. This is it.

And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get: that America is great — because America is good.

So enough with the bigotry and bombast. Donald Trump's not offering real change.

He's offering empty promises. And what are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country — to keep you safe, to get you good jobs, and to give your kids the opportunities they deserve.

The choice is clear, my friends.

Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer and stronger.

None of us ever have or can do it alone.

I know that at a time when so much seems to be pulling us apart, it can be hard to imagine how we'll ever pull together.

But I'm here to tell you tonight — progress is possible.

I know, I know because I've seen it in the lives of people across America who get knocked down and get right back up.

And I know it, I know it from my own life. More than a few times, I've had to pick myself up and get back in the game.

Like so much else in my life, I got this from my mother too. She never let me back down from any challenge. When I tried to hide from a neighborhood bully, she literally blocked the door. ""Go back out there,"" she said.

And she was right. You have to stand up to bullies.

You have to keep working to make things better, even when the odds are long and the opposition is fierce.

We lost our mother a few years ago, but I miss her every day. And I still hear her voice urging me to keep working, keep fighting for right, no matter what.

That's what we need to do together as a nation.

Though ""we may not live to see the glory,"" as the song from the musical Hamilton goes, ""let us gladly join the fight.""

Let our legacy be about ""planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.""

That's why we're here ... not just in this hall, but on this Earth.

The Founders showed us that. And so have many others since.

They were drawn together by love of country, and the selfless passion to build something better for all who follow.

That is the story of America. And we begin a new chapter tonight.

Yes, the world is watching what we do.

Yes, America's destiny is ours to choose.

So let's be stronger together, my fellow Americans.

Let's look to the future with courage and confidence.

Let's build a better tomorrow for our beloved children and our beloved country.

And when we do, America will be greater than ever.

Thank you, and may God bless you and the United States of America!",REAL
"BUSTED: Clinton Foundation Directly Tied To Plot To Steal Election Posted on October 27, 2016 by Prissy Holly in Politics Share This 
Ever since early voting began, numerous reports are claiming that the electronic voting machines are rigged, as votes for Donald Trump are automatically switched to Hillary Clinton. We’ve all begun to suspect that Hillary is behind the scam, and now, we have further proof that Democrats are the ones tampering with these machines as part of their intricate plan to steal the election. 
We recently reported how Hillary’s evil billionaire funder George Soros owns the voting machines in 16 key states, which immediately set off warning bells nationwide. Disturbingly, the massive fraud taking place is not just confined to those 16 areas, as another crooked player in Hillary’s election-stealing plot has just been revealed. 
In a bombshell just unearthed by independent researcher Micro Spooky Leaks , A Canadian company by the name of Dominion Voting provides the voting machines to 600 jurisdictions in 22 states and is directly linked to the Clinton Foundation as one of their massive donors. 
On their homepage, the company alludes to how they help rig elections, stating “ we strive to change elections for the better!” which is a chilling statement considering they supply 50% of the electronic voting machines on the U.S. voting market. 
Right after this startling information was revealed, however, it appears as though Democrats immediately began white-washing the information, as the link to the statement on the Wikipedia page that corroborated the bombshell information was mysteriously removed. 
Hillary has played dirty for years, and it appears as though her antics aren’t stopping now. After murdering many people close to exposing her scandals as a way to prevent them from ruining her presidential bid, the only thing left now is to steal the election through massive voter fraud. 
The picture at this point is becoming bleak. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump can defeat Hillary, as evidenced by his early lead in many historically blue states, and the recent bombshell that Hillary’s lead across many polls is completely fake. 
However, fighting back against electronic voting machines that have been calibrated by Hillary operatives to switch votes from Republican to Democrat will be extremely difficult. The only thing we can do at this point is demand a paper ballot when we vote. Dominion Voting machines that will be used in 22 states 
We are coming down to the wire here. Every day, more information surfaces on Hillary and the Democrats’ crooked scheme to steal the election. Continue to share stories like this and help fight back and spread the information. 
Knowledge is power, and with the ability to instantly share information with the internet, we can help expose what’s going on by constantly barraging our clueless friends and family members with the truth.",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy (D) will sign an executive order on Monday barring state-funded travel to Indiana because of the state's new law that could allow businesses to turn away gay and lesbian customers for religious reasons.

Malloy's move would make Connecticut the first state to boycott Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) quietly signed into law last week. The law allows businesses in the state to cite religious beliefs as a legal defense. Opponents fear it offers legal protection for businesses to refuse service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Two cities, San Francisco and Seattle, have imposed similar bans in response to the law. Businesses have also retaliated. Angie's List is pulling a campus expansion project in Indianapolis, and the CEO of Salesforce, a $4 billion software corporation, announced plans to ""dramatically reduce our investment"" in the state because of the law.

Twenty states have RFRA laws, but Indiana's law is substantially different. While other state RFRAs apply to disputes between a person and a government, Indiana's law goes further and applies to disputes between private citizens. That means, for example, a business owner could use the law to justify discrimination against customers who might otherwise be protected under law.

The Indiana law could result in ""employers, landlords, small business owners, or corporations, taking the law into their own hands and acting in ways that violate generally applicable laws on the grounds that they have a religious justification for doing so,"" reads their letter. ""Members of the public will then be asked to bear the cost of their employer's, their landlord's, their local shopkeeper's, or a police officer's private religious beliefs.""

That's in sharp contrast to states like Connecticut, which has an RFRA but one that pertains only to religious institutions, not private establishments. And unlike some other states, Connecticut also doesn't permit discrimination based on sexual orientation in any private establishment or institution.

Before signing the order, he called the Indiana law ""disturbing and outright discriminatory,"" and said the National Collegiate Athletic Association should relocate its Final Four tournament from Indiana to another state. Those games are set to begin later this week.

""I think that would be a wise choice for them to do if that's possible,"" said Malloy. ""I'll leave it up to them to make those decisions.""

The NCAA president Mark Emmert has said he is ""surprised and disappointed"" by Indiana's law, and that he is waiting for some kind of clarification to the law, or an outright repeal, before deciding whether to keep holding sporting events in the state.

Malloy said his executive order allows for any of the state's current contractual obligations with Indiana to play out, but said he doesn't plan to enter into any new ones.

""Somebody's got to stand up to this kind of bigotry and I'm prepared to do it,"" he said.",REAL
"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker confronted doubts about his foreign-policy acumen during remarks Saturday to a largely sympathetic audience.

At the end of a 45-minute discussion with wealthy conservatives, the moderator referred to complaints that Mr. Walker was “not prepared to speak about foreign policy” at a recent donor meeting in New York, and asked him what he was doing to bone up on the topic.",REAL
"Iran successfully test-fired a medium-range ballistic missile capable of striking U.S. forces in the region as well as Israel, the third such test since the nuclear agreement with Western nations took effect in January, multiple defense officials confirmed to Fox News.

The rogue nation conducted the test in defiance of a United Nations resolution that calls on Iran to cease work on its ballistic missile program.

“Iran has to abide by U.N. resolutions with regard to ballistic missiles tests, and if they have violated or not been consistent with those resolutions, that clearly would be a concern for us,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

Any ballistic missile launch by Iran is tracked by U.S. military spy satellites which pick up the flash during launch. This case was no different, according to officials.

Gen. Ali Abdollahi, deputy chief of the armed forces' headquarters, said the latest missile tested is very accurate, within 8 meters. ""Eight meters means nothing, it means it's without any error,"" he said. He did not elaborate.

In March, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles -- one emblazoned with the phrase ""Israel must be wiped out"" in Hebrew -- that set off an international outcry.

Since December, Iran has shipped out its low-enriched uranium, disabled its heavy water reactor in Arak, and weeks ago sold more than $8 million worth of heavy water to the U.S. in compliance with the nuclear deal. However, Iran has ignored separate U.N. resolutions barring the Islamic republic from ballistic missile tests. Fox News was first to report a secret Iranian ballistic missile launch in November.

The test-firing was carried out two weeks ago, Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Abdollahi as saying. Tasnim is close to the country's powerful Revolutionary Guard, which is in charge of Iranian ballistic missiles program.

The agency said the missile has a range of 1,250 miles -- enough to reach much of the Middle East. Iranian military commanders have described them as a strategic asset and a strong deterrent, capable of hitting U.S. bases or Israel in the event of a strike on Iran.

Analysts say Iran is likely seeking to demonstrate it is making progress with its ballistic program, despite scaling back on the nuclear program following the deal that led to the lifting of international sanction on Tehran.

Last month, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the Guard's airspace division, said a new, upgraded version of the Sajjil -- a solid fuel high-speed missile with a range of 1,200 miles that was first tested in 2008 -- would soon be ready.

But it was not immediately clear if the missile Abdollahi referred to was the new Sajjil.

The landmark deal does not include provisions against missile launches and when it came into effect on Jan. 16, the Security Council lifted most U.N. sanctions against Tehran, including a ban it had imposed in 2010 on Iran testing missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

To deal with the restrictions in the nuclear agreement, the council adopted a resolution last July, which only ""calls on"" Iran not to carry out such tests.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"On Monday, I made the case that Al Gore should run for president. But there's another obvious contender out there, too: Joe Biden.

Over at Yahoo, Matt Bai makes the case for Biden. ""Biden,"" he writes, ""is a better candidate than most pundits have ever given him credit for. Yeah, he's sloppy and meandering and says some nutty stuff. But that's all part of being genuine and three-dimensional, which may be the most valuable trait in modern politics and not a bad contrast to Clinton's robotic discipline.""

And Biden's certainly got the resume. When President Barack Obama wanted to make sure stimulus money didn't disappear to fraud, he turned to Biden — ""nobody messes with Joe,"" he said — and Biden succeeded. When the White House wanted to avoid the fiscal cliff, it was Biden who closed the deal with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Obama flubbed the first debate against Mitt Romney, it was Biden who restored the ticket's mojo by bullying his way past Rep. Paul Ryan. When the Democrats held their 2012 convention, it was Biden's speech that pulled the highest ratings — beating both Bill Clinton and Obama.

Biden's most off-the-reservation moment, meanwhile, is the kind of thing that should help him in 2016. He pushed the Obama administration to embrace gay marriage before it was quite ready. At the time, it looked like a gaffe. Now it looks prescient.

And yet, according to a recent Marist poll, Biden is running 47 points behind Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016 — and only one point ahead of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. A quick scan of RealClearPolitics' round-up of Democratic primary polls shows that's no outlier.

It's not like Biden has been out of the public eye for the last seven years. So why, if he's such a good politician, doesn't he command more support in the Democratic Party?

Here's my guess: there's a cultural gap between Biden and the party he seeks to represent. Biden is an old-school, white, male politician in a party that's increasingly young, multicultural, and female. Biden's gaffes matter because they tend to reinforce the perception among Democrats that he belongs to a different era.

When Biden calls shady lenders ""Shylocks,"" or says Obama is ""the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,"" he ends up coming off as, in New York Magazine words, ""your accidentally racist grandma."" That leaves Biden facing something more toxic than opposition: condescension.

What I wrote of Biden in January 2013 is still true today, I think. ""In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He's the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who's on a nickname basis with many of the world's most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.""

There is much that's weird about this. Hillary Clinton is a powerful candidate, but there's nothing about the last few months that makes her look invulnerable. She's shown real rust in interviews, pissed off liberals, and found herself in an email scandal.

But while Biden isn't much older than Clinton, she's somehow been more adept at signaling cultural affinity with young Democrats than he's been (though she's occasionally struggled too, most notably in her interview with Terry Gross on gay marriage). She also has a connection to female voters he can't touch. Even her memes are better.

I don't know exactly how Biden fixes this or even if he can. Clinton isn't inevitable, and Biden should, by all rights, pose a real threat to her. But, though Biden's always been known as a great speaker, he needs to learn to talk to a different party than the one he grew up in.",REAL
"The Washington game now requires that any unindicted politician with a bit of ambition — even 75-year-old Jerry Brown — let it be known that he is thinking about maybe, just possibly running for president.

But here’s the flip side: the media culture now demands to know whether these pols are quietly plotting a White House bid — and treats it as sort of strange if the answer is no.

What do you mean you’re not feverishly plotting a presidential bid three years before the next election? Is there something wrong with you?

I guess we don’t like to take no for an answer.

Take Paul Ryan. A natural leader of the conservative movement. The Republican VP nominee last year. A man who can translate Beltway jargon into Main Street concerns.

The Wisconsin congressman is in the spotlight because he just hammered out a budget agreement with Patty Murray that passed the Senate yesterday with 64 votes—three fewer than supported a cloture vote—after winning bipartisan approval in the House. The modest deal is noteworthy mainly because it temporarily ends the Washington gridlock and threats of shutdown and default. But it also brought sniping from more militant conservatives who see Ryan as selling out to the Democrats.

The dustup triggered a spate of Whither Paul Ryan pieces in the press.  Is he running? Is he not running? It’s 2013 already — we have to know!

“In interviews The Hill conducted with more than two dozen House Republicans from across the ideological spectrum over the last couple of weeks, many of Ryan’s colleagues said they are doubtful he will run for president in 2016. Most believe that concerns for his young family will lead him to lay claim to the job he’s always wanted: chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.”

Ryan wants to be a Hill poohbah and not move into the White House.

“Ryan on Tuesday told The Wall Street Journal that he plans to lead the Ways and Means Committee in the next Congress. Ryan and his wife Janna have three children, and his friends say that his concern about the hardship of an 18-month presidential campaign is a genuine factor in his consideration.”

This is the human factor that journalists rarely pause to consider. Running for president is a meat grinder that chews people up, and Ryan got a taste of that as Mitt Romney’s running mate.

I don’t know whether Ryan  is being coy, or whether, with the highest positive rating among Iowa Republicans, he’ll change his mind and jump into the race. But I do think the press ought to take him at his word until there’s evidence to the contrary.

I guess it wasn’t a big story when John Podesta compared the Republicans to a suicide cult.

But now that Podesta is joining President Obama’s inner circle, Politico is asking: “Can John Podesta Save Him?” (Boy, that’s a tall order.)

In its profile of Podesta, who is stepping down as head of the Center for American Progress, this incendiary quote was slipped into the narrative without comment.

White House officials, said Podesta, “need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress.”

Podesta was comparing John Boehner to Jim Jones, who led his followers to kill themselves? Didn’t that set off any alarm bells?

But the quote caused a stir now that the former Bill Clinton chief of staff is joining the White House, and he tweeted an apology: “In an old interview, my snark got in front of my judgment. I apologize to Speaker Boehner, whom I have always respected.”

Click for more from Media Buzz.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"Six days ago, Bernie Sanders pulled off one of the great upsets in modern politics — surging from more than 20 points behind in the polls to edge out Hillary Clinton and win Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary.

It was remarkable! It was historic! And it netted him four more delegates than Clinton in the state. Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Clinton won with more than 80 percent of the vote — and gained 28 more delegates than Sanders.

On the best night of the Sanders campaign to date, he fell 24 more delegates behind Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination.

That increasingly challenging math is what Sanders must confront Tuesday as voters in several large states — including Florida, Illinois and Ohio — go to the polls.

[Clinton leads Sanders by more than 2 to 1 in Florida, Post-Univision poll finds]

As of today, Clinton has 1,231 delegates to Sanders’s 576 — a lead of 655. That means that Clinton has 51.7 percent of the 2,383 delegates she needs to become the Democratic Party’s nominee.

Subtract superdelegates — Clinton is dominating even among this group of elected officials and party luminaries — and she has 766 delegates to Sanders’s 551, a margin of 215. (Worth noting: That is a wider lead than the margin by which Clinton ever trailed then-Sen. Barack Obama in the long slog of the 2008 primary race.)

That lead may not seem momentous. After all, almost 3,000 delegates are yet to be allocated in the primaries and caucuses to come. The problem for Sanders is that Democrats allocate their delegates proportionally in every state — meaning that between now and when the process ends June 7, there is no state where Clinton will be shut out.

Winning, then, is not enough for Sanders. He has to win by a lot to make up any real ground.

Clinton has already done that. Take, for example, Alabama. She won there March 1 by 59 points and gained 38 more delegates than Sanders. Or Georgia on that same day, beating Sanders by 43 points and netting 55 delegates. Or the aforementioned Mississippi, where Clinton’s 66-point win translated to a net gain of 28 delegates.

[Southern states help Clinton extend her lead over Sanders]

Sanders’s one big win came in New Hampshire’s primary. But his 22-point margin translated to a net delegate gain of zero because six superdelegates pledged to Clinton, bringing her delegate gain up to match his. Similarly, in the Colorado caucuses, Sanders won by 19 points but the superdelegate math meant the candidates each took 38 delegates.

Look at the next set of big contests, to be held Tuesday. Four states have more than 100 delegates to give out: Florida (246), Illinois (182), Ohio (160) and North Carolina (121).

Polling released Sunday morning suggests that Sanders has a big hill to climb. Clinton leads the senator 61 percent to 34 percent in Florida and has an edge of 58 percent to 38 percent in Ohio, according to NBC- Marist surveys. The race in Illinois, according to NBC-Marist, is closer, with Clinton at 51 percent and Sanders at 45 percent.

But wait, you say. Polling in Michigan had Sanders down 20 points and he won there. So this polling could be wrong, too.

Sure. It could. The problem for Sanders is this: Let’s say each of the NBC-Marist surveys is off by 20 points in Clinton’s favor. (Note that this is a thought experiment. I very much doubt a credible pollster such as this one would be off by even close to that amount.) That would mean Sanders loses Florida by single digits, essentially ties Clinton in Ohio and wins Illinois by 15 points. The delegate allocation from that trio of results? It would almost certainly favor Clinton.

Sanders is in a position where winning states is not close to enough if he wants to be the party’s nominee. He needs to start winning big states by big margins. As in winning Illinois or Florida by 30 or 40 points.

That seems very unlikely either Tuesday or beyond. If past votes are any guide, it will be a tough road for Sanders. There have been seven election nights in the race so far; Clinton has netted delegates in six of them, while the two candidates fought to a draw in the seventh (New Hampshire).

None of this means that Sanders can’t — and won’t — keep running. Winning states matters in terms of perception and keeps the wolves from his door. But winning states and emboldening your supporters aren’t the same as taking concrete steps to reduce or eliminate Clinton’s delegate lead.

That looks to be a near-impossible task for Sanders unless the numbers in the states to come start changing quickly.",REAL
"A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.

POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public will get to see them once the twelve TPP nations reach a final agreement and President Obama seeks congressional approval.

Still, the draft chapter will provide ammunition for critics who have warned that TPP’s protections for pharmaceutical companies could dump trillions of dollars of additional health care costs on patients, businesses and governments around the Pacific Rim. The highly technical 90-page document, cluttered with objections from other TPP nations, shows that U.S. negotiators have fought aggressively and, at least until Guam, successfully on behalf of Big Pharma.

The draft text includes provisions that could make it extremely tough for generics to challenge brand-name pharmaceuticals abroad. Those provisions could also help block copycats from selling cheaper versions of the expensive cutting-edge drugs known as “biologics” inside the U.S., restricting treatment for American patients while jacking up Medicare and Medicaid costs for American taxpayers.

“There’s very little distance between what Pharma wants and what the U.S. is demanding,” said Rohit Malpini, director of policy for Doctors Without Borders.

Throughout the TPP talks, the Obama administration has pledged to balance the goals of fostering innovation in the drug industry, which means allowing higher profits, and promoting wider access to valuable medicines, which means keeping prices down. U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has pointed out that pharmaceutical companies often have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to get a new drug to market, which they would have little incentive to do without strong protections for the patented product. But Froman has also recognized the value of allowing much cheaper generic drugs to enter the market after those brand-name patents expire. In the U.S., generics now comprise more than five-sixths of all prescription drugs, but only about one-quarter of drug costs.

Advocates for the global poor, senior citizens, labor unions and consumers as well as the generics industry have accused the administration of abandoning that balance, pushing a pharmaceutical-company agenda at the expense of patients and taxpayers. One critic, hoping to illustrate the point and rally opposition to TPP in Congress, gave POLITICO the draft chapter, which was labeled “This Document Contains TPP CONFIDENTIAL Information” on every page.

U.S. officials said the key point to remember about trade deals is that no provision is ever final until the entire deal is final—and that major compromises tend to happen at the very end of the negotiations. They expect the real horse-trading to begin now that Obama has signed “fast-track” legislation requiring Congress to pass or reject TPP without amendments.

“The negotiations on intellectual property are complex and continually evolving,” said Trevor Kincaid, a spokesman for Froman. “On pharmaceutical products, we are working closely with stakeholders, Congress, and partner countries to develop an approach that aims to make affordable life-saving medicine more widely available while creating incentives for the development of new treatments and cures. Striking this important balance is at the heart of our work.”

The draft chapter covers software, music and other intellectual property issues as well, but its most controversial language involves the rights of drug companies. The text reveals disputes between the U.S. (often with support from Japan) and its TPP partners over a variety of issues—what patents can cover, when and how long they can be extended, how long pharmaceutical companies can keep their clinical data private, and much more. On every issue, the U.S. sided with drug companies in favor of stricter intellectual property protections.

Some of the most contentious provisions involve “patent linkage,” which would prevent regulators in TPP nations from approving generic drugs whenever there are any unresolved patent issues. The TPP draft would make this linkage mandatory, which could help drug companies fend off generics just by claiming an infringement. The Obama administration often describes TPP as the most progressive free-trade deal in history, citing its compliance with the tough labor and environment protections enshrined in the so-called “May 10 Agreement” of 2007, which set a framework for several trade deals at the time. But mandatory linkage seems to be a departure from the May 10 pharmaceutical provisions.

In an April 15 letter to Froman, Heather Bresch, the CEO of the generic drug company Mylan, warned that mandatory patent linkage would be “a recipe for indefinite evergreening of pharmaceutical monopolies,” leading to the automatic rejection of generic applications. The U.S. already has mandatory linkage, but most other TPP countries do not, and Bresch argued that U.S. law includes a number of safeguards and incentives for generic companies that have not made it into TPP.

“With all due respect, the USTR has…cherry-picked the single provision designed to block generic entry to the market,” Bresch wrote.

Generics are thriving in the U.S. despite linkage, saving Americans an estimated $239 billion on drugs in 2013. But the U.S. is the world’s largest market, and advocates fear that generic manufacturers may not take on the risk and expense of litigation in smaller markets if TPP tilts the playing field against them. One generics manufacturer, Hospira, reportedly testified at a TPP forum in Melbourne, Australia, that it would not launch generics outside the U.S. in markets with linkage.

The opponents are also worried about the treaty’s effect on the U.S. market, because its draft language would extend mandatory patent linkage to biologics, the next big thing in the pharmaceutical world. Biologics can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for patients with illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B and cancer, and the first knockoffs have not yet reached pharmacies. The critics say that extending linkage to biologics—which can have hundreds of patents—would help insulate them from competition forever.

“It would be a dramatic departure from U.S. law, and it would put a real crimp in the ability of less expensive drugs to get to market,” said K.J. Hertz, a lobbyist for AARP. “People are going to look at this very closely in Congress.”

Drug companies are already pushing for TPP to guarantee them 12 years of exclusivity for their data regarding biologics, although the draft text suggests the other TPP nations have not agreed. Jay Taylor, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said it’s crucial for TPP to protect the intellectual property that emerges from years of expensive research, so that drug companies can continue to develop new medicines for patients around the world.

“These innovations could be severely hindered if IP protections are scaled back,” Taylor said. “This is especially important in the area of biologic medicines, which could hold the key to unlocking treatments for diseases that have thwarted researchers for years.”

U.S. officials would not discuss the status of the TPP talks. But they suggested the May 10 Agreement did include a milder form of linkage, although it didn’t prevent regulators from approving generics mired in patent disputes.  They also believe a 2009 U.S. law included a form of linkage for biologics, although again, that law's dispute resolution process for patent issues was not as prescriptive as the TPP draft. And they cautioned that any pre-Guam draft would not reflect recent negotiations over “transition periods” that would delay the stricter patent standards in developing countries like Vietnam.

In any case, Kincaid said U.S. negotiators are determined to strike a balance between innovation and access in the final product.

“While this is our touchstone, the negotiations are still very much in process, and the details of a final outcome cannot yet be forecasted,” he said.

But Malpani of Doctors Without Borders said U.S. negotiators have basically functioned as drug lobbyists. The TPP countries have 40 percent of global economic output, and the deal is widely seen as establishing new benchmarks for some of the most complex areas of global business. Malpani fears it could set a precedent that crushes the generic drug industry under a mountain of regulation and litigation.

“We consider this the worst-ever agreement in terms of access to medicine,” he said. “It would create higher drug prices around the world—and in the U.S., too.

",REAL
"  Posted at 11:03   
Michael Moore was super excited to learn that Republicans were driving traffic to his film , “Trumpland,” by passing around on social media a four-minute clip, even though he claims it was doctored. That’s not cool — if anyone’s going to doctor the footage in a Michael Moore movie, its going to be Michael Moore. 
Obviously Moore’s not a Donald Trump fan, and like many other liberals this weekend, he’s not an Anthony Weiner fan. Setting aside Judicial Watch’s lawsuit against the State Department, Hillary Clinton almost looked to be in the clear a few months back, but now her email shenanigans have returned to the front pages, all because of Weiner’s compulsion to send vulgar selfies online. Unbelievable that once again Hillary has to suffer the abuse of men & their dickish behavior. Bubba, Weiner, Trump, Newt, Comey. Sick of it. 
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 
What did Bill Clinton do that was so wrong? Hillary long ago established that he was the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And Weiner? Sure, be angry at him for the way he’s treated his wife and the women he’s sexted, but there would be no sensitive emails on his laptop if Hillary and company had simply used the secure government email accounts provided to them. 
Moore was just getting started on his misandrist rant, and when he’s on a roll, it’s best to step away until he’s finished it. The day can't come soon enough when women will take charge. Public policy will not be decided by dick pix, Tic Tacs, grab-assers or the GOP. 
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 No women ever invented an atomic bomb, built a smoke stack, initiated a Holocaust, melted the polar ice caps or organized a school shooting. 
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2016 @MMFlint wowwww? Women can't do ANYTHING…… 
— Nitro Rad (@NitroRad) October 29, 2016 
What about all those soccer moms tooling around in minivans and SUVs? The ones manufactured in Michigan, by union workers, in factories with smokestacks? And don’t be so quick to count out women   atomic bomb, either. @MMFlint You might to do a little reading on that atom bomb thingie. You could not be more wrong. 
— Terry O' (@IrishTea1) October 29, 2016 @MMFlint lots of women were on the Manhattan Project. You just demeaned them and belittled their efforts to support a warmonger… 
— Charlie Reed (@CharlieReed2004) October 29, 2016 RT @MMFlint "" No women ever invented an atomic bomb"" 
Leona Woods among others worked on the Manhattan Project. https://t.co/fay4GNLAzy",FAKE
"By now, everybody knows the injuries that contributed to Freddie Gray's death. Baltimore authorities and representatives for Gray’s family agree that the 25-year-old sustained fatal trauma to his neck and spine at some point while in police custody following his arrest on April 12. Although a full autopsy hasn't yet been released, the family has said that Gray’s spine was nearly severed, and that his doctors had attempted to repair three fractured neck vertebrae and a crushed voice box. Last week, The Baltimore Sun spoke to medical experts who said that Gray's injuries were, in the paper's words, comparable to those seen in “victims of high-speed crashes.”

While this may end up being a significant detail of the investigation, much is still unclear about the circumstances of Gray's death, including how Gray's head might have hit the wall of the van hard enough to kill him. Over the past few weeks, Baltimore police have provided few answers about how Gray went from seemingly healthy enough to flee police on the morning of April 12 to dead on April 19 after a week in a coma. On Wednesday, April 29, hours after stating that they would not give the public their forthcoming internal report on Gray's death, police leaked a different document to The Washington Post. It was the first new piece of information from police in nearly a week. But instead of clarity, it offered more confusion.

In its reporting of the incident, The Baltimore Sun found witnesses who refuted Miller's account to the court. In an April 25 article, Sun reporter Kevin Rector wrote: “Kevin Moore, a 28-year-old friend of Gray's from Gilmor Homes, said he rushed outside when he heard Gray was being arrested and saw him ‘screaming for his life’ with his face planted on the ground. One officer had his knee on Gray's neck, Moore said, and another was bending his legs backward. ‘They had him folded up like he was a crab or a piece of origami,’ Moore said. ‘He was all bent up.’"" Others claimed to have seen officers beating Gray with batons.

At one point during the arrest, according to the police commissioner, an officer pulled out a stun gun. Moore claimed to have seen this as well. According to the Sun, police investigators failed to obtain footage from a convenience store surveillance camera that may have captured the incident more clearly. Instead, the officers found that the moment in question had been taped over by the time they got there. This was a common theme throughout the investigation, as officers reportedly failed to obtain footage from other cameras that may have recorded key moments in Gray's subsequent ride to the police station.

A third perspective on Gray's arrest was added to the mix on Wednesday, when CNN interviewed an anonymous relative of one of the arresting officers. The woman said the officer believes Gray ""was injured outside the paddy wagon,"" though she expressed personal concern that ""six officers are going to be punished behind something that maybe one or two or even three officers may have done to Freddie Gray.""

This is the critical question, and there is still no clear answer. Witness video shows Gray screaming at the time he was loaded into the vehicle. According to the official police timeline, the van made its first stop four minutes later so that officers could shackle an ""irate"" Gray. He was removed from the van and was placed in leg irons.

Police and witnesses then agree that Gray was returned to the van in both hand and leg restraints. Officers have admitted they didn't buckle Gray's seat belt, a violation of police department policy that has led to suggestions that Gray may have been the victim of a ""rough ride"" -- an illegal but not uncommon technique in which officers drive vans in such a way as to cause injury to detained passengers.

At 8:59 a.m., about 15 minutes after Gray was first put in the van, the vehicle stopped for a third time after the driver asked an officer to perform a check on Gray. This had previously been explained as the second stop, and exactly what happened there was reportedly a key part of the investigation. Batts has said that responding officers had to ""pick [Gray] up off the floor and place him on the seat,"" and that Gray requested a medic at this time. He was ignored again.

The fourth and final stop was made minutes later to pick up another prisoner. At this point, it's unclear what state Gray was in. Davis has suggested that Gray was again found on the floor, but responsive enough to make another request for a medic. If this request was indeed made, it was evidently denied. Other reports suggest that Gray may have already lost consciousness when this second person was picked up.

Details of Allen's account conflict with earlier reports on Gray's time in the van, including reports from police officials themselves. According to the Post, Allen told investigators that Gray was “banging against the walls” and ""intentionally trying to injure himself.” But Allen later told WBAL: ""When I got in the van, I didn't hear nothing. It was a smooth ride. We went straight to the police station. All I heard was a little banging for about four seconds. I just heard little banging, just little banging.""",REAL
"The female prison employee at the center of an investigation into the escape of two killers pleaded not guilty Friday night to helping them flee the maximum security facility.

Prison tailor shop instructor Joyce Mitchell, 51, was arraigned on a felony charge of promoting prison contraband and misdemeanor count of criminal facilitation, authorities said.

Mitchell is accused of aiding in the escape of inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York last week.

She entered the court room with her hands cuffed in front of her, clad jeans and a lime green top looking terrified. She did not speak. She was ordered held in jail on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 bond on felony county and is due back in court Monday morning.

District Attorney Andrew Wylie said earlier Friday the contraband did not include the power tools used by the men as they cut holes in their cell walls and a steam pipe to escape through a manhole last weekend.

Wylie didn't elaborate on the charges Friday as more than 800 officers continued to search for the escapees, concentrating in a rural area around the prison in the Adirondacks near the Canadian border. Earlier residents reported seeing  tow men jumping a stone wall outside Dannemora.

Maj. Charles Guess of the New York State gave a stern warning to the convicts at an evening press conference,

""We're coming for you and will not stop until you are caught,"" he said.

He added that Mitchell's arrest represented ""one large piece of the puzzle in our quest"" to find the men.

Asked about any clues to the escapees' whereabouts, Guess said there was no ""conclusive evidence"" that either had left the area. None of the reports of possible sightings has been confirmed, he added.

""It's day six,"" he said, ""and if they have not escaped the area, you've got to assume they're cold, wet, tired and hungry.""

As to whether they split up, Guess said, ""there's no reason to believe they're not together but we're planning for both eventualities.""

Earlier, Wylie said Mitchell, a supervisor in the prison's tailoring shop, brought ""contraband"" into the prison but he declined to elaborate on what, specifically, she gave the men.

The Albany Times-Union reported late Thursday that Mitchell told New York State Police she gave Matt, 48, and Sweat, 34, access to a cell phone and smuggled tools into the prison.

A police source close to the investigation confirmed to Fox News Friday that Mitchell planned to provide a getaway car for the two convicted murderers but had a change of heart at the last minute. Mitchell instead checked herself into a hospital some 40 miles away from the prison, complaining of panic attacks, according to law enforcement.

Mitchell joined the prison staff in March of 2008 and earned $57,697 a year. She was suspended without pay, effective Friday.

Police, meanwhile, said Friday that two men believed to be the inmates were spotted jumping over a stone wall in the woods in Saranac, a few miles from the prison, the Buffalo News reported. According to the newspaper, a law enforcement officer said he believes he saw the two at 7:30 a.m. Friday and authorities converged on the area.

Colleen Cringle, who lives on Cringle road in Saranac, told the newspaper police were using her home as a staging area to search for the killers.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vowed that state law would come down hard on any prison system employee who crosses the line with inmates.

""If you do it, you will be convicted, and then you'll be on the other side of the prison that you've been policing, and that is not a pleasant place to be,"" Cuomo said. The governor also said investigators are ""talking to several people who may have facilitated the escape.""

The Times-Union also reported that Mitchell had been investigated in recent months by the state corrections department's inspector general after a fellow prison worker complained that she had gotten too close to Sweat and Matt. That investigation did not result in any discipline.

Prison employees and correction officers are prohibited from having relationships with inmates or performing favors for them.

Matt was serving 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnap, torture and hacksaw dismemberment of Matt's 76-year-old former boss, whose body was found in pieces in a river.

Matt and an accomplice stuffed William Rickerson in a car trunk in his pajamas and drove around with him for 27 hours because he wouldn't tell them the location of large sums of money he was believed to have.

According to testimony, Matt bent back the elderly man's fingers until they broke and later snapped Rickerson's neck with his bare hands.

After the killing, Matt fled to Mexico, where he killed a man outside a bar.

Sweat was doing life without parole for his part in the 2002 killing of sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia, who was shot 15 times and run over after discovering Sweat and two accomplices transferring stolen guns between vehicles.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from The Albany Times-Union",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
RATHER than relax and play Texas Hold ‘Em with his friends as they had a few cans after a recent night out, hardcore culchie Noel Kennelan desperatley attempted to explain the impenetrable rules of the card game ’25’, which he claims is ‘way better than poker, hi’. 
25, also known as ‘that culchie game’, involves the dealing of 5 cards to each player and the reveal of a trump card, followed by at least 10 minutes of explaining how the 2 of spades can beat the 9 of diamonds if spades were lead with, and diamonds aren’t trump. 
Kennelan, 28, made great efforts to explain to the 6 other men around the table of his Dublin flat the baffling rules of ‘stealing’ and ‘reneging’, but in the end had to concede that the game was too complex and the players were too drunk to fully wrap their heads around it. 
“After the nightclub, back to the house, few cans, the cards come out,” said Kennelan, dealing himself a solemn hand of Patience. 
“The lads all play poker, but 25 is where it’s at. Way more skill, you can win a hand with nothing if you play it right. But the lads just couldn’t get to grips with the fingers”. 
Kennelan later went online to see if there were any culchies in the area who were looking to play 25, and is considering setting up a club or something where they can go and drink Smithwicks and play cards and complain about Dublin.",FAKE
"Election Day: No Legal Pot In Ohio; Democrats Lose In The South

Tuesday is ""off year"" Election Day in parts of the country. Legalizing marijuana is on the ballot in Ohio, Houston voters will decide on an equal rights ordinance and San Francisco weighs short-term rentals in what's being called the ""Airbnb Initiative.""

Elsewhere, eyes are on governor races in Kentucky and Louisiana, and whether Democrats can make any progress in the South.

Here's a look at some of the races:

Houston voters will decide whether to keep an equal rights ordinance that was approved by the City Council last year. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — criteria not covered by national anti-discrimination laws. The ordinance is hotly debated, particularly after some opposition ads were released. The ads claim that the ordinance would allow men who identify as women to assault women and young girls in bathrooms.

Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the ordinance on Oct. 29, writing: ""No one should face discrimination for who they are or who they love — I support efforts for Equality in Houston & beyond. #HERO #YesOnProp1 -H"".

A White House spokesman said that President Obama and Vice President Biden were ""confident that the citizens of Houston will vote in favor of fairness and equality.""

Update from Houston Public Media: Houston's voters strongly rejected the anti-discrimination measure, with about three-fifths of voters opposed.

Republican Matt Bevin and Democrat Jack Conway are running to replace retiring Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat. Although Republicans have aggressively been spending money in the hope of retaining the governor's mansion, Conway has outspent Bevin 4 to 1. This race has been characterized by both candidates accusing each other of lying about their records.

Update from WFPL in Louisville: Conway conceded the race — the returns late Tuesday night showed Bevin winning with about 53 percent of the vote — and Republicans generally performed well in the state.

Louisiana has a gubernatorial election this year but it doesn't work the way you might expect. Louisiana's election system relies on what's called a ""jungle primary."" In a jungle primary, all candidates regardless of party appear on one ballot. If no one wins 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates face each other in a runoff election.

John Bel Edwards, a Democrat and state legislative leader, earned roughly 40 percent of the vote. He now will face Sen. David Vitter, a Republican, in the runoff election on Nov. 21. Vitter has had a tough race so far. His critics have continuously cited his involvement in a 2007 prostitution scandal, in which Vitter's telephone number was found in the records of the so-called D.C. Madam, Deborah Palfrey. Palfrey was accused of running a prostitution ring that made more than $2 million over 13 years.

The ""Clean Elections Initiative"" would increase public funding for candidates to up to $3 million in order to make them more competitive against privately-funded candidates, according to Reuters. The existing law makes up to $2 million available to candidates for state office. The ballot measure would also increase disclosure requirements and increase the penalties for campaign finance violations.

Update from the Portland Press Herald: The measure passed, with 55 percent of the vote as of late Tuesday:

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant is up for reelection and faces opposition from an unlikely candidate — truck driver and political unknown Robert Gray. According to The Associated Press, Gray didn't even tell his closest relatives that he had signed up to campaign for governor. Bryant has spent roughly $2.7 million this year and reportedly has $1.4 million in the bank. Gray has spent about $3,000 on his campaign in the past three months.

Update from Mississippi Public Broadcasting: Gray will presumably be back on the road after losing, 67 percent to 32 percent.

Ohio voters vote on two ballot measures with constitutional amendments that could dramatically change marijuana laws in their state. Issue 3, as one of these two measures is called, would enable landowners or operators of 10 predetermined sites the right to grow commercial marijuana. That's in contradiction to the second measure, Issue 2, which would prohibit monopolies from being enshrined in the state constitution. If both measures pass, there's sure to be lots of confusion.

Update from WCPN in Cleveland: Voters rejected legal and medical marijuana, with two-thirds voting against Issue 3; Issue 2, the measure rejecting the proposed marijuana oligopoly, was passing 54 percent to 46 percent.

San Franciscans heading to the polls Tuesday will get to vote on Proposition F, colloquially known as the ""Airbnb Initiative."" The initiative is a ballot measure that would strengthen regulation on the short-term rental of houses and apartments. While Airbnb is likely the biggest company in that niche market, the Los Angeles Times points out that there are other vacation rental companies that would be affected. Right now, residents can rent out their apartment or home for 90 days in a year. Proposition F would limit that rental period to 75 days. The measure is viewed as an attempt to discourage people from taking units off the housing market and using them as short-term apartment rentals. San Francisco has an acute housing shortage.

Update from KQED in San Francisco: Voters rejected the measure, Proposition F, 55 percent to 45 percent.

Seattle voters will decide on a campaign finance measure that's being touted as a national model for campaign finance reform. Ballot initiative I-122, if passed, would create a public financing model in the city. Every resident would receive a $100 voucher to give to the candidate of their choosing. The measure would also limit election campaign contributions from entities receiving city contracts of $250,000 or more, or from people spending more than $5,000 on lobbying.

Update from KUOW in Seattle: Voters overwhelmingly passed the measure, 60 percent to 40 percent.

All 140 seats of Virginia's General Assembly are up for election today. Republicans currently control the state Senate, 21 seats to 19. Expecting low turnout, both parties have been trying to drive their message home to voters. Republicans are expected to retain their majority in the GA. Democrats hope to take control of the state Senate.

Update from the Richmond Times-Dispatch: Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, and their strong control of the General Assembly.",REAL
"It’s impossible to overstate how colossal a fuckup this is. At every level, across both parties, the media, pollsters — all the democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent something like this from happening or at least warn us about it. Donald Trump, a Republican candidate who ran an openly racist campaign, who is as proud a misogynist as you’ll find anywhere, who is manifestly ignorant of public policy, who is brusquely authoritarian, who has little respect or understanding of democratic norms and who embodies every moral failing that’s supposed to disqualify a candidate from higher office, has apparently been elected as the next president of the United States.

The markets are collapsing, the globe is reeling, and nobody can quite explain what the hell happened. But here’s what this failure will mean: The climate, which is warming precipitously, is now guaranteed to continue along that trajectory toward global catastrophe. The millions of people who gained health coverage over the last half of a decade are now at acute risk of being thrown off their insurance plan and left to the unfeeling mercies of insurance underwriters.

Income inequality, already at dangerously high levels, will only grow worse as tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor are pushed through the Republican Congress. Unprecedented GOP obstructionism on Supreme Court nominees has been rewarded in the worst possible way. And the foreign policy of the United States will be run by a bona fide ignoramus.

The man elected to the most powerful office in the land has no idea what to do with it and no concept of its limitations. He attracts the worst people to him, sycophants and power-hungry strivers who will be placed in positions of authority and who will obey the boss’ diktat above anything else. Every democratic norm he gleefully shredded along the way is gone for good. Every thumb in the eye of transparency will now be official policy.

But right now those things are not what I think about when I contemplate life under President Donald Trump. This will sound trite, but primarily I think about my two boys, a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old. I don’t have to explain this to them because neither would understand. But if I were to tell my 2-year-old what is happening, I’d do it in Spanish because both he and his brother have deep Mexican roots that my wife and I want them to embrace and be proud of. It destroys me to know that they, that we live in a country that seems to have chosen as its leader a person who made frenzied racial attacks on my family’s heritage the launch pad for his successful presidential run. I think about the African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, and Latinos in this country who now face life in a country presided over by a candidate who embodies white nationalism and memorably couldn’t bring himself to disavow a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Children of undocumented immigrants who are U.S. citizens by birth have been told by their new president that they’ll be deported. Refugees from Syria who were relocated here to escape war and violence will have another target on their backs. These are the people who will feel the consequences of this failure most acutely. I have one more thing to add: I am sorry. In my capacity as a media figure, I too often treated Trump as a joke, a bumbling incompetent, someone who obviously could not be treated seriously as a legitimate candidate for the presidency. Now I can only think that I was too hidebound by conventional wisdom, too comfortably out of touch to see what was in front of me. I succumbed to the sideshow element of this awful race more times than I can be comfortable with. I own this failure, too.",REAL
"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
"Written by Daniel McAdams   While Americans were obsessing about tomorrow's election, the Obama Administration launched a serious military escalation in Syria. US Special Forces on the ground and jet fighters in the air are deployed in an operation to take Raqqa from ISIS control. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford announced over the weekend that the US and Turkey agreed on a long-term plan for ""seizing, holding and governing"" the Syrian city. Is this the beginning of a US-recognized rival Syrian government, as Benghazi was in Libya? We discuss in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is rapidly losing support among some of his most prominent home-state donors and power brokers, who are either hesitant to back him or shifting allegiance to former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

Bush’s aggressive moves to lock up the Republican Party’s premier fundraisers threaten to undercut the Garden State governor before his expected campaign can get off the ground, while raising questions about how robust of a network of support Christie will be able to muster.

Bush has stopped short of directly confronting Christie by holding a fundraiser on his home turf. But behind the scenes, he has been quietly wooing, via e-mail, a cadre of high-profile Christie backers, including a group that attended a private dinner with Bush at New York’s Union League Club in January.

“I’ve known and admired Jeb for many years and I’m obviously intrigued by his candidacy, or I wouldn’t have had dinner or communicated with him in recent weeks,” said New Jersey State Sen. Joseph M. Kyrillos Jr. (R), who chaired Christie’s 2009 gubernatorial campaign and attended the New York dinner. “Time will tell how things evolve.”

New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, a onetime Christie booster, signaled his support for Bush on Wednesday when he showed up at a fundraiser in Chicago for Bush’s political committees.

Former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean Sr., a longtime mentor of Christie who is no longer close to him, said in an interview Thursday that he hasn’t decided whom to back — while offering praise for Bush.

“When [Bush] said he has strong views on issues and won’t change them to win an early primary, it showed me he has real convictions,” Kean said. “The Republican Party in the past has had problems with people who changed their views in order to win a primary, only to have to scramble back in a general election. Voters don’t find that kind of behavior credible.”

Several Bush donors in New Jersey are also in the initial stages of planning an event in the state in March or April, according to several people with knowledge of the discussions. Bush may not attend, but his backers want to demonstrate his New Jersey support.

Several top Christie backers said Thursday that he still has a strong organization of financial heavyweights both in New Jersey and across the country, and they disputed the notion that he is being undercut by Bush.

“We’re doing fine,” said Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, who has pledged to devote substantial resources to advance Christie’s bid. “Everybody I’ve called and asked has said yes.”

Christie allies do not expect that he will be able to come close to matching Bush’s current fundraising spree, which is expected to bring in tens of millions. His team has sought to project a sense of calm as it makes daily calls to donors, arguing that much of the movement toward Bush is coming from loyalists who received appointments in the administrations of his father and brother.

Ray Washburne, the Dallas real estate developer leading the national fundraising push for Christie’s political committee, said there is plenty of room for both of them.

“Jeb has grabbed a good bit of the donor base, no question,” he said. “But there is still a huge amount of the donor base available to get.”

A Christie aide provided a list of two dozen New Jersey major contributors committed to Christie’s new political committee, including investor Finn Wentworth, trucking magnate Jerry Langer and Christie’s brother, Todd.

New Jersey real estate executive Jon Hanson, who served as finance chairman for Christie’s gubernatorial campaigns, said his in-state donor network is “stepping up and contributing.”

“I can see he’s out there doing a good job,” Hanson said of Bush. “But I don’t think that’s going to hinder our ability to raise money for Governor Christie’s PAC.”

Last week, Christie held a fundraiser at the Greenwich, Conn., home of former GOP gubernatorial candidate Thomas C. Foley. In the coming weeks, he is planning to headline finance events in California and Texas.

So far, Christie has been raising money solely for his Leadership Matters for America PAC, which can accept up to $5,000 from individual donors. An affiliated super PAC, which can raise unlimited personal and corporate money, is expected to be launched soon.

Once it is, Langone said he plans to put in significant amounts of money. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’m waiting for it to start.”

But the investor also noted that he would be squarely behind Bush if Christie’s Florida rival emerges victorious out of the GOP primaries.

“If Jeb Bush is the Republican nominee, I will do everything I can to help him get elected,” he said. “Jeb Bush is a good man. My preference is Christie for one reason: As I look at what this country desperately needs, I think he comes closest to giving us everything we need and want.”

The reticence Christie has encountered among prominent party financiers is a sharp contrast with the more than $100 million that the Republican Governors Association brought in under his recent chairmanship. While Christie aides have credited the fundraising haul to his efforts, some RGA donors have privately said their giving was driven more by their interest in supporting various governors up for reelection.

Christie’s difficulty in locking down home-state support comes after his remarks about child vaccinations on a recent trip to London drew a wave of scathing criticism and alarmed some of his supporters. The governor had to make a series of calls to assure contributors that he supports vaccination for diseases such as measles.

Spencer Zwick, Mitt Romney’s finance chairman in 2012, said the attitude of former Christie backers at home is telling.

“Kyrillos is a very good bellwether for what’s happening in New Jersey,” Zwick said of the state senator. “If Christie decides to run, he’s going to need the support from the people closest to him to sustain him until he can get national Republican support.”

Zwick, who has not committed to a 2016 candidate, added, “Personally, I have had my own reservations about what Governor Christie did at a key moment in the last presidential election and let it be known to him and others,” a reference to extensive public praise by Christie of President Obama for the federal response to Hurricane Sandy in the late stages of the campaign. “But I do not believe he had bad intentions and I have moved on.”

Another former Christie ally, New Jersey attorney Lawrence E. Bathgate II, hosted the Jan. 8 dinner in New York to introduce Bush to some of Christie’s top supporters.

Bathgate had been in Christie’s camp for years, but their relationship publicly soured after Christie’s administration pursued a plan to build protective dunes on the state’s coastline where Bathgate has an oceanfront home.

In an interview, though, Bathgate said his reservations about Christie began when he embraced Obama during his visit to the hurricane-battered state. He also expressed concern about more recent events, including the ongoing inquiry into the closing of traffic lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge.

“I know he wanted to work with President Obama on Sandy, but that doesn’t mean you have to put your arm around him and hug him,” said Bathgate, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. “That took the election and Mitt Romney off the front page. Then you see him a couple years later flying around on Jerry Jones’s jet, jumping up and down like he is a seventh grader. He’s going to have to answer for all of that, and for Bridgegate.”",REAL
"Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Pete Redfern Washington Home Depot store receives order for five-thousand gallons of gold exterior paint 
The Washington DC branch of the famous chain of home improvement superstores received an unusual and baffling phone call late last night. 
Store manager Chuck Williams told reporters, “We received a telephone call just before closing last night from a very excited gentleman, placing an order for over $120,000 worth of gold concrete paint.” 
He continued “It was quite a hurried conversation, and I couldn’t catch everything he said, but I did hear the caller say something cryptic about turning a white house gold. 
“I honestly have no idea what he could have meant, perhaps it was a riddle. And weirdly he kept referring to himself in the third person. 
“At first we thought it might have been a hoax or someone out of their head on mind-altering substances, but we have checked our account and the money is already there, so we will start fulfilling the order immediately.” 
When pressed by reporters, Mr Williams was reluctant to give further details for fear of breaching customer confidentiality, but he did confirm that the order was for a residence on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C 20500. 
He added, “I don’t know who this caller who referred to himself as ‘The Big Cheese’ could be, but he sure loves gold.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
" Western Lynch Mob on Russia Ties Itself up in Absurd Knots By Finian Cunningham
October 31, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" RT "" - The Western lynch mob-like campaign to ‘get Russia’ goes on, with the gathering this week of the United Nations Human Rights Council. By trying to suspend Russia from the council, the flagrant intent is to discredit and further demonize. The 47-member UNHRC, based in Geneva, is the United Nations’ premier inter-governmental forum on human rights. Members are selected on a rotational basis. On Friday, 14 seats on the council are up for renewal.
This week 80 mainly Western non-governmental organizations associated with human rights reportedly urged the UNHRC to drop Russia’s membership, citing allegations of war crimes committed during military operations to capture the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Over 80 NGOs call for Russia to be dropped from UN rights council over Syria https://t.co/uKTfWXWOLn
— RT (@RT_com) 24 октября 2016 г. Among the anti-Russia lobby were US-based and George Soros-funded Human Rights Watch. Notably, billionaire financier Soros is an open advocate for regime change in Russia.
The campaign to undermine Russia at the UNHRC was preceded last week when Britain – also a member of the council – convened a summit in Geneva. The council issued a resolution which pointedly condemned bombing of civilians in Syria, and implicitly laid the blame on Russia and allied Syrian state forces.
Russia’s permanent representative in Geneva Alexey Borodavkin rebuked the UNHRC for a one-sided, politicized statement, which he said sought to solely impugn Russia and Syria. He noted the rank hypocrisy of the United States, Britain and France, along with Gulf Arab states, which lobbied for the resolution.
Radar data proves Belgian F-16s attacked village near Aleppo, killing 6 - Russian military https://t.co/Aj8mgT39ri pic.twitter.com/XHU4ljZb4H
— RT (@RT_com) 20 октября 2016 г. These states have been arming and funding terrorist groups in Syria since the eruption of the war in March 2011. They are also sending their air forces on illegal bombing raids across the country – in the name of “fighting terrorism” – which has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and the destruction of social infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, public buildings and residential homes.
In recent months, warplanes dispatched by the US, France and Belgium (the latter two current members of the UNHRC) have carried out air strikes on Syria causing dozens of civilian casualties.
So, of course, Western-orchestrated claims against Russia over alleged human rights violations in Syria are patently hypocritical and belie their own criminality.
The contrived effort to delist Russia from the UNHRC has the same hallmark as other Western media campaigns to discredit Moscow, such as the banning of Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics on dubious drug-abuse charges, or the pseudo-probe into the downing of the Malaysian airliner in 2014 over Ukraine, or overblown claims that Russian aggression is threatening the security of Europe. We can also include baseless accusations made by shadowy US intelligence agencies that Russia is hacking into computer systems to somehow disrupt the American presidential elections next month.
Saudi Arabia poised to be reelected to UN Human Rights Council https://t.co/sqWeSwjg48 #UNHR #SaudiArabia #humanrights
— RT (@RT_com) 27 октября 2016 г. The UNHRC debacle is one strand in a bundle of psychological operations aimed at isolating, demonizing and delegitimizing Russia.
Perhaps the knock out absurdity in the latest rush by the Western lynch mob is the relation of Britain and Saudi Arabia, both of which are current members of the UNHRC seeking renewal of their seats.
That Saudi Arabia – widely seen as the most repressive regime on Earth – is even a member of the prestigious Geneva council is due to Britain engaging in underhand vote rigging to help its oil-rich ally gain a seat, according to documents released last year by WikiLeaks.
A Saudi-led military coalition continues to slaughter thousands of Yemeni civilians by bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, marketplaces, funeral halls, factories and residential homes. Human rights groups like HRW and UN agencies are well aware of this Saudi campaign of mass murder in Yemen. It is also well documented that US, British, French and German weaponry worth billions of dollars is assisting the Saudi regime in its war crimes. That makes these Western states fully complicit.
Moscow summons Belgian ambassador, presents data on F-16s bombing of Syrian civilians https://t.co/WzwvworaZd pic.twitter.com/cHlKvzaeUD
— RT (@RT_com) 21 октября 2016 г. Germany, for example, which is also a current member of the UNHRC, has seen its arms exports to Saudi Arabia jump by 250 percent over the past two years, according to a report last week.
Britain, the ringleader of the media campaign to denigrate Russia in Geneva, has sold over $4 billion worth of armaments to Saudi Arabia since the oil kingdom launched its aggression on its southern neighbor in March 2015. Even while Saudi Arabia is committing the most egregious crimes against humanity, the British government continues to send Royal Air Force pilots to help train Saudi counterparts, brazenly denying that there is any breach of international law.
There is little or no protest from the 80 NGO rights groups about these applicant states to the next cohort of the UNHRC.
The hypocrisy and double standards of serial human rights violators make their condemnations against Russia null and void.
Importantly too, is to not merely rebut the accusers as hypocrites, but to also elucidate the anti-Russia claims as fabrications.
The information that Western governments, rights groups and media base their claims of Russia bombing civilians is garnered from entirely dubious and partisan sources. Endless reports on Syria and the battle for the northern city of Aleppo broadcast by multibillion dollar Western news organizations are based, incongruously, either on claims issued by the British-located so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, or by “activist” groups within terrorist-held east Aleppo, which are funded by Western governments, such as the purported “rescue workers” of the White Helmets and the Aleppo Media Center.
BREAKING: UN Human Rights Council votes to open probe into #Aleppo ‘war crimes’ https://t.co/xrdojTxO3v pic.twitter.com/2gKhTiMovH
— RT (@RT_com) 21 октября 2016 г. In other words, Western governments, media, rights groups, and, sadly, UN agencies are promulgating an anti-Russia narrative that is recycled terrorist propaganda.Good proof of this is seen on the TV station called “Free Syria” broadcast across the Middle East and North Africa on Saudi-owned satellite platform ArabSat.
Free Syria is a crude propaganda channel funded by the Saudi monarchy. It features jingoistic images of Saudi King Salman, along with Saudi troops, warplanes and tanks.
Free Syria also features links to the militant group Ahrar al-Sham, which is implicated in countless terrorist crimes along with Nusra and ISIS. Bearded militants are routinely shown firing mortars while shouting Islamist slogans.
Another regular contributor to the images and “reports” on this Saudi-funded, terrorist-supporting channel are the White Helmets and the Aleppo Media Center. Thus, on this publicly available “Free Syria” channel what we see in stark reality is how state sponsor, terrorist networks and propaganda machine come together in a self-incriminating amalgam.
What is even more damning is that the same “ information” is disseminated – albeit in a more polished form – through Western news outlets, such as CNN, BBC, France 24 and a gamut of supposedly respectable newspapers, like the New York Times and British Guardian.
It’s an astounding feat how reality can be so inverted. Russia’s military is legally justified in assisting the allied sovereign government of Syria to defeat a covert war to topple the state. That war is a criminal enterprise fueled by Washington, London and Paris through the deployment of myriad terrorist proxies.
And to add insult to injury, these terrorist-sponsoring rogue states then turn around and accuse Russia at a UN Human Rights Council based on propaganda sourced from their terrorist proxies.
The utter insanity of it all. But maybe the Western lynch mob will eventually get hoisted on their own coiling ropes of deception.",FAKE
"Bernie Sanders has thrown his support behind Hilary Clinton, but it remains to be seen whether his base will follow his lead.

Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I) of Vermont, march during a protest in downtown on Sunday, in Philadelphia. The Democratic National Convention starts Monday in Philadelphia.

Amid lingering angst over the primary process, Bernie Sanders has a chance to encourage his supporters to embrace party unity.

Sanders is set to meet privately with supporters Monday before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Sanders backers have expressed frustration over the nominating procedures, the party platform and party leadership, with some suggesting they may protest or take action on the floor. But the Vermont Senator has struck a positive message in recent interviews, expressing his support for Hillary Clinton.

""I'm proud that, in the Democratic platform that was passed a few weeks ago, we are making some real progress,"" Sanders said on CNN Sunday. He added: ""My focus right now is defeating (Donald) Trump, electing Clinton, electing progressive candidates around this country and focusing on the issues that matter the most to working families.""

Efforts to promote party togetherness were not helped by the publication last week of thousands of hacked emails, some of which suggested the DNC was favoring Clinton during the primary season. For many Sanders fans, the messages proved that their concerns about party officials preferring Clinton were correct. While party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is stepping down soon, she will still have a convention role, which could draw jeers from Sanders delegates.

""Democrats had great fun chortling over last week’s less-than-smooth Republican convention – the 'Never Trump' revolt, the plagiarism, the booing, the high-profile GOP no-shows,"" The Christian Science Monitor's Linda Feldmann reports. ""Now, it appears that Donald Trump and the Republicans may have the last laugh, as thousands of pro-Sanders demonstrators descend upon Philadelphia to protest the Democratic establishment – including Clinton’s perceived deficits as a progressive.""

At a meeting of the DNC credentials committee Sunday, comments praising Wasserman Schultz were met with laughter by some Sanders supporters. At a committee meeting the previous day, Sanders backers shouted ""shame, shame, shame"" as amendments to abolish or limit superdelegates in future nominating competitions were voted down.

Some Sanders delegates feel the Clinton campaign is not taking their policy concerns seriously. At a news conference Sunday, Sanders delegate Norman Solomon, 65, of Point Reyes Station, California, said many of Sanders' liberal supporters were disappointed in Clinton's vice presidential pick of Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. He said most viewed Kaine as not progressive enough and that there had been discussion about a variety of protest actions at the convention, including walking out.

""We've got to challenge the corporate power in the Democratic Party represented by Hillary Clinton today,"" Solomon said.

Still, Sanders delegate Courtney Rowe, 34, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said ""we are not here to disrupt for the purpose of disruption."" She said she was not currently planning on any action and wanted to hear from Sanders.

Sanders, who endorsed Clinton two weeks ago after a long-fought primary, has sought to find common ground around the party platform and rules. He successfully won major platform concessions, including a $15 federal minimum wage, abolishing the death penalty and breaking up large Wall Street banks. And at the DNC rules committee the two sides agreed on a ""unity commission"" that will review changes to the nominating process, including limiting the role of superdelegates.

After the unity commission agreement, Sanders supporters seeking to pass amendments to abolish or curtail superdelegates opted against pursuing convention floor fights on the issue.

Sanders has made clear that he would like to see a full roll call vote at the convention, so that his delegates can show their support.",REAL
A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
By Vin Armani You know the state is in trouble when they’re afraid of one man with an Internet connection. The case of Julian Assange... ,FAKE
"Two more women accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of sexual assault Friday, with a relative of one of them saying that the allegation was ""an attempt to regain the spotlight.""



Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump's NBC reality show ""The Apprentice,"" said the real estate mogul kissed her and groped her after meeting at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2007 to discuss a potential job. Zervos, accompanied at a Los Angeles press conference by attorney Gloria Allred, said she was later offered a lower-paying job at a Trump golf course.

“You do not have the right to treat women as sexual objects just because you are a star,” Zervos said at the press conference, addressing Trump.

Late Friday, the Trump campaign released a statement purporting to be from statement in which a cousin of Zervos said he was ""shocked and bewildered"" by her account.

John Barry of Mission Viejo, Calif., said in the statement that Zervos spoke glowingly of Trump until the real estate mogul rebuffed an invitation to visit her restaurant during the primary campaign.

""I think Summer wishes she could still be on reality TV, and in an effort to get that back she’s saying all of these negative things about Mr. Trump,"" Barry said. ""That’s not how she talked about him before.""

Trump himself issued a statement saying that he ""never met [Zervos] at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life."" He added that Zervos had emailed Trump's office this past April 14 to ask if he could visit her restaurant in California.

Allred, who frequently represents women bringing sexual harassment and assault claims, said “many more women” have contacted her regarding the Republican nominee after a video emerged of Trump making lewd comments about women in 2005 – comments Trump apologized for, but dismissed as “locker room talk.”

Allred said Zervos is not filing a suit at this time.

Earlier Friday, The Washington Post reported on a woman’s claim that Trump put his hand up her skirt and groped her at a Manhattan nightspot in the early '90s.

According to the Post, Kristin Anderson claimed that while she was at the Manhattan nightspot in the early 1990s, Trump slid his fingers under her miniskirt and fondled her.

Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks called Anderson's claim a ""total fabrication."" She said in a statement, ""It is illogical and nonsensical to think Donald Trump was alone in a nightclub in Manhattan.""

The new allegations capped a tumultuous week on the campaign trail for Trump, who has faced a daily drip-drip of allegations even as he has tried to focus on Bill Clinton's female accusers -- and the massive leak of Clinton campaign emails by WikiLeaks.

As Zervos was making her accusations Friday, Trump was at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., rejecting all the allegations against him as “total fiction.”

“I have no idea who these women are,” Trump said. “The stories are total fiction. They’re 100 percent made up.”

He continued to expand on his argument that the claims are part of a conspiracy involving the Clinton campaign and what he calls “the corrupt media” – in particular the New York Times, which kick-started the reports of sexual misconduct earlier this week. Trump previously threatened to sue the Times over allegations they published from two women who claim Trump groped them.

On Friday, Trump went after the Times again, suggesting the reporters were acting at the behest of billionaire Carlos Slim, the largest shareholder in the Times.

“Now, Carlos Slim, as you know, comes from Mexico. He’s given many millions of dollars to the Clintons and their initiatives,” Trump said. “Reporters at The New York Times, they’re not journalists. They’re corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and for Hillary Clinton.”

Trump then claimed the controversy was “a total setup” consisting of “lies spread by the media” as a way to undermine his campaign. He went so far as to mock his accusers, making fun of one who told the Times he groped her on an airplane in the early 1980s.

“The only way they can figure they can slow it down is to come up with people that are willing to say ‘Oh I was with Donald Trump in 1980,’” he said, putting on a voice mocking his accusers. “'I was sitting with him on an airplane and he went after me on the plane.’ Yeah, I'm gonna go after you…”

“Believe me,” he added. “She would not be my first choice, I can tell you.”

One of the accusers who came forward earlier this week, Mindy McGillivray of Palm Springs, Fla., told the Palm Beach Post Friday that she was planning to leave the United States because she feared for her family’s safety. She told the paper cars had been driving around her house.

As Trump ratched up his attacks Friday on the media and his accusers, Democrats have been seizing on the accounts as proof that Trump is unfit for office. On Thursday, first lady Michelle Obama launched a scathing attack on the billionaire and the comments he made on the 2005 tape.

""We have a candidate for president of the United States who over the course of his lifetime, over the course of this campaign, has said things about women that are shocking, so demeaning,"" she said. ""I simply will not repeat anything here today. Last week, we actually saw this candidate bragging about sexually assaulting women. I can't believe I'm saying that, a candidate for president of the United States bragged about sexually assaulting women.""

On Friday, President Obama followed up, saying Trump was determined to “drag this election as low as he can possibly go” and warned that “democracy is on the ballot” in November.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"in: Government Corruption , Special Interests , US News The cross section of Hillary Clinton voters is a mixture of walking dead zombies, power hungry influence peddlers, money cartel thieves and establishment diehards willing to start a global confrontation to postpone an inevitable economic collapse. As for the first category; welfare recipients, government bootlickers and mentally deranged utopians survive in a subsistence existence or in a fantasy illusion. The corruption purveyors simply want to maintain their elitist system of institutional inequality. As for the tribe of international finance, their objective always remains the same. Pick the next stooge who can be controlled. Finally, for globalist who are frantic to continue their New World Order of worldwide oppression, the elevation of Hillary Clinton to the position of the mad hatter to achieve the mutual assured destruction that these Illuminati’s masters of the universe require to purge the “Little People” from the planet. Any opposition to this band of desperate and deranged desperados is portrayed as racist, xenophobic and defiant of the “Politically Correct” secular humanism culture. Here is the fundamental point of the conflict. The abandonment of the cannons of natural and common law has produced a didactic ineptness that thrusts humanity into a technocratic prison of a meaningless existence. Dante’s Inferno of basic extinction is the ultimate society that a capitulation to the rigged electoral fraud seeks to achieve. The bloody record of Killary Clinton earns her an especially prominent place in hell. Take your choice. She may descend into Level 7 , for “The violent, the assasins, the tyrants, and the war-mongers lament their pitiless mischiefs in the river, while centaurs armed with bows and arrows shoot those who try to escape their punishment” or Level 8- the Malebolge where “The magicians, diviners, fortune tellers, and panderers are all here, as are the thieves”. Of course this allegory of punishment falls on deaf ears for the Clintonistas . For them this blameless role model for social justice warriors can do no wrong. All the evidence and proof in the world is ignored or dismissed when your patron saint of the occult wears pants suits. The reason HRC is better known as Killary has a lot to do with the body count that follows her around. THE CLINTON BODY-COUNT and the ‘CLINTON DEATH LIST’: 33 SPINE-TINGLING CASES lists several of her enemies that dared defy the queen of mean. Now are these suspicious circumstances of such deaths just another right-wing conspiracy to bring down the Arkancide crime syndicate? To an objective investigator, engaging into an in-depth probe might just get one added to this long list. But why would a Clinton supporter care, she is the epitome of the liberated woman and placing her on the throne of feminism is far overdue. Accepting, if not savoring a little reign of terror is a small price to pay as long as the body count does not include your own person. During the French Revolution the sanguinary women, known as Tricoteuse, who sat and knitted while attending public guillotine executions have more in common with Robespierre than Marie Antoinette. These devotee libbers identified with the symbol of equality, while their crowned head of elitism disdainfully admonish the peasants: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. Queen Marie Antoinette may not have really said, “Let them eat cake” but the regnant of the House of Clinton demonstrates throughout her entire life revealed her true sentiments; despise and contempt for the “Little People”. The knitting culture of the zombies cult of progressive authoritarianism is at the center of the public psychosis that follows the dictates of Hillary Clinton. Their identity is so caught up in the myth of collectivism that the very spirit of individual liberty is a necessary causality to join the Clinton demon worship. Look to the fictional character of Madame Defarge penned in A Tale of Two Cities for a synopsis of all that is wrong with Killary and her followers. Charles Dickens presents this viewpoint of the quintessential monster. “Her problem, it seems, is that Madame Defarge just doesn’t know where to draw the line. As far as she’s concerned, “justice” for the fate of her family isn’t just that the Marquis gets murdered. Justice should, she thinks, include the “extermination” of all of the Marquis’s family. Given her druthers, Charles, Lucie, and even little Lucie would fall under the sharp blade of La Guillotine. As Madame Defarge exclaims to her husband, “Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!” (3.12.36). “It was nothing to her that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself.” (3.14.33) So it comes as no surprise that when “The meeting between Lucie and Madame Defarge makes this absolutely clear: Lucie falls on her knees, begging for mercy on behalf of her child. Madame Defarge stares at her coldly. She doesn’t even stop knitting.” This example of the dark side of human nature is particularly relevant and applicable when analyzing the gender iniquity of the wicked witch. For femininity enablement to champion such abuse from a coldhearted degenerate is the biggest disappointment of this election cycle. Society should never condone or provide consent for anyone, male or female; who is such a habitual sociopath. The influence hucksters do not pretend to be altruistic . They would support Lucifer if they thought they would gain the riches of this world. As for the money changers, they are already archfiends in the Synagogue of Satan. Lastly, the globalist’s warmongers covet the mass eradication of billions to satisfy their lust for world transcendence. These three factions are the true irredeemables. The masses of the walking dead need to politically repent and seek civic redemption. This objective is not possible by voting for Hillary Clinton. If you do nothing else before the November 8, 2016 election watch the video, A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 . No matter your ideological propensities, we all share a mutual objective. Prevent a nuclear war that will destroy all civilized life on the planet. After watching this presentation, every rational person must come to deal with the prospects of putting a psycho in command of the launch codes. Folks; Donald Trump is not the mad man. The schizoid is a systemic and immoral lunatic, who is ready to drop the beheading blade on all of America. Her similarity with Madame Defarge bleeds over to her decadent boosters, who are willing to sacrifice their family, friends and community for the joy of destroying our planet. For all the dissatisfied and frustrated citizens, who understand the colossal stakes of national survival intervene with any fellow acquaintance that has been indoctrinated to the propaganda of Hillaryland . Confront the zombies attitude and appeal to their individual self-interest. Put forth the prospect of not voting for Clinton, even if Trump would not be an option. Citizens will not be the only people voting. Non eligible people are being ushered into a ballot booth with predisposed programming to put Killary into the oval office. The establishment is revealing their real tyranny for any person, who is still alive and has the ability to assess the actual nature of this election. The power structure in ready to collapse and the global elites are prepared to start a world war to keep and protect their feudal system of coercion. Those who might survive will be the special and the anointed. The masses will be served up on the plate of expediency and necessity. Hillary Clinton has always been part of the gang of criminals, protected by the intelligence community, insider politicians and the legal system of corrupt lawyers and judges. Voting for her is a clear validation of pure mental illness. The fact that the discredited FBI is endeavoring to regain their credibility by reopening the criminal investigation into Killary Clinton’s attempt to hide her family’s pay to play scheme to sell out our country is dramatic. This development should provide ample reason to put any notion of voting for the diva of sleaze on hold. Thanks to the Wikileaks release of the illicit emails from the Clinton cabal, only a fool can vote for her. Come to grips with the prospects of knowingly elevating this lifelong criminal to become the commander-and-chief. Genuine national security cannot be scarified to allow a distrustful and compromised agent of foreign interests to become President. Killary is dead meat. She could never gain the confidence of the nation and her continued nihilistic conduct and her kleptocrat criminal violations cannot be tolerated or ignored any longer. If you really want to save the planet, you cannot cast your ballot for this known traitor.",FAKE
"Next Swipe left/right This anti-Trump advert on the side of a bus is really visually clever and you have to see it in motion @Madsalbers over on Twitter writes, “Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to…” Epic Bus Ad from the political party SF in Denmark is mocking @realDonaldTrump and encouraging Americans abroad to vote. #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/MfyeOYtDuQ 
— Mads Albers (@MadsAlbers) October 26, 2016 
Well done Denmark! Rolling your eyes like that…",FAKE
"Does The Russian Government Have A Reality Disconnect? — Paul Craig Roberts (10/25/2016) Dear friends and readers, 
PCR's new book, THE NEOCONSERVATIVE THREAT TO WORLD ORDER, is now available: In Print and Digital Format by Clarity Press Quarterly Call to Donations 
To remind, this is our quarterly request for donations. If you want the information and analysis that this site provides to continue, you must support the site. As the alternative is the presstitutes or Ministry of Propaganda, it is a good decision to support this site . Quarterly Call to Donations Dear friends, It is time for my quarterly request for donations. As we agreed, my columns and this site will continue as long as your support is forthcoming. If you wish to fully escape The Matrix and see reality as it really is, you are brave and I am honored to have you as readers and supporters. If reality is too much for you, then I should cease putting myself at risk. PCR http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/inbound/we87dn9 Thank you for your donations 
Many thanks to those who donated. I appreciate the commitment that readers have to this website. I match your commitment with my own. PCR Latest Book PCR's new book, HOW AMERICA WAS LOST, is now available: In Print by Clarity Press and In Ebook Format by Atwell Publishing Americans Are So Disconnected From Reality That “Insouciant” Has Become An Euphemism Print This Article 
Americans Are So Disconnected From Reality That “Insouciant” Has Become An Euphemism 
While the idiot presstitutes and their brainwashed victims hyper-ventilate about Trump’s lewd talk about women, one consequence of the ignored nuclear arms race restarted by the neoconservatives, who have been in charge of US foreign policy in the 21st century, is the Russian Satan 2, which is reported to be capable of destroying the entirety of a land mass the size of Texas or France with one hit. 
The neoconservative foreign policy that has produced this result is obviously a total failure and endangers all life on earth. Hillary Clinton is a representative of this disastrous foreign policy. If Americans and Europeans cannot put into office people who can get along with Russia, there is no future for anyone. Trump is the only one who says he sees no point in conflict with Russia. This is what is important, not lewd talk about women. 
Hillary’s lewd talk about Putin –“the new Hitler”–will get us all killed. 
http://newatlas.com/rs28-sarmat-satan-2-russian-icbm/46127/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=013c2812c9-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-013c2812c9-92498229 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . Newsletter Notifications Signup Form",FAKE
"The reporter's job is to ""comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"" — a credo that, humorously, was originally written as a smear of the self-righteous nature of journalists. And so the justification for going after a public figure increases in proportion to his or her stature. The bigger the figure, the looser the restraints.

After a quarter of a century on the national stage, there's no more comfortable political figure to afflict than Hillary Clinton. And she's in for a lot of affliction over the next year and half.

That's generally a good way for reporters to go about their business. After all, the more power a person wants in our republic, the more voters should know about her or him. But it's also an essential frame for thinking about the long-toxic relationship between the Clintons and the media, why the coverage of Hillary Clinton differs from coverage of other candidates for the presidency, and whether that difference encourages distortions that will ultimately affect the presidential race.

The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.

I understand these dynamics well, having co-written a book that demonstrated how Bill and Hillary Clinton used Hillary's time at State to build the family political operation and set up for their fourth presidential campaign. That is to say, I've done a lot of research about the Clintons' relationship with the media, and experienced it firsthand. As an author, I felt that I owed it to myself and the reader to report, investigate, and write with the same mix of curiosity, skepticism, rigor, and compassion that I would use with any other subject. I wanted to sell books, of course. But the easier way to do that — proven over time — is to write as though the Clintons are the purest form of evil. The same holds for daily reporting. Want to drive traffic to a website? Write something nasty about a Clinton, particularly Hillary.

As a reporter, I get sucked into playing by the Clinton rules. This is what I've seen in my colleagues, and in myself.

One of my former colleagues, a hard-nosed reporter who has put countless political pelts on his wall, once told me that everyone in public life has something to hide. Who goes down in the flames of scandal? The politicians we decide to go after.

That may not be 100 percent true, but it's true enough. The act of choosing, time and again, to go after the same person has the effect of tainting that person, even when an investigation or reporting turns up nothing nefarious — and it's time not spent digging into his or her adversaries. The original source of alleged malfeasance could come from the other party, within a politician's party, or from the reporter's own observations and industrious digging. But two things are crystal clear: If there's no investigation, there's no scandal. And if there's no scandal, there's no scalp.

The Clintons have been under investigation for about 25 years now. There's little doubt they've produced more information for investigators, lawyers, and journalists about their finances, their business and philanthropic dealings, and their decision-making processes in government than any officials in American history. They've watched countless friends frog-marched into congressional hearings and, in some cases, to jail. They know there's a good chance that any expressed thought will become part of the public record and twisted for political gain.

The most absurd allegations against Hillary Clinton have been bookends on her public career so far: that she had something to do with the suicide of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster, and that she bears responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

But in between, there was Travelgate, Filegate, and Whitewater. Some were less legitimate than others. When Clinton surprisingly claimed that she and her husband were ""dead broke"" when they left the White House, it was because they had spent all of their money to defend themselves against an eight-year barrage of investigations.

It's understandable, then, why the Clintons have a bunker mentality when it comes to transparency. But their paranoia leads them to be secretive, and their secrecy leads Republicans and the press to suspect wrongdoing. That spurs further investigation, which only makes the Clintons more secretive. The paranoia and persistent investigation feed each other in an endless cycle of probe and parry. Along the way, the political class and the public are forced to choose imperfect sides: the power couple that always seems to be hiding something, or a Washington investigation complex that is overly partisan and underwhelming in its ability to prove gross misconduct.

This is, for Republicans, a reasonable strategy. They know that if they keep investigating her, it will do two things: keep the media writing about scandals that might knock her out, and turn off voters who don't want a return to the bloodsport politics of the 1990s. They leak partial stories to reporters hungry for that one great scoop that will give them the biggest political scalp of them all. But they also err in jumping the gun in accusing her of wrongdoing, which allows Clinton to defend herself by pointing at the folly of her adversaries.

In touring the country to promote our book in 2014, my co-author and I were repeatedly lobbied to assert that Clinton is a lesbian. One gentleman pushed the issue during a Q&A at a Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — one of the few places you might expect that kind of thing to get a rest.

The National Enquirer published a story in April alleging that Clinton wiped her personal email server clean because it contained references to her lesbian lovers.

Meanwhile, the conservative media are also convinced Clinton is preparing to wage a war on Christianity if she wins the presidency. But one thing revealed in her State Department emails is that Clinton shared daily religious reflections with her friends.

It's not just the out-of-the-box allegations that keep the media machine spun up. A year before Chelsea Clinton got married, Clinton staffers were kept busy by mainstream journalists who were absolutely sure she had already gone through with secret nuptials.

And, on a more serious note, remember Benghazi flu? Many political opponents and members of the media were unable to accept the idea that Clinton was forced to cancel planned Senate testimony on Benghazi because she'd suffered a concussion. Now, three years later, it seems ridiculous to think that Clinton was making an excuse — she's since testified on both sides of the Hill — or that she suffered, as Karl Rove suggested, brain damage. And if she was making up the concussion to avoid testifying, how did she suffer brain damage from a fake fall?

The conservative media echo chamber, which bounces innuendo from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News and back again, ensures that the most damning story lines — true or not — stay alive. The Benghazi attacks are a perfect example. Terrorists killed four Americans. The conservative echo chamber seems convinced Hillary Clinton is at fault. The reasonable argument to make is that we shouldn't have been in Libya in the first place and the murders were a down-the-chain result of bad policy. But the right wing wants to prove that they happened because of Clinton's actions — or inaction — on security matters.

They've talked about security requests denied for Libya (never mind that the stronger contingent would have been in Tripoli, not Benghazi, and that there's no evidence Clinton herself was aware of the requests), a stand-down order that prevented reinforcements from arriving in Benghazi (never mind that they wouldn't have gotten there until after the fighting was done, and that even a House Republican committee found that there was no such order) and, most of absurd of all, that Clinton knew the attack was coming. This is how Limbaugh put it in May.

The freedom of the conservative media to make wild allegations often acts as a bulldozer forcing reporters to check into the charges and, in doing so, repeat them. By the time they've been debunked, they're part of the American public's collective consciousness. Or, as it's been said, a lie gets around the world before the truth gets out of bed.

One outgrowth of Clinton's terrible relationship with reporters is that journalists often assume she is acting in bad faith. There's good reason for that. Though she's added some new pros to her press staff for this campaign, her operation's stance toward the media was always a reflection of the way Bill Clinton's White House handled journalists.

Back in the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton relied on a series of Machiavellian spin doctors to keep the press at bay. With the Clinton White House, the modus operandi was to stonewall as long as possible, lie if necessary — or just out of habit — and turn questions around on the questioners. After all, Bill Clinton once wagged his finger at a press conference and told reporters, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman ... Ms. Lewinsky."" He'd lied in a deposition, too.

So the press has plenty of precedent for believing that when the Clintons aren't forthcoming — and sometimes, even when they are — they're covering something up. And the Clintons, given the history of some-smoke-no-fire investigations launched against them, have plenty of precedent for being mistrustful of the press. The result is a brutally dysfunctional relationship on both sides. The Clintons believe the press acts in bad faith, and the press believes the Clintons' attitudes toward the press are evidence that the Clintons are hiding something.

That attitude carried over to Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and to some degree her tenure as Secretary of State. The standard response to a reporter's question is not an answer. It is to ignore the question or to engage in a Socratic debate by asking a question in return. It's clear Clinton doesn't like the media one bit, as Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman reported last year.

At a July Fourth parade this past weekend, Clinton aides used rope to create an impromptu moving barrier for reporters, keeping them away from the candidate and voters. She treated them like cattle, and they responded by putting the video on television for the last three days.

The mistrust among journalists is a problem for Clinton. And as the media is an amplifier for the public, it's also little wonder that so many voters are inclined to believe she's often acting in bad faith. Most Americans say she's not honest and trustworthy.

This view, shared by many reporters and most of the public, makes it much easier to treat Clinton's actions as though they are uniquely sinister. Case in point: She made a ton of money giving paid speeches to people with business before the government. So did Jeb Bush, of course. But until Bush recently released an accounting of some of those speeches, the media had little interest in his dealings. Kudos to Ken Vogel of Politico, who did some digging on that for a story published Thursday.

The imbalance in assumptions about Clinton's motivations is another way in which the Clinton code has a distorting effect on the public perception of her. And it, too, is self-perpetuating: It leads Clinton to assume the press is biased against her, which leads her to treat the press poorly, which leads more reporters to assume she's trying to hide something from them.

When Clinton keynoted an annual fundraiser for David Axelrod's epilepsy charity in June 2013, several major news outlets sent reporters to cover the speech. That was more than three years before the 2016 election. Every word, every gesture, every facial expression is scrutinized.

Video of Clinton ordering a burrito bowl at a Chipotle became the first viral image of her campaign. Reporters gave fodder to late-night comedians earlier this year when they made a mad dash to catch up as her campaign van rolled by.

This coverage of every last detail, of course, isn't a one-way street. It wasn't until a reporter was tipped off to the Chipotle visit that anyone knew about it. She craves the attention even more than she detests it.

But that, too, has a distorting effect. As with the royal family in London, normally private moments become part of a public narrative: her husband's affair, her daughter's wedding, the birth of her granddaughter.

All the attention has the effect of making Clinton seem, to the casual observer, hungrier for press than even the average politician. And there's no doubt that part of the love/hate relationship is an intense desire to attract and manipulate coverage. But Clinton understands that sometimes it's better not to be in the spotlight.

The best example of that was when she declined requests to appear on Sunday political talk shows right after the Benghazi attacks. Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the UN and now Obama's national security adviser, leaped at the chance to stand in for Clinton. Those appearances ended up costing Rice the nomination to succeed Clinton as secretary of state when many senators concluded she had lied about the origin and nature of the attacks.

The press has such fascination with the Clintons that the coverage would be there whether Hillary Clinton wanted it or not.

For someone who lost a big lead in the 2008 presidential primary and is ceding ground to Bernie Sanders right now, Clinton is given a lot of credit for her political acumen. Her detractors see in every move, including the birth of her granddaughter, a grandly conceived and executed political calculation.

And Clinton plays into that by using the positives in her life for political gain.

That doesn't make her different from other candidates for the presidency — it makes her just like them. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie talked about his grandmothers, his mom, his wife, and his kids when he launched his bid for the presidency last week. Was that calculated to send messages about Christie to the public? Of course!

The best example, though, was the tear — the one that rolled down Clinton's cheek as she campaigned in New Hampshire after having come in third in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.

The New York Times's Maureen Dowd pilloried her for what Dowd saw as a window into the dark part of Clinton's soul.

How far political journalism has come from castigating Ed Muskie for crying to accusing Clinton of calculating that tears would help her win. She's not that good at politics.

I take a dim view of the idea that journalists successfully anoint political winners. The media might have been in the bag for Barack Obama, but he didn't win because he got positive coverage. He won because he had better strategy, a better message, and better skills at delivering that message — in the 2008 primary and in the two general elections he won.

That said, the media can definitely weigh down — and even destroy — a candidate. The emphasis on a candidate's flaws — real or perceived — comes at the cost of the candidate's ability to focus his or her message and at the cost of negative attention to the other candidates. This is a problem for Clinton, and it seems unlikely to go away.

Hillary Clinton is comfortable enough to be a target for a lot of journalistic affliction and powerful enough that no one needs to comfort her from that affliction. But these double standards are an important factor to keep in mind when judging her against her rivals for the presidency. Whether they're fair or not, the Clinton rules distort the public's perception of Hillary Clinton.

Correction: This story has been corrected to remove an erroneous reference to the source of the original report on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Drudge Report first broke news that Newsweek had decided to hold a story about the affair.",REAL
"Hillary Melts Down Over Weiner In Public, PICS Prove Campaign Is Imploding Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This 
Hillary Clinton’s campaign is imploding, and it’s so bad that she was caught having a mini meltdown after her press conference as she tried to explain this new email investigation by the FBI, thanks to Anthony Weiner’s laptop. As Hillary lost it, her campaign was caught red-handed, doing dirty tricks to pictures, and you’ll love just how desperate they have become as they see this election sinking like the Titanic. 
Rumors are flying after Hillary Clinton responded to the latest bomb dropped on her campaign, that thousands of government emails are on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Everyone knows Hillary should have been indicted before, and she had a meltdown of sorts when Kristen Welker of Fox News asked, “Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary Clinton?” 
While Hillary was walking away from the short press conference after the Weiner email story broke, she stopped and threw her head back and let out a creepy maniacal laugh . Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin found it really weird, saying it was like Hillary had lost it. She described Hillary “stopping and throwing her head back and laughing, it was really odd.” ""Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary Clinton,"" a reporter shouts as HRC walks out. Clinton only lets out a big laugh. 
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016 
However, Hillary Clinton was not really laughing. That was a public meltdown, and she is pissed off that an idiot like Anthony Weiner just cost her this election. It’s so bad that the Clinton campaign was caught photoshopping the crowd at a recent Ohio rally, where Bill Clinton spoke. Bill Clinton rally Oct. 29th, red arrow shows a man (left) who was duplicated in photoshopped pic put out by Clinton campaign, indicated with red circles (right) 
Then, if all of that isn’t bad enough, the Chicago Tribune, one of the most liberal papers in the country, had this headline yesterday: “ Democrats Should Ask Hillary To Step Down ,” which was written by John Kass who was speaking from Hillary’s real home state of Illinois. 
“FBI director James Comey ‘s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious .” [via Chicago Tribune ] 
If we are agreeing with the Chicago Tribune, you know what happened on Friday with James Comey and the FBI is so devastating that this election is over for Hillary. However, that doesn’t mean we can let up and sigh with relief just yet. 
However, we can be extremely optimistic that, after eight years and two elections that caused utter destruction for our country, we have an extremely good chance that Americans will reject Hillary and her criminal cabal. America was saved by Anthony Weiner, and it doesn’t get any stranger than that.",FAKE
"(Before It's News)
It is fun to look at polls, and using such data, decide which candidate will win which state, and ultimately, which candidate will win the electoral college. A lot of people and organizations do that, and for this reason, I don’t. I do not have access to polls that no one else sees. Were I to use polling data to directly predict outcomes per state, I’d use a method like that used by FiveThirtyEight, and probably come up with similar results. How boring. It would be a waste of my time to try to replicate the excellent work done by Nate Silver and his team.
Back during the Democratic Primaries, I decided that I wanted to get a handle on which candidate was likely to win, fairly early on. The polling based estimates were inadequate because most states simply didn’t have polling data that early in the process. So, I invented an alternative method, which made certain estimates of how voters with different ethnic identities would vote. That method accurately predicted several primary outcomes, outperforming the poll based methods such as those used by FiveThirtyEight.
After a while, enough primaries had been carried out that I could switch methods slightly. Using the same exact model, but primed with the results of prior primaries (that year) rather than my estimates of voter behavior, I used the ethnic distribution data for each state to predict the outcome of upcoming primary contests.
Once again, my method was very accurate, and once again, it out performed the polling based methods.
So, recently, I’ve tried to apply a similar method to estimating the electoral outcome for this year’s presidential race. But, it is impossible to use the same exact method because the entire thing happens all on one day. I can’t use the election results from a handful of states to estimate the likely future outcomes in other states.
I recognize that polling data is very limited on a national level. Things happen during an election season that probably change people’s likely voting behavior, especially among independents. Solid states are rarely polled, and small states, swing or not, are rarely polled. Many polls are of low quality. Right now, for instance, fewer than half of the states have polls that were a) taken fully after the final POTUS debate and b) have an A- or better rating from FiveThirtyEight. If I allow the use of B and occasional C ratings for recent polls, and allow a few polls to include periods of time prior to the last POTUS debate, but only in states that are very strongly in favor of one candidate or the other (and thus likely to not move anyway), I can find 32 states that have sort of usable polling data. Interestingly, states with some of the more controversial changes happening, like Utah and Iowa, are not adequately polled.
In order to apply a model like the one I used in the Primaries to the current election, I used the 32 states for which there was somewhat acceptable recent polling data to inform the model (to calculate the regression coefficients) in order to then, separately, predict the likely voting behavior (Trump vs. Clinton) in all of the states.
Before I show you the map, however, I need to discuss something else.
About a week ago the press, especially the somewhat more left leaning press, and various commenters, seeing much reaction to a series of events beginning with the NYT release of Trump’s tax return and ending with the final POTUS debate, events which sandwiched the sexual assault tapes and accusations, collectively decided that a huge gap between Clinton and Trump was rapidly opening up and the race would end with a double digit spread, an electoral rout, and a big party.
Soon after, I pointed out that this may not be correct. That polling data seemed to show, rather, that there was an expansion of the difference between the two candidates followed by a re-closing of the gap, with Clinton still leading but by about as much as before this temporary shift. To this I added a concern. If too many people assumed that the race was over and in the double digit range, perhaps there could be a GOTV backlash effect, or a funding effect, that would shift things to within shooting distance for Trump.
I was not alone in thinking this, and I was probably right. The GOP sunk, via pacs, 25 million dollars into Senate races in response to the Democrats shifting from the national race to the Senate, which was followed by the Democrats shifting back to the national race in certain states, presumably recognizing that the polls were artificially spread. Indeed, some who criticized (arguing mainly from incredulity and good wishes) my admonition noted, correctly, that some of that narrowing was because a bunch of right-leaning polls had come out all at once. This is true, but it ignores that a bunch of left-leaning polls had made the formation of the Great Gap of GOP Defeat look a lot bigger than it ever really was.
I say all this as part one of my preparation for what I’m going to tell you below, which is not the news you want to hear. Part two is some logic I’d like to bludgeon you with.
Consider these points:
1) True Trump supporters could give a rat’s ass about sexual assault, poor debate performance, or tax forms. Donald Trump was correct when he said, weeks ago, now forgotten, that he could gun someone down on the streets of Manhattan and he would not lose support form his base. These people did not abandon him when he was heard to talk about sexual assault. If anything, they were energized by it. And, I’m talking about something just shy of 40% of the voters. We live in a barely civilized asshole country.
2) Please tell me exactly which Hillary Clinton supporters, who were going to vote for Clinton over Trump all along, are NOW going to pick Clinton (if polled or on voting day) that change from not being Clinton supporters to being Clinton supporters? In other words (this is a somewhat subtle point) which people who hated Trump became True Haters of Trump after the sexual assault thing? Almost none. They were already there.
3) The third category of people, the undecideds (who are only lying about being undecided, in most cases) and the so-called “reasonable Republicans” (of which there are very, very few), who could conceivably shift from Trump to Clinton are going to divide their voting activities between Johnson, a write in (as they are being advised by Republican leaders in some cases) or simply staying home.
In other words, over the last few weeks, no source has emerged that hands Secretary Clinton more electoral votes than she probably had about a month ago, and Trump is not going to have any, or at least not many, electoral votes go away.
Those observations (part one) and that logic (part two) cause me to be utterly unsurprised to find out that an analysis of the electoral map I did on October 16th and one I did today do not show Clinton pulling farther ahead. In fact, the two analyses have Clinton being less far ahead than Trump now than ten days ago. The difference is in Ohio (shifting from Clinton to Trump) which is almost certainly going to happen, and North Carolina (which shifted from Clinton to Trump in this analysis) which seems much less likely to happen, and Arizona shifting from Clinton (that was probably wishful thinking) to Trump.
The point here is this, plain and simple. An analysis using a technique that has worked very well for me in the past shows that the difference between that moment of Maximal Clintonosity and today is plus or minus a couple of state. In other words, not different. Maybe a little worse. Really, about the same.
Here’s the current map:
Obviously, I will be watching for more data over the next few days. I assume there will be a spate of polls as we approach November 8th (the day Democrats vote. Republicans vote on the 28th of November). If so, then there will be convergence between my method of calibration and my method of calculation, and the model will consume itself by the tail and become very accurate at the same time.
But between now and then, perhaps that very small number of polls that are both recent and high quality will grow a bit more and I can do this again and resolve those closer states.
By the way, the “swing states” according to my model, the states where things are close, are Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia of those now in the Trump column. Those are indeed swing states. Numerically, the close states that are in the Clinton column are Virginia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania.",FAKE
"Jubilee Year of Mercy ends on November 20. Following Judgment? page: 1 Jesus to St Faustina: You will prepare the world for My final coming. (Diary 429) Speak to the world about My mercy ... It is a sign for the end times. After it will come the Day of Justice. While there is still time, let them have recourse to the fountain of My mercy. (Diary 848) Tell souls about this great mercy of Mine, because the awful day, the day of My justice, is near. (Diary 965). I am prolonging the time of mercy for the sake of sinners. But woe to them if they do not recognize this time of My visitation. (Diary 1160) Before the Day of Justice, I am sending the Day of Mercy. (Diary 1588) He who refuses to pass through the door of My mercy must pass through the door of My justice. (Diary 1146). The Jubilee Year of Mercy proclaimed by pope Francis, ends on November 20th the feast of Christ the King the end of the liturgical year. Every jubilee year is destined to end of course, that's why it is a year and not a decade.But...isn't it too much prophecy gathered in that last year? First of all, the Catholics expect earnestly the 100th anniversary of Fatima. The 100th year started on October 13 and would end on October 13, 2017. As pope Benedict said during his pontificate on his trip to Fatima, the 100th year will see the Fatima secrets fulfilled. Then, we had all kinds of predictions recently. Let only remember the once at the time Jewish rabbis predictions of the year 5776, encoded in Bible codes according to some of them, that also appeared to be the 49th jubilee year since the retaking of Jerusalem. ""Nothing happened, again"" would say many. Much happened in terms that might be the last quiet year before the events. Then we have the enigmatic wishes on the last Christmas of both pope and queen as if that would be our last Christmas? The wordings were vague enough to draw firm conclusion, anyway they were said and stirred public interest. There are more predictions, such as of major Solar kill shot, that even president Obama signed orders in case it happens. The French foreign minister said of 500 days before climate chaos, days that expired last Fall. How much more mercy is envisioned by God, in what time frames? If the sequence given in Garabandal of Great Warning- Miracle - Chastisement is to be accomplished before the 100th anniversary of Fatima, it seems God's mercy towards the entire world would end in less than a year time. The only possible date for the Miracle in 2017 would fall on April 13, Holy Thursday. Let make a distinction, mercy to individuals who accepted God's loving call, NEVER ENDS! But God is a just judge at the same time. The Chastisement is predicted by too many prophecies and cannot be disregarded as nonsense. Moreover,t he world today is in a worse shape than during the end of the Cold War. I don't know what exactly will follow, there are variety of scenarios each of them having its own justification and logic to exist. May be a combination of them will happen in reality. What is exactly Great Warning, is it only what is said to be by numerous seers, far not only those in Garabandal? For me it should include ET-angelic component. Time will tell. Time that runs out, according to Anguera and other apparitions of Virgin Mary. That doesn't mean it has all to happen on December 1st. Every next week draws us closer to the two doors, one of which is the Door of Mercy and the other the Door of Justice. Your take on recent catholic prophecy? Or may be protestant or orthodox one? edit on 27-10-2016 by 2012newstart because: (no reason given) edit on 27-10-2016 by 2012newstart because: (no reason given)",FAKE
"The Iraqi government -- supported by Shiite militias from Iran -- launched a large-scale military operation to take out Islamic State militants from Iraq’s western Anbar province Monday.

The operation is under way to recapture Fallujah and Ramadi, a senior defense official at the Pentagon confirmed to Fox News Monday. The efforts are supported by Shiite militias, known as Popular Mobilization Units, from Iran and its proxy Hezbollah.

Photos of Iran’s Quds force Commander Qasem Soleimani visiting Shia militia units inside Iraq have appeared on social media since ISIS took over large portions of Iraq a year ago.

The defense official was unaware of any U.S. air support boosting the operation. It has been longstanding Pentagon policy to support only units aligned with the government of Iraq, but the line can be blurred as the chain of command for units operating in Iraq is not always known.

The spokesman for the Joint Operations Command, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, said in a televised statement that the operation started at dawn Monday and that government forces are backed by Shiite and Sunni pro-government fighters.

The operation met fierce resistance from insurgents, who deployed five suicide car bombs and fired rockets to repel their advance on the city of Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, military sources in Anbar told Reuters.

There were also reports of fighting around the provincial capital Ramadi, captured by Islamic State two months ago.

There were also reports of fighting around Ramadi-- captured by Islamic State two months ago. Iraqi forces pushed towards the provincial capital from the west and the south, police sources in the province said. Islamic State supporters said those advances were repelled by the militants.

When Shia militia units launched an operation to retake another Sunni stronghold, Tikrit, in March, they did so without support from the U.S.-led coalition initially.  U.S. warplanes only supported the operation when the Shia militia units backed by Iran departed the area.

According to the latest coalition airstrike report, there were two airstrikes in Fallujah over the weekend.

This is not the first time the Iraqi government has announced an operation to retake Anbar -- where several key towns, including the provincial capital Ramadi, remain under ISIS control. In May, authorities announced an operation to retake Ramadi, but there has not been any major progress on the ground since then.

The forces arrayed against ISIS are varied, according to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters.

“This is a real mish-mosh,” said Peters, a Fox News contributor. “You have Shia militias -- not all of whom get along, by the way, Iraqi troops, police and some Sunni tribesmen. Iran is deeply involved in helping them plan and supervising the operation, but it is compartmentalized. It won’t be Sunni tribesmen and Shia militias standing shoulder-to-shoulder. So coordination is going to be a nightmare.”

Peters said retaking Fallujah, a much smaller city than Ramadi and closer to Baghdad, will be easier. Going into Ramadi, where ISIS has been dug in for two months and likely booby-trapped buildings, will be a dangerous and painstaking process, he said. And there is one more tactic to worry about, according to Peters.

“ISIS is very smart,” he said. “When they are attacked in one area, they strike in another area. It would not be surprising to see an asymmetric response -- perhaps a new attack on Tikrit or the oil fields in the north.”

Hadi al-Ameri, commander of the largest Shi'ite force, the Badr Organization, told Iraqi television Sunday he expected the main attack on Fallujah to happen after the Eid holiday which starts later this week.

Residents in Fallujah and Ramadi reported heavy bombardment of both cities early on Monday.

In a brief statement, Iraq's Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, vowed to ""take revenge from Daesh criminals on the battlefield... and their cowardly crimes against unarmed civilians will only increase our determination to chase them and to expel them from the land of Iraq.""

The Islamic State group, also known by the Arabic acronym Daesh, seized large parts of Anbar in early 2014 and captured Ramadi in May. Iraqi forces, which had been making steady progress against the extremists in recent months with the help of the air campaign, scored a major victory in recapturing Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit last month.

During the past few weeks, the troops have been moving to cut the militants' supply routes and to surround and isolate Ramadi and Fallujah.

Rasool didn't provide any further details on the ongoing operations. By noon, the country's state TV reported government forces recapturing villages and areas around Fallujah.

Meanwhile Monday, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for Sunday's series of bombings in Shiite areas of the capital, Baghdad, that killed at least 29 people and wounded 81 others, according to the ISIS-affiliated Aamaq news agency.

Iraq is going through its worst crisis since the 2011 withdrawal of U.S. troops. The Islamic State group controls large swaths of the country's north and west after capturing Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul and the majority of Anbar province.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"UKIP MEPs Steven Woolfe & Mike Hookem reported to French police over... UKIP MEPs Steven Woolfe & Mike Hookem reported to French police over Strasbourg scuffle By 0 61 
MEPs Steven Woolfe and Mike Hookem have been reported to French police over an altercation at the EU’s Strasbourg parliament, which saw Woolfe hospitalized and plunged crisis-hit UKIP into further turmoil. 
European Parliament President Martin Schulz said he had referred the “regrettable” incident to the French authorities “given the seriousness of the reported facts and their possible criminal implications.” 
Schulz says he had been recommended to do so by the European Parliament’s advisory committee on conduct, according to the Press Association. Following recommendation of EP Advisory Committee on Code of Conduct, I referred incident involving MEPs Hookem and Woolfe to FR authorities 
— EP President (@EP_President) October 26, 2016 Based on the result of the investigations, I will then take a decision about sanctions to be imposed according to EP rules 
— EP President (@EP_President) October 26, 2016 
“The committee concluded that the versions of the facts given by the two members involved diverged substantially and the facts seem to have happened in the absence of direct witnesses,” he told the parliament. 
Read more 
“It also stressed that given the seriousness of the reported facts and their possible criminal implications, further evidence is needed to clarify this matter. 
“As a result I have decided to follow the recommendation of the advisory committee and I have referred this matter to the competent French authorities. 
“Based on the result of the investigations, I will then take a decision about a sanction to be imposed.” Hookem off the hook 
An internal investigation by UKIP published on Wednesday afternoon ruled Hookem should not be held responsible for the altercation. 
“ In the absence of eye witnesses, the true facts of what took place in the ante room itself are impossible to determine and neither man has made an official complaint to the party over the incident. ” 
Despite the ruling, party investigators went into a detailed hypothesis as to what took place in the ante room between Hookem and Woolfe. The only thing it determines with any certainty is that “ the door was open prior to Mr Woofle’s fall. ” 
The investigation concludes Hookem was not close enough to the ante room door to open it himself, and so it is “ reasonable to assume that Mr Woolf opened the door whilst attempting to exit the ante room backwards. ” 
“ The investigation does find it unlikely that Hookem was in a position to be able to push Woolfe through the door, given where he was standing in the ante room immediately afterwards, but in the absence of an eye witness, it cannot make a definite determination .” 
While the report lets Hookem off the hook, it actually finds a series of quotes given by Woolfe to the Daily Mail earlier this month to have brought the party into “ disrepute .” 
“ Had Mr Woolfe continued his membership of the party, a disciplinary panel would have been convened to investigate these quotes ,” the report concludes. Crying Woolfe 
Woolfe quit UKIP last week, abandoning his leadership bid, and branded the party “ungovernable” without Nigel Farage as leader and the EU referendum to unite supporters. 
He will now sit as an independent in the European Parliament. 
Woolfe stands by the claim he “received a blow” from Hookem during an altercation at a private meeting of UKIP MEPs, where they were discussing Woolfe’s rumored plan to defect to the Conservatives. 
Woolfe says the incident caused him to suffer two seizures, partial paralysis and the loss of feeling in his face and body. He says he issued a police complaint. 
Hookem denies hitting Woolfe. 
The fallout from the incident has continued with claims Woolfe has been warned about “inappropriate behavior” by senior party figures. 
Hookem has also claimed Woolfe signed for £276 (US$300) in daily allowances at the European Parliament three times while recovering from his injuries earlier this month. 
Woolfe had been seen as a frontrunner in the race to replace Diane James, whose term as UKIP leader lasted just 18 days. 
Among the other contenders are Suzanne Evans, Paul Nuttall and Raheem Kassam. 
Also running is John Rees-Evans, who apologized this week over a 2014 claim that a “ homosexual donkey ” tried to rape his horse. He described the comments as “ playful banter .” 
The new UKIP leader will be announced on November 28. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia were born in the same year, chosen by the same president, live on the same Northern Virginia street and, in serving together on the Supreme Court longer than any other current pair of justices, have many times voted the same conservative way.

But one issue — how the Constitution protects gay citizens — divides and defines the two like no other. This week’s historic hearing on same-sex marriage is both the logical extension and ultimate showdown in a decades-long argument that so far Kennedy has always won.

[Here’s what the fallout of a ruling could be in the various states]

Each of Kennedy’s bold and lyrical rulings on behalf of gays — “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” he wrote in Lawrence v. Texas — has been just as reliably followed by a meticulous and fiery denunciation from Scalia.

“The court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed,” Scalia answered in the Lawrence case.

Kennedy has written all of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions on gay rights: protecting the civil rights of homosexuals in Romer v. Evans (1996), abolishing anti-gay sodomy laws in Lawrence (2003) and ruling in United States v. Windsor two years ago that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages.

Each was a steppingstone to the Supreme Court’s consideration on Tuesday of whether the Constitution forbids states from prohibiting gay couples to marry.

If the pattern continues and the court renders a landmark ruling favoring gay marriage, it will likely once again be Kennedy whose words memorialize that decision and Scalia who will articulate the dissent.

It is not a conflict everyone would have predicted for two of Ronald Reagan’s choices for the court. Scalia ascended to the bench in 1986, and Kennedy followed 17 months later. The two, born on opposite coasts in 1936, are consistent comrades on issues important to corporate America and in dismantling campaign finance laws they see restricting political speech.

After Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. sided with liberals to declare the Affordable Care Act constitutional, Scalia and Kennedy united with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a jointly written, 65-page dissent mocking the majority opinion and saying the entire act should be found invalid.

Kennedy is often the deciding vote when the ideologically divided court splits 5 to 4, but in two-thirds of those cases he sides with the conservatives.

But if they often arrive at the same conclusion — one obstacle for same-sex marriage proponents in the current case is Kennedy’s allegiance to states’ rights — Kennedy and Scalia could not be more different in how they view a judge’s role.

“Their different approach to gay rights reflects their more fundamental disagreement about how to think about the liberties protected by the Constitution,” said Paul M. Smith, a Washington lawyer who was on the winning side in the Lawrence case.

Scalia believes the only freedoms that should be viewed as protected by the Constitution “are those that have been protected under American law throughout our history, defined at the most specific level,” Smith said. Otherwise, the people decide.

Kennedy, Smith said, “believes that each generation has the right to conceive of newer and broader forms of liberty that merit constitutional protection. He sees history as a guide but not a straitjacket.”

Their battle is compelling, said Allison Orr Larsen, a William and Mary law professor, because it “brings to the forefront the theoretical question in constitutional law: How should courts respond to change when interpreting the Constitution?”

Michael Dorf, a professor at Cornell Law School and a former Kennedy clerk, said his former boss’s decisions on gay rights were not constructed to lead ultimately to a decision on same-sex marriage. But they provided a foundation for how to view new constitutional rights “if that’s where the country moves.”

Scalia, on the other hand, champions the cause of originalism, and Edward Whelan, a former Scalia clerk and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said his former boss learned quickly that “Kennedy’s judicial approach was not anything close to what Scalia’s is.”

“A basic tenet of originalism is that it’s not the role of judges to impose their own moral philosophies,” Whelan said. “Scalia understands the Constitution to leave the vast bulk of policy issues to the democratic processes and rejects the notion that it’s his role to read his own views into the Constitution.”

It’s worth remembering the differences among President Reagan’s choices for the Supreme Court.

He fulfilled his campaign pledge to name a woman to the bench with Sandra Day O’Connor, the pragmatic Arizona politician and judge who quickly became the court’s center.

Scalia’s selection was celebrated by conservatives eager to see a new method of constitutional interpretation forcefully advocated on the court.

Kennedy was a compromise, Reagan’s third choice for the seat he once hoped would be filled by conservative Robert Bork, whose nomination was defeated in the Senate. “This was the Bork seat,” said Smith. “Things could have been much different.”

Kennedy’s views, Dorf said, were those of a “moderate California Republican.”

Although he never ruled for gay rights as a lower court judge, Kennedy expressed concern about the policy even as he upheld the military’s right to dismiss gay servicemen. And Frank J. Colucci, a political science professor at Purdue University who has written a book about Kennedy’s jurisprudence, recalled that Kennedy in a speech criticized the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld a Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy.

“He came about as close as you can as a lower court judge to saying it was wrongly decided,” Colucci said.

Once on the court, Kennedy was able to say just that.

In the first gay rights case, Romer, Kennedy wrote for the majority in striking down a Colorado constitutional amendment. After some cities in the state began passing laws protecting gays from discrimination in housing, employment and other areas, voters through a referendum approved the amendment precluding such government protections.

Colorado’s amendment, Kennedy wrote, “classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

That began something of a call-and-response on the issue: Kennedy delivering the majority’s opinion, Scalia replying with a scalding dissent, read from the bench for emphasis.

“This court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality is evil,” Scalia wrote in Romer. “I vigorously dissent.”

In Lawrence, Kennedy got the chance to reverse the court’s decision on sodomy, and did: “Bowers was not correct when it was decided and it is not correct today.” Private, homosexual conduct between consenting adults, he wrote, “involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.”

O’Connor wrote a concurring opinion to say the ruling did not touch on the matter of whether gays would be able to marry.

Scalia wrote that homosexuals should be free to promote their cause through democratic means, but “many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.”

“They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive,” he wrote. “The court views it as ‘discrimination.’ ”

Two years ago, in Windsor, Kennedy wrote that the federal government’s refusal to offer the same government benefits available to heterosexual couples to legally married gay couples tells “all the world that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy” and “humiliates” their children.

Again, Scalia blasted the decision, saying the majority was merely being coy in saying the decision did not address whether states are required to give licenses for same-sex marriage.

“By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition,” he wrote.

Most federal courts have taken Scalia literally.

“The court agrees with Justice Scalia’s interpretation of Windsor,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robert J. Shelby of Salt Lake City.

Shelby’s decision to strike a marriage ban in Utah was the first such ruling following Windsor and began the path that continues to Tuesday’s oral arguments, and will end with the court’s decision in June.

40 years later: “I’ve got the license and the faggot letter”

The right finds a voice on same-sex marriage

Gay rights, religious rights and a compromise in an unlikely place: Utah",REAL
"WATCH: CNN Hack Humiliates Self, Tells Viewers U.S. Reps Are Term-Limited Already (They’re Not) 
That breakdown in communication in Washington is exactly what has fueled the rise of Trump . People are sick and tired of nothing getting done, at least nothing good, so they want a new leader who can actually accomplish great things. 
“I think that we have decided that rather than confront the disagreement and differences of opinion, we’ll just simply annihilate the person who disagrees with us,” Thomas said. 
Unfortunately he is exactly right. Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of preferring to demonize their opponents rather than engaging in meaningful discussion.   
This sort of polarization doesn’t help America. All it does is increase the frustration the American people have with Congress when they see nothing happening for years. 
Trump has a history of making compromises and hammering out complex deals in the business world. Unlike Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump has a history of making things work. 
If Trump can bring about some real change in Washington, he can finally turn this country around. 
Share this on Facebook and Twitter and let us know if you think electing Trump will be enough to fix what is broken in our capitol.  ",FAKE
"New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. ",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will lay out a vision of American foreign policy on Wednesday aimed at pushing his nascent 2016 presidential campaign out of the shadow of his father and brother, two former presidents who waged overseas wars.

""I love my father and my brother … But I am my own man –- and my views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences,"" Bush will say in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, according to excerpts provided to reporters late Tuesday night.

In his first major foreign policy address, the likely 2016 Republican front-runner will make the case for increased military spending so America can ""project power and enforce peaceful stability in far-off areas of the globe."" He will also criticize President Barack Obama's foreign policy, calling it ""inconsistent and indecisive.""

""Having a military that is equal to any threat ... makes it less likely that we will need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way,"" Bush plans to tell attendees, adding that he believes ""fundamentally, that weakness invites war… and strength encourages peace.""

The idea that a bigger U.S. military would act as a bigger deterrent to potential foes is one that reached its apex during the Cold War, but has been repeatedly challenged in the 21st century by the rise of global terrorism and sectarian conflicts.

The Obama administration is currently working to devise responses to a number of unconventional threats to global security. Chief among them are the rise of the so-called Islamic State in the Middle East, and the Russian-backed separatists waging guerrilla war in Ukraine.

From his speech, it appears that Bush would have America play a greater role than it already does in these conflicts. ""America does not have the luxury of withdrawing from the world –- our security, our prosperity and our values demand that we remain engaged and involved in often distant places,"" Bush will say. ""We have no reason to apologize for our leadership and our interest in serving the cause of global security, global peace and human freedom.""

This vision of America's role in the world directly contradicts the view held by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, another 2016 potential candidate, that the U.S. should avoid involvement in foreign conflicts unless they pose a direct threat to American lives.

But even as Bush stressed that he would devise his own way forward, plenty of his foreign policies invite comparisons, not contradictions, with those of his neoconservative brother, George W.Bush, and his realist father, George H.W. Bush. 

 One reason for this could be that Jeb Bush has consulted many of the same advisers his father and brother relied on to help them craft foreign policy while each was in office. The advisers represent a spectrum of conservative viewpoints, from the pragmatic James Baker, former secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, to the fiercely ideological Paul Wolfowitz, who served as deputy secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration.

Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush have held similar foreign policy ideas since at least 1997, when they were both signatories to a set of principles devised by the conservative Project for the New American Century, which were described by the group as a ""Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."" Other signatories include former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.",REAL
"I worked for Kasich on Capitol Hill. Yes, he’s very conservative. But there are a few surprises in there, and he’s in Bizarro World.

With his surprising second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, Ohio Gov. John Kasich has vaulted out of the pack of also-rans to become the latest hope of two distinct groups of people: Republican operatives fearing what Donald Trump’s berserker candidacy might do to their party, and ordinary citizens simply hoping to have a sane presidential candidate to vote for.

Until this past week, Kasich has not attracted much attention, mainly because the current dynamic of media coverage encourages histrionics and preening. But by appearing halfway normal, as he did at last Saturday’s debate in South Carolina, and not engaging in theatrics about carpetbombing, waterboarding, or ripping up treaties, he has become the default choice of those who would worry if Kasich’s opponents ever got their hands on the nuclear switch.

He has the advantage (and disadvantage) of a long record. I had a chance to see him in action as I worked for him for 17 years on budget and armed services issues—although I’ve had no connection to him in over a decade, or to his campaign, and am now a political independent.

In the 1980s, at the dawn of his congressional career, many members of his own party considered Kasich a conservative bomb thrower—he would offer his own budget, something back-benchers weren’t supposed to do in those days. He has not changed ideologically or temperamentally—his 2011 effort to roll back labor protection for state employees was too extreme and Ohio voters overwhelmingly defeated it—but while Kasich has remained a staunch conservative, much of his party has lurched so far right it has entered Bizarro World.

This fact accounts for Kasich’s reputation as a RINO (Republican in name only) and why it may be more difficult for him to win his own party’s nomination than the general election. His apostasy in having Ohio accept Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act is unforgivable to Republicans who consider health insurance for the poor to be an instrument of Satan. Likewise, in 1994 he voted for an assault weapons ban, pure heresy for the burgeoning Ted Nugent wing of his party. Kasich’s practice of occasionally dissing wealthy GOP donors who are accustomed to blind deference is considered a minus among the party’s bigwigs.

Those deeds might help, though, in a general election. So might his national security experience: 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee counts for far more involvement in that field than all his opponents combined. Refreshingly, as a congressman he avoided the kneejerk military interventionism that is now mandatory for GOP candidates. He opposed authorizing the Marines’ mission in Lebanon in 1983; the bombing of the Marine barracks in October of that year and President Reagan’s decision to quickly withdraw vindicated Kasich’s stand.

Similarly, he opposed President Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, which in his view amounted to a drive-by shooting with cruise missiles in a conflict in which no discernible U.S. interests were involved. He was also able to work across the aisle with Democrats to put a stake through the heart of the B-2 bomber, a Cold War anachronism, which at $2.2 billion a copy had become an unaffordable luxury.

As Budget Committee chairman, Kasich was also present at the creation of the first balanced budget since the Eisenhower era. While other factors, such as an avalanche of revenues from the dot.com bubble, set the stage for the achievement, he had a formidable job just to keep his own colleagues on task. The defense hawks were always itching to bust the budget caps with more Pentagon spending. And then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to suffer from ADD, occasionally threatened to derail the difficult march to a balanced budget with novel and unvetted policy visions.

The general election downside? Just as there are legitimate questions about Hillary Clinton’s receiving $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches, Kasich as a nominee would surely face scrutiny over his eight years as a managing director at Lehman Brothers. The investment bank’s collapse in September 2008, the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, nearly pitched the global economy into the abyss. Lawsuits to settle the dismantling of Lehman are still reverberating through the financial world. Ohio voters gave him a pass, but national inspection of his record would be more thorough—certainly if Clinton’s campaign had anything to do with it.

Stories occasionally surface about Kasich’s anger management problem. As a former employee, I can corroborate those allegations, as well as his tendency to preachy self-righteousness that is a constant temptation of professional politicians. These are, perhaps, pardonable sins both in view of the tasteless vaudeville act being played out by several of his GOP competitors, and his own positive accomplishments.",REAL
"On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.

The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer.

The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”

Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Chomsky recalls being taken aback that “anyone could support the idea—offered by a national political leader, no less—that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”

Some eyebrows were also raised when then-Senator Clinton appeared to make a questionable moral equivalency.

Regarding capturing combatants in war—the June capture of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit by Hamas militants who came across the Gaza border via an underground tunnel was very much front of mind—Clinton can be heard on the tape saying, “And then, when, you know, Hamas, you know, sent the terrorists, you know, through the tunnel into Israel that killed and captured, you know, kidnapped the young Israeli soldier, you know, there’s a sense of like, one-upsmanship, and in these cultures of, you know, well, if they captured a soldier, we’ve got to capture a soldier.”

Equating Hamas, which to this day remains on the State Department’s official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, with the armed forces of a close American ally was not what many expected to hear in the Jewish Press editorial offices, which were then at Third Avenue and Third Street in Brooklyn. (The paper’s office has since moved to the Boro Park section of Brooklyn.) The use of the phrase “these cultures” is also a bit of a head-scratcher.

According to Chomsky, Clinton was “gracious, personable and pleasant throughout” the interview, taking about an hour to speak to, in addition to himself, managing editor Jerry Greenwald, assistant to the publisher Naomi Klass Mauer, counsel Dennis Rapps and senior editor Jason Maoz.

Another part of the tape highlights something that was relatively uncontroversial at the time but has taken on new meaning in light of the current campaign—speaking to leaders with whom our country is not on the best terms. Clinton has presented a very tough front in discussing Russia, for example, accusing Trump of unseemly ardor for strongman Vladimir Putin and mocking his oft-stated prediction that as president he’d “get along” with Putin.

Chomsky is heard on the tape asking Clinton what now seems like a prescient question about Syria, given the disaster unfolding there and its looming threat to drag the U.S., Iran and Russia into confrontation.

“Do you think it’s worth talking to Syria—both from the U.S. point [of view] and Israel’s point [of view]?”

Clinton replied, “You know, I’m pretty much of the mind that I don’t see what it hurts to talk to people. As long as you’re not stupid and giving things away. I mean, we talked to the Soviet Union for 40 years. They invaded Hungary, they invaded Czechoslovakia, they persecuted the Jews, they invaded Afghanistan, they destabilized governments, they put missiles 90 miles from our shores, we never stopped talking to them,” an answer that reflects her mastery of the facts but also reflects a willingness to talk to Russia that sounds more like Trump 2016 than Clinton 2016.

Shortly after, she said, “But if you say, ‘they’re evil, we’re good, [and] we’re never dealing with them,’ I think you give up a lot of the tools that you need to have in order to defeat them…So I would like to talk to you [the enemy] because I want to know more about you. Because if I want to defeat you, I’ve got to know something more about you. I need different tools to use in my campaign against you. That’s my take on it.”

A final bit of interest to the current campaign involves an articulation of phrases that Trump has accused Clinton of being reluctant to use. Discussing the need for a response to terrorism, Clinton said, “I think you can make the case that whether you call it ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism,’ whatever the label is we’re going to give to this phenomenon, it’s a threat. It’s a global threat. To Europe, to Israel, to the United States…Therefore we need a global response. It’s a global threat and it needs a global response. That can be the, sort of, statement of principle…So I think sometimes having the global vision is a help as long as you realize that underneath that global vision there’s a lot of variety and differentiation that has to go on.”

It’s not clear what she means by a global vision with variety and differentiation, but what’s quite clear is that the then-senator, just five years after her state was the epicenter of the September 11 attacks, was comfortable deploying the phrase “Islamic terrorism” and the even more strident “Islamo-fascism,” at least when meeting with the editorial board of a Jewish newspaper.

In an interview before the Observer heard the tape, Chomsky told the Observer that Clinton made some “odd and controversial comments” on the tape. The irony of a decade-old recording emerging to feature a candidate making comments that are suddenly relevant to voters today was not lost on Chomsky, who wrote the original story at the time. Oddly enough, that story, headlined “Hillary Clinton on Israel, Iraq and Terror,” is no longer available on jewishpress.com and even a short summary published on the Free Republic site offers a broken link that can no longer surface the story.

“I went to my bosses at the time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody—even a direct quote from anyone—in a position of influence because they might need them down the road. My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it was and I held onto it all these years.”

Disclosure: Donald Trump is the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, publisher of Observer Media.",REAL
"Belgian authorities were searching for clues early Friday after police killed two in raids aimed at jihadists returning from Syria who were planning to launch a ""Belgian Charlie Hebdo"" attack, officials said.

Police were searching in Verviers, where the raid took place, and the greater Brussels area as part of a weeklong investigation that started well before the terrorism spree last week that led to 17 deaths in the Paris area. The Belgian operations had no apparent link to the terrorist acts committed in France.

And, unlike the Paris terrorists, who attacked the office of a satirical newspaper and a kosher grocery store, the suspects in Belgium were reportedly aiming at hard targets: police installations.

""They were on the verge of committing important terror attacks,"" federal magistrate Eric Van der Sypt said at a news conference in Brussels.

Across Europe, anxiety has grown as the manhunt continues for potential accomplices of the three Paris terrorists, all of whom were shot dead by French police. Authorities in Belgium signaled they were ready for more trouble by raising the national terror alert level from 2 to 3, the second-highest level.

Prime Minister Charles Michel said the increase in the threat level was ""a choice for prudence.""

""There is no concrete or specific knowledge of new elements of threat,"" he said.

The suspects in Verviers opened fire on police when they closed in on them near the city's train station, the magistrate told reporters. There was an intense firefight for several minutes. Video posted online showed a dark view of a building amid blasts, gunshots and sirens, and a fire with smoke billowing up. Two terror suspects were killed in the shootout, and another was arrested.

No police were wounded or killed in the clash, which occurred at the height of rush hour in a crowded neighborhood of this former industrial town of 56,000 about 80 miles southeast of the capital, Brussels.

Belgian news site L'Avenir, as well as Le Soir and France24, reported late Thursday that the government prosecutor's office said a dozen operations were launched against suspects across Belgium, in Verviers, Brussels and Hal-Vilvoorde. Some of those targeted are known to have returned recently from Syria.

The Belgian news site reported that, based on phone intercepts in the homes and cars of the three individuals involved in a shootout in Verviers, authorities believed the three were in the process of carrying out imminent attacks inside Belgium.

The French daily Le Soir is reporting that the investigations were launched against the Verviers suspects at least two weeks ago after they returned from Syria where they were thought to be involved in the fighting there.

The raids earlier Thursday included one on an apartment above a bakery in the eastern city of Verviers, authorities said. Authorities said the terror cell had ties to ISIS and was planning a major attack.

Earlier Thursday, Belgian authorities said they were looking into possible links between a man they arrested in the southern city of Charleroi for illegal trade in weapons and Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people in a Paris kosher market last week.

The man arrested in Belgium ""claims that he wanted to buy a car from the wife of Coulibaly,"" Van der Sypt said. ""At this moment this is the only link between what happened in Paris.""

Van der Sypt said that ""of course, naturally"" we are continuing the investigation.

At first, the man came to police himself claiming there had been contact with Coulibaly's common-law wife regarding the car, but he was arrested following a search of his premises when indications of illegal weapons trading were found.

A Belgian connection figured in a 2010 French criminal investigation into a foiled terrorist plot in which Coulibaly was one of the convicted co-conspirators. The plotters included a Brussels-area contact who was supposed to furnish both weapons and ammunition, according to French judicial documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Several other countries are also involved in the hunt for possible accomplices to Coulibaly and the other gunmen in the French attacks, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi.

In Spain, authorities said Coulibaly drove his common-law wife from France to Madrid on Dec. 31 and was with her until she took a Jan. 2 flight to Istanbul.

Spain's National Court said in a statement it was investigating what Coulibaly did in the country's capital with his wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, and a third person who wasn't identified but is suspected of helping Boumeddiene get from Turkey to Syria.

France is on edge since last week's attacks, which began at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The paper, repeatedly threatened for its caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, buried several of its slain staff members Thursday even as it reprinted another weekly issue with Muhammad on its cover.

Also, defense officials said France was under an unprecedented cyber assault with 19,000 cyberattacks launched after the country's bloodiest terrorist attacks in decades, frustrating authorities as they try to thwart repeat violence.

Around 120,000 security forces are deployed to prevent future attacks.

Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, some carried out by well-known Islamic hacker groups.

The attacks, mostly relatively minor denial-of-service attacks, hit sites as varied as military regiments to pizza shops but none appeared to have caused serious damage, he said. Military authorities launched round-the-clock surveillance to protect the government sites still coming under attack.

The Kouachi brothers claimed allegiance to Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Coulibaly to the Islamic State group.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Next Swipe left/right 8 classic football banners of our time Proof that sometimes the most entertaining part of a football match is the banners made by fans – here are 8 from over the years that have brightened up the beautiful game.
1. Aston Villa v Fulham, 2006",FAKE
"This time it's true no pantsTweetwave More Of Anthony Weiner's Greatest Hits Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests Display posts from previous: Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand 
Rubiks & Rubik’s Cube ® used by special individual permission of Seven Town Ltd. Write down this number and report to your Kommissar at the nearest railroad station. Don't forget warm clothes and a shovel! Channel list 
Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually 
Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida 
Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote 
The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush 
Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food 
Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI 
Obama ​​captures rare Pokémon ​​while visiting Hiroshima 
Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say ""It's creepy"" 
Barack Obama: ""If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"" 
White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party 
President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism' 
Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman' 
Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber 
Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend 
Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line 
As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards 
John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom 
Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right' 
News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: ""My work here is done"" 
Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign 
Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009 
National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman 
National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement 
Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response 
Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican 
Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check 
Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing 
Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first 
Susan Sarandon: ""I don't vote with my vagina."" Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer 
Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote 
New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to ""Live FOR Free or Die"" 
Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president 
Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two 
Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence 
Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men 
In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas 
TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons 
Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats' 
Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with ""This is for Paris"" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with ""Return to sender"" 
University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities 
Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island 
Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a ""safe space,"" changing Missouri motto to ""The don't show me state"" 
Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy 
State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery 
NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget 
College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action 
ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios 
Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic 
'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break 
ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood 
Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans 
Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people 
Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's ""unfettered capitalism,"" demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need 
John Kerry accepts Iran's ""Golden Taquiyya"" award, requests jalapenos on the side 
Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone 
John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons 
Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend 
Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles 
State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider 
Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons 
Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations 
Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals 
US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?' 
NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy 
China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: ""The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"" 
Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be' 
Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1% 
America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith 
Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine 
Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET 
Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths 
Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do' 
Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State 
President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise 
Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market 
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males 
NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record 
People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services 
Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba 
White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet' 
CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate 
Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson' 
Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city' 
Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers' 
Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first 
The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office 
White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders 
Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time 
Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy 
Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents 
Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences 
Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity 
Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow 
African countries to ban all flights from the United States because ""Obama is incompetent, it scares us"" 
Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it 
Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses' 
BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama 
Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free 
Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness 
President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser 
Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members 
White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos 
Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency 
Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole 
Harry Reid: ""Sometimes I say the wong thing"" 
Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids 
Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution 
Obama draws ""blue line"" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon 
""Hard Choices,"" a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original 
Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts 
Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks 
100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, ""the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"" 
Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news 
""Anarchy Now!"" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence 
Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours 
Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues 
""Free Speech Zones"" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes 
Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed 
Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account 
Joe Biden to Russia: ""We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"" 
In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea 
Al Sharpton: ""Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"" 
Mardi Gras in North Korea: "" Throw me some food! "" 
Obama's foreign policy works: ""War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"" 
US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: ""We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"" 
Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help 
The 1980s: ""Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."" 
In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook 
MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine 
Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants 
Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America 
North Korean voters unanimous: ""We are the 100%"" 
Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout 
Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss 
Feminist author slams gay marriage: ""a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"" 
Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district 
Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend 
Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle 
North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party 
White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare 
Kim Jong Un executes own "" crazy uncle "" to keep him from ruining another family Christmas 
OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea 
President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy 
Obama to Iran: ""If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"" 
Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC 
Obama: ""I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"" 
Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week 
Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message 
NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: ""Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"" 
Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough 
The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: ""I didn't build that"" 
Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare 
Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation 
Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans 
Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy 
GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords 
Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare 
Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria 
Sharpton: ""British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"" 
DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women 
Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees 
Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left 
Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel' 
FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp 
Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies 
GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election' 
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!' 
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism 
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota 
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith 
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page 
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment 
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria 
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent' 
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins 
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date 
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history 
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot 
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence' 
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program 
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration? 
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy 
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester 
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras 
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse 
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school 
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition 
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State 
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good' 
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners' 
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested 
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead 
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending 
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances 
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons 
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago 
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections 
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country 
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps' 
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out 
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen 
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class 
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead 
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations 
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward 
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward 
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects 
World ends; S&P soars 
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood 
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes 
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway 
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013 
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama 
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list 
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves 
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium 
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future 
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs 
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet 
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt' 
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties 
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years 
Obama attends church service, worships self 
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending 
Historical revisionists: ""Hey, you never know"" 
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh 
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: ""don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"" 
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness 
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears 
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke 
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights 
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse' 
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: ""Too few words"" 
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't 
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost 
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity ""Religion of Peace,"" praises ""moderate Christians,"" promises to send one into space 
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck 
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus 
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed 
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book ""The Road to Smurfdom"" 
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere 
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: ""When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"" 
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college 
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill! 
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!' 
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration' 
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome 
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies 
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, ""only 1% allowed to reach Israel"" 
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans 
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law 
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond 
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics 
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof 
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels 
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party 
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend 
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above 
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel ""50 Shades of Hay"" 
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name 
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich 
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag 
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its ""President for Life"" 
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory 
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off 
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named ""Fat And Furious"" 
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed 
White House: ""Let them eat statistics"" 
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama",FAKE
"Tweet Home » Headlines » Finance News » Trump’s Gettysburg Address against the New World Order 
The Trump movement is an existential threat to the established order that consistently adopts the agenda and practices from the demonic cabal of the NWO globalists. 

Submitted by James Hall : 
If not now, WHEN? Only the most dedicated Totalitarian Collectivist would want to keep the NWO in power. Those who are so dim-witted to believe that the governance elites are legitimate rulers, exercising moral authority are so ignorant and illiterate that they deserve the fate of sheep taken to the slaughter. The Sheeple designation is apt for a society mired in a distorted reality of serfdom. 
The New World Order moved from a century’s old scheme to enslave humanity into a consolidated “ international community ”, when the central banksters organized the Bank for International Settlements, with the adoption of the Bretton Woods system of monetary management, the reorganization of nation states with the end of World War II, the creation of the globalist United Nations and the establishment of the centralized bureaucracy of the European Union. 
The Trump movement is an existential threat to the established order that consistently adopts the agenda and practices from the demonic cabal of the NWO globalists. 
It is because of this opposition to the transnational ruling despots that the vicious, deceitful and unending assault on Trump and his followers has been unleashed, since real meaningful change cannot be allowed that would reverse the systematic destruction of Western Civilization. 
READ the Entire pledge of action that was presented as the 21 st century Gettysburg Address or watch the video . 
DONALD J. TRUMP CONTRACT WITH THE AMERICAN VOTER 
What follows is my 100-day action plan to Make America Great Again. It is a contract between myself and the American voter – and begins with restoring honesty, accountability and change to Washington. Therefore, on the first day of my term of office, my administration will immediately pursue the following six measures to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, DC: FIRST, propose a Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress; SECOND, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health); THIRD, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated; FOURTH, a 5 year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service; FIFTH, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government; SIXTH, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections. 
On the same day, I will begin taking the following 7 actions to protect American workers: 
 FIRST, I will announce my intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205 
 SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership 
 THIRD, I will direct my Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator 
 FOURTH, I will direct the Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers and direct them to use every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately 
 FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal. 
 SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward 
 SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure 
Additionally, on the first day, I will take the following five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law: 
 FIRST, cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama 
 SECOND, begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia from one of the 20 judges on my list, who will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States 
 THIRD, cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities 
 FOURTH, begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back 
 FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting. 
Next, I will work with Congress to introduce the following broader legislative measures and fight for their passage within the first 100 days of my Administration: Middle Class Tax Relief And Simplification Act. An economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year and create at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, in combination with trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy. The largest tax reductions are for the middle class. A middle-class family with 2 children will get a 35% tax cut. The current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3, and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified. The business rate will be lowered from 35 to 15 percent, and the trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10 percent rate. End The Offshoring Act Establishes tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free. American Energy & Infrastructure Act. Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. It is revenue neutral. School Choice And Education Opportunity Act. Redirects education dollars to gives parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. Ends common core, brings education supervision to local communities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable. Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act. Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and lets states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications. Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act. Allows Americans to deduct childcare and elder care from their taxes, incentivizes employers to provide on-side childcare services, and creates tax-free Dependent Care Savings Accounts for both young and elderly dependents, with matching contributions for low-income families. End Illegal Immigration Act Fully-funds the construction of a wall on our southern border with the full understanding that the country Mexico will be reimbursing the United States for the full cost of such wall; establishes a 2-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally re-entering the U.S. after a previous deportation, and a 5-year mandatory minimum for illegally re-entering for those with felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions or two or more prior deportations; also reforms visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying and to ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars. Restoring National Security Act. Rebuilds our military by eliminating the defense sequester and expanding military investment; provides Veterans with the ability to receive public VA treatment or attend the private doctor of their choice; protects our vital infrastructure from cyber-attack; establishes new screening procedures for immigration to ensure those who are admitted to our country support our people and our values Clean up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics. On November 8th, Americans will be voting for this 100-day plan to restore prosperity to our economy, security to our communities, and honesty to our government. 
This is my pledge to you. And if we follow these steps, we will once more have a government of, by and for the people. 
Publishing the entire list of all these positive measures, which challenge the elitist consortium of a criminal syndicate that impose a neo-feudal enslavement of humanity, documents the essence of the Trump vow of revolutionary nonviolent combat against the forces of satanic evil. 
The ironic symbolism of presenting this restoration of national greatness at the site of the historic betrayal of the original American Revolution, one must not forget that Abraham Lincoln embarked upon the initial destruction of the legitimate States’ Right essence that created the country. 
This apocalyptic step, set into motion the underpinnings of a global empire of which, America was never intended to pursue. Let’s hope that Donald Trump can rectify some of the damage done to the individual rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Gettysburg was not a victory for a union of free men, but was the launching of a lustful hegemony for an Imperium international order. 
Only this contract with American citizens can offer any hope of reestablishing a legitimate administration of a limited national government.",FAKE
Five candidates will be on stage Tuesday at the first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 race in Las Vegas. Here’s what each needs to do to come away in a better position at the end of the evening:,REAL
"As the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was unfolding, a high-ranking Pentagon official urgently messaged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top deputies to offer military help, according to an email obtained by Judicial Watch.

The revelation appears to contradict testimony Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave lawmakers in 2013, when he said there was no time to get forces to the scene in Libya, where four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

“I just tried you on the phone but you were all in with S [apparent reference to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton],” reads the email, from Panetta’s chief of staff Jeremy Bash. “After consulting with General Dempsey, General Ham and the Joint Staff, we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.”

The email was sent out at 7:19 p.m. ET on Sept. 11, 2012, in the early stages of the eight-hour siege that also claimed the lives of Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, private CIA contractors who raced to the aid of embattled State Department workers.

Although the email came after the first wave of the attack at the consulate, it occurred before a mortar strike on the CIA annex killed Woods and Doherty.

“This leaves no doubt military assets were offered and ready to go, and awaiting State Department signoff, which did not come,” Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog said in a statement.

Parts of the email from Bash were redacted before release, including details on what military forces were available.

In defending the Obama administration’s lack of a military response to the attack, Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee nearly two years ago that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the consulate at 3:40 p.m. ET. The second attack on the CIA annex a little over a mile away began three hours later. Bash’s email was sent approximately 40 minutes after that attack began.

Bash’s email, which bore the subject line “Libya,” was sent to Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff Jacob Sullivan, Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Thomas Nides.

The attack came in three waves at two locations. It began when a handful of attackers scaled the wall of the diplomatic post at dusk and opened a gate, allowing dozens of armed men inside who then set the building on fire. Stevens and Smith died after breathing in smoke while hiding in a safe room, and later died.

Hours later, a nearby CIA annex was attacked twice. Woods and Doherty died there while defending the annex from the rooftop. A team of six security officials summoned from Tripoli and a Libyan military unit helped evacuate the remaining U.S. personnel who were taken to an airport and flown out of Benghazi.

The Obama administration later falsely claimed that the attack was triggered by an Internet video that insulted Islam.

Lawmakers investigating the events surrounding Benghazi already had acquired the e-mail, along with tens of thousands of others related to the probe, according to Matt Wolking, spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

“The Select Committee has obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of documents in the course of its thorough, fact-centered investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, and this information will be detailed in the final report the Committee hopes to release within the next few months,"" Wolking told FoxNews.com. ""While the Committee does not rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers, I can confirm that we obtained the unredacted version of this email last year, in addition to Jake Sullivan’s response.""",REAL
"The Bentley administration, the Alabama legislature and the governor’s Alabama Health Insurance Exchange Study Commission weighed many of the same issues their counterparts in other states did. How would they finance the exchange's operations? Should a state agency or some other entity manage a new marketplace? How heavily should insurance companies be regulated? Would it better for Alabama to exert at least a little control over Obamacare, or to just let the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services do the work?

If that was the case four years ago, no one told Alabama state Sen. Jim McClendon (R), a native English speaker who co-chaired Bentley’s commission while a member of the state House of Representatives, which unanimously passed a bill in April 2012 to establish an Alabama health insurance exchange.

 

 “No. No. No. That was never, never brought up,” McClendon said in an interview with The Huffington Post last month. “I was unaware of that stipulation in the Affordable Care Act, and I would almost have to guess that anybody involved in this process was not aware of it. I was a little surprised when it came up eventually. Nope. I was the chairman of the commission and I was totally unaware of that.”

“Never. It was never discussed,” said Carey, who also worked with Delaware and Tennessee on their exchanges at the time, when he was a subcontractor working for LMI, a Tysons, Virginia-based government contractor. “It was never a consideration that they weren’t going to get subsidies if they deferred to the feds. I mean, I was there at every commission meeting and I was presenting, ‘Here are your options, here’s what I think it might cost you,’ and we did those type of calculations.""

I don’t remember that coming up. I really don’t. I really don’t ever remember that ever being brought up as an issue... I don’t ever remember anybody saying, ‘Well, if we do this and let the feds do it, this is the trade-off down the road'... I’m almost positive somebody would’ve brought it up... During the time, we didn’t know that. After the commission, that’s when all that stuff started coming out. We were like, ‘Oh, wait a minute.’ That could’ve really changed, obviously, the advice to the governor, because I don’t think he would’ve even said we’re not going to do it if it was clear at that point in time, all the way back four, five years ago, that if you don’t do this, here’s the side effect. Because that’s a huge trade-off.

Wren was the author of the health insurance exchange bill the state House passed in April 2012, and he championed a state-run marketplace until Bentley’s final decision in December of that year to forgo a state exchange. Wren told HuffPost he still believes Alabama should have its own exchange.

 

 Wren claimed in an interview that he was aware, early on, of a provision in the law that would restrict subsidies to those who purchased coverage on state exchanges. But in a subsequent email, his account shifted. Wren first said that issue came to his attention in 2009, before Obamacare had even passed. In a subsequent email, he wrote that he had misspoken during the interview, and said he'd actually learned of this phrase in 2011.

 

 “I believed at the time that for many reasons, including the possible favorable premium treatment to individuals purchasing from a state exchange, that Alabama should consider this over a federal,” he wrote.



 Greg Wren, then a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, in 2011.

 

 There is little evidence to back Wren's claim that he was aware of the now-controversial provision in Obamacare during his state’s debate over whether to establish an exchange. The former legislator could not offer an explanation for why his version of events differs from those of McClendon and the others interviewed for this article, or why it isn’t reflected in official documents or media accounts from the time.

 

 “At this point I can only say is [sic] I remembered back as best I could,” he wrote in an email.

Wren also acknowledged that he has no documentation from 2010 through 2012 to support his assertions that he understood the phrase “established by the state” could mean that subsidies wouldn’t be available in federal exchanges. The Alabama legislature does not transcribe floor or committee proceedings, so no official record exists of the debate on Wren’s bill.

 

 Wren was often quoted in the local and national press speaking about the advantages of state-run health insurance exchanges in 2011 and 2012, but HuffPost couldn’t find any articles that cited him saying the subsidies wouldn’t be available in federal exchanges.",REAL
"Trump Proudly Declares: Most Of The People I’ve Insulted Deserved It By Andrew Bradford on October 27, 2016 Subscribe 
Arrogance is defined as “an insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people.” In other words, Donald Trump perfectly exemplifies arrogance, and he just proved that fact yet again. 
Appearing on Good Morning America Thursday morning, the GOP nominee readily defended the insulting posts he’s made on Twitter: “It’s ok, most of them deserved it.” 
Trump then declared : “I believe in fighting back when people are against me, when they tell lies, you know, I have the power of this instrument and frankly sometimes I’ll use that. And I agree sometimes it will revert back or sometimes maybe it doesn’t come out — you have to be careful with it.” 
When exactly has Trump been careful with what he posts on social media? Try never. 
Melania Trump, who was also interviewed, said that if she becomes First Lady, one of her primary areas of focus would be social media: “What’s going on is very hurtful to children, to some adults as well.” 
Does that mean she’ll take away Donald’s cell phone and duct tape his hands to his sides so he can’t tweet out hateful and hurtful shit the way he normally does? Yeah, good luck with that, Melania! 
Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a two-page spread listing all of the insults and unkind postings Trump has made on Twitter since he announced he would be running for President in 2015. If you want to see a completely unhinged, uninformed, and unfiltered mind at work, just take a look at the Times article and recall what Hillary Clinton said regarding the Donald: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” 
Donald Trump cannot be trusted with a smart phone, let alone the reins of power for the most important nation in the world. 
Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab About Andrew Bradford 
Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
"Dems sue GOP over Trump's 'rigged' complaints Claim argument designed to suppress vote in minority communities Published: 33 mins ago 
(CNN) The Democratic National Committee is suing the Republican National Committee for aiding GOP nominee Donald Trump as he argues that the presidential election is “rigged,” claiming that Trump’s argument is designed to suppress the vote in minority communities. 
The suit, filed Wednesday in US District Court in New Jersey, argues that the RNC has not sufficiently rebuked Trump for the line of attack, which he has used as a rallying cry and is assumed to be a way to explain away a potential loss on Election Day. 
What (more) we’ve learned about Clinton’s circle, Neera Tanden from email hack",FAKE
"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016 Several Iraqi Soldiers killed by US Airstrike Near Mosul With a blocking force in place preventing ISIS from moving into Syria, reported by Iranian press, the US is doing everything possible to slow down the Iraqi Army and prevent successful operations. There have long been suspicions that the Kurds, who let thousands of ISIS oil trucks through their region each week, have been working with ISIS all along. It was the Kurds, not the real Kurds, but Barzani’s Saudi run dictatorship in Erbil, that invited Turkey into Iraq. Deputy Chief of the Nineveh Provincial Council Noureddin Qablan announced that the US-led coalition warplanes have launched airstrikes on army base in Nineveh province, killing several soldiers. “The US fighter jets hit one of the military bases of Iraqi Army’s 16th Division in a region North of Mosul, and the attack left at least four Iraqi soldiers dead,” Qablan said. According to FNA, He said that the US army has confirmed the attack, calling it a “mistake”. Qablan said that it is not the first time the US warplanes hit the Iraqi army and volunteer forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) military positions, adding, “The US-led coalition has each time said that air raids were not deliberate.” It is reported that another peshmerga convoy accidentally hit by an USA-led coalition airstrike near Mosul today. That’s was 3 “Mistakan Raid” in 24 hours. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016, With Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
The Manhattan billionaire made the announcement on Twitter and said he will hold a formal press conference to discuss it further on Dec. 15.,REAL
"Clinton Camp Desperate, Russia Trains for WWIII US media not letting the public know how tense Russia situation really is Infowars Nightly News   
Russia is training millions domestically for WWIII, the Clinton campaign has gone to drastic measures to appear as if they are still alive, the spy state is taking another step forward and the possible answer to National Anthem protests is revealed.   Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
"Panama City, Florida (CNN) Donald Trump is tearing the Grand Old Party apart.

The tension that has simmered in the Republican Party for years -- shutting down the government and nearly bringing the nation to default -- escalated into an outright civil war Tuesday. The conflict not only threatens the party's ability to make any realistic attempt at reclaiming the White House next month, but also previews the conflicts and divides that could consume the GOP for years to come if Trump loses.

On one side is Trump, who spent much of Tuesday lashing out on social media at his GOP foes, such as Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, and lamenting the lack of party unity. He's backed by conservative lawmakers including Iowa Rep. Steve King and the throngs of loyal supporters who attend his rallies, including the one here in Panama City, Florida, Tuesday, where he renewed his call for a government investigation into his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Some are even raising the potential of denying Ryan the speakership after the election.

On the other side is Ryan, who is devoting the full resources of his stature to maintaining a congressional majority. That dominance of Capitol Hill is suddenly threatened -- and not just in the Senate, where there are many competitive races, but also in the House, where the GOP majority was considered untouchable until recently.

The infighting -- sparked by the release Friday of a 2005 video depicting Trump describing women in vulgar and sexually aggressive terms -- isn't likely to ease in the 27 days before Election Day. Trump made clear Tuesday that if he loses in November, he won't go down quietly -- or alone.

He began the day with a series of shots -- taken over Twitter -- at Ryan, saying it's hard to do well when the speaker isn't supportive. He followed up about an hour later calling Ryan a ""weak and ineffective leader.""

And nearly two hours after that, Trump posed his most explosive tweet of the day.

'Shackles have been taken off me'

Trump continued his attacks on Ryan Wednesday during a rally in central Florida, where he said he's at a disadvantage when ""you have leadership not putting their weight behind the people.""

He also complained about getting no credit from party leaders for his Sunday night debate performance.

""Wouldn't you think Paul Ryan would call and say good job?"" he said. ""It got just about the largest audience for a second night debate in the history of the country. You'd think they'd say great going, Don, let's beat this crook. No, he doesn't.""

Trump's turn on his own party may seem counterproductive -- it hardly allows him to improve his chances of catching Clinton. But it does allow him the satisfaction of vengeance against party leaders he believes have never treated him fairly since his stunning outsider campaign captured the nomination earlier this year.

And by blaming Republican leaders for their failure to wholeheartedly endorse his campaign, Trump also opens up the possibility of a face-saving excuse if he crashes to defeat in November.

But the cost to the Republican Party of Trump's burn-it-down-around-him strategy is already high, could become more extreme and potentially leave the GOP badly damaged long after he has left the political scene.

To begin with, the estrangement between Trump and the party leaders is blowing open a gaping split between the party's grass roots and its establishment leaders that Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and others worked so hard to bridge over the summer.

It is a divide that will be hard to overcome if Trump loses the election. Forging unity could be impossible if hordes of Trump voters blame party leaders for the defeat of a man who electrified the grass roots supporters in a way no other Republican has managed in decades.

King, the Iowa Republican congressman, warned Tuesday that a purge of party elites might be necessary, saying ""the establishment wing of the party could simply be amputated out in this effort that's going on right now.""

""They've gone so far out on this limb,"" King said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.

The meltdown in the GOP is the culmination of forces that have been building for years. Intense antipathy towards congressional leaders over their failure to more forcefully oppose President Barack Obama gave rise to the Tea Party and sent waves of anti-establishment lawmakers to Washington in successive elections.

Trump's adoption of a factually-challenged style of campaigning would have been impossible without the power of conservative media that has been building for decades and is now fused with the GOP presidential ticket through the role of Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, who serves as the CEO of the Trump campaign.

Trump's turn against his own party could also reverberate in down-ballot races. Republicans have long known that their hold on the Senate was tenuous -- whoever ran at the top of their ticket -- but Trump's slumping poll numbers now threaten to drag down vulnerable incumbents too.

At the very least, a Trump implosion that cuts deeply into Ryan's majority could complicate the Speaker's already tough task of corralling his volatile majority coalition. If an anti-Trump landslide sweeps away House GOP members in more moderate districts, it could hand more relative power to the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus and give him the same kinds of fits that it imposed on John Boehner, his predecessor.

The dilemma is especially difficult for Republican senators running for re-election. Some are rejecting Trump because of revulsion at his remarks among more moderate voters. But at the same time, they risk alienating Trump supporters in states's where the former reality star racked up high margins in the primary race.

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte fits into this category and her desperate effort to walk the fine line between condemning and embracing Trump during this election has become a symbol of the wider GOP conundrum. Ayotte finally said she could not vote for Trump after the video emerged on Friday.

But another star of the GOP, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, said Tuesday he's not yet ready to back away from Trump. Rubio looks certain to need Trump voters to maintain his narrow lead in his re-election race. But at the same time, if more explosive video emerges about Trump, Rubio, who has presidential ambitions in his future, risks being tarnished by association with the Republican nominee.

Another lawmaker in a tough re-election race who is hedging his bets is North Carolina GOP Sen. Richard Burr, who said that while Trump's comments were ""indefensible,"" he still plans to support him.

For her part, the turmoil consuming the GOP would seem to provide a substantial boost to Clinton's White House bid. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday found the Democratic nominee enjoying a 9-point lead among likely voters in a four-way race.

But her aides caution against excessive optimism. There's concern inside the campaign that an increasingly negative race -- which could only become darker in the days ahead -- could turn off voters and make them less likely to show up at the polls. In that instance, a lower turnout could create an advantage for Trump.

""This seems to be their strategy, disgust everyone with our democratic dialogue so that they won't come out to the polls,"" John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman, told reporters Tuesday. ""I think it is very unbecoming a presidential candidate.""

Clinton said as much herself during an interview with a Florida radio station Tuesday.

""Despite all of the terrible things (Trump) has said and done, he is still trying to win this election,"" she said. ""And we cannot be complacent, we cannot rest.""",REAL
"Photos Credits: Social Media The so called “ opposition health authorities ” said in a statement posted online in Arabic: 
“Primary investigations point to a limited security breach by vandals likely connected to the regime, which has been attempting to target the medical sector in Free Syria in order to spread chaos.” The statement also added: “The Syrian interim government’s health ministry has instructed a halt to the second round of the measles vaccination campaign, which began Monday September 15th … following several fatalities and injuries among children in vaccination centers in the Idlib countryside.” Adnan Hazouri, the health minister in the Syrian opposition who held a conference (in the Arabic Language) said that he will resign if an investigation upheld allegations of negligence, as blood samples have been sent to Turkey for analysis. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights , which is based in London, also confirmed: 
“At least five children have died and 50 others are suffering from poisoning or allergic reactions after measles vaccinations in Jirjanaz, in the Idlib province.” The following video shows affected children in Saraqeb hospital in Idlib, Syria: Monther Khalil, the head of the Idlib medical department said this during an interview with Radio Hawa Smart -an opposition related station established on Gaziantep, Turkey: 
“The department assures all parents who have had their children vaccinated that the vaccine is completely fine and there is no risk to children who have already been injected. 
We have already vaccinated 60,000 children against measles and there has been no previous problem. The same crews also previously carried out a polio campaign, where they vaccinated 252,000 children across seven rounds, and there were no abnormal complications.” More than 190,000 Syrians have been killed during the foreign-backed war since 2011, which has also created more than 3 million refugees outside Syria. Sources:",FAKE
"“I want our next president – whoever he or she might be – to be somebody who is interested in women in Afghanistan and who will continue US policies… that we continue to do what we're committed to do as a country,” she said, as she appeared on stage alongside her twin daughters Jenna and Barbara.

“That's who I want - or the kind of people that will do that and will pay attention to our history, and know what's what's happened before and know specifically how we can continue to do the good things that we do around the world.”

•  Donald Trump endorsed by Rudy Giuliani in boost ahead of New York primary

Many in the packed auditorium took her words as a coded criticism of Mr Trump, whose foreign policy plans have been condemned as isolationist and weak on detail.

His closest rival Ted Cruz has also made clear that the US has no role in Afghanistan other than fighting terrorism.

In contrast, Mrs Clinton was among those who offered a cover endorsement for Mrs Bush's Afghan book. “For over a decade, Laura Bush has been an ally and advocate for the women of Afghanistan and, in particular, has worked to ensure that the voices of Afghan women are heard,” she wrote.

The two women share a special bond as former first ladies and are of a similar age: both know the struggles of working their way up in a male-dominated world.",REAL
"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
"By wmw_admin on September 16, 2008 
The ‘dots’ you are not supposed to connect… Affidavit of Richard Tomlinson By wmw_admin on February 14, 2008 
“I firmly believe that there exist documents held by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) that would yield important new evidence into the cause and circumstances leading to the death of the Princess of Wales.” They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part I By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Bill Ryan talks to a former City of London insider who participated in a meeting where the elite’s plans for depopulation were discussed. The meeting, which took place in 2005, also discussed a planned financial collapse Who Really Murdered Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman? By wmw_admin on February 28, 2015 
Revelations that a US soldier was the killer would have jeopardised public support for the “War on Terror”. Hence a frame-up was required. A Joe Vialls classic recovered. Back to the Future!!! Part 1 By wmw_admin on May 21, 2007 
Geological evidence points to an cataclysmic event that almost defies comprehension. The problem is that it may just happen again … and soon too. The Oklahoma City Bombing: 30 Unanswered Questions By wmw_admin on July 11, 2003 
Timothy McVeigh may have been tried and executed, but there are still too many unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City Bombing",FAKE
" Why Hillary Won't Unleash WWIII By Pepe Escobar October 31, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" RT "" - She is fully supported by virtually the whole US establishment; a bipartisan, neocon/neoliberalcon, regime change/”humanitarian” imperialist axis.
On the opposite side, for all his personal pathology problems and incoherent twitter-mouth ramblings, Donald Trump seemed to be on the money when he said that if elected, Hillary would use Syria to unleash WWIII.
To check out if that holds, let’s start with an essential backup.
The ‘Queen of War’, at the final US presidential debate in Las Vegas: "" A no-fly zone [in Syria] can save lives and hasten the end of the conflict. ""
The ‘Queen of War’, in one of her 2013 speeches to Goldman Sachs, published by WikiLeaks: a no-fly zone would "" kill a lot of Syrians .”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a no-fly zone in Syria “ would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. ""
No-fly zone would ‘require war with #Syria and #Russia ’ – top US general https://t.co/veSy8uETak pic.twitter.com/zXyCmWjdXj
— RT America (@RT_America) September 22, 2016 Predictably, the Clinton (cash) machine has been relentless promoting Hillary’s no-fly zone. Whenever cornered, the machine switches the narrative to Russian hacking of the DNC. Edward Snowden, who knows a thing or two about cyberwarfare, stresses there is no solid proof Russian intel hacked the Democratic/Clinton machine. And if they actually did it, the NSA would know. The fact the NSA is mum reveals this is no more than information war.
Pass the missile launchers, please Trump seems to have been more on the money when he insisted how Hillary will be outsmarted – as she already was in the past – when dealing with President Putin, who she has demonized as Hitler.
I have shown how Hillary will be prevented from launching WWIII because her no-fly zone is already implemented in Syria by Russia. And the Pentagon – reflecting Dunford’s comments - knows it, no matter how emphatically soon-to-be-unemployed Pentagon head Ash Carter threatens “ consequences .”
The Pentagon ranks Russia and China as the number one and two “existential threats” to US national security, in that order. And the US government reserves for itself the privilege of a nuclear “first-strike” – which Hillary supports (but not Trump); this is part of the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.
The relentless hysteria now crystallized as Cold War 2.0 has led scores of analysts to game the actual – terrifying - possibility of a US-Russia hot war. As much as the Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine may now lie in the dust – exactly because Washington refuses to back down from “first-strike” – only armchair Dr. Strangeloves get their kicks with the possibility of fighting a nuclear power. Dunford does not seem to be one of them.
What Hillary Clinton will certainly do is to double down on proxy wars, Vietnam/Afghanistan-style. So expect a President Clinton to authorize full weaponization of those Beltway-loved “moderate” Al-Qaeda-in-Syria rebels with plenty of shoulder-held missile launchers. This could easily get out of control – with lethal, yet not nuclear, consequences.
That’s exactly the point made by Mikhail Rostovsky in Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets; if Hillary ratchets up tensions, “ things could get out of hand .”
Also expect not so proxy ratcheting up of tension in the South China Sea; after all it was Hillary who claimed ‘mothership’ of the pivot to Asia; and it was Hillary who steered intra-South East Asian maritime disputes into the boiling cauldron of wider US-China competition.
And if that was not hard boiled enough, US frustration will be at an all-time high after Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s own pivot to China.
Say hello to my new Sarmat A case can be made that official Moscow is carefully getting ready to work with a Clinton – as in Obama III – presidency, with Hillary, a devil they know well when she was Secretary of State, to be dealt with as a pragmatist, unwilling and unable to plunge US-Russia relations into total incandescence.
A Clinton presidency for its part should know better than overestimate Russia’s financial “ weakness. ”
The national debt of Russia is only 17.7 percent of GDP; for the US it is a whopping 104.17 percent of GDP, or $19.2 trillion. Russia in 2015 had a trade surplus of $150 billion, while the US had a trade deficit of $531.5 billion. The current account surplus of Russia was 5.1 percent of GDP, or 65.8 billion, while the US ran a current account deficit of 484.1 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP.
Besides, Russia has all the natural resources it needs; unlike the US government, which believes it needs an empire of bases overseas and ten aircraft carrier task forces to secure the resources it lacks.
Moreover, as much as the Pentagon may continue to be infested by neocon cells, sound generals are also able to identify key Russian signals – such as the unveiling of the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear missile, which NATO calls Satan 2. The Sarmat delivers monster warheads of 40 megatons; boasts a top speed of seven kilometers per second; and is able to outfox any anti-missile shield system anywhere.
First images of new thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile to replace 'Satan' unveilled in Russia https://t.co/mmX2EHALQu
— RT (@RT_com) October 25, 2016
Hot war? Hillary Clinton may have pulled a Julius Caesar over Gaddafi. But she’s realist enough to not pull a (nuclear) Hitler over Moscow. Or is she?",FAKE
"Is It Time To Reconsider Lifetime Appointments To The Supreme Court?

The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the looming face-off between the White House and the Senate over his replacement have revived proposals that would limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Legal scholars from both political parties renewed a call Tuesday to reconsider how much time justices spend on the high court. Many of them cited, with disapproval, a bruising and protracted clash building between President Obama and the GOP-controlled Senate over when and how to fill Scalia's vacancy.

""The point of life tenure is to keep justices insulated from politics,"" said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr. ""That didn't quite pan out.""

For years now, lawyers have been floating proposals that future high-court justices spend no more than 18 years at a time on the Supreme Court bench. The plan would space out appointments, so presidents would make appointments every two years, supporters said. That would bring regular turnover and fresh thinking to the court — and align with the longer life spans of Americans since the nation's founding, they argue.

""It just sounds undemocratic,"" said Gabe Roth, executive director of an advocacy group called Fix the Court, about the lifetime court appointments. ""There's definitely concern about the justices being out of touch. There have been a number of cases with modern technology, whether it be smartphones or bulk data collection or different types of ways of getting TV over the airwaves or over the Internet.""

Thomas Merrill, a law professor at Columbia University and a former deputy U.S. solicitor general (1987-1990), said he's been ""a little bit skeptical"" of the idea of term limits for Supreme Court justices. But, Merrill said, his thinking has evolved.

""My current cautious endorsement of this is based on the perception that the whole issue of appointments to the Supreme Court has become incredibly contentious, partisan, political, almost to the point where the political system freezes up, as we're witnessing right now with the Scalia death,"" Merrill said. ""It would be a good thing not to have the type of Armageddon it looks like we're about to have.""

Term-limit supporters point to a 2015 poll by Reuters/Ipsos, after high-profile rulings on Obama's health care legislation and same-sex marriage, that suggested two-thirds of respondents would support a 10-year limit on tenure on the Supreme Court.

But actually changing the system could be remarkably difficult for a political system that's already near paralysis. Some lawyers said the change could be made by lawmakers, but others have concluded it would require amending the Constitution. To do that, the House and Senate would need to vote their support, and then three-quarters of the states would have to approve. Another path would be for two-thirds of the states to call for a Constitutional Convention.

""Not likely, but possible,"" Kerr of George Washington University said. ""We'll see how this year goes. It may become unbearable with the president and the Senate duking it out every day.""",REAL
"Hillary Clinton has earned enough delegates to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination, according to an Associated Press count released Monday night – an assessment swiftly challenged by primary rival Bernie Sanders and his campaign.

The AP released its updated tally, showing the former secretary of state winning enough delegates to become the first woman to top a major party’s presidential ticket, on the eve of the last major day of primary voting.

The AP said Clinton reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee with a weekend victory in Puerto Rico and late burst of support from superdelegates. Those are party officials and officeholders, many of them eager to wrap up the primary, free to support whichever candidate they want.

""We really need to bring a close to this primary process and get on to defeating Donald Trump,"" said Nancy Worley, a superdelegate who chairs Alabama's Democratic Party and provided one of the last endorsements to put Clinton over the top.

""It's time to stand behind our presumptive candidate,"" said Michael Brown, one of two superdelegates from the District of Columbia who came forward in the past week to back Clinton before the city's June 14 primary. ""We shouldn't be acting like we are undecided when the people of America have spoken.""



Clinton touted the news at a Long Beach, Calif., campaign event, saying the campaign is now on the “brink of a historic … unprecedented moment.” But even she stressed that six states are yet to vote on Tuesday and urged supporters to cast their ballots for her in those contests.

The six states to vote Tuesday include New Jersey, North Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, California, and South Dakota.

Campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement: “This is an important milestone, but there are six states that are voting Tuesday, with millions of people heading to the polls, and Hillary Clinton is working to earn every vote. We look forward to Tuesday night, when Hillary Clinton will clinch not only a win in the popular vote, but also the majority of pledged delegates.""

The Sanders campaign rejected the declaration that Clinton had clinched the party nod, citing its longstanding position that the superdelegates should not count until they actually vote at the convention – as they are free to switch sides before then.

""There is nothing to concede,"" Sanders told KTVU late Monday at a rally in San Francisco. ""Secretary Clinton will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to win the Democratic nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates. They vote on July 25th so right now our goal right at this moment [is to] do everything we can to win the primary tomorrow.""

Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs accused the media of “a rush to judgement"" and ""ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer.""

""Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump,"" Briggs said.

On Monday, Sanders' supporters expressed disappointment that the calls were made before California's primary and urged the senator to continue on despite the pronouncements. ""We're going to keep fighting until the last vote is counted,"" said Kristen Elliott, a Sanders' supporter from San Francisco who attended the rally.

Said another attendee, Patrick Bryant of San Francisco: ""It's what bookies do. They call fights before they're over.""

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed Clinton during an interview on “Good Morning America” before her home state’s primary.

""I'm a voter in California and I have voted for Hillary Clinton for president of the United States and proud to endorse her for that position,"" Pelosi said, though adding ""it's not over until it's over.""

Clinton has won 1,812 pledged delegates in primaries and caucuses. She also has the support of 571 superdelegates, according to an Associated Press count. The AP surveyed all 714 superdelegates repeatedly in the past seven months, and only 95 remain publicly uncommitted.

All the superdelegates counted in Clinton's tally have unequivocally told the AP they will back her at the convention and not change their vote. Since the start of the AP's survey in late 2015, no superdelegates have switched from supporting Clinton to backing Sanders.

Clinton’s presumptive victory Monday came nearly eight years to the day after she conceded her first White House campaign to Barack Obama. Back then, she famously noted her inability to ""shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.""

Campaigning this time as the loyal successor to Obama, Clinton fended off a surprisingly strong challenge from Vermont Sen. Sanders. He mobilized millions with a fervently liberal message and his insurgent candidacy revealed a deep level of national frustration with politics-as-usual, even among Democrats who have controlled the White House since 2009.

Clinton outpaced Sanders in winning new superdelegate endorsements even after his string of primary and caucus wins in May. Following the results in Puerto Rico, it is no longer possible for Sanders to reach the 2,383 needed to win the nomination based on the remaining available pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates, according to the AP.

Clinton leads Sanders by more than 3 million cast votes, by 291 pledged delegates and by 523 superdelegates. She also won 29 caucuses and primaries compared to his 21 victories.

Echoing the sentiments of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who overcame a decades-long rivalry with the Clinton family to endorse her last week, many superdelegates expressed a desire to close ranks around a nominee who could defeat Trump in November.

Beyond winning over millions of Sanders supporters who vow to remain loyal to the self-described democratic socialist, Clinton faces challenges as she turns toward November, including criticism of her decision to use a private email server run from her New York home while serving as secretary of state. Her deep unpopularity among Republicans has pushed many leery of Trump to nevertheless embrace his campaign.

""This to me is about saving the country and preventing a third progressive, liberal term, which is what a Clinton presidency would do,"" House Speaker Paul Ryan told the AP last week after he finally endorsed Trump, weeks after the New Yorker clinched the GOP nomination.

Yet Clinton showed no signs of limping into the general election as she approached the milestone, leaving Sanders behind and focusing on lacerating Trump. She said electing the billionaire businessman, who has spent months hitting her and her husband with bitingly personal attacks, would be a ""historic mistake.""

""He is not just unprepared. He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,"" Clinton said last week in a speech that was striking in its forcefulness, previewing a brutal five-month general election campaign to come.

Even without the nomination, Sanders can claim ideological victory. His liberal positions pushed the issue of income inequality into the spotlight and drove Clinton to the left on issues such as trade, Wall Street and campaign finance reform.

But she prevailed, in part, by claiming much of the coalition that boosted Obama. She won overwhelming support from women and minorities, catapulting her to decisive victories in diverse, delegate-rich states such as New York and Texas.

When Clinton launched her campaign last April, she did so largely unopposed, having scared off more formidable challengers by locking down much of the party's organizational and fundraising infrastructure. Vice President Joe Biden, seen as her most threatening rival, opted not to run in October.

Of the four opponents who did take her on, Sanders was the only one who emerged to provide a serious challenge. He caught fire among young voters and independents, his campaign gaining momentum from a narrow loss in Iowa in February and a commanding victory in New Hampshire. His ability to raise vast sums of money online gave him the resources to continue into the spring.

But Clinton vowed not to repeat the failings of her 2008 campaign and focused early on winning delegates, hiring help from Obama's old team before launching her campaign. They pushed superdelegates into making early commitments and held campaign appearances in areas where they could win the most pledged delegates.

Her victory in Nevada in late February diminished concerns from allies about her campaign operation. Decisive wins in Southern states on Super Tuesday and a sweep of March 15 contests gave her a significant delegate lead, which became insurmountable by the end of April after big victories in New York and in the Northeast.

She now moves on to face Trump, whose ascent to the top of the Republican Party few expected. The brash real estate mogul and reality TV star has long since turned his attention from primary foes to Clinton, debuting a nickname — ""Crooked Hillary"" — and arguing she belongs in jail for her email setup.

After a long primary campaign, Clinton said this past weekend in California she was ready to accept his challenge.

""We're judged by our words and our deeds, not our race, not our ethnicity, not our religion,"" she said Saturday in Oxnard. ""So it is time to judge Donald Trump by his words and his deeds. And I believe that his words and his deeds disqualify him from being president of the United States.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
Hillary Clinton can’t believe she’s losing.  ,FAKE
"Donald Trump tried to tamp down a newly revived campaign dust-up Friday over his views on President Obama’s birthplace, declaring the president was born in the United States – “period” – after declining to make that statement earlier this week.

The Republican presidential nominee also tried to blame Hillary Clinton for starting the controversy back in 2008, which her team denies. He cast his remarks as a bid to put the issue to rest once and for all, at a time when his poll numbers are rising.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said in Washington, D.C. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.”

He spoke at his new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a visit that began with lengthy remarks from military supporters and veterans. He briefly addressed the “birther” issue at the end.

The statement comes after Trump’s response on the matter in an interview Wednesday revived the issue. In the interview with The Washington Post, Trump was asked whether he believed Obama was born in the U.S. ""I'll answer that question at the right time,"" Trump told the paper. ""I just don't want to answer it yet.""

Trump’s campaign spokesman, trying to calm the waters, said overnight the Republican candidate now believes Obama was born in the U.S. Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Trump ""did a great service to the country"" by bringing closure to the debate.

""In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,"" Miller said.

But the Clinton campaign seized on Trump’s reluctance to address the issue in his Post interview.

Speaking shortly before Trump across town at the Black Women's Agenda Symposium, Clinton said Friday the Republican nominee was “feeding into” the “bigotry and bias that lurks in our country” – and should apologize.

“Barack Obama was born in America,” she said. “Donald Trump owes him and the American people an apology.”

Her campaign called his Friday comments ""disgraceful.""

The dust-up comes as Trump gains on Clinton in national and battleground state polls, even surpassing her in some states.

A new Fox News poll shows Clinton topping Trump by just one point among likely voters in the four-way ballot nationally.

In the head-to-head matchup, Trump’s up by one point.

Both candidates were fundraising Friday after events in Washington. Clinton has endured a rough week on the campaign trail, after criticizing some Trump supporters last Friday as ""deplorables"" and then having to take time off from the campaign due to a bout of pnemonia.

She used the birther issue to try and go back on offense.

While Obama was born in Hawaii, Trump several years ago was a key figure in stoking the so-called ""birther"" controversy. Critics saw it as an attempt to delegitimize the nation’s first black president.

Trump has said repeatedly during the campaign that he no longer talks about the ""birther"" issue.

The Trump campaign’s statement late Thursday claimed that Clinton launched the “birther” movement during her unsuccessful primary run against Obama in 2008.

""Hillary Clinton's campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President,"" the statement said. ""This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer.""

Clinton has long denied the claim, and fact-checkers previously have found no public evidence that she or her campaign directly pushed the issue. Rather, Trump’s comments appear to refer to reports that Clinton supporters circulated an email during the bitter 2008 primary race questioning Obama’s citizenship.

Yet former McClatchy D.C. bureau chief James Asher said on Twitter Friday that Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal in fact “told me in person” that Obama was born in Kenya.

Obama had released a standard short form of his birth certificate before the 2008 presidential election. Anyone who wants a copy of the more detailed, long-form document must submit a waiver request, and have that request approved by Hawaii's health department.

In 2011, amid persistent questions from Trump about his birthplace, Obama submitted a waiver request. He dispatched his personal lawyer to Hawaii to pick up copies and carry the documents back to Washington on a plane.

The form said Obama was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. It is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama's mother and the local registrar.

At the White House on Friday, Obama declined to comment at length on the issue, saying he’s got other business to attend to – and is confident about where he was born.

Fox News’ Nicholas Kalman and Tamara Gitt and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"(CNN) If confirmed to be from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, could a small portion of plane wing discovered on an Indian Ocean island be the clue investigators need to unlock one of aviation's biggest mysteries?

On the surface, the discovery on a Reunion Island beach is just what investigators have been waiting for -- the first physical piece of evidence since the flight vanished en route to Beijing in March 2014 with 239 people aboard.

According to a source close to the investigation, Boeing investigators are confident the debris comes from a 777 aircraft -- although no one is yet saying the part came from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

""It's only a very small part of the aircraft, but it could be a very important piece of evidence,"" Australian Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said Friday

Because Reunion Island is a French territory, the debris has been flown to France, where aviation safety bureau the BEA has taken responsibility for its testing and analysis.

The flaperon arrived in Toulouse over the weekend, but the fact that so many different countries and groups are involved in the search for the missing flight has complicated and delayed the situation somewhat.

Aviation experts are not expected to begin examining the part until Wednesday, and it is unclear how long their analysis will take.

Teams from each of the nations taking part in the search are expected to attend. Malaysia Airlines is sending investigators to France and a second team to Reunion, an airline official said.

Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said those involved would be careful to make sure all tests were carried out scientifically, and completely by the book.

She said that while ""everyone knows that it most likely is from MH370,"" investigators do not want to jump to conclusions.

""They're going to do a lot of analysis on the part, everything from X-rays to sonograms,"" Schiavo said. ""Then when they finally cut it open (looking for serial numbers and part numbers), it has to be filmed, all the parties to the investigation -- there are seven nations in this investigation -- they all need to be present.""

David Gallo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed: ""That's the way the BEA -- the French version of the NTSB -- works; they will be very careful about what they say and don't say.

""It's going to be scientific. It's a piece of evidence in a criminal investigation at this point, so they're going to take it apart bit by bit.""

Planes are stamped with serial numbers to allow parts to be identified and matched to a specific model and aircraft.

A source close to the investigation said Boeing investigators feel confident the piece comes from a 777, based on photos that have been analyzed, and a stenciled number that corresponds to a 777 component.

Another source told CNN's Rene Marsh that Boeing engineers have seen a part number in photos. A parts supplier confirmed 10-60754-1133 is a part number on a seal associated with 777s.

Images of the debris also appear to match schematic drawings for the right-wing flaperon from a Boeing 777. A flaperon helps the pilot control the aircraft.

""If the part numbers that are stamped on the pieces of the plane still survive, it literally could be a phone call to Boeing or the parts indices to see if it belongs to a 777. And if it belongs to a 777, it is MH370,"" said Schiavo.

Of the five accidents involving Boeing 777s, MH370 is the only one in which debris hasn't been recovered, Schiavo said.

If the identifying numbers are missing, more tests will need to be conducted on the part to determine its origin.

A French laboratory that the BEA could use has the capacity to ""identify very quickly"" which plane the debris belongs to, and what happened to it, a source close to the French investigation said.

Australian investigators, heavily involved for some time in the search, said they are looking at the barnacles attached to the discovered part that could allow marine biologists to tell how long it has been floating.

Truss said that he understood ""the photographs that are available are of such detail that it may be possible to make an identification without further physical examination.""

What does the condition of the debris indicate?

Through the French laboratory near Toulouse, ""engineers would be able to identify quickly whether the plane exploded in the air or whether it broke when hitting the water,"" the source close to the French investigation said.

Images of the component appear to show a small amount of damage to the front of the flaperon and a ragged horizontal tear across the back.

One group of independent observers has said that the damage to the flaperon should give authorities a good indication that the piece came off while the plane was still in the air.

The rear damage could have been caused if the airliner had its flaperon down as it went into the ocean, some members of the group, led by American Mobile Satellite Corp. co-founder Mike Exner, wrote in a preliminary assessment.

But the lack of damage to the front makes it more likely the plane was in a high-speed, steep, spiral descent and the part fluttered until it broke off, the group said.

If the flaperon were still on the wing when the plane hit water, the front would have been damaged by hitting the part of the wing to which it was attached, the group says.

However, Tom Ballantyne of Orient Aviation magazine said the condition of debris could indicate if the plane met a catastrophic end. Charring, for example, could indicate an explosion, he said.

Sciavo said investigators would be on the look out for tell-tale signs of what caused the crash: ""It's possible to find positive evidence of a criminal act, or, of course they could find the absence of that.

""If they find characteristic pitting in the wing structure, in the metal or the composite, that indicates there was some sort of explosive device, or if they find residue, which is not likely (after) this long in he ocean,"" she said.

""But they'll probably not be able to tell why the plane went down -- only that it did, and the manner in which it did.""

To learn more, the flight data recorders -- or so-called black boxes -- will be crucial.

If it is from MH370, will the main search area move?

Truss told a press conference Friday that the discovery of the debris in Reunion was ""consistent with some of the modeling we've done.""

""We remain confident that we're searching in the right place,"" he said.

He said authorities would ""continue to concentrate our efforts on seeking to locate the aircraft in the identified area.""

The current search is focused deep in the ocean off Western Australia, along an arc considered by investigators to be the most likely area the plane went down if it turned back toward Malaysia, as indicated by data, and stayed in the air before running out of fuel.

The southern end of the search area was the main focus, Truss said, but during the winter months weather conditions at that latitude were poor.

Once that search was completed, he said, searchers would focus efforts on a second identified area of interest.

If it's part of the plane, is it more likely the main section will be found?

Truss said that if the flaperon is proven to be from MH370, its discovery did not ""provide a great deal of help in specifically identifying where the aircraft is.""

If confirmed, however, the find is likely to give investigators further belief that other pieces of the plane have been carried by currents to the same region.

Will debris lead to a rethinking of past theories?

Thomas said, if anything, the location of the potential debris confirms modeling from the University of Western Australia that showed material from the plane could wash up around Reunion between 12 to 24 months after the plane's disappearance.

Despite the modeling, no one had been searching in that area, he said, because of the vast nature of the Indian Ocean and the multitude of factors that meant finding anything would be matter of luck and time.

""It was a matter of waiting for something to wash up,"" he said.

However, Truss said, a positive identification with MH370 would rule out the some of the more left-field theories that the aircraft was ""secretly parked in some hidden place"" on land.",REAL
"GOOGLE PLANNED MASSIVE AI INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK SPY TOOL FOR HILLARY CAMPAIGN IN 2014   Source: Higgins News Network 
A newly released Podesta email reveals that Google CEO Eric Schmidt contacted the Hillary campaign in 2014 to begin their partnership in sponsoring Clinton’s campaign run for President in 2016. 
The revelations come from a memo in the email sent to Cherry Mills which was then forwarded Robby Mook, John Podesta, and David Plouffe. 
Schmidt’s memo outlines an overall campaign strategy for Hillary, Schmidt’s vision for a massive cloud-based AI integrate software program and also reveals that Google colluded with the Obama administration in the 2012 election. 
The memo goes on to layout plans to construct a massive cloud-based database, along with programs that leveraged machine learning (aka Artificial Intelligence) that would be used to first to track users online to create a partial digital voter ids. 
Those partial digital ids contain a collection of attributes about the users online behavior which Schmidt explains will all eventually be tied to a real voter id file by leveraging machine learning. 
Schmidt details the procurement of a development team and the use of outline money to create software that will be connected to users smart phones on 2016 that would allow volunteers the ability to access any and all voter data. 
Schmidt also outlines ideas for the using the integrated tool to monitor social media and news stories to help promote positive articles and target the source of “rumors” and negative articles. 
Given Google’s massive collection of personal user data combined with previous revelations that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and Facebook COO were colluding with Hillary raises series concerns above user privacy, media manipulation and host of other problems. 
That combined with the fact that just about every other Silicon Valley company and executive is behind the Hillary Campaign makes this a chilling memo that should be getting much more attention than it is. 
Presented in full: 
Secondary verification by google.com DKIM key 
Fwd: 2016 thoughts 
Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:56 PMSubject: 2016 thoughts 
Cheryl, I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I havescheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but dolet me know if this is a helpful process for you all. Thanks !! Eric 

Notes for a 2016 Democratic CampaignEric Schmidt 
Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position toexecute well for 2016. 
1. Size, Structure and Timing 
Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paidemployees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceasesoperation four days after November 8, 2016 . The structure includes aChairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and aPresident who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements,systems and building and managing the organization. 
Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaignright after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 
2. Location 
The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly youngand hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very largehiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic,smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full ofdistractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhereguarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. 
The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work foryou. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all goodexamples of a large, blue state city to base in. 
Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find lowcost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis.This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. 
The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services(AWS) . All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smartphones along with credit card reader s. 
3. The pieces of a Campaign 
a) The Field 
Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy andempowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up thesystems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people.Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states.There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the humansystems. T he field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get outthe vote programs. 
For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as aworkflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build asimple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integrationas the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing isreally about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure andtrack all of it. 
There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field:determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling toconfirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protectionprograms at the state level. 
b) The Voter 
Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates allthat is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify,meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easilyspeak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get thevoter videos and other answers to areas they care about (“the benefits ofACA to you” etc.) 
The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potentialvoter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voterand the information we have to offer. 
c) Digital 
A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods toconnect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spreadgood news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will domuch of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partnersto pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. 
d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling 
New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earnedand social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable inreach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and othersurveys. 
Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors , andmodel how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us aboutthe origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme .Connect polling into this in some way. 
Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. 
e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resourceoptimization tools 
For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote.Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributesof the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn outand why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches workwell. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the mostimportant factors for turnout, and preference. 
It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcomingdatabases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurementpurposes. 
The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set ofvendors. 
f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online 
The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter recordsand i s maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud ).The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc. ) is unlikely to be used, andreplaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database andintermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter. 
Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities withthe actual voter file with high confidence . The key unit of the campaignis a “voter”, and each and every record is viewable and updatable byvolunteers in search of more accurate information . 
In the case w here we can’t identify the specific human , we can still have a partial digital voter id , for a person or “probable-person” with attributesthat we can identify and use to targe t. As they respond we can eventuallymatch to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key iseventually matched to a real person . 
The Rules 
Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there beno special interests in the financing structure . This means that allvendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure noone is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflictsof interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the auditshould include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from thecampaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.) 
The KEY things 
a) early b uild of an integrated development team and recognition that thisis an entire system that has to be managed as suchb) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choiceof vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused.c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smartphone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, andallows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone).d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build thefield, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful andperfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know aboutmedia placement, TV versus other media and digital media .  ",FAKE
"The Wall Street Journal's Adam Entous dropped a huge story Tuesday morning: Israel acquired classified US information while spying on the Iranian nuclear negotiations, and leaked the stolen information about the emerging deal to American lawmakers in an attempt to sabotage the Obama administration's outreach to Tehran.

This is yet another disaster for US-Israel relations. But that's not because Israel acquired classified US information, which honestly isn't that surprising. What's really outrageous is that Israel used the information in a deliberate attempt to manipulate American politics.

No one should be shocked that Israel was spying on the talks. A certain degree of espionage is pretty par for the course in world politics, even among allies. Indeed, as Entous' story repeatedly makes clear, American officials expected Israel to snoop on them. In fact, according to Entous, the US found out about the Israeli spying because it was already spying on Israel:

But there is a real scandal here, and that's Israel using stolen intelligence as part of a deliberate campaign of messing around with American partisan politics. That's why the White House is angry: ""It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy,"" a senior US official told Entous.

If Entous' reporting is correct, the Israeli government used the leaked information to help Republicans build support for new sanctions among Democrats, which would be necessary to overcome Obama's veto. Israel was using stolen information to help Mitch McConnell and John Boehner foment a Democratic rebellion against the president.

This is the same reason Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress about Iran infuriated so many Democrats this month. The problem wasn't that Netanyahu was invited to Congress; it's that the speech was coordinated with Republicans behind the president's back in a deliberate attempt to undermine his Iran policy.



The spying/briefing allegations suggest the speech was part of a much broader campaign to help Republicans pass new sanctions, a particularly dangerous move by Netanyahu at a time when Israel is at risk of becoming a partisan issue in America.

Allies really aren't supposed to do this sort of thing. Playing partisan domestic politics — and doing it with classified information, no less — positions Israel as the Republican Party's ally, not America's. The fact that Republican interests line up with Israel's in this case doesn't justify crossing these lines.

None of this is to say the Netanyahu government has to just sit down and accept an American Iran policy it opposes. It's perfectly within bounds for Netanyahu to publicly oppose the ongoing negotiations in which international powers are seeking to limit Iran's nuclear capabilities in exchange for relief on its crippling economic sanctions. It's fine for Netanyahu to lobby the French, who have an important role in the negotiations, to push for more stringent limits on Iran's nuclear program. That's all normal international politics.",REAL
"The United States comes up constantly when you talk to Russians about their country's place in the world. But the conversations tend to go a lot differently than many Americans might expect.

In the US, the common view is that Russians feel aggrieved by the loss of the Soviet Union and all the respect that came with being a global superpower. Russia's acts of aggression in Europe, in this telling, are all about challenging the American-led order as a way to prove Russia's might and importance. This aggression is wildly popular among Russians, many Americans believe, because it makes them feel patriotic and powerful to bully the West, and particularly the US, which they blame for Russia's problems.

""Russia took off its ideological blinders in 1991, but America still seems to have them on""

There is certainly truth to this, but it's just a piece of the truth. Rather, when you speak to influential people across institutions and the political spectrum in Russia, as Amanda Taub and I did during a recent reporting trip there, the story you hear over and over is one of Russia's fundamental weakness. And you hear a preoccupation with the United States that goes far beyond what even many Americans, who are famously narcissistic about our country, would expect.

In this telling, Moscow capitulated at the end of the Cold War, and even tried to make itself a friend to the far more powerful United States. But an irrationally aggressive America has instead sought repeatedly to weaken, control, or even destroy Russia. Their country, in this view, is insecure against an overwhelmingly powerful West. Its actions that we see as aggressive are actually defensive. And Moscow is kept safe only by careful vigilance and by the nuclear arsenal that you hear Russians cite over and over.

This is the version of history you hear in Russia from detached foreign policy pragmatists, from pro-Putin ideologues and anti-Putin ideologues, even from members of the pro-Western political opposition who support what they believe be to a Western agenda of weakening Russia.

There's a quote that speaks perfectly to this Russian worldview — and how Americans misunderstand it — in the most recent issue of Russia in Global Affairs, a Russian foreign policy journal that is widely considered to reflect the views of Russia's foreign policy establishment. The quote is from a Q&A with Vladimir Lukin, a prominent Russian diplomat and liberal politician who previously served as ambassador to the US:

Interviewer: In his 1994 book ""Diplomacy,"" Henry Kissinger writes that ""integrating Russia into the international system is a key task"" for the United States. But as he was saying this, the Americans were actually pushing Moscow away with their policy. Why? Vladimir Lukin: It is in the genes. America has a simple ideology – that there is only one truth in the world, that truth is held by God, and God created the United States to be an embodiment of that truth. So the Americans strive to bring this truth to the rest of the world and to make it happy. Only after that will everything be well. This ideology has a strong influence on their policy. A wise traditionalist and a geopolitical expert, Kissinger had good reason to call such politicians ""Trotskyites"" for advocating a world revolution, albeit in their own way, but always in the front and in shining armor. This is a tempting ideology and has been professed by different countries at different times, not only the United States.

Lukin is hardly seen as an anti-American hard-liner in Russia — rather, he's considered to be an objective expert on the United States and a highly professional diplomat. He is a founding member of the liberal opposition party Yabloko. That he would get the United States so obviously wrong — what Americans would call defending democracy and human rights, he sees as a far more radical and explicitly religious agenda of ""advocating a world revolution"" — is troubling. But his view is a common one, and that tells you a great deal.

The interviewer's response is similarly telling: ""So Russia took off its ideological blinders in 1991, but America still seems to have them on. The Soviet Union is gone, but the policy against it is not.""

This narrative of an inherently aggressive America is one we heard over and over in Moscow, not just from people who support Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive, anti-American policies but even from those who oppose them. In this view, American politics and policies are bent on, and in many ways driven by, a hatred of Russia and desire to destroy or at least control it. Russia has had no choice but to meet American aggression with defensive actions such as putting nuclear-capable missiles in Europe or arming eastern Ukrainian militias at threat of genocidal extermination by American-backed fascists, if only to deter the US from further actions that could lead to all-out war.

It's not hard to poke holes in this Russian worldview. As Stephen Sestanovich, a longtime senior State Department official who helped engineer the Clinton administration's Russia policies, wrote in a recent article for the American Interest, even the ""pragmatic"" Russian case for annexing Crimea in March 2014 makes little strategic sense:

Yet this was the worldview we heard even from professionals and politicians in Russia who oppose anti-Western policies. One foreign policy expert who wished for rapprochement with the West sighed to us that it would be impossible because Hillary Clinton, whom he said was widely viewed as irrationally anti-Russian, would soon take office. At another meeting, a political opposition leader remarked offhand that he hoped the US would be successful in its efforts to engineer regime change in Moscow.

As Sestanovich writes in his essay, ""The idea that the United States aims at a 'color revolution' in Moscow is the single most frequently repeated theme of official Russian rhetoric."" This is more than paranoia or government propaganda; it is the accepted worldview: that Russia is under constant threat from a hostile and irrational United States.

Lukin, at another point in his Q&A, lamented that the US had rejected Moscow's gestures at cooperation in the 1990s and instead sought to surround Russia with a hostile NATO alliance, thus forcing Russia into a defensive crouch and creating today's tensions. ""It was the biggest mistake the West made,"" he said, ""and gradually led to the current situation.""

These fears about America are likely to worsen in Russia if Hillary Clinton becomes president; many people told us she is seen by many Russians, especially Russian policymakers, as unbendingly hostile to Moscow and bent on the Putin government's destruction.

""Hillary is the worst option of any president,"" Fyodor Lukyanov, an influential Russian foreign policy expert who edits a leading foreign affairs journal and heads a foreign policy think tank, told us.

""Many people here believe that [she and her team] will try to come back to the line of the 1990s to encourage Russia into an internal transformation,"" Lukyanov added. ""Not by force, of course, but to encourage some kind of social development that will upend the current system and will promote a new one.""

WATCH: What most people miss about the war in the Ukraine",REAL
"While Trump’s edge is just 1 point — which is well within the margin of error — the Republican candidate has made up 13 points in under two weeks.

Trump — who used to read off every poll he led during rallies but had begun to call them inaccurate after he started to decline — has decided he likes them again, or at least he likes this one.

But not everyone wants to capitalize on the poll. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich called the new poll an “absurdity.”

At this point in 2012, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 1 point.

The daily tracking poll was conducted Oct. 27-30, 2016, and included 1,128 likely voters. The margin of error is 3 points.",REAL
"The chaotic scene -- accompanied by loud chants of ""shame, shame, shame"" -- included one Democrat facing off with the second-highest-ranking House Republican, accusations of foul play and a series of insults being traded openly on the House floor.

The clash began over a yearly spending bill to fund military construction projects and the Veterans Administration. Because the bill covers spending on federal contracts, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-New York, attached what he said was a one-sentence proposal to uphold President Barack Obama's executive order protecting LGBT workers from being fired. The amendment had enough votes to pass but the vote was held open, and several Republicans changed their position just before the vote was officially closed.

""They literally snatched discrimination out of the jaws of equality. We won this vote,"" a visibly irate Maloney told reporters.

Maloney accused House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of ""twisting arms."" Maloney and other Democrats told CNN that once the vote board showed the measure had 217 votes -- enough to pass with just eight seconds left in the vote -- McCarthy personally approached House GOP members to switch their ""yes"" votes to ""no"" as the presiding officer kept the vote open for several minutes past the standard five-minute period.

A senior House Republican leadership aide told CNN that it wasn't just McCarthy -- all the top GOP leaders were working to defeat Maloney's amendment because they were concerned that if passed, it would jeopardize the spending bill. When Maloney walked over to McCarthy to appeal to him to allow the measure to pass, saying plenty of Republicans backed it, he said McCarthy told him ""get on my own side of the aisle."" He answered back to the majority leader, ""What side am I supposed to stand on to support equality?"" One Republican who witnessed the exchange said Maloney walked over to the GOP side of the chamber and was ""taunting Republican members"" and had his arms up in the air as he was trying to talk to them about letting his proposal pass. Roughly a dozen Republicans approached Maloney as the vote was extended and told him they disagreed with their own leadership's tactics to work to defeat the measure. California Democratic Rep. Mark Takano, who was standing with Maloney, told reporters that Illinois GOP Rep. Bob Dold told the New York Democrat ""this is bulls***."" As the scene unfolded, reporters outside the chamber could hear jeers as the gavel came down with a new 212-213 vote tally, defeating the measure. No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer began shouting and calling out Republicans for not following the traditional practice of coming to the well of the House floor to change their votes, saying they instead remained in their seats to avoid being identified. Afterward, Democrats produced a list of seven House Republicans, including the head of the GOP's campaign arm, Oregon Republican Rep. Greg Walden, who initially backed Maloney's proposal before switching their votes. The other Republicans, according to a floor vote printout by Democratic staff, were Rep. Jeff Denham, R-California, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, Rep. David Valadao, R-California, Rep. Mimi Walters, R-California, and Rep. David Young, R-Iowa. Hoyer's staff also tweeted out the list of names, calling their votes ""shameful."" CNN has reached out to all seven House Republicans who changed their vote Thursday morning. So far, only Poliquin has responded about why he decided to vote no for the measure after originally registering support for it, defending his vote in a written statement to CNN. ""I am outraged that political opponents or members of the press would claim or insinuate that I cast a vote due to pressure or party politics,"" Poliquin wrote. ""No one controls my vote. I work hard only for the people of Maine's 2nd Congressional District."" Poliquin added, ""I abhor discrimination in any form and at any place."" ""They are bigots, they are haters,"" a seething Democratic Rep. Steve Israel said about House Republicans. He then immediately worked to tie House Republicans to Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, saying Trump ""is very proud of House Republicans today."" House Speaker Paul Ryan, who as the speaker doesn't typically vote, was holding his weekly news conference and missed the fracas. When asked about what happened, he told reporters he didn't have any details about who may have changed their votes, but made it clear he opposed the Democrats' proposal. ""The states should do this. The federal government shouldn't stick its nose in this business,"" Ryan said. Maloney vowed, ""These things are going to be remembered"" and told reporters he planned to try to push similar measures on other legislation. ""The people who stood in the schoolhouse door are going to have this hung around their necks for the rest of their careers, and I hope they can live with themselves,"" Maloney said. ""I hope they can look their kids in the eye and sleep OK tonight because what they did is as disgusting as one of the famous episodes in American history where we've seen people stand on the wrong side of the march toward Selma, or stand in the schoolhouse door when someone was trying to get an equal education.""",REAL
Fluoridation of public water supplies as well as the abundance of fluoride in food and dental products have become more controversial in recent years as more and more people realize that the... ,FAKE
"(CNN) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both accused Donald Trump of inciting violence, with the former secretary of state calling him ""bigoted"" and alleging he had perpetrated ""political arson,"" while the Vermont senator labeled him a ""pathological liar"" at a town hall on Sunday night.

""It is clear that Donald Trump is running a very cynical campaign pitting groups of Americans against one another. He is trafficking in hate and fear,"" Clinton said during the event at Ohio State University hosted by CNN and TV One. ""He actually incites violence in the way he urges his audience on, talking about punching people, offering to pay legal bills.""

Clinton charged that Trump was guilty of a case of ""political arson"" by throwing fuel on political divisions in the country.

""He has been incredibly bigoted towards so many groups,"" she continued. ""You don't make America great by tearing down everything that made America great.""

Clinton followed Sanders at the town hall moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper and TV One's Roland Martin. Sanders and Clinton are making closing arguments to voters in their increasingly contentious Democratic nominating marathon, two days before five states vote in crucial primaries that could set the tone for the rest of the contest.

On Sunday night, Clinton's comments followed Sanders' own sharp criticism of Trump.

""I hesitate to say this because I really don't like to disparage public officials, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar,"" Sanders said.

Sanders also blasted Trump for saying that he might pay the legal fees of a man charged with punching a protester at one of his rallies, adding that doing so was tantamount to ""inciting violence.""

""I would hope Mr. Trump tones it down big time and tells his supporters that violence is not acceptable in the American political process,"" Sanders said.

In one of the most dramatic moments of the night, Clinton was asked by audience member Ricky Jackson -- who spent 39 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, including a period on death row -- to justify her support for the death penalty in some cases.

She replied that the states had proven themselves incapable of carrying out fair trials and said she would ""breathe a sigh of relief"" if the Supreme Court and the states began to eliminate capital punishment.

But she argued that there was a case for a ""very limited use"" of the death penalty in cases of ""horrific"" terrorist crimes in federal cases like the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 during her husband's administration.

Speaking directly to Jackson, however, she told him, ""I just can't even imagine what you went through and how terrible those days and nights must have been for all those years. All of us are so regretful that you or any person had to go through what you did.""

Jackson, who is an undecided voter, was then asked by Martin if he was satisfied with Clinton's response. He replied, ""Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you, senator.""

The town hall took place in the wake of Sanders' surprise victory in the Michigan primary last week, which raised his hopes of competing with Clinton across Midwestern Rust Belt states.

They faced questions from Buckeye State voters as they vie for the support of blue collar and minority voters who underpin the Democratic coalition.

It also came at the end of a weekend filled with violence and disruption of Trump rallies, in which the real estate mogul pointed the finger at Sanders for the unruliness.

But Sanders said Sunday night, ""Our campaign does not believe and never will encourage anybody to disrupt anything.""

He added that people have the right to protest even though he said other candidates' rallies shouldn't be disrupted.

""Trump has to get on the TV and tell his supporters that violence in the political process in America is not acceptable, end of discussion,"" he said.

At the same time, Sanders dismissed the idea that he was responsible for the actions of all his supporters.

""Millions of people voted for me. If I have to take responsibility for everybody who voted for me, it would be a very difficult life,"" Sanders said

The town hall was also an opportunity for the two Democratic candidates to highlight their differences even if they didn't meet face to face.

One questioner, Amit Majmudar, a radiologist born to Indian immigrant parents and Ohio's poet laureate, told each one that he had one mission at the ballot box, to keep Trump out of office and asked what each would do to defeat Trump.

Clinton argued that she was the best candidate to take on Trump because she was ""the only candidate who has gotten more votes than Trump"" in the 2016 contests held so far.

She added that she was building a broad-based campaign to convince people that this was the highest-stakes election they had ever been involved in, explicitly because Trump was likely to be the Republican nominee.

And she said that the fact that Republicans had been ""after me"" for 25 years meant there wasn't anything the GOP had not already dug up about her.

""I am not new to the national arena and I think whoever goes up against Donald Trump better be ready,"" she said.

Clinton also said that there would be many arguments that Democrats could make against Trump but that she didn't want to ""spill the beans right now.""

""I am having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump,"" Clinton said, though she declined to name any other than Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who she said had done so publicly.

Sanders, for his part, pivoted to his Democratic opponent on the issue of trade, which is emerging as a key theme on both sides of the aisle in the 2016 presidential race.

He lashed out at ""corporately written trade agreements,"" which he said were designed to shut down U.S factories and pay people ""pennies an hour"" in China and Mexico.

""One of the very strong differences between Secretary Clinton and myself -- she has supported almost all of those trade agreements, I have vigorously opposed (them),"" he charged.

At one point while talking about trade though, Sanders slipped in another backhanded slap at Trump. Defending his position on trade, Sanders said that he did not want to cut off the United States from global trade flows.

""Nobody is talking about building a wall around the United States,"" Sanders said, before trailing off when people in the audience started chuckling. ""Oh, I beg your pardon, there is one guy who is talking about building a wall. Let me rephrase it: no rational person is talking about building a wall.""

During Clinton's appearance, she sought to match her rival's rhetoric on trade after she was asked by a laid-off steel worker how she would deal with alleged dumping of steel in the U.S. market by foreign nations.

""I believe that the dumping is illegal and we have to summon up the political and the legal arguments to take it on,"" Clinton said, specifically accusing China of the practice. Other nations, including Italy, South Korea and India have in recent months been accused of dumping corrosion-resistant steel in the U.S. market.

The town hall segment with each candidate concluded with a few more personal questions.

Clinton was asked to elaborate on her recent comment that she's not a natural politician like her husband Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama.

Clinton turned the question into a way of stressing her particular skills while admitting her liabilities, saying she had worked hard to become a better politician but wanted to be more than just good at campaigning.

""I don't want to be hired to be a constant candidate, I want to be hired to be the president because I think that I, in this moment in our country's history, bring the combination of skills and understanding and experience that can be really put to work immediately to do all parts of the job,"" she said.

She also said that the campaign skills of her husband and Obama are ""poetry,"" relating that ""I get carried away and I have seen them a million times."" She added that such stump skills were not her forte.

Sanders, asked which ideological opponents he got along with the best, mentioned Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, even though he's someone who Democrats have pilloried as a climate-change denier.

Though Sanders has been scoring some points on trade, Clinton has so far built a more diverse constituency resting especially on African-American voters and Hispanics and appears to have the edge going into Tuesday's primaries in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina.

Still, Sanders has high hopes of good results in the Midwest in particular and has been driving his message that the economy is stacked against working Americans and underpinned by a corrupt political system.

Tuesday's primaries are hugely significant because they make up the third-highest allocation of delegates available on a single day in the Democratic presidential race.

A new poll by The Wall Street Journal and NBC published on Sunday shows Clinton leading Sanders for the three biggest prizes available on Tuesday. She is up 61% to 34% on Sanders in Florida, leads him by 58% to 38% in Ohio and by six points in Illinois.

Sanders will be hoping that last Tuesday's results are an omen for this week after he went into the Michigan primary trailing badly in polls but still managed to best Clinton.

The former secretary of state, however, is looking to further bolster her lead in delegates over Sanders on Tuesday.

According to CNN estimates, Clinton has 1,244 delegates (including 772 pledged delegates and 472 superdelegates). Sanders has 574 delegates (including 551 pledged delegates and 23 superdelegates). Superdelegates are party officials and lawmakers who can vote at the convention and have already made their intentions clear.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated with the correct number of superdelegates for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.",REAL
"Written by Ron Paul Sunday November 13, 2016 In a disturbing indication of how difficult it would be to bring military spending in line with actual threats overseas, House Armed Services Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R – TX) told President Obama last week that his war funding request of $11.6 billion for the rest of the year was far too low. That figure for the last two months of 2016 is larger than Spain’s budget for the entire year! And this is just a “war-fighting” supplemental, not actual “defense” spending! More US troops are being sent to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere and the supplemental request is a way to pay for them without falling afoul of the “sequestration” limits.The question is whether this increase in US military activity and spending overseas actually keeps us safer, or whether it simply keeps the deep state and the military-industrial complex alive and well-funded.Unfortunately many Americans confuse defense spending with military spending. The two terms are used almost interchangeably. But there is a huge difference. I have always said that I wouldn’t cut anything from the defense budget. We need a robust defense of the United States and it would be foolish to believe that we have no enemies or potential enemies.The military budget is something very different from the defense budget. The military budget is the money spent each year not to defend the United States, but to enrich the military-industrial complex, benefit special interests, regime-change countries overseas, maintain a global US military empire, and provide defense to favored allies. The military budget for the United States is larger than the combined military spending budget of the next seven or so countries down the line.To get the military budget in line with our real defense needs would require a focus on our actual interests and a dramatic decrease in spending. The spending follows the policy, and the policy right now reflects the neocon and media propaganda that we must run the rest of the world or there will be total chaos. This is sometimes called “American exceptionalism,” but it is far from a “pro-American” approach.Do we really need to continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars manipulating elections overseas? Destabilizing governments that do not do as Washington tells them? Rewarding those who follow Washington’s orders with massive aid and weapons sales? Do we need to continue the endless war in Afghanistan even as we discover that Saudi Arabia had far more to do with 9/11 than the Taliban we have been fighting for a decade and a half? Do we really need 800 US military bases in more than 70 countries overseas? Do we need to continue to serve as the military protection force for our wealthy NATO partners even though they are more than capable of defending themselves? Do we need our CIA to continue to provoke revolutions like in Ukraine or armed insurgencies like in Syria?If the answer to these questions is “yes,” then I am afraid we should prepare for economic collapse in very short order. Then, with our economy in ruins, we will face the wrath of those countries overseas which have been in the crosshairs of our interventionist foreign policy. If the answer is no, then we must work to convince our countrymen to reject the idea of Empire and embrace the United States as a constitutional republic that no longer goes abroad seeking monsters to slay. The choice is ours. Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
"In New Responses, Hillary Clinton Insists Email Setup A Matter Of 'Convenience'

Hillary Clinton said she decided to employ a private email server ""for the purpose of convenience"" in early 2009 and doesn't remember ""specific consultations"" about using that account to conduct State Department business, the Democratic presidential nominee told lawyers in material related to a Freedom of Information Act case released Thursday.

In written responses to 25 questions from the conservative group Judicial Watch, Clinton largely hewed to her prior statements about the email controversy, often saying she did not recall details about the arrangement. Clinton signed the court filing ""under penalty of perjury"" on October 10, one day after her debate with Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have tangled with Judicial Watch for more than 20 years.

Some of that friction showed in her answers over 20-odd pages, littered with objections. At times, the candidate accused the conservative nonprofit of misstating her earlier remarks.

On occasion, she declined to answer questions about the vulnerability of her emails to hacking on the ground that it exceeded the boundaries of what a judge ordered earlier this year. And she cited attorney-client privilege in refusing to answer a question about her 11-hour testimony to a congressional panel in October 2015 that 90 to 95 percent of her emails ""were in the State's system.""

The Justice Department closed an investigation into Clinton's email practices with no charges against her or any of her aides. FBI Director James Comey found she had been ""extremely careless"" but concluded ""no reasonable prosecutor"" would have sought criminal charges. But that decision remains deeply unpopular among Republicans in Congress and with Trump, who is vying with Clinton to become president.

In the course of the investigation, the FBI recovered thousands of Clinton's emails during her tenure at the State Department. Many of those messages will be released in batches over the next month.

Clinton has said using one email account was a ""mistake"" she will not repeat. But it is also one she is unlikely to shake for the time being, if conservative watchdogs get their way.

""We're pleased that we now have a little bit more information about Hillary Clinton's email practices,"" Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. ""Our lawyers will be reviewing the responses closely. Mrs. Clinton's refusal to answer many of the questions in a clear and straightforward manner further reflects disdain for the rule of law.""",REAL
"While Donald Trump doubled down this week on his vow to make Mexico pay for his proposed southern border wall, his campaign is reported to be weighing options that don’t necessarily involve the seemingly far-fetched scenario of the Mexican government handing America a great, big check.

LifeZette first reported that the Republican presidential nominee and his top advisers are looking at using assets seized from drug cartels and other traffickers. This reportedly could involve establishing a “joint border security fund” -- holding seized assets from crackdowns on both sides of the border – for border construction and maintenance.

Trump, asked Thursday by Fox News about the report, did not deny the option is on the table.

“There are many ways that they can pay for the wall,” Trump said, calling it a “negotiation.”

But he again insisted, “The United States will not be paying for the wall. Mexico will be paying for the wall.”

Breitbart News, whose chairman Stephen Bannon left to be Trump’s campaign CEO, also reported that cartel resources would be seized to fund the wall if Trump wins.

Trump supporter, and former presidential primary rival, Ben Carson floated another option Thursday night.

Speaking with Fox News, Carson said money saved from enforcing the border could be used – though he did not elaborate on what level of savings the federal government could expect, particularly when Trump is proposing spending more money on border security resources.

“Recognize that a lot of money is going to be saved by enforcing our borders, by not, you know, giving various types of benefits to people who are here illegally,” Carson said. “That money is money that we otherwise would not have had and that can be applied to the wall and various other things. That’s I believe the spirit in which that comment is made. I don't think Mexico is going to write a check out and say here, pay for the wall.”

Trump has not addressed such details on the stump.

He declared in his immigration policy speech Wednesday night that, “Mexico will pay for the wall … they don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay.”

That came after Trump met with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico City, and both men left the meeting battling over the payment issue. Trump said they didn’t discuss “payment,” while Pena Nieto said he made clear Mexico will not put up the money.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump added the line about payment into his Phoenix speech, in response to Pena Nieto’s claims.

If a Trump administration did pursue using cartel assets to fund a wall, it would take billions. Trump has estimated the wall could be built for as little as $8 billion, though other analyses have put the cost much higher.

Estimates of Mexican cartel revenue vary drastically. The U.S. government estimated a decade ago that Mexican traffickers make nearly $14 billion on drug sales to the U.S.",REAL
"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:19 UTC © Jen Psaki President Obama holds news conference at the White House. As an American, someone raised to believe truth and justice will prevail, I am appalled at the foreign and domestic policies of my country's government. The level and scope of the deceit with which the Obama administration has laid out onto the world stage is embarrassing. For the first time in my 61 years I realize why some figures in our history were ashamed of being known as American. Our leaders have shamed us, done irreparable damage to our heritage and our legacy as a people, and still most of my countrymen sit idle. America today reminds me of a traveling circus, three rings of evil clowns entertaining a peanut gallery of onlookers. Or are we participant clowns? For over the better part of Barack Obama's presidency we've witnessed the most respected nation transformed, step-by-step, into one of the most dreaded empires the world has ever known. 300 million people, all their ancestors, and their future generations will pay the overwhelming cost of Obama's mistakes and malfeasance in office. While I do not personally believe this man is evil, I am sure the people behind him are. The lies, the impact, the unbelievable devastation these people have unwrapped, it spells the end of a perfect dream for humanity. I wonder as I type this, how many people reading it will realize how true my words are. John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US Department of State is a prototype for all that is wrong with our nation. He is a mirror reflection of Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in turn a further reflection of Barack Obama and the people who stand behind. They lie, cheat, steal, kill, maim, or at best coerce in order to achieve goals their constituency (the people) have no inkling of. All of us knew politicians have always been liars and crooked, but the degree to which we can be betrayed is unheard of today. This press conference on the alleged bombing of Aleppo hospitals by Russia, it is damning, damnable evidence of what I am saying. This is, of course, if one watches intently and then reasons. Compare what Kirby says, with what you have seen or read from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Measure the tone and content of this unique message. Bear with me, and I'll help you convict these warmongers of their crimes. The Circus of Liars I must point out that Barack Obama has had more State Department spokespersons than any president in history. First there was Sean McCormack, from 2005 to 2009, a leftover from the Bush administration. After McCormack's tour of administration liar in chief, he joined Boeing in 2009 and serves as the as vice president of Communications in Government Operations. McCormack left the Obama administration to more or less help Hillary Clinton and the ""click"" extend the growth of companies like Boeing. This Washington Post piece (amazingly) condemns both Hillary Clinton and McCormack for their apparent collusion to morph policy into business with, guess who? Why Mother Russia, of course. Philip J. ""P.J."" Crowley made his ""deal with the devil"" from 2009 to 2011. The 2011-2012 recipient of the General Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership (? The Military ties to State) is a War College bred and reared pentagon puppet. The fact most recent State Department liars are former military begs the question; ""Why is our foreign policy institution lined with CIA, spooks, War College graduates and command grade military officers?"" Crowley is an interesting example of how our foreign service is infested with war hawks and military industrial minions. To Crowley's credit, his candidness in the wake of the mistreatment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and his subsequent resignation redeemed this old soldier by comparison to his colleagues. He is emblematic of a system that uses good soldiers in order to mislead the people, and to misdirect our policies toward the wrong goals. Crowley is pretty much off the radar now, but somehow still semi-loyal to the Obama-Clinton team. His tweets on Twitter hum the Democratic Party line. He's now a Fellow at The George Washington University Institute for Public Diplomacy, which means he's been let out to pasture. Next we come to Victoria Jane Nuland, the pin-up girl of soulless and reprehensible US bureaucrats. From my perspective, as someone who has covered the Ukraine civil war extensively, Nuland in Kiev reminds me of the worst parts of the rise of Nazi Germany. I cannot possibly be bombastic enough in characterizing this Hillary Clinton spawn. It is not my nature to be unkind, or less than a gentleman, but this woman is no lady. Her hacked conversation, with fellow psychopath, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, lives in infamy amidst volumes of horrid US intentions. ""Fuck the EU"", along with the clear regime change the Obama White House was behind, should have spelled resignation for this demonic Washington witch. She, and her colleague Pyatt, are complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Donbass. Nuland, who most agree will be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State should she reach office, is the most deadly psychopath the American people could possibly put in charge of our foreign service. For the Russians who still have to deal with her, I am sure 20 minutes looking at her is unbearable. This is America fiddling, while our reputation abroad burns. She is the queen of regime change, she and her husband children of the ideology America needs to forcefully alter world governments. This is the ""WOW"" persona, the caricature of disastrous Washington policy. Don't take my word, research Nuland starting here , and see where it leads. Jen Psaki lied so well, and stuck up her nose to the dissenting press so expertly, she graduated the US State Department right up to the White House. Those of us who winced at her nonchalant misrepresentation of facts, also understand she is part of the click that now inhabits the halls of power in Washington. Psaki is part of a country club that runs it all. If the Democrats win in November's presidential election, people like Psaki will become monsters, an empowered American politburo kin to the worst fascists in history. Psaki is the official cheerleader now, of a White House campaign to create a legacy for the worst president in American history. Catch her Twitter feed her, and figure out why in the world Barack Obama would want to be a Wired Magazine editor for a day. Despite her pallid and docile appearance, make no mistake, this Obama minion is as deadly as Nuland, maybe even more so. I recall Psaki launched a social media attack on Russia that was nearly universally ridiculed as ""hash tag diplimacy."" Her ""hot mic"" comment on her own points on Egypt at a press conference as being ""ridiculous"", they remind me of Obama being caught promising then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he'd ""fix"" the ABM missiles issue if he won in 2012. What makes this spokesperson so dangerous is her forward enthusiasm, and her seeming happy-go-lucky satisfaction with being part of the biggest lie ever perpetrated. Lying is transfigured into truth, a job well worth doing. Good God. Finally we come to John Kirby, Naval War College trained mouthpiece for Emperor Caligula (look him up and compare to our presidents) and whichever Nero we elect next. A Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at the command level in the US Navy, he's what many former military people would refer to as a first class boot licker. I'm a squid myself, so I am familiar with the type. Kirby would climb a tree to tell a lie, if ordered to do so, and show righteousness in doing so. Kirby, Kerry, the whole Obama administration is utterly absurd. This recent press conference reveals just how out of bounds US policy is. Furthermore, Kirby's contention the Syrian war cannot end without airpower being grounded is likewise idiotic. The State Department's stance on Russia's hammering of jihadists only makes sense, if the overthrow of Assad and his legitimate government is a goal. John Kirby: Syrian War Won't End Without Grounding Aircraft - this is the headline that calls our attention to the fact Assad is about to wreck Washington's plan. Regime change has become such a common term now, that media consumers are immune to what it really means. Since the first Bush took office, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more governments have been turned upside down than at any time since World War II. And the ""Kirbys"" of the world are accomplices to massive world chaos. Kirby's ""Russians in body bags"" threat has pushed the Kremlin's panic button now. We have descended into crisis policy, an all or nothing lunacy that can only end in war. Three Rings of Evil Clowns These people are all deplorable. But compared to the linchpins of war they speak for, each is insignificant by comparison. This message for instance, the New York Times headline ""U.S. Officials Say Russia Probably Attacked U.N. Humanitarian Convoy"", it did not originate with them. Our new ""probably"" dogma is a function of a failing freedom, the complete takeover of a free press by western oligarchs that make Russian mafia types seem impotent. Watching this evil circus reminds me of a twisted horror movie, a guttural glimpse at wicked clowns betraying the children they are supposed to love and entertain. The Soros and Rockefeller types, those Rotschilds and the Goldman Sachs sharks, Silicon Valley fakers and Wall Street urchins the Clintons take money off of, the whole mess in our nation's capital stinks to high heavens. Just how my countrymen stomach it leaves me breathless and clueless at times. America is taking part in a wider broadcast of the movie The Turman Show these days. Raised up to believe in freedom of the press and the merits of democracy, my countrymen have been conditioned to rely on their media, their leaders, and the seeming implausibility that one group can take over the world. Well, a group has taken over half of it, and with the proper time and funding, this can be proven. Since me or some other researcher has no such investigative grant, the case against these evil clowns goes untried. The Nation, Slate, Global Research, RT, and myriad independent media attempt to dissent. But trillions of dollars flow back and forth fueling the paranoiac message - Russia is the enemy again! The first ring of circus clowns wield more power than Xerxes, the Bilderbergs probably even believe their own cause - perpetuating the elite order is, after all, a noble genetic cause. In the second ring business types and the oh-so aggressive and ambitious, they will literally do anything to succeed. The Clintons, Bushs, and Obamas out there are the master puppets. Their mission is pretty clear, pay the devil his due and cash in. It's really as simple as all that. Today's Washington is a bit like Chicago during Capone's time. Once the ""Man"" has you, he's got you but good. La Cosa Nostra hasn't got anything on the numbers games along the Potomac. The little crime bosses, grown up from their internships and grant designations, they pepper every institution in America. As they graduate, God knows what goals the Kirbys of the world set out to achieve. In the wider center ring, it's easy to see the Clinton Foundation workers really do drink Bill and Hillary's Kool Aid. Mind washed into believing in the ultimate bullshit, naïve middle intellectuals become squirming opportunists, oblivious to the fact they sold out. The ""Man"" has got them, and early on. Meanwhile, the whole mess is cloaked in the guise of democracy, and hidden underneath people's fear they'll be called conspiracy theorists. George Orwell's 1984 seems to have been written to exclude the possibility complete control could be achieved. But isn't that how complete control is ultimately achieved? Above the center ring, high up on the flying trapeze liberty defies death. The people are doing a high wire act without a net. We are the third ring of clowns, only we are hesitant to see our role as sellouts too. America is life under the big top, with our favorite pop stars handing out peanuts. I don't know how you feel about it, but I feel utterly betrayed.",FAKE
"When Donald Trump introduced his new university from the lobby of his famous tower, he declared that it would be unlike any of his other ventures.

Trump University would be a noble endeavor, he said, with an emphasis on education over profits. It was a way for him to give back, to share his expertise with the masses, to build a “legacy as an educator.”

He wouldn’t even keep all the money — if he happened to make a profit, he would turn the funds over to charity.

“If I had a choice of making lots of money or imparting lots of knowledge, I think I’d be as happy to impart knowledge as to make money,” Trump said at the inaugural news conference in the spring of 2005.

The launch of Trump University coincided with two auspicious developments for the real estate mogul: Through his then-year-old hit TV show “The Apprentice,” the billionaire was developing an image as America’s savviest boss, while the nation’s booming real estate market was giving hope to many who dreamed of striking it rich.

Ads touted Trump University as “the next best thing to being Trump’s apprentice.” Trump, who every week on TV singled out someone to be fired, pledged in a promotional video to “hand-pick” instructors. “Priceless information” would help attendees build wealth in the same real estate game that made Trump rich.

In the end, few if any of these statements would prove to be true.

Trump University was not a university. It was not even a school. Rather, it was a series of seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country that promised attendees they could get rich quick but were mostly devoted to enriching the people who ran them.

Participants were enticed with local newspaper ads featuring images of Trump, then encouraged to write checks or charge tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards for multi-day learning sessions. Participants were considered “buyers,” as one internal document put it. According to the company’s former president, Trump did not personally pick the instructors. Many attendees were trained by people with little or no real estate expertise, customers and former employees have alleged in lawsuits against the company.

“I was told to do one thing,” said James Harris, a Trump University instructor whose sessions have been repeatedly cited in the litigation, in an interview with The Washington Post. “And that one thing was: . . . to show up to teach, train and motivate people to purchase the Trump University products and services and make sure everybody bought. That is it.”

A Trump spokesman said Harris’s comments “have no merit” and accused Harris of “looking for media attention to further his own agenda.”

All told, Trump University received about $40 million in revenue from more than 5,000 participants before it halted operations in 2010 amid lawsuits in New York and California alleging widespread fraud. The New York attorney general estimated Trump netted more than $5 million during the five years it was active. He has since acknowledged that he gave none of the profits to charity.

This account is based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal company records that have become public as a result of the lawsuits, as well as new interviews with former Trump University employees and customers.

Many of the company’s internal records, including several “playbooks” that advised employees on strategies for pressuring customers, were unsealed in court over the past week in response to a request by The Post.

Trump and his lawyers have vigorously disputed the allegations, predicting that they will win in court and reopen the business. They point to positive customer-satisfaction surveys that have been submitted in the lawsuits and suggest they have been unfairly targeted by trial lawyers and a politically motivated attorney general in New York.

“We continue to believe that people got substantial value and that people were overwhelmingly satisfied,” said Trump’s general counsel, Alan Garten. “We are not going to be stopping what we are doing. We are going to continue to zealously defend this case because, at the end of the day, we know we are not being tried by The Washington Post or by CNN — but in a courtroom by a jury.”

Garten acknowledged that Trump never gave away the profits to charity. He said it was always Trump’s intention but that the lawyers leading the class-action suits against the company “got a hold of this and . . . whatever profits existed sort of evaporated.” The unfulfilled promise was first reported last year by Time magazine.

In his defense, Trump has often cited the many positive reviews by former customers. A number of them submitted sworn statements in court explaining their positive experiences at Trump University.

Kissy and Mark Gordon, who own a residential development company in Virginia and jointly signed up for the most expensive program in 2008, said in an interview that they still use techniques they learned from the course today.

“Did we have an expectation that Trump was going to teach us? No,” Kissy Gordon said. “We have a building background and the economy changed, and we were looking for something in the same field to do something with it. So we were there to learn.”

Gregory Leishman, another former customer, recalled speaking to his assigned Trump University mentor on the phone weekly and touring potential properties for purchase with him in New Haven, Conn. “They gave me information I didn’t have otherwise,” he said. “You can probably get all that information from reading books. But Trump University was a crash course. You pay more, you get more.”

Nonetheless, the company has emerged as one of the most potent lines of attack against Trump’s campaign for president.

In the Republican primary, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) cited it as a “fake university” and sought to use it to help build a case that Trump was a “con artist.”

In recent days, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and her campaign have picked up on that theme.

“Trump U is devastating because its a metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans a way to get ahead, but all based on lies,” tweeted press secretary Brian Fallon.

Trump also last week invited a torrent of criticism, including from legal scholars on the left and right, for accusing the judge presiding over the California suits, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, of being biased because he is of Mexican descent. Trump has said that Curiel is “Mexican,” although the 62-year-old was born in Indiana, and that because Trump wants to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border the judge cannot properly do his job.

The focus on Trump University also reignited a controversy in Texas over the decision there by the state attorney general not to file a fraud case against the business. Newly disclosed documents reported by Texas media show that investigators had probed the company for seven months and recommended a lawsuit. The inquiry was shut down when Trump University closed up shop in the state.

Trump later gave $35,000 to the gubernatorial campaign of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. A spokesman for Abbott, now the Republican governor of Texas, has said it’s “absurd” to suggest a connection between the case and the donation that came several years later and that Trump University was “forced out of Texas and consumers were protected.”

Garten also dismissed any connection between the Texas decision and Trump’s donation, saying investigators reviewed “a few complaints . . . and decided not to proceed.”

The Trump University sales pitch began at free seminars, such as one hosted at a Holiday Inn just outside of Washington in 2009.

[In downturn, aspiring moguls turn to Trump U. for wisdom]

A placard outside the ballroom read, “Trump, think BIG.” Inside, aspiring real estate investors heard the theme song from “The Apprentice,” the O’Jays classic, “For the Love of Money.”

Then, a Trump University instructor took the microphone. “All right, you guys ready to be the next Trump real estate millionaire? Yes or No!?” he yelled, according to a Post account at the time.

The purpose of these free 90-minute introductions was not to turn attendees into millionaires, but rather to “set the hook” for future sales, according to employee playbooks.

The playbooks directed leaders of the free seminars to conclude introductory events by getting “in the sales mindset,” “ready to sell, sell, sell!”

Three-day courses typically cost $1,495, the records show. But people who paid to attend them were then urged to sign up for even pricier “elite” programs.

A “workshop enrollment form” distributed to participants laid out the options in categories, starting with the “Trump Gold Elite” program. At $34,995, it was the most expensive option — providing three days of personal, in-the-field mentorship as well as special programs on real estate investment, “wealth preservation” and “creative financing.”

The “Trump Silver Elite” package, priced at $19,495, offered real estate and finance training. The “Trump Bronze Elite,” priced at $9,995, offered similar, but fewer, courses.

Employees distributed “profile” surveys on the first day of the seminars, in which participants would outline their financial goals, as well as current assets and liabilities. Attendees were told that the information would help them figure out how much they had to invest in real estate, according to customer complaints.

But in the evenings, after seminars had concluded for the first day, staff members were instructed to use the information to rank each participant according to assets they had available to spend on more Trump University programs.

“If they can afford the gold elite,” the playbook advised, “don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite.”

A 43-page “sales playbook” offered guidance on using psychological tools to convince students that they needed to sign up for the classes to fulfill their own goals — overcoming their worries that they might not need or be able to afford the classes.

“Customers don’t have needs — they have problems,” the book advised. “Problems are like health. The more a problem hurts now, the more the need for a solution now. And the more it hurts, the more they’ll be prepared to pay for a speedy solution.”

In a section devoted to “negotiating student resistance,” sales people were offered sample responses to common objections from potential students. If a potential customer said he was concerned about going into debt to pay for the classes, staff were advised to needle them: “I see, do you like living paycheck to paycheck?”

If doubts persisted, staffers were advised to invoke the big boss himself.

“Mr. Trump won’t listen to excuses and neither will we,” the instructors were told to say.

Former students have said they were instructed to call their credit card companies on the spot and raise their borrowing limit to pay for the program.

Harris, the former instructor, recalled one of his typical pitches to urge customers to find money for programs: “Do you have any equity on your home? Do you have a 401(k) or IRA?”

Harris, 47, said he was one of Trump University’s biggest sellers. Garten, Trump’s lawyer, said Harris was one of the most highly rated instructors.

Instructors had to sell hard to turn participants at free seminars into paying customers.

For the four years Trump University operated, more than 80,300 people attended the free introductory sessions. Those previews were offered 2,000 times in nearly 700 locations around the country.

But only around 6,000 people paid between $995 and $1,995 to attend three-day seminars, director of operations Mark Covais said in a 2012 affidavit. According to Covais, 572 people paid the full $34,995 for the top-level Trump University mentorship.

The entire program was built around Trump — his picture, his quotes and the promise of obtaining access to his special formula for prosperity.

One ad for the free Trump University seminars that appeared in a Corpus Christi, Tex., newspaper in 2009 promised attendees that they would “Learn from the Master,” below a picture of Trump.

“I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor,” read a quote on the ad, attributed to Trump.

The California class-action lawsuit contains 49 separate instances of Trump University attendees being told their instructor or future mentor was personally chosen by Trump in 2009 alone.

“Donald Trump personally picked me,” one instructor told a group at a free seminar in May 2009, according to a transcript of the session filed as part of the New York case. “He could have picked anybody in this world but he picked me and the reason he picked me is because I’ve been very, very successful helping average people make a lot of money.”

Harris, the former instructor, told an introductory meeting of potential customers in 2009 that Trump’s personal generosity was a core element of the program.

“He did not have to start this university,” Harris told the group, according to a transcript in the New York case. “He does not need the money. . . . He does not get a dime of it. Does everyone understand this? Please say ‘yes.’ He does not need the money.”

In one presentation cited in the New York lawsuit, Harris described Trump as instrumental to his own efforts to turn his life around just after high school.

“I lived on the streets of New York, mostly down in the subways for the first nine months, and I did a lot of things to make some money,” he told a group attending a 2008 event. “And then I met a gentleman and he took me in, and I lived with him for a year and he taught me how to do real estate. He is still my mentor today. So the reason I am here is because Donald Trump picked me.”

In an interview, Harris said he met Trump once in the early 1990s, backstage at an event at the Taj Mahal casino. “Here is the truth,” he said. “When I was at Trump University, I had not one interaction with him ever. Not one.”

In reality, the instructors were not close to Trump, and many were not experts in real estate, according to several ex-staffers who have testified in the lawsuits.

“The Trump University instructors and mentors were a joke,” said Jason Nicholas, who worked for the company for seven months in 2007 and submitted a statement in the lawsuit. “In my opinion, it was just selling false hopes and lies.”

Michael Sexton, who was president of Trump University, acknowledged in sworn testimony in the New York case that none of the event instructors were hand-picked by Trump. Trump told lawyers in California that he would not dispute Sexton’s statement — nor could he remember a series of instructors, including Harris, by name or face.

Trump also did not review course curriculum, Sexton said.

“He would never do that,” Sexton said. “Mr. Trump is not going to go through a 300-page, you know, binder of content.”

Only when it came to marketing material was Trump deeply involved, reviewing every piece of advertisement, Sexton testified.

“Mr. Trump understandably is protective of his brand and very protective of his image and how he’s portrayed,” Sexton said. “And he wanted to see how his brand and image were portrayed in Trump University marketing materials. And he had very good and substantive input as well.”

Garten, the Trump attorney, said Trump was engaged as any CEO would be in the operations. Outside experts designed the curriculum, Garten said, but Trump was “intimately involved” in the process. While Trump may not have selected every instructor, Garten said he was “very much involved in the process and the discussion of what type of instructor was desired.”

At the courses, students were supposed to learn Trump’s secrets of real estate success.

But in sworn testimony in New York, Sexton could recall only one Trump practice that was incorporated into the courses: Invest in foreclosed properties.

The lesson underscored how Trump University, which was formed to teach aspiring business people to profit from the fast-expanding housing market, tailored itself after the 2008 economic crash to offer guidance on profiting from the aftermath.

One ad placed in the San Antonio Express-News in October 2009 promised that seminars would allow participants to “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked experts how you can profit from the largest real estate liquidation in history.”

At a seminar called “Fast Track to Foreclosure,” students were instructed to find OPM, “other people’s money,” to buy homes out of foreclosure at depressed prices, dress them up with new paint and attractive landscaping — then flip them for profit.

Attendees were advised to use credit cards to invest in real estate, and they were told how to persuade credit card companies to raise their credit limits. If a credit card company representative asked for their income, they were advised to add $75,000 in anticipated earnings from their real estate venture before providing a figure for their expected earnings for the year.

Some customers have also alleged they were told there would be a personal appearance at the session by Trump. Instead, they received the opportunity to get their photograph taken with a life-size cardboard cutout of the mogul.

John Brown, a customer who provided a sworn statement in the New York case, described how he “came to realize that I was not adequately trained, which caused me to feel that Trump University had taken advantage of me.”

Brown said he paid $1,495 for a three-day seminar in 2009 and then used multiple credit cards to charge a $24,995 Trump mentorship program. Three years later, he said he had made no real estate investments using Trump knowledge — but was still paying off $20,000 from the courses.

“Because of the Trump name,” he said, “I felt these classes would be the best.”",REAL
"Trump Has Forever Changed American Politics > November 7, 2016, 9:46 pm A+ | a- Warning   
“If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump. 
Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics. 
Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover. 
Bush I and II, Mitt Romney , the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee. 
Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country. 
Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate. 
Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now. 
How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected? 
How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees? 
Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs . 
The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility. 
Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank. 
But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. 
The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak. 
Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with. 
He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are “ rapists .” He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women “pigs.” He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in “ fat-shaming ” a Miss Universe, calling her “Miss Piggy, ” and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the “Access Hollywood” tape with Billy Bush. 
While such “gaffes” are normally fatal for candidates, Trump’s followers stood by him through them all. 
Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump’s support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did? 
Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country. 
Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power. 
Trump’s followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in. 
These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote. 
They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future. 
They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the “deplorables” to fight. 
Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as “America First” and “Make America Great Again” by elites who think 55 million abortions since Roe is a milestone of moral progress. 
And what do they have in common with a woman who thinks partial-birth abortion, which her predecessor in the Senate, Pat Moynihan, called “ infanticide ,” is among the cherished “reproductive rights” of women? 
While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America’s future appears disunited and grim. 
But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots,” to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win? 
No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, “The work goes on, the cause endures.”",FAKE
"With Western and Iranian negotiators racing toward a June 30 deadline to hammer out the final details of a nuclear deal, the mood is tense. Just take a look at Twitter, where Secretary of State John Kerry’s senior communications adviser Marie Harf is feuding with a reporter.",REAL
"The overflow crowds showing up to hear Bernie Sanders these days are a testament not only to his current popularity and the campaign’s social-media savvy but also to the promotional abilities of an alchemy of like-minded interests: progressive activists, labor unions and even Sarah Silverman.

The comedian took to Twitter to let her nearly 6.7 million followers know she would be at a rally for the Democratic presidential hopeful here Monday. That event drew an estimated 27,500 people — about five times as large as any crowd that has turned out for Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“Bernie always seems to be on the right side of history,” Silverman told the boisterous audience at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, noting that the 73-year-old was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, supported gay rights in the 1980s and strongly opposed the Iraq war before most other Americans.

[To his old socialist allies, Sanders has sold out]

All told, Sanders has attracted more than 100,000 people to his rallies in recent weeks, riding a wave of Facebook shares, retweets and old-fashioned word-of-mouth to become by far the biggest draw on the campaign trail.

Such turnout is no guarantee that Sanders will perform well in the crucial early-nominating states — fellow Vermonter Howard Dean preached to similarly large and frenzied audiences in mostly liberal enclaves in 2003, only to collapse as the Iowa caucuses approached.

But it is drawing energy and attention away from Clinton — whose aides peg her largest crowd to date at 5,500 — and exposing a lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among some facets of the Democratic Party. And it is creating a network of small-scale donors and volunteers that could provide Sanders with the resources he will need to compete with the former secretary of state and first lady in the weeks and months ahead.

Roughly 28,000 people showed up for a recent Sanders rally in Portland, Ore. The self-described democratic socialist drew 15,000 in Seattle; 11,000 in Phoenix; 10,000 in Madison, Wis.; 8,000 in Dallas; and 4,500 in New Orleans.

[The Sanders predicament: Where do you fit all those people?]

This weekend, Sanders will host a couple of town hall meetings in Iowa and attend events with other candidates. His campaign has not yet said where his next large-scale rally will be.

In Los Angeles, Sanders’s campaign estimated that 27,500 people were jammed inside and outside the 16,000-seat arena — a figure impossible to independently verify. Nearly every seat appeared to be taken, and the arena floor was packed. Outside, thousands more watched the rally on large screens.

The throngs were greeted by Dante Harris, the leader of a flight attendants union local that had helped promote the rally.

“Did all of you make the trip out here on a Monday night because everything is going well for you and your family?” he asked.

Harris nodded and shouted back. “Workers’ lives matter! . . . Black lives matter! . . . The truth matters!” Struggling to be heard over the ensuing ovation, he said, “We can build a movement with Bernie!”

The audience was noticeably more diverse than those at recent Sanders rallies in Portland, Seattle and other majority-white cities. Los Angeles is majority-minority, with about 44 percent of its population Latino.

[Sanders needs to court black voters. Now he is.]

There were young hipsters and graying hippies. Some wore black T-shirts with red hammers and sickles; others wore black T-shirts that read “Black Lives Matter.” They sang along as the loudspeakers blasted songs by Willie Nelson, Tracy Chapman and Neil Young. One man carried a handmade sign that said “Bernie: Our Only Hope for Change.”

About a week before each Sanders rally, his campaign sets up a Web page announcing the location and blasts out an e-mail to supporters in that geographic area, asking them to RSVP. There are no paid advertisements.

The events are promoted on Facebook, with the campaign enlisting progressive groups and other “friends and allies” to help spread the word, said national field director Phil Fiermonte. From there, things tend to take on a life of their own.

Like Harris, climate-change activist Joe Galliani got a speaking slot in Los Angeles because his union had spread the word about the rally. He earned some of the loudest cheers as he denounced construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and touted the benefits of solar roofs.

Then there was Maria Barrera, the 31-year-old leader of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, who tearfully noted that Congress has not enacted comprehensive immigration reforms since the 1980s. “For the last 25 years, families have been separated,” Barrera said.

[Activists drove Sanders from a stage, 15,000 people awaited him at the next]

The turnout and enthusiasm have been similar at Sanders events across the country.

For the Portland rally, a local group lobbying for a $15-per-hour minimum wage in the city — a cause Sanders supports nationally — drove a sizable contingent of people to the event. In addition, the Oregon Democratic Party sent an e-mail to people in its database letting them know about the event (with the disclaimer that the party is not taking sides in the presidential primary).

Local Democrats who attended the rally said it appeared to draw lots of newcomers to party politics.

“I hardly ever go to these events without running into friends, and I didn’t see many people I knew,” said Sue Hagmeier, the communications officer for the Democratic Party in Multnomah County, which includes Portland.

Hagmeier said she probably received 15 to 20 digital notifications in advance of the event, counting forwarded e-mails and Facebook posts. Sanders supporters also posted fliers on telephone poles and promoted the event by “chalking the sidewalks,” a tradition in a city known for big political rallies. (In 2008, an estimated 75,000 people came to see then-Sen. Barack Obama on the banks of the Willamette River as he closed in on the Democratic presidential nomination.)

Sanders is striving to harness the energy to help him in states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where his crowds have been much smaller but still relatively robust. Volunteers hand out donation envelopes to rally attendees and carefully take down their contact information so they can be solicited for money later.

In Los Angeles, anyone who gave on the spot received a Sanders campaign T-shirt. Speakers asked the crowd to text “Bernie” to a five-digit number. In reply, they would receive text messages seeking money and volunteer time.

When Sanders came onstage, the cheers were deafening. His voice hoarse, the senator told the crowd, “This campaign is not a billionaire-funded campaign — it is a people-funded campaign.”

“There is no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism,” he said. “Or for a higher minimum wage. Or for paid parental leave. Or for at least two weeks of paid vacation. . . . Whenever we stand together, when we do not allow them to divide us up by the color of our skin or our sexual orientation, by whether a man or a woman is born in America or born somewhere else, whenever we stand together, there is nothing, nothing, nothing we cannot accomplish.”

Mike Jelf, 69, said he spent the day before the rally leafleting for the campaign in nearby Torrance. He brought his Saint Bernard, Munro, to the arena, wearing a shirt that said “Saints for Sanders.”

“I want to see a country that’s returned to the people, rather than a plutocratic oligarchy,” Jelf said. “I would like to have a planet that’s habitable for future generations.”

Jean-Luc St. Pierre, 19, said he flew from Maryland to attend the rally. He started a “Baltimore for Bernie” Facebook group targeting people in the home town of former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, another Democratic presidential candidate.

Gloria Rios, from Eagle Rock, Calif., said she joined Sanders’s e-mail list a month ago. “I feel very strongly about him,” she said, adding that she has concerns about Clinton.

What are those concerns? She paused. For a really long time.

“There’s — too much conflict around her,” Rios said. “I’m the kind of person who feels that what you say and do has to match up.”

Sanders, she added, “resonates more closely to me.”

After the rally, the Sanders campaign tweeted a photo showing some of the thousands who had watched from outside the arena.

“Apologies to the large crowds who couldn’t fit indoors at tonight’s rally,” the tweet said. “We’re gonna have to get bigger venues!”",REAL
"in World — by Mirza Yawar Baig — November 10, 2016 
Whew! Finally, the charade is over. Donald Trump is now the President of the United States of America. What does that mean? It means that Simpsons prediction came true: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2146815/the-simpsons-correctly-predicted-a-donald-trump-presidency-16-years-ago-in-episode-set-in-the-near-future/ 
So now you know who to refer to for accurate predictions about the future. Goodbye Tarot cards, et al. In 1995 I recall reading a survey which concluded that America was not likely to be ready for a woman president for the next twenty years. Twenty-one years later, it looks like that prediction was true. Given that women in America to this day are paid 80% of what men are paid, it is not surprising that Americans find it tough to visualize a woman in the White House in any place other than the President’s bed. 
So, what does Trump mean for America, for American Muslims, for Muslims worldwide, for non-whites in America and globally? I am asking this rhetorical question as I see all kinds of doomsday predictions flying around. I apologize for taking a different view. I see the Trump presidency as an opportunity for those who believe in the opposite of everything that Donald Trump promoted in his campaign to put their actions where their mouths are and show that they are as willing to stand up for what they believe in as he was. 
What does Trump mean for America? I hope he will be the best thing that happened to America ever. I hope that he can truly make ‘America Great Again’. I say that because though I am not American (should I say, ‘Thank God?’), I am one who believes that a truly ‘Great America’, can make this world great. The world truly needs to change. We need someone to lead the way to make the world compassionate, caring, fighting against injustice, corruption and poverty; disease and ignorance. Which nation is better suited to lead that fight? America has the resources, the intelligence, the education and the leadership ability which I hope it chooses to exercise. Trump won on the anti-establishment platform. I support that fully. The establishment has shown that what it can do is to fail spectacularly. The economy crashed and Obama rewarded those who crashed it. People were and are homeless when there are empty homes on foreclosed loans enough for every American to have two homes, not only one. Yet they are on the streets. I hope Trump can put Americans back in their own homes. 
Bush father and son, started never ending wars. Obama continued them adding his own flavor to it of drone strikes – using technology to create bug splats (the arrogance is incredible) – thereby escalating the global threat level that comes from driving people to desperation. Obama’s dabbling (what else to call it?) in Middle Eastern politics resulted in continuing the misery for people of Afghanistan and Iraq and new misery for people of Syria and by inference for the rest of the world. And to top it all ISIS came into being because of all of the above. The credit can be shared by all of them. So, Trump standing against the establishment means that he is against all of this. I sincerely hope so. 
All the jingoism that he rode on will get tempered when it comes to facing reality. It is easy to talk about kicking out the Mexicans and so on. But the day he does that, reality will dawn on him and his cohorts like it did on those who voted Pro-Brexit; that the rich need the poor to survive while the poor don’t need the rich. When nice white Americans get to pay $3 per potato, they will realize the value of cheap labor. Meanwhile some contractor will get the contract to build the Wall, which he will do from the Mexican side, no doubt as otherwise his margin will not make it worthwhile. So also, the wonderful idea to outlaw the H-1 visa. I don’t think it will take very long for Trump and his gang to realize that there is a reason there are blond jokes. And that Indians are not blond. Go figure that. 
The good news is that Trump made public what was private – racism, misogyny in a country that never stops ‘trumpeting’ about women’s equality, support for genocide, wars and weapons sales, the evils of unbridled capitalism, locker-room conversations which indicate attitudes – have all come out of the closet and locker-room. Now it is up to those who like to say that they believe in the opposite of all these things, to get off their backsides and bring about change. They can no longer live the lives of pretense and lies that they had become used to, saying, ‘It is not happening here.’ Trump proved that it is happening and has trumpeted it from the top of Trump tower. Sorry for so much bad punning in one breath. But there you go. 
As for Muslims and Trump, believe me Trump is far better than what Muslims have seen in the past. He is far better than what we have today. Take Sisi, the Oily royals who are personal friends of every weapons dealer, the Paki leadership and I can think of several more and Trump begins to look like a choir boy. What will he do that is not already happening? Frankly I don’t know and don’t care to speculate because the prime movers behind Muslim affairs and how they are, are Muslims themselves. Our leadership or more correctly its spectacular failure. Ordinary citizens pay the price, but what’s new about that? The fact remains that until we sort that out and do something about taking charge of our destiny, we must remain satisfied with others writing the script we are compelled to live by. Play endings depend on the script, not on the players. 
India is a classic example where a so-called minority of 200 million is kicked around like a football and used at will by every mercenary politician for his own ends. But Indian Muslims seem to be satisfied with that, so who is anyone else to complain. If you disagree and tell me that they are not satisfied, then I must ask you what it is that prevents them from doing what is glaringly obvious; get their act together, change their leaders and write their own script. 200 million is not a minority. It is a nation. But only if it chooses to be. Same story for Muslims globally. No point in blaming Trump or looking up to him to find solutions. It is our problem and we must solve it, so let us start doing that. 
Two other points: what about wars, global warming and such issues? Well, when you have a nation that lives on perpetual warfare and is supported in that by all the other major industrial nations who either manufacture and sell weapons or buy them, how can you pin it all on Trump? If weapons are made and sold, there will be wars. Wars will happen if they continue to make profits for those who run them. That people die is incidental. Those at the top who laugh all the way to the bank, don’t. Those that do, don’t count. They are ‘collateral’, who are necessary to prove the efficacy of the weapons that were used to vaporize them. If it wasn’t for the bugs who splatted, how would you assess the drones or their operators? The fact that the bugs were innocent or that they had families and so on; well, bugs are bugs. And that’s all that there is to it. 
Global warming? America decided on that when it chose Bush instead of Al Gore. For a minute I thought that was because they got confused because his name is Al Gore like Al Ghurair. But then I realized that it was because he had a terminal problem; he had a brain. See his famous movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and you will see what I mean. https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd If you do nothing else, buy this and see it. At least you will know why you died. Since you chose that, especially Americans, I believe it is only fair that you understand what you did. With Trump, that came out in the open, so get used to summer all year long. You won’t need to go to the French Riviera for a tan. You can get it at home. That is not inconvenient. 
Add to this the effect ofunending wars, refugee movement, changing cultures, security nightmares coming true, widening gap between the rich and the poor, global poverty and hunger, preventable disease which is not prevented because there’s no profit in it – when I think about all this and Trump’s election, Nero comes to mind. Renewing our link with tradition. Let us dance to the tune. What’s the use of fiddling otherwise? 
Final question that everyone is asking, ‘How safe is it to have someone like Trump with his finger on the nuclear button?’ 
My answer is, ‘The one who actually pressed that button was as different from Trump as could be. Yet he did it.’ Let me leave you to figure out the rest. 
Meanwhile it is midnight where I live, far away from Trump and America and time to go to bed. Truly it is said that there is solace in sleep. So, good night, world. Sleep well. As long as you stay asleep you can escape responsibility. 
Mirza Yawar Baig is based in Hyderabad, India and is the founder and President of Yawar Baig & Associates; an international leadership consulting organization. He can be reached at yawar@yawarbaig.com Share this:",FAKE
"Secretary of State John Kerry found himself on the defensive Thursday at a Senate hearing where he was hard-pressed to find support for the Iran nuclear deal from either side of the aisle -- and sharply sparred with Republicans who accused him of being ""fleeced"" and ""bamboozled.""

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was the first on the controversial deal to lift economic and other sanctions in exchange for concessions of the Islamic state's nuclear program. With Congress taking up the deal and expected to vote on it sometime in September, the hearing underscored the deep resistance the Obama administration faces from both parties.

""From my perspective, Mr. Secretary, I'm sorry ... I believe you've been fleeced,"" Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told Kerry, claiming the agreement paves the path for Iran to eventually develop a nuclear bomb.

Critics repeatedly suggested the Obama administration's negotiating team gave in to pressure from the Iranians on key points. They question whether sanctions indeed can be reinstated once they're lifted; whether Iran might be able to stall international inspectors; and whether Iran might be closer to a weapon once the deal expires.

Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, said: ""You guys have been bamboozled.""

Kerry, though, vigorously defended the agreement, calling it ""fantasy, plain and simple,"" to think the United States failed to hold out for a better deal at the bargaining table.

""Let me underscore, the alternative to the deal we've reached isn't what I've seen some ads on TV suggesting disingenuously,"" he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ""It isn't a quote better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran's complete capitulation.""

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz also said the deal is not ""built on trust.""

Some lawmakers tried to play referee when the hearing got heated. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said the remarks from Corker and Risch were ""disrespectful and insulting.""

""If you were bamboozled, the world has been bamboozled -- that's ridiculous,"" Boxer told Kerry.

Kerry still had to contend with skeptical Democrats, notably Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who questioned whether the language in the deal is tough enough and like Corker said the deal aids Iran in building an ""industrial-scale"" nuclear program.

Kerry earlier warned that Iran will not come back to the negotiating table to pursue a new deal, voicing frustration that: ""We've got 535 secretaries of state.""

The hearing comes as lawmakers raise new concerns about alleged secret ""side deals"" struck with Tehran over its nuclear program.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., first brought attention to them Tuesday, saying they learned from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that there were two ""side deals"" between Iran and the IAEA.

According to the lawmakers, one agreement covers inspection of the Parchin military complex, and the other concerns potential military aspects of Iran's nuclear program. On the former, they said, Iran would be able to strike a separate arrangement with the IAEA concerning inspections at Parchin.

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell joined Cotton and Pompeo in sending a letter to President Obama on Wednesday requesting that the agreements be made available to Congress so that they can be reviewed.

""We request you transmit these two side agreements to Congress immediately so we may perform our duty to assess the many important questions related to the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action],"" the letter says.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice, while defending the overall nuclear agreement, appeared to acknowledge the existence of the side deals on Wednesday. She said the matter of the Iran nuclear program's ""possible military dimensions"" (PMD) has long been an issue between Iran and the IAEA. She said they ""negotiated and concluded an agreement to deal with this issue of PMD, which was one of the major sticking points in our dealings.""

She added: ""These documents are not public, but nonetheless, we have been briefed on those documents, we know their contents, we're satisfied with them and we will share the contents of those briefings in full in a classified session with the Congress. So there's nothing in that regard that we know that they won't know.""

Pompeo also asked Kerry about the secret deals in a briefing Wednesday and said afterwards that Kerry ""confirmed that there were in fact side deals and himself had not seen the agreement.""

""I was incredibly surprised to learn there were components of the deal that Congress was not going to be privy to,"" Pompeo said, adding that he had expected that American negotiators would have demanded to see the side deals being cut.

Kerry said after Thursday's hearing, though, ""there are no side deals.""

The letter to Obama expressed concern that Congress was being kept in the dark.

""Most troubling, Iran and the IAEA reached agreement to resolve issues related to research at Parchin, but Congress will not have the ability to review this agreement, nor will we know the results of the IAEA's assessment until December 15,"" the letter says.

It goes on to request access to the side deals so that Congress can effectively review the deal as a whole:

""Failure to produce these two side agreements leaves Congress blind on critical information regarding Iran's potential path to being a nuclear power and will have detrimental consequences for the ability of members to assess the JCPOA,"" the letter says.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton told a joke. Speaking to a roomful of Goldman Sachs bankers in June 2013, Clinton said that Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein could leave the Wall Street firm that’s made him a billionaire to start a soup kitchen:

This exchange was written down by Clinton’s aides as they gathered information on what parts of her paid Wall Street speeches could prove damaging should they leak to the press. Her team filed it under the heading, ""AWKWARD.""

This ""AWKWARD"" quote and hundreds of other previously hidden nuggets about Clinton have spilled out into public view recently. Over the last two weeks, Julian Assange’s whistleblower platform WikiLeaks has published about 20,000 pages of emails illegally stolen from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair.

The strangest thing about the ensuing uproar is that none of the Podesta emails has so far actually broken any fresh scandals about the woman on track to be the next president. Instead, they’ve mostly revealed an underbelly of ugliness to the multiple Clinton controversies that we’ve already known about: the questionable relationship between the Clinton Foundation and its donors, Clinton’s ease with powerful interests on Wall Street, her ties to wealthy campaign contributors.

The Goldman soup kitchen joke is a perfect example. If there’s one thing to really get mad about here, it’s something we’ve known for years — that Clinton took millions from big Wall Street banks right before running for president. Seeing her and Wall Street titans share a laugh about helping the hungry might turn your stomach, but the most important question — was it wrong for Clinton to take big checks from Goldman right before running? — is in no way new. (Clinton’s campaign refused to comment on individual emails, instead blaming the Russians for hacking the emails and providing them to WikiLeaks.)

This is, from what we’ve seen so far, the real story of WikiLeaks’ Podesta emails. Yes, they have not found any major ""bombshells."" No, they’re not going to sink Clinton’s campaign. But by filling in the storylines that have long dogged her campaign with new and vivid detail, we are getting our clearest picture yet of how the sausage — or, if you prefer, the creamy risotto — gets made in Clinton-world.

It can be an ugly sight.

I’ve now read hundreds of the Podesta emails, as well as upward of 60 stories from across left-wing, mainstream, and conservative media outlets about what they entail.

I should stress that what I’ve found is far from all bad. Dozens of these emails show Clinton’s team genuinely striving to discover the correct position on an issue. Many of them show real, determined efforts to find the right solution to some public policy crisis. In general, especially compared to the vicious infighting that characterized her 2008 presidential run, you come away from the Podesta emails thinking that Clinton has assembled an admiringly loyal group of aides that believes in the candidate and the mission of the campaign. There’s some backbiting, but you could imagine far, far worse.

Then there’s the other stuff — the emails Podesta presumably wish never leaked. To help make sense of what we’ve learned, I’ve broken out the interesting new bits into what I think can be more-or-less characterized as four distinct categories:

Vox reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment, and spokesperson Glen Caplin replied that they are ""still not authenticating any individual emails."" The campaign also referred foundation-related questions to the foundation itself, and referenced several times that the leaks were tied to a ""Russian attempt to influence our election."" As it has to other reporters, the Clinton campaign did not dispute the accuracy of any of the individual emails.

We should be clear that these Podesta email leaks have nothing to do with the multiple other ""Clinton email"" scandals percolating over the past few years. So they aren’t, as some news outlets have incorrectly reported, related to the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private server or allegations that she went around transparency laws.

Instead, since these emails emerge from the private account of Clinton’s campaign chair, they tend to tell us far more about candidate Clinton than they do about Secretary of State Clinton.

There is, however, one exception to that general rule: the Clinton Foundation.

Since the campaign began, the Clinton Foundation has been at the center of an intense debate. The most extreme critics, like Donald Trump, have alleged that Clinton used the state department to transactionally reward the charity’s donors (there’s no evidence for that). Meanwhile, the campaign and foundation have fallen back on one consistent defense — that there’s been no proof of a quid pro quo between donor and foundation.

The Clinton Foundation really did do inarguably life-saving work. But good government experts have argued that the Clintons accepted private donations in a way that they should have known would have created dangerous conflicts of interest. This more nuanced attack faults the Clinton Foundation for dangerously blurring the distinction between private and public.

The Podesta leaks back up that story.

One way it does so is by uncovering a private audit conducted by a widely-respected New York City law firm. The review concluded that the Clinton Foundation’s board had failed to oversee potential conflicts of interest, and that some donors expected ""quid pro quo benefits."" ""Interviewees reported conflicts of those raising funds or donors, some of whom may have an expectation of quid pro quo benefits in return for gift,"" the audit found.

It’s not clear they received them. but either way the audit is a striking confirmation that even the attorneys hired by Clinton recognized the danger in the relationship between donor and foundation.

Then there’s another disclosure emerging from the Podesta emails: that Qatari officials sought to present Bill Clinton with a $1 million gift on his birthday on during his wife’s tenure as secretary of state. As the New York Times noted, this revelation suggests that foreign governments were able to gain an audience with Bill Clinton in exchange for a check. (The Times couldn’t confirm if the $1 million check was ever cashed.)

The last revelation in the leaks about the foundation may also be the most unusual: Chelsea Clinton apparently was running around raising the alarm bell over possible conflicts of interest, suggesting the Clintons themselves were aware of the potential problems. (Politico’s Kenneth Vogel has a detailed blow-by-blow of Chelsea’s concerns over the overlapping roles of a consulting firm named Teneo.)

Nothing here represents a major revelation. If you weren’t bothered by the Clinton Foundation before, this probably isn’t going to trouble you. But if you were, having an audit and Chelsea Clinton share your fears will fuel the sense that something suspicious was afoot here.

Over the course of the election, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders leveled a similar critique of Clinton: that she’s too wedded to the ""political establishment.""

For Sanders, that usually meant that Clinton didn’t have the independence to challenge powerful actors on Wall Street and in Washington, DC. Trump has used similar rhetoric, going after ""Crooked"" Clinton for her big dollar campaign contributors.

Whatever you think of the merits of those attacks, it’s clear that the majority of the American people think it’s correct, at least in broad strokes. Seven in 10 voters consider Clinton part of the establishment. Just 30 percent trust her to take on special interests.

It’s an impression that the Podesta emails only deepen — even if they don’t provide ground-breaking new controversies around it.

Again, none of this is revelatory. Nobody who has closely followed Clinton will be shocked to find her campaign was attuned to the wishes of donors. Her affinity for Israel is well known. Critics of her approach to campaign finance are mad about the decision to take money from big donors — not the internal discussion over whether or not to do so.

But watching how all of this unfolded — seeing for yourself how Clinton spoke gently to Wall Street — won’t make the disclosures any easier for her detractors to swallow. It’s a confirmation of what we already know, but that doesn’t make it any less astonishing, at least for Clinton’s critics.

Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street and big donors are certainly part of the story revealed by the Podesta leaks. But only one part.

Indeed, dozens of interesting tidbits have also emerged that allow us to see inside the Clinton campaign’s infrastructure. They have showed that, at some times, the Clinton campaign openly discussed the ""political"" implications of her deciding to get behind one policy or another. They also show the Clinton campaign at other times responding to more high-minded policy concerns.

In one leak, for instance, Clinton’s team discussed at length whether they should endorse the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which would restrict commercial banks’ ability to engage in some investment activity.

Clinton aide Mandy Grunwald worries that reversing course and backing the law would lead to ""phoniness charges,"" while not doing so could lead Sen. Elizabeth Warren to endorse Bernie Sanders. (""Jake"" in the following exchange is Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton adviser):

Then there’s a lengthy exchange in Clinton-world about a carbon tax proposal. As Vox’s Brad Plumer explains, the emails show how fears of embracing an unpopular idea dominated the internal discussion. Robby Mook, a top Clinton aide, said that embracing the carbon tax would prove ""lethal"" in the general election:

But other revelations have pointed to how the Clinton campaign got behind positions it found genuinely worthwhile. In one exchange highlighted by the Washington Post, the Clinton team talked about forming the ""signature pillars of a future progressive agenda"" like a ""significant middle-class tax cut.""

The exchange about the carbon tax did involve frank political talk. But as Plumer also noted, Podesta elsewhere makes genuine efforts to convince his colleagues about the menace posed by climate change and the need for genuinely huge solutions to address it:

There are other examples. A debate over the ""Cadillac Tax,"" which taxes the most expensive health insurance plans, showed twin impulses fighting against each other. As Vox has written, the tax is widely seen as an essential way to raise revenue for Obamacare. But it’s also hated by unions, whose votes and endorsements Clinton wanted to cultivate during the primary.

The emails reveal Clinton’s policy advisers arguing for a ""fix it"" strategy, while the ""political team"" pushed harder for her to call for a full repeal. (They ultimately came down fully on the political side):

None of Clinton’s critics will be surprised to find her team debating political ramifications of certain policies — it’s certainly widely understood that this is how almost all politicians make their decisions.

But a fair appraisal of the emails doesn't reduce Team Clinton to opportunism. Even behind closed doors, they appear motivated by a genuine embrace of progressive beliefs and causes. At least much of the time, that is. But not always.

Let's be honest: Everyone who has worked in a big enough office has said or written something about a co-worker he or she wouldn't say to that co-worker’s face.

Clinton-world is no exception. But most offices don’t have to deal with essentially all of their internal communications being dumped unceremoniously on the web. Team Clinton’s internal gossip and snipings have been neatly organized into a searchable database that the whole world can use.

These are, understandably, the best catnip for reporters. Like the other revelations, they also don’t tend to reveal anything genuinely earth-shattering. But by laying bare the bitter grievances we (generally) already knew about, these emails are fueling added frustration and old grudges. For instance, the emails include:

This kind of stuff, of course, has the least to do with public policy or the positions of the campaign.

But this category of emails is perhaps most interesting to people who work for Clinton. In a terrific article in Politico, Annie Karni and Glenn Thrush detailed the psychological impacts it’s having on the Clinton campaign:

As Karni and Thrush note, this should be a heady time for Clinton-world. She’s cruising to victory in the polls. Donald Trump has sunk in the polls, and Clinton has trounced him in three consecutive presidential debates.

In general, the critics most upset about the Podesta emails are the ones who have confirmed what Clinton’s inner-circle thought about them. Ironically, that dynamic now appears to apply to Clinton’s own team as well.

Two clear conclusions jump out when trying to determine what these emails tell us about a future Clinton presidency.

One is that Clinton appears genuinely responsive to pressure from outside groups. Her team has clear goals, but they’re also closely attuned to polls and to winning over the organizations (union backers, environmentalist groups, Black Lives Matter activists) whose support they think they need. In private conversations, Clinton tells the audiences in front of her more or less what they want to hear.

But while this appreciation for her listeners may reflect political savvy, it also suggests a flexibility that may worry those on her left. What happens if President Clinton gets polling suggesting a majority of voters support slashing entitlements? What if the country clamors for a war in Iran? What if she can win over Republican voters by tacking to the center?

And second, more than anything, the Podesta emails show how Clinton is the transactional politician many have long suspected. That’s a dispiriting conclusion for some who may wish she was a pure progressive. But it also helps clarify the battle lines for what looks like the coming Clinton administration — persuade her team they need you, and you might have a shot at getting them on your side.",REAL
"  Have you heard of Dr. William Thompson? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. His story was completely ignored by mainstream media outlets, the same way that they recently ignored the fact that the Pentagon paid a PR firm half a billon dollars to make fake terrorist/news videos.   Dr. William Thompson is a longtime senior CDC scientist. He has published some of the most commonly cited pro-vaccine studies — studies which purport to show absolutely no link between the MMR vaccine and autism, for example. Two studies he and his co-author published in 2004 and 2007 (CDC studies) were the most commonly cited studies used by the scientific community to debunk the controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine/autism link. ( Thompson, et al. 2007, Price, et al. 2010 , Destefano, et al. 2004 ) The study concluded that “the evidence is now convincing that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine does not cause autism or any particular subtypes of autism spectrum disorder.” ( source ) A decade later, Dr. Thompson came out publicly admitting that that it was “the lowest point ” in his career when he “went along with that paper.” He went on to say that he and the other authors “didn’t report significant findings” and that he is “completely ashamed” of what he did, that he was “complicit and went along with this,” and regrets that he has “been a part of the problem.” ( source )( source )( source ) A study with revised information and no data omission was published by Dr. Brian Hooker (a contact of Dr. Thompson) in the peer reviewed journal Translational Neurodegeneration, and it found a 340% increased risk of autism in African American boys receiving the Measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine on time. The study has since been retracted during the same time of this controversy.   You can read the full study HERE , although, unsurprisingly, it has since been retracted. Thompson’s attorneys, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Bryan Smith of Morgan & Morgan, also released a statement from Dr. Thompson, which mentioned Hooker: “ I have had many discussions with Dr. Brian Hooker over the last 10 months regarding studies the CDC has carried out regarding vaccines and neurodevelopmental outcomes including autism spectrum disorders. I share his belief that CDC decision-making and analyses should be transparent.” ( source ) Even pro-vaccine politicians were contacted, as these documents were sent to Congress. One of them reads as followed, as illustrated by congressman Bill Posey : “The [CDC] co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the [MMR vaccine] study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can.” CDC Blocking Testimony Disconcertingly, Thomas Frieden (see picture above), the Director of the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), has blocked Dr. Thompson’s attempt to testify on scientific fraud and the destruction of evidence by senior CDC officials. Attorneys Smith and Kennedy have been seeking to have Thompson testify on medical malpractice, specifically with regard to fraud in a series of studies that found no link between vaccines and autism, which are cited earlier in the article. Mr. Kennedy writes that, according to Thompson, “for the past decade his superiors have pressured him and his fellow scientists to lie and manipulate data about the safety of the mercury-based preservative thimerosal to conceal its causative link to a suite of brain injuries, including autism.” Ecowatch , Dr. Frieden said that “Dr. William Thompson’s deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHS [Health and Human Services].” Despite the fact that Thompson revealed a casual link between vaccines and autism, or autistic features, Frieden stated that “Dr William Thompson’s deposition testimony would not substantially promote the objectives of CDC or HHD.” The case seeking the testimony of Dr. Thompson is from the family of 16-year-old Yates Hazlehurst. A lawsuit is currently underway implying that Yates is autistic as a result of vaccine administration that occurred in 2001. Related CE Article With More Information 
The Top 6 Reasons Why More Parents Are Choosing To Not Vaccinate Their Children Some Quotes That Really Make You Think “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – ( source )( source ) Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal ( source ) “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet ( source )",FAKE
"Comments 
The alt-right and other Trump supporters were flush with excitement yesterday as their online echo chamber resounded with stories that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted on the basis of the newly discovered emails on Anthony Weiner’s computer. Today, of course, we learned that this was nothing but a bold-faced lied. While many of the more obscure right -wing blogs named nothing but imaginary sources to support their outrageous claims , the most legitimate source of the false story was none other than Fox News. 
On November 2 Fox News’ Bret Baier claimed that, according to two anonymous sources within the FBI, the agency’s investigation of Clinton would “continue to likely an indictment.” The very next day reality forced him to walk back those claims, which he called “inartful,” acknowledging that “that’s not the process.” 
Nonetheless, Baier did not entirely disavow his ruse of an imminent Clinton indictment, maintaining that “there is confidence in the evidence.” Given that Clinton’s indictment has been impending for months in the right-wing universe one would think that these shameless schemers would have wised up to the fact that it’s not going to happen – and for good reason . Instead, every time there is the slightest mention of Clinton’s emails, no matter how vague and clearly inconsequential , the alt-right rumor mill kicks into overdrive on its vicious crusade to smear the potential first female president in any way possible. 
In reality, there is absolutely nothing so far to suggest that there is anything incriminating in the most recent batch of Clinton emails, and it has become increasingly clear that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of the renewed investigation was nothing but a cynical and hypocritical political ploy. In part the announcement was designed to fuel a new Republican storyline that Clinton is unfit for the presidency because she is under federal investigation. The demagogues making these claims conveniently ignore the fact that Trump is under investigation in no fewer than 75 cases , including the rape of a 13 year-old girl. 
Another disconcerting storyline in yesterday’s firestorm of right-wing rumors is the political interference of Trump supporters in the FBI. If Baier’s so-called anonymous sources really were FBI agents, it would represent yet another recent example of meddling in the presidential election by Trump supporters at the supposedly impartial agency. In any case, the endless lies and distortions of the right-wing pseudo-media, from Fox News down to the lowliest blog, are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people.",FAKE
"Q. If Trump wins can it be considered a repudiation of the national news mediocrity? A. I certainly hope so! 
The performance of the major news outlets this election cycle has been something to behold. It’s been the worst, most shallow undertaking I can remember. And I remember the treatment Goldwater got. 
I wrote here on Lew’s blog last week about the hysterical reaction Gloria Borger and others had to Trump’s unwillingness to promise to respect the election results in advance. 
They acted like panicked teenage girls in a horror movie. 
Pat Buchanan explains the media’s panic. “The establishment is terrified that it has lost the country,” he says. “The country no longer believes in its leadership.” 
About time! 
Now with the Comey development it won’t be long before Dems start talking about a rigged system. 
Another moment of equal media idiocracy: When the Clintonistas blamed Russia for spilling DNC emails that showed its secret collaboration with Hillary and against Bernie Sanders. 
Trump said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing!” 
The line wasn’t well-delivered. But it was still funny. 
Even so, the joke was lost on the usual suspects. I watched CNN’s Jake Tapper’s visage grow dark as he expressed grave concern that Trump was inviting the Russians to interfere in our election. 
The whole thing brings to mind an old vaudeville comedy routine with, let’s say, Joe and Moe: Joe: I’m offended by the media’s alarmist reaction to Trump’s email joke. Moe: Are you offended as a Trump supporter? Joe: No, I’m offended as a person with a sense of humor! 11:09 am on October 29, 2016",FAKE
"October 27, 2016 
I don't think it's possible that there is a man on DS that hates Smerconish more than I do. I wanted so bad to prove that he's a jew but couldn't find proof. The syphilitic, slimy, whining quintessence of his soul, however, is jewish through and through...",FAKE
"I’m running on about an hour and a half of sleep and my nails are damn near chewed to the bone. This because, as a diehard Cubs fan, I was up until nearly 1:00 AM working to come to grips with what I had just witnessed. Once I finally went to bed I found myself tossing and turning so at 3:30 I said screw it… I’m heading to the office.
My beloved Cubbies had just won the World Series, defeating the Cleveland Indians in what is likely to go down as one of the most EPIC game 7 battles in the history of professional baseball. The Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908, making this Championship something we Cubs fans could only dream about until it actually happened last night.
As prediction hub FiveThirtyEight put it just a few days ago… the chances were slim. How slim? Slimmer than the odds of Trump winning next Tuesday.

An impossible scenario just become very possible. And fortunately for America, another seemingly impossible scenario is now suddenly started to look very possible.
A Hillary Clinton indictment is now likely .
This coming via FBI sources telling Fox News host Bret Baier that the FBI is moving towards what is “likely an indictment.”
Baier’s report includes the following key points .
1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year.
2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time.
3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature.
4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department.
5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.
That’s a pretty strong case for indictment. Of course, the corrupted DOJ can still do everything in its power to block justice, but it now appears the FBI is throwing DOJ demands out the window.
Gonna be an interesting few days ahead, folks. For those of us who are Cubs fans and news junkies sleep is not on the agenda.
",FAKE
"Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation 
Both inside the US and around the world, political observers have been waiting a long time for an election that would promise relief from the most noxious features of the American system. Alas, while it is high time that the US lead the way in reversing these trends, the outcome of the 18 month struggle to elect a new administration looks likely to scuttle all hopes for serious leadership and reform. 
I'm looking forward to a market crash to awaken the electorate out of our rut, honestly. Because if a Loony Tunes candidate {meaning Donald Trump – DK} doesn't give Democrats the courage to put up a push-left candidate {Bernie Sanders, or some facsimile – DK}, then catastrophe is the only correction we have left. – commenter «Snapshotist» 
Both inside the US and around the world, political observers have been waiting a long time for an election that would promise relief from the most noxious features of the American system, such as neoliberal economic austerity policies that hamstring governments' ability to maintain basic services and safety nets, military aggression and destabilization of regimes across a wide swathe of the globe, wholesale violation of privacy via NSA surveillance, trade agreements designed to maximize the power of international corporations over national governments, facilitation of fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure in the face of dire climate change consequences, a financial system sucking wealth away from the population and accelerating wealth inequality, and more. 
Alas, while it is high time that the US lead the way in reversing these trends, the outcome of the 18 month struggle to elect a new presidential administration looks likely to scuttle all hopes for serious leadership and reform on any of these critical issues. It follows, therefore, that in the near term (if not longer), progress will not be possible unless new forms of politics arise to deliver pressure from below on Washington, DC. But how much hope can we have for that? When will see this again? Crowds lining up hours in advance for a Bernie Sanders rally, New York, April 13th, 2016 
A Trump Contribution? 
By all indications, Clinton will win the election on November 8th, and virtually every political commentator will rejoice at the apparent demise of the Donald Trump phenomenon. As strange as it may seem, however, some of the passion of the Trump movement could provide fuel to the fire of reformist politics in the US. To be sure, Trump's campaign has gone far towards legitimizing and normalizing bigotry and ignorance, and this residue will persist. But Trump has also galvanized powerful resentment against an insular, self-serving political class. This sentiment dovetails with a major thrust of Bernie Sanders's advocacy of social democratic policies and empowerment of the population to reverse the accumulation of all power in the hands of wealthy campaign donors and corporations. 
Further, let us not forget, Trump has consistently promoted the idea of shelving antagonism towards Russia in favor of cooperation, together with reducing the role of the US military around the world. The point is not whether Trump genuinely means what he says (although one of his advisors who spoke with us insists that he does). The point is that Trump brought these positions out into the light, which has allowed increasing numbers of Americans to question the nation's reflexive reliance on military might, expansion, and aggression as a pillar of its foreign policy. If the left is truly serious about unseating Washington's neoliberal status quo, it should make every effort to harness some of the frustration that coalesced into the Trump movement towards broadly shared goals – getting the money out of politics being the most obvious. 
The Gullible Left 
For the moment, of course, the huge majority of the left is consumed with the impending election, and with the perceived imperative of defeating Trump by supporting Clinton as the «lesser evil» candidate. At first glance this seems eminently reasonable. But the certitude that has swept the country regarding the preferability of Clinton over Trump ought to give us pause. For those paying close attention, it is not necessarily clear which candidate is the lesser evil. The flaws marring each candidate are so grotesque, and the variables confronting the next administration are so uncertain, that one can easily support a case in either direction. A small segment of the left will reject both Brahmins and cast affirmative votes for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, of course. But the readiness of much of the left – the gullible left – to ignore Clinton's corruption, crimes, and cynicism is preemptively sapping the strength of the resistance that will be needed to push Madame President to pursue even half-baked progressive reforms on any issue. 
Meanwhile, as the gullible left and center coalesce meekly around Clinton, the real election is taking place behind the scenes: Clinton and her inner circle are lining up the key personnel who will largely determine the course of policy in her administration. Thanks to Wikileaks' publication of Clinton's current campaign chairman, John Podesta, we know very well that this process is far advanced by now. As David Dayen put it recently in « The New Republic »: 
If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors.... Who gets these cabinet-level and West Wing advisory jobs matters as much as policy papers or legislative initiatives. It will inform executive branch priorities and responses to crises. It will dictate the level of enforcement of existing laws. It will establish the point of view of an administration and the advice Hillary Clinton will receive. Its importance cannot be stressed enough, and the process has already begun. This is a fight over who dominates the Democratic Party’s policy thinking in the short and long term. 
Dayen adds that «...if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late». Well, one wonders why Dayen is so optimistic. Another Wikileaks release revealed that Clinton had more or less decided on Tim Kaine as her running mate all the way back in mid-2015 (!). Surely many of the top positions have long since been scripted, and for those still in play, can anyone – even David Dayen -- imagine public pressure making a difference in the selection? 
In short, the world should prepare itself for a Hillary Clinton administration that is full of Washington establishment clones and is diligently protected from criticism by a like-minded media establishment. Moreover, and more important, we can already see the Clinton administration maneuvering to avoid the gridlock that minimized President Obama's effectiveness by pushing key foreign and domestic policies further to the right, into the arms of the Republican Party. It is not difficult to locate telling indications on this score... «Sorry, I can't vote for Mrs. Strangelove» – commenter «natureboy» , renouncing Clinton for her hawkishness 
The implications of Clinton's ascendancy on US foreign policy are already coming into view, and they are more than a little disturbing. An article from Washington Post White House correspondent Greg Jaffe on October 20th delivered news just as bad as we expected: 
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House.... the bipartisan nature of the recent recommendations, coming at a time when the country has never been more polarized, reflects a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite. This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East… Taken together, the studies and reports call for more-aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe. 
Clinton is preparing a foreign policy more aggressive than Obama's, in other words. And – take note – she'll enjoy bipartisan support for it. «The entire concept is a form of corporate blackmail» -- David Dayen , characterizing Clinton's preparation of a tax repatriation policy that will permanently lower the tax obligations of large corporations. 
As far as domestic policy is concerned, meanwhile, all recent revelations point to a posture even more friendly to large corporate interests than that which has obtained under Obama. For example, an important investigation from David Dayen just a few days ago exposed the Clinton circle's coordination with top Democrats and Republicans in preparing an enormous and permanent reduction on taxation of profits corporations earn abroad. As journalist Matt Taibbi once described a similar proposal: «Let's give a big tax break to the biggest tax cheats». 
Yes, we can expect a few corporate-written trade deals to follow the tax reduction on profits earned overseas. And Wall Street will not be left out. Clinton has many options to assist her finance sector sponsors, including an important plan David Sirota and Avi Asher-Shapiro revealed last week. It would deliver hundreds of billions of dollars worth of individuals' retirement accounts into the hands of asset managers employing aggressive alternative investment strategies, and net the managers billions a year in fees. Campaign contributions do indeed bring corporations colossal returns in the US. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
"— Brad Thor (@BradThor) October 28, 2016 Men ruin everything with their dicks https://t.co/vFLzBWDEpO 
This FBI-investigation-into-Hillary-plot just got a whole lot thicker, so to speak: NYT alert: new emails were discovered while investigating into ANTHONY WEINER SEXTING SCANDAL. 
— Andrew Clark 🎃 (@AndrewHClark) October 28, 2016 
Wait, what? New emails tied to the FBI's Clinton inquiry were discovered during the investigation into Anthony Weiner's sexting https://t.co/FMHEkn03B0 
Dude: Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that the new emails uncovered in the closed investigation into Hillary Clinton ’s use of a private email server were discovered after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices belonging to Huma Abedin, an aide to Mrs. Clinton, and her husband, Anthony Weiner. … In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. was taking steps to “determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He said he did not know how long it would take to review the emails, or whether the new information was significant. Clinton picks up @nytimes 
— David Rutz (@DavidRutz) October 28, 2016 
What more can you say about this? 
— Kemberlee Kaye (@KemberleeKaye) October 28, 2016 Oh my god https://t.co/Qa8JRQuO8f",FAKE
"More Americans think that the media are too easy on candidates than in 2012 or 2008, according to a Pew Research Center poll. But they're also more likely to say that 'their' candidates are treated too harshly.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (l.), is interviewed by co-hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie on the NBC 'Today' television program, in New York, on April 21, 2016.

Both presidential campaigns have been outspoken in saying that they think the media are too hard on them. But do Americans agree?

More Americans think the media are letting presidential candidates off easy than in previous years, according to a poll released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday. In the case of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, 27 percent of Americans think the media is too easy on him, compared to 20 percent who reported feeling that way about coverage of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and 15 percent for John McCain in 2008. Some 33 percent of Americans think coverage of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is too easy, compared to 28 percent and 31 percent for President Obama in 2012 and 2008, respectively, according to the survey.

Positive attitudes toward the media have reportedly been declining since the 1970s. Less than one-third of people now say that they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media. Scholars say this is part of a larger trend in poor attitudes toward institutions generally, compounded by a rise in the number of media outlets and the polarization of these outlets.

When people ""go into their newsfeed or turn on the TV and they're getting information from a wide array of sources, and some of them are less than reputable ... it contributes to the sense"" that all media is untrustworthy, David Jones, a professor of political science at James Madison University, told The Christian Science Monitor’s Gretel Kauffman earlier this month.

A question about Americans’ attitude toward “the media” could refer to information expressing all kinds of opinions, in forums as large as a TV network or national newspaper or as small as a Twitter feed.

This polarity and range of sources could help explain why rising numbers of Americans also think that “the media” is being unnecessarily harsh – on their chosen candidates, that is. Pew reported that three-in-ten Democrats and independents who lean Democratic are likely to see coverage of Mrs. Clinton as too tough. Nearly half of Republican surveyed – 46 percent – believe that coverage of Mr. Trump has been too tough.

Finding the middle ground certainly isn’t easy. And nowhere is this clearer than in the high-stakes world of interviews and presidential debates. The Associated Press highlighted the demands placed on moderators with these guidelines offered during the 2012 election cycle:

Craft sharp questions to get the candidates to talk, while being meticulously fair not to challenge one more than another. Keep an eye on the clock so one candidate doesn't get to hog the time. Don't be bullied; be firm in forcing the candidates to move on. But be flexible enough to keep a productive discussion flowing. Know the difference. Keep the focus off yourself. And do it all on live television before some 60 million people.

Matt Lauer’s performance at NBC’s Commander-in-Chief forum earlier this month was widely panned, with critics saying that he focused too heavily on Clinton’s email server and failed to fact-check some of Trump’s statements. Candy Crowley, whose moderation of a 2012 debate Rush Limbaugh described as “an act of journalistic terror,” later told the Associated Press that she knew from the beginning that “somebody is always going to be unhappy no matter what you do.”

For some, the media’s election coverage – and Americans’ trust in the media on the basis of this coverage – is critical to American democracy.

""Citizens need information, they need to get it from the media. The First Amendment was set up to create a media that served as a surrogate role for the public, and if the public is not engaged and they move on and they're not consuming news ... it's really a disservice and it hurts our democracy a lot,"" Jeff McCall, a professor of communication at DePauw University, told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly following a 2014 Gallup poll.",REAL
"By Brig Asif H. Raja on October 31, 2016 
Asif Haroon Raja 
Editor’s note: Both BG Raja and Imran Khan are VT followers and personal friends of the Senior Editor. This is a vital untold story. IK isn’t returning emails and it would be nice to hear his side. Our bureau chief in Islamabad, Raja Mujtaba, has been gone for two years now, a huge loss for VT. 

Imran Khan (IK) and his partner Sheikh Rashid pursuing politics of agitation since mid-2014 are once again on a rampage and are determined to lock down Islamabad (Isbd) and seize power by force. Their tantrums have shot up the political temperature to a boiling point and has intensified uncertainty and insecurity. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Chief Minister Pervez Khattak along with PTI workers is exultantly moving in a convoy from Peshawar to reach Bani Gala and participate in the already declared November 2, D-Day for the final showdown with the government (govt) at D-chowk. He has puerilely given an ethnic color to his march by playing the Pashtun card. He and his convey has been greeted by the Punjab Police with tear gas shells at Attock Bridge and Hazro interchange. The PML-Q, PAT and PSP have pledged support to IK but from a distance. The PPP is gearing up to add fuel to fire. Maulana Fazlur Rahman led JUI-F has stood up in support of the beleaguered PML-N and has warned PTI that its march to Isbd will be contested. ANP, NP, QWP and MQM (P) sympathies are also with the ruling party. 
The fires of agitation lit by the PTI has spread to other cities as well. Containerization has taken the life of one army officer and one child and is causing great inconvenience to the dwellers of twin cities. Media is playing its usual negative role to keep the pot sizzling. One-seater Sheikh Rashid is being glorified and so is the bellicosity of IK, while govt’s defensive acts are demeaned. Anchors and analysts are busy upping the ante and none seem to be interested in defusing the volatile situation. Hate campaign against NS and his family by the social media has touched new heights of slander. Political wrangling and filibustering is further damaging the image of Pakistan in the world and the cause of Kashmir. 
The master planners sitting in London, Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi are keeping their fingers crossed and are excitedly watching the gathering storm and hoping that the govt machinery in Isbd will be paralyzed and will force Nawaz Sharif (NS) to resign, or the Army to intervene and take over. India is incessantly throwing logs into the fire by heating up the LoC, while RAW-NDS are continuing with their covert operations in selected zones. Their major interest is to disrupt work on CPEC. 
Followers of IK are bubbling with enthusiasm and have gone hyper. Some were caught carrying weapons, ammunition, tear gas shells and bullet proof jackets. Most are carrying batons and young girls are equally aggressive. PTI’s armed Tiger Force has been tasked to battle with the Police/FC if stopped. They are already seeing their charismatic leader wearing the crown and with Aladdin lamp in his hand removing all the chronic ailments of Pakistan in a flash. They are convinced that once he seizes power, milk and honey will start flowing in the rivers of Pakistan and miseries of the downtrodden will be alleviated. One reason of their euphoria is the apparent estrangement of the Army leadership over the security leak scandal. Their joys knew no bounds when Information Minister Pervez Rashid was sacked. It was seen as the beginning of the demise of NS Empire. It has further energized the PTI workers and they seem fully charged up to execute the orders of their Captain to lock down the capital city on November 2. IK has taken it as a last ditch battle. For him it is a do or die battle. He is once again expectantly looking towards Gen Raheel Sharif to raise his finger. 
Undoubtedly the security leak has suddenly become a bigger challenge for the govt than the IK threat. A high powered committee comprising of members from ISI, MI and IB will carry out in-depth investigation to trace out the culprits responsible for feeding the story and that too in twisted form to the Dawn newspaper, who were behind it, what was the motive, apportion blame and prescribe punishment. It is to be seen where the trail ends. Absence of the author of the controversial story Cyril Almeida will make things difficult for the investigators. 
Unlike its defensive stance to the 2014 sit-in, which had lingered on for 126 days without any outcome, this time the govt is in a defiant mood and is flexing its muscles to go to any length to defeat the sinister plans of the invaders. Containers have been placed on all entry points of Isbd and along Peshawar-Isbd road and along Bani Gala road. Large contingents of the police and paramilitary troops have been deployed while the army has been alerted to be prepared to defend Isbd under Article 245. At the moment, the entire leadership of PTI have got stranded in IK residence at Bani Gala. NS has addressed two public meetings in KP and his tone and tenor gave no sign of nervousness. Rather he was quite confident to win next elections in 2018 on the strength of his achievements and dismal performance of PTI in KP and PPP in Sindh. The govt side is of the view that there is no reason for IK to agitate when the Supreme Court has accepted his petition and NS has been summoned on account of Panama scandal. They say, PTI youth wing violated the curfew imposed under Section 144 CrPC and also defied Isbd High Court restraining order not to create mayhem. 
Pervez Rashid was in bad books of IK and his colleagues due to his counter jibes whenever IK lambasted NS. But he was not the most sought target. His unceremonious exit or an in-house change doesn’t fulfil the ambition of IK to become the PM. He desires that NS should be booted out or he quits voluntarily irrespective of the fact that his name does not appear in the list of account holders in Off Shore Company. He has no idea what is in store for him if NS is forced to throw in his towel. In all likelihood, the ruckus in the aftermath of NS departure will drown IK’s ambitions. It cannot be denied that NS is still the most popular leader and he has many feathers in his cap. His 3 rd time premature boot out will make him a political martyr and will not be taken lightly by his fans in Punjab. Baluchistan govt and JUI-F would also not welcome his ouster particularly when he had presented him and his family for accountability and the matter was with the courts. 
The situation will become ripe for chaos which outside powers have all along been trying to foment. The Army may have to grudgingly step in to restore semblance of order. In the wake of tense geo-political environment, terrorism, acute polarization, feudal mindset, partisanship, parochialism and secular-Islamic divide, it will not be possible for the Army to restore order and hold elections within three months as prescribed in the constitution. Supposedly, if elections do take place within 3 months, PML-N will surely win the race and perhaps PTI may lose KP as well. 
Elections without reforms will otherwise be an exercise in futility. The Army will perforce have to stretch its rule to 3-5 years if not more to be able to take Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Rangers operation in Karachi, FC operation in Baluchistan and ongoing combing operation to their logical ends; to implement the National Action Plan in letter and spirit, and to complete the vital project of CPEC. Additionally it will have to carry out following reforms for a better morrow and for enabling environment for true democracy to flourish: 1. Electoral, political, police, bureaucracy, judicial, education, media reforms. 2. Breaking the nexus between crime, politics, terrorism and corruption. 3. Effective accountability system. 4. Cleansing the Aegean Stables. 
All this will be possible only when there is strict martial law and politicians of all hues are kept at bay. Will this arrangement be acceptable to IK? If he is prepared to wait for 5 years, why not hold on for 1 ½ years and contest the 2018 elections and win the coveted crown!! Moreover, what is the guarantee that the Army will be able to put everything right since it was not able to do so in the past? Things may become messier. Memory of our people is very short lived. Soon they will forget the ills of NS and his good deeds will be recalled with fondness and the Army will be put on the mat with a vengeance as had happened during the four military rules. True to their tradition, anti-Pakistan foreign powers will be behind the anti-Army campaign. Political destabilization suit the conspirators since it makes it easier for them to exert pressure and dictate terms. It is indeed most unfortunate that our politicians are fighting for power among each other, while the media and so-called educated lot are supporting their favorite political leaders and feel no qualm in passing lecherous and insulting remarks against their opponents. Preferably, all our guns should be collectively firing at our enemies who are bent upon breaking up Pakistan. 
The writer is a retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of 5 books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, DG Measac Research Centre, Member Executive Council PESS. asifharoonraja@gmail.com Related Posts:",FAKE
"NBC affiliate WRCB TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee has inadvertently posted election night results. The results page appears to be similar to what mainstream news networks display on election night, including Presidential and Congressional results, the popular vote count, electoral votes, and percentage of precincts reporting.
The page, a screen shot of which has been sourced from internet archive site The Wayback Machine , is posted below and shows totals for the upcoming Presidential race. It announces Hillary Clinton as the winner.
As Jim Stone notes, the page was pulled directly from the WorldNow.com content management platform utilized by major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox and appears to be a non-public staging area for news and election results.
The original page has since been reset.
( Click here for full size image ) 

Though the results information appears on an FTP server at WorldNow.com, media companies like NBC’s WRCB TV utilize the platform, also know as “Frankly,” to power their news content. This can be verified directly a the WRCB web site by scrolling to the very bottom of the page footer which notes that it is, “Powered By Frankly.”
In addition to national results, Jim Stone has identified another page at the WorldNow.com FTP server that appears to show the State-By-State Presidential election results. This page is also accessible in archive format at WayBack Machine with a line by line breakdown available at Stone’s website.
Of interest is that the State-By-State results indicate a Hillary Clinton win in states like Texas (42% to 40%), Florida (44% to 40%) and Pennsylvania (44% to 40%) which have all been identified as states Clinton must steal to win the election .

Do these latest election “results” confirm that the fix is in and the vote is rigged?
If so, then we are no longer looking at an election where our votes will count, but rather, a selection where the winner is determined by those who count the votes.
Related: 
Will Barack Obama Delay Or Suspend The Election If Hillary Is Forced Out 
“Executive Orders for Sale”: Leaked Email Shows Hillary Auctioning Off ‘Laws’ To The Highest Bidder 
Watch This Incredible Video And Decide For Yourself: Did Hillary Clinton Cheat At The Last Debate By Using An Embedded Tablet Device In Her Podium? 
Are you ready for the disaster that will follow this election? ",FAKE
"By all accounts Loretta Lynch, president Obama’s choice to replace Eric Holder as attorney general, was very impressive in the first day of hearings. In fact, she was so impressive that even the right-wing bloggers at Powerline called her the Ernie Banks of nominees, which, judging from their eulogy for the real Ernie Banks, is very good indeed. But then they also said the committee was throwing softballs, so the metaphors got a little confusing.  It was a very good day for Loretta Lynch, much to their chagrin. She was appropriately confident, dignified and boring and thus made for a dull affair that was unlikely to derail her nomination.

The second day of hearings, in which both Republicans and Democrats on the committee invited both people to testify, was a little bit more lively. We knew it would be when the committee announced their guests. The Democrats offered a group of former colleagues and law professors. The Republicans offered a couple of conservative law professors to denounce President Obama’s usurpation of democracy — and some far-right-wing activists to complain about being victimized.

The first person to testify was someone who had never met or had any knowledge of Loretta Lynch. This was former reporter and current right-wing icon Sharyl Attkisson who told a harrowing story of harassment, including her questionable allegation that the government bugged her computer, obviously shocking the likes of Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch to the depth of their souls. It’s one thing for the government to relentlessly pursue reporters like James Risen who report serious and important stories. They wholeheartedly support the Justice Department in such cases. Attkisson, however, resigned from CBS News because she felt the entire network was biased in favor of the Obama administration and refused to allow her to pursue the scandals she just knew were there. (These were scandals like Benghazi and Fast and Furious — scandals that have been investigated approximately 756 times under every committee in the Congress and have turned up zilch.) Somehow they’ve managed to morph this professional dispute into a story of Attkisson being victimized by the authoritarian police state.

It would have been interesting to hear testimony about the government’s pursuit of leaks and reporters over the past few years, which really is a scandal and which should form the basis of questioning for the new attorney general. But since both parties are generally in favor of this practice, that wasn’t to be. Instead the Republicans called one of their celebrity martyrs to testify about how hard it is for a conservative to live in this world.

The next activist they called to testify about Loretta Lynch was a man who admittedly has absolutely no knowledge of her but had something to say about how Eric Holder was very mean to police officers around the country. He is an African-American sheriff from Wisconsin named David Clarke who up to this point is best known for his appearances on “Fox and Friends” in which he says things like, “the NAACP is nothing more than a propaganda entity for the left” and that the behavior of black people is the reason they are getting shot so often. He suggested that the federal government is waging a war on police and should butt out of local business.

The final activist of the day was a citizen who has been working her heart out trying to protect our electoral system from the scourge of nonexistent voter fraud. That would be a woman named Catherine Englebrecht, who runs a far-right-wing group called True the Vote, which sends out groups of “observers” to African-American and Hispanic polling places to make sure they’re not stealing the votes of decent Americans. Upon Eric Holder’s resignation, her group put out a press release stating that Holder had carried out a “radical, racialist assault on voting rights.” She was there to complain about the Department of Justice failing to immediately interview her over the alleged IRS scandal and to excoriate them over the “nightmare of citizen targeting.” She then testified that Loretta Lynch was wrong in saying that laws had been passed throughout the South to prevent some people from voting. Sen. Jeff Sessions pointed out that an Alabama Tea Party leader had been victimized by the IRS and nobody at the IRS cares. Sen. Orrin Hatch expressed his deepest sympathy for what she’s been through and assured her that they were going to get to bottom of it. Her voice cracked with emotion as she said, “Thank you, sir.” This was the first committee hearing of the new Senate Judiciary Committee under GOP rule, a hearing to determine the fitness of a presidential nominee to the most powerful law enforcement office in the land, and they called a group of partisan crackpots and grass-roots loons to relitigate moldy pseudo-scandals and complain about nonexistent government persecution. And it’s not as if they couldn’t have found some real scandals to talk about. The Obama Justice Department is hardly perfect. But they are married to their Foxified version of reality and simply can’t see the forest for the trees. The whole spectacle was a nostalgic trip back in time to the days of Clinton madness when the judiciary committees were able to leverage any public hearing into a scandal fest. The press seems less inclined to go along these days, a fact that Sharyl Attkisson would surely attribute to its political bias. But the truth is that these “scandals” are just sad echoes of the scandal-mongering of the 1990s. The energy is gone, the issues seem pale and lifeless. Not that there was ever any “there” there, but they are now just going through the motions. But I hope Democrats don’t get too complacent. President Obama has never been able to get their scandal mojo rising. But there’s every reason to suspect that this is just an off-season workout for what they see as a return to the big leagues. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency you can be sure there will be a return to the fiery investigations whenever the Republicans hold either house of Congress. And if history serves, the press will likely be eager to join the team. But this sad little show reveals just how much they are in need of some spring training. Loretta Lynch may be a genial public servant in the mold of Ernie Banks, but when it comes to scandal management, Clinton is Babe Ruth. They are going to need to up their game significantly.",REAL
"Conventional wisdom holds that Sen. Ted Cruz doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the GOP nomination, but I wouldn’t bet the ranch against him yet.

His announcement at Liberty University was impressive, and he was passionate and precise in a 40-minute speech without notes or TelePrompter.

A brilliant man of clear, conservative convictions, he is not muddled by the politics of calculation, which gives him an advantage in a big, wide-open field.

To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.

Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
"18 mins ago 3 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes It's fair to say, Europe's been shocked by Trump's   Europe's   Trump's   RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air      ",FAKE
"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**

 

 Buzz Cuts:

 • Trump advisors try to pivot not fishtail

 • Indiana shaping up as do or die for Cruz

 • What happened to working man’s liberalism?

 • Pro-Clinton PAC spends $1 million to fight online trolling

 • 10-point score

TRUMP ADVISORS TRY TO PIVOT NOT FISHTAIL

 HOLLYWOOD, FLA. – It’s a fine line between a general election shift and the dreaded ‘Etch A Sketch.’

Donald Trump’s supporters give him broad latitude on issues and even his promise of an attitudinal change. For example, his suggestion that the Republicans should become a pro-choice party likely wrinkled few brows among his core supporters.

The idea that Trump would change his attitude and approach along with his opinions wouldn’t trouble many who have faith in him as a man and a leader. For those who believe the Trump is the only person who can make America great again, putting on a new guise for the general election would be nothing troubling.

Remember, these are people who believe him when he describes himself as the new Reagan and the person more presidential than anybody since Lincoln.

But can Trump create a habitat that is healthy for both his backers and the kinds of folks that his newly expanded campaign are schmoozing here in Hollywood without further antagonizing the substantial chunk of his party that ranges from resentful to outright outraged about Trump’s surprising success in overtaking the GOP?

Trump had a very good day here Thursday. Aside from turning back a Rules Committee vote that might’ve helped Sen. Ted Cruz win a floor fight at the convention, delegates and other members of the establishment were very impressed by Trump’s campaign’s effort to start sucking up to them.

Promises of Trump’s flexibility when served alongside seafood platters and open bars from his new K Street handlers went a long way toward convincing the GOP elite that Trump is ready to play ball.

Little could be more comforting to them than the pledge from Trump’s campaign boss that the wildness of the frontrunner to this point has been a put on.

Consultants and party elders are not uncomfortable with the idea of tricking rubes or profit and or patriotism. And for those facing general election oblivion, anything that sounds like avoiding a savage showdown in Cleveland and not losing the general election by 40 states sounds good.

But even if Trump and his new handlers can keep the GOP elite and his existing populist base happy, the current maneuvers do pose a risk.

The most important thing for the Republican frontrunner right now is for his detractors and enemies on the conservative side of the party to just give up.

There are enough Republicans who loathe Trump to still stop him. But they have to go vote and they have to be willing to blow up their conventions to do it.

When Trump’s new Sherpa suggests that it has all been a fake so far, that gives new cause for alarm to the conservatives who already deeply mistrust Trump and see him as more of a Democrat than Republican.

All Trump needs in order to win is for the resistance to just lay down for a couple of weeks. When they wake up it will all be over.

But if Trump starts fishtailing in his turn towards conventionality it will reinvigorate the #NeverTrump movement.  

 

 It’s great to suck up to the party, even belatedly, but doing in such a transparent manner could be hazardous to Trump’s nomination. 

 

 [GOP delegate count: Trump 845; Cruz 559; Kasich 147 (1,237 needed to win)]

Fox News Sunday: Trump’s new man - Mr. Sunday sits down with the Trump campaign’s new boss, Paul Manafort, to discuss the latest campaign news on the heels of the RNC’s spring meeting. “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” airs at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.

 

 Indiana shaping up as do or die for Cruz - RCP: “Due to a dearth of public polling in Indiana, however, it’s not clear how large Cruz’s advantage might be, if he indeed has one. One recent private poll not affiliated with any of the presidential campaigns showed Cruz leading in two congressional districts, Kasich in one, and Trump dominating in two more. Three other congressional districts, meanwhile, showed Cruz and Kasich essentially tied…Although there are just 57 delegates at stake in Indiana, the contest is one of the few remaining wild cards on the primary map. If Cruz or Kasich do not win, the Republican race could quickly spiral out of their control. If Trump does not win Indiana, however, his delegate math becomes exceedingly difficult to win the nomination before Cleveland.”

 

 Unpacking Trump’s health proposal - Health care policy expert, James Capretta, points out the flaws in Trump’s health care plan proposal: “Trump has said he wants to get rid of the entirety of the [Affordable Care Act], including subsidies for health insurance and its expansion of Medicaid. What does he propose instead to boost enrollment in health insurance by lower-income households? Essentially nothing.”

 

 [Watch Fox: On Sunday, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer host a town hall in Philadelphia with voters ahead of the crucial Pennsylvania primary. Tune in at 8 p.m. ET]

 

 WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…

 The passing of legendary pop star Prince on Thursday rocked the music industry in a way not seen since the passing of Michael Jackson. But the music revolutionary also had another passion in his life, one that Charlie Murphy was surprised by: Prince’s love of basketball. Time: “Back in October, Prince unexpectedly showed up to Target Center in Minneapolis to watch the fifth and deciding game the WNBA Finals, between the Lynx and the Indiana Fever. The Lynx won, 69-52, to clinch the series. The pop icon…approached a Lynx staffer with an incredible offer. The players, plus a guest, were invited to his Paisley Park compound for a private concert…He played ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘When Doves Cry,’ ‘1999,’ and some new stuff. He played different instruments throughout the evening — guitar, keyboards, drums. He played until 4 am; a few Lynx players and coaches danced on stage.”

 

 Got a TIP from the RIGHT or the LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM

 

 POLL CHECK

 Real Clear Politics Averages

 National GOP nomination: Trump 40.4 percent; Cruz 30.6 percent; Kasich 21.8 percent

 National Dem nomination: Clinton 47.7 percent; Sanders 46.3 percent

 General Election: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +9.3 points

 Generic Congressional Vote: Democrats +1

WHAT HAPPENED TO WORKING MAN’S LIBERALISM?

 Vox’s Emmet Rensin takes a deep dive into a concept he dubs “smug style” liberalism in America and how the political concept changed from an ideology of the working class to that of the elite. How did this happen and what has the smug style done to American liberalism? This lengthy piece goes into the origins and results of the shift in American political thought:

 

 “The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography. Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party…In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent…The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing…It is the smug style’s first premise: a politics defined by a command of the Correct Facts and signaled by an allegiance to the Correct Culture…So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. They will resent them. They will find, over and over, how easy it is to justify abandoning them further.  They will choose the smug style.”

 

 Pro-Clinton PAC spends $1 million to fight online trolling - Daily Beast: “Citing ‘lessons learned from online engagement with ‘Bernie Bros,’ a pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is pledging to spend $1 million to ‘push back against’ users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram. Correct the Record’s ‘Barrier Breakers’ project boasts in a press release that it has already ‘addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.’ The PAC released this on Thursday.”

Democrats shift from protecting to adjusting Obamacare - National Journal: “In in­ter­views, Sen­ate Demo­crats poin­ted to items like sort­ing out the ‘Ca­dillac tax,’ build­ing on de­liv­ery-sys­tem re­forms, mak­ing sure states are af­forded flex­ib­il­ity in the law, and more. The Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner, Hil­lary Clin­ton, has based her own health plat­form on pro­tect­ing and build­ing on the Af­ford­able Care Act. Her pro­pos­als in­clude adding a new tax cred­it to help with ex­cess­ive out-of-pock­et med­ic­al costs, cap­ping monthly pre­scrip­tion-drug costs, and al­low­ing three free sick vis­its per year, to name a few.”

#mediabuzz - Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer talk with host Howard Kurtz ahead of their Sunday town hall with voters in Philadelphia. Watch Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.

 

 [Dem delegate count: Clinton 1893; Sanders 1180 (2,383 needed to win)]

 

 10-POINT SCORE

 BBC: “Tom Lo, 17, has told Newsbeat that he was about 10 minutes into the test when [a deer] ran across a road right in front of his car. ‘I was picking up speed because it was a 60mph zone and all of a sudden I see a deer in front of me…So I hit my brake but unfortunately the deer was killed,’ he says. It happened on a road near Colchester [England]. ‘I pulled over after the incident and my driving instructor had a look at the car and checked the deer…‘He said there was nothing we could do and that it wasn’t my fault, so I was told to continue my test.’ Amazingly, Tom passed the driving test with two minor faults.”

 

 AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…

 “I mean do we really have an epidemic of transgenders being evil in bathrooms across the country? I haven’t heard of a single case…This is a very small problem at the edges of the other problem having to do with gender identity that’s become national precisely because Republicans of North Carolina decided it was a problem.” – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier”

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"WASHINGTON — The United States is a significantly less Christian country than it was seven years ago.

That's the top finding — one that will ricochet through American faith, culture and politics — in the Pew Research Center's newest report, ""America's Changing Religious Landscape,"" released Tuesday.

This trend ""is big, it's broad and it's everywhere,"" said Alan Cooperman, Pew's director of religion research.

Christianity still dominates American religious identity (70%), but the survey shows dramatic shifts as more people move out the doors of denominations, shedding spiritual connections along the way.

Atheists and agnostics have nearly doubled their share of the religious marketplace, and overall indifference to religion of any sort is rising as well. Only the historically black Protestant churches have held a steady grip through the years of change.

Remember the familiar map of American religion? The South: A bastion of white evangelicals. The Northeast: Cradle of Catholics. The Midwest: Nest of Mainline Protestants. The West: Incubator of ""nones"" — people who claim no religious brand label.

Well, scratch all that in the new topography.

The shrinking numbers of Christians and their loss of market share is the most significant change since 2007 (when Pew did its first U.S. Religious Landscape survey) and the new, equally massive survey of 35,000 U.S. adults.

The percentage of people who describe themselves as Christians fell about 8 points — from 78.4% to 70.6%. This includes people in virtually all demographic groups, whether they are ""nearing retirement or just entering adulthood, married or single, living in the West or the Bible Belt,"" according to the survey report.

Massachusetts is down on Catholics by 10 percentage points. South Carolina is down the same degree on evangelicals. Mainline Protestants, already sliding for 40 years or more, declined all over the Midwest by 3 to 4 percentage points.The Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church, the country's two largest Protestant denominations, are each down roughly the same 1.4 to 1.5 percentage points.Every tradition took a hit in in the West as the number of people who claim no religious brand continues to climb.

Christian faiths are troubled by generational change — each successive group is less connected than their parents — and by ""switching"" at all ages, the report shows. While nearly 86% of Americans say they grew up as Christians, nearly one in five (19%) say they aren't so anymore.

""Overall, there are more than four former Christians for every convert to Christianity,"" said Cooperman.

Although evangelicals are part of the decline, their slide has been less steep. They benefit from more people joining evangelical traditions, but they're hurt by generational change and by America's increased diversity.

According to the survey, white ""born-again or evangelical"" Protestants — closely watched for their political clout within the GOP — now account for 19% of American adults, down slightly from 21% in 2007.

Politicians should take note, said Mike Hout, a sociologist and demographer at New York University who is also a co-director of the General Social Survey.

""Traditionally, we thought religion was the mover and politics were the consequence,"" he said. Today, it's the opposite.

Many of today's formerly faithful left conservative evangelical or Catholic denominations because ""they saw them align with a conservative political agenda and they don't want to be identified with that,"" Hout said.

Catholics dropped both in market share and in real numbers. Despite their high retention rate for people reared in the faith, they have a low conversion rate. Today, Cooperman said, 13% of U.S. adults are former Catholics, up from 10% in 2007.

Generational shifts are also hurting Catholic numbers. Greg Smith, Pew's associate director of research, said ""just 16% of the 18-to-24-year-olds today are Catholic, and that is not enough to offset the numbers lost to the aging and switching.""

Where are they going? To religious nowhere.

The ""nones"" — Americans who are unaffiliated with brand-name religion — are the new major force in American faith. And they are more secular in outlook — and ""more comfortable admitting it"" than ever before, said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

Their growth spans the generations, as well as racial and ethnic groups, said Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics for the Pew Research Center.

""Nones,"" at 22.8% of the U.S. (up from 16% just eight years ago) run second only to evangelicals (25.4%) and ahead of Catholics (20.8%) in religious market share.

The ""nones"" numbers are now big enough to show noteworthy diversity:

Atheists rose from 1.6% to 3.1%, and agnostics from 2.4% to 4%. Combined, there are more ""nones"" than Evangelical Lutherans, United Methodists and Episcopalians all together.

""It's because we're right,"" crowed David Silverman, president of American Atheists. He hadn't yet seen the Pew findings, but commented based on other surveys he said showed nones rising numbers. Indeed, it's the public attention given to ""nones"" in the last decade, combined with the wide-open access to anti-religious discussion on the Internet, that drives the change, Silverman said.

""More people know the facts, and more people realize they are not alone,"" Silverman said. And with these shifts, the stigma of coming out as an atheist is lessening.

""It's now impossible for an atheist to think he is alone in this world. They are automatically empowered,"" said Silverman.

The bulk of the ""nones"" (15.8%, up from 12.1% in 2007) don't even commit to any view on God. Instead, they say they believe ""nothing in particular.""

But among the ""nothings,"" there's a distinct split between ""spiritual"" and totally indifferent ""nones.""

Thirty percent of all ""nones"" still showed ""a sort of religious pulse"" by saying that religion is still at least somewhat important to them, said Cooperman.

However, the bulk of this group (39%) are not agnostic, atheist or vaguely spiritual — they're just not interested. Religion is not even somewhat important to them.

That same level of disinterest cuts into their social and political clout, said Hout.

The nothing-in-particular folks ""don't vote, don't marry and don't have kids,"" at the same rate as other Americans, said Hout. ""They are allergic to large, organized institutions — mass media, religions, big corporations, and political parties.""

""None"" is the winning category for religious switchers across society, particularly among gay and lesbians — 41% of gay or lesbian Americans say they have no religion. Cooperman said. ""This suggests the degree of alienation and discomfort and sense of being unwelcome that they may have felt in traditional religious groups.""

Intermarriage is rising with each generation. Among Americans who have gotten married since 2010, nearly four-in-ten (39%) report that they are in religiously mixed marriages, compared with 19% among those who got married before 1960, according to the report.

There's an identity gender gap. Most Christians are women (55%) and most ""nones"" are men (57%). However, women's unbelief numbers are growing: nearly one in five (19%) now say they have no religious identity.Diversity makes a difference. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up 41% of Catholics (up from 35% in 2007), 24% of evangelicals (up from 19%) and 14% of mainline Protestants (up from 9%). ""The share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus,"" the report said.

The latest survey was conducted among a nationally representative sample of 35,071 adults interviewed by telephone, on both cellphones and landlines, from June 4-Sept. 30, 2014. The margin of error on overall findings is plus or minus 0.6 percentage points.",REAL
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Claire Bernish 
Tony Podesta — brother of the now-disgraced Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta , whose files Wikileaks has been publishing — is not only a powerful Democratic Party lobbyist, but a registered foreign agent receiving a hefty monthly paycheck from the nefarious government of Saudi Arabia. 
No — as tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist as it might sound — that scenario is the absolute truth. 
In 1988, John and Tony Podesta formed the Podesta Group and have used their bigwig party-insider status to lobby and influence government policies — while, at various times, simultaneously holding positions of power — which has created a number of glaring conflicts of interest. 
According to the March 2016 filing made in accordance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Tony Podesta is an active foreign agent of the Saudi government with the “ Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court ,” and acts as an officer of the Saudi Arabia account. 
At this point, the web of pay-for-play between the Washington, political heavyweights, and foreign governments comes lurching into the spotlight. 
For starters, the Podesta brothers’ lobbying firm receives $140,000 every month from the Saudi government, which, in no uncertain terms — and despite a status as privileged U.S. ally — wages a bloody campaign of censorship, murder, suppression, human rights abuse, and worse against its civilian population, while bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys in neighboring nations. 
John Podesta previously served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, founded the think tank Center for American Progress (which oh-so-coincidentally touts the need to reframe Saudi Arabia’s hopelessly tarnished image), counseled President Obama, and now chairs Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
Tony Podesta acts as a foreign agent for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — lobbying to influence government policy in favor of the Kingdom — while also contributing to and bundling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
Think about that for a moment. 
One brother uses the influence of money to both affect United States foreign policy and infuse the Clinton campaign with cash — while the other wields the influence of power as a political insider for the same entities. 
As the Washington Post reported months ago in July, Tony Podesta’s lobbying efforts “raised $268,000 for the campaign and $31,000 for the victory fund.” 
“The Saudis hired the Podesta Group in 2015 because it was getting hammered in the press over civilian casualties from its airstrikes in Yemen and its crackdown on political dissidents at home, including sentencing blogger Raif Badawi to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for ‘insulting Islam,’” Alternet reported . “Since then, Tony Podesta’s fingerprints have been all over Saudi Arabia’s advocacy efforts in Washington DC. When Saudi Arabia executed the prominent nonviolent Shia dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, causing protests throughout the Shia world and inflaming sectarian divisions, The New York Times noted that the Podesta Group provided the newspaper with a Saudi commentator who defended the execution.” 
Notably, the Saudis’ reputation has only worsened as further atrocities pile up — concerning not only a record number of barbaric beheadings this year, but suspiciously reckless and errant U.S.-backed coalition bombings of civilian sites in several regions of active conflict. 
Additionally, Tony Podesta’s status as a registered foreign agent for Saudi Arabia is at least obliquely discussed in an email from April 15, 2015 — ironically revealed by Wikileaks’ publishing of his brothers personal communiques — in which former Clinton Foundation chief development officer and now campaign national finance director Dennis Cheng wrote to a small group of insiders: 
“Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] are already donating and raising. 
“I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.” 
To which general counsel to the Clinton campaign, attorney Marc Elias, replied [all errors original and emphasis added], 
“Responding to all on this. I was not on the call this morning, but I lean away from a bright line rule here. It seems odd to say that someone who represents Alberta, Canada can’t give, but a lobbyist for Phillip Morris can. Just as we vet lobbyists case by case, I would do the same with FARA. While this may lead to a large number of FARA registrants being denied, it would not be a flat our ban. A total ban feels arbitrary and will engender the same eye-rolling and ill will that it did for Obama.” 
As the exchange continues, how to precisely handle the campaign’s image with potentially controversial donors — while, at all costs, maintaining the flow of cash — becomes even more apparent. As strategist and campaign manager Robby Mook responds, 
“Where do we draw the line though?” 
Elias suggests a particularly intricate solution: 
“If we do it case by case, then it will be subjective. We would look at who the donor is and what foreign entity they are registered for. In judging whether to take the money, we would consider the relationship between that country and the United States, its relationship to the State Department during Hillary’s time as Secretary, and its relationship, if any, to the Foundation. In judging the individual, we would look at their history of support for political candidates generally and Hillary’s past campaigns specifically. 
“Put simply, we would use the same criteria we use for lobbyists, except with a somewhat more stringent screen. 
“As a legal matter, I am not saying we have to do this – we can decide to simply ban foreign registrants entirely. I’m just offering this up as a middle ground.” 
Mook eventually decides plainly, 
“Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?” 
All of this political wrangling appears to have had the desired effect — despite increasing calls for the United States to either rein in or sever completely its support for the bloody Saudi regime — the U.S. approved a stunning $1.29 billion sale of smart bombs to the Kingdom in November 2015. 
Tony Podesta’s specific contract with the government-run Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, which will earn $1.68 million by year’s end, does, indeed, suggest the infusion of a pro-Saudi message into the U.S. media propaganda machine. 
“Saudi Arabia is consistently one of the bigger players when it comes to foreign influence in Washington,” Sunlight Foundation spokesman Josh Stewart told the Washington Post . “That spans both what you’d call the inside game, which is lobbying and government relations, and the outside game, which is PR and other things that tend to reach a broader audience than just lobbying.” 
That broader audience — the American public — has indeed been manipulated courtesy of at least the thoroughly-corrupt Clinton campaign if not surreptitiously by the Saudis, as well. 
As The Free Thought Project has repeatedly reported , the evidence of collusion among the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the mainstream presstitutes is indisputable — including no less than 65 so-called journalists listed by name in various leaks as darlings of the campaign. 
Although this level of corruption and collusion would be considered intolerable in nearly any other nation on the planet. And yet, at the center of this shit storm of contention is an official nominee for the White House — who will not be held responsible for any number of questionable and criminal acts. 
The system isn’t rigged — it’s performing exactly as intended — and always will as long as the vote validates its existence. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) This time eight years ago, when she first ran for president, Hillary Clinton was already officially a candidate.

""I'm in it to win it,"" she said in a YouTube video posted on January 21, 2007.

But even though a second Hillary Clinton for president campaign is all but certain, she and those close to her are debating when she should jump in the race, potentially delaying her entry by months.

There is no waiting for Republicans, who are engaged in a furious behind-the-scenes scramble for advisers and donors. Mitt Romney, Republicans' nominee in 2012, announced Friday he would bow out after just three weeks on the presidential speculation treadmill. Three Republican senators, two current governors and one former governor have all made active moves toward campaigns.

There could be ten or more Republican candidates by this summer. That might be when Hillary Clinton gets around to officially moving toward a campaign, if she heeds some confidantes, who are privately arguing for an announcement in July to coincide with the start of the third fundraising quarter. Delaying until the summer is an idea that is said to be gaining momentum against those who want to stick to the plan for an April start date.

The possibility of the delay is very real but still unsettled.

""I would say it's 40 percent,"" in the direction of those arguing for a delay, said one Democrat who supports a spring debut for Clinton's presidential campaign. Another Democrat who saw merits in both time lines put the odds of a delay at 50 percent.

Democrats on both sides of the debate spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity so they could make their case without upsetting Clinton or those close to her for talking openly about internal deliberations.

Some Clinton loyalists worry that as the increasingly crowded Republican race heats up, the attacks on her could begin to stick without an apparatus in place to answer them.

The liberal superPAC American Bridge has been countering Republican attacks on Clinton's behalf but many Democrats think it's no substitute for a campaign messaging operation.

""They're doing terrific research,"" said one, ""but they don't know what her specific policy agenda is going to be. She should get in and start putting together a substantive policy agenda so the attacks that are going to begin to come from every single Republican who is jumping in to the race can be answered.""

The Democratic National Committee is beginning to take on a larger role in an effort to protect Clinton and the party brand but many Democrats are concerned even that won't be enough.

Other supporters want Clinton to lay low as the Republican field heats up, convinced Clinton will avoid some fire if she's undeclared and GOP candidates will take aim at each other instead.

""Never interrupt your opponent when it's destroying itself. That event in Iowa - nobody hated that more than [RNC chairman] Reince Priebus,"" said one Democrat, referring to the recent Iowa Freedom Summit, the first GOP cattle call for prospective candidates of many Republican presidential hopefuls (though noticeably neither Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney nor Rand Paul) attended. ""Let's get Sarah Palin out there, let's get Donald Trump out there - the whole clown car.""

Some Democrats believe it's also in Clinton's best interest to wait until President Obama, whose approval ratings have begun to rebound, becomes more popular, since a campaign by his former secretary of state will undoubtedly be seen as an extension of his presidency. It's a view shared by many at the White House who eye the entry of Clinton into the 2016 contest as the beginning of Obama's lame duck phase.

But if Clinton waits, she could run the risk of looking like she's taking the Democratic nomination for granted.

""The American people don't like to see a candidate assume that something is theirs for the taking,"" warned one Clinton supporter.

""If [Hillary Clinton] is trying to avoid a coronation it really is a terrible way to go about it. It sends a message that we don't have to campaign in the primaries."" said a Democratic operative in Iowa, who warned it leaves an opening. ""It really does require another candidate to fill that void""

And so far, no one has.

Vice President Joe Biden, former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, former Virginia Senator Jim Webb and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have all made the trek to Iowa in the last year, but none are being particularly agressive in recruiting staff or taking on Clinton.

""O'Malley hired one staff member the other day and that's all anyone is talking about,"" said the Iowa operative of the unusually quiet political scene in the early state. ""It's kinda weird.""

In 2008, Clinton's air of inevitability was off putting to many voters. Clinton and her advisers have been looking to avoid it this time around.

But without an insurgent, Obama-like candidate waiting in the wings (Clinton insiders are now pretty much convinced that populist darling and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren won't run, despite initial concerns she could mount a serious challenge from the left), many loyalists argue Clinton is safe to wait.

""If she's out there working hard, making her case, speaking to voters, that's what's going to matter,"" said a Washington-based Clinton backer who thinks a delayed campaign launch could benefit her.

It won't benefit her campaign coffers, however.

""Money will not flow until she's actually running,"" said one Democrat who cited powerful donor support for a Clinton run but acknowledged, ""People don't give that kind of money on speculation.""

The numerous Clinton loyalists interviewed for this piece admit there are arguments for both timelines. But perhaps the most important factor in deciding when to jump in the race is Hillary Clinton's personal inclination to put off campaigning.

The last time she ran for president, she entered the race in January 2006, almost two years before the election. The Democratic primary contest turned into a bruising slog that she is not eager to repeat.

""You can't dance in that spotlight for two years,"" a Clinton loyalist said. ""She's not Rand Paul, she's the most famous woman on earth and every move is scrutinized.""",REAL
"American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views 11/03/2016 
MONDOWEISS When it comes to aiding Israeli Apartheid, American Express is just another brick in The Wall, according to a new report. Roger Waters, lead singer behind Pink Floyd, lost a multimillion dollar American Express sponsorship for his 2017 US+Them tour after expressing solidarity this month with Palestinian students trying to end Israel’s apartheid system of military occupation using the same protest tactic that helped dismantle South African Apartheid (and, earlier, America’s Jim Crow): Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS. “I’m going to send out all of my most heartfelt love and support to all those young people on the campuses of the universities of California who are standing up for their brothers and sisters in Palestine and supporting the BDS movement,” Rogers said, according to CBS News , “in the hope that we may encourage the government of Israel to end the occupation.” American Express decided it would be a good idea to leak the cancellation of the contract to the New York Post , where Page Six’s Emily Smith has the exclusive story . “Roger is putting on a huge show. The company was asked to sponsor his tour for $4 million, but pulled out because it did not want to be part of his anti-Israel rhetoric,” an American Express spokesman told the paper. “We never committed to sponsoring Roger Waters’ upcoming tour. When we were approached with the options, we passed on making a bid.” American Express had helped sponsor Waters’ Oldchella Desert Trip festival (Coachella for the senior set featuring Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones) where he made the comments expressing support for human rights. But without anybody even asking them, American Express decided it had to go out of its way to bash Waters for “putting on a huge show.” Noteworthy about American Express’s decision is that it comes even as Waters included more mainstream political views, like featuring in the performance a line of children wearing shirts that said “Derriba el muro,” (Tear down the wall). He also showed Trump in a Klan outfit, and the show featured a floating pig balloon that calls the Republican candidate an “Ignorant, lying, racist, sexist pig,” CBS reported. Waters more mainstream kinds of leftist protest didn’t make up for his audacious display of solidarity with his fellow human beings living and dying under a ceaseless occupation. American Express has also sponsored Beyonce’s performances, where she has used art to make reference to police oppression of communities of color . But AmEx lost its nerve when Waters brought up Palestinian rights. According to the New York Post , Waters has known that there are consequences for standing up against the occupation, and that keeps others silent. “I have been accused of being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years. My industry has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel] . . . I’ve talked to a lot of them, and they are scared s – – tless. If they say something in public, they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed,” he said, according to the Post. But Waters is already famous, and 75, so the stakes aren’t the same as for young artists. Update (11/1/16) This article originally quoted the New York Post as saying that Citi had assumed sponsorship of the tour after American Express dropped out, but after publication a representative of Citi contacted us with this clarification: In your article “ American Express disowns Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters because of pro-Palestinian views ”, it mentions that “Citibank grabbed the opportunity to sponsor one of the biggest and best acts of the 20th century.” However, Citi is not a sponsor of Roger Waters’ upcoming tour. Two weeks ago, Citi offered a limited time pre-sale of tickets for cardmembers for select shows, as we do for thousands of concerts by different artists every year. The pre-sale has ended and we have no plans to work with this artist in the future. 
– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/10/american-express-palestinian/#sthash.cGAw7DW9.dpuf",FAKE
"Clinton said at a campaign event outside St. Louis that the ""ugly, divisive rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump and the encouragement of violence and aggression is wrong, and it's dangerous.""

""If you play with matches, you're going to start a fire you can't control,"" Clinton said about Trump at a caucus kick-off event at a local YMCA. ""That's not leadership. That's political arson. The test of leadership and citizenship is the opposite. If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. And if you see a bully, stand up to him.""

Clinton acknowledged the ""anger"" that is motivating people on the left and the right of the political divide but said the way to bridge the gap ""is to stand together against the forces of division and discrimination that are trying to divide America between us and them.""

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has made knocking Trump a regular part of her stump speech, blasting the businessman for comments he has made against Mexicans, women and Muslims. She regularly touts herself as the first candidate to call out his rhetoric.

But at the outset of the Republican race, many inside Clinton's campaign saw Trump as an interesting sideshow, not someone who could credibly capture the Republican nomination. That has changed. Clinton's top aides now view Trump as the favorite to win the Republican nomination, and Clinton has started to go after the brash billionaire with more directness. ""You don't get the chance to make America great by getting rid of everything that made America great,"" Clinton said, parroting Trump's campaign slogan. ""No, our values, our diversity, our openness, these are strengths, not weaknesses.""",REAL
"They tease terrorists. The prophet Muhammad cries. A devout Muslim woman shows some leg, and more. They take on Pope Francis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. There are nuns, priests, rabbis and imams. They laugh at death itself.

The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper attacked last week by Islamist extremists for lampooning the prophet Muhammad, became a symbol of freedom of expression as soon as it hit newsstands Wednesday — selling out millions of copies before dawn. Yet, in a country that mobilized Sunday by the millions in support of the paper’s right to mock, France also found itself facing a mounting debate over the limits of free speech within its borders.

French authorities on Wednesday detained and charged a notorious comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, with “glorifying terrorism” for an ambiguous Facebook post Sunday that, to some, appeared to show support for the gunman who killed four people in a kosher market Friday.

Since last week’s attacks, at least 54 people have faced similar charges — including several underage pranksters and drunken louts who were mouthing off. Authorities have used a beefed up anti-terrorism law passed last year to expedite their cases and issue harsher jail sentences — with one offender arrested Saturday already receiving a four-year sentence. The Justice Ministry has also issued fresh orders for prosecutors to crack down on “anti-Semitic and racist acts or speech.”

Laurent Léger, an investigative journalist for Charlie Hebdo who survived the attack, said there was no comparing the newspaper to Dieudonné — a French showman of Cameroonian descent who popularized a Nazi-like salute and who jokes about the Holocaust.

“Dieudonné does not know the Charlie spirit,” Léger said. “Charlie never glorified terrorism. Dieudonné is a bit too quick when he claims that his freedom of speech is being hampered. His attitude is just making things worse by continuing the confusion that is destroying this country.”

Yet others disagreed, saying France was in danger of trouncing the very right it is aiming to protect: freedom of expression.

“We can definitely talk about hypocrisy here,” said Adrienne Charmet, campaign coordinator for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based Internet rights group. “In the past days, we have seen a lot of people condemned for putting out words, no matter how condemnable those words, and receiving sentences that seem quite exaggerated.”

“French opinion is split in two,” she added. “Some see it as the worst possible response to last week’s attack, because many of those who have said these things were drunk, or teenagers, who did not know the weight of their words. But there is another segment of the population that does agree, because they feel these people are making themselves accomplices to terror. Either way, this crackdown on freedom of speech is a betrayal of last Sunday’s march.”

Charlie Hebdo was undoubtedly the hottest property in town Wednesday, with lines snaking for blocks as Parisians clamored for copies that sold out within minutes. An initial print run of 3 million copies was expanded to 5 million when kiosks across the country ran out.

Surviving staff members, who worked day and night after the Jan. 7 attack to ensure the issue came out on time, produced the paper. With their offices still roped off as a crime scene, the staff worked out of a conference room at the left-wing daily Libération. The offices there are being guarded around the clock by an extraordinary number of police officers and private security guards.

There was plenty inside the paper to stir controversy. The 16-page edition brims with the sort of irreverent, off-color humor that made Charlie famous — and infamous. No one is spared ridicule.

In one cartoon, two hooded terrorists are pictured in heaven, with one asking the other, “Where are the virgins?”

“They’re with the Charlie staff, loser,” his accomplice replies.

Another pictures a harried and exhausted cartoonist hunched over his desk, with a caption that reads, “Cartooning at Charlie Hebdo, it’s 25 years of work.” The next panel shows hooded gunmen mowing people down with a Kalashnikov, accompanied by the words, “For a terrorist, it’s 25 seconds of work.”

As ever with Charlie Hebdo, the goal is to provoke, to stir debate and to make people laugh — while also reminding anyone who might think otherwise that reading Charlie can be distinctly discomfiting.

The paper’s lead editorial offers a vigorous defense of secular values, saying that staffers laughed when they heard that the bells of the Cathedral of Notre Dame would ring in their honor.

“The millions of anonymous people, all the institutions, all the world leaders, all the politicians, all the intellectuals and media figures, all the religious dignitaries who proclaimed this week that ‘I am Charlie’ need to also know that that means, ‘I am secularism,’ ” the editorial says.

Delphine Ravion-Casalta, 39, spent an hour and a half visiting three newsstands Wednesday morning before she found her Charlie. She sipped coffee at a cafe, her copy proudly spread out before her, eagerly taking in every word.

“In France, we’re still fighting for our freedom,” she said. “We had revolution for our freedom. A lot of revolutions. And great men like Voltaire and Rousseau. The fight for those ideas continues.”

The rush for copies of Charlie Hebdo came as French authorities detained and charged Dieudonné, 48. After the unity march that brought 1.5 million people onto the streets of Paris on Sunday, the comedian wrote: “After this historic, no legendary, march, a magic moment equal to the Big Bang which created the Universe, or in a smaller way comparable to the crowning of the [ancient king] Vercingétorix, I am going home. Let me say that this evening, as far as I am concerned, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly.”

Charlie Coulibaly is a reference to both Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four people in a Paris kosher market on Friday. The comedian, in a second Facebook post Monday, sought to clarify his remark, saying his purpose was “to make people laugh, and to laugh at death, since death makes fun of us all, as Charlie very well knows.” He concluded by saying, “They consider me to be Amedy Coulibaly when I am no different from a Charlie.”

Valls, speaking in the National Assembly, sought to draw a distinction between the creative caricatures of Charlie Hebdo and the comedian’s hate-based humor, while insisting that France was not compromising freedom of speech.

“There is a fundamental difference between the freedom to be impertinent, and anti-Semitism, racism, glorification of terrorist acts and Holocaust denial, all of which are offenses, all of which are crimes, that justice should punish with the most severity,” he said.",REAL
"Email 

Hillary supporter Robert Dougherty from Jacksonville, North Carolina bragged on Facebook today about how he committed voter fraud. 
Robert boasted on how he voted for some of his Facebook friends using their identities, and tells them not to worry about voting, because he’s already done it for them. 
And he’s bragging about it on Facebook. 
Robert boasts about how they give you a sticker every time you vote. 
He says he will continue to vote all next week! 
“Isn’t North Carolina nice they give you a sticker every time you vote… No ID required.” 
“There isn’t a need for you to wait in line anymore. Took care of it for you. Gave you a straight Democratic ticket.” 
“Amazing how many addresses you get from Google. Going again until Saturday and all next week.” 
Robert either thinks voter fraud is a big joke or he’s one stupid Hillary-supporting criminal. 
What do you think, will Voter Fraud play a key role in the election?",FAKE
"Russia Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the UN (Photos by AFP) 
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin has accused the United Nations aid chief of arrogance and bias after he told the UN Security Council that Russian and Syrian airstrikes have turned Aleppo into a ""kill zone."" 
During a Wednesday Security Council meeting, Churkin accused Stephen O'Brien of making ""arrogant” and ""outrageous"" remarks and failing to recognize that Russia and Syria have been observing a humanitarian pause, which has been in place for the last eight days. 
“The moratorium on flights has been in place for eight days. Give us at least one proof or leave those narratives for a romance you would probably write later,"" he said. 
""If we needed to be preached to, we would go to a church,"" the Russian envoy added. UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien speaks during a press conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh on October 5, 2016. 
On Tuesday, Russia announced plans to extend the week-long suspension of airstrikes targeting foreign-backed Takfiri terrorists in Aleppo. 
Lieutenant General Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian military's General Staff said that Russian and Syrian jets had stayed 10 kilometers away from Aleppo since October 18, and that humanitarian corridors out of Aleppo remained open. 
Rudskoi further expressed Moscow’s readiness to organize more ceasefires on the ground in Aleppo to allow wounded civilians to be evacuated. Smoke rises from buildings hit by militant shelling in a government-held neighborhood of the Syrian city of Aleppo on October 20, 2016. 
Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, has been divided between government forces in the west and the militants in the east since 2012. In an attempt to free the trapped civilian population and to end the militants’ reign of terror in the east, the Syrian army, backed by Russian fighter jets, began a major offensive on September 22. 
Since March 2011, Syria has been hit by deadly militancy it blames on some Western states and their regional allies. Loading ...",FAKE
"Print 
I feel strongly that the Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy. For me, that means that we need a Supreme Court that will stand up on behalf of women’s rights, on behalf of the rights of the LGBT community, that will stand up and say no to Citizens United, a decision that has undermined the election system in our country because of the way it permits dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system. ” 
– Hillary Clinton 
The first salvo from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (or rather, her answer to the first question posed by Fox News’ Chris Wallace to her and Donald Trump at the third presidential debate) was as chilling as it was an exemplar of hypocrisy. 
Those on the left are quite fond of leveling the accusation against conservatives of employing “dog whistle politics,” rhetoric that allegedly contains hidden or esoteric derogatory messaging which targets a specific subgroup within the opposition. Ms. Clinton’s response to Wallace’s question (where they wanted to see the Supreme Court take the country, and their views on how the Constitution ought to be interpreted) however, was representative of this tactic. 
While women’s rights and those of the LGBT community may seem to be a curious focus for the high court (since objectively, women wouldn’t appear to be particularly oppressed given that one has been nominated to run for president, and the LGBT community accounts for less than 5 percent of the American population), Clinton’s answer revealed the focus she believes the court should have once she becomes empress. 
“Women’s rights” is of course “dog whistle” for unfettered abortion, even late-term abortion, which is essentially infanticide via dismemberment. “LGBT rights” is “dog whistle” for disenfranchising the majority of Americans who hold traditional values, primarily Christians. Leveraging a vocal minority of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender individuals whom the left has whipped into a froth against Christians is the methodology that was employed to negate the political power of Christians in Europe and Canada. A direct assault via legislation in this area would not work in the U.S. (at least not at present); however, judicial rulings could effectively bring about the same result. 
Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that judicial activism is unethical and skirts the Constitution and that Clinton’s overall objectives are manifestly evil. Hillary Clinton’s stated priorities for the Supreme Court are a clear indicator of her desire to use the court as a bludgeon against the Constitution and individual liberties, rather than allowing it to perform its designated function. The hypocrisy attendant to Clinton citing the rights of women and homosexuals when she is beholden via financial contributions to nations that institutionally persecute and murder members of these groups remains plain for all to see, despite being conveniently ignored by the press. 
Clinton’s reference to “powerful corporations and the wealthy” and the malign influence of that sinister conservative organization, Citizens United, was of course another exercise in blatant hypocrisy. Clinton is quite wealthy, and corrupt or otherwise compromised powerful corporations have been instrumental in bringing about the designs of American socialists. Even if Citizens United were a vehicle for “dark, unaccountable money,” the scope of its influence would pale next to the subversive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood , with which Bill and Hillary Clinton have been partnered for decades, or the myriad tentacles of organizations funded by George Soros , the former Nazi collaborator dedicated to advancing oligarchical collectivism in America, someone with whom the Clintons also have a long association. 
One need not attempt to decipher the thinly veiled intent behind Clinton’s debate rhetoric to discern what a Hillary Clinton presidency might look like. Her actions to date – and particularly those in the pursuit of seeking that office – should suffice quite nicely. Despite the craven complicity of the establishment press (mainstream media), there is ample evidence for even the most indolent news consumer to reach the conclusion that she and the Democratic leviathan supporting her, and which facilitated Barack Obama’s rise to power, are fundamentally malignant. 
In recent days, we’ve become aware of all manner of unethical conspiracies and outright criminality that’s been brought to bear in getting Clinton elected, from Democratic officials tampering with the outcome of the illegal email server investigation, to the oversampling of key demographics in polling in order to enhance the public perception of Clinton’s popularity, to the recent revelation of criminally prosecutable actions on the part of the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the White House. 
The bottom line here is that Hillary Clinton represents a class of people who transcend even the loathed archetypal modern politician in their rapaciousness and amorality. What all Americans – not just voters, and not just Republicans – need to realize is that leaders at the highest levels in the Republican Party are every bit as culpable as the gutter operatives of the Democratic Party who pay miscreants to dress up as ducks, instigate fistfights at opposition rallies and, yes, even vote for their candidates. 
The burning question is this: In the end, are we to be governed by the will of the people, or are we going to continue pretending that we have a representative government, when we are in effect being ruled by abject thugs operating behind a faux veneer of government?",FAKE
"From an Indiana pizzeria to a Washington State florist, America is grappling with a clash between gay rights and religious liberty. But there are paths forward.

Why climate scientists are taking fact-checking into their own hands

Arkansas state Rep. Warwick Sabin (D) cheers with others protesting the state's religious freedom law at the state Capitol in Little Rock last month.

The recent backlash against “religious accommodation” laws in Indiana and Arkansas is evidence of an increasingly bitter confrontation that is dividing the country and threatens to diminish the scope of religious liberty in America.

That is the conclusion of a number of scholars and experts who are urging the United States Supreme Court to consider this confrontation when it hears oral argument on April 28 in a potential landmark case involving same-sex marriage.

On one side are gay couples who are seeking the full benefits of equal treatment and dignity in a society that has long forced them into second-class status, or substantially worse.

On the other side are religious conservatives, who say they are being coerced to support and/or participate in activities that offend their religious beliefs.

Gay rights activists, sensing an approaching victory at the Supreme Court, are growing more aggressive in challenging the conservatives. Many argue that any accommodation of religious beliefs in the context of gay rights would amount to a “license to discriminate.”

Conservatives counter that the issue is freedom of conscience. Religious accommodations traditionally have been provided to avoid the prospect of coercion against one’s faith, they say.

Indiana and Arkansas were just the latest flashpoints in what could become a major turning point. For the first time in US history, a sizeable social and political force seems intent on sharply restraining or eliminating religious accommodations, according to scholars who study religious freedom.

Now with the Supreme Court poised to take up same-sex marriage, some advocates are hoping the high court will offer much-needed guidance to a nation torn between conflicting values.

Some states, like Indiana, have tried to address the religious accommodation side of the equation, while others, like Utah, have taken a more comprehensive approach – addressing religion accommodations and antidiscrimination laws together.

The stakes involve more than just whether same-sex couples will be able to obtain a cake, or photographs, or flowers for their wedding. Ultimately at stake is a quintessential requirement of life in America: tolerance – on each side for the other.

Douglas Laycock, a leading scholar of religious liberty, has staked out a middle ground position in the looming confrontation between gay rights and religious rights. He calls his approach “liberty and justice for all.”

“Same-sex civil marriage is a great advance for human liberty. But failure to attend to the religious-liberty implications will create a whole new set of problems for the liberties of those religious organizations and believers who cannot conscientiously recognize or facilitate such marriages,” writes Mr. Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, in a friend-of-the-court brief.

He is urging the high court to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. And he believes states should pass laws barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.

But he also favors robust religious freedom restoration laws at the state level, and he is urging the justices to make clear in their opinion that religious conservatives retain broad freedom to live their lives in accord with their highest sense of morality and faith.

“The gain for human liberty will be greatly undermined if same-sex couples now force religious dissenters to violate conscience in the same way that those dissenters, when they had the power to do so, forced same-sex couples to hide in the closet,” Laycock said.

“That is what will happen, unless this Court clearly directs the lower courts to protect religious liberty as well as same-sex civil marriage,” he told the justices.

In a speech last fall, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah warned that religious liberty was under attack – and losing ground. “What was once a broad consensus here in the United States that religious freedom deserves special protection has recently crumbled,” he said.

The senator said that gay rights organizations and other advocacy groups were increasingly opposed to religious exemptions that a few years ago would have passed without dissent.

“From my perspective, it appears that now these groups believe they are ‘winning’ the argument and therefore have no need for religious accommodations,” he said. “Whereas in the past they were willing to respect religious freedom, now that they believe they have the upper hand they are ready to disregard religious liberty altogether.”

Last June, the Supreme Court pushed back against this trend in a 5-to-4 decision upholding a religious accommodation for the owners of Hobby Lobby.

Within weeks of that ruling, 56 senators voted to overturn the decision and eliminate the accommodation. The tally, only four votes short of the 60 needed to advance the bill, included every Senate Democrat and three Republicans.

The uproar sparked by Indiana’s passage of its own Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in late March illustrates the potential high stakes for religious conservatives.

Indiana lawmakers and Republican Gov. Mike Pence encountered a swift and unrelenting backlash by a well-organized gay rights campaign supported by major business leaders, Democratic governors, and others threatening to unleash an economic boycott against an entire state.

Those threats prompted Republican leaders in Indiana and Arkansas to quickly retreat and water down their religious freedom laws.

It also directed a national spotlight on the intersection of gay rights and religious rights.

It did so in part by focusing on an eight-table pizza shop in Walkerton, Ind.

Memories Pizza owner Kevin O’Connor and his daughter, Crystal, said they would serve any gay or lesbian customers in the shop. But they added that they would refuse to cater a same-sex wedding because such a ceremony would offend their religious beliefs about marriage.

The store closed for eight days after receiving threats and hate mail. At the same time, supporters on a fundraising website contributed more than $840,000 to the shop.

The action against Memories Pizza erupted not from an actual request for service from a gay couple. It resulted from a hypothetical question from a local television news reporter.

Other well-known cases involve a Colorado bakery’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage ceremony, a New Mexico photographer’s refusal to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony, and a Washington florist’s decision not to design floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding.

In each case, the Christian business owner said the refusal was based on a sincerely-held religious belief about the sanctity of marriage. And in each case, the courts ruled that the Christian owners violated laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“In the last year or so, with the rise of the push for gay rights, it is beyond wanting there to be an appreciation and respect for gay rights. Now a segment of our population is seeking to have that right trump religious freedom,” said Jeffrey Mateer, a lawyer with Liberty Institute in Plano, Texas.

“We are seeing people of faith being attacked, discriminated against, and losing their jobs because they are speaking out on the marriage issue,” Mr. Mateer said.

Among other cases cited by conservatives:

It isn’t just a matter of filing lawsuits or challenging the award of government benefits to certain businesses. The broader campaign often portrays religious conservatives as bigots. The strategy appears aimed at discrediting any claim to the American tradition of solicitude to religious adherents involving sincere matters of faith.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” says Yale Law School Professor William Eskridge. “Here’s another way. What counts as a religious reason is highly dynamic.”

In the 1960s, opponents of the Civil Rights Act used the Bible to try to justify continued discrimination against African-Americans, notes Professor Eskridge, a leading scholar of gay rights. It didn’t work. The tactic was swept aside as the tide of public opinion embraced the principle of equality for African-Americans.

Eskridge suggests it is only a matter of time before gay rights become normalized across the country, and religious and moral arguments are swept aside and discarded.

“One of the lessons of history unfortunately is that very often the line between bigotry and religious doctrine or religious faith is not a clear-cut line, particularly when public opinion is swiftly changing,” Eskridge said.

The professor predicted that as the nation’s rapid embrace of gay rights continues, public norms and the law will also change. So will religious practice and belief, he said.

“We’ve already seen it. And we are going to continue to see it,” he said. “Some religions are literally changing their doctrine.”

So where does that leave the state of interplay between gay rights activists and religious conservatives?

The legal landscape is a patchwork. Even if the US Supreme Court rules in late June that all 50 states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, only 22 states currently have laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

That means that gay men and lesbians are vulnerable to discrimination in 28 states.

Among those 28 states: Indiana and Arkansas.

Some observers view the recent ugly flare-up in the culture war in both states as a missed opportunity.

Had officials in Indiana and Arkansas sought to pass their new religious freedom restoration laws in concert with new legal protections for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, the energy invested in threatened boycotts and waging heated protests would have been expended instead on celebrations of leadership and progress, these analysts say.

Robin Fretwell Wilson knows how to get this done. She was an adviser to the effort do it in one of the most conservative states in America.

“At a time of great change, people have to know what the rules are,” says Ms. Fretwell, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. The idea is to get the relevant parties around a table and negotiate a set of rules acceptable to all.

It employs a common sense approach: If you are sensitive to our concerns, we’ll be sensitive to yours.

The result was the Utah Compromise. It passed the Republican-controlled state legislature and was signed into law last month with the blessing of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When it takes effect on May 11, it will mark the first time in state history that gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people have specific legal protections prohibiting discrimination in housing and employment because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Utah gets it right on every single score,” Wilson says. “They did something good and decent for the LGBT community, but they did not make it come at the expense of religious believers. I think that’s huge.”

The workplace protections apply to all businesses with 15 or more workers, including state agencies, local governments, and school districts. It does not apply to religious organizations, religious schools, and wholly-owned subsidiaries of religious organizations. It also exempts the Boy Scouts.

The compromise has its critics. Some say it does not go far enough.

For example, the Utah Compromise does not address the thorny issue of public accommodations – whether a small business such as a bakery, wedding planner, or florist must participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies if they have religious objections.

But within the compromise are the seeds of a solution to that problem, as well, Wilson says.

The agreement establishes a right for any qualified person in Utah to get married at a county clerk’s office. But under the agreement, no official in any clerk’s office can be fired or otherwise forced to officiate a same-sex wedding if they have a religious objection.

Instead, every clerk’s office in Utah – including in rural counties – must have a process that provides a willing celebrant to any same-sex couple seeking to marry at the clerk’s office.

There is a term for this kind of approach. It is called religious accommodation.

Wilson says she is developing a similar model that may offer a compromise for religious business owners who are worried about getting sued over their religious objections to participating in a same-sex wedding.

In the medical field, there are recognized abortion conscience clauses that exempt certain medical professionals from involvement in that procedure because of their religious beliefs. In effect, someone else takes their place through a prearranged process.

“When that happens, no one says you are being mean to the lady who wants an abortion,” Wilson said. “We don’t even think about it that way.”

The same prearranged process could be set up at a Christian-owned bakery or flower shop. In essence, those parts of the business serving same-sex marriages would be handled by workers (in-house or by contract) who do not have a religious objection to such ceremonies.

“The idea that you show up in the moment and get refused by a religious person is really, really hard to choke down. I don’t think the gay rights people are going to be able to bargain to that,” Wilson says. “And the idea that you suddenly let gay rights run roughshod over every religious person in the community is also hard to choke down.”

She adds: “So if we can find a model where everybody gets served and religious people don’t have to leave those jobs, I think we’d do a really good thing.”

Wilson’s approach holds great promise, particularly in conservative red states looking for solutions or to avoid economic boycotts. But not everyone is ready and willing to negotiate a cease-fire in the culture war.

That’s where the concept of a RFRA may become essential as an increasing number of cases move into the courts.

Much of the controversy last month in Indiana and Arkansas was premised on misinformation and misconceptions on both sides of the debate, according to legal experts.

Some conservatives were under the false impression that a RFRA would offer guaranteed protection against lawsuits by same-sex couples. And some gay rights activists argued, incorrectly, that the Indiana RFRA would be a “license to discriminate.”

Uncritical press reports parroted this line, over and over.

The debate kicked up gobs of dust and fury, but shed almost no light on the real purpose of passing a state RFRA, analysts say.

“I don’t think it is right to view RFRAs in light of gay rights specifically, because RFRA has always protected religious minority groups,” says Eric Rassbach, a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington.

He says RFRAs have helped protect a Santeria priest seeking an exemption from a local ordinance outlawing goat sacrifices; it is being invoked to help native Americans who need an exemption from federal law to possess eagle feathers. The law has been used to uphold the right of a Sikh accountant to pass through security at a federal building in possession of her religious “kirpan,” a small dull dagger that is as symbolic to Sikhs as the cross is to Christians.

In January, the US Supreme Court applied a RFRA-like statute and ruled that the Arkansas prison system must allow a Muslim inmate to grow a short beard in compliance with his religious faith. That ruling was 9 to 0.

“If people want to go around stopping RFRAs or neutering RFRAs, the people who are going to be hurt will be the religious minorities – the Sikhs, the native Americans, the Muslims, the Orthodox Jews,” Mr. Rassbach said.

“I think that is a real problem for our society because we are not getting less religiously diverse, we are becoming more heterogeneous,” he said.

The purpose of passing a religious freedom restoration law is not to grant a right to engage in anti-gay discrimination, Rassbach and other analysts say. The law isn’t designed to work that way, and it hasn’t worked that way in practice.

No religious exemption sought under RFRA has ever been granted in any case involving alleged sexual orientation discrimination.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be an accommodation granted in the future. But these results suggest RFRA is no “license to discriminate.”

The real license to discriminate in Indiana was the state’s lack of a statute prohibiting discrimination because of sexual orientation. That is a license to discriminate, legal experts say.

In contrast, the purpose of a RFRA is different. The law is designed to allow a neutral judge to weigh the competing interests when a law that is applied broadly imposes a significant burden on sincerely-held religious beliefs.

When that happens, there must be proof that the provision advances a compelling government interest and that it is tailored to do that in a way least restrictive of religious faith.

This approach was not dreamed up in some backroom legislative chamber in Indiana. It is a legal standard that was recognized as a constitutional guarantee for the entire country and was enforced by the US Supreme Court from 1963 to 1990.

Despite this broad, constitutional protection of religious conscience, religious adherents didn’t always prevail. In 1983, Bob Jones University argued for a religious exemption from a federal regulation prohibiting tax-exempt organizations from discriminating on the basis of race. The university had a rule barring interracial dating.

The high court held that the government had a fundamental – and overriding – interest in ending any vestige of racial discrimination in education.

Though the decision did not diminish the importance of religious accommodations in general, it put religious adherents on notice: fighting discrimination is a compelling government interest that can outweigh a claim for religious accommodation.

Then, in 1990, the high court abruptly changed course. The justices were presented with a case involving two drug counselors who were fired for their sacramental use of peyote as members of the Native American Church. They were also denied unemployment benefits. The two sued the state of Oregon, seeking a religious accommodation that would allow them to collect the benefits.

A divided Supreme Court ruled that the free exercise clause of the Constitution did not authorize a religious exemption from laws of general applicability.

This was a major constitutional shift that made it more difficult for religious adherents – particularly those in minority religions – to seek accommodations from general laws that imposed significant burdens on their faith.

Congress responded in 1993 by passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. (It passed the House by voice vote, and the Senate 97 to 3.) The statute reestablished the same national legal standard of religious accommodation that had been enforced by the high court from 1963 to 1990.

Then in 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal RFRA only applied to federal law, not at the state or local level.

In response to that decision, states began enacting their own religious freedom restoration acts. Currently, 22 states – including Indiana and Arkansas – have enacted RFRAs.

In addition, 11 other states have interpreted their state constitutions as providing guarantees of religious liberty consistent with the standard enforced by the US Supreme Court from 1963 to 1990.

Thus, 33 of the 50 states have in some fashion embraced the broad concept of offering religious accommodations.

How the approaching legal battles will play out is uncertain.

Some cases will be preempted by automatic exemptions from discrimination laws that have long been granted to religious organizations and affiliated groups.

But the stage is now set for litigation over public accommodations related to same-sex marriages. Ironically, most of those cases will be litigated not in conservative “red” states, but in liberal “blue” states that have already accepted gay marriage. That’s because there are no antidiscrimination statutes in most red states that would allow a same-sex couple to file a lawsuit.

“It is that middle area of the small business, individual proprietorship, the mom and pop enterprise; that’s the area where this is going to bite,” Eskridge says. “That is in play and it is highly dynamic.”

The professor sees the legal landscape shifting against accommodation claims.  “Accommodations that would have been given in courts 10 years ago are not going to be given in courts 10 years from now, or even today in some cases.”

In courts across the country the critical question is going to be whether it is possible to strike a balance between discrimination and religious accommodation.

What is at stake is more fundamental than cakes, and photographs, and flowers. It is whether at some point politicians and judges begin to look for ways to defuse disputes so that both sides can start moving forward together toward tolerance and acceptance.

The alternative is more Indiana-style protests and boycotts.

“What was so devastating for the religious community was to be seen as saying we have to have our religious freedom so that we can knock down your gay rights. When they say stuff like that – which is just ugly – they lose,” Wilson says.

“But on the other side, if the gay rights guys say I have to run you out of business in order for me to win, that is just as ugly, and they will lose,” she says.",REAL
"Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) came to a convention of libertarian-leaning Republicans and talked about shrinking government, slashing regulations, fighting against the bulk collection of phone data and his great affinity for a rival in the presidential race.

Paul, Kentucky’s junior U.S. senator and scion of one of the country’s most famous libertarian families, was expected to lock down the support of libertarian voters in the presidential campaign. But as Paul’s poll numbers have sagged nationally — and in such libertarian-minded places as New Hampshire — Cruz is trying to pick off what is sometimes called the liberty vote.

Cruz essentially crashed what was supposed to be Paul’s big libertarian party here, the biennial meeting of the Republican Liberty Caucus. Cruz stood in a hotel here on a dreary Friday morning, surrounded by supporters and curious attendees who held signs and jostled for photos.

“I was elected with tremendous support from the liberty movement,” Cruz said of his 2012 Senate campaign, noting that Rand Paul and his father, former representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.), both endorsed him in that race.

The Texas Republican’s presidential campaign has been making the case that as Paul’s campaign has floundered, Cruz is viable — flush with cash and able to go the distance.

On the trail, Cruz has invoked the Fourth Amendment’s privacy protections and railed against the Federal Reserve. Last month, the campaign rolled out a video showing eight supporters of Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign who are backing Cruz for 2016.

“The liberty movement has been integral to our campaign since Day One,” Cruz said.

Cruz breaks down the Republican electorate into four brackets of support: tea party conservatives; evangelical Christians; establishment Republicans; and libertarians. He sees his base in the tea party and evangelical wings, but he also is trying to siphon off libertarian voters with a message of limited government.

Cruz tailored his speech here in New Hampshire to those voters. He took a less hawkish tone when discussing foreign policy, saying that the United States “shouldn’t engage in nation-building” and calling for armed Kurdish ground troops to fight the Islamic State.

“There’s no reason for us to get in the middle of the Syrian civil war,” he said.

Cruz praised the liberty movement as an “amazing thing” and vowed that the size of government will be “materially smaller” if he is elected president. He promoted a bill he co-sponsored to end the bulk collection of phone metadata — an issue that Rand Paul championed this year with a nearly 11-hour Senate floor speech.

“This is the battleground between Cruz and Paul,” said Dave Nalle, a former chairman of the Liberty Caucus. He said Paul appeals to privacy-minded libertarians while Cruz appeals to those who want a strict adherence to the Constitution.

“I was impressed” with Cruz, said Louis Colavecchio Sr. of Wakefield, R.I., who also said he has not decided whom he will support in the primary.

The scramble for supporters seems to have somewhat strained the cordial relationship between the onetime Senate allies. Last month, Paul said Cruz was “pretty much done for” in the Senate after Cruz tried to disrupt the passage of a government funding bill because it would give money to Planned Parenthood.

“Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership . . . which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the Senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively,” Paul said on Fox News Radio. On Friday, Cruz called Paul “a friend” and “good man.”

Paul gave an animated speech here and appeared to be in his comfort zone, saying he wants a government that leaves him alone. He reminded his audience of his marathon Senate speech to defend that principle. He called for reform of the criminal-justice system, and he knocked other candidates for saying they would not hold talks with rival nations. Paul also rapped Congress, labeling a just-passed bill that temporarily funds the government “a bunch of crap” and the body itself “impotent and inconsequential.”

“I’m embarrassed that I’m even a part of it,” said Paul, sporting a bright-blue belt with the University of Kentucky’s logo on it.

Paul played down the threat from Cruz.

“Both here and Iowa, we know where our support is and where my dad’s support was, and we feel comfortable that the overwhelming majority of it is with us,” Paul said.

Some libertarians here were uncomfortable with Cruz making religion such a large part of his campaign.

“I don’t think he’s going to have as much sway on Rand Paul’s electability as people think he will, because he’s a religious zealot. It’s too much,” said Austin Sekel, 22, who is supporting Paul. Cruz “needs to stop grandstanding on the Senate floor,” he said.

Sekel and others said they do not think Paul’s sagging poll numbers will change anything. Sekel thinks Paul has a base of support that has not yet become engaged in the campaign.

Bob Pyle, a pastor from Harrisburg, Pa., said Paul has a “solid, loyal following that is not given to the sounds of throwing red meat.” Between those people and Ron Paul supporters, Pyle said the Kentucky Republican’s fortunes will only increase.

Other people here are not completely enamored of either candidate. Some libertarians have said that Paul has run his race too far from his father’s pure libertarian principles. They include John Cisar, 36, of Burlington, Vt.

“I think there’s a big schism among libertarians that he’s fallen short of expectations,” Cisar said of Paul. Cisar said that he is not a Cruz fan and that he thinks Paul is the more acceptable of the two in the 2016 race.

“He’s the lesser of the evils,” Cisar said of Paul. “And that doesn’t make me feel really good inside to vote for him.”",REAL
"In a Tuesday editorial, the paper’s opinion editors cast significant doubt on the Texas Republican’s ability to assemble a winning coalition, arguing that Cruz’s assumption that he can win by turning out more white conservative voters is fundamentally flawed and warning that the Tea Party firebrand’s hardline stance on immigration makes him “a dream come true for Hillary Clinton,” the likely Democratic nominee in 2016.

Blaming Cruz for “plunging” the GOP’s favorability by leading the 2013 government shutdown — part of a botched attempt to derail health care reform — the Journal depicts Cruz as a polarizing figure all too willing to reflexively oppose anything the Obama administration proposes. The editors castigate Cruz as an “opportunist” for seeking to pare back government surveillance and for opposing the administration’s abortive effort to authorize air strikes in Syria in 2013 — stances that Cruz took despite a generally hawkish worldview.

As for Cruz’s claim that Republicans like 2012 nominee Mitt Romney have lost because they failed to galvanize the right-wing base, the Journal allows that “Romney in particular failed to motivate enough conservatives.” However, the editors posit, Cruz “is probably wrong to think that conservatives alone, especially white conservatives, can elect the next President,” adding that the party’s 2016 nominee “must broaden the GOP’s electoral appeal.” Part of that, the editorial suggests, entails a softer line on immigration; continued opposition to reform will only prove a boon to Democratic efforts to keep Latino voters solidly in the blue column.

This being the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the piece is not without pot-shots at Democrats. Indeed, the editorial is framed around the notion that Cruz is the Republican version of Barack Obama. There are areas of overlap: Both began their presidential bids as 40-something first-term senators, both graduated from Harvard Law School, both are perceived as dynamic speakers, and both boast appeal among key segments of their parties’ respective constituencies. Although the similarities largely end there, the Journal insists otherwise. Much as Cruz is notorious for his scorched-earth Tea Party tactics, the Journal would have us believe that Obama harbors “contempt” for Republicans and for the very idea of “work[ing] across the aisle.”

In the latter half of his second term, Obama may have come to the belated realization that Republicans had no interest in cooperating with him, but the president reached this conclusion only after the failure of his assiduous efforts to woo GOP support. His 2008 campaign rested on the notion that he, not Hillary Clinton, would bridge Washington’s partisan divide, and he spent much of his first term negotiating against himself in the vain hope that his proposals would garner Republican backing. There was the largely fruitless effort to secure GOP support for the 2009 stimulus package, for instance, and the months-long, ill-fated bid to get then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) to vote for health care reform. Obama’s Kumbayaism was doomed literally from the start; just as Obama took office, top congressional Republicans decided in a closed-door meeting that the next four years would be ones of knee-jerk opposition to the president’s policies. Six years later, Cruz is telling Republicans that the obstructionists who run his party aren’t intransigent enough. That view may be held by a large segment of the Tea Party, but even some of the nation’s most conservative voices find it laughable — and politically perilous.",REAL
"President Barack Obama called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to discuss escalating violence in eastern Ukraine, urging him to embrace a negotiated solution.

Expressing unease at ""Russia's ongoing support"" for separatists in Ukraine, Obama warned that the failure of upcoming peace talks would lead to more pain for Russia.

During the call Obama ""underscored the importance of President Putin seizing the opportunity presented by the ongoing discussions between Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine to reach a peaceful resolution,"" the White House said.

""If Russia continues its aggressive actions in Ukraine, including by sending troops, weapons, and financing to support the separatists, the costs for Russia will rise.""

Obama has dangled the prospect of further sanctions against Russia and U.S. arms being sent to the Ukrainian government if talks fail.

A four-nation peace summit is planned for Wednesday in Minsk.

The United States has voiced skepticism about Putin's sincerity in negotiating.

A previous agreement, signed in the Belarusian capital Minsk in September, has been largely ignored by Russia.

The White House on Tuesday said that the previous Minsk agreement must be the basis for any new deal.

Key points of that deal include withdrawing ""all troops and weapons"" from eastern Ukraine, allowing ""effective international monitoring of the international border"" and freeing hostages, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

""While we're supportive of continuing diplomatic conversations, what's most important is for both sides to come to the table ready to not just make commitments, but live up to them,"" said Earnest.

Obama also spoke to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, offering condolences for the loss of Ukrainian life.

A devastating rocket strike on Kiev's military headquarters in the east killed at least 37 people on Tuesday.

""The president underlined the commitment of the United States to work with our international partners to provide the financial support Ukraine needs as it continues to undertake essential reforms,"" the White House said.",REAL
"WASHINGTON — The nation's most powerful labor leader, vowing to defeat President Obama's key trade legislation in the House next month, warned Hillary Clinton of serious political consequences if she fails to take a stand against the Pacific trade pact that the president is campaigning for as a major part of his legacy.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, predicted that no more than 20 House Democrats would vote for Trade Promotion Authority, the ""fast-track"" bill that on Friday passed the Senate.

""Thirteen Democrats left their base,"" he said of the Senate vote in an interview with Capital Download. ""They decided to pass something that was going to cost jobs and lower wages, and they're going to have to answer to their constituencies for that."" He added: ""They'll be held accountable; there's no question about that.""

Organized labor has been waging a fierce battle against the legislation, which would require Congress to approve or reject without amendments the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal among the United States and 12 other Pacific Rim nations. Many labor unions have frozen campaign donations as they lobby against it.

The battle between two customary allies — a Democratic president and the country's biggest labor federation — underscores the complicated politics of Obama's attempts to pass legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress during the final two years of his tenure. It also exposes challenges ahead for Clinton, who praised the emerging Pacific pact as ""the gold standard"" in her memoirs as secretary of State but has avoided declaring her view of it since becoming a presidential candidate.

""Unfortunately, it falls far short of being the gold standard,"" Trumka told USA TODAY's video newsmaker series in an interview at AFL-CIO headquarters, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. ""It's not silver. I'm not sure it's copper or some other form of metal, but it's not gold, because it's going to cost us jobs and it's going to lower wages in this country.""

Trumka said he didn't know where Clinton now stood on the issue.

""She's going to have to answer that,"" he said. ""I think she won't be able to go through a campaign without answering that and people will take it seriously and it will affect whether they vote for her or don't vote for her.""

If Clinton backs the trade pact and the fast-track authority, there will be costs, he cautioned. ""It will be tougher to mobilize working people. It'll be tougher to get them to come out excited and work to do door-knocking and leafleting and phone-banking and all the things that are going to be necessary if she is the candidate and we endorse her to get elected. It will make it far more difficult.""

It even is ""conceivable"" that the AFL-CIO wouldn't endorse a presidential candidate, he said, ""if both candidates weren't interested in raising wages and creating jobs.""

Asked whether Obama's presidency had been good for working Americans, Trumka paused.

""The president's been seriously handicapped in his ability to deliver things for the American public, because you've got a determined opposition in the Republican Party that will actually hurt the country to deny him a victory,"" he began. But he added, ""I wish he would have fought for some of the things that are needed as hard as he's fighting for fast track and TPP.""

In the Senate vote, Trumka said he was surprised to have lost the support of Democratic senators Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, Chris Coons of Delaware and Patty Murray of Washington state. When the interviewer commented that it's hard to defeat a president, he replied: ""We'll see.""",REAL
"Pro-Palestinian Propaganda Lowering Standards of Truth in America Manipulation by doctored narratives in every sphere. October 28, 2016 
Reprinted from IsraelNationalNews.com . 
Commendably, organized American Jewry is finally focused on the campaign to boycott, de-legitimize, and sanction Israel. However, focusing primarily on Israel, and not also on America and Europe, is short-sighted. 
The BDS campaign has not devastated Israel economically. Israel is thriving both economically and in terms of regional alliances—but fifty years of a well-funded propaganda campaign has all but destroyed Israel's good name and has rendered her and Jews everywhere vulnerable to diplomatic, academic, and mob attacks. 
It has also lowered the standards for truth among Americans. This is a very important point. 
An Islamic-style of Jew hatred has merged with Western, politically correct anti-racism to breed an unnatural passion for ""Palestinians,"" (Fakestinians), which has infiltrated every corner, every crevice of our lives and world. It has infected Americans and Europeans on both sides of the aisle and of every class, race, and ethnicity. 
This is utterly astounding, amazing really; something like this does not happen overnight. 
The BDS campaign is rooted in the Arab League, PLO, and Soviet propaganda campaign that began in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, the UN proposed its infamous Zionism=Racism resolution. 
In 1967, the day after Israel won yet another war of self-defense, Israel--not the Arab aggressors--was seen as the alleged ""occupier."" 
By the late 1970’s, Edward Said's treacherous, lying work had begun to have its way with Western academics, (and with Western-style academics in Israel), European governments, and international organizations. 
I only realized how successful his campaign was in 1980, when Israel was demonized at a UN conference on Women in Copenhagen. The Soviets, the Iranians, the Arab League, the PLO-- roamed the hallways chanting ""Death to Israel;"" European feminists called upon ""Palestinian"" refugees but refused to hear Jewish-Israeli refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. By 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban was an even more out-of-control Hate Fest and riot against Israel. 
As we approach 2017, UN Resolutions against Israel are as commonplace as they are grotesque. UNESCO’s recent decision to De-Judaize Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the First and Second Temples is a grim and maddening continuation of this trend. At the same time, pro-Israel professors and students in America are increasingly being harassed, even fired. 
Such Lies have infiltrated my private social world. For example: At a recent holiday dinner, our guests agreed that we live in criminal and anarchic times and that no great power has stopped global barbarism, no entity is willing to bring the world back from the brink. 
A like-minded gathering, yes? Not exactly. One man, a genial, well-heeled, well-educated Jewish-American suddenly began hectoring us about the ""Palestinians."" ""What if they did not hate the Jews and destroyed all their textbooks that demonize Jews and Israelis? What if they were peaceful? Wouldn't we have to admit that Palestinians have always existed and therefore deserve a state of their own? You can't deny that the Palestinian people have always lived there, can you?"" Oh my. Where to start? The company included two author-scholars who, between them, have published 15 books and thousands of articles, many of them dealing with the history and nature of Islam, tribal gender and religious apartheid, Israel, and anti-Semitism, etc. Among us was a third author, who had also served four tours of duty in the IDF. I held my breath and prayed that we would not go to war at the table. This man was punching way above his pay grade and I could not understand why. 
The two author-scholars presented facts, cited statistics. I pulled down book after book from my shelves. We got nowhere. ""Look,"" he said. ""I have some really good Muslim friends, they're Americans, totally Westernized, they are Palestinians. They strongly feel that this is their identity. Why deny them the identity of their choice?"" And then I understood that the pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist propaganda behind the relentless BDS campaign is successful precisely because so many Americans of all ages, are without knowledge; without respect for knowledge; do not know this; and frankly, don't care. 
""Fair is fair,"" he said. In other words: What's good for the Jews has to be good for everyone else. If not, the Jews don't deserve whatever it is either. 
Here's a man who's not an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist; not an active member of any organization--yet who needs to believe the canard that non-Jewish ""Palestinians"" have always existed; or that they existed by the nineteenth century or no later than 1948, the year that another stateless people--the Jews--chose a national sovereign identity. 
He would not listen to reason. It was quite astounding. How is this possible? 
His mind-set is part of our ruling American zeitgeist. If Rachel Dolezal can say she's ""black"" even when she's ""white"" and direct a chapter of the NAACP; if a man can say that he's really a woman, trapped in a man's body; if all truth(s) are ""relative;"" if everything is ""subjective;"" if objectivity is no longer important; if doctored narratives have supplanted fact-based histories; if revisionism is preferred to truth--then, yes, anyone can say that they deserve their own nation state because they ""feel"" or ""believe"" that they do. 
I am grateful to my combative guest for reminding me that ignorance is often arrogant and as such, is a great enemy; that educated people have been especially vulnerable to False Ideas; that, psychologically speaking, we must approach them as if they've been brainwashed by a cult. 
Facts alone will not work. We must consider all known techniques for de-programming. 
This is one of our greatest challenges.",FAKE
"Remember last fall, when pundits and politicians were trying to talk themselves into Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House because he would lay down the law with the hard-right wing of the Republican caucus? When he was the man who could bring some much-needed order to the ranks? Who could maybe end this habit of careening from crisis to crisis that Congress has fallen into because the two parties are unable to agree on anything, down to whether toilet paper should be rolled over or under in Capitol Hill bathrooms, let alone a budget to fund the basic functions of government?

As the kids like to say, LOL:

“The release of President Obama’s eighth and final budget on Tuesday has forced into the open the seething tensions that never really went away after a spending agreement was reached last year, in part to ease Mr. Ryan’s transition into the speaker’s suite. That deal set spending until the end of October of this year, at levels that the president adhered to and Senate Republicans hope to make stick. But a core group of House Republicans who gave Mr. Ryan a pass back then now say they want to toss those numbers out like so much flotsam and pass their own budget with far tighter spending restrictions.”

That “core group of House Republicans” is the House Freedom Caucus, the band of 40 or so feral meerkats who did much of the heavy lifting in driving John Boehner into retirement. But they aren’t the only Republicans who look like infants here. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), the chairs of the House and Senate Budget Committees, last week announced they will not even let the director of the Office of Management and Budget present the proposed budget to the Congress. This practice is a common courtesy extended to presidential administrations for the last 40 years or so.

No one would expect any Congress to rubber-stamp a president’s budget proposal, of course. Not even if the same party controlled both chambers and the White House. But what’s notable here is this quote from one member of the Freedom Caucus:

Right, except you’re not passing a Republican budget any more than President Obama expects you to pass a Democratic budget. The president’s proposal is the opening to a negotiation, to be hashed out between two parties. Is anyone available who can explain the job of legislating to these legislators?

But like so many other legislative norms that the Republicans in Congress have tossed out the window during the Obama era, the practice of two co-equal branches of government openly and fairly debating genuine issues that will affect the American people has been given the heave-ho. Yet I’d bet cash money some of these legislators like Mulvaney and Price are also just astonished that bullying idiot Donald Trump is stomping their party’s candidates for the Republican nomination.

Paul Ryan knows how this is supposed to work. He was, after all, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee for the four years the Democrats controlled the House from 2007 to 2011. Then, when the GOP regained the majority in the chamber, he chaired the committee for another four years, until 2015. If anyone in the House knows how the budget sausage gets made, knows all the little compromises over appropriations levels and priorities that go into funding the government, it’s Ryan. But as part of his deal to earn his Republican colleagues’ votes for Speaker, Ryan devolved a fair amount of power for setting legislative agendas back to the committee chairmen. This took away one of the tools that past Speakers like Boehner could use as leverage to get bills they favored taken up by individual committees. With that gone, a weak Speaker is practically a helpless bystander to this sort of spectacle. Sure, maybe he can still yank the chairmanship away from Price, but that will just raise howls of protest from the other chairs who thought they had freedom to run things as they see fit. And though Price isn’t a member of the Freedom Caucus, you can bet that group approves of what he’s doing. If Ryan punishes him, he gets an even louder revolt on his right flank, in the middle of an election year. But beyond all this inside-baseball stuff is a point that many pundits have hammered on over and over during the primary campaign. Which is that this partisan infection of the House is not going away after the 2016 election, or even after 2018 and likely not until sometime after the next census in 2020, if it happens at all. So even if Democrats still hold the White House next year, either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton will spend much of his or her time negotiating and fighting these budget fights just to keep the government’s lights on, let alone pushing through major changes to healthcare or financial industry regulations. Plus, there’s a good chance he or she will be saddled with Paul Ryan as Speaker, and he’s about as solid as helium. By the end of 2017, we may all be longing for the halcyon days when John Boehner ran things.",REAL
"Lifting weights could ward off dementia and make you smarter 
  by: Vicki Batts Tags: weight lifting , dementia , brain health (NaturalNews) There are many reasons to partake in strength training; weight-baring exercises are known for their health benefits. But, could lifting weights also boost your brain? Recent research indicates that may just be the case.To begin the study, researchers asked a group of people aged 55 to 86 to engage in a mix of weight lifting and brain training exercises. All of the people who partook in the study had been diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor to Alzheimer's disease , and is an early sign of dementia.While this particular study did not examine whether the benefits of exercise could be extended to the general population, the results were quite impressive. Published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society , the study found that weight-baring exercises could indeed provide some brain benefits. The researchers found a casual relationship between an increase in muscle strength and an increase in brain function. On that basis, the team recommended that more people begin a strength training regime so that the world's aging population can hopefully be a little healthier. It is currently projected that about 135 million people will have dementia by the year 2050.The same team behind this most recent research also published a paper in 2014 that revealed that weight training provided cognitive benefits to just about every area of the brain – something cognitive training failed to do.While discussing their most recent data, one of the study's researchers, Dr. Yorgi Mavros of Sydney University, commented, ""What we found in this follow-up study is that the improvement in cognition function was related to their muscle strength gains. The stronger people became, the greater the benefit for their brain.""For the strength training, study participants were asked to lift weights that were equivalent to about 80 percent of their maximum capacity, twice a week for six months – similar to the way in which many athletes train. And, as the participants got stronger, the amount of weight they lifted went up as well, in order to maintain the desired 80 percent of their maximum effort.Brain scans revealed that certain regions of the brain actually increased in size for those who took part in the exercise regime. Dr. Mavros says that the benefits were profound enough to warrant recommending weight training for everyone.""The more we can get people doing resistance training like weight lifting , the more likely we are to have a healthier ageing population,"" he told the Independent . Dr. Mavros also added that the best way to ensure that you get the most benefit from exercise is by maintaining a regular routine. Exercising frequently, and with some intensity, is key to getting the most out of what you're doing.This new research is not the first to suggest that exercise can provide benefits to brain health . The body of research linking physical exercise to better cognitive function has only continued to grow over the last several years. Science has indicated that in addition to better mental health, exercise can also promote both better memory and concentration.Dr. James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer's Society, also had a few things to say about this new study. He noted, ""New research is beginning to unravel how physical exercise may have benefits for the brain as people get older. This study suggests that people with minor memory and thinking problems, known as mild cognitive impairment, may benefit from weight training to improve their brain health.""Pickett also noted that while it is not yet clear if exercise can reverse dementia, they do know that it is one of the most important factors in its prevention. Along with being active, he says that not smoking and eating a healthy, balanced diet are all essential to reducing the risk. Sources:",FAKE
"People excited about Christmas adverts told about rest of human culture 08-11-16 PEOPLE who cannot wait for big shops’ new Christmas TV adverts have been told about books, films and art. Amid growing anticipation about whether the John Lewis advert will feature a lovelorn reindeer or a sad robin, people who love cloying corporate sentimentality have been informed about humanity’s other cultural output. Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: “For many centuries before high street shops started creating 30-second seasonal narratives to sell jumpers, mankind has been telling stories. “These stories were written down in books, which are stored in libraries or on bookshelves. Some of them are pretty good. “Museums are another good starting point for learning about the things humanity has created that do not involve an animated creature breathing on a window and then drawing a heart in the steam. “Fuck it, even Netflix has some good stuff on it.” Mother-of-two Nikki Hollis said: “I actually tried to get the book version of the last John Lewis advert but apparently it doesn’t exist. “I hope the new one is about an otter who falls in love with Rita Ora and they have little half-human festive otter pups. Then they all go up in a balloon.” 
Save",FAKE
"WASHINGTON – The State Department on Saturday warned American citizens in South Africa of the imminent threat of terrorist attacks.

The warning, issued by the U.S. Diplomatic Mission to South Africa, states that the government has received information that terrorist groups are planning to carry out ""near-term attacks against places where U.S. citizens congregate in South Africa, such as upscale shopping areas and malls in Johannesburg and Cape Town.""

The warning refers to the public call by the Islamic State, or ISIL, to conduct terrorist strikes during the coming month of Ramadan.

The State Department has issued similar warnings to U.S. citizens living or traveling in Europe, saying credible information exists about ISIL militants planning attacks there.

On Friday, the Pentagon announced that it had conducted several strikes – some of them kept secret until now – against Islamic extremists outside of Iraq and Syria as the military widens its attacks on militants. In 2016 alone, U.S. attacks in Yemen have killed more than 100 militants, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East.

The most recent airstrike against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula occurred on May 19 in central Yemen and killed four al-Qaeda operatives. It was the ninth attack in Yemen this year, including several the military had announced since March. Central Command also confirmed three previously unannounced attacks in Yemen. Strikes on Feb. 3, Feb. 29 and March 30 killed 11 al-Qaeda fighters

The military didn't disclose those attacks immediately in order to confuse militants and act swiftly on intelligence gathered at the sites, Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, a Central Command spokesman, told reporters on Friday.

“Sometimes the chatter that comes after a strike allows us to collect more intelligence on adversaries to conduct future strikes,” Ryder said.

Meantime, in Iraq and Syria, the U.S.-led coalition continued to attack ISIL, hitting 25 targets, the military command in Baghdad announced Saturday. Those attacks came as Syrian troops advanced on Raqqa, the self-proclaimed capital of ISIL, and the suicide bombers struck in Iraq, killing 15 people in and around Baghdad.",REAL
"For a brief, happy—and misguided—moment, most Americans stopped thinking about Iraq. After withdrawing the last U.S. troops in 2011, President Barack Obama declared the country “sovereign, stable and self-reliant.” No such luck. Iraq plunged back into chaos as the Islamic State stormed the region last year, and the fall of Ramadi in May revived questions about how, and whether, the country can be salvaged.

As Americans try to understand what $2 trillion and nearly 4,500 American lives really accomplished, partisans are battling over how much blame falls on Obama, who left Iraq, and on President George W. Bush, who took us there. “If you fought in Iraq, it worked,” 2016 presidential candidate Lindsey Graham recently said. “It’s not your fault it’s going to hell. It’s Obama’s fault.” Naturally, Democrats see it differently: “This represents the failed policies that took us down this path 10 years ago,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said.

Who’s right? Could Iraq have remained stable if Obama had left behind a small troop contingent? Did Bush’s “surge” really stabilize the country? In June, Politico Magazine assembled a dozen experts—including veterans of both administrations from the State Department, White House, Pentagon and the CIA—and asked a simple question: Who lost Iraq? —Michael Crowley

Michael Crowley: Ambassador Khalilzad, you were in Iraq from 2005 to 2007. Describe the trajectory Iraq was on when you left, and the Iraq that Obama inherited when he was inaugurated in January 2009.

Zalmay Khalilzad: It was a very difficult period. Especially in the aftermath of the al-Askari Mosque bombing in 2006, the sectarian violence became front and center—a very large number of fatalities and causalities, both Shia and Sunni—and the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq. We began a more concerted effort training Iraqi troops, which resulted in significant growth in their size and capabilities. The new Iraqi government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki showed more willingness to use force against the Shia militias in Basra and Baghdad’s Sadr City. Additionally, the excesses committed by Al Qaeda in Iraq against the Sunni community was beginning to turn some Sunnis against them. With increased outreach to the Sunnis, we began to have significant numbers of them work with us.

There were still some issues unresolved—there was no oil law for the distribution of resources, there still was no reform of de-Baathification. These were self-inflicted wounds, if you like—mistakes we made, in my judgment, at the very beginning. But I think the Iraqis were heading in the right direction. You had a government that acquired greater national legitimacy. There was a greater Sunni participation in government compared to an earlier period. The level of violence, by the end of the Bush administration, was significantly down compared to 2006, early 2007.

We’re still talking about Iraq, but relatively speaking, I would say it was on a positive trajectory with some big issues still unresolved.

MC: Kim, tell us more about the security situation when President Obama arrived.

Kim Kagan: The security situation in Iraq was dramatically improved by operations conducted by surge troops—violence in Baghdad and in Iraq fell dramatically over the course of 2007. And in 2008, U.S. forces partnered with the Iraqi security forces, pushed AQI out of Baghdad, out of Diyala and all the way to Mosul, where the Al Qaeda elements were greatly reduced over time by follow-on operations and special forces operations. The Shia militias, which posed a threat to the sovereignty of the Iraqi government, had been greatly diminished by the operations that Prime Minister Maliki and U.S. forces undertook in 2008 and were no longer militarily viable within Iraq.

The two main threats to Iraqi state security had been significantly diminished by 2008 and over the course of 2009. Our U.S. forces were handing over security to Iraqi security forces, such that U.S. forces came out of the major cities of Iraq, and handed responsibility for those cities back to the Iraqi security forces. One of the principles behind the way that the U.S. had constructed its surge operations was that the U.S. had special tie-in capabilities that the Iraqi security forces did not have, because they were still growing, still developing skills. So clearing cities was something the U.S. did with Iraqi security forces’ support.

As those cities became more peaceful, as the population returned, as AQI left, the Iraqi security forces could handle the security environment in the urban centers. But AQI was not destroyed. It had not lost the will to fight. It was potentially reduced from an organization that had high-end terrorist capabilities that could threaten the state, to an insurgency, a group that had very limited capacity to act as a terrorist organization, but still had some will to fight, and still had some organization, some command and control left over, primarily in the Mosul area.

MC: John, what did the threat to the U.S. or western interests in the region emanating from Iraq look like at the time Obama took office?

John McLaughlin: If you go all the way back to 2008, the Arab Spring or Awakening was still years away. In 2008, Al Qaeda central was on the run but not defeated. We were still very much on guard against attacks on the United States; we were just two years after detecting the attempt by Al Qaeda-related people to put together an operation over the Atlantic out of London—the planes plot. So Al Qaeda in that period is still very dangerous but not particularly noteworthy insofar as its capability in Iraq was seen.

MC:  Ambassador Hill, you get to Iraq at the start of Obama’s first term. What does that Iraq look like—is it on a trajectory to a place where it can stand on its own?

Chris Hill: There was perhaps more optimism than the facts might have justified. For example, there was a view that somehow Maliki had gotten in the saddle, that he understood the need for outreach to the various groups and was prepared to continue the payments to the so-called Sons of Iraq. There was an overall kind of optimistic mood, but I must say, in talking to the Sunni leaders who were part of his cabinet, you certainly didn’t get the sense there was any reason to be optimistic. You certainly got the impression when you talked to people that it wasn’t going well. Going out to Anbar, for example, and talking to Sunni sheiks out there, they were all prepared to work together in a kind of all-in Sunni party, but you certainly didn’t get the impression they were cutting Baghdad any slack or cutting Maliki any slack.",REAL
"Pope Francis, making history’s first papal address to the U.S. Congress, on Thursday implored America’s leaders to accept those born in other countries as their own children, urging lawmakers to set aside political differences and embrace people who “travel north in search of a better life.”

The pope wrapped traditional Catholic teachings into a celebration of American icons including Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., drawing lessons from their work to gently but firmly push Congress to move beyond the partisan paralysis that has blocked progress on immigration reform, climate change and other issues.

“Each son or daughter of a given country has a mission, a personal and social responsibility,” the 78-year-old pontiff said in heavily accented English. “Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation.”

President Obama watched the speech on television, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “Pope Francis made the appropriate observation for the United States to live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves,” Earnest said.

[LIVE UPDATES: The latest on Pope Francis in America]

The Capitol Hill call to action kicked off a second full day of gleeful crowds and emotional visits to Catholic institutions. The faithful gathered at the Apostolic Nunciature, or Vatican embassy, to greet the pope when he emerged. More lined the streets as his motorcade traveled to the Capitol, where thousands waited on the Mall to watch his speech on giant screens.

After his address to Congress, the pope went directly from the grandeur of Capitol Hill to the spare St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in a neighborhood that has flipped over the past decade from marginalized to magnet. He prayed with people who variously wore suits and torn T-shirts, and he blessed the meals of more than 300 homeless people.

Upon arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the pope traveled by helicopter and motorcade to a very different St. Patrick’s, the soaring cathedral on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, for an evening service.

There, the pontiff began his homily by expressing “my sentiments of closeness” with Muslims after the tragic stampede that killed more than 700 pilgrims near Mecca on Thursday, the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest Muslim holidays. “I unite myself with all prayers to Almighty God, the merciful,” he said.

He spoke directly to nuns and women in the church, saying, “What would the church be without you?” He also referenced the clergy sex scandal for the second time on this visit, lamenting “the shame” caused by “brothers who harmed and scandalized the church in the most vulnerable of her members.”

The pontiff will carry his message to world leaders Friday when he speaks at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

In his speech to Congress, Francis crafted an address saturated in American references, with special praise for the nation’s role as “a land which has inspired so many people to dream.”

He was pointed at times, urging the abolition of the death penalty and the end of arms trading, and warning of the dangers of religious extremism worldwide. And he was oblique at points, never directly mentioning abortion or the United States’ rapid embrace of same-sex marriage, saying only that the family is being threatened and that “fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family.”

He saved his most specific prescription for combating climate change, a cause on which he said the United States has a special obligation to lead.

“I call for a courageous and responsible effort to redirect our steps, and to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity,” the pope said. “I am convinced that we can make a difference — I’m sure. And I have no doubt that the United States — and this Congress — have an important role to play. Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies.”

The pope, who helped broker a diplomatic opening with Cuba, offered himself and his example as a pastoral link between opposing points of view. “It is my duty to build bridges and to help all men and women, in any way possible, to do the same,” he said. “A good political leader is one who, with the interests of all in mind, seizes the moment in a spirit of openness and pragmatism.”

Although members of Congress largely avoided the ostentatious displays of partisan cheering that have come to characterize the president’s annual State of the Union addresses, an ideological divide was apparent at times. In response to Francis’s passage about climate change, Democrats mostly stood and cheered, while some Republicans stayed seated and applauded mildly, if at all.

But the response to the pope’s passionate words about embracing immigrants seemed to strike a bipartisan chord. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a presidential candidate and son of Cuban immigrants, wiped away tears as the pope called himself “the son of immigrants.”

[Pope Francis: ‘I always was interested in politics’]

Pope Francis tempered his call for action with a statement of support for the role that business plays in society, calling it “a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world.”

“The creation and distribution of wealth,” he said, is a vital element in the fight against poverty and climate change.

Those looking for signs of this pope’s political direction could find evidence in the speech’s repeated references to a pantheon of liberal heroes, from Dorothy Day, who dedicated her life to a battle against poverty and war, to Thomas Merton, whose “Letters to a White Liberal,” written in 1963, urged Christians to follow their faith and join the fight for civil rights for black Americans.

The pope praised King for his focus on “liberty in plurality and non-exclusion,” Day for “social justice,” and Merton for “dialogue and openness to God.”

[6 reasons the pope’s speech could be awkward for some lawmakers]

Francis implored Congress to “reject a mind-set of hostility” and embrace the immigrants who come “to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom.”

The pope, noting that many in Congress are also children of people who made the risky journey to America, said the nation must follow the golden rule and “treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated.”

“We must not be taken aback by their numbers,” he said, “but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation.”

Francis’s emphasis on immigrants is a matter of self-interest for a U.S. church that is rapidly becoming majority Latino. Parishes across the white Northeast are shuttered while many in the West and South are bursting with ­Spanish-language Masses.

That focus also dovetails with the major theme of his American trip so far, a series of reminders that his papacy is very much about renewing the church’s focus on the poor and the powerless. The pope this year opened a 30-­bedroom homeless shelter just steps from the Vatican. He had showers set up for homeless people in St. Peter’s Square, and he invited about 150 homeless people to a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel.

In New York, he will get a direct look at inner-city Catholic education when he visits a school in East Harlem and meets with immigrants and refugees. In Philadelphia, where he will end his U.S. visit, the pope will visit a prison to meet with inmates. In Washington, his visit at St. Patrick’s immediately — and pointedly — followed his hour in the majestic House chamber. The plain sanctuary of the 220-year-old downtown church was filled with people who need basic life services. But as Francis noted, “In prayer, there is no first or second class.”

“I need your prayers, your support,” the pontiff said, standing at a simple wooden podium before a reverentially silent flock. “Would you like to pray together?”

The hush broke like the uncorking of a bottle: “Yes!”

Americans are largely supportive of the pope’s engagement on economic, social and environmental issues. But American Catholics, who make up about one-fifth of the U.S. electorate, remain deeply divided over their church’s directives.

[Poll: Americans love this pope. His church? Not as much]

One Catholic congressman, Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), skipped the pope’s appearance to protest Francis’s advocacy for strong action against global climate change and what Gosar sees as the pope’s failure to speak out “with moral authority against violent Islam.”

The many lawmakers who were inside the chamber on Thursday emerged with bipartisan agreement that the pope’s central message was simple: Just get along.

On the Capitol lawn, many of those who watched the pope’s congressional address on giant video screens came away convinced that Congress should — but probably won’t — take his message to heart.

“I was not expecting him to address the bipartisan divide,” said Emily Warn, 62, a writer from Seattle. “It’s as if he was trying to heal Congress.”

In a country where the old-line Catholic population is diminishing because many families are having fewer children — though a wave of Hispanic immigrants is partly making up for that decline in numbers — the pope spoke to young Catholics, especially those who are “disoriented and aimless, trapped in a hopeless maze of violence, abuse and despair.”

They will have children, he said, only if the nation provides them with a greater sense of “possibilities for the future.”

After the address, Francis walked through the Capitol’s second floor to Statuary Hall and paused at the statue of Junípero Serra, the California missionary whom he had canonized on Wednesday.

The pontiff then joined Vice President Biden, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional leaders on the speaker’s balcony overlooking the West Front of the Capitol, greeting an enthusiastic crowd that numbered in the thousands. He said a few words of thanks in Spanish and then, to great cheers, switched to English: “Thank you very much, and God bless America!”

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, DeNeen L. Brown, Pamela Constable, Jessica Contrera, Ed O’Keefe, Michael E. Ruane and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.",REAL
"With just over a week until the first 2016 election contest, Donald Trump takes the lead in Iowa -- and maintains his big advantage in New Hampshire.

That’s according to the latest round of Fox News state polls on the Republican presidential nomination contest.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE IOWA POLL RESULTS

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL RESULTS

Trump bests Ted Cruz in Iowa and now receives 34 percent support among Republican caucus-goers.  Trump was at 23 percent in the Fox News Poll two weeks ago (January 4-7).

Cruz is second with 23 percent -- down a touch from 27 percent.  Marco Rubio comes in third with 12 percent, down from 15 percent.  No others garner double-digit support.

Among caucus-goers who identify as “very” conservative, Cruz was up by 18 points over Trump earlier this month.  Now they each receive about a third among this group (Cruz 34 percent vs. Trump 33 percent).

There’s been a similar shift among white evangelical Christians.  Cruz’s 14-point advantage is now down to a 2-point edge.

A lot has happened in the intervening two weeks.  Fox Business Network hosted a Republican debate where Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and Cruz attacked Trump’s liberal “New York values.”  On Tuesday, Gov. Terry Branstad urged his fellow Iowans to vote against Cruz because of his opposition to ethanol -- and former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Trump.

Republican pollster Daron Shaw says, “We tend to over-interpret every little thing in a presidential race, but here we actually have solid evidence Trump didn't just win last week in Iowa -- he won it by enough to put some distance between himself and Cruz.”  Shaw conducts the Fox News Poll with Democratic pollster Chris Anderson.

But a lot can change before Iowans caucus February 1.

A third of Republican caucus-goers say they may change their mind (33 percent).  Even one in four Trump supporters says they may ultimately go with another candidate (25 percent).

Cruz tops the list when GOP caucus-goers are asked their second-choice candidate.  When first and second-choice preferences are combined, it’s extremely tight between Trump (48 percent) and Cruz (45 percent).

That’s because 20 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers are so negative on Trump they say they would “refuse” to vote for him over the Democrat in November, while fewer say the same of Cruz (11 percent).  Another 14 percent say they would stay home if the nominee is Jeb Bush.

Here’s how the rest of the field stands:  Ben Carson is at 7 percent, Rand Paul is at 6 percent, Bush and Chris Christie each get 4 percent, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum tie at 2 percent, and Carly Fiorina gets 1 percent.

More than a third who say they will attend a Republican caucus this year have never gone before (38 percent).  Many of these first-time attendees, 43 percent, are supporting Trump, while 19 percent favor Cruz and 14 percent Rubio.  The poll can’t predict how many from this group will actually show up.

Among just those Republicans who have caucused before, it’s a 3-point race:  Trump 28 percent vs. Cruz 25 percent.  Another 10 percent go for Rubio.

True conservative values is the top characteristic GOP caucus-goers want in their party’s nominee (27 percent), closely followed by telling it like it is (24 percent) and being a strong leader (23 percent).  Those traits outrank nominating someone who can win in November (9 percent) or has the right experience (7 percent).

Unlike Iowa, there has been little movement in the New Hampshire Republican race. Trump continues to garner more than twice the support of his nearest competitors.

The Fox News poll shows Trump at 31 percent (down 2 points), Cruz at 14 percent (up 2 points) and Rubio at 13 percent (down 2 points).

Kasich is at 9 percent, Bush and Christie each receive 7 percent, Carson and Paul tie at 5 percent, while Fiorina gets 3 percent, and Huckabee 1 percent.

Despite dominating the NH race, Trump also tops the list as the nominee who would make Republicans stay home in November:  26 percent say they would refuse to vote for Trump against the Democrat.  Fifteen percent say the same of Bush, 14 percent feel that way about Cruz, and 12 percent about Rubio.

Over half of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State say they are certain to vote for their candidate, while 36 percent could still shift their support.

Granite Staters also want slightly different traits in their nominee than their Iowa counterparts.  NH GOP primary voters want a strong leader (27 percent) and someone who tells it like it is (21 percent) more than a nominee who has true conservative values (15 percent), is electable (13 percent), or has the right experience (12 percent).

The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R).  These polls were conducted January 18-21, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers.

The New Hampshire poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 401 Republican primary voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

In Iowa, the poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 378 Republican caucus-goers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.",REAL
"Congress faces a June 1 deadline for the law's expiration, and Paul's speech underscored the deep divisions over the National Security Agency's (NSA's) bulk collection of Americans' phone records, which was revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

""There comes a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer,"" the Kentucky senator said at 1:18 p.m. EDT when he took to the Senate floor. ""That time is now, and I will not let the Patriot Act, the most unpatriotic of acts, go unchallenged.""

He finished at 11:49 p.m., having not sat for more than 10 hours.

The House overwhelmingly passed a bill to end the bulk collection and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, has said the Senate will act on the issue before beginning a Memorial Day recess scheduled for week's end.

But McConnell, along with presidential hopefuls Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, favors extending the law. Final congressional approval of the bill before the deadline is no certainty.

Paul plunged into a lengthy speech declaring the Patriot Act unconstitutional and opposing renewal of the program. With a hefty binder at his desk, he spelled out his objections, occasionally allowing Republican and Democratic senators to pose questions and getting support from a handful of House members seated at the back of the chamber.

""I don't think we're any safer looking at every American's records,"" Paul said.

Paul's campaign sent out a fundraising appeal while his longstanding opposition to bulk collection, a pillar of his campaign, stirred social media.

Throughout the night, several Democratic senators and a few Republicans gave his voice occasional breaks by speaking several minutes to ostensibly ask him questions. Paul kept control by yielding for questions without ""yielding the floor,"" and by not sitting.

The surveillance issue has divided Republicans and Democrats, cutting across party lines and pitting civil libertarians concerned about privacy against more hawkish lawmakers fearful about losing tools to combat terrorism.

As Paul made his case, a Justice Department memo circulated on Capitol Hill warning lawmakers that the NSA will have to begin winding down its bulk collection of Americans' phone records by the end of the week if Congress fails to reauthorize the Patriot Act.

""After May 22, 2015, the National Security Agency will need to begin taking steps to wind down the bulk telephone metadata program in anticipation of a possible sunset in order to ensure that it does not engage in any unauthorized collection or use of the metadata,"" the department said.

If Congress fails to act, several key provisions of the law would expire, including the bulk collection; a provision allowing so-called roving wiretaps, which the FBI uses for criminals who frequently switch cellphones; and a third that makes it easier to obtain a warrant to target a ""lone wolf"" terror suspect who has no provable links to a terrorist organization.

Last week, the House backed the USA Freedom Act, which would replace bulk collection with a system to search the data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis. The vote was 338-88, and House Republican and Democratic leaders have insisted the Senate act on their bill.

But McConnell and several other top Republicans prefer to simply reauthorize the post-Sept. 11 law. McConnell has agreed to allow a vote on the House bill, but has indicated there may not be enough votes to pass it in the Senate.

The Justice Department also said that if Congress allows the law to expire and then passes legislation to reauthorize it when lawmakers return to Washington the week of June 1, it would ""be effective in making the authorities operative again, but may expose the government to some litigation risk in the event of legal challenge.""

The White House backs the House bill and has pressed for the Senate to approve the legislation and send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The House bill is the result of outrage among Republicans and Democrats after Snowden's revelations about the NSA program.

Although Paul called his action a filibuster, it technically fell short of Senate rules since the bill the Senate was considering was trade, not the Patriot Act.",REAL
"China Airport Security Robot Gives Electroshocks 11/02/2016 
ACTIVIST POST 
While debate surrounds the threat of autonomous “killer robots,” the mechanized replacement of humans continues across the workforce. 
The industrial robotics industry is logging record sales worldwide, and there appears to be no sign of a slowdown. As you can see in the graphic below, 2015 sales surged 12% over a previous record year to reach almost 1/4 million units. 
There are many factors driving this growth, which you can read about here; but one point worth noting is that the two leading countries are the US and China, with China leading the way. 
The nature of robotics is also changing, as new developments in artificial intelligence are giving robots an increasing range of potential uses. One key area, of course, is security. Robot security guards have already begun appearing at prisons , care facilities , and schools, in various locations around the world. 
One U.S. robot company, Gamma 2 Robotics, has designed several models for mass production. Their latest – RAMSEE – can be seen in the video below. A true mass roll-out of this fully autonomous security guard could significantly impact the 1.5 million humans that are currently employed in some form of security patrol. 
RAMSEE advertises the following capabilities: Is a physical presence that autonomously patrols without supervision Provides real-time data: intruders, motion, heat, fire, smoke, gases & more Is a human-machine interface that creates a powerful force multiplier 
Significantly, Gamma 2 Robotics has partnered with Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure: “the global leader in public safety and security solutions.” 
However, RAMSEE is missing one thing: weapons. For that, we have to travel to China, where they seem to have embraced police robots full throttle. 
In late 2015, I covered an announcement from China’s Xinhua news agency where they announced the development and deployment of 3 weaponized “anti-terrorism” robots that would be far more active than a mere patrol: 
“The toy-sized robots can coordinate with each other on the battlefield,” said the report, following their unveiling at the 2015 World Robot Conference in Beijing. 
The first model is known as a “reconnaissance” robot, which scouts for poisonous gases, dangerous chemicals and explosives before transmitting its findings back to base.If this initial investigation detects a simple bomb is the source of danger, the second robot model – a small explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) machine – would be sent in to diffuse it. 
But with other, more complicated threats, an attacker robot would start its mission, armed with “minor-caliber weapons, recoilless rifles and grenade launchers”. 
“With a sighting telescope, a trigger and a safe installed, the attacker can hit its target from a long distance,” Xinhua said. 
The local police force in Beijing was reported to be among the buyers for the three robots , which are priced at 1.5 million yuan (£156,000) for the set by manufacturers HIT Robot Group, who are based in the northern city of Harbin. 
“Apart from anti-terror operations, they can also be applied in fire fighting, public security, forestry and agriculture,” the company’s sales manager Chen Deqiang said, according to Xinhua. 
If we have learned anything about anti-terrorism efforts, authorities consider front-line deployment to be areas of public travel. We were given the TSA based on such notions, and have since witnessed its intrusive role in airports, and soon-to-be at other public transportation if authorities have their way. 
China has gone to the next level with a robot TSA of sorts called AnBot that is equipped with what is essentially a taser-like device that is being fittingly compared to a cattle-prod. 
Image Credit 
It was first introduced at a tech show earlier in the year, and was speculated to have been designed for protest suppression. For now, its first job is to patrol China’s Shenzhen airport. 
Most alarming, however, is that it is tied to one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. 
The back end of this “intelligent security robot” is l inked to China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer , where it has access to cloud services . AnBot conducts patrols, recognizes threats and has multiple cameras that use facial recognition. 
These cloud services give the robots petascale processing power , well beyond onboard processing capabilities in the robot. The supercomputer connection is there “to enhance the intelligent learning capabilities and human-machine interface of these devices,” said the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, in a report released Tuesday that examines China’s autonomous systems development efforts . [emphasis added] 
( Source ) 
This link to “cloud services” is a new trend in robot artificial intelligence that also has been referred to as the Wikipedia for Robots – essentially an Internet Cloud Brain. Through robot-to-robot information sharing they can speed up their learning process … autonomously. Examples have included robots that can learn to cook, and robots that can learn the tasks involved in care-giving. However, when applied to policing, things become much more ethically troubling. 
People were outraged in the U.S., for example, when a robot in Dallas was used to deliver a pound of C-4 explosive to a U.S. citizen whom the police deemed a sufficient threat worthy of immediate execution. At least, in that case, a human made the decision. But it is being viewed as a tip-toe along the path to the widespread use of “killer robots” much as we have seen with the use of drones. Discussion was once limited to overseas – egregious enough – but there has been a growing voice of those who are urging weaponized domestic police drones. 
As John Vibes wrote , it might be inevitable: 
The Taser corporation is planning on building a drone that is equipped with a stun gun, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal. 
Not only will the drones be equipped with tasers, but there is also talk of them being autonomous, meaning that an actual human won’t necessarily be needed to fly the drone. 
This is actually already being done in India , the first country to have approved the use of drones attached with “non-lethal” weapons. And, just this week, British tabloid, The Sun , had a feature entitled “Vladimir Putin’s Russia is preparing an army of robots and drones to take on its enemies, Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin admits.” Given the available facts, this title no longer seems so deliberately sensational. 
Clearly we are entering a potentially dangerous convergence of expanding robotic artificial intelligence along with the political will to continue allowing robots more and more autonomy as they carry out the traditional duties of the military and police. Some experts argue that the precision of robotics will curb many of the abuses we have seen from our military and police. But is that the trend we are actually seeing? Or will automated systems of violent control inevitably lead to even greater industrial-level suppression and killing? 
Nicholas West writes for ActivistPost.com . This article may be republished in part or in full with author attribution and source link .",FAKE
"The president's comments cap a geopolitical backlash sparked by Netanyahu's statement on Monday that a Palestinian state would not be established on his watch. The Israeli prime minister has since insisted that he remains open to a two-state solution under very specific, restrictive conditions. But the damage appears to have been done, with the White House offering only the most perfunctory of diplo-speak to obscure its frustrations.

""We indicated that that kind of rhetoric was contrary to what is the best of Israel's traditions. That although Israel was founded based on the historic Jewish homeland and the need to have a Jewish homeland, Israeli democracy has been premised on everybody in the country being treated equally and fairly,"" said Obama. ""And I think that that is what's best about Israeli democracy. If that is lost, then I think that not only does it give ammunition to folks who don't believe in a Jewish state, but it also I think starts to erode the meaning of democracy in the country.""

In his first public comments on Tuesday's elections in Israel, Obama's deepest discomfort was saved for Netanyahu's Election Day warning about Arab Israeli voters going to the polls ""in droves.""

Though he pledged to keep working with the Israeli government on military and intelligence operations, Obama declined to say whether the United States would continue to block Palestinian efforts to secure statehood through the United Nations. In a phone conversation the two had on Thursday, he said he indicated to Netanyahu that ""it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible.""

""We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn't happen during his prime ministership, and so that's why we've got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don't see a chaotic situation in the region,"" the president said in an interview with The Huffington Post on Friday.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is operating under the assumption that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support the creation of a Palestinian state, despite the Israeli leader's post-election efforts to recast himself as amenable to a two-state solution.

Besides the pressing international matters, Obama also discussed challenges on the domestic front. In forceful terms, he chastised Senate Republicans for holding up his attorney general nominee , Loretta Lynch, and encouraged Democrats to buck demands that they first pass a human trafficking bill with a controversial anti-abortion provision.

""Our goal,"" he added, ""is to get this done in a matter of weeks, not months.""

Negotiators took a hiatus for the observation of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. The president on Friday encouraged everybody involved to use that time to grow more ""comfortable with the current positions that are being taken.""

Standing in the way of that final deal, according to recent reports, are lingering disputes over limits on new types of centrifuges that Iran wants to develop and the pace of international sanctions relief to be given to the country after a deal is struck.

""Frankly,"" he said, ""they have not yet made the kind of concessions that are I think going to be needed for a final deal to get done. But they have moved, and so there's the possibility.""

While he expressed worry about the strain that Netanyahu had placed on Israel's democratic fabric, Obama did not see the Israeli prime minister's electoral victory as having a tangible impact on current negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. With just days to go before those talks between Iran, the U.S. and five other countries are scheduled to wrap, Obama offered a markedly sober assessment about the prospects for a deal.

An even bigger fight between the parties could be on the political horizon. The president flatly said that he would not sign an appropriations bill to fund the government if it did not alleviate the spending cuts brought about by sequestration. With spending cuts set to return in October 2015, his declaration ups the ante for lawmakers and portends another government shutdown showdown.

""I’ve been very clear. We are not going to have a situation where, for example, our education spending goes back to its lowest level since the year 2000,"" said Obama. ""We can’t do that to our kids, and I’m not going to sign it.""

Even without Congress' input, there are initiatives that Obama can pursue during his closing year-and-a-half in office. During the roughly 25-minute interview in the White House Cabinet Room, he said that two major ones will be coming.

""Relatively soon,"" Obama said, he will be raising the annual salary threshold at which companies are required to pay overtime to employees who work more than 40 hours a week. The president didn't tip his hand as to how much he would lift the current level of $23,600.

In addition, Obama said he would be exercising his pardon and clemency powers ""more aggressively for people who meet the criteria."" There has been ongoing criticism that he has utilized those powers less than many of his predecessors.

One place where Obama will not go in the closing months of his second term is back to the negotiating table over a ""grand bargain"" on long-term deficit or debt reduction. Despite Republican criticism that a crisis still looms, he insisted that the times allow for a different approach

""The truth is, is that circumstances changed,"" said Obama, when asked why he no longer highlights issues like entitlement reform. ""At that time, we were seeing significantly higher deficits, and the economy was just beginning to grow. We now know that we’ve got strong growth.""

His unwillingness to re-open those talks he had in 2010 and 2011 isn't indicative of some ideological drift, he added. Asked if he'd become a more progressive president over time -- as recent comments from his former top adviser Dan Pfeiffer indicated -- the president answered, emphatically, ""No.""

""What we have done,"" Obama said, ""is consistently looked for additional opportunities to get stuff done. ... By hook or by crook, we're going to make sure that when I leave this office, that the country is more prosperous, more people have opportunity, kids have a better education, we're more competitive, climate change is being taken more seriously than it was, and we are actually trying to do something about it. Those are going to be the measures by which I look back and say whether I've been successful as president.""",REAL
"WikiLeaks: Neera Tanden has ANOTHER ringing endorsement for Hillary! (No, not really) Posted at 3:21 pm on October 29, 2016 by Doug P. 
As emails released by WikiLeaks have revealed, Hillary Clinton adviser and Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden has demonstrated brutal honesty when it comes to the Clintons’ dealings, and a new email released today is no different: Neera Tanden knows (and she spells like Trump!): ""Sometimes HRC/WJC have the worst judgement"" https://t.co/hRSAhG2eua pic.twitter.com/cTs0oGSb4m",FAKE
"The first televised presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a bonanza for fact checkers. Here are some of the candidates' statements and how they compare with the facts.

Claim: Donald Trump repeated his insistence that he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming Clinton's assertions to the contrary were ""mainstream media nonsense put out by her"".

Reality Check verdict: Trump did not publicly speak out against the war before it started. On 11 September 2002, radio host Howard Stern asked Trump if he supported a potential invasion of Iraq. He replied: ""Yeah, I guess so"". During the debate, he tried to explain that away by saying the comment had been made ""lightly"". He said he had been arguing in private, to Fox News's Sean Hannity, that war would destabilise the Middle East, but we have no evidence to support that so far. He did start to express doubts after the invasion.

Claim: Clinton attacked Trump over his boasts about his business acumen. ""You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit,"" Clinton said. ""He started his business with $14m, borrowed from his father.""

Reality Check verdict: Trump says he received a $1m loan from his real estate mogul father. He also got loan guarantees and money from his future inheritance and inherited a share of his father's property holdings.

Claim: Trump alleged that Clinton called the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the ""gold standard"" of trade agreements. Clinton denied this but added: ""I did say I hoped it would be a good deal.""

Reality Check verdict: We give this one to Trump. Clinton did more than express hope that the deal would turn out well and in a 2012 trip to Australia said it would be the ""gold standard"": ""This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.""

Claim: Clinton said: ""People have looked at both of our plans, have concluded that mine would create 10 million jobs and yours would lose us 3.5 million jobs.""

Reality Check verdict: Clinton has made this claim before. It is based on an optimistic reading of a report by Moody's Analytics, which says that most of the 10 million new jobs would be created anyway by an expanding economy. If all of Clinton's economic policies became law - which the report says is unlikely - they would account for 3.2 million of the 10 million jobs. The same company analysed Trump's plans and suggested they would tip the US into recession and lead to 3.5 million job losses - something strongly disputed by the Trump campaign.

But the two reports cover different time frames. The author Mark Zandi told CNN Money a more accurate comparison to the 10 million jobs created under Clinton would be 400,000 jobs lost under Trump, not 3.4 million.

Claim: Trump has frequently tried to blame the rise of Islamic State militants on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This is his latest attempt.

Reality Check verdict: Possibly the strangest claim of the night. Clinton is 68 years old. The so-called Islamic State can trace its roots back to 1999, although it did not start referring to itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) until 2013. Read more here.

Claim: Clinton accused Trump of calling calling climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese. He insisted ""I did not say that"".

Reality Check verdict: This claim relates to a 2012 tweet which Trump later said was a joke. He said: ""The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.""

Claim: Clinton said race determines how people are treated in the criminal justice system.

Reality Check verdict: This is a tough one to prove as there are no figures on the percentage of crimes that result in arrest. What we do know is that black people are locked up five times more frequently than white people. African-American people make up about 13% of the United States population. White people make up 64%. But black people make up 40% of the prison population, and white people 39%. It does not mean that black people, who tend to live more in urban, heavily policed areas, are five times as likely to commit crime however.

Clinton also claimed that African American men are more likely to be killed by guns than other demographics, something that is largely borne out by the statistics.

Claim: Murders in New York city are up.

Reality Check verdict: As so often with crime statistics it depends how you slice it. The murder rate in New York city is close to record lows but did increase slightly between 2014 and 2015, according to FBI figures. But the very latest figures from the New York Police Department show murder rates are down 4% on 2015.

Murder rates across the US as a whole went up 10.8% in 2015, the biggest single-year percentage jump since 1971, with a big spike in a handful of cities including Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore.

Trump also claimed that ""stop and frisk"" tactics ""worked very well in New York"" and brought crime rates down. This is hotly disputed by researchers and commentators . Violent crime rates have continued to decline in New York, as part of a long term trend, even though the number of ""stop and frisk"" searches has gone down dramatically in recent years. Research by Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University found indiscriminate searches had little effect on crime, although his research also found crime was reduced when police stopped and frisked civilians after observing someone acting violently, selling drugs or ""casing a joint"".

Claim: Trump says he can't release his tax returns because he is in the middle of a tax audit. He also says publishing them would not reveal much.

Clinton suggests he will never publish them as they might reveal he is not as rich as he says he is, does not pay Federal tax and does not give as much to charity as claimed.

Reality Check verdict: Being audited by the Internal Revenue Service does not prohibit the release of tax returns. They would reveal Trump's annual income, how much he pays in tax and how much he gives to charity. Trump claims he has given $102m to charity in the past five years, but a Washington Post investigation could not find any cash donated by Trump's businesses after 2008. Trump's actual wealth has been assessed by Forbes at $4.5bn, compared with the $10bn he claims.

Interestingly, Trump has never provided evidence that he is actually under audit by the tax authorities. According to Associated Press, a letter released by his tax lawyers never used the word, merely describing his tax returns as under continuous review.",REAL
"Here's   
This is what it must feel like to be on Death Row, to be waiting for the moment when the iron door clangs open for the last time and four burly guards escort you arm-in-arm to the room where your life will be extinguished. That same sense of dread hangs over the presidential election of 2016. 
No one is happy about the election and no one anticipates better days ahead. America’s ‘glory days” appear to be in the rearview mirror while the steady downward slide seems to be gaining pace. This year’s presidential campaign has brought all the anger, anxiety and frustration bubbling to the surface. Nerves are raw, people are on edge, and the trepidation is so thick you could cut it with a knife. All the recent surveys tell the same story: Americans are sick of the mudslinging, sick of the scandals, sick of the recriminations, sick of the two party duopoly, and sick of the two candidates, the two most distrusted and reviled candidates in the country’s 230 year history. This is from the New York Times: 
“An overwhelming majority of voters are disgusted by the state of American politics, and many harbor doubts that either major-party nominee can unite the country after a historically ugly presidential campaign, according to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll… 
With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters… 
After weeks of Mr. Trump’s accusations that the election is “rigged,” a little more than six in 10 of his supporters say they will accept the results as legitimate if he loses. More than a quarter of Mr. Trump’s supporters say they will probably not accept the outcome if Mrs. Clinton is declared the winner, and nearly 40 percent of them say they have little or no confidence that Americans’ votes will be counted properly.” ( Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times /CBS Poll, New York Times) 
The growing sense of desperation in America today is palpable and it goes far beyond this one, isolated election cycle. The steady erosion of confidence in the nation’s main institutions is evident in Congress’s public approval ratings which seem to be stuck in single-digit territory. The public probably feels equal contempt for the Loretta Lynch Justice Department which is loaded with Clinton toadies that have done their best to quash any investigation into the illicit pay-to-play machinations at the Clinton Foundation. And, let’s not forget the media which has lost whatever shred of credibility it managed to salvage after its myriad of war-promoting lies about WMD, mobile weapons labs, aluminum tubes and Assad’s imaginary chemical weapons attacks, attacks that were invented from whole cloth at one of Washington’s many neocon think tanks where these fake ideas are typically hatched. The Forth Estate’s latest gambit is an idiotic attempt to prove that Vladimir Putin is trying to hack our thoroughly-corrupted Third World voting system to achieve some nebulous political gain. What a joke. 
No, Hillary, Putin is not gaming the system like you did in the primaries with Bernie Sanders, nor did he put a gun to your head and force you to delete the 33,000 missing emails from your private server. That was your handiwork Ms. Clinton, although you have a done a masterful job in deflecting attention from yourself and passing the buck for your own sleazy, criminal activities onto Moscow. 
But, back to the media. This from Gallup: 
“Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year. 
Gallup began asking this question in 1972, and on a yearly basis since 1997. Over the history of the entire trend, Americans’ trust and confidence hit its highest point in 1976, at 72%, in the wake of widely lauded examples of investigative journalism regarding Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. After staying in the low to mid-50s through the late 1990s and into the early years of the new century, Americans’ trust in the media has fallen slowly and steadily. It has consistently been below a majority level since 2007… 
Bottom Line:…the slide in media trust has been happening for the past decade. Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way. Now, only about a third of the U.S. has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.” ( Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low , Gallup) 
“Designed to inform the public”??? 
You gotta be kidding? Droopy confidence in the media is a triumph for ordinary working people who have begun to see through the charade of “unbiased coverage” and realize that the corporate owners of the press manipulate the news to shape perceptions and maintain their stranglehold on power. That’s what’s really going on, and that’s why a growing number of people have swarmed to Donald Trump’s campaign. They see Trump’s lack of political correctness as a sign that he is not owned by the Washington oligarchy of racketeers who invent teleprompter candidates like Obama and Clinton who are never certain what they actually believe until they see it printed in bold letters on the screen in front of them. ORDER IT NOW 
To large extent, Trump owes his shocking rise to the top of the GOP ticket to the fact that he shoots from the hip and that the media hates him. What was once a liability, has become an asset as trust for the despised media has plunged to depths never seen before. 
But that doesn’t explain what’s really driving this election and why are the American people so overcome by desperation? 
It’s all about economic insecurity. It’s all about the fact that standards of living are slipping, that an entire generation is bogged down with student debt, that all the good-paying jobs have been shipped to other countries, that family incomes are shriveling, that a good portion of the population feel threatened by immigration, that health care costs have skyrocketed, that retirement plans have been postponed, and that the great bulk of the nation’s wealth has been transferred to the 1 percent plutocrats and Wall Street landsharks who dictate policy through their Congressional lackeys and their allies at the Federal Reserve. That’s what the election is really all about. 
People are waking up to the fact that the American dream is dead, that the US is no longer the land of opportunity, and that the lives of their children are going to be worse than their own, far worse. This is why everyone is so upset, so frustrated, so hopeless. They are looking for a political ally who will address their needs, and instead they get bromides on transgender bathrooms or “glass ceilings” or any of the other soothing slogans the Democrats use to pacify the masses and to keep them in the flock. Only now it’s not working as well. Now a sizable portion of the blue collar vote has shifted into Trump’s camp mainly because they see through the phony Democrat rhetoric and all the job-eviscerating free trade deals they’ve pushed for years. Trump has skillfully tapped into the collective psyche of millions of working people who feel the Democratic Party tossed them under the track-hoe 30 years ago and never looked back. And, he’s right, too. The Dems have sold out their supporters, and it’s only going to get worse under Clinton, or should we say, Madame TPP. Here’s how Nile Bowie summed it up in a recent article at CounterPunch: 
“Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities… 
Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state. 
Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history.” ( Election 2016: A Political System In Crisis , Nile Bowie, CounterPunch) 
The big money guys don’t like Trump, and they make no bones about it. But Trump isn’t going away and neither are his followers, a vast number of whom will not respect the results of the election if Hillary wins. That’s a big problem for elites who like to manage the population through the popular election sham. Now all that’s at risk. 
And it’s not like Trump hasn’t bent over backwards to ingratiate himself with the deep-state powerbrokers either. He has. His first olive branch to the elites was the selection of Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence is a died-in-the-wool establishment Republican neocon who can be trusted to pursue the same extremist agenda the GOP has followed since the Gingrich revolution. But there was another big move that Trump made that escaped the notice of the media and which really underscores his willingness to “play by to the rules.” Here’s the story from Zero Hedge: 
“Six months ago, Steven Mnuchin became finance chair for the Trump campaign. Having successfully helped to raise 10s of millions of dollars for the campaign, the former Goldman Sachs partner and Soros Fund management employee is now positioned for something much larger as Donald Trump reportedly told his aides today that he wants Mnuchin to serve as his Treasury Secretary. 
Ironically, Trump has often criticized Clinton (and his former competitor Ted Cruz) for their links to the big banks: “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate. But as we noted previously, he had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him. …for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden call for the seemingly most “Wall Street” of Wall-Streeters to become Treasury Secretary may come as a big surprise to some and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.” ( Trump Wants Former Goldman Partner And Soros Employee To Serve As Treasury Secretary , Zero Hedge) Another head of Treasury from G-Sax? 
That figures. 
Trump is great with the rabble-rousing “take back your country” tirades and all the gibberish about the “rigged” system. But he also knows how to cave in when it suits his interests. He knows he’s not going to be president without Wall Street’s nod, so he’s enlisted a trusted insider to take care of business at Treasury. It’s a signal to the bigwigs that they don’t have to worry about the Donald going off the reservation. (wink, wink) So much for Trump’s independence, eh? 
And what can we say about Hillary Clinton that hasn’t been said a million times before? 
Clinton, who still holds a slim lead in most of the polls, is clearly the establishment candidate in a year when hatred for the corrupt Washington oligarchy, has reached levels not seen in the last hundred years. The fact that Hillary can run for the nation’s highest office while being investigated by the FBI, while being savaged by the daily releases of new, incriminating emails (from WikiLeaks), and while promoting a hawkish, neocon-driven foreign policy that portends a direct military confrontation with Russia, speaks to the fact that traditional liberal Democrats are either still hoodwinked by the Democratic Party’s manipulation of identity politics or simply terrified of the alternative, Donald Trump. 
And that’s why everyone is so utterly dejected and depressed about the election, because instead of voting for a candidate they really want or admire, most people are simply voting for the candidate that either disgusts or scares the hell out of them the least. What kind of choice is that? 
In less than 48 hours, the most agonizingly-wretched campaign of all times will be over, the ballots will be counted, and the new president will be named. The only thing that is certain is that, whoever wins, we lose. 
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at . (Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
"Ohio governor John Kasich, who is still running for president, effectively reminded the public of his continued presence in the Republican presidential race on Friday by making a rather regressive comment about how women could avoid being sexually assaulted.

“Don’t go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol,” Kasich suggested during an appearance at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York, when a female student asked how he would tackle sexual violence at colleges and universities. Kasich, a millennial in an older man’s body, provided several policy answers—increase access to rape kits and confidential reporting, for instance—and then provided that “one bit of advice.”

Recognizing within minutes that he might have stepped in it, the Kasich Twitter feed went hastily into damage control mode:

This isn’t the first time that Kasich has made awkward comments about women this week. On Tuesday, he was baffled during a town hall when a young woman asked him about social security, responding, “Did someone tell you to ask that question?” (Her response: “No, I think for myself.”)

Not surprisingly, Kasich has a history of making regularly cringeworthy comments about women. His greatest hits include telling a female questioner at a town hall “I don’t have any tickets for Taylor Swift,” and bragging about how women “left their kitchens” to vote for him in Ohio. In February, he signed a bill defunding Planned Parenthood, and in 2013, he signed a gag rule into law that cut funding for rape crisis centers that provided information about abortion services.

Women may not all love John Kasich, but John Kasich loves them. “Are you available?” he asked one woman who stood up to ask a question at a campaign event earlier this month. “You look great tonight.” Right on schedule, governor.",REAL
"On Friday, Speaker John Boehner announced that he will resign from the speakership and the US House at the end of October. Here, the Mischiefs of Faction writers offer their quick reactions.

I think Boehner's resignation is more notable for when it occurred than for that it occurred. He had been speaker or minority leader for almost a decade, and clearly no longer relished his job. I think that the next speaker will face the same obstacles that confronted Boehner, particularly a ""no compromise"" faction of conservatives. They cannot be satisfied with policy substance, since they mostly care about tactical extremism. They have also made it clear that they have little interest in the sort of ""pork barrel"" politics that members traditionally have seen as a means to reelection.

I don't think this situation will change until there is a Republican in the White House, since the Tea Partiers object to the slightest accommodation of President Obama or any Democratic successor. There's also a whole industry now devoted to feeding conservatives' belief that their leadership has sold them out. This includes talk radio, bloggers, and groups such as Heritage Action. Perhaps a leader with a warmer relationship with movement conservatives might be a more effective speaker. I'm skeptical that much will change soon.

John Boehner has finally decided to take his ball and go home. Of course, I understand why he is resigning: The House GOP is ungovernable right now. Thus, while it is an understandable decision, it is not a ""selfless"" one, as several members have described it. No, this is Boehner's coup de grace, executed with deftness. Now free to rely on Democratic votes when necessary, he will be able to keep the government open. In the same way, he might be able to pass other legislation in the next month. More importantly, he presents his fractured caucus with a parting ""gift"" of their own making: selecting their next leader. Beyond the obvious question of who will be the next speaker (probably Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California), really interesting questions raised by Boehner's decision include how the process will work out: Will other Republicans step forward and challenge McCarthy for the job? Will the GOP caucus ultimately come together behind a single candidate? If not, what will the Democrats do? As unexpected and exciting as today's surprise announcement is, this is probably going to get much more interesting before all is said and done.

John Boehner's resignation as speaker of the House is a good illustration of how American political parties are strong and how they are not. US political parties are not strong in the top-down sense. Neither presidents nor congressional leaders have a lot of control over backbenchers in their parties. The main reason is that these leaders don't control party nominations. While parties have become ""stronger"" since the 1970s, they have become stronger from the bottom up, not the top down.

Presidents don't have much better ability to force legislators to do what they want now (when party line votes are the norm) than they did in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s (when party line votes were rarer). What changed? The power to shape legislative behavior comes from the bottom up. Not just from ordinary voters (although those are influential), but also from organized interest groups and wealthy donors in the legislator's district and in their party's national constituency. These factions are what really influence legislators and create party unity, not their party leaders in Washington.

So why is there so much party unity now, when there wasn't in the 1970s? Now the parties are sorted ideologically. All the legislators who come from conservative districts and are backed by conservative interests groups are Republicans, while all those from liberal districts and backed by liberal interest groups are Democrats. So, unlike the 1970s, a party leader now presides over an ideologically unified caucus that usually votes together. Yet that doesn't mean that he or she has much more direct power over them than leaders did in the decades after World War II.

Speakers' jobs were actually more secure in the post–World War II era when they led ideologically diverse parties and party control rarely changed hands. The last speaker of the House to retire by choice because of age was Tip O'Neill, who left in 1986. All subsequent speakers have left because of internal party revolts, personal scandals, or electoral disappointments. It is a challenging job, because while US political parties are strong, the power largely does not rest in the congressional leadership. Politicians are loyal to their parties' voters and organized factions, not to their legislative leaders in DC.

The longstanding tension within congressional parties is that legislators need to cooperate with their parties to accomplish their shared goals, but to do so they must overcome the inherent diversity of American parties.

Since 2010, the House GOP has provided a brilliant demonstration of this tension. The rules of the House, and the Republican conference, provided Boehner with a great deal of power. But his ""majority"" included a sizable number of legislators who would not or could not cooperate with their party. They had campaigned against the party status quo. They promised not to vote for compromises. They promised outcomes they could not realistically achieve with a majority in one chamber (e.g. repealing Obamacare). They feared a primary challenge from the right more than losing to a Democrat.

It is likely that the next speaker will suffer from the same challenge because the challenge is systemic. The best chance to end the cycle, however, would be for the House GOP to select someone who is trusted by the Tea Party faction both inside and outside of Congress, so that when s/he says, ""That's a stupid strategy that will fail, resulting in a drop in the polls and a humiliating acceptance of the Democrats' demands,"" they will actually trust the speaker.

The nationalization of congressional politics has changed what it means to try to lead a congressional party. What we like to call leadership — for speakers, for presidents, whatever — often amounts to reading the interests and preferences of different actors and figuring out how to bring them into a coalition to support policy that includes a little something for everyone. Pet projects and distribution of resources (that is, what we used to know as ""pork"") can help this process along. But if legislators' preferences are driven by national issues like defunding Planned Parenthood and opposing the president, then the job of coalition building becomes that much more challenging. Boehner may not have been the most talented legislative leader, but his problems, as Greg indicates, are also structural and systemic. And to the extent that they reflect the infusion of national — and often symbolic — issues into congressional elections, they may run deeper than the Tea Party-establishment split.

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.",REAL
"Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified the Alabama official leading efforts against same-sex marriage in the state. It is the state's chief justice.

WASHINGTON — When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage last June, the man who won the leading case warned that opponents would find new ways to push back.

“We will have to continue the fight,” Jim Obergefell said then — and he was right.

For nearly a year, seesaw battles over religious exemptions and transgender rights have replaced what had been the gay rights movement's steady progress in winning protections against discrimination in states and cities. Legislative and legal skirmishes have been triggered by an intransigent Alabama chief justice and a defiant Kentucky county clerk, a Colorado baker and a Washington State florist, and most recently a conservative backlash that has traveled east from Texas to Mississippi to North Carolina.

""We never thought this had to do with just marriage,"" says Kristen Waggoner, senior vice president of legal advocacy at Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents many gay rights opponents in court. ""This is about more than marriage.”

It's also about more than bathrooms, although a North Carolina law that denies transgender people the right to use public restrooms corresponding to their gender identity has dominated the LGBT rights debate for the past two months:

Across the country, the gay rights movement has been met with local opposition — sometimes where it was least expected, such as Houston, which had three times elected a lesbian mayor. That has forced the movement back on the defensive less than a year after its greatest success: the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that extended same-sex marriage nationwide.

“To some, this is the next front in the war,"" says David Stacy, government affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights organization. “Some of the intensity on the other side, some of the emotional intensity, comes from that.”

Both sides in the battle say it's about individual rights — LGBT rights to live free from discrimination, and religious or moral rights to live free from government interference. It extends to education, employment and housing — and it may not be long before a lawsuit is headed back to the Supreme Court.

“I think this moment is going to be short-lived, but a lot of damage can be done in this moment,"" says Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act) and Title IX (of the Education Amendments Act) fully protect transgender people, and for that matter gay people.""

Justice Anthony Kennedy's historic ruling on same-sex marriage included a single paragraph warning of the war to come.

""The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered,"" Kennedy conceded. ""The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons.""

Those battles had begun long before the Supreme Court's decision. In states where same-sex marriage already was legal, merchants who refused to participate in gay and lesbian weddings based on religious objections were the targets of lawsuits. Most of them lost the early rounds and have appealed.

The first major sign of resistance after the high court's ruling came out of left field. Voters in Houston, where Mayor Annise Parker in 2010 became one of the first openly gay mayors of a major U.S. city, rejected a City Council-passed ordinance to protect residents based on characteristics that included sexual orientation and gender identity. The simple slogan: ""No Men in Women's Bathrooms.""

""They identified an opening and exploited it,"" says James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's LGBT efforts.

Then this year, state legislatures in South Dakota, Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina passed laws pushing back against LGBT rights. The bills were vetoed by Republican governors Dennis Daugaard in South Dakota and Nathan Deal in Georgia but signed by Mississippi's Phil Bryant and North Carolina's Pat McCrory.

Mississippi's law protects those who deny services based on religious objections to gay marriage or transgender people. North Carolina's prevents the state and its municipalities from establishing civil rights protections based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

""You're seeing an explosion of religious liberty legislation in the wake of Obergefell,"" says Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a conservative law firm and think tank involved in the effort. He calls it ""just the tip of the iceberg of what we will see as Obergefell begins to settle on the rest of the country.”

The fight reached the floor of the House of Representatives this month over an amendment intended to ban federal contractors from firing workers who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The measure was blocked, then passed, then blocked again.

Beset by such conflicts, gay rights advocates have made little progress in the past year on their major post-gay marriage agenda: passing state laws protecting the LGBT community against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations.

Utah was the 22nd state to pass such a law in March 2015. Since then, gay rights activists have met a wall of opposition in the remaining 28 states, mostly led by Republican governors and legislatures.

“People are using Obergefell now to say 'I can get married on a Sunday, but then I can go into work and get fired on the next day,” says Travis Weber, director of the center for religious liberty at the conservative Family Research Council.

 Even so, he says, ""There’s a need to protect religious dissenters.”

The two sets of legal skirmishes — over religious exemptions and transgender rights — ""have made it difficult for us to move forward,"" Esseks says. He calls them ""responses to the reality of the freedom to marry nationwide.""

There have been some victories for LGBT rights. Last month, a federal appeals court in Richmond ruled in favor of a transgender boy's right to sue a Virginia school district over its bathroom policy. A handful of states, led by New York, have banned the use of controversial conversion therapy on minors.

“It’s not as though we’re not making any legislative progress. We are,"" Minter says. Even the prospect of passing non-discrimination laws in 'red' states, he says, ""is actually much less daunting after Obergefell than it was before.”

But energized by their loss at the Supreme Court last June, religious objectors are fighting back amidst a presidential election that has divided the country along geographical, ideological and cultural lines.

""What’s at stake right now is so much bigger than whether someone has to shower with someone of the opposite sex,” Waggoner says. ""I think Obergefell opened that door more broadly than it had been before. It not only jeopardizes religious freedom, but it jeopardizes all of our religious liberties.”",REAL
"Who rode it best? Jesse Jackson mounts up to fight pipeline; Leonardo DiCaprio to the rescue? Posted at 6:41 pm on October 26, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
Vladimir Putin might have popularized the shirtless-on-horseback calendar pose that was echoed recently by Alex Jones , but Jesse Jackson deserves credit for at least one thing: he chose to keep his shirt on Wednesday when he rode up to the front lines of a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
— Marisa Villarreal (@marisa_villarr) October 26, 2016 Proud to stand with the Sioux Indians today in North Dakota. #StandingWithStandingRock pic.twitter.com/0dPbDk6RJD 
— Rev Jesse Jackson Sr (@RevJJackson) October 26, 2016 Jesse Jackson on the frontline with that native bling #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/QevCYFugN3 
— Ruth Hopkins (@RuthHHopkins) October 26, 2016 
Seen standing with Jackson (literally; check over his shoulder above) was “Avengers” actor Mark Ruffalo, who offered his own exclusive scoop of sorts by confirming that climate crusader Leonardo DiCaprio would be stopping by Thursday, assuming his green-friendly private jet that runs on unicorn tears isn’t delayed. This is happening! #noDapl ! Rev. Jesse Jackson calls @POTUS from #StandingRock ! Mark Ruffalo confirms Leonardo DiCaprio comes tomorrow pic.twitter.com/6b2Gd8FFpd 
— Asani Isapoet (@Asani) October 26, 2016 
President Obama seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the pipeline. The Seattle Times reports that the administration asked Energy Transfer Partners for a second time Tuesday to voluntarily cease construction, to no avail. And Hillary? No one’s even sure yet where she really stands on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but a few of Ruffalo’s fans aren’t happy that he’s now with her, sort of. Please please please. This is is worth getting out and voting for. A vote for HRC is a vote for @BernieSanders and @SenWarren ! https://t.co/9YElwJ48AJ 
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren It most certainly is not. That's propaganda Clinton stans like to push. I vote for who I believe in. 
— Stan Dallas 😍 (@FanInTheMoon) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren I don't recall Sanders being pro TPP, pro fracking and circling China with missiles. Lay off the weed 
— Tony Gagliardi (@hornetgags) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren @1lolamarina Sorry Mark, never was a turn the other cheek kind of guy. She wronged us. Never Democrat 
— John Jenkins (@Oteachjohn) October 18, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren NO. A vote for HRC is a for #ElectionFraud , corporate rule, corruption & endless war. #NeverHillary 
— Basement Barista (@SouthBoulder) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @dailykos So vote for Hillary who is a pro-fracking warhawk? Time to get the @GreenPartyUS 5% for a true progressive voice. 
— Eric Magnuson (@emmagnuson) October 17, 2016 . @MarkRuffalo Jill Stein's PROGRESSIVE policies are more like Bernie than HRC's. Why should Hillary get my vote? #JillNotHill 🌍💚☮️ 
— #DNC fraud lawsuit (@Ontheotherhand) October 16, 2016 @MarkRuffalo @BernieSanders @SenWarren A vote for HRC is NOT a vote for Bernie Sanders. Go Green. Vote Stein, not a corrupt warmonger. 
— Justin Kelly (@JKelly_80) October 16, 2016 
* * *",FAKE
"The speakership is one of the toughest jobs in Washington, especially when it includes trying to contain a Republican civil war.

Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R) of California speaks during a new conference on Capitol Hill in Washington Thursday after dropping out of the race to replace House Speaker John Boehner.

Shortly after Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy stunned Washington with another development in the race for speaker of the House – the front-runner announced Thursday that he was dropping out – names of new candidates began circulating.

Inevitably, the chatter quickly reached Rep. Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin – former vice presidential candidate, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and budget hawk who many members believe is the person most capable of uniting the deeply divided and turbulent House Republican conference.

But Chairman Ryan promptly put down this second attempt to draft him. As his Texan GOP colleague, Rep. Blake Farenthold tweeted:

Can you blame him? The speakership is one of the toughest jobs in Washington – especially this speakership, which is tasked with trying to end or contain a Republican civil war in the chamber.

“It’s going to take a lot of gumption and a lot of finesse and talent to bridge the gap. So yeah, it’s a difficult chore that very few people are willing to take on,” Rep. Harold Rogers (R) of Kentucky told a scrum of reporters Thursday afternoon.

Just hours earlier, majority leader McCarthy, an affable Californian known for his listening skills and outreach, capitulated in the face of revolt from the hard-line House Freedom Caucus. Its 40 or so members were set to vote against him in secret balloting.

His unscripted comments about the political nature of the Benghazi special committee, which is calling Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to testify later this month, also played a role in his decision, he said. McCarthy was attacked from all sides for that comment, from Democrats, Republicans, and the media, when he was tagged as a future speaker who can’t speak.

McCarthy was likely to survive the hard-liner defection Thursday, and win the majority support from his GOP conference needed to nominate him for the speakership. But it was not at all clear that he could win the 218 votes needed to elect the speaker on the House floor later this month.

Standing before cameras in the brightly lit marbled lobby of the Longworth House Office Building, his wife beside him, the leader capitulated. “We need a new face.… If we're going to be strong, we gotta be 100 percent united,"" he said.

“There’s too much anger,” McCarthy told Congressman Rogers, after taking himself out of the running at the closed-door balloting session, according to  Roll Call. The Washington Post reported members crying at the news.

“Who knows what’ll happen. People are crying, they don’t have any idea how this will unfold, at all,” Rep. Peter King (R) of New York, told the Post.

What most people see of the speakership is what shows up on television. But the job carries awesome responsibility: second in line to the presidency, manager of the Capitol complex, presiding officer of the House. And that’s the easy part.

Then there’s the role of chief messenger of your party, shaping the agenda, and trying to keep your members in line every day to cross the 218-vote threshold – the number of votes it takes to pass a bill in the 435-member body. And don’t forget incessant fundraising, which takes up most weekends. Oh, and negotiating with the White House and Senate.

Then add the “hell no” caucus of 40 to 50 right-wingers to this mix.

The hard-liners drove Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio to announce his early retirement for Oct. 30. In light of the decision of his No. 2 to withdraw, Speaker Boehner says he will stay on “until the House votes to elect a new speaker.” McCarthy says he is willing to stay on as leader. No date has been set for another leadership election.

Some Republicans want Boehner to finish out his term as a congressman and speaker.

“It’s a very difficult job and having someone like John Boehner there who has a lot of experience and has the courage to do what’s right … is a good thing,” says Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R) of Florida.

Congressman Curbelo, who describes the speakership as “more difficult than being the president,” says he doesn’t see any candidate from either party able to get 218 votes.

That hasn’t stopped new names from being floated, even while the other two candidates – Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida, backed by the Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – kept their hats in the ring.

Right-wingers were pleased to see McCarthy drop out. They see him as ""Boehner 2.0."" In a statement, the Freedom Caucus said it respects his decision to ""put the conference ahead of himself"" and said the next speaker ""needs to yield back power to the membership.""

The Republican caucus is going through a period of transition, says John Feehery, former spokesman to Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois, the longest serving Republican speaker. McCarthy represented a new generation of leaders in the House, where nearly half of the members have served four years or less.

“They’re going to have to chart their own course and they’re going to have to figure out how the House works together, and they’re going to make mistakes,"" he says.

That’s one way to learn.",REAL
"As Iowans prepare to cast the first votes in the presidential nominating process Monday, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders hoped to defy the polls and pull off upset victories in Monday night's caucuses.

After months of campaigning and more than $150 million spent on advertising, the race for supremacy in Iowa is close in both parties.

Among Republicans, the latest polls show real estate billionaire Donald Trump holding a slim edge over Cruz. Cruz, who became the first major candidate from either party to enter the presidential race 315 days ago, has pinned his hopes to a sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation. Cruz has also modeled his campaign after past Iowa winners, visiting all of the state's 99 counties and courting influential evangelical and conservative leaders.

""If you had told me 10 months ago that the day before the Iowa caucuses we'd be in a statistcal tie for first place I would have been thrilled and exhilarated,"" Cruz told Fox News late Sunday.

The Republican caucus is also the first test of whether Trump can turn the legion of fans drawn to his plainspoken populism into voters. The scope of the billionaire's organization in Iowa is a mystery, though Trump himself has intensified his campaign schedule during the final sprint, including a pair of rallies Monday.

 

 ""I don't have to win it,"" Trump said on CBS' “Face the Nation"" Sunday. ""I'm doing really well with the evangelicals in Iowa. But I'm also doing tremendously well all over the country with the evangelicals. … I think we have a good chance of winning Iowa.""

By contrast, Cruz told Fox News, ""We're not finding Trump's troops on the ground. ‎They don't have an organization that is perceptible.""

Cruz has also spent the closing days of the Iowa campaign focused on Marco Rubio, trying to ensure the Florida senator doesn't inch into second place. Rubio is viewed by many Republicans as a more mainstream alternative to Trump and Cruz, though he'll need to stay competitive in Iowa in order to maintain his viability.



On the Democratic side, Sanders has rallied to close a 40-point polling deficit against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reviving memories of her disappointing showing in Iowa eight years ago.

""Stick with me,"" Clinton said as she rallied supporters Sunday in Council Bluffs. ""Stick with a plan. Stick with experience.""

Sanders, whose crowds have been large and generally younger than Clinton's, urged voters to help him ""make history"". In a show of financial strength, Sanders' campaign announced Sunday it had raised $20 million in January alone. While Sanders has a large team in Iowa, his operation got off to a later start, particularly compared with Clinton, who has had staff on the ground in the state for nearly a year.

""I think we have a shot to win it, if people come out,"" Sanders told ABC's ""This Week."" The self-described democratic socialist's message that the U.S. economy is “rigged” against the middle class has appeared to resonate with an electorate that has grown frustrated with Washington and given rise to insurgent candidates like Sanders and Trump.

 

 The campaigns were anxiously keeping an eye on the weather, but a snowfall forecast to start Monday night appeared more likely to hinder the hopefuls in their rush out of Iowa than any potential voters. Republican John Kasich already had decamped to New Hampshire Sunday, with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush scheduled to follow Monday afternoon, hours before the caucuses start.

The trio of governors has had a light footprint in Iowa, banking instead on strong showings in New Hampshire's Feb. 9 primary to jumpstart their White House bids. Yet some Republican leaders worry that if Trump or Cruz pull off a big victory in Iowa, it would be difficult to slow their momentum.



Unlike in primaries, where voters can cast their ballots throughout the day, the caucuses begin across Iowa at 7 p.m. CST.

Democrats will gather at 1,100 locations and Republicans at nearly 900 spots.



Turnout was expected to be high. The Iowa Republican Party expected GOP turnout to top the previous record of 120,000 people in 2012. Democrats also expect a strong turnout, though not nearly as large as the record-setting 240,000 people who caucused in the 2008 contest between Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.



Iowa has decidedly mixed results in picking the parties' eventual nominees. The past two Republican caucus winners -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum -- faded as the race stretched on. But Obama's unexpected 2008 victory was instrumental in his path to the nomination, easing the anxieties of those who worried the young black senator would struggle to win white voters.



While both parties caucus on the same night, they do so with different rules.



Republicans vote by private ballot. The state's 30 Republican delegates are awarded proportionally based on the statewide vote.



Democrats take a more interactive approach, with voters forming groups and publicly declaring their support for a candidate. If the number of people in any group is fewer than 15 percent of the total, they can either choose not to participate or can join another viable candidate's group.



Those numbers are awarded proportionately, based on statewide and congressional district voting, as Iowa Democrats determine their 44 delegates to the national convention.

 

 Fox News Channel's Carl Cameron and the Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
". NAZI Flying Saucers & A Permanent Base in Antarctica A highly guarded secret is the probablity that German Nazis, as early as the 1930s, have built a sec... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/nazi-flying-saucers-permanent-base-in.html A highly guarded secret is the probablity that German Nazis, as early as the 1930s, have built a secret base at the South Pole. While this idea undoubtedly will strike most people as absurd, there is tantalizing evidence to suggest that something along this line might have some truth to it.Long-standing banking and business connections allowed high-ranking German leaders in 1944 to forge a formidable Nazi-controlled organization for postwar activities.Author Jim Keith wrote:""...in researching the shape of totalitarian control during this century, I saw that the plans of the Nazis manifestly did not die with the German loss of World War II. ""The ideology and many of the principal players survived and flourished after the war, and have had a profound impact on postwar history, and on events taking place today.""Orvis A. Schmidt, the U.S. Treasury Department’s director of Foreign Funds Control, in 1945 offered this description of a Nazi flight-capital program:The network of trade, industrial, and cartel organizations has been streamlined and intermeshed, not only organizationally but also by what has been officially described as ‘Personnel Union’.Legal authority to operate this organizational machinery has been vested in the concerns that have majority capacity in the key industries such as those producing iron and steel, coal and basic chemicals. These concerns have been deliberately welded together by exchanges of stock to the point where a handful of men can make policy and other decisions that affect us all.Could one of those ""decisions"" have been the creation of a Nazi base connected to the development of UFOs? While this notion may superficially appear to be sheer nonsense, the public record offers compelling — if incomplete — evidence to support this idea.One theory is that Martin Bormann and other top Nazis escaped to South America and on to a secret base in Antarctica — renamed Neuschwabenland by the Germans — where they built UFOs so sophisticated that their secret Nazi empire has exerted significant control over world events and governments to this day. Read: Hitler Escaped to Argentina & Died Old: Pictures of Him After the War, FBI Documents, DNA Analysis of Skull & Pictures of His House Reportedly, German Navy Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz stated in 1943:""The German submarine fleet is proud of having built for the Führer in another part of the world a Shangri-La on land, an impregnable fortress.""And it has been reported that U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd , upon his return from an expedition to Antarctica in 1947, stated it was,""necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions"" and that America could be ""attacked by fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed.""Advancing the idea that the Nazis continually shipped men and material to the South Pole throughout the war years, author R. A. Harbinson wrote:""Regarding the possibility of the Germans building self-sufficient underground research factories in the Antarctic, it has only to be pointed out that the underground research centers of Nazi Germany were gigantic feats of construction, containing wind tunnels, machine shops, assembly plants, launching pads, supply dumps and accommodation for all who worked there, including adjoining camps for slaves — and yet very few people knew that they existed.""But, while tales of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica may appear plausible to some, the idea that a warm water location at the South Pole has remained undiscovered and no one has escaped or deserted the place in more than 50 years stretched belief to the breaking point in years past.But with the new revelations of 60-70 degree temperature water, magnetic anomalies suggesting the possibility of a hidden city or base and the obvious back out taking place concerning current events at the pole, the idea of a secret base is no longer so far fetched.Rumors began to circulate that whilst Germany had been defeated, a selection of military personnel and scientists had fled the fatherland as allied troops swept across mainland Europe, and had established themselves at a secret base on the Antarctic continent, from where they continued to develop their advanced aircraft technology.Furthermore, it is interesting to note that at the end of the war, the allies determined that there were 250,000 Germans unaccounted for — even taking into account casualties and deaths. Huge Discovery: Nazi Maps and Documents to Agartha Confirm the Hollow Earth Accounts Could Neu Schwabenland have been a permanently manned German base at that time? The brackish water of the warm (30 degrees) lakes virtually confirmed that all had an outlet to the sea and would thus have been a haven for U-boats. The two ice-free mountain ranges in Neu Schwabenland presented no worse an underground tunneling project for Organization Todt than anything they had encountered and overcome in Norway.The Germans were the world's experts at building and inhabiting underground metropolis.At the end of the war the United States gave anything concerning Ohrdruf a top secret classification for 100 years upwards. The fact that there had been substantial underground workings there, and Ohrdruf was the location of the last Redoubt, was concealed absolutely. Fortunately for researchers, in 1962 the DDR had taken sworn depositions from all local residents during an investigation into wartime Ohrdruf, and upon the reunification of the two Germanys in 1989, these documents became available to all and sundry at Arnstadt municipal archive.From the Arnstadt documents it is clear that the Charite Anlage unit operated in a three-story underground bunker with floors 70 by 20 meters.When working, the device emitted some kind of energy field which shut down all electrical equipment and non-diesel engines within a range of about eight miles.For this reason, even though Ohrdruf was crawling with SS, it was never photographed from the air nor bombed. Declassified USAF documents dated early 1945 admit the existence of an unknown energy field over Frankfurt/Main ""and other locations"" which ""fantastic though it may appear"" were able to ""interfere with our aircraft engines at 30,000 feet.""Ohrdruf rebuilt below Neu Schwabenland during the last two years of the war would not have been difficult, and since Charite Anlage had the highest priority of anything in the Third Reich, it seems likely that it must have been.Such a base would have been impregnable, for the suggestion is that the force-field worked in various ways favorable to the occupants. Scary Secrets of the Third Reich's Base in Antarctica A remarkable event occurred in 1999, but only specialists paid adequate attention to it.A research expedition discovered a virus in Antarctica; at that, neither people nor animals had immunity to the virus. After all, Antarctica is far away, for this very reason the virus cannot be dangerous for the rest of the planet, especially since the dangerous discovery was deep in the permafrost.However, scientists say that against the background of a global warming threatening the Earth, the unknown virus can cause an awful catastrophe on the planet.Expert Tom Starmerue from the University of New York also shares the pessimistic forecasts of his colleagues.""We don't know what the mankind will face in the South Pole in the nearest time due to the global warming. It is not ruled out that an unbelievable catastrophe may break out. ""Viruses protected with a protein cover survive even in the permafrost; as soon as the temperature gets warmer they will immediately start reproducing.""American scientists treated the Antarctica discovery very seriously and even organized a special expedition that currently tests the ice for unknown viruses in order to develop an antidote in good time.What is the source of the virus in Antarctica where only penguins can survive in the ice? There is no answer to the question, specialists are at a loss. However, several theories concerning the problem have been put forward.A majority of scientists are inclined to believe that prehistoric forms of life probably survived in the permafrost. But some specialists blame bonzes of the Third Reich for delivery of a secretly developed bacteriological weapon to Antarctica. And this theory arose not in a vacuum. It is known that already in 1938 Nazis suddenly became interested in Antarctica, they organized two expeditions to the area in 1938-1939.At first, planes of the Third Reich took detailed pictures of unexplored territories and then they dropped several thousands of metal pennons with swastika there. The whole of the explored territory was called Neuschwabenland and was considered a part of the Third Reich.After the expedition, Captain Ritscher reported to Field-Marshal Göring:""The planes dropped the pennons 25 kilometers apart; we covered the area of about 8.600 thousand square meters. 350 thousand square meters of them were photographed.""In 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz dropped a remarkable phrase:""Germany's submarine fleet is proud that it created an unassailable fortress for the Führer on the other end of the world.""It highly likely means that Nazis were building a secret base in Antarctica within 1938-1943.Submarines were mostly used for transportation of necessary freight to the place.As specialists for the Third Reich wrote, at the end of WWII the submarines were relieved of their torpedo arms in the port of Kiel and then were loaded with containers with different goods. The submarines also received passengers whose faces were hidden behind surgical bands.Wilhelm Bernhard was commander of one of the submarines, U-530; the submarine left the port of Kiel on April 13, 1945. When it reached the shores of Antarctica, 16 members from the crew built an ice cave and put boxes into the cave; it was allegedly said that the boxes contained relics of the Third Reich, including Hitler's documents and personal stuff. The operation was code named Valkyrie-2.When the operation was over on July 10, 1945, the submarine U-530 entered the Argentinean port of Mar-del-Plata and surrendered to the authorities.It is also supposed that another submarine from the formation, U-977, under the command of Heinz Schäffer delivered the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun to Neuschwabenland. It followed the route of the U-530 submarine and called at Antarctica. The submarine arrived in Mar-del-Plata on August 17, 1945.But the version of Wilhelm Bernhard and Heinz Schäffer saying that the submarines delivered relics to the Antarctica shores (both captains told it at the interrogations held by the American and British intelligence services) seems rather dubious. It is unlikely that the serious operation was designed only for the sake of delivery of the Third Reich documents and relics.Later, special services seized a confidential letter of Captain Schäffer to his friend, Captain Wilhelm Bernhard who obviously planned to publish his memoirs.The letter was dated with June 1, 1983.It runs as follows: ""Dear Willy,I was thinking if it is reasonable to publish your manuscript concerning the U-530. The three submarines that took part in that operation (U-977, U-530 and U-465) are currently at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Isn't it better to leave them there? My old friend, think about it! Think please how then my book will look when you publish your memoirs (after, WWII Heinz Schäffer wrote a book named ""U-977"").We all made an oath to keep the secret; we did nothing wrong, we just obeyed the orders and fought for our loved Germany and its survival. Please think again: isn't it better to picture everything as a fable? What results do you plan to achieve with your revelations? Think about it, please."" Even 40 years after the events, Heinz insisted that Bernhard mustn't say the truth. Is it possible that the submarines delivered something more dangerous to the continent, not Hitler's documents?Could it be the bacteriological weapon traces of which were discovered in Antarctica as unknown viruses in the permafrost last year? NEUBERLIN If you had been a Wehrmacht soldier at the bombed-out railroad station in Poltava, a city in the Ukraine, during the summer of 1942, you may have seen a very strange-looking military unit on the march, heading for a waiting passenger train.The unit consisted of women, all of them blond and blue-eyed, between the ages of 17 and 24, tall and slender, their sensational figures encased in striking sky-blue uniforms.Each woman wore an Italian-style garrison cap, an A-line skirt with the hem below the knee, and a form-fitting jacket with the insignia of the SS. You might have thought the SS had recruited a platoon of high-class call girls, but the truth was far stranger than that. You would have been looking at Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's latest brainstorm - the Antarktische Siedlungnsfrauen [Antarctic Settlement Women or ASF].The story actually begins in 1938, when the German seaplane carrier Schwabenland sailed across the South Atlantic, bound for Queen Maud's Land in Antarctica.According to Russian ufologist Konstantin Ivanenko,""The Schwabenland sailed to Antarctica, commanded by Albert Richter, a veteran of cold-weather operations.""The Richter expedition's scientists used their large Dornier seaplanes to explore the polar wastes, emulating Admiral Richard E. Byrd's efforts a decade earlier.""The German scientists discovered ice-free lakes (heated by underground volcanic features) and were able to land on them. It is widely believed that the Schwabenland's expedition was aimed at scouting out a secret base of operations.""A German base was established in the Muhlig-Hofmann Mountains, just inland from the Princess Astrid Coast. The area was renamed Neuschwabenland (New Swabia) and ""the base was known only as Station 211.From the movie Schindler's List, people have gotten the idea that killing Jews was the Nazis' main concern. But in actual fact, Hitler and the SS were just as ruthless with the rest of the population in their eastern European empire, thinking nothing of shuffling large numbers of people around in their quest for a more perfect Aryan race.This shuffle was accomplished by a little-known office of the SS called the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (German for Race and Settlement Bureau) or RuSHA. In the Ukraine alone, RuSHA drafted 500,000 women for forced labor in the munitions factories of Nazi Germany.It was RuSHA which selected women for Himmler's unit of Antarktische Siedlungsfrauen (Antarctic Settlement Women) About half of the ""recruits"" were Volksdeutsch-ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in the Ukraine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The others were native Ukrainians whom RuSHA had ""upgraded"" to full Aryans.This process was called Eindeutschung (Germanization).According to Ivanenko,""There is increased popularity for the idea of a 'German-Slavonic Antarctic Reich.' It is said that 10,000 of the 'racially most pure' Ukrainians, out of half a million deported in 1942 by Martin Bormann, were transported to the German Antarctic bases during World War II, in the proportion of four Ukrainian women to one German man.""If true, this would mean that Himmler transferred 2,500 Waffen-SS soldiers, who had proven themselves in combat on the Russian front, to Station 211 - now Neuschwabenland - in Antarctica. This may be the source of the myth of the ""Last SS Battalion.""An ASF training camp was set up in Estonia, on a peninsula near Ristna on Hiiumaa Island in the Baltic Sea. It was a combination finishing school and boot camp, where the ladies took lessons in charm and housekeeping along with their courses in polar survival. Himmler kept the camp's existence a closely-guarded secret. For ""unhappy campers,"" the only escape consisted of a one-way train ticket to Auschwitz.(There is one known instance of an ASF ""deserter."" In 1943, Auschwitz guard Irma Griese, 22, the off-and-on girl friend of Dr. Josef Mengele , took to wearing a sky-blue ASF uniform, which she had scavenged from a pile of inmate clothing. Griese was hanged in 1946 for war crimes. The uniform's original owner must have had serious second thoughts about a permanent move to Antarctica).The failure of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz's U-boat offensive by May 1943 freed up dozens of ""milk cow"" U- boats. These were large submarines, almost as big as tramp steamers, which Dönitz had used to supply his U- boat ""wolf packs"" in remote seas of the world. Himmler now put them to work carting supplies and personnel to Antarctica.Himmler's rationale for sending thousands of settlers to Antarctica can only be understood within the context of his mystic beliefs. As a result of his youthful reading of New Age books, his association with the occultist Dr. Friedrich Wichtl, and his membership in the Artamen, Himmler became a believer in the Hindu concept of world-ages or yugas. He believed that the current age, or Kali Yuga, would end in a global cataclysm, thereby giving birth to a new world-age called the Satya Yuga.By sending a Nazi colony to Antarctica, Himmler was ensuring that a remnant of the ""pure Aryan race"" would survive the coming cataclysm with its society and culture intact. They would then take possession of Antarctica when the cataclysm melted the south polar ice cap.According to believers, the Neuschwabenland colony survived not only the end of World War II, but a full on battle with the 3,500 Marines and aircraft of Operation High Jump .In 2003 Ivanenko wrote:""The total population of Nazis in Antarctica now exceeds two million and that many of them have undergone plastic surgery in order to move about with greater ease through South America and conduct all manner of business transactions.""He called the Antarctic Reich,""one of the most militarily powerful states in the world because it can destroy the USA several times over with its submarine-based nuclear missiles, remaining itself invulnerable to U.S. nuclear strikes because of the two-mile-thick ice shield.""Further, he claims that the city of Neu Berlin, the colony's capital, sprawls through ""narrow sub-glacial tunnels"" under an unnamed mountain range, heated by ""volcanic vents.""The ufologist also makes the claim that Neu Berlin adjoins:""the prehistoric ruins of Kadath, which may have been built by settlers from the lost continent of Atlantis well over 100,000 years ago.""Still other fringe researchers claim that the actual ruins of Atlantis have been found — and possibly reoccupied — under the Antarctic ice. Some say that Atlantis is located near one of the 70 or so warm water lakes that have been discovered miles beneath the Polar Ice Sheet, such as Lake Vostok near the Russian base at the Pole of Inaccessibility.Another of the oft made claims about Neuberlin is that the city has an Alien Quarter, where Pleiadians , Zeta Reticulans , Reptoids , Men In Black , Aldebarani and other visitors from the stars dwell. As we have seen, the Nazis were working on some very advanced aircraft, some of which may have been capable of leaving the earth's atmosphere.Some researchers are convinced that the Nazis did indeed make it to the moon , and even Mars . Could they have made contact with space aliens once they left the earth? Or, could their rockets, foo-fighters and disk aircraft have attracted aliens to visit them?A claim floats around in modern U.F.O. lore that an extraterrestrial craft with anti-gravity propulsion crashed in the Schwarzwald in the summer 1936, and was recovered by the Nazis who back-engineered it, thus explaining their flying saucer program. You can read more about Nazi UFOs here . This parallels stories of a similarly recovered crashed ""saucer"" near Roswell , New Mexico in 1947, the American back-engineering of which supposedly led to the discovery of the transistor (patented by Bell Laboratories the following year), fiber-optics and other exotic technologies.Ivanenko reported that talk about the Antarctic Reich is ""becoming more and more popular"" in Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in eastern Europe.He writes:""In the May 10, 2003 issue of the (newspaper) 'Frankfurter Allgemeine', Polish journalist A. Stagjuk criticized Poland's decision to send troops to Iraq"" to assist with the Allied occupation.""At the end, he said, 'The next Polish government will sign a treaty with Antarctica and declare war on the USA.'""Ivanenko added that Stagjuk's words were broadcast on the shortwave radio station Deutsche Welle the same week.""Some analysts compared this sentence to famous code phrases which started wars in the Twentieth Century, such as 'Over all of Spain, the sky is cloudless' in 1936, and 'Climb Mount Niitaka' in 1941.""(""Climb Mount Niitaka"" was the signal Admiral Yamamoto sent to Kido Butai, the Imperial Japanese Navy's fleet, to begin the attack on Pearl Harbor.)It is strange to think of a large population living under the ice of Antarctica, totally divorced from the ""mainstream"" world.Then again, there are Jivaro indigenous people living on Lago de Yanayacu (lake), less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Iquitos, Peru, who have never heard of Courtney Love.So, is there a city under the ice inhabited by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original SS settlers?Or is it just an urban legend stemming from the chaotic conditions that prevailed in Europe during World War II?Some day we may know for certain. Excerpt of Jim Marrs ' article from ""Alien Agenda"" Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
"REPORT: Megyn Trashes Trump, Newt… Then Murdoch Announces Replacements Are Available 
“Amazing how many addresses you get from Google. Going again until Saturday and all next week. BAAHAA BAAHAA.” 
He then tagged someone else — it’s unclear if that was just to alert them to the post or to let them know that he voted for them. 
After his posts where he laughed and boasted about committing voter fraud, Dougherty apologized on Facebook: “I apologize for the insensitive post. Lesson learned about my stupidity.” 
It’s difficult to say whether Dougherty apologized because he didn’t do it and had made a stupid joke or if he was simply trying to avoid being prosecuted. 
Although we can’t tell for sure right now what’s true here, Dougherty’s comments at the very least are a reminder of how important voter ID laws are. 
If everyone were required to present identification to vote, Dougherty wouldn’t have made his “joke” about how easy it was to commit voter fraud — and if he actually tried to do what he boasted about on Facebook, voter ID laws would stop such a thing. 
For all we know, Dougherty may not even be a Clinton supporter; he could have been trying to make a point about voter fraud and the dirty tricks committed by Democrats. Doubtful, but who knows? 
No matter what his party affiliation or whether or not he actually did what he boasted about, he intentionally or not made the case for strong voter ID laws. 
Share this post on Facebook and Twitter so people can see how this man showed the importance of voter ID laws. What do you think about Dougherty's Facebook posts? Scroll down to comment below! Advertisement Popular Right Now",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on October 31, 2016 Sanchez Manning — Daily Mail Oct 29, 2016 
The BBC has been accused of acting recklessly after targeting children as young as six with a programme about a schoolboy who takes sex-change drugs. 
Parents are angry that the show, available on the CBBC website, features a transgender storyline inappropriate for their children. 
And concerned campaigners said it could ‘sow the seeds of confusion’ in young minds. The programme, Just A Girl, depicts an 11-year-old’s struggle to get hormones that stunt puberty, making it easier to have sex-change surgery in the future. 
One mother, writing on the Mumsnet website, said her daughter had become worried after seeing the video. She said her girl, who likes wearing boys’ clothes and playing football, had ‘asked me, anxiously, if that means she was a boy’. 
Tory MP Peter Bone said: ‘It beggars belief that the BBC is making this programme freely available to children as young as six. I entirely share the anger of parents who just want to let children be children. 
‘It is completely inappropriate for such material to be on the CBBC website and I shall be writing to BBC bosses to demand they take it down as soon as possible.’ 
Former Culture Secretary Maria Miller voiced her concerns over the BBC tackling the subject in ‘an age-appropriate way’, saying such issues should be raised ‘where children can have support from parents’. 
And Tory MP Julian Brazier said: ‘This programme is very disappointing and inappropriate. Children are very impressionable and this is going to confuse and worry them.’ 
Family campaigner Norman Wells said: ‘It is irresponsible of the BBC to introduce impressionable children as young as six to the idea that they can choose to be something other than their biological sex.’ 
Just A Girl is the fictional video diary of a child who calls herself ‘Amy’ and dresses as a girl. It is hosted on the CBBC website, aimed at children aged between six and 12. 
In the half-hour programme, Amy – played by an actress – reveals she was born a boy called Ben but has already started using puberty-halting drugs. 
Such hypothalamic blockers provoked a furore two years ago when The Mail on Sunday revealed an NHS clinic was willing to give them to children as young as nine. 
Critics cited research claiming that most teenagers confused about their gender never go through with surgery, with many realising they are gay. The BBC row comes amid growing controversy over gender issues, fuelled by a number of high-profile cases. In one, a Christian couple were threatened with having their 14-year-old daughter taken away because they oppose her plans to become a boy. 
In another, a seven-year-old boy was ordered to be removed from his mother’s care as ‘she was raising him as female’, causing him ‘a great deal of emotional harm’. 
In Just A Girl, Amy says: ‘When I was born, Mum said Dad was so pleased that he had a boy to take to the football. But Mum knew I was different. She realised early on that I was born in the wrong body.’ 
She adds: ‘My Mum supported me when I did a PowerPoint presentation to my class about transitioning and that I wasn’t going to come to school in boys’ clothes any more, but girls’ clothes. I wasn’t Ben, I was Amy.’ 
Later Amy is shown telling a friend, Josh – a boy who wants to be recognised as a girl – that she is on hormone blockers, saying it took ‘ages’ to get them after ‘loads of tests and talks at the clinic’. ‘Once they realised I was trans for real, [I] got them,’ she says. In another entry, Amy tells viewers she has developed a crush on a boy called Liam, but confides: ‘Liam thinks I’m just a girl, but I’m not. I’m trans. And what’s he going to say if he finds out? Stop being my friend? Why? I’m still me, aren’t I?’ 
Child psychotherapist Dr Dilys Daws said the programme could confuse children. She said that, while it was natural for youngsters to wonder what it would be like to be the opposite sex, the BBC was irresponsible to feature the ‘extreme’ step of gender change for six-year-olds because they were too young to grapple with such issues. 
The programme generated hundreds of comments on Mumsnet. 
One mother, who said her seven-year-old had watched the show, asked: ‘Am I being unreasonable to think this is an inappropriate topic for a young age group?’ 
Another replied: ‘Don’t think this is remotely suitable for a seven-year-old. To start suggesting that children can be transgender when they’re far too young to actually have a gender is reckless and damaging. A small boy who is told that he can become a girl may take this as meaning that sex changes are possible, that sometime in the future he’ll wake up with a girl’s body.’ 
Another user added: ‘I don’t think hormone therapy should be normalised any more than 12-year-olds drinking or doing recreational drugs should be normalised.’ 
Other critics slammed the BBC. Mr Wells, director of the Family Education Trust, said: ‘The more we promote the idea that a boy can be born into a girl’s body and a girl can be born into a boy’s body, and that drugs and surgery can put things right, the more children will become utterly confused. Respecting and preserving a child’s birth sex should be seen as a child protection issue.’ 
But some parents on Mumsnet were more positive. One wrote: ‘I don’t believe there is “too young” for stuff like this. The earlier you teach your children that everyone is different and that nobody is “normal” the better.’ 
Dr Polly Carmichael, a clinical psychologist specialising in transgender children, said: ‘Raising awareness of these issues is the best way to challenge stigma and discrimination associated with identity issues. Programmes like Just A Girl can contribute to a healthy and informed public discussion.’ 
The BBC said: ‘Just A Girl is about a fictional transgender character trying to make sense of the world, deal with bullying and work out how to keep her friends, which are universal themes that many children relate to, and which has had a positive response from our audience. 
‘CBBC aims to reflect true life, providing content that mirrors the lives of as many UK children as possible.’",FAKE
"Fans Thrilled as NFL Team Stands for Anthem… Then Players Unleash Sick Surprise 
“I think the brand is hotter than it’s ever been, but it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care,” Trump stated in a taped interview that aired Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the brand. I care about the country.” 
His words were echoed by his son Eric, who also felt confident about the survivability of the family’s brand in the face of relentless attacks. 
“I think we have the hottest brand in the world right now, and I think buildings like this are a testament to what we do every day,” Eric Trump said, referring to the hotel that had just opened ahead of schedule and under budget.   
There has been some damage attempted against the family business via negative press and spiteful boycotts, such as the mean-spirited campaign to ruin Ivanka Trump’s clothing and accessories line by tying it to the leaked 2005 tape of Trump making vulgar comments about certain women. 
However, Donald Trump Jr. insisted that in spite of the negative press the brand was doing just fine and was even expanding, proving it was far more than just a real estate development group tied to the New York City and tri-state area. 
“The brand is much more than New York City. This is a global brand,” Trump Jr. said. “I mean, when you look at the people he’s touching on a daily basis, the presidency, fixing America is so much bigger than any of that regardless.” 
Granted, it is entirely possible that the Trump brand will suffer long-term from the unceasing onslaught of negative coverage, though it is also just as likely that the brand could even grow in popularity, depending upon how the 2016 election ultimately plays out.  ",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) came out as a vaccine choicer Tuesday, saying it should be up to parents to decide whether to inoculate their children against deadly diseases that could infect the rest of the population.

His stance was looser than the one he took last year against Kaci Hickox, the nurse Christie forcibly quarantined over Ebola fears when she returned to the United States after helping patients in West Africa. There was never any evidence that Hickox had symptoms of Ebola, a far less contagious disease than the measles, which is currently spreading across the country due to parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.

On Monday night, Hickox went on ""All In with Chris Hayes"" on MSNBC and blasted Christie for his vaccination comments.

""I think this is a good example of Gov. Christie making some very ill-informed statements. We heard it a lot during the Ebola discussion, and now it seems to have happened again,"" said Hickox.

""We know that vaccines are safe, and we know that vaccines save lives,"" she said. ""I have worked in a measles outbreak in northern Nigeria before. We were seeing about 2,000 children a week with measles. It is a scary disease. I know that these families of these 100 people who have the disease now could tell you a little bit about what the disease looks like and how much misery it causes. After the vaccine was implemented in 1963, there was a large reduction in cases, about 98 percent. And I believe it was 1989 to '91, there was a resurgence. ... The stakes are high. We have to protect our most vulnerable populations.""

Christie made his controversial vaccination comments to reporters during his three-day trip to London, as he weighs whether to jump in the 2016 presidential field. Christie said he and his wife had vaccinated their children but understood ""that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.""

Christie spokesman Kevin Roberts later clarified the governor's comments, saying, ""To be clear: The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated. At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.""",REAL
"House Speaker Paul D. Ryan attempted to lift the horizons of his party with a speech last week in which he called for a competition of ideas rather than insults, and constructive political debate rather than the politics of demonization.

Ryan’s speech was aimed at pulling the Republican Party away from Donald Trump’s embrace — though he never actually mentioned Trump by name. Events quickly showed what he is up against. The speaker was quickly drowned out by a snarling argument between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas over their wives that almost eclipsed the terrorist attacks in Brussels in the U.S. media.

By week’s end, the Republican race had gone into the gutter over tabloid charges of infidelity, which the senator vehemently denied and for which he blamed the New York billionaire, who called it unfounded. A race that seemed already at the bottom managed to find another low.

Ryan’s speech was a relatively high-minded moment in the middle of this mud fight of a Republican nominating contest. His effort to rescue the party from a coming crisis is laudable, but the root causes of the condition go far beyond Trump.

The front-runner for the nomination of the Republican Party is as much a reflection of the condition as a cause, a reality that Ryan (R-Wis.) touched on only lightly in calling for a more positive and uplifting approach to politics by all sides. Which means stopping Trump alone won’t necessarily solve all of the party’s problems.

Four years ago, scholars Thomas Mann, then with the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, then and now with the American Enterprise Institute, published a book examining the breakdown in American politics. It was titled “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.”

The authors took aim at the gridlocked and dysfunctional politics of Washington and the broader issue of political polarization that has become endemic in recent years. They were unsparing but not even-handed in their critique. They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing.

Mann and Ornstein are back again with a second and updated paperback edition, called “It’s Even Worse Than It Was.” The paperback arrives in the middle of the most raucous presidential campaign in memory, one that has exposed even more the fissures, fractures and divisions within the Republican Party coalition.

What played out primarily in the party’s congressional wing has come to consume the presidential nominating contest. In their own ways, Trump and Cruz have brought to the surface the economic and cultural anger among many of those in the party’s base as well as the distrust of the party leadership — the same motivating forces behind the Freedom Caucus rebels in the House Republican conference.

The current campaign only adds fuel to the Mann-Ornstein thesis of a Republican Party at war with itself in ways that have helped cripple the governing process. Trump and Cruz reflect the yearning within the Republican base for anti-establishment outsiders to topple the insiders in Washington.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third remaining candidate for the nomination, is a dissenting voice, calling for cooperation and compromise. At this point, he is not just a dissenting voice; he is a minority voice in the presidential competition, unless he can start winning more primaries.

Trump and Ryan represent bookends in a political debate that has considerable consequences for the Republican Party and for the country. Trump’s position as front-runner not only highlights the degree to which the party is being taken over by anti-establishment forces but also foreshadows the possibility of a significant defeat in November if, as the GOP nominee, Trump is unable to reverse his standing among women, Hispanics, African Americans and other voting groups.

Ryan represents something far different, politics grounded in ideas and policies and an attitude of goodwill toward the opposition that he inherited from his mentor, Jack Kemp, the former House member from Buffalo who prodded his party to be more open and inclusive.

Yet Ryan’s speech left unanswered key questions about his capacity to change the behavior of his party’s conference in the House and in particular the degree to which he is willing to find a governing coalition apart from the hard-liners in the Freedom Caucus.

As the country’s highest-ranking Republican elected official, Ryan symbolizes the establishment’s backlash to Trump’s candidacy, a backlash that has so far failed to stop the New York businessman’s march to the nomination. The resistance might yet succeed. Whether it does or doesn’t, it raises the question of whether this presidential campaign ultimately will produce a true course change for the party or merely end up intensifying the forces that have brought it to this moment.

I put that question to Ornstein in an email exchange Friday: “This really is, I believe, an existential crisis for the Republican Party,” he wrote. “Will it be a Ryan-style conservative, problem-solving party, or will it be either a Trump-style, authoritarian, nativist and protectionist party, or a Cruz-style radical anti-government party content with blowing things up as they now stand? Or, just as possible, will the party break apart, with no clue as to what will replace it or how the pieces will fit into the broader political system?”

The prospects for a crackup are real, given what Trump’s candidacy has revealed about the party’s fractured coalition. Trump’s views on issues, outlined on the campaign trail and in a recent interview with The Washington Post editorial board, represent a fundamental break with many of the conservative ideas that have been at the party’s core for years.

Trump’s constituency finds his support for protecting rather than transforming Social Security and Medicare appealing. His words of praise for the work of Planned Parenthood, apart from performing abortions, are anathema to many religious conservatives. His views on trade run counter to the free-trade philosophy of the GOP elites. His comments about reevaluating the U.S. role in NATO shocked many in the Republican foreign-policy establishment.

That’s the threat Ryan and others in the party see as they watch the nominating contest move into the next rounds of primaries. But it isn’t clear that what the speaker advocated in his speech would be enough to put the Republican Party in a better place, even absent Trump. House Republicans are still an unruly group and, with some exceptions, the GOP still prefers to try to do business with itself.

The Republican Party remains a party of protest. It continues to struggle to demonstrate that, on the national level, it can be a true governing party.",REAL
"During the campaign, Trump had threatened to impose a large tariff to keep the jobs in the United States.",REAL
"John Oliver: America’s Increasingly Segregated Schools Are ‘Very Rarely Equal in Any Way’ (Video) Posted on Nov 1, 2016 
Public schools are more segregated than they have been for over 40 years, but the “Last Week Tonight” host argues this isn’t a case of “re-segregation.” It turns out places like New York “never really bothered integrating in the first place.”",FAKE
"The Rise of Mandatory Vaccinations Means the End of Medical Freedom   Source: The Antimedia 
Mandatory vaccinations are about to open up a new frontier for government control. Through the war on drugs, bureaucrats arbitrarily dictate what people can and can’t put into their bodies, but that violation pales in comparison to forcibly medicating millions against their will. Voluntary and informed consent are essential in securing individual rights, and without it, self-ownership will never be respected. 
The liberal stronghold of California is trailblazing the encroaching new practice and recently passed laws mandating that children and adults must have certain immunizations before being able to attend schools or work in certain professions. The longstanding religious and philosophical exemptions that protect freedom of choice have been systematically crushed by the state. 
California’s Senate Bill 277 went into effect on July 1st, 2016, and marked the most rigid requirements ever instituted for vaccinations. The law forces students to endure a total of 40 doses to complete the 10 federally recommended vaccines while allowing more to be added at any time. Any family that doesn’t go along will have their child barred from attending licensed day care facilities, in-home daycares, public or private schools, and even after school programs. 
Over the years, California has developed a reputation for pushing vaccines on their youth. Assembly Bill 499 was passed in 2011 and lowered the age of consent for STD prevention vaccines to just 12 years old. Included in the assortment of shots being administered was the infamous Gardasil , which just a few years later was at the center of a lawsuit that yielded the victims a $6 million settlement from the U.S. government, which paid out funds from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program . 
The Vaccinate All Children Act of 2015 is an attempt to implement this new standard nationwide, and although it has stalled in the House, it will likely be reintroduced the next time the country is gripped by the fear of a pandemic. 
The debate surrounding vaccinations is commonly framed as a moral struggle between the benefits to the collective and the selfish preferences of the individual. But since the outbreak scares of Zika , measles , and ebola , the rhetoric has taken a turn toward authoritarianism. 
It’s commonly stated by the CDC and most mainstream doctors that the unvaccinated are putting the health of everyone else at risk, but the truth isn’t so black and white . The herd immunity theory has been consistently used to validate the expansion of vaccine programs, but it still doesn’t justify the removal of choice from the individual. 
The classic exchange of freedom for perceived safety is a no brainer for the millions of Americans who are willing to use government to strap their neighbors down and forcibly inject them for the greater good. Anyone who expresses concern about possible side effects is immediately branded as conspiratorial or anti-science. Yet controversial claims that certain vaccine variants cause neurological disorders like autism have led some people to swear off inoculations altogether. This all-or-nothing dynamic has completely polarized the issue and prevents any reasonable discussion from taking place. Either you accept all of the CDC’s recommended 69 doses of 16 vaccines between birth and age 18, or you want to bring back measles, polio, and probably the black plague. 
On the other extreme side of the debate, if you fail to acknowledge all vaccines as dangerous, you’re an ignorant sheep. Through the internet, disinformation has become widespread and created a movement of people that have written off all the benefits accomplished through immunizations. These individuals are unable or unwilling to separate the science from the shady institutions that develop and distribute new vaccines. Even if thimerosal and mercury based preservatives cause adverse reactions in some patients, it doesn’t detract from the advantages vaccine technology provides. In this debate, like most others in the US, both sides are swept up in emotion and ignorance. 
Regardless, the public’s trust in vaccinations has been eroded by the reputations of those companies producing them. Pharmaceutical giants like Merck and Pfizer make billions from the distribution of these shots, and the potential profits after a mandate are enough to corrupt the morals of almost anyone. In one example, former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding left her post at the government agency in 2009 to work in Merck’s vaccine division. An investigative report published by the British Medical Journal last year found the CDC downplays its ties to the pharmaceutical industry. 
Further, by buying the support of politicians like Hillary Clinton — who received more donations from pharmaceutical companies and their employees than any other candidate this year — these huge companies are able to expand their influence in directing government policy . 
Maintaining control over what we put into our own bodies is a fundamental right, but for now, standing up to these government decrees only means ostracism from the education system and criticism from peers. In the future, however, the punishments for disobedience will likely only grow stricter. 
An Orange County doctor named Bob Sears is already in the crosshairs of California’s medical board after excusing a two-year-old from future vaccinations. The mother expressed concern that her daughter had an adverse reaction to a previous shot, describing the child as becoming limp “like a ragdoll” for 24 hours after the last dose. Dr. Sears’ alternative treatment recommendations break from the rules dictated by S.B. 277, and now his reputation, as well as his career, are in jeopardy. This new authority to strip doctors of their medical licenses for simply going against the state-imposed standards opens the door for the persecution of medical professionals who resist any government regulation. 
A vaccination is an invasive medical procedure that can have different effects on each and every individual. The Nuremberg Code’s first principle is voluntary consent, but it seems the lessons of history have been completely forgotten by today’s leaders. The transition of these shots from “recommended” to “required” is well underway, and those who think the ends justify the means are willing to forcibly make sure everyone else complies. 
The new benchmark set by California symbolizes a precedent that could be mimicked across the nation. Without having the discretion to choose which medications are injected into your body — or your child’s — how can anyone convince themselves they are free? This overreach and collusion can often be dismissed as a trivial issue, but the fact that voluntary consent is under attack speaks volumes to the extent that state power has metastasized.",FAKE
"This underwater lake is actually helping scientists deal with a much bigger mystery. Credit: EVNautilus 
It may seem impossible, but scientists have discovered what can only be deemed as a lake under the sea. Dubbed the “Jacuzzi of Despair,” the brine-filled pool is deadly for the majority of creatures that dare enter it but is proving to be highly informational for those that are studying it. 
Located in the Gulf of Mexico, the lake rises about 12 feet off of the ocean floor and is four to five times saltier than the surrounding ocean. It’s also twice as warm, rich with methane, which is what makes it bubble like a jacuzzi, and is dense with hydrogen sulfide. This makes it incompatible with the sea water and a completely separate entity. 
Dr. Erik Cordes, associate professor of biology at Temple University in Philadelphia who discovered the pool with several colleagues, told Seeker, 
“It was one of the most amazing things in the deep sea. You go down into the bottom of the ocean and you are looking at a lake or a river flowing. It feels like you are not on this world.” 
Since the conditions of the pool are so foreign to humans and most of the creatures living under the sea, it’s allowing scientists to get a glimpse of what life might be like in extreme circumstances. What started as an interesting lake in the middle of the ocean has now become the heart of experimentation for one of the most mysterious subjects known to man: space. Dr. Cordes said, 
“There’s a lot of people looking at these extreme habitats on Earth as models for what we might discover when we go to other planets.The technology development in the deep sea is definitely going to be applied to the worlds beyond our own.” 
What makes the pool even more unique is that it has a lively ecosystem that has evolved throughout the centuries to include more species. While larger animals, such as deep-sea crabs, die as soon as they enter the pool, other creatures have adapted to the atmosphere of the water and even thrive on it. Giant mussels formed symbiotic bacteria in their gills to feed off of the hydrogen sulfide and methane gas from the pool and specially adapted shrimp and tube worms were able to survive the harsh conditions. Any other animals that entered were immediately killed, pickled by the salt, and preserved forever. 
Watch the video below to see the beautiful lake for yourself and the creatures who did and did not survive the conditions. 
Do you like our independent & investigative news? Then please check these two settings on Facebook to guarantee you don't miss our posts:",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Get short URL 0 16 0 0 Indian and Russian defense delegations discussed joint defense projects and defense issues of mutual interest, in particular, the Sukhoi/HAL Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) and the upgrade of the Sukhoi Su-30MKI fighter, the sources at the Indian Defense Ministry sources told Sputnik. 
NEW DELHI (Sputnik) — On Wednesday, the India-Russia intergovernmental commission on military and technical cooperation held a meeting in New Delhi, bringing together the delegations headed by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Indian counterpart Manohar Parrikar. © AP Photo/ Aijaz Rahi India Seeks Foreign Defense Firm to Build Domestic Single-Engine Fighters 
""We discussed… the FGFA project and [upgrade] of SU-31 MKI which is presently India's priority,"" the sources said on Wednesday. 
The Russian-Indian FGFA has stealth capabilities and is based on the Russian T-50 prototype jet. The FGFA project came about following the signing of a Russian-Indian cooperation agreement on October 18, 2007. Su-30MKI (Flanker-H) multirole fighter",FAKE
"Yet the problems do remain “black and white” for reasons of economic exploitation and isolation that run deeper than race itself and that are gathering force, despite rising numbers of white/Asian and white/Hispanic marriages and of multiracial children, even in the families of police officers themselves. Unless we can face the reasons why more “diversity” in police ranks is a far-from-sufficient condition of justice, American society will remain more racist than many others, and thereby hangs my tale.

Shortly before Christmas 1996 in the lower-middle-class Queens neighborhood of East Elmhurst, robbers killed Officer Davis as he tried to protect Ira Epstein, the white owner of a check-cashing store where Davis was moonlighting as a security guard to earn extra money to buy holiday gifts for his 6-year-old daughter, Arielle.

Because Davis was off-duty at the time, it’s unclear if his assailants knew that he was a police officer. But because he was one and was murdered for doing what police officers do, his Episcopal funeral Mass in Garden City, Long Island, was a familiar “tableau of pomp and grief,” as the New York Times put it, with thousands of saluting, white-gloved, white-ethnic officers and a flyover by police helicopters.

“Arielle, your daddy, who loved you, who adored you…will always be a hero of New York City,” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told Davis’ daughter from the church pulpit. He asked the congregation to give Arielle something she would remember, and all present responded with a long, wrenching ovation. Noting that Ira Epstein’s widow had called Davis a role model for the city’s youth, Giuliani said, “She was right,” adding that, “When [Davis] died Saturday morning he was doing what he was trained to do – he was trying to protect another man.”

Many funerals of New York City police officers killed in action have been tableaus not only of pomp and grief but of the chasm that yawns between an “occupying army” of mostly white-ethnic officers and an “underclass” of inner-city, black and Hispanic men. I spent enough time there in the late 1970s to have wished that the sea of blue around Davis’ funeral — and now those of officers Ramos and Liu — would signify something better than a chasm.

But does it? Or have the examples set by Davis, Liu and Ramos on police forces given the rest of us excuses to rationalize the continuing, calculated, heavily policed and seemingly bottomless isolation of millions of black and Hispanic men and women? Are economic isolation and social stigmatization still driving some of the isolated — and those who police them — so crazy that it’s a wonder there aren’t even more police killers like those who killed Davis, Liu and Ramos?

Ramos and Wu’s killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, was a perversely politicized, vengeance-crazed black man. Even the slaying in Ferguson of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by white officer Darren Wilson has a symbolic but no less telling opposite (Wilson’s nightmare) in another Ferguson – Colin Ferguson, a perversely politicized, vengeance-crazed black man who, shortly before Christmas, 1993, boarded a suburban Long Island commuter train and shot 23 white passengers, killing six.

Although he killed no cops, many New York officers live on Long Island, whose suburban towns their parents or grandparents chose over New York City’s tenements and row homes in the 1960s while seeking greener pastures in the booming, postwar economy and insulation from racially changing inner-city neighborhoods and rising black crime. As Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin put it a day after Ferguson’s train massacre: “Last night, Brooklyn followed them home.”

Are these officers and prosecutors to blame for provoking their killers’ isolation and rage? Or are they really doing only what our democracy seemingly wants and expects them to do: keep the lid on blacks and Hispanics who are cheated and sidelined, as the rest of us look the other way and disclaim responsibility – an evasion that seems easier to some whenever a Brinsley or a Colin Ferguson explodes?

In a strange irony, Charles Davis probably reinforced white innocence because he was a generous cop, popular with other officers and with residents of the Queens neighborhood where he supervised youth basketball games and a club for kids who might want to join the NYPD. His large presence, sharp eye and caring strengthened the community policing that had helped to cut New York City’s murder rate in half in less than five years, to below 1,000 for the first time in three decades. (By 2013, that number would plummet to just over 300, and this year it may be even lower, notwithstanding predictable predictions of doom 11 months ago by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association that Mayor Bill De Blasio’s curbing of excessive NYPD “stop and frisk” practices would unleash mayhem.)

But if Davis’ blue uniform and the blue sea at his funeral signified something better than black-versus-white, that equation took a perverse turn as Queens District Attorney Richard Brown orchestrated the indictment of 19-year-old George Bell, a stock boy at Old Navy who lived with his mother and had no criminal background, and two other black men, as Davis’ killers. A recent Nation magazine review of the case by Hannah Riley, a former researcher at the Innocence Project and a student of criminology at the University of Cambridge, raises serious doubts that the men convicted and still in prison for killing Davis were really his murderers.

D.A. Brown’s zeal in convicting them may have been fortified by the fact that Davis’ wife had been an assistant district attorney, albeit in another jurisdiction. But all prosecutors who face high-profile, highly charged cases have other, more-powerful incentives to “resolve” them irresponsibly. New Yorkers would be reminded of that in 2002, when the four black men and one Hispanic man who’d been convicted and imprisoned in 1989 amid public outrage over the infamous assault and rape of the Central Park Jogger were released after years of unjustified incarceration after the real assailant confessed.

Such things happen partly because D.A.s win reelection by pandering to angry, frightened voters’ hunger for revenge and because police officers are literally the prosecutors’ comrades in arms and their witnesses before grand juries and in open trials. (The over-zealous assistant prosecutors and detectives complicit in both the Central Park jogger and Davis cases were women, by the way.) But Hannah Riley has found a would-be whistle-blower in retired NYPD detective Pete Fiorillo, who had been pleased at first to see Giuliani touting the work of other detectives in the case and who’d had, as he put it, “no intention of looking at it for the purpose of taking it apart.”

“But the more he learned,” Riley explains, “the more his doubts grew until he became convinced that the investigation and trial were irredeemably flawed. ‘This case represents a total breakdown of the criminal justice system from the bottom to the top: the police that investigated this case; the DA that prosecuted the case; the judge that tried all three cases,’ said Fiorillo. ‘They just didn’t have the courage to do the right thing.’”

Giuliani, himself an infamously zealous former prosecutor, told the public after Davis’ murder that, “If you shoot and kill a New York City police officer, the Police Department is going to catch you, they’re going to find you, usually in a short period of time, and then at a minimum you’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail. And in this particular situation, it’s quite possible you’ll get executed.”

The word “execution” had a dark double-entendre here, giving the “blue over black” equation another perverse twist: Prosecutorial railroading involves not only beguiling or coercing helpless and apparently hopeless young black and Hispanic men into confessions and eventual convictions, and not just complicity by grand juries whose secrecy sanitizes such orchestrations. It also involves finding excuses for officers who are spared indictment time and again — even after summarily executing unarmed and even unresisting black and Hispanic men and, in some cases, women.

Like most New Yorkers watching the Central Park and Davis cases, I was inclined to trust prosecutors and to assume the justice of the convictions. When reporters on the Davis murder were told that the 19-year-old Bell had been heard humming the song, “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas” during a break in the questioning at the 109th Precinct and that remorse seemed never to enter his mind, I assumed that he was yet another half-crazed casualty of inner-city isolation, the kind of casualty I’d encountered more than once.

In the late 1970s I ran a weekly newspaper serving poor neighborhoods just across Brooklyn’s Broadway and Flushing Avenue from Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Officers Ramos and Liu were killed; I made more than a few visits to the Tompkins Houses along Myrtle Avenue, outside of which the murders occurred, and to Woodhull Hospital, where they were brought with Brinsley, who committed suicide nearby. Just to the northeast lay Bushwick, a once-tidy, German and Italian white-ethnic neighborhood that had become mostly Hispanic and black in the 1960s in ways and for reasons I knew intimately and that I portray in my book “The Closest of Strangers,” two of whose chapters chronicle North Brooklyn’s ravaging by absentee landlords’ “block-busting” welfare-subsidy scams, rampant arson for profit and for revenge, and massive looting during a huge 1977 power blackout.

On two occasions I navigated the devastation all night with officers of Bushwick’s 83rd Precinct, accompanying them into scenes of domestic violence where terrified toddlers sucking on teething rings crawled across shattered plates and splattered dinners to hide behind sofas as their mothers told us why they’d called 911 out of desperation and sometimes for revenge. Sometimes the man was still there, and officers had to take him outside. Out on the street in the noisy, sulfurous darkness, a black-Hispanic youth sauntered up to the patrol car’s open window and taunted one of my hosts by asking, “You Officer Torsney? Gonna shoot me?” — referring to Robert Torsney, who on Thanksgiving Day in 1976, for no apparent reason, had fired a bullet into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, a ninth grader at Franklin K. Lane High School, outside the Cypress Hills housing project, near where Officer Rafael Ramos was buried last Saturday. As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted years later, “Torsney would later claim he had been afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it. The ‘epilepsy’ defense worked. Officer Torsney was acquitted of any wrongdoing.” Herbert’s column, “The Sickness in the NYPD,” is worth reading, if only for the experience of rubbing your eyes in disbelief. Another of its offerings: “One April morning in 1973 a veteran police officer named Thomas Shea pulled his service revolver and blew away a young black boy on a street in Jamaica, Queens. He shot the kid in the back. There was no chance of survival. Afterward, no one could figure out why the officer had done it. There was no reason for the shooting, no threat to Officer Shea of any kind. The boy’s name was Clifford Glover and he was 10 years old. Officer Shea was charged with murder but of course he was acquitted.” For every young man whom killers in uniform execute as unambiguously as they did Randy Evans, Clifford Glover, Eric Garner and many others without being indicted for it, still more essentially hapless, helpless people are packed off into the vast archipelago of incarceration that employs thousands of “corrections” officers. Either way, for the rest of us, it’s out of sight, out of mind, as were the hundreds of homeless people and derelicts about whom few New Yorkers asked when they disappeared from Manhattan’s streets during Giuliani’s mayoralty. If at the bottom of it all is the calculated isolation and impoverishment of blacks and Hispanics that I chronicled while climbing stairwells in Brooklyn’s Bushwick-Hylan and Borinquen Plaza housing projects to distribute our paper, next to that bottom are the cops we assign to keep the lid on it. Is it a wonder that they sometimes say that they feel like “garbage collectors” and that, when the “garbage” call them something worse, some of them explode? In the 1960s, insouciant, pseudo-insurgent, middle-class white youths called cops “pigs.” A police union took out an ad saying, “Next time you really need help, try calling a pig.” But, with a very few, spectacular exceptions like the Brinks armored car robbery, the worst thing that white kids did to cops in those days was call them names. Is it really surprising that some cops and corrections officers feel as trapped in neighborhoods like Bushwick as the people they’re charged with containing? Is it surprising that some of the young white men who are drawn to such work grew up marinating what I described here three weeks ago as ressentiment, the social pathology of a society that has begun to countenance torture abroad and the militarization of police at home against a decadent, demoralized populace that has come to include themselves? Or that, at the funeral of Rafael Ramos, stunted citizens like these would turn their backs on the chief executive of the democracy that employs them, and that they would thereby dishonor the fallen officer and flout civilian leadership of the police and the military as if they would prefer a police state? The surprise is that so many police officers are still as good as Davis and as the relatives of Salon’s own Joan Walsh, as she recounted here vividly this week and in her book “What’s the Matter With White People?” I, too, can testify that there are many officers, of all colors and backgrounds, as generous and effective as Charles Davis. In the mid-1990s, Peter Mancuso, a former NYPD sergeant, Marine combat veteran, and longtime police reformer, introduced me to other impressive colleagues while I was a columnist for the New York Daily News, a paper many cops read while sitting in their patrol cars. The officers I met were better, more proactive citizen-leaders than moralists who simply cluck their tongues at them. On the other hand, whenever I wrote columns like this one praising their reform efforts, I got some unexpected visits from the New York Fire Department, whose firefighters banged loudly on my door at 3 a.m. because someone had called in a false alarm a day or two after the column ran. Soon after the chokehold killing of Eric Garner, but before the assassinations of Liu and Ramos, another retired police officer sent me this video, distributed by anonymous officers who seem to be preparing for race war, that depicts black men maiming and murdering cops in realistic street scenes. Some of the scenes look staged, but if Brinsley’s real deed had been filmed it would have fit perfectly into this alarmist, racist montage. The officer who shared it with me calls it “almost a counter-training device. Its message is, ‘Never mind what we are about to tell you the law says; here is what you are up against at any moment.’ After seeing it, I can better understand that young Housing Division Officer opening stairwell doors with his gun in his hand [and, trigger-happy, shot and killed an unarmed, innocent 28-year-old black man two floors below him]. I’m wondering if he saw the video or something like it.’” (Before calling 911 to aid the man he’d shot, the housing officer called his union.) Officers’ testimony in cases like this and Eric Garner’s and Randy Evans’ and Clifford Glover’s and the rest is almost transparently scripted by the union. Another irony. Even as the rogue video and the real deeds of Brinsley and Colin Ferguson alarm us, and even as some officers’ turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral and a police graduation ceremony disgust us, many black leaders have been ascending a far-better learning curve from the demagoguery of the 1980s and ‘90s to more sophisticated, humane strategizing. Where now are the Louis Farrakhans, the Vernon Masons and Alton Maddoxes (lawyers of Tawana Brawley infamy) and the Johnnie Cochrans, whose verbal threats and courtroom tactics sent chills down whites’ spines? Al Sharpton, whom I knew well in those years and described here in November, has climbed that learning curve: He said that the Ferguson, Missouri, protest movement “was not about Darren Wilson’s job. It was about Michael Brown’s justice…. We are not anti-police. If our children are wrong, arrest them. Don’t empty your gun and act like you had no other way.” Sharpton also led Eric Garner’s family in protesting Brinsley’s deed and mourning the deaths of officers Ramos and Liu. Sharpton is a flawed leader, but efforts by Fox News’ flunkies to blame him and recent protesters for bad relations with police prove only that black leadership’s learning curve has been offset by some white male degeneration along the lines I sketched here. The glorious funerals given officers Davis, Liu and Ramos don’t dispel these white men’s growing bewilderment, fear and anger, less of it generated by black men than by economic and cultural riptides that would still dispossess and disorient many of them even if the U.S. were white from coast to coast. To overcome racism, we’ll have to reach past “black and white” story lines and find strategies that free the oppressed by freeing the oppressor. Police are trapped in the swamp I navigated in Brooklyn because all of us are trapped in a political economy that’s no longer legitimate or sustainable. Unless we confront what Joan Walsh is telling us has happened to the white working  and middle classes, and what AlterNet editor Don Hazen, economist James Galbraith and historian Eli Zaretsky are trying to tell us about the real roots of America’s white male problem, “black and white” explanations will fall short, on both sides of an enduring race line that leads us nowhere.",REAL
"The Supreme Court, it would seem, did not want you to see what it was up to on Wednesday.

The robed nine were hearing oral arguments in King v. Burwell , a legal effort by conservatives to dismantle Obamacare and probably the most politically charged case to appear before the high court since Bush v. Gore. But, as always, there was no video of the proceedings and, curiously, the court chose not to release same-day audio of the argument, as it did in Bush v. Gore and has done in other high-profile cases since then.

I went to the argument, as I have for the last decade, to attempt to paint for readers a verbal picture of the atmospherics in the room, such as Samuel Alito’s eye rolls, Sonia Sotomayor’s hectoring and Clarence Thomas’s states of repose. But this time, court staff placed me in the back corner, three feet from the door; blocking my view of the justices were two red-velvet curtains, a marble pillar, another marble pillar, and a closed brass gate carved with images of acorns, oak leaves, dolphins, helmets and plumes, animal heads and the Ten Commandments.

Ultimately, though, there will be no hiding what happened in that chamber Wednesday morning. Ninety minutes of lopsided argument in favor of the Obama administration’s defense cast significant doubt on what had been a plausible challenge to Obamacare’s legality. The conservative majority could still knock down the law, of course, but given the ambiguity exposed Wednesday, it would now be a breathtaking surprise for the justices to cause such massive upheaval — taking health-care immediately from 8 million and causing a death spiral for the rest of Obamacare — based on such a slender legal reed.

The four liberal justices furiously picked apart the arguments of Michael Carvin, who had also argued, unsuccessfully, in a 2012 challenge to the health-care law. Alito and Antonin Scalia were not as aggressive as usual in their questioning of the Obama administration’s lawyer, and Chief Justice John Roberts was almost as silent as Thomas. Anthony Kennedy, perpetual swing vote, had some serious doubts about the argument against Obamacare.

Kennedy said that while “perhaps you will prevail in the plain words of the statute, there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument,” along with a violation of federalism, because states would be coerced to embrace Obamacare exchanges or enter an insurance “death spiral,” he said.

“Sometimes we think of things the government doesn’t,” Kennedy informed him.

At issue: whether the language in the Affordable Care Act calling for each state to establish a health-care exchange means that people are not eligible for subsidies in states where the federal government created the exchanges because the state refused to do so. Take away those subsidies, and Obamacare collapses.

One part of the law favors the critics’ interpretation, but other parts of the law, and the broader context of the law, contradict such an interpretation. Given this Talmudic dispute over the text, it’s almost inconceivable that the justices, supposed practitioners of judicial modesty, would consider that justification sufficient to tear apart the nation’s social fabric.

Opponents of the law went through great contortions to bring this case. They’re arguing against tax credits — and thus in favor of tax increases. They had trouble finding people who had sufficient injury to have standing in the case — and in Wednesday’s arguments it became apparent that only one of the four plaintiffs clearly qualified. More difficulty came when Carvin argued that states would still get the benefit of exchanges even without subsidies. Justice Elena Kagan pointed out that he argued the opposite in his last appearance.

Whichever legal argument the law’s opponents were relying on at the moment, it was secondary to the political argument against Obamacare. Scalia, in his attempt to justify the social upheaval that would come if the court jettisoned the law, asked the government’s top lawyer, Donald Verrilli: “You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue? . . . Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time.”

There was laughter in the courtroom.

After the argument, hundreds of activists, whipped up by some members of that very Congress, waved signs and traded taunts as if they were rival fans at a basketball game.

“Stand up! Fight back! Health care under attack!” chanted one side.

“Liberty! Follow the law!” the other side shouted back.

In the unlikely event the Roberts court uses an ambiguous textual dispute to overturn the most significant social legislation of the era, there will be no place to hide from the national conflagration that follows.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY BREAKING : TED CRUZ CALLS FOR SPECIAL PROSECUTOR TO INVESTIGATE HILLARY Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 3, 2016 
The Trump train is peaking at the perfect time. 
Donald Trump is leading in most polls, and gaining in key BLUE states, like Michigan, where he is within one point of Crooked Hillary. 
Clinton is plagued by endless scandals, lies, and two criminal investigations. 
The reopening of her email investigation after FBI officials discovered 650K emails on her top aide’s computer, and the FBI investigation into the scam Clinton Foundation. 
Today, Trump supporter Ted Cruz tweeted out a call for a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton scandals. RT if you agree there needs to be a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute the corruption of Hillary Clinton! 
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 3, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) Both of the remaining Democratic candidates for president easily top Republican front-runner Donald Trump in hypothetical general election match-ups, according to a new CNN/ORC Poll .

But Hillary Clinton , who is well ahead in the Democratic race for the presidency, would likely face a stronger challenge should Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz capture the Republican nomination for president.

Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""

Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""

Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.

In the scenario that appears most likely to emerge from the primary contests, Clinton tops Trump 52% to 44% among registered voters. That result has tilted in Clinton's favor since the last CNN/ORC Poll on the match-up in January.

But when the former secretary of state faces off with either of the other two top Republicans, things are much tighter and roughly the same as they were in January. Clinton trails against Rubio, with 50% choosing the Florida senator compared to 47% for Clinton, identical to the results in January. Against Cruz, Clinton holds 48% to his 49%, a slight tightening from a 3-point race in January to a 1-point match-up now.

Sanders -- who enjoys the most positive favorable rating of any presidential candidate in the field, according to the poll -- tops all three Republicans by wide margins: 57% to 40% against Cruz, 55% to 43% against Trump, and 53% to 45% against Rubio. Sanders fares better than Clinton in each match-up among men, younger voters and independents.

The race for the presidency hits its primary season peak as 78% of voters, including almost the same share among Democrats, Republicans and independents, who say that the nation is more deeply divided on major issues facing the country than it has been in the past.

The survey asked voters to choose which of all the remaining top candidates, regardless of party, they trust most to handle seven top issues. Trump tops the list on the economy, terrorism and immigration, while Clinton is the top choice when it comes to health care, race relations and foreign policy. Voters are about evenly split between Trump and Clinton on gun policy.

Adding up all the candidates from each party, Republicans have the edge on the economy, terrorism, immigration and gun policy, while more voters choose one of the Democrats' candidates on race relations and health care, with about an even split between the two parties on foreign policy.

Voters' choices broken out by party provide an interesting window into areas where Trump might hold cross-party appeal. Though the share of leaned Republicans choosing Clinton on any of the tested issues tops out at 8% on health care, Trump is the most trusted for 15% of leaned Democrats on terrorism, 14% on the economy and 13% on immigration.

As noted above, Sanders holds the most positive favorability rating of any of the top candidates for president: 60% of registered voters view him positively, 33% negatively. He is the only candidate seen favorably by a majority of voters, and one of four who are seen more positively than negatively.

The two front-runners, Clinton and Trump, are seen unfavorably by majorities of voters. Almost 6-in-10 have a negative view of Trump, 59% with 38% favorable, and 53% have a negative view of Clinton, 44% see her positively.

Cruz also has a net negative rating, while impressions of Carson, Rubio and Kasich tilt positive.

The economy remains far and away the country's top concern as the election campaign rolls on, with 47% calling it most important as they decide how to vote for president, followed by 19% citing health care, 14% terrorism, 10% foreign policy and 8% illegal immigration.

Should Michael Bloomberg, the independent former mayor of New York City, throw his hat into the ring as an independent candidate, his candidacy would do more harm to Clinton's bid to beat Trump than it would to Sanders' effort.

All told though, few say they would consider backing Bloomberg if he did run. Interest is strongest among political independents, and just 49% of them say they would definitely or probably consider voting Bloomberg for president.

The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone February 24-27 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults. Results among the sample of 920 registered voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.",REAL
"U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers a campaign speech about national security in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S. June 13, 2016.

Donald Trump says his presidential campaign is revoking The Washington Post’s press credentials, and the Post isn’t the first major news outlet to be barred from Trump’s rallies and events. Trump previously banned Politico, BuzzFeed News, The Huffington Post, and others from his campaign events, according to The New York Times.

Trump called The Washington Post “phony and dishonest” in a Facebook post where he explained that he decided to pull the press credentials due to the paper’s “incredibly inaccurate coverage and reporting” of his campaign.

Trump took issue with a headline the Post wrote Monday that read, “Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting."" The headline was changed Monday afternoon to read, “""Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.""

The Post story covered Trump’s statements during a Fox News interview on Monday. When asked to explain why he called for Obama to resign after the shooting, he answered, in part, ""He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it's one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.""

Washington Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti Kelly told the Associated Press in an email that the Post changed the headline shortly after posting the story ""to more properly reflect what Trump said.""

""We did so on our own; the Trump campaign never contacted us about it,” Kelly said.

Washington Post editor Martin Baron said in a statement Tuesday that the decision to revoke the paper’s press credentials ""is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press."" Baron defended the Post’s coverage of Trump’s campaign so far and vowed to continue with honest, honorable and accurate reporting.

Trump has said that if he were to become president, news organizations that have criticized him “ will have problems.” He threatened to sue The Washington Post in January over an article about the bankruptcy of his Atlantic City casino. This would be a very difficult suit to win, thanks to the First Amendment's historically strong protection of journalists, but Trump has said as president he hopes to weaken the libel law that protects journalists covering public figures.

Under American libel law, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed under the First Amendment, it is difficult for public figures to sue reporters who criticize them because they must demonstrate that factually inaccurate statements were made with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth.

Legal experts doubt Trump as president could change libel law through executive order; the change would likely require a constitutional amendment.

Nonetheless, denying reporters access to his campaign events is within Trump’s current power.

Chris Cillizza wrote for The Washington Post on Tuesday that politicians and journalists inevitably have a tense relationship, “The job of journalists – at The Post and everywhere else – is to give voters the fullest and most accurate picture of the two people who want to represent all of us as president. That is a task that is, inherently, at conflict – at least at times – with the story the candidates want to tell about themselves. That tension is natural and often leads to uncomfortable relationships between the candidates and the media who cover them.”

This report contains material from the Associated Press.",REAL
"The Real Reason Obamacare is Coming Unglued by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
The days of $20 doctor house calls and affordable hospitals stays for the uninsured are long gone. Chalk it up to government involvement in healthcare. Now we learn that “Obamacare” premiums will sharply rise in 2017. Prepare for what’s next.",FAKE
"It seems increasingly likely that Jeb Bush will run for president. (Even his son is talking up the prospects.) What remains to be seen is whether Jeb Bush can actually win.

A lot of GOP establishment types are excited about a Bush candidacy. But don't expect the grassroots to eagerly embrace a former Florida governor who has made a habit of moderately breaking from conservative orthodoxy on big issues like immigration, or who recently (mildly) singled out Fox News for criticism. As the editor of the Washington Free Beacon said:

It's not hard to understand the Huntsman comparison. The former Utah governor — among the most conservative in the country during his tenure — was tarred as a base-betraying moderate before his campaign even officially began. To say he flamed out would be inaccurate in that he never lit up in the first place. Huntsman's much-hyped campaign was basically over as soon as it began.

Jeb already has the baggage of his brother to contend with. The last thing he needs is to invite are comparisons to the ill-fated Huntsman campaign. So how can he avoid this fate? Here are four pieces of unsolicited advice.

1. Toughen up. There are basically two ways that voters judge candidates. One is on the issues and the candidate's record on them. The other is based on temperament — our rather subjective sense of who this person is. For conservative voters who might be uneasy about Bush, his stance on some issues is problematic. Support for things like Common Core and immigration reform aren't exactly red meat for the GOP base. But Bush can balance this by being tough.

Huntsman was seen as ideologically moderate and temperamentally weak. That's a horrible combination. Ted Cruz is seen as ideologically stern and temperamentally tough, a better combination as far as the base is concerned, but probably one that catches up to him with the general electorate. Who has a good combination? Chris Christie's tough persona covers a multitude of sins on the issues — and indeed allows him to be a bit more ideologically moderate. Another example is John McCain. Moderate on some issues (including immigration reform), his tough-guy image helped provide balance — enough to win the 2008 nomination, at least.

Base voters on both sides of the aisle tend to conflate toughness with ideological purity. I'm probably more conservative than Ann Coulter, who backed Chris Christie for president in 2012 and defended RomneyCare. But I'm willing to bet everyone would suspect that Coulter, who is never afraid to take the knives out, is way more conservative than me. Style sometimes trumps substance.

Most candidates have a natural proclivity to be hard or soft. Mike Huckabee might be the best modern politician at playing nice and tough — but even here, the latter often comes across as inauthentic, and, ironically, as mean.

The problem for Jeb is that he seems to be temperamentally moderate as well as ideologically moderate. He needs to overcome this by getting tough. This is the most important thing he can do.

2. Don't flip-flop. Being tough sometimes mean sticking to your guns and standing up to the base (see Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment). Now, you might think that the smart move for Jeb would instead be to pander to the base and change his positions. This is almost always a terrible idea, and only compounds a candidate's image problem. The conservative base now not only distrusts you ideologically, but also sees you as a wimp — which is essentially the same as some caricature of an effete liberal. Yes, there may be ways to massage these things, to stress some issues and downplay others. But the answer for Jeb isn't to shed his moderate positions — that will only compound his problems. He cannot change his positions, no matter how tempting it may be. Doing so will make him look weak. And remember what we said about being tough?

3. Don't try to change the GOP base. This one probably seems obvious, but Jeb Bush isn't some backbencher running to ""get a message out"" or pull the other candidates toward him on certain issues (as Elizabeth Warren might if she challenged Hillary Clinton). If he runs, it should be to win. That means his purpose isn't to lecture the base or shame the base or change the base — it's to win the election. If he wants to win an argument instead of an election, he should stay home and write blog posts. Like me.

People can tell if you don't like or respect them. This is true of almost every profession. In Jerry Maguire, the title character's sports agent mentor tells him, ""Unless you love everybody, you can't sell anybody."" The same is true in the writing world: E.B. White said, ''No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence."" If Jeb harbors any resentment toward the Republican base, he either needs to sit this one out (because it will show), or overcome it by flipping a psychological switch and reminding himself constantly that these are good people and that he loves them.

4. Don't lamely suck up to the GOP base, either. I realize this might seem contradictory. But it's not. And while Jeb cannot and should not be in the business of overtly pandering — doing so would make him look inauthentic and weak — he absolutely must reach out to conservative opinion leaders. He must be accessible. And this will be a problem for him, because he is a bit cloistered. And because of the star-power associated with being a Bush, he can already seem intimidating, and likely already has a team of handlers charged with isolating him from the masses (Rudy Giuliani suffered from this, as well).

How to overcome this? The best model I've witnessed was McCain, who in 2008 was incredibly accessible to conservative writers. In that regard, he probably over-performed. Jeb should read this.

Jeb Bush doesn't have to be Jon Huntsman. In fact, he might well be the next president of the United States. But to win, he'll have to toughen up, stay true to himself, and walk a tricky path between alienating and bowing before the GOP base. It won't be easy — but he can do it.",REAL
"The revived Hillary Clinton email investigation story that gave Republicans some brief hope has been killed by a slew of new facts. 
Devastating point number one to Republicans. The emails aren’t about Clinton withholding, receiving, or sending emails: Pete Williams has sources saying not about Clinton world w/holding emails. Not about Podesta emails. Not emails from Clinton. 
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) October 28, 2016 
NBC’s Pete Williams also has details that are already taking the air out of Republican sails: NBC’s Pete Williams: Sr. officials say—During separate investigation “a device” led to add'l emails–not from Clinton https://t.co/QmmNoxXhOx 
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 
For those who can’t watch the video above: Important reporting from @PeteWilliamsNBC on the FBI/Clinton news (h/t @mmurraypolitics ). pic.twitter.com/RyxmTPXMtW 
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 28, 2016 
This might be a record for the fastest death of a Republican scandal. Trump and Republicans made a number of assumptions that turned out not to be true. It looks like the FBI is only trying to be careful in their review. Since the emails have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, the State Department, emails sent or received by Clinton or the Clinton Foundation, Republicans were wrong on all fronts. 
Facts won’t stop Republicans from trying to make something out of nothing, but the Comey letter is not the campaign changer that Trump and the Republicans were hoping for. The weakness of this story means that should play well in the conservative media echo chamber, but by Monday, it will be forgotten by the rest of the country.",FAKE
"Iraq’s Skies Darken as Islamic State Torches Oil Posted on Oct 28, 2016 
By Kieran Cooke / Climate News Network Photo: Kuwait, 1991. Today, the Islamic State copies Saddam Hussein, threatening Iraq’s environment with oil blazes. (Lt. Steve Gozzo USN via Wikimedia Commons) 
LONDON—Even at the height of the day, the skies in many parts of northern Iraq are dark as ISIS torches oil wells and oil-filled defensive trenches in its retreat. Artillery fire and bombing raids by US aircraft and others battling Isis are also causing conflagrations at oil installations. Aid teams near the town of Qayyarah, about 80 kilometres south of the Isis stronghold of Mosul, talk of escaping civilians being covered in oil residues . “Everywhere is covered in a fine dusting of black soot and grime”, one aid worker from the Save the Children charity told the BBC. “And the children we met were covered in it—their hands were black, their feet were black and their hair was matted…they were coming out in rashes, developing problems with their lungs.” Deliberate pollution There are fears that as ISIS comes under ever greater pressure it will unleash “scorched earth” tactics, setting alight ever more oil wells and deliberately polluting the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, two of the region’s main rivers, which supply water and power to millions. Setting oil fields alight could also have wider climate-related consequences. During Saddam Hussein’s invasion and subsequent retreat from Kuwait in 1990/91, the Iraqis set alight nearly 800 Kuwaiti oil wells: at one stage—in March 1991 – it was calculated that up to six million barrels of oil were being burned each day . The result was daytime darkness and long plumes of black smoke across a wide area of the Gulf. Though the long-term impact of Kuwait’s oil fires on the climate is still being assessed, the release of vast amounts of climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is considered to have added to the problems of warming, on both a regional and a global scale. The Gulf region is one of the fastest-warming in the world, with many areas forecast to be uninhabitable in the not too distant future because of higher temperatures and chronic water shortages. Long-term damage Pollution from the Kuwait oil fires and ruptured oil pipelines are also believed to have caused serious long-term damage to the waters of the Gulf. There are fears that, with pressure on the group mounting, similar developments could unfold in northern Iraq as Isis torches oil installations 25 years later. In recent years Iraq has been trying to ramp up its oil production in order to raise more revenues—partly to fund the war against Isis. But much of the development of Iraq’s fossil fuel resources has been badly planned and mismanaged . The World Bank says that, globally, approximately 140 billion cubic metres of natural gas produced together with oil are burned or flared off each year— adding 350 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere . “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact. ...” Iraq is now one of the world’s leading gas-flaring countries: a lack of pipelines and infrastructure means that its gas is mostly burned off. Meanwhile the country has been forced to import large amounts of gas from neighbouring Iran in order to meet its energy needs. Across northern Iraq and eastern Syria—the country’s main oil-producing region—Isis controls large numbers of oil wells and derives considerable income from selling fossil fuels on the black market . A lack of maintenance and expertise means that many of these installations are a hazard to the environment. Badly-run oil facilities also cause considerable human suffering. A recent report by Pax , a Netherlands-based church grouping, says that more than 5,700 makeshift oil refineries are operating in the ISIS-controlled Deir ez-Zor area of Syria. Thousands of civilians, many of them children, are forced to work at these crude, basically-run facilities. “From exploding fuel barrels to exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and inhalational toxins, these makeshift oil refineries will have a long-lasting health impact on communities and their environment”, says the report. 
Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues. 
Advertisement",FAKE
"New Yorkers fight to overturn ballot selfie ban New Yorkers fight to overturn ballot selfie ban By 0 119 
New York voters are suing the state, arguing it is unconstitutional to ban them from showing their completed ballots to others via social media. The ballot selfie ban is becoming a hot topic this election, affecting even celebrities like Justin Timberlake. 
The three New Yorkers – Eve Silber, Rebecca White, and Michael Emperor – filed the federal lawsuit in on Wednesday, seeking a judge to declare the election law banning “ballot selfies” unconstitutional, according to the attorney representing the group. 
“Taking a photograph of a filled out ballot is a powerful political statement that demonstrates the importance of voting. Without the photograph, the message loses its power,” says the lawsuit, filed by lawyer Leo Glickman in Manhattan Federal Court, according to the New York Daily News. 
Under the current state law, showing a marked ballot to another voter is considered a misdemeanor which can result in prison time and a hefty $1,000 fine, according to court papers. 
Glickman is seeking a court injunction to stop officials from enforcing the law before the November 8 election. 
Similar laws against “ballot selfies” have been struck down in Michigan, Indiana and New Hamsphire as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of speech. 
Selfies are being allowed at the polls in Connecticut, but officials will be watching for whether the practice becomes disruptive for voters. 
In New Jersey, Assemblyman Raj Mukherji is pushing for a bill that would protect voters’ right to take selfies at the ballot box, CBS radio reported. 
Singer-actor Justin Timberlake got into some trouble this week after posting a photo of himself voting in Tennessee on his Instagram page. The picture prompted a reminder of the law from state officials that such photography is against the law. 
Timberlake addressed the controversy during an appearance on ‘The Tonight Show’ Wednesday, telling host Jimmy Fallon he thought he was inspiring people with the picture and “had no idea” it was illegal. 
Taking photos inside a voting booth is illegal in Tennessee under a 2015 state law, as it is in 17 other states, according to a review of laws banning ballot selfies conducted by the Associated Press. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"For the first time in months, a national poll shows Donald Trump is not leading the Republican 2016 primary race, and instead has Ben Carson in first place.

Carson won the support of 26% of Republican primary voters, compared to 22% who are backing Trump, according to CBS News/New York Times . Though within the poll's margin of error, it marks the first time since the billionaire businessman's dominant rise over the summer where he has been bumped from the top spot nationally.

The new numbers also represent a reversal from the last CBS /New York Times poll, taken more than a month ago, which saw Trump leading Carson 27%-23%.

Carson and Trump have been running consistently neck-and-neck since the start of September -- with other candidates struggling to keep pace.

The switch in the lead comes as Carson has taken a clear lead in the Iowa race, beating Trump in some polls by double-digits. Trump told MSNBC's ""Morning Joe"" Tuesday morning ""I don't get it.""

CBS/New York Times pollsters found Carson outpacing Trump among women and evangelicals and running even with him among men. Trump performed better with moderate Republicans and voters without college degrees. No other candidate cracked double-digit support in the latest poll. Marco Rubio won 8% support, Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina tied for fourth place with 7 percent and Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and John Kasich each got 4%. The poll does carry an important caveat, however: 70% of respondents said they had not settled on a choice yet. Trump's supporters, however, are more locked in with their support. The most recent CBS/New York Times poll surveyed 575 Republican primary voters and carries a 6-percentage-point margin of error. RELATED: Donald Trump on poll slump: 'I don't get it'",REAL
"But Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection was regarded with apathy by many Palestinians in the West Bank, and some even welcomed the news – albeit as the best of several bad options.

“Under Netanyahu things will deteriorate. But if it can’t get any better, it might as well get worse,” Ahmad, who declined to give his full name, told Salon. His customers, browsing for phone accessories in central Ramallah, agreed. When you’re in the West Bank it doesn’t much matter who’s in the Knesset: settlement expansion, military crackdowns and wars have taken place on the watch of both the left and right, and there’s been realistic progress toward statehood under neither.

“The experience of the Palestinians is clear. Since the assassination of Rabin, nothing in Israeli politics has brought something good,” Huneida Ghanem, the general director of the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), told Salon. “Time and time again, election after election after election has just brought something worse. Palestinians see this and in their head, they understand that nothing is going to change, that it will just get worse and worse.”

This year, Ghanem said, some did hope that Herzog and Livni had the potential to change things – a wish that only makes Netanyahu’s win even more disappointing. But she also believes that any trust in the pair’s center-left Zionist Union, which until the election’s final hours was billed as a likely winner, is misplaced. The sense is echoed across the West Bank, where most dismiss the Israeli opposition with a laugh, refusing to refer to it as “left wing” in any meaningful sense.

“Netanyahu, Herzog, Lieberman: if anyone from those Zionist parties become prime minister it won’t make any difference. They all have the same strategy to fulfill their ideology,” Bassam Shweiki told Salon. A literature enthusiast and activist, Shweiki speaks English with a London twang despite the fact he’s lived most of his life in Hebron. A West Bank city carved up by Israeli settlement enclaves and military closures,  the city barely featured in election campaigns aside from a pro-settlement visit by right-winger Avigdor Lieberman.

“The Zionist ideology says Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people that God promised, so there’s no place for any other nations in the promised land,” Shweiki continued. “The strategy is to hold the peace process without announcing its death, while continuing to establish settlements, demolishing homes, confiscating Palestinian lands and so on, while deceiving the world by saying that there are negotiations.”

Shweiki’s view that expansion is inevitable in Zionism is shared by most in the West Bank, and it’s the reason many are even pleased at Netanyahu’s win. Unlike other leaders, they believe, he won’t obscure that fact, and with policies of occupation laid bare, pressure on Israel for a just solution can only increase.

“Personally I’m glad that he won. This proves to the world that it is Israel and its people that do not want peace,” Amer Khader, a postgraduate nutritionist from Ramallah, told Salon. “His speech was clearly stating that if he wins the Palestinian State will not see the light, that Jerusalem is forever the capital of the state of Israel, and for the continuation of the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

“What’s the worst that can happen? More houses to be taken when more than 2,000 have been demolished in East Jerusalem? Another war on Gaza? It’s already destroyed. More settlements? Let it be. It is just more isolation of Israel through its racist discriminatory apartheid policies.”

The bleak irony in Khader’s view comes from long experience. Even for those Palestinians who are able to vote – those citizens of Israel who make up some 20 percent of its population – the achievements of this election have transpired partly from the country’s right wing shooting itself in the foot. Last year, Israeli lawmakers raised the electoral threshold, a move supported in part by right-wingers who hoped it would push small Arab parties out of representation altogether. Instead, several Palestinian and left-wing parties banded together to create the Joint List, a broad coalition that won 14 seats and made Arab Israelis the third biggest power in the Knesset. Even as they bemoaned the Knesset’s rightward tilt, its leaders celebrated a new era of Palestinian political involvement on election night. “I came here to see resistance and to be proud of my community, to get the best for us and to further our aims of two states,” 18-year-old Razi Misherqui, wearing a party T-shirt and draped in a Palestinian flag, told Salon as the results came in. “I think Arab unity is really important and  we can use this to show that we can make change and challenge what’s going on.” In Ramallah, Ghanem called the Joint List victory the “surprise story” of the election, and it was the only reason that many Palestinians bothered to watch the political news at all. But that doesn’t mean it’s a game-changer. Many Arab Israelis, believing any political activity in the Knesset is doomed to fail, still boycott the elections and even the Joint List’s most ardent supporters are measured in their optimism. Even as he pledged to challenge the consensus of the election, leading Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi bemoaned a “disappointing” result in which the “extreme right-wing got the upper hand.” And in the West Bank, where Palestinians haven’t been able to vote for their own representation in nearly a decade, hope for any changes the joint list might make is guarded. With peace negotiations bearing only bitter fruit, an occupation with no clear end and a political mood characterized by frustration and extremism, the only sure thing about the path to a solution is that it will be tough. “Nothing is going to come from the Israeli state if the Israelis don’t feel they don’t pay any price for the Israeli occupation,” Ghanem told Salon. “The last 10 years they’ve been building up this right-wing narrative, this plan for Eretz Israel in the political scene. Things that were once unacceptable to talk about are now part of the hegemonic discourse in Israel. And I’m not talking about buses on Shabbat, I’m talking about fascist, discriminatory policies – the settlement enterprise, the occupation. “People feel very failed by the international community,” she added. “As they’ve grown older they put so much hope into the peace process. Over the years they’ve tried violence, and that didn’t work; the intifada, and that didn’t work; peaceful resistance, and none of it worked. And then the international community came to them saying if you do this, if you do this, you can have a state. But they’ve done that, and it’s led nowhere.” Still, there’s a strong feeling in the West Bank that change from the outside looks more likely than from within the Israeli state. Real international pressure and action, Ghanem said, with a strong stress on the word “real,” is the best hope for statehood. If that’s the case, Khader said, than a Netanyahu win might be a blessing in disguise. “Netanyahu is the worst for the economy of Israel and its international relations. And the only way Israel will get weaker is through screwing their own relations, which is happening,” he told Salon. “Let it be. It won’t get any better till it is screwed.”",REAL
"Richard W. Painter wrote in a New York Times an op-ed: The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election. 
Such acts could also be prohibited under the Hatch Act, which bars the use of an official position to influence an election. That is why the F.B.I. presumably would keep those aspects of an investigation confidential until after the election. The usual penalty for a violation is termination of federal employment. 
And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics. I have spent much of my career working on government ethics and lawyers’ ethics, including two and a half years as the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, and I never thought that the F.B.I. could be dragged into a political circus surrounding one of its investigations. Until this week. 
This is the second complaint to be filed against FBI Director Comey. The Democratic Coalition Against Trump has also filed a complaint against Comey for interfering in a presidential election as a federal employee. 
Suspicion around Comey’s actions has grown as the FBI Director is not expected to make any additional statements on this matter before the presidential election. Director Comey appears to have set himself for problems after the election as Senate Democrats are making it known that they are open to holding hearings to investigate the FBI investigation if they win back the Senate majority. 
Unless Trump wins and Republicans take control of Congress, Director Comey is going to have to answer for his decisions. 
As the complaints pile up, it looks like Congressional testimony may be the least of James Comey’s future problems.",FAKE
"Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 
INDEPENDENT 
The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. 
The threats to the streaming TV company might not be Amazon or other streaming services, but instead “pharmacological” ways of entertaining people, Reed Hastings has said. 
And just as films and TV shows are a supposedly improved version of other entertainments, those same things might eventually become defunct, he said. In the same way that the cinema and TV screen made “the opera and the novel” much smaller, something else might be on the way to do the same thing, the Netflix boss said at a Wall Street Journal event. 
Those challenges could come from anywhere, he said. They might not be another form of screen: “Is it VR, is it gaming, is it pharmacological?” Mr Hastings asked the event. 
He went on to say that it might be possible that in the coming years someone will develop a drug that will make people get the same experiences that at the moment come from streaming services like Netflix. Apparently making reference to The Matrix, he said that we might be able to take one pill to escape into a hallucination and then another to come back. 
“In twenty or fifty years, taking a personalized blue pill you just hallucinate in an entertaining way and then a white pill brings you back to normality is perfectly viable,” Mr Hastings said. “And if the source of human entertainment in thirty or forty years is pharmacological we’ll be in real trouble.” 
His references to The Matrix – and to being in “trouble” – recall arguments that have recently been made by tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Both have suggested that it might be possible that we are part of a simulated universe – something that they said might be part of a virtual reality world, but could just as easily be the result of a drug-induced hallucination. 
Mr Hastings didn’t indicate whether or not Netflix would look to make such drugs itself, or how it would fend off any companies that did. But it does sound a little like something out Black Mirror, which Netflix is showing the new season of at the moment.",FAKE
"""If I have an opportunity I would tell him to just focus, focus on policy,"" Ernst told CNN.

Ernst was speaking at the ""Roast & Ride"" event in Des Moines, Iowa, that she hosted. Trump later addressed the audience; he did not address Ernst's remarks.

""Hillary Clinton has given us so much to talk about really in the email scandal and her policies overseas. Really, she has a record of failure. Let's talk about that record of failure. We can focus on issues, not name-calling,"" Ernst said.

""I don't like it when campaigns go that direction. I'd say to both of them, back down. And let's really talk about the policies and the issues. That's my advice to them,"" Ernst was quoted in The Post. Ernst's comments come after Trump was criticized for calling Clinton a ""bigot"" at a campaign rally, and repeatedly refused to back down from the claims. ""That is not acceptable to be doing the name-calling back and forth,"" Ernst said. ""We need to focus on the issues. He has given voice to millions of American and there's something there. Americans feel that their voice is not being heard and he has really given her a platform, let's focus on the failures of Hillary Clinton,"" Ernst told CNN.",REAL
"#CRUX NCA REF 1122930JG AIFL IPR TO USA FEC INSPECTOR GENERAL LA MCFARLAND DL 1 PAGE 25 OCTOBER 2016 2344 QUESTIONS TO BE PUT TO USA FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION INSPECTOR GENERAL MS LYNNE A MCFARLAND DL Following the public disclosure of vote rigging in the U.K. at the General Election in 2015 by Applied I F Limited on the sleazeexpo.wordpress.com Blog and repeated on the wirralinittogether.wordpress.com Blog, we respectfully ask the questions below to the Inspector General of the USA Federal Election Commission Ms Lynne A McFarland The answers to these questions such as these below, which should not be considered exhaustive, might help to dispel Mr Trump’s legitimate concerns regarding potential Vote Rigging, and which have been expressed so clearly and publicly as what potentially might be expected at the Count on 8 November 2016 at the forthcoming USA Presidential Election? 1. Does The USA Have A Freedom Of Information Act Like The United Kingdom? 2. Does The Federal Election Commission Come Under The Freedom Of Information Act Of The USA? 3. Will The Federal Election Commission List Laws To Be Used At The 2016 Presidential Elections? 4. Does The USA Federal Election Commission, When Regulating USA Voting, Use A Voting Count Model In The Identical Way As The United Kingdom Electoral Commission Uses to Regulate UK Voting In England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? 5. Is A Voting Count Model Defined Within The Election Laws Current in the USA? 6. Where Is The Voting Count Model Which Is To Be Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process On 8 November 2016 In The USA To Be Found Within USA Election Law Statutes? 7. What Is The Voting Count Model Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process In The USA? 8. Is The Voting Count Model Used In The Presidential Voting Election Process In The USA Based Upon Acts Of United Kingdom Parliament Such As The Ballot Act 1872, And Representation Of The People Act 1983? 9. Perhaps Such Questions Could Be Continued? Applied I F Limited",FAKE
"After Debate Duke Says USA becoming Banana Republic November 3, 2016 at 9:27 am After Debate Duke Says USA becoming Banana Republic 
This is what the viewing audience thought about who won the debate!",FAKE
"Home › POLITICS › NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE NOW FIVE FBI FIELD OFFICES ARE PROBING CLINTON CHARITY, ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE 4 SHARES 
[10/31/16] FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Little Rock, Ark., are investigating the Clinton Foundation concerning allegations of pay-to-play financial and political corruption, according to a Wall Street Journal report Sunday. 
Mirroring information provided by a former senior law enforcement official that “multiple FBI investigations are underway involving potential corruption charges against the Clinton Foundation,” the Journal confirms what The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reported in August . 
FBI field offices in three cities, specifically, New York, Little Rock and Washington, D.C., were coordinating with the U.S. Attorneys working in those cities. FBI agents in Miami are also joining the probe, TheDCNF has since learned. 
The Clinton Foundation has numerous programs operating in Haiti, the Caribbean, Latin America and South America. 
“Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation” and described the unusual field office initiative as “at times a sprawling cross-country effort,” the Wall Street Journal reports. 
Several polls released Saturday and Sunday show a rapid deterioration of presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead in the wake of Friday’s disclosure by FBI Director James Comey that he is reopening the email server investigation. Comey said in August that he did not believe the FBI’s investigation of Clinton and her use of private servers and private email addresses to conduct official diplomatic business would be productive. 
Comey’s announcement Friday was related to a separate investigation of child pornography allegations against former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who is married to Clinton’s closest confidant, Huma Abedin. Weiner and Abedin separated earlier this year following a third disclosure of his sexting with an underage girl. Post navigation",FAKE
"Republicans have controlled Congress for a little more than two months now, but a top White House official says GOP lawmakers so far have failed to put any “points on the board” and that the president is driving the debate in Washington.

As House and Senate Republicans prepare to lay out their budget priorities this week, senior White House adviser Brian Deese offered a blunt assessment of the political landscape, saying that the majority party in Congress has simply been reacting to President Barack Obama’s proposals rather than advancing its own.",REAL
"Do Democrats Want What Bernie Wants, Or Just What Bernie Has?

For some weeks now, as Bernie Sanders has extended his remarkable and improbable run as a presidential candidate, people have been asking: ""What does Bernie want?""

That question is a distant echo of ""What does Jesse want?"" a relic of the 1988 runner-up candidacy of Jesse Jackson, another ""outsider"" challenger with a dedicated hardcore following. But more about Jackson in a moment.

This week, the question took a different form. After a rowdy convention in Nevada prompted death threats against that state party chair, the question suddenly became: ""Are the Democrats coming apart?""

Uniting for the fall has always been an issue for both parties. But this year, it was supposed to be the Republicans, with their 17 candidates and their frustrated #NeverTrump rearguard action, who broke up over their differences.

Now, it's working out quite differently. So we hear again that old nostrum: ""Democrats want to fall in love, Republicans want to fall in line."" A remarkable number of Republicans have accepted, if not embraced, Donald Trump as their nominee. But a large contingent of Democrats continue to feel the Bern, or at least remain very much out of love with Hillary Clinton.

Which brings us to this past weekend, which proved that sometimes what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.

The ""Nevada fracas"" has created a media meme and a conversational focus for the conflict roiling the Democratic Party. That is because it encapsulates the grievances felt on both sides.

Sanders supporters see that some of their number were not seated in Las Vegas and see evidence that the system is rigged against them. Clinton supporters hear the epithets hurled at women on that stage, including the state party chair and Sen. Barbara Boxer, and perceive evidence of something else.

Others will adjudicate what happened in Las Vegas, where both candidates' camps seem to think they were entitled to a majority of delegates. (Although Clinton won the initial round of caucuses back in February, Sanders had the upper hand in an intermediate round at the county level on April 2.)

One camp wanted an open process; the other wanted respect for the rules. A voice vote was gaveled to a conclusion despite an uncertain outcome, which is bound to cause trouble. But in the end, the party chair herself has come to seem the principal victim — ""more sinned against than sinning"" — because of extreme phone and online harassment.

Nevada's convention seems to have been an egregious case, an outlier. In other states where actual delegates are chosen in several phases, regular order has been followed without a similar outburst.

But exceptions to the rule often make news. And in this case, cable TV and social media have endlessly repeated the raucous video shot at the convention and the toxic harassment that followed. As Nevada became a national story, Sanders was pressured to respond.

The candidate has condemned violence generically, but has not apologized for his backers. Instead, Sanders and his retinue have denied responsibility for what happened and doubled down on their long-simmering resentments against Democratic Party officials.

They say the entire process has been rigged against them, even parts that have been in place for decades. And the implicit message has been: Treat us fairly or expect there to be consequences. When this message is combined with Sanders' vow this week to ""carry our fight to the convention,"" it darkens the portents for the national convention in Philadelphia.

So what does Bernie want?

Let's start with the obvious: He wants to be nominated and elected. That's understood. Every candidate has a perfect right to continue fighting until the last ballot is cast, as Sanders vows to do.

But even if he wins California, and several other states on June 7, Sanders would need vertiginous victory margins to win enough delegates to close the pledged delegate gap with Clinton. (The Democrats divide delegates proportionally according to the popular vote, which is just about as democratic a method as you can imagine.)

So Sanders' one path is to persuade superdelegates to prefer him over Clinton, even though they currently prefer Clinton by more than 10-1. (The only superdelegate to flip so far deserted Sanders for the front-runner.)

Sanders and his spokespersons say superdelegates should now ignore the overall vote and the pledged delegate totals and look at how much better Sanders does against Trump in hypothetical November matchups.

The only problem is that hypothetical tests six months before the election are notoriously unreliable. Just ask President Perot.

Moreover, many of the poll respondents who create this November differential right now are Sanders supporters who say they will shift to Trump in November. The likelihood of their actually doing so is problematic, given past experience with disgruntled backers of other candidates who fell short. (The most recent example would be the Clinton backers in 2008 who swore they would not vote for the man who beat her, Barack Obama, but wound up doing so in the fall.)

So the ""path to the nomination"" for Sanders is not just uphill, it is essentially vertical.

So what else might Sanders want?

No one seems to think Sanders wants to be vice president or have any other role in a Clinton administration. He would return to the Senate, where he would be in a wholly new weight class of political influence.

But he clearly wants to make a difference, to alter how the Democrats go forward in the fall campaign and beyond.

And that is what the Clinton camp must manage. It is entirely possible that the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this July will vote to change party rules, shrinking the number of superdelegates or requiring them to follow the voting results in their states.

It is also possible, if less likely, that the party would agree to allow more independents a role in its nominating process (although this would still depend on the will of the various states).

Sanders supporters will also strive to make the party platform more progressive, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and expanding Medicare to cover people of all ages and perhaps calling for free tuition at public colleges. (The platform already calls for much of Sanders' program regarding the campaign finance system and other issues.)

This might fall far short of the ""political revolution"" Sanders says his campaign is about. But it could still matter. And it could still point the party toward a far more progressive future.

That is one way in which the 1988 precedent is relevant. Jesse Jackson arrived in Atlanta with about 30 percent of the delegates (not nearly as many as Sanders will have this summer). At the time, it was easily the best showing for an African-American presidential candidate. And although Jackson was not going to be nominated (Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis had a first-ballot majority), his message of racial and economic inclusion was popular and powerful within the party's base.

The Dukakis forces recognized this and turned the proceedings over to Jackson on the second night of the convention. Thousands of Jackson supporters jammed the arena while delegates, alternates and journalists waited outside — unable to enter. Jackson gave an hourlong oration on the theme of common ground, a siege gun speaking for unity.

Jackson did his part in the fall, helping Dukakis carry nearly 90 percent of the black vote and 70 percent of the then-minuscule Hispanic vote. Unfortunately for Dukakis, minority voters cast only about one ballot in seven in 1988.

But by 2012, the share of the vote cast by people of color had nearly doubled. That stunning growth has turned a dozen states that were red in 1988 to blue in 2012 (California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, New Mexico, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware and Vermont).

The same demographic trends have made Florida, Ohio and Colorado toss-ups in presidential elections. All had been solidly Republican in 1988.

Sanders' hard base is not among minorities, of course, but among younger voters. His success has been built on winning three-fourths or even more of the voters under age 30. That is a group Clinton will need in the fall just as much as Dukakis needed Jackson's base in 1988.

Sanders may not want a Jackson-style prime-time convention session all his own. He might be willing to settle for platform and rules revisions that would validate his campaign. But if he wants a Bernie night in Philadelphia when he can bring his political revolution to life — even for a few hours — it might be a small price to pay for peace.",REAL
"Podesta wiki leaks...We prefer Muslims over Christians.... Will the MSM report thIsUser ID: 73227186 Re: Podesta wiki leaks...We prefer Muslims over Christians.... Page 1 10/22/16 5 10/22/16 8 Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.005s (7 queries)",FAKE
"CONCORD, N.H. – Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a warning to young women who aren’t inclined to elect the first female president. “Just remember,” Ms. Albright told the crowd at a get-out-the-vote rally for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The familiar phrase was […]",REAL
"Hillary Clinton has doubled down on her assertion that the FBI declared her public remarks on her email scandal “consistent and truthful,” despite independent fact-checkers concluding otherwise.

“And as the FBI said, everything that I’ve said publicly has been consistent and truthful with what I’ve told [the FBI],” Clinton said Wednesday in an interview with Brandon Rittiman of KUSA News.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler swiftly chided the Democratic presidential candidate for repeating the ""roundly debunked"" claim.

Clinton first cited the FBI in her defense last Sunday when “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace noted Director James Comey had contradicted her claim she never sent classified material from her home server.

“That's not what I heard Director Comey say … Director Comey said that my answers were truthful and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails,” she said.

Several fact-checkers, however, called her out on that claim.

The Washington Post's Kessler awarded her “four Pinnochios,” and noted, “Comey has repeatedly not taken a stand on her public statements.”

PolitiFact gave her a “Pants on Fire” rating for a lack of truthfulness and FactCheck.org declared her claims “false.”

Comey did tell Congress: “We have no basis to conclude she lied to the FBI.” But he did not say the same about her public statements.

During testimony before a House committee, Comey said it was “not true” that nothing Clinton sent or received was marked classified. To the contrary, he said, “there was classified material emailed.

Donald Trump also doubled down Thursday on his claim he saw video of Iranians taking $400 million in cash off an airplane on the same day American hostages were released. His campaign earlier said he meant that he saw television coverage of the hostages, not the cash, leaving an airplane.

Afterward, Trump once again clarified, this time via Twitter.",REAL
"Deep in the Haitian countryside, peanut farmer Wismith Moricette epitomizes the success of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s charitable work: Through an innovative program backed by the Clintons, the 23-year-old has doubled the yield from his one-acre plot. Along with all those peanuts, Moricette said, have come visions of a brighter future for his wife and young son.

Fifty miles away on Haiti’s north coast, Anelle Germinal exemplifies another reality of the Clintons’ work here: disappointment. The 33-year-old mother of four has been standing in the baking sun every day for months waiting for work in the struggling Caracol Industrial Park, which the Clintons have touted as a model that would change the economy of this impoverished country.

“They said we would have work,” Germinal said, “but I have nothing.”

Moricette and Germinal are two faces of the Clintons’ increasingly complicated relationship with Haiti, where their high-profile development efforts after a devastating earthquake in 2010 have produced both success and disillusionment.

As Hillary Clinton moves toward a second run for the White House, her family’s global charitable work, mostly through the Clinton Foundation, has come under intense scrutiny. The foundation has accepted large donations from corporations and foreign countries, raising concerns that the Clintons are creating conflicts of interest by blurring the lines between their political, business and charitable interests.

The Washington Post reported last month that the foundation’s donors include seven foreign governments that contributed millions during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. Among those donations was a $500,000 contribution from the Algerian government for earthquake relief in Haiti that the foundation has acknowledged violated the terms of an ethics agreement with the Obama administration.

The Clintons’ defenders have dismissed concerns about the donations as political sniping, saying the test of the foundation is not where it gets its money but how it spends it. They said their work has created economic opportunity, improved lives for women and girls, raised health standards and fought the effects of climate change across the developing world.

The work has been especially visible in Haiti, where the Clintons first traveled as young newlyweds in 1975 and where many people credit them with drawing the world’s attention immediately after the earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people.

With former president Clinton assigned by the United Nations to head up the emergency recovery effort and Hillary Clinton guiding official U.S. assistance as secretary of state, the couple helped a relief effort that has included some of the world’s richest people, biggest celebrities and most successful businesses. The Clintons also helped mobilize an effort in which international donors pledged $10.4 billion, including $3.9 billion from the United States.

Greg Milne, director of the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti Program, said projects include efforts that have helped more than 2,000 small farmers, an artisan-goods company that employs more than 300 people, a fish-farming operation, a cholera treatment center and improvements to schools in some of Haiti’s poorest slums.

Clinton supporters also point out that their successes have come amid Haiti’s chaotic political situation — parliament is not functioning and President Michel Martelly, dogged by scandal, is ruling with virtually no checks on his power — which is marked by endemic corruption, weak institutions, poverty, poor public education, terrible roads and other factors that have historically made it extremely difficult for development efforts to succeed.

The country has long had a fraught relationship with foreigners who come to invest and provide aid. Haitians often regard them with gratitude for desperately needed resources and, at the same time, with suspicion that their motives are more to make a profit in Haiti than to help it.

Nevertheless, the Clintons are facing a growing backlash that too little has been accomplished in the past five years and that some of the most high-profile projects they have backed — including a just-opened Marriott, another luxury hotel and the industrial park — have helped foreign investors and Haiti’s wealthy elites more than its poor.

“Bill Clinton is a good guy and well-intentioned, but the people here don’t think so — they think he’s here making money,” said Leslie Voltaire, a former government official who worked with Clinton on post-earthquake reconstruction. “There is a lot of resentment about Clinton here. People have not seen results. . . . They say that Clinton used Haiti.”

In January, Haitian expatriates picketed the Clinton Foundation’s New York headquarters, demanding to know why more progress has not been made with the billions in international aid pledged after the quake.

Said Raymond Joseph, a former Haitian ambassador to the United States: “People are asking, ‘What has Bill Clinton done for us?’ ”

The Clintons’ long influence in Haiti is hard to overstate.

As president in 1994, Bill Clinton deployed about 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been ousted in a coup in 1991. Clinton’s trade policies as president, which he later called a “mistake,” were devastating to Haiti’s rice production and made it harder for the country to feed itself.

In 2009, Clinton was named U.N. special envoy for Haiti, and he has visited the country 37 times since then.

After the earthquake, Clinton united with former president George W. Bush to create the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which distributed $54.4 million in the two years after the earthquake. Separately, the Clinton Foundation has spent more than $30 million in Haiti and led efforts through the Clinton Global Initiative to persuade private companies to spend vastly more.

“What I think most people don’t know, even if they’ve been on the ground there, is these people are immensely talented,” Bill Clinton said in a 2010 interview with NPR. “They have suffered from 200 years of outside and inside abuses and neglect and misgovernment. And a lot of the people who’ve gone there even to help them in the best of faith have done so in a way that would never have allowed them to support themselves and to lift themselves up. And now there is a true consensus for and determination for a sustainable, comprehensive, long-term, modern society in Haiti. And they can do it.”

But as the initial emergency response has evolved into efforts to ensure Haiti’s long-term development, Haitians increasingly complain that the Clintons’ most ambitious plans are disconnected from the realities of most people in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

For instance, the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund invested more than $2 million in the Royal Oasis ­hotel, where a sleek suite with hardwood floors costs more than $200 a night and the shops sell $150 designer purses and $120 men’s dress shirts.

One recent afternoon, the hotel appeared largely empty, and with tourism hardly booming five years after the quake, locals fear it may be failing. A spokeswoman for Occidental Hotels, the chain that runs the hotel, said that ­occupancy is up this year and that the project will “mature in the long run.”

Bill Clinton also introduced Marriott officials to Denis O’Brien, an Irish telecom billionaire who has contributed millions to the Clinton Foundation. The result is a $45 million Marriott hotel that opened this month in central Port-au-Prince. O’Brien said no Clinton money was invested in the project.

The ultra-modern hotel is adjacent to the headquarters of Digicel, a communications giant owned by O’Brien. When The Post visited recently, many, if not most, guests seemed to be foreign businessmen connected to Digicel.

Clinton defenders argue that hotels that cater to well-heeled foreign guests can still buy local products and provide local jobs, and those guests are often involved in business investments or aid projects that benefit the neediest Haitians.

O’Brien said his hotel employs 200 Haitians, is filled with locally purchased art and serves food from Haiti. O’Brien leads the Haiti Action Network, a collection of private businesses that have committed through the Clinton Global Initiative to spend $500 million on projects in Haiti. He and his company just built 150 schools and rebuilt Port-au-Prince’s historic Iron Market.

“I don’t know any modern leader that has spent more time helping a country and being so effective,” O’Brien said of Bill Clinton. “He works like a demon in the developing world. Nobody is doing that. Is Tony Blair doing that?”

Other Clinton-backed projects have not delivered on lofty promises: A 2011 housing expo that cost more than $2 million, including $500,000 from the Clinton Foundation, was supposed to be a model for thousands of new units but instead has resulted in little more than a few dozen abandoned model homes occupied by squatters.

Controversy surrounding the Clintons only deepened with the recent revelation, contained in an upcoming book by Peter Schweizer, that Tony Rodham — Hillary Clinton’s younger brother — serves on the advisory board of a U.S.-based company that in 2012 won one of Haiti’s first two gold-mining permits in 50 years. After objection from the Haitian Senate, the permits have been placed on hold.

“Neither Bill Clinton nor the brother of Hillary Clinton are individuals who share the interests of the Haitian people,” said Samuel Nesner, an anti-mining activist who thinks mining poses great environmental risks and will mainly benefit foreign investors. “They are part of the elite class who are operating to exploit the Haitian people.”

Clinton Foundation officials said Bill Clinton had been unaware of Rodham’s involvement in the mine project. A spokesman for Hillary Clinton said she does not know the chief executive of the mine.

“I strongly believe the Clintons came to Haiti in good faith and they wanted to have an impact,” said Jean-Max Bellerive, who was Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake and served as co-chairman with Bill Clinton on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. (Bellerive is also on the mining company’s advisory board.)

But, Bellerive said, the former president was hampered by a “weak” staff of American aides who were “more interested in supporting Clinton than helping Haiti.” Echoing a common sentiment in Haiti, Bellerive also said Clinton should have listened more carefully to the opinions and needs of ordinary Haitians: “How do you want a guy coming from Davos or Dubai to get the real feeling for what’s happening downstairs?”

Milne, of the Clinton Foundation, said the criticism is wrong and unsurprising.

“President Clinton is one of the most dedicated and highest-profile advocates for Haiti, and he is still engaged while others have moved on,” he said. “So it’s not surprising that, for some, he is an easy target for natural frustration that the change we all want isn’t happening faster.”

Milne said the country has experienced strong economic growth in recent years, with more Haitians employed and more children in school.

“Is Haiti building back better?” Milne said, using a phrase that the Clintons frequently quote. “In many ways, yes, though challenges remain.”

Paul Farmer, a doctor whose Partners in Health has helped provide medical care in rural Haiti since the 1980s and whose health network has received more than $1.8 million from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund for a medical residency program, also praised the Clintons’ work. He said he forged partnerships at CGI meetings with private businesses and other charities for a variety of projects he said would not have taken place without the Clinton connection.

He said that by any objective measure, Haiti has been improving, in part because of the Clintons’ efforts.

“Is the whole country built back better? I doubt it,” Farmer said. “Water insecurity and food insecurity are very pressing problems. But if you look at the health statistics for Haiti . . . infant mortality, child mortality — they’re all improving.”

Still, even some who have benefited from Clinton-backed programs have grown disillusioned.

“I read that Bill Clinton is the most popular politician in America, but he couldn’t get elected mayor in Haiti today,” said Jacky Lumarque, rector of Quisqueya University, a private school that was damaged in the earthquake and received $914,000 from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to create an entrepreneurship center.

Lumarque said the program has helped hundreds of Haitians turn their informal street businesses into formal entities that keep records, pay taxes and have potential for growth.

He said it has been a huge success — but stands apart from the usual strategy of foreign groups, including the Clintons, who tend to favor projects imposed by well-meaning foreigners that are more “about Haiti” than “for Haiti.”

The entrepreneurship center, Lumarque said, “is an example of what Clinton can do, in spite of himself.”

When Bill Clinton came here late last month to help inaugurate the new Marriott, he made a side trip by helicopter to Haiti’s central plateau to have a look at a Clinton-backed program that is revolutionizing the peanut-farming industry.

The Acceso Peanut Enterprise Corp. was started with a $1.25 million grant from the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is headed by Bill Clinton and Canadian mining executive and philanthropist Frank Giustra, as well as the charitable foundation of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

Acceso buys feed, fertilizer and fungicide at bulk rates, then sells them to farmers for far less than normal prices. Acceso also hires tractors for farmers who otherwise would be using an ox and plow.

Robert Johnson, an American who runs the program, said the improvements are vastly increasing yields, quality and farmers’ profits.

He said Acceso worked with about 1,000 farmers last year and bought about 120 metric tons of peanuts. This year, it expects to triple the number of farmers and buy almost five times as much peanut tonnage.

At least half of Acceso’s sales have gone to two large Haitian factories that produce a peanut-based paste that is given to malnourished children. Most of the rest goes to local peanut-butter producers, he said. The program’s success, Johnson said, comes from its market-driven approach: It’s not a charity, it’s a business with a charitable purpose.

“We’re building something that is going to be sustainable,” he said. “We talk to the farmers. We’re not going to just bring in something that someone thought up in ­Davos.”

The program is branching out into lime-growing, and Clinton visited a site last month where thousands of seedlings are being cultivated by dozens of workers.

Benel Auguste, 32, is one of the small landowners who rented his plot, about a third of an acre, to Acceso to plant limes. “It’s a good idea; it’s going to work,” he said. “We know limes and we need them. We can do this.”

The Clintons also were enthusiastic backers of the Caracol Industrial Park, which was built on 600 acres of farmland just east of ­the port city Cap-Haitien.

They agreed with economists, particularly Oxford University development specialist Paul Collier, who concluded that Haiti is an ideal place to create mass jobs in garment factories because of its proximity to the United States, favorable trade agreements and cheap labor.

The Clintons helped Haitian officials identify Sae-A Trading Co., which operates factories across the developing world and sews garments for giants such as Target, Gap and Wal-Mart, as a potential major investor.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, along with top aide ­Cheryl Mills, lobbied for the project with South Korean officials and hosted Sae-A executives in Washington to press the plan.

Bill Clinton attended the Sae-A contract-signing ceremony in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 11, 2011 — a day before the first anniversary of the earthquake. He later laid the first stone of the park’s construction. And then in October 2012, the Clintons, Martelly and other officials attended the ribbon-cutting.

Speaking to a group of investors at the ceremony, officials and celebrities that included actors Sean Penn and Ben Stiller, as well as business moguls Donna Karan and Richard Branson, Hillary Clinton said it represented “a new day for Haiti and a new model for how the international community practices development.”

“Haiti is truly open for business, and we want your help,” she said. “We see this partnership between governments like our own and the private sector as absolutely essential in promoting and supporting long-term prosperity in Haiti. We know very well that long-term prosperity cannot come from just the provision of aid. There must be trade and investment like we have seen here today.”

Today, Sae-A employs about 4,500 people. Company spokesman Lon Garwood said the operation has been steadily growing and will open a new facility next month. Henri-Claude Müller-Poitevien, a Haitian government official who works in the apparel industry, said the Caracol project is on schedule and continues to expand.

A power plant was built, but plans for a new port at the industrial park to carry finished goods to the United States have been shelved. Residents of the plant’s housing project say their land floods when it rains, and few said they think the plant will ever create the number of jobs originally promised.

“I believe that the momentum to attract people there in a massive way is past,” said Bellerive, the former prime minister. “You can do interesting things with Caracol, but you have to reinvent the concept. Today, it has failed.”

Each morning, crowds line up outside the park’s big front gate, which is guarded by four men in crisp khaki uniforms carrying shotguns. They wait in a sliver of shade next to a cinder-block wall, many holding résumés in envelopes. Most said they have been coming every day for months, waiting for jobs that pay about $5 a day.

From his envelope, Jean Mito Palvetus, 27, pulled out a diploma attesting that he had completed 200 hours of training with the U.S. Agency for International Development on an industrial sewing machine.

“I have three kids and a wife, and I can’t support them,” he said, sweating in the hot morning sun. “I have a diploma, but I still can’t get a job here. I still have nothing.”

Tom Hamburger in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"Facebook must have thought the online news game was pretty easy. Two years ago, it plucked a small team of about a dozen bright, hungry twentysomethings fresh out of journalism school or entry-level reporting jobs. It stuck them in a basement, paid them contractor wages, and put them to work selecting and briefly summarizing the day’s top news stories and linking to the news sites that covered them. It called them curators, not reporters. Their work appeared in the “Trending” section of the Facebook home page and mobile app, where it helped to define the day’s news for millions of Facebook users.

On Tuesday, Facebook became the subject of a Senate inquiry over claims of anti-conservative bias in its Trending section. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking a series of pointed questions about how Facebook chooses stories for the section, how it trains its curators, who’s responsible for their decisions, and what steps it’s taking to investigate the bias claims. He also asks for detailed records of stories that the company decided not to include in the Trending section despite their popularity among Facebook users.

The inquiry followed a report by Gizmodo’s Michael Nunez on Monday, in which anonymous former Facebook “curators” described the subjective process by which they assembled the Trending section. Facebook had publicly portrayed the section—which you can find near the top right of Facebook.com or under the search tab on the Facebook app—as an algorithmically driven reflection of the most popular stories its users are reading at any given time. But the ex-curators said they often filtered out stories that were deemed questionable and added others they deemed worthy. One, a self-identified conservative, complained that this led to subtle yet pervasive liberal bias, since most of the curators were politically liberal themselves. Popular stories from conservative sites such as Breitbart, for instance, were allegedly omitted unless more mainstream publications such as the New York Times also picked them up.

None of this should come as a surprise to any thoughtful person who has worked as a journalist. Humans are biased. Objectivity is a myth, or at best an ideal that can be loosely approached through the very careful practice of trained professionals. The news simply is not neutral. Neither is “curation,” for that matter, in either the journalistic or artistic application of the term.

There are ways to grapple with this problem honestly—to attempt to identify and correct for one’s biases, to scrupulously disclose them, to employ an ideologically diverse staff, perhaps even to reject objectivity as an ideal and embrace subjectivity. But you can’t begin to address the subjective nature of news without first acknowledging it. And Facebook has gone out of its way to avoid doing that, for reasons that are central to its identity as a technology company.

For that matter, you don’t get that big by admitting that you’re a media company. As the New York Times’ John Herrman and Mike Isaac point out, 65 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew view the news media as a “negative influence on the country.” For technology companies, that number is just 17 percent. It’s very much in Facebook’s interest to remain a social network in the public’s eyes, even in the face of mounting evidence that it’s something much bigger than that. And it’s in Facebook’s interest to shift responsibility for controversial decisions from humans, whom we know to be biased, to algorithms, which we tend to lionize.

Human values shape the Trending section, too. The algorithm that surfaces the stories might skirt questions of bias by simply ranking them in order of popularity, thus delegating responsibility for story selection from Facebook’s employees to its users. Even that—the notion that what’s popular is worth highlighting—represents a human value judgment, albeit one that’s not particularly vulnerable to accusations of political bias. (That’s why Twitter isn’t in the same hot water over its own simpler trending topics module.)

The problem with an algorithm that simply harnesses the wisdom of the crowd is that the crowd isn’t always wise. The most popular stories at any given time might well be misleading, or sensationalist, or even full of lies. That’s why Facebook felt the need to hire humans to oversee it. This is in keeping with the company’s broader push for what it calls quality content, another term that entails value judgments without copping to them.

But Facebook instead opted to hire cheap contractors and went on to claim that their role is simply to “confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers.” That’s a dubious claim, even if you think the allegations of liberal bias are trumped up. If the curators’ job was really just about cleaning up the data, Facebook seems to have forgotten to tell that to the curators themselves, who described their mandate very differently to Gizmodo. They said they were encouraged to prioritize stories from certain outlets deemed reputable; to avoid news about, among other topics, Facebook itself; and to replace the word Twitter in headlines with something more vague, like social media. That may not be political bias, but it’s bias all the same. They also described choosing stories for the Trending section that may not have been surfaced by the algorithm but that seemed to them to be important or worthwhile, like stories about conflict in Syria or the Black Lives Matter movement.

The problem will not be solved by firing bad apples or instituting tougher guidelines. The only way for Facebook to extricate itself from this mess is to admit that journalism isn’t as simple as it thought. It’s to stop treating “curators” like drones and stop treating news like a data set to be optimized. It’s to build a real human curation team with a real editor in charge and an ethos and a mission and an understanding of the responsibilities involved in shaping how the news is framed to 1.6 billion people. Surely a company that pays its interns $11,000 a month in salary and benefits can afford it.",REAL
"The federal government must make regular interest payments on the money it has borrowed to finance past deficits – that is, on the national debt held by the public.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the federal government’s net interest payments on that debt will total $229 billion in the 2015 fiscal year. Working Americans end up having to foot that very large bill to varying degrees based on each individual taxpayer’s adjusted gross income.

Click here to see your share of the federal debt.

And the CBO expects that this challenge will accelerate over the next decade. Current interest rates are low by historical standards and higher interest rates means higher interest payments. It’s projected that net interest costs will more than triple over the next decade, reaching $808 billion in 2025.

These numbers pose a real threat. The CBO has issued warnings about the serious negative consequences that such high and rising debt and interest payments on the debt could have on both the economy and the federal budget.

“The large amount of debt might restrict policymakers’ ability to use tax and spending policies to respond to unexpected future challenges, such as economic downturns or financial crises,” the CBO said in a recent report.

In the same report, they also cautioned that continued growth in the debt could lead investors to doubt the government’s willingness or ability to pay its obligations, which would require the government to pay much higher interest rates on its borrowing going forward.",REAL
"Ten days after he appointed new campaign leadership, Donald Trump and many of his closest aides and allies remain divided on whether to adopt more mainstream stances or stick with the hard-line conservative positions at the core of his candidacy, according to people involved in the discussions.

Trump has been flooded with conflicting advice about where to land, with the tensions vividly illustrated this week as the GOP nominee publicly wrestled with himself on the details of his signature issue: immigration.

A particular flash point has been whether to forcibly deport an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants from the country, a move Trump long advocated but is now reconsidering.

“He has been listening to a wide range of opinions on that,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has been at Trump’s side nearly constantly over the past week. “As you might imagine, there are different opinions on this, even in his campaign. In a very thoughtful way, he’s trying to figure what the right position is.”

“By the way,” Giuliani added, “that’s what everybody criticized him for in the past: that he’s not able to do that. He actually is able to do that.”

The conversations in recent days have featured voices from a range of Republican views, all jockeying to tilt the businessman’s politics in their direction, according to those involved. Trump tends to echo the words of the last person with whom he spoke, making direct access to him even more valuable, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal campaign discussions.

Those pushing Trump to soften his stances and tone — and who have gained immense influence in recent days — include Giuliani, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, a longtime ally who has no formal role with the campaign but talks to the candidate frequently and attended a strategy session last weekend. At recent private fundraisers, many Republican donors have also urged Trump to adopt a different pitch and rethink his priorities.

[Trump ‘softening’ on immigration? Many supporters don’t seem to mind]

Meanwhile, Trump continues to discuss immigration policy with Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), who is seen as the populist force behind much of his candidacy. While he has defended and encouraged Trump’s deliberations, Sessions is considered a balancing force against more centrist appeals. So is new campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, the hard-charging conservative website.

Trump was joined on the trail this week by Giuliani and Sessions, along with Stephen Miller, a former aide to Sessions who has become a well-trusted confidant. His New York-based children continue to play an outsize role.

But any suggestion of change has alarmed some conservatives and ardent backers. Firebrand commentator Ann Coulter declared this week that it was “a mistake” for Trump to consider abandoning his support for mass deportations and said his tone “sounds very consultant to me.”

The back-and-forth over immigration comes amid broader efforts by Trump to reach out to voters beyond the disaffected whites who compose his base, including events such as a roundtable Friday with Hispanic business leaders in Las Vegas. Trump also lashed out this week at his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, for accusing him of appealing to racist elements, repeatedly labeling her a “bigot” because he says her policies don’t help minorities.

Last year, Trump cast illegal immigrants as being mostly violent criminals, and he rolled out an immigration plan that embraced ideas that had long dwelled at the fringes of the GOP: no longer granting citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants, constructing a massive wall along the border with Mexico and perhaps restricting some legal forms of immigration. In interviews, Trump added that he would form a “deportation force” to remove the millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.

But Saturday, Trump asked a panel of Hispanic advisers for alternate ideas and made clear that he was willing to change on the issue. The next day, newly installed campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who has advised GOP candidates for years on how to win over swing voters, said in a CNN interview that Trump’s position on creating a deportation force was “to be determined.”

Over the next few days, Trump took a variety of positions that created a frenzy of confusion over where exactly he stands. On Tuesday, Trump said he was open to “softening” the rules for the millions of immigrants who came to the country illegally but are living peaceful and prosperous lives, only to say Thursday that his position is “hardening.”

At an immigration-focused town hall in Texas on Tuesday, which was later broadcast on Fox News, Trump repeatedly polled his audience on what he should do, allowing his internal conflicts to play out publicly.

“Can we go through a process? Or do you think they have to get out?” he asked the audience. “Tell me. I mean, I don’t know, you tell me.”

Trump provided the crowd a sympathetic portrait of a theoretical illegal immigrant who has been in the country more than a decade, building a life with children and a stable job. He repeatedly asked if that sort of person should be allowed to stay or be kicked out of the country, getting results that were often difficult to measure. At one point, Trump asked who in the crowd wanted all illegal immigrants thrown out, even the law-abiding ones, and a man stood up and bellowed: “I do!”

Fox News’s Sean Hannity then asked Trump: “You heard from the audience. What does your gut tell you you want to do?”

“Well, look, this is like a poll, this is like a poll,” Trump said. “And I love the guy that stood up and said — where is that guy? I love this guy. That’s my guy. I mean, I get it. I get it. And I understand what you’re saying. But this is sort of like a poll. And this is what I’m getting all over the country.”

Trump’s often contradictory comments on deportations came during interviews with Fox News or CNN, not during his campaign rallies. For two weeks, Trump has been reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter, a machine he had long cursed. As the week progressed, his control slipped and he went off-script more often — saying at a rally in Ohio on Monday that some urban areas are more dangerous than war zones and making a joke in Tampa on Wednesday about Clinton being medicated.

This week the campaign twice started to plan an event where Trump could give an immigration speech — an opportunity for him to settle on a position and document it — only to cancel without a clear explanation.

[Inside Donald Trump’s new strategy to counter the view of many that he is racist]

Trump’s comment about being open to “softening” laws to help illegal immigrants came Tuesday, the same day Coulter released her new book, “In Trump We Trust,” in which she writes that anything Trump does could be forgiven, “except change his immigration policies.” During an MSNBC interview that night, Coulter was obviously frustrated and threatened to cancel her book tour if the candidate clearly changed his position.

“I think this is a mistake. I’ve thought he’s made other mistakes, and I’ve given him constructive criticism when I think he makes a mistake,” she said. “I think this is a mistake.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked: “Does he take your criticism?”

“Um,” Coulter responded. “I haven’t had a lot, but yeah. No, he does listen to people. And I’m not advising him or anything, but I did write this magnificent book.”

By Wednesday, Coulter seemed confident again in Trump’s candidacy as she attended a book party in Washington and told Bloomberg News’s Joshua Green: “My worship for him is like the people of North Korea worship their Dear Leader — blind loyalty. Once he gave that Mexican rapist speech, I’ll walk across glass for him. That’s basically it. . . . I’ll criticize him, and I have, but it’s all minor stylistic stuff. We all want to shoot him at various times.”

Thursday, Trump took a different tone in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and said that he foresees “a lot of people being deported,” although he admitted such deportations could not all happen at once. Trump also doubled down on the notion that a majority of illegal immigrants are violent criminals who will be the first to go.

“And there are probably millions of them, but certainly hundreds of thousands,” he said. “Big numbers. They’re out. They’re out.”

At one point, Cooper asked Trump, “So if you haven’t committed a crime and you’ve been here for 15 years, and you have a family here, you have a job here, will you be deported?”

“We’re going to see what happens once we strengthen up our border,” Trump replied, describing that strength in detail. “And then we’re going to see what happens. But there is a very good chance the answer could be yes. We’re going to see what happens.”",REAL
"Hillary Clinton’s summer ends abruptly on Monday. For several weeks, the presidential frontrunner has toured the homes of America’s rich and famous, hosted by Justin Timberlake, welcomed by Magic Johnson and serenaded by Jimmy Buffett, Jon Bon Jovi and Paul McCartney.



It all helped swell Democratic coffers by a record $143m in August, crucial ammunition for the 64 days of TV advertising left between now and the general election. It also allowed an exhausted campaign to recharge its batteries following months on the road and July’s convention in Philadelphia.

But on Labor Day, Clinton swaps the beaches of Cape Cod and Long Island for the rust-belt towns of Ohio and Iowa, scenes of her bruising primary race against Bernie Sanders and home to a stubbornly loyal pockets of blue-collar support for Donald Trump.

She won’t be alone. Monday’s events in Cleveland and the Quad Cities, industrial towns bordering Iowa and Illinois, will debut a new campaign plane, large enough to carry the traveling reporters who were hitherto consigned to tagging along behind.

Journalists have complained for months about a lack of access to Clinton, who has not held a conference for 276 days. Her campaign has accused the media of fixating on that daily tally and ignoring the interviews she gives to select cable anchors or local news stations.

“This 257 days nonsense is ludicrous. When has it been the norm that a presidential candidate regularly does press conferences?” spokesman Nick Merrill askedreporters on Thursday. He then promised one “soon”.

The new aircraft is nothing if not symbolic: it launches the start of an intense period of travel and scrutiny during the debates and rallies before election day on 8 November.

The plane also provides room for key Clinton aides to escape their headquarters in Brooklyn and gain important time with the boss. Her loyal gatekeeper Huma Abedin will likely stand guard, returning to the plane after a period of absence that aides insist has nothing to do with the very public break-up of her marriage to former congressman Anthony Weiner.

Campaign manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta have their own challenge: working out where to direct the plane. Some campaign destinations are obvious, such as the swing states of Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa and North Carolina. Some in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan are getting more attention this time thanks to Trump’s appeal to the white working class. Colorado and Virginia look well out of his reach.

The bigger question is whether to take the battle into enemy territory. Trump has proved so unpopular among some Republican voters, minorities and women, that deep red territory is perhaps in play. States such as Arizona, Utah and Georgia, which haven’t voted Democrat in decades, could be vulnerable in the winner-take-all electoral college system – and Clinton has superior fundraising and a vastly more organised network of campaign offices.

Her campaign is at least testing the waters. On Friday, Clinton began airing TV ads in Arizona, where Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by nearly 10 points. Clinton’s husband is the only Democrat to have won the state in a presidential election since 1952.

Her campaign is also spending money in Nebraska, one of two states that splits electoral college votes and therefore offers Clinton a chance to peel off electors from the relatively liberal city of Omaha. Even Utah, where Trump has riled conservative Mormons, has seen the Clinton campaign open a field office.

Whether these moves amount to a radical new strategy or clever feints to trick Trump is not clear. Some inside Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters are reportedly cheering that moves into Republican heartlands appear to have Trump spending time and money in places he ought to take for granted – for instance, by staging a major immigration speech in Arizona.

Yet the confidence could easily become complacency too. Clinton’s healthy lead following the party’s convention has eroded in recent weeks, slipping down to the low single digits in some key states. Not only are the headline polls too close for comfort, but Americans still stubbornly dislike Clinton and Trump by enormous margins. A record number of Americans now say they dislike Clinton, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that showed 41% of Americans have a favorable impression of her, while 56% have an unfavorable one.

Though she enjoys a powerful coalition of support in Washington, particularly from the Obama administration, political surrogates cannot necessarily translate her shower their popularity on friends.

“This ain’t over man. This is not over,” Joe Biden warned at a rally for Clinton in Cleveland on Thursday, where one supporter confessed he was actually planning to vote Trump but came along because he just liked the vice-president.

The scepticism of many independent voters may also help explain the decision by Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri to shield the candidate from the rough-and-tumble of open press conferences, where generally risks are high and rewards low.

Clinton’s campaign has expressed frustration with the questions of trustworthiness, particularly over her private emails system that appear to reinforce a reputation of favoritism and privilege built up by the Clintons. Aides also complain that she does not get the recognition she deserves for developing many more new policy ideas than most candidates.

“People criticise me for having so many plans,” Clinton told a lukewarm audience of military veterans in Cincinnati on Wednesday. “People say, Oh there she goes with another plan about mental health, or whatever,” she added. “But I have this old fashioned idea that if you are going to ask to be president if you have to have a plan.”



Yet the campaign is under no illusion about the nature of this year’s fight. If hunkering down away from the press while outspending Trump – she has raised more money than the GDP of small Pacific nations – is what it takes to beat him, then so be it.

“This is not a normal election,” Clinton said at the American Legion convention in Cincinnati. “This election shouldn’t be about ideology, it’s not just about differences over policy. It’s about who has the experience and temperament to serve as president and commander and chief.”

“The stakes this fall are as high as any election in our lifetimes.”

Huma Abedin, Clinton’s right-hand woman and gatekeeper. Robby Mook, the campaign manager in charge of her election machine. John Podesta, family friend, campaign chairman and former chief of staff to Bill Clinton. Jennifer Palmieri, former Obama communications director now fielding flak for Clinton. Neera Tanden, key figure in transition team preparing the clan for power.

The campaign slogan “stronger together” captures Clinton’s broad belief in a more socially inclusive America, but the underlying policies range widely from a jobs program and infrastructure spending, to making college more affordable and tackling climate change. On trade and social security, she has moved to the left, rhetorically, at least.



Clinton’s experience as secretary of state, senator and activist first lady make her one of the most qualified candidates to run for office. Supporters also point to her resilience in the face of setbacks, long track record of social activism and historic achievement as the first woman nominee of a major party.

The biggest handicap according to opinion polls is a perceived lack of trust among voters, something exacerbated by years of attacks on Clinton family “scandals” and an ongoing controversy over her private email server. Voters sometimes also talk about finding her inauthentic and lacking warmth.

African Americans, women, Latinos, college-educated men – in short, a vast swath of the increasingly diverse US electorate. Geographically, the strongest support for Democrats is heavily concentrated on the coasts however.",REAL
"Australian taxpayers charged over $88 million for donation to corrupt Clinton Foundation October 31, 2016 Google + They both love to play the gender card, turning their immense privilege into victim status and ­dividing the electorate by sex.
Thus, Gillard nobbled Tony ­Abbott with her fabled misogyny speech and Clinton’s machine manages to drown out every Wikileaks embarrassment with a new Donald Trump bimbo eruption. 
The other thing the two ladies have in common is the Clinton Foundation , which Wikileaks emails now show is an influence-peddling political slush fund. 
And guess which country was one of its biggest donors? Australia. Yep, we’re up there with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 
The Australian taxpayer shovelled at least $88 million into the Clinton Foundation and associated entities from 2006 to 2014, reaching a peak of $10.3 million in 2012-13, Gillard’s last year in office. Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard both involved in the influence-peddling political slush fund that is the Clinton Foundation. 
On the Clinton Foundation website, AusAID and the Commonwealth of Australia score separate entries in the $10 million-plus group of donors, one rung up from American teacher unions. 
In 2009-10 Kevin Rudd handed over another $10 million to the foundation for climate research, part of $300 million he squandered on a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. 
Gillard also donated $300 million of our money to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education. 
Lo and behold, she became chairman in 2014 and has been ­actively promoting Clinton as president ever since — in a campaign video last December slamming Trump, in opeds trumpeting the next woman president and in appearances with Clinton spruiking girls’ education. 
The Abbott government topped up the left-wing organisation’s coffers with another $140 million in 2014, bringing total Australian largesse to $460 million, according to a press release from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. 
And yet, apart from the beautiful friendship with Gillard, what did Australia get from the Clintons for all that cash? 
A whole lot of trouble is what. 
The latest treasure trove of Wikileaks emails released last week shows that Australian green groups have been secretly funded to destroy our coal industry by environmental activists connected to the Clinton campaign. Apart from the friendship between Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard, what does Australia get from the Clinton Foundation for donating all that cash? A whole lot of trouble is what. 
The email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveals extraordinary details of the sabotage of the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland, which has damaged Australia’s national interest and denied cheap electricity to millions of poor Indians. 
Last August John Hepburn, former Greenpeace activist and founder of Australian anti-coal group the Sunrise Project, sent a crowing email to his American paymasters, the Sandler Foundation, which is also a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. (Founder Herb Sandler and mate George Soros funded another Clinton-aligned progressive group, the Centre for American Progress, previously chaired by Podesta.) 
“The Adani Carmichael mine and the whole Galilee Basin fossil fuel industrial complex is in its death throes,” Hepburn wrote in the email forwarded to Podesta. 
“I am going to buy a few bottles of bubbly for a celebration with the (Environmental ­Defenders Office) legal team, our colleagues at GetUp, Greenpeace, 350.org, ECF, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Mackay Conservation Group, Market Forces and the brilliant and tireless Sunrise team.” 
In another email forwarded to Podesta, Hepburn panics about an Abbott government inquiry into environmental charities and discusses hiding Sunrise’s sources of funding to safeguard its charitable tax status. 
Hepburn boasts about the latest legal blow to Adani, when the Federal Court overturned its approval and the Commonwealth Bank quit the project. 
In it he now wants to “escalate the campaign ­towards the other 3 big Australian banks”. 
And he mocks miners who “try to claim that there is some kind of foreign-funded and tightly orchestrated conspiracy to systematically ­destroy the Australian coal industry. (I seriously don’t know where they get these wacky ideas from!)” 
As if it’s not bad enough that foreign-funded activists are meddling with our largest export earner, Podesta’s emails also detail their insidious influence on indigenous land owners who blocked the Adani mine using powerful native title rights. 
This alliance of green groups with native title owners is a frightening development detailed in a new book by historian Keith Windschuttle, The Break-up of Australia: The Real Agenda behind Aboriginal Recognition. 
He reveals the imminent expansion of native title claims, either ­approved or quietly being processed, stretch across a whopping 60 per cent of the Australian continent, an area twice the size of Western Europe. 
Already 6000sq km of the Kidman cattle empire in the Kimberley has been given, via native title, to green activists to be converted from productive cattle country to a wildlife conservation area. 
“In return, the Yulumbu people get a paltry $50,000 a year royalty,” Windschuttle writes. 
“As a flora and fauna sanctuary it is economically defunct for the foreseeable future.” 
At worst, writes Windschuttle, the upcoming referendum for indigenous constitutional recognition, proposed by Gillard in 2012, could pave the way for a separate Aboriginal state on native title land, funded by taxation, royalties and lease payments — passive welfare in another guise. 
At the very least, the ­alliance between foreign-­funded green groups and ­indigenous owners gives ­environmentalists the opportunity to take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy and shut down industries they don’t like, from coal mines in Queensland to cattle farms in Western Australia. 
Thanks for nothing, Hillary and Julia. ",FAKE
"Updated at 10:04 a.m. ET

The Vatican has announced an end to an overhaul of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — an abrupt conclusion to a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the main umbrella group for nuns in the U.S. that began in 2012.

The Vatican said Thursday that it has accepted a report on the overhaul of the LCWR ""marking the conclusion of the Doctrinal Assessment"" of the umbrella group.

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit the unexpected announcement is seen as a sign of Pope Francis' focus on a more merciful church.

LCWR leaders met with Pope Francis later Thursday, during their annual visit to Rome. David Gibson of Religion News Service described the meeting as ""another indicator of the thaw in relations."" He added:

The Rev. James Martin, SJ., editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America, said in a Facebook post that the LCWR agreed to implement some changes, ""mainly regarding speakers and liturgies at its annual conventions. But overall, the operations of the LCWR remains intact.""

Joshua J. McElwee, writing in the National Catholic Reporter, said the ""news seems to bring to an end what had been an especially contentious period between the women religious and the Vatican.""

At issue was an investigation of the LCWR that began in 2012 under Cardinal William Levada, the previous head of the Vatican's theological watchdog. As NPR's Scott Neuman reported at the time, ""the Vatican issued a report declaring that the umbrella group representing most American nuns had strayed from church doctrine and adopted 'radical feminist' views. Rome ordered Seattle's archbishop to begin monitoring all operations of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious."" The investigation called for a five-year doctrinal overhaul of the group.

Sister Simone Campbell, head of the Catholic social justice lobby Network, told NPR at the time that the investigation came ""like a sock in the stomach.""

A separate Vatican investigation into U.S. nuns ended last December with the Vatican expressing what NPR's Sylvia Poggioli called ""appreciation for the dedicated work of nuns in education, health and among the poor.""",REAL
"The Disappearing Middle: Electorate Way Less Moderate Than Past Primaries

One of the biggest stories of the election cycle is turnout (as we've reported a few times now): Republican turnout has spiked far beyond 2012 levels, and Democratic turnout has fallen off after the party's mammoth 2008.

The tone and the turnout are vastly different between Republicans and Democrats this year, but oddly enough, both sides have something crucial in common: their voters are far less moderate than they were in their last primaries.

Let's start with the Republican numbers. The below chart shows the ideological difference between the Republican electorate this year and in 2012. Each dot represents one state — so, for example, 33 percent of Vermont Republican primary voters in 2016 said they considered themselves moderate or liberal, compared to 53 percent in 2012. That puts Vermont at negative-20 for ""somewhat conservative"" — the most extreme result we found among the 15 GOP states for which there was sufficient exit-poll data.

It's true exit polls can have a margin of error, but there's no mistaking a pattern here. In no state did the share of ""moderate"" and ""liberal"" GOP primary voters grow from 2012 to 2016. (The exit polls lumped moderate and liberal together in 2012, so they're not separated out here.)

Altogether, an NPR analysis finds that the share of ""somewhat conservative"" voters on the GOP side climbed by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 over 2012's primaries. (That is, among the states with exit polling data for both years). The share who were moderate or liberal, meanwhile, fell by around 9 percentage points, and the share who were ""very conservative"" held relatively steady.

Something similar is at work on the Democratic side, as well:

The share of moderate and conservative Democratic voters was down — sometimes dramatically so — in most states that have voted thus far. Meanwhile, the share of people who are somewhat or very liberal is way up.

This year, around 60 percent of Democratic primary voters said they considered themselves ""somewhat"" or ""very liberal,"" up from around 45 percent in 2008 (once again, among states with sufficient exit polling data for both years).

So interestingly, though voters on both sides are less moderate than in the last contests, Democrats this year have more decidedly moved toward the ""very liberal"" end of the spectrum. Republican voters, meanwhile, are way more ""somewhat conservative"" than in 2012, but don't appear to be more ""very conservative.""

One thing to keep in mind: Republican turnout across the board is higher this year. That means there are still a few more moderate and liberal Republican primary and caucus voters this cycle than there were in the 2012 primaries — it's just that the number of somewhat conservative Republicans shot up way more.

Likewise, Democratic turnout is down almost entirely across the board. Interestingly, even with the sharp drop off in turnout, multiplying the exit poll data by the turnout numbers suggests that the raw number of ""very liberal"" Democratic voters is, in fact, up slightly from 2008. However, the number of moderate and conservative voters dropped off steeply. And even though the share of ""somewhat liberal"" voters is up, the raw number is also down.

But anyway: all of this could mean that a bunch of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted in 2008 stayed home this year, while a lot of those somewhat and very liberal Democrats from 2008 came out again. Likewise, it could mean that the Republican wave of turnout is driven largely by a bunch of ""somewhat conservative"" voters who weren't there in 2012.

And looking at the results so far, there are simple explanations to why this might be happening. The very-liberal Bernie Sanders is probably driving some of the turnout among very-liberal voters. It's likewise possible that the somewhat-conservative Trump is behind the bump in somewhat conservative voters in Republican primaries (while Ted Cruz does better among very conservative voters, and John Kasich gets more votes among moderates).

But then, it might not just be candidate-driven: it's possible that lots of people have simply become more conservative or liberal than they were four or eight years ago. This is also to some degree plausible, as there is evidence that Americans are getting more polarized.

In other words, there's a chicken-egg question here, with no clear answer — chances are, they're both right. To the degree that voters are more polarized, they're gravitating toward more extreme candidates. And Sanders and Trump also both happen to be very good at energizing people to turn out and vote for them.",REAL
"Radio host Sean Hannity said on his show Wednesday that the latest revelations about Hillary Clinton's campaign from WikiLeaks prove that ""everything that conspiracy theorists have said over the years"" is true. 

 

 His examples: 

 

 -- ""Hillary knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding ISIS."" 

 

 -- ""Hillary Clinton’s dream of a hemispheric common market; open trade and open borders."" 

 

 -- ""Left wing activists plot[ting] a Catholic Spring and [infiltrating] the Catholic Church."" 

 

 -- The media ""conspiring to release [debate] quesitons to Hillary Clinton ahead of time.""

 

 -- Clinton aides ""advancing progressive ideology to foment revolution.""

 

 ""They’re propagandizing you, they’re posing as objective journalists and they are not,"" he said about CNN, the New York Times, CNBC and the Boston Globe. ""This is a mass media assault on your mind."" 

 

 ""This is like, you know, Communism in the Soviet Union propaganda,"" he said. ""It’s really sad but it's also true and it's also reality and it's also the world you live in.""

 

",REAL
"Print version Font Size The hypersonic aircraft , known as ""article 4202"" or ""15U71"" was successfully tested on October 25 for the first time. All avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system of the vehicle are entirely of Russian production.The weapon is capable of speeding up to 15 Max, or 7 km/sec. The vehicle was designed to be installed at prospective intercontinental ballistic missiles, instead of conventional warheads. The ""4202"" vehicle starts working at an altitude of about 100 km and flies to the target at the speed of 5-7 km/s. Before entering dense layers of the atmosphere, directly above the target, the hypersonic aircraft performs a complex maneuver that makes it difficult to interception by missile defense systems of the enemy . Noteworthy, the project of hypersonic warheads called ""Albatross"" appeared in the USSR in the mid-1980s, as a response to USA's attempts to create a missile defense system within the concept of ""star wars."" However, due to the technical difficulties, the project was shut down. In the mid-1990s, the Scientific and Production Association (NPO) resumed the development of the new weapon under the number ""4202.""According to sources at Roscosmos state corporation, the successful tests of the new hypersonic aircraft were made possible with the help of the intensive import substitution program. For instance, Russian engineers had to get rid of the control system, previously manufactured by Ukrainian company Hartron. The successfully implemented program provided an opportunity to resume the tests. As a result, all the avionics and electronic systems, as well as the control system now completely consist of Russian components.The Russian Army is to receive new hypersonic weapons by 2020 . The development of high-speed anti-aircraft missiles has made it possible to intercept and destroy any modern aircraft or missile at any altitude. The way out is to create the aircraft capable of flying faster than interceptor missiles.For this particular reason, major powers of the world, such as the USA, Russia and China, rushed to develop hypersonic flight vehicles of different types and purposes. China, for example, tested the hypersonic WU-14 glider on 9 January 2015. The Chinese aircraft is launched into outer space with the help of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then, the vehicle develops the speed of 10M, that is, more than 12,300 km/h, and dives onto the target. State-of-the-art air defense systems are unable to detect and intercept a target flying at this speed. China has thus become the third country in the world, after Russia and the United States, which has the technology of hypersonic vehicles for both nuclear and conventional weapons. In fact, the Chinese have created a warhead with control surfaces that can maneuver in flight thus becoming practically invulnerable. However, this vehicle does not have its own engine, so the Chinese creation has become another weapon for ""the poorest."" Russia currently works on different types of hypersonic scramjet missiles, which can be launched from land, ships or aircraft.Pravda.Ru requested an expert opinion from chief editor of ""Arms Export"" magazine, Andrey Frolov.""How competitive is Russia in the development of hypersonic aircraft?"" ""Russia is at the forefront. This is not the first test, I think that in the near future these systems will be passed into service at the army. The Americans do not have such weapons yet, the Chinese are in the development process.""""Are there any other details available?"" ""This is a secret subject. We know that such weapons have been created - and this is a lot to know already."" Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Five types of Russian weapons which USA are afraid of",FAKE
". The Hulk Actor Mark Ruffalo Has Joined Standing Rock to Protest DAPL Mark Ruffalo has graced our screens for years. Starring in movies such as Shutter Island, Zodiac and... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/the-hulk-actor-mark-ruffalo-has-joined.html Mark Ruffalo has graced our screens for years. Starring in movies such as Shutter Island, Zodiac and The Avengers as The Hulk, the Hollywood star is no stranger to fame and publicity. Ruffalo is also renown for using his celebrity status to highlight the more important causes and issues that we as a race, confront. The self-confessed climate change advocate has recently made headlines again, while joining in with the DAPL protestors. The DAPL protestors have been covered extensively here, at Anon, as the North Dakota oil pipeline continues in its construction.This week, Ruffalo was seen standing in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe facing off against police kitted up in riot gear. The underground pipeline has been a strong point of contention over the last months. Developer Energy Access Partners has claimed they have the proper permits to pursue the pipeline development in what they claim is private land. However, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and many of their supporters say the pipeline, planned to span some 1,134 miles through North Dakota to Illinois, is running through sacred Native American land. A photo posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 26, 2016 at 3:06pm PDT Ruffalo and Native renewables founder Wahleah Jones went to Cannon Ball, ND, to present the Sioux tribal elders with gifts of solar collection arrays in mobile trailers, to provide the protestors with clean energy. It is with this gift, Ruffalo hopes to help the Native American tribes remain firm at their protest encampment and further their cause – particularly to protect their sources of clean water, something the oil pipeline very much threatens. (The pipeline is listed to run directly under the Missouri River.)“We know from experience that pipelines leak, explode, pollute and poison land and water. But it doesn’t have to be that way,” Ruffalo said, who has been campaigning the anti-fracking movement since 2008.“This pipeline is a black snake that traverses four states and 200 waterways with fracked Bakken oil.” As per The Free Thought Project , the solar trailers will assist the Sioux tribe and other Native American tribes standing in the protest with medical facilities amongst other necessities, with an endless source of renewable energy. An irony not lost on the actor. Mark Ruffalo is another example of an individual not just simply staying in the by lines, donating money, but rather, he is using his celebrity status and time to display yet another injustice against the citizens of the world. He understands the lack of media attention this protest is receiving – and the lack of support. A photo posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 27, 2016 at 7:04pm PDT A video posted by Mark Ruffalo (@markruffalo) on Oct 27, 2016 at 8:44am PDT “There’s people being really hurt there; it’s very scary,” said Ruffalo on CNN. “The National Guard has been called in. This is not an emergency. This is not a national emergency. These are peaceful protesters.“Every single person you see there was trained in peaceful resistance. They spend basically the entire day doing prayers, chanting. I’ve never been around so peaceful a stand.”“This particular issue has brought together five hundred tribes from all over the nation,” the actor said. “Never in the history of our nation have all of the Native American tribes come together under one issue. They see this as a very special historic moment for them.“We can’t forget our humanity in the face of these kinds of things.” Reference: Anonhq  ",FAKE
"Ben Carson pitched a tax plan with numbers that didn't add up. Donald Trump boasted that he's paying his own way in the campaign, but he isn't. Chris Christie accused the government of stealing Social Security money that it has actually borrowed -- and has been paying back with interest.

Even the price of hamburger got a bad rap in the latest Republican presidential debate, thanks to Ted Cruz.

A look at some of the claims Wednesday night and how they compare with the facts:

CRUZ: ""If you look at a single mom buying groceries, she sees hamburger prices have gone up nearly 40 percent. She sees her cost of electricity going up. She sees her health insurance going up. And loose money is one of the major problems.""

THE FACTS: Americans may be facing many economic challenges, but rising inflation isn't one of them. And ""loose money,"" a way of describing the Federal Reserve's low interest rate policies, isn't to blame for expensive hamburgers.

Beef prices rose 21 percent in January of this year compared with a year earlier. That reflected a Midwest drought that had caused some cattle ranchers to cull their herds. Beef prices have since settled down and were up just 1 percent in September from a year earlier.

Electricity costs have actually fallen 0.4 percent during that period. Those are national averages, so some local areas will have different figures. Overall, inflation has remained below even the Fed's 2 percent target for the past three years. In fact, the government's primary inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, has actually been unchanged in the past 12 months.

CARSON: His proposed flat-rate tax, which would have everyone pay an income tax rate of about 15 percent, ""works out very well"" in budget terms because it would spark enough economic growth to offset the lower rate.

THE FACTS: Carson says his proposed tax would not increase the budget deficit because he would tax the entire economic output of the U.S. -- the gross domestic product -- plus corporate income and capital gains.

Carson has not laid out a detailed plan, so it is difficult to measure how it would affect revenues or the economy. But based on what he said, he's double-counting because corporate revenues are part of the GDP.

A tax rate of 15 percent would be a huge tax cut for the wealthy. The top income tax rate for individuals is now 39.6 percent. The corporate tax rate for corporations is 35 percent.

To help offset the rate cuts, Carson said he would ""get rid of all the deductions and all the loopholes."" That's a bold proposal, considering how popular many tax breaks are, including deductions for interest on home mortgages and charitable contributions, as well as exemptions for health insurance and retirement savings.

CHRISTIE: FBI Director James Comey said police officers are holding back ""because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States.""

THE FACTS: That's not what Comey said.

In a speech last week about an alarming rise in crime, Comey said some officers feel under siege because of the spread of viral videos taken by young people with cell phones. Comey said he'd heard about one police official who told his force ""their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.""

But Comey never mentioned Obama or blamed politicians for failing to support police. And Comey made clear he didn't have data to back up his gut impression.

Christie also said when Obama was asked to speak about the issue, he declined to support police. In fact, Obama gave a firm defense of police Tuesday, telling a police chiefs convention that ""this country is safer because of your efforts.""

TRUMP: ""I'm putting up 100 percent of my own money.""

THE FACTS: No, he's not.

Of $3.9 million raised for his campaign in the latest fundraising quarter, only $100,000 came from his own pocket. That was one major revelation from the latest batch of presidential fundraising reports, filed Oct. 15 with the Federal Election Commission.

That's a drastic shift from his springtime fundraising report, when he loaned his campaign nearly all of the $1.9 million it had.

BUSH: ""Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up for work.""

RUBIO: ""Barack Obama missed 60 or 70 percent of his votes"" when running for president while he was in the Senate.

THE FACTS: Bush correctly cited Rubio's spotty attendance record in the Senate since running for president, but ignored the fact that this is common when someone in public office runs a White House campaign --and previous candidates were absent far more often. Bush himself is free to run for president as he pleases, because he doesn't have a day job from which to be absent.

For his part, Rubio didn't offer a fair comparison when comparing his Senate voting rate with Obama's.

From Oct. 27, 2014, to Oct. 26, 2015, Rubio was absent for 26 percent of Senate votes, a worse attendance record than other senators running for president, according to an analysis by GovTrack.us, which tracks congressional voting records.

But in a comparable period in the 2008 race -- from Oct. 23, 2006, to Oct. 22, 2007 -- Obama was absent for 29 percent of votes, a bit more than Rubio's absences, but not as much more as Rubio charged. Republican John McCain was absent for 51 percent of Senate votes in that period.

Both Obama and McCain went on to miss an even bigger share of Senate votes as the election progressed -- an expected development bound to be seen again in 2016.

CHRISTIE: The federal government has ""stolen"" the Social Security taxes paid by workers and spent it on other things. ""It isn't their money any more. ... It got stolen from them. It's not theirs anymore. The government stole it and spent it a long time ago.""

THE FACTS: The money is not stolen, it's borrowed.

Over the past 30 years, Social Security has collected about $2.7 trillion more in payroll taxes than it has paid in benefits. By law, the Treasury Department has invested the surplus in U.S. Treasury bonds.

Over that same time period, the federal government has run budget deficits in all but a few years. To finance the deficits, the government has borrowed money, from other government agencies as well as public debt markets.

The money from Social Security has been spent, but Social Security holds Treasury bonds worth $2.7 trillion, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Saying the money has been stolen assumes that the federal government will not honor the bonds.

Social Security has been paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes since 2010. The program has been able to pay full benefits because the federal government has honored the bonds.

TRUMP: Asked about his criticism of Rubio for his support for increasing the number of high-skilled foreign workers given visas to work in the U.S. -- calling Rubio Facebook CEO ""Mark Zuckerburg's personal senator"" -- Trump denied ever making the comment. ""I never said that. I never said that,"" he said.

THE FACTS: He did say it, on his own website. Trump's immigration policy calls for a different approach -- raising the prevailing wage for the jobs that attract high-skilled foreign workers, in hopes that they'll be filled by more Americans.

Trump's policy statement said doing that ""will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg's personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.""

SEN. RAND PAUL: The new budget agreement ""will explode the deficit, it will allow President Obama to borrow unlimited amounts of money.""

THE FACTS: The agreement allows $80 billion more spending over the next two years, which is only a small addition to the $3.67 trillion the government spends every year. The government's annual budget deficit has declined to $439 billion, about 2.5 percent of GDP, below the average for the past 40 years.

Overall, whatever its faults, most economists have responded to this week's budget deal between Congress and the White House with a sigh of relief. The agreement, approved by the House earlier Wednesday, sets funding levels and extends the government's borrowing limit for two more years, thereby taking the threat of a government shutdown and debt default off the table.

A 2013 budget fight led to a 16-day partial government shutdown that was widely blamed by most economists for sharp drops in consumer and business confidence that dragged on the economy.

GEORGE PATAKI: ""Hillary Clinton put a server, an unsecure server, in her home as secretary of state. We have no doubt that that was hacked, and that state secrets are out there to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others.""

THE FACTS: The former New York governor, speaking in the undercard debate, exaggerated what's actually known about what happened to the emails of Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for her party's presidential nomination. While Clinton's email server was poorly configured and therefore more susceptible to hacking, there is no evidence of intrusion.

The FBI is studying the server, which was subjected to a phishing attack by Russian-linked hackers while she was secretary of state. It's not known whether she clicked on any attachments, which would have exposed her account. Her account was also apparently the subject of cyberattacks originating in China, South Korea and Germany after she left office in early 2013. Determining whether a hack was sponsored by a nation, rather than just originating from that country, is notoriously difficult.",REAL
"Even as it rises in many countries, income inequality has fallen worldwide, a result of pro-poor trends in places from Africa to China. A better focus on growth, innovation, and greater opportunities can help countries close the income gap.

For many in the US and elsewhere, it has become easy to see red or feel blue about income inequality. The Panama Papers revelations about hidden riches feeds this global glum. So does a focus in the US presidential race on charges of a “rigged” economy. Indeed, within many countries, inequality has risen. But not everywhere.

Worldwide, in fact, inequality is actually going down.

Humanity, it seems, is not leaving its poorest behind.

This conclusion comes from the work of an eminent expert on inequality, Branko Milanovic. He spent decades studying data at the World Bank and now works at City University in New York. In a new book, “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization,” he makes a case that the rapid growth of poorer countries since 1988 has brought the first decline in inequality since the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. Milanovic is pessimistic about the US reducing its inequality soon. But he finds many pro-equality trends will continue to grow the world’s new middle class. One trend is what he calls “pro-poor” innovation, such as the ability of African farmers to use cellphones to check on farm prices. Another is the use of online courses to educate poor people in skills sought by global companies.

China and other Asian countries have led the way in forging development policies that have helped close the global income gap. The best inequality-buster is economic growth, Milanovic says, but other efforts are needed, such as equality in opportunities. In Brazil, for example, inequality has gone down because of better education.

Milanovic’s findings are reinforced by new research from Tomáš Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. They find global inequality fell between 2003 and 2013. And they project the number of people in poverty will fall from 12.3 percent of the total population to 3.6 percent by 2035.

“The ability to participate in and benefit from economic growth has immediate and tangible impacts on the lives of the bulk of the world’s population,” the two economists conclude.

The very rich or the very corrupt may still hide their wealth in tax havens. Politicians in developed countries may decry rising inequality. But global trends and new data tell an alternative story about the progress already made to lift the poor.",REAL
"0 comments 
Families united in prayer on Thanksgiving Day. Prayer alone is not what comes to mind when you think of Obama’s America where we are told to leave God at home and out of our pledge. 
There has never been a more crucial time to look to God, as our nation is being divided and torn apart by the selfish greed of a corrupt society with leaders that lead from behind, and hide their dark secrets right in plain sight…because, they can. 
Now Walmart has brought us a Thanksgiving commercial that is a huge reminder of what is good, and what is right. A reminder of what a good foundation is made up of. Being grateful, family, and prayer. 
Most of all…coming together. 
The 30-second ad, which at World Series rates cost Walmart $500,000 — features the diversity of Americas families and the camaraderie of its service members as they gather, pray and enjoy the bonds of family. A commercial showing everyone praying before eating??? 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 great job Walmart!! #Walmart 
— Deplorable Jack (@DeplorableJackL) November 3, 2016 
Then their final thoughts… 
“America, let’s come together and take a moment to reflect on what we’re truly thankful for this holiday season. Friends, family and the chance to spend time with the ones we love. Walmart would like to give thanks to all of our Veterans and Active Duty Service Members at home and oversees this holiday season.” 
Walmart has invited a spirit of thanksgiving with just a few seconds of video. Can you imagine if “everyday Americans” brought just a few seconds of thanksgiving into their lives daily? 
What a difference it would make. It could change the very state we’re in right now. Where everything is about oneself and selfish desires. A generation of self-absorbed selfie taking kids who think they can’t do hard things. 
For them…it would make a HUGE difference. Related Items",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- Loretta Lynch was confirmed as U.S. attorney general on Thursday after months of GOP delays, making history by becoming the first African-American woman to hold the post.

Lynch was confirmed in the Senate 56 to 43. All Democrats voted for her, along with 10 Republicans: Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.).

Sen Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of Lynch's loudest critics, was the only senator to miss the vote. Hours earlier, he railed against Lynch for being ""unfit"" for the job.

""Today, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next Attorney General – and America will be better off for it,"" President Barack Obama said in a statement. ""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law.""

Republicans who opposed Lynch, who until now was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, conceded they didn't doubt she was qualified for the job. Instead, they voted against her because of their anger over Obama's recent executive action on immigration, which would provide deportation relief for up to 1.8 million undocumented immigrants. The matter is currently tied up in a lawsuit. Lynch will defend the policy in her new role.

""We are deeply concerned in this country about the president's executive amnesty. The unlawfulness of it, the breadth of it, the arrogance of it to the point that it's a direct assault on congressional power,"" said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). ""We do not have to confirm someone to the highest law enforcement position in America if that someone has publicly committed to denigrating Congress.""

Obama took the executive action in November after Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He's hardly the first president to use his executive authority on immigration matters. Every U.S. president since 1956 has used executive authority to grant various types of temporary immigration relief.

Ahead of Thursday's vote, Democrats chided Republicans for throwing up so many roadblocks to Lynch's confirmation. She had been waiting for a vote for more than five months, longer than any of her recent predecessors.

Lynch is ""an historic nominee,"" said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. By voting against her, he said, Republicans are ""making history for the wrong reason.""

""What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are saying is, it doesn't matter if you're qualified ... We have a new test: You must disagree with the president who nominates you,"" McCaskill added. ""It is beyond depressing. It's disgusting.""",REAL
"(CNN) A pair of convicted killers who escaped from an upstate New York prison may have headed across the border to Vermont, fearing the pressure of an intense manhunt in the neighboring state, authorities said Wednesday.

New York State Police Superintendent Joseph D'Amico said authorities are looking ""behind every tree, under every rock and inside every structure"" for fugitives Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 34. The pair made a brazen escape over the weekend from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. The search -- now in its fifth day -- involves more than 400 law enforcement officers. The state is offering a $100,000 reward.

In a news conference outside the maximum-security prison about 20 miles south of the Canadian border , Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin said the search area had expanded to his state based on information the inmates believed ""New York was going to be hot and Vermont ... cooler in terms of law enforcement.""

Vermont state police vessels and additional troopers will conduct patrols on Lake Champlain, which cuts across the states. In addition, searches will include campsites and public campgrounds.

""We have information that would suggest that Vermont was discussed as a possible location,"" New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at the same news conference. ""If they are headed toward Vermont ...Vermont is engaged and Vermont is mobilized and we are working hand in glove, and we will be coordinating several times a day to make sure every lead we have, every piece of information is shared.""

Under an agreement with Vermont, New York state troopers will be allowed across state lines if needed, officials said.

But D'Amico said authorities had no hard information the men had left New York state.

Law enforcement personnel were going door-to-door in both homes and seasonal residences and conducting checkpoints in hamlets and towns surrounding Dannemora. Cuomo said the inmates may have gotten a head start of several hours before the manhunt began.

""These men are nothing to be trifled with,"" Cuomo said.

For the first time since the escape, law enforcement officials acknowledged publicly that a woman who worked with the convicts in the tailoring shop at the prison may have played a role in the elaborate breakout.

D'Amico, without elaborating, said Mitchell had befriended the men and ""may have had some sort of role in assisting them.""

She has not been arrested or charged in connection with their escape, nor has anyone else. The source added that Mitchell is cooperating with police, having provided information as needed.

Her cell phone was used to call several people connected to Matt, according to another source with knowledge of the investigation. It's not clear who made these calls, when they were made or if Mitchell knew about them.

Mitchell went to the hospital this weekend because of panic attacks, according to one of the sources. By then, authorities had discovered during a 5:30 a.m. Saturday bed check that Matt and Sweat had escaped.

Mitchell has worked at Clinton for seven years as an industrial training supervisor, according to Jennifer Freeman, a spokeswoman for the New York State Comptroller. Her salary was $57,697 a year.

Mitchell's son Tobey Mitchell told NBC News his mother was in a hospital Saturday evening because ""she was having severe chest pains and she was concerned about that."" He added that his mom, who works at the prison with her husband, ""worries a lot about everything"" but strongly challenged suggestions she had done anything wrong.

""She is not the kind of person that's going to risk her life or other people's lives to let these guys escape from prison,"" he said.

His wife, Paige Mitchell, told CNN on Wednesday that ""95% of what is being said"" about her mother-in-law is not true.

""They don't have the facts to prove this,"" she said. ""This is just slander and rumor.""

Paige Mitchell said she believed Matt may have persuaded her mother-in-law to contact people for him who knew about art.

""He was interested in art,"" Paige Mitchell said of Matt. ""Her heart was in the right place.""

Paige Mitchell denied that her mother-in-law was to be the getaway driver or helped provide the power tools used in the escape. Saturday's hospital visit stemmed from the fact that Joyce Mitchell is a ""very nervous person,"" she said.

Rural area is rough and 'can be deadly'

If the escapees did indeed have a designated driver, imagine their horror when they popped out of a manhole sometime late Friday or early Saturday and found no accomplice waiting.

""That must have been just a complete panic on their part ... 'Now what? Where are we going to walk to -- this small, rural area?' "" said CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director. ""It's going to be hard to hide day or night for very long, and they wouldn't have been prepared to deal with the elements.""

They'd have to find food, water and money, while also trying to get their hands on weapons or a vehicle.

""That would put every family in that rural (area) in extreme danger,"" Fuentes said. ""If they're feeling like cornered animals out there, they are going to do something drastic to try to ensure their physical survival and their continued freedom out of that prison.""

Without any help like a getaway driver, someone who escapes from Clinton can easily get lost, said Jeff Hall, who teaches at the City University of New York and did his dissertation on northern New York prisons.

""The environment is formidable,"" said Hall, who grew up near the Dannemora prison, where his father worked. ""It's rough terrain and, if you're not familiar with it, it can be deadly.""

Warning: Tell police if you spot anything unusual

The first came in Dannemora after midnight Friday, about five hours before authorities discovered the men had escaped.

Another focus is about 40 miles southeast in Willsboro, a town of about 2,000 people along Lake Champlain.

That's where a resident spotted two men overnight Monday walking in a torrential rainstorm on a rural road, Willsboro Town Supervisor Shaun Gillilland said. As the witness' car approached them, they took off.

Both reports could be false leads, as often happens in manhunts. Former U.S. Marshal Service regional commander Lenny DePaul said he thinks it's important that people be on the lookout.

Still, authorities are clearly focusing on the rural swath of New York near Vermont and the Canadian province of Quebec.

Matt and Sweat's escape was so extraordinarily complex that experts say the two must have had help.

Using power tools, they cut through a cell wall that included a steel plate, maneuvered across a catwalk, shimmied down six stories to a tunnel of pipes, followed that tunnel, broke through a double-brick wall, cut into a 24-inch steam pipe, climbed through the steam pipe, cut another hole so they could get out of the pipe and finally surfaced through a manhole.

Aside from the mystery of how they got the necessary power tools, many wonder how they could have used them without detection.

The hole in the cell's steel wall suggests they used a cutoff wheel, ironworker Ernesto ""Ernie"" Peñuelas said. But using that tool would have produced a loud sound and detectable odor.

Their time on the lam is also remarkable. Most escapees in New York are captured within 24 hours, according to data compiled by the state. Of 29 inmates who fled between 2002 and 2013, only one was free for more than two days.

Escaping from detention happens thousands of times each year, federal statistics show. But most are from minimum security facilities, where prisoners just walk away. In 2013, there were 2,011 cases of prisoners who escaped or were absent without permission.

Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for fatally shooting and then running over Broome County Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia in 2002.

Matt was convicted for kidnapping a businessman for 27 hours and -- when he didn't comply with his pleas for money -- killing him.

""Torture is probably an understatement,"" Lee Bates, who drove a car carrying one of Matt's victims, told CNN's Anderson Cooper of the 1997 killing. He said Matt shoved a knife sharpener in his victim's ear, broke his neck and then dismembered the body.

Despite his violent past, Matt is capable of getting others to help him, Bates said.",REAL
"By John W. Whitehead
“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people . Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. 
The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable. ”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech 
Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law.
Say hello to America’s shadow government.
A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.
No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government— also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” —may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.
To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.
The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.
Yet it is the second shadow government —also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.
The Deep State, which “ operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power ,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.
So who or what is the Deep State?
It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice.
It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.
It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
These are the key players that drive the shadow government.
This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day.
Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office.
Domestic surveillance No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Global spying The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage .
Roving TSA searches The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country.
USA Patriot Act, NDAA America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected.
Militarized police state Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local law enforcement agencies without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones.
Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
SWAT team raids With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession.
Domestic drones The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones.
School-to-prison pipeline The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court.
Overcriminalization The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided.
Privatized Prisons States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.
Endless wars America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
Are you getting the message yet?
The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on.
As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”
The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley.
This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds.
It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats.
As Lofgren concludes:
[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change … If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda.
In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished.
So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com . Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org . 
The original source of this article is The Rutherford Institute Copyright © John W. Whitehead , The Rutherford Institute , 2016 ",FAKE
"By Tai Amri Spann-Wilson / 400yearsinbabylon.blogspot.com 
Dear Youth, 
On this day after the election, many are asking themselves how this could have happened. Regardless of who anyone close to you voted for, and regardless of how you yourself might vote, in a democratic country, the questions still remain: How could so few be allowed to vote? Why do so few who are eligible vote? How can we call ourselves a country when there seems to be so much hatred between those with differing ideologies? Do we care at all for people who are not like us? These questions can be maddening, but I beg you, don’t give up hope. I promise you that just the thought of you gives so many of us so much hope. Especially me. And also, please don’t fall into the temptation to hate those who may hate you. These times we are living in are reminding me, oddly enough, of the Empire Strikes Back. Luke, reacting to the violence of the world tries to combat it with more violence and ends up getting his hand cut off. It’s only after he goes and studies the intricacies of justice that he is able to confront Darth Vader and the Emperor in triumph. If I were to pick a Grandmaster Jedi of our world, it would be Dr. Howard Thurman, the “pastor” of Martin Luther King. Dr. Thurman wrote of hate, “The logic of the development of hatred is death to the spirit and disintegration of ethical and moral value.” While hatred is a natural emotion, acting from it and allowing it to take root will never accomplish the goals we want them to. I call you StillSpeaking Youth to combat what I have seen older generations do to younger generations throughout my lifetime and into history. Each generation seems to think that their generation was the one that knew how best to fight. I’m afraid that the older I get the more I might start saying to younger folkx, “At least MY generation had the Occupy Movement.” or “At least my generation was involved in the Black Lives Matter Movement.” But the truth of the matter is that every generation gets their chance to shine and be a part of creating what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called, The Beloved Community. We hear a lot about Dr. King’s Dream, but what we hear are the little specifics, white children and Black children holding hands and blah, blah, blah. We often miss the big picture. The big picture was that Dr. King believed, as I do, that there is a world possible right here that is far different than the world we live in today. In that world: there is no hatred over religious and political differences; everyone is loved and cherished for who they are, no matter the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their gender expression; and people aren’t treated differently because of how much money they make or what job they work. That Dream is possible, but only when we all put our hands into making this Beloved Community come true. I love each and every one of you so much, even when you get on my nerves I want to protect you from every harmful oppression. But the best way I know how to do that, is to try and help you be survivors in a world of hate. I always want to show you the survival tools I learned, and also the tools I’ve learned to help create a Beloved Community. Because I know, that just as I will someday be among the eldest generation of this world and that I hope to eventually be an ancestor that you call upon in your struggles, you will someday have to step up to the responsibilities of creating the Beloved Community in your own world just as me and my generation have. You don’t have to do it like us, in fact I really hope you don’t, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I want you to be those Love Warriors, I need you to be those Love Warriors, and I vow to be the Elder that you need. Just keep holding on and know this, the ancestors, including Dr. Thurman and Dr. King, are ALWAYS there when you call. You know I love you, Tai Amri (Baby Pastor and Jedi Master) Spann-Wilson 4.0 ·",FAKE
"Physical Gold Demand and Fear Posted on Home » Silver » Silver News » Physical Gold Demand and Fear 
These two factors are clearly in play today as the metals move higher in a surge we’ve been expecting since late last week. However, these gains might just as quickly be reversed so there are a few indicators you’d better be watching… 

From Craig Hemke, TFMetals : As mentioned in the title of this post, both physical demand and fear seem to be driving price today. How can we measure physical demand? Sometimes it shows up as a lack of overnight “London Monkey” trading. As prices were firming last week, we noticed this phenomena occurring again: http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/blog/7941/some-possible-encouragement And now look at the action overnight (earlier today) in London: Don’t ask me to quantify this because I can’t. This is pure conjecture based upon learned experience. As I’ve followed this stuff daily for nearly seven years now, I’ve noticed a clear correlation between London demand and the London Monkey daily price smash. And this clearly correlates with price trend. So, when The London Monkeys stand down…as they have more than half the time the past two weeks…this tells me that demand for physical is strong on London and, consequently, you can expect price to rise in New York, too. Also affecting things today is fear. This is the fear that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of The United States…I guess. Why this is such a “fear”, I don’t know. Perhaps, instead, a better word is “uncertainty”. The gold price is anticipating the uncertainty that a Trump victory would bring. Either way, when you get a 14-point turnaround in a major national poll just one week before the election, the effect is rather startling. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/01/post-abc-tracking-poll-clinton-falls-behind-trump-in-enthusiasm-but-has-edge-in-early-voting/ And it’s not just the metals. We’ve been tracking the impending breakout and surge in Bitcoin, too, and it’s up 3% today and back through $700. Since the previous breakouts on this weekly chart added 40% or so to the Bitcoin price, I’d say your next target is likely near $1000. Turning to the metals…Just yesterday, we discussed the likelihood of a surge higher. Prices had found support at/near the respective 200-day MAs and, with copper surging higher, we thought that a move like we’re seeing today was coming. And while this is all very nice, well and good, we really haven’t accomplished anything significant until prices move back above the 50-day moving averages. Yes, silver never closed below its 200-day and gold is now more than 1% back above its own 200-day…BUT…if you want to reverse the recent downtrend and get the hot, momo-chasing Spec HFT algo money to come charging back into the synthetic paper gold derivative, then you need this move to extend up, to and through the 50-day. For the sake of clarity, the charts below show nothing but the location of the 50-day MA for both the Dec16 gold and Dec16 silver. THESE ARE THE KEY LEVELS TO WATCH. A move through and close above these levels should excite the algos and drive price even higher. So, watch them both very closely and be sure to note the sharp down angle of both, too. This makes the pressure to jump to and through even greater. Two other key indicators we’re going to be sure to keep watching are copper and the HUI. Copper is up another 1% as I type. This is the 7th consecutive up day and I have a last of $2.222. The HUI is also higher but not as much as you might hope/expect. I’ve got it at 218 and up about 5.5 points. What should you be watching? Let’s get copper to continue higher and move up and out of this pennant AND let’s get the HUI back above 220. Both of these would help spur the metals even higher, too. There’s a lot more going on but I think I’ll stop here so that we can get this posted for everyone. TF",FAKE
"A 20-year-old protester has been charged with shooting two police officers in Ferguson, Mo., last week, authorities said Sunday.

County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said Jeffrey Williams was charged with two counts of assault in the first degree, one count of firing a weapon from a vehicle and three counts of armed criminal action.

McCulloch said Williams admitted firing the shots but said he was shooting at someone else.

""We're not sure we buy that part of it,"" McCulloch said, adding that the handgun used in the shooting has been recovered.

He said Williams was involved in the demonstration that was wrapping up when the incident took place. Williams, he said, was being held in lieu of $300,000 cash bail.

McCulloch said information provided by the public was key to the arrest. He encouraged anyone who knows anything about the shooting to contact police, saying the investigation was continuing.

Williams has had several minor run-ins with police and one felony arrest in St. Louis, court records show.

He spent two days in jail last March for failing to appear for court hearings for traffic infractions, including driving without a valid license and operating a motor vehicle without maintaining proper insurance. He also spent two days in jail in January 2014 for speeding.

Police arrested Williams in June 2013 for receiving stolen property, a felony, and credit card fraud. He was sentenced in March 2014 to two years probation.

Bishop Derrick Robinson of the Kingdom Destiny Fellowship International, who has been an organizer of Ferguson protests, later told CNN he spoke with Williams -- and that Williams said he was not involved in protests. He said Williams told him the shooting occurred after he had been robbed by an unknown assailant.

The officers were shot during a protest just after midnight Thursday. One was shot in the face, the other in the shoulder. They were released from the hospital later Thursday.

Ferguson has been the scene of sometimes violent protests since the shooting death of unarmed black man Michael Brown, 18, by a white police officer in August. The shooting and subsequent investigation brought national attention and a Justice Department probe to the St. Louis suburb.

The Justice Department investigation found systemic racism in the police department, prompting the resignation of the city manager, a local judge and the city's police chief.

Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement lauding the investigative cooperation between federal authorities and St. Louis County officials.

""This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated,"" Holder said in the statement. ""In the days ahead, we will continue to partner with the authorities in St. Louis County to secure justice for all those affected by this heinous and cowardly crime. And we will continue to stand vigilant in support of public safety officers and the communities they serve.""

The officers wounded Thursday were from St. Louis County and Webster Groves. After the shootings, the highway patrol and county police took control of security duties from the Ferguson department.

Hours after the shooting, Holder and Obama condemned the attack.

""They're criminals. They need to be arrested,"" Obama said. ""And then what we need to do is make sure that like-minded, good-spirited people on both sides -- law-enforcement who have a terrifically tough job and people who understand they don't want to be stopped and harassed because of their race -- that we're able to work together to try and come up with some good answers.""",REAL
"Posted on January 23, 2012 by Dr. Eowyn | 10 Comments While we were transfixed and distracted by the Newt vs. Mitt drama in South Carolina, Obama has quietly begun war with Iran — without informing the American people (or Congress?). 
This is the startling assertion made by James Rickards in an interview on January 13 with King World News. 
Rickards is a Senior Managing Director of Tangent Capital in New York, whose advisory clients include government directorates around the world. He is the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (Penguin/Portfolio, 2011). Rickards is also the man who had negotiated the release of American hostages from Iran in 1981, and continues to be involved in US national security issues and the Department of Defense. 
This is what Rickards told King World News about the situation in Iran: “The fact that we, meaning the United States, are on a path to a war with Iran is very clear at this point. It does seem the countdown has begun and it’s coming to a head sooner rather than later. Things are moving very quickly. General Martin Dempsey, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has arrived in Israel and Israel is integrating itself with the U.S. European Command or EUCOM. So, at this point, the integration of the Israeli and the US operational capability, including NATO based in Europe, is very far along. There are an enormous number of US troops in Israel. I don’t know if people realize that, but they are operating the THAAD system (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). They oversee weapons that will shoot down incoming Iranian missiles. There are joint exercises going on between the US and Israel. At the same time Iran is conducting war games. There are a lot of moving pieces on the chessboard at this point. This is not just war gaming or thinking about what might happen, the pieces have actually begun to move on the chessboard. For Israel this is really existential. The US would really like to see a world where Iran did not have nuclear weapons, but for Israel it is not a preference. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Iran has said they will burn Israel to the ground. So, this is not just a strategic rebalancing, this is life or death for the Israelis….. All of the information I have is that the US is going to do it (attack Iran). So the tension between Israel and the United States is being resolved in favor of letting the US actually launch the attack. Part of the reason for this is the retaliation vector. If the US attacks and Israel keeps out, then Iran has no justification for attacking Israel. They (Iran) will attack US targets in the Middle-East, but we’re ready for that, we’re prepared for that. We will suppress the missiles and their air force is a joke, we’ll take that out in the first day. But they do have a serious missile capability. We’ll need anti-missile warfare and we will need to strike those bases. We will need to do a lot of other damage to Iran, cyber warfare, take down the power grid, take down the command and control structure. Do whatever we can to stop them from attacking our assets in the Middle-East. This war will be fought with air power, sea power, cyberwarfare, financial warfare, sabotage, special operation, assassination, things like that. This is already going on. As an example, yesterday a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist had an unlucky encounter with a magnet bomb. So this war is already being fought. The other day the United States sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran. By the way, we’ve been sanctioning them for years, but we’ve been dialing it up little by little. It’s like the frog that’s boiled in a pot of water and doesn’t know until it’s too late that the water is getting hot. President Obama sanctioned the central bank about a week ago. The Iranian currency, the rial, dropped 30% in a single day. Hyperinflation has broken out in Iran. This is financial warfare. My point to the listeners is this is not theoretical, this is not a war game, not an exercise, it’s happening now and the clock is ticking.” USS Abraham Lincoln 
Rickards’ startling claim is verified by the UK’s Telegraph this morning . 
In defiance of Iran’s threat to close the critical Strait of Hormuz, the United States, Britain, and France have deployed six warships to the Strait, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln. The 100,000 ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier entered the Persian Gulf yesterday. 
That we are at war with Iran is also confirmed by a defense expert in the Australian government, a member of a military-strategic e-mail list I’m on. This is what he wrote about Rickards’ claim: “Got back from leave today and had our first major brief. The interesting thing to come out of it was that everyone in the 4 Eyes community regard ourselves at being in warlike mode, even though there is no ‘declared’ war. We are at war. It’s just that the general public can’t see it. We are certainly of the view that we have been at a cyber war for the last 12 years.” 
God help us.",FAKE
"The second presidential debate — bloody, muddy and raucous — was just enough to save Donald Trump’s campaign from extinction, but not enough to restore his chances of winning, barring an act of God (a medical calamity) or of Putin (a cosmically incriminating WikiLeak).

That Trump crashed because of a sex-talk tape is odd. It should have been a surprise to no one. His views on women have been on open display for years. And he’d offered a dazzling array of other reasons for disqualification: habitual mendacity, pathological narcissism, profound ignorance and an astonishing dearth of basic human empathy.

To which list Trump added in the second debate, and it had nothing to do with sex. It was his threat, if elected, to put Hillary Clinton in jail.

After appointing a special prosecutor, of course. The niceties must be observed. First, a fair trial, then a proper hanging. The day after the debate at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump responded to chants of “lock her up” with “Lock her up is right.” Two days later, he told a rally in Lakeland, Fla., “She has to go to jail.”

[Fareed Zakaria: The GOP is history. What about the country? ]

Such incendiary talk is an affront to elementary democratic decency and a breach of the boundaries of American political discourse. In democracies, the electoral process is a subtle and elaborate substitute for combat, the age-old way of settling struggles for power. But that sublimation only works if there is mutual agreement to accept both the legitimacy of the result (which Trump keeps undermining with charges that the very process is “rigged”) and the boundaries of the contest.

The prize for the winner is temporary accession to limited political power, not the satisfaction of vendettas. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chávez and a cavalcade of two-bit caudillos lock up their opponents. American leaders don’t.

One doesn’t even talk like this. It takes decades, centuries, to develop ingrained norms of political restraint and self-control. But they can be undone in short order by a demagogue feeding a vengeful populism.

This is not to say that the investigation into the Clinton emails was not itself compromised by politics. FBI Director James B. Comey’s recommendation not to pursue charges was both troubling and puzzling. And Barack Obama very improperly tilted the scales by interjecting, while the investigation was still underway, that Clinton’s emails had not endangered national security.

But the answer is not to start a new process whose outcome is preordained. Conservatives have relentlessly, and correctly, criticized this administration for abusing its power and suborning the civil administration (e.g., the IRS). Is the Republican response to do the same?

Wasn’t presidential overreach one of the major charges against Obama by the anti-establishment GOP candidates? Wasn’t the animating spirit of the entire tea party movement the restoration of constitutional limits and restraints?

In America, we don’t persecute political opponents. Which is why we retroactively honor Gerald Ford for his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which, at the time, Ford was widely reviled. It ultimately cost him the presidency. Nixon might well have been convicted. But Ford understood that jailing a president for actions carried out in the context of his official duties would threaten the very civil nature of democratic governance.

[Michael Gerson: Donald Trump is right: The GOP is utterly pathetic]

What makes Trump’s promise to lock her up all the more alarming is that it’s not an isolated incident. This is not the first time he’s insinuated using the powers of the presidency against political enemies. He has threatened Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos, owner of The Post, for using the newspaper “as a tool for political power against me and other people. . . . We can’t let him get away with it.”

Trump has gone after others with equal subtlety. “I hear,” he tweeted, “the Rickets [sic] family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!” And after National Review editor Rich Lowry made a particularly cutting remark about him on Fox News, Trump tweeted, “He should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!”

Trump also promises to “open up” libel laws to permit easier prosecution of those who attack him unfairly. Has he ever conceded any attack on him to be fair?

This election is not just about placing the nuclear codes in Trump’s hands. It’s also about handing him the instruments of civilian coercion, such as the IRS, the FBI, the FCC, the SEC. Think of what he could do to enforce the “fairness” he demands. Imagine giving over the vast power of the modern state to a man who says in advance that he will punish his critics and jail his opponent.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"A wave of apprehension and anguish swept the Republican Party on Thursday, with many GOP leaders alarmed by Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election and concluding that it is probably too late to salvage his flailing presidential campaign.

As the Republican nominee reeled from a turbulent performance in the final debate here in Las Vegas, his party’s embattled senators and House members scrambled to protect their seats and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities against what Republicans privately acknowledge could be a landslide victory for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

With less than three weeks until the election, the Republican Party is in a state of historic turmoil, encapsulated by Trump’s extraordinary debate declaration that he would leave the nation in “suspense” about whether he would recognize the results from an election he has claimed will be “rigged” or even “stolen.”

The immediate responses from GOP officials were divergent and vague, with no clear strategy on how to handle Trump’s threat. The candidate was defiant and would not back away from his position, telling a roaring crowd Thursday in Ohio that he would accept the results “if I win” — and reserving his right to legally challenge the results should he fall short.

For seasoned Republicans who have watched Trump warily as a general-election candidate, the aftermath of Wednesday’s debate brought a feeling of finality.

“The campaign is over,” said Steve Schmidt, a Trump critic and former senior strategist on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns.

Calling a refusal to accept the election results “disqualifying,” Schmidt added: “The question is, how close will Clinton get to 400 electoral votes? She’ll be north of 350, and she’s trending towards 400 — and the trend line is taking place in very red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona.”

[At third debate, Trump won't commit to accepting election results if he loses]

Clinton and Trump appeared together and traded jabs in delivering mostly lighthearted roasts Thursday night at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner, a white-tie gala benefiting Catholic charities. The candidates used searing humor to taunt each other, reflecting the personal animus on display in the debates. Trump’s routine was at times unsettling, drawing some rare boos from the audience. Held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, the dinner is a traditional event on the calendar for presidential nominees.

Meanwhile, top Democrats fanned out to battleground states on Thursday to hammer Trump for what they described as an unprecedented attack on the country’s political system and to attempt to yoke Trump to Republican candidates down the ballot.

Campaigning in Miami, President Obama said Trump’s doubts about the election outcome are “not a joking matter. That is dangerous.”

The president eviscerated Republicans who have stood by Trump, singling out Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who called Trump “a dangerous con artist” and condemned his more controversial comments during the GOP primaries but now plans to vote for him.

“Marco just seems to care about hanging on to his job,” Obama said, calling the senator’s positioning “the height of cynicism.”

And in Arizona, where polls show an unexpectedly tight presidential race, first lady Michelle Obama said Trump “is threatening the very idea of America itself” by suggesting he would not honor the election results.

“You do not keep American democracy ‘in suspense,’ ” Obama said in Phoenix.

[Rubio, once a shoo-in, fights the anti-Trump tide in Florida]

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Clinton’s vice-presidential running mate, held a rally at a downtown Charlotte brewery, where he said Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election reminded him of the Third World politicking he had seen as a young missionary in Honduras.

“The bigger we can win by, the harder it is for him to whine and have anyone believe him,” Kaine said, trying to galvanize supporters on the first day of early voting in North Carolina.

On the debate stage, Trump amplified what he had been saying for weeks at his rallies: that the election is “rigged.” Questioned directly as to whether he would accept the results should Clinton prevail, Trump said, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Clinton called Trump’s answer “horrifying,” both in the debate and to reporters overnight on her flight home to New York.

Trump’s advisers and surrogates struggled to explain the candidate’s position. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said it was too early to determine whether voting irregularities could make the difference between winning and losing. She and other Trump backers drew a parallel to then-Vice President Al Gore’s concession call to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, which he later withdrew as he awaited a recount in Florida.

“I’m going to keep reminding everybody about the 2000 election when Al Gore said he would accept the results of the election and then did not,” Conway said. “He retracted his concession.”

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, contended that Trump and the party would stand by the results unless the margin is small enough to warrant a recount or legal challenges. Priebus said Trump is merely preserving flexibility in the event of a contested result.

“All he’s saying is, ‘Look, I’m not going to forgo my right to a recount in a close election,’ ” Priebus said. “We accept the results as long as we’re not talking about a few votes where it actually matters. I know him. I know where his head’s at. . . . I promise you, that’s all this is.”

Other Trump surrogates took a different interpretation. Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general, accused the media of “splitting hairs” and insisted that Trump was “not threatening democratic norms,” while former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani argued that any Republican would be “stupid” to accept the integrity of results before they are known.

“Suppose she wins Pennsylvania by 50 votes,” Giuliani said. He speculated, without evidence, that Democrats would “steal a lot more than 50 votes in Philadelphia. I guarantee you of that. And I’ll tell you how they will do it — they’ll bus people in who will vote dead people’s names four, five, six times . . . or have people in Philadelphia paid to vote three, four and five times.”

Democrats expressed dismay that the Republican nominee and his backers were advancing the idea of widespread voter fraud.

“He is just trying to find an excuse for the fact that he’s going to lose, and perhaps the fact that he’s going to lose to the first woman president stings a little sharper than it might otherwise,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director.

Prominent Republican senators in tough reelection bids distanced themselves from Trump’s posture. “Donald Trump needs to accept the outcome,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) said in a statement.

McCain (Ariz.), who lost to Obama eight years ago, said in a statement: “I didn’t like the outcome of the 2008 election. But I had a duty to concede. A concession isn’t just an act of graciousness. It is an act of respect for the will of the American people.”

As of Thursday afternoon, neither House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had offered any comment, underscoring the party’s unease with its own nominee and the political dangers of tangling with him.

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a lawyer at Jones Day who has been national counsel for several Republican presidential campaigns, said Trump’s stance puts the party in “quite a difficult position.”

“There will be Republican candidates who are winning by narrow margins and losing by narrow margins,” Ginsberg said. “The party as a whole has a collective interest in having the results upheld.”

Republican pollster Whit ­Ayres said that at the Las Vegas debate, Trump “blew his last chance to turn it around.” But, he said, “I am not convinced that the rest of the party will have as bad a night [on Election Day] as Donald Trump is going to have, because the Trump brand is so distinct from the Republican brand.”

Escalating the Republican angst was Trump’s rally Thursday in Delaware, Ohio, where he advanced conspiracies swirling around far-right websites about Clinton. He referred to reports that Democratic operatives with no direct connection to the Clinton campaign hired people to violently disrupt Trump events.

“This criminal behavior that violates centuries of tradition of peaceful democratic elections, a campaign like Clinton’s that will incite violence is truly a campaign that will do anything to win,” Trump said, going on to call Clinton “a candidate who is truly capable of anything, including voter fraud.”

Trump also mentioned an email, which surfaced on WikiLeaks through an illegal hack that U.S. authorities blame on the Russian government, in which interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman Donna Brazile seemed to suggest to the Clinton team that she had knowledge of a question that would come up in a primary forum earlier this year. While Brazile has denied that CNN provided any questions in advance, Trump called her actions “cheating at the highest level.”

Even as his party loses faith, Trump proclaimed that he was poised for victory.

“Bottom line, we’re going to win,” he told the boisterous Ohio crowd. “We’re going to win. We’re going to win so big. We’re going to win so big.”

Jenna Johnson in Delaware, Ohio; David Weigel in Charlotte; Krissah Thompson in Phoenix; and Juliet Eilperin, Jose A. DelReal and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"posted by Eddie Got VHS tapes collecting dust on a shelf somewhere? Maybe you already reclaimed the space and they’re sitting in an attic long-forgotten. Hopefully you didn’t throw them out, though, as it turns out there might be quite the market for some old tapes. Modern directorial practice for movie releases and re-releases tends to include adding or editing the film from the theatrical version. While some people don’t mind or even enjoy these changes, for others, the original cut is worth a hefty price tag. This translates to listings on eBay for certain tapes at astronomical prices, like one particular Beauty and the Beast tape going for $9,999. The original Beauty and the Beast did not include the song “Human Again”; it was cut for space reasons, then re-added to the 2002 special edition. However, Disney tapes in particular might be valuable to collectors for other reasons. Reddit user Reddit_Executive speculates that, because of the specific branding on original releases, these movies could go for quite a bit: “On the spines of some VHS (and BetaMax) tapes is a black diamond with Walt’s signature on it. This was Disney’s first attempt to market their videos to homes. Because of this, certain Disney collectors are convinced that these VHS tapes are worth something.” While it’s possible some tapes are indeed worth quite a bit, many of the movies listed are actually selling for much less. Still, if your plan for your old VHS tapes begins and ends with “trash them,” there’s no harm in doing your research on what they might be worth. 
Source:",FAKE
"President Obama on Tuesday escalated his criticism of Donald Trump, calling him “unfit to serve as president,” as the Republican presidential nominee faced censure from members of both parties for disparaging the parents of a fallen army captain.

“The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn’t appear to have basic knowledge around critical issues in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job,” Obama said at the White House, during a news conference with the prime minister of Singapore.

Obama also challenged Republican leaders to go beyond distancing themselves from Trump, saying their objections “ring hollow” as long as they still pledge to vote for him.

“There has to come a point at which you say enough,” the president said.

Reflecting on the novelty of his own remarks, Obama said his warning stands apart from his criticism of his own Republican presidential rivals, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with whom he disagreed on “certain policy issues” but whose qualifications and “basic decency” he didn’t dispute.

“And had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans . . . this is our president, and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense,” Obama said. “But that’s not the situation here.”

The president’s remarks pinpointed Republican divisions. He also made clear that Democrats have disagreements of their own, by underscoring his commitment to the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Democratic candidate he hopes will succeed him, Hillary Clinton, opposes the deal, which is awaiting ratification in Congress.

“Right now I’m president, and I’m for it,” Obama said.

Obama’s was the latest in a volley of complaints this week against Trump, whose campaign responded in a statement denouncing the president as a “failed leader” who has wreaked havoc around the world.

Bipartisan and among the most sustained of the election cycle, the criticism of Trump has mainly been a response to his denigration of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, immigrants from Pakistan who appeared last week at the Democratic National Convention to denounce him for his harsh rhetoric about Muslims. They said their son, who was killed in Iraq, would have been barred from entering the country under Trump’s proposed ban.

But the broadsides have also focused on the nominee’s comments about foreign relations, including his apparent ignorance of Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014 and his appeal to Russian actors to expose Clinton’s emails.

In response, Trump has laughed off concerns about his overtures to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, saying warmer relations would help the United States pursue its international objectives, such as defeating Islamic State militants.

At a campaign event Tuesday in Ashburn, Va., Trump attacked Clinton for having a poor relationship with Putin, saying: “This is a nuclear country we’re talking about. Russia. Strong nuclear country.”

“Their stuff is newer . . . they have a lot more,” he said. “She wants to play the tough one. She’s not tough.”

[In clash with Khans, Trump went too far, some strategists say]

Meanwhile, a Kremlin spokesman told NBC News this week that Putin has never had any contact with Trump, which is in line with a recent statement by Trump that he has not spoken to Putin — and yet in direct conflict with the real estate mogul’s prior declarations, including in 2014 at the National Press Club, when Trump said he had been in Moscow and had spoken, “indirectly and directly,” with the Russian president.

In his hour-long remarks on Tuesday, delivered at a local high school, Trump repeated his grave warnings about immigration — across the southern border from Mexico as well as from countries beset by Islamic radicalism. Because “we don’t know if they’re ISIS,” Trump said of migrants from the Middle East, the result would be “the all-time great Trojan horse.”

He didn’t mention the Khans, who have proven themselves dogged in their campaign against Trump, or new evidence that the candidate’s approach is driving a wedge in the Republican Party. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) on Tuesday became the first sitting Republican member of Congress to say publicly that he plans to vote for Clinton, declaring in an interview with Syracuse.com that Trump is a “national embarrassment.”

The three-term congressman, who represents a swath of upstate New York near Syracuse but is not running for reelection this year, has bucked his party in the past on issues ranging from gay marriage to climate change. He declared his support for Clinton in an opinion piece published Tuesday on the news website and elaborated in an interview that Trump’s prolonged feud with the parents of a Muslim American Army captain killed in Iraq was the final straw.

“I saw that and felt incensed,” Hanna said in the interview. “I was stunned by the callousness of his comments.”

He added: “I think Trump is a national embarrassment. Is he really the guy you want to have the nuclear codes?”

Hanna had already said he would not vote for Trump — a stance shared by a handful of his Republican colleagues. But his pronouncement that he would therefore support Clinton, a woman reviled by much of his party, dealt yet another blow to Trump as his poll numbers dip in the wake of the conventions and as his campaign struggles under mounting criticism over his response to the Khans, whose son Humayun was killed in 2004, at age 27, by a car bomber in Iraq.

Trump said Khizr Khan had “no right” to assail him and suggested that Ghazala Khan was barred by her Muslim faith from speaking alongside her husband.

The quarrel continued into this week, as Trump tweeted that Khan had “viciously attacked” him and had shifted focus from the real concern, “RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM.” The GOP nominee faced strong criticism from a bipartisan group of decorated combat veterans, members of Congress and family members of slain soldiers. A particularly lengthy and impassioned rebuke came from McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” McCain said.

[Broad array of military luminaries condemn Trump over attacks on Khans]

On Tuesday, Trump addressed the matter only implicitly, faulting the media for not giving enough attention to Patricia Smith, a Trump supporter who is the mother of a victim of the Benghazi attacks, while giving “other people unbelievable amounts of air.” In fact, multiple networks, including CNN and MSNBC, carried Smith’s speech at the Republican National Convention live, while Fox News — whose host, Brian Kilmeade, criticized other networks for not covering Smith — did not.

Trump also said his critics would never desert him because they fear a Supreme Court stacked with Clinton appointees. He recounted his own comments from a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, in which he said he told his audience that “even if people don’t like me, they have to vote for me.”

“I said, even if you can’t stand Donald Trump, you think Donald Trump is the worst, you’re going to vote for me. You know why? Justices of the Supreme Court,” he said. “If they pick judges, we’re going to end up with another Venezuela, except just a bigger version.”

With a bit of stagecraft, Trump also appeared to try to fend off questions about his military acumen — and his own draft deferments during the Vietnam War — by beckoning onto the stage a lieutenant colonel. The man had given him his Purple Heart medal before the rally as a vote of “confidence,” Trump said.

“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” Trump said. “This was much easier.”",REAL
"The decision by Pope Francis to give his personal blessing – and a rosary – to Rowan County clerk Kim Davis thrust the pontiff into one of America’s most volatile cultural battles.

In his meeting with controversial county clerk Kim Davis last Thursday, Pope Francis reportedly told Ms. Davis to “stand strong” as she stands up for her religious beliefs in rural Kentucky.

The meeting between the pontiff and a woman who went to jail for five days for defying a Supreme Court order to allow same-sex couples to marry came before Francis made comments about “conscientious objection” as a human right, even for government officials.

In some ways, the meeting fit with the pope’s focus on the “spirit of encounter” as well as his unorthodox meetings with people he calls on the “peripheries.” And it also came days after he met with nuns fighting an Obamacare mandate on contraceptives, another front in the American cultural wars.

But the 15-minute tête-à-tête at the Vatican Embassy in Washington also jarred a number of narratives from the pope’s historic visit, suggesting to some critics that the pontiff condoned Davis’ actions – which critics say amount to imposing her personal religious beliefs, in violation of the Constitution, on same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses.

The decision by the pope to give his personal blessing – and a rosary – to Davis thrust the pontiff into one of America’s most volatile cultural battles.

In other ways, however, Francis focused Rome’s gaze on the changing dynamics of religious freedom in the progressive era, offering a moment of pause for many Americans to consider growing questions about how the United States handles religious objections to same-sex unions.

“I think both sides have either tried to vilify or champion Kim Davis in one way or another, but what they’re forgetting is that the central issue here is of religious freedom in the US, and how we treat it. What does it mean, and what are its boundaries?” says Joe Valenzano, an expert on religious rhetoric at the University of Dayton in Ohio. “The fact is, both sides have made just a colossal mess out of this to further their own perspective, rather than focusing on what could be a productive conversation for society.”

The Vatican confirmed the meeting, but gave no further commentary, potentially suggesting that it didn’t want to get into the political details of the struggle over same-sex marriage in Rowan County, Ky. For some Vatican observers, it wasn’t surprising that the pope, a religious figure, met with someone who has become a lightning rod for her religious beliefs.

The pope “took somebody on the front of the newspapers for faith-related concerns and met with her,” says Professor Valenzano. “[The pope told Davis that] you don’t lose faith because you lose a battle. That’s not the pope weighing in on the culture wars or endorsing Kim Davis’s position. That’s the pope endorsing the idea that religion is important to people.”

Yet for all the pope’s focus on moral values, the meeting with Davis and the nuns could have a political impact, writes John Allen Jr., on Crux, a Catholic news site. For one, he writes, the meeting “means that Francis has significantly strengthened the hand of the US bishops and other voices in American debates defending religious freedom.”

The meeting also could give more direct encouragement to other US officials who have declined to offer marriage licenses to same-sex couples. A number of clerks and other government officials have followed Davis’s lead, refusing to abide by the Supreme Court’s June ruling declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right.

The problem with that strategy, however, is that Davis, for one, represents what Doug Laycock calls a poor example of a religious martyr. He points out that Davis didn’t just want an opt-out from signing marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Instead, after her release from jail, she changed the Rowan County license form to take the name of the county off the form – a change the plaintiffs argue violates the judge’s order.

“Kim Davis gives religious liberty a bad name, and endangers it for everybody,” says Professor Laycock, a religious liberty expert at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. “She does not have to issue marriage licenses. But the county is not entitled to exemption, because the county does not have a religion. That’s the fundamental distinction.”

Those nuances may have been lost on the pope, Mr. Laycock suggests.

“If you come here from Rome, if you’re not closely following this, you don’t have any sort of deep understanding of US law,” he says.

The pontiff made waves in the US during his visit for his attempt to expand the Catholic church’s influence beyond the culture wars. He weighed in on climate change and the death penalty, bolstering his bona fides among US liberals. But he also buckled down on church doctrine on abortion and threats to the sanctity of marriage, to the applause of conservatives.

“I can’t have in mind all the cases that can exist about conscientious objection,” the pope said on the papal plane last week, “but yes, I can say that conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right.”

“And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right,” he said, adding, in what may have been a reference to Davis, “It is a human right, and if a government official is a human person, he has that right.”

For American political operatives, the pope’s message may ultimately be frustrating for its nuance. And that may be just fine with the pontiff. As Elizabeth Buerlin writes in the New Republic, “Pope Francis maintains a conservative position on the morality of marriage, and he is concerned for Christians who find their practice constrained by law. But he has also emphasized openness toward LGBT Catholics, famously asking, when queried about gay Catholics, ‘Who am I to judge?’ ”

In that way, she writes, Francis has, at least until now, shied away from directly engaging “the psychodrama of the American culture wars.”

But by meeting with Davis privately, the pope, at the very least, showed a willingness to take a stand on religious liberty, even if it tarnished his message in the eyes of some Americans.

“The news that Pope Francis met privately ... with Kim Davis throws a wet blanket on the good will that the pontiff had garnered during his US visit,” Francis DeBernardo, executive director of gay and lesbian Catholic advocacy group New Ways Ministry, told Reuters in an e-mail.

At the same time, some Americans said the visit may have helped humanize a polarizing figure in the struggle between deeply-felt religious beliefs and the equally deep desire by many gay Americans to marry.

“Any time you get people talking and meeting and listening, even if they don't agree, as long as there is a dialogue, I think we are better as a nation,” Judy Fitzpatrick, a Catholic who describes herself as moderate Republican, told a new Ipsos/Reuters poll, after hearing about Francis meeting Davis.",REAL
"in: Natural Medicine We all know that it’s important to eat our vegetables. At least, that’s what most of us have heard since we were kids. What our mother’s told us as when we were young, our doctors tell us as we get older. Sometimes though, it helps to have a more specific reason than high cholesterol, or even a motherly “because I said so.” Especially for people who aren’t big fans of eating organic greens. According to a study conducted at Oregon State University’s Linus Pauling Micronutrient Research Institute confirms that sulforaphane, a phytochemical found in broccoli and related cruciferous vegetables, such as cauliflower and cabbage , have a natural ability to target and attack prostate cancer cells without harming neighboring cells [ 1 ] . Unconnected studies suggest it may have similar promise for breast cancer. The active chemicals found in everyday foods – such as broccoli – are often much more potent than people would imagine. If fact, determining how to safely adapt these chemical ingredients for medical use is one of the biggest hurdles researchers face. Even edible plants that are considered “rich” in a given nutritional substance, contain relatively low amounts of it by volume. The vast majority of these compounds may also become toxic to humans if taken in large enough concentrations. While a number of previous investigations have proven that sulforaphane is able to attack both benign and malignant cancer cells, the Oregon State study is one of the first to prove that it is effective without disrupting otherwise healthy tissue. This gives researchers a tremendous tool for developing new, low-risk treatment options, and is likely to encourage additional research into the healing potential of other seemingly mundane edible plants. Realistically, it could be some time before these findings are applied to any sort of drug development or cancer treatment in a traditional hospital setting. Meanwhile though, the researchers behind the study recommend that we all eat more organic cruciferous vegetables. Besides broccoli, a number of readily available cruciferous vegetables contain naturally large amounts of sulforaphane. Some good examples of foods high in this important phytochemical include mild and spicy radishes, turnips, watercress, cabbage, arugula, kale, chard, and most other leafy greens. Unrelated studies also suggest a variety of other cancer-fighting compounds may be present in other herbs and garden vegetables. Celery and parsley , for instance, are especially rich in apigenin – a substance that has shown remarkable promise for fighting breast cancer. Trace amounts of apigenin are also found in oranges, apples, and some tree nuts. The problem is, it’s very difficult for the body to effectively extract it from any of these foods on its own. References: Oregon State University. Study confirms safety, cancer-targeting ability of nutrient in broccoli . News & Research Communications. 2011 June 9. Submit your review",FAKE
"The terrorist attacks in Paris could shake up the 2016 presidential race, reminding voters of the high stakes and potentially boosting candidates who put their governing experience front and center.

During much of the campaign, voters have swooned over candidates who trumpet their nonpolitical résumés. Celebrity businessman Donald Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson have led the Republican field, running far ahead of...",REAL
"Financial Markets Clinton Foundation , Hillary emails , Huma Abedin , Jim Comey , Weiner laptop admin 
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (King James Bible). Throughout recorded history, hubris has been the Achilles’ Heel of political despots. Hillary Clinton and her political crime machine has been operating above the law for decades, stretching back at least to when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas. “Hillary Clinton is a toilet scrubber for Goldman Sachs” – John Titus on the Shadow of Truth 
During her 2016 Presidential Campaign, it became routine for her get in front the public and lie with convincing ease. In Greek tragedy, “hubris” was an anti-hero’s excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to the character’s unforeseen demise. 
When Hillary was deposed by the FBI about the 33,000 emails on her private server that were wiped clean forever using BleachBit, she assumed her tracks were irrevocably covered up. But it wasn’t just 33,000 emails that were incinerated, reams of evidence including laptops, server back-ups and Blackberries either “disappeared” or were wiped clean. 
Out of the blue, as if sent to earth from a Higher Power, the FBI in its child pornography investigation of Anthony Weiner stumbled on to a laptop with 650,000 emails that appeared to have been downloaded from Hillary Clinton’s private server. It is highly probable that among this treasure trough of emails will be copies of the 33,000 emails that Hillary arrogantly assumed were wiped from the Universe. Hubris gets ’em every time. 
But it gets better than that. 650,000 is a decade’s worth of emails. It’s also possible that Weiner’s laptop will finally shed the light of Truth on Benghazi. “Jim Comey did not re-open this investigation of to go over old ground. Worse infractions were discovered.” – John Titus 
In addition to exposing Hillary to all sorts of felonies, her statement to the FBI under oath undermined by this unforeseen “Black Swan” event that has engulfed her campaign. 
The Shadow of Truth is pleased to present John Titus of Best Evidence productions adds his unique insight into this event. The two-part podcast covers analysis that has not been presented in either the mainstream or alternative media: Share this:",FAKE
"Programming Alert:Tune in to the FOX Business Network's GOP Debate on Thursday, January 14, beginning at 6 P.M. ET

The good people of Charleston, South Carolina, divide themselves into two groups – SOBS (folks living south of Broad Street) and SNOBS (those on the northern side).

Worse things have been said of the current crop of presidential hopefuls, nearly all of whom invade the Holy City the next few days – Thursday’s GOP debate, sponsored by the Fox Business Network; Sunday’s Democratic debate, carried by NBC.

If you’re counting at home, this marks the sixth time the GOP field has gathered on one stage, the second time that the Fox Business Network (FBN) has done the honors and, with only seven candidates in the main event (watch live at 9 pm ET), it could be the first time an evening with the Republicans might not descend into pouting, posturing and crosstalk.

How best to anticipate this debate?

The debate’s venue, the North Charleston Coliseum and Performing Arts Center, is less than 10 miles from the Emanuel AME church, the scene of last June’s mass shooting. Gun control won’t go undiscussed, what with President Obama bringing it up in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley revisiting the incident in her Republican response.

It’s a short walk from Emanuel AME to the Cooper River and a bustling container-ship and car-carrier operation that’s converted Charleston from a Navy town to a thriving hub of maritime commerce (BMW and Volvo use the seaport to ship autos made elsewhere in the right-to-work state). There’s no better tie-in for a few questions about the global economy.

Those ships dock upriver from Fort Sumter and were the site of a louder anti-Washington protest than anything the Tea Party’s imagined. Will Donald Trump tell America it’s time to party like it’s 1861?

What else to expect from the Republicans?

In the Low Country spirit of sippin’ bourbon and whiskey concoctions, six things:

1.   Rebel Yell. Before we get into what divides the Republican field, here’s what unites it – multiple opportunities to yell President Obama post-State of the Union. Expect strong words on the President’s omission of the situation on Farsi island, his post-San Bernardino emphasis on guns and not domestic terrorism, his invoking the word “Muslim” only in conjunction with hate crimes, plus his insistence that America’s global influence isn’t in decline.

2. Canadian Club. The knock against Ted Cruz is that most folks who’ve worked with him don’t like him. Let’s see if that carries over onto the debate stage should Trump resume the questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth. Will any other candidate intervene, or will they let Cruz and Trump slug it out? Then there’s also the matter of the Goldman Sachs undisclosed million dollar loan… As for Cruz, does he laugh off these lines of attack, or continue to return fire as he’s just begun to do in New Hampshire?

3. Southern Comfort. To the adage about South Carolina’s quirkiness (“too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum,” said the anti-secessionist James L. Petrigu), there’s this reality: it’s the most conservative of the four stops on the February primary circuit. How many of the seven contenders will cater to the local electorate, versus those who play to the more moderate Yankees up in New Hampshire? For the latter, keep an eye on Chris Christie, John Kasich and this guy . . .

4. Johnny Walker. That’s “Johnny”, as in John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, and “Walker” as in Walker’s Point, the family’s summer compound where the family assembles to celebrate wins and lick wounds. Historically, South Carolina has been invaluable to Bush presidential causes – both father and brother used it as a “firewall” in their respective winning candidacies. But that’s not so with Jeb. The Palmetto State doesn’t fit into a strategy that’s finish strong in New Hampshire or bust.

5. Wild Turkey. Not to suggest that Trump is poultry, but as usual he’s the wild card in the two hours he has to bond with the six other Republicans who trail him in national surveys. Do we assume Trump is the aggressor, in attacking Cruz? Or does he go easy on Cruz and go back to his favorite pincushion: the Clintons?

6. Old Fashioned. Not a brand of booze, but a cocktail (bourbon, splash of soda, bitters, sugar, orange wheel, cherry). The “old fashioned” candidate in this debate? It might be the decidedly youthful Marco Rubio, who suddenly seems less the futuristic GenXer and more a traditional Republican (convening a constitutional convention, berating Hillary Clinton for wanting higher taxes and bigger government). The last guy to popularize this cocktail: “Mad Men’s” Don Draper, who knew a thing or two about marketing and salesmanship.

That show lasted eight years on television – the same goal as everyone mixing it up in North Charleston.

Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
"(CNN) Thick fog forced authorities to suspend the air search Wednesday for seven Marines and four Army aircrew, feared dead after their Black Hawk helicopter crashed into waters off the Florida Panhandle.

The helicopter was first reported missing at about 8:30 p.m. (9:30 p.m. ET) Tuesday. Hours later, searchers found debris around Okaloosa Island near Eglin Air Force Base, base spokesman Andy Bourland said.

This debris washed up on both the north and south sides of Santa Rosa Sound, which connects mainland northern Florida and a barrier island.

The air search is expected to resume midday Thursday, the spokesman said. A spokeswoman for the Coast Guard said that boats will continue scouring the waters throughout the night Wednesday, weather permitting.

Human remains have washed ashore in the area near Eglin.

Base spokeswoman Jasmine Porterfield didn't specify what was found, noting the search-and-rescue mission remained underway. Still, there was little hope for a miracle, with Gen. Martin Dempsey -- chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- expressing his condolences.

He said the crash was ""a reminder to us that those who serve put themselves at risk, both in training and in combat.""

""We will work with the services to ensure that ... their family members will be well cared for.""

The Air Force, Coast Guard and civilian agencies participated in the intensive search focused on where they believe the aircraft went down, in waters east of the town of Navarre and the Navarre Bridge and near Eglin testing range site A-17.

Porterfield said approximately 100 people were involved in canvassing the ground and the waters, looking for debris: ""It's a huge effort underway.""

""We're working closely with all the parties involved to locate our Marines and the Army crew that were onboard,"" added Capt. Barry Morris, a spokesman for the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command . ""And, really, just our thoughts (and) prayers are with the Marines, the soldiers and the families of those involved in the mishap.""

No one is saying what caused the accident, with Eglin spokeswoman Sara Vidoni indicating only that there's no indication of anything suspicious.

There was heavy fog in the area when the aircraft went missing, though the Eglin spokeswoman said it's too early to tell whether that had anything to do with the crash.

""There is training in all conditions -- that's part of the military mission,"" Vidoni said. ""They were out there doing what the military does.""

According to Morris, the service members -- all men -- were involved in a seven-day training exercise of amphibious operations. It involved small boats and inserting and extracting Marines from the water via helicopter. Morris would not say in which phase of the training the Marines were on Tuesday night.

The UH-60 helicopter wasn't alone when it went down. A second Black Hawk -- assigned to 1-244th Assault Helicopter Battalion based in Hammond, Louisiana -- safely returned to the base, some 40 miles east of Pensacola.

The aircraft were both assigned to the Louisiana Army National Guard out of Hammond and taking part in what the U.S. military called a ""routine training mission involving the Marine Special Operations Regiment"" out of Camp Lejeune.

""Whatever the trouble was with the one aircraft, it did not involve the second helicopter that was participating in the exercise,"" Bourland said.

Seven Marines based out of Camp Lejeune

The Army aircrew members belonged to the Army National Guard unit out of Louisiana, part of a unit that Gov. Bobby Jindal said ""have fought courageously overseas in defense of our nation and here at home.""

By 11:15 a.m., relatives of all four of those guardsmen had been notified, though their names won't be released publicly until the Coast Guard recovers their bodies or calls off the search, said Col. Pete Schneider, a Louisiana National Guard spokesman.

""They have protected what matters most during times of crisis,"" Jindal said. ""These soldiers represent the best of Louisiana, and we are praying for them and their families.""

The pilots were instructor pilots, Maj. Gen. Glenn Curtis told reporters. He said the whole crew had several thousand combined hours of operation flying the Black Hawk.

This week's crash involved a UH-60 Black Hawk, a twin-engine helicopter introduced into Army service in 1979 in place of the iconic UH-1 Huey. Other branches have modified the Black Hawk for their own uses, including the Navy's SH-60 (the Sea Hawk), the Air Force's MH-60 (the Pave Hawk) and the Coast Guard's HH-60 (the Jayhawk).

The Army's UH-60 helicopter, which has a maximum speed of 173 mph, has an airframe ""designed to progressively crush on impact to protect the crew and passengers,"" according to the service.

As Morris, the Marine spokesman, pointed out, those who get on such aircraft or take part in other military exercises aren't always out of danger just because they're off the battlefield.

""We have a requirement to conduct realistic military training,"" he said. ""And unfortunately this mishap happened.""",REAL
" The Vision Thing
By Paul Edwards
That this election is an abysmal disgrace is nationally acknowledged; that it is absolutely unique is not, although it’s undeniable. Never before has virtually the entire mainstream media avidly, emphatically endorsed one Presidential candidate while furiously, contemptuously vilifying the other. Never has a sitting President joined in general denunciation of a candidate. With ten days to go it’s affirmed by most key sources that Donald Trump can’t win and Hillary Clinton will. Many pundits predict a landslide for her. Assume it. What then? The most hated President-elect ever will not be loved by the Congress she will confront. Even with a majority in the Senate--just possible--and in the House--not--prospects for a legislative agenda, should she have one, are non-existent. What Obama’s phony charm failed to achieve, Hillary’s lack of it will scarcely obtain. This presages four more years of stasis and nullity, of social and economic rot, financial chicanery, and national decay. As regards the composition of the Supreme Court--the panicky Liberal pitch for being “with her”--unless she nominates hidebound conservatives, which is probable, not a single selection will be confirmed during her term. So... paralysis in Congress, reaction in the Court; two limbs of government neutralized, gives us rule by a disliked, distrusted figurehead with the full power of Wall Street and the Imperial War-loving Establishment behind her. What then will be accomplished? First, the interests of The Empire will be promoted at least as robustly as in Obama’s eight years of sycophancy. Including his Rube Goldbergian Obamacare, still foundering and gouging, nothing of any benefit to Americans was achieved under this charlatan who perfected the skill of describing an airplane crash as a triumph of gravity. So what will she do in office? Well, start with what she won’t do. She won’t make any effort to restrain The Big Casino, the Gold Sacks Mafia. They made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. She won’t attempt any closing of the inequality gap. That would entail clipping her base--”Our Crowd” of the Hamptons, Palm Beach and Beverly Hills. She won’t meddle with Sick Care--”fool me once...”--or, corporate tax enforcement. Her Big Donors don’t want to pay them and why should they, right? She can just let Labor die of its own raging leukemia. College grads have to stay in their parents’ basements and service their college debt via Macdonalds because Arbeit Macht Frei. No need to do anything about Global Warming so long as you denounce it boldly at international meetings. Best leave the environment in the hands of those who can turn idle nature into money. Besides, the solution to pollution is dilution and clearcuts grow back in a millenium or so. On the minor agenda, she knows there are still small poor countries who require our R2P and cluster bombs. Others have resources that, with the odd military coup or assassination, should come on line nicely. Africa, say, has low-hanging fruit, and the Latin American mess needs our firm hand to prevent Lefty dictators diverting perfectly good profits to their own societies. Turning to the major crises, Exceptionalism requires that they be made far bigger. Our Defense Industries can’t be expected to muck along forever on paltry brushfire wars: Iraq, Afghanistan--though in fairness they’ve profuced steady income streams--and Libya, no bonanza, and Syria, which Putin’s diabolical meddling prevented blossoming as we hoped. Still, there’s no earthly reason we can’t achieve a profitable Third World War simply by refusing to take the bait of Satanic Putin’s wimpy peace offers and calling them what they really are: a mortal threat to our Capitalist System. So much for her first Hundred Days. Beyond the panicked cheerleading of the Imperial Elite--those that the late, great George Carlin referred to as “your owners”--and their failing organs of crowd manipulation, and beyond the day Clinton takes office if their hopes are consummated, America faces a cataclysmic crisis of governance; one of the order of magnitude of the secession of The South under Lincoln. Clinton and Trump are the physical, mental and emotional symptoms of that crisis. Our dead system must, and will, have catharsis. Which of them precipitates it may not greatly matter. Or it may mean everything. As Brutus said at Philippi: “Oh, that a man might know the end of this days business ere it come; but it sufficeth that the day will end and then the end is known.”
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net",FAKE
"They’re approximately 20 percent accurate. While this list would have held water prior to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, The Hill places undue value on social media.

“Twitter, Snapchat and other social media tools are also playing a role in the race,” the story argues for Zuckerberg’s influence, “but they do not have the reach of Facebook.”

If “likes, posts, comments and shares” were a valid metric, Bernie Sanders would be king of the world right now.

Citizens United invalidated any sort of grassroots political buzz (e.g. Sanders). Even the master of media manipulation, Donald Trump, won’t be able to translate his Twitter-momentum into a general election win against establishment collage Hillary Clinton, unless he can unite the GOP behind him.

The ability of nonprofits to accept unlimited individual donations to push a political agenda is far more important than whether or not the “money-losing” Huffington Post covers Trump under its “entertainment” or “politics” section.

So-called dark money, in conjunction with a wide-reaching “mouthpiece,” paves the road to the Oval Office — and even a brilliant John Oliver expose can’t change that.

Special interest groups — like the NRA — can scrounge up a good chunk of change for the candidate most likely to maintain the status quo, but Super PACs are the best source of dark money.

PACs have the added benefit of keeping their donors anonymous, which is a nice feature for people who don’t want their tennis partners to know they bet on the wrong horse or, worse yet, backed Trump.

As the face of the Koch Brothers — the infamous proprietors of libertarian-leaning Freedom Partners Action Fund — Charles Koch deals with the client-facing aspects of Koch PR.

In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Charles Koch explained his and his brother David’s decision to withhold their much-coveted endorsement of the remaining candidates. In so doing, Charles condemned what he called a “two-tiered system” (i.e. a regressive tax) and suggested Hillary Clinton might make a better president than Cruz or Trump.

Koch’s Hillary support isn’t necessarily as out-of-left-field as it may seem, considering the brothers’ recent embrace of criminal justice reform.

Last spring, Politico Magazine reported that “Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition of left-right advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress” with an aim towards eradicating prison overcrowding.

Among the major donors to the Center for American Progress is billionaire George Soros, who’s given $7 million to the Hillary Clinton-endorsing Priorities USA Action Super PAC during the 2016 cycle.

Soros was the top individual donor during the 2008 cycle as well, giving $5 million to four 527 organizations. In 2012, however, he gave just $1 million to Obama reelection PAC, Priorities USA. Soros has invested a relatively significant amount of personal money into this cycle, and is likely to up the ante when the general election rolls around. There’s a limit to how far PAC money can keep a candidate afloat (e.g. Jeb! Bush and Li’l Marco Rubio). For lack of a less conspiratorial word, every special interest needs a mouthpiece. Not a known political financier, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took a less direct route to political influence in purchasing the Washington Post in 2013. And though WaPo is a humongous organization, editorial leanings in the media tend to have a top-down effect. Despite his nearly $55 billion net worth, Bezos has donated relatively small amounts to Democrats ($28,000) and Republicans ($4,000). Some, however, claim he’s similar to other tech entrepreneurs who support a libertarian, small-government platform. The Post hasn’t formally endorsed Clinton, but its Editorial Board unmistakably condemned her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, in a January article titled “Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign.” In the months since the Editorial Board’s unendorsement, the Post has been accused of repeatedly parroting Clinton’s agenda. As the namesake of prominent news aggregation site, Drudge Report, Matt Drudge wields his right-wing influence through the careful curation of what appears on the site’s homepage. In their book, “The Way to Win,” Mark Halperin and John F. Harris call Drudge “the single most influential purveyor of information about American politics” for his role in John Kerry’s loss in 2004. Drudge Report reader polls, conducted after each televised debate this primary cycle, consistently declared Trump the winner. And a when asked who they’re supporting for the presidency, participating Drudge readers voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump (60% to second place Ted Cruz’s 19%). And though these polls are decidedly unscientific, they did capture the intensity of Trump’s support — the real story of the GOP campaign — and people are starting to give Drudge more and more credit as the Trump train chugs towards Cleveland. In a radio interview earlier this month, Cruz complained that Drudge Report “has basically become the attack site for the Donald Trump campaign.” “By all appearances, Roger Stone now decides what’s on Drudge, and most days they have a six-month-old article that is some attack on me,” Cruz added. “Whatever the Trump campaign is pushing that day will be the banner headline on Drudge.”",REAL
"By Lilian Na’ia Alessa / culturalsurvival.org 
Western science and Indigenous worldviews are often seen as incompatible, with the Indigenous view usually being far less valued by society at large. But an inside look at Indigenous ways of knowing shows that they offer unique and dependable insights, in precisely the areas where Western science is often weakest. 
I grew up in a family where Bible study was mandatory. Yet, despite the firm Christian branches that shaded my home, there were traditional roots that anchored daily life. My grandmother spoke no English and went about her tasks singing. She sang to things I couldn’t see, to stones and water. She spoke to the breezes that came off the sea. This was not odd to me. No question of sanity or need of counseling entered my mind. It was simply the mechanics of living, of praise to God, to the Creator. She wove fibers into amazing patterns, placing them in water while singing. When she finished singing, the coarse strands would be soaked and pliable and she would sing again until the pattern was done. Her songs, I came to realize, were timers for different tasks. She had no watch, knew no math, indeed had been denied the opportunity to get the education that became the currency of the world in her adulthood and old age. Instead, she had acquired a sophisticated methodology to transform the resources that yielded to her hand, and her hand only. There were no power tools, no mechanical devices to ease her work. There was only an elegance of skill that no machine could replicate. As a child, she was magic to me, and at her deathbed the shock of her mortality severed my faith in these songs. I turned to the precision of Western learning, so that such a fate would never befall me. So I would know the world, and in that knowledge, somehow control it. 
My desire to shun those things that had no firm margins grew as I came to learn the beauty and remarkable perfection of the universe through the eyes of those scholars who, like the elders of my youth, had discovered these things before. As I sat in uncomfortable chairs in lecture halls, a number in a sea of students, and despaired at the pain of examinations in those same chairs, a profound awe of the very molecules that composed my body and everything surrounding me settled. When I realized that the ability to pursue this learning fell squarely on my ability to navigate a system of hard edges, I panicked. I had been raised in a home swirling with soft fluidity of being. 
And now, my learning rejected these things. 
But numbers sing, too. Their words are clear and distinct, and their combinations were refrains of certainty. The slow draining of the deep convictions of my upbringing and generations of women who had sustained children with their hands became a steady flow. Here lay the solution: I could understand all things by measuring them, and in knowing those words I felt I could rewrite the song. 
The profound awe I felt as a student failed me when I took a job as a faculty researcher at a university. I came to realize that Western science hummed the words much of the time. I could see it coming: there were too many failures, too many times when it was apparent that politics, egos, and cliques were the white noise that drowned out the song. Like the death of my grandmother, it was a sound blow. 
Western science as a way of knowing has precision and discipline, and unlike most other ways of knowing, it can be faithfully replicated (most of the time) and understood by practitioners around the world, regardless of their language. But I was led to believe that it could explain more than it really could. Its limitations could be found not only in the over-simplification of the world but also in the murky stupidity of politics, greed, and hubris. And so, in my 30s, I found my faith in Western science fall away like a rock cast off a mountain for the second time in my life. In my rush to compose, rather than hear, the song, I was missing the synergy of the wisdoms of two worlds: one called “traditional” and the other called “Western.” 
The phrases “traditional ecological knowledge,”“traditional local knowledge,” and “folk knowledge” are often associated with “fuzzy knowledge,” the kind that comes from funneling information through a human instrument, whereas “Western science” suggests an absolute objectivity, immune from human bias. In order to discern between the two, one must understand how different cultures, including the “knowledge seekers” of both, come to exist, survive, and thrive in their worlds. The bottom line is that both address knowing the world using different, yet ultimately similar, approaches. Western science excels at unraveling the unseen—our medical technology a testament to this precision—while traditional knowledge reveals the dynamics of larger systems, particularly animals, plants, and habitats, and the wisdom of our place among them. 
In general, Western science and traditional knowledge are usually perceived as two separate, distinct, and somewhat incompatible entities. Why is this? In part, it is simply stubbornness and fear on both sides. In practice they are very similar, and in results they are highly complementary, because one works well at small scales and the other at large scales. But in their origins they differ. Western science is relatively new and evolved from the philosophies of Aristotle and Bacon that sought to standardize information so that it could be used by groups of people who did not necessarily live in the same region. People who moved from one region to another relied on this information to aid the growth of their crops, the health of their livestock, and the survival of their young, not to mention the development of weaponry, defenses, and trade. Aristotle stated that humans were separate from the rest of the “natural” world (this including animals, plants, and the places they lived). This was a pivotal time in history: medicine was advancing and people were making connections between cleanliness and protecting food sources from competing interests, such as rats, which also spread disease. 
Government   were providing security for more and more people, most of whom had descended from tribes that survived by hunting and gathering and competing for these resources with neighboring tribes through conflict and, less often, fragile treaties of cooperation. With this shift from conflict to more and more centralized organization came more time to observe the components of the world not directly related to survival. While not new speculations, a class of “observer” started documenting the way humans behaved with each other and other curious habits of the species. This class of observer was more often than not composed of members of religious sects, such as the clergy, and likely evolved from the strong shamanic heritage of their ancestral traditions. As these observations amassed and humans were ideologically “cleansed” of their socially offensive ties to the animal world, human nature sought to explain the observations. Tied into this desire was an increasing belief that the surrounding world was less and less a living, interacting system and more and more a source of resources, composed of “parts,” each of which could be isolated, understood, and manipulated, usually for the benefit of humans. At this point, any oral histories that linked societies to their environments were rapidly being relegated to the outlying villages and remnants of nomadic peoples. In other words, the “uneducated.” So the “observers” or “scholars” had isolated themselves from their environments and were increasingly reliant on a hierarchy of workers to support their existence and lifestyles, distancing them from the lands and waters that sustained them. Could this be the point where Western science and traditional knowledge diverged as two distinct socially constructed approaches to “knowing?” That remains to be studied, but perhaps one can link this early form of systematic observation and explanation to the relatively recent process called the “scientific method” which is often invoked to settle information-dependent conflicts. 
It is my opinion that an important distinction must be made between scales of knowledge with respect to the scientific method and traditional knowledge. Tech­nologies such as microscopes and antibodies have given us insights into the unseen worlds of micro-scale processes that we would otherwise never have acquired. As you increase the level of space (for example a cell in the body) and time, you increase the level of complexity, or how many things interact with each other at any given time. By the time you arrive at ecosystems, the interactions of organisms and their habits, you have accumulated an enormous amount of complexity. It becomes increasingly difficult to resolve what is causing which effect. As a consequence, the scientific method and the Western approach to “understanding” is more tenuous, and it is at this intersection of time and space that traditional knowledge is most apparent as another approach. By necessity, Western science must simplify things to develop testable hypotheses about how they work, which is both precise and useful at smaller scales. In the process, however, it eliminates details, many of which are considered “descriptive” and either not important to understanding or too confounding. A hallmark of traditional knowledge is that details are exquisitely noted and communicated in such a way that the user can detect small changes and respond accordingly. 
This approach to traditional knowledge has existed as long as we have as a species. The act of residing, surviving, and thriving in a place means that the resident must “know” her environment in such a way as to repeatedly have a high likelihood of regularly acquiring necessary resources, whether they are physical or not, on a regular basis. The consequence of failure is not the ridicule of one’s peers or the failure to get a research grant; it is sickness, suffering, and death. One could say that the stakes in traditional knowledge are much higher, and hence so is the precision. Traditional knowledge requires something that, with few exceptions, Western science has failed to accomplish: long periods of observation in the same place and the transmission of these observations to others in that place so that they can use them practically and often, from a young age. 
Some Western schools of thought romanticize traditional knowledge and perceive that somehow possessing it brings ultimate harmony of the user with his world. No mistakes will be made because there exists a magical link where all things are known. This is part of the devalidation of traditional knowledge because it fails to acknowledge that it, like the scientific method, is a process where information is accepted or rejected based on receiving knowledge continuously, both directly from the system and from one’s colleagues, friends, family, and mentors, usually to benefit the community and future generations. 
It should not be surprising that somebody suggests that the approach of traditional knowledge is not limited to humans. We have only recently become aware that elephants have very calculated ways of using and moving through their environments. They will find their food, raise their young, interact, and bury their dead in ways that are distinct to their clans, locations, and preferences and they will transmit this information from one generation to the next using a complex subsonic language. My grandmother told me similar stories about ravens, that we were really not that different, and that if we searched our memories really hard, we could actually see someone we knew in those brilliant, wise, winter eyes. 
Lilian “Na’ia” Alessa is of Salish ancestry. She received a doctorate in cell biology from the University of British Columbia and now works in the area of adaptive resource management in Alaska, using tools from both traditional and Western ways of knowing. This article is adapted from Alessa’s chapter, “What is Truth? Where Science and Traditional Knowledge Converge,” in The Alaska Native Reader, edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams and published in 2009 by Duke University Press. For more information, go to the Duke University Press website at www.dukeupress.edu [1] . 0.0 ·",FAKE
"President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin laid out sharply competing visions Monday about how to tackle the ongoing conflicts in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, with each blaming the other for the region’s turmoil even as they signaled a willingness to address it together.

In speeches to the U.N. General Assembly less than two hours apart, each leader said he embraced a foreign policy approach that respects international norms that are essential to global stability. Later in the day, the two met privately to hash out their differences and to see whether there was room for cooperation. The closed-door session lasted more than an hour and a half, ending just before Obama was scheduled to host a reception for delegates.

After the session, Putin left for Moscow. In brief remarks to Russian reporters, he described relations between the two countries as “regretfully at a rather low level” due to U.S. resistance but said that “we now have an understanding that our work needs to be strengthened, at least on the bilateral basis. We are now thinking together on the creation of appropriate mechanisms.”

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting, said that while it gave Obama “clarity on their objectives,” the two sides continued to disagree on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s role in the conflict and his future.

Russia’s “objectives are to go after ISIL and to support the government,” the official said, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Administration officials have expressed concern that new Russian deployments in Syria would bolster Assad’s fight against his opponents rather than degrade the militants.

In his speech, Obama took direct aim at Russia’s military buildup in Syria as well as its support for Ukrainian separatists, saying, “We are told that such retrenchment is required to beat back disorder, that it’s the only way to stamp out terrorism, or prevent foreign meddling.

“But I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backward. . . . And if we cannot work together more effectively, we will all suffer the consequences.”

[For Obama, a week that showed the world as he wants it, and how it really is]

Putin, for his part, charged that attempts by Western nations to impose democracy — including in Iraq and Libya — were responsible for upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa. While people in those regions clearly wanted and deserved change, “the export of revolutions, this time so-called democratic ones,” he said, had resulted in “violence and social disaster” instead of a “triumph for democracy.”

Then Putin had a question. “I cannot help asking those who have forced this situation, do you realize now what you have done?” he said in remarks that never mentioned but were clearly directed at the United States. “Policies based on self-conceit and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.”

Beyond the barbs, the two raised the prospect of cooperating more closely on fighting Islamist terrorists and brokering a political solution in Syria, where war has raged for 4 years. Obama and Putin — who opened their first extended, formal meeting in two years with a stiff handshake before the cameras — remain divided over Assad, whom Obama wants ousted and Putin continues to back.

“The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict,” Obama said in his 42-minute speech. “But we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo. . . . And so Assad and his allies cannot simply pacify the broad majority of a population who have been brutalized by chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing.”

Putin, by contrast, insisted that “no one but Assad’s forces­ and militias are truly fighting the Islamic State.” He said it would be an “enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed ­forces.”

Russia has directly challenged U.S. military and diplomatic dominance in the region and the U.S.-led coalition air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Over the past month, Putin has expanded Russia’s long-running provision of weapons to Assad with deployments of tanks and aircraft. Over the weekend, Russia and Iraq announced that they would establish a rival anti-militant coalition in Baghdad to include Iran and Syria.

In his speech before U.N. delegates, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani echoed Putin’s comments, saying that while the United States was responsible for the current tumult in the Middle East, his government was willing to help bring “democracy” to Syria.

Russia maintains that Western intervention in Syria is a violation of international law.

Putin proposed creating a “broad international coalition” that he compared to the “anti-Hilter coalition” during World War II.

Russia, the current chair of the U.N. Security Council, has called for a meeting next month to discuss how to better combat extremism. Moscow has also proposed a meeting among itself, the United States and the governments of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt on coordination over Syria.

The Obama administration has not yet responded to the latter proposal, and it remains unclear whether Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Sunni Arab state opposed to Assad, and Iran, the Syrian leader’s other main backer, would agree to cooperate on any Syrian initiative.

Leading European members of the U.S.-led coalition, which has been conducting air attacks against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria over the past year, have indicated that they believe the idea — and some cooperation with Russia — is worth exploring.

French President François Hollande, who last week authorized his country’s first air attacks in Syria, said Monday that “today, the moderate opposition is weak, Bashar al-Assad is weak, and ISIL is strong.”

“We can’t stick to our original enemies,” he said in a morning session with reporters. “We have to gather everybody together.”

“If Saudi Arabia and Iran can find agreement on the future of Syria, then there can be an ­answer,” Hollande said.

In comments last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to be softening their position toward Assad, at least temporarily. “We have to speak with many actors; this includes Assad, but others as well,” Merkel said. “Not only with the United States of America, Russia, but with important regional partners, Iran, and Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia.”

European views have been influenced not only by the stagnation in the Syrian conflict and the Islamic State’s expansion in Iraq, but also by the hundreds of thousands of refugees — many of them from Syria — who have been pouring into their countries.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised those European countries that have provided asylum but urged them to do more. “After the Second World War, it was Europeans seeking the world’s assistance,” Ban said.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was the first world leader to address the General Assembly on Monday, drew applause when she noted that her country has already provided shelter to many Syrian refugees. Brazil loosened restrictions two years ago and has issued more than 7,000 visas to Syrian refugees at this point — more than any other country in Latin America.

“We have our arms open to welcome refugees,” she said. “We are a multi­ethnic nation.”

Obama and Putin also offered differing accounts of what had transpired in Ukraine, where Russia has annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the country’s southeast.

Although Putin devoted the bulk of his speech to Syria and terrorism, he repeated Russia’s charge that the overthrow of Ukraine’s government early last year was “orchestrated from outside.” He said Russia would adhere to the Minsk agreements, once they gave adequate representation to the legitimate demands of eastern Ukraine separatists that Moscow has backed.

Obama, however, said the West would continue to impose economic sanctions on Russia unless it reversed course. “We cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.”

While relations with Russia rank highest on Obama’s priority list during this visit, his agenda includes other major bilateral meetings and working sessions. The president met privately Monday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pressing him to adopt a more stringent target for cutting India’s carbon emissions in the coming decades, and he convened a summit on bolstering U.N. peacekeeping forces.On Tuesday, the president will sit down with Cuban President Raúl Castro and Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Indian officials say they will announce their post-2020 climate target later this week. While they have indicated that they will embrace an ambitious goal for expanding renewable energy sources, they have balked at the idea of committing to cutting their overall carbon output in the near future.

Obama has privately pressed Modi to do more as part of the run-up to U.N. climate talks in December, dispatching a senior adviser, Brian Deese, to New Delhi this month to discuss the matter. After their meeting Monday, the president said, “And what I indicated to the prime minister is that I really think that India’s leadership in this upcoming conference will set the tone not just for today but for decades to come.”

Modi, meanwhile, reiterated his country’s commitment to install 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022. “The president and I share an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity,” he said.",REAL
"Home / Blue Privilege / Police Officer’s Wife Caught Faking a Robbery In a Scheme To Frame Black Lives Matter Police Officer’s Wife Caught Faking a Robbery In a Scheme To Frame Black Lives Matter The Free Thought Project October 30, 2016 1 Comment ( RT ) A Boston police officer’s wife has been charged with faking a robbery which she attempted to frame the Black Lives Matter Movement for. 
Maria Daly reported a burglary at her home in Millbury on October 17 and claimed her jewelry and some money had been stolen. She told police her home had been graffitied with the letters, “BLM.” 
“Something wasn’t quite right,” Millbury Police Chief Donald Desorcy said . “I think that was pretty obvious and as a result of that investigation, the officers did their due diligence and followed through with the investigation that we had.” This is white supremacist Maria Daly, the wife of Boston cop Daniel Daly.She staged a fake robbery of her home, and tried to blame #BLM pic.twitter.com/vrdqg1cM6r 
— Tariq Nasheed (@tariqnasheed) October 29, 2016 
CBS Boston reports Daly took to social media soon after the fabricated robbery, saying, “We woke up to not only our house being robbed while we were sleeping, but to see this hatred for no reason.” 
“If you would of [sic] asked me yesterday about this blue lives and black lives matter issue my response would of [sic] been very possitive [sic],” the now private Facebook account continues. “Today on the other hand I have so much anger and hate that I don’t like myself. This is what we have to deal with these days and it makes me sick that this is what was on the side of my house.” 
Despite Daly’s best efforts, the police were able to tell no robbery took place. @crystalhaynes The poor lady just needs some help.. 
— Mark Scanlon (@markscanlon50) October 28, 2016 
“Basically we came to the conclusion that it was all fabricated,” said Desorcy. “There was no intruder, there was no burglary.” 
Police concluded Daly fabricated the robbery due to financial difficulty. Daly confessed and returned the items she claimed were missing, which amounted to $10,000 in jewelry. 
Desorcy told reporters, “We weren’t going to sweep this under the rug,” and that he felt sorry for the family. 
Daly’s husband Dan is not suspected of being involved in his wife’s crime. Share Google + The Cat’s Vagina (Nasty Woman) 
So, is she going to be brought up on the same charges that any one of us would be for staging a crime and lying to police, or will she avail herself of Blue (Dick Holster) Privilege? Social",FAKE
"(CNN) As goes Walmart , so goes the nation?

Everyone from Apple CEO Tim Cook to the head of the NCAA slammed religious freedom laws being considered in several states this week, warning that they would open the door to discrimination against gay and lesbian customers.

But it was the opposition from Walmart, the ubiquitous retailer that dots the American landscape, that perhaps resonated most deeply , providing the latest evidence of growing support for gay rights in the heartland.

Walmart's staunch criticism of a religious freedom law in its home state of Arkansas came after the company said in February it would boost pay for about 500,000 workers well above the federal minimum wage. Taken together, the company is emerging as a bellwether for shifting public opinion on hot-button political issues that divide conservatives and liberals.

And some prominent Republicans are urging the party to take notice.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who famously called on the GOP to ""be the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club,"" told CNN that Walmart's actions ""foreshadow where the Republican Party will need to move.""

""The Republican Party will have to better stand for"" ideas on helping the middle class, said Pawlenty, the head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington lobbying group for the finance industry. The party's leaders must be ""willing to put forward ideas that will help modest income workers, such as a reasonable increase in the minimum wage, and prohibit discrimination in things such as jobs, housing, public accommodation against gays and lesbians.""

Walmart, which employs more than 50,000 people in Arkansas, emerged victorious on Wednesday. Hours after the company's CEO, Doug McMillon, called on Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson to veto the bill, the governor held a news conference and announced he would not sign the legislation unless its language was fixed.

Walmart's opposition to the religious freedom law once again puts the company at odds with many in the Republican Party, which the company's political action committee has tended to support.

It has been a gradual transformation for Walmart.

""It's easy for someone like a Chick-fil-A to take a really polarizing position,"" said Dwight Hill, a partner at the retail consulting firm McMillanDoolittle. ""But in the world of the largest retailer in the world, that's very different.""

Hill added: Same-sex marriage, ""while divisive, it's becoming more common place here within the U.S., and the businesses by definition have to follow the trend of their customer.""

The backlash over the religious freedom measures in Indiana and Arkansas this week is shining a bright light on the broader business community's overwhelming support for workplace policies that promote gay equality.

After Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, signed his state's religious freedom bill into law, CEOs of companies big and small across the country threatened to pull out of the Hoosier state.

The resistance came from business leaders of all political persuasions, including Bill Oesterle, CEO of the business-rating website Angie's List and a one-time campaign manager for former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Oesterle announced that his company would put plans on hold to expand its footprint in Indianapolis in light of the state's passage of the religious freedom act.

NASCAR, scheduled to hold a race in Indianapolis this summer, also spoke out against the Indiana law.

""What we're seeing over the past week is a tremendous amount of support from the business community who are standing up and are sending that equality is good for business and discrimination is bad for business,"" said Jason Rahlan, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign.

National Republicans are being forced to walk the fine line of protecting religious liberties and supporting nondiscrimination.

""By the end of the week, Indiana will be in the right place,"" Bush said, a reference to Pence's promise this week to fix his state's law in light of the widespread backlash.

Others in the GOP field are digging in. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the only officially declared Republican presidential candidate, said Wednesday that he had no interest in second-guessing Pence and lashed out at the business community for opposing the law.

Meanwhile, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who previously served on Walmart's board of directors, called on Hutchinson to veto the Arkansas bill, saying it would ""permit unfair discrimination"" against the LGBT community.

Jay Chesshir, CEO of the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce in Arkansas, welcomed Hutchinson's pledge on Wednesday to seek changes to his state's bill. He said businesses are not afraid to wade into a politically controversial debate to ensure inclusive workplace policies.

""When it comes to culture and quality of life, businesses are extremely interested in engaging in debate simply because it impacts its more precious resource -- and that's its people,"" Chesshir said. ""Therefore, when issues arise that have negative or positive impact on those things, then the business community will again speak and speak loudly.""",REAL
"By Adalia Woodbury on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 11:31 pm On Friday, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in on transgender rights in the case of Gloucester County School Board vs. G.G. This gives the right wing another chance to take civil rights away from people they don’t like. Plain and simple. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
On Friday, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in on transgender rights in the case of Gloucester County School Board vs. G.G . This gives the right wing another chance to take civil rights away from people they don’t like. Plain and simple. 
At issue is whether a transgender student who identifies as a boy has a right to use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender he identifies with. 
Last summer, the court granted the school board’s request to put a lower court ruling in the student’s favor on hold until the board filed its petition for review by the Supreme Court. Justice Breyer joined the conservative justices in that ruling as a courtesy. 
The Virginia school board established a policy mirroring “bathroom police” laws in red states like North Carolina that required students to use rest rooms and locker rooms to correspond with the gender they were assigned at birth. 
In this case, the district court ruled against G.G. by relying on a 1975 regulation allowing schools to provide “separate toilet, locker room and shower facilities based on sex” provided those facilities are comparable to those provided to the opposite sex. 
In January 2015, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a letter opining that if schools separate students in restroom and locker rooms based on their sex a “school must treat transgender students” in a manner consistent “with their gender identity.” 
Because of that letter, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit reversed the lower court ruling in favor of G.G. It relied on a 1997 Supreme Court decision that courts generally should defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation. 
In reality, the right wing hopes to achieve two political objectives with this case. First, this is about denying basic rights and dignity to people who are transgender, which is consistent with their ideological opposition to rights for women, POC and members of the LGBT community. Second, the right wing is hoping to weaken Federal Agencies by attacking their ability to interpret their own regulations.",FAKE
"Archives Michael On Television If Hillary Clinton Is Charged With Obstruction Of Justice She Could Go To Prison For 20 Years By Michael Snyder, on October 30th, 2016 
In the world of politics, the cover-up is often worse than the original crime. It was his role in the Watergate cover-up that took down Richard Nixon, and now Hillary Clinton’s cover-up of her email scandal could send her to prison for a very, very long time. When news broke that the FBI has renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, it sent shockwaves throughout the political world . But this time around, we aren’t just talking about an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents. I haven’t heard anyone talking about this, but if the FBI discovers that Hillary Clinton altered, destroyed or concealed any emails that should have been turned over to the FBI during the original investigation, she could be charged with obstruction of justice. That would immediately end her political career, and if she was found guilty it could send her to prison for the rest of her life. 
I have not seen a single news report mention the phrase “obstruction of justice” yet, but I am convinced that there is a very good chance that this is where this scandal is heading. The following is the relevant part of the federal statute that deals with obstruction of justice … 
Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsified, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under Title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 
If Hillary Clinton is sent to prison for 20 years, that would essentially be for the rest of her life. 
I have a feeling that the FBI is going to find a great deal of evidence of obstruction of justice in Huma Abedin’s emails. But unfortunately there is not likely to be a resolution to this matter before November 8th, because according to the Wall Street Journal there are approximately 650,000 emails to search through… 
As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton ’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe. 
Of those 650,000 emails, an inside source told Fox News that “ at least 10,000 ” would be of interest to the investigation. 
At this point, FBI officials have not even begun searching through the emails, because a search warrant has not been secured yet. The following comes from CNN … 
Government lawyers haven’t yet approached Abedin’s lawyers to seek an agreement to conduct the search. Sources earlier told CNN that those discussions had begun, but the law enforcement officials now say they have not. 
Either way, government lawyers plan to seek a search warrant from a judge to conduct the search of the computer, the law enforcement officials said. 
But the FBI is reportedly already searching a laptop that was co-owned by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin, and no warrant was necessary for that search because Weiner is cooperating with the FBI. 
Many have been wondering why FBI Director James Comey would choose to make such a bold move just over a week until election day. Surely he had to know that this would have a dramatic impact on the election, and it is unlikely that he would have done so unless someone had already found something really big. In addition, Comey was reportedly eager to find an opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of his peers at the FBI. The following is an excerpt from a Daily Mail article that was written by Ed Klein, the author of a recently released New York Times bestseller about the Clintons entitled “ Guilty As Sin “… 
‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ 
According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. 
So what happens next? 
In the most likely scenario, the FBI will not have time to complete the investigation and decide whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton before the election. This means that we would go into November 8th with this scandal hanging over the Clinton campaign, and that would seem to be very good news for Donald Trump. 
However, it is possible that once the FBI starts searching through these emails that they could come to the conclusion very rapidly that charges against Clinton are warranted, and if that happens we could still see some sort of announcement before election day. 
In the unlikely event that does happen, we could actually see Hillary Clinton forced out of the race before November 8th. 
Once again, this appears to be very unlikely at this point, but it is still possible. 
If Clinton was forced to step aside, the Democrats would need to come up with a new nominee, and that process would take time. In an article later today on The Most Important News I will reveal who I believe that nominee would be. 
In such a scenario, the Democrats would desperately need time to get their act together, and so we could actually see Barack Obama attempt to delay or suspend the election . The legality of such a move is highly questionable, but Barack Obama has not allowed a little thing like the U.S. Constitution to stop him in the past. 
This week is going to be exceedingly interesting – that is for sure. 
The craziest election in modern American history just keeps getting crazier, and I have a feeling that even more twists and turns are ahead. 
It sure seems ironic that Anthony Weiner is playing such a central role this late in the story, and I can’t wait to see what is in store for the season finale. October 30th, 2016 | Tags: 2016 Election , 2016 Election Delayed , 2016 Election Suspended , Anthony Weiner , Barack Obama , Clinton , Donald Trump , Election Delay , Election Delayed , Election Suspended , Hillary , Hillary Clinton , Hillary Clinton Email Scandal , Hillary Clinton FBI Email Investigation , Hillary Clinton Going To Jail , Hillary Clinton Going To Prison , Hillary Clinton Lock Her Up , Hillary Clinton's Crimes , Huma Abedin , North Carolina , Obama , Obstruction Of Justice , Trump | Category: Commentary aldownunder 
If Hillary Clinton Is Charged With Obstruction Of Justice She Could Go To Prison For 20 Years 
Lets hope so biglipnagger 
There is no way the machine will let her go to prison. Just not gonna happen. K 
Here is my prediction, one of three. 1.The FBI still decides not to fiile charges. 2. The Attorney General refuses the charges, if the FBI files them. 3. Obama pardons her, if all else fails. A corrupt Government, will never let one of their own, go to jail. Wish I still believed there was justice, in this Country. MeMadMax 
Most likely kaine will be thrown on top of the woodpile. 
But there is nothing that says we MUST have a democrat participating in the elections and we still have three other candidates. 
In fact, if the democrats want to survive, it would behoov them to throw hillary under the bus, even disenfranchise her from the dem party instead of trying to push one of the most toxic candidates in history. 
But dems havent shown one iota of reason since they got “their man” in the white house. In fact, that man took the dem party and twisted it into a monster. 
All it will take is one of the higher ups to say enough is enough. If there are any higher up dems left that are not under the control of demon in the whitehouse… carlcasino 
The Demon is NOT in the white house ! He is just the Soro’s sock puppet. Rob 
I hope, I hope, I hope, I hope….. carlcasino 
I’m giving odd’s that the Clinton Crime Cartel will skate –Again ? Any takers at 10:1",FAKE
"The two emails on Hillary Rodham Clinton's private server that an auditor deemed ""top secret"" include a discussion of a news article detailing a U.S. drone operation and a separate conversation that could point back to highly classified material in an improper manner or merely reflect information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.

The sourcing of the information could have significant political implications as the 2016 presidential campaign heats up. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state, and Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement as a sign that she was either negligent with the nation's secrets or worse.

On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails in a random sample of the 30,000 emails Clinton gave the State Department for review contained information deemed ""Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information,"" one of the government's highest levels of classification.

The two emails were marked classified after consultations with the CIA, which is where the material originated, officials said.

The officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level. Clinton did not transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes clear reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.

The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article that discusses the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While a secret program, it is well-known and often reported on. The copy makes reference to classified information, and a Clinton adviser follows up by dancing around a top secret in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation, they said. Several officials, however, described this claim as tenuous.

But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more suspect. Nothing in the message is ""lifted"" from classified documents, the officials said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls ""parallel reporting"" -- different people knowing the same thing through different means.

The emails came to light Tuesday after Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, reported that McCullough found four ""highly classified"" emails on the unusual homebrew server that Clinton used while she was secretary of State. Two were sent back to the State Department for review, but Grassley said the other two were, in fact, classified at the closely guarded ""Top Secret/SCI level.""

In a four-page fact sheet that accompanied a letter to Clinton supporters, Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri stressed that Clinton was permitted to use her own email account as a government employee and that the same process concerning classification reviews would still be taking place had she used the standard ""state.gov"" email account used by most department employees. The State Department, meanwhile, stressed that it wasn't clear if the material at issue ought to be considered classified at all.

Still, the developments suggested that the security of Clinton's email setup and how she guarded the nation's secrets will remain relevant campaign topics. Even if the emails highlighted by the intelligence community prove innocuous, she will still face questions about whether she set up the private server with the aim of avoiding scrutiny, whether emails she deleted because she said they were personal were actually work-related, and whether she appropriately shielded such emails from possible foreign spies and hackers.

Clinton says she exchanged about 60,000 emails in her four years as secretary of state. She turned over all but what she said were personal emails late last year. The department has been making those public as they are reviewed and scrubbed of any sensitive data.

The State Department advised employees not to use personal email accounts for work, but it wasn't prohibited. But Clinton's senior advisers at the State Department would have been briefed upon basic protocol for handling classified information and retaining government records. In Clinton's time, most officials saved their emails onto a separate file or printed them out when leaving office. Only recently has the department begun automatically archiving the records of dozens of senior officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry.

In the emails, Clinton's advisers appear cognizant of secrecy protections.

In a series of August 2009 emails, Clinton aide Huma Abedin told Clinton that the U.S. point-man for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, and another official wanted ""to do a secure"" conversation to discuss Afghan elections. Clinton said she could talk after she received a fax of a classified Holbrooke memo, also on a secure line. Later, Abedin wrote: ""He can talk now. We can send secure fax now. And then connect call.""

But other times, the line was blurred. Among Clinton's exchanges now censored as classified by the State Department was a brief exchange in October 2009 with Jeffrey Feltman, then the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East. Both Clinton and Feltman's emails about an ""Egyptian proposal"" for a reconciliation ceremony with Hamas are marked B-1.4, classified for national security reasons, and completely blacked out from the email release.

A longer email the same day from Clinton to former Sen. George Mitchell, then Mideast peace envoy, is also censored. Mitchell responds tersely and carefully that ""the Egyptian document has been received and is being translated. We'll review it tonight and tomorrow morning, will consult with the Pals (Palestinians) through our Consul General, and then I'll talk with Gen. S again. We'll keep you advised.""",REAL
"Last Christmas, Christian apologist, Eric Metaxas published an article in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal about a ‘miracle’, or perhaps I should say 'the miracle’ -- the origin of the universe. That article, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God went on to become, if not quite a miracle, at least a sort of wonder. It was shared via email and social media more than any other opinion article in the history of the Wall Street Journal. That’s really saying something, since the Journal is known to have one of the most popular op/ed pages in the world. Former editor Robert Bartley quipped that his was the only opinion page in journalism that actually sold papers.

Metaxas certainly tapped into something. As of this writing this morning, that article has over 470,000 Facebook shares and well over 9,000 comments. The wonder is not the article itself, but the phenomenon that in an age of angry pop atheism and sloppy ‘God-is-dead’ scientific journalism, intelligent, well-educated people, the kind of people who read the Wall Street Journal, still have minds which are open to the idea that the universe is not closed; that there is something (or Someone) beyond it who can intervene into it, Who started it whirling into existence in the first place.

I sat down across a Skype line with Metaxas recently to discuss the paperback release of his book, Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life. The first third of the book deals with philosophical issues: Are miracles possible? What are they exactly? And why are philosophical objections to them not quite as final or decisive as they purport to be?

The rest of the book is actual miracle stories, stories from history and stories from Metaxas’ circle of acquaintances. The latter are more persuasive than one might expect. We’ve all seen the toupee’d theurgist circuses of Christian television, hawking Jordan river water and magic oils to the gullible. But the people Metaxas describes in this book are a little harder to write off: Educated, well-read, accomplished leaders. The charming little story of Gregory Alan Thornbury and his wife and the miracle of the car keys packs a little extra power when you realize that Dr. Thornbury is a highly accomplished philosopher. I’m not saying that it’s right that secular elites in this country should write-off the testimony of people from trailer parks, I hate that contempt. But I am saying that if class and IQ are your excuses to not listen to people’s miracle stories, then Miracles takes away at least that excuse.

One of the most important features in the book is that miracles are not just intervention, they are information. I found myself wanting more along this line than the book offered. The koine Greek word for miracle is teras, and the word for sign is semeion, which is etymologically related to ‘sign’. Miracles are a form of communication. Modern materialists and those believers who live in reaction to materialism seem to think that the message of miracles is that God exists (or gods exist) and that this world is not the only world. The problem with that is that the miracles of the New Testament appeared in a world in which materialism was very rare, almost unknown outside upper class Romans. Jesus’ disputes with the religious leaders were not about whether God existed, they were about who God approved of and who He did not. In information science terms, miracles have 'entropy’ departures from the expected deterministic route, conferring signal or, as my friend George Gilder would say it, ‘surprise’.

Below you can find a partial transcript of the interview (which has been edited for clarity), and if you want the whole thing you can listen here.

JERRY BOWYER:  Eric Metaxas is our guest.  He's the author of Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life, which has just been published in the paperback edition.

Eric, thanks for joining us today.

ERIC METAXAS:  Well, it is my pleasure.  Thanks for having me.

METAXAS:  Well, that's not so easy to answer.  I would say that there are two answers; they're equally true, because it depends on what your definition is.  And I kind of go with both in the book.  One definition is anything that is an injection into the material world, into the universe of time and space, from outside of that world.  So anytime anything happens in this world, and you say this isn't possible to explain naturalistically, that can be a miracle.

The parting of the Red Sea was not a coincidence.  Jesus walking on water was not a hallucination.  If those things actually happened, you can say those are miracles.

But also -- well, let me put it this way.  I say that those kinds of miracles are God's way of speaking to us, trying to get our attention.  And so that's a particular kind of miracle.  So most of us, when we say something is a miracle, that's what we're talking about.  We're not just talking about something amazing; we're talking about something amazing that actually involves God.

But alternatively, when we're talking about, let's say the creation of the universe, the Big Bang, when you look at the details of it -- and the first part of my book deals with faith and science -- the scientific details of it, the more we know from science, the scientific details of it are so staggering that you can't help but think this had to have been something that God did.

So on one level, everything, all of creation, partakes in the miraculous; if you believe that God is involved on any level, every electron spinning around every nucleus of every atom is somehow miraculous.

But basically, when we're talking about miracles, we're not talking about that.  We're typically talking about, you know, I prayed for Uncle Jimmy and suddenly he could walk again.  You know, that's the kind of a miracle typically we're talking about.  And most of the miracles in the book are those kinds of miracles.  And the thirty miracle stories at the end of the book are definitely those kinds of miracles.

BOWYER:  So your definition of miracle does not include, say, the act of creation.  That might be a wonder, because it's not an intervention into an existing set of physical laws; it's the origin of that existing set of physical laws.

METAXAS:  That is extremely heavy.  I wasn't prepared for that.  I would have gotten the coffee before the interview.  That is a brilliant, wonderful observation and clarification.  And I'm not used to this, Jerry, so thank you for doing that.

I would actually say that the act of creation is a miracle, but it is -- as I meant to clarify earlier, it's a different kind of miracle, because there was no one there to observe it happening.  Although, in retrospect, through science, we can see what happened, and we can be staggered retroactively, or retrospectively, we can be staggered.  The more you look at the origins of the universe, the more you look at what was necessary for the universe to come into being, the more you say this simply could not have happened, that makes no logical sense.  Occam's razor says it's much easier to say God did it, than to say, you know, a thousand things had to line up perfectly, and, oh by the way, coincidentally, they did.  That makes infinitely less sense; it's infinitely less plausible.

BOWYER:  All right.  So just a quick aside for nonphilosophical listeners and readers, Occam's razor refers to the principle that all other things being equal, the simpler the explanation which explains all the observations, the more likely that explanation is to be true.

METAXAS:  Yeah.  When you're talking about science, sometimes people are so put off by the idea that God created the universe that they come up with these baroque, really hilarious alternative explanations.  Like, they say oh, there's an infinity of universes; by the way, we can't see them and we have no evidence for them, but there has to be.  And of all of those infinite universes, one of them got everything perfectly right.  And guess what, we just happen to be living here right now… It's just swell.  Now, to me, when people say that, I think that's actually less scientific than saying a creator created the universe.

BOWYER:  Because by definition, there is no possible observation of multiverses.  They were completely hermetically sealed off from us.

METAXAS:  Right.  And this is what people -- people who advocate for so-called multiverse theory, themselves, say that there's no evidence for them.  So it's a really tremendous speculation that makes believing in the God of the Bible look infinitely scientific in comparison.",REAL
"Print 
Some worrisome news is breaking across the nation where most Americans are now preparing to deal with a major spike in their already astronomical healthcare costs. The AP is reporting that healthcare premiums are about to rise an average of 25% across the country, even as many American families are already struggling to pay their current premiums. 
Premiums will go up sharply next year under President Barack Obama’s health care law, and many consumers will be down to just one insurer, the administration confirmed Monday. That’s sure to stoke another “Obamacare” controversy days before a presidential election. 
Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less. 
Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles. 
“Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” said Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. 
Fox News took the time on Monday to hammer House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her lies that Obamacare would make it easier for most Americans to get healthcare and that it would keep prices more “affordable.” 
Pelosi’s definition of affordable seems to be the exact opposite of what it actually means, because instead of slowing our rising healthcare costs, prices have actually been climbing higher, faster ! 
Administration officials are stressing that subsidies provided under the law, which are designed to rise alongside premiums, will insulate most customers from sticker shock. They add that consumers who are willing to switch to cheaper plans will still be able to find bargains. 
“Headline rates are generally rising faster than in previous years,” acknowledged HHS spokesman Kevin Griffis. But he added that for most consumers, “headline rates are not what they pay.” 
Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) wants to hear the Obama administration and their Democrat allies apologize for the disastrous plan, because thus far it seems to have hurt the average American far more than its helped. “We’ve reached this point because ObamaCare is built on the lie that Washington’s bureaucrats are smart enough to plan health care for millions of Americans. At every turn — whether it’s CO-OPs collapsing, premiums skyrocketing, or big insurers bailing — the American people have paid the price. More spin won’t solve this — it’s time for the White House to admit that this law isn’t working.” 
The people of Arizona woke up to even scarier news on Wednesday when they learned that their premiums would be rising by 116% this year! 
However, in Arizona, unsubsidized premiums for a hypothetical 27-year-old buying a benchmark “second-lowest cost silver plan” will jump by 116 percent, from $196 to $422, according to the administration report… 
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called the Affordable Care Act a “failure.” 
“Arizona families are demanding affordability, accessibility and choice when it comes to their health care – not the expensive, restrictive and poor quality care that has been forced upon them by Obamacare,” McCain said in a statement. “Until President Obama and Congressional Democrats wake up to the law’s failure, and until we repeal and replace it with solutions that encourage competition and put patients back in charge, the Washington-knows-best approach will continue to unfairly burden the Arizona families it was supposed to help.” 
Meanwhile, it seems that Hillary Clinton hasn’t gotten the memo about how bad Obamacare has been or about how much it’s hurt our economy, because she’s still out there running victory laps for the abysmal failure. ""You know, before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare."" #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/TfalVkgAgO 
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 12, 2016 
Somebody should probably tell her that the majority of Americans hate Obamacare and would prefer seeing it repealed. 
In a summer that saw many insurers drop out of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, Americans’ support for the healthcare law continues to be slightly more negative than positive. Now, 44% of Americans support the law, also known as Obamacare, and 51% disapprove of it — similar to what Gallup measured last November. 
51% disapprove of Obamacare (or Hillarycare if you prefer), even worse about 1/3 of Americans say the law has actually HURT them, and long term most Americans think the law will end up either hurting their families or not making any difference at all. 
Hopefully, the Trump campaign is paying attention and will begin hammering away on Obamacare. This is a winning issue for Republicans, and it could be the issue that helps us win in November. 
Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares",FAKE
"Waking Times 
“In the middle of all the brain-research going on, from one end of the planet to the other, there is the assumption that the individual doesn’t really exist. He’s a fiction. There is only the motion of particles in the brain. Therefore, nothing is inviolate, nothing is protected. Make the brain do A, make it do B; it doesn’t matter. What matters is harmonizing these tiny particles, in order to build a collective consensus, in order to force a science of behavior.” ~The Underground, Jon Rappoport 
Individual power. Your power. 
It stands as the essence of what the founding documents of the American Republic are all about, once you scratch below the surface a millimeter or so. 
Therefore, it stands to reason that colleges and universities would be teaching courses in INDIVIDUAL POWER. 
As soon as I write that, though, we all fall down laughing, because we understand the absurdity of such a proposition. Can you imagine Harvard endowing a chair in Individual Power? 
Students would tear down the building in which such courses were taught. They’ve been carefully instructed that the individual is the greatest living threat to the planet. 
If you can’t see that as mind control, visit your local optometrist and get a prescription for glasses. 
So we have this astonishing situation: the very basis of freedom has no reflection in the educational system. 
You can say “individual” within certain limited contexts. You can say “power,” if you’re talking about nuclear plants, or if you’re accusing someone of a crime, but if you put “individual” and “power” together and attribute a positive quality to the combination, you’re way, way outside the consensus. You’re crazy. You’re committing some kind of treason. 
In order to spot the deepest versions of educational brainwashing, YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOME STANDARD AGAINST WHICH YOU CAN COMPARE WHAT IS COMING DOWN THE PIPELINE INTO THE MINDS OF STUDENTS. 
If you lack that standard, you miss most of the action. 
If you lack that standard, you have already been worked over by the system. 
And in this case, the standard is INDIVIDUAL POWER. 
Clean it off, hose off the dirt, polish it, look at it, think about it, remember it. 
Then you’ll see some Grade-A prime mind control. Everywhere. Because schools either don’t mention it, or they discredit it. 
Back in the days when I was writing on assignment for newspapers and magazines, I pitched a story about individual power to an editor. I wanted to trace its history as an idea over the past ten years. 
He looked at me for a few seconds. He looked at me as if I’d just dropped some cow flop on his desk. He knew I wasn’t kidding and I had something I could write and turn in to him, but that made it worse. He began to squirm in his chair. 
He laughed nervously. 
He said, “This isn’t what we do.” 
For him, I was suddenly radioactive. 
I had a similar experience with a high-school history teacher in California. We were having lunch in a cafe in Santa Monica, and I said, “You should teach a course in individual power. The positive aspects. No group stuff. Just the individual.” 
He frowned a deep intellectual frown, as if I’d just opened my jacket and exposed a few sticks of dynamite strapped to my chest. As if he was thinking about which agency of the government to report me to. 
Now, for the schizoid part. The movies. Television. Video games. Comics. Graphic novels. They are filled to the brim, they are overflowing with individual heroes who have considerable power. These entertainment businesses bank billions of dollars, because people want to immerse themselves in that universe where the individual is supreme. They want it badly. 
But when it comes to “real” life, power stops at the front door and no one answers the bell. 
Suddenly, the hero, the person with power is anathema. He’s left holding the bag. So he adjusts. He waits. He wonders. He settles for less, far less. He stifles his hopes. He shrinks. He forgets. He develops “problems” and tries to solve them within an impossibly narrow context. He redefines success and victory down to meet limited expectations. He strives for the normal and the average. For his efforts, he receives tidbits, like a dog looking up at his master. 
If that isn’t mind control, nothing is. 
Once we enter a world where the individual no longer has credibility, a world where “greatest good for the greatest number” is the overriding principle, and where that principle is defined by the elite few, the term “mind control” will have a positive connotation. It will be accepted as the obvious strategy for achieving “peace in our time.” 
At a job interview, a candidate will say, “Yes, I received my PhD in Mind Control at Yale, and then I did three years of post-doc work in Cooperative Learning Studies at MIT. My PhD thesis? It was titled, ‘Coordination Strategies in the Classroom for Eliminating the Concept of the Individual.’” 
From Wikipedia, “Cooperative Learning”: 
“Students must work in groups to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. Unlike individual learning, which can be competitive in nature, students learning cooperatively can capitalize on one another’s resources and skills…Furthermore, the teacher’s role changes from giving information to facilitating students’ learning. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.” 
That is a towering assemblage of bullshit. 
“Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.” You could use that quote on the back cover of Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World . Everyone does not succeed—because the individual never finds out what he can do on his own. That avenue is cut off. He only knows what he can achieve in combination with others. He only knows what he can understand when he borrows from others. He may never glimpse what he truly wants to do in life. 
This is a tragic situation, but the tragedy is concealed, because the memory of shifting from individual independence to group dependence is gone. There is no such memory. A child is brought up without independence. Therefore, how can he recall losing it? 
He only knows the group and the team and the participation and the praise. He only knows the organizing of his life within a synthetically produced context. 
He is taught that this is good and necessary. 
So, one day, when a bolt comes out of the blue and he recognizes he is himself, what will he use to grasp that revelation and build on it? 
Yes, there are productive groups and teams, and one is always working with others, to some degree. But the core and the starting point is one’s self. That is where the insight and the magic begin. That is where the great decisions and commitments are made. That is where the world is born, every day. 
I see no end of writing about this magic, because civilization has been turned upside down by treacherous people who have been fabricating a counter-tradition that will sink the ship. About the Author 
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine . 
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix , click here .) 
This article ( Collective Consciousness – The Individual is Gone ) was originally created and published by Jon Rappaport’s Blog and is re-posted here with permission. 
~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
"But on one issue -- guns -- President Barack Obama lets the public mask slip, revealing the ire boiling within.

Before the cameras, moved by the massacres of innocents that have punctuated his presidency, Obama has wept, his voice has cracked, he's visibly shaken with frustration, he's lashed out at lawmakers he sees as cowards and even led a congregation in ""Amazing Grace.""

On Tuesday, as he faced a room filled with parents and relatives of victims of gun violence, he stopped speaking, grew silent and wiped away the tears that began to fall when he recalled the first graders killed in a Connecticut elementary school three years ago.

""Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,"" Obama said in the East Room of the White House.

At times, the President has questioned the nation he leads, asking why no other advanced country seems so blighted with regular killing sprees and wondering aloud why Americans will not choose to stop the bloodshed.

Evolving through a cycle of sadness, poleaxing grief, frustration and outright fury, Obama has even offered hints of self-recrimination at his own earlier failure to touch the perfidious politics of gun control himself.

But so far, all the emoting, anger and frustration have added up to little. Despite an expansive flexing of his executive powers, Obama, hampered by a Republican Congress and wary Democrats, has failed to significantly tighten gun control laws.

""We are not inherently more prone to violence. But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency. It doesn't happen in other advanced countries. It's not even close,"" Obama said. ""Somehow we become numb to it and we start to feel that this is normal. And instead of thinking about how to solve the problem, this has become one of our most polarized, partisan debates, despite the fact that there's a general consensus in America about what needs to be done.""

He added, ""We do have to feel a sense of urgency about it. In Dr. King's words, we need to feel the fierce urgency of now -- because people are dying.""

He will also press for public support on the issue at a live town hall meeting hosted by CNN on Thursday night -- making gun violence a priority of his final year in office, days before his valedictory State of the Union address.

Obama insisted Tuesday that he merely wants to enact a few common-sense gun safety measures. But the gun lobby is mobilizing and Republicans, led by 2016 front-runner Donald Trump, insist Obama is out to make it impossible for people to buy guns.

From the campaign trail to Tucson to Aurora

Obama's often demoralizing and politically radioactive experience with the politics of gun control started when he first set eyes on the White House and have confounded him ever since.

He got off on the wrong foot with Second Amendment advocates with an offhand remark during his 2008 campaign, when he said people in Midwest communities hit hard by economic blight ""cling to guns or religion.""

That seemed to many critics as disdainful of lawful firearms owners themselves, a slip his foes have used again and again to warn the president is coming to get their guns.

Obama also appeared to underestimate the potency of the gun lobby and National Rifle Association back then as well.

""What we have to do is get beyond the politics of this issue,"" Obama he said at a 2008 Democratic debate in Philadelphia.

But when he took office, gun control seemed far from his mind. With a financial crisis raging, and other priorities like health care reform demanding political capital, Obama was absent on the issue while Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

And to be fair, there were few Democrats -- especially those in red states -- who would have welcomed tough votes on gun control.

At a memorial service, a saddened Obama comforted relatives and cracked hearts when he hoped the youngest victim, nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, was jumping ""in rain puddles in Heaven.""

But he used the tragedy, not to make the kind of outspoken call for gun control that would become familiar in later years but to call on Americans to cleanse their poisoned politics.

""Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully,"" he said.

In the months to come, Obama would be called upon to react to more shootings, including one at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in which six people died and a massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 were killed.

But the emotional strain was clearly beginning to take a toll as he wondered after Aurora how he would feel if his daughters had been caught at the scene.

For Obama, the dam broke on what he later named as the worst day of his presidency in December 2012.

A few days later, at a heart-searing memorial service, loud sobs rang out in a school auditorium as Obama slowly read the roll of those killed, while crossing a threshold -- no longer reluctant to start talking politics as he mourned the dead.

""We, as a nation, are left with some hard questions .... can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?"" Obama said, offering to put whatever power his office held to prevent more tragedies.

And Obama kept to his word -- for several months.

The process did not only leave Obama looking like he'd let the relatives of the Newtown dead down, it appeared to further sour him on Washington itself, a town he no longer saw as moveable by the forces of hope and change.

""This was a pretty shameful day for Washington,"" Obama said, in a stunningly frank appearance in the White House Rose Garden after the lost Senate vote in April 2013.

""It came down to politics -- the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections,"" said Obama. ""They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment.""

Obama did enact 23 executive actions that the White House says have been successful, though officials admit that true reform is only possible through Congress.

But gun control once again slipped down the president's agenda -- after the White House apparently concluded the politics of the issue were impossible.

It took another year shattered by tragedies in 2015 from a bloodbath in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, to a massacre at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, to draw Obama back into the fray.

In one of the seminal moments of his presidency, Obama broke into ""Amazing Grace"" at a memorial service for a preacher and eight others killed in South Carolina by a gunman who wanted to incite a race war.

After another weary appearance at the White House podium after the Oregon shooting, Obama made clear his heart was sick at the whole futile business of going before the cameras to bemoan another massacre.

""Somehow this has become routine,"" Obama told reporters.

He made no apologies for politicizing the issue and warned ""this is not something I can do myself"" before going the extra step of worrying about his nation's soul.

""I would ask the American people to think about how they can get our government to change these laws,"" he said.

But the killings went on. After a radicalized Muslim couple staged a mass killing in San Bernardino, California, Obama faced a buzzsaw of Republican opposition when he spoke of the need to stop potential terrorists getting hold of guns. GOP presidential candidates said he should be focused on the threat from radical Islam not making it more difficult for law abiding Americans to defend themselves.

Now, Obama is back to try again, but even the President admits the measures are limited in scope.

""We maybe can't save everybody, but we could save some. Just as we don't prevent all traffic accidents, but we ... try to reduce traffic accidents,"" Obama said Tuesday. ""As Ronald Reagan once said, if mandatory background checks could save more lives, it would be well worth making it the law of the land.""

And with prospects bleak for any significant action in Congress, Obama's latest effort may be more about making peace with the relatives of the dead and his own conscience as the result of a realistic assessment that change is possible now.",REAL
"Share on Facebook In 2008, on a dig in the First Nation’s Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, archaeologists made a small but stunning discovery: a tiny clay pot. Though it might not have seemed very impressive at first glimpse, this little piece of pottery was determined to be about 800 years old. And inside that pot? Something that changes how we're looking at extinction, preservation, and food storage, as well as how humans have influenced the planet in their time on it. It's amazing to think that a little clay pot buried in the ground 800 years ago would still be relevant today, but it's true! It's actually brought an extinct species of squash that was presumed to be lost forever. Thank our Indigenous Ancestors! Even they knew what preservation meant. They knew the importance of the future, Is it not amazing that they are affecting our walks of life even to this day? Here it is! The pot was unearthed on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, where it had laid buried for the past 800 years. Inside, archaeologists found a stash of seeds. The seeds were probably buried in the pot as a method of storing food supplies. They were determined to be an old, now-extinct species of squash. Now, seven years after making this stunning discovery, students in Winnipeg decided to plant the 800-year-old seeds… to everyone's amazement, something grew! The squash was named Gete-Okosomin. It means “cool old squash” in the Menominee language. (Respect to the science people for respecting the indigenous people who's land this was found on, we see your good nature!) Now, they're working to cultivate the squash so that it doesn't go extinct… again. It may be just a humble squash, but it's also a symbol of first nations' community and history, as well as a fascinating look into how amazing plants can be. It just goes to show you that plants can be pretty incredible… and that sometimes, history has a funny way of coming back around. The Wheel of Life really stands out in this instance of history. Our Indigenous roots are strong and very much tied to the land. I was taught once that the people of Turtle Island were keepers of the land, not owners. I feel like this Squash is proof of that teaching. Check out the original story & the role of White Earth Land Recovery Project (where seed keepers tend to these seeds) or Winona LaDuke (who named the squash)! Related:",FAKE
"Republicans keep saying they’ll be ready to act if the Supreme Court upholds the big legal challenge to Obamacare, thereby wiping out financial assistance for millions of people in two-thirds of the states.

 

 With the clock ticking down to a ruling, it’s gotten awfully hard to take the GOP’s vows seriously.

Most experts expect the court to rule on King v. Burwell, as the case is known, on or around June 29, which is the last official day of its term. A victory for the plaintiffs would cut off tax credits that residents in Florida, Texas and 32 other states now use to pay for health insurance they obtain through Healthcare.gov, the federally operated marketplace.

The ranks of the uninsured would swell by more than 8 million, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute. The loss of so many customers would likely force insurance companies to raise premiums and withdraw altogether from some markets, affecting even those customers buying directly from insurers rather than through Obamacare's marketplaces.

Under Supreme Court rules, an order would typically take effect within 25 days of its announcement from the bench. In theory, the court could issue a stay delaying its impact. In practice, legal experts consider such a move both unlikely and of questionable significance, given the tight deadlines that insurers and state regulators face for setting next year's premiums.

Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.

 

 Leaders of the Republican Party have cheered on the lawsuit, in some cases filing formal friend-of-the-court briefs in support of it. They have also promised -- in op-eds, speeches and interviews -- to craft a “transitional” plan, or some kind of “off-ramp,” if the lawsuit is successful. The goals of such plans, Republican leaders have said, would be to minimize disruption for the people who now depend upon Affordable Care Act tax credits for their insurance, while crafting a long-term replacement scheme that would serve the public better than President Barack Obama’s health care law has. 

 

 Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was among those who made that promise back in early February, shortly after he took over as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “We have to have a contingency plan,” Ryan said. “We think we need to have an option, a plan, for these states that might find themselves in this difficult position.”

 

 Ryan’s committee, arguably the most powerful in the House, has direct jurisdiction over health care financing. So how many hearings has it held about these contingency plans?

 

 Zero.

Over in the Senate, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has introduced actual legislation and it has nearly 30 co-sponsors, including Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is the majority leader. But the bill is at best a first draft at legislation and, so far, neither the Finance Committee (which has the most power over health legislation) nor the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (which also has some jurisdiction) has sought testimony or scheduled a hearing -- about either the Johnson bill specifically or, more generally, what to do if the Supreme Court stops the tax credits in those 34 states. 

 

 No, in the six months since the Supreme Court announced it would hear King v. Burwell, Republicans in Congress have held exactly one formal hearing that focused on the subject. It took place last week, before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee. But the Small Business Committee is among the least powerful in Congress and it has virtually no jurisdiction over health care financing issues. That may explain why it attracted very little interest -- even from committee members, only a handful of whom bothered to show up.

 

 A generous takeaway from that hearing -- and lack of others -- is that Republicans are thinking about and working on health care plans much more intensely behind the scenes. Brendan Buck, Ryan’s spokesman, pointed out to The Huffington Post that Republican leaders have convened a working group to craft a post-King contingency plan -- with Ryan among its leaders. That group is now meeting three times a week, Buck said: “They’re informal, but it’s an active group.” 

 

 In addition, several high-profile conservative intellectuals have been talking and writing actively about how Republicans ought to react if the court takes their side -- and what kind of health care plan Republicans should be proposing as an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, regardless of how the justices rule. Avik Roy, the Manhattan Institute scholar and Forbes columnist now working with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s political action committee, has been outspoken on the need for an alternative. Philip Klein, longtime writer on health care and now managing editor of the Washington Examiner, has written a whole book on the subject.

 

 But there's a reason that congressional Democrats spent literally years holding hearings on health care reform and then, in 2009, focusing intensely on legislation for several months. The hearings were sometimes acrimonious and, for reform advocates, the media coverage that testimony and questions generated was a source of never-ending grief. At the same time, these hearings, before the committees that actually had jurisdiction on the issues, were necessary to craft a solution that could accomplish the reform’s main goals and then rally enough support to make it through Congress.

The kinds of plans Republicans seem to have in mind would require making equally difficult trade-offs and uniting even more fractious groups. Johnson’s bill, for example, would limit enrollment in plans only to those who already have them, and it would eliminate the individual mandate -- the requirement that people get coverage or pay a fine -- in all of the states. That would force insurers to raise premiums or maybe exit markets altogether.

Other Republicans have discussed altering the Affordable Care Act's regulation on premiums, so that insurers could charge less to younger people. But reducing premiums for the young means raising them for the old, which might be hard for Republicans to pull off given that older voters are now their political base.

Johnson's bill has gone to the Congressional Budget Office for a formal estimate on its impact, a Johnson spokesperson confirmed. That's meaningful -- and more than can be said of most proposals that Republicans have floated on op-ed pages recently. But if Republicans were serious about crafting a proposal that's capable of avoiding disruption and passing Congress, they would have started hashing out these arguments months ago.

Of course, the absence of a public effort to match the public rhetoric matters only if Republicans are actually serious about passing a plan. They may not be. Their real goals may be purely cosmetic -- to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance and, more immediately, to ease the anxiety of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, either of whom might hesitate to issue a ruling with such potentially devastating consequences to so many people.

 

 The lack of hearings obviously doesn’t prove that Republican leaders have such ulterior, cynical motives. But it makes that theory a lot more plausible.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"The Republican presidential candidates are seizing on the “top secret” Hillary Clinton emails in the final weekend before the Iowa Caucus, trying to slow their top Democratic rival by arguing her mishandling of the messages makes her unfit to be president.



“Hillary Clinton is a major national security risk. Not presidential material!” GOP frontrunner Donald Trump tweeted after the State Department said Friday that it will withhold 22 emails from Clinton's correspondence as secretary of state because they are classified “top secret.”

Trump and the 10 other Republican candidates are barnstorming across Iowa this weekend ahead of the Iowa Caucus on Monday, the first-in-the-nation balloting in the 2016 presidential race.

Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner, revealed last spring that she used a private server and email accounts for official business when she was the country’s top diplomat.

The State Department has in compliance with a federal court order released thousands of page of Clinton emails, with classified information redacted. However the agency said Friday that the 22 top-secret messages, in seven email chains, will not be released.

The intelligence community has deemed some of Clinton’s emails “too damaging"" to national security to release under any circumstances, a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review told Fox News.

“The new e-mail release is a disaster for Hillary Clinton,” Trump also tweeted. “At a minimum, how can someone with such bad judgement be our next president?”

Clinton has repeatedly said she never sent classified information through her private accounts. Her campaign on Friday questioned the secrecy of the messages and called for the State Department to release them.

The FBI is investigating the matter, which has raised questions about how federal agencies have different rules for classifying information and whether some of the emails were marked classified after the fact.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s top primary challenger, has declined to talk about the emails.

There is a “legal process in place, which should proceed and not be politicized,"" he said Friday.

During the first Democratic debate last year, Sanders famously dismissed the issue by saying, ""the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!""

He trails Clinton by rough 5 percentage points in Iowa but leads her by roughly 15 points in New Hampshire, which votes Feb. 9, according to the RealClearPolitics poll averaging.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, running third in most GOP polls behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, told an audience in Clinton, Iowa, that such sensitive emails being on Clinton’s server is “not acceptable.”

Cruz suggests that Clinton’s use of the private server and emails now appears “far more serious” than previously thought and that the most recent revelations put her candidacy into more peril.

Cruz, who has 15 events in Iowa before the caucus, is also raising questions about whether the Justice Department, run by the Obama administration, would indeed indict Clinton, if the investigation leads to that decision.

“There is an acceptance that the enforcement of criminal justice is decided not by the laws of this country, but by some political hack in the West Wing of the White House.That is not how our Constitution is meant to operate,” Cruz said on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.

“If she is indicted, it is difficult to see how she could successfully run for president. I would put nothing past the gall and audacity of the Clintons to try. But even the Democratic Party, I would find it hard to believe that they would be eager to nominate someone who is under indictment and could well face felony incarceration.”

Fox News' Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Cleveland has reached a settlement with the Department of Justice over a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by its police department, and it could be announced as soon as Tuesday, a senior federal law enforcement official said.

The official, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the settlement before the formal announcement, spoke Monday on the condition of anonymity.

News of the settlement came days after a white police officer was acquitted of manslaughter for firing the final 15 rounds of a 137-shot police barrage through the windshield of a car carrying two unarmed black suspects in 2012.

The suspects' backfiring vehicle had been mistaken for a gunshot, leading to a high-speed chase involving 62 police cruisers. Once the suspects were cornered, 13 officers fired at the car.

The case prompted an 18-month Department of Justice investigation into the practices of the police. In a scathing report released in December, the department required the city to devise a plan to reform the police force.

The specifics of the settlement were unavailable. Messages left for a Department of Justice spokeswoman and the Cleveland Police Department seeking comment weren't returned.

The Department of Justice's report spared no one in the police chain of command. The worst examples of excessive force involved patrol officers who endangered lives by shooting at suspects and cars, hit people over the head with guns and used stun guns on handcuffed suspects.

Supervisors and police higher-ups received some of the report's most searing criticism. The report said officers were poorly trained and some didn't know how to implement use-of-force policies. It also said officers were ill-equipped.

Mobile computers that are supposed to be in patrol cars often don't work, and, even when they do, officers don't have access to essential databases, the report said.

Police Chief Calvin Williams said in December that while it wasn't easy to have to share the federal government findings with his 1,500-member department he was committed to change.

""The people of this city need to know we will work to make the police department better,"" Williams said.

The investigation marked the second time in recent years the Department of Justice has taken the Cleveland police to task over the use of force. But unlike in 2004, when the department left it up to local police to clean up their act, federal authorities this time have been negotiating a consent decree designed to serve as a blueprint for lasting change among police. Several other police departments in the country now operate under federal consent decrees that involve independent oversight.

The Department of Justice in the last five years has launched broad investigations into the practices of more than 20 police forces, including in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, and in Baltimore, where another black man, Freddie Gray, suffered a spinal cord injury in police custody and later died. The Brown and Gray cases spawned protests that sometimes turned violent.

Saturday's bench verdict on the manslaughter charge against Cleveland patrolman Michael Brelo led to a day of mostly peaceful protests but also more than 70 arrests.

Two other high-profile police-involved deaths still hang over Cleveland, a predominantly black and largely poor city: a 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun fatally shot by a rookie patrolman and a mentally ill woman in distress who died after officers took her to the ground and handcuffed her.",REAL
"advertisement - learn more It’s been more than one hundred years since Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics, said that he regards “consciousness as fundamental,” that he regards “matter as a derivative from consciousness,” and that “everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” He is basically saying that the immaterial ‘substance’ of consciousness is directly intertwined with what we perceive to be our physical material world in some sort of way, shape or form, that consciousness is required for matter to be, that it becomes after consciousness….and he’s not the only physicist to believe that. “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy , to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”– Nikola Tesla advertisement - learn more Not long ago, a group of internationally recognized scientists came together to stress this fact and how it’s overlooked by the mainstream scientific community. It’s ‘post-material” science, an area of study dealing with the ‘non-physical realm, and it’s challenging the modern scientific worldview of materialism that’s dominated mainstream science. The idea that matter is not the reality is finally starting to gain some merrit. The summary of this report presented at the International Summit On Post-Materialist Science can be found HERE . “The modern scientific worldview is predominantly predicated on assumptions that are closely associated with classical physics. Materialism—the idea that matter is the only reality—is one of these assumptions. A related assumption is reductionism, the notion that complex things can be understood by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things such as tiny material particles.”– Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science MIT’s Max Tegmark,a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is one of the latest to attempt explaining why he believes consciousness is a state of matter. He believes that consciousness arises out of a certain set of mathematical conditions, and that there are varying degrees of consciousness – just as certain conditions are required to create varying states of vapor, water, and ice. As PBS emphasized, “understanding how consciousness functions as a separate state of matter could help us come to a more thorough understanding of why we perceive the world the way we do.” ( source ) Tegmark describes this as “perceptronium,” which he defines as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware and this substance should not only be able to store information, but do it in a way that form a unified, indivisible, whole. “The problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, we do we perceive this solution?”– Tegmark ( source ) This new way of thinking about consciousness has been spreading throughout the physics community at an exponential rate within the past few years. Considering consciousness as an actual state of matter would be huge, considering the fact that modern day definitions of matter require a substance to have mass, which consciousness does not have. What it does have, however, is some sort of effect on our physical material world, and the extent of this effect and how far it goes is the next step for science. 
The quantum double slit experiment is a very popular experiment used to examine how consciousness and our physical material world are intertwined. It is a great example that documents how factors associated with consciousness and our physical material world are connected in some way. 
One potential revelation of this experience is that “the observer creates the reality.” A paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays by Dean Radin, PhD, explains how this experiment has been used multiple times to explore the role of consciousness in shaping the nature of physical reality. 
The study found that factors associated with consciousness “ significantly” correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern. ( source ) “Observation not only disturbs what has to be measured, they produce it. We compel the electron to assume a definite position. We ourselves produce the results of the measurement.” (source) For a physicist to brush off the fact that understanding consciousness is necessary for the advancement and understanding of the nature of our reality is not as common as it used to be but, despite the empirical success of quantum theory, even the suggesting that it could be true as a description of our reality is greeted with harsh cynicism, incomprehension and even anger. 
R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University wrote in a 2005 publication for the journal Nature: 
According to [pioneering physicist] Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” . . . The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy. 
(“The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29,2005) (source) Thanks for reading.",FAKE
"A GOP Weekend, Courtesy Of The Koch Network And Citizens United

Republican presidential hopefuls are turning out this weekend for two big events, but just one of them, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, plans to be at both.

Cruz is among seven possible contenders who spoke Saturday at the Iowa Freedom Summit, co-sponsored by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, and the group Citizens United. Sunday night, Cruz is scheduled to join two possible primary rivals, Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., at a semi-annual conference of the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

Freedom Partners is a central part of the powerful conservative network assembled by billionaires David and Charles Koch.

Cruz, Rubio and Paul are to appear Sunday in a ""national policy forum"" moderated by ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl. The discussion is to be live-streamed to news organizations, although not to the general public. The conference runs through the weekend, providing well-heeled donors in the Koch network a chance to get acquainted with likely candidates.

The live-streaming marks a break with barring reporters from covering the conferences. But in recent years, the conferences have been beset by leaked documents and surreptitious audio recordings. Last June, someone recorded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, then running for re-election, saying the day the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was signed was ""the worst day of my life."" Another audio clip, in which Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst praised the Koch network, was used in an attack ad in her Senate bid, which she won.

There are indications that the Koch network may engage in the GOP presidential primary — a step it's previously avoided taking. As a measure of the network's clout, the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising, estimates that in the 2014 midterm elections, four Koch groups ran more than 12,000 TV ads, at a cost exceeding $25 million. The groups were the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the superPAC Freedom Partners Action Fund and the social welfare groups Americans for Prosperity and Concerned Veterans for America.",REAL
"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in The Hill newspaper and on The Hill.com. For more, click here.

I’m not one to gossip but…

There is a flood of early talk in political circles about who will get the vice presidential nods from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The strategy for picking a running mate this year is wildly different from anything seen before.

The textbook on picking a VP calls for a heavy focus on adding swing-state support for the top of the ticket. The book also advises finding a running mate seen by voters as plausibly able to take over as president.

Well, throw out the textbook.

No one believes that any running mate is going to tip this year’s electoral map. And no strong, silent type fits the bill at a moment when voters want to shake up the system.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) paid a visit to Clinton just days after she claimed the nomination, speculation kicked into overdrive.

And phone lines got hot when former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) were overheard in a TV green room telling each other that the other one is the best choice to run with Trump.

The dynamics that frame the selection of a VP this year were evident in a Washington Post/ABC poll released last week. It found that nearly 70 percent of Americans have an unfavorable of view of Trump, a 10-point increase since he entered the race last summer. According to the same poll, Clinton also reached a new personal high in her unfavorable rating at 55 percent.

Clinton’s trouble is dwarfed by Trump’s trouble. He is viewed negatively by 94 percent of blacks, 89 percent of Latinos and 77 percent of women.

Picking a dazzling candidate as his running mate is one move that has the potential to change the way the world sees him.

The last attempt to dazzle and distract with a vice-presidential pick was in 2008. GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got off to a good start with his surprise pick of little-known Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. She is beautiful, high energy and, that year, she had the potential to attract women disappointed that the Democrats had selected a black man over a woman as their nominee.

But the sparkle wore off quickly when Palin began to look uninformed and inept. Questions were raised about McCain’s judgment. Palin’s family life also became a staple of the gossip columns.

Palin’s selection looked especially bad in contrast with Democrat Barack Obama’s pick of Sen.Joe Biden (D-Del.). Biden was experienced and known to be a good guy, while his selection took the edge off the risk of putting a first-term senator in the Oval Office.

This time, Trump and Clinton need running mates combining the qualities of Palin and Biden.

The Trump campaign went nuts last month when Ben Carson said that Trump’s shortlist included Palin. Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla) and Ted Cruz (Texas), and two governors, Chris Christie of New Jersey and John Kasich of Ohio, were purportedly also on the list.

Palin’s downside is obvious; a desperate-looking Christie won’t do either. And Trump can’t afford to extend an offer to Rubio, Cruz or Kasich because he can’t risk being turned down.

That problem is getting worse by the minute as Trump lags farther and farther behind Clinton in the polls. Any dazzling vice-presidential pick has to think about his or her own political future. What will happen to them if Trump suffers a Barry Goldwater-style blowout loss in November?

Gingrich remains a serious contender to be Trump’s number two. He is a well-known personality and an ace with a TV soundbite who is also accustomed to dealing with controversy over his personal life.

But Gingrich sharply criticized Trump for his attacks on New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez and Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

Trump then did an impromptu poll on possible running mates. He asked the audience at a rally in Tampa to pick from Gingrich, Sessions or former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice got the biggest applause from the crowd.

Rice is a dazzler but the odds that she is willing to sign on are low to non-existent.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Clinton needs a star to bring young, energetic supporters of her primary rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, back into the fold.

That means Clinton can’t bring on a centrist pick. Moderate Democrats with close ties to corporate America like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia or Mark Warner of Virginia, or former Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, would anger the liberal base of the party.

She is left to choose among Warren and other left-of-center Democrats such as Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Tim Kaine (Va.).

Warren, however, has powerful detractors. Critics say she lacks foreign policy experience and note that she has never run a city, state, cabinet agency or business.

“I think she will not pick somebody that she feels in her heart isn’t ready to be President or Commander-in-Chief,” former Pennsylvania Governor and DNC Chairman Ed Rendell recently told a Philadelphia radio station. “I think Elizabeth Warren is a wonderful, bright, passionate person, but with no experience in foreign affairs and not in any way, shape or form ready to be commander-in-chief.”

Clinton could find dazzle by naming the first Latino vice-presidential candidate. But no one doubts she will win Latino voters energized by Trump's insults regardless. If she still wants that option, then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is the leading candidate. Labor Secretary Tom Perez and California Congressman Xavier Becerra have come on strong in the last few weeks.

When all the talk ends, Trump has few options. His best bet to dazzle is Gingrich. Clinton has a wider range, led by Kaine, Castro and Warren.

Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.

",REAL
"How Trump And Clinton Are Framing Their Closing Arguments

With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have each framed a closing argument to voters. Each is also focusing on battleground states in ways that reveal different paths to victory — earning 270 electoral votes on election night. (You can read more about the state of play here.)

Here, we lay out what voters will see from each candidate in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump has ridden a wave of anti-Washington sentiment all year, and in the final weeks of his campaign he's trying to crystallize that message.

Trump recently rolled out a reform package he's referring to as ""draining the swamp."" Trump wants to pass a constitutional amendment setting term limits for lawmakers. He's also calling for a hiring freeze on non-military federal employees, lobbying restrictions, and a sharp reduction in federal regulations.

Trump is now citing these proposals at every rally, along with a long laundry list of other priorities for the first hundred days of a Trump administration. Those include:

The Trump campaign has been running this ad in heavy rotation to draw a contrast between the Republican and Democratic nominees, to show how he will ""Make America Great Again.""

There's a problem Trump continues to create for himself: These policy proposals are often lost in the headlines created when Trump dwells on grievances against his perceived enemies in the media, government and other ""elite"" power structures.

Take Trump's recent speech in Gettysburg, Pa., which was billed as the roll-out of his agenda for the first 100 days of a Trump administration. Trump began the speech by promising to bring legal action against women who have accused him of sexual assault and harassment. This new threat — and not the repackaged proposals he had spoken about before — became the day's news.

Trump spent several minutes at a Monday rally in St. Augustine, Fla., railing against the media. ""They're almost as crooked as Hillary,"" he said. ""They may even be more crooked than Hillary, because without the media, she would be nothing.""

In Trump's telling, the FBI is in league with the Obama administration in its decision not to bring charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email server. And the press is in league with Clinton's campaign.

Trump has said polls showing him trailing Clinton are ""phony"" and that fact-checkers are ""crooked as hell"" — which fits his brand as the ""anti-everything,"" as NPR's Mara Liasson has framed Trump's approach. This resonates powerfully with the GOP nominee's core supporters, but it's unclear how strong that appeal is beyond Trump's base.

On the stump these days, Clinton continues to highlight her policy agenda, often circling back to issues she's been discussing on the campaign trail for months, such as college affordability and equal pay for women. She's also keen to talk about climate change and job investments.

Clinton is a policy wonk, and she's leaning into that in these final weeks. At the same time, she's increasingly willing to nod to the historic nature of her candidacy. She explicitly tied her policy goals to her gender this way on Monday:

""I do have a lot of plans, I do. And I get criticized for having so many plans,"" Clinton said. ""Maybe it's a bit of a women's thing because we make lists. We do, we make lists, and we try to write down what we're supposed to do and then cross them off as we go through the day and the week. And so, I want you to think about our plans as our lists — our lists as a country.""

Clinton often ties all of her ideas back to one central theme — that the decisions the next president makes will affect the kind of country America's children inherit. She's trying to drill home the idea that her campaign is focused on ""kids and families.""

""This is about more than winning an election; it's about the kind of country we want for our kids and grandkids,"" Clinton told voters at a rally in Manchester, N.H., on Monday.

In two new ads the campaign released this week, those closing arguments are reinforced as voters are encouraged to think about the future they want for their children.

Clinton is trying to convince voters that Donald Trump is mounting an ""an unprecedented attack on our democracy.""

Since the final debate in Las Vegas last week, she's hitting Trump on his reservations about saying he'll respect the results of the election.

""That is a direct threat to our democracy,"" Clinton told a crowd of a few thousand on the campus of Saint Anselm College in Manchester on Monday. ""I'm not going to try to call it anything else, because that's what it is. All this talk about the election being rigged, trying to stir up people who are supporting him at his rallies, that is a direct threat to our democracy.""

To quote the late Tim Russert, Donald Trump's election strategy can be boiled down to ""Florida, Florida, Florida."" Tuesday marked the third straight day Trump spent in the state. There's a good reason for that: Trump has no plausible path to the White House if he doesn't carry Florida's 29 electoral votes.

""Florida is must-win, and I think we're winning it,"" Trump told Fox News on Tuesday morning.

In addition to campaigning all over the state, Trump has focused a substantial amount of advertising dollars on Florida.

But Florida isn't enough. Trump has to basically sweep the battleground states in order to win. Other states where Trump is buying television ads — and making repeated visits — include North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Trump will hit two of those states — Ohio and North Carolina — later this week.

In yet another indication of how Trump has blended a presidential campaign with personal business, he's taking time off the campaign trail Wednesday morning to attend a grand opening ceremony at his new Washington, D.C., hotel.

While Trump does that, running mate Mike Pence is campaigning in deeply conservative Utah. That's something the GOP ticket needs to do this year, due to a collapse in support from Utah Republican leaders and serious apathy toward Trump from Mormon voters. Those two interrelated factors have opened the door for independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin to run neck and neck with Trump in Utah.

Trump is also defending a number of other traditionally red states, including Arizona, Georgia and Texas, where Clinton is challenging his lead.

This week, Clinton is focused on swing states where large numbers of people have already begun voting. That includes places like Florida (where she's campaigning Tuesday and Wednesday) and North Carolina (which she'll visit Thursday with first lady Michelle Obama). The campaign estimates some 60 percent of Floridians will cast their ballots by Election Day.

""Florida, Nevada, Iowa, North Carolina — these are all states where we expect a majority of people will have voted before Election Day,"" said Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri.

Democrats have a staffing advantage that could help with turnout in some of these early voting states — for the presidential race and for the competitive Senate races many are seeing.

The multipronged offense is focused on states Trump needs more than Clinton to reach 270 electoral votes. Florida tops the list. On Thursday, Clinton will campaign in North Carolina, a state that went for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, and on Friday she'll be in Iowa, a state where most of the polls have shown Trump with an edge — though polling has been relatively scarce there in recent weeks.

Clinton's campaign has not ruled out the idea of campaigning in traditionally Republican states, such as Arizona, where she seems to be in a statistical tie with Trump.

She has plenty of backup, too. Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have gotten lots of attention for their rebukes of Trump on the campaign trail. And President Obama is expected to campaign heavily in the next two weeks. That means Clinton's campaign can simply cover a lot more ground ahead of Nov. 8.",REAL
"When Scott Walker pronounced himself agnostic about President Obama’s patriotism and Christian faith, it must have seemed like a clever formulation. “I’ve never asked him, so I don’t know,” he said. And about Obama’s Christianity: “I’ve never asked him that.”

Walker quickly found his pitch unequal to the presidential big leagues. His argument can’t be generalized into a rule. I have never met Billy Graham, for example, but I’m pretty sure what he believes. As political attacks go, this one is particularly heavy-handed — the equivalent of saying: As far as I know, my opponent is not a swindler and a degenerate. A politician who tried this form of passive aggression before also got criticized for it. During the 2008 Democratic primary fight, Hillary Clinton said that Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know” — sounding more like one of the wackier speakers at a CPAC convention.

For Walker, this is more of a paper cut than a chest wound. But for the Republican Party, which some Americans associate with religious exclusivity, it can’t be good for a front-runner to sound religiously exclusive.

Walker’s Baptist upbringing — he is the son of a pastor — does put a particular emphasis on the personal acceptance of Christ. It was another Baptist governor, Jimmy Carter, who elevated the idea of being “born again” into the realm of presidential politics. For evangelicals in general, there is no such thing as a birthright Christian. Faith requires a conscious and highly consequential decision — a choice that some do not make.

But here Obama has been as forthright as anyone could be. “I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian,” he said in a 2008 Christianity Today interview. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.”

Questioning this affirmation involves a serious charge — an accusation of the worst sort of cynicism. And it is simply not the role of a Christian layman to publicly dispute the self-identification of other Christians, especially in a political context. It is a practice that can lead down ugly alleys of sectarianism.

Some, of course, will find the whole idea that human beings can make profoundly consequential religious choices to be foreign. And they may find proselytization — the necessary correlate of religious choice — to be offensive. But here a little patience might be in order. In many cases, adult converts have come through low points of addiction, humiliation or crisis. They believe they have found, past the limits of their own strength, something extraordinary and undeserved, which they can only describe as grace.

You may find such converts to be deluded or annoying, but there is little doubt that they have had a profound experience that defies adequate metaphor. They feel they have been washed by water or refined by fire. They have heard a voice in the night or a melody above the noise. Things previously thought important — status or wealth — appear vanishingly insignificant. They can say, with G.K. Chesterton:

And all these things are less than dust to me

Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

In such cases, people amazed by grace are wont to talk about it. But this motivation is the opposite of self-righteous judgment. It is gratitude. I have known people who, after a single moment of transforming trust, have spent the rest of their lives in astonished and vocal thankfulness.

But this type of faith, by definition, is unlikely to publicly judge the faith of others. It is founded on recognition of personal limits and failure. In the New Testament, grace often moves in stealthy and unexpected ways — lavished on lepers, Samaritans and tax collectors. Perhaps the modern equivalents would be people with HIV/AIDS, illegal immigrants and . . . tax collectors.

In any case, Christians should not look to the powerful for definitions of orthodoxy — or be proud of an unmerited gift.

Read more from Michael Gerson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook .",REAL
"“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Hillary Clinton,” Carly Fiorina quipped at Wednesday’s Republican debate. The line got hearty applause—but it also cut to the core of one of the defining lines of attacks against the former first lady and Democratic presidential frontrunner. After nearly forty years in public life, what exactly has she accomplished?

It’s a question that even, at times, has tripped up Clinton herself: During her 2014 book tour, when ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked her about her “marquee achievement,” Clinton changed the subject and she fumbled over a similar question during a women’s forum in Manhattan last year. “I see my role as secretary—in fact leadership in general in a democracy—as a relay race. You run the best race you can run, you hand off the baton. Some of what hasn’t been finished may go on to be finished,” she told Thomas Friedman. “I’m very proud of the [economic] stabilization and the really solid leadership that the administration provided that I think now leads us to be able to deal with problems like Ukraine because we’re not so worried about a massive collapse in Europe.”

The question Fiorina posed has also tripped up members of the Obama administration. When State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki was asked last year to “identify one tangible achievement” accomplished through one of Hillary Clinton’s key projects as Secretary of State—the first-ever audit of the department—Psaki punted, “I am certain that those who were here at the time, who worked hard on that effort, could point out one.”

Hillary’s supporters have been stumped too. When Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin asked a focus group of Iowans this summer about Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments, one Democratic supporter said, “I honestly can’t say I followed along [with] everything that was going on.”

So is Fiorina right? Are Democrats really unable to defend Clinton’s record on the merits? To find out, Politico Magazine on Thursday asked the nation’s top Democratic leaders and thinkers to name Hillary Clinton’s biggest accomplishment.

What is the most impressive item on Clinton’s record? Which legislative or policy triumph from her many years in office will be most important on the campaign trail? Not surprisingly, those surveyed all came up with an answer to defend their party’s likely presidential nominee. Whether these count as “marquee,” “significant,” or “tangible”? You be the judge.

‘It’s kind of hard to pick one accomplishment’

By Bill Burton, former senior strategist for Priorities USA Action, a super PAC in support of President Barack Obama.

It’s kind of hard to pick one accomplishment for Hillary Clinton. Personally, I’m sure she’d say her daughter and grandchild are her greatest accomplishments. Professionally, how about these three?

1. Her China speech on women.

2. Her role in killing Osama bin Laden.

3. Management of the State Department during which time we saw a 50 percent increase in exports to China, aggressive work on climate (particularly at Copenhagen), and the effort to create and implement the toughest sanctions ever on Iran—helping to lead us to the agreement currently on the table.

‘The sanction on Iran that brought them to the table’

Howard Dean is the former governor of Vermont and the former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Hillary Clinton was the principal author of the sanction on Iran that brought them to the table. We cannot afford any Know Nothings like Carly in the White House.

‘Nearly every foreign policy victory of President Obama’s second term has Secretary Clinton’s fingerprints on it’

American foreign policy was stronger when Hillary Clinton left the State Department than when she arrived. She took the reins from a Bush administration that had left America’s reputation deeply damaged and planted the seeds for the foreign policy successes we see today. From the agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, to the landmark normalization of relations with Cuba, nearly every foreign policy victory of President Obama’s second term has Secretary Clinton’s fingerprints on it.

Her accomplishments extend to health care, as well. As First Lady, she helped create and guide through Congress Children’s Health Insurance Program, a key program that brought health care coverage to millions of children. As a Senator, she worked across the aisle to provide full military health benefits to reservists and National Guard members.

Secretary Clinton was also an outspoken champion for women around the world. She set records for travel while leading the State Department and used every trip to empower the women of the 112 countries she visited. She made gender equality a priority of U.S. foreign policy. And she created the ambassador at large for global women’s issues, a post charged with integrating gender throughout the State Department.

‘The SCHIP program … which expanded health coverage to millions of lower-income children’

After universal health care failed in 1994, the Clinton Administration was reluctant to go anywhere near healthcare again—Democrats lost the Senate and the House in 1994, and losing the house was for the first time in 40 years. Then-First Lady Hilary Clinton ended up being the White House ally and inside player who worked with Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch to create the SCHIP program in Clinton's second term, which expanded health coverage to millions of lower-income children. She has other accomplishments but this one made a huge difference, and came at a time when politically the Administration was cutting deals with Newt Gingrich on the budget and not necessarily all that enthusiastic about revisiting health care.

This obviously isn't her only accomplishment but it is meaningful because she took a political battering after the failure in 1994 but came back to fight again, and was able to work on a bipartisan basis during a very polarized time to get this done. Seems relevant!

‘Clinton is one of the most accomplished people ever to run’

By Chuck Schumer, U.S. Senator for New York, Democratic party.

Hillary Clinton is one of the most accomplished people ever to run for the Presidency. I’m lucky enough to have seen those accomplishments up close from her time as Senator from New York and as Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton was instrumental in helping secure $21 billion in federal aid to help New York rebuild after 9/11. She fought tooth and nail to protect the first responders who rushed into danger when the towers collapsed and was pivotal in the passage of legislation that helped those first responders who got sick get the care and treatment they deserved. She worked night and day to protect and create jobs in New York, whether that was at the Niagara Falls Air Force base or the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Buffalo. She also led the charge on the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Act, which is now the law of the land.

As Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton was not only inspirational figure for billions of women around the globe, she also did much to restore the shattered credibility of the United States, which had lost so much influence following the failed foreign policies of the previous administration. She negotiated the cease-fire in Gaza that stopped the Hamas from firing rocket after rocket into Israel. She helped secure the START treaty’s ratification, and has advanced women’s rights in countries around the globe. That’s just a snapshot of what Hillary Clinton has accomplished over a lifetime of public service to New York and the country. If you really want to stump a Democrat, you should ask them which of Hillary’s accomplishments is your favorite—there are too many to choose from

‘Rebuilding America’s leadership and prestige overseas after the Bush years’

Bill Richardson is a former secretary of energy and governor of New Mexico.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was key in rebuilding America’s leadership and prestige overseas after the Bush years. She restored our alliances with the EU and key Asian allies as well as key relationships in Africa and Latin America.

By Chris Dodd, former U.S. Senator for Connecticut, Democratic party.

Having worked with her in the Senate and on the HELP Committee, the first thing that came to mind was her authorship of the Pediatric Research Equity Act. This law requires drug companies to study their products in children. The Act is responsible for changing the drug labeling of hundreds of drugs with important information about safety and dosing of drugs for children. It has improved the health of millions of children who take medications to treat diseases ranging from HIV to epilepsy to asthma. Millions of kids are in better shape and alive because of the law Senator Clinton authored.

By Paul Begala, political analyst for CNN and counselor to President Bill Clinton.

Easy: Iran sanctions. Sec. Clinton accomplished the nearly impossible mission of getting China, Russia, the European Union and the civilized world on board with crippling sanctions against Iran. This is what brought Iran to the negotiating table.

Ms. Fiorina may not see that as an accomplishment, since while she was CEO of Hewlett-Packard the firm sold hundreds of millions of dollars of computer products the the terrorist regime in Tehran, evading US sanctions.",REAL
"11 Shares
1 9 0 1
Iranians spend 4.5% of their annual earnings on beauty products, three times more than their European counterparts, as per official statistics. The Germans spend 1.5% and the French and British 1.7% of their income every year on cosmetics.
According to data from the Iranian Association of Cosmetics, Toiletries and Perfumery Importers, Iran accounts for $2.1 billion of the Middle East’s $7.2 billion beauty products market–second in the region after Saudi Arabia, the Persian daily Shahrvand reported.
It is said that there are 15 million consumers for cosmetic products in Iran. Dividing the annual turnover by this number shows that each consumer spends $140 on cosmetics per year. Germany’s online statistics portal (Statista) states that the per capita cosmetic spending in Europe is €90 ($99) on average. The index is $173.5 in Germany, $176 in France, $177 in Britain, $169 in Italy and $150 in Spain.
If the raw figures alone are taken, Iranians spend less than Europeans on make-up products. But the results change as other parameters such as the price of products and household average earnings are taken into account as well.
As confirmed by the Iranian Association of Cosmetics, Toiletries and Perfumery Importers, 70% of the cosmetics in the market are smuggled into the country and often sold at a lower price than they would be if they were legally imported, not to mention the health risks contraband products are likely to pose. Europeans on the other hand pay the real price of the products which includes tax and are thus more expensive.
MORE... Pakistani warships berth in Iran’s port as part of amicable relations, joint drills President Rouhani’s “open-door” economic policy: Recipe for indebtedness, deindustrialization and dependence Iranian Nowruz: A new day has come! Moreover, the spending has to be measured as compared to the average earnings. Based on Gallup Incorporation’s opinion polls, Iranians’ median per capita income has been estimated as $3,100 while that of the Germans, French and British $14,000, $12,500 and $12,300 respectively. The Spanish and Italians earn $6,800 and $7,200.
This means that Iranians spend 4.5% of their income on beauty products while the figure is 1.5% for Germans, 1.7% for the French and British, 3% for Italians and 2.5% for the Spanish.
These calculations show that people in Iran spend three times as much on cosmetics as German, French and British consumers.
 Cosmetic Surgery
Additionally, Iran’s Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons’ Association has announced that 80,000 cosmetic surgeries are performed each year constituting 0.3% of the operations in the world. This is a rather large percentage given that only 1.08% of the world population lives in Iran. Besides, the figure is said to be approximate due to the absence of an official registration system and the fact that other types of beauty surgeries such as body contouring and facial rejuvenation, among many others, are not included.
Data from the Central Bank and the Statistics Center of Iran suggest that cultural pursuits constitute a small portion of Iranian household expenditure. The reports indicate that each family spent only 2% of their income on recreation and cultural activities in 2015, less than half their expenses on cosmetic products.
Iran’s share of the world book market is 0.1% which is one-third the country’s share of the cosmetics market. The $2.1 billion incurred on beauty products is said to equal Japan’s cinema turnover and exceeds that of Bollywood and the UK’s film industry.
Culture, cinema and books don’t comprise high-income businesses in Iran while cosmetic surgeons and beauty product dealers make fortunes on their business.",FAKE
"Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont easily won the Democratic primary in West Virginia on Tuesday, the first of a string of potentially strong showings this month that may drag out, but not block, front-runner Hillary Clinton’s march toward the Democratic nomination.

Additionally, Donald Trump won Republican primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska — virtually foregone conclusions given that he was the only Republican remaining in the race.

“It is a great honor to have won both West Virginia and Nebraska, especially by such massive margins,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “My time spent in both states was a wonderful and enlightening experience for me.”

Heading into Tuesday, Clinton held a formidable lead in delegates, and because delegates will be awarded proportionally, Sanders’s West Virginia victory was not expected to make much of a dent in that lead. However, his enduring popularity, large rallies and insistence on staying in the race until the Democratic convention in July have highlighted some of Clinton’s weaknesses and prevented her from fully turning her attention to a general-election contest against Trump.

“West Virginia is a working-class state, and like many other states in this country, including Oregon, working people are hurting,” Sanders said at a rally in Salem, Ore., Tuesday night. “And what the people of West Virginia said tonight, and I believe the people of Oregon will say next week, is that we need an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”

Sanders’s advantage over Clinton in West Virginia was clear in preliminary exit polling. According to data published by CNN, roughly 1 in 3 Democratic voters identified as an independent, a group that Sanders won by nearly 40 points. Just over 1 in 4 wanted the next president to continue President Obama’s policies, less than half the share who said this across previous primaries this year. Clinton has promised repeatedly to continue to build on many of Obama’s policies and has consistently performed best among voters who support his agenda.

Sanders also benefited from support among Democratic primary voters who said they would favor Trump over Clinton or Sanders in a general election. Roughly 1 in 3 primary voters said they would back Trump in the general election over Clinton, and Sanders won two-thirds of their votes.

Clinton was weighed down by her own troubles. Three in 10 Democratic primary voters said they or a family member were employed in the coal industry, and Sanders won those voters by more than 20 percentage points. Ahead of the primary, Clinton was forced to reckon with comments she made earlier in the campaign about putting the coal industry “out of business.”

Sanders used the West Virginia victory as a rationale to stay in the race “until the last vote is cast.” Less than 15 minutes after the polls closed, Sanders sent out an email to supporters declaring victory and asking for money to help him in the next two contests in Kentucky and Oregon.

Recent polls show Sanders likely to perform well in a string of primaries this month in Oregon, Kentucky and Washington — states with smaller minority populations where Clinton may face similar challenges as in the West Virginia electorate.

Nevertheless, Clinton may have found a purpose to these contests in addition to trying to improve her performance against Sanders: to connect with the working-class white voters who may be crucial in a general-election match-up against Trump.

In the run-up to West Virginia’s primary, Clinton toured the state, holding small, intimate meetings with voters — including some detractors who challenged her on the comments she made about coal miners.

Clinton proposed tax changes that would assist families with the cost of child care — a contrast with Trump’s lack of a specific policy agenda.

Among other details, Clinton said she would limit child-care costs to no more than 10 percent of a family’s income.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Clinton said at a stop in Lexington, Ky., of the cost of high-quality care for young children and the struggles of working parents to pay for it. “It’s the most important job that any of us can do, and we’re making it really hard and really expensive.”

Bill Clinton was expected to tour Kentucky on Thursday.

The Clinton camp also sought to hold Trump to a tax platform that they called “risky, reckless and regressive,” anticipating that Trump may attempt to walk back some of those policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy.

“Donald Trump has put forward a tax plan that paces him squarely on the side of the super wealthy and corporations at the expense of the middle class and working families,” said Jake Sullivan, a senior Clinton policy adviser, in a call with reporters Monday.

Trump became the presumptive nominee after Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out following his victory in the Indiana primary last week. He has maintained a lighter schedule than usual since effectively securing the nomination. He visited West Virginia last week — only to ask Republican primary voters not to bother voting for him Tuesday.

“Save your vote for the general election, okay? Forget this one. The primary is gone,” Trump told a massive crowd in Charleston last week. He later made a swing through Oregon and Washington — continuing to target upcoming primary states while also, like Clinton, reaching out to white voters who are expected to play a big role in November.

Trump has also stepped up his attacks on Clinton. He has given her the nickname “Crooked Hillary” and has sharpened his attacks on her judgment, for instance on foreign policy, international trade deals and her vote for the Iraq War. He has also characterized her as an “enabler” of her husband’s indiscretions.

Once a Clinton stronghold, West Virginia’s political preference has shifted dramatically since she won by a landslide against Obama in the 2008 presidential primary.

Win or lose in the remaining contests, she is likely to maintain a significant lead over Sanders in both the votes and delegates necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination.

Sanders, in vowing to fight on, is eyeing the Democratic primary in California, where a huge delegate prize potentially awaits the winner on June 7. Sanders campaigned in Sacramento to a crowd of thousands on Monday. He rallied in Oregon Tuesday, and he was scheduled to campaign later in the week in South Dakota, which also votes in June.

“The political establishment is getting nervous,” Sanders said Monday. “They should be getting very nervous because real change is coming.”

Sanders made a pair of trips to West Virginia during the two weeks leading up the primary, where he emphasized jobs lost to trade deals and the persistent poverty in the state.

During his most recent trip, Sanders devoted a speech last week to the latter subject, staged at a food bank in McDowell County, where nearly half the children live in poverty. Sanders also touted a $41 billion plan to transition ailing coal workers into new industries.

In the lead-up to the West Virginia primary, Sanders also aired television ads in the state, something Clinton did not do.

Heading into Tuesday’s contest, Clinton held a formidable lead of 290 pledged delegates over Sanders, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Once superdelegates are factored in, Clinton’s lead stands at 774 delegates.

Clinton won the Democratic primary in Nebraska on Tuesday, but it was an “advisory” primary that followed caucuses in March at which Sanders won the majority of the delegates.

The more delegates Sanders accumulates between now and the Democratic convention in July, the more leverage aides say he will have in shaping the party’s platform. If he is not the nominee, Sanders has said, he would like to push Clinton to adopt his position on issues including universal health care and raising the minimum wage.

Sanders has continued to insist that he has a narrow path to the nomination that involves catching — or at least coming close to — Clinton in pledged delegates, which are allocated based on performances in primaries and caucuses. Sanders needs to win nearly two-thirds of the remaining pledged delegates to do that.

Gearan reported from Louisville and Lexington, Ky. Scott Clement, Jose A. DelReal and Emily Guskin contributed to this report.",REAL
"LAS VEGAS – The Democratic presidential candidates are holding their first debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas.

It marks the first time frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her main challenger so far – socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. – will appear on the same stage in this campaign, along with the other three candidates.

This campaign was expected to be a cakewalk for the former first lady, but it hasn't turned out that way.

One big reason seems to be the story that just won't away: how she used a private email server to conduct government business. It's fed a perception that she can play by a different set of rules.

Even so, Clinton still has a decent lead nationally over the socialist senator from Vermont, but Sanders is coming on strong. He's beating her comfortably in the key state of New Hampshire and is close in Iowa, too.

Plus, Sanders is the one drawing tens of thousands of people to his events. Democratic voters seem to be listening intently to his populist messages.

With the threat from Sanders a reality, Clinton is now trying to reposition herself a little more leftward. Just recently she came out against President Barack Obama's big Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement.

That's a reversal because while serving as secretary of state, she was for it. This new position puts her more in line with the liberal base of her party.

""As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it,"" Clinton said. ""I don't believe it's going to meet the high bar I have set.""

So, tonight the drama will center on how much Sen. Sanders and the other Democrats confront Clinton directly on the debate stage.

Expect former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley to be an instigator. He's trying to get traction and has taken some shots at Clinton over the last few months.

As for Clinton herself, she's trying to avoid a repeat of 2008 when she went in as the heavy favorite, then ran into a buzz saw called Barack Obama.

This time around the buzz is growing for Bernie Sanders.",REAL
"#InNorthDakota ~~ PALESTINIANS STAND WITH THE SIOUX 
October 26, 2016 

Palestinians know too well the threat to their own water supply …. 
As Native communities face an ongoing genocide and continue to resist the imperialist settler-colonial regime of the United States, Palestinians are too experiencing a genocide and ethnocide within our homelands from the settler-colonial state of Israel.” 
Image by Carlos Latuff “Water is life for all of us”: Palestinian activists join Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to protest DAPL Palestinians join Standing Rock Sioux to protest Dakota Access Pipeline 
Nadya Raja Tannous “Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests. In recent weeks, the state has militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, low-flying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians. The local sheriff and the pipeline company have both called our protest “unlawful,” and Gov. Dalrymple has declared a state of emergency. It’s a familiar story in Indian Country. This is the third time that the Sioux Nation’s lands and resources have been taken without regard for tribal interests. The Sioux peoples signed treaties in 1851 and 1868. The government broke them before the ink was dry. When the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1958, it took our riverfront forests, fruit orchards and most fertile farmland to create Lake Oahe. Now the Corps is taking our clean water and sacred places by approving this river crossing.” – Dave Archambault II , Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, opinion piece in the NY Times The Bakken formation in the northern United States and southern Canada is listed by US energy companies as one of the most promising options for national oil extraction, only surpassed in size by the oil fields in Alaska . The fields in North Dakota have been increasingly targeted for Bakken shale oil resources over the past years and they are quite familiar with public controversy: many of us remember the proposal of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline from 2008-2015, which was held in starkly low public opinion and struck down twice by the Obama administration . The proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is not so different from its failed counterpart. It is mapped out for the same length of 1,172 miles as the Keystone XL and is targeting the same Bakken shale reserves for carry across the upper Midwest . The proposed $3.8 billion dollar DAPL would transport 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day across four states and cross the Missouri River itself. Parent company, Energy Transfer Partners is selling the pipeline as an economic booster, job creator , and sure investment for the future of the American people. Yet, who exactly are they referring to and who did they consult? In the hills outside of Bismarck, North Dakota is the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, sitting along the banks of the Cannonball River, a tributary to the Missouri River. The pipeline construction sites can now be seen from the reservation, but many people here saw the pipeline coming before it even arrived. Just as Energy Transfer Partners and TransCanada failed to consult Native Tribes who live along the planned pipeline route and whose sacred lands, ancestral lands, and main water sources will be compromised by construction, there has not been a single tribal consultation around the proposed DAPL. On April 1st , Sacred Stone Spirit Camp was erected on the bank of the Cannonball as a residence for water protectors, many whom came from within and off the reservation to stand against pipeline construction, call for water preservation, and call for recognition of the Federal treat ies held with the Great Sioux Nation. What started out as a few hundred people quickly increased into the thousands, stemming the creation of the Oceti Sakowin and Red Warrior Camps on the other side of the Cannonball. Protectors, support, and solidarity with Standing Rock are arriving from all edges of the world, many of them representing Indigenous Nations . My own caravan set out from California the 2nd week of September, preceding the Palestinian Youth Movement-USA Caravan that arrived soon after. As a contingent of Indigenous peoples in diaspora and recent settlers on Turtle Island , we attest that those standing at Standing Rock are standing for our present and future as well. We must in turn stand for each other against the present, future, and historical supremacies of erasure, the active legacy of settler-colonialism, and the viciousness of greed. The pipeline company seems to remain unconcerned by the risk of polluting the reservation’s main water source, the highly probable degradation of land and sacred sights, and their trespass against a series of federal laws , and they are becoming increasingly reactionary to the flow of protectors in and out of the protector camps and surrounding areas. Just a few weeks ago, on September 28th, alarming images and video were released of armed police and military-style vehicles cornering protectors holding a prayer ceremony at a North Dakota construction site. The video portrayed the intensity on the ground and just how vulnerable the protector camps are without the gaze of the public eye: “They are moving in” “They won’t let us leave. They have locked us in on both sides” “They’ve got their weapons drawn” “They’ve got snipers on top of the hill” “They’re blocking me on Facebook” “They are arresting everyone now. Everyone is running” “Share this far and wide” – Transcript of LiveStream video via Unicorn Riot The militarized forces blocked the only exit from the site to the public road before arresting 21 protectors . Other attendees posted photos of a crop dusting plane releasing a gas or chemical over the crowd. There has been little clarity thereafter of the makeup of the compound or the purpose of the spray. The participation and planning of direct actions against DAPL construction, however, are continuing, with over 100 cars caravanning out to 5 construction sites the week of October 3rd and successfully halting construction for the day. Local authorities, private security hires, and the National Guard are seemingly disturbed by the presence of protectors as well, and are going out of their way to restrict access in and out of the protector camp area and intimidate newcomers. Indeed my own caravan coming from California was discouraged from approaching the reservation on the main road running from Bismarck, ND due to the checkpoints erected by North Dakota authorities. Our longwinded encounter with the highway patrol on our way to North Dakota — who insisted on not only checking all of our IDs followed by standing on the side of the highway outside of the car for an hour but also “passed our information down the line to the authorities higher-up” including suspicions of illegal activity — seemed to be motivated to dissuade an influx of supporters into the area. Stories of license plate checks, racial profiling of Native and ethnic drivers and/or car passengers, as well as arrests at roadblocks, circulated through the camps. Democracy Now , The New York Times , Huffington Post , and many independent news sources also reported these same tactics. Why did I go in the first place? Because somewhere in the awkward power dynamic of being a US citizen, a non-native inhabitant of Turtle Island , and a Palestinian in the Diaspora, I saw the struggle for livelihood and culture, the struggle against settler-colonialism, the struggle to protect the sacred and maintain your own legitimacy, and the ever ominous force of erasure and historical amnesia. What I later saw at Standing Rock both embodied this and became bigger than it; as a Mohawk Elder said to me, “Without water, we [humans] are infertile dust”. At a council fire in Oceti Sakowin during my stay, 280 Indigenous Nations were thanked for their support and representation at the camps. Movement leaders at Sacred Stone Spirit Camp have repeatedly stated that the gatherings of different Indigenous Nations near Cannonball, ND is the largest in the past 150 years on the North American continent . The council fire sits at the mouth of the main entrance of Oceti Sakowin Camp, outlined by rows of flags representing many of the Indigenous Nations who have come to stand with Standing Rock. At the end of one of the rows is the Palestinian flag. Seeing it filled me equally with joy and sadness because it confirmed two things that I had pondered throughout the long drive from California to North Dakota: the first thought is that the power of collective resistance against greed and settler-colonialism is a mighty force. That thought was embodied by my joy to see a representation of will by the presently unseen Palestinian siblings who had come to take a stand against destructive powers. The second thought was embodied by sadness for, if the struggle for protection of water, culture, land, heritage, and livelihood is truly mirrored in Standing Rock and Palestine, then the struggle ahead is both vast and uncompromising. I spoke with many inspiring protectors from the Maori in New Zealand, indigenous representatives from Ecuador, Canadian representatives from the Blackfoot Nation who were longtime activists in the “Idle No More” mobilizations, and Dakota/Lakota/Nakota from Standing Rock and the neighboring reservations among so many others. From a variety of perspectives and personal stories, the same foundational message was repeated back to me: this stand isn’t just about standing for Native rights, it is about protecting the water, protecting our earth and securing the livelihood of our next generations. Water is life for all of us. Myself and fellow members of the Palestinian Youth Movement–United States Branch had reflected on the latter thought when we authored our statement of solidarity “with the Standing Rock Sioux, the Great Sioux Nation and our other native sisters, brothers and siblings in the fight against the DAPL”, circulated on September 7th. Segments read: “We condemn all forms of state violence against our First Nation siblings and denote that the undermining of their sovereignty and livelihood is a part of the continuing dialectic of settler-colonialism transnationally. Since the arrival of settlers on Turtle Island, First Nations have resisted genocide and displacement. From seizure of land to reservations, from boarding schools to massacres, the state has done everything in its power to erase and eradicate First Nation peoples. Yet, they are still with us today and they continue to resist. Protecting their land, people, and future generations from the DAPL is a testament to their strength and resilience. …. As Native communities face an ongoing genocide and continue to resist the imperialist settler-colonial regime of the United States, Palestinians are too experiencing a genocide and ethnocide within our homelands from the settler-colonial state of Israel.” The comparisons are uncanny. I had spent most of the hours on the road to North Dakota contemplating the connections between the obstacles and oppressions facing those in Standing Rock and the obstacles and oppressions facing we Palestinians under occupation and apartheid. However, upon arriving at Standing Rock, I no longer just thought about the similarities, I felt them in my bones. When protectors at Standing Rock asked me about what Palestinians experience in our own fight against settler-colonialism , oppression, and greed, I answered sometimes through the language of statistics. Yet, more often, I told them narratives of genocide, exile, delegimitzation, broken promises, and resounding resilience. Sitting around a fire, burning sage and cedar wood, Darlene Meguinis of the Blackfoot Nation in Canada reflected on the beginnings of the Idle No More movement, in which she is still an active organizer. She told me: “Everything must start with prayer and ceremony, especially organizing.” She reminded me that the founders of Idle No More , elders Nina Waste, Jessica Gordon, Sheelah Mcleen, and Sylvia McAdams, had rooted the movement in ceremony. The result of doing so, Meguinis maintained, was to center the focus of the collective actions for change. Native youth in the #NoDAPL Youth Council at Standing Rock reiterated similar ideas about DAPL actions. Two youth leaders recounted to me, “we are striving for the results that we want to see but are being directed by our ancestors. We are here, acting now, for our children.” Intention and prayer surrounded much of the daily camp life and easily dispersed the tensions outside, even as the DAPL Company and National Guard helicopters flew low over the camps each morning, afternoon and night (something that pointedly reminded me of life in Palestine). Some mornings along the bend of the Cannonball River, which delineates Oceti Sakowin/Red Warrior Camp from Sacred Stone Spirit Camp, Native artists reflected the beauty around them in paintings and art installations. One of the organizers was Albuquerque artist Monty Singer, whose picture is shown below. The time set out to create art and music, to gather around fires and drum circles, to participate in prayer and ceremony with each other uplifted the vibrant energy of the camps and the people within them. We cheered, prayed and supported the direct actions as best we could every day; donations from across the U.S. and internationally flooded into the main entrance in the afternoons and community kitchens and donation booths ran 24/7 to maintain the swelling of protector numbers. Hundreds of people ebbed and flowed into the camps every single day. The sheer power required to uphold the movement is sobering: in light of the failed injunction by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the US Army Corps of Engineers at the lower court level, a Federal Appeals court officially halted construction of the pipeline, underlining the same temporary hold parameters as the decree proposed on September 9th by the Department of Justice (DOJ ). That hold applies solely within 20 miles on either side of Lake Oahe near the Missouri River. Other locations on the planned pipeline route are still open for construction and, though direct actions at sites of DAPL construction have not wavered, they are increasingly receiving less and less media attention with increasingly severe charges being applied to protectors. For example, the 5 protectors who strapped themselves to bulldozers at an active DAPL construction site 100 miles down Hwy 94 from the reservation during my stay at Oceti Sakowin Camp were slapped with felony charges for “criminal trespassing”, the same charges outlined against Amy Goodman in her arrest warrant as a result of her coverage of the DAPL in early September (although her charges at the time constituted a misdemeanor and were thankfully dropped October 17th after a court hearing ). Some of those arrested were even extradited back to their home states to face their charges from North Dakota in addition to preexisting protest charges in other states. My last night in Standing Rock, I spoke with a woman by the name of “Terry”, a resident of Bismarck, ND. I asked her why I had met so few non-natives from the local area at Standing Rock. Her response was direct and had very little to do with the sheriff’s implemented checkpoints and roadblocks: “It is because of the media propaganda. For example, during the dog attacks, Bismarck news covered a worker’s injury at the site and the hospitalization of a guard. No one gave popular air time or writing space to cover the effects of the dog attacks on protectors.” She mentioned that an article in the conservative paper, Town Hall , soon after the attacks read: “ So dogs were unleashed on these protestors. Good ”. She and a few others from Bismarck came to the camps because they saw past the media pressure. “We understand that the fight for clean water and recognition of Native sovereignty affects everyone in the surrounding area”, she told me, which would become increasingly apparent if oil leakage wells up in the Bakken region. In Geneva, on September 20th, Dave Archambault II, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, urged the UN Human Rights Council to stand with the tribe in opposing the DAPL project and advocate for the recognition of their sovereign rights, including the protection of water and sacred places . Protectors are remaining vigilant on and off site, many walking to pay respects to the graves of the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota ancestors that have been disturbed by construction. Martina Looking Horse, a longtime writer from Cheyenne River Reservation, has been camping at Standing Rock for over a month. She told me that she and her family plan to stay until the pipeline is defeated but stressed that the conditions at camp are not easy to live under. The torrential rainstorms, the swings of hot and cold, and the impending North Dakota winter discourage many from staying longer than a few weeks. Yet, Looking Horse affirmed her belief that she and many others will carry on, with or without the support of mainstream media. The hope, she reaffirmed, is that the national and international people of conscience will continue to support in all the ways that they can, hold the US government accountable to their promises, and not forget that the protectors are still there taking a stand. The day that I left, the PYM-United States Branch’s official caravan came into Oceti Sakowin, bringing supplies, people power, and small gifts for the tribal council as visitors to the land. They also read our statement at the tribal council fire and met many people, as I had, who stated how glad they were to see Palestinians supporting the front lines against movement suppression. The solidarity with Palestine for all of us who participated in caravans from PYM was overwhelming. What was supposed to be a few-day trip was extended into a week. Inspired by the stories, the people, the call to our moral responsibility to protect each other and the water that keeps us alive, we hope to return back to Standing Rock and bring supplies for winter. Friends of Sabeel North America also sent forward a statement of solidarity , in part remarking: “we know that settler colonialism depends on the exploitation of land and natural resources to the detriment of indigenous communities…Today, we see you, the Sioux nation and members of the other 280 Native American tribes who have joined you to protect the water of the Missouri River and stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, taking a stand for all life, the embodiment of resilience. As the Israeli occupation continues, Palestinian land is stolen, ancient olive trees are uprooted, and blood is shed, your struggle inspires our work and we redouble our efforts to witness and nonviolently resist. We stand in full support of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.” The light of hope in Standing Rock is not fizzling out. Upon returning to the Bay Area, I came across many art builds and donation efforts, and have been seeing many more events publicized by friends and family in New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Arizona. Thanks to Caleb Duarte and the wonderful youth from Fremont High School in Oakland (recently arrived unaccompanied youth from Chimeltenango, Guatemala) who made this solidarity banner: Art build in Oakland, CA : Recent unaccompanied minors from Guatemala write “Water is Life” in Maya. (Photo: Nadya Tannous) * Dignidad Rebelde woodblock print at the Oakland Art Build for Standing Rock. (Photo: Nadya Tannous) I remember thinking as I left Standing Rock to return to California: peoples suppressed by power and greed have strength when they rise together. There is a poignant uniting force through something as important as the world that sustains us. The river was quiet when I left, with lots of green and tall grass on its banks. The river flats lay muddy and fertile, the slow current reflecting the sky day and night, the water turning pink and orange by sunset. A water protector strapped to heavy machinery down the Hwy 94 shouted out , before being removed to jail, “This pipeline is a pipeline to the past. We need to be building sustainable infrastructure for the future, not destructive unsustainable industries that hurt land, that hurt water, that hurt people. Everything is wrong about this pipeline… We’re here standing in solidarity with millions of people from around the world that are against this pipeline.” (via Unicorn Riot) The collective call for justice is ringing loud and clear. Mni Wiconi –Water is life. Please support Standing Rock. Donate here to Sacred Stone Spirit Camp. Donate here to the Sacred Stone Camp Legal Defense Fund. Donate here to the next PYM caravan to Standing Rock. Source and more photos HERE Share:",FAKE
"Human remains recovered from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight 804 showed burn marks and were ""very tiny,"" suggesting an explosion brought down the plane, a senior Egyptian forensics official told the Associated Press Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a U.S. official briefed on the latest intelligence told Fox News, ""All signs continue to point to terrorism.""

The official who spoke to the AP claimed he personally examined the remains of some of the plane's 66 passengers and crew at a Cairo morgue. He said all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small and that ""there isn't even a whole body part, like an arm or a head.""

He added that at least one part of an arm had signs of burns -- an indication it might have ""belonged to a passenger sitting next to the explosion.""

The U.S. official speaking to Fox News said American satellites could have missed a potential explosion over the eastern Mediterranean. ""Contrary to popular belief, we cannot see every part of the earth all the time.""

The official said most U.S. satellites would be trained to positons on land and known areas of interest and not focused over an empty part of the sea, particularly the eastern Mediterranean.

The official would not rule out an explosion took place. To date, no terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the EgyptAir disaster.

The Airbus A320 crashed early Thursday morning near the end of a fight from Paris to Cairo.

An independent Cairo newspaper, al-Watan, quoted an unnamed forensics official Tuesday as saying the plane blew up in midair, but that it was unclear whether the blast was caused by the an explosive device or something else. The official also said the remains retrieved so far are ""no larger than the size of a hand.""

But Egypt’s head of forensics denied the statements Tuesday, Reuters reported, citing state news agency MENA.

""Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the Forensics Authority,"" MENA quoted Hesham Abdelhamid as saying.

Analysts who spoke to Fox News also said the body parts could have been broken up in a similar way upon impact with water.

Family members of the victims arrived Tuesday at a Cairo morgue’s forensics department to give DNA samples to help identify the remains of their kin, a security official said. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

An international effort to hunt for the plane's cockpit voice and data recorder resumed Tuesday, with ships and planes from Britain, Cyprus, France, Greece and the United States taking part in the search.

The search area is roughly halfway between Egypt's coastal city of Alexandria and the Greek island of Crete, where the water is 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep.

The head of Egypt's state-run provider of air navigation services, Ehab Azmy, told The Associated Press Monday that the plane did not swerve or lose altitude before it disappeared off radar, challenging an earlier account by Greece's defense minister.

Azmy, head of the National Air Navigation Services Company, said that in the minutes before the plane disappeared, it was flying at its normal altitude of 37,000 feet, according to the radar reading. ""That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar,"" he added.

""There was no turning to the right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt's FIR (flight information region), which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,"" Azmy said.

Greece's defense minister, Panos Kammenos, had said the plane swerved wildly and dropped to 10,000 feet before it fell off radar.

Greek civil aviation authorities said the flight appeared normal until air traffic controllers were to hand it over to their Egyptian counterparts. The pilot did not respond to their calls, and then the plane vanished from radars.

It was not immediately possible to explain the discrepancy between the Greek and Egyptian accounts of the air disaster.

A 2013 report by the Egyptian ministry of civil aviation records that the Airbus 320 in the crash made an emergency landing in Cairo that year, shortly after taking off on its way to Istanbul, when one of the engines ""overheated.""

It said that the EgyptAir A320 GCC took off from Cairo airport heading to Istanbul at 2:53 and that when it reached an altitude of 24,000 feet, the pilot noticed that one engine had overheated. A warning message appeared on the screen reading, ""engine number 1 stall."" After checking on best measures to take, the pilot headed back to Cairo’s airport where a maintenance engineer inspected the engine, disconnected it, and sent it to be repaired.

There were no injuries, no fire, and no damage to the plane, the report read, adding that the engine had a technical problem.

The report is one of over 60 reports classified by the ministry as incidents, serious incidents and accidents that took place between 2011 and 2014. Among them, 20 involved A320 Airbus planes, the highest among any other aircraft.

Experts contacted by AP said that while an overheated engine is not a common problem, it is unlikely to cause a crash.

David Learmount, a widely respected aviation expert and editor of the authoritative Flightglobal magazine, said, ""engine overheat is rare but it happens.""

He said that the pilot can shut down the engine and aircrafts can operate with a single engine.

""I don't think engine overheat alone has ever caused an aircraft to crash. An engine fire could cause a crash but has not done so in the modern aviation era,"" he added.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"U.S. counterterrorism officials are reviewing databases of known terror suspects and other materials after the deadly Paris shooting Wednesday morning, as the Obama administration opened the door to increasing security in the U.S. in response.

The terror attack on a satirical French publication known for lampooning Islam left at least 12 dead, and the attackers remain at large. U.S. officials already are in touch with their French counterparts.

The attackers reportedly shouted ""Allahu Akbar,"" Arabic for ""God is great, before escaping.

Two French officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, named the suspects to the Associated Press as Frenchmen Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, as well as 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

One of the officials said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.

All three remain at large.

Cherif Kouachi was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Fox News is told investigators had been reviewing terror databases, including for individuals who have traveled to Syria. They also looked to closed-circuit television and evidence from the crime scene.

In addition to identifying the suspects, the focus will be on determining whether this is isolated or part of a series of attacks.

It is thought to be an attack carried out by a small cell, which distinguishes this from recent lone-wolf attacks, including one in Ottawa, Canada, and another more recent attack in Sydney, Australia. Officials are looking at the level of premeditation, given eyewitness accounts that the gunmen asked for individuals by name as they stormed the office.

In addition, Fox News is told the assailants showed skill and familiarity with their weapons, and their escape also showed premeditation.

A Department of Homeland Security official told Fox News that the department is ""closely monitoring"" the situation.

""DHS will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people,"" the official said, urging the public to report suspicious activity to law enforcement.

However, the office of the U.S. Embassy in France tweeted that there are ""no plans"" to close the embassy in Paris or other diplomatic facilities in France despite ""misleading"" press reports.

U.S. investigators are expected to get more formally involved, but only after a request from the French government.

Based on conversations with government officials and analysts, they are looking at three categories of suspects: self-radicalized individuals; members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, specifically Al Qaeda's offshoot in North Africa known as AQIM; and those who have traveled to Syria and gotten training from Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.

The latest edition of Inspire magazine, from the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, calls for attacks on France, as well as America and other allies.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told Fox News he has confidence in French authorities who are pursuing suspects as well. ""I would think that one way or the other, they will find them,"" he said.

King also said the attack should be a ""wake-up call"" for Congress not to cut funding for DHS, despite an ongoing fight over funding the administration's immigration initiatives.

Catherine Herridge is an award-winning Chief Intelligence correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) based in Washington, D.C. She covers intelligence, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Herridge joined FNC in 1996 as a London-based correspondent.",REAL
"Email 
ISIS has declared war on Palestine, threatening genocide against the Palestinian people, following the murder of Hamas’ senior commander Saber Siam on Sunday. ISIS militants said that Siam was killed due to the fact he was “a partner in a declared war against religion and against Muslims, working for the heretical government in Gaza”. Americans.org report: The attack was conducted by ISIS-affiliated Salafist rebels who have also warned local residents to stay away from Hamas offices and buildings as it plans to carry out more attacks. The conflict between Hamas and ISIS in Gaza started when Palestinian forces demolished a makeshift mosque used by Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis in early May. Ansar al-Bayt al-Maqdis is an Egyptian Islamist group that has pledged allegiance to ISIS and has been recruiting Palestinians for the Islamic State. After demolishing the Almtahabin mosque, Hamas then arrested seven men, including a local Salafist Sheikh Yasser Abu Houli. ISIS claims it will kill Palestinians “one by one” and that it knows the names and addresses of all the officers working for the Palestinian Intelligence agency.",FAKE
"Happy Birthday, Hillary. You were destined to great things. And you knew it. *** I am astounded . I graduated in political science from the University of Naples, the university of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Giambattista Vico, and Benedetto Croce, in something like the 750 th graduating class; I have tried to keep up with the field as much as I could, even though I have preferred to concentrate on economics and political economy. I have always gotten along with the assumption that politics is ""the art of the possible."" But, let us give a good look at it. What is in this formula, if not a put down; a downgrading, so downgrading, characterization of this noble science? No wonder politics has become the art of bickering; the art of discord; the art of grasping at reefs, while we are drowning in perilous waters. No wonder, politics in the United States and much around the world has become polarized between two factions that fight for supremacy to the death. Not the death of the political class, but to the psychological and physical death of millions of people--in this country, the richest of the countries, the last best hope for mankind. Let alone the millions overseas. No wonder both the right and the left are focused on this set of policies: ""Deny them their rights; take their dignity away; give them a warm soup in a cold winter night; and go to sleep in peace."" What to say of this debasement of charity? What to say of this debasement of high morality? What to say of this debasement of politics? And there I was the other night, hearing and seeing the following words written on the screen of CNN, in their documentary on Hillary Clinton: - Advertisement - ""Politics is not the art of the possible"" politics is the art of making the impossible"" possible."" These are the words, not of Hillary of today or yesterday. These are the words of a young woman who breaks with tradition at the stodgy prestigious Wellesley College and becomes the first valedictorian in the history of that college. This is Hillary who is called to lead her class, not via invitation by academicians or administrators at Wellesley, but by her classmates who recognized the force of her leadership. This is Hillary Rodham, later to become Clinton, who throws away her prepared speech and delivers her oration extemporaneously: ""Politics is not the art of the possible"" politics is the art of making the impossible"" possible."" This is Hillary who is immediately recognized in the national press as a force of nature: woman's nature. This is a woman who could have been researching and writing and talking about political science for a lifetime. - Advertisement - This is a woman who could have climbed the rungs of academia with grace and ease. Instead"" She preferred to practice what she had discovered at such a young age. She rolled up her sleeves and went to work to make it possible for children to have a better life than the one to which they were clearly doomed by a society in thrall of control and scarcity and fear .",FAKE
"Copyright © 2016 100PercentFedUp.com, in association with Liberty Alliance | All rights reserved. Proudly built by WPDevelopers . STAY IN THE LOOP Sign up for our email newsletter to become a 100% Fed Up insider. Subscribe ",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton picked up an early if not surprising endorsement on Saturday from one of the country's largest labor unions: the American Federation of Teachers.

The executive council of the 1.6-million member AFT voted ""overwhelmingly"" in favor of backing the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, according to an announcement from the union. It marks the first endorsement from a major national labor union during the 2016 presidential campaign.

""Hillary Clinton is a tested leader who shares our values, is supported by our members, and is prepared for a tough fight on behalf of students, families and communities,"" Randi Weingarten, the union's president, said in the statement.

Weingarten and Clinton have been personal friends for years and the union threw its weight behind the Democrat during her 2008 campaign as well. In the resolution declaring its endorsement, the AFT said it polled its members twice and held two town halls before deciding which primary candidate to back.

The endorsement comes at a helpful time for Clinton as Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders surges in polls. Still considered a long shot, Sanders has proven to be an attractive candidate to progressives in the labor movement, particularly those turned off by Clinton's unclear positions on President Barack Obama's looming trade deal. A number of local labor federations are flirting with the idea of getting behind Sanders, Politico reported.

Clinton joined one of the AFT's executive council meetings last month, where she said teachers had become unfair targets of political attacks, according to the union.

""It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society's problems,"" Clinton had said. ""Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.""

Clinton plans to meet with officials from the AFL-CIO labor federation later this month to address their concerns with her unclear stance on the White House's trade pact, Reuters reported Thursday. The AFL-CIO vehemently opposed giving the president so-called fast-track authorization for the deal, though Congress ultimately granted it in June.",REAL
"What Does Trump’s Victory Mean For NATO? NPR. Charles flags the close, which is an unusually pointed admission of the basis of our imperialist project. 
Brexit 
Turkey is swiftly heading towards a regime of terror Bangkok Post (furzy) 
Trump Transition. I am trying, and hope you will help in comments, in pulling the noise out of the signal regarding what Trump will actually do when he becomes President and whether it will succeed, “success” consisting first of it being implemented and second, making him and his Administration appear to be legitimate (as in keeping campaign promises, delivering tangible benefits to voters or powerful interest groups he needs on board). Despite all the changes in messaging over the course of his campaign, Trump was consistent on immigration, trade and lack of infrastructure investment, and depicted all three as ways to improve conditions for workers. And political scientist Tom Ferguson says that the data shows that the propensity to vote for Trump was highly correlated with voters giving negative answers to questions like whether the economy or the job situation had gotten better. 
Trump and Sanders found power lying in the street by virtue of both parities abandoning high employment levels and wage growth as major policy goals. But if Trump is to deliver on his promise of delivering on those goals, he is at odds with much of his own party, which is keen to keep workers weak and preserve free trade (the corporate Republicans, particularly ones whose constituents include globalized businesses like autos, for the obvious patronage reasons; libertarians, out of ideology). Given that trade policy and immigration enforcement are areas in which the President has considerable latitude, whether and how he engages in these fights will be early tests of whether he intends to and is able to execute. 
Finally bear in mind that Trump not only has a thin bench staff wise, but also intellectually. Many of his sources of advice are ideologues who like the Brexiters in the UK, may cheerily recommend changes which might sound ducky (to them) without having the foggiest clue that the operational implications are nightmarish. For instance, I’m told the Trump transition team on policy is apparently planning on recommending that the US exit Nafta and the WTO on the first day of the Trump presidency. Pray tell, have they looked into what this means for US customs, and for US exporters dealing with foreign customs? 
In other words, the right wing think tank types that the Trump team is relying on runs the risk of being as clueless about issues of organizational capacity as the Greeks were who thought they had a trump card (pun intended) in a Grexit (for those new to Naked Capitalism, we had an extensive series of posts on this topic, see here , here and here for some examples). 
So for instance, see this BBC story: 
Trump likes main Obamacare provisions ‘very much’ , specifically, covering pre-existing conditions and letting children up to age 26. The story describes how the Republicans might oppose Trump: 
Complicating the matter is that a “revise and reform” effort may not fly with Mr Trump’s ardent supporters and the cadre of arch-conservative politicians in Congress, who want to tear up the law “root and branch”. 
Mr Trump often broke with Republican orthodoxy while campaigning and didn’t pay a political price. He may learn that as president he won’t get far without his party establishment’s help. 
In WSJ Interview, Trump Says He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Health Law Wall Street Journal. Note the heavy emphasis on job creation. This had been the Democratic party lode star through the Carter era. He also defines Pence’s job, which is to help on health care and sell Trump policies to Congress. This is similar to the role Joe Biden played. And he rejected the Administration “find those moderate Syrians” strategy.",FAKE
"Syrians wait near the Turkish border during clashes between ISIS and Kurdish armed groups in Kobani, Syria, on Thursday, June 25. The photo was taken in Sanliurfa, Turkey. ISIS militants disguised as Kurdish security forces infiltrated Kobani on Thursday and killed ""many civilians,"" said a spokesman for the Kurds in Kobani.

Residents examine a damaged mosque after an Iraqi Air Force bombing in the ISIS-seized city of Falluja, Iraq, on Sunday, May 31. At least six were killed and nine others wounded during the bombing.

Iraqi soldiers fire their weapons toward ISIS group positions in the Garma district, west of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, on Sunday, April 26. Pro-government forces said they had recently made advances on areas held by Islamist jihadists.

A member of Afghanistan's security forces stands at the site where a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up in front of the Kabul Bank in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on Saturday, April 18. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The explosion killed at least 33 people and injured more than 100 others, a public health spokesman said.

A Yazidi woman mourns for the death of her husband and children by ISIS after being released south of Kirkuk on April 8. ISIS is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions, crucifixions and other acts.

On April 1, Shiite militiamen celebrate the retaking of Tikrit, which had been under ISIS control since June. The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city.

A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.

An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.

ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.

A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.

Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.

Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.",REAL
"Dozens of police officers searched without success overnight for three suspects who shot and killed a 30-year veteran of the Fox Lake, Ill. police force.

Lt. Charles Joseph ""Joe"" Gliniewicz, 52, was shot at approximately 8 a.m. local time Tuesday after he radioed in to tell dispatchers he was chasing three men on foot in Fox Lake. Communication with him was lost soon after. Colleagues who responded found Gliniewicz shot in a marshy area near U.S. Highway 12, a main road through the village of about 10,000 people near the Wisconsin border and about 55 miles northwest of Chicago. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Lake County Undersheriff Raymond Rose told the Chicago Tribune that Gliniewicz's gun was found nearby. He added that searchers were were working with ""limited descriptions"" of the suspects, described by police as three males, two white and one black, who should be treated as armed and dangerous.

Helicopters aided about 100 officers who searched the area overnight, a sheriff's office spokesman said. Meanwhile, several schools in the area announced that they would be closed Wednesday due to the ongoing manhunt.

As the search went on, dozens gathered for hours along a street in the village to show their support for law enforcement officers.

Thirty-year-old Dan Raminick held a sign that said ""Police Lives Matter."" He lives a couple miles away and said officers came by Tuesday evening and thanked the crowd.

Caitlyn Kelly, a 22-year-old student, said she felt compelled to come out after other recent police shootings. She held a sign that said ""Blue and Brave.""

Authorities from across the state and region poured into Fox Lake throughout the day Tuesday, some wearing tactical gear and toting high-powered rifles. Federal agencies, SWAT teams and 48 police dogs assisted in the search for the suspects, Lake County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Christopher Covelli said.

Officers could be seen taking up positions on rooftops and along railroad tracks, scanning the terrain with rifle scopes and binoculars. Others leaned out of helicopters with weapons at the ready. Residents were urged to stay indoors. The service of a local commuter train was halted, and residents who wanted to take their dogs out to relieve themselves were told to stay in their homes — with the job of walking the pets handled by police officers.

An emotional Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit described the slain officer as a personal friend, a three-decade member of the department and a father of four sons.

""We lost a family member,"" Schmit said of the 52-year-old officer known around town as ""GI Joe."" ''His commitment to the people of this community has been unmatched and will be dearly missed.""

""This particular officer is a pillar in my community and definitely going to be missed, and (he) touched so many lives,"" said Gina Maria, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the community.

Gliniewicz's death is the third law enforcement fatality in Illinois this year, according to the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. It says firearms-related deaths in the U.S. are down 13 percent this year compared to the same period last year, Jan. 1. to Sept. 1; there were 30 last year and 26 this year.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from the Chicago Tribune.",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- The Senate advanced legislation Monday night to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, even though President Barack Obama has already said he would veto it.

The Senate voted 63-32 to clear a procedural hurdle and begin debate on the bill. Ten Democrats and one independent, Angus King (Maine), voted with every Republican to move the bill forward. Those Democrats included Sens. Michael Bennet (Colo.), Tom Carper (Del.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Mark Warner (Va.). A final vote is expected later this week.

Despite the strong vote, the Senate lacks the two-thirds majority vote needed to overcome a veto. The House passed the bill last week by a vote of 266 to 153 -- also shy of the 290 votes needed to clear a veto.

Congressional action on Keystone comes after the Nebraska Supreme Court cleared the way last week for the proposed pipeline's route through the state. The Obama administration had been waiting for the Nebraska ruling to render its own decision on the pipeline, which is still forthcoming.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Friday that the State Department is examining the court's decision as part of its process to evaluate whether the Keystone XL Pipeline project serves the national interest.

""As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out,"" Schultz said. ""Regardless of the Nebraska ruling today, the House bill still conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests, and if presented to the President, he will veto the bill.""

This article has been updated to include additional details on which senators voted to move the bill forward.",REAL
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter I’ve always dreamed of having my own indoor garden so that I can be self-sufficient during winter, but I live in a tiny apartment and have no room for a hydroponic system… Or so I thought! Thanks to the NutriTower , this dream of mine is now possible! The NutriTower The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system specifically designed for indoor use. It is the first system to use the patent-pending vertical lighting design. This technology allows you to grow more food than ever before without taking up valuable floor space! In just under 2 square feet of floor space, with up to 48 pots, it’s the most efficient method of growing food on the market. 

The NutriTower is a vertical hydroponic system that is simple, elegant and efficient. The patent-pending vertical lighting design and the gravity fed nutrient delivery system make this the most effective way of growing food in your home year round. Strong custom extruded aluminium frame The only system with vertical lighting Energy efficient high output bulbs Standard 24 pot layout is highly customizable Pots are easily removed for maintenance Gravity does most of the work Large reservoir means less maintenance Quiet pump runs only a few minutes each hour Individual timers so you’re in control Small footprint allows it to be placed anywhere 
The NutriTower is designed to be flexible to its users needs. You can customize your systems to be more oriented toward leafy greens or fruits and vegetables or a m i x ! Because it is a hydroponic system, there is no messy soil to deal with. 
My friends from the Valhalla Movement who have personally seen and interacted with the system have loved it so much they will use it in their own greenhouse inspired earthship ! If you are still not convinced why this system is awesome, click here to learn 8 reasons why the food revolution might happen in your kitchen!",FAKE
"US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo US abstains from UN vote calling for end to Cuban embargo By 0 94 
The US government abstained from the UN vote on a resolution calling for an end to the US economic embargo against Cuba, for the first time in 24 years. 
The 193-member General Assembly adopted the resolution with 191 votes in favor on Wednesday. The only other abstention, besides the US, was Israel. The vote is non-binding but it can have political weight. 
Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described the abstention as a “positive step for the future of improving relations between the United States and Cuba,” according to Reuters. 
Rodriguez said in September that the embargo cost Cuba $4.6 billion last year, and the full damage over the length of the 50-year embargo was estimated at $125.9 billion. 
When it was first announced that the US government would abstain from the vote, the entire General Assembly applauded. 
“Abstaining on this resolution does not mean that the United States agrees with all of the policies and practices of the Cuban government. We do not,” Samantha Power the US Ambassador to the United Nations told the General Assembly on Tuesday. 
“We are profoundly concerned by the serious human rights violations that the Cuban government continues to commit with impunity against its own people,” she said, according to AP. 
The Obama administration began normalizing relations with the Communist-run country in at the end of 2014, easing trade and travel restrictions. On July 20, 2015, diplomatic relations were restored, and embassies in the two countries were reopened. 
Lifting the full embargo will take the support of the Republican-run Congress, which remains critical of the administration’s efforts, arguing it offered too many concessions to Cuba and accepted little in return, especially on human rights and the restoration of expropriated property. 
Obama made the first visit to Havana by a US president in 88 years in March. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"By Wes Williams Election 2016 , Politics , Videos October 27, 2016 Young Turks Finds Out Why Trump Is About To Lose Utah For Republicans For First Time In Decades (VIDEO) Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
Utah. It is one of, if not the most conservative states in the nation, largely thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons. And as such it is usually a solid, bright red state on the electoral maps. Utah has gone for the Democratic presidential candidate exactly once in the past 64 years — in the anti-Goldwater wave of 1964. But this year it is possible that Utah will not be in the Republican column when the votes are added up. That is, at least not in the Republican column headed by Donald Trump, who is largely being rejected by voters in the Beehive State. 
Many Utah voters with strong religious beliefs are not happy with Trump, and unlike many Christian evangelical leaders who have decided to stay hitched to his wagon despite the allegations of improper sexual conduct, Utahans are bolting, putting the state in play. The Young Turks sent Michael Shure to the state to find out what was on people’s minds, and what many of them had to tell him was quite clear — they don’t think Trump is a good representative of their Christian beliefs. 
None of the young Utahans Shure spoke to said they planned to vote for Trump. Some said they would vote for Gary Johnson. One college student indicated that he would consider a vote for Hillary. But the name that seemed to come up more than any others was Evan McMullin. 
McMullin is the Republican who is running an independent campaign for president. He is also a Mormon, which gives him a huge advantage in Utah. Some recent polls of the state have McMullin polling even with Clinton, but still trailing Trump. But as Benjamin Morris notes at FiveThirtyEight, there are questions about the methodology of those polls that could mean McMullin’s support in Utah is even greater than he is getting credit for. 
Whether McMullin wins in Utah or whether Trump is able to squeak out a razor thin victory, one thing is certain: unlike many of their traditional “Christian” counterparts in the deep south and the rest of the Rocky Mountain region, many Mormons want no part of Trump or his policies, which some of them were quite willing to tell Shure that they considered to be un-Christian. Not only will a loss of Utah further hurt Trump’s slim chances of winning the White House, a McMullin win there would make him a footnote in future history books as the first third-party candidate since George Wallace in 1968 to win electoral votes. 
Here’s Michael Shure’s report on the mood in Utah, via YouTube: 
Featured image via George Frey/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by DCG | 2 Comments 
This guy is full of hot air. 
Via NY Post : The de Blasio administration is trying to limit the number of food trucks in the city by claiming that each hot-dog and kabob cart causes more pollution than a truck ride to Los Angeles. 
Deputy Health Commissioner Corinne Schiff made the claim at a City Council hearing Wednesday, in an apparent effort to sink a bill that would nearly double the number of food-vendor permits in the city by 2023 . 
“Meat grilling is a significant source of air pollution in the city,” Schiff said. “One additional vendor grilling meat emits an amount of particle pollution in one day equivalent to what a diesel truck emits driving 3,500 miles.” 
The new bill would boost the number of permits to 8,000 by 2023 and also create an enforcement team to sniff out violations. 
Since 1983, the number of street-food vending permits has remained steady at 4,235. But there are likely more carts than that on the streets, as some vendors simply open shop without a license and work until they are caught. 
Schiff argued any increase in the number of food carts needs to come with regulations stipulating that the carts operate in a more environmentally friendly manner. 
City Councilman Mark Levine (D-Manhattan), who is sponsoring the bill to increase the permits, wondered if this was already the case. “We have laws in the city about air quality that currently stipulate that any food establishment has got to have a hood over a grill,” Levine said. “Is that not currently the law?” 
Schiff, however, said there are no such laws regulating the carts as she suggested the proposals be delayed to ensure better pollution safeguards. 
“We really see this as an opportunity to work with the council to think through how we might use this modernization act to improve air quality,” she said. “The current laws don’t actually control the emissions that we’re concerned about.” 
Business-improvement districts and residents throughout the city also pushed for delays on increasing vendor permits, saying there are too many already in some neighborhoods, but welcomed increased enforcement. 
“The enforcement idea is a great idea,” said Ellen Baer, co-chair of the NYC BID Association. “Let’s see if this works, let’s see how it works, let’s see if it’s sufficiently funded, let’s see how many resources they need — before we start adding to the chaos.” 
But street vendors argued they’ve waited too long for reforms that would allow them to transition from operating illegally to legally. 
Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendor Project, described the bills as “far from our dream,” but said he supports most of what they call for. “It is a reasonable compromise,” he said. “Vendors have been waiting 35 years for this change . . . We certainly welcome a study being done, but we don’t think that should delay the progress that needs to be made. The time for reform is now.” 
Before the hearing, some vendors rallied outside, demanding that city officials and police stop harassing them and treating them like criminals . The bill will remain before the committee while members discuss possible changes.",FAKE
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"People who don't believe that unauthorized immigrants in the US should be given legal status tend to emphasize that it would be unfair to immigrants who are in the US legally — because they deserve a reward for settling in the US ""the right way.""

But what if the legal immigration process is itself unfair?

A new study by researchers at MIT and Brown University suggest that might be what's going on — unintentionally. They looked at applications for employment-based green cards among immigrants who were already in the US. What they found was that, in the standard approval process, Latin American immigrants were much less likely than average to get approved — and Asian immigrants were more likely. But when the government went through a slower but more complete approval process, the disparities disappeared.

For this study, the researchers (Emilio J. Castilla of MIT, and Ben A. Rissing of Brown) evaluated the phase in an application for an employment-based green card where the US Department of Labor has to approve or deny the immigrant's ""labor certification"" for a particular job. These applications get filed when a company decides to take an immigrant who's (almost always) already in the country on a temporary visa — like a work visa or student visa — and sponsor him or her for a green card, which would let him or her stay in the US permanently and eventually apply for citizenship. So this is the phase in the process where temporary immigrants can get approved to become permanent ones.

Technically, this is supposed to be evaluating the immigrant's would-be employer, not the immigrant him- or herself. In order to get the immigrant ""labor certified"" for a green card — or any work visa — the would-be employer has to prove that they tried to find a US citizen to fill the job, but failed.

One thing that isn't supposed to be a factor in the application is the immigrant's country of origin. But even when the researchers controlled for as many variables as they could — from the temporary visa that an immigrant held in the US when he filed the green-card application, to the skill level of the job — they found that approval rates varied widely from one nationality to the next. 90.5 percent of Asian immigrants were approved for labor certification. But only 66.8 percent of Latin American immigrants were.

The regional disparity even showed up in immigrants applying for the same type of job. ""Immigrants from Asia seeking employment as restaurant cooks are 41.6 percent more likely to be approved than immigrants from Latin America, all else being equal,"" the researchers write. It's a problem for high-skilled workers, too: Asian immigrants weren't any more likely than Canadians (for example) to get approved to work as computer software engineers, but Latin American immigrants were over 25 percent less likely.

The biggest problem with the study: the government agents looking over immigrants' applications could see each immigrant's educational background, but the researchers couldn't. That could be a huge factor explaining the variation: maybe Latin American immigrants are simply less educationally qualified for the positions they're applying for.

But the study indicates that can't be the whole story. For example, the researchers looked at immigrants who were already on H1-B high-skilled visas (99 percent of whom have a bachelor's degree or higher) but were applying to upgrade to green cards. Among that group, Asian immigrants were still 11 percent more likely than Canadians to get approved for green cards — and H1B-holding Latin American immigrants were 20 percent less likely.

There's also previous research showing that government officials profile immigrants based on their countries of origin. In one study, in which officials were asked to look over fictional visa applications, the author said that region of origin was being used strongly as a ""criterion of a visa applicant's desirability.""

Most of the time, the DOL makes decisions based on basic information about the immigrant, the job, and the employer, as well as evidence of the employer's failed attempt to recruit US citizens. 90 percent of those cases get approved, and they're typically approved or denied in under 4 months. But in a few cases — thanks to a process that is partly random, and partly not — applications are ""audited,"" and agents take a more in-depth look at an immigrant's background, and the requirements for the position. In those cases, only 57 percent of applications are approved — and it takes about 2 years to come to a decision.

According to the new study, audited applications had one big advantage over non-audited ones: the disparities in approval rates between immigrants from different regions disappeared. That might indicate that whatever is happening to favor Asian immigrants and disfavor Latin American ones in the quicker process is unintentional, since government officials don't appear to think there's good reason to be more suspicious of Latin American applicants.

The study's authors suggest an easy fix: making it impossible for an official to see an applicant's country of origin, just like officials aren't allowed to see applicants' ages or sexes. If this really is a significant problem, however, it's not something that changing the process in the future will be able to fix.

If the government is really making it harder for Latin American immigrants currently in the US legally to get green cards through their employers, they're unfairly forcing Latin American immigrants to make the difficult choice between leaving the country they've been living in for years, and staying in the US after their visas expire. In other words, the government's approval-rate problem might be driving more legal Latin American immigrants to become illegal.",REAL
"Tweet Widget by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon 
President Donald Trump? How did such a thing happen? A competent and purposeful Clinton campaign should have beaten Donald Trump. How did Hillary Clinton and one-percenter Democrats snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory? America Might Not Deserve Trump, But Dems and Hillary Deserved To Lose by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon 
It’s over. The crotch-grabbing racist con man beat the lying corporate warmonger. Donald Trump is president-elect of the US. 
It didn’t have to happen that way. Trump’s winning 58 million votes were a hair fewer than Clinton’s popular vote, a million or two less than Republican losers McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, six and ten million behind Obama’s 2012 and 2008 numbers. The buffoonish Trump was elected with such a low turnout because Hillary Clinton’s campaign was even less competent and credible. To borrow the condescending language Barack Obama deploys before black audiences, Hillary’s campaign never gave Cousin Pookie much reason to get up off the couch and vote. 
Republican and Democratic parties are alike owned by their one-percenter investor/contributors. Democratic party shot callers decided they’d risk losing with Hillary Clinton rather than winning with Bernie Sanders. So Democratic party leadership, their media allies and the entire black political class got behind Hillary Clinton and helped collude and conspire to eliminate VT Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democrat with the best chance against any Republican opponent. 
Once Bernie Sanders was eliminated Hillary waged a lazy and ineffective campaign, playing a hand with just three cards. 
The first was the broken record of how unthinkable and unprecedented a disaster a Trump presidency would be… a clownish sexual predator who pronounced climate change a hoax and would criminalize abortion, open concentration camps, repeal Obamacare, legalize stop and frisk, build a wall, appoint neanderthals to the Supreme Court, deport six or ten million immigrants instead of Obama’s paltry two million and who might be in hock to the Russians. Except for the thing about the Russians, it’s roughly the same picture Democrats have drawn of every Republican presidential candidate since Nixon. A story told that many times just gets old. Party leaders counted on it anyway, and it wasn’t enough. That was incompetence. 
A second and relatively weak card Democrats played was conjuring up an Imaginary Hillary Clinton, a defender of womens’ and human rights who held hands with the moms of killer cop victims, and occasionally mumbled about black lives mattering and the need to reform the criminal justice system. But Hillary’s decades-long record as a tool of banksters, billionaires and one-percenters was so well established in the public mind that Imaginary Hillary was a difficult sell, not credible. 
The one-percenter Democrats’ third card, on which they staked a lot was the early and unconditional endorsement of Hillary Clinton by   and Michelle. This had proven effective in Chicago in 2011 and 2015 where Obama’s blessings in 2011 and 2015 were key to fastening Rahm Emanuel on the city’s jugular vein after a half century of Daley rule. The entire black political class got behind Hillary too, from civil rights icons who ruminated on how they hadn’t seen Bernie Sanders back in the day to some other wise heads who assured us a vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka was an act of “ narcissism ” or maybe white privilege . But at the end of  ’s time in office, the Obama endorsement didn’t carry the clout it used to. 
Thanks to two generations of lazy Democrats who refused to try to consolidate the victory of the 1965 Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court in 2013 nullified its key provisions, enabling a constellation of laws and practices aimed at limiting access to the ballot on the part of students, minorities, the elderly and constituencies likely to vote Democratic. In the 2016 election cycle these practices stripped another few million Democratic voters from the rolls. 
All in all, Democrats were the authors of their own defeat this presidential election. Hillary couldn’t campaign against the one percent because her party is a party of the one percent. Hillary Democrats including Bernie himself after the convention could no longer acknowledge joblessness, low wages, lack of housing, permanent war or the high cost of medical care or they’d be campaigning against themselves. 
Donald Trump didn’t win because of some mysterious upsurge of racism and nativism. He won because Hillary Clinton’s campaign was even less inspiring and less competent than his own, and worked hard to snatch its own defeat from the jaws of victory. America might not deserve President Donald Trump. But Hillary Clinton didn’t deserve to win, Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and co-chair of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached  ",FAKE
"When Hillary Clinton can study up, work out her one-liners, figure out the best way to deflect questions and fence with inquisitors she does well. She thrives, therefore, in a debate or as a witness. She is the quintessential “A” student. No one will cram harder before the big exam than she.

Left to her own devices, however, she is consistently her own worst enemy. Before she worked out her lines, spontaneous answers about her finances (“We were broke”) or her initial stance toward the Benghazi scandal (“What difference does it make . . .?) disastrous. Refusing to take scandals seriously, her first attempts at brushing back the press come across as evasive, haughty and just plain false. In supposedly friendly settings, with her guard down, she winds up saying ludicrous things that come back to haunt her.

If not for Jeb Bush’s self-immolation this week, more attention would have been paid to yet another clueless Clinton moment. Asked about the Veterans Administration scandal in a softball MSNBC interview, she argued that “it’s not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.” She claimed Republicans were exploiting the situation and wanted the VA to “fail.” Her instinct to cast blame and attack political opponents renders her entirely tone deaf at times.

As you will recall, the scandal first uncovered in Phoenix turned into a nationwide investigation, forcing out the secretary and prompting new legislation. (From the Arizona Republic: “The Office of Inspector General concluded that hundreds of thousands of patients were subjected to unacceptable delays in care, and many died while awaiting appointments; wait-time records were falsified or inaccurate at 70 percent of the VA facilities nationwide; and department leadership was contaminated by bullying, reprisal and a lack of accountability. The public furor forced out VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and other administrators, while prompting the largest reform in department history.”)

It is incomprehensible that she would want to downplay the suffering of vets. A series of officials at veterans groups decried her comment. Stars and Stripes reported:

Veterans groups lobbed criticism at Clinton this week for being out of touch with veterans issues. The conservative group Concerned Veterans for America charged Clinton with downplaying and ignoring the VA’s problems. Paul Rieckhoff, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, called her comments on the VA a “head-scratcher.” The VA scandal that began last year with an agency cover-up of health care delays “was so widespread it has its own Wikipedia entry,” Rieckhoff tweeted Tuesday.

And lawmakers on both sides of the aisle lashed out. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said he was “appalled.” Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) declared, “The problems we’ve seen at the Phoenix VA are devastating and real. The VA scandal has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with systemic failure, negligence and lack of accountability.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted her, observing that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose Senate committee investigated the VA, was better on veterans issues than Clinton.

Her campaign tried to assure us she understands how “systematic” the problem is. No apology or correction from her was forthcoming.

[Opinion: Republicans are right. We in the media do suck.]

Now imagine if Republicans had said, well “Democrats are just exaggerating the impact of Hurricane Katrina.” The mainstream hardly blinked when it was Clinton, fresh from passing her endurance test at the House select committee on Benghazi.

The Republican opposition research team America Rising later put out a devastating ad, recounting one news report after another detailing the abuses, corruption and ensuing deaths. It ends with McCain saying, “She doesn’t understand veterans, she doesn’t understand what they need, and she is politicizing the issue. Shame on her.”

This episode reminds us of Clinton’s severe limitations as a candidate. It also should prompt Republicans to recognize the media is back in Clinton-rooting mood. Her outlandish statements will become headlines like: “Republicans try to exploit…” The media will shrug its collective shoulders at her inaccuracies and outright deceptions. This is all the more reason to find a superbly skilled nominee, one who can focus on her liabilities and cut through the media chatter.

At the recent debate and in subsequent interviews, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) used his time in the spotlight to focus on the evidence that immediately after the Benghazi attack she told family members and the Egyptian prime minister it was a terrorist attack while the administration perpetrated a false cover story for weeks.

Republicans cannot repeat often enough evidence of her ethical lapses and shoddy record. The press sure isn’t going to dwell on it.",REAL
"State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that an unknown U.S. official made a request over the phone to delete several minutes of a December 2013 video of the exchange between reporters and a State Department spokeswoman. The State Department routinely posts on its site the briefing that it holds nearly every day with the diplomatic press corps.

Kirby said the department technician who made the edit could not recall who requested it.

The deleted portion of the video involves questions about a previous press briefing in 2012 in which then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland denied secret talks between the U.S. and Iran about a potential nuclear deal were taking place.

After it was revealed in December 2013 that secret talks between the U.S. and Iran actually had taken place, then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki admitted the administration lied in order to protect the secret negotiations.

Earlier this month Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes acknowledged to The New York Times that the administration was deceptive about the talks, creating a ""narrative"" that they did not take place. When James Rosen of Fox News -- who asked the original questions of Psaki -- tried to refer back to the video last month, he found the exchange had been deleted. Kirby, who originally called the deletion a ""glitch,"" said Wednesday that he asked State Department lawyers to look into the matter after being notified about the omission. ""They learned that a specific request was made to excise that portion of the briefing. We do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made,"" Kirby said. Another senior State Department official said the technician found the request ""unusual"" and consulted her supervisor before making the edit. The supervisor, who also could not remember the name of the person who called, approved the request because it came from someone ""from a certain level and credibility"" in the Department of Public Affairs. ""Although this person did not remember the person who called her, or the person they were calling on behalf of, she remembers it was not (Jen) Psaki,"" this official said. ""Jen did not request it, did not know about it and had nothing to do with it."" Psaki, who now is the White House communications director, tweeted Wednesday that she was unaware of the episode: ""I had no knowledge of nor would I have approved of any form of editing or cutting my briefing transcript on any subject while @StateDept."" Kirby noted that the full briefing transcript, including the exchange on Iran, had always been available on the State Department website and that the omitted video has since been replaced with a complete version that had been archived with the Defense Department. He said that was the only instance he was aware of in which briefing videos were edited, though he couldn't be sure there weren't others. He announced a new policy Wednesday in which every video would be posted immediately with all edits disclosed. ""To my surprise, the Bureau of Public Affairs did not have in place any rules governing this type of action,"" he said. ""Therefore, we are taking immediate steps to craft appropriate protocols on this issue, as we believe that deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is not in keeping with the State Department's commitment to transparency and public accountability."" Because such rules weren't previously in place, Kirby said he found ""no reason"" to press forward with a more formal investigation.",REAL
"In a jobs report that may influence the Federal Reserve's decision on interest rates, the Labor Department says that 271,000 jobs were added in October. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 5 percent, according to the report from the agency's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's the biggest one-month jobs gain in all of 2015, according to Bloomberg News, which adds that the strong result is one of the positive signs the Fed's economists ""are looking for as they consider a year-end boost in borrowing costs.""

Friday's announcement tops economists' consensus expectations, which had forecast a modest gain of about 180,000 jobs.

Speaking in Congress this week, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen left open the possibility of an interest rate hike, while also saying it would be ""very gradual."" Citing good economic results, Yellen said there is a ""live possibility"" that policymakers might raise rates when the Fed meets in mid-December.

Last month, the Labor Department reported that only 142,000 jobs were created in September, with unemployment holding at 5.1 percent. With today's announcement, the BLS said the job-creation number was being revised to 137,000.

October's job growth occurred ""in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction,"" the Bureau of Labor Statistics says.

As for wages, the month also brought a 9-cent rise in the average hourly earning rate, with workers on private nonfarm payrolls now making an average of $25.20, according to the BLS, which adds that for the group, ""hourly earnings have risen by 2.5 percent over the year.""

The agency also says that the number of people who are ""involuntary part-time workers"" due to reduced hours or the difficulty of finding a full-time job ""edged down by 269,000 to 5.8 million in October.""",REAL
"For weeks, Hillary Clinton has looked for the knockout blow that finally forces Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic primary.

She may have gotten it tonight in Kentucky.

Sanders has to start winning every state by a landslide victory to have even a mathematical chance of catching Clinton's nearly 300-delegate lead. Kentucky was called for Clinton as an ""apparent winner"" at around 9:30 pm by NBC and after 10 pm by Kentucky's secretary of state, who called her the ""unofficial winner.""

Sanders has maintained that he'll stay in the race until the end of voting, and we don't have any new reason to believe he'll fly the white flag after Clinton's victory tonight. And his hard-line response to the Democratic Party over this weekend's events in Nevada certainly doesn't suggest he's ready to call it quits.

But Sanders needed to win Kentucky to maintain an increasingly far-fetched path to the Democratic nomination. The fact that he lost tonight — albeit by what appears to have been a very small margin — will only dramatically increase the calls for him to exit the race.

The loss is particularly tough for Sanders's campaign given that Kentucky was one of the more favorable states for him remaining in the race.

""Given the West Virginia results, I think Sanders is probably favored,"" said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics in an interview Tuesday morning, before voting began. ""Sanders has a very good chance in Kentucky.""

Sanders will probably face steeper odds in the upcoming contests in California and New Jersey, where have polls have Clinton leading by as much as double digits. Polling from Kentucky was scarce, but the state's largely white and rural voters were widely expected to break for Sanders — as they have throughout the country.

Kentucky has a large number of registered Democrats who are much more conservative than the rest of the party, a group that has in other states backed Sanders in part as a ""protest vote"" against the party's establishment, according to Kondik.

""More than half of Kentucky’s registered voters are signed up with the Democratic Party, even though the state’s election results have hewed decidedly Republican in recent years,"" wrote the polling firm Morning Consult in a preview of tonight's contest ""That’s an indication of the rightward shift of downscale whites, especially in once union-heavy Coal Country; those are voters who used to call themselves Yellow Dog Democrats.""

These voters broke for Sanders by a big margin in West Virginia, and they very well may have in Kentucky as well. But even if they did, it does not appear to have been enough to offset the big difference between Kentucky and West Virginia: diversity.

African-American voters are far more numerous in Kentucky — in part because of its cities, like Louisville and Lexington. (Kentucky's 2008 primary electorate was 9 percent black, compared to just 3 percent in West Virginia.)

Black voters have rescued Clinton's campaign since her first big win in South Carolina in February. And, tonight, they may have helped push her opponent out of the race.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly said Kyle Kondik works for the Center for Responsive Politics, rather than the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.",REAL
"Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of the new book ""Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Obama has called the Islamic State the ""face of evil"" but he's now under pressure from those who say he's not doing enough to beat it. Some insist that an attack on France was an attack on NATO and that it's time to go to war.

But only a fool would confuse caution for weakness. On the contrary, to defeat the enemy we have to fully understand who the enemy is, what they want and what kind of conflict we're involved in here. There are good reasons to proceed cautiously.

To clear something up: We are effectively at war with ISIS right now. A U.S.-led coalition has been bombing targets in Syria and Iraq for over a year, and in recent months Russia has been doing the same. How well it's worked is disputed: Obama has rhetorically shifted his objectives from crushing Isis to containing it.

Nevertheless, late last week there were signs of success. The Kurds took Sinjar , a strategically significant area in northern Iraq. Mohammed Emwazi, a vicious killer and propagandist, was likely killed in a drone strike.

Paris has obviously eclipsed the news of these breakthroughs.

Who or what are we fighting? ISIS is different from al Qaeda, the group behind 9/11. The latter operated as an alliance of cells spread across the world; ISIS, by contrast, seeks to create a geographic space within which to build a caliphate. This shift in strategy perhaps explains why ISIS has been even more successful than al Qaeda at hitting so many different foreign targets with so many different methods -- from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.

ISIS' caliphate offers a haven for tens of thousands of foreign jihadists: They come, they train and then many return home to create havoc. The caliphate also provides money and the moral encouragement of having an earthly ""paradise"" to fight for. In his groundbreaking essay on the motivations behind ISIS, Graeme Wood describes an ISIS recruiter calling it ""a vehicle for salvation.""

Its fighters are obsessed with recreating Islam in its earliest form ( or as they interpret it to have been, because the early caliphate was far kinder ) and believe that most other Muslims have fallen from the standard -- one that includes the uses of crucifixion and slavery. Whereas al Qaeda limited itself to comparatively rational political objectives, like expelling Westerners from the Arab peninsula, ISIS wants to bring on the apocalypse. It is not nihilist. It is deeply — if distortedly -- religious and we need to learn to take its brand of religion seriously.

The good news is that ISIS is isolated. Applying the phrase ""world war"" here is unhelpful because it conjures images of rival, equally sized nation states engaged in total war. But while ISIS' reach is global, it does not command sizable support beyond its shifting boundaries. Meanwhile, the alliance against it is one of the largest and most diverse in history, including America, Britain, France, Russia and Iran.

Saudi money may well have once supported it but the Saudi state is now opposed. Indeed the exceptional evil of ISIS leads us to view many of the regional political agendas in a different light. Iran, for instance, certainly is exporting its theocratic government to other countries. But it doesn't desire the end of the world. The regime is murderous and must be contained. But it can be engaged.

The complexity of Islamic world politics highlights another aspect of this conflict: It cannot be resolved entirely by force of arms. ISIS has exploited Sunni dissatisfaction with the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. This may mean Iraq as a whole has to be split up to work. Turkey probably has to accommodate Kurdish desires for a homeland . And, most importantly of all, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria, will have to depart the stage.

There can be no constructive government of Syria until there is law, order and democratic elections that legitimize proper opposition parties. If we give rebels the impression that the West wants to force Assad on them again, they will resist us, too.

Finally, there is the question of how we handle the Islamic presence within Europe itself. This is partly a matter of improving security measures and making sure returnees from Syria don't just disappear into the crowd. There's also a refugee crisis to confront. But while the demographic pressures and security problems of allowing hundreds of thousands of people to cross Europe have to be addressed in a firm way, there's no escaping the fact that a large, settled part of the EU's population is now Islamic.

And how we respond to ISIS has consequences for interfaith relations.

Some American politicians have suggested a religious test for refugees seeking access to the United States. This kind of prejudiced rhetoric adds to that false sense that this is a world war-style clash between conservative Muslims on one side and Christian democracies on the other. It is also unChristian and cruel. Moreover, while Americans might fear Islamification as an existential concept, we here in Europe have actual experience of living with Muslims -- and I can report that the living is easy.

Muslims are our friends, family and co-workers. They fear and despise ISIS as much as anyone else. And those of us in the center-ground of European politics are determined not to alienate, or discriminate against, citizens who are 100% British, French or German.

Of course, it is equally irritating to see politicians who seem to counsel doing nothing and Westerners lacerating themselves because they believe their countries are to blame for all the evil in the world. ISIS is evil -- real, concrete evil. It must be stopped. But we must proceed carefully, with a grand game plan and with the desire to build just and representative Arab regimes that last. The legacy of poorly chosen words or unilateral action is there for all to see.",REAL
"EDITOR'S NOTE: Orlando's mayor on Monday revised the death toll in the nightclub shooting to 49, from 50. The 50th body was identified as gunman Omar Mateen.



A gunman who pledged allegiance to ISIS opened fire early Sunday morning in a packed Orlando nightclub, killing 50 people and wounding at least 53 more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack Sunday afternoon via its Amaq news agency, Reuters reported. Amaq said an ""Islamic State fighter"" carried out the assault. It was not clear, however, if the shooting was actually directed by the terror group or only inspired by it.



The attack in Orlando at Pulse, which bills itself as ""the hottest gay bar"" in the city and was packed with more than 300 people for ""Latin Night,"" was reported minutes after 2 a.m. Sunday.

It ended hours later when police stormed the building and killed the shooter.

Dozens of partygoers remained hostage in the club for several hours after the initial shooting, prompting SWAT teams to rush inside. Shortly after 6 a.m. local time, Orlando police tweeted that the gunman had been killed. Authorities said there was not believed to be any further threat to the area.

""We know enough to say this was an act of terror and an act of hate,"" President Obama said in a speech from the White House on Sunday, cautioning that it was still early in the investigation.

House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement that the timing and location of the attack and information coming from local authorities indicated ""an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism.""

""The fact that this shooting took place during Ramadan and that ISIS leadership in Raqqa has been urging attacks during this time, that the target was an LGBT night club during Pride, and – if accurate – that according to local law enforcement the shooter declared his allegiance to ISIS, indicates an ISIS-inspired act of terrorism,"" Schiff said. ""Whether this attack was also ISIS-directed, remains to be determined. I’m confident that we will know much more in the coming hours and days.""

The gunman, Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, was heard shouting ""Allah Akbar"" while engaging officers, law enforcement sources told Fox News. Mateen also called 911 during the shooting to pledge allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fox News reported.

Mateen was interviewed three times by FBI agents -- twice in 2013, once in 2014 -- as part of two separate investigations, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron Hopper said. However, both inquiries proved inconclusive and the cases were closed.

Mateen was not under surveillance or the subject of an active investigation at the time of the shooting, Hopper said.

The 2013 investigation was related to comments Mateen allegedly made to a co-worker ""alleging possible terror ties."" FBI agents were unable to ""verify the substance"" of his comments, Hopper said.

Mateen was also interviewed in 2014 due to his ties to an American man who later drove an explosive-laden truck into a restaurant in Syria for an Al Qaeda affiliate. Mateen and the suicide bomber, Monar abu Salha, attended the same mosque, however, the FBI determined their contact ""was minimal,"" Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Mike

 McCaul told Fox News.



Mateen was a U.S. citizen, Rep. Alan Grayson said during a Sunday morning news conference, though that was ""not true of other family members of his."" Mateen, 29, lived in Fort Pierce, Fla. He was born in New York to parents of Afghan origin and was a Muslim, Fox News confirmed.

Mateen was married in 2009 to a woman who was born in Uzbekistan, according to the couple's marriage license, but the two divorced in 2011.



""He was not a stable person,"" the ex-wife, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post. ""He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.""

A mortgage form from 2013 lists Noor Salman as his wife and Mateen also had a 3-year-old son. Mateen appears to have had no criminal record.



A licensed security officer, Mateen also had a statewide firearms license. He purchased two guns -- a handgun and a long gun -- legally during the week before the shooting, an ATF official said.

The FBI was scouring Mateen's cellphone and electronic devices on Sunday afternoon to identify any possible terrorist connections. This includes searching for any traces of propaganda, scrubbing of his web browsing history, and running down communications with individuals via social media and mobile messaging apps.

As victims poured through their doors, Orlando Regional Medical Center officials called in six trauma surgeons, including a pediatric surgeon, Dr. Michael Cheatham said. Many of the wounded were ""critically ill"" due to their injuries, Cheatham said, and the hospital was trying to reach out to their families.

""I think we will see the death toll rise,"" Cheatham told The Associated Press.



Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in Orange County following the attack and asked for a moment of silence throughout the country at 6 p.m. on Sunday.



""This is an attack on our people,"" Scott tweeted around 11:40 a.m. ""It's an attack on Orlando. It's an attack on FL. It's an attack on America. It's an attack on all of us.""



Chief John Mina of the Orlando Police Department said officers were initially engaged in a gun battle outside the club before the suspect, armed with a handgun and ""assault-type rifle,"" went back into the building, where more shots were fired. He said the gunman then took several hostages.

""It appears he was organized and well-prepared,"" Mina said.

Officials said Mateen had some communication with police during this standoff, though they did not reveal what was said.



Eleven officers were involved in raiding the nightclub, and one officer was injured, according to Banks. The injured officer was hit by a bullet and his Kevlar helmet saved his life, Banks said.

A hotline for victims' families was set up at 407-246-4357. Identities of victims were being released at cityoforlando.net/victims after family members had been notified.



Witnesses in the club reported mass chaos after hearing several shots ring out inside the nightclub.

Pulse posted on its own Facebook page around 2 a.m.: ""Everyone get out of pulse and keep running.""

It's owner later said in statement that she was ""devastated by the horrific events that have taken place today.

Pulse, and the men and women who work there, have been my family for nearly 15 years. From the beginning, Pulse has served as a place of love and acceptance for the LGTQ community.  I want to express my profound sadness and condolences to all who have lost loved ones,"" Barbara Roma.



Mina Justice was outside the club early Sunday trying to contact her 30-year-old son Eddie, who texted her when the shooting happened and asked her to call police. He told her he ran into a bathroom with other club patrons to hide. He then texted her: ""He's coming.""

""The next text said: 'He has us, and he's in here with us,'"" she said. ""That was the last conversation.""

Jon Alamo said he was at the back of one of the club's rooms when a man holding a weapon came into the front of the room.

Club-goer Rob Rick said it happened around 2 a.m., just before closing time.

""Everybody was drinking their last sip,"" he said.

Fox News' Catherine Herridge, Chad Pergram and Matthew Dean and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"BNI Store Nov 5 2016 Muslims regularly use “Inshallah” (“God Willing” in Arabic) and nobody calls it ‘Christophobic’ hate speech…so why is “Deus Vult” (“God Willing” in Latin) graffiti being called ‘Islamophobic’ Crusader hate speech? At the newly sharia-compliant University of Southern Maine, moronic school officials say “Deus Vult” Graffiti of Crusades’ rallying cry is being referred to the state Attorney General’s office after the Latin phrase used by Christians was written on a desk and wall in a student government office. Press Herald The phrase was used as a rallying cry for Christians during the Crusades in medieval times, and more recently has now is being called an anti-Muslim insult. In an email to the campus community, USM President Glenn Cummings condemned the “anti-Muslim graffiti” found in the office in the Woodbury Campus Center. “I want you to know that addressing this is our highest priority. Our campus security is fully investigating what we believe to be a hate crime,” Cummings wrote. “A team from our Dean of Students is working hard to uncover the facts while providing opportunities for intergroup dialogue and supporting students directly and indirectly affected by this reprehensible act. (It’s free speech, you idiot, and Muslims use the exact same phrase everyday, especially when trying to impose their death cult on non-muslims) British member of ISIS Mostly, to our Muslim students I want to express how sorry I am this has happened. Please know that such actions affect all of us. This is not who USM is or wants to be.” (USM is a school of politically correct asswipes who should be fired) According to USM’s student body president (a Muslim, of course) , Muhammad “Humza” Khan, a male student who is not part of student government drew the graffiti Tuesday afternoon, while two student Senate members were in the office. Khan, who declined to identify the student because of the investigation, said the two witnesses have said they didn’t understand the meaning of the phrase – which was written in small letters on an electrical wire cover on a wall, and on a wooden desk. USM officials also have not released the student’s name. In a Facebook post, USM student body Vice President Matt Raymond condemned the graffiti. “I just wanted to say that all this happened a day after five Muslim students asked for applications to Student Government to become Senators. I believe this act of “criminal intimidation” (Seriously? You should be taken away in a straitjacket) to be linked to that fact,” Raymond wrote, adding that student government is open to all students of any race, gender, religion, sexuality, economic background or nationality.” (It is, but you can’t blame students for hating Muslims, the biggest threat to America) Southwest Airlines knows what it means and acted accordingly Humza Khan, myself, and our Cabinet under the Executive branch condemn in the harshest terms this crime of bias and intimidation. Let’s show folks that USM is a diverse and inclusive university for all moving forward!” A group of about 40 students rallied in support of Muslim students at lunchtime Thursday. Raymond said he plans to ask the student Senate to vote out two members who he believes did not respond appropriately to the incident. Khan said he believes the person who wrote the graffiti intended to intimidate Muslim students who have expressed interest in joining the student Senate. “The way Muslims see (that Latin phrase,) we see it indirectly as ‘Let’s kill Muslims,’ ” said Khan, who is Muslim. (But Muslim students who keep saying Death to Israel/Death to America are said to be exercising their freedom of speech) “It’s not immediately seen as racist, it’s not a racial epithet, but it’s still there to intimidate a specific group of people,” Raymond said. “And it served its purpose, even though it was coded language.” (One can only hope. Muslims should be banned from holding office anywhere America. Look at the mess the Muslim in the White House has made)",FAKE
"The use of extreme rhetoric by presidential candidates has sparked nationwide debates about American political polarization.

Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz have been the center of media attention for their use of inflammatory language, notably when Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug traffickers and when Cruz called for the carpet-bombing of the Islamic State group. Although news coverage of candidates’ rhetoric may be polarizing Americans and deepening the partisan divide, it has also arguably contributed to the current success of Trump and Cruz in the presidential race, explained Duke faculty and student leaders.

“There’s a kind of anxiety in the air probably across the country, but certainly with certain populations in the U.S. that Cruz and Trump are tapping into,” said Frederick Mayer, professor of public policy, political science and environment. “Both of those candidates have found a way to frame their message that’s really resonating with the anxieties about American decline, threats from terrorists abroad and at home, perceived threats to the American way of life.”

In last Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Barack Obama assured Americans that the country is not in decline, despite inflammatory claims.

“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air,” he said. “Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. Let me tell you something—the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth, period.”

Mayer noted that factors such as low unemployment, low crime levels and fewer instances of terrorism on American soil should also ease the anxiety of Americans.

“It’s ironic because you can make the claim that we have less to fear today than just about any people in any time in history,” he said. “All these factors that should make us feel good.”

Junior Adam Lemon, president of the Duke College Republicans, said that extreme rhetoric was necessary for the success of Trump and Cruz in a field of more than 15 candidates, where standing out in any way was imperative. He also noted that cable news has used stories about Trump to boost ratings.

“I think part of the reason that [Donald Trump] is polling so high is that his name is just so ubiquitous through all of the news media,” said freshman Steve Hassey, communications director for Duke Democrats. “Him being such a polarizing figure makes the mass coverage of him even more polarizing.”

Both Lemon and Mayer discussed how news can have a negative impact when it focuses on polarizing comments.

However, Mayer said he was optimistic that bipartisan reform is possible and will occur on certain issues. On campus, there have been a few bipartisan discussions, such as the Battle of the Brains debate between college Democrats and Republicans hosted by Duke Student Government last November in which students discussed issues ranging from racial discrimination to the national debt.

Although there have been bipartisan discussions, Lemon noted that there are barriers to fostering discussion between students of opposing political parties on campus.

“There are a lot more liberals on campus than conservatives,” Lemon said. “Liberals tend to talk amongst themselves. Conservatives are afraid to express their opinions, so they don’t really talk and neither side is really willing to engage too much.”

Mayer attributed the polarization and the lack of engagement between the two sides to something more than just extreme rhetoric.

“At some deep level, many of the problems we’ve been talking about are really manifestations of a loss of trust in each other, in our institutions and the like,” he said. “This whole dysfunction is a trust problem. We stopped trusting institutions. We don’t trust politicians. A world where you have very little trust is a much less functional world.”",REAL
" Hillary Clinton, FBI and the Real November Surprise
By Pepe Escobar ""As bad as it is the folks above the President make the decisions. They may have decided on Trump. These things do not happen by accident."" "" Sputnik "" - Thus spoke a high-level US business mover and shaker with secure transit in rarified Masters of the Universe-related circles, amidst the utter political chaos provoked by head of the FBI James Comey’s latest bombshell.
It’s virtually established by now that US Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey not to release his letter to Congress. But Comey did it anyway. If he had not, and a scandal would – inevitably – spring up after the US presidential election, Lynch would be perfectly positioned to deny she knew anything, and Comey would be on the firing line.
Lynch is a certified Clinton machine asset. In 1999 then-President Bill Clinton appointed her to run the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office. She left in 2002, taking the private practice revolving door. She was back to the Brooklyn office in 2010, urged by Obama. Five years later she became the 83rd US Attorney General, replacing the dodgy Eric Holder.
A plausible case has been made that Comey took his fateful decision based on a serious internal revolt at the FBI – led by key people he trust — as well as being egged-on by his wife.
Yet one of the key questions that refuse to go away is why the FBI waited until 11 days before the US presidential election to supposedly ""find"" an email trove on certified sexting pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
A Deal With Donald?
The business source, although unsympathetic to the Clinton machine, especially in foreign policy, is a realpolitik practitioner, not a conspiracy theorist. He is adamant that, “the FBI reversal could not have happened without orders above the President. If the Masters [of the Universe] have changed their mind, then they will destroy Hillary.”
He adds, “they can make a deal with Donald just like anyone else; Donald wins; the Masters win; the people think that their voice has been heard. And then there will be some sort of (controlled) change.”
What’s paramount in the whole soap opera is the faith in the US political system — as corrupt as it may be — must endure. That mirrors the faith in the US dollar; if confidence in the US dollar fails, the US as a hegemonic financial power is no more.
The source is equally adamant that, “it is almost unprecedented to see a cover-up as extensive as Hillary’s. A secret meeting between Bill Clinton and the Attorney General; the FBI ignoring all evidence and initially clearing Hillary to near rebellion of the whole of the FBI, attested to by Rudolf Giuliani whose reputation as a federal prosecutor is unquestioned; the Clinton “pay for play” foundation. The Masters are troubled that this is getting out of hand.”
The record shows that “the Masters do not usually have to go to such lengths to protect their own. They did manage to save Bill Clinton from the Monica Lewinsky perjury and keep him in the presidency. The Masters were not attacked in this case. They even got away with the 1987 cash settlement crash and the theft surrounding the Lehman debacle. In all these cases there were no overarching challenges to their control, as we see now open to the public by Trump. They antagonized and insulted the wrong man.”
All Aboard the Huma Train
Hillary Clinton is not at the center of Comey’s jaw-dropping October Surprise; it’s actually her right-hand woman and ersatz “daughter” Huma Abedin. This early January essay on Huma Abedin contains plenty of nuggets out and about – some of them positively eyebrow raising.
In case Hillary Clinton becomes the next President of the United States (POTUS), Abedin, alternatively known as Princess of Saudi Arabia, will most likely become Hillary’s chief of staff – the power behind running all White House operations.
A glimpse of the FBI-Huma Abedin connection is available here . Abedin was granted Top Secret security clearance for the first time in 2009, when Hillary named her deputy chief of staff for operations. Abedin later said she “did not remember” being read into any Special Access Programs (SAPs).
It’s crucial to remember that one of Abedin’s emails was huma@clintonemail.com. Crucial translation: she was the only high-level State Dept. aide whose emails were hosted by the notorious Subterranean Clinton Email Server – which she claimed she didn’t know existed until she heard about it in the news.
Abedin swore under oath in a lawsuit brought against the State Dept. by Judicial Watch that she had handed over all of her laptops and smart phones that could host emails relevant to the Subterranean Email Server investigation.
That may not have been the case. The laptop at the center of Comey’s bombshell was shared by Abedin and her husband Wiener before they split. If Abedin lied, she could face up to five years in jail for perjury. As if the whole illegal email-cum-sexting saga was not sordid enough, the “climax” now seems to have turned into a mixed wrestling match between the former couple, with the big “prize” being the slammer.
The FBI has finally obtained a warrant and is now frantically searching no less than 650,000 Abedin emails found on sexting freak Wiener’s laptop; the objective is to exactly determine which ones came from the Subterranean Email Server.
As if this was not demeaning enough, the FBI continues to conduct an investigation on the Clinton Foundation. As former Assistant Director of the FBI Tom Fuentes said , “The FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive unified case and be coordinated, so that investigation is ongoing and Huma Abedin and her role and activities concerning Secretary of State in the nature of the foundation and possible ‘pay to play’, that’s still being looked at now.”
Whatever happens until election day, US voters will have to consider the startling fact they may choose a next POTUS that is the subject of a wide-ranging “comprehensive unified” FBI investigation.
A Rotten, Rigged System?
A former federal public corruption prosecutor volunteers a plausible take on Comey’s action. In a nutshell, FBI agents investigating Weiner’s sexting – and they are a different set of agents investigating Emailgate — saw evidence of State Dept emails on his laptop. Comey knew he needed a search warrant to comb the emails at Wiener’s computer. So he pre-empted the – inevitable – subsequent hype by “sending out a vague letter to the Hill” that in the end left everyone even more confused.
That interpretation though may be only scratching the surface. Deeper and deeper, it seems that Comey’s decision was really precipitated by the senior FBI agents’ insurgence – fed up with the “extreme carelessness” Hillary cover-up. They’ve got to have some surefire material on the Clinton (cash) machine that never saw the light.
Comey could have just waited to say something after the election; after all the FBI maintains they had checked all Clinton emails, including deleted ones, not to mention the Podesta emails. So the emails on sexting Wiener’s laptop may be no more than a limited hangout.
A much more plausible explanation is that Comey had to do it not only because of the FBI internal revolt (or because he had an urge to upstage WikiLeaks?) He had to do it because the rot goes way beyond the Clinton “pay to play” racket and involves virtually the whole system, from the deep recesses of the Obama administration to the War Party scam, the Department of Justice, the CIA and the FBI itself.
What next? Brace for impact; it may well be the ultimate November Surprise.",FAKE
"There’s not really any good news for the GOP in the aftermath of yesterday’s House Benghazi Committee interrogation of Hillary Clinton. There had been some flickers of hope among conservative activists that the committee Republicans, led by chairman Trey Gowdy, would finally produce the long-rumored “smoking gun” that would prove once and for all that Hillary did… whatever evil thing she supposedly did with regard the Benghazi. Or maybe they’d goad her into making a terrible gaffe that would ruin her politically. But that’s not what happened.

After weeks of damaging stories about the Benghazi committee’s partisan agenda and vanishing credibility, it might have done Gowdy some good to put together a quiet and informative hearing that was befitting the “serious investigation” that he insisted he was leading. Instead, Gowdy took the lead role in proving correct each one of his Republican colleagues who said the committee was focused on damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances.

In his opening statement, Gowdy tried to shoot down allegations that the committee was focused on Clinton. “There are people frankly in both parties who have suggested that this investigation is about you,” Gowdy said to Hillary at the outset. “Let me assure you it is not.” But when it came time for Gowdy to ask questions, he focused singularly on Clinton’s emails with Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton friend and DC barnacle who was feeding Hillary intelligence “reports” from a source he knew in Libya. Gowdy used the volume of emails sent from Blumenthal to Clinton to portray him as a key advisor who had unfettered access to Clinton, and contrasted him with slain Libya ambassador Chris Stevens, who never emailed Clinton directly. “Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madame Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” Gowdy asked with much gravity.

Gowdy’s implication – that Stevens either lacked access to Clinton or that Clinton prioritized her communications with Blumenthal – was flagrantly false, and Gowdy knows it was false. Stevens had access to Clinton through a variety of means and could have been in touch with her at a moment’s notice if he’d wanted. But Gowdy used the frequency of email communication – and only email communication – to give the impression that Blumenthal was in the loop while the ambassador was not.

This theme was picked up on by his Republican colleagues, who weren’t nearly as subtle in their dishonesty as Gowdy was. Rep. Mike Pompeo grandiosely asked Clinton if Stevens had had Clinton’s cell phone number, fax number, or home address, and if he’d ever “stopped by your house.” After Clinton said no to all these things, Pompeo went in for what he thought was the kill: “Mr. Blumenthal had each of those and did each of those things. This man who provided you so much information on Libya had access to you in ways that were very different from the access that a very senior diplomat had to you and your person.” If you’re the sort of thick-headed dolt who thinks the ambassador was at a disadvantage because he couldn’t send the Secretary of State a postcard or pop in on her every Sunday afternoon, then this point was probably quite compelling.

While the Republicans were wasting their time trying to portray Clinton as a tool of Sid Blumenthal, the Democrats used their time to make clear just how pointless they believe the entire investigation is and allowed Clinton her opportunities to offer sanitized and carefully worded defenses of the Libya intervention. At least one member of the committee used the hearing to pose useful and interesting questions about issues that arose from the Benghazi attack: Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). She asked Clinton about policies for outsourcing security to local militias and security contractors, which has caused problems for the State Department and other government agencies. All in all it was a bust for Gowdy and the Benghazi committee, to the point that conservative pundits were griping about how poorly the Republicans fared against Clinton. Anyone who doubted that the committee was a partisan exercise in Clinton-bashing came away free of doubts. The only sliver of good news for the Republicans is that it likely won’t matter. The notion that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton engineered some sort of evil Benghazi cover-up is already assumed to be true in the minds of conservatives and Republican voters. The fact that Gowdy and crew spent the day stepping on rakes and scoring own-goals in a failed attempt to “prove” it won’t change their minds. And the House GOP won’t put the brakes on the investigation because the committee’s utility as a vehicle for strategic press leaks outweighs the bad press it’s enduring at the moment. The Benghazi committee will grind on, performing much the same role it always has.",REAL
"President Obama set out Monday to help seal a global climate pact at the opening of a major summit in Paris, though he faces stiff opposition at home from congressional Republicans and states worried his proposals will cost thousands of jobs.

The president joined more than 150 world leaders for the two-week conference where countries are trying to negotiate an agreement aimed at slowing an increase in global temperatures. In opening remarks, Obama called the meeting a potential “turning point” for the effort.

“What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet, is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it,” he said.

With the summit getting under way in the wake of the devastating terror attacks in the same city, some Republicans have questioned whether Obama is focusing too much on global warming and not enough on security. But Obama on Monday called the negotiations an “act of defiance” toward the attackers.

“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to save it?” Obama said. The president said that, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter (after China), “we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

The president also met one-on-one Monday with leaders of other nations responsible for the largest carbon emissions, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On the sidelines of the summit, Obama met as well with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss security matters.

But as Obama makes a personal press for a climate deal, he faces practical challenges back in Washington.

The president has pledged that the U.S. will cut its overall emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2030, and a centerpiece of that is a push to reduce emissions from U.S. power plants. But half the states are suing to block the power plant rules, claiming Obama has abused his authority under the Clean Air Act.

Further, Republicans on Capitol Hill are threatening to block committing U.S. dollars to a U.N. Green Climate Fund designed to help poorer countries combat climate change.

In the days before the Paris summit, Republicans warned that any Paris deal with legally binding provisions must come before the Senate for a vote. And without that approval, they warned, lawmakers will not green-light the Green Climate Fund money.

“Without Senate approval, there will be no money – period,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said at a recent hearing.

Barrasso and Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also sent a letter to Obama signed by more than three dozen senators likewise urging the president to have his special envoy relay to developing nations’ representatives that Congress “will not be forthcoming” with the Green Climate Fund money absent a Senate vote.

The president wants to direct $3 billion – including $500 million in the near-term – for the U.N. Green Climate Fund.

The Paris conference is aimed at the most far-reaching deal ever to tackle global warming. The last major agreement, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, required only rich countries to cut emissions, and the U.S. never signed on.

Among several sticking points is money -- how much rich countries should invest to help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil and gas producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.

With that in mind, at least 19 governments and 28 leading world investors were announcing billions of dollars in investments to research and develop clean energy technology, with the goal of making it cheaper.

Backers include Obama, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires George Soros and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, and Jack Ma of China's Alibaba.

Meanwhile, Obama met on the sidelines with Putin to discuss the civil war in Syria, as well as Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian jet last week amid allegations it crossed into Turkish airspace.

According to a White House official, Obama “expressed his regret for the recent loss of a Russian pilot and crew member and reiterated the United States' support for de-escalation between Russia and Turkey.”

Obama, though, also reiterated that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad must leave power as part of any political transition.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"UCLA reported Wednesday that nearly 180 patients were exposed to a potentially deadly ""superbug"" on contaminated medical instruments that infected seven patients and may have contributed to two deaths.

A total of 179 patients at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were exposed to antibiotic-resistant carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, during endoscopic procedures between October and January, the university said in a statement. The bacteria may have been a ""contributing factor"" in the deaths of two patients, the university said. Those who were exposed are being sent free home-testing kits that the university will analyze.

Similar outbreaks of CRE have been reported around the nation. They are difficult to treat because some varieties are resistant to most known antibiotics. By one estimate, CRE can contribute to death in up to half of seriously infected patients, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The bacteria can cause infections of the bladder or lungs, leading to coughing, fever or chills. CRE infections have been reported in every state except Idaho, Alaska and Maine, according to the CDC.

UCLA said infections may have been transmitted through specialized endoscopes used during the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic and bile-duct problems. The instruments are inserted into the patients' throats. The outbreak was discovered late last month during tests on a patient.

The two medical devices may have carried the bacteria even though they were sterilized according to the manufacturer's specifications, UCLA said.

The devices have been removed, and decontamination procedures upgraded, the university said.

""We notified all patients who had this type of procedure, and we were using seven different scopes. Only two of them were found to be infected. In an abundance of caution, we notified everybody,"" said Dale Tate, a University of California, Los Angeles spokeswoman.

On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory warning doctors that even when a manufacturer's cleaning instructions are followed, infectious germs may linger in the devices. Their complex design and tiny parts make complete disinfection extremely difficult, the advisory said.

National figures on the bacteria are not kept, but 47 states have seen cases, the CDC said.

A similar outbreak occurred in Illinois in 2013. Dozens of patients were exposed to CRE, with some cases apparently linked to a tainted endoscope used at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital. The hospital later changed its sterilization procedures.

A Seattle hospital, Virginia Mason Medical Center, reported in January that CRE linked to an endoscope sickened at least 35 patients, and 11 died, although it was unclear whether the infection played a role in their deaths.

""This bacteria is emerging in the U.S. and it's associated with a high mortality rate,"" Dr. Alex Kallen, an epidemiologist in CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, told the LA Times. ""We don't want this circulating anywhere in the community.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from MyFoxLA.com.",REAL
"(Before It's News)
Ivanka Trump is going to have to back off from her father’s campaign, because the hateful and sexist rhetoric of Donald Trump is severely hurting Ivanka’s clothing and lifestyle brand.
Women are turning on Ivanka Trump as she continues supporting her father despite allegations of sexual harassment against him and a 2005 audio tape capturing him bragging in lewd terms that he can do whatever he wants to women.
Now, the growing group of women are boycotting her line of clothing, jewelry, perfume and accessories sold as part of the Ivanka Trump Collection. They are also calling on the stores that carry the brand, including Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, to stop selling it.
It has even created its own hashtag, #Ivankant, as well as #GrabYourWallet.
From The Daily Mail :
‘If Ivanka Trump had distanced herself from the campaign I would not be boycotting her,’ Shannon Coulter, who called on Americans to boycott the brand earlier this month, told the Guardian.
‘But something changed for me when that tape was released.’
Coulter, who shared her own experience of sexual harassment at the hands of a male superior, launched the hashtag ‘GrabYourWallet’ on October 11, a reference to Trump’s offensive ‘grab them by the p***y’ remark from the audio tape.
The problem obviously for Ivanka, is that Donald Trump’s base, for the most part, doesn’t shop at Bloomingdale’s or Nordstrom, which are two of the largest stores that carry her clothing line, along with Macy’s.
What are your thoughts, should Ivanka’s business be hurt because of the actions of her father?
From Politico:
The New York Times cited a deposition from a woman who claimed that Donald Trump groped her under the table decades ago, but the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is certainly not a groper, his daughter said Wednesday.
“Look, I’m not in every interaction my father has, but he’s not a groper,” Ivanka Trump said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.” “It’s not who he is. And I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women.”
The billionaire businessman launched a Twitter salvo the “failing” newspaper for its “false, malicious & libelous story,” catapulting the story to become the newspaper’s most popular of the year, according to assistant news editor Theodore Kim.
—
Ivanka Trump said she read the Sunday cover story and “found it to be pretty disturbing, based on the facts as I know them, and obviously I very much know them” as a daughter and an executive who’s worked alongside him for more than a decade.
“I was bothered by it, but it’s largely been discredited since,” she said, referring to Brewer Lane’s criticism of the report. Brewer Lane, the ex-girlfriend whose first run-in with Donald Trump was used as the lead anecdote for the article, titled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved With Women in Private,” accused the newspaper of putting a negative connotation on her words.
“Most of the time when stories are inaccurate they’re not discredited, and I will be frustrated by that, but in this case I think they went so far,” Ivanka Trump continued. “They had such a strong thesis and created facts to reinforce it and, you know, I think that narrative has been playing out now and there’s backlash in that regard.”
Source RealTimePolitics.com Check out more contributions by Jeffery Pritchett ranging from UFO to Bigfoot to Paranormal to Prophecy",FAKE
"Share on Twitter 
Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) ignited a political firestorm Thursday night after he randomly brought up his Democratic rival’s heritage after she touted her military experience during a debate. 
Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who is of mixed Thai and American descent, cited her military service as well as her family’s when making the case against rushing into war. 
“I’m a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound,“ she said. ”Because people are quick to sound the drums of war and I want to be there to say, ‘This is what it costs, this is what you’re asking us to do’. Let’s make sure the American people understand what we are engaging in.” 
When given a chance to respond, Kirk remarked, “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” Illinois Senator Mark Kirk Made A Racist Remark About His Opponent’s Heritage https://t.co/MmS5HnGEG7 pic.twitter.com/Q1bFnqviAG 
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) October 28, 2016 
No one, including the debate moderator, quite knew how to react. After a brief awkward silence, the moderator moved the discussion forward. Critics immediately branded the comment as “racist” and distasteful. 
Duckworth lost both of her legs while serving as a pilot in the Army during the Iraq war. Her father also served in the U.S.army and her family’s military service goes all the way back to the Revolutionary War, BuzzFeed reported . US Representative Tammy Duckworth of Illinois arrives to address delegates on the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Image Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images 
Duckworth responded on Twitter with an indisputable message. My mom is an immigrant and my dad and his family have served this nation in uniform since the Revolution #ILSEN pic.twitter.com/ehEBHswFMs — Tammy Duckworth (@TammyforIL) October 28, 2016 
Kirk’s campaign later issued a statement addressing the controversy: 
“Senator Kirk has consistently called Rep. Duckworth a war hero and honors her family’s service to this country. But that’s not what this debate was about. Rep. Duckworth lied about her legal troubles, was unable to defend her failures at the VA and then falsely attacked Senator Kirk over his record on supporting gay rights.” 
But at that point, the damage was already done. ",FAKE
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce … Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 – 1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. 
If you ever wondered where that quote came from, now you know! A fine example from the 2016 election is commentators comparing Clinton to Lincoln. 
Stats Watch 
NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, October 2016: “The small business optimism index rose 0.8 points in October to 94.9, slightly exceeding expectations and extending a rebound from the 2-year low at 92.6 set in April” [ Econoday ]. “A net 25 percent of owners reported raising worker compensation, a 3 point increase from September. Capital outlays, a leading strength of the index recently and important for future growth, remained at a strong 27 percent, the second highest reading of the recovery.” But the NFIB’s press release says: “Small business owners are rattled by uncertainty and unable to decide whether to expand, whether to hire, or whether to make other important decisions that might boost the economy” [ Econoday ]. And: “the highest level this year” [ Calculated Risk ]. 
JOLTS, September 2016: “Job openings rose to 5.486 million in September, up from a revised 5.453 million in August but still on the low side of this year’s trend. Hires are down in the September data, to 5.081 million from August’s 5.268 million to suggest that employers are having a hard time filling slots” [ Econoday ]. “With it hard to find the right person for the right job, employers are holding onto their existing employees closely as the layoff rate fell… [I’m so old I remember when you could get training at your job! Good times….] Though hiring is down, these numbers nevertheless will confirm worries that wage inflation may be approaching, that employers will have to offer more to bring in the workers they need.” Time to screw the workers take away the punch bowl, Janet! And: “The data overall suggests that there was a slight cooling in the labour market during the third quarter, but not enough to discourage a December rate increase from the Federal Reserve” [ Economic Calendar ]. And: “[A]nother solid report” [ Calculated Risk ]. 
Fed Loan Officer Survey: “The latest Federal Reserve senior loan officer survey on bank lending standards reported that standards were basically unchanged for the commercial sector during the third quarter of 2016. There had, however, been some tightening of conditions on Commercial Real Estate (CRE) loans” [ Economic Calendar ]. And: “Bank credit tends to tighten up as the economy slows, which slows lending and makes matters worse.The buzz word is ‘pro cyclical'” [ Mosler Economics ]. As we’ve seen, the bright spot in CRE is supply-chain related, e.g. distribution centers. And that’s a bet on globalization, no? 
Shipping: “Investors are following online retailers into warehouses” [ Wall Street Journal ]. “Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund agreed to pay $2.7 billion for P3 Logistics Parks and its portfolio of European warehouses… in one of the biggest real-estate deals in Europe this year. The high returns on the industrial properties are a big draw, but the bigger attraction over the long term is the growing need for space to serve e-commerce customers in a European market with a limited number of high-quality warehouses. This is the second big buy in logistics for Singapore’s GIC Pte. fund, which bought the Blackstone Group LP’s IndCor Properties and its network of U.S. warehouses. The upheaval in the market likely isn’t over—another Blackstone property, Logicor, is exploring either an outright sale or an initial public offering of a business that owns 660 warehouses in 18 European countries.” 
Shipping: “The top U.S. maritime regulator [Federal Maritime Commission Chairman Mario Cordero] says the ongoing consolidation in the shipping industry isn’t leading to collusion to fix freight rates” [ Wall Street Journal ]. Of course not. That’s the purpose of setting up a ginormous cartel, right? 
Shipping: “The Port of Oakland said today its October export volumes reached a three-year high, increasing 20 percent over 2015 levels and posting the fourth-largest monthly total in its history” [ DC Velocity ]. “Port executives said that export volumes benefitted from weakness in the U.S. dollar that made U.S. exports more competitive in world markets and a strong agricultural harvest. Oakland is the closet seaport to the verdant growing areas of the Central, Napa, and Salinas valleys, and as a result handles much of the state’s agricultural export cargo. The port reported that containerized import cargo volume increased 2 percent in October. Overall loaded container volume—imports and exports—was up 11.4 percent, the port said.” 
Shipping: “[UPS] is buying medical-logistics specialist Marken Ltd., pushing deeper into the highly specialized and very profitable business of healthcare industry deliveries. The move is a play for high-yield business when many traditional industrial and retail customers are opting for slower, cheaper shipping….Closely-held Marken specializes in transporting clinical trial materials and medicine between 49,000 clinical trial locations around the world, work that is particularly sensitive in terms of time and temperature” [ Wall Street Journal ]. “For UPS, it also delivers a bigger entry into a growing market, particularly as aging populations in the developed world spend more on health care and clinical research expands.” 
Shipping: “Packaging machinery shipments in U.S. could reach $8.5 billion in 2020” [ DC Velocity ] “[T]he fastest-growing machinery types scored by CAGR through 2020 will be the labeling, decorating, and coding (3.9 percent) and the case handling (2.5 percent) machinery groups. That rapid growth is largely a result of new legislation demanding increased labeling and coding, continuing developments in printing technologies, and the proliferation of SKUs, PMMI said. The other machinery groups include: filling and dosing; bottling line; form, fill, and seal; cartoning; palletizing; closing; and wrapping and bundling.” Fascinating to see the interface between big data and stuff . 
Shipping: “Container ship demolition hits record high” [ Journal of Commerce ]. “Shipowners have demolished 4.2 times more 20-foot-equivalent units so far this year than in the same period of 2015, with 500,000 TEUs. Most of the activity has occurred in the last three months, which accounted for 41 percent of the demolition thus far in 2016. The demolition activity in the last three months surprised BIMCO [Baltic and International Maritime Council] positively and it exceeded our initial expectation based on the appalling 2015 demolition activity,’ said Peter Sand, chief shipping analyst, BIMCO. “The advance is a push in the right direction, as demolition activity is one of the essential measures needed to be taken to rebalance the container shipping industry.'”“Rebalance.” No Pakistanis burned to death lately , so we’re good! 
Shipping: “Southern California chassis shortages recede as Hanjin boxes are cleared” [ Lloyd’s List ]. 
Retail: “Panjiva Research Director Chris Rogers told Logistics Management that when specifically looking at import numbers for things like apparel, especially winter clothing, and toys, which are both down, it suggests that retailers are not feeling ‘hugely confident’ about the state of consumer spending. And he added that it is in direct contrast to recent data issued by the National Retail Federation, which is calling for holiday shipping season (the months of November and December) to be up 3.6 percent” [ Modern Materials Handling ]. From October. But still. 
Retail: “A recent survey of shoppers weighed in with their answer to the question, “Do you like Black Friday?” Only 14.7% said that they love it, while 50.7% said it was okay. More than a third — 35.3% — said they hated it. A rather staggering 85% of those surveyed either hated Black Friday or didn’t care much about it” [ 247 Wall Street ] ( original survey ). Throw me in the “hate” bucket! 
Housing: “It is so interesting to once again see the ‘drive until you qualify’ meme permeating the housing industry. People seem to think this is now a new permanent plateau, a new normal, yet ignore the low home ownership rate and the reality that momentum is turning. But of course many are not paying attention – they are stuck in traffic apparently. Mega commutes, rental Armageddon, and insane prices for crap shacks are all part of the game today” [ Dr. Housing Bubble ]. “If you look at the rise in these mega commutes in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley it shot up in 2010… Something fundamentally shifted here. Of course you have your house humpers saying that this is great and somehow reflects a healthy market but in reality, it simply shows a hyper manic market of people desperate to claw into a crap shack. And many are now having to endure Clockwork Orange like torture in traffic. Many Millennials are simply saying no and are renting closer to work (or living at home with parents).” 
Honey for the Bears: “The restaurant recession has arrived” [ MarketWatch ]. “One factor is pressure on discretionary income from the rising costs of staples such as rent, medicine and education. Then there’s the steady rise in the cost of eating out, which has come just as grocery bills are getting cheaper. The cost of food purchased for home use—that is, groceries—has fallen 2.4% in the past year, government data showed in October. That’s the biggest decline over a 12-month period since the end of the Great Recession in 2009… Food costs have shrunk because of a global glut in farm products such as wheat, rice, soy and corn. Then there’s the effect of U.S. producers increasing the size of egg-laying chicken flocks and cattle herds, which has helped bring down the cost of eggs, beef and milk—egg prices alone have tumbled a staggering 50% in the last year.” 
The Bezzle: “Amazon.com Inc. could be in the crosshairs of Europe’s taxman” [ Wall Street Journal , “Europe’s Taxman Could Have Amazon in Its Crosshairs”]. “That could be material for Amazon, which operates on thin margins for a large tech company. In 2015, it reported $596 million in profit on $107 billion in revenue—a profit margin of 0.56%.” 
Currency: “Taking the nation by surprise, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday night announced demonetisation of Rs. 1000 and Rs. 500 notes with effect from midnight, making these notes invalid in a major assault on black money, fake currency and corruption” [ The Hindu ]. 
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 29 Fear (previous close: 26, Fear) [ CNN ]. One week ago: 22 (Extreme Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Nov 8 at 11:22am. Mr. Market’s knuckles were white there, for a bit. 
Guillotine Watch 
“Amtrak boosts Wi-Fi speed on Acela Express” [ Progressive Railroading ]. Moar cowbell. 
News of the Wired 
“You Can Have Emotions You Don’t Feel” [ Nautil.us ]. 
“6 reasons to think twice before moving to Canada” [ MarketWatch ]. 
* * * 
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here . And here’s today’s plant: 
Because it’s all about the lettuce, right? 
Readers, Water Cooler is a standalone entity, not supported by the very successful Naked Capitalism fundraiser just past. Now, I understand you may feel tapped out, but when and if you are able, please use the dropdown to choose your contribution, and then click the hat! Your tip will be welcome today, and indeed any day. Water Cooler will not exist without your continued help. Donate",FAKE
"Email 
Last night the Chicago Cubs eked out a thrilling game 7 victory in the World Series against the Cleveland Indians and ended a championship drought that had lasted for 108 years. This is a historic moment to be sure, but there will be no smiling and cheering in Chicago: Fans of the Cubs are still too sad over the death of Princess Diana to do any celebrating. 
“I honestly never thought I’d see the Cubs bring home the trophy, but everyone here is still too swept up with grief over Lady Di to really enjoy themselves right now,” said Cubbies superfan Raymon Lindley, who was among the thousands of fans who gathered outside Wrigley Field following last night’s edge-of-your-seat game to light candles in memory of the late Princess Of Wales. “It would be macabre to celebrate the win in light of what happened to Princess Diana on that fateful August night in 1997.” 
Theo Epstein, the curse-breaking president of baseball operations for the Cubs, has shipped the World Series trophy overseas to Britain, where it is to be laid on the grave of the People’s Princess. While the people of Chicago are undoubtedly proud of their Cubs, no parade has been planned, as the general feeling of the city is that it would be too gratuitous at this time. 
“I just called my 91-year-old grandfather, who waited his whole life to see the Cubs win the World Series,” said longtime season-ticket holder Karen Hunter. “We spent the entire call crying about Princess Diana together. She was so young.” 
“I would give a thousand Cubs World Series wins if Lady Di could be alive for one more day,” Hunter added. 
History has been made, and the Cubs finally have their much-sought-after championship, but fans clearly still have a long way to go before they’re comfortable celebrating the historic achievement. Aside from the occasional outburst of “Candle In The Wind” by groups of bereft fans, Wrigleyville will remain a quiet and mournful place until the Cubs faithful are ready to party with their victorious hometown heroes. And it’s anyone’s guess as to when that will be.",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton’s campaign looks like a new media startup.

The Democratic front-runner has a staff of dozens producing original content — including bylined news stories and professional video — all managed by an audience development team, a model similar to digital news pioneers BuzzFeed or Vox.

A blog, called the ""Feed,” anchored by five full-time writers, pumps out articles, interactive trivia quizzes, GIFs of Clinton's late-night-show appearances and other content designed to engage supporters and court potential voters across social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.

“They seem to be trying to mimic a publisher,” said Michael Wertheim, an adviser to media and tech startups and a former strategy director at Upworthy.

President Obama's team was the undisputed powerhouse of the 2008 and 2012 cycles. Now his digital mastermind, Teddy Goff, is helming Clinton’s efforts, but, Goff says, succeeding in 2016 is far more challenging.

In past campaigns, ""we felt that we could pretty much reach the people we need to reach by running a really good Twitter and Facebook account,” he said. Obama for America built Facebook and Twitter followings of more than 45 million and 33 million, respectively.

Now, people have more power over what they consume, said Goff. They have “a higher set of expectations for how they’re going to be served,"" he said, and are steering away from overtly political messages.

“When you put those together, it’s a pretty difficult task.""

The Clinton approach is made possible by its resources, said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director. Others are “having to be leaner, be more resourceful and deal with a smaller staff,” she said.

Yet, in this election, “resources don’t necessarily mean they’ll resonate more or create more of a discussion on the platform,” said Jenna Golden, Twitter’s director of political ad sales. While the Democrat’s Brooklyn-based team crafts images and stories optimized for mobile viewing targeted at both broad and specific demographic audiences, Republican candidate Donald Trump’s approach is more basic: He sits at his computer and sends out missives. And Bernie Sanders, her main rival for the Democratic nomination, has more overall digital interactions than Clinton.

Trump’s posted over 5,000 times since June, mostly on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social analytics tool that monitors social media. Since June of last year, Trump has generated nearly 85 million interactions (positive and negative) on his campaign accounts, which include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Sanders comes in at 34.6 million and Clinton at 31 million.

According to Facebook, Trump generated the most interactions across the social media network the week after his controversial proposal to temporarily ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the country. Clinton's peak came the last week of October after a successful debate and a marathon performance before a House Benghazi hearing.

“Trump is absolutely dominating social this election cycle and it’s not even close,” said Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle chief executive. “It’s a way to skip the media and go directly to his audience,” he said. Yet dominating the conversation doesn't necessarily translate into votes.

Trump and Clinton have “very different strategic goals,” said Silverman. While Trump is “brand building,” Clinton is converting her traffic into actions such as site registrations to acquire data critical to her get-out-the-vote efforts.

Whether the Clinton or Trump model is more effective will be part of the election post-mortem, said Jake Horowitz, founder of Mic, a top millennial website.

“You have a very sophisticated operation, and then you have someone who’s a total monster with media attention, and they’re competing for attention across social,” said Horowitz.

A lot of the focus appears to be on evoking emotion as the former first lady battles perceptions that she isn't personable.

A recent post getting a lot of clicks shows Clinton retelling, in a speech, the story of Army Captain Humayun Khan, a 27-year-old Muslim American who died in Iraq after waving his unit away from a vehicle that exploded.

The video, set to background music, includes a cutaway shot to a visibly anguished man who, as Clinton speaks, bows his head and and chokes back tears as his fingers tweeze the bridge of his nose. It’s gotten over 2 million views on Facebook.

There’s also a regular series, called “Quick Question” that catches the candidate spontaneously discussing fun topics, including lessons from her mother and what it’s like to watch football in the Clinton household. “They catch her randomly, and she just answers. It captures her,” said Goff.

“They’re probably trying to get her to react in a genuine fashion and trigger some emotion,” said Wertheim.

Similar to what you’d find on BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post, Clinton's site is interactive. In December, a quiz asked readers to guess whether certain statements came from Donald Trump or someone else.

Another notes her summer job after college in Alaska “sliming” fish, or removing the guts from salmon with a spoon. Another featured five vintage photos telling “the story of how Bill and Hillary Clinton fell in love.”

Many readers are probably unaware some posts are from the campaign since a number feature people other than the candidate, including one of a cute 8-year-old and another highlighting a 1986 letter from a grandfather who fled Germany ahead of WWII aimed at illustrating the historic role the nation has played in taking in refugees.

Ultimately, though, digital experts say social media success depends on something only the candidate can deliver: authenticity.

“The candidates who are willing to be more authentic and show who they are as a person get a lot more engagement,” said Horowitz.",REAL
"Your Facebook Page Could Land You In a FEMA Camp 


Against my better judgment, I often put my articles on Facebook. Lately, Facebook has been taking down my posts, particularily on topics related to World War III. One of my readers counted 14 sites saw my articles disappear. It is too late for me, but for most of you, you should consider not participating on Facebook. It is one more intelligence gathering tool designed to separate the sheep, from the independent thinkers! 
No matter how annoying Facebook’s censors may be, there are real dangers associated with posting and reading on Facebook. 
Facebook’s Friends Are Not Nice People 
Facebook is aligned with both the CIA and the NSA. I have several credible sources tell me that all data posted on Facebook goes into series of cataloged files which culminates with each person being assigned a “Threat Matrix Score”. The mere existence of a Threat Matrix Score should send chills up and the collective spines of every American. 
When, not if, martial law comes to America, this Threat Matrix Score, of which Facebook data is used to help compile an “enemies of the state” list, your future longevity could be seriously imperiled. It is too late for people like Steve Quayle, Doug and Joe Hagmann, John B. Wells and myself to avoid being placed on this list. However, it is not too late for the average American to limit their exposure by NOT posting and participating on Facebook. Facebook participation should come with a black box warning: 
“WARNING: The views expressed on Facebook can and will be used against you. Participation in Facebook could prove detrimental to the length of your life. All political dissident views are immediately reported to the CIA and the NSA. Risk of repeated exposure on Facebook could result in you and your family being hauled out of their homes at 3AM, separated from your family and sent to a re-education camp”. 
Before you dismiss this hypothetical black box warning as too much “tongue in cheek”, please consider that the NSA is presently extracting large amounts of Facebook data and I do not think they are compiling a Christmas card list. Facebook’s Welcome Is Wearing Off 
Many of us in print and broadcast media are rethinking our association with Facebook. Several of our journalistic brothers and sisters have been censored and/or otherwise treated unprofessionally by this entity. Facebook has become replete with trolls who patrol the cyber corridors of this monolithic entity chastising and censoring whoever exposes the liberal, anti-human, depopulation agenda of the New World Order. Whether it is gun control, criticism of NWO puppet Obama or anything that the alleged grandson of David Rockefeller, Mark Zuckerberg, and his people disagree with, they will kick your Facebook account to the curb for daring to express a legitimate political opinion. 
Facebook’s Zuckerberg, The Self-Perceived Purveyor of Integrity and Morality 
Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, The Facebook Effect “ You have one identity, and the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity .” 
Who appointed Mr. Zuckerberg to be the moral police and the judge of integrity? It sounds like Zuckerberg can take his place with Soros, Gates, Turner, et al., and the rest of the global elite who think they have the right to treat humanity as their own personal property and view the masses as a disposable commodity. Julian Assange Assessment of Facebook 
Whistle blower, Julian Assange, once stated that “Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence. Facebook, Google , Yahoo – all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use.” 
Never before in American cyber-history do we see such an arrogant and agenda serving entity operating their propaganda so far in the open as we do with Facebook. This propaganda end of the New World Order is being blatantly exposed. 
Facebook’s arrogance was on full display when highly respected journalist, Jon Rappoport was banned from sharing his articles on Facebook. In this instance of blatant censorship, Jon’s banned article was merely a review of certain aspects of American presidents ranging from Nixon to Obama. Like so many of us that understand history and can see the tyrannical path that Obama is taking us down, Rappoport identified Obama’s unconstitutional missteps. And for daring to tell the truth, Facebook banned Rappoport for the mere expression of a legitimate political opinion. 
Readers may also recall when members of Infowars.com and the popular talk show host, Michael Rivero were banned in December of 2012, until the public outcry for Facebook to reinstate their respective accounts backed Facebook into a corner from which they acquiesced and reinstated the previously banned media figures. Rules For Thee but Not For Me 
Facebook does not apply their holier than thou attitude to their own corporate behavior. As Zuckerberg talks about rectifying Americans lack of integrity through timely Facebook exposure, Facebook fails to pay its own fair share of taxes as a result of tax loopholes and deductions. Facebook paid no income tax for the fiscal year 2012 , despite reaping $1.1 billion in U.S. corporate profits. While Americans have just been subjected to higher taxes, billion-dollar corporations like Facebook, General Electric, Boeing and Wells Fargo have all been able to avoid paying any corporate income taxes, reports the Citizens for Tax Justice .",FAKE
"Next Story → Judge Judy LOSES IT on Hood Rat: “You Sound Stupid! You’re 19-Yrs-Old, You Have a 2-Yr-Old Child, a Dead Boyfriend…” You may also like...",FAKE
"While Donald J. Trump refuses to release his federal tax returns, saying his tax rate is “none of your business,” a USA TODAY analysis found Trump’s businesses have been involved in at least 100 lawsuits and other disputes related to unpaid taxes or how much tax his businesses owe.

Trump’s companies have been engaged in battles over taxes almost every year from the late 1980s until as recently as March, the analysis of court cases, property records, and other documents across the country shows. At least five Trump companies were issued warrants totaling more than $13,000 for late or unpaid taxes in New York state just since Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, according to state records. This spring, as Trump flew to campaign rallies around the country aboard his trademark private jet, the state of New York filed a tax warrant to try to collect $8,578 in unpaid taxes from the Trump-owned company that owns the Boeing 757. The company has since paid that tax bill.

As recently as last week, Trump said he was “willing to pay more” taxes personally and that “taxes for the rich will go up somewhat” if he becomes president. But the lawsuits and other tax-related disputes show a different reality for his businesses. They illustrate a pattern of systematically disputing tax bills, arguing for lower property assessments, and in some cases not paying taxes until the government takes additional action. At least three dozen times, Trump companies’ unpaid tax bills have forced the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance to go to local courts to get liens against his properties to try to collect overdue bills. New Jersey also had to go to court for a lien to collect a Trump company’s unpaid tax bill. Eventually, those disputes were resolved, and his companies paid some amount of taxes.

The disputes surrounding Trump’s business taxes are uncharted territory for the presidential nominee of a major party. The GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, also had extensive business interests as the leader of a private-equity fund. But Trump has a network of complicated real estate and other investments, and some of the tax disputes are ongoing.

Trump has acknowledged that he tries to pay as little taxes as possible, and the public records across the country shed light on how he does it. In documents rarely seen by the public, Trump's businesses regularly minimize the value of his properties for tax purposes. Publicly, including in his presidential financial disclosure report, Trump’s team declares many of those same properties are worth tens of millions of dollars more.

He’s fought tax collectors to lower the assessed values of his luxury golf courses in Briarcliff, N.Y., and Jupiter, Fla. Yet on his presidential financial disclosure report, he valued each at more than $50 million.

USA TODAY’s examination of Trump’s track record as a business taxpayer found not just court actions, but dozens of additional tax disputes with local authorities that didn’t reach the courthouse in states including New York, Nevada, Florida and New Jersey. In some cases, Trump’s businesses have disputed tax assessments; in others, they have simply not paid the tax bill until after the government took additional action.

In New York, for example, there are dozens of tax warrants against Trump businesses. Tax warrants are filed only after the state has exhausted all other options to collect what’s owed.

“You have to ignore us to end up with a tax warrant,” said Geoff Gloak, spokesman for the state Department of Taxation and Finance. “We try to work with taxpayers to resolve the debt, long before it becomes a warrant.”

If the tax warrant is ignored, the state can choose to take the matter to court – and in some cases has.

In addition to the five tax warrants since his announcement, there are additional New York state tax warrants dating to the years before Trump became a candidate, including $1,580 in unpaid taxes in 2010 for Trump Mortgage, his failed mortgage venture, and $1,747 in unpaid taxes in early 2015 against Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, once known as the troubled Trump University, which was later paid.

Alan Garten, general counsel to the Trump Organization, said he was unaware of the particulars of the tax warrant cases. He said disputes can arise over how one calculates sales-tax liabilities.

“It happens all the time,” he said. “And some of the charges could have been mistaken.”

Real estate developers often appeal assessments, and Morris Ellison, a commercial real estate tax attorney based in Charleston, S.C., said it’s difficult to compare one organization’s volume of property tax appeals vs. another’s.

Garten said the companies do what any property owners have the right to do: challenge their property’s assessment to make sure they are fairly taxed.

“We are a business, and we are in the business of making money,” he said. “Why should it be any different if we think the assessment is incorrect? It would be irresponsible if we didn’t. It’s got to be fair.”

Trump has been particularly aggressive by any measure, acknowledging it’s part of his business strategy.

“I fight like hell to pay as little as possible,” he said at a New York news conference announcing his own tax plan in September. “I fight like hell always, because it’s an expense. And you know, I feel ... and I fight. I have the best lawyers and the best accountants, and I fight, and I pay. But it’s an expense.”

Trump’s boasts about his wealth have sometimes undercut his attempts to slash his taxes. In 1985, Trump scooped up Mar-a-Lago, the opulent estate built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in Palm Beach, Fla., for $10 million, bragging in his 1989 book, The Art of the Deal, that it was a sweet deal, worth far more than he paid. When the property was assessed at $11.5 million and later $17 million, Trump objected. Litigation dragged on until 1993 over the tax bills.

A settlement hinged on Trump agreeing not to develop the Mar-a-Lago land into individual lots, said Jay Jacknin, outside counsel for Palm Beach County’s appraisal’s office. Last year, the county assessed the property at about $20 million — though Trump’s federal financial disclosure form values it at “more than $50 million.”

Similarly, just up the road in Jupiter, Fla., Trump bought the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club and Spa in 2012 for a reported $5 million, then renovated it. For the past three years, his team has appealed the assessed value, of $13.7million as of 2015. In his financial disclosure forms, Trump claims that the course on 285 acres is worth “more than $50 million” and that it throws off more than $12 million in revenue.

In Westchester County, N.Y., Trump has taken an aggressive approach toward the town of Ossining regarding the taxable value of Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor.

The battle gained national prominence, after an investigation in September 2015 by The Journal News, which is part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, of the club’s audacious bid to slash its taxable value by 90%.

Town Assessor Fernando Gonzalez valued the 140-acre complex at $14.3 million (a valuation since increased to $15.1 million) — but Trump’s team countered that it was worth $1.4 million. For perspective, a three-bedroom villa built at Trump National’s 16th hole on a separate tax parcel sold in 2005 for $2.4 million and was recently on the market for almost $2 million.

Trump’s claimed value would slash the $471,000 in taxes he owes to the town, village county and its school district to $47,000.

Residents are outraged. “What he’s claiming is way off,” said Briarcliff Manor homeowner Steve Cohen. “I see people playing there. The club looks fabulous. It certainly isn’t falling into disrepair.”

The Trump team’s lowball valuation follows a pattern similar to other assessment battles. His camp’s estimate appears to be a mere opening bid in a negotiation.

Trump’s attorney, Jeff Rodner, acknowledges that he is sure the property is worth more than the $1.4 million.

“Maybe it’s worth $12 million, maybe $13 million,” Rodner told The Journal News. “Now, my value is my opinion until it’s proven otherwise.”

The Briarcliff property is among 20 developments on Trump’s financial disclosure report that he values at “more than $50 million” — accounting for $1 billion of his net worth that Trump claims totals $10 billion.",REAL
"Below is a short email that my friend Sam posted this morning to his Facebook page about his surprisingly positive experience with the US healthcare system. 
I thought it a fantastic read, and I wanted to pass it along to you: 
I had to run to the emergency room today for what may be a neurological issue. Dizziness, staggering, loss of balance, that kind of thing. 
I’m in San Diego, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I have no insurance. I figured I was screwed. 
But instead, the experience was unreal. 
I got seen immediately. I didn’t even have time to sit down, they just whisked me into an examination room. 
The doctor and nurse were ON IT, and they took their time with the exam and consultation. 
The visit ultimately involved staying the whole day for observation, all kinds of tests, sedation and reversal, blood pressure check, a full blood panel work up (results tomorrow, yes TOMORROW keep your fingers crossed) and having both ears cleaned and flushed. 
The bill was a mere $374.63. 
Do I have some insane insurance plan? Nope. 
Am I being super-subsidized by the rest of America? Nope. 
Am I a privileged politician with a special “bosses only” healthcare plan? Don’t make me laugh. 
It turns out that the care was for my dog, not for me. And we didn’t go to a ‘people’ hospital– I obviously took my dog to an animal hospital. 
She and I are both biological machines, mammals made mostly of water (though she sheds more than I do). 
The only other real difference is that the government is regulating the hell out of healthcare for people, while (relatively speaking), leaving healthcare for animals alone. 
And that, my friends, is the reason Obamacare has flopped, and why your healthcare costs will keep going up. 
It’s not greed. It’s not the drug companies. It’s not anything other than the application of government intervention in what should be a free market. 
Simon again. 
It’s not exactly controversial these days to suggest that the US healthcare system is in bad shape. 
According to data collected by numerous independent agencies like the Institute of Medicine, Commonwealth Fund, and Kaiser Family Foundation, the US still ranks dead last among advanced economies in overall quality of its healthcare system. 
In fact, the US healthcare system has the worst record in the number of deaths caused by mistakes or inefficient care. 
And wait times in the US for urgent care and primary care visits rank lower than every other developed nation. 
Americans pay at least 50% more for healthcare in terms of annual spending than people in other advanced nations, yet they receive less care as measured by the number of doctor visits. 
Sure, it’s great that there are fewer uninsured people than ever before in the US, but this is a measure of QUANTITY, not a measure of QUALITY. 
Undoubtedly the US is home to some of the finest medical professionals in the world. 
But they’ve been buried under an expensive, over-regulated bureaucracy that continues to erode overall quality in the system. 
A 2015 report from the National Academy of Sciences summed it up by stating, “For Americans, health care costs and expenditures are the highest in the world, yet health outcomes and care quality are below average by many measures.” 
But instead of trying to understand WHY the system is so slow, bureaucratic, and expensive to begin with, politicians try to ‘fix’ it by creating more regulations. 
It’s as if they believe they can legislate their way to a quality, efficient medical care system, just as they believe they can legislate their way to a better education system or economic prosperity. 
This almost never works. 
After all, the people who come up with these rules are notoriously unqualified and have rarely ever held a job outside of their giant government bureaucracy. 
So despite what may be some very good intentions to fix the system, they invariably make things worse. 
The end result is that your pet probably has access to more efficient healthcare than you do.",FAKE
"in: Protestors & Activists , Special Interests , US News Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … “Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it. Submit your review",FAKE
"Shattering the glass ceiling wasn't the only way historic firsts took the floor in Philadelphia Tuesday night, when the Democratic Party named Hillary Clinton as its presidential nominee.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention via a live video feed from New York during the second night at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 26, 2016.

With Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on the mic, addressing the crowds that thronged the Democratic National Convention hall in Philadelphia, history was made.

“I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” Senator Sanders said. The crowd roared, the delegates ‘ayed,’ and Mrs. Clinton officially became the first woman to be nominated by a major political party for the position of president of the United States.

Appearing on video from New York later Tuesday night, after a montage of the 43 men who have presided over the Oval Office filled the large screen overhead, Clinton thanked her party and the delegates for their role in helping her make “the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet.”

Calling out to the American viewers, she said: “If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say: I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next.”

Clinton’s nomination comes 240 years into the existence of the United States of America and nearly a century after the Constitution was amended in 1919 to give women the right to vote. There were still state restrictions that continued to make it difficult for women (and men) of color to exercise that right into the 1960s.

Her nomination was not the only precedent-setter at the convention. Tuesday night held echoes of both Clinton’s past roles and of the milestones reached by women in politics since they gained suffrage.

The convention itself is being chaired by Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge, who has shattered her own share of glass ceilings. Ms. Fudge was both the first African-American and first female mayor of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, a position she held from from 2000 to 2008. She is joined at the helm of the convention and the party by two other African-American women. Rev. Leah Daughtry, former chief of staff for the party's committee, is the chief executive officer of the convention for the second time, while Donna Brazile is the interim Democratic National Committee chair after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned last week, following an email scandal. Ms. Brazile became well-known in the party as Al Gore's campaign manager, the Washington Post reports.

In an interview with NBCBLK in November, Reverend Daughtry said that this year’s convention, now underway, would be ""the most diverse and the most forward-looking convention that we've had in recent history.""

The speaker line-up last night also included a fair share of ground-breakers. One of the senators who nominated Clinton during the state roll call was Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski, who said she was acting on behalf of ""all women who have broken down barriers for others."" Senator Mikulski herself was the the first Democratic woman to be elected to the Senate in 1987. Clinton held the role of senator for New York State between 2001 and 2009; the two women are among the group of 46 women to have ever held the role of US senator.

Another of the evening’s speakers was Madeleine Albright. A distinguished diplomat, Ms. Albright was the country’s first female secretary of State, a position that Clinton held under Barack Obama, when she was the third woman in the job. Albright was selected for that role in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Clinton himself would break ground, were his wife to be elected to his former office, as both the first man in the role traditionally referred to as ""first lady"" and the first former president to hold that place. Mr. Clinton was the keynote speaker last night, offering a personal portrait of his wife to counter the narrative of corruption and scandal that has at times ensnared the campaign.

Emphasizing his wife's history of activism, not just for women, but for socioeconomic and racial equality, Mr. Clinton called her the ""best darn changemaker I've met in my entire life."" She ""had done more positive change before she was 30 than many politicians do in a lifetime in office.""

The theme of “firsts” will continue Wednesday night, on point for a party that distinguishes itself from the competition with a progressive agenda.

This evening, President Obama, the first African-American president, will offer his support of Clinton. On Monday, she received the support of another historymaker, one who occupies another role Clinton herself once held: Michelle Obama, the nation's first African-American first lady.

This report includes material from the Associated Press and Reuters.",REAL
"Without a doubt, religion is one of the more difficult topics to discuss. After all, the majority of wars that have taken place on this planet stem from religious differences. But when a retired... ",FAKE
"Sen. Ted Cruz’s national spokesman Rick Tyler doubled-down on Friday following accusations that the campaign Photoshopped an image of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and President Obama.

“Every picture in a political campaign is Photoshopped,” Tyler told Fox News. “It is absolutely true.”

When pressed repeatedly by host Martha McCallum about why the campaign Photoshopped a picture of Rubio and Obama shaking hands in a picture on a website produced by the Cruz campaign, Tyler instead took aim at Rubio’s record.

“Marco Rubio and Barack Obama have shaken hands. There are plenty of photos of him shaking hands,” he said. “If they don’t like the picture we picked, then send me a picture they like of Marco Rubio shaking hands with Barack Obama and we’ll swap it out.”

The website, which features other digitally altered images of the Florida senator, offers visitors the chance to take a “stand against Rubio,” with a link to Ted Cruz’s get-out-the-vote site.

""This is a disturbing pattern, they are making stuff up every day,"" Rubio told reporters Thursday.

Rubio senior advisor Todd Harris said the body shown in the image in question is ""not Rubio.""

“This person, we don’t know who that is, but they Photoshopped Marco’s face onto somebody else. This is how phony and how deceitful the Cruz campaign has become.”

The campaign says the original image, apparently reversed, was from a stock photograph.",REAL
"Email 
Media coverage has recently been saturated with distressing scenes showing the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo, where aerial bombardment has led to a heavy loss of civilian life. The severity of the crisis instinctively makes us want to help – scores of protesters gathered outside the seat of the British prime minister on Saturday holding signs calling on the government to “Save Aleppo” and impose a “No-Bomb Zone Now”. While the anger is understandable, the way it is being channeled reflects a circumscribed policy debate – there are other options than a No-Fly Zone, which should be avoided as it would harm rather than help efforts to alleviate the suffering of Syrian civilians. 
In any area of policy, the mainstream debate revolves around policy alternatives that reflect establishment divisions. For example, in economics, ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism, at least there wasn’t until Keynesianism was rediscovered by some elites after the 2008 crisis. The debate over what is to be done over Syria revolves around two policy alternatives: the hawks, including likely next U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, advocate a NFZ and the doves, including the current U.S. administration, maintain that the sanctions regime should be increased. This effectively reflects a division within the establishment on how to proceed. Serious policy alternatives are not discussed. In particular, discussion of increasing aid and support to refugees, surely the most obvious way of directly helping civilians in Syria, and what the UN has called on industrialized countries to do , is curious by its absence. 
This circumscribed debate does not logically follow from its supposed pretext – stopping civilian loss of life. In fact, a NFZ is a policy that would unavoidably lead to civilians dying. Enforcing a NFZ means destroying air defenses, which are located to defend cities – i.e. they are located in areas where there are many civilians. Even the flagbearer for the hawks, Hillary Clinton, has admitted privately that with a No-Fly Zone “you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians”; such intervention will “take a lot of civilians”. This realization would seem inconsistent with the often-used humanitarian pretext, but it makes sense given Hillary Clinton’s recent admission that her top priority in Syria is removing Syrian President Assad. 
There is a clear parallel with the imposition of a NFZ in Libya, which prolonged the conflict and worsened the situation for civilians. NATO bombing directly led to scores of civilian deaths and facilitated the overthrow of the regime by rebel militias that have killed, and are continuing to kill , thousands. Particularly repugnant was the ethnic cleansing of black people , including through public lynching . In a 2013 paper , Alan Kuperman, a Harvard academic, argued that NATO intervention extended the war by a factor of 6 and increased the death toll 7 to 10 times; given that Libya is now a failed state, torn apart by warlords, we can safely say that these estimates were too conservative. President Obama privately calls the situation in Libya a “ shit show ”. Only last month a report from the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament found that the humanitarian justification was an insufficient pretext and based on falsehoods, the supposedly limited intervention led “ineluctably” to regime change, and that the (British) government, and by implication other participating Western powers, did not seriously consider diplomatic alternatives to military action. 
Regardless, the mantra of Western foreign policy is “it will be different this time” – unlike all recent Western military interventions this one will be limited, successful and won’t leave a worse humanitarian situation in its wake. Although, if the dire humanitarian situation in Aleppo necessitates immediate action, then why are there not equally loud calls for action for civilians facing similar situations? U.S. bombing in Manbij and Kobane in Syria and Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and flattened entire neighbourhoods ; more than a third of US and UK backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen have hit civilian sites, including schools , hospitals , weddings and funerals . 
Talking about this is not meant as a distraction or relativization; the fact that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are engaged in similar activities does not make the bombing of Aleppo less objectionable. However, it does raise questions about the motives of those pushing so hard for a no-fly zone. If western foreign policy actors, and their allies in press, were motivated by humanitarian concerns, then surely stopping these atrocities should appear on the policy agenda – especially given that the action required is easier and does not risk war with Russia. 
If humanitarian considerations were really the important factors in the foreign policy debate, then there would be discussion on the legitimacy of aerial bombardment of cities and towns, given that this invariably leads to civilian deaths. International agreements have been successful in making chemical and biological weapons illegal, a prohibition which is generally followed ( though not always ). The first well-publicized use of aerial bombardment, the Nazi bombing of Guernica in 1937, caused righteous, popular outrage. Tragically, however, its use became normalized during the Second World War and a ban on aerial bombing of cities was not included in the post-war international settlement. The fact that this seems so hopelessly idealistic reflects the fact that it is geopolitics, not humanitarian considerations, that govern international relations and foreign policy discussion; human suffering is nothing more than a useful pretext for whatever actions you want to take in order to secure geopolitical advantage. The U.S. and its allies want to remove Syria from Russia’s orbit, so therefore the dictator there must go, but airstrikes to support the dictator in Yemen are fine, because the dictator there is a friend of close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. 
There is an added complication with the NFZ in Syria in that it marks a return to Cold-War era brinkmanship and possible armed confrontation with Russia. The logic of brinkmanship runs that to make geopolitical gains, one must escalate to a level that will make the other side back down, partly by convincing your enemy you are ready to commit irrational acts. There is an inherent danger in this game: both states are nuclear armed and the consequences of a spiral of escalation could be devastating . 
Syria hawks, or what close Obama aide Ben Rhodes called the “ pro-stupid shit ” caucus, argue that a NFZ will lead Russia to effectively back down: for example, Clinton argued that it will “give us leverage in our conversations with Russia”. (Interestingly, in the exchange this quote from Clinton indicated the war goal: a NFZ will make Russia “put the Assad future on the political and diplomatic track” – i.e. Russia will be forced to accept regime change.) After all, despite the panic in the press, Russia is actually a feeble successor state to a superpower, and would come off worse in a direct conflict with the preeminent might of North America, or so the logic runs. 
However, ‘dovish’ Western foreign policy actors point to the danger that advanced Russian materiel support to Syria poses to the enforcement of a NFZ. Unlike other recent U.S. military adventures, enforcing a NFZ in Syria could lead to significant, and politically unpalatable, American casualties – pilots will be shot down. This realization means that saner establishment figures are opposed to a NFZ. For example, U.S. Army General Carter Ham, who oversaw the NFZ in Libya, said a NFZ is a “violent combat action that results in lots of casualties and increased risk to our own personnel”. 
Instead, relative doves like current Secretary of State John Kerry advocate intensifying the sanctions regime against Syria and Russia. Again, this does not seem to be seriously about helping civilians. A leaked UN report has revealed that the existing Western sanctions regime is preventing humanitarian aid and creating a humanitarian disaster that threatens to rival that caused by the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq during the 1990s. The history of sanctions tends to show that the costs are borne by civilians, and a Petersen Institute study of all sanctions incidents since WWII shows that sanctions failed to achieve their goals in about ⅔ of cases, and are even less successful when applied against enemies and autocrats. 
So, what is to be done? What should people in the West and globally push for to help the people of Syria? Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any quick fixes – the situation in Syria is complex and involves diverse actors, with competing interests. Immediate relief to the refugees fleeing the conflict should be a priority. In terms of foreign policy, campaigning for de-escalation and diplomacy against constant militarism remain the best solutions for the Syrian people, and humanity generally.",FAKE
"Experts Recommend Breaking Down Crushing Defeats Into Smaller, More Manageable Failures Close Vol 50 Issue 20 · Lifestyle 
SANTA BARBARA, CA—Offering advice to those who feel overwhelmed at the thought of becoming massive failures, a group of experts reported this week that the best way to approach a crippling defeat is to break it down into a set of smaller and more manageable setbacks. “The key to failing on a monumental scale is to take life one small misstep at a time,” life coach Jack V. Royce told reporters, emphasizing that people who hit absolute rock bottom seldom get there overnight. “Just start with a couple of minor fuckups and then build off that. It’s all about working through your long, humiliating downward spiral in workable increments: botch this, flub that, make a wreck of something else—and then, before you know it, you’re well on your way to being totally screwed.” Royce added that it’s also helpful every now and then to stop, take stock of your situation, and really beat yourself up about it. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
"Posted on November 1, 2016 by DCG | 1 Comment 
A good DRT* ending. 
From Fox News : A Pizza Hut employee shot and killed a man during an attempted armed robbery after hours at the store early Sunday morning in west Charlotte, N.C., according to Charlotte Mecklenburg Police. 
Officers were called about 1:38 a.m. to the Pizza Hut to a report of shooting and arrived to find Michael Renard Grace with a gunshot wound. 
Grace was pronounced dead on scene. 
According to police , three people entered the restaurant and were in the process of robbing the business when one of the employees fired his own personal handgun at one of the suspects . 
Investigators said a handgun was recovered at the scene that was being carried by the robbery suspect at the time he was shot. 
The other two robbery suspects fled the scene on foot and have not yet been apprehended. 
*Dead Right There",FAKE
"License DMCA My guest today is Maya Schenwar, Truthout's editor-in-chief, author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better , and co-editor of Who Do You Serve, Who Do you Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States . Joan Brunwasser: Welcome back to OpEdNews, Maya. We last spoke back in January, 2015. Now, I'd like to discuss your recent piece: Death Penalty for Heroin Dealers? More Proof the Drug War Is Not Over . Who thought the drug war was over in the first place and why? - Advertisement - Maya Schenwar: There has been a shift in mainstream politics toward condemning the drug war, and for good reason. It has done nothing to stem drug misuse, and meanwhile it has resulted in the criminalization and incarceration of millions of people, overwhelmingly Black and Brown people. With countless studies demonstrating its ""failure"" (I put this in quotes because I don't think the drug war was actually devised to help people in the first place), politicians who defend it end up looking pretty bad. So the current line is to say it's in the past, and that we have a new approach to drugs going forward. The Obama administration, many state governments, and even conservative politicians (including the ""Right on Crime"" crowd) have said that we need to leave behind the old war on drugs. In February, Eric Holder said the drug war is ""over,"" and Obama increasingly talks about treating drug-related issues as ""public health problems"" instead of criminal problems. JB: How does that change anything: the disproportionate numbers of minority members locked up for possession, more single moms incarcerated for the same, families split up and minors left with no parent at home? Are they, then, opening the prison gates and saying, ""We were wrong. This was all a big mistake; it didn't work and we diverted and wasted billions of dollars that could have been used to good purpose. And we ruined your lives for nothing. Oops. Sorry.""? MS: No, no one is opening the prison gates, unfortunately! There are some limited steps being taken toward scaling back drug-war-related incarceration. For example, Obama has issued hundreds of commutations to people serving super-long drug sentences. Some states have taken steps to reduce some very low-level drug offenses to misdemeanors instead of felonies, which means people are a lot less likely to be incarcerated for them. (California's Proposition 47 is an example of this, although the emphasis on ""low-level offenses"" has actually entrenched the idea that people should be severely punished for ""higher-level offenses.) - Advertisement - Obviously, in a number of states, marijuana is being decriminalized, and some are legalizing it. However, that doesn't mean there are no longer marijuana arrests -- in fact, an ACLU study released recently showed there were more marijuana possession arrests last year than arrests for all violent crimes. The study also showed that Black people are still disproportionately arrested in far greater numbers than white people, despite using marijuana at about the same rate as white people. JB: How do we understand this, Maya? Beyond being convinced that the whole penal system is seriously screwed up, what's the point of increased marijuana arrests? Is this a last gasp effort or at least partly to fill up jail cells and local or private prison coffers? MS: There wasn't an increase in marijuana arrests overall last year; there was a decrease. But obviously it was a small decrease, given that there was a larger number of possession arrests than all violent crime arrests. I don't think it's about filling private prison coffers. Ultimately, prisons are expensive for states, and I don't actually see money as a primary motivator to incarcerate people. Until we challenge criminality itself -- and challenge the white supremacy that underlies the US's version of criminality -- we won't be done with large-scale incarceration. We have to understand incarceration by looking at how people are being labeled as disposable and as ""dangerous,"" and how those things are racialized. Whether it's marijuana possession or something else, there will always be a convenient ""crime"" with which to charge Black and Brown people unless white supremacy itself is confronted. We also have to think about ableism, transmisogyny, patriarchy, economic injustice, capitalism -- really confronting the structures that make it possible for our society to lock millions of people in cages. If we look at the drug war through this lens, we understand that's it's not some stand-alone entity; it's one tool deployed by a larger power structure that continually targets marginalized people in order to keep itself going. JB: Good point. Does the fact that the penal dysfunction is part of a larger overarching dysfunction make it easier or harder to improve it? And what's ableism? I don't know that I'm familiar with that term. MS: I think the fact that it's part of an overarching structural problem means that it can't really been improved, per se -- it really has to be uprooted. I wouldn't say that can happen extremely easily; it's more a goal to move toward while making incremental changes. Ableism is the structural oppression against and devaluation of people with disabilities. One of the ways it plays out in relation to prison is the extremely high level of incarceration of people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. 'Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better' by Maya Schenwar(image by Berrett-Koehler Publishers) License DMCA JB: Quite true. I believe much of that shift occurred when President Reagan ""reallocated"" resources, closing many state mental hospitals and dumping the patients onto the streets and the unprepared public. And we've been paying the price, one way or another, ever since. What haven't we talked about yet? MS: There's of course much more to talk about, but we have to end things somewhere, right? One thing I'd caution people against is assuming that the automatic alternative to incarceration for people convicted of drug offenses should be drug treatment. First of all, most people arrested for drug offenses aren't dependent on drugs (most people who use drugs are not dependent on them); there are safe ways to use drugs and we have to challenge laws that stigmatize their use.",FAKE
"(Live Streams Available Below) 
Anti-Trump protesters are massing all over the country at this moment. Thousands of angry people in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Los Angeles. The New York Times reports that crowds have been peaceful thus far:
Protesters claim they are there to reject Donald’s Trump racist policies and some say they fear mass deportations under a Trump Presidency.
The anxiety began to build on social media this morning as scores of people called for protests, revolution and open threats to kill President Elect Donald Trump .
In the build up to November 8th we warned that the situation post-election, regardless of who wins, could quickly escalate into open warfare and Mike Adams of Natural News warned of a 95% chance of widespread post-election violence .
With large-scale protests now brewing in major cities across the country, we believe it is only a matter of time before some or all of these forecasts could come to fruition. Should things turn violent, though not confirmed by official sources, the Obama administration is prepared to respond. An insider leak last month indicated that the Federal government, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security, would be holding drills before and after the election in which they anticipate “no rule of law.” Such drills, should it be necessary, could very quickly go real-world.
In such a scenario a lock-down of major cities following widespread rioting would be the likely course of action.
There is a strong possibility that protests will be ongoing and that they may escalate. We encourage readers to take preventative measures by preparing for breakdown with a an easy to implement preparedness plan and necessary emergency stockpiles that may include food, water, self defense and protective breathing masks (for those who find themselves too close to the action for comfort) . 
Live Streams (Some of these streams may become unavailable as the night progresses): 


Related: 
The Prepper’s Blueprint: A Step-By-Step Guide To Prepare For Any Disaster 
Tactical Gas Masks and Filters 
Riots, Flag Burning And Open “Threats to Kill Trump” Follow Hillary’s Election Loss 
“This Quickly Escalates Into Open Warfare” – Why The Government Is Preparing For Post-Election Chaos 
Unrest and Martial Law? Leaked Military Drill Anticipates “No Rule of Law” After Election Results 
Prepping for a Full On Breakdown? Stockpile These Foods ",FAKE
"Posted on October 26, 2016 by Barry Soetoro, Esq Published on Oct 26, 2016 by Barry Soetoro HILLARY SUPPORTER (PAID OR UNPAID?) SLEEPS THRU HILLARY’S RALLY IN COCONUT CREEK, FLA. UNFORTUNATELY, THIS SNOOZING FAN IS POSITIONED OVER HILLARY’S SHOULDER ON LIVE TV. 
NOBODY COMES TO HILLARY CLINTON RALLIES — BECAUSE SHE’S BORING AND MENTALLY ILL. WHO WANTS TO WATCH A COMMUNIST WITH DEMENTIA SCREECH ABOUT ROADS AND BRIDGES? 
HILLARY HAS FINALLY EMERGED FROM HIDING, JUST IN TIME TO STEAL ELECTION 2016 VIA VOTER FRAUD. BUT WILL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BELIEVE SHE “WON” AFTER SEEING HILLARY’S PATHETIC TINY RALLY CROWDS? BEFORE SHE RIGS THE ELECTION, SHE’D BETTER DO A BETTER JOB RIGGING HER RALLIES. 
HILLARY’S EYEBALL GONE WILD:",FAKE
"Share This Abdul Barati, a 43-yera-old Afghan migrant, was arrested after investigators noticed something sinister about his house fire. 
When neighbors awoke to strange noises and the smell of smoke coming from a Muslim family’s house, they quickly rushed over to see what was happening. However, as soon as they looked in the window, they immediately notified the authorities of the unspeakable horror they witnessed. 
No matter what heinous crimes Muslims commit, there is always a leftist more concerned with preserving the already unsalvageable reputation of the religion that demands their submission. So, when a Muslim man carried out his gruesome plans in the middle of a suburban neighborhood in Australia, his neighbors were “shocked” to find that an adherent of the world’s most deadly religion could be so barbaric. 
The Daily Telegraph reports that Sydney residents awoke at 3:35 a.m. on October 18 to blood-curdling screams and thick smoke filling the air. They rushed outside to find Abdul Barati, a 43-year-old Afghan migrant, using water from a tap in a half-hearted attempt to extinguish a massive blaze tearing through his home. Instantly, their eyes were drawn to the bedroom window where his wife, 30-year-old Adelah, was banging on the pane and screaming in agony as she slowly burned to death. 
Desperately scrambling to save her life, neighbors told Abdul that they were going to try to help get his wife out of the house. Almost nonchalantly, he told them everything was “fine” and that he didn’t need their assistance except to call the fire department. It was not long after horrified residents were forced to watch the last few seconds of Abelah’s life that they realized this was all part of Abdul’s plan. 
After the fire department quenched the flames, Abdul was arrested and charged with murder. Investigators quickly discovered that the migrant had locked his young wife in their bedroom, removed their 6-year-old and 9-year-old sons, and set the property on fire, the Daily Mail reports. Abdul then pretended to fight the blaze as petrified onlookers watched his poor wife burn to death. Even more appalling is that the two children were also on the front lawn watching their mother engulfed in flames. Neighbors and the Baratis’ two young sons, aged 6 and 9, helplessly watched Adelah burn to death through the bedroom window. 
“There’s a lady screaming, but when my husband arrived to wake her up the screaming stopped already,” Manni Chen told Channel 9, according to News.com.au . “My husband tried to help the man, he said ‘do you need help?’ he said ‘no, no, no, just call the fire station’ and then my husband said ‘let the two kids get out’ and the man said ‘no we are fine.’ The man tried to use a water tap to get the fire down, but he just told my husband call the fire station.” 
We expect liberal apologists to come out in full force, either excusing this behavior as the fault of “mental illness” or blatantly denying its ties to Islam. Of course, if this had happened in a Sharia country instead of Australia, things would play out much differently. 
Earlier this month, a Pakistani Muslim father pardoned himself for the murder of his daughter after the Sharia court found him guilty of honor killing the young woman. In accordance with the country’s Islamic law, Faqeer Muhammad was granted acquittal after shooting and killing Kiran Bibi and Ghulam Abbas for their unapproved relationship, according to the Daily Pakistan . 
According to the Sharia legislature, a murderer can be completely pardoned of his crime if the family of the victim forgives and excuses them. In many cases such as this, the family members are able to pardon themselves for killing their dishonorable kin. 
“The deceased, Kiran Bibi, was my real daughter. She was a spinster at the time of her murder. There are no other legal heirs of the deceased except her mother, Bushra Bibi, and me,” Muhammad told the court. “I have forgiven the accused persons in the name of Almighty Allah, and have no objection to their acquittal. I also waive my right of Qisas (retribution) and Diyat (blood money).” 
Although legislation passed in 2015 outlaws the pardoning of murderers in honor killings, Islamic law reigns supreme in Pakistan, still allowing many Muslim killers to walk scot-free. 
Further proving the violent nature of Islam, fathers who murder their own children without a good Islamic reason are given more brutal sentences. At the same time as Muhammad was pardoning himself, Khalid Mehmood was sentenced to death for killing his 12-year-old daughter for not being able to make perfect bread. If only Mehmood would’ve told the court that he murdered the child for cursing Allah, he could’ve pardoned himself as well. 
Good Muslims cannot coexist anywhere in the world because as long as they are trying to follow their religion, they must call for the destruction of all other laws, religions, and cultures until their ideology reigns supreme. It’s nothing short of incredible that so many Westerners still find it shocking when they do just what the Quran commands.",FAKE
"Retired nuerosurgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson has formally endorsed Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for president.

Carson, who dropped out of the race last week, made the announcement alongside Trump at Mar-a-Largo on Friday, the billionaire's luxury club in Palm Beach.

""I have found that, in talking with him, that there's a lot more alignment philosophically and spiritually than I ever thought there was,"" Carson said during a press conference announcing his endorsement.

""It's about 'we the people.' We need to empower the people,"" Carson said in response to a question about his decision. ""That is not going to be done through politics as usual, be that Republican politics as usual, or be that Democrat politics as usual.""

""It requires somebody who's a bit of an iconoclast but someone who has the ability to listen and to make wise decisions,"" Carson said at the news conference, referring to why he endorsed Trump.

During Thursday night's GOP presidential debate, Trump confirmed the two spent time together earlier Thursday and discussed education and how to improve schools.

Citing sources close to Carson, the Washington Post reported he and Trump met in Palm Beach, earlier Thursday and reached an agreement.

""I hope that we can bridge the gap with everybody,"" Carson said. ""All the policies that I have ever talked about -- and Mr. Trump is going to be on board with this, too -- we talk about things that are good for everybody, not for this group or that group.""

""We will be looking at ways to do things that benefit all Americans that create an equal playing field -- equality of opportunity -- that's what we're looking for,"" he continued.

One source said Carson had been torn between Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, but opted to support Trump because of a rumor circulated ahead of the Iowa caucuses by the Cruz campaign that Carson had dropped out of the race.

In an interview with Fox News Radio's ""John Gibson Show"" Thursday, Carson was asked whether he was planning to join the Trump campaign.

""Let's put it this way, I'm certainly leaning,"" he said earlier, adding that there are ""two Donald Trumps"" - the one seen on television and the one he's gotten to know behind the scenes.",REAL
"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
‘Make America Great Again’ was the slogan of Donald Trump’s election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive, but is not very deeply rooted and likely be temporary, stemming as it does from Trump’s demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy. 
More damaging in the long term for America’s status as superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities – Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos – and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change. 
Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge. 
But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite. 
This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in the Britain or Kurds in south east Turkey. 
In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme – though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan – as well as four serious insurgencies. 
The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump’s comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening. 
Hillary Clinton’s intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist than Trump’s. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis and more to getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. 
President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, but it is still far greater than any other country’s. Currently, it is the US which is successfully coordinating the offensive against Isis’s last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clinton’s proposals for “safe zones” and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible. 
Trump’s instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have nothing to do with the Middle East. Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually end up by being dragged into its crises one way or other, and how they perform then becomes the test of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bush’s years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
"Donald Trump praised Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton defended her 2003 vote for war in Iraq in a televised Q&A Wednesday on national security.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with 'Today' show co-anchor Matt Lauer, left, speaks at the NBC Commander-In-Chief Forum held at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space museum aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid, New York, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton confronted their key weaknesses in a televised national security forum, with the Republican defending his preparedness to be commander in chief despite vague plans for tackling global challenges and the Democrat arguing that her controversial email practices did not expose questionable judgment.

Mr. Trump also renewed his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his disdain for President Barack Obama, saying that the Russian enjoyed an 82 percent approval rating. ""The man has very strong control over a country,"" Trump said. ""It's a very different system and I don't happen to like the system, but certainly, in that system, he's been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.""

Speaking to reporters in Laos, Obama said Thursday that Trump confirms his belief that Trump isn't qualified to be president ""every time he speaks"" and added: ""The most important thing for the public and the press is to just listen to what he says and follow up and ask questions to what appear to be either contradictory or uninformed or outright wacky ideas.""

Trump and Mrs. Clinton spoke back-to-back Wednesday night, each fielding 30 minutes of questions. While the candidates never appeared on stage together, the session served as a preview of sorts for their highly-anticipated presidential debates.

By virtue of a coin flip, Clinton took the stage first and quickly found herself responding at length to questions about her years in government. She reiterated that she had made mistakes in relying on a personal email account and private server as secretary of State and in voting for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a senator. But she defended her support for U.S. military intervention to help oust a dictator in Libya, despite the chaotic aftermath.

""I'm asking to be judged on the totality of my record,"" said Clinton, who grew visibly irritated at times with the repeated focus on her past actions.

Clinton, who has cast Trump as dangerously ill-prepared to be commander in chief, tried to center the discussion on her foreign policy proposals. She vowed to defeat the Islamic State group ""without committing American ground troops"" to Iraq or Syria. And she pledged to hold weekly Oval Office meetings with representatives from the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs to stay abreast of health care for veterans.

Trump did little to counter the criticism that he lacks detailed policy proposals, particularly regarding the Islamic State group. He both insisted he has a private blueprint for defeating the extremist group and that he would demand a plan from military leaders within 30 days of taking office.

But he was also harshly critical of the military, saying America's generals have been ""reduced to rubble"" under Obama. Asked to square his request for military options with that criticism, Trump said simply: ""They'll probably be different generals.""

Trump stood by a previous comment that appeared to blame military sexual assaults on men and women serving together, but added he would not seek to remove women from the military. And for the first time, he opened the door to granting legal status to people living in the U.S. illegally who join the military.

""I think that when you serve in the armed forces, that's a very special situation,"" Trump said. ""And I could see myself working that out.""

The Republican also repeated an incorrect claim that he was opposed to the war with Iraq before the invasion. That assertion is contradicted by an interview Trump did with Howard Stern in September 2002 in which he was asked whether he supported the invasion. He replied, ""Yeah, I guess so.""

With just two months until Election Day, national security has emerged as a centerpiece issue in the White House race. Both candidates believe they have the upper hand, with Clinton contrasting her experience with Trump's unpredictability and the Republican arguing that Americans worried about their safety will be left with more of the same if they elect Obama's former secretary of State.

This event – and the upcoming presidential debates – could be particularly important in the closing days of this election. As The Christian Science Monitor reports, this year an unusually large percentage of the electorate says it hasn’t made up its mind, or will vote for a third-party candidate. That’s a big chunk of folks who might swing in one way or another when the pressure of choosing on Election Day actually nears.

For instance, Wall Street Journal/NBC polling shows 13 percent of voters undecided in 2016. The corresponding figure from this time in 2012 was 8 percent.

“We are seeing a historically high number of potential voters who aren’t committing to either major party candidate at this point,” writes Middlebury College political science professor Matthew Dickinson on his“Presidential Power” blog.

While GOP candidates are often seen by voters as having an advantage on military and national security issues, Trump is far from a traditional Republican. He has no military experience and has repeatedly criticized the skill of the armed forces.

A flood of Republican national security experts have instead chosen to back Clinton, helping bolster her case that Trump is broadly unacceptable. Earlier Wednesday, former Defense Secretary William Cohen joined the list of GOP officials supporting Clinton.

Ahead of the forum, Trump rolled out a new plan to boost military spending by tens of billions of dollars, including major increases in the number of active troops, fighter planes, ships and submarines.

His address earlier in the day included plans to eliminate deep spending cuts known as the ""sequester"" that were enacted when Congress failed to reach a budget compromise in 2011. Republicans and Democrats voted for the automatic, across-the board cuts that affected both military and domestic programs, though the White House has long pressed Congress to lift the spending limits.

Trump expressed support for the sequester in interviews in 2013 — even describing them as too small — but seemed to suggest at the time that military spending should be exempt.

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Erica Werner in Washington and Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.",REAL
"John Kirby and the US State Department Blatantly Support Terrorists 
Kirby and the State Department serve as apologists and white-washers for barbarism Originally appeared at New Eastern Outlook 
The US government, together with the MSM, blatantly supports terrorists. The nexus between politicians, terrorism and the media is well known to the intelligence community. However these links and cozy connections are usually written off as mere coincidence. We are told that the arms and funding which they illegally receive are but an accidental by-product of supporting “freedom fighters,” and that no one planned for these groups to be transformed into terrorist organisations. 
This is but the tip of the iceberg as nowadays Radical Islamists are now just considered as rebels by the main stream media or described as “spoilers” by the US State Department, whose main spokesman, John Kirby just recently referred to Al-Nusra in East Aleppo as a spoiler to the ceasefire in Syria . 
The way the US government and the MSM support terrorists is nothing that should come as any surprise. And this is not accidental, because a specific spokesperson has been appointed to run this media spin operation. 
Meet John Kirby – the man who will call terrorism by anything other than what it is 
Retired Rear Admiral Kirby is the official US State Department Spokesperson. He is a graduate of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, rather than the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and holds degrees in history, international relations, national security and strategic studies. He has worked in information-based roles throughout his armed forces career, though usually speaking to the goverment rather than the public, and the steady, year-on-year increases in US military spending show he has been very effective in this role. 
Kirby was once a Pentagon spokesman. He used to be a Pentagon spokesman, well positioned to present sensitive information in non-controversial packages for mass public consumption. The Pentagon is hardly likely to tell us the truth about the things the public should be interested in: rows between generals, unauthorised or illegal actions or what the generals really think about the politicians they serve. But it has a press service regardless, so has to turn all that into something benign and equally interesting, as far as security clearance will allow. 
This is why, under Kirby’s direction, radical Islamist groups which commit acts which meet any definition of terrorism, even if you agree with their cause, are now referred to simply as “rebels” by the mainstream media, or “spoilers” by the State Department. Listen to this example: Kirby referring to Al-Nusra as a “spoiler” to the ceasefire in East Aleppo . 
He also has a neat trick for minimising terrorism: he refers to Daesh by the silly name Dash, a word Americans are familiar with from athletics, which conjures up images of educated young people in running gear rather than hooded terrorists murdering, beheading and marauding. His statements about Dash are really questionable. 
People probably think they are funny, what about those families of the beheaded people and those killed by ISIS, would they find it funny? It is sick. Readers should be disgusted with Kirby. 
Perhaps these guys think they have the terrorists controlled and managed. However when you tell the public we are at war with radical Islamists, and Al Nusra and others are on the terrorist watch list, why are these “national security experts” allowed to give them the a pass as if allies? The key is that we have allies that are radical Islamists who have attacked us and lots of others. Those allies are supporting the conflict in Syria . 
Western governments are always telling their public that we are at war with radical Islamists, and that Al Nusra and other groups are designated terrorists and will be eliminated (they are on a kill list). All kinds of actions are taken in the name of fighting terrorism, and Western soldiers are sent to die in faraway places doing it. 
So why is Kirby, presented as a “national security expert”, allowed to talk about them as if they are cuddly allies, or so insignificant that they are hardly worth the billions being spent fighting them? 
Terratwitter army 
Wars are by definition controversial, and always attract comment. Everyone has an opinion about a given conflict, and an important point, as they see it, to make. So there is always an endless stream of people who could be called upon to comment in the media. The only way to give any credibility to the contributor chosen is to present them as having some particular qualification, and Kirby’s title unquestionably gives him one. 
There will also be those up close to the action who disagree with anything Kirby says, including many of the troops the State Department has sent to fight in these conflicts. However there is more than one way to skin a cat. 
If Homeland Security wants to track down some actual terrorists then they should look at the source of Twitter feeds, and you will find all shapes and forms, many are members of the Islamist Front. It is clear that even some very prominent main stream journalists are actually supporting “rebels” by engaging with them in these learned exchanges. 
Have you ever noticed how certain articles and statements attract a large number of comments saying the same thing? These are allegedly from members of the public, and therefore by inference “neutral”, the response of the man or woman in the street rather than an interested party. However this “vox pop” system is easy to manipulate, and there is plenty of evidence this is actually happening.. 
Many of the Twitter feeds and comments about conflicts involving terrorists, allegedly from “the general public”, are actually from members of the Islamic Front, and can be traced back to them. One example is the Twitter account Monther@amirramzi. Yet mainstream journalists do not call these individuals out as such. They engage with them as if they are impartial observers whose observations prove the points made in their articles, which the commenters just happen to have read, amongst the dozens available at any given time, when they have plenty of other things to do with their lives. 
A State Department Spokesman has a long reach. You have to have a lot of weapons in place to take on the Pentagon, even in a verbal battle. Are we to believe that all these journalists are working with the Islamic Front independently, without help from above? 
Too good for their own good 
No one wants to live under a repressive regime. Consequently it is very easy to convey the notion that a “rebel” is simply a decent person fighting against injustice, as every individual likes to think they themselves are. People tend to make this connection without looking any deeper, and it takes a lot more effort than most casual observers are willing to make to go into the details of any conflict, and build a counter-narrative to the one presented by the mainstream media. 
The term “rebel” is used to cover all kinds of combatants in Syria. It includes both the “moderate opposition” and self-avowed terrorists. In order to make this fiction stand up, a lot of claims need to be made and a lot of things not reported, as they would counter the picture of a homogenous group of decent people taking a stand which is so obvious it does not need to be explained. 
It is rarely reported that the moderate opposition was persuaded to reject a UN plan to kick out Al Nusra, who are as much a threat to the ambitions of the moderate opposition as the Syrian government is. The opposition to Assad is now forcibly led by the terrorists the West claims to be fighting, because the more moderate forces have been subjected to it by the same West. This is why Kirby refers to Daesh as Dash – he is implying that the moderate forces are fully in agreement with it, and this somehow makes it something other than a terrorist group, in the same way Al Qaeda has been partially rehabilitated by saying its name over and over again until it becomes as familiar as breakfast to the reading public. 
Similarly the word “Christian” is bandied about for an American audience which is increasingly influenced by the religious right which mushroomed as a backlash to failed liberalism. Kirby and his assistants claim that Christians are being persecuted by Assad the Muslim, without going into exactly who is meant by “Christians”, and what the ramifications of holding that faith are. 
Most Syrian Christians describe themselves as Orthodox, but they are split into two very different groups. One is under the Patriarchate of Antioch, based in Damascus, and the other is under either the Jacobite Syrian church or the Nestorian Assyrian church, which have been outside the mainstream Orthodox communion since the 5th century. Politically these are very different animals – the Church of Antioch uses Arabic in its services as part of a deal with the state for protection, whereas the Syrians generally use Syriac and the Nestorians Aramaic. Nor do they receive the same protection, being treated as suspicious minorities by the Syrian state. 
It is this which lies behind the kidnapping and ongoing detention of two bishops, the Syrian Church’s Archbishop John Ibrahim and the Church of Antioch’s Metropolitan Paul Yazigi, who have been held by ISIS since 2013. This is intended to convey the idea that all Christians are the same, and all must therefore hate Assad. We are told that the whereabouts of these two bishops are unknown, but we were told the same about Terry Waite, the Church of England peace envoy who was held captive in Beirut for five years by the Islamic Jihad Organisation. 
On that occasion, with all the sophisticated weapons targeting systems and intelligence at its disposal, the West couldn’t find one captive in a city its raids demonstrated it knew backwards. Bishop Paul is the Metropolitan of Aleppo, strangely enough. 
Too many friends to be true 
The radical Islamists presented as cuddly flies in the ointment by Kirby are sponsored by external governments. We are often told that these include those of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. Many questions have been raised in Western countries about having state sponsors of terrorism as allies, and what those states’ real attitude to terrorism therefore is . Minimising the actions of these groups is therefore a domestic political imperative, not merely a foreign relations or security one, for Western governments. 
This is why Channel 4 News published the report “Aleppo – Up Close With The Rebels” on October 5th. It was an attempt to promote known war criminals and child murderers and thus cleanse their actions, and those of the governments who support them and supply them with the means of committing them. When people started recognising certain faces in the video, and connecting them to actions which had caused journalists to question the US government’s support for this particular rebel group, Channel 4 removed its own report, most unusually . It has not however changed its editorial policy, and presents other groups with similar records in the same way in spite of this. 
There is also a connection with John Kerry’s recent discussions with Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir. It is known that the 28 classified pages of the US government’s official 9\11 report, kept from public view, deal with the role Saudi Arabia played in those attacks. Now Kerry and al-Jubeir are trying to prevent the new Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act from having any effect. 
If it is actually enacted, JASTA will restrict sovereign immunity and make it easier for individuals to prosecute the Saudi state over 9\11, on the basis of the official report. It will also make it easier for other countries to pass parallel legislation which will result in the US being prosecuted for its own actions. This may explain why Obama vetoed the bill, and it was only passed over his veto. 
Now Kerry is trying to fix it so that the bill never comes into effect . If it was enacted, it could have a significant effect on future conflicts by enabling those who believe the actions of a sovereign nation, such as Syria, are criminal to pursue them through legal rather than military avenues. This is the option most “moderate” groups would doubtless prefer. This gives the US military-industrial complex, the only people to profit from any war, every motive for presenting radical terrorists as reasonable, sensible people doing a sensible thing. 
Everyone wins except the future 
Most terrorist groups would be equally radical in behaviour but not be able to achieve as much if just let to their own devices, as they would have neither the weaponry nor the intelligence support. The only reason terrorists who are happy to be martyred by the Western infidels accept their support is because it somehow legitimises them, and they can hope for future favours. 
Menachem Begin, former Israeli PM and Nobel Prize Winner for Peace, was still wanted in the UK for a Zionist bombing when he attended the Leeds Castle Middle East peace negotiations in 1978, but by then enjoyed the dignity of then being a Prime Minister rather than a terrorist, because the West said so . 
John Kirby is still serving the purposes of the Pentagon by presenting terrorists as reasonable, insignificant forces. Not only is he continuing the US sponsorship of terrorism by doing this, he is justifying the billions spent on fighting this apparently insignificant threat. Now the Pentagon can have unlimited funds to spend on anything it can sell to the public. 
Isn’t this a wonderful picture once you connect the dots? “US mainstream media — the playground of spooks and hacks. A propaganda arm of the regime indeed — but that’s not nearly all of it ….” 
Seems the terrorists have jokes of their own, and they are no laughing matter. Enemies are easy to manufacture, same as “manufacturing consent”, especially when you know your audience. It is also easy to turn them into friends in the same way. All you need to do is co-ordinate the effort like a military campaign. 
Who better than John Kirby to tell us what’s what before we have the time to work it out for ourselves?  ",FAKE
"First, let us get the known but essential details out of the way.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has become what a lot of people consider the solution to the Republican Party's potentially very big and very messy problem in the House. Still, Ryan is reluctant to vie for the House speaker job. He has reminded colleagues and reporters that he is a married man with three young children with whom, because of his existing work in D.C., he already spends only weekends. The New York Times reported that in recent years, current Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the man who wants out of the job, spent as many as 200 days a year en route to fundraisers or fundraising somewhere.

For Ryan, it's hard to imagine how the two travel patterns would not conflict.

There's almost nothing about Ryan's conundrum that Americans haven't heard before. In fact, work-life balance is about two days away from joining the list of arguably meaningless cliches. More than a few public figures — particularly lawmakers — have used the old ""resigning to spend more time with my family"" excuse for bowing out of some political race or office. Oftentimes, the excuse seems dubious.

And most of Ryan's own House colleagues seemed to have all but dismissed his family life concerns. Look closely at all those stories about which lawmaker has said what to Ryan to convince him to take the job. Not many have bothered to share a thought — at least in print — on how one might be speaker and a good father to three young children. Translation: Ryan should be more like them. He should leave the bulk of family responsibilities and relationship-building to his wife or the hired help a rising career can buy.

The truth is, there's almost nothing about Ryan's dilemma that many working parents don't know. The real and important difference here is that this time, this is a conversation that is kind of, sort of, being had about a man.

Let's admit at least this much: The way we think and talk about family life and work generally stays in some well-known territory.

First, there's child-care costs. For a middle-income family with a child born in 2013, feeding, clothing, educating and caring for that child into adulthood will cost over $300,000. That's after inflation. The figure is $241,080 before it. But lest anyone comfort themselves with the idea that we must be talking about the cost of raising a family in a big, glamorous city or a childhood with all manner of lessons and camps and enrichment activities, check out and use this useful government calculator. It's digital birth control. For real.

Here's just a taste. Check out the full report here.

But that math often leads to the second topic America likes to cover on the occasion that family and work responsibilities are discussed. This is the one where people ask in the most obtuse fashion possible why so many mothers are leaving or have left the workforce (43 percent) and what on Earth can be done about it.

The answer is beyond simple. Most women still make less than men. That's especially true for mothers. And when those who have a different-sex partner or husband sit down and do the math on child care costs and all the other items in that graphic above (we strongly suggest you check out the full thing), for some, work stops making much immediate financial sense.

When all else fails, there's the inevitable trend story or I-know-a guy-who-knows-a-guy dinner discussion about the virtual sprinkle of men who have become stay-at-home dads. This group may be on its way to becoming a small puddle. But let's not pretend that the stay-at-home dads (a large share of which are, despite the content of most of most of those trend stories, black) have become common. They are important but remain relatively rare.

As Ann Ann Marie Slaughter's Atlantic Magazine article and her book-length look at family and work issues have made plain, people are struggling and in many cases really distressed by this challenge. They are interested in these issues. And there's a lot of evidence that as Slaughter's book puts it, we need to rethink, reframe and, yes, revalue care (child care, family care, family time and relationship building) itself.

[She said women can't have it all. Now she's recommending a revolution in family life.]

Someone is sure to point out that Ryan's children are well past the swaddling and wake-up-at-night stage. That's true. But think long and hard about the implications of that idea, particularly if you are someone's boss.

Ryan, a man in his mid-40s, has young kids. He is part of a younger generation of fathers who, while they do not match the time put in by their children's mothers, are spending more time with their kids and doing at least a little more housework than fathers in the past. Is that really something to discourage?

And all politics and policy aside, anyone who has given the most cursory read to any child development research knows that children benefit from healthy, sustained and reliable contact with both their parents and, when possible, extended family. Certainly, Ryan has spent some enough time on Capitol Hill to see the sometimes sad results of another path. Is there any other professional community besides perhaps Hollywood where struggles with troubled and out-of-control children or rocky marriages are the subject of so many knowing jokes?

Moreover, Ryan is a man who came to his family life with a personal history that, at the very least, has given him real reason to be deliberate. Ryan found his own father, an apparently hard-charging lawyer, dead of a heart attack in his bed when Ryan was just 16. At that point, as Ryan's older brother told the New York Times, his older siblings were away at college. Ryan's mother went back to school. And his grandmother, who lived with the family, had reached the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease. Before Ryan even left high school, he experienced the toll of a sudden and early death and a slow, merciless one.

Is it really any wonder Ryan's wife said in an August interview that Ryan's time with his family is ""his oxygen?""

Now, Ryan's biggest critics would no doubt argue that Ryan's budget ideas haven't advanced the work-life balance cause, particularly for families with less money than his own. But whatever happens, the Ryan conundrum should make this much clear.

In the United States, talent is squandered, opportunities are missed and maybe even the common good sacrificed every day because hard choices like Ryan's too often have to be made.",REAL
"House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was considered the front-runner to replace John Boehner, stunned his Republican colleagues Thursday by abruptly withdrawing from the race, throwing the leadership battle into chaos.

McCarthy's decision, announced moments before Republicans were set to nominate their candidate, will postpone the vote for speaker. McCarthy had been running against Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Daniel Webster, R-Fla., before he dropped out, and it's unclear whether other candidates will now step forward.

While McCarthy, R-Calif., faced vocal opposition from some conservative members and groups, he was thought to have more than enough support to win the party's nomination in the vote initially set for Thursday. Fox News is told McCarthy, in revealing his choice, simply told colleagues it was not his time.

His withdrawal rattled fellow lawmakers, particularly allies in leadership. But addressing reporters afterward, McCarthy said he thinks the party needs a ""fresh face.""

""If we are going to unite and be strong, we need a new face to help do that,"" McCarthy said. ""We've got to be 100 percent united.""

He said he will stay on as majority leader.

Chaffetz, speaking shortly afterward, said McCarthy's withdrawal was ""absolutely stunning."" Chaffetz said he would remain in the race. ""I really do believe it is time for a fresh start,"" he said.

While Boehner originally was set to resign at the end of the month, the speaker said in a statement Thursday afternoon he ""will serve as Speaker until the House votes to elect a new Speaker."" He added, ""I'm confident we will elect a new Speaker in the coming weeks.""

Practically speaking, Republicans' overriding interest is to find a candidate who can muster an absolute majority on the House floor in a full chamber vote, originally set for Oct. 29. While McCarthy was likely to easily win the nomination, it was unclear whether he could muster a majority -- of roughly 218 members -- once lawmakers from both parties vote for speaker.

McCarthy gave no indication of dropping out earlier in the day. ""It's going to go great,"" McCarthy said Thursday morning. But he later suggested he was concerned he'd only be able to win narrowly in a floor vote.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said McCarthy actually felt he couldn't reach 218. Still, he said McCarthy's backing will be the ""most important endorsement"" for whoever seeks the post.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the party's vice presidential nominee in 2012, swiftly put out a statement saying he would not run, while saying he's ""disappointed"" McCarthy dropped out.

Conservative groups, meanwhile, cheered the decision. FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon said in a statement that McCarthy ""dropped out of the Speaker race because of the House Freedom Caucus and grassroots pressure. ... This is a huge win for conservatives who want to see real change in Washington, not the same go along get along ways of Washington.""

He was referring in part to a decision Wednesday by the conservative House Freedom Caucus -- with its 30-40 members -- to back Webster as a bloc.

The speaker's race already has seen several curveballs since Boehner suddenly announced his retirement and McCarthy swiftly positioned himself as the presumptive next in line.

Shortly after announcing his candidacy, McCarthy was seen to stumble in a Fox News interview where he appeared to link Hillary Clinton's dropping poll numbers to the congressional Benghazi committee. His comments fueled Democratic charges that the committee is merely political, which GOP leaders deny.

Amid the backlash over McCarthy's Benghazi remarks, Chaffetz entered the leadership race over the weekend.

Republicans have nearly 250 members in the House and on paper have the numbers to win against the Democrats' nominee, likely Nancy Pelosi. But if the eventual Republican nominee comes out with a tally short of 218, he or she will have to try to rally support to get to that number.

In a curious development, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., also sent a letter to House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., urging a full vetting of all leadership candidates to avoid a repeat of 1998, when the conference selected then-Rep. Bob Livingston in November to succeed outgoing House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It then emerged Livingston had been conducting an affair. Jones asked that any candidate who has committed ""misdeeds"" withdraw.

Asked by FoxNews.com to elaborate, Jones said he doesn't ""know anything"" specific about any of the candidates, but, ""We need to be able to say without reservation that 'I have nothing in my background that six months from now could be exposed to the detriment of the House of Representatives.'"" He said he wants to make sure the candidates have ""no skeletons.""

Fox News' Chad Pergram and FoxNews.com's Cody Derespina and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"By the constant administration of lies, the media puppeteers manufacture wars, protect the super-wealthy, and destroy democracy. Joe Giambrone “ We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious President. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fictitious orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush.”–Michael Moore Oscar acceptance speech, moments before his mic was cut off. T his year may mark a turning point, where the moral bankruptcy was laid bare for all. I’m speaking of the Bernie Sanders flip-flop for Hillary Clinton, the predictable bait-and-switch, which Democrats never seem to imagine in real time. The rest of us have seen it so often that the ruse has become routine Standard Operating Procedure. A particularly notable case is Sarah Silverman (left) , the filthy-mouthed comedienne, who originally championed Bernie. But she quickly fell into lockstep for Hillary. Silverman had a soul empty enough to go and scold the United States to support a candidate whom she had just been fighting against , and who actually stole the nomination from her own candidate through back-room deals at the DNC and through apparent voting-machine hacking . The thief was rewarded instead of jailed for some reason, which Hollywood has had absolutely zero interest in, as if it didn’t happen. They moved on instantly to lambast us all about Donald Trump 24/7. Orwell couldn’t have written it better. Hollywood has a highly complex understanding of political philosophy and particularly of this presidential race: 1. Trump Bad 2. Hillary Woman 3. So-called “Lesser Evil” W e should acknowledge, those who are literate, that Hillary Clinton’s repeated threats to escalate World War 3 over Syria leave her as potentially the greater evil, not the lesser at all. The jury is very much out. “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Rodham Clinton has a lengthy record of supporting every US aggressive war and opposing none. She may have played a part in the killings of over 2 million human beings so far, merely tallying those casualties from the three countries of Iraq, Syria and Libya. One may opt to also add another half-million Iraqi children who died as a result of her husband’s eight years of sanctions. I noticed Hollywood’s widespread mindless support for Democrats back in 2000, when I kicked that shockingly corrupt party to the curb and joyfully cast a vote for Ralph Nader, an actual American hero whose efforts have saved lives. Die-hard whiners of the Democratic rank-and-file still falsely claim that big bad Ralph gave the election to Dubya Bush, when anyone with the ability to read can see that it was the Supreme Court which stopped the legitimate counting of Florida ballots. Add Bush’s brother Jeb purging nearly two-hundred thousand minority voters from rolls. But the mindless strategy of attacking third parties and attempting to delegitimize democracy itself persists among the ignorant (a majority of Democrats perhaps). This is by design; this is who they are. They do not believe in democracy, because the billionaires who fund them do not believe in any democracy they cannot control. But the mindless strategy of attacking third parties and attempting to delegitimize democracy itself persists among the ignorant (a majority of Democrats perhaps). This is by design; this is who they are. They do not believe in democracy, because the billionaires who fund them do not believe in any democracy they cannot control . George W. Bush’s theft of the presidency did help expose the moral bankruptcy of Democrats as well as Republicans. When Bush lied about Iraq, Hillary Clinton was right there with him embellishing and freestyling! She claimed Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to be “undisputed.” Her lies helped sell the war to Congress, a war of aggression: what the Nazis did and were hung for at Nuremberg. Her role in aggressive war and in destroying International Law as a restraint against belligerence are profound crimes, grievous war crimes: “the supreme international crime” in the words of U.S. Judge Robert Jackson. When a handful of Democrats attempted to impeach the Bush junta for crimes relating to those wars, as well as to torture and cover-up, it was Democrat Nancy Pelosi who announced “Impeachment is off the table.” Criminal collusion, allowing the crimes to stand without recourse, that is what they did. The US federal government has served as a protection racket for international war crimes. The damage that Democrats inflicted upon the rule of law is equal to that of the Republicans. The former had a moral and legal responsibility to defend the Constitution, their oaths of office, but voluntarily opted not to. The Internet helped flood the world with information to pass around, both good and bad, but the crimes of both parties became difficult for them to wash away now that Google made all web searchers equal. Today, things have accelerated into realms of the absurd. CNN recently cut off a congressman in mid-sentence for uttering the word “Wikileaks.” This Soviet-style clampdown on dissent remains a shocker even in a society that’s pretty much seen it all. The media, distrusted by most , is only one aspect of the problem though. Americans get their views from joking heads as much as from stodgy teleprompter readers. Talk shows and comedy skits propagandize viewers every bit as much as do the Washington Post or New York Times . Celebrity endorsements matter. Documents recently emerged that confirm Oliver’s willingness to shill for Hillary. And he’s not alone among the so-called cutting-edge “perceptive” comedians. Bill Maher has long been a Democratic party loyalist, and recently Amy Schumer—for all her smarts and anti-status quo posturing—came out strongly for Hillary. Schumer may be a dupe and clueless about the true nature of the Hillary option, but Oliver cannot be so easily forgiven. A casual glance at those programs would reveal that democracy is non-existent in Hollywood today. All voices are not represented. Minority candidates cannot get air time, will not be interviewed, and will only be mocked in absentia as per John Oliver’s recent disgraceful hit piece on Green Party candidate Jill Stein , a cowardly move John. Shameful. But Oliver is far from alone. I single him out because he knows better and could have done justice to the Green Party and to its clear alternative to perpetual war, empire, and industrialized ecocide. But where would that have left him personally vis a vis the Hollywood political consensus? Nowhere is presidential candidate Jill Stein welcome, not on the debate stage where she belongs, not on the daily puff shows, not on the edgy comedy interview shows, and not on SNL. This blanket censorship is quite glaring, and clearly part and parcel of a system rigged in favor of Democrats―no matter who they are, nor how long their rap sheets happen to be. Hollywood’s strategy is as simple-minded as those who are easily programmed by it. They point the finger endlessly at the boogie-man, who happens to be Donald Trump this year―it’s the same every cycle. It was the evil Romney, the evil McCain and the evil Bush Jr. prior. In regimented fashion, the entire industry demonizes the enemy du jour , and so ensures that the crimes of their own candidate never receive any light of day. That’s the trick. In their manufactured hysteria over the latest Republican they omit the entire criminal history of the Democratic nominee, how she stole the nomination in the first place for instance, and they avoid mentioning all the non-criminal alternatives, who are not corrupted by Wall Street, the military-industrial-complex, and foreign tyrants. This manufactured hysteria is strategic, and it is a false dichotomy. The fake two-candidate only choice is never questioned by Hollywood. To do so would mark one as an aberration, a non-conformist, a free thinker. You would be outcast to hobnob with the likes of Charlie Sheen, Gary Busey, Roseanne Barr, and Randy Quaid. This conformism is a mechanism of social control, and it’s not a laughing matter. I use the word kakistocracy more often lately, rule by the worst. Only the worst, the most corrupt, the biggest liars can rise in this rigged system. A more formal study pegged it as “ oligarchy ,” but I find the term bland. It is very much rigged on numerous levels to keep out the honest and the moral. If that’s not a problem to you, Hollywood , then you are indeed living in a fantasy story: Michael Moore’s fictional times roll on. “ dems ? Do U have any thoughts on Obama’s transition from a progressive academic humanist 2 a regressive corporate warlord?” Joe Giambrone is an author and independent filmmaker . He publishes Political Film Blog mainly to store evidence of these ongoing crime sprees. Bonus Feature: Originally Posted on FEBRUARY 20, 2013 by JOE GIAMBRONE H ollywood likes to pretend that things aren’t political when they are. It’s that bi-partisan nationalist myth that if both corporate parties agree to cheer for the empire, then everyone cheers for the empire. It’s gotten so bad now that races like the Oscars and the Writer’s Guild screenwriting award are tight contests between one CIA propaganda film and another CIA propaganda film. The first one helps to demonize Iranians and set up the next World War scenario, while the second film fraudulently promotes the effectiveness of state-sanctioned torture crimes. If there ever was a time for loud disgust and rejection of the Hollywood / Military-Industrial-Complex, this would seem to be it ( contact@oscars.org ). Naomi Wolf made a comparison of Zero Dark Thirty ’ s creators Bigelow and Boal to Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl ( Triumph of the Will ). That, to me, seems inappropriately offensive to Leni Riefenstahl. The good German filmmaker never promoted torture through deception. Nor was Triumph a call to war. The film was simply an expression of German patriotism and strength, rebirth from the ashes of World War I. The current insidious crop of propaganda, as in the CIA’s leaking of fictional scenes about locating Osama Bin Laden through torture extraction, are arguably more damaging and less defensible than Riefenstahl’s upfront and blatant homage to Hitler’s leadership. The Zero Dark Thirty scandal should be common knowledge by now, but here is what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence wrote to Sony Pictures about it: “We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden… Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.” The filmmakers had every opportunity to explore the issue more fully, instead of relying on the “firsthand accounts” of the torturers themselves , and/or their allies within the Central Intelligence Agency. Notably, torturers are felons and war criminals. Those who know about their crimes and help cover them up are guilty of conspiracy to torture. Thus, these self-serving fairy tales that illegal torture led to the desired results (bin Laden) are tangled up with the motivation to protect war criminals from prosecution. Not only does this claim of successful torture help insulate the guilty from legal prosecution, it also helps to promote further criminal acts of torture in the future. Once this red flag issue was raised by the Senate, the filmmakers could have taken a second look at what they had put up on screens and reassessed the veracity of their material and the way it was being sold to the world. Instead they doubled down. Bigelow and Boal want it both ways, extraordinary access to CIA storytellers for a documentary-like “factual” telling of the bin Laden execution, but they also want license to claim that it’s just a movie and can therefore take all the liberties they please. Jessica Chastain, who plays a state-employed torturer/murderer, who also allegedly located Osama bin Laden, said : “I’m afraid to get called in front of a Senate committee… In my opinion, this is a very accurate film… I think it’s important to note the film is not a documentary.” In a nutshell, that’s the Zero Dark Thirty defense. It’s a highly sourced “ very accurate film ,” but we can take all the liberties we like because it’s not a documentary, and so if we made up a case for torture based on the lies of professional liars in the CIA, then oops. Mark Boal went so far as to mock the Senate Intelligence Committee, at the NY Film Critic’s Circle : “In case anyone is asking, we stand by the film… Apparently, the French government will be investigating Les Mis.” Any controversy over the picture seems to help its box office, as more uninformed people hear about it. The filmmakers themselves suffer no penalty as a result of misleading a large number of people on torture, to accept torture, to accept a secretive criminal state that tortures with impunity. Kathryn Bigelow’s wrapped-in-the-flag defense of the film: “Bin Laden… was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.” (emphasis in original) Nice propaganda trick at the end equating those who “gave all of themselves” and “death” with the individuals who “ sometimes crossed moral lines.” Everyone’s dirty; you see. All heroes are torturers; so it’s okay. Bigelow’s half-assed response to getting called out by the Senate for putting false torture results into her film, is to say : “Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore . War, obviously, isn’t pretty, and we were not interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences.” (emphasis added) Ignore? By her reasoning, because the Central Intelligence Agency tortured people, she was required to fit it into the plot somehow, whether it was relevant to the investigation or not. That’s her excuse. No matter that the scenes are fabrications, and the actual clues about bin Laden’s courier came from elsewhere (electronic surveillance, human intelligence, foreign services). Bigelow told Charlie Rose , when asked the same question about the torture: “ Well I think it’s important to tell a true story .” Unfortunately, when confronted with the Senate investigation, truth quickly takes a back seat. The truth Bigelow now clings to is that, “Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue.” To Kathryn Bigelow, the fact that the so-called “experts” she has sided with are torturer criminals with a vested interest in her portrayal of their crimes never occurs to her. She can dismiss the entire matter as a “debate.” Perhaps she no longer finds it “ important to tell a true story?” Kathryn Bigelow basking in the spotlight secured by shilling for the imperialist state. Kathryn Bigelow, America’s Leni Riefenstahl, claims that Zero Dark Thirty tells “a true story,” even when confronted by evidence that it is a lie. She is unapologetic and completely divorced from the real world damage her propaganda encourages. If this film takes home the Best Picture Oscar, it should serve as the cherry on top of a brutal, deceptive, decrepit and immoral empire, and signal this reality to the rest of the world. If this is allegedly the “best” of America, then we are truly finished. As for Ben Affleck’s Argo, its sins aren’t so readily apparent. Both films show wonderful Central Intelligence “heroes” acting to further US interests and take care of imperial problems. The Argo scenario is a rescue, however, instead of a hit. The problem is that Iran, a country thrown into a bloodthirsty dictatorship after its nascent democracy was murdered by the very same CIA in 1953, is now the bad guy. There are clearly two sides, and the film takes sides with the people who destroyed democracy in Iran and propped up an illegitimate monarch in order to control its oil and its refineries. When this despotic monarch whose secret police disappeared, tortured and murdered the political opposition – with the help and training of the CIA – is overthrown, we are supposed to overlook all that, because America is always good. We rescue our people. We risk our lives, and we come up with elaborate creative plans to help our people. We are heroic and triumphant vs. the inferior wild-eyed Persians and Arabs of the world. Now I do believe there’s a real story there, and the situation is ripe for telling, but an extreme sensitivity to the political context would be required. As Jennifer Epps put it : “…[T]he Iran we see in the [ Argo ] news clips and the Iran we see dramatized are all on the same superficial level: incomprehensible, out-of-control hordes with nary an individual or rational thought expressed. … But we never go behind-the-scenes at this revolution. (Instead, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio’s tempering historical introduction is soon outweighed by the visceral power of mobs storming walls, chador-clad women toting rifles, and banshees screaming into news cameras.) …The problem is that viewers who don’t already know their Chomsky or William Blum aren’t going to walk out of [ Argo ] muttering “gee, it’s more complicated than I thought.” Instead, they’ll leave with their fears and prejudices reaffirmed: that Middle Easterners create terror, that Americans must be the world’s policemen, and that Iranians cannot be trusted because they hate America. … Argo almost completely ignores individual Iranians; its portrait of an entire culture is neither refined nor sophisticated; and it does reinforce a simplistic, Manichean perspective.” Enough said? So why are Argo and Zero Dark Thirty receiving all these awards? Are the awarding bodies so full of hyper-patriots who believe pro-American films can deceive and demonize with impunity, that they want to send an unequivocal message of support for these practices? Is hyper-nationalist propaganda in vogue now? With the ascendancy of Barack Obama, there is no longer a moral anti-war voice of any significant size in America. Obama, the smooth talker, has soothed away morality, ethics, law and rights. The empire is beyond reproach because Obama runs it. So the liberal center/left says nothing. Nothing but empty blather and ignorant praise of the Democrats. Murder is being codified in secret as we speak. Bush’s wars are being publicly scaled down, only to ramp up new covert wars of conquest across Africa. Nothing substantial has changed since George W., only the style. There was a time when no one trusted the CIA. Far from heroes, they were the prime suspects in the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. CIA support of terrorists was well known, if not loudly opposed. This agency has sponsored Cuban exiles to commit acts of terrorism inside Cuba. Its Phoenix Program kidnapped and murdered Vietnamese villagers by the thousands, torturing and killing them for alleged communist sympathies. The CIA overthrew democracies from Iran to Gutemala to Chile, and was instrumental in waging a terror war against Nicaragua by employing drug-running mercenary terrorists called “Contras.” When the Church Committee investigated the agency in the mid-70s, lots of dirty laundry was aired. The agency was reined in for a time. Assassination was made technically illegal. In the 1980s, the CIA fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan by funneling money and arms to radical Islamic Jihadists – like Osama bin Laden – and creating an intelligence/military monster in Pakistan, known as the ISI. With untold billions of dollars of US tax money, plus Saudi oil money, the Pakistanis were propped up as a central hub for militant groups to operate throughout the region. Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden allegedly ended up living for the last decade of his life, half a mile from the Pakistani military academy. The CIA today is instrumental in the blitzkrieg of terror across Syria. It funnels arms and money to radical Islamic Jihadists, exactly as it did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 2011 it participated in the Libyan Crime Against the Peace doing much the same type of activity on behalf of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a group that helped take over that nation despite being included on the US State Department’s Terrorist List! The LIFG has sent its fighters over to Syria, after the fall of Qadaffi, to assist in the genocidal guerrilla war against the Syrian state, as well as civilians. The CIA assists in these activities. But of course those victims aren’t Americans. So none of that counts. “…Is it healthy for us to hold up images of Cold War CIA agents as selfless do-gooders?” –Jennifer Epps NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joe Giambrone is a filmmaker and author of Hell of a Deal: A Supernatural Satire . He edits The Political Film Blog , which welcomes submissions. polfilmblog at gmail. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
We apologize for this inconvenience. =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
"“This was not a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement.”

Not on anyone’s mind? For years, immigration has been the subject of near-constant, often bitter argument within the GOP. But it is true that Trump has brought the debate to a new place — first, with his announcement speech, about whether Mexican migrants are really rapists, and now with the somewhat more nuanced Trump plan.

Much of it — visa tracking, E-Verify, withholding funds from sanctuary cities — predates Trump. Even building the Great Wall is not particularly new. (I, for one, have been advocating that in this space since 2006.) Dominating the discussion, however, are his two policy innovations: (a) abolition of birthright citizenship and (b) mass deportation.

If you are born in the United States, you are an American citizen. So says the 14th Amendment. Barring some esoteric and radically new jurisprudence, abolition would require amending the Constitution. Which would take years and great political effort. And make the GOP anathema to Hispanic Americans for a generation.

And for what? Birthright citizenship is a symptom, not a cause. If you regain control of the border, the number of birthright babies fades to insignificance. The time and energy it would take to amend the Constitution are far more usefully deployed securing the border.

Moreover, the real issue is not the birthright babies themselves, but the chain migration that follows. It turns one baby into an imported village.

Chain migration, however, is not a constitutional right. It’s a result of statutes and regulations. These can be readily changed. That should be the focus, not a quixotic constitutional battle.

Last Sunday, Trump told NBC’s Chuck Todd that all illegal immigrants must leave the country. Although once they’ve been kicked out, we will let “the good ones” back in.

On its own terms, this is crackpot. Wouldn’t you save a lot just on Mayflower moving costs if you chose the “good ones” first — before sending SWAT teams to turf families out of their homes, loading them on buses and dumping them on the other side of the Rio Grande?

Less frivolously, it is estimated by the conservative American Action Forum that mass deportation would take about 20 years and cost about $500 billion for all the police, judges, lawyers and enforcement agents — and bus drivers! — needed to expel 11 million people.

This would all be merely ridiculous if it weren’t morally obscene. Forcibly evict 11 million people from their homes? It can’t happen. It shouldn’t happen. And, of course, it won’t ever happen. But because it’s the view of the Republican front-runner, every other candidate is now required to react. So instead of debating border security, guest-worker programs and sanctuary cities — where Republicans are on firm moral and political ground — they are forced into a debate about a repulsive fantasy.

Which, for the Republican Party, is also political poison. Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points and he was advocating only self-deportation. Now the party is discussing forced deportation.

It is not just Hispanics who will be alienated. Romney lost the Asian vote, too. By 47 points. And many non-minorities will be offended by the idea of rounding up 11 million people, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding members of their communities.

Donald Trump has every right to advance his ideas. He is not to be begrudged his masterly showmanship, his relentless candor or his polling success. I strongly oppose the idea of ostracizing anyone from the GOP or the conservative movement. On whose authority? Let the people decide.

But that is not to say that he should be exempt from normal scrutiny or from consideration of the effect of his candidacy on conservatism’s future. If you are a conservative alarmed at the country’s direction and committed to retaking the White House, you should be concerned about what Trump’s ascendancy is doing to the chances of that happening.

The Democrats’ presumptive candidate is flailing badly. Republicans have an unusually talented field with a good chance of winning back the presidency. Do they really want to be dragged into the swamps — right now, on immigration — that will make that prospect electorally impossible?

Yes, I understand. The anger, the frustration, etc., etc., that Trump is channeling. But how are these alleviated by yelling “I’m mad as hell” — and proceeding to elect Hillary Clinton?

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Blame government, not markets for monopoly Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency By Ron Paul - November 1, 2016 
When Time-Warner announced it planned to merge with another major communications firm, many feared the new company would exercise near-total monopoly power. These concerns led some to call for government action to block the merger in order to protect both Time-Warner’s competitors and consumers. 
No, I am not talking about Time-Warner’s recent announced plan to merge with AT&T, but the reaction to Time-Warner’s merger with (then) Internet giant AOL in 2000. Far from creating an untouchable leviathan crushing all competitors, the AOL-Time-Warner merger fell apart in under a decade. 
The failure of AOL-Time-Warner demonstrates that even the biggest companies are vulnerable to competition if there is open entry into the marketplace. AOL-Time-Warner failed because consumers left them for competitors offering lower prices and/or better quality. 
Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency by removing inefficient management and boards of directors. These managers and board members often work together to promote their own interests instead of generating maximum returns for investors by providing consumers with affordable, quality products. Thus, laws making it difficult to launch a “hostile” takeover promote inefficient use of resources and harm investors, workers, and consumers. 
Monopolies and cartels are creations of government, not markets. For example, the reason the media is dominated by a few large companies is that no one can operate a television or radio station unless they obtain federal approval and pay federal licensing fees. Similarly, anyone wishing to operate a cable company must not only comply with federal regulations, they must sign a “franchise” agreement with their local government. Fortunately, the Internet has given Americans greater access to news and ideas shut out by the government-licensed lapdogs of the “mainstream” media. This may be why so many politicians are anxious to regulate the web. 
Government taxes and regulations are effective means of limiting competition in an industry. Large companies can afford the costs of complying with government regulations, costs which cripple their smaller competitors. Big business can also afford to hire lobbyists to ensure that new laws and regulations favor big business. 
Examples of regulations that benefit large corporations include the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations that raise costs of developing a new drug, as well as limit consumers ability to learn about natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Another example is the Dodd-Frank legislation, which has strengthened large financial intuitions while harming their weaker competitors. 
Legislation forcing consumers to pay out-of-state sales tax on their online purchases is a classic case of business seeking to use government to harm less politically-powerful competitors. This legislation is being pushed by large brick-and-mortar stores and Internet retailers who are seeking a government-granted advantage over smaller competitors. 
Many failed mergers and acquisitions result from the distorted signals sent to business and investors by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco, which was a direct result of the Fed-created dot.com bubble. 
In a free market, mergers between businesses enable consumers to benefit from new products and reduced prices. Any businesses that charge high prices or offer substandard products will soon face competition from businesses offering consumers lower prices and/or higher quality. Monopolies only exist when government tilts the playing field in favor of well-connected crony capitalists. Therefore those concerned about excessive corporate power should join supporters of the free market in repudiating the regulations, taxes, and subsides that benefit politically-powerful businesses. The most important step is to end the boom-bust business cycle by ending the Federal Reserve.",FAKE
"President Obama offered enthusiastic support for Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday as he painted a hopeful picture of the country.

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wave to the crowd after the president spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Penn., on July 27, 2016.

President Obama described an optimistic, hopeful picture of America in a speech Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, pointedly diverging from the more foreboding tone of the previous week's Republican event.

Mr. Obama offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton, saying “nobody [is] more qualified” to be president, and galvanized delegates at the convention in Philadelphia by drawing a sharp contrast with the dark portrait of the country described by Republican nominee Donald Trump.

""I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before,"" Obama said as delegates cheered at the Wells Fargo Center. ""America is already great. America is already strong,"" he said, referring to Mr. Trump's promise to ""make America great again.""

""And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump,"" the president added.

As Mrs. Clinton, formerly secretary of State and first lady, became the first woman to gain the presidential nomination of a major party on Tuesday, a sense of looking forward to the future emerged as a theme of the party's convention: largely hopeful, but with sharp criticism of a potential Trump administration.

""Our convention is going to be optimistic, it’s going to be hopeful, and it’s going to be talking about specific plans,"" Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters Monday morning. As The Christian Science Monitor’s Amanda Paulson reports:

And so far, that’s largely been the case, even down to the signs distributed for delegates to wave on the floor: “Love Trumps Hate.” “Stronger Together.” “Rise Together.” If Trump titled his book “Crippled America” and declared himself the “law-and-order candidate,” the only one who can fix a rigged system and “make America great again,” the themes echoed by speaker after speaker in Philadelphia have been ones of togetherness, diversity, and an emphasis on American values of inclusion rather than a need to close off borders.

But despite the optimism evoked by many speakers, including first lady Michelle Obama and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Democrats could face an uphill battle. Trump’s narrative of an America divided along class and racial lines, and his accusations that the system is “rigged” against people still struggling economically, tap into many Americans' growing sense of distrust, particularly of political leaders in Washington.

Trump’s message also reveals a divide on optimism that exists along both partisan and racial lines, Ms. Paulson notes. A poll conducted by the Atlantic and the Aspen Institute last year found that less than half of white Americans believe the country’s “best days” lie ahead of it, compared to about 80 percent of African Americans, she writes.

On Twitter, Trump waved off Obama's depiction of the country.

On the convention’s third day, many speakers focused on Trump’s own record, with vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine noting the businessman’s lack of political experience, calling him “a one-man wrecking crew” who could not be trusted in the White House.

Attention now turns to whether Clinton, who is set to speak on the convention’s final day Thursday, can make a convincing argument for staking out her own path while also delivering on promises to continue Obama’s legacy, the Associated Press reported.

She has focused on addressing income inequality, student debt, tightening gun control and reigning in Wall Street, seeking to woo supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who mounted a strong challenge to Clinton by focusing particularly on a sense that many Americans are struggling economically. On Monday, Senator Sanders offered an enthusiastic endorsement of Clinton, saying he was ""proud to stand with her.""

Some Clinton delegates say the Democrats’ optimism also offers a counterbalance to Trump’s focus on looking backward.

“I think there are solutions, moving forward solutions, and I don’t want to go back to the 1950s, thank you very much,” Bear Atwood, a lawyer from Mississippi, told the Monitor earlier this week. “Where’s the perfect moment? I think it’s ahead of us.""

This article includes material from Reuters and the Associated Press.",REAL
"First we were told that a Russian hacker had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s computers and gotten hold of its oppo file on Donald Trump.

Now someone who goes by 'Guccifer 2.0,' a nod to the shadowy Romanian hacker, is claiming credit for putting the Trump file out there. Gawker and the Smoking Gun both published the report yesterday.

But what I find so amusing is that the opposition research file is hardly filled with secret stuff, the product of private eyes digging up dirt or hired-gun sleuths poring over documents. This supposed treasure trove, submitted in December, consists mainly of published articles and televised segments.

In other words, it’s all out there. You can Google it. Any reasonably sentient media consumer would know this stuff. It’s what we in the journalism racket call a clip job.

“Trump is Loyal only to Himself.”

“Trump’s Business Have Gone into Bankruptcy Several Times.”

“He Has Devalued and Demeaned Women Repeatedly Throughout His Career.”

“Out of Touch/Hand-Outs for the Wealthy at the Expense of the Middle Class.”

And the sources? Wall Street Journal, AP, Politico, Washington Post, Forbes, etc.

Trump, for his part, isn’t buying the DNC explanation that this is the work of some nefarious outside hacker. “Much of it is false and/or entirely inaccurate,” he says in a statement. “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader. Too bad the DNC doesn’t hack Crooked Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails.”

Now that sounds far-fetched as well. Not only is there nothing new here, but no one can absorb 200 pages at once. Why not dribble out the attacks, package them as talking points, put them in attack ads, rather than create a bogus hacking story and dump it all out there? Or dress it up with some narrative and release it as a report?

What we have here, whether it was done by Guccifer 2.0 or whoever, is a 21st-century Watergate. Instead of burglars breaking into DNC headquarters, a crime that led to the downfall of Richard Nixon’s presidency, we have cyberwarfare against DNC computers, only aimed at the de facto Republican nominee, and winding up in the now-bankrupt, sex-tape-publishing Gawker rather than the Washington Post.

Simply vacuuming up negative material on a candidate doesn’t work in today’s cluttered media environment. Trump has been awash in negative media reports since he got into the race one year ago. The trick to getting traction is by packaging some of the stuff in a way that it sticks—as the Democrats successfully did to Mitt Romney, and the Republicans to John Kerry.

Instead, the oppo file itself has become news—in a fleeting way that guarantees it will quickly become non-news.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"HAMPTON, N.H. -- Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that she sees ""no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back"" to Iraq as the Islamic State terrorist group makes gains.

The remarks by Clinton -- who has disavowed her own 2003 vote for the Iraq war as a senator -- come amid growing fervor among Republicans to send ground forces back to Iraq in some capacity to assist the Baghdad government in its battle with Islamic State, which earlier this week overran the city of Ramadi.

The Democratic front-runner made her comments during a brief news conference here at a brewery following a roundtable discussion with small-business leaders.

""I think it's a very difficult situation and I basically agree with the policies that we are currently following,"" Clinton said. ""And that is, American air support is available. American intelligence and surveillance is available. American trainers are trying to undo the damage that was done to the Iraqi army by former prime minister Maliki, who bears a very big part of the responsibility for what is happening inside of Iraq today.""

But she said ""this has to be fought by and won by Iraqis. There is no role whatsoever for American soldiers on the ground to go back, other than in the capacity as trainers and advisers.""

The large field of Republicans vying for the 2016 nomination has set a hawkish tone and all have called on the United States to do more in Iraq, with varying degrees of specificity. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is running mostly on national security issues, has called for sending 10,000 U.S. troops into the country, and others -- including former Texas governor Rick Perry and pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson have advocated for an unspecified number.",REAL
"It seems almost quaint, really, to go back to the start of this presidential campaign when the question du jour was whether Chris ""just-sit-down-and-shut-up"" Christie was too much of a bully to become president. Temperament, it seems, was a requirement.

Or even go back to Hillary Clinton's 2008 derision of Barack Obama as not ready to be president and take that 3 a.m. phone call about a national security crisis. Experience and depth of knowledge was also an issue.

But that's ancient history. Somehow, the notions of temperament and experience have been overtaken by the desire -- at least according to the polls so far in the GOP race -- for what passes as a show of strength, unbound by convention and unattached to complexity. Donald Trump, the undisputed frontrunner, reigns supreme, no matter what the half-formed solutions. As in: Muslims are trying to kill us, so let's keep them out. Illegal immigrants are ""raping"" and taking our jobs, so let's keep them out. Civility -- now called political correctness -- is ruining our national conversation, so let's abandon it.

The cliché is that presidential elections are about change, and that's true. Only this one may be about sea-change.

This is not something that comes from nowhere, out of the blue. Americans are, with good reason, truly afraid. According to our CNN polling , nearly two thirds believe an act of terrorism is likely in the homeland -- and that poll was taken before the carnage of San Bernardino. Eighty-one percent are convinced that the terrorists are here, living among us -- a completely rational conclusion.

Even more important -- and here's the key to Donald Trump's kingdom -- voters believe the political system, including (and maybe most of all) the President, have completely and utterly failed to get a handle on, or even appear to have a strategy for, security. And why would anybody blame anyone for thinking that? Sixty-eight percent say America's response to ISIS has not been tough enough, and a slightly smaller number say that when we do take action (in Iraq and Syria,) we fail. And that's not just among Republicans: Majorities in both parties say the United States has been ineffective in its response to the terror threat. This is not a new storyline. So this particular election-year story has all of the following: Disaffected and frustrated voters. Ineffective president. A level of public fear that has been rising steadily for at least a handful of years. Throw in anger at the collapsing political system, the establishment and the media, and Trump appears onstage like a vision emerging out of the clouds: the dark knight of our politics. Donald Trump is no fool. He's an experienced opportunist. He knows full well that he has stepped into a leadership vacuum that exists in American politics, and has been around for some time: Why should the American public have any respect at all for its institutions when they have been failing? When Congress can't legislate, or even behave? When the President -- elected with such high hopes -- fails to inspire or connect or even explain strategy? When others running for president often look like they're made of the same torn fabric, just with different holes? Trump flouts the conventions, and plays to fears. But for now, at least, it doesn't matter. In a large field of GOP candidates, Trump's solid core of support among one-third of Republicans -- a minority -- is enough to keep him on top, and any Republican running would like to have his numbers. His latest gambit -- a vague proposal to keep Muslims out of the country until ""our country's representatives can figure out what's going on"" is pure bombast, delivered to rally the faithful -- and he'll probably get a bump in the polls out of it. Jeb Bush calls it ""unhinged."" His fellow Republicans also punch at it, to varying degrees. But, for now at least, they're just punching jello. And hoping he doesn't break the mold.",REAL
"For First Time, Trump Shrinks In Spotlight; Fiorina Steals Show

Donald Trump was once again at center stage at Wednesday night's debate hosted by CNN — the second debate among the GOP candidates for president This time, however, he had a harder time holding the spotlight.

Again and again throughout the seemingly interminable three-hour spectacle, the attention of the audience migrated to the the smallest figure on the set: Carly Fiorina.

It could be lost on no one that Fiorina was the only woman in the cast of 11 hopefuls, nor that she had been admitted to the group only after CNN altered its original rules to take note of her recent surge in the polls. Even with this upgrade, propelled by her standout performance in the August debate among the lesser candidates, Fiorina has been languishing in the low single digits in most national polls.

That could be about to change. Any leveling off in Trump's astonishing trajectory will create a need for new storylines, and Fiorina seems poised to provide.

The other outsider phenomenon, Ben Carson, did not shine as brightly in the CNN event as he had on Fox in August. Soft-spoken and mild-mannered, the neurosurgeon disagreed with Trump about vaccines and autism but shied from any real conflict with him on the issue. At other times he seemed vague in explaining his 2003 Iraq War position and his willingness to de-emphasize armed conflict.

Fiorina, however, was a picture of decisiveness and to-the-point presentation. Like the consummate sales professional she is, Fiorina came armed with pithy, precise answers. She had neatly anticipated nearly all the questions thrown her way — including the ones she seized in the general scramble for air and camera time.

She was ready with the exact dimensions of the larger military she wanted, and the specifics of rebuttal to attacks on her stewardship of Hewlett-Packard. Trump made repeated, rather clumsy thrusts at Fiorina's executive history. She whipped them back at him with replies that cracked in the air.

The Trump show in general did not seem as dominating as in the first debate, or in the many news cycles since, when anything and everything he said made headlines. Wags soon dubbed the night ""Lady and the Trump,"" but that was not the whole story, either.

Trump was also set upon by a pack of his opponents, several of whom seemed to have boned up on his history of casino bankruptcies. He fended these off with breezy references to the way business works, but these did not seem to be working as well as in the past. Jeb Bush, though still a bit ill at ease, made his arguments with dignity and seriousness and jousted in his own restrained way with Trump (as well as with Rand Paul and others).

Much has been written and said about Trump's capturing the imagination of the white, older, working-class voters within the Republican electorate. This he has done, but not by himself. He has had an assist from the wide-eyed media, promoting the ""Summer of Trump"" with wonder and hunger for more. At times, on this night, there were signs that this dynamic was losing some of its energy, that the shtick might be beginning to wear thin.

This impression crept in despite the effects of the CNN debate format, which allowed any candidate mentioned by name to respond to that mention. As most of the candidates were, in varying degrees, gunning for Trump, moderator Jake Tapper was continually turning to The Donald for replies. Intended or not, this device kept the billionaire the center of attention even when Tapper was trying to distribute the airtime more equitably.

Still, there was more than enough running room for Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The senators from Florida and Texas fired the broadsides against both the Obama administration and the masters of the Senate that have been their stock-in-trade since the Tea Party movement first sent them to Washington.

Both did well at connecting with hardcore conservatives who agree the GOP leaders in Congress are useless. Rubio did so with more human appeal, however, using his remarkably empathetic facial appeal. Cruz seemed intent on softening his image, tossing verbal bouquets to his wife and his parents.

Chris Christie also seemed to thrive in the mix on this occasion. This in part because he interrupted the Trump-Fiorina fussing over who had done what in business. ""The 55-year-old construction worker who's out of a job doesn't care about your careers,"" Christie scolded. And he reinforced the point in an eloquent closing statement about refocusing national policy to benefit ordinary Americans.

John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, once again offered a mix of high-level resume and aw-shucks Americana, tossing out more numbers than any of his data-happy rivals but still managing to be more boyish than wonkish. Kasich surely has the credentials to be legitimate in this race, but he remains the credential candidate in an anti-establishment and even anti-credential year.

Among those getting the short end of the attention supply was Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. Walker had his lines down as well as anyone, but they all seemed to go back to Madison in 2011 and the massive protests against his first budget. Walker has raised eyebrows in the past by saying his facedown of these protests proved he could tame ISIS, Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs of Iran. But he was back on that theme again Wednesday night.

Rand Paul provided multiple moments of dissent, opposing not only the Iraq War of 2003 but also the proposals to intervene in the Middle East today. Mike Huckabee was reliable on the issue of religious liberty, which he defined as including the right of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis to defy the Supreme Court and deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

One final note about the ""happy hour"" debate that preceded the main event. Both Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina turned in sharp performances, with Jindal stressing harsh anti-Obama rhetoric and Graham a grim assessment of threats to national security — replete with a pledge to return more ""boots on the ground"" to the Middle East. The difference was that Graham mixed in a strong dose of sly Carolina humor, eliciting chuckles and even guffaws for things like a pledge to have ""more drinking"" in Washington.

As the Fiorina promotion this time around proved so worthwhile, perhaps in the future the GOP and sponsoring media will see fit to elevate the unofficial winner of each ""undercard debate"" to participate in the main event in the next round. It could become a kind of tradition. Provided of course that the undercard debate survives another round in this campaign.",REAL
"Friday, 4 November 2016 Nobel Prize recipients will be able to go to the drive thru window to get their awards. 
After accruing millions of dollars in debt, the Nobel prize committee will forgo a lavish award ceremony in favor of a webcast hosted by Carrot Top from a drive thru coffee kiosk. 
Nobel Committee head Jørgen Myklebust is putting his experience in marketing for Supermac's to the task with the new drive thru format for this years award ceremony. He explained the decision when he talked to reporter Rance Penning of the Daily Maul. 
""This will be the first year in a decade we don't lose money: the webcast costs us virtually nothing and Carrot Top has agreed to MC the award ceremony in exchange for a Nobel prize in chemistry. And having Carrot Top as the host is already giving us a boost with advertisers."" 
Myklebust further explained: 
""The nominees will be able to stream the webcast while in the parking lot at NK Stockholm, and the winners will drive up to the kiosk window to get their awards."" 
When Penning asked if the entire Nobel operation was moving to the kiosk, Myklebust dismissed the question as silly. 
""You know, it's not serious to ask if we are keeping our offices in the kiosk, of course our whole staff will not fit in a kiosk. For those who are curious, we'll continue to maintain our office space in a camping tent outside Tom Schuyler's house."" 
This reporter visited with Carrot Top to talk about the new gig. I had a few minutes with him in his Las Vegas dressing room as his assistants made him up for that nights show. 
""I can't wait to go to Sweden,"" said Scott Thompson (Carrot Top's real name). ""I can go incognito, you know, I don't stand out as a ginger there."" 
When asked about props for the webcast, the beloved orange one jumped up and grabbed some vials and a butane torch from a toy box. 
""Oh, yeah! Since my Nobel prize is in chemistry, I'm bringing my Meth Lab Jr.™ chemistry set, I should probably save that for the end of the show in case I blow anything up!"" 
""And for sure I'm bringing my tip jar!"" 
At which point Thompson showed this reporter an actual glass jar with a credit card reader embedded in it. Make XRhonda Speaks's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
"Mark Warner, Virginia Ron Wyden, Oregon 
In both houses of Congress, these were the barest of margins — 218 Yes votes in the House and 60 Yes votes in the Senate, in each case exactly the minimum required for passage. Another indication of how toxic this “trade” bill is. No Democrat dared touch it who didn’t want to or have to. 
Black Lives Matter and the TPP 
And now the TPP has become even more toxic, since the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social-justice movement has endorsed the anti-TPP position. Politico Pro has this (sub. required; my emphasis): 
Obama’s latest TPP foe: Black Lives Matter By Andrew Hanna Monday, Oct. 31, 2016 
The Obama administration will face an unexpected adversary as it gears up for what could be a blockbuster lame-duck fight over the Trans-Pacific Partnership: the Black Lives Matter movement. 
The group — best known best for its protests of police shootings of African-Americans — has joined the fray over the Asian Pacific trade deal as part of its growing focus on economic issues, contending the pact would lead to greater racial injustice . It ties past trade deals to the closures of factories that have hurt black workers disproportionately and increased black poverty . 
Its involvement could influence the votes of a handful of wavering Democrats, should Congress tackle TPP during the lame duck. 
“There are groups that are going to pay a lot of close attention to what they say, especially the Congressional Black Caucus,” said Bill Reinsch, a fellow at the Stimson Center and close trade-vote watcher. 
Only a small band of 28 House Democrats voted to give the president fast track authority to complete TPP, including three members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.). A fourth black caucus member, Republican Mia Love of Utah, also voted for fast-track authority. 
With anti-trade fervor whipped into a fever pitch by the presidential election campaign, their votes are considered key to passage of the pact — and all are under increasing pressure to abandon the president should the pact come to a ratification vote. 
The pretend reason, of course, for TPP support is support for a major legacy “want” by the first black president. The pro-Clinton members of the Democratic Platform Committee, for example, resisted to the end any explicit language about TPP on the grounds that the Party must support its president. 
Democrats Prioritize Party Unity Over Including Stand Against TPP In Platform 
Members of the Democratic National Convention Platform Committee shot down an attempt to include specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal in the platform, despite the fact that both Democratic presidential candidates have taken positions against the TPP. 
The attempt failed because members appointed by Hillary Clinton and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed it was improper to oppose the TPP when President Barack Obama fervently believes in the agreement. However, by putting party unity before taking a firm stand against the trade agreement, the door was left open for Clinton to go back to supporting the TPP , which was the case when she was secretary of state. 
“It is hard for me to understand why Secretary Clinton’s delegates won’t stand behind Secretary Clinton’s positions in the party’s platform,” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said…. 
Even platform committee chair, Representative E.J. Cummings [normally progressive on trade issues], chose to vote against the resolution. He, too, bragged about not voting for trade agreements. 
“I don’t want to do anything as he ends his term to undercut the president of the United States. I’m just not going to do it. And that’s where I stand,” Cummings proclaimed. 
That’s the pretend reason — supporting the first black president — for most of them anyway. The real reason is different and not unexpected — money and everything money can buy. The Democratic Party as it’s currently configured exists to enable the fire hose flow of corporate and big-wealth dollars into its coffers. Opposing that flow gets you the “Sanders treatment,” but I’m not spilling any new beans in saying that. 
This move by Black Lives Matter takes away the pretend reason and thus puts some careers at risk. BLM has high visibility at the moment. It will be worth watching the result, the actual TPP vote, as this plays out later. 
What to Watch For in the Lame Duck 
Once the Democrats figure out how many Republicans will defect from their leadership in each house of Congress (there were 50 House Republican defections last time plus six not voting, and five Senate defections plus two not voting), they’ll know how many Democrats will have to “take one for the team” — vote Yes on TPP so others with reputations to protect (like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi ) don’t have to. 
The numbers needed to pass TPP in the Senate have changed this time. Only 51 votes are needed there now (that’s part of what “fast track” means). Finding 50 No votes in the Senate is not an impossible task, but it’s a very high bar — depending on the way Republicans vote, as few as four “Democrats” like Ron Wyden could guarantee passage. 
So the greatest vulnerability for TPP is in the House . Can Democrats again muster something like 28 pro-corporate votes? Which Democrats will chose to take the fall a second time? Corporatists like Ron Kind will eagerly comply. But will Earl Blumenauer ( bow-tie bicycle guy )? Will CBC members Sewell and Johnson, with BLM lobbying hard against them? Or will other House Democrats be needed (and willing) to take the fall so Pelosi can move TPP across the line? 
Again, Fast Track passed the House with zero votes to spare. What if the Republican opposition — including the opposition to Speaker Ryan in the wake of the Trump debacle — swells to more than 50? This could be a very close vote. 
TPP, Obama’s Legacy and “A Glide Path to His Life as an Ex-President” 
The Politico article quoted above helpfully notes this about Obama’s legacy: 
If successfully pushed through Congress, ratification of the trade accord would be the last major piece of legislation of the Obama presidency. The prospect that black lawmakers and activists could help to hand him a defeat is complicated by Obama’s position as the first black president. 
“ This is part of President Obama’s legacy ,” said [CBC member Gregory] Meeks. 
Will Barack Obama get his legacy wish, along with his legacy library and foundation? The New York Times a few weeks ago told us this about Obama’s future plans and needs: 
Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House. 
The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion . The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future…. 
So far, Mr. Obama has raised just over $5.4 million from 12 donors, with gifts ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. Michael J. Sacks, a Chicago businessman, gave $666,666. Fred Eychaner, the founder of Chicago-based Newsweb Corp., which owns community newspapers and radio stations, donated $1 million. Mark T. Gallogly, a private equity executive, and James H. Simons, a technology entrepreneur, each contributed $340,000 to a foundation set up to oversee development of the library. 
The real push for donations, foundation officials said, will come after Mr. Obama leaves the White House . 
Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser, oversees an effort inside the White House to keep attention on Mr. Obama’s future and to ensure that his final 17 months in office, barring crises, serve as a glide path to his life as an ex-president . 
“A glide path to his life as an ex-president.” I guess you could call him, after his 2008 trademark, “ever hopeful and looking for change” Interesting times indeed. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"Training French soldiers to supervise Daesh Voltaire Network | 27 October 2016 français Español italiano Deutsch Türkçe On 22 September 2016, while cleaning around an abandoned troglodyte refuge not far from the church of Saint-Florent on the outskirts of Saumur (France), a group of workers saw three men drive away hurriedly in a white van. Entering the cave, they discovered video equipment and a generator, as well as newspapers in the Arab language and Daesh flags.
Wishing to calm not only the anxiety of the population, but also the police, the gendarmerie and the sub-prefect, General Arnaud Nicolazo de Barmon, commanding officer of the Military Schools in Saumur declared that the men were not terrorists, but students of a training exercise by the Inter-Army Centre for Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological defence (CIA NBCR).
If such were the case, in the middle of the current state of emergency, the CIA NBCR would have violated the rules of notification for this exercise, which should have been transmitted to the different local authorities before the exercise began. Apart from this, it is not easy to discern how any of the equipment discovered might be in any way useful for exercises in nuclear, radiological, biological and chemical defence.
In the same buildings as the CIA NBCR in Saumur are the schools specialised in Intelligence and Inter-Army Combat.
The presence of French forces has been noted since the very beginning of the events in Syria, in 2011. In 2012, 19 French soldiers who had been taken prisoner were handed back, at the Lebanese border, to the Army Chief of Staff, Admiral Édouard Guillaud, with other soldiers supervising Baba Amr’s Islamic Emirate. The death of French soldiers supervising the Islamist troops was certified in several places, particularly in Sannayeh in 2013. While France, in 2014, had supported Al-Qaïda against Daesh, the presence of French officers within the Caliphate itself has been attested by several witnesses in 2016.
In November 2014, the Pentagon declared that it had killed an agent of the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) in Samarda – the agent, David Drugeon, was working within Al-Qaïda, while the French Minister for Defence denied any link with the victim. Thereafter, the US Press confirmed that David Drugeon had trained Mohamed Mera (terrorist attacks in Toulouse and Montauban), and the Kouachi brothers (attack on Charlie Hebdo ).
France has never officially recognised that it has troops on the ground in Syria, although it has admitted that it shares common headquarters there with allied special forces .
Translation
Pete Kimberley",FAKE
"Enough Is Enough

If we really want to do something about the worst effects of our electoral process, let’s start by simply having less of it.

You might think that Hillary Clinton has been running for president for, well, ever — but technically she began her campaign on April 12th last year, 18 months ago. Donald Trump launched his bid for the White House a more restrained 15 months ago. But if you want a real contrast, cross the Atlantic. I once ran elections in the UK, where the typical length of a campaign is not 18 or 15 months but four or five weeks.

Look, I get it about the constitution, free speech and all that. Believe me: As a recent(ish) immigrant, living in Silicon Valley, having taught at Stanford and started a business here, I have all the zeal of the convert. I truly think that America is the greatest nation on earth, and I feel profoundly lucky to be able to be part of it.

But can we just talk about the election process for a moment? Is there a single person in this country who feels better able to choose between Trump and Clinton today than a year ago? What have we learned about these candidates that we couldn’t have discovered over the course of the nine weeks since Labor Day? Nine weeks is double the length of a general election campaign in the UK. I’m not saying British democracy is perfect, not by a long way. But at least the flaws aren’t inflicted on the population on a continuous basis.

The most common thing I hear people saying about the election right now is “Please let it be over!” Of course, you could argue that the reason is not so much the length of the process but the uniquely polarizing nature of the major party nominees this time, and the fact that unusually, they were both well-known to the American people before they even entered the race. If two relatively obscure candidates had been nominated, perhaps the cries of pain from the public wouldn’t be quite as anguished.

There’s more to this question, though, than familiarity with — or contempt for — any individual politician at any given time. The length of election campaigns in America causes real, structural problems throughout our democratic system, regardless of who the candidates are.

First, the relentless posturing involved in near-permanent campaigns contributes to the hyper-partisanship that makes reasonable debate on public policy issues increasingly difficult. An environment where any half-thoughtful comment can almost instantly find its way into an overnight online attack ad is one that incentivizes politicians to put ‘messaging’ ahead of problem-solving, and that’s not good.

For example, I agree with Hillary Clinton’s emphasis on the importance of early intervention and parenting support as one of the best ways to tackle poverty and inequality. But if elected, I expect her administration would approach this priority in a disastrously old-fashioned, top-down, bureaucratic way that would end in failure.

No candidate of either party could say that: it’s too nuanced a position. With most members of Congress literally starting their next election campaign the day after this one has ended, you won’t see any of them move beyond yelling platitudes like “nanny state” or “war on women.”

For a start, it means that it’s harder for people who are not wealthy to run for office. Who has the time and the resources to take two years off work to get elected? Rich people, that’s who. It’s no surprise that the proportion of millionaires in Congress is at an all-time high.

More than that, the cost of lengthy political campaigns is a direct factor in the systemic corruption that is such a notable feature of American democracy. In fact, if you look at what actually happens in Congress and in state legislatures, it is difficult to argue that America is in any meaningful sense of the word a democracy at all. It is a donocracy, where the funders of election campaigns literally buy the outcomes they want from the political system.

Look too at the role of organized labor, providing campaign infrastructure, volunteers, get out the vote operations. None of that would be touched by campaign finance reform. And then look what the unions get in return: in my home state of California, budgets that increase compensation for corrections officers while cutting spending on public schools and state universities. Way to go, progressives!

The truth is that even if Clinton wins, and by some miracle enacts some version of campaign finance reform, the assorted lobbyists, bloodsuckers, sleazebags and other hangers-on in Washington DC will breathe a huge sigh of relief because they know that for them, life in our nation’s capital will go on as corruptly as before.

No, if we really want to do something about the worst effects of our electoral process, let’s start by simply having less of it. Think of it like pollution control: it doesn’t make the problem go away, but it does make the world a bit less toxic. Radically shortening election campaigns is no more a silver bullet than changing the law on political donations. But it would make a big difference, and has the advantage of being easier to implement.",REAL
By Common Dreams After a national election season that many called “interminable” and where the trending phrase to describe the contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump became... ,FAKE
"(CNN) Who among the nascent field of 2016 contenders represents the future? For half of Americans, it's Hillary Clinton.

Asked in a new CNN/ORC poll whether seven possible candidates better represent the future or the past, 50% said Clinton evoked the future, more than said so of any other candidate. By contrast, Joe Biden and Jeb Bush, whose names have been in the political conversation even longer than Clinton's, were each seen as representing the past by 64% of Americans.

Even some relative newcomers to national politics are more closely linked to the past than the future. Half said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie represents the past, while 43% said he represents the future. On Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, 49% thought he represented the past, 41% the future. And 42% thought Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker represented the past, 39% the future.

Overall, across the field of seven, just two were deemed more ""future"" than ""past,"" and both were women: Clinton (50% future, 48% past) and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (46% future, 37% past).

Both Clinton and Warren prompt significant gender gaps, with women more likely than men to call each a representation of the future. Among men, 53% see Clinton as a representation of the past, while 55% of women see her representing the future. On Warren, women see her as more future than past by a 50% to 32% margin, while men split evenly, 43% on each side.

Democrats generally see their own possible presidential contenders as representative of the future. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 74% called Clinton a candidate who represents the future, 61% said so of Warren and 51% of Biden.

Last month, Mitt Romney bowed out of the presidential race with a nod to his party's future, saying he hoped ""one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well-known as I am today"" would wind up better prepared to beat the eventual Democratic candidate.

But Republicans don't see the field as particularly future-oriented. Of the four Republican candidates tested, a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rated two of them as more representative of the future than the past, Walker (55%) and Paul (53%). Fewer saw Christie (49%) or Bush (47%) that way.

Walker gained ground among Republicans in the race for the party's presidential nomination, the poll showed, while Christie and Bush both faltered. The shuffling field also saw a double-digit gain in support for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who now tops the field with 16%. The national survey found Huckabee closely followed by Bush at 14% (down 9 points), Walker at 11% (up 7 points) and Paul at 10%. Ben Carson lands in fifth with 8% and Chris Christie at sixth with 7% (down 6 points). No other candidate tops 5%.

Walker's gains are concentrated among older voters. He leads the field among those age 65 or up with 22%. Among Republicans under 50, Huckabee and Paul fare better than they do among their 65 and over counterparts.

Among conservative Republicans, it's a three-way tie: 15% each say they'd be most likely to support Bush, Huckabee and Walker, with 10% each behind Carson and Paul.

The poll finds less change on the Democratic side. Clinton still leads the field with 61%. Her next closest competitor, Biden, has gained six points since December and stands at 14%. Warren follows at 10%. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley all remain in the low single digits.

As overseas turmoil riles President Barack Obama's approval ratings for handling foreign affairs, terrorism now joins the economy at the top of voters' priority lists as the 2016 contest kicks off. Forty-two percent called terrorism an extremely important issue in their presidential vote, on par with the 41% calling the economy that important. Education (40% extremely important) and health care (39% extremely important) also rank near the top.

Sharp partisan divides in priorities emerge outside the economy and health care. On terrorism, 87% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say it's extremely or very important, compared with 78% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to call illegal immigration an important issue (74% among Republicans vs. 55% among Democrats), while Democrats are more apt to prioritize the income gap (75% among Democrats vs. 45% among Republicans) and global warming (63% among Democrats vs. 23% of Republicans).

The CNN/ORC International poll was conducted February 12-15, 2015, and interviewed 1,027 adult Americans, including 436 Republicans and independents who describe themselves as Republican, and 475 Democrats and independents who describe themselves as Democrats. Results for all adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 points. For results among Republicans or Democrats, it is 4.5 points.",REAL
"It was a tough night for front-runners in New Hampshire and a good night for governors.

Marco Rubio hit a wall named Chris Christie. Donald Trump couldn’t put down an aggressive Jeb Bush. And Ted Cruz had to issue a public apology to Ben Carson.

Christie was the relentless prosecutor. Bush was knowledgeable and, in contrast to some earlier performances, tough and direct. Ohio Gov. John Kasich carved out space as a candidate ready and willing to work across party lines.

Given the timing and the state of the Republican nomination contest, few debates have had the potential to shape the order of finish in a primary campaign more than Saturday night’s forum at Saint Anselm College. Trump holds a big lead. But the competition underneath him is fierce, and the outcome Tuesday likely to be consequential. Those with the most to lose were the ones who tried to make the most out of their time on stage.

No one had a rockier night than Rubio, the senator from Florida whose strong third-place finish in Iowa made him the candidate on the rise in the Republican presidential race. But under a blistering attack from Christie, who characterized him as a politician with no notable accomplishments who had run away from the immigration reform bill he had co-sponsored, Rubio faltered.

Rubio knew the attacks were coming, but instead of answering them directly, he sought to change the subject. Once, twice, three times he offered a quick counterpunch and then slid off the criticisms to turn to an attack on President Obama, repeating his language almost word for word and drawing boos from the audience.

When he accused Christie of having to be shamed into going back to New Jersey to deal with the recent snowstorm, Christie came roaring back. “That’s what Washington, D.C., does,” Christie said. “The drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.”

What was most striking was the fact that Rubio played directly into the criticism that, while he is a gifted and natural communicator, he is overly scripted and returns to his standard stump speech as quickly as he can.

The strategy has worked for him in past debates, but repetition got the better of him on Saturday. Rubio wanted to debate Obama and Hillary Clinton, warning time and again that the president has deliberately led the country in the wrong direction and that Clinton would extend those policies. Those kinds of attacks bring cheers at his campaign rallies but were far less effective during Saturday’s debate.

In the later stages of the debate, Rubio seemed to regain his footing both on foreign policy and on a question about abortion in which he talked about the balance between a woman’s right to make her own decisions and the right of an unborn child to live.

Even when Bush drew a distinction with Rubio over whether there should be exceptions for rape, incest and life of the woman, which Bush favors, Rubio said he would sign a bill as president that included those exceptions but that he still stood by his personal convictions. Rubio said he would rather lose an election than be wrong on the issue.

Trump struggled when the subject of eminent domain, a hot-button issue for many conservatives who dislike government, was introduced. The billionaire builder initially offered a ringing defense of the practice of government taking private property for such projects as roads and bridges.

Bush countered, initially agreeing that eminent domain is necessary for the public good but then attacking Trump for attempting to use the practice to take property from an elderly woman in Atlantic City, N.J., for the purpose of a parking lot for one of his casinos.

Trump reverted to attacks he has long leveled at Bush — that he lacks strength or energy. “He wants to be a tough guy,” Trump said dismissively.

But Bush came right back at him: “How tough is it to take away a property from an elderly woman?” he said sarcastically.

When Trump told Bush to keep quiet, the audience let out another round of boos, to which Trump said, “That’s all his donors and special interests.”

Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses, had two difficult moments at the start of the evening. The first came over criticism Cruz leveled at Trump earlier in the week, saying, “I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable with someone who behaves this way having his finger on the button.”

Trump was given the first word and defended himself. He reminded everyone that he had opposed the war in Iraq, adding, “I’m not the one with the trigger.”

“Other people up here, believe me, would be a lot faster,” he said.

When Cruz was asked to explain why he thought Trump lacked the temperament to be president, he ducked. “The assessment the voters are making here in New Hampshire and across the country is they are evaluating each and every one of us,” he said.

Reminded by ABC News anchor David Muir that he had not explained why he had made the earlier comment, Cruz ducked again.

Trump responded: “He didn’t answer your question. And that’s what’s going to happen with our enemies and the people we compete against. . . . People back down with Trump. And that’s what I like, and that’s what the country is going to like.”

That didn’t end the early hazing for Cruz. He was asked why his advisers had called Iowa volunteers on the night of the caucuses to say that Carson might be quitting the race and to encourage voters to back the senator from Texas.

Cruz blamed the problem on what he said was a misleading news report on CNN that he said was not corrected for several hours. But he also apologized to Carson and said he had done so the day after the caucuses.

Carson, in his typically quiet way, accepted the apology but not the explanation. “In fact, the timeline indicates that initial tweet from CNN was followed by another one within one minute that clarified that I was not dropping out,” he said.

More than in other previous debates, this one turned into governors against the others. The three share common experiences, and when they talk about one another, it’s clear there is mutual respect, though they are in a battle in which they cannot all survive. And whether by design or accident, the three seemed to reinforce one another in taking down the candidates who finished first, second and third in Iowa.

Christie delivered one of the strongest performances of the campaign, clearly determined to knock down Rubio, whom he described this past week as “a boy in the bubble.” Fighting for his political life, he was merciless in attacking Rubio for lacking the courage to fight for the immigration reform legislation that passed the Senate but faltered in the House.

Rubio countered by attacking Christie’s record in New Jersey, noting that the state has gone through repeated credit downgrades during his two terms. The audience seemed to side with Christie. Whether voters will do the same is the test for the next three days.

Kasich was the happy warrior, a governor who stressed jobs, the economy and dealing realistically with issues, not on the basis of pure ideology. Bush has tried for many months to make his record in Florida the centerpiece of his candidacy. Only now in these closing days has he appeared more comfortable as a candidate.

Saturday’s debate here offered a last opportunity for candidates to make a persuasive argument before a primary election likely to winnow the field of realistic hopefuls to four at most.

The New Hampshire electorate is famously fickle for upending front-runners and defying conventional wisdom and turning its back on winners in Iowa. A more charitable description is that this is a state where voters keep their options open as long as possible.

While it’s true that many voters have been locked in for weeks or months, a sizable number are spending these last few days shopping and pondering. They are at every rally on this final weekend, looking for that connection that tips them firmly in one direction or another.

That makes pollsters nervous and campaigns hopeful. The candidates know lightning can strike, and they grasp for every sign that it is happening to them. In the days after Iowa, there has been some movement in the polls but nothing definitive yet.

What makes this year’s GOP primary distinctive from past campaigns is the number of candidates on this final weekend who still think they have a chance to move on to succeeding rounds of primaries and caucuses. Saturday’s debate underscored both the sense of possibility and the sense of urgency that surrounds the last days of campaigning here.",REAL
"Public funding of elections — that is, relying on tax revenue more than private donations to fund candidate campaigns — is a popular campaign finance reform proposal, if one that many Americans don’t fully embrace.  Public funding is often thought to free candidates from the burden of fundraising and reduce the influence of wealthy donors and special interests.  That all sounds good.  Who likes “special interests,” after all?

Now, new research shows that public funding has an unexpected consequence: increased polarization.  That is, public funding makes it harder, not easier, to elect moderate candidates.

That is the conclusion of political scientist Andrew Hall.  He focuses on state legislative elections and compares trends in the five states that implemented robust public funding programs — Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — to trends in other states.  Here is what he finds:

Below is a graph showing the distribution of ideology (“NP scores”) in legislatures in states that implemented public financing (the “treated” states) and those that did not (the “control” states).  The first group of states became more polarized after the implementation of public financing.  But no such change occurred during this time in the states that didn’t implement public financing.

In a more elaborate statistical analysis, Hall examines the gap between Republican and Democratic legislators representing similar districts.  In a polarized legislature, a Republican and a Democrat will tend to vote in very different ways even though they represent essentially the same constituents.  Hall finds that public financing increases this gap between the parties by 30 percent.

Why does public financing appear to have this effect?  Hall argues that public financing weakens the influence of a maligned, but moderating, force in elections: access-oriented interest groups.  Public financing reduces the funding supplied by these groups by over $20,000 per race, on average.  The problem is that these groups give relatively little to ideologically extreme legislators and much more to moderates.  Individual donors, however, have no such preference.

This leads to a broader point about campaign finance and polarization.  Much of the debate over campaign finance is based on distinctions between “good” donors and “bad” donors.  Good donors are taxpayers, in a public financing system.  Or, in a privately funded system, good donors are ordinary citizens, sometimes called “small donors.”  Bad donors are political party organizations, wealthy people, political action committees, and interest groups.

The problem is that if you want to reduce polarization, this way of thinking about donors gets things exactly backward.  Small donors are a polarizing influence, as Adam Bonica has shown.  Meanwhile, wealthy people tend to be a moderating influence.  The same is true of many political action committees and interest groups.  The same is true of political party organizations, as Brian Schaffner and Ray La Raja argue in this post.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good reasons to favor public financing or small donors.  But favoring those things may also mean living with the trade-off: a more polarized, and probably less functional, politics.

Note: For a response, see this follow-up post by Seth Masket and Michael Miller.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"The Anatomy of Crisis and the Decline of US Empire Submitted by Danny Haiphong on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 12:18 Tweet Widget by Danny Haiphong 
There are multiple dimensions to the crisis that afflicts U.S. imperialism. The latest election is evidence of a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling parties. Americans are estranged from a government that spies on every one its citizens – and on the rest of the world, too. “Unemployment, poverty, racist state repression, and war are all the system has to offer.” Unable to escape a 40-year economic slump, the U.S. instead plots the destruction of its rivals. The Anatomy of Crisis and the Decline of US Empire by Danny Haiphong 
“ The vast majority of oppressed communities, particularly Black workers, have seen their labor become disposable in a post-industrial society.” 
Whether one analyzes the economic, military, or political spheres of US imperialism, one thing is abundantly clear. The very fabric of the United States is in deep crisis. The crisis is largely misunderstood by the vast majority of working and oppressed people living under it. But a specter haunts the US and it isn't anything like Hollywood's scary movies. That specter is the possibility that the people will become a conscious force of opposition to the crisis and seek to dismantle the system of capitalist empire that governs it. 
Crises are genuinely thought of in economic terms. The economic base of capitalism is indeed suffering from protracted economic crisis. The US capitalist economy, and thus the world capitalist economy pegged to its hip, entered a period of stagnation in the mid to late 1970s. What followed was a slowdown in production facilitated by the increased monopolization, financialization, and increased technological capacity of the system. Capitalism's source of profit, labor, was now being exploited by an apparatus too big to expand the profits of the system without intensified exploitation. The aftermath of capitalism's periodic collapses from overproduction and under consumption have been characterized ever since by a complete and total assault on all workers. 
“Wages have declined or remained stagnant for nearly four decades.” 
The conditions of the crisis speak for themselves. Workers in the US, and the entire Western world for that matter, have seen conditions rapidly deteriorate as the capitalist system has sought to maximize profits in the face of productive slowdown. Free trade agreements such as NAFTA have given corporations the freedom to eliminate production domestically in order to seek a better deal internationally. Wages have declined or remained stagnant for nearly four decades . Unemployment has become a permanent fixture of life for millions and nearly one of two people in the US are considered poor or ""near poor."" 
At this time, the US is a low-wage capitalist economy dominated by service oriented, precarious employment. Racism has played a large part in the disparity inherent under these conditions. The wealth gap between Black America and White America is larger than it was in the Civil rights era. Not only has Black America been the target of racist housing policies from predatory lenders leading up to the 2008 crisis, but the burden of privatization and austerity has been directly aimed at Black families. Hedge funds, for example, have used working class Black communities as the guinea pig to test the effectiveness of massive school closures and teacher layoffs as well as the expansion of charter schools. Thousands of Black teachers have lost their jobs as a result to the mostly white demographic of Teach for America corps members. 
“ The wealth gap between Black America and White America is larger than it was in the Civil rights era.” 
However, it is not enough to understand the crisis of capitalism through an economic lens. The crisis possesses many forms. Repressive state activity has become more pronounced, especially in the aftermath of the War on Terror. Racist repression in particular has intensified as the vast majority of oppressed communities, particularly Black workers, have seen their labor become disposable in a post-industrial society. Nearly 1100 Black Americans are killed every year by law enforcement all over the country. The war on Black and indigenous peoples that laid the foundation of the United States has only become more severe, as evidenced by the fact that one of every eight prisoners in the world is a Black American. The Dakota Access Pipeline struggle has shown that not even the concentration camps forced upon indigenous people are safe from the profit-seeking tentacles of the crisis-ridden system. 
And every American can guarantee that civil liberties are a thing of the past. The NSA, FBI, and the rest of the intelligence community possess access to the entire population's mail and phone devices. A massive surveillance dragnet accountable to no one but the ruling class allows the US state to keep tabs on whoever resists the conditions of the crisis. War at home is ultimately a reflection of the broader war being waged around the world. The US capitalist system is a global system with the largest military state in human history. War has thus played a critical role in the response to system crisis. 
The US military acts as the enforcement arm of neo-colonialism and capitalist exploitation around the world. It has expanded into nearly every African state through the US African Command (AFRICOM). The US military state continues to support fascism in Ukraine and fundamentalist Islam in places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It has destabilized a number of nations in the last decade alone, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The US has collaborated with NATO, Israel, and Turkey to militarily encircle Russia and China militarily and sponsor terror groups responsible for the massacres in Syria. 
“The US imperialist system is predicated on the expansion of global capital by any means at its disposal, including the use military force to clear the way for corporate plunder. 
But the US military is in crisis too. It is plagued by a disillusioned rank and file and the inevitability of a global confrontation with Russia and China if it continues on the current course. The demands of a stagnating global capitalist economy and the ever-increasing exploitation of masses of working people offer no potential for a reversal of fortune. The US imperialist system is predicated on the expansion of global capital by any means at its disposal, including the use military force to clear the way for corporate plunder. The US military state has grown both in size and in violence in order to prevent the global shift of power currently underway. 
Russia and China have become the number one challengers to US global hegemony. China's economy will soon surpass that of the US and Russia's recovery from post-Soviet collapse has propelled the Putin-led nation back onto the global scene as a major factor in world affairs. These two powers are becoming increasingly close both economically and militarily. This has made the US ruling class increasingly nervous in the midst of economic decline. To maintain hegemony, the US military state set the world ablaze through endless war in every region of the world that dares to seek ties with Russia and China. 
At this point, the US imperialist system cannot peacefully compete in any way with its so-called rivals to the East. The contradictions of the system have become unmanageable. Unemployment, poverty, racist state repression, and war are all the system has to offer. Another economic collapse is on the horizon. Crisis is built into the global capitalist system's constant drive to accumulate profit in the face of global misery. The decline of US imperialism and empire will not change regardless of the election. What is sure to change is the mass reaction to the decline as life becomes more and more unbearable under the grip of empire. Danny Haiphong is an Asian activist and political analyst in the Boston area. He can be reached at [email protected]",FAKE
"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**

Buzz Cut:

 • Uncovered audio: Hillary was ‘adamantly against illegal immigrants’

 • Clintons on campaign cash: If disclosure ‘looks bad,’ don’t disclose

 • Where’s Jeb? The whale is getting ready to surface

 • Can Cameron come out ahead in U.K. kerfuffle?

 • But the caucuses were really something

UNCOVERED AUDIO: HILLARY WAS ‘ADAMANTLY AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS’

 The RNC today is shelling presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in her bunker with newly uncovered audio from a 2003 radio interview she gave as a senator. Apparently asked about the issue of illegal immigration, which was a hot button in the state at the time, Clinton swung hard: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants.” Clinton, on the campaign trail in Nevada Wednesday, promised to push for citizenship for those in the country illegally. She also vowed to go beyond President Obama’s executive amnesty for an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants if Republicans do not acquiesce. Obama’s order has so far been blocked by federal courts.

 

 In the audio from the RNC of what the committee says is Clinton’s interview with radio host John Gambling, Clinton calls for more border security and for employers to stop hiring illegal immigrants. “Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx,” she is heard to complain “You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

 

 CLINTONS GET CREATIVE ON CAMPAIGN CASH: IF DISCLOSURE ‘LOOKS BAD,’ DON’T DISCLOSE

 If you thought that Hillary Clinton would be more bashful about buckraking given the current scandals surrounding her family finances and those of its foundation, you haven’t been paying attention. Clinton is vacuuming up money in California this week, but behind the scenes her campaign is busy blurring lines on campaign cash. First, Clinton will do what Democrats once reviled and raise cash for her super PAC. President Obama endorsed his super PAC, but stopped short of plumping for checks. (Candidates can’t legally make the ask, but they can probably stand next to the guy with his hand out – wink-wink, nudge-nudge – and swear up and down that they are not coordinating their efforts.)

 

 Second, Clinton is so far not disclosing the identities of the bundlers, the mostly wealthy partisans who collect checks from their friends for campaigns. You know – bundlers. Releasing the names is not a legal requirement, but it has been standard practice for presidential candidates of both parties. You’d think Clinton would want to be more forthcoming about where her money comes from these days. But as her husband said​, “Any kind of disclosure is a target” that it “looks bad.” So the answer to the lengthening list of questions for the candidate and her campaign is less disclosure and more blurry fundraising lines.

 

 Who made varsity this season? - A memo obtained by Bloomberg gives all the names of Clinton’s campaign A-team this time around. Not a lot of familiar faces, signaling a desire for change in this election cycle.

 

 No pictures allowed, Clinton Foundation guests gather in Morocco - ABC News: “When ABC News producers attempted to take pictures of guests arriving at the front entrance, Moroccan police threatened their arrest. The foundation’s spokesman initially professed not to know where the reception was being held, and the location was among the only not included on schedules handed out to the media and published online.”

 

 Hillary personal email use ‘not acceptable’ says State Dept. - The Hill: ""Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account run through a private server was 'not acceptable' and happened without officials’ knowledge, a top State Department record-keeper said on Wednesday. 'I think the message is loud and clear that that is not acceptable,' Joyce Barr, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the Bureau of Administration, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.""

 

 TRADE ROILS BOTH PARTIES AS AIR OBAMA HEADS TO NIKE

 As he laces up to tout his trade deal at Nike’s Oregon headquarters – an intriguing choice given the company’s sweat-shop past – President Obama’s push for fast track authority is proving to be far from a slam dunk in Congress. Indeed, with Obama pressing reluctant Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner are trying put a buzzer beater. But opposition to the deal is stiff on both sides of the aisle and the pact is no more popular with Sixteeners of both stripes. Breaking with GOP frontrunners who support the deal, presidential candidate Mike Huckabee trash-talked the trade pact, warning that American workers could “take it up the backside” under the current proposal. “Fast-track means nobody’s paying attention,” Huckabee said. Among Democrats, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley are strongly opposed. And where is Hillary Clinton in all this? On the bench, where she says she’s “watching closely.”

 

 Bernie heckles - “Nike epitomizes why disastrous unfettered free-trade policies during the past four decades have failed American workers, eroded our manufacturing base and increased income and wealth inequality in this country,” Democratic candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., penned in a letter to the president Tuesday. “Just don’t do it,” Sanders wrote.

 

 Why Nike? - National Journal takes a detailed look at the apparel giant, which is headquartered in the U.S. but does most of its business overseas: “Nike made $12.4 billion in profits last year, thanks in large part to 1 million subcontracted workers at factories primarily in low-wage countries in Asia. For years, the company has faced allegations that a number of those factories use sweatshop conditions and illegally low wages to produce sneakers and clothes that Nike then sells in much wealthier countries.”

 

 WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…

 One of the most famous photographs in sports journalism is of the 1965 game between rival schools Deerfield Academy and Mount Hermon in which the game went on before full stands as a huge fire consumed Mount Hermon’s science building right behind the bleachers. Would you like to know the story behind the famous photo? NYT has the details: “Halftime came. Officials conferred about how to handle the nettlesome situation. In a decision that surely would not be made in today’s safety-conscious, litigious world, they decided it would be better if the teams just carried on. ‘We were told to suck it up and play,’ [one Mount Hermon player] recalled.”

 

 Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM

 

 POLL CHECK

 Real Clear Politics Averages

 Obama Job Approval: Approve – 46.1 percent//Disapprove – 49.2 percent

 Direction of Country: Right Direction – 29.5 percent//Wrong Track – 61.1 percent

 

 WHERE’S JEB? THE WHALE IS GETTING READY TO SURFACE

 As three more fish joined the growing school of Republican presidential candidates this week, the whale in the race, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has be staying far below the surface. Bush has been quiet lately, with no public events and an under the radar op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Some advisers told the WaPo not to expect an announcement for at least a month. But others have told Fox News First that the official announcement will be sooner than that and done in a low key manner – as might befit a candidate with 99 percent name recognition among Republican voters. (While a candidate like Scott Walker, still unknown to 1 in 5 Republicans in the latest WSJ/NBC News poll needs a lift from his eventual launch, Bush will be risk-averse.) So when does the whale of a candidate come to the surface? Perhaps his speech at Liberty University’s commencement this Saturday will be just that spray.

 

 How Jeb sank Christie - National Journal: “From the time a Bush candidacy started looking more likely, the wind came out of [New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s] presidential sails to the point when he was effectively dead in the water. It was mostly because Bush filled a void that Christie planned to fill in himself. The bridge mess was just icing on the cake.”

 

 [Gov. Christie starts another two-day tour through New Hampshire today.]

 

 Rubio snags top-drawer Nevada state director - Las Vegas Review-Journal: “U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio on Wednesday gained a strong ally when Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison announced would be the Florida senator’s presidential campaign director in Nevada…[Hutchinson] noted Rubio’s family ties to the Silver State, having lived in Las Vegas for six months while growing up. His father was a bartender and his mother a maid.”

 

 Paul pays up for his own name - National Journal: “Days before [Rand Paul] launched his bid for president, his campaign shelled out more than $100,000 to a domain-buying firm to purchase a ‘domain name.’ Soon after, RandPaul.com, which had previously been a pro-Paul site run by his fans, emerged as the official portal for the campaign. Federal campaign records show Paul used his Senate reelection committee to pay $100,980 to Escrow.com, a domain service, on March 27.”

 

 Carson meets with community leaders in Baltimore - Baltimore Sun: “Dr. Ben Carson, the former Hopkins neurosurgeon who announced his candidacy for president this week, will visit with Baltimore faith and community leaders on Thursday...A spokeswoman did not respond to a request to clarify if Carson's visit is related to the Freddie Gray case. Carson is also set to speak to at a Maryland Right to Life banquet later Thursday evening in Woodlawn.”

 

 “And we have to re-instill that can-do attitude that is so important in our nation. It's what drove this nation from no place to the pinnacle of the world, and the highest pinnacle anybody else had ever reached. And it doesn't have anything to do with one's ethnicity. It has to do with the American spirit.” – Ben Carson on “The Kelly File.”

 

 Huckabee strategy: Focus south and skip New Hampshire - Union Leader: “That Huckabee question looms large as the GOP field expands and the former Arkansas governor is reported to be concentrating on the first caucuses in Iowa and the southern primaries in the weeks after New Hampshire’s leadoff contest…Huckabee received 26,916 votes in the New Hampshire primary in 2008. Chuck Norris is again on the Huckabee bandwagon. How many of his old friends in the Granite State will say the same?”

 

 As he cuts a deal with a former rival - The ad man famous for producing the “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, and working with Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Ma., in 2007 will host a Huckabee fundraiser in Phoenix on May 14, political strategist and producer Floyd Brown confirms to Bloomberg.

 

 [Day two of Huckabee’s “Factories, Farms and Freedom” tour includes meet & greets at Charlie’s American Grill in Sioux City and the Pizza Ranch in Cedar Rapids.]

 

 Perry defends tuition for illegal immigrants - Dallas Morning News: “[Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry] then had another chance to explain his support of the so-called Dream Act after a speech that focused on foreign policy. In answering a query from Jorge Baldor, founder of the Latino Center for Leadership Development, Perry said it made sense to educate children brought to the state illegally, but ‘through no fault of their own’…‘The fact is you’re either going to have givers or takers,’ Perry said, ‘If you’re not going to educate, and allow these kids to go through that process and become a giver, because they’ve been educated, then I would suggest you’ve been focused on the wrong issue.’”

 

 Santorum announces he’s announcing – Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., announced to Greta Van Susteren last night that he will announce his 2016 plans in his home state on May 27. Watch the clip here.

 

 Fiorina rollout rolls on - Carly Fiorina gives a speech at a Dallas County GOP event in West Des Moines, Iowa and hosts a few meet and greets today.

 

 Snyder not running? – Despite murmurings of a potential run two sources tell Politico Gov. Rick Snyder, R-Mich., is not running. A Snyder spokesperson declined to comment.

 

 Campaign cinema - Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has a new campaign video out today that highlights his vision of a new America with a New Hampshire backdrop. Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas, also uses New Hampshire to show his connections with voters.  Gov. Mike Huckabee’s video focuses on commitment to family and faith.

 

 CHANGES TO THE IOWA STRAW POLL LOOK GOOD FOR CANDIDATES

 The traditional Iowa straw poll will be a little different this time around with a lot less pressure on the candidates. The event hosts are taking a lot of the cost for real estate and food on themselves, but candidates now need to be nationally viable candidates that are part of the discussion. Check out this op-ed for all the details.

 

 THE JUDGE’S RULING: DEFLATE THE PATRIOT ACT

 With the Patriot Act up for renewal on May 31 Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano analyzes the constitutional complications of the law and a growing movement called ‘Restore the Fourth,’ that advocates ending the Patriot Act under the Fourth Amendment. President Obama and Republicans agree on the renewal, but should they? Read here for the judge’s take.

 

 CAN CAMERON COME OUT AHEAD IN U.K. KERFUFFLE?

 Voting is in full swing in Britain and polls won’t close until 5 p.m. ET. What will happen? No one seems to know except that result will be messy as either of the two major parties are likely to need the help of at least one smaller group – liberals, Scottish separatists, anti-European Unionists, etc. – to build a majority coalition. Lacking an executive branch, Britain’s system gives control of the entire government to the party which wins a vote equivalent to the vote for speaker of the House of Representatives in the U.S. With polls showing neither the Labour nor Conservative parties likely able to win the 326 seats necessary to win an outright majority, control of the government for America’s most important ally will hinge on deal making with the niche parties. Can Prime Minister David Cameron and his Tories cling to power? Will Scots have their revenge by helping Ed Miliband and Labour topple the current ruling coalition? It is quite likely to be a mess. Lucky for you then that SkyNews will have all of the details.

 

 Bibi survives with last-minute deal - AP: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday completed the formation of a new coalition government, reaching a last-minute deal with a nationalist party just before a midnight deadline. The late-night deal saved Netanyahu from the unthinkable scenario of being forced from office. But it set the stage for the formation of a narrow coalition dominated by hard-line and religious parties that appears to be on a collision course with the U.S. and other allies.”

 

 BIG NAMES LINE UP FOR MEMORIAL DAY PARADE

 The list of participants and entertainers for the May 25 National Memorial Day Parade on the National Mall is out this morning: Actors Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna; television chef Robert Irvine; musicians Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, Caleb Johnson from American Idol and country singer Beau Davidson; Miss America 2015 Kira Kazantsev, TNA Wrestling stars including Army vet Chris Melendez; and martial music and displays from the Marine Corps Equestrian Color Guard, the U.S. Army Band and marching platoons from all service branches. Get more info from American Veterans Center.

 

 BUT THE CAUCUSES WERE REALLY SOMETHING

 Reuters: “The Australian Sex Party, a tiny party known for its salacious name and election day antics, said on Thursday that it had been deregistered after the country’s election watchdog ruled it did not have enough activists. Co-founder Robbie Swan said in a statement that the party would ‘vigorously’ appeal a decision handed down by the Australian Election Commission (AEC) that removed its official status following a review of its membership. Under Australian law a political party must have either an elected representative in the federal parliament or 500 members to keep its registration. The Sex Party has one lawmaker in the Victoria state legislature, but none at federal level.”

 

 AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…

 “[President Bill Clinton] said there was a guy who said he put the information in the wrong box, and now he says we have no idea how this information was left out. It’s sort of amusing.  It reminds you of what they said about a lot of other stuff they lied about consistently in the ‘90s.  And this is just a guarantee that if we elect Hillary, we’re going to get this for another eight years.” – Charles Krauthammer  on “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

 

 Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"President Obama defended his administration’s approach to the terror threat at a White House summit Wednesday, standing by claims that groups like the Islamic State do not represent Islam -- as well as assertions that job creation could help combat extremism.

Obama, addressing the Washington audience on the second day of the summit, said the international community needs to address “grievances” that terrorists exploit, including economic and political issues.

He stressed that poverty alone doesn’t cause terrorism, but “resentments fester” and extremism grows when millions of people are impoverished.

“We do have to address the grievances that terrorists exploit including economic grievances,” he said.

He also said no single religion was responsible for violence and terrorism, adding he wants to lift up the voice of tolerance in the United States and beyond.

Obama’s address came as Republican lawmakers and others criticized the administration for declining to describe the threat as Islamic terrorism.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf has also come under fire for suggesting several times this past week that more jobs could help address the terrorism crisis.

On Tuesday, Rob O'Neill, former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who claims to have fired the shot that killed Usama bin Laden, told Fox News: ""They get paid to cut off heads -- to crucify children, to sell slaves and to cut off heads and I don't think that a change in career path is what's going to stop them.""

Obama also called on Muslim leaders to “do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there is an inherent clash in civilizations.”

Obama acknowledged that some Muslim-Americans have concerns about working with the government, particularly law enforcement, and that their reluctance “is rooted in the objection to certain practices where Muslim-Americans feel they’ve been unfairly targeted.”

He said it was important it make sure that abuses stop and are not repeated and that “we do not stigmatize entire communities.” He also said it was vital that “no one is profiled or put under a cloud of suspicion simply because of their faith.”

Although Obama called for a renewed focus on preventing terrorists from recruiting and inspiring others, some thought his message seemed to miss the mark.

“He was meandering, unfocused and weak,” said Richard Grenell, former U.S. spokesman at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration and a Fox News contributor. “He was talking about isolating terrorists. He doesn’t understand the threat that we face… People are being burned in cages and he’s talking about more investments?”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in an interview with Fox News, called Obama an ""apologist for radical Islamic terrorists."" And he mocked the president for recently comparing modern-day atrocities to those committed during the Crusades.

""I don't think it's too much to ask the president to stay in the current millennia,"" Cruz said, describing the rhetoric as ""bizarre politically correct double-speak.""

Recent Fox News polling showed most voters think Obama should be tougher on Islamic extremists. It showed 68 percent think Obama should be tougher; only 26 percent said he's being tough enough.

The poll of 1,044 registered voters was taken Feb. 8-10. It had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Leaders from 60 different countries traveled to Washington for the summit this week.

Community leaders from Boston, Minneapolis and Los Angeles were also in attendance and discussed how their cities could help empower communities to protect themselves against extremist ideologies.",REAL
"Bill White November 7, 2016 7 Ways To Prepare For An Economic Crisis 
Using the past economic collapses as an example, we can see that people’s lifestyles changed dramatically. Even those who managed to keep their jobs and businesses have to make radical adjustments in their lies, just to be able to survive. 
There is no reason for us to think that things will be any different here in the United States, than they were in Argentina; in fact, they could very well end up being worse. 
The reason I say it could be worse is that there will be nobody to bail out the United States, as has been done with other countries. We know from the 2009 housing collapse that anything negative that happens in the U.S. economy has a worldwide effect. 
Since other countries will end up suffering as well, there is no way that they will be able to help us. 
Liberals have touted the idea of redistributing the wealth of the wealthy in order to take care of our country’s woes. I’m not going to discuss the morality or ideology of that right now; but I will say this: if you were to take all the wealth of the 100 richest people in the United States and add it together, it wouldn’t pay our federal government’s bills from January 1 st till tax day. 
Of course, since their wealth isn’t really in cash, but rather in ownership of properties and companies, there’s no way of using it to pay the government’s costs or debts. 
The other thing that could make the collapse worse here in the United States is that most Americans aren’t prepared to live without all of our comforts. If you go to other countries, people are more accustomed to doing things themselves, instead of expecting society to do them. They know how to do basic things like slaughter a hog and pluck a chicken ; things that the average American hasn’t had to do for generations. 
Here are a number of lifestyle changes which can help your family to be ready to survive the meltdown: 
Pay off Your Home 
Home mortgages are dangerous in a financial crisis . If you don’t have enough income coming in to make the payment on your home, then you could very easily lose it. No matter how prepared you are, if you don’t have your home, you’re going to be in trouble. 
There are a number of strategies around for paying off your home mortgage early. I won’t go into them here, because this really isn’t a book about personal finances. 
You can find the necessary information on how to pay off your home early in a number of places. I highly recommend looking into Dave Ramsey’s teachings on the subject. 
Another option you may want to consider is downsizing. By selling your existing home and moving into something smaller, you might be able to reduce your mortgage payments or even the length of your mortgage. That would help you to get rid of your mortgage sooner. 
In the case of the financial crash coming before you manage to pay it off (which is very likely), your payments will be smaller, making it easier for you to keep making those payments. 
Pay off All Other Debts 
Any debt is a liability, enslaving your family’s finances to others. By paying off your outstanding debt, you eliminate the risk of lenders coming to take what you have. While other debt is not as important as your home mortgage, paying it off can make it easier to pay off your mortgage quicker. 
Paying off your debt also reduces your monthly cost of living, freeing up more money for use in preparing for the pending crash or some other activity your family wants to do. 
The vast majority of Americans have too much debt, which greatly limits their options and the decisions that they can make. 
Learn to Do Things without Electricity 
So much of our modern lifestyle depends upon electricity. We are used to using it for literally everything; from preserving our food to entertaining us. However, loss of electricity is a common problem during times of economic meltdown. 
Oh, the electricity probably won’t go out and stay out, but you can count on a lot of service interruptions. 
When service is lost, many of the things which we take for granted are lost as well. Our ability to store and cook food is compromised, as well as our ability to work. Lighting is gone, as well as most of our communications. For many people, the loss of electricity means the loss of being able to work as well. 
For everything you use in your life that is electric powered, you need an alternative. That means having something that you can use to do the same job, should the power go out. In some cases, you might be able to do without that thing, but you need to analyze that and make that determination, not just accept it as an assumption. 
Re-do Your Budget 
Probably one of the best things you can do to prepare for a financial meltdown is to re-do your budget, establishing a more frugal lifestyle. Chances are, when the economic collapse happens, you’re going to have to be living that more frugal lifestyle. 
By establishing it ahead of time, you not only train yourself and your family to be more careful of how you use your money, but you also save money which you can then use to buy and stockpile necessary supplies . 
Many people today live from paycheck to paycheck. That doesn’t mean that they’re using their money wisely though. Their budget may include eating out three times a week, spending $400 per month on their cell phones and another $300 per month on entertainment. Yet they complain about not having enough money to buy some basic emergency supplies. 
There are a lot of places where the average family spends more than they need to. Buying new cars is another one. Banks and the auto industry make a lot of money off of families who are making payments on two cars at a time. For some, their combined car payments are higher than their house payment. 
While reliable vehicles are a necessity, having two car payments every month isn’t. It would be better to buy older cars and not have those high payments to make. 
Eat Healthy 
How can eating healthy be part of preparing for a financial meltdown? Easy; the most expensive things that most of us eat are junk food. As a nation, we spend a fortune on prepared foods, snack foods and sweets. 
When the financial meltdown comes, you probably won’t be able to afford all that junk. You’ll end up eating much simpler foods, which carry more nutrition. 
At the same time, eating all that junk food is not good for your health. Medical expenses can be extremely high, especially for those who have ignored eating healthy. 
While it may sound a bit extreme, eating healthy can make the difference between life and death , by helping protect you from a life-threatening medical problem. 
Get in Shape 
This one goes hand-in-hand with eating healthy. People who are in good physical condition are much less likely to have medical problems, especially high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol; all of which can become life-threatening. 
However, there’s another part to this as well. That is, preparing your body for the physical rigors of survival. 
Living without all the modern conveniences requires much more physical work than living with them. That’s why so many of us are out of shape. We’ve become accustomed to allowing machines to do the things that we used to do ourselves. We’ve become softer. 
Many of us can’t do the physical work necessary for surviving without all those modern machines. 
Find Like-Minded People 
Many experts on survival and preparedness recommend banding together with other like-minded people and forming a prepping community . The idea is that in the wake of a disaster, the community would gather in one place to live and work together. Each member of the team would have their assigned area of responsibility, based upon their unique skills. 
There are many advantages of working together in a prepping community. The right community can increase your chances of survival. 
However, the wrong one can cause severe problems, with people leaving the group and taking most of the supplies with them. 
Be careful what group you join, investigating the morals and personalities of the people first, to make an informed decision about whether the group will stick together to help each other, or become selfish and steal from each other. 
Our ancestors survived harsh times and their secrets can help you survive during the most treacherous conditions if the world is struck with a tragedy. 
  Bill White for Survivopedia. 155 total views, 155 views today",FAKE
"“I’m going to walk away with it and win outright. I’m going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.” – Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s blend of bombast, amorality and media savvy has carried him to the Republican nomination. He’s proven that an ability to dominate coverage and dictate the narrative is sufficient in today’s political climate. None of this is surprising: Trump’s a TV man with a gift for self-promotion. His entire career has been preparation for this moment, this campaign. He saw our broken, perverted process with clear eyes and he’s exploited it with aplomb.

You have to give him credit for that.

While the Republican Party is ultimately responsible for Trump (they welcomed him into their big tent, after all), the media is equally culpable for the calamity that is his candidacy. Every American is entitled to be as undiscerning and uncritical as they like. There’s nothing in the social contract that demands voters educate themselves. A democracy, for the most part, can tolerate its share of credulous citizens. But the media has a special obligation in a free society. It’s the only profession protected by the U.S. Constitution for a reason: it’s a check on power and a gadfly for crooked politicians and abusers of power.

The media has failed spectacularly this election. “It [Trump’s campaign] may not be good for America,” said Les Moonves, the CEO and executive chairman of CBS, “but it’s damn good for CBS..Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” This is the plundering reaction Trump expected. “They will never take the lights off of me,” he famously said to Republican officials two years before announcing his candidacy.

Importantly, Trump also understood how to navigate the process without engaging issues that matter. To call his campaign substance-free is too generous. It’s been a cavalcade of insults and ethno-nationalist dog-whistling, punctuated by populist platitudes. If we had a functional media, Trump would be challenged by journalists and anchors. Instead, they’re too busy monitoring the ratings to notice he’s using them to prop up his campaign.

Part of the problem, as Columbia journalism professor Todd Gitlin notes in The Washington Post, is that Trump has “cracked the campaign reporters’ code.” Gitlin writes: “Trump regularly runs circles around interviewers because they pare their follow-up questions down to a minimum, or none at all. After 30-plus years in the media spotlight, he knows how to wait out an interviewer, offering noncommittal soundbites and incoherent rejoinders until he hears the phrase, ‘let’s move on.’ He takes advantage of the slipshod, shallow techniques journalism has made routine, particularly on TV – techniques that, in the past, were sufficient to trup up less-media-savvy candidates – but that Trump knows how to sidestep.” Examples of this abound. Gitlin cites interview after interview in which Trump rope-a-dopes reporters when they ask questions he can’t answer or when they suggest, however passively, that he’s wrong or lied about the record. “Trump is a master of darting from slogan to slogan,” Gitlin writes. “That’s why interviewers must do their homework and be prepared to go at least 2-3 questions deep on any issue.” Great idea, but it’s difficult to dive deep when interviewers are forced to shoehorn serious questions in limited time between competing toothpaste commercials. Trump gets away with this because of the mutually beneficial relationship he has with the press. He knows people like Moonves are interested in selling penis pill ads, not informing the electorate. Voters, for their part, are happy to project whatever they want onto the empty vessel that is Trump. Meanwhile, the truth is an afterthought and the whole sordid circus continues unimpeded. Gitlin urges journalists “to honor the good name of their profession and take off the kid gloves.” Sound advice, but I’m not holding my breath.",REAL
"Iraq Civilians leave their homes as Iraqi troops fight against Daesh militants in the village of Tob Zawa. (Photo by AP) 
Daesh terrorists have abducted tens of thousands of civilians from near Mosul to use them as human shields as government forces inch closer to the city proper in an operation to retake it, the UN says. 
UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the terrorist group also killed at least 232 people on Wednesday, including 190 former Iraqi security forces and 40 civilians, who refused to obey its orders. 
“Many of them who refused to comply were shot on the spot,” Shamdasani said in Geneva, citing reports corroborated by the UN that were “by no means comprehensive but indicative of violations.” 
As the news emerged, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi volunteers said they were set to launch an offensive against Daesh west of Mosul imminently. 
Ahmad al-Assadi, a spokesman for the popular forces, confirmed that the fighters had completed preparations to move in the direction of Tal Afar, a Daesh-held city 63 kilometers west of Mosul. 
He added that the fighters would move to capture Tal Afar from their positions in the Iraqi town of Qayyara, situated some 60 kilometers south of Mosul. 
“A few days or hours separate us from the launch of operations there,” Asadi said. 
Iraqi forces liberated three key areas from Daesh terrorists east of Mosul. Army officials said troops also seized a tank and artillery from the terrorists, and found a two-kilometer-long tunnel full of ammunition. 
The army is edging closer to Mosul by liberating villages around the city. Nearly 80 Daesh-held towns and villages have been retaken by the army since the Iraqi forces began the battle to liberate Mosul last week. Loading ...",FAKE
"Oregon Standoff Leaders Acquitted For Malheur Wildlife Refuge Takeover page: 1 link A federal court jury on Wednesday acquitted anti-government militant leader Ammon Bundy and six followers of conspiracy charges stemming from their role in the armed takeover of a U.S. wildlife center in Oregon earlier this year. Bundy and others, including his brother and co-defendant Ryan Bundy, cast the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a legitimate and patriotic act of civil disobedience. Prosecutors called it a lawless scheme to seize federal property by force. This is news! I surely did not expect these guys n gal to get off. Someone lost their life during this event which is sad. Justice has spoken. Does this set a precedent going forward? The likelihood of this happening again in a similar fashion seems high given the current political climate. A more detailed article.",FAKE
"Muslims Start Chanting Allah On Plane, Flight Attendant Quickly Shuts Them Up Oct 29, 2016 Previous post 
A Muslim couple has accused Delta Airlines of Islamophobia after their behavior forced a flight attendant to take action after they decided to parade their religious entitlement on a flight to the United States. 
According to reports, the two had boarded the plane when they started chanting “Allah” repeatedly. When a flight attendant noticed what they were doing he sprang into action and stopped them dead in their tracks. 
The couple has since taken issue with Delta, claiming that they had been ‘racially profiled,’ which is tough to do considering Islam is not a race but rather a religion. 
The couple in question, Faisal and Nazia Ali, claim to be victims of religious discrimination after they had to be removed for “suspicious activity” on an airplane. Most people would probably find being the only two people on the plane that were hiding their phones as the steward passes, sweating, and repeating the word “Allah” on an international flight to the united states from Paris a little suspicious. 
That’s exactly the type of behavior that this couple was exhibiting when the flight attendant had to take action and do so quickly, reports The Independent. 
After the flight attendant noticed this odd behavior he chose to act, taking the safety of the passengers and the crew above any sort of reprimand he might receive for being a ‘racist’ or a bigot. 
He told them to get up grab their things and get off of the plane. That’s when one of the Delta employees said that the pilot had made the final call because their behavior had made the rest of the passengers feel uncomfortable. 
The couple then went through an interrogation process before they were determined to not be a threat and sent home on the next flight and then offered a full refund. Of course this wasn’t enough for this entitled couple. The couple took this so-called ‘offense’ and contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which by the way has ties to terror organizations. 
Once CAIR filed an official 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"""If the deal now being negotiated is accepted by Iran, that deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons - it will all but guarantee that Iran will get those nuclear weapons, lots of them,"" the Israeli leader said in a 39-minute speech to the U.S. Congress that offered a point-by-point critique of Obama's Iran diplomacy.

In an appearance that strained U.S.-Israeli relations and was boycotted by dozens of Obama's fellow Democrats, Netanyahu said Iran's leadership was ""as radical as ever,"" could not be trusted and the deal being worked out with world powers would not block Iran's way to a bomb ""but paves its way to a bomb.""

""This deal won't be a farewell to arms, it will be a farewell to arms control ... a countdown to a potential nuclear nightmare,"" Netanyahu told lawmakers and visitors in the House of Representatives. His speech drew 26 standing ovations.

Netanyahu's speech culminated a diplomatic storm triggered by his acceptance in January of a Republican invitation that bypassed the White House and Obama's fellow Democrats, many of whom considered it an affront to the president.

Obama refused to meet Netanyahu, saying that doing so just ahead of Israel's March 17 general election would be seen as interference. Aides to Obama said he would not be watching the speech, broadcast live on U.S. television.

Underscoring the partisan divide over Netanyahu's address, House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said afterwards that as a friend of Israel, she was near tears during his speech, calling it ""an insult to the intelligence of the United States."" She said she was ""saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.""

Netanyahu entered the chamber to a cacophony of cheers and applause, shaking hands with dozens of lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner, before taking a podium and telling lawmakers he was deeply humbled.

At the start of the speech, he sought to defuse the intense politicization of his appearance, which has hardened divisions between Republicans and Democrats over the White House's approach to stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He said he was grateful to Obama for his public and private support of Israel, including U.S. military assistance and contributions to Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system.

""I regret that some see my appearance here as political,"" he said. ""I know that no matter which side of the aisle you sit on, you stand with Israel.""

Although given the cold shoulder by the U.S. administration, Netanyahu on Monday offered an olive branch, saying he meant no disrespect to Obama by accepting an invitation to speak to U.S. lawmakers that was orchestrated by the president's rival Republicans.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu appeared to offer another possible avenue for an Iran deal but put very strict conditions on it.

Having previously demanded a total elimination of Iranian nuclear projects with bomb-making potential, he said the United States should not ease its restrictions until Iran improves its overall conduct, a comment that could stiffen support among Republicans to maintain U.S. sanctions on Iran or seek to escalate them.

But the Israeli leader did not specifically call for new penalties, something Obama has said would undermine ongoing talks and would prompt a veto if passed by Congress.

""If the world powers are not prepared to insist that Iran change its behavior before a deal is signed they should at the very least be prepared to insist that Iran changes its behavior before the deal expires,"" Netanyahu said. The terms under consideration a suspension of restrictions on Iran's sensitive nuclear activities in as little as 10 years.

He added that while Israel and similarly minded Arab states might not like such a deal, ""we could live with it"".

He added that the drop in oil prices put the United States and other countries in a stronger position to negotiate with Iran.

""Iran's nuclear program can be rolled back well beyond the current proposal by insisting on a better deal and keeping up the pressure on a very vulnerable regime, especially given the recent collapse of the price of oil.""

As many as 60 of the 232 members of Congress from Obama's Democratic Party sat out the address to protest what they see as a politicization of Israeli security, an issue on which Congress is usually united.

The absence of so many lawmakers could raise political heat on Netanyahu at home. Many Israelis are wary of estrangement from a U.S. ally that provides their country with wide-ranging military and diplomatic support.

On Monday, Obama appeared to wave off any prospect that the bedrock U.S. alliance with Israel might be ruined by the rancor.

Netanyahu, a right-wing politician who has played up his security credentials, had denied his speech would have any design other than national survival.

He introduced Nobel peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, 86, to prolonged applause and said: ""Elie, your life and work inspires and gives meaning to the words 'Never Again.' I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past."" Wiesel sat in the gallery next to Netanyahu's wife Sara.

Netanyahu wants the Iranians stripped of nuclear projects that might be used to get a bomb - something Tehran insists it does not want. Washington deems the Israeli demand unrealistic.

Netanyahu, who has hinted at the prospect of unilateral strikes as a last resort on Iranian nuclear sites, told lawmakers Israel would stand alone if needed but he made no threat of military action.

Speaking just before Netanyahu's address, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, in Switzerland for talks with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, said the Israel leader was ""trying to create tension"" in the negotiations, which face an end-of-March deadline to reach a framework accord.

Under a 2013 interim deal, the United States and five other powers agreed in principle to let Iran maintain limited uranium enrichment technologies. U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice argued on Monday that this commitment could not be undone.

A deal with Iran is far from guaranteed, given U.S. assessments that more than a decade of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran might again fail to clinch a final accord.

The United States and some of its allies, notably Israel, suspect Iran of using its civil nuclear program as a cover to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Iran denies this, saying it is for peaceful purposes such as generating electricity.",REAL
"Unprecedented Surge In Election Fraud Incidents From Around The Country   Zero Hedge 
Mounting evidence would suggest it's getting more and more difficult for the left to claim that there are ""no signs"" of fraud in the 2016 election cycle...though we're sure they will continue to try. Just this morning the Miami Herald noted that two arrests were made in Miami-Dade county on election fraud charges including efforts by one woman to illegally register voters (some of whom were dead...a recurring theme this election cycle) while another 74-year-old election worker was charged with actually "" illegally marking ballots"" . 
A 74-year-old woman tasked with opening envelopes sent by Miami-Dade County voters with their completed mail ballots was arrested Friday after co-workers caught her illegally marking ballots, resulting in an unknown — but small — number of fraudulent votes being cast for mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado. 

Investigators linked Gladys Coego, a temporary worker for the county elections department, to two fraudulent votes, but they suspect from witness testimony that she submitted several more. 

In a separate election-fraud case, authorities also arrested a second woman for unlawfully filling out voter-registration forms on behalf of United for Care, the campaign to legalize medical marijuana in Florida. 

The Miami-Dade state attorney’s office plans to accuse Tomika Curgil, 33, of filling out forms for five people without their consent. She also submitted at least 17 forms for people who apparently don’t exist — and several forms for people who are dead. 

Police officers arrested Curgil at her Liberty City home Friday morning and intend to charge her with five felony counts of submitting false voter-registration information. 
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle was quick to praise the ""swift arrest of the wrongdoers"" and ensure voters of the "" integrity of the electoral process."" That said, we, like many others, wonder just how many similar cases of election fraud will go unnoticed between now and election day. 
“Our law enforcement effort against these election law violators was swift and resulted in an immediate arrest of the wrongdoers,” Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The elections department was quick to detect and report these violations to our task force. 

“Anyone who attempts to undermine the democratic process should recognize that there is an enforcement partnership between the elections department and our prosecution task force in place to thwart such efforts and arrest those involved. Now we need to move forward with the election.” 

“I want to ensure the voters of Miami-Dade County that the integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures work,” White said in a statement. “While disappointed by these incidents, I am very proud of the safeguards the Elections Department has in place to prevent these fraudulent attempts, and I commend the employees who remained vigilant just as they were trained to do.” 
Meanwhile, Florida isn't the only state with fraud problems as an NBC affiliate in Virginia is reporting that a former resident of Alexandia was also arrested after being caught creating fictitious voter registrations and faces up to 40 years in prison. Of course, Virginia, run by long-time Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe, is no stranger to election fraud as one democratic organization was already caught earlier this month re-registering dead voters . 
A former resident of Alexandria, Virginia, is facing up to 40 years in prison after he allegedly used fake names to fill out voter registration applications. 

Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, is facing four felony charges related to allegations of voter registration fraud , the Commonwealth's Attorney's Office said. Each charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. 

In the spring of 2016, Massaquoi was registering new voters as an employee of a local advocacy group. According to the Commonwealth's Attorney, Massaquoi fabricated applications and used fake names to fill out the registration forms. 

The fake applications were filed with the Alexandria Office of the General Registrar, who reported the issue to Commonwealth's Attorney Bryan Porter. 
All of these reports simply add fuel to the fire of Trump who has been relentlessly attacking the ""rigged"" elections for the past several weeks. The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD 
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016 'Obama Warned Of Rigged Elections In 2008.' Time to #DrainTheSwamp https://t.co/AkczH8l0FJ pic.twitter.com/7mIkwAHTuV 
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016 

Of course, these are just a few of the people who have actually been caught for their election ""rigging"" efforts. Meanwhile, there have seemingly been an unlimited number of other fraud cases pop up around the country involving everything from illegal voter registrations to dead people voting. In fact, a recent report from CBS Chicago found that over 100 dead Chicagoans had voted 229 times over the past decade. 
Susie Sallee was buried in 1998. Yet records show she voted in Chicago 12 years later. 

Victor Crosswell died in 1994, but records show he’s voted six times since then. 

And then there’s Floyd Stevens. Records show he’s voted 11 times since his death in 1993. 

“It’s crazy,” Sharon Stevens Anderson, Stevens’ daughter, tells CBS 2’s Pam Zekman. “I don’t see how people can be able to do something like that and get away with it.” 

Those are just a few of the cases CBS 2 Investigators found by merging Chicago Board of Election voter histories with the death master file from the Social Security Administration. 

In all, the analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade. 

Moreover, an ABC affiliate in Philadelphia uncovered similar instances of dead voters in the ""City of Brotherly Love."" 
So, Action News dug through a decade's worth of election and death records to see if there was any truth to the claim. 

Some of what Action News investigation found was stunning. 

Pezzano passed in 2006 . But state voting records show the South Philadelphia native still listed as an ""Active Voter"" who cast ballots in 2008, 2012, 2014, and the 2016 primary election. 

Our investigation also found Joseph B. Haggarty resting peacefully in a Bucks County cemetery. His grave marker confirmed he died in 2010, but records show he voted five years after his death. 

Action News also found Paul Bunch, who died in 2006, also cast a vote in this year's primary which was nearly ten years after death records show he died. 

But, while all of this may seem shocking, in due time, we're confident these arrests and all other instances dead people voting, etc. will be seen for what they really are, namely another blatant attempt to suppress low-income and minority votes. Share This Article...",FAKE
"According to a report, Attorney General Loretta Lynch advised FBI Director James Comey to not send a letter to Congress that would inform them of new emails the agency discovered in their investigation of Hillary Clinton 's illegal email server. 
The New Yorker reported : 
On Friday, James Comey , the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton 's private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey's decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department's longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election , but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise. 
Comey's decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. 
""You don't do this,"" one former senior Justice Department official said. ""It's aberrational. It violates decades of practice."" The reason, according to the former official, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing cases involving the department, ""is because it impugns the integrity and reputation of the candidate, even though there's no finding by a court, or in this instance even an indictment."" 
In the letter that Comey sent to staffers , he expressed that he was under an obligation to inform the people's representatives of the finding. 
""Of course, we don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,"" Comey wrote. ""I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record."" 
""At the same time, however, given that we don't know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don't want to create a misleading impression,"" he added. ""In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter and in the middle of an election season there is significant risk of being misunderstood."" 
What I don't get, or maybe I really do, is that Comey would not recommend charges against Clinton when he knew for a fact that she broke federal law and had the evidence in hand to prove it. So, don't be deceived by this recent opening of the Clinton probe into her email crimes . Nothing is going to come of it because all of these people are in bed together and they are merely putting on a show for the American people. Mark my words. Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
"Donald Trump is adamant that he raised more than $5 million for military veterans this campaign season and that it is all going to veterans charities. After reports raised questions about whether that's true, Trump scheduled a press conference Tuesday to give more details about the donations' whereabouts.

At his press conference, Trump explained the lack of clarity surfaced in a recent Washington Post report by stating he ""wanted to keep it private"": ""I don't think it's anybody's business if I wanna send money to the vets,"" before ultimately unveiling the list of recipients.

According to reporting from the Associated Press, many of these donations were dated the same day as the Washington Post's article. Trump associated the timing with the vetting process, ""reviewing statistics, reviewing numbers and also talking to people in the military to find out whether or not the group was deserving of the money,"" he said Tuesday.

But what his reaction to scrutiny of his alleged veterans donations really reveals about Trump is how he handles criticism from the press — viewing fact-checking from reporters as personal attacks rather than a nettlesome but necessary role in democracy.

Last week, the presumptive Republican nominee responded to the Post's report which found his January charity event – which he claimed raised more than $6 million in donations for veterans charities – had come up short.

It's not the first time reports have raised questions about the donations. In March, Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks shot down media inquiries in an interview with CNN that similarly wondered about these alleged donations.

""If the media spent half as much time highlighting the work of these groups and how our veterans have been so mistreated, rather than trying to disparage Mr. Trump's generosity for a totally unsolicited gesture for which he had no obligation, we would all be better for it,"" Hicks told CNN.

At the event, which Trump held as counterprograming to the Republican presidential debate he boycotted in January, the candidate said he ""broke $6 million"" in donations, $1 million of which he donated himself.

But as of March, Hicks said they were still collecting donations. Now Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, says some of the event's biggest donors have backed down on their promises. The fundraiser actually brought in $4.5 million, or 75 percent of what was initially said, the Washington Post's David Fahrenthold reported. He later remarked on Twitter that even the adjusted numbers are still a hefty and admirable sum for a worthy cause:

At the time of the report, the campaign said the amount was not $4.5 million, Trump tweeted it is somewhere between $5 million and $6 millions, and it was unclear where Trump's own pledge of $1 million ended up.

But regardless of the numbers, something has become increasingly clear: Trump feels this isn't about the money. He's making it about him doing a good deed.

""The press should be ashamed at themselves, and on behalf of the vets the press should be ashamed of themselves,"" Trump said Tuesday, even calling a reporter at his press conference a ""sleaze.""

The reports were a personal attack, Trump said.

""Instead of being like, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Trump,' or ‘Trump did a good job,' everyone said: ‘Who got it? Who got it? Who got it?'"" Trump said. ""And you make me look very bad. I have never received such bad publicity for doing a good job.""

The Washington Post report was yet another ""dishonest"" ploy from the mainstream media, trying to spin his good deed into scandal, he tweeted when the report surfaced.

In many ways, Trump's idea to host a fundraising event honoring veterans began as a reaction to the ""disgusting media."" In January, Trump decided to boycott the last GOP presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses because of Fox News host and debate moderator Megyn Kelly.

It was an early chapter in their months-long feud — she represented the ""biased"" media; he felt she had personally targeted him in the first debate and intended to tank Fox News's ratings by hosting a charitable even in Iowa at the same time as the debate. (Trump and Kelly have, of course, now officially made up.)

Trump's fundraiser was organized on a whim and featured the things that represent Trump the most: Middle America, an unyielding love for America, and Trump supporters.

For Trump, the Washington Post's report was an attempt to turn a good deed sour.

But Fahrenthold maintains that wasn't the intention, launching a 16-tweet response to Trump's comment. He has some questions:

January's fundraising event raised a lot of money for veterans. It was also undeniably a political platform.

It resembled a Trump rally as much as it did a charitable event, I reported in January:

Since then, Trump has used the event to exemplify all the good he has done for the military and its veterans. In the weeks after, he used his campaign events to give large checks to various charities, rallying confidence that he can get good things done; with a snap of his fingers he raised millions.

The point is clear: Trump, ""under no obligation,"" did a good thing.",REAL
"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

A week out from Election Day, here's the only thing we're sure of after Friday's bombshell political news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is one again looking at Hillary Clinton's emails: Another U.S. institution -- the FBI -- has taken a hit. (It's especially true after all of the obvious leaks coming from the FBI and Justice Department.) And that news isn't good for the country's democracy. Back in 2014, our national NBC/WSJ poll looked at Americans' confidence in 15 different institutions and industries, and majority had confidence in just two of them.

So this lack of confidence in American institutions was taking place BEFORE this presidential election, and you can only imagine what the situation is going to look like afterwards. As for Comey and his decision to make his announcement 11 days before an election, we understand he was in a lose-lose situation. (If he withheld this information before the election, it could have been equally damaging.) But the problem was how vague Comey's letter to Congress was, as well as the fact that it was sent before the FBI even had access to the emails. It's hard to reconcile Comey being so transparent with a July press conference and then testimony to Capitol Hill -- over a matter where there were no charges -- and then so opaque in a letter to Congress just days before the election.

Team Trump deals with its share of negative stories

While the Clinton campaign is still dealing with the fallout from Friday's news, Halloween night saw several tough stories aimed at Team Trump. There was the New York Times report on new tax documents showing Trump ""used a legally dubious method"" to avoid paying taxes; NBC News reported that the FBI ""has been conducting a preliminary inquiry into Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort's foreign business connections""; and Mother Jones reported that a veteran spy gave the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate ties to Trump.

Today in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Trump and running mate Mike Pence will deliver a policy speech to ""repeal and replace"" Obamacare. It's a smart move for the Trump camp to focus on policy when everyone is paying attention. A Trump aide previews the speech to NBC's Peter Alexander: ""The speech will be delivered along with several of those congressional leaders who the Trump Administration will work with to immediately repeal and replace it. What's even more powerful is that we'll have Gov. Pence there to address how he has successfully navigated Indiana through this mess and created a model for other states to follow.""

This week's NBC|SurveyMonkey tracking poll has Clinton ahead by 6 points over Trump in the four-way horserace, 47%-41% -- which is exactly where it was last week. Moreover, that six-point 47%-41% lead was identical in interviews before the Comey news (Monday through Friday) and after (Saturday and Sunday). More from the poll: ""Likely voters were split on whether they thought the controversial announcement by the FBI was an important issue to discuss or more of a distraction to the campaign. A slight majority of likely voters nationwide—55 percent—said it was an important issue. Forty-four percent said the news was more of a distraction to the campaign."" Now the national Washington Post/ABC tracking poll has Trump up a point, though that's in contrast to the other tracking polls we've seen after the Comey news.

The Comey Surprise might not have hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential chances. But it might have hurt downballot Democrats, who were counting on a large Clinton margin over Trump. ""While FBI Director James Comey's email bombshell is unlikely to dent her White House chances, Democrats fear it might shorten her coattails and threaten their prospects of retaking the Senate,"" NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald writes. ""'It's certainly not helpful,' said Missouri Democratic Party Chairman Roy Temple. 'It kind of pollutes the Democratic brand in a way that's unnecessary, simply because it doesn't actually involve any new information, which is why the frustration at Comey is so high right now.'"" More: ""'The slightest breeze in any direction can really push these races one way or another,' said Ian Prior of the Senate Leadership Fund, a deep-pocketed GOP Super PAC. 'All you need is need is .01 (percent) in a [close race].'"" By the way, a Monmouth poll from yesterday showed a tied race in Indiana's Senate race, which isn't good news for Democrats' bid to retake the Senate.

Burr says gun owners may want to put a ""bullseye"" on Clinton

But this story won't help Republicans in the key North Carolina Senate race. CNN: ""Sen. Richard Burr privately mused over the weekend that gun owners may want to put a 'bullseye' on Hillary Clinton… The North Carolina Republican, locked in a tight race for reelection, quipped that as he walked into a gun shop 'nothing made me feel better' than seeing a magazine about rifles 'with a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it.'"" Burr apologized. ""The comment I made was inappropriate, and I apologize for it. But the audio CNN obtained also contained this other sound from Burr, in which he said he'd work to keep Clinton from filling the vacant Supreme Court seat. ""[I]f Hillary Clinton becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court.""

First Read's downballot race of the day: Ohio Senate

In a swing state during what's shaping up to be a tough year for many Republicans, GOP Sen. Rob Portman has executed a model campaign against Democratic former governor Ted Strickland. He's been a strong fundraiser and energetic campaigner who built an impressive independent GOTV effort that's targeting possible split-ticket voters rather than just a Republican base. Strickland has committed his fair share of unforced errors, including his August declaration that the death of Justice Antonin Scalia ""happened at a good time.""

Hillary Clinton spends her day in Florida, hitting Dade City at 3:00 pm ET, Sanford at 6:15 pm ET, and Ft. Lauderdale at 8:45 pm ET… Donald Trump makes stops in King of Prussia, PA at 11:00 am ET and Eau Claire, WI at 8:00 pm ET… Mike Pence stumps in Pennsylvania… Tim Kaine is in Wisconsin… President Obama campaigns in Columbus, OH at 4:30 pm ET… Joe Biden is in North Carolina… Bernie Sanders campaigns in New Hampshire and Maine… And Bill Clinton has three events in Florida.",REAL
"Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter faces 16 years in prison, while Steubenville rapists walk free Please scroll down for video 
Deric Lostutter was part of the group affiliated with Anonymous who exposed the rapists of an underage girl in Steubenville, Ohio. While his actions eventually helped to highlight the terrible crime against the young woman and helped to bring the perpetrators to justice, he has received no thanks from law enforcement who have instead elected to put him on trial for felony hacking. If he is found guilty, he will face up to sixteen years in prison. Incidentally, the rapists who were also found guilty at trial have already completed their exceptionally short detention sentences. Steubenville hacker indicted for bringing rapists to justice 
The sobering details of the Steubenville rape case were detailed heavily in 2013 when the perpetrators came to trial. Members of a local football team gang raped a high school girl and posted pictures, and social media posts are bragging about they had done to her. Only two of the perpetrators were ever arrested on charges of rape and kidnap, Trent May and Ma’Lik Richmond, both of whom received far more local support then their victim. 
Initially, local authorities showed a reluctance to prosecute any of the perpetrators of this senseless and violent act owing to their privileged place in local society. This led to international outrage and eventually a group called KnightSec, which is affiliated to Anonymous decided to step in. They hacked into the Steubenville High School sports fan website and exposed the cover-up by school administrators and the identities of the girl’s attackers. They also posted a video of several students making light of the rape victim. They threatened to expose more individuals associated with the cover-up if the rapists did not come forward and confess. Eventually, two young men did come forward and were convicted of the rape of a minor. Ma’Lik Richmond served a paltry ten-month spell at the juvenile detention facility, and Trent May served two years . 
According to Tor Ekeland, a lawyer speaking for Lostutter, he and his client were both incredibly surprised that he had been targeted by the FBI about this hacking. He said; “I don’t understand why they are prosecuting somebody who helped expose the rape of a minor… This is not a situation where somebody, you know, hacked a hospital or took down a nuclear power plant. This was an act of political protest against the rape of a 16-year-old girl.” 
Now Lostutter must wait and see whether he will face the full sixteen years in prison that his ‘crime’ can carry. Naturally, his supporters are appalled. “You get 16 years for forcibly entering your way into a computer, but you get one year for forcibly entering your way into a woman. I think that’s the precedent the government is setting here, ” said Ekeland. 
This article (Anonymous hacker Deric Lostutter faces 16 years in prison, while Steubenville rapists walk free) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
"Get short URL 0 18 0 0 Officials responsible for overpaying re-enlistment bonuses to soldiers a decade ago and officials who ordered those bonuses repaid earlier this month need to be held responsible, US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain said in a statement. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Members of the National Guard in the US state of California were paid excessive bonuses at the height of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and were ordered to repay those bonuses earlier this month after an audit discovered the overpayments. ""That is why I will work together with the Department of Defense and my colleagues in the Senate to explore all options available to hold those responsible for this unacceptable situation accountable and to ensure this never happens again,"" McCain stated on Wednesday. 
McCain called a Defense Department decision to suspend collection of the payments ""a long overdue first step."" 
However, he added that thousands of service members and their families, whose lives have been disrupted through no fault of their own, are still waiting for certainty that the problem will be fixed. 
The Defense Department said earlier on Wednesday that about 2,000 soldiers are affected and that it will set up a system to review each case before any efforts to collect money resume. ...",FAKE
"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**

Buzz Cuts:

 • Romney’s timely Trump trolling

 • Rubio, Cruz sharpen attacks on Trump

 • Carson wonders whether his campaign ripped off donors

 • Hillary knocks Bernie on guns in fight for black votes

 • Hey, it’s hard to book a good housepainter

 

 ROMNEY’S TIMELY TRUMP TROLLING

 Donald Trump argues that Mitt Romney is in no position to be asking for the 2016 Republican frontrunner’s tax returns on the grounds that Romney lost the 2012 general election. Romney is also, Trump wrote, a “dope.”

But Romney is arguably the very best Republican to be asking Trump about his tax returns given how successfully Democrats exploited Romney’s filings to alienate potential voters. Democrats essentially called Romney a tax cheat for his low rates and the attack stuck. And it is a line, in some form or another, which Democrats will be sure to repeat against the billionaire Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee.

Romney began releasing his tax returns amid pressure from his rivals in early Republican primaries in 2012. But because Trump’s rivals have neglected to actually attack the frontrunner very much, Trump is only just now being pressed on this crucial general election issue.

Romney’s troll timing is perfect. Trump is either less than a week away from starting to put the Republican nomination in the bag or facing lengthening odds in his unlikely but so-far successful quest. He is also facing tonight what promises to be his most challenging debate yet.

Trump’s detractors to this point have mostly knocked Trump for insufficient conservativeness, or flip flopping, or being of poor character. But voters primarily interested in conservative orthodoxy and personal virtue are probably not part of Trump’s long-term coalition. Trump’s voters don’t seem to care about his politics. They just want a winner.

What few have hit the frontrunner on are his business failures and the unhappy chapters of his career. His business troubles and his finances have been a long-running part of Trump’s media feuds in the past but have oddly not been part of the political discussion. It is particularly odd given how much of a focus Romney’s relatively tame business record was four years ago.

Romney’s mischievous speculation is using Trump’s tactics against Trump. When the celebrity billionaire speculated about Sen. Ted Cruz’s nativity, Sen. Marco Rubio’s sweat glands, or Ben Carson’s gifts as a teenaged knife fighter, he was doing exactly what Romney is doing now.

Whether Trump can manage to lock up his party’s nomination – which could come as soon as March 15 – without divulging his tax returns will depend on the press and his competitors. Neither has shown themselves to have much snap in their noodles when it comes to taking on Trump so far, but the hour is late and the stakes are high.

Rubio, Cruz sharpen attacks on Trump - Fox News: “Speaking at a special forum in Houston hosted by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called on Republican voters Wednesday to unite around his campaign, saying that his was ‘the only campaign that can beat Donald [and] has beat Donald,’ a reference to his win in last month's Iowa caucuses…Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has finished second in each of the last two nominating contests, acknowledged that Trump was ‘the frontrunner and I’m the underdog, but I’ve been an underdog my entire life.’ Rubio added that his campaign ‘would not allow the conservative movement to be defined by a nominee who isn't a conservative.’ Rubio also took a shot at Trump, though he did not mention that candidate's name, for his remarks on Muslims.”

Trump’s resort spurned American applicants for foreign workers - NYT: “Since 2010, nearly 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers [at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.]. But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.”

White nationalists plump for Trump in robocalls - Daily Beast: “A xenophobic pro-Donald Trump robocall urges voters in Vermont and Minnesota not to vote for a ‘Cuban’ like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. The call comes from the American National PAC and is voiced by its founded William Daniel Johnson, the leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party. ‘The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,’ the call said. ‘I am afraid to be called racist. Donald Trump is not a racist, but Donald Trump is not afraid. Don’t vote for a Cuban. Vote for Donald Trump.’ Trump had previously disavowed the super PAC that released controversial robocalls on his behalf in Iowa.”

Why it’s still a race - RCP’s Lou Cannon explains why Trump isn’t the inevitable nominee writing that Trump’s unfavorable rating and loss of late-breaking voters means Trump still faces competition heading into Super Tuesday.

March 15: ‘Day of Reckoning’ - FiveThirtyEight: “March 15 is truly the GOP’s ‘day of reckoning,’ and Florida may be the most pivotal state on the entire calendar. If Trump defeats Rubio in his winner-take-all backyard, it would be game over. But if Rubio wins over enough of Jeb Bush’s old supporters to claim Florida’s 99-delegate jackpot, it could mark a long-awaited turning point in the race. At the very least, he could leverage such an outcome to try to prevent Trump from winning a majority of delegates by June.”

Carson wonders whether his campaign ripped off donors - The Atlantic: “For months, reporters and political operatives…have been pointing out that Ben Carson’s campaign bears many of the hallmarks of a political scam operation. Now Carson seems to agree. On CNN on Tuesday, Carson discussed his year-end staff shake-up: ‘We had people who didn't really seem to understand finances,’ a laughing Carson [said] adding, ‘or maybe they did—maybe they were doing it on purpose.’ It’s a remarkable statement—especially because he’s so blithe about it… First, many of the companies being paid millions and millions of dollars are run by top campaign officials or their friends and relations, meaning those people are making a mint. Second, many of the contributions are coming from small-dollar donors. If that money is being given by well-meaning grassroots conservatives for a campaign that’s designed not to win but to produce revenue for venders, isn’t it just a grift?”

Ed Note: Wednesday’s Fox First incorrectly listed Cruz’s delegate count. His number today is actually unchanged since the final tabulation of the Nevada Caucus results.

 

 WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE

 In a coral reef near Tahiti one photographer set out to capture as many species as he could in a single photograph. Smithsonian has the story: “What if you sifted through every last little organism that lives or passes through a single cubic foot of space in a day? On a coral reef? In a forest? How many species would you find? This was the question that [photographer Michael] Liittschwager wanted to answer—and photograph. He came up with the idea of a biocube; his proposed standard for sampling biodiversity. A 12-inch cube that he would set in one place and observe long enough to catalog everything within it. He started on Mo’ore’a [an island off Tahiti], but has since brought his biocube method to many locations around the world.”

HILLARY KNOCKS BERNIE ON GUNS IN FIGHT FOR BLACK VOTES

 USA Today: “Hillary Clinton’s gun-control offensive against Bernie Sanders in South Carolina will provide the template she follows in upcoming state contests with sizable African-American electorates. Two days in a row this week, Clinton campaigned with mothers who’ve lost children to gun violence, including Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. Her campaign also cut a new web video and held a conference call highlighting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ record on guns, including his support of the so-called Charleston loophole, which allowed Dylann Roof to acquire a firearm before completing a background check.”

Colorado caucus good for Bernie, superdelegates to Hillary - Denver Post: “The stakes in Colorado are significant for both campaigns, offering Sanders an opportunity to showcase the energy behind his campaign and giving Clinton a chance to demonstrate that her sizable organization can deliver votes…The caucus system mostly favors Sanders, as it gives an outsized voice to the most motivated party activists, who will gather at 7 p.m. for 3,010 precinct meetings that start the delegate-selection process…In the end, at the state and congressional district conventions in April, Colorado will award 66 delegates — in addition to the 12 superdelegates, most of whom are committed to Clinton.”

Super Tuesday money race - Bernie Sanders is banking big on Colorado spending $1.2 million in the state alone, but overall his competitor Hillary Clinton outspends him across all 11 states voting next Tuesday at $4.1 million compared to Sanders $3.3 million, according to NBC News.

 

 THE JUDGE’S RULING: APPLE VS. DOJ

 Fox News’ Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano argues that the Department of Justice has no authority to force Apple to give them the ability to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorists, and says DOJ already has the information they’re seeking: “The DOJ knows where this data on this killer’s cellphone can be found, but if it subpoenas the NSA, and the NSA complies with that subpoena, and all this becomes public, that will put the lie to the government’s incredible denials that it spies upon all of us all the time. Surely it was spying on the San Bernardino killers.” Read here.

CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS

 Today, the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institute, and Center for American Progress are hosting an event on the changing demographics of voters in elections and what that means heading into November. The event is at AEI today starting at 10 a.m. ET and going through the afternoon. See here for details.

HEY, IT’S HARD TO BOOK A GOOD HOUSEPAINTER 

 Sky News: “A couple from Peterborough [England] have been revealed as the winners of a lottery jackpot of more than $45 million. Cambridgeshire pair Gerry Cannings, 63, and wife Lisa, 48, matched their numbers in the draw held on 13 February but delayed the collection of their winnings for a week…Mrs Cannings, a school teacher, explained why the couple took a week to come forward to claim the prize. She said: ‘I know it sounds mad but we had a guy in to paint the whole house. We’d been planning it for ages and had packed everything into boxes. We just thought it would be easier to wait, although it did mean that Gerry had to carry round the winning ticket in his wallet all week. It was very nerve-wracking.’”

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"By Claire Bernish 
On Thursday, police from no less than five states sporting full riot gear and armed with heavy lethal and nonlethal weaponry, pepper spray, mace, a number of ATVs, five tanks, two helicopters, and military-equipped Humvees showed up to tear down an encampment of Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and supporters armed with … nothing. 
Under orders from the now-notorious Morton County Sheriff’s Office, this ridiculously heavy-handed standing army came better prepared to do battle than some actual military units fighting overseas. 
But the target of their operation — a group of slightly more than 200 Native American water protectors and supporters opposing construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline — never intended to do battle with the armed, taxpayer-funded, corporate-backed, state-sponsored aggressors. 
Reports vary, but no less than 141 people were arrested Thursday, and — according to witnesses — police marked numbers on arrestees’ arms and housed them in cement-floored dog kennels , without any padding, before they were transported as far away as Fargo. 
“It goes back to concentration camp days,” asserted Oceti-Sakowin coordinator Mekasi Camp-Horinek, who, along with his mother, was marked and detained in a mesh kennel, reports the Los Angeles Times. 
Although Thursday’s incident remained relatively peaceful for some time, with only shouts, chants, and occasional attempts by water protectors to convince this standing army to examine its motives and reconsider, clashes nonetheless broke out — solely because of gratuitous police aggression. 
After facing off for a couple hours, these militant cops began closing in on the water protectors to shut down the Treaty of 1851 camp — in reference to the Fort Laramie Treaty of that year, which established a large parcel of land designated exclusively Native American territory not to be disturbed by the U.S. government. Prior to his arrest, Camp-Horinek had established the camp, stating, as cited by Indigenous Rising : 
Today, the Oceti Sakowin has enacted eminent domain on DAPL lands, claiming 1851 treaty rights. This is unceded land. Highway 1806 as of this point is blockaded. We will be occupying this land and staying here until this pipeline is permanently stopped. We need bodies and we need people who are trained in non-violent direct action. We are still staying non-violent and we are still staying peaceful. 
Despite the water protectors’ commitment to nonviolence, the militarized police response went as would be expected — horribly awry. 
“A prayer circle of elders, including several women, was interrupted and all were arrested for standing peacefully on the public road,” stated a press release from Indigenous Environment Network . “A tipi was erected in the road and was recklessly dismantled, despite law enforcement statements that they would merely mark the tipi with a yellow ribbon and ask its owners to retrieve it. A group of water protectors was also dragged out of a sweat lodge ceremony erected in the path of the pipeline, thrown to the ground, and arrested.” 
Claims to the contrary by Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier aside, Native American and Indigenous water protectors and supporters have refrained from violent acts on the whole, preferring instead peaceful prayer vigils and acts of civil disobedience. 
No matter how peacefully the opposition acts, armed defenders of Big Oil interests seem determined to brutalize , disrespect, and generally incite and inflict violence against those who desire unsullied water for generations to come. 
In fact, at the beginning of September, a private security firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for pipeline construction, indiscriminately unleashed vicious attack dogs on water protectors, press, and supporters — for reasons as yet unknown. 
During the savage attack, a pregnant woman, young girl, and many others suffered serious dog bites thanks to the ineptitude of the dogs’ handlers. Afterward, a warrant for inciting a riot was issued Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman — for doing her job, filming events as they happened — though charges were subsequently thrown out. 
Although ETP and some law enforcement officers defended the barbarous actions of the private security mercenaries, the Guardian now reports that — because the guards lacked proper licensing — they could now face criminal charges. On Wednesday, the Morton County Sheriff’s Office made the determination that “dog handlers were not properly licensed to do security work in the state of North Dakota.” 
Bob Frost, owner of Ohio-based Frost Kennels, told the Guardian , “All the proper protocols … were already done. I pulled my guys out the next day because we weren’t there to go to war with these protesters.” 
Frost insisted he had cooperated with authorities investigating the incident — but the sheriff’s department disagrees. Seven handlers and dogs were deployed to the scene in early September, allegedly in response to reports of trespassers; but, according to the Guardian , police have only managed to identify two people. 
The sheriff’s department claims Frost has not provided necessary information, and unnamed security officials cited in the report said that “there were no intentions of using the dogs or handlers for security work. However, because of the protest events, the dogs were deployed as a method of trying to keep the protesters under control.” 
In a statement cited by the Guardian , Morton County Captain Jay Gruebele said, “Although lists of security employees have been provided, there is no way of confirming whether the list is accurate or if names have been purposely withheld.” 
Water protectors, in the meantime, are left to deal with absurdly disproportionate state violence — and the altogether unacceptable, disrespectful, and demeaning insult of being relegated to dog kennels after being arrested for exercising their rights. 
As Lakota Country Times editor, Brandon Ecoffey, wrote in an editorial Thursday, 
Over the course of the last several months the abuse of detainees by Morton County Law Enforcement has overstepped every boundary guaranteed by the American constitution. Water protectors have been seen being bound and hooded by police. People are being stripped searched and abused within their jail for misdemeanor crimes. And police have employed the use of mass surveillance through drones on the protector camps. This isn’t a war zone this is North Dakota. 
Claire Bernish writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com , where this article first appeared . Share:",FAKE
"By Djuan Wash / filmsforaction.org 
One cannot claim to be intersectional while at the same time being elitist and exclusionary. Everyone isn't hip to what heteronormativity, heterosexism, cisgendered, cissexism or many new-age terms mean. You can't write people off for not being where you are or prescribing to your beliefs. Being intersectional means to love and support people where they are and assist them in their efforts at gaining a better understanding of intersectional social justice. While the work ultimately lies on the individual to read/research further once you enlighten them, you can't do that if you brow beat them for being ignorant. If you're unwilling to meet people where they are, you're not being intersectional, you're being an asshole. This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 4.0 ·",FAKE
"The most controversial presidential campaign  in modern American history has sharpened a long-standing debate: Is it ethical to not vote?

More than 92 million Americans who were eligible to vote four years ago didn't cast ballots. But politics in the Age of Trump has prompted editorial writers, Democratic partisans and even some Republicans to argue that Donald Trump is so unacceptable as a potential commander in chief that citizens have a heightened duty to show up to cast their ballot against him.

Some Trump supporters, presumably including those who chant ""Lock her up!"" at GOP rallies, feel the same way about Hillary Clinton.

""Let's be clear: Elections aren’t just about who votes, but who doesn’t vote,"" first lady Michelle Obama said last week at a Clinton campaign rally at La Salle University in Philadelphia, with a cautionary message aimed at Millennials. ""And if you vote for someone other than Hillary, or if you don’t vote at all, then you are helping to elect Hillary’s opponent.  And the stakes are far too high to take that chance, too high.""

""Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton,"" she wrote in Friday's The Wall Street Journal. But she warned, ""Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.""

On Team Trump, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani are among those who argue it is Clinton whose election would pose a threat to the republic. And some Republicans who oppose Trump make the case for sending a message by supporting a third-party candidate or not voting at all.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, vanquished by Trump in the GOP primaries, told reporters Thursday after delivering a guest lecture at Harvard University that he planned to vote, but not for Trump or Clinton. ""If everybody didn't vote, that would be a pretty powerful political statement, wouldn't it?"" he said.

Trump's temperament — criticism of Muslim-American Gold Star parents, a late-night Twitter storm against a former beauty queen — and policy views that include skepticism of the NATO alliance and admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin have fueled alarm even among some life-long Republicans about whether he should be trusted with the nation's highest office. Former president George H.W. Bush and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney are among those who have said they won't vote for Trump.

But concerns about Clinton, including questions about her honesty and trustworthiness, have complicated the calculations by some voters about just whom to support. All that has boosted Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, whose 7.3% level of support in the RealClearPolitics average of recent nationwide surveys is higher than any third-party candidate on Election Day since Ross Perot in 1996.

When both major-party candidates get negative ratings from most Americans, will more voters just stay home?

Inspirational contenders tend to do best in drawing voters to the polls. The highest rate of turnout since World War II was 63.8% of the voting-eligible population in 1960, when a youthful Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy narrowly won the White House. After decades of more-or-less steady decline, it spiked again to 61.6% in 2008, when Illinois senator Barack Obama was elected the nation's first African-American president.

But scholars say fear can be as compelling as hope.

""Fear is a pretty big motivator, just as is enthusiasm,"" says Michael Dimmock, president of the non-partisan Pew Research Center, which has studied voters and non-voters. Turnout in presidential elections tends to dip in years such as 1996 and 2000, when voters don't see the stakes as particularly high or the differences between the two major candidates as particularly sharp.

Neither factor would apply this time. And high levels of interest this year may signal higher turnout.

In a Pew study released this summer, more than eight in 10 said they were following news about the candidates closely, the highest level of interest in a quarter century. Eight in 10 said they had thought ""quite a lot"" about the election. Three of four said it ""really matters"" who wins.

That said, two-thirds called the tone of the campaign too negative, and only four in 10 were satisfied with their choices, the lowest level in two decades. Just one in 10 said either candidate would make a good president. Four in 10 said neither would.

""We've never had candidates like this for president,"" says Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida who heads the United States Elections Project. He turns to Senate races for comparison, citing the 2010 Delaware contest when Democrat Chris Coons crushed Republican Christine O'Donnell. She was a controversial Tea Party-backed contender who, among other things, aired a TV ad denying she was a witch.

Despite a contest that wasn't seen as competitive, turnout in the First State was among the highest in the country last year.

""My guess is people are going to be activated to vote against these candidates,"" McDonald says. ""They may not like their particular candidate ... but they certainly don't like the other party's candidate.""

""It's not: 'How much do I like these people?'"" says Jan Leighley, an American University professor and co-author of Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality and Turnout in the United States. ""It's: 'Does it make a difference between this person I do not like opposed to that person I do not like?'""

This year, Trump has heightened that issue with rhetoric that seems ""outside the scope of reasonable conversation or respectable public dialogue,"" she says. If he continues to do that, she says the question for voters could be this: ""Is one being irresponsible by not casting a ballot?""

In the first, tentative clues about turnout this year, McDonald says requests for absentee ballots in congressional districts in Iowa, Maine and North Carolina likely to favor Clinton have been running slightly ahead of requests at this point four years ago. Requests in districts in those three states likely to favor Trump have been running slightly lower.

""Most Americans think there's an obligation to vote,"" says Jason Brennan, a Georgetown University professor and author of The Ethics of Voting, though the percentages may be inflated because they think that's what they're supposed to say. He doesn't agree, likening it to a lottery, when an individual ticket or vote isn't likely to make a difference.

That said, he generally does vote himself.

A look at the demographics of those least likely to vote explains why Democrats are more focused on turnout efforts than Republicans. A majority of eligible Latino voters and of voters under 30 didn't go to the polls in 2012. Both groups support Clinton over Trump, and they make up significant blocs in some battleground states — Millennials in Colorado and Virginia, Hispanics in Florida and Nevada.

Clinton has vowed to encourage 3 million new Americans to register to vote before Nov. 8. She and her top campaign surrogates increasingly are focused on registering voters before state deadlines loom and encouraging supporters to cast early ballots.

That said, Trump has done well among another group of voters not inclined to cast ballots: Those who don't have a college education. Only a third of eligible voters who don't have a high school diploma voted in 2012, and less than half of those with only a high school education did so.

Most non-voters stay away from the polls not because they are making an ideological statement but because they say they are too busy, or they don't like either candidate, or they don't think it matters if they vote. As a group, they are younger, less educated and less affluent than voters. They express less interest in politics and public affairs, although a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll of unlikely voters in 2012 found two-thirds of them said they were registered.

They are much more likely than voters to favor an activist government; eight in 10 said the government plays an important role in their lives. And the USA TODAY survey found they supported Obama over Romney by more than 2-1, a far wider margin than those who cast ballots.

Get-out-the-vote efforts, a standard part of presidential campaigns for decades, have started earlier than ever this year, in part because of the rise in early voting. An estimated four in 10 voters will have cast early or absentee ballots before the polls open on Nov. 8. The GOTV campaigns also have taken on a fiercer intensity than, say, when the choice was between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

""I agree with the premise of The Arizona Republic, The Detroit News and many others that Donald Trump is a unique kind of candidate who represents a unique kind of threat to our fundamental way of life,"" says Norman Ornstein, a veteran political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. USA TODAY, which in the past hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate, on Friday came out against Trump, urging voters to go to the polls to support someone else.

Ornstein acknowledges some voters are wary of Clinton as well. ""Even if you see it as the lesser of two evils,"" he says, ""one of those evils is going to become president.""",REAL
"31   GOLD , KWN King World News 
On the heels of a historic election and chaos in global markets, the world is about to witness a breathtaking once in a century event. 
Expect Stunning Changes Stephen Leeb: “ Donald Trump’s victory sparked some of the most tumultuous action in the markets in decades – by some measures far more extreme than in 2008…. IMPORTANT… To find out which company is set to become one of the highest grade producing gold mines on the planet and is one of the greatest precious metals investment opportunities in the world CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
There is little doubt the market is signaling major changes ahead. These will almost certainly be more than just a change in market leadership, from big-cap high-tech stocks to metal miners, etc. They will be more than a reversal in the market’s overall direction, say from bull to bear. Rather the market is telling us to expect stunning changes in the entire nature of the world’s economy. And all investors should be listening. 
Trump Win Initially Shocks Global Markets Let’s review this past historic week. On Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning as a Trump victory became ever clearer, stock futures dropped further and further into the red and at their low were down 5 percent. Gold rallied and at its high it was up about 5 percent. 
Then it seemed to dawn on almost all investors at the same moment that whatever you thought about Trump’s temperament, his populist message had carried the day. His economic policies would be hell bent on growth. From climate change to financial regulation, all barriers to growth would be knocked down. And given his real estate background, leverage wouldn’t scare him one bit. 
The thought of major infrastructure projects, tax cuts, less regulation, and a constrained Fed led to a 180-degree turn. Stocks were in, bonds and deflation out. Steady growth was out, leveraged cyclical growth was in. This was a trend that had been trying to take hold since mid-year, but the Trump victory sealed the deal big time. 
Take a look at the chart below. Year Chart Of Caterpillar, FaceBook, Amazon, Rio Tinto 
Four major companies diverged dramatically post-election. Facebook and Amazon sank against the rising market, while Rio, one of the world’s largest commodity producers, and Caterpillar, which as the largest earth-moving company is highly leveraged to infrastructure and mining, soared. Most commodities followed suit. Copper’s weekly gain was one of the largest ever. And from its low in late October, when Trump started to gain in the polls, copper has climbed 15 percent. 
Gold was the other side of the coin. After rising 5 percent on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, the Midas metal turned tail and finished the week down nearly 5 percent. Blame the decline, if you want, on the spike up in bond yields and the strong buck. But as I said above, the market’s dramatic moves signal a lot more than relatively short-term shifts in market leadership. For the record, gold almost always falls at the onset of major market turmoil as investors raise cash to get aboard the new leaders. And when the switch involves investors ditching deflation fears and replacing them with enthusiasm for growth, there’s further reason gold initially was left out in the cold. 
We Are About To Witness A Once In A Century Event But don’t let that obscure the bigger reality. While gold could fall a bit more in coming days and weeks, the table has been set for the next act in a massive – perhaps once-in-a-century – bull market in the metal, as commodity scarcities force the world into a new monetary system with gold at its center. 
America’s plans for infrastructure will likely be followed by similar efforts within the E.U., albeit no doubt reluctantly and with a lag. But the only way the E.U. can remain intact is if it starts to generate growth. Even if Merkel holds on to power, we think Europe will move in this direction, which means infrastructure spending. And if Merkel is defeated or doesn’t run, a big infrastructure push in Europe becomes an even bigger bet. 
But even more to the point, however, is the massive amount the East will be spending on infrastructure. Such spending already has accounted for the uptrend in commodities even prior to the Trump blast-off. 
Speaking of Europe, the biggest infrastructure project on that continent was the Marshall Plan, which after World War II helped build up the economies of war-torn countries, in the process granting the U.S. major trade partners. Many still speak with wonder at the scope of that plan. The Chinese analog, which I talk about a lot, goes by the name of One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or the Silk Road initiative. Whatever you call it, it is massive, by some estimates 12 times the size of the Marshall Plan. Its goal is to connect more than 60 countries, which together have 4.4 billion inhabitants and currently account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s economy . And OBOR is just the start of development in the East. 
OBOR and the ongoing economic activity it will foster will utterly dwarf the impact China’s development already has had on the global economy. China today is the largest consumer of just about all major commodities. Multiply Chinese consumption today by many-fold and you get the long-term message of the past week’s unprecedented stock market turbulence. 
With zigs and zags, for the foreseeable future the market will be trying to price in not just an ordinary bull market in commodities, one in which demand temporarily exceeds supplies, but a bull market powered by fundamental scarcities in basic commodities ranging from copper to zinc to fossil fuels. There will be a scramble for virtually all commodities, even ones that are relatively plentiful, as all will be needed to build out a world relying on new sources of energy. As I have argued before, once you have fundamental scarcities, it is probably too late to switch monetary systems from paper to gold. The time to switch is when these scarcities come into view. What we saw this week was the first sign that this new world is, indeed, within sight. 
The $50 Trillion Project And A New Monetary Order To give you a specific taste of what lies ahead, as the U.S. spends perhaps $1 trillion to repair its crumbling bridges, its ancient water pipes, its highways, and its electric grid, China will be adding 31 percent to its capacity to generate electricity as well as entering into agreements to build ultra-high-voltage grids (another area, along with super computers, in which China leads the world) that allow China to generate power it can transmit to countries ranging from Germany to Japan to India. This electricity will be needed to power electric cars and provide lighting in dense urban areas that have yet to be built. Wang Min, an executive vice president of the government-owned Chinese State Grid, has said ultra-high-voltage power networks can tie together the entire Silk Road by 2050. The cost estimate he gives is $50 trillion, well more than $1 trillion a year. But talking about this in dollars is misleading, indeed, meaningless. 
As commodities grow scarcer, they won’t be available for dollars at all. Enter a new monetary order – and gold. I don’t expect to be around in 2050. But well before then, as signaled by the market this past week, we’re all likely to see Eastern development and the new gold-based monetary system it will spawn emerge as the dominant economic and socio-political stories for years to come. ” ***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Whistleblower Andrew Maguire – This Is What The Commercials Banksters Are Up To In The Gold Market CLICK HERE. 
© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
"Forbidden History. Secret Egyptology Exposed! # Grey 0 
They built the Sphinx of Giza ancient Egyptians four thousand years ago, and it is responsible for elder completely unknown civilization? What do we know about the history of mankind? Tags",FAKE
"Home › ECONOMIC › THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN NO LONGER DEAL WITH THE LIMITLESS CORRUPTION OF THEIR GOVERNMENT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC CAN NO LONGER DEAL WITH THE LIMITLESS CORRUPTION OF THEIR GOVERNMENT 8 SHARES 
[10/28/16] MARY WILDER -The federal government has really been dropping the ball over the last few decades. Time and time again they prove that they are completely untrustworthy and do not care about the citizens of the United States’ best interests. As the recent Wikileaks emails have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, those that hold positions of power within the federal government are owned by the corporations that continue to put financial gain over individual freedom. It’s a scary reality, but there’s no denying it any longer. 
Unfortunately this has been what Americans deal with for decades now. Nothing has ever been done about it because the American people felt as though there is nothing they could do in order to stop it. However, it appears as though we have lately gotten to the point where we are unwilling to put up with the corruption of our government any longer. 
In an article published on The Daily Sheeple , Charles Hugh Smith writes that the ruling elite “have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their phony facade of political legitimacy and ‘the rising tide raises all boats’ has cracked wide open, and the machinery of oppression, looting and propaganda is now visible to everyone who isn’t being paid to cover their eyes.” 
So what does this realization mean for the future of America? Hopefully that the rest of our country will continue waking up and opening their eyes to the truth. The longer the masses avoid the acknowledging the truth in regards to the federal government, the longer their control over the American people will last. During a time when our individual liberties are under attack every day, there is nothing more important than sending the message that we control our own lives. 
Of course, it is also extremely important to prepare for retaliation. These are people whose entire existence revolves around being able to control the populous. They are most likely not going to go down without a fight. When we begin rejecting their corruption on a mass level, they will definitely do everything in their power to silence the outspoken ones. You could argue that it has already begun in regards to social media. Other forms of expression are probably next. 
Human lives should be more valued than big governments. It’s time that we all realize that and completely reject the global elite’s plans to enslave us all. Our lives very well could depend on it. Post navigation",FAKE
"And the Wisconsin Republican isn’t talking about moving legislation in Congress.

Long before Ryan clutched the speaker’s gavel, bow hunting deer consumed his late-fall and early-winter weekends. Ryan aims to bag three or four deer a year. He then crafts jerky and sausage from the meat.

Ryan has held the speaker’s job since late October. And so far, so good in the legislative sausage factory. Passage of major education and transportation bills. A tax relief package. The forging of a bipartisan pact to avoid a government shutdown.

Ryan even challenged Republican Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump -- without mentioning the candidate by name. This came after Trump suggested the U.S. should ban Muslims from entering the country.

“What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for, and more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for,” said Ryan after Trump’s proposal a few weeks ago.

Ryan appears to have altered the course on Capitol Hill -- at least for a time.

“I’m very happy with how the last sev­en weeks have gone,” he declared.

But the sausage of late hasn’t been the political stuff Otto von Bismarck spoke of when describing the onerous legislative process.

Next year is when Ryan’s real sausage-curing experiment is put to the test -- merging political pork, veal, beef and venison with intestines, salt, spices and breadcrumbs.

The “barn” left to Ryan by former House Speaker Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, is now formally clean.

Anything from here on is Ryan’s barn. Passing the annual spending bills. Dealing with the Obama administration. Deciding what to do about the Benghazi committee. A decision on a threat by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. Wrangling over the Asian trade pact. Confronting the threat of terrorism. Chasms in the GOP. Internecine fighting over the 2016 race for president.

Right now, most political observers are trained on the campaign for president. But Ryan is campaigning, too. Not for president (at least not yet). But a campaign to calm the House, return to the illustrative but elusive “regular order” and instill confidence in the public and lawmakers.

But 2015 was marked by exceptional turmoil within the GOP ranks, calls for Boehner’s head and his eventual resignation, an aborted campaign for speaker by Majority Leader California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, squabbling over funding the Department of Homeland Security and raising the debt ceiling vexed Congress this year.

Ryan wants 2016 to go differently.

Already, there are catcalls from the far-right that Ryan is the same as Boehner. Or maybe worse than Boehner. Or that he already sold out. In the new year, Paul Ryan will face the conservative wing of the GOP. There’s no more saying he came into the play during the second act or that Boehner is still on the hook.

“There will always be contrarian voices out there,” Ryan said. “Members of the conservative movement know me as one of their own.”

He hopes to hand the biggest legislative keys to the House Appropriations Committee and rank-and-file members as they try to fund the government next year.

This involves plowing through the 12 annual spending bills to run each section of the government and avert a crisis next September. They had better get rolling.

Congress is scheduled to be out of session for a staggering seven weeks stretching from July through early September to accommodate the Democratic and Republican parties’ conventions.

That doesn’t leave much time to wrap things up by September 30, 2016, the end of the government’s fiscal year.

When asked how and why things seem easier than under the tenure of his predecessor, Ryan momentarily ponders the question.

“I’m not sure I can give you a good answer on that,” he finally replies.

However, he made clear that his goal is to “loosen control.” Perhaps without realizing it, Ryan responds to the Boehner regime interrogatory, saying “this place used to pre-determine everything, down to the amendment.”

Ryan believes he can empower members to influence policy through the appropriations process. They can do so by prescribing how much or how little money the federal government devotes to a given program. That invests everyone in the enterprise.

Of course, that means Republicans won’t get a lot of things they want (and demand from Ryan). And Democrats sure won’t, either.

Ryan got a taste of working with Democrats on the recent pact to fund the government and renew major tax breaks at the end of the year.

“I didn't really know these people,” he said of the Democrats, pointing out that he talked to Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, Nevada, once for about 30 seconds in 2012.

He says he and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., never had a conversation before the omnibus spending talks.

That’s to say nothing of negotiating with President Obama.

Obama wants to dine with the new GOP speaker sometime in the new year. Ryan’s spoken with the president by phone on multiple occasions since claiming the gavel.

Still, Ryan described the administration’s approach to governing as “arrogant, paternalistic and condescending.”

Even if Ryan’s able to get along with Obama and congressional Democrats -- to say nothing of members of his own party -- the presidential sweepstakes will dominate 2016. And what happens if one particular candidate polls well as they approach the Republican convention in Cleveland?

“I put up with politics in order to do policy,” he says.

But there’s lots of GOP handwringing about whether Republicans can hold the Senate and maybe (maybe) the House if the party nominates Trump.

“I think we’re going to have a good climate,” Ryan says optimistically of the GOP.

But there’s already chatter about what happens if the party is torn and Trump is cruising toward victory at the Cleveland nominating convention.

What does the GOP do? Some private Republican conversations involve a brokered convention. Maybe the party pulls a Steve Harvey and switches the nominee at the last minute. One line of thought is for the GOP to engineer a brokered convention that perhaps propels someone like Ryan to the nomination.

“He’s the only person who can unify the Republican party,” opined one senior Republican House member, “and possibly beat Hillary Clinton.”

Ryan publicly eschews that sort of talk. Of course, he also didn’t like talk about him running for speaker …

Until he did.

Some political observers point to the video Ryan released before Congress abandoned Washington for Christmas. Titled “A Confident America,” the slickly-produced, creatively-shot tape mimics a campaign commercial -- if not a movie trailer.

It crescendos with dramatic music and inspirational oratory, liberally swiping segments from a speech Ryan delivered a few weeks ago in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress.

“We believe in the American idea,” Ryan proclaims. “We stand for a more prosperous, a more secure and a more confident America.”

Note that Ryan is one of few major GOP political figures who has been willing to take on Trump.

But for now, there’s sausage to be made -- in Washington and in Wisconsin.

Ryan knows what to do with the venison back home. And in 2016, we’ll see how he does in the Capitol Hill smokehouse.",REAL
"Attorney general nominee Loretta E. Lynch carefully backed the Obama administration’s policies on immigration and drug enforcement Wednesday, sidestepping political tripwires before lawmakers deeply critical of the department she has been picked to lead.

During an all-day confirmation hearing that highlighted Republican anger with the administration, Lynch declined repeated opportunities to disavow actions taken by the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

Instead, the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general cast herself as a career federal prosecutor determined to uphold the rule of law and willing to provide honest counsel to the president even when he might disagree.

In calm, polished replies, Lynch also acknowledged Republican concerns and pledged to foster a better relationship with lawmakers if confirmed.

“You’re not Eric Holder, are you?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked at one point.

Lynch, 55, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said she supports the use of the death penalty as an effective punishment and considers waterboarding “torture and thus illegal.” She said it was the Justice Department’s job to enforce the laws Congress passes, but when pushed about Holder’s decision not to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act, she said there are “rare instances” when careful analysis of existing laws raises constitutional issues.

Immigration proved to be the most significant flash point during the hearing, with Republicans voicing continuing outrage over the administration’s executive actions.

At the start of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, which was interrupted many times as senators left to vote, Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) asked whether the president could defer deportations “for millions of individuals in the country illegally and grant them permits and other benefits, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution or immigration laws say.”

Lynch said that it was important for the Justice Department to ensure that any executive action be legal but that she was not involved in the decisions leading up to the president’s actions.

Referring to a Justice Department memo on the president’s authority on immigration matters, she said, “I don’t see any reason to doubt the reasonableness of those views.”

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who has said he plans to vote against Lynch, said he was “very disappointed and frustrated” with her responses.

“I have a huge concern regarding what I think is the president’s illegal, unconstitutional executive amnesty, and I have a huge concern of the fact that you think it is within the law,” Vitter said. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agreed with Vitter and said after the hearing that he will vote against Lynch.

Lynch is the first Obama Cabinet nominee to face a confirmation hearing since Republicans took over the Senate this year. The department she has been selected to oversee has been a regular target of Republicans’ ire on a range of issues, including investigations into the Internal Revenue Service and the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and a botched gun-trafficking operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked his colleagues not to “turn this exceptional nominee into a political point-scoring exercise” by badgering her on immigration and the controversy over the investigation into the IRS.

He described Lynch as “one of the keenest legal minds that our country has to offer, someone who has excelled at every stage of her education and her career, while cultivating a reputation as someone who was level-headed, fair, judicious and eminently likable.”

Holder — whose six-year tenure overshadowed Wednesday’s hearing — had a particularly rocky relationship with Congress. Lynch has chaired the Justice Department committee that advises him on policy decisions.

Among the points of contention between the administration and Congress has been the Justice Department’s policy on marijuana in response to the legalization of the drug in Colorado and Washington state. The department announced that it would not challenge those state laws and said that in prosecutions it would prioritize marijuana offenses­ such as distribution to minors.

Asked about her own views on marijuana, Lynch said she does not support legalization.

Sessions asked Lynch whether she agreed with a remark made by President Obama — and published last year in the New Yorker magazine — that the drug was no more dangerous than alcohol.

“I certainly don’t hold that view and don’t agree with that view of marijuana,” Lynch said. “I certainly think that the president was speaking from his personal experience and personal opinion, neither of which I’m able to share.”

When pressed on the legality of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs, Lynch replied that she believed they were “constitutional and effective.”

If Lynch is confirmed as the 83rd attorney general, she will take the reins of the Justice Department at a moment of high tension between law enforcement and minority communities across the country.

In her testimony, she emphasized her strong bonds with law enforcement and her desire to heal the rifts between police and the communities they are tasked with protecting.

One of her priorities, she said, will be to work to strengthen “the vital relationships between our courageous law enforcement personnel and all the communities we serve.”

“In my career, I have seen this relationship flourish — I have seen law enforcement forge unbreakable bonds with community residents and have seen violence-ravaged communities come together to honor officers who risked all to protect them,” Lynch said. “As attorney general, I will draw all voices into this important discussion.”

Lynch was accompanied by her husband, Stephen Hargrove; her father, the Rev. Lorenzo Lynch, who traveled from Durham, N.C., and sat behind her; and her only surviving brother, Leonzo Lynch, who is a preacher in Charlotte. Her other brother, Lorenzo Jr., a former Navy SEAL, died in 2009. She placed his Navy SEAL trident pin on the witness table in front of her while she testified.

A group of two dozen of Lynch’s fellow U.S. attorneys from across the country were in Washington, watching the hearing together on television from the Justice Department building. In the audience at the hearing was a group of Lynch’s Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters, dressed in bright red.

Lynch told the committee about her family and the values instilled in her by her parents, both from North Carolina.

“My mother, Lorine, who was unable to travel here today, is a retired English teacher and librarian for whom education was the key to a better life,” Lynch said. “She recalls people in her rural community pressing a dime or a quarter into her hands to support her college education. As a young woman, she refused to use segregated restrooms, because they did not represent the America in which she believed.”

“She instilled in me an abiding love of literature and learning, and taught me the value of hard work and sacrifice,” Lynch said.

Lynch’s father, a fourth-generation Baptist preacher, opened his Greensboro church in the early 1960s to those planning sit-ins and marches­, standing with the protesters while carrying her on his shoulders.

“As I come before you today in this historic chamber, I still stand on my father’s shoulders, as well as on the shoulders of all those who have gone before me and who dreamed of making the promise of America a reality for all and worked to achieve that goal,” Lynch said. “I believe in the promise of America because I have lived the promise of America.”",REAL
"There’s been a lot of media attention recently to the changing demographics of the United States, where, at current rates, people who identify as “white” are expected to become a minority by the year 2050. But in many ways, the shift in national demographics has been accelerated beyond even that. New data from the American Values Atlas shows that while white people continue to be the majority in all but 4 states in the country, white Christians are the minority in a whopping 19 states. And, nationwide, Americans who identify as Protestant are now in the minority for the first time ever, clocking in at a mere 47 percent of Americans and falling.

The most obvious reason for this change is growing racial diversity. Most Americans still identify as Christian, but “Christian” is a group that is less white and less Protestant than it has been at any time in history. The massive growth in Hispanic Catholics, in particular, has been a major factor in this shift in the ethnic and religious identity of this country. White Catholics used to outnumber Hispanic Catholics 3 to 1 in the 2000s, but now it’s only by a 2 to 1 margin.

But another major reason religious diversity is outpacing the growth of racial/ethnic diversity is largely due to the explosive growth in non-belief among Americans. One in five Americans now identifies as religiously unaffiliated. In 13 states, the “nones” are the largest religious group. Non-religious people now equal Catholics in number, and their proportion is likely to grow dramatically, as young people are by far the most non-religious group in the country. This isn’t some kind of side effect of their youth, either. As Adam Lee has noted, the millennial generation is becoming less religious as they age.

These changes explain the modern political landscape as well as any economic indicator. While not all white Christians are conservative, these changing numbers definitely suggest that conservative Christians are rapidly losing their grip on power. And while some non-white Christians are conservative, their numbers are not making up for what the Christian right is losing. And whether conservative leaders are aware of the exact numbers or not, it’s clear that they sense that change is in the air. Just by speaking to young people, turning on your TV, or reading the Internet, you can sense the way the country is lurching away from conservative Christian values and towards a more liberal, secular outlook. And conservative Christians aren’t taking these changes well at all.

To look at the Christian right now is to see a people who know they are losing power and are desperately trying to reassert dominance before it’s lost altogether. The most obvious example of this is the frenzy of anti-abortion activity in recent years. Anti-choice forces have controlled the Republican Party since the late ’70s, but only in the past few years have they concentrated so singlemindedly on trying to destroy legal abortion in wide swaths of the country. In 2011 alone, states passed nearly three times as many abortion restrictions as they had in any previous year.

None of this is a reaction to any changes in people’s sexual behavior or reproductive choices. It’s not like there was a spike in abortions causing this panic. In fact, the abortion rate has been declining. And despite continuing media panic over adolescent sexuality, the fact is that teenagers are waiting longer to have sex, on average, than in the past. Despite this, not only are you seeing a dramatic increase in attacks on legal abortion, the Christian right has expanded its attacks to contraception access, suggesting that something has worked them into a panic they believe can only be resolved by trying to reassert their religious and sexual values.

That something isn’t changes in sexual behavior, but it’s reasonable to believe it’s because of changes in sexual values. People might not be having more sex, but they are feeling less guilty about the sex they are having. Since Gallup first started polling people in 2001 on moral views, acceptance of consensual sex between adults has skyrocketed. In a decade’s time, acceptance of premarital sex swelled from 53% to 66% of Americans and acceptance of gay Americans grew from a mere 38% to a majority of Americans. Even polyamory has become more acceptable for Americans, rising from being accepted by 5% of Americans to 14%. The fact that these changes in attitude are rising alongside the growth of irreligiosity is not a coincidence. More perhaps even than the 1960s, Americans are in a period of questioning rigid sexual and religious mores, and concluding, in increasing numbers, that they are not down with guilt-tripping people for victimless behavior and demanding conformity for its own sake. Some of them–now a whopping 22% of Americans!–are leaving religion entirely. Some are continuing in their faith but choosing to interpret their values differently than Christian conservatives would like. And so we see Christian conservatives cracking down in a desperate bid to regain control. They claim that they’re being oppressed by increasing tolerancefor religious diversity. They have latched onto, with some success, the claim that “religious freedom” requires giving Christians the right to oppress others. The Republican Party is in complete thrall to the religious right, to the point where giving the Christian right one go-nowhere symbolic bill instead of another one created a major political crisis. The irony is that this panic-based overreach is just making the situation worse for the Christian right. One of the biggest reasons the secularization trend has accelerated in recent years is that young people see the victim complex and the sex policing of the Christian right and it’s turning them off. And they’re not just rejecting conservative Christianity but the entire idea of organized religion altogether. In other words, the past few years have created a self-perpetuating cycle: Christian conservatives, in a panic over changing demographics, start cracking down. In reaction, more people give up on religion. That causes the Christian right to panic more and crack down more. In the end, Christian conservatives are going to hasten their own demise by trying to save themselves. Not that any of us should be crying for them.",REAL
"Can nuclear war break out on the Korean Peninsula? 02.11.2016 Print version Font Size Does China support Pyongyang? Can the Chinese intervene in a possible conflict between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States? Senior officer at the Center for Korean Studies at the Institute of the Far East, Yevgeny Kim, gave an interview to Pravda.Ru, in which we spoke about North Korea's nuclear program and the possibility of the denuclearization of South-East Asia. ""North Korea is a closed and little known country in many ways. Yet, who raised the question of a nuclear threat? After all, there are American atomic bombs in South Korea."" ""China has been involved in this actively during the recent years, but one should not attach much importance to it. The mandate of the six-party talks was about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The question is not only about the elimination of nuclear weapons in North Korea . One should remove US nuclear bombs from South Korea and exclude a possibility for any type of nuclear weapons to appear on the Korean Peninsula on the whole. ""US nuclear-powered submarines with nuclear weapons, US aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons and US aircraft with nuclear weapons violate the regime of the nuclear-free zone in South Korea. Look at the Goa Declaration that was signed by the leaders of Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. There are more than one hundred articles in this lengthy declaration, but it contains no word about the North Korean nuclear issue.""Last year's BRICS declaration did not mention anything about the the North Korean nuclear issue. Therefore, the leaders of the five countries do not believe that North Korea is guilty of this problem."" ""Vladimir Putin said once that no one will touch a country if this country has a nuclear bomb. If it does not have a nuclear bomb, this country may experience the fate of Libya. What is Russia's stance on North Korea? Does Russia recognize the right of North Korea to have a nuclear bomb?"" ""The Americans would have shipped air defense systems to South Korea regardless of what kind of weapons North Korea would have had - nuclear or not. Russia is one of the great powers that has nuclear weapons, but Russia is not interested in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Of course, Russia would not like to see the emergence of new nuclear powers in the world. ""At the same time, Russia understands why other countries have nuclear weapons. Russia always says that all countries should proceed from the interests of equal security. Why should the USA be worried about the presence of nuclear weapons in North Korea? North Korea cannot attack the USA. Even if North Korea has launched missiles into space , it does not mean that those missiles can carry nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have to be delivered to the territory of another state, and a missile has to reenter the atmosphere, where plasma can destroy it, but the missile has to remain guidable in such conditions to deliver its nuclear weapons to the target. North Korea does not have the technology."" ""Why does China keep silence?"" ""China understands the reason, for which North Korea has to develop its nuclear weapons. The Chinese realize that the Americans deploy air defense complexes to contain China and Russia, not North Korea. The Americans do not even hide the fact that they have another nuclear warhead to be delivered to Germany. Nowadays, one can test and further improve nuclear weapons without a physical explosion, and North Korea would need to switch to methods of mathematical analysis."" ""What will determine the economic development of North Korea - Sangun or reforms?"" ""Reforms, definitely. Sangun - the policy of the supremacy of the army - appeared in the mid-1990s, when the country was in dire straits. The country was forced to unite as a military camp and create the mobilization economy. Sangun made it possible to overcome a very difficult period in the history of North Korea, and the country continued its development, where rigid military control was not required. Now they conduct reforms."" ""Do you think a nuclear war may break out on the Korean Peninsula?"" ""No, a nuclear war will not break out on the Korean peninsula, as North Korea will not use military weapons first. The Americans have a theory of pre-emptive nuclear strike on North Korea, and Russia too, by the way. North Korea does not have such a theory."" Interviewed by Said Gafurov Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru North Korea threatens USA with 'unique' war",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"But he's staying away from criticizing his rival over her private email use during her tenure as secretary of state, continuing to downplay an issue that Republicans have used heavily against Clinton.

Still locked in a heated primary battle against Clinton, Sanders said Sunday on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" that she should find a vice-presidential pick who doesn't have a cozy relationship with corporations.

""I would hope, if I am not the nominee, that the vice-presidential candidate will not be from Wall Street, will be somebody who has a history of standing up and fighting for working families, taking on the drug companies whose greed is doing so much harm, taking on Wall Street, taking on corporate America, and fighting for a government that works for all of us, not just the 1%,"" Sanders said.

The Vermont senator's vice-presidential prerequisites look like a list of his campaign's top talking points. But his comments also served to lay out terms for Sanders embracing Clinton if she secures the Democratic nomination at the party's convention in Philadelphia in July.

Host Chuck Todd asked Sanders specifically whether he'd support Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a former governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, for the vice-presidential nod. Sanders wouldn't answer directly, saying: ""I think we are once again into a little bit of speculation. I have known Tim Kaine for years. I really like him very much."" Asked whether he'd join Clinton as her running mate on a party unity ticket, Sanders said he's still ""knocking my brains out to win the Democratic nomination."" ""That's where I am right now. What happens afterwards, we will see,"" Sanders said. ""But right now, my focus is on winning the nomination."" The final major set of primary contests, headlined by California, is coming up June 7. But Sanders has focused much of his attention on Donald Trump in recent days -- hammering the presumptive Republican nominee while largely ignoring Clinton. On Sunday, days after a State Department inspector general's report harshly criticized Clinton for her use of a private email server, Sanders again let the issue slide. He'd sent a signal that he could be ready to hit Clinton over her email on Bill Maher's HBO show Friday, saying ""it has"" when asked if the story had ""moved a little bit"" from his initial refusal to criticize her on it, starting in last year's debates. But on ""Meet the Press,"" asked about the report, Sanders said that ""these are areas that I have stayed away from. There is a process, people will draw their conclusions from the inspector general report. But again, you know, I think the American people are tired of that type of politics. And I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality."" On CBS' ""Face the Nation,"" Sanders went just a step further, saying Clinton's email issue merits a ""hard look"" but still stopping short of criticizing her for it. ""Now, you're right -- the inspector general just came out with a report; it was not a good report for Secretary Clinton. That is something that the American people, Democrats and delegates are going to have to take a hard look at,"" he said. ""But for me right now, I continue to focus on how we can rebuild a disappearing middle class, deal with poverty, guarantee health care to all of our people as a right.""",REAL
"Hacking Accusations Against Russia Are Sign of Washington's Desperation 
With Putin winning across the board, Washington is struggling to contain its humilitation Originally appeared at Strategic Culture Foundation 
The Obama administration is now accusing Russia of cyber-crime and trying to disrupt the US presidential election. The claim is so far-fetched, it is hardly credible. More credible is that the US is reeling from Putin’s stunning humiliation earlier this week. 
Since June, US media and supporters of Democrat presidential contender Hillary Clinton have been blaming Russian state-sponsored hackers for breaking into the Democratic party’s database. 
It is further alleged that Moscow is stealthily trying to influence the outcome of the election, by releasing damaging information on Clinton, which might favor Republican candidate Donald Trump. 
Russia has vehemently denied any connection to the cyber-crime charges, or trying to disrupt the November poll. 
Now the Obama administration has stepped into the fray by openly accusing Russia. «US government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections», reported the Washington Post. 
This takes the row to a whole new level. No longer are the insinuations a matter of private, partisan opinion. The US government is officially labelling the Russian state for cyber-crime and political subversion. 
Predictably, following the latest allegations, there are calls among American lawmakers for ramping up more economic sanctions against Russia. While US intelligence figures are urging for retaliatory cyber-attacks on Russian government facilities. 
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov derided the US claims as «rubbish». He noted that the Kremlin’s computer system incurs hundreds of hacking attempts every day, many of which can be traced to American origin, but Moscow doesn’t turn around and blame the US government for such cyber-attacks. 
There are several signs that the latest brouhaha out of Washington is a bogus diversion. 
As with previous Russian-hacker claims by the Democrats and US media, there is no evidence presented by the Obama administration to support its grave allegations against the Russian government. Assertion without facts does not meet a minimal standard of proof. 
When reports emerged in June – again through the Washington Post – that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian agents, the allegation relied on investigations by a private cyber security firm by the name of CrowdStrike. The firm is linked by personnel to the NATO-affiliated, anti-Russian think tank Atlantic Council. Again no verifiable evidence was presented then, just the word of a dubious partisan source. 
Back then the Russian scare story, for that’s what it was, served as a useful diversion from far more important issues. Such as the 19,000 emails released from the DNC database showing that the party chiefs had preordained Clinton’s presidential nomination over her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders. Much-vaunted «US democracy» was exposed as a fraud, and so the Washington establishment quickly went into damage-limitation mode by smearing Russia. 
It was the whistleblower site Wikileaks, run by Australian journalist Julian Assange, that released the embarrassing emails. It had nothing to do with Russia. Assange has since hinted that his source was within the Democrat party itself. 
This is where it gets really explosive. Assange has vowed to release more emails that will prove that Clinton as Secretary of State back in 2011-2012 masterminded the supply of weapons and money to Islamist terror networks in Libya and Syria for the objective of regime change. Furthermore, Assange says that the emails prove that Clinton lied under oath to Congress when she denied in 2013 that she was had any involvement in facilitating arms to the jihadists. 
Assange has said that Wikileaks is going to publish the incriminating emails on Clinton’s alleged gun-running to terrorists this month. If the evidence stands up, Clinton could be prosecuted for perjury as well as treason in aiding and abetting official terrorist enemies of the US. 
The exposure of an American presidential candidate as being involved in state sponsorship of terrorism while serving as a top government official is a powerful incentive for the Obama administration to find a lurid diversion. 
Hence, the latest charges by the US government against Russia as perpetrating cyber-crime and of trying to subvert American democracy. 
This is just one more illustration of how irrational and unhinged the US government has become. 
Day by day, it seems, leads to more damning revelations of Washington’s complicity in illegal wars, covert subversion of foreign states, and systematic collusion with terrorist networks which have inflicted thousands of deaths on American citizens, among many more thousands of other innocent civilians around the world. 
In addition to exposure by sources like Wikileaks, much of revelation about US criminality and state-sponsored banditry has emerged from Russia’s principled military intervention in Syria. Russia’s intervention has not only helped salvage the Syrian nation from a foreign conspiracy of covert war for regime change. Russia’s intervention has also brought into clear focus the systematic links between Washington and its terrorist proxy army working on its behalf in Syria. 
Washington’s mask of moral and legal superiority has been ripped from its face. And what the world is seeing is the vile ugliness beneath. 
Such is Washington’s ignominious fall from pretend-grace to its grim, odious reality that Vladimir Putin this week was empowered to speak from the moral high ground. 
In announcing Russia’s unilateral suspension of a 2002 accord with the US for the disposal of nuclear-weapon-grade plutonium, Putin went much, much further. He gave Washington a list of ultimatums that included the US ending its trumped-up sanctions against Russia, with financial compensation, as well as the scaling back of NATO forces from Russia’s border. 
In other words, the Russian leader was talking truth to American power in a way that megalomaniac Washington, with all its ridiculous delusions of «exceptionalism», has never ever heard before. 
American pretensions of greatness are eroding like a castle built on sand. Washington’s criminal enterprises and specifically the complicity in terrorism for the supreme crime of foreign aggression are being glaringly exposed. 
And now with due contempt, Russia is putting manners on Washington. It must be excruciating the humiliation for the narcissistic American tyrant to be treated with the disrespect that it deserves and which is long overdue. 
Moreover, the humiliation is not just in the eyes of the world. The American people can see the true ugly nature of their rulers too. When a giant banner declaring «Putin a peacemaker» was unfurled off Manhattan bridge in New York City this weekend, the popular enthusiasm went viral. 
Washington is reeling from Putin’s righteous courage to call it out for what it is. The truth-telling is hard to take for this unipolar unicorn. Its deluded myth-making about its own virtues are being stripped bare. 
What’s going on here is a world-class, historic exposure of American power as a nefarious excrescence on humanity. 
The reaction is understandable: foaming-at-the-mouth, desperate, hysterical and panicked. Accusing Russia of hacking into the American «democratic process» is a wild attempt to divert from the paramount issues: Washington’s exposed descent into a vile morass of its own making; the emperor is a criminal; the people know it; and a genuine world leader like Vladimir Putin has the temerity to lay it on the line to this has-been.",FAKE
"Architect Of Paris Attacks Was Killed In Raid, French Authorities Say

The suspected architect of the Paris attacks was killed during a violent police raid conducted by French authorities in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday, French authorities say.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud was a Belgian national in his late 20s. Authorities believe that Abaaoud was close to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

During a press conference, Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said that Abaaoud was believed to be responsible for planning many of the Islamic State attacks in Europe.

Of the six planned attacks that have been foiled in France, he said, Abaaoud was believed to have been involved in four of them. Authorities believe he orchestrated the the three teams that attacked six locations across Paris and killed 129 people.

Announcing his death, Cazeneuve said that as promised, ""the Republic is doing everything it can to destroy terrorism.""

The Saint-Denis raid on Wednesday were bloody and violent. Police fired more than 5,000 rounds and one suspect — presumed to be a woman — detonated a suicide vest. Another suspect, whom we can now assume was Abaaoud, was killed by either gunfire or a grenade explosion during the confrontation with police.

Yesterday, authorities said because of the carnage, forensic evidence had to be used to identify the dead. Today, Paris Prosecutor François Molins said that Abaaoud's was identified using fingerprints.

As we've reported, until recently authorities believed that Abaaoud was issuing orders from Syria. Cazeneuve said that authorities knew that he had left for Syria in 2014, but they had no indication that he had come back to Europe.

However, three days after the Paris attacks on Nov. 16, Cazeneuve said they received a tip from an ""intelligence service outside of Europe,"" saying they had picked up signals that Abaaoud had passed through Greece. Authorities across the world knew, he said, that an international warrant had been issued for Abaaoud's arrest. The implication there is that somehow Abaaoud's presence in Europe had fallen through the cracks.

Cazeneuve added that he has called for a meeting with other European countries to talk about ways they can bolster cooperation on border controls and the fight against weapons trafficking.

""Things are not going far enough. Things are not moving fast enough,"" Cazeneuve said. ""Europe owes it to all the victims of terrorism to act.""

NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that the fate of Salah Abdeslam, whom police say was a key operative in the attacks, is still unknown. Another unidentified suspect may also still be on the loose.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, police conducted raids at six locations across Brussels, including some in the Molenbeek suburb, which has become notorious for producing radicalized youth.

NPR's Peter Kenyon reports that officials say they are looking for associates of Bilal Hadfi, one of the Islamist attackers who died during the Paris killings on Friday. Hadfi was one of two terrorists who detonated explosive vests just outside a packed stadium in north Paris.

This is a breaking news story, we'll update this post with the latest as we get it, so make sure to refresh this page.

Update at 8:11 a.m. ET. Lower House Votes To Extend State Of Emergency:

France's National Assembly approved President Hollande's request to extend the state of emergency in the country by three months. The measure still has to be approved by the Senate.

As NPR's Lauren Frayer reports, the state of emergency allows the government to:",REAL
"Dr. MacDonald & Dr. Duke Expose the Vicious War on Trump by the Jewish Establishment! November 10, 2016 at 11:25 am 
Dr. MacDonald & Dr. Duke Expose the Vicious War on Trump by the Jewish Establishment! 
Today Dr. Duke had Professor Kevin MacDonald as his guest for the hour. They discussed the importance of the Trump victory as well as what needs to be done. They agreed that regarding immigration, the most important thing in the long term is repealing the 1965 Act. 
They also pointed out the phenomenon of whites voting their ethnic interests. While we have been hearing that white women were going to vote against Trump, they wound up supporting him by a 10% margin. Even almost half of white women with a college education supported Trump, despite the years of Jewish indoctrination at college. The same can be said for white millennials. 
This is an important show in terms of showing the path forward. Please share it widely. 

Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
Click on Image to Donate! 
And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
"The percentage selecting “Muslim” is notably higher than in other polls conducted on this topic. This difference likely depends on how the question is phrased. Previous survey questions about Obama’s religion tend to sound like a pop quiz — such as “do you happen to know the religious faith of Barack Obama?” But by asking “what Obama believes deep down?” I was intentionally granting respondents license to stray from the pesident’s self-reported Christian faith. This reveals a prevalent willingness to distrust this pesident or categorize him as “the other” in terms of religion. Of course, respondents could also be “cheerleading” — using a survey question to express their general dislike of Obama rather than a genuine view about his religious faith. But, if these results were largely driven by anti-Obama cheerleading, we should expect more respondents, especially Republicans, to choose the very unpopular category of “atheist.” Relatively few do so.

Previous ruminations on the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim theme have suggested various sources for it: ignorance, Fox News, racism, too much World Net Daily in your diet.

Theodoridis’ post was inspired by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s remarks that he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But do other elected Republicans suggest that Obama is not only not a Christian, but a Muslim? I ran a search in the Congressional Record for recent floor speeches in which the word Islam or Islamic and the President appear. This is snapshot, of course, and the number of constituents who actually listen to these speeches is infinitesimal. But if elected Republicans aren’t afraid to question Obama’s religious commitments for the permanent record, think of what they might say to constituents in smaller settings, or the well that they are drawing from when they make remarks in Congressional sessions for which they receive no pushback, and in fact receive encouragement.

Republicans drew from recent conservative complaints that Obama refuses to say that Islamic State and other terrorist groups are “Islamic,” that he doesn’t take the threat of terrorism seriously, and he is insufficiently protective of American exceptionalism.

On February 24, 2015, Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC) said on the House floor that his constituents “shared with me their frustration at the ambiguous language from this administration in describing the evils of radical Islamist terrorism,” and that he himself has “grown weary at the timidity” of Obama, who “continues to be defensive, at best.” He went on:

At first glance, the silence appears to be passive or poor leadership. But I am inclined to believe that the President’s posture is not one of weakness but, rather, an intentional directive in both rhetoric and action. It appears that his promise to take our country in a fundamentally new direction is being played out in realtime. Instead of defending our liberty and our way of life, which is the most charitable in the world, our President seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God. I would be remiss today if I did not pause and remember our Egyptian Christian brothers in the recent barbaric attacks in Libya. ISIS murdered innocent husbands and fathers who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs. Just this morning, we hear further reports out of Syria that Islamic State militants have abducted dozens of Christians, including women and children. Weeks prior, the President chastised the Christian community for getting on their judgmental high horses. Yet, in describing our martyred brothers from Egypt, the President refused to even utter the word, “Christian.” The undermining of our beliefs has become an issue with this President.

Contrary to Walker’s statement, which echoes a claim circulating in conservative circles that Obama did not identify the Coptic victims of the Islamic State massacre as Christians, at last week’s summit on countering religious extremism, Obama noted that that Islamic State’s “slaughter of EgyptianChristians in Libya has shocked the world.” Notice, in Walker’s speech, the juxtaposition of the statement that Obama “seems to scoff at the belief that our country has been uniquely blessed by God” (i.e., he’s not a Christian) with his own remembrance of the murdered Egyptian Christians “who clearly died for their faith and their beliefs.”

Some of the floor statements come from ardent Christian supporters of Israel, who contrast Obama negatively with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a February 5, 2015 floor speech, Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) called Netanyahu “one of the most prescient voices that we have in the entire world to address some of the subjects and some of the dangers that face the United States of America.” In contrast, Franks claimed, Obama “chooses to listen to these mysterious voices of those who did not vote in our Nation’s election,” yet “has sought to go after and silence” Netanyahu. (He did not specify whose “mysterious voices” were whispering in Obama’s ear.) Franks questioned whether Obama is “so naive or, worse, so arrogant as to believe that we can have any type of credible, diplomatic agreement” with Iran. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), in February 2, 2015 floor remarks, asked, “this administration also refuses to say that we are at war with radical Islam. There is so much sensitivity in the White House over its statements that one is puzzled to wonder: Why are they sensitive about calling terrorists ‘terrorists?’” The next day in a floor speech, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), after describing atrocities committed by terrorists, added, “I guess if you are part of this administration, you shouldn’t consider that to be all that radical because this administration, under their watch, with Commander in Chief Barack Obama, had orders given to remove crosses from the chapels on our military installations.” (Gohmert repeats this claim, despite it having been debunked in 2013; the military, according to FactCheck.org, “has a longstanding policy against permanent religious symbols being attached to military chapels.”) In the speech, two days before the National Prayer Breakfast, Gohmert noted Obama’s upcoming appearance, adding, “I am greatly appreciative of the President’s espoused faith.” (emphasis mine). In a January 14, 2015 stemwinder, after laying out a litany of Obama’s alleged sins in failing to recognizing “that radical Islam is a threat to our very existence and way of life,” Gohmert delivered a brief lecture on how Christians are supposed to act (and govern): I have Christian friends that say: Yes, but as Christians, we are supposed to turn the other cheek. That is as individuals. Individual Christians should live out the beatitudes as Christ gave them. But the government has a different role. If you do evil, you should be afraid because the government, within the bounds of Christianity–Romans 13:4–is supposed to punish the evil, eliminate the evils, and protect your people. I don’t try to convert anybody using my position in government, but for those who misunderstand Christian teaching, you need to read Romans 13. Romans 13 is about submission to governmental authority, and the particular verse Gohmert cited reads: “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” In other words, Obama isn’t punishing (purportedly Islamic) wrongdoers; he therefore doesn’t understand what Gohmert believes to be biblical imperatives for governing. Draw your own conclusions. Of course Poe, Franks, and Gohmert represent the far right flank of their party, but their fellow Republicans don’t dispute them. As Theodoridis theorizes, Scott Walker is a “moderate” on the spectrum of misrepresenting Obama’s religion because he merely said he didn’t know whether Obama is a Christian. But you could argue that Poe, Franks, and Gohmert never explicitly said Obama is a Muslim. Yet according to Theodoridis’ research, a majority of Republicans think he is.",REAL
"Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author and keynote speaker. In 2014, she was named outstanding news talk-radio host by the Gracie Awards. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author

(CNN) If you understand nothing else about Donald Trump, understand this:

He has a particular mindset we see all the time in business -- he's ""the disrupter.""

The disrupter is someone whose entire ""brand"" is to break the mold, to turn the way we do things on its head. Amazon did this with retail, Uber did it with taxi services, Airbnb did it with travel, Tinder did it with dating, Slack is doing it with email, Spotify is doing it with music, peer-to-peer lending is changing banking.

Disrupters don't fix what's broken because they don't innovate from inside the system. They break the mold, change our thinking about the mold and then hand us the new rules for how things work.

Just look at the Big Five companies that drive the Internet economy -- all disrupters -- Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook. They were early movers, they played by their own rules. First they disrupted how we do business online, and now they define it. And they control it. Apple just reported its highest earnings ever. Looks like disruption is working.

Today every taxi company in America could band together, and they still would not stop the power of Uber. That is because when you gain enough momentum, you dominate the market and the conversation.

In his effect on everything from Fox News to the Koch Brothers to the newspapers that endorse candidates, Trump has disrupted every single aspect of the game of politics and created new rules -- and based on the polls, what he's done is working.

And so far, most of the political establishment has been wrong about what this all means. They said he wouldn't last and now he's leading in the polls. They said he wouldn't disclose his financial information or quit reality TV and he did both. They said that every insulting, ridiculous, inaccurate and offensive thing that Trump has said would hurt him. No sign of this. They said no network would bow to his demands for shorter debates -- but they did.

Who knows what will happen when the Republican National Committee has to officially pick its candidate for president, but -- holy cow -- it sure will be interesting to watch. And who will we be watching? Trump.

We can call Trump the carnival barker or the political side show, but discrediting the one who is wielding new power is what we do when we lose control of the negotiation. It's not politics, it's business -- as usual. This is why Trump understands that he can ignore it.

He also understands something powerful: leverage. He is above Fox News, because he IS the news. And he knows that what he says AND where he goes is the story and therefore it is the business asset. So he is keeping control of that asset.

The establishment can't play by the disrupter's rules, because the rules are designed to destroy it.

The Republican establishment has already lost. Trump will be the party's next nominee no matter how many times he says he won't call Megyn Kelly a bimbo. It doesn't matter how many backroom meetings the Koch brothers organize or what Reince Priebus does to rally RNC delegates. It's over.

The newspaper endorsements are also irrelevant, as are the fringe politicians and reality stars who are lining up to endorse Trump. They are all too late.

The only thing that can beat Donald Trump now is the one thing he doesn't control: Americans who don't want his services as president of the United States.

And the only way they will make a difference if there are enough of them -- enough liberals, Democrats, independents, and yes, even some Republicans and conservatives -- who can appreciate the appeal of a disrupter, but don't want one to lead the country.",REAL
"Waking Times 
With the election behind us, and the cloud of 24/7 candidate propaganda lifting, some deep truths about the state of American society are becoming evident, and the slow-coming, but predictable effects of social engineering are more visible than ever. 
Decades of fear programming, dumbing down, authoritarian leadership, violence entrainment, divisiveness, crooked economics , moral subterfuge, and physical pollution have changed the social fabric of the nation. The result is escalating madness, tension, chaos, violence, and mindless self-destruction as people unleash their frustration, hate and rage onto their neighbors, burning their own communities to the ground. 
How is it that hundreds, thousands, even millions of Americans can be triggered to hit the streets in violent protest over soft social issues, while life and death matters such as war are completely left off the register, going entirely unchallenged by the public? How is it that in 2016 the main issues driving people to action are the socially divisive ones pitting Americans against each other along race, gender and political beliefs? Why are we so willing to hurt each other, yet so unwilling to confront the machine? Predictive Programming – A Snapshot of the Future 
In the climactic scene of the 2014 film, Kingsman: The Secret Service , the hero is in a church among a congregation of people being whipped into a frenzy of hate by a bigoted pastor. Then, a signal is transmitted from the film’s villain to all the smartphones in the building, and everyone enters a trance. A mindless rage of murderous violence ensues, and no one has any idea why they are killing each other. 
While it passes for entertainment, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels in today’s real world. Take, for example this scene from the children’s restaurant, Chuck E. Cheese’s: 
Social media makes it possible to trigger many people in an instant, and now we can easily record acts of stupidity and mob violence and share them with the world. Violence against real human beings is now just as entertaining as scripted Hollywood violence. All some people need is the right signal and they’ll go nuts. 
This is happening right now around the nation as the political left refuses to accept the outcome of the election, staging protests, beating people in the streets and threatening to kill Trump supporters. 

Meanwhile, people on the extreme right are harassing and abusing immigrants around the nation, as though a Trump victory implies a holocaust is in order. Students in this high school chant ‘White Power’ while walking down the halls. 
White students at this middle school scream ‘Build the Wall’ during lunchtime: 
The fact that children and America’s youth are engaging in such mindless stupidity is terrifying, but it’s a direct result of the condition of their parents, and the American family has been under attack for generations. Here’s a sickening look at how some are transferring their rage and confusion onto the budding generation: Pawns Fighting Pawns on the Grand Chessboard 
We are in the throws of a cultural revolution engineered by the likes of billionaire George Soros who uses his wealth to finance social unrest in America and in Europe. 
Our lives are being manipulated by the powerful, and our frustrations with this corrupt, authoritarian matrix are skillfully directed onto issues that will only cause further public division, never onto the problems created by the elite themselves . It is to their advantage that we hurt each other, as it prevents us from challenging their rule while giving them license to crack down evermore. 
Take for example the antiwar movement. Before the invasion of Iraq, millions of people around the world furiously protested the invasion. The media did its best to pretend like resistance was nil, and the bombs were unleashed anyway. In the years that followed, the Patriot Act gave us free speech zones, and the war on terror gave a freshly militarized police the mandate to unleash official brutality onto any who threatened the establishment in any meaningful way. 
The net effect is that almost no one bothers objecting to war. 
The media does, however, cover protests over social issues that divide us all, and so people vent their frustrations in the these arenas instead, mobilizing for softer social issues like gender bias and offensive language, with the target of blame being other Americans. Government even offers assistance for these types of protests as we see in places like Portland, Oregon where police are aiding anti-Trump rallies , and in California where students are being permitted and encouraged to skip school to protest the fair democratic election of Trump. 
In other words, we’ve been trained to complain about getting our feelings hurt and blame each other, and trained to shut the fuck up about the big crimes of the state. 
In the game of chess, pawns are the expendable masses. Their role is to serve as an advance force to draw the opponent into a predictable and controllable conflict. They are used by and dispensed of by royalty as tools in pursuit of a larger conquest. 
We are being weaponized against ourselves, and our rulers couldn’t be more pleased. For how much longer will we consent to being their pawns? Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . Like Waking Times on Facebook . Follow Waking Times on Twitter . This article ( Election 2016 and the Weaponization of the American Public ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
"President Obama will be conducting visits to the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center this week. The visits aim to reassure the nation of the White House strategy for combatting terrorism.

Starbucks will expand in China – and it looks like a smart idea

President Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Dec. 6. Fears of terrorism are hanging over America’s holiday season, and Obama plans a series of events this week aimed at trying to allay concerns about his strategy for stopping the Islamic State group abroad and its sympathizers at home.

In an effort to ease fears relating to terrorism, President Obama will spend much of this coming week discussing his strategies for combatting the influence of the Islamic State (IS) militant group at home and abroad.

In recent weeks, the president has taken an increasingly soothing tone in response to terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., urging Americans not to allow themselves to be pulled apart by distrust and fear.

""Terrorists like ISIL are trying to divide us along lines of religion and background,"" Obama said in his weekly address on Sunday, using an acronym for the extremist group. ""That's how they stoke fear. That's how they recruit.""

However, for an increasing number of Americans, such fears are very real, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. In January a Press-GfK poll found 5 in 10 Americans believed the risk of a terrorist attack in the United States was high. A new survey reveals that number has increased to 7 in 10, despite attempts by the government to assure citizens there are no credible threats to the US.

In effort to publicize his the government's counterterrorism efforts, the president has scheduled a series of high-profile visits to the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center this week, before leaving Washington for his annual two-week family holiday in Hawaii.

The Dec. 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino raised concerns about the US government's ability to identify lone-wolf radicals who may have been inspired by Islamic State. The US government has been successful in intercepting would-be terrorists who have been in contact with terrorist recruiters online, but the fact that the shooters in the San Bernardino attacks managed to remain under the government's radar until they killed 14 people at a health department holiday party has fueled fears that the government may not be doing enough.

The recruitment strategies employed by IS, including an online approach that focuses on inspiring lone attacks, has forced US intelligence officials to engage in a war on multiple fronts, from the Middle East to social media.

Obama will start the week with a National Security Council meeting at the Pentagon, followed by a public update about the US strategy against Islamic State.

On Thursday, Obama will visit the National Counterterrorism Center, which analyzes intelligence to stay abreast of recruiting methods and other information on terrorist groups. Obama is scheduled to address reporters after a briefing at the suburban Virginia facility.

The visits are seen as counterweights to the increased fear over terror attacks in the public and in the widely-viewed presidential election campaigns. Previously, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the US, a suggestion that the president has alluded to in public comments urging Americans to remain united.

""We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam,"" Obama said on Sunday.

This report includes material from The Associated Press.",REAL
"COMICAL: Larry the Cable Guy slams ‘indefensible’ hypocrisy from Donna Brazile Posted at 3:57 pm on October 29, 2016 by Doug P. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
The defenses of Hillary Clinton have reached comical proportions, so it’s only appropriate that a comedian helps point out a fresh round of hypocrisy: Lol. I swear this is getting ridiculous. The hypocrisy is indefensible RT @RyanBLeslie : This tweet didn't age well. https://t.co/8fPB4wnJ92 
— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) October 29, 2016 
Indefensible indeed! Check out this flashback from current DNC head Donna Brazile by way of Media Matters: Wash. Post Editorial Board: Republicans Are Damaging Rule Of Law By Attacking FBI Director Comey https://t.co/HEyZqdRsaK 
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) July 7, 2016 
That’s from July 7th. Oh how the Democrats’ attitude has changed in the course of one day! Trending",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton in lead a day before Election Day 11/07/2016 
PRESS TV 
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads her Republican rival by three percentage points nationally as they head into the final day of a tight race for the White House, according to a new poll. 
The final Bloomberg Politics-Selzer & Co poll released on Monday has Clinton ahead of Trump, 44 percent to 41 percent. 
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson was at 4 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein had 2 percent support. 
Clinton also leads Trump by three points in a hypothetical two-way matchup when third-party candidates are not included. 
Another tracking poll released early on Monday also put Clinton in the lead. 
The former secretary of state held a four-point lead over the billionaire businessman in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. The survey showed 47 percent of likely US voters backed Clinton while 43 percent said they supported Trump. 
The Clinton campaign received a late break with FBI Director James Comey announcing Sunday that no criminal charges were forthcoming in the probe of Clinton’s newly-found emails. 
“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July,” the FBI chief wrote in a new letter to congressional committee chairmen. 
The development is a major relief to Clinton, who is spending the final hours of her campaign trying to close Trump’s path to presidency. Donald Trump walks off the stage after holding a rally at Loudoun Fairgrounds in Leesburg, Virginia, early in the morning on November 7, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
Comey sent the presidential race into a frenzy last month when he sent a letter to Congress saying the FBI had discovered emails in a separate probe that could be linked to the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server when she was secretary of state. 
The surprise move infuriated Democrats and lifted the presidential hopes of Trump, who has turned the email controversy into a favorite line of attack against Clinton. 
Still, Trump continued to seize on the email issue, insisting that Clinton is “guilty.” 
“Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it, the FBI knows it, the people know,” he said Sunday at a rally in Detroit, Michigan. “And now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box on November 8.” 
Both Clinton and Trump plan to spend the last day of the campaign racing across key battleground states that could determine the results of Tuesday’s election. 
Trump will visit Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire and finish the day with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
Clinton is travelling to Pennsylvania and Michigan before closing with a midnight-rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) The Democratic candidates for president gathered in Las Vegas for their first debate Tuesday, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.

The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN listened throughout the debate, selecting key statements and then rating them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.

Reality check: Martin O'Malley says U.S. has ""failed"" to invest in overseas human intelligence

O'Malley said, ""We have failed as a country to invest in the human intelligence that would allow us to not only make better decisions in Libya, but better decisions in Syria today. It's a huge national security failing.""

Given the opacity of the available data, it is difficult to issue a verdict on O'Malley's statement, but it is possible to provide some context to what he claims.

The National Intelligence Program requests congressional funding for the intelligence-gathering activities of six federal departments, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

As a matter of policy, the government does not disclose information about the budget of the NIP beyond the aggregate, or ""top-line"" amount requested and the amount approved by Congress.

The most recent year for which data on the approved congressional appropriation for the NIP is available is FY 2014. The aggregate amount approved for the year ending March 2015 was $50.5 billion. This amount represents a 3% increase over the previous year, which saw an annual NIP appropriation of $49.0 billion, partially due to reductions associated with the sequester.

The amount appropriated in FY 2012, the year during which the attack took place on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, was $53.9 billion, the second-highest appropriation during the decade 2005-2014.

In August 2013, The Washington Post obtained documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden regarding the previously undisclosed $52.6 billion FY 2013 budget, and providing a level of detail that had never been released on a previous U.S. intelligence budget. The documents indicated that the United States has 107,035 employees in the intelligence community. Of these, the largest employer of civilian intelligence officials is the CIA, which had the equivalent of 21,459 full-time civilian employees.

According to the leaked documents, in FY 2013, ""human intelligence operations,"" consisting of ""clandestine acquisition"" of documents and other material, ""collection by personnel in diplomatic and consular posts"" and ""official contacts with foreign governments"" comprised an annual budget of $3.6 billion.

While specific data on human intelligence operations is not available for other years, CNN military analyst Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling notes that the government has cut human intelligence operations relative to other forms of intelligence collection, fueling a major debate in the intelligence community since the 1990s.

An additional obstacle to effective human intelligence gathering is the lack of racial diversity within the CIA's own ranks, according to CIA Director John Brennan. Minorities make up less than 24% of the CIA workforce, and only 10.8% of its top senior intelligence service. Brennan noted that, in many of the countries that are the focus of the CIA's current work, it is harder for white employees, and easier for many minorities, to operate covertly.

Chafee said: ""We just spent half a billion dollars arming and training soldiers, the rebel soldiers in Syria, they quickly joined the other side.""

The Obama administration recently announced it was going to suspend the train and equip program in Syria and not take on new recruits while they assessed how to better to improve on the program. To be sure, the program faced many challenges despite the near $500 million price tag. In testimony last month, U.S. Central Command Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin said only ""four or five"" graduates of the program were on the battlefield at that time, nine months after the program began.

An initial group of 54 rebels that had been put into northern Syria this summer came under attack by al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and ceased to function as a fighting force, the Pentagon said last month. At least five of those forces were captured by al Nusra but their fate is not clear. Pentagon officials told CNN in August that some of those rebels got stuck in Turkey and never actually crossed the border into Syria, while others just simply ran away after coming under attack and never came back to regroup with their unit.

And then U.S. officials confirmed last month that coalition-issued pickup trucks and ammunition had fallen into the hands of al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria. But rather than evidence of rebels joining the other side, that equipment was given up in order to gain ""safe passage,"" according to Central Command spokesman Col. Patrick Ryder.

To suggest that all graduates of the program defected from their ranks to groups opposing the U.S.-led coalition is not true.

Reality check: Did Hillary Clinton not have a position on Keystone?

Clinton said she never had a position on the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline before she said last month that she would oppose it.

""I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone,"" she said.

But as a member of the Obama administration, the then-secretary of state indicated she was likely to support it -- though she never said so explicitly.

""We haven't finish all of the analysis,"" Clinton told the Commonwealth Club in October 2010. ""So as I say, we've not yet signed off on it. But we are inclined to do so and we are for several reasons.""

Over the next five years, Clinton would repeatedly decline to say what her opinion was while the Obama administration studied the project. Last month she finally said, ""I oppose it.""

O'Malley made the pitch Tuesday night that he could do better than all the promises made by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and others because he had already pushed those priorities into law when he was governor.

""We raised the minimum wage, passed the living wage, invested more in infrastructure, went four years in a row without a penny's increase for college tuition,"" O'Malley said.

He also increased spending on roads and capital projects and succeeded, after many years of failed attempts, in increasing the state's gas tax to pay for those improvements.

Clinton said, ""I did say when I was secretary of state three years ago that I hoped it would be the gold standard. It was just finally negotiated last week and in looking at it, it did not meet my standards.""

Negotiations on the TPP trade agreement began while Clinton was secretary of state, but the significant details were worked out after she left that office.

In fact, Clinton did not say she ""hoped"" the TPP would be the gold standard, at the time she said the deal set the gold standard.

""This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field,"" Clinton said at an event in Australia in 2012. ""And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.""

Nearly three years have passed, and Clinton has been out of office for most of that time as talks have proceeded on the important details of the deal. As such, it is reasonable for Clinton to claim that the deal has changed since she supported it and was involved in its negotiation.

However, in some ways, the deal has strengthened over the years in areas that Clinton has cited as key concerns.

Clinton now says the deal doesn't do enough to address currency manipulation. But the deal didn't include clear language on that topic in 2013 either, when critics in Congress were calling for it to be added.

She also says she is concerned about the benefits the deal gives to pharmaceutical companies -- which are strengthened under TPP, but less than they would have been under the deal in its 2013 state.

VERDICT: Clinton's claim she said she ""hoped"" TPP would be the gold standard is false. She said it was the gold standard and fully supported the negotiations. Her broader point about the deal changing since she left office is True, but Misleading. The deal has changed in the past three years, but in some instances those changes have improved the very deficiencies she cites.

CNN's Anderson Cooper grilled Sanders repeatedly on whether he was protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits. After some explaining, Sanders landed on a simple answer: ""Of course not.""

Sanders has been nailed by liberals and his Democratic opponents for his positions on gun control, including his decision to vote against the Brady bill and for allowing Amtrak riders to bring guns in checked bags. And his comment during the debate sounded like a sharp stance in favor of clamping down on gun manufacturers, defending his vote to shield them from litigation as part of a ""large and complicated bill.""

""Where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action,"" he said Tuesday night.

But in a July interview with CNN, Sanders sounded starkly different, saying that gun manufacturers could not be held responsible. The sole difference was that in that interview Sanders did not say the manufacturer was aware of the crime that would later be committed.

""If somebody has a gun and it falls into the hands of a murderer and that murderer kills somebody with the gun, do you hold the gun manufacturer responsible?"" he asked. ""Not any more than you would hold a hammer company responsible if somebody beats somebody over the head with a hammer. That is not what a lawsuit should be about.""

Reality check: Bernie Sanders said, ""African-American youth unemployment is 51%, Hispanic youth unemployment is 36%. It seems to me instead of building more jails and providing more incarceration maybe just maybe we should be putting money into education and jobs for our kids.""

There is certainly an employment crisis among minority youth. But as he has done in the past, Sanders may have misspoken when he cited those statistics.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has found that 51.3% of black and 36.1% Hispanic high school graduates, age 17 to 20, are underemployed. That means they either don't have a job, aren't working as many hours as they would like or aren't currently looking for work but would like a job.

The comparable number for whites is 33.8%.

The official unemployment rate for black youth, age 16 to 24, was 20.7%. For Hispanic youth, it's 12.7%, while for white youth, it's 10.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The government data is not limited to high school graduates and has a wider age range.

Reality check: Hillary Clinton said, ""We have to look at the fact that we lose 90 people a day from gun violence. This has gone on too long and it's time the entire country stood up against the NRA.""

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 33,636 people killed by firearms in 2013, the last full year for which data is available. That averages to about 92 people a day. However, the number includes suicides, unintentional deaths, and incidents with undetermined intent as well as violence-related firearm deaths (homicide and legal intervention). In 2013, 11,675 people were killed in violence-related deaths by homicide or legal intervention, which equates to almost 32 deaths a day. The CDC reports 505 unintentional deaths by firearms in 2013, or just more than one death per day. They also report 281 deaths where the intent was undetermined in 2013.

Ninety-two people did die each day in 2013 from a firearm injury. However, the number of people killed from violence-related homicides and legal interventions in 2013 was much lower -- about 32 deaths a day.

Reality check: Bernie Sanders said, ""It is wrong today in a rigged economy that 57% of all new income is going to the top 1%.""

The top 1% saw their incomes soar 27.1% during that time period, while the bottom 99% got an only 4.3% bump in income. Healthy stock market returns helped fuel income gains among the wealthy.

But the good news for the bottom 99% was that 2014 was the first year of real recovery from Great Recession losses. That's thanks to a drop in the unemployment rate from 6.6% at the start of 2014 to 5.6% by year's end.",REAL
"0 comments 
Not a lot of teenage boys would go out of their selfish ways to stand up for a teacher like this. He stood up for his teacher when his peer punched her in the face. This young man is certainly respectable! 
A shocking video has emerged showing the moment a protective student knocked out a classmate who had just attacked their female teacher. The footage shows that the teacher was trying to break up a fight between two students – one in a red hoodie and one in a black hoodie – when the boy in the red turns around and hits her in the face. The teacher, dressed in white and wearing glasses, appears to fall to the ground after being hit, and then leaves the classroom. 
Then, a third student comes in and punches the boy in head, sending him straight down to the ground. The third student is heard saying: ‘Watch the f— out, you just hit the fucking teacher.’ He then adds: ‘Chill your s—, you just hit the f—ing teacher, you don’t f—ing do that. Who the f— do you think you are?’ 
The teacher then reappears in the room, and appears relatively unscathed. She tells the group to stop fighting and separate.‘He just f—ing hit you, that’s not cool,’ says the boy that came to her defense.‘It’s not cool,’ the teacher replies. It is unclear where the video was filmed or what school was involved, however the clip was spreading quickly on social media on Wednesday after appearing on the website LiveLeak. Some viewers questioned whether the boy in red may have mistakenly hit the teacher, believing she were the other one of the students. However others said he clearly meant to hit the woman. 
Shout out to the boy for standing up for what is right! Related Items",FAKE
"Ben Carson has seized the national lead from Donald Trump in a new poll, in a development sure to force the billionaire businessman to modify his well-polished campaign stump boast that he's ""leading every poll.""

Released ahead of Wednesday's third Republican presidential primary debate, the CBS News/New York Times Poll showed Carson leading nationally with 26 percent, to Trump's 22 percent.

The survey follows a string of Iowa polls that showed the retired neurosurgeon pulling ahead in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. Trump, who had led the field nationally and in key states since the summer, has tried to downplay the results but on Tuesday acknowledged Carson is gaining momentum.

""Ben Carson is now doing well,"" Trump said in an interview Tuesday morning on MSNBC.

At the same time, Trump has made clear he plans to challenge Carson at Wednesday's primary debate as the two battle for the top spot.

Trump previously called Carson ""low energy"" and questioned his immigration stance. On Tuesday, he predicted Carson would have to deal with more scrutiny from all directions.

""One thing I know about a frontrunner, you get analyzed 15 different ways from China. A lot of things will come out,"" he said.

He continued to tout his own numbers and support.

""I have tremendous crowds and tremendous love in the room and, you know, we seem to have hit a chord. But some of these polls coming out, I don't quite get it. I was No. 1 pretty much in Iowa from the beginning, and I would say we're doing very well there. So I'm a little bit surprised,"" he said. ""The other polls, as you know, in other states are extraordinary.""

The most recent Iowa poll showing Carson ahead was conducted by Monmouth University and released Monday. It showed Carson leading Trump by 14 points, his biggest lead to date.

Trump has led the Republican field nationally in almost every poll until now.

The CBS News/New York Times survey showed the rest of the candidates trailing in single digits. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was in third with 8 percent, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former HP chief Carly Fiorina with 7 percent.

The poll of 575 GOP primary voters was taken Oct. 21-25, and had a margin of error of 6 percentage points.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton is clobbering Bernie Sanders—and yet getting negative reviews from some of the pundits.

How is that possible? The Democratic race is essentially over. President Obama is privately telling donors it’s time to get on the Hillary train, the New York Times reports. A front-runner who wins in state after state usually basks in a winner’s aura as the party coalesces around her, and draws glowing profiles of how she and her team did it.

Sure, Hillary was always expected to beat Bernie. It’s also true that Clinton has never been beloved by the press, and the feeling is mutual.

But the larger problem is the outlook as the commentary class looks ahead to the fall.

Until the last couple of weeks, the conventional wisdom was that a Trump nomination would all but assure a second Clinton presidency. After all, she’s the former senator and secretary of State with an awesome political machine, and he’s the untested billionaire with a penchant for divisive rhetoric. Plus, Democrats have an Electoral College edge and have won the popular vote in five of the last six campaigns.

But some commentators see troubling signs in Clinton’s performance so far and wonder how she would withstand a Trump onslaught. The Donald has high negatives, to be sure, but Hillary does as well.

An unsparing assessment comes from Joe Klein, who has known the Clintons for a quarter century and mostly written sympathetically about them since his 1992 New York magazine cover story on Bill Clinton.

Klein agrees with Hillary’s self-assessment that she is not a natural politician, but goes much further in weighing a Trump matchup:

“Clinton seems particularly ill equipped for the task. She is our very own quinoa and kale salad, nutritious but bland. Worse, she’s the human embodiment of the Establishment that Trump has been running against…

“Indeed, her real problem is that she’s too much of a politician. She still speaks like politicians did 20 years ago, when her husband was President. This year, the candidates who have seemed the most appealing–Trump, Sanders, John Kasich–don’t use the oratorical switchbacks that have been beaten to death since John F. Kennedy.”

It’s no secret that Sanders has pushed Clinton to the left on trade, immigration, Wall Street and other issues. But Klein says that is often viewed as dissembling:

“There is an odd new law of U.S. politics: You can lie, as Trump does all the time, egregiously, but you can’t temporize. You can’t avoid a position on the XL pipeline or the Trans-Pacific trade deal, as Clinton tried to do in the campaign. You can’t try to please too many people too much of the time. Raising your voice to make a point–which Clinton does all the time, disastrously, because it seems such a conscious act–won’t get you anywhere unless you’re really angry.

“In the end, I’m not at all certain that Clinton can beat Trump.”

A note about her speaking style: When Clinton won five states on Tuesday night, I tweeted that she was shouting her speech and that it would be more effective with the audience at home if she was more conversational. I didn’t say she was shrill, I didn’t say she should smile, and in the past I’ve criticized Sanders for shouting his way through debates.

But I was hit with hundreds of tweets declaring me to be a horrible, misogynistic sexist. Some of this was a wave powered by what others had said about her speech. Maybe my quick take was wrong. But I hope we’re not entering a period where any criticism of the presumptive Democratic nominee is treated as sexism.

Other left-wing pundits, driven in part by ideology, fear the worst. This Salon headline boils it down:

“Hillary Will Never Survive the Trump Onslaught: It’s Not Fair, But It Makes Her a Weak Nominee.”

Clinton’s largest problem, in my view, is her low polling marks on honesty, a result of the email scandal and perhaps decades of scars of accumulated accusations, some of them fair and some exaggerated.

Veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield, writing earlier in Politico, spells out three reasons why Clinton could prove to be a weak candidate:

“First, Hillary Clinton commands little trust among an electorate that is driven today by mistrust. Second, her public life—the posts she has held, the positions she has adopted (and jettisoned)—define her as a creature of the ‘establishment’ at a time when voters regard the very idea with deep antipathy. And finally, however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she represents the future as America’s first prospective female president,

Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in 2008 when she lost to Barack Obama. The combination of those three factors is already playing out in the Democratic primary, where younger voters are turning away from her and embracing a geriatric, white-haired alternative in droves.”

When Clinton recalibrates, says Greenfield, “she always embraces the politically popular stand.”

However lukewarm the Democratic base may be about Hillary, she enjoys broad support within the party and most Bernie backers should have no trouble shifting their allegiance to her. The same can’t be said for Trump, who is weathering a Republican revolt against the likelihood of his winning the nomination.

We’ll know Hillary is solving her enthusiasm problem when she starts getting better reviews from journalists on the left.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia 'It was as bright as day for 5 or 6 seconds! Sensation!' Published: 9 mins ago 
(Russia Today) People in eastern Siberia have been left mystified by a flash that illuminated the sky with green light, resembling the famous Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. The event has become a hot topic for discussion, with people suggesting the flash could have been anything from a meteor to space junk or even a rocket. 
The phenomenon was observed by residents of Irkutsk Region and Buryatia Republic in eastern Siberia on Tuesday, local media reported. 
According to local witnesses, the sky was illuminated by a green light, before an object resembling a comet fell from the sky. Some locals claimed that the object was moving towards Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth.",FAKE
"Manchester, New Hampshire (CNN) It was the revenge of the governors as Republicans met for their final debate before the Granite State's primary on Tuesday.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie knocked the rising Florida Sen. Marco Rubio down several pegs, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush went toe-to-toe with billionaire businessman Donald Trump and equaled or got the better of his nemesis. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, meanwhile, stayed with his positive game and seized opportunities to tout his own record.

Here are five takeaways from Saturday night's debate on ABC as the primary clock counts down.

After a stronger-than-expected third-place finish in Iowa -- and taking a clear lead over other ""establishment"" candidates -- Rubio knew he'd be wearing a big target Saturday night.

But whether he was over-rehearsed or under-prepared, Rubio was off-key as he responded to the attacks.

The opponent responsible for most of them: Christie.

From the debate's outset, he pestered Rubio. ""You have not been involved in a consequential decision where you had to be held accountable,"" he said.

But he then opened up a brutal line of attack in suggesting that the Florida senator only knew how to turn a phrase rather than accomplish something.

""Marco, the thing is this,"" Christie said. ""When you're president of the United States, when you're a governor of a state, the memorized 30-second speech where you talk about how great America is at the end of it doesn't solve one problem for one person.""

In answering Christie, Rubio consistently turned to the same talking point, casting President Barack Obama as calculating rather than incompetent, and intent on changing America for the worse.

The fourth time he invoked Obama, though, the audience turned on him, booing the answer. And then moderator David Muir drove in the knife, saying: ""The governor wasn't talking about the President.""

Rubio rebounded a bit near the debate's end, when he hammered Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for supporting abortion rights -- and won applause from the audience for it.

Of Democrats, Rubio said: ""They are the extremists on the issue of abortion, and I can't wait to expose them in a general election.""

Christie, Kasich and Bush know that since they're all competing for the same pool of more moderate voters, there probably aren't enough tickets out of New Hampshire's primary for all three.

But the trio were still happy to unite in attacking the senators in the race (and, in Bush's case, Trump).

The only mild governor-on-governor criticism came from Christie, who noted that Kasich had increased the number of Ohio's government employees. But that followed praise of Kasich's job performance, with Christie saying he'd ""done a great job in Ohio.""

And Bush, in arguing that money and authority should shift from the federal government to the states, said: ""I trust Kasich and Christie to build the roads in their states.""

All three turned in strong performances Saturday night -- and their timing couldn't have been better, given Rubio's on-stage struggles and New Hampshire's reputation for voters who make their decisions at the last minute.

Kasich played up his time as the House's lead budget-writer during the surpluses of the 1990s and his record in turning a deficit into a surplus in Ohio.

Bush effectively traded blows with Trump, lighting into him on eminent domain with a brutal response to the real estate mogul's accusations that Bush wanted to sound tough: ""How tough is it to take property from an elderly woman?""

And Christie, who risked coming across as a bully in order to knock Rubio down early in the debate, was moving when he talked about drug addiction, linking his position on helping addicts to his stance opposing abortion, saying he wants to support kids after they're born as well as before.

""I'm pro-life when they get out, and it's a lot more complicated,"" he said.

Still, there are two big questions: Is it too little, too late? And on a Saturday night, how many New Hampshire voters were watching?

3. Trump vs. Cruz: The fight that didn't happen

They've bashed each other on the campaign trail in recent days, but Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump -- the two top-finishing candidates in Iowa's caucuses -- seemed to want nothing to do with each other on the debate stage.

It was one fight that was conspicuously absent Saturday night, and it contributed to Rubio's awful night. The Florida senator might have been hoping that those two would bash each other -- but it didn't happen, and he clearly was Enemy No. 1.

Cruz had a revealing answer when asked who he expects will win the Super Bowl: ""With an eye toward February 20, Carolina,"" he said, alluding to the South Carolina primary.

Why it matters: New Hampshire's more moderate electorate means it's not a state where Cruz is likely to shine. He could, though, win in South Carolina -- and his campaign's strategy largely relies on racking up delegates in Southern states with March primaries.

Trump's answers were revealing in their own way, demonstrating that his support isn't about an ideological opposition to big government as much as a desire for strength and a sense that the government is incompetent.

At one point, he defended eminent domain, a practice he's used as a real estate developer. Later Trump backed the role of government-sponsored health care, saying: ""You're not gonna let people die sitting in the middle of the street in any city in this country.""

Trump was restrained for most of the night -- with the exception of a bit of audience-taunting when, during an exchange with Bush, he dismissed those booing as his donors, and with a single shot at Cruz during his closing statement (more on that later).

Cruz made false claims about CNN's caucus-night reporting -- and the network immediately called him on it.

As caucus-goers were still voting in Iowa, Cruz's staffers had wrongly cited CNN in playing up the idea that former neurosurgeon Ben Carson was dropping out of the race.

""My political team saw CNN's report breaking news and they forwarded that news to our volunteers. It was being covered on live television,"" Cruz said Saturday. He said CNN reported that Carson was suspending his campaign ""from 6:30 p.m. to 9:15,"" and ""didn't correct that story until 9:15 that night.""

""What Senator Cruz said tonight in the debate is categorically false,"" CNN responded in a statement put out while the debate was in progress. ""CNN never corrected its reporting because CNN never had anything to correct. The Cruz campaign's actions the night of the Iowa caucuses had nothing to do with CNN's reporting. The fact that Senator Cruz continues to knowingly mislead the voters about this is astonishing.""

CNN had reported that Carson would continue campaigning after taking a break at home in Florida. His next stop, reporter Chris Moody said, would be Washington, D.C., for the National Prayer Breakfast.

Carson passed on the opening to go after Cruz directly Saturday night: ""I'm not going to use this opportunity to savage the reputation of Sen. Cruz.""

But he did say he was ""very disappointed that members of (Cruz's) team thought so little of me"" that they would believe he was dropping out after all the effort his campaign put into the race. He pointed to his dedicated volunteers and noted that ""one even died"" -- a reference to an auto accident in which one of his supporters was killed.

Trump, who'd avoided Cruz all night, did take one shot at him at the debate's end. After Cruz cited his victory in Iowa during his closing statement, Trump said: ""That's because you got Ben Carson's votes, by the way.""

Thought the 2016 debate season couldn't get any weirder? Think again.

At the start of ABC's broadcast Saturday night, Carson -- the second man due to appear on stage -- seemed not to hear his name. So he lingered behind the curtain as other candidates, confused, walked past him.

Soon, Trump -- who apparently had the same problem -- joined Carson in waiting.

And Kasich wasn't introduced at all, until the moderators were told they'd missed the Ohio governor.

Moderator Martha Raddatz defused the situation by pointing to a loud and rowdy audience that made it difficult to hear.

But on television, it was baffling: The names of the candidates came through loud and clear.

Carson -- late to the stage -- quickly disappeared on it. And while he got supportive chuckles from the audience for his cracks about not getting enough air time -- ""I thought maybe you thought already I had dropped out,"" he said -- that's not the way to climb above his fourth-place finish in Iowa.",REAL
"November 14, 2016 ‘Communication within this company just infuriates me,’ said insufferable manager Steven Parker, after tweeting the same remark to his 3 online followers. ‘The silo mentality is toxic and we need to break down organisational barriers so that fundamental knowledge is shared. This firm is a breeding ground for interdepartmental turf wars, and we must implement some basic cross-functional solutions’. 
Steven continued shouting quite loudly at every available opportunity about a matter of negligible significance – a chain email entitled: ‘Stationery cupboard low on blue pens’. 
Mr. Parker runs his own family business and that his 2 support staff, wife Jenny and daughter Emma, completely despise him. jonessgl",FAKE
"WASHINGTON —Two Capitol Hill panels that police the ethics of members of Congress appear to be battling about which has authority over 10 lawmakers accused of unwittingly accepting improper travel and gifts from the state oil company of Azerbaijan.

A Washington Post story published Wednesday detailed the contents of a confidential Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) investigation of a 2013 trip to Azerbaijan, a former republic of the Soviet Union in Central Asia.

The OCE was created in 2008 to vet ethics cases and recommend action to the Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee retains sole authority to judge whether members have broken the rules and to mete out punishment. The committee apparently asked the OCE to drop this case. There is no evidence the committee has ever made such a request before.

The OCE report indicated that 10 members of Congress had improperly accepted travel and gifts from the state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan, which secretly paid for the trip and not the non-profit groups that purportedly sponsored it. The lawmakers said they had no idea the non-profits were not the true sponsors of the trip, and apparently neither did the Ethics Committee, which approved the members' travel in advance.

The report found no evidence that the lawmakers made any effort to aid an Azeri pipeline project that the state-owned oil company was pushing at the time.

Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y. — one of the lawmakers involved in the case — said the Ethics Committee asked the OCE to stop its investigation of the trip because the committee had started one of its own. OCE declined, however, the Post reported.

Such a refusal is ""pretty outrageous,"" said Chris DeLacy, a partner at the law firm Holland & Knight who represents lawmakers in ethics cases. ""It's like we've generated two separate Ethics Committees and OCE has gone rogue.""

The OCE report indicates that Meeks did not cooperate with its investigation, according to the Post, but Meeks' office says that is not true.

Meeks gave OCE ""documents and other information in response to its request,"" said spokeswoman Sophia Lafargue, but OCE did not tell him that the Ethics Committee had asked it to end its review despite House rules requiring it do so.

""This is why he would not be interviewed by OCE, and this is why OCE said in the leaked report that he 'declined to cooperate,' "" Lafargue said. ""Congressman Meeks is committed to cooperate with the Ethics Committee in its review of this matter.""

The 2008 House resolution that created the OCE states that when it is notified that the Ethics Committee is investigating a case, ""the board shall refer such matter to the committee and cease its preliminary or second-phase review ... and so notify any individual who is the subject of the review.""

OCE's own rules, however, state it will stop its investigation when the Ethics Committee starts ""an investigatory subcommittee"" — the committee's rarely used formal investigative process. The committee makes a public announcement when it creates those subcommittees and has not announced one for the Azerbaijan trip.

OCE may ""draw a lot of flak"" for the Azerbaijan case, but the process worked as it should except for the leak, said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist at the liberal-leaning watchdog group Public Citizen.

The OCE investigated and reported to the committee, Holman said, adding that if the committee ""prevailed upon the OCE to not do a report, (the case) probably would have been buried."" The report shows a real concern, Holman said: the use of bogus non-profits by a foreign government to circumvent congressional travel rules.

Holman said the dispute between the two bodies is reminiscent of the early days of the OCE, when the two publicly feuded repeatedly over jurisdiction and the rules of investigations. But he said, ""I do not see it escalating to the point we saw in the very beginning.""

The case also involves the first leak of a full OCE report before its public release, which has led lawyers who defend lawmakers to call the entire process unfair.

There have been more ethics case since OCE started, DeLacy said, a trend for which the office deserves some credit. But if the intent of the law was to spur for Ethics Committee investigations, and the committee has launched a probe in a case, there is no reason for OCE to keep investigating.

Earlier this year, the House changed its own rules to give lawmakers a new defense against ethics investigations. The language stated that the two ethics bodies ""may not take any action that would deny any person any right or protection provided under the Constitution of the United States,"" an apparent reference to long-simmering concerns that the OCE does not allow the subjects of investigations to see the evidence against them. At the time, Elliot Berke, a lawyer who has defended several Republicans in ethics cases, said, ""from Day One of the OCE's existence, there have been serious concerns about lack of due process.""

The OCE report apparently found that the 10 members who traveled to Azerbaijan — Meeks; Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla.; Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y.; Danny Davis, D-Ill.; Rubén Hinojosa, D-Texas; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Leonard Lance, R-N.J.; Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M.; Ted Poe, R-Texas, and then-congressman Steve Stockman, R-Texas — were unaware that the trip was improperly funded by a foreign government. Nevertheless, in similar past cases, the Ethics Committee has required lawmakers to pay back the costs of travel, which for this trip would total thousands of dollars for each traveler. In past cases, lawmakers have been allowed to use campaign money instead of their personal funds to pay these costs.

Airfare for the members and their spouses totaled more than $110,000, the Post reported.",REAL
"A new video investigation released Monday by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action shows how Democratic-aligned organizations used a tactic called 'bird-dogging' to incite violence and chaos at Trump rallies for media consumption. A key Clinton operative is captured on camera saying, ""It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker.""

 

 In the video, Democratic activists Robert Creamer and Scott Foval reveal their strategy to create a sense of ""anarchy"" in and around Donald Trump events over the course of the campaign. Foval tells an undercover operative: ""One of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate.""

 

 ""So the term bird dogging: You put people in the line, at the front which means that they have to get there at six in the morning because they have to get in front at the rally, so that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there,"" explains Foval. ""To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions. You have to train them to bird dog.”

 

 In another undercover interview, Creamer tells Project Veritas that his organization, Democracy Partners, has daily check-ins with the Clinton campaign in order to coordinate efforts. “I just had a call with the campaign and the DNC, every day at one o’clock,” says Creamer subordinate Zulema Rodriguez in the video.

 

 Foval explains to O'Keefe's undercover journalist how the web of Democratic organizations is designed to subvert laws preventing Super PACs and political action groups from organizing directly with campaigns: ""The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the shit on the ground... Democracy Partners is the tip of the spear on that stuff.""

 

 ""We're consultants so we're not the official entity and so those conversations can be had between consultants,"" Foval explains, “The campaigns and DNC cannot go near [Democratic super PAC] Priorities [USA], but I guaran-damn-tee you that the people who run the Super PACs all talk to each other and we and a few other people are the hubs of that communication.”

 

 One event specifically mentioned by the Democratic operatives to have been 'bird-dogged' was the September incident in North Carolina where a 69-year-old woman was supposedly assaulted by a Trump supporter. In reality, the woman was ""trained"" by Foval as part of his operation. “She was one of our activists,” he says.

 

 “I’m saying we have mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit, make no mistake,” says Foval in the video. “Over the last twenty years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel, and a shower. And I put them in a program. Like I’ve done that. But the reality is, a lot of people especially our union guys. A lot of our union guys…they’ll do whatever you want. They’re rock and roll. When I need to get something done in Arkansas, the first guy I call is the head of the AFL-CIO down there, because he will say, ‘What do you need?’ And I will say, I need a guy who will do this, this and this. And they find that guy. And that guy will be like, Hell yeah, let’s do it.”

 

 ""It doesn't matter what the friggin' legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker,"" Foval also said. 

 

 Update: James O'Keefe Demands The Corporate Media to Report Veritas

 

 

 

 In this video, James O'Keefe explains how the corporate media, including Fox News, are allowing themselves to be intimidated by the Clintons and the DNC and are refusing to air the bombshell investigative video released by Project Veritas Action.",REAL
"Anyone writing sentences like ‘nevertheless fuels the perception that the Clintons may have…’ might want to stop and think about whether they are reporting news or innuendo.

It’s Labor Day weekend, and the polls have tightened in the last week. Donald Trump has done nothing to earn this, of course. His schizophrenic jaunt from Mexico to Arizona—I love the Mexican people! I love them so much I’m creating a police force to send them home to Mexico!—was a mess.

Because Hillary Clinton is more unpopular than she’s been in a long time—or ever, if you believe the spin on the the new Washington Post/ABC poll. In that one, she’s 15 points underwater. Other recent polls have been both better and worse—she’s minus-17 in YouGov/Economist but only minus-8 in Fox. But the picture is pretty consistent overall, and it’s bleak.

Her unfavorable numbers over the course of the last several months tell an interesting and mostly overlooked tale. The conventional wisdom is that her numbers went south after the Times broke the story in March 2015 of the email server, and they’ve been lower-hemispheric ever since. That’s true—but there are variations within that are worth examining.

Through the summer of 2015, she was barely underwater—three to five points. By December and January it was marginally worse, six or seven in most polls. But she didn’t hit double digits until March and April, and then she really bottomed out around minus-20 in late May and early June.

What was happening? Well, she and Bernie Sanders were going at it pretty good, which surely reduced some liberals’ opinions of her. But mostly she was getting buffeted about on the winds of scandal—the Benghazi committee was leaking a steady trail of morsels, and in late May the State Department inspector general came out with its report saying she hadn’t gotten White House approval for using the private server.

In other words, there looks to be a link between fresh Clinton scandal stories in the newspapers and her approval numbers dropping from a still-lamentable-but-manageable minus-8 or 10 to a (gulp!) minus-15 or 17. And in the last two weeks, of course, as we’ve seen a new batch of such articles, her negatives have inched back up, and the head-to-head polls have tightened.

What does this tell you to look forward to? You don’t need the political acumen of Lyndon Johnson to figure this out. It means the Republicans, and Judicial Watch, the source of most of these scandal stories, are going to do everything they can to keep them on the front pages between now and Election Day. Oh—with assists from Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin.

That’s the only environment in which Trump has a remote chance of winning—if it “seems” like the Clintons are “up to their old tricks”; if there are stories out there that, while including “no smoking gun,” nevertheless “feed” the “perception” that the Clintons are corrupt.

The media are showing every sign of falling for each and every breathless Judicial Watch press release that lands in their inboxes without the least bit of skepticism and scrutiny. I discussed the weaknesses of that big AP story in my previous column. There’ve been other lame stories recently, too. The Crown Prince of Bahrain one was another preposterous Clinton Rules piece. He made his donation to the Clinton Global Initiative—which wasn’t really a donation per se but seed money for a program for Bahraini students to study in America—long before Clinton became secretary of state—so he’d have to have been clairvoyant to know he was going to be corrupting a future secretary four and five years later.

Matthew Yglesias cited a few of the whoppers in a strong piece that noted the curious difference in coverage received by the Clinton Foundation and one run by Colin Powell. America’s Promise was headed by Alma Powell while Colin was secretary of state in the early 2000s and, according to Yglesias, got money from disgraced Enron CEO Ken Lay while the State Department was helping Enron resolve a dispute in India.

Why the difference in coverage? Yes, I know a lot of people would say because Colin Powell is clean and the Clintons are corrupt. I say the answer is more likely that Colin Powell didn’t have a Judicial Watch poking and prodding into every aspect of his life trying to make him look dirty and send him to jail. He also didn’t face an industry of “book” authors willing to print the most fantastical lies about him, lies gobbled up by hundreds of thousands of readers. Go look at the Times nonfiction best-seller list. Sit down first.

That insane scrutiny means two things. One, the media really ought to try to be careful about just swallowing whatever connections and insinuations Judicial Watch and other right-wing Clinton haters trumpet for the next nine weeks. It’s a rather high-stakes time. If there’s a legit Clinton story, obviously, run with it. But if people find themselves writing sentences with phrases like “nevertheless fuels the perception that the Clintons or their associates may have…” they might want to stop and think about whether what they have on their hands is news or innuendo.

But two—yes, the scrutiny places responsibility on the Clintons, too. It may not be fair that they and they alone have a Judicial Watch on their tail. But fair or not, it’s a fact. And they should behave accordingly. And they should know that the right is going to try to keep the words “Clinton” and “scandal” next to each other on the front pages for the next nine weeks, and they should do everything in their power to keep those words out of the papers. Announcing that they’ve rethought matters and Chelsea won’t remain on the foundation board would be a good start.",REAL
"As some presumably small portion of Americans sat through a dull debate between the Republican and Democratic vice-presidential nominees on Tuesday night, a far more interesting drama was unfolding within the Libertarian ticket. VP candidate Bill Weld told the Boston Globe that he plans to focus on attacking Donald Trump for the remainder of the campaign — essentially admitting that running mate Gary Johnson can not become president.*

Trump has Weld’s “full attention,” he explained, because his agenda is so terrible it’s “in a class by itself.” “I think Mr. Trump’s proposals in the foreign policy area, including nuclear proliferation, tariffs, and free trade, would be so hurtful, domestically and in the world, that he has my full attention,” Weld said.

Apparently he avoided acknowledging that his new mission amounts to working to make Hillary Clinton president. He pointed out that he disagrees with Clinton on fiscal and military issues, though last week on MSNBC he said he’s “not sure anybody is more qualified than Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States.”

It’s unusual for a candidate to admit defeat five weeks before the election, even though Johnson is at just 7.4 percent nationally in the Real Clear Politics polling average. However, Weld’s move doesn’t exactly constitute “going rogue,” since earlier in the day Johnson admitted in a CNN interview, “I guess I wasn’t meant to be president.” The Libertarian nominee was trying to argue that his lack of foreign-policy knowledge is an asset five days after he was unable to name a world leader he admires. Johnson described that as another “Aleppo moment,” referring to a previous gaffe in which he failed to recognize the name of the besieged Syrian city.

The gaffes led many to say Weld should be at the top of the ticket, and Weld strategists reportedly looked into the possibility of doing that, only to be shot down by Johnson.

Weld insists that he’s not abandoning Johnson, and that his running mate is fully in support of his strategy shift. “I have had in mind all along trying to get the Donald into third place, and with some tugging and hauling, we might get there,” he said.

However, Weld’s claim that there’s no discord on the Libertarian ticket wasn’t very convincing. He also suggested to the Globe that he may abandon the Libertarian party in the future. “I’m certainly not going to drop them this year,” he said.

Weld, a former two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts, said that after blocking a Trump presidency, he’d like to work with Republicans like Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour to rebuild the GOP.

“Maybe somebody is going to come up with a new playbook, and I don’t know who it’s going to be, but it would be fun to participate,” he said.

Maybe Mike Pence? Both vice-presidential candidates seem pretty eager to move past the humiliations of the 2016 campaign.

* Update: In an interview with Reason on Wednesday, Weld tried to clarify — or walk back — his remarks to the Globe:

He also posted a statement to Facebook:",REAL
"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] “I’ve Always Been An Admirer Of Donald Trump”– Taoiseach November 9, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , POLITICS Share 0 Add Comment 
TAOISEACH Enda Kenny has congratulated US president-elect Donald Trump, after he beat Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in a dramatic election count result this morning. 
Mr. Kenny said the people of the United States have made a very clear choice and that he always knew Trump would win the presidency, stating he looks forward to meeting him soon. 
“I’ve always been an admirer of Donald Trump,” Mr. Kenny opened up, scratching his nose, “Such a lovely man and a deserving president. I was rooting for him from the very beginning of this campaign, and I hope to meet him and his beautiful first lady very soon”. 
However, sources in Leinster House confirmed that an emergency Government meeting was called early this morning in a bid to decide who goes to the US for St. Patrick’s Day 2017. 
“The Taoiseach requested a box of straws and a scissors,” one insider said, “I think Leo Varadkar picked the short straw and may have to meet Mr. Trump with a bowl of Shamrock in the White House next year”. 
Asked about his comments about Mr. Trump being ‘racist and sexist’ earlier this year, the Taoiseach claimed he was only messing at the time and that he was only poking fun at the future president of the United States. 
“Donald will know I was only blaggarding with him,” Kenny stated, “we’re always messing and joking like that in politics. I look forward to playing a round of golf with him in Clare,” adding, “I’m more concerned about making the Irish recovery great again”.",FAKE
"(Before It's News)
Compare and contrast New Jersey and Florida voting protocols, In Florida the information on your voter registration card and ID have to match, you are issued a 12″ printout (similar to a cash register receipt) showing your name, date of birth and address which you then must confirm, and that is placed on a clear […]",FAKE
"October 27, 2016 at 4:21 PM 
Listen, it doesn’t matter who wins…the system can not mathematically go on the way it has…..so please dont make it sound like Trump is going to bring it down…and fuck yes…people like me want to see heads roll…they should be rolling for what they have done to this country….politicians, newspeople, celebrities…. all of them. If you or I did what they have done…we would be in Leavenworth in heart beat. Trusy me, it will get worse before it gets better…but when you’re cutting a malignancy out, it’s going to hurt.",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton When They Asked Her What She Thinks of Hillary Clinton, They Never Expected Her to Say THIS! 
0 comments 
Kids say the darndest things… ADORABLE! ""My dad told me that Hillary Clinton LIES A LOT, so if she wins she might take over the country! "" @realDonaldTrump #VoteTrump pic.twitter.com/cHrP8lkPbS",FAKE
"Vanessa Tijerina was not politically active until a couple years ago. Then she started looking closely at problems in the healthcare system, feeling that mainstream politicians were not delivering solutions – and discovered Bernie Sanders.

Last September, at short notice, she drove three hours to San Antonio, Texas, from her home near the border with Mexico so she could join other Sanders supporters in a protest against a Democratic congressman who had criticised the Vermont senator. In January she marched through Manhattan for Sanders, inspired by his idealistic and unorthodox message.

And then the 74-year-old lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, and backed her for the White House last month at the national convention. That was where Tijerina and Sanders diverged.

“A lot of us waited with bated breath, wondering: what’s he going to do?” she said. “Because depending on what he did, that’s where the movement was either going to go or not go. He decided to stay there, and the movement can’t stay there. It cannot stay in a centrist environment. The movement is antagonising that environment so we can’t stay there.”

Tijerina and others were calling for a new phase of a Sanders-style political revolution on Thursday, as the Green party kicked off its presidential nominating convention in the improbable location of Houston, Texas – Big Oil’s back yard. (The convention’s slogan is: “Houston, We Have a Solution”.)

“To me the Green party was the only other option,” Tijerina said in a conference room at the University of Houston. “There’s just no way that anything centre or right of centre was going to get America where it needed to be.”

The 38-year-old nurse is standing as a Green party candidate for a Texas congressional district this November.

“When I found out about Jill Stein, which was literally a month after I found out about Bernie – depending on who you ask, she is perhaps more progressive than Bernie,” Tijerina said. “She is perhaps more aggressive politically than Bernie and she is perhaps, some would say, less afraid, or less intimidated – or whatever it is, she has what Bernie has and perhaps more.”

Stein is set to be confirmed as the Green party’s nominee on Saturday and is openly courting the seemingly large number of Sanders supporters who are reluctant or refusing to heed his call to support Clinton. In a Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, Stein is at 3.9%, behind the Libertarian party’s Gary Johnson, at 8%; Donald Trump is at 36.9% and Clinton at 43.5%.

Hardly numbers to threaten the duopoly, but enough to potentially complicate close races in swing states in November and indicative of significant unhappiness with the Democratic and Republican candidates. (In 2012, Johnson received only 0.99% and Stein 0.36% of the popular vote.) Enough also to awaken some deep-seated Democratic angst rooted in the trauma of 2000, when some blamed Green party candidate Ralph Nader’s presence in Florida for costing Al Gore the general election and sending George W Bush to the White House.

Adding to the sense of the Green party as an irritant for Democrats, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may address the convention via video link on Saturday, about two weeks after carefully timed leaked emails showed that Democratic National Committee officials seemingly plotted to undermine Sanders’ campaign, causing a storm and adding to his loyalists’ antagonism towards Clinton and the party.

Stein’s choice this week of the human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate might complicate the outreach. In a blogpost last September on the left’s response (or lack of it) to Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen, Baraka wrote: “Sanders supporters have not only fallen into the ideological trap of a form of narrow ‘left’ nativism, but also the white supremacist ethical contradiction that reinforces racist cynicism in which some lives are disposable for the greater good of the west.

“And as much as the ‘Sandernistas’ attempt to disarticulate Sanders ‘progressive’ domestic policies from his documented support for empire … it should be obvious that his campaign is an ideological prop – albeit from a center/left position – of the logic and interests of the capitalist-imperialist settler state.”

A request for comment made through Stein’s campaign was not returned. But it would likely take much more than some debatable blog articles to persuade many of the convention-goers in Houston to vote for an establishment figure they see as emblematic of a dishonest, warmongering status quo that is in thrall to big corporations and unwilling or unable to solve systemic inequalities.

“Voting for the oligarchy is not how you get rid of the oligarchy,” said Carlos Martinez, 40, an activist from Texas who creates social media content. “I in good conscience cannot vote for somebody that supports interventionist wars and supports what Hillary Clinton supports, and I will vote for Jill Stein.”

Sanders, some Clinton supporters – and Trump himself – have argued that casting a ballot for the Green party is tantamount to helping the Republican candidate. Stein and her supporters, of course, reject that idea.

“I really can’t tell who or what Donald Trump is,” Martinez said, “but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be fear-baited into supporting Hillary Clinton and I don’t think that the majority of Sanders supporters are scared to vote their conscience and they’re going to be fear-mongered into pulling the lever for somebody that’s against their own interests.”

Wearing a red “Feel the Bern” T-shirt, Pam Ellis attended a boisterous evening event designed to woo the “Bernie or Bust” crowd that drew a couple of hundred people.

“I have a conflict because I like Bernie; I never really cared that much for Hillary. Nothing specific or anything, I just feel like it’s more big money influence in politics,” the 57-year-old nurse said. Her top issues were access to education and healthcare, subjects that were at the heart of Sanders’ electoral pitch – focused, like Stein’s, on social justice.

“I think he furthered the Green party platform whether he intended to or not, brought it to the forefront and caused me to do a lot of research on the Green party, and that’s why I’m here now,” she said.

Ellis also dismissed the notion that voters should think tactically. “What good is it to live in the United States where you have the right to vote and the freedom to vote for who you want to, if you’re going to be scared into voting?” she said.

“I’m tired of the lesser of the evils. I’m just sick of that. That’s not what my father and his brothers went and fought in world war two for, so we could be scared into voting for one of two candidates. This is a huge country. We should have debates with the Libertarian party and the Green party. We need to hear from everybody.”",REAL
"The presidential candidates are laser-focused on South Carolina right now, with the Republican primary coming up on Feb. 20, and the Democratic primary on Feb. 27.

The latest surveys show Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton as the clear frontrunners. But the other candidates are waging fierce battles for second place.

Heading into South Carolina, Trump already has a solid lead. The latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows the billionaire with 36 percent support, compared to about 20 percent for his nearest competitor, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Trump hopes to build on the momentum from his New Hampshire win.

""If we win here after winning so big in New Hampshire, we will make America great again -- that I can tell you,"" Trump said.

What's extraordinary about his New Hampshire win is the breadth of his victory. Trump won in virtually every category, capturing both men and women in the city and the countryside. He won voters of all ages, and both conservative and moderates, and in every issue group.

Meanwhile, Cruz says it's clear he's the main challenger to Trump.

""One of the most important conclusions coming out of these first two states is that the candidate who can beat Donald Trump is me,"" Cruz said.

Polls show Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in third and fourth place right now.

And as of Wednesday, two GOP candidates are no longer in the race: former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dropped out after weak showings in New Hampshire.

The Democratic race is also hotly contested. Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton in New Hampshire, but she leads him in South Carolina, with 62 percent compared to his 32 percent.

Clinton has acknowledged that she must figure out how to reach young voters, especially women. In New Hampshire, Sanders pulled in more than 80 percent of women voters under 30. Now she's reaching out to them.

""You may not support me, but I support you,"" Clinton said.

Sanders is also threatening Clinton with an impressive fundraising machine – and he's invested heavily in Nevada, which holds its Democratic caucus on Feb. 20.

He's clearly going after the minority vote, but so is Clinton. This week, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC voted to endorse the Democratic frontrunner.

If the polls are correct, Clinton and Trump should easily win in South Carolina. But the other candidates are fighting to catch up and March is coming – when more than 20 states will cast their votes.",REAL
"by Jerri-Lynn Scofield 
Jerri-Lynn here: The following post summarizes the state-of-play regarding production cutbacks for twelve oil-producing states invited to participate in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) ongoing discussions regarding a much-anticipated output freeze. As the post suggests, failure to agree restrictions and stabilize prices might heighten the risks of terrorist attacks and political instability in some of the non-OPEC countries invited to participate in wider negotiations. Yet inviting new participants to the negotiating party is only likely to complicate the situation and slow further the implementation of an internal production reduction already delayed for nearly a year. 
By Zainab Calcuttawala, an American journalist based in Morocco. She completed her undergraduate coursework at the University of Texas at Austin (Hook’em) and reports on international trade, human rights issues and more. Originally published at Oilprice.com 
Last week, Venezuelan oil minister Eulogio del Pino released a list of states invited to participate in the OPEC ongoing negotiations regarding a much-anticipated output freeze. 
Russia, Egypt and ten other oil exporters made the list, though the high variation between the economic and political standings of the non-OPEC participants add to the already complicated and delicate orchestration of the deal— if there is to be a deal, that is. 
This past weekend, several of the invited non-OPEC countries sent representatives to Vienna for consultations regarding the terms of a potential freeze deal. No details have been finalized, but those who participated agreed to meet again before the 30 November OPEC summit. 
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Energy Minister Alexander Novak have recently agreed to freeze output in coordination with OPEC, if the group’s members can flesh out a plan amongst themselves. 
According to OPEC Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo, the bloc is on track to deliver a deal by the end of November. Barkindo also said that Russia has agreed to participate in OPEC’s official meeting this month. 
As outlined by the Jamestown Foundation last month, Kazakhstan is desperate for a freeze deal to help economic development rebound to the 6-7 percent expansion rate that the former Soviet Republic saw when barrel prices exceeded $100. But just because they are desperate for a cut doesn’t mean they will participate. 
Kazakh Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said on Tuesday that Kazakhstan itself would not be doing any cutting, because, according to Bozumbayev, their production levels are small in proportion to some of the others at the negotiating table, namely Russia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Iran, and Mexico. 
This year, Kazakhstan does not expect its economy to grow more than 0.1 percent, while 2017 forecasts from the World Bank predict a low one-percent increase in GDP. Kazakhstan – which recently reopened its Kashagan field, depends on oil exports for over 60 percent of total government revenues and a quarter of its GDP. 
A failed deal could mean renewed terrorist attacks and political instability for Kazakhstan as the Kazakh economy continues to spiral downwards. 
Asked what he hoped Saturday’s meeting would achieve, a Kazakh official in attendance in Vienna desperately said: “We just hope the price will react and it will increase.” That desperation is shared by many other oil-dependent countries, but this desperation is also a sign that these countries are not in any position to scale back the production that generates the most revenue. 
Azerbaijan was also at the table. Halfway through October, Azerbaijan – a country that produced more than half of the world’s oil a century ago – also announced its support of an OPEC/non-OPEC cut, which, as ClipperData noted , is convenient because the country’s September oil production was 10.2 percent lower than its August rate. 
“Venezuela and Azerbaijan agree that some measures will be taken to stabilize the market,” Azeri Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said this weekend. “We agreed the price of oil can be around $60 per barrel.” Statements revolving around price, however, do not speak to who is ready to share the burden of cutting production, and do little to assuage market fears that a cut is but a wispy goal. 
Oman wasn’t buying the feasibility of OPEC cuts either, and before the Algiers meeting in September, Oman said as much, stating that it did not believe in the bloc’s ability to solve the pricing crisis due to several failed efforts to freeze output over the past year. 
Newer reports on Oman show that they officially support an output freeze and overall reduction, with the expectation that “similar measures be taken by other countries.” It remains unclear if Iraq, a war-torn nation currently defying production limits, and Iran, a country trying to regain its legs now that sanctions were lifted, count as one of the “other countries” that Oman expects to cut output. 
As a net oil importer, Egypt does not have the market power or political capital to sway the momentum of a freeze one way or another. The North African country’s recent spat with Saudi Arabia – the de facto leader of OPEC – over suspended petroleum shipments will also limit the salience of Egyptian interests in the bloc’s proceedings. 
Sources from the Egyptian Parliament say the country’s energy ministry will be asked to review Saudi Aramco’s five-year agreement to supply Egypt with petroleum derivatives in the coming weeks, further complicating relations between the two nations. 
Ninety-nine percent of Canadian oil exports go straight to the United States, according to governmental data from the buyer and seller countries. 
Neither of the two North American countries is part of OPEC, and they have their own agreements for energy supplies. So even though Canada has been invited to participate in the freeze talks, the country does not have the economic or political incentive to reduce output. 
Brazil elected to “observe” Saturday’s meeting as the country prepares to increase production rates over the next few years. This makes them extremely unlikely participants in any efforts to scale back production. 
Other countries present this weekend included Mexico, which has spent the better part of this summer building a hedge against low oil prices for the next fiscal year. 
Small-scale producers such as Bolivia and Trinidad and Tobago have already turned down production over the past two years, which had a limited effect on market fundamentals. 
Norway, a 1.6 million barrel per day producer that has increased output by 2.1 percent in 2014 and 3.08 percent in 2015, declined to meet with OPEC over the weekend. 
The geopolitics of oil within OPEC has already delayed the implementation of an internal production reduction for almost an entire year. By adding new nations from previously uninvolved continents (North America and Europe), the bloc has flooded the negotiation table with new interests – creating a fresh slate of diplomatic obstacles to overcome before an output freeze can be implemented. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"(CNN) Sometimes political change comes from unexpected people and at unexpected moments. One of the biggest surprises of 2016 is that Donald Trump is poised to win the nomination of the Republican Party while defying key elements of GOP orthodoxy.

While Trump may very well shift hard to the right in the general election (reversing the conventional pattern of running to the hard right in the primaries and then shifting to the center in the fall), the fact that he will win the nomination after having run such an eclectic and unorthodox campaign is something that party professionals will take note of.

Whether or not Trump really believes any of the heresies he's stated about GOP positions is besides the point, at least for the moment. And while Trump is a unique case given his celebrity stature, one thing is clear -- he has made statements that until this year most experts would have characterized as touching a third rail for anyone seeking to win the nomination.

Republican politicians have been pretty lockstep on policies for years. And Trump has stuck to the right, the far right, on questions like immigration. But the surprise of this year is that on a number of other issues Republican voters have been willing to vote for someone who refused to toe the party line.

Just this past week Trump reiterated his statements about being willing to raise taxes, an unheard-of position for a GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan came to town in the 1980s.

Trump is certainly no Bernie Sanders. His overall tax agenda fits comfortably within the Reagan legacy: he would cut taxes for the wealthy and hope that supply side economics will work the magic its adherents claim. Yet he has refused to rule out some tax increases. Early on he announced that he favored higher taxes for hedge fund managers and last Sunday stated that taxes would go up on the wealthy.

This kind of statement was sure to kill a Republican candidacy in years past. Ever since anti-tax activist Grover Norquist pressured Republicans to sign a pledge stating that they would not raise taxes—and Reagan blasted the Democratic presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, in a 1984 debate after he admitted in a debate that he would have to do this—Republicans on the campaign trail never concede that they would take this step.

Even through his vacillations and flip-flops, Trump has now talked of higher taxes several times and many voters in the party seem willing to back him.

He has also avoided the familiar rhetoric about cutting entitlements or privatizing Social Security. ""I want to leave Social Security as it is,"" he said. Sounding very much like a Democrat, Trump has been pretty insistent throughout that he has no intention of going after these giant programs.

More to the point, he has offered rhetoric stating his support for what they accomplish. It is not because these programs are a third rail, according to Trump, but because they are good.

In his conflict with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Trump has warned that he disagreed with Ryan who ""wants to knock out Social Security, knock it down, way down. He wants to knock Medicare way down.""

In addition to being a sure-fire way to ""lose the election,"" Trump added that, ""more importantly, in a sense, I want to keep it. These people have been making their payments for their whole lives. I want to keep Social Security intact. Now, I want to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. I want to do a lot of things to it that are going to make it much better, actually. But I'm not going to cut it, and I'm not going to raise ages (of eligibility), and I'm not going to do all of the things that they want to do.""

Trump is on to the secret that many red-state Republicans like their entitlements and are not enthused by party rhetoric about taking those benefits away. When tea party Republicans warned President Obama in 2010 to ""Take Your Government Hands Off My Medicare,"" they meant it.

Saying no to free trade

On free trade, Trump has been saying things that make a conservative's head spin. He has done extremely well in a number of states by talking about how trade agreements like NAFTA were disastrous to U.S. workers, destroying jobs and undercutting wages. ""No more sweatshops or pollution havens stealing jobs from American workers,"" he has said.

Of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement between the U.S. and 11 other countries, which Trump calls ""ObamaTrade,"" he said: ""The TPP is a horrible deal. It is a deal that is going to lead to nothing but trouble.""

Trump has made attacks on free trade a core aspect of his campaign against other Republicans as well as against Hillary Clinton. His arguments have resonated in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, where workers have watched entire industries being slowly gutted as production moved overseas.

He has talked about a return to trade restrictions and trade war with rhetoric that Republicans, and most Democrats, have rejected for decades.

Conservative cultural values also have been absent from his stump speeches. Trump, who has lived a life more suited to Howard Stern's radio show than an evangelical church, has not really paid much attention to the religious right or their strand of conservatism, apart from a few moments like his visit to Liberty University.

He is all about economics, and slowing the flow of immigrants and ""making American great again."" He has sometimes gone directly against many evangelicals' positions, such as when he stated his support for transgender people using any bathroom they wanted.

He says he opposes abortion but has made statements supportive of Planned Parenthood that are anathema to many on the right. ""You can say whatever you want,"" Trump said, ""but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly.""

Evangelicals are certainly nervous, with many leaders saying they want a vice presidential pick that they can trust. But Trump has survived unscathed, even in many southern primary states.

When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has stepped back from the hawkish neoconservative rhetoric that has dominated Republican circles for several decades. Although he still brandishes a big stick when talking about what he would do to ISIS and how he would combat the threat of terrorism, he has made statements that are skeptical about relying on the military as the prime instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

In his ""America First"" speech, he talked about the need to recognize the limits of U.S. power and to only engage in conflicts that are directly essential to the national interest as he defines it.

When former President George W. Bush joined the campaign trail in South Carolina to help his brother Jeb, Trump went right after Bush's war in Iraq and blasted it as a mistake. All of this talk seems to be just fine with many Republicans.

It is much too early to tell what the long-term impact of Trump's candidacy will be on the Republican Party. But with all the attention that has been paid to the risks Trump poses as a leader and the ugly statements that have come out of his campaign, we have not looked closely enough at how and why a candidate who refused to accept the party's doctrine has won the nomination.

This is a big story in an era of rigid party polarization. If Trump's campaign becomes a model for future candidates, we might see a very different Republican Party in years to come.

Of course, if Trump goes on to suffer a landslide defeat against Hillary Clinton, rock-ribbed conservatives might say, ""I told you so,"" and the dynamics of GOP politics in 2020 could return to what they've been in the past.",REAL
"Home This Month Popular What The Trump Skeptics Got Wrong What The Trump Skeptics Got Wrong FitzRoy Sommerset 
FitzRoy is a British and American Nationalist who refuses to apologize for the British Empire. As a young man, he ""took a President's shilling"" and served in the U.S. Army. In his free time, he enjoys studying history and destroying the SJW revisionist narrative. November 12, 2016 Politics 
There have been few true upsets in our history: Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Wellington’s victories at Assaye and Waterloo, and Washington’s victory at Yorktown over the most professional army in the world. It is often said that when General Charles O’Hara (who had the dubious distinction of surrendering to both George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte) surrendered Cornwallis’s sword, the band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” 
Today, the establishment and the intellectuals cannot help but share a similar sentiment as Cornwallis or O’Hara did at Yorktown. And I fully admit: In spite of my vote for Trump, I fully expected him to lose. The polls, his 60% negative approval rating, and the sheer forces of the media, the FBI and even some Republicans were arrayed against him. My skepticism of Trump was not his ideas, but his chances of winning the election. Myself, and other conservative intellectual skeptics who voted for him, were wrong. 
I am one of the intellectuals who expected a Trump defeat. I’ve been studying politics, history and economics for years, reading countless books on the matter from The Prince to Freakonomics to The Wealth of Nations. 
And I was wrong. It was a Canadian housewife and an Iranian pickup artist who called it correctly for Trump. Trump beat the odds, he beat the intellectuals, and made the establishment “babies in the hands of a giant” as was said after Napoleon’s resounding victory at Austerlitz in 1806. 
The left is currently in panic-mode in an attempt to explain how they lost. They are calling Trump supporters racist, sexists, homophobic and even sex offenders! But in the end, it was this same blindness that made them psychologically incapable of defeating Donald Trump. Trump was immune to almost all conventional political weapons. Trump won because of the following 
1. The left seemed far more interested in calling Trump and his supporters racist than saying something of substance. 
2. Outlets such as the New York Times did blatantly stupid crap like try to blame the NRA for the Orlando Shootings, and even tried to call them terrorists. In this, they beat even Trump in outrageousness: they thought the American people were stupid, so they just lied to them and said “fuck it, those peasants will believe anything we write.” 
3. All Trump had to do was call them on their bullshit, and call them liars. And he was 100% right: the MSM has lied to the American people this entire election cycle. Subsequent to every terrorist attack perpetrated by a Muslim, the MSM continued to push the narrative that “home grown right-wing terrorism is the real problem.” Trump called them on their lies, and the American people, who are tired of being lied to by the MSM, cheered him on, even if he had a few issues with the truth himself. 
4. The Democrats ran the absolute worst candidate possible. Hillary Clinton had negative approval ratings that rivaled Trump’s own. And she was bland. And she couldn’t decide if she was a moderate or a firebrand progressive. And she is corrupt, and lied about it, stupidly thinking the American people were too ignorant to understand that putting classified information on a private email server is a recklessly irresponsible thing to do. 
5. Trump knew how to communicate with people. He knew that whites without a college degree were tired of being talked down to by progressives on the left and genuine intellectuals on the right (like myself). I freely admit I am guilty of this: when you study two thousand years of philosophy, economics and rhetoric (Cicero was particularly effective), it is sometimes frustrating when people don’t approach a situation in terms of axioms and proofs. The working class that built America go by what they feel in their gut, and often times, they are right. 
All in all, the left failed because they failed to understand America. They bought into the idea that “Americans are stupid…haha!” Americans are not stupid: they may not be smart, but they sure as hell know when a liberal taking head is lying to them about now the NRA is basically the Taliban in an obviously biased hit piece. Hillary took working class Americans for granted, and she lost. This should stand as a parallel for black Americans whom the Democrats also take for granted. 
I am pleased that Donald Trump is now President-Elect. He wasn’t just a candidate, he was the anti-candidate. He did everything a politician should not do. He used vulgar language. He talked freely about his ideas. He made no pretense about being polite to those who are destroying America. He turned weaknesses (such as his spotty track record) into strengths that would have ended any other candidate’s campaign. He was the un-candidate America needed. 
I have high hopes for Trump’s presidency. In spite of my tepid support, I see Trump as a President who can do a lot of good, and has the potential to do more good than any President of recent memory. 
First, Trump spat in the face of PC culture and won. Just as Scott Walker took on the Unions in Wisconsin and cucked them by winning the recall election by getting more votes than he did in the previous election, Trump defeated the SJW’s. If Trump can keep this up, we can achieve a major strategic victory in the war against political correctness, and get back to a concept called “actually being correct.” 
Secondly, Trump is an unapologetic nationalist. He loves America, and doesn’t give a damn if you think Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is a great book. The Department of Cultural Guilt that has infected schools in America teaches children to hate their own country. I look forward to seeing Trump abolish the practice of teaching children that the Founding Fathers were evil racists, the British Empire did nothing good for the world, and that America is the greatest evil the world has ever seen. 
Lastly, Trump is the antithesis of everything the Social Justice Warriors stand for: a successful alpha male who tells people to go fuck themselves and still gets elected. I hope to see a rise in masculinity in America: studies have shown that testosterone levels are down among the American male population. This should rise under Trump, as men embrace their masculinity instead of hiding it for fear of being accused of sexual assault. 
I was a Trump skeptic. I underestimated him. I didn’t disagree with him on much (perhaps maybe 20% of his platform), but I had little faith he could pull it off. And I was vocal about my concerns regarding his elect-ability. But like the liberals, I was wrong. And a Canadian housewife and a former pickup-artist-turned-conservative-philosopher were 100% right. 
I recall something I told a fellow soldier while on a long, boring convoy operation in Iraq: “When a genius says something, others say ‘wow, that is way above my head.’ But when a true genius says something, others say ‘wow, why didn’t I think of that before?!” Trump is a true genius: he stated the obvious to the American people and made them believe he wanted to Make America Great Again (and I think he genuinely does). He didn’t use fancy graphs or focus groups: he spoke the truth, without political correctness. 
And now he is President-Elect.",FAKE
"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose caustic comments about Mexicans have inflamed the immigration debate, told thousands of cheering supporters here Saturday that “we have to take back the heart of our country.”

In a rambling, defiant speech delivered in this border state that has been the epicenter of the nation’s divisive battle over immigration reform, Trump declared: “These are people that shouldn’t be in our country. They flow in like water.” One man in the crowd of 4,200 shouted back, “Build a wall!”

Basking in polls that show he has risen to the top of the crowded Republican field, Trump took obvious glee in mocking former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite who is setting fundraising records.

“Jeb Bush, let’s say he’s president — Oy, yoy, yoy,” Trump said. He asked the crowd: “How can I be tied with this guy? He’s terrible. Terrible. He’s weak on immigration.”

Trump’s 70-minute address here, which sounded more like a stream-of-consciousness rant than a presidential-style stump speech, put an exclamation point on his bombastic push since his presidential announcement last month to return immigration to the forefront of the national conversation.

Bush and illegal immigrants were not the only targets of Trump’s scorn: He also criticized Macy’s, NBC, NASCAR, U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton and, several times, the media.

Republican leaders say they believe the celebrity billionaire has virtually no chance of being their nominee, much less of making it to the White House. And, for now at least, his following seems limited to the far right as opposed to the party’s mainstream.

Yet Trump has reignited a heated debate over an issue, immigration, that the GOP had been determined to settle after it hurt Republicans in the most recent presidential election.

Party leaders increasingly fear that Trump could do damage to more viable candidates, such as Bush, who could lose their own footing on immigration. These candidates confront a familiar challenge: During the primary season, they must deal with the anger and anxiety that many on the right feel about illegal immigration. But they must do it in a way that will not damage their appeal to a broader electorate in November 2016.

Republicans are handling Trump delicately for another reason as well: They fear that he could leave the GOP entirely and wage a well-funded third-party campaign, a possibility that Trump has not ruled out.

[GOP leaders fear damage to party’s image as Donald Trump doubles down]

After Trump repeatedly referred to illegal immigrants in the harshest of terms — calling them, among other things, killers and rapists — Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called Trump and asked him to tone things down. But that, if anything, has reinvigorated Trump and his vocal supporters.

The crowd in Phoenix began lining up outside the convention center before dawn, with many spending hours in temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees. Hundreds of people, who stood in lines snaking down several downtown blocks, did not make it into the ballroom for his speech.

Many of Trump’s supporters blame illegal immigrants for crime and economic problems but also express dismay over cultural changes.

“We don’t recognize our country anymore,” said Jan Drake, 72, who lives in a retirement community outside Phoenix. “If you’re coming into our country, you have got to conform to what we stand for. You speak English. You don’t try to change our country to what your country was.”

After watching Trump on television the past couple of weeks, Drake said that she has become convinced that “he would be a very strong president. He doesn’t kowtow to anybody. The Republican Party will try to squeeze him out because they’re afraid of him. But he can tell them where to go — to pound sand.”

After he walked onto a catwalk stage here like a rock star, Trump basked in his crowd. “The word is getting out that we have to stop illegal immigration,” he said.

While Trump was railing against Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, a handful of protesters in the crowd interrupted. Trump’s security guards arrived to break up the skirmish that followed. His supporters screamed “USA! USA! USA!” in the protesters’ faces as the guards escorted them out of the convention hall.

“I wonder if the Mexican government sent them over here,” Trump said from the stage. He assured the crowd, “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back.”

Trump also had harsh words for Islamic State terrorists. If he becomes president, Trump said, “They will be in such trouble . . . ISIS, believe me, I would take them out so fast. You have to do it.”

But it was his crusade against illegal immigrants that had Trump’s crowd most enthused. After expressing shock that his immigration message has resonated so strongly with the GOP base, Trump said, “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back.” He walked off the stage to Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Earlier, as his plush Boeing 757 headed from an appearance in Las Vegas to Phoenix, Trump sat in a leather chair, surrounded by binders of articles about him and sipping a Coca-Cola — the full-calorie kind, he noted, because, “Have you ever seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke?”

“Something is happening in America. You may not want to see it, but something big is happening. People are sick and tired of politicians, and I’m here for them,” he said in an interview. “I’m ready to go right at the Mexican government. I’m going to charge them $25,000 per illegal immigrant and, oh, I’ll make them pay.”

“Would Bush do that? Would Rubio? I don’t think so,” Trump added, taking aim at two of his more mainstream rivals, Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, including most Republicans, support an overhaul of the law to give millions of undocumented immigrants a means of staying in this country legally. But a passionate fraction of the Republican electorate believe otherwise.

Lou Brudnock, 71, said he is attracted to Trump’s brash “truthfulness” on immigration and his willingness to be politically incorrect.

“This country today is sad, sad, sad,” Brudnock said. “You can’t say anything or they call you ‘a racist.’ It’s like we’re back in Nazi Germany. But look around, man. It’s people here reading and listening to his message.”

Trump, by virtue of his celebrity, has provoked a backlash far more widespread than ever seen toward lesser-known immigration hard-liners, such as former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo (R). That means he could leave lasting damage to the GOP and whoever turns out to be its 2016 standard-bearer.

All of those cross-pressures were in play Saturday at Trump’s appearances here and in Las Vegas. More mainstream Republicans had anticipated the spectacle and made no secret of their concern.

“I had hoped that we had moved on from some of the coarse rhetoric,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “When there’s so many candidates, you can appeal to a very small segment of the population and get news and get elevated.” Flake is a leading proponent of a comprehensive immigration measure that would include a path to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally.

Arizona has been a hotbed of anti-immigration sentiment, having passed a 2010 law that requires law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they detain and suspect are in the country illegally.

Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who in some ways is the face of that law, having been the subject of racial-profiling lawsuits — helped warm up the crowd before Trump’s arrival.

“I know that Donald Trump is speaking out,” Arpaio said. “He’s getting a lot of heat. But, you know, there’s a silent majority out here.”

“We’re not silent anymore!” a man in the crowd shouted.

Arpaio brought up the mostly dormant questioning of President Obama’s birth certificate. He and Trump are perhaps the most vocal of the “birthers,” who falsely contend that Obama was not born in the United States.

Immigration also has gained new attention after the June 30 shooting death of a woman along San Francisco’s heavily touristed waterfront, allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been deported five times from the United States.

Trump — along with much of the rest of the Republican field — has criticized the policies of “sanctuary cities,” where officials cannot detain those they suspect of being in the country illegally unless they have other grounds to do so.

Republican strategists say that it is possible to address anxiety over illegal immigration within the GOP base without alienating the electorate at large. Advisers to Bush and Rubio, for instance, say that their candidates can play a long game on the issue, continuing to make a case for comprehensive changes to the law, while waiting for the Trump boomlet to subside.

“You can give a fuller picture of those types of people who are coming to America who are not documented, who are not legal,” said Peter Wehner, who was a top official in George W. Bush’s White House. “And you can speak about them in a humane and decent and true way.”

Karen Tumulty in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"Nashville, Tennessee (CNN) As opposition to Common Core began to swell in Tennessee, Jeb Bush showed up to an education forum in March of last year, advocating for state officials to keep the higher standards in place.

Now, a little more than a year later, Bush returned to Nashville Saturday night to address the state's GOP dinner, but his push for the state to hold onto Common Core didn't succeed. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill to review the controversial standards and rebrand them with a Tennessee-specific focus.

The bill was widely viewed as a compromise between Common Core opponents -- who wanted to get rid of it altogether -- and supporters, including Haslam, who wanted to stay on track with the new assessments.

What happened in Tennessee has already happened in a number of states as the political momentum against Common Core has caught fire in the past two years, fueled by an onslaught of criticism from conservatives who decry the standards as federal overreach.

And with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- a once-staunch enthusiast of Common Core -- announcing this week that his state will gut the standards and come up with something else, Bush, who has yet to declare his all-but-certain candidacy, remains the only top-tier presidential hopeful who is still defending Common Core.

That doesn't mean he takes issue with states doing what Tennessee and New Jersey are attempting. He's made it clear that he's fine with states choosing an alternative path, as long as those states maintain high benchmarks for students.

""I think the governor [Haslam] has every right to do anything as it relates to education policy,"" Bush told reporters Saturday night, with Haslam standing by his side. ""This should be a state issue. And Washington should have nothing to do with this at all.""

Still, Bush -- unlike other 2016ers -- is not backing away from his endorsement of Common Core as an effective method of measuring student learning. His brother, after all, pushed and ultimately signed No Child Left Behind in early 2002, which imposed test score standards on schools with lower-income students that received federal funding.

As for Common Core, Jeb Bush has expressed frustration with how the standards have been prone to misinformation that have in part helped turn the issue into a political football.

""Because people have a different view of what Common Core is, am I supposed to back away from something that I know works?"" he asked at the same event in Bedford.

As two-term governor of Florida from 1999-2007, Bush focused heavily on education reform, which included implementing higher standards as well as a school voucher program. After he left office, he launched a nonprofit called the Foundation for Excellence in Education that ultimately became a leading proponent of Common Core.

Contrary to what some believe, Common Core standards were not developed by the federal government but by the National Governors Association along with help from state education leaders, parents and teachers. The standards dictate what students in elementary school and high school should know by the end of each grade, and it's up to the states to come up with testing and curriculum that align with those measurements.

The federal government got involved when it gave states financial incentives to adopt higher standards. Those standards didn't have to be Common Core, but since the standards were available, 46 states have adopted them since 2010, though some have since changed or eliminated them.

While Common Core has sometimes been misunderstood, ""perception is reality in politics,"" said Gregory Gleaves, a Republican strategist in Tennessee. ""If the perception is out there that it comes from DC, then it is a political problem. And that was the case for those who supported Common Core.""

Despite praising it during his first term, Christie on Thursday noted that he's heard constant complaints from parents and educators. ""I felt like we had to give it a fair chance, I think we did. We've given it a four-year chance,"" he said. ""They feel as if it's been imposed upon them from Washington.""

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal -- also potential Republican presidential contenders -- were initially on board with Common Core and helped implement the standards during their first terms, but later moved to get rid of them.

Jindal especially has become one of the most vocal opponents of the standards, and a lawsuit he launched against the federal government over Common Core got a hearing in a Baton Rouge court on Thursday.

That's why some states renamed the standards to give them a more local feel. Iowa, for example, named it the ""Iowa Core."" This method was encouraged last year by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who reportedly told state education officials to lose the ""Common Core"" name. ""Rebrand it, refocus it, but don't retreat.""

For his part, Bush has politely tried to correct some misunderstandings about Common Core on the trail, without trying to get to deep in the weeds. At an event in Manchester, a retired math teacher told Bush that he got frustrated with spending more time testing than teaching.

Bush explained that tests are only administered on the state and local level -- not by the federal government -- and proposed that states should mandate that school districts tell parents why they are giving so many tests. That would better facilitate a conversation between parents and educators on how to strike a balance.

""And that's the way it should be. You can do that in New Hampshire,"" he said, urging the man, John Potucek, who's also a state representative, to push back on the state about his complaints. ""But please make sure you have accountability around students, 'cause the net result is you're going to have a decline.""

After the event Potucek told CNN he was surprised by Bush's answer, and while he didn't agree with everything Bush said, he said his Common Core stance wouldn't be a deal-breaker.

""He explained it in a way that I wasn't expecting, and I have to kind of chew on it a little bit,"" he said.

It doesn't always go well, though. At a town hall in Dubuque, Iowa, a retired local school board member named Les Feldman grilled Bush about his support for Common Core. After a tense back-and-forth that lasted several minutes, a somewhat exasperated Bush ultimately concluded with, ""I'm just for higher standards, man.""

""People want a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer""

While opponents dislike Common Core for a number of reasons, Republican primary voters mostly disagree with it because they see it as federal overreach into what should be a local issue. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, said a one-size-fits-all approach to education doesn't work.

""The education needs in Silicon Valley versus rural Iowa versus Tennessee are very different,"" he said. Ogles lead a grassroots campaign that helped mobilize opposition to Common Core in Tennessee and pressure state officials to search for a different approach.

As for Bush, Ogles said he doubts conservative voters will buy the likely presidential candidate's argument that he supports both Common Core as well as a state's decision to opt out and choose their own standards.

""There's certain core issues that most people want a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer, and I think this is one of those issues. You can't be for it and then also be for state standards,"" he said. ""Ultimately, he's going to have to make up his mind, especially here in the southern states.""

Aides say there's no conflict in Bush's position. States had to opt in, and they can opt out.

The bottom line, Bush has argued, is that students need better accountability and there are a variety of ways to make that happen with higher standards.

""There's got to be a better way,"" Bush said at an event in Manchester, New Hampshire earlier this month, saying only half of high school graduates are college or career-ready. ""We can't just keep fooling ourselves and just say 'oh it's because ... kids in poverty can't learn'.""

""That's crap,"" a man in the audience interjected.

""Thank you, brother,"" Bush said forcefully. ""That is crap.""",REAL
"Even by his standards, Donald Trump's reaction to the release of an audio tape of him joking about sexually assaulting women was astonishing:

He seamlessly pivoted from a devastating revelation about his own misogyny to pointing out that Bill Clinton is the Real Sexist.

This is part of a pattern. In the first presidential debate, he congratulated himself for not bringing up Bill's infidelities: ""I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, I can't do it. It's inappropriate. It's not nice."" In case anyone wasn't clear about what he was talking about, after the debate he told reporters, ""I’m very happy that I was able to hold back on the indiscretions with respect to Bill Clinton.""

In case that was too subtle, he had his surrogates bring the matter up repeatedly. Arkansas Attorney General and Trump surrogate Leslie Rutledge told NBC News's Craig Melvin in response to questioning about Trump's treatment of Miss Universe Alicia Machado, ""If we want to dig back through the '90s on comments made about women, we can certainly look to Secretary Clinton referring to Monica Lewinsky as a neurotic loony-toon."" Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) went even further, making shocking new allegations about Hillary Clinton's infidelities with the same women as her husband: ""Look at what she has done: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, my goodness.""

What's the motivation for Trump and his team to dredge the Clinton affairs up? The '90s scandals are pretty old news. There are 18-year-olds voting in this election who weren't alive when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in January 1998, and millions more voters in their 20s and 30s who weren’t really old enough to remember.

And more importantly (Blackburn’s apparent confusion aside), these are allegations about Bill Clinton. If anything, Hillary Clinton, as the cheated-on party in the Flowers and Lewinsky cases, is a victim. Why should any of this reflect poorly on her campaign?

The best explanation we have is twofold. First, the Trump campaign thinks public perceptions around the scandals like those surrounding Bill Clinton have changed in a way that might make that history extremely damaging to the Clintons’ reputation with millennials — if those millennials are briefed on what happened. Thus, bringing it up whenever possible. Second, they view making the conversation about Bill as an effective way to deflect the many, many allegations of sexism against Trump that this campaign has brought to light.

Steve Bannon, the CEO of Trump's campaign and former head of Breitbart News, has believed there’s potential in reviving the Bill Clinton scandals for some time now. In January 2015, way before Trump even announced his run for president, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green talked to Bannon about his and Breitbart’s efforts to gather dirt on the Clintons. Bannon was insistent that Bill Clinton’s marital indiscretions were promising ground:

There’s an obvious counterargument to this claim: When people were aware of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions in the 1990s, it didn’t make him unpopular. Indeed, in the first weeks after the Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky story on January 17, 1998, Clinton’s approval rating spiked upward, from about 60 percent to 69:

After the House impeached him in December, his popularity spiked again, only falling after the whole saga ended with a Senate acquittal in February. It’s hard to conclude anything besides that the scandal was good for Clinton’s reputation with the public at the time, and completely backfired for congressional Republicans, who faced losses in the 1998 midterms for good measure.

And that’s nothing compared with what the scandal did for Hillary. If Bill’s approval ratings edged upward as a result of the Lewinsky affair, Hillary’s positively soared:

So why in the world would a Republican-aligned operative want to replicate that experience?

The answer lies in Bannon’s allusion to his younger female employees. Yes, these scandals didn’t hurt Clinton the first time around — but the constant barrage of scandals created a numbing effect that weakened the power of each individual charge. And, more pertinently, our norms around sexual misconduct have changed dramatically since the 1990s.

The main line of attack against Clinton in the Lewinsky case from Republicans was a combination of a) the president was unfaithful to his wife, indicating moral bankruptcy on his part, and b) he lied about it under oath, undermining the rule of law. It definitely wasn’t that he was abusing the power of his office by having an affair with a subordinate. That would have been a hard argument for congressional Republicans to make, given that House Speaker Newt Gingrich was having an affair with a staffer (now his third wife) during the whole process.

But in retrospect, this is clearly the most important and troubling aspect of the story. Adultery is wrong, but most Americans view it as a private failing that doesn’t necessarily reflect a politician’s ability to do their job. Perjury is also wrong, but the focus on that element reeked of an effort to find a charge, any charge, with which to impeach Clinton.

A president sleeping with a White House intern, by contrast, is clear cut-and-dried sexual harassment. It’s absolutely unacceptable behavior toward a subordinate. In a private company, it’s a fireable offense. It might have been accepted as normal in the '90s, but sexual harassment has slowly come to be recognized as a serious offense in workplaces, and exploiting the power of a senior office to get a lower-ranked employee to consent to sex is a particularly egregious manifestation of it.

More to the point, we now have 20 years of hindsight, and it’s clear that the real victim of the imbroglio was Lewinsky herself, who has been denied the ability to live a normal life with relative anonymity and has become an activist against online abuse after enduring loads of it herself.

The even clearer examples of this are cases where Clinton was accused not of consensual sex but of sexual assault. Lewinsky and Clinton’s previous paramour Gennifer Flowers tend to get placed in the same bucket as Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey, but all three of the latter women accused him of sexual assault. Broaddrick claims that Clinton raped her; Jones alleged that he exposed himself to her; Willey accused him of grabbing her breasts and forcing her to touch his genitals.

You can judge those claims credible or not (having reviewed the cases, I think the Broaddrick allegation is much more credible than the other two), but they’re not ""sex scandals."" They’re accusations of sexual violence. And recent public conversations about Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and other prominent men accused of sexual assault suggest that the American public is much more willing now to treat those kinds of accusations seriously.

There’s an issue with Bannon’s strategy, however. It depends not merely on getting young voters outraged about Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. To work, this strategy has to convince them that Hillary Clinton is somehow complicit in, or responsible for, his behavior. And that is a much tougher sell, both because the evidence is far thinner (the closest thing to a smoking gun is Hillary calling Lewinsky a ""narcissistic looney-toon"" … in a private conversation with a friend) and because of the inherent perversity of blaming a wife for her husband’s crimes.

It’s a move that denies Clinton her identity as a distinct person from her spouse, which in turn undermines any of the feminist appeal this attack line might have had to voters outraged by Clinton’s treatment of Lewinsky, Broaddrick, etc.

Sure enough, when Rachel Kramer Bussel surveyed female millennial voters for Fortune on their views on the scandals, she found that most people she talked to thought it was gross to equate Clinton's behavior with that of her husband, with one commenting, ""I consider Hillary Clinton as a politician independent of her husband, Bill Clinton. Just as I would never associate Bernie Sanders as a politician with his wife, Jane Sanders, I would never associate a politician as a politician with their spouse.""

It’s informative to look at the actual point in the debate where Trump brought-up-by-pretending-to-not-bring-up the Clinton sex scandals. It was directly in response to Hillary Clinton bringing up his treatment of Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and other instances of sexism:

CLINTON: You know, he tried to switch from looks to stamina. But this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs, and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers, who has said... TRUMP: I never said that. CLINTON: ...women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men. CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ""Miss Piggy."" Then he called her ""Miss Housekeeping,"" because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name. TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this? CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado. TRUMP: Where did you find this? CLINTON: And she has become a US citizen, and you can bet... CLINTON: ...she’s going to vote this November. TRUMP: You know, Hillary is hitting me with tremendous commercials. Some of it’s said in entertainment. Some of it’s said — somebody who’s been very vicious to me, Rosie O’Donnell, I said very tough things to her, and I think everybody would agree that she deserves it and nobody feels sorry for her. But you want to know the truth? I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself, ""I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate. It’s not nice.""

Trump was getting pummeled on his own record of mistreating women, and he immediately parried with a reference to the affairs.

You see this relationship in the responses of his surrogates, as well. Recall what Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager said: ""He literally could have gone there and made very clear that he came ready to say some rough things if she was going to challenge him about his abuse – about his record on women."" (Emphasis mine.) Rutledge, the Arkansas attorney general, replied to questioning about Machado by saying, ""If we want to dig back through the '90s on comments made about women…"" and running through the Lewinsky scandal.

This trend suggests that the Trump campaign has assigned a specific role for the candidate's attacks on Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. They’re not deployed right off the bat, or in TV ads, but only as damage control in response to questions about his own record of mistreating women.

That might be smart campaigning; as the old saying goes, ""If you’re explaining you’re losing,"" and trying to parry specific accusations might come off as defensive. But this strategy does have a side effect of implicitly conceding that Trump behaved poorly. Even he and his team aren’t willing to defend his own conduct on the merits. So they deflect to Bill’s — and try to pin it on Hillary in the process.",REAL
"Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was supposed to be a central argument for her forthcoming run for president. Her globe-trotting record as the nation’s chief diplomat, her role championing women’s empowerment and gay rights, and her experience on tough national security issues were all supposed to confer credentials that none of her possible GOP opponents would possess.

But over the past two weeks, with back-to-back revelations that she was working with foreign countries that gave millions of dollars to her family’s charitable foundation and that she set up and exclusively used a private e-mail system, that argument has been put in peril.

Instead of a fresh chapter in which Clinton came into her own, her time as the country’s top diplomat now threatens to remind voters of what some people dislike about her — a tendency toward secrecy and defensiveness, along with the whiff of scandal that clouded the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton.

That side of Hillary Clinton also plays directly into the main Republican argument against her, that she is a candidate of “yesterday” — as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida recently put it — who comes with decades of baggage the country no longer need carry.

“Part of the reason the story is gaining traction is that it reminds people of what the Clinton White House was like,” said American University political science professor Jennifer Lawless. “It reminds people of the scandals, the secrecy and the lack of transparency that were often associated with Bill Clinton’s eight years in Washington.”

Clinton was already certain to face sharp questions during a presidential campaign about her handling of the deadly attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. She has never been shown to have any direct role in events leading up to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, but an inquiry that Democrats call a fishing expedition has been given new life by the revelation that her e-mails were not immediately given to Congress.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), who chairs a special congressional committee on Benghazi, has subpoenaed Clinton’s e-mails and plans to call her as a witness once his investigation is further along. That will mean a showdown in the middle of a presidential campaign in which she will be trying to reintroduce herself to voters.

“You do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this is,” Gowdy said in a news conference last week.

Clinton has said nothing about the e-mail controversy beyond a tweet promising to seek to make the messages public. On Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Clinton needs to talk in more detail about the issue. “From this point on, the silence is going to hurt her,” Feinstein said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Clinton’s problems at the State Department also make it easier for Republicans to connect her to what they see as President Obama’s shaky foreign policy and his broken promise to operate the most transparent administration in history.

Even the smallest things are being looked at anew. The iconic image of her at the State Department, which she chose as her Twitter avatar, shows her seated aboard a military transport plane, reading something — perhaps e-mail — on her BlackBerry.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is weighing a 2016 bid, cast her reliance on private ­e-mail as a serious security risk. “It’s a little baffling, to be honest with you, that didn’t come up in Secretary Clinton’s thought process,” the Republican said in a Friday radio interview.

And while Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite for her party’s nomination, some Democrats last week were more open about their misgivings about her candidacy. On Friday night in New Hampshire, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who might run against her, for the first time broke his silence on her use of the private e-mail account, saying that “openness and transparency are required of governing in the modern age.”

For Clinton, the State Department years were a kind of protective cocoon from partisan politics, even though she was a visible member of a Democratic administration that was doing regular battle with congressional Republicans.

She was rarely called upon to take public positions on partisan issues. Her history as a politically active first lady, senator and failed Democratic candidate for president were rarely mentioned in day-to-day news coverage of her trips and priorities as secretary.

Clinton’s busy pace — she visited a record 112 countries — made it easy to deflect questions about the common assumption that she would make another run for the White House when her time at the State Department was over.

After leaving office, she wrote a memoir of her time at the State Department that was published last year. The book, “Hard Choices,” marked her unmistakable entry into the 2016 presidential race and amounted to a virtual campaign manifesto.

“We have to use all of America’s strengths to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries, more shared responsibility and fewer conflicts, more good jobs and less poverty, more broadly based prosperity with less damage to our environment,” Clinton wrote.

Clinton posted a Twitter message Wednesday night — two days into the e-mail controversy — saying she wants the public “to see my e-mails.” She said she has asked the State Department to review them for release.

That review could also establish whether she broke any rules about the handling of sensitive information.

The e-mail arrangement meant that Clinton’s work ­e-mails were being routed through a private server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home and were not being archived by the government as now required. She handed over 55,000 pages of e-mails upon the State Department’s request last year, more than a year after she left her post.

She has not explained the reason for the un­or­tho­dox arrangement, and her husband declined to weigh in on Sunday. “I’m not the one to judge that. I have an opinion, but I have a bias,” Bill Clinton said in response to a reporter’s question during a Florida appearance, according to Bloomberg Politics. He added: “I shouldn’t be making news on this.”

The White House has distanced itself from the growing controversy. Obama said in an interview with CBS on Saturday that he did not know about Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail until reading news reports last week.

“The president does have the expectation that everybody in his administration takes the steps that are necessary to be in compliance with the Federal Records Act and with the Presidential Records Act,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday. “And again, that means using, as often as possible, using your official government e-mail when you’re conducting official government business.”

White House officials communicated with Clinton on her private account, and it is not clear that any White House official flagged the practice as a potential problem.

The e-mail revelation came after the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation acknowledged in February that it had accepted a foreign-government donation in 2010 without submitting it for an ethics review, as required in a 2008 agreement with the Obama administration.

The 2008 agreement had been reached to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Under the agreement, the foundation was to submit any donation from a foreign government that had not previously given money to the foundation.

The goal was to allow ethics officers to analyze whether it might appear that the government was trying to influence U.S. policy with a donation to a charity so closely linked to the nation’s top diplomat.

The foundation told The Washington Post that it had failed to follow that process in the case of an unsolicited $500,000 donation from the government of Algeria to assist in earthquake relief in Haiti. The donation coincided with a spike in lobbying by Algeria, which was defending its human rights record to U.S. officials.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the donation did not pose a problem because U.S. support for rebuilding efforts in Haiti was well known before the Algerian donation came in.

Prominent Clinton backers have dismissed the recent controversies as minor distractions unimportant to voters and blamed the e-mail flap on a Republican attack machine.

But other Democrats expressed exasperation at what they called a slow and ham-handed response to the e-mail controversy by her small group of advisers. There is no in-house, campaign-grade rapid-response operation, and outside defenders had little notice that a problem was brewing.

“I’d be surprised to find a lot of Democrats who think this is going to have a lot of legs,” said one senior Democratic strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Clinton is not yet a candidate. “But there is a level of angst and annoyance about how badly the thing has been mishandled.”

Several Democrats said the controversy is being blown out of proportion and questioned whether Republicans are being subjected to the same level of scrutiny.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said that Clinton has been aboveboard and that the controversy will quickly fade.

“She’s not trying to hide anything,” Sanchez said.",REAL
"President Obama said Thursday that he will keep 5,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan into 2017, ending his ambitions to bring home most American forces from that war-torn country before he leaves office.

The president’s decision came after an extensive months-long review that included regular discussions with Afghanistan’s leaders, his national security team and U.S. commanders in the field. The move reflected a painful, if predictable, reality on the ground in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has seized new territory over the past year as Afghan troops have taken over the vast majority of the fighting.

“Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be,” Obama said Thursday morning from the White House, explaining his decision. “. . . Meanwhile, the Taliban has made gains, particularly in rural areas, and can still launch deadly attacks in cities, including Kabul.”

[The Islamic State is making these Afghans long for the Taliban]

Obama said he will also dramatically slow the pace of the reduction of American forces and plans to maintain the current U.S. force of 9,800 through “most of 2016.” The post-2016 force will still be focused on training and advising the Afghan army, with a special emphasis on its elite counter­terrorism forces. The United States will also maintain a significant counterterrorism capability of drones and Special Operations forces to strike al-Qaeda and other militants who may be plotting attacks against the United States.

The revised troop plans came after Afghan forces were driven from Kunduz, the first major city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001. Two weeks passed before the Afghans, with some support from U.S. planes and Special Operations advisers, took the city back from the Taliban. Militants are now threatening other cities. “The bottom line is, in key areas of the country the security situation is still very fragile, and in some places there’s risk of deterioration,” Obama said.

The president praised the Afghan government, under the leadership of President Ashraf Ghani, as a willing partner, and he lauded the Afghan troops, who have taken significant casualties. Both were critical factors in his decision to keep U.S. troops in the country.

“Every single day, Afghan forces are out there fighting and dying to protect their country,” Obama said. “They’re not looking for us to do it for them.”

The president insisted that his decision to abandon his plans to bring home U.S. troops was not a disappointment, even as he acknowledged the nation’s war weariness after more than 14 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. “I do not support the idea of endless war,” he said.

His decision to keep troops in Afghanistan follows the surprising collapse of much of the U.S.-trained Iraqi army last year under pressure from Islamic State militants. Republican critics have charged that Obama withdrew troops too quickly from Iraq, precipitating the collapse of the Iraqi army and the rise of the Islamic State.

The president did not mention the Iraqi failures in his statement from the White House. White House officials said that the Iraq setbacks did not influence Obama’s decision and that the two situations are not comparable, because the Afghan government was eager to maintain a long-term U.S. presence. Such conditions did not exist in Iraq.

Afghan officials on Thursday welcomed the move to keep 9,800 troops in the country. “It’s very positive in light of the continued problems that this region is facing,” said Mohammad Daud Sultanzoy, a presidential candidate in 2014 who is now allied with Ghani. “Our security [forces] have shown the will and capability to fight, but we still need the support of our allies, especially the United States.”

In Ghazni province, where Afghan forces are locked in a bloody fight with the Taliban, Gen. Sayed Malok called it a “good decision at the moment but a temporary solution.” He called for a more robust effort to train and equip Afghan forces.

The decision is a significant departure from the exit plan that Obama announced in a White House Rose Garden speech in May 2014. In keeping with his promise to “turn the page” on the costly wars launched by his predecessor, Obama said then that he would reduce the U.S. footprint to about 1,000 troops, all based in Kabul, by the end of 2016.

It is also a stark illustration of how persistent militant threats have stood in the way of Obama’s promises to end the ground wars that have dominated U.S. foreign policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In addition to a resurgent Taliban, al-Qaeda appears to have staked out new ground in Afghanistan, far from the group’s mountain enclaves to the northeast. Last week, U.S. forces began a major operation against al-Qaeda in Kandahar, launching 63 airstrikes on militant training bases.

David Sedney, a former Pentagon official who is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the 2015 fighting season was “the most massive, fiercest” yet.

“The Taliban are already signaling that next year’s offensive will be bigger and bloodier than this year’s. The Taliban are bad; Daesh is worse,” Sedney said, referring to the emerging Islamic State presence in Afghanistan.

Administration officials portrayed the decision as a natural extension of a strategy that was making progress, rather than an indication that the president’s original plan had failed. “I don’t think anyone ever intended that the job, so to speak, would be finished” despite Obama’s time­table, said Lisa Monaco, a senior White House official. “We always said that we would continue to have a presence there.”

[After Kunduz, Taliban is now targeting other Afghan cities]

Under the new plan, the U.S. military will retain bases in Kabul, as planned, but also have forces at Bagram air base and at bases outside Kandahar and Jalalabad, the largest cities in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern regions.

Obama emphasized that Afghans would continue to take the lead role in the fighting, with Americans providing advice and some counterterrorism support from bases outside Kabul. “These bases will give us the presence and the reach our forces require to achieve their mission,” he said.

The larger force of 5,500 troops is projected to cost about $15 billion a year, or about $5 billion more than the smaller, 1,000-person Kabul-based force would have cost.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, speaking at the Pentagon, said the next president will probably need to make decisions about the long-term position of U.S. forces­ in Afghanistan.

“Is it going to be 5,500 forever?” he told reporters. “I can only say this: That is our best estimate now of what we should plan for and are planning for and budgeting for for 2017.”

Although U.S. deaths have fallen off dramatically in recent years, the change may also mean more U.S. casualties. This year, 25 American service members and civilians have been killed in the country.

Obama emphasized that the relatively small American military presence, down from 100,000 at the war’s peak, would not decide the war’s outcome, and he emphasized that peace talks offered the sole viable solution to the long, bloody civil war.

“By now, it should be clear to the Taliban and all who oppose Afghanistan’s progress, the only real way to achieve the full drawdown of U.S. and foreign troops from Afghanistan is through a lasting political settlement with the Afghan government,” Obama said.

Sudarsan Raghavan, Sayed Salahuddin and Mohammad Sharif in Kabul contributed to this report.

In Afghanistan, the art of fighting extremism

Afghans who once watched war from afar forced to flee as front lines shift

Afghan forces straining to keep the Taliban at bay",REAL
"Democrats loyal to Vice President Biden have a three-word response to the politicians and pundits who say Hillary Rodham Clinton’s performance in Tuesday’s Democratic debate makes a Biden campaign less likely: Not so fast.

Appearing eager to tamp down talk that the window of opportunity for the vice president to launch a campaign nearly closed after the debate, loyalists are taking steps to assure potential supporters that there is still a path to the nomination, however competitive and challenging, if Biden decides to run.

The clearest evidence came Friday as the International Association of Fire Fighters informed the vice president the union will endorse him if he enters the race, according to a source familiar with the union’s thinking. That followed a letter e-mailed late Thursday to Biden’s political support network by former senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, who said a Biden campaign would be “optimistic,” “from the heart” and unscripted.

“If he runs, he will run because of his burning conviction that we need to fundamentally change the balance in our economy and the political structure to restore the ability of the middle class to get ahead,” Kaufman wrote.

Even as initial polls showed a bump for Clinton after her performance, Biden’s lingering shadow continued to leave a sense of instability over the Democratic race, leading to questions on the subject for President Obama during a Friday news conference with the South Korean president. “I am not going to comment on what Joe is doing or not doing,” Obama said. “I think you can direct those questions to my very able vice president.”

And in a television interview Friday, Clinton declined to embrace a suggestion from John Podesta, her senior campaign adviser, that Biden must make a decision soon because the race is already engaged. “That’s up to Vice President Biden,” she said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.” “Certainly I’m not in any way suggesting or recommending that the vice president accept any timetable other than the one that is clicking inside of him. He has to make this decision.”

Kaufman’s words were arguably less significant than the author behind them. The former senator — appointed to the seat after his ex-boss became vice president — is Biden’s longest-serving adviser, bridging the divide between the generation of staffers who worked for Biden as a senator in the 1980s and a new crop of lieutenants who came up through the past decade of the family’s public service.

More important, Kaufman has been frequently portrayed as the most reluctant of the trio of inner-circle aides to the vice president to launch a bid and is known to be angry at the frequent portrayals of Biden as being on the brink of announcing his candidacy. A note from him to the alumni network is treated as having more credibility than any leak to the national press corps.

The main issue, still apparently unresolved, remains whether Biden and his family feel ready for the rigors of a presidential campaign so soon after the death of his oldest son, Beau, in May. Nothing Biden has said publicly in recent weeks has suggested an affirmative answer, but he has not addressed the issue directly since before Pope Francis’s visit to the United States last month.

According to those tracking the vice president’s deliberations, a decision could come at any time, although the only certain timetable is the one set by the deadlines for qualifying for primary and caucus ballots throughout the country. Those deadlines began to take effect at the end of the month.

Outside Biden’s tight circle of advisers, many Democrats have long assumed that, beyond personal and family considerations, the biggest factor in the vice president’s decision-making involved Clinton’s political vulnerability.

A month ago, as controversy over her use of a private e-mail account while serving as secretary of state damaged her image, she appeared seriously weakened. That prompted calls from nervous Democrats, or those in the party never particularly partial to Clinton, for Biden to jump in.

[Family issues weigh heaviest on Biden as he considers a 2016 run]

But assessments of Clinton brightened considerably after she delivered an impressive performance in Tuesday’s debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and two other candidates.

Biden loyalists have tried not to be swept up by shifting assumptions about the strength or weakness of the Democratic front-runner, believing she was never as damaged as some were suggesting a month ago.

At the same time, they are not persuaded that this week’s debate fundamentally changed the race in her favor. There is outside evidence backing up that view, including strong interest in Sanders on social media and the fact that the senator from Vermont raised more than $2 million in the 24 hours after the debate.

In recent days, Biden has kept in touch with leaders of key constituency groups, including calls Friday morning. One recipient of a Biden call, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the private conversation, said the vice president actively discussed the emerging campaign strategy, its structure and what constituencies he would win over. Biden believes he has a persuasive message for Democratic voters and would have the resources to run a competitive and potentially lengthy campaign, the call recipient said. Moreover, Biden’s view of the debate, this source said, was that it confirmed that Clinton’s current competition is subpar at best.

Polls and other evidence suggest that if Biden was to enter, the Democratic nomination campaign would quickly become a three-way contest. Clinton would remain the favorite, but it is clear that Sanders has more than enough money to continue well beyond the four earliest states — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Biden has told those he has spoken with that he believes he, too, would have the money to remain in the race past those states. It remains unclear what other unions would follow the firefighters in endorsing Biden. “Any conversations I’ve had with the vice president would be private,” Harold A. Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said in a telephone interview Friday night.

None of the first four contests appears ready to tip to Biden, although because he is not a declared candidate, the polls are not reliable. But some of those partial to Biden have seized on a little-remembered fact from 1992 to offer hope that early defeats need not drive a candidate out of the nomination contest.

[As Biden weighs a 2016 campaign, does he want to be the anti-Clinton?]

In that campaign, Bill Clinton lost 10 of the first 11 contests, from early February through the first days of March. He then secured a string of victories in western and Southern caucuses and primaries, followed by wins in Illinois and Michigan that effectively broke the back of his opponents.

Hillary Clinton’s next major event will be an appearance Thursday before the House committee investigating the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012, along with her e-mail account. That highly charged appearance has taken a turn in her favor as a result of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggesting the goal of the committee had been to weaken her politically.

Then on Oct. 24, Clinton and other Democratic candidates will speak at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, a quadrennial proving ground for presidential hopefuls. Given the breadth of organizing that Clinton’s team has done in the Hawkeye State, Biden’s advisers assume the event will give her an additional boost, although Sanders will have plenty of supporters there, too.

All that would suggest that Biden could delay announcing a decision until after those two events.

There were many lines in Kaufman’s letter that suggested Biden still wasn’t ready to make a decision, despite the encroaching deadlines.

“I know in the daily ups and down of the political swirl, we all get bombarded with the tactics. So sometimes it’s good to take a step back and get real again. Let’s stay in touch,” Kaufman wrote. “If he decides to run, we will need each and every one of you — yesterday!”",REAL
"Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton received a big convention bounce. A new CNN poll has her leading GOP rival Donald Trump 52 percent to 43 percent in a two-way matchup.

The Republican nominee is still under fire for how he reacted over the weekend to the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq.

Khizr Khan blasted Trump at the Democratic convention, noting that unlike his fallen son, Trump has ""sacrificed nothing and no one."" Unwilling to the let the insult pass, Trump hit back, implying that Khan's wife wasn't allowed to speak during her husband's DNC address because of the family's Muslim faith.

The GOP nominee's remarks have sparked outrage from veterans and members of his own party.

""While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,"" war hero Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said.

Trump's campaign is now appealing to GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill to help quell the controversy.

Meanwhile, a mother whose son was killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is also speaking out.

Patricia Smith criticized Clinton at the Republican convention, noting that she has received much different treatment than the Khan family.

""I was treated like dirt. I don't think the Khan family was treated that way. I was treated like dirt. I was called a liar… I don't imagine my son getting killed. I don't imagine that at all,"" Smith said.

Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Clinton attacked Trump's tax cut plan, and again called on him to release his tax returns.

""And while we're at it, we would like to see those tax returns wouldn't we? My husband and I put out, I think about 33 or 34 years' worth, if you're interested,"" Clinton pointed out.

Trump alleges that former presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., made a deal with the devil to endorse Clinton.

""If he would have just not done anything, just go home, go to sleep, relaxed, he would have been a hero, but he made a deal with the devil. She's the devil. He made a deal with the devil,"" Trump said.

There's still a long way to go until Election Day and many of today's controversies could easily be forgotten by November. Clinton's poll bounce could fade as bounces often do, turning this into a tight race once again.",REAL
"Advocates say prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Alabama turned off the water to Kinetik Justice Amun’s solitary cell after he initiated a hunger strike. Officials then transferred him to the Limestone Correctional Facility, which has a “behavioral modification program” known among prisoners as a “hot bay” dorm in which prisoners are forced to live in pairs in hot and squalid solitary confinement cells.
Kinetik, also known as Robert Earl Counsil, is the second leader of the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) to be transferred to Limestone. FAM is a group of incarcerated people and their families struggling to end prison slavery and shed light on inhumane conditions in Alabama’s prison system.
James Plesant, also known as Dhati Khalid, was the first leader to be transferred. Melvin Ray, also known as Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, is the last remaining leader of FAM not to be transferred to Limestone.
According to a statement released by the Ordinary People Society, an Alabama-based human rights group for the incarcerated, Kinetik refused meals upon arrival at the Kilby Correctional Facility on October 21. Before the transfer, Kinetik spent three years housed in solitary confinement at the Holman Correctional Facility.
As previously reported by Shadowproof, Kilby is said to be a “ bully camp .” When one Alabama prisoner learned of Kinetik’s transfer to Kilby, he explained the prison is where they send those that “they have to iron out with brutality.” He added, “When they send you to Kilby, that’s where they break your arms and break your legs.”
Prison officials turned off the water to Kinetik’s cell in response to his hunger strike, advocates say. “They are trying to kill him,” argued Pastor Kenneth Glasgow, founder of the Ordinary People Society and an “outside” spokesperson for FAM. The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Alabama Department of Corrections is currently facing a federal investigation into the rampant violence, overcrowding, and structural decay in its prison system. Kinetik believes his transfer was an act of retaliation by prison officials for his political activity, and that they timed the transfer to prevent him from meeting with this lawyer.
Kinetik is an outspoken advocate for the human rights of the incarcerated. Along with Dhati Khalid and Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun, Kinetik and the Free Alabama Movement were some of the people behind the call-to-action for the national prison strike against prison slave labor, which began on September 9.
Prominent human rights lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, announced he will work with Pastor Glasgow and look into Kinetik’s case.
Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun told Shadowproof the “behavioral modification” dorm or Hot Bay like the one at Limestone is “supposed to be a volunteer program where you volunteer to go into it, but there’s no volunteer aspect. They’re just putting people in it.”
“You don’t have to have anything specific that you’ve done. They’re not serving you any paperwork, there’s not any kind of due process, and they’re getting funding from it,” he said. “So to justify funding, they have to have bodies.”
“Really what they’re doing is they’re targeting individuals,” Bennu said. He noted there is a Hot Bay program at Donaldson, where he is incarcerated. “That’s where James Plesant was originally. T hey framed him. They’re constantly framing and jumping on people in that Hot Bay.”
In the Hot Bay, prisoners are denied visitation, religious services, recreation, and social services, according to the Free Alabama Movement.
“[The Hot Bay] is worse than solitary confinement because they take all of your property and you have a cell mate,” Bennu said. “So the one here at Donaldson is two men to a cell. You’re in the cell with another person for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Y’all defecating with each other. Y’all urinating with each other, passing gas, burping, sleeping, waking up. Constantly, you’re in the cell with the door locked 24/7 with someone else.”
“They’re sending you up there, they’re torturing people up there. People first got exposed to the Hot Bay program from Bibb County,” Bennu recalled.
“There was a bunch of young guys in there. They tore the Hot Bay up,” he said, referring to a July 2015 riot. “They made it where you couldn’t stay in it. They had to get everyone out of there. That’s how bad they are. That’s how bad it was.”
“A lot of people think that when they say they put us in solitary confinement that it’s solitary confinement. In and of itself, that constitutes the torture. It’s not just putting me in the cell. It’s the conditions that they put me in inside of these cells,” Bennu argued.
He continued, “They put us in contaminated cells. What they do is, they have people in solitary and they be complaining about the plumbing or complaining about the lights or the ventilation or something. And they will put us in those cells.”
“They already know there are issues—there’s plumbing issues, there’s maintenance issues, and they’ll put us in these, what they call ‘black out cells’ or contaminated cells. The lights won’t work, we’ll be in the cells in the dark trying to read, ruining our eyesight. The mattress will be torn up, sleeping on top of these concrete slabs. The water will be leaking, running all over the cell. The vents and stuff are filthy. “
“It’s all of these elements that are added on, but that doesn’t show up in the paperwork, and that’s what they’ve done to people like myself. They put me in an isolated cell. I’m on what they call, ‘Walk Along Status.’ That means I cannot interact with anyone. I can’t be around another person. Same thing with Kinetik and James Plesant,” Bennu concluded.
A prisoner previously explained to Shadowproof that Limestone is “where they send everybody and you have to spend one year in isolation.” That prisoner hoped Kilby was not a “layover” on Kinetik’s way to Limestone.
“If he doesn’t reach Limestone, he’ll be okay,” the prisoner said at the time. According to the website for the Alabama Department of Corrections, Kinetik is now incarcerated at Limestone.
The post Alabama Prison Officials Retaliate Against Prison Strike Leader By Cutting Water To Cell appeared first on Shadowproof .
",FAKE
"Email 
On Monday, a man who voted for Donald Trump was arrested for wearing a T-shirt that referenced Hillary Clinton 's comments about Trump supporters being ""deplorables"" to the polls. 
Brett Mauthe, 55, was arrested after he went to the polls wearing a pro-Trump hat and a shirt that read, ""basket of deplorables."" 
According to KSAT 12, Mauthe removed his hat at the request of those who were overseeing the polls. However, since the t-shirt did not violate the election code, he refused to turn it inside out nor remove it. 
Subsequently, he was arrested and charged with electioneering. 
KSAT 12 reports : 
Bulverde police Chief Gary Haecker confirmed the arrest but declined to release details. Instead, he deferred to Comal County's election coordinator, Cynthia Jaqua. 
Jaqua said the offense of electioneering isn't limited to people who stand outside polling places holding signs. Violations can be committed by voters as well. 
""It can mean a T-shirt, a button, a hat, you know?"" she said. ""Anything related to the voting, the party, the candidate."" 
Jaqua declined to release specific details about Mauthe's arrest. 
Jaqua is quoted by My San Antonio : 
It's in the election code. Electioneering is prohibited within a 100-foot marker. You cannot express views for or against a candidate or political party by wearing buttons, T-shirts, hats, whatever else or carrying signs,"" she said. 
Most people who make the mistake manage to avoid going to jail, she added. 
""Every election we have to advise people. Even if it's a school bond issue. They wear candidates' shirts and we just have to remind them. 'Please go into the restroom and turn it inside out.' This is the first time I recall someone getting arrested,"" she said, during two decades working at the county election office. 
""A gentleman did walk in a little while ago with a slogan for Trump, and when I asked him to please take it off, he was real nice, and took it off,"" she added, while working a polling site Thursday afternoon in New Braunfels. 
So, according to this nonsense, a perfectly legal shirt could be worn to the polls one day, but if a politician make reference to the phrase on that shirt it becomes illegal to wear it to the polls the next day? This is utterly ridiculous. 
My question on all of that is, what happened to free speech? Is that recognized as a God-given right in the First Amendment? I mean, I realize that the Constitution is to restrict the federal government, but honestly, shouldn't the states recognize the right of free speech, even in a polling place? Seems to me those kinds of laws stifle the very thing you are electing representatives to ensure are protected. 
Other voters agree with me. 
""I don't feel like you should be preaching to anybody, but I do feel like you should be able to wear a shirt if you want and if it has the candidate,"" Georgina Pereida said after casting her vote. ""I'm kind of shocked, because I think that's part of the freedoms that we're voting for."" 
Jose Tovar claims that you should know the rules and regulations if you are 18 and vote. Again, I ask, why are there laws and regulations restricting this freedom of speech? It's not inflammatory. It isn't a lie. It isn't slander. What's illegal about it? 
I'll tell you, politicians want to control people, and this is one of many means they use to do that. This is what happens when you don't hold your elected officials accountable for the stupid regulations they impose. 
Mauthe decided to not comment anymore after his story began to be altered in the media. 
""The reason I'm not going to talk any more to the media is that the story gets twisted around, and I don't want to give you any comment,"" he said . 
The charged of electioneering is a class C misdemeanor. Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . shares",FAKE
"NGOs should condemn terrorists in Syria, not Russia fighting them – Foreign Ministry Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 22:53 Edited time: 26 Oct, 2016 23:12 Get short URL Aerial view of the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow. © Maksim Blinov / Sputnik The NGOs that demanded Russia’s removal from UN Human Rights Council lack impartiality as they ignore terrorist activities as well as violations by the US-led coalition in Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Commissioner for Human Rights told RT. Trends Russian anti-terror op in Syria , Syria unrest 
Targeting Russia was “a gross misstep on the part of the human rights defenders,” Konstantin Dolgov said. 
“If they call themselves [human rights defenders] they have to be objective. Al least, they have to try to be impartial. How can they assess the human rights situation in Syria in this one-sided manner? Just to join the chorus of Western governments and politicians, groundlessly accusing Russia of bombing civilian targets in Syria, without providing any evidence of this,” Dolgov added. 
READ MORE: US-led coalition killed 300 Syrian civilians in 11 probed strikes – Amnesty 
The NGOs, which failed to provide any solid proof of Russia’s alleged wrongdoings, “completely ignore the bulk of the problem” in Syria, the commissioner stressed. “And the bulk of the problem is the activities of the terrorist organizations like Islamic State, [Jabhat] al-Nusra… which have been persistently killing dozens of thousands of civilians in Syria.” 
Dolgov wondered “how can those NGOs ignore… numerous killings of civilians and destruction of infrastructure by the coalition led by the US?” when “there are multiple examples” of such violations. 
“If you’re against violations of human rights, you should be against violation everywhere and by everybody,” he said. 
The commissioner pointed out that, on Wednesday, Amnesty International – which had not signed the petition – blamed the US for killing hundreds of civilians in Syria and refusing to investigate those incidents. 
The numbers of civilian victims provided by the group – around 300 – “aren’t complete,” Dolgov said. 
“I don’t think that an accurate number. I don’t think anybody there has an accurate number.” Read more Over 80 NGOs call for Russia to be dropped from UN rights council over Syria 
More than 80 international organizations – including Human Rights Watch, CARE International and Refugees International – have signed a petition for Russia to be thrown off the UN Human Rights Council. They claimed that Moscow was no longer fit to hold its position in the United Nations body, due to its military operation in Syria. 
It turned out that most of the organizations are part of the very same Syria Relief Network based in Turkey, however, casting potential doubts over their impartiality. 
The petition came ahead of the UN Human Rights Council election, scheduled to take place on Friday. The Foreign Ministry official opted not to predict the outcome of the vote, but said that Russia was “definitely” running to regain its seat on the council. 
“We’re running because we have a very strong record in the protection of international law; in the protection of international human rights law. We don’t have right now, at this last moment before the election, to prove anything. Our policies are well known and we’ve been one of the most active and creative members of the UN Human Rights Council for many-many years now,” Dolgov stressed. 
West, Arab states ‘protecting terrorists’ who will never win in Syria – Mother Agnes to RT 
Moscow is aware that there some international players who want to block Russia’s activities in the Human Rights Council, because “we’re not professing double standards. We are consistently against politicizing human rights. We have a lot of supporters,” Dolgov added.",FAKE
"Genetically Modified Crops in U.S. Fail to Deliver Expected Yields 10/31/2016 
ALL GOV 
The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat. 
But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides. 
The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides. 
Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise. 
An analysis by The Times using U.N. data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany . Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops. 
At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides. 
One measure, contained in data from the U.S. Geological Survey , shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since GM crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen 21 percent. 
By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen 65 percent and herbicide use has decreased 36 percent. 
To Learn More:",FAKE
" The Fatal Expense Of American Imperialism
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
 Boston Globe "" - THE SINGLE MOST important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, “guns versus butter.” The United States is getting this choice profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overreach.” If our next president remains trapped in expensive Middle East wars, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems.
It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.
The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of US national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.
The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of “successful” US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
This tradition of US-led regime change has been part and parcel of US foreign policy in other parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Wars of regime change are costly to the United States, and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It is nearly a truism that US wars of regime change have rarely served America’s security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A “successful” regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In many other cases, such as the US attempts (with Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the result is a bloodbath and military standoff rather than an overthrow of the government.
WHAT IS THE DEEP motivation for these profligate wars and for the far-flung military bases that support them?
From 1950 to 1990, the superficial answer would have been the Cold War. Yet America’s imperial behavior overseas predates the Cold War by half a century (back to the Spanish-American War, in 1898) and has outlasted it by another quarter century. America’s overseas imperial adventures began after the Civil War and the final conquests of the Native American nations. At that point, US political and business leaders sought to join the European empires — especially Britain, France, Russia, and the newly emergent Germany — in overseas conquests. In short order, America grabbed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and Hawaii, and joined the European imperial powers in knocking on the doors of China.
As of the 1890s, the United States was by far the world’s largest economy, but until World War II, it took a back seat to the British Empire in global naval power, imperial reach, and geopolitical dominance. The British were the unrivaled masters of regime change — for example, in carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Yet the exhaustion from two world wars and the Great Depression ended the British and French empires after World War II and thrust the United States and Russia into the forefront as the two main global empires. The Cold War had begun.
The economic underpinning of America’s global reach was unprecedented. As of 1950, US output constituted a remarkable 27 percent of global output, with the Soviet Union roughly a third of that, around 10 percent. The Cold War fed two fundamental ideas that would shape American foreign policy till now. The first was that the United States was in a struggle for survival against the Soviet empire. The second was that every country, no matter how remote, was a battlefield in that global war. While the United States and the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation, they flexed their muscles in hot wars around the world that served as proxies for the superpower competition.
Over the course of nearly a half century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by US strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire. Often, far more prosaic interests were involved. Private companies like United Fruit International and ITT convinced friends in high places (most famously the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen) that land reforms or threatened expropriations of corporate assets were dire threats to US interests, and therefore in need of US-led regime change. Oil interests in the Middle East were another repeated cause of war, as had been the case for the British Empire from the 1920s.
These wars destabilized and impoverished the countries involved rather than settling the politics in America’s favor. The wars of regime change were, with few exceptions, a litany of foreign policy failure. They were also extraordinarily costly for the United States itself. The Vietnam War was of course the greatest of the debacles, so expensive, so bloody, and so controversial that it crowded out Lyndon Johnson’s other, far more important and promising war, the War on Poverty, in the United States.
The end of the Cold War, in 1991, should have been the occasion for a fundamental reorientation of US guns-versus-butter policies. The occasion offered the United States and the world a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to reorient the world and US economy from war footing to sustainable development. Indeed, the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, established sustainable development as the centerpiece of global cooperation, or so it seemed.
Alas, the blinders and arrogance of American imperial thinking prevented the United States from settling down to a new era of peace. As the Cold War was ending, the United States was beginning a new era of wars, this time in the Middle East. The United States would sweep away the Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East and establish unrivalled US political dominance. Or at least that was the plan.
THE QUARTER CENTURY since 1991 has therefore been marked by a perpetual US war in the Middle East, one that has destabilized the region, massively diverted resources away from civilian needs toward the military, and helped to create mass budget deficits and the buildup of public debt. The imperial thinking has led to wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, across four presidencies: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The same thinking has induced the United States to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, despite the fact that NATO’s supposed purpose was to defend against an adversary — the Soviet Union — that no longer exists. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has emphasized that eastward NATO expansion “was certainly a violation of the spirit of those declarations and assurances that we were given in 1990,” regarding the future of East-West security.
There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War, in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz dreams of US dominance were taking shape, the United States accounted for around 22 percent of world production. By now, according to IMF estimates, the US share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States, at around 18 percent. By 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund, the United States will produce roughly 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy.
Thus comes a fundamental choice. The United States can vainly continue the neoconservative project of unipolar dominance, even as the recent failures in the Middle East and America’s declining economic preeminence guarantee the ultimate failure of this imperial vision. If, as some neoconservatives support, the United States now engages in an arms race with China, we are bound to come up short in a decade or two, if not sooner. The costly wars in the Middle East — even if continued much less enlarged in a Hillary Clinton presidency — could easily end any realistic hopes for a new era of scaled-up federal investments in education, workforce training, infrastructure, science and technology, and the environment.
The far smarter approach will be to maintain America’s defensive capabilities but end its imperial pretensions. This, in practice, means cutting back on the far-flung network of military bases, ending wars of regime change, avoiding a new arms race (especially in next-generation nuclear weapons), and engaging China, India, Russia, and other regional powers in stepped-up diplomacy through the United Nations, especially through shared actions on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, disease control, and global education.
Many American conservatives will sneer at the very thought that the United States’ room for maneuver should be limited in the slightest by the UN. But think how much better off the United States would be today had it heeded the UN Security Council’s wise opposition to the wars of regime change in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Many conservatives will point to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea as proof that diplomacy with Russia is useless, without recognizing that it was NATO’s expansion to the Baltics and its 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, that was a primary trigger of Putin’s response.
In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast over-investment in the military. Today the United States has similarly over-invested in the military, and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. It’s time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.”",FAKE
"A Group Of Reluctant Men Hold Kittens For The First Time. Hilarity Ensures By Tiffany Willis on September 14, 2014 Subscribe Screengrab via YouTube 
Not everyone is a cat fan, and not everyone finds kittens adorable. I confess: I’ve always been a dog person, actually, but in recent years, I’ve become very attached to my adorable cats , too. 
In this video, a group of big burly guys visited a feral cat rescue shelter and were given the opportunity to play with the kittens. They were reluctant, but you can quickly see how they transformed. This is priceless. 
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page . Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one. 
Tiffany Willis is the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with ?the least of these? and disadvantaged and oppressed populations. She’s passionate about their struggles. To stay on top of topics she discusses,?like her? Facebook page ,? follow her on Twitter , or? connect with her via LinkedIn . She also has?a? grossly neglected personal blog ?and a? literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. About Tiffany Willis 
Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan, a proponent of voluntary simplicity, a single mom, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with “the least of these"" -- disadvantaged and oppressed populations, the elderly, people living in poverty, at-risk youth, and unemployed people. She is a Certified Workforce Expert with the National Workforce Institute , a NAWDP Certified Workforce Development Professional, and a certified instructor for Franklin Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens . Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn . She also has a grossly neglected personal blog , a Time Travel blog , a site dedicated to encouraging people to read classic literature 15 minutes a day , and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. Click here to buy Tiff a mojito. Connect",FAKE
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"Donald Trump has summoned a tornado of negative stories that threaten to rip his campaign from its foundation if he doesn't stop, supporters inside and outside Trump's orbit are warning.

Several top backers — including Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — are trying to persuade Trump to move past his feud with the parents of the late Iraq War soldier Humayun Khan, stop bashing fellow Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. John McCain, and refocus his attacks on Hillary Clinton.

But hopes aren't high among Republican allies that Trump, 70, can make such a fundamental change at this point. And the Trump campaign publicly denies that any intervention is occurring at all.

""The reality is that I don't think anyone has any influence"" over Trump, a party source told NBC News.

Within the GOP, strategists are increasingly wondering at what point candidates will aggressively break with Trump or the party will divert resources from the presidential race to head off a collapse down the ticket.

""They don't want to, but he's forcing people's hands,"" GOP strategist Ryan Williams told NBC News. Williams described the campaign as ""free-wheeling and careening from one self-inflicted controversy to another.""

Trump's allies within the party can complain, but they can't say they weren't warned.

Trump has made outrageous and offensive statements from the minute he announced his campaign last year, and he slimed Republican rivals at every step along the way.

He's resisted previous entreaties from party elders to change course after calling Mexican immigrants ""rapists,"" proposing a ban on Muslim visitors to the United States, linking Sen. Ted Cruz's father to the John F. Kennedy assassination and bringing up a federal judge's ""Mexican heritage"" as proof of bias.

""He lacks any kind of self-control,"" a GOP operative said. ""That's not my opinion. It's well demonstrated.""

As Trump regularly reminds voters at rallies, however, he's also survived numerous so-called crises to reach his current position. But the general election isn't the primaries, and the timing and intensity of the current episode stand out.

CNBC's John Harwood quoted an unnamed ally of campaign manager Paul Manafort on Tuesday night who called the mood ""suicidal"" and said Manafort was ""mailing it in"" after concluding that Trump was incapable of taking his advice.

Another source inside the campaign told NBC News that Harwood's account was ""all true"" and that the environment was ""way worse than people realize.""

Lending particular urgency to this week's chaos is Trump's declining position in the polls against Clinton, who appears to be enjoying a major bump from last week's Democratic convention.

Surveys indicate Clinton not only eliminating Trump's gains from his own convention, but also regaining the solid lead she held before FBI Director James Comey's criticism of her email practices depressed her support.

The most recent NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll puts him behind Clinton, 50 percent to 42 percent, with registered voters. A Fox News poll released Wednesday gave Clinton a 49 percent-to-39 percent lead.

Convention bounces are sometimes fleeting, but once the race settles, there are few opportunities for candidates to make up ground, making Trump's missteps especially dangerous.

The Olympics begin this weekend, making it harder for Trump to win free media for much of the month. He could make it up by buying TV time, but the Clinton campaign and allied groups have reserved $98 million in ads through November — compared to less than $1 million on Trump's side.

The less likely Trump looks to win and the more toxic he looks with key voting groups, the more pressure Republican candidates in competitive races will face to denounce him.""

""If Trump wants us to make a choice between our senators and representatives and him, it won't be him,"" another GOP operative in a swing state told NBC News.

But it's a delicate balance. If Republican candidates abandon Trump en masse, party operatives warn, depressed voters might stay home and leave federal and state candidates vulnerable to an electoral wipeout.

While Republican candidates in some swing states have polled ahead of Trump by distancing themselves from his more controversial positions, they still need conservatives to show up and split their ticket to prevail.

So far, few high-profile Republicans running for office have repudiated Trump — even Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire is sticking by him, despite Trump's recent insults and Ayotte's longtime discomfort with his rhetoric.

The further Trump sinks, however, the harder it becomes to hold everyone together.

A veteran GOP strategist suggested that the party should be able to win competitive House and Senate races with smart campaigns if Trump is trailing Clinton by 1 to 5 points. But if he starts to trail by double digits in polls — as he did in Fox's survey — it could create a panic as Republicans rush to disavow his candidacy in the hope that they might survive the coming disaster.

Publicly, Trump and his top aides argue that talk of campaign troubles are overblown.""We're great — it's a terrible week for Hillary Clinton,"" campaign spokesman Jason Miller told NBC News with a smile Wednesday.

Trump, Miller said, has always been the anti-establishment candidate. His refusal to support Ryan against a pro-Trump primary opponent only reinforced that brand.

And the campaign has had some good news mixed with the bad. This week, it raised an impressive $80 million in campaign contributions along with party allies — short of Clinton's $90 million, but a strong improvement for a campaign that built its fundraising operation from scratch after Trump largely self-funded during the primaries.

Some also note that Clinton and other Democrats are vulnerable to negative stories.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Obama administration shipped $400 million in cash to Iran as part of a deal over sanctions at the same time Iran released Americans it had detained. The State Department said that the payment was unrelated and that the negotiations were kept separate, but Republicans accused it of paying a ransom.

Fact checkers have also pilloried Clinton this week for claiming that the FBI corroborated her previous defenses of her email practices.

But other campaign aides expressed concern that Trump failed to capitalize on Democratic weaknesses or emphasize his core strengths because he's too often distracted by side stories and settling scores within the GOP.

""We've got to get back to these basic issues that got him this far,"" former Trump adviser Barry Bennett told MSNBC.

Trump's afternoon speech Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Fla., demonstrated the difficulty. He began with a long and focused recounting of the Iran story and Clinton's statements on her use of a private email server. He also praised Sen. Marco Rubio for endorsing him, extending an olive branch to a onetime critic after having baited Ryan and McCain the day before.

""The campaign is doing really well,"" Trump said. ""It's never been so well united.""

But the usual Trump, still nursing past grudges and falling into bizarre tangents, wasn't far behind.

After discussing Iran, he turned to his old feud with Megyn Kelly, in which he said the Fox News host had ""blood coming out of her wherever."" Trump, who made the initial comment one year ago this week, told the crowd that ""perverted"" Democrats wrongly portrayed it as a comment on menstruation in attack ads, when, in fact, he meant ""her nose, her ears, her mouth.""

Despite his outward confidence, Trump has sounded more concerned about his position. In several interviews and speeches, he's made unsubstantiated claims that the election could be ""rigged"" against him, raising concerns that he might be laying the groundwork to delegitimize a Clinton presidency after a loss.

""Wouldn't that be embarrassing, to lose to Crooked Hillary Clinton?"" Trump said in Florida. ""That would be terrible.""",REAL
"Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, now at the starting line of a general election race, traded shots across the capital Friday in dueling addresses before two very different D.C. audiences -- each warning the other would take the country backward.

Trump headlined the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” summit while Clinton addressed a Planned Parenthood national conference.

Trump, looking to solidify his standing with evangelical Christians, offered assurances Friday that he would “restore respect for people of faith” -- and stressed the “sanctity and dignity of life.”

If there was any doubt he wanted to throw Clinton's Planned Parenthood speech into sharp relief, he took on his presumptive rival later in his remarks. Trump warned Clinton would ""appoint radical judges,"" eliminate the Second Amendment, ""restrict religious freedom with government mandates,"" and ""push for federal funding of abortion on demand up until the moment of birth.""

He also cast her support for bringing in Syrian refugees as a potential clash of faiths. ""Hillary will bring hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom have hostile beliefs about people of different faiths and values,"" he said.

Clinton, meanwhile, in her first speech as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee, said a Trump presidency would take the country back to a time “when abortion was illegal … and life for too many women and girls was limited.”

Clinton thanked the nonprofit women’s health group and abortion provider for their support in the Democratic primary race. In January, Planned Parenthood backed Clinton, offering its first-ever primary endorsement in the group’s 100-year history.

Clinton made it clear that women’s issues would be a staple of her campaign, promising abortion rights supporters that she would “always have your back” if elected president.

Clinton repeated claims that Trump wants to “take America back to a time when women had less opportunity” and freedom.

“Well, Donald, those days are over. We are not going to let Donald Trump -- or anybody else -- turn back the clock,” she told the cheering crowd.

Before arriving at the event, Clinton held a private meeting at her D.C. home with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has been rumored to be a consideration for running mate.

Echoing some of the attacks Warren has made in recent days, Clinton attempted to elevate the importance of this election.

“We are in the middle of a concerted, persistent assault on women’s health across the country,” warned Clinton, who said the 2016 election was “profoundly different” than previous elections.

In what is a campaign trail staple of hers, Clinton highlighted Trump’s insults toward women and asserted that it would be “hard to imagine depending on him to defend the fundamental rights of women.”

Trump, meanwhile, continued calling Clinton, “crooked Hillary” and referred to her ongoing email scandal. He took her to task on her domestic and foreign policy stances.

Trump was interrupted by protesters at the annual gathering of evangelical Christians. The protesters shouted “Stop hate! Stop Trump!” and “refugees are welcome here.”

Trump called the chants “a little freedom of speech” but added it was also “a little rude, but what can you do?”",REAL
"Hillary Clinton’s niece has revealed to Radar that she will be voting for Donald Trump next week. 
Macy Smit is the daughter of Bill Clinton’s brother Roger. 
“Something tells me the Clinton side of the family looks at me and my mother as not good enough, but we’re hard-working!” she said. 
“I support Donald Trump — 100 percent! I have been a Democrat my entire life, but Trump is what we need right now — somebody who is going to stand up for us. I think at this point Hillary just wants it for the history books — to be the first woman president for selfish reasons.” 
Macy, a hairstylist in Tampa, is married to a meteorologist with the U.S. Air Force. Her husband is currently stationed in Kuwait coordinating operations in Iraq. 
“They’re not as good as everyone thinks they are,” Macy said in reference to the Clintons. “I went through some very personal things [without their support],” she added, speaking of a miscarriage she suffered last year. 
“The Clintons are all talk!” said Macy’s mother, Martha. “Hillary says she’s all about family, but she’s got a niece she’s never met and never acknowledged. The Clintons have never helped us out.” 
Even Hillary Clinton’s own family can’t stand her…",FAKE
"Confusion reigned at Budapest's main railway station Thursday morning after Hungarian police allowed hundreds of migrants to enter the building, but the country's railway operator said that no direct trains would depart for Western Europe, the intended destination for many refugees.

A Reuters photographer estimated that up to 1,000 migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia had poured into the Keleti railway station from the square outside. The photographer also reported that some people had stormed the first trains they could find and were trying to push themselves and their children into the carriages through the doors and windows.

The Associated Press reported that announcements were made over the station loudspeakers in several languages, including English, that the trains were not heading west. Some migrants could be seen getting off the domestic trains, while others remained on the carriages amid the confusion.

A train that managed to leave the station, which was  bound for a town called Sopron, was stopped by police about an hour from Budapest, The Guardian reported. The passengers were ordered to get off the train. Some of the passengers grabbed hold of the train track to prevent police from taking them to a refugee camp.

Some reportedly banged on windows, chanting, ""No camp, no camp.""

Some of the migrants had been forced to sleep in the streets of Budapest for two nights after Hungarian police closed the terminal to them Tuesday. At that time, migrants with valid tickets but no travel documents were prevented from boarding trains to Austria and Germany.

There was no immediate explanation from the police or other authorities about why the migrants were allowed to enter the terminal Thursday. The rail company said its stance was due to ""railway transport"" security reasons. A Hungarian government spokesman confirmed to Sky News that no international trains would be leaving the station for ""safety reasons.""

Later Thursday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said his country's military would be deployed at the country's southern border with Serbia as part of a crackdown on migrants and human traffickers.

Orban told the Associated Press in Brussels that Hungarian parliament is pushing through new measures ""that will create a new legal situation at the borders, even more strict than it was."" He added that the migrant ""problem is not a European problem, the problem is a German problem, nobody would like to stay in Hungary ... all of them would like to go to Germany.""

More than 160,000 migrants have crossed into Hungary this year as members of the 28-nation E.U. squabble over how to deal with its worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.

On Wednesday, the leaders of Germany, Italy and France called for a ""fair distribution"" of refugees throughout the E.U. Germany alone is expected to take in 800,000 migrants this year, four times more than its 2014 total. Meanwhile, Italy and Greece, which have had to deal with an increase in migrants attempting the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing, have complained that their resources are being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.

The crisis was given new urgency on Wednesday when images of a drowned three-year-old boy whose body had washed up on the shore of Turkey's Bodrum peninsula spread rapidly on social media. Turkish authorities said the boy was one of 12 Syrians who had drowned trying to reach Greece when the boat they were traveling in sank. The boy's mother and five-year-old brother were also among the victims.

Back in Hungary, migrants had threatened Wednesday to walk the 105 miles to the Austrian border if police would not let them board trains to their desired destinations.

Hungary tantalizingly opened the way Monday, allowing more than 1,000 migrants to pack westbound trains -- and inspiring a migrant surge to the capital -- before it withdrew the option 24 hours later.

Hungary, which for months had permitted most applicants to head west after short bureaucratic delays, now says it won't let more groups deeper into the European Union and claims EU backing for the move.

With an estimated 3,000 people camping outside the station, conditions had grown increasingly squalid despite the efforts of volunteers distributing water, food, medicine and disinfectants.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"By BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo T he “revolving, rigged system” that purports to be American democracy was revealed in all its corporate vulgarity on a Baltimore university stage, last week. Two U.S. Senate candidates of the duopoly parties pretended to support the Green Party’s candidate’s right to join the debate, but failed to protest when cops hauled her away. “This was their ‘Rosa Parks’ moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy” — but failed the test. “The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard.” US corruption during this campaign season is on full display for the entire world to ponder. No one paying even scant attention can deny the thin veneer that is used to hide state sponsored police murder of Africans, structural poverty and the cozy relationship between the 1% rulers in the Democratic and Republican parties. Green Party candidates, such as Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka and Margaret Flowers have forced sunlight’s disinfectant power to expose a rigged, racist and revolting political system that politically and economically devours communities of color, condones police murders of Black youth, intentionally exposes communities, like Flint, Michigan, to poisoned water, promotes drone warfare and the pilfering of the natural resources of Africa and South America. The system, however is finding it more difficult to block out the voices of dissent. Such was the situation this week at the University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs where Dr. Margaret Flowers, the Green Party candidate for the Maryland US Senate seat, was refused the opportunity to participate in the only televised debate alongside Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Republican state Del. Kathy Szeliga. The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard. The sham excuse used to exclude Flowers was that her poll numbers had not reached 15%. But, of course it is difficult to reach the magic number of 15% in the polls when one is systematically excluded from debates and public events. This is the revolving rigged system that Black people know so well. “When the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding.” When the rigged debate started, audience members called for Dr. Flowers to join Van Hollen and Szeliga. Shouts of “let her speak” could be heard from the audience. Responding to the audience, Dr. Flowers took her place on the stage shaking hands with both candidates. Standing on the stage, she turned her attention to the audience and said: “I think it’s important for voters to understand the differences between myself and Congressman Van Hollen and Delegate Szeliga.” With the police moving on stage to remove her, she said, …”I mean, you say you’re a public university and you want to educate the public, but without having a full public discussion, that doesn’t actually happen.” While Van Hollen and Szeliga seemed to agree with Dr. Flowers participating in the debate, when the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding. Delegate Szeliga noted that a third podium was available but both politicians remained silent while Dr. Flowers was forced to leave the stage. This was their “Rosa Parks” moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy but Van Hollen and Szeliga, failed to show the smallest amount of courage, leadership and commitment to anything greater than their individual ambitions and desire for power. Margaret was escorted by police to a sidewalk outside the debate hall and that symbolically represents the state of US democracy. After church on Sunday, a sister said to me, “I know a lot of Black folks are going to vote for Hilary Clinton but I can’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I’ve decided to vote for Jill Stein. I’m going to vote my conscience!” My only response after agreeing with her analysis was to add, “Don’t forget to also vote for Margaret Flowers.“ Dr. Margaret Flowers of Green Party Interrupts Maryland Senate Televised Debate: Margaret Flowers Campaign Information: http://www.flowersforsenate.org [4] Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/margaret_flowers_ejected_debate",FAKE
"What once was considered “pie in the sky” is slowly becoming law. In New York, state legislators just agreed to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, with the full effect beginning in New York City by December 2018. California just passed a compromise raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022. New Jersey and the District are planning to move similar laws. After New York and California, nearly 1 in 5 (18 percent) in the U.S. workforce will be on the path to $15 an hour.

How did this reform go from being scorned as “extreme” to being enacted? Consensus politicians don’t champion it. Pundits and chattering heads tend to ignore it. Many liberal economists deride it as too radical. The idea moved only because workers and allies organized and demanded the change.

Three years ago, fast-food workers walked off the job in what began the “fight for $15 and a union.” With the federal government as the largest low-wage employer, federal contract workers demonstrated repeatedly outside the Pentagon, Congress and the White House, demanding executive action under the banner of a “Good Jobs Nation.”

Progressive politicians added their voices. In Seattle, Kshama Sawant, an engineer and economist running under the banner of Socialist Alternative party, won a seat on the city council in 2013. She made a $15 minimum wage a centerpiece of her campaign and pushed it when in office. The Service Employees International Union, one of America’s largest unions; business leaders such as Nick Hanauer; and political leaders such as Seattle Mayor Ed Murray helped build the coalition needed to get it done. Now wages in Seattle are headed to $15. And in SeaTac, the airport district that passed a $15 minimum wage in a referendum, the wage is in effect now.

In New York, insurgent mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio made raising the minimum wage central to his campaign. He and the Working Families Party joined with striking low-wage workers, labor and community groups, and city council members. Zephyr Teachout’s surprisingly strong challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) put pressure on him to act.

At the national level, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) joined with demonstrating contract workers. The CPC lobbied President Obama to use his executive power to raise wages for federal contract workers. The president responded with three historic executive orders, lifting the minimum wage for contract workers to $10.10, cracking down on wage theft and other workplace violations, and extending paid leave to contract employees.

Obstacles remain. Today, 42 percent of American workers earn less than $15 an hour. And the right to a union has been trampled by relentless and at times lawless corporate resistance. The Republican leadership in Congress refuses even to allow a vote on raising the national minimum wage that, at $7.25 an hour, means full-time workers can’t even raise their families out of poverty.

But now Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, says that “the Fight for $15 launched by underpaid workers has changed the nation’s economic trajectory, beginning to reverse decades of wage inequality.”

Contrary to the business lobby, an analysis by economists at the University of California at Berkeley shows that New York’s increases will not lead to job losses. The higher wages will generate billions in new consumer spending; the increased sales will offset the costs to businesses. In Seattle, the unemployment rate reached an eight-year low after the initial increases in the minimum wage last year.

This movement continues to build. The Fight for $15 and Good Jobs Nation initiatives will ratchet up their walkouts and demonstrations this month. On Monday, an interfaith coalition of religious leaders issued a call for “moral action on the economy.” They will press presidential candidates to pledge to “issue an executive order to make sure taxpayer dollars reward ‘model employers’ that pay a living wage of at least $15 an hour, provide decent benefits and allow workers to organize without retaliation.” As Jim Winkler, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, summarized: “This election is fundamentally about whether the next president is willing to take transformative executive action to close the gap between the wealthy and workers.”

Sanders has made $15 and a union a centerpiece of his campaign. He has urged Obama to take executive action and surely will sign the pledge. Hillary Clinton supports raising the minimum wage to $12.50, allowing cities to go higher. Her position on the pledge is unknown. The Republican candidates — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Donald Trump and Ohio Gov. John Kasich — oppose raising the minimum wage and would likely repeal Obama’s executive orders on low-wage contract workers if elected.

With inequality reaching record extremes, childhood poverty the worst in the industrial world and more Americans struggling simply to stay afloat, this country is desperately in need of bold reform. Yet bold ideas are repeatedly mocked as unrealistic and blocked by entrenched interests and conservative politicians. What the activists and low-wage workers have shown with their fight for $15 is that the changes we need will come if people organize and force them. Many commentators deride Sanders’s call for a political revolution, but that may be the most realistic idea of them all.

Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter.",REAL
"Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal – and the Senate bill to give the president fast track authority to negotiate it – say it will hurt American workers. Here is a look at some of those claims.

President Obama delivers remarks on trade at Nike corporate headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., Friday. Mr. Obama pressed fellow Democrats to support his push for a trade deal with Asian countries.

The Obama administration has a tough sell convincing Congress to grant it “fast track” trade negotiating authority so it can complete negotiations on the biggest regional trade deal in United States history – the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, involving a total of 12 nations (though not China).

The administration sees this as a tremendous opportunity for economic growth. It wants fast track – which would require Congress only an up-or-down vote on a final agreement – to help it secure the best deal it can. Opponents, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, too, say fast track and TPP will cost America jobs. But supporters say their approach is “new and improved.”

Below are some of the critics’ chief concerns, and how fast track and TPP supporters respond:

Critics say free trade kills jobs. Business says it creates them. However, it’s not that simple.

Most economists agree that broadening trade results in economic growth, but benefits are shared unevenly.

“Trade liberalization promotes overall economic growth among trading partners but … there are both winners and losers,” the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in an April 2015 report. It’s also extremely difficult to calculate how a trade deal affects job creation and loss “due to a lack of data and important theoretical and practical matters,” CRS said.

In reviewing the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, CRS found that ""NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters.""

The Obama White House admits that while the overall benefits of trade expansion “may be large” they may also be “unevenly distributed.” Trade, therefore, “can also have adverse effects for some workers” the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said in “ The Economic Benefits of US Trade,” a report issued earlier this month.

So the White House is arguing to members of Congress that policies the administration supports, such as investment in infrastructure, worker training, and education, can offset jobs lost as a result of trade deals.

Assistance for the displaced: Is it enough?

  

 Trade adjustment assistance (TAA) programs provide help beyond traditional jobless benefits for workers displaced by trade. Displaced workers get help to train for a new career. Without such extra help, the thinking goes, these workers might find new jobs but have to take a big cut in pay – or they might drop out of the job market entirely.

The programs are also designed to boost chances of passing trade legislation, drawing in some Democrats who might otherwise be in the ""no"" camp. In a separate bill, TAA has been beefed up to raise benefits and to include service sector workers for the first time.

Whether TAA works, however, is a matter of debate. One 2012 Labor Department study found that, after four years, participants had earnings comparable to a group of non-TAA job losers.

That can be viewed as bad news (even with the help, they aren't doing any better than other people recovering from joblessness). Or as good news (this is a particularly hard-hit group of workers, who might have fared worse without the training).

Politically, “If TAA made even a relatively modest contribution to the ease of enacting free-trade policies, the program’s benefits would outweigh its costs,"" said the report.

When countries such as China and Japan artificially lower the value of their currencies, it costs Americans jobs because foreign imports become cheaper and US exports more expensive. So critics want language in the fast-track bill against currency manipulation.

The bill’s supporters don’t dispute the dangers. That’s why, for the first time, fast-track legislation makes the issue a “negotiating objective” for the administration.

But an enforcement mechanism is too strong a remedy to include in the bill, the administration says, claiming that it would derail trade negotiations. It could also endanger America’s ability to manage its own currency, and lead to retaliation and trade wars, US officials say. They point to modest success in recent years in pressuring China to increase the value of its currency.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York, who calls currency manipulation the “most significant trade challenge this country faces,” succeeded in getting a currency amendment in a related customs bill. It’s not yet clear what will happen to this measure or other attempts to address the issue.

Don’t know what’s in the TPP? That’s because it’s “top secret,” criticizes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts, a vocal opponent of fast track.

That was a complaint that her colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon heard a lot at town halls. As a result, “I really went to the mat on these secrecy issues,” Senator Wyden said at a recent Monitor breakfast.

Senator Wyden, who is the administration’s point man on trade in the Senate, points out that with the fast-track bill, the full text of the TPP and any other trade agreements will be public for the first time – 60 days before Congress starts voting on it. Under fast track, any member of Congress can have access to classified negotiating texts. Members can attend negotiating rounds or be briefed by the administration on request.

That’s not good enough for Senator Warren. She’s pushing a petition that tells US trade officials: “No vote on a fast-track for trade agreements until the American people can see what’s in this TPP deal.” Members of Congress also complain about restricted access for their staffs, on whom they heavily rely.

Critics are up in arms over the way corporations settle disputes over alleged violations of free-trade agreements. The investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, lets foreign countries sue governments in special tribunals, rather than going through the country’s court system.

The problem with this, they argue, is that the tribunals grant huge payments to corporations for the violations – such big payments that countries are then incentivized to change their regulations. Not only do supporters of labor object, they worry that foreign companies will use the tribunals to force changes in US regulations and laws.

The administration says it is writing safeguards into the TPP that will prevent this from happening.

President Obama also told Yahoo Politics: ""There is no chance, zero chance, that the US would be sued on something like our financial regulations, and on food safety, and on the various environmental regulations that we have in place, mainly because we treat everybody the same."" He added, ""We treat our own companies the same way we treat somebody else's companies.""

For the first time, a non-free-market economy such as Vietnam will be included in a broad trade deal involving the US, and that’s a problem, say critics. “Americans should not be forced to compete against desperately poor workers like those in Vietnam who make as little as 56 cents an hour,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, wrote in a letter to to US Trade Representative Michael Froman last month.

In 2013, the US trade deficit with Vietnam was $19.6 billion.

But supporters argue that fast track and the TPP are precisely intended to protect against this problem. The fast-track bill raises the bar for labor, environment, and human rights standards, says Wyden. “Trading partners must adopt and maintain core international labor and environmental standards, with trade sanctions if they do not comply,” he said in a statement last month.

Staff writers David Cook and Mark Trumbull contributed to this report.",REAL
"Go to Article Donald Trump was willing to give up a very fulfilling life that took decades to build, so he could step up and take control of an out of control government. He and his family have already sacrificed so much because he chose to put his country first. Making sacrifices is certainly not something loudmouth liberals like Robert DeNiro are accustomed to. DeNiro was very vocal about his opposition to the wildly successful business man Donald J. Trump. He felt so strongly about his hate for Trump that made a video where he angrily stated he’d like to, “punch him in the face.” Now that Trump won the election in a landslide, DeNiro has chosen to get behind the Trump rioters who are terrorizing cities across America. Anti-Trump rioters are breaking windows, using baseball bats to smash the windshields of innocent citizens who get trapped in their hellish protests as they try to escape. Women who are taking part in the protests are being punched in the faces by men who are also taking part in the George Soros funded protests. American flags are being burned and families who are walking in major cities are being subjected to the most vile and disgusting, hateful language and images imaginable. If this is the kind of America that Robert DiNero is openly supporting? And if so, why would any American pay to see his movie,”Comedian”? 
Robert De Niro gave anti-Donald Trump protesters across the United States his backing Friday as he spoke about how “depressed” the tycoon’s win in the presidential election had made him. 
The 73-year-old star was on the red carpet at the world premiere of his new film “The Comedian” in Los Angeles when he was asked how he was coping with Trump’s victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. 
“How am I doing? I’m very depressed,” the famously laconic “Raging Bull” actor told reporters. 
“We have to just wait and see how things go and keep our eyes ever vigilant on the new government.” 
Asked if he thought the protests were an appropriate response to the outcome of Tuesday’s election, he replied: “Yes, absolutely. Things aren’t being done right.” 
Demonstrators took to the streets in Miami, Los Angeles, New York and other US cities for a third straight night on Friday. 
In Manhattan, they held signs reading “Your Wall Can’t Stand in Our Way” — a reference to the anti-immigration barrier the billionaire has promised to build on the US border with Mexico. 
De Niro hasn’t minced his words in his criticism of Trump, describing him as “a punk,” “a pig” and “an idiot.” 
“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said before the election. 
Earlier in the day a town in southern Italy where De Niro’s grandparents came from offered the actor a means of escape. 
“If, after the disappointment of Trump, he wants to take refuge here, we are ready to welcome him,” said Antonio Cerio, the mayor of Ferrazzano. 
“The Comedian,” De Niro’s passion project which took him eight years to bring to the big screen, was part of this year’s program for the American Film Institute’s annual AFI Fest in Los Angeles. – Yahoo 
Here’s a clip of Trump-hater Megyn Kelly promoting DiNero’s hateful rant against Donald J. Trump:  ",FAKE
"Tweet 
Pediatrician Jim Smith is thrilled with his new career as a professional Clown. He specializes in children’s birthday parties but has the skill set to perform at kindergarten graduations as well. “Leaving the hospital was the best thing I’ve ever done. Can I say that again?” said an elated Dr. Jim Smith. 
Dr. Jim Smith first became interested in becoming a Clown after suffering from extreme burnout. Catalysts included helicopter Moms, antivax Jenny Mccarthy supporters, and the general stress of saving the world. After dealing with one particularly overbearing soccer mom, he stormed out of the office ranting, “**** this noise; I can’t take this horse**** anymore!” and never returned. Using obscenities for the first time felt nothing short of liberating. 
Dr. Jim Smith’s new lifestyle is entirely different from the clinic he used to work at. Previously, he woke up at 6am sharp but now he rolls out of bed in the neighborhood of 11:30am to ensure he is prompt for lunchtime birthday contracts. “I take my responsibilities very seriously,” said Dr. Jim Smith proudly. After a solid hour of challenging work, he practices his Downward Dog poses. 
In spite of all the Clown perks, Jim has admittedly taken a rather large pay cut. As a pediatrician, the Doctor made $200,000.00 per year. Now he makes $17,500.00 a year if fully booked and tipped generously. However, Dr. Jim Smith says that eating Ramen noodles with his wife and kids is definitely worth the consistent joy he experiences performing slapstick routines. “Freedom really has no price tag,” said Clown Jim Smith. 
Dr. Jim Smith’s favorite part of the job is showcasing his balloon skills. “Even though the kids cry sometimes, they don’t die,” he stated enthusiastically. Creating these balloon animals has proved to be significantly more meaningful than diagnosing heart defects. 
Dr. Jim Smith sleeps soundly knowing the nurses aren’t “hunting (him) down like cattle.” Instead, parents and children alike watch him smile and laugh as if he’s the greatest entertainer in the world. He even gets to wear a red nose! And doing mime is endlessly entertaining and unpredictable too. 
Dr. Jim Smith’s old colleagues have inquired what degree is needed to become a Clown. They’ve also expressed curiosity as to whether it is a high demand skill. 
Dr. Jim Smith’s only regret is that he didn’t become a Clown sooner. 315 Shares ",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- Leaders from more than 70 cities and counties, some going against their states, joined a legal brief filed Monday asking an appeals court to allow President Barack Obama's deportation relief policies to move forward.

""Continuing to delay implementation of the president’s executive action on immigration hurts our economy and puts families at risk,"" New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), who spearheaded the effort with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) as part of Cities United for Immigration Action, said in a statement.

""Cities are where immigrants live, and cities are where the president's executive action will be successfully implemented,"" he continued. ""Our cities are united, and we will fight for the immigration reform this nation needs and deserves -- whether in the courtroom, in Congress, or in our communities. Make no mistake about it: our voices will be heard.""

Under the policies Obama announced in November, as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants with longstanding ties to the U.S. may be able to stay and work temporarily.

Twenty-six states, led by Texas, filed the lawsuit, arguing the relief programs would cause them harm and violate the Constitution. They've won support from some Republican members of Congress and governors.

But 14 states and the District of Columbia, including some led by Republicans, filed an amicus brief, saying the programs should be allowed to move forward.

Garcetti and de Blasio spearheaded a similar brief in January and received about 30 signatures. The latest brief is backed by mayors, county executives and governments from 73 cities and counties in 27 states. The National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors also have joined the brief. The cities and counties are home to 43 million people, according to organizers of the brief.

Some cities signing onto the brief are in states that joined the lawsuit against the president's executive actions. Houston, the most populous city in Texas, is part of the cities' and counties' brief, as is the state capital, Austin. Cities and counties in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Indiana, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Florida and Utah also signed on, even though their states are suing over the executive actions.

The brief argues the executive actions would be good for public safety and the economy in their cities and counties, and would help immigrants integrate and keep families together. The delay in implementing Obama's orders, the brief argues, ""harms their cities and counties and all residents thereof by forestalling the critical benefits of that action.""

The Obama administration is seeking a ruling to allow the programs to move forward. The Justice Department filed an appeal last week asking the court to lift the injunction.

UPDATE: 3:45 p.m. -- Nearly every House Democrat -- 181 of them -- signed on to another amicus brief filed on Monday asking the appeals court to lift the preliminary injunction on Obama's immigration policies.

The House Democrats' amicus brief says that they ""well understand the importance of ensuring that the executive does not exceed its constitutional or statutory authority."" But it goes on to say that the lawmakers understand the executive has the authority to use its discretion in enforcing the law.

""The broad discretionary authority to set removal policies and priorities is both explicit and implicit in the Nation’s immigration laws and has been exercised also by prior Administrations of both parties in ways consistent with the Secretary’s actions,"" the brief states, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.",REAL
"BREAKING : Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Endorses Donald Trump BREAKING : Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Endorses Donald Trump Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 26, 2016 Our vets love Trump. 
They know he’s the ONLY one who can fix the broken system. 
Our vets are dying in the streets and the hallways of VA hospitals, while illegals and refugees enjoy taxpayer “freebies.” 
The ONLY way this will change is by getting rid of the global liberals and voting AMERICA FIRST! 
In an emotional meeting, Trump spoke to the Bay of Pigs veterans, who proudly endorsed him. 
Donald reassured them all that we would “Make America Great Again.” 
One vet, at the end of the clip, can be seen wiping his eyes. 
He knows his country is LOST and this is the last chance to get it back. 
Don’t let him down, America. 
Watch the video: Truly honored to receive the first ever presidential endorsement from the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. #MAGA #ImWithYou pic.twitter.com/U7xVj1ajMs 
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"By Covert Geopolitics
We have been very, very suspicious of Donald Trump since he began his political run.
Many believed he was an outsider who was our “only hope” to tame the US federal government beast. But it has become very clear he is not.
First, Wikileaks showed that Killary herself actually approved Trump to be her competitor. According to an email sent from an assistant at the Clinton campaign, Hillary was aware that Trump was going to run before the political process was fully underway.
Clinton advised the mainstream media to push his legitimacy as a “pied piper” candidate because she realized, after looking at the poll numbers, that she wouldn’t stand a chance at winning the presidency against any of the establishment republicans without making them “pied pipers” – it just so happened that Donald was the easiest to play the role considering his long history of friendship with the Clintons.

In addition, the mainstream media was more than complicit in creating a narrative that the 2016 presidential elections were about Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump from the get go.
But, barely reported in the media, was that after the 3rd presidential debate, Clinton and Trump went out for a night on the town together… and where they went is of great interest.
They went to an annual Jesuit function which is usually full of New World Order types.
THE JESUITS One of the more interesting things that occurred right at the end of the Jubilee year in early October, was that the Jesuits installed a new Superior General, with the date to commence being actually at midnight on the end of Jubilee.
We found this interesting because there is plenty of evidence that the Jesuits are at least one major arm of what you can call the illuminati.
In fact, the Jesuits were founded in Spain by what various reports call “crypto Jews” – those who are Jewish but pretending to be Catholic. Certainly at that time in Spain it was safer not to be a Jew.
Even Wikipedia, which wouldn’t recognize a conspiracy if it were directly presented by its participants has this to say about the Jesuits:
… In the first 30 years of the existence of the Society of Jesus there were many Jesuit conversos (Catholic-convert Jews) including the second Father General Diego Lainez … The original founder Ignatius … said that he, “would take it as a special grace from our Lord to come from Jewish lineage.” 
At the beginning of the Al Smith dinner party after Cardinal Dolan was introduced, a joke was even made by a speaker that “everyone in attendance is doing their part in supporting their charitable efforts and that it couldn’t be done without the support of many of the other devoted “Catholics” on stage like Henry Kissinger, Howard Rubenstein, and Mort Zuckerman” – all of whom are obviously Jewish so this remark was naturally met with a lot of laughter…
In fact, an extraordinary amount of controversy swirls around Jesuits. They are said to constitute the “Black Church” and thus adhere to the same Satanic religion as the world’s elite bankers supposedly hold.
The leader of the Jesuit order is commonly recognized in conspiratorial circles as the “Black Pope” whose signature staff is a crooked cross. Historically, the Jesuit Order has been seen as one that shirks no crime in expanding the power of the Church.
Lest this sound entirely outrageous, one must note that the Jesuits are, for instance, the inventors of concentration camps, which they established in Paraguay in order to incarcerate and then torture the native indians of the area.
But the litany of attributed Jesuit evil is even darker than that according to those who believe in the order’s continued malicious pursuit. The supposed founder of the Bavarian-based Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt, was a Jesuit.
In fact, the order is reputed to have been deeply involved in the Illuminati’s initial expansion, and chances are it is still deeply involved.
One more thing that highlights the evil of the Jesuits is their extreme oath of induction which all superiors must take in order to be elevated to the higher rungs of the organization. This is taken from the book Subterranean Rome by Carlos Didier, translated from the French, and published in New York in 1843 and reads in part,
“…promise and declare that I will, when opportunity present, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals, as I am directed to do, to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex or condition; and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics, rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the walls, in order to annihilate forever their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly, I will secretly use the poisoned cup, the strangulating cord, the steel of the poniard or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honor, rank, dignity, or authority of the person or persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agent of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Faith, of the Society of Jesus…”
One of the most poignant quotes regarding the malevolence of the Jesuits comes from Marquis de LaFayette 1757-1834; who was a French statesman and general who served in the American Continental Army under the command of General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.
His quote is as follows:
“It is my opinion that if the liberties of this country – the United States of America – are destroyed, it will be by the subtlety of the Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, for they are the most crafty, dangerous enemies to civil and religious liberty. They have instigated MOST of the wars of Europe.”
THE BIG BASH When evaluating Jesuit behavior and influence, please keep in mind that both Donald Trump and Hillary’s VP, Tim Kaine, are Jesuit educated. And it should be of GREAT interest, therefore, that practically on the eve of the US election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton partied the night away at a Jesuit function that included such prominent Jesuit-trained attendees as Henry Kissinger.
Not only did the two not look like sworn enemies… they looked like two star crossed lovers going to their first prom.
We have long held to our stance that Killary will be the next President of the US. The amount of vote rigging, murders and shenanigans to even get her to where she is so far has been tremendous… and it won’t stop.
That said, if by some fluke, and the Diebold machines malfunction or people in the US wake up slightly and Donald Trump gets elected… it is pretty clear they are on the same team and, as we’ve said previously, nothing major will change.
So, if you were hoping that this election could change things in the US… get over that hope right now. It might change things, but only for the much, much worse.
This charade is being played right in front of everyone’s eyes and most do not understand what is happening or why jokes like the “Catholic” joke is actually funny to these elite people.
They are laughing at the peasants’ stupidity and lack of understanding, not because the men mentioned are Jews… anyone with half a brain knows that.
… The groundwork for global governance has been laid, don’t let them blindside you as they attempt to carry out their nefarious plot. Donald Trump even stated at the dinner, “We’ve got to come together, not only as a nation, but as a world community.”
https://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2016/10/25/rigged-election-hillary-trump-caught-partying-like-bffs-kissinger-jesuit-gala.html+https://youtu.be/rP45LHZ_kIM 


Above image – the chief staff of EU paying homage to their emperor, the Jesuit pope.

These people are called Magis because they can do magic, and the basic tenet why these Magicians are so very successful is that most people want to be fooled.
***
Aside from the fiat monetary scam and bloodsoaked petrodollar, another significant source of funds for the Nazionist Khazarian Mafia is the “healthcare” industry which registered a whopping $3.09 trillion in 2014 , and is projected to soar to $3.57 trillion in 2017, in the US alone. We believe that this is just a conservative figure. 
We can all help the revolution by avoiding all Khazarian pharmaceutical drugs, defeat any viral attack and scaremongering, like the Zika virus, easily by knowing how to build our own comprehensive antiviral system. Find more about how we can kill three birds with one stone, right here . 
Source: Covert Geopolitics 
Related: The Jesuits: Priesthood of Absolute Evil The Rothschild’s Royal Papal Knights Are Jesuit Controlled The Jesuits Have Chosen Their New Black Pope Ultra-secret Plot Behind Hillary Exposed: Yes, The Jesuits Will Be The Power Behind The Throne The Revolutionary War: How America Became A Jesuit Enclave Revisionist History; The Jesuits Founded America! As Told By The Victors Illuminati, Jesuits, Obama & Government Connections The Jesuits: Historians Expose Conspiracy to Rule the World Obama’s Jesuit Connections Surface Former Jesuit Priest Exposes How the Vatican Created Islam CERN Watch: Jesuit Connection Confirmed! David Icke on the Jesuit Order — Exposing the Elite The Diabolical History of The Society of Jesus (aka The Jesuits) Knight of Malta: Controlled by the Diabolical Society of Jesus (aka Jesuits) ",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders clashed fiercely Sunday over jobs, trade and Wall Street while agreeing that much more must be done to address a two-year-old water-contamination crisis that has paralyzed this majority-black city.

The session included the sharpest exchange yet between the Democratic presidential candidates over their economic plans and records. It included a heated argument over the auto industry bailout, which is of keen interest in Michigan, where both Democrats and Republicans will hold presidential primaries Tuesday.

Clinton emphasized the “hard choices” that lawmakers and President Obama made in 2009, facing the prospect of a collapse in the auto industry, and she noted that Sanders, a senator from Vermont, voted against a bailout measure.

Sanders said he voted against forcing “hard-working” Americans to bail out “the crooks of Wall Street.”

“If everybody had voted the way he did, I believe the auto industry would have collapsed,” Clinton said.

Sanders angrily hushed Clinton as she sought to interject. “Excuse me, I’m talking,” he said, drawing gasps from the audience.

“If you’re going to talk, tell the whole story,” Clinton replied.

“You’ll get your turn,” he snapped.

The debate, which aired on CNN, was added to the Democrats’ schedule after Sanders emerged as a stronger-than-expected challenger. Flint was chosen as the site to highlight the water crisis, which has become a focus of liberal anger.

The episode began two years ago, when state overseers who had taken over the city switched its water supply to the Flint River without treating the water to avoid corrosion of lead pipes. Lead leached into the water supply, and although residents began complaining immediately, the problems did not fully come to light until January, amid revelations that state officials had spent much of 2014 and 2015 dismissing those complaints.

Both Clinton and Sanders have said that the crisis would never have happened in a richer, whiter city. The debate featured heartbreaking and harrowing stories about children who stopped growing, lost their hair or were intellectually stunted by poisoned water.

Sanders used his opening statement to repeat his call for the state’s Republican governor to resign over what he called a “dereliction of duty,” before shifting to his core message about economic inequality.

For the first time, Clinton agreed that Gov. Rick Snyder should “resign or be recalled.” Previously, she had said that her approach was to try to solve the problem and that assigning blame could wait.

“The state should also be sending money immediately to help this city. I know the state of Michigan has a rainy-day fund for emergencies,” Clinton said. “It’s raining lead in Flint.”

Sunday’s debate opened with a moment of silence in honor of former first lady Nancy Reagan, who died Sunday at 94. The session was the first Democratic debate since the Super Tuesday contests, when Clinton emerged with a lead of nearly 200 pledged delegates over Sanders.

She slightly expanded her delegate lead after a win in Louisiana on Saturday, while Sanders claimed victories in Nebraska and Kansas. The debate had been underway for only a few minutes Sunday when Sanders’s victory in the Maine caucuses was announced.

Sanders’s successes and his vow to remain in the race through the Democratic convention lent a new tension to the debate. Gone were the magnanimous and polite gestures each had offered the other in previous debates.

“Let’s have some facts instead of some rhetoric for a change,” Clinton said testily.

“Let me tell my story, you tell yours,” Sanders said at another point. “Your story is voting for every disastrous trade amendment and voting for corporate America.”

Sanders mocked Clinton’s defense of the Export-Import Bank as helpful to small businesses. He would shutter the institution he called the “Bank of Boeing” for its efforts on behalf of the aircraft maker as it competes with rival Airbus.

Sanders’s opposition to the Ex-Im Bank put him at odds with the Democratic caucus in Congress — a fact that he embraced.

“I don’t want to break the bad news,” Sanders said sarcastically. “Democrats are not always right. Democrats have often supported corporate welfare. Democrats have supported disastrous trade agreements.”

Both candidates have campaigned hard in Michigan. Tuesday’s vote here will serve as a test of Clinton’s institutional support from unions and of Sanders’s appeal with the working class.

It could also set the stage for a contentious fall election. Clinton has already begun shifting her focus on the campaign trail to a potential general-election matchup against the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, although neither he nor the rest of the Republican field got much mention Sunday.

“Donald Trump’s bigotry, his bullying, his bluster are not going to wear well with the American people,” Clinton said.

Labeling Sanders a communist “was one of the nice things he said about me,” Sanders joked.

Michigan is a swing state that both Republicans and Democrats see as a potential victory in November. Trump is favored to win here Tuesday, and his tough-guy message on international trade has found an audience here.

Over several days of campaigning here, Sanders has focused squarely on jobs and trade, accusing Clinton of backing international trade deals that stripped Michigan of good-paying jobs.

He also stressed his long opposition to trade pacts such as the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership with Pacific Rim nations. Clinton had backed the TPP deal, a signature initiative of President Obama, when she was secretary of state. She announced last year that she opposes it, which Sanders allies call an election-season conversion that she could reverse if elected.

“I am very glad, Anderson, that Secretary Clinton has discovered religion on this issue,” Sanders said to moderator Anderson Cooper. “But it’s a little bit too late.”

The Sanders campaign thinks that the primary map becomes more favorable to him as the race shifts out of the South, but his window to overtake Clinton is narrowing.

But with momentum from other primaries that featured large numbers of African American voters, Clinton holds a comfortable lead in Michigan. She has focused her campaign here on black voters, who were about a quarter of the primary electorate in 2008, and on the Flint crisis.

A Detroit Free Press-WXYZ poll released late Saturday shows her leading Sanders by 56 percent to 31 percent, a gap that “suggests it may be too late for him to battle back to a victory here despite a strong effort in recent days,” the newspaper wrote.

The poll had her in a statistical tie with Sanders on the question of trustworthiness and up three points on the question of who would be the “more progressive president.” Only 17 percent of those polled felt Sanders had the best chance of winning in November.

At a news conference before the debate, Sanders acknowledged that he trails Clinton in Michigan, in part because he has continued to struggle to reach African American voters, who represented about 23 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in 2008.

During the debate, he fumbled a question about what “racial blind spots” he has by suggesting that only black people live in ghettos.

“When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or when you get dragged out of a car,” he said.

For her part, Clinton misstated her own position on gun control, a central issue in her campaign.

“I think we have to try everything that works to try to limit the number of people and the kinds of people who are given access to firearms,” she said.

That goes further than her official position that loopholes in existing gun-control laws should be narrowed and that people on the federal terrorist no-fly list should be prevented from buying guns.

Despite predicting a continued strong challenge from Sanders, Clinton’s advisers hope that by April, her delegate advantage will make it virtually impossible for Sanders to claim the nomination.

The catastrophic failure represented by the Flint water crisis set the tone for the feisty debate, with both candidates expressing outrage and promising action.

“President Sanders would fire anybody who knew about what was happening and did not act appropriately,” Sanders said.

Sanders also demanded a rebate for Flint residents who paid their water bills throughout the crisis, something that has already been done. Snyder has obtained a $30 million appropriation to pay Flint water bills and give residents money back.

“You are paying three times more than poisoned water than I pay in Burlington, Vermont, for clean water,” Sanders said.

Clinton pledged to “get rid of lead everywhere” within five years if she is elected.

Elahe Izadi in Washington and Steve Friess in Flint contributed to this report.",REAL
"Photo by SarahTz | CC BY 2.0 


Empty Declarations of Democracy… Vacant Boasts of humanity 
For decades, Israel has held itself out as being the lone “democracy” in the Middle East; a state where the rights of individuals could not and would not be held hostage to the autocratic whims of royalty, but rather a full partner to a free and robust electoral process that guarantees not just meaningful input from the governed but the ability to challenge state policies as the winds of change blow from “the river to the sea.” 
Once again, recent events have proven this to be just so much a perverse myth… empty rhetoric… second only to the brazen unfounded Israeli boast of having the “most humane army in the world,” even as the body count of Palestinian children grows in cemeteries and prisons that have become very much its own unique brand of 21 st century youth hostel. 
Recently, Hagai El-Ad , an Israeli and Jew, who serves as executive director of B’Tselem (The Israel Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), spoke before the UN Security Council urging it to take immediate action against Israel’s illegal settlements. 
Demagoguery and Inhumanity Exposed 
Not quite 1400 words in its entirety, one paragraph in particular of El-Ad’s testimony sums up life for millions of those captured by a democracy that sees day as night… pain as pleasure. Crushing, despite its brevity, the power and pain of these words could easily be part of an opening statement by a war crimes prosecutor at a tribunal called to hold Israel accountable for crimes unseen since the Nuremburg tribunals some 70 years ago. 
“What does it mean, in practical terms, to spend 49 years, a lifetime, under military rule? When violence breaks out, or when particular incidents attract global attention, you get a glimpse into certain aspects of life under occupation. But what about the rest of the time? What about the many “ordinary” days of a 17,898-day-long occupation, which is still going strong? Living under military rule mostly means invisible, bureaucratic, daily, violence. It means living under an endless permit regime, which controls Palestinian life from cradle to grave: Israel controls the population registry; Israel controls work permits; Israel controls who can travel abroad – and who cannot; Israel controls who can visit from abroad – and who cannot; in some villages, Israel maintains lists of who can visit the village, or who is allowed to farm which fields. Permits can sometimes be denied; permits must always be renewed. Thus with every breath they take, Palestinians breathe in occupation. Make a wrong move, and you can lose your freedom of movement, your livelihood, or even the opportunity to marry and build a family with your beloved.” 
In a free democratic society these comments, while perhaps controversial, would certainly not constitute sedition. In an open, healthy State these words would surely give reason to pause and reflect… but never serve as a rational trip-wire to strip their speaker of his birthright as an unbound citizen empowered to support his government for policies he finds just but condemn it for those that bear the star of tyranny. It is a distinction that Israel has failed to adopt or learn over the course of its 50 year subjugation of millions whose only crime is to be born Palestinian in occupied land with sign-posts everywhere that simply say “ Jews only.” 
Beating of Chests 
Not long after El-Ad’s powerful speech before a world body entrusted with securing fundamental rights and liberty for all of its citizenry, the hue and cry could be heard among Israeli political elite to silence such subversive talk. Thus, Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan of the Likud Party undertook the first steps of reprisal by announcing he was considering submitting a bill to the Knesset that could remove the citizenship of Israelis who act against their country in international organizations. According to Bitan, “El-Ad’s actions at the Security Council are a blatant violation of the trust citizens must have for their country, so he should go find another country where he could be a citizen.” 
Alarming, one might ask; no, not at all… merely another in an endless daily stream of steps by a government second to none when it comes to autocratic, indeed dictatorial, control of every fiber of its citizens freedoms, particularly their ability to access and exchange information without fear of retribution. 
Much is known and largely ignored about the thousands of Palestinian civilians that have been targeted and slaughtered by the Israeli military machine in occupied Palestine, whether in Gaza or the West Bank. Indeed, the killing fields of Gaza or execution alleys of back street Jerusalem no longer acquire more than a passing fancy or footnote in the evening news spread across a world now busy with outrages of more recent vintage. After 70 years of slaughter, it’s just so much business as usual. 
So, too, we have seemingly become numbed to the reality that thousands of Palestinian political prisoners languish in isolation, many sitting year after year, some for decades, in administrative detention cells of political prisons… uncharged, undefended and untried, tortured in ways that leave the spirits of those still roaming the now empty cellblocks of South Africa’s notorious Robben Island relieved their misery was ended quickly through state sanctioned executions by “suicide.” 
The Mighty Censor’s Sword 
Closures of Palestinian news rooms and television stations are commonplace… yet no more remarkable than assaults by Israel upon Palestinian journalists that long ago moved into triple digits and show no sign of abating. The Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms ( MADA ) has documented a pattern of such attacks by Israel running, for some time now, at almost 400 per year. Although the exact number of Palestinian journalists killed or injured by Israel over just the last decade may never be known, it has been documented that seventeen lost their lives in Gaza, alone, during the months of bombings which it endured in 2014. 
Dozens of Palestinian journalists and private bloggers have been arrested by Israel and held for violating vague administrative codes that typically come down to the application of entirely undefined prohibitions such as “incitement.” Dareen Tatour , a 35-year-old poet and Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested and placed under administrative detention on charges of inciting violence via her poetry which she posted on Facebook and which merely praises those who fight against Israeli domination. Also arrested and charged with criminal incitement was 19-year-old Anas Khateeb , on the basis of her Facebook posts which included such alarming statements as “Jerusalem is Arab,” and “Long live the Intifada.” 
Recently, Palestinian journalist, Samah Dweik , was released from prison having served almost six months for an alleged incitement charge which resulted from comments about the occupation she posted on her private Facebook account. For most of her sentence, her family was banned from visiting or having any contact with her. She was but one of over 20 Palestinian journalists recently imprisoned by Israel for allegations of incitement, along with hundreds of other Palestinian activists or bloggers who have been targeted for arrest and prosecution for nothing more than postings of political opinions about the Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance on social media. Dweik’s release came not long after Israel and Facebook entered into an agreement to “work together” to monitor Palestinian posts. 
The Sword Cuts Deeper 
Increasingly, Palestinians are not the sole victims of an Israeli policy to silence “dissent” or to dramatically curb the nature and extent of information made available to its citizens… Jews and Arabs alike. For example, not long ago, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman confronted the military station director after Army Radio broadcast a documentary on the life of the leading Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish , saying that material like Darwish’s shouldn’t darken Israeli airwaves. 
In what can only be described as a systematic effort to control both journalists and citizens in their ability to read and write, to access and exchange information, and to reach informed opinions essential to a public and democratic dialogue about current and future Israeli policies, its machinery of censorship has become the linchpin of the State’s view of what is appropriate knowledge and speech and what is not. 
Thus, of late, Israel has begun to demand of social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter that they have input, if not control, over what posts ultimately find their way into the stream of ideas and debate within the Israeli public at large. According to Quds Press, Facebook and Twitter recently deleted thousands of posts, pages and accounts as a result of demands made by the Israeli Ministry of Justice based upon little more than amorphous claims that the information posed a threat to the safety of Israel. 
On an even more ominous note, the Knesset has begun to formulate legislation that would require foreign entities to actively monitor social media sites for information deemed to be offensive to Israel. Under the legislation, content based liability could be found for material published by foreign nationals, addressed to foreign nationals and posted on foreign websites thereby reducing the concept of free speech in Israel to one that is cast by the prevailing political winds of the day and little else. 
Recently the chief Israeli censor notified dozens of Israeli bloggers and social media activists that any material they might wish to publish in their personal blogs or social media accounts, when dealing with a wide range of what was described as “security” related subject matters, must be vetted. Although provided a generic and ambiguous catalog of those areas to be submitted for clearance, the targets, themselves, were not permitted to disclose the makeup of the list under penalty of law. If history can be counted upon to be the guidepost of what subject matters must be prescreened before publication, in the past the list has included such security “sensitive” subject matters as: 
+ Cooperation agreements with foreign militaries; 
+ Letters to the editor on military or security matters; 
+ Contacts with foreign countries; 
+ Anything connected to the nuclear industry; 
+ Information about official delegations abroad; 
+ Any material which constitutes a “danger” to people’s lives; 
+ Immigration policies from “endangered” nations; 
+ Use of foreign sources or material that touch upon any of these areas; 
+ Detention of those suspected of security offenses; 
+ Any information about military industries; 
+ Appointments, resignations, firings, rumors about IDF activities or commanders 
Finally, in a readily transparent effort to maintain a democratic illusion of a free and uncensored flow of information in the market place of ideas, pursuant to the censorship regulations there are complete prohibitions against leaving any blank spaces or other potential indicators in one’s writing or posts that might suggest or lead one to conclude that material has been deleted. 
For those disturbed over this censorship procedure, it must be remembered that we are, after all, talking about a state that recently placed 101st out of 179 countries in the press Freedom index worldwide. Indeed, this appalling placement for the Middle East’s sole democracy is significantly better than Israel has scored in the Freedom index for quite a number of years. 
For those wondering just how widespread, indeed systemic, Israel’s censorship procedures are, it is a country with a military censor procedure that has banned, outright, publication of, soon to be, some 2000 articles and redacted various information from 15,000 others in recent history. That is thousands of articles professional journalists and editors decided were of public interest but which never saw the light of day. Imagine how many more events of public interest went uninvestigated, or articles which were not written, issues debated, or challenges brought to bear for the Israeli body politic to consider because of self-censorship by journalists or editors too tired or principled to seek pre – approval of their body of work by government censors. Stories simply swallowed up and disappeared by an industry of censorship. 
Human Rights… Israel Wrongs 
Although not yet law, in what can only be described as an all-out onslaught against core democratic rights and values, over the last several days consideration of a bill has begun in the Knesset that would empower the Defense Minister to detain a citizen without trial; to deny one the right to pursue or obtain employment in a field of interest; to limit access to various public places; and “to impose any other order or restriction necessitated by considerations of national security or public safety”. 
Earlier in January 2011, the Knesset endorsed a right-wing proposal to investigate some of Israel’s best-known human rights organizations for “delegitimizing” its military. Among others was B’Tselem. The proposed investigations would entail inquiries into the funding of several human rights groups that have a history of criticizing Israeli policies. At the time, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel described the proposal as a “severe blow” to Israeli democracy and critics labeled the policy as “ McCarthyist “. 
Recently a variation on that bill became law in Israel compelling non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive more than half of their funding from foreign state entities to declare so publicly. Ultimately, the legislative criteria were tailored specifically to silence criticism of government policies by some 27 NGO’s… 25 of which, including B’Tselem, are considered to be left-wing… while the other two are non-affiliated. As intended, the bill will have absolutely no impact upon right-wing and pro-settlement NGOs which are funded almost entirely by private donations from powerful Zionists and Zionist entities from outside of Israel. 
One can only imagine that upon returning home to the firestorm awaiting him, following his speech before the UN, Hagai El-Ad surely felt what it must have been like to be an activist leftist Jew in the United States during the dark days of McCarthy. 
On the other hand, perhaps El-Ad should consider himself very fortunate indeed. On his twitter account, Arab-Palestinian MK Ahmad Tibi mocked MK David Bitan’s call for El-Ad’s de-citizenship saying: “Why stop at removing citizenship? Why not destroy the home of the B’Tselem director-general? Why not bar his entire family from entering the country, remove his land, submit them to administrative detention, and put checkpoints and closures in his neighborhood?”",FAKE
"**Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**

Buzz Cut:

 • No, Sanders wouldn’t be a better match for Trump

 • Power Play: Senate flipping out?

 • Reid tries to diffuse Dem tensions

 • Fox News Latino poll: Hillary tops Trump by 39 points with Hispanics

 • Look out below

NO, SANDERS WOULDN’T BE A BETTER MATCH FOR TRUMP

 Bernie Sanders is looking a lot like John Kasich these days. And, no, not because of their hand gestures.

In the final round of “Super Sloppy Double Dare” that was the GOP nominating process, Kasich argued that he should be the nominee because he handily beat Hillary Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head matchups while now-presumptive nominee Donald Trump consistently lagged.

Now, Sanders who is, as Kasich was, out of the running for the nomination is asking his party to throw over the frontrunner for the sake of general election viability. And there’s data to back him up.

In this week’s Fox News poll and the most recent NYT/CBS News poll, Sanders outperforms Clinton against Trump. And it had been true for Kasich, too.

But it doesn’t really matter. First, any Democrat without her enormous negative ratings would match up better with Trump than Clinton does. Throw Martin O’Malley or even an imaginary candidate (insofar as those are different concepts) in a poll, and you might see a similar result.

And that’s because those candidates haven’t been the target of millions of dollars in attack ads or even garnered much in the way of media scrutiny. These are not just hypothetical matchups, they are, in many ways, hypothetical candidates.

Head-to-head matchup polls in primaries can be useful if you’re talking about frontrunners and/or candidates who have been substantially defined in the minds of voters.

Then there’s the question of how the process shapes the product. Competing for your party’s nomination definitely can damage your reputation. Lordy day, it can.

But, there is also a payoff at the end of the line, as the party swings in behind its man or woman. So it’s not just that Sanders’ head-to-head matchups with Trump aren’t reflective of the general-election reality, neither are Clinton’s.

The current Trump bump is real. The NYT/CBS News poll tells the tale: Eight in 10 Republicans said that the party should unite behind him, despite their disagreements. And in his battle with Clinton, Trump is getting the same post-victory boost his predecessor, Mitt Romney, got four years ago.

After a primary season of unrivaled acrimony, the realities of the binary choice of the general election are setting in.

The big question now is what Clinton’s bounce will look like.

It will certainly be there. Eighty percent of Democrats in the poll said that party unity was essential to victory and 83 percent said Clinton could do that. For Republicans, just 63 percent said unity was essential to victory and just 64 percent believed Trump could deliver on that task.

That discrepancy helps explain Trump’s deficit in this survey.

What we must wait to see is how big a boost Clinton will get – perhaps less than Trump considering that her party is already more united. We also can’t know whether the surge in partisan loyalty we see for Trump today will last, or if the party’s underlying fracture will reassert itself.

The answers to both sets of questions will depend on how well Clinton and Trump traverse the eight weeks until convention time.

WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE…

 The Scientist: “They don’t snore, but might creak during their slumbers. For the first time, trees have been shown to undergo physical changes at night that can be likened to sleep, or at least to day-night cycles that have been observed experimentally in smaller plants. Branches of birch trees have now been seen drooping by as much as 10 centimetres at the tips towards the end of the night. ‘It was a very clear effect, and applied to the whole tree,’ says András Zlinszky of the Centre for Ecological Research in Tihany, Hungary. ‘No one has observed this effect before at the scale of whole trees, and I was surprised by the extent of the changes.’”

POWER PLAY: SENATE FLIPPING OUT?

 With the presidential picks in both parties essentially decided, party operatives are turning to the Senate as the next battle heading into the November election, and Republicans are on the defending side. Can they keep their majority, or will Democrats flip it back in their favor? National Republican Senatorial Committee National Spokeswoman, Alleigh Marre, gives her picks for seats she believes the GOP can maintain while Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Communications Director, Sadie Weiner, gives her take on seats she thinks Democrats can easily steal.

Reid tries to diffuse Dem tensions - WSJ: “Divisions within the Democratic Party, including the eruption of violence on the part of Bernie Sanders’s supporters at a state party convention in Nevada, have thrust Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid into the center of an intraparty brawl in his final months in office.”

[Matthew Continetti says Obama’s policy of non-intervention extends to his party’s own civil war.]

Fox News Latino poll: Hillary tops Trump by 39 points with Hispanics - Fox News Latino: “With less than six months to go before the presidential elections, Latinos overwhelmingly support Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, according to a Fox News Latino poll released on Friday. The poll found that 62 percent of registered Latino voters would head to the ballot box for Clinton in November, while only 23 percent would support Trump on Election Day – a finding that many experts say is not surprising given the two candidates’ differing stances on issues important to Latinos.”

[A new Fox News poll says that when it comes to most issues, Clinton comes out ahead of Trump, but trails badly on two of the most important: economy and terrorism.]

Fox News Sunday - Trump policy adviser Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, join guest host John Roberts on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.

#mediabuzz - Host Howard Kurtz wraps the week’s media news. Watch Sunday at 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Guests include Bob Woodward, Brit Hume and Tucker Carlson.

RACE NOTES

 Thirty-five years ago, Trump released his taxes and showed he paid not one cent - WaPo

Trump helps pay off Chris Christie’s campaign debt, but mocks gubernatorial girth - NYDN

Minnesota State GOP trying to prevent funding for Trump - [St. Paul] Pioneer Press

WITHIN EARSHOT

 “I’m 3 million votes ahead of [Bernie Sanders] and I have an insurmountable lead in pledge delegates and I’m confident that just as I did with Senator Obama, where I said, you know what? It was really close. Much closer. Much closer than it is between me and Senator Sanders right now.” -- Hillary Clinton talking on CNN about the state of the Democratic primary race between her and Bernie Sanders.

 

 LOOK OUT BELOW

 AP: “The San Diego County Department of Animal Services says a baby opossum is doing well after being rescued from a toilet. The soaking wet little creature is seen in photos posted on the department’s Facebook page. The agency says a Pacific Beach woman found the critter in her toilet on May 1 and Animal Control Officer Carlos Wallis responded and took it to the San Diego Humane Society’s Project Wildlife. It will be released when it is old enough to survive on its own. A second opossum was found in the home later, along with a broken window which likely allowed the animals to enter. Animal Services Deputy Director Dan DeSousa says both opossums are doing OK.”

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"Your daily reality snack Georgia Abandons Ukraine's Anti-Russian Obsession 
After a brief period in which both Ukraine and Georgia appeared to be united against Russia, it now appears that the two nations are moving along very different paths Originally appeared at Russia Direct 
In October, Georgia didn’t support any of Ukraine’s resolutions denouncing the Kremlin’s foreign policy within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). That is surprising, given how many analysts had by now assumed that Georgia and Ukraine were on the same page when it came to Russia. 
The two resolutions deal with “the political implications of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine” and human rights abuses “on the occupied Ukrainian territories.” By supporting them, PACE recognized the military conflict in Ukraine as “Russian aggression” for the first time and called on the Kremlin to withdraw its forces from the eastern part of Ukraine. Moreover, it denounced the parliamentary elections , recently conducted by Russia in Crimea . 
When the Georgian delegation in PACE didn’t support these resolutions, the nation’s pro-Western parties reacted strongly. For example, the United National Movement lambasted the Georgian government and accused the country’s former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, of supporting Russia. Moreover, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Georgian president and now the governor of the Odessa region in Ukraine, described such a stance as a “disgraceful” move. 
However, an immediate response came from one of the members of the Georgian delegation in PACE, Eka Beselia. She retorted that Tbilisi needed to defend its own national interests. Even though this statement seems to have alleviated the increasing conflict, the video of Russian-Ukrainian journalist Matwey Ganapolsky, who accuses Georgia of betraying Ukraine in favor of Russia, fuelled the tensions. In contrast, Russian pundits see the unwillingness of Georgia to vote for the PACE resolution as a sign of improvement in Tbilisi-Moscow relations. 
In reality, the reluctance of the Georgian Dream, the ruling party in Georgia, to approve these resolutions is just the logical conclusion of complicated relations with Kiev. Since the start of the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space , Georgia and Ukraine were largely in the same boat. 
After the success of the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi and the Orange Revolution in Kiev, the newly elected governments were closely connected with each other and teamed up against Russia. This resulted from friendly relations between Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Timoshenko and former president Viktor Yushchenko on the one hand, and Georgia’s Saakashvili on the other hand. 
However, their relationship was rather pragmatic in its nature, although officially Tbilisi recognized Ukraine as one of its closest allies. Since 2007 the democratic processes in the two countries have started moving in a reverse direction. Saakashvili’s penchant for conducting an aggressive policy as well as his authoritarian inclinations was increasing, while Ukraine faced the corruption and the political rivalry between Timoshenko and Yushchenko. 
The more impact this had on the countries’ stability and development, the more obvious became the fact that the ruling elites from both sides did not support democratic reforms, but only the regimes that were friendly to them. Thus, Georgian-Ukrainian relations could be seen as a form of cooperation between governments, not between the people. 
And this trend became relevant until the 2010 presidential elections, when Georgia’s civil society and population called on the government to support democratic processes and regime change in its “brother” country. From then on, Georgia has been shying away from supporting the political regime in Ukraine and focusing more on the support of the country’s own population. 
However, Ukraine refused to consider such tactics, with its official representatives criticizing the Georgian Dream coalition for supporting Russia during the 2012 parliamentary elections. Moreover, Kiev cooperated with Georgia’s United National Movement, which was openly accused of building an authoritarian regime and egregious human rights abuses. 
Logically, the new Georgian government under Ivanishvili cannot help paying attention to this fact. But it was relatively reticent and didn’t respond, even when Georgian volunteers came to fight in Eastern Ukraine to support Kiev and accused Tbilisi of supporting Russia. That had some implications for the Georgian Dream: It was seen as a political force that is capable of defending the country’s national interests. 
Moreover, Georgian voters also saw the fact that Saakashvili was appointed as the governor of the Odessa region as an unfriendly move from Ukraine, as a slap in the face, because the former Georgian president was legally prosecuted in his home country, which meant that Ivanishvili couldn’t fulfill his pledges and restore justice [During the election campaign he promised to put Saakashvili in jail for corruption and the abuse of power — Editor’s note]. The problem was exacerbated when Kiev granted Saakashvili Ukrainian citizenship, which made it impossible to imprison the former Georgian president. 
Saakashvili crossed the red line during the latest parliamentary elections in Georgia during the campaign. First, his colleagues from the United National Movement visited Ukraine. Second, he openly called for a coup d’état against the Georgian government, which he sees as pro-Russian. In fact, he threatened to conduct a new revolution in Georgia. This was the last straw for the Georgian Dream. 
It is safe to say that the current Georgian political elites started seeing Ukraine as a real headache and the shelter for dubious and controversial Georgian politicians from the United National Movement accused of different wrongdoings and legal violations. 
However, with the victory of the Georgian Dream in the 2016 parliamentary elections, a lot has changed. Moreover, the odds of the party of winning the constitutional majority are really high. It means that the influence of the party is growing in the Georgian parliament and even more could change. 
As a result, the government won’t necessarily have to take into account the views of other political forces to take decisions. It can be pretty outspoken now that it won’t put up with anti-government moves and initiatives like the ones promoted by Saakashvili. Moreover, the Georgian voters, who are seeking to have those involved in the violations during Saakashvili’s tenure prosecuted. So, in this regard, the electorate supports the Georgian Dream. 
Thus, all this indicates that Georgian-Ukrainian relations have always been more complex and nuanced than they seemed to be at first glance. During Saakashvili’s tenure, there was cooperation between his government and the ones of Timoshenko and Yushchenko. However, eventually, Tbilisi shifted its priority from supporting top political officials to supporting society and people. 
Ukrainian politicians should keep in mind that the Russian factor is not the only one that determines the Ukrainian-Georgian agenda. Providing shelter to Saakashvili also does matter. So, to improve the relations with Tbilisi, Kiev should take into account its national interest and support the Georgian people instead of the country’s politicians.",FAKE
"Topics: Politics , Hillary Clinton , Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , President , US Constitution Thursday, 10 November 2016 
If anyone in this ""great"" land knows anything about renovation, it may well be presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump. A veteran of the real estate industry for several decades now, Trump surely has renovated his share of properties, buildings and even golf courses. His latest project, however, could be his most ambitious: the Bill of Rights itself. 
""Look at this thing,"" The Donald said as he held a copy the seminal American document before a crowd of reporters. ""It's old. I mean, it's old, like really old. You hear what I'm saying? It is old."" 
When asked what his intentions for the document were, Trump proposed a ""renovation"" of the foundational document ""just like he would any of [his] older buildings that didn't cut the mustard anymore. I mean, Ivana wasn't cutting it anymore, so I got Marla Maples. New is better. I think we all know that, new is better. New equals better. Sometimes you have to tear something down to make something new, right? And then it's all better."" 
When asked what he specifically meant by ""tearing down the document"" that is the basis of this country's inalienable rights, Trump continued, ""Hey look, I don't know when this thing was written, probably a long time ago, like in the 1920's or something, but it doesn't make any sense anymore. I have a real problem with an old, stinky document telling me how to live my life. If we're gonna make America great again, the first thing we have to do is make these document new again, and that's what I'm gonna do on the first day in office. Bingo-bango, new document for the new America. I mean, really, no one reads this stuff anymore."" 
The presidential hopeful was then asked how he planned to rejuvenate the Bill of Rights. ""First of all some of this spooky language needs to get cleaned up. Like how is a working-class guy like me, the average citizen, supposed to understand this stuff? The trial of all crimes (except in cases of impeachment, and in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when in actual service in time of War or public danger) shall be by an Impartial Jury of the Vicinage, with the requisite of unanimity for conviction, the right of challenge, and other accostomed [sic] requisites; and no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherways [sic] infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment by a Grand Jury; but if a crime be committed in a place in the possession of an enemy, or… blah, blah, blah. Vicinage? That's not even a word, is it? Unanimity? Impeachment? These aren't words like hammer, dumptruck or bigly. They're talking in circles. That's right, they're talking in circles. So that one's gone. Just out. Accostomed? Otherways? These Founding Father clowns can't even spell!"" 
Trump's furor grew as he read more of the document. ""Freedom of religion? No one goes to church anymore. Who cares? That one's going too. All it does is protect these Muslims who blew up buildings. God forbid they blow up my towers. That's out. Freedom of speech? Freedom to lie, that's what I call it. Freedom to lie, like those bastards on CNN and Hillary over there. This seventh here, that's a doozy. It says in ""all matters involving more than 20 dollars"". That's a joke. I tip 20 dollars at Starbucks when I get my coffee. That one's out. ""Due process of law"" … another joke. Out! This third one, ""quartering soldiers,"" what's that? I have waaaay too much respect for our soldiers to start chopping them up into quarters. I mean, that's like serial killer stuff, right? No, absolutely not, I will not chop up soldiers. On my first day in office, I will find anyone who is trying to chop up American soldiers and make them pay."" 
When prompted that he may be misinterpreting the articles in the Bill, Trump lashed back. ""Of course I am! Look at it some time. Who can understand this stuff? Of course I'm misinterpreting this stuff. Maybe this is how they talked in the 1920's, but not now, not in Trump's America. And the ideas are just stupid. Look at this fourth one. No illegal ""search and seizure""? If I can't walk into someone's house and arrest him, how am I gonna maintain law and order? If I can't just take someone's stuff, how am I gonna know what's going on in this country, huh? You tell me. And this old piece of paper is trying to tell me when I'm president - not if but when - I'm gonna restore law and order. This fourth one, how many shootings in Chicago happened because my police have their hands tied by this stupid fourth amendment. I mean, that's what I'm gonna do, starting on the first day of my term. The very first day. Here's another peach: no ""cruel and unusual punishment."" What's that? How else do you deal with terrorists? That's why we got soft. These terrorists knew they could come over, bombs some buildings, kill a bunch of people and know this piece of paper was gonna make sure they didn't get their precious feeling hurt. First day in office, that one's out!"" 
One reporter asked The Donald if he knew that the ""stinky, old"" document he was holding was supposed to protect the American people from injustice, and false legal claims. (He was also asked if he knew what ""quartered"" meant). ""Hey, I'm not saying people don't have rights. People have rights. Of course people have rights. Sure they do. I'm just saying they don't need all this stuff. The first day I'm in office, the very first day, I'm gonna make a nice simple list of rights, you know, without all this fancy nonsense. It's outdated. We need something for 2016, something nice and simple."" 
Trump then said he had to meet with his team of architects and engineers to draw up plans for a wall along the southern border of the US, which he would start building on his ""very first day in office."" Make Chris Dahl's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
"The European Union’s sharpening divisions over a spiraling refugee crisis broke into the open Thursday with two leaders strongly disagreeing in public over whether the asylum-seekers were threatening “Europe’s Christian roots.”

That was the language used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he warned Europe against allowing in mostly Muslim families. A day after a drowned Syrian toddler washed up on the Turkish coast, another European leader retorted that Christian values demanded helping the less fortunate.

The furious exchange — a rare breach of the E.U.’s buttoned-down decorum — came as Hungarian authorities apparently laid a trap for thousands of asylum-seekers who had packed Budapest’s central train station after days of worsening conditions outside the station. Police had blocked them from entering the station for days but allowed them in early Thursday.

But a refugee-packed train apparently bound for the Austrian border came to a halt just west of Budapest, in a small town where dozens of police officers were waiting on the platform. They tried to force people off the train to take them to a migrant-processing center, threatening their chances to make it onward to Western Europe.

By day’s end, there was a standoff, with the packed train surrounded by police and the migrants refusing to budge. Some of the passengers received medical treatment on the platform.

[European railways become ground zero for the migrant crisis]

Orban, Hungary’s nationalist leader who has spearheaded attempts to turn back the migrants, said Thursday that he had little choice but to seal his nation’s border with razor wire, soldiers and a high fence.

“We Hungarians are full of fear, people in Europe are full of fear, because we see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation,” he said in Brussels in a raw joint appearance with European Parliament President Martin Schulz. Orban and Schulz, a veteran politician from Germany, made no attempt to paper over their differences or their distaste for each other.

The Hungarian leader blamed Germany for the crisis, saying that its open-door policy toward Syrian asylum-seekers was propelling a wave of migrants to undertake dangerous journeys toward Europe’s heart. Germany expects 800,000 asylum-seekers this year, and it has said that it does not plan to turn away Syrians.

“The moral, human thing is to make clear: ‘Please don’t come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country. Stay there. It’s risky to come,’ ” Orban said.

Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have overwhelmed Europe’s capacity to respond in recent months, opening stark divisions. Some leaders believe that the world’s largest economic bloc — a vast territory of 503 million residents — is more than capable of accommodating refugees. Others, including Hungary’s Orban, believe the continent’s population is in a far more delicate state.

The divisions could threaten some of the most basic tenets of the E.U., an alliance built on the ashes of World War II in a bid never again to allow such destruction. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that a Europe with no internal borders — a key achievement of European unification — could be in question if no solution to the refugee crisis is found.

He warned that the splits emerging during the refugee crisis could do lasting damage to the 28-nation alliance, which was founded on a spirit of consensus and burden-sharing.

“This is a crucial moment for the European Union,” Schulz said. “A deeper split of the union is a risk we cannot exclude.”

Orban’s fears are shared by many Eastern European nations, which have pushed hard against any attempt to require them to take in asylum-seekers. Slovakia has said it will accept only Christians. In Estonia, where fewer than 100 migrants have been resettled, police on Thursday were investigating a suspicious early-morning fire at a dormitory that was housing victims of Syria’s war.

[Britain takes in so few refugees from Syria they would fit on a subway train]

But the concerns also extend to Britain. There, fewer Syrians than would fit in a London subway train have been accepted this year. British media reported Thursday that Prime Minister David Cameron would soon announce plans to take in “thousands” more Syrian refugees, a striking turnaround for a leader who a day earlier had said that the answer to the crisis was not simply taking in “more and more” refugees.

Elsewhere in Europe, the refusals brought mounting anger from leaders who are more sympathetic to the growing crowds of asylum-seekers.

“For a Christian, it shouldn’t matter what race, religion and nationality the person in need represents,” European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday, launching into Orban before the two met in Brussels. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, proposed resettling at least 100,000 refugees across Europe.

In France, President François Hollande said the death of the toddler is “a tragedy, but it’s also a call to the European conscience. Europe is made of values and principles.” Images of the child’s body lying facedown and partly in the water on a Turkish beach evoked consternation around the world.

Hollande said he had just reached an agreement with Germany on a proposal for mandatory quotas to more equitably spread refugees across the E.U. Some European countries “are not shouldering their moral obligations,” he said.

Merkel, meanwhile, said she understood that not every nation was prepared to take on as large a burden as her country was doing. But she said it was impossible for Germany, Sweden and Austria alone to continue taking in the vast majority of the incoming asylum-seekers.

“The Geneva Convention does not apply only to Germany but also to every state,” she said, referring to the international treaty that requires countries to take in refugees of war.

Orban has vowed to seal Hungary’s borders by Sept. 15, empowered by emergency measures expected to be approved by the country’s parliament in the coming days. The measures would give authorities broad powers to crack down on illegal migration.

Outside Budapest’s elegant stone-and-glass-fronted station Thursday evening, people living in tents and atop worn woolen blankets sprawled across a vast public plaza and into an adjacent subway concourse. Tourists carrying frame backpacks slipped into the station entrance past women cradling babies, men pacing anxiously and children arguing over the few available toys.

Refugees expressed a keen awareness that Hungary does not want them — and said the feeling is mutual.

“Hungary is a poor country. They can’t give us the life we’re looking for. They can’t even give us food or water,” said Yahya Lababidi, a tank-top-wearing 21-year-old law student from the northern Syrian province of Idlib. “We want to go to the rich countries.”

Lababidi said he had been traveling for a month, passing along “the usual route” — through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia — with a plan ultimately to settle in the Netherlands. But he said that when he tried to enter the train station in Budapest five days earlier, police officers barred his path. Since then, he’s been sleeping on the cold stone of the plaza.

“I escaped from war,” he said. “I thought things would be better than this.”

[As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refu­gee crisis looms in the Middle East]

Hungarian leaders “have done all they can to stir up popular sentiment against immigrants and refugees,” said Marta Pardavi, a co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a group that offers legal advice to asylum-seekers. “This has become a totally divided issue. Friendships break up over this.”

Critics of the European response said the continent’s 20th-century history of dictatorships and wars should instill in it more sympathy for others in need.

“We are facing a historical moment, perhaps one of the biggest the E.U. has had to face over the last couple of decades,” said Yves Pascouau, director of migration and mobility policies at the Brussels-based European Policy Center. “European citizens have fled dictatorships and wars. This is a part of our history. We’ve been able to be protected elsewhere in our countries.”

Witte reported from Budapest. Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

European railways become ground zero for the migrant crisis

Why the language we use to talk about refugees matters so much

E.U. leaders show little unity ahead of emergency conclave on refugees",REAL
"The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app and exclaimed how glad he was to see me. “What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said. I got his message. He’s selling out.

In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing a front-runner. If that person is Donald Trump, they will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions people at a time (Muslims, women, the disabled), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.

That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth and, as he did by insisting on Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the Sept. 11 attacks, and he just perseveres. He cannot be shamed.

It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but I shall do so anyway. What they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.

It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a disabled New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time: Oh, that’s just Trump. He’ll say anything. He doesn’t mean it.

Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. The motley crew that now surrounds him will be supplemented and upgraded by establishment names. They will use the same reasoning that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) did last month when he endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity or, its functional equivalent, stopping Hillary Clinton.

But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Donald Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Clinton? (Trump’s campaign boasts he has the endorsement of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, both associated with Bill Clinton’s sexual rap sheet. This could get ugly.)

Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country.

A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his Web page — is an effective appetite suppressant. Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan and Teresa Giudice, from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” a fresh alumna of the federal prison system. A meeting of Trump supporters might have to be sanctioned by a pro wrestling promoter.

When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been, no doubt extracting promises of good behavior that later will be broken. Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or craven and deservedly mocked by history.",REAL
"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
Barack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. Hillary’s “Big Tent” is Obama’s “Grand Bargain” on Steroids by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
“ The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.” 
When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations. 
Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks. 
“Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.” 
In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people -- and still counting. 
Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP -- not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage. 
“For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’” 
With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle. 
“A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.” 
The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means. 
Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah! 
A New, Bigger Bargain 
Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said. 
Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire. 
“An inherently unstable arrangement.” 
Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air. 
But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
"Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a political insider who believed in civility, suspended his campaign Wednesday – one day after Sen. Ted Cruz bowed out.

How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich arrives to Central Medford High School in Medford, Ore. on April 28. The Ohio governor suspended his campaign Wednesday.

John Kasich, who ran as a hug-providing political insider in a year dominated by voter anger and the rise of outside candidates, suspended his political campaign on Wednesday. The move leaves Donald Trump standing alone as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Mr. Trump sounded conciliatory after news broke that Governor Kasich was quitting. He said that the Ohio governor might be helpful in the Buckeye State for the general election and that he would be interested in vetting Kasich as a possible vice presidential running mate.

“I think John’s doing the right thing,” Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Did he? Not everyone was so sure. Kasich supporters bemoaned the loss of what they felt was the last source of civility in the race. Over the months of a campaign where other candidates resorted to deeply personal insults, innuendo, and shouting, the Ohio governor stood alone in emphasizing the complexity of political problems and the need to work with others to find answers.

“If this is his last campaign, he went out admirably,” tweeted Yahoo News National Political Correspondent Matt Bai on Wednesday.

Others pointed out that Kasich had finally reached his strategic goal – a one-on-one match-up with Trump – only to withdraw. Whether he could have beaten Trump or not was irrelevant, in this view. He’d have been able to rally anti-Trump forces in a way Ted Cruz could not, and show that Trumpism had not conquered the entire Republican Party.

The problem is that Trump, if not Trumpism, does conquer all in the GOP. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus last night referred to Trump as the “presumptive nominee.” Given that, and fact that Trump is almost certain to pile up a winning majority of 1,237 delegates by the end of the primary season, Kasich felt he had no choice but to look for the exits.

And there were never enough of those supporters, anyway. Kasich won only his home state of Ohio and by the end was at less than 20 percent in the national polls in a three-man race.

Technically, Kasich finished 2016 in fourth, even though he was the last losing contender to drop out. Trump, Senator Cruz, and Marco Rubio all won more delegates. It’s amazing that he stayed in the race so long, given that he won more than 20 percent of the vote only once in the first 20 GOP primaries or caucuses, notes FiveThirtyEight polling guru Harry Enten.

“Most candidates would have seen the writing on the wall and gone home. Kasich didn’t see the wall or the writing, or he didn’t care,” writes Mr. Enten.

Would Trump actually ask Kasich to be his running mate, and if so would Kasich accept? Trump’s said he wants a politician as a VP, and the Ohio governor would provide balance to the billionaire in terms of experience and message. The pair never really clashed, though Trump did mock Kasich’s losing ways and his enthusiastic methods of eating.

For Kasich, a VP slot might validate his quixotic effort and provide a cap to his long and varied political career. But Kasich also described himself as a “Prince of Light and Hope,” and he’d be joining a presidential candidate who’s shown no eagerness to embrace either of those characteristics.",REAL
"October 28: Daily Contrarian Reads By David Stockman. Posted On Friday, October 28th, 2016 My daily contrarian reads for Friday, October 28th. You need to login to view this content. 
David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself. 
David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly. 
This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login 
David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers.",FAKE
"How Western Media Teleported a Child 'Victim' from Homs to Aleppo (PHOTOS, VIDEO) 
Western media is capable of amazing feats which defy even the laws of physics Originally appeared at Russian Spring 
The West keeps fighting its informational war on Russia blaming Russian Air Force for bloody crimes in Syrian Arab Republic. To persuade the world community of the fact that Moscow is to blame for catastrophic humanitarian situsation in Syria and not «moderate opposition» fighters turning the country into chaos world media descend into manipulating facts and publishing fakes. 
The easily expected maximum effect has photos and videos showing children suffering from war and bombardments. Western readers keep on commenting such stories and blaiming “Assad’s regime and Putin”, but haven’t the slightest idea that those stories are skillfully made up. 
«Russian Spring» has already covered a story of a girl who had been saved again and again, several times in just one month , and now we are offering a tear-squeezing vide about a girl who was teleported from Homs province to Aleppo by the Western media. 
Child, where are you from? 
On October 10 a footage showing allegedly one of the “bombardment victims» of Syrian Talbiseh in Homs province was published on YouTube channel of local informational resource talbisah. 
And then the taer-sqeeinf video started its walk of fame thriugh media and social media: it was published on AJ+ Facebook page in particular (a Qatar-based telecom giant Al Jazzera) where it was reached by over 10 mln people (as of October 24). 
Al Jazeea accompanied the video with pitiful subttles and corresponding title: «Happy Moday from Syria: this little girl is calling her dad after her house was destroyed by an airstrike». 
BBC dealt with that video shortly and ""relocated"" the girl called Aya (as she introduced herself on the video) from Talbiseh to Aleppo by including a footage called «Aleppo: Where is my dad?» aya_bbc.jpg 
Have a more attentive look on how medical staff working: even if we omit the shooting location fraud look at how strange the doctors behave. Instead of giving the first aid necessary for a kid after (alleged) bomberdment, instaed of cleaning head and face wound to minimize comtamination risk the doctors (or the actros playing doctors) keep walking around the girl wearing a troubled look not to hinder filming the vdeo. 
Quite thick and artificail-looking blood cathes our eye as well as dark-blue bruises under girl’s eyes lookking a lot like make-up. 
The whole video looks like a staged one, the authors and creators have just used a win-win tactics for their short film: a child wounded at war. 
Twitter star 
The journalists kept on using the pretty-looking mode in their propaganda. Som time later the girl was given a poster which read “Don’t bomb me again. It hurts. Aya” and made another tear-sqeezing photo which was then published by some Omar Qayson calling himself war journalists and media activist on his Twitter page . aya_twit.jpg 
It’s laughable but “media activist’s” Twiiter «has only 11 posts open to public and the first of them is a photo of a bird killed by bombardments, the three last are reposts of the aforementioned Aya’s photograph. 
Hashtags he chosen for his photo (Children of Syria and Russian kills us ) confirm the obvious fact: social media accounts like that are created by Western journalists with just one aim — to spread false photo and videos blaimimg Russia for «bloody crimes against Syrian people».",FAKE
"First of all, poor Melania. She was just trying to do her part and get the hell out of there. She deviated not a word from the teleprompter, except when thrown by unfamiliar words—like when “adversaries” came out as “advisories.” Hey, they’re similar.

Second of all, how the hell does this even happen? Watch the video of Melania and Michelle Obama superimposed upon each other, and you get a sense of how audacious the theft was and how perfect-for-TV this brouhaha is. If someone wrote the speech for Melania, how did that person get hired? And if Melania wrote it herself, who let that happen? (Rule for first gentlemen and first ladies: do not pick your own words.)

In case you missed it, I’m referring to the Melania-Michelle plagiarism flap—that Melania lifted some paragraphs out of Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech. It is a major embarrassment to the Trump campaign and, without doubt, to Melania. That said, let’s not exaggerate its importance. Writing in The New Republic, Brian Beutler called it “incredibly damaging”—which seems over the top. It’s devouring the oxygen right now. In 24 hours, it won’t be.

Every scandal has a half-life. The worst scandals brand you forever and keep unfolding forever. The least serious get forgotten fast and run out of gas in a day. I think Melania’s is of the latter sort.

To brand you forever, a scandal needs to reveal something hugely distasteful. This wasn’t that big a deal. She’s Donald’s wife, not Donald. To keep unfolding forever, a scandal needs to have an interesting mystery. This isn’t that interesting or mysterious. The question of how this blunder happened is worth a story, but not a lot of stories.

Contrast this with the scandal of erstwhile Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly yanked a female reporter’s arm in a boorish manner. That kept going and going because the allegations were very distasteful (assault!) and the mystery was interesting (did he really do it as claimed?). Every couple of days or so, it seemed, a new video emerged. It was an excellent dumb scandal.

Plagiarism is one of those sins that doom journalists but not politicians or their wives. In 1987, when running for president, Joe Biden plagiarized vast passages from Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock, which made for humiliating coverage. In 2008, Barack Obama lifted passages from Massachusetts then-governor Deval Patrick, a misstep that Obama smoothly batted away by saying Patrick had suggested the lines because of the two men’s shared philosophy. Both men did okay in the long run.

So this will damage Trump a little but not much. The pearl-clutching is taking place in newsrooms, not in America’s living rooms. It’s embarrassing, but it plays into no popularly accepted narrative. (That Trump’s campaign is bumbling and chaotic in its operations is known to political buffs but not the broader public.) Tomorrow, we’ll be arguing about some other snafu. And, the way things are going, we’ll have more than a few to choose from.",REAL
"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

After bombshell, does the remarkably stable '16 race stay stable?

There's no hyperbole in stating that the 2016 Hillary Clinton-vs.-Donald Trump presidential race has been the craziest we've covered. Consider all of the jaw-dropping moments: Mexican rapists. WikiLeaks. Vladimir Putin. The Access Hollywood video. Alicia Machado. Trump's visit to Mexico. ""Basket of Deplorables."" Birtherism. And the debates -- all of them. Despite them all, however, the race has been remarkably stable. Just look at the national NBC/WSJ poll numbers since Sept. 2015.

But does that stability change after FBI Director James Comey's bombshell Friday that his organization learned of the existence of new emails that appear ""pertinent"" to its previous investigation into Clinton's email practices? One the one hand, the polling we've seen -- so far -- suggests that voters remain in their partisan corners. According to this weekend's Washington Post/ABC poll, 63% of voters said the FBI's review makes no difference. And among the 34% who say it makes them ""less likely"" to back Clinton, those voters are disproportionately Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. What's more, the post-Comey polls we've seen (here and here) haven't really budged, at least not yet. On the other hand, it has never been a positive for Clinton throughout this entire presidential race when the focus has been on her, especially on the subject of emails. Eight days to go…

The latest developments in the Comey Surprise

Meanwhile, here are all of the latest developments in the Comey Surprise: The FBI obtained a warrant to search emails related to the probe of Hillary Clinton's private server that were discovered on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop... Also on Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid accused Comey of violating the Hatch Act, which bars government officials from using their authority to influence elections... Former Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a ""scathing op-ed condemning FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. 'I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI'""… And NBC's Ari Melber has a piece concluding that newly discovered emails -- even if they contain classified information -- would unlikely change the earlier conclusion not to charge Clinton.

FBI's review of the emails could be quick

Additionally, NBC's Pete Williams reports that it's possible the FBI's review of the emails could end quickly -- now that the FBI obtained a warrant to search them. ""They'll narrow them down to look at just those dating from the time Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Then they'll weed out any that are not about government business. Agents will use automated software to search what's left for duplicates they've already found during the investigation of the Clinton e-mail server. Any that remain will be checked for classified information,"" Williams reported on ""Today"" this morning. ""Officials say there's no way to tell how long that will take. But they say if it goes quickly, and nothing classified is found, the FBI could say so within the next few days. It largely depends on how many of the e-mails are duplicates and how many are new to the investigators.""

NBC/WSJ/Marist polls: Clinton up in NC, deadlocked race in FL

Over the weekend, we released brand-new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls of Florida and North Carolina (which were conducted before Friday's bombshell news). The numbers:

The polls (conducted Oct. 25-26) also measure early voting in these two states. Among the 36% of likely voters in Florida who say they've already voted, Clinton is ahead, 54% -37%. Among those who haven't voted in the Sunshine State, Trump is up, 51%-42%. And Clinton leads by a 61%-33% margin among the 29% of North Carolinians who say they've already voted.

It's amazing when news about Donald Trump -- no matter how controversial -- gets drowned out by other events. Still, don't miss this Washington Post piece into Trump's charitable giving, or lack thereof: ""For as long as he has been rich and famous, Donald Trump has also wanted people to believe he is generous. He spent years constructing an image as a philanthropist by appearing at charity events and by making very public — even nationally televised — promises to give his own money away. It was, in large part, a facade. A months-long investigation by The Washington Post has not been able to verify many of Trump's boasts about his philanthropy. Instead, throughout his life in the spotlight, whether as a businessman, television star or presidential candidate, The Post found that Trump had sought credit for charity he had not given — or had claimed other people's giving as his own.""

How violence and retaliation are constant themes in Trump's rhetoric

Also, do read NBC's Benjy Sarlin on how violence and retaliation are common themes in Trump's rhetoric and in his events. ""In his eyes, the world is an unforgiving place where cities are 'war zones,' where 'rapists' are streaming across the border and where jealous rivals are hatching plots to humiliate America and Trump personally. To prevail in such an environment, he suggests, the response to any slight must be swift and overwhelming. Dwelling on limits imposed by law or tradition is usually a secondary concern. This framework has expressed itself in policy, in which Trump has extolled the use of torture, threatened reprisals against the families of terrorists and pledged to jail Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state. It has expressed itself rhetorically in vicious insults against critics and in his encouragement of violence by supporters.""

First Read's downballot race of the day: Florida Senate

Marco Rubio rode to Republicans' rescue when he reversed his pledge not to seek re-election, although it's not a complete slam dunk that he'll hold onto his seat. The former presidential candidate faces challenges -- most notably his well-known national ambitions and his frustration with the Senate, as well as his tortured relationship with the GOP presidential nominee. But luckily for Rubio, his Democratic opponent, Rep. Patrick Murphy, is far from an ideal candidate. He's taken heat for overselling parts of his resume and for his reliance on his wealthy family for campaign donations. Our NBC/WSJ/Marist poll has it Rubio 51%, Murphy 43%.

Hillary Clinton spends her day in Ohio, campaigning in Kent (in the Cleveland-Akron area) at 2:45 pm ET and then in Cincinnati at 6:15 pm ET… Donald Trump is in Michigan, hitting Grand Rapids at noon ET and Warren at 3:00 pm ET… Tim Kaine stumps in North Carolina… And Mike Pence is in Florida.",REAL
"George Washington was the first President of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. He also served as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and he has the distinction of being the only President unanimously elected by the Electoral College.

The second U.S. President, John Adams, served from 1797 to 1801. He was also the first vice president of the United States, and he was the first President to reside in the White House, moving in on November 1, 1800, while the White House was still under construction.

James Monroe (1817-1825) was the last of the Founding Fathers to be elected President. During his seventh State of the Union address, he outlined a foreign policy that warned European powers against further colonization of or meddling in the Western Hemisphere. This was later known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) was the only President to serve in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He is also the only President to have been a former prisoner of war: Jackson was 13 when became a courier during the Revolutionary War, and he was later captured by the British.

William Henry Harrison (1841) probably had only just finished unpacking his things at the White House when he died of pneumonia one month into his term. Harrison was the first U.S. President to die while in office, and he had the shortest tenure ever of any commander-in-chief.

John Tyler's term (1841-1845) saw several presidential firsts. He was the first vice president to succeed office after the President died, he was the first to lose his wife while in office, and he was the first to marry while in office.

Zachary Taylor (1849-1850), aka ""Old Rough and Ready,"" was a hero in the Mexican-American War. Mystery surrounds his actual cause of death from a stomach ailment. Did he just eat too many cherries, or was it murder? The 1991 exhumation of his body proved it wasn't arsenic poisoning at least.

Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) was the first President to not get his party's nomination for re-election. He signed the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the people there to decide whether to allow slavery. This worsened the tension between the North and South.

Just four months into his term, James Garfield (1881) was shot by a disgruntled lawyer who'd aspired to join the administration as a diplomat. The President was taken to the Jersey Shore, where doctors hoped the ocean air would help him recover. He died two weeks later.

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for proposing and creating the League of Nations. But he was never able to convince the United States to join. Although he was first opposed to a federal amendment allowing women to vote, Wilson shifted his position during his second term and the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) was inaugurated on the year of the stock market crash that sent the country into the Great Depression. Although Hoover pushed for money to be appropriated for large-scale projects, he opposed federal relief payments directly to individuals. The national economy never recovered during his term, and the shantytowns that developed were nicknamed ""Hoovervilles.""

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was the only President elected to the office four times. During his 12 years as President, he championed numerous social programs and measures, including the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and Social Security. Roosevelt contracted polio at age 39 and never recovered the use of his legs.

John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) was the first Roman Catholic President. He was assassinated in his first term, which was marked by the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the creation of the Peace Corps, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, and the beginning of military involvement in Vietnam.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the agreement that led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. At home, Carter's presidency was plagued by inflation and unemployment, and he lost his bid for a second term amid the hostage crisis in Iran.

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) was the only actor ever elected President, and his talent as a speaker earned him the moniker ""the great communicator."" An affable Republican who wooed many Roosevelt Democrats, the staunchly anti-communist Reagan is seen as having played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) was a former CIA director and served two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan. His approval rating at home soared after he led an international coalition to oust Iraq from Kuwait, and communism in Eastern Europe fell on his watch. But he lost his bid for re-election amid a sluggish economy and after reneging on a promise not to raise taxes.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001) ran on the slogan, ""It's the economy, stupid."" Plagued by various scandals -- including accusations of sexual impropriety -- he was the second president to be impeached. He was acquitted in 1999.

George W. Bush (2001-2009) is the son of former President George H.W. Bush. His presidency was largely defined by his response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2003, he ordered the invasion of Iraq on suspicion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Barack Obama (2009-2017) became the first African-American to hold the office of President. He took the oath of office amid the Great Recession, the biggest economic challenge since the Great Depression. Under the Affordable Healthcare Act, millions of uninsured Americans have gotten health insurance.",REAL
"James Comey to be taken out, knows too much about Clintons 08.11.2016 | Source: AP Photo James Comey, Director of the FBI, can be sacked for a 'thoughtless step' - intrusion into elections. Valerie Jarrett, Obama's adviser, managed to convince him of necessity to undertake such a step, Daily Mail reported with a reference to a source in the White House. At the same time, other sources assert that Comey himself is ready to resign, not waiting for Obama's decision. In the FBI many believe that the Director has prejudiced reputation of the bureau and lost his weight among employees . Reopening of investigation against the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 'for no apparent reason' and spontaneous closure of the case... Isn't Comey though a political figure? Could he have initiated everything by himself? Viktor Olevich, a political analyst , has commented Pravda.Ru on the issue. James Comes is a high-ranking political manager in the American system. He has long-standing relationship with the Republican party, he has been its adherent for several decades. He was taking various stances, which correlated with the Republican party's policies, including that regarding a conflict between the US law-enforcement and Afro-American community, where his stance was closer to the Rights than the current Administration of the White House. Head of the FBI took part in a corruption investigation regarding Bill Clinton in the early-2000, when a multimillionaire Marc Rich was pardoned by the president Bill Clinton. As a result of the investigation, the former president was not prosecuted. Nonetheless, Comey's attitude to Clintons is still quite suspect, negative. It's not by chance that last Friday, 11 days before elections, investigation was renewed by decision of the FBI Director. Moreover, a dossier on that investigation of Clinton's corrupt activity - Jams Comey carried out 15 years ago - was leaked via the FBI Twitter account. These are absolutely interrelated events. In such way, Comey tried to pressurize Clinton's campaign. However, just two days ago Comey announced that the new investigation was stopped. It's clear that certain negotiations between Comey's bureau and other parts of the US establishment took place. Those talks resulted in the fact that a case on potential disclosure of a state secret while using a private server when Hillary Clinton was a State Secretary, was closed yer again. It's no surprise that Obama's Administration is going to get rid of unwanted head of the FBI and substitute him for a person that will be favourable for new administration of Hillary Clinton, as she will evidently win today. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru 
FBI Plan B fails: Clinton to be next president",FAKE
"Print 
As Marco Rubio and Patrick Murphy squared off in the final debate of their Florida Senate race, the discussion turned to the Syrian civil war. Rubio, a former presidential candidate and member of the Senate intelligence committee, challenged his rival’s understanding of the factions on the ground. Murphy, a two-term congressman, reverted to a familiar line. 
“It just goes back to the same point,” he said, “that Senator Rubio continues to support Donald Trump, and it is shameful that he stands there with him.” 
The audience laughed, faintly, at one of nearly 20 mentions of the Republican presidential nominee during the one-hour debate. When Murphy next mentioned Trump, Rubio was quick with a rejoinder based on a famous Joe Biden rebuke of Rudy Giuliani : “A noun, a verb and Donald Trump: that’s his answer to everything.” 
The race in Florida, among the most closely watched in the country, could help determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate.",FAKE
" The True Scandal of 2016 Was The Torture of Chelsea Manning By Jeremy Scahill
November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" The Intercept "" - A few days ago, we learned that Private Chelsea Manning attempted to take her own life last month for the second time since being sentenced to 35 years at the U.S. military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. The whistleblower, who provided the collateral murder video, the Iraq and Afghan war logs, and the hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. State Department cables to Wikileaks, was convicted of espionage. As I waited to vote today, I found myself thinking of her languishing in misery in isolation and incarceration.
This election — particularly in its closing stages — has been dominated by controversies over emails, classified documents, and Wikileaks. We’ve heard endlessly about Hillary Clinton’s private basement server, her 33,000 deleted emails, the phishing and leaking of John Podesta’s emails, including parts of Clinton’s much discussed private speeches to Goldman Sachs. Trump, for his part, suddenly discovered a great love for Julian Assange, though he does have trouble correctly spelling Wikileaks in his tweets of praise. Taken together with Trump’s bizarre and consistent lauding of Vladimir Putin and leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, the country has been treated to an odd flashback of Cold War propaganda, including a fair dose of red-baiting from the Democrats. In the matter of Anthony Weiner’s computer, his wife Huma Abedin’s communications and the potential implications for Clinton, the FBI, whose overreach had not previously been of much concern to Democrats, suddenly became a deviant manipulator of the electoral process, while Trump and his supporters alternately praised the agency’s professionalism and denounced it as part of the rigged system.
The U.S. public is now getting a taste of the way hacking, phishing, and an overwhelming dependence on fallible machines and networks can impact politics. But let’s be clear: None of the disclosures in this campaign — not one thing in any of the hacked emails or those declassified and released from Clinton’s private server — has brought to light anything of greater importance than the documents Chelsea Manning provided to Wikileaks. She revealed war crimes, including murder and torture, dirty and duplicitous dealings of the U.S. and its allies, exposed liars, documented a secret history of America’s longest running war, and forced a much needed debate about the U.S. role in the world. And for that, she is being tortured.
The double standards of our society dictate that a perjurer like the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, faces no consequences for his crimes. Gen. David Petraeus gets a slap on the wrist, no jail time, and prestigious positions at universities for sharing classified information with his mistress. Only Gen. James Cartwright may face the inside of a prison cell for discussing classified information with journalists — and he is a sacrificial lamb for the cause of exonerating Clinton and Petraeus from any true accountability by the Obama Justice Department.
But Chelsea Manning, whose motivation was noble, whose actions made our country better, faces the full wrath of the system. And it may end up killing her. When we talk about the high-tech scandals that marked this election, at the top of the list should be the torture of Chelsea Manning.",FAKE
"Right now the oil market is totally focused on finding a bottom for oil prices. However, according to OPEC's Secretary-General Abdulla al-Badri we've already hit bottom. Not only that, but he sees a real possibility that oil prices could explode higher to upwards of $200 per barrel in the future. He's far from the only one that sees a return of triple-digit oil prices.

According to the Secretary-General, speaking in London on Jan. 26, the oil market doesn't need to look for oil prices to bottom as the market has already bottomed. Instead, he offered quite bullish comments by saying, ""Now the prices are around $45-$55, and I think maybe they [have] reached the bottom and we [will] see some rebound very soon."" Now, normally that type of remark would be just another layer of noise, but this is coming from OPEC's Secretary-General so it comes with a lot of weight behind it.

That said, he's not saying that OPEC will come in and rescue the oil market by reversing its previous decision to hold steady on production. Instead, he sees the signs that the oil market is self-correcting as oil companies have made deep cuts to spending, which will eventually lead to lower production growth. Further, the rig count in the U.S. is plunging, which is usually a key to a bottom in oil prices. However, in the midst of cutting back as the industry works through the current oversupply the Secretary-General is now warning that the industry is putting future oil supplies at risk by under investing today.

The Secretary-General said that, ""if you don't invest in oil and gas, you will see more than $200"" when it comes to future oil prices. While he didn't give a timeframe, he did note the correlation between investment and future production. This is because oil production naturally declines and oil companies need to invest in new production to not only replace this decline in production from legacy oil fields but to add new production to meet growing demand. However, oil companies are reluctant to invest in new production as their cash flows decline.

Over time this could become a problem as oil fields around the world naturally decline by an average of about 5% per year. In order to overcome this decline oil companies need to develop about 200 billion barrels of oil supplies over the next decade and a half just to meet demand.

These supplies will require the industry to invest $7-$10 trillion. However, with the big capital budget reductions oil companies have announced this year it could make it harder for the industry to meet future supply needs. In fact, the industry might defer up to $150 billion oil projects this year due to the collapse in crude prices. Many of these investments, however, wouldn't have yielded actual production for a couple of years due to the long lead time of major projects.

As an example, Chevron delivered first oil on two of its Gulf of Mexico projects late last year after beginning construction on the fields in 2011. Meanwhile, another $6 billion project it just sanctioned at the end of last year won't produce any oil until 2018. It's these long lead time projects that are being delayed, which is setting the world up for higher oil prices in the future as an under investment today has the potential to lead to a constriction in future supplies.

OPEC's Secretary-General is calling the bottom in oil prices. While he's not the first to call a bottom, he does lead the organization that currently controls the oil market so his comments do have a lot of weight. Further, he's also suggesting that the cuts that oil companies are making could have a dramatic impact on future oil prices as the under investment has the potential to cause oil prices to rocket higher if demand grows faster than future supplies. That, however, would all be part of OPEC's plan as it purposely pushed for lower oil prices now so it could control market share once oil prices surged in the future. It's willing to endure short-term pain for the potential of a big long-term gain.

The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.",REAL
"Home › VIDEO › “CLINTON, INC”: WATCH HOW’S IT PAINS MSM TO REPORT CLINTON CORRUPTION “CLINTON, INC”: WATCH HOW’S IT PAINS MSM TO REPORT CLINTON CORRUPTION 0 SHARES Post navigation",FAKE
"When it takes up the question of whether President Obama's 2014 immigration executive actions were constitutional, the Supreme Court will throw out its typical playbook.

United States v. Texas is one of the most — if not the most — important cases before the highest court this term. It's certainly the most important immigration case the Supreme Court has taken up in a generation (or, arguably, a century). And the Court is treating it accordingly.

On Monday, instead of splitting up 60 minutes of oral arguments between the two sides of the case, as usually happens, the Court will convene for 90 minutes — and bring in more parties to argue their case.

Texas and the 25 other states suing will get 30 minutes. The federal government will get 35. But the Supreme Court has also given 10 minutes to a lawyer representing a group of immigrant women who'd benefit from Obama's executive actions. And that's not all — 15 minutes will go to the US House of Representatives (thanks to the Republican House majority), which has jumped in to support the states.

The unusually complicated oral argument process reflects just how messy this case is. It's a case covering surprisingly narrow-sounding legal questions, but its outcome carries broad implications for the relationship between Congress and the president, and the relationship between the federal government and the states. Oh, yeah — and it's a presidential election year, and both immigration and the Court itself have become election issues.

All this makes it something of a nightmare scenario for Chief Justice John Roberts, who tends to be more anxious than the typical Supreme Court justice to present the Court's opinions as drawn purely from law rather than politics.

As the justices hear oral arguments and consider the case before issuing an opinion (which they're expected to do in late June, at the end of the term), Roberts and the other justices will have to work through legal questions that are both less contentious and more abstract than the broader immigration debate makes them seem.

Then they'll have to figure out if there's any way they can cobble together a five-vote majority for a lasting opinion — or if the eight-person Court will deadlock, putting the most important case of the Court's term in limbo and creating the opportunity for chaos.

In November 2014, President Obama issued a series of memos declaring executive actions on immigration. Two of those are at issue in this case.

One memo expanded the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which since 2012 had allowed immigrants who'd come to the US as children to apply for temporary protection from deportation and work permits.

The other one added a new deferred action program — the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program — which would have allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants who have US citizen or permanent resident children to apply for deportation protection and work permits as well.

The two 2014 actions are usually referred to as DAPA/DACA+. Since the states won in the lower courts, both of them have been put on hold since the first ruling was issued in February 2015. The original DACA program from 2012, however, is still in place and isn't being challenged in this suit. (To prevent confusion, I'll just refer to DAPA instead of DAPA/DACA+ when talking about the 2014 actions.)

Federal immigration enforcement has totally transformed over the past 20 years. More people are eligible for deportation than ever before. The growth of the unauthorized population pre–Great Recession meant there were more people to deport. After 9/11, the government got vastly more money and resources for deportation. And deportations escalated accordingly — from 183,000 in 1999 to a high of 400,000 during the first several years of the Obama administration.

President Obama has spent most of his time in office trying to impose some sort of control on all of this — to make sure the government is choosing who's most important to deport, rather than arbitrarily deporting anyone Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents get their hands on. His first attempts — setting high and low ""priorities"" for deportation and telling immigration agents to follow them — were something both sides in the current court case agree he could do but that rank-and-file immigration agents frequently ignored in favor of their own judgment.

So in 2012, President Obama created the first deferred action program, DACA — allowing people to proactively apply for protection from deportation, rather than simply hoping that ICE followed the memo not to deport them. It's been solidly effective. After comprehensive immigration reform stalled in Congress in 2013, pressure grew on Obama to use the tool that had worked — deferred action — to protect other groups of low-priority immigrants, and he did just that with DAPA and expanded DACA in 2014.

DAPA was supposed to be the program that ensured Obama's legacy on immigration, turning him from the ""deporter in chief"" of his first term to a man who brought immigrants out of the shadows. If the Supreme Court lets the program go forward, that legacy is assured. If it strikes DAPA down, Obama's legacy — and immigrants' attitude toward the Democratic Party — will be an ambivalent and disappointing one.

United States v. Texas is political in its origins. That doesn't at all mean that the states that sued the Obama administration are wrong on the merits — it's just an acknowledgment of the circumstances around the case's genesis shortly after Obama announced the executive actions.

There wasn't a serious legal challenge to the original DACA program in 2012, even though many of the criticisms of DAPA in this case would have applied to DACA as well. But in June 2012 the country was in the middle of a general election campaign, and the Republican nominee was trying to run toward the center and appeal to Latinos. In November 2014, on the other hand, the relatively unpopular President Obama was responding to an electoral defeat in the midterm elections — including the loss of the Senate — with executive actions on an issue that mobilized the GOP base.

The states on each side of the case have lined up along partisan lines. The Texas suit involves 23 states — all but three of them under unified Republican control — as well as four Republican governors (three of whom have Democratic attorneys general who wouldn't let the state officially join the case) and one Republican attorney general. The states that have filed briefs supporting the Obama administration, meanwhile, represent about two-thirds of the states with Democratic attorneys general.

Texas is leading the coalition of states bringing the lawsuit for two reasons. One, it's offered the most persuasive case for how DAPA could actually hurt the state (more on that later). Two, it houses the Southern District of Texas, which was the court the states chose to file their case in, presumably because they knew they'd have a good chance there. (The administration and its allies have implied that this is unfair, but it happens all the time.)

They chose wisely. In February 2015 — just a few days before the government was scheduled to start accepting applications for expanded DACA — Judge Andrew Hanen issued an injunction, preventing the government from moving ahead with the program on the logic that the states were ""likely"" to prevail on some of their claims. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction. And in January, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

As the case has made its way through the courts, it's gotten much broader. Initially, the injunction was based on a narrow claim that the Obama administration hadn't used the right procedure in instituting DAPA. The Fifth Circuit ruled that DAPA was also (or at least, was likely to be) illegal on the merits. And now the Supreme Court has added a constitutional question: whether DAPA violates the ""take care"" clause of the Constitution.

While this is theoretically still a ruling on the injunction, the Supreme Court is dealing with the merits of the case — ensuring that if a majority of the Court's eight justices side with the Obama administration, or with the states, the case is finished (and DAPA is alive, or dead) for the duration of Obama's time in office.

The stakes have risen accordingly. The House of Representatives asked, and was granted, the chance to argue that DAPA violates laws that Congress has passed — something that isn't totally unheard of at the Supreme Court level but certainly raises the political temperature of the case.

And on the federal government's side, the argument on behalf of the ""Jane Doe"" immigrant women — not to mention the likely presence of many potential DAPA beneficiaries in the Supreme Court during the oral arguments — will inevitably remind the justices that this is a question of the balance and separation of powers, and about immigrants themselves.

Because immigration is such a divisive culture war issue — and because phrases like ""enforce the law"" get tossed around frequently as talking points — it sure seems like this case should be a massive legal dispute over what should happen to unauthorized immigrants in the US. But it's not. There are four questions at play in the case, and all of them are, given the importance of the case, relatively narrow.

1) Is it even legal for Texas to sue the federal government to stop the DAPA program?

The states' case, in one sentence: It costs the state government money to give subsidized driver's licenses to DAPA recipients who now qualify for them.

The federal government's case, in one sentence: If that were all it took for a state to sue the federal government over a policy it didn't like, the courts would be clogged forever.

The first question the Court has to address whether Texas and the other states had ""standing"" — whether they are legally able to bring the lawsuit at all. In order to show standing, Texas has to show that implementing DAPA causes some direct harm to the state.

Even if the substance of Texas's legal argument against DAPA is correct, if it can't show that it had standing the whole suit gets dismissed — allowing DAPA to go into effect after all. (This route would give the Supreme Court some appealing options, as we'll get to in a bit.)

The Republican governors and state attorneys general on Texas's side of the case clearly think that allowing unauthorized immigrants to remain in their states is harmful for all sorts of reasons. But as is often the case with Supreme Court cases — and is definitely the case with this one — the actual argument being put forward in the courtroom is a lot narrower than the argument over whether unauthorized immigrants are good or bad for America that's happening around the case.

So far, courts have found that the states have standing for a single reason: Texas driver's license costs. Under Texas law, people who get deferred action are eligible for driver's licenses — and because fees only partially cover the cost of producing a license, the state government covers the rest of the cost. DAPA would make hundreds of thousands of Texans eligible to apply for driver's licenses for the first time, which would cost the state money.

The Supreme Court now has to decide whether that's enough of a reason to allow Texas (and the other states) to sue the federal government over the entire policy.

The federal government argues it's not President Obama's fault that Texas law would allow DAPA recipients to get driver's licenses. Furthermore, supporters of the federal government's side in this case argue there's a slippery slope: Allow the states to sue the government over a policy they don't like, as long as they can show that it costs the state something (even if that cost is recouped), and the courts will be clogged with lawsuits left and right.

They're hoping that possibility will scare Chief Justice Roberts (who dissented in a previous case about states suing the federal government, Massachusetts v. EPA) into protecting the Supreme Court's legacy by remaining above the dispute.

2) Is DAPA a substantive new regulation — which the Obama administration didn't follow the proper procedure for?

The federal government's argument, in one sentence: Nope, it's just a general ""statement of policy,"" and we do those all the time.

The states' argument, in one sentence: It sets pretty hard-and-fast standards for who qualifies for deferred action and work authorization; that seems pretty rule-like.

This question also seems pretty narrow — it's a challenge about whether the Obama administration did DAPA the right way, instead of whether it was the right thing to do. So it might not get a lot of the Supreme Court's attention. But this was actually the basis for the original ruling freezing DAPA, issued in February 2015 by Judge Hanen of the Fifth Circuit.

Under the Administrative Procedures Act, the government can't just issue new regulatory ""rules""; it has to propose them and then allow a certain period for public response. (Hence the term ""notice and comment,"" which comes up a bunch when people are discussing this aspect of the Supreme Court case.)

The Obama administration didn't do this with DAPA. It argues it didn't have to, because it wasn't a real rule, just a general guideline. The states disagree.

At root, this is a disagreement about how the deferred action programs actually work: whether immigration agents actually have the leeway to reject applications for any reason (policy-like) or whether the Obama administration has dictated that anyone who meets the standards should get protection (rule-like).

And because DAPA hasn't gone into effect yet, this is really an argument about how the original DACA program is working — even though the existing deferred action program isn't being challenged in this case.

3) Is DAPA within the president's authority, or does it encroach on parts of immigration law where Congress has already set down the rules?

The federal government's argument, in one sentence: DAPA is just a way to tell immigrants they're not being deported — something that both sides agree is legal.

The states' argument, in one sentence: DAPA goes beyond that, by bestowing ""lawful presence"" and work permits on immigrants Congress didn't want to grant either one to.

Legally, this is the biggest question about DAPA: Does it violate US law by going beyond what the president is allowed to do on immigration? But again, the disagreement between the two sides in the actual court case is a lot narrower than you'd think (given the general heatedness of the immigration debate).

US immigration law gives the president a lot of latitude to make policy decisions — more than he gets in a lot of other areas. So the states in this case agree that President Obama (and the rest of the executive branch) have the latitude to choose whom to deport and whom not to deport. The states even say it would be okay if the Obama administration issued cards to people who were ""low priorities"" for deportation indicating that they were low priorities.

But they say DAPA goes beyond what the president is allowed to do, and crosses into areas where Congress has set firm rules on immigration, in two ways. It allows deferred action recipients to apply for work permits, which the states argue violates Congress's intent not to allow unauthorized immigrants to work legally in the US. And, they say, DAPA deems people to be ""lawfully present"" in the US even though Congress has said it's illegal for them to be here.

The phrase ""lawful presence"" is probably going to be thrown around a lot at Monday's oral arguments — it's become increasingly central to the states' argument. The federal government argues that the states are simply getting confused. ""Lawful presence"" isn't the same thing as ""lawful status"" in immigration law — it doesn't grant anyone the right to be in the US. (The federal government has started arguing that it's really more like ""tolerated presence."")

3) Is Obama abandoning his constitutional obligation to ""take care"" to enforce Congress's laws by implementing DAPA?

The federal government's argument, in one sentence: Nope.

The states' argument, in one sentence: Yep.

This question wasn't even considered in the lower courts — the Supreme Court added it to the case on its own. It centers on the Constitution's ""take care"" clause: ""He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.""

There isn't a lot of Supreme Court jurisprudence on what this phrase actually charges the president to do, so it's interesting that the Court felt it was particularly appropriate here — though it's entirely possible that the justice interested in this was Antonin Scalia and the surviving justices don't have any interest.

The answer to the ""take care"" question depends on whether DAPA violates US law to begin with. If the federal government is right, and DAPA is within the president's legal authority, then he's not abandoning his duty to execute the laws by implementing it. If the states are right, and DAPA is illegal, then Obama might be violating the ""take care"" clause in implementing it — but the program would be struck down in any event.

For people who believe that President Obama is legally obligated to deport unauthorized immigrants under all circumstances, the idea that he's violating the constitution by not ""taking care"" to enforce immigration laws has some appeal. But again, neither side is actually arguing that in court.

There are dozens of hypothetical possible answers the Court could reach to any of the four questions above. But in terms of the case's practical outcome, there are essentially four options.

Furthermore — and this is where things get really messy — the absence of a Supreme Court opinion could allow another circuit court to hear a case on DAPA and rule that it could go forward. How such a lawsuit would proceed is unclear; maybe some of the states that sided with the Obama administration could find standing. But it would create a situation in which DAPA was legal in some parts of the country and illegal in others.

It's entirely possible that the Supreme Court would go out of its way to avoid that level of chaos. That's why some analysts think the most likely outcome is this:

If the Court sides with the states, nothing changes — programs that currently aren't in effect won't go into effect. But if the Court sides with the administration, an estimated 4.5 million immigrants who are currently vulnerable to deportation will get three years of protection and the ability to work in the US legally.

The effects this could have on the lives of those immigrants (and their families) could be huge.

The evidence from DACA, which has protected about 700,000 immigrants for the past three and a half years, is promising. Three-quarters of DACA recipients had been able to get better-paying jobs, 30 percent had gone back to school, and 59 percent said they could help support their families. There's evidence that DACA helps keep immigrants integrated into American life — instead of losing interest in school or career because they feel their immigration status holds them back.

If the Supreme Court reinstates DAPA at the end of June, the Obama administration will only have seven months left in office to process applications — and many of the community groups that would have been able to help people get those applications will be busy mobilizing for the election.

Furthermore, the election might discourage some immigrants from wanting to sign up to begin with — if they're worried that Donald Trump will be president come 2017, they'll be much less inclined to turn over their personal information to the government.

DAPA is an Obama administration initiative. There's nothing stopping the next president from ending the program and rescinding its protections, even if the Supreme Court upholds it this year. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have already promised to do just that in their first few days in office.

That doesn't mean that the immigrants who have gotten deferred action so far would necessarily get deported. In fact, that's the bigger decision that President Cruz or Trump would have to make: what to do with a database of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are unauthorized but who by definition are well-educated, speak English, or at least have kids who are US citizens.

A President Trump might start his mass deportation campaign by targeting the immigrants he can most easily locate: former deferred action recipients.

Some pundits have argued that this means the real immigration fight is what happens in November, rather than what happens in the courts this spring. Insofar as the next president will choose whether to end deferred action, that's true. But the Supreme Court decision could definitely shape what options a president has to expand it, as both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have promised to do.

Sanders has explicitly said that he'd protect some 8 or 9 million people using deferred action; Clinton has said she wouldn't deport immigrants who hadn't committed crimes, but hasn't explained how she'd protect them.

If the Supreme Court strikes down DAPA — or upholds it, but articulates a limiting principle that clarifies that this is the most a president can do — both of those plans will be a lot harder to implement, but a Democratic president would be under even more pressure to find a way to protect immigrants. That could create trouble.

Conservatives siding with the states in United States v. Texas argue that if Obama wins this case, there's no limit to who could be protected from deportation. They make a persuasive case.

The Obama administration argues that while DAPA was legal, it wouldn't have been legal to give deferred action to even more immigrants — say, parents of DACA recipients. But their reasoning on this point is fairly weak (and it doesn't help that both candidates for their own party's presidential nomination are promising to do just that).

This lack of ""limiting principle"" gives conservatives a lot of pause. A president could do whatever he likes on a whole host of issues — say, refuse to enforce any environmental regulations, or even declare a tax cut by executive fiat. (Vox's Andrew Prokop lays out some of the options.)

Hypotheticals like these raise some valid concerns about the use of prosecutorial discretion generally. But these are issues with existing law, and it's not clear that a ruling for the feds in this case would make them any worse.

Many legal scholars believe that immigration law simply gives the president more discretion than other areas of law. So a ruling for Obama in this case wouldn't necessarily create a precedent for other issues.

If the president has historically had a lot of leeway to set immigration policy, though, a ruling for the states would effectively constrain that power.

The states in this case aren't asking the Supreme Court to issue a broad ruling. But that doesn't stop the Court from doing so if it wants. And if the Court finds that it's illegal for the president to allow a large group of immigrants to apply for work permits, that definitely calls the original DACA program into question — and raises questions for other uses of executive power on immigrations as well. (An extremely broad ruling against the president could even dictate that the executive branch can't declare immigrants ""low priorities"" for deportation, though that's extremely unlikely.)

But even a relatively narrow ruling for the states would have implications for other issues where the president didn't have as much leeway to begin with.

It's possible to imagine a Supreme Court ruling against Obama whose argument implicitly called into question other things he's done, from delaying the employer mandate to modifying key provisions of No Child Left Behind (not to mention the original DACA program). It wouldn't automatically strike down any of these, but it could open the door to future court challenges.

What legal scholars who side with the administration are particularly concerned about, though, is what will happen if Texas and the other states are granted standing at all — even if the Court ultimately sides with Obama. They argue that this would essentially invite states to sue the federal government over any policy they don't like, and then hunt down some way the policy harms them. (In an amicus brief, for example, law professor Walter Dellinger argues that states could start suing the IRS over which organizations are exempt from federal taxes.)

To a certain extent, this is what the states are doing anyway — no state has ever sued the federal government for doing something the state likes. But the Supreme Court has long tried to avoid becoming a way for states to challenge federal policy willy-nilly. That's the sort of politics it tends to want to stay out of.

Then again, the lesson of United States v. Texas may very well be that even if politics stop at the Supreme Court door, the cases that come in — and what happens to decisions that come out — are political from start to finish.",REAL
"I dare you to restrain yourself from laughing at Trump and Hillary in a stronger hot show # akajsaid 1 
off court okay a woman of the people that's what you're a man of the people who don't like carbon i was living in the white boy tell you what professional wrestling skin like a Russian drive safe russian and get there you going back with any probably couldn't find me you don't the job drunk think that decade not quite y'all just American side ... Tags",FAKE
"link a reply to: carewemust ""Vomiting black liquid"" caught my eye. I know bleeding internally can cause black vomit, sometimes it looks like coffee grounds. But something in the HeatStreet article that Fox news linked too also caught my eye: Max was buried in Canterbury cemetery after his mother arranged to have his body flown home a week after his death. A post-mortem examination was carried out by a pathologist in east Kent, but Vanessa says that more than two months later she still does not know the result, or whether there will be an inquest. She added: “Apparently, he had not suffered any obvious physical injuries but he could have been slowly poisoned, which is why the results of toxicology tests from his post-mortem are so important. [bolding by me] Activated charcoal -- which is black and readily available to anyone -- is used to treat poisoning, and could cause black vomit also. Could Spiers have suspected he was being poisoned and tried to self-treat with activated charcoal? I can't find much more about the black vomit... as in if someone was with him before/during/after he vomited the black liquid... or if it was found at the same time as he was found dead.",FAKE
"Clinton Campaign STUNNED As FBI Reportedly Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton Emails Posted on Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Clinton Campaign STUNNED As FBI Reportedly Reopens Probe Into Hillary Clinton Emails 
A SHOCKING blow to the Clinton Campaign emerged unexpectedly Friday as the FBI has reportedly REOPENED probe into Hillary Clinton’s email server as “The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 


Here we go… 
Yes. Exactly! 
He’ll own it once we vote him in there. 
Then he’ll pull the plug and drain it and put all those corrupt SOBs in prison. Maybe you too ; ) 
A ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ! 
Drain the swamp! 
Reopened!??!?!??!? 
This monster needs to be opened, all right. 
I’ll leave up to the readers to come up with ways to execute that idea. 
How many people were there when Nixon was reelected despite the fact that the Watergate investigation was in full swing? That ended pretty badly for Tricky Dick. And Killer was on the judicial investigation group at this time. This group was lead by a Democrat and he fired Killer for lying. I don’t recall the nature of the lie but it was enough to get her fired. 
From Fox News Politics 

FBI Director James Comey wrote in a letter to top members of Congress Friday that the bureau has “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 
Comey did not detail those emails, saying only that they surfaced “in connection with an unrelated case.” 
He told lawmakers the investigative team briefed him on the information a day earlier, “and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
He said the FBI could not yet assess whether the new material is significant and he could not predict how long it will take to complete “this additional work.”",FAKE
"Will the Middle East be as unstable 10 years from now as it is today? I posed that question this week to a class of students at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. About half answered yes — that things will be as bad or worse, no matter what the United States does.

These graduate students sense what many Middle East experts are beginning to vocalize: The region is caught in a turbulent vortex of change that’s likely to continue for many years, perhaps decades. The drivers are political, social, economic and demographic forces over which the United States and other outside powers have little control. For the next generation, instability may be the rule in the Middle East, rather than the exception.

Predictions about the future based on current trends are always risky because analysts can’t foresee the unexpected “black swan” events that produce radical change. Nobody could have anticipated that a Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation in 2010 would begin a cascade of revolution and civil war in the Middle East. Similarly, we can’t forecast the process that may eventually restore balance.

Economic and demographic data show a region already stressed by slow growth and high youth unemployment. These problems are compounded by refugee flows from wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya — and worsened by falling oil prices that hinder Saudi Arabia’s ability to provide a buffer.

The International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook, released this month, presents a grim picture. Unemployment will top 13 percent in Egypt and Tunisia this year and reach nearly 12 percent in Algeria. Economies aren’t growing fast enough to provide enough jobs for young people: Growth this year is expected to be 1.3 percent in Iraq, 2.5 percent in Lebanon, 2.6 percent in Algeria, 3.8 percent in Jordan and 4 percent in Egypt.

Saudi Arabia’s growth forecast has been slashed more than 1.5 points to 3 percent this year and is projected to decline further next year because of oil prices. The Saudis are waging a bloody air war in Yemen, apparently convinced that threats to their security are external. But the more intractable problems may be internal, with the Saudi budget falling into what the IMF warns will be “substantial deficit” this year and next.

“Tepid” growth and falling oil exports mean larger trade and budget deficits, predicts the IMF. The region will suffer a cumulative current-account deficit of 1.9 percent of gross domestic product this year; even the oil-exporting countries will run a deficit of 1 percent. “Deepening conflicts and security disruptions in a number of oil-exporting countries could further undermine economic activity, delay reforms and dampen confidence,” warns the IMF.

The Middle East’s body politic, enfeebled by these disorders, has been ravaged by sectarian and civil wars. The International Rescue Committee estimated this month that 11.4 million Syrians, or about half the population, have fled their homes. The Syrian disaster has affected the whole region. To take just one example, poverty has more than doubled in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to a recent World Bank report.

As weak governance structures have buckled across the Middle East, extremist groups have become more powerful. The most potent is the Islamic State, which exploded out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But many other groups across the region are fusing popular rage with sectarian and tribal bases of support. Even if the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, can be “degraded” in Iraq and Syria over the next three years, as President Obama hopes, the underlying disorder in the region could spawn ISIS 2.0, or even 3.0.

Observing the devastation in the Middle East is a bit like watching a hurricane pummel a vulnerable coastline. Outsiders can try to mitigate the destruction and provide humanitarian relief. They must also try to protect themselves from collateral damage. But they can’t stop the raging winds and surging tides from leveling fragile structures. As disaster-management experts have learned, a big storm has to blow itself out before rebuilding can begin.

Graham Allison, who heads the Belfer Center here, argues that the U.S. government should be careful about trying to fix problems in the Middle East until it understands them better. He contrasts the deadly Ebola virus with the ideological contagion of the Islamic State. We know what causes Ebola and how to stop it, Allison wrote recently in Time magazine, but there is no such clarity about how the Islamic State toxin spreads or how it can be cured.

What we do know is that this extremist virus has taken root in a body that is already severely weakened and showing no signs of recovering soon.

Read more from David Ignatius’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Matter and antimatter, simultaneously. By BEC Crew
Almost 80 years ago, an Italian physicist proposed that a particle could exist as both matter and antimatter at the same time. Called the Majorana fermion, this mysterious state of matter set off a decades-long hunt, with scientists finding the first real evidence of its existence earlier this year .
And now physicists in China have discovered that an elusive type of quasiparticle can behave just like a Majorana fermion, and it could help us to finally understand this incredibly weird phenomenon.
If you’re not familiar with the Majorana fermion , it was first proposed by Italian theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937. He predicted that a type of particle called a fermion could act as its own antiparticle.
In the standard model of physics, every particle has an antiparticle. These antiparticles are usually an entirely separate particle, with the same mass but opposite charge of their partner.
Even electrically neutral particles have antiparticles, such as the neutron, which is made of quarks, and the antineutron, which is made of antiquarks.
In very rare cases, a particle with no mass and no charge can act as its own antiparticle, and we’ve only identified a few examples of these so far – photons (light particles), hypothetical gravitons , and WIMPs .
Majorana fermions, if they exist, fall into this final category, and if we can find them and harness them, it would change everything about how we record and process information in the next generation of quantum computers.
“The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists,” physicist Leonid Rokhinson from Purdue University noted back in 2012 . “It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge.”
Unlike regular computers that use bits of 0 and 1, quantum computers use quantum bits that can exist in a state of 0, 1, or a superposition of both.
The problem with building a computer out of quantum bits (or qubits) is that it’s incredibly difficult to make a record of what state they previously held once they’ve been switched, and there’s no point having a computer that can’t retain information.
But physicists think Majorana fermions could be the key to solving all of that.
“Information could be stored not in the individual particles, but in their relative configuration, so that if one particle is pushed a little by a local force, it doesn’t matter,” said Rokhinson .
“As long as that local noise is not so strong that it alters the overall configuration of a group of particles, the information is retained. It offers an entirely new way of dealing with information.”
In April this year, a team from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee discovered the first real proof of the existence of Majorana fermions in something called a quasiparticle.
Unlike a regular particle, which is a physical object that makes up an atom, a quasiparticle is an entity that has some characteristics of a distinct particle, but is made up of a grouping of multiple particles instead. Finding a Majorana fermion quasiparticle is one thing, but the real goal is finding a Majorana fermion particle.
Fast-forward to now, and physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they’ve identified another type of quasiparticle that behaves just like a Majorana fermion, called Majorana zero modes (MZMs).
The team was able to synthesise these quasiparticles inside a quantum simulation, and manipulate them in ways that would work within a quantum computer system. Most significantly, they showed that they could retain information encoded in their Majorana zero modes, even when errors and ‘noise’ were applied to the system.
“[W]e demonstrate the immunity of quantum information encoded in the Majorana zero modes against local errors through the simulator,” they describe in their paper, published in Nature Communications. 
If the team’s simulation can be replicated in experimental conditions, it means we could have another candidate for Majorana fermion-like behaviours on our hands, and another shot at something to build the quantum computers of the future with.
In the meantime, here’s more on those elusive Majorana fermions:

Source: Science Alert 
",FAKE
"REPORT: Hillary’s Friends Told To Lie About Her Email Scandal 
How powerful is the NSA? 
This secretive agency employs thousands of people and has literally weaponized our national information technology infrastructure. Most of the most powerful espionage tools are created by the National Security Agency’s elite group of hackers. 
If there is anyone on the planet who best understands the NSA’s clandestine capabilities, it’s Kim Dotcom. The international encryption expert and open-source advocate wanted people to know that there was a clear path to recovering Clinton’s emails that she has claimed were deleted because of their “personal” nature.   
You can see the list here: I know where Hillary Clintons deleted emails are and how to get them legally @TGowdySC @seanhannity @realDonaldTrump . 100% true. Retweet. pic.twitter.com/eir8r0FJ8M 
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
Clinton began using the now-famous private server at her home in 2009. Using XKeyscore, the surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden, NSA analysts could drill deeper into data as far back as 2012, when Clinton served as secretary of state, the Business Times reported. 
Congress spent millions of dollars investigating Hillary Clinton’s missing emails and illegal use of a private server, and the liberal media , rather than reporting on the results of those investigations, has instead tried to use the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as a sideshow to distract from the issues that really matter to Americans.  ",FAKE
"An Iranian ship purportedly carrying aid to Yemen should change course and head to Djibouti where the United Nations is overseeing humanitarian deliveries, US officials demanded Tuesday.

The US military is tracking the ship after Tehran reportedly said it would send warships to escort the vessel to Yemen, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.

The ship, the Iran Shahed, had moved through the Strait of Hormuz and was now in the Gulf of Oman, according to the marinetraffic.com site. But the vessel was not under any naval escort at the moment, Warren said.

""We are monitoring the Iranian ship,"" he said. ""We are aware of the Iranians' statement that they plan to escort this ship with warships.""

The state Iranian IRNA news agency earlier quoted a naval commander, Rear Admiral Hossein Azad, saying naval forces would be ""safeguarding"" the vessel.

Iran's Red Crescent had said last week that it would send a ship carrying 2,500 tons of humanitarian aid to Yemen, where Tehran-backed Huthi rebels are fighting pro-government forces supported by a Saudi-led coalition.

""The Iranians have stated that this is humanitarian aid,"" Warren said.

""If that is the case, then we certainly encourage the Iranians to deliver that humanitarian aid to the United Nations humanitarian aid distribution hub, which has been established in Djibouti.""

""This will allow the aid to be rapidly and efficiently distributed to those in Yemen who require it,"" he added.

When asked if the US military would try to search the ship or prevent it from docking in Yemen, Warren declined to comment.

The warnings from Washington raised the possibility of a potential confrontation at sea after tensions flared in recent days in the Strait of Hormuz.

The US Navy bolstered its presence in the Gulf after Iran seized a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel in the vital waterway.

Iranian authorities later released the ship, citing a commercial dispute with Denmark's Maersk group, which chartered the vessel.

""If the Iranians are planning some sort of stunt in the region, they know as well as we do that it would be unhelpful and in fact could potentially threaten the ceasefire (in Yemen) that has been so painstakingly brought about,"" Warren said.

""We call on the Iranians to do the right thing here and deliver their humanitarian aid in accordance with UN protocols which is through the distribution hub that's been established in Djibouti,"" he added.",REAL
"There’s nothing quite like playing in front of the hometown crowd to get your mojo back. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump did in the New York primary Tuesday, winning 61 of 62 counties and all but one congressional district en route to scooping up 90 delegates.

In the end, Trump’s resounding victory may have been as vital to the tone of the race coverage as it was to his actual path to the Republican nomination. After a month of taking on water thanks to staff shake-ups, organizing failures and a big loss in Wisconsin, The Donald trounced his rivals in the media capital of the world.

But it’s probably not enough as he tries to secure the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination before reaching the GOP convention in Cleveland. The most likely scenario will have Trump getting about 1,185 delegates. Here’s why.

New York marks a crucial geographic segue in the race, as the calendar turns away from the Ted Cruz-friendly interior and into Trump’s mid-Atlantic wheelhouse. With 156 bound delegates at stake next Tuesday, the test for Cruz and John Kasich will be how many they can pick off.

You can start by penciling in 39 delegates for Trump as the likely statewide winner in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Exceeding the 50 percent mark in Connecticut would mean another 13 delegates who would otherwise be split among the field.

And Trump can expect to win about half of Rhode Island’s 19 proportionally allotted delegates. The rest will be awarded to the respective winners of each congressional district.

The best delegate-poaching opportunity for Kasich comes in the affluent Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, where polls show Trump dead last behind Cruz. Winning three or four districts between the Beltway and the Connecticut Gold Coast would be a big success. The best news for Trump opponents is that the single biggest trove of delegates will be the 54 unbound Pennsylvanians elected independently of candidate affiliation or obligation. While many have pledged to support the winner of the state or their district, all would be in play in Cleveland, a wrinkle that complicates Trump’s path.

Trump would be wise to maximize his April opportunities. Other than New Jersey on June 7, there are no more gimmes, and few opportunities to reap a disproportionate share of delegates even from those states Trump might win. The Mountain West has been inhospitable terrain. The Pacific Northwest states split their delegates proportionally. And even West Virginia, in the heart of Trump’s Appalachian sweet spot, has a delegate system so complicated that he may come away shortchanged.

The bellwether to watch will be Indiana. The criminally under-polled state holds promise both for Trump (open primary, blue-collar sensibilities) and his opponents (affluent Indianapolis suburbs for Kasich, grassroots conservatives and evangelicals for Cruz), and awards 30 at-large delegates to the statewide winner. If Cruz can reprise the Midwestern magic that carried him in Wisconsin, he can stop the Trump offensive in its tracks. Short of that, he and Kasich must peel away as many congressional districts as possible to prevent Trump from heading into June needing only a glorified chip shot to clinch.

In the end, the race will come down to California and its massive cache of 172 delegates in what will amount to 53 unpredictable mini-primaries across disparate terrain. Ninety delegates will be awarded in districts where President Obama received 60 percent or more of the vote. Two-thirds of those will be decided in seats where Mitt Romney won 30 percent or less, including eight bona fide “rotten boroughs” where he couldn’t even crack 20 percent.

Trump can hardly expect a New York-style romp here, meaning he needs at least 1,100 delegates coming in.

Cruz’s argument at an open convention will be stronger if he can claim more than 800 delegates while keeping the deficit to a minimum. The California endgame will hinge on what happens in Indiana. If Cruz can battle through the coming adversity for a Hoosier State victory, the odds are we’re headed to Cleveland.

Bottom line: Even if Trump wins Indiana and staves off Kasich in the ’burbs, he’d probably end up just shy of what he needs — perhaps as close as 1,230 delegates. But it’s more likely that Indiana proves tougher for him and leaves him closer to 1,185 delegates — putting all eyes on Cleveland.",REAL
"CHICAGO —Donald Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, on Saturday first blamed ""thugs"" for his decision to cancel a rally in Chicago over alleged security concerns and then said supporters of his Democratic rivals caused disruptions there.

""It is (Hillary) Clinton and (Bernie) Sanders people who disrupted my rally in Chicago - and then they say I must talk to my people,"" Trump tweeted. ""Phony politicians!""

""Obviously, while I appreciate that we had supporters at Trump’s rally in Chicago, our campaign did not organize the protests,"" the Vermont senator said in a statement. “What caused the violence at Trump’s rally is a campaign whose words and actions have encouraged it on the part of his supporters.""

The Chicago Police Department said on that four men and a woman were arrested at the rally after brief scuffles broke out at the event at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion. Four of the individuals were still in police custody on Saturday morning but had not yet been charged, said Officer Jose Estrada, a department spokesman. One individual was given an ordinance citation and released.

However, CBS News said its reporter, Sopan Deb, was detained by law enforcement while covering the scene.

Another man, activist William Calloway, said he was arrested and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespassing. Calloway said police told him they arrested him because he failed to immediately exit the arena after the rally was canceled and guests were ordered to exit. The police department, however, said he was not among the five they had taken into custody. Calloway said that he was arrested by UIC campus police.

Calloway played a prominent role in the court-ordered release of a police video of a white officer fatally shooting a black teenager, which triggered months of protests in the city. Calloway said he believes that his role in the McDonald case may have factored into police detaining him. He said police released him about three hours after taking him into custody.

""They knew who I was,"" Calloway said in a phone interview Saturday.

Anthony Guglielmi, a police department spokesman, said the Trump campaign did not consult the police department before canceling. ""The decision was made by the campaign on its own,"" Guglielmi said.

Trump held a rally in the Dayton suburb of Vandalia Saturday afternoon and planned an event in Cleveland ahead of primary voting in Ohio on Tuesday. Trump denied some media reports that a rally in Cincinnati on Sunday had been canceled.

On Twitter, Trump blamed the protesters for Friday's canceled rally. ""The organized group of people, many of them thugs, who shut down our First Amendment rights in Chicago, have totally energized America!"" he said on Twitter.

At the Dayton rally, Trump said some of the people taunting and harassing his supporters in Chicago ""represented Bernie, our communist friend.""

""With Bernie, he should really get up and say to his people, 'stop, stop.' Not me,"" Trump said.

Chaos ensued after organizers announced at 6:30 p.m. that Trump, who never arrived at the pavilion, had scrubbed the event. Some protesters rushed the arena floor in celebration, many shouting, ""Bernie, Bernie"" and ""We stopped Trump!""

Police ejected at least a half dozen anti-Trump demonstrators, including one man who got onto the stage and approached the podium.

Joe Fritz, 20, who came to hear Trump speak, said a woman punched him outside the arena after the rally was canceled.

He said the woman, who was with a girl about 10 years old, landed a glancing blow to his chin after he questioned her for yelling epithets toward police and about Trump. ""I told her, 'What kind of example are you setting?'"" Fritz said.

Fritz said he and his friend were then surrounded by other anti-Trump protesters who screamed at them before police pulled them out of the crowd.

Still, the pushing and shoving was brief, and some protesters said security concerns were overstated.

""(Trump) felt us tonight and felt our power tonight,"" said Angelica Salazar, 30, of West Chicago, Ill. Salazar, who went to speak out against Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, said she did not feel unsafe.

Matthew Ross, a Chicago activist, said suggestions from Trump that protesters presented a security risk don't hold up.

""Have you seen what his supporters have incited at their rallies?"" asked Ross, who said a Trump supporter threw water on him after it was announced that the rally was canceled. ""I think what [Trump] is doing is inciting violence.""

Afterward, Trump spoke by phone with several news networks and described many anti-Trump protesters, including those at previous rallies, as violent. ""I just don't want people hurt,"" he told MSNBC.

Trump has been criticized about violent comments he and his supporters have made on the campaign trail. When attendees at an event in November kicked a Black Lives Matter activist, Trump said, ""Maybe he should have been roughed up.""

Another supporter, John McGraw, sucker-punched a protester at a rally Wednesday in North Carolina. McGraw later told Inside Edition that ""we might have to kill him"" next time the protester shows up.

Trump insisted that anti-Trump protesters were instigating incidents at his events. “I certainly don’t incite violence,"" he said.

“If a protester is swinging a fist at a man or a group of men, and if they end up going back,"" he said, ""I’m not looking to do him any favors.""

Trump's rivals for the GOP nomination quickly weighed in on the uproar.

Sen. Marco Rubio, speaking Saturday in Florida, blamed the rhetoric of the front-runner for the violence, and the media for ignoring his ""offensive"" statements for too long.

""This is what happen when a leading presidential candidate goes around feeding into a narrative of anger and bitterness and frustration,"" Rubio said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, Trump's closest rival in the race, noted that ""in any campaign, responsibility starts at the top.""

""When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face, the predictable consequence of that is that it escalates,"" Cruz told reporters in Illinois. ""Today is unlikely to be the last such incidence.""

""Some let their opposition to his views slip beyond protest into violence, but we can never let that happen,"" the Ohio governor said in a statement.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said the ""divisive rhetoric"" of the Trump campaign should be of ""grave concern.""

""We all have our differences, and we know many people across the country feel angry,"" Clinton said in a statement. ""We need to address that anger together.""",REAL
"(Before It's News)
This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at Economic Collapse blog .
Editor’s Comment: In particular with electronic voting, the opportunity to flip votes and steal elections is almost unstoppable and will be very difficult to hold accountable. Nonetheless, that is exactly what activists in Texas and other key states should focus on. After decades of solid “red state” status, they are now talking openly about Hillary winning the Lone Star State and flipping it blue… despite being perhaps the most despised, unlikable and untrustworthy presidential candidate in modern history.
Take a look at the electoral college, and the shades of ‘blue and red states’ as things have been… if Team Hillary is able to steal Texas, there will be no way for Trump to win 270 electoral college, even if he wins Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and other swing states. Perhaps this has been their secret weapon all along, and the reason that she has been so arrogant throughout the entire campaign:
These are dangerous times, and the establishment – after systematically denying the voice of the people on many fronts – is now making a huge gamble at holding onto power even in the face of obvious fraud. Will there be any legitimacy left in this country? And what happens if/when this election is stolen and everyone knows it?
It Is Happening Again! Voting Machines Are Switching Votes From Donald Trump To Hillary Clinton
by Michael Snyder
Is the 2016 election in the process of being stolen? Just a few weeks ago I issued a major alert warning that this exact sort of thing might happen. Early voting has already begun in many states, and a number of voters in Texas are reporting that the voting machines switched their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. The odd thing is that none of the other choices were affected when these individuals attempted to vote for a straight Republican ticket. If Hillary Clinton is declared the winner of the state of Texas on election night, a full investigation of these voting machines should be conducted, because there is no way that Donald Trump should lose that state. I have said that it will be the greatest miracle in U.S. political history if Donald Trump wins this election, but without the state of Texas Donald Trump has exactly zero chance of winning. So those living down in Texas need to keep reporting anything unusual that they see or hear when they go to vote.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but the exact same thing was happening during the last presidential election. The state of Ohio was considered to be the key to Mitt Romney’s chances of winning in 2012, and right up to election day the Romney campaign actually believed that they were going to win the state.
Unfortunately for Romney, something funny was going on with the voting machines. In a previous article , I included a Quote: from an Ohio voter that had her vote switched from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama three times …
“I don’t know if it happened to anybody else or not, but this is the first time in all the years that we voted that this has ever happened to me,” said Marion, Ohio, voter Joan Stevens.
Stevens said that when she voted, it took her three tries before the machine accepted her choice to vote for Romney .
“I went to vote and I got right in the middle of Romney’s name,” Stevens told Fox News, saying that she was certain to put her finger directly on her choice for the White House.
She said that the first time she pushed “Romney,” the machine marked “Obama.”
So she pushed Romney again. Obama came up again. Then it happened a third time.
“Maybe you make a mistake once, but not three times,” she told Fox News.
And we did see some very, very strange numbers come out of certain areas of Ohio four years ago.
For example, there were more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County in which Barack Obama got at least 99 percent of the vote in 2012.
If that happened in just one precinct that would be odd enough. But the odds of it happening in more than 100 precincts in just one county by random chance are so low that they aren’t even worth mentioning.
And of course this didn’t just happen in Ohio. Similar things were happening all over the country .
The reason why I bring all of this up is to show that there is a pattern. If a fair vote had been conducted, Romney may have indeed won in 2012, and now it appears that voting machines are being rigged again.
In Wichita County, Texas so many people were reporting that their votes were being switched from Trump to Clinton that it made the local newspaper …
Shortly after early voting booths opened Monday in Wichita County, rumors swirled online about possible errors in the process. Several online posts claimed a friend or family member had attempted to vote straight party Republican ticket, but their presidential nomination was switched to the Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton. None of the local reports were from people who experienced the situation first hand. A Bowie woman posted that a relative who lives in Arlington saw her votes “switched.” The post was shared more than 100,000 times Monday.
And Paul Joseph Watson has written about some specific individuals that are making allegations that their votes for president were switched by the machines. One of the examples that he cited was a Facebook post by Lisa Houlette of Amarillo, Texas …
Gary and I went to early vote today…I voted a straight Republican ticket and as I scrolled to submit my ballot I noticed that the Republican Straight ticket was highlighted, however, the clinton/kaine box was also highlighted! I tried to go back and change and could not get it to work. I asked for help from one of the workers and she couldn’t get it to go back either. It took a second election person to get the machine to where I could correct the vote to a straight ticket. Be careful and double check your selections before you cast your vote! Don’t hesitate to ask for help. I had to have help to get mine changed.
I don’t know about you, but major alarm bells went off in my head when I read that.
A similar incident was reported on Facebook by Shandy Clark of Arlington, Texas …
Hey everyone, just a heads up! I had a family member that voted this morning and she voted straight Republican. She checked before she submitted and the vote had changed to Clinton! She reported it and made sure her vote was changed back. They commented that It had been happening. She is trying to get the word out and asked that we post and share. Just want everyone’s vote to be accurate and count. Check your vote before you submit!
And of course they weren’t the only ones reporting vote switching. It turns out that lots of other Texans have also experienced this phenomenon …
So is there a serious problem with the voting machines?
According to Breitbart , one county in Texas has already removed all electronic voting machines and has made an emergency switch to paper ballots…
Chambers County election officials have executed an emergency protocol to remove all electronic voting machines available during early voting until a software update can be completed to correct problems experienced by straight-ticket voters .
Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne told Breitbart Texas Tuesday morning that all electronic voting was temporarily halted until her office completes a “software update” on ES&S machines that otherwise “omit one race” when a straight ticket option is selected for either major party. The Texas 14 th Court of Appeals race was reported to be the contest in which voters commonly experienced the glitch.
Let’s keep a very close eye on this. If the state of Texas ends up in Trump’s column on election night, perhaps no harm has been done.
But if Trump loses Texas there is no possible way that he will be able to make up those 38 electoral votes somewhere else.
Despite what the mainstream media is saying, the truth is that election fraud is very real. Just the other day, WND published an article that contained a list of documented cases of election fraud in 23 different states . And Devvy Kidd just authored a piece that pointed out that there are 24 million voter registrations in this country that are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate“…
In 2012 the highly respected Pew Research Center exposed the sickening state of voter rolls in this country:
Nearly 2 million deceased registered to vote
Close to 3 million registered in multiples states
Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate
More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters
Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state
But despite everything you just read, the mainstream media is trying very hard to prop up faith in the integrity of the process. In fact, just today CNN came out with an article entitled “ Poll: Most see a Hillary Clinton victory and a fair count ahead “…
Almost 7 in 10 voters nationwide say they think Hillary Clinton will win the presidency next month, but most say that if that happens, Donald Trump will not accept the results and concede, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.
Americans overall are more confident that the nation’s votes for president will be cast and counted accurately this year than they were in 2008. Whatever the outcome, however, nearly 8 in 10 say that once all the states have certified their vote counts, the losing candidate has an obligation to accept the results and concede to the winner.
Unfortunately, CNN does not have much credibility left at this point, and it is getting harder and harder to believe the polls that are being put out by the mainstream media.
And the mainstream media would also have us believe that if evidence of election fraud does emerge that it will be because the Russians have made it up …
U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.
But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said.
Now that is a real “conspiracy theory”, and it would be incredibly funny if all of this wasn’t so serious.
During this election season, if you see or hear anything unusual about voting in your area, please report it.
The American people should be allowed to make a free and fair choice, and anyone that attempts to alter an election is committing a crime against all of us.
And let’s watch the state of Texas very carefully. If it goes blue, you will know that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.",FAKE
"In some gas stations around the country, the price of a gallon of regular has dropped below $1.42. AAA and GasBuddy, two organizations that follow gasoline prices, say that gasoline prices below $2 will not be unusual in most of the United States. As oil prices fall, and refinery capacity stays strong, the price of gas could reach $1 a gallon in some areas, a level last reached in 1999. As a matter of fact, the entire states of Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Caroline have gas prices that average at or below $1.75.

Gasoline prices are driven mostly by four factors: oil prices, proximity to refineries, refinery capacity and state taxes and levies. Oil prices have dropped below $33 a barrel and continue to collapse. The recent decision by Saudi Arabia to continue to keep its oil exports high essentially has dissolved the OPEC cartel. The decision also has forced the kingdom to chop its 2016 budget. This ongoing supply glut guarantees oversupply of crude. At the same time, slowing national economies in the largest countries, including China, will lower demand. China now tops the list of oil importers, according to the Financial Times, having moved ahead of the United States.

The cost of producing oil from shale deposits, particularly in the United States, is greater in some cases than what it can be sold for. Nonetheless, parts of this industry continue pumping, increasing supply, while others go bankrupt because they cannot survive with crude prices so low.

Several states house large refineries or are close to those that do. This is particularly the case near the Gulf of Mexico, including the massive refinery operations south of Houston. Some owned by Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) process several hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. Proximity to refineries is a factor in gasoline prices, if the refineries are running at or near capacity and produce gasoline instead of other petroleum products.

Finally, gas taxes in several states are well below the national average of $0.4869 a gallon, according to the American Petroleum Institute. In some low gas price states, these taxes are below $0.40. This includes South Carolina at $0.3515, Missouri at $0.3570 and Oklahoma at $0.3540. Low gas taxes in these states compound the effect of falling oil prices.

The odds grow each day that gas prices will be $1 a gallon in some areas in the United States, particularly those where prices are already close to hitting $1.40 — and falling.

24/7 Wall St. is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news and commentary. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.",REAL
"JERUSALEM, Israel – An unknown group in Iran posted an animated film on the Internet simulating a missile attack on Saudi Arabia, including an attack on their main oil fields.

While it's unclear who made the video, it highlights the growing animosity between these two Middle East giants.

The animation simulates an Iranian rocket attack using missiles fired from Yemen. The attack is designed to cripple Saudi Arabia on multiple fronts.

The video states it's a ""response to the hallucinations and empty threats of the Saud clan"" and that ""the arm of vengeance of the Islamic world will emerge from the sleeve of the Yemenis.""

The video reveals the GPS coordinates of Saudi Arabia's main oil facility at the Ghawar Oil Field and then shows the missiles destroying the Saudi Aramco facility and setting the area on fire.

It also simulates attacks on Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, which it calls the Freemason Tower. Then it shows missiles striking the Saudis' main air base and crippling its anti-missile system.

The rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran intensified when the Saudis executed a top Shiite cleric. Iran followed by allowing protesters to ransack the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran, prompting Saudi Arabia to cut diplomatic relations.

Pakistan then weighed in on the side of the Saudis, saying they would wipe Iran off the map if it threatened the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia.

The concern for many in the region is that the rivalry between the two Middle East titans will go from a war of words to a war on the battlefield.",REAL
"Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/indias-stonehenge-7000-year-old.html A remarkable 7,000-year-old megalithic site that served as an astronomical observatory has been found in Muduma village in Telangana, India. The discovery has been hailed as one of the most significant archaeological findings in India over the last few decades.According to Times of India , the team of archeologists described it as ""the only megalithic site in India, where a depiction of a star constellation has been identified."" The ancient observatory dates to 5,000 BC and the researchers believe that it is the earliest astronomical observatory discovered in India and perhaps even in the whole of South Asia.The site consists of around 80 huge menhirs (standing stones), which are 3.5 – 4 meters tall. There are also about 2000 alignment stones, which are 30-60cm tall.According to experts, no other excavation site in India has so many menhirs concentrated in such a small area. The maximum concentration of menhirs is located in the central portion of the monument.One of the surprising details discovered at the site is a depiction of the constellation known as Ursa Major, which is formed from small cup-sized pits carved into a standing stone. The group of about 30 cup-marks were arranged in the same shape in which Ursa Major can be observed in the night sky with the naked eye. The carving depicts not only the prominent seven starts, but also the peripheral stars too. The large standing stones that form an observatory in Telangana, India ( Satya Vijayi ) Moreover, as ArcheoFeed.com reported: an ""imaginary line drawn through the top two stars point to pole star or the North Star.""Researchers believe that the site still holds many secrets. The next planned research will take a place in December led by archeologists from Korea.Numerous prehistoric observatories have already been discovered around the world, including Peru, Britain and Armenia. Thousands of years ago people were trying to understand the sky and were often using their observations to make predictions for agricultural and ceremonial purposes. The site Zorats Karer from Armenia dates back to the same period as the observatory from India. The constellation Ursa Major as it can be seen by the unaided eye ( public domain ) As Natalia Klimczak from Ancient Origins wrote :“Zorats Karer is also known as Carahunge, Karahunj, Qarahunj. It is located in an area of around 7 hectares and covers the site nearby the Dar river canyon, close to the city of Sisan. The ancient site is often called the ""A rmenian Stonehenge ,"" but the truth of what it is may be even more fascinating. Related: Stonehenge is 5,000 Years Older Than Previously Thought According to researchers, Zorats Karer could be among the world's oldest astronomical observatories, and is at least 3,500 years older than British Stonehenge. The site was rediscovered in 1984 by a team led by researcher Onik Khnkikyan. After a few months of work, Khnkikyan concluded that the site of Zorats Karer must have been an observatory. Moreover, with time, Armenian archeologists, astronomers and astrophysicists found that there were at least two other ancient sites important for prehistoric astronomy in the vicinity: Angeghakot and Metzamor. A general view of the Karahunj site near Sisian, Southern Armenia. ( CC BY-SA 4.0 ) In 1994, Zorats Karer was extensively analyzed by Professor Paris Herouni, a member of the Armenian National Academy of Science and President of the Radio Physics Research Institute in Yerevan. His expeditions revealed a great deal of fascinating information about the site. First of all, his team counted 223 stones, of which 84 were found to have holes.They measured the longitude, latitude and the magnetic deviation of the site. The researchers also created a topographical map of the monumental megalithic construction, which became the basis of further work. Finally, the main treasure of the site was unearthed – a collection of many impressive and unique astronomical objects. The researchers realized that several stones were used to make observations of the sun, moon and stars. They were located according to knowledge about the rising, culmination moments, and setting of the sun, moon and specific stars. The stones are basalt, somewhat protected by moss but smoothed by the rain and wind and full of holes and erosion. Many of the stones were damaged over time.In ancient times, the stones were shaped and arranged in what are known as the north and south arms, the central circle, the north-eastern alley, the separate standing system of circles and the chord. The stones are between 0.5 and 3 meters tall and weigh up to 10 tons. Some of them are related to burial cists."" By Natalia Klimzcak, Ancient Origins / Cover image: Main: The Ursa Major constellation (Fotlia). Inset: The megalithic site in Telangana, India ( Bangalore Mirror ) This article was originally published on Ancient Origins and has been republished with permission. Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Top US General Pleads With Troops Not To Revolt Over 2016 Essential Reading General Ivashov: “International terrorism does not exist” By wmw_admin on February 24, 2007 
Gen. Leonid Ivashov was Chief of Staff of Russian armed forces when the 9/11 attacks took place, but he says, they weren’t carried out by Osama or al-Qaeeda. The most likely culprits, says the General, were transnational mafias and international oligarchs Waco: The Untold Story. By wmw_admin on May 6, 2006 
The real story behind Waco. A shocking revelation that ultimately led to the death of the man who sought to expose it, attorney Paul Wilcher. Bilderberg Meeting – Media Should Be Ashamed By wmw_admin on July 12, 2003 
Why do the Bilderberg meetings receive so little coverage. Victor Thorn examines why, and how, real news is suppressed by the mainstream media BBC Report (Subsequently Deleted): Ukrainian Fighter Shot Down MH17 By wmw_admin on July 31, 2014 
On the anniversary of its downing: BBC reporter interviews eyewitnesses (with English subtitles) who saw jet fighters fire on MH17. The BBC has since deleted the report They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here Juri Lina – In the Shadow of Hermes By wmw_admin on July 15, 2011 
Fixed and a “must see” for all serious students of REAL history. This outstanding video from the author of “Under the Sign of Scorpio” challenges many modern myths. With English subtitles The Mastermind Behind 911? By wmw_admin on February 11, 2005 
He recieved hardly any media attention while chief financial officer at the Pentagon, but he might just be THE KEY FIGURE behind the events of 911 The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance America Before Columbus By Rixon Stewart on September 1, 2006 
Could it be that certain powers have a vested interest in keeping our real history under wraps? Because a great deal has been unearthed which is completely at odds with conventional notions regarding the origins of what we know today as America The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on October 31, 2016 Ed Klein — DailyMail.com Oct 30, 2016 
New York Times bestselling author Ed Klein has just published his fourth book about the Clintons since 2005, Guilty as Sin. 
Klein had told how Bill Clinton enjoyed foot rubs, massages and romps in his presidential library with female interns and has described new details about Hillary’s medical crises. Guilty as Sin is available in bookstores and for order from Amazon. 
James Comey’s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director. 
‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ 
According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom 
‘He’s been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,’ said the source. 
‘When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary’s personal email server turned up in a computer used [her close aide] Huma Abedin and [Abedin’s disgraced husband,] Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation. 
‘The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,’ the source continued. ‘And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. 
‘He talks about the damage that he’s done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he’s been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It’s taken a tremendous toll on him. 
‘It shattered his ego. He looks like he’s aged 10 years in the past four months.’ 
But Comey’s decision to reopen the case was more than an effort to heal the wound he inflicted on the FBI. 
He was also worried that after the presidential election, Republicans in Congress would mount a probe of how he had granted Hillary political favoritism. 
His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department. 
‘Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him,’ the source said. 
As I revealed in my latest New York Times bestseller Guilty As Sin Obama said that appointing Comey as FBI direct was ‘my worst mistake as president.’ 
‘Lynch and Obama haven’t contacted Jim directly,’ said the source, ‘but they’ve made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.’",FAKE
"President Barack Obama's popularity with the public is on the upswing, according to a new Gallup poll that found him enjoying his strongest approval rating in nearly two years.

That breaks down predictably along party lines, with 90% of Democrats viewing him favorably while only 13% of Republicans say the same. The overall boost in popularity seems to be driven in part by a steady improvement in his standing with independents — he's now seen favorably by 52% of independents, up 6 percentage points since April and 17 percentage points since last fall.

That's when Obama was suffering from the lowest popularity his tenure, with only 37% of Americans viewing him favorably last fall.

But the 53% of Americans that view him favorably don't all approve of his job performance, which typically lags a few points behind a president's personal popularity. Gallup's daily tracking poll found him still underwater with voters in terms of his job performance, with 43% approving while 51% disapprove of the job he's doing in office.

Still, that, too marks a favorable upswing from last fall, when Obama was also facing some of the lowest approval ratings of his time in office. Gallup surveyed 1,024 adults from May 6-10 via landline and cell phone, and the poll has a margin of error of 4%.",REAL
"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › BLOOMBERG-BACKED PENNSYLVANIA ATTORNEY GENERAL SENTENCED TO 10-23 MONTHS IN PRISON BLOOMBERG-BACKED PENNSYLVANIA ATTORNEY GENERAL SENTENCED TO 10-23 MONTHS IN PRISON 0 SHARES 
[11/1/16] NRAILA – Back in August , we reported that Michael Bloomberg-backed then-sitting Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane had been found guilty of criminal conspiracy and perjury in a case stemming from the abuse of her office. Kane’s sentencing hearing was held Monday, where Judge Wendy Demchick-Alloy sentenced the former attorney general to 10 to 23 months in prison. In 2012, Kane was elected Attorney General of Pennsylvania with the help of a $250,000 Bloomberg-funded ad campaign against her opponent. Even before assuming office, Attorney General-elect Kane attacked the Right-to-Carry by signing a letter opposing federal reciprocity legislation. Kane would go on to attack Right-to-Carry reciprocity again, unilaterally and illegitimately eliminating Pennsylvania’s recognition of non-resident Florida Concealed Weapon Licenses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer , at the sentencing hearing, Demchick-Alloy admonished Kane for her conduct in leaking confidential grand jury materials as part of an attack on a political rival. Demchick-Alloy stated, “The case is about ego, ego of a politician consumed by her image from Day One… And instead of focusing solely on the business of fighting crime, the focus was battling these perceived enemies … and utilizing and exploiting her position to do it.” A colleague that testified at the hearing described Kane’s office by stating, “through a pattern of systematic firings and Nixonian espionage, she created a terror zone in this office.” In seeking a lenient sentence for his client, Kane’s attorney cited the consequences the convicted criminal had already suffered, telling the court, “She stands a convicted felon subject to public shame and public humiliation.” Further, the attorney argued that prison was a risk to Kane’s safety. According to the Inquirer, Demchick-Alloy appeared unimpressed, noting, “When you unfortunately dirty yourself with criminal behavior, you assume that risk.” Kane had faced a potential 12 to 24 years in prison for her crimes. Though Demchick-Alloy imposed only a fraction of the maximum sentence, Kane’s punishment should be enough to prevent her from obtaining a position where she could torment her political adversaries, or Keystone State gun owners. Post navigation",FAKE
"We Are Change 
Wikileaks helped celebrate Hillary Criminalton’s birthday Wednesday by gifting Hillary and the American people another glimpse into Clinton land. Corruption, dirty tricks all to get the Presidency the tactic hasn’t changed since Arkansas. Do whatever it takes. Wikileaks has now proven the Clinton’s past allegations of corruption likely to be true, all those talks over the years of Hillary claiming Bill’s sexual assaults were fraudulent are now bluntly obvious Hillary’s ill attitude towards staff is also confirmed the “right wing” conspiracy is clearly seen and it’s one against the American people to rig the election. Now Wikileaks may have something in the works a potential birthday surprise for Mrs. Clinton according to Kim DotCom a friend of Julian Assange.
Kim Dotcom tweeted out a series of mysterious tweets today that suggest Wikileaks could potentially have a Birthday wish for Hillary Clinton containing her 33,000 work related emails later this evening.
Does @Wikileaks have 33,000 explosive candles for Hillary's birthday cake? Maybe?! ?
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
Ring Ring ??
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
Oh no! @wikileaks pic.twitter.com/HcHRNl3pMq 
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 
Bleachbit(ch) can't bleach it ?
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 26, 2016 

 
Kim Dotcom additionally hinted in an interview in May, 14th, 2015 that “Julian Assange and Wikileaks would be Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016,” prior to Guccifer 2.0 prior to the DNC leak, Collin Powell’s emails, Podesta’s emails, Obama’s emails and the list goes on and on..
Either Kim Dotcom knew what Wikileaks had or he’s the new age Nostradamus. The next keypoint is that Kim DotCom knows Julian Assange they talk as seen in the video below Kim Dotcom is asked by Bloomberg reporter, Ali Elkin , “How often do you talk to Julian Assange.” Dotcom responds, “Why is that important to you? Look I like these guys I look up to them I think they are very brave they are going through a very hard time you know and they chose to do that for the betterment of all of us so yeah I love to talk to them.”
Later on in the interview DotCom was questioned about another previous tweet that “he would be Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.” Dotcom then went on to correct himself saying “I have to say really it’s more Julian but I am aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks well he has access to information I don’t know the specifics.”
Is it possible that Kim Dotcom was tipped off by Julian Assange that a birthday gift from Wikileaks the international whistle-blower organization to Hillary Clinton may drop later on tonight? We will soon find out, If these tweets were just Dotcom trolling or if he was serious and a massive leak is about to happen that could potentially end the campaign presidency of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Stay tuned to we are change we will keep you up to date and will break news if Wikileaks leaks “explosive candles” as Dotcom put it for Hillary Clinton.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The post Is A Birthday Surprise Coming For Hillary Criminalton? Kim Dotcoms Mysterious Tweet. appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"It was, finally, the moment Democrats have been waiting for: Former Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders facing off one-on-one, unencumbered by extraneous candidates and audience questions. Last night’s MSNBC debate crackled with heat, as the two candidates stood very close to each other on stage and made their case to the watching public, answering questions from moderators Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd. It led to both candidates becoming their most provocative—Clinton was forceful and dismissive, while Sanders was stern and evasive. The first hour exacerbated the tension between them, as both candidates seemed to entrench in their worldviews, no matter how unpopular. The two bickered over the definition of the word “progressive”—it comes from the word “progress,” did you know?—and of who, exactly, is part of the “establishment.” As I observed yesterday, during the CNN Democratic Town Hall, both Sanders and Clinton were attempting to finesse compromises (or the semblance thereof) between polar opposites, the rhetorical equivalent of walking the plank. But debates are about differentiation, and primaries are about being choosy, so here we stood, watching mom and dad argue after dinner as if the whole state of the free world depended on it.

Things got kind of intense. They dug into each other’s differences, trying to make sound untrue what is patently obvious to the outside observer: Sanders is a stubborn college professor, obsessively dedicated to principle; Clinton is a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, doggedly focused on process. And frankly, neither candidate is served by a debate. This isn’t an election where adulation for a candidate’s ideology swept the other nominees, à la then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008. This is an election between two pragmatic, prickly politicians, two grandparents who have been in public service for decades. Debates make them fighters. And while this head-to-head match-up was long overdue, the first segment of the debate was honestly exhausting to watch, especially after the introspection of the informal town hall. Perhaps the Democratic party is just a little too bleeding-heart to revel in the bloodsport of two strong liberal politicians trying to take each other down, but it certainly seemed that every attack made from one candidate to the other looked mostly bad for that candidate; when Clinton railed against Sanders for his “artful smear” of her politics, she was booed, and when Sanders dismissed Clinton as a shill of the establishment, he dismissed for the obvious fact that a woman candidate for president is a revolution in and of itself.

Process and principle sparred again and again, and moderators Maddow and Todd did well to let the two speak while also finding incisive, specific questions to address to each. It’s difficult for any moderator to hold a candle to Rachel Maddow, but especially when grilling both liberal candidates, she dazzled. She directed a question to Sanders that struck to the heart of the practical difficulties of his platform—asking him how he planned to work with the corporations that advanced progressive agendas, those corporations that had to be dealt with to pass the Affordable Healthcare Act, for example. She asked Clinton for the chance to see the transcripts of those Goldman Sachs speeches. Maddow asked Sanders how he really intended to win the presidency as, essentially, a third-party candidate. And she asked Clinton to justify how she still considered herself a viable candidate, multiple scandals into her career. If Sanders and Clinton were bickering, last night, over the custody of the American people, Maddow was the impish child playing them against each other; indeed, the night’s most heated exchanges came as a result of her pointed questioning.

Which might be why about halfway through the debate, the tension of night noticeably defused. Maybe Sanders and Clinton wised up to Maddow’s game; maybe it was too late in the day, and too late in the campaign trail, to waste so much energy on being angry on television. Of course Clinton’s farther right than Sanders; come the general election, she’s going to be trying to appear moderate. Of course Sanders’ policies will be a bit harder to enact than Clinton’s; he is, in his own words, literally instigating a revolution. The segment on foreign policy allowed the candidates to take a breather; Clinton immediately was more confident, going over her area of expertise, and diverted from his primary issue of capitalism, Sanders was a bit of a wallflower, allowing for some breathing room in the discussion. By the time Todd and Maddow returned to discussing the scandals of the campaign, both candidates seemed like they’d gotten the sparring out of their system. A question about Clinton’s emails elicited a steadfastly neutral response from Sanders: “There’s not a day that goes by when I am not asked to attack her on that issue, and I have refrained from doing that and I will continue to refrain from doing that.” And when Maddow asked Clinton if she wanted 30 seconds to discuss an allegedly misleading advertisement from the Sanders campaign, Clinton just stared a bit, with an exasperation she deployed well at the Benghazi hearings, and then simply responded, “No.” It was a very parental “no.” Final, but with some warmth attached. And it indicated a deep respect for either the other candidate or for the optics of cooperation, which often are exactly the same. I think that Sanders and Clinton have real issues with each other, but I also think that neither Sanders nor Clinton really want to fight with each other, and at the end of the day, despite the whiz-bang of the zingers, neither do we. Beyond the artificial dichotomy of the debate, Sanders and Clinton are all we’ve got—two viable candidates against a stack of wildcards that are still funded and still in the race over on the other team. Of course, calling them Mom and Dad is reductive and gender-essentialist; I am being a little facetious. But there’s a certain degree of unearned faith I’m pinning on both that is the same desperate confidence we all invest in our parents, when we need to believe them when they say that they will keep us safe from danger. And it’s not just me that feels it. As is the habit of kids everywhere, Todd rushed into the awkward camaraderie between the candidates with a too-soon, too-intimate question. Secretary Clinton, you’ve made it clear when you look at Senator Sanders, you do not see a president, but do you see … do you see a vice president? [Clinton laughs.] Would you unite the party by trying to pick Senator Sanders as your running mate? There’s no better evidence of the Democratic Party’s desperate desire for a united front against the looming specter of loony Republicans than this question, the political equivalent of politely asking mom and dad if they will get back together. The debate was revealing, but the questions were even more so; arguments about how to arrange the deck chairs gave way to the realization that the Titanic is sinking. Sanders quipped, “On our worst days, I think it is fair to say we are 100 times better than any Republican candidate.” The crowd cheered. And after closing statements, when Maddow and Todd said goodbye to the candidates, Maddow made sure to hug each.",REAL
"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
"Americans are bracing for a summer of racial disturbances around the country, such as those that have wracked Baltimore, with African Americans and whites deeply divided about why the urban violence has occurred, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found.

A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems.",REAL
"With Trump's call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, several of the nation's most esteemed journalists and influential news outlets have set aside traditional notions of balance and given themselves license to label the Republican front-runner a liar, a demagogue, a racist and worse.

Tom Brokaw, the veteran NBC News anchor, has called Trump's proposal ""dangerous,"" and likened it to the Holocaust and the Japanese internment. On its front page, The New York Times has said Trump's idea is ""more typically associated with hate groups."" Dan Balz, of The Washington Post, has called Trump's rhetoric ""demagogic,"" while BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has informed staff that it is acceptable to refer to Trump on social media as a ""mendacious racist,"" because, he said, those are facts.

Several others have said Trump's proposal poses a national security threat. ""This is not small ball, actually. This matters,"" Richard Engel, the NBC News chief foreign correspondent, said Monday. ""It is...a black spot on our collective foreign policy and our conscience. And it also just feeds into the ISIS narrative.""

The willingness to use such language and draw such analogies represents a watershed moment in the media's coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign, several journalists and political observers told CNN. For the first time in six months, news organizations are abandoning concerns about impartiality and evenhandedness and stating what they believe are objective truths about the Republican's most popular presidential candidate.

""What Trump is doing is wildly outside American traditions and values, and that's what we're covering and responding to and I think you see that across major media outlets,"" Smith told CNN. ""I've never seen a candidate base his campaign on vilifying a minority group. So it would be misleading to characterize it any other way.""

But the new media backlash also comes six months into a campaign that has been characterized by Trump's derogatory statements -- about Mexican immigrants, African-Americans and others -- since the day it began. That has left many observers feeling like the media's newfound confidence is late in coming.

""As his comments have become more extreme, the mainstream media has been more willing to describe him -- accurately in my view -- as a demagogue, a national security threat, and a racist. But frankly, his racism and demagoguery were apparent from his first speech announcing his candidacy back on June 16,"" said Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker's Washington correspondent and CNN political analyst.

To be sure, many journalists have been characterizing Trump's campaign in these terms for some time. In August, Lizza compared Trump to the ""far-right parties"" in Europe, and said that he was ""running a candidacy that is based on resentment of non-white people.""

But for the most part, journalists stopped short of calling Trump demagogic or racist, despite the fact that he has often relied on false information about minorities to appeal to popular prejudices. At his campaign launch, Trump called Mexican immigrants criminals, drug dealers and ""rapists."" In November, Trump tweeted out inaccurate homicide statistics suggesting that blacks were responsible for 81 percent of white homicides. FBI statistics for 2014 put the actual number below 15 percent.

If this were racism and demagoguery, the mainstream media was not quick to identify it as such. That may have been due, at least in part, to the unique nature of Trump's campaign. For a long time, many journalists didn't take the former reality television star seriously. When he became the front-runner, despite his incendiary remarks, many were simply confounded by his ability to flout the conventional rules of American politics.

""I think the media has struggled to cover the dark side of the Trump phenomenon because political reporters do not have experience covering a major political figure who is both openly racist and -- let's be honest -- an extremely entertaining politician,"" Lizza said.

Trump's call for ""a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States"" changed all that.

""The media began by covering Trump as a sideshow, then grew more aggressive in challenging him on his 'facts', and now is more actively commenting on the character of his campaign,"" said David Axelrod, the chief strategist on Barack Obama's presidential campaigns and CNN senior political commentator.

The new phase of Trump-media relations has ushered in an unusual moment in American politics, said media experts.

Frank Sesno, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a former CNN Washington bureau chief, said journalism ""has moved into the 'have you no shame' mode. There are thresholds and several have been crossed and that blows up so-called objective reporting. There are times when he-said she-said isn't enough.""

Kelly McBride, the vice president for Academic Programs at The Poynter Institute, stressed that while some of the terms were appropriate, it was important for journalists to put Trump's remarks in context.

""Rather than just calling him racist, there's more journalistic value in pointing out why it's racist,"" she said. ""So I like it when I see newsrooms making historical analogies. I like the editorials pointing out that he's dangerous and why.""

The question now is, what impact will the media backlash have, if any?

Trump has proven time and time again that incendiary remarks only bolster his support. Moreover, his supporters harbor little respect for the American media, and often give the candidate a standing ovation when he calls the media ""scum.""

Frank Rich, the New York Magazine columnist, said the media's disdain would only ""enhance his support from his fans.""

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, agreed. ""Media disdain is a badge of honor for Trump and his supporters,"" he said. ""So this latest bout of criticism from the press won't hurt him.""

""Perhaps the only way the media could dent Trump would be to have him on TV less often and become less obsessed with him--but that's not going to happen,"" Lowry added. ""Bottom line: Another Republican candidate is going to have to outmaneuver Trump or just flat-out beat him. It's that simple.""",REAL
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The root cause of stress is fear, as all fear is the threat of losing our attachments. If we’re attached to a desired outcome, anything that threatens it will be something we fear. The fear of losing control underpins stress, for example, and creates frustration over what can’t be controlled. As desirable as it is to be in a position of control, our attachment to it ultimately creates a fear that can manifest as stress, worry, anxiety, and panic. advertisement - learn more Fear brings disorder into our experience when it is within us, and it’s an energy that suppresses consciousness. Activation energy is the force required to get you from doing something when you’re on autopilot (such as habits, routines, procedural awareness, or relaxing) to doing something new. It is a manifestation of willpower. When we are in a state of fear (stress), our activation energy is diverted toward doing things to ourselves that are primarily against our will. Running late for work and caught in a traffic jam? You can either become frustrated and upset because you fear arriving to work late (which brings you no closer to your goal of getting there on time), or you can accept the present moment and use it as a learning lesson to leave earlier next time. You can also choose to enjoy the unexpected free time in the morning and listen to a podcast or some music. There are many choices you can make in that space of time that can affect or degrade even the most minute increments of your personal development. Stress causes you to divert attention and willpower away from your initial goal, bringing you no closer to it than when you began. In a state of stress and fear, your willpower gets diverted toward the threat, not the goal, and this is against your own best interest. Time is currency, so pay attention to what you spend your time on. advertisement - learn more Now of course there are valid situations where your willpower MUST be diverted toward dealing with the threat or there might not be any willpower left for you to use in the future! There are two types of fear: survival based fear and ego based fear. Ego fear includes fear of rejection, failure, humiliation, loss, uncertainty, lack of control, etc. These fears are not real, but may feel so to you. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? Is it death, the loss of freedom, a loved one suffering? If it’s none of those then you’re too attached to an outcome that is not essential to your wholeness. When we’re mindful of our awareness, extraordinary things await us on the opposite side of fear. Believe. Believe in what? Yourself? A higher power? Both? Believe in the truth of your situation by first accepting everything that is happening. You can’t move forward in a state of denial because denial is resistance. Then think about what you’re afraid of (an outcome, for example) and why it is making you feel afraid. What will you lose that is causing your anxiety? What is this thing that you’re holding onto that is vital to your security and wholeness? Fear should be an alarm, not a program. An alarm alerts you of danger, while a program controls and runs the show. When ALERTED by fear we can use the logic of our conscious mind to analyze if we are in any real danger, rather than allowing the subconscious mind and its primal instincts to impulsively control us. Even if we don’t lash out during times of stress and frustration, we may remain divided and chaotic internally, throwing emotional temper tantrums no one else sees. Do your job to parent yourself and take control of the inner child embedded in your subconscious mind (we all have one). Fear is an insecurity, and insecurity is the source of many malfunctions in the human condition. However, if it wasn’t for fear, we would never know who and what we really are. Fear is illusion. Life is designed to strip illusion from you by bringing you face to face with your fears again and again until you have no choice but to face them, release resistance to them, and become fearless. Once you become fearless you’re free from illusion because you have discovered the truth of what’s on the other side of your fear. We design our lives to run away from fear so we don’t have to feel it, but whatever we resist persists, chasing us into the corner. It’s understandable why we do this but it’s not helpful because this daunting tool that keeps offering itself to us is the tool of our expansion, the tool of truth if we are ready to accept it. You would be oblivious to yourself without fear, which makes it one of the greatest tools of awareness. You shouldn’t feel ashamed of it; regardless of how tough you are, every human being feels fear. People who suppress fear are glorified. Rather than suppress it, feel it and come to terms with it. This way you won’t feel the need to suppress it because you have already gotten to its source: truth. And the truth will always wipe out fear. By suppressing fear you’re ignoring your personal lesson. We often ignore what our emotional guidance system is trying to tell us because we don’t think fear is valid. Fear is a red flag within us that we should pay closer attention to so we can dig deep and find the source of that fear. Suppressing it is only ignoring the shadow, masking it as courage. We don’t examine the fear that we have; instead, we try to focus on anything that decreases the level of fear that we experience. Sometimes fear is legitimate and sometimes it is not, but we must always pay attention to it so we can get to the Truth of why it’s there. Fear of the unknown is also common. Since we know nothing about the unkown, what we actually fear is whatever we ourselves project into it. We think we know what potential negative thing the unknown might hold for us and we are running from the projection of that potential pain. We fear what we project into the unknown based on our previous experiences (mostly from childhood) of uncertainty and discomfort. The reptile brain seeks comfort, so anything that is uncomfortable alerts our primal survival drives. These red flags create anxious moments to our pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding ego. When faced with the unknown, the mind goes to work projecting its already acquired fears into the unknown so that it can predict what lies there. It’s those projections that we fear. It’s not the unknown of that experience that it fears, it’s what it thinks it knows that experience will create. We need to be brave enough to face and admit to what we actually fear. This may sound counterintuitive, but everything we do, regardless of how stupid or damaging it is for ourselves, has a positive intention at its core. Anxiety responses aim to help us — usually to get us out of a situation, to protect us. Every behaviour that we generate, even if it’s detrimental to our long-term growth and happiness, has a positive intention behind it, and recognizing this will allow you to change the behaviour. Your subconscious mind wants to protect you but it doesn’t think long-term with respect to your growth and happiness; it reacts in the present moment, and wants to deal with the perceived danger NOW. The subconscious is always thinking about what’s happening now, and how to fix it now. It thinks, “How do I get out of it? How do I survive it?” While your subconscious mind is intuitive, smart, and integral to the mind-body system, it is also deeply irrational and has the cognitive capacity of a 10-year-old child. Ask yourself, would you let a 10-year-old run your life? We need to educate and guide the subconscious mind using its own language and worldview. The subconscious mind’s job is to keep you happy, healthy, and safe, so when you give it a way to understand that what it’s doing is hurting you, it will stop the behaviour. If the subconscious mind has to choose between safety and happiness, it will always chose safety. Self-preservation is its primary objective, to protect you and keep you alive so you can move your genes forward. Do not justify your fear. While something could have happened to you that created the fear, such as a traumatic event, you must still move beyond it. It may be difficult, but when you justify your fear, in whatever terms, you remain a prisoner to it. You give yourself a reason to hold onto the fear because you’re telling yourself that this fear is coming from the outside instead of its true source, the inside. Once you become aware of something, you have the choice and power to change it. Your belief systems determine your ability to overcome your fears. If you tell yourself, “I can’t overcome this fear,” you ensure this remains true. As long as you believe it, it will be True in your reality. The perception we have of ourselves is greater than the perception other people have of us. Your perceptions will determine how you will react, which in turn determines how long the fear will last in your life. Facing your greatest fears will be your greatest liberation. Your fears are your unresolved issues; once you get to the Truth of why they exist, you can resolve those issues and stop feeding the fears. We must let go of and reexamine what we think is good and bad because our perspective shapes our fears. 
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"More than 500,000 people have gotten health insurance in Kentucky through the state's health care exchange, Kynect, and through expanded Medicaid. Kentucky has seen the second-steepest drop in uninsured of any state.

Supporters of the health care law point to it as one of the success stories, but the man who very well could become the state's next governor is vowing to ""dismantle"" Kynect and cancel the Medicaid expansion.

""We will have a very spirited discussion as it relates to health care in our state. Trust me on that,"" vowed Republican Matt Bevin, the surprising apparent winner of the contentious GOP gubernatorial primary. The Tea Party-backed Bevin finished just 83 votes ahead of James Comer, the state's agriculture commissioner, out of more than 200,000 votes.

""Obamacare's been very good to the state,"" said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.

But President Obama is very unpopular in the state and anything associated with him is, too. Kentuckians and Bevin are stressing the ""first three syllables instead of the last one"" in Obamacare, Cross said.

It is the latest example of the problems Obama's signature legislation has faced at the state level, where most governors and legislatures are in Republican hands. The Affordable Care Act, often called ""Obamacare,"" can be viewed very differently based on the name.

In 2013, Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies, the bipartisan pollsters who conduct the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, tested that in 2013 for CNBC. The poll asked separately about feelings toward ""Obamacare"" and the ""Affordable Care Act."" There was almost a 10-point difference in how much more negatively people felt toward ""Obamacare,"" and almost three times as many did not know the ""Affordable Care Act.""

It was similar when the question was asked specifically in Kentucky about feelings toward ""Kynect"" and ""the new health care law."" An NBC News/Marist poll in May 2014 found by a 29 percent to 22 percent margin that Kentuckians had a favorable opinion of their state health care exchange. But 57 percent had an unfavorable view of ""Obamacare,"" while just 1 in 3 had a positive one.

In Kentucky, the governor has the power to unilaterally create or disband programs like Kynect, Cross said. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear chose to both set up a state exchange and expand Medicare. But he is term-limited.

Bevin, a venture capitalist who lost badly in a Senate primary last year to Mitch McConnell, would face off with Democrat Jack Conway. Conway, the state attorney general, starts as a slight favorite, but Kentucky is a conservative state, and Conway struggled in his 2010 Senate bid against Republican Rand Paul.

Bevin made getting rid of Kynect and the Medicaid expansion central to his campaign. He is also vowing to implement right-to-work laws and shrink government, in part, through attrition of public sector workers.

""I think it, too, is destined to crumble under the weight of its own instability,"" Bevin said of Kynect when he announced his long-shot bid for governor.

Bevin wound up breaking through in the primary, in large measure, by pitting the two front-runners against each other. He did it with this memorable ad, depicting Comer and Hal Heiner, a former Louisville city councilman, as children at a backyard table throwing food at each other:

""Hal Heiner and James Comer are acting like children, throwing insults and attacking each other,"" an announcer says as pasta splatters across the lens. ""Kentucky can do much better."" The ad pivots, labeling Bevin as ""grown-up leadership for Kentucky.""

But now it will be Bevin's policies that come under sharper scrutiny. He argues the state cannot afford the Medicaid expansion, which was the biggest reason for the drop in the uninsured. Federal funds currently pay for it, but that money will eventually go away.

""The fact that we have 1 out of 4 people in this state on Medicaid is unsustainable; it's unaffordable,"" Bevin said during the campaign, ""and we need to create jobs in this state, not more government programs to cover people.""

But Medicaid expansion is different than Kynect, which has been held up as one of the best-functioning state exchanges in the country.

""He won't get away with it,"" Cross maintained of Bevin's promise to get rid of Kynect. ""He'll have to get serious about it at some point and stop conflating Kynect and the Medicaid expansion.""",REAL
"« Previous - Next » The First Space Photo Of Earth - Shot From A Third Reich Rocket In 1946 
Prior to 1946, the highest pictures that had ever been taken of the Earth were from the Explorer II balloon in 1935. At 13.7 miles up, the photos were understandably vague. At this point, our view of Earth was largely based on science, with a bit of support from the Explorer II photos. However, nothing was clear enough to be confirmed. 
In October of 1946, the ideas of many scientists were confirmed, as new heights were reached. Something astonishing occurred at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Using a V2 rocket that had been captured from Nazis and brought to White Sands in 300 rail cars after the war, a camera was shot into space. The first rocket reached what is now a measly height of 65 miles. At nearly five times the height of previous photos, researchers now had their first view from space. While the camera was destroyed, plummeting back to earth at nearly 500 feet per second, the film had been protected by a steel case, completely untouched . 
Fred Rulli recalls after the recovery of the film, “when they first projected them onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts”, speaking of the photos in 1946. He speaks of his friend, who realized the importance of the day, saying “Do you realize what’s going on here?” Many may not have. They had no idea that in the years following that spectacular day, the V2 rockets would reach even greater heights, traveling over 100 miles up. Hundreds of photos were taken and researchers were ecstatic at what they had discovered. 
Today, when millions of people watch pictures of the Earth from cameras in outer space every day, it seems a perfectly natural thing. Since the V2 rockets, photos have been taken from the moon during the Apollo 8 mission, from space beyond Neptune in 1990 from the Voyager 1, and more recently from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It seems as though there is not much left to discover when it comes to the surface of the Earth and the photos we have captured of it. However, there will always be something greater. There will always be something new to be found, always a new way to capture beautiful, more technological photos of the surface of our Earth. 
This article (The First Space Photo Of Earth - Shot From A Third Reich Rocket In 1946) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
"Could Hillary Clinton be the next Richard Nixon? Now that’s a provocative question, but it isn’t quite what you think.

The other day, I watched Hillary and Bill Clinton take in their close friend Terry McAuliffe’s inauguration as governor of Virginia. Neither Clinton spoke, but their presence said it all: Virginia, the Mother of Presidents long before it was a modern swing state, will be seeing a lot of the Clintons—and now they have a ready-made home-away-from-home in the gubernatorial mansion that adorns Richmond’s Capitol Square.

Every time you observe the Clintons, you can’t help but ponder the long and winding road of their 40-year electoral saga, beginning with Bill’s unsuccessful 1974 run for Congress in Arkansas. Their lives are so suffused with politics that it seems incredible to consider that Hillary might not run in 2016.

After all, with just one exception, a Clinton has always tried for public office whenever a tantalizing opportunity presented itself. The rule-breaker was Bill’s aborted run for president in the 1988 cycle. On the eve of his expected candidacy announcement in July 1987, with the national press gathering in Little Rock, his long-suffering chief of staff, Betsey Wright, she later told PBS, huddled with her boss and presented a list of women he was alleged to have been “seeing.” After a number of responses along the lines of “she’ll never talk,” Clinton belatedly awakened to the reality that he could self-destruct in the post-Gary Hart world—Hart had been forced out of the Democrats’ presidency sweepstakes just a couple of months earlier following allegations of adultery. The next day, Clinton declined to run, stunning the news media with the unconvincing excuse that he had decided to spend more time with his family.

Nearly three decades later, Hillary needs no cover story should she surprise us and spurn another White House tour. Now in her mid 60s, she knows as much as any human being alive what an arduous journey lies ahead even for a heavily favored contender. Inevitably, she will consider how much she wants, or is able, to keep going at a killer pace throughout her 70s and, more important, her chances of prevailing in November 2016.

Much of it is out of her hands. Low job approval numbers for President Obama, should they persist, will make it difficult for any Democrat to win, even with the party’s seeming Electoral College edge and growing demographic advantages among minorities and the young. Just ask John McCain how President George W. Bush’s unpopularity affected his 2008 White House bid. (Of course, you can’t rule out the very real chance that the Republicans will rescue the eventual Democratic nominee by putting forward an out-of-the-mainstream nominee.)

The Clintons are nothing if not shrewd, and they’ve lived through the entire era of postwar American politics. So Hillary Clinton would be the last to believe what I have heard with increasing frequency: that, in the end, no one of real heft, even Vice President Joe Biden, will challenge her for the Democratic nomination she nearly won in 2008, and she will steamroll over the minor contenders who do. Most frequently mentioned in the “minor” category are former Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland. (O’Malley also made a little-noticed appearance at the McAuliffe inauguration.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would be a major opponent should she run, but she insists she will not. When California Gov. Jerry Brown also bowed out, NBC News’s First Read called it “a reminder that Hillary Clinton will probably face little to no serious competition if she runs.”

Possible? Sure. But history’s guide tells us otherwise. A consensus choice for a major-party presidential nomination is exceedingly rare—and this is where the Nixon comparison comes in.

Incumbent presidents often find their second-term nominations nearly unopposed, though even in this rarefied group, there are notable exceptions: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. (Truman and Johnson withdrew in 1952 and 1968, respectively, partly because of intra-party opposition.)

But when no incumbent was running, the only precedent for a consensus choice in the entire post-World War II era is Richard Nixon in 1960. This impressive feat was nonetheless achieved with some difficulty and embarrassment. Nixon thought he had averted a serious GOP challenge when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller withdrew as a potential candidate in December 1959. But Nixon’s unappealing persona and substantial baggage from the political wars of the 1940s and 1950s worried many Republicans eager for a third consecutive White House victory. Rockefeller sensed it and reconsidered, toying with a surprise candidacy on the eve of the 1960 Republican National Convention. At the last instant, Rocky relented, mollified by the so-called “Treaty of Fifth Avenue,” a series of concessions by Nixon negotiated in an all-night session and announced by the New York governor himself.",REAL
"Russia, India will expand military cooperation with focus on Navy projects 26 October 2016 TASS The Russian defence minister pointed out that the progress of joint production of Ka-226 helicopters, BrahMos and S-400 indicates technical cooperation with India should be expanded. Facebook india , russia , shoigu Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, and Defense Minister of India Manohar Parrikar at a ceremony of signing a final protocol of the meeting of the Russian-Indian Inter-Governmental Commission on Cooperation in Military Industry, in Delhi. Source:Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation 
The Russian and Indian defence ministries have been instructed to expand military and military-technical cooperation, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Wednesday. 
""The extra tasks set in the course of the meeting Russian and Indian leaders held on October 15-16 indicate that we should expand the sphere of our military-technical cooperation,"" Shoigu said as the Russian-Indian inter-government commission for military-technical cooperation met in session for the 16th time. 
India could get delivery of the S-400 in 2020 
The parties have already begun a discussion of all issues that are related to the post-warranty maintenance and life cycle contracts for the military technologies to be provided or provided earlier, Shoigu said. 
""It goes without saying that we have noted with great satisfaction the progress achieved in our major projects, such as the joint production of Ka-226 helicopters, missile systems BrahMos and air defence systems S-400 ,"" he said. 
Source: mil.ru 
There is a special major program for naval ships, including submarines, Shoigu added. 
""I believe that today there is a good opportunity for reviewing the results of the previous year and identifying targets for next year. We are ready to discuss all crucial problems, issues and prospects for our military and military-technical cooperation,"" Shoigu concluded. Fight against terrorism 
Kadakin: Russia with India. Terrorism is greatest human rights violation 
The struggle against international terrorism requires consolidation of all forces and rules out double or triple standards, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Wednesday. 
""What is absolutely unacceptable in the struggle against terrorism is the use of double and sometimes triple standards. Those who are terrorists on Monday cannot turn into moderate opposition on Tuesday. There will have to be fundamental consolidation of all sound forces in the struggle against this ill of the 21st century,"" Shoigu said at a meeting of the Russian-Indian inter-governmental commission for military-technical cooperation. 
He pointed out that the struggle against terrorism was a major issue. 
First published by TASS . ",FAKE
"Next Swipe left/right Make music great again, with these 10 Trumped up album covers We’ve previously seen how the addition of Donald Trump can ruin perfectly good films , now the tiny-handed man baby ruins 10 albums.
1. 
— Suzanne McCusker (@SuzMcC72) November 2, 2016 
2. https://twitter.com/Okeating/status/793820751782633472",FAKE
"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
During a panel discussion on Wednesday's “Anderson Cooper 360,” Republican strategist and CNN regular Ana Navarro went off on Newt Gingrich over his meltdown on “The Kelly File”— during which he angrily accused Kelly of being “ fascinated with sex .” 
After Cooper referred to Gingrich's rant as “ironic,” Navarro jumped to take issue, 'correcting' the host before torching Gingrich over the treatment of his wife: 
“I think the word you were looking for was ‘hypocritical.' Remember Newt Gingrich’s wife? When he was running in 2012, told all of us, told the media [...] Gingrich offered her the choice between an open marriage or a divorce. 
So maybe, just maybe, if all of that baggage is on your shoulders, maybe you shouldn’t be the surrogate out there wagging your finger and accusing the woman who was reporting on sexual assault. 
Let me explain it slowly — sexual assault and sex are two things. One is unwanted. One is wanted. So maybe they need to understand that to begin with.” 
Navarro told uber-Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes that Gingrich shouldn't be used by the campaign in any capacity, given his past. Image Credit: Screenshot/CNN YouTube 
Incidentally, following the release of the now-infamous leaked 2005 video in which Trump brags about grabbing women by the p***y, Navarro angrily yelled the word during a CNN panel discussion after Hughes chastised her for saying it on-air. 
We'll go ahead and put Ana down as a “maybe” for Trump. ",FAKE
The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
"Today, they are the source of ‘all conspiracy theories’ they are the inspiration behind many fiction novels, movies.

Illuminati is considered as the secret organization that is really controlling the world, pulling strings from behind ‘the scene’ and steering the world towards a New World Order. But this all started back in 1776, Ingolstadt, Germany by a man named Adam Weishaupt who was a respectable professor.


Adam Weishaupt’s idea was creating a better world. As a boy he was an avid reader, consuming books by the latest French Enlightenment philosophers in his uncle’s library. He was convinced that the monarchy and the church were repressing freedom of thought.
Adam Weishaupt was not, he said, against religion itself, but rather the way in which it was practiced and imposed.  His thinking, he wrote, offered freedom “from all religious prejudices; cultivates the social virtues; and animates them by a great, a feasible, and speedy prospect of universal happiness.” To achieve this, it was necessary to create “a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way.” In this period Freemasonry was steadily expanding throughout Europe. This secret group offered appealing alternatives to freethinkers. Adam Weishaupt wanted to join this lodge, however, he decided later to create his own.

On the night of May 1, 1776, the first Illuminati met to found the order in a forest near Ingolstadt. Bathed in torchlight, there were five men.

There they established the rules that were to govern the order.

All future candidates for admission required the members’ consent, a strong reputation with well-established familial and social connections, and wealth.

At the beginning the order had only 3 levels: ‘novices, minervals, and illuminated minervals…’ The name “Minerval” referred to the Roman goddess of wisdom, Minerva, reflecting the order’s aim to spread true knowledge, or illumination, about how society, and the state, might be reshaped.

A novice preparing to pass to the higher level of minerval, for example, had to present a detailed report on the titles of the books he owned, the identity of his enemies, and the weak points of his character. All members had to pledge the needs of a society before their personal.

THE RISE OF THE ILLUMINATI: 


Over the years the secret order grew considerably in size and diversity. By the end of 1784, the Illuminati had 2,000 to 3,000 members.

Although, at first, the Illuminati were limited to Weishaupt’s students, the membership expanded to included noblemen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and jurists, as well as intellectuals and some leading writers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

They included important people in Bavarian public life, such as Baron Adolph von Knigge and the banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who provided funding.

Baron von Knigge played a very considerable role in the society’s organization and expansion. As a former Freemason, he was in favor of adopting rites similar to theirs.

Members were given ‘secret’ names from famous history characters. Weishaupt was Spartacus, for example, and Knigge was Philo.

With more members the number of levels in the Illuminati had to increase. There were 13 degrees of initiation, divided into three classes.

HERE IS THE COMPLETE LIST OF ILLUMINATI CLASSES AND LEVELS: 


FIRST CLASS 
Each novice was initiated in humanitarian philosophy until he became a minerval. He then received the order’s statutes and could attend meetings.
Initiate Novice Minerval Illuminatus Minor 
SECOND CLASS 

The various degrees in this class were inspired by Freemasonry. The illuminatus major supervised recruitment, and the illuminatus dirigens presided over the minervals’ meetings.
Apprentice Fellow Master Illuminatus Major Illuminatus Dirigens 
THIRD CLASS 

The highest degree of philosophical illumination. Its members were priests who instructed lower-degree members. The lower orders of this class were themselves under the authority of a king.
Priest Prince Magus King 
THE PROHIBITION OF ILLUMINATI: 


The secret society stood for some controversial opinions. They considered that suicide was legitimate, that its enemies should be poisoned, and that religion was an absurdity. However, when the Duke-Elector of Bavaria found the secret society was planning to conspire against Bavaria on behalf of Austria, it was then when he issued an edict in June 1784 banning the creation of any kind of society not previously authorized by law.

Bavarian police found highly compromising documents, including a defense of suicide and atheism, a plan to create a female branch of the order, invisible ink recipes, and medical instructions for carrying out abortions.

The evidence was used as the basis for accusing the order of conspiring against religion and the state. In August 1787, the duke-elector issued a third edict in which he confirmed that the order was prohibited, and imposed the death penalty for membership.

Adam Weishaupt lived the rest of his life in Gotha in Saxony where he taught philosophy at the University of Göttingen.

The Bavarian state considered the Illuminati dismantled.

THE ILLUMINATI WAS JUST GETTING STARTED: 


Adam Weishaupt was accused of helping to plot the French Revolution.

This was the start of a war that will give birth to some of the greatest money machines that still exist today.

The secret society shifted its goals. They already had connections and knowledge. They didn’t need their society to be legal to exist.

Members chose to use the connections for making more money and profit because they realized with enough money you can control the world. You can control the laws. You can establish your agendas without being conflicted by ‘less’ enlightened people’s opinions.


The Illuminati have been fingered in recent events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Weishaupt’s ideas have also influenced the realms of popular fiction, such as Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons and Foucault’s Pendulum by Italian novelist Umberto Eco.

Although his group was allegedly disbanded, Weishaupt’s idea still exists, pulling the strings.
But this article raises one really important question. Considering Adam Weishaupt’s first intent ‘a state of liberty and moral equality, freed from the obstacles which subordination, rank, and riches, continually throw in our way’ is it possible for this to be achieved and integrated into a society where people are not fully awaken?

Life Coach Code 
SOURCE ",FAKE
"The death threats were starting to get to Constantin Querard. They had been streaming in from Donald Trump supporters, who wanted to know why Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had won delegates at Arizona’s convention even though Trump had won the state. After the deluge, finally, a nice-seeming message appeared on his Facebook page.

Querard, the Arizona political consultant who had managed Cruz’s delegate campaign, clicked to read the rest.

“I’m praying for you to get prostate cancer.”

Cruz’s delegates were girded for two more months of this, then a contested convention where they could force a second ballot and defeat Trump, making all the hate mail worth it.

Instead, hundreds of Republican activists have been elected as delegates to a convention expected to be a coronation of Trump. Delegates such as Querard, who outfoxed Trump supporters at state conventions, were now trapped on a speeding Trump Train. They were legally bound to stand up and nominate him. That might be the last time they vote for him.

“I’m a lifelong Republican and I love the party,” said Querard. “But don’t ask me how I’ll vote in November. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough death wishes where it’s pretty soon for me to strap on the jersey with any authenticity.”

There are unhappy delegates at every party convention, but the captive audience of Trump skeptics bound for Cleveland is unique. For months, supporters of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich worked to get their supporters elected as unbound delegates, or even as “Trojan horse” delegates bound to Trump on the first ballot but free to bolt if the contest continued.

[Trump turns to general election — and away from past positions]

For a few weeks, it seemed to be working. Kasich and Cruz both crowed about their ability to out-organize Trump’s forces, who in Cruz’s world were not “capable to run a lemonade stand.” As both men lost high-profile contests — Trump won all but two of them, in Utah and Wisconsin, after March 15 — Cruz took to counting up his state convention victories as proof that voters were rejecting Trump.

Yet Trump turned the wins against them, telling his mega-rallies that a “crooked deal” was stealing his delegates. Roger Stone, a Trump ally who had promised to publish the names and hotel rooms of “Trojan horse” delegates, was happy to see them fail.

“Many will not attend, leaving their seats to the alternates, who in most cases are Trump supporters,” Stone said. “I am not too concerned about their feelings.”

The people who had out-organized Trump were dazed by the backlash. “North Dakota did it how it was supposed to be done,” said Bette Grande, a hard-charging Cruz delegate who helped him dominate that state’s weekend convention. “The media didn’t like that because it was something they didn’t understand, so they bought into the lie of Trump that something unfair was going on.”

Grande, like almost all of the Cruz and Kasich delegates, intended to head to Cleveland anyway. In the days since the Indiana primary, delegates have occasionally sought instructions or solace from the Cruz and Kasich campaigns. There has been no instruction to stand down, and no hint that the results can be overturned.

“It is time for those who supported others in the Republican Party to come together and help Mr. Trump be the best candidate he can be,” said Jim Brainard, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., whose election as a pro-Kasich delegate turned out to be one of that campaign’s last coups. “It’s a big tent, and those of us who disagree with Trump will hopefully have an opportunity to sway his views.”

Some of the “Trojan horses” had only reluctantly backed Cruz or Kasich. Subba Kolla, a Realtor from Northern Virginia, had backed Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) in the state’s close primary, but allied with Cruz during the state convention. Cruz’s forces won a smashing victory, but Kolla was resigned to backing Trump.

“I’m not sad,” he said. “I am a party loyalist. I am representing my community, the Indian American community, and I don’t want to disappoint them. Most of our community supported Rubio. Now there’s only Trump. I don’t have any bad feelings about him.”

Several other delegates said that they would attend to keep Trump and the GOP honest. Virginia state Sen. Richard H. Black (Loudoun), a Cruz delegate, said he had actually preferred Trump’s “America first” policy to Cruz’s, but intended to go to Cleveland and defend the social conservative planks of the Republican platform.

Kay Godwin, a Georgia conservative who had become a Cruz delegate, felt the same way. “It wasn’t the Lord’s plan for Ted to win, but maybe that’ll be his plan next time,” she said. “The reason I became a Republican is because the platform is wonderful. It stands for everything that I stand for in my heart.”

Still, there were holdouts. Querard knew of one alternate who no longer wanted to spend the money to go to Cleveland. Russell Donley, a former speaker of the Wyoming House who had won one of Cruz’s slots, said the Trump victory made him inclined to stay home with his wife.

“If Trump’s short one vote, and there’s an opening for Cruz, okay, then I go,” Donley said. “But I’m an old Wyoming boy, and going to Cleveland in the summer doesn’t really enthuse me.”

Then there was Eric Brakey, a young state senator from Maine who had been part of a Cruz slate that triumphed so resoundingly that Gov. Paul LePage (R) denounced it. Four years earlier, Brakey had fought just as hard to become a delegate for former Texas congressman Ron Paul, only to watch the Republican National Committee overturn the state convention and replace some Paul delegates with Romney delegates. This year, Brakey was finally given a vote at the convention — and received yet another disappointment.

“Donald Trump isn’t who my conscience tells me to support,” Brakey said. “Then again, neither was Ted Cruz. I voted for Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) at the caucuses, and when I ran for delegate I said I would reflect the will of the voters. Now I’m sort of jokingly telling people that I’ll cast my vote for Ron Paul — four years late.”",REAL
"On Sunday Syrian state media said rebels had used chemical weapons against government-controlled districts of Aleppo. 

RT reports: 
Scores of civilians, including several children, were killed while hundreds of others were wounded in “relentless and indiscriminate” attacks carried out by opposition groups in the western districts of Aleppo, according to the UN statement. 
“Those who argue that this is meant to relieve the siege of eastern Aleppo should be reminded that nothing justifies the use of disproportionate, indiscriminate [attacks,] including heavy weapons on civilian areas and it could amount to war crimes,” de Mistura said. 
He echoed the condemnation voiced by the UN secretary-general regarding the attacks on schools. The special envoy also criticized the “use of heavy airpower on civilian areas.” 
“The civilians of both sides of Aleppo have suffered enough due to futile but lethal attempts of subduing the city of Aleppo,” he said. “They now need and deserve a stable ceasefire covering this ancient city of Syria.” 
Earlier on Sunday, state news agency SANA reported that “shells containing poison gases” had been fired at the residential district of al-Hamdaniya in western, government-held Aleppo. 
RT Arabic’s crew in Aleppo reported 36 cases of suffocation. Al-Mayadeen reported that all the victims of the attack are civilians. 
Just recently, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on a number of attacks in Aleppo that targeted schools and claimed the lives of at least three children in the period of 24 hours. Twelve more people died in an attack on a humanitarian aid corridor opened next to a school in the Al-Mashariq district, according to the ministry’s information. Twelve more people were injured. 
Meanwhile, according to Russia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, over 16,000 people have fallen victim to opposition groups meant to be under US control. “From February to September, the opposition groups that are supposed to be under the US control committed 2,031 violations of the [cessation of hostilities], which claimed lives of 3,532 military personnel and 12,800 civilians,” the Mission’s statement, published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry, reads. 
According to Dr. Said Sadek, professor of Political Sociology at the American University of Cairo, it’s not likely that Western powers and the Gulf states will end their backing for rebel groups, even if they are found responsible for using chemical weapons in Aleppo. “We have to understand that for six years, the Western countries and the Gulf states invested in those ‘moderate’ or radical groups, and so they cannot abandon them,” Sadek explained. “They cannot pull out now and say, ‘OK we discovered that we are wrong, let’s get out and leave them.’ They have invested in them and they will still use them for bargaining in the future of Syria.”",FAKE
"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Michael DePinto 
Who would have thought right? Hillary’s campaign establishing what appears to be some very close ties with the largest social media company ( Facebook ) on the Internet, right in the midst of her presidential campaign? It’s not enough that Hillary has Google hiding various stories from Clinton search queries, but it looks like she had to go and get Facebook on board to help her cheat as well. But should Trump supporters take any issue with that? 
Sure, there’s been issues in the past with Facebook banning conservatives for merely looking at their monitors the wrong way, but all that changed this week right? If you recall, earlier this week we learned that despite donating huge amounts of money to Hillary’s campaign, allegedly Mark Zuckerberg betrayed Hillary Clinton, and actually jumped on board the Trump Train … or is there more to this? In the video below I dig a bit deeper into both these stories… 
Emails Show Connection Between Facebook Executive, Clinton Campaign 
… kept the interactions with Clinton private … 
A new WikiLeaks email dump shows Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg eager and willing to be involved in helping Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
Sandberg’s role in helping the research-driven Clinton campaign was revealed in a WikiLeaks email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. 
“I have arranged for Sheryl Sandberg and her researcher to be available on 5 March at 10 am to step through the research on gender and leadership by women,” Mills wrote in a February 2015 email. 
Two months after that meeting, Sandberg offered to do more for the campaign in response to an email from campaign chairman John Podesta expressing sympathy for the death of her husband. 
“I still want HRC to win badly ,” Sandberg wrote in May 2015. “I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.” 
Facebook has said that Sandberg was acting in a private capacity in sharing research with the Clinton campaign. Sandberg kept the interactions with Clinton private, and did not formally, publicly endorse Clinton until early 2016. 
However, she kept in touch with the campaign. In August 2015, she emailed Podesta offering to put him in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , a staunch opponent of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . 
“Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him,” she wrote. 
“He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about,” she added. 
“He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research),” she wrote. 
The WikiLeaks emails from Podesta’s account imply a meeting was arranged later that month. 
SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS ARE ACTUALLY GOVERNMENT CREATIONS: 
If you doubt that the CIA made Google, and Google made the NSA, but you don’t read the following: save your worthless drivel for someone who cares. If you don’t have the facts presented, how can you presume to dispute then? Conversely, if you dispute the facts presented with evidence stacked higher than Mt. Everest, by all means… let’s hear it, but support your opinions with FACTS, not platitudes.",FAKE
"The country's biggest liberal super PAC, which helped re-elect President Obama last year, is shifting focus to support a possible Hillary Clinton White House bid in 2016.

A spokesman for Priorities USA Action, originally formed by ex-Obama advisers, confirmed to FoxNews.com that it is now raising money in support of Clinton.

There have been sporadic efforts by Democratic groups to encourage Clinton -- who has not yet revealed her 2016 plans -- to run, but this would mark one of the earliest and highest-profile efforts to date to raise money for someone who, at this point, is not a candidate.

To coincide with the shift in focus, the group has appointed new leaders, including ex-Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. The group also will be co-chaired by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who has called for Clinton to run in 2016.

""We couldn't be more proud and excited to be joined by Jim Messina and Governor Granholm, whose leadership and political acumen will be invaluable in our effort to elect a Democratic president in 2016,"" Priorities USA Action Executive Director Buffy Wicks said in a written statement.

The New York Times first reported the shift. According to the report, Priorities USA is seeking six-and-seven-figure donations to fuel pro-Clinton ads and more.

""I think the numbers clearly show that she's the strongest presidential candidate on the Democratic side,"" Messina told the Times. ""And Priorities is going to be there for her if she decides to run.""",REAL
"Two civilians and one police officer died after a gunman opened fire at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, leading to a five-hour standoff with law enforcement.

Nine other people, four civilians and five police officers, were taken to local hospitals with gunshot wounds and are in good condition, according to police.

The gunman is in police custody after surrendering just before 5 pm local time, police spokesperson Lt. Catherine Buckley told local reporters. The suspect has been identified as Robert Lewis Dear.

The University of Colorado police officer who was killed, Garrett Swasey, 44, was described by family and friends as a loving father of two young children and a devoted co-pastor at his local church.

The incident began at the Planned Parenthood Colorado Springs Westside Health Center just before noon Mountain Time. The gunman exchanged fire with police officers for hours before he was apprehended, and police worked to evacuate people still inside.

Police described the suspect as a stocky, bearded white male wearing a trench coat. He was reportedly armed with a ""long gun."" Reporters have tweeted photographs of the suspect allegedly being taken into custody.

The call to the police originated from the address of the Planned Parenthood clinic, although the motives of the shooter are still unclear.

""We're not sure what the connection is to Planned Parenthood, but that was the initial address we were given for the service,"" Buckley said.

The FBI warned of threats to reproductive health facilities this past September, in the wake of graphic sting videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood selling fetal body parts for profit. There have been at least four cases of arson perpetrated against Planned Parenthood clinics this year alone.

Planned Parenthood released the following statement on the shooting:

Colorado Springs is about one hour south of Denver. CBS News is running a live stream of the coverage, which you can watch here.",REAL
"Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” Report from the Refugee Camp in Calais, France: “the Jungle” By 0 114 “I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”) Forty-two percent of the people who came to the Jungle are from warring parts of Sudan and South Sudan; thirty-two percent are from Afghanistan. Others are from Syria, Yemen, Iraqi Kurdistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Egypt, and more; they have crossed between 6 and 13 countries to arrive in Calais, with their final goal to reach the U.K. In Calais, it seems they are facing the hardest border to cross. A plume of smoke rises from the Sudanese quarter of “The Jungle” in Calais as police begin demolishing the refugee camp. (Photo credit:Alexandra Vuillard) There are many who have died or been seriously injured in their attempts to cross the border to the U.K. One couple was trying to cross by train. Her boyfriend made it on; she leapt, wrapped her arms around him, but did not get her bottom half onto the train. She was cut in half. He was deeply traumatized by her tragic death. In another case, a brother and sister tried to cross to the U.K. by truck. They were both hit on the road; he died and she is in the hospital. Most people from the Jungle Camp who are in the hospital were wounded in accidents while trying to get into the U.K. Broken bones and deep cuts on arms,…",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump on Wednesday refused to say he would accept the result of the presidential election if he loses to Hillary Clinton, raising the possibility of an extraordinary departure from principles that have underpinned American democracy for more than two centuries.

""I will look at it at the time,"" Trump said when asked during the final presidential debate whether he would concede if he loses on November 8, following his claims that the election is ""rigged"" against him.

He added: ""I will keep you in suspense.""

The comments at the Las Vegas showdown marked a stunning moment that has never been seen in the weeks before a modern presidential election. The stance threatens to cast doubt on one of the fundamental principles of American politics -- the peaceful, undisputed transfer of power from one president to a successor who is recognized as legitimate after winning an election.

The Republican nominee doubled down on his comments about the election Thursday during a rally in Delaware, Ohio, where he said he would accept the results ""if I win.""

Trump's debate performance could doom his chance to win over any remaining undecided voters at this late stage in the campaign. His comments about the election results came during a debate in which he spoke of ""hombres,"" language that could offend Latinos. And he referred to Clinton as a ""nasty woman.""

His campaign manager sought to blunt the election comments, appearing on CNN's ""New Day"" Thursday.

""What Donald Trump has said, over time, if you take all of his statements together, he has said that he will respect the results of the election,"" said Kellyanne Conway, although she argued what he's saying is not without precedent.

""Everybody, including Al Gore in 2000, waits to see what those election results are,"" she later added. That's a flawed comparison, however, since Gore's fate was in the hands of an automatic recount due to the narrow margin of George W. Bush's lead in Florida. Gore did not question the integrity of the election before Election Day.

The election remarks also expose a divide with Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, who told CNN's Wolf Blitzer before the debate, ""We'll certainly accept the outcome of this election.""

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who is leading Trump in most polls, said her competitor's remarks were ""horrifying"" and accused him of taking refuge in the idea that any event that turns out against him -- even an Emmy award that goes to a rival -- is ""rigged.""

""That is not the way our democracy works,"" Clinton said. ""We've been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections. We've accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what is expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.""

She continued: ""He is denigrating -- he's talking down -- our democracy. And I for one, am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.""

Trump's remark about the election result is certain to dominate the aftermath of the debate with only 19 days to go before the election, and it seemed likely to overshadow the GOP's nominee's strongest performance in any of the three presidential debates.

A CNN/ORC instant poll found 52% of debate watchers viewed Clinton as the winner compared to 39% who felt the same about Trump.

Trump didn't have much margin for error going into the debate. He's down eight points in the latest CNN Poll of Polls and is nearly out of time to launch what would have to be one of the most remarkable comebacks of modern times.

The showdown began in a more civil and calm way than the two previous debates, in which Trump and Clinton repeatedly flung sharp, bitter jabs at one another. He was far more disciplined for much of the debate, and did his best to avoid taking Clinton's bait, showing restraint as he and Clinton debated the Supreme Court, the Second Amendment, abortion and the economy.

The billionaire reality star-turned-politicians did a better job than in the first two debates of prosecuting Clinton's weaknesses, lambasting her over her record as secretary of state and the controversy over her private email server, and painting her as the symptom of a tired political establishment who had achieved nothing in her 30 years in public life.

But Trump seemed to lose his cool as the debate went on, harshly criticizing Clinton and occasionally getting testy with the debate moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News. The debate began to take a turn when Trump and Clinton clashed over the Republican nominee's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Clinton blasted Trump as a ""puppet"" of Putin and directly called on him to condemn what she said was a Russian effort to use cyberattacks to influence the election in her opponent's favor.

Trump replied that Putin had no respect for Clinton or President Barack Obama.

""That's because he would rather have a puppet as president of the United States,"" Clinton said, implying that Putin wanted Trump to win the election.

""No puppet. You are the puppet,"" Trump said.

Trump said he had never met Putin but allowed that the Russian leader had said nice things about him, and said it would be good if Washington and Moscow worked together to fight ISIS.

But he added: ""This is not my best friend.""

Clinton and Trump also bitterly sparred over the theme of who is qualified to be president. Wallace pressed Trump on why so many women had come forward to accuse him of sexual assault if the allegations were not true.

Trump said the claims had been ""largely debunked.""

""I think they want either fame or her campaign did it,"" Trump said, referring to the women that came forward after he said at the last debate that he had never been abusive to any women.

Clinton noted that Trump had implied at several rallies that he could not have made inappropriate advances toward the women because they were not sufficiently attractive.

Trump wrongly denied that he had ever made such a remark.

""Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity and their self worth,"" Clinton said.

Clinton said that Trump's treatment of women was part of pattern of behavior that saw him insult a disabled reporter, go after the parents of a fallen Muslim soldier and question the impartiality of an American judge of Mexican descent.

She said such tactics were in line with a divisive and very ""dangerous vision of our country.""

The tone of the debate -- unusually substantial at the start -- never recovered once the atmosphere became charged. As the event wound down, Clinton said that under her economic plan, the payroll taxes of both herself and Trump would go up to ensure the solvency of Social Security -- unless her rival could figure out a way to avoid paying taxes.",REAL
"The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.",REAL
"Posted by Daisy Luther 
According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey , Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election. 
Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI. 
Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees : 
“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch , who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election. 
Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: 
Really? 
The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI? 
That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something. 
This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine. 
On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise . 
Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign? 
Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source ) 
Oh, I’ll bet she does. 
I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright , saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach. 
Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they? 
We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her. 
And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal. 
“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “ 
Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton. 
But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be: 
“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.” 
Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. My biggest question is this: Why now? 
Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation? 
Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons. 
They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence. 
They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully. 
Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before. 
This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication: 
Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails. 
James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material. 
On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously. 
But wait – it gets better: 
The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. 
“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida. 
Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election. 
“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. 
“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can. 
“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’” 
Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful",FAKE
"The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
FBI Director Comey, in letter to members of Congress, says FBI is investigating additional emails in Clinton private server case pic.twitter.com/Ue0qlhqT5w 
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 

The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take.
FBI Dir just informed me, ""The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation."" Case reopened
— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016 

Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported.
Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case.
“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,” he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.” 
Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September.

In mid-October, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised at least “four new hearings” after Congress returns from recess in November based on the new emails, which lawmakers received but have not been made public.
“This is a flashing red light of potential criminality,” Chaffetz said.
The new evidence points to a “quid pro quo” arrangement between the FBI and the State Department, he noted.
DEVELOPING — DETAILS TO FOLLOW
Source: RT News 
",FAKE
"Print 
Although members of Congress are now absolutely outraged the Pentagon is trying to recoup bonuses given out to thousands of troops, it turns out, Congress actually knew about this problem for at least two years. 
Andreas Mueller, chief of federal policy for the California National Guard, wrote an email to the California congressional delegation, stating the Guard told members of Congress about the bonus reclamation issue two years ago, The Los Angeles Times reports. 
In fact, Mueller noted that the Guard had even offered a solution, but Congress took zero action. 
In effect, the scandal stems back to about a decade when the National Guard was called upon to supply more troops. Guard officials were only supposed to give out bonuses to high-value positions like intelligence or civil affairs, to incentivize more soldiers to head to Iraq and Afghanistan during a marked troop shortage. But that rule was ignored and thousands of soldiers received bonuses they weren’t actually supposed to, unbeknownst to them. 
Now, the Pentagon wants those bonuses back and with interest. 
Since the story first broke Saturday, members of Congress have declared how abhorrent it is for veterans to be targeted with tax liens and wage garnishment for refusing to pay back these bonuses. GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Marine Corps reservist, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on Sunday, asking for him to get involved as to find a solution to this “boneheaded” decision . 
On the other side of the aisle, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi sent House Speaker Paul Ryan a letter Monday arguing that as soon as Congress gets back in session, members should immediately pass legislation to halt the Pentagon’s collection efforts. 
Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer also wrote a letter to Carter, insisting that he had the power to simply forgive the debts without any action from Congress. 
“Thousands of our service members are paying the price for mistakes made by California National Guard managers, some of whom are now serving jail time or paying restitution for their crimes,” Feinstein and Boxer said . “It is outrageous to hold these service members and their families responsible for the illegal behavior of others.” 
But in the meantime, the California Guard certainly does not have the legal power to forgive debts, however much it might want to do so. 
Article reposted with permission from The Daily Caller shares",FAKE
"A Texas jury reached a guilty verdict in the murder trial of Eddie Ray Routh, the ex-Marine charged with killing former U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, author of the memoir American Sniper.

Routh was sentenced to life in prison without parole for shooting Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield to death at a gun range near Fort Worth in 2013. Defense lawyers had argued that Routh suffers from paranoid schizophrenia; Routh had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Kyle's autobiography, published in 2012, spent months on The New York Times best-seller list and was adapted by director Clint Eastwood in the film American Sniper, in which Kyle is portrayed by Bradley Cooper.",REAL
"As Marco Rubio settles into his new role as a rising top-tier candidate, most of his opponents in the Republican presidential race are showing a reluctance and even an unwillingness to engage him directly on the national stage.

The spotlight on Rubio is intensifying in the media as journalists investigate the senator’s political record and background. But he otherwise is left facing relatively low hurdles for now, bypassing the kind of heated personal clashes that have shaped the 2016 nomination race.

For Rubio, it is a return to the lofty status he had after he burst onto the national scene five years ago. Many Republican elites are once again celebrating him as the party’s golden boy, if not its strongest general-election candidate, and fear seeing him bruised too badly during the primary season.

“He’s articulate, attractive and young. His rivals don’t want him to win, but no one wants to lose him,” said Vin Weber, a prominent Jeb Bush supporter. “Of course, politics is a rough-and-tumble sport, and he’ll need to take a few punches. But at the end of the day, this is a party that needs to find ways to appeal to Hispanic voters, and having him on our side is an asset.”

The other candidates have not figured out how to deal with what some are calling “the Marco moment,” hinting at critiques and possible anti-Rubio ads to come but hesitating to make Rubio their main target.

[Dan Balz: Ten months in, the GOP race has no obvious front-runner.]

Donald Trump has castigated Rubio on the stump and in Twitter messages as a “total lightweight” who is “weak” on immigration. But under the prime-time glare of Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, the outspoken mogul fell silent about the senator from Florida.

When Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) tried to draw a contrast, he did so only with a thickly veiled line about sugar subsidies, something few voters could connect to Rubio.

And although Bush’s campaign previewed a litany of possible attacks on Rubio, the former Florida governor didn’t say a word in Milwaukee about his onetime protege.

Bush sees Rubio as a direct competitor for the support of wealthy donors and party leaders. Bush’s campaign and its allied super PAC, Right to Rise, have signaled possible lines of attack: In a strategy presentation to donors a couple of weeks ago, the Bush campaign branded Rubio disparagingly as a “GOP Obama.”

In the candidates’ Oct. 28 debate, Bush lunged at Rubio over his spotty Senate voting record, even suggesting that he resign his seat. But the offensive backfired, and in the two weeks since, Bush has steered away from Rubio. The dilemma is further complicated by pressure from many of Bush’s Florida-based financial backers, who also like Rubio and want Bush to go easy on him.

Asked why Bush did not scrutinize Rubio during the Milwaukee exchange, campaign manager Danny Diaz said the debate “was a serious one where important issues were discussed,” and he urged reporters to stay tuned for the next debate on Dec. 15. “We look forward to catching up with all our good friends in Las Vegas,” Diaz said.

Bush’s surrogates indicated that more heat on Rubio would arrive in short order.

“It’s a long campaign,” Al Cardenas, a Florida-based Bush supporter who also is close to Rubio, told reporters in Milwaukee. “Everybody’s going to be scrutinized. Those who do well will get scrutinized more.”

GOP strategist Ari Fleischer put it more bluntly: “The candidates will chop each other up if they thought it would help them. Every one of those candidates think it should be them, and they can give you every reason why it shouldn’t be Rubio.”

[Fourth GOP debate is more about party fault lines than personal attacks.]

The mostly substantive nature of Tuesday’s debate, sponsored by Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal, did not invite many personal skirmishes. In one exception, Rand Paul went after Rubio for wanting to increase military spending. But in a tense exchange with the senator from Kentucky, Rubio responded by articulating a hawkish worldview and portrayed Paul as championing an “isolationist” foreign policy.

Trump described the debate’s atmosphere as lacking fireworks. “It was amazing, because the lights went on and you never know what’s going to happen — are you going to be attacked and do you go for the kill, right?” he said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “That was not really necessary.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said the billionaire contender will continue to talk about his differences with Rubio, especially on immigration.

“People are going to keep looking at Rubio’s record,” Lewandowski said. “They’re going to ask themselves if they really want another first-term senator as president, someone who may not have the right experience. Those concerns aren’t going away.”

Rubio’s advisers presented the lack of engagement Tuesday night as a sign of Rubio’s strength.

“The phrase where I come from is ‘There’s no education in the second kick of the mule,’ ” Terry Sullivan, Rubio’s campaign manager, told reporters. “I kind of feel like folks figured out that taking on Marco isn’t such a great idea. . . . I don’t think anybody’s really itching to take on Marco on the debate stage.”

Perhaps the best encapsulation of Rubio’s good fortune came when moderator Maria Bartiromo asked him how his résumé stacks up against Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decades of service. Rubio could not help but grin. It was the softest of softballs — an opening for the 44-year-old senator to cast himself as the candidate of the future.

Eric Fehrnstrom, who was an adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, said Rubio “has a gift of the golden tongue.”

But he added: “I don’t think any candidate on that stage thinks that they’re somehow immune from political attacks. Rubio’s biggest vulnerability is immigration. While he did not address that at length [in Tuesday’s debate], I would expect when the attacks go up on TV that immigration will be in the mix.”

Supporters of rival campaigns voiced surprise that Rubio was not drawn into the immigration discussion, considering his leadership in 2013 on the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. Rubio has since disavowed the legislation and has hardened his immigration positions overall.

“There should be more scrutiny of Rubio, no doubt about it,” said Bob Smith, a former senator from New Hampshire who is backing Cruz. “It’s almost as if the media is ignoring his immigration record, or at least not giving it much coverage. Conservatives up here, however, are well aware of it, and my sense is that they’ll continue to vet Rubio on their own.”

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, said other Republican candidates may be afraid of tangling with Rubio in a debate.

“Rubio is skilled at delivering a scripted, rehearsed counterpunch, and they had to know he would be prepared,” Pfeiffer said. He added that Cruz seems to be “patiently waiting for his moment to make this attack. Cruz wants to see the whites of Rubio’s eyes before he fires his biggest guns.”

Indeed, Cruz has been laying the foundation for the contrast he hopes to make with Rubio if the nominating contest narrows to the two of them, as some pundits predict. In debate after debate, Cruz has positioned himself as a hard-line opponent of amnesty, and more generally as a conservative purist.

In his immigration comments Tuesday night, Cruz did not single out Rubio. But his advisers did with reporters afterward.

The freshman Texan “will draw contrasts on issues,” Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said. “Senator Rubio was for the Gang of Eight. Senator Cruz wasn’t. Right now, we’re just beginning that, and we’ve got three months till Iowa.”

Jose A. DelReal in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"Trump Will Skip GOP Debate As Feud With Fox News Boils Over

This post was updated Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. ET

The stage is set for Thursday's Fox News Channel final debate ahead of the Iowa caucuses — but front-runner Donald Trump won't be there.

After teasing earlier Tuesday evening that he ""probably won't bother"" with the debate, Trump's campaign confirmed he won't participate, citing unfair treatment from the network:

As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts. 

 

 Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn't play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process - and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.

Trump's objections stem from last year's first GOP presidential debate, when anchor and moderator Megyn Kelly pressed him about his derogatory comments about women. Trump was outraged, and later said on CNN that Kelly had ""blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever"" with her angry questioning.

On Tuesday evening, Trump doubled down when speaking to reporters in Iowa, dismissing Kelly as a ""third-rate reporter"" who is ""frankly not good at what she does.""

Fox News hasn't backed down on picking Kelly again as one of its moderators, alongside Bret Baier and Chris Wallace. And earlier Tuesday, the network slammed Trump for trying to bully it into changing the moderators.

""We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings,"" a Fox News spokesman said in a statement.

That tongue-in-cheek statement seemed to push Trump to follow through on his threat to not participate in the debate.

In lieu of attending the debate, Trump's campaign said he would ""instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.""

Fox News shot back in a statement late Tuesday evening, saying it was the Trump campaign who had threatened Kelly.

""We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing – Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage,"" a Fox News spokesperson said. ""Capitulating to politicians' ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly. In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a 'rough couple of days after that last debate' and he 'would hate to have her go through that again.' Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. Trump is still welcome at Thursday night's debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on FOX News & FOX Business, but he can't dictate the moderators or the questions.""

Earlier in the day, Trump posted an Instagram video, calling Kelly ""biased."" On Twitter, he asked followers to vote on whether he should debate.

His absence would change the balance of the debate and give his rivals free shots to attack Trump.

With Trump off the stage for the 9 p.m. ET debate, that means it's Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who will be center stage, followed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was kept off the main stage at the last debate.

At 7 p.m. ET, the earlier undercard debate will feature former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore — who hasn't been on a debate stage since August.

Cruz issued his own debate challenge to his main Iowa rival — a 90-minute one-on-one debate next Monday, the day of the Iowa caucuses.

""Give the Republican primary voters the right to see a fair and policy-focused debate, not simply insults,"" Cruz said on the Mark Levin radio show, according to Politico.",REAL
"The Dark Agenda Behind Globalism And Open Borders   By Brandon Smith 
When people unfamiliar with the liberty movement stumble onto the undeniable fact of the “conspiracy” of globalism they tend to look for easy answers to understand what it is and why it exists. Most people today have been conditioned to perceive events from a misinterpreted standpoint of “Occam’s Razor”— they wrongly assume that the simplest explanation is probably the right one. 
In fact, this is not what Occam’s Razor states. Instead, to summarize, it states that the simplest explanation GIVEN THE EVIDENCE at hand is probably the right explanation. 
It has been well known and documented for decades that the push for globalism is a deliberate and focused effort on the part of a select “elite;” international financiers, central bankers, political leaders and the numerous members of exclusive think tanks. They often openly admit their goals for total globalization in their own publications, perhaps believing that the uneducated commoners would never read them anyway. Carroll Quigley, mentor to Bill Clinton and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is often quoted with open admissions to the general scheme: 
The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. – Carroll Quigley, Tragedy And Hope 
The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion, in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic . They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer, and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will. 
This mentality is evident in the systems that they build and exploit. For example, central banking in general is nothing more than a mechanism for driving nations into debt, currency devaluation, and ultimately, enslavement through widespread economic extortion. The end game for central banks is, I believe, the triggering of historic financial crisis, which can then be used by the elites as leverage to promote complete global centralization as the only viable solution. 
This process of destabilizing economies and societies is not directed by the heads of the various central banks. Instead, it is directed by even more central global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, as outlined in revealing mainstream articles like “ Ruling The World Of Money “published by Harper’s Magazine . 
We also find through the words of globalists that the campaign for a “new world order” is not meant to be voluntary. 
… When the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people. – HG Welles, Fabian Socialist and author of The New World Order 
In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than f rom the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault. – Richard Gardner, member of the Trilateral Commission, published in the April, 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs 
The New World Order cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the single most significant component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions. – Henry Kissinger, World Action Council, April 19, 1994 
I could quote globalists all day long, but I think you get the general idea. While some people see globalism as a “natural offshoot” of free markets or the inevitable outcome of economic progress, the reality is that the simplest explanation (given the evidence at hand) is that globalism is an outright war waged against the ideal of sovereign peoples and nations. It is a guerrilla war, or fourth generation warfare, waged by a small group of elites against the rest of us. 
A significant element of this war concerns the nature of borders. Borders of nations, states and even towns and villages, are not just lines on a map or invisible barriers in the dirt. This is what the elites and the mainstream media would like us to believe. Instead, borders when applied correctly represent principles; or at least, that is supposed to be their function. 
Human beings are natural community builders; we are constantly seeking out others of like-mind and like-purpose because we understand subconsciously that groups of individuals working together can (often but not always) accomplish more. That said, human beings also have a natural tendency to value individual freedom and the right to voluntary association. We do not like to be forced to associate with people or groups that do not hold similar values. 
Cultures erect borders because, frankly, people have the right to vet those who wish to join and participate in their endeavors. People also have a right to discriminate against anyone who does not share their core values; or, in other words, we have the right to refuse association with other groups and ideologies that are destructive to our own. 
Interestingly, globalists and their mouthpieces will argue that by refusing to associate with those who might undermine our values, it is WE who are violating THEIR rights. See how that works? 
Globalists exploit the word “isolationism” to shame sovereignty champions in the eyes of the public, but there is no shame in isolation when such principles as freedom of speech and expression or the right to self defense are on the line. There is also nothing wrong with isolating a prosperous economic model from unsuccessful economic models. Forcing a decentralized free market economy to adopt feudal administration through central banking and government will eventually destroy that model. Forcing a free market economy into fiscal interdependency with socialist economies will also most likely undermine that culture. Just as importing millions of people with differing values to feed on a nation after it has had socialism thrust upon it is a recipe for collapse. 
The point is, some values and social structures are mutually exclusive; no matter how hard you try, certain cultures can never be homogenized with other cultures. You can only eliminate one culture to make room for the other in a border-less world. This is what globalists seek to achieve. It is the greater purpose behind open border policies and globalization – to annihilate ideological competition so that humanity thinks it has no other option but the elitist religion. The ultimate end game of globalists is not to control governments (governments are nothing more than a tool). Rather, their end game is to obtain total psychological influence and eventually consent from the masses. 
Variety and choice have to be removed from our environment in order for globalism to work, which is a nice way to say that many people will have to die and many principles will have to be erased from the public consciousness. The elites assert that their concept of a single world culture is the pinnacle principle of mankind, and that there is no longer any need for borders because no other principle is superior to theirs. As long as borders as a concept continue to exist there is always the chance of separate and different ideals rising to compete with the globalist philosophy. This is unacceptable to the elites. 
This has led not so subtle propaganda meme that cultures that value sovereignty over globalism are somehow seething cauldrons of potential evil. Today, with the rising tide of anti-globalist movements, the argument in the mainstream is that “populists” (conservatives) are of a lower and uneducated class and are a dangerous element set to topple the “peace and prosperity” afforded by globalist hands. In other words, we are treated like children scrawling with our finger paints across a finely crafted Mona Lisa. Once again, Carroll Quigley promotes (or predicts) this propaganda decades in advance when he discusses the need for “working within the system” for change instead of fighting against it: 
For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group. – Carroll Quigley, from Dissent: Do We Need It? 
The problem is that these people refuse to confront the fruits of globalization that can be observed so far. Globalists have had free rein over most of the world’s governments for at least a century, if not longer. As a consequence of their influences, we have had two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession which is still ongoing, too many regional conflicts and genocides to count and the systematic oppression of free agent entrepreneurs, inventors and ideas to the point that we are now suffering from social and financial stagnation. 
The globalists have long been in power, yet, the existence of borders is blamed for the storm of crises we have endured for the past hundred years? Liberty champions are called “deplorable” populists and fascists while globalists dodge blame like slimy slithering eels? 
This is the best card the globalists have up their sleeve, and it is the reason why I continue to argue that they plan to allow conservative movements to gain a measure of political power in the next year, only to pull the plug on international fiscal life support and blame us for the resulting tragedy. 
There is no modicum of evidence to support the notion that globalization, interdependency and centralization actually work. One need only examine the economic and immigration nightmare present in the EU to understand this. So, the globalists will now argue that the world is actually not centralized ENOUGH. That’s right; they will claim we need more globalization, not less, to solve the world’s ailments. 
In the meantime, principles of sovereignty have to be historically demonized — the concept of separate cultures built on separate beliefs has to be psychologically equated with evil by future generations. Otherwise, the globalists will never be able to successfully establish a global system without borders. 
Imagine, for a moment, an era not far away in which the principle of sovereignty is considered so abhorrent, so racist, so violent and poisonous that any individual would be shamed or even punished by the collective for entertaining the notion. Imagine a world in which sovereignty and conservatism are held up to the next generation as the new “original sins;” dangerous ideas that almost brought about the extinction of man. 
This mental prison is where globalists want to take us. We can break free, but this would require a complete reversal of the way in which we participate in society. Meaning, we need a rebellion of voluntary associations. A push for decentralization instead of globalization. Thousands upon thousands of voluntary groups focusing on localization, self reliance and true production. We must act to build a system that is based on redundancy instead of fragile interdependency . We need to go back to an age of many borders, not less borders, until every individual is himself free to participate in whatever social group or endeavor he believes is best for him, as well as free to defend against people that seek to sabotage him; a voluntary tribal society devoid of forced associations. 
Of course, this effort would require unimaginable sacrifice and a fight that would probably last a generation. To suggest otherwise would be a lie. I can’t possibly convince anyone that a potential future based on a hypothetical model is worth that sacrifice. I have no idea whether it is or is not. I can only point out that the globalist dominated world we live in today is clearly doomed. We can argue about what comes next after we have removed our heads from the guillotine. 
You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market.com . If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here . We greatly appreciate your patronage. Share This Article...",FAKE
"Archives Michael On Television 22 Reasons Why Starting World War 3 In The Middle East Is A Really Bad Idea By Michael Snyder, on August 27th, 2013 
While most of the country is obsessing over Miley Cyrus , the Obama administration is preparing a military attack against Syria which has the potential of starting World War 3. In fact, it is being reported that cruise missile strikes could begin “ as early as Thursday “. The Obama administration is pledging that the strikes will be “limited”, but what happens when the Syrians fight back? What happens if they sink a U.S. naval vessel or they have agents start hitting targets inside the United States? Then we would have a full-blown war on our hands. And what happens if the Syrians decide to retaliate by hitting Israel? If Syrian missiles start raining down on Tel Aviv, Israel will be extremely tempted to absolutely flatten Damascus, and they are more than capable of doing precisely that. And of course Hezbollah and Iran are not likely to just sit idly by as their close ally Syria is battered into oblivion. We are looking at a scenario where the entire Middle East could be set aflame, and that might only be just the beginning. Russia and China are sternly warning the U.S. government not to get involved in Syria, and by starting a war with Syria we will do an extraordinary amount of damage to our relationships with those two global superpowers. Could this be the beginning of a chain of events that could eventually lead to a massive global conflict with Russia and China on one side and the United States on the other? Of course it will not happen immediately, but I fear that what is happening now is setting the stage for some really bad things. The following are 22 reasons why starting World War 3 in the Middle East is a really bad idea… 
#1 The American people are overwhelmingly against going to war with Syria… 
Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria’s government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll says. 
About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act. 
#2 At this point, a war in Syria is even more unpopular with the American people than Congress is . 
#3 The Obama administration has not gotten approval to go to war with Syria from Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires . 
#4 The United States does not have the approval of the United Nations to attack Syria and it is not going to be getting it. 
#5 Syria has said that it will use “ all means available ” to defend itself if the United States attacks. Would that include terror attacks in the United States itself? 
#6 Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made the following statement on Tuesday … 
“We have two options: either to surrender, or to defend ourselves with the means at our disposal. The second choice is the best: we will defend ourselves” 
#7 Russia has just sent their most advanced anti-ship missiles to Syria. What do you think would happen if images of sinking U.S. naval vessels were to come flashing across our television screens? 
#8 When the United States attacks Syria, there is a very good chance that Syria will attack Israel. Just check out what one Syrian official said recently … 
A member of the Syrian Ba’ath national council Halef al-Muftah, until recently the Syrian propaganda minister’s aide, said on Monday that Damascus views Israel as “behind the aggression and therefore it will come under fire” should Syria be attacked by the United States. 
In an interview for the American radio station Sawa in Arabic, President Bashar Assad’s fellow party member said: “We have strategic weapons and we can retaliate. Essentially, the strategic weapons are aimed at Israel.” 
Al-Muftah stressed that the US’s threats will not influence the Syrain regime and added that “If the US or Israel err through aggression and exploit the chemical issue, the region will go up in endless flames, affecting not only the area’s security, but the world’s.” 
#9 If Syria attacks Israel, the consequences could be absolutely catastrophic. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising that any attack will be responded to “ forcefully “… 
“We are not a party to this civil war in Syria but if we identify any attempt to attack us we will respond and we will respond forcefully” 
#10 Hezbollah will likely do whatever it can to fight for the survival of the Assad regime. That could include striking targets inside both the United States and Israel. 
#11 Iran’s closest ally is Syria. Will Iran sit idly by as their closest ally is removed from the chessboard? 
#12 Starting a war with Syria will cause significant damage to our relationship with Russia. On Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said that the West is acting like a “ monkey with a hand grenade “. 
#13 Starting a war with Syria will cause significant damage to our relationship with China. And what will happen if the Chinese decide to start dumping the massive amount of U.S. debt that it is holding? Interest rates would absolutely skyrocket and we would rapidly be facing a nightmare scenario . 
#14 Dr. Jerome Corsi and Walid Shoebat have compiled some startling evidence that it was actually the Syrian rebels that the U.S. is supporting that were responsible for the chemical weapons attack that is being used as justification to go to war with Syria… 
With the assistance of former PLO member and native Arabic-speaker Walid Shoebat, WND has assembled evidence from various Middle Eastern sources that cast doubt on Obama administration claims the Assad government is responsible for last week’s attack. 
You can examine the evidence for yourself right here . 
#15 As Pat Buchanan recently noted, it would have made absolutely no sense for the Assad regime to use chemical weapons on defenseless women and children. The only people who would benefit from such an attack would be the rebels… 
The basic question that needs to be asked about this horrific attack on civilians, which appears to be gas related, is: Cui bono? 
To whose benefit would the use of nerve gas on Syrian women and children redound? Certainly not Assad’s, as we can see from the furor and threats against him that the use of gas has produced. 
The sole beneficiary of this apparent use of poison gas against civilians in rebel-held territory appears to be the rebels, who have long sought to have us come in and fight their war. 
#16 If the Saudis really want to topple the Assad regime , they should do it themselves. They should not expect the United States to do their dirty work for them. 
#17 A former commander of U.S. Central Command has said that a U.S. attack on Syria would result in “ a full-throated, very, very serious war “. 
#18 A war in the Middle East will be bad for the financial markets. The Dow was down about 170 points today and concern about war with Syria was the primary reason. 
#19 A war in the Middle East will cause the price of oil to go up. On Tuesday, the price of U.S. oil rose to about $109 a barrel. 
#20 There is no way in the world that the U.S. government should be backing the Syrian rebels. As I discussed a few days ago , the rebels have pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda , they have beheaded numerous Christians and they have massacred entire Christian villages . If the U.S. government helps these lunatics take power in Syria it will be a complete and utter disaster. 
#21 A lot of innocent civilians inside Syria will end up getting killed. Already, a lot of Syrians are expressing concern about what “foreign intervention” will mean for them and their families… 
“I’ve always been a supporter of foreign intervention, but now that it seems like a reality, I’ve been worrying that my family could be hurt or killed,” said one woman, Zaina, who opposes Assad. “I’m afraid of a military strike now.” 
“The big fear is that they’ll make the same mistakes they made in Libya and Iraq,” said Ziyad, a man in his 50s. “They’ll hit civilian targets, and then they’ll cry that it was by mistake, but we’ll get killed in the thousands.” 
#22 If the U.S. government insists on going to war with Syria without the approval of the American people, the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, we are going to lose a lot of friends and a lot of credibility around the globe. It truly is a sad day when Russia looks like “the good guys” and we look like “the bad guys”. 
What good could possibly come out of getting involved in Syria? As I wrote about the other day , the “rebels” that Obama is backing are rabidly anti-Christian, rabidly anti-Israel and rabidly anti-western. If they take control of Syria, that nation will be far more unstable and far more of a hotbed for terrorism than it is now. 
And the downside of getting involved in Syria is absolutely enormous. Syria, Iran and Hezbollah all have agents inside this country, and if they decide to start blowing stuff up that will wake up the American people to the horror of war really quick. And by attacking Syria, the United States could cause a major regional war to erupt in the Middle East which could eventually lead to World War 3. 
I don’t know about you, but I think that starting World War 3 in the Middle East is a really bad idea. 
Let us hope that cooler heads prevail before things spin totally out of control. It Is Illegal To Feed The Homeless In Cities All Over The United States » Boo-urns 
There is no need for a *world* war. Just let them all kill each other; the sooner the world is free from the idiocy that abounds throughout the entire middle east — including Israel — the better off the rest of us will be. 2Gary2 
Does anyone out there see this ending well? 
Michael Rodster 
The US and it’s Allies don’t care what happens in the Middle East. In fact it’s my view that they would prefer absolute chaos and a full blown out war. 
As the mantra in 1992 Elections…”It’s all about the economy stupid”. And the same applies here as well. This is all desperation as the US knows what’s coming economically. If they can ramp up their Military Industrial Complex it could help boost the economy. That is the primary business the US is in. It’s all about war and spying. 
I do hate constantly repeating the man but it’s needed here as well. This all played out during the Great Depression except this time all the fiat based currency nations are in the same boat as the US and this time they have nukes 
“Trade wars, Currency wars, World wars”– Gerald Celente Adrian 
On the contrary, a few may benefit…the CEOS and huge shareholders of Halliburton, Ratheon, etc…but the economy would be hurt by threats to oil, decreased stability in the ME, and so on. They don’t care about the economy, if they did they would have implemented stark programs to bring millions back to work. Instead, it’s been business as usual with downsizing, QE 2,3, 4, and shipping jobs overseas. davidmpark 
No. It won’t. Bad Kitty Cat 
Not at all… and I also wonder how many US allies are going to join in! I truely believe there is a strong desire for war! old fart 
As usual they will join in for the first few months then slowly fade away leaving the US stuck with the whole mess. it has happened every time this time we are having a revisit to the crusades,, That mess lasted for 200 years and was never settled it just quieted down for a mutual draw. Hambone 
Short of the second coming, I see no happy endings to this play. cateye 
No good ending. Cataclysm perhaps. I got a bad feeling about this whole thing….like the US is being led like a lamb to slaughter. Colby Williams 
We should just back off of the whole Syrian thing, its not worth it. JustanOguy 
No. tom 
No I don’t Michael. Thank you for keeping us informed on many fronts. I share your work everyday in e-mails and on FB. I hope that people are listening to what you are saying MeMadMax 
Ochooma’s ego will kill us all… lupa 
There would be plenty of sand for the building trade! or Rebuilding trade! RICHARD 
I think we are on the verge of a economic collapse and a world war. With everything going on in just this country i will be surprise if we make in till the end of Oct. I have said this before. The train is just about to go over the cliff. lavista4u 
Yes. true…I believe its a distraction. September is Illuminati New year and they do some crap during the Month of September like 911… 
What is coming to Americans next month could be 100 times worse than what they would do to Syrians. 
Americans needs to be more prepared and ready than Syrians it seems …It could be a distraction to cause chaos in America. 
They know no one wants war in America and even lame stream is publishing that story and 99% of comments on main stream news sites like CNN is against war…. 
I believe America is their next target not Syria even though they are making it look like its Syria and Iran…. 
Even if this does not turn out this way…Americans need to be prepared for all scenarios….as they are center of all problems created by the cabal. good luck….Make friends and join forces….Unity is Strength…. patricia666 
my mother in-law got Dodge Dart Sedan by working parttime from a home pc. see this website w­w­w.K­E­P­2.c­o­m old fart 
How much was she charging per lay? Sueychop 
When the stuff hits the fan every American should make sure to shoot at least two Russians before they get shot themselves. That way we win. seth datta 
How can this not be a part of/prelude to the End Times? And yet ignorance and apathy are the order of the day for most folk. Tim 
@Richard, I couldn’t agree more. I think this October we will have our eyes opened. This train is in full speed. I have been stocking up for the last 2 years on food, ammo and sanitation. The biggest problem I have run into is income and cost of ammo. The ammo price has come down and some sites are catching up (midland and foxtrotgear seem to be the best prices). The ammo shortage hurt the last year, but my income seems like it has dwindled over the last 2 years. Josh 
It has been a rough couple of months. I always check ammoseek and it seems like bulk ammo and foxtrotgear have the best bulk prices. Don’t forget sanitation, food and medical. Keep your powder dry. MeMadMax 
If possible, keep a full tank of gas at all times. It seems like things are going faster than what we know. Gay Veteran 
as Gerald Celente says about the economy: when all else fails they take you to war Beanodle 
Oil at above $150.00 per barrel will decimate many economies. Especially it the suppliers demand Gold or a currency other than U.S. dollars for it. 
If Obama starts a foreign war without Congressional approval can he be impeached? Would his impeachment placate Russia and China? Celery Muncher 
Impeachment didn’t faze Bill Clinton and it certainly won’t faze King Barry the rodeo clown. These people will simply laugh at the impeachment proceedings and there are not enough congressmen with guts to remove the putz from office even if he was impeached. Obama will go on his merry way doing what he pleases because everyone is so scared of being branded a racist that their balls are frozen in their pants…. Gay Veteran 
There is bipartisan agreement on empire abroad and the national security/surveillance state at home obama_drama 
Bingo dood! Arkaden 
“If the President takes us to war without Congressional approval, I will call for his impeachment. The Constitution is clear. And so am I.” -Joe Biden, 2007 
“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” -Barack Obama, 2007 
THIS time must be different. Hambone 
It’s sad, but those lying, two-faced hypocrites will never be held accountable for their words and actions by a great many of the lemmings in this country. We are truly getting the government we deserve. myrna652 
my mom in law just got Hyundai Sonata Sedan by working at home online… see this page w­w­w.J­A­M­20.c­o­m Adrian 
DOUBLESPEAK! CorrectionSir 
Actually, the president can authorize military action, short of declaring war, if it is in support of allies, treaties or through the request of the UN. That’s the way things have been changed and rejiggered. Gay Veteran 
and NONE of those apply in Syria Ralfine 
Attacking a sovereign country is an act of war. And an attacked country has the right to defend itself, i.e. by sinking the attacking fleet. squashpants 
He said that in 2007? Afghanistan started in 2001, and Iraq in 2003. What war was Biden referring to? MeMadMax 
Prolly georgian conflict. GodHelpUs 
Over amount of years U.S. prospered with the highest public debt. Without wars on it’s territory and so on.. Economy collapse is inevitable. To hold it over, U.S. needs to seed unstability and war in other countries. To keep ourselves stable country, to keep dollar high value (but without gold – dollar is just a paper). We intentonally made that “Arabic spring”, changed management of all those countries. Who didn’t agree – was murdered (like Kaddafi), who did like Egypt – was changed by our man. Now we expect another wave of economical collapse. We NEED to seed fear and distable east. And it’s not Obama! He’s just a puppet.. We made hugest and well trained army with the top weapons on other countries money 😀 But It won’t last forever… churchill 
o aye pal for sure its diffrent obama changed his bacon for weetabix he goes for a 5 mile run now before thinking about war and fat soldiers not being able to run from their turbo tanks it takes an american soldier at least 2 hours to put his make up on first Elelei Guhring 
Notice how neonics found in many pesticides most manufactured by Bayer/Monsanto and which have killed up to 70% of bee populations around the world are not an imminent threat to the nation, even though this action is considered Terrorism under US law: any action that endangers the food supply IS terrorism. davidmpark 
We accepted our orders for NBC gas masks today. 2 adult sizes; 3 children sizes. Got them online for $6.99 ea/free shipping. 
Also got some extra med kits, potassium iodine, and more food. 
We will get hit. The US will get struck again and no country will cry for us. Could we take on the international community? Only if we use WMD’s on them, too. China, Russia, and Iran will retaliate. 
Congress needs to move to stop Obama as this is enough to prove he and his entourage are incapable of ensuring the welfare of the United States. Impeachment needs to be done, arrests need to be made, trials must commence… and sentences if judge and congressional jury find guilty anyone for crimes against this people. 
We must support such actions by Congress, or we will pay the price; not them. ?huh 
Where did you get the masK? Were filters outdated? That is cheap! davidmpark 
They’re IDF leftovers bought on Amazon. I also bought the new canisters – assuming the included cans are expired. ?huh 
I looked and the Amazon review show the items are old and may not be useful and attack. Some are as old as 40 years. davidmpark 
If you are worried about gas attacks, you can make a filter for an air conditioning unit. 
First, get all of the supplies you can: a lot of baking soda and wood charcoal (not briquettes), piece of wood, a scale (any kind), a large pot, 2 pillow cases, a plastic or metal box, and duct tape. 
Pour the baking soda into a pot and weigh it. After recording the weight, place on heat source and cook it for a few minutes. Remove and re-weigh, then repeat. When the scale no longer shows change in weight, pour the powder into a pillowcase and make more if necessary to fill to pillowcase about half way or more. This process converts the sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate (soda ash, or activated carbon). 
Now pour the charcoal onto the pot and use a piece of wood to crush the charcoal into smaller pieces, about the size of wheat grains. Pour into pillow case and make more if necessary to fill to pillowcase about half way or more. Some dust will fall out – let it. 
Now, drill or cut two holes big enough to snuggly fit the air intake hose of your A/C unit into the plastic or metal box on the shorter sides. Place the bag of soda ash on one side, the bag of charcoal on the other side. Seal with duct tape generously. Now attach the air intake hoses of your A/C unit on the unit with the air entering the charcoal first, and the soda ash second. Duct tape generously on both ends. 
We built this last year when the ash and smoke from local wildfires were choking the air around us. We were supremely comfortable with filtered air. Will it work for chemical weapons? The soda ash is the same ingredient used in gas masks, but I really don’t know. Works great for smoke and ash, and chili cook-off’s, but I have no real data that it will work for WMD’s. Can some experts chime in? Truther 
Two easy reasons to understand: Racial Guilt and Desire for Something for Nothing. There you go. saintmatty 
A very good chance that we will get hit. Major city and who knows where else. Get some food and water together. Might be inside for a few days as chaos occurs in the streets. davidmpark 
One of those times a carbine would be handy… Keywee 
“Why did such a good nation decide to #$%& itself over this bad? We’re so much better than this!” I think that as a nation you became complacent, distracted with trivial “entertainment”. The world banking system got it’s claws back into you after all that hard work by the founding fathers to escape it. Hopefully once enough of your own people are affected by the actions of your government you will rediscover your revolutionary roots. Gay Veteran 
“…Congress needs to move to stop Obama….” you assume they disagree with him davidmpark 
I’m hoping they’ll do their job for once. Gay Veteran 
we will all be disappointed, because there is NO difference between the 2 parties Ralfine 
All people have the government they deserve. Syrin 
Here’s how this could play out. We invade Syria. It’s a leaping point to go to war with Iran who has already threatened war with Israel if we invade. Obama will sign the UN Small Arms Treaty, and Russian troops have already been training on US soil for over a year to disarm Americans. I believe they will stage some false flag event in FEMA region 3 which has been urgently stockpiling by “no later than October 1″ according to all their requests for supplies. (do a search, they are stockpiling a A ton in FEMA region 3) Martial law will be declared enforced by our militarized polive, some Iranian patsy will be blamed, and they will jump from Syria to Iran. Obama had a behind the scenes meeting with the highest level financial people in the US last week. The last time this happened, they took out gold. I think they will use the war and false flag events to perform a simultaneous engineered collapse of the economy because they know we cannot recover from our debt burden hoping the no information GARY voters will blame the evil Syrians for our economic problems. Just like Nazzzi Germany, we become a dictatorship overnight. davidmpark 
Okay, I looked it up about the stockpiling for region 3. That makes good sense to concentrate around there for the sake of the powers in DC. They’d want to make sure they don’t have any disruptions in their cocktail parties and lasciviousness. 
They stockpiled around the furherbunker during the battle for Berlin. Makes sense to do that sort of thing when they make unpopular and more blatant illegal actions against their own people. K 
Excellent comment. The idea behind Russian troops was, it would be easier to get them to fire on civilians. I wonder if the puppet masters every gave any thought to the fact, that would cut both ways. K 
E4B spotted in Turkey yesterday. I have never heard of them deploying them outside the Country before. The Check is in the Mail 
Over the top but I understand the concern. It is not like the fools in DC have earned any trust. old fart 
How can that be after all Zero won the Nobel Peace Prize. xander cross 
I blame white men who are profiting of the weapons dealing. Of course, all of you will ignore that fact. Smh Jason Mckenzie 
1st Oct came and went, ya rumour-monger.. K 
Ever since they passed that war on terror resolution in 2001. It seems no President feels they need clearance from anyone. Can this end well? Only if a backdoor agreement has been made with Russia and China. A certain number of missiles fired at certain agreed on targets. In exchange they stick to just stern words. If such an agreement does not exist. Then the first salvo, could easily cause everyone in the area, to bring out their new toys. And that will not end well. A D 
OIL is naturally occurring – GOD created the earth & everything in it. There is enough OIL in the USA, but the eco-nazi’s and other idiots will not allow them to drill. Just like AIR now carbon is a threat, so many idiots believe all of the LIES trumped up by elites. davidmpark 
“OIL is naturally occurring…” Yeah, the Abiotic Oil process. We won’t ever run out of oil. Ralfine 
Any idea why it’s called organic chemistry? Trainwreck Coming Fast 
That will change. It is ALL going to change once the fur begins to fly domestically and abroad. Things that will be different: 
–Even the liberal fools will be begging to drill. But they will not understand that decades of no new refineries means terrifying shortages caused by them. 
–No more discretionary spending on music, entertainment, parties, etc. Sure, it will occur, but a tenth of what is evident now. The boards, extra houses, luxuries, will no longer be part of life. Maybe not so bad. 
–Roving bands of gangs and criminals will be put down by law abiding citizens with guns. People will no longer accept crime. Bring back the death penalty and frontier justice. It is coming. The “I was disadvantages” growing up will only get a bullet in the head. The nation will no longer be able to afford and tolerate the rape of society. 
–Healthcare will be a disaster. Obama and the Left will blame it on the GOP but that will only work for the hardcore remnant of his supporters. The rest of the nation will marvel at its stupidity for not pushing back sooner. But they will realize the system has been so destroyed that it will take years to bring back what we had. 
–WHERE TO STOP? It is so obvious. Gay Veteran 
at what cost? yeah you can have all the oil you want here at $500 a barrel Ralfine 
And, to get one barrrel you have to spend 5 barrels in energy. Keywee 
Yay! Someone else who actually gets it! A D 
AIR, WATER, OIL you name it, the eco-nuts and elitist will do whatever it takes NOT to let a good crisis go to waste.. quoted from OHBOMA thugs. ResilientNews 
one of my local tv stations had a poll on their website if the u.s. should strike Syria and the results were 100% NO. Bill 
Best poll of many asking the same question shows 25% in favor. Still doesn’t show the idiot in chief is listening to we the “real”people!!! Lennie Pike 
The thugs who control the U.S. are allied with those who control China! Birds of a feather (elite Godless fascists) have joined forces for totalitarian worldwide rule!!!) 
Our industry and gold has been intentionally transferred to China. 
Expect to see Chinese militery in the U.S. – not Russian – if Russia allows it. clemster 
The Russians will never look like the “good guys”. Tatiana Covington 
It could be that a coup d’etat will be required. 
I hope not. GodHelpUs 
Over amount of years U.S. prospered with the highest public debt. Without wars on it’s territory and so on.. Economy collapse is inevitable. To hold it over, U.S. needs to seed unstability and war in other countries. To keep ourselves stable country, to keep dollar high value (but without gold – dollar is just a paper). We intentonally made that “Arabic spring”, changed management of all those countries. Who didn’t agree – was murdered (like Kaddafi), who did like Egypt – was changed by our man. Now we expect another wave of economical collapse. We NEED to seed fear and distable east. And it’s not Obama! He’s just a puppet.. We made hugest and well trained army with the top weapons on other countries money 😀 But It won’t last forever… Bill 
It’s ironic that we have a war brewing as the debt limit comes to a head —–again. Big drop in the 10 yr as $ leave the stock market for the “safety” of bonds. Any guess where the 10 yr will be in 90 days? Tobias Smith",FAKE
"Fifteen years after NATO bombings, Montenegro wants to join NATO 07.11.2016 | Source: AP photo Montenegro's prosecutor for investigations in the field of organized crime, Milivoye Katnich, said that a group ""Russian nationalists"" was plotting to assassinate Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, who is known for his pro-Western orientation. ""Organizers of a criminal group, who are nationalists from the Russian Federation, proceeded from the fact that the government of Montenegro chaired by Milo Djukanovic would not be changed as a result of elections, so one had to overthrow the government by force,"" the prosecutor said, Pravda.Ru reports. Pravda.Ru asked an expert opinion from an expert at the Institute of European Studies, Stevan Gayich. ""Is it a provocation of the pro-Western government? Who is standing behind it?"" ""What the prosecutor's office of Montenegro, and the Djukanovic regime in general, have been doing recently can be described as walking in the fog. The opposition does not recognize the elections, and the government has found itself in a deep political crisis. Djukanovic has already announced that he will not be prime minister if his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) forms the government. The socialists already say that the DPS has supposedly formed a government, meaning that Montenegro is sure to be a NATO member. In fact, however, the government has not been formed. They defend the interests of the West, so the fight has risen to a higher geopolitical level. ""No evidence has been provided. In my opinion, this story is completely fabricated in a very poor way to stir up some noise during the elections and create an atmosphere of fear among opposition voters."" ""How should Russia respond?"" ""Russia should at least respond on the level of diplomacy. Montenegro, as a historically Serbian state, used to be a pro-Russian country. NATO bombed Montenegro 15 years ago, and one had to completely change the identity of the people to make Montenegro a NATO member. One of the key points of the identity of the people of Montenegro, the Serbian people, is their attachment to Russia. One had to strike a serious blow on this peculiarity of the people of Montenegro to create a new identity."" On October 16, Montenegro held parliamentary elections. Twenty Serbian citizens were detained on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack and a coup on the election day. According to preliminary data, the people wanted to attack citizens and police officers who gathered in front of the parliament with a view to proclaim the victory of one of the political parties and imprison the prime minister of Montenegro. Pro-Western Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) of Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic won the elections. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"Parts Of Patriot Act Expire, Even As Senate Moves On Bill Limiting Surveillance

It was a dramatic day on the floor of the United States Senate on Sunday. Unable to overcome parliamentary maneuvers by Sen. Rand Paul, the body adjourned and let three controversial provisions of the Patriot Act expire at midnight.

Trying to beat a midnight deadline during a rare Sunday session, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to fast track a House bill that would overhaul the government's bulk collection of Americans' phone records.

At around 7 p.m. ET, the House bill cleared a key procedural hurdle, but as the sun set on Washington, it became clear that a Senate rule allowing for 30 hours of debate would force parts of the Patriot Act to expire at least temporarily.

""The Patriot Act will expire tonight,"" Paul, the Kentucky Republican who has led the charge against the government's bulk collection program, said. ""But it will only be temporary. They will ultimately get their way.""

Before this session, Paul promised to use any parliamentary moves available to him to force any Senate vote on the measure to happen after the 12 a.m. deadline.

He was warned by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that he was putting the country at risk.

""To go dark on this is a risk on Americans' lives,"" Sen. Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, said on the floor of the Senate.

McConnell, the senior Republican senator from Kentucky, said that blocking this legislation should be ""worrying for our country."" McConnell said that even though he had vehemently opposed this bill previously — his chamber had also failed to move it forward earlier this week — he would attempt to pass it.

""We shouldn't be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive, and we certainly should not be doing so based on a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of Edward Snowden,"" McConnell said.

Paul fired back, saying he worried that the House bill actually made the government better at collecting phone records in bulk. He said he couldn't trust the secret court tasked with interpreting the law and that he wanted to add amendments to the bill. He added that the U.S. is using fear to convince Americans of the need for these programs, but the country already has the tools to fight terrorists. They could seek warrants, he said, instead of dragging Americans into what he said was an unconstitutional surveillance system.

""Mark my words,"" he said, ""the battle is not over.""

At around 9:45 p.m. ET, after a lengthy break, McConnell took the floor again and admitted defeat. He offered several amendments to the House bill and adjourned until 12 p.m. ET on June 1, guaranteeing that parts of the surveillance programs instituted by the U.S. after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 would end entirely at least temporarily.

In a statement, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the Senate had taken ""an important—if late—step forward tonight.""

The White House has always supported HR 2048 — also known as the House's USA Freedom Act. The bill ends the bulk collection program as we know it. If passed, the government would still have access to the data, but it would now have to query databases kept by phone companies.

""We call on the Senate to ensure this irresponsible lapse in authorities is as short-lived as possible,"" Earnest said. ""On a matter as critical as our national security, individual Senators must put aside their partisan motivations and act swiftly. The American people deserve nothing less.""

We'll live-blogged the Senate action as it happened. Keep reading if you want a play-by-play.

Update at 11:03 p.m. ET. The Most Dramatic Moment:

We'll leave you tonight with video of the most dramatic moment of the night. It happened as Sen. Rand Paul tried to get five minutes to speak. Here's the video via Real Clear Politics:

Paul, by the way, goes on to win the parliamentary tousle, finally getting his five minutes.

The Senate has adjourned. Three provisions of the Patriot Act will expire at least temporarily.

Update at 9:34 p.m. ET. Senate Still In Session:

The Senate is still technically in session. A senator suggested the absence of a quorum, which has given the Senate time to figure out what will happen next.

Update at 9:31 p.m. ET. Strong Support For 'Comprehensive Reform':

In a statement, Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said today's vote and the likely temporary end of the bulk collection program are a reflection of strong support for ""meaningful and comprehensive reform of the surveillance laws.""

He added: ""Congress should take advantage of this sunset to pass far reaching surveillance reform, instead of the weak bill currently under consideration.""

Update at 8:16 p.m. ET. What To Expect?

So, where do we stand right now? The Senate now has the ability to move on the House bill, but senators can debate the bill for 30 hours.

Manu Raju of Politico reports that Majority Leader McConnell ""plans to employ a prerogative Reid rarely used: Making senators actually debate in post-cloture time — or he'll continue process.""

Congressional Quarterly reports that a McConnell spokesman said there will "" 'likely' be no more votes tonight.""

This means three provisions of the Patriot Act are likely to lapse, if only temporarily.

Update at 8:00 p.m. ET. Bulk Collection Will Likely Lapse:

Wyden and Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico, are still talking on the floor.

It's worth noting that according to White House officials, who briefed reporters last week, it is now likely there will be a lapse in the government's bulk collection program.

As we reported: While the statutory deadline is Monday, June 1, ""senior administration officials said they have to begin winding down their surveillance programs at 4 p.m. ET on Sunday. That process, they said, could be aborted as late as 8 p.m. ET.""

We are now past that window.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, just finished a speech on the floor. Wyden has been a long-time critic of the bulk collection program.

During his speech, he reminded Americans that the administration had misled Congress in the past. He was specifically referring to a hearing in which he asked National Intelligence Director James Clapper if the National Security Agency collects ""any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans.""

Clapper answered, ""No sir,"" before adding, ""not wittingly.""

Clapper ended up apologizing for that answer.

Wyden said that's why the Senate has to ask the ""hard questions.""

""It is our job to ask the hard questions,"" Wyden said.

Update at 7:53 p.m. ET. What Does The House Bill Contain:

We've noted Paul's reservations about HR 2048 — or the House's USA Freedom Act.

From a previous post, here's what that bill would do:

Update at 7:42 p.m. ET. Patriot Act Will Expire:

Sen. Paul said: ""The Patriot Act will expire tonight. But it will only be temporary. They will ultimately get their way.""

With that, Paul stepped off the floor. Here's a quick recap of what he said:

Update at 7:28 p.m. ET. 'Bill Will Ultimately Pass':

Sen. Rand Paul took to the floor shortly after the cloture vote passed. He conceded that the House bill would ""ultimately pass,"" but ""tonight begins the process of ending bulk collection.""

His issue with the House bill, he said, is that Congress may just be replacing one bulk collection program with another.

""It's hard for me to have trust in the people who we are giving great power to,"" Paul said.

The senator from Kentucky said he would offer up amendments to the bill.

Update at 7:08 p.m. ET. Procedural Vote Passes By Large Margin:

The procedural measure to move onto the House bill ultimately passed by a large margin — 77 to 17.

It means the Senate has overcome a major procedural hurdle, but any senator can still debate the measure for 30 hours.

The votes are still coming in, but the Senate has reached the 60 votes needed to limit debate and move on to the House bill.

However, Paul, or any senator for that matter, can force the Senate to debate the matter for another 30 hours before they can vote on the bill. That is of course many hours after the midnight deadline.

The vote so far: 75 in favor of cloture, 15 opposed.

With a temporary extension off the table, Sen. McConnell said he had only two options: One, let the programs expire. Two, try to pass the House bill.

The first option, he said, is ""completely unacceptable."" So, he said, he would move forward with the reconsideration of the House bill.

That motion passed with a voice vote and the Senate is now voting to limit debate and move on to the House bill. That's also known as a cloture vote.

As Fox's Chad Pergram reports on Twitter, that doesn't mean much because even if they get the 60 votes needed for cloture, ""Paul can still require 30 hrs burn off clock before Senate can get on Hse's NSA bill. Means pgms would lapse.""

Update at 6:16 p.m. ET. McConnell Proposes To Extend Two Sections:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor to propose a very limited bill — one that would extend Sections 206 and 6001, the so-called roving wiretaps and lone wolf provisions.

Just like that, Paul objected, and McConnell said that his objection should be ""very worrying for Americans.""

""The nature of the threat is very serious,"" McConnell said; therefore, we should not be ""disarming unilaterally.""

The Senate has reconvened. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is on the floor.

Update at 6:05 p.m. ET. The Debate So Far:

While we wait for the Senate to reconvene, here's a little recap of what we've heard on the floor so far: Democratic Sens. Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy made the case that the Senate should act quickly to pass the House bill.

Leahy said that it had been passed by the House in bipartisan fashion, and that it makes significant changes to the government's surveillance programs.

Reid said that this is an important national security program. He said that CIA Director John Brennan and even Senate Republicans agree that allowing parts of this law to expire would ""threaten our national security."" In his words, this is ""big time stuff.""

In his five minutes, Sen. Paul essentially scoffed at that notion.

""How will we protect ourselves?"" he asked. ""What about using the Constitution? What about getting a warrant?""

Update at 5:56 p.m. ET. What To Expect:

Right now the Senate is in recess. Both parties are meeting to discuss how to go forward. When the Senate returns, we expect a series of votes to reconsider HR 2048 — also known as the House's USA Freedom Act.

The Senate had already failed to move that measure forward earlier this month.

It did not take long for the drama to get started. About an hour into the session, Sen. Rand Paul asked to speak for five minutes. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a fellow Republican, shot him down, and Sen. John McCain, another fellow Republican, suggested Paul should learn the rules of the Senate.

That's when Paul called for a live quorum — a roll call that determines whether a majority of the Senate is in the chamber to continue doing business. To speed things up, the live quorum was called off and Paul was given his five minutes.

""This in important debate,"" Paul said. ""This is a debate over the bill of rights, over the Fourth Amendment. ... It is a debate over your right to be left alone.""

Paul said that the surveillance programs put in place by Section 215 were illegal. Then he issued a warning: ""I'm not going to take it anymore.""",REAL
"US charges 61 with India-based scam involving 15,000 victims US charges 61 with India-based scam involving 15,000 victims By 0 166 
The US Justice Department has charged 61 people and entities with involvement in a major India-based scam that targeted thousands of Americans. 
The scheme involved Indian call centers, where some workers called American citizens and convinced them to pay their non-existent debts by impersonating Internal Revenue Service (IRS), immigration and other federal officials, the Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday. 
Some victims were even offered short-term loans or grants on condition of providing good-faith deposits or payment of a processing fee. 
The scammers had stolen more than $300 million from at least 15,000 unsuspecting citizens, the department noted. 
The victims’ money was laundered by an American network of criminals who used debit cards or wire transfers under fake identities, the indictment said. 
Federal officials arrested 20 people across America on Thursday. Additionally, 32 individuals and five call centers in India were charged…",FAKE
"Turkish Objections Won't Stop YPG's Involvement by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This 
US Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the leader of the US military forces in Iraq and Syria , today announced that Kurdish YPG forces will participate in the invasion of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa, despite Turkish government demands that the Kurds not be allowed to take part. 
Townsend was a bit vague on the details of Kurdish involvement, saying the US are “going to take this in steps,” and that Turkey has to realize the only way that the US is going to have enough force to take over Raqqa any time soon is with a significant portion of the YPG involved. 
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reiterated that his government wants only “local forces” involved in the Raqqa battle, and that the YPG, who Turkey considers a terrorist organization, must not be allowed to take part in any way. 
Turkey’s military has been attacking the YPG in several locations around Syria over the past week, including heavy airstrikes which killed an estimated 200 YPG fighters who were engaged in an offensive against ISIS around Afrin. The Turkish government has repeatedly complained the YPG is gaining too much territory in Syria, and that they must abandon much of it. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"CHARLESTON – John Kasich isn’t sure how he got to be the runner-up to in Tuesday’s New Hampshire GOP primary, an achievement that is drawing more South Carolina voters to his under-the-radar presidential campaign. “Frankly no one would have thought I would finish in second place, way ahead of everybody else, in New Hampshire,” Mr. Kasich told […]",REAL
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
Michael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
Moore’s new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is — except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he’s dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the “Elect her and then hold her accountable” stuff. He says we have a responsibility to “support her” and “get behind her,” and that if after two years — yes, TWO YEARS — she hasn’t lived up to a platform he’s fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you’ve put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon which Hillary Clinton reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions — the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that “coziness” consists of, and he claims that she’s more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
What? It wasn’t one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It’s all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a “No Fly” zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
That’s just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. “I hope she did,” screams Moore. “That’s who I want as Commander in Chief!” Hee hee hee. 
Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least “universal” healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton’s focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it’s the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn’t create “universal” healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton’s progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates “that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass.” Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore’s inclusive comments throughout his performance: “We’re all Americans, right?” 
Moore’s fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government — executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
But when he runs for president, Moore says, he’ll give everybody free drugs. 
I’ll tell you the Clinton ad I’d like to see. She’s standing over a stove holding an egg. “This is your brain,” she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. “This is your brain on partisanship.” This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
"President Obama's affection for the New York Times op-ed section is pretty well-documented at this point. David Brooks and Tom Friedman are regulars at Obama's occasional off-the-record conversations with columnists, and attended one right before the start of airstrikes against ISIS, along with fellow columnist Frank Bruni; Brooks in particular has been a longtime White House favorite.

But according to David Axelrod's new memoir, Obama reserves an intense loathing for their colleague Maureen Dowd. Here's how Axelrod remembers an encounter during Obama's campaign trip to Europe in the summer of 2008:

Maureen Dowd, the talented but tart columnist for the Times, was traveling with us and was granted a brief interview with Obama. When we brought her to the front of the plane for the interview, however, Obama proceeded to blister her for a previous column she had written. No one got under Barack's skin more than Maureen, whose penchant for delving into the psyches of her subjects was particularly irritating to the self-possessed Obama. Normally polite under any circumstances, he was patronizing and disrespectful to Maureen in a way that I had rarely seen. This was not well received by Dowd who, like most journalists, was accustomed to firing off salvos, yet decidedly uncomfortable when fired upon herself. After that awkward encounter, she seemed to take particular delight in psychoanalyzing Barack and belittling him in print, which only deepened his contempt. Maureen, who is as gracious and loyal to her friends as she is rough on the high and mighty, would become a friend of mine in Washington, which became a minor source of tension with Obama. ""Why are you friends with her?"" he would demand after Maureen sent one of her acid darts his way.

In an email to the Huffington Post's Michael Calderone, Dowd denied that her writing was motivated by a desire to avenge Obama's slight, writing ""The idea that I punished him for giving me his opinion is not true and plays into an unfortunate stereotype of women, the Furies swooping down.""

In any case, Obama's certainly not the first person to lodge this particular complaint against Dowd, that she is excessively interested in psychoanalyzing political figures while neglecting what it is they're actually advocating, that, in her own words, she ""focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy."" In a 2005 profile by Ariel Levy in New York Magazine, Dowd dismissed this criticism as sexist: ""All the great traumatizing events of American history— Watergate, Vietnam, the Iran/contra stuff — have always been about the president’s personal demons and gremlins. So I always thought that criticism was just silly … as if it was a girlish thing to be focused on the person.""

WATCH: Obama on why he's such a polarizing president",REAL
"Their itinerary includes meetings with Cuban government officials, a possible meeting with Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino, possible meetings with representatives of Cuba's civil society, a visit to the U.S. Interests Section, and a meeting with other ambassadors to Cuba. The delegation will travel to Cuba on Saturday, and return Monday evening.

A spokesman for Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, tells CNN, the delegation will seek ""clarity from Cuba on what they envision normalization of relations to look like, and, ""going beyond past rote responses such as 'end the embargo.""

The spokesman says the congressional members, ""hope to develop a sense of what Cuba and United States are prepared to do to make a constructive relationship possible. "" The delegation will also, ""impress upon Cuban leaders the importance of concrete results and positive momentum,"" and, ""Convey a sense of Americans' expectations, and perceptions in Congress."" Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who is heading the delegation Looking forward to #Cuba visit to discuss our relationship & potential collaboration w/ #RI's academic institutions http://t.co/AO5r782ea0 — Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) January 17, 2015",REAL
The president-elect hasn't made clear how he will avoid conflicts between his vast empire and his official duties.,REAL
"Clinton Takes First Step To Dispel Doubts About Candidacy

Both of the leading Democrats probably helped themselves in their party's first debate of the 2016 presidential campaign, held in Las Vegas and carried by CNN. But Hillary Clinton, the candidate with the most to lose, may have come away having gained the most.

The longtime front-runner has been beset by controversy, falling poll numbers and a brittle relationship with the media. A bad performance before this season's first national audience would have deepened doubts about her candidacy.

At a minimum, Clinton needed to hold her own and provide as little fresh ammunition as possible to her critics. She met this standard and far exceeded it, performing more ably than in any major media appearance since her best debates and speeches in 2008. Her answers were substantive, measured and confident. But even more important, her demeanor was both relaxed and energetic. At times, she even seemed to be enjoying herself.

Her main challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also had a good night. His strong views on the left bank of the American mainstream found a receptive audience in the partisan crowd. He even got applause for saying he could and would defend his philosophy by ""explaining what Democratic socialism is."" Questioned about his distaste for capitalism, he turned the issue to income inequality and banks ""too big to fail.""

Several of the ""focus group"" interviews conducted by news organizations found their participants liking Sanders the best of the group.

But Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland who has been running a distant third to Clinton and Sanders, also had his moments of connection with the crowd. He made several appeals to environmentalists, especially on climate change. And he told a moving story of parents from Colorado who lost a child in the Aurora theater shooting and then were denied a day in court suing the gun dealer who sold 4,000 rounds of military ammunition to the shooter.

Less successful on balance were the debate's lesser-known entrants, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and former Rhode Island Sen. and Gov. Lincoln Chafee. The latter, a former Republican turned independent turned Democrat, had trouble finding an angle of attack against his former Senate colleagues.

In fact, the entire proceeding was notable for its tone of collegiality. While the candidates disagreed about guns, trade legislation, the use of coal and the use of U.S. military power abroad, they did so in a manner that was more than civil. Whether intentional or not, their behavior contrasted with the rancor and personal confrontations that studded the first two presidential debates on the Republican side.",REAL
"Store Guardian Front Page: “A 16-Year-Old Migrant Cries…” This image of a ""16-year-old"" migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable Chris Menahan | Information Liberation - October 27, 2016 Comments 
Won’t you take pity on this poor, innocent little child? 
This image of a “16-year-old” migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable. 
“A 16-year-old from Ethiopia cries while he awaits registration at a processing centre in the makeshift refugee camp near Calais,” the photo’s caption reads. The image is placed under a headline reading: “Councils resist pressure to take children from Calais.” 

This crying “child” is supposed to make Brits feel guilty and demand their government allow “children” like him into their nation. 
The image is not a fake, nor is it being used satirically. It comes from the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti , you can see four pictures of the man for sale on their website . 
The “child migrant” is clearly in his 40’s, yet their editors evidently believe their readers are so incredibly stupid they’ll actually believe they’re looking at a 16-year-old boy. 
A look at Emilio’s twitter shows one person appears to have actually bought the lie: @morenatti2004 Imposible no hacernos mirar y luego, un nudo en la garganta. pic.twitter.com/A7zvz5440q 
— Luján Artola Paulos (@rowley_bel) October 25, 2016 
“Impossible not make us look, then, a lump in the throat,” the tweet reads. 
Incidentally, Ethiopia is not even a war zone, so I’m not sure how this 45-year-old man can even be considered a “refugee.” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP  ",FAKE
By Dan Dicks Tim Hortons Doesn’t Want You To See The Truth. Press For Truth has been banned from Tim Hortons! In this video Dan... ,FAKE
"On Wednesday, I wrote about why raising the Social Security retirement age is a particularly cruel policy to people who hate their jobs and die young — a group that tends to be poor.

On Twitter, the very smart Marc Goldwein, who works for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, took issue with the piece. Twitter is good for a lot of things, but debating the distributional impacts of changes to Social Security isn't one of them. So let's move the debate here.

In case you don't want to read the rest of this, here's the short version of my response: a Social Security check means something very different to someone with no retirement savings than it does to someone with hefty retirement savings. Cutting 11 percent of the check someone lives on and 11 percent of the check someone barely notices are not the same thing. And, finally, cutting 11 percent of the check of someone who loves his job is very different from cutting 11 percent of the check of someone who desperately wants to retire.

Goldwein's tweet uses a table from the Social Security administration showing that the cut lops a roughly equal percentage off the benefits of people at all income levels — and of course it does; raising the retirement age is an across-the-board cut. But a 6.5 percent cut to Social Security benefits for someone with no other income is much more harmful than an identical cut for someone with $100,000 a year in income from retirement savings.

This debate is complicated a bit by the fact that there are actually two ""retirement ages"" for Social Security: the early retirement age, which is the earliest age at which someone can begin receiving benefits, and the full retirement age, at which Social Security grants ""full"" benefits (though, confusingly, you can get still larger Social Security checks by retiring later than the full retirement age). Some proposals raise only the early retirement age, some raise only the full retirement age, and some, like Chris Christie's plan, raise both. But the Congressional Budget Office finds that increasing either retirement age — or both retirement ages — hurts the poor more than the rich.

Here's what it says about raising the early retirement age:

Here's what it says about raising the full retirement age:

In both cases, the basic effect is the same: raising the retirement age is manageable so long as you can continue working, and want to continue working. But it's a much bigger problem if you can't continue working, or you desperately want to stop working, and were going to rely on Social Security to support you in retirement.

Which is to say, raising the retirement age is a cut that targets people who hate their jobs and want to retire, but can't do so without Social Security.

And then there's the fact that the poor live shorter lives than the rich. If we raised the early retirement age from 62 to 65, then someone who lives until 80 would see their 18 years of retirement cut to 15 years — a loss of about 16 percent of their retirement. Someone who only lives until 73, however, would see their retirement cut from 11 years to eight — a loss of about 27 percent of their time in retirement.

This speaks, by the way, to one of the main justifications given for raising the retirement age: that Americans are living longer lives these days. But as this chart from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation shows, the recent increase in life expectancy has been much larger among the affluent.

This is where we get into questions not of budget but of values: I think in a country as rich as ours, it should be possible for people who hate their jobs to retire relatively young, so they can spend a good portion of their adult life in retirement. I think it's easy for people who love their jobs to underestimate how soul-crushing it is to hate going into work every day. And so I prefer fixes to Social Security that don't force people who hate their jobs to spend longer in the workforce.

Perhaps that would change if we didn't have other options for closing Social Security's shortfall — but there are so, so many other paths that it baffles me why so many in Washington have fixated on this one.",REAL
"(CNN) Aerial bombardments blew apart a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the battleground Afghan city of Kunduz about the time of a U.S. airstrike early Saturday, killing at least 19 people, officials said.

The blasts left part of the hospital in flames and rubble, killing 12 staffers and seven patients -- including three children -- and injuring 37 other people, the charity said.

As the United States said it was investigating what struck the hospital during the night, the charity expressed shock and demanded answers, stressing that all combatants had been told long ago where the hospital was.

""(The bombing) constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law,"" Doctors Without Borders, known internationally as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, said.

""We were running a hospital treating patients, including wounded combatants from both sides -- this was not a 'Taliban base,' "" said Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières, upon release of the group's internal review of the attack.

""We were running a hospital treating patients, including wounded combatants from both sides -- this was not a 'Taliban base,' "" said Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières, upon release of the group's internal review of the attack.

The attacks came as fighting intensified between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded Kunduz in late September.

The attacks came as fighting intensified between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded Kunduz in late September.

Doctors Without Borders is asking for an indepedent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. President Barack Obama has apologized to the charity group for the attack.

Doctors Without Borders is asking for an indepedent investigation by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. President Barack Obama has apologized to the charity group for the attack.

Doctors Without Borders said it had emailed the GPS coordinates of its main hospital and administration office building at the Kunduz center before the airstrike. The U.S. commander said airstrikes were called after Afghan troops advised they were ""taking fire from enemy positions.""

Doctors Without Borders said it had emailed the GPS coordinates of its main hospital and administration office building at the Kunduz center before the airstrike. The U.S. commander said airstrikes were called after Afghan troops advised they were ""taking fire from enemy positions.""

Flames are visible inside a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after a U.S. airstrike on Saturday, October 3. At least 30 people died in the attack, the charity said in its internal review of the strike released Thursday, November 5. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has said the hospital was hit accidentally.

Flames are visible inside a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after a U.S. airstrike on Saturday, October 3. At least 30 people died in the attack, the charity said in its internal review of the strike released Thursday, November 5. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan has said the hospital was hit accidentally.

""There are many patients and staff who remain unaccounted for. The numbers may grow as a clearer picture develops of the aftermath of this horrific bombing,"" MSF said, adding all the dead and injured were Afghans.

The bombardments continued even after U.S. and Afghan military officials were notified the hospital was being attacked, the charity said.

The circumstances weren't immediately clear, but the U.S. military was conducting an airstrike in Kunduz at the time the hospital was hit, U.S. Army Col. Brian Tibus said.

The military is investigating whether a U.S. AC-130 gunship -- which was in the area firing on Taliban positions to defend U.S. special operations troops there -- is responsible, a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity.

The White House released a statement from President Barack Obama offering condolences to the charity from the American people.

""The Department of Defense has launched a full investigation, and we will await the results of that inquiry before making a definitive judgment as to the circumstances of this tragedy,"" the President said. ""I ... expect a full accounting of the facts and circumstances.""

The top U.S. and NATO military commander in Afghanistan said he spoke to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani about the deadly airstrike, the U.S. military said.

""While we work to thoroughly examine the incident and determine what happened, my thoughts and prayers are with those affected. We continue to advise and assist our Afghan partners as they clear the city of Kunduz and surrounding areas of insurgents. As always, we will take all reasonable steps to protect civilians from harm,"" said Gen. John F. Campbell.

The incident occurred on roughly the sixth day of fighting between Afghan government forces -- supported by U.S. air power and military advisers -- and the Taliban, which invaded the city early this week.

According to MSF, the compound is gated and no staff members saw any fighters there or nearby.

""If there was a major military operation going on there, our staff would have noticed. And that wasn't the case when the strikes occurred,"" Christopher Stokes, the charity's general director, told CNN.

One nurse said in an article on the MSF website that he was sleeping in a safe room when he was awakened by a large explosion. The bombing lasted about an hour, Lajos Zoltan Jecs said.

As he went to help the wounded, he and others tried to save a doctor. He died on an office table, Jecs said. The nurse saw six patients who had burned to death in their beds. Another patient was dead on an operating table.

""I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable,"" he said.

Charity: We told everyone of our location

The charity, which had had been caring for hundreds already hurt in days of fighting, said it had told all warring parties the exact location of the trauma center, including most recently on Tuesday.

When the aerial attack occurred, 105 patients and their caretakers were in the hospital. More than 80 MSF international and national staff were present.

The U.S. special operations troops were in the area advising Afghan forces, the military official who was speaking anonymously said. The official stressed that the information about the probe was preliminary.

Pribus said a ""manned, fixed-wing aircraft"" conducted a strike ""against individuals threatening the force"" at 2:15 a.m. local time, and that the strike ""may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.""

The U.N. mission in Afghanistan sharply condemned the airstrike.

""I condemn in the strongest terms the tragic and devastating air strike on the Médecins sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz early this morning, which resulted in the deaths and injury of medical personnel, patients and other civilians,"" said Nicholas Haysom, head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul expressed condolences on its Facebook page.

""The U.S. Embassy mourns for the individuals and families affected by the tragic incident at the Doctors Without Borders hospital, and for all those suffering from the violence in Kunduz,"" it read. The embassy praised the group's work as ""heroic.""

The International Committee of the Red Cross also expressed condemnation.

""Such attacks against health workers and facilities undermine the capacity of humanitarian organizations to assist the Afghan people at a time when they most urgently need it,"" said Jean-Nicolas Marti, Head of the ICRC delegation in Afghanistan.

Bullets broke windows and punctured the roof of the intensive care unit.

The Taliban captured Kunduz earlier this week in the group's biggest victory in 15 years. It was a major setback for Afghan forces.

Afghanistan said it reclaimed most of the city Thursday in a big operation backed by U.S. airstrikes.

But hours later, there were signs that the Taliban were back in Kunduz, a resident told CNN. Gunshots erupted near the airport.

Kunduz is a strategic hub on the main highway between Kabul and Tajikistan.

On Thursday, Taliban fighters also took the Warduj district of Badakhshan, east of Kunduz province.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen Mark Hertling said it was common for facilities such as hospitals to give combatants their coordinates.

""The coalition air forces will put something called a no-fly area on that GPS coordinate, so you have a pinpoint dot on a map, where you say something is there ... don't hit it,"" Hertling said.

""But when the fluidness of the battlefield takes place and you have engagements with troops on the ground, sometimes there are mistakes,"" he said.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton Waiting In Wings Of Stage Since 6 A.M. For DNC Speech PHILADELPHIA—Saying she arrived hours before any of the members of the production crew, sources confirmed Thursday that presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been waiting in the wings of the Wells Fargo Center stage since six o’clock this morning to deliver her speech at the Democratic National Convention. Depressed, Butter-Covered Tom Vilsack Enters Sixth Day Of Corn Bender After Losing VP Spot WASHINGTON—Saying she has grown increasingly concerned about her husband’s mental and physical well-being since last Friday, Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, told reporters Thursday that the despondent, butter-covered cabinet member has entered the sixth day of a destructive corn bender after being passed over for the Democratic vice presidential spot. DNC Speech: ‘I Am Proud To Say I Walked In On Bill And Hillary Having Sex’ A friend of the Clinton family describes a Hillary who America never gets to see: the one he saw having sex. Trump Sick And Tired Of Mainstream Media Always Trying To Put His Words Into Some Sort Of Context NEW YORK—Emphasizing that the practice was just more evidence of journalists’ bias against him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stated Thursday that he was sick and tired of the mainstream media always attempting to place his words into some kind of context. Who’s Speaking At The DNC: Day 4 Here is a guide to the major speakers who will be addressing attendees on the final night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Bound, Gagged Joaquin Castro Horrified By What His Identical Twin Brother Might Be Doing Out On DNC Floor PHILADELPHIA—Struggling to free himself from the tightly wound lengths of rope binding his wrists and ankles together, bruised and gagged Texas congressman Joaquin Castro was reportedly horrified by what his identical twin brother, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, might be out doing on the floor of the DNC Thursday. Obama: ‘Hillary Will Fight To Protect My Legacy, Even The Truly Detestable Parts’ PHILADELPHIA—Emphasizing the former secretary of state’s competence and tenacity during his Democratic National Convention address Wednesday night, President Barack Obama praised Hillary Clinton as someone who would work tirelessly to defend and advance the legacy he had built, even the “truly repugnant parts.” Tim Kaine Clearly Tuning Out In Middle Of Boring Vice Presidential Acceptance Speech PHILADELPHIA—Describing the look of total disinterest on his face and noting how he kept peering down at his watch as the speech progressed, sources at the Democratic National Convention said that Virginia senator Tim Kaine clearly began tuning out partway through the boring vice presidential acceptance address Wednesday night. Cannon Overshoots Tim Kaine Across Wells Fargo Center PHILADELPHIA—Noting that the vice presidential nominee had been launched nearly 100 feet into the air during his entrance into the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, sources reported that the cannon at the back of the Wells Fargo Center had accidentally overshot Tim Kaine across the arena, sending him crashing to the stage several dozen feet beyond the erected safety net. Biden Regales DNC With Story Of ’80s Girl Band Vixen Breaking Hard Rock’s Glass Ceiling PHILADELPHIA—Devoting a large portion of his speech to the “pioneering, stiffy-inducing” all-female quartet, Vice President Joe Biden regaled the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night with the rousing story of the metal band Vixen breaking hard rock’s glass ceiling in the late 1980s. ",FAKE
"—Debby Borza stood before a wall of photos of 40 people who died here Sept. 11, 2001, and gently tapped her daughter’s face on a computer touch screen, not knowing exactly what to expect.

“What do they have to say about my dear, sweet daughter?” she said, her face brightening as the screen filled with photos of Deora Frances Bodley, 20, at her high school graduation, working as a volunteer reading tutor, visiting Paris — an album of a promising young life cut short 14 years ago Friday, when four al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked United Airlines Flight 93.

Borza was among the family members given an early look at the $26 million Flight 93 National Memorial visitor center that opened this week, remembering the legacy of the 9/11 attacks and honoring the courage of 40 passengers and crew members who fought back against their four hijackers, preventing the plane from hitting its presumed target, the U.S. Capitol.

“It’s important to me that the visitor sees what these 40 people took on, to take a stand for freedom, to take the kind of stand that cost their lives,” said Borza, whose daughter was the youngest female passenger on Flight 93. “Maybe there will be some special thing they see about Deora that will inspire them.”

As Americans mark the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thousands will gather at long-established monuments at Ground Zero in New York, at the Pentagon in Virginia and at other sites honoring the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. But those who come to the national monument in Shanksville, to honor Bodley and the passengers who kept 9/11 from becoming even more catastrophic, will find a work still in progress.

The stunning concrete-and-glass visitors center and museum are finally open, but landscaping and other finishing touches are still underway. Yet another structure, the Tower of Voices, a nearly 100-foot bell tower with 40 chimes, is scheduled to be built during the next two years.

A memorial plaza close to the crash site, in a field that was once a strip mine, was completed in time for the 10th anniversary in 2011.

At the time, former president Bill Clinton, visiting the site with former president George W. Bush, expressed frustration with the pace of the project.

Clinton and Bush soon became personally involved, speeding fundraising and development, according to Gordon Felt, president of Families of Flight 93.

“President Clinton and President Bush both came through for us,” said Felt, whose brother, Edward Porter Felt, 41, died in the crash.

Felt said the families were closely involved in all aspects of the complex development, working with private donors and state and federal officials — as well as the National Park Service, which operates the memorial — to raise money, acquire land, select a design and complete construction.

“Our loved ones left a legacy for all of us,” Felt said, noting that the plane, which was traveling at 563 mph, was less than 20 minutes of flying time from Washington. “If the Capitol building was destroyed that day, just think how much more devastating an impact that day would have had on our country.”

The legacy of Flight 93 might already have inspired others to stand up against terrorist attacks, Felt said. Last month, three Americans acted to avert a massacre on a train in France.

“It’s important that we don’t forget the events of the day, but the individual people who stood up to say no,” Felt said. “They could have sat back and let others dictate the end of their lives. But they fought back and became heroes in the process.”

In the chill and rain

On Thursday, several hundred people huddled under umbrellas in a heavy, chilly drizzle for the official opening of the visitors center. Speakers remembered the passengers and crew of Flight 93, who “changed the course of American history,” said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D).

“They are modern-day heroes who represent the very best in us,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who also quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered on another remote Pennsylvania field: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

Alan Hantman, the appointed architect of the Capitol from 1997 to 2007, addressed family members in the crowd, noting that he was in the building on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and saying, “I’m one of those who was saved by your loved ones.”

Paul Murdoch, the architect of the memorial, said it is designed to highlight the power of the story of Flight 93.

“In its raw severity, we acknowledge their sacrifice. In its solemn darkness, we acknowledge their loss. In its calm serenity, we offer solace at their final resting place. And in its monumental scale, we praise their heroic deeds,” Murdoch told the crowd.

The visitors center and museum is set between two soaring concrete walls that rise 40 feet high, one foot for each of those who died. It is set directly on Flight 93’s flight path, with a black stone walkway indicating the precise route that the plane followed. On the valley floor below, a large boulder marks the point of impact, serving almost as a headstone in a place where very few human remains were recovered.

The center presents the events of Sept. 11, 2001, as they unfolded. The first display that visitors encounter features that morning’s Wall Street Journal; photos of local students entering an elementary school; a diagram showing that there were 4,500 planes in the air when Flight 93 took off at 8:42 a.m. from Newark on its way to San Francisco.

The next display features video clips of a stunned Katie Couric telling viewers of NBC’s “Today” that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. There follows video of the second plane hitting, the South Tower collapsing, the voice of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings saying, “My God.”

Display cases are filled with tiny fragments of the plane; bits of metal and wire and electronics; a charred seat belt; a safety instruction card; bent metal spoons and forks; the Oracle employee identification card of passenger Todd Beamer; the New Jersey driver’s license of passenger Colleen Fraser; a Visa card that belonged to one of the hijackers.

At one display, visitors can pick up a phone and listen to some of the 37 calls that were made from Flight 93 that morning, some to 911 and some to family members. Those calls allowed passengers to understand that what they faced was not a normal hijacking, and it also allowed them to say goodbye.

“I just wanted to tell you I love you. We’re having a little problem on the plane. I’m totally fine. I just love you more than anything, just know that,” Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas says in a message on her husband’s answering machine.

Passenger Linda Gronlund calls her sister and says: “I just love you and I just wanted to tell you that. I don’t know if I’m going to get the chance to tell you that again or not.”

Another wall is dedicated to a life-size photograph of a Boeing 757 cabin, showing the plane as the passengers would have seen it after the hijackers forced them all to the back. When they decided to rush their attackers, they had to move 100 feet to the front of the plane, down an aisle 20 inches wide.

Ed Root, whose cousin, flight attendant Lorraine Bay, died in the crash, stood in front of the photograph, contemplating that daunting prospect.

“We all ask ourselves, ‘What would I have done if I was here?’ ” Root said. “What would you do? Would you have just stayed back there and hoped for the best? Or would you have reacted? Thankfully, they did react.”

While 9/11 is a defining event for America, Root noted that it is getting to be “history” for younger Americans, even those now in college.

“We need them to remember,” he said. “This history is not over. This is a story that goes on.”",REAL
"Fox Business News aired two GOP presidential debates Tuesday: a prime-time event starring eight candidates and an earlier debate featuring four second-tier contenders, based on an average of recent polls.

Not every candidate uttered facts that are easily fact checked, but following is a list of 15 suspicious or interesting claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.

This was a great line by Rubio, well delivered, but it’s totally off base.

The median wage of welders is $37,420, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median wage for philosophy teachers is $63,630, according to BLS.

In fact, the average first-year salary for a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy is $42,200 — with a mid-career average of $85,000, according to Payscale.com. For college professors, the median salary is $89,913, with the top 10 percent having a salary near $200,000.

By contrast, the top 10 percent salary for welders is only about $58,590, BLS says.

Carson has a point, but such a trend did not play out every time the federal minimum wage was raised.

Our friends at PolitiFact have compiled a chart showing the years Congress raised the minimum wage, and the months of job growth in the following one-year period. The chart shows that between 1978 and 2009, raising the federal minimum wage did not always result in job loss or job growth. In fact, it was split almost evenly; out of the 11 times the minimum wage was raised, there was overall job growth six times, and overall job loss five times.

Still, the Congressional Budget Office projected that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from the current wage of $7.25 per hour would result in about 500,000 fewer workers having jobs — and possibly up to 1 million workers would be affected. Raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour could result in 100,000 to 200,000 jobs lost, the CBO projected.

However, many more low-wage workers’ earnings would increase as a result of raising the minimum wage, the CBO found. Under the $10.10 option, 16.5 million workers with hourly wages less than the proposed minimum would see an increase in their earnings. Under the $9 option, 7.6 million workers would see an increase.

Conventional economic analysis may show that increasing the minimum wage reduces employment by increasing the cost to employers, and by raising the cost of low-wage workers relative to other inputs like machines or technology, the CBO wrote. But conventional economic analysis might not always apply, according to the CBO: “For example, when a firm is hiring more workers and needs to boost pay for existing workers doing the same work — to match what it needs to pay to recruit the new workers — hiring a new worker costs the company not only that new worker’s wages but also the additional wages paid to retain other workers.”

Trump likes to cite this historical example to defend his plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, but never uses its now-politically-incorrect name, “Operation Wetback.”

As our colleague Yanan Wang documented in September, this campaign dumped hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants back into Mexico, with few resources to fend for themselves: “Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home. … After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.”

Moreover, researchers now believe claims that more than 1 million people were deported to be highly exaggerated, with the actual figure closer to 250,000.

A Brookings Institution report appears to confirm Paul’s claim. But at The Fact Checker, we always warn readers against correlating the economic trends in a city or state to policy decisions of a single executive — or in this case, his or her party.

A study by the Brookings Institution ranked the top 10 and bottom 10 largest cities in the country by income inequality, using 2012 Census data. PolitiFact rated Paul’s statement Half True, based on this study.

Among the 10 cities with the highest income inequality, nine had Democratic mayors. Atlanta, under a Democratic mayor, had the highest inequality out of the nation’s largest cities. The other cities led by Democrats were San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore.

PolitiFact found that seven of the 10 cities in the report with the least income inequality had Republican mayors: Oklahoma City; Omaha, Neb.; Fort Worth, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Mesa, Ariz.; Arlington, Tex.; and Virginia Beach, Va.

The 10 cities with the least inequality obviously are smaller cities than the ones in the top 10. The range of income distribution is wider in larger cities with bigger populations.

This is stale statistic, derived from a report published in 2014 by the Brookings Institution, which studied Census Bureau data called Business Dynamic Statistics. Brookings analysts tracked data back to 1978 and found that starting in 2008, business deaths exceeded business births through 2011.

It soon became a favorite GOP talking point (Marco Rubio used it in the last debate). But that report is out of date. More recent data shows the trend shifted in 2012 and in the past two years, business starts began to exceed business deaths.

In saying he was against increasing the minimum wage, Carson cited a figure for black teenage unemployment that seemed suspiciously high to some viewers. Apparently he meant to refer to the unemployment rate, though it came out sounding like he was saying 80 percent were unemployed.

But then a 19.8 percent unemployment rate sounded suspiciously low. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it stood at 25.6 percent as of October.

The Carson campaign initially sent a 2013 report from the American Enterprise Institute that said the jobless rate for black male teens was 44.3 percent — but 19.8 percent for white male teens. Oops. Then we were sent a pair of studies that show the summer jobless rate for black teens was 19 percent. Seems like a shifting of the goal posts, but apparently he was talking about summer employment. He just didn’t make that very clear.

We note this comment because it is very puzzling. The Chinese are in Syria? The Carson campaign did not respond to a query. (Update: Spokesman Doug Watts sent links to blog posts from September 2015 speculating that China was in Syria and a 2012 article about possible Chinese participation in war games with Russia and Syria, which noted the reports were unconfirmed.)

But while there were reports in Middle Eastern media that China would fight alongside Russia in Syria, that has been dismissed by the Chinese media as “speculative nonsense.” A newspaper tied to the ruling Communist Party noted, “It’s not China that brought chaos to Syria, and China has no reason to rush to the front lines and play a confrontational role.”

This may have been true at the start of his campaign, but it’s no longer valid though Trump loves to keep saying this line. In the third quarter of this year, the Trump campaign received $4 million in unsolicited donations, according to the campaign’s latest financial filing. Since launching the campaign, Trump has spent about $2 million of his own money, the filing said.

Carson appears to cite the common statistic that 22 veterans commit suicide a day. At best, this figure is a rough, outdated estimate based on partial data.

This statistic comes from the VA’s 2012 Suicide Data Report, for which researchers analyzed death certificates of veterans from 21 states, from 1999 to 2011. They took the percentage of veteran deaths identified as suicides, out of all suicides from those states during that period. Then they applied that percentage to the number of suicides in the United States in a given year. That comes out to 22 suicides a day.

But the sample size was fewer than half the states, and did not include some states with the largest veteran populations (such as Arizona, California, Texas and North Carolina). Researchers who wrote this report provided a major caveat about their findings: “It is recommended that the estimated number of veterans be interpreted with caution due to the use of data from a sample of states and existing evidence of uncertainty in veteran identifiers on U.S. death certificates.” The Department of Veterans Affairs, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Defense Department have been working on a larger study to accurately quantify the suicide problem among veterans.

Suicide is a serious concern among veterans, and Americans at large. In fact, suicides among veterans happen at a higher rate than Americans in general.

Huckabee appears to be citing data from a flawed article that appeared in the tabloid Daily Mail in September. That one in five figure is simply wrong.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that of the nearly 800,000 refugees arriving by sea in 2015, 52 percent are from Syria, followed by 19 percent from Afghanistan and 6 percent from Iraq. (Nearly 3,500 people were dead or missing because of the sea journey.) Obviously, both Afghanistan and Iraq are also war-torn countries.

About 650,000 refugees arrived in Greece, followed by nearly 150,000 in Italy.

UNHCR also says there are nearly 4.3 million registered Syrian refugees, with more than 2 million living in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon and more than 600,000 in Jordan.

The former Arkansas governor gets this depressing factoid correct. In January of 2000, there were 17.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to government statistics. As of October this year, there were just 12.3 million manufacturing jobs.

Huckabee was also right to reach back to 2000, during the Bill Clinton presidency, as that was the high point for manufacturing in the past 20 years. Almost 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost during George W. Bush’s term in office — and the nadir was reached during President Obama’s term, when the United States had only 11.5 million manufacturing jobs. Some of those jobs have been recovered, but the total number of manufacturing jobs is still lower than when Obama took office.

None of the Democratic candidates have said they would boost tax rates so high, even on the wealthy.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has not yet released a tax plan, but he has repeatedly denied that he would increase taxes from the current marginal rate of 39.6 percent to as high as 80 or even 90 percent. (The marginal rate is what you pay on each additional dollar earned.) Sanders claims he would fund his $1 trillion plan to rebuild U.S. infrastructure by tapping corporate profits now stashed in overseas tax havens.

The United States had a marginal tax rate of 90 percent in the Dwight Eisenhower administration, and then John F. Kennedy proposed to reduce it to 70 percent. (The plan was approved by Congress after his assassination.) But even such rates would not take 90 percent of a person’s income.

The crime rate has been decreasing for decades, but you wouldn’t know it just listening to what Christie says about the rampant “lawlessness” in the country.

The violent crime rate has been decreasing steadily since 1991, despite overall population growth. The FBI Uniform Crime Report, which compiles data from law enforcement agencies, shows the violent crime rate decreased by 15 percent since President Obama took office in 2009. In 2011, the violent crime rate was the lowest it had been since 1971.

The murder rate also has been dropping in major American cities, including in New York City. This has been the trend for the past decade, even in cities that once were overrun by crime. This trend holds even despite a blip in some cities this summer.

It’s not entirely clear where Santorum got his figure, or how the father “living” at the time the child is born is an incentive not to marry the mother. Perhaps Santorum meant that the father was living in the home at the time the child was born, leading to his argument about cohabiting.

In any case, a 2014 Pew Research Center analysis of 2013 Census data show that 46 percent of children younger than 18 years old are living in a “traditional” family — a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. According to the analysis, 34 percent of children in 2013 were living with an unmarried parent, and most of the unmarried parents were single. Four percent of all children were living with two cohabiting parents.

Santorum may be referring to a report, referenced in a 2014 Associated Press article, by researchers at Harvard University and Cornell University that found found that at least half of mothers who were cohabiting when their child was born were still in relationships with the child’s biological father five years later. More couples are cohabitating, and the trend likely will continue because many couples are postponing marriage until their finances are more stable, according to the article, citing research by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The National Center for Health Statistics also found that nonmarital births increasingly are likely to occur among cohabiting couples, though the rate of births of unmarried women has decreased since the peak in 2008.

This is one of Jindal’s favorite boasts about his record, but he takes too much credit for saying he “cut” the state budget 26 percent.

The state budget in fiscal 2009, Jindal’s first budget after taking office in 2008, was $34.3 billion. In fiscal 2016, the proposed budget was $25.1 billion. That is a $9.2 billion decrease, or 26.8 percent.

But this budget decrease was not due to his executive decisions alone. Federal funding also decreased by $10 billion during those eight years, from $19.7 billion to $9.7 billion. Part of this decrease was due to waning federal funding for hurricane recovery, according to the Times-Picayune.",REAL
"What you need to know about the election recounts

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein intends to seek recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.",REAL
"Home › MEDIA | POLITICS › CLINTON CAMPAIGN COOPERATED WITH POLITICO ON ‘DEMYSTIFYING’ HUMA ABEDIN CLINTON CAMPAIGN COOPERATED WITH POLITICO ON ‘DEMYSTIFYING’ HUMA ABEDIN 0 SHARES 
[11/1/16] Asked to provide a quotation for a Politico profile of Huma Abedin in July 2015, Clinton Campaign manager John Podesta wanted to use the phrase “wicked smart” instead of “bright,” and he emphasized Abedin’s “strategic sense.” 
Podesta also agreed with a campaign staffer’s suggestion to describe Abedin as “an integral part of the team.” 
The Wikileaks email exchange , dated July 2, 2015 and released on Tuesday, begins with Clinton’s press secretary Nicholas Merrill telling Milia Fisher, Podesta’s aide, that “Politico has been working on a profile on Huma that we are being what I’d call partially cooperative with.” 
Merrill said after consulting with Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and Huma herself, the campaign decided to have the reporter sit down with Huma “off the record.” 
“We think there is some value in demystifying her a bit in general, and Politico isn’t a bad place to do it,” Merrill wrote to Fisher. 
Merrill asked Fisher to see if Podesta “would be willing to weigh in, which I think would be good in the spirit of showing team unity.” 
“The piece will be about Huma’s evolution from body person to senior staffer, so if he’s up for it, maybe John could say something about her being a multi-faceted team player,” Merrill wrote. Then he offered a suggested quotation: 
“Like: I was there at the White House when Huma was a young intern, and now she’s an integral part of the team. She’s as multi-faceted as she is bright, and when you combine that with her humility, you couldn’t ask for a better colleague.” 
Merrill tells Fisher, “Feel free to tweak that, put it in John’s voice, or blow it up.” 
Fisher forwarded Merrill’s email to Podesta, asking him if he’d be willing to provide a quote. “Comms (communications) thinks it might lend an air of community to the piece,” she wrote to Podesta. 
Podesta’s reply: “Change bright to ‘wicked smart’ and after humilty add ‘and strategic sense.'” 
The complete email exchange, as provided by WikiLeaks, can be seen here : 
The July 2, 2015 Politico profile of Abedin described her as “Clinton’s longest-serving aide.” It said that “like a mother monitoring her child on the playground, she never let Clinton drift out of her line of sight, ever vigilant and poised to act.” Post navigation",FAKE
"“I was in Kentucky when Sen. Rand Paul announced his candidacy and I worked on his campaign.”

So you're still warming up the idea of Donald?

“I’m here for a totally different reason . . .the issue I’m passionate about is medical cannabis oil to treat my autistic son. . . I was up here last week trying to get it in the platform.”",REAL
"October 27, 2016 - Fort Russ News - Novorossiya - translated by J. Arnoldski -  


During a press conference in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, official spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists that Ukraine is purposefully disinforming the public on the question of providing weapons to OSCE observers in Donbass. 
“Kiev’s statement that some kind of agreement on deploying an OSCE police mission in Donbass has been achieved does not match reality. The mission will have a purely civil character,” Zakharova explained. 
According to her, Russia supported the possibility of providing observers with  service weapons  during discussions , but the issue did not go forward due to a lack of consensus. 

Zakharova added that the deployment of a police mission is possible only on the contact line.  


     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
                                                   

       Follow us on Twitter! 
                               

             Donate! 
",FAKE
"The Senate’s failure to extend the USA Patriot Act will bring the legislation on NSA phone-record collection and other key surveillance activities perilously close to expiring on June 1, forcing senators to return early from recess for a rare Sunday session.

The Senate vote was just one of two this weekend that set the stage for dramatic showdowns on Capitol Hill in the coming weeks and months.

The GOP-led upper chamber passed bipartisan legislation Friday night to strengthen President Obama's hand in global trade talks. However, the legislation must now pass the Republican-led House, with help from Democrats because some conservative members oppose the legislation.

Speaker John Boehner supports the measure and says Republicans will do their part to pass it.

Dozens of House Republicans oppose the legislation either out of ideological reasons or because they are loath to enhance Obama's authority, especially at their own expense.

Senate and now House Democrats are showing little inclination to support legislation that much of organized labor opposes.

On the Patriot Act bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he will bring the upper chamber back into session on Sunday, May 31 -- roughly 24 hours before the post-9/11 legislation expires.

Meanwhile, the National Security Agency is starting to winding down its bulk collection of domestic-calling records in preparation for the Senate voting again against the legislation, according to the Justice Department, which says the collection takes time to halt.

The Senate went into the early hours on Saturday morning to vote on the legislation before leaving Washington for Memorial Day recess.

By the time senators broke for the holiday, they had blocked a House-passed bill and several short-term extensions of the key provisions in the Patriot Act.

The main stumbling block was a House-passed provision to end the NSA collecting the phone-call metadata and instead have the records remain with telephone companies subject to a case-by-case review.

McConnell warned against allows the NSA and other key surveillance programs under the act to expire.

However, he and other key Republican senators oppose the House approach, backed by officials who argued it is the best way for the United States to keep valuable surveillance tools.

Fellow GOP Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, also a 2016 presidential candidate, called the Senate's failure to allow the extension a victory for privacy rights.

""We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security,"" Paul said in a statement. ""This is only the beginning -- the first step of many. I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all.""

The White House has pressured the Senate to back the House bill, which drew an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote last week and had the backing of GOP leaders, Democrats and the libertarian-leaning members.

But the Senate blocked the bill on a vote of 57-42, short of the 60-vote threshold to move ahead. That was immediately followed by rejection of a two-month extension to the existing programs. The vote was 54-45, again short of the 60-vote threshold.

McConnell repeatedly asked for an even shorter renewal of current law, ticking down days from June 8 to June 2. But Paul and other opponents of the post-Sept. 11 law objected each time.

At issue is a section of the Patriot Act, Section 215, used by the government to justify secretly collecting the ""to and from"" information about nearly every American landline telephone call. For technical and bureaucratic reasons, the program was not collecting a large chunk of mobile calling records, which made it less effective as fewer people continued to use landlines.

When former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the program in 2013, many Americans were outraged that NSA had their calling records. President Obama ultimately announced a plan similar to the USA Freedom Act and asked Congress to pass it. He said the plan would preserve the NSA's ability to hunt for domestic connections to international plots without having an intelligence agency hold millions of Americans' private records.

Since it gave the government extraordinary powers, Section 215 of the Patriot Act was designed to expire at midnight on May 31 unless Congress renews it.

Under the USA Freedom Act, the government would transition over six months to a system under which it queries the phone companies with known terrorists' numbers to get back a list of numbers that had been in touch with a terrorist number.

But if Section 215 expires without replacement, the government would lack the blanket authority to conduct those searches. There would be legal methods to hunt for connections in U.S. phone records to terrorists, said current and former U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. But those methods would not be applicable in every case.

Far less attention has been paid to two other surveillance authorities that expire as well. One makes it easier for the FBI to track ""lone wolf"" terrorism suspects who have no connection to a foreign power, and another allows the government to eavesdrop on suspects who continuously discard their cellphones in an effort to avoid surveillance.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Trump has been the leader for several months now, but Carson appears to have broken through with key demographics, particularly evangelicals. The CBS report sums up Carson’s advantages well:

Carson has made gains across many key Republican groups. In a reversal from earlier this month, he now ahead of Trump among women and is running neck and neck with him among men. Carson’s support among evangelicals has risen and he now leads Trump by more than 20 points with this group. Carson performs well among conservative Republicans and those who identify as Tea partiers.

It’s not terribly surprising that Carson leads Trump among women and evangelicals: Trump is the misogynist par excellence and Carson is a proud religious fanatic – these are natural demographics for Carson. But Carson’s rising support among men and Tea Partiers, relative to Trump, is somewhat surprising.

Tea Partiers don’t do policy. Their project is essentially negative, which is why the GOP’s nihilism and obstructionism began in earnest when Tea Partiers were elected to Congress in 2010. Neither Carson nor Trump have anything resembling a platform or a plan. They’re outsiders with no political experience who want to disrupt the status quo – that’s a message that resonates with conservative men and Tea Partiers.

If there’s a difference, it’s that Trump is louder and more aggressively obnoxious than Carson, which ought to endear him to these demographics. Evidently, though, Carson’s unhinged nice guy routine is working. His new campaign ad perfectly illustrates both his appeal and his vacuousness.

In a 30-second TV spot, Carson manages to hit all the right conservative notes without coming close to explaining what he’s going to do. “I’m Ben Carson and I’m running for president,” he says. “The political class and their pundit buddies say: ‘Impossible. He’s too outside the box.’ Well, they do know impossible. Impossible to balance the budget, impossible to get border security, impossible to put aside partisanship…I’m Ben Carson, I’m running for president, and I’m very much outside the box.”

If you’re waiting for the part where he says how he’s going to balance the budget or get border security or put aside partisanship, you don’t know Ben Carson or the new GOP. Carson is basically doing the same thing as Trump: bashing the “political class” and promising to fix everything that’s broken – only Carson does so with a lukewarm smile whereas Trump pounds his fist on the table with Tri-State bravado. It doesn’t matter that neither candidate has a discernible plan to accomplish any of these things – the empty rhetoric is more than enough for Republican voters. One of the more interesting findings in the new CBS/NYT poll is that 55 percent of Trump backers say their support is firm, while 80 percent of Carson supporters say they could change their minds. This is good news for Trump; it suggests Carson is far more of a flavor of the month candidate than Trump. Whatever the reason, Trump has real staying power – he’s proven that. Carson, however, remains a question mark. He may well win in Iowa, thanks to his support among evangelicals, but the GOP’s last two Iowa winners – Santorum and Huckabee – lost the nomination. Trump, moreover, is well-positioned in the other early primary states like New Hampshire and South Carolina, where he remains comfortably ahead of Carson. Carson’s boost in the polls will be a boon to his campaign, but his long-term viability is still debatable. If this trend continues for another month or two, however, Trump might be in real trouble.",REAL
"Continue Scroll down to preview in browser Manny Pacquiao’s Son Dead? Report Says Jimuel Pacquiao Dies Of Asthm Complications NCAA Season 87: Opening Day, July 2, 2011 inboundpass/ Flickr cc",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton's Postapocalyptic Hellscape Plan?? ""Important we avoid age of peace..."" Re: Hillary Clinton's Postapocalyptic Hellscape Plan?? That has to be BS..look at the email.. even the .com is wrong, and is ;comdingdangaramaramaflimflam?? Mail with questions or comments about this site. ""Godlike Productions"" & ""GLP"" are registered trademarks of Zero Point Ltd. Godlike™ Website Design Copyright © 1999 - 2015 Godlikeproductions.com Page generated in 0.007s (7 queries)",FAKE
"Carmel Institute celebrates 5th anniversary with jazz concert October 27, 2016 RBTH u.s.-russia relations , jazz The Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History celebrated its 5th Anniversary. Source: Press photo 
The Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History celebrated its 5th Anniversary by hosting a standing room only concert at the historic Lincoln Theatre celebrating Cultural Dialogue and the Giants of Jazz. Over 1200 guests and students from all over the Washington DC metropolitan area thoroughly enjoyed this memorable concert celebrating the common language and mutual love of jazz that the United States and Russia share. 
Source: Press photo 
Said Carmel Institute Founder and Advisory Chair Susan E. Carmel, “The Carmel Institute emphasizes shared values, common interests and cultural dialogue. These are important qualities necessary to achieve cooperation, mutual respect and to overcome pervasive stereotypes. I am honored and grateful to have two incredible cultural Ambassadors at our Fifth Anniversary celebration for the Carmel Institute. Igor Butman and Wynton Marsalis exemplify the best of cultural diplomacy and cultural dialogue, and help us represent the Institutes' focus on enhancing greater cultural understanding through shared common interests and face to face interactions. By continuing to emphasize the importance of these qualities to our younger generations and future leaders, we are making an investment into the future that will be paid back ten-fold over time.” 
Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the U.S. and Honorary Co-Chair of the Institute acknowledged the Institute’s milestone by saying, “We would like to congratulate the Carmel Institute for Russian Culture and History and its leadership with the fifth anniversary and express our gratitude for their support and dedication. What started as a modest cultural initiative, five years later has grown both in scope and scale. Far surpassing the initial plans, it has now turned into an Institute that creates an opportunity to strengthen interest and knowledge of culture and history of Russia, thus contributing to the increase of mutual understanding between the two nations.” 
Source: Press photo 
According to jazz great Igor Butman, “I am honored to contribute to the rich tradition of jazz diplomacy by performing with Wynton Marsalis at the fifth anniversary concert of the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History. It is an even greater honor to perform at the Lincoln Theater where so many giants of jazz have expressed themselves in the universal language of music. I wish the Carmel Institute many more years of success in its tireless campaign to promote culture as a medium of communication between two great cultures that have always achieved success through dialogue and cooperation.” 
Source: Press photo 
Dr. Anton Fedyashin, Director of the Carmel Institute of Russian Culture and History, added, “The Carmel Institute has become an integral part of American University’s commitment to an education that prepares students for global responsibilities in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Without ignoring problems of which history provides so many examples, our program emphasizes shared values, common interests, and cooperative achievement, and always points towards the positive stages in the US-Russian relationship from which we hope that students can learn in order to guide their decisions as they emerge as global leaders.",FAKE
"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
"Three things are inevitable in this life: death, taxes, and conservative claims that we simply can’t afford to give low-wage workers a pay boost. Nobel Prize-winning economist takes on the latter inevitability in his New York Times column today, seizing on recent developments to illustrate why arguments against wage increases don’t withstand serious scrutiny.

Take McDonald’s announcement this week that it would pay its workers $1 above the minimum wage per hour at the 1,500 outlets owned and operated by McDonald’s itself. (The move, which still falls well short of what workers and their advocates seek, affects 90,000 workers, but it doesn’t apply to the 750,000 workers employed by McDonald’s 3,100 American franchisees.) While modest in scope,McDonald’s move — coming on the heels of similar wage boosts by bold-faced names like Walmart and Target — suggests that “[m]aybe it’s not that hard to give American workers a raise, after all,” Krugman writes.

While free market fundamentalists might retort that global competition will sink firms that boost worker pay, Krugman responds by noting that most American workers are “employed in service industries that aren’t exposed to international trade.”

What about technology? Isn’t it an unassailable maxim of modern economics that we can afford to pay larger wages only to highly skilled workers — ones who can’t be replaced by machines? As Mike Konczal wrote recently, technology is but a small part of the larger inequality phenomenon. The key factors, he pointed out, include tax policy, the financialization of the American economy, deunionization, and the conscious political choice not to raise the minimum wage.

What’s more, Krugman observes, “Workers are people; relations between employers and employees are more complicated than simple supply and demand.” This truism is borne out in empirical evidence, with comparisons of states that raised their minimum wages with neighboring states that didn’t showing that higher pay does not mean fewer jobs.

Similar factors explain another puzzle about labor markets: the way different firms in what looks like the same business can pay very different wages. The classic comparison is between Walmart (with its low wages, low morale, and very high turnover) and Costco (which offers higher wages and better benefits, and makes up the difference with better productivity and worker loyalty). True, the two retailers serve different markets; Costco’s merchandise is higher-end and its customers more affluent. But the comparison nonetheless suggests that paying higher wages costs employers a lot less than you might think. And this, in turn, suggests that it shouldn’t be all that hard to raise wages across the board. Suppose that we were to give workers some bargaining power by raising minimum wages, making it easier for them to organize, and, crucially, aiming for full employment rather than finding reasons to choke off recovery despite low inflation. Given what we now know about labor markets, the results might be surprisingly big — because a moderate push might be all it takes to persuade much of American business to turn away from the low-wage strategy that has dominated our society for so many years. There’s historical precedent for this kind of wage push. The middle-class society now dwindling in our rearview mirrors didn’t emerge spontaneously; it was largely created by the “great compression” of wages that took place during World War II, with effects that lasted for more than a generation.",REAL
"President Barack Obama’s trip to Alaska’s Arctic on Monday likely will reverberate much farther south, on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, where global warming is expected to emerge as a key issue.

His visit to the North Pole region, the first ever for a sitting president, coincides with a growing public consensus that the earth is heating up and that humans have something to do with it.",REAL
"YouTube censoring videos – on censorship! share in: Education , Google , Journalism YouTube has yet again censored another educational video from Prager University. The content of the banned video? Criticism of censorship; hopefully the irony of their choice to remove it isn’t lost on YouTube’s executives. The video, titled The Dark Art of Political Intimidation, was released last week and features Kimberly Strassel. Strassel is a Wall Street Journal columnist who explains tactics commonly used by the leftists to shut down free speech from the right. This included blackmail, harassment and intimidation. Back in 2010, the IRS started to target conservative non-profit organizations intentionally. Groups were experiencing heavy delays when trying to aquire tax exempt non-profit status. This was an attempt to curb their political involvement in the 2012 election, explained Strassel. A Democratic prosecutor in Wisconsin launched a shadow campaign of financial investigation against conservatives. Their houses were raided before sunrise, with accompanying gag orders to keep them quiet about the raids. The reason for all that was revenge for supporting the Republican Governor Scott Walker. Kimberly Strassel highlights even more examples in the five-minute video showing censorship of political opponents. Youtube placed the video into restricted mode — which is a common filter used by schools, libraries and parents to shield their children from outrageously obscene and graphic content. NewsBusters reports: “Conservative radio host Dennis Prager’s idea for PragerU is to give students alternative, non-progressive takes on history, civics and other issues. there’s no cursing, no violence or any kind of indecency in any of them.” Prager University’s videos including those that have been censored are all G rated. This leaves questions about why the popular video platform is placing restrictions on them. At least 21 additional videos produced by the conservative not for profit educational organization that is Prager University have been placed into restricted mode by Youtube. There is a petition circulating to stop the censorship, which has aquired over 76,000 signatures so far. Hopefully, YouTube will get its act together about restricting videos that pose no threat to children. Better yet, they should make some key changes to their algorithms to prevent this from happening in the future. A Youtube statement given to Wall Street Journal stated, “[V]ideo restrictions are decided by an ‘algorithm’ that factors in ‘community flagging’ and ‘sensitive content.’” Basically progressives tripped the algorithm in an attempt to limit free speech and political involvement from conservatives. YouTube has lifted the restriction on The Dark Art of Political Intimidation this past weekend, thanks to the Wall Street Journal giving them a very hard time over the censorship. Sources: ",FAKE
"Richard J. Davis is a former assistant Watergate special prosecutor and assistant secretary of the treasury for enforcement in the Carter administration. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) As we enter 2016, things certainly are looking more positive for Hillary Clinton than they appeared six months ago.

The email controversy , while not gone, is fading. The Benghazi House Committee has been exposed as more about politics than a serious examination of security failings. Vice President Joe Biden has decided not to challenge her in the primaries.

This then may be the ideal time for Clinton proactively to take steps to minimize the potential damage to her candidacy from other sources of controversy: the Clinton Foundation and speaking fees earned by former President Clinton. Such steps need to include significant restrictions on who the foundation will accept donations from as well as on where the former president will speak for money.

Taking these steps now is particularly important for Hillary Clinton because one area where her poll numbers remain problematic is whether she is viewed as honest and trustworthy . And, as demonstrated by a recent Washington Post article, there remains media interest in the extraordinary amounts of money the Clintons have raised for their political and philanthropic activities.

It is important to understand that the issue regarding the Clinton Foundation is not whether the foundation is (or was) a conduit for illegal bribes and it certainly is not about whether the foundation does truly humanitarian work. I am not aware of serious evidence that the former is the case. I am aware of many projects that the foundation has undertaken in the areas, among others, of global health and economic development, particularly in places where children and their mothers are severely disadvantaged. (Full disclosure: I am not supporting a candidate in the election at this point; I did contribute to the draft Biden movement before he decided not to run.)

The issue is how, at a time when Americans have understandably become cynical about government, and where money in politics is already out of control, do we avoid adding to the impression that our government is for sale, and how does this candidate demonstrate to an already super suspicious public that she truly is an honest person committed to ethical government.

In thinking about the foundation and speaking fees we are not operating on a clean slate. Questions have already been raised about how the foundation operated while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. Donations in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars were accepted by the foundation from foreign governments and others when they had issues being considered by the State Department.

Where we are talking about a foundation run by the secretary of state's husband, in both of these circumstances -- contributions to the foundation from those then having business before the department and the foundation doing business with the State Department -- the appearance of receiving favored treatment may be clearly present.

Clinton cannot avoid having to respond to questions about foundation activities and speaking fees while she was secretary of state. History cannot be rewritten. She can, however, meaningfully address this controversy by announcing now that if she becomes President the foundation will not do business with the United States government, and that neither the foundation nor her husband will accept fees or contributions either from foreign entities or from those doing business or seeking to do business with the government.

One objection to this approach might be that such restrictions would make it difficult if not impossible for the foundation to operate, or at least operate at its current level. The answer to this possible complaint is straightforward: No one is required to seek to become president of the United States, but if you do, you and your family simply cannot do certain things. And one of those things is accept fees or contributions that make it appear our government is for sale and that the way to influence U.S. policy is to contribute money to entities controlled by the President's family or pay huge fees to her husband.

If fees or contributions were made to the spouse of the President of Zimbabwe or her foundation we would not tolerate it and, indeed, our government might well investigate such payments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We certainly should not tolerate it if such payments involve the family of the President of the United States. Hillary Clinton should act now to address this problem before it becomes a larger threat to her candidacy.",REAL
"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
"Share This 
Today we call it the status quo, or endless war, or we just don’t bother to notice it. Indeed, now more than ever we don’t notice it. It’s barely part of the 2016 election, even though we’re engaged in active conflict in half a dozen countries, toying with a relaunch of the Cold War with Russia and, of course, hemorrhaging, as always, more than half our annual discretionary budget on “defense.” 
World War II has been going on for seven decades now and has no intention of ever stopping . . . of its own volition. But this year’s rocking electoral craziness – not just Hurricane Donald, but the unexpected staying power of the Bernie Sanders campaign – may well be the harbinger of transcendence. Apparently there’s another force in the universe capable of standing up to the American, indeed, the global, military-industrial status quo. 
Slowly, slowly this force is organizing itself and taking human shape. This isn’t a simple process. After all, the game of empire – the game called war, the game of domination – has been coalescing political power for several thousand years now. 
But our current military budget was birthed by the wars of the 20th century. William Hartung , writing recently at TomDispatch, shows the fascinating connectedness of the wars that followed VE and VJ Days, as the corporate beneficiaries of the Big War aligned with mainstream politicians of both major parties and coalesced into the Washington consensus. Over the decades they have engaged in an ongoing struggle to maintain military spending at breathtakingly high levels and avoid any sort of transition to something called peace. 
The two pillars of this consensus, as Hartung points out, are the ideology of “armed exceptionalism,” that a shifting array of enemies are out there itching to destroy us, but we will persist in our mission to maintain order in every corner of the planet; and the “strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts,” ensuring entrenched political power for the arms lobby. 
So World War II initially, as we know, morphed into the Cold War, America’s crusade against communism, which was set into motion in 1950 by a long-classified report (NSC-68) prepared by the State and Defense departments and the CIA, urging the vigorous containment of Soviet expansion and the development of the hydrogen bomb. 
President Truman “was somewhat taken aback at the costs associated with the report’s recommendations,” according to history.com , and “he hesitated to publicly support a program that would result in heavy tax increases for the American public, particularly since the increase would be spent on defending the United States during a time of peace.” 
Peace! What a nuisance! But: “Thank God Korea came along,” as an aide to Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it at the time. The Korean War gave the militarists the enemy they needed and the nuclear arms race, and so much else, was born. The military budget was set for decades. 
As Hartung points out, the next terrible hurdle the budget boys faced was in the wake of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. That war, and the universal draft that essentially pulled the whole country into a front-row seat for it, spawned a passionate antiwar movement and, ultimately, a moldering national disgust for war, known as Vietnam Syndrome. The Cold War continued, but the U.S. military was confined to proxy wars for a while and had to rethink its strategy. 
Two things happened. The universal draft was ended, removing most of the American middle class from a life-and-death stake in our military operations; and Saddam Hussein, our ally, was recast as Adolf Hitler. And in 1991, President George H.W. Bush embarked on a month of war with Iraq known as Operation Desert Storm. Not only did the US“win” this war and kill over 100,000 Iraqis (and ultimately cause hideous health problems for American soldiers), but, perhaps most importantly: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” So the president proclaimed. 
Unfortunately for the war consensus, the Soviet Union dissolved a short time later and the Cold War ended . . . and a “peace dividend” loomed. Hartung notes that Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the situation thus: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.” 
Would military spending be diverted to infrastructure repair, free education, universal health care? 
Well, no. The Bill Clinton presidency found a few new demons. It fought a war in Kosovo and, on the domestic front, vastly expanded the prison-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the neocon think tanks cogitated and one of them, the Project for a New American Century, reflecting the fact that geopolitical thinking had stopped with World War II, decided that what America needed was a new Pearl Harbor . And then came the presidency of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Global War on Terror. And the US military budget was carved, seemingly, in stone. 
Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 on the promise of serious change, but any hope that he intended to upend W’s wars was soon dispelled. He dumped the name but kept the wars, essentially settling “for a no-name global war,” Hartung writes. “He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to US allies like Saudi Arabia. . . . (O)ne might call Obama’s approach ‘politically sustainable warfare.’” 
And here we are, immersed in a no-name global war that has no logical end and few serious critics in the world of mainstream media and politics. But maybe the American democracy is not the closed system it’s supposed to be. 
For instance, John Feffer , director of Foreign Policy in Focus, points out that Donald Trump, in all his fun-house recklessness, is shaking up the consensus: “Democrats and Republicans disagree about many things. But with a few exceptions they all support an enormous military budget, an expensive overseas expeditionary force, and unilateral acts of force when necessary to protect US national interests (understood broadly). 
“It’s an odd paradox that Trump, who blathers on about making America great again, departs from this consensus.” 
He won’t win, and he shouldn’t win for a million reasons, but in his recklessness he has touched the raw anger of a sizable chunk of the American electorate. Sanders, speaking with compassion and integrity and delivering a far different message, managed to tap the same well of public outrage. And, as Feffer noted, “the mainstream is worried that the political parties will realize that the ‘bring the war dollars home’ message can win a national election and disrupt the comfortable revolving-door consensus.” 
And World War II will finally end? Not this year, but maybe four years from now, if we refuse to let the war consensus have any peace in the interim. 
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at or visit his website at commonwonders.com . Reprinted with permission from PeaceVoice . Read more by Robert Koehler",FAKE
"Will the anti-Clinton revolt among American elites gain momentum? November 7, 2016 - Fort Russ Mikhail Khazin , one of the top Russian economists- Translated from Russian by Kristina Kharlova There are rumors of revolt in the US state apparatus in the broad sense of the word against Hillary Clinton. Note that the top layer of the US establishment still supports Clinton, squashing any signs of disobedience: FBI closes cases, newspapers stop printing nasty things about her and so on. But one way or the other the issue floats to the surface. One of the likely reasons for this, is that Hillary Clinton is actively trading the national sovereignty of the United States in the framework of the activities of her foundation. In other words, American patriots consider her a traitor. And, as it turned out, this factor may play a decisive role. Previously it was not so obvious. In particular, the latest issue — the sale by Lockheed Martin to Turkey of a few dozen fighters of the fifth generation. Clinton is an old lobbyist for this company, so there is no doubt that it's her achievement. The problem is that Turkey under the current circumstances may cease to be a US ally, and no one can guarantee that these fighters do not fall into the hands of potential adversaries. For this reason, I do not exclude that these actions led to the resumption of the case against Clinton by the FBI. The results of tomorrow's elections remain unclear. But one thing is for sure: there are many people in the US who do not advertise their fondness of Trump, but in reality are ready to support him in the election. That is why the result of the vote may be surprising. Follow us on Facebook!",FAKE
"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / American Funhouse: Manufacturing Consent Essential Reading By Smoking Mirrors on September 8, 2011 
Smoking Mirrors at his creative best writing about … well you decide what he’s writing about Hellstorm – Exposing The Real Genocide of Nazi Germany (Full Documentary) By wmw_admin on May 10, 2015 
What happened in the aftermath of World War II has been one of the darkest and best kept secrets in world history. The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop! By wmw_admin on August 21, 2010 
The sacrifice of “six million Jews” was being talked about before Hitler rose to power. A photocopy from the American Hebrew dated Oct. 1919, speaks openly about a holocaust of six million Jews before declaring “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun”!! The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure Does God Play Dice with the Universe? By Rixon Stewart on December 1, 2003 
Research into particle physics is revealing a world full of almost magical qualities. Could it be that this mysterious, puzzling world is in fact the world of the spirit – the spiritual world that saints and mystics throughout history have sought to explo “Holocaust” declared 7 years before there was a “Holocaust” By wmw_admin on December 13, 2014 
The New York Times was already reporting of Jewish persecution and an ongoing “Holocaust” in May 31, 1936 Magic Thermite and the 9/11 Fairytale By Smoking Mirrors on April 15, 2009 
The evidence is in and it’s irrefutable: scientists have discovered traces of hi-tech explosives in the WTC debris. Which means the UK/US/Israel will have to stage another event on the scale of 9/11 to counter the brushfire this report will ignite",FAKE
"Posted on November 5, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine. 
Whether you are for Hillary Clinton or against her, the problem with Hillary Clinton isn’t her lack of experience. Almost the entire political establishment is behind her. Throughout all the bumps and scandal in this whole election cycle, Republicans and former presidents are coming out of the woodwork supporting her. According to the LA Times she may well be one of the most experienced candidates in US history, while even accounting for severe conflicts of interest inside the Clinton Foundation. Neither friend or foe doubt Hillary Clinton’s experience after 30 years in politics. 
The problem is even Hillary Clinton’s friends say she has a history of acting without thinking, of making bad decisions. According to Neera Tanden : “Almost no one knows better than me that her instincts can be terrible.” 
Does Hillary Clinton show bad instincts and terrible decision-making skills, and if she does, how will this affect the USA? 
According to journalist Robert Parry “the people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East… Taken together, the studies and reports call for more aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe.”One of the lead organizations revving up these military adventures and also counting on a big boost in military spending under President Clinton-45 is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO that has been pushing for a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.” 
The Atlantic Council is the think tank for the CEEC which is associated with NATO. The CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition) has only one goal. At the beginning of the presidential campaign they put out a small list of questions for the candidates to decide who they would support for the president. 
The first question was essentially “Are you willing to go to war with Russia?” Hillary Clinton has answered that question and received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. Who is the CEEC? 
The Central and Eastern European Coalition represent the various Central and Eastern European countries to the US government. What makes them special in an election is that they control a 20 million person strong bloc vote in key states across the country and sway elections by themselves. The price of a Clinton win is war with Russia. 
If that seems a little too much to be believable, reconsider the Iraq war. All it took was for the Iraqi diaspora to develop strong ties with like-minded people from “The Project for the New American Century” that wanted regime change in Iraq. Many of the people associated with the PNAC crossed over into the Bush administration . They pushed the invasion together. 
“ Walt Vanderbush’s essay, “The Iraqi Diaspora and the US Invasion of Iraq” (chapter 9), traces the collaboration between leaders of the Iraqi diaspora and neoconservative Americans, many of them linked to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to convince the US government to wage war and bring about “regime change” in Iraq… The INC claimed credit for placing 108 articles in the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times (of London), during a nine-month period before the war.” 
It wasn’t terror, Osama, or even oil that the Iraq war was fought for. It was a guy named Ahmed Chalabi who was the only victor of the Iraq war. 
American-emigre groups use their strategically settled populations in key battleground states, deep pockets, and unbridled political ambition to gain control over their home “old” countries. Even more insidious is the influence they exert over the United States to destroy old enemies. 
Do we want senior cabinet and policy positions filled by people that think starting WWIII is a good goal? Let’s take a look at the make-up and politics of some of these. 
Starting at the top let’s look at the Ukrainian emigres which lead the CEEC and the Atlantic Council. One thing anyone represented by the UCCA (Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America) or the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) has in common is Axis-political heritage and beliefs. The OUN is the political grouping of Ukrainian nationalists and it would vote for Adolf Hitler if he was running in a heartbeat. 
Unless real Nazi political views (not neo-nazi) found a way to survive all these years with this group of people, the statement is just insulting. Anyone reading should be insulted because that level of offensiveness in a politically charged environment is wrong. 
Nazism or Axis-Nazism are political beliefs and principles that structure your government the same as Republican or Democratic control would. The only difference is the “ism.” The “ism” means everything you do in your life revolves around your politic so it’s not just political or social guides or guidelines. It’s your lifestyle and everything wraps around it. Anything or anyone that goes against it is an enemy of the state, and it is personal. 
From their own words in the Ukrainian Weekly, real, active political Nazi’s are alive, kickin’ and ready for a Clinton win! It is the sheer number of groups self-identifying as practicing real Nazi beliefs in the US gaining policy and cabinet positions under a Clinton win that is incredible. 
The Ukrainian World Congress with its affiliates in over 40 countries and others work tirelessly in trying to keep Ukraine and the Ukrainian spirit front and center. 
“We have had a minister of finance, Natalka Jaresko, in the Cabinet. We now have Ulana Suprun as acting minister of health. We have many from the diaspora assisting with strategizing, reforming and supporting the overall cause. We have a highly successful program in Patriot Defence. We are out to change the way business is done. 
Unity to act when required has been the diaspora’s mantra – this cannot be disputed. 
As time moves on, we see that things take a natural course. We see that two wings of the OUN – (OUNb)Banderivtsi and (OUNm)Melnykivtsi – are working actively on the international level, working in partnership and currently are in strong negotiations about becoming a single entity again.” 
With all you’ve heard about Stepan Bandera’s OUN since the Maidan coup in Ukraine, I’ll bet you didn’t know they call New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia home. 
The UCCA and the UWC still celebrate their Nazi SS because they are still Axis-nazis. The OUN were the vile Holocaust murderers during and after WWII and their politics live on in their children today. This is no different from the children of other Waffen-SS leaders or if Hitler had surviving children that stood up and ran other countries based in Hitler’s policy. These American kids are sent to Ukraine to learn how to copy and act like Stepan Bandera before they come back to America and get involved in policy making. 
“ OUNb leader Ivan Kobasa also took responsibility of making sure the Ukrainian-Americans received the proper secondary education at Ukrainian nationalist schools(MAUP) in Ukraine. From the mid-2000’s enrollment in this educational system has skyrocketed. Today almost all members of the current Ukrainian government are graduates of this ideological system that was taught to them by moderates like David Duke who is also a graduate of the MAUP system.” 
While American media criticizes David Duke’s support for Donald Trump, they say nothing about Hillary’s strongest supporters hiring David Duke as a professor to teach their children college level history. Is Hillary Clinton too far right for David Duke? After all, he has no plans to conquer Russia. 
When you look at her campaign coffers and the most active political activists supporting Hillary Clinton, many are groups whose politics are not republican or democrat, but old-world nationalist. They are spread across America and still idolize their Waffen SS heroes, literally. They have statues and holidays and children’s groups across America in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago celebrating some of the vilest mass murderers in history. And they teach their children to idolize them and grow up using them as role models. They also bring up their children in the same political mold of ultra-nationalism. 
Now they want an America that will do the same. Over the last 30 years, the old world nationalists have moved into media and policy positions to make this happen. If that wasn’t enough they control a 20 million person bloc vote in key states and swing states in important cities across America. 
I am not using the word nazi as an insult, this isn’t neo-nazi or even a nazi revival. These groups have been the most extreme political activists in the USA over the last 50 years and are a continuation of what their parents were in the 1930’s. In their own words, they never assimilated into American culture. They assimilated the culture to them. In the words of the CIA, they are political animals. Today, their wagons are circled around a Hillary Clinton presidency. 
The OUN were the guards at the Holocaust prison camps, Waffen SS, and volunteer brigades that were famous for torture and murder. In Ukraine, they killed over 3 million people and conducted the first act of Holocaust at Babi Yar. 
The funny part if there was one is that with every fiber of your being, you want to argue against these facts. The OUN on the other hand featured at least one of my articles on their rise in American politics even though I called them devils. The fact they find me credible shouldn’t get lost on you. 
When these good friends of Hillary Clinton from the CEEC start getting tapped for advisory posts, and cabinet positions through the Atlantic Council or Project for a new American Century, will they automatically become Democrats or Republicans? 
Does America want a war with Russia so the losers of WWII can settle old scores? 
For the first time, under a Clinton presidency, America will have unbridled Axis-nazis/old world nationalists/ nazis in most of the cabinet and policy positions. They are getting the positions because they are delivering donations, bloc votes, political propaganda, and hard activism in battleground states. 
The results for the Clinton campaign in emigre dominated states is the same as it was when they first got together. Clinton is up by 11 points in important emigre bloc voting districts. 
…In last month’s heavily publicized Pennsylvania Senate race. Ukrainian and Baltic groups, protesting the administration’s attempts to prevent the break-up of the USSR, supported the Democratic candidate, Harris Wofford. This position contributed to the defeat of Dick Thornburgh, a former attorney general in the Bush administration….”The Ukrainian Weekly, December 8, 1991, No. 49, Vol. LIX 
In a Ukraine Weekly interview with candidate Bill Clinton-“For the last 40 years, many Ukrainians have been supporters of the Republican Party. However, Mr. Bush severely damaged his relations with Ukrainians with his “Chicken Kiev” speech, and by his unwillingness to see Ukraine’s point of view in disputes with Russia. How will your party seek to secure the goodwill of voters concerned by this issue?” … 
Clinton’s answer…“The Bush administration has had a spotty record abroad…including the president’s insulting warning against “suicidal nationalism” made before proindependence forces in Kiev in the summer of 1991 — and a failed economic record at home. We hope Ukrainian Americans will join our effort to put people first.” – Interview with Candidate Bill Clinton-Ukrainian Weekly Issue 43, 1992 
In what has become the ultimate pay to play scheme, the Clinton’s gave over Ukraine to OUNb nationalists to run as they saw fit. This was payment for political support and bloc votes that won the 1992 elections for Bill Clinton. American citizens were given a country to run and represent in any manner they chose to do it. 
According to Ukrainian nationalist scholar Taras Kuzio , the Axis- nazi political beliefs started to be taught to children in Ukraine after the OUNb took the reins. This was the preparation for what would become a nationalist coup in 2014 Ukraine. 
This pattern follows the Clinton-NATO expansion and every CEE (Central and Eastern European) country freed by the Clintons followed suit. In Croatia, Croatian-Americans have more parliamentary seats and representation than any group from Croatia. 
Other than American-emigre groups gaining rule and representing the “home country” in the US, there is only one other universal factor each of them revived. Axis- nazi politics and political views became normal in their home countries. In Croatia, they even revived the Waffen SS Battalions. 
The people at the CEEC are behind the Atlantic Council and PNAC will be making the domestic and foreign policy decisions in a Clinton administration. While I would not call Hillary Clinton a Nazi, the people she surrounds herself with actively are. There is very little doubt that Victoria Nuland, a Ukrainian-American brought up in these beliefs will be Secretary of State under a Clinton Administration. 
To get an understanding of what that means, the same people that are deciding Ukrainian domestic and foreign policy will be sending their people to those cabinet positions. 
The one thing for sure is even publications that support her candidacy wonder about Hillary Clinton’s lack of judgment and surrounding herself with nationalist war-hawks that want war with Russia. 
According to the WEEK “At first, Obama went over the top of public opinion to avenge American honor against ISIS. Slowly, America’s mission has crept to include some form of regime change with the ouster of Assad. Now Clinton is selling the American people on greater military interventions so that the U.S. can challenge Putin. Clinton seems unable to distinguish between what is of vital interest to the Russians and peripheral interest to America. She combines this with her bias toward always taking action — of any sort, for good or ill. The combination is dangerous.” 
The article ends in the hope that Clinton is once again lying. Both current president Obama and Hillary Clinton are trying to sell America on the idea that there are moderates fighting a civil war in Syria. We are arming and training them. Are there moderates in Syria worth supporting? Do we have any business there to begin with? The article goes as far as stating the US is determined to overthrow every country that is friendly to Russia. 
Right now Clinton wants to establish a no-fly-zone to protect her moderates. Who are they? US Special Forces on the ground are adamant that Clinton wants to give US military support to ISIS even if it means starting an open war with Russia. 
“ Nobody believes in it. You’re like, ‘Fuck this,’” a former Green Beret says of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian militias. “Everyone on the ground knows they are jihadis. No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort, and they know they are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’” “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. 
Since 2014, Ukraine has fully supported al Nusra and at the beginning of the civil war pulled 200 ISIS fighters to the Ukrainian front lines. These fighters are jihadis from Crimea. They have also set up an ISIS training camp near Mariupol. Like all other volunteers, they don’t receive government support and rob to make a living. 
Before this, the Kosovo example looms large. Does inviting indicted mass murderers and people preparing for illegal organ trade (crimes against humanity) trials to your national party convention as special guests qualify as good judgment? Does it showcase Hillary Clinton’s good instincts to be president? 
Welcome to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton’s special guest from Kosovo took time-out from preparing for his crimes against humanity case to give support and wish her well. 
“Invited as a guest to the 2016 Democratic National Convention is none other than Kadri Veseli, the Speaker of the Kosovo Assembly. Veseli is a former Kosovar Albanian leader of the KLA and its spy organization SHIK. He’s being indicted along with the current president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci for small things like organ trafficking and crimes against humanity .’ 
The main witness against Clinton friends, Veseli and Thaci, is a man that was ordered to cut the heart out of another man that was begging for mercy. In a 1998 interview with the BBC , US special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard had this to say about Veseli and Thaci; “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.” 
Clinton’s relationship with the Albanian and Kosovo killers stretches back to the first Clinton election in 1992. During the campaign season the Clinton duo found out quickly how powerful the emigre national vote was in America. In one fell swoop, the Albanians and the KLA after them went from what the USA definitely recognized as Islamic terrorists to victims we were going to war for. 
The Clinton humanitarian bombing in the Balkans drove victims into the waiting clutches of the KLA, and the spread of Islamic terrorism worldwide. 
In what became her first executive decision, first lady, Hillary Clinton brow-beat the unwilling president Clinton into bombing the Balkans and creating a humanitarian catastrophe. Today, as a result of this, ISIS is setting up training camps in what is widely referred to as Clinton country. 
“On the territory of Kosovo and Metohija, the local police detained three militants of so-called “Islamic State” (a terrorist organization banned in Russia), is going to organize a series of terrorist attacks in Serbia.” Terrorists LIH (IGIL/ISIS) break through the Balkans to Western Europe March 2016 
Clinton’s jihadi bloc vote in America remains central to her winning this election along with the rest of the CEEC. Does America want people advising the president that openly support genocide like the Kosovars, Albanians, or Ukrainians? 
Hillary Clinton is not an Islamist. Hillary Clinton is not a Nazi. But the question remains. Why is she surrounded by and listening to people that are? Is that her best judgment?",FAKE
Tonight’s presidential debate figures to be one of the most-watched political events in American history. Viewership for the first one-on-one showdown between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump is expected to approach the 80 million who watched Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980. One-third of voters say the presidential debates will be very important in helping them […],REAL
"Republican Donald Trump’s and Democrat Hillary Clinton’s efforts to portray themselves as assertive adversaries of the Islamic State terror group are increasingly defining the 2016 presidential race — and never more so than in the wake of the massacre in Nice, France, this week.

Although authorities have not yet tied the attack to jihadist-inspired terrorism, both candidates immediately responded to the latest in a string of attacks at home and abroad that have heightened voter anxiety by vowing aggressive efforts to combat the Islamic State.

They have done so in strikingly different ways, she with specific proposals and he with broad promises. But together, their messages effectively assure a war-time posture in the White House next year no matter who becomes president — and they mark a sharp departure on the campaign trail from the non-interventionist sentiment that then-Sen. Barack Obama rode into office eight years ago.

The intense jockeying was encapsulated in a round of dueling telephone interviews Thursday evening with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, following the deadly truck attack in southeastern France that killed more than 80 people assembled to celebrate Bastille Day. The interview was especially notable for Clinton, who rarely speaks to Fox News but may have been trying to engage with conservative voters who care deeply about national security and may not be sold on Trump.

“We’ve got to do more to understand that this is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups,” Clinton said. “It’s a different kind of war. We need to be smart about how we wage it, but we have to be determined that we’re going to win it.”

In his interview, Trump ticked through a list of recent attacks as evidence that a change in management style at the top is a necessity to blunt future attacks.

“You look at San Bernardino. You look at Paris. A hundred and thirty people killed and so many injured in Paris from that attack. And you look at Orlando. It’s out of control,” Trump said. “And Bill, unless we get strong and you know, really strong and very, very smart leadership, it’s only going to get worse.”

[In truck rampage, experts see potential shift toward cruder, deadlier acts of terror]

The back-to-back interviews underscored the differences in the two candidates’ approaches. Trump has embraced the debate over terrorism to emphasize his proposed ban on most foreign Muslims — which Clinton vigorously opposes — and advance a muscular but nebulous strategy to stamp out terrorists abroad.

Clinton has been more specific, arguing for a “smart” but strong effort to combat the Islamic State, focusing on ratcheting up intelligence cooperation between the United States and its allies and fighting radical propaganda online.

Clinton must walk a fine line. Even as she pursues centrist Republicans, including veterans of the Bush administration’s foreign policy shop, she is trying to consolidate support among Democrats after a bruising primary with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Many liberals already see her as too hawkish, going back to her vote for the war in Iraq in 2002, which contributed heavily to her primary defeat six year later against Obama.

“There’s a lot of concern about another war in the Middle East,” conceded Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a Sanders endorser who helped the candidate win a landslide in his own state’s primary. “But look, this is not a choice between Hillary Clinton and Gandhi. This is a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I’d be far more terrified of Trump’s reckless foreign policy than of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump faces challenges of his own. While his freewheeling rhetoric and his controversial Muslim ban and proposed wall along the Mexican border were big hits in the Republican primary, they have exposed him to accusations in the general election that he is not serious and ill-prepared for the rigors of major security decisions.

With the Republican and Democratic conventions taking place over the next two weeks, Clinton and Trump will be auditioning on the national stage at a time when the public’s attention has been repeatedly directed to global terrorism threats.

“It’s an electorate that is profoundly insecure and unsure about what happens next both in terms of the economy and increasingly in terms of international policy and terrorism,” said Anita Dunn, former White House communications director in the Obama administration. “Making the case to the American people that you are the person to address their issues and to make the country feel secure again is really the predominant challenge for both campaigns.”

[Assailant was ‘entirely unknown’ to anti-terror units, prosecutor says]

In his Fox News interview, Trump said he would ask Congress for a war declaration on the Islamic State, a move rarely used in American history.

“If you look at it, this is war coming from all different parts. And frankly it’s war, and we’re dealing with people without uniforms,” Trump said.

In her interview, Clinton used similar language to describe the threat posed by the Islamic State. But asked on CNN whether she would endorse Trump’s proposal to seek authorization from Congress for war, she made clear that she has no intention of drawing U.S. or NATO troops into a fight with the Islamic State. She called it the Islamic State’s “dream” to pull U.S. ground troops into a war in the region.

“I would point people to read more about what the hopes and ambitions of ISIS happen to be,” Clinton said, using a common acronym for the group. “They would love to draw the United States into a ground war in Syria.”

“They actually think the end times could be hastened if we had some great confrontation in that region,” she added.

Hours after the coup attempt in Turkey, Clinton became the first candidate to issue a statement calling for calm and “respect for laws, institutions, and basic human rights and freedoms.” The sentiment closely echoed the comments of Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry and offered an implicit contrast with Trump, who had not yet commented on the situation.

Still, Clinton has not shied away from supporting an aggressive and frontal approach to the threat.

She has argued that the United States and its allies should continue to reclaim territory from the Islamic State, boxing their fighters into smaller and smaller territory. She has criticized allies in the region for not doing enough to stop radicalization within their own borders, and she called on countries including Saudi Arabia and Qatar to invest more in the global effort to fight the Islamic State.

She has also embraced the language of more conservative politicians. After the Orlando attack on a gay nightclub by a self-radicalized convert to the Islamic State, Clinton said “radical jihadist terrorism” and “radical Islamist terrorism” are virtually the same, after once refusing to use the word Islam in the context of terrorism out of concern that it would only embolden the enemy and enable recruitment.

Trump, like many Republicans, has repeatedly slammed Obama for refusing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” And he has accused Clinton of moving closer to his point of view.

In fact, Clinton’s positions are not that divergent from the policies of the current White House. Her hawkishness has been mostly displayed through rhetoric, or by degree — though she has strayed from the president on a key issue, stating that the Islamic State threat cannot be “contained,” as Obama has stated, but rather must be “defeated.”

Liberal Democrats who support Clinton have struggled to get Sanders supporters past her foreign policy record. At Netroots Nation, the annual conference of progressives held this year in St. Louis, Clinton’s campaign was nearly invisible. Foreign policy, a focus of some past conferences, was discussed only at a few crowded panels.

Rania Khalek, 30, a journalist who has written critically of Clinton, said the Democrat poses a more direct threat to the Muslim world than Trump.

“People are not going to protest when she decides to put boots on the ground in Syria,” Khalek said. “People are not going to protest when she decides to give Israel more military aid. She has a record of killing people. Donald Trump doesn’t have that record, yet.”

Jennifer Miller-Smith, a 50-year old Clinton supporter from Florida, argued that some progressives subjected Clinton to tests they never demanded of Kerry or Vice President Biden — for example, their support for the Iraq War.

“Iraq was a long time ago, and she’s learned since then,” Miller-Smith said. “We’ve all learned since then.”

“Even I believed Colin Powell,” she said about the former secretary of state.

Charles Khan, 28, a financial reform activist who was in seventh grade at the start of the Iraq War, said that polling and politics might curb Clinton’s hawkish tendencies.

“I think Hillary is smart and doesn’t want to do anything that is unpopular,” Khan said. “With a huge majority of Americans not wanting to be involved in another war, that’s probably the stance she’d take.”",REAL
"Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was the first since the Islamic State-inspired terrorist shooting in San Bernardino, California, and not surprisingly, most of the questions tossed out by CNN moderators dealt with national security and terrorism. In the days since San Bernardino, public fears over terrorism have grown, and President Obama has been doing what he can to tamp down anxiety and encourage people not to give in to the fear that terrorists work to inspire. But as the CNN debate made painfully clear, the Republican presidential candidates have quite the opposite goal in mind: They want everyone to be scared witless by the looming terrorist menace and worried that they will be the next to die.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, back on the main stage thanks to CNN’s expansive inclusion rules and his own improved poll numbers in New Hampshire, did the most to actively scare the shit out of every person unfortunate enough to be watching. In his opening statement he announced that “America has been betrayed” by “the leadership that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have provided to this country.” As proof of that betrayal and treason, Christie pointed to yesterday’s closing of the Los Angeles Unified School District “based on a threat.” He never got around to mentioning that the “threat” had long since been revealed as a hoax. But still Christie was worried about the “children filled with anxiety,” and the “mothers who will take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop,” and the “the fathers of Los Angeles, who tomorrow will head off to work and wonder about the safety of their wives and their children.” They live in terror, these nameless gendered stereotypes, because Obama couldn’t protect them from the threat posed by “madbomber@cock.li.”

Asked what he would do to ensure that fear does not “paralyze” American in the aftermath of terrorism, Christie explained that paralyzing fear is, unfortunately, “the new normal under Barack Obama.” “Everywhere in America is a target for these terrorists,” he said, giving everyone a reason to be afraid always. Christie’s closing statement was a riff on 9/11. “Many of our friends and others in our neighborhood lost their lives that day.” Christie even offered himself as a menacing presence, leaning forward and shifting back and forth behind his lectern like a rhinoceros sizing up a Jeep full of safari tourists. His message all evening was blunt and terrifying: you will die, unless you vote for me.

Not far behind Christie was Sen. Marco Rubio, who made a point of spelling out in detail the menacing nature of the Islamic State. “This is the most sophisticated terror group that has ever threatened the world or the United States of America,” he warned. “This is a very significant threat we face. And the president has left us unsafe.” He made a special point of noting the Islamic State’s sophistication: “This is a radical jihadist group that is increasingly sophisticated in its ability, for example, to radicalize American citizens… This is not just the most capable, it is the most sophisticated terror threat we have ever faced.” He warned about “the next time there is an attack on this country” while pushing for reinstatement of metadata collection provisions in the Patriot Act. Sen. Ted Cruz went a slightly different route, linking Republican panic over Syrian refugees to both the San Bernardino terrorist attack (which had nothing to do with refugees) and the 2013 Senate immigration reform bill to score a bank-shot hit on Rubio: CRUZ: Because the front line with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport and the Rio Grande. Border security is national security. And, you know, one of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight Bill was that it gave President Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees without mandating any background checks whatsoever. Now we’ve seen what happened in San Bernardino. When you are letting people in, when the FBI can’t vet them, it puts American citizens at risk. All in all it was a grim, bleak, and frightful debate that saw several leading candidates try to stoke heightened public anxiety over terrorism. There were no acknowledgements that acts of terrorism are exceptionally rare, with just “45 Americans killed in jihadist terrorist attacks” since 9/11. (More Americans have died as a result of homegrown right-wing terrorism, but that threat didn’t earn a single mention at the debate, even though one such attack took place just days before San Bernardino.) This was more about resurrecting the national security politics of the Bush years, when Republicans would conjure the threat of imminent terrorist slaughter on American soil to cast Democrats as weak and to justify the rollback of civil liberties in the interest of safety. A scared voter is a motivated voter, and Republicans have every interest in keeping people as terrified as possible.",REAL
"On the eve of the two national political conventions that will shape the images of the major-party presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a competitive contest nationally but with the presumptive Republican nominee facing deficits on key character attributes and issues, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey shows Clinton leading Trump by 47 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. That represents a shift in Trump’s direction since last month’s Post-ABC poll, which showed Clinton leading by 12 points. In the new poll, Clinton leads by 10 points among all adults — 50 percent to 40 percent — compared with a 14-point lead among this wider group last month.

Both candidates remain highly unpopular — the two most unpopular in the history of Post-ABC polling. By about 2 to 1 (64 percent to 31 percent), Americans view Trump unfavorably. Clinton’s numbers are not quite as negative — 42 percent favorable and 54 percent unfavorable. Half of all registered voters say they have strongly unfavorable views of Trump, while 47 percent say they have strongly unfavorable views of Clinton — the highest ever in a Post-ABC poll for her.

The survey also highlights the degree to which Americans are motivated by negative impulses rather than seeing the choice in positive terms. Almost 6 in 10 say they are dissatisfied with the choice of Trump vs. Clinton. Fifty-four percent of Clinton’s supporters say they are mainly voting against Trump, while 57 percent of Trump supporters say they are mainly voting against Clinton.

Given the dissatisfaction, there is the possibility that candidates from minor parties will attract the support of disaffected voters. In a four-way matchup that also includes Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party, the poll results are Clinton 42 percent, Trump 38 percent, Johnson 8 percent and Stein 5 percent.

The new poll comes after a tumultuous two weeks that included the killings of five police officers in Dallas and deadly shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. As the calling for the poll was closing came news of an apparent terrorist attack in Nice, France. All these events have added to the tensions of a country on edge and heightened the importance of security and racial issues in the choice of a president.

The poll also comes after Clinton was spared prosecution by the government for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. But while avoiding any criminal charge, Clinton received a stern rebuke from FBI Director James B. Comey, who said she and her aides had been “extremely careless” in their handling of sensitive classified material in their email exchanges.

The previous Post-ABC poll showed Clinton with a larger lead than some other national surveys taken around the same time. Whether or how much the shift toward Trump in the current survey was affected by how the FBI investigation was resolved can’t be measured. Other recent polls show the difference in the race nationally to be in low single digits, with Clinton generally enjoying the advantage.

Republicans begin their nominating convention here in Cleveland on Monday and will conclude Thursday with the expected nomination of Trump, with Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate.

The Democratic convention, in Philadelphia, will begin July 25, with Clinton poised to become the first woman nominated for president by a major party. She is still mulling her vice-presidential choice and met with several contenders Friday.

Trump hopes to produce a convention that helps to alleviate questions about his fitness to be president among many Americans, but he begins with an enormous deficit on that issue. The Post-ABC poll found that nearly six in 10 registered voters say he is not qualified to serve as president — with 49 percent saying they strongly believe that. Meanwhile, Clinton is seen as qualified to serve as president by 56 percent of voters.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, about 7 in 10 see Trump as qualified to be president — but almost one-quarter of that part of the electorate still questions the presumptive GOP nominee’s fitness.

The survey highlights familiar fault lines in the electorate. Trump leads among men, 49 percent to 41 percent, while Clinton enjoys an even larger margin among women, 52 to 38 percent. Voters ages 18 to 39 support Clinton 54 to 34 percent, while those 65 and older back Trump 51 to 42 percent. Those between 40 and 65 are almost evenly divided. Trump leads by 15 percentage points among white voters, while Clinton has a huge 52 percentage point lead among nonwhite voters.

At this point, the Democrats are slightly more united behind Clinton than Republicans are behind Trump. One goal of the Trump campaign is to leave Cleveland at the end of the week with the party more united and enthusiastic about the nominee. Currently, 86 percent of Democrats back Clinton, while 82 percent of Republicans back Trump.

Independent voters lean toward Trump, 47 to 41 percent, although winning independents is no guarantee of winning the presidency. Four years ago, Mitt Romney won among independents while losing to President Obama.

Clinton enjoys the support of 8 in 10 self-identified liberals, while 7 in 10 conservatives back Trump. Moderates go decisively for Clinton, 52 to 36 percent.

The contest between Clinton and Trump highlights one potential shift in the electorate that will be closely watched between now and November: the division among voters based on educational attainment.

Trump’s most important block of voters are whites without college degrees, who support Trump by a margin of 60 to 33 percent. But college-educated white voters have been shifting toward the Democrats, and the poll underscores that the competition for those voters will be hard-fought and potentially decisive in the election’s outcome. Republicans historically have carried the votes of whites with college degrees, and Romney won the group by 14 points over Obama four years ago.

The Post-ABC poll finds whites with college degrees are evenly divided — 43 percent Trump, 42 percent Clinton, with an outsize 10 percent volunteering support for “neither.” When gender is included in the analysis, the poll finds that white women with college degrees narrowly support Clinton, while white men with college degrees support Trump by a slightly larger margin.

Of seven issues tested, Clinton has double-digit advantages over Trump on three — race relations, handling an international crisis and immigration. Clinton has smaller edges on looking out for the middle class and handling terrorism, while Trump holds small edges on taxes and the economy.

Across six attributes, Trump has an 11-point margin among registered voters on the question of which candidate would do the most to bring needed change to Washington. By a margin of five points, he is seen as more honest and trustworthy. Clinton has a similar edge on empathy with people’s problems and representing people’s values and holds double-digit edges on having better judgment and having a presidential personality and temperament.

In an election that is likely to be framed as a choice of continuity with Obama’s policies vs. a change in direction led by a Washington outsider with no previous political experience, a bare majority of voters say they prefer experience in politics to someone outside the establishment. That’s a narrower margin than earlier in the year, when 59 percent said they favored a politically experienced candidate. The poll indicated there was growing support for an outsider among Republicans and independents.

Clinton’s trust deficit is highlighted on another question in the poll: whether she is too willing to bend the rules. Seven in 10 Americans (72 percent) said she is. The poll also asked whether respondents saw Trump as biased against women and minorities. On that question, 56 percent said yes. When people were asked which was the greater concern, a plurality (48 to 43 percent) cited Trump’s possible bias.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted July 11-14 among a random national sample of 1,003 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is 4 points among the sample of 816 registered voters.",REAL
"The California congressman has worked by John Boehner's side for the past year. Now, he's actively seeking the top post.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is officially declaring his candidacy for House speaker to replace John Boehner.

Boehner announced his resignation on Friday under pressure from conservatives.

McCarthy, who is Boehner's No. 2, sent a letter to GOP lawmakers on Monday pledging to fight for conservative principles — and asking for their support as the next speaker.

""If elected speaker, I promise you that we will have the courage to lead the fight for our conservative principles and make our case to the American people,"" McCarthy wrote in the letter to his House Republican colleagues. ""But we will also have the wisdom to listen to our constituents and each other so that we always move forward together.""

McCarthy is strongly favored to get the job though he faces a challenge from Florida Republican Rep. Daniel Webster.

He is currently serving his fifth term in Congress and has been endorsed by Boehner.

The Christian Science Monitor detailed McCarthy's background and his short term as House majority leader.

In his tenure as the deputy, McCarthy has been loyal to Boehner, for instance, “backing up the outgoing speaker's plan to remove a controversy over ""defunding"" Planned Parenthood from a stopgap spending bill that's needed to avoid a government shutdown next week. And he supported Boehner last year as one of only 28 Republicans to vote to raise the so-called debt limit without seeking concessions from Obama,” The Associated Press reports. After Boehner’s announced that he'll step down next month, McCarthy issued a statement calling Boehner a leader and a mentor, according to NBC News. ""It takes profound humility to step down from a position of power, and John's depth of character is unmatched."" McCarthy said. ""Now is the time for our conference to focus on healing and unifying to face the challenges ahead and always do what is best for the American people."" According to the Boston Globe, Republicans will hold their internal leadership elections Oct. 1 to avoid drawing out the process of electing a successor to Boehner. ""I'll tell Kevin, if he's the next speaker, that his No. 1 responsibility is to protect the institution. Nobody else around here has an obligation like that,"" Boehner told reporters on Friday. ""Secondly, I'd tell him the same thing I've just told you. You just do the right thing every day for the right reasons, the right things will happen.""

Material from Reuters was used in this article.",REAL
"A guide to the Paradoxroutine page: 1 Hah I'm here randomly post, and be good at nothing. If I were to sum up myself in one form or another it would be this: What is it that I wish to create? In a seamless dance of hope and intrigue, I jitter and pounce on that which does define. But in an ends' motion what is it that I have made? More musing of a solid soul, a gasp of an angel brought forth upon the devils mask. Shattered within a hopeless contextual void of self dissolution. To dissolve in ones own thoughts of regard of high and mighty being? In the beginning what is it that we seek? In hell and high water, in times of disregard. What is it that seeks us. From times of happenstance to those of remorse. Again we beckon the call to purpose and resolve. Every time, even without a moments clarity we call too and forth of the void, to give us direction. Show me ways beyond vice, ways not wanted of founded living, shallower within such a world. Should they be down caste or sought without voice? Give me guidance before the light. Hope before the void. I shall know of the kingship of a heralds' life, before the life of a herald be know to his people. To this preponderance I shadow skirt my minds eye, to a veil beyond the guise that which is a worded Maya. I find such things a mere hope of sound falling. Give me hope or the hope of death. Give me light or knowledge of only darkness. Give not guidance, but a misadventured fall into the abysmal realm of chance and near do wells shortcomings. Shall be you chance or stones carved Providence? I beckon the call to truth, yet I hope and pray tell that none does exist. The only way to continue searching, is to never find the answer we seek. To find is to know, to know is to be content. To be content is to stagnant in truth. To find death in one truth, one truth among many. To live is to know nothing, but to know what you understand has already become false by nature is to understand that my musings are bull****. edit on 10|27|2016 by Paradoxroutine because: Because I'm a dumbass.",FAKE
"Videos AT&T-Time Warner Merger: Another Media Consolidation That Puts Profits Over Consumers ‘The deals are driven by Wall Street’s insatiable desire for short-term growth at any cost,’ a media analyst at a consumer advocacy NGO wrote, warning about the risks of the deal. | November 2, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! 
MINNEAPOLIS — Media analysts warn that a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner is more likely to enhance corporate bottom lines and pad the pockets of Wall Street investors than benefit consumers. 
“Big mergers like this inevitably mean higher prices for real people, to pay down the money borrowed to finance these deals and compensate top executives,” said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press, an NGO that protects net neutrality and online press freedom, in an Oct. 22 press release . 
The media first reported that AT&T was in “informal” talks to merge with Time Warner on Oct. 20 . By Oct. 24, AT&T announced that Time Warner had agreed to be bought out by the telecommunications giant for $85.4 billion. 
Currently, Time Warner represents one of a shrinking number of mass media conglomerates that increasingly control the vast majority of news available to Americans. AT&T is one of the world’s largest providers of mobile phone and landline services, and, as owner of DirecTV, a major player in the television marketplace as well. 
Corporate executives have promised that the merger could make more content available to consumers , offer new options for mobile viewing , and provide alternatives to traditional cable TV. Representatives of both companies have also tried to mollify concerns that the deal would violate antitrust laws, claiming it represents the “vertical integration” of two different markets , rather than a merger of competitors. 
Many media experts have expressed concern and skepticism about these claims, particularly in regard to the potential benefits to consumers. Wood suggested AT&T’s buyout of DirecTV, which was completed in July 2015 , should serve as a warning about the possible effects of this new, larger merger model. He warned: 
“The deals are driven by Wall Street’s insatiable desire for short-term growth at any cost. And just as AT&T’s recent purchase of DirecTV was quickly followed by price hikes, there’s every reason to expect this potential tie-up would cost internet users and TV viewers dearly too.” 
Kevin Kelleher , a reporter at Time magazine, weighed in on Oct. 24. He wrote that the deal “makes sense for media executives, less so for consumers,” as it’s unclear how bringing content creators and internet service providers together would actually benefit the end user. He continued: 
“For now, concerns over the deal seem to be outweighing the benefits, which could end up being negligible. For decades, the pipes that streamed digital content remained largely independent from the companies that provided the content. And no consumers complained.” 
Meanwhile, several senators have come out in opposition to the proposed merger, citing concerns about the ultimate implications for consumers, the role of Washington’s “revolving door” into the corporate world, and what this buyout could mean for the future of media consolidation. 
On Sunday, Al Franken , a former TV actor and senator representing Minnesota, told The New York Times’ media reporter Jim Rutenberg that the merger could increase prices and reduce the number of choices available to consumers. 
“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers,” Franken said. 
Elizabeth Warren , a senator from Massachusetts known for her consumer advocacy, objected to Christine Varney’s involvement in the deal. Varney, an antitrust lawyer who has been hired to oversee the AT&T and Time Warner merger, previously worked for the Obama administration investigating antitrust claims. On Monday, Warren told Fortune: 
“Americans have had it with regulators like Varney, who talk a good game about holding the bad guys accountable while counting down the days until they can collect a fat paycheck from the corporations they were supposed to regulate. The revolving door is out of control. If we want to hold corporate lawbreakers accountable, we can’t ask their friends to do it.” 
Bernie Sanders , the senator from Vermont and former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, also objected to the deal in an open letter published Wednesday on Medium. In addition to echoing the concerns shared by others like Franken, he warned that the buyout could provoke future media mergers that would further consolidate an already limited market. 
“At a time when our telecommunications and media industries are already too concentrated, we should be focused on opening those markets to more competition, not less,” he wrote. 
In the case that the merger does go through, AT&T’s ties to the national security state may also give rise to serious privacy concerns. A day after the AT&T-Time Warner merger was officially announced, Kenneth Lipp, a reporter at The Daily Beast, revealed that AT&T is storing customer information and selling it for profit . That, of course, came more than three years after Edward Snowden leaked classified information which detailed the telecommunications giant’s close collaboration with the NSA to spy on millions of Americans. 
“Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and ‘vertically integrated,’ sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers,” Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and her frequent collaborator, Denis Moynihan, wrote in an editorial published on Thursday . 
“We can’t know if Alexander Graham Bell envisioned this brave new digital world when he invented the telephone. But this is the future that is fast approaching, unless people rise up and stop this merger.” Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"For Jeb Bush’s campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump’s attacks on the former Florida governor as a ­“low-energy” politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it.

Some advisers argued for an aggressive response, even to the point of challenging Trump to some kind of one-on-one confrontation. Others resisted, believing Trump’s candidacy was unsustainable, while some cautioned against getting “into a pigpen with a pig,” as one adviser recalled. Others described it as “trying to wrestle with a stump.”

Those summer days crystallized the plight of a campaign that had begun with enormous expectations and extraordinary resources, as the scion of one of America’s dynastic political families sought to follow his father and brother to the presidency.

At what would become a crucial moment, Bush’s team had no clear strategy for a rival who was beginning to hijack the Republican Party that the Bush family had helped to build, other than to stay the course set months earlier of telling Bush’s story to voters.

“There was no consensus,” senior strategist David Kochel said of the discussions about how to combat the threat of Trump’s candidacy. Other campaigns were wrestling with the same problems, but as the front-runner in the polls at the time, Bush would suffer more than the others.

On Saturday night, the candidacy that had begun with such promise ended quietly after a disappointingly weak fourth-place finish in South Carolina.

Ever the gracious realist, Bush announced in his concession speech that he would end his campaign as Trump continued to soar as the GOP front-runner. “I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,” he said.

Whether Jeb Bush ever had a chance to win the Republican nomination in a campaign year that proved so ill fitting for a rusty politician who preferred policy papers to political combat is a question that will be debated long after the 2016 race has ended.

“Donald Trump channeled the worst fears, frustrations and anxiety of voters, but he also magnified those same feelings,” Sally Bradshaw, Bush’s chief strategist and confidant, said Sunday in an email. “It would be difficult for any solutions-oriented conservative to tackle Trump in this environment, much less one who was seen as having been so much a part of the establishment. He was never going to be an angry guy — and voters wanted angry.”

Mike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. “Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries,” he said. “That was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem was there was a huge anti-establishment wave. The establishment lane was smaller than we thought it would be. The marketplace was looking for something different, and we’ll find out how that ends when we have a nominee.”

The result is one of the most startling failures in the modern history of American politics: the fall of the House of Bush. It is a human story about the struggles of one of the most successful former governors in America in his bid to become president, like his father and brother, set against the backdrop of one of the strangest political cycles the country has seen in years.

Beyond underestimating the anger in the electorate, three other problems led to Bush’s downfall. First, the candidate and his team misjudged the degree of Bush fatigue among Republicans.

Aides said an internal poll conducted last fall showed discouraging news: Roughly two-thirds of voters had issues with Bush’s family ties. “Bush stuff was holding him back,” said one aide who saw the polling data. “We obviously knew it was an issue, but even still, the gap between it and other issues — I don’t think we thought it would be that big.”

[For Jeb Bush, the challenge remains making it about ‘Jeb,’ not ‘Bush’]

Second, Bush and his team miscalculated the role and power of money and traditional television commercials in the 2016 race. During the first six months of 2015, Bush raised more than $100 million, most of it stockpiled in Right to Rise, a strategy that seemed right at the time but came at the cost of not dealing with other pressing needs.

“We didn’t use that time to introduce him as a unique brand,” said Vin Weber, an outside adviser. “We used it to raise money. I don’t want to say they made an obvious and clear mistake, but in retrospect, it was a mistake.”

The aggressive fundraising came to be known as “shock and awe,” an echo of the initial bombing of Iraq by U.S.-led forces before the 2003 invasion. In the campaign context, it could be read as code to other potential candidates to get out of the way. But the prodigious fundraising of Bush’s broad network scared off no one. As the Bush campaign would learn, every credible candidate today has a few billionaire friends who can enrich a super PAC. In the end, all that money came to symbolize frustration rather than power.

Third, Bush ran a campaign that, whether deliberate or not, was rooted in the past, managed by loyalists who admired Bush and enjoyed his confidence but who, like the candidate, found themselves in unfamiliar political terrain.

His advisers were convinced from the start that the more voters learned about what Bush had done as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, they would flock to him as their presidential candidate. Bush stubbornly held to that approach — even as evidence mounted that it was out of step with voters.

Doug Gross, a prominent Iowa Republican, recalled meeting with Bush in July 2014 in Kennebunkport, Maine, to talk about the impending campaign. “He definitely wanted to run. He’s always had it in him and knew this was his last chance,” Gross said. “He was trying to figure out how to do it his own way. I was struck by his obstinate avoidance of any political discussion. . . . He wanted to do it his way or no way.”

In contrast to the doldrums of August 2015, July seemed a glorious time for the Bush team. Early that month, Team Jeb gathered in Kennebunkport to celebrate that the campaign and two allied political committees had together raised nearly an unprecedented $120 million. The numbers were made public as nearly 300 major Bush fundraisers assembled to mingle with the Bush family and campaign advisers.

Guests were transported in black-and-red trolleys to Walker’s Point, the Bush family compound. The group gathered for a photo with former president George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush.

That evening, Bush touted the team’s record fundraising as guests dined on lobster rolls and hamburgers at a luxury resort tucked among a forest of birch groves and balsam fir. “It was incredibly memorable to be there with several generations,” said Jay Zeidman, a Houston-based investor who helped raise money from young professionals.

The next day, the donors got briefings from senior Bush aides including Bradshaw, campaign manager Danny Diaz and finance director Heather Larrison. They laid out how the campaign planned to take on contenders such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Throughout, there was little mention of Donald Trump.

[That time Jeb Bush invited 300 top donors to his parents’ house]

“None of us thought he would last the summer,” said one person who was in attendance.

At that moment, however, Trump was already in the process of undermining Bush’s candidacy. If Bush had ever gone up against someone like Trump, it didn’t show. Trump was a new and different kind of rival, one given to personal insults rather than policy debates, who monopolized media coverage and got away with provocative statements that would have sunk normal politicians.

After marching in two July 4 parades on a rainy Saturday in New Hampshire, reporters asked Bush about Trump’s claim that Mexico was allowing immigrants to illegally cross into the United States. It was one of the hundreds of times he would face such questions.

Bush said “absolutely” he was offended by Trump’s rhetoric. “We’re going to win when we’re hopeful and optimistic and big and broad rather than ‘grrrrrr’ ” he said — literally, growling – “just angry all the time.”

That very night, Trump attacked Bush as soft on immigration and took aim as well at Bush’s wife, Columba, who was born in Mexico and entered the country legally — retweeting and then deleting a disparaging comment about her.

Nothing, however, cut as close to the bone as Trump’s claim that Bush was too “low-energy” to serve as president.

The accusation was laughable — until it began to stick. Trump’s charge was in fact a proxy for a different and more difficult argument to combat: that Bush was neither strong nor edgy enough for a party seething with anger at the grass roots.

[Inside the Bush-Trump melodrama: Decades of tension and discomfort]

“Nobody tapped into it, for all the polling, all the focus groups,” said Theresa Kostrzewa, a North Carolina lobbyist who raised money for the campaign. “The biggest thing they did was miss was just how angry the American electorate was and that Trump would be their Captain Ahab.”

Bush’s advisers would contest that claim. They could see the anger, they said. The issue was what to do about it. “Donors, political operatives and big thinkers from around the country urged us to ignore Trump for months,” Bradshaw said. “There was no one in the news media or the operative class at the time who felt Trump would ultimately be a serious contender for the nomination.”

At the same time, others feared that engaging Trump was almost beneath Bush and would thrust the candidate into a never-ending game of charge-countercharge. “Jeb should be bigger than this,” another aide recalled thinking.

Over at Right to Rise, Murphy sent a clear signal: Trump is not our fight right now.

“If other campaigns wish that we’re going to uncork money on Donald Trump, they’ll be disappointed,” Murphy told The Washington Post in late August. “Trump is, frankly, other people’s problem.”

At that moment, the Bush team’s analysis showed that no Trump voters were likely to shift their support to Bush. On Sunday, Murphy said that attacking Trump would only have benefited other candidates. Bush’s campaign needed to consolidate the establishment lane while hoping that Trump and Cruz would sort out the competition among the anti-establishment candidates.

Bradshaw also dismissed complaints from some donors that she cut the candidate off from advice. Noting that Bush long has been active on email, Bradshaw responded in a message by saying: “Donors constantly gave conflicting advice — attack Trump, don’t attack Trump; smile more; smile less — you look like you are smirking. I didn’t tell people they were wrong — not my style — I did a lot of listening, and I’m sure there were things we could have done better — but withholding info from the Governor simply did not happen in our campaign.”

For much of the autumn, Bush’s engagement with Trump was on-again, off-again — skirmish, then turning away. Not until late last year did he truly start a concerted and sustained series of attacks. Aides said Bush was particularly affected by the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and felt, as one adviser put it, that it was “time to stand up to the bully.”

“Jeb was the only candidate with the political courage at the time and frankly throughout the last six months to take on Trump directly for doing something that the governor felt was very harmful to the Party and to the country,” Bradshaw wrote. “There was no hesitation at that point given his comments about women, about Hispanics, his lack of knowledge on issues of national security and on and on.”

Bush’s failure to come to terms with one of the downsides of his family name came to a head over a four-day period in May, when he stumbled over the decision by his brother, former president George W. Bush, to go to war in Iraq.

Changing his answer on a daily basis, Bush came across as a flat-footed campaigner clearly uncomfortable articulating his views on the most critical moment of his brother’s presidency. But it also highlighted the ­double-edged nature of being a candidate named Bush.

In a January Washington Post-ABC News poll, nearly 6 in 10 Americans held an unfavorable view of Bush. He was the only Republican with a negative favorability rating: 44 percent said they had a favorable impression of the former governor while 50 percent rated him negatively. His rankings grew worse as the campaign progressed.

A fundamental weakness, supporters said, was the lack of a coherent rationale for Bush’s candidacy and the failure to make inroads with activists on the right. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t clear the name was ever surmountable,” said a Bush donor. “If the name was going to be surmounted, it would have to be because there was a fresh set of ideas.”

Bush offered ideas, but in a campaign dominated by Trump, they were ignored or lost to most voters.

One of the biggest tactical advantages Bush appeared to have early on — a richly endowed super PAC — was not the invincible weapon his team thought it would be. It cut off his access to a key adviser, Murphy, whom he installed at the group’s helm.

It also meant that during the first six months of last year, nearly all of the coverage about Bush focused on how he was socking away millions into the super PAC, all while maintaining that he had not decided whether to run. In an election brimming with anger toward the wealthy elite, Bush seemed almost flippant about his pursuit of big dollars.

Murphy was convinced that much of what was taking place was noise and that when the voters began to check in, the super PAC’s financial might would be overpowering.

First, the committee would use it to lay out Bush’s biography. Then, as necessary, the group would turn its arsenal on his rivals. “Our job is just to amplify his story and what he’s saying and we banked enough cash that nobody’s turning our speaker off,” Murphy told Bloomberg Politics in October.

Back at campaign headquarters, the team hewed to that timetable and sensibility. Once the Bush record was burned into voters’ minds, attitudes would shift, Bradshaw said at the time. A Bush donor complained, “Murphy had a timetable, and nothing mattered until December and January.”

By the end of January, Right to Rise had raced through at least $95.7 million out of the $118.6 million it had collected, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost $87 million went into a barrage of television ads, online videos, slick mailers and voter phone calls—to no avail.

Mel Sembler, a former Bush ambassador who helped raise money for the super PAC and served on its governance board, said he believes the group’s strategy was sound.

“We had confidence in Mike, and I think we did the best we could in deploying of resources,” Sembler said. “That’s not where the problem is. . . . The timing was not right for Jeb. Our candidate was just not connecting with the electorate.”

The final months were difficult for Bush. After a particularly weak performance during a debate in Boulder, Colo., in October in which Rubio appeared to get the better of him, there were suggestions that he might quit the campaign right then.

Reporters who made inquiries about the possibility were brushed off. In the middle of it all, Bush spotted a reporter who was a regular on the trail with him. “Hey — I didn’t drop out, did I?” he shouted. “You know, that kind of stuff really gets my juices going. I’m going to win this thing, and when I do — you’re going to give me a big hug.”

Through it all, Bush attempted to keep both good humor and determination in the face of the inevitable.

“I was stunned by how well he handled the last month of this campaign when the writing was on the wall,” said Tim Miller, Bush’s communications director. “It is hard to go out there every day and put on a fake smiley face. He was in really high spirits and didn’t lash out at people in private throughout the last two months.”

The final indignity in a campaign that had suffered through many came three days before Saturday’s primary, when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley endorsed Rubio rather than a man she described as a friend and mentor.

When it ended Saturday night, Bush told saddened supporters: “We put forward details, innovative, conservative plans to address the mounting challenges that we face. Because despite what you might have heard, ideas matter, policy matters.”

His final remarks as a presidential candidate were a reflection of the campaign he had constructed from the start, one he had built to his unique specifications, which nonetheless proved to be a mismatch for a political environment that caught him by surprise — and for which he paid a hefty price.",REAL
"There were several reports this month, based on former and current aides, that Mitt Romney is actively weighing another presidential run. The biggest sign yet comes from a recent interview with The New York Times, where the former 2012 Republican nominee offered a less than Shermanesque response to the million-dollar question.

This was the obvious opening for me to ask if there was a chance. Romney's response was decidedly meta — ""I have nothing to add to the story"" -- but he then fell into the practiced political parlance of nondenial. ""We've got a lot of people looking at the race,"" he said. ""We'll see what happens.""

Buoyed by good poll numbers and a wide-open prospective Republican field, Romney went farther than his ""circumstances can change"" reply in August, and certainly miles forward from the, ""Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no,"" answer in January.

If he does throw his hat into the ring for a third time, the former governor of Massachusetts told the Times that he would employ a cameraman -- essentially his own tracker -- to follow him around in order to guard against statements that derailed his 2012 campaign. ""I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff,"" Romney said.

Romney said the tactic could potentially prevent another ""47 percent"" incident, which by his telling, was nothing more than a problem of setting.

""My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,"" Romney said. ""If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.""",REAL
"Nine Others Wounded in 'Friendly Fire' Attack by Jason Ditz, October 29, 2016 Share This 
As Iraqi forces continue to struggle to get closer to the ISIS city of Mosul during the ongoing invasion, a US friendly fire incident has been reported in the town of Tal-Kayf, a town which fell quite some time ago and in which recent fighting hadn’t been reported. 
According to Iraqi military officials, the US airstrikes against the town killed at least four Iraqi soldiers and wounded nine others . The details are still scant on what happened, and the US has yet to comment on the incident at all. 
Iraqi officials are chalking it up as a mistake, but it is unclear why the town would be struck by US planes in the first place, as the Iraqi troops had been there for almost a week and there did not appear to be ISIS forces in the immediate vicinity. 
Iraqi forces confirmed the incident amid an announcement of more villages captured in the area west of Mosul. Many of the villages more than 5 km from the city have already fallen, and ISIS appears to be only sparsely defending those that remain, with the vast majority of their fighters hunkered down in Mosul itself, prepared for a major battle. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Pinterest 
It’s been a quarter-century since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made history by becoming only the second black judge ever to serve on the nation’s highest court. 
But you won’t see celebrations, recognition, or even acknowledgement of this feat – in fact, the “Thomas-derangement,” as The Daily Caller calls it, has not abated one bit. 
This despite the fact that the impact Thomas has had is unequaled. Thomas is one of the nation’s most influential lawmakers and has admirers from all legal corners. 
Yet, he is ridiculed, belittled, and assaulted with the type of disgusting comments usually reserved for common criminals and deviants. 
Writing in The New York Times , Maureen Dowd referred to the Justice as “the creepy guy who acted pervy toward [Anita Hill] and won. 
This barrage of insults is not just among his legal and intellectual peers, either. Thomas has been completely wiped clean from any mention in the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. 
His accuser Anita Hill, however, is given prominent display. The exhibit features testimonies trumpeting her courage and the surge of women’s activism that ensued, while making only peripheral reference to Thomas. 
Despite these slights, Thomas continues to speak out. At a speech at the Heritage Foundation, the justice warned that we are “destroying our institutions.” 
“At some point, we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions,” he said, acknowledging that the Court might also partially be at fault. “What have we done to gain their confidence?” he asked. “Perhaps we should ask ourselves what we have done to not earn it or to earn it.” 
The court’s lone African-American justice also defended his view that even prior Supreme Court precedents must be bent or broken to comply with the Constitution — something most of his colleagues don’t believe. 
“You’ve got lots of precedents out there that have been changed,” Thomas said. “I believe we are obligated to rethink things constantly.” 
Thomas ended with some positive words about former Justice Antonin Scalia, who he affectionately referred to as “Nino.” 
The court has become evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, a change that could become even more pronounced if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and controls who will replace Scalia. But Thomas chose to dwell more on his friendship with “Nino” than ponder the future without him. 
“He was from the north, and I was from the south, but we wound up at the same place,” he said, referring to their views on the paramount importance of the Constitution and individual freedoms. Scalia, he said, fretted over big principles as well as smaller things such as punctuation and syntax.",FAKE
"A collaborative effort between Patrick Miller of the University of Kansas and Pamela Johnston Conover of the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers new insight into the growing phenomenon behind political polarization in the United States. The study, titled Red and Blue States of Mind: Partisan Hostility and Voting in the United States, was published in Political Research Quarterly on March 30.

When Only Partisan Voters Vote, Only Partisan Candidates Are Elected

The authors argue that the voters who are most likely to participate in elections are those who hold a very strong partisan identity. As a result, elections become less about substance, and more reminiscent of a sports game, where the goal is to win at any cost. The University of Kansas news service summed up the study, saying:

“They found that many average voters with strong party commitments — both Democrats and Republicans — care more about their parties simply winning the election than they do either ideology or issues. Unlike previous research, the study found that loyalty to the party itself was the source of partisan rivalry and incivility, instead of a fundamental disagreement over issues.”

The trend toward greater polarization within the American electorate has been happening for years, but the contributing factors are numerous and complex

A study by Pew Research shows polarization has steadily increased since 2002. Miller and Conover’s study examined a few possible causes, one of which was the tendency for partisans to consume only media content that reinforces their own worldview.

In a video, Miller explained that these tendencies are having an impact on Congress itself by stifling compromise and breeding a political environment that lacks civility.

“We’re not thinking about politics in the way that most Founders wanted, which is to think about issues, be open to compromise and not be attached to parties,” said Miller. “We’re looking at politics through a simplistic partisan view in which we think our side is good and their side is bad.”

Among other things, the study found:",REAL
"The hunt for two convicts who escaped from a maximum-security prison in New York has shifted back upstate, following an intense search near the Pennsylvania border this weekend.

Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police

New York State Police engage in a manhunt for two prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat in Friendship, New York on Sunday. Heavily-armed police converged on towns in western New York state on Saturday to investigate possible sightings of the two convicted murderers who escaped a maximum-security prison two weeks ago, police said.

The latest sighting of two convicts who escaped from a New York prison now places them close to the Canadian border — more than 350 miles from where state police conducted their search less than a day before.

Investigators and military trucks arrived at Mountain View and Owls Head in Franklin County, N.Y., late Sunday in response to reports that a person had been seen fleeing from a hunting camp in the area after breaking into a cabin, Glenn MacNeill, acting Franklin County district attorney, told local NBC affiliate WPTZ.

The Associated Press reported Monday afternoon that State Police Maj. Charles Guess said at a news conference that authorities had ""specific items"" from the Adirondack cabin some 20 miles west of the prison and sent them to labs for DNA and other testing. He would not elaborate on the items but characterized the latest search effort — one of many over the past 17 days — as a confirmed lead.

""There are a number of factors that make this a complex search: the weather, the terrain, the environment and frankly the vast scope of the north country of the Adirondacks,"" Major Guess said.

Police said the cabin sighting was unconfirmed, but authorities nonetheless shifted the hunt for Clinton Correctional Facility inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from a rural mountainous area near the Pennsylvania border to upstate New York.

Witnesses told WPTZ that helicopters are in the air and checkpoints are in place on roads in the area, which is 25 miles west of the prison where the two inmates used power tools to cut holes through their cell walls to escape on June 6.

Still, state police said in a news release late Sunday that though they will continue to respond to reports of sightings, a “primary focus of the search continues to be in the Dannemora area,” close to Clinton Correctional. The statement urged Dannemora residents to stay alert, adding:

If these men are spotted, please call 911 immediately. Do not approach, as both are considered to be very dangerous.... New York State is offering a reward of $50,000 for information that leads to the capture of either suspect ($100,000 for both). The U.S. Marshals Service has placed Sweat and Matt on their 15 Most Wanted Fugitives List, and is also offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the capture of either suspect.

“We will search under every rock, behind every tree and structure until we are confident that that area is secure,” State Police Maj. Michael J. Cerretto said at a news conference.

Sweat was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff's deputy, while Mr. Matt was doing 25 years to life for the 1997 kidnapping, torture, and murder of his former boss.

The Christian Science Monitor reported that prison worker Joyce Mitchell remained in custody on charges that she provided the two men hacksaw blades, chisels, and other tools to aid in their escape. She has pleaded not guilty.

Officials said a corrections officer also has been placed on administrative leave as part of the investigation into the men's escape.

State police will hold a media briefing with Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wiley and County Sheriff Dave Favro on Monday at noon to provide updates on the search.",REAL
"An armed Dakota Access security contractor confronted indigenous water protectors fighting the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. He had an assault rifle, which he pointed at the water protectors, and he wore a bandana over his face. He was arrested by the Bureau of Indian Affairs police and later released without charge.
In video aired by “Democracy Now!”, as host Amy Goodman described, the man carrying the rifle, who has been identified as Kyle Thompson, points a rifle “at the protectors as he attempts to flee into the water.”
“A Standing Rock Sioux tribal member says he saw the man driving down Highway 1806 toward the main resistance camp with an AR-15 rifle on the passenger side of his truck,” Goodman reported. “Protectors chased down his truck and then pursued him on foot in efforts to disarm him.”
“Protectors said inside the man’s truck they found a DAPL security ID card and insurance papers listing his vehicle as insured by DAPL. That’s the Dakota Access pipeline,” according to Goodman.
Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, witnessed the encounter between the armed contractor and water protectors. He said on “Democracy Now!”:
It was a very terrifying moment for a lot of us watching, I mean, to see this man pulling an assault rifle at our water protectors. And I think that—many blessings and gratitude to some of the military veterans within our security, from within our Oceti Sakowin camp, who stepped up to negotiate and to de-escalate this man, to really talk to him to make sure that he did not hurt anybody, until the Bureau of Indian Affairs police officers could show up.
Thompson appeared on the scene about the same time that hundreds of police with militarized equipment surrounded a newly formed camp called the 1851 Treaty Camp, which was setup by water protectors to reclaim “unceded Dakota territory affirmed as part of the Standing Rock Reservation in the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1851.”
Sacred Stone Camp, which has led indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline, reported that police cleared blockades, attacked water protectors with pepper spray and concussion grenades, and used shotguns to fire rubber bullets. A sound cannon was also deployed against water protectors as well, as the police brutally tore down the encampment.
Dakota Access denies Thompson was working for the company, however, Thompson posted on Facebook and claimed he was “doing his job to photograph burning company equipment when he was confronted by demonstrators,” according to APTN National News .
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe apparently claims Thompson fired off shots while Thompson vehemently denies that any shots were ever fired. He maintains FBI agents, who took him into custody, could back up his story.
However, Thompson’s story becomes incredibly suspicious, as he insists the water protectors “had knives and were dead set on using those knives.” He says a water protector fired a flare.
The video of Thompson’s confrontation in the water definitely does not show any knife-wielding water protectors trying to attack him.
What is troubling is the fact that he was not dressed in a manner that would clearly indicate he was a security contractor for DAPL. He looked like an infiltrator. One wonders what would have happened if he made it to the 1851 Treaty Camp and engaged in disruptive behavior that the police could then use to justify the brute force used against water protectors.
It is unknown what company Thompson worked for, but he was previously deployed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Separately, another suspicious act against the indigenous water protectors occurred overnight on October 29, when a fire spread near the Oceti Sakowin camp.
“There was some mysterious incident of a vehicle that came out of nowhere, that was almost acting as a distraction, was spinning doughnuts in the middle of the road, and then it sped off to the south,” Goldtooth shared on “Democracy Now!”. “And immediately after that, flames were seen on top of the hill to the west. There’s documented footage [of] what appears to be a drip line, which is from what I understand, is a technique used in firefighting. I mean, it was very, very clear that that brush fire that happened was an act of arson by unknown individuals.”
“Given the recent events with the Dakota Access worker, given the escalation of law enforcement, that, you know, a lot of fingers are pointing towards Dakota Access as being a culprit behind this late fire. And thank god that the wind was pushing away from the camp. The fire spread pretty large.”
The post Armed Dakota Access Contractor Accused Of Trying To Infiltrate Water Protectors appeared first on Shadowproof .
",FAKE
"Previous 18 State Swat Team Drill In Prep for Backlash Against a Stolen Election 
Paul Martin, through his sources has learned of an 18 state Swat Team Drill. The drill is exceptionally covert but The Common Sense Show has learned that the intent of the drill is centralize and coordinate martial law activities over a large swath of states at the same time. 
It is apparent that the election is going to be stolen and the establishment and their minions are expecting a violent backlash. Remember, both the New York Times and the Washington Post contacted Dave Hodges and Mike Adams fishing for information regarding any potential headlines related to a planned violent backlash should Clinton steal the election. 
More on this coming suppression of the will of the people is included in the following video. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US 
This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.",FAKE
"Tweet Home » Headlines » World News » Michael Moore: Joe Blow Will Vote Trump As “Ultimate F–– You to the Elite… A Human Molotov Cocktail” 
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history. 
From Mac Slavo, SHTFPlan : 
A tidal wave is coming. 
Michael Moore, a liberal’s liberal who holds die-hard loyalty to Hillary Clinton, is acknowledging what everyone with a clear head recognizes: that she doesn’t even remotely connect with the average voter, doesn’t understand their problems – and above all, doesn’t care about them. 
Although Moore can’t support Donald Trump, he seems to admire his ability to resonate with the actual problems that the people who formerly made up the middle class are going through – economic and otherwise. Moore, like Trump, understands the pulse of the people, though they differ in just about every other way. 
This election represents a pivotal point, and an end of the line for the deal that people once held with their leaders. After decades of broken promises and deals to sell them short and sell them out, people have had enough. 
THAT’S what this election is about. 
Right or wrong, Trump represents a rebuke of the system – as Moore calls it, the ultimate “F––– You” ever directed at the system. 
Here’s some of what he said in an epic rant (reportedly excerpted from his rush-election film Trumpland) that is strangely validating of Trump’s entire campaign: 
Whether Trump means it or not, it’s kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things that people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle-class loves Trump. 
“They’re not racists or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people. So, after talking to a number of them, I sort of wanted to sort of write this.” 
[…] 
Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of the Ford Motor executives and said: if you close these factories, as you are planning to do in Detroit, and rebuild them in Mexico, I am going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them. 
It was an amazing thing to see. No politician — Republican or Democrat — had ever said anything like that to these executives. It was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Brexit states. You live here in Ohio. You know what I am talking about. 
He is the human Molotov cocktail that they have been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8th — Election Day — although they have lost their jobs. Although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank. Next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone. The car’s been repossessed. They haven’t had a real vacation in years. They’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan. They can’t even get a f**king percocet. 
They have essentially lost everything they had…except one thing. The one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote. 
[…] So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, take that lever — or felt pen or touchscreen — and put a big f**king X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. 
[…] 
They see that the elites who have ruined their lives hate Trump. 
Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The Media hates Trump… 
The enemy of my enemy is who I am voting for on November 8th. 
Trump’s election is going to be the biggest F**K YOU ever recorded in human history. 
And it will feel good. 
What red-blooded American, working stiff or laid off schmo wouldn’t want to stick it to the establishment and rebuke the very system that brought them to this point? After all, it is their fault. 
People have been hurting and in decline for eight long years – and for all his smiles and posturing, Obama hasn’t done a damned thing. And Hillary can’t even pretend. 
The people who will be deciding the popular vote in this election want to take down that system and put someone in who will – once and for all – stand up for them. Basically, Americans want revenge. 
What the electoral college decides is another matter altogether, of course. On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only…",FAKE
"Bias bashers More Beer, Less Vodka as Russians Mull Ongoing Crisis 
With the crisis continuing, Russians are not only eating less, they are also drinking less - particularly vodka and other hard drinks. Against the background of an overall decline in alcohol consumption, Russian preferences are shifting to beer and wine Originally appeared at Russia & India Report 
The volume of retail trade turnover in Russia continues to decrease. In August, it fell by 0.1 percent compared to the previous month, compared to January-August last year, when it fell by 5.7 per cent, said analysts from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). They were citing data from the state statistical agency Rosstat and a survey conducted by the Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting. 
The turnover is decreasing because Russians are not only eating less and cutting back on spending on services, but they are also drinking fewer alcoholic beverages. 
Sales of vodka dropped catastrophically’ 
From January to August 2016, vodka, liqueurs and brandies accounted for 42 percent of sales volume. Beer amounted to 44-45 percent of total sales of alcohol. Another 12-13 percent was wine production. 
Other beverages (cider, mead, etc.) made up less than 1 percent of alcohol products bought by people, according to RANEPA's monitoring data. 
The range of sales is clearly seasonal. Retailers usually sell more wine, champagne and vodka in December while sales of beer increase by 15-20 percent in mid-summer compared to the beginning of the year. 
""Retail sales of alcohol have significantly decreased over the past two years. 10.6 percent fewer alcoholic beverages were sold between January and August this year than during the same eight months of 2014,"" the survey report stated. Retail sales of alcoholic beverages bottomed out in January and April 2016. 
""Sales of vodka have dropped catastrophically,"" Alexandra Burdyak, a senior researcher at RANEPA and one of the authors of the study, said. ""The drop was 13.4 percent against the same period of last year. The main decline occurred last year, when sales of vodka decreased by 12.6 percent compared to 2014."" 
However, the wine production sector showed a different trend. The traditional New Year increase in sales of wine and champagne dragged on, with wine sales remaining at 2015 levels until May 2016. 
Burdyak said consumers first finished their earlier stored wine and then, as stocks in cabinets dried out, and lovers of wine and sparkling wines made sure that nothing was happening in the economy, the ruble was not strengthening and the prices of imported alcohol were not decreasing, they began to buy this type of alcohol again. 
The new generation of consumers 
According to Burdyak, the decrease in consumption of vodka and other alcoholic beverages has been steady since 2013. Strong alcohol consumption peaked in 2007, and it has been in decline since then. 
The taste of Russians, born in 1985 and later, has been shaped by western, primarily European influences; they prefer wine, beer and other light alcoholic beverages. 
However, Vadim Drobiz, director of the Centre for Federal and Regional Alcohol Market Studies (TSIFRRA), believes it is a little too early to talk about a reduction in alcohol consumption in Russia. 
""Because of the crisis, the main consumers of alcoholic drinks could have switched to cheaper options, this is possible,"" he said. ""But few people are capable of seriously saving on alcohol."" Drinking away the crisis 
Vodka consumption fell from 53 percent of retail sales, measured in terms of absolute alcohol content, in 2007-2009 to 39 percent in 2015. During the same period, the share of beer increased from 31-32 percent to 43 percent of total sales of alcoholic beverages. 
The total volume of retail sales is calculated in terms of absolute alcohol content as follows: Half a litre of vodka (40 percent alcohol) is equal to 200 grams of ethanol; one litre of beer (4 percent) is equivalent to 40 grams, and one litre of wine (12 percent) contains 120 grams of ethanol. 
These trends appear likely to continue over the next few years, though some analysts have reservations. 
""It should be borne in mind that consumers, and the Russians certainly in my experience, consider strong alcohol to be an antidepressant,"" Drobiz said. ""And that means that consumption of vodka and other spirits in the context of the ongoing economic crisis is not likely to fall.""",FAKE
"THE STING videos targeting Planned Parenthood are hard to watch. Doctors talk clinically, some say callously, about harvesting fetal tissue. Technicians identify and isolate tiny organs. References are made to “it’s a baby” or “it’s another boy.” The videos were taken surreptitiously and were artfully edited to produce maximum discomfort about complicated issues that, for many, are inherently uncomfortable.

That truths were distorted to paint an inaccurate and unfair picture of a health organization that provides valuable services to women — as well as to demonize research that leads to important medical advances — doesn’t matter to antiabortion activists. Or, sadly, to the politicians who pander to them.

Planned Parenthood is under virulent attack for the role a small portion of its affiliates play in helping women who want to donate fetal tissue for medical research. The antiabortion group Center for Medical Progress has orchestrated a propaganda campaign accusing the nation’s largest provider of abortions of profiting from the illegal sale of fetal tissue, a charge refuted by Planned Parenthood.

None of the videos released shows anything illegal and, in fact, the full footage of Planned Parenthood executives meeting with people presumed to be buyers for a human biologics company include repeated assertions that clinics are not selling tissue but only seeking permitted reimbursement costs for expenses. Indeed, the Colorado clinic featured in the videos refused to enter into a contract with the phony company because of its failure to meet its legal and ethical standards.

Such facts, though, haven’t stopped officials in several Republican-led states, including Texas, Louisiana and Ohio, from launching investigations of Planned Parenthood, even though affiliates in those states don’t facilitate fetal tissue donations. In Washington, Senate Republicans have fast-tracked a bid to defund Planned Parenthood, with a vote set for Monday. Fortunately, it’s unlikely there will be 60 votes to advance the bill, as cutting off funds to Planned Parenthood would be irresponsible.

No federal money is used by Planned Parenthood to provide abortions except in some rare exceptions. So cutting off government funds, mostly through Medicaid and grants, would only hurt the thousands of people, most of them low-income women, who each day depend upon Planned Parenthood for birth control, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections and other health services. Given that many of the clinics are in medically underserved areas, it’s a myth, as Republicans claim, that other providers can fill the gap. Shutting down clinics would make it harder for many women to obtain birth control — and the last thing either side of the abortion debate should want is an increase in unwanted pregnancies that result in more abortions.

We are under no illusions that the vendetta against Planned Parenthood will end. Conservative Republicans are already threatening to shut down the federal government in the fall by blocking any spending that includes money for Planned Parenthood. It’s clear from how quickly Republican presidential hopefuls seized on the issue that it will be a staple of the campaign trail. Consequently, it’s important that congressional Democrats and others continue to stand up for Planned Parenthood and the women whose health depends upon its services.",REAL
"https://web.archive.org/web/20161109183253/http://www.huffingtonpost.com They pretend Trump’s win is a victory for bigots, instead of a defeat for the aristocracy (‘Wall Street’, ‘The Establishment’, or America’s billionaires and their agents such as lobbyists and the leading politicians). However, a close look at the evidence shows Huffington Post to be wrong: Trump’s win was overwhelmingly driven by Americans’ repudiation of the aristocracy itself (such as, for example, repudiation of the Institute that runs Huffington Post’s neoconservative international edition, World Post , the Berggruen Institute (including Eric Schmidt , Lawrence Summers , Fareed Zakaria , Arianna Huffington, Nicholas Berggruen , Ernesto Zedillo , Carl Bildt, Niall Ferguson, and Joseph Nye , all being proponents of Obama’s building war against Russia — such as : “To confront Putin, Europe will have to make changes that will be deeply controversial on a continent long committed to environmentalism and marked by an aversion to the use of force”). And, as far as global warming is concerned, which is a real problem about Trump, it’s also very much and demonstrably — not merely in words — a real problem about Hillary too (and one that outside the context of the Presidential campaign has even been courageously reported by some of HuffPo’s own reporters ), but HuffPo and other Democratic Party propagandists pretend there’s reason to believe that Trump’s actions would be even worse than hers have been, and HuffPo’s readers thus end up being little else than Democratic Party suckers who feel satisfied in their ‘news’ reading to soak up what is almost entirely Democratic Party propaganda, which means the propaganda emanating out of the White House whenever a Democrat resides there — sort of like a Democratic Party version of the Republican Party’s Fox ‘News’. The aristocracy ( all of it, both its Republican and its Democratic Party branches) continue their campaign, and expect to crush their opposition — the public (of all parties). And that’s what a close look at the evidence shows explains Trump’s win — not bigotry on the part of the American public. Bigotry is a huge problem in every society, but especially amongst the aristocracy, who love to pretend that it’s mainly a problem ‘down below’ — so that they can continue to exploit the public while claiming to be superior to it. That’s the Big Lie, which Obama and the Clintons — and Huffington Post — promote and get paid very well to promote. Their campaign never ends. Only the personnel do.",FAKE
"TRUNEWS 10/31/16 Dr. Lance Wallnau | Answered Prayer: The Cabal Crumbles October 31, 2016 Is the new FBI investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton God’s answer to His saints? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles expands on James Comey’s Friday announcement, and the scandalous tie in with long time aide, and Muslim Brotherhood darling, Huma Abedin. Pastor Rick also speaks with Dr. Lance Wallnau regarding the Lord’s use of Donald Trump as a spiritual wrecking ball in The Body of Christ. Edward Szall provides updates on the latest from WikiLeaks, and Fior Hernandez details the major spiritual shift occurring in the pews of America as Election Day approaches. 
Today’s Audio Streamcast. Click the audio bar to listen: <span itemprop=""name"" content=""TRUNEWS 10/31/16 Dr. Lance Wallnau | Answered Prayer: The Cabal Crumbles""></span> <span itemprop=""description"" content=""Is the new FBI investigation into Hillary Rodham Clinton God’s answer to His saints? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles expands on James Comey’s Friday announcement, and the scandalous tie in with long time aide, and Muslim Brotherhood darling, Huma Abedin. Pastor Rick also speaks with Dr. Lance Wallnau regarding the Lord’s use of Donald Trump as a spiritual wrecking ball in The Body of Christ. Edward Szall provides updates on the latest from WikiLeaks, and Fior Hernandez details the major spiritual shift...""></span> <span itemprop=""duration"" content=""5123""></span> <span itemprop=""thumbnail"" content=""http://static.panda-os.com/p/1305/sp/130500/thumbnail/entry_id/0_kvyhphja/version/1 /acv/62""></span> <span itemprop=""width"" content=""350""></span> <span itemprop=""height"" content=""25""></span> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/products/video-platform-features"">Video Platform</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Management"">Video Management</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Video-Solutions"">Video Solutions</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Player"">Video Player</a> 
Right-click to download today’s show to your local device in mp3 format: Streamcast MP3 
Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play ! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media How To Listen To TRUNEWS 
Here on our show pages, there are two ways to listen to TRUNEWS. The first is to use the embedded player on the page. It is the black bar that you see above. Just click the arrow on the player for today’s broadcast. If you prefer to save the program to listen to it later on your PC or mobile device, just click the ‘DOWNLOAD MP3’ link above to archive that particular streamcast. Streamcast Archives",FAKE
"The Wisconsin GOP primary suggests that, no matter what the Republicans do from here on out, they will anger some major faction of a fractured party.

Ted Cruz accomplished what he set out to do in the Wisconsin Republican primary: beat front-runner Donald Trump soundly, winning most of the state’s delegates and raising the probability of a contested GOP convention in July.

But Senator Cruz’s big victory – he beat Mr. Trump by 13 points, 48 percent to 35 percent – doesn’t prove that he is “uniting the Republican Party,” as he claimed in his victory speech Tuesday night. It merely demonstrates that the Texas senator is consolidating his role as the “anti-Trump” in a presidential nomination race that has plunged the GOP into crisis.

The Wisconsin exit polls tell the story.

“More than half of Cruz’s supporters, and two-thirds of [Ohio Gov.] John Kasich’s, said they were ‘scared’ of what Trump would do in the White House – a remarkable rejection of the leading candidate in the race,” write analysts for ABC News.

“Notably, among Cruz’s own voters, only a quarter were excited about what he’d do as president – further suggesting that he garnered substantial anti-Trump, not necessarily, pro-Cruz, support.”

Governor Kasich underperformed in Wisconsin with only 14 percent of the vote, but he remains adamant about taking his campaign to the convention as the only “mainstream” Republican still in the race. The effect, though, has been to split the anti-Trump vote.

Perhaps more troubling for the GOP were responses to how Wisconsin Republicans would vote in the general election. If Trump is the party’s nominee against Democrat Hillary Clinton, only 61 percent of GOP primary voters said they would vote for him; 19 percent said they would vote for a third-party candidate, 10 percent said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton, and 8 percent said “no one.”

If it’s Cruz vs. Clinton in November, only 66 percent of Wisconsin Republicans said they’d back Cruz; 18 percent said they’d vote third party, 6 percent said Clinton, and 6 percent said “no one.”

These numbers are similar to national polling that shows a deep divide within the GOP between Trump supporters and Republican voters who oppose him. It’s also true that, inevitably, as Election Day nears, many unhappy voters will surely end up holding their nose and voting for their party’s nominee anyway. Clinton, in particular, inspires revulsion among many Republicans.

But Trump is no mere Republican candidate. The brash billionaire inspires rock-solid loyalty among a third of the GOP electorate, including the first-time voters he has lured into the process with his populist, nativist message. If Trump is not the nominee, many of his supporters say, they will abandon the party altogether – especially if they believe Trump is treated unfairly at the convention.

On the issue of “fairness,” one exit poll question was particularly devastating to the Republican establishment: If no one wins a majority of the delegates before the convention, whom should the party nominate? voters were asked. A majority,  55 percent, said “the candidate with the most votes in the primaries.” Only 43 percent said “the candidate who the delegates think would be the best nominee.”

“In all likelihood, Donald Trump will go to the convention with the most delegates. Wisconsin doesn’t really change that,” says Matthew Kerbel, chairman of the political science department at Villanova University in Philadelphia.

If Trump arrives at the convention without a majority of the delegates, then it becomes easier to deny him the nomination.

“But the cost of denying him is to split the party,” says Professor Kerbel. “And the cost of not denying him is it becomes his party, and Donald Trump becomes the face of the party.”

That could have a profound impact on other Republicans on the ballot.

Among general election voters, Trump has sky-high negatives. Cruz and Clinton also have high negatives – but not close to Trump’s. Kasich argues he’s the most electable, and general election matchups bear that out, but his path to the nomination through a contested convention is impossibly narrow. He’ll need to convince a deadlocked convention that a candidate who finished at the back of the pack deserves to jump the line. His argument is “electability” – polls do show him performing better than Trump or Cruz against Clinton. But Tuesday’s exit polls showed electability held little sway with voters.

The next test comes in two weeks with the New York primary – home turf for both Trump and Clinton, who, like Trump, needs to overcome an embarrassing defeat in Wisconsin. Clinton’s 13-point loss to Bernie Sanders – 56 to 43 percent – was nevertheless expected. Wisconsin’s electorate is largely white, and very liberal, both playing to the Vermont senator’s strengths. Trump also wasn’t a good fit for Wisconsin, both demographically and culturally.

Before Wisconsin, New York polls showed both Trump and Clinton well ahead of their top competitors. If either underperforms, it will be clear that Wisconsin was a turning point. Both will be damaged, but still on track to head to their respective conventions with the most delegates. The math, at this stage in the race, is almost impossible to overcome.",REAL
"Former Tea Party congressman and conservative radio host Joe Walsh (R-IL) recently took to Twitter to announce his plans for armed insurrection against the government when Republican   loses the election in a few weeks. On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. 
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. 
You in? 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
This is not the first time the outspoken radical has made controversial remarks. He responded to the tragic shootings of police officers in Dallas by a lone wolf sniper by openly calling for a race war. Before that, Walsh called for the journalists at MSNBC and CNN to be beheaded for refusing to show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that provided the justification for the terrorist attacks committed by a cell claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) against the publication’s offices in January 2015. 
The denizens of Twitter quickly responded with vicious mockery of the outrageous Tea Party demagogue: Joe Walsh, charging the Capitol steps 
flintlock musket in hand 
barks his shin real bad 
thus the revolution died 
— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom shouldn’t that musket be auctioned off to pay the child support you owe? 
— jacqui rodham (@heyjdey) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom I would highly encourage you to take your musket and point it at the nearest armed police officer 
— evil roy slade (spoo (@EvilRoySladeDS) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom Do you often invite people to joint musket-grabbing sessions?",FAKE
"The evacuation of American diplomats, soldiers and even CIA operatives from Yemen is stirring deep concerns that the U.S. is losing a vital foothold in territory that the most notorious Al Qaeda affiliate calls home.

The White House says Defense Department officials remain on the ground and are coordinating with Yemeni counterparts, but the retreat of most U.S. personnel is seen as a significant setback for what had been a cornerstone of American counterterrorism operations.

""Bottom line is increased danger to the United States homeland,"" House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, told Fox News.

President Obama last fall, in announcing military action against the Islamic State, cited counterterrorism efforts in Yemen as a model and a success story.

But Thornberry said there is now ""less pressure"" on America's chief enemy in that region, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which he described as a ""serious"" threat.

""That makes it easier for them to plot and plan against us,"" he said.

The State Department confirmed earlier this week it had closed the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and evacuated its staff because of the political crisis and security concerns following the takeover of much of the country by Iran-linked Shiite Houthi rebels.

But The Washington Post reported that the embassy closure also has forced the CIA to withdraw personnel. Officials told the Post the CIA has pulled ""dozens"" of operatives and other staffers from the country, including senior officials who were working with Yemen's government against Al Qaeda operatives.

One former U.S. official called the development ""extremely damaging"" to the CIA mission there.

Some CIA personnel reportedly remain in Yemen as the agency tries to maintain its intelligence network. But coordination with Yemeni agents undoubtedly becomes more difficult.

House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., predicted the pull-out would ""hinder the United States' campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,"" the group which claimed responsibility for the recent Paris terror attack -- and which has attempted attacks inside the U.S. over the past several years.

Nunes also said the chaos in Yemen should fuel concerns about Iran -- with whom the U.S. and other countries are negotiating regarding its nuclear program -- since the Yemen rebels are Iran-backed.

Yemen has been in crisis for months, with Houthi rebels besieging the capital and then taking control.

The Houthis last week dissolved parliament and formally took over after months of clashes. They then placed President Hadi and his Cabinet ministers under house arrest. Hadi and the ministers later resigned in protest.

On Tuesday, U.S. officials said the embassy closure would not affect counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda's Yemen branch.

""The United States remains firmly committed to supporting all Yemenis who continue to work toward a peaceful, prosperous and unified Yemen,"" State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. ""We will explore options for a return to Sanaa when the situation on the ground improves.""

Both the CIA and the military's Joint Special Operations Command run separate drone killing programs in Yemen, though the CIA has conducted the majority of the strikes, U.S. officials have said.

On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest also said counterterrorism operations are still ongoing.

""There continue to be Department of Defense personnel ... on the ground in Yemen that are coordinating with their counterparts in Yemen ... and continuing to carry out the kinds of actions, the counterterrorism actions that are necessary to protect the American people and our interests,"" he said.

Earnest stressed that Yemen has long had a weak central government and faced challenges, but the U.S. nevertheless has ""succeeded in applying significant pressure to the AQAP leadership that's operating in Yemen.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
"Mysterious, middle-of-the-night drone flights by the U.S. Secret Service during the next several weeks over parts of Washington -- usually off-limits as a strict no-fly zone -- are part of secret government testing intended to find ways to interfere with rogue drones or knock them out of the sky, The Associated Press has learned.

A U.S. official briefed on the plans said the Secret Service was testing drones for law enforcement or protection efforts and to look for ways, such as signal jamming, to thwart threats from civilian drones. The drones were being flown between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. The Secret Service has said details were classified.

Some consumer-level drones, which commonly carry video cameras, are powerful enough to carry small amounts of explosives or a grenade.

The challenge for the Secret Service is quickly detecting a rogue drone flying near the White House or the president's location, then within moments either hacking it to seize control over its flight or jamming its signal to send it off course or make it crash.

The Secret Service has said only that it will openly test drones over Washington, but it declined to provide details such as when it will fly, how many drones, over what parts of the city, for how long and for what purposes. It decided to tell the public in advance about the tests out of concern that people who saw the drones might be alarmed, particularly in the wake of the drones spotted recently over Paris at night. Flying overnight also diminishes the chances that radio jamming would accidentally affect nearby businesses, drivers, pedestrians and tourists.

It is illegal under the U.S. Communications Act to sell or use signal jammers except for narrow purposes by government agencies.

Depending on a drone's manufacturer and capabilities, its flight-control and video-broadcasting systems commonly use the same common radio frequencies as popular Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies. Jamming by the Secret Service -- depending on how powerfully or precisely it works -- could disrupt nearby Internet networks or phone conversations until it's turned off. Testing in the real-world environment around the White House would reveal unexpected effects on jamming efforts from nearby buildings, monuments or tall trees.

Signals emanating from an inbound drone -- such as coming from a video stream back to its pilot -- could allow the Secret Service to detect and track it.

Federal agencies generally need approval to jam signals from the U.S. telecommunications advisory agency, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. That agency declined to tell the AP whether the Secret Service sought permission because it said such requests are not routinely made public.

The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed it formally authorized the Secret Service to fly the drones and granted it a special waiver to fly them over Washington. The agency declined to provide specifics about the secret program.

In January, a wayward quadcopter drone, piloted by an off-duty U.S. intelligence employee, landed on the White House lawn. At the time, the Secret Service said the errant landing appeared to be accidental and was not considered a security threat.

The agency had been looking at security issues surrounding drones before the January crash, but the crash of that drone led the agency to focus more attention on security issues surrounding small, unmanned aircraft that can be hard to detect. Previously published reports have disclosed that the Secret Service already uses jammers in presidential and vice presidential motorcades to disrupt signals that might detonate hidden remotely triggered improvised explosive devices.

Researchers with the Homeland Security Department's science and technology directorate are working on strategies to interdict an unauthorized drone flying inside security areas. The research arm of DHS is trying to balance security concerns of the small, hard-to-detect devices, with the burgeoning commercial use and interests of hobbyists. Likewise, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said last week it's studying how the U.S. can resolve privacy risks with increasing use of drones.

The Homeland Security Department hosted a two-day meeting last month with industry officials, law enforcement and academics to discuss balancing security and commercial interests and establishing security practices. Days later, the Secret Service, which is part of the Homeland Security Department, distributed a three-sentence press release saying it will ""conduct a series of exercises involving unmanned aircraft systems, in the coming days and weeks.""

Trying to keep drones out of a secure area can be tricky.

There are basically three ways to stop a drone, said Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: block the radio signals linking the drone to its controller, hack the aircraft's control signals and trick it into believing it is somewhere else, or physically disable it. Some drone manufacturers program a ""geo fence"" -- location coordinates their drones treat as off-limits and refuse to fly past -- into the drone's programming. Police could physically knock a drone out of the air with a projectile or use a net to catch it.

""If it were me that would actually be the first thing I would think about doing,"" Gillula said. ""You would have to basically encase the White House in this net. It sure wouldn't look pretty, but in some ways it would be the most effective way.""",REAL
"Despite a firm denial by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a senior law enforcement source charges that she gave an order for police to stand down as riots broke out Monday night, raising more questions about whether some of the violence and looting could have been prevented.

The source, who is involved in the enforcement efforts, confirmed to Fox News there was a direct order from the mayor to her police chief Monday night, effectively tying the hands of officers as they were pelted with rocks and bottles.

Asked directly if the mayor was the one who gave that order, the source said: ""You are God damn right it was.""

The claim follows criticism of the mayor for, over the weekend, saying they were giving space to those who ""wished to destroy.""

By Tuesday night, despite the chaos a day earlier, Baltimore police along with the National Guard and other law enforcement contingents seemed to be restoring order in the city, which was under a curfew overnight.

Rawlings-Blake has defended her handling of the unrest, which grew out of protests over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

The mayor, in an interview with Fox News' Bill Hemmer on Tuesday, denied any order was issued to hold back on Monday.

""You have to understand, it is not holding back. It is responding appropriately,"" she said, saying there was no stand-down directive.

She said her critics have a right to their opinion.

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, just days into the job, addressed the unrest on Wednesday. She offered her ""deepest condolences"" to the Gray family, but said the ""senseless acts of violence"" are a ""grave danger to the community"" and ""counterproductive."" She reiterated that the FBI and DOJ civil rights unit are investigating, and ready to offer assistance.

She said she's been in direct contact with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and others.

On Monday, Hogan suggested the mayor waited too long to request a state of emergency.

That followed criticism over her remarks over the weekend, when she said it's important to give protesters the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech.

She seemed to take that notion a step further: ""It's a very delicate balancing act, because, while we tried to make sure that they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.""

As her ""destroy"" remarks faced a buzzsaw of criticism amid the riots Monday, the mayor initially tried to deny she said them.

""I never said nor would I ever say that we are giving people space to destroy our city, so my words should not be twisted,"" the mayor said Monday.

In a press conference, she accused critics of a ""blatant mischaracterization.""

But her office eventually released a written statement acknowledging she said those words -- while attempting to explain them.

Howard Libit, director of strategic planning and policy, said: ""What she is saying within this statement was that there was an effort to give the peaceful demonstrators room to conduct their peaceful protests on Saturday. Unfortunately, as a result of providing the peaceful demonstrators with the space to share their message, that also meant that those seeking to incite violence also had the space to operate. ...

""The mayor is not saying that she asked police to give space to people who sought to create violence. Any suggestion otherwise would be a misinterpretation of her statement.""

On Wednesday, Ben Carson, a potential Republican presidential candidate who was a pediatric neurosurgeon at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins, urged against ""piling on"" the mayor, whom he knows.

He told Fox News the bigger issue is what big-city mayors should be doing to prepare - early - for situations like this, particularly in what he described as a ""tinderbox"" atmosphere.",REAL
"The FBI should get the lead out on its investigation over Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, Jane Sanders said Thursday.

During an interview with Neil Cavuto aired Thursday on Fox Business, the wife of Bernie Sanders and one of his closest political advisers also said that the campaign would continue to draw distinctions with Clinton on policy issues and not personal affairs.

Sanders noted that her husband's campaign has said as much from the very beginning of the campaign, particularly after he remarked during the first Democratic debate that the American people are ""sick of hearing about your damn emails.""

But Jane Sanders also noted that the Democratic candidate said there was a process, remarking that the FBI investigation is going forward.

""We want to let it go through without politicizing it, and then we’ll find out what the situation is. And that’s how we still feel,"" Sanders said. ""I mean, it would be nice if the FBI moved it along,"" she added, with a laugh.",REAL
"The Volcker Rule is a key reform adopted after the 2008 financial meltdown that bans banks from gambling in securities markets with taxpayer money -- a tactic known as proprietary trading. But under legislation slated for a Wednesday vote, banks would be given a two-year reprieve from unloading some of their riskiest holdings -- known as collateralized loan obligations.

The deregulation measure is one of 11 changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that Republicans will bring to the floor under a single bill Wednesday. The legislation can only pass the House if dozens of Democrats support it, since the bill will be brought up under special rules that require a two-thirds majority for approval. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) will lead the opposition to the bill for Democrats on the House floor. Ellison will likely be opposed by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who voted for a similar bill in April, and supported the bank subsidy in December.

“One day into the new Congress, House Republicans are picking up right where they left off: trying to gut Wall Street reforms so that big banks can make more risky bets using taxpayer-backed money,"" Warren said. ""This is yet another big bank giveaway that makes our economy and middle class families less safe.”

""It's all about the bonus pool,"" said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a financial reform nonprofit. ""The attack on the Volcker Rule has been nonstop, because proprietary trading is about big-time bets that result in big-time bonuses. Wall Street has been fighting it from day one, and they're not going to stop.""

""It's absurd,"" said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. ""It's getting on five years after the passage of the Volcker Rule, and the banks have still not actually been required to stop doing anything that they want to be doing. And anytime we get close to the point where they could, somebody comes in with an extension.""

Collateralized loan obligations, or CLOs, are complex contracts similar to the mortgage securities that crashed the economy in 2008. To create a CLO, banks package dozens of risky corporate loans together and sell slices to investors. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a major bank regulatory agency, warned in December that the corporate debt market is overheating and becoming increasingly dangerous.

The nation's largest banks dominate the CLO market. According to an April letter from five federal regulators, banks with at least $50 billion in assets hold between 94 percent and 96 percent of the domestic market, valued at $84 billion to $105 billion.

A similar version of the bill was initially introduced by Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) and cosponsored by Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), passing the House by a voice vote in April. The legislation received another vote in September, when it passed the House 320 - 102, with 95 Democrats voting in favor and just one Republican, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) voting against it.

""Alvarez wants to kill the Volcker Rule, so it's being delayed until they can kill it. He made the decision to delay it until 2017, and this is consistent with that strategy,"" a frustrated Democratic aide told HuffPost.

Alvarez -- a bank-friendly holdover from the years when Alan Greenspan chaired the Fed -- in December delayed the moment of truth for a host of other risky bank investments through 2017. The Federal Reserve wasn't immediately available for comment after normal business hours.

The flurry of activity on the Volcker Rule follows the December passage of a $1.1 trillion spending bill that included subsidies for risky Wall Street derivatives trading. The bill repealed a key section of President Barack Obama's 2010 financial reform legislation. Obama said that he opposed the plan, but didn't want to derail the broader spending bill over it.

If the latest bill to aid big banks clears the House, the Republican-controlled Senate likely has the votes to pass it as well, unless new filibuster rules provide Democrats with more leverage. Obama has the authority to veto the legislation, but bank watchdogs are wary of Obama after his support for the December spending bill that included the Wall Street subsidy.",REAL
"The Left Turns on Bob Dylan for His Pro-Israel Views, Refusal to Acknowledge Nobel Prize Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
So Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His name is now enshrined among a list of laureates that includes luminaries like T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 
It’s a tremendous honor for the legendary singer-songwriter, that’s for sure. But it’s also stirred up its share of controversy. I won’t debate Dylan’s award—I’ll leave that to my esteemed colleagues Andrew Klavan and Ron Radosh —except to say two quick things. First, when the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to people like Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, did it dim the luster of the prizes in other categories? And second, I like the idea of songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved” (and, apologies to Andrew, even “It Ain’t Me, Babe”) joining the pantheon of Nobel Prize-winning literature. 
But now that the reliably left-leaning Nobel Prize Committee has given Dylan an award, a funny thing has happened. The left has begun to turn on Dylan for being less than the predictable leftist they have expected him to be. In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature—He Deserves it! 
The first example comes to us from that cherished source of unbiased news, Al Jazeera. In a recent editorial , French sociologist and “media critic” Ali Saad takes the media to task for reporting the news of Bob Dylan’s award without mentioning that he— gasp— supports Israel. Saad gripes that: 
…media outlets, both Arab and international, framed the story without taking issue with Dylan’s pro-Israel stance and instead portrayed him exclusively through the prism of his constructed image as defender of the oppressed. 
Saad goes on to cite “Neighborhood Bully,” an early ’80s tune from Dylan that expresses support for the nation of Israel. 
The song, that Stephen Holden described in The New York Times in 1983 as “ an outspoken defence of Israel “, begins by stating two key precepts emphasising the Israeli perspective: first by comparing Israel to a man in exile whose enemies unjustly “claim he’s on their land”, a sentence that serves as a scolding to those who refute the legitimacy of Israel’s historic claim to Palestine’s land. Then, by metaphorically presenting Israel as a man “outnumbered by a million to one”, which postulates the frequent representation of Israel as the underdog of the Middle East.Such a stance by an anti-war activist raises serious doubts over Dylan’s commitment to humanity 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"October 26, 2016 @ 9:37 pm 
FaceBook has censored my posts on Donald Trump. Susan K October 26, 2016 @ 9:09 pm 
It will not work. They can try and try and try again. Going around in circles. I must admit it is very pleasant to know how distressed some groups are because of Donald Trump. When Donald Trump is elected, and he will be, he should make it very clear he will not deal with any country persecuting freedom of speech. Az gal October 26, 2016 @ 8:32 pm 
The Globalists are waging war on Donald Trump. Democracy is dead or dying. We are the soldiers for freedom. Our most important weapon is our vote! VOTE TRUMP!",FAKE
"Five key states will hold Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday. The outcome could define the race for both parties.

But as voters prepare to head to the polls, controversy over a string of violent brawls continues to swirl around Donald Trump.

At a Trump rally in Ohio Sunday, Secret Service agents rushed to protect the Republican frontrunner after a protestor stormed the stage. And at other rallies throughout the weekend, Trump was constantly interrupted by hecklers.

Five key states will hold Republican and Democratic primaries on Tuesday. CBN News' David Brody shares his thoughts on the upcoming contests and how they could define the race for both parties. Watch below:



Even so, his Democratic rivals are placing the blame squarely on him.

""He actually incites violence in the way that he urges his audience on,"" Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton charged.

""Trump has to get on the TV and tell his supporters that violence in the political process in America is not acceptable, end of discussion,"" Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, said.

But Trump has refused to take responsibility for clashes at his campaign events. He insists outside agitators are at fault, and even laid some of the blame on Sanders supporters – and indeed many of the Vermont senator's supporters did show up.

""It was totally organized, troublemakers, troublemakers,"" Trump said. ""They are not protestors; they are disrupters. They are supposed to disrupt.""

But with hours left to go before voters head to the polls in Tuesday's five critical states, Trump's Republican rivals aren't backing down.

""This will be a disaster for the country because if Donald is the nominee, it makes it much, much more likely that Hillary Clinton wins the general,"" Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said.

""We've reached the point in this country where our political discourse looks like the comments section of a blog where people can just say whatever they want about anyone without any rules of civility, no norms that govern how we interact with one another,"" he said.

Still, polls show Trump will likely be the big winner Tuesday, except perhaps in Ohio, where Gov. John Kasich is out front with 39 percent.

Meanwhile in Florida, with 99 delegates and winner takes all, it's a must-win for Rubio. But a CBS poll has him currently in third place. Experts say a defeat in his home state would likely kill his campaign.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were the butt of the joke in a fake Saturday Night Live campaign commercial showing Clinton, played by Kate McKinnon, slowly-- and literally -- transforming into rival Bernie Sanders just to win more young supporters.

""As Millennials, your voice is important. You're the ones who will decide this election,"" McKinnon says. ""And luckily, I Hillary Clinton, share all of your exact same beliefs...""

""I'm whoever you want me to be and I approve this message,"" she says, drawing laughter from the audience.

Jokes aside, Clinton is hoping to add to her lead in the delegates as polls show her ahead of Sanders in all five states.

Whatever happens, the outcome of Tuesday's primaries will be critical for both the Republican and Democratic candidates and the results are almost certain to shape the dynamics of the race.",REAL
"Oklahoma Fraternity Is Closed Over Video Of Racist Chant

Responding to a video that allegedly shows members of its University of Oklahoma chapter chanting racist slurs about African-Americans and lynching, the national office of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity has closed the chapter and suspended its members.

The video reportedly captured a scene of members of the fraternity, dressed in formalwear, chanting slurs as they rode on a chartered bus. It surfaced Sunday, immediately drawing wide condemnation for the chant's mention of lynching and the promise that the fraternity will never have a black member.

Update at 2:15 p.m. ET: More Reaction From School President

""To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you. You are disgraceful,"" says University of Oklahoma President David Boren. ""You have violated all that we stand for.""

He added, ""Real Sooners love each other and take care of each other like family members.""

Boren said he has ordered all ties severed between the school and the SAE chapter, stating, ""I direct that the house be closed and that members will remove their personal belongings from the house by midnight tomorrow.""

""The fraternity's national president Brad Cohen said he called a board meeting Sunday night when the organization learned of the incident, and decided to close the chapter immediately. ""Students were seen moving their belongings out of the house in Norman late last night and early this morning. A minority-rights student group hosted a protest Monday morning on the University of Oklahoma's campus. ""In a statement last night, OU President David Boren called the behavior 'reprehensible' and contrary to the university's values.""

Late Sunday night, the national fraternity posted a statement about the Oklahoma incident, saying:

""We apologize for the unacceptable and racist behavior of the individuals in the video, and we are disgusted that any member would act in such a way. Furthermore, we are embarrassed by this video and offer our empathy not only to anyone outside the organization who is offended but also to our brothers who come from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and ethnicities.""

Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded in 1856, at the University of Alabama; the fraternity initially confined its growth only to Southern states but has since grown to more than 200 chapters around the nation, with more than 15,000 collegiate members currently, according to the organization's website.",REAL
"Jeb Bush announced Tuesday morning that he has set up an exploratory committee to pursue running for president. Virtually every person who takes this step ultimately throws his or her hat in the ring. It’s only a matter of time.

How should we assess Jeb Bush’s candidacy?

Polls show him at or near the top of the prospective Republican nominees for 2016. The recent McClatchy-Marist poll has Mitt Romney and Bush leading with 19 and 15 percent respectively. And a PPP poll has Bush ahead of Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Paul Ryan and both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Despite this, Bush by no means has an insurmountable lead. And while the Bush name for some is a positive and will help Jeb enormously, for others it is an unalterable negative both because of prior history, ideology and perceived performance in office.

That said, there is one constituency that I fully expect to support Jeb Bush: the donors, bundlers and those who pursue independent expenditure. There’s every reason to believe that this community – the money community – will rally behind Bush’s candidacy and given the importance of independent expenditure political action committees in the last presidential election, it’s fair to assume that between his own campaign committee and outsiders, he will be the best funded candidate in the Republican field.

Nevertheless, it will be far from a cakewalk for Bush in the primary. His problems are three fold.

First, his ardent support for Common Core does not sit well with many in his party.  Second, he has come out in support of comprehensive immigration reform, a hot button issue today with the GOP and its supporters, especially in light of President Obama’s executive action last month. And third, he’s considered tax increases as part of an overall reform package to help balance the budget in the past – anathema to those that control the GOP today.

For all these reasons, it may be hard for Tea Party Republicans and the right wing of the party more generally, to support his candidacy.

This is not to say that Jeb Bush will not be smart enough to try to neutralize these potential disadvantages. He surely will. To this end, Bush’s thoughtful and reasonable message at the Wall Street CEOs conference was a positive and uplifting one, exactly what the Republican Party needs to go mainstream and what the Tea Party itself abhors.

Should Bush make the general election he will be a compelling candidate against the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The most recent poll numbers show the race between them tightening, and I suspect the campaign itself will reflect that reality.

Put another way, both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton represent the center of their parties and both are practical politicians, if nothing else.

They’re both also smart and serious about the issues and we can expect, if they’re the nominees, to have a thoughtful debate about America’s future with the possibility of candidate agreement on a number of issues, something we haven’t seen in decades.

I know Jeb Bush and I know Hillary Clinton. They are both considerate people, committed to the broader interests of the American people regardless of political party.

Jeb Bush’s entry into the race prospectively gives the Republicans their strongest candidate and possible nominee. It also gives the American people the prospect of the best debate and dialogue we’ve had in a very long time.",REAL
"Donald Trump endorsed an unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs Monday during a day-long tour of Washington, casting doubt on the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and expressing skepticism about a muscular U.S. military presence in Asia.

The foreign policy positions — outlined in a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post — came on a day when Trump set aside the guerrilla tactics and showman bravado that have powered his campaign to appear as a would-be presidential nominee, explaining his policies, accepting counsel and building bridges to Republican elites.

On Monday night, Trump delivered a scripted address in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, prompting ovations with pledges to stand by Israel and take a hard line on peace talks with the Palestinians.

Trump’s whirlwind day of appearances around the nation’s capital was intended in part to head off an establishment push to deny him the Republican Party’s nomination. But in the Post meeting, the billionaire mogul also made clear that he would not be beholden to the GOP’s long-held orthodoxies.

During the hour-long discussion, during which he revealed five of his foreign policy advisers, Trump advocated a light footprint in the world. In spite of unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere, he said, the United States must look inward and steer its resources toward rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

“At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves?’ ” Trump said in the editorial board meeting. “I know the outer world exists, and I’ll be very cognizant of that. But at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially the inner cities.”

Trump said U.S. involvement in NATO may need to be significantly diminished in the coming years, breaking with nearly seven decades of consensus in Washington. “We certainly can’t afford to do this anymore,” he said, adding later, “NATO is costing us a fortune, and yes, we’re protecting Europe with NATO, but we’re spending a lot of money.”

[A transcript of Donald Trump’s meeting with The Washington Post editorial board]

Throughout his unlikely campaign, Trump’s unpredictable, incendiary persona has been his rocket fuel. But with the nomination now within his reach, he is trying at times to round out his sharp edges to convince his party’s leaders — not to mention general-election voters — that he has the temperament and knowledge to be president.

This was one of Trump’s goals as he addressed AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington. For perhaps the first time in his campaign, Trump read from a prepared text on teleprompters — a device he has colorfully mocked other politicians for using.

On Israel, Trump mostly hewed to the party line, giving a full-throated defense of the nation and its interests and arguing that no candidate is a more forceful champion of the Jewish state. His eyes pinging back and forth between the teleprompter screens, Trump embellished his prepared text only to deliver a few criticisms of President Obama and his first-term secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner.

“When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One,” Trump vowed. He received enthusiastic applause from the crowd of thousands, and the much-rumored walkouts during his speech were either called off or went unnoticed in the cavernous Verizon Center arena.

Earlier Monday, Trump sought to cultivate ties with his party’s establishment at a private luncheon he hosted on Capitol Hill. It was attended by about two dozen Republicans, including influential conservatives in Congress and prominent figures from GOP policy and lobbying circles.

Those with whom he met directly urged Trump to “be more presidential,” according to one attendee. This person, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to relate details of the closed session, described it as “a very serious conversation,” adding: “This was the Donald Trump who talks with bankers, not the Donald Trump who is on the stage.”

Trump also sought to showcase his business acumen and dealmaking prowess. He staged an afternoon news conference at the historic Old Post Office Pavilion, which his real estate company is turning into a Trump International Hotel, a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. The candidate, flanked by employees wearing hard hats, led journalists on a tour of the construction zone.

Trump’s visit to Washington comes amid an intensified effort by some in the Republican establishment, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, to deny him the nomination by forcing a contested convention at which the party could rally around an alternative.

At his luncheon meeting, Trump warned party leaders against using parliamentary maneuvers to block his nomination. He later told reporters that he had a productive conversation recently with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and that he has “many millions of people behind me.”

“Now, they can play games, and they can play cute,” Trump said of Ryan and other GOP leaders. “I can only take [Ryan] at face value. I understand duplicity. I understand a lot of things. But he called me last week, he could not have been nicer. I spoke with Mitch McConnell, he could not have been nicer. If people want to be smart, they should embrace this movement.”

Neither Ryan nor McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate majority leader, attended Monday’s meeting with Trump. It was held at Jones Day, the law firm of Donald F. McGahn, a Trump campaign attorney, and was convened in part by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a key Trump ally.

Attendees included Heritage Foundation President Jim De­Mint, a former senator from South Carolina and a conservative movement leader, as well as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former House Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.). A group of House members who have endorsed Trump also attended.

“We met with Senator Sessions and some of the great people in Washington,” Trump said. “We had a really good meeting. . . . They can’t believe how far we’ve come because, you know, I think a lot of people maybe wouldn’t have predicted that.”

Trump began the day at The Post, where his on-the-record meeting with the editorial board covered media libel laws, violence at his rallies and climate change, as well as foreign policy.

For the first time, Trump listed members of a team chaired by Sessions that is counseling him on foreign affairs and helping to shape his policies: Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz. All are relatively little known in foreign policy circles, and several have ties to the George W. Bush administration.

Trump praised George P. Shultz, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, as a model diplomat and, on the subject of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, said America’s allies are “not doing anything.”

“Ukraine is a country that affects us far less than it affects other countries in NATO, and yet we’re doing all of the lifting,” Trump said. “They’re not doing anything. And I say: ‘Why is it that Germany’s not dealing with NATO on Ukraine? . . . Why are we always the one that’s leading, potentially, the third world war with Russia?’ ”

While the Obama administration has faced pressure from congressional critics who have advocated for a more active U.S. role in supporting Ukraine, the U.S. military has limited its assistance to nonlethal equipment such as vehicles and night-vision gear. European nations have taken the lead in crafting a fragile cease-fire designed to decrease hostility between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.

Trump sounded a similar note in discussing the U.S. presence in the Pacific. He questioned the value of massive military investments in Asia and wondered aloud whether the United States still is capable of being an effective peacekeeping force there.

“South Korea is very rich, great industrial country, and yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do,” Trump said. “We’re constantly sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games — we’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.”

Such talk is likely to trigger anxiety in South Korea, where a U.S. force of 28,000 has provided a strong deterrent to North Korean threats for decades.

Asked whether the United States benefits from its involvement in Asia, Trump replied, “Personally, I don’t think so.” He added: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. We’re a debtor nation.”

Jenna Johnson, Paul Kane, Missy Ryan and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
"59 Views November 11, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
In the aftermath of a brutal takedown in the gold and silver markets, today whistleblower and London metals trader Andrew Maguire told King World News that the paper gold market traded a jaw-dropping 6,800 tonnes of gold in just one day. 
Andrew Maguire: “Just to illustrate how ludicrous the paper markets have become, during the U.S. election day daily session the total swap of Comex Open Interest constituted a staggering 2,268 tonnes (of paper gold)! This volume does not include the unallocated paper-centric over-the-counter markets, where volume exceeded the Comex by a factor of (more than) 2 times… Continue reading the Andrew Maguire interview below… Advertisement To hear which company investors & institutions around the globe are flocking to that has one of the best gold & silver purchase & storage platforms in the world click on the logo: 
Andrew Maguire continues: “Now brace yourself; in total this conservatively places the swap of paper gold positions at a ludicrous 6,800 tonnes. That’s unprecedented, Eric. The record daily volume totals more than two years of (annual global gold production or total annual) mine supply…To continue listening to this extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire that will be released within hours, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, you can listen to it when it’s released by CLICKING HERE. 
  Is This Why The Smash In Gold & Silver Is Happening? A Shocking Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding…  ",FAKE
"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / What A Hillary Presidency Would Bring Essential Reading Untold Truths About the Planned War on Iran By wmw_admin on April 9, 2013 
Dynamite documentary: Press TV talks to former White House insider Gwenyth Todd about the push for war with Iran. She has subsequently escaped to Australia to avoid FBI prosecution. Essential viewing Inside 9/11: Hijacking the Air Defense By wmw_admin on August 13, 2011 
Why did U.S. air defense fail so spectacularly on 9/11? As this video explains, it was likely due to one man and he wasn’t sitting in a Afghan mountain cave Who Are The Illuminati? By wmw_admin on April 24, 2004 
Conspiracy theory is now an accepted turn of phrase but sometimes one hears the expression, sometimes whispered rather than spoken. “The Illuminati”. 9/11 and Zion: What Was Israel’s Role? By Nick Kollerstrom on August 31, 2012 
When Netanyahu said the very next day, ‘This is very good for Israel”, he wasn’t just blurting out something indiscreet, he was publicly congratulating the various agents who had worked so hard The Essene Gospel of Peace I By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
Based on texts found in the Vatican library and the Royal Library of the Hapsburg’s and dated to the first century AD, the following is considered by some to be the real words of Christ The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance London Beheading Hoax Confirmed? By wmw_admin on May 24, 2013 
Was the London beheading a hoax? After Sandy Hook anything is possible and the authors present a very convincing case that it was. Judge for yourself",FAKE
"WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - Tensions are building inside and outside the white marble facade of the U.S. Supreme Court building as the nine justices prepare to issue major rulings on gay marriage and President Barack Obama's healthcare law by the end of the month.

Of the 11 cases left to decide, the biggest are a challenge by gay couples to state laws banning same-sex marriage and a conservative challenge to subsidies provided under the Obamacare law to help low- and middle-income people buy health insurance that could lead to millions of people losing medical coverage.

Many legal experts predict the court will legalize gay marriage nationwide by finding that the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of equal treatment under the law and due process prohibit states from banning same-sex nuptials.

In three key decisions since 1996, Kennedy has broadened the court's view of equality for gays. The most recent was a 2013 case in which the court struck down a federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples.

During oral arguments in the gay marriage case on April 28, Kennedy posed tough questions to lawyers from both sides but stressed the nobility and dignity of same-sex couples.

The healthcare decision is tougher to call. Chief Justice John Roberts, the swing vote when the court upheld Obamacare in 2012, said little during the March 4 oral argument to indicate how he will vote.

The court will issue some rulings on Monday, with more likely later in the week.

For the justices, the pressure is on to have the rulings ready. That can be difficult as the cases in which they are closely divided are generally the ones left until the end.

James Obergefell, one of the plaintiffs in the gay marriage case, said he will be at the court for all the remaining decision days.

Obergefell sued Ohio, challenging its ban on same-sex marriages, after the state refused to acknowledge his marriage to John Arthur on Arthur's death certificate. They were married in Maryland, a state that allows gay marriages, just months before Arthur died in 2013.

The Supreme Court does not announce in advance which rulings will be issued on any given day.

""It's nerve-racking, it's exciting, but it's also scary,"" Obergefell said while waiting in line to enter the courtroom on Thursday.

On the other side of the issue, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian group that opposes gay marriage, will have at least two attorneys in the courtroom, spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.

As for the closed-door deliberations at the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hinted during a June 12 speech at the turmoil to come. ""Sharp divisions, one can confidently predict, will rise in the term's final weeks,"" Ginsburg said.

Prior to June 15, the court was split 5-4 in only seven of the 46 cases decided at that point. But last week alone, four of the nine rulings were 5-4 decisions. In the rulings, several justices wrote separate opinions in which they aimed pointed comments at their colleagues.",REAL
"Email 
I visited Mosul on the day it fell to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and a small detachment of US Special Forces on 11 April 2003. As we drove into the city, we passed lines of pick-up trucks piled high with loot returning to the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq. US soldiers at a checkpoint, over which waved the Stars and Stripes, were shooting at a man in the distance who kept bobbing up from behind a wall and waving the Iraqi flag . 
If there had ever been any sympathy between liberators and liberated in Mosul, it was disappearing fast. Inside the city, every government building, including the university, was being systematically looted by Kurds and Arabs alike. I saw one man who had stolen an enormous and very ugly red and gold sofa from the governor’s office dragging it slowly down the street. He would push one end of the sofa a few feet forward and then go to the other end and repeat the same process. The mosques were soon calling on the Sunni Arab majority to build barricades to defend their neighbourhoods from marauders. 
We parked our vehicle near a medieval quarter of ancient stone buildings while we went to see a Christian ecclesiastic. When we got back, we found that our driver was very frightened and wanted to get out of Mosul as fast as possible. He explained that soon after we left a crowd had gathered, recognised our number plates as Kurdish and debated lynching him and setting fire to his car before being restrained by a local religious leader moments before they took action. 
The oil city of Kirkuk was captured at about the same time by the Peshmerga, despite having promised the Americans and Turks that they would do no such thing. Again, there was looting everywhere and I saw two Peshmerga stand in the middle of the road to stop an enormous yellow bulldozer that was being driven off. Instead of slowing down, the driver put his foot on the accelerator so the Peshmerga had to jump aside to avoid being crushed. 
Inside the newly established Peshmerga headquarters, I ran into Pavel Talabani, whose father Jalal Talabani headed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party whose militia now held the city. He stressed the temporary nature of the Kurdish occupation of the city. “We came to control the situation,” he said. “We expect to withdraw some of our men in 45 minutes.” 
Some Peshmerga, but not all: 13 years later the Kurds still hold Kirkuk, whose population is Kurdish, Arab and Turkoman, and to which the Kurds claim an historic right saying they have only reversed anti-Kurdish ethnic cleansing by Saddam Hussein. 
By now the rest of the world has forgotten that there was a time when the Kurds did not hold the city. The Kurdish leaders had understood that the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein had created conditions of unprecedented political fluidity and it was an ideal moment to create facts on the map, which would become permanent whatever the protestations of other players. 
The current multi-pronged offensive aimed at taking Mosul is producing a similar situation as different countries, parties and communities vie to fill the vacuum they expect to be created by the fall of Isis, just as in 2003 the vacuum was the result of the fall of Saddam Hussein. 
The different segments of the anti-Isis forces potentially involved in seizing Mosul – the Iraqi army, Kurds, Shia and Sunni paramilitaries, Turks – may be temporary allies, but they are also rivals. They all have their own very different and conflicting agendas. Presiding over this ramshackle and disputatious alliance is the US, which is orchestrating the Mosul offensive and without whose air power and Special Forces there would be no attack. 
The Shia-dominated Iraqi government needs to take and hold Mosul, Iraq’s main Sunni Arab city, if it is to be convincing as the national government of Iraq. To achieve this, Baghdad’s rule must be acceptable to the Sunni majority in the city in a way that was not true when Isis took it in 2014. It needs to establish its rule while it still has full military and political support from the US. 
The Kurds, for their part, want to solidify their control of the so-called “disputed territories” claimed by both the central government and the Kurdish regional authorities. The Kurds opportunistically used the defeat of the Iraqi Army in northern Iraq by Isis two years ago to take these territories inhabited by both Kurds and Arabs, thereby expanding by 40 per cent the area of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). They know that once Isis is defeated, the Kurds will no longer get international and, above all, American backing to hold this expanded version of the KRG. 
These problems have only begun to surface because Mosul is still a long way from being besieged or even encircled. 
The Shia militia forces are surprisingly calm about being excluded from a military role in the siege. They may calculate that the Iraqi army, if it gets sucked into street fighting, will not be able to take Mosul on its own and will have to look to them for support. The Shia paramilitaries are making up for their lack of participation in the battle for Mosul by sending reinforcements – some 5,000 men, according to reports – to join the Syrian Army in the siege of East Aleppo. 
Turkey wants to be a player and, as a great Sunni power, the defender of the Sunnis of Mosul. To this end, it has soldiers based at Bashiqa, north east of Mosul, and claims to be taking part in the attack. But so far at least, Turkish ambitions and rhetoric in Iraq and Syria have exceeded its performance. Both interventions may be designed to impress a domestic audience which is deluged with exaggerated accounts of Turkish achievements in the government-controlled Turkish media. 
These participants in the struggle for Mosul may be dividing the tiger’s skin before the tiger is properly dead. Isis showed that it still has sharp claws when it responded to the assault on Mosul with raids on Kirkuk and Rutbah on the main Iraq-Jordan road. It is fighting hard to slow down the anti-Isis advance towards Mosul with a mix of suicide bombers, IEDs, booby-traps, snipers and mortar teams. But it is unclear if it will make a last stand in Mosul where, at the end of the day, it must go down to defeat in the face of superior numbers backed by the massive firepower of the US-led air forces. 
The likelihood is that Isis will fight for Mosul, the site of its first great victory, in order to prolong the battle, cause casualties and to let divisions emerge among its enemies. But its strategy over the last 12 months has been not to stage heroic but doomed last stands in any of the cities it has lost in Iraq and Syria. 
At Ramadi, Fallujah, Sinjar, Palmyra and Manbij it has staged a fighting withdrawal at the last moment. The same may now happen in Mosul.",FAKE
"Mall of America to Close for First Time Ever on Thanksgiving Nov 11, 2016 0 0 
For the first time ever the Mall of America will close on Thanksgiving Day. This represents a sea change. Instead of fighting crowds on Black Friday to buy the latest gadgets, hundreds of thousands of Americans will instead be home spending time with their families and friends, and 15,000 employees will enjoy the same opportunity which many consumer-focused shoppers have often taken for granted. 
Mall of America officials just announced that they were veering from their tradition of staying open from the morning of Thanksgiving day into Black Friday. The super mall, home to 520 stores in Bloomington, Minnesota, will stay closed on November 24th except for certain operations like the Walk to End Hunger fundraiser. The mall will reopen the following morning at 5am with a ribbon cutting ceremony for anxious customers. Americans are Drowning in Their Stuff The Average American Household Contains 300,000 Items 
You don’t have to be an extreme minimalist to appreciate the fact that Americans, more than in almost any other country, have too much stuff. The LA Times reports that there are more than 300,000 items in the average American home. Even the size of the average home has tripled over the last ten years. You’ve got to have the space to put all that stuff! And yet, one in five Americans rents an off-site storage space to put their overflow. This is the fastest growing sector of commercial real estate in the past four years, according to the NY Times, even though America is home to 50,000 storage facilities – more than five times the number of Starbucks. It could do us good if malls closed their doors more often. 
Americans spend trillions on goods and services that they don’t really need. This includes booze, jewelry, and sports paraphernalia. We spend more on shoes, jewelry and watches than we do on education. 
While this fact alone doesn’t necessarily point to a habit of overt consumerism, in many cases it does point to an ethos of unsustainability. Much of Our Stuff is Toxic 
As the Story of Stuff details, many of the products we purchase contribute to the degradation of our environment – from the petro-chemicals used in our cars, and in our hand lotions, to a seemingly benign glass of water which comes from a plastic bottle. 
From non-stick cookware, to hand-sanitizer, shower-curtains, to furniture , we are living with a multitude of consumer purchases that are not good for us. Our children’s toys are toxic, and even our carpets and the paint we put on our walls is health-destroying , yet we’ve come to expect that ‘more’ is better, without demanding quality. Moving Toward a Shared Economy 
What is more, many of the things we use can be shared. Why do we need to ‘own’ something that we only use sporadically? This goes for garden tools, and sports equipment as well as human resources, even. House swapping and Uber were based on people’s growing realization that sharing works. 
Ask yourself – how many times are you actually going to watch that DVD? Are you children really going to play with that plastic toy for more than ten minutes before its tossed aside? Then there’s the clothes we wear for special occasions. Often a dress or suit is worn once, and then never again. Companies are now capitalizing on the trend to re-use and share resources, and the trend couldn’t have come at a better time. 
Services and space are also growing into the shared-economy. If you have a garden only you and a handful of people enjoy, why not open it up to the community? Are you taking your dog for a walk? Why not offer to take the neighbor’s too? Or share the fees of a dog-walker with dog-loving friends. Looking for the Root Cause 
Through repetitive advertising, we have been subconsciously programmed to believe that our lives are empty without more things in them. We unknowingly seek quantity over quality in everything we purchase because we are trying to fill an emotional void. By playing on our innate emotional responses, and our base urges, the advertising industry overarchingly promotes the products and services of companies which pollute the planet, divide communities, rape the earth of its resources, and promote slave and child labor. 
If a ruling elite can create docile, easily controlled subjects, they don’t question the goods and services they are being sold, let alone its geo-political agendas. This is the undercurrent of an ogilopolistic , mechanized system designed to make consumers – not dreamers, thinkers, and doers. 
When we start to pull out this programming at the roots, and see it for what it is, we can start making more informed choices. Does this mean we can never buy a new pair of shoes again, or travel to a foreign country? Absolutely not, but it means you can make wiser (hopefully fewer) purchases, and share resources where applicable. Instead of staying in a hotel you can make a new friend overseas, and trade houses. You can purchase goods from companies that give back to their communities and uphold fair trade practices. The sustainable company is indeed peeking out from our consumer-based programming, and if the Mall of America is closing, even for one day, it portends a brighter future for Americans who have been obsessed with spending money they don’t have for things they don’t need. 
Image credit: StartatSixty.com , Featured image: source Vote Up Christina Sarich Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga .",FAKE
"Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan, David Stockman, warns that regardless of who wins the US presidential election, Americans can expect the stock market to drop by... ",FAKE
"If you want to support the show and receive access to tons of bonus content, subscribe on our Patreon page for as little as $5 a month. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the show on iTunes . We can’t do this show without your support!!! On this episode, Roqayah and Kumars speak with a married father of one who has spent over ten years as a biologist and environmental protection specialist, planning large scale projects to minimize environmental impacts for several federal agencies. John (not his real name) was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in March and he’s now found himself stuck in between massive gaps in our healthcare system and an out-of-control drug war.
John tells us about his initial diagnosis, a diagnosis that came many months late because of his inability to get the care he needed in a timely fashion. This delay in care happened despite him having some of the best health insurance available as a federal employee. Once diagnosed, John tells us about how he was forced to continue working full-time so as not to lose his life insurance or health insurance policies. Without life insurance, his family would be severely impacted if he should die, and without health insurance, he could not afford the care required to keep him alive. If he were to get insurance on the private market, it would be too expensive to afford, even with his current salary, and the benefits would be severely limited compared to what he currently has.
John also tells us how he is at risk for losing his job (hence the pseudonym) because of his use of medical marijuana, the only treatment that has allowed him to deal with the horrible effects of his cancer and chemotherapy treatments. There are strict rules against federal employees using medical marijuana, even if they work in states where it is legal. Recently, it was announced that random drug-testing would be extended to all federal employees, putting John at-risk for losing his job, his healthcare, and his life insurance. We discuss the pharmaceutical industry’s role in fighting the legitimacy of medical marijuana, as well as their role in perpetuating skyrocketing healthcare costs. We also discuss the importance of writing to government officials to speak out on behalf of John and those in a similar position who are denied life-saving treatment, whether due to cost or due to our indefensible drug laws.
Look for a story from Roqayah in Shadowproof on John’s situation shortly!

The post Delete Your Account – Episode 23: Don’t Get Sick appeared first on Shadowproof .",FAKE
"President Donald Trump has given very hard thought into who will be in his Cabinet. He has several names in mind, names that will literally change America and CNN doesn’t like this at all. Well, too bad! VIA Conservative 101 According to Politico , some of those names include Gingrich for Secretary of State, Mnuchin, a 17 year veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasure Secretary and Mayor Giuliani for Attorney General. And of course Sheriff David Clarke as the Homeland Security Secretary. He has been an incredible patriotic American and leader in Blue Lives Matter. CNN was terrified by this. “I think the one major flag I have is that someone like Sheriff Clarke would be considered as his Homeland Security secretary? Someone who I very much see as if he’s not a terrorist inciting terrorism?” said CNN commentator Angela Rye. “If people are afraid of Sheriff Clarke, afraid of the policies which he represents, I think that’s terrorism,” she said. This of course, makes no sense. You can’t just call people who disagree with you terrorists. Check out the video below and see for yourself. 
Now, this makes me wonder… what gives Angela the right to call an honest person like Sheriff Clarke a terrorist? Is it jealousy? 
You can’t call someone a terrorist just because you don’t agree with them. It’s absurd! 
What are your thoughts on this? Do you think that Anglea Rye is a disgrace to journalism? 
Share us your thoughts in the comments section below. 
Thank you for reading. 
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
"(((Smithsonian))) Refuses to Include Judge in Black Museum Because He has Normal People Opinions 
Eric Striker October 27, 2016 Dat nigga ain’t even smoke crack. 
The Smithsonian Museum, run by American Jewish Committee award-winning mankind harasser (((David J. Skorton))), has decided to exclude Supreme Court Justice Judge Clarence Thomas from its African-American Museum, showing that Jews only want to empower certain kinds of blacks that advance Jew-specific agendas. This Jew gets to decide who gets into the black museum and who doesn’t. 
While I don’t agree with Thomas’ conservative philosophy, he has long been a constitution-respecting thorn in the side of the Jewish activist judge bloc of Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. Whenever these Jews (and Sotomayor, along with the Jew Merrick Garland if he gets confirmed) vote to get something insane through, Thomas has been a reliable voice of reason tempering and often downvoting them in defense of free speech, freedom of association, etc. 
Coming from a background of poverty and homelessness, Thomas has genuinely worked hard and shown remarkable aptitude in the art of jurisprudence, he wasn’t appointed to fill an Affirmative Action quota. He is a member of the “talented tenth” of the black race and if there’s going to be an African-American museum, he has certainly earned his place in it, yet won’t be included , because he has refused to abuse his gavel in pursuit of violent anti-White discord. Rather than commending him for his legal ethic, Jews are punishing him by obliterating his memory as soon as he dies to serve as an example to any other unusually intelligent blacks out there. 
It’s not a secret that Jews filter just who and what Negroes in America should aspire to, from founding the pro-race mixing NAACP and sabotaging black nationalist Marcus Garvey, to running virtually all media intended for black people (BET-owned by Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, or The Root  – run by Israeli citizen Haim Saban’s Univision), and now picking and choosing what individuals blacks should exemplary members of their race. 
So who is being included? 
Well, the African-American Museum has an entire section dedicated to the Jewish-financed and extreme anti-white Black Panthers , Black Lives Matter, convicted Cultural Marxist terrorist Angela Davis. Examples of some of the ideological indoctrination featured at this Jewseum. Is (((Gloria Steinem))) “African-American”? So why is she there? 
Cracked out James Brown, famous for shuckin’ and jivin’ while smoking crack and not much else, is according to reports treated by the Smithsonian as the second coming of Christ. 
Is that appropriate? 
I won’t go as far as to claim that blacks would be astrophysicists if all Jews vanished tomorrow, but I will say that blacks would not only be far better off according to every metric, they also would instinctively respect and emulate the White man as Booker T. Washington believed they should, rather than lash out at us for no reason as Jews instruct them to. 
Blacks in the 1930’s once had a crime rate lower than urban Italian and Irish in the law and order South, along with their own small businesses, farms, fairly in-tact families. But because the Jew capitalizes on dysfunctional societies full of dysfunctional people, James Brown is made immortal while they pretend Clarence Thomas ain’t a REAL nigga . 
Jewish cultural mandate socializes some Whites into acting like low-lives as well. While the manifestations are different depending on natural temperament and abilities of race, one thing we can all agree on is that neither the White man nor the black man are living up to their full potential in this age of decline and decay.",FAKE
"In 1982, during one of many visits to Israel, I had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who told me, ""Israel needs friends."" He added that in the end, his nation could not trust any nation with its fate and security. The protection of Israel, he said, was ultimately the responsibility of Israelis.

Begin's comment was prophetic given the petulance of our current president, who behaves like an enemy of Israel when he attempts to impose a Palestinian state on Israel and negotiate a deal with Iran that can only lead to new threats against the Jewish state and further destabilize the chaotic Middle East.

In his determination to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program (which Iran has denied exists, so what is the U.S. negotiating?), President Obama has traded history, facts and reality for a potential deal with a regime that promotes terrorism around the world and is busy attaching Iraq to its vision of a greater Persian Empire.

Last Saturday, Iran's Supreme leader Ali Khamenei again called for ""Death to America,"" just one day after President Obama appealed to Iranians in a video message to seize a ""historic opportunity"" for a nuclear deal and a better future. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, also continues to use inflammatory rhetoric about the ultimate destruction of Israel. What should this tell us?

The president is cozying up to a nation that oppresses women, has an apocalyptic view of the world and believes that if it starts a nuclear war the 12th Imam -- the Islamic messiah -- will emerge from a well and bring peace on Earth and good will, at least to Shia Muslim men. Women will remain subject to male domination and have only the few rights given to them by men.

Israel, which embraces Western values of free elections, religious tolerance and pluralism, a free press and equal rights for women is treated by President Obama and his administration as Iran should be treated. Do these people suffer from diplomatic dyslexia, or anti-Semitism?

The coming nuclear deal with Iran, if it occurs, will be a sham from the start. Agreements between nations require at least some trust, but Iran has as much credibility as a double-your-money promise from Bernie Madoff.

Why should Israel be forced to surrender more land to an enemy that has sworn to destroy it? A Palestinian state would likely be used as a launching pad for an attack. Gaza is a perfect example. It has been used by Hamas to attack Israel, which unilaterally and foolishly gave it up in hopes of promoting peace.

Suicide is not in Israel's interests, or that of the United States, but suicide is what President Obama seems to want Israel to commit by pressuring it to return to indefensible 1967 borders and accept a nuclear deal with Iran.

That two states is not what Israel's enemies want was made clear enough when President Clinton brought then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO leader Yasser Arafat to Camp David in 2000. Barak offered Arafat virtually everything he asked for -- 95 percent by some estimates -- and Arafat rejected the offer. Arafat, his contemporaries and those who have come after him, desire only one state headed by themselves with no Jewish state and no Jewish presence, as evidenced by the wars and terrorist attacks they have launched and continue to wage against Israel.

In Deuteronomy 17:7, God instructs the ancient Israelites: ""You must purge the evil from among you.""

In his dangerous pursuit of a problematic nuclear weapons deal with Iran and his attempt to marry a cancerous Palestinian state to the land of Israel, President Obama is not purging evil; he's inviting it to spread. History will judge him for this as it has every other nation that has harmed ""the apple of His eye."" (Zechariah 2:8)

Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
"Be the First to Comment! Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Search articles ",FAKE
"**Want FOX News Halftime Report in your inbox every day? Sign up here.**

On the roster - Bernie’s swan song begins - Dubya back in the game - Rubio leans towards a run, GOP insiders say - Save yourself, no really

 

 BERNIE’S SWAN SONG BEGINS

 In Sen. Bernie Sanders’ address Thursday he said a lot of things, except that he would concede his bid for the Democratic nomination. But on the heels of his meeting with Hillary Clinton, subsequent matching statements, and his promise that he would do everything he could to defeat Donald Trump the signs that the end is near couldn’t be clearer.

 

 So why not drop out now?

 

 Well, there are two schools of thought on that.

 

 One is that Sanders is trying to hold on to as much leverage as he can to make his policy positions part of the party platform and institute changes in the primary process. The idea is that the longer he remains in the race the more Clinton and the party will concede for the sake of the much coveted word this cycle: unity.

 

 But that theory has some holes in it.

 

 A prolonged holdout by Sanders actually weakens his hand. Supporters like Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., the first member of congress to back Sanders, have started to throw their support behind Clinton. The small donations that once poured in have dried up. And the much-reported massive rallies have dwindled with time and are now absent.

 

 All this to say Sanders’ momentum doesn’t look quite as threatening as it did back in March, or even May. Any hope that Sanders could win, or pose some sort of mathematical challenge based on delegate count, ended with the California primary 10 days ago.

 

 Not to mention President Obama’s endorsement for Clinton this week…

 

 Which is exactly why those in the second school of thought believe Sanders remaining in the race is a strategy to benefit Clinton and the Democrats more than anything else.

 

 In this notion, the longer Sanders remains in the more his fire continues to burn out on its own, leaving Clinton in better graces with his supporters than if she appeared to force him out while he still had momentum. Clinton appears as the magnanimous candidate letting her challenger run his own course instead of the political powerhouse choking the competition, and Sanders doesn’t look like he cut and ran. Everyone wins.

 

 The cordial meeting the two candidates had this week seems to show that is exactly what’s happening. Since Clinton has officially secured presumptive nominee status Sanders is no longer a distraction from her general election strategy or a threat of division within the party. His presence in the race doesn’t hold the same ire for her it once did.

 

 But remember, Sanders is not a dyed in the wool Democrat and he doesn’t feel obliged to abide by any party’s rules. Although his campaign has said they’re no longer recruiting superdelegates it doesn’t mean the independent, socialist-turned-Democratic-challenger will bow out quietly.

 

 So however long he remains in the race, how he bows out will be on his terms regardless of party unity or strategy.

TIME OUT

 On this day in 1885, a ship sailed into New York harbor carrying 350 individual pieces of cargo that would become one of America’s most iconic symbols: the Statue of Liberty. Since that time Lady Liberty has welcomed immigrants through Ellis Island, bid farewell to thousands of troops going “over there,” witnessed an attack on the city to which she lights the way, and seen the same city rebound with spirited purpose.

 

 As President Ronald Reagan said at the statue’s centennial celebration: “[W]e too dare to hope -- hope that our children will always find here the land of liberty in a land that is free. We dare to hope too that we’ll understand our work can never be truly done until every man, woman, and child shares in our gift, in our hope, and stands with us in the light of liberty.”

 

 Flag on the play? - Email us at HALFTIMEREPORT@FOXNEWS.COM with your tips, comments or questions

 

 SCOREBOARD

 Average of national presidential polls: Clinton vs. Trump: Clinton +5.8 points

 Generic congressional vote: Democrats +2.2

 

 DUBYA BACK IN THE GAME

 NYT: “After eight years of largely abstaining from politics, former President George W. Bush is throwing himself into an effort to save his party’s most vulnerable senators, including several whose re-election campaigns have been made more difficult by Donald J. Trump’s presence at the top of the ticket. In the weeks since Mr. Trump emerged as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Bush has headlined fund-raisers for two Republican senators and has made plans to help three more. Among them are Senators John McCain of Arizona, who was one of Mr. Trump’s earliest targets of derision, and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire… Next week, he will appear in St. Louis at a fund-raiser for Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. And similar events are being planned for Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rob Portman of Ohio.”

 

 RUBIO LEANS TOWARDS A RUN, GOP INSIDERS SAY

 WashEx: “Marco Rubio is leaning toward running for re-election, say Republicans monitoring the senator’s movements for signs of a decision…The Florida Republican is now re-considering, motivated in part by Sunday’s jihadist terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead plus the shooter. But Republican insiders are predicting that Rubio will in fact jump into the race because they believe there have been smoke signals for weeks indicating he planned to change course…Perhaps telling, it’s GOP operatives in Florida who are most convinced that Rubio is going to run. Rubio’s team has been organizing and preparing to launch a 2016 Senate campaign for weeks, one veteran Florida Republican strategist said.”

 

 And Dems are ready - The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a video this morning attacking Rubio for his absence in the U.S. Senate showing they are already preparing for the Florida senator’s potential reelection bid in the Sunshine State.

 

 IN COVERAGE

 Fox News Sunday – Chris Wallace hosts Attorney General Loretta Lynch to discuss gun restrictions in wake of the Orlando shootings, and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski talks the 2016 race on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Check local listings for broadcast times in your area.

 

 #mediabuzz - Howard Kurtz breaks down how the media covered the biggest news stories, including Bill Hemmer on his experience reporting from Orlando. Watch #mediabuzz Sundays at 11 a.m. and a reairing at 5 p.m. ET.

 

 PLAY-BY-PLAY

 Clinton, Trump Twitter wars wage on - WashEx

 

 Major companies pull sponsorship from GOP convention - The Hill

 

 How game theory helps explain Trump’s strategy - WaPo

 

 Hillary pushes DNC towards general election focus - Time

 

 Over 50 State Dept. employees call for a regime change in Syria - Fox News

 

 AUDIBLE

 “Election days come and go but political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end.” -- Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his live webcast Thursday.

 

 SAVE YOURSELF, NO REALLY

 [Victoria, British Columbia] Times Colonist: “Vancouver firefighters, eager to deploy two new boats, were disappointed last week when one of the vessels was, ironically, damaged by fire during transport…The two boats, worth approximately $1.5 million apiece, were custom built for Vancouver in Kingston, Ont., by MetalCraft Marine to replace the fire department’s two aging water craft…But as the long-awaited, 43-foot vessels were being transported to Vancouver by tractor trailer last week, there was a malfunction with the packaging…There is no concern that the boat is unsafe because of the fire [Vancouver Fire and Rescue spokesman added] adding that the vessel had been taken apart to transport.”

 

 AND NOW A WORD FROM CHARLES…

 “You can keep all the Muslim immigrants you want away from our shores. It will make no difference. In the end, the only thing that will work – as it worked to a large extent with al Qaeda – you have to go after them where they live, and drive them out.” -- Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.

 

 Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Sally Persons contributed to this report. Want FOX News Halftime Report in your inbox every day? Sign up here.",REAL
"Trump proposals that seem startling now – such as killing terrorists’ spouses – might be less so after years of a Trump administration, political experts say.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves to the crowd over the heads of media photographers as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally on June 11, 2016, at a private hangar at Greater Pittsburgh International Airport in Moon, Pa.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been extraordinary in many ways. But one of its most unprecedented – some would say shocking – aspects is the way the blustery billionaire keeps promising to do things that are likely beyond the limits of presidential authority set by the Constitution of the United States.

His supporters thrill to Mr. Trump’s promise of raw power, of course. Tearing up treaties, torturing terrorists, threatening Muslims – all are huge applause lines at Trump rallies. President Obama is already stretching the legal bounds of his office, many Republicans insist. Trump would be just going Democrats one better.

But others think Trump’s talk raises important questions about the extent to which he could threaten American law and democratic norms. The most likely change might not involve out-and-out authoritarianism as much as a coarsening of acceptable US political behavior. Trump proposals that seem startling now – such as killing terrorists’ spouses – might be less so after years of a Trump administration.

“What would be activated would be a normalization of certain kind of things ... The law might not change but the attitude would,” says Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.”

Many of Trump’s more outrageous proposals involve enemies, perceived and real.

Take the media. (Please, as Trump might paraphrase Henny Youngman.) Trump, who has barred organizations such as The Washington Post and Politico from covering his campaign events after coverage he deemed unfair, has promised to loosen libel laws to make it easier to sue media companies. Never mind the First Amendment, or that Congress is the body of government that actually writes laws.

Then there’s US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a pair of class action lawsuits charging the defunct Trump University with fraud. Trump’s personal and racial attacks on the US-born judge show a high degree of disregard for judicial independence, say critics, especially his insistence that somebody should “look into” Curiel’s background. If elected, how will Trump deal with losses in personal business or executive branch litigation?

Trump’s been particularly bombastic about what he’d do in terms of national security. He insists he’d target the wives and children of terrorists – a deliberate killing of civilian bystanders. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has said that if Trump orders such action the US military would likely refuse, setting off a dispute that could spiral into a constitutional crisis. Trump has also said numerous times that he would reinstitute waterboarding of terror suspects, or “worse.”

“That’s a really troubling thing. Waterboarding is torture, pretty clear. And if waterboarding is torture it violates criminal law,” says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University in Washington and author of “Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security.”

As for Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants entering the US, that may – or may not – pass constitutional muster. Traditionally the executive branch has broad latitude to set immigration regulations. However, the Supreme Court might look askance at a ban on a particular religious group, even if applied to people outside the US, according to Professor Edelson. It’s uncharted legal territory. And Congress might weigh in. After all, GOP lawmakers from House Speaker Paul Ryan on down have said they oppose such a ban.

“Trump could try to act against Congress, but that would put him on a weak footing,” notes Edelson.

Trump’s bombast has put many of his nominal Republican supporters in a difficult position. For years, GOP lawmakers been accusing Mr. Obama of abusing his office and bypassing the will of Congress, and now their party’s presumptive presidential nominee is promising to go even farther.

In response, some have taken the position that Trump will inevitably be restrained by existing checks on presidential power, both legislative and judicial. His staff will curb his enthusiasm for things he really can’t do. “He’ll have a White House counsel,” says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Well, maybe. The job of a White House counsel isn’t primarily to point out the limits of presidential authority. It’s to figure out legal justifications for things presidents already want to do, says Professor Rudalevige of Bowdoin.

That should not be a surprise. They’re lawyers, and the president is their client. Even if they conclude something can’t be done, the government has lots and lots of other legal offices. The Oval Office can pick and choose the opinion it likes best.

As to legislative and judicial checks on presidential power, those are not automatic. If a president oversteps their bounds, much would depend on what the people who staff those branches of government decide to do.

“The Constitution does not enforce itself,” says Edelson of American University.

That, in turn, could depend on the domestic political and international security situation facing the nation at that moment. Consider World War II: President Franklin Roosevelt, facing a grave threat, decided that it would be OK to go ahead and imprison Japanese-Americans in internment camps. He issued an executive order to that effect.

Today that seems pretty clearly unconstitutional, and it probably did then, too. But most US citizens accepted it due to the nature of the times.

That’s the civil liberties danger associated with national security fears. Power flows to the Oval Office, and when the danger is passed, not all of that power flows back.

Since 9/11 the presidency has changed, argues Edelson. President George W. Bush pioneered sweeping surveillance powers, some of which have since been enacted into law. Obama has intensified a nominally secret drone war that includes the extra-judicial killing of American citizens deemed to be terrorists. The next president will inherit that war intact.

This increase in presidential security power will be an issue whoever wins the presidency, says Edelson. It’s not specific to Trump or presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

“The reality is we shouldn’t trust anyone with unlimited power,” he says.

As for Trump, if he wins the White House in the fall, he can argue that voters have approved his many proposals. He has made no secret of how he would move to try and deport the millions of unauthorized immigrants currently living in the US. He has broadly hinted that he considers all Muslims in America complicit in some manner with Islamic State-inspired domestic terrorist attacks. It would be of a piece for Trump to propose heightened scrutiny for Muslims in the US.

In that case, the US would still be a democracy. But it might not still be a liberal democracy, according to Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

By “liberal democracy,” Mr. Hamid does not mean a government leftish on the political spectrum, but one that respects broadly recognized personal rights and freedoms. Under Trump, the US might become an illiberal democracy, according to Hamid: a place where a majority has voted to restrict the personal rights of a minority, or minorities.

“Regardless of the final [election] outcome ... the billionaire’s rise offers up a powerful – and frightening – reminder that liberal democracy, even where it’s entrenched, is a fragile thing,” Hamid writes.",REAL
"(16 fans) - Advertisement - Yeah. I know, I know. I'm an iconoclast. Yep and I'm proud of it. So the other day I got to thinking about religion and other things in the Homo Sapiens space called life. You know I get philosophical from time to time. And then I get inspired to tackle some very touchy and sensitive subjects that usually set off a lot of people. I get a perverse joy in rubbing people the wrong way and send them into WFT hissy fits. So you know that this article is going to have some folks seeing red and the God-police will start pulling out their truncheons to give me a whack on the ole noggin just to prove their point that I should not meddle in the affairs of the Great Father somewhere in a place called Heaven. The fact is that today, with the click of a mouse button the era of seeking answers and advice about God directly from rabbis, pastors, or imams is gradually coming to an end. And the cause of this backsliding and undermining of the hitherto unquestioned role of these ""emissaries of God on earth?"" Well, it's not a human person but Artificial Intelligence personified and its called ""Google."" Google may be the well-known supercomputer system that processes information by nano-seconds but AI has been with us for a long time. Consider the following: Self-driving cars have arrived; Siri (on your Iphones and Ipads) can listen to your voice and find the nearest movie theatre; and I.B.M. set the "" Jeopardy""- conquering Watson to work on medicine, initially training medical students, perhaps eventually helping in diagnosis. Nowadays, scarcely a week goes by without the announcement of a new A.I. product or technique. And for all the constant complaining about the religious right's inappropriate influence in politics and religious conservatives' attempts to tear down the church-state wall, the secular movement in America is actually doing quite well. The most recent Pew Research Center poll says 23 percent of Americans are religiously unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics and no-religion people); that percentage increases to 35 percent for Americans under thirty-five -- young people are not doing too many religious conversions, and see God as part of a belief system of their parents. So, for Americans in the Bible Belt and elsewhere this is alarming news - if secularism hasn't yet taken over the country, its on track for that to happen. And its all the fault of artificial intelligence as epitomized in the incredible superpower of Google . Now I do NOT intend to be dismissive of religion or disrespect people's beliefs OR their right to worship and believe what they want to. Me? I believe that every Thursday night when karaoke takes place in Brooklyn my bulldog Max turns into a werewolf seeking cats to relieve them of their hemoglobin fluids. You get my drift -- you can believe what you want but that does not make what you believe true. But one thing is not in doubt -- Google and God are on our daily human agendas. Indeed, the questions that Americans type into Google searches about God appear to confirm the country's rising secularism. For example, according to an economist writing in the New York Times : ""Despite the rising popularity of Pope Francis, who was elected in 2013, Google searches for churches are 15 percent lower in the first half of this decade than they were during the last half of the previous one. The top Google search including the word ""God"" is ""God of War,"" a videogame, with more than 700,000 searches per year."" Bummer, people searching for a videogame with the word ""God"" in it? WFT! Are people losing their cotton-picking minds? And to make matter worse the same economist, Stephens-Davidowitz, also discovered that ""Searches questioning God's existence are up."" He went further to seek what questions people Google whilst in their periods of doubt: The No. 1 question? In the United States of America? Is without a doubt: ""who created God?"" And the second? ""why God allows suffering?"" in number 3 ""why does God hate me? And in fourth place: ""why God needs so much praise?"" - Advertisement - It now appears from this data that people in America are looking to Google for answers to some pertinent and serious questions about God and in an oblique way questioning what they were taught by their parents and learned in churches on Sundays for so many years. There is absolutely no doubt that the Internet and Google have been at odds with religion. The Google phenomenon is also explainable in the context of the adversarial relationship between science and religion -- they just don't mix. Religion -- all religions -- are based on a system of blind, unquestioning belief and a rejection of objective inquiry that is substituted with faith. Religions place and validate this faith by statements found in their Holy Books that's interpreted by preachers, pastors, priests and ministers. These writings and teachings MUST be accepted without question by the faithful. Science on the other hand believes that ALL things in nature should be questioned and examined. And that it is only by this kind of objective inquiry that humankind has progressed and will progress. The Internet and Google are not the products of a Sunday sermon or the dogmatic faith or prayers of the faithful. Advances in medicine, communications technology, transportation, and other things that define modern human existence are the results of science -- not faith or belief. In fact, the cornerstone of the scientific method is to question everything; science accepts nothing that is not provable -- again and again and again. The rise of American secularism and of individuals with no religious affiliations is directly due to the rise and use of the Internet. Hitherto the Internet, and in particular Google , people used libraries and their church leaders for research on questions of faith, belief, and the existence of God. Religion had a stranglehold on knowledge and issues of God and Sin. But with the advent of Google information and knowledge became readily available and a new generation is now growing up in a society more open to doubting old canards and traditional belief systems. Google has undermined religion's central premise for the belief in God -- his all-knowing faculty. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Google can bring up literally millions of hits SIMULTANEOUSLY on every conceivable topic that the human mind can imagine -- including Biblical history, origins and that of other religious books, and their pros and cons. For iconoclasts like me declining religious affiliation is akin to social improvement. It's evidence of the clarifying influence of scientific rationality that's the end result of the global information revolution. I know that one of the questions here will undoubtedly be about personal faith in the context of our ability to pay bills, order clothes and food, communicate with friends and family and send emails across the word in seconds. And too, I'll hear the issue of the difference between Google as a profit-making, altruistic organization, and the church whose primary concern is about the condition of our souls. These are valid arguments when it comes to God and Google. I'm not suggesting that this is an either or situation. But what I am suggesting is that modern experiences in the secular world are now impacting religious belief and not in a very positive manner. - Advertisement - And yes, from a religious standpoint the question is: because of the rise of Google are religious institutions that used to answer questions about God and Sin crowdsourcing the acts of faith that the entire system is built on? Put another way, does religion risk losing its ability to provide answers to life on earth when Google's data cannot do so? And, in today's Internet and Google dominated world will faithful people when in doubt, Google ""who created God?""",FAKE
"— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 27, 2016 If you don’t have the guts to run for office on your ideas @realDonaldTrump , then you shouldn’t run for office at all. 
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 27, 2016 
Sen. Sanders was correct. Elections are supposed to be contests about ideas and visions for the future. However, the Republican Party ran out of ideas decades ago and has been on a slow and steady descent into substituting beliefs for facts, and hopes for visions. 
Trump is trying to suppress the vote because voter suppression is the only tactic that he has left that may lead him to victory. 
It takes guts and courage to run a presidential campaign based on ideas and principles. Donald Trump lacking in both the guts and courage departments which is why he is spending the final days of his presidential campaign trying to con and scheme his way into the Oval Office. 
The media will never say it, but real candidates for office don’t try to win by discouraging people from voting. The best candidates get people excited to vote and play their vital role in the democratic process. 
Bernie Sanders gets it. Donald Trump never will.",FAKE
"Philadelphia (CNN) The Democrats search for a rising star. Convention calculations for Bernie Sanders. Donald Trump makes a Western foray. And the superdelegate saga continues.

These storylines are all part of this week's ""Inside Politics"" forecast, which previews what political observers will be talking about in the coming days.

No one expects the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton relationship to devolve into Donald Trump-Ted Cruz territory. But there are lingering frustrations from the primary season, so there may be a few dustups in Philadelphia.

Or even brush fires, as CNN's Jeff Zeleny put it in describing the potential for Clinton-Sanders tensions during this week's Democratic National Convention.

""Some Sanders delegates are hoping that Monday is an opportunity for them to have their say. They were watching in Cleveland with great interest. Yes, the rules are different. Almost everything is different. The Clintons are definitely running a tighter convention here, but, the Sanders people are not that thrilled with her pick for a vice president . And they're enraged by this leak episode at the DNC .""

Why make a decision when you can appoint a commission?

Another big Sanders convention priority was getting rid of the so-called superdelegates who have favored Hillary Clinton. Those are the elected officials and party activists who wield convention votes and can decide who to support regardless of voting in their home states.

The party establishment wants to protect its perks, and so Sanders' proposal ran into trouble in the convention rules committee. But the proposed rules do call for a study, which may steer the commission toward Sanders' priorities.

It recommends the commission keep the superdelegates, but requires that all but a select few be bound by results of the primary or caucus in their home state.

3) Boston is to Obama as Philadelphia is to ...?

Who will be this year's Barack Obama?

As in, do the Democrats have a next-generation star who will become a household name this week?

Obama made his big jump in 2004 as a prime-time speaker at the convention in Boston that nominated John Kerry for president.

Julie Pace of the Associated Press noted that the list of Democratic prospects this year isn't as long because the GOP has had so much success in state and local elections during the Obama years.

""There just isn't a big bench for the Democratic party, particularly in governor's mansions across the country,"" she said. ""You have Democratic leaders who will be watching some of these lesser-known Democrats to see if one of them may be the next rising star who could be up for (a presidential) election in four or eight years.""

4) History through the eyes of Willie Brown

Willie Brown is now a fixture at Democratic conventions, but he wasn't always treated as a party icon.

The liberal activist and former San Francisco mayor recalls when it was hard for African-American delegates to get their credentials.

Jonathan Martin of The New York Times shared snippets from an oral history of sorts that Brown recorded.

""It was fascinating talking to him about the changing nature of these conventions,"" Martin said. ""You know, he was a young man in his 30s fighting folks from the South who did not want to have black delegations seated. He is now here at the end of a two-term black president, and watching him ... and what the party has become was a fascinating hour for me.""

Donald Trump heads west this week, looking to make inroads in a region that has been difficult for him.

Colorado is the swing-state prize Trump hopes to sway, and CNN's Maeve Reston notes that recent polls there have shown a steady lead for Hillary Clinton. But Trump being more competitive in Colorado could help tilt the electoral college.

""Talking to people in that state, though, it's really interesting to see the reaction to the Pence pick there because in some ways Pence could help Trump turn out social conservatives, but (he) hurts him with so many of those key swing voters who are critical to him winning there,"" she said. ""So it will be fascinating to see how he plays that this week.""",REAL
"law , economy , society , standard of living , RBTH Daily The study assessed attitudes about non-violent legal violations, such as working ""off the books"" or not officially registering a business. Source: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/TASS 
Thirty percent of Russians believe that they can increase revenues or improve their standard of living only by violating the law, a recent survey carried out by RANEPA's Center for Socio-Political Monitoring found. ""Alarming symptom"" 
Respondents' agreement with this point of view depends on their economic well-being, experts say. The worse their financial situation, the more they believe they need to break the law to become wealthier. For example, 52 percent of respondents with low incomes feel this way. U.S. asked to join probe into Russian anti-corruption official 
The study assessed attitudes about non-violent legal violations, such as working ""off the books"" or not officially registering a business, the Center's director Andrei Pokida told RBC. The survey was conducted by personal interviews with 1,600 people from 35 regions. 
""This is an alarming symptom, as citizens' attitudes toward the shadow economy and their willingness to engage in this process can be observed against the background of a gradual decline in real incomes of the population,"" the researchers state. The average income of Russians has decreased by 6.1 percent during the past last year, a record decline since 1999. Almost half of Russians justify the shadow economy 
Experts found that working people have a ""very approving"" attitude towards various forms of the shadow economy. 
While only 7.2 percent of respondents believe that it does more benefit than harm, 34.5 percent of respondents believe the shadow economy is more beneficial than harmful, and 38.3 percent are inclined to think that it brings both benefit and harm equally; the rest found it difficult to reply. These statistics imply that about 45 percent of the employed population of Russia justify the informal economy. Russian official received a bribe of 2 bags of Whiskas 
Compared to previous survey results, the number of people who clearly approve of the informal economy decreased, down from 10.5 percent in 2013. However, the proportion of those who were neutral slightly increased, up from 33.2 percent. But Russians were even more tolerant of the shadow economy in 1990: 49.5 percent were convinced that it brought both benefit and harm, 21 percent supported it and only 13.5 percent opposed it. 
Over the subsequent 11 years, though, attitudes changed dramatically. In 2001, the number who supported the informal economy dropped to a historic low of 2.1 percent, while those opposing it increased to 49 percent; 26.7 percent remained neutral. 
According to RANEPA's June estimates, about 30 million people are engaged in Russia's shadow labor market, or 40.3 percent of the economically active population. Of these, 8.7 million people (11.7 percent) are completely excluded from the official workforce, while the remaining receive a portion of their salary ""under the table"" or have additional unreported earnings.",FAKE
"For the first time, nearly all of the countries are committing to some level of action.

Fog and smog swallow up the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Monday, Nov. 2, 2015. The UN's environmental authority has quietly raised its assessment of the level global greenhouse gas emissions can reach in 2020 while still avoiding dangerous climate change, ahead of the Paris climate summit scheduled for late November.

Negotiators from 195 countries are set to meet in Paris for two weeks, beginning Nov. 30, to wrap up a new, historic pact to limit global warming. A committed group-effort approach replaces top-down strategies that haven’t worked.

For the first time, nearly all countries are committing to some level of action, eroding a long-standing divide between developed and developing countries. To get there, however, negotiators jettisoned specific targets on greenhouse gas emissions imposed in a binding treaty. Those targets have been replaced by an overall goal countries have accepted: to hold global warming to no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F.) by 2100. Each country will determine its own approaches and how much it can contribute to curbing emissions – through cuts or a reduction in the growth rate of emissions – that, collectively, would put the world on the 2-degree path.

These commitments have deadlines of 2030, and in some cases 2025. They represent the first step in a process that would lead to periodic reviews and intensification of these efforts until atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, are stabilized at a level that holds warming to 2 degrees C.

Q: What do the commitments look like?

More than 150 countries have submitted “intended nationally determined commitments” (INDCs), according to Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These countries represent about 90 percent of global emissions. The commitments vary in ambition. Each country sets its own baseline against which it gauges progress. And some commitments are contingent on receiving financial help.

China has pledged to slow the growth in its CO emissions so that they peak around 2030. That includes a pledge to increase the share of electricity generated by renewable and nuclear sources to 20 percent by 2030. The United States has pledged to cut carbon emissions to at least 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Others, such as Ethiopia and Guatemala, use “business as usual” projections as their baselines and hold part or all of their emissions pledges contingent on receiving aid to pay for green energy technologies and for adaptation.

Q: What effect will these have on global warming?

These commitments represent an encouraging shift away from business as usual. But if they all are fully implemented and nothing more is done in the interim, they will have placed the planet on a path to warming around 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F.) by 2030 rather than 2 degrees. The draft agreement recognizes this, however. It envisions regular reviews aimed at assessing progress and intensifying efforts. If the reviews are set up at five-year intervals, as some expect, the first would come in 2020.

Q: What gives people hope that this will work?

Climate policy specialists cite several factors. One of the most important is a change in attitude. Strategies that once seemed burdensome are increasingly seen as economic opportunities, notes Taryn Fransen, a climate policy specialist with the World Resources Institute in Washington who leads an international collaboration tracking the INDCs and efforts to fulfill them. In addition, over time countries have become more aware of how global warming is affecting them. And renewable technologies are taking hold faster than many had predicted, a pace many models don’t incorporate.

Still, that growth may not be enough, others argue. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has noted that to hold warming to 2 degrees C by 2100, countries will need two more arrows in their quivers: the use of bioenergy combined with trapping the CO emissions and sequestering that carbon underground. Both are controversial and, for now, neither is available on a large scale.

Q: What are the remaining hurdles to the agreement?

One critical element is money: How much financing will be forthcoming for developing countries, and what sort of compensation might there be for loss and damage? Developing countries still have doubts about the credibility of past commitments from rich countries to increase access to financing for climate-related projects. In 2009, rich nations pledged $100 billion by 2020. Even when that is met, questions remain about what follows. Developing countries are looking for language that indicates this help will continue and increase.

On loss and damage, the US, for instance, is working to ensure that the agreement has no language that implies open-ended liability on the part of developed countries for the damage global warming inflicts on developing countries. That issue may await the final week of the talks to get sorted out, notes Alden Meyer, with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. Another issue is the gap between the commitments and emissions reductions needed to put the planet on the 2-degree C path and how that will be addressed. Provisions for some sort of review process will come out of the talks, Mr. Meyer says.“But how they are couched and how effective they will be, and whether they really create an opening to stand back and look at this again in four or five years – that’s a question,” he says.",REAL
"This post has been updated.

Donald Trump released a letter from his personal doctor on Thursday that summarizes his latest physical exam, saying he takes a cholesterol-lowering drug and is overweight but overall is in “excellent physical health.”

Trump discussed the results of the exam on ""The Dr. Oz Show"" on Thursday afternoon, saying that presidential candidates have an ""obligation"" to voters to be healthy and that he feels like he is still in his 30s.

""When you're running for president, I think you have an obligation to be healthy. I just don't think you can do the work if you're not healthy. I don't think you can represent the country properly if you're not a healthy person,"" Trump, 70, said on the health talk-show, adding that the last time he was hospitalized was when he had his appendix removed at age 11.

[Trump admits he wouldn’t release his medical results if they were ‘bad’]

The one-page letter is signed by Trump's  longtime doctor, Harold N. Bornstein, a gastroenterological specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. The letter states that Trump is 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighs 236 pounds, making him overweight and on the verge of being obese for his height. Trump said in the interview that he would like to lose 15 to 20 pounds but that weight loss has always been difficult for him because of his lifestyle.

The letter also lists the results of recent lab tests, which Bornstein says are all within the normal range. The letter says that Trump takes a statin, a drug for lowering cholesterol, along with a low dose of aspirin. During the talk show, Trump said that both of his parents lived to an old age and many of his mother's relatives in Scotland lived into their 90s. The letter states that there ""is no family history of premature cardiac or neoplastic disease.""

While the letter released by Trump gives more information on his health and physical makeup than previously known, it does not constitute his medical records nor does it give extensive detail about past health matters.

Trump discussed the document with talk-show host and surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz during a taping in New York on Wednesday that aired on Thursday afternoon. Oz is popular nationally but his credibility has been questioned by critics. Trump disclosed the one-page letter to The Washington Post on Thursday soon before the campaign released it publicly. In the letter, which is dated Sept. 13, Bornstein states that Trump has been under his care since 1980, and sits for an annual physical exam.

Bornstein's letter this week lacked the creativity of a letter he signed in December that called Trump's health “extraordinary” and declared he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein told NBC News last month that he wrote the letter in about five minutes as a Trump associate waited to collect it, though he stood by his glowing assessment.

In the letter released on Thursday, Trump’s “laboratory results” from a blood test and other exams are also given. He has a cholesterol level of 169, with his level of high-density lipoproteins at 63, his low-density lipoproteins at 94.

The businessman’s blood pressure is 116 over 70. His blood sugar level is 99 milligrams per deciliter. Trump’s level of triglycerides, which are a type of fat in blood, is 61 milligrams per deciliter. And his prostate-specific antigen level is measured as 0.15.

“His liver function and thyroid function tests are all within the normal range,” Bornstein writes, adding that “his last colonoscopy was performed on July 10, 2013 which was normal and revealed no polyps.”

Trump’s latest electrocardiogram test and chest X-ray took place in April 2016 and were “normal.""

With regard to Trump’s heart, Bornstein writes that “his cardiac evaluation included a transthoracic echocardiogram” in December 2014 and “this study was reported within the range of normal.”

Bornstein notes that there is “no family history of premature cardiac or neoplastic disease” and that Trump’s parents, Fred and Mary, “lived into their late 80s and 90s.”

[Despite gestures, Trump is still the least transparent U.S. presidential candidate in modern history]

Overall, Trump seems to be relatively healthy, said Allen Taylor, chief of cardiology with MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute, which is based at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

“He could lose a few pounds,” said Taylor, who reviewed Trump's information. “His BMI could be improved upon.”

Because Trump is taking medication, his cholesterol levels are normal to optimal, Taylor said. The information released shows he has had a complete cardiovascular screening evaluation, and shows him to be at low to intermediate risk for someone his age of developing heart disease in the next 10 years. Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and men typically have a higher risk than women. Using two conventional risk calculators for heart disease risk, Taylor said Trump has a 7 to 8 percent chance of developing heart disease—stroke, heart attack, sudden death—in the next 10 years.

The metric that raised some eyebrows was the inclusion of his testosterone level. Some doctors will screen older patients for testosterone levels, but usually only if there are symptoms suggesting low levels, such as extreme fatigue and lack of libido. Some doctors may prescribe testosterone supplements, a relatively controversial practice, Taylor said. He said Trump’s level is in the normal range, and is not a factor or indication for overall health.

“To me, it’s a non-number. It’s like a vitamin D level. It would not be an indication of a presidential candidate’s overall health,” he said.

Trump’s activity comes as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is returning to the campaign trail following a bout of pneumonia. Clinton’s campaign on Wednesday released a two-page letter from her doctor that said she had been treated this week for “mild” bacterial pneumonia but is in overall good health and “fit to serve as president.” For months Trump has raised questions about Clinton’s health and stamina, and on Wednesday wondered aloud, tauntingly, about whether Clinton could hold hour-long rallies.

“I don’t know, folks. Do you think Hillary could stand up here for an hour?” Trump asked thousands of supporters on Wednesday in Canton, Ohio, where he held an event.

Read the full text of the letter here.",REAL
"Print 
According to CBS News , a Des Moines woman has been charged a woman with election misconduct, a Class D felony, after officials said she voted twice. 
Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek says officers charged 55-year-old Terri Rote with first-degree election misconduct on Thursday after being notified by elections officials that she had submitted two absentee ballots. 
The real bombshell comes in paragraph 3: 
According to an Iowa Public Radio report, Rote voted two times for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
After quoting Trump’s “oft-repeated line on the … campaign trail: ‘The polls are rigged,'” the CBS reporters note that Thursday’s development is not a one-off deal. They quote Polk County Attorney John Sarcone as saying, “This [is] maybe the third [time] we’ve had some irregularity that’s resulted in a criminal charge.” 
From there, the writers go on to express their newfound support of voter ID laws, adding that Republicans have been right all along and some method for keeping elections honest is long overdue. 
Oh, wait a seond: No they don’t. That would be the logical conclusion, but since when are liberals capable of logical thought? 1 shares",FAKE
"The Supreme Court unanimously decided that once a defendant is found guilty or pleads guilty to a crime, the ""speedy"" part of the constitutional Sixth Amendment's ""right to a speedy and public trial"" no longer applies.

""Does the Sixth Amendment’s speedy trial guarantee apply to the sentencing phase of a criminal prosecution? That is the sole question this case presents. We hold that the guarantee protects the accused from arrest or indictment through trial, but does not apply once a defendant has been found guilty at trial or has pleaded guilty to criminal charges,"" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered in the Court's opinion.

The case, Betterman v. Montana, specifically referred to Brandon Thomas Betterman, who was given his seven-year prison sentence 14 months after he initially pleaded guilty to felony bail jumping in a Montana state court. He took the case to Montana's Supreme Court, which ruled that sentencing was not part of the ""trial"" in a ""speedy trial"" – a ruling the Supreme Court upheld Thursday.

Criminal proceedings take place in three parts: an investigation prior to arrest, a charge and trial where the accused is assumed innocent until proven guilty, and finally, after a conviction, a sentencing. The Court ruled that the language in all three of these stages – ""accused,"" ""convicted,"" ""trial,"" and ""sentencing""– have distinctly separate protections.

""The Sixth Amendment’s Speedy Trial Clause homes in on the second period: from arrest or indictment through conviction. The constitutional right, our precedent holds, does not attach until this phase begins, that is, when a defendant is arrested or formally accused. Today we hold that the right detaches upon conviction, when this second stage ends,"" the Court's opinion said.

In constitutional cases like these, as Rory Little wrote for SCOTUSblog, it is in the high court's benefit to provide as much specificity as possible:

In Betterman v. Montana, a cut-and-dried Sixth Amendment case with a simple question, the Supreme Court took the opportunity to raise – but not rule on – additional questions about protections afforded under separate due process clauses. While ""the speedy trial right — like other similarly aimed measures — loses force upon conviction,"" Betterman may have had ""other recourse"" under the due process clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments, the opinion reads.

Both the Fifth Amendment, which grants the right of a grand jury and protect against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, and the 14th Amendment, which protects the rights of citizens more broadly, require a ""due process of law"" in any proceeding that could deny a citizen ""life, liberty, or property.""

However, because Betterman brought forward a Sixth Amendment case, the Court had ""no reason to consider today the appropriate test for such a Due Process Clause challenge.""

In concurring with the Court's decision however, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a point to note that Betterman was not wrong to question inordinately long sentencing times – he just argued the wrong case.

""I write separately to emphasize that the question is an open one,"" Sotomayor wrote.",REAL
"In March we wrote: Reading About Zika May Hurt Your Brain . We listed 35 sensational ""news"" headlines about potential catastrophes related to a Zika epidemic. The common factor of those panic creating media wave - all those headlines included the miraculous little word may . The pieces were pure speculations with some quoting this or that ""expert"" who was hunting for research funds or lobbying for some pharmaceutical or pesticide conglomerate. In June we added: Zika Virus Does Not Cause Birth Defects - Fighting It Probably Does . New serious research found what some people in Brazil had suspected from the very start of the small and strictly locally limited jump in microencephaly cases in Brazil: [D]octors in the Zika affected areas in Brazil pointed out that the real cause of somewhat increased microcephaly in the region was probably the insecticide pyriproxyfen, used to kill mosquito larvae in drinking water: The Brazilian doctors noted that the areas of northeast Brazil that had witnessed the greatest number of microcephaly cases match with areas where pyriproxyfen is added to drinking water in an effort to combat Zika-carrying mosquitoes . Pyriproxyfen is reported to cause malformations in mosquito larvae, and has been added to drinking water in the region for the past 18 months. Pyriproxyfen is produced by a Sumitomo Chemical - an important Japanese poison giant. It was therefore unsurprising that the New York Times and others called the Brazilian doctors' report a ""conspiracy theory"" and trotted out some ""experts"" to debunk it. ... But [s]cientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute also researched the pyriproxyfen thesis. They found : Pyriproxifen is an analog of juvenile hormone, which corresponds in mammals to regulatory molecules including retinoic acid, a vitamin A metabolite, with which it has cross-reactivity and whose application during development causes microcephaly . ... [T]ests of pyriproxyfen by the manufacturer, Sumitomo, widely quoted as giving no evidence for developmental toxicity, actually found some evidence for such an effect , including low brain mass and arhinencephaly—incomplete formation of the anterior cerebral hemispheres—in rat pups. Finally, the pyriproxyfen use in Brazil is unprecedented—it has never before been applied to a water supply on such a scale. ... Given this combination of information we strongly recommend that the use of pyriproxyfen in Brazil be suspended pending further investigation. Today the Washington Post finally admits that the Zika virus does not cause birth defects: [T]o the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil. The wide areas where the flue virus occurred outside of the small area in Brazil saw no increase in birth defect numbers. The number of (naturally occurring) microcephality cases stayed constant despite a very large increase in (harmless) Zika virus infections. The numbers in Brazil also turned out to be partially inflated because of a lack of standard diagnosis criteria and unreliable statistics. A factor we had pointed to in our very first piece. The WaPo piece today muses about several ""possible"" causes for the local increase in cases in northeastern Brazil that indeed happened. It quotes some of the very ""experts"", like from the pharmaceutical industry influenced CDC, that were wrong on the issue since the very first panic headline. It strenuously avoids to even mention the most likely cause - the excessive local use of an insecticide that is supposed to cause birth defects - in developing mosquitoes. Thus the reporting is still void of journalistic ethics and irresponsible in its conclusions. It did not take much effort to get this right. An hour or two of skimming through publicly available sources of good standing, some basic higher education and sound reasoning was enough. But instead of doing such basic inquiries ""journalists"" and media ""served"" panic and speculations by biased ""experts"". Keep this story in mind for the next sensationalist onslaught of panic headline. There surely will be some ""interests"" behind those; just don't expect unbiased facts and basic logic reasoning. Comment: And Zika -- like Ebola, SARS, bird flu, West Nile, etc. -- will fall down the memory hole...until the next scare comes along.",FAKE
"The early 2016 presidential debate already is full of conversation about when and how to use American power abroad. An equally important but often overlooked question is this: Why use American power?

This part of the debate over national-security policy focuses on what Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls “the purposes of American power.” Broadly speaking, there are four potential reasons to use American power, including military power, on the world stage:",REAL
"Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis VN:F [1.9.22_1171] Close Transcript Transcript: Sesame Seeds for Knee Osteoarthritis 
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. 
Ever since the 1920s, doctors have been injecting arthritis patients with gold. Evidently, “gold-based medicines have been in use for thousands of years,” and remarkably, are still in clinical use as so called disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs—meaning they can slow the progression of rheumatoid arthritis. 
Unfortunately, such drugs can be toxic, even fatal, causing conditions such as gold lung, a gold-induced lung disease. “Although its use can be limited by the incidence of serious toxicity,” injectable gold has been shown to be beneficial. But maybe, some researchers suspected, some of that benefit is the sesame oil that’s injected, which is used as the liquid carrier for the gold. 
Sesame seeds contain anti-inflammatory compounds, with names like sesamin and sesamol, which researchers suspect “may serve as a potential treatment for various inflammatory diseases.” But, these were in vitro studies. First, we have to see if it has an anti-inflammatory effect in people, not just cells in a petri dish. But, there haven’t been any studies on the effects of sesame seeds on inflammatory markers in people with arthritis, for example—until now. 
“Considering the high prevalence of osteoarthritis…and since until now there has not been any human studies to evaluate the effect of sesame in [osteoarthritis] patients, this study was designed to assess the effect of administration of sesame [seeds] on inflammation…” And, they found a significant drop in inflammatory markers. But, what effect did it have on their actual disease? 
Fifty patients with osteoarthritis of the knee were split into two groups; standard treatment, or standard treatment plus about a quarter-cup of sesame seeds a day, for two months. Before they started, they described their pain as about 9 out of 10—where zero is no pain, and 10 is the maximum pain tolerable. After two months, the control group felt a little better—pain down to 7. But, the sesame group dropped down to 3.5—significantly lower than the control group. 
The researchers conclude that sesame appeared to have a “positive effect,”“improving clinical signs and symptoms in patients with knee [osteoarthritis].” But, the main problem with this study is that the control group wasn’t given a placebo. It’s hard to come up with a kind of fake sesame seed. But, without a placebo, they basically compared doing nothing to doing something. And, any time you have patients do something special, you can’t discount the placebo effect. 
But, what are the downsides? I mean that’s the nice thing about using food as medicine—only good side effects. Though the results are mixed, there have been studies using placebo controls that found that adding sesame seeds to one’s diet may improve our cholesterol and antioxidant status. And, the amount of sesamin found in as little as about one tablespoon of sesame seeds can modestly lower blood pressure a few points within a month—enough, perhaps, to lower fatal stroke and heart attack risk by about 5%; potentially saving thousands of lives. Please consider volunteering to help out on the site. Close Sources Video Sources",FAKE
"Posted on November 9, 2016 by DavidSwanson 
Dear Democrats, 
Are you finding yourselves suddenly a bit doubtful of the wisdom of drone wars? Presidential wars without Congress? Massive investment in new, smaller, “more usable” nuclear weapons? The expansion of bases across Africa and Asia? Are you disturbed by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen? Can total surveillance and the persecution of whistleblowers hit a point where they’ve gone too far? Is the new Cold War with Russia looking less than ideal now? How about the militarization of U.S. police: is it time to consider alternatives to that? 
I hear you. I’m with you. Let’s build a movement together to end the madness of constantly overthrowing governments with bombs. Let’s propose nonviolent alternatives to a culture gone mad with war. Let’s end the mindset that creates war in the first place . 
We have opportunities as well as dangers. A President Trump is unpredictable. He wants to proliferate nuclear weapons, bomb people, kill people, stir up hatred of people, and increase yet further military spending. But he also said the new Cold War was a bad idea. He said he wanted to end NATO, not to mention NAFTA, as well as breaking the habit of overthrowing countries left and right. Trump seems to immediately back off such positions under the slightest pressure. Will he adhere to them under massive pressure from across the political spectrum? It’s worth a try . 
We have an opportunity to build a movement that includes a focus on and participation from refugees/immigrants. We have a chance to create opposition to racist wars and racism at home. We may just discover that what’s left of the U.S. labor movement is suddenly more open to opposing wars. Environmental groups may find a willingness to oppose the world’s top destroyer of the environment: the U.S. military. Civil liberties groups may at long last be willing to take on the militarism that creates the atrocities they oppose. We have to work for such a broader movement. We have to build on the trend of protesting the national anthem and make it a trend of actively resisting the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. 
I know you’re feeling a little beat down at the moment. You shouldn’t. You had a winning candidate in Bernie Sanders. Your party cheated him out of the nomination. All that stuff you tell yourselves about encouraging demographic trends and the better positions of young people is all true. You just looked for love in all the wrong places. Running an unpopular candidate in a broken election system is not the way to change the world. Even a working election system would not be the central means by which to improve anything. There’s no getting back the mountains of money and energy invested in this election. But activism is an unlimited resource. Directing your energies now in more strategic directions can inspire others who in turn can re-inspire you. 

Dear Republicans, 
Your outsider is threatening insiderness. He’s got the same tribe of DC corporate lobbyists planning his nominations that Hillary Clinton had lined up for hers. Can we resist that trend? Can we insist that the wars be ended? Can those moments of off-the-cuff honesty about dinosaurs like NATO be turned into actual action? Donald Trump took a lot of heat for proposing to be fair to Palestinians as well as Israelis, and he backed off fast. Can we encourage him to stand behind that initial inclination? 
Can we stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership and end NAFTA as well? We heard a million speeches about how bad NAFTA is. How about actually ending it? Can we stop the looming war supplemental spending bill? Can we put a swift halt to efforts in Congress to repeal the right to sue Saudi Arabia and other nations for their wars and lesser acts of terrorism? 
How about all that well deserved disgust with the corporate media? Can we actually break up that cartel and allow opportunities for media entrepreneurs? 

Dear United States, 
Donald Trump admitted we had a broken election system and for a while pretended that he would operate outside of it by funding his own campaign. It’s time to actually fix it. It’s time to end the system of legalized bribery, fund elections, make registration automatic, make election day a holiday, end gerrymandering, eliminate the electoral college, create the right to vote, create the public hand-counting of paper ballots at every polling place, and create ranked choice voting as Maine just did. 
Voter suppression efforts in this year’s elections should be prosecuted in each state. And any indications of fraud in vote counting by machines should be investigated. We should take the opportunity created by all the McCarthyist nonsense allegations of Russian interference to get rid of unverifiable voting. 
There are also areas in which localities and states, as well as international organizations and alliances, must now step up to take the lead. First and foremost is investing in a serious effort to avoid climate catastrophe. Second is addressing inequality that has surpassed the Middle Ages: both taxing the overclass and upholding the underclass must be pursued creatively. Mass incarceration and militarized police are problems that states can solve. 
But we can advance a positive agenda across the board by understanding this election in the way that much of the world will understand it: as a vote against endless war. Let’s end the wars, end the weapons dealing, close the bases, and cut the $1 trillion a year going into the military. Hell, why not demand that a businessman president for the first time ever audit the Pentagon and find out what it’s spending money on? 

Dear World, 
We apologize for having elected President Trump as well as for nearly electing President Clinton. Many of you believe we defeated the representative of the enlightenment in favor of the sexist racist buffoon. This may be a good thing. Or at least it may be preferable to your eight-year-long delusion that President Obama was a man of peace and justice. 
I hate to break it to you, but the United States government has been intent on dominating the rest of you since the day it was formed. If electing an obnoxious president helps you understand that, so much the better. Stop joining in U.S. “humanitarian wars” please. They never were humanitarian, and if you can recognize that now, so much the better. The new guy openly wants to “steal their oil.” So did the last several presidents, although none of them said so. Are we awake now? 
Shut down the U.S. bases in your country. They represent your subservience to Donald Trump. Close them. 
Want to save the earth’s climate? Build a nonviolent movement that resists destructive agendas coming out of the United States. 
Want to uphold the rule of law, diplomacy, aid, decency, and humanitarianism? Stop making exceptions for U.S. crimes. Tell the International Criminal Court to indict a non-African. Prosecute the crime and crimes of war in your own courts. Stop cooperating in the surrounding and threatening of Russia, China, and Iran. Clinton wanted to send weapons to Ukraine and bomb Syria. Make sure Trump doesn’t. Make peace in Ukraine and Syria before January. 
It’s time that we all began treating the institution of war as the unacceptable vestige of barbarism that it can appear when given an openly racist, sexist, bigoted face. We have the ability to use nonviolent tools to direct the world where we want it to go. We have to stop believing the two big lies: that we are generally powerless, and that our only power lies in elections. Let’s finally get active. Let’s start by ending war making . This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
"Trick-Or-Treaters Get Their Socks Rocked By BADASS Hillary Pumpkin Outside Posted on October 31, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
An incredible video is being shared on social media after someone wanted to go political with their jack-o-lantern carving this year. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, this badass pumpkin seemed to center around her – and it will surely knock the socks right off any trick-or-treater headed to their house tonight. 
Halloween is a fun time for many people – especially families with younger ones. However, it seems that a few homeowners decided to try and entertain the adults that may cross their path. Proving just that is a video shared to the Facebook page called “ Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children ,” which shows how one person went political with theirs. 
As can be seen in the short clip , the jack-o-lantern was emptied and carved to look like a set of jail bars. Making it just that much better, the person responsible for carving the pumpkin actually stuffed a picture of Hillary in there to make it appear as though she is in prison – where she belongs. 
Within just a few short days, the video has already been seen over 3 million times with that number on the rise. However, if you think people on social media are ramped up over the ingenious carving, you can imagine the reactions that thing will get from trick-or-treaters tonight. 
As it turns out, the cool idea actually sparked a bit of a movement with several other people doing the same. In fact, in order to make it crystal clear, others even wrote the words “Hillary 4 Prison” on their creations as well:",FAKE
"Topics: Hillary Clinton , Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , Brexit , FBI Director Comey Sunday, 13 November 2016 
Despite the continuing wailing and tears and gnashing of teeth from angry Hillary supporters, the Trump Party is officially the winner of the 2016 presidential election. 
Foremost now in all the post-election sound and fury is the new United States of Amurkier, according to analyst Dmitri Globulus, of the website Times Die Hard. 
Hillary and the Clintonistas are lining up all the culprits for the defeat--since that obviously had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton herself--starting with FBI Director James Comey. 
It wasn't her politics of more of the same, including beefing up wars in the middle east, continuing the policies of Obama, and renewing hostility with Russia. 
No, it was Comey. 
Comey was very nasty in announcing new emails had been discovered in Anthony Weiner's computer, which tipped the balance. 
If only he had kept his mouth shut, according to the Clinton DieHards, she would have prevailed. 
Her failure to talk Amurexit had nothing to do with it, whereas Trump continually signaled ""The System is Rigged!"" 
But Dmitri Globulus says Trump was on target, not Clinton. 
""It's basically a grapes of wrath syndrome. Too much imbalance in wealth distribution, severe economic depression, and Government Pretense of a 'recovery' that fooled nobody."" 
Add in free trade ideas and shipping jobs to the cheapest labor markets in the world leaving ordinary citizens out of work and you've got a lot of anger. 
Add in Obamacare with its premiums going up and the Pharmaceutical Industry leaping up its profit margins--more anger. 
Add in stupid wars with the only logic behind them making money for the munitions people and The War Establishment--more anger. 
Add in refugees fleeing somewhere, anywhere, with their countries either blasted economically or from continuing, monstrous war--more anger. 
Add in Washington-As-Usual with its talking heads and scoffing and labeling its opposition ignorant and stupid--more anger. 
The Brexit people across the Atlantic are calling out: ""Welcome to the Club! We're done with the Plutocrat Trans-nationalists!"" 
Many Amurkier people have responded: ""So are we! Time to change it!"" 
The Clintonistas meanwhile continue to enjoy their outrage. Make joseph k winter's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
"BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic State militants have accepted a pledge of allegiance by Nigerian-grown Boko Haram extremist group, a spokesman for the Islamic State movement said Thursday.

Boko Haram has been weakened by a multinational force that has dislodged it from a score of northeastern Nigerian towns. But its new Twitter account, increasingly slick and more frequent video messages and a new media arm all were considered signs that the group is now being helped by IS propagandists.

Then on Saturday, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Sheka posted an audio recording online that pledged allegiance to IS. On Thursday the Islamic State group's media arm Al-Furqan, in an audio recording by spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, said that Boko Haram's pledge of allegiance has been accepted, claiming the caliphate has now expanded to West Africa.

Al-Adnani had urged foreign fighters from around the world to migrate and join Boko Haram.

""We announce our allegiance to the Caliph of the Muslims ... and will hear and obey in times of difficulty and prosperity, in hardship and ease, and to endure being discriminated against, and not to dispute about rule with those in power, except in case of evident infidelity regarding that which there is a proof from Allah,"" said the message.

The Boko Haram pledge to IS comes as the militants reportedly were massing in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza, considered their headquarters, for a showdown with the Chadian-led multinational force.

Boko Haram killed an estimated 10,000 people last year, and it is blamed for last April's abduction of more than 275 schoolgirls. Thousands of Nigerians have fled to neighboring Chad.

The group is waging a nearly 6-year insurgency to impose Muslim Shariah law in Nigeria. It began launching attacks across the border into Cameroon last year, and this year its fighters struck in Niger and Chad in retaliation to their agreement to form a multinational force to fight the militants.

Boko Haram followed the lead of IS in August by declaring an Islamic caliphate in northeast Nigeria that grew to cover an area the size of Belgium. The Islamic State had declared a caliphate in vast swaths of territory that it controls in Iraq and Syria.

The Nigerian group has also followed IS in publishing videos of beheadings. The latest one, published March 2, borrowed certain elements from IS productions, such as the sound of a beating heart and heavy breathing immediately before the execution, according to SITE Intelligence Group.

In video messages last year, Boko Haram's leader sent greetings and praise to both IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and leaders of al-Qaida. But Boko Haram has never been an affiliate of al-Qaida, some analysts surmise because al-Qaida considers the Nigerians' indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim civilians as un-Islamic.

Recent offensives have marked a sharp escalation by African nations against Boko Haram. An African Union summit agreed on sending a force of 8,750 troops to fight Boko Haram.

Military operations in Niger's east have killed at least 500 Boko Haram fighters since Feb. 8, Nigerien officials have said.

Members of the U.N. Security Council proposed Thursday that the international community supply money, equipment, troops and intelligence to a five-nation African force fighting Boko Haram.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
"BNI Store Nov 4 2016 Wife of Muslim jihadist who killed and wounded over 100 in Orlando nightclub massacre says she “knew nothing” “I was unaware of everything,” says Omar Mateen’s wife, 30-year-old Noor Salman (whose whereabouts were a matter of controversy for some time after the massacre), has given her first interview since the Pulse Nightclub massacre to the New York Times. The New York Times piece does not go into detail about her movements since the FBI seemingly lost track of her, although it suggests she is still a person of interest to law enforcement. Her lawyers pop up early in the article to insist she “did nothing wrong” and to forbid questions about her discussions with federal agents. Salman said she had no idea what Mateen was up to on the day of the attack. She knew her husband watched jihadist videos, but she did not think much of it. But how could she have not suspected what her husband was planning – she knew he had the weapons, she drove him to the nightclub and dropped him off: Noor Salman, wife of Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, had all the hallmarks of a willing accomplice to her husband’s jihadist slaughter. Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom told The Times that studies show relatives and friends are aware of budding terrorist activities about 64% of the time and argued that Mateen’s abusive relationship with Salman “doesn’t give her a free pass as a bystander to not come forward.” Salman insists she had no dark suspicions about several trips she took with Mateen that have been viewed as preparation for his terrorist career, although the lawyers notably intervened to prevent her from discussing the most notorious of these incidents – the April 2015 trip to Disneyworld that Mateen may have used to case the park for an attack. Salman did nothing to warn the police of her husband’s intentions. When the FBI first questioned Salman, she admitted to bringing Mateen ammunition and a holster. The piece describes her as “shattered and afraid,” to the point that she sometimes has trouble getting out of bed. (Awww…I bet those 49 people her husband slaughtered in cold blood in Orlando would love to have that problem)",FAKE
"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Monday that a potential nuclear deal with Iran ""could threaten the survival of Israel,"" as he kicked off a contentious visit to the United States meant to build the case against such an agreement.

The centerpiece of his visit will be an address to Congress on Tuesday. But speaking first to The American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, the Israeli leader underscored the dangers he said are posed by Iran, which he called the world's ""foremost sponsor of state terrorism.""

""Iran envelops the entire world with its tentacles of terror,"" he said, displaying a map showing various connections between Iran and terror groups. He warned Iran could pursue Israel's destruction if it obtained a nuclear weapon.

""We must not let that happen,"" Netanyahu said.

Both the Obama and Netanyahu administrations, as a matter of policy, agree that Iran must not be able to obtain a nuclear weapon. But the Israeli leader has concerns that the framework of the current diplomatic talks could lead to an ineffective deal.

His address to Congress on Tuesday has meanwhile become the source of immense tension between the two governments. The speech was arranged at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner, but without the involvement of President Obama. Some Democrats plan to boycott that speech, and the U.S. president has no plans to meet with the prime minister -- though the White House insists this is out of a desire not to appear to be influencing upcoming Israeli elections. On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview with ABC's ""This Week,"" before he arrived in Switzerland for talks with Iran's foreign minister, that the administration did not want the event ""turned into some great political football.""

But it appeared too late for that. With accusations flying on Capitol Hill, Netanyahu's visit has plunged the rocky Obama-Netanyahu relationship to perhaps its lowest point.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fox News on Monday this is the ""worst"" he's ever seen the U.S.-Israel relationship. He claimed critics are acting ""in such a hysterical fashion"" because they're concerned Netanyahu will make a ""compelling argument"" against the pending Iran agreement.

Netanyahu, though, stressed Monday that the alliance is ""stronger than ever"" despite the current disagreement, as he gently mocked the recent media coverage.

""Never has so much been written about a speech that hasn't been given,"" he said. Netanyahu also said he meant no ""disrespect"" to Obama or his office in agreeing to address Congress. He said he ""deeply"" appreciates all Obama has done for Israel and did not intend to ""inject Israel into the American partisan debate.""

But he said he had a ""moral obligation"" to speak up about the dangers Israel faces, and stressed that these dangers are, for his country, a matter of ""survival.""

The prime minister's address was to be bracketed by speeches from two senior U.S. officials: U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Power, who spoke Monday morning, tried to ease tensions and offer assurances of the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship. She said that partnership ""transcends politics"" and always will.

She stressed that diplomacy with Iran is the ""preferred route"" but the U.S. will keep its security commitments.

""The United States of America will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, period,"" she said. ""There will never be a sunset on America's commitment to Israel's security.""

In Washington, Netanyahu has positioned himself squarely against the Obama administration on the issue of the Iran talks. The Israeli leader is expected to press his opposition to a diplomatic accommodation of Iran's program in his speech Tuesday to Congress.

""We are not here to offend President Obama whom we respect very much,"" said a Netanyahu adviser, who was not authorized to be identified. ""The prime minister is here to warn, in front of any stage possible, the dangers"" of the agreement that may be taking shape.

The adviser, who spoke shortly before the delegation touched down in Washington, said Israel was well aware of the details of the emerging nuclear deal and they included Western compromises that were dangerous for Israel. Still, he tried to lower tensions by saying that Israel ""does not oppose every deal"" and was merely doing its best to warn the U.S. of the risks entailed in the current one.

The Obama administration apparently is concerned about the details Netanyahu might discuss. An Associated Press journalist traveling with Kerry in Geneva tweeted Monday that Kerry said the U.S. is concerned by reports that ""selective details"" of the talks may be revealed.

Netanyahu considers unacceptable any deal that does not entirely end Iran's nuclear program. But Obama is willing to leave some nuclear activity intact, backed by safeguards that Iran is not trying to develop a weapon. Iran insists its program is solely for peaceful energy and medical research.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Monday afternoon again touted the U.S.-Israel bond, and stressed that options remain on the table -- including a military option -- if Iran does not comply with any nuclear agreement.

He continued to give the chances for a deal a ""50-50"" shot, citing lingering questions over whether Iran's political leadership would sign off on one.

The invitation to speak to Congress extended by Boehner, R-Ohio, and Netanyahu's acceptance have caused an uproar that has exposed tensions between Israel and the U.S., its most important ally.

By consenting to speak, Netanyahu angered the White House, which was not consulted in advance, and Democrats, who were forced to choose between showing support for Israel and backing the president.

Netanyahu's visit comes as Congress weighs legislation to trigger more sanctions against Iran if talks fail. Obama adamantly opposes that bill, but supporters could use Netanyahu's expected warnings to build their case for it.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"By Joachim Hagopian October 31, 2016 
This last Friday it became public record that FBI Director James Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email server investigation after repeatedly testifying before Congress and the world up to last July that he’d closed the case , after in his words not finding sufficient evidence of “any criminal wrongdoing ” to indict her in spite of her four years as Secretary of State egregiously breaching our national security , committing obstruction of justice and willful tampering with evidence, deleting 30,000 emails after receiving a court subpoena constituting destruction of evidence, not to mention repeatedly engaging in perjury before Congress and the FBI. 
But obviously, a federal investigation still in process in late June never stopped serial rapist-crime boss Bill Clinton’s illegal ambush at the Phoenix airport of Comey’s boss US Attorney General Loretta Lynch “clearing” the way for Hillary to proceed without consequence to be anointed as the next US figurehead puppet president by the ruling elite. Because it’s so blatantly obvious to the entire world that Hillary is guilty as sin, Comey’s whitewash didn’t go over well with either Americans or longtime FBI agents who reacted angrily to Comey’s over-the-top corruption. Subsequently, in recent months Comey has had a virtual mutiny on his hands as in the FBI boss has lost all credibility, respect, and moral authority. 
A former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. The former DC attorney added that the FBI investigators discovered more emails on a phone confiscated from the former New York Congressman and separated husband Anthony Weiner that also included his wife and longtime Hillary’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin’s communications that allegedly bear pertinent relevance to the Hillary case. Funny how things have a karmic way of coming full circle – the Clintons first introduced Weiner and Abedin 15 years ago and they married a half dozen years ago. 
In a separate FBI investigation involving Weiner’s alleged sexting messages with a 15-year old minor , the phone in question was handed over to the FBI. The investigating teams of both the Weiner and Hillary cases compared notes and apparently additional emails not already issued by WikiLeaks or already in FBI possession recently came to light on Weiner’s phone . The legions of rank and file FBI agents were already fuming over Comey’s complete ethical and legal lapses in his choice not to indict Hillary. Joe diGenova believes that FBI personnel forced Comey’s hand to reopen the investigation after giving him the ultimatum that if he failed to do so, the FBI defiantly would. According to diGenova, this latest plot twist only proves that: 
The original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation. 
Otherwise, had a real investigation been conducted, that Weiner phone used by both Anthony and Huma would have been picked up by the FBI and its contents thoroughly scrutinized long before now. 
In addition to stating the obvious, that the higher-up feds had already made the decision to not consequence Hillary for her crimes, speculating on why that phone was not already submitted to the FBI as evidence, the former DC attorney concluded: 
There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright , and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it. 
Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash. Additionally like their boss, Hillary’s aides also sent classified material using private servers. On top of that, longtime aide Cheryl Mills on multiple occasions has perjured herself lying under oath for the Clinton crime family, tasked with “cleaning up” (aka covering up) their countless scandals over the past several decades. Indeed the whole Clinton entourage not already “mysteriously” winding up in the growing Clinton dead pool are all unindicted criminals protected by the corrosively corrupt DC cronyism where backroom deals (a la Bill’s airport ambush) are brokered based on whatever dirt’s been gathered and used as bargaining blackmail chips against all parties involved. That’s how the Washington crowd stays immune from any and all accountability as well as stays alive. Violate that crime syndicate code of conduct and you lose your life as more recent victims earlier this year have. 
In a “leaked” memo to his FBI that surfaced on Fox Friday night, Comey outlined his reasons for reopening the case in light of the new information the director believes would have ultimately been leaked to Congress and the public anyway. So in full damage control/CYA mode, the beleaguered director now going public really had no choice in the matter. His underlings were chomping at the bit to both out and oust him. In an obvious attempt to weakly claim some moral high ground, Comey wrote in his memo: 
I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. 
Though his leadership and character are perceived by the vast majority of both FBI personnel as well as American citizens to presently lay in ruin as a pathetically shameful stain and humiliating joke on both the FBI organization and Washington in general, James Comey appears to be feebly attempting to save his own career and reputation for appearing now to “come clean.” But make no mistake, his moral turpitude displayed throughout this Hillary debacle from early 2015 to now has over-exposed him as a total lackey and fraud, so at this late stage of the game, redemption is not even an option. But the criminal misconduct, rampant corruption and diabolical evil committed by those at the highest puppet levels of federal power, and especially the elite puppet masters controlling them, their sins produce far more devastating consequences than this morally lacking man in the middle of this latest controversy. 
Because there is no way that the FBI will properly conclude this part 2 of the Hillary investigation saga before the November 8 th election, Hillary, and her Democrats are predictably crying foul , demanding that the FBI immediately disclose what it has, which of course is a moot point that won’t happen. It seems highly unlikely that the email texts from Abedin and Weiner found on his phone would not contain clear criminal evidence that implicates Hillary. Since Hillary was the globalist choice after Obama was selected in 2008, it seems unlikely that the puppet masters would not permit this latest development to even occur. But then perhaps the ruling elite is pulling the plug on Hillary, concluding that she simply carries too much liability baggage with her deteriorating health condition and never-ending scandals, maybe the globalists are rethinking an alternative replacement like her obnoxiously aggressive VP candidate, the Jesuit-trained and educated Tim Kaine. 
That said, there are some cynics who believe that this recent odd turn is the last ditch desperado attempt being staged to overturn Trump winning by a landslide. This conjectured scenario goes something like this: a few days prior to the election the FBI will once again “clear” Hillary of all charges. This, in turn, would offer her the last minute much needed boost being able to cash in on her worn out persecution complex , plagued forever by her “right wing conspiracy” theory against the “much maligned” woman of destiny. 
In response to all her scandals, Hillary’s M.O. has always been to falsely blame some villainous sinister force. This year it’s been Putin hacking into her emails, and Trump, Putin, and Assange colluding and plotting behind her back. She’s always been as paranoid as Richard Nixon , attempting to deflect the heat she draws from her own skullduggery lies by constantly pointing fingers to externalize blame onto others. It’s a deeply rooted pathological complex that certain tightly screwed sociopaths possess. 
This latest sudden turn of events obviously has James Comey incurring the wrath of Hillary Democrats as well as the Justice Department. By disclosing the reopened investigation so close to the election date that undoubtedly casts some influence on the potential outcome, Comey is defying his AG boss while clearly violating DOJ written policy . Lynch herself even tried to quash Comey’s letter to Congress. But as diGenova alluded, by Comey’s own past misdeeds (and those of his boss and Obama as well), the FBI director placed himself between this rock and a hard place by his own slipshod, half-ass probe failing to acquire Weiner’s phone the first time around. 
The entire sordid affair of this year’s totally rigged political election – pre-fixed in Hillary’s favor – blatantly reveals to America the gross misnomer of the US “justice” system being two-tiered, one for elitist crime cabal bosses like Hillary and the other for the rest of us 99% no longer protected in a totalitarian police state by our once rule of law the US Constitution. Regardless of what happens in the future, the truth genie’s already been let out of the bag, and for eyes open enough to see, it’s floating in the Washington cesspool of filth, debauchery and deception regularly perpetrated by our “entrusted perps” we have as our so called leaders. 
Moreover, this year’s unending batches of Wiki-leaked DNC/Hillary emails and Project Veritas undercover campaign videos confirm that the entire US political, as well as economic system, is morally and financially bankrupt, irreparably broken and in need of complete overhaul. Voter fraud and election fraud are rampant. Soros funded electronic voting machines that are preprogrammed to vote for Hillary are operating in 16 key battleground states. America’s internal house now is in total disarray, badly in need of a deep cleaning purge like never before. Mainstream media is strongly biased against Trump in its blind support for Hillary . As Secretary of State she treasonously sold out our nation, placing us all at high security risk and under foreign interest control at the hands of high rolling bidders so she and her fat cats can get richer as fellow partners-in-crime from places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, destroying our once sovereign country while aiding, abetting, financing and supporting our enemies the global terrorists around the world. She helped create ISIS and plans world war against Russia, China and Iran. The traitors in our government and their globalist puppet masters – the Rothschilds, Rockefellers , the Bushes and Clintons all need to be rounded up, imprisoned and tried at The Hague for both treason and their endless crimes against humanity. The Best of Joachim Hagopian Tags: Joachim Hagopian [ ] is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com .",FAKE
"On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.",FAKE
"[Updated at 2 p.m. ET] Over and over, as Republican voters spoke of the presidential race – and of Donald Trump in particular – one word kept coming up: “strong.”

The nation needs a strong leader, said the 12 voters, gathered Tuesday night in St. Louis for a focus group. That’s hardly a surprising conclusion, especially following the deadly terror attacks by the Islamic State in Brussels earlier in the day. And Mr. Trump, the GOP presidential front-runner, projects strength, they said.

After Tuesday’s nominating contests, in which Trump gained more delegates than his top rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the billionaire is one step closer to accomplishing an extraordinary feat: winning the Republican presidential nomination as a political novice, while bucking party orthodoxy on a range of issues, from trade to entitlements to the US’s role in the world to Planned Parenthood.

Some in the group expressed reservations about Trump. He needs a “filter,” two of the women said. He needs to “turn the noise down just a tad,” said another. “Be a bit more humble,” said one of the men. Two of the 12 voters in the focus group – organized by veteran pollster Peter Hart, with reporters watching via live stream – said they would vote for Trump in November only as “a last resort.”

So why do some voters see Trump as strong?

“Because he’s direct and outspoken, and uses language that they understand and relate to,” Mr. Hart told the Monitor Wednesday. “I don’t want to say the swear words, but the way in which he approaches it, it’s not political speak. It’s straight talk, and he gets credit for it.”

Hart describes Trump’s style as “authoritarian.” In fact, recent academic research shows that Trump supporters are united by one common trait – not income, education level, or race, but an inclination toward authoritarian leadership. That finding could have profound implications for the Democrats come November, if Trump is the Republican nominee.

“Because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow,” wrote Matthew MacWilliams, the author of the study and a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Politico last December.

Placing Trump in the American historical context is tricky. In many ways, the real estate mogul/reality TV star/Twitter maven has no historical precedent. But in his ability to project strength, at least, Hart sees a hint of Ronald Reagan.

“If you were looking for the one link between President Reagan and Trump, it is the clear, straightforward, declarative language,” says Hart. “The difference is, Reagan was always the smiling face, with an upbeat, sunny message of ‘morning in America,’ and Trump is obviously stern and tough. And while he says he will ‘make America great again,’ essentially his language is much more negative and harsher.”

After Tuesday’s nominating contests, in which Trump gained more delegates than his top rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the billionaire is one step closer to accomplishing an extraordinary feat: winning the Republican presidential nomination as a political novice, while bucking party orthodoxy on a range of issues, from trade to entitlements to the US’s role in the world to Planned Parenthood.

But ultimately, if Trump wins the Republican nomination, only one said they would never vote for him. That result flies in the face of polls that show major reservations about Trump by Republican voters. One recent survey shows more than a third of Republican voters in the “never Trump” camp.

On Tuesday, Trump and Senator Cruz performed as expected: Trump won the Arizona primary, and all 58 delegates at stake, with 47 percent of the vote. Senator Cruz won the Utah caucuses, and all 40 of the state’s delegates, with 69 percent of the vote. A contested GOP convention in July remains a possibility, but Trump still has potential to lock up the nomination before then.

In Arizona, about half of the voting took place before Tuesday, and the attacks in Brussels. Among those who voted on primary day, it’s not clear how the terror attack might have affected voters’ choices.

But Brussels certainly weighed heavily on the focus group voters in St. Louis. When asked for the “one thing” they’re looking for in the next president, voters named a range of qualities, including ability to get things done, high moral character, and toughness.

“You’ve got to be strong,” said Trump supporter Kevin Rotellio, a restaurant manager in his 40s. “We can’t be weak, or we might be the next terror attack.”

At another point, when the discussion turned to leadership style, one participant brought up a world leader whom Trump has said he admires.

“This business about Trump’s being outspoken and harsh and all that – isn’t Putin the same way? And he seems to be doing OK, so I don’t know that that’s bad,” said Joseph Glass, a retired engineer who voted for Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the Missouri primary.

The biggest reservations over Trump were voiced by women – a reflection of polling that shows women are more concerned than men by Trump’s manner, and an overall gender gap. When the group was asked by Mr. Hart if Trump would be different as president than he has been as a candidate, some expressed hope that that would be the case.

“If he surrounds himself with reasonable people, he will be different,” said Joyce Reinitz, a teacher who lists her party affiliation as “not strong Republican.” “He’ll still be opinionated. But he will have perhaps some of the social filters built in as personalities that will try to calm him down.”

Another woman, homemaker Gabrielle Ritter, also hoped for the calming influence of advisers, if Trump is elected. Ms. Ritter, an independent who voted for Cruz in the primary and came into the focus group with a “very unfavorable” view of Trump, wished “he could just come across more reasonable.”

“I’m concerned about him discussing deals with Putin or Iraq or the Middle East or Mexico,” she said. “I’m concerned, because of how he is portrayed in the media right now, how he is going to handle those situations, so that we don’t end up in a worse international situation. I think that the best decision that he could make is to choose a good cabinet of advisers to help him.”

Cherri Crenshaw, another independent woman who voted for Cruz, said she is looking for a president who is ""strong plus respectful."" When asked to elaborate, she responded: “It’s the opposite of Donald Trump. I think he is very strong, but I think he comes across as a bully. I don’t think you can lead the country when you’re demeaning people in such blatant ways.”

And yet of the 12, only one focus group participant said they could never vote for Trump. And when asked if they had reservations about Trump’s understanding of foreign policy, only one person raised their hand.

Dissatisfaction with the status quo is that high – high enough to put a foreign policy novice in the Oval Office. Frustration over the Obama years, and the inability to “get things done,” burns hot. And Republican voters, at least most of these voters, are prepared to bet on someone who is untested in government – even someone they don’t much like. They dismissed the concerns of the GOP “establishment” as “Washington politicians” who have nobody but themselves to blame for the rise of Trump.

Focus groups are an imperfect way to gauge public sentiment. (Though it must be noted that Hart as moderator, with the sponsorship of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is considered the gold standard.) Sometimes a form of “group think” can set in.

That may have been the case with this group, when all but one said they’d vote for Trump if he’s the nominee. But exasperation with the Obama administration, and the state of the country, may be so high by November that the vast majority of Republicans would be willing to pull the lever for Trump, despite the polls today.",REAL
"On November 1st, The Intercept headlined ""Here's The Problem With The Story Connecting Russia To Donald Trump's Email Server” , and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that: 
""Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did.” 
The Intercept team concluded their detailed analysis of the evidence by saying: 
""Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire’s spam marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name, to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there’s literally no way to disprove that. But there’s also literally no way to prove it, and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof. Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: A company that Trump has used since 2007 to outsource his hotel spam is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we’re all making the exact same speculation about the unknown that’s caused untold millions of voters to believe Hillary’s deleted emails might have contained Benghazi cover-up PDFs. Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.” 
However, they failed to dig deeper to explain what could have motivated this smear of Trump: was it just sloppiness on the part of Slate, and of Foer? Hardly — it was anything but unintentional: 
A core part of the Democratic Party’s campaign for Hillary Clinton consists of her claim that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian agent. This is an updated version of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s campaign to “root communists out of the federal government,” and of the John Birch Society’s accusation even against the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that, ""With regard to ... Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason."" 
Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. Neoconservatism has emerged as today’s Republican Party’s Establishment, and (like with the Democratic Party’s original neocon, U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing”) they’ve always viewed Russia to be America’s chief enemy, and they have favored the overthrow of any nation’s leader who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad. Hatred and demonization of Russia is the common core of neoconservatism — the post-Cold-War extension of Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. 
Both Slate and especially Foer have long pedigrees as Democratic Party neoconservatives — champions of U.S. invasions, otherwise called PR agents (‘journalists’) promoting the products and services that a few giant and exclusive military corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dyncorp, and the Carlyle Group, offer to the U.S. federal government. I’ll deal here only with Foer, not with his latest employer (in a string, all of which are neocon Democratic ‘news’ media). 
Foer wrote in The New York Times, on 10 October 2004, against ‘isolationist’ Republicans, who regretted having supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he headlined about them there, “Once Again, America First” , equating non-neoconservative Republicans with, essentially, the pro-fascist isolationists of the 1930s. He concluded that they would come to regret their regret: “Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley's steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts.” That’s how far-right Franklin Foer is: he’s to the right of those Republicans. 
On 7 June 2004, Foer, in a tediously long, badly written and argued, article in New York Magazine, “The Source of the Trouble” , described the downfall of The New York Times’s leading stenographer for George W. Bush’s lies to invade Iraq, their reporter Judith Miller. He closed by concluding that “the source of the trouble” was that Miller was simply too earnest and tried too hard — not that she was a stenographer to power: 
“People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” 
(She was anything but “trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” She was the opposite: a mere stenographer to George W. Bush and to the Administration’s chosen mouthpieces, such as the anti-Saddam exiled Iraqi Ahmad Chalaby.) 
On 20 December 2004, when the question of whether to bomb Iran was being debated by neoconservatives, Foer, who then was the Editor of the leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic, headlined in his magazine, “Identity Crisis: Neocon v. Neocon on Iran” , and he introduced a supposed non-neocon from the supposedly non-neocon Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, to comment upon the conflict among (the other Party’s) neocons: 
“In part, the lack of neocon consensus [on whether to, as John McCain was to so poetically put it, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ ] can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody — not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry’s brain trust — has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a ‘problem from Hell’ with no good solution.” 
But, actually, both Pollack and Brookings are Democratic Party neocons themselves; and among the leading proponents of invading Iraq had been not only Pollack but Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon . Brookings had no prominent opponent of invading Iraq. 
(Brookings has a long history of neoconservatism , and routinely leads the Democratic Party’s contingent of neocon thinking, even urging a Democratic administration to have its stooge-regimes violate international laws .) 
The real reason why neocons (being the heirs of the far-right extremists’ Cold-War demonization of Russia, even after communism is gone) wanted to conquer both Iraq and Iran, was that both countries’ leaders were friendly towards Russia, and were opposed by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, which family quietly worked not only with the U.S. government but with Israel’s government, against both Iraq and Iran, as well as against Syria — those three nations (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) all being friendly toward Russia, which both the Saudi aristocracy, and not only the U.S. aristocracy, hate. 
It’s not just the conservative ‘news’ media that are neoconservative now. The so-called ‘liberal’ media are so neoconservative that, for example, Salon can condemn Donald Trump for his having condemned Hillary and Obama’s bombing of Libya. Salon condemned Trump’s having said “We would be so much better off if Qaddafi were in charge right now”— as if Trump weren’t correct, and as if what happened after our overthrow and killing of Qaddafi weren’t far worse for both Libyans and the world than what now exists in Libya is. (But, of course, for Lockheed Martin etc., it is far better). CBS News and Mother Jones condemned the Trilateralist Joseph Nye for having veered temporarily away from his normal neoconservatism. Then, Nye wrote in the neocon Huffington Post saying that David Corn of Mother Jones and Franklin Foer of The New Republic had misrepresented what he had said, and that he was actually a good neocon after all. Nye closed: “In any case, I have never supported Gaddafi and am on record wishing him gone, and also on record supporting Obama’s actions in recent weeks. We now know that Gaddafi’s departure is the only change that will work in Libya.” Sure, it did. Oh, really? It’s Trump who is crazy here? 
More recently, Foer headlined at Slate, “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests — and advance his own — he’d look a lot like Donald Trump.” Foer proceeded to present the view of Trump that subsequently became parroted by the Hillary Clinton campaign (that Trump=traitor). Wikipedia has a 450-person ”List of Republicans opposing Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016"" , and it’s almost entirely comprised of well-known neoconservatives — the farthest-right of all Republicans, the people closest to Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Foer cited many neoconservative sources that are not commonly thought of as Republican, such as Buzzfeed; and he even had the gall to blame the Russian government for having made public its best evidence behind its charge (which was true ) that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was no authentic ‘democratic revolution’ such as the U.S. government and its ‘news’ media said, but was instead a very bloody U.S. coup d’etat in Ukraine , which was organized from the U.S. Embassy there, starting by no later than 1 March 2013 , a year beforehand. Foer wrote: 
“The Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a recording of a blunt call between State Department official Toria [that’s actually ‘Victoria’] Nuland [a close friend of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney] and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly planted the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it — and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak, few doubted the White House’s contention that Russia was the source.” 
To a neoconservative, even defensive measures (such as Russia’s there exposing the lies that America uses to ‘justify’ economic sanctions and other hostile acts against Russia) — indeed, anything that Russia does against America’s aggressions against Russia, and against Russia’s allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) — anything that Russia does, is somehow evil and blameworthy. And, of course, America’s aggressions are not. 
The U.S. government and its neocon propagandists are outraged that some people are trying to expose — instead of to spread — their lies. The American government isn’t yet neocon enough, in the view of such liars.",FAKE
"The front-runners in the race for president are one step closer to clinching their parties' nomination.

Donald Trump completed a five-state sweep in Tuesday's Republican presidential primaries, while Hillary Clinton won four out of the five states, losing only Rhode Island to her rival Bernie Sanders.

Now the two front-runners are beginning to shift their focus, with each expecting to go up against the other in the General Election.

""Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she has got going is the woman's card,"" Trump told supporters.

Clinton fired back, saying, ""Well, if fighting for women's healthcare and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the 'woman's card,' then deal me in!""

The former secretary of state now has nearly 90 percent of the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination, and after a sweep of Tuesday's primaries, Trump is one step closer to avoiding a contested convention.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are hoping their alliance to stay out of each other's way in Indiana, Oregon, and New Mexico will help slow down Trump's momentum and block him from winning the nomination before the convention.

""I got good news for you tonight. This campaign moves back to more favorable terrain,"" Cruz told his supporters.

Currently, Trump has 950 delegates, Cruz has 560, and Kasich has 153. It takes 1,237 to win the nomination.

Meanwhile on the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders refuses to go quietly into the night.

""The fight we are waging is not an easy fight, but I know you are prepared to wage that fight,"" the Vermont lawmaker told supporters.

The candidates now move on to Indiana, with Sanders, Cruz, and Trump all holding events there Wednesday.

With Kasich pulling back in the Hoosier State, Cruz will basically have a shot at a one-on-one race against Trump. But if he loses, it could turn out to be his last stand.",REAL
"Unless you go out of your way to seek truthful news from reputable sources, chances are you – like the majority of the populace – are fed regurgitated current events received from a small... ",FAKE
source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
"Embarrassing and infuriating: the NBC anchor’s ‘misstatements’ reveal much about America’s media environment.

By now, it may be time to paraphrase a famous remark by Rep. Mo Udall at an endless political dinner and conclude that, “Everything that can be said about Brian Williams has been said; it’s just that not everyone has said it yet.”

Consider what follows as a few footnotes to the Big Stuff—“Why did he do it?” “How bad were his misdeeds?” “Are there others?” “Can he survive?” In the reactions to the story of the Flak Attack That Wasn’t lie some telling realities about today’s media world.

There Is No “Wall of Silence.” My Twitter feed was—and still is—filed with assertions that the mainstream media will circle the wagons to protect one of their own. This is precisely what has not happened. The New York Times has published accounts that cast serious doubt not only on Williams’s later storytelling, but also on the original NBC story 12 years ago. Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column is brutal, reporting concerns within NBC News of Williams’s tendency to aggrandize himself. In The New Yorker, satirist Andy Borowitz wrote an acidic “diary” painting the NBC anchor as the embodiment of upper-class privilege. The Washington Post, CNN, Slate and The Daily Beast—media outlets that would never be confused with right-wing zealotry—have been highly critical of Williams. Only a few familiar faces—Dan Rather and TIME’s Joe Klein—have spoken up in Williams’s defense.

You can argue that these outlets been “forced” into this because the digital world makes it impossible to ignore the depredations of traditional media. Or you can note that the media themselves have come to accept that they need to be subject to the same critical gaze as other institutions. Thus the birth of ombudsmen and public accountability—from The New York Times and Jayson Blair’s tall tales, to the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke and her eight-year-old addict, to CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard story, to CNN’s Tailwind scandal and beyond. Whatever the reason, the notion that the “mainstream media” has rushed to protect Brian Williams is laughable.

Williams Made Himself A Perfect Target. There’s no more attractive story than one suggesting that an important or powerful figure is a hypocrite. It’s the war hawk urging the dispatch of young men and women into harm’s way, but whose draft deferments or sketchy medical condition exempted him from the draft. It’s the liberal voting to bus children to school while sending her kids to private academies. It’s the tribune of moral virtue paying for abortions for the staff assistant he knocked up. It’s the environmentalists flying to a climate change rally in a private jet.

Brian Williams is, in this sense, a perfect fit. His inaccurate, or misleading, or deeply dishonest account of what happened in Iraq seems to put the lie to a career that has featured him in the midst of one danger or another. To be clear on this point: Williams in fact has been in many places where natural disasters or violence have indeed involved risk. (I write as someone who, in more than 30 years of network TV reporting, found himself in physical danger exactly once, in South Africa, for a period of perhaps 15 minutes.)

But by steadily exaggerating the perils of his helicopter journey, he’s permitted critics to suggest that it was all an act; that he is not who he wanted us to think he is. He’s also opened the door to those who scoff at the danger journalists face. On Thursday, Rush Limbaugh scornfully referred to journalists who “put on a trench coat and stand in a street in Beirut.” This is a slanderous smear on the critically wounded Bob Woodruff and Kimberly Dozier, on Mike Kelly and David Bloom (who died in Iraq), on James Foley and other journalists beheaded by ISIS, on the 61 journalists killed in 2014. It is, however, a slander that will resonate, and it will resonate because Williams was apparently unwilling to let his record, unvarnished, speak for itself.

Have You Looked In the Mirror Lately? Brian Williams is one of many in the mainstream or traditional or legacy media who have warned about the difficulty of judging the credibility of “new media.” When a story is coming from somewhere “out there,” in the digital universe, with no imprimatur, where’s the institutional backup, where are the researchers, the editors, the fact-checkers, the accountability?

Well, in this case, it was the toolbox of the “new media” that exposed the holes (or lack of them) in the helicopter story. Facebook gave a member of the U.S. military the forum on which to challenge Williams (“Sorry, dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft”). Moreover, there are a lot of questions still to be answered about why the NBC staffers who were with Williams never raised their voices to say: “Um Brian, about that story…”

As for what happens next: I don’t know what NBC—or outside investigators—are going to find. I don’t know if it makes sense (assuming no other transgressions) for Williams to sit down with a smart, tough but fair inquisitor—Megyn Kelly? Jon Stewart? The scheduled appearance on Letterman Thursday?—and answer whatever questions are thrown his way. It probably makes sense for Williams to shelve his considerable comedic gifts and stay away from Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live.

I do know that there’s one idea that struck me as eminently on point. It comes from Matt Dowd, the recovering political operative and ABC News analyst, who tweeted: “Maybe [the] news media can learn from this episode and start being a little more compassionate when others mess up.”",REAL
"Any idea that the Republican Party would vote on and pass reforms to immigration law apparently evaporated when voters in Virginia ousted then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) in early June. But even before Cantor lost, there wasn't a lot of political incentive for Republicans to move on policy this year, as The Upshot blog of the New York Times pointed out on Monday. Looking at it cynically, most of the closely contested races this year are in states that have very small Hispanic populations.

But compared to the 2016 primary season, 2014 is practically a bonanza of diversity. If the metric is how much will this help me win my next election, there's very little incentive for the next Republican nominee to embrace reform until he or she has already accepted the party's nomination.

We'll start at the beginning. According to data from the Census Bureau, Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to weigh in on nominees, both had relatively small percentage of the voting age population that was Hispanic: 5.2 and 2.8 percent, respectively. Extrapolating out from 2008 to 2016, those numbers will grow slightly -- but only slightly. In the 2012 Iowa Republican caucus, a negligible percentage of voters -- essentially zero -- were Hispanic, according to entrance polls. In New Hampshire, it was about the same.

Josh Putnam, visiting assistant professor of political science at Davidson College in North Carolina, is tracking likely primary dates for 2016. (For the most part, they haven't yet been set as states jockey for influence.) Using his list as a guide, we can roughly game out the rest of primary process beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.

It's certain that voting will take place in Nevada and South Carolina at the front end of the calendar. South Carolina's got a similarly small percentage of voting-age Hispanics as New Hampshire, and, sure enough, it had a similarly tiny percentage of Hispanic voters in 2012.

Nevada is interesting. According to that Census data, Hispanics comprised about 22.8 percent of the voting age population in 2012 -- and if the trend from 2008 continues, will top 25 percent in 2016. Which is where we get into the other limiting factor: the type of election. Data from the George Mason University's United States Election Project indicates that about 57.1 percent of people of voting age in the state voted in the 2012 general election. But in picking the nominees? That dropped to 1.9 percent -- because Nevada, like so many other states, has a caucus system, which tends to limit involvement from all but the diehards. Only 5 percent of those who voted in Nevada's 2012 Republican caucus were Hispanic -- vastly under-represented as a share of the population.

The next states on Putnam's schedule are Colorado, Minnesota and Utah. They might try to jump ahead of South Carolina and Nevada. Colorado, which The Upshot notes is the only state that is both important in 2014 and has a decent-sized Hispanic population, will likely see Hispanics as about 20 percent of the population in 2016 and 12 percent of the voters -- in the general election. Colorado, too, has a caucus system; in 2012, according to the George Mason project, one voter participated in the caucus for every 39 that voted in November. As for the other two, Minnesota's voting-age Hispanic population is small -- likely under 4 percent of the total such population in 2016. Utah's should be bigger, nearly 17 percent. But only 7 percent of the people that come out to vote in the 2016 general in Utah will be Hispanic, if the trend holds.

The next three states, per Putnam, will likely be North Carolina, Arizona and Michigan. Arizona is the most heavily Hispanic, and its primary had about 12 percent turnout of the voting age population in 2012. But despite that population being about 17 percent Hispanic, exit polls showed that only about 8 percent of Republican primary voters were Hispanic.

There are two reasons for that lower turnout in the primary process. The first is that Hispanic turnout has been lower than the general public consistently in general elections. There's no reason to suspect that this is different in primaries.

The second reason for reduced turnout in Republican primaries in particular is that Hispanic voters tend to vote Democratic. In the 2012 general, Hispanic voters went for President Obama 71-27, with the older population trending slightly more toward Romney. This is the vicious political cycle the Republicans had hoped to escape: lower support among Hispanics because Republicans oppose immigration reform, but Republicans opposing comprehensive immigration reform in part because their base is so heavily non-Hispanic.

This map shows the expected percentage of the voting-age population of each state that will be Hispanic in 2016 (again, assuming trends hold).

The highest percentage of 2012 turnout from Hispanic voters was in those states in the southwest: Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico. California and New Mexico are slated to vote in June -- at the very end of the process. Arizona, we mentioned above. Which leaves Texas.

In 2012, you might remember Texas's governor, Rick Perry (R), ran for president. Perry scolded critics of in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants, telling the critics, ""I don't think you have a heart."" For a variety of reasons -- that position included -- voters in Iowa and New Hampshire didn't reward Perry, and he dropped out before South Carolina.

But it reinforces the operative point: that you have to make it through a lot of very white states before Hispanic voters are a substantial part of the electorate. Perry didn't, dropping out long before Texas even voted.",REAL
"In the latest twist on the weirdest campaign ever, Donald Trump seems to have encouraged supporters to kill Hillary Clinton.  Trump said, “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although, the Second Amendment people maybe there is. I don’t know.”  Of course in the immediate aftermath of the loony homicidal comment, the Trump campaign is now saying that the “dishonest media” is misreading his claim.  That might hold water if it weren’t actually the second time that his campaign has supported killing Trump’s competition in the last month.

This latest attack also comes on the heels of  Trump’s crack at Clinton’s mental state last week in a rally in New Hampshire. “She is a totally unhinged person. She’s unbalanced. And all you have to do is watch her, see her, read about her.  She will cause — if she wins, which hopefully she won’t — the destruction of our country from within.”  If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was talking about himself.

Trump has spent his whole campaign attacking his competition. Name-calling, insulting, and bullying have been campaign staples.  But calling Clinton “unbalanced” is more than a simple tactic; it is a strategy that reverses one of the most pointed attacks on Trump—whether or not he might be well enough to serve and whether or not his limited mental capacity might lead to the destruction, not just of our country, but of the entire planet.

There has been a recent flurry of news media coverage that has focused on whether or not Trump might not be well, whether he might suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s, and whether or not his thin skin and uncontrollable temper might be a problem for a president. Even more disturbing we learned of his inability to understand why we should not nuke Europe.  Then–after all that–we get the frightening and unhinged 2nd Amendment comment. Clearly we have reason to question whether or not he has the ability to do the job.

Anticipating that concern, Trump released a letter from his physician back in December attesting that“if elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” When the letter was first released many laughed it off.  It seemed like yet another sign of a bombastic and surreal campaign.  But now that we are only months away from the general election it is time to return to that letter and wonder if it is further proof that Trump is scamming the US public.

Experts have mixed opinions on whether or not candidates should be required to release medical records.  Does a candidate have an expectation of privacy or does the public have the right to know about the health of their president? According to CNN, “In 2008, a high-profile panel of doctors recommended that presidential and vice-presidential candidates be required to undergo a health exam by an independent team of doctors from the American College of Physicians.” That effort failed, though, when it became clear that such a practice would become immediately politicized.

So, even though we require physicals of pilots, it is still not a requirement that a candidate for president release a full medical report.

That means Trump’s letter was optional, which makes it even more odd, given the fact that he isn’t interested in voluntarily releasing his tax returns.  What could have been the motivation for releasing what may well be the weirdest medical report in the history of presidential elections?

The letter does not uphold even the flimsiest medical standard and it uses hyperbolic language that has no connection at all to facts.  Aside from making the outrageous and completely unverifiable claim that Trump would be the healthiest president ever, it makes other odd statements.  We read, for instance, that he has had a medical exam that revealed “only positive results.” In the medical community a “positive result” means a bad prognosis. What we want are “normal” results.   The letter uses the word “excellent” twice in relation to medical tests—another oddity since again the standard would be to say “normal.”  The letter also states that Trump’s only medical issue was an appendectomy but there is no mention of the bone spur, which kept him from serving in Viet Nam.

Apart from the lack of scientific rigor, the letter starts with “To Whom My Concern.” It is worth pausing to worry that the physician who has been taking care of Trump since 1980 has such a poor command of the English language. In fact, the language in the letter mirrors the same sort of bombastic language common to Trump-speak. The writing was so bizarre that it led Robert Reich to wonder if it had been written by Trump himself. So who exactly is the doctor that signed this letter? Well, as if the letter weren’t strange enough,Trump’s post on Facebook said it had been “written by the highly respected Dr. Jacob Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital.” But, Trump can’t even seem to get the name of his physician right, since the letter states it was written by Jacob’s son, Dr. Harold Bornstein who took over care for Trump after his father retired. Bornstein junior is a gastroenterologist, hardly the sort of specialty designed to offer a comprehensive overview of a patient’s health.  The irony that Trump’s bill of good health comes from a doctor who specializes in the gastrointestinal tract should not be missed.  Recall that when Stephen Colbert introduced “Trumpiness” to his viewers while covering the RNC, he explained that “Trumpiness” was a lot like “Truthiness”—except that rather than describe truth coming from the gut, “Trumpiness” comes from lower down the digestive track.  If Trump gets all of his ideas from his bowels, then maybe a gastroenterologist is exactly the sort of doctor he needs. But all kidding aside, Bornstein’s specialty simply doesn’t qualify him to speak of the fitness of Trump overall.  He attests to facets of Trump’s health that are well outside of his area of expertise.  Even more bizarre, since the letter went public, Bornstein has stayed mostly under the radar. His websitehas been pulled down.  And his Facebook account is mostly inactive. If you want to check out the doctor, your best shot is this wacky profile picture.  There were also lots of memes produced after the letter surfaced. Even The Daily Show did a funny bit on it. It all makes for a good laugh, but the time for joking about Trump is over.  While his tax returns might give us a glimpse into the reality of his business practices, his medical letter may be even more revealing.  It was optional to release it, but now that it is in the public domain we have a right to question it. It is blatantly obvious that it isn’t fully accurate. Now it is worth wondering if any of it is true. Imagine if the media decided that this letter was as important to investigate as just one of Clinton’s emails.  Until they do, we can only guess which of the two candidates is the most “unbalanced.”",REAL
"But even though it is ultimately an egalitarian ruler, wreaking havoc on the old, young, good and bad alike, Time seems to hold a special grudge against Loretta Lynch, the woman who, after an unprecedented delay, was finally sworn in on Monday as the 83rd attorney general in the history of the United States.

The first indication that Time has it in for Lynch was also the most obvious: the Senate’s 167-day-long dawdle. But while it was obviously wrong to make the first African-American woman ever nominated for the post wait so absurdly long to be confirmed (only two of Lynch’s 82 predecessors waited longer), I’m hesitant to throw the fault entirely on Time’s shoulders. The attack was launched by Republicans, after all; Time was merely their weapon.

But the second piece of evidence that Time may be holding a particular grudge against the attorney general was more palpable: the riots that convulsed Baltimore this weekend and paralyzed the city on Monday. Because although Lynch obviously had nothing to do with the disorder, the riots’ fires show with blinding clarity that Lynch’s first goal — which is “improving police morale,” according to the Times — is entirely premature. The wanton destruction of property cannot be legitimated; but simply criticizing anarchy and praising law enforcement won’t bring the mayhem to an end. And it won’t provide justice.

In many ways, the chaos in Baltimore is just the latest iteration of one of America’s saddest and longest-running stories. It is another example of what Martin Luther King once called “the language of the unheard.” King was speaking then of the riots that traumatized much of the country during the summer of 1966. But the social ills he described as kindling for the riot’s fire — poverty, police brutality and malign neglect — are, despite the nearly 49 years that followed, still powerful forces in America today.

For this particular moment, though, it’s Baltimore Police Department’s documented history of lawless violence that’s been identified as the riots’ inspiration. Protestors and rioters — who, it’s worth noting, are usually not the same — cite as their catalyst the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man and Baltimorean. On April 12, Gray was arrested by officers from the BPD. When police detained Gray and put him in a van for transportation, he was walking; by the time the trip was over, he had a broken neck. He died on April 19th.

No one yet knows for sure exactly what happened to Gray during that trip and in that van. There are reports that he was taken out at one point and beaten, but an autopsy showed no injuries except for those to his spinal cord and neck. The BPD has already admitted that its officers did not provide Gray with the necessary medical care. But the main question — Why was he able to run from the police in the morning, but struggling to breathe by nightfall? — has gone unanswered, though an increasing number suspect the widespread, grotesque practice of giving “a rough ride” is to blame.

Yet the fact that such a thing could happen, and only become a major story after the activism of peaceful protesters (and the destructive hijacking of violent rioters), is exactly the problem. The fact that the BPD’s reputation is such that many Baltimoreans heard Gray’s story with weary outrage rather than shock or indignation is exactly the problem. The fact that the BPD rank-and-file evidently feels so comfortable with extralegal brutality, and are so accustomed to wielding it, that demands for accountability has left them panicking — that, too, is exactly the problem. I’m quite certain that, at least to some extent, Attorney General Lynch would agree. But that’s why it’s so unfortunate that news of her interest in “finding common ground between law enforcement and minority communities” came when it did. Because once the last stone is thrown, the fires are put out, and the state of emergency in Maryland is lifted, what Baltimore and the countless places in the U.S. like it will need is not another conversation. And finding “common ground” won’t be what America needs from its attorney general or its Department of Justice. What will be needed instead is for the authorities in Baltimore, Maryland and D.C. to stop pandering to the police unions who demand carte blanche in the field and an endless line of officials singing about their valor. What will be needed instead are signs that the authorities take fears of the rise of the “warrior cop” and police militarization seriously, and that they will no longer see the deaths of people like Gray as “tragic.” Because they’re not cosmic acts of injustice; they’re crimes. To suspend (with pay) the officers who may be responsible is not enough — and Lynch needs to make clear that she understands that, and that her predecessor’s groundbreaking report on Ferguson, Missouri, was no aberration. What will be needed, in short, is for the people most apt to use “the language of the unheard” to feel that someone who matters is finally listening. And that those in public office prove with actions that they believe it when they say an African-American life is worth no less than a cop’s. Now is not the time for Lynch to focus on making law enforcement happy. Now is the time for her to promote equal justice. Improving police morale can wait.",REAL
"The Militarized Police at Standing Rock is Working for This Man The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/the-militarized-police-at-standing-rock.html The months long Dakota Access Keystone XL pipleine protest at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation by Native Americans and those sympathetic to protection of our water supply has been met with heavy-handed and brutal clamp down by police and national guard. Militarized goons in battle dress have stormed protector camps with LRAD sonic weapons, attack dogs , tear gas, tazers , and even live ammunition ( killing horses ), while politicians and mainstream media do their best to ignore this growing atrocity, hoping to wait it out until the protestors give up. But, as the saying goes, Water Is Life , and the issue of life and death is at the root of this protection movement, therefore, for people concerned with life, giving up on this is simply unthinkable. The root issue justifying state oppression of the protest is capitalism, and the perception that money is more important than life itself.When the police and national guard attack U.S. citizens on private property to protect corporate interests, who are they really working for? The corporate dream of the Keystone XL pipeline is to create a profit stream for a small number of people at the expense of the natural world and anyone in the way. At the top of this pyramid of profit is Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company responsible for the project. So who is Kelcy Warren? A native of East Texas and graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in civil engineering, Warren worked in the natural gas industry and became co-chair of Energy Transfer Equity in 2007. With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000 miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined products and crude oil. The company’s holdings include Sunoco, Southern Union and Regency Energy Partners. Forbes estimates the 60-year-old Warren’s personal wealth at $4 billion. Bloomberg described him as “among America’s new shale tycoons”— but rather than building a fortune by drilling he “takes the stuff others pull from underground and moves it from one place to another, chilling, boiling, pressurizing, and processing it until it’s worth more than when it burst from the wellhead.” [ Ref. ] Shockingly, in 2015 the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appointed Warren to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission which is an insult to environmentalists working to protect Big Bend National Park and surrounding sacred tribal lands from another $770 million pipeline project .“According to the governor’s office, the state parks and wildlife commission “manages and conserves the natural and cultural resources of Texas,” along with ensuring the future of hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation opportunities for Texans.” [ Ref. ] This glaring conflict of interest has inspired Environmental Science major at UTSA and former Texas State Park Ambassador Andrew Lucas to begin a drive to have Warren removed from this environmental post. His petition is described here : Most people may know Kelcy Warren as the man behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dallas-based billionaire and CEO of Energy Transfer Partners has been making headlines for fast-tracking a 1100 mile crude oil pipeline across the Midwest and under the Missouri River, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. No environmental impact assessment, no respect for cultural sites, and no regard for the local and widespread communities living along the river. A similar story is unfolding out in West Texas, where Warren’s company has split through the pristine Big Bend region with the 200 mile Comanche Trail Pipeline and nearly-complete 143 mile Trans Pecos Pipeline. These Pipelines mark the way for massive natural gas and oil developments in the Trans Pecos region. With untold damages unfolding for cultural and environmental resources at the hands of Energy Transfer Partners, it would surprise most to know that nearly a year ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Kelcy Warren for a 6 year term as 1 of the 10 commissioners who preside over Texas Parks And Wildlife… Why? Probably the $550,000 in campaign contributions Abbott received from Warren. ( Read More… ) Footage of militarized police using the Long Range Acoustic Device ( LRAD ) crowd control weapon against protectors at standing rock on October 27th, 2016: Final Thoughts Warren is listed as number 150 on Forbes list of wealthiest Americans with an estimated net worth of $4.2 billion in September of 2016. He is the head of the Dakota Access Pipeline snake. If you are scratching your head wondering why militarized police and private security contractors are beating, gassing and attacking peaceful resistors, including women, children and the elderly, the answer is, they are doing it to protect the interests of Kelcy Warren and others invested in this pipeline project. By Isaac Davis, Waking Times About the author: Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
"Bundy Ranch occupiers acquitted on all counts after challenging the corrupt Bureau of Land Management 
Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes Tags: Ammon Bundy , Oregon ranchers , court decision (NaturalNews) In what freedom fighters across the country are calling a stunning victory against a tyrannical government agency, a jury in Oregon has acquitted all seven defendants involved in the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in January.Cheers broke out in the Portland, Ore., federal courtroom when the jury announced the acquittals of Ammon Bundy, along with brother Ryan Bundy and five others, the Chicago Tribune reported .The seven were charged with conspiracy to impede federal workers from their jobs at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which is located about 300 miles southeast of Portland. Also, the jury could not reach a verdict on even one count of theft for Ryan Bundy. Shocked by the acquittals The announcement by the jury did not come without additional drama, however. Upon hearing the jury's decision, Marcus Mumford, one of Ammon Bundy's attorneys, demanded his client be released, even shouting at the judge. That prompted U.S. marshals to tackle Mumford to the ground and use a stun gun on him a number of times before arresting him, the Tribune reported.U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said she was not able to release Bundy because he faces federal charges in Nevada, his home state, related to an armed standoff with federal Bureau of Land Management agents at his father Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 .As reported by KATU , the armed standoff began Jan. 2 and lasted nearly six weeks. The incident brought new attention to the long-running issue of too much federal ownership of lands in the American West. The confrontations at the refuge earlier this year and on Cliven Bundy's ranch in 2014 essentially reignited arguments between private citizens – mostly ranchers – and the federal government that stem from the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion in the late 1970s, when Western states like Nevada attempted to wrestle more control of their own territory from the federal government .As noted by The New York Times the federal government owns nearly half of the land – 47 percent – in the West.The Tribune noted that even the defendants' attorneys were shocked by the acquittals.""It's stunning,"" said Robert Salisbury, an attorney for defendant Jeff Banta. ""It's a stunning victory for the defense. I'm speechless.""The U.S. Attorney in Oregon , Billy J. Williams, said in a statement that his office stood by its decision to prosecute the seven defendants.""We strongly believe that this case needed to be brought before a Court, publicly tried, and decided by a jury,"" the statement said. 'When the jury hears the story, I expect the same result' The Oregon case was, in a sense, an extension the tense standoff between federal officials with the BLM and other authorities, and the Bundy's two years ago in Nevada. Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy are all scheduled to go on trial for that standoff early next year.It's not clear what the outcome of the Nevada trial will be. Federal attorneys have said they don't feel like the outcome in Oregon will have any effect whatsoever on the Nevada trial.But defense attorneys involved in the Nevada trial aren't so sure. Daniel Hill, an attorney for Ammon Bundy , says the Oregon acquittal bodes well for his client and the other defendants, all of whom are facing felony weapon, conspiracy and other charges, the Tribune reported.""When the jury hears the whole story,"" he told The Associated Press , ""I expect the same result."" Sources:",FAKE
"Leave a reply 
Alexandra Bruce – Celebrated author Graham Hancock explains why Atlantis existed. 
Hancock specializes in theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past… SF Source Forbidden Knowledge TV  ",FAKE
"From Coca-Cola to Microsoft, companies that gave big bucks to the 2012 convention that nominated Mitt Romney are slashing this year’s budgets for the July coronation of Donald Trump.

Some of America’s largest corporations, which backed the Republican National Convention that nominated Mitt Romney in 2012, are lurching away from sponsoring the 2016 confab. Under pressure from anti-Trump advocacy groups, corporations that have traditionally not hesitated to drop millions on national conventions are limiting their contributions and scaling back their activities.

Coca-Cola, for example, contributed $660,000 to the convention in 2012 but is dramatically drawing down the amount it is giving this year. The corporation gave $75,000 to both parties’ conventions this time around, a company spokesman told The Daily Beast, stressing that the contribution took place in 2015. Coca-Cola has indicated to anti-Trump groups that it will not give any more.

And Microsoft, which contributed $1.5 million in cash and services to the Republican National Convention in 2012, said in a press release just days ago that it “decided last fall to provide a variety of Microsoft technology products and services instead of making a cash donation.” If it did indeed make that decision last fall, it put off the announcement until just last week, after an anti-Trump coalition had began pounding its drums.

“Both Coca-Cola and Microsoft have agreed to end cash donations to political conventions that promote hate and bigotry, and we applaud their decision to do so,” said Farhana Khera, the executive director of Muslim Advocates, which is part of the coalition. “We hope that other companies will take their lead and send a strong message against hate.”

Still, some of America’s largest technology companies are charging full steam ahead. AT&T, which provided $3 million in 2012, will be an official communications provider for the July convention. Google will serve as the official livestream provider in Cleveland. And Facebook will support both Republican and Democratic conventions.

Many of the 2012 Republican convention’s biggest sponsors didn’t respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast, including the American Petroleum Institute, Florida Power and Light, and Lockheed Martin, which were responsible for combined millions in contributions last cycle.

Sheldon Adelson contributed $5 million to the 2012 convention, making him the largest individual donor, but a spokesman didn’t respond to a question about this year’s convention. Marketing Solution Publications, run by financier William Edwards, gave the largest corporate donation last cycle at $4 million. But Edwards had nothing to say after The Daily Beast called his office asking if he would re-up this year.

Or, as in the case of Walmart, companies said they had not yet made up their mind about whether they would sponsor the convention, less than three months before the event.

In off-the-record asides, corporation spokespersons insisted to The Daily Beast that the convention is really about supporting the city of Cleveland, or the democratic process, or open political dialogue. The contributions aren’t an endorsement, they said, and in any case the corporations donate the same amount to both parties.

“They are sponsoring a party for Trump,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, another group urging corporations not to contribute to the event. “Muslim kids being bullied, Latino kids being yelled at with threats of deportation at sporting events…these corporations are closing their eyes, closing their ears, closing their mouths, and handing over their wallets.”

Corporations could be forgiven for seeking to distance themselves from the Cleveland convention. Even leading Republicans are going skip the event: four of the past five GOP presidential nominees—Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush—are declining to attend.

The Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, which aims to raise $64 million for the Republican convention, had a relatively slow month of fundraising—coinciding with a period of intense uncertainty over who the Republican nominee might be, or whether the nominee would even be decided by July.",REAL
"Edward J. McCaffery is Robert C. Packard trustee chair in law and a professor of law, economics and political science at the University of Southern California. He is the author of ""Fair Not Flat: How to Make the Tax System Better and Simpler."" The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

It turns out that the group for whom things ended well had significantly more positive recollections of the whole affair from its beginning. The psychology of it is simple to understand: Happy endings matter. Even an unpleasant experience can lead to happy memories in hindsight if it ends well.

So too with taxes.

Let's just say that when it comes to taxes for the average American, ""stuff"" happens (keeping the colonoscopy metaphor running), paycheck to tax-reduced paycheck. But recent statistics suggest that 8 out of 10 American taxpayers get a refund when they file their taxes, and the average amount is close to $3000 . That pays for a lot of stuff. To make the good news even better, tax filing has gotten rather simple for most people, with various software and service providers offering to do the dreaded paperwork for free. No filing headaches and a check to boot. What's not to like?

The fact of the matter is there is plenty not to like when it comes to the U.S. tax system. For example, the laws are biased against two-worker marriages; taxes go up when two relatively equal earners marry, as the rate brackets for couples are less than double that for single filers. Taxes are also overly complex and essentially optional for the truly rich , who make their wealth off of their existing wealth, the largely untaxed returns from capital, rather than by getting ordinary paychecks like most of us.

But now is not the time to explain such serious matters; the people are too busy spending their refunds. The once dreaded Tax Day has become a happy spending spree for most Americans. This state of short-term bliss follows from some deep trends in our tax laws. In brief, the U.S. income tax system is increasingly a wage tax, with limited taxes on capital (what the rich have) and limited deductions for most of us. For example, 3 out of 4 Americans using a standard deduction get no break for their charitable contributions. All of this has been hashed and rehashed by politicians, professors and pundits. But who has time for that? Let's go to our television sets and check out the commercials. One clever spot ran during the recent Super Bowl, suggesting that the Boston Tea Party -- a tax revolt -- could have been averted with free online filing, which the sponsor was eager to provide. Filling out 1040s was part of what made the income tax so odious for the masses for such a long time -- who doesn't remember our parents fretting over shoeboxes of receipts sometime in April, the cruelest month? Now as Tax Day approaches, we are flooded with advertisements about America getting its billions back, without even having to pay to prepare the forms. We get paid to play! Here is the happy ending that Kahneman and others have shown can mitigate the memories of unpleasantness past. The simple fact is that a simple tax is also rather simple to administer. Service providers kindly offer to help out the masses of befuddled Americans. Of course, these kind souls want their happy endings too. They are betting that once the large refunds become obvious to their customers, the grateful taxpayers-turned-consumers will happily purchase add-on services, such as ""audit protection insurance,"" or perhaps deposit the money in financial accounts managed by the provider. Just as lottery winners notoriously go on impulsive spending sprees, the ""found money"" of tax returns can finance many nice purchases. Of course, there are still those annoying matters of the deep unfairness of the tax laws, biased against modern families and wage earners, and in favor of the rich living off capital. No real bother -- stuff happens. Let others fret about fairness. As long as our taxpaying or colon procedures end with a smile -- or a check -- who has time to dwell on the bad stuff that came before?",REAL
"Follow on Facebook Print This Post 
CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT 
The nationwide boycott of all Carlton United Brewery products reached new heights over the weekend, after it was revealed that a camp of ringers in Queensland’s Channel Country have only been drinking Sauvignon Blanc for the last five weeks. 
They join a growing political movement of punters that are abstaining from drinking any of Australia’s highest-selling beer brands, in a showing of support for 55 workers who lost their jobs at Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) in June. These men and women are also known as the #CUB55. 
The maintenance workers lost their jobs after CUB terminated a machine maintenance contract with employer Quant, they were then offered their jobs back again at a 65% lower wage, after penalty rates and other entitlements. 
E.H Pearson Cattle Company ‘s head stockman, Ronnie Austin says although he and his mates often punch on with the unionised Betoota shearing contractors, joining the CUB Boycott was a “no fucking brainer”. 
“I’m usually not a big supporter of the Unions, but you can’t carry on the way these blokes have been” 
“It’s fucking crook, mate” 
Austin says it’s been hard work trying to avoid getting stuck into a few green demons at knock off after pushing cattle all day, but it’s their duty as fellow workers to support the CUB 55. 
“It’s been tough. But we are all starting to get around the lively fruit flavours of the Jacob’s Creek Sauvignon Blanc” 
“The passionfruit and citrus prevail across the palate, which is pretty much enhanced by the fresh natural acidity which provides vibrancy and length on the finish” 
With the Mount Isa New Years Eve Rodeo as the next big event pencilled in on their calendars, Austin says the Betoota boys are prepared to throw down with anyone who questions their choice of drink. 
“If CUB haven’t sorted this mess out by then, well yes of course we will still be drinking white wine on New Years Eve” 
“If anyone has problem with it then they can come and talk to me and Rocko. It won’t be the first time we’ve had to bust heads in the Isa” 
“In fact anyone who wants to drink VB around me better have a note from their doctor because It’s just bloody unaustralian” 
It seems the CUB boycott has travelled across all cultures and state borders in Australia, with workers unions in Brisbane marching as well as hipster musicians now being forced to choose between supported the workers and drinking Melbourne Bitter ironically. 
",FAKE
"Comments 
A bombshell report from CNBC confirms that FBI Director James Comey had in fact concluded that the government of the Russian Federation was interfering with the election, but fought to keep that information from being released to the public because it was “too close to the election.” 
Instead, Comey prevented the name FBI from appearing on the statement the government ultimately made on October 7th. 
This attitude stands in stark contrast to the cavalier way in which Director Comey threw a wrench into the election by writing a letter to “update” Congress on the Hillary Clinton email investigation since the FBI discovered emails that “may” be pertinent to their previous inquiries. 
That announcement has drastically shifted the polling landscape of the election and given the Republican Party the final stretch ammunition that the Donald Trump campaign, sinking after weeks of sexual assault revelations, needed to bail themselves out and redirect the national narrative away from their own bad press. 
The hypocrisy is astounding; it appears that the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted to hide the machinations by a foreign power to interfere in the elections of the United States to protect the Republican nominee, who has a long documented history with the operatives of said foreign power and a personally profitable reason to cultivate their support. 
The Director then said that he couldn’t release that information to the public – which definitely deserves to know if a foreign power is interfering with our electoral process – because it was “too close to the election” but then releases an intentionally vague and misleading letter concerning new emails that “may or may not be” pertinent to an investigation which the FBI itself had already exonerated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over? 
It’s obvious that Director Comey has joined Congressional Republicans in their efforts to conduct a witch-hunt against one of our nation’s most devoted public servants and usher in the election of a treasonous sexual predator instead.",FAKE
"The Corruption of the Clinton’s is like an endless dark pit of lies and manipulation. 
I am so sick of Clinton’s and I can’t believe anyone would vote for her. This FBI that is lying and trying to change documentation should be held to a legal standard and people who have tried to hide documentation and have lied should be thrown in prison for treason! 
As far as how the media treats Hillary Clinton, if you’ve noticed, they treat her like a queen. The liberal media likes to pamper, lie, and make sure America knows she is the best option. We, however, know better. So does Jason Chaffetz. 
For those of you who do it know who Chaffetz is, he is the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman who famously told the guy who destroyed Hillary’s email server that he was served on live TV. Now he just served up a brutal threat to Hillary Clinton and she is running scared. 
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM CHAIRMAN JASON CHAFFETZ CONFIRMED IT WILL HOLD ADDITIONAL HEARINGS ON DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER WHEN MEMBERS RETURN FROM RECESS. 
NEW FBI DOCUMENTS RELEASED MONDAY SHOW UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE PATRICK KENNEDY PUSHING THE FBI TO DECLASSIFY EMAILS IN EXCHANGE FOR A “QUID PRO QUO” DEAL — A MOVE CHAFFETZ AND HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN DEVIN NUNES FOUND DEEPLY TROUBLING. 
“Undoubtedly there will be, based on the documents the FBI released today there are new facts that need to be investigated. I’m very concerned about the quid pro quo that was in negotiation between the State Department and the FBI,” Chaffetz told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Chairman Nunes and I believe Patrick Kennedy should be relieved of his duties immediately pending an investigation. This is a manipulation if not an outright crime and so we’re gonna drive into that.” 
While the downgrade discussed between the agency officials didn’t come into fruition, the congressmen were clear they believe the proposal was inappropriate.",FAKE
"President Barack Obama on Tuesday addressed the eruption of protests and riots in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, condemning the violent demonstrations while acknowledging that the underlying problems plaguing the city are ""not new"" and will require national ""soul-searching"" to solve.

During a press conference with Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Obama was asked by NBC News' Chris Jansing about the growing frustration that not enough is being done in communities like Baltimore.

Obama said his thoughts are with Gray's family as well as the police injured in Monday's protests, and he criticized the violent approach taken by some demonstrators.

""There's no excuse for the kind of violence we saw yesterday,"" he said. ""It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting. They're not making a statement. They're stealing. When they burn down a building they're committing arson, and they're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunities from people in that area.""

""They were constructive and they were thoughtful,"" he said of those demonstrations. ""And frankly it didn't get much attention. And one burning building will be looped on television ... and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way have been lost in the discussion.""

He continued, ""Since Ferguson and the task force that we put together, we have seen too many incidences of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals -- primarily African-American, often poor -- in ways that raise troubling questions. It comes up, it seems like, once a week now. Or once every couple of weeks. So I think its pretty understandable why the leaders of civil rights organizations, but more importantly moms and dads, might start saying this is a crisis. What I'd say is this has been a slow rolling crisis.""

""We have to own up to the fact that occasionally there are going to be problems here,"" he said.

""We can't just leave this to the police. I think there are police departments that have to do some soul-searching. I think there are some communities that have to do so some soul-searching. But I think we as a country have to do some soul-searching. This is not new. It's been going on for decades,"" he said. ""If we are serious about solving this problem, then we're going to not only help the police, we're going to have to think about what we can do, the rest of us.""

""That's hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force,"" he said. ""If we really want to solve the problem, we could, it's just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant and that we just don't pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns. And we don't just pay attention when a man gets shot or has his spine snapped.""

Violent protests broke out in the Maryland city on Monday following the funeral for Gray, the 25-year-old who died last week after suffering a spinal injury while in police custody. At least 15 police officers were injured and 27 individuals were arrested during Monday's protests.",REAL
"Get short URL 0 16 0 0 The United States cannot rule out the possibility that the Daesh was involved in attacks that led to the deaths of more than 30 civilians in central Afghanistan, US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby said in a briefing on Wednesday. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Earlier in the day, local media reported that Daesh militants , previously active in eastern Afghanistan, had killed 36 noncombatants in the terrorist group’s first major offensive in the country’s central region. © REUTERS/ Alaa Al-Marjani Daesh May Bring Unpleasant Surprise to US-Led Coalition in Mosul ""I can’t stand here before you and rule out that Daesh or ISIL [Daesh] had a hand in this or was responsible,"" Kirby told reporters. 
It is no secret, Kirby continued, that the United States has long been concerned about the Daesh aspirations to establish a presence in Afghanistan. 
According to TOLOnews, Daesh militants attacked the Chaghcharan district of the central Ghor province on Tuesday evening. Afghan security forces responded to the attack, killing one of the Daesh commanders. 
The Daesh is outlawed in Russia and numerous other countries in the world. ...",FAKE
"The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election Posted on Tweet   The United States Is Pre-Positioning “Enemy Assets” In Preparation For A Rigged Election 
With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not. 

From Jeremiah Johnson, SHTFPlan : 
There are a number of excellent pieces circulating that hypothesize on what will happen before, during, and after the election. Mike Adams of Natural News and Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show have both dug deeply, examining the overall situation with outstanding insights as to the possibilities. Mike’s piece listed the scenarios that can happen regarding either outcome, and government actions that can be triggered by the result. Dave’s videos and telephone conversations expose the fact that the government is indeed preparing to have plans ready and in place with drills and exercises that can turn into an actual operation immediately. 
You can watch Dave Hodge’s full report with Paul Martin below: 
That being mentioned, an article came out the other day written by Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press, October 26 entitled US Official: Russia Might Shoot Down US Aircraft in Syria . The article highlights dialogue from a Charlie Rose interview via CBS at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that was conducted with National Intelligence Director James Clapper . The answers that Clapper gave to the questions gives two “insights” into the Obama administration’s mindset. This comment came regarding the potential for the US and Russia engaging one another militarily: 
“I wouldn’t put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that [it] was threatening to their forces on the ground. Russia has deployed a very advanced and capable air defense system in Syria and would not have done that if it [Russia] wouldn’t use it.” 
James Clapper 
Then Clapper was questioned about North Korea, and he had this to say: 
“…the U.S. policy of trying to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons is probably futile. Perhaps the only thing the U.S. could get would be limitations on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause. They are under siege and they are very paranoid, so the notion of giving up their nuclear capability, whatever it is, is a nonstarter with them.” 
All of this sounds very lackadaisical, coming from the Director of National Intelligence. That is because it is: Obama is pursuing a laissez-faire policy regarding “threats,” either from Russia or North Korea. The reason? He created them to use later. Clapper’s next responses are very interesting regarding the questions of whether or not Russia has been tampering with the election process and the recent threat by Vice President Joe Biden that the U.S. will respond to the (alleged) tampering with a Cyberattack designed “to embarrass and humiliate” the Kremlin. Here is an excerpt of that interview: 
“Clapper also was asked about the Obama administration’s claim that recent hacking of political sites was orchestrated by top Russian officials. The U.S. response might not come in the form of a reciprocal cyberattack on Russia, Clapper said. 
Pressed on the subject, Rose, the interviewer, noted that there is a sense that the Russians were not paying any price for the hacking. 
“Maybe not yet,” Clapper replied. 
“Maybe after the election?” Rose asked. 
“I’m not going to pre-empt,” Clapper said.” 
There we have it, in the absence of verbal commitment, no matter how nebulous the answer may seem. Just because it is nebulous, however, does not belie the nefarious nature of the answer, and it is obvious: The Obama administration is setting the Russians up for the time of the election to blame any deviance or hacks on them. 
It is no secret that election fraud is being committed now, even with the early voting that is occurring in several states. The Cyberattacks conducted on Friday, October 21st were a Beta-test for what is to come: full-blown election fraud and an attack on the infrastructure of the U.S. , to be blamed on Russia or North Korea and used as justification to either suspend the elections or declare them null and void. 
On October 25 , an article was released entitled DMV Computer Outage Raises Fear of Election-Day Cyber Attacks , as presented on losangeles.cbslocal.com . Apparently 100 DMV offices in California had a gigantic computer malfunction that was not attributed to hacking. The article interviewed a USC professor who had the following to say: 
“Election day may be a different story. Government computer systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks. I think there will certainly be some sort of cyber security issue in some location.” 
Clifford Neuman, Director, USC Center for Computer Systems Security 
From a standpoint of greater simplicity, the government can simply collapse the power grid, and this can be blamed on an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon from North Korea or Russia. If this is not done, the government can use the Soros-provided voting machines and other nefarious measures (such as dead people’s names being used to vote, illegal aliens casting a ballot, or people voting in numerous states, to name a few) to steal the votes. Then blame can be shifted to the Russians. 
Keep in mind that the Cyberattack on October 21 was found to “not be done by a government’s actions through state actors,” as the Mainstream media termed it. How true. Not one concrete shred of justification that Russia has been conducting any Cyberattacks has been provided. Certainly the Russian government has taken the time to investigate the source of the hacking on the U.S. systems. They will certainly monitor the elections in some manner to protect themselves from any accusations of hacking and prove they do not hold any culpability when the Democrats skew the numbers of the election and steal it themselves. 
This is why the federal government has warned Russia that simply to monitor the elections may warrant criminal charges being brought against the Russian government. 
But it’s OK to have UN election monitors, which in itself is a violation of the 10 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, right? 
The law doesn’t apply to the Democrats; the law only matters as long as they can inflict it upon you. Soros just came out recently and cursed democracy in general: though toad like in appearance and mannerisms, this communist foreigner is responsible for the collapse and/or debilitation of almost a dozen governments. In a previous article we covered how the voting machines in the early voting in Illinois did not register the original choice of the voter and “chose” the Democratic candidates. This was labeled as a “calibration error,” so simply and innocently. The communists masquerading as Democrats know the truth of the matter, that it is those who count the votes and not the voters who decide the elections. 
In summary, the U.S. is pre-positioning its “enemy-assets” to blame – on what the administration does – for a collapsed election labeled as “rigged” or the suspension of the election for any number of reasons, real or illusory, such as a genuine attack the U.S. provokes or an attack the U.S. carries out on itself . 
Civil unrest and/or war are the escape hatches to bail out of the Constitution and to take control of the country…not letting either crisis go to waste. With civil rest or a world war, the administration will be handed the country on a platter – indefinitely – and the election will be a moot point, whether it happened or not. 
Buy 2017 Gold Pandas and Buy 2017 Silver Panda Coins On Pre-Sale Now! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion!",FAKE
"A gay man is selling beer during the NBA playoffs.

In a light-hearted ad airing repeatedly during the pro basketball games, television- and Broadway-star Neil Patrick Harris is hawking Heineken Light. I noticed the commercial in part because it's such a stark counterpoint to a more traditional alcohol ad airing during the playoffs.

In that ad, part of a series, actor Ray Liotta sidles up to a bar silent and cool, staring down another guy who lacks the requisite guyness to order the same 1800 Tequila as Liotta. (Before Liotta, another actor who became famous playing a mobster, Michael Imperioli, played the tequila brand's tough guy.) The chief creative officer of the ad agency behind the Liotta ads told Adweek, ""It's about what tequila used to be, which is mystery and toughness -- a guy's guy's drink.""

Actually, it's about something even more rudimentary: preying (dully, predictably) on masculine insecurity for profit.

Beer advertising has traditionally been a bro world, with a visual vocabulary limited to stereotypical expressions of masculinity. Tough guys and hot babes rule. Heineken is offering a different vision. Although light beer tends to get less macho treatment, a clever, funny, glib, gay, Tony-winning, song-and-dance man is not the beer-hawking norm -- Harris's past engagement with bro culture notwithstanding.

A few years ago, Heineken targeted masculine insecurity in the ugliest way, basically marketing misogyny in 12-ounce increments. An ad featured Jay Z fetching himself a Heineken and disregarding a female friend's request to refill her champagne glass. Like Liotta in the tequila ad, Jay Z conveyed his contempt for the unworthy other in the frame. Jay Z is world-renowned for his remarkable capacity to articulate. Yet to sell beer, the mega-famous rapper went mute.

A 2013 Harvard Business Review article on brand polarization cited a competition between two hard cider brands in the U.K. After a new advertising campaign helped transform Magners, a cider, into ""a hip drink for young upscale professionals, a demographic that hadn’t consumed much cider in the past,"" a rival brand, Strongbow, decided to ""drive a wedge in the market.""

Heineken's choice of Harris seems indicative of a similar kind of polarization, although class seems a less obvious wedge here than cultural politics. In the familiar landscape of beer marketing, Harris counts as counter-cultural. Even less obvious choices have caused friction. A 2013 Cheerios ad featuring a multiracial family may not have been intended to polarize -- but judging from the racist reactions it elicited, it surely did. When the cereal brand opted to follow up with another ad using the same multiracial actors, however, it knew exactly where it was planting its cultural flag: with the emerging multiracial majority and in opposition to racial conservatives.

Likewise, a 2014 Cadillac ad that all but screams ""Republican"" is too knowingly crafted to be any kind of mistake. It traffics in snide stereotypes about Europeans and suggests that buying more ""stuff"" -- including a Cadillac -- is the reward for people who make their own luck. (So spare me your liberal sob story about inequality and lack of opportunity.)

The linkage of political identities and brands isn't new. (Democratic Subarus, Republican Cadillacs, as the New York Times reported.) It makes sense that a polarized cultural and political sphere would encourage polarized consumer branding, as well. If you watch the Harris Heineken ad and the Liotta tequila ad, you can't help but make assumptions about a host of underlying values being conveyed. Harris may like plenty of ""stuff,"" for example -- he's rich and famous and can afford it -- but he seems a better fit with the Cheerios family. And we don't have to guess where he stands on gay marriage. After Liotta's character leaves the bar, by contrast, it's not hard to imagine him riding off into the sunset, silent and alone -- in a Cadillac with a Ted Cruz sticker on the bumper.

Perhaps we'll know that political polarization is easing when we can watch a game on TV without having to choose teams even during the commercial breaks.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg View's editorial board or Bloomberg LP, its owners and investors.

To contact the author on this story:

 Francis Wilkinson at fwilkinson1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor on this story:

 Zara Kessler at zkessler@bloomberg.net",REAL
"As they navigate their respective crises, both Greek and Iranian governments are trumpeting a historical narrative that portrays them as the victim of big-power efforts to subjugate the less powerful.

Who do Greece and Iran think they are?

As global powers find themselves locked in face-offs with two relatively small states – economic powerhouse Germany and the European Union with Greece over its debt, and the United States and five other world powers with Iran over its nuclear program – exasperation is growing among the “bigs” that their smaller counterparts are not bowing to reality and accepting compromise faster than they are.

After all, it’s Greece that risks a full financial collapse without another European bailout, and Iran whose economy has been slammed by international sanctions that will only be lifted if Tehran agrees to a deal limiting its nuclear ambitions and opening its nuclear facilities to inspection.

The major powers in both crises see mounting brinkmanship and intransigence where they feel reason should prevail. But both Greece and Iran are engaging their more powerful interlocutors in a manner that suggests how much they are driven by the more ephemeral motivations of dignity and mutual respect.

The Greek and Iranian examples aren’t the first instances where smaller states have used the scenario of the little guy being stepped on by big, bad bullies to further their cases, particularly with domestic audiences. The imbalance of power in both diplomatic confrontations has seemed to reinforce the determination in Athens and Tehran to stand firm on what they see as their sovereign interests.

But even if the appeal to a sense of national dignity resonates, some diplomatic analysts say taking pride too far can end up closing off escape routes to countries in crisis – ultimately working against their public's interests.

“In both these cases of high-powered negotiations – Greece over its debt crisis and Iran over its nuclear program – the smaller country feels it’s facing the opprobrium of the rest of the world,” says Mark Hibbs, a Berlin-based senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That has led to an us-versus-them sentiment that has fed off of each country’s strong sense of national pride, and in both cases the leaders have played that card with their populations.”

But in both cases, too much focus on national dignity has helped push the negotiations to the brink of failure, Mr. Hibbs adds – an outcome he says does not serve the interests of either country.

In the Iran case, international negotiations in Vienna that faced a Tuesday deadline were extended to the end of the week, with both sides saying significant progress was made in recent days but that critical sticking points remained.

As for Greece, a referendum Sunday that screamed nationalist pride as voters rejected Europe-imposed austerity measures has been followed by Greek calls for renewed debt-relief talks and a European cold shoulder, particularly from Germany.

As they navigate their respective crises, both the Greek and Iranian governments are trumpeting a historical narrative that portrays them as the victim of big-power efforts to subjugate and dominate the less powerful, some analysts say.

“In both Iran and Greece they have spent decades cultivating a narrative of grievance,” says Peter Feaver, a professor of international relations at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “So in that atmosphere you have [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel transformed into Adolf Hitler, and the America of Obama turned into the America of the 1950s,” when the US engineered a coup in Tehran that installed the late Shah Reza Pahlavi in power, he adds.

To the Western powers and international institutions dealing with Iran on nuclear ambitions and Greece on its debt, “that narrative is beside the point of the matters at hand, it’s not today’s story,” Dr. Feaver says. “But to the Iranian and Greek delegations, that longer historical context does make sense,” he adds. “It serves as a filter for distorting the policy options.”

The narrative of smaller countries confronting the injustices of the world’s arrogant powers is a longtime staple of Iranian rhetoric in particular, Carnegie’s Hibbs says. Iran has claimed an international right to an indigenous nuclear power program since the early 2000s, he notes, and has portrayed international efforts to investigate Iran’s nuclear facilities as a veiled attempt by “the Great Satan” and other world powers to deny Iran an international right.

To a large extent that narrative fell into disuse in Greece as the country joined the powerful club that is the European Union, and then entered the even more restricted inner circle in the Eurozone. But the narrative of the aggrieved has returned with a vengeance, Hibbs says, as Germany’s powerbroker role in the country’s debt-relief negotiations has revived memories of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Greece.

But Hibbs says that both Greece and Iran are “picking and choosing” among historical facts to suit their narrative, leaving aside those that don’t fit the story they wish to tell.

“In both cases there’s a kind of historical amnesia,” he says. “You hear about rights and dignity, but you don’t hear Iranians acknowledging their country’s two decades of systematically violating international obligations” related to the nuclear program, he says.

“You don’t hear the Greeks saying they’re in this mess because of past [financial] commitments they didn’t honor,” Hibbs adds. “At some point, you’d like part of the picture to be the Greeks facing their responsibilities in addressing their problems.”

Duke’s Feaver agrees that Greece has played up the “powerful narrative of big countries imposing things on a smaller country” when it should be looking at its own role in its difficulties.

But he also sees a danger in equating the Greek and Iranian cases, when the game he sees Iran playing is much more about expansive ambitions than about addressing grievances.

“Iran is a country with imperial ambitions and it plays a much more problematic role in the region, and that does figure in the nuclear talks,” Feaver says. “Greece’s peccadilloes are much more of the ordinary sort,” he adds, “things like a dysfunctional public sector and overspending and petty corruption. So in that sense it’s not fair to lump them together.”

Moreover, he says that the Greeks face real-life upheaval and impoverishment as a result of coming to terms with Germany and the EU that go beyond the ephemeral injuries of a supposed wounded national pride.

“The Greeks are being asked to do things that are not just a matter of pride, but which would be very disruptive of Greek citizens’ lives,” he says. “But in material terms, what is being asked of Iran [in the nuclear talks] does not put in jeopardy the average Iranian citizen – although it may be problematic for the military part of the Iranian state.”

The injured dignity argument may have won the Iranian regime some points at home, and it may even resonate with other “small” states.

But Feaver says Western powers, and in particular the US, should stand up to it and address it for the negotiating tactic that it is.

“I think President Obama wants to say, ‘Wait a minute Iran, this is not about the little guy defying the strong, it’s not about the powerful trying to dominate the weak; this is about the rule of law.’ ”",REAL
"Home / Badge Abuse / “This is My Second One”— Virginia Cop Caught Bragging About Killing Two Unarmed People “This is My Second One”— Virginia Cop Caught Bragging About Killing Two Unarmed People Claire Bernish July 27, 2016 7 Comments 
A former Virginia police officer and U.S. Navy veteran, whose trial for murder begins this week, told a witness, “this is my second one,” after killing an unarmed 18-year-old black man in April 2015. 
While unclear whether or not the jarring statement amounted to a boast, the camera on ex-Portsmouth Officer Stephen Rankin’s Taser recorded him saying this to a Walmart employee mere seconds after he fatally shot unarmed teen and alleged shoplifter William Chapman in the store’s parking lot in April 2015. 
Rankin had, indeed, killed another unarmed man, Kirill Denyakin — under circumstances similarly and sufficiently questionable to earn three years’ administrative leave — just four years prior to the shooting for which he now stands accused of first-degree murder. 
During the final pretrial hearing on Tuesday, the Guardian reported , Rankin’s lead defense attorney, James Broccoletti, argued the former officer’s “statement is not probative of anything,” in an unsuccessful attempt to have it suppressed. 
Prosecutors countered to Judge Johnny E. Morrison they should not have to “sanitize the evidence” surrounding the fatal shooting. 
“The defendant made the comment, not just in the presence and earshot of a witness, but to the witness,” argued Commonwealth’s Attorney Stephanie N. Morales , who heads the case against Rankin. 
Although Morrison had previously disallowed direct statements to jurors concerning Rankin’s fatal shooting of Denyakin, as the Guardian noted , it now appears the officer’s prior use of deadly force will play an albeit limited role in the prosecution’s case. 
Troubling details about the killing of unarmed 26-year-old Kazakhstani cook, Kirill Denyakin, on April 23, 2011, would seem to suggest a glib tone in the officer’s later statement to the Walmart employee. 
Rankin responded to a call about Denyakin drunkenly pounding on the door of a residence where he had been staying with friends. Alleging the cook reached for his waistband and then charged toward him, Rankin shot Denyakin 11 times in the chest and limbs, as The Free Thought Project reported . No weapons were recovered on Denyakin’s body or at the scene — but when the man’s family filed a $22 million civil suit against the officer, the situation took a dark turn. 
Defending his use of deadly force, Rankin — who had chosen a photograph of a dead Serb who had been lynched by the Nazis in 1943 as his Facebook profile picture — took to a local newspaper’s website, posting roughly 250 comments derisively attacking Denyakin’s character and insulting his family’s attempt to seek compensation, writing : 
“22 mil won’t buy your boy back … let alone a habitual drunk working as a hotel cook.” 
Weeks prior to that deadly interaction, one of the officer’s supervisors cautioned senior commanders Rankin was “dangerous” and likely to harm someone. Further revelations included Facebook posts in which the cop referred to his firearms case as “Rankin’s box of vengeance.” 
A grand jury refused to indict Rankin for the Denyakin’s killing — and though the department placed him on administrative leave for nearly three years, it took just over a year after his return to active duty for Rankin to fatally shoot Chapman under circumstances suspicious enough to now stand accused of murder. 
On the morning of April 22, 2015, Portsmouth Walmart employees summoned police to report a shoplifter. Rankin responded and confronted 18-year-old Chapman in the store’s parking lot. Several witnesses reported seeing Rankin attempting to handcuff the teen, but their observations of what happened next differ to some degree. 
Two construction workers said Chapman broke free from the officer, knocking his Taser to the ground; but, in speaking to separate reporters afterward, one described the man “ whaling on ” the officer, the other noted the pair’s subsequent interaction was a “ tussle ” in which the teen had not been close enough to physically strike Rankin. 
In a report , pathologists noted Rankin would have been at least 30 inches away from Chapman when he was shot, and the medical examiner did not find gunpowder burns or residue suggestive of a point-blank or near point-blank shooting. No stolen items were listed among the victim’s personal effects. 
Further, body cam footage recorded Rankin holding his Taser, but abruptly and perhaps conveniently, if not outright suspiciously, stopped for the 15 seconds surrounding the shooting — only to pick up after the deadly interaction, with the Taser on the ground. 
Chapman’s family’s attorney, Jon Babineau, recounting what he was told for Pilot Online , said in December, “The video was operational up until just before the shooting, and then it was not operational for about 15 seconds,” though an unnamed source told him the gap had been caused by a “power source issue” and did not necessarily believe the tape had been edited. 
In September 2015, a grand jury indicted Rankin for murder and the illegal use of a firearm. 
Rankin has since been terminated from the Portsmouth force and continues to maintain his innocence. 
Jury selection for the murder trial is slated to begin this morning. Share Google + Fred Ziffel 
Anytime the calculated death of a human being is forced by another knowing these actions are not ABSOLUTELY necessary and there was no other immediate threat to life, the act of taking or ending said life becomes murder. Who the perpetrator is, or what his/her occupational profession is, is totally irrelevant. Murder is not justifiable. 
I hope they prosecute this vigorously and relentlessly. Bill Allyn 
Justice System Reform List America has a serious, institutionalized, systemic law enforcement problem. Over the last 4 decades, our law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, putting every citizen at risk of being shot and killed for nothing more than reaching for their wallet, as instructed, or less. This may increase safety for police officers (debatable, in the long run), but at the expense of making American citizens far less safe, which is the exact opposite of the goals of law enforcement. We need to create systems that bring back accountability within every level of the justice system. Nationally, we need to: 1. Create citizen oversight committees with powers of subpoena and prosecutorial discretion for every law enforcement agency in the country. A special independent prosecutor must be assigned immediately for officer-involved shootings. Committee members should be randomly selected and replaced often, like grand jurors, to avoid corruption. 2. Require law enforcement officers to be personally insured to protect taxpayers from lawsuits. Too risky for insurance? No insurance, no badge. Insurance could be partially publicly subsidized. 3. Require every law enforcement officer to wear a camera. No camera, no gun. Also, implement GPS tracking on all police cars and cameras. 4. Require yearly psyche tests to screen out potentially abusive officers. 5. Require random drug and steroid tests. 6. All police agencies must keep a database of every officer-caused civilian injury, shooting or killing, and that data must be periodically transmitted to a third-party, non-biased national database. 7. Any officer involved in a shooting must be alcohol and drug tested immediately. 8. Officers should be made aware of studies on abuse of power, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. Ensure there are clear policies on use of force. 9. More training to deal with mentally ill, or a mental illness crisis unit. More training and encouragement to use peacemaking, conflict resolution, and de-escalation skills. Increase educational requirements, focusing on psychology, sociology, and social work. 10. Create a special number (third party, independent of police) to report police brutality. Victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings should immediately be appointed an attorney to represent their position/case. 11. Create national database of abusive officers, so they don’t just get hired elsewhere. 12. Reverse militarization of police forces. Take away military weapons, APC’s, uniforms, and especially the attitude. Police officers are civilians, not a branch of the military. Require at least 5 years between active duty military and civilian police employment. Keep SWAT/military weapons and equipment under lock and key only to be used in genuine emergencies. Quit viewing the community you police as a “war zone”. 13. Prohibit television shows that glorify bad, illegal, or unconstitutional policing, such as “Cops”. Glorifying these behaviors creates a dangerous situation for American citizens and should not be tolerated. 14. Increase community outreach. Hire officers from the community. Officers need to be more in touch with the people they are sworn to protect. 15. End no-knock raids. It is perfectly legal for a home owner to respond to a break in with gun in hand, which gets them killed when the police are the intruders. This makes it unreasonably dangerous on citizens, especially when cops often go to the wrong address. 16. Reform forfeiture laws to protect citizens’ property rights and due process. No forfeiture proceedings until after conviction. All forfeiture proceeds go directly to the victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings. 17. End drug prohibition/war on drugs. Use harm reduction strategies. 18. End private prison industry. 19. Create a national organization dedicated to these ideals. Jamieson 
This list is brilliant! Great post. Ibcamn 
cops are just criminals with a badge. Occams 
Sad that there will be lots of tax-dollars spent just to simply let him walk away, but then, that will satisfy the sheep, as did Hillary’s ‘exoneration’….. As Bill’s ‘Limited Hangout Op’– $650m spent on a blowjob – to hide selling missile secrets to the Chinese. 
Treason runs deep in the White, these last 30 years. 
The US military is in Syria, helping ISIS, and US planes recently bombed and murdered over 100 civilians. Treason and murder. 
Why should the public see any better when it allows all this? Brian King 
Another psychopath kkkop that needs to get locked up Social Trending",FAKE
"Twenty four years ago Hillary Clinton walked on stage at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as the hopeful future first lady. Thursday night she walked on stage at the 2016 convention as the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major U.S. political party.

""Stronger together"" was the overwhelming theme Thursday evening as Clinton took the stage, with an early shout-out to Bernie Sanders supporters, some of whom protested her nomination with glow in the dark shirts.

Clinton's main efforts focused on differentiating herself from rival Donald Trump, as well as focusing on the ""steady leadership"" she would provide on foreign policy and the economy.

Largely absent from her speech: mentions of faith, religious liberty and abortion. She did get in a dig at Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, saying ""we will not ban a religion.""

She also referenced her Methodist faith, telling of her mother's admonition to ""do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.""

Aside from Clinton making history as the first female presidential nominee from a major U.S. political party, her daughter Chelsea is also making history, having both of her parents run as the presidential candidate for their party.

""I am here as a proud American, a proud Democrat, a proud mother, and tonight in particular a very, very proud daughter,"" Chelsea Clinton said in her speech introducing her mother.

""I am so grateful to be her daughter, she makes me proud every single day,"" Clinton said.

Although Hillary Clinton won the nomination, the big question surrounding her historic night was would she be able to garner the attention and popularity she needs in order for Democrats to get behind her. She was quick to praise President Barack Obama whose legacy she hopes to build on.

""America is stronger because of Obama's leadership,"" Clinton said.

In an attempt at party unity she also pointedly affirmed her former opponent Bernie Sanders in the first few minutes of her speech, hoping to appease his supporters.

Her focus later turned to rival Donald Trump as she alternately fired away at his campaign and cast a vision for her own.

""Don't let anyone tell you our country is weak. We are not. Don't let anyone tell you we don't have what it takes--we do,"" Clinton said.

She continued to tell the audience to never believe someone who says he can fix the country on his own, referring to Trump.

""He is forgetting every last one of us,"" Clinton said.

She went on to use her campaign slogan saying, ""We can fix it together,"" and referenced her book, It takes a Village.

""'Stronger together' is not just a slogan for our campaign, but a guiding principle,"" she said.

Clinton made multiple promises throughout the nearly one-hour speech, from her plan to support ""local forces"" to take out ISIS to creating ""more good jobs with rising wages"" in the United States.

She also promised to work with Sen. Bernie Sanders on education.

""Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free for the middle class and debt-free for all. We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt,""  she said.

Clinton assured her audience that she'll provide the necessary leadership in foreign policy and attacked Trump's ability to handle complicated foreign affairs.

""Imagine him in the Oval Office facing a real crisis,"" she said. ""A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.""

Clinton said the United States will prevail over ISIS, promising to strike its sanctuaries from the air, support local forces on the ground and increase intelligence.

Earlier on Thursday, FBI Director James Comey warned of the great threat the U.S. faces with the growing terrorist organization.

Clinton ended the night on a note of promise for the future, telling Americans, ""We are stronger together.""",REAL
"Email 
With millions of eyes watching CNN for election results tonight, the network really couldn’t afford any high-profile screwups. But unfortunately, that’s exactly what they got when John King tapped his touchscreen electoral map too hard and plunged himself straight into a digital hellscape from which there seems to be no escape. 
Ouch. That’s some major egg on CNN’s face! 
The night appeared to be going smoothly in the network’s Washington studio, until King tried to zoom in on a breakdown map of crucial Ohio swing districts. When the map seemed to freeze up, a frustrated King tapped the Magic Wall with enough force that his whole arm plunged through the suddenly fluid surface of the screen. Before Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper could step in, he had been fully engulfed in a vast virtual expanse of colorful, swirling data. 
With millions of Americans tuning in to watch the results of this historic election, CNN has been forced to press on even as they try to free John King from the computerized map. A noticeably emotional Wolf Blitzer mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to his imprisoned colleague before tapping the board to call up a gender breakdown of likely Oregon voters, the bar graph of which animated right into John King’s spine, launching nearly all the way to the mid-Atlantic states. If CNN producers thought that they had stabilized the situation by urging King to take refuge in the bottom corner of the screen, it did not take long for them to realize how wrong they were. When Connecticut was called for Hillary Clinton, the trapped John King was also turned entirely blue and let loose a horrible scream as if he were being burned alive. This level of panic was matched moments later when King tried to fend off a ravenous piece of malware with just his loafer, only for the shoe to shatter into pixels that the code devoured. 
Yikes. CNN will be wondering for a while how this all went so wrong, and on their biggest night, too. 
With plenty of states left to declare tonight, there’s still time for King to be rescued from the computerized nightmare. But with uploading a JPEG of a ladder for him to climb up and trying to shepherd him onto a thumb drive having already failed to return King to the studio, CNN may be running out of options. 
No matter how this shakes out, it’s clear CNN has a MAJOR technology fail on their hands. Then again, this is just what happens when anchors play with tech toys without reading the instructions. Well, better luck in 2020, guys.",FAKE
"Home › POLITICS › CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION HAS SHIFTED THE POLLS SIGNIFICANTLY IN TRUMP’S FAVOR CLINTON EMAIL INVESTIGATION HAS SHIFTED THE POLLS SIGNIFICANTLY IN TRUMP’S FAVOR 4 SHARES 
[11/1/16] MICHAEL SNYDER -Donald Trump has all the momentum now. Will it be enough to propel him to victory on election day? Trump’s poll numbers were improving even before we learned that the FBI had renewed its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the new survey results that came out over the weekend and on Monday make it clear that Clinton’s “certain victory” is not so certain after all. Unless something changes, Americans are going to go to the polls on November 8th with an FBI criminal investigation hanging over the Clinton campaign like an ominous cloud, and that is very good news for Trump. 
The Clinton campaign was hoping that this renewed investigation would not “move the needle”, but unfortunately for them that appears not to be the case. Hillary’s unfavorable rating just hit an all-time high , a whopping 45 percent of all Americans believe that this scandal is “worse than Watergate”, and a Rasmussen survey has found that 40 percent of all undecided voters that are leaning toward voting for Hillary Clinton are still open to changing their minds before election day. 
And even before this story broke on Friday, Clinton was having a difficult time getting her voters to the polls. According to the New York Times , early voting among young adults and African-American voters is significantly down compared to 2012, and those are demographic groups that Clinton desperately needs to turn out in large numbers. 
But of course the key to winning the election is getting to 270 electoral votes, and poll numbers appear to be shifting in the key swing states that Trump and Clinton both desperately need. For a moment, I would like to examine what the numbers currently look like in some of the most important states… 
Florida 
Without Florida, Donald Trump has absolutely no chance of winning. This is something that even the Trump campaign has admitted. That is why it was so alarming that most of the polls in October had Hillary Clinton leading in the state. 
Fortunately for Trump, a new survey that was conducted on Sunday shows him leading in Florida by four points . 
Georgia 
Georgia wasn’t supposed to be a problem. Georgia has traditionally been a deep red state, but polling throughout this election season had shown a very tight race. This had Republicans deeply concerned and the Clinton camp very happy. 
But now the momentum has seemingly shifted and the latest poll has Trump up by seven points . 
North Carolina 
Mitt Romney won North Carolina in 2012, and Donald Trump very much needs to win it if he hopes to be triumphant on November 8th. Hillary Clinton was shown to be leading in the eight most recent polls before the email story broke, but in the first major survey conducted afterwards she is now down by two points . 
Ohio 
No Republican has ever won the presidency without Ohio, and Trump knows how important it is to his chances. The three most recent polls conducted before the FBI renewed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails all showed a tie, but now the very first survey conducted afterwards shows Trump up by five points . 
Colorado 
Hillary Clinton has consistently been in the lead in Colorado throughout this campaign, and most experts didn’t give Trump much of a chance in the state, but the latest survey shows that Clinton’s lead has been whittled down to just one point . 
Arizona 
A survey that was conducted in mid-October showed Clinton having a five point lead in John McCain’s home state, but now the latest major poll has Trump up by two points . 
Nevada 
One of the most important swing states out west is Nevada, and most surveys showed Hillary Clinton with a strong lead throughout the month of October. Unfortunately for her, a poll that was conducted on Sunday shows Donald Trump with a four point lead . 
Clearly Trump has the momentum at this point, and it will be very interesting to see how the numbers change over the next few days. 
And as we learn more about what is in these newly discovered emails, will her fellow Democrats stick with her? Already, some are publicly wavering. The following example comes from WND … 
Longtime Clinton confidante and former Democratic pollster Doug Schoen told Fox News the newly renewed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server is forcing him to “reassess” his support for the Democratic nominee for president. 
Schoen, a Fox News contributor, made the comments to host Harris Faulkner during a live television appearance Sunday night on “Fox Report Weekend.” 
Public opinion is shifting quickly, but the bad news for Trump is that more than 23 million Americans have already voted. So millions upon millions of Americans cast their votes before they even learned of this new FBI investigation. If the race is very close, that could end up making the difference. 
And of course the race could dramatically change once again if the FBI comes to some sort of resolution about these new emails prior to November 8th. On Monday, CNN reported that a resolution before election day did not appear to be likely… 
FBI officials are unlikely to finish their review of new emails potentially related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server before the November 8 election. 
The initial work of cataloging top Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails found on her estranged husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop could be done in the next few days, US law enforcement officials told CNN. 
But the investigators are expected to spend more time doing other work, including likely working with other federal agencies to determine what — if any — classified materials are in the emails. This makes it unlikely there will be a resolution prior to the election. 
However, late on Monday evening the Drudge Report reported that the L.A. Times has learned that investigators may have a “preliminary assessment” completed “in coming days”… 
LA TIMES TUESDAY: FBI Investigators had planned to conduct new email review over several weeks. It now hopes to complete ‘preliminary assessment’ in coming days, but agency officials have not decided how, or whether, they will disclose results publicly… Developing… 
Whether good or bad, I do believe that the American people deserve to hear something conclusive about these emails before November 8th. 
If nothing is found to implicate Clinton, the American people should be told that. 
And if evidence of very serious crimes is discovered, there is no way in the world that should be held back until after the election. 
Even if it throws the election into complete and utter chaos , the American people deserve to know the truth. 
But will we get it? 
Stay tuned, because I think that this is going to be a crazy week. Post navigation",FAKE
"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 23:00 UTC Authorities in North Dakota may be feeling the heat from the international attention the Dakota Access Pipeline is getting. They're now saying they lack the manpower to remove the encampment of protesters located on federal land near the controversial pipeline. The announcement may signal a softening of the treatment the protesters, up until now, have been receiving. For months now, The Free Thought Project 's spotlight has been shining on the, some might say, dark and dirty deeds of law enforcement and their treatment of largely Native American peaceful protesters. Attack dogs were unleashed on the protesters in September, injuring six, and an additional 30 protesters, including children, were sprayed with pepper spray. In all, more than 260 people have reportedly been arrested since the protests began in Morton County — over 100 this weekend alone. The sheriff's office's announcement comes just two days after The Free Thought Project encouraged readers to contact Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier's office demanding him to allow for peaceful protest, even providing a link to a petition for his removal. Spokeswoman Donnell Preskey told The Associated Press the department doesn't ""have the manpower"" to remove the more than 100 protesters from the property. ""We can't right now,"" she said. Preskey said the land belongs to a Texas-based firm, Energy Transfer Partners, and was purchased from a local rancher for an undisclosed price. According to the AP , the Native Americans claim the land is theirs by way of an, ""1851 treaty and they won't leave until the pipeline is stopped."" ""We never ceded this land,"" said protester Joye Braun. ""The $3.8 billion pipeline, most of which has been completed, crosses through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Opponents worry about potential effects on drinking water on the Standing Rock Sioux's reservation and farther downstream on the Missouri River, as well as destruction of cultural artifacts,"" writes the AP. The disputed ranch is more than 100 years old and was the first one to be inducted into the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. According to the AP: ""It is within a half-mile of a larger encampment on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' land where the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and hundreds of others have gathered in protest. Protesters do not have a federal permit to be on the corps' land, but the agency said it wouldn't evict them due to free speech reasons . Authorities have criticized that decision, saying the site has been a launching point for protests at construction sites in the area."" While the announcement by the Morton County Sheriff's office may signal a change in tone and the potential for more relaxed police tactics, it remains to be seen. Late Monday, Standing Rock Sioux chairman Dave Archambault II issued the following statement, calling on the Obama Administration's U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the militant treatment of its peaceful protesters, and asked for an injunction to the pipeline's construction. Archambault wrote; The militarization of local law enforcement and enlistment of multiple law enforcements agencies from neighboring states is needlessly escalating violence and unlawful arrests against peaceful protestors at Standing Rock. We do not condone reports of illegal actions, but believe the majority of peaceful protestors are reacting to strong-arm tactics and abuses by law enforcement. Thousands of water protectors have joined the Tribe in solidarity against DAPL, without incident or serious injury. Yet, North Dakota law enforcement have proceeded with a disproportionate response to their nonviolent exercise of their First Amendment rights, even going as far as labeling them rioters and calling their every action illegal. We are disappointed to see that our state and congressional delegations and Gov. Jack Dalrymple have failed to ensure the safety and rights of the citizens engaged in peaceful protests who were arrested on Saturday. Their lack of leadership and commitment to creating a dialogue towards a peaceful solution reflects not only the unjust historical narrative against Native Americans, but a dangerous trend in law enforcement tactics across America. For these reasons, we believe the situation at Standing Rock deserves the immediate and full attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, the DOJ should impose an injunction to all developments at the pipeline site to keep ALL citizens - law enforcement and protestors - safe. The DOJ should be enlisted and expected to investigate the overwhelming reports and videos demonstrating clear strong-arm tactics, abuses and unlawful arrests by law enforcement. The chairman's request seems to validate many of the reports coming from the field, that peaceful protesters are being labeled as rioters and are not being treated with the dignity they feel they deserve. As The Free Thought Project reported two days ago, many of the protesters are being thrown to the ground, squashed underfoot, strip-searched, and forced to remove sacred hair braids — all considered ""strong-arm tactics, abuses, and unlawful,"" by Archambault.",FAKE
"President Obama told the United Nations on Monday that they must all work together on an array of challenges — from Syria to Ukraine, from poverty to climate change — because ""the United States cannot solve the world's problems alone.""

While making a largely thematic address to the U.N. General Assembly about the need for global cooperation, Obama also had harsh words for Russia just hours ahead of a tense meeting with President Vladimir Putin later on Monday.

The president criticized Russia's aggression in eastern Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, saying ""we cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.""

While not citing the Russian president by name, Obama also challenged Putin's assertion that the only solution to the conflict and refugee crisis Syria is to back Bashar al-Assad, describing him as a tyrant ""who drops barrel bombs to massacre innocent children.""

Throughout his 42-minute speech, Obama also defended the Iran nuclear agreement and questioned a Chinese military build-up in the South China Sea that has drawn protests from U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea. He extolled the new U.S. approach to Cuba, and called on Congress to lift the decades-long economic embargo against the communist island.

Obama also pledged to continue the fight against the threats of the Islamic State — ""we will not be outlasted by extremists"" — but said other nations need to participate, a common theme of his U.S. address.

""Together, we must strengthen our collective capacity to establish security where order has broken down, and to support those who seek a just and lasting peace,"" Obama said.

U.N. members also need to work together to face challenges ranging from extreme poverty to violence against women to trade and global economic development to the ravages of climate change, Obama said.

Referring to a conference in December seeking a global climate change agreement, Obama said ""the United States will work with every nation that is willing to do its part so that we can come together in Paris to decisively confront this challenge.""

In stressing the need for multi-lateral action, Obama cited the U.S. problems with the war in Iraq, citing ""the hard lesson that even hundreds of thousands of brave, effective troops, trillions of dollars from our Treasury, cannot by itself impose stability on a foreign land.""

Obama also criticized dictatorships and authoritarian governments across the globe, including Iran where hard-liners continue to criticize the United States in spite of the lifting of sanctions in the wake of the nuclear deal. ""Chanting Death to America does not create jobs, or make Iran more secure,"" Obama said.

Recent history proves that ""dictatorships are unstable,"" Obama said: ""You can jail your opponents but you can't imprison ideas.""

Speaking 70 years after the founding of the United Nations, Obama praised the work of the organization founded in the ashes of World War II and designed an to prevent a third global conflict.

Through its work, Obama said, lives have been saved, agreements forged, diseases conquered, and mouths fed, although ""we come together today knowing that the march of human progress never travels in a straight line, that our work is far from complete, that dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.""

Later on Monday, Obama meets separately with two powerful world leaders: Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and Putin of Russia.

Speaking to the General Assembly shortly after Obama, Putin said countries should back Assad because his government in Syria is fighting Islamic State militants. The Russian leader chided the U.S. for backing Syrian rebels, saying some of them have defected to the IS.

As for Ukraine, Putin said a ""coup"" that evicted a pro-Russian leader has led to a civil war in that country.

Obama will also attend a U.N. luncheon, chair a meeting on peacekeeping efforts, and host a reception for General Assembly delegates.

As Obama spoke to delegates at the United Nations, the White House issued a memorandum pledging support for peacekeeping missions, and ordering executive agencies to help. The United States is looking for similar pledges from other nations, and Obama told U.N. delegates that ""we have to do it together.""

During his speech to the General Assembly, Obama also made references of some of politics surrounding the U.S. presidential election. In an apparent reference to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Obama denounced voices who call for ""walls"" designed to ""keep out immigrants.""

In his repeated call for greater global cooperation, Obama noted what he called ""increasing skepticism of our international order,"" and of government in general. He blamed some of it on ""greater polarization, more frequent gridlock,"" and various movements ""on the far right, and, sometimes, the left.""

Critics of the system are also exploiting ""the fears of ordinary people,"" Obama said, creating ""a politics of us versus them.""

Globalization is fact, however, and ""we cannot look backwards,"" Obama said.

""We live in an integrated world,"" he said, ""one in which we all have a stake in each other's success.""",REAL
"Even if hackers don't strike on Election Day, the drumbeat of cyberattacks and leaks this campaign cycle has affected the way citizens view the electoral process.

—Even if hackers don't actually try to tamper with voting Tuesday, the unprecedented amount of cyberattacks this campaign cycle – and the public warnings of possible Election Day digital fraud – has already had a profound impact on American democracy.

Consider this: In the wake of widespread hacks against political organizations this summer, a survey from cybersecurity firm Carbon Black found that 38 percent of Americans are ""concerned"" that the election itself could be hacked, while another 18 percent are ""very concerned."" Just 11 percent of respondents said they were ""not concerned at all.""

These fears of digital sabotage, apparently, led 1 out of 5 respondents to say they might not even vote.

If that's representative of the entire electorate, it means that some 15 million people could stay home Tuesday – as a result of a hacking campaign the Obama administration has blamed on Russia.

After an unknown group or person known as Guccifer 2.0 claimed responsibility for the hack on the Democratic National Committee this summer, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence blamed senior Russian officials for orchestrating the breach as part of a broader effort to sway American public opinion and undermine trust in the election.

But the high-profile accusation didn't quash Guccifer: It resurfaced once again over the weekend to hint at more Election Day tampering: ""I will monitor that the elections are held honestly. I also call on other hackers to join me, monitor the elections from inside and inform the US society about the facts of electoral fraud.""

While election and cybersecurity experts dismissed that claim as hyperbole, it may be a ""last-ditch effort"" to sway the vote or deter people from heading to the polls, Justin Fier, director for cyber intelligence and analysis with security firm Darktrace, told PCWorld. ""His goal during all this time has been public influence.""

Warnings that voting booths might be hacked have certainly put state election officials on alert for any abnormalities Tuesday. DHS officials say they've spoken to all 50 states about providing help with scanning their systems for risks and offering other services, but wouldn’t detail the assistance specific states had received.

But even if foreign hackers can't compromise actual voting systems, the internet campaign to spread fear of vote hacking and manipulation may be enough to have a major impact on public trust.

Daniel Chiu, deputy director of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, noted that since Republican candidate Donald Trump and others are claiming the election could be rigged, hackers don't need to actually strike on Tuesday to discredit the vote. ""Merely a credible claim of doing so could compel voters to cry foul and undermine the legitimacy of the vote both at home in the US and abroad,"" said Mr. Chiu.

To be sure, successfully compromising voting machines would be difficult, say experts.

""The US election landscape is made up of approximately 9,000 different state and local jurisdictions, providing a patchwork of laws, standards, processes, and voting machines,"" noted Ian Gray, cyber intelligence analyst at the firm Flashpoint, in a blog post today. ""This environment is a formidable challenge to any actor – nation-state or not – who seeks to substantially influence or alter the outcome of an election.""

But that's probably not Russia's aim, he said. ""Russia can most likely achieve a more reliable outcome with fewer resources not by attacking the election infrastructure directly, but rather by organizing a disinformation campaign attacking confidence in the election itself.""

Some experts say that mere reports of possible Election Day hacking on social media, blogs, and in mainstream news outlets could fuel post-election challenges to the results.

""If you lose faith in the process, then what? There could be appeals for months,"" said Ben Johnson, chief security strategist at Carbon Black. ""There could be appeals for months. We need to have enough integrity and transparency in the process so people are comfortable that the election wasn't tampered with.""

State officials are on guard for any potential signs of tampering. ""There's a heightened awareness and a heightened concern,"" said Karen Jackson, Virginia Secretary of Technology. ""If you're paying attention to cybersecurity, then election systems are just one of the systems you're paying attention to anyway.""

The idea of nameless, faceless hackers or foreign spies disrupting the election, clearly, is a major concern on Tuesday. But it's not just a cyberattack that could have an impact, she notes. ""Somebody could pull a fire alarm. All of those things have the power to disrupt the voting process.""",REAL
"Approximately 1 in 68 children has an autism spectrum disorder, making the disorder more common than it used to be and a force to be reckoned with. There are even service dogs that are specially... ",FAKE
"Julian Assange October Surprise REVEALED 10/28/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports on the Julian Assange October Surprise & Rants about a Complacent Mainstream Media. 10/27/2016 TRUTH REVOLT http://youtu.be/PsVNKmb6jEc There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is r ... Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 INDEPENDENT The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. The thr ...",FAKE
"Posted by Madeline | Oct 29, 2016 | 2016 , Daily Blog | 0 | Thanks Barbora!
First Contact Film! 
ABOUT FILM 
FIRST CONTACT is a unique documentary, narrated by Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe winning actor JAMES WOODS, that tells the true story of Darryl Anka’s UFO encounters that led him to channel an extraterrestrial being known as BASHAR, who delivers messages to prepare Earth for contact with another civilization. 
The film not only explores the potential positive impact of ET contact on our society, but also demystifies channeling, the medium through which Darryl is able to communicate with the inter-dimensional being. 
FIRST CONTACT will not only astound viewers with starting eyewitness accounts and scientific evidence, but the film also explores many of the questions we’ve been asking for millennia: Why are we here? What’s the nature of existence? Where are we headed? 
Bashar answers these questions via channeling and, accompanied by state-of- the-art graphics, explains how the universe works and how each person creates the reality they experience. 
Over the past three decades, thousands of individuals around the globe have listened to Bashar’s messages and have had the opportunity to apply these principles in their lives and create the reality that they desire. 
FIRST CONTACT proposes that we are not alone and that Truth is Stranger Than Fiction. Share: Rate:",FAKE
"By Jason Easley   5:03 pm 370 of nation's top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States.   
370 of nation’s top economists have come together to urge the American people not to elect Donald Trump to be the next President Of The United States. 
In the letter , the economists listed a dozen economic policy reasons why voters should not vote for Trump, but it as their conclusion that was stunning, “He promotes magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.Donald Trump is a dangerous, destructive choice for the country. He misinforms the electorate, degrades trust in public institutions with conspiracy theories, and promotes willful delusion over engagement with reality. If elected, he poses a unique danger to the functioning of democratic and economic institutions, and to the prosperity of the country. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you do not vote for Donald Trump.” 
Trump’s thoughts on the economy are dangerous to the prosperity of the country. It isn’t just that Trump is a person of bad character who lacks any of the human traits that voters should seek in a president. It is also that his policies are nonsense. 
Economists don’t write these types of letters ever. The economists aren’t discussing partisan politics. They view Trump and his ideas as a threat to the American economy. 
Donald Trump’s economic ideas aren’t based in reality. Trump is selling a fantasy, and when 370 of the nation’s top economists warn that a vote for Trump is a dangerous choice for the country, voters would be wise to listen.",FAKE
"Even the long-term unemployed are starting to find work. But how strong is the jobs recovery, really?

Trevor Parkes has been through the tunnel called unemployment in post-recession America and come out the other side. In the summer of 2013, he moved from Texas to Tennessee so his family could be closer to his wife’s parents. But when his new job evaporated with a layoff after just four months, Mr. Parkes was in trouble: unemployed in a difficult job market, edging toward age 50, and with two kids moving through school.

Not least among his challenges: He was still a newcomer to the Nashville area, with few friends or connections to turn to for support. “I was basically terrified, because I didn’t know anyone here,” he says.

Even with his wife working in youth ministry, the year that followed was one of emotional turmoil. Parkes tried it all. Temp work. Networking with other parents at his kids’ school. Contacting former employers. Mining online job boards. Each week, more résumés went out into the void.

Then this past fall, something changed. First came a small regional bank that actually wanted to interview him. Not long after came a call from the very bank that had laid him off. It was starting a new flood insurance underwriting division and hired Parkes to be part of the team.

The job means new confidence and financial security for Parkes and his family. It also represents a larger story of employment revival in the US economy.

Today’s US job market is healthier than you might realize. True, the recovery is incomplete. Even a good job market today won’t mean conditions are easy for US workers.

Yet the progress is real. And crucially, it’s helping to address one of the defining features of the Great Recession and its aftermath: the large number of people who are long-term unemployed and in many cases at risk of dropping out of the workforce altogether.

An improved job climate has, more broadly, revived economic spirits across America. For the first time since the Great Recession officially ended some 5-1/2 years ago, Gallup and CNN polls find a majority of Americans having a positive view of the economy.

Last year saw the strongest US employment growth since 1999, and the official US unemployment rate has fallen to 5.7 percent of the labor force as of January, down from 6.6 percent a year before.

“It’s certainly good news that payroll growth has eliminated a lot of the employment gap that resulted from the recession,” says Andrew Levin, who is joining the economics faculty of Dartmouth College. “But at the current pace of job creation, another 18 months to two years will probably be needed to reach full employment.”

In fact, even as the undeniable gains give the United States lower joblessness than many European nations, the set of remaining challenges is also clear:

• Middle-class incomes had been stagnating and inequality widening even before the recession. Those trends have now become central political questions, gaining attention from Republican and Democratic leaders alike in the run-up to a presidential election in 2016.

• From robots to smart phones, technology has opened new opportunities for consumers but is also disrupting traditional occupations. Economist Tyler Cowen distilled the worry in a 2013 book, “Average Is Over,” forecasting a future in which an educated elite pulls increasingly far ahead of everyone else.

• As the US emerges from the most protracted jobs bust since the Great Depression, a historically high number of working-age civilians are still without work or underemployed. Some have part-time jobs rather than the full-time ones they hope for. Some have grown so discouraged that they’ve stopped even looking for work.

One key worry is that many of the recession-sidelined Americans have become so detached from the workforce – losing skills, connections, marketability – that they may never work again.

Reviving the rate of labor force participation (the share of US adults who are working or wanting to work) may be a vital measure of whether America is really nearing “full employment.” That’s why, at this point, a month in which the unemployment rate edges up isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if it’s a sign of more people being drawn into the job hunt.

Economist Stephen Rose of George Washington University sees the challenges, but he also cautions against buying into a view of long-term pessimism. Time and again, he says, forecasts of a grim future have emerged in times of economic distress, technological change, or global competition – and then been proved wrong.

Already, in at least a few industries, a shortage of workers is starting to surface. Tim Bowe, chief executive of a product-development firm based near Boston, says the college- and graduate-degree scientists he’s looking to hire are hard to find.

“The market is not even tightening,” he says. “It’s tight.”

The company, called Foliage, hopes to grow its 600-person US workforce by 20 percent this year as it brings technology solutions to clients in industries from cars to industrial equipment.

Even beyond strong fields like math and sciences, employers have been adding jobs lately across a broad range of industries. The new positions include many low-paid ones in restaurants and retail shops. But many are also in professional services, sales, and skilled factory work. Fully 1 in 10 new jobs over the past year has come in construction, a welcome revival for an industry that was hit especially hard by the recession.

The job gains have actually been coming since the end of 2010 – and slower than anyone wished. But last year saw a pickup in the pace, a shift toward the better in public opinion about the economy, and forecasts of continued job creation in 2015.

Even states such as Michigan and Ohio have seen high unemployment rates plummet, in part because of a revival of automotive and other manufacturing. And in 28 states, led by many west of the Mississippi, employment is now back above 2007 levels.

This is welcome news for workers of all ages.

Young people between 16 and 24 years old, actually, have been the age group whose connections to work have most frayed since 2008. Their rate of participation in the labor force took a drop after the recession that was twice as big as the drop for workers ages 25 to 34 or ages 45 to 54.

Now that is changing. Rashid Nelson, a senior at Boston University, says he’s seen the job outlook improving steadily each year he’s been in college. And now he knows he has a job waiting, as an account manager for AT&T, selling telecommunication technologies to both small and large businesses.

“I just wanted to put myself in a good position,” he says of his intensive job hunt last fall. “I didn’t want to be that one student who graduated and didn’t know what he was doing.”

That focus, not just an improved job market, contributed to his finding a position. He majored in an area that’s in demand (marketing), planned carefully (leaving his Fridays clear of classes for potential travel for job interviews), and kept sending out applications during fall semester.

Today, as a student ambassador for Boston University’s Center for Career Development, he’s urging peers to do similar planning.

Older workers, too, are glad to see an improving employment climate. Sam Jarman of San Diego went through a long stint of unemployment – twice. Working in the mortgage industry, an epicenter of the financial crisis, he lost one job in 2008. He found another in 2009, making loan modifications for people at risk of foreclosure.

It was a high-level job (managing other managers on the team) but his job security was inversely related to the health of the economy. By early last year he was laid off again.

The business of making regular home loans was picking up, but he was 51 years old and says no one would hire him. “They said, ‘You’ve been out of the origination side for five years and a lot has changed. We want to hire someone who has more recent experience.’ ”

Call it wisdom or desperation, Mr. Jarman began widening his efforts. “I prayed, I networked, I was ready to take anything. I looked in health care, at Petco, Jack in the Box,” he says. “For the first time in 27 years, I considered leaving California because there were no jobs here.”

But in October he landed one, in the lending industry and at a local credit union. He took a 25 percent pay cut and is one step down from his prior managerial level, but he’s glad to be there. “I like it. There are good people here, and [the company] isn’t going to leave San Diego,” he says. “I feel more secure.”

As of January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics still counts 2.8 million Americans as unemployed for more than half a year and still looking for work. Even when people do move forward, it’s not unusual for the process to be start-and-stop – with new jobs that don’t last very long.

The positive thing is simply this: From blue-collar workers to people like Jarman, more and more jobless workers are finding their way back to work.

One day last fall, Lidia Sotomayor was doing a dress rehearsal for that pivotal few minutes that could make or break her future – a job interview.

Her mock interviewer, a woman from a group called Platform to Employment, was in effect the drill sergeant in a boot camp for the long-term unemployed. (“They coddled you for the first hour,” Ms. Sotomayor recalls of the five-week intensive program.)

Sotomayor fought through the tough questions, drawing on her training. Don’t be intimidated. Pause to think, but not for too long. In the end, the room of about two dozen other jobless people erupted in applause at her performance.

The rehearsal, and the confidence boost, soon bore fruit. She now has a job as a bookkeeper in a small company, based in her home city of Bridgeport, Conn., that makes electric cable assemblies for business clients.

Her story offers a window on how today’s job market, though reviving, remains tougher than before the recession – and is being transformed by evolving technology.

Sotomayor was coached on how to craft a profile on the website LinkedIn and how that would help. She learned how companies are besieged by electronic job applications – and quickly weed through them in ways that winnow out lots of viable candidates.

Joseph Carbone, who heads the organization that created Platform to Employment, says the challenges for workers are long term as well as partly cyclical.

“The days of getting a job and staying there for the rest of your working life, and not blending in any additional education or training – they’re gone, they’re over,” he says. Managing one’s career means “you’ve got to be vigilant.”

As Mr. Carbone describes it, employers are simply warier of making a full-time hire than they used to be. If they can meet a workplace need with part-timers, temp workers, or contractors, that takes financial and regulatory liabilities off their shoulders. When they do hire full-timers, it comes with the expectation of continuous advancement in skills.

These aren’t new trends. “Lifelong learning” was becoming more than just a catchphrase even in the 1990s. But workplace change has accelerated. Switching jobs is fine, but being unemployed can quickly make one’s skills look out of date – not to mention being a financial drain.

Sotomayor says the training program hammered home a simple message: “Stop the bleed” by getting reemployed, even at a lower salary. If a new job isn’t within reach, Carbone urges people to do something to show they’re active – taking courses or volunteering, for instance. Such lessons apply to young and old alike.

Mr. Nelson, the soon-to-be college grad, is already steeped in the notion that he should keep his eye more than a few steps down the career trail. He has a long-term goal to build experience toward working as a sports marketing agent in professional basketball.

As more Americans who want jobs find them, they are shifting from belt-tightening to a new sense of confidence and new possibilities.

A job doesn’t define a person, after all, but for millions it does contribute to everything from their sense of purpose to their ability to help a charity or a neighbor in need.

For Andre Miles near Chicago, a job means something as simple as being able to treat his young children to a night of special fun.

“I’m taking the whole family to Chuck E. Cheese’s tonight,” he says by phone as he commutes homeward from his customer service job toward his wife and three young kids. That’s the kind of thing that had been cut out of the family budget in late 2012, when his old job moved to Atlanta and he decided to stay in Illinois.

After a long time out of work, Mr. Miles landed a job in December with an assist from a group called Skills for Chicagoland’s Future. “I have something to offer,” Miles says, referring to his skills in customer service. But jobs are also allowing him and his wife to pursue possible new paths through additional schooling.

Randy Candelaria, who lives near Salt Lake City, found that getting a paycheck opened an even bigger door of opportunity: the potential to reconnect with his family and leave homelessness behind. His job is paying for a cellphone, which in turn has put him back in touch with his daughter and grandsons, ages 4 and 6.

After two years without work and living in homeless shelters and at friends’ homes, Mr. Candelaria considers his new employment at a custom countertop company an amazing breakthrough. For workers like him, with prison time in their past, the job market is tougher than for most.

“It’s hard when you make mistakes and you wish you could go back and ‘would have, should have, could have,’ ” he says. “Because of those choices, I have consequences, but it’s nice to know there are still programs and people who are willing to help.”

Help came for him when he stopped in at the Utah Department of Workforce Services on a day when the office was uncommonly empty. He was just there to use the fax machine, not to do any prospecting. Still, he had registered with the agency, and began talking to employees who mentioned a job that was a possible fit for him. One phone call later, he had an interview – and later a job.

In Tennessee, Parkes no longer winces when he meets other parents who ask what he does for a living. The family budget has also expanded. While he was unemployed, the couple had shopped only at discount grocery stores, skipped getting health and dental insurance for themselves, and relied on help from family members and their church.

Now Parkes can focus on paying down his debts and looking more than a month down the financial road for himself and his family.

After persisting in maintaining a positive attitude through it all, Parkes also says the year of joblessness has put material success in perspective.

“I was talking with my son the other day about wealth and I asked him to define what being rich means,” he says. “To me, you just need a place to live. A place that keeps you warm at night, keeps you cool in the summer. Not being tied to debt – that’s what it means to be rich.”

Contributing to this report were Carolyn Abate in San Francisco, Eilene Zimmerman in San Diego, Emiley Morgan in Salt Lake City, and Michael Holtz in Boston.",REAL
"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a once rising star of the GOP presidential pack, has dropped out of the race. Now the field is scrambling to re-align.

Just this summer, Walker led the Republican field in Iowa. But on Monday, he called it quits and suggested that someone could emerge from a smaller pool of candidates with a clear conservative alternative to the current frontrunner, Donald Trump.

""Today, I believe that I am being called to lead by helping to clear the race so that a positive conservative message can rise to the top of the field. With that in mind, I will suspend my campaign immediately,"" he said.

But will others drop out so that support can build around an alternative to Trump? None are expected to do so anytime soon. In fact, they're all vying for the Walker campaign assets.

Some believe that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will benefit the most from Walker's departure. They're both considered ""fresh faces"" with next generation appeal.

Late Monday, Rubio was already welcoming Walker staff to his team, as was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

The latest CNN poll shows political outsiders Trump, former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson leading the presidential pack, with Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in fourth and fifth place respectively.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is battling off an unexpectedly strong challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. She's also waiting to see if Vice President Joe Biden decides to enter the race.

In her latest campaign move, the former secretary of state is promising not only to protect Obamacare from GOP plans to repeal it – but to improve it.

""As the latest census numbers show, the number of uninsured continues to fall and Americans are now seeing, hearing, and feeling the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act,"" a Clinton campaign official said Saturday.

It's already a presidential campaign year that no one could have predicted, and voters have never had so many candidates to consider.

But whether any of them will follow Walker's advice to lead by falling back is unlikely for now.",REAL
"A key operative in a Democratic scheme to send agitators to cause unrest at Donald Trump’s rallies has visited the White House 342 times since 2009, White House records show.

Robert Creamer, who acted as a middle man between the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and “protesters” who tried — and succeeded — to provoke violence at Trump rallies met with President Obama during 47 of those 342 visits, according to White House records. Creamer’s last visit was in June 2016.

Creamer, whose White House visits were first pointed out by conservative blog Weasel Zippers, is stepping back from his role within the Clinton campaign. (RELATED: Second O’Keefe Video Shows Dem Operative Boasting About Voter Fraud)

Hidden camera video from activist James O’Keefe showed Creamer bragging that his role within the Clinton campaign was to oversee the work of Americans United for Change, a non-profit organization that sent activists to Trump rallies. (RELATED: Activist Who Took Credit For Violent Chicago Protests Was On Hillary’s Payroll)

Scott Foval, the national field director for Americans United for Change, explained how the scheme works.

“The [Clinton] campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, The Foval Group goes and executes the shit,” Foval told an undercover journalist.

One example of the “shit” Foval executes was an instance in which a 69-year-old woman garnered headlines after claiming to be assaulted at a Trump rally.

“She was one of our activists,” Foval said.

Creamer’s job was to “manage” the work carried out by Foval.

“And the Democratic Party apparatus and the people from the campaign, the Clinton campaign and my role with the campaign, is to manage all that,” Creamer told an undercover journalist.

“Wherever Trump and Pence are gonna be we have events,” he said.",REAL
"Home / News / TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! fisher 5 mins ago News Comments Off on TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! TRUMP TSUNAMI INCOMING: What Trump Did In Florida Today Will Make Him President! 
Breaking! Breaking! Bad news for Hillary in Florida. Early voting numbers from Florida are showing that Republicans have cast 17,000 more votes than Democrats. 
*** 6 days before the Election in 2012, Democrats in Florida cast 39,000 more votes than Republicans. 
*** Today, six days before the election, Republicans have now cast 17,000 more votes than Democrats. 
Watch Trump in Miami, FL today: 
",FAKE
"Report: Friend Has Been Going By Middle Name This Whole Fucking Time CALABASAS, CA—Astounded that it had never come up at any point in the six years they had known each other, local woman Lucy Reed, 25, reported Tuesday that her friend Nicole Silberthau had apparently been going by her middle name this whole fucking time. Teary-Eyed Tim Kaine Asks Clinton If His Hair Will Grow Back In Time For Election Day NEW YORK—His lower lip quivering while showing his running mate the uneven patches on his head where he attempted to give himself a trim, a teary-eyed Tim Kaine reportedly asked Hillary Clinton this morning if his hair would grow back in time for Election Day. ",FAKE
"President Obama embarks on a trip to Africa on Thursday that includes a controversial stop in Ethiopia, where the authoritarian government has come under sharp international criticism for its handling of political dissent.

The Ethi­o­pia visit has raised hackles among human rights advocates who question the administration’s level of concern about the issue as it seeks to advance new security and economic goals on a continent where good governance and democratic freedoms often do not top the priority list. But to others, it reflects the evolution of America’s relationship with the continent, which now offers opportunities for the United States in a way it didn’t decades ago, when it was primarily an aid recipient.

“The decision to go to Ethiopia greatly undermines the stated goals and commitments of this administration when it comes to support for human rights, the rule of law and good governance in Africa and beyond,” said Sarah Margon, Human Rights Watch’s Washington director. “It shows that it ranks priorities and shows that security and development often trump human rights concerns, which is a very shortsighted policy approach.”

Dozens of journalists left Ethiopia last year, saying they faced threats from the government because of the work they do. In April 2014, the government charged seven bloggers known as Zone 9, as well as three reporters, under the country’s anti-terrorism law. A few months later, the owners of six private publications were charged under Ethiopia’s criminal code. In early July, the government released two of the bloggers and all three of the reporters who had been arrested, along with a journalist who had served roughly four years in prison, though the Committee to Protect Journalists said at least a dozen members of the media remain jailed on terrorism charges.

Ethi­o­pia’s ambassador to the United States, Girma Birru, described Obama’s decision to visit his country as “confirmation of the strong relationship that’s been built between the two countries.”

Birru said prosecuting journalists was not evidence of human rights violations. “If a journalist, or a teacher, or a professor, or a farmer is supporting these types of groups to instigate violence, then he should be charged,” he said. “But the fact that he is carrying the name of ‘journalist’ should not save him from being charged on this ground.”

White House aides acknowledge that visits like the one to Ethi­o­pia can bestow a measure of credibility to foreign governments and often use the lure of a presidential visit to win diplomatic concessions from non-

democratic and repressive regimes. Obama often meets with members of civil society during his overseas visits, as a way of encouraging independent groups to pursue their goals in the face of government opposition.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, national security adviser Susan Rice said the president would not hesitate to raise difficult topics during his trip, including the way Ethiopia’s ruling party treats its opposition and discrimination against Kenya’s LGBT community.

“Not just in Africa, but around the world — when we are traveling to countries where we have concerns about the rule of law, human rights, corruption, whatever, democratic governance — we make those concerns known publicly and privately,” Rice said. “And we have done so continuously in the case of these two countries and will continue to do so.”

Some experts say that Obama must weigh human rights against other important factors.

Princeton Lyman, who served as U.S. special envoy for Sudan and South Sudan from 2011 to 2013 and did stints as the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa, said that the United States must now consider the opportunity for investment in Africa even as the continent has become increasingly important for national security reasons, in the fight against international terrorists and other destabilizing regional forces.

“The question for policymakers is: How do you balance these different interests when they sometimes run up against each other?” Lyman said.

The Obama trip will try to balance several of those interests: In Ethi­o­pia, he will visit the Addis Ababa headquarters of the African Union, which has played an increasingly active role in trying to maintain regional and economic stability in the region. The Ethi­o­pia stop will follow a visit to the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, which is being held this weekend in Kenya, where Obama’s father was born.

Kenya has made strides in recent years with increasingly democratic elections, though it has still come under fire for its restrictions of two Muslim groups on the coast, Haki Africa and Muslims for Human Rights, and abuses by members of its security forces.

But Samuel R. Berger, who served as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser and is currently co-chairman of the Albright Stonebridge Group, said one cannot view foreign policy through the single lens of human rights. “The world is too complicated right now,” he said, “and too dangerous in this part of the world, to think of human rights and security as an either-or proposition.”

When President George W. Bush was contemplating a trip to Vietnam in 2006, it set off similar questions inside the White House, said Joseph Hagin, the deputy chief of staff for operations from 2001 to 2008.

“The real key on any of these trips is: ‘What’s the deliverable? What good would the visit do?’ ” Hagin said. “If you think you’re going to get a commitment to change behavior, and you think that’s valuable, that could be enough to go.”

Hagin said that, in the end, Bush aides concluded that Hanoi had made enough progress on opening its economy that the trip would be beneficial. Bush visited the nascent stock market in Ho Chi Minh City and used a red mallet to strike a gong that opened trading on the day he arrived.

Obama is reportedly considering a trip to Vietnam during a planned Asia tour this fall. Vietnam is one of the 11 nations negotiating with the United States on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an expansive free trade deal that Obama has placed high on his second-term agenda. But human rights advocates protested this month when the president played host to Communist Party Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the White House.

Foreign policy experts said a Vietnam visit makes sense for a president who has already made history in Southeast Asia, becoming in 2012 the first U.S. president to visit Burma, also known as Myanmar. His stop in Malaysia in 2014 was the first by a sitting president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967.

At a town hall-style appearance with young activists during his April 2014 visit, Obama pressed the Malaysian government, which is also part of the TPP deal, to improve its human rights record but declined to meet with opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

“You can’t expect an American president to go solve Malaysia’s problems in Malaysia. Malays have to solve them,” said James Keith, who served as U.S. ambassador to Malaysia from 2007 to 2010.

And presidential human rights advocacy has clear limits. Ahead of Obama’s historic visit to Rangoon, Burma, in 2012, the nation’s ruling military junta released dozens of political prisoners, and President Thein Sein agreed to allow human rights advocates to inspect prisons. Obama met with democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been released two years earlier after 15 years of house arrest, and he gave a speech at Yangon University saying the “flickers of progress . . . must become a shining North Star for all this nation’s people.”

But by the time Obama returned to Rangoon — and to the country’s capital, Naypyidaw — last fall, many of those political gains had been reversed. Thein Sein’s regime had jailed journalists and political activists, Suu Kyi was banned from running in this fall’s presidential election and violence was displacing tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya in the countryside.

“One has to recognize that more and more, ever since the Cold War ended, the value to foreigners of an American visit — our ability to influence change — has gone down,” Keith said. “It’s the rise of the rest. It’s not American decline. It’s just natural.”

Once the Africa trip is over, the White House will have more difficult decisions to make regarding presidential travel, such as whether Obama should visit Cuba now that the two countries have normalized relations. Asked on Friday what the United States would need to see from the Cuban government before Obama would visit, White House press secretary Josh Earnest rattled off a long list of human rights initiatives.

“We would like to see the rights of political opponents of the Cuban government inside of Cuba not be thrown in jail just because of their political views,” he said, adding, “A respect for a free and independent media would be another step that we would like to see them take.”",REAL
"  Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , World // 0 Comments 
A disturbing new report suggests that over two-thirds of wild animals living on Earth are set to become extinct by the year 2020. 
The comprehensive report by the WWF and Zoological Society of London says animal populations across the globe will continue to plummet by 67% by 2020 due to a mass extinction that is killing the natural world. 
Thegaurdian.com reports: 
The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and salamanders. 
The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which humans dominate the planet. “We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point,” said Prof Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the report. 
Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF, said: “The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it. Life supports life itself and we are part of the same equation. Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support systems, as we know them today, will collapse.” 
He said humanity was completely dependent on nature for clean air and water, food and materials, as well as inspiration and happiness. 
The report analysed the changing abundance of more than 14,000 monitored populations of the 3,700 vertebrate species for which good data is available. This produced a measure akin to a stock market index that indicates the state of the world’s 64,000 animal species and is used by scientists to measure the progress of conservation efforts. 
The biggest cause of tumbling animal numbers is the destruction of wild areas for farming and logging: the majority of the Earth’s land area has now been impacted by humans, with just 15% protected for nature. Poaching and exploitation for food is another major factor, due to unsustainable fishing and hunting: more than300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction, according to recent research. 
Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants. Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug. Amphibians have suffered one of thegreatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts. 
Rivers and lakes are the hardest hit habitats, with animals populations down by 81% since 1970, due to excessive water extraction, pollution and dams. All the pressures are magnified by global warming, which shifts the ranges in which animals are able to live, said WWF’s director of science, Mike Barrett. 
Some researchers have reservations about the report’s approach, which summarises many different studies into a headline number. “It is broadly right, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” said Prof Stuart Pimm, at Duke University in the US, adding that looking at particular groups, such as birds, is more precise. 
The report warns that losses of wildlife will impact on people and could even provoke conflicts: “Increased human pressure threatens the natural resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources.” 
However, some species are starting to recover, suggesting swift action could tackle the crisis. Tiger numbers are thought to be increasing and the giant panda has recently been removed from the list of endangered species. 
In Europe, protection of the habitat of the Eurasian lynx and controls on hunting have seen its population rise fivefold since the 1960s. A recent global wildlife summit also introduced new protection for pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammals, and rosewoods, the most trafficked wild product of all. 
But stemming the overall losses of animals and habitats requires systemic change in how society consumes resources, said Barrett. People can choose to eat less meat, which is often fed on grain grown on deforested land, and businesses should ensure their supply chains, such as for timber, are sustainable, he said. 
“You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of business,” Barrett said. Politicians must also ensure all their policies – not just environmental ones – are sustainable, he added. 
“The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are,” said Barrett. “My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in despair – there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act. I do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it.”",FAKE
"Illegal immigrants—along with other noncitizens without the right to vote—may pick the 2016 presidential winner. Thanks to the unique math undergirding the Electoral College, the mere presence of 11-12 million illegal immigrants and other noncitizens here legally may enable them to swing the election from Republicans to Democrats.

The right to vote is intended to be a singular privilege of citizenship. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention rejected allowing the people to directly elect their President. The delegates chose instead our Electoral College system, under which 538 electoral votes distributed amongst the states determine the presidential victor. The Electoral College awards one elector for each U.S. Senator, thus 100 of the total, and D.C. gets three electors pursuant to the 23rd Amendment. Those electoral numbers are unaffected by the size of the noncitizen population. The same cannot be said for the remaining 435, more than 80 percent of the total, which represent the members elected to the House.

The distribution of these 435 seats is not static: they are reapportioned every ten years to reflect the population changes found in the census. That reallocation math is based on the relative “whole number of persons in each state,” as the formulation in the 14th Amendment has it. When this language was inserted into the U.S. Constitution, the concept of an “illegal immigrant,” as the term is defined today, had no meaning. Thus the census counts illegal immigrants and other noncitizens equally with citizens. Since the census is used to determine the number of House seats apportioned to each state, those states with large populations of illegal immigrants and other noncitizens gain extra seats in the House at the expense of states with fewer such “whole number of persons.”

This math gives strongly Democratic states an unfair edge in the Electoral College. Using citizen-only population statistics, American University scholar Leonard Steinhorn projects California would lose five House seats and therefore five electoral votes. New York and Washington would lose one seat, and thus one electoral vote apiece. These three states, which have voted overwhelming for Democrats over the latest six presidential elections, would lose seven electoral votes altogether. The GOP’s path to victory, by contrast, depends on states that would lose a mere three electoral votes in total. Republican stronghold Texas would lose two House seats and therefore two electoral votes. Florida, which Republicans must win to reclaim the presidency, loses one seat and thus one electoral vote.

But that leaves the electoral math only half done. The 10 House seats taken away from these states would then need to be reallocated to states with relatively small numbers of noncitizens. The following ten states, the bulk of which lean Republican, would likely gain one House seat and thus one additional electoral vote: Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. 



Iowa has gone Democratic six out of the last seven times. Michigan and Pennsylvania have both gone comfortably Democratic in every election since 1992. But five states—Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma—all went by double-digit margins to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. And Romney carried North Carolina by two percent while losing nationally by nearly four percent, a large difference. Likewise, despite solidly beating 2008 GOP nominee John McCain by seven percent nationally, President Obama eked out a bare 0.3 percent win in the Tar Heel State. The current Ohio polls also look promising for the right GOP nominee, and no Republican has ever won the Presidency without carrying the Buckeye State. There is no plausible statistical path for the Republican Party’s nominee to win an electoral majority without these states.

Accordingly, for analytic purposes, three of the states that would gain electoral votes are Democratic. The remaining seven are fairly put in the GOP column. Combining the two halves of the citizen-only population reapportionment, states likely in the Democratic column suffer a net loss of four electoral votes. Conversely the must-win Republican leaning states total a net gain of four electoral votes. These are the four electoral votes statistically cast by noncitizens.

U.S. elections have been decided by far narrower margins. One electoral vote decided the 1876 presidential election. A swing of three electoral votes in 2000 would have elected Al Gore. A glitch in the Electoral College system enabled Aaron Burr to come within one vote of winning the presidency over Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Though they can’t cast an actual ballot, we effectively allow noncitizens to have an indirect, and possibly decisive, say in choosing the President.

Three years ago, President Obama became the first Democrat in 76 years to win a second term with a repeat majority vote. Yet Romney still won two-dozen states with a total of 206 electoral votes. Based on current polling and historical trends, a credible GOP ticket right now must be considered likely to carry all the 24 Romney states and their 206 electoral votes. The key to Republican hopes to win 270 electoral votes next year therefore revolves around the three biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Virginia.

Yet a credible future GOP nominee has reason to be hopeful. Obama carried Florida last time by only 0.9 percent. Hillary Clinton suffers from an upside down image among Sunshine State voters, 37 percent having a favorable opinion but 57 percent holding a negative one in a recent poll. She is in a statistical tie with highly unpopular GOP hopeful Donald Trump and loses by 11 percent to former Governor Jeb Bush. Florida statistically should be the easiest of these key swing states for the GOP to win.",REAL
"(Before It's News)
What is Vitamin E? Vitamin E is an important fat-soluble antioxidant compound that aids the body in neutralizing the harmful after-effects of oxidation of fats. Current research is even looking into the important role that this vitamin plays in stopping free-radical production, a key method of preventing the development of chronic diseases and aging. It is also a vital element in the overall maintenance of a healthy immune system.
Some studies are even looking into its role in preventing degenerative mental imbalances such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. And while many of us may do well in taking extra vitamin E supplements, we can use an organic diet to get a large amount of the daily requirements for this powerful antioxidant lipid. In fact, there are many common foods with vitamin E. You probably have a few in your house right now.
Foods With Vitamin E
Here are fifteen foods with vitamin E that you should strongly consider adding to your diet.
1. Almonds
Almonds are one the best vitamin E foods. Just an ounce of almonds offers a whopping 7.4 milligrams of vitamin E. You can also get your vitamin E needs in the form of almond milk and almond oils. We would recommend eating raw almonds, if possible.
2. Raw Seeds
Select raw seeds , such as sunflower, pumpkin and sesame, are another common food with vitamin E. In fact, eating just ¼ of a cup of sunflower seeds gives you 90.5% of your recommended daily value, making them one of the best vitamin E foods you can eat daily.
3. Swiss Chard
Swiss chard is easily one of the healthiest vegetables you can eat on a daily basis. Commonly known to be high in vitamin K, vitamin A and vitamin C, Swiss chard is another food high in vitamin E. Just one cup of boiled swiss chard greens will provide you with almost 17% of your daily recommended values.
4. Mustard Greens
Similar to swiss chard, mustard greens are very nutrient dense and will provide a variety of health benefits. Not only are they one of the best vitamin E foods, but mustard greens are also high in vitamin K, vitamin A, folate , and vitamin c. Eating just one cup of boiled mustard greens contains about 14% of your daily dietary requirements. We would recommend eating organic mustard greens, if possible.
5. Spinach
Spinach may not be your favorite veggie, but it is one of the best leafy greens you can add to your diet. Not only is it one of the best calcium foods and naturally high in folate, it’s also one of the best vitamin E foods as well. Just one cup of boiled spinach will provide you with approximately 20% of your daily needs. Try adding fresh spinach to your sandwiches to make them extra healthy.
6. Turnip Greens
While turnip greens may have a slightly bitter taste, they are very high in many essential nutrients. Like the rest of the leafy greens on this list, just one cup will provide you with plenty of vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C and folate. Not to mention approximately 12% of your daily requirements of vitamin E.
7. Kale
Kale is another great cruciferous vegetable you should eat as often as possible. Kale is very high in many nutrients, in fact, just one cup of boiled kale can give you almost 6% of your daily vitamin E requirements. We would recommend eating organic kale, if possible.
8. Plant oils
Most plant seed oils are very good sources for Vitamin E as well. The best oil with vitamin E is Wheat germ oil. In fact, one tablespoon of this oil holds 100% of your daily Vitamin E requirements. Sunflower oil is another excellent option, as it provides over 5 mg of the vitamin, and can easily be be used for cooking. Other great Vitamin-E-rich oils include hempseed oil, coconut oil, cottonseed oil (with almost 5 mg of vitamin E), olive oil and safflower oil. We would recommend only buying oils that are cold pressed unrefined and organic.
9. Hazelnuts
A perfect snack during a long workday, eating just one ounce of hazelnuts can provide you with approximately 20% of our daily requirements of vitamin E. For an alternative to eating nuts, try drinking hazelnut milk in your morning coffee instead of milk or flavored creamer.
10. Pine Nuts
Add an ounce of these nuts to anything you please! One serving contains 2.6 mg of vitamin E. You can also use pine nut oil for added health benefits.
11. Avocado
Perhaps one of the tastiest foods with Vitamin E, avocados represent natures creamiest, oil-rich food. Just half of an avocado holds more than 2 mg of vitamin E. Avocados are very easy to incorporate into your diet. We would recommend adding sliced avocados to your salad, a sandwich, or mashed up as guacamole!
12. Broccoli
For generations now, broccoli has been considered one of the best detox foods , but it’s also one of the healthiest foods high in Vitamin E. Just one cup of steamed broccoli will provide you with 4% of your daily requirements. Broccoli may not be as nutrient dense as other Vitamin E foods on this list, but it is definitely one of the healthiest foods you can eat daily.
13. Parsley
An excellent spice, parsley is another great Vitamin E food. Try adding fresh parsley to salads and dishes for an extra Vitamin-E kick. Dried parsley will also provide you with this important vitamin, but the fresher the better.
14. Papaya
This popular fruit is most commonly known as one of the best vitamin C foods , but it’s also high in Vitamin E. Just one papaya will give you approximately 17% of your daily needs. Try adding fresh or frozen papaya to fruit smoothies, along with other fruity vitamin E foods on this list for an extra healthy snack!
15. Olives
From the oil to the fruit, eating olives is an excellent way of getting your daily needs for vitamin E. Just one cup of olives can give you approximately 20% of your daily recommended amount.
These are just a few examples of foods with vitamin E. There are plenty more that aren’t listed here. Which vitamin E food is your favorite? Let’s hear your thoughts below.
The post 15 Foods That Contain The Most Vitamin E appeared first on The Sleuth Journal .",FAKE
Home › VIDEO › TREY GOWDY: “WHAT IN THE WORD IS LORETTA LYNCH DOING TALKING TO COMEY” TREY GOWDY: “WHAT IN THE WORD IS LORETTA LYNCH DOING TALKING TO COMEY” 4 SHARES Post navigation,FAKE
"Region: Asian-Pacific region Twenty years ago, eight Arctic states established the Arctic Council (AC) to jointly develop the Arctic Region and preserve the environment and culture of the indigenous peoples. Initially, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Norway, Russia, the United States, Finland and Sweden held memberships in the Council. Later, other states with interests in the Arctic Region joined the AC. India, China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan were granted the observer status by AC several years ago. Considering financial capacity and vast experience in the marine logistics of these countries, they can render valuable assistance to the AC member states. They all had to make strenuous effort to join the AC. Today they are doing their best to gain access to the Arctic resources and maritime routes. The real treasure of the Eurasian sector of the Arctic Ocean is, of course, the Russian Northern Sea Route (NSR), running through the Arctic Ocean along the Russian Federation’s northern coast. Lately, Russia has been devoting much attention to the development of this unique transport corridor. In his December 2015 address to the Federal Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin talked about the significance of the NSR. The NSR has been repeatedly referred to as the corner stone of economic growth and transport safety for the northern territories and Russia as a whole. This is the shortest sea route from the European part of Russia to the Far East. In a broader sense, the NSR is a huge section of the shortest sea route connecting Europe and Asia and the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Access to the NSR would mean for Asian states a major reduction of time and cost required to ship goods to Europe. Currently, almost all cargo is delivered to Europe via the Suez Canal, along the southern coast of Eurasia. Not only is this way much longer, but also riskier since there is a threat of pirate and terrorist attacks. In recent years, the risks associated with shipping goods along this route doubled because of tense situation in the Pacific Rim. Territorial disputes between China and other countries of the region, attempts of the US to retain its influence there might trigger a situation when someone decides to block the southern route for navigation. It would not be hard to do either since this route has several vulnerable areas that could be easily seized and controlled by relatively small groups of people. They are narrow passages, including the Suez Canal and the Strait of Malacca. If, God forbid, something like that happens, the NSR can become a life saver for the countries of the Asia Pacific region trading with Europe. It is worth mentioning that the NSR runs through Russian territorial waters, which means that the countries looking to use it have to build rapport with Russia. This circumstance might play an important role in the development of Russian international relations. What is more, the states wishing to use the NSR would have to participate in its development, including as investors. It is a complicated and costly task to upkeep the NSR. Russia has to employ its icebreaker fleet, and more so in wintertime, which is very expensive, to support navigation. As of today, Russia uses the NSR mostly to ship cargo and deliver the goods manufactured by local industry from the Extreme North ports. One of the key users of the NSR is the Russian company Norilsk Nickel. It owns more than half of all goods shipped via the NSR. Since Norilsk Nickel owns icebreakers, the company is able to deliver its products year round. Gazprom and Rosneft are two other companies forwarding goods via the NSR. The Russian Northern Territories development program implies engagement of foreign companies willing to participate in the maintenance of the NSR’s navigability. Japan is one of the countries showing a genuine interest in cooperation. At the beginning of 2016, Japan’s Arctic ambassador Kazuko Shiraishi made a curious statement. She said that Japan was willing to ship up to 40% of all cargo it currently delivers to Europe via the NSR. Japan, in turn, can render assistance in the monitoring of ice conditions. China is another major potential user of the NSR. At first glance, it might seem rather odd since China is developing its Maritime Silk Road, which will connect Asia to Europe via the southern route mentioned above. Some experts predicted that the Maritime Silk Road and the Northern Sea Route would become rivals. However, it looks like China sees certain advantages in having a backup route understanding the volatility of situation in the Asia Pacific region. For whatever reasons, the Chinese government has demonstrated its interest in the NSR on a number of occasions. In 2013, the first Chinese ship Yong Sheng sailed along the NSR. It began its journey in the port of Dalian (China) and arrived in Rotterdam (Netherlands). However, much remains to be done for the NSR to become an adequate alternative for a longer southern sea route, including the development of a sophisticated infrastructure featuring marine terminals in different sections of the route for yearlong loading and unloading (currently, only one NSR port, Dudinka, can accommodate ships all year long). The Russian side is casting a hopeful eye on Chinese investors as prospective partners for this project. Apparently, the “Celestial Empire” is also committed to secure its foothold in the NSR. Currently, China is energetically participating in the development of the Arkhangelsk Region. For several centuries, Arkhangelsk has been the Russia’s strategic foothold in the Arctic Region. This is one of the key sections of the NSR with high concentration of industrial facilities and important seaports. Today as before, the Arkhangelsk Region is given high priority in the new “Socio-economic Development of Russian Arctic Region” project. In October 2016, the Russian company Arctic Transportation and Industrial Hub “Archangelsk” signed a contract with the Chinese Poly International Holding Co. According to the document, the Chinese company will fund the construction of a deep-water port near the Madyug Island in the White Sea. This will be a weighty contribution to the development of the NSR. It is anticipated that by 2030 the new port’s turnover could exceed 30 million tons of goods. China’s profound interest in the Arkhangelsk Region was demonstrated once again when a major Chinese company Huadian decided to invest funds in the region’s power sector. Last summer, the joint Russian-Chinese enterprise “Huadian-Arkhangelsk CHPP” bought out the only source of central heating in the region, the Arkhangelsk CHPP, by paying off its 2.7 billion rubles debt. It is clear that China is really interested in gaining access to the Arctic territories of the Russian Federation. The Northern Sea Route is a unique transport corridor with a potential of placing Russia among the most important transit countries in the world. Besides, the NSR can attract many major foreign investors. And Russia’s foremost task is to give them a warm welcome. Dmitry Bokarev, expert politologist, exclusively for the online magazine “ New Eastern Outlook. ” Popular Articles ",FAKE
"Top officials of the Cruz campaign are convinced there is one specific step that could have stopped Trump -- and they blame Sen. Marco Rubio for not taking that step.

In early March, it became clear that Trump was well on his way to the nomination and would even likely defeat Rubio in his home state of Florida's March 15 primary. According to several sources close to Cruz, the Cruz campaign conducted several secret polls to see what the impact would be if Rubio joined Cruz as his running mate, with Cruz at the top of the ticket.

Politico reported in March that Rubio rejected the idea of a ""unity ticket."" But the sources close to Cruz and Rubio are now offering a much fuller picture of the extent of Cruz's polling, the reasons why Rubio said no, and the resentment the Cruz people have about Rubio's rejection of the idea.

The Cruz campaign polled in three March 15 primary states, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina -- though not in Ohio, home to Kasich, or in Florida.

They also tested the matchup in a poll in Arizona, which would hold its contest on March 22, and in Wisconsin, which would hold its primary on April 5. What did polls suggest a Cruz-Rubio ticket would do in those states? ""Blowout,"" said a source close to Cruz. ""65%-35%,"" with Trump losing. Through friends and emissaries, the Cruz campaign tried to get Rubio on board. But Cruz could not reach him on the phone, and others reported back to the Cruz campaign that Rubio did not seem interested in having a discussion about this at all. ""He went off the grid,"" said a source close to Cruz. Cruz campaign officials speculated that Rubio was interested in preserving his political viability for a contested GOP convention or the 2020 race. A source familiar with Rubio's thinking says there never really was a concrete offer from the Cruz campaign to team up -- just vague discussions from donors about polls and the potential for such a move -- but either way, he was not interested. For one, the source said, Rubio thought the notion of two senators from Washington, D.C., teaming up against Trump would fit all too easily into the Trump outsider narrative. Second, Rubio was concerned that as a fellow Cuban-American freshman senator, he didn't think he complemented Cruz particularly well. Lastly, Rubio felt that the nominee should have the freedom to pick whomever he or she wants at the convention to help win in November and not be bound to a short-term decision made in the thick of the primaries. The lack of bounce after Cruz attempted such a move with Carly Fiorina reinforced his belief that he was right, the source said. A source close to Kasich reported that the Ohio governor tried to broach the subject with Rubio as well, and the campaigns discussed it as well, before and after the March 8 Michigan primary. Kasich's team did not conduct any polling but they are also convinced if the two men had teamed up, ""we would have swept the rest of the primaries."" What the result would have been in these alternate universes where a Cruz-Rubio ticket was on the ballot, or a Kasich-Rubio team, is unknown. Trump, in this reality went on to win in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Arizona. He was not stopped.",REAL
"by Brian Shilhavy Editor, Health Impact News 
15 years ago, I was the first one to import a high quality saturated fat called “Virgin Coconut Oil” from the Philippines and market it in the U.S. market. Coconut oil is a traditional fat that has been consumed for thousand of years in tropical climates, where historically western diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity and others were not common, in spite of their high saturated fat diet. 
During World War II when the Japanese cut of the supply of the high saturated fat edible oils like coconut oil and palm oil with their occupation of the Philippines and other Southeastern nations, industry in the U.S. developed the “expeller-pressed” method of extracting oil from seeds that had not previously been a source of dietary oil, mainly the U.S. cash crops of soybeans and corn. These polyunsaturated oils were not shelf-stable edible oils, so the industrial process of “homogenization” was developed to make them more shelf stable, and behave more like shelf-stable saturated fats. 
Politics, not science, influenced government agencies like the USDA to promote these new polyunsaturated oils as more healthy than saturated fats. A new dietary dogma of “low-fat” was developed, and history now shows that America’s health greatly suffered as a result. Until even today, we have seen very high numbers of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease plaguing Americans. 
So it was with much opposition 15 years ago that I presented the real science behind coconut oil and saturated fats, but many now are waking up to the terrible consequences of following the government-sponsored low-fat diet dogma for so many years. 
One can truly turn their health around by simply making a dietary choice as to the types of fats one consumes, and increase the consumption of healthy fats, particularly when those fats in the diet replace harmful processed carbohydrates. The Science of Fats: Information that Could Change Your Life 
From November 7 – 14 Dr. Mark Hyman , Dr. Carrie Diulus, and over 30 of the world’s top experts on fats will participate in an online FREE summit dispeling the biggest MYTHS about fat, and revealing the latest research about how to eat, move and supplement your diet for improved health and longevity. Join these world-renowned experts, such as Aseem Malhotra, MD (one of Britain’s top cardiologists), Amy Myers, MD , Gary Taubes (famous science author that challenged mainstream media’s dogma on fats), Sayer Ji (Founder of GreenMedInfo.com), best-selling author Nina Teicholz , Peter Attia, MD , and dozens of others! 
There’s so much confusion and misinformation out there about FAT…both the fat on our bodies, and the fats we eat. You’ve been told that eating fat makes you fat — and increases your risk for heart disease and other chronic illnesses — but fat is NOT the enemy. The truth is: eating MORE FAT can help shut down cravings, accelerate weight loss and potentially prevent or reverse disease. 
Register today for FREE to watch this online summit! Published on November 2, 2016",FAKE
"Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) told religious conservatives at the Values Voters Summit this weekend that blood might have to be shed if Hillary Clinton is elected president.

""I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically,” Bevin said Saturday. “But that may, in fact, be the case.""

He added, citing Thomas Jefferson's ""blood of patriots and tyrants"" quote: ""The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood. Of who? The tyrants, to be sure. But who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.""

Bevin, a tea party supporter who has been known to make a controversial comment or two, clarified his comments to the Lexington Herald-Leader, saying he was referring to military sacrifice.

""Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas, and they need our full backing,” Bevin said in a statement. “We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.""

Bevin's comments echo a tea party rallying cry that has cropped up from time to time. Activists and even some lawmakers have cited Jefferson's quote to reinforce the stakes for their political movement.

As for the 2016 campaign, Bevin's comments are the latest example of elected officials promising very bad things if the wrong candidate is elected. And it's not just Democrats warning about Donald Trump having his finger on the nuclear button — a prospect that has been the subject of a Hillary Clinton campaign ad.

Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) warned recently that a Clinton win might mean this could be the ""last election"" in which Americans would be able to elect a president with ""godly moral principles.""

Similarly, other Republicans have warned that nominating Trump might lead to the end of the Republican Party as we know it. George W. Bush even suggested he might be the last Republican president.

Conservative talk show hosts have warned of even worse, up to and including civil war. But Bevin's comments appear to be the most full-throated warning about a Clinton presidency so far from a high-ranking GOP elected official.",REAL
"Contaminated Food from China Now Entering the U.S. Under the 'Organic' Label The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/contaminated-food-from-china-now.html The Chinese food production industry is one of the world's least-regulated and most corrupt, as has repeatedly been proven time and again. Now, it appears, there is no trusting anything that comes from China marked ""organic.""Natural Health 365 reports that several foods within the country are so contaminated that Chinese citizens don't trust them. What's more, the countries that import these tainted foods are putting their citizens at risk.U.S. Customs personnel often turn away food shipments from China because they contain unsavory additives and drug residues, are mislabeled, or are just generally filthy. Some Chinese food exporters have responded by labeling their products ""organic,"" though they are far from it.There are several factors at play which make Chinese claims of organic unreliable. First, environmental pollution from unrestrained and unregulated industrial growth has so polluted soil and waterways with toxic heavy metals that nothing grown in them is safe, much less organic. Also, there is so much fraudulent labeling and rampant corruption within the government and manufacturing sectors that it's not smart to trust what is put on packaging.In fact, farmers in China use water that is replete with heavy metals, Natural Health 365 noted in a separate report . In addition, water used for irrigation also contains organic and inorganic substances and pollutants. Chinese ""organic"" food is so contaminated that a person could get ill just by handling some of it. 'Dirty water' is all there is The report noted further:""This is reality – all of China's grains, vegetables and fruits are irrigated with untreated industrial wastewater. The Yellow River, which is considered unusable, supports major food producing areas in the northeast provinces.""Many Chinese farmers won't even eat the food they produce, if you can believe that. That's because it's clear that China's water pollution issues are so pronounced that it threatens the country's entire food supply.Chinese farmers have said there is no available water for crops except ""dirty water."" As part of the country's industrial prowess, it is also one of the largest producers (and consumers) of fertilizers and pesticides, Water Politics reported.The site noted further that as China's industrial might grows, so too does the level of contaminants in the country's water supply. Lakes, rivers, streams and falling water tables are becoming more polluted by the year.In addition to man-made pollutants, animals produce about 90 percent of the organic pollutants and half of the nitrogen in China's water, say experts at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning. There are times when water is so polluted it turns black – yet it is still used to irrigate crops, and of course, that affects so-called organic farming operations as well. These nine foods are particularly vulnerable to becoming tainted, Natural Health 365 noted: Fish: Some 80 percent of the tilapia sold in the U.S. come from fish farms in China, as well as half the cod. Water pollution in China is a horrible problem, so any fish grown there are suspect. Chicken: Poultry produced in China is very often plagued with illnesses like avian flu.Apples and apple juice: Only recently has the U.S. moved to allow the importation of Chinese apples, though American producers grow plenty for the country and the world. Rice: Though this is a staple in China and much of the rice in the U.S. comes from there, some of it has been found to be made of resin and potato. Mushrooms: Some 34 percent of processed mushrooms come from China. Salt: Some salt produced in China for industrial uses has made its way to American dinner tables. Black pepper: One Chinese vendor was trying to pass off mud flakes as pepper. Green peas: Phony peas have been found in China made of soy, green dye and other questionable substances. Garlic: About one-third of all garlic in the U.S. comes from China.Shop wisely.",FAKE
"Forget Wikileaks...this is the real October Surprise that is going to stop Hillary page: 1 link People have a hard time wading through all of the twists and turns, and convoluted political intrigue, that are the devastating stream of revelations about just how corrupt the Democratic Party...and its supreme leader Hillary Clinton...is. Most people don't have the time, or the attention span, to pour over the tens of thousands of documents being released by Wikileaks - and the MSM is trying their hardest to ignore the subject. Having said that, my father once told me that, ""There are two things you don't mess with. A man's wife, or a man's paycheque...and not necessarily in that order."" Substitute ""woman"" and ""husband"" if you like, but the message is very clear. And now...even CNN cannot ignore it...we have the issue that directly affects people's pocketbooks. Plain and simple. The pain and the impacts are very real and very personal. Obamacare Premiums... Just watch the Polls swing on this issue leading up to November 8...and watch as State after State goes from Blue to Red - just like the American peoples' bank accounts, due to the astonishing increases in Obamacare Premiums! edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: link not working edit on 27-10-2016 by mobiusmale because: typo link a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. link a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. People will vote with their wallets. Looks like the people least likely to afford it get hit the hardest. time.com... Yet it’s also true that for Americans who don’t get insurance through work, and who make too much money to qualify for federal subsidies, the cost of health coverage is about to soar dramatically, with premiums sometimes rising $1,000, even over $2,000 for the year. If one were making 45k per year and the cost of a service increased 1k-2k for THAT year one would find other service providers or not use the service at all. But if you did not pay for health insurance you would owe the irs a penalty of 2k. Damned if you do Damned if you do not. 5% of someones income is alot, enough to make them think about who to vote for. a reply to: kruphix I am 27, never get ill, have low blood pressure, and am in good shape. My premiums doubled since this mess. So I ditched it. This was a redistribution of health care. link I don't understand why Trump hasn't been all over this opportunity. He should stop with the nonsense shooting himself in the foot crap and focus on this news to sway more voters to his side. Instead he has been babbling about his awesome golf course. It is times like these that make me think he must be taking a dive on purpose. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. link a reply to: kruphix The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. Yeah the people in the ""basket of deplorables"" are a small minority as well. Perhaps in your opinion they are all in the same basket. Nice to be told ""you're a amall minority"" your fate won't effect an election. originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. cool, then abolishing the abortion that is ""Obamacare"" should be quick and easy. Then we can get insurance companies back to competing for our business and maybe get insurance back to where most people can afford it and not just those making less than $23k a year. You do realize that Obamacare is the single biggest failure in the history of the US last 8 years right? Much like a monkey #ing a football. link a reply to: mobiusmale It's going to cost Hilary some votes but is NOT going turn a blue state red. Might sway a poorer purple one toward red, but I'm unsure of what state fits that bill exactly. Fl maybe? a reply to: Greggers Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. ""Work with her""? really kind of like the dems worked with the gop to pass the ACA to begin with? Pass it before you read it? Like your plan keep your plan? That kind of cooperation? originally posted by: kruphix a reply to: mobiusmale Most people get their insurance through their work, the next largest segment has Medicare/Medicaid. Those that get their insurance through the exchanges, not all of them are experiencing a large premium hike. The people you are talking about that are effected by these premium hikes are a small minority that won't tilt the election one way or another. But go ahead and think this will change blue states to red. Considering you're talking about small and medium business owners who the current administration (and HRC) says they want to support, I am fairly certain the OP is accurate. The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. Shows how out of touch the top is with the middle. Employer sponsored rates are high too. It's cutting into employees' pay. Wake up voters !!! originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. yes, the young ones who are also making minimum wage or close. If they make any money at all, they will miss the subsidies and be paying the $500 to $800 a month the rest of us have to pay. The way it was before Obamacare was much much better for everyone except the one's with pre-existing conditions. It's a shame we couldn't have someone who was smart enough to grasp that. Then they could have just tried to fix that tiny slice of the population instead of jamming a broomstick up the rest of us. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. ""More Federal Funding"" is just code for, ""we are going to increase taxes""...so Hillary's solution for high Health insurance Premiums, is to move the taxpayer drain a little farther to left and call it something else. I mean what choice would she have, if she wants to keep some semblance of this disaster intact? The Obama/Clinton regime doubled the National Debt to over $20 trillion dollars in 8 yearts...how much deeper can that go before the whole bubble bursts? a reply to: Vasa Croe The price hikes are a direct slap in the face to those of us that own our own small businesses and pay for insurance on our own. That's right they forgot if you have less than 50 people employed you do not have to provide insurance to your employees. originally posted by: Mr Headshot a reply to: kruphix Kinda going to spin off that, but isn't it funny that that is the argument being made by the left now? The poor and disaffected who don't get the insurance through their work (basically the people who were invoked to pass the bill) are going to, now, take the brunt of the hikes. Of course they will because they're the ones on the exchanges. One thing Hillary would like to do is provide more federal funding to get younger people signed up, to lower the risk pool and in turn lower premiums. Of course, the Republicans won't work with her on it because ""OBAMACARE,"" so who knows. I guess everyone is holding out for single payer, which is the inevitable result once the insurance industry collapses under the high cost of medical treatment. And where exactly does federal funding come from? *looks at wallet* No such thing as a free lunch. My healthcare costs have gone up almost 50% while benefits have gone down, and I'm on an employer provided plan. I'm 33yo and healthy as a horse. Healthcare is not a right, quit treating it as such. Get some actual competition in the system as well as some tort reform and maybe you'll see some improvement. Start jailing cronies and letting unprofitable companies fail you'll see some improvement. I feel sorry for anyone who believes that Democrats/Republicans are one dimes worth of different from each other... edit on 10-27-2016 by cynicalheathen because: (no reason given)",FAKE
"Donald Trump: The next President of the United States of America   Donald Trump will be the new President of the United States of America . Trump won 276 electoral votes with the necessary minimum of 270 votes. During his speech as the winner, Trump has promised the Americans to be president for all citizens of the country. According to him, America will not be satisfied with anything but the best. At the same time, the newly elected president has promised to seek common ground, not enmity, with partners in the world. formal voting procedure for electors will be held on December 19 and January 6, 2017, Congress will adopt its outcome. The inauguration of the president-elect is scheduled for 20 January. To win the election, a candidate needs to enlist the support of 270 electors. The procedure for their formal vote will be held on December 19, while on January 6, 2017 Congress will approve its results. The inauguration is scheduled for January 20, when the US president-elect takes office. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"We Are Change 
Emails revealed by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s account contained lots of strange emails about food, ties to human trafficker Laura Silsby, and a photo of Asian girls eating pizza — so naturally the internet has been set on fire with theories about secret codes and a child sex ring.
Is this Laura Ling in the Podesta Pizza email pic? Bill Clinton rescued? ID 8673 #HillaryIndictment #PrisonPizza pic.twitter.com/YuuKOpvywJ 
— Jupider Leigh (@jupiderleigh) November 4, 2016 

On Wednesday, a Reddit post titled “I believe I have connected a convicted child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons,” contained a list of email links regarding Laura Silsby, former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge.
BREAKING: Redditor may have connected a child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons. https://t.co/REW7RwPn4S 
— Brittany Pettibone (@BrittPettibone) November 3, 2016 

Silsby was found guilty in Haiti of child trafficking in 2010, after she attempted to cross the Haiti-Dominican Republic border with 33 Haitian children — all but one of the children had at least one living parent and were not orphans. Nine others who were arrested along with her were freed, thanks to the efforts of the Clintons .
“Along with the Haitian justice system, some observers excused the missionaries’ actions, even though they rose to the level of child trafficking. They did so essentially because we place such little value on the integrity of poor families; the idea that the missionaries were acting to ‘save’ these children justified the damage they would have caused to the children and their families,” Shani M. King wrote for the Harvard Human Rights Journal. “In this way, the Silsby case offers a window into international and domestic child placement schemes that disrupt poor families and disregard traditional forms of child placement.”
Jorge Puello Torres, Silsby’s legal adviser, was later arrested for running an international sex trafficking ring. Torres was accused of luring girls from the Caribbean and Central America into prostitution by offering to make them “models.”
In 2011, he was sentenced to three years and one month in federal prison for “alien smuggling.”
Were 33 children for Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein's ""use""? Forget corruption, these emails expose connections to child sex trafficking. https://t.co/9CvlndNTDs 
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 

“Hillary has a LONG history of interest in Ms. Silsby. Wikileak emails dating back till at least 2001 have been found in her archives discussing Laura’s NGO (EmailID 3776). Laura had claimed she planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. They instead located to Haiti,” the Redditor wrote.
On Friday, Wikileaks released their 28th installment of the Podesta Files and the speculation online grew even stranger.
Search all Podesta emails for these keywords. We are uncovering a child sex ring. #PodestaEmails28 pic.twitter.com/h6N6O76sAw 
— Jared Wyand ?? (@JaredWyand) November 3, 2016 

Theories and screenshots began to swirl, claiming that bizarrely-worded emails about food were codes for child sex trafficking. It is important to note that this is originated on anonymous message boards, and the “keywords” were not listed in any of the emails.
Please read this Podesta email. Is this code for something SICK? #Trump #MAGA pic.twitter.com/3gRlCQVbJH 
— GuthDaddy (@mediumsexy) November 3, 2016 
Simple, either Podesta feeds everyone walnut sauce or he arranges orgies with Black boys
So many cryptic emails like this #PodestaEmails28 pic.twitter.com/JcEAnDcpZw 
— Jared Wyand ?? (@JaredWyand) November 3, 2016 

Lawyer and popular author/journalist Mike Cernovich was among those sharing and discussing the theories.
""I'm dreaming about your hotdog stand in Hawaii…""
This is code for something.
Sex trafficking? https://t.co/BNulNKBi4u pic.twitter.com/L3l5j40ahy 
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 

“As a lawyer who has handled many criminal cases, I have strong instincts for when ‘code’ is being used. Reading these emails gives me the sense that they are speaking code words, like criminals,” Cernovich told We Are Change. “However the reports I’ve seen online do not seem credible and I myself have not fully cracked the code.”
""I think it has a map that seems pizza-related.""
This is code. I know this from representing drug dealers. https://t.co/9mX3kivmPz pic.twitter.com/yk1vJIOlMd 
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) November 3, 2016 

Cernovich added that because of the facts that Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin’s husband is currently under investigation for sexting a minor, and Bill Clinton flew on convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet (which is called “The Lolita Express”), the whole inner circle deserves scrutiny.
“Bill Clinton took six trips to Epstein’s island without Secret Service. Weiner was sexting 15 year old girls. Whole inner circle is suspect,” Cernovich said.
Whether this is a case of confirmation bias, or something more sinister — one thing is certain:
People really do not trust Hillary Clinton — to the point where thousands of people are actually having serious discussions about whether or not she is involved in a child sex ring. 
Perhaps the Democrats should consider bringing Bernie Sanders back now.
The post Internet Is On Fire With Speculation That Podesta Emails Contain Code for Child Sex appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
"Part 1 BABYLON ""SUN WORSHIP"" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDHZaMeIwRs",FAKE
"Relief efforts intensified in Katmandu on Sunday as Nepal continues to reel from powerful aftershocks and a devastating earthquake that left more than 3,200 dead.

The international effort geared up to hunt for survivors and provide aid as a second American victim was identified as one of 18 who died on Mount Everest in a massive avalanche triggered by Saturday's magnitude-7.8 earthquake.

Marisa Eve Girawong, of Edison Township in New Jersey, was working as a base camp medic for a Seattle-based group leading a mountain-climbing expedition. The former physician's assistant joined Madison Mountaineering a year earlier.

Relief groups, which began arriving in Nepal in large numbers Sunday, say there is still time to save lives. Government agencies and aid groups began rushing doctors, volunteers and equipment into Nepal as Katmandu's international airport reopened. Some aid vehicles were able to travel overland from India to the stricken Nepalese city of Pokhara.

""That means supplies could potentially come in overland from India. That is a positive sign,"" said Ben Pickering, Save the Children's humanitarian adviser in Britain. ""The airport opening is a small miracle.""

The Pentagon dispatched a cargo plane Sunday to Nepal with about 70 disaster-relief and rescue personnel and their gear to aid the earthquake-ravaged country. The Air Force C-17 is expected to arrive in Nepal on Monday, according to Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.

Pickering cautioned that chaotic conditions may create a bottleneck at the airport as governments and aid agencies try to bring in personnel and supplies in the coming days.

UNICEF said Sunday that at least 940,000 children in areas affected by the earthquake are in ""urgent need"" of humanitarian assistance. UNICEF staff reported dwindling water supplies, power and communications breakdowns.

""Day two is just as bad as day one. We get the aftershocks every five minutes,"" said Basanta Adhikari of Biratnagar, in eastern Nepal.

Adhikari said his uncle was killed in Katmandu on Saturday near where he was admitting his son to a hospital.

""He was standing at a shop with his friend chatting when the Earth started shaking. He ran out to try to survive, but to no avail as a tall house fell on him, and he was buried under the rubble,"" Adhikari said.

Vast tent cities have sprung up in Katmandu. The earthquake, the strongest to hit the country in 80 years, destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods and was strong enough to be felt all across parts of India, Bangladesh, China's region of Tibet and Pakistan.

With people fearing more quakes, many Nepalese felt safer spending the night under chilly skies, or in cars and public buses. Sunday's aftershocks made people only more tense.

""There were at least three big quakes at night and early morning. How can we feel safe? This is never-ending and everyone is scared and worried,"" Katmandu resident Sundar Sah told the Associated Press. ""I hardly got much sleep. I was waking up every few hours and glad that I was alive.""

Nepal authorities said Sunday that at least 2,430 people died in that country alone, not including the 18 dead on Mount Everest. Another 61 people died from the quake in India and a few in other neighboring countries. At least 5,900 have been injured. With search and rescue efforts far from over, the death toll is expected to rise.

But as the first stunned survivors of the avalanche on Mount Everest reached Katmandu, they said that dozens of people may still be missing and were almost certainly dead.

""The snow swept away many tents and people,"" said Sherpa, a guide the first group of 15 injured survivors to reach Katmandu.

Those 15 survivors, most of them Sherpa guides or support staff working on Everest, flew from Lukla, a small airstrip not far from Everest. None were believed to be facing life-threatening injuries, but many limped to a bus taking them to a nearby hospital, or they were partially wrapped in bandages.

The overwhelming devastation destroyed or damaged many of Nepal's traditional temples, palaces and historic sites.

The Dharahara Tower, one of Nepal's most famous landmarks, was reduced to little more than a pile of rubble. Up to 180 people were killed and 200 people were trapped in what was left of the structure, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported.

The world reacted quickly to the disaster, offering money, relief materials, equipment, expertise and rescue teams to the country of 28 million people that relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.

The U.S. Mission in Nepal released an initial $1 million for immediate assistance. Australia pledged $5 million in aid. Pakistan, and Britain said they would assist in the relief effort.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis led prayers for the dead and those injured in the massive earthquake. He called for assistance for survivors, and ""all those who are suffering from this calamity,"" during his weekly Sunday blessing.

Rescuers were continuing to dig through the rubble of concrete, bricks, wood and iron to hunt for survivors.

In one particularly harrowing incident Sunday, police in Katmandu's Kalanki neighborhood managed to save a man who was trapped under a dead person. His family stood nearby crying and praying.

Police were eventually able to dig out the man, who was surrounded by concrete and iron beams. His legs and hips were crushed under the weight of the debris.

Contributing: Naila Inayat in Lahore, Pakistan; Cheryl Makin in Edison, N.J.; Tom Vanden Brook and Doug Stanglin in McLean, Va.; the Associated Press",REAL
"The Democratic National Committee over the weekend set its preliminary 2016 presidential primary calender, with the four traditional carve-out states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada -- holding contests in February and everybody else after that.

The calendar mimics what we've seen from Republicans, who have basically agreed on the same order of succession. Here's how that looks:

From there, all other states would be permitted to hold contests between March 1 and June, with party conventions being held in the early or mid-summer.

Seems reasonable, right? Well, the problem is that there isn't much hope the calendar will stay this way. And all it takes is for one state to be the spoilsport and force a re-casting of the entire calendar. (Translation: New Year's in Des Moines.)

In recent years, a handful of the other 46 states have bucked the committees and moved their primary dates to compete with or preempt the early states, wanting the limelight (and campaign spending) that comes along with being one of the primaries that actually, you know, matters. And it's pretty easy for a state like Florida to just crash the party and set its date for late January, as it has done the last two presidential elections.

About the only thing stopping it or others from doing so are the penalties, which generally entail decreasing the number of delegates they get to the national party conventions, among other, lesser things. Those penalties have been ratcheted up in recent years, with the Republican National Committee trying out even-harsher penalties this time around. As I wrote in January:

Penalties for states moving in February or January will be more serious than in the past. While the committee previously stripped them of half their delegates, they will now lose more than that, in most cases. States with at least 30 delegates would be left with just 12 representatives at the convention, while states with less than 30 delegates would have nine.

The reason the rules have been tightened? Because they didn't work. Even faced with losing half their delegates, Florida, Arizona and Michigan all moved their contests ahead of March 1, pushing the earliest states to move from February to January.

But while the RNC has tightened its rules for 2016, the DNC has not. Rather than going further than the halving of delegates, the DNC is sticking with the same rules as last time, which allow for harsher penalties but don't mandate them. So while the DNC is reserving the right to increase penalties after a state sets a date in violation of party rules, it's all hypothetical.

In reality, though, neither set of rules is likely to have the desired effect of actually stopping renegade states from jumping ahead. Will Florida really balk at jumping the line again because it would have 12 delegates instead of 50? Maybe. Will a smaller state that loses only a few more delegates under the new RNC rules feel that strongly? Probably not. And will the DNC actually increase penalties on a state that has already set its primary date by deducting more delegates, just to send a message? I guess we'll see.

And delegates remain overrated anyway. Despite the delegate races we've seen in recent years, it's still clear that momentum is a bigger factor in determining presidential nominees. The 2012 GOP primary and 2008 Democratic primary both included relevant delegate counts, but in both cases, the races continued in spite of their being a clear delegate frontrunner and likely nominee.

In addition, all of the states that jumped ahead in 2008 and 2012 got the desired effect of holding an important presidential primary: relevance. And until those early states are actually boycotted by the candidates or somehow excluded from the horse-race/momentum game that is the early primary process, states will have motivation to move up -- delegates be damned.

We aren't yet seeing the so-called ""front-loading"" of the primary calendar, but there's still lots of time. And the off-year (2015) is when the game of leap-frog usually begins.",REAL
"""If he gives it, I will not accept it,"" Trump said at a news conference in Cleveland at the close of the Republican National Convention.

""I don't want his endorsement,"" he added. ""Just, Ted, stay home, relax, enjoy yourself.""

He also suggested that if Cruz were to seek the White House, he would set up a super PAC to oppose him.

And Trump, speaking the end of a week dedicated to unifying the party, once again revived the conspiracy theory published in the National Enquirer that linked Cruz's father to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald -- an accusation that has no evidence behind it.

Trump doubles down on denial of linking Cruz's dad to JFK assassination Trump doubles down on denial of linking Cruz's dad to JFK assassination ""I don't know his father. I met him once,"" Trump said. ""I think he's a lovely guy, a lovely guy. All I did was point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer, there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. Now Ted never denied that it was his father."" Trump first suggested that Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of Kennedy the morning of the Indiana primary, citing the tabloid story. Cruz allies have since repeatedly pointed to that low blow from Trump as a reason for refusing to support the Republican nominee. And on Thursday, Cruz referenced the incident, as he drew an angry reaction from members of his state's own GOP delegation. ""I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,"" Cruz said. Trump: Heidi the best thing Cruz has got going for him Trump: Heidi the best thing Cruz has got going for him Trump devoted a significant portion of Friday's event, billed as a thank you to convention staff and organizers, to attacking his former primary rival. Speaking at the RNC on Wednesday, Cruz had declined to endorse Trump, instead urging delegates to vote their ""conscience."" Cruz said that the Trump campaign had seen the speech beforehand, and that he told Trump personally that he would not make an endorsement. But Trump appeared to dispute that on Friday morning, saying Cruz went off-script at the convention. ""So Ted Cruz took his speech that was done, was on the Teleprompter, said hello, then made a statement that wasn't on the speech, then went back to his speech,"" Trump said. ""See, to me, that's dishonorable."" Trump likewise said it was ""dishonorable"" of Cruz to abandon his pledge to support the Republican nominee. But Trump said that Cruz's camp started it with an ad that ran in Utah showing racy photos of his wife, Melania Trump. The ad was put out by a PAC with no official ties to the Cruz campaign, but Trump said Friday that he doesn't buy that. ""Folks, a lot of us are political people,"" Trump said. ""We're not babies. His people are on the PAC."" At one point in his remarks, Trump even suggested forming his own PAC to oppose Cruz if the senator runs again in four years. ""I don't see him winning anyway, frankly. But if he did, it's fine,"" Trump said. ""Although maybe I'll set up a super PAC if he decides to run."" Turning to his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump asked, ""Are you allowed to set up a super PAC, Mike, if you are the president to fight somebody?""",REAL
"Email 
We all know that our national government — the one headquartered in Washington, D.C. — is called the “federal government.” The word “federal,” as well as its equivalent in other languages, is also used to describe certain other national governments, such as Mexico’s, and words such as “federation” and “confederacy” are evidently related to it. But what does the term “federal” mean? 
The word comes from the Latin foedus , meaning “covenant,” and denotes a form of government that, if not wholly invented by America’s Founders, was certainly perfected by them and applied to the governance of a much larger territory than anyone else had ever managed. The proper name for the methodology of creating and sustaining a “federal” government is “federalism.” And many historians and students of political philosophy believe federalism to be among the greatest of all the American Founders’ contributions to civilization. 
When the Founders first won independence from the British Empire, they drafted a document known as the “Articles of Confederation,” America’s first national constitution. The former 13 colonies, having fought together in the war for independence despite being technically separate, now wished to create a bare-bones national government that would unite them in a loose confederation — that is, a union of mostly independent states wishing to enjoy some of the advantages of political union while maintaining most of their independence. Early America was not the first such confederation; the country of Switzerland had existed (and continues to exist) as a federation among separate so-called cantons speaking four different languages and possessing very different cultures for several centuries before the American founding. And Canada, founded almost a hundred years after the United States and consisting of two major ethnic groups speaking different languages (English and French), also refers to itself as a confederation. 
For a variety of reasons, the American Founders came to believe that a more robust arrangement than loose confederation was needed. Because of this, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was convened by representatives from 12 of the original 13 states. (Rhode Island did not participate.) After nearly four months of discussion and sometimes acrimonious debate, the final draft of a new U.S. Constitution contemplating a stronger national government than the Articles of Confederation had countenanced was signed and submitted to the governments of the 13 states for ratification. 
This entire process, including ratification, had been undertaken by the separate states. They in effect created a national government that, in most respects, was inferior in authority to the states. Those powers delegated to the national government that the states agreed to renounce, such as the power to form treaties with foreign governments, were understood to have resided with the states as well until delegated to the newly formed federal government. The covenant implied by the term “federal” was among the formerly independent states to delegate some of their powers to an agreed-upon central authority. This covenant also bound the federal government to respect the limits on its powers clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and to otherwise defer to the states or to the people — as the 10th Amendment makes explicit. 
The federal government, in other words, exists entirely by the license of the states, and its powers are derived from theirs, and not the reverse. This was (and remains) in stark contrast with most other national governments, wherein states, provinces, departments, oblasts, or other political subdivisions are created by a pre-existing strong central government. There was, for example, no interest in federalism in the founding of each of modern France’s successive revolutionary republics; the government in Paris merely divided French territory into administrative units known as departments, mostly for bureaucratic convenience. Many of Russia’s oblasts date all the way back to the czars, and the remainder were created during the Soviet period. On the other hand, some modern states, such as Mexico, India, and Argentina, are divided into states or provinces with significant autonomy, but in none of these did the national government arise as a consequence of a pact among previously independent state governments. 
The intent of the Founders was that the federal government, formed by a covenant among the states, would be primarily their servant and not their master, and that it would likewise serve the people. The division of powers among the states, and between the state and federal governments, would make it much more difficult for would-be tyrants to subvert these aims and to grind the people down as in an Old World autocracy. But the history of the United States since the very early 19th century, only a few decades after its founding, has seen a steady migration of power from the states and the people into the federal government. In a wide array of concerns — from education to public lands to the regulation of food to marriage — the federal government is making itself the supreme authority, while converting the states into mere geographical administrative units expected to implement federal laws, regulations, and rulings, regardless of whether those laws, regulations, and rulings are constitutional. In this way, the doctrine and practice of federalism is being turned on its head. 
Much of this has taken place, not because the states have permitted the federal government to wrest existing legal authority from the states (although this has taken place, particularly under the pretext of equal rights), but because the federal government has been allowed to usurp power where none has been enumerated in the Constitution — and then claim that states are subordinate in the exercise of such powers. 
In our day, the system of federalism has been all but abandoned. Most Americans believe that all government authority comes from Washington, trickling down by the consent of elected national rulers to state and local governments. We will not be able to restore constitutional government without first restoring federalism. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
No product advertisements. 
Please post comments in English. 
Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
"Print 
[Ed. – Every now and then the facade cracks. Somebody asks a question the media haven’t intervened to spin yet, and a bit of truth peeks out about what the public really thinks. CNN is our poster child on this one, but it could be any number of them.] 
Two national polls released late last week confirmed the public widely recognizes the news media’s agenda in favor of Hillary Clinton and decidedly against Donald Trump, a reality documented in a NewsBusters study earlier in the week. 
“By nearly 10-1, all those surveyed say the news media, including major newspapers and TV stations, would like to see Clinton rather than Trump elected,” Susan Page and Karina Shedrofsky reported deep into a Thursday USA Today story on the latest USA Today /Suffolk University poll on the Clinton-Trump race. 
The October 27 article elaborated on how even a solid majority of Clinton supporters also realize journalists want Clinton to win: “That includes 82% of Trump supporters and 74% of Clinton supporters. Six in 10 Trump supporters say the news media is coordinating stories with individual campaigns, rather than acting on its own accord. Three in 10 of Clinton supporters feel that way.”",FAKE
"The most recent Republican presidential nominee is taking shots at Donald Trump's fitness to be president.

And he's not mincing his words.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, called the current GOP front-runner ""a phony, a fraud"" in a speech Thursday morning in Salt Lake City. And he didn't stop there.

Romney described Trump as ""a con artist"" whose demeanor is ""recklessness in the extreme."" As for Trump's record as a ""huge business success""? ""No, he isn't."" And when it comes to Trump's prescriptions to bring back jobs from China and Japan? ""Flimsy at best.""

Trump quickly hit back at Romney during a rally Thursday afternoon, again calling him a ""choke artist"" and saying he was disappointed by his 2012 campaign. ""The guy ran one of the worst campaigns in the history of politics,"" Trump said.

Trump added that Romney ""chickened out"" from running in 2016 because of Trump's candidacy.

Romney spoke for 20 minutes at the Hinckley Institute at the University of Utah and got specific, digging into aspects of Trump's record as a businessman.

""His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat,"" Romney said, referring to a real estate seminar Trump launched in 2005 that was forced to change its name because it wasn't a real university. It is now the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging fraudulent behavior.

Romney then added to the list of failed business ventures: ""There's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?"" Romney concluded, ""A business genius he is not.""

Then came the attacks on Trump as a human being.

""After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter's questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity.""

Romney remarks are unprecedented in the way he — the party's most recent presidential nominee — attacks the man who seems on track to secure this year's GOP nomination.

Romney began the speech by saying he is not declaring his own candidacy, adding, ""I am not going to endorse a candidate today.""

He said one of three others still in the race — Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, or Gov. John Kasich — should be the nominee. Then, without saying so specifically, he seemed to endorse a strategy to bring about a brokered GOP convention this summer.

""Given the current delegate selection process, this means that I would vote for Marco Rubio in Florida, for John Kasich in Ohio, and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state,"" said Romney.

The goal would be to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination on the convention's first ballot in July.

After reports surfaced that Romney was planning to speak out against Trump on Thursday, the billionaire was quick to fire back at Romney on Twitter.

Will Romney's blunt words have any impact? It's not likely Trump supporters will be moved by the critique of a man they see as the ultimate establishment insider — who failed in attempts to win the presidency.

In the past year, Trump has hardly needed excuses to lay into Romney. In stump speeches, he regularly calls Romney a ""loser"" who blew the chance to defeat President Obama in 2012.

In an interview Thursday morning with the Today show, Trump called Romney a ""stiff.""

But it wasn't always so contentious between these two wealthy Republican businessmen. Trump endorsed Romney's 2012 White House bid, and Romney eagerly reciprocated the love.

Romney has been critical of Trump's tone for months, but this speech comes as Trump has won 10 of the first 15 nominating contests, holds a lead in convention delegates and shows little sign of flagging. While many Republican insiders are eager to rally around a non-Trump candidate, there's no indication voters are consolidating around an alternative.

In addition to criticizing his temperament, Romney argued that Trump is unelectable in a general election.

""Trump relishes any poll that reflects what he thinks of himself. But polls are also saying that he will lose to Hillary Clinton,"" said Romney.

This week, a group of more than 60 conservative foreign policy experts wrote an open letter denouncing Trump's statements, concluding that Trump is ""fundamentally dishonest"" and would ""use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.""",REAL
"President Obama indicated Thursday that he is preparing to announce Cuba’s removal from the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a move that should quickly lead to a full restoration of diplomatic ties and the opening of embassies in Havana and Washington.

Speaking at a gathering of Caribbean leaders here, Obama said the State Department had finished a review of the issue. There is little doubt that it recommends he drop Cuba from the list, and the only real question is when the announcement will be made.

That could come as early as this week, as Obama attends a summit of Latin American leaders that for the first time will be joined by Cuban President Raúl Castro. Administration officials said a decision on when the president will take action has not been finalized and awaits formal consultation with other affected government agencies.

[Read: Rare poll shows vast majority of Cubans welcome closer ties with U.S.]

But anticipation is already running high, and Caribbean leaders with whom Obama met on Thursday voiced strong approval for the new era in U.S.-Cuba relations. 

In Washington, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, issued a statement saying he welcomed what he said was the positive State Department recommendation.

Obama confirmed that the White House had received the review but said he would “not make an announcement today.” He added, “I do think we’re going to be in a position to move forward on opening embassies.”

As he began a meeting with Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, Obama noted that a new poll of Cuban public opinion, published in Thursday’s edition of The Washington Post, demonstrated “overwhelming support” for the normalization process and “overwhelming interest by most Cubans to put one era behind us and move forward.”

[Read: What it means to drop Cuba from list of terrorism sponsors]

A positive announcement on the terror-list decision would be welcomed at the two-day Summit of the Americas, which Obama will attend on Friday and Saturday in Panama with up to 35 other leaders from across the Western Hemisphere. The summit is held every three years, and this will be Castro’s first time in attendance. It will be Obama’s third time, following meetings in 2009 and 2012 that were overshadowed by U.S. insistence that Cuba be excluded.

Administration aides have strongly hinted that Obama and Castro will meet for more than a handshake at the summit, but they have not specified the nature of the encounter.

A White House official said Thurwday: “I can confirm that President Obama spoke with President Castro on Wednesday, before President Obama departed Washington.”

Secretary of State John F. Kerry also met with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla late Thursday in Panama City, the Associated Press reported.

As delegations gathered on the eve of the summit, the presence of communist Cuba made for some extraordinary and also ugly scenes.

In one part of town Thursday, at a forum for the chief executives of major U.S. companies including Facebook, Coca-Cola and Boeing, a Cuban trade official invited America’s corporate leaders to visit the island, telling them his country was open for business.

But at a parallel event at a different location, raucous pro-

Castro crowds disrupted a gathering of nonprofit and civil society groups, blocking Cuban dissidents from participating and denouncing the event’s organizers for daring to invite them.

The tensions, which had boiled over into a wild melee Wednesday in a city park, were a reminder that Cubans’ deep divisions will persist long after the United States reopens an embassy in Havana.

“We are deeply concerned by reports of attacks targeting civil society representatives in Panama for the Summit of the Americas exercising freedom of speech and harassment of those participating in the Summit of the Americas Civil Society Forum,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, adding that the U.S. “condemns those who use violence against peaceful protesters.”

The situation was also a sign that while the Castro government is increasingly willing to tinker with its economic model, the experiment doesn’t extend to politics. The government also remains determined to stifle critics well beyond Cuba’s borders.

But Rodrigo Malmierca Díaz, Cuba’s minister of foreign trade and investment, said in a speech that although U.S. sanctions continued to limit American business with the island, Obama’s recent moves were “a positive step.”

Malmierca said the Castro government is seeking more than $8 billion in foreign investment in its new effort to spur growth.

Once Obama approves the recommendation to delist Cuba, Congress will have 45 days to consider the proposal. But legislators have no power to alter such a recommendation except through new legislation, a move that is seen as unlikely. The administration has made the case to Cuba that Obama’s decision — even before the end of the 45 days — should be enough for the two countries to move forward on reopening embassies.

Cuba has said it cannot envision having full diplomatic relations with a country that has charged it with supporting overseas terrorism. In many ways, the U.S. designation, first imposed in 1982, is a Cold War relic. Although the United States strongly objects to Cuba’s domestic policies, it has offered no evidence for decades that Cuba is actively involved in terrorism abroad.

Leaders of 14 of the 15 members of the Caribbean Community, known as Caricom, met here with Obama. Those in attendance ­welcomed the broader move toward normalization, which ­Simpson Miller called “a bold and courageous move . . . for the good of all of our people.” Obama, she said, is “on the right side of history.”

[Obama moves to normalize relations with Cuba as American is released by Havana]

While the focus of the Caricom talks covered regional security and economic development, Obama’s visit here is also part of a larger plan, which includes his outreach to Cuba. The move is directly related to the administration’s efforts to improve U.S. standing in the region and to undermine Venezuela’s attempts to draw the Caribbean states into its orbit. For years, Venezuela has used cut-rate oil to buy anti-

American support from cash-strapped Caribbean governments.

In recent weeks, Caracas, with money problems of its own, has rolled back energy subsidies to Caricom members. With an energy security program announced in January by Vice President Biden, the Obama administration hopes to help fund island infrastructure to receive and use U.S. gas and petroleum, and then to subsidize U.S. sales of energy products to the Caribbean.

As they try to wean island governments away from Venezuela, administration officials have also attempted to play down their difficulties with Caracas. Thomas A. Shannon, a senior aide to Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was in Venezuela on Thursday for meetings with President Nicolás Maduro. The visit aimed to give at least the impression that the United States is trying to smooth over its differences with the Maduro government before the Caricom meeting and the larger Summit of the Americas.

Miroff reported from Panama City. David Nakamura in Washington also contributed to this story.

Where U.S.-Cuba relations stand and what may change

At the Summit of the Americas, focus is likely to be on the U.S. and Cuba

Argument between U.S., Venezuela puts Cuba in awkward position

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
"November 4, 2016 Turkey Rounds Up Erdogan’s Political Opponents as Crackdown Widens 
Salahhatin Demirtas, once hailed as the “Kurdish Obama,” among the pro-Kurdish opposition lawmakers held on Friday 
A Turkish court placed the two leaders of a major pro-Kurdish opposition party under arrest on Friday in a dramatic widening of a political crackdown that followed July’s failed military coup that will raise concerns about the future of Turkey’s parliamentary democracy. 
Police detained the co-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahhatin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, early on Friday morning along with nine other lawmakers. The measures against pro-Kurdish officials more than three months after president Recep Tayyip Erdogan narrowly survived an attempt by part of the military to seize power on July 15 could also open a new season of conflict with armed Kurdish insurgents. Hours after the arrests, a car bombing reportedly killed at least eight people in the city of Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish-majority southeast of Turkey.",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on October 30, 2016 By Timothy Fitzpatrick — The Fitzpatrick Informer Oct 29, 2016 Anno Domini Donald Trump and Mossad asset Ghislaine Maxwell out on the town in New York City in 1997. Click to enlarge Part I Any inquisitive person should be asking themself why a seemingly anti-establishment candidate like Donald Trump has been allowed to get as far as he has in the U.S. presidential race for election November 8. The simplest answer is that he isn’t anti-establishment and is only fronting a very convincing facade for public consumption. The family-made rich man has been strategically propped up as the all-accommodating GOP extremist opponent of candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, herself part of the very same establishment and even personal friend to Trump—at least prior to the race. The two candidates come from the same organized criminal syndicate that leads back to Israel, its murderous Mossad terrorist organization, and the Lansky international crime syndicate. Furthermore, as we shall see, Trump is nothing more than a puppet of Mossad and is likely under their control through opportunism and, darker yet, blackmail. What Trump and his cronies all share in common is sexual compromise and their loyalty to the international Judeo-masonic power structure. Sexual blackmail and Illuminism Jeffrey Epstein and alleged child sex procurer Ghislaine Maxwell Perhaps the most powerful form of blackmail is that which involves sexual matters, and so it is that throughout human history, many men of power have been brought down upon revelation of some sexual scandal. It was through this channel that Adam Weishaupt’s illuminism (blackmail) was so successful in his time through to today (Weishaupt stole the Catholic sacrament of confession and used for his own personal gain—so that he could gain knowledge of people’s sins in order to use it against them). Since then, it has proven to be the most useful form of blackmail employed, especially in the political world. Every person in a position of power should be suspected of being controlled through this form of blackmail, since the Judeo-masonic cryptocracy controls virtually every aspect of organized government, the press, and the financial system, to name a few. You may have heard of the bizarre sexual initiation of Yale University’s Skull and Bones secret society, where the would-be bonesman reveals his sexual secrets to his fellow initiates and initiators. [ i ] From the very start of their societal ascent, you could say, a bonesman is blackmailed and falls under control of the society. Former Israeli Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky revealed in his first tell-all book about the Mossad: “… there are three major “hooks” for recruiting people: money; emotion, be it revenge or ideology; and sex.” [ ii ] This scenario is played out in virtually every sphere of influence at one degree (pun intended) or another. As it happens, both presidential candidates are connected to sexual scandals, the likes of which we shall explore in Trump’s life. Mossad’s child-sex ring procurers Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein",FAKE
"We Are Change 
In this video Luke Rudkowski interviews Matt a computer programmer who’s allowing everyone to run there own election polls. Already 800,000 people in the U.S were independently polled and the findings contradict the main stream media polls.
https://www.callforamerica.com/ 
The post THE POLLS CAN NO LONGER BE RIGGED THIS ELECTION appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"« on: Today at 01:06:08 AM » New Lunar Craters Mystery | Space News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz0GhlVKQuk Oct 26, 2016 ThunderboltsProject New scientific reports are once again forcing planetary scientists to rewrite the history of our own moon. Study reveals lunar surface features younger than assumed http://phys.org/news/2016-10-reveals-lunar-surface-features-younger.html A new study into the lunar surface contradicts the notion that cratering on the moon occurs incrementally over vast eons of time. A team of scientists studied several thousands of before and after images of the moons’ surface, with the visual data covering nearly a million square miles. What they found is that lunar cratering appears to occur at a rate more than 100 times faster than the standard impact model has predicted. Could electrical processes on the moon be responsible for the cratering? Our Electrically Scarred Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9WOucaz-0 The Missing Ceres Craters Mystery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibSeyMzPClU Electric Crater Chains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5EjXhtKagg Logged",FAKE
A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups.,REAL
"4 Replies 
Jonathan Turley – It appears that that “ basket of deplorables ” was a bit larger than Hillary Clinton expected. I was up to 4 am at Fox participating in the coverage of the election from New York. This was my fourth such presidential election as part a media team and it was fascinating to watch [results] unfold at the campaign headquarters at Fox. 
History will judge the decisions of Democrats leaders in this election. As I have previously written, the Democratic National Committee and establishment (including allies in the media) did everything they could to engineer the election of Hillary Clinton. While they had an extremely popular candidate in Bernie Sanders as well as Vice President Joe Biden, they insisted on advancing Clinton despite her being deeply disliked and the ultimate symbol of the establishment that the public was rallying against. 
As the close race indicated, the selection of a Sanders or Biden would have likely produced a sweep of both the White House and the Senate for the Democrats. Instead, they lost them both by forcing voters to vote for someone with record negatives. 
Voters were clear that they did not want Clinton, but the Democrats assumed that the “lesser of two evils” approach would again prevail. They were wrong. Many people voted for third party candidates and many people on the fence refused to pick the candidate most associated with the establishment and the status quo. 
I expect that history will judge the work of figures like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Donna Brazile harshly in the roles that they played and more generally in the failure of Democratic leaders to heed the clear demand from voters for a change in leadership. Hillary Clinton was a talented and historic nominee. However, she was also the very symbol of the establishment and heavily laden with the type of associations that the public was clearly reacting against. 
The wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania shows precisely how reckless and cynical the DNC strategy proved to be. Clinton won only 18 states and the District of Columbia, though it did earn her 242 electoral votes. Now for the first time in decades, the Democrats have handed a Republican president both houses of Congress. They solved gridlock but not in the way that they had hoped. 
I was astonished to see Clinton decline to speak to her supporters who had wait so loyally at their campaign headquarters. While she did concede over the telephone to Trump, I thought it was bad form not to come down to the headquarters and address the nation and her supporters. They worked incredibly hard and the loss was a terrible blow for them. They deserved better in my view and I felt truly sorry for both their disappointment and effective abandonment at that moment. 
Looking at the results coming into the headquarters, it was clear that no further “counting” would change the result as Clinton’s telephone call affirmed a short while later. It is the final obligation of a candidate in a presidential campaign to be with your supporters and show the nation that the transition of power would proceed, as it always has, in an orderly fashion. It was highly ironic given the well-founded criticism of the statement of Trump that he might not accept the results of the election — a view driven home by Chris Wallace (who was the gold standard for moderators in these election debates). 
The greatest loser in this election was the mainstream media. As I previously discussed , I believe that Trump did bring much of the negative coverage on himself. However, I saw many journalists discard any semblance of neutrality in their coverage, as vividly shown in Wikileaks emails of coordination with the Clinton campaign. The priority for the media should be a serious reexamination of its coverage in this election. 
In the end, the public wanted change and they got it. The fact is that many of the public has long felt that they no longer controlled their government and they were right. That is what makes this so revolutionary and transformative for American politics. Whatever a Trump Administration may hold, it will be shock to the system and that is precisely what tens of millions of Americans wanted. SF Source Jonathan Turley  ",FAKE
"Republican front-runner Donald Trump took a new round of shots at the GOP's nominating process Sunday, while his newly-hired convention manager Paul Manafort accused Trump's rival Ted Cruz of using ""gestapo tactics"" to earn delegate support at nominating conventions across the country.

Speaking to thousands packed in a frigid airport hangar in western New York, Trump argued anew that the person who wins the most votes in the primary process should automatically be the GOP nominee.

""What they're trying to do is subvert the movement with crooked shenanigans,"" Trump said. The real estate mogul compared himself to Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who is well behind Hillary Clinton in that party's delegate race despite a string of state wins.

""We should have won it a long time ago,"" Trump said. ""But, you know, we keep losing where we're winning.""

Trump was introduced at the rally by Buffalo real estate developer and 2010 New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who said that talk of a brokered Republican convention ""suggests that they can take that right away from the American people to choose their leader.""

Manafort, a veteran GOP strategist who worked on White House campaigns for President Gerald Ford in 1976 and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole in 1996, told NBC's ""Meet The Press"" that the Cruz campaign was using a ""scorched earth"" approach in which ""they don't care about the party. If they don't get what they want, they blow it up.""

Manafort added that the Trump campaign is filing protests because the Cruz campaign is ""not playing by the rules.”

“You go to his county conventions and you see the gestapo tactics,"" he said.



Trump has a 743-to-545 delegate lead over the Texas senator, with the end of the primary/caucus season fast approaching. Over the weekend, Cruz completed his sweep of Colorado's 34 delegates by locking up the remaining 13 at the party's state convention in Colorado Springs. He already had collected 21 delegates and visited the state to try to pad his numbers there.

Cruz came out ahead in the Colorado contest, though, after dedicating resources to the convention process and putting in personal face time on the day of the final vote, something Trump did not do. The Trump campaign’s flyers in Colorado naming their preferred delegates were also riddled with errors. While Trump aides blamed the state party for giving them bad information, the party pushed back.

And on Twitter, the Colorado GOP retweeted a message, saying: “You may not like CO's caucus system, but it's representative, and claiming delegates were 'stolen' insults the Republicans who participated.”

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier also retweeted a message saying the rules “were publicly available for months to people who know how to read and understand words.”

Polls show Trump holding a sizable lead in the next big state contest, New York's April 19 primary, but Cruz is trying to chip away at Trump's home-state advantage in conservative pockets of the Empire State.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is third with 143 delegates, behind Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who ended his campaign March 15 with 171 committed delegates.

Manafort insisted Sunday that he’s still connected enough to wrangle delegates.

""You would be surprised who's been calling me over the last week and where they're from,"" he said. ""Do I know the 25-, 30-year-old delegates? No. Do I know the people who push buttons in a lot of these states? Yes.""

However, Manafort made clear the Trump campaign won’t use strong-arm tactics.

“That’s not my style,” he told NBC. “That’s not Donald Trump’s style. That’s Ted Cruz’s style.”

Manafort also dismissed the notion that the Trump campaign has missed opportunities to get delegates through insider tactics and boasted that Cruz has and will continue to lose that way.

He said the Trump campaign has gotten all of the committee spots in Alabama and that it “wiped [Cruz] out"" in a similar effort in Michigan.

“You’re going to see Ted Cruz get skunked in Nevada,” Manafort added.

Manafort made clear the race to get 1,237 delegates will likely extend until early June, which includes California’s GOP primary, with 172 delegates, and the New Jersey primary with 51 at stake.

“I’m confident there are several ways to get to 1,237,” he said.

Trump would need to win nearly 60 percent of all the remaining delegates to clinch the nomination before this summer's convention in Cleveland. So far, he's winning about 45 percent.

Manafort insisted being hired by the Trump campaign was not a shakeup, particularly amid Cruz’s come-from-behind win last week in Wisconsin.

He argued the campaign season is entering its end stages and that Trump must move from the free-wheeling, free-media style that made the first-time candidate the GOP presidential front-runner.

“Donald Trump has recognized that,” Manafort said, while arguing Trump still runs the campaign.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
Donald Trump’s red wave on Election Day was an unprecedented body blow against neoliberalism. The stupid early-1990s prediction about the ‘end of history’ turned into a – possible – shock of the new. The new global nativism? Perhaps a new push towards democratic socialism? Too early to tell. 
Once again. A body blow, not a death blow. Like the cast of The Walking Dead, the zombie neoliberal elite simply won’t quit. For the Powers That Be/Deep State/Wall Street axis, there’s only one game in town, and that is to win, at all costs. Failing that, to knock over the whole chessboard, as in hot war. 
Hot war has been postponed, at least for a few years. Meanwhile, it’s enlightening to observe the collective American and Eurocrat despair about a world they can’t understand anymore; Brexit, Trumpquake, the rise of the far-right across the West. For the insulated financial/tech/think-tank elites of liquid modernity, criticism of neoliberalism – with is inbuilt deregulation, privatization a-go-go, austerity obsession – is anathema. 
The angry, white, blue collar Western uprising is the ultimate backlash against neoliberalism – an instinctive reaction against the rigged economic casino capitalism game and its subservient political arms. That’s at the core of Trump winning non-college white voters in Wisconsin by 28 points. Blaming “whitelash” , racism, WikiLeaks or Russia is no more than childish diversionary tactics. 
The key question is whether the backlash may engender a new Western drive towards democratic socialism – read David Harvey’s books for the road map – or just nostalgic nationalism raging against the neoliberal Washington/EU/NAFTA/ globalization machine. 
Read my lips: much lower taxes 
Trump is proposing to turn the tables on the neoliberal game. Throughout his campaign he criminalized free trade – the essence of globalization – for decimating the American working class, even as US businesses blamed free trade for forcing them to squeeze workers’ wages. 
So let’s see how Trump will be able to impose his priorities. In parallel to addressing the appalling structural decline in US manufacturing, he wants to pull a China: a massive $1 trillion infrastructure project over 10 years via public-private partnerships and private investments encouraged by lower taxes. That’s supposed to create a wealth of jobs. 
Lower corporate taxes in this case translate into a whopping $3 trillion over 10 years, something like 1.6 percent of GDP. That would be the way to incite huge multinationals to repatriate the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits stashed abroad. This fiscal shock would create 25 million jobs in the US over the next 10 years, and propel a 4 percent growth rate. 
And then there’s the protectionist drive that will renegotiate NAFTA and kill TPP for good. Not to mention raising import tariffs over manufactured products (many by de-localized US multinationals) imported from China and Mexico. 
It’s open to fierce debate how Trumponomics will manage to square the circle; with more economic growth fueled by less taxes, imports will rise to satisfy internal demand. But if these products are subjected to stiffer tariffs, they will become more expensive, and inflation will inevitably rise. 
Anyway, the bottom line of protectionist Trumponomics would be a huge blow against global trade. Deglobalization, anyone? 
Asia braces for impact 
Predictably, the heart of deglobalization will be the Trump-China relationship. Throughout the campaign, Trump blamed China for currency manipulation and proposed a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. 
In Hong Kong banking circles, no one believes in it. Key argument: the already strapped basket of “deplorables” simply won’t have the means to pay more for these Chinese imports. 
Another thing entirely would be for Trumponomics to find mechanisms to hurt US companies that de-localize in Asia. That would translate into serious problems for outsourcing Meccas such as India and the Philippines. Outsourcing in the Philippines, for instance, serves mostly US companies and attracts revenue as crucial to the nation as total Filipino worker remittances from abroad, something like 9 percent of GDP. 
It’s quite enlightening in this context to consider what Narayana Murthy – founder of Indian IT major Infosys – told the CNBC TV-18 network; “What is in the best interest of America is for its corporations to succeed, for its corporations to create more jobs… to export more… so I’m very positive.” 
Four months ago Nomura Holdings Inc. issued a report titled “Trumping Asia” . No less than 77 percent of respondents expected Trump to brand China a currency manipulator; and 75 percent predicted he will impose tariffs on exports from China, South Korea and Japan. 
So no wonder all across Asia the next months will be nerve-wracking. Asia – and not only China – is the factory of the world. Any Trump trade restriction over China will reverberate all across Asia. 
Brace for impact: deglobalized Trumponomics vs. Neoliberalism will be a battle for the ages. 
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at . (Reprinted from RT by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
"Email 
The boat, along with other means of travel, are often undertaken as matters of freedom. Movement keeps one alive in times of peace, and in conflict. The Australian government, and those backing its practices, have wished over the years to limit, if not halt such movement altogether. 
Since the last decade, extreme measures have been implemented that effectively qualify Australian sovereignty while singling out a particular breed of asylum seeker. The former aspect of that policy was specifically undertaken to excise the entire mainland from being qualified as territorially valid to arrive in. 
The entire policy effectively assumed a military character, most conspicuously under the Abbott government’s embrace of a creepily crypto-fascist border protection force, equipped with uniforms and patriotic purpose. Operation Sovereign Borders effectively meant that the refugee and asylum seeker were fair game – not to be processed and settled equitably with a minimum of fuss, but to be repelled, their boats towed back to Indonesia, and people smugglers bribed. 
An entire intelligence-security complex has also been created, fed by private contractors and held in place by the promise of a two-year prison sentence for entrusted officials in possession of “protected” information. 
Such statements as those made today by Prime Minister Turnbull, announced with note of grave urgency at a press conference, tend to resemble a typical pattern in Australian politics since the Howard years. 
The borders, even if supposedly secure, are deemed to be in a permanent state of siege, forever battered by potential invaders keen to swindle Parliament and the Australian people. Yes, boasted the Abbott, and now Turnbull government, the boats laden with desperate human cargo have stopped coming. Yes, all is well on the sea lanes in terms of repelling such unwanted arrivals. But for all of this, the island continent is being assaulted by characters of will, those keen to avail themselves of desperate people and their desire for a secure, safe haven. 
The policy has also received international attention from such establishment institutions as The New York Times. “While that arrangement,” went an editorial this month, “largely stopped the flow of boats packed with people that set off from Indonesia weekly, it has landed these refugees – many from Iran, Myanmar, Iraq and Afghanistan – in what amounts to cruel and indefinite detention.” 
As the editorial continued to observe, “This policy costs Australian taxpayers a staggering $US419,000 per detainee a year and has made a nation that has historically welcomed immigrants a violator of international law.” 
While this obscenity has been powdered and perfumed as humanitarian, designed to halt the spate of drowning cases at sea, the latest announcements have abandoned the stance. “They must know,” claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, “that the door to Australia is closed to those who seek to come here by boat with a people smuggler.” 
Finally, an honest statement twinning two perceived demons in Australian refugee policy: the people smuggler and the asylum seeker, both equivalently horrible to Australian authorities. To that end, not a single asylum seeker arriving by boat will be permitted to settle in Australia. This policy will also affect arrivals from July 2013. 
Such a stance of finality seems little different to pervious ones made by Abbott’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd. What is troubling about it is the element of monomania: never will any asylum seeker, who had arrived after a certain date, will be permitted to settle in Australia. 
The intention there is to make sure that those designated refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, facilitated by Australia’s draconian offshore regime, will have the doors shut, effectively ensuring a more prolonged, torturous confinement. Absurdly, they will then be permitted to slum away indefinitely in such indigent places as Nauru, with a population hostile to those from the Middle East and Africa. 
Turnbull’s stance may also suggest a degree of desperation. Not all has gone swimmingly with the offshore detention complex. The PNG Supreme Court rendered an aspect of the Australian refugee policy redundant in finding that detaining individuals indefinitely on Manus Island breached constitutional rights. 
Peter Dutton, the hapless Minister for Immigration, has struggled in managing what can only be described by the border security obsessives as an administrative disaster. Rather than admitting to the realities that searching for refuge over dangerous routes will always find a market, the Australian government persists in a cruel delusion that continues to deny international refugee law while punishing the victims.",FAKE
"President Obama campaigns Tuesday with Mrs. Clinton for the first time. He's more popular than she is, and can excite the Democratic base. But Obama also faces risks.

President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived at Yangon International Airport in Yangon, Myanmar in 2012. The last time they traveled together was to the country, which had recently adopted democratic reforms. They’ve been bitter rivals, allies and colleagues. When they take the stage at their first joint campaign appearance on July, 5, 2016, Obama and Clinton will show off a new phase in their storied relationship: co-dependents.

President Obama is set to hit the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton for the first time, the next step in what Democrats hope is a march to four more years in the White House.

Mr. Obama has been itching to campaign for Mrs. Clinton for a while. But there was this little thing called the primaries that had to play out first. Then there was the Orlando massacre on June 12, which forced the cancellation of their first joint appearance, which was to take place a few days later.

Obama, too, has been mindful of Bernie Sanders, who still hasn’t endorsed Clinton, and of Senator Sanders’s supporters. Still, polls show that most Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters are ready to vote for Clinton, so the big question is  turnout. That’s where Obama comes in, beginning Tuesday, when he joins Clinton on stage in Charlotte, N.C. He’s more popular than Clinton, and can (Democrats hope) rally the troops. But Obama also faces risks as a surrogate.

Here’s a list of the ways Obama can both help and hurt Clinton’s candidacy. First, the positives:

He’s better at campaigning. There’s a reason he beat Clinton in 2008, when she was the heavy favorite going in to win the Democratic nomination. He’s the master at soaring rhetoric, and she is all about 10-point plans.

He has higher approval ratings. Obama is more popular than Clinton. His job approval rating is hovering around 50 percent, which is pretty good, considering that he was “under water” for much of the last three years – that is, more voters disapproved of his job performance than approved.  Clinton, in contrast, is deeply underwater, seen favorably by only 40 percent of Americans and 56 percent unfavorably. Maybe Obama can offer her some coattails.

As president, Obama still commands the bully pulpit. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is a master at attracting media attention, but Obama is pretty good at it too. Wherever Obama goes, so do the media – and that’s good for Clinton when he’s campaigning for her. Attracting free media, which amplifies her message at no cost, saves campaign cash for other purposes, such as get-out-the-vote efforts.

Obama can troll Mr. Trump in a way Clinton can’t. Obama clearly loves to make fun of Trump. Remember the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, when Obama mocked him mercilessly as the real estate mogul sat stone-faced in the audience? Trump had harangued Obama on his place of birth to the point where Obama released his long-form birth certificate just to end the distraction, and at that dinner, Obama got his payback.

Obama has a deeper connection to key constituencies. Obama won the presidency twice in part by winning big among minorities, young voters, and single women. Clinton is beating Trump handily among all three constituencies, but Democrats are concerned about getting those groups excited about turning out. Obama is expected to play an important role in inspiring those groups, especially minorities and Millennials, to show up at the polls.

Obama is sharing his campaign data. The president’s vaunted “data-driven machine,” the operation that elected him twice, is now at Clinton’s disposal – including Obama’s massive email list. That explains all the emails showing up in supporters’ inboxes offering a chance to go see the Broadway musical “Hamilton” with Clinton.

Fundraising. Obama is still a major rainmaker for his party, and that benefits everyone up and down the Democratic ticket.

Obama is no longer the ‘change’ candidate. Eight years ago, Obama was the candidate of hope and change. Now an older, grayer Obama represents the status quo, which for some Americans isn’t good, and Trump is the candidate of change. So it will be harder to jazz up crowds.

It’s the Republicans’ ‘turn.’ After two terms of the Democratic Obama, voters would usually be ready for a swing of the pendulum toward the GOP. So Obama and Clinton are trying to buck history. Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and unorthodox policies give the Democrats hope. But Obama has to be mindful that, in theory, this shouldn’t be a Democratic year.

Obama can’t campaign everywhere. He'll avoid solidly red states. Even in battleground states, the president has to pick his spots, and that probably means avoiding heavily blue-collar areas. Pennsylvania is one example. It’s shaping up to be an important state for Trump, if he’s going to have a shot at winning. But after Obama’s secretly recorded comments during the 2008 campaign about voters in small-town Pennsylvania who “cling to guns or religion,” he should probably steer clear of rural western Pennsylvania and similar areas in the old rust belt.

Obama and Clinton differ on some important policies. Under pressure from Sanders’s unexpectedly strong campaign, Clinton has moved to Obama’s left on issues relevant to working Americans, such as trade and the minimum wage. And she remains more hawkish on military intervention abroad.

In a way, these policy differences help refute the idea that a Clinton presidency would be just a third Obama term. But if voters bring them up during campaign appearances, it could be awkward for both the president and Clinton.

Obama has to beware the Trump trap. Too much trolling could drag the president down.

Bottom line: Obama can do a lot of good for Clinton over the next four months, as he works to convince American voters that they should warm up to her just as he did. But there’s only so much a lame-duck president can do for his hoped-for successor.",REAL
"The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia comes less than a month before the Supreme Court hears its biggest abortion case in a decade.

On March 2, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstadt, a challenge to a Texas law that has closed about half of the state's abortion clinics since 2013.

If the law is allowed to stand, abortion rights supporters say it would close all but about 10 of Texas's abortion clinics. Advocates on both sides of the abortion issue say this case could be the most important decision on abortion in 25 years.

Scalia has been a staunch opponent of abortion rights, and critical of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1972, which established a constitutional right to abortion. ""You want a right to abortion? There's nothing in the Constitution about that,"" Scalia said in a 2011 interview.

Scalia was a near-certain vote in favor of upholding the Texas law. Without him, things get a bit more complicated. But the key thing to know is this: Without Scalia, its very hard to see a world where the Supreme Court affirms the Texas law's constitutionality.

Here's why: There are almost certainly four votes against the law from the Court's liberal wing. And it's possible there are five votes, as justice Anthony Kennedy has been a swing vote on abortion cases. A 5-3 decision would be the best case for abortion rights supporters, as it would repeal the Texas law and prevent other states from passing similar restrictions.

The best case outcome for the abortion rights opponents, meanwhile, is a 4-4 tie. In that case, Supreme Court rules say that the decision of the circuit court is left in place without setting any constitutional precedent.

In that case, this would let the Texas law stand, since the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the restriction. That would be far from an ideal outcome for the law's challengers and would leave abortion access greatly restricted in Texas.

But it also wouldn't give other states the clear signal that these types of restrictions are constitutional — something that abortion opponents would very much like to see.

The case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, was brought by Texas abortion providers challenging Texas's House Bill 2, which the legislature enacted into law in July 2013.

That bill has two main restrictions, both of which the clinics challenge in this case. One was a requirement that all abortion clinics have admitting privileges at local hospitals. That piece of HB2 went into effect in September 2013, and forced 14 clinics that could not obtain admitting privileges to close.

HB2 also requires abortion clinics to become ambulatory surgical centers, essentially mini emergency rooms that can handle complex medical situations. Ambulatory surgical centers, for example, must have wide enough hallways to fit a gurney and larger operating rooms than abortion clinics typically use.

Abortion clinics in Texas have said that upgrading to these new standards would cost upward of $1 million. They have argued that the new requirements are unnecessary, as abortions tend to have a very low complication risk. Approximately 0.05 percent of first-trimester abortions have complications that require hospital care.

Texas clinics have said because these upgrades are so costly, many facilities would close. Their lawyers previous stated that about 900,000 of Texas's 4.5 million reproductive-age women would live more than 150 miles from a clinic if HB2 stands.

The Supreme Court has, in previous rulings, articulated standards for judging the constitutionality of abortion restrictions like these. And one key standard the justices have settled on is whether a restriction places an ""undue burden"" on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

The Supreme Court has previously defined an undue burden as a law with the ""purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus."" The Supreme Court has previously ruled that laws requiring women to notify their spouses of their abortion, for example, are an undue burden, as it could make it impossible for some women to access the procedure.

The Texas law requires abortion clinics to become mini emergency rooms

The Texas clinics argue that HB2 ought to fit the ""undue burden"" definition: Because it would force most Texas abortion clinics to close, it would become the type of ""substantial obstacle"" that the Supreme Court has previously found to be unconstitutional.

If the Texas law stands, the clinics argue, ""every woman in Texas would have to live under a legal regime that fails to respect her equal citizenship status and would force her to grapple with unnecessary and substantial obstacles as a condition of exercising her protected liberty.""

Texas has defended its new restrictions as not placing a substantial burden on those seeking abortions. As evidence, it points to the fact that the admitting privileges portion of the law has been in effect for more than a year, forcing 14 clinics to close. The clinics, they pointed out, presented no evidence of women who wanted to obtain an abortion not being able to do so.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals used that argument to uphold the law in October.

""Demand for abortion services in Texas may decrease in the future, as it has done nationally over the past several years,"" the Fifth Circuit ruled. ""The record lacks evidence that the previous closures ... have caused women to be turned away from clinics. Without any evidence ... plaintiffs do not appear to ... show that the ambulatory surgical center provision will result in insufficient clinic capacity.""

The Fifth Circuit continued that ""the evidence does not indicate, without specificity, that by requiring all abortion clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers, the overall costs of accessing an abortion provider will likely increase.""

Texas has also challenged the clinics' argument that the new restrictions are unnecessary because abortion is generally a safe procedure, saying it's not the place of the courts to second-guess the possible outcome of the law.

Abortion rights supporters have pointed to new research that suggests the state was wrong on this. According to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, major Texas cities have seen significant increases in wait times at abortion clinics. In Dallas, where the average wait time for an abortion was five days prior to HB2, women may now wait as long as 20 days.",REAL
"The Empire Files: Inside Palestine's Refugee Camps The Empire Files: Inside Palestine's Refugee Camps By 0 59 
In her first on-the-ground report from Palestine, Abby Martin gives a first-hand look into two of the most attacked refugee camps in the West Bank: Balata and Aida camps. 
With millions of displaced Palestinians around the world, hundreds of thousands are refugees in their own country — many have lived packed into these refugee camps after being ethnically cleansed from their villages just miles away.",FAKE
"At 3 a.m. on a cold desert night earlier this month, four Islamic State militants carrying guns, grenades and cash slipped into Saudi Arabia here through a hole in the new heavy fencing that separates this country from Iraq.

They were immediately spotted by Saudi border guards in a state-of-the-art control room 35 miles away, appearing first as blips on radar, then as ghostly white figures on night-vision cameras scanning the desolate desert landscape.

Heavily armed troops were dispatched to confront them. When the battle ended, the four intruders — all Saudi citizens — and three Saudi soldiers were dead, including the local base commander, who was killed when a militant pretending to surrender detonated a suicide vest.

“Thanks to God and our new systems, we are ready for whatever they try,” said the new commander, Ali Mohammed Assiri, whose troops have now been issued orders to shoot on sight anyone breaching the border. “If you are not willing to defend the country, you don’t deserve to live in it.”

Except for Syria and Iraq, where the Islamic State controls territory, no country is more directly threatened by Islamist militants than Saudi Arabia, which the extremists regard as a traitor to Islam for Riyadh’s close associations with the United States and the West.

No king of Saudi Arabia has ascended the throne amid more regional turmoil than King Salman, who was crowned Friday upon the death of his brother King Abdullah.

With war raging in Syria and tensions with Iran increasing, Saudi Arabia is threatened by a disintegration of the national government in Yemen across its southern border and by the Islamic State militants who are dominating the Iraqi desert just over its northern border.

Salman indirectly mentioned the threat of rising violence and regional instability on Friday in his first speech to the Saudi people, saying that “the Arab and Islamic nation is in dire need today to be united and maintain solidarity.”

Militants have staged four attacks inside the kingdom in the past six months, resulting in the deaths of eight civilians, 11 police or border guards and 13 militants, according to Saudi officials.

As in the recent attacks in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper and a kosher supermarket, most of the Saudi attacks have been carried out by homegrown radicals influenced or trained by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda or other extremist groups. Saudi authorities said that they have arrested 293 people in connection with the incidents and that 260 of them are Saudi nationals.

Saudi officials are anticipating more attacks, either by some of the 2,200 or so Saudi citizens they say have gone to fight with the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq, or by others who infiltrate Saudi Arabia’s borders, especially the nearly 600-mile frontier with Iraq, which runs mainly through empty desert.

“They are targeting Saudi Arabia, and they want to have a very big terrorist act in this country,” said Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

The Saudi government has responded by sharply beefing up border security and by creating new laws that give the government broad power to arrest anyone who joins, or even praises, the radical groups — which has led to complaints from human rights groups that the laws are being unfairly used against activists who merely criticize the government.

Officials have also made it illegal for imams in the country’s 85,000 mosques to give sermons sympathizing with religious extremists. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has launched the al-Sakinah Campaign for Dialogue, an anti-radicalization program that includes a Web site offering anonymous counseling.

“We are also educating the imams to tell people that what ISIS is saying is against Islam,” said Tawfeeq al-Sediry, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of Islamic affairs. “They represent violence. We represent the real Islam.”

Saudi officials said they have also tightened controls on charities suspected of channeling money to radicals. Wealthy Saudi individuals are widely believed to be a significant source of funding for the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

Critics point to that funding as evidence that many Saudis quietly support the Islamic State, seeing it as a Sunni Muslim force fighting to protect other Sunnis, especially in Syria and Iraq, where Shiite Muslims control the government with the support of Saudi Arabia’s chief rival, Iran.

“In the Middle East, it’s nothing new: You create your own terrorists, then pretend you are fighting them,” said Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi activist who runs the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington. “The Saudis didn’t even invent it, but they’re good at it.”

Ahmed said the Saudi government is “playing both sides” to give “the appearance that they are the good guys.”

“They get a lot of political traction out of it,” Ahmed said. “To the Americans, they are the guardians of safety, and no matter how horrible they are on human rights, the way they treat women and all that, they are the ones who are keeping things under control. Really, they are very clever.”

Awadh al-Badi, a researcher and scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, rejects those assertions. He says the Islamic State is offering arguments that attract some idealistic young Muslims.

Islamic State leaders say they want to establish a vast Islamic caliphate or “khalifa,” including taking control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which are in Saudi Arabia.

“For many young people, the idea of khalifa is the idea of the great Islam,” Badi said. “The idea itself is attractive to many people who aspire to see a return of Islamic dignity and influence.”

One Western diplomat based in Riyadh said Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist militants has been unwavering. He noted that Saudi Arabia has joined the U.S.-led military coalition against the Islamic State and sent fighter jets to bomb militant targets — including one F-16 piloted by King Salman’s son Prince Khaled.

“We have had to fight the perception that the Saudis are not doing enough,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “From here, we think they are doing plenty. They tell us, ‘We’ve been fighting these guys and their ilk for 12 years, so don’t tell us how to fight these people.’”

The kingdom faced a wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the mid-2000s, but officials were able to stop them with a fierce crackdown that resulted in the jailing of thousands of suspected militants.

The decree issued last spring making it illegal to belong to or publicly support the Islamic State and other radical groups has slowed the flow of Saudis joining the militants, said Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, because it allows police to arrest anyone trying to go as well as those returning.

The most visible sign of Saudi Arabia’s response to the rising militant threat is the extensive new system of fences, ditches, razor wire and berms along the border with Iraq, which stretches from the border with Kuwait in the east to Jordan in the west.

King Abdullah inaugurated the barrier system in September after six years of construction on the project, which was initially conceived as a defense against the sectarian chaos in Iraq but is now primarily a defense against the Islamic State.

Saudi officials have also embarked on a multiyear project to similarly fortify all the thousands of miles of land borders, with Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and especially Yemen — where the government was recently toppled by rebels aligned with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main rival for power in the region.

Sometimes jokingly referred to as the “Great Wall,” the Iraq border defense system involves two high fences topped with concertina wire, backed by deep ditches and tall sand berms designed to make it impossible for any vehicle to cross.

The physical barriers are reinforced by technological ones, with 40 radar towers, each 125 feet high, that constantly sweep a radius of nearly 25 miles looking for any movement. Each tower is fitted with two cameras — one for daytime, one for night — that can zoom in on objects up to 12 miles away.

At the border’s main control room, at the border guard base in Arar, a town of about 100,000 people in the empty desert nearly 600 miles northwest of Riyadh, operators sit at computer monitors watching 24 hours a day.

When radar spots something moving in a suspicious place, the operators use a mouse to swivel the camera in its direction. Most of the time it’s nothing dangerous — a camel or a shepherd’s dog — but in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 5, it was four heavily armed militants.

Not far from a remote and desolate border crossing, which is only open during the hajj pilgrimage season, the four militants slipped through a hole left by a construction crew working on the fence.

Turki said the men were trying to get to Arar, where police arrested three Saudis and four Syrians suspected of plotting with the infiltrators. The four militants were carrying nearly $20,000 in cash, four suicide vests, six grenades, five assault rifles and pistols and two silencers.

“Even if they got to Arar, were they waiting for the people to rise with them? I doubt it,” said Badi, the King Faisal Center scholar. “They send messages: We are capable of coming to you. We will target you. Terrorism will come to you.

“It’s the same idea as the attacks in France,” he said. “They are not planning to take over France, but they send a message that they can do this.”",REAL
"With Another Deadline Looming, Whispers Of Iran Nuclear Deal Emerge

As Iran and world powers faced yet another self-imposed deadline on Monday, whispers of a deal began to leave the negotiating room.

Quoting two unnamed diplomats, The Associated Press reported that the deal, which would limit Iran's nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of sanctions, would be announced Monday.

NPR's Peter Kenyon, who is reporting from Vienna, reports that Iranian TV is adding to an expectation for a deal. He filed this report for our Newscast unit:

""The signals from Iran are positive, with state-run media predicting an agreement will happen, and Iranian officials describing the document as running to almost 100 pages, including several technical annexes. ""Most reports of an imminent deal, however, include the caveat that a few issues need to be worked out, and the various capitals must sign off on any agreement. ""If they do get an accord, exhausted negotiators will have little time to celebrate their achievement. Critics in congress warmed up their attacks on Sunday talk shows in Washington, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu re-stated his argument that Iran is a bigger threat than the self-proclaimed Islamic State.""

The BBC rounds up what high-level officials said on the record about the negotiations on Sunday:

""US Secretary of State John Kerry said 'a few tough things' needed to be resolved but added: 'We're getting to some real decisions.' ""French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who cancelled a trip to Africa to stay at the talks, said: 'I hope we are finally entering the final phase of these marathon negotiations. I believe it.' ""In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani said the sides had 'come a long way.' 'We need to reach a peak and we're very close,' the Isna news agency quoted him as saying.""

If, indeed, the deal is reached, it would mark the culmination of decades of diplomacy. The deal, however, would have to be approved by several capitals — including the U.S. Congress.",REAL
"In a speech Wednesday outlining his would-be foreign policy, Donald Trump tried to sound presidential. The Republican presidential candidate succeeded in sounding tough if contradictory. But he outlined a foreign policy that isn’t so different from that of Hillary Clinton.

Take ISIS for example. Trump acknowledged in his speech the jihadist army that is slipping its tentacles into the West and promised that its “days are numbered.” But Trump refused to provide any details of how he would fight ISIS—implying he doesn’t want to telegraph his brilliant strategy to the enemy.

This is too clever by half.  Given that ISIS is rampaging in the Middle East and has massacred Americans there, in Europe, and right here in the United States, it’s insufficient for a presidential candidate effectively to say “yadda, yadda I’ll beat ISIS” and provide no more information.

Frankly, it sounds like a teenager who has failed every quiz during the semester but implausibly promises to save the day by acing the final.

The reality is Trump’s strategy to defeat ISIS is basically the same as that of President Obama and Secretary Clinton, which is to say he has no strategy at all.

Earlier Wednesday Trump all but endorsed Obama’s announcement that he’ll send 250 more troops to Syria, saying “I could agree with it,” but declaring he would dispatch them secretly.

Trump doesn’t know how to go beyond the Obama-Clinton foreign policy of using gestures to appear be reacting to events without actually solving anything.

Evidently, Trump would also mirror Clinton on Russia.  Despite promises to regard Moscow “with open eyes” Trump observed Wednesday, “we are not bound to be adversaries,” and added, “I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia.”

This is no different than the self-regard and conceit that led Clinton to offer the Russians a plastic “reset” button, believing the force of her personality would change the Russians’ calculation of their national interests.

Wednesday in Washington Trump laudably called for containing the spread of radical Islam while observing that is not just a military struggle but a “philosophical contest”—a reality that has eluded much of the U.S. government since 9/11.

It seems like Trump is newly willing to borrow a few ideas from Ted Cruz and other conservatives who have been pressing these issues throughout the presidential campaign.  However, the businessman undercut himself by saying he will stick with the Iran nuclear deal he allegedly disdains, promising merely to implement it strictly.

There is no way to defeat radical Islam without ceasing the grand accommodation of the Iranian regime that Obama enacted as Secretary Clinton cheered.

The biggest takeaway from Trump’s foreign policy speech should be that the only remaining candidate with a conservative, Reaganesque foreign policy prepared for today’s threats is Ted Cruz.

Trump’s speech was helpful for that reason alone.



Christian Whiton is a member of the Cruz National Security Coalition. He was a State Department senior advisor in the George W. Bush administration and a policy advisor on the Giuliani and Gingrich presidential campaigns. He is author of ""Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War"" (Potomac Books 2013).",REAL
"What will Donald Trump do if he loses the elections in a week and a half from now, as most polls indicate? 
He has already declared that he will recognize the results – but only if he wins. 
That sounds like a joke. But it is far from being a joke. 
Trump has already announced that the election is rigged. The dead are voting (and all the dead vote for Hillary Clinton). The polling station committees are corrupt. The polling machines forge the results. 
No, that is not a joke. Not at all. 
This is not a joke, because Trump represents tens of millions of Americans, who belong to the lower strata of the white population, which the white elite used to call “white trash”. In more polite language they are called “blue collar workers”, meaning manual workers, unlike the “white collar workers” who occupy the offices. 
If the tens of millions of blue-collar voters refuse to recognize the election results, American democracy will be in danger. The United States may become a banana republic, like some of its southern neighbors, which have never enjoyed a stable democracy. 
This problem exists in all modern nation-states with a sizable national minority. The lowest strata of the ruling people hates the minority. Members of the minority push them out of the lower jobs. And more importantly: the lower strata of the ruling majority have nothing to be proud of except for their belonging to the ruling people. 
The German unemployed voted for Adolf Hitler, who promoted them to the “Herrenvolk” (master people) and the Aryan race. They gave him power, and Germany was razed to the ground. 
The one and only Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a bad system, but that all the other systems tried were worse. 
As far as democracy is concerned, the United States was a model for the world. Already in its early days it attracted freedom-lovers everywhere. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a glowing report about the “Democratie en Amerique”. 
My generation grew up in admiration of American democracy. We saw European democracy breaking down and sinking into the morass of fascism. We admired this young America, which saved Europe in two world wars, out of sheer idealism. The democratic America vanquished German Nazism and Japanese militarism, and later Soviet Bolshevism. 
Our childish attitude gave way to a more mature view. We learned about the genocide of the native Americans and about slavery. We saw how America is seized from time to time by an attack of craziness, such as the witch hunt of Salem and the era of Joe McCarthy, who discovered a Communist under every bed. 
But we also saw Martin Luther King, we saw the first black President, and now we are probably about to see the first female President. All because of this miracle: American democracy. 
And here come this man, Donald Trump, and tries to rip apart the delicate ties that bind American society together. He incites men against women, whites against blacks and hispanics, the rich against the destitute. He sows mutual hatred everywhere. 
Perhaps the American people will get rid of this plague and send Trump back where he came from – television. Perhaps Trump will disappear like a bad dream, as did McCarthy and his spiritual forefathers. 
Let’s hope. But there is also the opposite possibility: that Trump will cause a disaster never seen before: the downfall of democracy, the destruction of national cohesion, the breaking up into a thousand splinters. 
Can this happen in Israel? Do we have an Israel a phenomenon that can be compared to the ascent of the American Trump? Is there an Israeli Trump? 
Indeed, there is. But the Israeli Trump is a Trumpess. 
She is called Miri Regev. 
She resembles the original Trump in many ways. She challenges the Tel Aviv “old elites” as Trump incites against Washington. She incites Jewish citizens against Arab citizens. Orientals of eastern descent against Ashkenazis of European descent. The uncultured against the cultured. The poor against all others. She tears apart the delicate ties of Israeli society. 
She is not the only one of her kind, of course. But she overshadows all the others. 
After the elections for the 20 th Knesset, in March 2015, and the setting-up of the new government, Israel was overrun by a band of far-right politicians, like a pack of hungry wolves. Men and women without charm, without dignity, possessed by a ravenous hunger for power, for conspicuousness at any price, people out for their own personal interest and for nothing else. They compete with each other in the hunt for headlines and provocative actions. 
At the starting line they were all equal – ambitious, unlikable, uninhibited. But gradually, Miri Regev overtakes all the others. All they can do, she can do better. For every headline grabbed by another, she can grab five. For every condemnation of another in the media, she gets ten. 
Benyamin Netanyahu is a dwarf, but compared to this bunch he is a giant. In order to remain so, he appointed each of them to the job he or she is most unsuited for. Miri Regev, a rude, vulgar, primitive person became Minister of Culture and Sports. 
Regev, 51, is a good-looking woman, daughter of immigrants from Morocco. She was born as Miri Siboni in Kiryat-Gat, a place for which I have deep feelings, because it was there that I was wounded in 1948. Then it was still an Arab village called Irak-al-Nabshiyeh, and my life was saved by four soldiers, one of whom was called Siboni (no connection). 
For many years, Regev served in the army as a public relations officer, rising to the rank of Colonel. Seems that one day she decided to do public relations for herself, rather than for others. 
Since her first day as Minister of Culture, she has supplied the media with a steady stream of scandals and provocations. Thus she gradually overtakes all her competitors in the Likud leadership. They just cannot compete with her energy and inventiveness. 
She declared proudly that she sees her job as the elimination of all anti-Likud people from the cultural arena – after all, “that’s what the Likud was elected for.” 
All over the world, governments subsidize cultural institutions and creative people, convinced that culture is a vital national asset. When Charles de Gaulle was the President of France, he was once approached by his police chiefs with the request to issue an arrest warrant for the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, because of his support for the Algerian freedom fighters. De Gaulle refused and said: “Sartre too is France!” 
Well, Regev is no de Gaulle. She threatens to withdraw government subsidies from any institution that publicly opposes the policy of the right-wing government. She demanded the cancelation of the program of an Arab rapper who read from the works of Mahmoud Darwish, the adored national poet of the Arab citizens and of the entire Arab world. She demanded that all theaters and orchestras perform in the settlements in the occupied territories, if they want to keep their subsidies. 
This week she won a resounding victory when Habima, the “national theater”, agreed to perform in Kiryat-Arba, a nest of the most fanatical fascist settlers. Indeed, no day passes without news of some new exploit by Regev. Her colleagues explode with jealousy. 
The basis of Israeli Trumpism and of Miri Regev’s career is the deep resentment of the Oriental – or Mizrahi – community. It is directed against the Ashkenazim, the Israelis of European descent. They are accused of treating the Orientals with disdain, calling them “the second Israel”. 
Since those recruits of Moroccan descent saved my life near the birthplace of Miri Regev, I have written many words about the tragedy of Mizrahi immigration, a tragedy of which I was an eye-witness from the first moment. Many injustices were committed by the established Jewish population against the new immigrants, mostly without bad intentions. But the greatest sin of all is rarely mentioned. 
Every community need a sense of pride, based on its past achievements. The pride was taken away from the Mizrahim, who arrived in the country after the 1948 war. They were treated as people devoid of culture, without a past, “cave-dwellers from the Atlas mountains”. 
This attitude was a part of the contempt for Arab culture, a contempt deeply embedded in the Zionist movement. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader and forefather of the Likud party, wrote in his time an article entitled “The East”, in which he expressed his disdain for Oriental culture, Jewish and Arab alike, because of its religiosity and inability to separate between state and religion – a barrier to any human progress, according to him. This article is rarely mentioned nowadays. 
The Oriental immigrants came to a country that was predominantly “secular”, non-religious and Western. It was also very anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. The new immigrants understood quickly that, in order to be accepted in Israeli society, they must get rid of their traditional-religious culture. They learned to distance themselves from everything Arab, such as their accent and their songs. Otherwise it would be difficult to become part of the country’s new society. 
Before the birth of Zionism – a very European movement – there was no enmity between Jews and Muslims. Quite the contrary. When the Jews were expeled from Catholic Spain, many centuries ago, only a minority immigrated to anti-Semitic, Christian Europe. The vast majority went to Muslim lands and was received with open arms all over the Ottoman Empire. 
Before that, in Muslim Spain, the Jews achieved their crowning glory, the “Golden Age”. They were integrated in all spheres of society and government and spoke Arabic. Many of their men of letters wrote Arabic and were admired by Muslims as well as Jews. Maimonides, perhaps the greatest of Sephardic Jews, wrote Arabic and was the personal physician of Saladin, the Muslim warrior who vanquished the Crusaders. The ancestors of these Crusaders had slaughtered Jew and Muslim alike when they conquered Jerusalem. Another great Mizrahi Jew, Saadia Gaon, translated the Torah into Arabic. And so on. 
It would have been natural for Oriental Jews to take pride in this glorious past, as German Jews take pride in Heinrich Heine and French Jews in Marcel Proust. But the cultural climate in Israel compelled them to give up their heritage and pretend to admire solely the culture of the West. (Eastern singers were an exception – first as wedding performers and now as media stars. They became popular as “Mediterranean singers”.) 
If Miri Regev were a cultured person, and not merely a Minister of Culture, she would have devoted her considerable energy to the revitalization of this culture and giving back pride to her community. But this does not really interest her. And there is another reason. 
This Mizrahi culture is totally bound up with the Arab-Muslim culture. It cannot be mentioned without noticing the close relationship between the two for many centuries, during which Muslims and Jews worked together for the advancement of mankind, long before the world heard of Shakespeare or Goethe. 
I have always believed that restoring pride was the duty of a new generation of peace-lovers that will arise from among the Mizrahi society. Lately, men and women from this community have reached key positions in the peace camp. I have high hopes. 
They will have to fight the present culture minister – a minister who has nothing in common with culture, and a Mizrahi woman who has no Mizrahi roots. 
I hope for a Jewish-Mizrahi revival in this country because it can advance Israeli-Arab peace and because it can strengthen again the loosened ties between the different communities in our state. 
As a non-religious person I prefer the Mizrahi religiosity, which has always been moderate and tolerant, to the fanatical Zionist-religious camp that is predominantly Ashkenazi. I have always preferred Rabbi Ovadia Josef to the Rabbis Kook, father and son. I prefer Arie Der’I to Naftali Bennett. 
I detest Donald Trump and Trumpism. I dislike Miri Regev and her culture.",FAKE
"Home / Be The Change / The State / Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Claire Bernish May 10, 2016 35 Comments 
It isn’t gang violence. It isn’t even domestic violence. What is the leading cause of murder in Carson City? According to Sheriff Ken Furlong, it’s marijuana. 
“It’s against that law,” Furlong told local ABC affiliate, KOLO 8. “It does change people’s attitude and we do see people dying as a result of it, needlessly, and there’s no excuse for it. 
“In the last 13-15 years, all of the violence we’ve seen that has turned deadly, have [sic] been in someway related to a marijuana issue.” 
Before you get too excited, thinking Furlong nailed it — the fact cannabis remains a federal Schedule 1 drug and thus technically illegal in the ongoing yet utterly failed war on drugs — that isn’t all he had to say on the matter. 
KOLO 8 noted the 2016 deaths of 18-year-old Grant Watkins and 40-year-old Dennis Watkins, Jr. — both killed during transactions involving the sale of cannabis. 
“During a transaction, they set it up, ‘I’m going to sell this to you,’ then all of a sudden someone gets shot and killed,” Furlong continued. “It’s not because they were under the influence; it’s because they were doing something deadly and it turned out that way.” 
As Furlong explained, the threat to life isn’t due to the drug’s effects on the system, per se , but the ‘culture and crimes’ surrounding it ‘that can be overwhelming,’ as KOLO 8 paraphrased. 
“It’s a very cherished culture and people have very strong beliefs,” the Sheriff elaborated. “When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” 
But Furlong’s complete lack of understanding of all things cannabis — including both medicinal and recreational aspects — didn’t stop there. According to the Sheriff, the community faces repercussions following a law enforcement drug bust — because addicts suddenly have no way to procure their … cannabis. 
“We’re watching very closely, not only for a spike in crime, but for people who are in critical need of medical care because of that lack of treatment, based on withdrawal from the drug,” he asserted. 
Yes, you read that right. Carson City’s Sheriff-in-charge firmly believes depriving people of cannabis — a plant scientifically and anecdotally proven to save lives — will lead to a crime wave and health crisis of no small proportions. 
But what he explained next, as paraphrased by KOLO 8, harkens back to the earliest days of cannabis prohibition and the propagandist classic, Reefer Madness: 
‘Sheriff Furlong says unlike other drugs like heroin or methamphetamines that can distort your mind, people using marijuana usually have rational trains of thought which give them the ability to act out and become violent when someone takes away or violates their drug.’ 
At this point, if you’re having a good laugh, stunned, or shaking your head, you most certainly are not alone. 
Obviously, Sheriff Furlong grasps the potential perils in black market trade — but he wholly fails to recognize removing cannabis’ illegality would thus remove the risk of violence. When the State is removed from consensual business transactions, individuals are free to conduct trade as they see fit — if cannabis were abundant and legal, it would be highly unlikely people would continue killing each other over soured deals. 
But Furlong’s stupefying lack of knowledge concerning the effects cannabis has on the body, though certainly laughable, also should concern the residents he’s tasked with overseeing. 
Mischaracterizing cannabis so broadly as to believe it will warp people’s minds to a heightened frenzy where they’re likely to commit violence is downright dangerous. 
For one thing, this inexcusable misperception could color the training Sheriff Furlong decides to give law enforcement trainees and officers. Considering the absolutely epidemic national spate of violence inflicted by trigger-happy cops who already seem to have an irrational fear of the public, training them to further view cannabis users as likely to act out physically is nothing short of dangerous. 
If sheriff’s deputies conduct a raid on a residence known for cannabis transactions with the preconception the people inside could turn violent instantly, it’s arguable they would be more likely to misinterpret anything they encounter. This unnecessarily heightened fear that their life could be in peril from a cannabis-crazed maniac would have obvious influence on their decisions for whether or not to employ deadly force. 
Sadly, Sheriff Furlong likely isn’t alone among law enforcement in the United States. As long as the drug war remains firmly entrenched in policy and culture, dangerous misunderstandings and lack of knowledge will arguably be the greater source of violence than would the substances be were they not illegal. 
In the meantime, while forced to pick apart drug laws state by state, perhaps drug and cannabis education — not fear- and prohibition-based propaganda, but serious education — should be mandatory in law enforcement training. Share Google + Lannim 
All he did, without knowing it, was admit that the real criminals are the ones who enforce prohibition and create this culture of violence. When you suppress a legitimate market it will be replaced by a black market that is regulated by force instead of voluntary interaction. Violence begets violence, and it doesn’t get any more violent than the state. ACAB Matt Agorist 
EXACTLY! James Michael 
Considering the government never created a constitutional amendment allowing prohibition the entire drug war is treason and felonius…. EVERY killing a murder…. EVERY raid a felony home invasion…. EVERY jailing a false imprisonment…. EVERY fine extortion…… The cops and the courts are a criminal enterprise…. AKA RICO….. and meet the definition of it perfectly…. Lannim 
Exactly. I would say that the drug war would be just as illegitimate and criminal with an amendment, but being able to argue that it’s ALSO unconstitutional helps, considering most Americans think their rights are contingent upon what’s written on sacred documents. b4integrity 
The federal government is a continuing, criminal, domestic, terrorist enterprise. 
We need a DEA eradication program. Paschn 
Goddamn it does my old heart good to see folks lay things out as you did! Couple that with SCOTUS’ treason with corporate citizenship, Patriot act, Habeas corpus gone, Posse Comitatus, gone granting civil immunity to big pharma, setting up a federal committee to “review” claims made by citizens harmed by “safe” vaccines, then paying off those claims WITH TAX PAYER MONEY to protect the bottom line of the elites…. Murdering Ranchers for pointing out the FED’s treason.. Let us not forget the 2 sets of books most governments run (CAFR). Let me know when you folks have had enough SEWER NATION – IDIOT CULTURE. Centrist Force 
This is easy to solve. end the criminal part of this. There is no need for marijuana to be illegal. You want to end drug deals and guns get the cops out of the equation and nobody needs to play this mob games. Gregory Pius 
We did that in Oregon and Washington. Tax revenues are bursting the state coffers, and the police now have to find honest work (or at least overzealously enforce something else). Everybody wins. Sadly, almost all LEOs I’ve ever heard to talked to have a deeply-held conviction that legalization of cannabis will result in the loss of their job. A … kaynash 
We have far too many ignorant people in positions of power…..of course our press doesn’t help either, they are just as ignorant, so no one is getting educated from that source any longer. But really, a Sheriff? If you are going to criminalize people, you should have a much better understanding of what you are saying. Because thinking people in law enforcement are more than aware that it’s criminalizing drugs that is the problem….and this guy actually comes close to realizing that and then draws the totally wrong conclusions from it. dufas_duck 
“When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” 
Sounds like he described the average policeman…….. Gregory Pius",FAKE
"Photo by The U.S. Army | CC BY 2.0 

Here is a list of the noteworthy, ongoing results of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq beginning in March 2003. (Recall that invasion was denounced by the UN as illegal, based entirely on lies, and—given the U.S.’s hegemonic position in the world, allowing it to act with impunity—the crime’s architects have never punished.) 
1/ The principal achievement of the war and occupation was the dramatic expansion of the al-Qaeda network that had attacked the U.S. on January 11, 2001. An al-Qaeda franchise was established in Iraq for the first time, playing a key role in the Sunni “insurrection” against the occupiers and their Shiite allies, then expanding across the border into Syria where it split into the al-Nusra affiliate and its even more savage rival, ISIL. Iraq also served and serves as a training ground for jihadis now operating from Iraq to Libya and beyond. 
2/ The invasion and its consequences encouraged the cause of Kurdistan , an imagined state straddling Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world, victims of British and French colonialists who divided the region between them after World War I. After the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. established a “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq to discourage Baghdad from deploying troops in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan had already obtained a degree of autonomy before the invasion but the status became official under the occupation and a referendum for independence is likely to pass soon. This would infuriate Iraq and perhaps provoke Turkey’s intervention. As it is, the autonomous region is locked in struggle with Baghdad over territorial claims and control over oil fields. 
3/ The invasion destroyed the Iraqi state , causing it to fracture into three: Kurdistan, the Sunni zone in the west, and the Shiite-majority areas around Baghdad. The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein had been extremely repressive and brutal. But it had maintained order; discouraged religion in politics; protected the Christian and other religious minorities; promoted women’s rights; imposed no dress code; enforced a criminal code modeled after the Napoleonic (not the Sharia); licensed rock n’ roll radio stations, allowed the brewing of beer and its sale etc. The Shiite-led regime boosted into power by the occupation has reversed much of this. (A bill to ban the production and sale of beer was just passed by Parliament last week.) But the regime’s power does not extend into much of Anbar Province, ISIL still governs Mosul, and again, Kurdistan has become autonomous. 
4/ Because Shiites are the majority in Iraq (60%), and dominate Iran next door; and because the leaders of Shiite parties have studied in Iran or lived their in exile and are sympathetic to Iran’s mullah-led regime; and because the U.S. was forced by peaceful mass protests to allow elections and the emergence of Shiites as the leaders of the country, Iran’s power and influence in the region has expanded dramatically. (Apparently no one in the State Department thought about that.) Since Iran has not attacked another country in centuries—but was savagely attacked by Saddam Hussein in 1981, sparking a long war killing over half a million people—and since Iran’s friendliness to its neighbor, one of the few Arab countries in which its co-coreligionists hold power, is entirely natural, one can ask why anyone might be alarmed by this. But it does alarm some, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, that crucial U.S. Arab ally governed by Wahhabi Sunnis, most of all. 
5/ The invasion produced a regional power struggle between Sunni Islamists on the one hand, and their Shiite (and other) enemies on the other. This is often portrayed as a contest between Saudi Arabia (whose government-backed clerics condemn Shiites as heretics, and who fear the prospects for rebellion in Saudi Arabia’s own oppressed Shiite minority) and Iran, depicted as the protector of Shiites in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen etc. (The so-called “Shiite Crescent” extending from Iran to Hizbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon in fact embraces states and movements that have little in common with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But they are all targeted by the medieval regime in Riyadh which tars them all with the Iranian brush.) The Saudis were keen advocates for a U.S. strike on Iran (on the false pretext of a nuclear threat); are major supporters of al-Nusra in Syria and have funded ISIL as well, preferring such Islamist forces to the secular if Alawite-led Syrian regime; and are bombing the hell out of Yemen with active U.S. and British assistance under the false pretext that the Shiite Houthi “rebels” are agents for an expanding Iran. These things would not be happening, had the U.S. not ripped the lid off Pandora’s box in Iraq in March 2003. 
6/ The invasion has produced friction between the U.S. and its important NATO ally Turkey (which has the second largest military in the alliance). Turkish war planes are bombing Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) militia in Syria who constitute the U.S.’s most reliable allies, producing U.S. protests (which the Turks ignore, arguing straight-faced that the YPG are just as terrorist as ISIL). The Turks warned before the invasion of Iraq that it would likely produce regional instability. But Ankara would have allowed the U.S. to attack from Turkish soil if Turkish forces as part of the “coalition of the willing” could be stationed around Mosul, once part of Turkey—the idea being to contain Kurdish nationalism. 
Fortunately the parliament rejected the deal. But the predicted instability has occurred. The Arab Spring of 2011 in Syria was not directly connected to the Iraq invasion, but gave the U.S. the opportunity to pontificate that “Assad has lost legitimacy,” demand his immediate resignation, and bankroll the armed opposition including the Kurds. The fact that U.S. efforts to find and recruit Syrian Arab forces as allies—who are not in bed with al-Nusra—to topple Assad have failed so dismally binds the Pentagon ever closer to forces that Turkey wants to wipe out. (The conflict and contradiction are embarrassing to Washington. Oh, by the way, did you notice that the Turkish foreign minister just announced that Turkey would invade Iraq if it “felt threatened”?) 
Having declared in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad must go, the U.S. was faced in 2014 with the horrible embarrassment of ISIL (that toxic fruit of its Iraq invasion) winning lightening victories from Raqqa to Fallujah, obliterating the Sykes-Picot line dividing Syria and Iraq. The now-Syria based terrorists were approaching Baghdad. So now the U.S. having withdrawn all troops in Iraq was back in action, bombing to prevent such a disaster. And it started bombing ISIL positions in Syria (although with far less efficacy than the later Russian efforts) in league with a list of largely reluctant allies dragooned into formal membership in what Washington likes to call a “coalition” to make its unilateral program for the region sound like the will of what they like to call “the international community” regardless of how many key nations that imagined “community” includes. 
The U.S. command that Assad step down was made in the summer of 2011. Turkey’s President Erdogan, hitherto a friend and even mentor of the Syrian leader, opportunistically took up the U.S. demand and demanded his resignation. And Ankara itself began to interfere big-time in the neighboring country it once dominated, targeting Kurds more than anyone else. Since the U.S. relies on these allies, how could there not be a sharp conflict here? 
7/ The invasion of Iraq and aftermath resulted in four million Iraqi refugees fleeing the country as of 2007. Hundreds of thousands have poured into Europe, alongside people displaced by U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Libya, and by the turmoil in Syria exacerbated by U.S. actions, producing a massive continent-wide crisis. Many Europeans aptly blame the deluge on the U.S., pointing to the U.S.’s paltry record of admitting refugees from the Middle East and complaining of strained national resources to handle the humanitarian catastrophe. (Another embarrassment.) *** 
This is all what Buddhists call “karmic retribution” for past acts. Or what the Hebrew prophet Hosea referred to when he said “Those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.” Or what the CIA meant when it invented the term “blowback.” It’s all heading towards something, unless decent people stop it. 
But when I watch people like Michael Moore line up behind the foremost advocate of war in U.S. politics, joining (consciously, philosophical) amoral thugs hell-bent on maintaining and expanding the empire when it’s in a stage of precipitous decline, I am not optimistic. Not only will she win, but she will rival Dick Cheney as a cold-blooded latter-day Cold Warrior, cynically exploiting fear and stupidity to try to bring Russia to its knees. 
Hillary doesn’t recognize any of these seven points, which to recapitulate are: 
+ US actions have greatly strengthened al-Qaeda 
+ US actions have encouraged Kurdish nationalism (with unpredictable ramifications) 
+ The US through its vicious illegal actions has destroyed the modern Iraqi state 
+ US actions have solidified ties between Iran and Iraq’s majority Shiite community, strengthening a country still targeted for “regime change” 
+ The invasion of Iraq and the regime change there exacerbated the historical Sunni-Shiite divide, and encouraged Saudi Arabia as the ultra-Islamist protector of the shrines to redouble its efforts to support extremist Sunnis everywhere in the region 
+ The results of the invasion place Turkey and the U.S. at loggerheads over the question of Kurdish nationalist movements in both Iraq and Syria 
+ US interventions in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 have produced a massive refugee crisis, inflicted mainly on Europe 
She does not acknowledge that George W. Bush’s invasion (that she so passionately endorsed, fully exposing her Valkyrie soul, was criminal and not somebody’s well-meaning “mistake”). She doesn’t have any analysis of the Kurdish question. (She is not—as sometimes alleged by supporters—a “policy wonk” but a lazy intellect who doesn’t know jack-shit about the real world.) 
She has never expressed regret for the horrific destruction of Iraq, nor given any attention to the plight of its women, who were (as she surely knows) much better off under Saddam Hussein. (To acknowledge that would be to suggest that sometimes U.S. imperialism favors misogynist Islamists over relatively progressive secularists, for its own pragmatic empire-building purposes. She can’t mention that publicly.) 
She deals with the rise of Iran—made inevitable by the U.S. invasion of Iraq—by doubling down on her crude clueless Iran rhetoric, which rests on the assumption—repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies—that Iran might pose a nuclear weapons threat. She doesn’t understand the history of the Sunni-Shiite divide; I believe she rolls her eyes in irritation that these people have these differences so hard to understand, impeding the Exceptional Nation’s ability to straighten everything out by bombing, and conquering, and making people die. She doesn’t understand anything about the history of the Kurds and their fate in the region. 
She feels no guilt at all about her orchestration of the ruin of Libya. She sees no reason to link her own actions to the flooding of Europe with refugees fleeing terror. But she will probably be the next president, with fellow shieldmaidens Michele Flournoy (as “secretary of defense”) and Victoria Nuland or Samantha Power (as secretary of state). 
Never acknowledging what happened yesterday, never able to absorb historical lessons, determined to maintain and expend its global hegemony (just as that becomes absolutely impossible to do, because other nations rise too, and great nations like Spain and Britain actually get humbled over time), the U.S. under Clinton will likely head methodically towards a showdown with Russia. She wants so badly, to show she can do it. She’ll do it for women, everywhere, to show how strong a woman can be. 
And then there will be a sudden strange change in your environment. As you wonder what’s going on you’ll be painlessly vaporized, on account of Hillary’s passion to topple Assad, or forcibly reintegrate the Donbass into Ukraine. 
The brilliance of the 2003 invasion will be clarified as never before in that bright blast, as Hillary—a very strong woman—cackles in the background from her bunker about how she came, saw, and a million died.",FAKE
" especially the conservatives. It’s Independents like Sanders who will fight for our rights…people who are not bought by the power elite.""",FAKE
"The REAL REASON Hillary Was Not Prosecuted For Her Email Scandal Will Infuriate You Oct 28, 2016 Previous post 
Oh, Governor Terry McAuliffe… The smelly, Democratic cat of politics that just keeps returning to our doorstep. 
Just this summer he restored voting rights to thousands of felons with the hopes of garnering more votes for Clinton (I’m surprised his legislation wasn’t entitled, “Felons for Felons!”). 
Now we’ve found out that he and his money are likely part of the reason why Hillary Clinton was not prosecuted for her e-mail scandal. 
In a story line that would make the writers of House of Cards salivate, Governor McAuliffe donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaign of the Deputy FBI Director’s wife. 
Yes, you read that right. 
According to Zero Hedge : 
The latest allegation of potential impropriety and conflict of interest involving the Democratic Party and the FBI, which over the summer famously cleared Hillary Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing as relates to her personal email server, comes not from a Podesta email or a Wikileaks disclosure, but the WSJ which overnight reported that the political organization of Virginia Govenor Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use . 
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane NAACP, has insisted she is black, despite having white parents. She has been quoted as saying, ""That question is not as easy as it seems. There's a lot of complexities ... and I don't know that everyone would understand that.""

I do understand. Years ago, even before Sen. Elizabeth Warren was exposed for identifying herself as Native American (which she is not), I believe I was the first person in the world to assert that transgender activism by Chaz Bono (and now by Caitlyn Jenner) could sow the seeds for people not only to assert their core gender identities, despite DNA evidence to the contrary, but also to assert their racial identities, despite physical and historical evidence to the contrary. If a man with male anatomy and a “Y” chromosome can assert he is female and be put on the covers of celebrity magazines and given awards for bravery, why can’t a white woman assert that her internal identity is that of a black woman?

If a blond man with Scandinavian roots visits Japan and feels a gripping sense of belonging, such that he is certain he is among his own people, why can’t that man return to America, dye his hair, have facial surgery and be accepted as an Asian-American?

Why does factual history have to dictate current reality if a human being feels very deeply that that factual history is not in tune with his or her inner sense of self?

I mean the question sincerely, because we are rushing into this philosophical and psychological landscape with almost no consideration of its implications. And I am not taking sides with either transgender advocates or those who oppose them. Let others consider the implications of the transgender movement for our collective grip on reality, as a culture and as a species.

I am merely stating what seems obvious to me. If our measure of what a person is must be no more and no less than what she feels she is, then Rachel Dolezal can be black, if she wants to be, and if she can show evidence that she has sincerely adopted that vision of herself. And Elizabeth Warren can be a Native American. To do otherwise would be to stigmatize them for their “racial identity,” in the same way that Caitlyn Jenner would object to being stigmatized for Caitlyn’s “gender identity.”

Racial identity need not be the end of this, by the way. Here’s one to ponder: If a man feels, to the core of his being, that he is 65 when he is chronologically 35, and if he can show evidence that he has voiced this self-concept, repeatedly, and has objected vigorously to being treated as though he is 35, who are we to lace him to his actual date of birth? Why not let him choose another that feels “right”? And if he applies for Medicare, why should he be denied? Isn’t that discriminating against him based on his age identity?

You may think this is ridiculous (and I might), but a leading attorney with whom I have consulted has suggested that the case of such a man would not be without some merit, given the case law regarding transgender individuals.

As my artist friend Lincoln Agner puts it, “When we cross enough boundaries, millions of people can end up playing air guitar.”

I have warned and warned and warned that breaking free of certain apparent realities that define us as human beings – genetically and historically – can have profound implications for how closely people remain tied to reality, in general. Let us see how far down this path of “self”-assertion we travel, and with what results.



Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.",REAL
"by Lambert Strether 
Lambert: A round-up of Brexit options, hard and soft. Wouldn’t the Brits have an easier time of it if they wrote their Constitution down? 
By Silvia Merler, an Italian citizen, who joined Bruegel as Affiliate Fellow at Bruegel in August 2013. Her main research interests include international macro and financial economics, central banking and EU institutions and policy making. Originally published at Bruegel . 
What’s at stake: last week, the UK High Court ruled that the triggering of Article 50 – and therefore the Brexit process – should involve the UK Parliament. The Government will appeal the decision but this has created a new wave of uncertainty about the timing of Brexit, and on what this involvement can mean in practice. We review the different opinions. 
Jo Murkens on the LSE blog has a very good explainer of the legal basis of the judgement, which he considers exemplary in its clarity and reasoning. The decision’s focus is strictly constitutional, not political: the only question it examined was whether, as a matter of UK constitutional law, the Crown, acting through the government, is entitled to use prerogative powers to trigger Article 50 in order to cease to be a member of the European Union. This – it turns out – hinges on a balance between constitutional requirements and individual rights. 
Article 50 allows the UK to withdraw from the EU “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. Turning to these requirements, the government argued that the Crown – through the government – has a prerogative power to authorise the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, and that this power can only be taken away by express terms in an Act of Parliament. The court acknowledges the government’s position as correct, but only with respect to rights and obligations created as a matter of international law. As soon as individual rights protected by domestic law are affected, Parliament must be involved, especially because some individual rights would be lost upon withdrawal, as they cannot be replicated in UK law. Murkens argues that the decision amounts to a proper drubbing for the government particularly because it was not the claimants that landed the hammer blow, but the government itself, by acknowledging that the Art.50 notification would inevitably lead to the loss of some individual rights. The next stop, however, is the UK Supreme Court. 
David Allen Green writes in the FT that the High Court decision is as strong as it could be and creates a substantial problem for the prime minister’s Brexit policy. The government should look hard at the reason for the court’s judgment. Central to the judges’ thinking is the impact that leaving the EU will have on the rights of UK citizens: the court has said that extinguishing such rights cannot be done by mere executive action. But the problem is more than one of form. The difficult and interlocking legal issues created by the UK leaving the EU are such that the matter is not for a prime minister, or indeed a court, to decide. 
Allen Green argues that the government is not taking the opportunity offered by the judgment to start the exercise again, properly: an appeal has been announced and the court has been denounced. Those in favour of the UK remaining in the EU can draw only limited comfort from the decision, because there is no reason to believe parliament will directly defy the result of the referendum. The only thing that has been undermined by the High Court’s decision is May’s superficial approach to achieving Brexit. Eventually, the government will have to adopt a broader, more collaborative and more open approach to the process, as there is no alternative to making a success of it. 
Camilla Macdonald discusses three options and argues that the ruling is not a victory for “soft” Brexit. The first option is for the government to succeed in overturning the result on appeal to the Supreme Court. MPs will then have the chance to debate at length, but they will have lost the leverage over the Government that the current ruling affords them. Second, the Government may lose the appeal and yet manage to “face down the rebels” in the Commons in time to meet May’s timetable of triggering Article 50 by March. This could be achieved by passing a non-amendable motion that presents MPs with a binary choice to approve or reject triggering article 50, assuming most MPs would not dare to risk the ire of the leave voting public. The third option – which Macdonald considers the most likely – is that the Government loses its appeal and is forced to introduce primary legislation, i.e. a Brexit bill, that will make it difficult, but not impossible, to meet the deadline. This is likely to force the Government to make concessions to MPs, but not necessarily in any form that will amount to a commitment to a “soft” Brexit. 
“Soft Brexit” is what the majority of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and part of Conservatives now want, but the biggest obstacle to this outcome is the lack of unity and of a negotiating strategy among this would-be coalition. In this situation, it is hard to see what red lines could be imposed on the government. Yet, Mcdonald thinks that involving Parliament in a process that will ultimately be defined by many complex and cross-cutting trade-offs might help to dispel the myths of simplistic “hard” and “soft” labelling. Nationalist parties would no longer plausibly be able to claim that they are excluded and the ruling could end up being an important victory for thought and reflection over rabble rousing on both sides. 
Jolyon Maugham writes on FT Alphaville that after the High Court’s Brexit decision, we should forget about the activation of Article 50 in March. The Government’s appeal is likely to be heard in the Supreme Court in early December and this opens new risks. Lingering, unaddressed, in the background to this litigation is a question about whether an Article 50 notification is reversible. The High Court in reality proceeded on the assumption that a notification, once given, could not be withdrawn. But the Supreme Court has a different legal obligation and it might feel legally compelled to address that assumption directly. Addressing it would require a politically explosive referral to the European Court of Justice, because the question of whether a notification is reversible is one of European law. Beside the likely delay of around three months, a finding by the Supreme Court that an Article 50 notification could be “pulled” would leave ajar the door to a prospectively damaging continuation of the Referendum campaign until the time exit is formalised. 
Assuming instead that the appeal fails, the government will have to draft a Bill and place it before parliament. And that Bill would have to pass both Houses of parliament. In the Commons there would be little or no enthusiasm for rejecting it, but it is likely that MPs would impose conditions on the triggering of Article 50, thus constraining the government’s negotiating position. Parliament may wish to choose whether to accept the outcome of the negotiations and it may even require that the deal negotiated by the government be put back to the people in the form of a second referendum. In practical terms, it is difficult to contemplate that these steps – drafting a Bill, debating it in the Commons, voting on amendments, placing it before the House of Lords and then addressing amendments introduced by the Upper Chamber in the Commons again – can sensibly be taken after the result of the Supreme Court appeal is known but before March. So, unless the Supreme Court overturns the High Court’s decision, Maugham thinks we should consider May’s March deadline ancient history. 
Stephen Booth at Open Europe makes four main points about what this decision means going forward. First, if Government loses the appeal, then legislation is likely to be necessary. The reasoning of the ruling illustrates that, if the claimants’ argument holds (which regards rights stemming from EU membership set down in parliamentary legislation), the courts were never likely to be satisfied by anything short of legislation to trigger Article 50. Second, parliamentary moves to block Article 50 trigger would be politically explosive. It is unlikely that a majority of MPs in the Commons would actually move to block Brexit by preventing the Government triggering Article 50, especially having voted to give the public the opportunity to vote to leave the EU in the referendum. Booth argues that the same is probably true for the House of Lords, which would create a full-blown constitutional crisis if it opposed Article 50 outright. 
Third, Parliament’s leverage over process is far greater than over any negotiating mandate or outcome. So process is likely to be the focus of any parliamentary tussles over legislation to trigger Article 50, with MPs and Lords seeking to amend the Bill to give them greater and more formal powers to scrutinise. Fourth, Booth argues that a general election is not out of the question. This would certainly mean missing the end of March 2017 deadline but would also mean that any MPs seen to be blocking the referendum result would find it very hard to keep hold of their seats and this is why he thinks it is likely that an Article 50 Bill would be passed. 
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics argues that for now, this turn of events exposes the hypocrisy of May’s government position of wanting to repatriate all EU political powers back to the United Kingdom, but wishing to deny the country’s sovereign lawmakers a say on the Article 50 process. Whatever happens, the court ruling has dealt a blow to the small right-wing clique of hardcore euro skeptics in the Conservative Party and May’s government and the potential direct involvement of Parliament is good political news for Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party – as his only path to becoming prime minister is the one that opens up if May and the Conservatives completely botch the Brexit negotiations. He also argues that this should also harden further the EU negotiating position. These developments make it more likely that May will soon be forced to call an early election to seek a new mandate on Brexit. The Conservatives would probably win, but an accelerating economic downturn, the United Kingdom’s first past-the-post-electoral system, and a potential rallying of Remain supporters, could spring a surprise. 
Tyler Cowen argues that the British parliamentary vote might matter. The more likely scenario in his view is simply that Parliament stalls, demanding that Theresa May give them “the right Brexit”. Of course there is no such thing, wrong Brexit is wrong Brexit, if only because EU-27 cannot agree on very much. But with enough stalling, eventually another national election will be held and of course Brexit would be a major issue, probably the major issue. That in essence would serve as a second referendum, and if anti-Brexit candidates did well enough, parliamentarians would have cover to go against the previous expression of the public will. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"Convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s mother, Zubeidat, has reportedly posted a statement online declaring Americans “the terrorists here” and calling her son “the best of the best.” In a message sent to a family friend on Russian social media site VKontakte, Zubeidat Tsarnaev wrote, “I will never forget it. May god bless those who helped my son. The terrorists here are the Americans and it’s known to everyone. My son is the best of the best.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 counts against him and now faces the death penalty.

Zubeidat said she was outraged at the verdict in an interview with Vocativ over WhatsApp:

""TODAY THEY ARE KILLING MUSLIMS, AND TOMORROW WILL COME YOUR TURN AND HE, WHO DOUBTS THIS IS DEEPLY MISTAKEN!!!!!” . ""THEY WILL PAY FOR MY SONS AND THE SONS OF ISLAM, PERMANENTLY!!! THE TEARS OF THEIR MOTHERS WILL BE FUEL FOR THEM IN HELL, AND ALSO THEIR BLOOD, I AM DOUBTLESS AND ETERNALLY GLAD THAT I KNOW THIS FROM THE WORDS OF THE CREATOR, NOT JUST ANYONE’S WORDS!!!!!!""",REAL
"BNI Store Oct 31 2016 It isn’t ‘Islamophobia’ when an Oklahoma GOP State Rep. says “Islam is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out” Unfortunately, some Christians in Oklahoma, where there has been one savage beheading of a Christian woman by a Muslim and at least one other beheading attempt, seem to think so, and blindly condemn all outspoken critics of Islam…especially the Christians. Nondoc Whining about so-called “Islamophobia is exactly what James Davenport, a Christian political science professor of at Rose State College, is doing . Specifically, he attacks State Rep. John Bennett for holding an interim stud y this past week on the impact of “radical Islam, Shariah Law, the Muslim Brotherhood and the radicalization process” on Oklahoma and the nation. During the course of this study, Rep. Bennett referred to Adam Soltani, the executive director for designated terrorist group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter of Oklahoma), and Imam Imad Enchassi, of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, as “terrorists.” As someone who grew up in the Evangelical Christian tradition, and as someone who believes religious freedom remains a fundamental principle of our system of government, I am both offended and saddened at this spectacle. I am offended that a state representative from my state would use the cloak of Christianity to spew hate and bigotry such as this. I am also offended that he would do so while arguing he is defending freedom. Imam Enchassi then got up from his seat in the audience and hugged two members of other faiths who were in attendance. Bennett asked Rep. Randy Grau, R-Edmond, chairman of the Judiciary and Civil Procedure Committee, to admonish members of the audience not to hug a Muslim. In fact, during one exchange between Bennett and Imam Enchassi, the Imam stated, “It’s a free country,” to which Bennett, who served in the U.S. Marines replied, “I know, I fought for it in two wars.” John Guandolo, the founder of UnderstandingtheThreat.com , who served in the Marines and is a former FBI agent, said the Islamic movement in Oklahoma has made significant strides, and he called CAIR-Oklahoma executive director Adam Soltani a terrorist. Under questioning from Bennett, Guandolo said groups in the country’s jihadi network use relationships with other faiths as a tool. But one wonders what, exactly, Bennett fought for. It clearly wasn’t freedom. Neither freedom of religion nor freedom of association seem high on his list of priorities, especially if you happen to be a member of Islam. Perhaps he was fighting for Christianity. The problem with that line of reasoning is there rests absolutely no instruction in the New Testament for believers to physically fight for Christ, or for the faith. In fact, if one were to hold strictly to Christ’s own words on this, one could easily reach the conclusion that Christ expects us not to fight for him (read John 18:36 ). So if Bennett wasn’t fighting for freedom, and he wasn’t fighting for Christianity, what was he fighting for? Perhaps he should spend more time reading the history of his own faith rather than fretting about the supposed threat from Muslims. He would find that this combining of religion and state power never ends well — for anyone. I also mentioned I was saddened by this event. That sadness comes from the fact that I know I will receive pushback from members of my own faith community on this matter. I will be told I do not understand the true threat posed by Islam. I’ll also be told I’ve been blinded to the truth by my immersion in the liberal world of academia. Too many Evangelicals have been convinced by opportunistic political and religious leaders that any acknowledgement or accommodation of Islam is a threat to Christianity itself. I disagree. If allowing others to freely practice their faith, if providing (special and excessive) accommodations to those of Islam and if refusing to use the levers of government to intimidate, harass or oppress minority faiths (the one faith determined to subjugate and dominate those of every other faith) is a threat to Christianity, we Christians have bigger problems than we know. 
If Christians want to have real influence on our society — if we want to spread the good news of God’s love — we must reject the type of political religion promoted by Rep. Bennett and his ilk. We must stand with those of other faiths and affirm that, unlike some in the Oklahoma Legislature , we believe all people of faith are entitled to practice their religion freely without fear of official sanction. “If you are concerned that there are some who wish to destroy the Christian faith, follow Christ’s instructions: “Love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you…You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.” ( Luke 6:27-36 ) (And we see how well that idea has worked out for Christians in the Middle East who are very close to becoming extinct because of the ethnic cleansing by the Muslim majority) RELATED STORIES/VIDEOS:",FAKE
"BNI Store Oct 31 2016 WELCOME TO PARIS where tour buses have to navigate around all the new Muslim tent cities filling the streets Now that France has shut down the filthy Calais ‘jungle’ camp where thousands of illegal alien Muslim invaders had been squatting, Muslim tent cities are sprouting up all over the streets of Paris. Gee, I guess French tourism hasn’t taken a big enough hit yet, following several Islamic terrorist attacks.Â",FAKE
"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
"WHAT WILL Donald Trump do if he loses the elections in a week and a half from now, as most polls indicate? 
He has already declared that he will recognize the results -- but only if he wins. 
That sounds like a joke. But it is far from being a joke. 
Trump has already announced that the election is rigged. The dead are voting (and all the dead vote for Hillary Clinton). The polling station committees are corrupt. The polling machines forge the results. 
No, that is not a joke. Not at all. - Advertisement - 
THIS IS not a joke, because Trump represents tens of millions of Americans, who belong to the lower strata of the white population, which the white elite used to call ""white trash."" In more polite language they are called ""blue collar workers,"" meaning manual workers, unlike the ""white collar workers"" who occupy the offices. 
If the tens of millions of blue collar voters refuse to recognize the election results, American democracy will be in danger. The United States may become a banana republic, like some of its southern neighbors, which have never enjoyed a stable democracy. 
This problem exists in all modern nation-states with a sizable national minority. The lowest strata of the ruling people hates the minority. Members of the minority push them out of the lower jobs. And more importantly: the lower strata of the ruling majority have nothing to be proud of except for their belonging to the ruling people. 
The German unemployed voted for Adolf Hitler, who promoted them to the ""Herrenvolk"" (master people) and the Aryan race. They gave him power, and Germany was razed to the ground. 
THE ONE and only Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a bad system, but that all the other systems tried were worse. - Advertisement - 
As far as democracy is concerned, the United States was a model for the world. Already in its early days it attracted freedom-lovers everywhere. Almost 200 years ago, the French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a glowing report about the ""Democratie en Amerique."" 
My generation grew up in admiration of American democracy. We saw European democracy breaking down and sinking into the morass of fascism. We admired this young America, which saved Europe in two world wars, out of sheer idealism. The democratic America vanquished German Nazism and Japanese militarism, and later Soviet Bolshevism. 
Our childish attitude gave way to a more mature view. We learned about the genocide of the native Americans and about slavery. We saw how America is seized from time to time by an attack of craziness, such as the witch hunt of Salem and the era of Joe McCarthy, who discovered a Communist under every bed. 
But we also saw Martin Luther King, we saw the first black President, and now we are probably about to see the first female President. All because of this miracle: American democracy.",FAKE
"Posted on November 2, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
We’ve repeatedly shown that it’s much more likely that American insiders – not Russian hackers – leaked the Clinton emails. 
Today, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – told Washington’s Blog: 
My vote all along has been on an insider passing all these emails to Wikileaks. 
If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it. It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network. In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world. So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there. 
Binney has previously explained to us that a Russian hack would have looked very different, and that he thought the hack may have been conducted by an NSA employee who was upset at Clinton’s careless handling of America’s most sensitive intelligence. 
The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee (Craig Murray) – who is close friends with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange – said he knows with 100% certainty that the Russians aren’t behind the leaks. 
Murray said today: 
“The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended [a] whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow .” 
Prominent investment advisor and economic forecaster Martin Armstrong writes today: 
All our indications from behind the curtain are suggesting that there are many within the “intelligence” sector and “law enforcement” sector who are deeply troubled with the Clintons. They are trying to release documents and info to stop the Clinton Inc. Machine. That’s all we can say on this topic right now. Suffice it to say, there is a real internal battle going on in Washington. 
And the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under numerous administrations – both Democratic and Republican – (Steve Pieczenik ) said recently that a group of officers from various U.S. intelligence and military agencies have staged a “counter-coup” to save America from corruption, and are the source of the leaked emails: 
Interesting times, indeed …",FAKE
"174 Views November 11, 2016 GOLD , KWN , KWN II King World News 
With gold down over $31 and silver plunging $1.08, is this why the smash in gold and silver is happening? Today King World News is reporting on a shocking game-changer in the gold and silver markets that is now unfolding. 
Eric King: “Keith, you are a legend in the business and you have been on a long road trip that’s taken you around the world, including into Asia and Europe. You are in London currently but talk about about what you discovered in Hong Kong? I understand that a huge transformation is coming to the gold and silver sector.” 
A Game-Changer For Gold & Silver Is Now Unfolding Keith Neumeyer: “That’s correct, Eric. I have been building relationships in Hong Kong for many, many years, but up to now there has been no way for Chinese investors to invest in North American companies. But for the first time ever Chinese investors can set up an account through Interactive Brokers, which has just opened an office in Hong Kong. This is going to be a massive game-changer for the gold and silver sector… IMPORTANT: To hear which legend just spoke with KWN about $8,000 gold and the coming mania in the gold, silver, and mining shares markets CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
Keith Neumeyer continues: “What this means, Eric, is that for the first time ever Chinese investors will now be able to directly buy U.S. and Canadian mining stocks.” 
Eric King: “When you talk about the Chinese coming into the mining share market, even though the sector is currently experiencing the final stages of a correction, you are talking over time about a radical flow of money into the mining shares, aren’t you?” 
The Tip Of The Iceberg Keith Neumeyer: “Yes, and it will just be the tip of the iceberg compared to what is coming. This is a new phenomenon and as more and more Chinese investors open up new accounts through brokerage firms in both China and Hong Kong, they are going to be looking to add to their exposure in the gold and silver space and they will now be able to do that by investing in mining stocks for the first time ever. 
We are in the beginning stages of a new bull market in gold and silver and the mining shares, so that will translate into huge money flowing into North American, and Canadian companies specifically, from China.” 
Eric King: “I know you are familiar with the mania that took place in the mining shares in the late 1970s and into 1980 time frame. Despite the pullback, like the one we are seeing today and this week, what we will eventually see is a super-charged mania in gold, silver, and the mining shares because of the ocean of money that will be part of the secular bull market in gold and silver, this time around from China and the rest of Asia. Pierre Lassonde has spoken with me in the past about this but it was in relation to physical gold and silver prices. However, what you have uncovered now opens the door for oceans of money to eventually pour into the mining shares. Meaning, this mania will see upside moves that are difficult to comprehend because the Chinese are notoriously aggressive gamblers.” 
Keith Neumeyer: “The key thing you and Pierre have discussed many times is the fact that the Chinese are gamblers. They love to play the stock market now and that will add a new dynamic to the gold and silver mining share market that we have never seen in the North American marketplace. 
We have experienced bull runs in the mining share market over the last 15 or so years but it has never had the Chinese buyer coming in as part of the whole equation. What that means is that over the next few years in this new bull market in the mining sector we will see these new buyers, the Chinese, coming into the market and setting the stage for a major run in the mining shares. 
China has a huge population, the largest population on the planet, and they are getting wealthier by the day. The Chinese are very familiar with the gold and silver markets and they love the physical metal. For them to be able to buy mining stocks, which generally trade at 3 – 5 times the move in gold and silver, they will be all over that upside leverage in the gold and silver markets. 
Chinese Buying Causes A Major Silver Stock To Skyrocket! As I said earlier, Eric, this is a new phenomenon. I was just in Hong Kong with some of my staff and we met a large number of investors who are already shareholders in First Majestic Silver and First Mining Finance. This is quite interesting and it represents the beginning of what is going to be massive change in the mining share industry. We all know what happened to First Majestic Silver in the first six months of this year when it went from $4 Canadian to nearly $25 a share (see stunning 10-year chart below of First Majestic Silver). 
Yes, the share price has corrected over the past couple of months but you can be assured that the massive spike to nearly $25 was due in part to Chinese buying.” 
Eric King: “Keith, when I saw that move in First Majestic Silver I knew it was a short squeeze combined with new money entering the stock and I was trying to figure out where that money was coming from because the stock essentially went back to the all-time highs when the price of silver was around $50. Now I know where that new money was coming from — China. And of course this time the price of silver was only $20 and change when the Chinese money helped propel the stock back to the previous all-time high. Was that just a preview of what is to come in the mining sector and in First Majestic Silver? Because I am trying to figure out what happens to the share price of First Majestic Silver when the price of silver goes to $25 or $30 or even higher.” 
Keith Neumeyer: “Eric, you mentioned an important point about short covering. First Majestic had 14 million shares short in January when the stock was $4 Canadian. The short position dropped to only 4 million shares by July. That’s when the stock peaked at nearly $25 Canadian. That was indeed a huge, huge move. And now today the short position is back to 18 million shares, which is ridiculous but it’s the highest short position in the First Majestic Silver’s history. 
Interestingly, the price of silver went from $13.50 (U.S.) to around $21 in late July. But the price of First Majestic Silver went from a low of $2.40 (U.S.) to over $19 a share. You have to remember that is only with a little more than a $7 move in the price of silver. That was a pretty amazing move. So when we look forward to $25 or $30 silver, you will see some pretty interesting prices for First Majestic Silver.” 
Neumeyer added: “Eric, we have also seen a very nice move in gold, even with the correction here, and I think this is a great opportunity for investors to take advantage of this down-move in gold and take a look at high-quality equities. One of those companies is First Mining Finance (symbol FF in Canada and FFMGF in the U.S.). I believe First Mining Finance has the best portfolio of development projects in the world. I don’t believe that the market fully understands what the company has achieved as a business. 
The company has amassed 14 million ounces of gold in the ground with projects in great jurisdictions in the province of Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland. If a major is looking for a portfolio of gold projects, this portfolio will make their mouth water looking at what First Mining Finance possesses. The company has about 25 projects throughout Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. 
As I said earlier, it is probably the best assembly of projects in the world and the company’s share price is highly undervalued at current levels. At 68 cents a share (Canadian) we are talking about roughly $21 for every ounce of gold in the ground. And in a healthy market the price for gold in the ground should be priced at 3, 4 or 5 times that amount.” 
Eric King: “Keith, where do you see the price of silver trading in 2017?” 
Price Of Silver To Soar By The End Of The Year And Into 2017 Keith Neumeyer: “I would never have believed that the price of silver would have traded down from $50 to $13.50 an ounce and it happened for all kinds of ridiculous reasons, from manipulation and short selling to sentiment and other things your guests have pointed out on King World News. 
I projected the price of silver would end at $21 an ounce by the end of 2016. The price of silver hit $21 in July of this year, which was a fantastic move, and has since pulled back. This has positively impacted First Majestic Silver with cash flows that we haven’t seen for 5 or 6 years and our treasury is building every week — at new record highs — and our balance sheet is extremely strong. 
But getting back to the price of silver and the fact that it hit $21 in July of this year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see $21 to $23 by the end of 2016. And while we have seen about a $100 move down in the price of gold in the last couple of days, the price of silver has pulled back but it has remained much stronger and I think that bodes very well for the price going forward. So I am expecting $25 – $30 silver in 2017.” ***Within hours KWN will be releasing Andrew Maguire’s powerful interview, where he discusses what to expect next after the gold and silver smash. 
  For People Who Are Worried About Druckenmiller Selling His Gold…  ",FAKE
"Dad in weird mood since 2004 07-11-16 A 54-YEAR-OLD man has been in a bit of a mood for the past 12 years, his family has noticed. Engineer Roy Hobbs has seemed reluctant to spend time with family members for the last decade or so, preferring to be in the shed or slumped in his chair with a can of lager and a forbidding look on his face. Son Paul Hobbs said: “Come to think of it, dad has seemed a bit pissed off since a few years after I was born. “Maybe something happened near the start of the 20th century that annoyed him. “I suppose we could ask him but that might just make it worse. I sometimes hear whistling from the shed so he seems to be okay when he’s on his own.” Hobbs’s wife Linda said: “He was quite chirpy during the 90s. He’s probably just hungry.” 
Share:",FAKE
"Sputnik October 27, 2016 
NATO and Washington’s activities in Eastern Europe and the Baltics de facto amount to permanent military presence, Sergei Ermakov, a senior analyst at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, told RT, adding that we have seen “only the tip of the iceberg” so far. “Endless war-games and rotational deployments essentially amount to permanent military presence. NATO is testing a drastic military buildup. We have witnessed the alliance deploy expeditionary forces and assault troops to Eastern Europe. These are offensive, not defensive forces. What we have seen is only the tip of the iceberg,” Ermakov said. 
The North Atlantic Alliance has pledged to refrain from deploying substantial forces along the NATO-Russia border on a permanent basis, but has been increasingly active in the region. The bloc approved its largest military buildup in Eastern Europe and the Baltics since the end of the Cold War at the 2016 Warsaw summit, a development viewed with deep concern in Moscow. 
As part of this initiative, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US will establish and lead four battle groups expected to be deployed in Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Each will total up to 1,000 soldiers. These battalions are said to become operational in early 2017. The alliance has justified its massive buildup by blaming Russia for its ostensibly “assertive” behavior. Moscow has consistently denied these groundless claims. 
Ermakov further explained that forces of NATO’s European members are not as lethal as they might seem. “On paper this is a force exceeding Russia’s [military] potential by several times. But it lacks real combat power. This is why Americans need to be everywhere. The US was forced to boost US European Command’s budget,” he said. 
Earlier this year, the Pentagon requested $3.4bn for its operations in Europe in 2017, a four-time increase compared to its $789-million budget this year. A d v e r t i s e m e n t 
Russian officials and experts have repeatedly pointed out that NATO increasing assertiveness has put regional stability at risk. 
The bloc’s muscle flexing and aggressive rhetoric “greatly reduce European security and the chances for a revival of constructive dialogue between Russia and NATO, something Russia has been calling for so many years. Instead, the bloc is doing its best to provoke an arms race with unpredictable results,” Peter Korzun, an expert on wars and conflicts, wrote for the Strategic Culture Foundation. Ermakov also said that the United States wants to increase its presence in the Black Sea region to counter Russia. “Americans can no longer count on Turkey due to the failed coup attempt. Ankara has become a complicated partner. [Washington] is instead focusing on Bulgaria and Romania,” he said. 
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg mentioned Romania during a press conference held following the latest meeting of NATO’s defense ministers. He said that Romanian troops will join the US-led battle group in Poland. He also said that the ministers discussed progress made in strengthening NATO’s presence in the Black Sea region “in the air, at sea and on land.” This initiative will include among other things “a Romanian-led multinational framework brigade on land,” he observed, providing no additional information on the subject. 
Ermakov further said that Washington also wants to counter Russia in Central Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 6:39 am Share this article",FAKE
"California & Oregon Want To Secede From The U.S. After Trump Election Nov 12, 2016 2 0 
In what is shaping up to be the beginning of a revolution within the United States, residents from California and now Oregon are wanting to secede from the U.S. after Donald Trump was elected President…and they want Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Washington state to join them to create an entirely new country altogether. 
Two days after the Trump election in the U.S. residents in California began a campaign called “ Yes California Independence Campaign ,” which is to initiate the process to officially secede from the U.S. California residents are pushing for secession. 
Ruiz Evans said Yes California intends to launch an initiative that asks Californians whether they believe the state should remain part of the United States or break away on its own. Similar to the Citizens United ballot measure voters approved Tuesday, it would begin as an advisory proposal to kick-start an arduous process. Marcus Ruiz Evans is the vice president of the group and s aid that Californians have a choice : 
“The reason that we’re here today is we wanted to point out to everybody in California that the American system is broken. It’s failing. It’s sinking. You as a Californian have a choice to make: Do you go down with that ship out of tradition or sail on your own?” 
Their website states that Californians should follow Brexit’s lead: In our view, the United States of America represents so many things that conflict with Californian values, and our continued statehood means California will continue subsidizing the other states to our own detriment, and to the detriment of our children. However, this independence referendum is about more than California subsidizing other states of this country. It is about the right to self-determination and the concept of voluntary association, both of which are supported by constitutional and international law. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the international community with their “Brexit” vote. Our “Calexit” referendum is about California joining the international community. You have a big decision to make. To add to Calexit’s momentum, an Oregon lawyer has joined the movement and filed the Oregon Secession Act , which has formally invited the states of California, Alaska, Washington, Hawaii and Nevada to secede with them and form a new nation together. The Act was filed by lawyer Jennifer Rollins and writer Christian Trejbal, who said that Oregonian values are no longer the values held by the rest of the United States and that joining with these other states to create a new nation “is a viable way to go forward.” However, just 24 hours after the Act was filed, they withdrew it due to the amount of violence they saw in the streets around the world. Trejbal said that they were receiving death threats and that their movement is not about violent protesting, so it was best to withdraw it at this time. Though Oregon has suspended their secession campaign for now, California’s campaign is growing stronger. With Texas speaking of secession just months ago, we now have the most populated state in the U.S. speaking of secession as well. Regardless of one’s political stance, it is clear to see that the people are growing restless and that something is going to have to give, and give soon. How do you see this playing out? Will California be able to secede and will other states join them? Will the U.S. Congress allow something like this to happen? Will revolution be the result?  ",FAKE
"First Read is a morning briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

HEMPSTEAD, NY -- Well, we're finally here: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tonight square off in their first presidential debate at Hofstra University, making it arguably the most consequential night so far of the 2016 election. The stakes are enormous, with recent polls showing the national race ranges from a six-point lead for Clinton (in the NBC/WSJ) to a dead-even tie (in Bloomberg's). There are five storylines we're watching heading into the debate.

Which Donald Trump shows up? After observing him over the last 15 months, including during the GOP debate season, we're pretty confident who Trump is -- he's aggressive, loaded with zingers and oppo hits, and shaky on policy. But there the possibility that a different Trump could show up tonight. But if we were in Las Vegas, we'd bet heavily on the Trump we know showing up. (Just see Trump's Gennifer Flowers tweet from over the weekend.)

Which Hillary Clinton comes to play? Meanwhile, we've spent the last eight years watching Clinton at presidential debates, and she's good. (Remember, she's a former lawyer.) Clinton was at her absolutely best last October in that first Democratic debate, where she ran circles around Bernie Sanders and her other opponents. But Clinton also has had some uneven performances -- think of that Democratic debate in Iowa right after the Paris terrorist attacks. And there was her game-changing rough moment when Tim Russert asked her about drivers' licenses for undocumented immigrants in Oct. 2008.

How does Trump fare in his first one-on-one debate? That's right. Tonight will be the first time that Trump has ever debated an opponent one-on-one. Indeed, he thrived (and sometimes simply survived) during the GOP debate season with as many as eight to 10 other Republicans on the stage. So even though he was always in the spotlight, he only had to speak 12-18 minutes in a two-hour debate. Tonight will be different.

How does Clinton fare in facing off against the ultimate Alpha Male? In his preview of tonight's debate, the Atlantic's James Fallows interviewed the famous anthropologist Jane Goodall. ""In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,"" Goodall said. ""In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position."" How Clinton responds could be one of the most important parts to tonight's debate.

What happens in the first 30-40 minutes? As Politico's Shane Goldmacher observes, history has shown that most memorable moments of a debate typically happen early. ""That's when Al Gore first sighed, Mitt Romney knocked President Obama on his heels, and Marco Rubio, earlier this year, glitched in repeating the same talking point — over and over and over. It's when Gore tried, unsuccessfully, to invade George W. Bush's space, Richard Nixon was first caught wiping away sweat with a handkerchief (during the moderators' introductions!) and Gerald Ford in 1976 made the ill-advised declaration that, 'There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.'""

Do the debates really matter?

That's the fascinating question our colleague Dante Chinni asks. And his answer: not really. ""Looking at pre-debate NBC News/Wall Street Journal presidential polls and the final election results since 1992, there is only one campaign where the debate may have made a serious difference — 2000. In every other case, the candidate that led going into the debates wound up winning on Election Day. And, to be fair about 2000, Democrat Al Gore actually did get more votes than Republican George W. Bush (but lost the Electoral College), so technically — where the popular vote is concerned — the numbers above show a perfect 6 for 6. The candidate that led in the poll going into the debate period won the election."" On the other hand, 34% of voters in our new NBC/WSJ poll said that debates will be either ""extremely important"" or ""quite important"" in deciding their vote. Also, don't be surprised if the third-party vote in polls starts to drop after tonight. And how that vote gets distributed in the post-debate polls will be important to watch.

NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald and Benjy Sarlin tee up tonight's debate. ""The good news for Trump, Republicans say, is that the expectations for his performance are about at rock bottom. While he's been more a more disciplined campaigner in recent weeks, he's struggled to stay on message and answer substantive policy questions. He also has never faced the bright spotlight of a one-on-one debate. His campaign, looking to reinforce his underdog image, claims he's eschewing typical debate preparations... Clinton, meanwhile, faces sky-high expectations. She's an experienced debater, having participated in nearly 40 debates since her first campaign for senate in New York 16 years ago, and has been holding marathon prep sessions at a debate camp set up in a hotel near her Chappaqua home.""

The debate starts at 9:00 pm ET, and it lasts 90 minutes - divided into six 15-minute segments. Clinton gets the first question of the debate (on the result of a coin toss). About 1,000 audience members will be in attendance, and they are encouraged to remain quiet. We've got everything else you need to know about all the presidential debates, all in one place -- nbcnews.com/debates.

Tim Kaine campaigns in Florida, making stops in Lakeland and Orlando… And Mike Pence holds a rally in Milford, NH at 1:30 pm ET.",REAL
"Head Of Medicare, Who Oversaw Obamacare Rollout, Will Step Down

Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who oversaw the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, will step down.

Tavenner announced her departure on Friday in a message to staff.

""I have great pride and joy knowing all that we have accomplished together since I came on board five years ago in February of 2010,"" Tavenner said.

Tavenner was at the center of the problematic rollout of Obamacare, the president's signature domestic program. When the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace was first introduced in October of 2013, the website was essentially useless.

After the mess, Obama shook up the staff — Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius left last year — but Tavenner remained. After much controversy and congressional hearings, the problems were eventually solved.

In a message to staff, Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell called Tavenner ""one of our most esteemed and accomplished colleagues.""

""It goes without saying that Marilyn will be remembered for her leadership in opening the Health Insurance Marketplace. In so doing, she worked day and night so that millions of Americans could finally obtain the security and peace of mind of quality health insurance at a price they could afford. It's a measure of her tenacity and dedication that after the tough initial rollout of HealthCare.gov, she helped right the ship, bringing aboard a systems integrator and overseeing an overhaul of the website. ""She is a big part of the reason why, as of this past spring, roughly 10 million Americans had gained health coverage since last year – the largest increase in four decades.""",REAL
"Videos Republican Protester Says He Was Nearly Killed After Trump Says ‘Take Him Out’ Secret Service whisk candidate off stage as supporters create scare by attacking lone anti-Trump Republican at Nevada rally   Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Laconia Middle School, Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016, in Laconia, N.H. 
So who nearly killed whom in Reno, Nevada on Saturday night? 
A fracas at a Donald Trump rally captured on live television Saturday night saw the Republican candidate whisked off the stage by Secret Service agents and left those watching perplexed by what happened in the front rows as police in military gear appeared on the scene with one man ultimately led away by officials. 
But while one of his sons joined another top campaign aide in “ irresponsibly ” and falsely suggesting it was an assassination attempt against Trump, the man at the center of the incident says that all he did was hold up a sign reading “Republicans Against Trump” before being tackled and beaten by those around him at the rally. 
Speaking with the Guardian following the event, the man, who identified himself as Austyn Crites from Reno, said it was the hysteria of his fellow Republicans at the rally—and incitement by the presidential candidate himself—which turned a simple gesture of dissent into a much more dangerous situation. Watch protester relives Trump fans’ attack at Nevada rally: 
“I just went with sign that said ‘Republicans Against Trump,'” Crites told the Reno Gazette-Journa l . “It’s a sign that you can find online. I held up the sign and initially people around me were just booing me telling me to get out of there. Then a couple of these guys tried grabbing the sign out of my hands.” He said he had no intentions other than to let his opinion be known. He expected to be booed and perhaps led away, but not pummeled nearly to death. 
“Multiple people just tackled me down, kicking me choking me and just beating me up,” he said. “That’s when things even got crazier. I was on the ground and people were holding my arms, legs and I kept saying I can barely breathe. I was turning my neck just to get a little bit of air to keep from passing out.” The police, he said, intervened just in time. 
According to the Guardian : The 33-year-old – who says he has been a registered Republican for about six years – said he was kicked, punched and choked, and feared for his life when the crowd turned on him at the gathering in Reno, Nevada . Crites cited Trump’s treatment of Mexicans, Muslims and women as the reason he decided to protest again Trump, who he described as “a textbook version of a dictator and a fascist”. There were panicked scenes at the Trump rally, apparently prompted by shouts from at least one person in the crowd that the protester had a gun. Hundreds of people fled to the the back of the auditorium in panic as Trump was hurriedly rushed from the stage by his security detail. 
As the following clip of the unfolding incident shows, Trump acknowledges someone in the crowd during his remarks, saying, “Oh we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500?” As the crowd begins to agitate and boo, Trump then says, “Okay. Take him out.” Just seconds later, as the scuffle appears to intensify, is when agents quickly approach Trump and take him off stage. Watch Donald Trump Rushed Off Stage by Secret Service: After Crites was removed from the event by security and police, Trump returned to the stage and told his supporters. “No one said it would be easy.” 
Though Republicans and Trump supporters on social media overnight were calling him a “thug”“infiltrator” and “Clinton shill,” Crites posted a Facebook message (subsequently deleted) which said he has nothing official to do with the Clinton campaign, though he is supporting the Democratic candidate this year over Trump and has donated to her campaign. 
“Take what happened to me tonight,” Crites wrote to his fellow Republicans in the post, “as a classic example of dictator incitement of violence — against your own Republican brother with a stupid sign.” This work by Common Dreams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"Of course, Republicans and conservatives find these twin facts offensive and unbelievable. They hold onto their founding myth of Lincoln and “Great Emancipator” while simultaneously being dependent on voters from the former Confederacy for power—states that still fly and honor the American swastika, a rebel flag of treason and anti-black hatred.

Despite their protests, the evidence is overwhelming.

The ascendance of Donald Trump and his coronation as the presumed 2016 Republican presidential candidate is the logical outcome of a several decades-long pattern of racism, nativism, and bigotry by the American right-wing and its news entertainment disinformation machine.

For example, in response to the triumphs of the black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement, the Republican Party has relied on the much discussed “Southern Strategy.” Lee Atwater, master Republican strategist and mentor to Karl Rove explained this approach as:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”

Ronald Reagan and other Republican elites would leverage Atwater’s approach to winning white voters and elections. To point, Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the locale where American civil rights freedom fighters Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were killed by white racial terrorists. In that speech, Reagan signaled to the ghosts of Jim and Jane Crow and the neo-Confederacy by stating his support for “states’ rights.”

Reagan would continue to use overt and coded racial appeals to gin up white support through his references to a “lazy,” “violent” and “parasitic” class of black Americans who he described as “welfare queens” and “strapping bucks.” George Bush would continue with the Southern Strategy when he summoned up white racist stereotypes and fears of “the black beast rapist” in the form of Willie Horton during the 1988 presidential election.

The Age of Obama witnessed an explosion of anti-black racism by the Republican Party and conservatives en masse. Birtherism, the rise of the Tea Party, the use of antebellum language (which was used to defend the Southern slaveocracy) such as “secession” and “nullification”, both overt and coded racist invective by Republican officials and news media, and a pattern of disrespect towards both the idea and literal personhood of Barack Obama as the United States’ first black president has been the norm. This deluge of anti-black animus towards Barack Obama does not exist in a separate universe outside of American society: it has real impact on the values and behavior of citizens.

To wit: in discussing his recent work on racial attitudes and political polarization, Professor Michael Tesler has noted how:

In all, Barack Obama’s presidency has been so disruptive to the white right-wing political imagination that it has resurrected a type of overt racism which was thought to be largely vanquished from American public life.

The intersection of white racism (“modern” and “old-fashioned”), nativism, a sense of white victimhood, and grievance mongering in the form of conspiracy theories and other unfounded beliefs is evident in other ways as well.

Fifty-four percent of Republicans believe that Barack Obama is a “secret Muslim.” Forty-four percent also believe that Obama was not born in the United States. Forty-two percent of Republicans believe that Muslims should be banned from the United States. Sixty-four percent of Republicans believe that “racism” against white people is as big a problem as discrimination against black Americans.

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Republican and Republican-inclined respondents want to return to the “good old days.. This number is higher for Trump backers. It is important to note that this era was one of Jim and Jane Crow anti-black racism, legal sexism, and unapologetic discrimination against gays and lesbians. This yearning for a return to a fictive golden age of white male Christian domination over American social and political life is reflected in other work that shows how white people are much more pessimistic about their futures than Hispanics and African-Americans. Donald Trump is not a political genius. He understands what the Republican base yearns for and has been trained to believe–like a sociopolitical version of Pavlov’s dog–by its leaders. Trump says that Muslims should be banned from the United States because Republican voters respond to such hatred and intolerance. Trump lies that undocumented Hispanic and Latino immigrants are rapists and killers who want to attack white women because Republican voters find such rhetoric compelling. Trump uses social media to circulate white supremacist talking points about “black crime” because modern conservatives nurtured on “law and order” politics believe that African-Americans are out of control “thugs” possessed of “bad culture” who live to prey on innocent and vulnerable white people. Trump talks about China “raping” the United States because this arouses anger and fear of a new “yellow peril” where the manhood and honor of (white) America is sacrificed to a “sneaky” and “scheming” “Oriental” horde who twist their Fu Manchu mustaches and seduce white women in opium dens while simultaneously negotiating multibillion dollar trade deals. And perhaps most damning, Donald Trump has been endorsed by neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan: he has been reluctant to publicly reject and denounce their support. The corporate news media has aided and abetted “Trumpmania” by normalizing his racist, nativist and bigoted behavior. In response to Trump’s crucial win in last week’s Indiana primary, Slate’s Isaac Chotiner skewered this failure of journalistic integrity and responsibility among the TV news chattering class as: On TV Tuesday night, there was hardly a whimper. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox contented themselves with bright chatter about Ted Cruz’s hurt feelings, about Donald Trump’s political skill, about the feckless, pathetic Republican establishment. None of the commentators I saw mentioned the import of what was happening. Large chunks of the media have spent so long domesticating Trump that his victory no longer appeared momentous. He is the new normal….There was little talk of ideology, or racism, or bigotry, or fascist appeals. Instead, the conversation was about process; Trump had been fit into the usual rhythms of an election season. The closest thing I heard to open-mouthed shock came from Rachel Maddow, who wondered, correctly, why out of 330 million people the Republican Party had chosen this particular reality-television star. Elizabeth Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian countess who killed hundreds of young virgin girls and then bathed in their blood with the hope that it would maintain her beauty. Since at least the end of the civil rights movement, the Republican Party and movement conservatives have followed a similar “beauty” regimen. Instead of the blood of female virgins, they have washed themselves in racism and bigotry in order to buoy their political vitality. Donald Trump decided to move this political ritual out of the shadows and into the light of prime time television and the 24/7 news cycle. Trump, with his background in professional wrestling and reality TV simply took what has always been implied by the American Right-wing and made it obvious. The question now becomes, will Trump’s version of Elizabeth Bathory be enough to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House in November 2016?",REAL
"Former Miss Finland accuses Trump of sexual assault, bringing number of accusers... Former Miss Finland accuses Trump of sexual assault, bringing number of accusers to 12 By 0 58 
Miss Finland 2006 has become the 12th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault. Ninni Laaksonen claims the presidential candidate groped her while they took a picture together before an appearance on ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ 10 years ago. 
Laaksonen, now 30, told Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat on Thursday that Trump groped her in New York in July 2006. A translation provided by the Daily Beast explains that the incident occurred when she and three other Miss Universe contestants were taking photos outside the Late Show studio. 
“ Trump stood right next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt. He really grabbed my butt, ” she said. “ I don’t think anybody saw it but I flinched and thought, ‘What is happening?’ ” 
The beauty queen also attended parties at Trump’s residence with Melania, whom he had married one year prior to the incident. 
“ Somebody told me there that Trump liked me because I looked like Melania when she was younger ,” she told The Telegraph. 
Trump has vowed to sue all of his accusers, calling them “ horrible, horrible liars .” However, he may have a difficult time taking Laaksonen to court, as she currently lives in Finland where she runs Ninnin Lifestyle and Living, a beauty and cosmetic company. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"The State Department has ordered an internal audit of its recordkeeping, officials said Friday, outlining a top-to-bottom look at the agency's practices in the aftermath of revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private email account and server during her tenure.

The department released a letter that Secretary of State John Kerry sent to the department's inspector general earlier this week, asking for the review and calling it critical to ""preserve a full and complete record of American foreign policy"" and for the U.S. public to have access to that information. Among the questions he outlined were how best to retain records in light of changing technology, the agency's global presence and increasing demands from Congress.

Department spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters Friday the review would include the archiving of emails as well as Freedom of Information Act and congressional inquiries. He said it was not specific to Clinton, a likely presidential candidate who has been dogged by questions since it became clear she didn't use a government email account while in office and only provided the State Department with copies of work-related emails late last year.

The full trove of Clinton emails will be published on a website after they are reviewed. She says they contain no classified information. The State Department says emails pertaining to a congressional panel's examination of the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, will be released in advance of the others.

In the letter, Kerry said his department has undertaken significant efforts to promote preservation and transparency, including through better technology and training of staff. But he said the burden was significant, with more than 18,000 FOIA requests arriving each year that put a ""significant strain"" on diplomats whose main job is the advancement of U.S. foreign policy. In addition, he said, congressional investigations and requests have ""greatly increased.""

Kerry also didn't mention Clinton specifically, but noted that officials were ""facing challenges regarding our integration of record-keeping technologies and the use of nongovernment systems by some department personnel to conduct official business.""

He asked Inspector General Steve Linick to make several recommendations. They range from how to make improvements across more than 280 diplomatic posts worldwide to ways to streamline efforts to preserve appropriate documents. Kerry questioned whether the agency has even the resources and tools necessary to meet its obligations.

The department has particularly struggled with the backlog of public records requests. Some have languished for years without being met.

Earlier this month, The Associated Press sued to gain access to Clinton's correspondence after repeated FOIA requests to the department went unfulfilled. They included one request made five years ago.

An inspector general's report in 2012 criticized the State Department's practices as ""inefficient and ineffective,"" citing a heavy workload, small staff and interagency problems.

Kerry asked if outside expertise might be advisable on how best to manage, preserve and make transparent its documents. He asked the inspector general to conduct ""an expedited review of these issues.""",REAL
" United States – Reformation or Fracture?
By Thierry Meyssan Observing the US presidential electoral campaign, Thierry Meyssan analyses the resurgence of an old and weighty conflict of civilisation. Hillary Clinton has just declared that this election is not about programmes, but about the question ŤWho are the Americans?ť. It was not for reasons of his political prgramme that the Republican leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate, Donald Trump, but because of his personal behaviour. According to Thierry Meyssan, until now, the United States was composed of migrants from different horizons who accepted to submit to the ideology of a particular community . This is the model which is in the process of breaking down, at the risk of shattering the country itself. "" Voltaire "" - During the year of the US electoral campaign that we have just weathered, the rhetoric has profoundly changed, and an unexpected rift has appeared between the two camps. If, in the beginning, the candidates spoke about subjects which were genuinely political (such as the sharing of wealth or national security), today they are mostly talking about sex and money. It is this dialogue, and not the political questions, which has caused the explosion of the Republican party – whose main leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate - and which is recomposing the political chess-board, awakening an ancient cleavage of civilisation. On one side, Mrs. Clinton is working to appear politically correct, while on the other, ŤThe Donaldť is blowing the hypocrisy of the ex-ŤFirst Ladyť to smithereens.
On one side, Hillary Clinton promises male / female equality - although she has never hesitated to attack and defile the women who revealed that they had slept with her husband – and that she is presenting herself not for her personal qualities, but as the wife of an ex-President, and that she accuses Donald Trump of misogyny because he does not hide his appreciation of the female gender. On the other, Donald Trump denounces the privatisation of the State and the racketing of foreign personalities by the Clinton Foundation to obtain appointments with the State Department – the creation of ObamaCare not in the interest of citizens, but for the profit of medical insurance companies - and goes as far as to question the honesty of the electoral system.
I am perfectly aware that the way in which Donald Trump expresses himself may encourage racism, but I do not believe for a second that this question is at the heart of the electoral debate, despite the hype from the pro-Clinton medias. It is not without interest that, during the Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton apologised to the Nation and convened a number of preachers to pray for his salvation. But when he was accused of similar misconduct by an audio recording, Donald Trump simply apologised to the people he had upset without making any appeal to members of the clergy. The currrent divide re-awakens the revolt of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran values against those of the Calvinists, mainly represented in the USA by the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists.
While the two candidates were raised in the Puritan tradition (Clinton as a Methodist and Trump as a Presbyterian), Mrs. Clinton has returned to the religion of her father, and participates today in a prayer group composed of the army chiefs of staff, The Family, while Mr. Trump practises a more interior form of spirituality and rarely goes to church. Of course, no-one is locked into the systems in which they were raised, but when people act without thinking, they unconsciously reproduce these systems. The question of the religious environment of the candidates may therefore be important.
In order to understand the stakes of this game, we have to go back and look at 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell instigated a military coup d’etat which overthrew King Charles 1st. He wanted to install a Republic, purify the soul of the country, and ordered the decapitation of the ex-sovereign. He created a sectarian régime inspired by the ideas of Calvin, massacred thousands of Irish Papists, and imposed a Puritan way of life. He also created Zionism – he invited the Jews back to England, and was the first head of state in the world to demand the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This bloody episode is known by the name of the ŤFirst British Civil Warť.
After the monarchy had been reinstated, Cromwell’s Puritans fled from England. They set up in Holland, from where some of them left for the Americas aboard the Mayflower (the ŤPilgrim Fathersť), while others founded the Afrikaneer community in South Africa. During the War of Independence in the 18th century United States, we saw a resurgence of the struggle of the Calvinists against the British monarchy, so that in current manuals of British History, it is known as the ŤSecond Civil Warť.
In the 19th century, the American Civil War opposed the Southern States (mainly inhabited by Catholic colonists) to the North (mostly inhabited by Protestant colonists). The History of the winning side presents this confrontation as a fight for freedom in the face of slavery, which is pure propaganda. The Southern states abolished slavery during the war when they concluded an agreement with the British monarchy). As a result, we once again saw the revolt of the Puritans against the Brititsh throne, which is why some historians speak of the ŤThird British Civil Warť.
During the 20th century, this interior confrontation of British civilisation seemed over and done with, apart from the re-appearance of the Puritans in the United Kingdom with the Ťnon-conformist Christiansť of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It was they who divided Ireland and agreed to create the Ť Jewish national homelandť in Palestine.
In any case, one of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Kevin Philipps, dedicated a voluminous thesis to these civil wars, in which he noted that none of the problems had been solved, and announced a fourth confrontation [ 1 ].
I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton will be the next President of the United States, or that if Mr. Trump were to be elected, he would be rapidly eliminated. But over the last few months, we have witnessed a large electoral redistribution within an irreversible demographic evolution. The Puritan-based churches now account for only a quarter of the population, and are swinging towards the Democrat camp. Their model looks like a historical accident. It disappeared in South Africa, and will not be able to survive much longer, either in the United States or in Israël. Beyond the Presidential election, US society will have to evolve rapidly or split once again. In a country where the youth massively rejects the influence of the Puritan preachers, it is no longer possible to displace the question of equality. The Puritans envisage a society where all men are equal, but not equivalent. Lord Cromwell wanted a Republic for the English, but only after he had massacred the Irish Papists. This is how it is at the moment in the United States – all citizens are equal before the law, but in the name of the same texts, black people are systematically condemned, while attenuating circumstances are found for white people who have committed equivalent crimes. And in the majority of states, a penal condemnation, even for a speeding ticket, is enough to cancel the right to vote. Consequently, white and black people are equal, but in most states, the majority of black people has been legally deprived of its right to vote. The paradigm of this thought, in terms of foreign policy, is the Ťtwo-stateť solution in Palestine – equal, but above all, not equivalent.
It is Puritan thinking that led the administrations of preacher Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr. and Jr. are direct descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers), Clinton and Obama to support Wahhabism, in contradiction to the declared ideals of their countries, and today, to support Daesh.
A long time ago, the Founding Fathers built communities in Plymouth and Boston which were idealised in the US collective memory. And yet the historians are formal – they claimed to be creating the ŤNew Israëlť, and chose the ŤLaw of Mosesť. They did not place the Cross in their temples, but the Tables of the Law. Although they are Christians, they attach more importance to the Jewish scriptures than the Gospel. They oblige their women to veil their faces and re-established corporaI punishment. Thierry Meyssan , French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate . Translation - Pete Kimberley
[ 1 ] The Cousins’ Wars , Kevin Philipps, Basic Books, 1999.",FAKE
"In a political season marked by nonstop polling, a lively exchange took place recently about the state of public opinion research and what to believe about all of the numbers describing the state of the race.

The context for the discussion was set by a series of national and state surveys showing Donald Trump gaining on or overtaking Hillary Clinton in the general-election campaign. It broadened into an examination how polls are produced and used in a competitive media environment.

Earlier this spring, Clinton enjoyed a substantial lead over Trump. Now, the RealClearPolitics poll average in the presidential race shows Clinton with a lead of just one point: 43.8 to 42.8 percent. Some recent polls showed Trump ahead, including a Washington Post-ABC News poll of registered voters released a week ago.

The shift raised questions: Is this merely a bounce for Trump because he has wrapped up the Republican nomination while Clinton is still fighting a campaign against Bernie Sanders? In that case, will Clinton reverse Trump’s gains once she has claimed the Democratic nomination? Do the current polls mean that the general election will be close and hard-fought? Most provocatively, is there something wrong with some of these polls?

The first salvo in the exchange came from Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University. Both are scholars to whom I’ve gone many times as I’ve reported campaigns and politics generally. The two co-authored an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Stop the Polling Insanity.”

They pointed to what they said were “wild fluctuations and surprising results” in recent Trump-Clinton polls. They also underscored how news organizations are producing polls at a rapid rate and using them to make news and generate clicks. “Too many of this year’s polls, and their coverage, have been cringeworthy,” they wrote.

Ornstein and Abramowitz took issue with a Reuters-Ipsos tracking poll that showed Clinton with a 13-point lead on May 4, a tie five days later and then a six-point lead for Clinton on May 15. They questioned whether opinions could have shifted that much during a time “when there were no major events” in the campaign.

They challenged an online NBC-SurveyMonkey poll that showed Trump within three points of Clinton and said that Trump was receiving 28 percent of the Hispanic vote when “most other surveys have shown Mr. Trump eking out 10 to 12 percent among Latino voters.”

They also raised doubts about a trio of Quinnipiac polls in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, arguing that the samples used in the surveys were “whiter than the states had in 2012” exit polls.

“When polling aficionados see results that seem surprising or unusual, the first instinct is to look under the hood at things like demographic and partisan distributions,” they wrote. “When cable news hosts and talking heads see these kinds of results, they exult, report and analyze ad nauseam. Caveats or cautions are rarely included.”

The two scholars went on to cite well-known challenges for all types of polls. Traditional polls, considered the most reliable over a long period of time, use random samples of the population, call landlines and cellphones, and use real people to conduct the interviews. But those surveys are extremely costly, and response rates for many have plummeted over the years.

Online surveys use panels of potential respondents rather than randomly drawn samples. The methodology differs among the practitioners and is in a regular state of examination and refinement. They are much less expensive to produce.

Ornstein and Abramowitz’s op-ed prompted a rejoinder from Jon Cohen, SurveyMonkey’s chief research officer, and Mark Blumenthal, the firm’s head of election polling. (For the record, Cohen is a former polling director at The Post and someone with whom I’ve worked closely and collaboratively over many years.)

The SurveyMonkey duo took issue with the suggestion that polls showing Trump and Clinton in a close race are almost by definition to be questioned. “It’s not enough for Trump’s opponents to wish him away,” they wrote. “It’s important for political professionals to actually explore what is buoying Trump — even if they find his rise unfathomable.”

They argued that the polls have not been on a wild ride. In fact, they said, there was a clear trend based on the moving average of an average of all polls. Once Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee after his victory in the May 3 Indiana primary, Clinton’s lead began to shrink.

As for the NBC-SurveyMonkey poll showing Trump winning 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, they noted that six other national surveys taken after the reality TV star effectively secured the nomination showed his Hispanic support ranging from 15 percent to 31 percent, while acknowledging they were on the high end. But they said Clinton’s margin over Trump among Hispanics across the six polls ranged from 23 points to 53 points. The NBC-SurveyMonkey poll’s margin was in the middle of that range at 37 points.

Citing the late Andrew Kohut, the founder of Pew Research, they said those in the field of survey research should be measurers not handicappers. “Now more than ever at this moment of reinvention for public opinion polling, we need many independent estimates of voter preferences, not a herd of handicappers issuing their best guesses about the eventual outcome,” they wrote.

Those exchanges prompted another voice to enter the conversation, that of Mark Mellman, a respected Democratic pollster to whom many journalists long have gone for his insights into polls and elections. Noting that Ornstein, Abramowitz, Cohen and Blumenthal were all “very smart people,” Mellman sought to avoid taking sides and instead offered a few thoughts of his own on the issues raised.

Writing in the Hill, Mellman began by saying that an examination of polling averages of RealClearPolitics and the Huffington Post’s Pollster’s model showed that there is “little doubt that the presidential race has tightened considerably” since March and April. But he added that the current state of the race does not necessarily mean the outcome in November will be close.

He reminded everyone that, in the spring of 2008, when John McCain had wrapped up the Republican nomination while Barack Obama was still engaged in a hard contest against Clinton, the general-election polls showed the Arizona senator ahead. He lost the general election by 7 percentage points.

Looking at the issue of Trump’s support among Hispanics in the NBC-SurveyMonkey poll, he said that 28 percent “seems high, but not bizarrely out of sync,” given other polls and history. He also said that if Trump were getting, say, 13 percent of the Hispanic vote rather than 28 percent, Trump’s overall number in the horse race would be just 1.5 points lower.

Polls have played a significant role in this campaign. They’ve determined participation in the GOP debates and how the candidates were aligned on the stage, and they’ve driven a lot of coverage of the race. There is no question that news organizations have sometimes been indiscriminate in the way they have highlighted individual polls.

So there is food for thought in this series of exchanges. The traditional method of polling has become prohibitively expensive for most organizations at a time when the demand for public opinion surveys continues to grow, in politics and other fields. The methodology of all types of polls is under challenge. There is a serious and urgent debate underway among public opinion researchers about the way forward.

For the rest of us, the exchanges lead to common points of agreement, all of which might seem obvious but should not be forgotten. Don’t put too much emphasis on any single poll. Look closely at averages of groups of polls to determine whether there are real shifts in the race. And don’t expect polls to predict the future. Leave that question to the voters in November.",REAL
"Will Mitt 3.0, as he’s already been dubbed, be a better model than the earlier two incarnations?

Without so much as a single syllable uttered in public, Mitt Romney has shaken up the 2016 race, employing a strategy of calculated leaks to indicate that he wants to mount a third presidential bid. I was skeptical of what seemed like a trial balloon to buy some time as Jeb Bush claimed the mantle of establishment candidate, but this has mushroomed into Mitt trying to get the gang back together.

But given that Romney muffed what Republicans viewed as a prime opportunity to oust President Obama, the media are asking this question: What exactly would be different next time?

The exercise is reviving some bad memories of Romney’s flaws as the GOP nominee. And Romney would have to explain his change of heart after he (and Ann) so repeatedly declared that they were done trying to move into the White House. What’s his rationale? To save the party from Jeb? Or has he just been badly bitten by the presidential bug?

Let’s stipulate that beating an incumbent president, even with an anemic economic recovery, was tough. Let’s also stipulate that Romney is an experienced businessman, has a good temperament, can raise truckloads of money, and proved to be a strong debater.

But there were so many self-inflicted wounds that it’s hard to catalogue them. Self-deportation. I like being able to fire people. Binders full of women. The 47 percent.

Not even Romney’s biggest fans would suggest he’s a natural campaigner. I watched him up close with crowds and while he gamely tried to connect with folks, there’s an awkwardness rooted in his natural reserve. And that extended to his arm’s-length relationship with the press corps.

Part of the chatter now is that Romney could fare better

Politico quoted one Romney campaign alumnus as saying the new effort would “tell the story of Mitt better.” Several Romney veterans recalled how well the accounts from parishioners in Romney’s Mormon community resonated with voters who had been bombarded with ads about his tenure at Bain Capital.” Romney, of course, mostly avoided talking about his religion.

Politico quoted another former top adviser as saying “he really has to show people that he’d do it differently, rather than just say he’d do it differently. He needs to assure folks he’d take a much more direct approach to laying out the vision for his campaign versus having those decisions driven by a bunch of warring consultants.”

So why is Romney gearing up to do this? The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who has set the pace on this story, quoted yet another anonymous Romney adviser as saying, “Mitt’s a very restless character. He is not the type to retire happily, to read books on the beach. . . . He believes he has something to offer the country and the only way he can do that is by running for president again.”

But that explanation is more about Romney’s feelings than how he’d be a stronger candidate than last time around. And not everyone in the GOP is wild about the idea. John McCain, who defeated Romney in 2008 (and wants his friend Lindsey Graham to run this time) says: “I thought there was no education in the second kick of a mule.”

“Why would Republicans, who grudgingly submitted to a Romney nomination in 2012 only after every other possibility had exhausted itself, give him another try when so many alternatives are available? What qualities would make a Romney candidacy more attractive to Republican voters in 2016 than it was in 2012?”

The Fix columnist Chris Cillizza admits he’s stunned by the prospect of a third Mitt campaign:

“I don't doubt Romney's sincerity. But I do think he and those close to him are fooling themselves that he can simply proclaim that he is running a new and different campaign -- one based on foreign policy and poverty, according to Politico -- and that will be that. It's literally impossible for me to imagine such a scenario.”

Breitbart goes back to the Netflix film “Mitt” that some acolytes are fondly remembering, and doesn’t give it two thumbs up:

“The best that can be said for the Romney portrayed in ‘Mitt’ is that, had he conveyed his behind-the-scenes personality to voters better, Romney might have mitigated the damage from Obama’s attacks. Maybe some of his self-effacing humor, or seeing Romney wear duct-taped gloves while skiing and pick up hotel-room trash like a normal person might could have offset the ruthless out-of-touch businessman image portrayed by his opponent.

“But the subtext of  ‘Mitt’ is Romney’s tragic inability to actually be that person in public.

“For a man seeking his third shot at the presidency amidst the strongest GOP bench in decades, it’s not a flattering portrait.”

The former Massachusetts governor doesn’t have to win over the pundits, of course, but he does need a smarter approach to using the media to get out his message. There’s already talk that he won’t be bringing back his old communications team, which often didn’t bother to respond to reporters.

The media love the idea of a Mitt-vs.-Jeb showdown. But Romney, who once mused about how those who lose presidential elections are branded losers, needs to offer a compelling rationale for why he can win.

Click for more from Media Buzz

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"At the end of last week’s Republican debate, moderator Bret Baier questioned each of the candidates about their commitment to the Republican Party. Would Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich support Donald Trump if he was chosen as the GOP’s presidential nominee?

After the past few weeks of intense in-fighting — in which Trump has been called a “con artist” and a threat to conservative principles — a casual spectator would have expected an unequivocal “no” from at least one candidate. But, of course, that wasn’t the case. All said they would support the businessman and, instead, strongly denounced their Democratic counterparts.

The moment illustrates the widely discussed notion of political polarization, a growing disdain our two parties have for one another and the subsequent dysfunction from divided government. Members of the Republican Party have made clear that winning the White House back from our Democratic president is their highest priority, even if that means handing it over to a man they expressly detest.

Our political parties are more polarized today than they were in the decades after the Civil War, the result of decades of growing political divide. Bipartisanship is openly scorned by congressional leaders, and even the more moderate Senate Republicans have refused to consider a nomination by President Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, suggesting that a growing part of the party is unwilling to negotiate with the president on any level.

Democrats, on the other hand, have also rejected cooperation. Obama has routinely made it clear that he would use whatever power he has to work around or override Republicans in Congress. He has threatened vetoes outright in his State of the Union addresses and his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, assured reporters this year that “audacious” executive action would continue throughout the election year.

There’s no sugarcoating it. No one gets along. And this polarization is not just a Washington phenomenon. Polling suggests a sustained decline in centrism among the general public. Both conservative and liberal voters see their opposing party with greater animosity than in the past two decades, and as a result, liberal Republicans and so-called “Blue Dog” conservative Democrats have become a dying breed.

Political polarization has become so entrenched that some commentators are beginning to predict doomsday scenarios for the U.S. political system. Under this narrative, polarized politics stem from flaws in our Constitution and are the norm of U.S. history, and over the past few decades we have been exiting an unnaturally civil period of post-World War bipartisanship. Eventually, these pundits say, polarization will continue to rebound and increase to the degree that the federal government won’t be able to sustain itself or deal with national emergencies. Thinking back to the government shutdown in 2013 and multiple threats to repeat it, such a scenario doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

These predictions are somewhat extreme, but at the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a quick-and-easy solution on hand. That’s because consensus among political scientists studying polarization is as rare as consensus among politicians. There is little agreement as to what is causing the trend. Some academics blame electoral policies, such as gerrymandering or an emphasis on the primary system, that have resulted in a mismatch between the more moderate general public and extreme political representatives. Others suggest that the problem is a deeper trend, reflecting the complicated political movements that have occurred in the past half-century. And still others have blamed a long list of other factors, from media coverage to genetic selection to women taking a greater role in populist movements.

But there’s one thing most experts agree on: Polarization at this heightened level is a problem. That’s because, in addition to halting crucial legislative initiatives and making it difficult to fill key government appointments, it hurts the economy by leading to more regular federal crises, such as debt ceiling impasses or the “fiscal cliff.”

The stakes are high and warrant an energetic debate. Is polarization a design flaw of our presidential system? What would be necessary to curtail our legislative dysfunction, and from where does it stem? What does the future hold for our two-party system?

Over the next few days, we’ll hear from:

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, authors and scholars at the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, respectively;

Dana Nelson, author and professor of English at Vanderbilt University;",REAL
"A man protests against international trade agreements TTIP and CETA in front of EU headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, Oct. 27, 2016.
The Canadian government raised concerns over the European Union’s regulations on chemicals on more than 20 occasions over the course of a decade, according to a letter seen by Energydesk .
In a note sent to the Belgian government on October 19 , the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) claims that the Canadian state challenged the EU’s REACH regulations at the World Trade Organisation 21 times between the years 2003 and 2011.
The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) describes the REACH regulations as providing “a high level of protection of human health and the environment from the use of chemicals.”
The news will raise concerns that Canadian companies may use the trade and investment deal CETA to undermine EU regulations.
“The threat of undue Canadian influence on environmental regulations such as REACH is real,” CIEL CEO Carroll Muffett wrote .
The CETA deal – which sets up private courts that enable foreign corporations to sue countries – has been held up by the British government as a model for post-Brexit free trade deals.
Corporate courts Canadian companies have also used the trade agreements to take legal action against countries on 42 occasions, according to data from the Investment Policy Hub — with Canada ranked 5th among the nations in which this type of investor-to-state lawsuit have been filed.
Earlier this year, for example, the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada sued the United States government for $15 billion over its decision to scrap the Keystone XL project — using a provision in the NAFTA trade deal.
CETA, which is currently being signed by EU members following a week-long blockade by Wallonia and two other Belgian regions, sets up an investor dispute system called the Investment Court System (ICS) .
In fact the ICS was among the reasons that the Wallonian government took a stand, with the region’s leader Paul Magnette saying: “I would prefer that [the ICS] disappears pure and simple and that we rely on our courts or at the very least, if we want an arbitration court, it must provide equivalent guarantees to domestic ones.”
As part of the newly negotiated agreement, the Belgian government will ask the European Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the deal — and the ICS in particular.
Beyond REACH REACH – the r egistration, e valuation, a uthorisation and restriction of ch emicals – is a set of extensive rules “adopted to improve the protection of human health and the environment from the risks that can be posed by chemicals” — so says the European Chemicals Agency .
Canada’s concerns – which were not formal actions, but rather issues raised at the WTO – largely related to rules around competition and whether the regulations would be burdensome to business .
The 21 complaints spanned the administrations of the Liberal Paul Martin, when REACH was just a draft, and the Conservative Stephen Harper.
Essentially Canada – like the United States – takes issue with the European approach to regulation, which is described as the ‘precautionary principle’.
This approach means products need to be proven safe by companies who seek to market them, before they enter the market. In North America, the burden of proof is on public authorities, which have to prove that a product is dangerous.
Documents unearthed by CIEL show that Canada has filed objections to the EU using this approach to regulate endocrine disrupting chemicals, arguing that the “EU’s hazard-based approach could unnecessarily disrupt trade in food and feed”.
Scientific studies show a range of health impacts caused by exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals – which are found in food containers and plastics – including IQ loss and adult obesity.",FAKE
By Justin Gardner As the corporatocracy tightens its grip on the masses – finding ever more ways to funnel wealth to the top – humanity... ,FAKE
"Email 
Life can be tough, but students at Willow Creek Elementary School in Duluth, Minnesota, have done something this year that will make you cry tears of joy: When they noticed that a fellow student wasn’t eating lunch at school, they brought him so many lunches that he clogged the door and school got canceled. 
Compassion for the win! 
When caring students saw that 9-year-old Bryce Oswald was showing up to school every day without a lunch, they knew they had to do something. They started giving Bryce fruit snacks and pats of butter from their lunches, and even pooled their allowances to buy Bryce hoagies and rotisserie chickens in an effort to make sure that he wouldn’t go hungry and would instead get massive enough to clog the door to the school and get school canceled. 
“Bryce didn’t have anything to eat, so we knew we had to help him out,” said Willow Creek student Kali Summers. “We gave him our lunches every day, even if we got really hungry. We knew if he kept eating he would get fat enough to clog up the door and we wouldn’t have to go to school.” 
The plan worked perfectly. In a matter of months, Bryce went from having no lunch at all to having so many lunches that he packed on 115 pounds, got stuck in the door, and school got canceled. The students were so successful in plumping Bryce up that it took four firefighters with a jackhammer to finally be able to pry him out. 
Mission accomplished! 
Due to these kids’ selfless dedication, not only did Bryce not go hungry, but all of the kids and teachers were able to stay home from school to play, watch TV, and relax instead of going to school for a full two days. They aren’t stopping there, either: Even though Bryce is now bigger than any other student in the district, the kids are going to continue to give him lunches in hopes that he can get stuck in the door so tightly that school gets canceled for a full week. 
Beautiful! Adults could learn a thing or two about kindness and commitment to your dreams from these remarkable kids.",FAKE
"A leading Republican critic of the Iranian nuclear talks is calling on the U.S. to ""walk away"" from the table after negotiators missed a key deadline, while other lawmakers joined in voicing concern that Iran could extract critical final-hour concessions in the scramble to salvage an agreement.

Negotiations resumed in Switzerland on Wednesday but were almost immediately beset by competing claims, just hours after diplomats abandoned a March 31 deadline to reach the outline of a deal and agreed to press on. And as the latest round hit the week mark, three of the six foreign ministers involved left the talks with prospects for agreement remaining uncertain.

Amid the confusion, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Fox News he's concerned the framework of a deal could allow Iran keep its uranium stockpiles and continue to enrich uranium in an underground bunker.

""You have to be willing to walk away from the table and to reapply leverage to Iran,"" Cotton said. ""And the fact that they're not willing to do that, that we're still sitting in Switzerland negotiating when three of our negotiating partners have already left just demonstrates to Iran that they can continue to demand dangerous concessions from the West.""

Speaking on MSNBC, former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean seemed to agree. He said that while President Obama is ""right"" to seek a deal, it might be time to ""step away"" from the table and make clear that the U.S. is not backing off key positions -- including on Iran's uranium stockpile and the pace of sanctions relief.

""I am worried about this,"" Dean said.

Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., also told Fox News ""we're potentially [legitimizing] them having a nuclear infrastructure."" She added: ""We don't know exactly what's behind closed doors.""

Despite all sides agreeing to blow by their deadline in pursuit of a rough agreement, even the White House threatened to abandon the talks if Iran wouldn't budge.

""If they're unwilling to make those kinds of commitments that give us that assurance -- and by us I mean not just the United States, I mean the international community -- then we'll have to walk away from the negotiating table and consider what other options may be available to us, and there is certainly the possibility that that could happen,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday.

Earnest indicated Wednesday that's still an option but called the scenario ""hypothetical"" as talks are ""making some progress."" He said talks continue to be ""productive"" but that ""we have not yet received the specific, tangible commitments we and the international community require.""

On Tuesday, negotiators had been trying to agree to simply a joint statement that could justify talks continuing until a final June deadline.

Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told reporters that if the sides make progress on the text of a joint statement, then that could be issued by the end of the day. But he suggested the statement would contain no specifics.

A senior western official quickly pushed back, saying that nothing about a statement had been decided and that Iran's negotiating partners would not accept a document that contained no details.

The German Foreign Ministry tweeted that ""nothing is agreed,"" although ""progress is visible.""

Araghchi named differences on sanctions relief on his country as one dispute, along with disputes on Iran's uranium enrichment-related research and development.

""Definitely our research and development program on high-end centrifuges should continue,"" he told Iranian television.

The U.S. and its negotiating partners want to crimp Iranian efforts to improve the performance of centrifuges that enrich uranium because advancing the technology could let Iran produce material that could be used to arm a nuclear weapon much more quickly than at present.

The exchanges reflected significant gaps between the sides, and came shortly after the end of the first post-deadline meeting between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, his British and German counterparts and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in the Swiss town of Lausanne. They and their teams were continuing a marathon effort to bridge still significant gaps and hammer out a framework accord that would serve as the basis for a final agreement by the end of June.

Eager to avoid a collapse in the discussions, the United States and others claimed late Tuesday that enough progress had been made to warrant an extension after six days of intense bartering. But the foreign ministers of China, France and Russia all departed Lausanne overnight, although the significance of their absence was not clear.

Kerry postponed his planned Tuesday departure to stay in Lausanne, and an Iranian negotiator said his team would stay ""as long as necessary"" to clear the remaining hurdles.

Officials say their intention is to produce a joint statement outlining general political commitments to resolving concerns about Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. In addition, they are trying to fashion other documents that would lay out in more detail the steps they must take by June 30 to meet those goals.

The additional documents would allow the sides to make the case that the next round of talks will not simply be a continuation of negotiations that have already been twice extended since an interim agreement between Iran, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany was concluded in November 2013. Obama and other leaders, including Iran's, have said they are not interested in a third extension.

But if the parties agree only to a broad framework that leaves key details unresolved, Obama can expect stiff opposition at home from members of Congress who want to move forward with new, stiffer Iran sanctions. Lawmakers had agreed to hold off on such a measure through March while the parties negotiated. The White House says new sanctions would scuttle further diplomatic efforts to contain Iran's nuclear work and possibly lead Israel to act on threats to use military force to accomplish that goal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to question the course of talks on Wednesday.

He said Iran views Israel's destruction as non-negotiable, ""but evidently giving Iran's murderous regime a clear path to the bomb is negotiable. This is unconscionable,"" he said. ""At the same time, Iran is accelerating its campaign of terror, subjugation and conquest throughout the region, most recently in Yemen.""

Netanyahu said a better deal would ""significantly roll back Iran's nuclear infrastructure"" and link a lifting of restrictions on its nuclear program to ""a change in Iran's behavior.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned supporters at a rally here Sunday that he and his Likud party may not win Tuesday’s election, a potentially dramatic fall for a consummate political survivor whose nine years in office transformed him into the public face of contemporary Israel.

A loss by Netanyahu — or a razor-thin win and the prospect that he would be forced to enter into an unwieldy “government of national unity” with his rivals — would mark a sobering reversal for Israel’s security hawks, in a country where the electorate has been moving steadily rightward for the past 15 years.

The final round of opinion polls Friday showed Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party facing a surprisingly strong challenge by Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Labor Party, and his running mate, former peace negotiator ­Tzipi Livni, who hold a small but steady lead. Their campaign has emphasized economic issues and the soaring cost of living.

[Read: A guide to the political parties battling for Israel’s future]

Netanyahu charged in a radio interview Sunday that hostile Israeli journalists and shadowy “foreign powers” were behind an anti-Netanyahu campaign that could be his undoing.

Livni, his longtime rival and the former justice minister, countered that Netanyahu was panicking and looking for scapegoats.

“The citizens of Israel will replace Netanyahu, not because of what is written in the newspapers,” she said Sunday, “but because they don’t have enough money to buy a newspaper . . . or buy apartments for their children.”

The Netanyahu campaign assumed the prime minister would get a bump in support after his speech before a joint meeting of Congress two weeks ago, when he directly challenged President Obama and warned that the United States was about to sign a disastrous pact that would not halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

[Read: Why Israel’s top right-winger wants his people to ‘stop apologizing’]

His supporters boasted of his Churchillian skills as a master orator. Their high hopes were raised as a rapturous Congress gave him repeated standing ovations. Yet the speech did little to move the electorate — even as it angered the White House and congressional Democrats and undermined bipartisan relations between Israel and its closest ally.

“It’s clear that Netanyahu thought what he did in Washington would help him, but it didn’t do him any good at home,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, a director at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

[Read: Could Isaac Herzog become Israel’s next prime minister?]

Two highly critical reports released in the past month have also taken a toll on the prime minister and the Likud campaign.

Netanyahu was personally hurt by embarrassing revelations about profligate spending of state money at his official residence in Jerusalem and his private beachside villa north of Tel Aviv. Israelis were mildly shocked to see how much the premier and his wife, Sara, spend on hairdressers and maid service — in addition to an eye-popping $24,000 a year on takeout food.

Netanyahu and his party were also dinged by a scathing report last month that concluded they had failed to do much to address the soaring cost and availability of housing for financially strapped Israelis, who are frustrated by the high cost of living here.

Netanyahu’s ally on the hard-line right, Naftali Bennett, the economy minister, said he was surprised that threats at Israel’s borders were not as important in this campaign.

“It’s the first time that I can recall that the voters are zeroing in on the economy,” Bennett said in an interview. “Some thought there might be other issues, like Iran, but there hasn’t been.”

Bennett is leader of the Jewish Home party, which draws electoral support from religious nationalists and the pro-settler camp. According to opinion polls, backing for his party has not grown since the 2013 election.

“Bennett was the darling who got a lot of attention at the expense of everyone around him, but he made some serious mistakes,” said Reuven Hazan, who chairs the department of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bennett tried to bring a retired Israeli soccer star onto his list of candidates for parliament, but core party members revolted, complaining that Eli Ohana was a celebrity who played games on the Jewish Sabbath and supported Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, anathema to the pro-settler wing of the party.

Both Netanyahu and Bennett, a tech millionaire and former commando, are viewed as strong on security, and both talk tough about the Palestinians.

Bennett is out front saying he would never give away occupied land in the West Bank to create an independent Palestinian state. During the campaign, Netanyahu also distanced himself from peace talks. He vowed there would be no concessions or withdrawals from the West Bank and suggested that the two-state solution was no longer relevant.

Both may be sailing into contrary winds. The last polls for Israel Army Radio found that more than half of Israelis surveyed plan to vote based on social and economic issues and that fewer than 1 in 3 put security at the top of their concerns. Nine of 10 respondents said the cost of living would influence their choice.

After shunning debates, public appearances and media interviews for most of the campaign, Netanyahu in the past few days has popped up on radio and television and, on Sunday, at a large rally in Tel Aviv.

At the event, attended by thousands, Netanyahu warned, “If we don’t close the gap, there is a real danger that a left-wing government will rise to power.”

On Israeli Channel 2’s “Meet the Press” show Saturday night, the host pressed Netanyahu on why he is trailing in opinion surveys.

“I am liked,” he protested. “The public prefers me to continue to lead by many percentage points over my rival.” He referred to polls that ask voters who they would like as prime minister (which is different from which party they will vote for).

The prime minister complained that the world was against him and wanted to weaken Israel. “Foreign consultants are here in droves,” he said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, “and the money is flowing here. All of it is intended to make the Likud lose.”

Bennett blamed outsiders, too. “All the media and all the NGOs are out to overthrow the right,” he told students at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. “I’ve never seen such a concentrated effort, with money from abroad.”

Neither Bennett nor Netanyahu has alleged which foreign governments are seeking influence, but both have pointed the finger at an Israeli grass-roots organizing group calling itself V15, which is dedicated to ousting Netanyahu. Its social media networks helped bring 35,000 people out to a rally last week in a Tel Aviv park under the banner “Anyone but Bibi,” Netanyahu’s nickname.

One of V15’s top advisers is a former Obama campaign director named Jeremy Bird, an expert on grass-roots politicking and voter mobilization.

A shift from right to center in Israel would likely please the Obama White House. It would help Obama if the administration reaches an imperfect deal with the Iranians. It might also reinvigorate moribund peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and give Secretary of State John F. Kerry another chance to help solve one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.

It is possible that Netanyahu and Likud could either win or come in a close second and then emerge as the ultimate victors, because their challengers could not put together a governing coalition from the small parties, whose leaders can emerge as kingmakers.

Many Likudniks blame Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud minister who started a new party called Kulanu, for siphoning off moderate voters. The candidate is popular in Israel because he broke up the cellphone monopolies and slashed mobile per-minute rates. He gets high marks for focusing on socioeconomic issues but is also tough on security, seemingly an ideal candidate for today’s voter mood.

Kahlon is expected to win more than enough seats to help form a coalition government for either Netanyahu or Herzog. He has not said which candidate he would join in the next government.

-A guide to the political parties battling for Israel’s future

-Why Israel’s top right-winger wants his people to ‘stop apologizing’

-Could Isaac Herzog become Israel’s next prime minister?",REAL
"The president and Republican leaders are pushing hard to pass legislation known as Trade Promotion Authority that allows a White House to fast-track trade deals through Congress with no amendments, no procedural hurdles or filibusters, and a simple up-or-down vote in limited amount of time.

That fast-track authority likely would make it possible for the Obama administration to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership with a dozen Pacific Rim nations, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe. Together, those pacts would cover about 80 percent of the global economy.

The much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s covered about 10 percent of the word's trade, and Reid said that deal and many since have all been disastrous for American workers, costing millions of jobs.

""It causes huge job losses,"" Reid said. ""As Einstein said, you keep doing the same thing over and over again, and you expect a different result, that's the definition of insanity.""

""We can look at these trade bills over the years -- every one of them without exception causes to American workers job losses. Millions of job losses,"" Reid added. ""But yet they're going to try the same thing again and hope for a different result. That's insanity.""

Obama has tried to counter such complaints by pointing to some of the benefits of free trade deals, insisting they do create jobs, and that his will be the ""most progressive"" trade pact in history. He's also accused people like Reid and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) of ""making stuff up.""

""I would not be promoting any agreement that I didn't think at the end of the day was going to be creating jobs in the United States and giving us more of an opportunity to create ladders of success, higher incomes and higher wages for the American people, because that's my primary focus,"" Obama argued last week.

Democrats have pushed back on that, though, with Warren releasing a report this week that details the same sorts of promises made in trade agreements for decades, most of which were broken, according the report.

 

 Obama got support Wednesday from his would-be trade ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who spoke just before Reid, accusing Democrats of blocking progress and jobs for America.

“Our friends on the far left may try to cynically spin their war against the future as something other than what it truly is, but we know better,"" McConnell said. ""It’s no wonder President Obama has called them 'wrong' and suggested they make stuff up.""

He said the main result of failing to craft trade agreements that lower barriers would be to cost the United States and its businesses markets.

“What happens if the far left actually succeeds in its apparent quest to retain foreign tariffs that unfairly impact American workers and their paychecks?"" McConnell said. “It would mean lost opportunities for American risk-takers. ... It would mean lost opportunities for American manufacturing, lost opportunities for Kentucky farmers and lost opportunities for more jobs, better wages and a growing economy that can lift everyone up.""

A vote on the Senate's fast-track bill could come by the end of the week. If McConnell can find a way to satisfy about a dozen Democratic fast-track backers in negotiations of amendments, it is likely to pass. Such agreement remained uncertain Wednesday, however, and prospects for the measure's success in the House are also highly uncertain, with most Democrats there, as well as dozens of Republicans, opposed.",REAL
"Email 
Why does everyone think that presidential campaigns are about “issues,” when anyone over the age of consent knows they are all about sex? But it says a lot about the lasting power of Viagra that this is still the case when we have a couple of seventy-year-olds on the ballot. (“ For an election lasting more than four years, please call your doctor .”) 
In last week’s newspaper there was a report on the tenth or eleventh woman (I have lost track) to come forward to say that Donald Trump made suggestive and “inappropriate” advances to her during a golf tournament that took place about ten years ago. 
The woman in question is Jessica Drake, who during her press conference announced that at the time of the tournament, she was working in the “the adult industry” (that’s what People Magazine calls porn) for Wicked Pictures (the 20th Century Fox of gang banging) when the randy Donald kissed and hugged her in his room. 
Trump was already in his pajamas when she knocked on his door, together with two friends. Normally, in the adult business, when three porn stars knock on your hotel door, it’s considered foreplay. 
When Trump’s effusive greeting of Miss Drake did not lead to more snuggling, let alone the suggestion to preview some of her work on the hotel television, he offered her $10,000 to satisfy his suite dreams. 
Drake again demurred, saying that the next morning she needed to get back to Los Angeles “for work.” By that point in her career she had already notched screen credits for “Extreme Doggie” and “Fornocopia.” I would mention other titles, but as they say at the New York Post , “This is a family newspaper.” 
That rejection prompted Donald to offer Jessica an early morning ride (of shame?) on his Trump airliner back to LA, which still didn’t turn the trick. * * * 
Then last week, in the presence of her lawyer, Gloria Allred (the Perry Mason of many cases against Bill Cosby) Miss Drake tearfully repeated in primetime her shock and dismay that Mr. Trump had tried to take liberties with her reputation, which, after all, includes the 2009 Adult Video News Award for the “Best Double Penetration Sex Scene” in her classic work, “Fallen.” 
Drake said she was coming forward now to stand in “solidarity” with the other women Trump has manhandled, although there were suggestions that her outing was timed to coincide with the launch of Drake’s new online store, where devoted viewers can purchase such classics as her “Guide to BDSM for Beginners,” among other titles. 
Normally scenes such as the one I am describing would be consigned to John Oliver, Monty Python, or Saturday Night Live , but in the new normal of presidential politics, even Miss Drake gets a respectful hearing on the issues. 
For example, the next day the Huffington Post reported: “Woman Says Trump Sexually Assaulted Her, Offered Her $10,000 For Sex.” 
The deadpan New York Times wrote: “Ms. Drake, who appeared Saturday with the women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred, said Mr. Trump had hugged and kissed her and the other women without permission.” 
The headline in New York Magazine read: “Adult Actress Jessica Drake Details Trump Assault, Blasts Him for ‘Uncontrollable Misogyny’.” 
Look, I have no doubt that Trump is a pig who routinely gropes and propositions women, but since when does the press in a presidential election have to source its stories in the “adult” industry? * * * 
Sadly, the answer to this question dates to winter 1992 when Bill and Hillary Clinton figured out that unless a presidential candidate has a sexual storyline, few of the voters will pay much attention to their positions on nuclear disarmament or welfare reform. 
During the 1992 Super Bowl, the Clintons appeared on a halftime special of 60 Minutes to deny jointly (Bill: That allegation is false ) that he had ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers, who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas when Bill was governor and often out jogging. 
In this vaudeville performance, Hillary played the straight man, adding: “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” (At least she didn’t reference The Eagles.) 
Only in 1998, under oath in a sworn deposition, did Bill admit to having a 12-year affair with Ms. Flowers. But neither her allegations in 1992, nor his lying about it, cost him the election that year. 
Just the opposite: Clinton’s wanderlust might have won him sympathy among the voters (no strangers to sexual boredom) who found they had more in common with a soft-shell Baptist (Bill) than an uptight Protestant (George H.W. Bush). 
Nor did Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky under oath in the Paula Jones case hurt his post-presidential career (worth $200 million +) or the electoral prospects of his wife in 2016. 
But it did turn sexuality into a mainstream presidential campaign issue, which is one of the reasons why this year’s race seems only to be about sex. * * * 
No doubt the Clintons do find some delicious irony in Trump’s groping charges, as payback for what they view as the Republican use of sexuality to impeach Bill in 1998 and, in 2016, for the GOP plan to make his many adulterous affairs fair game for their campaign soundbites. (Cut to an online image of the White House and over it a fading picture of Bill smoking a cigar, with the caption “Here we go again?”) 
Without the pageant-loving, casino operating Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton could well have been vulnerable on the sexual front, with Bill’s mistresses steady fodder for negatives ads and the many allegations from his scorned lovers that Hillary organized the slut-shaming. 
Instead of the 2016 election turning on Hillary’s marriage to Hugh Hefner’s doppelgänger, the storyline that has played best in the media is Donald’s secret life as a groper. 
The press actually has given Trump a pass for his adultery (which produced all those wonderful children) but zeroed in on his groping, in part because he confessed to it on an NBC videotape and also because—think of ratings—gropers belong in the same basket of deplorables as child abusers and others lurking on subways, crowed elevators, or near schoolyards. 
Best of all for the Clintons, politically anyway, is that the charge of groping is impossible for Trump to refute. Even denying it sounds sleazy. 
And it colors all aspects of the campaign. To wit: the New York Times headline when at Gettysburg Trump outlined his vision for America: “Donald Trump Pledges to ‘Heal Divisions’ (and Sue His Accusers).” * * * 
For its mud-slinging, I am sure the Trump campaign has spent many long hours brainstorming how to tar Hillary as a lesbian. But even that innuendo has fallen flat, despite the rumor mongering that she’s in a Boston marriage with her assistant Huma Abedin (whose husband, Anthony Weiner, is otherwise distracted in high school chat rooms). 
Several of Bill’s former lovers (Sally Miller, Dolly Kyle, and Flowers) have tried to play up Bill’s pillow talk that Hillary prefers the nighttime company of women. But none of these allegations have gone further than Infowars or the supermarket press. (“ Hillary Hit Man Tells All !”) 
Nor have out-of-wedlock children, a staple of the 1884 campaign (as was chanted to Grover Cleveland: “ Ma, Ma, Where ’ s my pa ?”), gotten much play in this year’s presidential race. 
Trump and his casino gumshoes have put considerable effort into tracking down the rumor that Danney Williams is Bill Clinton’s illegitimate son by a Little Rock prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams. 
Trump invited Danney (a sympathetic man) to the third presidential debate, as if to press on Bill a Scarlet Letter. Despite Williams looking very much like President Bill, the story got no more traction than did the news that Malik Obama, the president’s shunned half-brother, is supporting Trump. He, too, got a debate invitation, to sit in the box presumably marked “Shame.” 
Also in the dustbin of history are the allegations that Flowers aborted Bill’s baby in 1977 and the whispering campaign (a great political standby when proof is elusive) that Chelsea is the product of an affair between Hillary and her then law firm colleague, Webb Hubbell. 
The Williams and Hubbell stories come with some convincing Internet similarities, at least in the photographs, although in both cases politically, this rumor milling whiplashed against Trump, as voters have only equated such tawdry allegations with his Birther past, something that has stuck as campaign mud. * * * 
Technically, Birtherism does’t directly involve sex, although it lingers on its fringes, as it speaks to Barack Obama’s illegitimacy, his foreign allegiances, and possibly disputed paternity, including the claim that Frank Marshall Davis was actually Obama’s biological father (another subterranean creed of Trumpism). 
Again, the documentary proof is a series of look-a-like photographs, as close as the Internet gets to DNA. That Davis was an American Communist works well in the campaign, as it suggests the origins of Obama’s political genetic code. 
Ironically, for all his efforts at smear, Trump came out the loser in the debates when Hillary nailed him to Birtherism, which has become a convenient code word for Trump’s racism, misogyny, and intolerance of immigrants, especially muslims. 
Nor, in response, did Trump have any luck in linking the Birther movement to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, when, according to Donald, consigliere-journalist Sidney Blumenthal delighted in the suggestion that Barack was born in Kenya. 
Instead, the debate claim only made Trump look disingenuous. Clinton got a pass on what her campaign may or may not have insinuated in 2008. And at this point, no one cares. But voters do remember Trump as the Imperial Wizard of Birtherism. * * * 
Republicans can only blame themselves for wanting to divide the electorate in 2016 along lines of sexual preference or deviance, although this strategy was based on Hillary being the Democratic nominee and anyone other than Trump standing for the Republicans. 
Had the GOP nominee been Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, or John Kasich, Clinton Inc. might well have been vulnerable to possible storylines about infidelity, illegitimacy, and rape. (Cue up the Paula Jones description of Bill, during a business meeting, exposing himself in a Little Rock hotel and settling her lawsuit for $850,000.) 
Instead, the Republicans went with the polyamorous Trump, who, in addition to three marriages, has bragged on morning radio about his success with young women and who since 1996 has been leering at Miss Universe contestants—a bit like Austin Powers. ( Shall we shag now, or shall we shag later ?) 
With Trump’s resumé of creepy perversion, you might have thought that the Republicans would drop sexual misconduct from the electoral playbook. Instead, they doubled down to make the case that both Clintons, if elected, would turn the White House into a strip club. 
Not only did the Clintons shrug off such innuendo, but, in response, they said (in effect), if they did, it would be to cater to the likes of players such as Donald J. Trump (leisure suit and open collar optional). * * * 
For the moment—and I can’t see anything changing in the last days of the campaign—the accepted wisdom of most front pages is that Donald Trump has groped as many women as Tiger Woods has watched pole dancing in Vegas. Even the gallery of “their women” looks about the same. 
Conversely, few voters seem to care that Bill might have forced himself on several women or that Hillary helped to cover up his brutality. That’s a narrative of the 1990s, which is perhaps the last time Austin Danger Trump read the newspaper. ( I’ve been frozen for 30 years. I’ve got to see if my bits and pieces are still working .) 
For most voters in 2016, names such as Kathleen Willey or Juanita Broaddrick are as lost in time as Nan Britton, who just before the 1920 election bore a love child with then candidate Senator Warren Harding. 
Britton and the child got Republican hush money and a sad little house in Asbury Park, New Jersey. After Harding won, she was invited to the White House but their affair, so to speak, was kept in the closet. * * * 
If you think about elections as political sitcoms, in 1960 the Kennedys had to run as Rob and Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show , complete with twin beds, long flannel pajamas, and prudent kisses on the cheek to say good-night, even if The JFK Reality Show would make Trump, Bill Clinton, and Tiger look like apprentices at adultery. 
Come 2016, only something that resembles Modern Family and a desperate-housewives reality show can crack network primetime, and who better to put on air than The Clintons, with their Dallas -like money, communal sexuality, and more illicit storylines than CSI . 
For more than twenty years, Bill and Hillary have been bringing us seasons of lust, affairs, “I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman”, Vince Foster, Travelgate, foundation slush funds, basement servers, commodity trading, Whitewater, Bosnian snipers, pay-to-play, Benghazi, lost e-mails, and the like, and the ratings only continue to go up. 
Sure, The Apprentice was fun for a few episodes, but the sameness of insulting young people grew tedious. How is that supposed to compete with Bill making a pass at Huma, while her husband goes to prison for airing his junk, and Chelsea finding out about her real father. Next on The Clintons ?",FAKE
"David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at his blog: How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) The horror began late Wednesday morning in San Bernardino as at least two gun-wielding people stormed into a conference center at the Inland Regional Center, a state-funded nonprofit that works with the California Department of Developmental Services, and killed 14 people.

The killers fled, and two suspects have been killed, and so far we still can only speculate at their motives. Reports suggest the violence was focused on a holiday banquet celebrating county workers, with at least some suggesting it was a targeted killing , and police identified one of the attackers as Syed Rizwan Farook , an inspector for the county health department.

The shootings took place at a government center that provides services to adults and children with developmental disabilities. It's an important facility, one of about 20 that serve tens of thousands of individuals throughout California. As reporters rushed to the scene, rumors flew that the killing involved disabled children, or a mental health patient, or a disgruntled parent, or any number of horror stories. The disability community braced, then felt a kind of guilty relief.

The killers, it seems, were not aiming at children with disabilities nor the people who provide them with services. But they hurt those children, their parents and caregivers, and the staff who have dedicated their lives to serving disabled Americans, nonetheless.

As the father of a child with Down syndrome, though not a Californian, I know these types of buildings well. I've spent so much of the last decade in and out of such offices, signing up for services, getting treatments and learning about the world of disability. While every mass shooting is horrific, the carnage can often feel remote, especially as Americans become inured to the regularity of the violence. There have, after all, been more mass shootings in 2015 than days in the year

And yet, this time it was far too easy for me to imagine the terror of people with and without disabilities as the guns fired, the fire alarm sounded, and the sirens rang out. We'll certainly start hearing stories about children and adults with disabilities as we begin to sort through the aftermath. I spoke with one parent in the area, Shannon Jenkins, who told me that her daughter, ""receives services at Inland Regional Center. At any given time, there are hundreds there between employees, kids and adults with special needs, and their parents/(caregivers)."" On a crowded Wednesday afternoon, we're lucky the body count wasn't worse.

But the survivors don't escape unscathed. Some of the children and adults with developmental disabilities experienced the trauma of being present at a mass shooting. My son, as is relatively common, reacts with real panic to certain kinds of sounds and lights, including close proximity to alarm.

What kind of trauma will disabled children carry forward from this event? And, of course, disabled children are not the only ones at risk for trauma and its consequences. Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most common forms of disability in America, a condition for which everyone involved is now at risk.

The social media feeds of the Inland Regional Center are filled with pictures of joy and friendship. A Christmas party with a child sitting on Santa's lap. People dancing and singing to ""Celebration."" Signs for the upcoming winter dance on Friday, perhaps intended to be held in the very hall now riddled with bullets and blood. This was a place that was doing the hard work of building an inclusive community.

Worst of all, there continues to be no reason to think that any degree of horror will spur cultural or policy change when it comes to the easy access to firearms in America. The empathy I felt for the people at a disability services building made the violence more real to me. But I've felt this degree of empathy before. When Adam Lanza killed all those first-graders on December 14, 2012, I thought about my own son, then a 5-year-old, and imagined him experiencing the horror of a shooter in his school. Surely every parent in America had such thoughts as they sent their children off to school in the following days, and perhaps every day since.

And yet, we've done nothing. The pace of mass shootings is accelerating . Thanks to the power of the gun lobby and their cronies in Congress, all we do is offer empty thoughts and prayers, while we slowly become more and more afraid.",REAL
"The speech Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to give to a joint session of Congress Tuesday is one of the most critical of recent times. It concerns not only the very existence of his nation, but also the terribly real possibility of nuclear holocaust in the foreseeable future. Our own security is at stake as well: Iran is developing intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons that will reach our shores.

The question isn’t why should Congress listen to what he has to say, but rather why in the world would certain members not to hear him out?

Prime Minister Netanyahu will speak on the prospect of Iran being able to develop nuclear weapons.  He is making this speech because – like many people – he is fearful that the agreement President Obama wants to strike with Iran would not put in place effective controls to prevent the mullahs – and plausibly in turn the many terrorist organizations they actively support – from acquiring weapons-grade fissionable material.

The Obama administration has tried to discredit Prime Minister Netanyahu and dismiss his appearance on Capitol Hill as a political stunt tied to the upcoming Israeli elections.  Some of the president’s followers in Congress have vowed to boycott the speech.  But their red herring arguments cannot be allowed to disguise the crucial importance of his visit or of the issue that has prompted it.

Allowing Iran to join the nuclear club – or come perilously close -- would trigger a frightening round of weapons proliferation.  Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region would all be understandably motivated to similarly arm themselves. The Middle East of today, which far too often teeters on the brink of meltdown, could in comparison seem a relatively stable, peaceful place.

And make no mistake, the specter of the revolutionary government of Iran armed with nuclear weapons does not just threaten the Middle East. Iran is believed to already possess missiles capable of delivering a warhead to Israel and perhaps even Europe.  Development of more powerful models that would extend their range to include the United States is just a matter of time. Iran’s ability to not only attack, but also to intimidate other countries into meeting its demands would increase exponentially with its acquisition of nuclear capabilities. Imagine Tehran “suggesting” to European countries how to treat their growing Muslim populations? Sharia law, anyone?

But obviously, the nation most likely to first suffer from Iran’s nuclear ambitions is Israel.  That is why it is so important for members of Congress to listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu.  The United States and Israel have a longstanding friendship that has always enjoyed strong bipartisan support.  We cannot refuse our close ally at least the opportunity to explain how a nuclear Iran would affect it.  No one demands that every member of Congress agree with the Prime Minister, but they all have a duty to listen to him.

Additionally, Congress definitely has a fundamental obligation – to the American people and the world - to be actively involved in this policy decision.  This is not Obamacare or regulating the Internet.  The consequences of allowing President Obama to go it alone with another opaque executive action could not only be catastrophic, but also impossible to remedy with after-the-fact legislation.  Once Iran has the bomb, the game is over.

The stakes here could not be higher – Israel’s continued existence, America’s moral authority, nuclear conflict, and the ghastly breakdown of world order.  Party politics cannot be allowed to interfere with bringing this matter to the most successful resolution possible.  Congress must listen to Prime Minister Netanyahu -- and so should President Obama.

Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media. His latest book, ""Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code, and Reforming the Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity"" (McGraw-Hill Education, December 10, 2015).",REAL
"Elizabeth Warren announced a bill creating a Financial Product Safety Commission with House and Senate Democrats in March 2009. The body was designed to have oversight over mortgages and other financial instruments to protect consumers against predatory practices. She said if the agency had existed before the subprime collapse then ""there would have been millions of families who got tangled in predatory mortgages who never would have gotten them."" HuffPost's Ryan Grim reported : Without all these toxic assets on banks' balance sheets, the institutions wouldn't be on the brink of collapse and the recession would be more manageable. ""Consumer financial products were the front end of the destabilization of the American economic system."" Sen. Charles Schumer's cosponsorship of the bill is notable because of his proximity to Wall Street. The bill's merit, the New York Democrat said, is that it regulates the actual financial product rather than the company producing it.",REAL
"The Guardian is Going Friggin Nuts Over Calais 
Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 27, 2016 Where is this innocent little boy supposed to go if he can’t live in a squatter camp and throw rocks through car windshields, The Guardian asks. 
Okay, so earlier today I already posted a front page story from The Guardian featuring an imagine of a “16-year-old child” who was obviously a man in his forties who was forced out of his home in the Jungle camp in Calais. 
But I’ve gotta post more. 
They are going absolutely nuts over this. 
The rest of the media is too, of course, but The Guardian epitomizes liberal hysteria, so we’ll focus on them. 
All of these headlines are from the last 24 hours – the period since the camp was officially closed. I won’t even bother to link them, because who cares. You already know what they’re saying. 
Three of them are written by the same woman, Lisa O’Carroll. 
One has to wonder if she wasn’t one of the women who were using the Calais camp as a sex tourism destination . 
You can ask her about it on Twitter. 
@lisaocarroll 
This situation is insane though, holmes. 
These people invaded Europe, mostly from Africa. None of them are legitimate “refugees,” or they would claim that status. They are allowed to stay in France indefinitely, where they are clothed and fed, but they want to go to Britain because the welfare system is so good. They set up an illegal squatter base next to the freeway, and used it to break into trucks bound for the UK and to launch random violent attacks on cars – very often just throwing rocks for no reason. 
This week, 7 years after it was founded in 2009, they finally closed it and forced out the inhabitants, because basically it had become impossible to safely pass from France to England in a car. And the entire media is saying that the act of closing the camp is nothing short of pure and unadulterated evil. 
The way they’re selling it? 
By showing pictures of men between the ages of 25 and 45, saying they’re teenagers and calling them “children.” 
It’s like something out of an absurdist comedy. But most everything is these days. 
Anyhow, these women, cucks and kikes are eventually going to get their way. Migrants are already moving back in, as the fires have died down from where they set their own squat on fire when they were asked to leave. 
Migrants have started moving back into the “Jungle”, hours after French authorities announced they had finished clearing out the Calais camp. 
Thousands of migrants were evacuated as multiple large blazes raged across the sprawling camp in northern France. 
By midday, regional prefect Fabienne Buccio had said operations to clear the camp, which began on Monday, had been completed days earlier than planned. 
“There are no more migrants in the camp,” she told the Associated Press news agency. 
I said this would happen. Everyone knew it would happen. White Europeans have no will to do what needs to be done, so these animals are simply allowed to do whatever they want. 
What needs to be done is of course race war. 
These people need to be rounded up and deported back to Africa, and if they refuse and start fires, they need to be shot. 
This situation isn’t complicated or nuanced in any way. 
But that won’t happen. 
Because Europe is ruled by the coalition of evil: empowered women, cucks and kikes.",FAKE
"Did Donald Trump really just surge past Hillary Clinton in two of the election's most important battlegrounds?

New swing-state polls released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University show Trump leading Clinton in Florida and Pennsylvania — and tied in the critical battleground state of Ohio. In three of the states that matter most in November, the surveys point to a race much closer than the national polls, which have Clinton pegged to a significant, mid-single-digit advantage over Trump, suggest.

The race is so close that it's within the margin of error in each of the three states. Trump leads by three points in Florida — the closest state in the 2012 election — 42 percent to 39 percent. In Ohio, the race is tied, 41 percent to 41 percent. And in Pennsylvania — which hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988 — Trump leads, 43 percent to 41 percent.

Clinton's campaign responded to the surveys by cautioning that while the swing states were always expected to be close, the urgent stakes of a possible Trump election remain high.

""We know the battlegrounds are going to be close til the end. That's why we need to keep working so hard,"" Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon tweeted Wednesday morning. ""Trump is a serious danger, folks.""

Trump, meanwhile, thanked his supporters for the strong showing, tweeting a celebratory series of images featuring Fox News graphics showing the Quinnipiac results. ""Thank you!"" Trump tweeted, adding ""#ImWithYou,"" an implicit shot at the Clinton campaign's initial slogan, ""I'm With Her.""

In another blow to Clinton, a McClatchy-Marist poll of registered voters nationwide released on Wednesday showed Clinton's lead over Trump slip to three points, 42 percent to 39 percent, after leading by six points in a Fox News poll conducted in late June.

But other polls give Clinton an advantage in all three states. Including the new Quinnipiac surveys, POLITICO’s Battleground State polling average — which include the five most-recent polls in each state — gives Clinton a 3.2-point lead in Florida, a 2.8-point edge in Ohio and a larger, 4.6-point advantage in Pennsylvania.

By Wednesday afternoon, a quartet of battleground polls painted a hazy picture of the race in those three states, as well as in Colorado and Wisconsin. The latest NBC News/Marist/Wall Street Journal polls showed Clinton up by three points against Trump in Iowa (42 percent to 39 percent), tied in Ohio (41 percent to 41 percent) and up by nine points in Pennsylvania (45 percent to 36 percent), in contrast to her two-point deficit in the Quinnipiac poll.

Monmouth University's survey of likely Colorado voters found Clinton with a significant 13-point advantage, while Trump cut into Clinton's Wisconsin advantage by five points compared to last month, trailing 45 percent to 41 percent compared to last month, when Clinton led 46 percent to 37 percent.

While the Quinnipiac results are eye-popping, they don’t represent any significant movement — except in Florida. In three rounds of polling over the past two months, the race has moved from a four-point Trump lead in Ohio in the first survey, then tied in the next two polls. In Pennsylvania, Clinton led by one point in the first two polls and now trails by two.

But in Florida, the race has bounced around. Clinton led by one point in the first poll two months ago, but she opened up an eight-point lead in June — a lead that has been erased and more in the new Quinnipiac survey.

The polls from the Connecticut-based school are likely to be met with some skepticism. When Quinnipiac released their first round of polls in the same three states two months ago, they prompted a round of sniping from Democrats and an F-bomb on Twitter from Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight founder who has built a career using poll results to make political predictions.

But subsequent polls later confirmed the May Quinnipiac surveys: Trump pulled virtually even with Clinton nationally after knocking out his rivals for the GOP nomination.

It’s possible the results of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server dating back to her service as secretary of state — FBI Director James Comey called Clinton and her staff “extremely careless,” even as he said the government shouldn’t press charges because there wasn’t evidence of criminal intent — are driving Clinton’s poll numbers down leading into the conventions, typically a critical time for campaigns.

In the poll release, the school suggested the investigation could have played a role, pointing to other lingering questions about Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness. “While there is no definite link between Clinton’s drop in Florida and the U.S. Justice Department decision not to prosecute her for her handling of emails,” Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown said, “she has lost ground to Trump on questions which measure moral standards and honesty.”

But the Quinnipiac polls are imperfect measures of a post-email investigation race. That’s because, like many of the school’s other polls, they were conducted over an unusually lengthy, 12-day time period: June 30 through July 11.

The national polls conducted since Comey’s statement are mixed: Clinton posted a 3-point lead in this week’s NBC News/SurveyMonkey online tracking poll, down from a 5-point lead the week prior. Morning Consult, another online tracking poll, gave Clinton identical 1-point leads in the days before and after Comey’s statement.

Overall, Clinton leads by 4.3 points in the latest national HuffPost Pollster average, and she has a 3.7-point advantage in the RealClearPolitics average.

The polling in other battleground states since the announcement are also cloudy. Monmouth University surveys conducted after the Comey statement gave Clinton a 4-point lead in Nevada — but showed Trump ahead by two points in Iowa.

In the Quinnipiac polls, there are warning signs for both candidates in all three states. First, despite near-universal name-ID, neither candidate can break out of the low 40s on the ballot test. That points to two very unpopular candidates.

But, in a reversal from earlier surveys, it’s a more acute problem for Clinton. Clinton’s unfavorable ratings (59 percent in Florida, 60 percent in Ohio, 65 percent in Pennsylvania) are higher than Trump’s (54 percent in Florida, 59 percent in Ohio, 57 percent in Pennsylvania) in all three battleground states. And majorities in all three states — which together account for 67 electoral votes, or nearly a quarter of the 270 necessary to win the presidency — have a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton.

Another measure of voters’ ambivalence about Clinton in the Quinnipiac poll: a second ballot-test question, this time adding two third-party candidates to the mix. When voters are asked to consider the general election again, this time given the option of choosing Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Trump’s advantage over Clinton grows in each state. Trump leads on the four-way ballot by five points in Florida, one point in Ohio and six points in Pennsylvania.

There are some eyebrow-raising results from the polls, however. On the two-way ballot test in Florida, Clinton trails Trump despite the Republican winning just 21 percent of non-white voters in the increasingly diverse state.

In Ohio, Clinton wins 90 percent of Democrats, but Trump only captures 77 percent of Republicans, putting him at a significant disadvantage. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by close to 10 percentage points, both candidates are at 82 percent among their own partisans, with Trump only three points ahead among self-identified independents.

Former presidential candidate Herman Cain on Wednesday said he was not surprised by Trump's upswing.

""And that's because Donald Trump's substance is finally starting to cut through some of the media clutter and Hillary Clinton's shallowness is also starting to emerge. She is the free-stuff candidate disguised as wanting to help people, but that's not coming through. But Donald Trump's substance is what's finally starting to emerge,"" Cain told ""Fox & Friends,"" in the same interview in which he praised former 2012 rival Newt Gingrich as the right choice for Trump's vice president.

For Bernie Sanders, Clinton's dismal showing is more proof that his former rival needs to more effectively make her policy-based case against Trump.

""This is not a beauty contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton,"" Sanders said on ABC's ""Good Morning America."" ""This is the fact that the middle class of this country is in trouble. Which candidate has more to say about education, more to say about health care, more to say about climate change, more to say about income and wealth inequality, more to say about a sensible foreign policy? And I think the more the people hear the contrast between the two I think Secretary Clinton's support will grow.""

",REAL
"BY CHRISTINE WILLIAMS 
The West has in effect developed a two-tier legal system for Muslims. 
The article below is about a baby being dumped in the road, with the Muslim migrant perpetrator escaping jail time. This follows another shocking recent report about the rape of a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna by a Muslim refugee from Iraq; his sentence was overturned because the judge accepted, outrageously, that the man thought the little boy consented. 
Our senses have seemingly gone numb to Muslim crime. This is similar to the phenomenon of how Muslim Arab violence against Israel is tolerated, as suggested by Middle East scholar Ephraim Karsh: 
The sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be tolerated. 
Karsh’s comment is based on the unflattering principle of low expectations toward Muslims, which is a costly malady, as Western civilized society is slowly descending into the barbarism seen in Islamic states. 
Less than two decades ago, no one could could have imagined reports such as these: Violent “asylum seekers hurl chairs and throw punches in ‘wild west’ fight that left five in hospital”; a 90-year-old woman gets raped by a Muslim; a 79-year-old woman visiting her sister’s grave also gets raped by a Muslim; up to a million girls in the UK are sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs; and crime has seized Europe, with coverups of Muslim crime in the U.S. as well. 
“No jail time for asylum seeker who dumped baby in road”, by Paul Gillingwater, The Local , October 19, 2016: 
The 27-year-old had been living in an asylum centre in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and had already been given several warnings for being drunk and violent. 
So when he turned up again intoxicated with a beer in his hand and was told to leave, he flew into a furious rage. 
Spotting his baby daughter in a pram nearby, he grabbed her and ran into the busy road, and put her in the middle of a traffic lane. 
The man’s lawyer denied however that he wanted to cause the child any harm, saying he wanted to take a photograph 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
" The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections Donald Trump claims the U.S. presidential election is “rigged,” drawing condemnation from the political/media establishment which accuses him of undermining faith in American democracy. But neither side understands the real problem, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
 "" Consortium News "" - The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise.
We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000).
Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated.
The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.
Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote).
That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners.
Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century.
Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks.
Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners.
However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960.
Nixon’s ‘Treason’
So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam.
The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam.
Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason” — from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking:
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process.
To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”]
The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason” – top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington.
Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”]
In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign.
Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper
In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise?
The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver.
That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate.
By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan.
Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class.
Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration.
In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview:
“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”
Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government.
While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there.
A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt.
Tired of the Story
By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991.
However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages.
Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation.
Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena.
Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape.
Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991.
Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.
At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.”
Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President ,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.]
Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings.
Timid Democrats
But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory.
That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.”
In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue.
“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.
“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naďve in the extreme.
Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent.
Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense .
But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”]
Past as Prologue
Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000.
Indeed, if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000.
Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency.
The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted.
However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.”
So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.”
However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred.
On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case.
Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom.
However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future.
By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,” “ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”]
A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus
Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted.
Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.”
Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers.
But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country” – is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest.
So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia.
Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people.
There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are.
The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
"Thursday marked the close of the two-month window for determining eligibility based on averages of national polls. The results were based on 14 polls including interviews with more than 6,000 potential Republican primary voters. The top 10 candidates overall -- plus Fiorina, whose average support places her within the top 10 in polls conducted after the first debate held August 6 -- have all qualified for the 8:00 p.m. debate next Wednesday in Simi Valley. The remaining four candidates will appear during an earlier debate beginning at 6:00 p.m.

The overall rankings based on an average of all qualifying polls for the 16 candidates who met the requirements for participation are:

The rules for inclusion were amended late last month so that any candidate who made the top 10 in an average of polls conducted after the Fox News/Facebook debate held on August 6 would also be included in the later debate. Fiorina is the only candidate to move from the bottom six to the top 10 in that post-debate average. Here are the averages for qualifying polls conducted after the August 6 debate and released by September 10: Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, who participated in the August 6 debate, did not meet the criteria for inclusion in next Wednesday's debate. Candidates were required to average 1% support in any three polls released during the two-month window. Out of the 14 polls released during that time, Gilmore had 1% support in only one poll. The post-debate polls were also used to determine the order that the candidates would appear on stage. Trump will anchor the center of the stage for the 8:00 p.m. debate, flanked by Carson to his right and Bush to his left. Walker, Fiorina, Kasich and Christie, in that order, will stand to Bush's left, while Cruz, Rubio, Huckabee and Paul will appear to Carson's right. In the earlier debate, Santorum and Pataki will stand to the left and Jindal and Graham will be on the right. Perry was originally tabbed to be center stage before he announced on Friday that he was dropping out of the race. The overall average includes results from a Fox News poll released July 17; a Washington Post/ABC News poll released July 20; a CNN/ORC poll released July 26; a Quinnipiac University poll released July 30; a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released August 2; a Monmouth University poll released August 3; a Fox News poll released August 3; a Bloomberg Politics poll released August 4; a CBS News poll released August 4; a Fox News poll released August 16; a CNN/ORC poll released August 18; a Quinnipiac University poll released August 27; a Monmouth University poll released September 3; and a CNN/ORC poll released September 10",REAL
"STRANGE THING moving up Alaska’s Chena River caught on video   
An employee from the Alaska Bureau of Land Management was checking out the Chena River on Wednesday, but on this day when he was looking at the surface from an aerial view, he saw something never seen before. Labeled as a ""strange thing"", a creature was swimming along the surface of the river but looked like no ordinary creature. Unique Creature Captured On Tape In Alaska 
As of now, it is being called an ice monster, though some have called it a variety of things. Some individuals think it is a huge eel, while others have indicated that it is simply a large fish. 
There has not been a further investigation by the individual and the company who spotted the monster, but they provided a very vague response and indicated that they would leave it up to the public to make the guesses and dictate whatever the creature is. The creature is unique in that it appears to be an incredibly light white color with a wiggly body, much like a fish. It seems to have a fin of some sort. However, it is extremely long. The length is equivalent to an adult rattlesnake. The visual features are vague in that only parts of its body can be seen during the recording. The head can not be seen, but the mid-section and rear areas of the body are slightly shown . 
It is very possible that it could be an eel as eels can reach extremely large lengths, though the average one is not of this length. The idea of it being a pike is a lot less likely because pike can grow to relatively long sizes, there is a very unlikely chance that a pike could possibility grow to the length and pike are not that bright white. Some are white with spots; however, they are not as noticeably white as the recording shows. 
Ultimately, it is still left to the public to guess what this unique creature is. It brings up an interesting question of why the employee nor the company would further look into what the creature was or why no one else has attempted to look more into the creature. Icy cold conditions would make this endeavor a lot more difficult. However there have to be some individuals who are overly curious about what this monster is. 
This article (STRANGE THING moving up Alaska’s Chena River caught on video)  ",FAKE
"Donald Trump has just five days until the Republican National Convention begins in Cleveland, Ohio, and many expect he will name his running mate by the end of this week.

Among the frontrunners right now: Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Pence introduced Trump at an Indianapolis rally Tuesday night and compared him to Ronald Reagan.

""I think he is someone who has connected with everyday Americans like no one since Ronald Reagan,"" Pence said of Trump.

According to CNN, a Trump source says that Pence has already passed a major hurdle, noting that his vetting ""was completely clean and that mattered. No one needs an extra hassle.""

CBN Chief Political Correspondent David Brody says Pence is a ""solid movement conservative"" and that most evangelical leaders would support a Pence pick, despite his ""religious liberty misstep"" in Indiana.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that it is suspending Gingrich's contract since the former speaker is also a vice presidential contender. Gingrich would bring years of Capitol Hill experience to the ticket and has publicly campaigned for Trump for months.

Trump told the Wall Street Journal this week that he's looking for an ""attack dog"" in his running mate. That person would help him fend off attacks from Democrats, the media, fellow Republicans, and even Supreme Court justices.

Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has spoken out against Trump in a series of interviews, recently calling him among other things ""unqualified"" to serve as president.

Trump hit back overnight, tweeting that ""Justice Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot--resign!""

Even Democrats have chided Ginsburg, noting that justices historically have kept out of politics.

On the Democratic campaign trail, Bernie Sanders gave his long-awaited endorsement to Hillary Clinton Tuesday night in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It comes after party platform talks, a process that Sanders wanted to influence.

With the platform including a $15-an-hour minimum wage and tougher restrictions on Wall Street, it looks like he did.

For now, with the Republican convention coming up before the Democratic convention, the focus is on Trump and who will be on the ticket with him in the race for the White House.",REAL
"That’s not to say that his campaign was especially successful. Many observers felt Kasich was pursuing a replay of former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman’s failed 2012 bid for the Republican nomination. Huntsman and Kasich even shared a campaign architect, the heterodox GOP strategist John Weaver. The playbook may have gotten Kasich farther than it did Huntsman, but that still wasn’t enough to win the nomination, or even to come close. (As for Huntsman, he now backs Trump .)

While hardly anyone predicted Trump’s success in the Republican campaign, few expected Kasich would get this far either. In a crowd of young, charismatic GOP figures, Kasich was the odd man out, a somewhat more grizzled figure who had run abortively for president in 2000, and a comparatively moderate figure in a party trending increasingly to the right. Somehow, Kasich managed to hold on to the bitter end, the final challenger to Trump.

The Ohio governor’s exit leaves Donald Trump as the last man standing in the Republican field. Though he’d already assumed the mantle of presumptive nominee with Senator Ted Cruz’s exit Tuesday night —after Trump trounced both of them in the Indiana primary—Kasich’s exit seals the deal. Kasich has been mentioned for weeks as a potential vice-presidential candidate for Trump, who will need to shore up his policy and political credentials ahead of the general election.

John Kasich will end his bid for the presidency Wednesday afternoon in Columbus, according to multiple reports. Kasich had planned to hold a press conference at Dulles Aiport near Washington Wednesday morning, but he never took off—perhaps an apt metaphor—staying home and scheduling a press conference for 5 p.m., where he is expected to make his announcement.

For a time, before Trump’s ascendancy became inevitable, Kasich’s plan seemed plausible. In New Hampshire, the nation’s first primary and second nominating contest, he placed (a distant) second to Trump, and hoped to portray himself as the reasonable alternative to the entertainer. But having placed a huge bet on the Granite State, Kasich had little infrastructure in place for the rest of the campaign, and was a non-entity in the South Carolina primary. By the time the campaign reached his home state, Kasich was effectively out of the running. Ohio turned out to be the only state that he won. He closes out the campaign with fewer delegates than Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out on March 15.

Kasich’s sell to voters was that amid a sea of volatile, unpredictable characters like Trump and wild-eyed radicals like Cruz, he was an old-style true conservative who could also win swing states like Ohio. To the extent that his campaign had a policy theme, it was his advocacy for a balanced-budget amendment—a vague promise, tethered to his work on balancing the national budget while in the U.S. House in the 1990s. (Opinions about just how central Kasich had been in that work differed widely.)

But some of his other policy stances were at odds with much of the Republican Party. As governor, he had circumvented the GOP-led Ohio legislature to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. As though that were not bad enough, he compounded his offense in the eyes of conservatives by justifying his choice by faith. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,” he said. “But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’”

Many of Kasich’s former colleagues viewed his image as a soft, cuddly, friendly politician with skepticism—they remembered a more irritable, angry Kasich—it seemed to take with many voters. The problem was that Republican primary voters didn’t want a sane, rational nominee in 2016. They wanted a Trump.",REAL
"Why Negotiators At Paris Climate Talks Are Tossing The Kyoto Model

Negotiators and heads of state from nearly 200 countries are meeting for the next two weeks near Paris to craft a new treaty to slow global warming.

It's the 21st ""Conference of the Parties"" held by the United Nations to tackle climate change. One treaty emerged, in 1997, after the conference in Kyoto, Japan. That's no longer in effect, and, in fact, the Kyoto Protocol, as it's known, didn't slow down the gradual warming of the planet.

Now governments are ever more desperate to do something to slow warming — so much so that they've thrown out the model set in Kyoto and opted for a new approach for Paris.

Valli Moosa, a former climate negotiator from South Africa, says the main reason Kyoto failed to slow warming lies largely with who wasn't included in the treaty. ""You actually cannot have a meaningful agreement without China and the United States being part of it,"" he says.

The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, so the world's biggest greenhouse-gas emitter didn't have skin in the game. And developing countries, including China and India, were not required to reduce emissions. Now those countries are becoming the biggest sources of greenhouse gases as their economies thrive. China, in fact, is now the world's biggest emitter, and India isn't far behind. Moreover, the Kyoto treaty had U.N. bureaucrats and negotiators setting goals for the participating countries to lower their greenhouse gases. Many countries didn't make their targets; others dropped out. Economies were at stake, and few countries were comfortable marching to a U.N. beat.

So what negotiators are bringing to the table at the Paris talks is an arrangement whereby each country is offering to reduce its own emissions by whatever amount it can manage. And everybody participates, not just developed countries.

Most nations arrive with a reduction target already in hand. What will be difficult is deciding who will pay how much to developing countries to build economies that won't keep producing high emissions.

French negotiator Laurence Tubiana points out that the key to success is convincing governments that those economies can be ""low-carbon,"" and that this won't be a bar to developing wealth. ""How much I'm sacrificing for the sake of emissions reductions, that's no more,"" she says of the message that negotiators are pushing. ""And now ... the Chinese, even the Indians are really coming in. It's about low-carbon economy.""

Previous attempts to replace the Kyoto treaty have failed. This new approach is voluntary, and most of the world has agreed theoretically to participate, which negotiators hope will sweeten things enough to get a deal. Still to be determined, however, is who will pay for this massive revolution in the world's energy economy, and what strings will be attached to their largesse.",REAL
"BNI Store Nov 6 2016 That was then… Sadly, this is now: Quebec seems to have done a 180 and is considering allowing Muslim women to wear the most offensive, most oppressive, and most potentially dangerous (terrorists often dress in burqas to hide bombs) kind of clothing of all – big black garbage bags that cover everything but the eyes. Is Canada trying to become Sweden? All these leftist idiots preaching diversity should go around the world and see what a lack of white people has done for the 3rd world. This is nothing more than white genocide, perpetrated by those in power, who want a population they can easily control and enslave…like Islam.",FAKE
"Election 2016 and the Growing Global Nuclear Threat Playing a Game of Chicken with Nuclear Strategy Email This Page to Someone Your Name Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
Once upon a time, when choosing a new president, a factor for many voters was the perennial question: “Whose finger do you want on the nuclear button?” Of all the responsibilities of America’s top executive, none may be more momentous than deciding whether, and under what circumstances, to activate the “nuclear codes” — the secret alphanumeric messages that would inform missile officers in silos and submarines that the fearful moment had finally arrived to launch their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) toward a foreign adversary, igniting a thermonuclear war. 
Until recently in the post-Cold War world, however, nuclear weapons seemed to drop from sight, and that question along with it. Not any longer. In 2016, the nuclear issue is back big time, thanks both to the rise of Donald Trump ( including various unsettling comments he’s made about nuclear weapons) and actual changes in the global nuclear landscape. 
With passions running high on both sides in this year’s election and rising fears about Donald Trump’s impulsive nature and Hillary Clinton’s hawkish one, it’s hardly surprising that the “nuclear button” question has surfaced repeatedly throughout the campaign. In one of the more pointed exchanges of the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump lacked the mental composure for the job. “A man who can be provoked by a tweet,” she commented , “should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes.” Donald Trump has reciprocated by charging that Clinton is too prone to intervene abroad. “You’re going to end up in World War III over Syria,” he told reporters in Florida last month. 
For most election observers, however, the matter of personal character and temperament has dominated discussions of the nuclear issue, with partisans on each side insisting that the other candidate is temperamentally unfit to exercise control over the nuclear codes. There is, however, a more important reason to worry about whose finger will be on that button this time around: at this very moment, for a variety of reasons, the “nuclear threshold” — the point at which some party to a “conventional” (non-nuclear) conflict chooses to employ atomic weapons — seems to be moving dangerously lower. 
Not so long ago, it was implausible that a major nuclear power — the United States, Russia, or China — would consider using atomic weapons in any imaginable conflict scenario. No longer. Worse yet, this is likely to be our reality for years to come, which means that the next president will face a world in which a nuclear decision-making point might arrive far sooner than anyone would have thought possible just a year or two ago — with potentially catastrophic consequences for us all. 
No less worrisome, the major nuclear powers (and some smaller ones) are all in the process of acquiring new nuclear arms, which could, in theory, push that threshold lower still. These include a variety of cruise missiles and other delivery systems capable of being used in “limited” nuclear wars — atomic conflicts that, in theory at least, could be confined to just a single country or one area of the world (say, Eastern Europe) and so might be even easier for decision-makers to initiate. The next president will have to decide whether the U.S. should actually produce weapons of this type and also what measures should be taken in response to similar decisions by Washington’s likely adversaries. 
Lowering the Nuclear Threshold 
During the dark days of the Cold War, nuclear strategists in the United States and the Soviet Union conjured up elaborate conflict scenarios in which military actions by the two superpowers and their allies might lead from, say, minor skirmishing along the Iron Curtain to full-scale tank combat to, in the end, the use of “battlefield” nuclear weapons, and then city-busting versions of the same to avert defeat. In some of these scenarios, strategists hypothesized about wielding “tactical” or battlefield weaponry — nukes powerful enough to wipe out a major tank formation, but not Paris or Moscow — and claimed that it would be possible to contain atomic warfare at such a devastating but still sub-apocalyptic level. (Henry Kissinger, for instance, made his reputation by preaching this lunatic doctrine in his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy .) Eventually, leaders on both sides concluded that the only feasible role for their atomic arsenals was to act as deterrents to the use of such weaponry by the other side. This was, of course, the concept of “ mutually assured destruction ,” or — in one of the most classically apt acronyms of all times: MAD. It would, in the end, form the basis for all subsequent arms control agreements between the two superpowers. 
Anxiety over the escalatory potential of tactical nuclear weapons peaked in the 1970s when the Soviet Union began deploying the SS-20 intermediate-range ballistic missile (capable of striking cities in Europe, but not the U.S.) and Washington responded with plans to deploy nuclear-armed, ground-launched cruise missiles and the Pershing-II ballistic missile in Europe. The announcement of such plans provoked massive antinuclear demonstrations across Europe and the United States. On December 8, 1987, at a time when worries had been growing about how a nuclear conflagration in Europe might trigger an all-out nuclear exchange between the superpowers, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 
That historic agreement — the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear delivery systems — banned the deployment of ground-based cruise or ballistic missiles with a range of 500 and 5,500 kilometers and required the destruction of all those then in existence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation inherited the USSR’s treaty obligations and pledged to uphold the INF along with other U.S.-Soviet arms control agreements. In the view of most observers, the prospect of a nuclear war between the two countries practically vanished as both sides made deep cuts in their atomic stockpiles in accordance with already existing accords and then signed others, including the New START , the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 2010. 
Today, however, this picture has changed dramatically. The Obama administration has concluded that Russia has violated the INF treaty by testing a ground-launched cruise missile of prohibited range, and there is reason to believe that, in the not-too-distant future, Moscow might abandon that treaty altogether. Even more troubling, Russia has adopted a military doctrine that favors the early use of nuclear weapons if it faces defeat in a conventional war, and NATO is considering comparable measures in response. The nuclear threshold, in other words, is dropping rapidly. 
Much of this is due, it seems, to Russian fears about its military inferiority vis-à-vis the West. In the chaotic years following the collapse of the USSR, Russian military spending plummeted and the size and quality of its forces diminished accordingly. In an effort to restore Russia’s combat capabilities, President Vladimir Putin launched a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar expansion and modernization program. The fruits of this effort were apparent in the Crimea and Ukraine in 2014, when Russian forces, however disguised, demonstrated better fighting skills and wielded better weaponry than in the Chechnya wars a decade earlier. Even Russian analysts acknowledge, however, that their military in its current state would be no match for American and NATO forces in a head-on encounter, given the West’s superior array of conventional weaponry. To fill the breach, Russian strategic doctrine now calls for the early use of nuclear weapons to offset an enemy’s superior conventional forces. 
To put this in perspective, Russian leaders ardently believe that they are the victims of a U.S.-led drive by NATO to encircle their country and diminish its international influence. They point, in particular, to the build-up of NATO forces in the Baltic countries, involving the semi-permanent deployment of combat battalions in what was once the territory of the Soviet Union, and in apparent violation of promises made to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not do so. As a result, Russia has been bolstering its defenses in areas bordering Ukraine and the Baltic states, and training its troops for a possible clash with the NATO forces stationed there. 
This is where the nuclear threshold enters the picture. Fearing that it might be defeated in a future clash, its military strategists have called for the early use of tactical nuclear weapons, some of which no doubt would violate the INF Treaty, in order to decimate NATO forces and compel them to quit fighting. Paradoxically, in Russia, this is labeled a “ de-escalation ” strategy, as resorting to strategic nuclear attacks on the U.S. under such circumstances would inevitably result in Russia’s annihilation. On the other hand, a limited nuclear strike (so the reasoning goes) could potentially achieve success on the battlefield without igniting all-out atomic war. As Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace explains, this strategy assumes that such supposedly “limited” nuclear strikes “will have a sobering effect on the enemy, which will then cease and desist.” 
To what degree tactical nuclear weapons have been incorporated into Moscow’s official military doctrine remains unknown, given the degree of secrecy surrounding such matters. It is apparent, however, that the Russians have been developing the means with which to conduct such “limited” strikes. Of greatest concern to Western analysts in this regard is their deployment of the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile, a modern version of the infamous Soviet-era “Scud” missile (used by Saddam Hussein’s forces during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991). Said to have a range of 500 kilometers (just within the INF limit), the Iskander can carry either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. As a result, a targeted country or a targeted military could never be sure which type it might be facing (and might simply assume the worst). Adding to such worries, the Russians have deployed the Iskander in Kaliningrad, a tiny chunk of Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania that just happens to put it within range of many western European cities. 
In response, NATO strategists have discussed lowering the nuclear threshold themselves, arguing — ominously enough — that the Russians will only be fully dissuaded from employing their limited-nuclear-war strategy if they know that NATO has a robust capacity to do the same. At the very least, what’s needed, some of them claim , is a more frequent inclusion of nuclear-capable or dual-use aircraft in exercises on Russia’s frontiers to “signal” NATO’s willingness to resort to limited nuclear strikes, too. Again, such moves are not yet official NATO strategy, but it’s clear that senior officials are weighing them seriously. 
Just how all of this might play out in a European crisis is, of course, unknown, but both sides in an increasingly edgy standoff are coming to accept that nuclear weapons might have a future military role, which is, of course, a recipe for almost unimaginable escalation and disaster of an apocalyptic sort. This danger is likely to become more pronounced in the years ahead because both Washington and Moscow seem remarkably intent on developing and deploying new nuclear weapons designed with just such needs in mind. 
The New Nuclear Armaments 
Both countries are already in the midst of ambitious and extremely costly efforts to “ modernize ” their nuclear arsenals. Of all the weapons now being developed, the two generating the most anxiety in terms of that nuclear threshold are a new Russian ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) and an advanced U.S. air-launched cruise missile (ALCM). Unlike ballistic missiles, which exit the Earth’s atmosphere before returning to strike their targets, such cruise missiles remain within the atmosphere throughout their flight. 
American officials claim that the Russian GLCM, reportedly now being deployed, is of a type outlawed by the INF Treaty. Without providing specifics, the State Department indicated in a 2014 memo that it had “a range capability of 500 km [kilometers] to 5,500 km,” which would indeed put it in violation of that treaty by allowing Russian combat forces to launch nuclear warheads against cities throughout Europe and the Middle East in a “limited” nuclear war. 
The GLCM is likely to prove one of the most vexing foreign policy issues the next president will face. So far, the White House has been reluctant to press Moscow too hard, fearing that the Russians might respond by exiting the INF Treaty altogether and so eliminate remaining constraints on its missile program. But many in Congress and among Washington’s foreign policy elite are eager to see the next occupant of the Oval Office take a tougher stance if the Russians don’t halt deployment of the missile, threatening Moscow with more severe economic sanctions or moving toward countermeasures like the deployment of enhanced anti-missile systems in Europe. The Russians would, in turn, undoubtedly perceive such moves as threats to their strategic deterrent forces and so an invitation for further weapons acquisitions, setting off a fresh round in the long-dormant Cold War nuclear arms race. 
On the American side, the weapon of immediate concern is a new version of the AGM-86B air-launched cruise missile, usually carried by B-52 bombers. Also known as the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO), it is, like the Iskander-M, expected to be deployed in both nuclear and conventional versions, leaving those on the potential receiving end unsure what might be heading their way. In other words, as with the Iskander-M, the intended target might assume the worst in a crisis, leading to the early use of nuclear weapons. Put another way, such missiles make for twitchy trigger fingers and are likely to lead to a heightened risk of nuclear war, which, once started, might in turn take Washington and Moscow right up the escalatory ladder to a planetary holocaust. 
No wonder former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry called on President Obama to cancel the ALCM program in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. “Because they… come in both nuclear and conventional variants,” he wrote, “cruise missiles are a uniquely destabilizing type of weapon.” And this issue is going to fall directly into the lap of the next president. 
The New Nuclear Era 
Whoever is elected on November 8th, we are evidently all headed into a world in which Trumpian-style itchy trigger fingers could be the norm. It already looks like both Moscow and Washington will contribute significantly to this development — and they may not be alone. In response to Russian and American moves in the nuclear arena, China is reported to be developing a “ hypersonic glide vehicle ,” a new type of nuclear warhead better able to evade anti-missile defenses — something that, at a moment of heightened crisis, might make a nuclear first strike seem more attractive to Washington. And don’t forget Pakistan, which is developing its own short-range “tactical” nuclear missiles, increasing the risk of the quick escalation of any future Indo-Pakistani confrontation to a nuclear exchange. (To put such “regional” dangers in perspective, a local nuclear war in South Asia could cause a global nuclear winter and, according to one study , possibly kill a billion people worldwide, thanks to crop failures and the like.) 
And don’t forget North Korea, which is now testing a nuclear-armed ICBM, the Musudan, intended to strike the Western United States. That prompted a controversial decision in Washington to deploy THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile batteries in South Korea (something China bitterly opposes), as well as the consideration of other countermeasures, including undoubtedly scenarios involving first strikes against the North Koreans. 
It’s clear that we’re on the threshold of a new nuclear era: a time when the actual use of atomic weapons is being accorded greater plausibility by military and political leaders globally, while war plans are being revised to allow the use of such weapons at an earlier stage in future armed clashes. 
As a result, the next president will have to grapple with nuclear weapons issues — and possible nuclear crises — in a way unknown since the Cold War era. Above all else, this will require both a cool head and a sufficient command of nuclear matters to navigate competing pressures from allies, the military, politicians, pundits, and the foreign policy establishment without precipitating a nuclear conflagration. On the face of it, that should disqualify Donald Trump. When questioned on nuclear issues in the first debate, he exhibited a striking ignorance of the most basic aspects of nuclear policy. But even Hillary Clinton, for all her experience as secretary of state, is likely to have a hard time grappling with the pressures and dangers that are likely to arise in the years ahead, especially given that her inclination is to toughen U.S. policy toward Russia. 
In other words, whoever enters the Oval Office, it may be time for the rest of us to take up those antinuclear signs long left to molder in closets and memories, and put some political pressure on leaders globally to avoid strategies and weapons that would make human life on this planet so much more precarious than it already is. 
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular , is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left . A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation . Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1. (Reprinted from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)",FAKE
"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
"Officials Concede Plan Could Change, as Could Definition of 'Mosul' by Jason Ditz, November 03, 2016 Share This 
The US has made much of its troops involved in the Mosul invasion not being “combat” troops, even though one of the troops was killed in a roadside bombing while embedded with Kurdish combat troops. As the troops near Mosul, however, Pentagon spokesman Col. John Dorrian insists there are no plans so far for troops to enter Mosul. 
Col. Dorrian insisted that Iraq’s government has said “it’s just gonna be their forces.” He did, however, say he didn’t want to say US troops would “never” be involved, insisting that the plans could change at any time. 
Other officials, quoted anonymously by Reuters , suggested that the definition of Mosul could also change, saying that suburbs and parts of the city’s outskirts could easily be redefined as not Mosul, allowing US troops to enter those areas without having to technically “enter Mosul.” 
The Obama Administration initially promised “no boots on the ground” in Iraq, but with some 6,000 such troops in Iraq, they’ve seen been trying desperately to claim they are in “non-combat” roles. This too has been difficult to sell, with a number of those troops embedded in combat units. Those troops are nominally “advisers,” but are regularly being put into combat areas. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Russian pianist Denis Matsuev terrorized in US for supporting Putin   AP photo The US tour of outstanding Russian pianist Denis Matsuev was marred with attacks from rabid members of anti-Russian Signerbusters group.The group organized a picket at Carnegie Hall prior to the concert of Denis Matsuev and accused the musician of supporting ""Putin's criminal regime."" Later, Arts Against Aggression group in Boston organized a Halloween-style installation called ""Putin & Matsuev House of Horror s"" near the building of a local concert hall. According to the organizers of the above-mentioned acts, US citizens should ask themselves whether it is appropriate to continue cooperation with the Russian artists, who support the policies of President Vladimir Putin.Denis Matsuev runs many charitable programs, conducts youth music competitions and festivals for youth and children, such as ""Stars on Baikal"" and ""Crescendo.""In December 2011, Matsuev became an honorary professor at the Moscow State University. He headed the Interregional Charitable Foundation ""New Names,"" the purpose of which is to provide education to talented children.Denis Matsuev is also the art director of the Foundation named after Sergei Rachmaninoff. Matsuev appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a request to buy back Rachmaninoff's Swiss estate ""Senart"" to establish the International Cultural Centre at the property. In February 2006, the pianist became a member of the Council for Culture and Arts under the Russian President.Noteworthy, it is not the first time, when Russian musicians face such obstruction due to the political situation in the world. After the concert of the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre in Palmyra, some pundits found the performance ""rather weak"". Thus, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called the concert in Palmyra a tasteless and cynical idea.In general, however, the majority of Western officials supported the cultural campaign of the prominent and world-famous Moscow orchestra. United States Department of State Mark Toner said, in particular, that he would never condemn such a wonderful act.  ",FAKE
"Two of the Republican Party’s top White House hopefuls clashed sharply Friday over President Obama’s new Cuba policy, evidence of a growing GOP rift over foreign affairs that could shape the party’s 2016 presidential primaries.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), who backs Obama’s move to normalize relations with communist Cuba, accused Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) of being an “isolationist” with his hard-line opposition to opening up trade and diplomatic engagement with the island nation. Paul suggested that Rubio “wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat.”

Paul’s comments came after Rubio — the son of Cuban exiles who has stepped forward as a leading voice of resistance to Obama’s policy — told Fox News that Paul had “no idea what he’s talking about” when it comes to Cuba.

The feud is the loudest public dispute so far between potential GOP 2016 candidates and lays bare the divergent world views of traditional hawks — including Rubio and past Republican presidents and nominees — and the emerging, younger libertarian wing represented by Paul.

For decades, Rubio’s position has been the GOP’s natural default. But Paul is testing that convention.

“Are we still cold warriors or are we entering a brave new world in diplomacy?” Republican strategist John Feehery said. “Rubio’s perspective is we have Cuba, we have North Korea, we need a bold, internationalist, America-led world that fights the bad guys. Rand Paul is taking his father’s position to a new level, which is constructive engagement, but America isn’t really the policeman of the world.”

Hawkish Republicans have long called Paul’s foreign policy “isolationist,” a label he rejects. In this week’s Cuba debate, Paul applied the label to Rubio.

Paul’s comments were unusually personal, beginning with a series of tweets aimed at Rubio followed by a two-paragraph message on his Facebook page. “Senator Rubio is acting like an isolationist” and “does not speak for the majority of Cuban-Americans,” he wrote.

Paul followed up with an op-ed on Time’s Web site Friday afternoon in which he wrote that he grew up learning to despise communism but over time concluded that “a policy of isolationism against Cuba is misplaced and hasn’t worked.” He noted that public opinion has shifted in favor of rapprochement — especially among young people, including young Cuban Americans — and that U.S. businesses would benefit by being able to sell their goods in Cuba.

“Communism can’t survive the captivating allure of capitalism,” Paul wrote. “Let’s overwhelm the Castro regime with iPhones, iPads, American cars, and American ingenuity.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who traveled to Cuba this week with the U.S. entourage to secure contractor Alan Gross’s release, shared Paul’s sentiments. Flake said that he supported Obama’s decision to normalize relations and that after a five-decade embargo, it was time “to try something different.”

Rubio responded to Paul’s comments Friday evening, telling conservative radio host Mark Levin, “I think it’s unfortunate that Rand has decided to adopt Barack Obama’s foreign policy on this matter.”

For both Paul and Rubio, there are short-term political benefits to the tussle. With potential donors and other influential Republicans deciding between roughly a dozen presidential hopefuls, the pair are generating media attention and staking out ground on a high-profile policy issue.

The spat was also the latest example of Paul’s combative tendencies. He has been the most aggressive GOP presidential contender in taking on Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former secretary of state and likely Democratic candidate, and showed Friday that he will not hesitate to throw punches at fellow Republicans as well.

Ana Navarro, a Miami-based Republican strategist close to Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, said it was an example of the “silly season.”

“There are some issues, like eye surgery and Kentucky bourbon, Paul knows something about,” she said of the ophthalmologist turned lawmaker. “But to try to outdo Rubio on Cuba policy — and to do it by trolling him on Twitter in 140-character spurts — is frankly not productive, mature or senatorial.”

Paul is trying to chart a new course for Republicans on foreign policy and areas such as race relations, working with Democrats on legislation to address drug sentencing guidelines.

“Paul is going to stretch the limits and try to grow the party in directions Republicans aren’t used to,” said Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary to George W. Bush. “I think the only upside he’ll have is with young people. Outside of that, I think it’s going to be tough going for him. . . . The history of the party is much more interventionist, muscular, strong, Ronald Reagan foreign policy.”

Paul’s aides said the senator considers Cuba policy an economic and diplomatic issue and not a partisan one.

But GOP primary voters may see it differently. “There’s a certain willingness among conservatives to reconsider our Cuba policy, but the fact that it’s been negotiated by Obama — whom we have no confidence or trust in — makes it suspect,” said Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative leader. “If this had been done by a trustworthy, conservative Republican, it would have been different.”

Rubio, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has worked to distinguish himself as a leading voice on international affairs. Almost immediately after Wednesday’s Cuba announcement, Rubio spoke out aggressively and in personal terms. Raised in Miami by parents who fled Cuba in the 1950s, Rubio grew up surrounded by other Cuban American families and now represents them in Washington.

“It is just another concession to a tyranny by the Obama administration rather than a defense of every universal and inalienable right that our country was founded on and stands for,” Rubio told reporters on Capitol Hill.

Most 2016 GOP hopefuls — including Bush, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — issued statements similar to Rubio’s. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has not spoken specifically on Cuba but generally shares Rubio’s more hawkish worldview.

William Kristol, a prominent neoconservative and editor of the Weekly Standard, noted that most of the potential candidates, as well as the party’s congressional leaders, are “all in the same neighborhood” on foreign policy.

“Rand Paul is a lonely gadfly,” he said. “Rand Paul speaks for a genuine sentiment that’s always been in the Republican Party, but maybe it’s 10 percent? 15 percent? 20 percent? I don’t think he’s going to be a serious competitor for guiding Republican foreign policy.”",REAL
"Former GOP Representative Calls For Armed Insurrection (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 27, 2016 
Former Representative Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) has called for armed insurrection if Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wins the election. Walsh: ‘I’m Grabbing My Musket’ 
Joe Walsh is a stain on the history of my little part of the country. He served for a blessedly short time before being demolished by Representative Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) in the 2012 election, but he still has ardent supporters around here. He’s relatively well-known for his outrageous tweets, but this one, posted on October 26, made some real waves: On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
You in? 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
Wow. 
I will grant that a musket is not going to do you much good these days. So perhaps, PERHAPS, it was a metaphor. 
But what does this say to the droves of Trump supporters, armed with much more than a musket, who believe the election will be stolen from their anointed one? 
Walsh, facing both harsh criticism and hilarious jabs on Twitter for his comment, did not back down: I'm serious. I don't think a musket would do much good these days, but it's time for civil disobedience on the right. https://t.co/ThJPEbALWZ 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
Yahoo! News interviewed Walsh about the comment, and he said : “I’m not talking about inciting violence. I’m saying, ‘If Trump loses, man, game on, grab your musket. We’re going to protest. We’re going to boycott. We’re going to picket. We’re going to march on Washington. We’re going to stop paying taxes. We’re going to practice civil disobedience.’ Whatever it takes.” 
This has become the standard operating procedure of Republicans, particularly Trump-supporting Republicans. Make veiled threats and then walk them back (“Aww, c’mon, I was kidding! Can’t you guys take a joke?”), but make sure the knuckle-draggers who support them get wind of it. It’s disgusting. 
This morning, Walsh tweeted: I told Thomas Jefferson gov forced a baker out of biz for defending her religious beliefs. 
""Can't happen here"" he said. ""Grab your musket!"" 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 27, 2016 
While this tweet is asinine on so many levels, it also suggests that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically in his initial tweet. After all, in Jefferson’s time, muskets were one of the weapons of choice. Walsh Is A Disgrace 
Language like this has no place in political discourse. If Walsh were nothing more than the radio host he currently is, it would be disgusting. Given that he used to be a representative in the United States Congress, it is downright abhorrent. 
It’s also not the first time Walsh has suggested violence. 
After the shooting of several police officers in Dallas this summer, Walsh tweeted — and later deleted — the following: Screenshot via Chicago Tribune 
So it’s really not out of the question to think he’s actually looking to incite violence with his “grabbing my musket” comment. 
I’m just happy his Congressional office is no longer sullying the quaint town square. 
Watch Don Lemon take Walsh to task for his Dallas tweet here: 
Featured image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald 
Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect",FAKE
"The former Florida governor, appearing at a business roundtable here, also called for a strategy to ""take out"" ISIS but did not go into specifics. He mostly argued that the war started during his brother's administration helped create stability in Iraq and since been unraveled because of Obama's policies.

""The focus ought to be on knowing what you know now, Mr. President, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?"" said Bush, who's expected to announce his presidential bid in the coming months.

In December 2011, the United States withdrew its final combat troops from Iraq, bringing an end to the nearly decade-long conflict that started under George W. Bush. The Obama administration asked for more troops to remain on the ground, but negotiations with the Iraqi government did not ensure that U.S. military personnel would be granted immunity.

Jeb Bush argued that Obama ""could have kept the troops in and he could have had an agreement,"" adding ""the United States had enough influence to be able to deal with the immunity issue.""

""He made the decision to get out. I don't begrudge him that. It was a decision made based on a campaign promise,"" he told reporters in New Hampshire. ""It wasn't based on conditions in Iraq at the time and I think we're paying a price for it."" Critics at the time warned that extremist elements would grow more powerful without a U.S. presence, and now Republican presidential contenders are pointing to the rise of ISIS as proof that the United States should have pushed harder to stay in Iraq. In his remarks at the business roundtable -- an event organized by New Hampshire activist Renee Plummer -- Bush defended his brother's leadership during the Iraq war. ""ISIS didn't exist when my brother was President. Al Qaeda in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was President,"" he said. ""There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the President could've built on and it would've not allowed ISIS."" He called for a plan to ""take out ISIS"" with help from other countries, saying there is currently ""no strategic imperative"" to restore stability in Iraq. Asked later by reporters what that strategy should be and whether it should include combat troops in the area, Bush said he would rely on advice from military advisers. ""We have ground troops in Iraq. I would take the best advice that you could get from the military. Make the decisions based on conditions on the ground, not for some political purpose,"" he said. ""Whether we need more than 3,000 -- which is what we have now -- I would base that on what the military advisers say."" Panel: Bush should have been prepared for Iraq question Panel: Bush should have been prepared for Iraq question Bush struggled to answer questions last week about whether he would have gone into Iraq knowing what's known now about faulty intelligence that initially spurred military action. After multiple days of unclear answers, he ultimately said he would not have invaded in hindsight. RELATED: Can Jeb Bush escape his brother's legacy on Iraq? His difficulty in answering the question -- one that pits his loyalty to his brother against political calculation -- created a narrative that drew criticism from other White House hopefuls and sparked questions of whether Bush was ready for prime time. At the roundtable in Wednesday, however, Bush was met with encouragement from voters. When one man called Bush's family an ""asset,"" the room broke out into applause. As he's done at every event, Bush maintained that he loved his family, and he sought to assure the audience that he's gotten through last week's storm. ""It got bumpy, but all is well now,"" he said. ""The ship is stable."" Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush waves as he takes the stage as he formally announces he is joining the race for president with a speech June 15, 2015, at Miami Dade College in Miami. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush shakes hands with attendees after speaking at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference on February 27 in National Harbor, Maryland. Bush takes a selfie with a guest at a luncheon hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on February 18 in Chicago. Bush delivered his first major foreign policy speech at the event. Bush hands out items for Holiday Food Baskets to those in need outside the Little Havana offices of CAMACOL, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce on December 17 in Miami. Bush waves to the audience at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 30, 2012, on the final day of the Republican National Convention. Bush (left) and wife Columba Bush attend the 2012 Lincoln Center Institute Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on March 7, 2012, in New York City. President Barack Obama (left) speaks about Bush (center) while visiting Miami Central Senior High School on March 4, 2011 in Miami, Florida. The visit focused on education. Bush (left) speaks with Brazilian President in charge Jose Alancar during a meeting at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, April 17, 2007. Bush was in Brazil to speak about sugar and ethanol business. Then-Texas Governor Rick Perry (center) testifies as Bush (right) and then-Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (left) listen during a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Capitol Hill October 19, 2005. Bush gives a thumbs up signal from his car as he leaves a local polling station after casting his vote in Coral Gables, Florida, November 5, 2002. Bush walks out of the West Wing after meeting with his brother, then-President George W. Bush, at the White House January 9, 2002. Governor Bush participated in the signing ceremony of the Everglades Protection Agreement. Then-Mexican President Vincente Fox (left) and Bush hold a press conference September 7, 2001, in Miami. Fox visited Florida to attend the Americas Conference and deliver a speech to speak about issues such as immigration. Then-President George W. Bush (right) is greeted by Jeb Bush on March 21, 2001, at Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida. President Bush was in Orlando to attend the American College of Cardiology Annual Convention. Bush speaks during a press conference at the Carandolet Government Palace in Quito, January 18, 2006. Bush and a businessmen delegation were in a two-day visit to talk about a free trade agreement. Bush speaks to reporters after meeting with the Florida State Cabinet at the Florida State Capitol Building November 16, 2000, in Tallahassee, Florida. Then-President George W. Bush (left) and Jeb Bush (right), raise their arms onstage following a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds, October 25, 2000, in Brandon, Florida. Jeb Bush (left) and then-President George W. Bush stand with their arms around each other's shoulders at a rally in Miami, Florida, September 22, 2000. Then-President George W. Bush (right) and Jeb Bush go through the line for strawberries during a stop at the Stawberry Festival March 12, 2000 in Plant City, Florida. The Bush family, (left to right) former U.S. President George W., former Florida Governor Jeb, former President George H.W. and his wife Barbara, watch play during the Foursomes matches September 25, 1999 at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts the site of the 33rd Ryder Cup Matches. Former President George H.W. Bush (second left), his wife Barbara Bush (left), their son Jeb Bush (center), then-first lady Hillary Clinton (second right), and former then-President Bill Clinton (right) look up to see the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team November 6, 1997 at the conclusion of the dedication ceremony of the George Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Portrait of the Bush family in front of their Kennebunkport, Maine house August 24, 1986. Pictured, back row: Margaret holding daughter Marshall, Marvin Bush, Bill LeBlond. Pictured, front row: Neil Bush holding son Pierce, Sharon, George W. Bush holding daughter Barbara, Laura Bush holding daughter Jenna, Barbara Bush, George Bush, Sam LeBlond, Doro Bush Lebond, George P. (Jeb's son), Jeb Bush holding son Jebby, Columba Bush and Noelle Bush.",REAL
"posted by Eddie Below is a great example of how police harass the innocent. C.J. and Matt were simply walking, at night. They had committed no crime and presented no threat to another’s property or person when a police officer decided to detain them. 
This police officer had no reasonable suspicion to stop these guys so he says they were loitering. Apparently walking through a public space at night, is now loitering. After stopping them, the officer claims that not answering questions is ‘suspicious activity.’ Apparently the 5th Amendment to the Constitution is ‘suspicious’ to this cop. Some people will say that he should have consented and answered the questions this cop was asking. However they have probably never heard this lecture, by officer George Bruch of the Virginia Beach Police Department, explaining why you should ‘never, never, never, ever talk to the police, ever.’ The police will all to often use your own words to imply that a crime has been committed, even if you are innocent. Around the 4:30 mark in the video, C.J. makes this officer look pretty silly. It was good that C.J. got this jab in early as the night had apparently just started for these cops. Tax payer money well spent.",FAKE
"A member of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen said Friday that the group directed the massacre earlier this week at a Paris magazine, as the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning to citizens, saying they faced an increased risk of reprisals.

Earlier Friday, near simultaneous raids by French police killed the two Islamist brothers behind the attack and another terrorist. The raids, conducted at locations 25 miles apart, took out Cherif and Said Kouachi and a suspect in a policewoman's killing who had seized hostages at a Paris grocery on the brothers' behalf, but also left four hostages dead, according to authorities and reports from the scene.

The Al Qaeda member on Friday provided a statement in English to The Associated Press saying ""the leadership of AQAP directed the operations and they have chosen their target carefully.""

There was no independent confirmation of the report, and U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials say it is too early to conclude who is responsible for the massacre on Wednesday that left 12 dead.

However, Cherif Kouachi told a French TV station before Friday's raid at an industrial park that he was sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen and had been financed by the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011.

The State Department's warning says attacks against Americans are becoming increasingly prevalent. It also cites an increased risk of reprisals against U.S. and Western targets for the U.S.-led intervention against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, and comes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Australia and Canada, as well as the Paris massacre.

If confirmed, the attack would be the first time Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen has successfully carried out an operation in the West after at least two earlier attempts.

The Al Qaeda member said the attack was in line with warnings from the late Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden to the West about ""the consequences of the persistence in the blasphemy against Muslim sanctities,"" adding that it was ""revenge for the honor"" of Islam's Prophet Muhammad, which the satirical Charlie Hebdo had occasionally lampooned.

The lightning-quick strikes earlier Friday ended two tense, hours-long standoffs, one at a printing plant north of the city and the other at a kosher supermarket on Paris' east side, where four hostages were killed, as many as 15 were freed. A hostage held north of the city by the brothers, who killed 12 in a commando-style attack at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, was reportedly freed. The fast-moving developments, signaled by explosions and gunfire at a printing plant in Dammartin-en-Goele, followed by similar sounds at Hypercacher (Hyper Kosher), a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris, brought to a climax a three-day terror ordeal and manhunt involving nearly 90,000 police and military personnel.

The Kouachi brothers, the radicalized French-born slackers whose attack on Charlie Hebdo left two police officers among the dozen dead, were both killed in the first raid. The brothers, 32 and 34, respectively, are believed to have ties to Al Qaeda in Yemen, and military experts who viewed footage of their bloody, late-morning raid on Wednesday said they appeared to be well-trained terrorists. Charlie Hebdo had long angered Muslim radicals with its penchant for publishing cartoon images of Prophet Muhammed.

In Paris, police said Amedy Coulibaly, who is believed to have know the brothers and was suspected of killing Paris Police Officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe Thursday, as she attended to a routine traffic accident in the city, was killed in a raid moments later, ending his supermarket siege. Police had identified him and his longtime girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, as suspects in the police killing, but her whereabouts were not immediately known. Police were searching for another possible suspect who may have escaped the grocery store siege, but it was not clear if that person was Boumeddiene.

At the kosher grocery near the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of the capital, the gunman burst in shooting just a few hours before the Jewish Sabbath began, declaring ""You know who I am,"" an official recounted.

The attack came before sundown when the store would have been crowded with shoppers, and President Francois Hollande called it ""a terrifying anti-Semitic act.""

Coulibaly killed the four people in the market shortly after entering, Molins said.

Several people wounded in the grocery store were able to flee and get medical care, the official said.

Coulibaly, 33, and Cherif Kouachi were committed followers of convicted terror kingpin Djamel Beghal, according to Le Monde.

Earlier Friday, a French security official told the AP that shots were fired as the brothers stole a car in the town of Montagny Sainte Felicite in the early morning hours. French officials told Fox News that the suspects threw the car's driver out at the side of the road. The driver, who recognized the suspects, then called police and alerted them to the suspects' whereabouts.

On Thursday, U.S. government sources confirmed that Said Kouachi, 34, had traveled to Yemen in 2011 and had direct contact with an Al Qaeda training camp. The other brother, 32-year-old Cherif, had been convicted in France of terrorism charges in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq. The sources also confirmed that both brothers, who had been orphaned as youngsters and spent years committing petty crimes and doing menial jobs, were on a U.S. no-fly list.

Fox News was told the investigators have made it a priority to determine whether he had contact with Al Qaeda in Yemen's leadership, including a bomb maker and a former Guantanamo Bay detainee.

Hollande called for tolerance after the country's worst terrorist attack since 1961, in the middle of the conflict over Algerian independence from France.

""France has been struck directly in the heart of its capital, in a place where the spirit of liberty -- and thus of resistance -- breathed freely,"" Hollande said.

Charlie Hebdo had long drawn threats for its depictions of Islam, although it also satirized other religions and political figures. The weekly paper had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, and a sketch of Islamic State's leader was the last tweet sent out by the irreverent newspaper, minutes before the attack. Nothing has been tweeted since.

Eight journalists, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed in the attack.

Charlie Hebdo planned a special edition next week, produced in the offices of another paper. Editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, who was among those slain, ""symbolized secularism ... the combat against fundamentalism,"" his companion, Jeannette Bougrab, said on BFM-TV.

""He was ready to die for his ideas,"" she said.

Authorities around Europe have warned of the threat posed by the return of Western jihadis trained in warfare. France counts at least 1,200 citizens in the war zone in Syria -- headed there, returned or dead. Both the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda have threatened France -- home to Western Europe's largest Muslim population.

The French suspect in a deadly 2014 attack on a Jewish museum in Belgium had returned from fighting with extremists in Syria; and the man who rampaged in southern France in 2012, killing three soldiers and four people at a Jewish school, received paramilitary training in Pakistan.

Fox News' Greg Palkot, Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Admittedly, the question is speculative, but not without merit.
During the debates and in the heated final days of the campaign, Donald Trump vowed to assign a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary and send her to jail.

It was easily the highlight of the entire campaign:
But when you talk about apology, I think the one that you should really be apologizing for and the thing that you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted, and that you acid washed, and then the two boxes of e-mails and other things last week that were taken from an office and are now missing.
And I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor. 
When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. In my opinion, the people that have been long-term workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this, where e-mails — and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.
So we’re going to get a special prosecutor, and we’re going to look into it, because you know what? People have been — their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you’ve done. And it’s a disgrace. And honestly, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. ( source )
But, now that victory has set in, and the election is officially over, can anybody expect that he will actually do it?
Certainly, we must wait until he is inaugurated and has a chance to show what kind of president he will be.
However, Trump’s victory speech gives good reason to doubt the prospects for his actually assigning a “special prosecutor” against Hillary Clinton.
He opened the speech with praise for Clinton and a call for unity – certainly a different chord for now-president-elect Trump:
TRUMP: I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton. (APPLAUSE) She congratulated us — it’s about us — on our victory, and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she — she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. 
(APPLAUSE) I mean that very sincerely. (APPLAUSE)
Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division; have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.

Certainly, there is something to be said for being a gracious winner – and for Trump, proving to his critics that he won’t be their worst nightmare.
But what really accounts for the shift in tone?
Late in the evening, John Podesta – top aide to Hillary, thoroughly implicated in wickedness by Wikileaks – announced, in essence, that the campaign would not concede, that they would wait until every last vote was counted.
Clearly, Team Hillary was fully prepared to challenge a recount, to take it to court in every venue possible. Al Gore did so (and with good cause), and she could too.
Hillary and her campaign had every opportunity to deny Trump easy victory, even when there was no real chance left for her.
And yet, shortly after Podesta’s announcement, Trump gave his victory speech, noting a call from Hillary Clinton herself in which she conceded – but on what terms?
Though it is admittedly speculative – can anyone else claim to know what was said during that call? – it is entirely possible that the primary demand for her swift admission of defeat was that any and all possibility of prosecution and investigation for her sordid and illegal activities be taken off the table.
Did Hillary make THAT call? Did Trump essentially grant her immunity from his own special court in exchange for the win he otherwise already earned?
Only time will tell.
But it STILL seems that Hillary knows something that we all do not – because she has said all along that it is not going to happen… that there isn’t even the slightest chance:
Hillary Clinton: Criminal Indictment “Not Going to Happen”

HILLARY CLINTON INDICTMENT FURY – Hillary Claims Indictment “Not Gonna Happen”

So, is she right about that?
What will Trump do in the first 100 days?
Don’t be surprised if campaign rhetoric ends up being just all talk. For Trump supporters who were, above all, opposing Hillary Clinton and urging her being prosecuted and held accountable – don’t hold your breath.
Read more: 
Trump Calls Out Hillary at Debate: “You Should Be in Jail… I’ll Call A Special Prosecutor” 
5 Wikileaks Revelations That Should’ve Tanked Hillary’s Campaign 
Where Are The Handcuffs? This Video Blows The Doors Open On Hillary’s Corruption, Obfuscations and Outright Lies 
Emails Reveal Hillary Literally Read Up On “How to Delete Something So It Stays Deleted” 
",FAKE
"The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the foiled terrorist attack at a Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas Sunday. But that doesn't mean the group had much to do with the attack.

The attempted terror attack by two Muslim-Americans in Garland, Texas, Sunday so far appears to confirm what terrorism experts have been saying for months: The Islamic State has no ability to carry out attacks in the United States.

But the incident shows that the Islamic State’s ability to inspire and, to a limited degree, direct “lone wolf” jihadis remains a challenge with no simple answers.

No evidence yet shared with the public suggests that the two men killed by a security officer when they opened fire on a building hosting a “Draw Muhammad” contest were hardened Islamic State operatives. They pledged fealty to the Islamic State in a tweet minutes before the attack.

But one of them, Elton Simpson, had been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s radar screen since 2006, and he faced charges in 2011 over claims that he wanted to join jihad in Somalia.

The degree to which he and his Phoenix-area roommate, Nadir Soofi, reached out to the Islamic State – or the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) reached out to them – is unclear. The FBI is combing through the men’s social media histories for clues.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the Islamic State’s greatest threat to the US is in its online messaging, which Jessica Stern, co-author of the new book “ISIS: The State of Terror,” calls a “social contagion.” What is known about Sunday’s attack underscores that “it’s less important that ISIS actually speaks [directly to attackers], because ISIS’s goal is to inspire this kind of attack.”

This is terrorism on the cheap. The Islamic State doesn’t have to try to send operatives to the US. It can simply prod disgruntled Americans and claim the credit.

For the Islamic State, “trying to get guys from Syria or Iraq into the United States [to fight] would be stupid and fruitless, because it would take time and money, it would take guys away from the fight, and why would you even do it when you have a great force multiplier in the Internet, where you can get people to pop up anywhere, making you seem omnipotent and universal?” asks Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent.

On one hand, Sunday’s attack gave that impression. But it also suggested the limitations of outsourcing terrorism operations. America’s legal dockets are strewn with the stories of homegrown terrorists who were rumbled by the FBI or simply failed. CNN notes that the attackers had body armor and semiautomatic weapons and yet were killed by a traffic officer with a pistol.

The events showed that the attackers were “wannabes who have never really done anything legitimate, and who hope this act will give them acceptance,” Mr. Clemente says.

For that reason, the attack in Garland “doesn’t suggest to me that this is a clear escalation,” says Ms. Stern. Rather, it points to the Islamic State’s opportunism – both in recruiting would-be terrorists and in capitalizing on their exploits.

“This is something ISIS has been hoping will happen,” she says.

The Islamic State has made many claims of responsibility in attacks throughout North Africa and Europe, though this is the first time it has done so for an attack in North America.

The attack last October on the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa by a lone gunman seemed taken out of the Islamic State playbook, investigators said, but Canadian intelligence never found a credible connection.

The Garland attack also stirred memories of the attack by jihadists on the satirical Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as an attack at an event this spring attended by Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who has caricatured Muhammad.

Sunday’s event, sponsored by controversial free-speech activist Pam Geller, promised the artist behind the best cartoon of Mohammad a $10,000 prize. It included a keynote address from controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has decried the “Islamicization of the Netherlands.”

The Islamic State message does appear to hold some appeal for a minuscule fringe. In addition to Islamic State-inspired attacks, an estimated 3,000 Westerners – including perhaps “hundreds” of Americans – have traveled to Syria since 2011 to join violent jihad.

As of last October, Norwegian terrorism analyst Thomas Hegghammer found a low “blowback rate” for those fighters coming back to their home countries to engage in terrorism – only about 1 of every 150 to 300, much lower than the rate for foreign fighters in Afghanistan, for example.

He suggested that was because of the Islamic State’s primary focus on establishing a caliphate in the Middle East. “ISIS is unlikely to go all in on global [terrorism] operations the way al Qaeda Central has. The organization is not designed for that, and such a strategy is not compatible with its state-building ambitions,” he wrote on CNN.

In the months since, ISIS’s messaging campaign has become more global, but its operational reach has apparently remained focused on the Middle East. The result, experts say, is attacks like the one Sunday.

“It’s not as if ISIS has a cell in the United States or trains people,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an Islamic State expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Harzliya, Israel, tells The New York Times. “This is not ISIS coming to America.”",REAL
"Waking Times 
Supporters of Clinton in the painfully long 2016 presidential campaign warned us before the vote that if Trump lost the election, his supporters would stop at nothing to disrupt Clinton’s inauguration. They said riots, violence and revolution would break out, and that Republicans would claim voter fraud and refuse to respect the democratic process or accept the results should Hillary have won. 
This scare tactic and all the other nightmare fantasies about Trump projected into public consciousness by the left were insufficient to persuade enough voters to go for Hillary, and as many suspected would happen, Clinton voters are now doing the precise things they had previously declared to be unacceptable. 
Hypocrisy is now as American as apple pie, and no one is really all that surprised that phony idealists are taking to the streets, destroying property, threatening to assassinate the president elect , and organizing to prevent Trump’s inauguration . Some are even openly calling for revolution. The deeper irony here, though, is that people from all walks of life should be out protesting the government as well, but for much more significant reasons than to protest the outcome of the election. 
In the true American spirit of redressing grievances, and as a public service to a nation struggling to find purpose and reason, here are four critical issues that any worthwhile protestor should add to their post-election list of complaints against the machine. 1.) The Orwellian Permanent War and The Military Industrial Complex 
This is the biggest elephant in the room. The U.S. has ongoing military operations in dozens of nations, and it has at least 800 military bases in eighty something foreign nations . Hundreds of non-combative foreign civilians a year are killed by U.S. bombs and drones and written off as collateral damage. The military industrial complex has fully commandeered the progress and development of technology, and sells billions of dollars of weapons each year to countries around the world including severely oppressive dictatorships states like Saudi Arabia . 
At home, expenditures on ‘defense’ account for over half of every dollar U.S. taxpayers give Uncle Sam, diverting resources away from improving our country here at home. Surplus military equipment and battle hardened veterans are increasingly moving into the civilian law enforcement sector, dramatically exacerbating social issues such as police brutality and racism . The security industry has expanded to include the mass surveillance of every American and continues to invade our privacy in evermore creative ways . Genuine organic terrorism against Americans at home and abroad is the indirect result of destroying foreign nations and entire civilizations , stealing oil and other resources from foreign nations, while murdering innocents. 
War has become the health of the state and it’s poisoning every segment of our society and culture. 2.) Serious Human Rights Abuses Committed by Government 
Protestors today are taking to the streets to reject the verbal and emotional abuse of minority and sensitive members of our society, while actual physical human rights abuses are going under-addressed. 
Members of America and the world’s elite are involved in covering up and participating in a global trade of sex slaves , and widely believed to be involved in pedophilia, child abduction and occult worship and rituals . 3.) Debt Slavery 
The top-tier of the banking and investment world have created a global system of economic slavery which intentionally creates ever-increasing public debt. The human race owes so much money that no one really understands to whom it is owed . It could be aliens for all we know, but if the status quo remains, it would take the daily productivity of many generations to come to pay off only what is owed today, and the debt increases every minute. 
This is a stealthy form of slavery that is written into the matrix code of society. To be born on earth is to owe money. This is utterly unacceptable, and so systemically unstable it’s guaranteed to collapse, causing worldwide suffering . 4.) Environmental Stewardship is Criminally Negligent 
Viewpoints on the environmental stress we see in our world today vary wildly depending on who you talk to and what their background or agenda may be. Call it global warming, climate change, or whatever you like, but at its core, our natural world is being sold off and destroyed for corporate profit. Massive unchecked pollution and environmental destruction by the energy industry and corporations at large is destroying this planet at an exponentially increasing rate. Industrial disasters like Fukushima go unaddressed while the world’s rainforests are being decimated and indigenous cultures driven to extinction . This sad list just goes on and on. It’s just too much to put down here. Final Thoughts 
You could easily add so much more to this if you like, as there are a thousand and one causes rebelling against, yet so very few ever seem to make it into public consciousness and onto the corporate mainstream news . If you’re outraged about what is happening in America today, but haven’t yet included these issues on your ‘mad as hell’ list , then your protest isn’t living up to its full potential, and your idealism is only half-assed. Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( 4 Truly Important Issues for Your Post Election List of Things to Protest ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
"Email 
A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the U.S. public and the U.S. media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace. 
This poll was commissioned by that notorious leftwing hotbed of peaceniks, the Charles Koch Institute, along with the Center for the National Interest (previously the Nixon Center, and before that the humorously named Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom). The poll was conducted by Survey Sampling International. 
They polled 1,000 registered voters from across the U.S. and across the political spectrum but slanted slightly toward older age groups. They asked: 
“Over the last 15 years, do you think U.S. foreign policy has made Americans more or less safe?” 
What, dear reader, do you say? 
If you say less safe, you not only agree with dozens of top U.S. officials the week after they retire, but you agree with 52.5% of the people polled. Those who said “more safe” add up to 14%, while 25.2% said “about the same” and 8.3% just didn’t know. 
Well, at least all these humanitarian wars to spread democracy and eliminate weapons and destroy terror have benefited the rest of the world, right? 
Not according to the statistics that show terrorism on the rise during the war on terrorism, and not according to 50.5% of poll respondents who said U.S. foreign policy has made the world less safe. Meanwhile 12.6% said “more safe” while 24.1% said it was about the same and 12.8% didn’t know. 
Asked about four wars in particular, registered U.S. voters said each of them had made the U.S. less secure, by a margin of 49.6% to 20.9% on Iraq, 42.2% to 18.9% on Libya, 42.2% to 24.3% on Afghanistan, and 40.8% to 32.1% on bombing ISIS in Syria. 
These answers should not immediately be taken to prove that the U.S. public is universally wise and well informed, and (not coincidentally) at odds with U.S. media. Not only is that margin pretty slim on ISIS, but 43.3% of those polled said ISIS was the greatest threat the United States faces. Meanwhile 14.1% named Russia, 8.5% North Korea, 8.1% the national debt, 7.9% domestic terrorists, and bringing up the rear with the correct answer of global warming as the greatest threat were a grand total of 4.6% of those polled. 
A survey of U.S. news reports would certainly suggest a point of agreement here between the public and the media. But here is where it gets interesting. Although the public believes the hype about danger emanating from these foreign forces, it does not favor the solution it is endlessly offered by the media and the U.S. government. When asked if, compared to last 15 years, the next president should use the U.S. military abroad less, 51.1% agreed, while 24.2% said it should be used more. And 80.0% said that any president should be required to get congressional authorization before committing the U.S. to military action, while 10.2% rejected that radical idea that’s been in the U.S. Constitution since day 1. 
The U.S. public may look quite depressingly ignorant in a quick survey of Youtube videos, but check this out: Asked if the U.S. government should deploy U.S. troops on the ground in Syria 51.1% said no, compared to 23.5% who said yes. Only 10% said yes on Yemen, while 22.8% said no — however, 40.7% said the U.S. government should keep “supporting” Saudi Arabia in that war. 
Good majorities also oppose Japan acquiring nuclear weapons, Germany acquiring nuclear weapons, or the U.S. defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack. (Who invents these scenarios?) 
This moderately encouraging survey of public sentiment stands in stark contrast to U.S. media coverage of wars in general and Syria in particular. The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is ready for a bigger war as are columnists in the Washington Post and USA Today, as well as, of course Chuck Todd and other televised talking head. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton’s comment to Goldman Sachs that a “no fly zone” would require “killing a lot of Syrians” has received dramatically less press than her brave calls for creating a humanitarian no fly zone, and the steady depiction of that proposal as “doing something”— in contrast to the only other option: “doing nothing.” 
The public, however, rejects the only “something” that’s on offer and just might leap at the opportunity to try something else, if anyone ever proposed anything else.",FAKE
"While some Justice Department investigations are adversarial, a new model of collaborative reform is surprising police in some cities, as they find themselves included as part of the solution.

Searching for a ""framework ... [to] heal,"" Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake put in a 911 call to the US Department of Justice to ask for a civil rights investigation into the Baltimore Police Department’s beat cop tactics.

Her call, not even a week after a local prosecutor charged six police officers with crimes including murder for their alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, is part of a broader trend of ""collaborative reform"" between Washington and local jurisdictions.

What's striking about such investigations is that they don't just slam the police, but also aim to help officers stay safe and protect citizens, as well as show that they are part of the solution.

In fact, following a Baltimore Sun series on police abuses in the city last year, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts approached the Justice Department to conduct a collaborative review, which had been under way the day Mr. Gray died while in police custody.

Some DOJ investigations are adversarial, as police bristle at court orders and federal monitors. But a federal investigation into whether Baltimore cops routinely violate people’s civil rights is likely to mirror similar probes in Las Vegas and Philadelphia, where police chiefs have been able to use federal findings to gain leverage with elected officials and also use facts to rebut claims by police officers that they’re doing nothing wrong, says Sam Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

To be sure, Mr. Walker says, it’s “too early to tell” whether such interventions can bring the kind of fundamental reforms that Mayor Rawlings-Blake is hoping to find in the aftermath of Gray’s death and injuries to nearly 100 cops during violent riots.

But there is growing evidence that such collaborative efforts can help communities grapple with deep tensions between police and neighborhoods and build trust around common goals like respect, dignity, and sanctity of life.

After Las Vegas police shot a record 25 people in 2010, the city began its own reforms and asked the Department of Justice for help a year later. In 2011, the DOJ began the new collaboration program, delving deep into practices, training procedures, and policies to root out where officers were going wrong and where policies failed the people.

As of 2012, the Las Vegas department had completed dozens of difficult reforms, including rewriting its use-of-deadly-force policy to include a reference to officers acknowledging the “sanctity of human life” as they make critical split-second decisions. The department added so-called reality-based training to give officers more options than quick deployment of deadly force as they interacted with drugged, drunk, or mentally ill citizens. Since then, the number of officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas has stayed below historical averages, year to year.

In March, the Justice Department reported back on practices of the Philadelphia Police Department, which had seen a stretch of years in which police killed a person nearly every week, many of them unarmed. The DOJ team, which was made up of policing experts and not prosecutors, released a string of findings that pointed to problems in both policy and training.

Surprisingly to some, many complaints came from officers themselves. Among the findings were complaints from officers that they were not properly trained to deal with violent suspects. The training needed to be less staged and more reality-based, officers said, including allowing trainees to grapple with each other to learn tactics.

“Interview participants generally thought that the defensive tactics training offered at the academy focused too much on legal liability and not enough on teaching practical and realistic methods for surviving a physical encounter,” the DOJ report stated. “They did not believe that [training] sufficiently prepared them for a physical encounter.”

Aside from giving leaders hard facts to work with, such reports can also help defend police officers. Even though many police shootings have a racial backdrop, the Justice Department found that Philadelphia police did not have a problem with racial stereotyping. In fact, unarmed white males were more likely to be shot and killed by Philadelphia police than unarmed black males.

“I want to express regrets for all who have been shot in Philadelphia, civilians or police officers.... Every life is precious in this city and this country, so we need to maintain this level of focus,"" Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said in March. ""We're one big city. Everyone wants to be safe. Citizens want to be safe. Police officers want to be safe.""

The Justice Department has conducted 19 civil rights investigations since 2000, stepping up the efforts in the Obama era, with five police departments coming under federal monitoring in 2012 alone. Some of those investigations have been scathing, including a report in March that documented abuses by the Ferguson (Mo.) Police Department that helped fuel protests in the wake of Michael’s Brown death last August, at the hands of a police officer.

So far, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has not replied to the Baltimore mayor’s request for a separate civil rights abuse probe.

But the request makes clear that the city’s police probably have problems that go beyond the treatment of Gray.

Since 2011, the city has settled more than 100 lawsuits equaling nearly $6 million in cases where people were bruised and battered by officers, only to have trumped-up charges later dropped by a judge.

True, institutional change can be difficult. After the Baltimore Police Department promised the courts in 2010 it would curb the large percentage of false arrests in the city by offering better training, the department dragged its feet, the American Civil Liberties Union has alleged. The issue has reared up again in the Gray case, since prosecutor Marilyn Mosby has charged that officers falsely arrested Gray for carrying a legal knife.

But so far in Philadelphia and Las Vegas, one key to success has been the efforts to engage police officers in the process by showing them that they are part of the solution, and that the collaboration isn't about outsiders second-guessing their actions. In Philadelphia, Commissioner Charles Ramsey sent every officer a link to the Las Vegas report, so they could see for themselves that it was more an attempt to help officers stay safe and protect citizens than blaming them for their actions.

""Cops are always leery of something,"" Mr. Ramsey told the Baltimore Sun. ""We did as much as we could to alleviate any concerns and fears.""",REAL
"By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley T he resistance to a Hillary Clinton presidency has already begun. Activists gathered in Chicago “to strategize the fight against police violence, neoliberalism and imperialism,” all of which promise to be hallmarks of her administration. The Black Misleadership Class plays its usual, toadying role. “The liars who said they would hold Obama’s feet to the fire are repeating their empty words and hoping no one pays attention.” “All forms of mass action must be used to deprive Clinton of support or claim of a mandate.” The Hillary Clinton administration, Slick Willie part II, will bring catastrophe unless there is constant agitation waged against it. The same woman who bragged that her party platform was progressive now brags that Republicans endorse her. The situation is urgent but there is no need to despair or to reinvent the wheel. There are groups across the country engaging in protest and they show a clear path for a liberation movement. This columnist joined with 200 activists in Chicago for the Right to Exist, Right to Resist [3] conference organized by the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS USA). The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Police Oppression, Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, Peoples Organization for Progress, Bayan USA, Chicago Teachers Union, US Palestinian Community Network, Committee to Stop FBI Repression and others met to strategize the fight against police violence, neoliberalism and imperialism. If it is true that no person is an island then no struggle should be waged in isolation. The people of Ferguson, Missouri received support from Palestine during their rebellion against police occupation. The neoliberal onslaught that privatizes education and closes schools also deprives Flint, Michigan of clean water and its democratic rights. American imperialism threatens all life on this planet with its constant provocations against Russia and China which risk world war. “The black “misleaders” are silenced yet again by a prospective Democratic presidency.” Moore: A former Bernie Sanders supporter and recent 100% convert to Hillary—in the name of what? Good proof that liberals are forever blind to much of the world’s realities. This presidential election repeated the sleight of hand which presents the Democrats as the party which defends us from the barbarians. Donald Trump is the foil used to fool millions of people into believing that the errand boys and girls of neoliberalism can also be the guarantors of human rights. Hillary Clinton’s administration will be disastrous for black Americans in particular. The black “misleaders” are silenced yet again by a prospective Democratic presidency. They will not speak up against Hillary Clinton any more than they did against her husband or Barack Obama. They said nothing when Bill Clinton ended the 60-year long entitlement to government benefits. They said nothing when he used the war on drugs as an excuse to lock up thousands of black people with draconian prison sentences. They said nothing when Obama wouldn’t allow those people to request their freedom or when he declined to prosecute even one killer cop. They say nothing when American presidents wage wars of aggression all over the world. We can expect more going along to get along when “two for the price of one” becomes a reality. WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO THREAD FOOLS RUSH IN . This presidential election repeated the sleight of hand which presents the Democrats as the party which defends us from the barbarians. Donald Trump is the foil used to fool millions of people into believing that the errand boys and girls of neoliberalism can also be the guarantors of human rights . Not only must activists do their utmost to fight back against the real life Lady MacBeth but they must call out those who falsely claim to be in their camp. The liars who said they would hold Obama’s feet to the fire are repeating their empty words and hoping no one pays attention. They must be exposed right now and again after election day because they will surely make good on their history of appeasement. The Right to Exist, Right to Resist conference took place on the second anniversary of Laquan McDonald’s murder at the hands of Chicago police. McDonald was only 17 years of age, a child according to American law. His death, the existence of the Homan Square secret prison and other instances of torture and brutality resulted in demands for community control of the police. “She may bring the mothers of police murder victims on to the stage but she has said nothing about ending the death toll.” Chicagoans are struggling to establish an elected Civilian Police Accountability Council [4] (CPAC). Black community control of the police is a mobilizing issue all across the country. The demands began under Obama and must continue after Hillary Clinton takes office. She may bring the mothers of police murder victims on to the stage but she has said nothing about ending the death toll. That task is left for activists who know better than to expect any justice from her. Millions of Americans struggle financially and are displaced by gentrification or fear the police or want to keep their public schools open. But in 2016 they have been led astray by one of the most cynical presidential campaigns of all time. Hillary Clinton preferred Donald Trump as her rival because she was likely to lose to any other Republican. She then used the man she wanted to run against to rally otherwise skeptical voters to her side. The ego maniacal Trump performed as expected and is driving all but dead-ender right wingers to Hillary’s side. There must be no celebrating when her victory is announced. That is the moment when the fights must begin in earnest. All forms of mass action must be used to deprive her of support or claim of a mandate. The champion of the ruling classes cannot be allowed to claim the progressive mantle. That title belongs to the people who met in Chicago and marched in memory of Laquan McDonald. Frederick Douglass’ advice to “Agitate, agitate, agitate,” must still be followed. If not Hillary Clinton will privatize Social Security and find a rationale to start one last disastrous war. She will be stopped only if we assert our right to exist and right to resist. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/organizing_in_age_of_hillary",FAKE
"The Iowa caucuses are 11 weeks away. That is a lifetime in a political campaign. Except that it’s really not.

The campaign is about to enter its holiday period — a time when people, including Iowans and New Hampshire types, start paying much more attention to how to stuff their turkey and what’s under the Christmas tree than they do to politics. TV ads, stump speeches and even debates tend to get lost — or plain ignored — in the holiday maelstrom.

Thanksgiving is in less than two weeks. Christmas is four weeks after that. A week later, it’s New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day. Suddenly, it’s Jan. 4, and the caucuses are only 28 days away.

That’s the real calendar math of 2016. The race is almost certain to freeze in place — or close to it — in 10 days, only to thaw a few days into the new year.

That prospect should worry Republicans who have an eye on retaking the White House after eight years in the political wilderness. Why? Because the top tier of the GOP field, as of today, is just two candidates large: former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson and real estate investor Donald Trump.

In virtually every national poll of Republican voters, Carson and Trump not only lead the rest of the field by a wide margin, but also combine to take well north of 50 percent of the total vote. Carson is the favorite in Iowa, while Trump remains the front-runner in the New Hampshire primary.

[Time for GOP panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.]

The problem for Republicans is that in an election likely to be focused on foreign policy — the Paris attacks late last week make this an even greater likelihood — neither Carson nor Trump have demonstrated a depth of knowledge likely to reassure voters that they are up to the job of commander in chief.

Trump, in particular, would be a very problematic nominee for Republicans — not just because of his relative cluelessness on foreign policy but also because of his comments on immigration, women, prisoners of war, Iowans and lots (and lots) of other things.

Establishment Republicans had long believed that former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s massive financial edge — a super PAC that supports him raised $100 million in the first six months of the year — would allow him to overtake the likes of Carson and Trump as actual votes neared.

But Bush has been far less than advertised as a candidate, and it’s not clear that all the money in the world can sell a message that Republican caucus and primary voters simply don’t want to buy.

That leaves Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, as the establishment pol best positioned to overtake the outsiders at the top of the field. And it could happen. But, Rubio’s fundraising has been less than impressive, and although he has moved up in polling, he has less than half of the support enjoyed by Trump or Carson in both early-state and national surveys.

[The Take: Why no one is dropping out of the GOP presidential race]

Put simply: Any Republican who tells you that Trump and/or Carson are a fad who will fade before Iowa is engaging in the most wishful of thinking. It’s a near-certainty at this point that the top tier going into Iowa will look almost exactly like it does today — Carson and Trump at the top, with Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) inching upward.

The state of the Democratic race is far less in flux — and, therefore, is causing much less agita for the party establishment.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, after months of listless campaigning, almost certainly secured the Democratic nomination with her strong showing in October — a month bookended by a standout performance in the first presidential debate and her marathon testimony in front of the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton remains far from a perfect candidate — her decision to exclusively use a private e-mail server while at the State Department will be a major point of emphasis for Republicans in the general election — but she is by far the most complete candidate in the Democratic field.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders seems comfortable being a protest candidate rather than a serious challenger to Clinton — as evidenced by his refusal in each of the first two debates to use questions about Clinton’s e-mail issue to draw a broader contrast between the two candidates.

Sanders’s viability in Iowa and, especially, New Hampshire, a state where he is a slight favorite as of today, means that he will remain a relevant part of the race all the way through February. But it’s hard to see a path to victory for Sanders unless he can significantly expand his coalition beyond whites or peel voters off of Clinton — neither of which seem likely.

The state of both parties’ races today will almost certainly be the state of those races when actual voters begin to start paying attention again right around Jan. 4. That prospect should make Republicans frown and Democrats smile.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Even before the debris from the Paris terrorist attacks was swept away, politicians began sounding the alarm that Syrian refugees could be a national security threat to the United States. The issue has dominated the U.S. political conversation during the week since gunmen and suicide bombers terrorized Paris on a Friday night.

All Republican presidential candidates called on President Barack Obama to renege on his pledge to admit 10,000 refugees fleeing Syria's brutal civil war into the U.S. and argued instead for a full stop, fearing terrorists could infiltrate their ranks.

Thirty-one governors have declared Syrian refugees unwelcome in their states and on Thursday the House passed a bill to bar refugees from Syria and Iraq from entering the U.S. Nearly 50 Democrats joined 242 Republicans to pass the bill, which the White House has threatened to veto. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, suggested the U.S. only accept Christian refugees . Ben Carson, another candidate, likened refugees to ""rabid dogs"" threatening the neighborhood.

But those responses ignore one very important fact: the refugee program is quite simply the toughest way for a foreigner to legally enter the United States. There are other security gaps that would be easier for would-be terrorists to exploit.

Were any of the Paris attackers refugees?

As of now, none of the Paris attackers have been confirmed as having entered Europe as refugees.

In fact, most of the Paris attackers were European citizens born in France or Belgium. Two of them appear to have entered Europe through Greece although it doesn't appear that they came in through a refugee program.

Perhaps more importantly, the European refugee admission system is dramatically different from the U.S. system for Syrians, in large part because the U.S. is geographically separated from Syria. The U.S. has the opportunity to do far more vetting before refugees arrive on their shores.

How does a refugee get into the U.S.?

Refugees must undergo an 18- to 24-month screening process, minimum, that the United Nations' refugee arm oversees. And that's before individual countries even begin to consider a refugee's application and conduct their own additional interviews and background checks.

The screening process generally includes multiple interviews, background checks and an extensive cross-referencing process that tests refugee's stories against others and accounts from sources on the ground in their home country.

Throughout that process, U.N. officials and local government officials in temporary host countries like Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon look to determine the legitimacy of asylum seekers' claims and ensure that they meet the criteria of a refugee, including that they are not and have not been involved in any fighting or terrorist activities.

Refugees also have their retinas scanned and have their fingerprints lifted.

Christopher Boian, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, called the process ""stringent"" and ""long and complex.""

""If at any stage in that process there is ever the slightest shadow of a doubt or the slightest whisper of suspicion, they are removed from the process. That is that,"" Boian said.

""The very, very few Syrian refugees who are accepted and referred for consideration for resettlement in another country -- there simply is no more closely scrutinized population on earth these days,"" he added.

That's because other countries have so far pledged to resettle just 159,000 of the more than 4 million Syrian refugees -- setting an extremely high bar for resettlement.

And refugees aren't automatically considered for resettlement: only the most vulnerable refugees -- such as torture victims, female heads of household, people with serious medical conditions and other especially vulnerable groups.

So after they go through that process by the U.N., the U.S. does an additional screening?

That's right. After a rigorous screening process and several interviews carried out by the U.N. refugee agency, refugees the U.S. agrees to consider for resettlement have to undergo an additional interview, medical evaluation and security screening.

According to one U.S. government official, there's an additional layer of vetting that's specific to Syrian applicants, including special briefings for interviewers and information from the U.S. intelligence community.

The security screening involves checks against several government agencies' databases and terrorist watch lists using biographic and biometric information. It's a process Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, recently called ""the most stringent security process for anyone entering the United States.""

And Syrian refugees get an additional, more targeted layer of screening involving the U.S. Intelligence agency, according to a government official.

Sounds pretty rigorous. How does the refugee process stack up to other ways of getting into the U.S.?

The refugee program is simply the toughest way for any foreigner to enter the U.S. legally.

For most people, getting a tourist visa to enter the United States is much easier, but still requires an in-person interview and involves a typical background check. The process takes anywhere from a few days to a couple months.

But there's an even easier way to get into the U.S. if you're a citizen of one of 38 mostly European countries, including France and Belgium.

As a sign that the Obama administration agrees that there are gaps that need closing, one of the U.S. officials said, in the coming days the administration expects to announce plans for additional steps to be taken with European countries that participate in the visa waiver program.

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who sits on the intelligence committee, said it ""would be much harder"" for a terrorist to get into the country through the refugee program than with a passport from one of the 38 countries in the visa waiver program.

""(The refugee process) would take 18 months to two years. Under the visa waiver program, it could take 24 hours,"" King told CNN in a phone interview. ""The target of our work should be strengthening the visa waiver program.""

""We do need to pay attention to whether the terrorists could infiltrate the refugee flow. I don't think it's something we should ignore, but the amount of vetting that goes on there already is very through,"" King added.

So is that program getting strengthened?

A bipartisan proposal to do just that is gaining momentum on Capitol Hill.

Noting that 20 million people each year use the visa waiver program to visit the United States, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said in a Thursday news conference that a bill she is proposing with Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, would help guard against terrorists trying to exploit the program.

""Terrorists could exploit the program, could go from France to Syria, as 2,000 fighters have done, come back to France, use the visa waiver program and without further scrutiny come into the United States,"" said Feinstein, a senior member of the intelligence committee.

The Feinstein-Flake bill, which is set to be formally introduced after Thanksgiving, would keep foreigners who've traveled to Syria or Iraq in the last five years from using the visa waiver program. It would also mandate fingerprinting for all travelers entering the U.S. from visa waiver countries and requires all foreigners from those countries to have a modern passport that has an embedded e-chip that is more secure and includes an individual's biometric information and other data.

Flake, the bill's Republican sponsor, told reporters Thursday the refugee program could be strengthened to include better tracking of refugees once they arrive in the country, but said touted the rigorous process as something that shouldn't be a source of concern.

""On the front end, it is a very thorough vetting that they get. So of all the things that we ought to be concerned about, that is not at the top of the list,"" he said.",REAL
"  As Crooked HIllary Investigation Reopens, Democrat Cities Push To Allow Illegal Immigrants Voting 'Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,' Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include noncitizens.   29, 2016 Some Democrat-Run Cities Want Their Illegal Alien Population to Vote 
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yesterday, FBI director James Comey announced that they have reopened the investigation into Crooked Hillary’s illegal email server. Yay! But even before that, Democrat operatives are working around the clock to skew the election results in any way they can. Today we present to you Democrat-run cities in America allowing illegal immigrants to vote in the upcoming election. Should illegal immigrant voting be legal? Wha…??? 
‘Look at illegal immigrants voting all over the country,’ Donald Trump recently claimed in a Fox News interview, part of his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the integrity of the presidential election. There’s no evidence to support the Republican nominee’s claims of election fraud, but some cities are moving to expand voting rights to include non-citizens (illegal immigrants) . Trump Opposes Same-Day Voter Registration to Prevent Illegal Immigrants from Voting: 
The latest is San Francisco , where the Nov. 8 ballot will include a measure allowing the parents or legal guardians of any student in the city’s public schools to vote in school board elections. The right would be extended to those with green cards, visas, or no documentation at all. “One out of three kids in the San Francisco unified school system has a parent who is an immigrant, who is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a voice,” says San Francisco Assemblyman David Chiu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. “We’ve had legal immigrants who’ve had children go through the entire K-12 system without having a say.” Undocumented immigrants should also have the right, Chiu adds, to bypass the “broken immigration system in this country.” Should Illegal Immigrants Be Allowed to Vote in US Elections? 
Today there are six jurisdictions in Maryland that let non-citizens (illegal immigrants) vote in local elections. Chicago allows them to take part in elected parent advisory councils but not to vote in school board elections. Four towns in Massachusetts have moved to allow noncitizen voting and are awaiting state approval. And in New York City, where non-citizens (illegal immigrants) make up 21 percent of the voting-age population, the city council is drafting legislation that would allow more than 1.3 million legal residents to take part in municipal elections. The city previously allowed non-citizens (illegal immigrants) to vote in school board elections, but that ended when New York’s school boards were dissolved in 2002. Liberals Sign Petition to Allow Illegal Immigrants to Vote in 2016 Presidential Election: 
San Francisco has tried in the past to grant noncitizens access to school board elections. A 2004 measure narrowly failed, with 51 percent voting against it. “There was an opposition campaign at that time,” Chiu says. He sponsored another ballot measure in 2010, which also failed. This time, Chiu says, he’s hoping for a victory. So far he’s seen no organized opposition: “I think that’s because of the ugly, anti-immigrant statements expressed by Donald Trump and his supporters.” SHARE THIS ARTICLE  ",FAKE
"VIA Conservative 101 According to Politico , some of those names include Gingrich for Secretary of State, Mnuchin, a 17 year veteran of Goldman Sachs for Treasure Secretary and Mayor Giuliani for Attorney General. And of course Sheriff David Clarke as the Homeland Security Secretary. He has been an incredible patriotic American and leader in Blue Lives Matter. CNN was terrified by this. “I think the one major flag I have is that someone like Sheriff Clarke would be considered as his Homeland Security secretary? Someone who I very much see as if he’s not a terrorist inciting terrorism?” said CNN commentator Angela Rye. “If people are afraid of Sheriff Clarke, afraid of the policies which he represents, I think that’s terrorism,” she stated. Naturally, this is ridiculous. It is just outrageous to name someone as a terrorist just because you disagree with them. Watch the video below and be sure to let us know what you think of it in the comment section. 
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
"Most people can agree that a solution to bullying must be found. This Wisconsin town believes it may have the answer. 

In recent years, bullying-related suicides account for over 6,000 deaths per year for people ages 15 through 24. This Wisconsin town passed a law that forces parents to pay a fine if their child is a bully. 

As the connection between bullying and suicide becomes undeniable, parents, teachers, and students alike are trying to find a solution to this very important issue. Yet, there are too many adults who still see bullying as just another aspect of growing up. It has been proven that bullying is a prevalent problem that leads to many negative effects for it’s victims. Some of these negative effects include depression, fear, lack of motivation to attend school, and suicide. 

Police in Shawano, Wisconsin are trying to curb bullying by holding parents accountable if their child is involved in bullying. 

The city council of Shawano just passed an ordinance that allows police to intervene when aggression happens. The law applies to anyone under the age of 18 and covers various forms of harassment ranging from taking lunch money to cyberbullying on social media. 

Shawano parents will be warned after the first incident, but if the child’s behavior doesn’t change within 90 days, parents will be fined $366. A repeat offender will be fined $681. 

While the majority of parents agree that bullying needs to stop, the new ordinance has raised a lot of controversy. Some critics believe that there could be difficulty distinguishing between playful banter and harassment. But police Chief Mark Kohl assures the public that the ordinance is not generated towards ‘kids being kids’ and playground banter, but instead towards kids who are meticulously using social media or their words to purposefully hurt others. 

While some parents embrace the fining idea, others disagree believing it will not solve the issue, only burning a hole in the pockets of already stressed out parents. 

It is an interesting solution and only time will tell if it works. Feel free to share you own thoughts on the subject. 

Share this to start a dialogue about the issue of bullying in your community. 

Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
"Hey, you! Any interest in running for the US House or, maybe better, the US Senate? A few seats are up for grabs in 2016. It's a very powerful, prestigious, decently well-paying job. Lots of important decisions. Great on a résumé.

What's that you say? Not interested. Not for you? Yeah, I get it. I wouldn't want to run for Congress either. I know, you're probably a reasonable person, a nuanced thinker with a bit of an independent streak. You don't want to get drawn into the maw of that tribal trench warfare down there on the DC swamp. It's a bitter, angry place. And no fun.

But hey, somebody has to do the job. And, flippant tone aside, it really matters who does do the job. If reasonable, level-headed people like you don't want to run for Congress, that means only hair-on-fire ideologues will put run the place, and ... oh wait. That does seem to be happening a bit these days.

Which takes us to that upcoming 2016 congressional election.  Yet another golden opportunity to bring some fresh talent into Washington, maybe for some folks who are more excited about governing than about trying to make government disappear altogether?

If such optimism sounds like the triumph of hope over experience, it probably is. Which raises an important question: Why don't we get many moderates, especially moderate Republicans, running for office these days?

I've gathered here two good explanations from some recent political science literature:

Say you're a moderate Republican. You might look at the Republican Party in Congress and feel like it's not exactly your people in charge of the place. You'd see that the leaders in Congress tend to be on the extremist side, and you'd make a reasonable guess that you wouldn't get too far in Congress as a moderate. By contrast, if you're a True Conservative, you'd see an opportunity to fit right in.

This is the ""Party Fit hypothesis,"" as developed by political scientist Danielle Thomsen in a paper titled ""Ideological Moderates Won't Run: How Party Fit Matters for Partisan Polarization in Congress."" (She also has a forthcoming book on this.) Thomsen looked at some surveys of state legislators and some data on who actually runs for Congress. Her conclusion based on the data is simple: ""The more liberal the Republican state legislator, the less likely she is to run for Congress; the more conservative the Democratic state legislator, the less likely she is to do so.""

In an email, Thomsen told me that there are indeed moderates in the state legislatures. She estimates that ""about 20% of Republican state legislators are as liberal as former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and nearly 30% of Democratic state legislators are as conservative as former representative John Tanner (D-TN)."" It's just that they are much less likely to run for Congress.

Like most aspects of polarization, the ""party fit"" story is asymmetrical — the polarizing impact is much stronger for Republicans. Democrats have maintained more ideological diversity and get more moderates to run. This is not true for Republicans.

And like most aspects of polarization, it feeds on itself. As Thomsen also wrote in her email to me, "" As moderates gradually lost their place in both parties, polarization has become self-reinforcing.  The hyper-partisanship in Congress has discouraged moderates from running for and remaining in Congress, which has further exacerbated the ideological distance between the parties.""

Again, say you're a moderate Republican. Chances are your local and state party leaders are not all that interested in encouraging you to run. Most likely, they are ideologues themselves, and they'd like to find people who share their beliefs, especially if they are Republicans. They want True Conservatives.

This is a conclusion I draw from a fascinating survey of 6,000 county-level political party leaders, conducted by political scientists David Broockman, Nicholas Carnes, Melody Crowder-Meyer, and Christopher Skovron. They asked what qualities party leaders wanted.

Sure, the party leaders said they looked for the usual things — honesty, experience intelligence, dedication, good looks, and, yes, ability to raise money.

But they also cared about ideology — particularly the Republicans. Broockman et al. write:

And party leaders do play a very important role in candidate recruitment, as Broockman documented in a separate paper: In pretty much every study trying to explain why candidates decided to run for office, recruitment was a major factor.

Again, we have a self-reinforcing loop here: The more ideologues run the party, the more they are going to recruit other like-minded candidates to run for office.

There is also probably a fundraising aspect to this. Most of the big donors tend to be pretty ideological (again, especially on the right). If they give a lot of money, it's almost always because they feel very strongly that one or the other of the two major parties needs to be in charge. Active passion and strong partisanship tend to go together.

For example, in explaining ""leapfrog representation"" (the phenomenon of extremist candidates jumping over the median voter in a district when a seat changes partisan control), political scientists Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron point that active donors tend to be more extreme than non-donors. They argue that this may offer one explanation why candidates do not converge on the middle — if you can't raise money from (ideological) donors, it's harder to run for office.

Sure, you might argue, party leaders may be ideologues themselves, especially on the right. But most of all, they want to stay in power. And to stay in power, they need to win elections.  And to win elections, they need to converge on the median voter who is, by definition, in the middle of the left-right ideological distribution. Ergo, the moderating pressures of electoral competition should overcome these forces of extremism.

Fair enough. In close races, party leaders may indeed face a trade-off between ideology and electability.

But one problem is there just aren't that many close races.

By the latest Cook Political Report 2016 projections, 378 out of 435 House seats are considered safe — that's 87 percent. Add in the 25 ""likely"" seats, and we're at 403 out of 435, or 93 percent, at low or no risk. So it doesn't matter whether parties pick moderates or ideologues — they're almost certainly going to win as long as they don't pick a convicted felon (or maybe even if they do).

In the Senate, 19 or 33 seats up in 2016 are solid for one party or another by the Cook assessment. If we add in the likely seats, we're at 25 or 33, or 75 percent low or no risk. In state legislatures, meanwhile, 43 percent of seats are not even contested.

In other words, the proposed moderation of the median voter theory doesn't have very many seats on which to work its supposed magic.

But then again, it's not even clear that competitive elections actually bring candidates to the middle. Research by political scientists Anthony Fowler and Andrew B. Hall suggests that partisans who win in close congressional elections vote just as extreme as partisans who win by landslides. Fowler and Hall conclude, ""Elected officials do not adapt their roll-call voting to their districts' preferences over time, and ... voters do not systematically respond by replacing incumbents.""

No wonder, then, that political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have described the median voter theory as a failure in a recent paper criticizing the ""Downsian"" paradigm (Anthony Downs popularized the median voter theory). As Hacker and Pierson conclude, ""Parties not only fail to converge, they diverge asymmetrically."" One key reason for this, they argue, is that organized interests within the parties make strong demands, and ""party leaders will be attentive to such demands because groups can provide resources they need, offering critical financial and organizational support.""

Okay, so you're probably not going to run for Congress in 2016. Nor am I.

But somebody out there is going to put up with all the endless fundraising calls and the invasions of privacy and the negative ads attacking them and the endless recitation of the same platitudinous speeches over and over again. And, especially on the right, that somebody is probably going to be an ideologue. Because who else wants to run these days? And who else do party leaders want to recruit?

The obvious suggestion is that we need to get some different people running for national office — again, especially on the right.

More broadly, we might want to think a little more about the pipeline of who's getting involved in politics at all. And yeah, we probably also ought to do something about this problem of only a tiny share of the millennial generation viewing politics as a worthwhile career. But there's plenty of time ahead to work through these problems.

So watch this space for some ideas in the months ahead. I'm going to be thinking a bit about this problem.

This post is part of Polyarchy, an independent blog produced by the political reform program at New America, a Washington think tank devoted to developing new ideas and new voices. See more Polyarchy posts here.",REAL
"WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to define what it meant by ""one person, one vote"" a half century ago.

The justices will consider a challenge brought by two rural voters in Texas who claim their state Senate ballots carry less weight than those cast in urban areas with large numbers of non-citizens ineligible to vote.

Under the current system in nearly all states, state legislative districts are drawn with roughly equal populations. The standard dates back to decisions made by the Supreme Court in the early 1960s.

If the justices change the standard from total population to legal voters, illegal and some legal immigrants would not be counted, along with children and most prisoners who have committed felonies. That would equalize the power of each vote but result in districts of unequal population.

It also would make it harder for Hispanics in ethnic areas to elect the candidate of their choice, because their voting strength would decline, or the districts would be less compact and subject to legal challenge. That could help Republicans in rural areas and hurt Democrats in cities.

States and localities most likely to feel the effect of any change include Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and the New York metropolitan area. While only state legislative districts would be affected, a separate challenge could be filed to change the way congressional districts are drawn.

In the Texas case, Sue Evenwel's mostly rural district has about 584,000 citizens eligible to vote, while a neighboring urban district has only 372,000. As a result, voters in the urban district have more sway to influence the outcome.

A federal district court in Texas ruled that the state Legislature's use of total population could not be appealed. But as far back as 2001, at least one justice, Clarence Thomas, had said the issue should be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

""The one-person, one-vote principle, by its terms, entitles voters to an equal vote,"" the challengers said. ""Unless the districting process no longer protects that right, the judgment below cannot stand.""

The organization behind the challenge, the Project on Fair Representation, also was the source of other major Supreme Court cases challenging minority preferences. Among them: Fisher v. University of Texas, challenging the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions, and Shelby County, Ala., v. Holder, challenging a major section of the Voting Rights Act.

The challengers were backed by a half-dozen conservative and libertarian groups, an unusually large number for a case that had yet to be granted by the high court.

Texas responded that the justices had never required legislative districts to be drawn based on the number of voters, rather than total population. ""Multiple precedents from this court confirm that total population is a permissible apportionment base under the Equal Protection Clause,"" the state said.

The case will be taken up during the court's next term, which begins in October.",REAL
"DES MOINES — It's Iowa's nightmare scenario revisited: An extraordinarily close count in the Iowa caucuses — and reports of chaos in precincts and computer glitches — are raising questions about accuracy of the count and winner.

This time it's the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Even as Hillary Clinton trumpeted her Iowa win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, aides for Bernie Sanders said the eyelash-thin margin raised questions and called for a review. The chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party rejected that notion, saying the results are final.

The situation echoes the events on the Republican side in the 2012 caucuses, when one winner (Mitt Romney, by eight votes) was named on caucus night, but a closer examination of the paperwork that reflected the head counts showed someone else pulled in more votes (Rick Santorum, by 34 votes). But some precincts were still missing entirely.

Like Republican party officials in 2012, Democratic party officials worked into the early morning on caucus night trying to account for results from a handful of tardy precincts.

But at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had eked out a slim victory, based on results from 1,682 of 1,683 precincts.

After voters from the final missing Democratic precinct tracked down party officials Tuesday morning to report their results, Sanders won by two delegate equivalents over Clinton in the final missing precinct, Des Moines precinct No. 42.

The Iowa Democratic Party said the updated final tally of delegate equivalents for all the precincts statewide was:

That's a 3.77-count margin between Clinton, the powerful establishment favorite who early on in the Democratic race was expected to win in a virtual coronation, and Sanders, a democratic socialist who few in Iowa knew much about a year ago.

Sanders campaign aides told the Register they've found some discrepancies between tallies at the precinct level and numbers that were reported to the state party. The Iowa Democratic Party determines its winner not based on a head count like in the Republicans' straw poll, but based on delegate equivalents tied to a math formula. And there was enough confusion, and untrained volunteers on Monday night, that errors may have been made.

""We feel like that there’s a very, very good chance that there is,"" said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. ""It's not that we think anybody did anything intentionally, but human error happens.""

Team Sanders had its own app that allowed supporters and volunteers to send precinct-level results directly to the campaign. At the same time, caucus chairs sent their official results to the state party, either over a specially built Microsoft app or via phone. Sanders aides hope to sit down with the state parties and review the paperwork from the precinct chairs, Batrice said.

""We just want to work with the party and get the questions that are unanswered answered,"" she said.

McGuire, in an interview with the Register, said no.

""The answer is that we had all three camps in the tabulation room last night to address any grievances brought forward and we went over any discrepancies. These are the final results,"" she said.

McGuire in her 2:30 a.m. statement said: ""Hillary Clinton has been awarded 699.57 state delegate equivalents, Bernie Sanders has been awarded 695.49 state delegate equivalents, Martin O’Malley has been awarded 7.68 state delegate equivalents and uncommitted has been awarded .46 state delegate equivalents. We still have outstanding results in one precinct — Des Moines 42 — which is worth 2.28 state delegate equivalents. We will report that final precinct when we have confirmed those results with the chair.""

Team Clinton quickly embraced that news, and flatly stated that nothing could change it.

Clinton's Iowa campaign director, Matt Paul, said in a statement at 2:35 a.m.: ""Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa caucus. After thorough reporting — and analysis — of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates. Statistically, there is no outstanding information that could change the results and no way that Senator Sanders can overcome Secretary Clinton's advantage.""

McGuire repeated that Tuesday afternoon, saying the reporting app had a built-in failsafe to prevent volunteers from reporting more delegates than were assigned to each precinct.

Clinton, who saw her expected Iowa win slip away in 2008, grasped the prize Tuesday.

""I can tell you, I've won and I've lost there, and it's a lot better to win,"" she said at a rally in New Hampshire, the state that votes next on the presidential nominating calendar.

But that didn't quell doubts back in Iowa.

“Politics is a contact sport with few referees, so torturing your opponents with questions about the transparency of an election can be very harmful and damaging,” said Steffen Schmidt, a longtime political observer and professor at Iowa State University in Ames.

Discrepancies can occur in official elections, and caucuses are not even official election events run by the secretary of state's office, noted Dennis Goldford, a Drake University professor who closely studies the Iowa caucuses.

""The caucus system isn't built to bear the weight placed on it,"" he said. ""There aren't even paper ballots (in the Democratic caucuses) to use for a recount in case something doesn't add up.""

Democrats have never released actual head counts, and McGuire said they would not be released this time, either. Determining a winner based on state delegate equivalents rather than head count is a key distinction between how the Democrats conduct their caucuses versus conducting a primary, she said. New Hampshire and Iowa are generally careful to maintain such distinctions as part of their effort to preserve their status as the first caucus state and first primary state.

There were reports of disorganization and lack of volunteers Monday evening. Party officials reported a turnout of 171,109, far less than the record of 240,000 seen in 2008. Democratic voters reported long lines, too few volunteers, a lack of leadership and confusing signage. In some cases, people waited for an hour in one line, only to learn their precinct was in a different area of the same building. The proceedings were to begin at 7 p.m. but started late in many cases.

The scene at precinct No. 42 — the one with the final missing votes — was ""chaos"" Monday night, said Jill Joseph, a rank-and-file Democratic voter who backed Sanders in the caucuses.

None of the 400-plus Democrats wanted to be in charge of the caucus, so a man who had shown up just to vote reluctantly stepped forward. As Joseph was leaving with the untrained caucus chairman, who is one of her neighbors, ""I looked at him and said, 'Who called in the results of our caucus?' And we didn't know.""

The impromptu chairman hand-delivered the results to Polk County Democratic Party Chairman Tom Henderson Tuesday. Sanders won seven state delegates, Clinton won five.

Ames precinct 1-3 started caucusing two hours late, at 9 p.m., because the crowd was so big and the check-in line so slow, said Peter D. Myers, a finance major and member of the student government at Iowa State University, who caucused for the first time.

Capacity at the caucus site, Heartland Senior Center, was 115, but 300 people turned out, Myers said. At one point, they considered moving to the parking lot of the Hy-Vee grocery store.

“It was so chaotic that we ended up making the building work even though capacity was doubled,” he said.

Myers said he registered to vote in August but “was alarmed to find out I wasn't on the list, so I had to go to the back of the line. The gentleman in front of me has caucuses the past three cycles and he wasn't on the list, either.”

No one was there to lead the caucus, so “a pregnant lady took charge and counted the Bernie supporters, and a Hillary captain took the small group to a corner and counted the supporters,” he said.

Sanders ended up with four delegates and Clinton one, he said.

An Indianola precinct that gathered in Hubbell Hall at Simpson College had a discrepancy between the number who checked in, and people counted in the first vote.

“The chair and secretary knew the count was off but proceeded anyway,” said Paige Godden, a reporter for The Record Herald and Indianola Tribune. “We did the final count at least three times. People were very frustrated by the end.”

New voters made up nearly 40% of the caucusgoers — 207 of 521 — at Democratic precinct No. 59 on at Des Moines Central Campus, organizers said. The precinct ran out of voter registration forms and had to print more.

When the caucus began, the one-by-one head count discovered 58 more people voting than had checked in. Organizers asked anyone who had not signed in to do so, and then recounted. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Clinton supporter who lives in the precinct, stepped in to help with the recount.

The precinct’s caucus chair, Mark Challis, wasn’t sure if the counts were accurate, but changes wouldn’t have affected the final vote tally, which had Sanders substantially ahead.

Democrat Mary Ann Dorsett of Des Moines told the Register that 492 voters turned out in her precinct, but there were only a handful of people assigned to check people in.

“It was a very large room, so clearly they expected a large turnout,” Dorsett said. “The lines snaked through the corridor and out the door. It took over an hour to check in. Republicans in the same precinct were seated long before this, and already listening to speeches.”

Dorsett thinks the one-by-one head-counting system is “a real head-scratcher in terms of the possibility of inaccuracy as well as time wasted.”

“If all the smartphones were eliminated, it could have been 1820, and we were re-enacting the roles of a bunch of farmers sitting in a church hall, counting heads. Is this the 21st century?” she said. “This may well be my last caucus unless the Democratic Party cleans up its act.”

Meanwhile, Republican Party of Iowa officials are doing a review — they’re comparing the app results for each candidate with what the precinct chairs jotted down on their “e-forms” on caucus night.

“When you’re counting thousands of votes you’ve always got to be careful,” Iowa GOP spokesman Charlie Szold said.

Microsoft, one of the premier tech companies in the world, had developed websites to deliver results in real time. But both the Democratic website, idpcaucuses.com, and GOP website, iagopcaucuses.com, struggled intermittently throughout the night, crashing for periods of time and locking out the public from access to the results.

McGuire said the app system the volunteers in the precincts used to file their numbers was never down. ""They (Microsoft) had plenty of capacity for our results,"" she said.

Microsoft spokeswoman Angela Swanson-Henry said: ""National interest in the Iowa Caucuses was high, and some who attempted to access websites may have experienced delays which were quickly addressed.""

Contributing: Tony Leys and Kevin Hardy, The Des Moines Register. Follow Jennifer Jacobs on Twitter: @JenniferJJacobs",REAL
"New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. ",FAKE
"Donald Trump said in an interview that economic conditions are so perilous that the country is headed for a “very massive recession” and that “it’s a terrible time right now” to invest in the stock market, embracing a distinctly gloomy view of the economy that counters mainstream economic forecasts.

The New York billionaire dismissed concern that his comments — which are exceedingly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a major party front-runner — could potentially affect financial markets.

“I know the Wall Street people probably better than anybody knows them,” said Trump, who has misfired on such predictions in the past. “I don’t need them.”

Trump’s go-it-alone instincts were a consistent refrain — “I’m the Lone Ranger,” he said at one point — during a 96-minute interview Thursday in which he talked candidly about his aggressive style of campaigning and offered new details about what he would do as president.

The real estate mogul, top aides and his son Don Jr. gathered over lunch at a makeshift conference table set amid construction debris at Trump’s soon-to-be-finished hotel five blocks from the White House. Just before, he had met there with his foreign-policy advisers and just after he visited officials at the Republican National Committee — signs that, in spite of his Trump-knows-best manner, the political novice is making efforts to build a more well-rounded bid.

[Read the full transcript of the Trump interview]

Over the course of the discussion, the candidate made clear that he would govern in the same nontraditional way that he has campaigned, tossing aside decades of American policy and custom in favor of a new, Trumpian approach to the world.

In his first 100 days, Trump said, he would cut taxes, “renegotiate trade deals and renegotiate military deals,” including altering the U.S. role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

He insisted that he would be able to get rid of the nation’s more than $19 trillion national debt “over a period of eight years.”

Most economists would consider this impossible because it could require taking more than $2 trillion a year out of the annual $4 trillion budget to pay off holders of the debt.

Trump vehemently disagrees: “I’m renegotiating all of our deals, the big trade deals that we’re doing so badly on. With China, $505 billion this year in trade.” He said that economic growth he foresees as a consequence of renegotiated deals would enable the United States to pay down the debt — although many economists have said the exact opposite, that a trade war would be crippling to the U.S. economy.

Trump also said that the United States has lost its standing in the world and that he would make people “respect our country. I want them to respect our leader.” Asked how he would do so, Trump cited an “aura of personality.”

As a group of world leaders attended President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit less than a mile away, Trump said that, like Obama, he would support full-scale nuclear disarmament but quickly added: “I love that. But from a practical standpoint, not going to happen.”

Were he to be elected president, Trump said he would want high-level employees of the federal government to sign legally binding nondisclosure agreements so that staffers couldn’t write insider accounts of what it’s like inside a Trump White House.

“When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” Trump said.

But first, Trump must get elected, and his campaign is struggling through one of its most challenging stretches. In the past week, his campaign manager has been charged with battery for grabbing a reporter, Trump has been criticized for mocking the looks of an opponent’s wife as compared with those of his own spouse, and he has backtracked from comments about abortion that offended many in his own party.

Trump said that everyone close to him — family, friends, Republican leaders — has been urging him to tone down his attacks and reach out to former rivals, both to reassure wary voters and to begin the difficult process of unifying a party in which many have sworn to never back him. Trump does not intend to take the advice. He said such overtures are “overrated.”

“I think the first thing I have to do is win,” he said. “Winning solves a lot of problems. And I have two people left”: his two remaining Republican rivals, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

“Sometimes you have to break an egg,” Trump said, and Cruz and Kasich were the two remaining eggs.

Trump did offer some concessions to the realities of being a political novice, saying that he would not pick an outsider like himself as a vice-presidential running mate, but rather, “somebody that can walk into the Senate and who’s been friendly with these guys for 25 years, and people for 25 years. And can get things done. So I would 95 percent see myself picking a political person as opposed to somebody from the outside.”

In another unprecedented move, Trump said he plans to announce a list of 10 to 12 judges from which he would pick to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court to allay concerns from conservatives that he wouldn’t choose someone to their liking.

“I’m getting names. The Federalist people. Some very good people. The Heritage Foundation,” Trump said. “I’m going to announce that these are the judges, in no particular order, that I’m going to put up. And I’m going to guarantee it. I’m going to tell people. Because people are worried that, oh, maybe he’ll put the wrong judge in.”

And after a series of violent incidents at his rallies between supporters and protesters, Trump acknowledged that, at least for a little while, he has tried to calm things down.

“We’ve purposefully kept the crowds down this past week,” he said. “You know, we’ve gone into small venues and we’re turning away thousands and thousands of people, which I hate, but we didn’t want to have the protest. You know, when you have a room of 2,000 people, you can pretty much keep it without the protesters.”

The question posed to Trump about his decision to run: “Where do you start the movie?”

A wry smile spread over his face as he repeated the question about the moment when he decided to turn what had long been a flirtation with running for the presidency into something real.

Asked who he talked to about this critical decision, Trump answered: “To myself.”

“To my family, but to myself.”

So it was an interior dialogue?

“This is thought process. And I’m saying to myself, you know, look, they put me in these polls. I’m number one.”

Trump said his interest really started to pick up in the summer of 2014, when he was still busy with his hit NBC reality show, “The Apprentice.” He kept his ambition mostly to himself, slowly thinking it through into early last year, when he hired political advisers, months before he formally jumped in.

Trump said his experience throughout the last two years wasn’t like 1987, when he first made a speech in New Hampshire that he “forgot about” soon after delivering it. This time, as he read the daily newspapers, printed-out online articles (his preferred method of reading) and kept tabs on cable news, he felt the pull.

“I said, ‘You know, this is something I really would like to do.’ I think I’d do it really well. Obviously the public seems to like me,” Trump recalled.

“I’ll tell you a moment when it kicked to yes. Because it was a monetary moment also. . . . There was a moment in, I would say February of last year, so that would be four months, three, four months before I announced, when Steve Burke, great guy, of Comcast . . . came to see me with the top people at NBC. And they wanted to extend my contract.”

Trump told them he was going to run for president instead.

“I just felt there were so many things going wrong with the country,” Trump said of his thinking at the time. He was frustrated with what he saw as the “stupidity” of trade deals and Iran nuclear negotiations that were “terrible” and dominated by “Persians being great negotiators.”

Trump’s wife, Melania, heard most of his complaints, but was not enthused about him becoming a candidate. “She said, ‘We have such a great life. Why do you want to do this?’ ”

“I said, ‘I sort of have to do it, I think. I really have to do it.’ . . . I could do such a great job.”

Later, Melania said, “I hope you don’t do it, but if you run, you’ll win,” according to Trump.

Now, more than a year later and with the Republican nomination in sight, Trump’s family is giving him different advice. “My family said to me — and Don [Jr.] has said this, and Ivanka, and my wife has said this — ‘Be more presidential.’ ”

Trump said he is getting similar guidance from close friends. He had a story to share. A couple weeks ago, a friend, a famous athlete, called. This was right after Trump beat Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, the senator’s home state. “That was a big beating. Don’t forget, he was the face of the Republican Party. He was the future of the Republican Party. So [the athlete] called me up. And he said, ‘Hey Donald, could you do us all a favor? We love you. Don’t kill everybody. Because you may need them on the way back.’ ”

But Trump doesn’t see it that way, at least not yet. “I think you have to break the egg initially,” he said, adding that he has to beat his opponents and secure the nomination before he is willing to consider reaching out or easing off in any way.

When it was suggested that he seems comfortable being the Lone Ranger — the famous old-time TV and radio masked vigilante who fought for good outside the law — Trump immediately concurred.

“I am,” he said. “Because I understand life. And I understand how life works. I’m the Lone Ranger.”

Asked how he would build a coalition for the general election, Trump responded that he hasn’t focused on Hillary Clinton yet — an implication that once he starts attacking her, voters would rally to his side.

Pressed on whether it is incumbent on him to tame the anger within his party, Trump said it was, but also: “I bring rage out. I do bring rage out. I always have. I think it was, I don’t know if that’s an asset or a liability, but whatever it is, I do. I also bring great unity out, ultimately. I’ve had many occasions like this, where people have hated me more than any human being they’ve ever met. And after it’s all over, they end up being my friends. And I see that happening here.”

Not with everyone, though. Trump acknowledged that he has been “rough” and “nasty” in debates — so much so that some relationships with his former rivals are likely beyond repair. “One of the problems I have is that when I hit people, I hit them harder maybe than is necessary,” he said. “And it’s almost impossible to reel them back.”

Like Rubio, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. “Some of the people that I was competing against, I’m not sure they can ever go back to me,” Trump said. “I was very rough on Jeb.” It was “Jeb: Low energy. Little Marco. Names that were devastating.”

Trump seemed unsure whether Cruz would ultimately fit that category. Trump noted that they had gotten along quite well for many months and suggested they could again, but he was also ambivalent about potentially reaching out to Cruz if he beats the senator from Texas for the nomination.

“I’ll never have to call him,” to get his help and support, Trump said, adding that if Cruz did reach out, he would congratulate him. “Because out of 17 people, you beat 16. Okay? Which is pretty good.”

Still, Trump admitted that he needed to do more outreach. “Honestly, a lot of people are calling me, but I should be calling them,” he said. “Because to a certain extent, I should be calling them, they shouldn’t have to be calling me.”

Trump noted that two of his former rivals, Ben Carson and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, are supporting him. As for some others, “They will be loved. At the right time, they will be loved.”

Asked specifically at this uncertain moment in his campaign whether “all politics, all successful politics, is about coalition building,” he responded: “It’s true.”

“I do,” Trump said, his arms folded across his familiar dark suit, white shirt and red tie, as he sat in what he hopes will be his newest trophy hotel. “I agree. I agree.”

Pressed on when that coalition building might begin, he turned to stories about boxing great Muhammad Ali and football coaching icon Vince Lombardi.

Ali, he said, earned respect “through having the goods. You know, so Muhammad Ali is a friend of mine. He’s a good guy. I’ve watched many people over the years. Muhammad Ali would get in the ring, and he’d talk and talk and scream and talk about the ugly bear, and this, that — you know. And then he’d win. And respect is about winning. We don’t win anymore. I see it in my — we don’t win anymore. And he’d win. I’ve seen many fighters that were better than Muhammad Ali, in terms of talking. I’ve seen guys that were so beautiful, so flamboyant, they’d get into the ring — and then they’d get knocked out. And guess what? It’s all gone.”

“The coalition building for me will be when I win. Vince Lombardi, I saw this. He was not a big man. And I was sitting in a place with some very, very tough football players. Big, strong football players. He came in — these are tough cookies — he came in, years ago — and I’ll never forget it, I was a young man. He came in, screaming, into this place. And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt. Now, this guy could’ve whisked him away and thrown him out the window in two seconds. This guy — the player — was shaking. A friend of mine. There were four players, and Vince Lombardi walked in. He was angry. And he grabbed — I was a young guy — he grabbed him by the shirt, screaming at him, and the guy was literally. . . . And I said, wow. And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won.”

Trump has for months contended that the U.S. economy is in trouble because of what he sees as an overvalued stock market, but his view has grown more pessimistic of late and he is now bearish on investing, to the point of warning Americans against doing so.

“I think we’re sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble,” Trump said. He made clear that he was not specifying a sector of the economy but the economy at large and asserted that more bullish forecasts were based on skewed employment numbers and an inflated stock market.

“First of all, we’re not at 5 percent unemployment. We’re at a number that’s probably into the twenties if you look at the real number,” Trump said. “That was a number that was devised, statistically devised to make politicians — and, in particular, presidents — look good. And I wouldn’t be getting the kind of massive crowds that I’m getting if the number was a real number.”

[The bizarre optimism in Donald Trump’s theory of the economy]

Trump’s assertion does not match data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its analysis of joblessness beyond the unemployed — such as “marginally attached” workers and those who have dropped out of the labor force — was under 10 percent nationally last month.

Trump’s view also runs counter to that of most economists, whose rough consensus is that the U.S. economy has about a 20 percent chance of slipping into recession this year largely because growth remains weak across the world, according to a Wall Street Journal survey of economists in March.

Most economists aren’t overly worried about an imminent downturn because job creation remains strong, workers are starting to see their wages grow and the Federal Reserve remains cautious about shifting away from the low-interest-rate stance that has helped stimulate the economy.

Any number of Trump’s predictions haven’t worked out. In 2012, for instance, he predicted that if Obama were reelected, oil and gas prices would go “through the roof like never before.”

In 2011, Trump said that when Obama’s health-care law took effect, national unemployment would “go even higher” than 9 percent. He was also bullish on real estate investments in the run-up to the housing bust.

Nonetheless, Trump said, “it’s precarious times. Part of the reason it’s precarious is because we are being ripped so badly by other countries. We are being ripped so badly by China. It just never ends. Nobody’s ever going to stop it. And the reason they’re not going to stop it is one of two. They’re either living in a world of the make-believe, or they’re totally controlled by their lobbyists and their special interests.”

“I’m pessimistic,” Trump said. “Unless changes are made. Changes could be made.”

By Trump, for instance: “I can fix it. I can fix it pretty quickly.”

Trump firmly believes that a turnaround on trade would be the necessary beginning of a solution to any looming recession.

He mentions the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one pact he would immediately seek to renegotiate, putting him at odds with congressional Republicans who supported giving the president fast-track trade authority last year.

Coupled with his push on trade would be a “very big tax cut,” which Trump unveiled last September. That proposal increases taxes on the “very rich” but reduces taxes for most taxpayers and would cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. To woo companies back to the United States, he would offer an incentive of a deeply discounted rate and would no longer allow corporations to defer taxes on income earned overseas.

In the center of Washington on Thursday, world leaders were attending a summit focused on reducing nuclear stockpiles around the world. A day earlier, Trump had made headlines for saying at an MSNBC forum that he would “possibly” use a nuclear weapon as president. Less than a week before, in an interview with the New York Times, Trump had suggested that Japan and South Korea should consider acquiring nuclear arms as a way of disengaging the United States from its role as a military protector — a proposal that the Obama White House promptly called “catastrophic.”

Told that Obama had said in 2010 that his greatest worry is a nuclear device exploding in an American city, Trump at first took a dig at the president.

“It’s funny. It’s very interesting. I’m surprised he said that because I heard him recently say that the biggest problem we have is global warming, which I totally disagree with. Okay?” Trump said.

But after mocking, Trump turned solemn on the topic, calling the nuclear threat the “single greatest problem” for global peace. “You look at Hiroshima and multiply it times a thousand,” he said, shaking his head.

Trump said if other countries would agree to do so simultaneously, he would be open to eliminating nuclear weapons held by the United States. “If it’s done on an equal basis, absolutely,” he said.

But Trump added a caveat. He said as much as he supports the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons, it may not be feasible in the current climate and with countries such as Russia and Pakistan perhaps unwilling to relinquish their arms since they are “spending a tremendous amount of money.”

“That’s something that in an ideal world is wonderful, but I think it’s not going to happen very easily. I would love to see a nuclear-free world. Will that happen?” Trump said. “Look, Russia right now is spending a tremendous amount of money on redoing their entire nuclear arsenal.”

Turning to Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, Trump said he continues to appreciate praise from Putin, even though his human-rights record and incursions into Ukraine and elsewhere have alarmed many. “I want Putin to respect our country, okay?” Trump said. “I think he respects strength. Okay? I think Putin respects strength. And I’ve said it before, I think I will get along well with Putin. Now you never know. I don’t say that — only a fool would say, ‘I will,’ but I feel that I will get along well with Putin.”

After talk of Putin and strength, Trump was read a few lines from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Obama in the Atlantic, which quotes Obama as saying, “Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.”

Trump listened carefully and said: “Well, I think there’s a certain truth to that. I think there’s a certain truth to that. Real power is through respect. Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear. But you know, our military is very sadly depleted. You look at what’s going on with respect to our military, and it’s depleted from all of the cuts,” Trump said, noting that he frequently sees advertisements for former U.S. military bases being available for purchase.

“I don’t want people to be afraid. I want them to respect our country,” he said. “Right now, they don’t respect our country.”

Trump said the United States should not retreat from the world but should reevaluate its relationships and role in many international groups and alliances, including NATO.

“First of all, it’s obsolete,” he said. “Our big threat today is terrorism. Okay? And NATO’s not really set up for terrorism. NATO is set up for the Soviet Union more than anything else. And now you don’t have the Soviet Union.”

But for Trump, NATO, Putin, nuclear weapons, all of that is for later. For now, against mounting calls from friends, loved ones and fellow Republicans, remains the fight.

“My natural inclination is to win,” Trump said. “And after I win, I will be so presidential that you won’t even recognize me. You’ll be falling asleep, you’ll be so bored.”

Jim Tankersley and Evelyn M. Duffy contributed to this report.",REAL
"Get short URL 0 13 0 0 This would actually be a best-case scenario for the European Space Agency, as a software glitch on the ExoMars Schiaparelli lander, which crashed on the surface of Mars October 19, would be easier to remedy than a hardware issue. 
Andrea Accomazzo, the ESA’s head of solar and planetary missions told the journal Nature, ""If we have a serious technological issue, then it’s different, then we have to re-evaluate carefully…But I don’t expect it to be the case."" © Photo: Pixabay If a Trip to Mars Doesn't Kill You It Might Cause Massive Brain Damage and More The spacecraft consisted of a Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing demonstrator module, and a Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and was a joint venture between ESA and Russian space agency Roscosmos. 
ExoMars’ chief objective was to confirm markers of active geological and biological processes on the red planet by seeking evidence of methane gases, which have been detected by past Mars missions, along with other atmospheric gases. 
Nature noted that the mission was ""a prelude to a planned 2020 mission, when researchers aim to land a much larger scientific station and rover on Mars, which will drill up to 2-metres down to look for signs of ancient life in the planet’s soil."" © Photo: Pixabay Next Small Step & Giant Leap: United States to Send Humans to Mars by 2030 
The TGO entered Mars orbit last week after a seventh-month trek and now makes it way around the planet every 4.2 days, but never sent back signals indicating that the descent module made a successful landing on the planet’s surface. NASA released images Friday taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that show what appeared to be scorch marks near the area where the craft was supposed to have touched down, implying that it may have exploded on impact. 
Project scientist Jorge Vago suggested that ExoMars’ parachute and heat shields may have deployed prematurely, and the thrusters, which are supposed to engage for 30 seconds, shut after three seconds due to a software glitch. © Photo: Pixabay Mars 'Ain't No Limit': Elon Musk Envisions Future Colonization of Space 
He told Nature, ""My guess is that at that point we were still too high…And the most likely scenario is that, from then, we just dropped to the surface."" An investigation is ongoing, and data gleaned over the near future will determine whether ExoMars is intact, but the ESA said all of the craft’s main goals had been achieved and the mission was a success, despite the unexpected impact. 
""As it is, we have one part that works very well and one part that didn’t work as we expected,” said Vago. “The silver lining is that we think we have in hand the necessary information to fix the problem."" 
The ESA had a similar experience in 2003 when the British-led Beagle 2 mission disappeared attempting to make a Christmas Day landing on Mars. ...",FAKE
"by Yves Smith 
Yves here. Even though this post is a bit wonky, it’s short and very important. And you need to read about something other than the election. Recall that Angus Deaton is the winner of the Swedish-National-Bank-named-for-Albert-Nobel prize and with Anne Case, performed an important study that exposed the spike in death rates among less-educated middle aged whites . 
By Nancy Cartwright, Professor of Philosophy, University of Durham and University of California, San Diego and Angus Deaton, Senior Scholar and Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Economics Department, Princeton University. Originally published at VoxEU 
In recent years, the use of randomised controlled trials has spread from labour market and welfare programme evaluation to other areas of economics (and to other social sciences), perhaps most prominently in development and health economics. This column argues that some of the popularity of such trials rests on misunderstandings about what they are capable of accomplishing, and cautions against simple extrapolations from trials to other contexts. 
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been sporadically used in economic research since the negative income tax experiments between 1968 and 1980 (see Wise and Hausman 1985), and have been regularly used since then to evaluate labour market and welfare programmes (Manski and Garfinkel 1992, Gueron and Rolston 2013). In recent years, they have spread widely in economics (and in other social sciences), perhaps most prominently in development and health economics. The ‘credibility revolution’ in econometrics (Angrist and Pischke 2010) putatively frees empirical investigation from implausible and arbitrary theoretical and statistical assumptions, and RCTs are seen as the most ‘credible’ and ‘rigorous’ of the credible methods; indeed, credible non-RCT designs typically pattern themselves as closely as possible on RCTs. Imbens (2010) writes, “Randomised experiments do occupy a special place in the hierarchy of evidence, namely at the very top.” 
In medicine, Pocock and Elbourne (2000) argue that only RCTs “can provide a reliably unbiased estimate of treatment effects”, and without such estimates, they “see considerable dangers to clinical research and even to the well-being of patients”. The link between bias and risk to patients is taken as obvious, with no attempt to show that an RCT experimental design does indeed minimise the expected harm to patients. The World Bank has run many development related RCTs, and makes claims well beyond unbiasedness. Its implementation manual states, “we can be very confident that our estimated average impact” (given as the difference in means between the treatment and control group) “constitute the true impact of the program, since by construction we have eliminated all observed and unobserved factors that might otherwise plausibly explain the differences in outcomes” (Gertler et al. 2011). High-quality evidence indeed; the truth is surely the ultimate in credibility. What Are Randomised Controlled Trials Food For? 
In a recent paper, we argue that some of the popularity of RCTs, among the public as well as some practitioners, rests on misunderstandings about what they are capable of accomplishing (Deaton and Cartwright 2016). Well-conducted RCTs could provide unbiased estimates of the average treatment effect (ATE) in the study population, provided no relevant differences between treatment and control are introduced post randomisation, which blinding of subjects, investigators, data collectors, and analysts serves to diminish. Unbiasedness says that, if we were to repeat the trial many times, we would be right on average. Yet we are almost never in such a situation, and with only one trial (as is virtually always the case) unbiasedness does nothing to prevent our single estimate from being very far away from the truth. If, as if often believed, randomisation were to guarantee that the treatment and control groups are identical except for the treatment, then indeed, we would have a precise – indeed exact – estimate of the ATE. But randomisation does nothing of the kind, even at baseline; in any given RCT, nothing ensures that other causal factors are balanced across the groups at the point of randomisation. Investigators often test for balance on observable covariates, but unless the randomisation device is faulty, or people systematically break their assignment, the null hypothesis underlying the test is true by construction, so that the test is not informative and should not be carried out. 
Of course, we know that the ATE from an RCT is only an estimate, not the infallible truth, and like other estimates, it has a standard error. If appropriately computed, the standard error of the estimated ATE can give an indication of the importance of other factors. As was understood by Fisher from the very first agricultural trials, randomisation, while doing nothing to guarantee balance on omitted factors, gives us a method for assessing their importance. Yet even here there are pitfalls. The t-statistics for estimated ATEs from RCTs do not in general follow the t-distribution. As recently documented by Young (2016), a large fraction of published studies have made spurious inferences because of this Fisher-Behrens problem, or because of the failure to deal appropriately with multiple-hypothesis testing. Although most of the published literature is problematic, these issues can be addressed by improvements in technique. Not so, however, in cases where individual treatment effects are skewed – as in healthcare experiments, where a one or two individuals can account for a large share of spending (this was true in the Rand Health Experiment); or in microfinance, where a few subjects make money and most do not (where the t-distribution again breaks down). Once again, inferences are likely to be wrong, but here there is no clear fix. When there are outlying individual treatment effects, the estimate depends on whether the outliers are assigned to treatments or controls, causing massive reductions in the effective sample size. Trimming of outliers would fix the statistical problem, but only at the price of destroying the economic problem; for example, in healthcare, it is precisely the few outliers that make or break a programme. In view of these difficulties, we suspect that a large fraction of the published results of RCTs in development and health economics are unreliable. 
The ‘credibility’ of RCTs comes from their ability to get answers without the use of potentially contentious prior information about structure, such as specifying other causal factors or detailing the mechanisms through which they operate. A sceptical lay audience is often unwilling to accept prior economic knowledge and even within the profession, there are differences about appropriate assumptions or controls. Yet, as is always the case, the only route to precision is through prior information and controlling for factors that are likely to be important, just as in a (non-randomised) laboratory experiment in physics, biology, or even economics, scientists seek accurate measurement by controlling for known confounders. Cumulative science happens when new results are built on top of old ones – or undermine them – and RCTs, with their refusal to use prior science, make this very difficult. And any RCT can be challenged ex post by examining the differences between treatments and controls as actually allocated, and showing that arguably important factors were unevenly distributed; prior information is excluded by randomisation, but reappears in the interpretation of the results. 
A well-conducted RCT can yield a credible estimate of an ATE in one specific population, namely the ‘study population’ from which the treatments and controls were selected. Sometimes this is enough; if we are doing a post hoc program evaluation, if we are testing a hypothesis that is supposed to be generally true, if we want to demonstrate that the treatment can work somewhere, or if the study population is a randomly drawn sample from the population of interest whose ATE we are trying to measure. Yet the study population is often not the population that we are interested in, especially if subjects must volunteer to be in the experiment and have their own reasons for participating or not. A famous early example comes from Ashenfelter (1981), who found that people who volunteer for a training programme tend to have seen a recent drop in their wages; similarly, people who take a drug may be those who have failed other forms of therapy. Indeed, many of the differences in results between experimental and non-experimental studies can be traced not to differences in methodology, but to differences in the populations to which they apply. The ‘Transportation’ Problem 
More generally, demonstrating that a treatment works in one situation is exceedingly weak evidence that it will work in the same way elsewhere; this is the ‘transportation’ problem: what does it take to allow us to use the results in new contexts, whether policy contexts or in the development of theory? It can only be addressed by using previous knowledge and understanding, i.e. by interpreting the RCT within some structure, the structure that, somewhat paradoxically, the RCT gets its credibility from refusing to use. If we want to go from an RCT to policy, we need to build a bridge from the RCT to the policy. No matter how rigorous or careful the RCT, if the bridge is built by a hand-waving simile that the policy context is somehow similar to the experimental context, the rigor in the trial does nothing to support a policy; in any chain of evidence, it is the weakest link that determines the overall strength of the claim, not the strongest. Using the results of an RCT cannot simply be a matter of simple extrapolation from the experiment to another context. Causal effects depend on the settings in which they are derived, and often depend on factors that might be constant within the experimental setting but different elsewhere. Even the direction of causality can depend on the context. We have a better chance of transporting results if we recognise the issue when designing the experiment – which itself requires the commitment to some kind of structure – and try to investigate the effects of the factors that are likely to vary elsewhere. Without a structure, without an understanding of why the effects work, we not only cannot transport, but we cannot begin to do welfare economics; just because an intervention works, and because the investigator thinks the intervention makes people better off, is no guarantee that it actually does so. Without knowing why things happen and why people do things, we run the risk of worthless casual (‘fairy story’) causal theorising, and we have given up on one of the central tasks of economics. 
See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"Susan Goldberg is the editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, which dedicated its entire November issue to climate change. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) When National Geographic first sent some of the world's best photographers and mapmakers on assignment more than 125 years ago, we didn't set to capture the ""before"" photos for an imperiled planet. But that's exactly what happened.

Over the decades, from the Matterhorn to the Great Barrier Reef to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, these intrepid explorers became the visual record-keepers of climate change.

Today, that record is alarmingly clear. Since the late 19th century, Earth's average temperature has increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, melting glaciers and raising sea levels.

As President Barack Obama noted this year, ""shrinking ice caps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart.""

Meanwhile, roughly a fifth of the Amazon rainforest , which stores a quarter of the world's carbon found on land, has been destroyed over the past 40 years. In 1980, scientists logged 291 ""catastrophic"" floods, droughts, storms and other weather events; last year, that number tripled to 904.

Humans are a highly adaptive species. Just ask Greenland's Inuits who, in the words of one anthropologist, ""went from subsistence hunting to Facebook in less than a century."" But our adaptability has limits.

Climate change is affecting nearly everything. It's displacing entire cultures, posing challenges to our health, weakening our economies and threatening our national security.

The question we face as journalists who chronicle the state of the planet is stark: Will we write a new chapter in the progress of humankind? Or will we write the obituary of Earth?

As world leaders meet in Paris this month for the U.N. Climate Change Conference, it appears, thankfully, that the years of dithering and denial finally may be behind us. While some leading presidential candidates continue to question the science and impact of climate change, recent polls show that three-quarters of Americans now acknowledge that climate change is happening.

It is critical that we build on this momentum.

For all the talk of alternative energy technologies, ultimately, the most important source of energy is all of us. That's why all of us -- individuals, businesses and governments -- have a responsibility to fix the problems we have caused.

Take personal consumption. It's easy to assume that one person can't affect our warming world, and that's part of what makes climate change such a daunting issue to tackle. But one person can make a difference.

Leaving your car at home twice a week can cut 2 tons of carbon emissions annually. If the average American family did laundry with cold water, that could save 1,600 pounds of CO2 a year. As for all the phone chargers and other electronics that we plug in and don't use? Those consume the equivalent of a dozen power plants , meaning that simply switching on and off a power strip could save your household up to $200 a year while also helping to save the planet. It just goes to show that when it comes to climate change, there's no such thing as chump change.

At the same time, scientists, business leaders and entrepreneurs alike are realizing the benefits of a green economy, whether it's major U.S. corporations saving millions by cutting energy use to nascent businesses selling solar lights to off-grid vendors in India and Myanmar.

Currently, just 13% of electricity in the United States comes from renewable technology. But if American industry truly commits to this undertaking, the United States could be to the Age of Climate Change what we were for the Information Age -- the driver and beneficiary of a revolutionary economy.

Finally, governments need to galvanize a national and international response to this defining challenge of our time. Whoever takes the oath of office in 2017 will not only need to negotiate and adhere to strict limits on carbon emissions, but he or she will need to encourage America's transformation into a sustainable society.

Already, we've seen countries such as Germany lead the way, generating more than a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources. In the United States, policymakers at every level will be responsible for upgrading outdated infrastructure, building smarter cities and spurring the development of wind, solar and other renewable technologies.

The message of magazines past and future is clear. One way or another, we inhabitants of Earth need to cool it. The choice -- and the opportunity -- is ours.",REAL
"President Obama and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker traded barbs Monday after the president suggested that the likely Republican presidential candidate ""bone up on foreign policy.""

Obama made the remarks in an interview with NPR published Monday, responding to a question from reporter Steve Inskeep about Walker's vow to undo a nuclear pact with Iran on his first day in the White House.

In defending his administration's tentative framework with Iran over its nuclear program, Obama told NPR that he is confident that it does not need congressional approval. He added that he hopes lawmakers ""won't start calling to question the capacity of the executive branch of the United States to enter into agreements with other countries. If that starts being questioned, that's going to be a problem for our friends and that's going to embolden our enemies.""

Obama added: ""And it would be a foolish approach to take, and, you know, perhaps Mr. Walker, after he's taken some time to bone up on foreign policy, will feel the same way.""

Walker, who has been eager to establish his foreign policy chops ahead of a likely bid for the GOP presidential nomination next year, didn't take long to fight back with a string of Twitter messages.

Walker has been overshadowed the past two weeks as a pair of rivals — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — announced their candidacies for the Republican nomination. The governor has not impressed many of the party's leaders with his knowledge of international affairs, drawing mockery last month for refusing to talk about foreign policy on a trip to London and then for comparing his experience battling labor protesters to taking on Islamic State terrorists.

Obama has been eager to sell the Iran nuclear framework to a skeptical Congress as his administration seeks to finalize a deal without lawmakers approving additional sanctions on Tehran that could scuttle the talks.",REAL
"President Barack Obama forcefully disagreed with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on gay rights as they stood right by each other in a joint news conference on Saturday.

""With respect to the rights of gays and lesbians, I've been consistent all across Africa on this,"" Obama said. ""I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law, and that they are deserving of equal protection under the law, and that the state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.""

Kenyatta responded later on, saying LGBTQ rights is just one of the issues that he and Obama disagree on, CNN's Kristen Holmes and Eugene Scott reported. ""Kenya and the United States, we share so many values,"" he said. ""But there are some things that we must admit we don't share — our culture, our societies don't accept. It's very difficult for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.""

A Supreme Court decision recently legalized same-sex marriages across the US. But many countries in Africa, including Kenya, still ban same-sex relations altogether. Other countries punish same-sex relations with the death penalty.

Here's a thorough breakdown of national laws from the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, which is now slightly outdated since it's missing the Supreme Court decision affirming marriage equality in the US (click to enlarge):

So while the US is making great strides on LGBTQ rights, much of the rest of the world lags far behind — sometimes dangerously so for LGBTQ people.",REAL
" 00 UTC © USGS Map of the earthquake's epicenter An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 rattled a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome, on Wednesday (Thursday NZT), just two months after a powerful temblor toppled villages, killing nearly 300 people. There were no immediate reports of damage. Italy's National Vulcanology Center said the epicenter was near Macerata, near Perugia. The US Geological Survey said it had a depth of some 10 kilometres, which is relatively shallow. The quake was felt across a broad swath of central and southern Italy, shaking centuries-old palazzi in Rome's historic centre. The Aug. 24 quake destroyed hilltop village of Amatrice and other nearby towns. Wednesday's quake was felt from Perugia in Umbria to the capital Rome to the central Italy town of Aquila, which was struck by a deadly quake in 2009. The mayor of Aquila, however, said there was no immediate report of damage. ​The quake struck at 7.10pm on Wednesday (local time). ""The earthquake only happened a few minutes ago. It's dark here, so impossible to determine if there has been any damage outside,"" one resident in Penna San Giovanni told EMSC. ""All services - electricity, internet, etc - are still working normally."" MORE TO COME",FAKE
"The battle over the budget that President Obama will submit Monday is emerging as a preview of the 2016 presidential election debate on national security, an area that for now appears to be the greatest vulnerability of Obama and the Democrats.

The president will ask Congress to break through its own spending caps — commonly referred to as “sequestration” — and allocate about $561 billion for Pentagon expenditures, about $38 billion more than is currently allowed under the law.

There’s broad consensus in both parties that the military needs more money to modernize its forces and meet its responsibilities in a world that seems to have grown more chaotic and dangerous in the past 12 months. It’s unclear, however, how Congress and the White House can come to an agreement on where to find the additional funds.

Even if both parties share the blame, a cash-strapped Pentagon could still provide an opening for Republicans — whose standing on national security issues was damaged by the Iraq war — to make an argument that they are the party best positioned to keep the country safe.

“A lot of Republicans see opportunity in an election that’s a referendum on Obama’s foreign policy,” said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. A presidential election featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton, who served as Obama’s secretary of state, would raise the profile of international issues.

Democrats, though, are determined to prevent the re­emergence of their pre-Iraq-war reputation as being the weaker party on defense.

The impasse over the defense budget has left the Pentagon’s top generals complaining that the spending caps, which have been in place since 2013, are damaging the military at a time when the country can least afford it. The list of new threats includes Islamic State fighters, who last year seized major cities in Iraq and Syria, a Russian-backed insurrection in eastern Ukraine and the collapse of the government in Yemen.

“The global security environment is more dangerous, and sequestration is still on the books as the law,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week. “It’s absolutely crazy for this country.”

Obama has in recent months been able to cite a resurgent economy, strong job growth and a low unemployment rate as proof that his economic policies are delivering for the nation. “Because of the policies that this administration put in place, our economy has bounced back stronger than ever,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday.

The public perception of the president’s handling of national security matters, amid the growing unrest in the Middle East and Ukraine, has not been nearly as strong. “We’ve had an interesting and, I would acknowledge, up-and-down year with respect to the perception of our foreign policy,” said a senior administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the formal budget announcement.

In recent years, Republicans and Democrats have been able to blunt the worst effects of the budget caps by cobbling together short-term deals that modestly increased defense and domestic spending by finding offsets — essentially, cuts to other programs or fee increases. But each year that the budget caps are in place, it gets harder to find new savings to meet the Pentagon’s needs, lawmakers and White House officials said.

Republicans have shown little willingness to raise taxes to cover the costs of a bigger military budget. The White House, meanwhile, is not likely to back a budget compromise that would boost defense spending at the expense of prized domestic programs that have also been slashed in recent years.

“It looks like the administration is trying, but I don’t think the fundamentals are there for a compromise,” said Kathleen Hicks, who served as a top official in the Pentagon under Obama and now is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Republicans, long divided between deficit and defense hawks, have not made additional spending on defense a top priority in recent years. But as the economy improves and the presidential election nears, they appear to be coalescing around the need for more Pentagon spending “for no reason other than expediency,” Hicks said.

“They’ll have to move to the center” on defense spending, she said. “And I do think world events are pushing them in that direction.”

It is unclear how hard the Obama administration is willing to fight for more military spending. Although the president’s blueprint includes a big boost for the Pentagon, some in the president’s party have questioned his commitment on the issue. The president did not mention the need for more military spending in his State of the Union address or in a major foreign policy speech at the U.S. Military Academy in late May— an omission that some hawkish Democrats found “worrisome,” Hicks said.

White House officials, though, insist that a failure to provide relief to the Pentagon would be devastating to the country’s military and its national security and that Obama will not accept a budget that carries the caps forward.

The promises of more money from Congress and the White House have yet to ease concerns in the Pentagon. The top brass have been complaining for years that the budget caps have forced them to pare back training, slash troop levels and gut their modernization programs.

Now their biggest worry is that lawmakers and the public have stopped listening to them on the issue and, absent a major crisis, will not fix the problem.

“At what point do we lose our soldiers’ trust, the trust that we will provide them the right resources, the training and equipment?” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff.

The military’s case for more money also has been hindered by the turmoil at the top of the Defense Department.

Former defense secretary Chuck ­Hagel, who was essentially fired by Obama in November, had little background in Pentagon budget issues and generally seemed overwhelmed by the job, military officials said. Obama’s pick to replace him, Ashton B. Carter, has not been confirmed by the Senate. He has a long background serving at top levels of the Pentagon and is expected to be a more forceful and articulate advocate for lifting the budget caps.

Meanwhile, liberal Democrats, eager to fend off the Republican critique that excessive domestic spending and government waste have caused the Pentagon’s budget woes, cite the supporters of the 2003 Iraq war as the real problem.

“These are the same guys who voted for a war in Iraq and forgot how it was going to be paid for,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a possible Democratic presidential candidate. “You know how it’s paid for? It’s paid for on the credit card. We don’t know how much it will cost by the time we take care of the last veteran . . . $3 trillion or $4 trillion. They weren’t worried about that.”

Missy Ryan and Steven Mufson contributed to this report.",REAL
"Donald Trump is looking for a veep with the political experience Trump lacks, while Hillary Clinton is looking to diversify the ticket.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (l.) stands with Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, June 27. According to campaign insiders, Senator Warren is on the shortlist to be Mrs. Clinton's running mate.

According to insiders, Donald Trump wants a running mate who has what he lacks – political experience –while Hillary Clinton is putting a premium on competence and diversity.

Yet the presidential rivals are running strikingly similar processes for tapping their vice presidential picks: relying on prominent Washington lawyers to comb through the background of top contenders, seeking guidance from a small circle of trusted advisers and family members, and weighing their personal chemistry with prospects.

Mr. Trump, a wealthy businessman who has never held public office, is mulling a small number of political veterans. He's seriously considering former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, according to people with direct knowledge of the vetting process.

""We're vetting a lot of good people, and we have a lot of interest in people that want to leave high positions and do this,"" Trump said Thursday.

The right VP candidate could help bring party leaders, Republican voters, and big donors into the Trump fold, all people the campaign desperately needs ahead of the general election.... With more than 60 percent of voters feeling unfavorable about Trump at the end of June, the right VP pick could help voters feel more positive about the Republican ticket.

But in light of their own low favorability ratings, Ms. Hinckley wrote, ""Gingrich and Christie might not be the ones to do it.""

The presumptive Republican nominee appears less concerned about diversity, considering only white men over age 50 for the role. His campaign chairman said that Trump is not interested in choosing a woman or minority for the sake of appealing to a particular segment of the electorate.

Former Secretary of State Clinton has said she wants a running mate who is well-prepared to become president, and Democrats say she's giving priority to diversity and has been weighing women, Hispanic candidates, and black candidates — a nod to the voting blocs Democrats need to win in presidential elections.

Top contenders for the Democratic ticket include Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of Washington's most prominent female lawmakers; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, a telegenic 41-year-old Hispanic politician; and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a white man over 50 from a swing state.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, one of two black senators, was also being considered, though it's unclear whether he is still in the running.

A running mate rarely shifts the trajectory of a presidential race, but it's still among the most important decisions nominees face during the general election, and their choice is viewed as a reflection of their priorities and values.

Clinton has veteran Democratic lawyer James Hamilton overseeing her selection process, with input from longtime confidants John Podesta and Cheryl Mills. Clinton is expected to begin meeting with candidates herself next week, according to two Democrats with knowledge of the process.

Given Clinton's decades in the public eye, her advisers don't expect her selection of a running mate to change her electoral prospects significantly. But one Clinton aide said it was important that her running mate help tell the ""story"" of her candidacy.

Clinton has increasingly said her campaign is about Americans being ""stronger together"" — a phrase intended to convey the importance of a diverse country fighting for common goals.

Aides who have worked in senior White House posts under President Obama and former President Bill Clinton have also been emphasizing the need for personal chemistry, noting that a strained relationship between a president and vice president can be destructive in the West Wing.

Clinton and Trump face fast-approaching deadlines as they evaluate their choices.

Trump has said he plans to announce his running mate at the Republican National Convention, which kicks off in Cleveland in just over two weeks — but the campaign has also considered pushing up the date. A person familiar with Trump's decision-making process said the one-time reality television star is weighing how to maximize the suspense of his choice. He might do it showbiz-style at the convention.

Trump has spent weeks discussing his options with his adult children, business associates, and even friends from his country clubs. A.B. Culvahouse, a lawyer who has overseen vice presidential vetting for previous GOP nominees, sent vetting paperwork to top contenders late this week.

While the businessman has made clear he'll tap a political veteran for the post, those close to him say that's not the only element.

""He's not going to pick someone he doesn't personally like,"" according to one person with knowledge of the process. Like others who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, they were not authorized to discuss the vice presidential process publicly.

The businessman has a close relationship with most of the vice presidential finalists. He's less familiar with Governor Pence, though Marc Lotter, a spokesman for the Indiana governor, has said the two plan to meet this weekend.

In choosing a political veteran, Trump would not be sending a message only to voters, but to the numerous GOP leaders who are wary of his candidacy.

""That would soothe some concerns — but not all of them,"" said Kevin Madden, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee.

Clinton is expected to wait until after the Republican convention to announce her running mate, allowing her to use her pick to distract from any boost Trump receives from the GOP gathering. She and her running mate will be nominated at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the last week in July.

Lemire reported from Erie, Penn. Associated Press writer Steve Peoples contributed to this report.",REAL
"Trump's Hollywood Walk of Fame star Destroyed with a Sledgehammer and Pick page: 1 link I guess you could say it a sign of the strength of feeling this election has generated but in the real world it's just a mindless piece of vandalism that achieves nothing. A man wearing high visibility jacket and helmet was filmed taking out his frustration in front of a group of onlookers. News report on the incident. I suppose it made him feel better but it will return before he goes to prison. edit on 26-10-2016 by gortex because: (no reason given) I suppose it made him feel better but it will return before he goes to prison. So he was charged then? You didn't provide a link. edit on 10/26/2016 by ColdWisdom because: (no reason given) You don't think he will be arrested and charged ? He may not be in custody yet but he will be , he will be caught. link pure filth that guy is. I get it...Donald sucks, whatever..cast your vote against him on the 8th. Consider if Obama gets a star, will some dumbass redneck be smashing that up also because he didn't like the politics? morons. followers of the DNC in action. Such peaceful folks. link a reply to: gortex Poor sumbeyotch. The low IQs are always on display on both sides. I hope he just gets probation. This is how sore losers everywhere will react when Trump wins by a landslide. I like how safety-conscious he was by wearing a high visibility jacket, though. This is how sore losers everywhere will react when Trump wins by a landslide. I like how safety-conscious he was by wearing a high visibility jacket, though. If a mouth breather like this is so upset before the election, damn, if Trump does win, how many of these ass clowns will go full retard after the 8th? Thought these stars were for artists like actors. What did Trump get the star for? For this ""not-scripted"" TV show? Is it like with the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody nowadays gets one(thinkig of Obama and the EU...) originally posted by: network dude followers of the DNC in action. Such peaceful folks. No one said he was a DNC supporter He may just be a bloke who hates racist, homophobic, misogynistic narcissists. Thought these stars were for artists like actors. What did Trump get the star for? For this ""not-scripted"" TV show? Is it like with the Nobel Peace Prize, everybody nowadays gets one(thinkig of Obama and the EU...) He got it for his role as producer on The Apprentice. originally posted by: roadgravel It could be a psyop by a Trump supporter. Make people feel for Trump's lost star and therefore vote for him. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Nobody is going to vote for him just because somebody vandalized his star in Hollywood. edit on 10/26/2016 by AdmireTheDistance because: (no reason given)",FAKE
"But before you really devote yourself to purging this cherisher of women from your mind, do yourself a favor and read Evan Osnos’s recent New Yorker piece on the “loose alliance” of scared and angry Americans who are driving the Trump phenomenon. As Osnos understands, Trump’s supporters, who are part of a nativist resurgence throughout Western politics, are more important than the man himself. And regardless of Trump 2016’s ultimate fate, these people aren’t going anywhere.

I’ve written previously about the Trumpites (or Trumpeteers, if you prefer) and how they’re defined as much by their authoritarianism as their ethno-nationalism. But while those characteristics are certainly present among the people Osnos spoke to for his report, another trait jumps out, too. And it’s one that helps explain why the Republican Party establishment is so out of touch, and so incapable of defeating Trump in a zero-sum battle for influence.

The trait is a lack of belief. Not in God or country, both of which Trump supporters rather enjoy, but rather in the fundamental legitimacy of American society’s most powerful and entrenched institutions; the government, the banks, the media, the academy, etc. Because aside from one extremely notable exception (which we’ll talk about in a bit), there’s not a single major institution of American political life that these folks wouldn’t like to see Trump conquer — the Republican Party itself very much included.

For a sense of how this plays out in the real world, think of the now-infamous opening question of the GOP’s first top-tier presidential debate. In truth, the question was more of an order: Any candidate who would not promise to support the GOP in 2016, regardless of the candidate, was asked to raise their hand. The request was ostensibly directed toward all of the debate participants, but everyone knew its real target was the only candidate who hadn’t ruled out a third-party run: Trump.

The question was an attempt to bring Trump to heel by leveraging the Republican Party’s institutional prestige against him. The goal was simple: expose Trump as a bad team-player. And if we lived in a time when party loyalty mattered, it probably would’ve worked. But the devoted reactionaries who now comprise the GOP base don’t trust — much less like — the “RINOs” among them. The patent anti-Trump bias of the Fox News/Republican Party borg only made them love him more.

That’s certainly the impression you get reading Osnos’s piece, or this Time report on a recent focus group run by Frank Luntz. One woman tells Luntz that she is “frustrated beyond belief.” She says she feels like she’s been “lied to,” because despite Republican gains in the 2014 midterms, “[n]othing’s getting better.” Her sentiment was widely and deeply shared. “We’ve got to show the Republicans that we’ve had it with them,” another woman said. “They treat us like crap,” she added. “That’s why we want Trump.”

It’s hard to imagine there’s anything the Republican Party can do in this climate to win the favor of Trump’s supporters. But state Republican Party efforts in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia to “compel” Trump to swear loyalty to the GOP are especially doomed. Such an ultimatum is not only “[t]he kind of thing that could make [Trump] bolt the GOP,” as ex-Trump advisor Roger Stone tweeted. It’s the kind of thing that could make Trump supporters in those states vote for a third-party. Or simply not vote. So the GOP is in quite a bind. If it goes after Trump, it will only bring him and his supporters closer together. But if the Republican Party tries to ignore him, or allow him to transform it into an American version of UKIP, then it will no longer be able to serve its fundamental purpose of winning elective office for Republican candidates — especially the ones aiming for the White House. And if you’re looking at this from the perspective of the GOP as an institution, that’s unacceptable. For conservatives trying to win the Trumpites back to the GOP, it seems, the Holy Grail would align the party with an institution that has even more gravitas and authority than Donald Trump. And as I said earlier, polling suggests there is at least one institution that fits the bill. Using it as a wedge to separate Trump from his admirers, however, would raise some major ethical questions. For example, what if the cure for Trumpism is somehow even worse? Because the institution in question is the military — which Americans trust far more than the media, organized religion, and the rest of the government — that’s a real concern. It was when he spoke of the armed forces that Luntz’s focus group adored Trump the most. “[T]he military is going to be so strong,” he promised, “nobody is going to mess around with the United States.” He got nearly unanimous 100s for that boast, apparently; “a seldom occurrence among focus groups,” according to Time. Perhaps the world should be thankful, then, that there is no war hero or celebrity general for the GOP to task with destroying Trump. (Thanks, Paula!) But if we assume that Trump is succeeding mainly because he reaches voters who felt otherwise ignored, and not because of any extraordinary political talents, then there’s no reason to think the problem Trump represents will go away once he does. It could just as easily come back again and again and again, each time in a slightly different form. And if the GOP eventually does find a military figure who is acceptable to the establishment while simultaneously bringing the Trumpites back into the party tent? Well, then there may be a time in the not-so-distant future when we’ll pine for the relatively benign and innocent days of the Summer of Trump.",REAL
"As part of a partnership with Factcheck.org, a look at Hillary Clinton's recent claim regarding the various congressional investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Clinton claimed that the seven investigations have found that 'I and nobody did anything wrong.' Did they really?

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said all of the government investigations into the terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi concluded that ""nobody did anything wrong."" That's not exactly accurate.

An independent accountability board appointed by Clinton found ""systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels."" On the day the report came out, four State Department employees were placed on administrative leave, and all four were later reassigned.",REAL
"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
"The escalating feud between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz has expanded into a fight for the backing of the GOP’s anti-establishment establishment, with both seeking validation from figures with immense influence on the right.

Trump unfurled a highly anticipated endorsement from former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin while campaigning in Iowa on Tuesday, giving him a jolt among the party’s restless base. Palin’s endorsement came a day after Trump received the effusive praise of evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr., whose views could help Trump among religious voters.

But other conservative voices, many of whom had cheered Trump in recent months, have rallied to Cruz’s side. On talk radio, Mark Levin and Glenn Beck have fumed over Trump’s recent questions about Cruz’s Canadian birth. In Cruz, they see a movement leader who champions their values, whereas they say Trump is an interloper who lacks an ideological core.

The frenzied courting of conservatives is testament to their power in shaping a contest that is being dominated by two Washington outsiders. Neither has won the backing of a single governor or senator — and it’s unclear that either man even wants to. In this race, it is the media titans, personalities and activists who have long stood on the GOP’s fringe who now have all the cachet.

“You need a scorecard to keep track,” said Craig Shirley, a conservative historian. “Talk radio and bloggers — anyone outside of the system is at the center of the party, and we’re witnessing in real time the shift away from the Republican establishment in deciding who the nominee will be.”

Palin on Tuesday described Trump as someone who could change the status quo in American politics, and she praised his values as a father and community leader.

“He builds big things, things that touch the sky,” she said as Trump looked on, glowingly. “He has spent his life looking up.”

Of the GOP leadership and critics of Trump, she said: “They are so busted. . . . What the heck would the establishment know about conservatism?”

After Palin finished, Trump waved and put his arm around her. “We’re going to give them hell,” he said as the crowd roared.

The value of Palin’s endorsement was hotly debated Tuesday, with Trump supporters saying her popularity in Iowa will give the reality-TV star a significant lift and Cruz backers playing down her impact.

Barry Bennett, Ben Carson’s former campaign manager, sided with those who thought it was consequential. “I think Sarah Palin actually helps Trump a lot because she’s showing them that it’s okay,” Bennett said. “Whatever lack of credentials he has, he’s making some inroads into places where we didn’t think he’d play.”

One key Cruz ally said Palin could help Trump win over women. “He’s a thrice-married, non-churchgoing billionaire, and she gives him credibility with conservative women,” said Kellyanne Conway, who manages a Cruz super PAC. “It’s a net positive.”

Palin’s move came as a surprise to some in her orbit, given her friendly rapport with both Trump and Cruz. In 2011, she dined with Trump at a pizza shop in New York as she mulled her own White House bid, and, according to Republicans familiar with her thinking, she has been increasingly enthusiastic about Trump as he has surged in the current race. Their circles also overlap: Trump’s political director, Michael Glassner, is a former Palin aide.

Aside from Palin, Trump’s campaign is backed by prominent conservatives such as activist Phyllis Schlafly and radio host Michael Savage. Willie Robertson, a star of the “Duck Dynasty” ­reality-TV show, is with Trump, too.

Last week, it was Cruz who won the support of another “Duck Dynasty” star, when Phil Robertson signed on. The senator from Texas is also backed by longtime activists such as L. Brent Bozell III and Richard Viguerie, social conservative leader James Dobson, and actor James Woods.

It is on talk radio, especially, where Cruz has built support, which has proved critical now that Trump has taken to attacking him relentlessly. Most of these drive-time and lunch-hour heroes to rank-and-file Republicans were initially complimentary of Trump’s focus on illegal immigration last year, but they have since soured.

“I’m sick and tired of stupid talk!” Levin said Monday on his program. “This is why I’m sick and tired of stupid issues! I didn’t spend 40 years of my life — 45 to be exact — to reach a point where we actually might take back the White House with somebody who is conservative, whomever that is, to be discussing birther issues!”

On Saturday, Beck will appear in Waterloo, Iowa, at a rally hosted by a pro-Cruz super PAC. Those who are planning to be with Beck onstage attest to Cruz’s strength on the right in the state: Rep. Steve King, conservative author David Barton and Christian organizer Bob Vander Plaats. Cruz is banking on that deep goodwill, carefully built up over the course of the 2013 government shutdown and the 2014 elections, to sustain him.

Trump and Cruz had spent most of the campaign praising each other, but they have switched to attack mode ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

Trump’s case against Cruz is more temperamental than ideological. He has called the Texan “nasty” and disliked by his Senate colleagues, and has wondered aloud, repeatedly, whether Cruz’s birth in Canada leaves him vulnerable to lawsuits over his citizenship.

“When you talk about temperament, Ted has got a rough temperament,” Trump said Tuesday in Winterset, Iowa, ahead of the Palin event. “You can’t call people liars on the Senate floor, when they are your leader.”

Cruz has a more understated approach. He mostly avoids taking personal shots at Trump and keeps his emphasis on the policy differences between them, pointing out where the businessman has sided with Democrats, in particular.

“If you’re looking for someone who’s a dealmaker, who will capitulate even more to the Democrats and give in to Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, then perhaps Donald Trump is your man,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday at a stop in Barnstead, N.H.

Palin’s endorsement, which came after days of teasing by Trump’s campaign and widespread speculation on cable TV, riled the right in the hours before it was made official.

Appearing Tuesday morning on CNN, Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler called Palin’s expected nod a “blow” to her reputation because “she would be endorsing someone who’s held progressive views all their life.”

“I think if it was Sarah Palin — let me just say, I’d be deeply disappointed,” he said.

Supporters of Palin and Trump responded with fury. In a blog post, Palin’s eldest daughter, Bristol, wrote that Tyler’s remark “makes me hope my mom does endorse Trump.”

By the afternoon, after Sarah Palin’s endorsement, Cruz felt compelled to clarify that Tyler’s view did not reflect his own. “I love Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is fantastic,” he told reporters. “I will always remain a big, big fan of Sarah Palin’s.”

The drama Tuesday was not limited to the right. Fault lines were beginning to be drawn by members of the GOP leadership as they grappled with the possibility of having the race come down to Trump or Cruz, rather than a candidate who is a more natural fit with donors and party brass.

Speaking at an Iowa energy summit, Gov. Terry Branstad (R) called Cruz an “opponent of renewable fuels” who should be defeated.

Trump reacted gleefully on Twitter: “Wow, the highly respected Governor of Iowa just stated that ‘Ted Cruz must be defeated.’ Big shocker! People do not like Ted.”

Branstad’s position reflects a broader unease with Cruz among Republican leaders. In Trump, most party leaders see a candidate who is unpredictable and controversial, but far less ideological than Cruz and, therefore, more likely to work with them. Several have reached out to Trump in recent weeks as their preferred candidates have stalled in the polls.

Cruz was dismissive of Branstad and said the development signals his own stature as the race’s only true conservative outsider. “It is no surprise that the establishment is in full panic mode,” Cruz told reporters Tuesday.

Rush Limbaugh, who has not picked a side in the Trump-Cruz standoff, said on his program Tuesday that “Trump is trying to position Cruz as angry, unstable, can’t get along with anybody, and thus will not be able to do deals. . . . Cruz is trying to highlight Trump’s past liberalism, ‘New York values,’ what have you. . . . Now, we’ll see if this works.”

Jenna Johnson and Jose DelReal in Iowa, and Philip Rucker, David Weigel and Katie Zezima in New Hampshire contributed to this report.",REAL
"The man authorities say killed four Marines in Chattanooga, Tenn., Thursday has no known connections to terrorist organizations and was seen by his peers as 'normal.'

A mugshot of Muhammod Youssuf Abdulazeez from a DUI charge in April in Hamilton County is seen in this image provided by the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office Thursday. Investigators on Thursday sought to determine what led a 24-year-old gunman to open fire at two military offices in Chattanooga, Tenn., killing four Marines in an attack officials said could be an act of domestic terrorism. Abdulazeez, identified as the shooter by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was shot to death in the rampage that also injured three people.

Authorities say the man they believe killed four Marines in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Thursday had not previously been on their radar, and that no connection has been found yet tying him to an international terrorist organization.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez was a 24-year-old, Kuwait-born, naturalized American. Officials and witnesses say Mr. Abdulazeez opened fire on a military recruiting center and a Navy-Marine training center several miles away. Three people were wounded, in addition to the four Marines killed.

Abdulazeez was also killed during the attack, by what a US official said was a shot fired by Chattanooga police.

Details on the motives for Abdulazeez’s attack and on the ""numerous weapons"" used in the attack are still unknown.

""We are looking at every possible avenue, whether it was terrorism, whether it's domestic, international, or whether it was a simple criminal act,"" FBI agent Ed Reinhold said.

The FBI issued the following statement Thursday:

The FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, along with the Chattanooga Police Department and other law enforcement partners, are working jointly to investigate today’s shootings at a military recruitment center and a reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee in which four individuals were killed and three injured. The shooter, Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, is also deceased. While it would be premature to speculate on the motives of the shooter at this time, we will conduct a thorough investigation of this tragedy and provide updates as they are available.

Marilyn Hutcheson, who works across the street from where one of the attacks took place, says she heard a barrage of gunfire begin around 11 am. The incident lasted about 20 minutes, she said.

""I couldn't even begin to tell you how many,"" Ms. Hutcheson told The Associated Press. ""It was rapid-fire, like pow-pow-pow-pow-pow, so quickly. The next thing I knew, there were police cars coming from every direction.""

Abdulazeez, an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, had been popular among his peers, says Hussnain Javid, who attended both high school and college with Abdulazeez.

“He was very outgoing,” Mr. Javid told AP. “Everyone knew of him.”

Another high school peer, Greg Raymond called Abdulazeez “creative” and “light-minded,” but disagreed that he was popular.

""He was a really calm, smart, and cool person who joked around. Like me, he wasn't very popular so we always kind of got along. He seemed like a really normal guy,"" Mr. Raymond told AP.

Residents in the neighborhood where authorities believed he lived also said they did not know Abdulazeez or his family very well.

The attacks come at a time when the US military and law enforcement officials have warned about “lone wolves” threatening domestic targets, as well as during the month of Ramadan, when the Islamic State has threatened intensified violence and has encouraged extremist attacks in the United States.

Evidence connecting Abdulazeez to the Islamic State has not been found, but the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist groups, said Abdulazeez wrote online Monday that “life is short and bitter” and that Muslims should take opportunities to “submit to Allah.”

President Obama said Thursday that a prompt investigation would ensue, and that the White House had told the Pentagon to keep military installations vigilant.

""It is a heartbreaking circumstance for these individuals who served our country with great valor to be killed in this fashion,"" Mr. Obama said.

This report contains material from Reuters and the Associated Press.",REAL
"This is the planet Post Article Comment 
These discussions are not moderated. We rely on users to police themselves, and flag inappropriate comments and behavior. In accordance with our Guidelines and Policies , we reserve the right to remove any post at any time for any reason, and will restrict access of registered users who repeatedly violate our terms. OpEdNews welcomes lively, CIVIL discourse. Personal attacks and/or hate speech are not tolerated and may result in banning. Comments should relate to the content above. Irrelevant, off-topic comments are a distraction, and will be removed. By submitting this comment, you agree to all OpEdNews rules, guidelines and policies.",FAKE
"There is an path for Democrats to regain the presidency — and it does not run through Ohio, Michigan or Wisconsin.",REAL
"To watch the video of photographer Tim Tai getting pushed around by a turf-protecting scrum of protesters at the University of Missouri is to experience constitutional angst.

“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” said one protester at the university’s Mel Carnahan Quadrangle following the news that University system President Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin would resign amid an uproar about racial issues on campus.

“I do have the right to take photos,” replied Tai, a 20-year-old senior at the university who was shooting the proceedings on Monday on assignment for ESPN.com. A former staff photographer for the Columbia Missourian, Tai was forced by circumstances to double-task as he attempted to take photographs and provide civics lessons.

Following the announcement of the resignations, Tai chronicled a celebration including the protest group Concerned Student 1950. After 10 minutes or so of jubilation, said Tai in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, protesters decided that it was time to push the media away from an encampment of tents on the quad’s lawn. ” ‘Media, get off the grass,’ ” said the organizers, as Tai recalls.

Yet he wasn’t backing up. He wanted some good shots of the tents, and that’s where the trouble started.

“You’re an unethical reporter; you do not respect our space.”

Those were just a few of the taunts that Tai received as he attempted to do his work. His references to a certain founding document persuaded precisely none of his opponents. “Ma’am, the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine,” he said. At one point, Tai tangled with a protester about the absence of any law proscribing his presence on this disputed grass. “Forget a law — how about humanity?” protested the protester.

So much for the ideal of the American collegiate quad as a locus of tolerance and free expression. Time to usher in a new ethic of intimidation, a twist that carries some irony at the Columbia, Mo., campus. Back in February 1987, 58 protesters seeking the university’s divestiture from companies that do business in South Africa were arrested for trespassing on the quad. They were dropped in all cases but one, who secured an acquittal on the grounds that the quad was a highly public space.

“The people who were trying to impede the photographer, in effect, were trying to impede his rights to be there,” says Sandy Davidson, a curators’ teaching professor at the University of Missouri school of journalism. Nor was Tai intent on peering into the tents with his lenses. “I was not trying to get into the tents,” says Tai. “I wanted a picture of the tents, placing it in the quad … because that’s part of the story.” Regarding the restraint that the protesters were demanding, Tai felt this wasn’t the time. “I think … there are times when it’s best for photographers to put their camera down,” he says. However: “In this situation, this was national news, breaking news … at a public university and the students involved have become public figures.”

Upon checking his photos, Tai realized that the obstruction worked. “They didn’t turn out well because all the hands were in the way, and you know …,” he says. Were he to be given a redo, he’d likely just move to another spot. “At the moment, I felt I had to stand up for being there,” he says.

Tom Warhover, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, said the Tai video aligns with recent events. “The protesters all week have asked people kind of to stay out of the tent area proper, if you will, and so we’ve had many confrontations because it is a public space and … other students have a right to be there,” says Warhover, who approves of how Tai carried himself: “I’m pretty proud of Tim’s actions, both standing up for himself and his job but doing it in a way that didn’t provoke.” Through his travels, Tai has learned that on one hand, the protesters “want to protect idea of privacy and protect a safe space where not they’re not overwhelmed with the attention. On the other hand, they want to control the narrative themselves because they feel the media has not treated minority or black stories accurately.”

There’s no excuse for protesters to push a photographer in a public square; there’s no excuse for protesters to appeal for respect while failing to respect; there’s no excuse for protesters to dis the same rights that allow them to do their thing.

And there’s even less excuse for faculty and staff members at the University of Missouri to engage in some of this very same behavior. In his chat with this blog, Tai cited the involvement of Richard J. “Chip” Callahan, professor and chair of religious studies at the university. In the opening moments of the video, Callahan faces off with Tai over whether the photographer can push to get any closer to the tents. “I’m not gonna push them,” says Tai.

Moments later, the protesters resolve to throw up their hands (literally) to show Tai who owns this public roost. Callahan participates in this collective action. As Tai swivels his camera from place to place, Callahan shuffles to block the sight paths. Behold these screenshots:

Callahan, after moving a bit to the left and holding up his hands.

Callahan again, after moving to the right with hands aloft. The religious studies prof paired agility drills with his censorship.

A source with access to Callahan’s tweets (they’re “protected“) passes along these screenshots to yield some insight on his views regarding the media and the protests at the university:

Callahan didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls. The university’s media office said it has no comment at this point on the staffers. Not only did Tai identify Callahan as the person at the start of the video, but so did Peter Legrand, a graduate who took courses from Callahan.

At the 2:00 minute mark in the above video, Janna Basler, the university’s assistant director of Greek life and leadership, adds her own thuggish sensibilities to the mix: “Sir, I am sorry, these are people too. You need to back off. Back off, go!” In her showdown with Tai, Basler lays bare how little she knows about photography. As they tussle about a woman with whom Tai had just finished arguing, Basler says, “She gets to decide whether she’s going to talk to you or not.”

Tai responds like someone who’s interested in securing images, not quotes: “I don’t want her to talk to me,” he says as Basler gets in his face. When Tai asks her whether she’s with the office of Greek life, Basler responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student of 1950.”

And the video ends with assistant professor of communication Melissa Click essentially threatening a journalist: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”

These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.

UPDATE: The university’s journalism school dean has released a statement reading, in part, as follows:",REAL
"A prospective general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could significantly alter which states are in play this fall and heighten more than in any recent election the racial, class and gender divisions within the national electorate.

After successive campaigns in which President Obama expanded the Democrats’ electoral map options by focusing on fast-growing and increasingly diverse states, a 2016 race between Clinton and Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt.

With a focus on trade issues and by tapping anti-establishment anger, Trump would seek to energize white working-class Americans, who Republicans believe have been on the sidelines in recent elections in substantial numbers. Trump would also attempt to peel away voters who have backed Democrats, a potentially harder task.

At the same time, Clinton could find Trump a powerful energizing force on her behalf among African Americans and Latinos, which could help to offset the absence of Obama on the ticket after two elections that drew huge minority turnout. That could put off-limits to Trump some states with large Hispanic populations where Republicans have competed intensely in recent elections.

Although polls give Clinton a solid advantage over Trump in a general election, many Democrats remain wary because of what one party strategist called “the unpredictability of Trump.” As one former member of Obama’s campaign team put it, “I feel like in some ways my brain has to think differently than it ever has.”

Democrats will assess the landscape in several ways: which states are likely to be in play, which of those are different from past elections, and which voting groups present particular problems. They expect to update their analyses constantly, given how quickly Trump can have an impact on events.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll from earlier this month showed stark divides among those backing Trump and Clinton.

Overall, the former secretary of state led 50 to 41 percent among registered voters. Trump led 49 to 40 percent among white voters, while Clinton led 73 to 19 among non-whites. Trump led by five points among men, and Clinton was up by 21 among women. Trump led by 24 points among whites without college degrees, while Clinton led by 15 among whites with degrees.

Many Republicans fear that numbers like those could doom the party to defeat in the fall, and they remain hopeful that they can stop Trump in the primaries or at a contested convention. But some Democrats worry that polling data about Trump could provide a false sense of security because voters might be reluctant to acknowledge that they intend to back him.

Party strategists and independent analysts have just begun to explore in-depth the contours of a Trump vs. Clinton election, examining in particular how the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate might affect the preferences of specific voter blocs. More difficult to assess, but no less important, is how a Trump-Clinton contest would affect turnout among those groups.

The main conclusion to date is that a Trump nomination would test theories among some Republicans about the potential strength and power of the white vote to change the electorate and give the GOP the White House. Given what is known, Trump would appear to have no choice but to center his energies on states in the industrial and upper Midwest.

The eventual conclusions of party strategists about Trump’s possible route to victory will affect critical choices for both campaigns as they decide where to invest tens of millions of dollars in resources for television ads, where to deploy their most extensive voter mobilization and get-out-the vote operations, and where the nominees will concentrate their campaign travel in the fall.

Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress, said Trump’s only path to victory lies in “a spike of white working-class support. . . . It’s trying to break apart the heartland part of the ‘blue wall,’ with less emphasis on the rest of the country.”

The “blue wall” is a term coined by journalist Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media and refers to the 18 states plus the District of Columbia that Democrats have won in the past six elections. Those states add up to 242 electoral votes, giving Democrats a foundation and therefore several combinations of other states to get to 270.

Among the 18 states that have been in Democratic hands since the 1992 election are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along with Ohio and Iowa, those heartland states are likely to be the most intensely contested battlegrounds in the country if a Trump-Clinton race materializes.

All those states have higher concentrations of white voters, including larger percentages of older, white working-class voters, than many of the states in faster-growing areas that Obama looked to in his two campaigns.

“If he drives big turnout increases with white voters, especially with white male voters, that has the potential to change the map,” said a veteran of Obama’s campaigns, who spoke anonymously in order to share current analysis of the fall campaign.

Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and veteran of past presidential campaigns, said Trump’s overall general election strength is unpredictable at this point, in part because Trump could campaign as a different candidate from the one on display throughout the primaries. But he said that what Trump has shown to date is an ability to surprise his opponents and offer crosscutting messages to draw support.

“To be successful as a Republican candidate you have to be the equivalent of a neutron bomb,” Schmidt said. “He’s a neutron bomb. Donald Trump has been disruptive in the way Uber has been disruptive in the taxi industry.”

No one expects a totally different electoral map in a Trump-Clinton campaign, given the hardening of red-blue divisions. Analysts say that nearly all the same states that have been fought over in recent elections will remain potential targets, especially at the start of the general election. Ohio, Florida and likely Virginia in particular will be fought over until the very end of the election.

On the other hand, states such as Nevada, New Mexico and possibly Colorado could see less competition unless Trump can overcome his extraordinarily high negative ratings within the Hispanic community.

The two pairs of presidential campaigns since the beginning of the 21st century proved to be remarkably static in terms of the number of battleground states and whether they voted Republican or Democratic.

Those campaigns collectively also highlight the shrinking number of truly contested states. In 2000, there were 12 such states decided by fewer than five points. By 2012, there were just four.

The 2000 and 2004 campaigns produced close finishes in the electoral college, with Republicans winning both with fewer than 290 electoral votes. The 2004 campaign was a virtual rerun of 2000, with just three states shifting to the other party: Iowa and New Mexico in the direction of the Republicans and New Hampshire to the Democrats.

Obama’s 2008 campaign changed the map, with nine states that had supported then-president George W. Bush in 2004 backing the Democratic nominee. The 2012 campaign, like 2004, reinforced the status quo. By the end of the campaign, there were only a handful of real battlegrounds and just two states shifted from 2008: Indiana and North Carolina. Both moved in the direction of the Republicans.

William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that if Trump were to carry Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and either New Hampshire or Minnesota, he would not need some of the traditional Southern battlegrounds. Frey hastened to add that such a sweep of the Midwest appears highly unlikely. Nonetheless, he said that path through the Midwest would hold the keys to victory for Republicans if the New York businessman is their nominee.

What makes the coming campaign so intriguing is that Trump’s and Clinton’s demographic strengths are near-mirror opposites. He has drawn significant support among white working-class voters during his march toward the Republican nomination, especially white men. Clinton has drawn sizable support among minority voters, particularly African Americans, in her contest against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Trump’s strength among men is offset by his weakness among women. Clinton has at times struggled to attract younger women in her battle with Sanders, but few doubt she would have a significant advantage in a general election campaign against Trump.

Similarly, Trump’s support among white voters without college degrees could be offset by the prospect of similarly strong support among whites with college degrees — a growing force in the Democratic coalition.

The focus on white working-class voters will not negate the key role minority voters could play in the outcome next November. “I think that energy underneath the wings of the minority community could be as strong as it was for Barack Obama, only this time against Donald Trump,” Frey said.

One Democratic strategist said that on the basis of preliminary analysis of poll data, Trump’s vote share among Hispanics could be lower than Mitt Romney’s 27 percent share in 2012 and that his margin among African Americans could be nearly as low as Romney’s.

A recent Washington Post-Univision poll of Hispanic voters showed Trump currently doing worse than Romney, trailing Clinton in a hypothetical general election by 73 to 16 percent.

Republican Schmidt, however, warned Democrats that Trump could prove more appealing to minority voters, especially African Americans, than they assume. “He’s an asymmetric threat,” Schmidt said. “He fits into none of the conventions. He has a completely unorthodox style.”",REAL
"Encouraged by a new poll giving him a double-digit lead in the state and eager to pivot to the general election, the Republican front-runner stressed the importance of Indiana's Tuesday GOP primary more than he or his top advisers have previously.

""Indiana is so important and we have to win it,"" Trump said to a crowd of approximately 1,500 people packed into a theater here in Terre Haute, Indiana. ""If we win Indiana, it's over.""

While also echoing his top advisers' comments that he can clinch the nomination without Indiana's 57-delegate prize, Trump urged Indiana Republicans to put him over the top -- a victory that would solidify Trump's increasingly clear path to winning the GOP nomination on the first ballot of the party's summer convention.

Still, Trump didn't relent in his attacks against the Texas senator, whom Trump accused of being a liar. Trump also focused on Cruz's now non-existent path to winning the GOP nomination on the first ballot of the convention and mocked Cruz for announcing a running mate , former GOP candidate and businesswoman Carly Fiorina , under those circumstances. Cruz can only stake a claim to win his party's nomination if he can keep Trump from clinching the 1,237 delegates needed before the party's July convention.

""I've been saying that!"" Trump exclaimed.

Cruz was born in Canada to an American citizen mother -- his Cuban-born father later became a citizen. Trump has that used to claim Cruz is not a ""natural-born citizen"" and therefore ineligible to be president.

The Cruz campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

A win in Indiana Tuesday could depress Trump's rivals' hopes of keeping him from the 1,237 delegate mark necessary for a GOP nomination win. Trump suggested Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- who formed a pact with Cruz to stay out of Indiana and focus on other states -- might drop out if Trump triumphs in the Hoosier State.

That, Trump said, would give him a chance to try and bring much-needed unity to a fractured Republican Party.

""It's really important that we win because if we win -- you know, we want to raise money for the party and we want to raise money for the Senate races and the congressional races and do a lot of things instead of wasting our time with these people,"" Trump said.

But Trump's ongoing primary battle didn't stop him on Sunday from knocking the former secretary of state repeatedly before a rowdy crowd of Hoosier supporters.

Still, he pressed a plea for Indiana voters to deliver him a victory Tuesday that he said would empower him to focus on Clinton.

""Please. Let's focus on Hillary,"" he said.",REAL
"A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday pins Jeb Bush’s favorable rating at 35 percent compared to 57 percent who view him unfavorably. The only good news is that he’s 30 points above water among Republicans, 61 percent to 31 percent, and Republicans are the demographic that counts in a Republican primary. (He remains underwater among Tea Party supporters, though.) He’s way underwater among Democrats — but also among independents, who view him unfavorably 30 percent to 62 percent.

Then there’s ol’ Don Trump, who’s long held the position of candidate viewed most unfavorably (though very much liked by the people who do view him favorably, hence the high national and early-state polling numbers). Trump’s favorability rating sits at 38 percent, with his unfavorable at 58 percent. Not that different from Bush.

And then consider how each fares in a matchup with Hillary Clinton, whose favorables aren’t in such great shape either. Clinton defeats Trump by six percentage points, 51 percent to 45 percent. Against Bush? She leads by nine percentage points, 52 percent to 43 percent.

All of which raises some questions about what, exactly, the GOP establishment and the many, many wealthy donors who have donated to Bush see in him, expect from him. Or as the New York Times’ Nate Cohn puts it:

Jeb Bush is supposed to be the electable one. That’s why establishment donors flock to him: get him past the primary by giving his super PAC over $100 million, with which he can slam everyone else for as long as necessary, and then he can win the general election in a way that Cruz or Walker or Trump cannot. That’s because Jeb is supposedly the most reasonable of the general election candidates, the least beholden to ideological overreach, and the one most rhetorically open-armed about wooing Hispanic voters into the Republican coalition.

The only problem is that the more the public sees of Jeb, the more they dislike him and the thought of him becoming president. That wretched 30-62% figure among independents, combined with a head-to-head hypothetical in which he fares worse against Hillary Clinton than TRUMP! does, would seem to throw the whole rationale behind the Jeb Bush campaign down the toilet. Which is funny, because Jeb Bush doesn’t come across as nearly as much of an asshole as many of the other candidates do. He can seem mumbly or boring or stilted, but not actively malevolent. That he’s doing so poorly among independents — and that 92 percent of independents know enough about him to have an opinion — is likely a function of his last name. Bush hopes that the more he shows himself and explains his plans, the more he’ll be viewed as his own person. He’s not executing this plan especially well. The smartest thing that Jeb Bush has done this year was convince a whole host of wealthy Republican donors and establishment operatives to get behind his candidacy early. Now that they’ve invested so much into this candidate, they’re willing to stick it out well past the point at which the candidate has proven himself to be a boob.",REAL
"By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 US Preparing For War With Russia? Cristina Silva — IBT Oct 25, 2016 This 1997 aerial photograph shows the entrance to a cave facility the U.S. military uses in the Trondheim region of central Norway. Heavy armour, tanks, artillery and Armoured Personnel Carriers are pre-positioned in the cave complex ready for use by thousands of NATO troops who could be flown into Norway should conflict erupt with Russia. (Defense Department photo courtesy of the National Archives). Click to enlarge 
More than 300 Marines will be deployed to Norway along the Russian border as tensions between Moscow and Washington over conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have provoked new threats of sanctions and military upgrades. The deployment marks the first time a foreign military will be on the ground in Norway since World War II, according to Reuters. 
The Marines will take part in training and manoeuvres in near Arctic conditions. They will be stationed at the Vaernes military base in central Norway about 600 miles from Russia and will “increase NATO’s ability to rapidly aggregate and employ forces in northern Europe,” Major General Niel Nelson, commander of U.S. Marines in Europe, said Monday. 
Norway typically maintains good relations with the Kremlin and the two nations share a 122-mile border in the Arctic. But the Russian military has raised concerns in recent months after ordering its troops to train along Norwegian airspace and expand remote border roads. Moscow’s recent military exercises near Sweden, Denmark and Finland, as well as the former Soviet Union states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, have also stroked fears of a miltary build-up. 
“This U.S. initiative is welcome and also fits well within ongoing processes in NATO to increase exercises, training and interoperability within the Alliance,” Norwegian Defence Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide said in the statement. “The defence of Norway is dependent on allied reinforcements, and it is crucial for Norwegian security that our allies come here to gain knowledge of how to operate in Norway and with Norwegian forces.” 
NATO previously deployed four multinational battalions to Poland and the Baltic States to temper Russian agression, and U.S. tanks have been stationed in Europe. Norway has been a NATO member since 1949, but under a deal with Russia it had prevously said it would not allow foreign troops on its land. But Russia’s ongoing military conflicts in Ukraine and Syria have drawn rebuke from Europe and the United States, including threats of further sanctions. Meanwhile, Moscow continues to spend big on defense . 
Former senior Norwegian army officer Jacob Borresen told broadcaster NRK the latest deployment “sends negative signals eastwards” that could incite a Cold War-style “confrontation zone.” 
Russia has already denounced the move . “Taking into account multiple statements made by Norwegian officials about the absence of threat from Russia to Norway, we would like to understand why Norway is so much willing to increase its military potential, in particular through the stationing of American forces in Vaernes, “embassy spokesman Maxime Gourov said in an email to Agence France-Presse.",FAKE
"By Julian Assange / counterpunch.org 
In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected US President. 
On the eve of the election, it is important to restate why we have published what we have. 
The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks – an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself. Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed. 
This is why, irrespective of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election, the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work. 
The US public has thoroughly engaged with WikiLeaks’ election related publications which number more than one hundred thousand documents. Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us. It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment. 
We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish. We had information that fit our editorial criteria which related to the Sanders and Clinton campaign (DNC Leaks) and the Clinton political campaign and Foundation (Podesta Emails). No-one disputes the public importance of these publications. It would be unconscionable for WikiLeaks to withhold such an archive from the public during an election. 
At the same time, we cannot publish what we do not have. To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or Jill Stein’s campaign, or Gary Johnson’s campaign or any of the other candidates that fufills our stated editorial criteria. As a result of publishing Clinton’s cables and indexing her emails we are seen as domain experts on Clinton archives. So it is natural that Clinton sources come to us. 
We publish as fast as our resources will allow and as fast as the public can absorb it. 
That is our commitment to ourselves, to our sources, and to the public. 
This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election. The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers. I spoke at the launch of the campaign for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because her platform addresses the need to protect them. This is an issue that is close to my heart because of the Obama administration’s inhuman and degrading treatment of one of our alleged sources, Chelsea Manning. But WikiLeaks publications are not an attempt to get Jill Stein elected or to take revenge over Ms Manning’s treatment either. 
Publishing is what we do. To withhold the publication of such information until after the election would have been to favour one of the candidates above the public’s right to know. 
This is after all what happened when the New York Times withheld evidence of illegal mass surveillance of the US population for a year until after the 2004 election, denying the public a critical understanding of the incumbent president George W Bush, which probably secured his reelection. The current editor of the New York Times has distanced himself from that decision and rightly so. 
The US public defends free speech more passionately, but the First Amendment only truly lives through its repeated exercise. The First Amendment explicitly prevents the executive from attempting to restrict anyone’s ability to speak and publish freely. The First Amendment does not privilege old media, with its corporate advertisers and dependencies on incumbent power factions, over WikiLeaks’ model of scientific journalism or an individual’s decision to inform their friends on social media. The First Amendment unapologetically nurtures the democratization of knowledge. With the Internet, it has reached its full potential. 
Yet, some weeks ago, in a tactic reminiscent of Senator McCarthy and the red scare, Wikileaks, Green Party candidate Stein, Glenn Greenwald and Clinton’s main opponent were painted with a broad, red brush. The Clinton campaign, when they were not spreading obvious untruths, pointed to unnamed sources or to speculative and vague statements from the intelligence community to suggest a nefarious allegiance with Russia. The campaign was unable to invoke evidence about our publications—because none exists. 
In the end, those who have attempted to malign our groundbreaking work over the past four months seek to inhibit public understanding perhaps because it is embarrassing to them – a reason for censorship the First Amendment cannot tolerate. Only unsuccessfully do they try to claim that our publications are inaccurate. 
WikiLeaks’ decade-long pristine record for authentication remains. Our key publications this round have even been proven through the cryptographic signatures of the companies they passed through, such as Google. It is not every day you can mathematically prove that your publications are perfect but this day is one of them. 
We have endured intense criticism, primarily from Clinton supporters, for our publications. Many long-term supporters have been frustrated because we have not addressed this criticism in a systematic way or responded to a number of false narratives about Wikileaks’ motivation or sources. Ultimately, however, if WL reacted to every false claim, we would have to divert resources from our primary work. 
WikiLeaks, like all publishers, is ultimately accountable to its funders. Those funders are you. Our resources are entirely made up of contributions from the public and our book sales. This allows us to be principled, independent and free in a way no other influential media organization is. But it also means that we do not have the resources of CNN, MSNBC or the Clinton campaign to constantly rebuff criticism. 
Yet if the press obeys considerations above informing the public, we are no longer talking about a free press, and we are no longer talking about an informed public. 
Wikileaks remains committed to publishing information that informs the public, even if many, especially those in power, would prefer not to see it. WikiLeaks must publish. It must publish and be damned. 
Julian Assange is the founder of Wikileaks. His most recent book is The Wikileaks Files (Verso). 0.0 ·",FAKE
"Pakistan This photo taken in Lahore on October 27, 2016 shows Pakistani protesters burning the Indian flag to show their support for the Kashmiri people. (Photo by AFP) 
Pakistan has declared an Indian diplomat persona non grata and given him 48 hours to leave the country, in a tit-for-tat move that comes a day after India said it would deport a Pakistani official. 
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said it had declared Indian diplomat Surjeet Singh persona non grata and that it had informed India’s diplomatic mission in Islamabad of the decision. 
The statement said Singh was accused of activities “that were in violation of the Vienna Convention and the established diplomatic norms.” 
An aide to India’s prime minister in New Delhi said the Indian government was looking into the matter. 
The decision came after India said on Thursday it had declared a Pakistani consular official persona non grata for “espionage activities” against New Delhi. 
Mehmood Akhtar, the visa official at the Pakistani mission, had been briefly detained by Indian police on Wednesday outside the gates to the Delhi Zoo where he met two Indian associates. 
Indian police said the Pakistani diplomat and his alleged accomplices were found in possession of forged documents, defense-related maps, deployment charts and lists of officers working along India’s border with Pakistan. Kashmiris protesters shout anti-India slogans at a rally in Muzaffarabad, October 26, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi dismissed the allegation, saying it “never engages in any activity that is incompatible with its diplomatic status.” 
Relations between India and Pakistan have been strained in recent months, with New Delhi blaming Islamabad for a raid on an army base in Indian-controlled Kashmir in September that killed 19 soldiers. 
Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both since the two countries gained independence from Britain in 1947. They have fought four wars with each other, three of which have been over Kashmir. 
'Indian soldier, civilian killed in Kashmir' 
An Indian paramilitary officer claimed that Pakistani troops had opened fire along the volatile frontier in Indian-controlled Kashmir, killing a civilian and a soldier. Pakistan's army denied the claim. 
The Indian officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Pakistani soldiers fired mortars and automatic gunfire at several border posts in Jammu region on Friday in an ""unprovoked"" violation of a ceasefire accord between India and Pakistan in the disputed region. 
Troops from the two countries regularly trade fire, causing casualties. 
On Thursday, protesters in Kashmir and Pakistan observed the Black Day, demonstrating against what they called Indian occupation. Loading ...",FAKE
"In this News Shot, Joe Joseph quickly discusses a new system being put in place at Detroit International Airport and sixteen other airports nationwide. This is classic “problem, reaction, solution” where they make it so incredibly miserable to travel, that people will gladly give their rights away for convenience.

Watch on YouTube 
Source: New Technology At Detroit Metro Airport Allows Travelers To Move Through Security Lines In A Flash Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) hasn't yet said he'll run for president in 2016, but during an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, he didn't seem fazed by the prospect of potentially challenging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

""If I run, I will beat her,"" Christie said.

Christie said should he run for president, he's confident he could win Pennsylvania, New Mexico and New Hampshire -- three states that voted for President Barack Obama over his 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

Christie's currently visiting New Hampshire, though he told Yahoo earlier this week the trip shouldn't be seen as a likely start to a 2016 campaign.

""Whether I decide to run for president or not, ultimately, is something I won't decide until May or June of this year,"" he said.",REAL
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is refusing to hand over $800,000 in credit-card bills as part of a probe into his travel expenses. The monitoring organization New Jersey Watchdog alleges that Christie has been costing the public a pretty penny for his travels, including an 1,800 percent increase in the governor’s security detail since he took office. “Last year, Christie traveled out-of-state more than 100 days while visiting 36 states, Mexico, and Canada, primarily to help raise $106 million in campaign contributions as chairman of the Republican Governors Association,” wrote reporter Mark Lagerkvist. Christie’s office denied the request for the American Express bills because “the monthly statements indicate the names of the Executive Protection Unit members, the number of Executive Protection Unit members, and the location of these members on a day-to-day basis.”",REAL
"Russia deployed long-range air defense missiles at its air base in Syria Thursday in a rapid response to the downing of one of its bombers by a Turkish warplane.

Russia's state-owned RIA Novosti news agency, quoting its own reporter on the ground, reported that the shipment of S-400 long-range missiles had been delivered. They will be based in Syria's coastal province of Latakia, just 30 miles away from the border with Turkey and are capable of striking targets within a 250-mile range with deadly precision.

The deployment of the missiles came hours after Turkey released audio recordings of what it says are the Turkish military's warnings to the pilot of the Russian Su-24 bomber that was shot down at the border with Syria early Tuesday.

The recordings indicate that the plane was warned several times that it was approaching Turkey's airspace and asked to change course. The voice is heard saying: ""This is Turkish Air Force speaking on guard. You are approaching Turkish airspace. Change your heading south immediately.""

Turkey has informed the United Nations that two Russian planes disregarded warnings and violated Turkish airspace ""to a depth of 1.36 miles and 1.15 miles in length for 17 seconds.

The plane's surviving pilot has denied that his jet veered into Turkey's airspace ""even for a single second""and rejected Turkey's claim that it had issued repeated warnings to the Russian crew. The other pilot was killed by militants in Syria after bailing out, while his crewmate was rescued by Syrian army commandos and delivered in good condition to the Russian base early Wednesday. A Russian marine was also killed by the militants during the rescue mission.

The Kremlin also moved the navy missile cruiser Moskva closer to the shore to help protect Russian warplanes with its long-range Fort air defense system.

""It will be ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,"" Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting with military officials. He also announced the severance of all military ties with Turkey and said that from now on, Russian bombers will always be escorted by fighters on combat missions over Syria.

Tuesday's incident was the first time in half a century that a NATO member shot down a Russian plane. If Russia responds by downing a Turkish plane, NATO member Turkey could proclaim itself under attack and ask the alliance for military assistance.

Most observers believe that a direct military confrontation is unlikely, but that the shooting down of the plane will further fuel the Syrian conflict and complicate international peace efforts.

The situation is also alarming because the Russian and Turkish presidents both pose as strong leaders and would be reluctant to back down and seek a compromise.

The announcements came as Russian forces launched a heavy bombardment against Syrian rebel-held areas in Latakia province. At least 12 airstrikes hit the area Wednesday as pro-government forces clashed with fighters from the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda, and Turkmen insurgents, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters.

The Russian plane's downing has marked a dramatic turnaround in relations between Russia and Turkey, who have proclaimed themselves to be ""strategic partners"" in the past and developed booming economic ties despite differences over Syria.

Putin described the Turkish action as a ""crime"" and a ""stab in the back,"" and called Turkey an ""accomplice of terrorists."" In a sign of the escalating tensions, protesters in Moscow hurled eggs and stones at the Turkish Embassy, breaking windows in the compound. Police cleared the area and made some arrests shortly after the protest began.

Putin has also dismissed Turkey's claim that the Russian warplane intruded its airspace, voicing particular annoyance about Ankara turning to NATO instead of speaking to Russia, ""as if it were us who shot down a Turkish plane.""

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu sought to ease tensions Wednesday, calling Russia Turkey's ""friend and neighbor"" and insisting relations cannot be ""sacrificed to accidents of communication."" He told his party's lawmakers that Turkey didn't know the plane was brought down Tuesday was Russian until Moscow announced it.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in turn said that the downing of the plane ""highlights the need to strengthen mechanisms to avoid such incidents in the future.""

""We should not sleepwalk into unintended escalation,"" he wrote in an op-ed that is to be published Thursday and was made available to The Associated Press.

Iran meanwhile lashed out at Turkey, with the official IRNA news agency quoting Presidednt Hassan Rouhani as saying Ankara is responsible for the heightened tensions in the region.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from Sky News.",REAL
"by Yves Smith 
I just received an e-mail from AirBnB which patently violates the CAN-SPAM Act by virtue of not having an unsubscribe option. It’s even cheekier for AirBnB to be contacting me since I am deeply opposed to AirBnB and have never once visited their site, and never have or would use their service, either as a lodger or a host. That means they are very likely to have violated the CAN-SPAM Act in a second manner, by virtue of having harvested my e-mail address . 
A big problem with CAN-SPAM is the only parties with a right of action are “Internet Access Services” and not “natural persons,” as in end recipients. 
Here are the relevant provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act per Wikipedia : 
The 3 basic types of compliance defined in the CAN-SPAM Act, unsubscribe, content and sending behavior compliance, are as follows: 
Unsubscribe compliance A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails. Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 business days. Opt-out lists also known as Suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes. 
Content compliance Accurate “From” lines (including “friendly froms”) Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive) A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present. PO Box addresses are acceptable in compliance with 16 C.F.R. 316.2(p) and if the email is sent by a third party, the legitimate physical address of the entity, whose products or services are promoted through the email should be visible. A label is present if the content is adult. 
Sending behavior compliance A message cannot be sent through an open relay A message cannot be sent without an unsubscribe option. A message cannot be sent to a harvested email address A message cannot contain a false header A message should contain at least one sentence. A message cannot be null. Unsubscribe option should be below the message. 
Here’s the offending message, with the subject line, “Discrimination and Belonging: What it Means for You,” in its entirety: The Airbnb Community Commitment Hi, Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to a Community Commitment beginning November 1, 2016. Agreeing to this commitment will affect your use of Airbnb, so we wanted to give you a heads up about it. What is the Community Commitment? You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias. How do I accept the commitment? On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept. What if I decline the commitment? If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests. What if I have feedback about the commitment? We welcome your feedback about the Community Commitment and all of our nondiscrimination efforts. Feel free to read more about the commitment . You can also reach out to us at . The Airbnb Team Sent with ♥ from Airbnb ‌A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌,‌ ‌I‌n‌c‌.‌,‌ ‌8‌8‌8‌ ‌B‌r‌a‌n‌n‌a‌n‌ ‌S‌t‌,‌ ‌S‌a‌n‌ ‌F‌r‌a‌n‌c‌i‌s‌c‌o‌,‌ ‌C‌A‌ ‌9‌4‌1‌0‌3‌ Airbnb Ireland, The Watermarque Building, South Lotts Rd, Ringsend, Dublin 4, VAT Number: 9827384L 0 0 0 0 0 0 This entry was posted in Guest Post on",FAKE
"Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Marco Rubio knows what he’s doing.

A week ago, the youthful senator from Florida was in great shape. His surprisingly strong finish in the Iowa caucuses left him with a clear chance to consolidate mainstream Republican support — and a path to the GOP presidential nomination.

But in just a few minutes Saturday night, Rubio undid everything he had worked for during the past year — really, the past five years. His singularly disastrous debate performance, in which he repeated irrelevant, canned phrases, caused would-be supporters to flee for Ohio Gov. John Kasich and other more stable candidates.

And Tuesday night, Rubio proved true the axiom popularized by Alan Simpson, the wisecracking former senator from Wyoming: “One day you’re the toast of the town, the next you’re toast.”

The culprit here, as in most things that have gone wrong this campaign season, is Donald Trump, who after his convincing win in New Hampshire is once again the front-runner for the nomination. Typically, Iowa and New Hampshire serve as proving grounds for the candidates. Voters there scrutinize the contenders, who rise and fall in the polls as various candidates gain and lose the status of front-runner. But Trump’s celebrity short-circuited the process. With Trump dominating the coverage and the polls, Iowa and New Hampshire failed to fulfill their traditional vetting roles.

Rubio was one who never got the scrutiny. And when he emerged, blinking, into the spotlight after Iowa, voters found an empty suit. Watching him campaign last week, I wrote: “Rubio’s strong Iowa finish has brought new attention — and overcapacity crowds — in New Hampshire. But the would-be supporters are greeted by a robot.”

[What Marco Rubio would have said if he had won New Hampshire]

This wasn’t necessarily a surprise to those who watched Rubio closely (or even to those who recall his water-gulping response to the State of the Union three years ago). Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins, who wrote about Rubio in a 2015 book, observed that he had an “incurable anxiousness — and an occasional propensity to panic in moments of crisis, both real and imagined.”

He had seemed to be a good debater — but with 10 or more candidates crowding the stage in early debates, he didn’t have to go far beyond canned lines. On Saturday, exposed to withering attacks from rival Chris Christie, a former prosecutor, Rubio suffered what was perhaps the most memorable lapse at the presidential level since Edmund Muskie appeared to weep in the New Hampshire snow in 1972.

“Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio proclaimed early in the debate, as ungrammatical and off-point. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

A moment later, Rubio said again: “But I would add this. Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

And again: “Here’s the bottom line. This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Even when called out by Christie for the mindless repetition, Rubio said again: “We are not facing a president that doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows what he is doing. That’s why he’s done the things he’s done.”

The reviews were savage, and then, on Monday night, RubioBot malfunctioned again. “Janette and I are raising our four children in the 21st century, and we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats,” he told supporters, then added: “In the 21st century, it’s becoming harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats.”

Exit polls left little doubt that Rubio’s glitches ruined his prospects in New Hampshire. Two-thirds said the debates were important, and of the nearly half of GOP voters who made choices in the last few days, Kasich did far better than Rubio.

This left Rubio, with 70 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, languishing at 10 percent of the vote. He trailed not only Trump (34 percent) but also Kasich (16 percent), Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, who was once left for dead. “I’m disappointed with tonight,” Rubio said Tuesday, acknowledging that “I did not do well on Saturday night.”

The results also left Republicans, once again, without a consensus alternative to Trump — and with dwindling hope of finding one. Had Rubio received scrutiny earlier, voters might have been able to find a candidate who didn’t wilt in the spotlight. But Iowa and New Hampshire didn’t serve their functions this time. Trump got in the way.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Entitled Customer Slams Restaurant On Yelp, What Happens Next Is Sheer Badassery By Tiffany Willis on October 11, 2014 Subscribe 
A customer ( Yelp name Sonal B) was visiting Kansas City for a conference when she decided to try to get take-out food from Voltaire , “an upscale restaurant across the street from her conference building. The only problem with that is that Voltaire doesn’t offer take-out and they never have, by policy.” The customer pitched a fit, threatened to get her “lawyer” husband involved (and did), and threatened the manager with a bad Yelp review, which she did minutes after leaving the restaurant. 
But Voltaire’s owner responded. And it was fabulous. 
The Yelp review: Most unfriendly and arrogant restaurant in KC. Just called Voltaire to try to order some food because we’re in a late business meeting across the street. First, they refused to answer our question about what type of broth is used in the risotto. Then they said they won’t pack food to go. My husband spoke to the manager and explained that we’re in a conference room across the street, and asked if they can pack our dinner (which we would pick up). The hostess flat-out refused to answer our question about the food or to try and work with us so we could get food in our meeting. My husband asked to speak with the manager. The manager, Jamie, said, “our food is plated beautifully, and we can’t put it in a ‘to go’ container.” So thanks, Jamie, we’ll just starve. (What the manager said is just not true by the way we’ve eaten there before, and they did pack our food to go.) When my husband said that he was going to post a Yelp review about the way the restaurant was treating us, the manager questioned, “Are you a grown man and an adult?” Yes, Jamie, we are grown adults, and we do not do business with people who behave like you do. We regularly travel to NYC and eat at a variety of restaurants, which are more than happy to accommodate people by packing food to go. This restaurant thinks they’re too good for their customers. They will soon learn that if you ignore your customers, they’re going to start ignoring you. I would not even give this place one star after this experience, and I’m dismayed by their unprofessional and arrogant behavior. 
The owner’s response: I sincerely apologize that we don’t offer ‘take-out’ food at our restaurant. Being a Yelp user, I’m sure you were aware that on our Yelp business page, on the right side of the screen, it lists details about our establishment. There is an item listed ‘Take-Out : No.’ We have never offered take-out food as we believe the food we prepare should be presented as we see fit, (usually) on a plate inside the dining room. As for the risotto, its made with a vegetable stock – this dish is vegetarian, and I’m certain that who you were speaking with wanted to make extra certain the information provided to you was accurate. On your previous visits, you say you have witnessed dishes being boxed up as proof that we provide ‘take-out’ food. Although we do allow our guests to take their uneaten food with them in to-go boxes after they have dined with us, we have never offered ‘take-out’ food. If you were actually starving, as in a life threatening condition requiring nutritional sustenance, we would be happy to assist you..we do make exceptions for emergency situations. Our general manager did question the age/maturity of your husband after he became combative and threatened us with a negative Yelp review if we did not alter our operational practice and provide him with ‘take-out’ food. 15 minutes later you indeed came through with this threat. I can assure you that we don’t offer ‘take-out’ food because we feel we are ‘too good’ for our customers; we just prefer to have our guests dine with us, allowing for the proper presentation (and temperature) of their fare that has been skillfully prepared by our kitchen. I am very pleased that you frequent New York. We travel often as well. And I can assure you that there are many restaurants in NYC that do not offer ‘take-out’ food. Although there are many other options that do – in Kansas City as well (Go Royals!). It was made REPEATEDLY clear in the conversation with your husband that he is a lawyer. Let me provide the following analogy/role reversal-it may assist in clarifying your request. YOU: I want to hire you to handle my divorce. ME: But, I’m a tax lawyer. YOU: I don’t care I want you to handle my divorce. ME: Sorry, but I don’t practice that form of law. YOU: Just handle my divorce, I’ll pay you-it will be fine. ME: I don’t feel comfortable providing my services as a divorce lawyer, as I am a tax lawyer. You won’t receive the service you are wanting or that I am willing to provide. YOU: Well, I travel to NYC often, and in NYC, Tax lawyers handle my divorce litigation all the time. I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve told you I’m a chef, right? ME: Well, that’s nice sir, but I really can’t help you. It goes against my business practice. YOU: If you don’t represent me in my divorce, I’m going to post it all over the [most frequented social media review of lawyers] that you refused to provide me with the service I requested, and make baseless allegations about how you are very pretentious, arrogant and unprofessional. I will also try to prevent you from getting any additional business by damning you on said social media platform. Now will you represent me? ME: I don’t take kindly to threats. Thanks for your feedback. We will let you know if we decide in the future to practice divorce law, I mean, provide ‘take-out’ food. 
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page . Sign up for our free daily newsletter to receive more great stories like this one. 
h/t NextShark About Tiffany Willis 
Tiffany Willis is a fifth-generation Texan, a proponent of voluntary simplicity, a single mom, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal America. An unapologetic member of the Christian Left, she has spent most of her career actively working with “the least of these"" -- disadvantaged and oppressed populations, the elderly, people living in poverty, at-risk youth, and unemployed people. She is a Certified Workforce Expert with the National Workforce Institute , a NAWDP Certified Workforce Development Professional, and a certified instructor for Franklin Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens . Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , or LinkedIn . She also has a grossly neglected personal blog , a Time Travel blog , a site dedicated to encouraging people to read classic literature 15 minutes a day , and a literary quotes blog that is a labor of love . Find her somewhere and join the discussion. Click here to buy Tiff a mojito. Connect",FAKE
"Election Results Confirmed Via: Bloomberg , Google 
NBC Reports: Hillary Clinton has phoned Donald Trump To Concede 
Ladies and gentlemen, The President-Elect Of The United States of America: 

(Pictured: The cover Newsweek refused to print. Millions of copies of Hillary’s cover were printed and sent to book stores.) 
Coming Soon to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. : 

And the cover that never made it (but was printed because of a “business decision” at Newsweek) 

",FAKE
"It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?

Since it appears that no political data geek keeps track of voters who die between elections, I took it upon myself to do some basic math. And that quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that the trend could have a real effect in certain states, and make a battleground states like Florida and Ohio even harder for the Republican Party to capture.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”

Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. But the key question is whether these election death rates will make any real difference. There are so many other variables that dead voters aren’t necessarily going to be a decisive factor.

“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”

But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.",REAL
"PHOENIX - ""Ladies,"" Carly Fiorina said, ""look at this face!""

Fiorina took direct aim at Donald Trump here Friday evening, offering up a sharp rejoinder to comments by Trump that appeared to mock Fiorina's appearance.

""Look at that face,"" Trump told Rolling Stone in an interview published Wednesday. ""Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!""

Absolutely, Fiorina said at the National Federation of Republican Women's annual conference here.

""This is the face of a 61 year old woman. I am proud of every year and every wrinkle,"" ""Fiorina said as the overwhelmingly female crowd laughed and cheered.

The real estate mogul defended himself Thursday, saying that he was ""talking about persona. I'm not talking about look."" Critics pounced on Trump, saying that his remarks about Fiorina reinforced the notion that he is a misogynist.

Fiorina also hit Trump on the issue of leadership, saying that wealth does not a leader make.

""Leadership is not about position. It is not about title. It is not about how big your office is or how big your plane or your helicopter or your ego,"" Fiorina said.

Fiorina had additional words for Trump after the speech, according to Fox News.

Fiorina pitched herself as a proven leader who challenged the status quo and has done business with world leaders. She tried to project an authoritative informality, repeatedly addressing the crowd as ""ladies,"" commiserating with the hopes, dreams and struggles of many and lamented that those in the political sphere try to pigeonhole women's interests.

""Our experiences, our views, our hopes, our desires, are as diverse as the other half of the nation. The men. And I personally am so tired of hearing about women’s issues,"" she said. ""All issues are women's issues.""

Women, she said, still bear a disproportionate burden of poverty and child care duties and the pace of change for women has been slower. She recounted stories of sexism and the double standards that women face,  including being called a ""token bimbo"" at work and the time a colleague told her she can't come to a meeting with a client, because he wanted to get together at a strip club called the Board Room.

""I said, 'I hope you don't feel too uncomfortable, but I'll see you at The Board Room,'"" Fiorina recalled saying. ""I got in the cab and I gave him the name and address of the strip club and he said 'oh are you the new act?'""

Fiorina recounted being asked if a woman's hormones would prevent her from serving in the Oval Office.

""So, ladies, let’s just think: can we think of a single instance in which a man’s judgement was clouded by his hormones?"" she asked as the crowd whooped, applauded and gave her a standing ovation.

""I'm not standing up,"" a man in the crowd said.

Fiorina also called out Hillary Clinton numerous times, saying she took ""photo-ops"" with world leaders while Fiorina did business with them -- Fiorina said on her first day in office she would call ""my friend"" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pledge her stalwart support for Israel and the Supreme Leader of Iran to tell him that the Iranian nuclear deal is off. She said that a commander-in-chief must ""understand technology,"" a dig at the controversy surrounding Clinton's e-mail while she was at the State Department.

Even though Republican majorities were elected in Congress, she said, nothing has happened: the border isn't secure and Planned Parenthood isn't defunded, an issue that drew loud applause.

Most of all, she told the women, she wants them to vote for her because she is up for the job.

""I am not asking for your vote and your support because I am a woman. I am asking for your vote and your support because I am the most qualified candidate to win this job and do this job,"" she said.",REAL
"In the end, elections usually come back to the economy—to jobs, wages, taxes, imports and exports, the price of goods and the cost of an education. Differences over all these issues—from tax rates and immigration to globalization and the minimum wage—are particularly sharp this year between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Here’s a look at where the two candidates stand on the top economic issues.",REAL
"If you’re looking to stop Trump, history won’t be providing you with any roadmaps.

Let’s say you’re a Republican who is looking with abject terror at the thought of a Donald Trump nomination. You look at poll numbers from upcoming states—Trump by six! Trump by eight! You read and hear about “vectors” and “glide paths”, and you start looking for reassurance that it’s still early, that the last shall be first. Examples abound in sports—didn’t the Red Sox trail the Yankees 3-0 in the 2004 League Championship Series? Weren’t the New York Giants 13 1/2 games out of first in 1951? Surely there are cases where a doomed candidate turned the campaign around, right?

Well…sort of. There are any number of primary campaigns that saw a significant shift of fortunes, but they provide cold comfort for the anti-Trumpeteers. Why? Because 1) they happened a relatively long time ago, 2) they all happened in two-candidate races and 3) none of them resulted in a victory for the come-from behind candidate.

When President Gerald Ford barely beat ex-California Governor Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire in 1976, it might have been seen as a strong showing against a sitting President. But because the Reagan campaign had touted his strength there, the close finish was portrayed as a loss. When Ford won the next four primaries, including a landslide win in Illinois, Reagan’s challenge was on life-support.

In North Carolina, however, a combination of Senator Jesse Helms’ organizational muscle and a half-hour TV speech centered on foreign policy gave Reagan a victory that kept his campaign alive. Over the next 10 weeks, Reagan won 10 primaries, turning the fight into a delegate-by-delegate battle. In the end, the power of incumbency and a last-minute flip by the Mississippi delegation on a crucial rules fight gave the nomination to Ford. We have not seen a genuinely contested nomination fight since.

Of the first ten contests, he won only his native Massachusetts. With polls showing him headed to a big loss in New York, his campaign prepared to fold its tents. But the polls were wrong. Kennedy won the state by an 18-point landslide. That gave his campaign enough energy to keep the fight going all the way through the primaries—he won California, New Jersey, and seven other states—and the convention. He was never able to close the gap, but with more than a third of the delegates, Kennedy was able to win platform concessions and a much-celebrated prime-time speech. (He was also able, intentionally or not, to subject Carter to the humiliation of pursuing him at the rostrum in an attempt to stage a hands-clasped unity photo opportunity.)

Few campaigns have seen more twists and turns than the 1984 Democratic primary. What began as a ceremonial coronation of former Vice President Walter Mondale was upended, with no advance warning, when Senator Gary Hart and his “new ideas” campaign won a landslide in New Hampshire. He followed that with five wins in the next two weeks; only Mondale victories in Georgia and Alabama, with crucial margins provided by black voters, kept him afloat.

Then a tried-and-true pattern -- rise, scrutiny, decline—kicked in. Hart (unlike Reagan and Kennedy) was a relatively unknown political commodity. When the spotlight turned on him, questions great and small arose: Why had his changed his name from Hartpence? Why was his real age a mystery? More seriously, did the core of the Democratic Party freely want to nominate a figure who regularly challenged liberal orthodoxy (“We’re not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” he once said to a party that revered Humphrey’s liberal passions).

With big-city Democrats, labor, and African-Americans rallying to his side, Mondale won Illinois and then New York by a landslide. Once again, the nomination seemed to be in Mondale’s grasp. But Hart then won a string of primaries in May, and in June beat Mondale in California. Pre-primary polls also showed Hart with a big lead in New Jersey. But when he told a California audience by telephone that he was consigned to a “toxic waste dump in New Jersey,” Garden State Democrats responded by giving Mondale a 16 point win. But for that careless comment, Hart might well have turned the convention into a genuine battle.

That was more than thirty years ago. And in the decades since, there’s been nothing like a sharp turn of fortune in any nominating contest. There have been early challenges to favorites; there has been at least one case—Clinton in 1992—where it took a month or so for the ultimate nominee to win his first primary. There have been years—2008 for Democrats, 2012 for Republicans—when it took months for the nominee to claim enough delegates to end the contest. Moreover, there’s no historical parallel to today’s Republican race. Far from being an unknown commodity like Hart in 1984, Trump is better known than any of his rivals. And given that what he has handily survived, it is hard to imagine what he might say or do that could properly be described as “self-destructive.”

This doesn’t mean a Trump nomination is a done deal. With a majority of the party still opposing him, a two-person race offers a theoretical possibility. There may be enough left of “traditional Republicans” that a unified chorus proclaiming Trump a disaster could prove effective. But if you’re a Republican looking to find a clue to derailing Trump, history is not going to offer you anything like a roadmap.",REAL
"Today, President Obama will roll out the final version of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, an ambitious effort to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly one-third from 2005 levels by 2030. This seems likely to set in motion an ideological death struggle that will rival the one over Obamacare — but with arguably even higher stakes.

That’s because the long-term success of the new EPA rule — presuming it survives legal challenges — will depend to no small degree on the actions of the next president. The states don’t have to tell the federal government how they will seek to meet the rule’s carbon emissions targets — many GOP states may not comply — until around the time Obama’s presidency is ending and beyond. With implementation set to stretch out over many years, a Republican president could seek to relax or undo the plan, as Jason Plautz notes.

What’s more, the stakes are extremely high here because the success of this plan could help determine the viability of long-term international efforts to combat climate change. With an international climate accord expected soon, the fate of Obama’s plan will help determine whether the U.S. can keep its end of the carbon-emission-reducing bargain. As the New York Times puts it:

Climate scientists warn that rising greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly moving the planet toward a global atmospheric temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the point past which the world will be locked into a future of rising sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, and shortages of food and water. Mr. Obama’s new rules alone will not be enough to stave off that future. But experts say that if the rules are combined with similar action from the world’s other major economies, as well as additional action by the next American president, emissions could level off enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Ben Adler adds that Obama’s plan is “the centerpiece of any realistic program to meet…the intended targets we have outlined ahead of the Paris climate talks that will take place later this year.” (Indeed, Congressional Republicans are encouraging GOP governors to resist the new rule with the explicit purpose of undermining the chances of getting an international climate deal by sowing doubts as to whether the U.S. can meet its own pledges.)

Thus, the next president may well determine whether this plan helps lay the foundation for future international cooperation designed to avert an outcome that many scientists think could be irreversible. That will thrust the issue into the presidential race, making it perhaps more important than in previous cycles.

Hillary Clinton issued a strong statement pledging to defend Obama’s plan against “Republican doubters and defeatists,” a sign her campaign sees this issue as a good point of contrast with which to cast the GOP as the party of the past. And indeed, the major Republican presidential candidates have already come out against the plan. But this is only the beginning. An international climate accord could be reached at the end of the year — just when the GOP presidential primaries are (sorry, I can’t resist this) heating up in a big way.

Given that this would combine Obummer Mandates with a new effort at international engagement that many GOP primary voters will likely oppose, it could perhaps make Obama’s climate push even more ideologically toxic to Republicans, requiring the GOP candidates to outdo one another in their zeal to oppose it.

* KEY DEM CONGRESSMAN BACKS IRAN DEAL: Dem Rep. Adam Schiff, a pro-Israel moderate who is respected on foreign policy by many Democrats, comes out in favor of the Iran deal in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:

As Goldberg notes, this could influence undecided Jewish Dems. Proponents are increasingly pushing back on the notion that opposing the deal is the only “pro-Israel” position.

* SCHUMER LEANING AGAINST IRAN DEAL? Politico reports on the intense pressure from both sides on Senator Chuck Schumer as he makes up his mind on whether to support the Iran deal. Politico suggests he’s leaning against it. But:

Keep an eye on that: if Schumer does oppose the deal, he may not do so all that loudly, and enough Dems could still support it to prevent Obama’s veto of disapproval measure from being overridden. The White House can’t lose more than a dozen Dems.

* WARREN COMES OUT FOR IRAN DEAL: Senator Elizabeth Warren has just come out in favor of it. That isn’t surprising, but it’s a reminder that if Schumer opposes it, he’ll antagonize the left in a big way — and he’s set to become next Senate Dem leader.

* POLL FINDS BROAD OPPOSITION TO IRAN DEAL: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans oppose the “nuclear deal with Iran” by 57-28. The poll doesn’t define the deal, and a recent Washington Post poll that did define it found majority support. But this does suggest that proponents may have a great deal of work to do if Americans are broadly inclined against it out of distrust of Iran.

Meanwhile, a new YouGov poll that does define the deal found support for the deal has dropped from 51 percent to 36 percent, though only 38 percent oppose it.

* REPUBLICANS OPPOSE HIKING TAXES ON RICH: Another interesting tidbit from the new Quinnipiac poll: 61 percent of Americans think the federal government should try to reduce the gap between well off and less well off Americans, and 60 percent support increasing taxes on higher income earners to reduce middle class taxes.

But Republicans oppose both those things by 57-35 and 65-31.

* HILLARY GOES UP ON THE AIR: The Clinton campaign is airing two ads in Iowa and New Hampshire with strong biographical emphasis: One discusses her mother’s influence on her, and the other talks about her work for children. “We’re going to make sure everyone knows who Hillary Clinton really is,” the Clinton camp says. “We’ve planned for a competitive primary with Hillary herself working to earn every vote.”

The Beltway pundit consensus appears to be that Clinton’s favorability ratings are in free fall, so perhaps this is also part of an effort to “get her positives up,” as the jargon has it.

* WHAT REALLY MATTERS AT GOP DEBATE: E.J. Dionne has a nice column arguing that what really matters at this week’s GOP debate isn’t Donald Trump’s antics; it’s the question of whether the GOP candidates will deviate even a tiny bit from stale GOP economic doctrine:

Nope. All signs are that the GOP candidates all believe the answer to stagnating wages and the failure of the recovery to achieve widespread distribution is to get government out of the way.

* AND TRUMP-MENTUM RAGES ACROSS THE LAND: A new NBC News poll finds Donald Trump continues to surge among Republican voters nationally: He’s first with 19 percent; Scott Walker has 14; and Jeb Bush has 13. Breakdown:

So Trump is winning lots of GOP-leaning independents while also cutting into the conservative support of Walker and Cruz.",REAL
"Much is being made of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which she used when she was Secretary of State. To me, the real issue is not that Hillary endangered national security by sending classified information in the clear. No – the real issue is that the Clintons act as if they are above the rules and laws that apply to “the little people.” They are superior and smug, totally devoted to themselves and their pursuit of power and the privileges that come with it. It’s a matter of character, in other words. Hillary’s evasiveness, her lack of transparency, her self-righteousness, her strong sense of her own rectitude, make her a dangerous candidate for the presidency.
My second point is this: The issue of classification should be turned on its head. The real issue is not that Hillary potentially revealed secrets. No – the real issue is that our government keeps far too much from us. Our government uses security classification not so much to keep us safe, but to keep the national security state safe – safe from the eyes of the American people.

As The Guardian reported in 2013 :
“A committee established by Congress, the Public Interest Declassification Board, warned in December that rampant over-classification is ‘imped[ing] informed government decisions and an informed public’ and, worse, ‘enabl[ing] corruption and malfeasance’. In one instance it documented, a government agency was found to be classifying one petabyte of new data every 18 months, the equivalent of 20m filing cabinets filled with text.”
Nowadays, seemingly everything is classified. And if it’s classified, if it’s secret, we can’t know about it. Because we can’t be trusted with it. That’s a fine idea for an autocracy or dictatorship, but not so fine for a democracy.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Impossible when nearly everything of any importance is classified.
Too bad Hillary didn’t send everything in the clear – what a service she would have done for the American people and for democracy!
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. 
",FAKE
"Get short URL 0 4 0 0 NCI Information Systems has been awarded a $63 million contract to provide engineering and integration services to the US Army’s Garrison Humphreys in South Korea, the company stated in a press release Wednesday. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The work will require NCI to relocate technical equipment and staff for the United Nations Command and US Forces Korea from Yongsan in the Seoul metropolitan area to areas north of the South Korean capital, the release added. 
It noted that Army Garrison Humphreys is projected to grow from 9,000 to 44,000 soldiers, civilians and family members. “NCI will provide services for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence/information technology (C4I/IT) infrastructure and systems within sensitive compartmented information facilities,: the release said. ""The work will be performed at four facilities currently under construction at Camp Humphreys, including the Communications Center, Battle Command Training Center, US Forces Korea Operations Center and US Army 2nd Infantry Division."" ...",FAKE
"NAIROBI, Kenya — Armed terrorists stormed a university in northern Kenya on Thursday, killing 147 people, wounding dozens and taking hostages during a 15-hour siege until four militants were killed by security forces. Christians and converts to Islam appeared to have been the targets.

More than 550 students were evacuated and 79 were injured in the standoff on the Garissa University campus, about 90 miles from the Somali border. The Somali-based Islamic terrorist group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack — the al-Qaeda-linked organization's deadliest in Kenya.

Students said the gunmen separated Christians from Muslims and held hostages in a dormitory, where they placed explosives around the Christian hostages, according to Kenya's National Police Service.

Kenyan Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph Nkaissery said some students were killed during morning prayers at the mosque. Jackson Kamau, a student at the university, said the militants killed those who were likely converts to Islam. Locals can differentiate between Somali Muslims born into Islam and those who have converted because they come from different ethnic groups.

""We'll not allow terrorists to divide our country on religious lines,"" said Aden Duale, majority leader in Kenya's National Assembly.

Most of the 147 dead were students. Two security guards, one policeman and one soldier also were killed in the attack, Nkaissery said.

One suspected extremist was arrested as he tried to flee, Nkaissery told a news conference in Nairobi.

Heavy gunfire erupted at the college as the Kenyan military worked to end the siege. Police Inspector General Joseph Boinett said a dusk-to-dawn curfew will be in place in Garissa and three neighboring counties starting Friday through April 16.

The White House strongly condemned the attack and said the United States was providing assistance to the Kenyan government.

""We extend our deep condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed in this heinous attack, which reportedly included the targeting of Christian students,"" White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement.

Kenyan police offered a $220,000 bounty for Mohammed Mohamud, also known as Dulyadin and Gamadhere, who they suspect planned the attack.

Students who were able to escape said gunmen stormed the university, setting off explosives and shooting people on the campus just after 5 a.m. local time.

""Most of us were asleep when the incident happened,"" said Nicholas Ntulu, a student at the university. ""We heard heavy gunfire and explosions. Every person ran for dear life as we passed the gunmen. Several (students) were shot dead.

""There was nobody to help us at the time of the attack,"" he said. ""The police officers took more than an hour to arrive at the scene.""

President Uhuru Kenyatta urged Kenyans to stay calm. ""This is a moment for everyone throughout the country to be vigilant as we continue to confront and defeat our enemies,"" he said.

Kenyatta ordered the inspector general of police to accelerate the applications of 10,000 recruits for the Kenya Police College.

""We have suffered unnecessarily due to shortage of security personnel,"" he said. ""Kenya badly needs additional officers, and I will not keep the nation waiting.""

Frightened students rescued from the university gathered at a military camp near the Garissa airstrip.

""The sounds of gunfire was all over — we couldn't tell what was the right direction to go to be safe,"" said Ann Musyoka, a second-year student. ""We had to face the gunmen — they shot several people as we escaped towards the gate.""

Victims were rushed to a hospital, and those critically injured were airlifted to the capital, Nairobi.

""I was not at the institution when the incident occurred, but several students phoned me, crying over the attacks,"" said Jacktone Kweya, the dean of students. ""When I tried calling them back, their phones were off. It's very disturbing.""

Robert Godec, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, said the United States ""strongly condemns"" the attack.

""We extend our deepest condolences to all who have been affected,"" he said in a statement. ""The attack once again reinforces the need for all countries and communities to unite in the effort to combat violent extremism.""

The assault comes in the wake of an intelligence report issued last week by security officials warning that al-Shabab was planning an attack on major institutions in retaliation for Kenyan military action in Somalia as part of an African Union initiative against the group.

Al-Shabab has carried out several attacks in Garissa and across Kenya in the past few years, including an attack in 2013 at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi that left 67 people dead, and others on mosques in Mombasa, a coastal city in the east.

Nairobi-based security analyst Abdiwahab Sheikh said the incident highlights how the government has failed to shore up security in the country.

""The government has not learned anything from the Westgate attack,"" he said. ""How do you allow terrorists to take students hostage for more 10 hours? I think our security forces need to learn from the past.""",REAL
"Gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is the new President-elect of the United States. Though a a few results may still be unclear, Trump has captured the perennial large battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina, plus Georgia. And, in a change not seen in more than a generation, he has seized Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania and Michigan have not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since 1988 and Wisconsin since way back in 1984. It appears also that states the Democrats thought were well and truly in the bag for them, such as Minnesota, Maine and Virginia, have stayed blue with only wafer-thin or very disappointing margins. The 2nd Congressional district of Maine, a state which divides its electoral votes along with Nebraska, has been called for the Republicans for the first time in nearly 30 years. The last time any Maine district voted for a GOP Presidential candidate was 1988, when George H. W. Bush seized all four electoral votes there.
Importantly, too, avowedly liberal states have seen significant turnouts for Trump. For example, counts so far show that some 40% of voters in Connecticut and Rhode Island, states with even more liberal media bias than the nation generally, have opted for the “racist,” “sexist,” and “homophobic” Republican candidate. Their votes ultimately did not change the electoral college map, but it is heartening to know that even in the eye of the liberal storm, plenty of people are happy to support Trump. This is despite them facing fierce rebukes and, often enough, violence if they make their views public.
The “clown” candidate has beaten 16 more “experienced” Republican challengers and now Hillary Clinton, the most elite-backed candidate in the world’s political history.
As tonight’s results have shown, plenty of Trump voters in red and blue states alike have been forced to keep their beliefs quiet. Media airtime for pro-Trump views and stories has been deliberately minimized and frequently demonized by the major networks. Mainstream “journalists” such as Glenn Thrush , Wolf Blitzer , Jake Tapper , Jessica Valenti , and Brent Budowsky have been caught collaborating with both the DNC and Clinton campaign (if you believe that these two groups are actually separate). This only increases the esteem in which the emphatic, resounding Trump victory needs to be held.
And let’s not forget the Senate and House races! After months of spineless GOP cucks rushing to differentiate themselves from Trump, The Donald has still carried them to victory in both Houses of Congress . The White House, Senate and House of Representatives are all in Republican hands until at least the 2018 House midterms. Can you taste the very salty tears of the liberals and SJWs yet?
Every powerful vested interest not only supported Hillary, but did everything they could to ruin Trump Yes, it’s happening.
Did you see the last major Hillary Clinton rallies? Celebrities-cum-political hacktivists, chief among them Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Katy Perry, all fell into Clinton’s corner well before their final appearances for her, excoriating anyone who had the gall to support Donald Trump. Even long-term Republicans who betrayed Trump, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, were attacked by celebrity SJWs such as Robert DeNiro after they joined the “Never Trump” ranks, as if they were dangerous saboteurs. The celebrity paranoia has been palpable for months. Hollywood, that broad industry taking in not just film stars but also singers, silver screen actors, and comedians, has become little more than an overpaid trade union for Hillary Clinton.
Likewise, every major American company that has come out for a candidate has come out for Hillary. Plenty of “neutral” corporations have undoubtedly been funneling support to the Clinton campaign behind the scenes as well. Prominent billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett have done all they could to drag Hillary’s stumbling half-corpse, both literally and figuratively, across the line. Whilst Trump has been supported by a number of ten-figure businessmen, these men are regularly attacked in the media. They include the scapegoated but brave Peter Thiel and Carl Icahn.
And then there’s the mainstream media. Countless studies have indicated that about 85-90% of all journalists are liberal. This over-representation is more salient still in the upper echelons of newsmen and women, particularly prominent mastheads such as The New York Times , Washington Post , and Huffington Post , plus Democratic TV surrogates like CNN and NBC. The 2016 campaign has inflated this preexisting liberal bias, one that plagued the two George W. Bush Administrations but raged even more ferociously against Donald Trump over the last 18 months.
All of these media elites have lambasted Trump for over a year, at the same time they give the paltriest coverage of the disgusting Hillary, Podesta and DNC emails. Everything newsworthy on this front, from the overwhelming presence of Clinton Foundation donors in Hillary’s Secretary of State diary book to more recent revelations about John Podesta’s involvement with Satanic rituals, has been brushed off the balcony by the Wolf Blitzers and Chuck Todds of the American mainstream media. Yet Trump has triumphed nonetheless!
The new administration must crush the criminal Democratic elites and Clinton Foundation with the rule of law Will Hillary now find herself stumbling into jail?
Inasmuch as the Clinton campaign, the SJWs, and their big business and media enablers have been defeated in this year’s election, they retain very well-oiled and effective means for trying to undermine President Trump once he takes office. Trump’s first priority as Commander-in-Chief must be to remove the bureaucratic apparatchiks preventing a full and frank investigation of the Clinton Foundation. He also needs to clear the way for legal inquiries into the various criminal activities, as uncovered by Wikileaks, perpetrated from within the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The Department of Justice in particular has engaged in all manner of skulduggery, most notably when Attorney-General Loretta Lynch had a private meeting with Bill Clinton during the most crucial time of the FBI investigation into Hillary’s emails. Additionally, elements of the State Department illegally informed Hillary about new developments in that same case. Enough is enough. It’s time to drain the swamp.
Election night produced another curve-ball: after weeks of calling Donald Trump a “sore loser” for him not saying if he would respect the final result, Hillary Clinton refused to speak to her supporters and the American people. It would seem that she only telephoned Trump privately. So who’s the sore loser now?
Last night we were witnesses to the greatest electoral sea-change in American—and perhaps global—history. We cannot lose sight of the work to be done, but for the next 24 hours we can bask in this unprecedented victory against all odds.
Hail to the Chief, Donald J. Trump.
Read More: 4 Reasons Donald Trump Will Win The Presidential Election Of 2016 

",FAKE
"(CNN) Millionaire real estate heir Robert Durst was ""lying in wait"" when he shot and killed his longtime friend because she ""was a witness to a crime,"" prosecutors alleged Monday.

The evidence behind that accusation wasn't revealed in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's court filing, which charged Durst with first-degree murder. If he's convicted in the December 2000 killing of Susan Berman, prosecutors said, he could face the death penalty.

The charges, filed two days after FBI agents arrested Durst in New Orleans, set the stage for a new courtroom battle for a man who's no stranger to run-ins with the law.

Durst's alleged connections with Berman's death and two others became the focus of HBO's true crime documentary, ""The Jinx.""

He admitted to shooting and dismembering his neighbor but was acquitted of murder.

He was suspected in his first wife's disappearance, but no one could pin him to it.

And just before Berman, his longtime confidante, was going to speak to investigators about his wife's case, she was killed.

He's long denied any connection to her death or his wife's disappearance. But some say his mutterings picked up on a live microphone and broadcast in the HBO documentary make it sound like Durst could be changing his tune.

""What the hell did I do?"" Durst says from a bathroom at the end of the documentary. ""Killed them all, of course.""

His attorney says not to read too much into those comments. But more on that later.

To understand the complexities of Durst's life -- and the deaths linked to it -- we have to start at the beginning:

His first wife, Kathie McCormack, was on her way to medical school in New York when she vanished in 1982.

""I put her on the train in Westchester to go into the city that evening. That was the last time I ever saw her,"" Durst testified in a separate case over a decade later.

Despite a cloud of suspicion over the years, Durst has never been arrested in the disappearance.

What we know: Crime writer Susan Berman was a longtime friend of Durst's.

In 2000, when investigators reopened the 1982 disappearance case of Durst's first wife, they made plans to visit Berman in Los Angeles.

""She was a confidante of Robert Durst. She knew him well,"" CNN's Jean Casarez said. ""And it was just days before investigators were to fly out to California to talk with her about what she may have known about the disappearance of Kathleen Durst that she was shot execution-style in her living room.""

Fast forward 15 years, to this past weekend: Durst's arrest was in connection with Berman's death. (See below.)

What we don't know: We don't know whether Durst was the person who sent an anonymous letter to police telling them there was a body in Berman's home.

A police handwriting analysis said the writing on that card looked like Durst's, author Miles Corwin told CNN in 2004. But even with that, at the time, Corwin said police didn't have enough evidence to arrest Durst. So what's changed?

In ""The Jinx,"" Berman's stepson reveals a letter from Durst he found among her possessions.

""You look at the letter, and the handwriting is astonishingly similar,"" said Michael Daly, a special correspondent for The Daily Beast.

What we know: In 2001 -- almost two decades after his wife's disappearance and after Berman's killing in late December 2000 -- millionaire Durst was living in the coastal Texas city of Galveston.

Durst testified that he hid out in Galveston and posed as a mute woman because he was afraid as he faced increasing scrutiny, Court TV reported at the time.

He got into a scuffle with his neighbor, Morris Black, and admitted to shooting and killing him.

Prosecutors said Durst planned Black's killing to steal his identity. Defense attorneys said Black sneaked into Durst's apartment, and Durst accidentally shot him as both men struggled for a gun.

Durst testified he panicked and decided to cut up Black's body and throw away the pieces.

What we don't know: Why Durst chose Pennsylvania to escape to after shooting and dismembering his neighbor.

He had jumped bond and almost got away -- if not for a sandwich that the heir stole from a store. He was captured in Pennsylvania for shoplifting, even though he had hundreds of dollars in his pocket.

What we know: Durst is now accused of killing Berman, the crime writer.

Authorities found him Saturday at a New Orleans hotel, where he was staying under a false name and was carrying a fake driver's license, according to a law enforcement official who's been briefed on the case. Durst had a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver on him when he was arrested, according to New Orleans Police Department records.

He'd paid for the hotel in cash, and authorities believe he was preparing to leave the country and flee to Cuba, the official said.

Investigators found marijuana and a ""substantial"" amount of cash in Durst's hotel room, a source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

Police said they arrested Durst ""as a result of investigative leads and additional evidence that has come to light in the past year.""

The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office on Monday charged him with first-degree murder. In New Orleans, he's also facing felony firearms and drug charges.

What we don't know: What the new evidence is that led authorities to arrest Durst, why they arrested him when they did and when he'll be taken to Los Angeles.

Susan Criss, a former Texas District Court judge who presided over the 2003 murder trial, told CNN that producers of ""The Jinx"" gave all the evidence they uncovered to police, and it's likely Durst's statements on the show are part of the case against him.

""That case has been several years in the making,"" she said. ""The investigation has been going on. The making of the cases has been going on. And I think these are pieces of evidence that are going to be used, and they're going to be very powerful pieces of evidence.""

But that doesn't mean investigators only learned about evidence as the show aired, she said.

""They turned over the handwriting sample a couple years ago, at least two or three years ago,"" she told CNN. ""They told me when they did it. The police had it. The police didn't just learn this when they watched television. They've had that.""

""Do I think this is a coincidence? Hell, no,"" he said. ""There has been rumor, innuendo and speculation for a number of years, and now we're going to get our day in court on this.""

Once that day comes, prosecutors said Monday that Durst could face the death penalty if convicted.

He waived his right to fight extradition to Los Angeles during an appearance Monday before a New Orleans Magistrate Court. But Durst remains in jail in New Orleans, where he was booked Monday on charges of being a felon in possession of a firearm and possession of a firearm with a controlled substance. That could delay his extradition.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office says he'll be brought back to Los Angeles for arraignment ""at a future date.""

Durst's lawyers deny that he had anything to do with Berman's death and say they're eager for him to go to Los Angeles.

""Bob Durst didn't kill Susan Berman,"" DeGuerin told reporters Monday. ""He's ready to end all the rumor and speculation and have a trial.""

What we know: The HBO documentary series ""The Jinx"" aired in six episodes, ending Sunday.

Immediately after the finale's last shot, Durst went into the bathroom, apparently not realizing his microphone was still on.

""There it is. You're caught,"" he said.

He then rambled a series of seemingly unrelated sentences before saying, ""He was right. I was wrong.""

Then, the most intriguing remarks: ""What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.""

What we don't know: What did those words really mean?

Criss told CNN that it wasn't the first time Durst made statements that seemed to incriminate himself while being recorded.

""In our trial, he had been recorded on the phone talking to his wife and friends, making a lot of admissions, and the state never used that,"" she said. ""But he was aware that he had been recorded, saying things that could implicate him in the murder we were trying. Earlier in those interviews, in a previous interview for that very program ('The Jinx'), there was a break where he was caught practicing his testimony. And so he realized, he knew he had a mic on. This is the third time he's made that mistake.""

While the comments may appear incriminating, his attorney told Fox News' ""Justice With Judge Jeanine"" that the offhand remarks might not mean anything.

""Your honesty would lead you to say you've said things under your breath before that you probably didn't mean,"" attorney Chip Lewis said.

When asked for comment, HBO praised the series' director and producer in a statement Sunday.

""We simply cannot say enough about the brilliant job that Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling did in producing 'The Jinx,' "" said HBO, which is owned by Time Warner -- the parent company of CNN. ""Years in the making, their thorough research and dogged reporting reignited interest in Robert Durst's story with the public and law enforcement.""

Jim McCormack, the brother of Durst's first wife, said he's glad Durst's ability to avoid conviction may be unraveling.

""The dominoes of justice are now starting to fall,"" he said. ""Through our faith, hope and prayers the last domino will bring closure and justice for Kathie.""",REAL
"American officials said this week they plan to train up to 25,000 Iraqi troops in a major mission to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from Islamic State militants sometime this spring.

The mission is welcome, but frankly it is unlikely to succeed unless there is, at the same time, a deeper understanding on the part of our government of the real threat that the Islamic State and its adherents pose to us as a nation—and what our role in this broader fight must be. Unless the United States takes dramatically more action than we have done so far in Iraq, the fractious, largely Shiite-composed units that make up the Iraqi army are not likely to be able, by themselves, to overwhelm a Sunni stronghold like Mosul, even though they outnumber the enemy by ten to one. The United States must be prepared to provide far more combat capabilities and enablers such as command and control, intelligence, logistics, and fire support, to name just a few things.

Yet to defeat an enemy, you first must admit they exist, and this we have not done. I believe there continues to be confusion at the highest level of our government about what it is we’re facing, and the American public want clarity as well as moral and intellectual courage, which they are not now getting.

There are some who argue that violent Islamists are not an existential threat and therefore can simply be managed as criminals, or as a local issue in Iraq and Syria. I respectfully and strongly disagree.

We, as a nation, must accept and face the reality that we and other contributing nations of the world are at war, and not just in Iraq. We are in a global war with a radical and violent form of the Islamic religion, and it is irresponsible and dangerous to deny it. This enemy is far broader than the 40,000 or so fighters in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. There also exists a large segment of this radical version of Islam in over 90 nations abroad as well as here at home. Just ask those countries from which foreign fighters are flowing into the Levant to support this “jihad.”

Nor is this enemy going away any time soon. As abhorrent as this form of radical Islam is, we must recognize and understand that it is a political ideology with the foundation of its laws emanating from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s life as its guide—and nothing else is needed. This form of radical Islam is in direct conflict with a large segment of the Islamic community; a community that must stand taller and be counted right now or they will be counted among the dead—killed at the hands of these radical militants (this includes both Sunni and Shia).

Having served in the theaters of war of Iraq and Afghanistan for many years, and faced this enemy up close and personal, I have seen first hand the unrestrained cruelty of our enemy. While they may be animated by a medieval ideology, they are thoroughly modern in their capacity to kill and maim as well as precisely and very intelligently transmit their ideas, intentions and actions via the Internet.

In fact, they are increasingly capable of threatening our nation’s interests and those of our allies, and it would be foolish for us to wait until they pose an existential threat before taking decisive action. Doing so would only increase the cost in blood and treasure later for what we know must be done now.

Not surprisingly, the recent draft authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF (a minor component of a still required comprehensive strategy), signals that we are willing to wait for them to become existential. Again, this is irresponsible and dangerous thinking. This authorization requires far more and far stronger objectives and authorities for our military commanders and not be simply another limiting timetable that sets unreal expectations.

Instead, this authorization should be broad and agile, and unconstrained by unnecessary restrictions. These restrictions cause not only frustration in our military and intelligence communities but they also significantly slow down the decision-making process for numerous fleeting opportunities. If this is due to a lack of confidence in our military and intelligence leadership, get rid of them and find new ones.

And if there is not a clear, coherent, and comprehensive strategy inclusive of all elements of national power forthcoming from the administration, there should be no authorization at all, simply leave the existing one in place.

There are solutions to this problem. However, solving tough, complex problems such as eliminating this radical form of Islam from the face of the planet will require extraordinary intellect, courage, and leadership. Leadership that isn’t consensus building, but thoughtful, insightful, yet, when it matters, decisive.

We have seen this type of leadership throughout world history and we have examples in our own history—Washington, Lincoln, FDR to Ronald Reagan. When faced with threats to our way of life and the lives of our friends and allies around the world—they stepped up to lead. Whether that leadership meant forcing our will on the enemy or outmatching them with our wits and imagination, they faced the difficult reality head on.

To that end, I offer the following three strategic objectives:

• First, we have to energize every element of national power in a cohesive synchronized manner—similar to the effort during World War II or the Cold War—to effectively resource what will likely be a multi-generational struggle. There is no cheap way to win this fight.

• Second, we must engage the violent Islamists wherever they are, drive them from their safe havens and kill them. There can be no quarter and no accommodation. Any nation-state that offers safe haven to our enemies must be given one choice—to eliminate them or be prepared for those contributing nations involved in this endeavor to do so. We do need to recognize there are nations who lack the capability to defeat this threat and will likely require help to do so inside of their own internationally recognized boundaries. We must be prepared to assist those nations.

• Third, we must decisively confront the state and non-state supporters and enablers of the violent Islamist ideology and compel them to end their support to our enemies or be prepared to remove their capacity to do so. Many of these are currently considered “partners” of the United States. This must change. If our so-called partners do not act in accordance with internationally accepted norms and behaviors or international law, the United States must be prepared to cut off or severely curtail economic, military and diplomatic ties.

Winning doesn’t come without cost and solving difficult messy problems is never easy, but that’s what leaders do. Let’s lead!",REAL
"Seven years ago, in the Czech capital of Prague, Barack Obama delivered his first major foreign policy speech as president. To rapturous applause, he laid out his vision for “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”. It earned him that year’s Nobel peace prize.

On Friday he will bookend his two terms in office with another appeal for nuclear disarmament, this time during a historic trip to Hiroshima. No other sitting US president has ever visited the Japanese city that was razed to the ground by a single atomic bomb in the final days of the second world war.

An estimated 140,000 people, almost all of them civilians, perished instantly in the vast inferno, or died within a few months from severe burns, blast injuries or radiation sickness. Many more succumbed years later to cancers and other radiation-related illnesses.

The president will make no apology on behalf of his nation for this horrific attack. That he has made clear. But most of the remaining survivors, known as hibakusha, have not demanded one. Their focus instead is on the future – how to realise the oft-cited, long-elusive goal of a nuclear weapon-free world, lest anyone else ever suffer as they have.

Many hibakusha have been dismayed by the president’s dismal record on disarmament. Setsuko Thurlow, who was 13 years old when the building she was in collapsed around her from the atomic blast, wrote in the New York Daily News last week: “We are frustrated by Obama’s eloquent propensity to say one thing and do another.”

Under the Obama presidency, contrary to perceptions, the pace of nuclear warhead dismantlement has slowed, not hastened. Indeed, the two presidents Bush and Bill Clinton each made greater gains in downsizing the colossal US nuclear stockpile amassed during the cold war.

But more alarming than this failure to destroy old nuclear weapons has been the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of new, “smaller” ones, for which the threshold of use would be lower, according to former military commanders.

At great expense, the president has bolstered all three components of the nation’s “nuclear triad”: the strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched missiles. This was the price paid for securing Republican support in 2010 for the ratification of a modest bilateral arms reduction treaty with Russia.

Obama’s much-publicised “nuclear security summits” largely ignored the greatest source of nuclear insecurity in the world today: 15,000 nuclear weapons, including 1,800 on hair-trigger alert. Instead, they focused on measures to keep “vulnerable nuclear material” out of terrorists’ hands – a vital endeavour, certainly, but for all the fanfare the results were small.

Now the United States is stridently resisting diplomatic moves by two-thirds of the world’s nations to declare nuclear weapons illegal. It boycotted UN talks in Geneva this month aimed at setting the stage for negotiations on a prohibition treaty. But it cannot veto this initiative, just as it could not veto the processes that led to bans on landmines in 1997 and cluster munitions in 2008.

While a prohibition on nuclear weapons will not result in disarmament overnight, it will powerfully challenge the notion that these weapons are acceptable for some nations. It will place them on the same legal footing as both other types of weapons of mass destruction – namely, chemical and biological weapons.

In Geneva, Australia spoke neither for nor against a ban. Under the caretaker government, it was compelled to remain silent on matters for which there is no bipartisan agreement. The Coalition government has fervently opposed the “ban the bomb” movement, arguing that the so-called US “nuclear umbrella” guarantees Australia’s “security and prosperity”.

Labor, by contrast, has declared its firm support for “the negotiation of a global treaty banning [nuclear] weapons”, welcoming “the growing global movement of nations that is supporting this objective”. This was an important addition to its revised national platform in 2015.

Its new policy, no doubt, will prove unpopular with our powerful ally – whoever may serve as the next commander-in-chief – but it is in harmony with the policies of our nearest neighbours, from whom we have grown increasingly isolated on this issue in recent years. Among the most outspoken proponents of a ban are New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Australia should look to these and other nuclear-free nations in our region, and beyond, for guidance on disarmament matters – not to a nation bristling with 7,000 nuclear weapons. The US will not, alas, lead the way to a world without these horrible weapons. Even under one of its most progressive presidents, it has failed abysmally to do so.

The promise of Prague was broken. Let us not get caught up in the hope and hype of Hiroshima. To succeed in eliminating nuclear weapons, we must begin by stigmatising and prohibiting such weapons. The US will not support us in this endeavour. But the overwhelming majority of nations will. We must stand firmly on the right side of history.

The problem is not North Korea or Russia or China, or whoever else we may perceive as the enemy. The problem is the weapons these and others possess and threaten to use every day through the doctrine of “deterrence”. They are inherently indiscriminate, inhumane and immoral weapons. Soon, too, they will be illegal. Australia must stop defending them simply out of deference to its ally.",REAL
"The debacle in Congress last week over President Barack Obama's trade agenda was further evidence that domestic political wrangling is harming U.S. leadership in the global economy.

By failing to pass Trade Adjustment Assistance, which provides help to American workers affected by international trade, Congress has raised doubts about the U.S.'s ability to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim economies. It also dims the prospects for the negotiations on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.

It wasn't the first time recently that Congress sought to derail an agreement the executive branch had successfully advanced abroad. In recent months, lawmakers have again failed to approve reforms to the International Monetary Fund that were crafted by the administration, approved by most of the fund's global membership and are in the U.S. national interest (and they entail neither additional financial obligations nor an erosion of U.S. influence, representation and veto power on major IMF decisions).

As with trade, congressional blockage of IMF reforms had less to do with the merits of the case than with the posturing of individual lawmakers as they prepare to seek re-election. The dysfunction reflects a legislative branch that has been operationally undermined not just by extreme polarization of the two parties, but also by the influence of the extremes within the parties as they set up the terms of the debate for the next presidential-nomination primaries.

Outside the U.S., the image of an uncooperative Congress has also been fueled by the Republican lawmakers who took the unprecedented step of sending a letter to Iran's leadership warning that the nuclear agreement being pursued by Obama could well be overturned after the November 2016 elections.

To be fair, such signals to the rest of the world haven't been emitted by Congress alone. The administration itself slipped in its handling of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Ignoring advice to join this new institution and seek to shape and influence it from within, the U.S. embarked on a concerted public campaign to block it. Those efforts were thwarted as U.S. allies joined the China-led initiative, forcing a rather embarrassing retreat.

All this justifiably worries those who believe that effective U.S. economic leadership is essential to a well-functioning global system. This is especially true now, when world growth is struggling, there are genuine concerns about currency wars and countries have fallen further behind in dealing with some collective challenges, including environmental ones.

Historically, the U.S. has been the most effective in coordinating crisis management efforts, pushing forward multilateral reforms and enabling global policy cooperation. Moreover, there is no credible alternative to U.S. leadership on the international economic stage.

The Group of Seven isn't representative of the realities of recent global economic realignments. The G-20 is unwieldy and lacks sufficient continuity. Europe, with its endless challenges, is too internally focused and preoccupied. China is hesitant to step up to broader international responsibilities. And too many international institutions are burdened with longstanding legitimacy and credibility deficits related to outmoded representation and governance features.

After Congress's loud statement last week, many hope that lawmakers will find a way to put trade authorization back on track this week. Yet such a stop-go strategy is far from cost-free. It does little to restore confidence in Congress, whose public approval rating languishes at or close to record lows. And it suggests to the rest of the world that, due to seemingly endless internal political polarization and dysfunction, the U.S. cannot be relied on to play its natural role as the world’s economic conductor.

Congress would be well advised to take note of this before turning other international economic initiatives into spectacles. And, while it is at it, it should really move to approve IMF reforms that are in both the national and global interest.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

 Mohamed A. El-Erian at melerian@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

 Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net",REAL
"Washington (CNN) No deal is better than a bad deal, say critics of President Barack Obama's nuclear talks with Iran.

But what if Republican and Democratic opponents succeed in their intensifying effort to derail the diplomacy?

The price of failure could be an ugly blame game and cascade of political reprisals leading to nuclear chicken between Iran and the West -- potentially leading to war.

""We would have to deal with a resumption of Iran's nuclear activities, which we don't want to see take place. Iran would have to deal with the resumption of sanctions, which they don't want,"" said Gary Samore, a top nonproliferation official during Obama's first term.

For now, the grave consequences of a breakdown in talks are one reason the United States and Iran are still at the table, as a grueling diplomatic process reaches critical deadlines and painful political decisions beckon.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are haggling over the remaining issues in Lausanne, Switzerland, ahead of an end-of-the-month deadline for a framework agreement, which then must be finalized by July 1.

But time may be running out for a deal in which six world powers would lift sanctions that have throttled Iran's economy in return for assurances that Tehran will continue to stay a year or so away from developing a nuclear bomb.

The White House puts the chances of a deal at only 50-50: Disputes still rage over the scale of nuclear infrastructure Iran will be allowed to keep, the pace of sanctions relief and the extent of nuclear site inspections.

Despite the controversy stoked last week in Washington when 47 GOP senators sent a letter to Iran's leaders warning that the future of a deal was not guaranteed, many analysts believe that the talks will go on, even if the end-of-March deadline slips.

""Not because all sides are desperate to keep talking. But I think sufficient momentum has been created in the last month or so that they see real possibilities,"" said Robert Einhorn, a former senior U.S. State Department arms control official.

Obama may now have slightly more political leeway on the talks than before -- ironically because of attempts by U.S. and Israeli critics to pen him in.

A few weeks ago, skeptical Democrats appeared to be lining up with Republicans and approaching a veto-proof Senate majority that could have forced Obama to submit a deal to Congress or accept the passage of new sanctions. Either move could have killed the agreement.

But the Republicans' letter and a fiercely critical speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the proposed deal prompted some skeptical Democrats to close ranks, at least temporarily.

But Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN's Dana Bash on ""State of the Union"" that Obama was on the cusp of agreeing a ""very bad"" deal that would allow Iran to keep its nuclear infrastructure intact. He said that if an agreement is reached, he would bring up legislation that would give Congress 60 days to back or reject a deal, despite fresh pleas from the White House for the GOP to hold off. If no deal is reached, McConnell said on Sunday that he would press ahead with toughening sanctions on Iran, he said.

Republican sources, meanwhile, said that despite the furor over the letter from the senators, no Democrats had yet formally pulled support for legislation requiring the Senate to have a say on the deal. That leaves the real possibility of a pitched political showdown on Iran in the coming months.

The opening for diplomacy is meanwhile not endless. And if no deal emerges by July, political pressure for a tougher administration stance towards Iran may be unstoppable.

If diplomacy fails, how events unfold will be dictated by how the process collapses; who gets the blame; and the political pressures exerted on Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Washington and Tehran.

""If, at the end of June, there is not a deal, and talks have broken off, I think that it is inevitable that the Congress will adopt new sanctions legislation,"" said Einhorn, now with the Brookings Institution.

""What that will mean is the Iranians will reciprocate.""

Iran could start up centrifuges halted during the nuclear negotiations, bring more advanced machinery online and enrich uranium to the potent 20% level that would get it closer to a weapon.

And if it bars international inspectors, the world would have no idea how far Iran is from making a bomb.

The administration thinks that if the United States gets the blame for using hardball tactics that derail talks -- if, say, Congress imposes more sanctions, as administration critics want -- there is no way its international partners would keep existing sanctions in place, let alone double down and impose new ones.

In addition to unilateral U.S. sanctions Congress has imposed, the United Nations, European Union and other countries have put in place their own sanctions cutting off Iran from international partners and not just the American economy.

Cornelius Adebahr, a European security specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, predicted Iran would reap a propaganda victory.

""It would give ammunition for Iran to say the U.S. is not reliable,"" he said.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Jim Walsh, a specialist on the talks, said the Iranian government would have little choice but to hit back at a tougher U.S. stance.

""The Iranians are just not going to take it. They are going to feel condemned to respond. Both sides will take their shovels and dig the holes deeper.""

Walsh continued, ""We would be between a lame duck (U.S.) president for whom negotiations had just failed, a weakened Rouhani, for whom negotiations have just failed, and a coming U.S. presidential election -- not exactly the best environment to return to talks and accomplish a diplomatic settlement.""

Aborted negotiations that leave Iran rededicated to its nuclear program raise the specter of Tehran with a bomb -- or some enemy country taking military action to stop it.

But critics of the deal being worked out in Switzerland don't agree that such an outcome is the likeliest scenario.

GOP hawks and Israel believe Tehran is so desperate for sanctions relief, especially at a time of low oil prices, that it will have no choice but to offer a better deal than the one currently on the table and agree to the complete halt to uranium enrichment that Israel and conservatives demand.

""If Iran threatens to walk away from the table -- and this often happens in a Persian bazaar -- call their bluff. They'll be back, because they need the deal a lot more than you do,"" Netanyahu maintained in his Congress speech.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made the case in a USA Today op-ed Friday that Obama should ""walk away from a flimsy nuclear agreement.""

Those opposed to the deal reject the administration that follow their advice would likely blow up the talks and set Washington on an inevitable path to war as the only remaining way to disable Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

Instead, GOP congressmen counter that several bills they are pushing, with significant Democratic support, do not forestall the possibility of continued diplomacy if talks fail. They say that extra sanctions would increase Obama's leverage in diplomacy, not weaken it.

Even if talks do succeed this year, the long-term future of an agreement still wouldn't be assured.

The diplomatic effort has powerful critics among hardliners in Tehran who, whatever's written on paper, could push to illicitly expand Iran's nuclear program and close in on a bomb. It's not just Republicans who fear Tehran may violate any deal or test the limits of compliance. Some people who back the talks admit that may be the case, too.

In Washington, Congress will be required to lift the existing sanctions on Iran to sustain the agreement in years to come -- a step that is hardly a given.

And the stiff Republican opposition means a deal is not assured of surviving the arrival of a new president in the White House come 2017. A future Republican president could reverse Obama's sanctions waivers fairly quickly, as the senators warned in their letter to Iran.

Whether the new president would want to do so is another matter, however, especially if Iran lives up to the terms of a deal, which would include stringent verification by international inspectors.

He or she would risk a heavy political price. A unilateral Washington pullout would likely infuriate U.S. partners and leave the rookie president facing a boiling crisis that could overwhelm the new administration's nascent foreign policy.

""That's what the administration is counting on -- if there is compliance and the deal is working well,"" said Einhorn.

Kerry reminded Congress this week that Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia would all be cosignatories of a deal.

""If all those countries have said this is good and it's working, (will a new president) just turn around and nullify it on behalf of the United States?"" he asked. ""That's not going to happen.""

Congress would face the same cost-benefit calculation when it comes to the sanctions only lawmakers can expunge. In the event of a Democratic White House victory in 2016, the congressional math could also change in favor of a deal.

And if Republicans keep their majorities, lawmakers who are bent on thwarting Obama may be less willing to handcuff a new GOP president.",REAL
"Election’s Rape And Sexual Assault Accusations Need to Be Taken Seriously Posted on Oct 27, 2016 
By Sonali Kolhatkar Protesters organized by the National Organization for Women gather near the Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York City on Oct. 12, as sexual assault allegations about GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump emerged on the heels of The Washington Post’s bombshell report about Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” hot-mic comments regarding his treatment of women. (Frank Franklin II / AP Photo) 
Less than a day after the third and final 2016 presidential debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump faced new accusations from a woman who recounted a story of her sexual assault at his hands. Karena Virginia told members of the press how Trump groped her in public at the U.S. Open in 1998 while asking, “Don’t you know who I am?” 
Two days later, two more women, Kristin Anderson and Summer Zervos, made similar allegations . Earlier this year, a woman named Katie Johnson said Trump raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old; she filed a lawsuit against him that was later thrown out on a technicality. Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana Trump, has also accused him of raping her. To date a dozen women have publicly alleged that Trump in some way assaulted them. 
Jane Piper, an activist who faced her rapist in court in 2014 , told me in an interview that she believes the women who have accused Trump. “I take their word as their word, and I believe them,” she said. “We have this documented evidence of [Trump’s] attitude and behavior toward women,” added Piper, referring to his numerous public statements revealing a callous and disrespectful attitude toward women. To Piper, the idea that Trump might be a serial perpetrator of sexual assault is consistent with his language and the attitude he has publicly displayed. 
Advertisement Square, Site wide 
Think about Bill Cosby. While he has not been convicted on charges of sexual assault, in the court of public opinion, he is already considered guilty. He has admitted to drugging women in order to have sex with them, and the sheer volume of accusers against him leaves one wondering: “How could they possibly all be lying?” As Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump during the final presidential debate, “Why would so many different women from so many different circumstances, from so many different years, why would they all ... make up these stories?” 
Indeed, in cases such as those involving Cosby and Trump, there is little to be gained by publicly proclaiming oneself the victim of rape and assault. All a woman gains is to be forever known as someone who accused a famous man of a vile crime. According to Piper, “It is not comfortable to be known in this way. It makes no sense, and it is ridiculous and offensive and insulting” to imply that a woman might make it all up for fame. 
Like Cosby, Trump has bragged about assaulting women. In a now infamous recording obtained by The Washington Post , Trump revealed to TV host Billy Bush that he simply has his way with women: “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” And, as in Cosby’s case, women are emerging from the woodwork as the election looms to reveal sordid stories about Trump’s alleged assaults on them. 
One major difference here is that Cosby is an actor (who will indeed face the accusations against him in court), while Trump is running for the highest office in the nation. While all men, including Cosby, need to be held to high standards on sexual assault, those who run for president deserve the utmost scrutiny. 
Piper dismissed the response by Trump’s supporters that the timing of the accusations now emerging is suspect. “Of course, this timing is perfect,” she told me, “because [Trump’s accusers] just listened to him in that video describe what he did and [be] proud of it, and the next day, in the debate, lie and say that he never ever actually did that.” Piper said that if she had been one of the women who had alleged assault by Trump, she “would be doing everything in my power to make sure that the public knew what kind of person this man was so that they would know what kind of leader they were choosing to elect.” Essentially, anyone running for president of the United States should expect his or her past and present to be scrutinized under the most stringent of microscopes. 
“Womanizing,” or having affairs, as presidential candidate Gary Hart was accused of in 1987, is very different from being accused of sexual assault or rape. Hart was brought down by a media frenzy that began with a single, provocative photograph. Trump is heading straight into an election dogged by repeated accusations of crimes—not affairs—and all he has offered are simplistic denials and deflections.",FAKE
"A stormy opening night of the Democratic convention battered the Philadelphia arena on Monday as defiant Bernie Sanders supporters resisted attempts to persuade them to embrace Hillary Clinton.

Impassioned pleas for unity from a trio of Democratic women led by Michelle Obama raised hopes that the tumultuous first day of the convention may provide catharsis.

But despite a direct plea for calm from Sanders, many of his 1,846 delegates in the arena repeatedly jeered at mentions of the party’s presumptive nominee for the first hour or two of the evening.

Only after the Vermont senator appeared on stage at the Wells Fargo Center to urge them that the decision to choose between Clinton and Trump was “not even close” did the rebellion that has divided the party for much of the year show signs that it had reached its peak.

“Any objective observer will conclude that – based on her ideas and her leadership – Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States,” Sanders said, after three minutes of trying to quiet the floor.

Signs that a week of big-name Democratic speakers may help overcome the uncomfortable split also emerged when the first lady delivered a speech that brought the room to a standstill.

“Because of Hillary Clinton our daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that woman can be president of the United States,” said Obama with evident emotion in her voice.

“In this election we cannot sit back and hope that everything works out for the best ... Between now and November we need to do what we did eight years ago and four years ago,” added the first lady. “We need to pour every last ounce of our passion and our strength and our love for this country into electing Hillary Clinton as president of the United States of America.

Earlier, even a live rendition of Bridge over Troubled Water from Paul Simon, ripe with symbolism, could not disguise scenes of open revolt that proved far more vocal than expected and caused consternation on stage.

“Can I just say to the Bernie or Bust people: you are being ridiculous,” said Sanders-supporting comedian Sarah Silverman as she called for unity and backed Clinton “with gusto”.

“I will be respectful of you. And I want you to be respectful of me,” demanded Ohio congresswoman Marcia Fudge of the vocal Sanders supporters after she was repeatedly interrupted. “We are all Democrats and we need to act like it.”

The tone of the evening was set when the religious invocation at the start of the session was interrupted by rounds of competitive chanting for different corners for the room: “Bernie! Bernie!” drowned out by “Hillary! Hillary!” and back again, as the pastor stood awkwardly on stage.

Congressman Elijah Cummings had his speech about the struggle of his family against racism interrupted by Sanders supporters protesting against trade deals. Other speakers nervously approached applause lines not knowing whether they would be booed or cheered by the fractious crowd.

At times, there was a faint echo of the mood at the Republican convention last week, where every mention of Clinton’s name also prompted boos, albeit much louder and without the balancing cheers of her supporters.

During a two-minute pause while an official photograph was taken of the hall, a lone shout of “Bernie” punctuated the awkward silence.

And as a violent thunder storm forced the evacuation of marquee tents outside the arena, party officials sent a warning to those outside:

A text to Sanders delegates was also sent to try to calm the storm inside. “I ask you as a personal courtesy to me to not engage in any kind of protest on the floor,” said the text signed “–Bernie”. “It is of utmost importance you explain this to your delegations.”

Yet the anger was intensified by leaked emails suggesting bias against the Sanders campaign by party officials, and the Democratic National Committee began the night with an apology.

“These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process,” it said. “The DNC does not – and will not – tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates. Individual staffers have also rightfully apologized for their comments, and the DNC is taking appropriate action to ensure it never happens again.”

The turning point came when Obama took to the stage, to a rapturous welcome from Democrats waving a sea of “Michelle” purple placards.

She called Clinton “the president I want for my girls” and someone “who knows that the world is not black and white and easily boiled down to 140 characters”.

“Only one person I trust with the responsibility to be president and that is our friend Hillary Clinton,” said Obama.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a popular figure on the left, also focused her attention on defeating Trump in a calm speech that drew out what was at stake in November’s election.

“For me this choice is personal; it’s about who we are as a people,” said Warren, blasting Trump as “a man who thinks of nothing but himself”.

In an extended call for Sanders supporters to join her on the journey toward backing Clinton, Silverman memorably described her Republican opponent as “calling people names from his gold-encrusted sandbox because [he] was given money instead of human touch”.

Richard Trumka, president of the labor organisation the AFL-CIO, struck a similar note: “He thinks he’s a tough guy. Well Donald, I worked in the mines with tough guys. I know tough guys, they’re friends of mine. And Donald, you’re no tough guy. You’re a bully.

But it fell to Sanders himself to list the ways in which Clinton’s policies increasingly matched the priorities of his supporters.

“I understand that many people here in this conventional hall and around the country are disappointed at the result ... I think it’s fair to say no one is more disappointed than I am,” he said.

“Our revolution continues … Election days come and go but the struggle of the people to create a government that represents all of us and not just the one percent continues.”

After he left the stage, an email to supporters announced he was creating a new organisation, called Our Revolution, which would “transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families”.

John Parker, a delegate from Florida, said he was not too concerned with the rancor within the party on the first day of its convention.

“Democracy is not always pretty and people have the right to their opinion,” he said. “It is what it is. But look around, we’re all good now.

“There’s no choice but Hillary Clinton. We can’t take Donald Trump.”

Gary West, a Sanders supporter and delegate from Texas, said the email leaks revealed “a major bias in the party”. Having volunteered out of pocket to organize for Sanders across the country, West said he had not yet warmed up to Clinton and the controversy “made it more difficult”.

“We all suspected that these things were going on, the rigging of the primaries and the collusion between the DNC and the Hillary campaign,” West said. “And we were all told we were crazy.

“Nobody on stage has brought it up as an apology to Bernie, as an apology to the delegates.”

“It’s an uphill battle for Hillary to get the support of the progressive movement,” he added. “She has to prove herself.”",REAL
The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
"By Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 12:20 pm Trump “refused 2 produce records sought by prosecutors for 6 months. Said under oath: Was destroying them whole time.” Share on Twitter Print This Post 
Newsweek’ s Kurt Eichenwald has struck again, reporting that Donald Trump “refused 2 produce records sought by prosecutors for 6 months. Said under oath: Was destroying them whole time.” 
The whole strategy, he writes at Newsweek in an article he swears was written before Comey’s announcement, was “deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.” 
In 1973, he reveals, “the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans.” 
Shortly after the government filed its case in October, Trump attacked: He falsely declared to reporters that the feds had no evidence he and his father discriminated against minorities, but instead were attempting to force them to lease to welfare recipients who couldn’t pay their rent.The family’s attempts to slow down the federal case were at times nonsensical. Trump submitted an affidavit contending that the government had engaged in some unspecified wrongdoing by releasing statements to the press on the day it brought the case without first having any “formal communications” with him; he contended that he’d learned of the complaint only while listening to his car radio that morning. But Trump’s sworn statement was a lie. Court records show that the government had filed its complaint at 10 a.m. and phoned him almost immediately afterward. The government later notified the media with a press release. […] Six months after the original filing, the case was nowhere because the Trumps had repeatedly ignored the deadlines to produce records and answers to questions, known as interrogatories….Finally, under subpoena, Trump appeared for a short deposition. When asked about the missing documents, he made a shocking admission: The Trumps had been destroying their corporate records for the previous six months and had no document-retention program. They had conducted no inspections to determine which files might have been sought in the discovery requests or might otherwise be related to the case. Instead, in order to “save space,” Trump testified, officials with his company had been tossing documents into the shredder and garbage. 
So Trump can accuse Hillary Clinton of destroying emails – and he does, nearly every day – but only as a means of covering up and deflecting his own misdeeds in that regard. 
“With false affidavits and ‘deny and delay” strategies,” writes Eichenwald, “Trump & his cos hid and destroyed records sought in court.” 
Donald Trump is a world class liar and a man known for his deflection tactics, projecting his own guilt onto others. His Foundation in trouble? Point the finger at the Clinton Foundation. Sexual assault allegations? Point the finger at Bill and Hillary Clinton. 
Once again, Kurt Eichenwald has dug into Donald Trump’s deplorable past and revealed the real Donald Trump. It’s not pretty. And each revelation from Eichenwald and David Fahrenthold shows Trump to be an even worse human being than the last. 
It is no wonder his deplorables love him so much. 
It Turns Out Trump Put off Investigators for 6 Months While He Destroyed Emails added by Hrafnkell Haraldsson on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on October 28, 2016 The Volgodonsk, a Buyan-m class Russian corvette. Click to enlarge Reuters — Oct 26, 2016 
Russia is sharply upgrading the firepower of its Baltic Fleet by adding warships armed with long-range cruise missiles to counter NATO’s build-up in the region, Russian media reported on Wednesday. 
There was no official confirmation from Moscow, but the reports will raise tensions in the Baltic, already heightened since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and cause particular alarm in Poland and Lithuania which border Russia’s base there. 
The reported deployment comes as NATO is planning its biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the Cold War to deter possible Russian aggression. 
Russia’s daily Izvestia newspaper cited a military source as saying that the first two of five ships, the Serpukhov and the Zeleny Dol, had already entered the Baltic Sea and would soon become part of a newly formed division in Kaliningrad, Russia’s European exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. 
Another source familiar with the situation told the Interfax news agency that the two warships would be joining the Baltic Fleet in the coming days. 
“With the appearance of two small missile ships armed with the Kalibr cruise missiles the Fleet’s potential targeting range will be significantly expanded in the northern European military theater,” the source told Interfax. 
Russia’s Defence Ministry, which said earlier this month the two ships were en route to the Mediterranean, did not respond to a request for comment, but NATO and the Swedish military confirmed the two warships had entered the Baltic. 
“NATO navies are monitoring this activity near our borders,” said Dylan White, the alliance’s acting spokesman. 
The Buyan-M class corvettes are armed with nuclear-capable Kalibr cruise missiles, known by the NATO code name Sizzler, which the Russian military says have a range of at least 1,500 km (930 miles). 
Though variants of the missile are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, the ships are believed to be carrying conventional warheads. 
“The addition of Kalibr missiles would increase the strike range not just of the Baltic Fleet, but of Russian forces in the Baltic region, fivefold,” said Ben Nimmo, a defense analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who has been tracking the ships’ progress. 
“The two small corvettes, with their modern, nuclear-capable missiles, may yet have an impact out of proportion to their size in the Baltic.” SWEDEN, POLAND WORRIED Russian cruise missile launch from ships in the Caspian Sea to targets in Syria. Click to enlarge 
Izvestia said Russia’s Baltic Fleet would probably receive a further three such small warships armed with the same missiles by the end of 2020. 
It said the Baltic Fleet’s coastal defenses would also be beefed up with the Bastion and Bal land-based missile systems. The Bastion is a mobile defense system armed with two anti-ship missiles with a range of up to 300 km (188 miles). The Bal anti-ship missile has a similar range. 
Sweden’s Defence Minister said his country was worried by the presence of the warships in the Baltic Sea, complaining the move was likely to keep tension in the region high. 
“This is … worrying and is not something that helps to reduce tensions in our region,” Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist told Sweden’s national TT news agency. “This affects all the countries round the Baltic.” 
Swedish media said the Kalibr missiles had the range to hit targets across the Nordic region. The Russian Defence Ministry said in August that the two corvettes had been used to fire cruise missiles at militants in Syria. 
Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz, in Brussels for a NATO meeting, called the deployment “an obvious cause for concern,” the PAP news agency reported. “Moving such ships into the Baltic changes the balance of power,” he said. 
Earlier this month, Russia moved nuclear-capable Iskander-M missiles into Kaliningrad leading to protests from Lithuania and Poland.",FAKE
"Republican presidential candidate Sen.Ted Cruz blasted Donald Trump Friday as a phony conservative who must be stopped before he wins the presidential nomination.

In a speech to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., Cruz said, “It’s easy to talk about making America great again -- you can even put that on a baseball cap.

“But do you understand the principles that make America great in the first place?”

Cruz said Trump was in no position to answer that question.

Fresh from a bitter Super Tuesday battle and rancorous debate Thursday night, Cruz appeared relaxed in jeans. He took full advantage of Trump’s announcement earlier in the day that he would be skipping the event, which is typically considered a required stop for Republican candidates seeking to woo the conservative base.

Dr. Ben Carson, who spoke after Cruz on Friday, announced he was formally leaving the race. Sen. Marco Rubio was expected  to appear on Saturday, while Ohio Gov. John Kasich spoke earlier on Friday.

Citing rallies in Kansas and Florida, where there are upcoming primary battles, Trump demurred, leaving a hole in the CPAC schedule.

“I think someone told him (Fox News host) Megyn Kelly was going to be here,” Cruz said, joking. “But worse, he was told conservatives were going to be here. Even worse, he was told there would be libertarians here. Even worse, young people were going to be here.”

“I hope none of you have a degree from Trump University,” he said, referring to the lawsuits against Trump’s now defunct online school.

Cruz was only interrupted once by audience members chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” The audience applause was otherwise enthusiastic as Cruz revived a key charge against Trump from Thursday night - that he has been funding and cozying up to Democrats for years.

Referring to the loss of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Cruz warned that the court is now “one justice away” from the loss of religious liberty and the second amendment right to bear arms.

“Let me be very clear to every man and woman here at CPAC, I will not compromise away your religious liberty. I will not compromise away your second amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Cruz said.

He also poked at Trump, whom he said suggested in a previous debate that the U.S. should be neutral in order to negotiate in the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. “As president I have no intention of being neutral. America will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel.”

Joking on stage with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Cruz also suggested Hillary Clinton should get used to “orange pant suits” in case she's indicted in the ongoing email controversy and that for the first time, a general election debate may be “convened in Leavenworth.”",REAL
"Donald Trump’s supporters deserve to have their concerns taken seriously.

If the media and commentators in 2016 can agree on nothing else, it’s this. It’s a bit of an odd meme. I can remember literally no one in 2012 dwelling on the importance of taking the concerns of Mitt Romney voters seriously, even though they made up a considerably larger share of the population than Trump supporters. No one talks about taking the interests of Hillary Clinton supporters, a still larger group, seriously.

But Trump supporters, a smaller group backing a considerably more loathsome agenda, have received an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy, undertaken as a sort of passive-aggressive snipe at unnamed other commentators and politicians perceived to not be taking their concerns seriously.

“Trumpism has, in part, made the rest of the nation all the more eager to ignore the millions of white voters living on the edges of the economy,” Michelle Cottle worries at the Atlantic.

“Many decent, sincere people who feel disregarded, disrespected, and left behind — in ways that I do not feel and have never felt — can disproportionately embrace political opinions that I view as bigoted or paranoid,” David Blankenhorn empathizes at the American Interest. “Today’s upscale Americans are less and less likely even to interact with, much less actually give a damn about, those other Americans.”

“Their problems should still be addressed,” Michael Brendan Dougherty writes at the Week, “not because the elite views them as virtuous and thus deserving of the help of the state and its political class, but by virtue of our common citizenship.”

I agree with a lot of this. The government should help people who are materially struggling. Globalization definitely left some segments of the population struggling, and they deserve help. White people, while still economically dominant over black and Latino Americans in basically every way possible, can suffer from poverty too.

But there’s something striking about this line of commentary: It doesn’t take the stated concerns of Trump voters, and voters for similar far-right populists abroad, seriously in the slightest.

The press has gotten extremely comfortable with describing a Trump electorate that simply doesn’t exist. Cottle describes his supporters as “white voters living on the edges of the economy.” This is, in nearly every particular, wrong.

There is absolutely no evidence that Trump’s supporters, either in the primary or the general election, are disproportionately poor or working class. Exit polling from the primaries found that Trump voters made about as much as Ted Cruz voters, and significantly more than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trump voters, FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver found, had a median household income of $72,000, a fair bit higher than the $62,000 median household income for non-Hispanic whites in America.

A major study from Gallup's Jonathan Rothwell confirmed this. Trump support was correlated with higher, not lower, income, both among the population as a whole and among white people. Trump supporters were less likely to be unemployed or to have dropped out of the labor force. Areas with more manufacturing, or higher exposure to imports from China, were less likely to think favorably of Trump.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Lower-income whites are always likelier to support Democrats than other whites. It’d be very odd if Trump singlehandedly reversed that longstanding trend in American public opinion. But it suggests that the image of Trump supporters as whites on the economic margins, being failed by the elites in Washington and New York, is wrong.

So what is driving Trump supporters? In the general election, the story is pretty simple: What’s driving support for Trump is that he is the Republican nominee, a little fewer than half of voters always vote for Republicans, and Trump is getting most of those voters.

In the primary, though, the story was, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has explained at length, almost entirely about racial resentment. There’s a wide array of data to back this up.

UCLA's Michael Tesler has found that support for Trump in the primaries strongly correlated with respondents' racial resentment, as measured by survey data. Similarly, Republican voters with the lowest opinions of Muslims were the most likely to vote for Trump, and voters who strongly support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants were likelier to support him in the primaries too.

In April, when the Pew Research Center asked Republicans for their views on Trump, and their opinions on the US becoming majority nonwhite by 2050, they found that Republicans who thought a majority nonwhite population would be ""bad for the country"" had overwhelmingly favorable views of Trump. Those who thought it was a positive or neutral development were evenly split on Trump.

By contrast, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 got less primary support from voters with high racial resentment and anti-immigration scores than they did from less racially resentful or anti-immigrant voters. Those two primaries were lost by the white nationalist wing of the Republican Party at a time when that wing was gaining in number. As New America's Lee Drutman has found, Republicans’ views of blacks and Latinos plummeted during the Obama years:

The white nationalist wing was gaining in strength, and due for a win. It got one in Trump.

Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant.

The message this research sends is very, very clear. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is opposed to racial equality. It has increased in numbers in reaction to the election of a black president. The result was that an anti–racial equality candidate won the Republican nomination.

Given that the US is one recession away from a Republican winning the presidency, this is a concerning development.

The American press is overwhelmingly made up of left-of-center white people who live in large cities and have internalized very strong anti-racist norms. As a result, it tends to be composed of people who think of racism as a very, very serious character defect, and who are riddled with anxiety about being perceived as out of touch with “real America.” “Real America” being, per decades of racially charged tropes in our culture, white, non-urban America.

So in comes Donald Trump, a candidate running on open white nationalism whose base is whites who — while not economically struggling compared with poor whites backing Hillary Clinton and doing way better economically than black or Latino people backing Clinton — definitely live in the “real America” which journalists feel a yearning to connect to and desperately don’t want to be out of touch with.

Describing these people as motivated by racial resentment, per journalists’ deep-seated belief that racism is a major character defect, seems cruel and un-empathetic, even if it’s supported by extensive amounts of social scientific research and indeed by the statements of Trump’s supporters themselves.

So it becomes very, very tempting to just ignore this evidence and insist that Trump supporters are in fact the wretched of the earth, and to connect them with every possible pathology of white America: post-industrial decay, the opioid crisis, labor force dropouts, rising middle-age mortality rates, falling social mobility, and so on. This almost always fails (globalization victims and labor force dropouts are less likely to support Trump, per Rothwell), but if there’s even a small hint of a connection, as when Rothwell found a correlation between Trump support and living in an area with rising white mortality, you’re in luck. If you can squint hard enough, the narrative will always survive.

There’s a parallel temptation among leftists and social democrats who, in their ongoing attempt to show that neoliberal capitalism is failing, attempt to tie that failure to the rise of Trump. If economic suffering among lower-class whites caused Trump, the reasoning goes, then the solution is to address that suffering through a more generous welfare state and better economic policy, achieved through a multiethnic working-class coalition that includes those Trump supporters. Yes, these supporters may be racist, but it’s important not to say mean things about them lest they fall out of the coalition.

I actually agree that the current capitalist regime is failing. We need truly universal health care, universal child care, a universal child allowance or basic income, and programs to address deep poverty. Redistribution is a very good, necessary thing.

But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.

Nor did Austria’s welfare state prevent the far-right Freedom Party — led by Jörg Haider, who praised Hitler for having a “proper employment policy” — from entering government in 1999. France’s crèches and best-in-the-world government health care didn’t prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been repeatedly convicted of Holocaust denial, from reaching the runoff for the 2002 presidential elections. It has not stopped his successor and daughter Marine from leading polling for next year’s presidential elections. The Netherlands’ comprehensive welfare state has not prevented first Pim Fortuyn and then Geert Wilders from becoming major political forces, with the latter leading most polls for the next elections.

Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.

Comprehensive welfare states are very, very good. They do not solve racism. Whites in both Europe and America have made it very clear that they will not accept becoming a demographic minority without a fight, and will continue to vote for candidates that speak to that concern and promise immigration policies that put off white minority status for as long as possible.

One thing this analysis decidedly does not imply is “Hey, Trump supporters are just racists, let’s give up on them.” Trump’s nomination is a threat to America that must be addressed and never allowed to happen again. Giving up is not an option. We have to figure out some way to respond.

Nor is somehow denying Trump supporters material support they need an option (though this is a proposal I’ve only ever heard attacked by journalists sympathetic to Trump supporters; I’ve never heard it actually proposed). Hillary Clinton, to her great credit, has offered programs ranging from expanded child care to free college to a plan to fight the opioid epidemic to child tax credit expansions to improvements to Obamacare that will leave millions of white Trump supporters much better off. This isn’t worth doing to win back their votes; it’s worth doing because it’s the right thing to do.

Notably, Trump is not proposing anything like this and would in fact raise taxes on many middle-class families. Insisting, as many journalists have, that his supporters aren’t voting for the white nationalist candidate because they agree with him on race seems like a way to be charitable to those voters. But the idea that voters are motivated by economic struggles and so are voting for a candidate who would make their economic situation far worse is much more insulting than accepting they are uncomfortable with racial equality. The implicit idea is that Trump’s voters aren’t motivated by genuine political disagreement about race, but are just dupes voting for the wrong candidate because they’re too dumb to Google his tax plan.

Any solution has to begin with a correct diagnosis of the problem. If Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, motivated by economic marginalization, then even full Bernie Sanders–style social democracy is not going to prevent a Trump recurrence. Nor are GOP-style tax cuts, and liberal pundits aggressively signaling virtue to each other by writing ad nauseam about the need to empathize with the Trump Voter aren’t doing anyone any good.

What’s needed is an honest reckoning with what it means that a large segment of the US population, large enough to capture one of the two major political parties, is motivated primarily by white nationalism and an anxiety over the fast-changing demographics of the country. Maybe the GOP will find a way to control and contain this part of its base. Maybe the racist faction of the party will dissipate over time, especially as Obama’s presidency recedes into memory. Maybe it took Trump’s celebrity to mobilize them at all, and future attempts will fail.

But Donald Trump’s supporters’ concerns are heavily about race. Taking them seriously means, first and foremost, acknowledging that, and dealing with it honestly.",REAL
"Ever since The Donald descended that escalator at Trump Tower a couple of months ago to announce his entry into the presidential race, Democrats have been laughing. Watching the Republicans squirm and Fox News jump through hoops has made the GOP presidential primary a delightful entertainment for their rivals on the other side of the aisle. I don’t know how many of them had it in them to watch the whole Trump Town hall extravaganza in Derry, NH, on Wednesday — but those who did were unlikely to be laughing by the end of it.

There was the standard braggadocio and egomania that characterizes his every appearance and weird digressions into arcane discussions of things like building materials (for The Wall, naturally.) He complained about the press and politicians and declared himself superior to pretty much everyone on earth. But after you listen to him for a while, you come away from that performance with a very unpleasant sense that something rather sinister is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon.

Trump was still talking when Chris Hayes opened his show that night with this comment:

I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here because I think what we are seeing is past the point of a clown show or a parody. I believe it is much more serious and much darker…You have someone now who is getting huge crowds, who is polling at the top of the GOP field, who polls show is beating Jeb Bush by 44 to 12 percent on the issue of immigration, going around the country calling little children, newborn babies, anchor babies saying that he’s going to use that term which I find a dehumanizing and disgusting term. Talking about giving the local police the ability to “do whatever they need to do to round up” the “illegals”. Building a wall, talking about basically chasing 11 million people out, talking about deporting American citizens to “keep families together”, talking about what would essentially be the largest most intrusive police state in the history of the American republic to go about this task, that is the person that is right now at the head of the Republican party’s presidential contest.

And the delirious crowd applauded all those those things just as they loudly cheered this reference to Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier held by the Taliban for more than five years:

It’s that pantomime of him shooting Berghdahl dead and saying “when we were strong, when we were strong” that appeals so much.

Trump repeatedly paints a picture of America in decline — weak, impotent and powerless, in terrible danger of losing everything unless we get a leader who will cast off all this “political correctness,” this effete insistence on following the rules. He promises to “make America great again” by cracking down on the “bad people” and being very, very strong.

When talking about Iraq, he characterized the the Iraqi people as cowards, “running whenever the bullets are flying.” He said “the enemy has our best equipment, we have the old stuff”  and that the country is a mess because of all the “years of fighting unsuccessfully — because of the way we fight.” (The implication is that we didn’t take the gloves off.) He said, “the problem is that as a country we don’t have victories anymore. When was the last time we had a victory?” And he declared, “I believe in the military and military strength more strongly than anybody running by a factor of a billion… We are gonna make our military so strong and so powerful and so incredible, so strong that nobody’s gonna mess with us, folks, nobody. And we don’t have that right now.” This garnered huge cheers from the crowd.

On economics, it’s all about other countries taking advantage of the US.  He said, “They’re up here, we’re down there. I don’t blame China or Mexico or Japan. Their leaders are smarter and sharper and more cunning — and that’s an important word, cunning — than our leaders. Our leaders are babies…our country is falling apart.” He explains the problem:

China is killing us. They’ve taken so much of our wealth. They’ve taken our jobs. They’ve taken our business, they’ve taken our manufacturing, [audience member screams out “our land”] Our land? The way they’re going they’ll have that pretty soon.Think about it, we have rebuilt China — somebody said to me “that’s a harsh statement”  — it’s the greatest theft in the history of the United States.  Now I have great respect for China and their leaders.  The largest bank in the world is from China. They’re a tenant of one of my buildings. I love China I think it’s great.  But we don’t have the people that know what they’re doing so … they’re killing us. You know what that is? They call it a sucking action. They’re sucking the jobs and the money right out of our country.That’s what they’re doing. We’ve rebuilt China. They have bridges, they have airports so do other countries and we’re like a third world country…They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money.They take our jobs they take everything and we owe them money. How does that happen? It’s magic.  That’s not gonna happen with Donald Trump.

If a person feels as if this country isn’t what it used to be, that they’ve lost their place, that their future isn’t promising, Donald Trump is telling them right up front that foreigners are to blame. It isn’t the government being unwilling to collect taxes from people like Donald Trump so we can build infrastructure — we’re rebuilding China instead of our own country. It isn’t that we spend vast sums of money to maintain the world’s only superpower military, it’s that people from other countries are stealing us blind. And Trump will fight all these foreigners to take our country back from them wherever they are. Of course, there is no foreigner who is wrecking this once great country more than the undocumented immigrant and he plans to cleanse our culture of their evil influence: …we have crime all over the country, we have … the borders, the southern border is a disaster…The other night a 66 year old woman, a veteran, raped sodomized, brutally killed by an illegal immigrant. We gotta stop we gotta take back our country. We’ve gotta take it back! [huge applause] I love this country and I know that I can make it great again. We have to build a wall, we have to get the bad people out. A lot of the illegals, if you look at Chicago with the gangs,… you look at Baltimore, you look at Ferguson, a lot of these gangs, the most vicious, are illegals. They’re outta here. The first day I will send those people … those guys are outta here. [cheers] They talk about guns, I’m a big second amendment person, I believe in it so strongly [cheers]. Big.  But they talk about guns and you look at Chicago, Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the US by far, and people are being shot with guns all over the place. You need enforcement but you also have to get the bad people out, the people that aren’t supposed to be here and we’re gonna get em out so fast, so quick — and it’s gonna be tough. It’s not gonna be “oh please will you come with us please will you please come with us.” Because you know these law enforcement people, and I know the guys in Chicago, the police commissioner’s a great man. They can do it, if they’re allowed to do it. I know the guys, I know em, New York, they’re great. Bratton, great. They can all do it. They can all do it. But they have to be allowed to do their job, they have to be allowed to do their job. [Cheers] It isn’t just liberals like Chris Hayes who are becoming alarmed by this. Republican strategist Alex Castellanos sees the attraction of Trump in similar terms: When a government that has pledged to do everything can’t do anything, otherwise sensible people turn to the strongman. This is how the autocrat, the popular dictator, gains power. We are seduced by his success and strength… As our old, inflexible government grows beyond its capacity to service a complex and adaptive society, and its failures deface our landscape, it creates demand for efficiency. Who can bring order to this chaos? Who has the guts and the strength to make the mess we have made work? Then, the call goes out for the strongman. Who cares what he believes or promises? And with the voice of the common man, though he is anything but, the strongman comes and pledges to make America great again. Castellanos agrees with Trump that America is going to hell in a handbasket largely due to liberal failure, but doesn’t think that consolidating power in the hands of a single billionaire is a great way to deal with it. It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s ramblings as the words of a kook.  But he’s tapping into the rage and frustration many Americans feel when our country is exposed as being imperfect. These Republicans were shamed by their exalted leadership’s debacle in Iraq and believe that American exceptionalism is no longer respected around the world — and they are no longer respected here at home. Trump is a winner and I think this is fundamentally what attracts them to him: I will be fighting and I will win because I’m somebody that wins. We are in very sad shape as a country and you know why that is? We’re more concerned about political correctness than we are about victory, than we are about winning. We are not going to be so politically correct anymore, we are going to get things done. But his dark, authoritarian message of intolerance and hate is likely making it difficult for him, or any Republican, to win a national election, particularly since all the other candidates feel compelled to follow his lead. (Those who challenged him, like Perry and Paul, are sinking like a stone in the polls.) And while Trump’s fans may want to blame foreigners for all their troubles, most Americans know that their troubles can be traced to some powerful people right here at home.  Powerful people like Donald Trump. Still, history is littered with strongmen nobody took seriously until it was too late. When someone like Trump captures the imagination of millions of people it’s important to pay attention to what he’s saying. For all his ranting, you’ll notice that the one thing Trump never mentions is the constitution.",REAL
"Taming the corporate media beast BRICS Countries to Invest $500 Million in Russian Gold Deposit 
A new agreement to restart exploration and extraction at a mine in Siberia marks a milestone in the development of economic ties among the BRICS nations. Originally appeared at RBTH 
A consortium made up of the Chinese state-owned mining firm China National Gold Corporation, India’s SUN Mining Group and the Russian Far East Development Fund, as well as funds from South Africa and Brazil is prepared to invest up to $500 million in the development of the Klyuchevskoye gold field in the Transbaikal region (over 4,000 miles east of Moscow). The agreement was signed during the most recent BRICS summit, which that took place in the Indian resort of Goa on Oct. 15-16. According to plans for the site, Klyuchevskoye will become operational three years after investment becomes available and will yield some 6.5 tons of gold per year. 
This is the first mining deal in the history of BRICS that involves all five member states, which makes it particularly significant, says Wiktor Bielski, global head of commodities research at VTB Capital. Bielski adds that the agreement paves the way for bigger projects in the future that can benefit a wide range of BRICS investors. 
Benefits for the partners 
The Klyuchevskoye gold deposit was explored a long time ago, however, the bulk of the gold was not extracted because of the costly development process that was halted some 20 years back, according to Alexei Kalachev, an expert analyst with FINAM investment firm in Moscow. The China National Gold Corporation, however, has the relevant technological experience to extract and process the gold, Kalachev said. 
The deposit is currently owned by India’s SUN Gold, Ltd., part of the SUN Mining Group, which has not begun to develop it. In August 2016, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service said that the China National Gold Group intended to buy 70 percent in the deposit from SUN Gold. According to Kalachev, the idea of a consortium may have evolved from an attempt to speed up the deal at the highest levels. 
The Klyuchevskoye gold deposit is not especially rich; at its stated production volumes and reserves, it will have a life cycle of 11-12 years, while the average life cycle of gold mines worldwide is 15-16 years, says Artem Kalinin, a portfolio manager at Leon Family Office. Additionally, the cost of production at Klyuchevskoye is being forecast at the average global level. “That said, the Chinese are used to operating in this mode: the country’s steel and coal industries have very weak production costs, but they have so far been feeling quite alright thanks to cheap financing and state support,” Kalinin said. 
Russian gold mining companies are currently not taking part in developing Klyuchevskoye, but according to Kalinin, Russia stands to gain regardless of who develops the site. “The Russians will get an opportunity to borrow new technologies and to get an infrastructure that the Chinese will build,” he said. 
Alexei Kalachev notes that other obvious upsides for Russia include a rise in tax revenues, new jobs and an inflow of foreign investment. 
What’s in it for China? 
Despite the fact that China is the world’s leader in gold mining and one of the world’s largest consumers of the precious metal, its resource base is rather weak, says Kalinin. The CIS countries host the majority of the world’s gold reserves — 28 percent. Another 20 percent of the reserves are located in North America while Asian reserves make up just 11 percent. 
Oleg Remyga, head of China studies at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, notes that China’s gold production is falling — it was down 0.4 percent in 2015 — while consumption is rising — up + 3.7 percent in 2015. “Hence, the clear ambition of Chinese companies to enter international markets,” Remyga explained. 
According to Remyga, the China National Gold Group’s investment in the Klyuchevskoye deposit is part of this bigger drive for resources. Chinese companies have already purchased shares in Canada’s Pinnacle Mines, Ltd. as well as 50 percent of shares in a deposit in Papua New Guinea owned by Barrick Gold Corp. “I am convinced that it is just the beginning of acquisitions of Russian gold-mining assets by Chinese companies, such as Zijin Mining, China Gold, Zhaojin Mining Industry, and Shandong Gold,” Remyga said, adding that negotiations with them have been going on already for five years.",FAKE
"The global climate negotiations scheduled to take place at the end of this year in Paris are not a time for empty rhetoric or half-hearted commitments to cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, President Obama reminded the world Monday evening. On the contrary, he stressed, “This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reached an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got — while we still can.”

Speaking at a meeting of Arctic Circle nations in Anchorage, Alaska, Obama outlined the science behind his urgent call for climate action, and stressed that failure, this time, is not an option. “On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late,” he said. “That moment is almost upon us.”

The warning rings frighteningly true, as time is indeed running out not just for an Obama climate deal, but for any climate deal. As talks began last year in Lima, Peru for a draft of the agreement intended to be signed and sealed this December in Paris, experts reminded the delegates that the world has already used up nearly two-thirds of its carbon budget — the amount of carbon we can continue to pour into the atmosphere while still having a chance at keeping warming below two degrees Celsius. It’s a limit, some experts contend, that we’ve already in effect blown past. Yet with the day of reckoning nearing, negotiations aren’t where they should be, to say the least: fewer than 60 countries, representing just 61 percent of the world’s emissions, have submitted their goals for cutting back, many of which are considered to be not nearly ambitious enough. In June, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon complained that talks were moving “at a snail’s pace.”

Obama emphasized that the U.S. is on track to meet its submitted goal — a 26 to 28 percent decrease in emissions from 2005 levels by 2025 — thanks in large part to the finalization of the EPA’s new regulations for coal-fired power plants. There is, unfortunately, still reason to doubt the sincerity of the president’s commitment to the radical action he says is needed. Obama continues to press the fact that climate change is not only real — deniers, he scoffed, are “on their own shrinking island” — but a crisis that we’re experiencing right now, a point driven home by his decision to speak from Alaska, where the impacts of climate change are already taking a significant toll. Yet at the same time, his administration has allowed Shell to go ahead and drill for oil in the Arctic, a decision that to many feels irreconcilable with his insistence that the world must address the key causes of climate change as quickly as possible — not to mention the contention, among experts, that our best hope of preventing climate catastrophe requires us to leave all of the Arctic’s oil and gas reserves in the ground. “I am not trying to suggest that there are not going to be difficult transitions that we all have to make,” Obama conceded. Still, he said, “This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now.”",REAL
"Africa , China , Hybrid Wars , United States By Andrew KORYBKO (USA) 
The most colonized and exploited continent in the history of the world is once more the center of global competition, albeit this time the form of rivalry between the Great Powers has taken on a much more nuanced, though no less intense, form. The US, France, and their unipolar allies want to retain Africa as their exclusive labor, market, and resource reserve for the foreseeable future, both out of their own material self-interest and with the added strategic benefit of depriving China and others of its economic fruits. Contrarily, China wants to integrate the world’s fastest growing economies and populations into the unfolding multipolar world order and give them a fair chance at succeeding in the global system. The contrast between the West’s neo-colonialism and China’s liberating sovereignty couldn’t be more crisp, and it’s this opposition of diametrically opposed global strategies and development models that sets the stage for the grand proxy battle between the US and China over Africa. 
Just as much as China needs Africa in order to maintain its steady growth rates into the foreseeable future and ensure its domestic stability, so too does the US want to ‘poach’ Africa from China in order to offset the structural sustainability of its number one rival’s global leadership. The nature of the African-wide proxy conflict is that China is ardently working to finance, construct, and connect various infrastructural projects to one another in order to create a supraregional web of intermodal transport corridors that could then perfectly complement the maritime portion of the One Belt One Road (“New Silk Road”) global vision, while the US is trying with equal fervor to seize control of key nodes along these transnational routes as well as strategically disrupt crucial portions in order to increase China’s dependence on the unipolar-influenced areas. As the ultimate last resort, however, the US, the “world island” in all the manners that it can be strategically understood as, will pull out all the stops and unleash a ‘scorched earth’ trail of Hybrid War destruction in its wake while it strategically retreats back to its self-sufficient “Fortress North America” as the final coup de grace in the African proxy war against China. 
More than likely, it won’t ever get to that dramatic of an absolute point whereby the US fully retreats from Africa or totally destroys the continent with Hybrid War, but realistically speaking, there’ll likely be a blended development of scenarios that takes place in this heated theater of competition over the coming decades that integrates elements of both extremes. China will predictably succeed in spearheading several ultra-strategic New Silk Road development corridors in Africa, while the US will probably sabotage a few others and unleash a handful of Hybrid Wars to keep the existing ways indefinitely at bay from fully actualizing their envisioned geo-economic potential. There’s no surefire way to know with absolutely certainty what the future will bring, but it’s possible to acquire an educated expectation about the structural and systemic manner in which the identified group of states will be targeted by US-provoked Hybrid Wars. Even accounting for the possibility that some of the forthcoming examined scenarios might be “naturally occurring” in that they require little if any external pressure to instigate, there’s still a strong likelihood that at least some of the investigated possibilities will eventually occur to varying extents and that the geopolitical repercussions will indisputably impact quite negatively on China and the larger multipolar world’s grand position in the New Cold War. 
This section of the book is organized in such a manner that Part I will describe Africa’s overall geopolitical situation, highlighting the influence of hegemonic and institutional regionalism (sometimes overlapping, other times not) over the continent’s affairs in order to clearly illustrate the preexisting advantages and obstacles to China’s New Silk Road vision. The subsequent chapters of the African Hybrid War research will then comprehensively examine the five separate categories of states and their pertinent neighbors that the author has already identified as being relevantly incorporated into the immediate thesis. To remind the reader about what was described in Part III of the book’s Introduction and to expand upon the earlier presented paradigmatic map in a more structurally detailed manner, the following cartographic revision will be henceforth used as the point of reference in guiding the research beyond Part I: 
Key 
* Yellow – East Africa/East African Federation 
* Blue – Central-Southern Africa 
* Black – Failed State Belt 
* Red – Lake Chad Region 
* Hashed/Thatched Lines – countries that will inevitably become involved in the targeted category states’ Hybrid War destabilization, whether as an aggressive actor, a passive victim, or a blended mix thereof. Schematic Observations 
A few comments need to be stated about the above map before commencing Part I of the African Hybrid War research: 
Southern African Cone: 
Firstly, while it’s conceptually possible for all states in Africa (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) to be afflicted by Hybrid War, keeping in accordance with the axiom that this method of warfare is more often than not applied in disrupting multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects and/or seizing control of them, it can be surmised that the ones which could most radically revolutionize the continent’s geopolitical and geo-economic would be most actively targeted and consequently receive the highest likelihood of some sort of Hybrid War destabilization in the coming future. All of this will be described in detail in Part I, but for now it’s enough to know that the identified states lay along the paths of China’s presently constructed Silk Road routes or most probable forthcoming projects that it could pursue in achieving its grand strategic ends. 
It should be clarified at this point that the Southern African Cone was not included in the above model because its economic corridors are relatively well-established and have already been utilized for some time by all sorts of Great Powers, the West obviously included. Furthermore, concerning Namibia and Botswana’s global connectivity via South Africa, and to an extent, even Zimbabwe and Mozambique’s as well, this mostly deals with the one-way transport of natural resources and less so with each respective state’s labor and market potential. While each of these countries have a given role that they play vis-à-vis the Chinese economy, none of them except for South Africa (the hub through which most of their exports, barring Mozambique’s, pass) is integral enough to be targeted by their own Hybrid War. 
Theoretically speaking, disruptions in the regional periphery around South Africa could have a strategic effect in putting pressure on the country’s multipolar leadership and pave the way for a regime change scenario, but given the rotten nature of corrupt South African politics, it’s more expected that traditional ‘soft coup’ means such as constitutional technicalities and simple Color Revolutions (i.e. the anti-Rousseff coup in Brazil) would be used in this instance. Additionally, the resources of the population-sparse countries of Namibia and Botswana and the general market and labor potential of South Africa are already pretty much integrated into the larger global economy, so there are many existing unipolar stakeholders that would also be adversely affected by a severe disruption in or around their common point of African access. The same can’t be said so much about Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the former rich in minerals such as diamonds and platinum while the latter is poised to become one of the world’s largest LNG exporters, so it’s entirely possible that they may be targeted sometime in the future. But even so, it would be less in connection with China’s multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects than with their own individual standalone potentials in their respective fields, thus strategically differentiating them from the other countries included in the present study (although that is not to say that Hybrid War techniques would not be used – they probably would to a large extent). 
Insular Importance: 
In relation to the above, the insular countries of Africa were also not included in the continental overview, although they too play an important role in its evolving geopolitical paradigm. Nevertheless, because they’re island nations, they’re not directly connected to anything else besides the high seas, so although they may have valuable transit node status for China as an integral component of its Sea Lines of Communication, they’re not as directly affected by the region-stretching Hybrid War study that was commenced for the mainland. Nevertheless, because each of them could play a pivotal role in influencing continental affairs if properly utilized by a partnering Great Power, it’s worthwhile to very concisely comment on how they fit into the larger strategic equation that will be described throughout this work: 
* Yellow – Canary Islands (Spain): This legacy holding allows Madrid to exert influence near the coasts of Morocco and Western Sahara, both thought to be rich with fish and possible energy resources. 
* Green – Cabo Verde (formerly Cape Verde prior to late-2013): The former Portuguese colony connects the North and South Atlantic and offers a strategic position near the mouth of the Senegal River, as well as being positioned along an important oceanic route that the US and EU must take to access West Africa. 
* Blue – São Tomé and Príncipe: Another former Portuguese colony, this one is crucially located in the hydrocarbon-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea and in close proximity to the shoreline of Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria. 
* Violet – Comoros and the French overseas department of Mayotte: These two locations are almost on top of northern Mozambique’s LNG-prospected Rovuma Basin and thus near what will likely become a major energy exporting area in the near future. 
* Orange – Seychelles: The former UK-colonized island chain lies along the route of approach that India and China must take in accessing the burgeoning East African marketplace, and it’s for this strategically competitive reason that New Delhi has proactively sought to build a naval base and position some of its military units there in order to “contain” China. 
* Unmarked – Mauritius and the French island of Reunion: These two insular areas are not directly relevant to Africa’s mainland geopolitical order, although they do acquire significance vis-à-vis Madagascar and the US-controlled Indian Ocean bastion of Diego Garcia. 
Transregional Conflict Overspill: 
One of the most striking aspects of the reference map is that it clearly delineates the geopolitical fault lines where Hybrid War conflicts could easily become transregional: 
Out of all of the areas designated by the map, it’s most probable that the uncontrollably violent processes in the Failed State Belt of the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan would be the ones to spread to other parts of Africa, at least as regards the continent’s conflicts that are presently ongoing (and not accounting for those that have yet to possibly erupt). In particular, CAR’s chaos could result in a refugee and militant overspill to Cameroon and Chad, possibly leading to these respective Christian- and Muslim-led governments supporting their own confessional sides in the country’s unresolved civil war. The misleading “Clash of Civilizations” narrative that would assuredly be purposely pushed by the Western mainstream media will be discussed later on when addressing the Failed State Belt, but at this moment it’s useful just to be aware of the transregional “infection” potential that the CAR has in affecting the Lake Chad region. Additionally, the country’s domestic difficulties could also spread southward into the northern reaches of the Central-Southern state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), representing a dual destabilization threat emanating from the CAR. 
South Sudan can do something similar to the CAR in relation to the northern part of the DRC, but possibly even to the Horn of Africa state of Ethiopia and the East African state of Uganda as well. Tellingly, these latter two states are actively involved in the conflict resolution process in South Sudan and are jostling against one another for influence there in order to carve out defensive buffers (but also markets, of course) to protect themselves from this scenario. It should go without saying that South Sudan was only brought into existence because it was forcibly severed from Sudan proper over a three-decade-long civil war period, and the dynamic of anti-Khartoum action hasn’t stopped since Juba gained its independence in 2011. Therefore, South Sudan represents an even larger asymmetrical regional threat than CAR does, and their combined destabilization potential explains why they’re both categorized together as part of the Failed State Belt. 
If their respective conflicts somehow merged into a transnational conflagration, then that would represent a large-scale Hybrid War threat in the geographic heart of Africa, but the closest this has henceforth come has been the over-exaggerated threat of Joseph Kony. With reference to the Failed State Belt’s Hybrid War vulnerabilities and the transregionalization that its internal conflicts pose, it’s little wonder then that the US exploited the mystique around this warlord in order to deploy a limited but very strategic contingent of its special forces to Uganda, South Sudan, DRC, and CAR. Almost as an afterthought but drawing on the tangent of transregional conflict overlap, it’s topically pertinent to recall the Darfur Conflict and how this essentially was a proxy competition between the Lake Chad regional state of Chad and the extended Failed State Belt and somewhat Gulf-influenced state of Sudan. It’s no longer as relevant of a geopolitical item as it once was during the mid-2000s, but it nevertheless still has the potential to re-erupt in the future, especially if the externally directed Sudanese dissolution process speeds up and makes headway in the states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan. 
Lastly, there’s the realistic possibility that the US’ attempts to instigate a Hybrid War in Burundi could set off a chain reaction of destabilization in the eastern DRC, Rwanda (and by extent, possibly up to Uganda), and western Tanzania, thereby making this geographically tiny state a disproportionately large trigger in upsetting the regional balance. Although there’s not yet an active conflict in Burundi anywhere on par with the scale of what’s been raging in the CAR and South Sudan over the past couple of years, this doesn’t mean that one can’t quickly develop if the entire state collapses under Hybrid War pressure, and this disturbing scenario will certainly be explored more at length later on in the work. 
Mapping out the expected transregional conflict overspill zones in Africa, one can unmistakably see that it’s the entire Upper-Central (Failed State Belt) and the eastern portion of the Central-Southern zones of Africa that are most at risk of this destructive process unfolding. Accordingly, this realization leads one to conclude that the DRC and the areas immediately abutting it provide the most fertile ground for the transnationalization of domestic conflicts, which somewhat (but not totally) explains why the Second Congo War eventually came to involve states located far away from the actual battlespace and be nicknamed “ Africa’s World War ”. To put it another way, the Hybrid War vulnerabilities of the identified area combined with its obvious geostrategic centrality to the African continent makes it doubly capable of sucking countless states into a literal Black Hole of Chaos that could easily become the ultimate proxy war climax between the US and China. 
To be continued… 
Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the author of the monograph “ Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change ” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare. 
PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:",FAKE
"in: Preparedness\Survival , US News Darned if we do and darned if we don’t. That basically sums up the current election cycle. I’d go so far as to say that everybody loses during this election, especially if the promised chaos erupts when the winner is announced. Regardless of which candidate “wins” the presidential election, I have a bad feeling about the aftermath. I think we could be on the cusp of the most widespread civil unrest since the Civil War. If you are interested in getting prepared for it but don’t want to read over all of the frightening possibilities, go here and sign up for a Prepping Crash Course that will help you be ready for impending chaos in a mere 24 hours. For those who are wondering how things might go down, let’s look at some scenarios. If Trump wins… There is so much anti-Trump wrath among Progressives that violence has already erupted at campaign rallies. Trump supporters had eggs and bottles thrown at them in San Jose , a police car was smashed and nearly 20 were arrested at a violent protest in Orange County, and a man was even arrested for trying to grab a police officer’s gun to assassinate Trump . And look at what Clintonites did to this homeless woman who was trying to protect Donald Trump’s star from being further defaced on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. YouTube Notice how many of these mob-minded cowards it took to terrorise one homeless woman…Classy, right? Now, think about how these people will react if Trump is somehow elected. If you have a sign in your yard, you will be a target for their rage. Got a Trump/Pence sticker on your car? Expect that it could be defaced. Even more recently, Penn State students were “triggered” by a pro-Trump rally and began tearing down signs, swearing at the pro-Trump kids, and disrupting their event. What’s more, it isn’t just Social Justice Warriors and Progressives folks would need to worry about. A top activist in the group, Black Lives Matter, took to Twitter to inform everyone exactly what would happen if Trump were to win the presidency. This was deleted but is archived here . The tweet was followed by this one, which is still u p… Don’t delude yourself. With a Trump victory, trouble is coming. And don’t think living in a small town keeps you safe. The population of Ferguson, Missouri is barely over 20,000 people – hardly a metropolis. If Clinton wins… With the newly intensified investigation into her corruptio n, it hardly seems possible that she could still win this election, but her supporters seem blind to the crimes she has committed. Instead of looking at the facts, they’re saying “First woman president YA !!!” With all of the collusion , it seems like the FBI is fighting a tough battle to see her indicted. There once was a day that this suspicion would be enough to keep the American people from voting for a person who is blatantly in it for she can personally gain. The Wikileaks email scandal continues, with new revelations about our government leading to possible criminal proceedings, impeachment and heaven only knows what else. As well, there’s a very, very good chance that the election will be rigged . Somehow, despite all that is going on, Clinton’s campaign is still planning her celebratory fireworks party , scheduled to start several hours before all the votes could even be counted. If this happens, Trump supporters will be enraged – and justifiably so. Joe Walsh, a former congressman, has already tweeted he’s “grabbing his musket.” And Walsh is not alone. Many Americans are sick and tired of the blatant, in-our-faces corruption. There is talk of revolution and even a quiet counter-coup going on behind the scenes. Others concur that unrest is coming. I’m not the only blogger out here in Bloggerland who thinks all hell will break loose regardless of who becomes presidents. Mike Adams of Natural News wrote , “My ANALYSIS of possible outcomes from the upcoming presidential election reveals that America only has a 5% chance of remaining peaceful after November 8. This does not mean the violence will occur on November 9th, but rather that events will be set into motion on that day which will lead to an escalation of violence (95% chance…) Check out his predictions of the possible scenarios . And from the more liberal side of the unrest coin, an essayist for Cracked.com still comes to a similar conclusion. “Over the last few weeks a growing number of people have started wondering, “Is it possible the United States is heading for a new civil war?”…Every time I wanted to dismiss those headlines I thought about my visit to Ukraine last year, to cover their ongoing civil war . The most common sentence I heard was, “It’s like a bad dream.” Up to the minute the shooting started, almost no one thought civil war was a serious possibility.” You need to get prepped. Immediately. What it all boils down to is that we need to be prepared. We need to be ready for any unrest that comes about as a direct result of the election – and I really believe that there will be some form of uprising against the result. I hope it will be nothing more than a few minor, isolated incidents, but I can’t get past the niggling feeling that all hell is just about to break loose. November 7 could be the last day of normalcy for quite some time. The governments of Germany and the Czech Republic have told their citizens to stock up on food, water and basic survival supplies in case of a national emergency. We need to be doing the same. If you would like to take a class to help you prepare for this, you can learn more here. If you don’t want to invest in a class, use this FREE handy checklist to make sure you’ll have everything you need. Post-Election Chaos Checklist Make sure everything is in order. While it’s unlikely that services like internet, electricity, and municipal water will be affected, it doesn’t hurt to be ready for that possibility. The key here is to make certain you don’t have to leave your home for the duration of the unrest, should it come your way. Check your pantry and fill any gaps in your food preps. Order emergency food buckets – if you order right away there is still time to get them before the election.",FAKE
"Research could ‘potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV’, scientist says 

Scientists have managed to remove DNA of the HIV virus from living tissue for the first time in a breakthrough that could lead to an outright cure.

At the moment, treating the disease involves the use of drugs that suppress levels of the virus so the body’s immune system can cope.

Now researchers in the US have revealed they used gene-editing technology to remove DNA of the commonest HIV-1 strain from several organs of infected mice and rats.


In April, the same team reported that they had successfully eliminated the virus from human cells in the laboratory, but a paper in the journal Nature Gene Editing revealed they had managed to do the same thing in live animals for the first time.

The researchers’ team leader, Professor Kamel Khalili, of Temple University, said: “In a proof-of-concept study, we show[ed] that our gene-editing technology can be effectively delivered to many organs of two small animal models and excise large fragments of viral DNA from the host cell genome.”

The current antiretroviral drugs for HIV are not able to eliminate HIV-1 from the infected cells.

And if treatment is interrupted, the virus can start replicating quickly, putting patients of risk of getting full-blow AIDS. 
This is because it is able to persist in immune system T-cells and other places where it is not actually active and is unaffected by the current treatments. 

The researchers used a specially adapted virus to deliver the gene-editing system into the cells.
“The ability of the rAAV delivery system to enter many organs containing the HIV-1 genome and edit the viral DNA is an important indication that this strategy can also overcome viral reactivation from latently infected cells and potentially serve as a curative approach for patients with HIV,” Professor Khalili said. In a statement, Temple University said the implications of the new study were “far-reaching”.
“The gene-editing platform by itself may be able to eradicate HIV-1 DNA from patients, but it is also highly flexible and potentially could be used in combination with existing antiretroviral drugs to further suppress viral RNA. It also could be adapted to target mutated strains of HIV-1,” it added. Professor Khalili said a clinical trial could happen within the next few years, but he first planned to carry out a similar study involving a larger group of animals.

TMZ Breaking 
SOURCE ",FAKE
"This video shows you how to structure water inexpensively using magnets and a kid’s toy (for less than $10). 
Hat tip, Minty! SF Source THE OLD LAB RAT Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
"Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author and keynote speaker. In 2014, she was named outstanding news talk-radio host by the Gracie Awards. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

It was a verbal cage fight. There was no winner -- only a loser, the American people.

Fox News' Bret Baier started the debate by asking the audience to behave as if they were sitting between a library and Red Wings game.

It was a request the audience ignored by hooting, jeering, cheering and booing throughout the entire debate.

It went downhill from there, fast.

As the first question went to Trump, my husband said, ""He says the same thing every time."" I answered: ""Yes because it works and he's winning.""

In less than seven minutes, Trump was making a reference to his own penis size.

""(Rubio) referred to my hands, if they're small, something else must be small,"" he said. ""I guarantee you, there's no problem.""

This debate was somewhere between a cage fight and a reality show. It had plenty of insults, bickering, private parts and bad spray tans. But it lacked what America needs.

It lacked policy. It lacked substance. And it lacked something very important: a future president.

Tonight, it became clear that the GOP would rather be angry, broken and righteous than win an election. Americans are supporting Trump because they are angry, they are sick of Washington, they want to see change and they want an outsider. I can respect that, and I understand it.

Trump was so out of control with his insults and trash talk. It got old fast. I've written extensively about Trump for CNN.com.

Here's the crazy part. It doesn't matter. He's still going to be the GOP nominee.

In the most interesting moment of the debate, Fox's Megyn Kelly confronted Trump with video clips of him contradicting himself. It was the first time Trump was differential.

They showed Trump clips of himself reversing his decision on Afghanistan, on Syrian refugees and on George W. Bush and the issue of weapons of mass destruction. It was the only time he wasn't on the attack. He explained his flip-flopping by saying ""you have to show a degree of flexibility.""

Yet overall Trump's campaign is based on only two words: ""Believe me."" It'll be Trump and Rubio heading into the GOP Convention.

John Kasich was the smartest and most reasonable guy on the stage, and he promises not to leave anyone ""behind."" However, he's been left behind. It's over.

Cruz proved Thursday night that he's too ""scary"" to moderates and independents to win a national election.

And Rubio had some incredible moments -- particularly when he addressed the issues related to Flint's water crisis and when he was asked directly about comparing Trump to Kim Jong Un of North Korea. But he couldn't rise above the screaming match that Trump created. He tried to rise above it. But he was still the ""little"" Rubio, as Trump has said.

This was embarrassing to watch, and if the next four years are marked by the kind of nastiness we saw on the stage tonight, that's down right scary.",REAL
"A group of senators is calling for higher wages and better health care for the contractors who work in Senate office buildings.

Private companies receive contracts to provide many of the services for government buildings on Capitol Hill, from running the cafeterias to cleaning offices to restoring aging buildings.",REAL
"""On this broadcast last week, in an effort to honor and thank a veteran who protected me and so many others after a ground-fire incident in the desert during the Iraq War invasion, I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,"" Williams said. ""It did not take long to hear from some brave men and women in the air crews who were also in that desert. I want to apologize.""

He clarified Wednesday that he had been in a helicopter following the one hit by an RPG. He recalled how his NBC News team and the air crew next ""spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert,"" a detail that is not in dispute.

The on-air apology, however, may not suffice. Williams' public recollection of the events that day has changed several times over the past decade, ranging from his being unaware of the lead helicopter having been struck when changing course, to his apparently witnessing the attack, to his most recently claiming that he was in the rocket-damaged helicopter.

The Iraq helicopter controversy is the first to shake Williams' decade-long tenure as anchor of ""NBC Nightly News,"" the top-rated evening newscast. A network star, he may be able to ride out the unflattering press and social media swipes. But the same might have been said about then-""CBS Evening News"" anchor Dan Rather, whose career at the network unraveled in 2004 after bloggers challenged documents he reported as detailing the young George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

""I don't know the particulars about that day in Iraq. I do know Brian,"" Rather said in a statement provided to The Huffington Post. ""He's a longtime friend and we have been in a number of war zones and on the same battlefields, competing but together. Brian is an honest, decent man, an excellent reporter and anchor -- and a brave one. I can attest that -- like his predecessor Tom Brokaw -- he is a superb pro, and a gutsy one.""

Williams, reporting from Kuwait City, described how the lead helicopter pilot of four Chinooks flying in formation had observed a man in a pickup truck fire an RPG and another man shoot a rifle. Williams didn't say in the report that the helicopter in which he was traveling had been hit. He noted that ""all four choppers dropped their load and landed immediately.""

""We quickly make our drop and then turn southwest,"" Williams said. ""Suddenly, without knowing why, we learned we’ve been ordered to land in the desert. On the ground, we learn the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky.""

That version of the story, in which Williams doesn't witness the attack, matches what former crew members told Stars and Stripes. They described the anchor as being ""nowhere near"" the attack, having arrived in a fourth helicopter about an hour after the three helicopters in front were forced to make an emergency landing.

In a television segment on Downing's death, Williams said that the helicopters ""we were traveling in at the start of the Iraq War were fired on and forced down for three days in a stretch of hostile desert in a sandstorm."" He didn't distinguish between an RPG and small-arms fire, such as from a rifle.

A couple of months later, Williams again suggested that his helicopter had been fired upon. In a Sept. 12, 2007, interview with Gen. David Petraeus, he said that ""at the start of the war, when I was flying in a Chinook with General Downing, that helicopter was shot at by a farmer.""

Later that month, he recounted the story to David Letterman, saying that ""two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in -- RPG and AK-47.""

 

 On Jan. 30 of this year, Williams recalled on the ""Nightly News"" that the ""helicopter we're traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG."" The segment was offering tribute to Sgt. Tim Terpack, who led the platoon that protected the NBC News crew in the desert that day. Williams and Terpack were shown at a New York Rangers game while the arena announcer described how the anchor's ""Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire.""",REAL
"Getting 10 Minutes of Sunlight Per Day Can Stop Depression Vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins your body needs Image Credits: Michael Pollak/Flickr . 
Vitamin D is one of the most important vitamins you can give your body. 
This vitamin can affect nearly 2,000 genes in your body, and the best part of it is that you don’t even need a supplement to get your full recommended amount of vitamin D – you only need to get out in the sun for a few minutes a day. 
Vitamin D is beneficial for staving off depression. Without the required amount of vitamin D in your diet (or the necessary amount of time spent in the sun), you can experience and excessively low mood and other signs of depression. 
And one of the most well-known and important benefits of vitamin D is the effect it has an calcium absorption and building healthy bones. 
This is especially important for children, as the vitamin helps with bone growth as well as developing strong teeth. Those who do not have enough vitamin D may find themselves at risk for fractures or soft bones. 
Thus, vitamin D is not only important for children, but also women who can be susceptible to brittle bones as they age. 
The vitamin may also play a crucial role in helping your body ward off disease. Studies suggest that getting in enough vitamin D can help ward off multiple sclerosis, heart disease and help your body steer clear of the dreaded flu. 
If you don’t get enough vitamin D, you may find yourself feeling tired or experiencing general aches and pains. If the deficiency is severe enough, you may also find yourself developing stress fractures. 
So how do you get enough vitamin D in your diet? 
You can always purchase supplements, most of which contain enough, or in some cases, more than enough of your daily recommended allowance. 
It is also naturally found in salmon, sardines, egg yolk and shrimp. Milk, cereal, yogurt and orange juice are often fortified with vitamin D to ensure that you get the recommended amount. 
For those who live in a sunny climate, spending 10 minutes outside per day can actually give you the required amount of vitamin D. Although it is not advisable to spend too long outside without protection from the sun in the form of sun block or extra layers of clothing, it is recommended that you do get outside for at least a small part of the day to soak up those rays. 
You can, however, get all of the benefits of vitamin D in your diet or by taking supplements during the winter months when the sun takes a rest, or if you happen to live in a colder climate. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"AUSTRIA: Freedom Party leader calls Chancellor Angela Merkel the “most dangerous woman in Europe” Heinz-Christian Strache (right), chairman of the anti-Islamization Freedom Party roasted the German Chancellor for allowing an unlimited amount of Muslim illegal aliens which he claims has left Europe on the verge of civil war. Talking to supporters, Strache argued “the uncontrolled influx of migrants alien to our culture who seep into our social welfare system… makes civil war in the medium-term not unlikely.” Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) party leader Heinz-Christian Strache (L) and Freedom Party’s presidential candidate Norbert Hofer UK Express (h/t Terry D) Strache added that his party’s presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, “will be there for all Austrians” in a rallying speech to drum up support ahead of the general election. Hofer has attempted to keep a neutral tone in a bid to broaden the typical appeal of the Freedom Party from an anti-immigration stance to the wider Austrian population ahead of a re-run of the earlier election. Yet the 45-year-old’s recent election posters carry the phrase “so help me God” – a term which has been slammed by both Islamic and Christian officials who say introducing God into the campaign is not appropriate. “Vienna must not become Istanbul” He says what Vienna thinks Three branches of the Protestant church in Austria released a joint statement denouncing the slogan. It reads: “God cannot be instrumentalised for one’s own intentions or for political purposes. “We consider that mentioning God… to attack other religions and cultures indirectly amounts to an abuse of his name and religion in general.” The Freedom Party claim Hofer used the rallying phrase as it came “directly from the heart” and “is strongly anchored in Christian and Western values” which the party holds. Two-thirds of Austrians identify as Catholic while just four per cent are Protestant. The Freedom Party narrowly lost the election by just 31,000 votes to Alexander Van der Bellen’s left-leaning Green party, but the result was ruled void after voting irregularities were discovered. The initial re-run of the election was due to take place in October but has been pushed back to December after defects were found in the postal vote envelopes.",FAKE
"We Are Change 
With only days away from the most followed and extraordinary Presidential election of all time, the debate has devolved into the sexual behaviors surrounding the candidates more than ever.
Donald Trump, the GOP nominee, Hillary’s husband Bill Clinton, the former President of the United States, and now Anthony Weiner has somehow entered the fray. It is quite sad indeed that the media has chosen to run with this angle, and it speaks volumes about the tabloid celebrity obsessed nature of the United States, but if we are going to go there, let’s go there.
First we have Donald Trump, a man who has been married 3 times, has been very open and frankly arrogant about his opinion of women, especially in televised interviews over the last 3 plus decades, and is now being crucified for grabbing the world by the pussy. Seriously? Folks everybody knew what they signed up for when he announced he was running. He ran beauty pageants for Christ’s sake. Has Trump been a misogynist in the past? Absolutely .
The truth is how many men out there can say they haven’t acted in that manner at some point in their lives, let alone yesterday? It’s not something I, or any other man should be proud of, but lets put the shoe on the other foot for a second. If a group of women were having a conversation and the most attractive one of them stated “Sometimes I just walk up to the hottest guy at the bar and grab him by his cock, they let me do it,” would anybody really be outraged? I highly doubt it.
Now let’s take a look at Bill Clinton. Ever since Bill Clinton first ran for President in 1992, his sexual promiscuities and alleged predatory sexual behavior, including rape , have been widely available to the public. I would never defend any type of unwanted sexual advances, but once again we all knew this years ago. Although the mainstream has underplayed this, perhaps the most striking thing they have failed to detail in any depth is his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.

It was revealed in May that Clinton’s flight logs had him traveling with Epstein at least 26 times during his presidency. Epstein, a billionaire, flew in a private jet dubbed “The Lolita Express” . Those unfamiliar with Epstein should note that he is a convicted pedophile who allegedly ran what many refer as “Sex Slave Island” which trafficked in underage girls for the upper echelon of society in the Virgin Islands. To be fair, there have been allegations of Trump being tied to it as well, but so far there is no hard evidence. Meanwhile, Hillary reportedly went with Bill to the sex island – six times . 

Where is the outrage regarding the sexual abuse of children among global heavyweights including the political elite?
Now this brings us to some of the latest revelations regarding Anthony Weiner who is now somehow involved in the email scandal with his regards to SEXTING A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL ! Huma Abedin happens to be married to Weiner and up until the scandal hitting the news, Hillary’s top aide. Weiner is probably the worst of the worst at being caught in his serial deviant sexual behavior, but those in the know understand this is par for the course.
Little is yet to be reported on what is actually in these emails other than they apparently contained classified information, and the fact is we can’t be expected to know before the election what’s in them…unless of course Wikileaks is planning on one last dump in the next day or so. It is again worth noting of the under-reporting of the pedophilia angle of this story.
So what’s missing here? Um, well, how about Hillary Clinton herself? The mainstream media has NEVER strayed into the possibility Hillary has been unfaithful to Bill, or that their is an open marriage arrangement between the two of them. House of Cards anyone? Those unfamiliar with the show should note that the protagonists of the series, the Underwoods, a political power couple, have an open marriage that also take part in all sorts of sexual decadence , the type only reported upon briefly in the media, if at all.
The truth is that Hillary has been rumored to have a plethora of sexual partners outside of her marriage , both male and female, the latest of which is her aid Huma. However we are not here to speculate in such matters. Instead let’s look at one case in particular. Webb Hubbell.

Those unfamiliar with Hubbell should note that he, Hillary Clinton, and Vince Foster all came up together in the Rose Law Firm during the 70’s. By all accounts they were a tight knit unit that spent countless hours together in their quests for social mobility. Hubbell would become the Mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1979. Bill Clinton, who married Hillary in 1975, would take the Governorship the year prior.

So what evidence is their of an affair between the two? Many believe the existence of Chelsea Clinton, based on looks alone. Chelsea appears to have no physical resemblance whatsoever to Bill, however she looks ASTOUNDINGLY like Hubbell.

The interesting thing is that Hubbell has refused to deny that he is her biological father! When asked by World Net Daily Hubbell responded “No Comment” . Truly bizarre if indeed their is no possibility of such a thing.
In the end why would this matter? It just goes to show you the level of secrets the Clintons have kept for decades upon decades in their continued quest for more and more power. It also gives a very candid portrayal on how the media has handled scandals involving the Clintons over the years. When you go to the voting booth keep that in mind.
The post The Sex Scandal That Could Change The Election appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"The Obama administration announced Friday it will temporarily halt new coal leases on federal lands until it completes a comprehensive review to determine whether fees charged to mining companies provide a “fair return” to taxpayers.

The decision immediately triggered accusations from business groups and Republican lawmakers of a renewed ""war on coal.""

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, on a conference call, stressed that the move “is not a pause on coal production” entirely -- but will give the government time to study the benefits of coal as well as its impact on the environment.

Jewell told reporters she is “confident” the pause on new leases will not disrupt the country’s ability to meet production needs.

Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for 21st Century Energy, slammed the decision. Herbert called the move “a foolish crusade” that strips America of one of its “diverse mix of energy sources.”

""Another day, another front on the war on coal from this administration,” she said in a statement following the announcement. “At this point, it is obvious that the president and his administration won't be satisfied until coal is completely eradicated from our energy mix.”

Roughly 40 percent of the coal produced in the United States comes from federal lands. The vast majority of that mining takes place in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

It's unclear what impact the moratorium will have on many coal companies given the declining domestic demand for coal and the closure of numerous coal-fired power plants around the country. Coal companies have already stockpiled billions of tons of coal on existing leases.

But the announcement will no doubt please environmental groups that have long said the government's fee rates encouraged production of a product that contributed to global warming.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called Friday's announcement the ""latest front in an ideological war on coal that has contributed to devastation in communities in Eastern Kentucky and to the loss of thousands of jobs across the commonwealth.""

The administration held a handful of public hearings last year to get feedback on the adequacy of the fees charged companies for coal mined on federal lands. The government collects a 12.5 percent royalty on the sale price of strip-mined coal. The rate was established in 1976. The money is then split between the federal government and the state where the coal was mined. Coal companies also pay a $3 fee annually for each acre of land leased.

Government auditors have in the past questioned whether the rate provided an appropriate return, though they did not make specific recommendations to raise it. Industry groups counter that any increase in royalty rates will hurt consumers and threaten high-paying jobs.

President Obama said during the State of the Union address Tuesday that he would push to change the way the federal government manages its oil and coal resources.

The review will look at such issues as how, when and where to lease, how to account for the public health impacts of coal, and how to ensure American taxpayers earn a fair return on their resources.  An administration official noted that reviews of the federal coal program have occurred twice before, once in the 1970s and again in the 1980s, and pauses on the approval of new mining leases accompanied each review.

Jewell said some exceptions to the moratorium will be allowed, most notably for small lease modifications. And while the federal government will proceed with environmental reviews for pending lease applications, no final decision will be made.

The administration held hearings in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico last year on the federal coal program. Several people representing tribes, local ranchers and environmental groups spoke in favor of increasing royalty rates, saying it would hasten the transition to cleaner energy sources.

Several GOP lawmakers sent staff to relay their concerns about the Interior Department's efforts.

For example, Penny Pew, a district director for Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, said that ""President Obama and his agency minions are trying to put the coal industry out of business by imposing a flurry of draconian mandates not based in reality.""

Meanwhile, David J. Hayes, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress, said Thursday the current rules for coal mining on federal lands were written when people could still smoke on planes and dump sewage in the ocean.

""President Obama and (Interior) Secretary (Sally) Jewell are absolutely right to launch this comprehensive review and to set the federal coal program in a more fiscally and environmentally responsible direction,"" Hayes said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Cancer is the proliferation and growth of abnormal cells that, over time, can invade tissue and cause severe damage to the body’s organs. It’s often hard to spot in its early stages, but once it’s detected, it can reach a point of no return if it isn’t treated.

That’s where ObamaCare is today. It has cancer. And if it is not treated quickly and aggressively, it will die.

The cancer started to grow soon after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, but the spread was too slow to display visible damage. But now it’s detectable, and it has started to invade much of the U.S. economy and our health care systems. Here are some of the symptoms:

Declining enrollment numbers. ObamaCare was designed to provide quality health insurance to people who couldn’t afford it – and for a few years we saw a significant number of early adopters. But a disproportionate number of them were people who previously couldn’t buy health insurance because it was too expensive or because the insurance companies wouldn’t cover their pre-existing conditions. After the ACA was passed, they jumped at the chance to get insurance – and there was a benefit for them.

But look at what’s happening now: The projected number of enrollees for 2016 – 20 million on the federal and state health exchanges – has been cut in half to 10 million, according to Health and Human Resources Secretary Sylvia Burwell. Most of the shortfall is attributed to young, healthier individuals who have decided not to sign up. But their contribution to the system is critical, because it helps cover the losses of the older, less healthy people who participate.

If the government’s marketing efforts are successful and those who are already enrolled don’t drop out, the government predicts that 3 to 4 million people will join the system next year. But the economics that were the basis of financing ObamaCare have already been sliced in half, and there is no plan to compensate for the shortfall that will result.

Rising premiums. In the past few weeks, many state insurance regulators have approved all or most of the premium increases sought by the largest health plans in their states. When ObamaCare went into effect, many of these plans offered low rates, anticipating that they would bring in new customers.

Instead, they dug themselves a very deep hole. The customers they took on were less healthy than they expected, and they cost them much more than they’d anticipated. They priced themselves at an unsustainable rate, and now they can’t dig out because the projected number of new members has been cut in half.

You don’t need a math degree to know what a company facing this kind of loss will do to stay afloat: It will raise its prices. This change in market dynamics also has fueled a consolidation in the insurance industry, which will result in decreasing competition that will face a lot of resistance and could drive costs even higher.

The demise of the co-ops. Health care cooperatives – non-profit alternatives to for-profit insurers – were designed to drive more competition among insurers and provide more choices for consumers, especially in places where those choices are limited.

The government set aside billions of dollars in loans to prop up these co-ops, but many have failed in the last couple of months because they lacked the infrastructure they needed to market their product and they failed to understand the risk pools of the populations they were insuring.

A major flaw in government budgeting across healthcare.gov, the state exchanges and the co-ops has been the inability to forecast accurately what it will take to make new models work and keep them running. We have seen numerous explosions along the way because of this. The co-ops’ failure could indicate what will happen to underfunded state exchanges, as well.

 

 Another key ObamaCare provision whose outcome is still in limbo is the Accountable Care Organizations, which were set up to improve the efficiencies of care.

The jury is still out on whether ACOs will be able to deliver quality care, but it is very clear that they have not received the money they need to share information across key stakeholders and coordinate care that is truly cost effective.

Employer Backlash. While the number of people without health insurance has gone down in five years from 17.5 percent to 10.7 percent, most of that is due to a vast expansion of Medicaid and to subsidies that help lower-income people buy insurance. Most of the coverage gains did not come from workers getting affordable health care from their employers.

For many employees on or near minimum wage, the plan options their employers offer are still not affordable. And in a bizarre twist, the health care law considers a worker able to afford employer-sponsored insurance if it costs 9.5 percent or less of his annual household income. But how do employers know how much the household income is when they don’t employ the entire household?

 

 In an effort to stay afloat and not pay a penalty, some employers have resorted to coaxing their employees to get coverage from private or public exchanges. But when employees choose to go without coverage, they don’t get the care they need, and that becomes a huge problem for employers when they get sick and don’t show up to work.

At the same time, insurers are becoming increasingly reluctant to offer policies to small employers, since the employees who sign up for the insurance tend to be the ones who are less healthy and cost more. As a result, many insurers have started gaming the system – offering policies for the first year, as required by law, and then using a loophole in the law that allows them not to renew.

The projections of ObamaCare’s success were overestimated. The projections of its cost were underestimated. And we still haven’t found a way to provide health care for everyone at a price that is sustainable and ensures quality care for the long haul. There is a consistent theme in all of this: ObamaCare has cancer, and it’s spreading. Its diseased organs are now surfacing.

It’s time to recalibrate the financing of the Affordable Care Act, subject it to a rigorous analysis of what works and what doesn’t and present a new business plan that American taxpayers can live with.

Dr. Sreedhar Potarazu is an acclaimed ophthalmologist and entrepreneur who has been recognized as an international visionary in the business of medicine and health information technology. He is the founder of VitalSpring Technologies Inc., a privately held enterprise software company focused on providing employers with applications to empower them to become more sophisticated purchasers of health care. Dr. Potarazu is the founder and chairman of WellZone, a social platform for driving consumer engagement in health.",REAL
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address",FAKE
Next Swipe left/right This Irish TV channel killed their weather presenter for Halloween What did you do to celebrate Halloween last night? Irish language broadcaster TG4 killed their weather presenter. RIP Caitlín Nic Aoidh. Wtf just happened to caitlin on the weather tonight? #TG4XX pic.twitter.com/IOUR3xiLgy,FAKE
"posted by Eddie It seems that the long wait to receive a signal from outer space has finally paid off because after years of silence two astronomers from the Laval University in Quebec claim to have found 234 signals from alien civilizations. Ermanno Borra and his graduate student Eric Trottier, the astronomers we mentioned, begun analyzing stars and galaxies in search of light emitted at regular intervals. After analyzing 2.5 million of them they found what they were looking for in234 stars which resemble our Sun in size. According to the researchers, the signals are emitted by alien civilizations. The team was focused on the light spectrum’s Fourier Transform (FT). For the uninformed, an FT is a mathematical device that helps scientists to find the origin of the signal’s components and how they came to be. For example, if the light is a muffin, using the FT formula will reveal the recipe, couldn’t be simpler than that. The FT analysis revealed periodic modulated components which the scientists believe are a result of the super quick light pulses (less than a trillionth of a second) sent by Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI). Their paper is published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and it reveals that the scientists discard any other possible explanation like instrumental effects, rotation of molecules, rapid stellar pulsations, and peculiar chemistry. They write: “ We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis . The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the Sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis .” Only extremely powerful lasers, such as the one found at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , could generate these superfast pulses. Furthermore, Ermanno Borra has previously published articles where he states that this is the least explored area of astronomy. An inevitable question then arises: Why would these aliens choose such a complex and energy-consuming way to communicate? Surely they could have figured out a better way, after all they’re supposed to be millions of light years ahead of us in terms of technology and science. Although the team believes that the most logical explanation would be that aliens are trying to communicate with us, they are aware that further research is needed to confirm their findings. Breakthrough Listen , a Stephen Hawking-backed project will take up the task of further analyzing the 234 stars the team found, but the UC Berkeley team (the project’s science program base) encourages people to be skeptical regarding the findings, until further proof is available. The Breakthrough Listen team released a statement saying: “ The one in 10,000 objects with unusual spectra seen by Borra and Trottier are certainly worthy of additional study. However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations .” Source:",FAKE
"Theme: 9/11 &‘War on Terrorism’ , Crimes against Humanity , US NATO War Agenda Two years ago, “Majd” wrote these words on a Facebook posting: “ I am Syrian… living in Syria in the middle of everything. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment. They are al Qaeda Jabhat al Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans etc and the extremist jihadists sent by the West, the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country. We thought you are against al Qaeda and now you support them. The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people… The chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by the USA and the UK, etc. Everyone knows that here. American soldiers and people should not be supporting barbarian al Qaeda terrorists who are killing Christians, Muslims in my country and everyone. Every massacre is committed by them. We were all happy in Syria: we had free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank. Life before the crisis was so beautiful here. Now it is hard and horrific in some regions. I do not understand how the good and brave American people can accept to bomb my country which has never harmed them and therefore help the barbarian al Qaeda. These animals slit throats and behead for pleasure… they behead babies and rape young kids. They are satanic. Our military helped by the millions of civilian militias are winning the battle against al Qaeda. But now the USA wants to bomb the shit out of us so that al Qaeda can get the upper hand. Please help us American people. They are destroying the cradle of civilization. Stop your government. Impeach that bankster puppet you have as president… support Ron Paul or Rand or anyone the like who are true American patriots. but be sure of one.thing..if they attack and I think they will….it will be hell. Be sure that if it were to be a world war, many many will die. Syria can and will defend itself and will sink many US ships. Iran will go to war..Russia and China eventually if it escalates… and all this for what ? For the elites who created al Qaeda through the US government and use it to conduct proxy wars and destabilize countries which do not go along with their new world order agenda !!? American people…you gotta regain control of your once admirable country. Now everyone hates you for.the.death you bring almost everywhere. Ask the Iraqis…the Afghans…the Pakistanis…the Palestinians…the Syrians…the Macedonians and Serbs…the Libyans…the Somalis…the Yemenis ….all the ones you kill with drones everyday. Stop your wars, Enough wars. Use diplomacy..dialogue…help..not force.” Consistent testimonies from Syrians, as well as well-documented, open-source Western sources, and historical memory, all serve to reinforce the accuracy of the aforementioned testimony. Syrians are living the horror brought to them by the criminal West. They can not afford the complacency of shrugging their shoulders in indecision, not when their lives and their ancient civilization is being threatened by Western-paid terrorist mercenaries of the worst kind. “Our” proxies, slit throats, chop heads, and take no prisoners as we waffle in indecision, ignore empirical evidence, and take the comfortable easy road of believing the labyrinth of lies promulgated by Western media messaging. The veil of comfortable confusion, nested in an unconscious belief that our government knows best or that it is patriotic to believe the lies and fabrications implicit in the hollow words of politicians (who no longer represent us) and the false pronouncements of Imperial messengers, is concealing an overseas holocaust . Western societies are rotting from the inside out because of these lies and this barbarity. We are protecting a criminal cabal of corporate globalists who do not serve our interests and never will. Our democracies, which we should be protecting, have long disappeared – except in the hollow words of newspaper stenographers. Instead we are supporting transnational corporate elites and their delusional projects. Poverty and unemployment are all soaring beneath the fakery of government pronouncements, as the public domain evaporates beneath words like “efficiency” or the “economy” — all false covers that serve to enrich elites and destroy us. Internal imperialism at home is a faded replica of the foreign imperialism abroad. As countries are destroyed, and its peoples are slaughtered — think Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and others — by abhorrent Western proxies — public institutions are contaminated, and ultimately replaced by parasitical “privatized” facsimiles. Public banking is looted and destroyed in favour of transnational banksterism, World Bank funding, and IMF usury. Food security is destroyed and replaced by biotech tentacles and engineered dependencies on cash crops and unhealthy food. Currencies are destroyed, sanctions are imposed, and the unknown, unseen hand of totalitarian control imposes itself, amidst the cloud of diversions and confusions, aided by comprador regimes, oligarch interests, and shrugging domestic populations. Syria refuses to submit. That is why the West is taught to hate her, and the rest of the world learns to love and respect her. Yet, Syria’s struggles are our struggles. Syria represents international law, stability, and integrity: the same values that western peoples overtly cherish but stubbornly reject, as our countries wilt beneath suffocating veils of lies and delusions . I support Syria, because I respect what remains of international law. I support Syria because I reject Wahhabism, Sharia law, and terrorism. I support Syria because I reject the undemocratic, transnational oligarchies that are subverting our once flourishing, now dead, democracies. I reject the lies of our propagandizing media , the hollow words of our politicians, and the fake “humanitarian” messaging that demonizes non-belligerent countries and their populations. In the name of justice, humanity, and the rule of law, I support the elected government of Syria led by its President, Bashar al-Assad. Syria, an ancient cradle of civilization, is leading the way towards a better future for all of us. All we have to do is open our eyes. The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Mark Taliano , Global Research, 2016 NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS",FAKE
"As soon as the terror in Brussels ended, the post-terror rituals began. Photos and videos of the carnage emerged, victims were given names and faces and allies expressed their sorrow and pledged assistance. Citizens of Brussels, following the lead of New Yorkers after 9/11 and Parisians after two attacks last year, created shrines and odes to the dead.

In America, security ramped up as millions feared their cities would be next, and officials vowed to harden our defenses in the fight against ­Islamic State.

Unfortunately, the rituals also include President Obama doing something stupid.

After each atrocity, Obama acts weirdly detached, a pattern that continued after Brussels. His happy-go-lucky tourist antics in Cuba, followed by tango dancing in Argentina, provided a shocking contrast to fear at home and manhunts in Europe.

To continue reading Michael Goodwin's column in the New York Post, click here.

Michael Goodwin is a Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist.",REAL
"by Yves Smith 
Yves here. I strongly suspect that Naked Capitalism readers will find a lot not to love about this proposal, but I’ll let you have at it in the comments section. I’ll start with two. The first is setting up this program as bonds, when they are most like a trust account. And why should the amount of the grant be set at birth? A lot of children suffer severe setbacks after birth, like the death of a parent or debilitating injury. 
Second is that this proposal does nothing to address the expressed problem. The issue is that even though children from lower-income backgrounds might get into college, they can’t mix much/at all socially with the better off students because they don’t have the spending money to allow them to do that. But these “bonds” provide for spending money only for perceived-to-be-legitimate purposes, like the education itself. Even though going on ski trips with the other kids might be key to economic advancement, it would be politically unacceptable for a government program to pay for that sort of thing. 
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website 
Imagine that a black child from a family of modest resources gets the opportunity to attend an elite college preparatory school. Motivated by a love of learning and strong desire to achieve, he excels in school and goes on to attend highly regarded universities, earning advanced degrees. Surely that child is well positioned to ascend the ladder of economic prosperity in America, right? 
Not so fast. 
The goal of broadening financial wealth to all Americans, regardless of race, gets plenty of applause across the political spectrum. But so far this goal has remained devilishly elusive. To understand why you have to know how people come by wealth in the first place. It’s popular to say that we build wealth through discipline — by hitting the books, working hard and saving money. The reality is a little different. 
Past Injustice Shapes Present Reality 
Darrick Hamilton knows this from personal experience. Despite his family’s modest means — not poor but hardly affluent — he attended the Brooklyn Friends School, an elite private institution where teachers emphasized social justice. Hamilton started college at Oberlin excited to seek out his path to the American Dream. But he soon found out that the path was smoother for some than for others. 
All around him, white kids from affluent families were getting checks in the mail from their parents — money that could be spent on tuition, extracurricular activities, and the kind of socializing that builds professional networks. Black students of more modest means, on the other hand, were often at a disadvantage even when their parents were able to help financially. If they received money from home, things besides books demanded financial attention. The same was true if they had a job. Even when black students worked hard and saved diligently, the money was often spoken for before it was time to pay the tuition bill for the semester. 
The reason has to do with the cumulative effects of centuries of gross economic disadvantages that black families have endured, from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. The legacy of those severe headwinds is that even when an individual family is able to reach the middle class, there is still likely to be a constellation of poorer extended family members in need of various kinds of financial assistance. When they call, you help, if you can. Economists call this “wealth leakage.” 
Hamilton noticed this phenomenon play out among black students at school and in the professional realm. Rather than enjoying resources from parents and grandparents, they often had to provide money for cousins, nieces, uncles, and siblings. After obtaining his Ph.D. in economics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Hamilton, who now teaches economics and urban policy at The New School in New York, focused on how poverty in the family increases the racial wealth gap for middle class black individuals. 
The source of wealth building in America, he realized, is less what you save than your capacity to invest in an asset through money given by parents and grandparents. These transfers are critical to the acquisition of assets, like a home or a small business — the kinds of things that require huge down payments. 
“If you’re not fortunate enough to get that down payment or have that resource at a key juncture of your life,” observes Hamilton, “you will not have that pathway towards building economic security that somebody else has. You could be a jerk. You could be a good person. It has little to do with the particular individual.” 
This logic flies in the face of the long-cherished belief that education and hard work are the great equalizers in American society. Many still insist that much present day inequality is caused by bad individual decisions and not by structural problems associated with discrimination. But the vast inequality between black and white citizens suggests that there’s more going on than poor choices. In 2013, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median household wealth was $134,230 for whites compared to a paltry $11,030 for black Americans. 
The reason, says Hamilton, is pretty clear: “In a capitalist system, if you lack capital, it just locks in inequality.” 
Fortunately, he thinks the problem can be alleviated if we are willing to aim the attack at the source. Hamilton and his colleague William A. Darity, Jr. of Duke University are stratification economists, pioneers in an emerging subfield of social science who focus on the structural dimensions of a person’s economic position. They propose a solution to wealth inequality that may appeal across the political spectrum: Why not give every American baby seed capital so they can grow up to take part in the capitalist system? This could be done, they argue, through “Baby Bonds” that would be set up for every child born. 
How Baby Bonds Work 
Baby Bonds, in Hamilton’s formulation, would be funded directly out of Treasury and held in an account by the federal government, similar to Social Security. The amount a child receives would depend on the wealth position into which she is born. If she’s the offspring of Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, she might get $500, but upwards of $50,000 if she is born at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. The average amount for a child would be around $20,000. Accounts would be guaranteed a nominal one and a half rate of return, and the payout would not take place until the child becomes an adult. At that time, you get to spend the money — but not just on anything. The funds would have to be used for a “clearly defined asset enhancing activity,” like financing a debt-free education, purchasing a business, or buying a home. (The program would need to be coupled with financial reform and regulation to mitigate predatory effects, including extraordinary tuition increases aimed at exploiting better-resourced young adult baby bond recipients). 
A commission would be set up to identify exactly what kinds of activities might qualify. 
“These conditions are set up to protect the resource,” says Hamilton. “In my own situation, if I had received an infusion of cash as a young adult, there would have been a lot of family needs to take care of before I could begin thinking about self-investment like purchasing a home. Specifying what the money can be spent on may not guarantee an outcome, because people still choose the investment they engage in, but it at least ensures that the investment is an asset-enhancing endeavor which can help build wealth over the long run.” 
Unlike some past proposals for child savings accounts, Baby Bonds are designed so that it doesn’t matter if your parents can contribute or not. Hamilton says this is done so that however good or bad or affluent or poor your parents may be, as a citizen you get some seed capital so that you can take part in the American economic mobility system. 
But wouldn’t such a program be too costly? 
Not at all, says Hamilton. He notes that there are about 4 million children born every year, so if the average account is at $20,000, the whole program might cost $80 billion. If you add another $10 billion, the very highest estimate for administering the program, it comes to $90 billion maximum. That might sound like a lot, but not when you consider what the federal government already spends trying to promote asset ownership through the tax code. He cites a report on all such policies (like the mortgage interest reduction and reductions in capital gains) by CFED , a Washington-based non-profit focused on expanding economic opportunities for low-to-moderate income Americans. All told, these programs cost over $500 billion dollars . (The mortgage interest deduction alone is estimated to cost more than $405 billion for tax years 2014 through 2018 ). 
Next to these figures, Baby Bonds looks like a bargain. They also have the advantage of distributing the capital where it’s needed most. Federal programs already in place tend to funnel money towards the more affluent, says Hamilton, noting that the bottom 60 percent of earners get about 5 percent of that $500 billion, while the top 10 percent get well over half. He thinks that Baby Bonds could be fully funded simply by capping the existing mortgage interest reductions. 
So how would a race-blind program help to close gaps in wealth and income between black and white Americans? 
Hamilton points out that about 85 percent of black households fall below the national median of the wealth distribution, so the means test for the Baby Bonds program as well as its target needs to be keenly focused on wealth. 
Baby Bonds address wealth in two ways: First, because of the way black people are clustered at the poorer end of the wealth distribution, more will qualify for the program. Secondly, because the program is focused on asset-enhancing activities, they will benefit when they become adults and are able to use the funds to build the kinds of assets that have so often been out of reach historically. 
A Potential Political Winner? 
Inequality has been a hot topic this political season, but much of the discussion has focused on student debt. Hamilton acknowledges that this is important, but it’s not enough to close the racial wealth gap. 
“It will help avoid wealth leakage for millions of people and black individuals that end up going to college,” he says. “It’s certainly the case that black students are disproportionately impacted by student debt. But this only helps those who actually end up going to college. It’s limited in its approach.” 
Something more is needed. He notes that in other countries, programs similar to Baby Bonds have already been implemented, such as a child trust program set up in 2005 that gave every British citizen born on or after September 1, 2002 an investment account to build savings that would help fund their transition to adult life. 
The U.K. program differed from Baby Bonds in several key ways: it was smaller in scale, parents could add to the account, and the trust was unconditional, meaning that the money could be used for anything rather than a specific set of potentially wealth-building activities. Unfortunately, the program sank under a wave of austerity in 2011 following the global recession, so it’s unclear exactly how well it worked because the children who received the accounts are not yet old enough to have used them. 
Could Baby Bonds work in America? Hamilton observes that in the past, both conservatives and liberals have endorsed programs designed to give American children a stake in the future. KidSave, a program conceived by then-Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, with then-Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as co-sponsor, would have allotted each child a small deposit at birth (around $1000), with additional $500 deposits every year for five years. The money would then be invested in a limited number of mutual funds, but it couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement, when a substantial nest egg would have theoretically grown. Various versions of the plan attracted support from conservatives like Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the Heritage Foundation. 
The premise behind Baby Bonds is slightly different; it’s based on the recognition that the problem in building wealth is not savings. 
“Most Americans don’t save, period,” says Hamilton. “It’s really getting access to that asset that’s going to appreciate. Homes give Americans most of their wealth, or, if not homes, some other asset. So this is moving us a bit from that narrative of how to leverage poor people to do better things by giving them incentives to saying, well, why don’t we empower them with an account so that they actually can make decisions that can lead to their mobility.” 
Hamilton observes that Baby Bonds simply arm everybody with the opportunity to benefit from the markets— an idea the most die-hard free market champion might appreciate. “If conservatives really believe in the fairness of the markets,” he says, “then let’s give everybody opportunity to participate. We’re talking about babies, so this is before we start coming up with narratives about the deserving poor or the undeserving poor. We’re saying, at birth, we’re going to give everybody a chance to engage in economic mobility in America.” 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"Two-time world champion in kickboxing killed in Moscow. Video 07.11.2016 | Source: Pravda.Ru On November 6, a man was killed in the south-west of Moscow. The victim was identified as 29-year-old native of the North Caucasus region, a two-time world champion in kickboxing. Representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Irina Volk, said that the murder suspect was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport, from where he was going to fly to Baku, Azerbaijan. The 31-year-old suspect was said to be an acquaintance of the victim, also a native of the North Caucasus. The video of the incident was released by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The video shows a man falling out from the driver's door of the parked car. The other man leaves the car and escapes from the crime scene. ""According to preliminary reports, the men stopped by the shopping center. A conflict sparked between them in the car. Most likely, the cause of the conflict was a question of money. One of them men shot the other one in the chest from a Makarov pistol that he was possessing illegally and then escaped,"" Irina Volk said, Interfax reports. Immediately after the incident, the murderer booked a plane ticket. He was not allowed to board the plane at Sheremetyevo Airport and was arrested. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) In the so-called Invisible Primary of 2016, Jeb Bush is the invisible man — and he prefers it that way.

After taking the political world by surprise in early January with the formation of a shiny new political committee, Bush has largely receded from public view, instead putting an acute focus on raising money and building what his growing team of aides describe as a ""shock and awe"" campaign operation.

Aside from some previously-booked paid speeches, a series of banal postings on Instagram and Twitter and a few random run-ins with scrap-hungry reporters, the former Florida governor seems determined to avoid the traps of the horse race-driven daily news cycle and the expectations game that comes with it.

Bush's mission in these early days of the cycle is to keep his head down and raise as much money as possible in an effort to muscle out his closest Republican rivals, hire a talented staff and build a high-octane campaign apparatus that can go the distance against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

""There is a lot going on under the surface,"" said one Bush-aligned strategist who, like most allies interviewed for this story, refused to talk on the record about any campaign plans. ""He is still in the process of considering whether to run, but we are building and organizing. It's a pretty muscular financial and political organization.""

His staffers, meanwhile, are fiercely tight-lipped about his plans and calendar, including a forthcoming book rollout, offering only the blandest of comments to reporters.

""I like to ski, I can't comment,"" Bush told one reporter.

When big issues have surfaced -- like President Barack Obama's dramatic changes to the country's decades-old Cuba policy -- Bush has played it safe, opting to make his opinions known on Facebook rather than on television news.

Bush's decision to shun the limelight in January 2015 makes sense to veterans of the presidential process. Though the 2016 race would be his first presidential bid, Bush seems determined to avoid the flame wars and Twitter spats that other first-time candidates are dabbling in, attention-sucking moments that can distract a candidates and staffers from their day-to-day goals.

""There is still plenty of time,"" said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. ""The caucuses are more than a year away.""

Bush's most high-profile appearance came last Friday during a paid speech to the National Automobile Dealers Association convention in San Francisco. Close-political watchers mined his appearance for clues about a possible message, but he revealed little new about his thinking beyond now-familiar calls for immigration reform and a more ""adult"" political tone in Washington.

Bush advisers are promising a splashier showing on Feb. 4, when Bush is set to address the Detroit Economic Club, a frequent stopover for ambitious Republicans.

In the meantime, Bush has been flying around the country courting big Republicans donors and asking them to contribute to his political action committee, Right to Rise PAC, and an affiliated super PAC.

""It's a smart strategy, because you have got to have a lot of money to run,"" said Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, who said Republicans ""will have a better chance"" in 2016 if they nominate a governor or ex-governor not associated with the unpopularity of Congress.

According to some Republicans, the Bush committees together are raking in daily sums in the mid-to-high six figures, an intake that should guarantee an impressive showing once the first fundraising quarter concludes in March.

""Other candidates aren't doing that,"" said one unaffiliated Republican in Washington who had been recently briefed on the fundraising.

Still, Bush backers vigorously deny a report from earlier this month that they are planning to haul in $100 million in the first quarter, a near impossible goal.

Much of the news about Bush's financial activities is emerging from supportive donors leaking tidbits to reporters. On the staff side, it's no-comment, all the time.

""It's the Jeb Bush culture,"" said one Florida Republican who knows the likely candidate. ""It's consistent with how he ran previous campaigns. Consistent with how he governed. Focus is execution, getting things done and lack of turmoil. That's the goal anyway. You always fall short from time to time.""

The no-nonsense posture of Bush-world makes for a striking contrast when compared to the daily palace intrigue swirling around Romney, Bush's closest competitor for establishment Republican support.

Ever since Romney told a room full of New York donors — many of them already committed to Bush — that he was seriously considering a 2016 bid, seemingly every Romney meeting, lunch, phone call and ""private meeting"" has surfaced in the press.

The read-all-about-it Romney drama is fueled, in part, by a circle of advisers that forged chatty relationships with the national press over eight years of campaigning and are happy to puff up their boss in the media. But despite Romney's bold moves in recent weeks, even some of his most devoted aides remain uncertain about his 2016 chances. Some believe he's best-positioned in a wide-open field while others are more torn about his re-emergence, but remain loyal to him nonetheless.

Romney's will-he-or-won't-he act has a short shelf life, a range of top Republicans and donors groused to CNN.

""I think there is a clear connection between endless leaks about high-level staff meetings and tremendous campaign insecurity,"" said one senior Republican sympathetic to Bush who has spoken with people in both the Bush and Romney orbits. ""Jeb-land seems too busy organizing to worry about leaking trivia.""

Romney is expected to make a decision about the race in the next two weeks, according to people who have spoken with him in recent days.

But Bush's quick start might have already boxed out Romney on the fundraising front. In Republican financial circles, talk over the last week has centered on how Bush has already secured commitments from a large swath of Romney's biggest bundlers and contributors, raising the former Massachusetts governor's barrier to entry.

Bush is also ahead of Romney in the race for campaign talent, though the hiring process is moving at a somewhat slower pace than the money chase.

Since before the holidays, Bush's two closest political advisers — Sally Bradshaw and Mike Murphy — have been recruiting staffers and consultants with a blizzard of phone calls and a cascade of meetings in Washington and elsewhere. They have focused heavily on staff talent from party committees in Washington and consultancies with ties to the Republican establishment. Already, Bush has tapped U.S. Chamber of Commerce political director Rob Engstrom, who helped engineer the Republican establishment's national drubbing of the tea party in 2014, as a top adviser.

It remains unclear who will run the campaign. Bradshaw, several Republicans said, is likely to remain in a senior adviser role. Sara Taylor Fagen, an Iowa native and former political director for George W. Bush, has been frequently mentioned as a likely campaign manager. Fagen did not respond to a request for comment.

Several Republicans familiar with the moves said Bush's high command has been very aggressive on the digital side, promising to build a state-of-the-art data and digital operation. Bush team has had conversations with a variety of top digital firms in Washington, and Chris Georgia, a former digital staffer for the National Republican Congressional Committee now working for Bush, has already tried to hire away staffers from a handful of leading digital firms.

In the pivotal early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Bush has been careful to manage expectations, moving slower than most of his rivals. Bush has called the Iowa GOP Chairman, Jeff Kaufman, and Grassley said he has made arrangements to speak with Bush on Tuesday. He has also dialed some party leaders in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but for now appears to be relying on goodwill from early state veterans of his father's and brother's political orbits.

Bush is also keeping an eye on Michigan, which has yet to move its primary date from a February slot to later in the year despite the threat of penalties from the Republican National Committee. Former Michigan governor John Engler is keeping tabs on on the state's primary for Bush and his team.

Bush's organizational strength, fundraising prowess and blooming establishment support have impressed Washington insiders. But his strengths have yet to be tested in the wilds of the campaign trail, where goodwill for Romney still lingers among rank-and-file Republicans. Bush will have to introduce himself to Republican voters, hold steady throughout the ups-and-downs primary grindhouse and explain thorny positions to a GOP electorate that has drifted right since Bush last held office almost a decade ago.

At some point in the coming months, Bush will have to show some more leg to the public.

In Iowa, Branstad said he spoke to Bush about coming to an Agriculture Summit for presidential candidate in March. Bush, he said, ""has some real interest in that.""

""My advice to all the candidates is come early and come often,"" Branstad said. ""I hope he does.""",REAL
"Email 

The Times made a reference on Thursday to the suffering of millions of Yemenis using the phrase ""the forgotten war"". 
An18-year-old Yemeni girl's image catches the attention on the front page of the newspaper. Her malnutrition reduced her to a skeleton and she has disturbingly become emaciated as a result of food shortage. 
This newspaper reported that Saida has been hospitalized in the port city of Hodeidah because of malnutrition while the city is under economic siege of Saudi Arabia.",FAKE
"(CNN) French police say two suspects in Wednesday's terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine are still on the loose after escaping onto the streets of Paris.

In a statement on their website, French national police ask for information on the whereabouts of suspects Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, warning that both could be armed and dangerous.

Police released photos of the two men, who Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman told CNN are brothers in their 30s.

Cherif Kouachi, left, and Said Kouachi, right, are suspects in the Paris attack.

Police found an ID document of Said Kouachi at the scene of the shooting, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported. ""It was their only mistake,"" said Dominique Rizet, BFMTV's police and justice consultant, reporting that the discovery helped the investigation.

Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year-old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police. CNN has not independently confirmed whether the suspect has surrendered.

Police fanned out across France in an intense manhunt for the suspects, who were masked and dressed in black when they burst into the satirical magazine's office Wednesday, killing 12 people.

A tactical unit was deployed in an operation about a 144 kilometers (about 90 miles) from Paris in Reims, France, following the attack, CNN affiliate BFMTV reported. Authorities haven't revealed details about the target of the operation, but speculation surged in French media that investigators could be closing in on the suspects.

French authorities vowed to step up security and apprehend those responsible.

""Everything will be done to arrest (the attackers),"" French President Francois Hollande said in a speech Wednesday night. ""... We also have to protect all public places. Security forces will be deployed everywhere there can be the beginning"" of a threat.

It's too soon to say whether the suspects were operating alone, CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.

The gunmen said they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed and shouted ""Allahu akbar,"" which translates to ""God is great,"" Molins said.

A witness who works in the office opposite the magazine's told BFMTV that he saw two hooded men, dressed in black, enter the building heavily armed.

""We then heard them open fire inside, with many shots,"" he said. ""We were all evacuated to the roof. After several minutes, the men fled, after having continued firing in the middle of the street.""

The men reportedly spoke fluent French with no accent.

One unsettling video, posted to YouTube, shows two men shooting on a Paris street, then walking up to and firing point-blank at a seemingly wounded man as he lay on the ground.

Video shows a gunman approaching his getaway car and raising his finger in the air in what appears to be a signal, possibly to another vehicle or other people who might have played a role in the attack, a Western intelligence source briefed on the French investigation told CNN.

'Parisians will not be afraid'

At an event in Paris' Place de la Republique, demonstrators held up pens in honor of the slain cartoonists and chanted, ""We are Charlie!"" Pictures posted online showed similar demonstrations in other cities, including Rome, Berlin and Barcelona.

""Parisians will not be afraid,"" Klugman said. ""We will fight terrorism with our common values, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. ... We are at war, but we still want to behave as a leading democracy.""

Armed soldiers could be seen standing guard outside monuments, in transit stations and elsewhere in well-trafficked spots around France by Wednesday evening.

Police impounded a black Citroen in northeastern Paris similar to the one purportedly used by the attackers as a getaway car. Video from CNN affiliate BFMTV shows the vehicle being towed from Porte de Pantin, in Paris' 19th district.

Investigators will do a complete DNA work-up on the Citroen, including soil signatures that might suggest where the gunmen came from, a Western intelligence source briefed on the probe told CNN.

The same source said that French authorities are searching all travel records from the past 17 days to see whether any of the attackers entered the European nation over the holidays. This includes checks at Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, as well as whatever limited information is available from train stations.

Thursday will be a national day of mourning for those killed in the attack, Hollande said. He asked for a moment of reflection Thursday and said flags will be at half-staff for three days.

Its last tweet before Wednesday's attack featured a cartoon of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Earlier cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed spurred protests and the burning of the magazine's office three years ago.

A year later, in an interview with Le Monde newspaper, Charbonnier gave little indication that he planned to change Charlie Hebdo's ways.

""It may sound pompous,"" he said, ""but I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.""

The attack on the magazine spurred a wave of support for the publication and its practices around France and the world.",REAL
"Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both rising in the polls, staged their own spirited debate on immigration and national security in Tuesday's Republican presidential debate.

Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz, right, both speak as Ben Carson, second from left, and Donald Trump, second from right, look on during the CNN Republican presidential debate at the Venetian Hotel & Casino on Dec. 15, 2015, in Las Vegas.

In the final Republican presidential debate of 2015, no subplot mattered more than the growing feud between Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida.

Senator Cruz, surging in the polls, is an anti-GOP-establishment outsider – like front-runner Donald Trump – but with stronger conservative bona fides than Mr. Trump and significant appeal among evangelicals.

Senator Rubio, now polling third nationally, represents a kinder, gentler face of Republicanism, one with a more collegial relationship with fellow senators than Cruz and more potential to attract swing voters in the general election.

With Trump’s national lead continuing to grow, to the chagrin of party leaders, the battle to become the main alternative to Trump is more pitched than ever as the kickoff Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1 draw closer.

But the battle didn’t play out Tuesday night in attacks on Trump. Indeed, Cruz and Rubio both went easy on the flamboyant billionaire, in a likely effort to woo his supporters should they cool to his unorthodox campaign persona and style. Instead, the two Cuban-American senators went after each other in Las Vegas on national security and immigration, the evening’s dominant themes in the wake of terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. Here’s how those exchanges played out:

NSA phone record surveillance. Rubio has been going after Cruz lately over his vote for the USA Freedom Act, which imposed new limits on the collection of phone metadata by US intelligence agencies in an effort to protect civil liberties.

“I promise you, the next time there is attack on – an attack on this country, the first thing people are going to want to know is, why didn't we know about it and why didn't we stop it?” Rubio said Tuesday. “And the answer better not be because we didn't have access to records or information that would have allowed us to identify these killers before they attacked.”

Cruz defended the legislation as expanding the potential universe of records the government has access to. What he didn’t say is that the government now must get a court order to access them, which defenders say does not represent a serious hurdle.

Defense spending and approach to Islamic State. Rubio also went after Cruz for voting multiple times against legislation that authorizes defense spending.

“You can’t carpet bomb ISIS if you don’t have planes and bombs to attack them with,” Rubio charged, referring to the so-called Islamic State. “They cannot be defeated through air forces.”

Cruz has promised to “carpet bomb” ISIS with air strikes, and is less enamored of sending US ground troops to Syria and Iraq than is Rubio. In the debate, he defended his “no” votes against the defense authorization act as fulfillment of a promise to oppose the federal government’s authority to detain US citizens without due process.

Cruz also tried to lash Rubio to the policies of President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

""We need to focus on killing the bad guys, not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars,"" Cruz said.

Immigration. For Rubio, this issue is the most fraught, as it gives some conservatives pause over his candidacy. As a new senator, he co-authored comprehensive immigration reform legislation, only to renounce the bill – which included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Rubio has sought to paint Cruz as favoring “legalization” of the undocumented, over his support for big increases in the caps on green cards and the number of visas for high-tech workers. Cruz has since backed off that position, and in the debate, he fought back.

“I led the fight against [Rubio’s] legalization and amnesty,” Cruz said, adding that “to suggest our record's the same is like suggesting the fireman and the arsonist have the same record because they are both at the scene of the fire.""

In debate post-mortems, both senators were deemed to have had strong performances, and their duel is likely to intensify in the weeks ahead.

That Cruz and Rubio are both Cuban-American first-term senators in their mid-40s may be an accident of history, but it matters to a Republican Party anxious to showcase diversity. Whether either could make major inroads into the Hispanic vote is an open question, particularly for Cruz, who doesn’t speak Spanish and who only uses his heritage to highlight his Cuban-born father’s journey to freedom in the US.

Rubio, on the other hand, is fluent in Spanish and has made his Cuban-immigrant parents’ humble lives as service-workers a central part of his optimistic view of the American dream.

If any of the Republican candidates are capable of channeling Ronald Reagan, whose sunny demeanor helped him to the presidency twice, it may be Rubio. Likability is a key ingredient to presidential campaign success, and if support for Trump begins to wane, one can’t assume that his voters go to Cruz.

“Too often [Cruz’s] message seems negative, and I think that’s a challenge for him,” says Henry Barbour, Republican national committeeman from Mississippi, speaking before Tuesday’s debate. “The key is to come across as the guy with the positive agenda – the Ronald Reagan of the group. And everybody wants to be the Ronald Reagan.”",REAL
"Malone, New York (CNN) After a massive, more-than-three-week manhunt for David Sweat, the escaped murderer is back where he started -- in custody.

Authorities said a New York State Police sergeant -- identified as Jay Cook -- spotted Sweat, and after Sweat ran, the sergeant gave chase.

""At some point, running across a field, he realized that Sweat was going to make it to a tree line, and possibly could have disappeared, and he fired two shots,"" New York State Police Superintendent Joseph A. D'Amico told reporters.

Sweat, who was unarmed, was hit twice in the torso.

A photo exclusively obtained by CNN shows Sweat in custody moments after his capture. He appears bloodied and was wearing a camouflage outfit, not prison garb.

He was taken into custody in the town of Constable, in upstate New York, very close to the Canadian border.

""I can only assume he was going for the border, that he was that close,"" D'Amico said.

Sweat was captured about 16 miles north of the location where fellow escapee Richard Matt was killed last week. The officer was alone when he shot Sweat.

Sweat was transported to the Alice Hyde Medical Center in Malone, an officer at the hospital told CNN. He was later moved to Albany Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition, according to Dennis McKenna, medical director there.

Emergency, trauma, intensive care, radiology and vascular surgery specialists are involved in his care, McKenna said.

No law enforcement officers were injured during Sweat's apprehension.

""The nightmare is finally over,"" said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. ""We wish it didn't happen in the first place. But if you have to have it happen, this is how you want it to end.""

Sweat was imprisoned at the Clinton Correctional Facility for shooting dead an officer who pursued him after a robbery he committed.

Guards discovered them missing on June 6, during a routine bed check.

Law enforcement experts stressed Sunday that it's crucial Sweat survive so that officials can learn exactly how he and Matt escaped, and who helped them.

""Now that we have Mr. Sweat, it gives us the opportunity to have some more questions and provide more facts on the overall situation,"" Cuomo said. ""Anyone who we find who was culpable and guilty of cooperating in the escape will be fully prosecuted.""

D'Amico told reporters that investigators haven't yet interviewed Sweat, but that they hope to soon.

Investigators have questioned guards at the Clinton Correctional Facility about what conversations they had with the escapees about life outside the prison, according to a law enforcement official.

They believe Sweat and Matt were gathering information for almost a year about hunting cabins and the fields around the prison to help them navigate the terrain.

It's believed their conversations with the guards might have given the escapees some knowledge of how to get around, the official said.

Earlier Sunday, about 1,300 federal, state and local law enforcement officers were searching vehicles at roadblocks and scouring dense woods in upstate New York for Sweat.

Searchers had at times followed two sets of footprints, but when they gunned Matt down one day after his 49th birthday, there was no sign of Sweat nearby.

So, on all-terrain vehicles and in helicopters, they continued looking for the man who eluded them for three weeks, using infrared vision devices to peer through the night.

D'Amico admitted that authorities had a hard time tracking the fugitives and offered a possible explanation: pepper.

""We believe that possibly these two males were using pepper to throw the scent off of the dogs that were tracking them,"" he said.

The search Sunday was focused on an area along New York's State Route 30 between County Route 41 in the town of Malone and County Route 26 in the town of Duane.

Audra Buchanan of Constable said she was stunned to hear recently that Sweat could be near her home.

""We were so nervous,"" she said. ""We've had our housed locked down.""

When she saw on CNN that Sweat had been shot and was in custody, she said she felt ""an incredible sigh of relief.""

When she heard sirens and saw ambulances fly by her home, she thought, ""Oh my God, thank God!"" she told CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

Her 9-year-old daughter has been begging to go outside and play for weeks, and Buchanan said she's glad she can now let her.

Sweat's mother described a similar feeling of relief. Pamela Sweat spoke to Time Warner Cable News after her son was captured.

""We started crying because (he) wasn't killed,"" she said.",REAL
"Texas county switches to 'emergency paper ballots' After 'glitches' reported with election software Published: 30 mins ago 
(INFOWARS) A county in Texas has switched to “emergency paper ballots” after electronic voting machines in the region suffered technical glitches. 
Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne issued a press release Tuesday night announcing electronic voting would be suspended until the glitches affecting voting machines could be corrected. 
“The Straight Party vote for both the Republicans and Democrats did not automatically select one race on each ballot,” states the press release.",FAKE
"Home / Badge Abuse / Police Family Fakes Robbery, Vandalizes Own Home to Blame it On Black Lives Matter Police Family Fakes Robbery, Vandalizes Own Home to Blame it On Black Lives Matter Matt Agorist October 31, 2016 Leave a comment 
Millbury, MA — If you want to scam your insurance company while painting a group in a negative light who wants your husband and his peers to be held accountable for beating and killing unarmed black people, you can simply fake a robbery on your police officer’s home and blame it on Black Lives Matter. But, you have to do it better than Maria Daly, who was busted last week for that very act. 
According to CBS Boston, police say on October 17 Maria Daly reported a burglary at the family home, saying jewelry and money had been stolen. She also reportedly said her house was tagged with graffiti that appeared to reference the Black Lives Matter movement. 
After investigators looked at the supposed crime scene, however, they quickly determined the entire account was false. 
“Something wasn’t quite right,” said Millbury Police Chief Donald Desorcy. “I think that was pretty obvious and as a result of that investigation, the officers did their due diligence and followed through with the investigation that we had.” 
“Basically we came to the conclusion that it was all fabricated,” said Desorcy. “There was no intruder, there was no burglary.” 
After Daly robbed and vandalized her own home, she reported it to police and then went on social media to decry the ‘hatred’ against her husband from Black Lives Matter. 
“We woke up to not only our house being robbed while we were sleeping , but to see this hatred for no reason,” she said. 
Naturally, chief Desorcy quickly exonerated Daly’s police officer husband, noting that he had no role in the deception. Whatever you say chief. 
“She must have tagged the place herself,” one neighbor said. “I don’t know why you’d do that if you’re gonna stage a robbery, I mean really come on, you’re a cop’s wife. You should know better.” 
Maria Daly faces charges of filing a false police report and misleading a police investigation, according to CBS Boston. 
People vandalizing their own property to blame Black Lives Matter is not an isolated incident. 
A man who accused Black Lives Matter activists of vandalizing and spray-painting his car was recently arrested because police believe that he vandalized the car himself to stage a hoax and to scam his insurance company. Scott Lattin, a self-described supporter of police, reported in September of 2015, that his truck was torn apart and tagged with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” Lattin alleged that his vehicle was targeted because he had a number of pro-police stickers and symbols displayed. 
Lattin’s story received national press, and he even appeared on a number of news programs where he showed the damage that was done to his truck. However, shortly after the hype, Whitney police arrested Lattin on a misdemeanor charge of making a false police report. 
“We had initial video when the officers took the report and then when we saw your story on Channel 4. When we looked at those two videos, there were some differences in those and that led us to take the investigation into a different direction,” Whitney Police Chief Chris Bentley said, adding that the case was “very disturbing.” 
Lattin was apparently so excited about going on TV he further vandalized his own truck, more so than what was initially reported. When police noticed the extra damage on the TV report, they knew he was lying. Share",FAKE
"Toward the end of our meeting with President Obama, one of us asked whether the Iran nuclear deal might change the future of that country's poisonously anti-American politics, and Obama drifted from the technical and political details he'd otherwise focused on into something of a more reflective tone.

""I just don’t know,"" he said, leaning back a bit in his chair for the first time since he'd arrived. ""When Nixon went to China, Mao was still in power. He had no idea how that was going to play out.

""He didn’t know that Deng Xiaoping would suddenly come in and decide that it doesn’t matter what color the cat is as long as it catches mice, and the next thing you know you’ve got this state capitalism on the march,"" Obama said, paraphrasing the famous aphorism by Mao's successor that capitalistic policies were acceptable if they helped China. ""You couldn’t anticipate that.""

It was surprising to hear Obama, normally more restrained in how he discusses the Iran nuclear deal, refer to it, however cautiously, as a moment when the arc of history might curve.

It was one of several interesting moments during an intimate 90-minute meeting Obama held with 10 journalists in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on Wednesday. What follows is a description of that conversation and what it reveals about how the president sees the nuclear deal and the larger problems of the Middle East, as well as the opposition to the deal, a subject he returned to frequently and at times with a visceral frustration that seemed to verge on disgust.

But Obama's primary message was one of certainty. That the meeting was on the record — such gatherings, a routine event at the White House, are normally off the record — spoke to this, as did his easy manner and his eagerness to discuss fine-grained details of the deal, as well as criticisms.

""Of all the foreign policy issues that I've addressed since I've been president,"" he said, ""I've never been more certain that this is sound policy, that it's the right thing to do for the United States, that it's the right thing to do for our allies.""

Since world powers had reached the agreement on limiting Iran's nuclear program, three weeks earlier in Vienna, Obama has calibrated his remarks on the deal to a narrow political mission: Get it enough support to get past Congress. That has meant emphasizing only ways in which the deal will serve US (and Israeli) security interests to limit Iran's nuclear program, and downplaying everything else.

To hear him draw a connection between the nuclear deal and China's transformation, then, was striking. It suggested that Obama, though he has repeatedly insisted he does not expect the character of Iran's regime to change, does see it as a possibility, one potentially significant enough that it evokes, at least in his mind, President Nixon's historic trip to China.

At the same time, the lesson Obama seemed to draw from the comparison was not that he, too, was on the verge of making history, but rather that transformations like China's under Deng, opportunities like Nixon's trip, can have both causes and consequences that are impossible to foresee. His role, he said, was to find ""openings"" for such moments.

He cited his 2012 trip to Myanmar — the first ever by a sitting president, and part of his effort to reopen the dictatorship to the world — and his detente with Cuba.

With regards to Myanmar, also known as Burma, ""we still don’t know yet how that experiment plays itself out,"" he said. In listing Myanmar's reforms since his trip, he mistakenly referred to dissident Aung San Suu Kyi running for president — in fact, the regime has barred her from running — before realizing his error and correcting himself. It was an unintentionally revealing comment, hinting at the ways that reforms can reverse and ""openings"" can close.

""We don’t know whether it’s going to get over the hump and suddenly Burma is completely transformed, or whether it retrenches as the generals in that country get scared about losing their privileges and prerogatives,"" he went on. ""But what we’ve done is we’ve created a possibility for change.""

His point seemed to be that he could imagine such a possibility for an opening in Iran as well, though the results were uncertain. He said of Iran's future, echoing his point about Myanmar, ""We don’t know how it’s going to play itself out.""

From there, Obama drifted back to discussing what he had brought us to the White House to discuss, which was his case for the Iran nuclear deal, which meant reasserting, as he had many times before, that the deal did not assume Iran's good behavior on nuclear issues but rather that it was a means for enforcing it.

He was careful at all times not to premise the deal on Iran's good intentions, much less the country undergoing any sort of transformation. Still, in that unguarded moment, he seemed to suggest a hope that the deal could help create ""a possibility for change"" all the same.

Several times, Obama was asked — and resisted answering — a simple question: What is his plan if the deal falls apart?

Congress, for example, could block the deal, something that looked more possible by Friday, when Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer announced he would oppose it. Yet while Obama was eager to talk about why killing the deal would be bad, all the ways that it would allow Iran's nuclear program to proceed and set back US foreign policy, he refused to say what he would do if that happened. At one point, when one of the journalists present began asking about his plan B, Obama cut him off, joking that he wanted to save the journalist from wasting his question.

Politically, it's understandable that he'd refuse to answer: if he says he has no Plan B, he would look foolish, but if he says he has a good plan B, he would make it easier for Republicans to justify killing the deal. Yet it's an important question.

The closest he got to providing an answer was when he was challenged on whether the only alternative to the deal was really war, as he's frequently asserted. He did not describe a clear plan B, but he did rule out a number of options.

""I do not say that a military option is inevitable just to be provocative, just to win the argument. Those are the dictates of cold, hard logic,"" he said.

If Congress killed the deal, ""doubling down on unilateral sanctions"" against Iran would not be enough, he said, to get another deal. And he was ""quite certain"" that it would not be possible to ""force our P5+1 partners [the world powers that are party to the nuclear deal] or other countries, like India or South Korea or even Japan"" to go along with Congress's demand to set a new, higher bar for what the nuclear deal has to accomplish.

If that happens, he said, ""we’ve sort of run out of options at that point. ... At minimum, what we’ve done is we’ve put Iran in the driver’s seat."" In one scenario, he said, Iran could pull out of the deal and resume its nuclear development immediately: ""The scenario that everybody talks about happening 15 years from now happens six, nine, 12 months from now.""

In another scenario, Iran would declare its intention to abide by the deal. Sanctions would fall away, Russia and China would exploit the opening to hijack the process, and the US would possibly, he said, be excluded from the inspections regime and enforcement systems set up by the deal. In other words, the US would get shut out of the very process of monitoring Iran's behavior that it had set up.

""In that scenario, then, Iran is going to get some of that sanction relief anyway, and our credibility in terms of now being able to exercise any influence on how the Security Council thinks about this thing has been completely eroded,"" he said. ""I’d have to talk to the lawyers as to what standing we would even have, since Congress would have rejected this deal, for us to be a party to it, in which case we’re not in the room, potentially.""

Any of these, he said, would make it easier for Iran to grow its nuclear program and harder for the US to do anything about it: ""In almost every scenario, our ability to monitor what’s happening in Iran, our ability to ensure that they are not breaking out, our ability to inspect their facilities, our ability to force them to abide by the deal has gone out the window.""

Obama would not spell out what he planned to do in such a scenario, but he did say he would try to piece together a new sanctions coalition, though he was not optimistic about it. ""Maybe it’s possible that for a certain period of time we can hang on to the Europeans — not certain; maybe. Maybe we can twist some arms to have some of our Asian allies hang on,"" he said.",REAL
"Of late, Bernie Sanders has been under assault from the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party. The charge? His campaign has circulated economic projections that show stunning — and rather implausible — benefits from Sanders's agenda.

Sanders's ""promises runs against our party's best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic,"" wrote four Democratic ex-chairs of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers. ""These are numbers we would describe as deep voodoo if they came from a tax-cutting Republican,"" agreed Paul Krugman.

Amidst this onslaught, Steve Randy Waldman has penned what is, I think, the best defense of Sanders. He admits that the campaign's policy proposals are sketchy and the economic projections it's circulating are fantastical. But he argues that none of that really matters.

The president's ""role is to define priorities that must later be translated into well-crafted policy details,"" he says. ""In a democratic polity, wonks are the help.""

Waldman has a point. If elected president, Sanders could certainly get some top economists to tighten his policies. He would have the vast machinery of the federal government available to sweat the details. The best experts in academia would be honored to advise him. Every think tank in town would produce reams of research on how to implement his ideas.

And, hell, let's just be honest: All this policy talk is just a way to pass the time between now and the election. It doesn't matter how strong Bernie Sanders's single-payer health care plan is — it's not going to pass, just like Donald Trump isn't going to get Mexico to pay for a wall and Hillary Clinton isn't going to get universal pre-K past a Republican Congress and Ted Cruz isn't going to set up a value-added tax.

It's obvious that debating the details of campaign proposals is, on some level, fantasy football for wonks. Events will intercede, bureaucracies will weigh in, Congress will balk, promises will be broken. Remember when Barack Obama ran for president opposing an individual mandate and then flip-flopped and supported one? So what's the point of paying attention to any of this at all?

As someone who pays quite a lot of attention to campaign policy processes, here's my answer: Watching a candidate run his campaign's policy processes is one of our best ways of predicting how he would run his White House.

The key word there, by the way, is run. Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning.

This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they're wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn't, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren't.

My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn't very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn't surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn't seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he's attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president.

The reason I care about the puppies-and-rainbows promises of his single-payer proposal is that I think Sanders believes them — I don't think he's a cynical politician simply eliding the weaknesses of his plan. The reason I care about his campaign's circulation of fairly outlandish economic projections is that it makes me worry there's no one around Sanders with the sense to say that those results don't pass the smell test. The reason I'm frustrated by Sanders's promise that a political revolution will overcome all opposition to his plans is I think he believes it, and so I'm not sure he has a real plan B for when the political revolution doesn't happen. The reason Sanders's persistently superficial answers on foreign policy matter to me is that they're a test of his ability to learn on the fly about topics he's not terribly interested in.

In a democratic polity, wonks are the help. But that only underscores the importance of electing someone good at hiring and managing them. A President Sanders could hire excellent technocrats to help him make policy, but would he want to? A President Sanders could surround himself with experts who know the shortcomings of his ideas, but would he listen to them? A President Sanders could become deeply engaged on foreign policy, but would he decide to?

Management isn't the sexiest or most inspiring of topics. But, as Jimmy Carter can tell you, it matters. A good vision can be destroyed by a bad strategy; high ideals can be muddied by weak staffing; a pure heart can be led astray by bad advice.

There are plenty of criticisms to be made of Obama's presidency, but I think the baseline competence of his administration has begun to dim memories of how important presidential management really is.

The Bush administration was, from this perspective, a genuine disaster — a festival of tax cuts that didn't make sense and wars that were ill-planned, and all of it run by a man who clearly couldn't separate experts from hacks (""Heckuva job, Brownie!"") and good advice from ideological fantasies. I have always thought this story, reported by Megan McArdle, showed the mundane ways in which Bush's deficiencies diminished his presidency:

A senior economic adviser for George W. Bush once told me a rather haunting story about the administration’s decision to sign the 2002 farm bill ... Like virtually all sound economists, Bush’s advisers disliked the bill, a subsidy-laden monstrosity that was considerably worse than the farm bill that had preceded it in 1996—but they reluctantly allowed it to go forward, because they thought passing the farm bill would buy legislative support for something they considered even more important: the authority the president needed to advance the next round of treaty negotiations at the World Trade Organization. As compromises go, this one didn’t seem too bad, so Bush’s advisers put on their game faces as the president signed it into law on May 13, 2002, with a touching speech about providing a safety net for farmers. All went well until later, when someone cracked a joke about how ""we don’t need another farm bill."" The president, shocked, demanded an explanation. ""What’s wrong with the farm bill? No one told me to veto the farm bill."" The adviser wasn’t trying to hide the football, but had just assumed that Bush knew. So had everyone else. It was so obvious to economists, no one thought to tell the president.

On the other hand, George W. Bush's father wasn't the most brilliant policy mind to ever occupy the Oval Office, but he was an excellent manager who chose good staff, made decisions he didn't like but knew were necessary, and ran a competent and mostly scandal-free bureaucracy. There's a reason esteem for his presidency has grown greatly since he left office.

Voters are hiring managers, and the presidential campaign is a long, strangely constructed job interview. Among the qualities people are looking for are inspiration and decency, and Sanders has shown he has both in spades. But the presidency demands more than that, and Sanders's success means he needs to show he's up to the more mundane rigors of the job, too.",REAL
"This Video is REALLY Disturbing... 
Not just to African Americans but to Americans in General... 
Many of The DNC Policies that pertain to African Americans are deeply insulting and condescending in implication. 
Voter ID Laws are not restrictive to The average African American but are portrayed as impediments to them because of the Intellectual Entitlement Mentality of The Democratic Nation Party. 
The Racism Game is a cover for manipulation of both minorities and the majority... 
Divide and Conquer... 
They Divide the Voting Block... 
To Conquer The Election.",FAKE
"Leaked email shows Monsanto Executive V.P. invited to 'Hillraiser' fundraiser to put Clinton into the White House for Monsanto's benefit 
  Monsanto , Hillary Clinton fundraiser , Charles Burson (NaturalNews) Wikileaks email 28657, part of the John Podesta email leaks, reveals that the Hillary Clinton campaign sought money from a top Monsanto executive to put her into the White House. See the email here .Hillary Clinton, known as the Bride of Frankenfood , is a longtime supporter of Monsanto, a corporation whose deceptive tactics of collusion, intimidation and bullying are a perfect fit for the Clinton regime, which even a former FBI official now describes as a criminal operation .The Monsanto operative invited to the fundraiser was none other than Charles W. Burson, Monsanto's former Executive V.P., Secretary and General Counsel. Burson, who retired from Monsanto in 2006 but still maintained an active Monsanto.com email address all the way through 2015, was praised by Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant for pushing the corporation's international imperialism agenda to force patented seeds down the throats of poor farmers in developing nations. It's sickening. Via PR Newswire : ""On behalf of the Monsanto Board of Directors and the employees of Monsanto, I thank Charles for his service to our company,"" said Hugh Grant, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Monsanto. ""During his tenure, Monsanto successfully transitioned from an agricultural company fueled by its chemistry business to one led by its seeds and traits businesses. Charles has played an important role in building the company's legal organization to better serve our growing business, not only in the United States but also in Latin America and Asia-Pacific, where farmers are increasingly choosing to plant Monsanto seeds and technologies. Clinton fundraiser sought money from one of the most evil corporations in the history of humankind In other words, Charles Burson was instrumental in Monsanto suing farmers whose fields were contaminated by genetically modified Monsanto seeds . This legal action by Monsanto is globally considered to be one of the most evil, anti-human rights abuses of legal power ever witnessed in the modern world, yet the Hillary Clinton campaign saw this man as an opportunity to raise more money to put Hillary Clinton into the White House (where, no doubt, she would return the favor to Monsanto through government policy decisions at the USDA and FDA).Fully consistent with the criminal conduct of the Clinton crime mafia, Charles Burson also took part in excusing Monsanto's illegal bribery of over 140 Indonesian officials as part of its international agricultural imperialism march against subsistence farmers.After caught committing massive bribery and collusion in Indonesia, Monsanto's then general counsel Charles Burson explained that no, Monsanto isn't a bad company. They're super honest, and transparent and ethical, too!""The company has taken remedial actions to address the activities in Indonesia. At every stage of this process -- beginning with our voluntary disclosure and throughout the governmental investigations and settlement process -- Monsanto has been fully cooperative, and has made clear that improper activities will not be tolerated by the company. We are pleased today to begin the process of putting these matters to rest,"" wrote Burson. Surprise! The Justice Department then ""defers prosecution"" of Monsanto and forgets these crimes ever happened... Whaddaya know! With the corrupt, lawless Justice Department calling the shots, Monsanto was then given a get out of jail free card by the political elite in Washington.From the same link above: The Justice Department said it had agreed to defer prosecution on the criminal information for three years, saying it would dismiss it after the period if Monsanto fully complied with the terms of the agreement. So, wait. You mean to tell me that a corporation which got caught bribing 140 foreign officials in Indonesia -- a felony crime under U.S. law -- was able to get away with it by claiming they will be honest from now on? And the Justice Department says oh yes, you're fine now, there will be no prosecution for your serious crimes? And then the Clinton fundraiser people specifically reach out to the Monsanto attorney who orchestrated all this and said, ""Hey, this guy would be awesome to help support a Clinton presidency?""Yep.That's Hillary Clinton in a nutshell: Hopelessly corrupt... criminally involved... collusion at every level and the total abandonment of human rights and human dignity. This woman shouldn't be behind a desk at the Oval Office... she should be behind bars! Oh, and it case you're curious, here are all the other emails that were cc'd in that same Hillary Clinton fundraiser message . Check out some of the names. Do you now see how deep the Clinton corruption really is?From:ldavis@lannyjdavis.comTo: aegis1865@gmail.com, agoldberg@tridentpllc.com, teaguelr@aol.com, Alan.Kreczko@thehartford.com, amy@weisspublicaffairs.com, annedwards@gmail.com barry_toiv@aau.edu, benjaminmaxwelladams@gmail.com, bethnolan@gmail.com, blindsey@wlj.com, bobjnash@sbcglobal.net, bdsmith@cov.com, mimbroscio@cov.com, bwnussbaum@wlrk.com, c_moscatelli@yahoo.com, cadavis8@gmail.com, charles.w.burson@monsanto.com, cheryl.mills@gmail.com, ches.johnson@gmail.com, christopherlehane@sbcglobal.net, cliffmauton@hotmail.com, dnionakis@gmail.com, davidfein@icloud.com, dmchirwa@live.com, debbzerwitz@gmail.com, ddoufekias@mofo.com, dkendall@wc.com, don@bluetext.com, donna.peel@comcast.net, dsosnik@nba.com, Doug.band@technoholdings.com, dpeel@rddlaw.net, efhughes4@yahoo.com, eangel@legalaiddc.org, Erskine@2Bowles.com, ericgioia@gmail.com, ecomite@scott-scott.com, fitztoiv@yahoo.com, gterzano@hotmail.com, dcanter434@aol.com, Goodstein8@aol.com, gradymccoy@yahoo.com, wgreggburgess@gmail.com, hickes@ickesenright.com, ira.fishman@nflplayers.com, iraij@foley.com, jjohnson@gloverpark.com, jkagan@supremecourt.gov, jkennedy2006@gmail.com, jlockhart@jplgrp.com, jquinn@quinngillespie.com, jakesiewert@gmail.com, jamie.baker@armfor.uscourts.gov, Jane.Sherburne@BNYMellon.com, jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com, jeremymgaines@gmail.com, jklein@newscorp.com, jlwitt@wittassociates.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, Jonathan.Yarowsky@wilmerhale.com, joshua.king@thehartford.com, josh@personal.com, juliampayne24@gmail.com, juliemziemba@gmail.com, karen_kucik@yahoo.com, KARacine@venable.com, kathiwhalen@comcast.net, kathyruemmler@gmail.com, kearney_j@sbcglobal.net, kengskov@starbucks.com, kpopp@sidley.com, kumiki.gibson@gmail.com, lbreuer@cov.com, lbrown@georgetown.edu, lisa.krim@georgetown.edu, lizdave@me.com, loriwier@comcast.net, lorriemchugh@comcast.com, moconnor@wc.com, mmelendez@lannyjdavis.com, margaretwhillock@sbcglobal.net, marnacooks@gmail.com, marsha@scottyandura.com, marvin.krislov@oberlin.edu, marystreett@hotmail.com, maryellen_glynn@yahoo.com, marymfrench@sbcglobal.net, Mary_B._DeRosa@nsc.eop.gov, maura.pally@gmail.com, Mdf@markfabiani.com, melissaprober@gmail.com, mecabe@verizon.net, michelle_aronowitz@hotmail.com, mmccurry@psw-inc.com, nadjanaomi@me.com, neal.wolin@gmail.com, claire_e_mccombs@who.eop.gov, ernewman@alumni.princeton.edu, nicole.seligman@us.sony.com, pambcashwell@gmail.com, pmarple@chadbourne.com, info@panettainstitute.org, pauloetken@gmail.com, peter.erichsen@ropesgray.com, prundlet@humanityunited.org, rklain@aol.com, Robert.Weiner@aporter.com, RSlater@PattonBoggs.com, srutherford@clintonschool.uasys.edu, sbradley@mclarty.com, sreich@akingump.com, swilson@cov.com, sally@thepaxtongroupconsulting.com, Sbwhoeop@aol.com, emkarcher.schmitt@yahoo.com, shelia.cheston@ngc.com, shelli_peterson@fd.org, stacyr404@gmail.com, stephenneuwirth@quinnemanuel.com, steveR@metalrecyclingcorp.com, sricchetti@cox.net, stevenfreich@gmail.com, sylvia.burwell@hotmail.com, tfmclarty@maglobal.com, todd_j_campbell@tnmd.uscourts.gov, tschroeder@texarkanalaw.com, vcanter434@aol.com, wdellinger@omm.com, wendy.white@ogc.upenn.edu, wpmarsha@email.unc.edu",FAKE
"Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/10/clintons-are-under-multiple-fbi-investigations-as-agents-are-stymied/ 
The post Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
"Military: Goal Is to 'Liberate' Eastern Bank of Tigris River by Jason Ditz, October 31, 2016 Share This 
Iraq’s invasion of Mosul has entered its third week with a noteworthy first, as the first Iraqi special forces entered the city itself in the area around Karama District, in the far east. There was fighting reported both within the district and in surrounding suburbs. 
Indications are that the vast majority of the fighting in the area remains in the suburbs, with only a small incursion into the city itself. Still, Iraqi military officials say their goal is to take the whole eastern bank of the Tigris River, which divides the city. 
The area entered is near a key industrial site within Mosul. It is unclear how well secured this area is from ISIS’ perspective, as they’ve laid heavy traps and tunneled in around the city in anticipation of the invasion, but indications were that a lot of these defensive measures were taken in residential areas. 
ISIS is believed to have several thousand fighters in Mosul, and with the US announcing they intend to kill anyone who tries to escape, they are likely to resist all the more fiercely, knowing they don’t have any place to go after Mosul. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"SHOCK VIDEO : Hillary Needs Help Climbing ONE SINGLE STEP in Florida SHOCK VIDEO : Hillary Needs Help Climbing ONE SINGLE STEP in Florida Videos By TruthFeedNews October 27, 2016 
Hillary Clinton needed a helping hand to trek up a single step during a visit in Florida today. 
Clinton was outside to greet supporters in Lake Worth when she attempted to stand on a small riser. With help from her Secret Service agents, she finally conquered the single step. 
Watch the video: 
Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"President Obama’s decision to expand the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Syria is a reflection of the conflicting pressures on a commander in chief who doubts that military force alone can end the conflicts in those countries, but who also feels compelled to act in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe and a growing threat to the United States.

The president on Friday said that he was sending about 50 Special Operations troops to northern Syria to work with Kurdish and Arab fighters battling the Islamic State. The deployment, though small, marks the first full-time deployment of U.S. forces to the dangerous and chaotic country.

The troops will be accompanied by more U.S. attack planes, based across the border in Turkey, and plans for more joint raids — led by Iraqi counterterrorism forces — to capture and kill Islamic State leaders.

The troops, planes and plans for more raids represent an “intensification” of the president’s existing strategy, said senior administration officials. Few of those officials, however, suggested that the moves would be enough to break open the stalemated conflict or produce sudden battlefield gains.

“This is a very complex battle space, and we’re not directly involved in the way we’ve been in the past,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Without a clear overarching strategy to resolve the conflict, “we’re looking at things in a granular way,” the official said. The goal, for now, is simply to incrementally reinforce those areas that are working and abandon initiatives that are not.

Obama began his second term having brought one war in Iraq to an end and pledging to bring home America’s ground troops from a second in Afghanistan. To that end he set hard limits on U.S. deployments and firm time frames for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Before deploying forces, Obama would regularly demand that his commanders explain the “theory of the case” behind the moves. The phrase is evocative of the president’s legal training and his deep skepticism that U.S. military power can bring lasting change to broken societies. He wanted assurances that the operations would work as intended as well as coherent explanations of how and when they would end.

As he nears the end of his presidency, Obama faces the prospect that he will leave office with ground forces deployed to three combat zones.

Last month, the president said he would keep 5,500 ground troops in Afghanistan to advise struggling Afghan army and to pursue the remnants of al-Qaeda. In Iraq and Syria, the president has incrementally boosted the U.S. force, beginning an initial deployment of several hundred troops to Iraq in 2014, after Iraqi army forces in Mosul were overrun by Islamic State fighters. The president sent 450 more American trainers and advisers after Iraqi forces were routed at Ramadi by a much smaller Islamic State force in the spring.

Those forces were supposed to work with the Iraqi army and local tribal fighters to plan an offensive on Ramadi that has largely stalled. “We have four axes converging on Ramadi, and on any given day, none of them makes any movement at all,” said a senior U.S. official involved in the war planning.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, Obama in July made a rare visit to the Pentagon to push Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and his top commanders for options to increase the intensity of U.S. military operations without putting U.S. troops in a direct combat role.

More ambitious and costly measures such as no-fly zones or buffer zones that would require tens of thousands of ground troops to effectively protect civilians were rejected. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that she favors a no-fly zone in Syria. Other riskier proposals, such as the introduction of Apache helicopters or combat advisers who would move closer to the front lines and call in airstrikes or bolster the Iraqi attack on Ramadi, weren’t explicitly rejected but were deemed unnecessary for now.

The president’s final decision balanced his desire for the United States do more with his determination to keep American forces from being pulled too deeply into conflicts in which U.S. effectiveness was limited or where there were no clear military solutions.

The 50 Special Operations troops and the new attack planes heading to Syria and Turkey will bolster Kurdish and Syrian Arab forces that were able to make surprising gains over the summer with the backing of U.S. warplanes.

“The success in northern Syria wasn’t the result of any strategic planning,” said a senior defense official who tracks operations in the region. “Really, it was an opportunity that fell into our laps.”

Syrian Arab and Kurdish forces have fought to within 30 miles of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital. With additional American help, U.S. officials said the fighters could isolate the city, cutting its supply lines running up to the Syrian border.

Over the longer term, U.S. officials said that a loose coalition of Syrian Arab, Turkmen and Kurdish fighters might be able to dislodge the Islamic State from a 68-mile stretch of the border, creating a space where refugees can find haven. The hope is that the coalition can also begin to provide some level of governance and take part in diplomatic negotiations to replace Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

But even the most optimistic U.S. officials said such an outcome could take years.

In the near term, administration officials expressed cautious optimism that the combination of more U.S. air power, a bigger Iraqi push against Islamic State forces in Ramadi along with Kurdish and Syrian Arab efforts in Raqqa and along the border could shift the momentum on the battlefield.

“If you get all these things in motion, you put a lot of pressure on the Islamic State to move and communicate,” a senior U.S. official said. “As they do, they become targets.”

So far, it’s a strategy that hasn’t draw much support in Washington. Republicans and some Democrats, who have been pressing Obama to do more, criticized the president’s caution.

“His incremental step-by-step approach is an effort to manage risk and keep tight reins on the mission, but ultimately it could mean that the whole is less than the sum of its parts,” said Michele Flournoy, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, who was among Obama’s top choices to be defense secretary last year before Carter was selected.

Flournoy said the addition of U.S. air controllers to call in airstrikes, a more robust bombing campaign and more support to moderate rebels, combined with the measures the president is already taking, could accelerate gains on the battlefield.

“If he took these actions all at once, it could have a greater impact,” she said.

Some liberal Democrats described the president’s moves as a slippery slope to a deeper U.S. commitment. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) called the president’s announcement last week the “latest in a series of alarming signs that the U.S. war against ISIS will continue to accelerate in the absence of congressional action.”

White House officials, meanwhile, described the president’s moves as the product of hard lessons learned on a complicated and chaotic battlefield. “We always envisioned this as a three-year campaign,” the senior U.S. official said. “In year one we learned some of our local partners did well and others didn’t. So we are doubling down on those who did well.”",REAL
"geoengineeringwatch.org 
Global climate engineering programs are mathematically the single greatest assault against nature ever launched by the human race. Incredibly, the majority of global populations still remain oblivious to the ongoing blatant climate engineering atrocities occurring overhead day after day. This willful blindness of the masses is largely due to the total betrayal of the truth by the vast majority of the science community and all of mainstream media , both of whom are heavily invested in covering up the crimes of their paymasters. How badly damaged is our once thriving biosphere? We are past the point of no return in regard to the once thriving planet we have known. Below is a quote from a powerful and moving recent article by Dr. Glen Barry which accurately outlines the reality we collectively face. 
Miraculous nature is being murdered. Everywhere we look inequitable over-consumption is devastating the natural ecosystems that sustain a living Earth. Together we yield to ecological truth – personally embracing a global ecology ethic, and demanding others do so as well – or we all needlessly die at each others’ throats as the global ecological system collapses and being ends. 
A primary sign of biosphere collapse is clearly evident by the rapidly imploding cryosphere. Arctic sea ice continues to advance further into record low levels . Though official agencies like NASA will never admit to the ongoing climate engineering crimes, they are beginning to acknowledge that the excessive cloud cover over the Arctic in recent years (solar radiation management) is exacerbating the overall warming , not mitigating it. Other studies also confirm the overall planetary warming is being fueled by ""contrails"" (which are in reality solar radiation management sprayed particulate trails ). The 30 second video below fully illustrates the shocking loss of Arctic sea ice. 
Not only is the Arctic sea ice at a record low level, but now the ice on the opposite end of the Earth, Antarctica, is also rapidly retreating to record low levels as well. This is a fact that the US corporate media is not covering. The 2 minute video below elaborates on the rapidly accelerating loss of Antarctic sea ice. 
Antarctic sea ice extent has been the last vestige of denial for those who still desperately cling to the ""global warming is a hoax"" fossil fuel industry false narrative. To dogmatically cling to this false narrative is also to toe the line for the power structure, big oil, and the climate engineers . The poles are not the only part of the cryosphere that is imploding, the Himalayan glaciers are disappearing at blinding speed. The 8 minute video below is a recent update from the Himalayas. 
Our planet is already free-falling into a runaway warming scenario , global climate engineering is further fueling this scenario. The graph below illustrates the rapid increase of warmer days being recorded on our planet. 
Global climate engineering programs not only worsening the overall warming of the biosphere, but also destroying the ozone layer , derailing the hydrological cycle , and contaminating the entire planet due to the highly toxic heavy metal and chemical fallout . 
Where do we go from here? How can we stand against the power structure that currently controls the fate of the world in which we live? The single greatest leap we could collectively make in the right direction is by fully exposing the climate engineering issue to the masses. If we can expose the geoengineering assault, populations around the globe would unite in a common cause. If we can expose it, we can stop it. Those, that are still clinging to the insanely false ""global warming is a hoax"" narrative, are doing great harm to credibility of the overall anti-geoengineering community, and thus to the cause itself. The planet is accelerating into total meltdown. Climate engineering is making an already horrific anthropogenic warming scenario far worse overall. Those who truly claim to be committed to the fight to stop climate engineering have an obligation to objectively examine frontline facts and film footage . Sadly, even some major ""independent"" news sites are pushing the ""global warming is a hoax"" false narrative . Pushing this patently false narrative is exactly what climate engineering/industrial complex wants, and is extremely harmful to the cause of exposing and halting the ongoing weather warfare assault. Why? If we are to have any chance of stopping the climate engineering insanity, if we are to have any chance of convincing the climate science community to start telling the truth about the climate engineering assault, the anti-climate engineering community must stand on frontline facts and not on ridiculously false ideological dogma. Investigate, and make your voice heard , time is not on our side. 
May be freely reprinted, so long as the text is unaltered, all hyperlinks are left intact, and credit for the article is prominently given to geoengineeringwatch.org and the article’s author with a hyperlink back to the original story. 6 Responses to Climate Engineering And Cryosphere Collapse jim stewart October 27, 2016 at 4:18 pm 
""Sadly, even some major 'independent' news sites are pushing the 'global warming is a hoax' false narrative."" Indeed, shame on Infowars, considering they should know better. But then, so much hyperbolic & elipitical rhetoric is geared to sell to what folks wish to believe, rather than what truthseekers pursue to be savvy and shrewd.",FAKE
"  Donald Trump Wins The Presidency In Historic Mandate Victory As Hillary Clinton Concedes Reaction to the prospect of a Trump presidency rippled across the globe, with financial markets abroad falling as American television networks raised the prospect that Mrs. Clinton might lose. Asian markets were trading sharply lower, down around two percentage points, and in the United States, Dow Jones futures were down as much as 600 points in after-hours trading.   The American people have voted, Donald Trump is president, and the world is in shock 
“And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding:” Daniel 2:21 (KJV) Tonight. the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob spoke quite loudly. Change like this country has never seen, like the world has never seen, has arrived at our doorstep. President Trump has been elected leader of the free world . People, you better buckle up because things are about to become unglued. For well over a year now, we here at NTEB have been telling you that Donald Trump is God’s man for the White House, and that Bible prophecy would be fulfilled in the process. Two very eye-opening articles you need to read are The Real Reason Why Donald Trump Was Chosen To Be The Republican Candidate For President and Why A Bible Believer Is Supporting Donald Trump For President Of The United States . I wrote those articles on May 4 and February 13, respectively. Are YOU ready for what comes next? The liberal news media certainly does not seem to be ready, in fact, they seem to be in quite the state of shock as you can see below. The NYT declared just after 11:30 p.m, Donald Trump was declared the victor in Florida , earning him the state’s 29 electoral votes and giving him a more certain grip on the presidential contest with Mrs. Clinton. How the world is reacting to Trump’s victory: Reaction to the prospect of a Trump presidency rippled across the globe , with financial markets abroad falling as American television networks raised the prospect that Mrs. Clinton might lose. Asian markets were trading sharply lower, down around two percentage points, and in the United States, Dow Jones futures were down as much as 600 points in after-hours trading. CNN: This Sea of Red Has Got to Make You Feel Better Fox News projects: Donald Trump wins FL, Clinton wins CA Chris Wallace: Trump could be our next president Donald Trump wins Florida, CNN projects: 
Get ready for momentous change like this country has never seen, and while you do that, get ready for the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. 
Because it’s coming…  ",FAKE
"Share This 
Our nation is out of control, and perhaps the biggest threat is our lax border policy, courtesy of Barack Obama. Proving just that is an illegal alien who managed to sneak his way back into this country after being deported twice. However, it’s the sick surprise he had for his girlfriend that landed him behind bars – and hopefully, it’s for good. 
It all started when the daughter of illegal alien Raul Perez, 43, got an odd phone call from her father that just couldn’t be ignored. After hanging up with her father, Perez’s daughter immediately called 911, prompting dispatch to send a few officers to the home of the girl’s mother, 31-year-old Karla Guadalupe-Magana, a mother of 5 and Perez’s girlfriend. Raul Perez (left), Karla Guadalupe-Magana (right) (Source: Mail Online ) 
Unfortunately, the situation would take a horrid turn as officers made their way into the home to find the woman dead on the bathroom floor with Perez asleep in the bed just feet away. Come to find out, the illegal alien decided to strangle her to death for reasons unknown – but it only gets worse from there . 
According to reports, Perez is actually a Mexico national in the United States illegally and had already been deported twice, but making matters worse, he was actually in police custody just 4 days prior to the murder. Unfortunately, he was released on bond due to a technicality. 
Perez had been arrested for operating a vehicle while intoxicated, but he reportedly used a fake name to fly under the radar. Although his fingerprints were taken and sent to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeing how the agency “ doesn’t monitor this type of thing 24/7 ,” Perez was released on bond before the local jail heard anything back. 
Right now, Perez is facing life in prison and deportation once he has answered for his crimes – not that it really does any good. As it stands, this illegal alien could live the rest of his life, leeching off the American taxpayer while in our prison system, because our border is so porous that he just walked across three separate times. If he’s deported, that would solve the drain on our taxpayers, but as he’s already proven, it also means he could do it all again if our border issue isn’t solved. 
This is the type of problem that America is dealing with, and it all stems from Barack Obama’s presidency and the man’s dangerous policies. Beyond tying Border Patrol’s hands behind their backs, our so-called leader has left our nation’s border literally open for anyone to simply walk across. 
Unfortunately, because of that lunacy, a mother of 5 is now dead. However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel if Donald Trump gets elected. Not only will he allow Border Patrol to do its job, he’ll build a wall, making it just about impossible for scum like Perez to come into this country – and that, my friends, is exactly what we need.",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama joined nearly 100 members of Congress in Selma, Alabama, on Saturday for the 50th anniversary of ""Bloody Sunday"" -- a watershed moment of the civil rights movement -- where he honored the men and women who stood their ground in a violent confrontation with police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

""We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod, tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice,"" Obama said in a soaring speech that addressed race and civil rights.

The president hailed Selma as a city of extreme importance to America's history -- on par with wartime settings of Concord, Lexington and Gettysburg, and places where innovation took great strides such as Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral. And he paid deference to the foot soldiers who sparked a movement: Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Joseph Lowery, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton, Diane Nash, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, Andrew Young and Fred Shuttlesworth, among others.

""What they did here will reverberate through the ages,"" Obama said. ""Not because the change they won was preordained, not because their victory was complete, but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible; that love and hope can conquer hate.""

In attendance for the event were Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and Lewis, who rallied alongside the civil rights leader and still bears visible scars from his involvement in the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Joining them at the famed bridge were thousands of citizens, civil rights activists and politicians, including former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.

""We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true,"" he said. ""We just need to open our eyes, and ears, and hearts, to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over, the race is not yet won, and that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character -- requires admitting as much.""

But he noted that race relations in the country had come a long way since Selma, pointing to major progress in gender and marriage equality. ""What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic, or sanctioned by law and custom; and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was,"" he said.

Obama also took direct aim at Congress for failing to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement that arguably owes its existence to the confrontation in Selma. Republicans on the Hill stand broadly opposed to renewing the law, with no signs of bringing it up for a vote.

""How can that be?"" Obama asked. ""The Voting Rights Act was one of the crowning achievements of our democracy, the result of Republican and Democratic effort. President Reagan signed its renewal when he was in office. President Bush signed its renewal when he was in office. One hundred Members of Congress have come here today to honor people who were willing to die for the right it protects. If we want to honor this day, let these hundred go back to Washington, and gather four hundred more, and together, pledge to make it their mission to restore the law this year.""

""What is our excuse today for not voting? How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future?"" he asked.

""You are America. Unconstrained by habits and convention. Unencumbered by what is, and ready to seize what ought to be,"" he said. ""For everywhere in this country, there are first steps to be taken, and new ground to cover, and bridges to be crossed. And it is you, the young and fearless at heart, the most diverse and educated generation in our history, who the nation is waiting to follow.""",REAL
"Donald Trump and Paul Ryan might not have built the bridge but they at least may have established the framework toward presenting a unified front against Democrats in November, after their sit-down Thursday morning on Capitol Hill.

Following a bruising primary season where Trump and House Speaker Ryan were publicly cool toward one another, the two met at Republican Party headquarters in downtown Washington, and later described it as a “great conversation.”

Much was at stake for the presumptive nominee, for Ryan and for the party itself. The meeting was called after Ryan last week declined to endorse Trump – at a press conference following the meeting, Ryan still would not publicly do so.

Reprising comments from a day earlier, Ryan said: “This is a process. It takes a little time. You don’t put it together in 45 minutes. … I don’t want us to have a fake unification process here.”

At the same time, Ryan said he was “very encouraged” and they are “planting the seeds” to get unified.

Trump on Thursday had lined up three meetings with members of the Republican establishment he’s spent much of his campaign railing against. He met first with Ryan and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who also tweeted that the meeting was a “very positive step toward party unity.” He then sat down with House GOP leaders, followed by a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other top Senate Republicans.

“While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground,” Trump and Ryan said in a joint statement. “We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal. … This was our first meeting, but it was a very positive step toward unification.”

A source inside the first meeting also described it as “very positive” and a “good step toward achieving party unity.” According to the source, Trump and Ryan discussed a range of policy issues. The source would not characterize, though, whether Ryan was “there” yet on Trump himself.

But the source provided an unvarnished assessment to Fox News: “No B.S. Very helpful.”

On the sidelines, lawmakers had conflicting views over how to handle Trump as their party nominee.

Pro-Trump Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., told Fox News he’s “baffled” by colleagues who won’t get behind Trump.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., though, said he’s among those “who would love to see [Trump] tone it down.”

On Wednesday, explaining his hesitation about outright endorsing Trump, Ryan said he wanted to pursue ""real unification"" among Republicans after a hotly contested primary campaign.

""We cannot afford to lose this election to Hillary Clinton,” Ryan said at a news conference Wednesday.

In a closed-door GOP meeting Wednesday, a number of Republicans stood up and argued in support of Trump, with one saying that anyone who cares about ""unborn babies"" should get behind him because of the likelihood the next president will make Supreme Court appointments, and Trump's would be better than Clinton's, lawmakers who were present told the Associated Press.

Others expressed reservations, and asked Ryan to raise concerns with Trump about where he really stands on social issues and budgetary policies, including changes to Social Security and Medicare. Trump has said in the past that he doesn't want to touch Social Security or Medicare, whereas Medicare cuts have been a centerpiece of GOP budgets Ryan has shepherded over the years.

Earlier Wednesday, Trump sought to downplay the stakes of his visit with Ryan, telling ""Fox and Friends"", ""If we make a deal, that will be great. And if we don't, we will trudge forward like I've been doing and winning all the time.""

Trump's allies and advisers have repeatedly insisted that he can claim the White House with or without leading congressional Republicans. Additionally, Trump's team doesn't believe Ryan or the GOP's other congressional leaders have any significant influence on the majority of general election voters.

Some congressional Republicans have made clear that they would like to see Ryan come around to supporting Trump sooner rather than later.

""Donald Trump is unifying the party already,"" said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Trump's chief Washington ally. ""The party is the people who vote.""

Another Trump supporter, Rep. John Fleming, R-La., predicted it was ""very unlikely"" that Ryan would not ultimately back the Republican nominee.

Wednesday night, Trump's campaign released an endorsement signed by the chairs of seven House committees. ""It is paramount that we coalesce around the Republican nominee, Mr. Donald J. Trump,"" the GOP lawmakers wrote.

While Trump's team is prepared to shrug off much of the party's establishment, that does not include the RNC.

The political novice plans to rely heavily on the committee's expansive political operation to supplement his bare-bones campaign, which has so far ignored seemingly vital functions such as voter data collection, swing-state staffing and fundraising infrastructure.

""As we turn our focus toward the general election, we want to make sure there's the strongest partnership,"" said Sean Spicer, the RNC's chief strategist.

Absent a viable Republican alternative, there were new signs on Capitol Hill that Trump's conservative critics were beginning to fall in line.

""As a conservative, I cannot trust Donald Trump to do the right thing, but I can deeply trust Hillary Clinton to do the wrong thing every time,"" said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., adding that he would vote for Trump if that's the choice he has.

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho., said he will support Trump, although ""I'm not enthusiastic about it.""

""He can get us enthusiastic if he comes to talk to us,"" continued Labrador.

Meanwhile, more Republican voters appear to be moving behind Trump, despite big-name holdouts such as Ryan, both former president Bushes and the party's 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.

Almost two in three Republican-leaning voters now view Trump favorably, compared to 31 percent who view him unfavorably, according to a national Gallup Poll taken last week. The numbers represent a near reversal from Gallup's survey in early March.

Fox News' John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with attorneys general in 10 other states, are suing the Obama administration over the president's directive to allow transgender students to use whatever bathroom that matches their gender preference.

The lawsuit is an attempt to make sure states can ignore the federal government's mandate.

The 10 other states joining the lawsuit include Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Maine, Louisiana, Utah and Georgia.

They're asking the courts to declare the directive unlawful, accusing the administration of engineering a ""massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.""

Supporters of the lawsuit argue that in addition to violating privacy and safety rights of women and children, the White House directive is a major overreach of power.

""Simply put, the Obama administration is creating new law, outside the boundaries of the Constitution - making changes only Congress can make,"" Paxton said.

""I think the problem with the way the Obama administration has carried this out is that they haven't candidly assessed the cost of this type of policy,"" Trotter said on NPR.

""So we understand that women need privacy. They need safety in places that they frequent. And yet the Obama administration has decided to reinterpret an old law that never included transgender people for over 40 years,"" she said.

Trotter said the president is doing this from a Washington one-size-fits-all edict instead of going through Congress and having a national discussion.

Some schools are now worried if they don't comply, they will lose funding.

""We don't have a rule of law if we can reinterpret a more than 40-year-old law and say that the plain language, the black letter of the law is meaningless because someone has become enlightened about it,"" Trotter said.

Texas' lieutenant governor previously went as far as to say the state is willing to give up the $10 billion it receives in federal education dollars rather than comply.

The directive from the U.S. Justice and Education Departments represents an escalation in what the Obama administration calls a civil rights issue.

""This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them - indeed, to protect all of us,"" U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.

This isn't the only legal fight over transgender rights. Earlier this month the Justice Department and the state of North Carolina sued each other over a state law curbing public restroom access for transgender people.

The question of whether federal civil rights law protects those who identify as transgender has no definitive answer and will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Still, schools that refuse to comply with the Obama administration's directive could very likely be hit with civil rights lawsuits from the government and a cutoff from federal aid to education.",REAL
"Next Swipe left/right A brutal spoof advert for the new Macbook that highlights everything it doesn’t have What if instead of useful features, your shiny new laptop has less stuff that before? You need a 2016 Macbook Pro!",FAKE
"All 10 US Navy sailors detained by Iran after drifting into its territorial waters have been released, the US and Iran said Wednesday.

Could the juvenile suspects in the Tennessee wildfires be tried as adults?

Detained American Navy sailors shown in an undisclosed location in Iran. Iranian state television reported that all 10 U.S. sailors detained by Iran after entering its territorial waters have been released. Iran's Revolutionary Guard said the sailors were released Wednesday after it was determined that their entry was not intentional.

All 10 U.S. Navy sailors detained by Iran after drifting into its territorial waters a day earlier have been freed, the U.S. and Iran said Wednesday.

The Navy said the American crew members returned safely and there were no indications they had been harmed while in custody.

The nine men and one woman were held at an Iranian base on Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf after they were detained nearby on Tuesday. The tiny outpost has been used as a base for Revolutionary Guard speedboats as far back as the 1980s.

The sailors departed the island at 0843 GMT aboard the boats they were detained with, the Navy said. They were picked up by Navy aircraft and other sailors took control of their boats for the return voyage to Bahrain, where the U.S. 5th Fleet is based.

The Navy added that it ""will investigate the circumstances that led to the sailors' presence in Iran.""

The Revolutionary Guard's official website published images of the detained U.S. sailors before their release, showing them sitting on the floor of a room. They look mostly bored or annoyed, though at least one of the sailors appears to be smiling. The sole woman had her hair covered by a brown cloth. The pictures also showed what appeared to be their two boats.

""After determining that their entry into Iran's territorial waters was not intentional and their apology, the detained American sailors were released in international waters,"" a statement posted online by the Guard said Wednesday.

US Vice President Joe Biden says that America did not apologize to Iran over U.S. sailors allegedly entering Iranian territorial waters.

Biden made the comments Wednesday in an interview with ""CBS This Morning.""

The vice president said: ""There's nothing to apologize for. When you have a problem with the boat you apologize the boat had a problem? No, and there was no looking for any apology. This was just standard nautical practice.""

Biden said that the Iranians realized the U.S. sailors ""were there in distress and said they would release them and released them like ordinary nations would do.""

Gen. Ali Fadavi, the navy chief of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard, was quoted earlier Wednesday by Iranian state TV as saying that an investigation had shown the Americans entered Iranian territorial waters because of ""mechanical problems in their navigation system.""

U.S. officials also blamed mechanical trouble for the incident. They had said on Tuesday that Tehran assured them the crew and vessels would be returned safely and promptly.

Fadavi said the American boats had shown ""unprofessional acts"" for 40 minutes before being picked up by Iranian forces after entering the country's territorial waters. He said Tehran did not consider the U.S. Navy boats violating Iranian territorial waters as an ""innocent passage.""

The sailors were nonetheless allowed to make contact with the U.S. military, based on Iran's ""responsibilities and Islamic mercy"" late Tuesday, he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who forged a personal relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif during the three years of nuclear negotiations, called his Iranian counterpart immediately on learning of the incident, according to a senior U.S. official. Kerry ""personally engaged"" with Zarif on the issue, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Kerry said in a statement Wednesday: ""That this issue was resolved peacefully and efficiently is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure and strong.""

Kerry has a close relationship with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif after the recent nuclear deal between the Islamic Republic and world powers.

Kerry learned of the incident around 12:30 p.m. EST as he and U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter were meeting their Filipino counterparts at the State Department, the official said.

Fadavi said Zarif ""had a firm stance"" during the telephone conversation with Kerry about the sailors' presence in Iran's territorial waters and ""said they should not have come and should apologize.""

Carter said he was pleased with the sailors' release and he thanked Kerry for his diplomatic efforts. ""Around the world, the U.S. Navy routinely provides assistance to foreign sailors in distress, and we appreciate the timely way in which this situation was resolved,"" Carter said.

The Guard's 200,000-strong force is different from the regular Iranian military and is charged with protecting the ruling system. Its naval forces are heavily dependent on armed speedboats that can be used in teams to swarm much larger vessels.

The incident came amid heightened tensions with Iran, and only hours before President Barack Obama gave his final State of the Union address to Congress and the public. It set off a dramatic series of calls and meetings as U.S. officials tried to determine the exact status of the crew and reach out to Iranian leaders.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told The Associated Press late Tuesday U.S. time that the sailors' boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when the U.S. lost contact with them.

The sailors were part of Riverine Squadron 1 based in San Diego and were deployed to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain. When the U.S. lost contact with the boats, ships attached to the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier strike group began searching the area, along with aircraft flying off the Truman.

The Riverine boats were not part of the carrier strike group, and were on a training mission, the officials said. The craft are not considered high-tech and don't contain any sensitive equipment, so there were no concerns about the Iranians gaining access to them, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive incident publicly.

In an earlier incident, in late December, Iran launched a rocket test near U.S. warships and boats passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, the route for about a fifth of the world's oil.

Last February, Iran sank a replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier near the strait and has said it is testing ""suicide drones"" that could conduct kamikaze missions on naval ships. It has also challenged foreign cargo ships operating in the Gulf, opening fire on at least two in April and May.

In one of those incidents, Iran temporarily seized a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship over what it said was a commercial dispute before releasing it with its crew more than a week later.

Meanwhile, Iran was expected to satisfy the terms of last summer's nuclear deal in just days. Once the U.N. nuclear agency confirms Iran's actions to roll back its program, the United States and other Western powers are obliged to suspend wide-ranging oil, trade and financial sanctions on Tehran. Kerry recently said the deal's implementation was ""days away.""

Schreck reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Bradley Klapper and Richard Lardner in Washington, Jon Gambrell in Dubai and Nasser Karimi in Tehran contributed to this report.",REAL
"It's a big primary day in the race for the White House, with Donald Trump trying to lock down his GOP frontrunner status. Democrat Hillary Clinton is trying to do the same.

""Super Tuesday 2,"" as some are calling it, is a day that could be the critical turning point in the race for president: there'll be contests in five states, including the delegate-rich, winner-take-all states of Florida and Ohio.

""This is a place I want to win. This is the place, this is going to do it,"" said Trump, who was in Ohio overnight attacking its governor and his rival John Kasich. The two are neck-and-neck in the polls there.

""Kasich cannot make America great again,"" Trump said. ""He can't do it.""

If Trump loses Ohio, some analysts believe that when the Republicans meet in Cleveland it could be a contested convention. If Kasich loses, he's likely out of the race.

Nevertheless, the ""Stop Trump"" movement was in full effect, with the billionaire's rivals spending Monday reminding voters of the recent violence at some of Trump's rallies.

""This country is not about us tearing one another down,"" Kasich said.

""Oh look, a Bernie Sanders sign,"" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., noted at one of his rallies. ""Don't worry, you're not going to get beat up at my rally.""

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said, ""One difference between this and a Donald Trump rally is I'm not asking anyone to punch you in the face.""

But Trump insisted, ""There's no violence. There's a love fest. These are love fests.""

Meanwhile in Florida, Rubio is determined to claim victory in his winner-take-all home state, despite polling behind Trump – in some cases by more than 20 points.

And in Charlotte, North Carolina, Clinton was blaming Trump for the violence at his rallies.

""I do call him responsible. I think if you go back several months, he's been building this incitement,"" she charged.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was in Illinois, far behind in the delegate count but confident – and getting much closer in the polls in recent days.

""Let us see this great state lead this country into a political revolution,"" he told supporters.

Clinton holds a wide lead in Florida and North Carolina, but recent polls show a tight race in Missouri and Sanders narrowing her advantage in Illinois and Ohio.",REAL
"We still do not know who or what is responsible for the crash of EgyptAir Flight 804, but we know this much for certain: The terrorist danger is growing, and it won’t be contained to the Mediterranean.

Responding to criticism of President Obama’s handling of terrorism, White House press secretary Josh Earnest boasted Thursday of all the setbacks the Islamic State has experienced in recent months, noting that in Iraq “45 percent of the populated area that ISIL previously controlled has been retaken from them. In Syria, that figure is now 20 percent.”

That’s like a patient who ignored a cancer diagnosis bragging that he finally reduced the tumor in his lung — glossing over the fact that he let it spread and metastasize to his other organs. If he had attacked the Islamic State cancer early, Obama could have stopped it from spreading in the first place. But instead, he dismissed the terrorist group as the “JV team” that was “engaged in various local power struggles and disputes” and did not have “the capacity and reach of a bin Laden” and did not pose “a direct threat to us.” He did nothing, while the cancer grew in Syria and then spread in Iraq.

Now the cancer has spread and metastasized across the world.

According to a recent CNN analysis, since declaring its caliphate in 2014, the Islamic State has carried out 90 attacks in 21 countries outside of Iraq and Syria that have killed 1,390 people and injured more than 2,000 others. The Islamic State has a presence in more than a dozen countries and has declared “provinces” in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Post reported in 2015 that “since the withdrawal of most U.S. and international troops in December, the Islamic State has steadily made inroads in Afghanistan” where it has “poured pepper into the wounds of their enemies . . . seared their hands in vats of boiling oil . . . blindfolded, tortured and blown apart [villagers] with explosives buried underneath them.”

And while the Islamic State spreads and grows, al-Qaeda is making a comeback. Obama is touting the killing of Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour as “an important milestone,” but the truth is that the Taliban has made major military gains in Afghanistan — and that has opened the door to al-Qaeda. The Post reported in October that “American airstrikes targeted what was ‘probably the largest’ al-Qaeda training camp found in the 14-year Afghan war.” Sounds good except for one small problem: There were no major al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan when Obama took office. Now it is once again training terrorists in the land where it trained operatives for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Al-Qaeda has also regained lost ground in Yemen, the country where it trained and deployed the underwear bomber who nearly blew up a plane bound for Detroit in 2009. And as a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project notes, the “Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group” and “is much more dangerous to the U.S. than the ISIS model in the long run.”

Overall, Gen. Jack Keane recently testified that al-Qaeda has “grown fourfold in the last five years.”

We’re lying to ourselves if we think that the violence we are witnessing is going to be confined to the Middle East . . . or South Asia . . . or North Africa . . . or Europe. It is only a matter of time before the Islamic State and al-Qaeda bring this violence here to our shores.

Indeed, in many ways we face a situation far more dangerous and complex than we did before Sept. 11, 2001. Before 9/11, we largely faced a danger from one terrorist network (al-Qaeda) with safe haven in one nation (Afghanistan). Today, we face danger from multiple terrorist networks with safe havens in a dozen or more countries.

Moreover, we face something we have never seen before: two terrorist networks — the Islamic State and al-Qaeda — competing with each other for the hearts of the jihadi faithful and the backing of jihadi financiers. The way to win that competition is to be the first to carry out a catastrophic attack here in the United States.

When it came to terrorist networks, the George W. Bush administration had a mantra: We’re going to fight them over there so that we do not have to face them here at home. Obama abandoned that mantra. And now the danger is getting closer to home with each passing day.

Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"You are here: Home / US / Politico Tries to Destroy Trump, But It Backfires IMMEDIATELY Politico Tries to Destroy Trump, But It Backfires IMMEDIATELY October 28, 2016 
Sometimes you want so desperately for something to be true, you print it in an article and dispense it for public viewing. 
Wait. That’s not a saying at all. Hmmm… 
Well, that is what Politico must think and that’s certainly what they did. 
You wonder why we can’t trust liberal news media … 
According to The Blaze : 
Politico ran a story Thursday night that suggested that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s “Trump Victory” fund had transferred no money to the Republican National Committee in the month of October. The actual truth is that Trump has transferred about $2.2 million so far this month, along with several hundred thousand dollars to various state committees. It is not clear what caused the error, but Politico’s site now reads: 
This story has been corrected. An earlier version said the RNC did not receive any money directly from Trump Victory. POLITICO regrets the error. 
Of course, even that “small” amount of money would seem shocking to Politico considering their candidate of choice flies around the world in a Boeing on charitable donations, kowtows to the wealthy for donations to the slush-fund, and only wears the finest of all pantsuits. 
Trump’s funds may be small because, unlike the Hillz, he is not a part of the political establishment. 
Although the donations are “anemic” this year, and come nowhere near the monstrous amount of dollars the Clintons are using to dupe Americans into standing with her, Donald Trump has a real chance at winning this election. 
Despite the attempts by the liberal media to silence real stories of Clinton corruption, despite the smoke and mirrors the Clinton campaign created to make Trump look like a monster, he’s still in the fight. 
Let’s take a lesson from Politico and continue to raise suspicions over liberal media sources. 
It is pretty bad that a press is so incredibly desperate to cast Trump in a poor light that they resort to flat out lies. 
Silly Politico , that’s what Hillary does!",FAKE
"Email Print After writing a lengthy suicide note exposing terrifying plans the government has for American citizens, a US Customs Agent walked onto a pier in NYC and blew his brains out. Sources inside the New York City Police Department have revealed to SuperStation95, the contents of a suicide note found on the body and they are utterly frightening. The note, which says it was written over the course of a full week in advance, outlines why the officer chose to shoot himself: “The America I grew up in, and cherished, has been murdered by its own federal government. Our Constitution has become meaningless and our laws politicized so badly, they are no longer enforced except for political purposes” the note said. “Our elected officials are, to a person, utterly corrupt and completely devoid of any love or respect for the country which pays them. To them, everything is about getting and keeping power, and making illicit money from backroom deals.” The 42-year-old U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officer shot himself with a 40 caliber service pistol inside Pier 40 in Hudson River Park at around 11 am. (1) A source at the scene described how the officer calmly walked into the park, took out his pistol and shot himself in the head. A ICE federal agent fatally shot himself in the head at waterfront Chelsea park (pictured) in New York Friday The 42-year-old worked as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officer and his offices were nearby to the scene of the shooting. He was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital but doctors were unable to save him. (2) ICE released a statement Friday afternoon: ‘Tragically, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officer from the New York field office suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound and has passed away.’ It added: ‘The agency is not releasing further details pending notification of the officer’s next of kin. According to the suicide note, the Officer said: “I was hired to enforce the law; to capture and deport people who come to this country against our laws. But now, if I dare to do that, I face being suspended or fired because our President refuses to faithfully execute the duties of his office. Instead, I come to work each day, and collect a paycheck twice a month, for intentionally doing little to nothing. I cannot and will not be party to this fraud; to this usurpation of the law, or to the despicable politicians betraying our nation” the note continued. ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing the matter and coordinating with the New York Police Department on the investigation. The agent worked at a field office in lower Manhattan, just blocks away from the scene of the shooting. MENTIONS “FEMA CAMPS” FOR AMERICANS (3) In the suicide note, the officer revealed what he claimed are terrifying plans the feds have been finalizing: “If the American people knew what this government is planning, they would rise-up and overthrow it. If I or anyone else in the federal government revealed what is coming, we would be killed anyway, so now I will reveal what I know. We in federal law enforcement have been drilling for several years to control riots and uprisings from a coming financial collapse and widespread bank failures. The drills involve life-sized images of American men, even women and children, whom we are told to shoot for “practice” and to “get used to it.” We have been told that the economy is terminally ill and will fail in 2016. We are also told the banks are all insolvent and the FDIC doesn’t have nearly enough funds to bail out depositors. We are told these events are unavoidable and it is imperative that the government survive when people rise-up over this. When the collapse takes place, detention camps created under the FEMA REX-84 program in the 1980’s to house illegal aliens whom we were going to deport, will instead be used to imprison American Citizens whom the government feels constitute a “threat.” American citizens will be rounded-up without warrants and imprisoned without trial for God knows how long. These camps have been equipped to carry out Hitler-scale killings! An actual “purge” of Americans citizens by the very government which they, themselves, created and pay for! I cannot be party to this.” The Note goes on to say talk about state-level national guard being disarmed by the feds (4) and over 1 Billion rounds of ammunition purchased by the feds (5) and the Military over-deployed and being shrunk (6) : “The government knows the military will rise-up to stop this, so our military is being deployed overseas, intentionally involved in foreign fights, and deliberately shrunk in size so they cannot be here or help Americans! This is why certain ammunition and weaponry has been removed from state-level National Guard Armories and over a Billion rounds of hollow point ammunition has been bought by the federal government. The states themselves have been disarmed of military-grade firepower so they cannot defend themselves from the federal activities. This is also why local police departments have been militarized and provided with armored vehicles and weapons of war” the note says. “When the inevitable collapse begins to take place, electric power to the entire country will be shut off, as will all forms of communication. All banks will be immediately closed; no one will be able to get any money because all ATM’s will be offline. Credit, Debit and EBT cards will not function. Anyone without cash will have no way to get any. The Emergency Alert System will be used to takeover all broadcast stations and tell the public this is a result of a cyber attack. But while the American people patiently await things to get back to normal, the government will unleash round-ups of citizens they deem militants or dangerous . With all civilian communications out, and all TV and radio stations taken over by the Emergency Alert System, by the time word spreads of what is taking place, the government will already have the upper hand. Federal Prisoners to be GASSED TO DEATH The note goes into a wide array of very specific plans and does so in extremely specific detail about what the feds are allegedly planning. For instance, it talks about federal prisons: “Every federal prison has been outfitted with lethal gas systems. When things go bad, all prisoners in all prisons will be placed in their cells on lock-down. Prison staff will depart the facility, and a certain designated person will trigger a lethal gas system. All federal prisoners, regardless of their crime or their sentence, will be gassed to death in their cells. Once the gas clears, the dead will be removed and the prisons will then be used to house citizens who fight against the federal onslaught.” PRIESTS RECRUITED TO QUELL OPPOSITION (7) The note makes mention about Priests, Rabbis and Clerics from various religious denominations having been recruited and trained to quell resistance: “So intent is the government to succeed they have recruited priests, rabbis and clerics from various religions to quote appropriate Scriptures about “obeying government.” They are being trained to tell people not to fight back and that their best hope is to pray.” EXECUTIVE ORDER 13603 (8) The suicide note goes to great lengths about Executive Order #13603 signed by President Obama on March 16, 2012. The note details: 
Executive order 13603 about “National Defense Resources Preparedness.” 
This 10-page document is a blueprint for a federal takeover of the economy. Specifically, Obama’s plan involves seizing control of: 
* “All commodities and products that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals” 
* “All forms of energy” 
* “All forms of civil transportation” 
* “All usable water from all sources” 
* “Health resources – drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment” 
* Forced labor ( or “induction” as the executive order delicately refers to military conscription) 
Moreover, federal officials would “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources.” SuperStation95 took a look at this Executive Order from the Government Printing Office (GPO) web site and, sure enough, everything contained in the Officer’s suicide note about this Executive Order is true! To be sure, much of this language has appeared in national security executive orders that previous presidents have issued periodically since the beginning of the Cold War. But more than previous national security executive orders, Obama’s 13603 seems to describe a potentially totalitarian regime obsessed with control over everything. Obama’s executive order makes no effort to justify the destruction of liberty, no effort to explain how amassing totalitarian control would enable government to deal effectively with cyber sabotage, suicide bombings, chemical warfare, nuclear missiles or other possible threats. There’s nothing in executive order 13603 about upholding the Constitution or protecting civil liberties. In what circumstances, one might ask, would a president try to carry out this audacious plan? Executive order 13603 says with ominous ambiguity: during “ the full spectrum of emergencies .” DATABASE OF PREPPERS The suicide note touches on the subject of “Preppers:” “We in federal law enforcement have also been told that the government has a full database of all so-called “Preppers.” Those people will be dealt with first — by armed federal agents coming to take their guns, then their food stocks, so food can be re-distributed as the government sees fit.” If the dead Officer’s claims about an unavoidable economic and banking collapse are true, would it then follow that the Executive Order put in place by Obama, might be activated? Would all of us find ourselves in forced labor, while the government takes OUR food and re-distrubutes it under the Executive Order’s paragraph about “allocating resources?” This is terrifying stuff! There is much more to the suicide note and SuperStation95 is considering how much more to publish. As such, this is a developing story and readers should check back for further updates. THESE COULD SIMPLY BE INSANE RAMBLINGS It is not our intent to cause panic or alarm and while we expect readers to be intelligent enough to discern this on their own, we feel compelled to point out that these could simply be paranoid ramblings of an insane person who killed himself. On the other hand, these could also be revelations by a person who was so distraught over the ugly truth, that he killed himself. We at SuperStation95 just don’t know. We urge everyone to stay calm, think rationally, and decide whether or not to take any action to prepare, in case this person’s suicide note is telling the truth. SOURCING / CORROBORATION 
(1) ICE Agent Suicide in NYC: NY Daily News 
(2) Taken to Lenox Hill Hospital NY Post 
(3) REX-84 FEMA CAMPS Wikipedia 
(4) National Guard being stripped of Crew-Serviceable Weapons and communications gear – Republic Broadcasting, John Stadmiller 
(5) Dept. of Homeland Security Orders 1.6 BILLION rounds of ammunition Forbes Magazine 
(6) US Army over-deployed and intentionally shrunk ARMY TIMES 
(7) Clergy Recruited by Gov’t to quell opposition KSLA-TV Channel 12 
(8) Executive Order 13603 White House US Government Printing Office UPDATE – MAY 10, 2016 10:00 PM EDT– The web site SNOPES.com has issued a declaration that our story is some sort of hoax, that we are somehow NOT a radio station and attributed the story – and this web site – to a former FBI National Security Intelligence Asset named Hal Turner, whom she smears as a “White Supremacist.” This is not the first time SNOPES.com has made accusations against us simply because we have been the exclusive source of politically-incorrect news. And while we stand-by our stories in every regard, this barrage of attacks by SNOPES.com is becoming libelous. 
We address the SNOPES.com accusations one at a time: 1) No aspect of our story above is a hoax. What Snopes.com seems to take issue with is the existence and content of a suicide note which was revealed to us by the NYPD. The person from NYPD who gave us this information did so after trying to get two other New York Media outlets, (one TV, the other a newspaper) to publish the story and was rebuked within minutes by media contacts who said “we won’t touch this with a ten foot pole.” The fact that the NYPD now claims “no note was found” does not surprise us at all; NYPD has very close ties with the feds and the feds have an intense interest in concealing or discrediting the information it contained. 2) According to the FCC Licensing Bureau, 95.1 FM in New York City is the HD-4 frequency for WNSH 94.7 FM as licensed by the FCC as shown HERE 3) Our story was written by our News Room staff, not anyone named Hal Turner. 4) Mr. Turner was formerly a paying customer of this radio station from October 7, 2015 thru March 30, 2016. He bought air time from us to air his personal radio show “The Hal Turner Show.” Finances caused Mr. Turner to cancel his programming on our radio station and continue his show on WBCQ International Shortwave , where he is on the air live from 9-11 PM every Wednesday evening. Mr. Turner’s web site is: HalTurnerShow.com . He is welcome to return to our airwaves if his finances improve. 5) SNOPES.com claims Mr. Turner is a “white supremacist.” In reality Mr. Turner worked for the FBI from 1993 – 2008, with his TOD as the Joint Terrorism Task Force from 2003-2008. His job was to infiltrate white supremacist groups to thwart violent criminal acts by such persons. This information came out when the Obama Administration betrayed Mr. Turner in 2009 and arrested him for writing in 2009, what the government PAID HIM $3,000 TO SAY on DATELINE NBC and FOX NEWS CHANNEL just four years earlier in 2005! After three trials (two hung juries) Mr. Turner was Bankrupted by legal fees, was appointed a public defender, who threw the case, resulting in Mr. Turner’s conviction. For SNOPES.com to smear Mr. Turner as a “White Supremacist” when federal court records show the exact opposite, is a prime example of the utterly shoddy research and reporting provided by SNOPES.com 
The criticism and SNOPES.com outright falsehoods about this story, and others, have been written mostly by: 
Ms. Kim A Lacapria, Age 37 (born Mar 20, 1979 ) 
39 Cockonoe AVE 
Babylon, NY 11702-1901 Those of you who are offended by this type of journalistic misconduct, may wish to contact Ms. LaCapria in a peaceful, lawful, non-threatening and non-violent manner to complain about her shoddy journalism. PLEASE DO NOT HARASS THIS IGNORANT PERSON and PLEASE,PLEASE,PLEASE do not make any threats or commit any intimidation. None of us need that and it will only result in serious legal trouble. 
Ms. La Capria can be reached at: Tel. (516) 422-7943 
(516) 422-7494 ",FAKE
"Font Size ""What does the rising gold price mean for the Russian economy and ordinary consumers?"" ""It means that the Russian Central Bank has been running a justifiable policy, because the bank has been purchasing gold during the recent three years. Now gold will cost even more. Citizens still have an opportunity to buy gold investment coins that are VAT-free in Russia, unlike bullions. ""In Russia, there are three ways of investing in gold. They include unallocated bullion accounts in banks - bullions and coins. This method is bad because unallocated bullion accounts are excluded from the deposit insurance program. Therefore, if a bank collapses, the state will not give you anything back. ЭA bullion is a good investment, but in Russia, this investment shall include 18% of value added tax. Therefore, your price per one gram or one ounce of gold will be 18 percent higher. Gold investment coins are exempt from VAT, so this is the most profitable way among those that exist. ЭIn Russia, the most common gold coin is known as ""Pobedonosets"" or ""Victorious."" This is a quarter of an ounce coin. The global standard is one ounce or 31 grams. In Russia, however, we produce quarter of an ounce coins - approximately 7.7 grams of pure gold. Today, this coin costs about 20,000 rubles. I bought it in the early 2000s when it was 4,000 rubles. The price grows in both rubles and dollars. ЭThe most popular foreign coin is known as the ""Australian Kangaroo,"" because it depicts a kangaroo. This coin costs about 91,000 rubles today. This is an ounce coin, 9999 purity. Since the beginning of the year the price on the coin has increased by 20 percent,"" said Alexey Vyazovsky. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"Katie Walsh, the Republican National Committee’s chief of staff, was just a few hours from meeting with Donald Trump’s new political director this week when the television outside her office blared the latest news breaking out of the Trump orbit. “Christie defends Trump: He’s not a racist,” the CNN headline declared.

The scene illustrates the tricky task facing the party, which is serving as the main engine behind Trump’s presidential bid: How do you a run a disciplined campaign for a candidate who is anything but?

“He’s the nominee, and he’s going to make sure his views are known,” Walsh said carefully during an interview. “He’s made that pretty clear. We will leave it to Mr. Trump to speak for Mr. Trump . . . and we will keep hitting Hillary and raising money to be ready for November.”

Trump’s failure to build a truly national campaign has left it to the GOP to run one on his behalf, while also trying to extinguish the regular political brush fires set off by the unpredictable candidate. The arrangement has intensified the burden on the Republican National Committee, forcing it to absorb core campaign tasks and testing whether it has improved the field and data capabilities on which it fell short in 2012.

The real estate mogul’s operation has centered on his ability to gobble up news time with a stream of tweets, rallies and television hits, while largely outsourcing basic political functions such as fundraising and rapid-response efforts. He is leaning on the RNC even more as the race moves into the general-election phase, which requires intensive work to identify, persuade and mobilize voters.

The Trump campaign has yet to build out its headquarters or national staff, ending the primaries with 70 employees, compared with 732 on the payroll for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His backstop is the party: The RNC has deployed 461 field staffers to 16 states — more than it has ever had on the ground at this point in an election — while spending $100 million on its data and digital operations since the last presidential campaign. The investments were pushed by Chairman Reince Priebus after the Democrats outgunned the GOP in 2012.

“It creates an opportunity for the party to, for lack of a better term, show off what it’s been working on for the last three and a half years and provide the campaign with the infrastructure they don’t have the time to build right now,” Walsh said.

“We are kind of the infantry coming up behind the campaign saying, ‘We’re here. How can we be helpful?’ And the Trump campaign has embraced that,” she added.

For the RNC to successfully take over many of the campaign’s traditional tasks requires trust, coordination and a unified strategy — all difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. But this year is anything but normal.

Priebus ended up deeply immersed in a behind-the-scenes effort this week to persuade Trump to walk back his accusations that a Latino federal judge was biased against him because of the judge’s ethnicity, even making editing suggestions for the statement that the candidate eventually released, according to people familiar with his role.

[The rant that could derail Trump — and the GOP rush to get him back on track]

“The team they have in place is very good,” said GOP strategist Mike DuHaime, who served as RNC political director during George W. Bush’s second term and helped guide the 2008 turnout effort. “I think what ultimately is missing is that it needs to mesh with the nominee’s. . . . No matter what the RNC does, it’s still up to the campaign to set the direction.”

That direction has been coming from Trump, who serves as his own strategist. He personally responds to nearly every critique, including that his operation is too meager. “I am getting bad marks from certain pundits because I have a small campaign staff,” Trump tweeted this week. “But small is good, flexible, save money and number one!”

Senior RNC officials are offering daily advice and resources to their less-experienced campaign counterparts. Communications strategist Sean Spicer is in constant contact with Trump press secretary Hope Hicks, while chief digital officer Gerrit Lansing is coordinating with Trump’s small digital staff.

“It’s a collaborative effort,” said campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “They are working hand-in-glove with us. We are working with their team; they are working with our team. Everyone is happy.”

Party officials have been making the case that the campaign needs to expand its footprint, but persuading Trump has been a slow process. The candidate scrutinizes proposed budgets, sending them back with skeptical queries, according to people familiar with the discussions. His main argument: I spent only $56 million in the primary, and I beat 16 opponents — why do I need all this?

“It’s not so much, ‘We don’t trust you’; it’s, ‘Help me understand why I need this,’ ” Walsh said of the campaign’s reaction. “There’s a dialogue that maybe wouldn’t exist with a more traditional candidate that had used more traditional methods in his primary campaign.”

Lewandowski said the campaign will soon expand its political, communications and fundraising teams. “We will keep growing, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. Among the additions: political director Jim Murphy, a longtime GOP consultant who was tapped after predecessor Rick Wiley was abruptly dismissed.

[Many Trump supporters don’t believe his wildest promises — and they don’t care]

Because of his unrivaled ability to reach millions of voters through social media, many party officials think that Trump will be able to forgo some of the expenses that have bloated presidential campaigns in the past.

“Look, Donald Trump has thrown out the rule book and rewritten it and run the most nontraditional, unorthodox campaign in my lifetime, and it’s worked so far,” said Steve Duprey, an RNC committeeman from New Hampshire.

Still, even round-the-clock media domination will not be enough to secure an Election Day victory, GOP strategists warned.

“People can talk all they want to about how this race will be determined on the big-picture message and Hillary’s approval numbers and how horrible they are,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. “It always comes down to good, old-fashioned blocking and tackling. We turn out our voters, we win. They do a better job, they win.”

And the underfunded state parties alone cannot carry the weight of a fall turnout operation, which typically is buttressed by hundreds of presidential campaign staffers.

Getting the right voters to the polls to support Trump and the rest of the GOP ticket falls to Chris Carr, a garrulous Louisiana native who serves as the RNC’s political director. From his third-floor office at RNC headquarters, Carr has spent the past 16 months remaking the party’s field program. In doing so, he has looked at the RNC’s vaunted turnout apparatus in 2004 for lessons, increasing the emphasis on volunteer training and metrics.

He also has studied the methods used by President Obama’s team, which he saw up close as the Nevada state director for Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012. Romney’s main field office in the state that year was in Summerlin, down the street from a small Obama for America office.

“Any time of the day you could go and pull on that door, it was locked,” Carr recalled. “We were like, what is this guy doing? . . . He was in his turf, working. He was organizing.”

Carr has sought to bring that model to the RNC. Rather than assign staff to battleground states based on population, the terrain has been carved up into small “turfs” that each contain 8,000 to 10,000 low-propensity or swing voters. The party deployed an early wave of staffers last fall to key states to focus on voter registration. Volunteers have been cultivated with one-on-one coffee meetings and monthly house parties.

Beginning last Friday, each state team was required to begin a daily door-knocking regimen — an effort that will feed fresh voter data into the national database through ­Nov. 8. Augmenting the party’s voter file has been one of the top priorities of the RNC, which hopes to weaponize personal information about voters this year the way Obama’s team did in 2012.

“We’ve spent over $100 million between data and digital over the last four years, investing in that voter file, making sure we have that ability to know everything we can about every voter out there — not only from a knowledge perspective, but how do you talk to them?” Walsh said. “Do they respond to email? What time of day? What issues do they respond to?”

[After briefing with Trump’s chief strategist, House Republicans see ‘pivot’]

In June 2012, the RNC had 170 field staffers on the ground; now there are more than double that, with the largest contingents in Florida (59), Wisconsin (49), Pennsylvania (54) and Ohio (53). That remains short of what the RNC had promised state parties if a nominee had been selected back in March, worrying local officials who had hoped for a bigger ground force by now. National Republican officials said they are on track to hit their staffing goals by July 31.

To do so, the RNC needs the infusion of cash that usually comes with the selection of a presidential nominee. But fundraising has been slow to ramp up, in part because Trump largely self-financed his primary bid and had no structure to solicit donors.

In the meantime, the party is seeking to draw on a major resource the Trump campaign can provide: enthusiasm.

This week, the campaign emailed supporters urging them to take part in a national day of action that the RNC is holding Saturday to register new voters. Before the Trump appeal went out, several hundred volunteers in Virginia had committed to attend. By Thursday morning, that number had soared to 1,000.",REAL
"Daily Mail October 27, 2016 Republicans say they’ll keep the heat on Hillary Clinton if she wins the Oval Office with new investigations into her family charity and quid pro quo allegations. Judicial Watch, a conservative group that’s been at the forefront of Clinton’s email scandal, is already talking impeachment for the not-yet president. ‘I know this generation of Republican leaders is loath to exercise these tools, but impeachment is something that’s relevant,’ the organization’s president, Tom Fitton, told NBC News. Fitton noted, however, that congressional Republicans were unlikely to follow his advice. ‘They see [the oversight process] as an opportunity in some measure to keep their opponents off-kilter, but they don’t want to do the substantive and principled work to truly hold corrupt politicians, or the administration, or anyone accountable,’ he charged. Republicans on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a bevy of new investigations involving Clinton in the next Congress.   8:32  ",FAKE
"Out on the campaign trail, Donald Trump relishes his feud with his own party. He threatened to sue the Republican National Committee. He called its nominating system “rigged,” “deceptive” and “a disgrace.” And he has suggested he might try to depose the party chairman.

But as RNC members gathered at a palatial beach resort here this week, Trump’s aides launched an urgent effort aimed at rebranding the mogul’s persona and thawing hostilities with the skittish party elite.

“We need unity as soon as possible,” said Ed Cox, the New York party chairman and a Trump supporter.

Yet while the charm offensive has made some progress, interviews with dozens of GOP officials here showed that the celebrity billionaire still has to overcome a host of lingering concerns — both about his loyalty to the party as well as his discipline and electability as a candidate.

“We’re the ones that built this party,” said Jonathan Barnett, a national committeeman from Arkansas. “You see so many states where they have never reached out or built an organization. . . . Remember, we’re good people. We’re the grass roots. We’ve been around a long time. And Trump needs us.”

Trump’s top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, assured RNC members here that Trump views the party leadership as “partners,” both in raising money and crafting a state-by-state strategy, and that his hot rhetoric has been “a part that he’s been playing” and will soon give way to a more presidential demeanor.

[Trump is playing ‘a part’ and can transform for victory, aide says]

Some members were skeptical of Manafort’s pitch.

“Trump keeps saying that he’s going to be so presidential that he’ll put you to sleep,” said José Cunningham, chairman of the District of Columbia GOP. “He loves to say that. His people say he’ll do that, have that demeanor. I’d still like to see that because, well, we haven’t.”

Trump himself is taking steps to repair relations. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called the billionaire mogul on Wednesday to congratulate him on his blowout victory in the New York primary.

“We had a great talk, no problem,” Priebus said in an interview. “Donald Trump is conciliatory. You notice he hasn’t been saying ‘RNC’ lately. He hasn’t been saying that lately. He certainly hasn’t been talking about me lately.”

Priebus acknowledged that there probably are political benefits for Trump to rail against the process and use the RNC as a foil.

“They’ve made a calculation somehow that it works, ginning people up over accusations that the delegate selection process is rigged,” Priebus said. “I don’t think they would be doing it on a lark.”

Priebus said that the process is not skewed against Trump: “Nothing’s rigged, just like nothing was rigged in New York when the top vote-getter got 60 percent of the vote but received 90 percent of the delegates.”

Trump’s rhetoric fits into his broader playbook to run against what he sees as corruption across the economic and political spectrums. Manafort said in an interview that Trump’s portrayal of the GOP nominating rules “is no different than the rigged economy, the rigged banking system.”

“It fits into the whole narrative of the system is broken and certain types of establishment situations don’t meet the expectations of people,” he said.

[It’s on: Tensions between Trump and the GOP escalate in public fight]

For much of the campaign, the Trump operation seemed to alienate, even shun party officials who are accustomed to courtship by candidates.

Many officials took particular umbrage at Trump’s on-and-off public flirtation with ousting Priebus.

“Stop the attacks on Reince and the RNC leadership,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Matt Moore said. “Reince is the best chairman, I think, in the party’s history, and there is no question that he is the guy to lead us into the general election. Any discussion about a new chairman is completely stupid.”

On that point, Manafort said, “This discussion over the last few weeks has not been an anti-Reince campaign.”

Trump has been outfoxed by his chief Republican rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, at state conventions and other gatherings where delegates to the national convention are selected. Manafort said Trump is not seeking to upend the existing rules but believes the system lacks transparency and is trying to lay the groundwork for changes in future years.

Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich addressed the RNC this week. Also present were leaders of Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC, who huddled privately with some members Friday. The group’s chairwoman, Katie Packer, distributed a memorandum urging party leaders to do everything possible to stop Trump from locking up the nomination.

“It is not too late,” Packer wrote. “You are under no obligation to wrap your arms around a candidate who has not won a majority of GOP votes, or a majority of delegates, and perhaps wouldn’t even be the frontrunner had the original field been much smaller.”

Yet in hallway chatter here, there was a growing sense of resignation about Trump as the nominee.

“I sense that everybody has come around to the position that what we choose is what we choose and that to have an opponent to Hillary Clinton, you take what you got and you run with it as fast as you can,” said David Norcross, a former RNC general counsel.

[Is it too late for a Donald Trump makeover?]

The conversations in Florida come amid a revamping of Trump’s campaign. Manafort said Trump is assembling teams of communications specialists, schedulers, policy advisers, speechwriters, researchers and liaisons to Capitol Hill, think tanks and other GOP power centers — all traditional campaign elements that had been lacking in Trump’s shoestring structure.

“We couldn’t run a general election with eight people,” Manafort said.

Manafort suggested that the individuals who have been appearing on cable television shows as Trump representatives will begin playing smaller roles as he asserts control over what he called “the narrative.”

“Now we’re transitioning,” Manafort said. “He’s trying to be the nominee, and people want to see the entire package.”

Among the newest members of Trump’s team is Rick Wiley, who is well known to RNC members, serving as the committee’s political director in 2012. When he addressed RNC members on Thursday, Wiley sought to emphasize those connections and went out of his way to praise the work of the committee’s staff under Priebus.

Wiley said the party and its nominee would be fully committed to waging a successful fall national campaign. Arguing that the RNC had adapted the organizing model developed by the 2008 Obama campaign, he added, “We are going to inherit a field program second to none.”

In his presentation, Wiley addressed worries among many Republicans that Trump as the nominee could lead the party to a catastrophic defeat in the fall, one that could put its Senate majority at risk and cost Republicans House seats.

“You’re going to see this map expand,” he said, contending that Trump’s potential appeal to Reagan Democrats — working-class white voters — could make states in the upper and industrial Midwest that long have been in the Democrats’ column competitive in the fall.

“If we’re playing in these states and we’re winning in some of these states and the Democrats are playing and having to spend money in those states,” he said, “it’s a good thing for us, it’s a good thing for the party.”",REAL
"Show biz: Business and breakthroughs Exclusive: Vanessa Frank learns what makes or breaks members of film industry Published: 29 mins ago About | | Archive Vanessa Frank has been involved in the film industry first as an actress and then in production, distribution and international sales. At 31, she directed her first film, “Let The Lion Roar,” starring Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Sorbo and Grammy nominated singers Jaci Velasquez, Tim Rushlow and Jamie Grace. The film was an indie distribution success, with sales in 52 nations. Print 
About Film Talk 
Film Talk podcasts takes you inside the minds of some of the brightest filmmakers in the world. Learn from award-winning filmmakers as they teach the secrets to their success – the daily habits, routines and practices they employ to be the best in their industry. Guests include Oscar winners, Emmy Award winners, and Golden Globe winners. You can access the archive of all Film Talk podcasts here . 
Making independent films happen with Atit Shah 
Atit Shah is a film producer with five films releasing within the next 12 months, including “Jekyll Island” starring Oscar-nominated Minnie Driver, Emmy Award-winner John Leguizamo, AnnaSophia Robb and Ed Westwick, and “Money” starring Kellan Lutz. 
He is the CEO of Create Entertainment, and is represented by UTA. 
Breaking through as a female director with Melanie Aitkenhead 
Melanie Aitkenhead is the director of the reboot of “Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?”, Oscar-nominated James Franco’s retelling of the 1996 classic film of the same name. The film stars Tori Spelling, with a cameo by Franco and premiered on Lifetime. 
She’s also the director of the film adaption of James Franco’s popular novel “Actors Anonymous,” which explores the lives of young actors in Hollywood and stars Franco alongside Oscar-nominated Eric Roberts, Keegan Allen and Scott Haze. 
Building the franchise with Scott Mitchell Rosenberg 
Scott Mitchell Rosenberg is the CEO of Platinum Studios, one of the world’s largest independent libraries of comic book characters. Scott has played an integral role in creating one of the largest bibles in comic book history: the Platinum Studios “Macroverse,” which includes anchor titles such as “Cowboys & Aliens.” 
A constant innovator, Scott established Platinum in 1997, following a successful career as the founder of Malibu Comics, which sold to Marvel in 1994. At Malibu, Scott led many successful comic spinoffs into toys, television and feature films, including the billion-dollar film and television mega-hit, “Men in Black.” 
The art of entrepreneurship with Kent Speakman 
Kent Speakman is a producer and entrepreneur at the intersection of entertainment and technology. Examiner.com has called him “one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry.” He has won the iMedia Entertainment Marketing award for “Best Digital Campaign” and “Best Mobile Entertainment Startup,” and he was awarded Evan Carmichael’s “Top 100 Entrepreneurs to Follow” in 2013 preceded by the “iMedia Top Ten Digital Marketers” in 2009. 
Kent founded KONNECT – a digital, mobile and experiential agency that works with startups, brands and entertainment properties – before he co-founded FAMEUS, a new social network that connects members of the entertainment industry in innovative ways with a unique technology and that was listed on the Huffington Post’s “Top 10 Startups in LA” in 2015. 
Kent has an international network of professionals and influencers, having orchestrated a variety of film and technology projects in Canada, the US, the United Kingdom, Asia and India. He has produced hundreds of events across Canada and the US, whilst working with clientele ranging from A-list celebrities, to tech mobile startups. 
The Legal Aspect of Filmmaking with Dan Satorius 
Dan Satorius is a world-class entertainment lawyer, with a practice that focuses principally on transactions, intellectual property, business structuring and financing. Furthermore, he is a nationally regarded attorney on clearance issues including Fair Use. His clients include Academy Award, Emmy Award, Independent Spirit Award, and Peabody Award-winning independent producers, writers and broadcasters in the film and television industry. 
After graduating from film school and law school, Dan produced award-winning documentaries and short dramatic films. His graduate thesis film was selected as a finalist for a student Academy Award. In addition to practicing entertainment law for more than 25 years, Dan has been an adjunct professor at William Mitchell School of Law where he taught Entertainment Law. 
Dan is an active member of the American Bar Association’s Forum on the Entertainment and Sports Industries, Co-Vice Chair of the Film and Television Division, and a member of the Governing Committee.",FAKE
"The Volcker Rule bars banks operating in the U.S. from speculating in securities markets for their own profit -- a risky activity that can put taxpayers on the hook for big bailouts if the bank bets turn sour. But there are exceptions to the rule. For instance, banks are allowed to hold U.S. government debt in their own accounts.

But those same banks aren't allowed to trade in Canadian government debt. Oliver thinks that's a NAFTA violation. Although he didn't lay out his argument in detail on Wednesday, NAFTA, like the TPP, generally bans countries from discriminating against each other's financial services. NAFTA prohibits policies that limit cross-border trade in financial services and requires the U.S. to treat Canadian companies the same way that it treats U.S. companies.

""The Volcker Rule is clearly not a violation of NAFTA or any other trade agreement, all of which explicitly safeguard the ability of the United States to protect the integrity and stability of our financial system,"" a Treasury spokesperson said. ""The Volcker Rule is a key prudential financial regulation that prohibits risky proprietary trading while protecting taxpayers and the depth, liquidity, and stability of U.S. capital markets. NAFTA does not weaken our ability to implement Wall Street Reform now or in the future, and neither would any trade agreement we're negotiating.""

 

 It's true that NAFTA contains an exemption for ""prudential"" regulation, and financial reform watchdogs strongly agree with the Treasury Department's interpretation. But it's not an airtight case.

Sorting out whether the Volcker Rule qualifies for that exemption is the sort of thing that a court would traditionally determine under U.S. law, and U.S. courts typically give significant deference to the views of the executive branch. U.S. courts, however, don't have jurisdiction over NAFTA or any other free trade pact. International tribunals do.

""The administration can say whatever it wants about its interpretation of these trade agreements,"" said Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform, a Wall Street watchdog group. ""The problem is, under the terms of these agreements, they are not going to be interpreting them. Private tribunals of trade lawyers are going to be interpreting them, and there are going to be plenty of openings, as this shows, to make claims that critical prudential regulations conflict with trade agreements. And eventually one of those is going to win out.""

Treasury has known about Oliver's objection to the Volcker Rule for more than a year. As far back as 2011, a lobbying group representing Canadian banks claimed that the Volcker Rule runs afoul of NAFTA in arguments presented to U.S. regulators. But none of this turmoil prevented Obama from flatly rejecting Warren's contention that trade agreements, particularly the TPP, can be used to attack financial standards.

""The notion that corporate America is going to be able to use this provision to eliminate our financial regulations and our food safety regulations and our consumer regulations -- that's just bunk,"" Obama told reporters in an April conference call. ""It's not true.""

Canada may not opt to pursue a NAFTA case against the U.S. over the Volcker Rule. If it doesn't, Canadian banks won't have the right to sue on their own because NAFTA bars individual companies from suing sovereign nations over most financial services violations.

But the TPP would be different, according to congressional briefings by the U.S. Trade Representative, which are reflected in a December letter from Warren to Ambassador Michael Froman, the top Obama trade official. The TPP wouldn't just empower foreign governments to sue the U.S. over bank regulations; it would allow individual companies and investors to bring such cases.

Under the ""investor-state dispute settlement"" process, an international tribunal cannot overrule a law or regulation, but it can assess financial penalties to encourage countries to change said law or regulation. In the past, under other trade deals, the mere existence of such cases has sometimes pressured governments into abandoning non-financial services regulations.

Moreover, the TPP would reportedly allow foreign banks to sue the U.S. government for failing to provide them with a ""minimum standard of treatment."" The term is vaguely defined, but international tribunals have interpreted it very broadly to make corporations eligible to receive damages for lost profits caused by policy changes that occurred after they invested in a country. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) raised similar concerns in her own December letter to Froman over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a pending trade deal with Europe.",REAL
"Pediatricians Ease Screen Time Guidelines New Company Aims To Explore Intersection Of Technology, Other Thing Intuihub officials say the particular thing needs to incorporate the latest technology if it wants to stay relevant. Close Intuihub officials say the particular thing needs to incorporate the latest technology if it wants to stay relevant. NEWS October 26, 2016 Vol 52 Issue 42 · News · Technology 
SAN FRANCISCO—Explaining how their company was poised to usher in a bold new era of innovation, founders of local startup Intuihub told reporters Wednesday that their mission is to explore the intersection of technology and another thing. 
“When you look at where the world is going right now, it just makes a lot of sense to take cutting-edge technology and incorporate it into this other thing,” said Intuihub co-founder Martin Fiske, who explained that the other thing will be modernized and streamlined once it is integrated with the latest technological breakthroughs. “We’re looking out at an exciting new frontier, one in which technology will be used to push the boundaries of what the other thing is capable of.” 
“And we believe there’s no limit to what we can accomplish when we take technology and the other thing and put them together,” Fiske added. 
Intuihub will reportedly employ groundbreaking advancements in technology to take the other thing in a variety of new and intriguing directions, including some directions, company officials promised, that have never before been imagined. According to the startup’s founders, their work will forever change the way people think about and interact with the thing. 
Fiske, who reportedly began his career working solely with the other thing but soon realized that adding technology to what he was doing would “open amazing new doors for the thing,” told reporters that his company has an incredible opportunity to revolutionize both technology and the other thing. Five years from now, he said, the thing is likely to be completely unrecognizable by today’s standards. 
He pointed out that Intuihub is already disrupting the entire landscape by using technology to make the other thing more accessible and convenient. 
“Technology is evolving, and the other thing needs to evolve along with it,” said Fiske, noting that no other company focusing on the other thing is using technology the way Intuihub is. “The synergy between technology and this thing will be so strong that when the two come together, they may actually create a third thing, one that we believe could be truly world-altering.” 
After describing their plans to launch a revolution that will change the lives of millions for the better, Intuihub founders confirmed they were also interested in partnering with brands to create more personalized experiences for the thing’s consumers. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
"License DMCA 
It's like we are back to the 1800s when the U.S. Army rampaged against Native American tribes across the American West. The militarized police and the use of the National Guard this week in responding to the Standing Rock Sioux Native American challenge in North Dakota to big oil and its dangerous pipelines reminds one of Custer's Last Stand against Sitting Bull. 
In fact, the portrait of Sitting Bull is on one of the most popular t-shirts available to supporters of the ""water protectors,"" as those are known who protest yet one more oil pipeline that crosses sensitive watershed areas and major rivers of the United States. 
Four days last week, I joined hundreds of Native Americans and social justice campaigners from around the United States and around the world, in challenging the Dakota Access Pipe Line (DAPL), the 1,172-mile, $3.7 billion dollar scar across the face of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. 
Last week, I photographed the area along Highway 6 south of Bismarck where the Energy Transfer Partnership contractors were busy digging the trench for the ""Black Snake"" as the pipeline is called. License DMCA - Advertisement - 
I also counted 24 police cars returning to Bismarck at shift change around 3 p.m., a huge number of state law enforcement personnel and vehicles dedicated to protection of corporate business, instead of the rights of citizens. 
Huge machines were chewing up the earth near water sources for all of North Dakota. The pipeline was rerouted from near Bismarck so if the pipeline breaks it would not endanger the water supply of the capital city of the state. But it was relocated to where it will cross the Missouri River and will jeopardize the water supply of the Native Americans and all Americans living in southern North Dakota and downstream of the Missouri River. Security forces protecting the Dakota Access pipeline construction spray protesters with pepper spray. License DMCA - Advertisement - 
On Thursday, the digging took a more confrontational turn. The huge digging equipment arrived to cut across State Highway 1806 at a spot where water protectors had set up a front-line camp several months ago, one mile north of the main encampment of over 1,000 people. As the equipment arrived, the ""water protectors"" blocked the highway. 
In a dangerous incident, an armed private security guard of DAPL came onto the camp and was chased off into the water abutting the camp by water protectors. After a lengthy standoff, tribal agency police arrived and arrested the security guard. Water protectors set his security vehicle on fire. 
On Friday more than 100 local and state police and North Dakota National Guard arrested over 140 people who blocked the highway attempting to stop the destruction of the land. Police in riot gear with automatic rifles lined up across a highway, with multiple MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected military vehicles), a sound cannon that can immobilize persons nearby, Humvees driven by National Guardsmen, an armored police truck and a bulldozer. 
Police used mace, pepper spray, tear gas and flash-bang grenades and bean-bag rounds against Native Americans who lined up on the highway. Police reportedly shot rubber bullets at their horses and wounded one rider and his horse. 
As this police mayhem was unfolding, a small herd of buffalo stampeded across a nearby field, a strong symbolic signal to the water protectors who erupted in cheers and shouts, leaving law enforcement officials wondering what was happening. The security forces protecting the Dakota Access pipeline against protesters are heavily militarized.",FAKE
"BOULDER, Colo. -- It's expected to be another fiery, wild night as the Republican presidential candidates get together in Boulder, Colorado, Wednesday for their third debate.

So far, this presidential soap opera has clearly been entertaining and surprising.

The latest turn is a new CBS/New York Times national poll that shows retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson overtaking Donald Trump as the GOP frontrunner – a development that has the billionaire scratching his head.

""Trump losing in polls to Carson. Carson? I don't think Carson is going to negotiate really well with China folks in all fairness, okay? I don't think so and I like him. I don't think so,"" Trump remarked at a recent rally.

Expect some Trump jabs Wednesday night. As for Carson, the doctor told CBN News he's hoping voters will see what he represents.

""I hope they will look at my life, look at the entirety of my life and see that it has been dedicated to the uplifting of people by leading a life that's not full of scandal, and adhering to the values and principles of our Judeo-Christian foundation,"" he said.

Carson's not the only candidate who is relying on faith to help his case. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, believes he will eventually move higher in the polls.

""I'm the only one on that stage that has a record of standing up to Washington over and over again, of defending the Constitution, of defending liberty, defending religious liberty, and I think that's why we're seeing such incredible enthusiasm among the grassroots,"" Cruz declared.

Cruz, Carson, Trump and others want to strike gold with the key evangelical voting bloc. While this debate could begin to show movement, political strategist Ralph Reed doesn't expect any tidal waves.

""This idea that there's going to be a coalescing behind one candidate, that's a myth. That's not going to happen. The evangelical community is very vibrant. It's not monolithic and it doesn't march to a single drummer and it's not easy to command,"" Reed explained.

Wednesday night's debate will focus mostly on the economy. That will give candidates like Ohio Gov. John Kasich and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush a chance to tout their economic records.

Bush will take the opportunity to lay out his recently announced entitlement reform plan, a subject he spoke about at Regent University.

 

""My belief is that once you reach 67, or 66 now, your payroll tax as an employee – you should keep it because that's the way you're going to save money more directly and be able to live a life of independence,"" Bush told the crowd.

It's just one of the topics on tap for what is expected to be yet another night of presidential must see TV.",REAL
"You want to support Anonymous Independent & Investigative News? Please, follow us on Twitter: Follow @AnonymousNewsHQ This article (A List of Best Password Managers Offering Both Free and Premium Services) is a completely free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com .",FAKE
"New bionic eye implant connects directly to brain 11/03/2016 
RUSSIA TODAY Scientists may have made a significant breakthrough in restoring human sight, as a woman who had been blind for seven years has regained the ability to see shapes and colours with a bionic eye implant. 
The 30-year-old woman had a wireless visual stimulator chip inserted into her brain by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) surgeons in the first human test of the product. As a result, she could see colored flashes, lines, and spots when signals were sent to her brain from a computer. 
The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, suffered no significant adverse side effects in the process, according to a statement. 
The device, which was developed as part of the Orion 1 programme by Second Sight, uses technology to restore sight by bypassing the optic nerve to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex, according to chairman Robert Greenberg. 
It is designed for those who cannot benefit from the Argus II retinal system that was unveiled at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital last year, but has limited application, as it depends on the patient having some retinal cells. 
This new system goes one step further by sending signals directly to the brain. It has the potential to restore sight to those who have gone completely blind for virtually any reason, including glaucoma, cancer, diabetic retinopathy, or trauma, according to the manufacturer. 
The next step is to connect the implant to a camera on a pair of glasses, and the company plans to seek FDA approval in 2017 to get the go ahead to conduct these trials. 
UCLA neurosurgeon Nader Pouratian, who implanted the stimulator, said the results of the surgery are promising. 
“Based on these results, stimulation of the visual cortex has the potential to restore useful vision to the blind, which is important for independence and improving quality of life,” he said.",FAKE
"Home › SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS DISAPPOINTED THAT HURRICANE MATTHEW WASN’T WORSE GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS DISAPPOINTED THAT HURRICANE MATTHEW WASN’T WORSE 0 SHARES 
[10/26/16] J.D.HEYES – Only the sickest, most warped and ideologically polluted minds would secretly hope for greater death and destruction to their own people and country, but such is the case with “climate change” zealots . 
As pointed out by Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), it was former President Obama crony and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel who once infamously remarked that political leaders should never let serious crises “go to waste,” because they can use them to advance a political agenda where they could not do so before. 
As for the recent Hurricane Matthew, it appears as though a number of political operatives and true believers in the global warming religion likely wanted it to be worse than it actually was (which, to many people, was bad enough). 
Why? Because that would be consistent with their history. 
For the record, the storm killed 30 Americans and more than 1,000 people in total. Early damage estimates were put at about $5 billion. Yet that is not enough death and destruction for the global warming hoaxers. 
For the record, the hoaxers have tried advancing the narrative that in this day and age, thanks to man-caused actions, the weather is getting worse and more severe . Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton enlisted the assistance of the hoaxer-in-chief, Al Gore, her husband’s vice president and today’s chief global warming liar, to use Matthew to advance the phony narrative. 
Only, before the hurricane actually made landfall days ago in South Carolina, it had been more than 4,000 days since a hurricane actually struck the United States. That’s 10 years, 11 months and some change. 
Alarmists were “itching for a large-scale disaster,” IBD reported, because every day that passed that didn’t herald a major weather event, especially one on an epic scale, meant that their dire predictions of more and bigger storms made them look like clueless, silly con artists (which they are). 
Their sick impatience for a major weather-related crisis was summarized very well a couple of years ago when a guy named Greg Blanchette announced that since the weather is getting worse and more severe , that he “kind of” hoped that North America “gets it’s a** kicked this hurricane season. It would motivate us on climate action.” 
Like we said, sick . 
This may or may not be the same Greg Blanchette who advocated placing scary global warming warnings on gasoline pumps – which is now law in North Vancouver, British Columbia. That doesn’t matter, though, because if it’s not the same person, that only means there are two global warming hoaxer cranks out there sharing the same name. 
Then, as IBD noted, a couple of years before this Blanchette dude was hoping for weather-related death and destruction, British naturalist David Attenborough noted that a “disaster” was required to wake people up to the massive threat of climate change. 
Up to that point, the “disasters” that the U.S. had experienced “with hurricanes and floods … [didn’t] do it.” So, a cataclysmic event was needed in order to scare enough people into demanding some sort of action, which of course would come in the form of costly government regulations that are not based on sound, demonstrable and replicable scientific data. 
Then, as Matthew tore up Florida’s Atlantic Coast, Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Georgia, outed the sick hoaxers , tweeting that he was hearing “ridiculous complaining” that the hurricane was actually less powerful than anticipated. 
“Some seem disappointed there isn’t tragic loss of life/apocalyptic,” he noted, adding: “I am thankful.” 
IBD summed up the facts: While the environmental movement contains sincere people, it is also replete with idiots and lunatics who yearn for a planet devoid of humans (with the exception of themselves, of course). Attenborough himself has complained to the British press that human beings are a “plague on the Earth.” (We assume he is counting himself as well, which – if he is – seems even less rational, if that’s possible.) 
There are nothing but theories claiming that man-caused activity is responsible for changing weather patterns. There is no hard evidence and there is no replicable data, which there should be if such claims were provable outside of anecdotal findings . If this was a real issue the language would not have changed from “global cooling” in the 1970s, to “global warming” in the 1980s and ’90s, to “climate change” today. Post navigation",FAKE
"On Thursday night, Donald Trump finally acknowledged an obvious, proven fact: President Obama was born in the United States. Or, rather, Trump's campaign said that he acknowledged it, in a statement that was itself riddled with falsehoods.

""Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President,"" the statement begins. That's untrue — and it's been fact-checked any number of times. In 2011, Politico outlined the origins; in May, our fact checkers dubbed it ridiculous.

""This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer,"" the statement continues. Again, Clinton wasn't looking for an ""answer"" to the non-question of where Barack Obama was born because her campaign wasn't pressing the issue. Even before the release of Obama's long-form birth certificate, an announcement of Obama's birth was found in a Honolulu newspaper. His 2008 campaign had released a statement of live birth demonstrating where he was born. Anyone who asked the question for whatever reason had the answer in front of them, if they chose to see it.

""Even the MSNBC show 'Morning Joe' admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump,"" the statement goes on. Whether or not someone on ""Morning Joe"" said it — a show, we will note, that has spent an awful lot of time of late disparaging Trump — that doesn't make it true.

""In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate,"" it reads. ""Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised."" This is a remarkable pair of sentences. Terming the incident ""ugly"" and saying he's resolved it is a bit like a person intentionally running someone over, dumping them outside a hospital and then asking for a letter of commendation for wrapping things up so neatly. The ""incident"" was fostered and nurtured by Trump in the spring of 2011, who used his position of celebrity to draw attention to it — as part of his first exploration of running for president. It was only when Obama first released his full birth certificate and then mocked Trump at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner that year that Trump seemed to drop the issue.

The Trump team tries to spin that as a win. ""Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States,"" the statement continues.

This compresses an awful lot of time. As I wrote last week, Trump continued to raise questions about Obama's birthplace for years after the release of the birth certificate. At a news conference immediately afterward, Trump said that ""hopefully"" the issue was resolved. He then encouraged Sheriff Joe Arpaio's quixotic attempt to prove the birth certificate a forgery, which was of course unsuccessful.

In 2015, he said, ""I don't know"" when challenged on the subject. In January, when the subject came up, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, ""Who knows?"" That was eight months ago.

The statement then moves into a campaign sales pitch: ""Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to America, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing school choice opportunities and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again."" That last point is important: It's part of Trump's sales pitch to black voters. And lest you think that Trump's outreach to black voters didn't play a role in this, the campaign made clear to BusinessWeek's Joshua Green that it did.

It seems hard to believe that this statement will do much to assuage those voters' concerns. After all, this isn't an apology for Trump's birtherism, it's a rationalization for it — and not a very good one.

What's more, a critical part of the Trump campaign's statement is the signature it bears: ""Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor."" Clearly we can take Mr. Miller's word as the word of the candidate, right?",REAL
The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
"The simmering dispute over media access to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign erupted again Monday when a reporter for DailyMail.com was told by the campaign he couldn’t attend her events in New Hampshire.

David Martosko, a reporter for DailyMail.com, a website affiliated with the Daily Mail in London, said the Clinton camp said his newspaper wasn’t part of the official group -- known as the print pool -- that covers the White House on a rotating basis. As a result, he was blocked Monday from covering her events in person for the pool.

""I got there when I was told to get there,"" Martosko told Fox News' Megyn Kelly Monday night. ""Quarter to eight in the morning, I showed up in the parking lot, told them who I was, and they said 'No, you can't come.'

""This happened twice today,"" Martosko told Kelly later in the interview. ""I just came right over here from an evening event where Mrs. Clinton was the keynote speaker ... I showed up again and said 'I'm the designated pool reporter' and I was told 'you need to leave.' I find that unacceptable and offensive, and I think most of my journalistic colleagues do as well.""

The campaign said it is trying to resolve the issue. However, it denied any suggestion that Martosko was denied access because of his newspaper’s critical coverage of Clinton.

“The Daily Mail can sensationalize [the incident] as they see fit for their readers, but that's what happened,"" a Clinton aide told Fox News.

Major media organizations in Clinton’s traveling press pool issued a statement Monday night defending Martosko and rejecting any attempt by the Clinton campaign to “dictate” who covers the candidate.

“We haven't yet had a clear explanation about why the pool reporter for today's events was denied access,” said the statement signed by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Tribune Publishing, as well as the Daily Mail and others.

“But any attempt by the campaign to dictate who is in the pool is unacceptable.”

""The pool in general is tight-knit organization,"" Martosko told ""The Kelly File"" Monday night. ""And to a man and woman, they all said, 'No. The Clinton campaign does not get to choose who covers them.'""

Most presidential campaigns essentially follow the procedures outlined by the White House Correspondents Association. To accommodate the frequent media crush, a newspaper reporter, a photographer and a TV crew, known as the pool, covers an event. Then the details are widely shared via email to reporters and others.

However, in covering Clinton, a group of 14 news organizations, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, have formed to cover events and share the information on a limited basis.

Group members argue that those who don’t share the expenses of covering a campaign shouldn’t have immediate access to the information, or “pool reports.”

Still, this is not the first time a member affiliated with the foreign press has complained about being excluded from covering Clinton up close.

“My feeling is that some people have established the rules and that we haven’t been part of the discussion,” a reporter for the French TV network Canal Plus recently told The Post. “I went to Iowa to cover [Clinton’s] first event. I only saw her van. … I am fighting for equality and access for all.”

The Clinton camp on Monday also said: ""We have been working to create an equitable system, and have had some concerns expressed by foreign outlets about not being a part of the rotation.”

A DailyMail.com spokesperson on Monday afternoon confirmed that Martosko was denied access to the Clinton event and kept from boarding a van that her campaign is using to transport pool reporters around New Hampshire. However, the campaign has yet to provide a full explanation, considering Martosko was scheduled to be the designated print pool reporter, the spokesperson also said.

Martosko tweeted: “For those of you asking: What I've seen online re: today is accurate, and I intend to report here whether they want me to or not.""",REAL
"The Obama administration says new visa rules passed by Congress could undermine the Iran nuclear deal. But Congress embraces its role as a watchdog.

The Iran nuclear deal may be signed, sealed, and on the road to implementation, but there are signs that the sparring between the Obama administration and Congress is merely taking new forms.

The newest flashpoint is a new visa-waiver law designed to reduce the risk of terrorists entering the country. The measure appears to force anyone who has traveled to Iran since 2011 to get a visa before visiting the United States.

Some administration officials worry that this kind of provision could be opponents' way of undermining an agreement that they couldn’t defeat outright. Secretary of State John Kerry responded by telling Iran that President Obama would waive the provisions that might interfere with the nuclear deal.

For their part, critics see Mr. Obama’s proposed waiver as another sign that he’s going soft on Iran in order to preserve a major piece of his foreign policy legacy.

The tension points to the deep mutual suspicions that remain on Iran. As a result, the path forward could be a narrow one, with Congress embracing its role as an Iran watchdog while Obama pushes for the space to allow the agreement to take hold.

For the moment, some officials say the administration is eyeing upcoming parliamentary elections in Iran. The hope is that smooth implementation of the nuclear deal will boost moderate candidates in the February voting.

But others say this is the wrong time to be placating Iran.

Secretary Kerry’s promise “suggests the administration will bend over backwards to implement the nuclear deal, when actually this is the time when the US should react stronger and show more firmness towards Iran,” says Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran in Washington, an opposition group of exiled Iranians. “Otherwise they’ll pave the way to further Iranian defiance.”

The new visa law was passed amid heightened concerns over visa-less travel in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attacks. It affects the citizens of 38 countries whose citizens do not need visas to enter the United States. Under the new law, citizens of those countries will now need to obtain a visa if they are also citizens of Iraq, Sudan, Syria, or Iran. Moreover, some interpret the law to mean that anyone who has visited those four countries since 2011 will also need a visa.

Iran officials worry that the new law could hurt the Iran economy. Business representatives who know they could have a harder time entering the US could be deterred from visiting Iran, they say.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told the New Yorker the new visa provisions were “absurd,” adding no Iranian or visitor to Iran had attacked the West. “Whereas many people have been targeted by the nationals of your allies [or] people visiting your allies… So you’re looking at the wrong address.”

The comment seemed a thinly veiled reference to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, whose nationals or recent visitors were involved in the Paris and San Bernardino attacks.

Kerry pledged in a letter to Mr. Zarif that the US would implement the new visa rules “so as not to interfere with legitimate business interests in Iran” and was looking into ways to “waive” any aspects that violated the nuclear deal.

Administration officials say they have no intention of going soft on Iran. Indeed, they recently held a closed-door briefing for members of Congress at which they laid out actions undertaken to counter Iran’s efforts to spread its influence in the Middle East. The officials revealed the recent US intercept of a shipment of Iranian arms destined for Houthi rebels fighting a war against the US-backed government in Yemen.

Nuclear deal critics like Mr. Jafarzadeh say they cringed at Kerry’s quick reassurances to Iran. “It was very troubling to say the least to see Secretary Kerry rush to send a letter to Zarif that gives unwarranted promises of multiple-entry business visas to a government whose economy is run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an organization whose agenda includes terrorism, buying influences in international affairs, and exporting Islamic fundamentalism.”

Even some congressional supporters of the nuclear deal are warning that strict vigilance of Iran must continue. Members of Congress have expressed particular concern about two Iranian ballistic missile tests in recent weeks. At least one of them violated a Security Council resolution barring Iran from testing missiles that could potentially carry nuclear warheads, according to the United Nations.

On Thursday, Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware – a backer of the deal – warned against anything short of “relentless implementation” of the agreement and “aggressive enforcement” of separate sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s “support for terrorism, human rights violations, or their ballistic missile program.”

“If we take our eye off this ball,” he said, “they will take that as a clear signal that … they have carte blanche to continue their actions that are antithetical to our values and interests.”",REAL
"While Ohio has been a presidential bellwether for decades, Hillary Clinton has largely focused her efforts elsewhere, as polls consistently put the Buckeye State in Donald Trump’s column. Still, the G.O.P. nominee’s lead is narrow, and now a huge new endorsement could put Ohio back in play, thanks to one of the state’s biggest stars: LeBron James.

“When I think about the kinds of policies and ideas the kids in my foundation need from our government, the choice is clear. That candidate is Hillary Clinton,” the Cleveland Cavaliers star wrote in an op-ed Sunday, published by Business Insider. James drew on his experiences working with kids in Akron, Ohio, through his charity—the LeBron James Family Foundation—as motivation for his support of Clinton, who he argues will also build on the legacy of President Barack Obama. “Only one person running truly understands the struggles of an Akron child born into poverty,” he wrote.

James’s endorsement of Clinton comes at a crucial time in the presidential race. Unlike Clinton, who has multiple potential paths to the White House, a victory for Trump in less than six weeks hinges on winning Ohio and its 18 electoral votes. Right now, the New York billionaire is enjoying a 3.8-point edge on average in the polls in the battleground state, thanks in part to the state “growing older, whiter and less educated than the nation at large,” as The New York Times reports.

But to triumph over Clinton, Trump needs more than just the white vote. And in Ohio, James is as close to royalty as you can get. The fact that the star forward is backing Clinton could potentially mobilize minority voters and tip the scales toward the Democratic nominee. For weeks Trump, has struggled to make inroads with the African-American community as he faces charges of running a campaign fueled by bigotry. His tone-deaf appeals to black voters (“What do you have to lose?”) and advocacy for widespread use of the controversial policing tactic “stop and frisk” hasn’t helped. In the wake of a number of high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of police officers, James argues that Clinton is better suited to respond to the heightened racial tensions in the U.S. “We must address the violence, of every kind, the African-American community is experiencing in our street and seeing on our TVs,” he wrote. “We need a president who brings us together and keeps us unified. Policies and ideas that divide us are not the solution. We must all stand together—no matter where we are from or the color of our skin. And Hillary is running on the message of hope and unity that we need.” With enthusiasm for her candidacy flagging, Clinton needs celebrity endorsements like James’ to help get out the vote—especially among black voters who are a critical Democratic constituency but, like other voting blocs, are less excited about Clinton than Obama.

James is far from the only high-profile athlete who has shared his political views during this election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who throughout the N.F.L. season has protested police violence by choosing not to stand during the national anthem, said that both Clinton and Trump “are proven liars,” and that voters will have to “pick the lesser of two evils.” Last week, two Seattle Seahawks players commented on the recent police shootings. On Conan, Marshawn Lynch said he hopes “people open up their eyes and see that there’s really a problem going on.” And Richard Sherman refused to take reporters’ questions during a news conference last week as a form of protest. Even, Michael Jordan, who is famously said to have quipped, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” wrote a statement earlier this year condemning violence against African-Americans and the killing of police officers, and donated $1 million each to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund and the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Institute for Community-Police Relations.",REAL
"""Congress has completely abdicated their responsibility,"" White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, speaking of its inaction on the Obama administration's request for nearly $2 billion to take extensive preventative measures, such as developing vaccines and widespread mosquito control.

""I take no joy in suggesting that Republicans are going to look back on this time that they've had to act on the Zika virus and deeply regret it,"" Earnest added.

The White House slammed members of Congress over the administration's decision to shift more than half a billion dollars that was designated for fighting Ebola to instead be used against Zika.

The Zika virus has been linked to microcephaly -- a condition in which a developing fetus' brain fails to fully grow and babies are born with unusually small heads -- as well as Guillain-Barre syndrome, which causes the body to attack its own nerves.

Officials said Wednesday there have been 64 confirmed cases of Zika in pregnant women in the continental U.S. One baby has been born with microcephaly in Hawaii and more cases are being investigated. So far, the U.S. cases appear to have been contracted in other countries where the virus has been circulating. The White House stressed that even with the shift in funds from the Ebola coffers, the current amount of money available won't be enough to adequately prepare for what the World Health Organization has called a global health emergency. ""At some point, later this spring or maybe later this summer, all of you and your news organizations are going to be sounding the alarm about the significant threat that is posed by the Zika virus,"" Earnest said. ""That is going to happen."" But as Earnest was briefing reporters, the House Appropriations Committee put out a statement explaining its position. ""More than a month ago, we called on the administration to use existing funding and legal authorities to provide the most immediate and effective response to the Zika outbreak,"" the statement said. ""We are pleased to hear today that federal agencies are heeding our call."" And offering some reassurance in the face of the White House's ominous predictions, the statement said, ""As we move forward, the Appropriations Committee will continue to monitor the changing needs resulting from this unpredictable crisis to assure the resources necessary for the response are available."" In the White House's view, though, until Congress approves more funding, there's a risk. The Office of Management and Budget devoted a blog post to the problem on Wednesday, saying, ""Without the full amount of requested emergency supplemental funding, many activities that need to start now would have to be delayed, or curtailed or stopped, within months.""",REAL
"The United States and Cuba have taken major steps to end their 50 years of hostility, and some researchers think Americans could reap an unexpected benefit: better access to Cuban medical innovations.

""The US may be the world leader in basic cancer research, biotechnology, and treatment,"" explained Marga Gual Soler, who studies science diplomacy. ""But Cuba has built a universal, free, and public health care system, [and] has the highest number of medical doctors per capita in the world, a robust biotechnology industry developed with very low resources, and guaranteed access to drugs and advanced diagnostics for the population.""





One of the first diplomatic exchanges involved Cimavax, a lung cancer vaccine first developed in Cuba. But it doesn't work for prevention like a traditional vaccine; instead, it stimulates the immune system in a different way, to stop cancers from growing in people who already have the disease. Researchers down there found that the vaccine increased survival rates and had few side effects in patients with late-stage disease.

There's reason to be cautious: US studies will need to replicate these findings in order to meet federal regulatory standards. And it's still a long way from clinical trials to being widely available for patients.

For now, scientists are excited about the possibility — and the exchange raises questions about how a political shift might spur medical innovation.

To learn more, I spoke to Dr. Kelvin Lee of Buffalo's Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Lee helped lead America's collaboration with Havana's Center of Molecular Immunology, which discovered the vaccine. Here, he explains why he thinks Cimavax is particularly promising, and why he's so enthusiastic about more Cuba-US medical exchanges.

Julia Belluz: How did your exchanges with the Cubans change how you think about medical innovation coming out of there?

Kelvin Lee: Everybody believes Cuba is this country stuck in the 1950s without realizing that the reason Cuban biotech is so innovative is because Cuba as a country has put a very high priority on health care. The public health care metrics are comparable to the US in terms of longevity and infant mortality. Cuba punches way above its weight. Because it is economically constrained, it has to be extraordinarily innovative.

""Many people think what Cuba has to offer the US is rum, cigars, and baseball players"" They have two other anti-cancer vaccines [in addition to Cimavax] that are equally exciting but earlier in development. They also have a monoclonal antibody called Nimotuzumab [to treat brain cancer]. The US has monoclonal antibodies that target colon and lung cancers. However, those antibodies cause a fair amount of toxicity. Nimotuzumab does not have those side effects, so it's applicable for pediatric patients. They’ve used it in pediatric brain cancer. We don't have anything we can give to kids safely. That’s another drug we’d be very interested in seeing.

JB: So how did the warming of relations between the US and Cuba impact bringing Cimavax here?

KL: We got the license to import it, but what we needed were manufacturing documents from the Center for Molecular Immunology that described how the vaccine was manufactured, what quality control measures were taken, etc. This is 1,000 pages the FDA needs to review.



A trade mission [last year] allowed us to go down there and sign the agreements to move the documents forward. So the mission finalized the last piece and allowed us to march into clinical trials. This was one of the biggest obstacles for us. Many people think what Cuba has to offer the US is rum, cigars, and baseball players. Through the trade mission, many realized the biotech sector in Cuba is really remarkable.

JB: This vaccine is being called a revolutionary lung cancer vaccine. But it's actually more a treatment than what we typically think of as a vaccine. Can you explain exactly what Cimavax does?

KL: This vaccine has been developed by the Center for Molecular Immunology in Havana. They've been developing it since the late 1990s and have done a lot of interesting clinical trials, including a large phase 3 randomized controlled trial in 405 patients in Cuba. The patients had advanced-stage lung cancer, primarily because that’s their No. 1 cancer burden in Cuba and they don't have anything else other than first-line chemotherapy. Now it has been approved by the Cuban FDA for the treatment of lung cancer.

The vaccine is made out of a man-made protein that is called epidermal growth factor. This is a protein your body normally produces, and it helps support the growth of normal cells like skin cells. [It can also help cancer cells grow.] In those cells that become cancerous, this vaccine initiates an immune response against the epidermal growth factor protein, thus depleting an important thing the cancer needs to grow and survive. So the cancer can’t grow anymore. 



 JB: Could this method be applied to vaccines for other types of cancers or used for cancer prevention?

KL: Our Cuban colleagues have not tested that, because they’re economically constrained. They've only tested it in the No. 1 cancer burden in Cuba, lung cancer, and they haven't had the resources to do clinical trials in other types of cancer. [We'll study that.]

Can it be used in prevention? We already know patients that have early-stage lung cancer can get their cancers removed. We also know many are smokers who have damaged their lungs all over the place and have pre-cancerous lesions all over their lungs. They have a very high risk of relapse with a second lung cancer. We think the real potential for this vaccine is we can reduce the risk of relapse in this patient population.

One can think even further: If we develop an algorithm to predict a person's lung cancer risk, we could potentially vaccinate the very highest-risk cohorts to try to reduce their risk of lung cancer. That patient population is potentially in the millions, especially if you go worldwide.

JB: How far are we away from this vaccine reaching the US?

KL: Cuba has done the phase-three studies [the final preapproval phase studies to confirm safety and effectiveness], and there are other phase 3 studies going on internationally in lung cancer. But there has been no experience in the US because of embargo issues.

So we are predicting that the FDA is going to ask for a phase 1 study [which will test the drug in healthy people to confirm it's safe] in the US, just to replicate the safety data that our Cuban colleagues already reported. Once we get through that, we anticipate we won't see very much toxicity or anything different from what’s been reported. After that phase 1 study, we'll move on to other phase 1 studies in prevention and potentially in other cancers.

We will be filing an investigational drug application with the FDA. Hopefully we can get that document together and submitted this spring.

On a parallel track, we have two clinical trials that are in the institutional approval process here at Roswell Park. We are hoping to get those approved within the same time frame. That would mean we have trials here opening at the end of this year.",REAL
"You are here: Home / US / Hillary Isn’t Only One Who Suffers Memory Loss, Look What Bill Just Did…. Hillary Isn’t Only One Who Suffers Memory Loss, Look What Bill Just Did…. October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
Bill Clinton will probably have to avoid Hillary even more than usual after his latest showing on the campaign trail, in which it became clear that it isn’t just his wife that has memory issues. 
Slick Willy was out on the campaign trail on Tuesday, angling to get his lecherous, alleged-rapist butt back in the White House, and apparently he forgot his own criminal business partner wife’s campaign slogan. 
“But we were growing together,” Bill said. “This slampaign slogan of Hillary’s, ‘growing together,’ it’s more than just two words that sound good.” 
That’s not a typo either; according to IJR , Bill called Hillary’s “campaign slogan” a “slampaign slogan,” before mangling Hillary’s already-stupid actual campaign slogan: “Stronger Together.” 
Bill probably shouldn’t use “I’m With Her” either, since he might lapse into, “and her, and her over there, and her right there too.” 
“Stronger Together” is also the name of Hillary’s flop of a book, which I highly doubt Bill bothered to read, although you can’t really blame him for that; he has a hard enough time staying awake when his wife speaks — he must be immune to shrill cackling by now. 
I’m guessing Bill is going to want to stay as far away as he can from Hillary while she likely has one of her infamous “cooling off” periods. Hillary has been widely reported to have a nasty temper , so it’d certainly be wise for Bill to stay far away. 
Hillary can’t be mad for too long though, because it’s likely that she’s going to need Bill to run the White House. Although neither of them appear to be in the greatest health, they can do a great deal of damage between the two of them. 
Bill and Hillary have had a painfully obvious agreement throughout their “married life” to help each other politically. Now it’s Hillary’s turn and she’s surely not going to take too kindly to Bill screwing up her ascendancy. 
No need to worry Hillary, you’re responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, ruining the life of a 12-year-old rape victim, and numerous other crimes and disgusting deeds, so a few memory lapses from Bill won’t affect the election. 
Hillary managed to forget answers nearly 40 times during the FBI investigation into her use of private servers to send and receive classified information as secretary of state, so forgetting a dumb campaign slogan should be no big whoop. 
What would be nice is if Bill’s memory lapses led to a moment of clarity and human decency and he let everyone know where the bodies have been buried during the Clinton mafia’s assault on American politics. Won’t happen though; we can’t have nice things…",FAKE
"The White House counsel's office reportedly was kept in the dark about Hillary Clinton's exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state, in the latest detail raising questions over how and why she stayed off the government system despite administration guidance to the contrary.

Clinton used non-official personal email, and also used a server traced to her New York home.

An unnamed source told The Associated Press the White House counsel's office only found out about her heavy personal email use as part of the congressional investigation into the Benghazi attack.

The person said Clinton's exclusive reliance on personal email as the nation's top diplomat was inconsistent with the guidance given to agencies that official business should be conducted on official email accounts. According to the source, the counsel's office asked the State Department to ensure that her email records were properly archived, after finding out in the course of the Benghazi probe she did not follow the guidance.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and others were stepping up efforts to get to the bottom of the issue.

The House select committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi subpoenaed her personal emails on Wednesday. And the Republican National Committee's chief counsel formally requested a State Department inspector general investigation.

Amid the pressure, Clinton said on Twitter late Wednesday she has asked the State Department to make her emails available to the public, in her first public response to the controversy.

""I want the public to see my email,"" she tweeted. ""I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.""

This means the State Department will vet the 55,000-plus pages she handed over, leaving the diplomatic agency with the intensely politicized task of determining which can be made public.

The State Department said it would review the emails as quickly as possible but cautioned it would take some time.

The email saga has developed as the first major test for how the White House and President Obama's administration will deal with Clinton's likely 2016 presidential campaign -- and the inevitable questions that will only get louder as 2016 approaches.

In his letter to department Inspector General Steve Linick, RNC Chief Counsel John Phillippe urged an investigation into whether Clinton's system posed a cybersecurity risk, what the department email policies were, how Clinton was allowed to use the personal system and other issues.

""The American public deserves to know whether one of its top-ranking public official's actions violated federal law,"" he wrote. ""With transparency and openness in government being one of President Obama's guiding principles, it is incumbent upon your office to determine the facts surrounding this issue.""

Since the revelations surfaced this week, the Obama administration has been pummeled by endless questions about Clinton, who hasn't formally announced a run. In the absence of an official campaign to defend her, the White House press secretary has been put in the awkward position of being a de facto Clinton spokesman and the most public voice speaking on her behalf.

While trying to avoid doing political damage to Clinton, the White House has put the onus on her aides to explain exactly what happened.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged Wednesday that Clinton would have emailed White House officials on a non-government account. But the source familiar with the matter who spoke to the AP said the White House was not aware that was her sole method of email and that she wasn't keeping a record of her emails at the State Department.

The person said the White House's concern was that agencies must maintain records for historical and legal purposes in the case of a Freedom of Information Act request or subpoena. If the State Department didn't control the records, officials there could not search and ensure they are turning over what is required and that could create a legal issue for the agency.

Earnest said the guidance given to government officials is that they should forward work emails on a personal address to official accounts or even print them out and turn them over to their agency to ensure they are properly maintained.

The Associated Press also has reported that Clinton's account was set up on a computer email server traced to her home in Chappaqua, New York.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program appeared to take a sour turn Wednesday after pushing on past a key deadline, but Secretary of State John F. Kerry decided to stay in Switzerland an extra day in search of a breakthrough.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that progress had been made and that Kerry would remain “until at least Thursday morning.” But the short period appeared to reflect the difficulties in the talks between six world powers and Iran over a preliminary agreement on restricting the Islamic republic’s ability to use its civilian nuclear technology to build atomic weapons.

“We continue to make progress but have not reached a political understanding,” Harf told reporters.

The talks with Iran appeared to be on ever-more-shaky ground as the day elapsed. The White House said Iran had not made commitments about its nuclear program in Wednesday’s sessions, and Iran’s foreign minister described negotiations with the West as “always problematic.”

Though the talks continued, Germany’s foreign minister said it was possible they could collapse.

[The big questions any nuclear deal with Iran would have to answer]

“It is clear the negotiations are not going well,” two prominent Republican senators who have been wary of an agreement — John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) — said in a joint statement. “At every step, the Iranians appear intent on retaining the capacity to achieve a nuclear weapon.”

The Obama administration had sought a broad political framework for an agreement by Tuesday, with three additional months to negotiate the technical details. But a deadline that perhaps was intended to pressure Iran to make concessions came and went as the country’s representatives bargained hard. A temporary nuclear agreement with Iran remains in effect until June 30.

Diplomats and politicians sounded exasperated Wednesday, even as they acknowledged they were still exploring proposals to find a way out of their impasse.

In Washington, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the talks were productive but that there were unresolved details. He said the United States would not arbitrarily end the negotiations if they were making progress, “but if we are in a situation where we sense that the talks have stalled, then yes, the United States and the international community is prepared to walk away.”

In Lausanne, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that new proposals would be considered but that the two sides were still far apart.

When asked whether the talks could collapse, Steinmeier told German reporters: “Naturally. Whoever negotiates has to accept the risk of collapse. But I say that in light of the convergence [of views] that we have achieved here in Switzerland, in Lausanne, it would be irresponsible to ignore the possibility of reaching an agreement.”

Steinmeier said he would reassess on Thursday morning whether to stay or return home. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who went to Paris on Wednesday morning, was headed back to the talks in Lausanne that night.

Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammed Javad Zarif, was critical of his counterparts when he was approached by reporters as he strolled along the shores of Lake Geneva.

“I’ve always said that an agreement and pressure do not go together; they are mutually exclusive,” he said. “So our friends need to decide whether they want to be with Iran based on respect or whether they want to continue based on pressure. They have tested the other one. It is high time to test this one.”

Earlier, speaking to Iranian reporters outside the Beau Rivage Palace, where talks are being conducted, Zarif sounded weary with the approach taken by the multiple negotiating teams on the other side of the table.

“The negotiations’ progress depends on political will,” he said, according to Iran’s Mehr News Agency. “The other party’s political will has always been problematic.”

With the departure of several foreign ministers who had arrived over the weekend, Kerry was joined at the table by the British and German foreign ministers and the European Union’s foreign policy chief. France, China and Russia were represented by their ministers’ deputies.

The Obama administration and its negotiating partners are seeking an agreement that will sharply limit Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons for at least a decade and maintain lesser restrictions in subsequent years. Iran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes. It is seeking the lifting of international sanctions that have battered its economy.

The day’s negotiations started amid hopes of a preliminary agreement on at least some issues.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he expected the talks to end late Wednesday with a statement “announcing progress.” That was quickly contradicted by diplomats from other countries.

Araghchi also offered some insight into Iran’s position on two central issues — the lifting of sanctions and the future of Iran’s research on centrifuges to enrich uranium.

“We insist on lifting of financial and oil and banking sanctions immediately,” he told Iranian state television, adding that the pace for lifting other sanctions was still being negotiated.

“We insist on keeping research and development with advanced centrifuges,” he added, referring to Iran’s desire to eventually replace its outdated centrifuges with more modern technology that enriches uranium more quickly. The United States and its negotiating partners want to keep restrictions on Iran’s nuclear research through the final years of a potential 15-year accord. They also want economic sanctions lifted more gradually.

For months, the State Department avoided the word deadline, a term that was used in Congress and the press. Officials called it a goal. In recent weeks, though, even U.S. diplomats began using the term.

“We’ve said that March 31st is a deadline; it has to mean something, and the decisions don’t get easier after March 31st,” Harf said Monday.

Some say the White House should never have adopted the “D” word.

“It was a mistake to set the March 31 deadline in the first place, because we need a positive outcome more than anyone else,” said Gary Samore, a former nuclear arms adviser to President Obama. “Naturally, the Iranians are taking advantage and playing hard ball.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept up his unrelenting criticism of an agreement with Iran.

“Yesterday, an Iranian general brazenly said, and I quote, Israel’s destruction is nonnegotiable. But evidently giving Iran’s murderous regime a clear path to a bomb is negotiable,” he said in a statement from Jerusalem.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who was visiting Israel on Wednesday with a congressional delegation, said in an appearance with Netanyahu: “Regardless of where in the Middle East we’ve been, the message has been the same: You can’t continue to turn your eye away from the threats that face all of us.”

William Branigin in Washington, William Booth in Jerusalem and Karoun Demirjian in Moscow contributed to this report.

A framework? A deal? The semantics of the talks.",REAL
"Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation October 29, 2016 
[Classic: January 22, 1998] — Suddenly nobody is questioning Paula Jones’s veracity anymore. Mrs. Jones told a simple story and has stuck with it, while the president has shifted ground, equivocated with his patented “carefully worded denials,” and let his thuggish, blundering, and very expensive lawyer handle public relations. 
The Clinton team’s line, echoed by the major media until recently, has been that Mrs. Jones is “trailer-park trash” whose allegations are credible only to dirty-minded right-wing Clinton-haters. Never mind that her allegations are consistent with a great many other allegations from a great many sources. The Clinton strategy was to scare her off, and then, when that didn’t work, to make her character the issue, leaking their own allegations to the press. 
But her tenacity created enormous pressure, forcing the president to make a humiliating appearance in her presence a few days ago to give his deposition — and possibly to try to tamper with other witnesses. Only he knows how many other potential witnesses there are. 
The new charges of creepy lechery and criminality have finally cost Clinton his protective press. Though Newsweek spiked its own scoop, the story exploded anyway. All those journalists who have covered for Clinton now feel he’s yanked the rug out from under them once too often 
And it happened because a story they didn’t want to dignify with coverage refused to go away. The story Newsweek spiked was written by Michael Isikoff, who had left the Washington Post in fury two years ago when the paper spiked a similar story he’d written on the Jones suit. But now the “respectable” press has finally caught up with the “crazy” press, leaving Hillary Clinton to repeat her usual gripe — Bill’s just the victim of someone’s political agenda — to an empty gallery. 
Clinton is standing on a precipice, staring down into the abyss of impeachment and prison. One nudge — another story, witness, allegation, or tape recording — could push him over. And the market value of any damaging evidence has skyrocketed, with the media fighting fiercely for the kind of information they used to spurn. He’s at the mercy of any bimbo who wants to step forward. 
After being driven from office, Richard Nixon was able to make a comeback by claiming, however speciously, that his motive had always been to defend the dignity of the presidency. That’s a claim Clinton won’t be able to make. If he seduced a twenty-one-year-old White House intern and urged her to perjure herself for his sake, the dignity of the presidency was the last thing on his mind. Nor will he have the diehard it-didn’t-start-with-Watergate defenders Nixon had. In Clinton’s case, it started long ago in Arkansas. 
He arrived in Washington with a trail of sleazy rumors, some of them substantiated. The “respectable” press ignored all that, including the fact that Gennifer Flowers had enjoyed rapid promotion as a state employee (and had tapes of Clinton urging her to lie about their liaison). It ignored “right-wing” reports that he’d used state troopers to procure women. Such stories illustrated his readiness to abuse power for sleazy purposes, but they were treated as cheap sex gossip. When Paula Jones told her story, it fit the pattern — but was rejected as unworthy of serious attention. 
Now that the pattern is undeniable, Clinton is still Clintonizing — issuing new carefully-worded-denials, as if he might yet exculpate himself with verbal cleverness. It hasn’t sunk in that he no longer has many supporters who will seize on any excuse for believing his version. His guilt isn’t an epistemological puzzle. 
Supporting Clinton has become extremely costly. He has destroyed the Democrats’ congressional majorities in both houses, and though he managed to win reelection (by methods that will now get redoubled scrutiny), he has destroyed his own presidency. And his disgrace will be contagious. 
The major media should not be allowed to ask: “How were we supposed to know?” It’s their business to know — and to inform the public. But their job had to be done by Paula Jones and the “right-wing” press. ### 
This is one of 82 essays in Joe Sobran’s collection of his writing on the President Clinton years, titled Hustler: The Clinton Legacy , which has just been republished by FGF Books.",FAKE
"The Washington Post reported : 
Donald Trump raised just $29 million for his presidential campaign committee in the first 19 days of October, about half as much as his Democratic rival, putting him at a severe financial disadvantage in the crucial final days of the White House contest, new campaign finance reports filed Thursday night showed. 
The GOP presidential nominee had just $16 million left in his campaign coffers on Oct. 19, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $62 million. When the cash reserves of their joint fundraising committees are included, Clinton’s war chest grew to $153 million, while Trump’s totaled $68 million. 
Trump’s total fundraising dropped 39% in the first 19 days of October. $29 million is close to nothing for a national presidential campaign in the closing weeks of the race. At a time when Trump needs boots on the ground to get out the Republican vote, his presidential campaign is broke, and in debt to the tune of $2 million. There isn’t going to be a last-minute ad blitz for Trump, or a reservation of television time so that the Republican nominee can speak directly to voters before election day. 
The plan for Trump is for the campaign to continue to limp along with lots of rallies, which are good for Trump’s ego, but not effective in getting voters to the polls. Trump promised to donate $100 million to his campaign but has only given $56 million . The billionaire who promised to self-finance has run his presidential campaign into the ground. Trump took ten times more money out of his campaign in reimbursements to his own businesses than he gave in October. 
Fundraising is an indicator of expected election outcomes. The money tends to go towards the winner at the end of an election. Hillary Clinton is having no trouble raising money, which suggests that enthusiasm is high among her supporters. Trump’s cash crush points to a depressed base that doesn’t expect him to win. 
Trump has done what he does best. He talked a big game while bankrupting the Republican Party for his own personal gain. Convincing Republicans to give him their nomination may go down in history as Trump’s biggest con of all.",FAKE
"Reasons to Risk Nuclear Annihilation   latest neocon/liberal-hawk scheme is for the U.S. population to risk nuclear war to protect corrupt politicians in Ukraine and Al Qaeda terrorists in east Aleppo, two rather dubious reasons to end life on the planet, says Robert Parry. 
By Robert Parry 
Obviously, I never wanted to see a nuclear war, which would likely kill not only me but my children, grandchildren, relatives, friends and billions of others. We’d be incinerated in the blast or poisoned by radiation or left to starve in a nuclear winter. 
But at least I always assumed that this horrific possibility would only come into play over something truly worthy, assuming that anything would justify the mass extinction of life on the planet. Peter Sellers playing Dr. Strangelove as he struggles to control his right arm from making a Nazi salute. 
Now, however, Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists are telling me and others that we should risk nuclear annihilation over which set of thieves gets to rule Ukraine and over helping Al Qaeda terrorists (and their “moderate” allies) keep control of east Aleppo in Syria. 
In support of the Ukraine goal, there is endless tough talk at the think tanks, on the op-ed pages and in the halls of power about the need to arm the Ukrainian military so it can crush ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who dared object to the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 that ousted their elected President Viktor Yanukovych. 
And after “liberating” eastern Ukraine, the U.S.-backed Ukrainian army would wheel around and “liberate” Crimea from Russia, even though 96 percent of Crimean voters voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia – and there is no sign they want to go back . 
So, the world would be risking World War III over the principle of the West’s right to sponsor the overthrow of elected leaders who don’t do what they’re told and then to slaughter people who object to this violation of democratic order. 
This risk of nuclear Armageddon would then be compounded to defend the principle that the people of Crimea don’t have the right of self-determination but must submit to a corrupt post-coup regime in Kiev regardless of Crimea’s democratic judgment. 
And, to further maintain our resolve in this gamble over nuclear war in defense of Ukraine, we must ignore the spectacle of the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev wallowing in graft and corruption . 
While the Ukrainian people earn on average $214 a month and face neoliberal “reforms,” such as reduced pensions, extended years of work for the elderly and slashed heating subsidies, their new leaders in the parliament report wealth averaging more than $1 million in “monetary assets” each, much of it in cash. 
A Troubling Departure 
The obvious implication of widespread corruption was underscored on Monday with the abrupt resignation of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who was the appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region. A scene from “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the bomber pilot (played by actor Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb to its target in the Soviet Union. 
Though Saakashvili faces charges of abusing power back in Georgia, he was nevertheless put in charge of Odessa by current President Petro Poroshenko, but has now quit (or was ousted) amid charges and counter-charges about corruption. 
Noting the mysterious wealth of Ukraine’s officials, Saakashvili denounced the country’s rulers as “corrupt filth” and accused Poroshenko and his administration of sabotaging real reform. 
“Odessa can only develop once Kiev will be freed from these bribe takers, who directly patronize organized crime and lawlessness,” Saakashvili said . Yes, that would be a good slogan to scribble on the side of a nuclear bomb heading for Moscow: “Defending the corrupt filth and bribe takers who patronize organized crime.” 
But the recent finger-pointing about corruption is also ironic because the West cited the alleged corruption of the Yanukovych government to justify the violent putsch in February 2014 that drove him from office and sparked Ukraine’s current civil war. 
Yet, the problems don’t stop with Kiev’s corruption. There is the troubling presence of neo-Nazis , ultranationalists and even Islamic jihadists assigned to the Azov battalion and other military units sent east to the front lines to kill ethnic Russians. 
On top of that, United Nations human rights investigators have accused Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service of hiding torture chambers . 
But we consumers of the mainstream U.S. media’s narrative are supposed to see the putschists as the white hats and Yanukovych (who was excoriated for having a sauna in his official residence) and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the black hats. 
Though U.S. officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, helped organize or “midwife” the coup ousting Yanukovych, we are told that the Ukraine crisis was a clear-cut case of “Russian aggression” and Crimea’s decision to secede (and rejoin Russia) was a “Russian invasion” and an “annexation.” 
So, all stirred up with righteous indignation, we absorbed the explanation that economic sanctions were needed to punish Putin and to destabilize Russian society, with the hoped-for goal of another “regime change,” this time in Moscow. 
We weren’t supposed to ask if anyone had actually thought through the idea of destabilizing a nuclear-armed power and the prospect that Putin’s overthrow, even if possible, might lead to a highly unstable fight for control of the nuclear codes. 
Silencing Dissent 
Brushing aside such worries, the neocons/liberal-hawks are confident that the answer is to move NATO forces up to Russia’s borders and to provide military training to Ukraine’s army, even to its neo-Nazi “shock troops.” Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine’s Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV) 
After all, when have the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks ever miscalculated about anything. No fair mentioning Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or other lucky countries that have been on the receiving end of a benighted “regime change.” 
An American who protests or even mentions the risk of nuclear war is dismissed as a “Kremlin stooge” or a “Putin puppet” or a “useful fool” repeating “Russian disinformation” and assisting Moscow’s “information war” against the U.S. government. 
But if you’re still a bit queasy about risking nuclear annihilation to keep some Ukrainian kleptocrats in power, there is the other cause worth having the human race die over: protecting Al Qaeda terrorists and their “moderate” rebel comrades holed up in east Aleppo. 
Since these modern terrorists turn out to be highly skilled with video cameras and the dissemination of propaganda, they have created the image for Westerners that the Syrian military and its Russian allies simply want to kill as many children as possible. 
Indeed, most Western coverage of the battle for Aleppo whites out the role of Al Qaeda almost completely although occasionally the reality slips through in on-the-ground reporting , along with the admission that Al Qaeda and its fellow fighters are keeping as many civilians in east Aleppo as possible, all the better to put up heartrending videos and photos on social media. 
Of course, when a similar situation exists in Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq, the mainstream Western media dutifully denounces the tactic of keeping children in a war zone as the cynical use of “human shields,” thus justifying Iraqi and U.S. forces killing lots of civilians during their “liberation.” The deaths are all the enemy’s fault. 
However, when the shoe is on the Syrian/Russian foot, we’re talking about “war crimes” and the need to invade Syria to establish “safe zones” and “no-fly zones” even if that means killing large numbers of additional Syrians and shooting down Russian warplanes. 
After all, isn’t the protection of Al Qaeda terrorists worth the risk of starting World War III with nuclear-armed Russia? And if Al Qaeda isn’t worth fighting a nuclear war to defend, what about the thieves in Ukraine and their neo-Nazi shock troops? Calling Dr. Strangelove. 
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
"A string of damaging stories about Hillary Clinton's activities as Secretary of State -- including the new controversy surrounding her email habits -- are giving fresh ammo to Clinton skeptics who have grown resigned lately to the idea of a Democratic coronation instead of a genuine, competitive primary.

Now, those Democrats clamoring for a Clinton alternative are once again speaking up about the need for a primary that will, at the very least, serve as a vetting process and prepare Clinton for the general election.

Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State.

Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina.

Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid.

Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid.

Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a ""buzzy"" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary.

Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a ""buzzy"" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare.

Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance.

Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance.

Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his ""options open"" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it.

Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his ""options open"" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates.

Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd ""make a good President.""

Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd ""make a good President.""

Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections.

Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections.

Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages.

Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages.

Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects.

Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects.

Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.

Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance.

On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May.

On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is establishing a committee to formally explore a White House bid. ""If I run, my candidacy will be based on the idea that the American people are ready to try a dramatically different direction,"" he said in a news release provided to CNN on Monday, May 18

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents.

""The closer we get to 2016, the more the electorate pays attention, which we're now seeing with foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation and in Hillary's undisclosed emails,"" said Boyd Brown, a Democratic National Committee member and former state legislator from South Carolina. ""These are problems that raise real leadership and transparency concerns, concerns that can be addressed in caucuses and primaries, but would go ignored in a coronation process.""

In conversations with grassroots Democrats around the country and in key nominating states, there is renewed concern that Clinton is saddled with too much baggage and dubious political instincts that could sink her against the GOP nominee if the kinks are not worked out in a contested primary.

""The Democratic base that isn't wedded to her is nervous about it,"" said Deborah Arnie Arnesen, a progressive radio host in Concord, New Hampshire. ""It makes her more vulnerable. What is this anointed candidate getting us? A much more flawed candidate than we thought. And Republicans now have material they never thought they would have.""

""We need to litigate this in a primary so that she will better at it, or it will be the Republicans who will be doing it for her,"" she added.

The latest round of bad press began last week when the Washington Post reported on foreign government contributions made to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation while she was serving as Secretary of State, including one donation from the Algerian government that may have violated the Obama administration's ethics policy.

This week, the New York Times broke the news that Clinton exclusively used a private email account to do business at the State Department, allowing her to skirt federal record-keeping practices. The revelation also raised security concerns, though State Department officials said nothing classified passed through her account.

And late Wednesday, Clinton sought to realign herself on the side of transparency, tweeting that she wants ""the public to see my email.""

But that doesn't mean they'll be released anytime soon. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a statement Thursday that the review process will take ""some time"" because of the volume of emails to sift through.

Clinton supporters have pushed back against the media and Republicans, waving off the stories as yet another Twitter-fueled much-ado-about-nothing that has little resonance with the typical voter beyond Washington.

""Voters do not give a sh-t about what email Hillary used,"" said Democratic strategist Paul Begala, a longtime Clinton ally and CNN contributor. ""They don't even give a fart.""

But if regular voters aren't paying attention, the Democratic power brokers who hold sway over the nomination process in key states — the legislators, local party chairmen and plugged-in activists — most definitely are. The questions some of them are raising are less about the specifics of the stories and more about the long-established narratives they feed: That the secretive Clintons, enabled by unquestioning loyalists, play by their own rules.

""The questions relating to Hillary are more about, are we tired of the same old thing?"" asked one prominent Democratic state Senator in South Carolina who wished to remain anonymous. ""It's time to turn the page and find something that will appeal to voters in South Carolina. People just don't relate to these national stars like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi or whatever.""

The critical voices in the Democratic Party should not be confused for the majority view. Many Democrats are siding with Clinton through the e-mail flap, underscoring her broad popularity within the party and her undisputed frontrunner status. Recent polls of Iowa Democrats have put Clinton's lead over her closest potential rival, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, at anywhere from 40 to 56 points.

""This stuff feels kind of petty to me,"" said Cindy Pollard, a Clinton backer and vice-chairman of the Jasper County Democrats in Iowa. ""Like, this is all they got?""

But the stories have given new fuel to stalwart Clinton skeptics who, anxious about the prospect of a nominee who hasn't been challenged seriously in the national political arena since her ill-fated 2008 campaign, have been demanding other prominent Democrats to join the 2016 race and not give Clinton a free ride.

Some of her critics are unabashed anti-Wall Street progressives who have urged Warren to join the fray. Some are younger Democrats who see the Clintons as emblems of the past, and others are simply skeptical of Clinton's ability to stir the passions of the Democratic base.

Whatever their motivations, the Anybody-But-Hillary voices have been happy over the last several years to prop up potential rivals and feed reporters quotes about the importance of a Democratic nomination fight instead of a free walk to the nomination for Clinton.

But in recent months, with Warren looking unlikely to run and Clinton lining up blue chip talent for her nascent campaign staff, the critics have lowered their voices and braced for the coming reality of Clinton-as-nominee, even if potential contenders like Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders make a run.

While many Democrats are still reluctant to publicly criticize the Clintons — ""Everybody is kind of afraid right now to say anything,"" one of Iowa's most well-connected Democratic organizers told CNN when asked about the new controversies — others are less likely to pull punches.

In New York, Zephyr Teachout, who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo from the left in last year's Democratic Primary, chided Clinton in the New York Daily News over the e-mail flap.

""She shouldn't have done it,"" Teachout said. ""She should come forward and give a press availability on it. Just as a matter of leadership, she should address it directly ... This is why we need a primary, to force debate both about policy and leadership style.""

Dick Harpootlian, a former South Carolina party chairman and supporter of Vice President Joe Biden, said the e-mail story is yet another Clinton scandal to throw on the pile.

'Always another shoe to drop'

""There's always another shoe to drop with Hillary,"" Harpootlian told the Washington Post. ""Do we nominate her not knowing what's in those e-mails? If the e-mails were just her and her family and friends canoodling about fashion and what they're going to do next week, that's one thing. But the fact that she's already turned e-mails to the Benghazi committee because she was doing official business on it means she's going to die by 1,000 cuts on this one.""

Brown, the DNC member, said that party leaders in his state are feeling ""shaky"" about Clinton.

""Folks are remembering why they pushed back in 2008, and a candidate with the right message and retail politics could pick the lock Clinton thinks she has on the party faithful,"" Brown said.",REAL
"At 7 a.m., the Kurdish forces began their assault.

Backed by a barrage of U.S.-led airstrikes, about 7,500 Kurdish peshmerga fighters, including thousands of minority Yazidis, launched a three-pronged attack against the ­Islamic State in the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar.

They had gathered at the base of Mount Sinjar at dawn Thursday. Some prayed and others huddled by campfires before moving to their positions. The dirt tracks to the front lines were jammed with vehicles full of fighters.

On the western side of the mountain, Kurdish special forces tentatively advanced on foot into Islamic State-held territory followed by a snaking convoy of armored vehicles. By nightfall they had succeeded in cutting the highway next to the city, which runs from Raqqa in Syria to Mosul in Iraq, splitting the Islamic State’s territory apart.

Peshmerga forces had entered a former Iraqi military base and cleared a string of ­villages, Kurdish officials said.

The drive to retake Sinjar is the largest offensive launched by Iraqi Kurds against the Islamic State and a key test of their military capabilities. It comes as the militants face attacks on multiple fronts, from Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria, to Ramadi in western Iraq.

The loss of Sinjar would deal the Islamic State a severe setback, cutting its supply lines between Iraq and Syria. But it is also a particularly emotive fight.

The sudden fall of Sinjar to Islamic State militants in August 2014 devastated the Yazidi community. Hundreds of thousands fled Sinjar and the surrounding area — many straight into the hands of the extremists, who ­consider Yazidis heretics. Yazidi men were summarily executed en masse, and women were rounded up to be bought and sold as sex slaves. Tens of thousands of people fled to Mount Sinjar.

As troops gathered Thursday at dawn at the base of the mountain to launch their attack, the Yazidi fighters pledged vengeance.

“It was a tragedy, and we carry a great sorrow in each of us,” Salim Shevan, a 28-year-old Yazidi fighter, said as he left for the front lines. “We will have revenge.”

[Horrifying tales of sexual slavery for Yazidis who could not flee]

After the Kurdish forces began advancing, bulldozers broke through the earthen barrier that previously marked the front line to make way for dozens of armored vehicles, led by a U.S.-

supplied MRAP, designed to withstand roadside bombs.

While the closest villages appeared abandoned, the attackers soon encountered resistance as they turned toward Sinjar.

In the distance, a vehicle sped toward the convoy from the direction of Syria.

“Suicide bomber! Suicide bomber!” Brig. Gen. Rawan Barzani, the special forces commander and son of the Kurdish region’s president, radioed to his men on the front line. The convoy fired two antitank missiles, but they missed. Another finally hit as the car neared the convoy, and a plume of gray smoke rose into the air.

[The Islamic State’s attacks on Yazidis constitute genocide, report says]

Sinjar lies on Highway 47, the route used by the Islamic State to transport fighters, weapons and commodities such as oil.

“Getting Sinjar is crucial because then [the Islamic State] has to decide between Raqqa and ­Mosul,” the group’s stronghold in northern Iraq, Barzani said. “It won’t be able to hold both.”

Kurdish commanders said they expected the offensive to last about a week. Despite quick progress made Thursday, few believed the fighting in the city will be easy.

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that advisers from the United States and other countries were taking part in the Sinjar operation but declined to provide the number of foreign forces involved.

“Most of those folks . . . are behind the front lines, advising and working directly with peshmerga commanders,” Cook said. “There are some advisers who are on Sinjar Mountain, assisting in the selection of airstrike targets.”

British officials said they are also supporting the operation. “The Royal Air Force has been playing a full part in coalition reconnaissance and strike missions to provide effective air support to them and other Iraqi ground forces,” a Defense Ministry spokesman said.

U.S. officials estimate that about 400 to 550 Islamic State militants are in the city.

Lt. Col. Dilgash Zebari, a peshmerga commander, said militants have dug tunnels and hideaways in the city. “We’ve had suicide bombers; we are expecting more when we go inside,” he said.

If the offensive bogs down, ­rivalries between various factions fighting the Islamic State will be to blame, Zebari said.

The long-planned operation had stalled for weeks because of bad weather and political wrangling between factions of Kurdish soldiers. Fighters affiliated with the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have held positions in the city, but Kurdish peshmerga forces launching the offensive said they are not directly coordinating with them.

“If the liberation takes too long, it will be because of having troops from different parties, each of them flying their own flag,” said Zebari.

The Kurdish-led efforts also have significance in the wider ­efforts to cripple the Islamic State. In Syria, Kurdish militiamen emerged as a linchpin in Pentagon plans after the failure of Washington’s strategy to arm and train other Syrian rebel units to fight the Islamic State.

Syrian Kurds have waged a ­series of strikes against the Islamic State and last year withstood the group’s siege of Kobane, a town near the Turkish border.

But the rising profile of Kurdish fighters poses potential complications for the U.S.-led alliance. Turkey, a NATO member that has battled PKK separatists for decades, has deep concerns over growing Kurdish political and military influence, fearing it could encourage greater calls for autonomy.

The U.S. military said Thursday that it dispatched an additional six F-15E fighter jets to the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey to join the air campaign against the Islamic State.

Bryan Murphy, Missy Ryan and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

Sinjar was escape route or trap for thousands

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
"— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016 
She did finally land … Everyone at Hillary's Cedar Rapids ""rally"" knew about the FBI reopening the case before she did. pic.twitter.com/WoPaBmhF3v 
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 28, 2016 
Sounds like there was a wait on the tarmac for Hillary … but it supposedly wasn’t FBI story related. Clinton delay on tarmac wasn't about the FBI, it turns out. Pool report notes that Annie Leibovitz came off after, likely had a photo shoot. pic.twitter.com/xE5pm3ITRC 
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) October 28, 2016 
Photo shoot must be code for a “holy crap, what do we do with this FBI thing” meeting. Trending",FAKE
"  This ordinance is a big step forwards by creating awareness about this topic, which is clearly something we need more of. It specifically requires all cellphone retailers in the area to provide consumers with a notice on radio frequency (RF) radiation exposure and the proper guidelines to help users avoid this type of exposure. Warnings may include the dangers associated with carrying a phone in a shirt, pants, tucked into a bra or anywhere else on a person that may exceed federal safety guidelines. The ordinance was created with the help of Lawrence Lessig, a Law Professor at Harvard University, and Robert Post, the Dean of Yale Law School, as well as the California Brain Tumor Association, who believes, along with hundreds of other scientists, that the research is sound. In retaliation, the wireless industry has filed an appeal against the ordinance. Notifying consumers of the harms associated with cell phone use at the point of sale would clearly hurt their profits. Some companies already have warnings in their packaging, but it’s only found in the fine print and isn’t mentioned at the point of sale. For example, here’s a statement from Apple about the issue, who already has existing safety recommendations for cellphone use; however, most people don’t know about them: “To reduce exposure to RF energy, use a hands-free option, such as the built-in speakerphone, the supplied headphones, or other similar accessories. Carry iPhone at least 10mm away from your body to ensure exposure levels remain at or below the as-tested levels. Cases with metal parts may change the RF performance of the device, including its compliance with RF exposure guidelines, in a manner that has not been tested or certified.” ( source )   A similar statement from Blackberry reads as follows: “Use hands-free operation if it is available and keep the BlackBerry device at least 0.59 in (15mm) from your body (including the abdomen of pregnant women)… ( source ) The issue here is that Berkeley citizens and most other cell-phone users are completely unaware of these guidelines and the dangers surrounding cell phone usage, which has obviously been downplayed by the industry. For example, a poll conducted by Lessig and his colleague before the ordinance was finalized found that: 74% of Berkeley residents carry their cell phones against their bodies 70% said they didn’t know that cell phones were tested assuming they would not be carried against the body 80 % said they might change their behavior if they knew knowing that “radiation tests to assure the safety of cell phones assume a cell phone would be carried away from your body” 85 % said they had never known or read any of the manufacturer’s recommendations 82% said they would want this information made available to them at the time they purchased their cell phone. The underlying purpose of this poll, and the ordinance in general, is to shed light on the apparent disconnect that exists between the current safety recommendations and customer knowledge and understanding of those recommendations. Here’s the text of the required notice, as Lessig writes in his blog : “The City of Berkeley requires that you be provided the following notice: To assure safety, the Federal Government requires that cell phones meet radio frequency (RF) exposure guidelines. If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This potential risk is greater for children. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual of information about how to use your phone safety.” This is a Very Minimal Requirement Despite the fact that informing customers of the dangers of cell phone usage is the ethical thing to do, the wireless industry has filed an appeal to stop this effort. Specifically, CTIA (wireless association) filed the appeal after a judge ruled in favor of the ordinance. However, the California Brain Tumour Association claims that: One of the members of the three-judge panel, Michelle Friedland, is married to Daniel Kelly, a DSP senior engineer with Tarana Wireless Inc. and has worked on the 5G technology for the upcoming rollout to the market. According to the California Brain Tumor Association, AT&T is a major investor in Tarana, which also has a past chief technology officer of Ericsson and Sony Mobile sitting on its board of directors. The association also assumes that Kelly is a stockholder in Tarana, giving him a vested interest in the wireless industry…. If a judge has any financial interest in a controversy before her, she should have rescued herself from the case…Just the fact that her husband is in the industry and the timeliness of this with the 5G rollout is probably enough for her to rescue herself. ( source ) Below is a picture of Tom Wheeler, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair & former Senior Lobbyist, announcing the roll out of 5G microwave technology. So, what exactly is happening here? Basically, the privatization of this rollout may remove oversight and standards. Unfortunately, big industry has paid off the scientists, bought the lawmakers, and ruled the proliferation of microwaves and other phenomena as “safe.” A powerful group of people have infiltrated these organizations along with most international health agencies. “The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” – ( source )( source ) Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal The Science Dr. Joel M. Moskowtiz, the Director and Principal Investigator at the Center for Family and Community Health at Berkeley School of Health, and Dr. Martin Blank of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and Colombia University, are two out of hundreds of scientists from more than 30 countries who have produced more than 2,000 peer-reviewed articles about the hazardous effects of RF radiation. All of these scientists united together and formally signed and sent a letter to the United Nations requesting more thorough and unbiased research be performed regarding the dangers of RF radiation. Below is a video of Dr. Blank outlining the potential hazards associated with these devices: HERE is a video of him giving a lecture about the issue. Did you know that The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radio frequency fields (including those from cell phones) as a possible carcinogen in 2011? (source) The dangers of cell phone usage gained significant mainstream credibility in 2011 when the World Health Organization (WHO) admitted that cell phone radiation may cause cancer. The statement was based off a cumulative decision made by a team of 31 scientists from 14 different countries after reviewing evidence in support of their claim. You can read more about that HERE. It’s pretty startling news, especially given the fact that a child’s brain absorbs much more radiation than that of an adult. Below is a video of Dr. Devra Davis, one of the most well-respected and credentialed researchers on the dangers of cellphones: “[A] cellphone is a two-way microwave radio…Industry has fought successfully to use the phrase ‘radiofrequency energy’ instead of microwave radiation. Because they know radiofrequency energy sounds fine. We listen to music with radios. Everybody needs more energy. What could be better than that? But radiofrequency energy is another word for microwave radiation. If people understood that they were holding a two-way microwave-radiating device next to their brain or next to their reproductive organs, they might think differently about it.” ( source ) Things You Can Do To Limit Your Exposure & Why You Shouldn’t Worry Worrying is pointless, and solves nothing. That being said, coming across such information can be scary, and that’s the last reaction you should have; after all, our thoughts feelings and emotions alone have shown to have a significant effect on our biology, and letting go of fear could possibly be the first step in helping you limit the effect that EMFs could be having on your body. That being said, here are some others measures you can take: As Dr. Mercola points out, until the industry starts taking this matter seriously, the responsibility to keep children safe falls on the parents. To minimize the risk to your brain, and that of your child, pay heed to the following advice: Don’t let your child use a cell phone . Barring a life-threatening emergency, children should not use a cell phone, or a wireless device of any type. Children are far more vulnerable to cell phone radiation than adults, because of their thinner skull bones. Keep your cell phone use to a minimum. Turn your cell phone off more often. Reserve it for emergencies or important matters. As long as your cell phone is on, it emits radiation intermittently, even when you are not actually making a call. Use a land line at home and at work. Reduce or eliminate your use of other wireless devices. Just as with cell phones, it is important to ask yourself whether or not you really need to use them every single time. If you must use a portable home phone, use the older kind that operates at 900 MHz. They are no safer during calls, but at least some of them do not broadcast constantly even when no call is being made. You can measure your exposure from your cordless phone is to measure with an electrosmog meter, and it must be one that goes up to the frequency of your portable phone. As many portable phones are 5.8 Gigahertz, we recommend you look for RF meters that go up to 8 Gigahertz. You can find RF meters at EMFSafetyStore.com . Even without an RF meter, you can be fairly certain your portable phone is problematic if the technology is labeled DECT, or digitally enhanced cordless technology. Alternatively, you can be very careful with the base station placement as that causes the bulk of the problem since it transmits signals 24/7, even when you aren’t talking. “If you can keep the base station at least three rooms away from where you spend most of your time, and especially your bedroom, they may not be as damaging to your health. Ideally it would be helpful to turn off or disconnect your base station every night before you go to bed.” – Dr Mercola Limit cell phone use to areas with excellent reception. The weaker the reception, the more power your phone must use to transmit, and the more power it uses, the more radiation it emits, and the deeper the dangerous radio waves penetrate into your body. Ideally, you should only use your phone with full bars and good reception. Avoid carrying your cell phone on your body, and do not sleep with it under your pillow or near your head. Ideally, put it in your purse or carrying bag. Placing a cell phone in your bra or in a shirt pocket over your heart is asking for trouble, as is placing it in a man’s pocket if he seeks to preserve his fertility. The most dangerous place to be, in terms of radiation exposure, is within about six inches of the emitting antenna. You do not want any part of your body within that area while the phone is on. Don’t assume one cell phone is safer than another. There’s no such thing as a “safe” cell phone. Respect others; many are highly sensitive to EMF. Some people who have become sensitive can feel the effects of others’ cell phones in the same room, even when it is on but not being used. If you are in a meeting, on public transportation, in a courtroom or other public places, such as a doctor’s office, keep your cell phone turned off out of consideration for the “secondhand radiation” effects. Children are also more vulnerable, so please avoid using your cell phone near children. Use a well-shielded wired headset: Wired headsets will certainly allow you to keep the cell phone farther away from your body. However, if a wired headset is not well-shielded — and most of them are not — the wire itself can act as an antenna attracting and transmitting radiation directly to your brain. So make sure the wire used to transmit the signal to your ear is shielded . One of the best kinds of headsets use a combination of shielded wire and air-tube. These operate like a stethoscope, transmitting the sound to your head as an actual sound wave; although there are wires that still must be shielded, there is no wire that goes all the way up to your head. Tips for Avoiding Dirty Electricity Risks Additional options to minimize your risks from dirty electricity, compiled by Paula Owens, M.S. for the Ahwatukee Foothill News, include: 13 “Avoid using laptop computers on your lap. Switch out compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs for incandescent light bulbs. Consider replacing Wi-Fi routers with Ethernet cables. Avoid electric water beds, blankets and heating pads. Remove electrical devices from your sleeping area. If you must use an electric alarm clock, keep it at least five inches from your body when sleeping. Or, opt for a battery-operated clock. Move power strips at least three inches away from your feet. Switch to flat-screen TVs and computer monitors as these emit less EMFs than the older styles. If you live in close vicinity to or underneath electrical wires, power lines or cell phone towers, you may want to consider moving. Stand three to four feet away from microwave ovens when in use [or stop using them altogether]. Consider shielding devices to reduce EMFs from cell phones, cordless phones and landline speaker phones. Ask your electric utility provider to remove wireless smart meters and replace them with a wired smart meter. Walk barefoot on the sand, grass or dirt. This common practice known as earthing or grounding allows the healing negative ions from the ground to flow into our body and have been shown to reduce stress hormones and inflammation. Use 100 percent beeswax candles and Himalayan salt lamps in your home and office to absorb EMFs from the air. Salt lamps serve as natural room ionizers, emitting negative ions into the environment that effectively bind with all the excess positive ions, reducing EMFs, killing bacteria and purifying the air.” 

The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"Thursday 3 November 2016 “We won, you lost, get over it” Brexiters told outside High Court 
Brexit supporters have been ‘gently encouraged’ to accept the rule of law and allow parliament to vote on whether Article 50 should be triggered. 
The High Court has ruled that Parliament must vote on whether the UK can start the process of leaving the European Union, leaving all Brexit supporters having to get over it. 
Remain campaigner, Simon Williams, told us, “The entire Brexit movement is really big on accepting results, so we have no doubts whatsoever that they will give a knowing nod at this result and simply get over it. 
“I shouldn’t imagine there’ll be a single dissenting voice to be heard anywhere in their ranks, as they tell each other they lost fair and square, and it’s time to move on with their lives. 
“After all, when you lose, you’ve got to try and get over it. That is the only option available to losers, as they have taught us all so well over the last few months. 
“Of course, they might want to try and overthrow the democratic rule of law, but then we might find we get some new portmanteaus like ‘crying Brexitears’ and ‘throwing a Brexitantrum’.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own? ",FAKE
"We Are Change 

In today’s political climate even our beer is up for debate. And why shouldn’t it be? This is America. We debate things here. That’s how democracy works. (At least when the issues aren’t taboo.) Recently, it’s shown up in the state of Pennsylvania with Eric Trump, Donald Trump’s son, garnering an endorsement for the Republican candidate from Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery.
And now the debate turns to political action.
With the most recent statement from Richard “Dick” Yuengling Jr., the 73-year-old owner of D. G. Yuengling & Son’s, located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania — the seat of Schuylkill County — Yuengling said that his company was “behind” Trump. Inevitably, a lashing out occurred in the digital realm with regard to political correctness and expressively personal views. Customers weren’t pleased. They were offended. In fact, some even claimed that they’d never drink Yuengling again.
This is what democracy is, and should be. Sure. And yet, something is lost in the politicized scramble of this ugly election year.
A Pennsylvania state representative, Brian Sims, announced on his Facebook page that he was saying “GOOD BYE” to Yuengling Brewery.
“I’m not normally one to call for boycotts but I absolutely believe that how we spend our dollars is a reflection of our votes and values! Supporting Yuengling Brewery, that uses my dollars to bolster a man, and an agenda, that wants to punish me for being a member of the LGBT community and punish the black and brown members of my community for not being white, is something I’m too smart and too grown up to do.” 
Sims represents the 182nd district of Philadelphia , which includes a majority of Center City, in addition to parts of Rittenhouse Square, Grays Ferry, and South Philadelphia. I live here. I walk those areas of the city.
And I see, feel, and hear other elements of our society that go unnoticed or receive little to no attention. To observe this sort of outcry against a presidential candidate is expectantly what democracy was birthed upon, as we know in the city of Philadelphia. We take action. (We like to think.) However, along the way I’ve seen the incessant results of many issues that get buried, in favor of political expediency and trending topics that ultimately define our aggressive actions towards “voting with our dollars”.
If that’s the case, then what about all the other detriments to our standard of living? For instance, the opiate epidemic that is sweeping Pennsylvania and the surrounding states and the rest of the country by storm.
According to a June 2016 report from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health , entitled “The Epidemic of Overdoses From Opioids in Philadelphia”, drug deaths involving the fatal use of opioids, from 2000-2014, had tripled. In 2014, approximately 47,000 people died from overdoses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC). Sixty-one percent of that total was attributed to the use of opioids.
“Since 1999, the number of prescriptions for pharmaceutical opioid pain relievers in the U.S. more than quadrupled.” 
Opioid-related overdose deaths in Philadelphia were nearly three times higher in men than among women in 2015. Those deaths were also more than two times as high among whites, as opposed to deaths among African Americans.
Between 2003 and 2015, in Philadelphia, cocaine and benzodiazepines were detected in overdose deaths in tandem with opioids at a rate of 70% and 90%, respectively. During that same period, overdose deaths related to heroin more than doubled in the city, with approximately 400 deaths reported in 2015.
In that same year, there were nearly 700 drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia. That’s more than twice as many deaths from homicide in that same year.
From 2014-2015, 10% of the nearly 1,300 overdose deaths in Philadelphia were from non-residents. Most of those non-residents were people from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and other parts of Pennsylvania.
Once the president is elected, these issues won’t go away. In fact, they’re extant — some as a surrogate to the system we attribute to healthcare. (One of the most hotly contested issues of partisan bickering in the country.)
Additionally, these effects are increasingly felt in Philadelphia hospitals.
“The percentage of Philadelphia hospital emergency department visits related to opioid overdoses increased from approximately 0.4% in 2007 to nearly 0.7% in 2015. In 2015, there were over 6,500 emergency department visits for opioid overdoses. For each opioid-related death, there were approximately 12 hospital emergency department visits.” 
So while the country politically corrects itself — whatever that means — myriad issues get buried beneath picking and choosing a side, in response to the emotional disturbances of partisan bickering.
Rather than dealing with facts, the web of society becomes entangled with He Said, She Said.
Ultimately, this coercive cultural backwardness and evolutionary substandard, the rattle-mouthed bickering of intellectual thought and deceptive, manipulative action, that matches up more closely with the reptilian species, rather than the spirit of the human heart and the cultural celebration of life and all its wonder, is exactly what gave rise to Trump.
And our opioid epidemic.
Somewhere along the way, the facts were buried beneath the lie. And the truth has become something else, entirely.
 
Sources
http://www.phillyvoice.com/beer-drinkers-disavow-yuengling-after-owner-shows-support-for-trump/ 
The post Political Correctness for Yuengling Brewery; What About Our Opioid Epidemic? appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"Amid the hand-wringing over the gutter-level sexual exchanges between Trump and Cruz, it doesn’t hurt to remember that it has been ever thus in American politics.

The innuendos flying back and forth between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump about the mutual sexual peccadillos of the candidates and their wives has elicited an abundance of hand-wringing over how such mud-slinging has dragged presidential politics into the gutter. Actually, it has returned it to the steamy, if seamy, flow of American history that harkens back to the Founding Fathers. The only surprise is that pundits affect to be surprised by this turn of events. In fact, sexual indiscretion and its consequences are an indelible part of our nation’s political tradition

The issue is not whether our forbears who attained, or aspired to, the White House were plaster saints but, rather, how the times in which they lived responded to their behavior. The ink had hardly dried on the Constitution in 1791 when our first secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, entered into a liaison with Maria Reynolds, whose scoundrel of a husband, James, blackmailed Hamilton in return for his silence, further implicating Hamilton in corruption charges. It wasn’t until six years later that Hamilton’s political enemies exposed the affair. Hamilton responded by coming clean, admitting that he’d slept with the lady but denying the corruption charges. His response won him points for candor but the mud never quite came unstuck.

Ted Cruz might not want to follow the path pursued by Andrew Jackson, who killed Charles Dickinson in a duel in 1806 for impugning the reputation of Jackson’s wife, Rachel. The duel did nothing to mar Jackson’s reputation, as evidenced by his being elected president two decades later. The more notorious sexual scandal of Jackson’s political career occurred during his presidency when he insisted on defending the virtue of Peggy Eaton, the wife of his War Secretary, John Eaton. Peggy, a local tavern keeper’s daughter disparaged in Washington society for her allegedly easygoing ways, was shunned by the wives of Jackson’s cabinet. What started out as a contretemps of social snubs soon grew into a full-blown political schism. Eaton eventually resigned, but Jackson revenged himself on his recalcitrant cabinet members by dismissing several of them. Jackson won the battle but at a cost that contributed to a growing schism in the Democratic Party.

A different set of circumstances entirely arose from two men who entered the White House as bachelors: James Buchanan (1857-1861) and Grover Cleveland, who served two terms in the Gilded Age. There, their similarities end. Buchanan was rumored to have had a homosexual friendship with William Rufus King, himself a former vice president, whom Jackson disparagingly referred to as “Miss Nancy.” The real scandal of Buchanan’s tenure was his virtual abdication of executive responsibility as the nation unraveled in the months leading up to the Civil War.

Grover Cleveland was another story. Running as a reforming Democrat in 1884, he was vilified by his Republican enemies as the father of an out-of-wedlock son whom he’d sired during an earlier sojourn in Buffalo. The GOP, which had run the bribe-receptive Sen. James G. Blaine against Cleveland, sought to detract from their own candidate’s turpitude by sullying Cleveland’s reputation. Cleveland was mocked with the chants of “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” accompanied by cartoons lampooning the errant father who’d abandoned his illegitimate son. Cleveland turned the tables on his tormenters by acknowledging responsibility for the boy and providing for his welfare, although he never fully owned up to admitting paternity. The exposure may have dented his campaign but didn’t derail it as he went on to win the White House.

Then there was Warren Harding, the first president to be elected with the women’s vote, who displayed his fondness for the ladies by maintaining a long-term affair with his best friend’s wife, Carrie Phillips, when he was elected in 1920, and, for good measure, embarking on a second liaison in the White House with the youngish Nan Britton. Their trysts led to the birth of an illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth. Monthly payments to the parties involved assured their discretion. Harding’s tenure was ushered in by Prohibition and the ensuing Jazz Age. But his teetotaling supporters came to have greater concerns than rumors of randy hijinks in the Executive Office when the Teapot Dome scandal blew the roof off the GOP White House.

The age of Democratic ascendancy, which roughly stretched from the New Deal through the Great Society, provided an Era of Good Feeling where the human lapses of our Chief Executives were overlooked by a forgiving press. It was only after their tenures that a more prurient, or judgmental, posterity examined their private affairs more closely. Thus, the discreet indiscretions of Franklin Roosevelt with Lucy Mercer and Missy LeHand (or, for that matter, Eleanor with Lorena Hickock), Jack Kennedy’s serial philandering, or LBJ’s randy ways, were all suppressed  by a media that was more concerned with presidential policies than peccadillos.

With the sexual abandon of the Cultural Revolution came a new approach to residents of the Oval Office or aspirants for the job. Those who sought or won the post, for the most part, had the same human frailties as their predecessors. The difference was in the Anything Goes approach of the media, whetted by the success of exposing the Watergate scandal and abetted by a technological revolution that made what was once the province of intimacy the source of prurient interest under the rubric of “the public’s right to know.” Watergate, whatever its virtues, made the president fair game and encouraged an “investigative” journalism that devolved from monitoring public malfeasance to invading what had once been considered private affairs.

So by the 1988 campaign, when Democratic Sen. Gary Hart’s presidential hopes and political career became caught in the maw of tabloid journalism and left to the mercies of reporters on the scent of sexual scandal, the quest for the presidency had become an adjunct of the entertainment industry. The Oscars for this spectacle went to the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Donald Trump took it to the next logical step from turning a candidate into a celebrity to simply making a celebrity a candidate. Americans love a circus and the circus has now come to town, or rather the electronic Town Hall of social media, digital dazzle, squawk radio, and cable wrestling that passes for discourse in our political arena. The unrestrained passions of partisan politics and party faction that Washington futilely warned against were there from the beginning. They have simply been amplified by technology. The list cited above is a short one.",REAL
"Migrants Refuse To Leave Train At Refugee Camp In Hungary

Thousands of migrants flooded into a train station in the Hungarian capital Thursday after police lifted a two-day blockade, but some who boarded a train they thought was going to Germany ended up instead at a refugee camp just miles from Budapest.

The Associated Press reports that ""excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at the Keleti station in Hungary's capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been canceled. A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart 'due to safety reasons until further notice!'

""Many migrants, who couldn't understand either language and were receiving no advice from Hungarian officials, scrambled aboard in a standing-room-only crush and hoped for the best,"" the AP said.

Scuffles broke out when police ordered the passengers off the train at Bicske, according to the BBC.

Meanwhile, Hungary's prime minister says his country is doing all it can to manage a growing migrant crisis, even as European officials said they will meet this month in Brussels to discuss an effort to ""strengthen the European response"" to the situation.

Viktor Orban said the influx of refugees into his country is really ""a German problem"" because that is the intended destination for most of them. Hungarians, along with other Europeans, are ""full of fear"" he says, because ""they see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation.""

""If we would create an image ... just come because we are ready to accept everybody, that would be a moral failure, because that is not the case,"" Orban said after a meeting with European Parliament President Martin Schulz, according to The Washington Post. ""The moral human thing is to make clear, please don't come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country. Stay there. It's risky to come.""

Meanwhile, Voice of America reports that British, French and German officials have called for urgent action and plan to hold talks on Sept. 14 in Brussels to address the crisis.

VOA reports: ""The three ministers also called for better processing of migrants in Italy and Greece.""

As we've reported, the United Nations believes that more than 300,000 migrants have set out for Europe from North Africa and the Middle East on the Mediterranean Sea so far this year, a 40 percent increase on all of last year.

As NPR's Middle East editor Larry Kaplow writes: ""On any given day now, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, are drifting in ships or clinging to boats that are little more than inflatable rafts. They go in other ways, too. Jumping fences in Morocco to get to Spanish territory. Cramming into trucks from Turkey. Riding trains across Europe.""",REAL
The president refuses to say he’d hold to the tradition of avoiding public comment or political attacks on the successor.,REAL
"Ten-Step Program for Adjusting to President-Elect Trump New York Times. Actually not bad. 
Donald Trump Ran on Protecting Social Security But Transition Team Includes Privatizers / Intercept (martha r). Looks like the answer as to whether Trump was getting rolled by the Republican establishment is coming pretty quickly. Remember that Trump doesn’t owe Wall Street anything; this appears to be the result of turning to Republican “experts”. 
Trump Recruiting Among the Lobbyists He Once Denounced New York Times. 
Donald Trump: JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon Being Considered for Treasury Fortune (resilc). Wonder if Trump is running this trial balloon to make Elizabeth Warren see red and make Trump’s good buddy Carl Ichan look good by comparison. 
Trump’s Transition Team Works to Form Cabinet Wall Street Journal. Story flogs Hensarling as a possible Treasury Secretary candidate (gah!) along with other scary ideas. But I tend to discount this because Hensarling is a buddy of Pence, and so far, Trump’s interactions with Pence have featured lots of friction. And Hensarling is plenty useful to Trump right where he is now. Let’s hope this reading proves to be correct. 
U.S. consumer financial agency could be defanged under Trump Reuters 
Trump Ascends to the Cherry Blossom Throne – Tyler Sic Semper Tyrannis (Kfathi). A contrary view to the links above, and today’s must read. Bear in mind that he exaggerates the role of Soros in US politics (Eastern Europe is a completely different kettle of fish). Too many other squillionaires throwing $ at candidates and think tanks. See his comment about John Bolton in particular (mind you I don’t see how anyone can think Bolton is a good idea), and his warning: “Instead, my friends on the Left, worry that he will not only do what he said he would, but he’ll go above and beyond, and the people will love him for it.” But this cheery reading discounts the difficulty Trump will have in securing the ability to govern. Saboteurs on what is nominally your side are a tougher obstacle than external opponents. 
Blankfein Says Trump Infrastructure Commitment Good for Growth Bloomberg (resilc) 
Before Taking the White House, Trump Due in Court over Fraud Vanity Fair. A President’s power of pardon is absolute save for impeachment, so Trump could pardon himself. But would he dare? And I’m not an expert on immigration law, but it’s hard to see how Trump is on shaky legal ground in deporting undocumented aliens. Other countries do it all the time. Try overstaying your visa and watch what happens if you get caught out. 
Trump Shows Every Sign of Carrying Out Sweeping Immigration Crackdown Bloomberg. If Trump moves too fast on deportations, as opposed to policy changes (as in relying on loud noises, including warnings to employers, to induce many undocumented workers to leave of their own accord), Trump could precipitate sustained and serious protests. But the Feds may lack the staffing to increase deportations all that much near term. 
Record Numbers of Undocumented Immigrants Being Detained in U.S. Bloomberg. Resilc: “Last I checked a demo has been in control since 2008.” 
Trump bucks protocol on press access Associated Press. Lambert: “And where were they when Clinton didn’t hold a press conference for ~300 days?” 
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/58393 . Martha r: 
When you go to the link, click on Attachment to download the pdf of the 9-page report. 
from the bottom of page 6: 
OTHER INSIGHTS: Based on group discussion, and debate exercises distributed prior to the debate. By the Numbers • Who won the debate: 27 to 2(or 3*) in favor of Sanders • Who is more electable in November: 15 to 13 in favor of Sanders • Who has a stronger message: 17 to 11 in favor of Sanders • Who will win the South Carolina primary: 10 for Sanders, 9 for Clinton, and 11 unsure • Who moved undecided voters: 14 lean Sanders, 2 lean Clinton, 14 remain undecided *One of the HRC supporters was uncertain about her position post group. 
The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why. FiveThirtyEight. Resilc: “Because they are a con and mumbo jumbo?” Moi: Notice how Silver focuses on how “pollsters” missed to exculpate his own failings. As Keynes said: 
A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.",FAKE
"VIDEO : Sean Hannity “The American People Have Finally Been Heard” VIDEO : Sean Hannity “The American People Have Finally Been Heard” Videos By TruthFeedNews November 10, 2016 
Sean Hannity Reacts to Trump’s Historic Victory. 
“The Washington Establishment is TERRIFIED and they should be. These people do NOT get it. I’m going to try to explain it to them.” 
Watch the video: 
Support the Trump Presidency and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"Michael Brown’s parents plan to bring a civil lawsuit for the wrongful death of their son against Darren Wilson and the city of Ferguson, Missouri. The announcment came a day after the Justice Department released its report on the abuses of the city’s police department and said Wilson wouldn’t be charged for violating Brown’s civil rights. Brown family lawyers note that the burden of proof is lower in a civil case than the criminal cases that were considered by both the federal government and a St. Louis County grand jury.",REAL
"A Swedish MP has lashed out after it was revealed Muslim freeloaders posing as refugees would be allowed to jump ahead of Swedish families in the housing queue. NOT ANYMORE! UK Express Earlier this month Express.co.uk reported several councils in the Scandinavian country are prioritising the requests of asylum seekers ahead of their own citizens, with Muslim migrants given housing straight away, despite Swedes being placed on a huge waiting list. Now 20 accommodations in Klippan, in south Sweden, are being prepared for Muslim migrants after a new policy demanded all available apartments owned by the municipal property company be put aside for asylum seekers. The move has been criticised by Therese Borg, of the Swedish Democrats (SD) party, as she argued the Muslim invaders should be placed on the list and wait their turn. Ms Borg said asylum seekers urgently needed to be placed on the list alongside regular people because hardworking citizens risked growing resentful of the preferential treatment. She told Nyheteridag : “You can see a lot of comments on Facebook. People are pissed off. “There are a lot of teenagers living at home and who are looking for [a small apartment] to move into as it is a good place to start [building a life]. “The small apartments are necessary for [the youth] moving out, but they are not offered them unless the newly arrivals decline to take the property.” Meanwhile aid workers helping migrants say they have been terrified by Muslim attacks which have left them too scared to leave their homes. The SD politician also said the council should start focusing on the migrants already living in the area, rather than focusing funds on asylum seekers who might arrive in the future. Lashing out against the Government and Migration Board, Ms Borg demanded they take responsibility for the migrants they have allowed into the country. Even worse, a lot of Swedish families are being kicked out of their homes in order to accommodate Muslim freeloaders: However, Bert-Inge Karlsson, of the Christian Democrats, blasted Ms Borg’s comments as he insisted her portrayal of the situation was out-of-touch with reality. Mr Karlsson said: “I [question] the way Theresa Borg has portrayed it as if we have an extraordinary housing crisis in the nation. How is it then possible for us to take in so incredibly many. “She has returned to the kind of insinuation… which suggests the entire world could be on its way here.” In March this year, Sweden passed a law requiring all municipalities accept and provide housing for migrants, allowing families and others on the waiting to be placed at the back of the queue. The turmoil nation, which has been plagued with increasing levels of violence and criminal activity , with three police officers quitting each day , is experiencing chronic housing shortages as a result of the country’s generous asylum and migration policies over the last decade.",FAKE
"Home › SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY › U.S. LAWMAKERS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER NEW HACKING RULES U.S. LAWMAKERS RAISE PRIVACY CONCERNS OVER NEW HACKING RULES 0 SHARES [10/27/16] A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. Congress on Thursday asked the Justice Department to clarify how a looming rule change to the government’s hacking powers could impact privacy rights of innocent Americans. The change, due to take place on December 1, would let judges issue search warrants for remote access to computers located in any jurisdiction, potentially including foreign countries. Magistrate judges can normally only order searches within the jurisdiction of their court, which is typically limited to a few counties. “We are concerned about the full scope of the new authority that would be provided to the Department of Justice,” 23 senators and representatives wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The Supreme Court in April approved amendments to Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure that would allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet. Those amendments will take effect on December 1 of this year unless Congress passes legislation that would reject, amend or postpone the changes. Some lawmakers, led by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, have introduced legislation that would halt the changes, but it has yet to gain much traction. Post navigation",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"www.youtube.com 0 
Hypothesis: There are Major Bombings that have been printed on the U.S. Currency many years BEFORE the events actually happened. 
There is a common denominator between all the images and how they were spiritually discerned by what was recorded in the prophets of Isaiah spoken 2,700 years ago. 
There are multiple layers of ink and watermarks printed on the bills when magnify appear to produce animations. Tags",FAKE
"After 11 hours, a House committee’s questioning of Hillary Rodham Clinton provided few new details about the 2012 attacks on American installations in Benghazi, Libya – and no clear victory for Republicans seeking to trap Clinton in an admission of bad judgment.

The marathon hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi concluded at 9 p.m. with a whimper. As the hours passed, Republican lines of questioning became increasingly opaque and partisan conflict riled members on both sides of the aisle.

Clinton, maintaining calm throughout the hearing, received ample opportunity to defend her record and describe her commitment to the safety of U.S. personnel while serving as secretary of state. Only a handful of times did Republicans succeed in putting her on the spot, more often engaging Clinton on topics that seemed tangential to understanding the 2012 attacks that killed four Americans.

Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), an ardent defender of the impartiality of his investigation, insisted the time was being put to good use.

“Learning about the four people who died ... is worth whatever amount of political badgering that may come my way. I’ve seen the personification of courage and public service. I’m a better person for it,” he said late in the evening.

Clinton only obliquely mentioned the conflict surrounding Gowdy’s panel, which two Republican lawmakers have suggested is politically motivated. “I recognize that there are many currents at work in this committee, but I can only hope that the statesmanship overcomes the partisanship,” she said.

Republicans on the committee through the day had repeatedly asked Clinton about the special access she gave longtime friend Sidney Blumenthal, who sent reports about Libya to the private e-mail address that Clinton used for government business while she was secretary of state. They have contrasted that with the treatment of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, whose requests for greater security measures went through official channels and never bubbled up to Clinton’s desk.

“Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,” said Gowdy.

The sharpest questions of the day came from Republicans Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Mike Pompeo (Kan.). Jordan accused Clinton of misleading the public about the 2012 attacks in order to help President Obama’s reelection prospects.

“You picked the [account] with no evidence. You did it because Libya was supposed to be . . . this great success for the White House,” said Jordan, who charged that Clinton had blamed the attacks on reaction to an anti-Muslim video, while knowing that was false. “And now you have a terrorist attack. It’s a terrorist attack in Libya. And it’s just 56 days before an election.”

Jordan was the first Republican in this hearing to spell out the alternate history of the Benghazi episode that many on the right believe is the correct one. He spoke rapidly, interrupting Clinton at times, and personally accusing her of falsehoods.

“Where did the false narrative start? It started with you, madam secretary,” Jordan said. After his questioning period ended, Gowdy gave Clinton a chance to respond.

“I wrote a whole chapter about this in my book, ‘Hard Choices.’ I’d be glad to send it to you,” Clinton said. “I think that the insinuations that you are making do a grave disservice” to those in government.

Clinton said she had not intended to mislead, but instead had sought to make sense of confusing intelligence reports from Libya and other places where protesters had overrun American diplomatic installations. After that — prompted by a friendly Democratic congressman — Clinton told the committee that she had felt the loss of four Americans in Benghazi deeply.

“It’s a very personally painful accusation” that she had misled the public, Clinton said. “Having it continued to be bandied around is deeply distressing to me. I would imagine that I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together. I’ve been wracking my brain about what could have been done, or should have been done.”

In the next round, Jordan returned to the line of questioning. It became a parsing of a statement Clinton had issued about the attack afterward, with Clinton and Jordan arguing about whether Clinton had blamed an anti-Islam video as the cause of the Benghazi attacks. Jordan became animated as he asked the questions, repeating and re-stating his case in fast bursts.

Clinton, on camera, smiled a small smile that indicated amused tolerance. Her answer was slow and utterly forgettable, which was the victory she wanted.

[Clinton testifies — then and now]

Pompeo pressed Clinton about why no one at the State Department had been fired in the aftermath of attacks.

“Why don’t you fire someone?” Pompeo said. “How come no one has been held accountable to date?”

Clinton responded that she had relied on inquiries into the attacks, which found that State Department officials had made mistakes but no misconduct rose to the level of a firing offense. “In the absence of finding dereliction or breach of duty, there could not be immediate action taken,” Clinton said.

“The folks in Kansas don’t think that was accountability,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo also asked Clinton a question related to her unusual e-mail arrangement, in which she used a private e-mail account — and a private e-mail server housed at her home in New York — to conduct State Department business. That meant that people with her e-mail address, including longtime friend Blumenthal, could reach her directly. Why, Pompeo asked, had she not been made aware of requests for greater security at U.S. outposts in Libya — passed through official State Department channels — but Blumenthal’s ideas about Libya got to her inbox?

“He’s a friend of mine. He sent me information that he thought might be of interest,” Clinton said of Blumenthal. “He had no official position in the government, and he was not at all my adviser on Libya.”

Republicans asked relatively few questions about the issue that has dogged Clinton’s presidential campaign — her use of a private e-mail account to conduct public business as secretary of state.

They did not delve into Clinton’s e-mail practices until more than 9½ hours of the hearing had passed. At that point, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) aggressively said that Clinton has shifted her story on the topic and questioned whether she has now turned over all her work-related e-mails.

Clinton merely repeated what she has said on the topic many times before — she said using a private account was a mistake but the State Department now has all of her work correspondence.

[What Clinton’s e-mails tell us about her management style]

Pompeo’s questions put Clinton on the defensive for the first time on Thursday, after other Republicans misfired with questions that strayed — in time or in subject matter — from the attacks that were supposed to be the hearing’s focus. It was damaging enough that the next Democratic questioner, Rep. Linda Sanchez (Calif.), played a video clip designed to attack Pompeo himself, in which TV journalist Andrea Mitchell told Pompeo that he was wrong to say Blumenthal was a major adviser for Clinton on Libya.

But by 5:15 p.m., the hearing seemed to have lost steam.

Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) was no longer pressing Clinton about whether she’d fulfilled her duties as secretary of state – instead, she asked whether she had owed Stevens a personal phone call, because he was her friend.

“Why did it not occur to you to pick up the phone and call your friend?” Roby asked. “I just want to hear from you why, with all this information…did it not occur to you to pick up the phone and call your friend, Ambassador Stevens, and ask him what he needed?”

Clinton replied again that Stevens had been given the chance to make those requests through official channels.

After an evening break, around 6:30 p.m., Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) sought to bring new vigor to the questioning. In a choreographed gesture, he tore a sheet of paper meant to symbolize Stevens’s requests for additional security in Benghazi. “You created an environment, Madam Secretary, where [requests] didn’t get through. They didn’t get through to you, they didn’t get through to your inner circle ... [the State Department] breached [its] fundamental duty to secure his safety,” he said.

“I think it’s a disservice for you to make that statement,” Clinton replied.

Democrats, as expected, have used their time to toss Clinton softballs — or to attack the existence of the committee itself. “The questions are increasingly badgering, I would even say increasingly vicious,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Clinton late in the evening. “It seems to me that really, the majority simply wish to wear you down. It is clear that they are trying to attack you personally.”

As the second round of questions came toward a close, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democrat, asked Clinton about an allegation that has circulated among conservatives for years: that she or somebody else in the Obama administration had told U.S. military personnel to “stand down,” and not rush to the rescue of those in Benghazi.

“Of course not,” Clinton told the Maryland congressman. “Everybody in the military scrambled to see what they could do . . . logistics and distance made it unlikely that they could be anywhere near Benghazi in any kind of reasonable time.”

Republicans – including Gowdy – seemed to hurt their own cause at times. Several spent their 10-minute periods on oddball lines of questioning: One pressed Clinton repeatedly about an e-mail exchange between two State Department staffers that Clinton said she did not know. Others loudly remarked that Clinton was reading notes passed from aides, a common practice at Washington hearings. Another spent several minutes trying to prod Clinton into saying she’d done something even more common than hearings: A politician taking credit for something.

And, repeatedly, the Republicans were baited by Democrats into a time-wasting fight over whether this committee was a partisan tool, and if any of them should be there at all. Just before lunch break, Gowdy and several Democrats got into a loud argument about whether to release Blumenthal’s interview transcripts, while cameras showed Clinton shuffling papers.

“I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of deaths of four Americans,” Clinton said to Gowdy, before the intra-legislator bickering began.

For Clinton, her performance at the hearing was the continuation of a remarkable turnabout. As of several weeks ago, a revelation from this very committee – the existence of that private e-mail account – had put her on the defensive, and threatened to undermine her presidential campaign.

But since then, she’s gotten help from another Democratic candidate: Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who said in the Democratic debate that he, like many Americans, was tired of hearing about the e-mails. A Republican, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) seemed to validate Clinton’s longtime contention that the committee was a partisan tool, not a real investigation.

[The Fix: Why. Was. Hillary. Clinton. Speaking. So. Slowly?]

In her opening statement, Clinton sought to portray herself as above political questions and to portray the panel as second-guessing the necessary risks taken by U.S. diplomats abroad.

She began her testimony by naming the four dead. She said she’d known Stevens, recommended him for the job, and met his casket when it returned to American soil after the 2012 attacks.

“Nobody knew the dangers of Libya better [than Stevens]. A weak government. Extremist groups. Rampant instability,” Clinton said. “But Chris chose to go to Benghazi because he knew that America had to be represented there at this critical time.”

In her statement, Clinton sought to get in front of the day’s questions, which are likely to focus on the security precautions at the two American facilities where the four died. It was a “pre-buttal,” to use the political term, in which Clinton portrayed that kind of question as contrary to the spirit of diplomatic work.

“Retreat from the world is not an option,” Clinton said. “America cannot shrink from our responsibility to lead.”

Clinton ended her opening statement with an admonition to the committee itself, to ask questions that were not intended to undermine her politically.

“I’m here. Despite all the previous investigations, and all the talk about partisan agendas, I’m here to honor those we lost,” Clinton said. “My challenge to you, members of this committee, is the same challenge I put to myself. Let’s be worthy of the trust the American people have bestowed upon us.”

[Clinton needs to avoid a “what difference does it make” moment ]

The committee’s chairman opened the hearing with a long defense of its right to exist. Gowdy began by talking about his own work — defending his committee from allegations that it is a partisan effort disguise as a fact-finding panel. That suggestion was made by a top member of the House GOP, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), a few weeks earlier. McCarthy, pressed to say what results the Republican majority had produced, noted that Clinton’s presidential poll numbers had declined after the House investigation began its work.

“There are people — frankly in both parties — that have suggested that this investigation is about you. It is not,” said Gowdy, a former prosecutor elected to Congress in 2010. “It is about what happened before, during and after the attacks that killed them. It is about what this country owes to those who risk their lives to serve it. And it is about the fundamental responsibility of government to tell the truth.”

Gowdy, in his opening statement, listed what he said were flaws in past investigations, saying they were either incomplete or too close to the Obama administration. He said that his committee was the first to discover valuable facts, including that Clinton had used a private e-mail server to conduct government business at the time of the attacks.

He said that Clinton had not been interviewed on the Hill until now because of Clinton’s own e-mail arrangement, which meant she took valuable e-mails with her when she left office.

“You kept the public record to yourself for almost two years,” Gowdy said. “And it was you and your attorneys who decided what to turn in and what to delete.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, followed Gowdy with his own opening statement — an attack on his own panel’s credibility. Cummings charged that the committee had passed up chances to interview other government officials, in order to focus on Clinton herself.

“They set up this select committee with no rules, no deadline, and an unlimited budget. And they set them loose, madam secretary, because you’re running for president,” the Maryland congressman said. “Republicans are squandering millions of taxpayer dollars on this abusive effort to derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

Cummings noted comments from McCarthy and others that he said indicated the partisan nature of the committee’s work, under Gowdy’s leadership. He called the committee “this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition.”",REAL
"JUST AS negotiators were completing an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program on Monday, Post reporter Jason Rezaian was summoned to a Tehran court for another session of his secret, irregular and blatantly political trial. We find it hard to believe this was a coincidence.

Mr. Rezaian, a 39-year-old California native who was arrested just under a year ago, has been cruelly forced into an auxiliary role in the long negotiations between Tehran and a U.S.-led coalition — a pawn used by hard-liners to undermine goodwill, or perhaps to demonstrate that any accord Iran strikes with the West will not alter its repressive domestic regime or its anti-Western policies. The ordeal has inflicted untold physical and psychological suffering on a journalist who moved to Iran with the ambition of improving Americans’ understanding of its people and culture.

Enough. Now that the nuclear deal is completed, it is past time for Iranian authorities to release Mr. Rezaian, along with two and possibly three other Americans imprisoned in the country, including pastor Saeed Abedini and retired U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati. President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry have spoken hopefully of charting a new course in relations between the countries. If that is to happen, the release of the prisoners must be the first step.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister who also has hinted at a new era of cooperation, ought to understand this imperative. He has called Mr. Rezaian a “friend” and “a good reporter”; he is clearly aware that there is no basis for the espionage charges brought against him. During the negotiations, Mr. Zarif dodged questions about the Post reporter and at one point even suggested, absurdly, that he might have been duped into wrongdoing. Now he and President Hassan Rouhani should be obliged to put a stop to a travesty that is showing them to be powerless to control the domestic hard-liners who seek to sabotage the nuclear agreement.

An opportunity for clemency is imminent. According to Mr. Rezaian’s mother, Mary Breme Rezaian, her son should soon be eligible for release on bail. A law sets a detention limit of one year for Iranian detainees whose trials have not been completed. Mr. Rezaian is regarded by Iran as a citizen, so the provision should apply to him. He was taken from his home on July 22 along with his Iranian wife, Yeganeh Salehi, who is also on trial but has been released on bail.

Though U.S. officials have raised Mr. Rezaian’s case and Mr. Obama publicly called for his release, his case and those of the other Americans were not part of the nuclear negotiation. While that may have been appropriate, Mr. Rezaian’s release should be a condition for any further improvement in relations. If the Rouhani government wishes to show that it can cooperate with the West on matters beyond its nuclear program, let it start by freeing Jason Rezaian.",REAL
"(CNN) With Hillary Clinton behind in New Hampshire and holding on to a narrowing margin over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, new CNN/ORC polls in Nevada and South Carolina suggest Clinton holds strong support in the two states that could prove to be a firewall for her.

Clinton has the support of 50% of those who say they are likely to attend the Democratic caucus scheduled for February 20 in Nevada -- which plays host to the first debate among the declared Democratic candidates on Tuesday and is the first state to elect delegates after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Sanders follows at 34%, then Vice President Joe Biden at 12%, with the rest of the field garnering less than 1% support.

After conceding the presidency to Trump in a phone call earlier, Clinton addresses supporters and campaign workers in New York on Wednesday, November 9. Her defeat marked a stunning end to a campaign that appeared poised to make her the first woman elected US president.

Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

Clinton arrives at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New York on September 11. Clinton, who was diagnosed with pneumonia two days before, left early after feeling ill. A video appeared to show her stumble as Secret Service agents helped her into a van.

Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.

Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.

After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""

After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""

Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.

Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.

Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.

Clinton is reflected in a teleprompter during a campaign rally in Alexandria, Virginia, in October 2015.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""

Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.

Clinton, now running for President again, performs with Jimmy Fallon during a ""Tonight Show"" skit in September 2015.

Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.

Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.

Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.

Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.

Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.

Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.

In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.

The Clintons pose on the day of Chelsea's wedding to Marc Mezvinsky in July 2010.

Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.

Clinton, as secretary of state, greets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during a meeting just outside Moscow in March 2010.

Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.

Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.

Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.

Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.

Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.

Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.

Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.

Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001.

Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.

Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.

President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.

President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.

The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.

The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.

Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.

The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.

The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.

The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.

Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.

Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.

In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.

Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.

The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.

The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.

Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.

Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.

In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.

In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.

Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.

Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.

Among those who say they are likely to vote in South Carolina's primary, set for one week after Nevada's caucuses, Clinton holds a larger edge, 49% to Biden's 24%, with Sanders at 18% and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley at 3%.

Should Biden decide to sit out the race for the presidency, Clinton's lead grows in both states. In South Carolina, a Biden-free race currently stands at 70% Clinton to 20% Sanders with O'Malley holding at 3%, and in Nevada, Clinton gains 8 points to 58%, while Sanders picks up just 2 points and would stand at 36%.

In South Carolina, Clinton's advantages stem largely from Sanders' unpopularity with black voters, who made up a majority of Democratic primary voters in the state in 2008, the last time there was a competitive Democratic primary. Back then, black voters broke 78% for Barack Obama to 19% for Clinton.

In the new poll, 59% of black voters say they back Clinton, 27% say Biden and just 4% for Sanders. Among white voters, Sanders has the edge, 44% to 31% for Clinton and 22% for Biden. Without Biden in the race, it's a near-even split among whites, 48% Clinton to 47% Sanders, while blacks break 84% to Clinton and just 7% would back Sanders.

These two states, along with Iowa and New Hampshire, are the only ones permitted by both major parties to hold primaries or caucuses in February, and the outcome of the contests in these early states can make or break a presidential campaign.

Clinton's stronger support in Nevada and South Carolina could bolster her campaign heading in to the large batch of ""Super Tuesday"" contests set to be held on March 1.

In both Nevada and South Carolina, Clinton holds double-digit advantages as the candidate who would do the best job handling the economy, health care, race relations, foreign policy and climate change, and is broadly seen as the candidate with the best chance to win in 2016 (58% say so in South Carolina, 59% in Nevada).

The margins between Clinton and Sanders narrow when it comes to which candidate is most honest and trustworthy (in South Carolina, 35% say Clinton, 27% Biden, 21% Sanders, in Nevada, 33% Sanders, 32% Clinton and 22% Biden), and in Nevada, on who best represents Democratic values (44% say Clinton, 37% Sanders) and understands the problems facing people like you (42% Clinton, 39% Sanders).

The four other candidates tested in the polls -- former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, Harvard professor Larry Lessig, O'Malley and former Virginia senator Jim Webb -- lag well behind Clinton, Sanders and Biden on the issues and attributes tested. None of them top 3% on any of those questions.

The economy is the clear top issue in both states, with 45% in Nevada and 43% in South Carolina calling it the most important issue in determining their vote for presidency next year. Health care and social issues follow in both states, though South Carolina voters are more apt to say health care is key than Nevada caucus-goers (29% health care, 10% social issues in South Carolina, 16% for each issue in Nevada).

Clinton's biggest issue advantage comes on foreign policy (she's up 38 points over Biden in South Carolina and 30 points over him in Nevada), while the margins are narrower on the economy (47% Clinton, 24% Biden, 18% Sanders in South Carolina, 46% Clinton, 31% Sanders, 15% Biden in Nevada) and climate change (44% Clinton, 22% Sanders and 21% Biden in South Carolina, 41% Clinton, 30% Sanders and 16% Biden in Nevada).

While Sanders and Clinton have been sparring over the economy for quite some time, both foreign policy and energy policy have earned attention from the two campaigns recently. Sanders has highlighted his opposition to the Iraq war in 2002 as a foreign policy credential, while Clinton declared her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

The CNN/ORC polls were conducted by telephone October 3-10. A total of 1,009 South Carolina adults were interviewed, including 301 who said they were likely to vote in the Democratic presidential primary. In Nevada, interviews were conducted with 1,011 adults, including 253 who said they were likely to participate in the Democratic presidential caucus. Results among likely Democratic voters in South Carolina have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points, for Nevada Democratic caucusgoers, it is 6 points.",REAL
"A week ago, the US election looked to be over. Hillary Clinton was riding so high in the polls after a disastrous series of gaffes by Donald Trump that few could conceive of a Republican path to victory on 8 November. Friday’s shock intervention by the FBI may not be enough to change that outcome on its own, but it has certainly set political imaginations running wild.



The worry for Democrats is that fresh inquiries regarding Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state come at a difficult time. Not only is it hard to prove a negative and re-establish her innocence with barely a week to go until the election, but the letter to congressional officials from director James Comey capped a tricky run of news that was already making a sizable dent in her polling lead.

Momentum for Trump began to recover first thanks to another set of emails, the contents of which perhaps explain why the Clintons risked so much to try to retain control of her electronic communications in the first place. Released by WikiLeaks, a factor that US intelligence agencies have blamed on Russian hackers, these emails to and from campaign chairman John Podesta have been trickling out for weeks, with mostly embarrassing rather than damaging content.

That changed on Wednesday with the release of a report that appeared to confirm just how much the Clinton family has blurred the boundaries between its business, charitable and political interests. Though almost all of the new information related to Bill rather than Hillary, it gave Trump supporters fresh ammunition at a moment when they were desperate to shift attention from their candidate’s own scandals over taxes and alleged inappropriate behaviour towards women.

In an election that many pollsters describe as an unpopularity contest, it does not take much to swing the mood of independent voters. By Friday, the combination of no news from Trump and bad news from Clinton had halved her average lead in the polls since the last presidential debate.

“When the attention was on Trump, Clinton was winning. Now, the attention is on Clinton,” said political consultant Frank Luntz, who has predicted the winner in 2016 will be the campaign that keeps the focus on its opponent.

Sunday’s average lead for Clinton in national polls of 3.4% ought still to be a healthy safety margin. Bill Clinton’s lead over George Bush shrank from 11 points to just three in the last two weeks of the 1992 election, yet he won by nearly double that margin.

But among Democrats, a cause for concern – if not yet panic – is that very few polls published so far were carried out after news broke about the FBI and the emails.

One reputable survey that got close, an ABC News-Washington Post tracking poll released on Sunday, showed just a one-point overall lead for Clinton. It asked some voters on Friday evening what they thought and found the news had mostly hardened existing opinions but could also play a role at the margins.

“About a third of likely voters say they are less likely to support Clinton given FBI director James Comey’s disclosure,” said pollster Gary Langer. “Given other considerations, 63% say it makes no difference.”

Only 7% of Clinton supporters felt it would make any difference, but this rises “much higher among groups already predisposed not to vote for her”, the poll found.

“The potential for a pullback in motivation of Clinton supporters, or further resurgence among Trump’s, may cause concern in the Clinton camp – especially because this dynamic already was under way,” Langer added. “Intention to vote has grown in Trump support groups in the past week as the intensity of criticisms about him has ebbed.”

The notion that the FBI may not change any minds but will bolster opinion, and thus perhaps turnout, was also supported in a poll of voters in 13 battleground states. This CBS poll showed just 5% of Democrats said the issue might make them less likely to support Clinton, compared with more than a quarter of registered Republicans.

This risk also helps explain the ferocity of Democratic calls for the FBI to urgently exonerate Clinton.

Many loyalists are convinced the latest trove of emails, discovered on equipment shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner, are an irrelevance.

Even if some show more classified information passed its way through the private server, it should not change the FBI’s earlier decision that a criminal charge would be unfair without evidence of intent or coverup.

But so long as this is not categorically established, there may be a nagging doubt in some minds that the FBI suspects otherwise. Not everyone will be prepared to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. Some studies have shown just 11% of voters describe Clinton as “honest and trustworthy”, lower even than Trump’s score of 16%.

While it may not be enough to the tip the balance, running for president while facing potential criminal investigation is never a good look.",REAL
"Monsanto Behind 4-Years-in-the-Making, Failed Peace Deal in Colombia Nov 7, 2016 1 0 
Colombians just refused a peace deal championed by President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón with the narrow margin of just .05% of the votes. This would have ended 52 years of war in the country that has resulted in 250,000 deaths thus far. 
Though recent stories suggested the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels who had been waging a guerilla war in Colombia had put down their arms , a surprising contributor to the prolonged hardship Colombians now face can be traced directly to Monsanto . 
Negotiations for the failed peace deal took four long years, but behind the attempts to start fresh, with hopes of incorporating FARC rebels into civil Colombian life, the biotech and seed-monopolizing company, Monsanto, was waging a war of their own. 
Members of the FARC rebel resistance have spent decades roaming the jungles of Columbia – bathing in creeks and sleeping in crude campsites . They, like almost no other Colombian, are familiar with the U.S.-Colombian so-called anti-narcotic war which allows Monsanto to spray the air with glyphosate, widely known as the trademarked herbicide, Roundup. 
Once this herbicide reaches the jungle floor, it destroys not only coca, but also the many other plants that provide for indigenous Colombian’s needs. 
This practice began in the 1980s. In 1999 the campaign to spray glyphosate acquired an official status known as ‘Plan Colombia.’ Only just recently, the Colombian government defied the U.S. agreement and stopped the aerial spraying of crops used to make cocaine, ending the 20-year long, Monsanto-led environmental devastation. 
What many don’t know is that the U.S. government pledged to fund the purchase of glyphosate herbicides from Monsanto, supply the aircraft equipped with the means to spray, and to train Colombian commandos to carry out the aerial onslaught . 
These planes faced an ongoing threat of receiving ground fire by FARC rebels. 
FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez (real name is Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri), known as ‘Timochenko’ among partisans and a graduate of the Peoples’ Friendship University in Russia as well as a trained doctor, said in an interview to Colombian newspaper VOZ: 
“In the regions, where farm communities live close to coca crops, the government accuses landowners of illegal coca production and using this excuse constantly air-sprays their fields with glyphosate. This chemical destroys coca randomly along with other agricultural crops, causing irretrievable harm to animals and people, especially to children, seniors and pregnant women.” 
The result was that rebels attempted to shoot down planes to escape chemical death. In an attempt to avoid the ground fire, the U.S.-supplied, Monsanto-herbicide-filled crop dusters would fly higher, but continue their spraying, becoming more willy-nilly in their aim. 
The Colombian tropical rainforests, are thus barbarically sprayed with millions of tons of Monsanto’s herbicide. This is extraordinarily troublesome due to the fact that Colombia is considered one of the most important countries for maintaining biodiversity, with almost 10% of all endemic plant species growing within its forests. 
Moreover, 6 million Colombians have had to flee their homes due to Monsanto’s spraying . Instead of eradicating crops, you’d think the biotech company was trying to eradicate people. Indigenous Shuar leader from Scumbios, Ecuador explains the situation , 
“We always used to have a pharmacy in the jungle. But now we can’t find the trees and animals that we need. The animals and fish have disappeared. The birds, too. We have never seen anything like this before. It has to be the result of the spraying. We notice the effects immediately after the area is sprayed. Birds, animals, and fish begin to disappear within a few weeks. The health effects linger for weeks, and even longer.” 
Additionally, soil has lost its fertility, water is polluted, and multi-generational homesteads are uprooted. Forests are quickly dying, also. 
Instead of the land being shepherded by Colombians, biotech corporations use them to expand their genetically-modified crop empires, which are resistant to glyphosate. 
What has assisted this expansion? The war against Colombian guerrillas. FARC representatives at peace talks in Havana were the ones who demanded Monsanto and the US stop spraying . 
As Russian journalist, Elena Sharoykina has stated , 
“Despite the support of the head of the government, the glyphosate moratorium was criticized by the Colombian ‘war faction’ and its U.S. bosses. Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno, the defense minister, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the former head of the government, and Kevin Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador in Bogota, have publicly opposed it. They claimed it an undeserved concession for FARC and appealed to continue the aerial spraying of the herbicide ‘for the sake of combating narcotics’. 
Of course, it’s not only about coca plantations. The U.S. uses the anti-narcotic campaign in Colombia as an easy excuse to eradicate FARC. Washington is usually surprisingly tolerant to drug production, when it brings profit. 
. . .Nowadays, the estimated number of active FARC members hardly exceeds 5-6 thousand people. It’s naive to think that several thousand of rebels trapped in jungle can control a transnational joint venture known as the ‘Colombian cocaine industry’, worth tens of billions U.S. dollars .” 
One thing is clear in the face of a lost vote for peace. 
“‘Glyphosate’ and ‘war’ have become synonyms now in Colombia. That is why the moratorium on the aerial spraying of the herbicide wouldn’t last long. Already in April 2016 the Colombian government under U.S. pressure and on the pretext of fighting the drug business resumed the use of glyphosate .”",FAKE
"Previous Oathkeepers to Prevent Voter Fraud- Operation Sabot 
I recently interviewed Oathkeepers Stewart Rhodes and one of his writers who goes by the handle of “Navy Jack” about their plans to oversee the elections for fairness and to remove the intimidation that is coming from the Soros/Clinton cabal. 
This interview produced some of the best election analysis that is on the airwaves. Among the many points discussed centered around the possibility of Clinton being indicted after winning the election but before the the Inauguration. We would have an old-fashioned Constitutional crisis. 
Listen to this fascinating interview and then please circulate this widely. Make it go viral!",FAKE
"Non-mainstream poll shows Trump poised to win with 76% chance Alternative media poll shows Trump leaving Clinton in the dust November 6, 2016 Momma Loves The Donald/Flickr ( INTELLIHUB ) — An independent, non-mainstream poll shows Trump is favored to win the presidential election against Hillary 76 — 24, which is quite the contrast to so-called mainline polling data. 
An open poll taken by Intellihub News via Twitter shows Hillary with 24%, compared to Trumps 76%, at the time this article was published. Who will win the #election2016 and become our next President? 
— Intellihub (@intellihubnews) November 6, 2016 
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has reported that Hillary “holds a 4-point lead over Donald Trump.” 
There are still some 16 hours left on the poll until it expires, so cast your vote now. ©2016. INTELLLIHUB.COM. All Rights Reserved.",FAKE
"Donald Trump is way ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination.

Bernie Sanders will win the New Hampshire Primary on Tuesday, and he’s close to Hillary Clinton in national polls.

But neither Trump nor Sanders is likely to win!

In our new Fox News TV special, “Tech Revolution” at 8 and 11 pm ET Sunday night, we’ll explain why the better way to predict winners is to look at betting odds. They give Marco Rubio more than a 50 percent chance of winning the nomination, and Hillary Clinton an 80 percent chance.

Betting odds have a better track record than polls or pundits. They come from people who put their own money on the line, rather than people who just mouth off.

George Mason University economist Robin Hanson puts it this way:  Imagine you’re in a bar…

“You're pontificating -- and somebody challenges you and says, ‘want to bet?’ All of us, as soon as somebody says ‘want to bet?’ -- we pause. And go, ‘do I really believe that?’”

You are more careful when you bet.  If you aren’t, you lose money.  Think the odds above are wrong?  Put your money where your mouth is.

American politicians banned most political prediction markets, but they’ve allowed a few, like PredictIt.org.

PreditctIt’s odds are a little off because bettors may not trade more than $850 per candidate. The odds on bigger unrestricted markets, like England’s Betfair.com, are more informative.   Because Betfair posts those odds in confusing gambling formulas, the two of us simplify them for Americans here: ElectionBettingOdds.com.

These odds update every five minutes.

Prediction markets like Betfair are not run by sketchy bookies.  They are businesses that operate the way stock markets do – people buy and sell “shares” that pay out based on whether a candidate is successful. Today, for about 10 cents, you can buy a share of Trump. If he becomes president, you win a dollar.

These odds have a good track record. In November, Ben Carson surged to first place in polls, but bettors knew he would fade--Betfair had him at just 9 percent. Now his odds are below 1 percent.

Betting odds do sometimes fail: Until the evening of the Iowa caucus, bettors thought Donald Trump would win.

But they still beat polls and pundits. Part of the reason they’re good is the “wisdom of crowds.”

Some people betting may be fools making bad bets -- but enough of them have good information that the whole group of bets is likely to be accurate.  You see this on the TV show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”

Contestants can ask the audience, or an expert.  Experts do pretty well.  They get the answer right 65 percent of the time, but the audience gets it right 91 percent of the time.

Bets on a prediction market called Intrade accurately predicted “American Idol” winners, Oscar winners, and the election results in almost every U.S. state. They even predicted when Saddam Hussein would be captured.

Sadly, our government said betting is “contrary to the public interest.” It sued Intrade and put them out of business.   We no longer have access to Intrade’s interesting and useful predictions.

Fortunately, a few sites still allow political betting, and the best odds are easily readable at ElectionBettingOdds.com.  And we’ll explain this better on TV Sunday night!

John Stossel’s special “Tech Revolution” airs Sunday night on Fox News Channel at 8 pm ET.

Maxim Lott is a Fox News supervising producer and is on Twitter at @MaximLott.

John Stossel is the author of ""No They Can't! Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed"" and host of ""Stossel"" (Fridays at 9 PM/ET), a weekly program highlighting current consumer issues with a libertarian viewpoint. Stossel also appears regularly on Fox News Channel (FNC) providing signature analysis. Click here for more information on John Stossel.",REAL
" The Source Of Our Rage The Ruling Elite Is Protected from the Consequences of its Dominance By Charles Hugh Smith
Please read my election note at the end of the essay.
November 10, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" Of Two Minds "" - There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance.
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape.
If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation’s output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins.
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige ).
America’s Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to “the little people” they loot with abandon.
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America’s Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement.
Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of “economic growth,” but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below).
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility , as has trust in government and key institutions.
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed:
“In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center.”
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%.
As I described in America’s Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending . , the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust.
Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt.
The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo.
The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power.
This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military’s spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table.
Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc.
This is why we’re enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite’s dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance.
This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available .
ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump .
They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump.
There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation’s Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity.
As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016).
If you still don’t understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.
My new book is #8 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book’s website . http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html",FAKE
"NEW YORK  — Donald Trump fired his hard-charging campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, on Monday in a dramatic shake-up designed to calm panicked Republican leaders and reverse one of the most tumultuous stretches of Trump's unconventional White House bid.

Lewandowski, in some ways as brash and unconventional as the candidate himself, had been by Trump's side since the beginning of his unlikely rise to presumptiveGOP nominee. But he clashed with longtime operatives brought in to make the seat-of-the-pants campaign more professional.

The former conservative activist played a central role in daily operations, fundraising, and Trump's search for a running mate, but Lewandowski's aggressive approach also fueled near-constant campaign infighting that complicated Trump's shift toward the general election.

Reached by the AP on Monday, Lewandowski deflected criticism of his approach, pointing instead to campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

""Paul Manafort has been in operational control of the campaign since April 7. That's a fact,"" Lewandowski said, declining to elaborate on his dismissal. Asked by CNN why he was fired, he said: ""I don't know the answer to that.""

Lewandowski also says his relationships with Trump's top adviser, Paul Manafort, and the candidate's daughter, Ivanka are good.

Lewandowski was fired Monday after a tumultuous period for the campaign, marked by infighting and rumors. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement earlier in the day that she wishes Lewandowski the best.

He is the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party's delegation to the GOP national convention.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks described Lewandowski's departure as a ""parting of ways."" A person close to Trump said Lewandowski was forced out largely because of his poor relationship with the Republican National Committee and GOP officials. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The move came as Trump faced continued deep resistance from many quarters of his party concerned by his contentious statements and his reluctance to engage in traditional fundraising. Trump was upset that so many Republicans — House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell among them — were reluctant to support him, the person said, and at least partially blamed Lewandowski.

People close to Trump, including adult children Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., also had long-simmering concerns about Lewandowski, who had limited national experience before becoming Trump's campaign chief. Some of Trump's children were among those urging the billionaire businessman to change tactics for the general election.

""Firing your campaign manager in June is never a good thing,"" said veteran Republican operative Kevin Madden. ""The campaign will have to show dramatic changes immediately on everything from fundraising and organizing to candidate performance and discipline in order to demonstrate there's been a course correction. Otherwise it's just cosmetics.""

Lewandowski has long been a controversial figure in Trump's campaign, but benefited from his proximity to the presumptive Republican nominee. Often mistaken for a member of the candidate's security team, he traveled with Trump on his private plane to nearly every campaign stop, giving him more direct access to the businessman than nearly any other campaign staffer.

He was a chief promoter of the idea that the best campaign strategy was to ""Let Trump be Trump."" Lewandowski frequently dismissed the notion that Trump needed to hire more experienced political hands, spend on polling and sophisticated data operations, and moderate his rhetoric as he moved toward the general election. That approach clashed with seasoned operatives hired in recent months.

Minutes after news of Lewandowski's departure was announced, Trump aide Michael Caputo tweeted, ""Ding dong the witch is dead!"" and included a link to the song from the film, ""The Wizard of Oz.""

Lewandowski was charged with misdemeanor battery in the spring for an altercation involving a female reporter during a rally. The charges were later dropped. Trump defended Lewandowski throughout the episode and repeatedly framed his own actions as a sign of loyalty and a demonstration that he would not give in to outside pressure.

""Folks, look, I'm a loyal person,"" Trump told voters at the time.

""It's so important,"" he said of loyalty in a subsequent interview. ""And it's one of the traits that I most respect in people. You don't see it enough.""

Lewandowski's consulting firm, Green Monster, was paid more than $360,000 by the Trump campaign through the end of April, and reimbursed an additional $15,000 for travel expenses, according to fundraising reports.

Yet his approach within the campaign sparked intense criticism from experienced Republican operatives inside and outside of the campaign.

The move comes a day before Trump is to attend a major New York City fundraiser, organized by longtime GOP financier Woody Johnson, the NFL Jets owner. Trump will spend part of Tuesday and Wednesday at finance events in his home city.

Many of the top Republican fundraisers had encountered turbulence between worried donors and a campaign manager who did not seem fully onboard with the idea that Trump and the party needed to buckle down and raise the money needed to build a robust general election operation.

Republican strategist Ryan Williams, a frequent Trump critic, said Lewandowski's dismissal ""is the first major public admission from Donald Trump that his campaign is not going well.""

""This shows donors, activists and party officials that he is willing to make significant changes, even if it means parting ways with a trusted political aide,"" Williams said. ""Now Trump needs to demonstrate that he is willing to change his own approach by toning down his rhetoric and becoming a more disciplined general election candidate.""",REAL
"A Times story headlined “Obama Privately Tells Donors Time Is Coming to Unite Behind Hillary” had Obama telling DNC high rollers to “come together.” In it Obama “didn’t explicitly call on Sanders to quit” but a “White House official” confirmed his “unusually candid” words. It was a plant dressed up as a scoop. Obama spoke not privately but on background, and not to his donors but through them (and the paper) to his base. It was a different portrait of Obama as unifier: political, financial and media elites, all working as one to put down a revolt.

Obama’s neutrality is a polite scam. His “private” chat came before voters in 29 states even had their say. Presidents never let appointees make endorsements, but three Obama cabinet secretaries — Agriculture’s Tom Vilsack, HUD’s Julian Castro and Labor’s Thomas Perez — backed Clinton early, thus shepherding whole economic sectors into her camp. At Obama’s DNC, ethically challenged Debbie Wasserman Schultz brazenly violates party rules by daily rigging the game for Clinton.

Sanders often says he took on “the most powerful political machine in America,” by which he means the Clintons. He’s really fighting the whole Democratic Party: White House, Congress, DNC, elite media and, sad to say, national progressive groups. That includes organized labor but also nearly every liberal lobby in town. He’s been a more constant friend than Hillary Clinton to almost all of them — but he must face and defeat them all. That he’s done so in 14 states — 15 counting Iowa-and fought four more to a draw is a miracle — and a sign their days are truly numbered.

Donald Trump has accomplished little by comparison. Everything was easier for him. When he hit party elites, no one hit back. Democratic elites had a flawed but still formidable Clinton to carry their water. Republicans had Jeb Bush, and now Ted Cruz. Trump took the low road and then lowered it some more, yet could help himself to issues of broad populist appeal without an establishment type feigning agreement. The media that ignored or dismissed Sanders coddled and appeased Trump. Eight years of open GOP warfare prepared Trump’s way. Bernie’s in the first wave to hit the Democratic beach.

With each call to surrender, Sanders just gets stronger. The day the Politico story ran, he swept Democrats Abroad 69 percent to 30 percent. The next day Hillary took Arizona with 58 percent of the vote but Sanders blew her out in Idaho and Utah, polling an unheard-of 79 percent in caucuses that shattered turnout records. On Saturday he’d chalked up three more wins in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington with average margins of 76 perfent. In a Times/CBS poll out this week the man who started the race 60 points down closed the gap to five. In a Bloomberg poll released Saturday he took a 1 point lead.

It raises a question that the elites who rig rules, stifle debate and call on Sanders to withdraw must answer: Who do you think you are? It also raises a question for Washington-based organizations allegedly safeguarding progressive values: What have you done? With all her money, contacts and celebrity and full, albeit covert support of her president and party, Clinton needed every last liberal endorsement to survive Iowa, Nevada, Missouri, Illinois and Massachusetts. How did she get them? If those endorsements don’t strike you as at least counterintuitive, ponder the record:

Clinton backed NAFTA and the TPP, dithered on the minimum wage and still doesn’t support a living wage. Why would labor help her defeat a man who never once left its side on these and countless other vital issues?

She backed the Defense of Marriage Act in the ’90s, opposed same-sex marriage till 2013 and recently recalled Nancy Reagan as a hero of the AIDS crisis. The Human Rights Campaign may be the bravest and most loyal of all liberal lobbies. Why abandon a stalwart ally like Sanders for one who dithered and dodged on every tough issue?

From Sister Souljah in 1992 to Barack Obama in 2008, the Clinton record on racial politics is highly mixed. She backed the Clinton/Gingrich welfare bill that left millions of African Americans in poverty and the Clinton crime bill that landed millions more in jail. Why did a PAC run in the name of the Congressional Black Caucus pick her over a guy who went to jail to protest segregated housing?

The answers are many and complicated. One is that some once great, grass roots movements pledged their troth to a political party and lost touch with their values and their members. Led by hired technicians and assorted other Washington lifers, many froze members out of their decisions. It’s a big part of the story but not the whole story. Another part pertains to ideology and the tyranny of tactical thinking.

Ideology is easy to spot in those we deem extremist; it’s harder to see in those we deem “centrist.”  All ideologues think their ideology is empirical — Engels called his “scientific socialism” — but centrists get away with it. We call their shared ideology “neoliberalism.” Its adherents include deficit hawks, military interventionists, market deregulators, free traders and, the key to it all, pay-to-play politicians.

This ideology is bipartisan. Without the full support of Democratic elites, NAFTA, the TPP, the Iraq war, Wall Street deregulation, every revolving door and no bid contract, every cut ever made to Social Security or Medicare, would be impossible. The culture wars we so loudly deplore are mostly a sideshow staged by political elites to hold onto their base while conducting their business. This election exposes the real divide in American politics, the one separating us from them.

Neoliberal politics is entirely tactical and tactical thinking is static. Most people oppose Wall Street crooks, Mideast ground wars and cuts to Social Security so they talk endlessly about what the Congress they’ve corrupted won’t pass and what other voters allegedly won’t support. Neoliberals love horse-race politics because it never favors reform. Polls favor known quantities. Endorsements go to people in power; money to those willing to reward the investment. Tacticians rely on marketing tools made to manipulate, not illuminate.

Since global finance capitalism runs on pay to play politics, neoliberals promise “change” but can never deliver reform. They can’t talk us out of wanting a living wage or universal health care so they argue tactics: change is impossible because someone else doesn’t want it; we can’t afford it, even though it saves us money.

The tyranny of tactical thinking surely led some progressives to Clinton despite knowing she’d likely let them down again. It even infects the minds of voters. In hopes of catching a Democratic ear or two, I’ll illustrate the point using polls.

Eight month ago Bernie was a stranger to Democrats. In a recent CNN poll his popularity among them surpassed Clinton’s. (85 percent /10 percent versus 76/19). The Times poll shows the gap widening. In it, 56 percent of Dems say if he’s the nominee they’ll support him “enthusiastically.” Just 40 percent say the same of her. On issues his lead is far greater; that’s why she mimics him rather than the other way around. Yet this is the same poll in which she beats him by 5 percent. Some Democrats who prefer him vote for her. I put it down to tactical thinking. In that same poll 72 percent of Democrats say regardless of how they feel she’ll be the nominee. Seventy-eight percent say her ideas are “realistic”; 56 percnt say his are. The case she makes is purely tactical; she can win; she can pass her program; she has more delegates. They’d be reasonable arguments if they were true, but all evidence says they aren’t. That so many smart people buy into them only proves my point: ideology makes you stupid. Like all ideologues, neoliberals see themselves as fact driven free thinkers. Last fall polls started showing Bernie beating Republicans who beat Hillary. Clintonites said early polls mean nothing. In their best ‘pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’ voices, neoliberal pundits treated this baseless assertion like a law of physics. It’s not. We take early polls with big grains of salt but Clinton and Trump were very well known with high, hard negatives. That’s different. Six months later he still beats her in every general election poll; her people still dismisses the polls. She says Republicans haven’t attacked him yet, but she sure has. The result: people like her less and him more. She says wait till voters find out he’s a socialist. They did and guess what: socialism got more popular. If they find out how honest and frugal his brand of socialism is they’ll like it even more. Pundits tout Clinton’s foreign policy cred. As Secretary of State she no doubt took copious notes but she’s wrong on every issue she and Sanders dispute. She says her Iraq war vote was a long time ago and anyway she apologized but her theory of the case resembles Jeb Bush’s. (She blames W. Jeb blames the staff) As Secretary she applied her Iraq War logic to Libya and Syria. She promoted fracking, bugged the office of the U.N. Secretary General and meddled illegally in a Honduran coup. At what point is her experience cancelled out by her inability to learn from it?  And does Bernie ever get credit for being right? She has vast political experience but may be the most gaffe-prone major candidate ever to run for president. Bernie on the other hand rarely misspeaks. Pundits who prize “message discipline” seem not to notice. They used to say independent voters decide elections, but independents abhor Hillary and adore Bernie so they say it less now. Hillary ranks worst of all the candidates on honesty and Bernie best.  He has the highest favorability rating of any candidate in the race. Save for Trump, she has the lowest of any major candidate in the history of polling. To fact driven, free thinking neoliberals none of it matters. Facts that contradict ideology never do. Clintonites say Bernie should quit so she can focus on Trump. But Trump’s no more inevitable than Clinton. If he gets croaked in Cleveland, does anyone believe she has a better shot than Bernie of bringing some of his followers back into the Democratic fold? In any case it’s not Bernie but her response to him that kills her. Coming out against the TPP or the banks would help if she seemed at all sincere. Her clumsy smears—Bernie wants to repeal Medicare, Bernie opposed the auto bailout, Bernie loves the Minutemen etc., etc.—serve only to fuel doubts about her character. Her shameless surrogates accuse him of partisan disloyalty.  Could voters care less? Bernie won’t quit but even if he did it wouldn’t fix what ails her. Both Clinton and Trump argue their inevitability. It’s an illusion propped up by rules meant to stifle dissent. (Superdelegates in her case, winner-take-all in his) She’d be the weakest candidate Democrats have nominated in half a century or more. He’d be the worst ever nominated by either party. Neither will finish strong. Both may crumble. Each will then say early wins in a rigged system entitle them to nominations. Will either party have the wisdom to say no? Current rules of both parties are undemocratic All conventions are free to adopt their own rules. Victory may well go to whichever one has the courage to change. Hillary Clinton’s closing argument, other than her inevitability, is the impossibility of the middle class getting what it wants: a living wage, single payer health care, an end to pay-to-play politics. One thing’s for sure; we’ll never get them without new leader and new rules. The range of possible outcomes includes a Clinton/Trump race but also a Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz or John Kasich-led ticket coming out of Cleveland 10 points ahead of Hillary Clinton or 5 points behind Bernie Sanders. It also includes a Sanders/Trump race in which Bernie beats Trump by more than FDR beat Alf Landon. It only sounds crazy if you’re wearing neoliberal blinders. Two polls in the last five days (Bloomberg and CNN) say that’s exactly what would happen. For this to happen, lots of other stuff has to happen first. Republicans have to flinch and nominate Trump. Bernie has to pick all the low hanging fruit that’s left and win a couple of tougher races. The Democrats have to unstack the deck. I have a suggestion. Start with the superdelegates. For a solid year the Democratic National Committee has broken its own rules. As Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard noted in resigning as a DNC vice chair to back Bernie, officers may not back candidates until a nominee emerges. Schultz and other Clintonites mock the rule. In slashing debates from 26 in 2008 to six in 2016 and repealing a ban on federal contractor donations, Schultz, a payday loan industry ally, acted with zero due process; no notice, minutes, meeting or vote. DNC members said not a word. 435 of them, all unelected, are superdelegates. They had no business voting to begin with. All their votes should be allotted to candidates in proportion to their performance in each state. Bernie Sanders must stay in the race not only till the convention but till the end of whatever ballot nominates him or Hillary Clinton. He must do so because he and not she would make the stronger candidate and the better president. Regardless of how the next primaries, he should do it because his campaign isn’t just a revolution, it’s a movement that must outlast this election and many more to come. Blinded by ideology and self-interest, party elites say everything we want is impossible. The people in the movement know if we keep eyes on the prize we can do great things, even a thing as great as electing Bernie Sanders president.",REAL
"There were a couple of not-so-very-subtle signals here inside of Hofstra University that Donald Trump lost Monday night’s highly-anticipated debate against Hillary Clinton, and badly.

The first was the audible sound of groaning by some of his supporters (picked up by my attentive colleague Steve Shepard) inside the debate hall as Trump meandered self-defensively through a succession of answers against a very focused, very energized and very well-rehearsed Hillary Clinton.

Another tell: After the 90-minute sparring match finished, Clinton’s team practically bounded into the spin room – more in glassy-eyed disbelief than visible elation that things had gone so much better than expected. The GOP nominee’s people, by contrast, dribbled into the media pen like surly seventh-graders headed for homeroom the day before summer vacation. “F—k, let’s do this,” a prominent Trump surrogate said before diving into a scrum.

Trump and his new-ish messaging team have labored mightily to turn the avatar of populist rage into a reasonable facsimile of someone who you could see sitting in the Oval Office. But this best-laid plan unraveled on Monday – amid Clinton’s steely assault and the dignified interrogation of NBC’s Lester Holt, who struck a deft balance between facilitator, BS detector and lion tamer.

Within minutes of the opening bell, Clinton’s attacks forced domesticated Donald to go feral – he bellowed, interrupted her repeatedly, grunted, and toward the bedraggled end, became muted and pouty.

“It was bizarre,” said Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, who, like many Clinton allies, seemed visibly relieved. “He was clearly rattled, and clearly focused on defending himself, which I’m told narcissists are prone to do, and he clearly faded at the end. It’s not like she’s going to jump out to a 10-point lead, but this was good.”

Whether or not this reverses Trump’s momentum, or reestablishes Clinton's control of the race is an open question. Who won is not. Here are five takeaways.

Trump was wimpy when defensive. He is supposed to be the big meanie but it was Clinton who hit him where it hurt most. It doesn’t take a Jung (or even Dr. Phil after a couple of Bud Lights) to figure out that the GOP nominee – who boasts like a barfly – just might be over-compensating. Hence, Clinton, who started the debate a little tentatively, quickly launched into a carefully planned program of Freudian mind-games, contrasting her own middle-class businessman dad (who had his own issues) with Trump’s imperious, larger-than-life father Fred who launched his son’s business career but also was said to be extremely tough on him.

First she started in with a paean to her father’s running a small printing business in Chicago (This might be the first time a candidate has described, in detail, the silk-screen squeegee process on a debate stage) – then she pivoted to mocking supposedly self-made Trump’s start in the real estate business. “You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit. He started his business with $14 million, borrowed from his father,” she said icily.

“My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars,” he responded weakly – and so it went on a range of topics.

Whether it was because Clinton was so well prepped, and Trump was so breezily unprepared – or had a simple case of opening night jitters – the bully-boy nominee abandoned his most effective mode of debate combat, answering an attack with a harsher one. She went right for Trump’s ego – questioning his questionable $11 billion net worth, his boastful record on job creation and picking apart his tough talk on fighting ISIS.

In 2007, preparing for a primary race she’d eventually lose, Clinton told me that the key to presidential political campaigns was understanding that the most effective attacks weren’t about exploiting someone’s weaknesses but challenging an opponent’s perceived strengths. When confronted with that assault, Trump wilted and offered a series of meandering answers that had his Republicans wincing. “It was a draw,” former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said. “But he was on the defensive far too much. That’s a direct result of his inexperience.”

What about the Clinton Foundation? The former secretary’s debate team (including longtime aide Phillippe Reines, who snapped a pre-debate photo in a Trump circled-finger pose) expected him to savage her on the various questions raised about her family’s foundation. They were worried about it. While he hammered her ever-so-briefly on emails, he was so engaged in self-justification, he flat-out forgot to pursue an attack that could have made the night a lot less lousy.

His “30 years” attack worked – and he’ll use it again. Trump may have lost the first debate, but he’s proven to be a fast learner, and is likely to come back stronger in early October for the second debate, a town hall style affair, in St. Louis. And there were a few gold nuggets strewn in the wreckage of Hofstra – the most valuable an assault (demonstrable and fact-checker-friendly) on Clinton’s effectiveness in 25-plus years of public life.

The been-there-not-done-that argument was particularly useful when coupled with his usual slams on Bill Clinton’s passage of the increasingly unpopular NAFTA agreement from the 1990s and Hillary Clinton’s election-year flip-flop from TPP booster to opponent.

“When she started talking about this, it was really very recently,” Trump said of her opposition to the trade deal. “She's been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn't she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective. Just because of the tax and many other reasons, but just because of the fact.”

When Clinton claimed that she planned to “really work to get new jobs and to get exports that helped to create more new jobs.” He scoffed, and shot back, “But you haven't done it in 30 years or 26 years.”

Clinton effectively attacked his business career. Trump’s attempt to head off debate-night questions about his five-year campaign promoting the birther slander against Barack Obama was a humbling face-plant. His attempt to pin the origin of the charge against Clinton associate Sid Blumenthal was semi-effective with the political press, but it withered under the insistent interrogation of an African-American moderator determined to extract an apology or reasonable explanation. Trump offered neither – and suggested Obama should actually be grateful he pursued the canard because it’s now been resoundingly put to rest.

Politically, his tortured explanation helps energize black voters – who already oppose him in historic numbers. But later in the debate, Clinton plucked the strains of what could be a genuine crossover hit this fall among ever-elusive white working-class voters and independents: Trump’s failure to turn over his tax returns. Clinton went there with a vengeance – engaging in a little Trump-esque fact-free speculation about the motives of the billionaire developer-turned-reality TV star.

“So you've got to ask yourself, why won't he release his tax returns?” Clinton mused, with relish. “And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings... Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.”

Trump’s answer did more harm than good:

“That makes me smart,” he said – referring to his business, not his political, acumen.

Her most effective attack – and his worst answer. If the GOP nominee needed any more proof that preparation trumps bombast in a general election debate, he got it when Clinton launched a merciless attack on his habit of stiffing contractors who have labored on his construction projects over the years. Again, Clinton brought it back to her father, describing how bad he would have felt if one of his clients had accepted his work without paying his bill.

""I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects, marble installers, drapery installers, who you refused to pay when they finished the work you asked them to do,” Clinton said, delivering a carefully scripted attack. “We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It's a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn't pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do.”

This is a particular dangerous issue for a candidate whose entire campaign is rooted in fighting for the working class -- and his flippant response, yet again, gave comfort to his enemies.

“Maybe he didn't do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump quipped.",REAL
"So, it's official. After years of signing ""-BO"" at the end of @BarackObama t o signal the tweets he crafted himself from an account operated by the Organizing for Action staff, the President now has his very own handle @POTUS , tweeting for the first time:

""Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.""

And some asking the question on a lot of people's minds, what happens to the handle when a new President takes office?

According to a White House official, @POTUS handle will transfer to the next President when Obama leaves office on 2017. President Bill Clinton even had some fun with the news, tweeting: Welcome to @Twitter, @POTUS! One question: Does that username stay with the office? #askingforafriend

For his banner photo, the President chose a powerful image from the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches, where he, first lady and Congressman John Lewis (D-Georgia) led a commemorative march, hand in hand, over the Selma Bridge. Per a statement from t he White House , the @POTUS handle ""will serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him."" Naturally, folks on social are having a little fun with this new presidential social presence: — The First Lady (@FLOTUS) May 18, 2015 The bear is loose on the Twittersphere! Welcome to the interwebs, Mr. President. https://t.co/SrlAbK3rfK — Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) May 18, 2015 .@POTUS joined Twitter just in time to live tweet The Bachelorette premiere tonight. — Erin Ruberry (@erinruberry) May 18, 2015 I'm going to enjoy the brief 10 minute period where I have more Twitter followers than @POTUS. pic.twitter.com/w28RPLGY09 — Byron Tau (@ByronTau) May 18, 2015 And Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy tweeting a gif of the President with a selfie stick: Welcome to twitter @POTUS! Looking forward to lots of Presidential selfies pic.twitter.com/jjWnkwX14h — Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) May 18, 2015 In the meantime, we'll just wait for your first GIFs and selfies, Mr. President.",REAL
"on November 3, 2016 12:22 am · 
Donald Trump’s deplorable supporters aren’t waiting for the election results to start spilling blood. 
They’ve been threatening bloody violence ever since Trump began claiming that the election is “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton. And Trump has called for them to intimidate voters at polling places. 
In Texas last week, a Trump supporter was arrested for electioneering at a polling place because he was wearing one of Trump’s stupid hats and a “Deplorables” T-shirt to vote. 
Election code prohibits any person from electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place. 
Of course, Trump supporters threw a temper tantrum because they think the rules don’t apply to them. 
Well, now it looks like they have retaliated by setting up a booby trapped Trump sign at a polling place knowing that an official or volunteer would have to take the sign down. 
At Collin College in Plano, Texas a Trump sign was discovered zip-tied to an official polling location sign in direct violation of the election code that forbids electioneering at polling places. 
But when a volunteer went out to remove the sign they got a nasty surprise in the form of box cutter blades that were strategically hidden inside. The blades sliced into the volunteer’s hands and drew blood, requiring medical attention and prompting officials to order that signs be checked thoroughly before removal. 
“It just shows how far we have come in politics where people want to be so mean and so hateful to try and injure somebody who’s probably not got any political party persuasion one way or the other,” local Democratic Party campaign chair Steve Spainhouer said in response . “I think most people have already made their minds up at this point how they’re going to vote and so there’s nothing to gain by being mean spirited or hateful.” 
Here’s the video via KTVT . 
Frankly, this should be considered an act of domestic terrorism. Trump’s supporters have gone too far and it could get worse as Election Day approaches. And if Trump loses, his supporters have already threatened to try to overthrow the federal government in a bloody coup. 
Clearly, these people are deranged and the safety of voters and election officials are in danger. But you won’t hear Donald Trump condemning this act of violence. After all, he is the one inciting it. 
Featured Image: Darren McCollester/Getty Images Share this Article! ",FAKE
"President Obama talks political polarization and the 'Balkanization' of the media in his seventh and final appearance on 'The Daily Show' on Tuesday night.

President Obama made his seventh and final appearance on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night to reflect on his time spent in office and the lessons he’s learned.

“The one thing I know as I enter my last year as president is the country is full of good and decent people and there is a sense of common purpose at the neighborhood level and at the school and in the workplace,” Mr. Obama told host Jon Stewart.

“And that dissipates the further up it goes because of the money and all the filters and all the polarizing that takes place in how politics are shaped,” he continued.

Part of this polarization, Obama said, is due to the changing nature of the media.

“I think [the media] gets distracted by shiny objects and doesn’t always focus on the big, tough choices and decisions that have to be made. And part of that is just the changing nature of technology,” he said.

The president admitted that the White House was “way too slow in trying to redesign and reengineer” the structure of its Press Office to adapt to online and social media, and lamented the “Balkanization” of the media in recent years.

“You’ve got folks who are constantly looking for facts that reinforce their existing point of view as opposed to having a common conversation,” Obama said. “I think one of the things that we have to think about, not just the president but all of us, is how do we join together in a common conversation about something other than the Super Bowl.”

The only way everyday citizens can prevent this polarization, the president continued, is by getting involved and contacting local representatives. He went on to “guarantee” that “if people feel strongly about making sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon without us going to war and that is expressed to Congress, then people will believe in that.”

Other topics discussed in the 22-minute interview were the Iran deal, which Obama portrayed as the best achievable compromise, and progress made in the fields of healthcare and climate change. He also cited improvements in the Department of Veteran Affairs, the economy, and the efficiency of government in general.

“What I do think has happened is a lot of the work that we did early starts bearing fruit later,” Obama said, giving the example of the Iran negotiations. “So it finally comes to fruition. But it represents a lot of work.”",REAL
"We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.

We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.

But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.

“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.

What I hear from people who bleat on about “The real issue is mental illness,” when pressed for specific suggestions on how to deal with said “real issue,” is terrifying nonsense designed to throw the mentally ill under the bus. Elliot Rodger’s parents should’ve been able to force risperidone down his throat. Seung-Hui Cho should’ve been forcibly institutionalized. Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis should surrender all of their constitutional rights, right now, rather than at all compromise the right to bear arms of self-declared sane people.

What’s interesting is to watch who the mentally ill people are being thrown under the bus to defend. In the wake of Sandy Hook, the NRA tells us that creating a national registry of firearms owners would be giving the government dangerously unchecked tyrannical power, but a national registry of the mentally ill would not — even though a “sane” person holding a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than a “crazy” person, no matter how crazy, without a gun.

We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.

What’s also interesting is the way “The real issue is mental illness” is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves.

This is cruel, ignorant bullshit when it’s used to discredit people who are the victims of crimes. It is, in fact, one major factor behind the fact that the mentally ill are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators–every predator loves a victim who won’t be allowed to speak in their own defense.

But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer.)

Elliot Rodger told us why he did what he did, at great length, in detail and with citations to the “redpill” websites from which he got his deranged ideology. It isn’t, at the end of the day, rocket science — he killed women because he resented them for not sleeping with him, and he killed men because he resented them for having the success he felt he was denied.

Yes, whatever mental illness he may have had contributed to the way his beliefs were at odds with reality. But it didn’t cause his beliefs to spring like magic from inside his brain with no connection to the outside world.

That’s as deliberately obtuse as reading the Facebook rants of a man who rambled on at great length about how much he hated religion and in particular hated Islam and deciding that the explanation for his murdering a Muslim family is that he must’ve just “gone crazy” over a parking dispute.

Now we’ve got a man who wore symbols of solidarity with apartheid regimes, a man who lived in a culture surrounded by deadly weapons who, like many others, received a gift of a deadly weapon as a rite of passage into manhood. He straight-up told his victims, before shooting them, that he was doing it to defend “our country” from black people “taking over.” He told a woman that he was intentionally sparing her life so she could tell people what he did. There is no reasonable interpretation of his actions that don’t make this a textbook act of terrorism against black Americans as a community. And yet almost immediately we’ve heard the same, tired refrain of “The real issue is mental illness.” Well, “mental illness” never created any idea, motivation or belief system. “Mental illness” refers to the way our minds can distort the ideas we get from the world, but the ideas still come from somewhere. One of the highest-profile cases of full-blown schizophrenia in history is that of John Nash, who, unlike the vast, vast majority of mentally ill people, really did develop a whole system of delusions entirely separate from reality. And yet even then the movie A Beautiful Mind whitewashes what those beliefs actually were–when he came up with an all-powerful conspiracy that was monitoring his every move, that conspiracy by sheer coincidence was a conspiracy of the world’s Jews. Was it just sheer bad luck for Jewish people that a random genius’ random fertile imagination made them into demonic villains? Or did he get that idea from somewhere? Misogynistic rants that exactly match Elliot Rodger’s are just a Google search away, if you have a strong stomach. So are racist threats that exactly match Dylann Roof’s. Are all those people “mentally ill”? And if so is there some pill you could distribute to cure it? Dylann Roof is a fanboy of the South African and Rhodesian governments. As horrific as Roof’s crime was, the crimes that occurred over decades of apartheid rule were far, far worse, and committed by thousands of statesmen, bureaucrats and law enforcement officials. Were all of them also “mentally ill”? At the risk of Godwinning myself, John Nash wasn’t the only person to think the Jews were a global demonic conspiracy out to get him–at one point in history a large portion of the Western world bought into that and killed six million people because of it. Were they all “mentally ill”? Even when violence stems purely from delusion in the mind of someone who’s genuinely totally detached from reality–which is extremely rare–that violence seems to have a way of finding its way to culturally approved targets. Yeah, most white supremacists aren’t “crazy” enough to go on a shooting spree, most misogynists aren’t “crazy” enough to murder women who turn them down, most anti-government zealots aren’t “crazy” enough to shoot up or blow up government buildings. But the “crazy” ones always seem to have a respectable counterpart who makes a respectable living pumping out the rhetoric that ends up in the “crazy” one’s manifesto–drawing crosshairs on liberals and calling abortion doctors mass murderers–who, once an atrocity happens, then immediately throws the “crazy” person under the bus for taking their words too seriously, too literally. And the big splashy headliner atrocities tend to distract us from the ones that don’t make headline news. People are willing to call one white man emptying five magazines and murdering nine black people in a church and openly saying it was because of race a hate crime, even if they have to then cover it up with the fig leaf of individual “mental illness”–but a white man wearing a uniform who fires two magazines at two people in a car in a “bad neighborhood” in Cleveland? That just ends up a statistic in a DoJ report on systemic bias. And hundreds of years of history in which an entire country’s economy was set up around chaining up millions of black people, forcing them to work and shooting them if they get out of line? That’s just history. The reason a certain kind of person loves talking about “mental illness” is to draw attention to the big bold scary exceptional crimes and treat them as exceptions. It’s to distract from the fact that the worst crimes in history were committed by people just doing their jobs–cops enforcing the law, soldiers following orders, bureaucrats signing paperwork. That if we define “sanity” as going along to get along with what’s “normal” in the society around you, then for most of history the sane thing has been to aid and abet monstrous evil. We love to talk about individuals’ mental illness so we can avoid talking about the biggest, scariest problem of all–societal illness. That the danger isn’t any one person’s madness, but that the world we live in is mad. After all, there’s no pill for that.",REAL
"GOP presidential candidates called for prayers for victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris and a swift response from the U.S., while criticizing President Barack Obama‘s foreign policy.",REAL
"(CNN) The mystery into the death of Freddie Gray grew more complex Thursday as several new reports put the focus on what might have happened during a roughly 40-minute ride in the back of a police transport van.

• Investigators found that Gray was mortally injured in the van and not during his arrest, a Washington television station reported, citing multiple law enforcement sources.

• Police told reporters they have learned of an additional stop the van made as it was traveling to a police precinct.

• An officer involved in the arrest believes Gray was injured before being put into the vehicle, according to a relative who gave the officer's account to CNN.

• A second prisoner, who was picked up after Gray, told investigators that he thought Gray ""was intentionally trying to injure himself, according to The Washington Post.

What happened to Gray, the 25-year-old Baltimore man who suffered a severe spine injury and died one week after his arrest, has led to angry debate and protests nationwide. For the first time Thursday, Baltimore police walked with marchers and stopped traffic for them at intersections.

When the 10 p.m. curfew went into effect for the third night, there were still many protesters on the streets. Activists and local leaders were telling people to go home.

A body was found a block away from a CVS pharmacy that had been looted and set on fire during Monday's rioting. CNN's Ryan Young saw authorities tending to it.

It was discovered in a parked semi truck. Investigators did not say if the body was that of a man or a woman or if there was any connection to the riots.

But a dispatcher from an Illinois-based trucking company that commissions the truck said Baltimore police called to ask about one of its drivers hailing from Baltimore. His family had reported him missing for two to three days during a trip home, said dispatcher Brad Rhodes from Henderson Trucking Company.

The driver was supposed to return to work Wednesday, but did not show up. Rhodes did not confirm if the driver of that vehicle was the missing man and did not know the missing driver's fate.

The sources quoted by the Washington-based station said the medical examiner had determined Gray's death was caused by a catastrophic injury after he slammed into the back of the police transport van while inside it, ""apparently breaking his neck; a head injury he sustained matches a bolt in the back of the van.""

The station said it was unclear what caused Gray to slam into the back of the van and whether Gray caused the injury.

An official in the state's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner wouldn't comment to CNN on the report, citing an ongoing investigation. The official said the autopsy report on Gray could be delivered to the State's Attorney Office ""as soon as tomorrow or early next week.""

Staff members were still doing examinations Thursday, the official said. The completion and delivery of the final report will depend on how quickly that evaluation is completed and compiled. While it could be sent Friday, there is still the possibility it won't be ready until early next week, the official said.

How Gray was injured and whether police are liable for his death are questions now in the hands of the state's attorney for Baltimore City.

Police led a news conference by announcing they handed their investigative files over to prosecutors a day earlier than planned.

The state's attorney for Baltimore City confirmed she had received the report and said that while police have regularly briefed her office on their findings, her team has been conducting its own independent investigation.

""While we have and will continue to leverage the information received by the department, we are not relying solely on their findings but rather the facts that we have gathered and verified,"" prosecutor Marilyn Mosby said. ""We ask for the public to remain patient and peaceful and to trust the process of the justice system.""

Mosby will ultimately decide whether to file charges against any of the officers.

Investigators delivered their report early because ""I understand the frustration. I understand the urgency,"" police Commissioner Anthony Batts said.

""This does not mean that the investigation is over. If new evidence is found, we will follow it,"" he added. ""Getting to the right answer is more important than speed.""

The announcement of the additional stop by the police van was treated almost as a footnote in the police news conference.

""This new stop was discovered from a privately owned camera,"" Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis said without elaborating.

Many observers, though, say that revelation and other reports makes the Gray case even more suspicious -- and there has been no shortage of protesters taking to the city's streets to express their doubts about police accounts of what happened between Gray's April 12 arrest and his death.

The Rev. Jamal Bryant of Baltimore's Empowerment Temple has been helping organize protests and speaking to people in the community. Young people have told him in the past two days that they are ""absolutely frustrated and their confidence level is absolutely shattered"" and that Thursday's news only exacerbates those feelings.

""They don't believe that Mr. Gray was hurting himself in the van, and this additional stop lends credence to the suspicion that something is absolutely off track,"" he said.

Batts told CNN's Chris Cuomo that people are jumping to conclusions and no one is trying to cover anything up.

""I think it's unfortunate that these little things are coming out. I think that it's inappropriate,"" he added while out checking on his officers Thursday night. ""I think people should take a deep breath to wait for state's attorney to come out with the entire information.""

Attorney Andrew O'Connell, who is part of the Gray family's legal team, described the police time line as a ""moving target,"" meaning it keeps changing over time.

""What I would like to know and what we have been asking for from the beginning are the radio runs that are recorded during these stops,"" he said. ""Whenever a police officer makes a stop, he's supposed to radio it in. We haven't seen those. Those are usually the best way to get an accurate picture of what happened during an arrest.""

An official who had been briefed on the investigation told CNN that the stops are key to determining what happened, and as O'Connell pointed out, each stop is supposed to be logged, generally by the van's driver, and that didn't happen in this case. That's why the initial police time line was missing the new stop, the official said.

But where O'Connell stopped short of leveling accusations, CNN legal analyst Mel Robbins was more incredulous.

""They found out about it after doing this investigation where they interviewed over 30 people,"" she said. ""So what that says to me is that if it's going to take a closed-circuit, private camera to show the stop, that they were not getting that information from the police officers during the investigation.""

'This is why they investigate'

CNN law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes contended, however, that it was too early to assert something nefarious was at play and said finding and reviewing videos in an investigation is laborious.

""This could be a private security camera that was from a business, looking down the sidewalk and the street from their business that maybe just got turned over,"" he said. ""This is why they investigate. More facts come up gradually. When you have private citizens turn over videos to look at, they may not have realized it was that van, the business owner may not have known that it had anything to do with this case.""

Hwang Jung, owner of the market at North Fremont Avenue and Mosher Street where the newly disclosed stop took place, said officers in suits came into his store last week asking to see surveillance footage from April 12 at around 8:30 a.m.

After viewing the footage, the officers gave him their number and said two more officers would come copy the footage, which happened a few hours later, Hwang said.

The footage was lost, he said, when his store was looted in the days after Gray's death. He said he couldn't be sure exactly what day the officers came by but he thought it was early in the week of April 19.

It was April 24, a Friday, that Deputy Commissioner Davis told reporters that there had only been three stops en route to the police station: the first to put leg irons on Gray, the second ""to deal with Mr. Gray"" (an incident, he said, that remained under investigation) and the third to pick up a prisoner in an unrelated matter.

The new stop, Davis said Thursday, came between the first and second stops.

The six officers involved in the case have been suspended, and none has spoken publicly about what occurred.

But a relative of one of the officers spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity. She is related to one of the six officers but said the officer didn't request the interview.

The relative said she worries all six of the officers who encountered Gray during his April 12 arrest will be incriminated when only some might be responsible.

""Six officers did not injure this man,"" she said. ""Six officers didn't put him in the hospital. I'm worried that instead of them figuring out who did, that six officers are going to be punished behind something that maybe one or two or even three officers may have done to Freddie Gray.""

She also told CNN that the officer doesn't know how Gray was injured but said he believes it happened during the arrest.

""He believes that Freddie Gray was injured outside the paddy wagon,"" the relative said.

She also gave an explanation of why Gray was not buckled into the police van: He appeared belligerent.

""They didn't want to reach over him. You were in a tight space in the paddy wagon. He's already irate,"" she said.

Police have said five of the six officers have been interviewed by detectives, while the sixth invoked the right to decline to be questioned.

WJLA reported the van driver was the officer who has not be interviewed.

Report: Gray was trying to hurt himself, prisoner says

The news of what the second prisoner told police was in a Washington Post account that cites an investigative document written by a Baltimore police investigator.

In it, a prisoner who was in the police van with Gray said he could hear Gray ""banging against the walls"" of the van and thought Gray ""was intentionally trying to injure himself.""

The prisoner was separated from Gray by a metal barrier and could not see him, police have said.

When asked about the report, Gray family attorney Jason Downs said they cannot react to rumors and the family wants to see the medical examiner's findings.

He disputed the notion that Gray caused his own fatal injury.

""Any suggestion that Mr. Gray harmed himself in the back of that van is something that Freddie Gray's family strongly disagrees with,"" Downs told CNN's ""Erin Burnett OutFront"" on Thursday. ""In this case, common sense dictates that Freddie Gray did not sever his own spinal cord whether it was outside of the van or inside the van.""

Regardless of what happened, the police commissioner said Gray should have gotten medical help sooner.

""We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times,"" Batts said last week.",REAL
"Sure, We Want An Honest And Trustworthy President, But It's Complicated

Americans say they like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton the most for president, but they don't think they're honest and trustworthy.

Such a lack of trust, according to the latest Quinnipiac University poll, might be astonishing if we were not already accustomed to hearing about it — about our politicians in general and about these two candidates in particular. But the new polls shows one of the starkest divides yet.

Polling at 27 percent, Trump is at least 10 points ahead of any of his many rivals among registered Republicans. Clinton is the choice of 60 percent of Democrats, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders a rather distant second at 30 percent.

Yet 60 percent of poll respondents said they did not find Clinton ""honest and trustworthy."" Fifty-nine percent said the same of Trump.

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll said this anomaly has been apparent over months of polling.

""We've always found bad numbers on 'honest and trustworthy' for both Clinton and Trump, but good numbers for both on leadership,"" Malloy said.

Indeed, Clinton scored exactly as well on ""strong leadership qualities"" in this poll (60 percent agreeing) as she did poorly on honest and trustworthiness. And Trump, by the same token, got similar numbers for strong leadership (58 percent yes, 39 percent no).

""The one (judgment) seems to eclipse the other,"" said Malloy. ""I mean, what else could it be?""

The preference for strength as the premier quality in a leader has a long history both in the U.S. and around the world. In times of stress, in particular, many countries have turned to leaders regarded as tough and decisive – even if those same politicians were also controversial and distrusted by many.

In terms of the whole sample, this does appear to be the case. But the apparent contradiction between leading the pack and failing the trust test seems less pronounced upon closer inspection.

With their own supporters, Trump and Clinton were rated as honest and trustworthy. Among those planning to vote for Trump next year, 90 percent said he was honest and trustworthy while only seven percent said he was not. Among those planning to vote for Clinton, 84 percent said she was trustworthy while and 13 percent disagreed.

There are, of course, reasons someone might vote for a candidate without entirely trusting that person. It could simply reflect a preference for them over the other available alternatives.

In Clinton's case, Democrats might see her as the party's most electable candidate, even though the Quinnipiac poll finds Sanders runs better against some Republicans in hypothetical match-ups.

In Trump's case, the willingness to back him despite controversy and doubts may indicate the absence of any other consistent GOP rival who's been able to challenge him. Trump's closest competitor to date has been neurosurgeon Ben Carson, but this poll shows Carson fading as many of his former supporters are split between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

We also need to remember that Trump and Clinton's front-runner status in the candidate preference numbers reflects only the choices within their respective parties. Quinnipiac talked to 672 Republicans and 573 Democrats, but the bad numbers for both Trump and Clinton on whether they are ""honest and trustworthy"" were based on the responses of all 1,453 registered voters surveyed.

Among Republicans, Trump's trust number was much higher (58 percent) than it was from all people in the survey. Among Democrats it was just 12 percent, while independents gave him 36 percent— nearly matching the 35 percent average for all respondents.

Similarly, among Democrats Clinton has a much higher trust number (73 percent). With Republicans it was just seven percent, and among independents it hit 26 percent— leading to an overall average among all respondents of 36%.

The news in this poll may be more worrisome for Clinton, if only because her trust number among independents was 10 points lower than Trump's marks.

While many numbers in the poll could be cautionary for her backers, a remarkable 63 percent of all respondents (and 60 percent of independents) said she had ""a good chance of beating the Republican nominee,"" whomever that might be. That measure was the highest figure in the hypothetical general election test for any candidate in either party.

Meanwhile, only 46 percent of all respondents believed there was ""a good chance"" of Trump beating an unnamed Democratic nominee next November, with independents split evenly on the question.

The poll was conducted nationwide using live interviewers calling both land lines and cell phones from November 23rd-30th (after the November 13th Paris attacks). The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points for the whole survey sample and plus or minus 3.8 points for the Republican sample and plus or minus 4.1 points for the Democrats.",REAL
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter “This is the way the system works, it’s a rotten system, and I see elections as so much of a charade. So much deceit goes on. . . . whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat president, the people who want to keep the status quo seems to have their finger in the pot and can control things. They just get so nervous so, if they have an independent thinker out there, whether it’s Sanders, or Trump, or Ron Paul, they’re going to be very desperate to try to change things. . . . More people are discovering that the system is all rigged, and that voting is just pacification for the voters and it really doesn’t count.” advertisement - learn more Above are the words of Dr. Ron Paul, three-time presidential candidate and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Similar to Bernie Sanders, Dr. Paul attracted significant attention while he was in the running, appealing to the intellect of the masses and helping to wake people up to the realities of the U.S. electoral system. U.S. presidential elections are rigged. This is the truth that he, and Sanders, and so many others, hope to make clear. Voting only provides the illusion of democracy, it does not actually serve democracy. In the video below, Dr. Paul goes on to describe how the electoral process has become a giant charade, meant to entertain rather facilitate democracy. He also argues that who exactly is chosen for president is irrelevant, because corporate interests will always prevent them from effecting real change. In a recent debate with Hilary Clinton, Bernie Sanders made the same arguments, saying that “no matter who is elected to be president, that person . . . will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, (and) the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them.” ( source ) It is an uncomfortable truth, as Bernie himself admits, but it is a reality we must face. And hearing this for the first time can be jarring, to be sure. We’ve been told that the world operates in a specific way, that we decide who our political leaders will be, but as with anything in life, it’s important that we discover the truth for ourselves rather than trusting blindly the words of others. We have been programmed to believe everything we are told, and corporate media is not telling us the truth. Dr. Paul and Bernie Sanders are not the only major political figures to speak out about this issue. Various presidents and politicians have been saying this for decades. For example, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26 President of the United States, told the world that “behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.” He also stated that “presidents are selected, not elected.” Even the very first British MP, Benjamin Disraeli, warned us that “the world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Here is a very memorable quote from former New York City (1918-1925) Mayor John F. Hylan: advertisement - learn more The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection. ( source )( source ) Here is another great one from the 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, taken from his book The New Freedom : Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United State, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. ( source ) As you can see, the idea that the system is corrupt and ruled by outside influence is not a new one, but it is only recently that the general population has begun to see it for themselves. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. 
“Democracy is popular because of the illusion of choice and participation it provides, but when you live in a society in which most people’s knowledge of the world extends as far as sports, sitcoms, reality shows, and celebrity gossip, democracy because a very dangerous idea. Until people are properly educated and informed, instead of indoctrinated to be ignorant mindless consumers, democracy is nothing more than a clever tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the rest of of us.” – Gavin Nascimento. Presidents now seem to be little more than figureheads, meant to capture the hearts and attention of the people while leaving corporations (controlled by the big banks) free to do as they will, polluting and destroying our planet in their endless quest for profit. Barack Obama was a big time celebrity, and there is no doubt in my mind that Hillary Clinton will be the same by taking on the role of “first female president.” While this is obviously a commendable and much-needed step forward for gender quality, I think we need to take a step back and consider the bigger picture. We can’t look to our political leaders for change, we have to look to ourselves, because our desires are not being represented or addressed in the political sphere. The ongoing GMO debate is just one example of this, but there are many. If we want to change the things which matter the most — the degradation of the environment, the military industrial complex, poverty, among others — we can’t keep looking to political ‘leaders’ like Obama or international organizations like the UN, all of whom give empty speeches, year after year, like they’ve always done, without taking real action. And nothing ever seems to get done. Don’t let them fool you any longer. Change will not come from them; it never has and it never will. Change can only come from you and from me, and the first step is awareness. See the circus for what it is and choose not to participate. If we keep looking to ‘them’ to provide the solutions we need to take care of our planet, we will continue down this road to destruction. It’s how we got here in the first place. I will leave you with these words from the late Carl Sagan, which neatly explain how it is we continue to be blinded by those in control: “ One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” 

The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"Pope Francis has been brushing up on his English ahead of his arrival in Washington in September, and tickets to his U.S. events are already a hot commodity. But anyone expecting his message to be simply one of mercy and love could be in for a distinct surprise.

In his speech to a joint meeting of Congress, the pope of the poor could well deliver a harsh message for the world’s richest nation. For all the genuine warmth of his smile, his track record suggests he sees it as his job not just to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable. And however delicately he fine-tunes his language, the hard fact is that he believes the United States is as much a part of the problem as the solution.

For more than a century, popes have made nuanced criticisms of the free-market capitalism that drives the American dream. But Pope Francis, with an unprecedented vigor, is locking horns with much that Washington and Wall Street hold dear. Why does he take such a hard line?

In the two-plus years since his election, he has enchanted and bewildered the world in equal measure with his compassion and his contradictions. But he has also proved himself a wily and sophisticated politician. Understanding this side of Francis—capable of crafty maneuvering, unafraid of confrontation, ready to seek out unlikely allies—is essential for understanding the complicated effect he is having on American politics.

The pope born in Argentina as Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been called both a Marxist and a reactionary. But unpack the long biography of this 78-year-old cleric, and a more complex and intriguing reality emerges. Francis has never embraced one particular political ideology, though he has been comfortable around people who have. His first boss, the woman who ran the Buenos Aires chemistry laboratory where he worked, was a Communist whose diligence and integrity he greatly admired. “Marxist ideology is wrong,” the pope said in 2013, “but in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don’t feel offended.”

What has shaped Francis, instead, is his lived experience. Born into an Italian immigrant family, he has a long-standing bias toward the underdog and those who must struggle to survive. The most formative part of his priestly life was the 19 years he spent among the very poorest in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires, where he was known as the “bishop of the slums.”

But there is another key to understanding the pope’s worldview. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, was above all a theologian. Pope John Paul II, before that, was originally an actor and a philosopher. But Francis trained as a scientist. One of his adages is: “Facts are more important than ideas.” The intersection of these two threads in Francis’ life—his sympathy for the poor and his insistence that reality comes before theory—help account for how the United States and its unrestrained capitalism have come into the papal crosshairs.

Like many Latin Americans, Pope Francis is ambivalent toward America. “He combines both a sense of respect and a feeling of resentment at the economic and cultural dominance of his bigger neighbor,” one senior member of the Roman Curia told me. As a young man, Bergoglio was schooled in the politics of Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón. “Peronism” was a curious alliance of labor unions, the army and the church. It sought what Perón called a “third position” between communism and capitalism. It favored authoritarian nationalism and looked to the state rather than the market for solutions; Francis was much influenced by the latter.

In his later years, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis saw firsthand the devastation wrought upon ordinary people by economic policies originating in Washington. During Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, when half the population was plunged into poverty, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and U.S. Treasury agreed to policies that imposed severe austerity on Argentina’s lower class. Six years later, Francis took the leading role in shaping the pro-poor, anti-colonial spirit of the Latin American church articulated by the region’s bishops at their seminal meeting in Aparecida, Brazil.

Pope Francis is no knee-jerk liberal. He has held the traditional Catholic line on issues like abortion, gay marriage and even contraception, yet he has radically shifted the focus of the Catholic Church away from sexual ethics onto the morality of money.

That became clear in the eco-encyclical he released this year, Laudato Si. To the horror of climate skeptics, it endorsed the worldwide scientific consensus that global warming is largely human-created. It was ironic that, before publication, Catholic Republican presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum had been admonishing the pope that science is better left to scientists. That was exactly what Francis, the former chemist, thought he was doing by accepting the view of 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists. For Francis, the source of the Earth’s degradation was clear: “[T]he degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey.”





In July, Pope Francis delivered his fiercest condemnation of contemporary capitalism to date, addressing an assembly of political and community activists in Bolivia. Behind global capital’s indifference to the poor and the planet and all the “pain, death and destruction” it brings, he said, there lies “the stench of what Basil of Caesarea—one of the church’s first theologians—called ‘the dung of the devil.’ An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind.” In this “subtle dictatorship,” capital has become an idol. In response, Francis called for change—“real change, structural change”—using the word no fewer than 32 times. Land, lodging and labor were “sacred rights,” and working for their “just distribution” was a “moral obligation” and, for Christians, a “commandment.”

Such talk has had an immediate impact in American politics. The AFL-CIO’s policy director Damon Silvers, who is not a Catholic, said: “I couldn’t recall any leader of any religion in my lifetime speaking so plainly about economic justice and how that is at the core of how we human beings are supposed to treat each other.” At the other end of the political spectrum, Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, a former altar boy, labeled the pope “the most dangerous man on the planet.” Big Catholic donors like American billionaire Ken Langone, working to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, have been so upset by the pope’s unvarying pronouncements that they warned cardinals that wealthy Catholics might stop giving to the church. The pope’s aversion to red-blooded capitalism is just too apocalyptic for America’s tycoons—overlooking the curative powers of technology, ignoring the way the free market had lifted millions from poverty and refusing to consider that Catholic teaching on contraception is partly to blame for our overcrowded planet.

Yet Francis’ supporters argue that he is not advocating a specific political program; rather than taking political sides, he is trying to open people’s minds to the generosity, openness and inclusiveness of the gospel. “It’s not Marxism,” one cardinal told me. “It’s classic Catholic social teaching, as developed by previous popes.” What, after all, is Francis’ joyful embrace of the poor and the rejected—kissing a man with a terrible skin disease, visiting thousands of African migrants washed up on Europe’s shores in Lampedusa, Italy—but an echo of Jesus of Nazareth?

It’s this appeal to ordinary people that underscores just how bold Francis’ agenda truly is. He addresses his message not only to Catholics but, as his documents have insisted, to “all people of good will.” His call for society to break with “compulsive consumerism” and move to a more “sustainable” pattern of life will affect thousands of Catholic schools, parishes and hospitals throughout the United States and the world. But his plea that rich nations should turn down the air-conditioning, embrace carpooling and make other lifestyle changes has the capacity to enthuse many who do not normally look to Catholic moral theology for inspiration.

And it has left free-market advocates and politicians around the world with a troubling question: What if the people actually respond?",REAL
"Sanders, an independent senator who caucuses with Democrats, has been inching towards a presidential run for months by traveling the country and speaking to liberal groups in critical presidential states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Sanders' Senate office would not comment on his 2016 plans, but the source close to the senator said Sanders' Thursday announcement will likely be subdued.",REAL
"Sunday night's public proclamation that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich had reached a truce aimed at ceding states to one another was not predicted but also entirely predictable. With his failure to gain any delegates in New York, Cruz is no longer able to win enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination — a position in which Kasich has found himself for weeks. So the only viable path to the nomination for each is a contested convention — which necessitates that Donald Trump not win enough delegates to clinch it himself.

And so, on Sunday, the public revelation that the two candidates would split upcoming states. Cruz will be cleared to win Indiana — with Kasich canceling upcoming events in the state — and Cruz will allow Kasich to win in Oregon and New Mexico. Each needs Trump to fall short of the 1,237 delegates it would take for him to win the nomination, with Cruz poised to potentially win on the second ballot and Kasich, in a more nebulous set of circumstances, to win somewhere else down the line. Allowing for Cruz to gobble up as many of Indiana's 57 delegates as he can and for Kasich to scoop up Oregon and New Mexico's 52 would put a dent in the 391 delegates Trump still needs to hit 1,237.

But the plan isn't as foolproof as it might seem.

The two made it public in part so that the various super PACs supporting each candidate would get the message. As our Matea Gold notes, Kasich's announcement was explicit in suggesting to his super PAC supporters that they should allow Cruz to win Indiana, writing in his statement that the campaign ""would expect independent third-party groups to do the same and honor the commitments made by the Cruz and Kasich campaigns."" But the announcement was also meant to present a united Not Trump front, of the kind that Trump opponents have been seeking for a while (though usually by virtue of hoping either Cruz or Kasich dropped out).

The problem, though, is that the math is much trickier than simply handing one state to Cruz and another to Kasich.

Let's start with Indiana. It was one of the four states that we identified in March as being key to the Republican contest by virtue of the number of delegates it offers. Two of those four, New York and Pennsylvania, will have voted by Wednesday morning, with Trump almost certainly winning over 100 of the pledged delegates the two have to offer. (Most of Pennsylvania's delegates are unpledged, meaning they could vote for Casper the Friendly Ghost, if inclined to do so.) The fourth state still outstanding is California, which we'll get to.

A Fox News poll released Friday showed Trump with an eight-point lead over Cruz in Indiana. But FiveThirtyEight's forecast, including factors besides polls, has Cruz as a slight favorite. Trump has won most of the states around Indiana (save Ohio) by small margins, and Cruz should similarly be close in the state. Getting Kasich out of the picture means that the state's delegates — given out to whoever wins the state or its nine congressional districts — are much more likely to go to Cruz. Indiana has 8 percent of the delegates left to acquire and 15 percent of the delegates Trump needs to clinch. Handing them to Cruz would be a big win for those who want a non-Trump nominee.

The delegates in Oregon and New Mexico, though? Ehh. There hasn't been good polling in either state recently, but each state allocates its delegates proportionally. Meaning that if Trump would get, say, 33 percent against Kasich's 33 and Cruz's 33, consolidating behind Kasich so that he gets 66 percent of the delegates doesn't really subtract from Trump's total at all.

Where the two really need to stop Trump is in winner-take-all states such as New Jersey (where Trump currently has the support of a majority of the state's Republicans). That's 51 delegates — 13 percent of what Trump still needs — that Cruz and Kasich want to disrupt. And the big prize, California, where the winner of the state gets 13 delegates and the winner of each of its 53 congressional districts gets three. The idea, apparently, is that Kasich and Cruz might target specific congressional districts? That's optimistic.

After all, Cruz tried to target specific districts in New York and still got goose-egged. Those Fox polls released Friday showed Trump with a wide lead in the state, making the task for Kasich and Cruz trickier. Kasich had only about $1.1 million on hand at the end of March, meaning that his ability to campaign anywhere, much less in specific congressional districts, is limited. (It's part of the reason that his pulling out of Indiana helps his campaign.)

This also raises the question of how much of an effect the will of the candidates might actually have on the outcomes. There's a lot of talk about strategic voting, particularly from surrogates, but there's not much evidence that voters really care. Here are the apparent talking points for Cruz's campaign, via the Wall Street Journal's Reid Epstein:

That's political finger-crossing. Primary voters are more engaged than your average voter, but will thousands of Cruz supporters in Oregon mark their ballots for Kasich simply to help fulfill the campaigns' grand strategies? If I were a betting man, which I am, I'd probably take the under.

What's at the heart of this plan is the simple fact that Trump's got a narrow path to those 1,237 delegates. There are a number of scenarios where he hits the mark and perhaps more where he doesn't. Cruz and Kasich have little choice but to try to keep him from getting there and have few options for doing so beyond trying to parcel out states like poker chips.

But as the Republican Party has learned repeatedly since the Iowa caucuses Feb. 1, voters are impressively immune to the whims of party poobahs. Cruz and Kasich need Trump to fail in his push for delegates. This could theoretically help. It could also be another few strands of spaghetti, clinging tenuously to the wall for a brief instant, but then, like so many strands before them, dropping to the ground, impotent. At least, Cruz and Kasich can say they tried.",REAL
"Brexiters set up demented ‘people’s courts’ 07-11-16 BREXIT supporters have set up a network of ‘people’s courts’ where justice is based on popular opinion. Anti-EU Britons’ dissatisfaction with the legal system has led to the creation of makeshift courts dealing with everything from witchcraft to disputes over borrowed garden tools. Accountant and people’s judge Roy Hobbs said: “The court convenes in my living room, with the legal cases argued by our ‘barristers’ Sandra the local florist and Degsy, an unemployed decorator who’s seen A Few Good Men five times. “Our biggest case so far has been the legality of Brexit. The court came to the unanimous decision that it is totally brilliant and anyone who disagrees deserves a toe up their arse. “You can accuse anyone of anything. Last week we dealt with 48 cases of people being shortchanged at the local Sainsbury’s, a French spy and an old lady who put a curse on a horse than made it go lame. “Punishments range from the stocks for not wearing a poppy to hanging for more serious crimes, such as men having long hair. “Tomorrow I’ve got the case of a man who’s guilty of liking Nicola Sturgeon. He won’t be spouting his lies when he’s being hit in the forehead by turnips.” 
Share:",FAKE
"Lincoln Applegate Hahn November 4, 2016 @ 6:30 pm 
We’ve seen your “French Values”…. and they are the problem …. comme ci comme ca (like this and that) ? Etti November 4, 2016 @ 6:09 pm 
What a foolish man! He believes that accepting migrants and teaching them to learn French will see them in the French Parliament. Of course you will and they will be forcing sharia law on to the French population not making the country more civilised. Lisa November 4, 2016 @ 6:03 pm 
Because rightly or wrongly, people project their view of the world onto others.We live according to the golden rule and don’t do to others that which we do not want them to.do to us. Many cannot fathom or conceive just how vile the followers of the murderous paedophile can be. It’s incomprehensible. Even animals that have been traumatised and abused don’t behave like that when rescued. Europeans have mostly been peaceful for the last 70 years because they made a concerted effort to live in peace and to uphold dignity of life and human rights. That came at a price. Followers of the paedophile savage are socialised differently. They are pathetic and emotionally infantile. In the West we are taught to take personal responsibility for our actions. They are taught to blame everyone but themselves often turning victims into the guilty in the case of raped women. In the West violent displays of anger are frowned upon and we are taught to apologise for our wrong doIngs. Muslims have a warped and messed up sense of honour. An honour they will gladly kill their families to restore. In short they accept everything that is a crime in our countries as somehow permissible. Incompatible. In the West they are given human rights they don’t deserve and freedoms they can’t handle. Proven recipe for disaster. You have to be very very naive to believe that people who are fed a steady diet of intolerance, opression and hatred since birth will miraculously change just because they cross a border from hell hole to civilsed country. It should be obvious by now that Muslims born in europe cannot be integrated so what hope do we have integrating the rest. Nicolai sennels wrote a great paper on why islam is prone to creating monsters. Puts it all into perspective and is a must read in my opinion.",FAKE
"US Presidential Elections Sound a Warning of Catastrophes to Come By Daily Bell Staff - November 08, 2016 
What’s wrong with Hillary Clinton’s brand? … As momentous an occasion as this should be for women around the world, Ms. Clinton would begin her term in the Oval Office with her unpopularity ratings at near-record levels. All of which leads to the question: What’s wrong with Brand Hillary? – The Globe and Mail 
In the run-up to today’s election, many articles on Hillary in the mainstream media have tried to explain more fully why Hillary is electable and desirable as the leader of the US. 
A common theme of these articles is that Hillary’s troubles are not mentioned or analyzed in detail. The Economist magazine, like many other publications, recently came out with an endorsement of Hillary. 
But the endorsement simply dealt with Hillary’s legislative and professional history. As always when it comes to Hillary in the mainstream media, deeper questions are glossed over. 
This approach to covering Hillary is deliberate and has generated increasing skepticism among large portions of the American public. Correctly, alternative media reports have pointed out this declining credibility but not enough have explained its widening ramifications. 
More: 
Ms. Clinton is one of the most qualified presidential candidates in recent memory – and her credentials are that much more impressive compared to those of her opponent. 
After her time as first lady – in the state of Arkansas, and in the White House – Ms. Clinton served her country as a U.S. Senator and as secretary of state. 
The article goes on to ask why Hillary has not been “able to break through in a way that inspires fervent support and popularity.” 
At this point a significant analysis would grapple with underlying issues regarding Hillary’s background and approach to politics and life. These issues are well known. But instead, these issues are presented as “multiple scandals, ranging from Lewinsky to Benghazi, and most recently, her e-mails.” 
The use of the word “scandal” implies something embarrassing. The significance of these problems in her personal and professional life goes far beyond embarrassment. It illustrates her approach to the US political system and generally how she wields power. 
Having skipped past this analysis, the article then minimizes the scandals themselves, stating, ”Any politician who has been in the game that long has their fair share of scandal.” 
The article continues to evolve toward ephemera, suggesting that a big problem with Ms. Clinton is her inability to “appear likable to voters.” This is a political problem to be sure, but it is not the UNDERLYING problem, which is much more significant. 
Finally, the article brings up the idea that a big reason for the disconnect between Hillary and voters has to do with her gender. “As disheartening as that still is, society and the media still stereotype women and paint them with a negative brush.” 
The article explains that much criticism of Hillary is gender-related. She has been scrutinized because of her health problems and has too-often been seen by the media as a wife and mother rather than as a businesslike politician with a long, professional history. 
As stated, articles like this are at variance with what many believe to be true. Hillary is seen, at this point, by tens of millions as a person with an extremely shady past who may be part of a larger political mafia with her husband that deals in extortion, cover-ups, drug-dealing and even murder to generate vast profits for their Clinton Foundation, and thus for themselves. 
Since this information is so widely dispersed, articles that don’t deal more directly with these issues can be seen either as painfully naive or as concealing something. It is one of the reasons that trust in the mainstream media has plunged so precipitously. 
Additionally, as we pointed out recently, belief in “conspiracy theories,” has risen to over 50 percent. Hillary’s campaign and its coverage may be directly responsible. Once people were increasingly and regularly exposed to the disconnect between what they believed about Hillary and what was being presented, they began to reexamine various “conspiracy” reports they’d previously discounted. 
Even among those voting for Hillary, there is widespread sentiment that she may have committed criminal wrongdoings and deserves a trial rather than the presidency. 
We’ve advanced the idea that none of this has come about by accident, not the FBI fumblings, nor reports of her healthcare problems, nor even the email “scandals.” All of this in fact was known well in advance of her latest presidential run. 
This is simply not a coincidence in our view. The idea, increasingly it seems, is to shatter cultural cohesion in the West with an eye toward creating increased globalization and an internationalized society. This presidential election and its mainstream coverage has done just that. 
Going forward, it is probable that cultural destruction will be increasingly significant throughout the West, employing numerous strategies – political, ethnic, economic and military. 
These elections – whether Hillary wins or Trump – are evidently the starting gun, along with the European immigrant crisis, for a new series of elite programs. These will likely yield up serial catastrophes that will change lives and belief structures going forward for millions and even billions 
Conclusion: Building an international world, whether the effort is to be successful or not, is a massive and horribly disruptive and bloody prospect. Americans would be wise to perceive this latest presidential elections as a kind of warning of what it is to come.",FAKE
"A recent viral video showed a woman wielding a Bible overhead and marching through a Target, ringing out her message through the brightly lit aisles. “I’m a mother of 12 and I’m disgusted by this wicked practice,” she cried. “Mothers, get your children out of this store … it’s a dangerous place!”

The woman, who has not been identified, is not the only one incensed by Target’s announcement that it would allow transgender customers to use the restroom that matches their gender identity. More than 700,000 people have pledged to boycott the store. Target’s move, meanwhile, was seen as a response to a new North Carolina law that requires people in government buildings to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex on their birth certificate—in effect forcing post-transition transgender people to use the bathroom of the opposite sex.

The idea that children, especially girls, will somehow be hurt by relieving themselves alongside transgender women has been one of the main arguments of the law’s proponents. In the words of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, “Men should not be going to the bathroom with little girls.”

There’s no evidence that municipalities that have protected trans people’s restroom access have seen a spike in public-safety issues. But according to some studies, not having protected restroom access can be harmful for trans people.

According to a study by Georgia State University’s Kristie L. Seelman, being denied bathroom access is correlated with an increased risk of suicide attempts among trans people.

Transgender people have said bathroom access is one of their “most pressing challenges,” Seelman writes in the study, which was published in February in the Journal of Homosexuality. Trans people have reported getting stared at or being asked to leave, something that causes them “great stress,” according to researchers. Seelman highlights an earlier study of 93 trans people that found 68 percent had been verbally harassed in bathrooms, and 9 percent were physically assaulted.",REAL
"Clinton perversion of electoral procedures, manipulation of media and the Justice system should make every American voter think twice about Hillary 
Before we get into the meat of this thing, let me make two things very clear: The evidence presented here is not the usual half-checked/chosen at random/doctored stuff we’re used to in madcap conspiracy rumours. Everything shown here is a matter of undisputed public record – a rare thing in this Presidential campaign I’m not trying to prove a theory here, as I lack the resources to do so. I am merely using informed logic to establish those four things required to build any credible case: behavioural track record, means, motive and opportunity. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that in terms of capability of performing dirty tricks, the Clinton campaign ticks all four boxes. The Clintons’ track record on dirty tricks 
Negative advertising, smear rumour, making rally halls look more full/empty on TV and innate media bias have all been obvious for many years in Western election campaigns. Not surprisingly, during Presidential campaigns this is heightened by the physically more personal nature of the contest. 
Huffington Post banned The Slog from commenting in 2012 after I alleged the use of troll swarms by Obama to mess up Republican sites. Three months later, his White House CoS casually confirmed the story. 
This is truth bending, and isn’t illegal. But the Clinton track record against Bernie Sanders is of a quite different order. I was given first-hand evidence, for example, of blatant threats to Democratic National Convention (DNC) workers that anyone helping organise Sanders rallies would have no future or place in a Clinton White House. But there is also disturbing evidence of electoral irregularity as well. October 2015 – over 120,000 voting registrations lost in Brooklyn – & rock solid Sanders neighbourhood, plus nearly a third of Sanders supporters complaining that, on pitching up to vote, their Party registrations had been changed Over nine straight 2015 primaries, Sanders won seven: in the other two, “massive voter irregularities” were reported. Hillary won them. The supposedly neutral DNC is stuffed with overt Clinton activists. The private company collecting sensitive poll/registration information NPG van has close ties to Bill Clinton and worked for him in 1992. Leaks from NPG are, to say the least, recurrent. On the eve of the Democratic party’s convention in Philadelphia, a whopping 20,000 emails were made public by Wikileaks showing supposedly ‘neutral’ senior party officials tried to undermine Mr Sanders’s insurgent left-wing campaign by publicly portraying him as an atheist. Solidly Sanders locations in Arizona’s Maciopa County found their polling booths available reduced from 200 to 60. Odd behaviour during a Primary campaign. Undercover videos just four days ago showed two senior DNC operatives openly admitting to paid interference with Trump rallies and voter registration manipulation. 
These days, one talks to Washington pundits who – sadly – shrug and say “both sides are at it – they cancel each other out”. But what I’ve shown above is just a fraction of highlights compared to the total media exposure of Clinton criminality. Doing a quick count from 78 sites, press titles and broadcasters last night, allegations against the Clinton campaign outnumber all others by 5/2. 
However, it’s at this point that we go beyond even electoral irregularity and into suggestions of Hillary Clinton perverting the course of events at the Department of Justice (DoJ). Here, we segue neatly into ‘means’. The means to destroy Trump 
Without any shadow of doubt, the biggest bubbling-under scandal of the campaign (until complaints about Trump’s locker-room and sex abuse behaviour ‘surfaced’) was that involving emails sent by Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. 
The headline here is this: while heading up State, she only used her own personal and heavily abuse-protected server to send official emails – rather than official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers. On leaving that job, the State Department hurriedly classified all the emails retrospectively. 
This suggestive of the fact that Ms Clinton has something to hide. Her behaviour was also highly irregular, and cannot solely be explained by national security concerns: if there are fears about how secure State is, then we may as well all pack up and go home. (There are as it happens; but their security is a hundred times more sophisticated than hers). 
Hillary maintains that her behaviour did not break federal rules, and there are precedents to show that. The hole in her defence is that there are no precedents for all the emails to have produced on her private server. 
Having seen the content of some 150 emails, the FBI began by being quite bullish on the subject of an investigation. But then suddenly it wasn’t. An anodyne report was eventually issued in July 2016, criticising her “extreme carelessness”. 
Her behaviour does not support that finding. Over at the DoJ, Dan Metcalfe, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy (FOIA), said this gave her even tighter control over her emails by not involving a third party such as Google, and helped prevent their disclosure by Congressional subpoena. He added: “She managed successfully to insulate her official emails, categorically, from the FOIA, both during her tenure at State and long after her departure from it—perhaps forever”, making it “a blatant circumvention of the FOIA by someone who unquestionably knows better” . 
But neither State nor the DoJ did anything. The former issued a report making it clear that Secretary Clinton had lied to employees about the ‘permission’ she had, and confirmed that permission had never been sought. She also lied to the media about never sending classified material via her own server: a review of the 55,000-page email eventually released found “hundreds of potentially classified emails”. 
There is a clear – very clear – scenario that scopes out here: that of an ambitious wannabe US President conspiring to hide her guilt about stuff in perpetuity. Among the forty emails held back by US security agencies are those assumed to refer to the Benghazi Compound disaster, during which the Ambassador lost his life in the most bestial manner. 
However, the FBI having been quietly told to pipe down, the job facing the Clintons now was to get the DoJ onside. Bill went right to the very top. 
In late June 2016, it was reported that Bill Clinton met privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on her private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Three days later, a Justice Department official categorically told the media that Attorney General Lynch will accept “whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director make about whether to bring charges related to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server”. 
Washington sources confirm that Lynch “already pretty much knew what the FBI would say”. Did the Clintons have a strong motive? 
Nothing is ever conclusive in these areas. But the overwhelming suggestion from these events is that the Clintons most certainly do have the means to influence the activities and output of the Justice Department. 
However, it’s easy to argue that Candidate Clinton had little to fear from Trump; the media almost universally dismissed him as a no-hoper. So why take the risk of, potentially, using the DoJ to put her adversary in a spot? 
It’s easy to argue that, but the US media have been wrong about Donald Trump since Day One. And the facts don’t support the argument. 
Last night, the BBC released this trend map of the poll support for each candidate throughout the campaign: 
On this diagram, I have indicated in green ink the two points at which Clinton and Trump are neck and neck. In early to mid July – following embarrassing email revelations – Clinton’s support dips, and Trump briefly overtakes her. 
From the word go, the Clinton campaign saw Trump’s financial background, practices and exposure as an obvious weakness. Having pressed hard for his tax returns, once his official election as the GOP presidential nominee was confirmed – June 19th 2016 – they began demanding to see his financials. 
In fact, they already knew of one unfortunate link: on March 20th, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal had featured a piece showing Donald Trump’s massive dependence on Deutsche Bank as a credit supplier. The Murdoch press is campaigning solidly for Hillary, and Rupert himself has given substantial donations to her presidential bid. His motives towards her and Deutsche have been detailed by The Slog elsewhere . 
The dates here are key – particularly the dates from which Deutsche Bank ceases to be ‘troubled’ in the background, and increasingly becomes a foreground, front-page crisis . 
In early to mid June, Trump racks up his support and closes the gap with Clinton.Other financial papers pick up on the WSJ story….despite the fact that Trump’s cash flow and personal salary alone would be enough to pay off all the Deutsche loans. At this point, the International Monetary Fund releases a report saying that Deutsche Bank “appears to be the most important net contributor to systemic risks in the global banking system.” 
The IMF – and its boss Christine Lagarde – are prime movers in aiding Clintonian foreign policy relating to the EU and North Africa. But still Trump’s support leaps from 34-40%. Then early July, S&P Global Ratings lowers its outlook on Deutsche Bank to negative. At the same time, Deutsche Bank’s U.S. unit fails the U.S. Federal Reserve’s stress test. The story filters down into non-specialist media. Clinton consolidates her lead. 
But by this time, DB is starting to look like a basket case – which it has been for years – and the ‘ailing’ bank gets kicked out of the STOXX blue-chip Europe 50 index. 
And yet, the Donald starts to recover momentum. By mid September, he’s back to almost neck and neck. It’s now that the DoJ Establishment goes for the throat.The Justice Department chooses this precise moment – September 16th – to splash with the news that Deutsche Bank faces a whopping $14.5 billion malpractice fine. Within hours, its shares go into freefall. 
Between September 20th and 28th, a broader media blitz and online campaign openly calls Trump “massively dependent on Deutsche loans”. Counterspin from the Deutsche camp claims negotiations to reduce the DoJ fine are well in hand. Two days later Justice splashes again: no, it alleges, they haven’t even started yet. 
But still, general awareness of the Trump-Deutsche link remains low….and Trump himself steadies his poll ratings. Locker rooms, pussy grabbing abuse allegations suddenly sprout via close Clinton ally David Farenthold. Donald’s poll ratings dive. 
Donald Trump is just beginning to recover his position. Already pro-Democrat sites are switching tack to say that Trump “is a puppet candidate of foreign banks” – a silly allegation, given that he only works with one, and it’s more dependent on his business than vice versa. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has Deutsche CEO John Cryan by the balls; as far as the Clintons are concerned, it holds all the cards. Opportunity 
For myself, I doubt very much that Hillary & Co will go any further down the ‘dodgy credit’ road. With only two weeks to go to Election day, an imminent Deutsche collapse would play into Trump’s allegedly wandering hands: it is, after all, the US unit that faces the fine, and Trump’s populism is anti Wall Street. 
I think an equal (if not bigger) force behind pushing Deutsche Bank into the limelight is that of forcing it into a Middle East role where it can be a Rottweiller controlled by State, its old boss Hillary Clinton, and massive regional investor Rupert Murdoch. 
But while the opportunity was there, it’s obvious that Bill Clinton had all the influence his wife needs to help her get elected. Indeed, by being so unpopular in his own Party, Donald Trump has made this a much easier task: nobody but nobody in the US élite wants Trump in the White House. 
As I endeavoured to stress at the outset, the object in this post is not to prove a conspiracy, but rather to present an avalanche of evidence to support one simple – and widespread – observation about the Hillarybillies: as their power has increased, so too has their megalomania inflated to a frightening degree. 
Where once there were only crooked land deals and cigars to go on, today it is easy to argue that this creepy couple are operating at the kind of level where the American systems of Law, foreign policy, power separation and democracy itself are being perverted. This much has been obvious for some time; but American voters need to make their minds up by November 8th which they want least – Donald Trump in the White House, or Mr and Mrs Clinton doing the bidding of corporate globalism…while dragging the US further and further towards geopolitical confrontation. 
Looked at in that way, while this has probably been the most superficial and childish Presidential contest in American history, it will probably also turn out to have been the most important.",FAKE
"Why You Should Stop Apologizing for Doing All That You Can Illustration by Kim Ryu By Kelly Hayes / transformativespaces.org 
I’ve noticed lately that lot of allies and accomplices I talk to about NoDAPL and other struggles will name what they are trying to contribute to the cause, and then promptly apologize that they can’t do more. Often, the apologies seem perfunctory, or even insincere, but sometimes, they seem quite heartfelt. Personally, I deal with enough ideological tourists and movement loitering to feel a little sad when good people are doing good things, and feeling shitty about themselves anyway. 
Maybe they don’t realize how many people applaud themselves for “standing on the right side of history,” as though reading an article or a book, and figuring out where to “stand,” is how one affects the course of history. 
Or perhaps they just don’t know how to appreciate themselves — or have even been taught not to. 
So I just want to say to everyone — whether you see yourself as an ally, accomplice or frontline struggler: 
If you are really doing all that you can, you have nothing to apologize for. 
Because if you are really and truly doing all that you can, you’re actually setting a pretty high standard for the rest of us. 
And if you are really and truly doing all that you can, you should appreciate that about yourself, and allow yourself to be appreciated by others. Because as simple as it may sound, it’s often hard for us to internalize the fact that, on the scale of what we can all contribute, all you can is actually everything. 
If you’re accustomed to selling yourself short, that may seem a little grandiose, so let’s vision this through for a moment: 
Can you imagine how much closer to free we could get if everyone really did all that they could — within their own capacity, without martyring themselves in a heap of burnout? 
What would it look like? 
What could we build? 
I think some of us have seen snapshots of what that could look like, in moments of consuming, fast-paced community collaboration, where we had to take care of each other to sustain community, and the work. But those breakneck sprints of action and inspiration, and the community-care triage that they necessitate, are not a model for day-to-day living. Because that intensity burns out. A broad, sustainable vision — and a simple one really — of community where everyone who claims to care passionately about a thing simply does all they can, and does their best… that’s obviously a dream that’s still under construction. 
When we think about what obstacles impede that dream, we might first think of the internal failings of individuals: apathy, selfishness, etc. But what informs these tendencies? Is it possible that we are taught that some contributions are too small to matter, and that some are so great that they’ll make all the difference? Are we caught in a mythology where we are deemed either heroic or insignificant? 
The idea that heroic individuals somehow marshal their talents, and resources (hello, Batman), to liberate the masses has, to put it mildly, an oppressive functionality. If internalized, it has the potential to shorten our social and political reach, due to our own self obsession. In movement building, we learn that heroic communities, rather than heroic individuals, propel our freedom dreams. Such communities are made up of people of all capacities, who bravely and lovingly do all they can. 
Respecting our differing capacities is part of taking care of each other, and personally, I want to live in world where we honor each other’s contributions, celebrate one another, and love and care for each other. 
So the bottom line here is: Be glad to acknowledge that you do all you can. 
Let’s not teach others, who might take an interest in movement work, that feelings of insufficiency and guilt are the inevitable consequences of those efforts. We can be humble without erasing or diminishing ourselves. We can tell people what it means to us to do what we can, and we can discuss the different shapes that can take — and how fulfilling it can be. 
If you’re reading this and thing to yourself, “Well, I really could do a lot more,” you could be right. I don’t know your story, or who depends on you, what your health is like or what resources you have to give. But if you think you have more to offer, don’t approach those efforts from a place of guilt — because as you may have noticed, the guilt of the privileged has never gotten anyone free. 
So take joy in sharing your efforts and ideas with others. Celebrate what it means to be a resistor acting in defense of your community, or acting in solidarity with others. And if you’re a white accomplice, appreciate what it means to be a full-fledged traitor to white supremacy. Because that’s a beautiful thing and worth smiling about. 
I’m not saying we should gloss over the messes we make and wade through in our organizing spaces. As communities, we need to be real about the rough places movement work can go — especially when discussing the structural oppressions we replicate in our own spaces. But we also need to feel right about the things we deserve to feel right about, and to remind each other of that. 
If your goal is to be enough to put right everything that’s wrong, you will never be enough. But if your goal is to build a culture and a community that upends its oppressions, then the best you’ve got — the best that a whole lot of us have got — is exactly what it’s going to take. 
It’s easy to tell people not to burn out, but I think it sometimes helps to think of movements as larger forces of nature — as constellations of actions, movements, stories and freedom fighters. There are all kinds of action-takers who show us what the pursuit of freedom looks like. 
So just do your best today, and do it again tomorrow, and feel right about that. Because together, we will get there. 0.0 ·",FAKE
"Clinton Gets Back In The Game After Blowout Loss To Sanders In N.H.

Just 48 hours after his landslide win in New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders was in Milwaukee, Wis., reminding everyone how far he had come in his quest for the presidency — and perhaps realizing how far he still has to go.

It was a night both candidates could feel good about. Hillary Clinton had more than ample opportunity to show off her mastery of policy, while Sanders' progressive passion was on display as well. As in the five previous meetings between the two, it was Sanders' big vision versus Hillary Clinton's store of knowledge. It was Sanders' idealism soaring and Clinton's realism bringing it to earth. It was his inspiration versus her preparation.

""The American people have responded to a series of basic truths,"" said Sanders in his opening statement. ""We have today a campaign finance system which is corrupt, which is undermining American democracy, which allows Wall Street and billionaires to pour huge sums of money into the political process to elect the candidates of their choice.""

Sanders said Americans understand that the economy is rigged, that ordinary workers are putting in longer hours for less pay and that income growth is going almost entirely to the top 1 percent of incomes.

Clinton stressed from the start that she wanted to ""knock down all the barriers that are holding Americans back, and to rebuild the ladders of opportunity that will give every American a chance to advance, especially those who have been left out and left behind.""

The packed house of Democratic activists on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee was strongly supportive of one candidate or the other — and at least receptive to both. They loved Clinton's two potshots at the state's Republican governor, Scott Walker.

Clinton scored the governor for his battles with labor unions, especially those representing public employees, and said she doubted governors such as Walker would support Sanders' goal to provide free tuition for all at public colleges and universities. Both times, the local crowd of Democrats roared its approval.

And while Sanders had moments guaranteed to make his core supporters ecstatic, he did not dominate the evening as one might expect the 22-point winner of the first primary to do. Part of that was Clinton's persistent cool, which included her answer when asked why 55 percent of the women in New Hampshire had just voted for Sanders.

""I have spent my entire adult life working toward making sure that women are empowered to make their own choices — even if that choice is not to vote for me,"" Clinton said. ""I believe that it is most important that we unleash the full potential of women and girls in our society.""

Sanders also seemed the less disciplined of the two contenders. At one point, after Clinton had made a ""once I'm in the White House"" reference, Sanders shot back: ""Well, Secretary Clinton, you're not in the White House yet."" While it might have pleased his partisans, the remark drew some audible disapproval in the hall.

Sanders also indulged in several asides of a historical nature, tipping his hat to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and ripping into former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Clinton had cited as someone she listened to.

Still another factor hovering over the proceedings was the coming shift in the demographics of the early-state primary voters. Both the upcoming Democratic contests (Nevada caucuses on Feb. 20, South Carolina primary on Feb. 27) have far more Latino and African-American voters than Iowa and New Hampshire. They also have fewer progressive activists and far less penchant for underdogs. Neither borders either candidate's home state.

The importance the candidates place on these more diverse constituencies was readily apparent in the answers and examples both gave on Thursday night. Sanders talked about the criminal justice system, the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos and the exaggerated difficulty of finding jobs in minority communities.

Sanders said that once he is able to increase taxes on Wall Street and other centers of wealth, he would be able to provide ""jobs for millions of young people"" and also education to equip them for those jobs. At that point, he said in response to a question, race relations in the U.S. would ""absolutely"" be better than they have been in the Obama era.

Clinton, for her part, cited the late Nelson Mandela, the legendary leader of South Africa, as her foreign role model in international affairs. But she also repeatedly used her relationship with President Obama as both a human shield and an advertisement for herself.

Questioned about accepting campaign contributions from Wall Street, she noted that Obama had done the same in 2008 and yet still enacted laws Wall Street opposed. When Sanders again dinged her for voting to authorize force against Iraq in 2002, she noted that Obama — like Sanders — had opposed the invasion, yet still tapped her for Secretary of State when he took office.

Clinton also attacked Sanders for praising a book that said Obama in office had disappointed progressives and suggesting someone from the left should challenge his re-nomination in 2012.

Sanders said any senator would have some disagreements with a president, but Clinton responded that Sanders' assessments of Obama as weak and failing the test of leadership were another matter. Sanders noted that Clinton herself had run against Obama in 2008.

The Sanders team also knows that before the next debate takes place, 11 states will have voted on March 1 — Super Tuesday — and another three states on March 5. By the time these two candidates take the stage together again, the race could look quite different.

Even now, the walloping Clinton took in the Granite State has barely cost her anything in the delegate count. She got a share of the delegates in both Iowa and New Hampshire. And she has been endorsed by a big majority of the so-called ""superdelegates,"" the elected officeholders and party officials who will have about a fifth of all the votes at the convention in July in Philadelphia.

All of which makes it important for Sanders to build on his Iowa and New Hampshire performances and maintain his momentum in the 16 states weighing in between now and that next debate on March 6 in Flint, Mich.",REAL
"WikiLeaks Documents Reveal United Nations Interest In UFOs 11/02/2016 
HUFFINGTON POST 
Revelations in a set of hacked emails released by WikiLeaks earlier this month have sparked new conversations about UFOs and speculation that extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth. But a very significant ― and possibly overlooked ― group of WikiLeaks items relevant to the topic was released on May 18, 2015. 
WikiLeaks posted more than half a million U.S. State Department diplomatic documents from 1978 detailing America’s interactions with countries all around the world ― including Grenada Prime Minister Eric Gairy’s efforts to organize a United Nations-based committee to research and investigate global UFO reports. 
Many of the documents, written by American UN officials, indicated how closely they were monitoring Grenada’s UFO-related activities. 
One document , from Nov. 18, 1978, revealed my involvement in helping Grenada to produce a credible UFO presentation. 
I had an opportunity in early 1978 to meet Gairy in New York to present an idea about how I thought the UN would pay attention to his UFO crusade. Through his ambassadors, I gave him a copy of a documentary record album, “UFOs: The Credibility Factor,” that I produced for CBS Inc. in 1975. 
Gairy and I met, and after I convinced him I could bring a very credible group of speakers to the UN, he agreed to sponsor my proposal (see image below). Shortly after a handshake deal, he made me a temporary delegate-adviser of Grenada and the rest was, well, history. COURTESY OF LEE SPEIGEL This 1978 letter from Grenada to Lee Speigel confirmed that country’s commitment to sponsor Speigel’s UFO presentation at the United Nations. 
The following image shows part of the group I brought together in July 1978 to meet with UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. He wanted to know what we were planning to do at our November event in front of the Special Political Committee, which included representatives from the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. COURTESY OF LEE SPEIGEL On July 14, 1978, producer Lee Speigel (now a Huffington Post writer) brought together a group of military, scientific and psychological experts to meet with United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to discuss Speigel’s upcoming presentation to the U.N. Special Political Committee later that year. Topic: The importance of establishing an international UFO committee. Pictured from left: USAF astronaut Col. Gordon Cooper, astronomer Jacques Vallee, astronomer/astrophysicist Claude Poher, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Grenada Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy, Waldheim, Morton Gleisner of the Special Political Committee, Lee Speigel, researcher Leonard Stringfield and University of Colorado psychologist David Saunders. 
Another cable posted on WikiLeaks , from Nov. 24, 1978, refers to Ambassador Richard Petree’s meeting with Grenada representatives “to discuss their UFO resolution. Ambassador Petree acknowledged the high level of interest in UFOs among some elements of the private sector and scientific community … and pointed to the budgetary impact as a major concern of the U.S. and other countries.” 
On Nov. 28, 1978, the day after our presentation at the UN, this document was sent through official channels, detailing the actual UFO event, describing what each of the invited scientific and military speakers had to say to the member nations. 
A few days after that, on Dec. 2, 1978, a follow-up cable was transmitted, including the following: 
Subsequent to the introduction of the Grenadian UFO resolution, Misoff [Mission Officer] has engaged in two separate informal negotiating sessions, which included representation from Austria, USSR and Grenada, in an attempt to arrive at a mutually acceptable compromise solution to the problem. 
A draft decision to be taken by the Special Political Committee (SPC) has been agreed upon by the participants in the informal negotiations, subject to concurrence of their respective capitals. We think referral of the [UFO] matter to the Outer Space Committee (OSC) without a preordained mandate as to what action is to be taken, provides the flexibility the OSC needs to take whatever action it deems appropriate. 
It will also obviate the need to vote on a resolution (and gamble on the results). 
The following week brought forth another document , on Dec. 8, 1978, which stated: 
“The General Assembly invites interested member states to take appropriate steps to coordinate on a national level scientific research and investigation into extraterrestrial life, including unidentified flying objects, and to inform the secretary-general of the observations, research and evaluation of such activities.” 
It was further suggested that Grenada’s views on UFOs could be discussed in 1979. Unfortunately, that didn’t come to pass, as Grenada Prime Minister Gairy was overthrown in a 1979 coup. 
Needless to say, without the Gairy-based initiative on UFOs, it was quietly relegated to Grenada’s back burner. 
This is the tip of the UFO-UN iceberg. It shows how the subject of UFOs wasn’t merely officially ridiculed or slapped aside. There was, and perhaps still is, some interest there, just waiting to emerge.",FAKE
"On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.

But here's a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, ""the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.""

Here's what that looks like in chart form:

This doesn't mean that the Republican majority is illegitimate or anything like that. Indeed, after 2008 and 2012, the tables were turned: Democrats got more Senate seats than their vote share suggested they should. The problem isn't that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans. The problem is that the deck is stacked in favor of small states, which receive equal representation in the Senate despite dramatic variance in population. The Senate is a profoundly anti-democratic body and should be abolished.",REAL
"6827 N. High Street, Suite 121 Worthington, Ohio 43085 
Sound and Vision 
It’s pretty simple now. The ZOG has been mortally wounded. They’ve been caught manipulating the news and polls. Basically they have one foot on a banana peel and the other in their graves. 
Now the investigation has been reopened. 
We stand at the threshold of infinity. 
Remember to continue with Operation Endgame Hillary to eliminate all remaining resistance. 
Takes a few minutes out of your day to click on this link, and drag a few over to your social media. 
If you missed Memetic Monday on Wednesday, check it – instructions are detailed therein. 
Operation Endgame Hillary is not optional. 
Remember what Andrew said: 
“Everybody Memes! Nobody Quits! Or Ill Kill You Myself!” 
We are at the threshold, fam. 
The Colonel",FAKE
"Email 
One year ago, I was arrested for both statutory rape and possessing child pornography, and I deeply regret my disgusting crimes. Since that fateful day, I’ve been serving a 16-year jail sentence, using every second of that time to reflect on, and repent for, what I have done. I’ve truly learned a lot about myself as a person, and if our president-elect, Donald Trump, were to recognize my transformation and to pardon me, I would be honored to serve as his Secretary of Agriculture. 
In the event Donald J. Trump pardons and then appoints me to his future Cabinet, I, Jared Fogle, current federal inmate and former Subway spokesperson, could think of no greater privilege than to serve our commander in chief, and our country, as the head of our Department of Agriculture. 
It is the Secretary of Agriculture’s sworn duty to provide assistance to our nation’s farmers, as well as to protect farmland and enforce food safety, and if I am let out of jail, I believe I am ready for the task. To have Donald Trump both forgive my child-sex crimes and recognize how useful my deep knowledge of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, hot Italian peppers, olives, and other sub toppings could be to his administration would make my heart swell with pride. 
To serve our farmers at the federal level would be greater than any Subway sandwich I ever ate, greater than any Subway commercial I ever made, and greater than any large pair of pants I ever wore. 
As someone who has sold hundreds of millions of Subway sandwiches to the American people since the year 2000, I know the burden of working for the public, and I would not let our new president, nor the American people, down. It would be an immense privilege to serve for a full four years, and pending Donald Trump negating my seven federal counts of production of child pornography, I would start that process immediately. 
I lost over 245 pounds and ate thousands of Subway sandwiches before I was arrested for paying for sex with a minor, and I do hope that President-elect Trump considers that fact when making his decision whether or not to pardon and appoint me secretary of agriculture. To serve our farmers at the federal level would be greater than any Subway sandwich I ever ate, greater than any Subway commercial I ever made, and greater than any large pair of pants I ever wore. 
So, hopefully, the next time I address you, it will be not from my prison cell in Englewood Federal Correctional Institution but from the National Mall, in Washington, D.C. Believe me, the next four years would be incredible not just for me, but for you, should our president-elect look deep into his heart and give the department the spokesperson it deserves!",FAKE
"The jury in the Jodi Arias case tasked with deciding whether she should be sentenced to life in prison or death for killing her lover nearly seven years ago was unable to agree on terms of sentencing Thursday, removing the possibility of a death sentence.

The judge declared a mistrial and will sentence Arias to either life in prison or a life term with the possibility of release after 25 years.

It marked the second time a jury has deadlocked on her punishment -- a disappointment for prosecutors who argued for the death penalty during the nearly seven-year legal battle against Arias.

Arias was convicted of murder in 2013 after a lengthy trial that became a sensation with its tawdry revelations about her relationship with victim Travis Alexander.

The victim's sister, Samantha Alexander, sobbed in court while the decision was announced.

The jurors deliberated for 26.5 hours over a five-day span. Earlier this week, Arias' attorneys said jurors were at an impasse, but the judge denied a mistrial request. A verdict does not rule out the possibility of a hung jury.

Arias stabbed and slashed Alexander nearly 30 times, slit his throat so deeply that she nearly decapitated him, and shot him in the forehead. She left his body in his shower at his suburban Phoenix home where friends found him about five days later.

She initially denied having anything to do with the killing. She later admitted that she killed Alexander but claimed it was self-defense after he attacked her. Prosecutors said it was premeditated murder carried out in a jealous rage after he wanted to end their affair and planned a trip to Mexico with another woman.

That jury deadlocked on her punishment, prompting the sentencing retrial that began in October.

Chris Hughes, a friend of Alexander, told KPHO that a hung jury would be frustrating.

""My personal opinion is that she earned the death penalty,"" Hughes said. ""I would be OK with life in prison, if she never gets out again, but she deserves the life of a death row inmate.""

The day she was convicted of murder, Arias gave a jailhouse interview with a local Fox reporter in which she said she'd rather have the death penalty. ""I believe death is the ultimate freedom,"" she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report",REAL
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is bulking up his political team in preparation for a likely presidential bid, adding three veteran operatives who played senior roles in George W. Bush’s re-election.

The Christie team is expanding its political operation as his allies launch a super PAC to raise large sums from wealthy supporters in order to advertise and conduct voter outreach on behalf of the New Jersey governor, in what most expect to be a prolonged and expensive nominating fight.",REAL
"Why Did Attorney General Loretta Lynch Plead The Fifth? Barracuda Brigade 2016-10-28 Print The administration is blocking congressional probe into cash payments to Iran. Of course she needs to plead the 5th. She either can’t recall, refuses to answer, or just plain deflects the question. Straight up corruption at its finest! 
100percentfedUp.com ; Talk about covering your ass! Loretta Lynch did just that when she plead the Fifth to avoid incriminating herself over payments to Iran…Corrupt to the core! Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered. 
In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran. 
The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her]role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch. More Related",FAKE
"Moscow’s first gay pride parade was held in May 2006, thirteen years after homosexuality was decriminalized in Russia. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion, the beginning of a new era of openness for the LGBT community.

It didn’t quite work out that way. LGBT marchers that day clashed with riot police, who tried to stop the event. “We disturbed something very deeply rooted in Russian society, some very evil power of intolerance and violence,” says Nikolai Baev, a prominent LGBT rights activist who attended the march.

Only a few months later, Russia saw its first regional anti-gay law passed in Ryazan, 200 miles east of Moscow. It was the first official sign that the Russian authorities would resist the LGBT movement—a resistance that has grown and become increasingly violent as LGBT activism has grown over the last decade.

That violence hit Dmitry Chizhevsky in November 2013 when he attended a weekly meeting for the LGBT community and friends called the Rainbow Tea Party in Saint Petersburg. “It was a place to socialize, drink some tea and play some games,” Chizhevsky says. It wasn’t a political event, and Chizhevsky wasn’t much for protests.

The old town had a hectic feeling that weekend as the 10 th Annual March Against Hatred took place in the city’s gracious main streets. The next day, on November 3, the tea party was more crowded than usual.

“I saw two guys next to the door wearing masks,” Chizhevsky recalls. “After that I heard shots. The first one hit my eye. They yelled, ‘Where will you run, faggot?’ and one hit me several times with a baseball bat. Then the attackers ran away. One of the small balls [from a pneumatic pistol] stayed behind my eye.” The police ran a rather lackluster investigation and no one was ever arrested.

He became an unsolved statistic—just one of a growing number in Russia’s LGBT community who’ve been attacked or harassed in what has become an unprecedented crackdown. In most of the West, gay rights has seen startling breakthroughs in the last decade. Russia has not just been left behind, but has become demonstrably worse and more dangerous, according to more than two dozen individuals we spoke with in five Russian cities over six weeks of reporting. On the local and national level, a series of so-called anti-gay propaganda laws were passed that made it illegal to discuss LGBT themes with minors or to distribute such information to them, even if it dealt with health issues.

In a country that increasingly punishes the “other” and where violence against select groups and individuals is often tolerated—and even encouraged—by the state, there’s become no greater target than being LGBT. A community that was just beginning to organize found itself under assault, the target of a deep-seated Russian homophobia that had now been embedded in law.

And for Chizhevsky, although he thought about staying in his native land, the price of being gay in Russia was ultimately just too high. Like more and more gays and lesbians over the last two years, Chizhevsky had had enough of Russia, a place where his sexual orientation alone seemed to make him an enemy of the state.

“Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about it,” Chizhevsky says about the trauma of that day. “I feel that I have gotten used to it over the past year. I am thinking more about the opportunities ahead and the future I want to build” in the United States. In July 2014, a little more than six months after the attack, Chizhevsky arrived in New York.

A self-educated software developer, Chizhevsky made his way to Washington, D.C., where he discovered an LGBT community that was out and open and living without fear. Chizhevsky decided to try to make a life here and to seek political asylum in the United States.

He was one of many Russian gays and lesbians to make that trek. U.S. asylum applications from Russians rose 15 percent overall in 2014, when there were 969 new cases. The U.S. government does not release the reasons people seek asylum, but asylum seekers like Chizhevsky say the spike is at least in part a result of the crackdown on the LGBT community.

“Everyone says that my case is not very difficult because it has been so well documented,” Chizhevsky says over coffee at Busboys and Poets on 14 th Street in Northwest D.C. “Even the United Nations asked Russia about my case”—a fairly typical part of the process since asylum seekers need to prove that they are in danger at home.

Despite the trauma, Chizhevsky is one of the lucky ones. LGBT activists interviewed in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan and Archangelsk say there is a pitched level of anxiety for those who stay behind. “All of a sudden, people started calling us Sodomites,” says Tatiana Vinnitchenko, 41, a lesbian activist with a group called “Rakurs” (Perspective). Rakurs is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that provided legal advice and community centers for the LGBT community in Arkhangelsk, which lies some 600 miles from Moscow and is the site of Russia’s first major seaport.

Vinnitchenko says she expects to be fired this  month from her job as a professor at Northern Arctic Federal University because of her activism. A Russian language instructor, Vinnitchenko says she’s been given an ultimatum: “I had to leave my job or stop my activities in Rakurs.” Leonid Shestakov, the acting rector at the university, says there have been “conversations of a personal nature held with Vinnitchenko,” but focused only on the performance of her duties.",REAL
"The National Security Agency's bulk phone record collection program was dealt a blow Thursday as a federal appeals court said the controversial program exceeds what Congress has allowed and urged lawmakers to step in.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan permitted the National Security Agency program to continue temporarily as it exists, and all but pleaded for Congress to better define where the boundaries exist.

""In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape,"" the opinion written by Circuit Judge Gerald Lynch said.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other Obama administration officials said they are reviewing the decision, while civil liberties-minded lawmakers cheered the ruling.

""This is a monumental decision for all lovers of liberty,"" Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement.

The ruling comes at a key time, with relevant provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire June 1 and Congress debating potential changes.

Paul on Thursday reiterated his call for Congress to repeal the relevant Patriot Act provisions. The House is planning a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would effectively end bulk data collection and curb other provisions of the Patriot Act. But in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he's pursuing a ""clean"" extension of the law.

Thursday's ruling said that if Congress decides to authorize the collection of data as it is done now, ""the program will continue in the future under that authorization.""

But the judges added: ""If Congress decides to institute a substantially modified program, the constitutional issues will certainly differ considerably from those currently raised.""

The appeals judges said the issues raised in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union illustrated the complexity of balancing privacy interests with the nation's security.

A lower court judge in December had thrown out the case, saying the program was a necessary extension to security measures taken after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The appeals court, which heard two hours of arguments by lawyers in December, said the lower court had erred in ruling that the phone records collection program was authorized in the manner it was being carried out.

During the December arguments, the judges said the case would likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A spokesman with the White House National Security Council said they are ""evaluating the decision. ""

The spokesman stressed that President Obama ""has been clear that he believes we should end the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program as it currently exists by creating an alternative mechanism to preserve the program's essential capabilities without the government holding the bulk data,"" and said, ""We continue to work closely with members of Congress from both parties to do just that.""

In 2013, secret NSA documents were leaked to journalists by contractor Edward Snowden, revealing that the agency was collecting phone records and digital communications of millions of citizens not suspected of crimes and prompting congressional reform. Snowden remains exiled in Russia.

A spokeswoman for government lawyers in New York declined to comment Thursday.

The ACLU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"We Are Change 
In this video Luke Rudkowski breaks down the real reason that Hillary Clinton isn’t facing charges in the FBI’s renewed investigation into her private server as secretary of state.
Support WeAreChange by Subscribing to our channel HERE:
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c… 
Visit our main site for more breaking news http://wearechange.org/ 
Patreon https://www.patreon.com/WeAreChange?a… 
SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange
Facebook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange 
Instagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange 
Rep WeAreChange Merch Proudly: http://wearechange.org/store 
OH YEAH since we are not corporate or government WHORES help us out http://wearechange.org/donate 
We take BITCOIN too
12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP
The post BREAKING: THE REAL REASON HILLARY CLINTON WONT BE CHARGED BY THE FBI appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"Blame Government, Not Markets, for Monopoly Written by Ron Paul Email 
When Time-Warner announced it planned to merge with another major communications firm, many feared the new company would exercise near-total monopoly power. These concerns led some to call for government action to block the merger in order to protect both Time-Warner's competitors and consumers. 
No, I am not talking about Time-Warner’s recent announced plan to merge with AT&T, but the reaction to Time-Warner’s merger with (then) Internet giant AOL in 2000. Far from creating an untouchable leviathan crushing all competitors, the AOL-Time-Warner merger fell apart in under a decade. 
The failure of AOL-Time-Warner demonstrates that even the biggest companies are vulnerable to competition if there is open entry into the marketplace. AOL-Time-Warner failed because consumers left them for competitors offering lower prices and/or better quality. 
Corporate mergers and “hostile” takeovers can promote economic efficiency by removing inefficient management and boards of directors. These managers and board members often work together to promote their own interests instead of generating maximum returns for investors by providing consumers with affordable, quality products. Thus, laws making it difficult to launch a ""hostile"" takeover promote inefficient use of resources and harm investors, workers, and consumers. 
Monopolies and cartels are creations of government, not markets. For example, the reason the media is dominated by a few large companies is that no one can operate a television or radio station unless they obtain federal approval and pay federal licensing fees. Similarly, anyone wishing to operate a cable company must not only comply with federal regulations, they must sign a “franchise” agreement with their local government. Fortunately, the Internet has given Americans greater access to news and ideas shut out by the government-licensed lapdogs of the ""mainstream"" media. This may be why so many politicians are anxious to regulate the web. 
Government taxes and regulations are effective means of limiting competition in an industry. Large companies can afford the costs of complying with government regulations, costs which cripple their smaller competitors. Big business can also afford to hire lobbyists to ensure that new laws and regulations favor big business. 
Examples of regulations that benefit large corporations include the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulations that raise costs of developing a new drug, as well as limit consumers ability to learn about natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals. Another example is the Dodd-Frank legislation, which has strengthened large financial intuitions while harming their weaker competitors. 
Legislation forcing consumers to pay out-of-state sales tax on their online purchases is a classic case of business seeking to use government to harm less politically-powerful competitors. This legislation is being pushed by large brick-and-mortar stores and Internet retailers who are seeking a government-granted advantage over smaller competitors. 
Many failed mergers and acquisitions result from the distorted signals sent to business and investors by the Federal Reserve’s inflationary monetary policy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the AOL-Time-Warner fiasco, which was a direct result of the Fed-created dot.com bubble. 
In a free market, mergers between businesses enable consumers to benefit from new products and reduced prices. Any businesses that charge high prices or offer substandard products will soon face competition from businesses offering consumers lower prices and/or higher quality. Monopolies only exist when government tilts the playing field in favor of well-connected crony capitalists. Therefore those concerned about excessive corporate power should join supporters of the free market in repudiating the regulations, taxes, and subsides that benefit politically-powerful businesses. The most important step is to end the boom-bust business cycle by ending the Federal Reserve. 

Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and is reprinted here with permission.  ",FAKE
"11 Views November 13, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
On the heels of a remarkable week where the world witnessed the greatest political upset in history and subsequent chaos in global markets, today King World News is pleased to present an extremely important update on the war in the gold market from Michael Oliver at MSA. Oliver allowed KWN exclusively to share this key report with our global audience after last week’s takedown in the gold market. 
By Michael Oliver, MSA (Momentum Structural Analysis) November 13 ( King World New s) – Gold: If one seeks to capture large trends, then measure large… If one does not have a long-term map to watch as the trend unfolds, then it’s all too easy to run when some bullets fly. And they always fly… Continue reading the Michael Oliver piece below… Advertisement To hear which company investors & institutions around the globe are flocking to that has one of the best gold & silver purchase & storage platforms in the world click on the logo: 
How We Got To Where We Are Today MSA projected a blow-off type move in gold, commencing in September 2009, based on price and momentum concurrence and especially its relative performance breakouts vs. global stocks, (report was entitled “Gold is Speaking!”) Momentum then broke out over a three point downtrend, noted by the first red line. 
During that rise a very large price selloff occurred in early 2010 that no doubt shook teeth and generated widespread doubt. Big as the drop was, it did not negate any long-term structural factors on momentum. Nothing reversed that bull view on our part until momentum broke down in early 2012 (second red structure was violated – a line defined by many points along the line) at around price of $1700 (see middle of second chart above). 
Then after the top in 2011/2012 and after momentum had already begun to cave, there came a hair curling rally in late summer 2012. But for annual momentum it was a laughable and uneventful rally. It did not alter the major downside that had already been signaled by momentum early that year. Therefore MSA was not impressed. Many no doubt went long thinking the gold bull was on again. Not! 
The Gold Bull Market Breakout Then with momentum basing action that was optimally clear and massive, gold’s momentum broke out upside as price moved up into the mid-$1100s in February 2016. The massive flat red line on momentum was blasted through (see breakout on far right hand side of chart two above. 
MSA remains resolutely bullish and asserts that a long-term annual momentum uptrend is underway . Exit if you must, based on your own level of risk tolerance (each investor and asset manager is different, after all), or if your time scale of participation is short-term. 
MSA defines trends, often intermediate and short-term ones in many markets, but in the case of gold we argue that a long-term vista must dominate at this point in time, due to massive shifts underway in other asset categories. Implications of those shifts going forward are quite large, such that gold is likely to be at the forefront of world attention in the coming few years . 
The Dream Of Investors But remember that the long-held dream of investors to capture and profit from large trends (like the three massive but simple trends shown on the prior page) can never be accomplished if one allows short-term or even intermediate-term trend indicators to have more gravitas than the ongoing long-term trend factors . In some markets that’s a reasonable approach, but at this point in time, with the annual trend dynamics underway, we caution about “trading” gold . 
This annual bull signal is simply too young, has not reached any levels of upside excess, and the downturn on long-term momentum charts in the current selloff is not negating that which was screamed by gold’s annual momentum breakout in February. ***KWN has just released one of Art Cashin’s greatest audio interviews ever discussing the gold market at length, including the recent takedown in gold, what to surprises to expect in key markets as Trump becomes president, and what impact massive public works projects will have on the United States, inflation, gold, bonds, and much more. and you can listen to this extraordinary interview by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Whistleblower Andrew Maguire – This Is What The Commercials Banksters Are Up To In The Gold Market CLICK HERE. 
© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton plans to attack Donald Trump’s national security plans in a major speech on foreign policy on Thursday, as the frontrunners campaign in California ahead of the state’s primary next week.

Clinton’s campaign said the speech, which will be delivered in San Diego at 11.30am local time, will draw a clear line between the former secretary of state’s plans and those outlined by Trump, which include having Mexico pay for a border wall that its president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said his country would not support, and temporarily banning Muslims from entering the US.

Clinton campaign senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said the speech would outline why Trump was “fundamentally unfit” to be president.

“And you will hear in her speech a confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values – a strong contrast to Donald Trump’s incessant trash-talking of America,” Sullivan said.

Clinton’s campaign has said it expects to secure the final delegates she needs to officially become the party’s nominee after the California and New Jersey primaries on 7 June.

“She will rebuke a litany of dangerous policies that Trump has espoused,” Sullivan said, “ranging from nuclear proliferation to endorsing war crimes, from denouncing Nato to banning Muslims.

“But Clinton’s critique will go beyond specific policies and she’ll make clear that the choice in this election goes beyond partisanship. Donald Trump is unlike any presidential nominee we’ve seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job.”

Clinton’s campaign has steered its plan of attack towards Trump while fending off the other remaining Democratic hopeful, Bernie Sanders.

Clinton has 2,312 delegates, including 543 super delegates, to Sanders’ 1,545 delegates, including 44 super delegates, according to the Associated Press.

Clinton did not mention Sanders on in a Wednesday night speech at Rutgers University in New Jersey, in which she called Trump a “fraud”.

Her remarks focused on newly released documents that show Trump’s defunct business training program, Trump University, encouraged staff to target prospective students’ financial weakness in order to move them to enroll in expensive courses.

“This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud,” she said. “He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U.”

The same day, Barack Obama delivered a hit on Trump in a speech in Elkhart, Indiana. The US president told his audience a Trump presidency would increase the risk of a financial crisis.

“The Republican nominee for president has already said he’d dismantle all these rules that we passed,” Obama said, referring to Wall Street reform. “That is crazy.”

Trump is also ampaigning in California. Speaking in Sacramento on Wednesday night, he responded to Obama’s claims from earlier in the day by calling the president “a total lightweight”.",REAL
"The latest batch of emails released by WikiLeaks provides a rare glimpse into how Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign handles money from U.S. lobbyists who are registered agents for foreign interests.

In an email chain with the subject, “Re: Foreign registered agents,” various figures in her presidential campaign discuss the best way to handle donations from U.S. lobbyists who are registered agents for foreign parties.

The chain features Dennis Cheng, national finance director for the Clinton campaign, asking, “We really need make a policy decision on this soon – whether we are allowing those lobbying on behalf of foreign governments to raise $ for the campaign. Or case by case.”

The emails continue with a debate about the best way to manage lobbyists working for foreign interests who want to raise money for the campaign.

Jesse Ferguson, deputy national press secretary and senior spokesman for Clinton, tries to understand just how much money is up in the air. “Is there anyway to ballpark what percent of our donor base this would apply to (aka how much money we’re throwing away) Cost benefits are easier to analyze with the costs. :)”

The emails feature a list of foreign agents that the Clinton campaign was worried about possibly excluding from fundraising, including people lobbying on behalf of Somalia, United Arab Emirates, Kurdistan, the Transitional Government of Libya, and the Republic of Iraq, among others.

Later, Cheng seems worried about losing this potential fundraising, writing, “Hi all – we do need to make a decision on this ASAP as our friends who happen to be registered with FARA are already donating and raising. I do want to push back a bit (it’s my job!): I feel like we are leaving a good amount of money on the table (both for primary and general, and then DNC and state parties)… and how do we explain to people that we’ll take money from a corporate lobbyist but not them; that the Foundation takes $ from foreign govts but we now won’t. Either way, we need to make a decision soon.”

Finally, Robby Mook, campaign manager for Clinton, writes, “Marc made a convincing case to me this am that these sorts of restrictions don’t really get you anything…that Obama actually got judged MORE harshly as a result. He convinced me. So…in a complete U-turn, I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks. Are you guys ok with that?”

Jennifer Palmieri, director of communications for Clinton’s campaign, responds to that email, “Take the money!!”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].",REAL
"17 mins ago 2 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes Check Keiser Report website for more: http://www.maxkeiser.com/ In this episode of the Keiser Report Max and Stacy discuss howls at the moon as the Bank of Japan attempts to taper the Tokyo condo market ponzi. They also discuss the newly announced interventions by the UK government in the nation’s deflating property pyramid. In the second half Max interviews journalist and comedy writer, Charlie Skelton, about his observations on the US elections. He concludes that Hillary is the face in the machine of the Matrix and that the craziness is the system. WATCH all Keiser Report shows here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL768A33676917AE90 (E1-E200) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC3F29DDAA1BABFCF (E201-E400) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K2ZtV_1KphSugBB7iZqbFyz (E401-600) http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K1GpAv3ZKpNFoEvKaY2QFH_ (E601-E800) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPszygYHA9K19wt4CP0tUgzIxpJDiQDyl (E801-Current)   Subscribe   Like    ",FAKE
"(CNN) Hillary Clinton declared victory early Tuesday morning in a razor-thin contest against Bernie Sanders in Iowa. But Democratic party officials have not yet declared a winner.

""Hillary Clinton has won the Iowa Caucus,"" the Clinton campaign said. ""After thorough reporting -- and analysis -- of results, there is no uncertainty and Secretary Clinton has clearly won the most national and state delegates.""

The state party indicated in a separate statement that it was not ready to make a call.

""The results tonight are the closest in Iowa Democratic caucus history,"" Iowa party chairman Andy McGuire said. ""We will report that final precinct when we have confirmed those results with the chair.""

One thing is clear after Monday night's Iowa caucuses: there's a long, volatile election season ahead before two deeply fractured parties can unite behind a nominee.

Cruz's victory sets him up as a formidable force in delegate-rich, Southern states to come and offers movement conservatives hope that one of their own can become the Republican nominee for the first time since Ronald Reagan.

Claiming victory, Cruz fired immediate shots at both Trump and the party elites he has so infuriated by waging an anti-establishment crusade that has nevertheless endeared him to the GOP's rank and file.

""Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next President of the United States will not be chosen by the media, will not be chosen by the Washington establishment,"" Cruz said.

With about 99% of the GOP vote in, Cruz was ahead of Trump 28% to 24%. Rubio was at 23%.

""It is breathtaking to see what happens when so many Americans stand up and decide they're fed up with what happens in Washington and they want something different. They want a leader they can trust, they want a leader that stands for them against the corruption of Washington,"" Cruz told CNN's Dana Bash in an interview aired Tuesday on ""New Day.""

Trump, hours after predicting a ""tremendous"" victory, delivered a short but gracious speech that lacked his normal bombast, saying he loved Iowa and vowed to bounce back next week in New Hampshire.

""We will go on to get the Republican nomination and we will go on to easily beat Hillary or Bernie,"" Trump told supporters. ""We finished second, and I have to say I am just honored.""

Rubio will also leave Iowa with a leg up over other establishment rivals including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who have a lot at stake in New Hampshire.

""This is the moment they said would never happen. For months, they told us we had no chance,"" a jubilant Rubio said. ""They told me that I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line. But tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message — after seven years of Barack Obama, we are not waiting any longer to take our country back.""

On the Democratic side, Clinton and Sanders are deadlocked at 50% with 99% of the votes counted. Clinton, the national front-runner, admitted breathing a ""big sigh of relief"" after escaping Iowa -- the state she handily lost to Obama in 2008 -- but promised a vigorous campaign with Sanders.

""It's rare that we have the opportunity we do now,"" she said in a speech that didn't explicitly claim victory but sought to position her as the authentic progressive in the race.

Sanders, who trailed Clinton in Iowa by 30 points three months ago, told a raucous crowd chanting ""Bernie, Bernie"" that his campaign made stunning progress.

""Nine months ago, we came to this beautiful state, we had no political organization, we had no money, we had no name recognition and we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America.""

""And tonight,"" he said, ""while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie.""

Though Sanders fared well in Iowa and is nicely posited in New Hampshire, his hurdle is proving that he can appeal to more ethnically diverse electorates in later contests in places such as South Carolina.

Sanders made the case to CNN's Chris Cuomo, when he campaign plane landed in New Hampshire early on Tuesday morning, that he expects to challenge Clinton among nonwhite voters.

""We lost (the nonwhite vote), but that gap is growing slimmer and slimmer between the secretary and myself. I think you'll find as we get to South Carolina and other states, that when the African-American community, the Latino community, looks at our record, looks at our agenda, we're going to get more and more support,"" Sanders told Cuomo on ""New Day.""

The caucuses resulted in two casualties -- one on each side. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Republican, both dropped their candidacies after faring poorly.

Even before the caucuses began, Ben Carson's campaign said he wouldn't go directly to New Hampshire or South Carolina -- the site of the next primary contests. Instead, the retired neurosurgeon, who was briefly the Iowa front-runner last fall, will go to Florida to rest and see his family.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is also skipping New Hampshire but will go straight to South Carolina, which holds its Republican presidential primary on February 20.",REAL
"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:02 UTC © Daniel Acker-Bloomberg/Getty Images With their candidate lagging in most of the major polls, Donald Trump's supporters are hoping the election holds a surprise akin to June's Brexit vote. Goldman Sachs, though, believes the chances of a Nov. 8 surprise in the U.S. are remote. The two races differ in several key ways , Goldman economist Alec Phillips said, diminishing the possibility of a repeat where polling incorrectly suggested that Britons would vote to stay in the European Union. ""We think the situation is different for two reasons. First, and most importantly, while both situations represented an opportunity for voters to endorse a change in the status quo, voters in the U.K. were asked to decide on an idea whereas in the U.S. they are being asked to decide on a person ,"" Phillips said in a note to clients Wednesday. ""Second, the polls are simply not as close in the current presidential contest as they were ahead of the U.K. referendum."" On the first point, Phillips obviously is correct. The second, though, isn't as clear. True, some polls have showed a yawning gap between the two candidates. The latest NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll put the Hillary Clinton lead at 11 points , the last ABC tracking poll had the Democrat ahead by 8 and CNN has the advantage at 6 points. However, the Real Clear Politics average of all major polls gives Clinton just a 4.4-point edge, and the Los Angeles Times ' tracker even sees Trump with a 1-point lead. By comparison, the final London Telegraph poll heading into the June 23 vote had the ""remain"" vote with a comfortable 4-point lead . Betting odds in the U.K. had given ""remain"" an 88 percent chance of prevailing, against the ""leave"" victory of 4 points. In his analysis, Phillips noted that The Economist magazine published an average of polls that showed the referendum tied, with a large percentage of undecided voters. He also said polls showing Trump ahead, like the LA Times and Rasmussen, use methodology different from many of the other mainstream outlets (though he concedes that polls showing Clinton with outsize leads also could be outliers). Comment: Translation: the other MSM polls are rigged, e.g., with their tendency to oversample Democrats. Phillips mostly dismisses the importance of third-party voters, whom he said often break toward a major-party candidate as Election Day approaches. ""In theory, if undecided voters broke entirely in favor of Mr. Trump on Election Day, this could change the election outcome ,"" he wrote. ""However, the views of undecided and third-party voters suggest that they are more likely to vote for Sec. Clinton than Mr. Trump, if they vote at all."" Specifically, he cites a Washington Post poll showing that 46 percent of voters not supporting either Clinton or Trump had a ""strongly unfavorable"" view of Clinton, against 71 percent for Trump . Finally, he believes Trump won't be aided significantly by stronger-than-expected turnout, while early voting trends don't appear to favor the Republican either. However, Phillips does not address recent polls showing Trump with a solid chance of winning critical swing states Florida and Ohio, or narrowing gaps in Pennsylvania and North Carolina . ""Overall, while one cannot rule out the possibility of an electoral surprise, most of the theories as to how this might occur are not borne out by the recently available data,"" Phillips said. ""The declining share of undecided and third-party voters is shrinking, leaving fewer voters left to persuade, and while a shift in turnout could upend the models most pollsters use, there are no signs thus far in early voting that such a shift is occurring and, if anything, recent data suggest a slight Democratic turnout advantage."" Wall Street is heavily invested in a Clinton victory. Securities and investment firms have poured nearly $65 million into her campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Goldman Sachs employees have donated $284,816 to Clinton and just $3,641 to Trump, who has received $716,407 from Wall Street. Comment: Two possibilities stand out: 1) The puppet masters have learned their lesson from Brexit. In other words, when rigging an election, don't underestimate the number of people who will actually vote the 'wrong' way. If you think you can swing 10% of the vote in your favor when you need 20-30%, you're going to fail, leading to an unexpected and undesired outbreak of actual democracy. 2) Goldman Sachs is just as myopic as their anti-Brexit peers. U.S. voters are not just voting for a person. For many, voting for Trump really is voting for an idea (rightly or wrongly). Even though he's a moron, Michael Moore captured this sentiment quite well: In other words, it's possible Goldman Sachs have started believing their own propaganda and the data from their media partners' fake polls. If so, they may be in for a bigger surprise than they expected.",FAKE
"by Tanaaz 
Crystals are a great tool for healing, awakening and raising your vibration. When I first started out on my spiritual journey it took me a while to truly appreciate the power of a crystal. 
When you find a crystal that really resonates with you and that you feel really attracted to, you know you have found the right one. 
For years, I chose crystals based on the written metaphysical properties and for some reason they always felt “off” to me. When I started choosing crystals based on feeling alone, that is when I truly noticed their amazing abilities. 
Crystals contain a powerful energy for helping you to recharge your own vibration and connection to Spirit. 
Here are 3 ways to use your crystals to recharge: Mind, Body, Spirit Recharge 
Perfect for an all-over recharge for your energy, best done just before bed. 
1.) Choose 3 crystals that resonate with you- one for your mind, one for your body and one for your spirit. Make sure your crystals are cleansed. 
2.) Hold the physical body crystal in your hand and set your intention into the stone. Whisper what outcome or feeling you would like to create in your physical body. Hold the stone close to you as you repeat and feel your intention. Repeat this process for the mind and spirit crystals as well. 
3.) After setting your intention into your crystals, sleep with them under your pillow or by your bedside. 
4.) Keep your crystals close to you whenever you need an energy recharge. Positive Energy Recharge 
Perfect for recharging your energy after being around a negative person or situation. 
1.) Choose 2 powerful, cleansed crystals that resonate with you and place them in each hand. Gently close your hand around the crystals and breathe. 
2.) As your breathe feel the energy of the crystal moving up through your arms and travelling around your entire body. Feel the beautiful, vibes of the crystal cleansing and clearing your aura and energy. 
3.) Keep breathing through the cleansing until the energy of the crystal has travelled to every part of your body. 
4.) Cleanse your crystals if needed after you are done. Self- Empowerment Chakra Recharge 
Perfect for when you are lacking confidence in yourself. 
1.) Choose one crystal that resonates with you and place it out to be charged in the sunlight for at least 30 minutes. Alternatively, you can choose 7 crystals – one for each chakra. 
2.) Once the crystal has been charged, start rubbing it between your hands to generate heat and more energy. 
3.) When you feel the heat or charge of the crystal, place your hands over your root chakra or pelvis area (touch your skin not your clothes). Allow the energy to sink in to this area of your body. 
4.) When you feel the energy has gone in, rub the crystal again and place it on your next chakra. Keep repeating this process until you have done all 7 chakras. 
Happy recharging!",FAKE
"""2014 was the planet's warmest year on record. Fourteen of the 15 hottest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century,"" Obama said. ""Yes, this winter was cold in parts of our country, including Washington. Some people in Washington helpfully used a snowball to illustrate that fact. But around the world, in the aggregate, it was the warmest winter ever recorded.""

It's of course a huge coincidence that the visit is in the backyard of two Republican presidential hopefuls who have been squishy on the subject of climate change, and a Republican governor who reportedly told state employees they can't even use the words ""climate change.""

""Climate change can no longer be denied,"" Obama said. ""It can't be edited out. It can't be omitted from the conversation. And action can no longer be delayed."" 

 

 Ahead of the visit, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on a call that Obama would ""use the occasion of Earth Day to highlight his commitment to fighting to protect public health and to fighting the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change."" And the president picked Florida, Earnest said, because it's a place ""where these kinds of issues have traditionally been bipartisan.""

Earnest was coy about the fact that Florida also happens to be the home of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, two likely Republican presidential contenders who haven't been as enthusiastic about climate action. Bush has said he's a ""skeptic"" when it comes to climate change, while Rubio says he doesn't believe human activity is causing the planet to heat up.

The president, Earnest said on the call, hopes the visit ""will prompt an elevated political debate about making climate change a priority."" However, he added, the trip is ""not an effort to go to anyone's home state, but to raise the debate.""

Earnest maintained that Obama's visit ""isn't about campaigns, this is about making progress on a priority."" But he also noted that ""the Republicans who choose to deny the reality of climate change, they do that to the detriment of the people they're elected to represent.""

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), also no big fan of the concept of climate change, has taken to Twitter to criticize Obama's Everglades visit. Scott argued that the president should do more to get federal funding for Everglades restoration, because, he said, ""Our environment is too important to neglect.""

Earnest fired back against Scott on Wednesday. ""It's a little tough to take criticism from someone who has banned the words 'climate change' for the accusation that the president has been insufficiently committed to fighting climate change,"" he said, referring to reports that Florida officials were forbidden from using the terms ""global warming"" and ""climate change"" in official communications. ""That's a tough case to make, but it sounds like that didn't stop him.""

The White House also used the occasion to tout the benefits of the National Park Service, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. A new report from the NPS released Wednesday finds that every dollar invested in the parks returns $10 to the U.S. economy through tourism and other related industries. The NPS reported a record 293 million visitors in 2014.",REAL
"Trump, who has shaken off several high-profile controversies that would have ended other presidential campaigns, faced an immediate backlash from advocacy groups, and members of his own party distanced themselves from the GOP front-runner. The incident recalls Trump's 2011 quest to challenge Obama on where he was born, which ended with Obama releasing his long-form birth certificate. It also follows a debate performance Wednesday that garnered mixed reviews for the billionaire businessman.

""We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims,"" an unidentified man who spoke at a question-and-answer town hall event in Rochester, New Hampshire asked the mogul at a rally Thursday night. ""You know our current president is one. You know he's not even an American.""

A seemingly bewildered Trump interrupted the man, chuckling, ""We need this question. This is the first question.""

""Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us,"" the man, wearing a ""Trump"" T-shirt, continued. ""That's my question: When can we get rid of them?""

""We're going to be looking at a lot of different things,"" Trump replied. ""You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We're going to be looking at that and many other things."" The real estate mogul did not correct the questioner about his claims about Obama before moving on to another audience member. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest condemned the remarks Friday, but added ""Is anybody really surprised that this happened at a Donald Trump rally?"" The audience members comments and Trump's response were quickly denounced by Democrats. Hillary Clinton, the party's front-runner for president, personally tweeted late Thursday that Trump's remarks were ""just plain wrong,"" and followed up on it Friday morning at a press conference. ""I was appalled,"" Clinton said bluntly to a question from CNN's Suzanne Malveaux. ""Not only was it out of bounds, it was untrue. He should have from the beginning corrected that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness."" Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, called the incident a sign of ""a lack of moral courage."" ""I don't know if Trump is using dog-whistle politics to win support in the polls, or if he genuinely believes the racist things he says. Either way, he showed a complete lack of moral courage in that clip, and he has shown once again that he completely unqualified to be President of the United States."" ""GOP front-runner Donald Trump's racism knows no bounds. This is certainly horrendous, but unfortunately unsurprising given what we have seen already. The vile rhetoric coming from the GOP candidates is appalling,"" Schultz said. ""(Republicans) should be ashamed, and all Republican presidential candidates must denounce Trump's comments immediately or will be tacitly agreeing with him."" READ: Chris Christie: I would have said Obama is Christian After the event, several reporters asked Trump why he didn't challenge the questioner's assertions. Trump did not answer. But Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager, later told CNN that the candidate did not hear the question about Obama being a Muslim. ""All he heard was a question about training camps, which he said we have to look into,"" Lewandowski said. ""The media want to make this an issue about Obama, but it's about him waging a war on Christianity."" Trump announced Friday that he would cancel his trip to South Carolina, citing ""a significant business transaction."" New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Friday that he would not ""lecture"" Trump on how to respond to comments like that, but said that leaders are responsible for correcting voters on certain issues. ""I'll tell you what I would do and I wouldn't have permitted that if someone brought that up at a town hall meeting of mine. I would have said, 'No, listen. Before we answer let's clear some things up for the rest of the audience.' And I think you have an obligation as a leader to do that,"" Christie said on NBC's ""TODAY"" Friday. RELATED: Misperceptions persist about Obama's faith, but aren't so widespread Obama, who has spoken openly about his Christian faith, was born to an American mother and Kenyan father in Hawaii. But Trump has been one of the leading skeptics of Obama's birthplace, saying he did not know where Obama was born as recently as July A recent CNN/ORC poll found 29% of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, including 43% of Republicans. Trump is not the first Republican candidate to raise eyebrows over comments involving Obama and his ethnic and religious background. In February, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker became embroiled in a brief controversy when he told The Washington Post that he didn't know if Obama was a Christian. ""I've never asked him that,"" Walker said. A spokeswoman later clarified that he did believe Obama was Christian, but disagreed with the media's obsession with ""gotcha"" questions. And in 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain was booed after he famously told an audience member at a campaign event that Obama was a ""good family man."" ""He's a decent family man ... (a) citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,"" McCain said then. ""That's what this campaign is all about.""",REAL
"Lawyer Who Kept Hillary Campaign Chief Out of Jail in DOJ Hillary Probe November 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
Peter Kadzik kept Hillary's campaign chief out of jail. And he hopes to do the same for her. 
Hillary's people have gone on the warpath against the FBI. Their allies are Obama's political appointees at the DOJ. And this is who is in their corner. 
The Justice Department official in charge of informing Congress about the newly reactivated Hillary Clinton email probe is a political appointee and former private-practice lawyer who kept Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta “out of jail,” lobbied for a tax cheat later pardoned by President Bill Clinton and led the effort to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch. 
Peter Kadzik, who was confirmed as assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in June 2014, represented Podesta in 1998 when independent counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating Podesta for his possible role in helping ex-Bill Clinton intern and mistress Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations. 
“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote on Sept. 8, 2008 to Obama aide Cassandra Butts, according to emails hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks. 
Kadzik’s name has surfaced multiple times in regard to the FBI’s investigation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for using a private, homebrewed server. After FBI Director James Comey informed Congress on Thursday the FBI was reviving its inquiry when new evidence linked to a separate investigation was discovered, congressional leaders wrote to the Department of Justice seeking more information. Kadzik replied. 
“We assure you that the Department will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” Kadzik wrote on Oct. 31. 
Kadzik had been an attorney with Dickstein Shapiro LLP for 18 years before he represented Podesta in the Clinton/Lewinsky investigation. He was hired in 2000 as a lobbyist for tax cheat Marc Rich, who was controversially granted a pardon by President Bill Clinton during Clinton’s final days in office. Kadzik got the job “because he was ‘trusted by [White House Chief of Staff John] Podesta,’ and was considered to be a ‘useful person to convey [Marc Rich’s] arguments to Mr. Podesta,’” according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report. 
Marc Rich? Funny you should mention his name. FBI boss Comey was the prosecutor in that case. And the FBI recently released material from the investigation into that case. 
So there's a lot of Clinton history coming full circle here.",FAKE
"Just over a year after Donald J. Trump descended his iconic escalator in Manhattan to announce he was joining a packed field of political veterans seeking the Republican nomination for president, the New York billionaire completed an astonishing and historic political ascent Thursday night in Cleveland, officially claiming his party’s nomination — and declaring to struggling Americans, “I am your voice.”

Trump electrified the convention crowd on closing night, with chants of “U.S.A.” frequently breaking out as the nominee vowed to put “America first.” He used the speech to align his campaign squarely on the side of struggling American workers of all political stripes, as he moved to broaden his appeal beyond the Republican base that largely decided the primaries.

“Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned. … These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice,” Trump said. “I am your voice.”

And he delivered a tough law-and-order message throughout, declaring from the convention floor in Cleveland, “Safety will be restored” under a Trump presidency.

“America will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced,” Trump vowed.

He described the nation at a “moment of crisis,” citing terror attacks, violence against police and “chaos in our communities” including rising inner-city crime. “I will restore law and order to our country,” he said, while vowing to crack down on illegal immigration.

Trump’s highly anticipated speech -- at 75 minutes, the longest convention acceptance address since 1972‎ --  amounts to his closing argument before Clinton and the Democrats get their turn starting Monday in Philadelphia. As much as Republican leaders bashed the presumptive Democratic nominee in Cleveland, Democrats are likely to be just as tough on the Republicans at their convention.

The next big step for Clinton, though, will be to name her running mate, a decision that could come as early as Friday.

But before the attention turns to Clinton, Trump got in his final shots.

The businessman closed his address by turning rival Clinton’s “I’m with her” campaign slogan on its head.

“I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads, I’m with you,” Trump said.

He blasted Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state – citing the bloody tumult in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya – saying her legacy is “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness” and a “change in leadership” is needed.

“Hillary Clinton’s legacy does not have to be America’s legacy,” he said.

And defending his aversion to political correctness, he said for anyone who wants to hear “the corporate spin, the carefully crafted lies, and the media myths, the Democrats are holding their convention next week -- go there. But here, at our convention, there will be no lies.”

Trump also cycled through his campaign promises, including the controversial calls to build a southern border wall and “immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.”

He added, “We don’t want them in our country.”

Trump vowed as well to protect LGBTQ citizens from terrorism like the Orlando club shooting. In a moment that allowed him to show his gay-rights support, Trump thanked the crowd for cheering that line: “It is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”

The speech caps a dramatic convention week marked by powerful displays of party unity but also tensions, flaring most recently when Ted Cruz withheld his endorsement Wednesday night.

The omission prompted boos from pro-Trump delegates, and the unrest continued into Thursday, when the Texas senator defended his decision before an audience of Texas delegates clearly divided over Cruz’s handling of the convention speech.

At the same time, Trump’s newly anointed running mate Mike Pence deftly set the stage for Trump’s big night, effectively making the conservative case for the billionaire businessman in his own nomination acceptance speech on Wednesday. The choice of Pence – a classic conservative with Midwestern roots – helped bring various factions of the party together even before the convention began.

Despite the Cruz commotion, top party leaders from House Speaker Paul Ryan to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus worked to heal divisions in the party over the course of the Cleveland coming-together.

“He’s brought millions of new voters to our party because he’s listening to Americans” anxious about the state of the country, Priebus said. “With Donald Trump and Mike Pence, America’s ready for a comeback after almost a decade of Clinton-Obama failures.”

Priebus claimed Republicans are the party with new ideas, while Democrats are the “same party doing the same old thing,” trotting out the “same old candidate” next week.

Members of Trump’s family also spent the week giving voters a glimpse into the tycoon’s more personal side, with daughter Ivanka introducing her father Thursday night. Appealing to women, she praised the businessman’s record supporting female employees at his organization. And touting her dad as a tireless fighter who can bring his work ethic and aptitude to the nation’s highest office, Ivanka asked all voters to put their faith in him.

“For more than a year, Donald Trump has been the people’s champion, and tonight he is the people’s nominee,” she said. “… When my father says he’ll make America great again, he will deliver.”",REAL
"You Are Here: Home » Health News » Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer Prev post Next post 
Breakthrough research discovered that smoking one pack of cigarettes every day can lead to 150 cell mutations in a year. These mutations can occur in different regions of the body, increasing the risk of smokers to develop cancers not just in areas that are in direct contact with inhaled chemicals. 
A comprehensive study, the first of its kind, probed deeper into the effects of smoking on the human body through the use of a pattern recognition program. The methodology is likened to recording the noise in a roomful of people and then separating individual voices to better hear them. 
A group of collaborating researchers studied and compared 5,000 cancerous tumors from those who are habitual smokers and those who have not smoked a single cigarette in their life. The results were staggering with 150 different kinds of mutations in different parts of the body. The Main Reasons to Quit Smoking Quit Smoking Now! 
You reduce your risk of getting serious disease no matter what age you give up. However, the sooner you stop, the greater the reduction in your risk. In fact, researchers have found that if you quit smoking before the age of 50 your risk of dying is virtually reduced to that of a non-smoker. 
Even if you give up after the age of 60, your risk of dying at any given age is reduced by about 39% compared to a person who carries on smoking. If you stop smoking you: Reduce the risk of getting serious smoking-related diseases such as heart disease, cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and peripheral vascular disease. Reduce the risk of getting various other conditions which, although not life-threatening, can cause unpleasant problems. For example: Erection problems (impotence). Optic neuropathy – this is a condition affecting the nerve supplying the eye. Cataracts. A breakdown of the tissue at the back of the eye (macular degeneration). A skin condition called psoriasis. Gum disease. ‘Thinning’ of the bones (osteoporosis). Raynaud’s phenomenon – in this condition, fingers turn white or blue when exposed to cold. Reduce the risk of pregnancy complications if you are pregnant. If you have smoked since being a teenager or young adult: If you quit smoking before the age of about 35, your life expectancy is only slightly less than it is for people who have never smoked. If you stop smoking before the age of 50, you decrease the risk of dying from smoking-related diseases by 50%. 
It is never too late to quit smoking to gain health benefits. Even if you already have COPD or heart disease, your outlook (prognosis) is much improved if you quit smoking. 
Planning and support can help you quit smoking for good. Before your quit day, take time to prepare for challenges. Make a plan for quitting. Know what to expect in the first days of being smokefree. Identify your reasons for quitting and plan how to ask for help if you need it. Quit Smoking! Smoking Cigarettes Causes 150 Genetic Mutations and Cancer 
Breakthrough research discovered that smoking one pack of cigarettes every day can lead to 150 cell mutations in a year. These mutations can occur in different regions of the body, increasing the risk of smokers to develop cancers not just in areas that are in direct contact with inhaled chemicals. A comprehensive study, the first […] How to Detox the Lymphatic System 
Do you experience any of the lymphatic congestion symptoms? The fact is almost every condition and disease process can be linked to poor waste removal in the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a network of tissues and organs. It is made up of Lymph – a fluid that contains white blood cells that defend […] Foods That Boost ‘Super-Antioxident’ Glutathione 
Glutathione is a substance found in every cell in the body, where it acts as an antioxidant to neutralize free radicals and prevent cellular damage. Since glutathione is so effective for detoxification, it could be tempting go out and buy some supplements. However, studies have found that taking glutathione in oral supplements has practically no effect […] Overcoming Nightmares Through Lucid Dreaming 
by Kerry McGlone Nightmares can be defined as an unpleasant and frightening dream. They’re completely harmless, but not something anyone wants to experience as they sleep. They can leave individuals scared, and even have them traumatized; leaving them unable to sleep the next night in fear of it occurring again. Just imagine yourself having the […] Nestle CEO says You Shouldn’t Have the Right to Water 
Get ready to feel infuriated: the CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck, has been caught on video saying he believes water should not be a public right, that instead it should be something only the wealthy have access to. By Matt Hall — Staff Writer As Nestle is the 27th largest company in the world and does […] 5 Things Everyone Should Know About Introverts 
The following five traits are what I consider to be some commonly misunderstood characteristics of introverts, coming from a true introvert herself! by Rebecca McKown – MindBodyGreen I’m an introvert to the core, and there’s a good chance that either you or someone you know is, as well. As a child I was called shy, a […] Top 10 Foods That Increase Sex Drive 
Do you feel like your sex drive just isn’t what it used to be? You aren’t alone — many people feel that way at some point in their lives. In some cases, a decrease in libido may be due to a medical issue. For many people, however, the situation may be remedied without resorting to […] 11 Natural And Effective Uses For Lavender Oil 
If you’re looking to get some bang for your buck, lavender oil is a godsend.! by Elizabeth Seward – Staff Writer Whether you want to use the fragrant essential oil for practical purposes around the house or holistic healing, lavender oil is packed with health benefits and everyday uses that shouldn’t be ignored. The oil, which is […] Homemade Body Wash Recipe 
Try this awesome homemade body wash recipe today! by Jillee – Onegoodthingbyjillie.com When I was growing up…I don’t think we ever bought “body wash”. It was Ivory or Dove bar soap…or nothing at all. 🙂 Even after I first got married we still did the bar soap thing…because I remember trying to convince the hubster that Dove soap was better than Irish Spring. lol. (I still try to convince him […] Chia Seeds Health Benefits 
by Kris Gunnars – Authority Nutrition Chia seeds are among the healthiest foods on the planet. They are loaded with nutrients that can have important benefits for your body and brain. Here are 11 health benefits of chia seeds that are supported by human studies. 1. Chia Seeds Deliver a Massive Amount of Nutrients With […] Scientists Officially Link Processed Foods To Autoimmune Disease 
by April McCarthy – Preventdisease.com The modern diet of processed foods, takeaways and microwave meals could be to blame for a sharp increase in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, including alopecia, asthma and eczema. A team of scientists from Yale University in the U.S and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, say junk food diets […] Cancer Drug Melts Away Deadly Cancer Cells in 80% of Patients 
A new breakthrough cancer drug has been shown to significantly reduce or even completely destroy cancer cells in almost 80% of patients with an advanced form of leukaemia in a four-year clinical trial. In 20% of patients, it caused complete remission of the disease. “Many patients have maintained this response more than a year after […] Pneumonia cured in 3 hours using natural medicine 
Pneumonia is a deadly disease caused by both bacteria and viruses, but what if one simple vitamin could cure the disease in only 3 hours!! by Jonathan Landsman – Naturalhealth365.com The numbers are staggering. The eighth leading cause of death, in the United States, is pneumonia and influenza – killing over 50,000 people per year. Conventional […] Join For Free! Discover Little Known Health Secrets and Useful Tips For Healthy Living! First Name ",FAKE
"Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) knocked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday for backing away from his push for comprehensive immigration reform, saying on ABC's ""This Week"" that he had ""folded like a cheap shotgun.""

Rubio, who announced his bid for president last week, has gotten heat from some conservatives for co-authoring an immigration reform bill that would allow some undocumented immigrants to eventually become citizens, along with ramping up border security and enforcement measures.

He then said in February that he'd since learned a comprehensive approach was the wrong one, and that border security should be done separately and before other reform.

McCaskill said, ""He took a principled, courageous stand on immigration reform"" while helping to draft the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate in 2013 -- but then dropped those principles.

""Then the minute his party's base starting chewing on about it, the minute Rush Limbaugh criticized him, he folded like a cheap shotgun,"" she said. ""That's old politics. That's not what we need right now. That is the stalest trick in the book. That is shirking on your principles because of the political necessities of your party.""

Rubio said on CBS's ""Face the Nation"" in an interview that aired on Sunday that it was wrong to say he ""walked away from"" immigration reform.

""Well that's not an accurate assessment,"" he said. ""What I'm saying to people is we can't do it in a massive piece of legislation, and I know because I tried. We understand that we have to deal with 12 million human beings that are in this country, that have been here longer than a decade. We know we have to deal with this. We are not prepared to deal with it until first you can prove to us that this will never happen again.""

""Well that's a hypothetical that will never happen,"" Rubio said, reiterating he would first ask for border security and enforcement bills.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who is considering a run for president and is another author of the 2013 immigration bill, also referred to Rubio's shift on immigration Sunday in an interview with ""Fox News Sunday."" When he was asked to give his thoughts on Rubio, he threw in a slight dig while praising the senator.

""He embraced immigration reform,"" he said. ""He seems to have backed off -- I'll let him explain why. I think comprehensive immigration reform, securing our border and dealing rationally with the 11 million [undocumented immigrants], is the only way you're going to solve this problem.""",REAL
"bamacare is back before the Supreme Court in a case that could gut the health care law and leave millions of Americans facing severe consequences.

King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that originated in conservative and libertarian think tanks, alleges that a stray phrase in the Affordable Care Act -- “an exchange established by the state” -- means the federal government isn’t allowed to provide subsidies to the residents of states that refused to establish health insurance exchanges under the law.

Only 13 states and the District of Columbia have their own exchanges. If this bid to derail the Affordable Care Act succeeds, the subsidies would disappear -- maybe immediately, maybe a little later -- for Obamacare enrollees everywhere else.

Behind the numbers, however, is a very human story. Without the subsidies, health insurance costs would spike beyond the means of low- and moderate-income recipients. As a result, close to 10 million people would lose their health coverage. Many others would face major increases in the premiums they pay for insurance.

The Huffington Post interviewed six Americans at risk of the worst effects of a high court ruling against Obamacare. We wanted to know how the law has affected their lives already, and how the absence of subsidies might affect them in the future. They told stories of life and death, financial ruin, lifelong plans in jeopardy and families disrupted. Here are those stories, as told by the people who would be living them.",REAL
"4 Things The New Hampshire Primary Will Tell Us

New Hampshire voters go to the polls Tuesday, and they will resolve a lot of questions. Here are four things the first-in-the-nation primary will tell us:

1. How much damage did the last debate do to Marco Rubio?

Rubio came into New Hampshire with a head of steam. He quickly moved into second place in the polls, and there was even some hope he could overtake Donald Trump in the Granite State. But then, the needle got stuck on his talking points in the ABC debate on Saturday, earning him the worst reviews of his — until now — charmed presidential run.

Eager to dispel the perception that he's ""a broken record in an empty suit,"" Rubio's campaign has been denying the debate was a disaster — and lowering expectations. In an interview with NBC on Monday, Rubio seemed to be giving up on his hope of becoming the clear establishment alternative to Trump and Cruz after New Hampshire, saying the race was going to go for a while longer. Few tracking polls were in the field after Saturday's debate, so it's hard to measure whether Rubio's shaky performance hurt him with voters. We'll find out tonight.

He certainly did in Iowa, where his lead disappeared at the end. Trump has said he wasn't even familiar with the term ""ground game,"" but has now invested more in get-out-the-vote infrastructure in New Hampshire. Still, he is relying most on his own popularity — he's called himself ""the product"" — and his commanding lead in the polls. No poll has shown Trump's big lead in New Hampshire sliding, but New Hampshire voters are famous for making fools of pollsters — and front-runners.

Clinton expects to lose to Bernie Sanders. Tomorrow's results will tell us by how much. Margins matter. Her minuscule victory in Iowa gave her no momentum at all in New Hampshire. So a big, double-digit win for Sanders would give him a huge boost heading into next week's Nevada caucuses, where the Clinton campaign is hoping its union-based ""firewall"" is still strong.

If she can close the gap in New Hampshire — even by a little — and hold Sanders' lead to single digits, she will be able to boast that she pulled off a little bit of yet another Clinton comeback.

4. How much (or how little) will the GOP field shrink?

Before Saturday's debate, many people were expecting the GOP field post-New Hampshire to be a three-man race — Trump, Ted Cruz and Rubio. But if one or more of the governors place in the top three, or even four, they may refuse to drop out until after South Carolina.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey's Chris Christie all say they are going on to South Carolina, but if they don't place in the top tier, their fundraising will evaporate, and there will be tremendous pressure on them to get out. New Hampshire voters could decide how big the GOP field is going forward.",REAL
"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
The 2016 presidential race is tightening by all measures, and a poll just out from ABC/Washington Post shows that Donald Trump has a legitimate shot at winning the election. 
The gap has shrunk to just four points nationally among Likely Voters: 
The lead has shrunk to such an extent that the Hillary campaign is warning that “Donald Trump could win.” 
Hillary campaign adviser Robbie Mook released the following statement: 
""We’ve seen polls tighten since the last debate, and we expect things to get even closer by election day,” he said. 
“Donald Trump could win this election,” Mook added. 
Just recently, the Clinton campaign was confident of a massive victory and was looking to run up the tally. 
As FiveThirtyEight pointed out , look for polls to tighten leading up to election day. Hillary's national average is currently around five points, and Trump has regained the edge in the battleground states of Florida and Nevada. 
It looks like the campaign picture has changed and election day could be more of a nailbiter than many had recently believed. ",FAKE
"Investigators said Thursday they have recovered 32,000 emails in backup tapes related to the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative organizations.

Though they don't know how many of them are new, they told a congressional oversight committee that IRS employees had not asked computer technicians for the tapes, as directed by a subpoena from House oversight and other investigating committees.

That admission was in direct contradiction to earlier testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

“It looks like we’ve been lied to, or at least misled,"" said Rep. John Mica, R-Fla. at a congressional hearing Thursday evening,

IRS Deputy Inspector General Timothy Camus, who testified alongside Inspector General J. Russell George, said his organization was investigating possible criminal activity. He did not elaborate, other than to suggest a key factor is whether documents were intentionally withheld.

The emails were to and from Lois Lerner, who used to head the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. Last June, the IRS told Congress it had lost an unknown number of Lerner's email when her computer hard drive crashed in 2011.

At the time, IRS officials said the emails could not be recovered. But Camus said investigators recovered thousands of emails from old computer tapes used to back up the agency's email system, though he said he believed some tapes had been erased.

""We recovered quite a number of emails, but until we compare those to what's already been produced we don't know if they're new emails,"" Camus told the House Oversight Committee.

Neither Camus nor George would describe the contents of any of the emails at Thursday's hearing.

The IRS says it has already produced 78,000 Lerner emails, many of which have been made public by congressional investigators.

Camus said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner's emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner's emails on the tapes.

Several Oversight committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.

""We have been patient. We have asked, we have issued subpoenas, we have held hearings,"" said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the Oversight Committee. ""It's just shocking me that you start, two weeks later you're able to find the emails.""

Though the IG's office is looking at possible criminal activity, Washington, D.C.-based attorney Patrick O'Donnell said the Justice Department would have the final say on whether anyone at the IRS would face charges. O'Donnell, who has worked on government enforcement matters, told FoxNews.com the IG's office typically refers their recommendation to the DOJ, though in some cases the IG will work in tandem with the DOJ throughout an investigation.

At the hearing, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., questioned the significance of the recovered emails in an exchange with Camus.

""So as I understand it from your testimony here today, you are unable to confirm whether there are any, to use your own words, new emails, right?"" she asked Camus.

Maloney: ""So what's before us may be material you already have, right?""

Maloney. ""So may I ask, why are we here?""

The IRS issued a statement saying the agency ""has been and remains committed to cooperating fully with the congressional oversight investigations. The IRS continues to work diligently with Congress as well as support the review by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.""

The IRS estimated it has spent $20 million responding to congressional inquiries, generating more than one million pages of documents and providing agency officials to testify at 27 congressional hearings.

The inspector general set off a firestorm in May 2013 with an audit that said IRS agents improperly singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status during the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Several hundred groups had their applications delayed for a year or more. Some were asked inappropriate questions about donors and group activities, the inspector general's report said.

The week before George's report, Lerner publicly apologized on behalf of the agency. After the report, much of the agency's top leadership was forced to retire or resign, including Lerner. The Justice Department and several congressional committees launched investigations.

Lerner's lost emails prompted a new round of scrutiny by Congress, and a new investigation by the inspector general's office.

Lerner emerged as a central figure in the controversy after she refused to answer questions at two House Oversight hearings, invoking her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself at both hearings. At the first hearing, Lerner made a statement saying she had done nothing wrong.

Last year, the House voted mostly along party lines to hold her in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions at the hearings.

Fox News' Doug McKelway and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Banana Republic Election in the United States? 07.11.2016 Print version Font Size Nothing is more hypocritical than to hear that the US government is going to send ""election observers"" to other countries. For nowhere on the planet are elections more easily rigged than in the United States of America. In ""Votescam: The Stealing of America"" (1992) the late Collier brothers summarized the alarming state of affairs, which still prevails today. In Chapter one, ""Electronic Hoodwink"", they begin by quoting the first words spoken by President-elect, George Bush in his Nov. 8, 1988 victory speech in Houston, Texas. Bush said: ""We can now speak the most majestic words a democracy can offer: ""The people have spoken . . . "" The Colliers comment in the following brilliantly written passage: ""It was not ""the People"" of the United States who did 'the speaking' on that election day, although most of them believed it was, and still believe it. In fact, the People did not speak at all. The voices most of us really heard that day were the voices of computers strong, loud, authoritative, unquestioned in their electronic finality . . . It only makes common sense that every gear, every mechanism, every nook and cranny of every part of the voting process ought to be in the sunlight, wide open to public view. How else can the public be reasonably assured that they are participating in an unrigged election where their vote actually means something? Yet one of the most mysterious, low-profile, covert, shadowy, questionable mechanisms of American democracy is the American vote count . . . Computers in voting machines are effectively immune from checking and rechecking. If they are fixed, you cannot know it, and you cannot be sure at all of an honest tally."" In fact, according to the Nation Magazine article published in August, 2005, ""How They Could Steal the Election This Time,"" by veteran reporter Ronnie Dugger, only four mega-election vendors, ES &S (Election Systems & Software), Hart, Diebold and Sequoia processed 96% of the USA vote on election night. Circa 2013, a company named Dominion acquired Diebold and Sequoia. Privately owned computer software And the processing of the nation's ballots are done, in 1988, in 2004, and in 2016, on secret, privately owned computer software which election officials in the USA agree by contract not to inspect. In other words, the vote in America is utterly unverifiable on these machines. America processes over eighty percent of the presidential vote on secret computer programs owned by only three mega-election vendors. This is at the very least an unholy concentration of power. If the three mega-vendors are working together behind the scenes, then it is the few that own this election software that selects the President. As Joseph Stalin said, ""Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."" This issue of computerized election fraud simmered sub rosa from 1988 until August 1, 2016, when Donald Trump stated at a Columbus, Ohio Rally that he was afraid the ""November election is going to be rigged against me."" The nation's national press went into a frenzy. Jonathan Chait screeched in his headline for nymag.com, ""Donald Trump, Discovering New Way to Undermine Democracy, Calls Election Rigged."" In fact, it was NOT the raising of healthy questions by Trump that was undermining democracy. It was so-called reporters like Chait who didn't like anyone raising any concerns at all. On C-Span on August 21, 2016, best-selling author Roger Stone asserted that is was dangerous NOT to ask questions about how the vote was counted. After all, the Founding Fathers did encourage a healthy skepticism of government, including the part of the government that runs the elections. The situation in the United States is absurd. The fact that the public has no guarantee that the vote is actually that of the people is insane, and tears at the very fabric of democracy. Press concern is so grave about Trump's charge of a possibly rigged election, that in the last two of the three Presidential debates, NBC's Lester Holt and FOX's Chris Wallace both asked Trump if he would accept the election results. In the third debate, Trump stunned Wallace by saying he'd wait and see after he looked at the evidence, and that he was going to keep everyone in suspense. No way votes can be verified Three Supreme Court cases stated that the US voter's right to vote consisted of two parts: 1) the right to cast a ballot; and 2) the right to KNOW that one's ballot is counted accurately. With secret computer counts, there is simply no way to verify the vote. None. This is the first major election in America where the people are learning just how compromised the computer based vote has become. On October 18, 2016, computer expert Ethan Pepper appeared on the Sean Hannity radio show and noted that any election computer can be hacked; that if you get in you can switch a million votes as easy as switching one vote; and he also raised the question of WHO owns the election computer software by noting that George Soros was closely associated with those who provided 16 states with the Smartamatic voting machines. This highlights the greatest danger: that the election vendors themselves OWN the election software and that THEY are the prime suspects for rigging elections. After all, they don't have to hack in, they ARE in as the programmers of the software. And with local election officials signing contracts not to inspect the source code of the computer software, these same election vendors know that no one is looking over their shoulder. On October 26th, FOX Cable News discussed the computer voting machines in Texas that were caught by numerous voters switching their Trump vote to a Hillary vote in early election voting. This phenomenon also surfaced in Maryland. Trump has tweeted and facebooked his 21 million followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about the computerized ""vote-flipping"" from Trump to Hillary in Texas. The issue of computerized election fraud was now planted in the public mind as a serious issue for the first time since election computers were introduced into the USA circa 1973. On October 31, 2016, the Drudge Report led with two links on how election computers were hacked. He linked to the new video by Bev Harris on youtube and on blackboxvoting.org entitled, ""Fraction Magic."" The Big TV Networks have been playing defense ever since. Rigging the election Every few hours one of the big Networks are running a story about how it would be almost ""impossible"" to rig a national election. But the networks had to report between airing these stories about a week ago that Ebay, Twitter, and the New York Times websites had been hacked, thus totally undermining their stories about the safety of election computers. The situation can be fixed in the USA, or prevented in other countries, by throwing the computer systems out altogether, and counting the paper ballots by hand, in public with all invited to observe, BEFORE the ballots leave the public sight. On November 5, 2016, FOX news carried commentary that whichever side wins in the Presidential race, the other will cry ""computer votefraud."" So the issue has finally become front and center in the Presidential campaign. Dr. David Dill of Stanford University is quoted in a 2004 Nation Magazine article, ""How They Could Steal the Election This Time"": ""Why am I always being asked to prove these systems aren't secure? The burden of proof ought to be on the vendor. You ask about the hardware. 'Secret.' The software? 'Secret.' What's the cryptography? 'Can't tell you because that'll compromise the secrecy of the machines.'... Federal testing procedures? 'Secret'! Results of the tests? 'Secret'! Basically we are required to have blind faith."" People of the USA act like citizens of Banana Republic Blind faith? That's what the subjects and slaves of Banana Republics and tin-horn dictatorships are reduced to. And that's what the people of the United States have now been reduced to since at least as far back as 1988, even though most Americans don't know it. 2016 has been a year of awakening on the election fraud issue. Will that awakening continue to grow so that the United States of America and all other nations? Will the United states and other nations replace easily-rigged election computers, and restore transparent, honest elections with hand-counted paper ballots at the neighborhood polling place once again? As it stands, there is absolutely no way to know who really won the upcoming presidential election in America. The power elite can rig their voting machines to whatever outcome they want. One of the ways the cabal in the United States can be stopped is by a verifiable vote where the America people can be assured they live in a democracy where their vote actually counts and that the will of the people is carried out in the elections. Nancy O'Brien Simpson Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report. A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and political commentator.",FAKE
"0 comments 
With just days to go until the election, the Democrats are trying to salvage what little remains of Hillary Clinton’s reputation. Time Magazine is now trying to defend the left-wing candidate with a last resort–using the sexism card. 
As we get closer to Election Day, the left seems to be running out of excuses for their floundering candidate. Left-wing heads are on the verge of exploding. Not unlike the Galaxy S7. So, in Time Magazine’s latest attempt to play off Hillary Clinton’s FBI investigation , they’re digging deep and pulling out… the sexism card ?! 
I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. 
No it isn’t. Emailgate, or my preferred term “Dikileaks” is about a candidate mishandling confidential email. A flagrant abuse of the law and our national security. Also, Hillary Clinton doesn’t represent all women. But nice try, dummy. 1 
The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around. 
Actually yes, we can imagine this happening to a man. Men cannot hide behind their vagina, or Time readers’ stupidity. Which means they’re usually punished. See also General Petraeus . Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is running for President. She might even win. While under FBI investigation. So “muh sexism” charges are lazy. And insulting to anyone who has three brain cells (like the writer of the Time article). 
The people are demanding Clinton act like moral exemplars, thundering from the pulpit like Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather. But Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their many conservative friends are not remotely Clinton’s moral superiors. They are simply bullies, using gender discrimination to give a veneer of plausibility to their accusations. 
“Moral exemplars”? “Thundering from the pulpit”? No, Time Magazine feminist shill, Robin Lakoff. People are demanding Hillary Clinton not be a criminal liar. Not really that much to ask of someone who wants to lead the country. 
Trump and the other men on Time Magazine’s list haven’t done anything illegal. That’s the difference, not their sex organs. Not their fashion choices. Evidence is piling up against Hillary more and more each day. Even the mainstream media is turning against her . Which means pantsuits or regular suits enter not into the Hillary is a Criminal equation. Her investigation isn’t about sexism. It’s about Hillary breaking the law. 
But desperate Time calls for predictable, desperate measures: SEXISM! Just as any criticism of Obama was deemed RACISM. 
Leftists are running out of defenses for the pantsuited devil-spawn. So they resort to old hat tactics. Just like they do when they say Wikileaks is the product of Russian hackers. 
If we had a brick for every Clinton scandal and misdeed, the wall wouldn’t cost a cent. There’s nothing sexist about holding someone, male or female, accountable for their actions. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. It would be sexist NOT to hold Hillary to the same standards as all the boys. This is absolutely ridiculous. It’s not that we are against having a woman for president. We’re just against that woman being Hillary because she is corrupt and a pathological liar. Related Items",FAKE
"If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History Posted on Home » Headlines » World News » If Donald Trump Wins The Election, It Will Be The Biggest Miracle In US Political History 
Are we about to see the largest election day miracle of all time? 

From Michael Snyder : 
Because as I will show in this article, that is precisely what it is going to take in order for Donald Trump to win. Before I go any further, I want to make it exceedingly clear that I am not saying what the outcome will be on November 8th. As I recently told a national television audience, I do not know who is going to win. 
In this article I am simply going to examine the poll numbers and the electoral map as they currently stand. But in this bizarre election things can literally change overnight, and it is entirely possible that we could still have another “October surprise” or two before it is all said and done. And without a doubt Donald Trump desperately needs something “to move the needle”, because if the election was held today Hillary Clinton would almost certainly win. 
What we have witnessed so far during the 2016 election season has been absolutely unprecedented. Just consider some of the things that we have seen up to this point in time. 
We have never had a bigger “October surprise” than the release of the lewd audio tape from 11 years ago in which Donald Trump claimed to grope women without their consent. 
We have never seen the mainstream media openly attack a presidential candidate as much as they have attacked Donald Trump. In the past, the big mainstream news outlets at least pretended to be fair and balanced, but this year they have completely discarded all notions of objectivity. 
They should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves, and no matter who wins the election they will never be able to get their integrity back. 
We have also never seen a major party at war with itself this close to a presidential election. It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and a whole host of prominent Republican leaders have been openly attempting to sabotage the Trump campaign. 
If Donald Trump is able to overcome all of these factors, it truly will be a miracle of Biblical proportions. 
As it stands at the moment, however, the numbers are looking quite ominous for Trump. Right now, the Real Clear Politics average of national polls has Hillary Clinton ahead by 6.2 percent. Most political experts consider that to be an insurmountable lead at this stage in the game. 
But even if Trump can close that gap and pull ahead, that does not mean that he will win the election. In fact, Trump could beat Clinton by millions of votes nationally and still lose. 
In order to win the election, one candidate has got to get to 270 electoral votes. And on the latest Real Clear Politics electoral map, 262 electoral votes are being projected to go to Hillary Clinton, 164 electoral votes are being projected to go to Donald Trump, and 112 electoral votes are in the “toss up” category. 
So unless something dramatically changes, Donald Trump is essentially going to have to run the table in all of the closely contested states in order to win, and the mathematical odds of that happening are extremely slim. 
Let’s take a closer look at this. The first thing that Donald Trump is going to have to do in order to get to 270 electoral votes is to win all of the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012. That would get him up to 206 electoral votes. 
Unfortunately, it looks like that may be very difficult to do. Romney won North Carolina, but the six most recent polls all have Clinton ahead in that state. Romney also won Arizona, but the most recent poll to be taken there has Clinton ahead by five points. 
But for a moment, let’s assume that Trump can win all of the states that Romney won. On top of that, there are four other states that Trump must win… 
#1 Trump must win Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Without Florida, Trump has no realistic path to 270 electoral votes. So on election night if it is announced that Trump has lost Florida, you might as well turn off your television and go to bed because Trump is going to lose the election. 
Unfortunately for Trump, four recent major surveys all show Trump down by four points in the Sunshine state. 
#2 Trump must win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes. No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, and the two most recent major surveys show that Trump and Clinton are tied in the state. 
#3 Trump must win Iowa’s 6 electoral votes. Fortunately for Trump, most recent surveys show him actually leading in Iowa. 
#4 Trump must win Nevada’s 6 electoral votes. At this point that is looking like it will be very tough to do, because all of the recent polls have Clinton leading in Nevada, including the most recent one that has her up by 7 points. 
If Donald Trump can win those four states, that still does not get him to 270 electoral votes. Instead, it gets him to 265 electoral votes, and so he would still need one more medium-sized state to win. 
The most likely candidates for that last state are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Minnesota. Unfortunately for Trump, Clinton appears to have big leads in all four of those states right at this moment. 
But even if Trump can somehow pull off a miracle and squeak past the 270 electoral vote mark, the truth is that Utah could still mess everything up. 
Do you remember Evan McMullin? 
He was the third party “conservative alternative” candidate that was hyped for a couple of days but that seemingly fell off the map afterwards. 
He is only on the ballot in 12 states, but one of those states is Utah, and it turns out that Evan McMullin is a Mormon. 
Many Mormons believe that a Mormon will be elected president someday when the U.S. Constitution hangs “like a thread“. According to this belief, this Mormon president will turn the country around and all sorts of wonderful things will start to happen. Many Mormons thought that Mitt Romney was going to be this president, but now Evan McMullin has become the target of these expectations. 
So how in the world could Evan McMullin become president? 
Well, their plan is to have Evan McMullin win Utah, and that could potentially keep both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from both getting to 270 electoral votes if the election is super close. If that happens, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. 
It is being projected that the House will still be controlled by the Republicans after this election, and so the choice would come down to either Trump or McMullin, and those backing McMullin believe that he would have a realistic shot in that scenario. 
I know all of this sounds very strange, but this is actually being discussed around family dinner tables all over Utah tonight. 
And in recent days Evan McMullin has been soaring in Utah. One recent survey shows Trump with a one point lead over McMullin, and another recent survey actually show McMullin leading Trump by four points in the state. 
So Trump could pull off a miracle and do everything else that he needs to do to get to 270 electoral votes, and Utah could end up messing up everything for him. 
In addition, it is also very important to keep in mind that Trump could actually get all of the legitimate votes that he needs to win and still have it stolen from him by election fraud. There was widespread evidence of “funny business” in 2012, and this is something that I detailed for a live studio audience down at Morningsideearlier this month… 
Are you starting to see why I would consider this to be the biggest miracle in American political history if Donald Trump actually overcomes all of these factors and wins the election? 
And we don’t have to wait until November 8th to get some indications about how the vote is going to go. Early voting is already taking place is some states, and so far the signs are not encouraging for the Trump campaign. The following comes from CNN… 
Democratic early turnout has stayed steady in North Carolina compared to 2012, while Republicans have dropped by about 14,500. In Nevada, Democrats have a smaller early voting deficit today than they did at this point in 2012. And Democrats are slightly ahead in Arizona in the early vote so far, though they are lagging Republicans in the tally of how many Arizonans have requested ballots. 
Perhaps most surprisingly, Democrats improved their position in conservative and Mormon-heavy Utah, where recent polls have shown a tight race. At this point in 2012, Republicans led Democrats in early voting by more than 22,000 voters. But so far this year, the GOP advantage is only 3,509. 
But if you do want Trump to win, the good news is that we still have more than two weeks before November 8th. 
We have seen some extremely bizarre things happen already in this election, and a miracle is definitely not out of the question. 
In fact, I am of the opinion that it is quite likely that some very strange events could take place between now and early November. So hold on to your hats, because the most interesting portion of the 2016 election may still be ahead of us.",FAKE
"By Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture . He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com . His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World . Originally published at TomDispatch < /p> 
To say that this is the election from hell is to insult hell. 
There’s been nothing like this since Washington forded the Rubicon or Trump crossed the Delaware or delivered the Gettysburg Address (you know, the one that began “Four score and eleven women ago…”) — or pick your own seminal moment in American history. 
Billions of words, that face, those gestures, the endless insults , the abused women and the emails, the 24/7 spectacle of it all… Whatever happens on Election Day, let’s accept one reality: we’re in a new political era in this country. We just haven’t quite taken it in. Not really. 
Forget Donald Trump. 
Doh! Why did I write that? Who could possibly forget the first presidential candidate in our history preemptively unwilling to accept election results? (Even the South in 1860 accepted the election of Abraham Lincoln before trying to wave goodbye to the Union.) Who could forget the man who claimed that abortions could take place on the day of or the day before actual birth? Who could forget the man who claimed in front of an audience of nearly 72 million Americans that he had never met the women who accused him of sexual aggression and abuse, including the People magazine reporter who interviewed him? Who could forget the candidate who proudly cited his positive polling results at rallies and in tweets, month after month, before (when those same polls turned against him) discovering that they were all “ rigged ”? 
Whatever you think of The Donald, who in the world — and I mean the whole wide world (including the Iranians ) — could possibly forget him or the election he’s stalked so ominously? When you think of him, however, don’t make him the cause of American political dysfunction. He’s just the bizarre, disturbed, and disturbing symptom of the transformation of the American political system. 
Admittedly, he is a one-of-a-kind “politician,” even among his associates in surging right-wing nationalist and anti-whatever movements globally. He makes France’s Marine Le Pen seem like the soul of rationality and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte look like a master tactician of our age. But what truly makes Donald Trump and this election season fascinating and confounding is that we’re not just talking about the presidency of a country, but of the country. The United States remains the great imperial state on Planet Earth in terms of the reach of its military and the power of its economy and culture to influence the workings of everything just about everywhere. And yet, based on the last strange year of election campaigning, it’s hard not to think that something — and not just The Donald — is unnervingly amiss on Planet America. 
The World War II Generation in 2016 
Sometimes, in my fantasies (as while watching the final presidential debate), I perform a private miracle and bring my parents back from the dead to observe our American world. With them in the room, I try to imagine the disbelief many from that World War II generation would surely express about our present moment. Of course, they lived through a devastating depression, light years beyond anything we experienced in the Great Recession of 2007-2008, as well as a global conflagration of a sort that had never been experienced and — short of nuclear war — is not likely to be again. 
Despite this, I have no doubt that they would be boggled by our world and the particular version of chaos we now live with. To start at a global level, both my mother (who died in 1977) and my father (who died in 1983) spent decades in the nuclear age, the era of humanity’s greatest — for want of a better word — achievement. After all, for the first time in history, we humans took the apocalypse out of the hands of God (or the gods), where it had resided for thousands of years, and placed it directly in our own. What they didn’t live to experience, however, was history’s second potential deal-breaker, climate change, already bringing upheaval to the planet, and threatening a slow-motion apocalypse of an unprecedented sort. 
While nuclear weapons have not been used since August 9, 1945 , even if they have spread to the arsenals of numerous countries, climate change should be seen as a snail-paced version of nuclear war — and keep in mind that humanity is still pumping near-record levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I imagine my parents’ amazement that the most dangerous and confounding issue on the planet didn’t get a single question , not to speak of an answer, in the three presidential debates of 2016, the four and a half hours of charges, insults, and interruptions just past. Neither a moderator, nor evidently an undecided voter (in the town hall second debate), nor either presidential candidate — each ready to change the subject on a moment’s notice from embarrassing questions about sexual aggression, emails, or anything else — thought it worth the slightest attention. It was, in short, a problem too large to discuss, one whose existence Donald Trump (like just about every other Republican) denies, or rather, in his case, labels a “hoax” that he uniquely blames on a Chinese plot to sink America. 
So much for insanity (and inanity) when it comes to the largest question of all. On a somewhat more modest scale, my mom and dad wouldn’t have recognized our political world as American, and not just because of Donald Trump. They would have been staggered by the money pouring into our political system — at least $6.6 billion in this election cycle according to the latest estimate, more than 10% of that from only 100 families. They would have been stunned by our 1% elections ; by our new Gilded Age ; by a billionaire TV celebrity running as a “populist” by riling up once Democratic working-class whites immiserated by the likes of him and his “brand” of casino capitalism, scam, and spectacle; by all those other billionaires pouring money into the Republican Party to create a gerrymandered Congress that will do their obstructionist bidding; and by just how much money can be “invested” in our political system in perfectly legal ways these days. And I haven’t even mentioned the Other Candidate, who spent all of August on the true “campaign trail,” hobnobbing not with ordinary Americans but with millionaires and billionaires (and assorted celebrities ) to build up her phenomenal “ war chest .” 
I would have to take a deep breath and explain to my parents that, in twenty-first-century America, by Supreme Court decree, money has become the equivalent of speech, even if it’s anything but “free.” And let’s not forget that other financial lodestone for an American election these days: the television news, not to speak of the rest of the media. How could I begin to lay out for my parents, for whom presidential elections were limited fall events, the bizarre nature of an election season that starts with media speculation about the next-in-line just as the previous season is ending, and continues more or less nonstop thereafter? Or the spectacle of talking heads discussing just about nothing but that election 24/7 on cable television for something like a full year, or the billions of ad dollars that have fueled this never-ending Super Bowl of campaigns, filling the coffers of the owners of cable and network news? 
We’ve grown strangely used to it all, but my mom and dad would undoubtedly think they were in another country — and that would be before they were even introduced to the American system as it now exists, the one for which Donald Trump is such a bizarre front man. 
What Planet Is This Anyway? 
I wish I still had my high school civics text. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember it: the one in which a man from Mars lands on Main Street, USA, to be lectured on the glories of American democracy and our carefully constructed, checked-and-balanced tripartite form of governance. I’m sure knowledge of that system changed life on Mars for the better, even if it was already something of a fantasy here on Earth in my parents’ time. After all, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower — my mom and dad voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson — was the one who, in his farewell address in 1961, first brought “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” and “the military-industrial complex” to the attention of the American people. 
Yes, all of that was already changing then, as a peacetime war state of unparalleled size developed in this country. Still, 30-odd years after my father’s death, surveying the American landscape, my parents might believe themselves on Mars. They would undoubtedly wonder what exactly had happened to the country they knew. After all, thanks to the Republican Party’s scorched-earth tactics in these last years in bipolar Washington, Congress, that collection of putative representatives of the people (now a crew of well-paid, well-financed representatives of the country’s special interests in a capital overrun with corporate lobbyists), hardly functions anymore. Little of significance makes it through the porticos of the Capitol. Recently, for instance, John McCain (usually considered a relatively “moderate” Republican senator) suggested — before walking his comments part way back — that if Hillary Clinton were elected president, his fellow Republican senators might decide a priori not to confirm a single Supreme Court justice she nominated during her tenure in office. That, of course, would mean a court now down to what looks like a permanent crew of eight would shrink accordingly. And his comments, which once would have shocked Americans to the core, caused hardly a ripple of upset or protest. 
On my tour of this new world, I might start by pointing out to my mom and dad that the U.S. is now in a state of permanent war , its military at the moment involved in conflicts in at least six countries in the Greater Middle East and Africa. These are all purely presidential conflicts, as Congress no longer has a real role in American war-making (other than ponying up the money for it and beating the drums to support it). The executive branch stands alone when it comes to the war powers once checked and balanced in the Constitution. 
And I wouldn’t want my parents to simply look abroad. The militarization of this country has proceeded apace and in ways that, I have not the slightest doubt, would shock them to their core. I could take my parents, for instance, to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan, their hometown and still mine, and on any day of the week they would see the once-inconceivable: actual armed soldiers on guard in full camo. I could mention that, at my local subway stop, I’ve several times noted a New York police department counterterror squad that could be mistaken for a military Special Ops team, assault rifles slung across their chests, and no one even stops and gawks anymore. I could point out that the police across the country increasingly have the look of military units and are supplied by the Pentagon with actual weaponry and equipment directly off distant U.S. battlefields, including armored vehicles of various sorts. I could mention that military surveillance drones, those precursors of future robotic warfare (and, for my parents, right out of the childhood sci-fi novels I used to read), are now regularly in American skies ; that advanced surveillance equipment developed in far-off war zones is now being used by the police here at home; and that, though political assassination was officially banned in the post-Watergate 1970s, the president now commands a formidable CIA drone force that regularly carries out such assassinations across large swaths of the planet, even against U.S. citizens , and without the say-so of anyone outside the White House, including the courts. I could mention that the president who, in my parents’ time, commanded one modest-sized secret army, the CIA’s paramilitaries, now essentially presides over a full-scale secret military, the Special Operations Command: 70,000 elite troops cocooned inside the larger U.S. military, including elite teams ready to be deployed on what are essentially executive missions across the planet. 
I could point out that, in the twenty-first century, U.S. intelligence has set up a global surveillance state that would have shamed the totalitarian powers of the previous century and that American citizens, en masse, are included in it; that our emails (a new concept for my parents) have been collected by the millions and our phone records made available to the state; that privacy, in short, has essentially been declared un-American. I would also point out that, on the basis of one tragic day and what otherwise has been the most modest of threats to Americans, a single fear — of Islamic terrorism — has been the pretext for the building of the already existing national security state into an edifice of almost unbelievable proportions that has been given once unimaginable powers, funded in ways that should amaze anyone (not just visitors from the American past), and has become the unofficial fourth branch of the U.S. government without either discussion or a vote. 
Little that it does — and it does a lot — is open to public scrutiny. For their own “safety,”“the People” are to know nothing of its workings (except what it wants them to know). Meanwhile, secrecy of a claustrophobic sort has spread across significant parts of the government. The government classified 92 million documents in 2011 and things seem not to have gotten much better since. In addition, the national security state has been elaborating a body of “ secret law ”— including classified rules, regulations, and interpretations of already existing law — kept from the public and, in some cases, even from congressional oversight committees. 
Americans, in other words, know ever less about what their government does in their name at home and abroad. 
I might suggest to my parents that they simply imagine the Constitution of the United States being rewritten and amended in secrecy and on the fly in these years without as much as a nod to “We, the People.” In this way, as our elections became elaborate spectacles, democracy was sucked dry and ditched in all but name — and that name is undoubtedly Donald J. Trump. 
Consider that, then, a brief version of how I might describe our new American world to my amazed parents. 
America as a National Security State 
None of this is The Donald’s responsibility. In the years in which a new American system was developing, he was firing people on TV. You could, of course, think of him as the poster boy for an America in which spectacle, celebrity, the gilded class of One Percenters, and the national security state have melded into a narcissistic, self-referential brew of remarkable toxicity. 
Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is elected president, one thing is obvious: the vast edifice that is the national security state, with its 17 intelligence agencies and enormous imperial military, will continue to elaborate itself and expand its power in our American world. Both candidates have sworn to pour yet more money into that military and the intelligence and Homeland Security apparatus that goes with it. None of this, of course, has much of anything to do with American democracy as it was once imagined. 
Someday perhaps, like my parents, “I” will be called back from the dead by one of my children to view with awe or horror whatever world exists. Long after the America of an unimaginable Donald J. Trump presidency or a far-more-imaginable Hillary Clinton version of the same has been folded into some god-awful, half-forgotten chapter in our history, I wonder what will surprise or confound “me” then. What version of our country and planet will “I” face in 2045? 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration warned doctors and hospitals Thursday to use extra caution in disinfecting a hard-to-clean medical scope that has been linked to the spread of powerful ""superbugs"" in outbreaks across the country.

The agency said that even meticulous cleaning of the duodenoscopes, which are used on about 500,000 patients a year, may not entirely eliminate the risk. And it advised doctors and hospitals that it is studying possible solutions, including new disinfection protocols.

The FDA announcement followed a report from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center that seven patients — including two who died — were infected with the superbug CRE in an outbreak tied to contaminated duodenescopes. The hospital said in a statement that as many as 179 patients who had undergone procedures using the scopes were potentially exposed to the bacteria from January 2013 to January 2014.

The UCLA cases are the latest of several CRE outbreaks nationwide that have been linked to duodenoscopes, which are used to treat gallstones, certain cancers and other disorders in the digestive system. USA TODAY first reported on the outbreaks in an investigation published last month, and other cases have come to light since.

CRE bacteria are formally known as Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae, reflecting their resistance to carbapenem antibiotics — the last line of defense in the medical toolbox. While it is possible that other infections also may be transmitted from contaminated duodenoscopes, CRE cases generate particular concern because of their risks -- fatality rates for patients with CRE infections can run as high as 40%-50%.

""Meticulously cleaning duodenoscopes prior to high-level disinfection should reduce the risk of transmitting infection, but may not entirely eliminate it,"" the FDA said in its advisory. It noted that the agency is working with duodenoscope manufacturers ""to identify the causes and risk factors for transmission of infectious agents and develop solutions to minimize patient exposure.""

The scopes are used for a procedure called ERCP, or Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography, in which the devices are used with contrast dyes and X-rays to help doctors locate and treat blockages in the bile and pancreatic ducts. The scopes have ""elevator"" mechanisms at their tip that control tiny tools used to trim tissue or insert stents.

While there are surgical options for much of the work done in ERCP procedures, the duodenoscopes typically are considered the less invasive and less dangerous option.

Colleen Schmitt, a physician and president of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, says that ERCP remains a relatively safe procedure that generally carries lower risks of complications than surgery.

""Some of these patients (needing ERCP) are very sick and to take them into a surgical procedure could be risky,"" she says, noting that ERCP is ""less invasive than surgical options.""

Still, she says, more research is needed ""so we can be sure we understand the scope of this (infection) problem,"" as well as the best strategies for minimizing risks to patients. In the meantime, she adds, the society is looking to raise awareness among doctors and hospitals on the need for special attention in cleaning duodenoscopes.

Lawrence Muscarella, a biomedical engineer and independent consultant who advises hospitals on endoscope safety, says more need to be done to advise patients of the risks so they can make informed decisions on their treatment options. He also called for better tracking of infections associated with contaminated duodenoscopes, noting that many outbreaks likely are going unreported.

The FDA says in its advisory that it is aware of 135 patients nationwide who may have contracted bacterial infections from contaminated endoscopes. However, the agency acknowledges that ""it is possible that not all cases have been reported.""

USA TODAY's investigation identified three CRE outbreaks linked to duodenoscopes -- in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Seattle. Another outbreak subsequently was reported in Philadelphia. In the UCLA case, like the others, fatalities of infected patients couldn't necessarily be linked directly to the CRE, because most of those patients had other conditions that also could have contributed to their deaths.

In the Seattle outbreak, which occurred in 2012 and was particularly large, 32 patients were diagnosed with CRE and seven died within 30 days -- a window health officials used in identifying potentially associated deaths. Another four patients who had the infection died later.",REAL
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Joe from MassPrivateI Streamed live 21 hours ago by RonPaulLibertyReport Fifteen years ago yesterday, President George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law. It was said to be a necessary – and temporary – response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. It has since become a permanent scar on the Fourth Amendment and the national-security state in Washington D.C. tells us we are in more danger than ever. Is this working? Share this:",FAKE
"The 8th Democratic Debate In 100 Words (And 4 Videos)

In Miami and on Univision, the eighth Democratic debate focused heavily on issues important to Latinos. It meant Sanders and Clinton parted ways with Obama, promising to end deportations. Clinton was asked some tough questions, including whether she would suspend her campaign if she was indicted over her email issue. ""It's not going to happen,"" Clinton said. ""I'm not even answering that question."" Sanders was faced with a video in which he praised Fidel Castro. He said despite all the bad, Cuba did make strides in health and education. The two sparred again on her Wall Street speeches. The highlights:

That's the quickie version of what happened in the eighth Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 race Wednesday night. The politics team has wall-to-wall coverage.",REAL
"Attacks Ramp Up Ahead of Russia's New Ceasefire by Jason Ditz, November 03, 2016 Share This 
A coalition of Syrian rebels led by the Nusra Front have been attacking government-held Western Aleppo since Friday, and escalated the strikes ahead of Russia’s new ceasefire. Reports out of the city suggest heavy firing against government-held neighborhoods. 
While details are still emerging, 12 civilians were reported slain in the firing, and around 200 others were wounded . This toll is independent of the toll from fighting on the ground between rebels and military forces, for which no official figures have yet been released. 
The Russian ceasefire is intended to offer a 10-hour window during which the rebels can leave the city freely through two corridors, taking their weapons and anything else with them, though the rebels have already denounced both the offer and the ceasefire, insisting they will never surrender the city. 
Both sides have been trading fire for months, often shelling one another’s neighborhoods, attacks which tend to kill a lot more civilian bystanders than combatants. They also trade offensives and counteroffensives, aiming to take control of the entire city. 
So far, neither side has been able to get serious gains in the fighting over the city. Some smaller gains by the Syrian military last month appear to be getting reversed with this new offensive by the rebels from outside the city. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Militias prepare for election unrest while Christians fast November 02, 2016 Members of the III% Security Force militia gather for a field training exercise in Jackson, Georgia, U.S. October 29, 2016. REUTERS/Justin Mitchell 
Prominent patriot militia groups are preparing for potential unrest following the elections, while millions of Christians fast for a peaceful transition. Chris Hill, a paralegal, code named ""Bloodagent”: ""How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!"" Hill admires Trump’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Hill: ""This is the last chance to save America from ruin.” ""I'm surprised I was able to survive or suffer through eight years of Obama without literally going insane, but Hillary is going to be more of the same."" Hill on possible post-election march on DC: ""I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process.” Hill: “We've building up for this, just like the Marines. We are going to really train harder and try to increase our operational capabilities in the event that this is the day that we hoped would never come."" Southern Poverty Law Center: Estimates there were 276 active militias last year, up from 42 in 2008. Three Percent Security Force draws its name from the notion that no more than 3 percent of the American population fought in the Revolutionary War against Britain. Former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh: ""If Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.” 
(JACKSON, GA) Down a Georgia country road, camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training -- and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
""How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!"" asks Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name ""Bloodagent."" 
""Ooh-rah!"" shout a dozen militia members in response, as morning sunlight sifted through the trees last weekend. 
As the most divisive presidential election in recent memory nears its conclusion, some armed militia groups are preparing for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
They say they won't fire the first shot, but they're not planning to leave their guns at home, either. 
Trump's populist campaign has energized militia members like Hill, who admire the Republican mogul's promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election may be ""rigged,"" and has said he may not respect the results if he does not win. At least one paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, has called on members to monitor voting sites for signs of fraud. 
The Oath Keepers, a prominent Pro-Constitution militia force that sent gun-toting members to the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, called on members last week to monitor voting sites on election day for any signs of fraud. 
An hour south of Atlanta, the Three Percent Security Force started the day around the campfire, taking turns shooting automatic pistols and rifles at a makeshift target range. They whooped with approval when blasts from one member's high-powered rifle knocked down a tree. 
Millions of Christians are praying and fasting for a peaceful transition following the election results on November 9th. TRUNEWS President Rick Wiles announced a 21 day fast leading up to November 8th, encouraging believers around the country to join in intercession during this dangerous period for our nation.",FAKE
"Posted on November 5, 2016 by DCG | 3 Comments 
From The Independent : Saudi Arabia is set to behead a disabled man for taking part in anti-government protests. 
A specialised criminal court in Riyadh , the Arab kingdom’s capital, sentenced Munir al-Adam, to death for “attacks on police” and other offences they said took place during protests in the Shia-dominated east in late 2011 . 
The 23-year-old is partially blind and was already partially deaf at the time of arrest; he alleges he is now completely deaf in one ear as a result of being severely beaten by police. His family issued a statement rejecting the verdict and claiming that Mr. Adam was tortured into confessing, The Times reported. 
The steel cable worker said he had only signed a document admitting the offences after being repeatedly beaten. He said he had been accused of “sending texts” when he was too poor to own a mobile phone. 
Forty-seven protesters and alleged supporters of al-Qaeda were executed in a single day in January. In July, the number of beheadings in Saudi Arabia reached 108 this year, putting the country, which has a population of nearly 29 million people, on track to exceed its 2015 execution total. 
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most prolific executioners. Research last year by human rights organisation Reprieve found that, of those identified as facing execution in Saudi Arabia, some 72 per cent were sentenced to death for non-violent alleged crimes, while torture and forced confessions were common. 
“Munir Adam’s appalling case illustrates how the Saudi authorities are all too happy to subject the most vulnerable people to the swordsman’s blade,” said Maya Foa, of Reprieve. “Saudi Arabia’s close allies, including the UK, must urge the kingdom to release Munir, along with juveniles and others who were sentenced to death for protesting.” 
The traditionally close relationship between Saudi Arabia and Britain has become strained in the past year as people in the West have protested against the use of the death penalty, including against minors. Protests also erupted across the Middle East in January. 
Sara Hashah, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa spokesperson, said Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran were responsible for 90 per cent of all recorded executions globally and were out of step with the rest of the world . 
“In Saudi Arabia, where people are routinely sentenced to death after grossly unfair trials, we have seen a dramatic surge in the number of executions in the past two years which has shown no sign of abating in 2016,” she told The Independent in July. 
“This clearly demonstrates that Saudi Arabia’s authorities are increasingly out of step with a global trend of states moving away from the death penalty. “Saudi Arabia’s authorities must end their reliance on this cruel, inhuman and degrading form of punishment immediately.” 
Mr. Adam was reportedly detained in February 2012 for taking part in protests in his home town of Qatif the previous year, when he was 18 years old. 
Read the rest of the story here . 
DCG",FAKE
"A cornered Donald Trump prowled the presidential debate stage on Sunday, threatening to jail an opponent he called “the devil” in a last-ditch bid to staunch his hemorrhaging campaign hopes.

Swaying malevolently behind Hillary Clinton as she parried attacks on everything from her husband’s sex life to Wall Street and her foreign policy judgment, the Republican dominated the night but made little effort to seduce new voters.

Instead, he began the night by assembling a group of women in a press conference to revisit alleged sexual assaults by Bill Clinton, before confronting his opponent hardest on her private email server.

“OK Donald, I know you are into big diversion tonight,” shot back Clinton. “Anything to get away from your campaign and how Republicans are deserting you.

“Everything you have heard from Donald just now is not true. I am sorry to keep saying this but he lives in an alternative reality,” she added.

The Democratic frontrunner fired off occasional attacks of her own, accusing Trump of being in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, but looked rattled by the brutal onslaught over her record in office.

Trump, embracing the spirit of the “lock her up” mob chants at his rallies, threatened: “If I win I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation – there has never been so many lies and so much deception,” he threatened.

Clinton said it was “awfully good” that someone with the temperament of Trump was not in charge of the law in the country, provoking another Trump jab: “Because you’d be in jail.”

“She got caught in a total lie and now she is blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln,” added Trump as Clinton attempted to defend leaked Wall Street speech transcripts.

The Republican’s leonine menace even turned on the moderators at Washington University, demanding half a dozen times why they were interrupting him but not asking tougher questions of Clinton.

Within moments of the candidates meeting on stage – without shaking hands – the night sank into an ugly war of words between two nominees devoid of civility, a spectacle unlike any presidential debate in recent memory.

After briefly sticking to general talking points about Barack Obama’s record and the need to “make America great again”, Trump was easily baited into a contentious exchange with Clinton.

The sparring followed shortly after Trump was asked to address the recently leaked 2005 video which captured him bragging about groping women without their consent. The former reality TV star apologized, saying he was “embarrassed by it”, but brushed off as “locker room talk” the unguarded content that has sent dozens of Republican lawmakers fleeing from his candidacy.

“I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” Trump said.

Clinton responded that the leaked video revealed “what he thinks about women, what he does to women”.

“He has said that the video doesn’t represent who he is. But I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is,” Clinton said.

“With prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them. Politics, policies, principles … but I never questioned their fitness to serve,” she added. “Donald Trump is different.”

The real estate mogul was visibly fuming, scowling and pacing as Clinton spoke. Shedding any semblance of contrition over the video, Trump pounced on the indiscretions of Bill Clinton while raising unproven accusations that the former president had assaulted women.

“There’s never been anybody in the history of politics that’s been so abusive to women,” Trump said. “Mine are words and his are action.”

Declining to hit back, Clinton invoked first lady Michelle Obama’s memorable speech at the Democratic national convention in July: “When they go low, we go high.”

But Trump was in no mood to switch gears. His rejoinder to Clinton’s criticism of Trump’s rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims, prisoners of war and women was to falsely pin conspiracy theories surrounding Obama’s birthplace on Clinton’s 2008 campaign – even though Trump rose to political prominence on a crusade to obtain the president’s birth certificate.

The debate turned even chillier as the topic turned to Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state – and Trump’s bulldozing attack caused damage.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Trump told his rival, jabbing his finger repeatedly in her direction.

Clinton once again attacked Trump for his praise for Vladimir Putin and noted the repeated cyber-attacks by Russian-backed hackers in an attempt to influence the election. “The Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing attacks on American accounts to influence our election. WikiLeaks is part of that,” said Clinton. She added: “Never in history has a foreign power [worked] so hard to influence outcome of election.”

Trump responded by suggesting “maybe there is no hacking” and disclaimed any ties to Russia. “I don’t know Putin, I think it would be great if we got along with Russia but I don’t know Putin.” He went to insist: “I know nothing about Russia.”

Only right at the end of a verbally violent 90 minutes was there a brief truce when the candidates were asked to name one positive thing about each other. “I respect his children,” said Clinton after first throwing back her head and laughing.

“She doesn’t quit,” responded Trump. “She doesn’t give up. She’s a fighter and I consider that to be a very good trait.”

While the debate was widely characterized as both bitter and nasty, Clinton’s campaign was confident voters were capable of discerning the difference between the two candidates.

“There was only one president on the stage tonight,” Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon told reporters in the spin room.

“There was only one person that showed the demeanor, the temperament, the resolve and the discipline to actually be president.”

He then added of Trump: “Everything from his meandering answers on policy, which showed a complete lack of understanding on important issues like Syria and healthcare, to his body language on stage where he was menacingly stalking her during parts of her answers, suggested that this is not someone with the temperament to be president of the United States.”

Jason Miller, senior communications adviser to the Republican’s campaign, argued that when Trump “turned the Honest Abe question around on Mrs Clinton that was a knockout”.

Trump supporters in the spin room also stood by their candidate in the wake of the latest audio revelations. Ben Carson, a former primary season rival of the Republican nominee, insisted that when Trump made those remarks “that was a very different time in his life and at that time he was a billionaire playboy and the language that he used was consistent with that”.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani also dismissed the wave of Republicans who had announced in the past 48 hours that they were no longer voting for Trump. “Sometimes Republicans get a little weak-kneed,” said Giuliani. “I happen to be a Republican with very strong knees.”

Only two Republican officials were in the spin room to praise Trump’s performance: longtime Trump ally Senator Jeff Sessions and congressman Jason Smith of Missouri. When asked about the paucity of Republican elected officials defending Trump after the debate, Smith told the Guardian: “I am reminded of what my grandfather told me, that ‘people will hurt you a lot to help themselves a little’ and elected officials that are willing to go out and have kneejerk reactions when they are losing the focus of issues, that is the problem.”

The Missouri Republican went on to dismiss those who have abandoned Trump, adding: “Most of the people who have been leaving were last to arrive and first to leave and what we have to know and remember as a party that we are fighting for principles and issues and don’t make personality such a big part.”

Nigel Farage, interim leader of the UK Independence Party, was also in the spin room to defend Trump and attack Clinton as a threat to democracy. “If you value democracy and if you value being in control of your own destiny then you have to reject Hillary Clinton’s ideas. Simple,” said Farage.

An hour before the debate started, Trump sought to distract attention away a newly released recording of him boasting of molesting women by staging a surprise stunt to highlight claims once made against his opponent’s husband.

Despite recently claiming that he would rather the second presidential debate be about “policy” rather than “in the gutter”, the Republican nominee held the extraordinary three-minute press event with four women who have accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. One of them claimed: “Bill Clinton raped me and Hillary Clinton threatened me.”

Speaking in a conference room to handful of reporters in an event aired on Facebook Live, Trump appeared with Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton and Kathleen Willey. Three of the four women have claimed inappropriate sexual contact with Bill Clinton, which he has denied. Shelton was the victim of a 1975 rape where Hillary Clinton was assigned by an Arkansas court to represent her assailant.

The women took turns in speaking after Trump praised them as very courageous. They then joined him in the debate hall as guests.

“We’re not surprised to see Donald Trump continue his destructive race to the bottom,” said Clinton spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri in response to the press conference.

“Hillary Clinton understands the opportunity in this town hall is to talk to voters on stage and in the audience about the issues that matter to them, and this stunt doesn’t change that.”

The press stunt came just 48 hours after a tape was released of Trump making obscene boasts about using his fame to kiss and grope women without their consent. The tape caught Trump on a live microphone with then-Access Hollywood host Billy Bush in 2005, and includes the statement “I am automatically attracted to beautiful women. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss, I don’t even wait … and when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.” Trump, who was then 59 years old and newly married to his third wife, Melania, added “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Although the Republican nominee issued a videotaped apology after midnight on Friday, the mounting controversy has led to a growing number of Republicans to announce that they will not vote for Trump in November. These included the party’s 2008 nominee, John McCain, as well as a number of other senators in tight re-election battles including Rob Portman of Ohio and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire.

Many have argued in favour of letting Trump’s running mate, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, fight the remainder of the election against Clinton, even though such a scenario remains highly unlikely under Republican party regulations.

Trump is struggling to overcome deep scepticism among women voters, which has led to plummeting poll numbers in recent days and risks putting his chances of winning the presidency out of reach.

Clinton appeared to be in a jovial mood following the debate, chatting and laughing with husband Bill and members of her staff at the front of her plane back to New York.

Before departing St Louis, she came back to talk to reporters. 



Asked if she was aware of Trump standing behind her as she answered questions, Clinton let out a laugh. “I could tell, yes,” she said. “Well, it was a very small space and I tried to give him space when he was talking to people. I would go back and lean up against my stool, but he was very present.”

She added: “I was surprised by the absolute avalanche of falsehoods. I really find it almost unimaginable that someone could stand and just tell falsehood after falsehood.

“You all remember Politifact said that he was the most untruthful candidate they’d ever evaluated … I think they said he was 70% untruthful and so I think he exceeded that percentage tonight.”",REAL
"Eric Peters Autos October 31, 2016 
Automotive good ideas gone bad range far and wide – whether it’s a classic fail like the exploding Pintos of the early ’70s – or a late-model train wreck like the Pontiac Aztek. 
Here are ten automotive atrocities that will be remembered for as long as the warranty claims (and class-action lawsuits) linger: 
* The entire American Motors Corp. (AMC) lineup – 
From dreadful dreadnoughts like the malformed Matador to demented detritus like the Gremlin and Pacer, no other automaker ever managed to build such a seemingly endless conga line of bizarre, poorly conceived (and often, poorly built) cars within such a short span of time (from the late 1960s to the early-mid 1970s). 
Only bankruptcy eventually succeeded in stopping the madness. Exceptions deserving of a kind word include the Javelin and AMX, which were decent efforts hobbled by AMC’s perpetual lack of adequate development funds. 
* Chrysler’s “lean burn” engines – 
While Honda was developing highly efficient combustion chambers to lower engine emissions via engineering advances such as the CVCC cylinder head (which allowed the cars to meet federal exhaust emissions standards without catalytic converters) Chrysler was duct-taping its V8s with leaned-out carburetors that mainly made them even harder to start than they were before – and prone to stalling in the middle of busy intersections. 
In addition, you also got gelded performance and terrible gas mileage. 
Now you know why “rich, Corinthian leather” never made a comeback. 
* General Motors’ diesel V8 – 
Imagine a luxury car that was both slow and inefficient as well as prone to early and catastrophic engine failures and you have a taste of the bitter flavor that was the diesel-powered Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs of the late ’70s and early ’80s. 
These “diesel” engines were actually converted gas engines, which (contrary to the myth) wasn’t the problem. Poor quality control was. 
The resultant debacle not only soured an entire country on the otherwise perfectly sound concept it helped hustle Oldsmobile to the boneyard of automotive has-beens and nearly killed off Cadillac, too. 
* The Sterling – 
Japanese automakers rarely screw the pooch, but this was an exception. 
Back in the late 1980s, in collusion with British car maker Land Rover, Acura Legends were re-sold as “British” Sterling 825s and 827s. The alliance was as enduring as the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact – and just as awkward. Parts for these cars – especially interior pieces – are all but impossible to find. Dealer support is nonexistent. Resale values are lower than current highs for well-worn Yugos. 
If Truman had had another bomb left to drop, the childhood home of the dude who would grow up to create Sterling would have been a worthy target. 
* Pontiac Fiero – 
A great idea ruined by upper management skinflints and con men – who thought it would be slick take Chevette underthings (front suspension, engine) and put them in a car that looked sporty and then charge the suckers top dollar. 
First-year sales were great – until the word got out. They then nose-dived into the ground like the Air France Concorde, forcing the car’s cancellation just four years after it came out. Just in time to hand over the entire market for a car of this type to Mazda , which brought out the Miata a year after the Fiero was sent to the crusher. The Best of Eric Peters Tags: Eric Peters [ ] is an automotive columnist and author of Automotive Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his website Copyright © 2016 Eric Peters",FAKE
"“Has science gone too far?” Smew over on Reddit has spotted an awesomely awful food mash-ups:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”, replies horheezusbobeezus . 
We thought we’d check out if this is actually any good and there’s a review over on pizzabacker.com , “Is this something I can recommend? I would say skip it.”",FAKE
"When speaking, he sometimes holds his elbows into his body as if protecting something. He repeatedly gestures with an “A-OK’’-type sign, and waves his open palms back and forth, like he’s playing an accordion. He forces a smile — mouth corners up! — looks self-satisfied and insincere at the same time.

When speaking, she emphasizes a point by shaking a right fist with her thumb out on top — a gesture that wouldn’t be so distracting if it weren’t so reminiscent of the one from whom she apparently picked it up, her husband, the former president, at his most didactic.

When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton debate Monday night, they’ll express themselves physically as well as verbally. Their body language — movements, posture, facial expressions — may inadvertently reveal as much about them as their words. Consultants call it “leakage.’’

It’s one thing to repeat talking points; it’s another to control the message you convey with your body. And it’s one thing to be coached on such nuances, as both candidates have been; it’s another to remember it with 100 million people watching.

Ruth Sherman, a prominent communications consultant and speaking coach, analyzed the candidates’ body language for the USA TODAY NETWORK.

Although Sherman admires Trump’s communications skills, some of his ticks and tendencies drive her crazy, because they distract an audience from his message (“It’s called ‘noise.’ You just get sick of it.’’) or contradict it.

• The self-hug. Trump gestures with his arms stuck out and elbows held unnaturally close to his sides. “It looks like he’s protecting something,’’ Sherman says — undesirable in one who claims to be a strong leader. (See 0:07-0:10)

• The A-OK. To the point of distraction, Trump forms his thumb and forefinger into the A-OK sign, except that the extra three fingers are curled instead of sticking out straight. (See 0:12-0:15)

• The chop. It’s what it sounds like, an annoying hand reflex that’s drummed out of every novice scholastic debater. (Starting at 0:12-0:15)

• The accordion. With his palms open toward each other, he moves his arms back and forth for emphasis, evoking those mechanical monkeys crashing the symbols.

• The grimace. With seemingly Herculean effort, Trump turns up the corners of his mouth. But the rest of his facial muscles are not cooperating — check the eyes. It undercuts credibility and looks incredibly uncomfortable.

Sherman says Clinton is well dressed and well groomed, uses her hands effectively and moves well. She particularly liked the way Clinton took the stage for her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, moving from right to left and basking in applause from around the hall.

• The thumb-over. When most people make a fist, they tuck their thumb across their knuckles. But Clinton rests her thumb on top of her forefinger, which is fine — she doesn’t look like she’s going to slug anybody — but reminds us that the gesture was popularized by the 42nd president. (See 0:25-0:27)

• The shrug. Clinton sometimes gives a little shrug while she’s making a point, which suggests subconscious uncertainty about what she’s saying.

Sherman has more technical complaints about Trump’s body language, but feels he’s a much better performer and communicator than Clinton — partly because he practiced before a national reality TV show audience for 14 years and partly because he’s a natural.

However grating his Queens accent or distracting his idiosyncratic gestures, Trump has trained his audience to accept him as he is — “that’s Donald.’’

Since in a televised debate performance tops content, Sherman says, “it’s his to lose. Content is not enough. Words are not enough.’’

But didn’t words sink President Gerald Ford in 1976, when he said in a debate with Jimmy Carter that the Soviets didn’t dominate Eastern Europe? She chuckles. “Gerald Ford was no Donald Trump.’’

• QUIZ: Test your memory of general election debates

• INTERACTIVE: Decide the next president's path to the White House",REAL
"2016 elections by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo 
The “revolving, rigged system” that purports to be American democracy was revealed in all its corporate vulgarity on a Baltimore university stage, last week. Two U.S. Senate candidates of the duopoly parties pretended to support the Green Party’s candidate’s right to join the debate, but failed to protest when cops hauled her away. “This was their ‘Rosa Parks’ moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy” -- but failed the test. Green Party’s Margaret Flowers Challenges US Senate Debate in Maryland as Undemocratic by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo 
“ The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard.” 
US corruption during this campaign season is on full display for the entire world to ponder. No one paying even scant attention can deny the thin veneer that is used to hide state sponsored police murder of Africans, structural poverty and the cozy relationship between the 1% rulers in the Democratic and Republican parties. Green Party candidates, such as Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka and Margaret Flowers have forced sunlight’s disinfectant power to expose a rigged, racist and revolting political system that politically and economically devours communities of color, condones police murders of Black youth, intentionally exposes communities, like Flint, Michigan, to poisoned water, promotes drone warfare and the pilfering of the natural resources of Africa and South America. 
The system, however is finding it more difficult to block out the voices of dissent. Such was the situation this week at the University of Baltimore College of Public Affairs where Dr. Margaret Flowers, the Green Party candidate for the Maryland US Senate seat, was refused the opportunity to participate in the only televised debate alongside Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen and Republican state Del. Kathy Szeliga. The corporate media and the political duopoly collaborated to ensure that the Green Party message would not be heard. The sham excuse used to exclude Flowers was that her poll numbers had not reached 15%. But, of course it is difficult to reach the magic number of 15% in the polls when one is systematically excluded from debates and public events. This is the revolving rigged system that Black people know so well. 
“When the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding.” 
When the rigged debate started, audience members called for Dr. Flowers to join Van Hollen and Szeliga. Shouts of “let her speak” could be heard from the audience. Responding to the audience, Dr. Flowers took her place on the stage shaking hands with both candidates. Standing on the stage, she turned her attention to the audience and said: 
“I think it’s important for voters to understand the differences between myself and Congressman Van Hollen and Delegate Szeliga.” With the police moving on stage to remove her, she said, …”I mean, you say you’re a public university and you want to educate the public, but without having a full public discussion, that doesn't actually happen.” 
While Van Hollen and Szeliga seemed to agree with Dr. Flowers participating in the debate, when the police came to escort her off the stage neither candidate provided a meaningful protest of the anti-democratic process unfolding. Delegate Szeliga noted that a third podium was available but both politicians remained silent while Dr. Flowers was forced to leave the stage. This was their “Rosa Parks” moment when they could have stood for integrity and democracy but Van Hollen and Szeliga, failed to show the smallest amount of courage, leadership and commitment to anything greater than their individual ambitions and desire for power. 
Margaret was escorted by police to a sidewalk outside the debate hall and that symbolically represents the state of US democracy. 
After church on Sunday, a sister said to me, “I know a lot of Black folks are going to vote for Hilary Clinton but I can’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I’ve decided to vote for Jill Stein. I’m going to vote my conscience!” My only response after agreeing with her analysis was to add, “Don’t forget to also vote for Margaret Flowers.“ 
Dr. Margaret Flowers of Green Party Interrupts Maryland Senate Televised Debate: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix98YXLWUJg 
Margaret Flowers Campaign Information: http://www.flowersforsenate.org Dr. Marsha Adebayo is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated: No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA . She worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered South African vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit led to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet and serves on the Advisory Board of ExposeFacts.com.",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama on Wednesday made the case for Congress to formally authorize the use of military force in the war against ISIS, declaring that congressional passage of the measure makes the U.S. ""strongest"" in the fight, and that ""ISIL is going to lose.""

""Now, make no mistake, this is a difficult mission and it will remain difficult for some time,"" he said during an afternoon press conference. But, he added, ""Our coalition is on the offensive, ISIL is on the defensive and ISIL is going to lose.""

Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, outlined the parameters of the request he delivered to Congress earlier that day. He said the bill reflects ""our core objective to destroy ISIL,"" and includes authority for a ""systemic and sustained campaign of airstrikes,"" support and training for forces on the ground and humanitarian assistance.

He made clear, however, that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, does not call for the deployment of ground troops in Iraq or Syria.

""I am convinced that the U.S. should not get back into another ground war in the Middle East -- it's not in our national security interest and not necessary for us to defeat ISIL,"" he said.

The joint resolution would limit the President's authority to wage a military campaign against ISIS to three years and does not authorize ""enduring offensive ground combat operations,"" according to text of the resolution.

The resolution would also sunset the 2002 AUMF that spawned the Iraq War. Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq in 2011, but the military authorization remains in effect.

The resolution drafted by the White House does not repeal the 2001 military force authorization that has served as the legal justification for the military campaign against ISIS and other U.S. military efforts to combat terrorism around the world.

The document also specifically notes that ISIS poses a ""grave threat"" to U.S. national security interests and regional stability.

And Obama detailed the ISIS threat in a letter to Congress accompanying the draft legislation.

""The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) poses a threat to the people and stability of Iraq, Syria, and the broader Middle East, and to U.S. national security,"" Obama writes. ""It threatens American personnel and facilities located in the region and is responsible for the deaths of U.S. citizens""

As in the draft resolution, Obama goes on to name the Americans killed in ISIS captivity, ""including James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Abdul-Rahman Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller.""

There is broad support in Congress for a formal AUMF, though lawmakers disagree on the scope of the military powers that should be handed to the President.

House Republican leaders were quick to dismiss the White House draft authorization as too limited, insisting that the President should have fewer limitations.

""If we are going to defeat this enemy, we need a comprehensive military strategy and a robust authorization, not one that limits our options,"" House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement Tuesday. ""Any authorization for the use of military force must give our military commanders the flexibility and authorities they need to succeed and protect our people...I have concerns that the president's request does not meet this standard.""

Boehner's No. 2, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, echoed Boehner's support for an AUMF as well as his criticism of the limits the White House's draft would impose.

""I am prepared to support an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that provides new legal authorities to go after ISIL and other terrorist groups. However, I will not support efforts that impose undue restrictions on the U.S. military and make it harder to win,"" McCarthy said in a statement.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi took the opposite path during a press conference Wednesday.

""We hope to have bipartisan support for something that would limit the power of the President, but nonetheless protect the American people in a very strong way,"" Pelosi said.

Pelosi added that she hoped the three-year authorization would be longer than needed to defeat ISIS.

Pelosi also offered her support for repealing the 2002 authorization, another provision included in Obama's draft resolution.

""I don't see any reason -- in fact I actively support -- repealing the 2002 authorization. It was based on a false premise,"" Pelosi said. ""Nonetheless, it should go, and it should go now.""

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is staffing up for a potential 2016 presidential bid, took the opportunity to slam likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

""I do really blame Hillary Clinton's war in Libya,"" Paul said Wednesday on Fox News referring to the NATO campaign to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi authorized by Obama while Clinton was secretary of state.

Libya has erupted into civil war and has become a breeding ground for radical Islamic fighters, many of whom have left to join ISIS's ranks.

Paul also said the U.S. needs to supply more weapons to Kurdish fighters fighting ISIS in Iraq, but said the U.S. should refrain from getting involved in the war in Syria -- fearing weapons supplied to moderate fighters could get into ISIS's hands.

Paul has been at odds with his Republican colleagues on many aspects of foreign policy, especially in urging for a more restrained, and not limitless, authority to fight ISIS.

Obama urged Congress during his State of the Union address to formally authorize the military campaign to ""show the world that we are united in this mission"" and Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress to swiftly pass the resolution.

""We are strongest as a nation when the Administration and Congress work together on issues as significant as the use of military force,"" Kerry said. ""This is a moment where Congress can make it clear all over the world that no matter differences on certain issues, at home we're absolutely united and determined in defeating ISIL.""

Obama again noted in his letter to Congress Wednesday that he already has the authority to fight ISIS, ""I have repeatedly expressed my commitment to working with the Congress to pass a bipartisan authorization for the use of military force"" against ISIS.

Obama also stressed that the White House's draft resolution would constrain the U.S. military effort and would not authorize ""long-term, large-scale ground combat operations"" like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While Obama did not repeal the 2001 military authorization, he explained in his letter that he remains ""committed to working with Congress and the American people to refine, and ultimately repeal, the 2001 AUMF.""",REAL
"Donald Trump's Problems Are Much Deeper Than A Campaign Manager

Things are not going well for Donald Trump.



On Monday, he fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski ran the campaign on a shoestring budget and a strategy that was largely built off and fueled by the candidate's say-whatever personality and brand.

That worked great in a primary — not so much in a general election. But Trump's problems are far deeper than an embattled campaign manager, who just four months ago was described as Trump's ""alter ego.""

Trump's family stepped in Monday in a scene that could have been ripped from The Apprentice.

Lewandowski was summoned to a morning meeting, but it was a setup, New York magazine's Gabe Sherman reports:

Tension has persisted in the campaign between Lewandowski and a faction led by veteran political operative Paul Manafort, a former Ronald Reagan aide, who was brought on in the spring to manage a potential battle for delegates at the convention. But doubts started to grow about Lewandowski's management. The bottom line is Lewandowski didn't run a campaign that could win a modern-day presidential campaign.

Here were some of the problems:

Money: Trump didn't need much of it in the primary campaign. He was able to get himself on TV without much problem. But Trump, who claims to be worth $10 billion, vowed not to fund his general-election campaign. That, combined with Trump's lackluster fundraising, has made lots of Republicans wring their hands. At the end of May, Trump's campaign had just $1.3 million cash on hand — and owed Trump himself $45.7 million. That figure is so paltry, it's less than every Republican senator up for re-election in competitive races. In something of an exit interview on CNN Monday after his firing, Lewandowski bragged twice that ""the money is pouring in."" He said the campaign had raised some $6 million to $8 million at recent events.

Trump would have to raise that amount of money every single day for two to three months to total the $500 million he said he would need to fund a general-election campaign. And that's half of what most real campaigns for president would need nowadays. In 2012, Romney and Obama spent roughly $2 billion combined.

Travel: Trump wasted a monthlong advantage over Hillary Clinton when he had vanquished his rivals and she was still battling Bernie Sanders. Instead of focusing on traditional swing states, Trump traveled to states where he is likely to win or likely to lose.

Staff: Trump's campaign has fewer than 100 staffers. He boasts how ""efficient"" his operation is, with 73 employees. Clinton is estimated to already have around 800 paid staffers. Those are people who can be used to register voters and then get them to the polls in key states. You could believe Trump's boast that his campaign is more ""efficient"" and that his constant presence on TV compensates for a smaller staff. Or you could look to history: By August of 2012, Obama had 901 people on his payroll; Mitt Romney had 403.

And never mind the size of the staff; what is the campaign doing with them? Trump has eschewed data and behavioral analytics so far. That's something the Clinton team not only is all over, but something the Republican Party recognized was a problem after losing twice to Obama. The president broke the mold on this, and Republicans have tried hard to make up ground in the use of data.

Ads: Hillary Clinton and groups supporting her are spending more than $23 million on ads in eight key battleground states, according to NBC/SMG Delta.

For those who think it's still early, it's not really. Consider 2012 — back then, Romney and his allies were on air with almost $40 million in ads, compared with Obama and his supporters with $45 million. And one of the lessons of 2012 was that Romney allowed his opponents to define him with negative advertising early on. Trump's negatives are far worse than Romney's were at this point in the campaign.

But here's the reality: Blame the campaign manager all you want, he's not really the problem. Trump's problems go well beyond a campaign manager and straight to him. Problems in a campaign usually stem from the top, and that's especially true in this one.

Message: Trump has myriad problems, including a lack of policy depth, a dereliction of facts and an overall message — especially when he talks about race and identity — that has offended lots of voters he didn't have to worry about in a nearly all-white Republican primary. But a general election is a whole different ballgame. Some 14 million people voted for Trump in the primaries — a record. But Obama won almost five times as many votes in the 2012 general election (66 million).

Image: Trump may have been the Teflon Don with GOP voters, but he was Velcro with the rest of the country. Coming out of the primary, Trump's negative rating is higher than any other presidential candidate in history. And it has gotten worse in the past month following (1) his inflammatory comments that the presiding judge in the Trump University fraud case was biased because of his Mexican heritage and (2) the veterans fundraiser imbroglio. Trump donated $1 million only after the Washington Post reported there was no evidence he had done so as promised. That led to a press conference at which Trump called reporters names like ""sleaze"" and, derisively, ""a real beauty."" (Both reporters are children of Cuban immigrants.)

Disunity: All of that has led to a split with Republican Party leaders. Never before has the sitting speaker of the House called his party's presumptive nominee's comments ""racist"" (as Paul Ryan did with Trump's comments on the Trump U judge). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Trump to get on message and stick to the script. One Republican senator said he would not entertain any more Trump questions and others are refusing to defend him and even threatening not to support him.

Inconsistency And A Lack Of Discipline: Trump himself months ago had promised to be ""more presidential than anybody other than the great Abe Lincoln."" Back in March, on the night of the Michigan primary and five days after he became the first presidential candidate in history to defend the size of his genitalia during a live national presidential debate, Trump vowed, ""I could be more presidential than anybody. I can be more presidential, if I want to be, I can be more presidential than anybody.""

He called it ""easy."" It's proved to be not so easy. Instead, Trump seems to have an internal conflict choosing which self he wants to be. He delivered two wooden speeches, reading from a teleprompter twice in a week after GOP disunity came to a head. And then he was back to his free-wheeling self at a rally in Atlanta on Wednesday. His rambling speech went on for more than an hour, with Trump sometimes ducking out of incomplete thoughts midway through a sentence, sometimes coming back to them much later.

You just never know which Trump you're going to get — and both have their flaws.

Polls: Trump is now facing a minor collapse of his poll numbers against Hillary Clinton. After Trump wrapped up the nomination, he pulled even with Clinton, according to the Real Clear Politics average of the polls. (That was when the Democratic race was not yet settled.) Over the past month, Trump has dipped below 40 percent. Clinton holds, on average, a 6-point lead. Polls this far out are hardly predictive of what will happen in the fall, but the trend is unmistakable and worrying many in the GOP.

Besides the horse-race numbers are other worrisome figures for the GOP:

— An ABC/Washington Post poll found 70 percent of Americans dislike Trump, including 56 percent who have a ""strongly unfavorable"" view. That's unheard of. What's more, 9 in 10 Hispanics have an unfavorable view of Trump, including more than three-quarters who said so ""strongly.""

— A CBS/New York Times poll found that 41 percent said they thought Clinton had done something illegal with her emails and private server setup in her home. Yet Trump was pulling in only 37 percent against Clinton's 43 percent in a head-to-head matchup. That means Trump isn't even getting all of the people who thought Clinton had done something illegal.

All of this has led to ""Free the Delegates,"" the latest of the Stop Trump/Never Trump/Dump Trump movements.

""It's good news for us, bad news for the Trump supporters,"" contended Kendal Unruh, a delegate from Colorado, speaking Monday on MSNBC of Lewandowski's ouster. She's one of the leaders of ""Free the Delegates,"" which is encouraging the Republican National Committee to change its rules and allow delegates to vote their conscience at the convention.

""There is not a campaign, there is not an organization,"" Unruh said of the Trump team, adding, it would be ""impossible to win against Hillary Clinton"" with Trump on the ticket.

But Free the Delegates, like past Stop Trump efforts, is unlikely to succeed. It, too, has little organization. And, perhaps most importantly, no candidate.

""Zero chance of success, unless Ted Cruz, who controls almost 1,000 delegates, joins in,"" is how veteran GOP operative Charlie Black described the effort. Black worked for John Kasich's presidential campaign, but also has ties to Manafort, with whom he founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly. ""This likely will calm down before the convention.""

Another veteran strategist called it ""unlikely"" that the RNC rules would be changed to derail Trump and said it is ""highly improbable"" that most of the delegates would ""go against the will of millions of Republican primary voters.""

""The ball is the hands of one person, Donald Trump,"" said Danny Diaz, who managed Jeb Bush's presidential campaign. ""If he proves he can campaign without attacking fellow Republicans and employing divisive rhetoric, he will have few issues becoming the nominee, despite getting grudging support on the floor of the convention.""

If Trump continues to be critical of fellow Republicans, however, it's possible there could be at least a protest vote on the floor of the convention. Sure, Trump would still be the nominee, but the last thing the party wants is a demonstration of disunity shown live on national television months before voting.

Either way, Trump has a lot of work to do — and it starts with himself.",REAL
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 14 + 5 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
"United States Marine Field McConnell  Plum City Online - ( AbelDanger.net )  October 26, 2016 
1. Abel Danger ( AD ) claims that Hillary Clinton used DOJ Pride 8(a) actors to blackmail mentors of the Federal Bridge Certification Authority – including erstwhile directors of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – with child pornography originating from a B.C. pig farm. 

2. AD claims that in early 2001, Clinton's 8(a) companies used their pig-farm network (cf. Starnet) to set up a server to the federal bridge in the basement of her Chappaqua home where she allegedly used Serco Zulu timing signals to synchronize and watch 'the first live-broadcast mass snuff film in human history' on 9/11. 

3. AD claims that Serco 8(a) companies at the US Patent and Trademark Office have issued phony keys for an electronic voting pad input device (US 7537159 B2) so the George Soros-tied company Smartmatic can switch votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton – a former patent lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

4. United States Marine Field McConnell – Global Operations Director of Abel Danger – has offered to serve as a five-star general in a Trump administration and destroy Clinton's pig farm friends at DOJ Pride and the federal bridge with which they can activate weaponized devices through the Serco patent office. 


Soros Linked Voting Machines To Be Used In Key Battleground States   
Note the ransom equals the bonus paid by Lockheed Martin Sister Lynne Cheney to JonBenet's father 

Media Coverage of Starnet Raid - August 20, 1999   

Hillary Clinton vs. James Comey: Email Scandal Supercut  
Copy of SERCO GROUP PLC: List of Subsidiaries AND Shareholders! [Note British and Saudi Governments, AXA, HSBC , Teachers' and Gold man Sachs]    
Defense Ammunition Center [Outsourced to Serco ]   
Serco ... Would you like to know more?  

""Digital Fires Instructor Serco - Camp Pendleton, CA Uses information derived from all military disciplines (e.g., aviation, ground combat, command and control, combat service support, intelligence, and opposing forces) to determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities, and probable courses of action."" 

"" Serco Processes 2 Millionth Patent Application for U.S. Patent and Trademark Office   
Date: 18 Mar 2013  
Serco Inc., a leading provider of professional, technology, and management services to the federal government, announced today that their Pre-Grant Publication (PGPubs) Classification Services team recently processed their 2 millionth patent application for the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO). Each application was also processed within the contractually required 28-day window."" 

For sure, defence counsel have made much of Taylor's involvement with the missing and murdered women, all but pointing the finger at her as homicidal maniac, the real killer. What's not in dispute is that Taylor is one scary character ? street-hardened, menacing, a procurer of prostitutes lured to the Pickton farm, contemptuous of both sex-trade workers (especially street walkers) and drug addicts. 

""Concern Grows Over Soros-Linked Voting Machines   
Sixteen states may be using balloting equipment from a company tied to the leftist billionaire  
by Edmund Kozak | Updated 24 Oct 2016 at 5:21 PM  
Concern is growing over revelations that voting machines in a significant number of states could be linked to a company tied directly to billionaire leftist George Soros and his personal quest to create a nationless, borderless global state. 

The U.K.-based Smartmatic company posted a flow-chart on its website that it had provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona. Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former U.N. official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Since the story first broke, the flow-chart has disappeared from Smartmatic’s website, raising further questions about the real status of the Soros-tied voting equipment and whether it is truly being deployed in U.S. elections. 

If Malloch-Brown's Soros ties weren't troubling enough, he also has ties to the Clintons through his work at two consulting firms. 

According to a spokesperson for the National Association of Secretaries of State, Smartmatic is not on a list of federally certified providers for election systems and officials in several states’ have contested that their equipment came from Smartmatic. Why, then, had Smartmatic bragged about providing over 50,000 voting machines for U.S. elections?"" 

""Check http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/309533/opinion/why-have-all-the-digital-signatures-from-the-election-returns-been-stripped "" 

""Electronic voting pad input device, system and method  
US 7537159  
B2 ABSTRACT  
In the preferred embodiment, the invention is a data entry device intended for use by voters during an election to enter selected choices. Its basic functions are to display available options and accept voter input. Its design achieves simplicity in its preparation, deployment, and operation at any given electoral event. It also furnishes accuracy, reliability, durability, and reusability. It connects in a standard protocol to a voting station's host processor. It accepts up to 300 key codes, each one potentially a unique selection. Names, symbols, or pictures identifying candidates are printed on a paper template compliant with the device's geometry, inserted prior to an election, and visible through the device's transparent cover. When the number of candidates or valid options in a contest exceeds its capacity, additional identical units can be chain-connected, until a sufficient number of voting options are available. 

Publication number: US7537159 B2  
Publication type: Grant  
Application number: US 11/160,782  
Publication date: May 26, 2009  
Filing date: Jul 8, 2005  
Priority date: Jul 8, 2005  
Fee status: Paid  
Also published as: US20070007340   
Inventors: Antonio Mugica , 4 More »  
Original Assignee: Smartmatic International Corporation   
Export Citation: BiBTeX, EndNote, Ref Man Patent Citations (12), Referenced by (4), Classifications (7), Legal Events (7)  
External Links: USPTO , USPTO Assignment , Espacenet "" 

""BREAKING: @HillaryClinton's E-Mail Server Company Got Almost $1 Million In Gov't Loans After Wiping E-Mails   
OCTOBER 26, 2016  
BY CHARLES C. JOHNSON 6 COMMENTS  
Give it up already. It's over. K. J. Gillenwater was the primary researcher behind this story. 

Hillary Clinton's e-mail server company got almost $1 million in government loans starting immediately after they were secretly asked to wipe Hillary Clinton's name from her e-mails. 

Platte River Networks (PRN) got a $493,000 loan from the Small Business Administration in August 2014 and another $350,000 loan in September 2015: 

Public government data available as USAspending.gov 

The first half-million dollar loan arrived not one month after PRN employee Paul Combetta was caught accidentally revealing his company was deleting evidence at Hillary's request in July 2014 . 

The second $350,000 loan came about one year later. 

You won't hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media. Keep the GotNews mission alive: donate at GotNews.com/donate or send tips to editor@gotnews.com. If you'd like to join our research team, contacteditor@gotnews.com. 

After getting the first loan, PRN moved to a large office space after previously working out of the owner’s condo. The head of the Small Business Administration is Maria Contreras-Sweet , a Mexican immigrant who was appointed to the office by Barack Obama two months before Hillary's PRN got the first loan. 

WikiLeaks leaks have proven Hillary's corrupt pay-to-play scheme. GotNews has shined a light on how Hillary gets favors from Hispanic and Democratic government bureaucrats before . 

Did Hillary Clinton pay her e-mail server company Platte River Networks (PRN) with almost $1 million in favorable government loans — given out by a political friendly — in order to alter her illegal e-mails and get her name off them? 

It sure looks like it. 

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been lodged for more information. 

Stay tuned for more. 

K. J. Gillenwater was the primary researcher behind this story."" 

""WHY BILL CLINTON'S 26 TRIPS ON THE LOLITA EXPRESS CHILD RAPE JET MATTER May 15, 2016  
Daniel Greenfield   
We don't know what Bill Clinton did or didn't do in company with Jeffrey Epstein. But we certainly know what Epstein did and, almost as outrageously, what he got away with doing . 

Some of the most shocking allegations against Epstein surfaced only after the conclusion of an FBI probe, in civil suits brought by his victims: for example, the claim that three 12-year-old French girls were delivered to him as a birthday present. But the feds did identify roughly 40 young women, most of them underage at the time, who described being lured to Epstein's Palm Beach home on the pretense of giving a ""massage"" for money, then pressured into various sex acts, as well as the ""Balkan sex slave"" Epstein allegedly boasted of purchasing from her family when she was just 14. More recently, a big cash payment from Mail on Sunday coaxed one of Epstein's main accusers out of anonymity to describe what she claims were her years as a teenage sex toy. This victim, Virginia Roberts, produced a photo of herself with Prince Andrew in 2001 and reported that Epstein paid her $15,000 to meet the prince. Then 17 years old, she claims that she was abused by Epstein and ""loaned"" to his friends from the age of 15. 

Sex crimes of the kind Roberts alleges took place typically carry a term of 10 to 20 years in federal prison. Yet when all was said and done, Epstein served his scant year-plus-one-month in a private wing of the Palm Beach jail and was granted a 16-hour-per-day free pass to leave the premises for work. 

In short, Epstein was never actually in jail. During his ""house arrest,"" he flew around the country on his jets from his New York City place to his private island. At least one of Epstein's victims claimed to have met Bill Clinton. And it turns out that Bill Clinton was a much more regular passenger on the Lolita Express. 

Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender's infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ""Lolita Express"" -- even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com. 

Clinton's presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein's Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including ""Tatiana."" The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls. 

It doesn't help that the Democratic establishment seems to have played a role in getting Epstein a pass on child rape, that Bill Clinton already had rape accusations in his past or that the Clintons had become notorious for their willingness to do favors for criminals in exchange for money. 

Either way we've come a long way from Gary Hart being bounced for ""Monkey Business"" to Bill Clinton flying around on a child rapist's plane without anyone in the media seeming to care much about it. 

Social conservatives often get a bad rap. But there really is no limit to how low standards can fall when any trace of a moral code vanishes out the window. What did Bill Clinton actually do? Who knows. More importantly these days, who cares 

ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam."" 

""For sure, defence counsel have made much of Taylor's involvement with the missing and murdered women, all but pointing the finger at her as homicidal maniac, the real killer. What's not in dispute is that Taylor is one scary character ? street-hardened, menacing, a procurer of prostitutes lured to the Pickton farm, contemptuous of both sex-trade workers (especially street walkers) and drug addicts. 

""She's pure evil,'' says one outreach worker, who asked that her name not be used in any story about Taylor. 

... 

Court has heard that Taylor's DNA was found on 113 items retrieved from the Pickton property ? including handcuffs, condoms, clothing, syringes ? and also on items that belonged to some victims ? Brenda Wolfe's lipstick, Mona Wilson's rosary. 

One witness, Pickton pal Pat Casanova, told the court he once received fellatio from a woman he knew as ""Angel,"" who'd been brought to the farm by Taylor. He said he gave the money to Taylor, who shared some of it with ""Angel."" 

Another witness, Gina Houston, put Taylor on the same bed with victim Sereena Abotsway, in Pickton's trailer. 

In his lengthy police interview, Pickton repeatedly tells police he wants to speak with Taylor. 

On the stand, Houston recounted a conversation she'd had with Pickton about Taylor, shortly before his arrest. 

""Willie told me that he believed she (Taylor) would do the right thing when she came back. That she would take responsibility for what she said she would take responsibility for."" 

Source 

Jeff Wells points to other odd things. 

A week or so ago a man called Steve Remian committed suicide-by-cop but: The name ""Steve Remian"" surfaced at the Robert ""Willie"" Pickton murder trial in New Westminster, B.C., last March, when jurors were told that Remian's name ? with a Burnaby, B.C., address ? was on the label of a suitcase packed into a box found in Pickton's workshop. 

In April, jurors heard further evidence that DNA testing on two hairs found on a Hudson's Bay blanket removed from Pickton's motorhome linked one to Pickton, and the other to a ""Steve Remian."" 

A source involved in the Oakville shooting investigation told the Star that the man shot by police had been charged with sexual assault earlier in life while living in Oakville, but had been acquitted, although a co-accused was convicted. 

Source 

It does seem like a regular hive of activity: Robert Pickton's pig farm was a constant buzz of activity, with people and vehicles coming and going all the time, a woman who lived in Pickton's trailer for a time testified on Wednesday. 

Tanya Carr, 35, told the jury in Pickton's murder trial that people were coming and going all day long at the Port Coquitlam, B.C., farm and it wasn't unusual for people to show up late at night looking for Pickton or his brother Dave. 

Source 

Also there are those Hells Angels and the ""Piggy Palace"": 

""It was a rough crowd"" at Piggy's Palace, said Brian, a musician who played there a few years ago with the hard-rock band South City Slam. 

The nightclub, he said, was inside an old building on a property Dave Pickton and his brother Robert own at 2552 Burns Rd., near their pig farm on Dominion Road in Port Coquitlam.... 

""Even the women were tough- looking -- a lot of leather and denim. It wasn't a cocktail-gown kind of place ,"" he recalled. 

Brian, who didn't want his last name used, recalled that there was a coat-check girl and a sign saying, ""Check your knives and other weapons at the door."" ... 

The crowd at Piggy's Palace often included men wearing Hells Angels biker club colours. 

""They were there a lot,"" said Brian. ""The people who came all seemed to know one another.""  

""Super Serco bulldozes ahead  
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER UPDATED: 23:00 GMT, 1 September 2004 
SERCO has come a long way since the 1960s when it ran the 'four-minute warning' system to alert the nation to a ballistic missile attack. 

Today its £10.3bn order book is bigger than many countries' defence budgets. It is bidding for a further £8bn worth of contracts and sees £16bn of 'opportunities'. 

Profit growth is less ballistic. The first-half pre-tax surplus rose 4% to £28.1m, net profits just 1% to £18m. Stripping out goodwill, the rise was 17%, with dividends up 12.5% to 0.81p. 

Serco runs the Docklands Light Railway, five UK prisons, airport radar and forest bulldozers in Florida.""  

"" Serco farewell to NPL after 19 years of innovation 8 January 2015 Serco said goodbye to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at the end of December 2014 after 19 years of extraordinary innovation and science that has seen the establishment build a world-leading reputation and deliver billions of pounds of benefit for the UK economy. During that period under Serco 's management and leadership, NPL has delivered an extraordinary variety and breadth of accomplishments for the UK's economy and industry. Some of the key achievements during that time have been:… It has been estimated that work carried out by the Centre of Carbon Measurement at NPL will save eight million tonnes of carbon emissions reductions (2% of UK footprint) and over half a billion pounds in economic benefit over the next decade…. NPL's caesium fountain atomic clock is accurate to 1 second in 158 million years and NPL is playing a key role in introducing rigour to high frequency trading [for Serco 's front running banks] in the City through NPL [Zulu] Time."" 

""UK Cabinet Office – Emergency Planning College – Serco …..Types of Exercise Workshop Exercises These are structured discussion events where participants can explore issues in a less pressurised environment. They are an ideal way of developing solutions, procedures and plans rather than the focus being on decision making. Table Top Exercises These involve a realistic scenario and will follow a time line, either in real-time or with time jumps to concentrate on the more important areas. The participants would be expected to be familiar with the plans and procedures that are being used although the exercise tempo and complexity can be adjusted to suit the current state of training and readiness. Simulation and media play can be used to support the exercise. Table-top exercises help develop teamwork and allow participants to gain a better understanding of their roles and that of other agencies and organisations. Command/Control Post Exercises These are designed primarily to exercise the senior leadership and support staff in collective planning and decision making within a strategic grouping. Ideally such exercises would be run from the real command and control locations and using their communications and information systems [Feeling lucky, Punk?] . This could include a mix of locations and varying levels of technical simulation support. The Gold Standard system is flexible to allow the tempo and intensity to be adjusted to ensure maximum training benefit, or to fully test and evaluate the most important aspects of a plan. Such exercises also test information flow, communications, equipment, procedures, decision making and coordination. Live Exercises These can range from testing individual components of a system or organisation through to a full-scale rehearsal. They are particularly useful where there are regulatory requirements or with high-risk situations. They are more complex and costly to organise and deliver but can be integrated with Command Post Exercises as part of a wider exercising package.""  

""Christopher Rajendran Hyman CBE (born 5 July 1963 in Durban, South Africa)[1] was Chief Executive of Serco Group plc from 2002 to October 2013.[2] … On graduation, he worked for Arthur Andersen. In 1989, he won an 18-month exchange with Ernst & Young in London, who employed him after four months.[1] Head hunted in 1994 by Serco , Hyman became European finance director, and in 1999 was made group finance director. In 2002, Hyman became chief executive. .. Hyman resigned from his role of Chief Executive of Serco on 25 October 2013 following allegations that Serco had overcharged government customers. .. He was [making a presentation to Serco shareholder, including British and Saudi governments] on the 47th floor of the World Trade Center [North Tower] at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001."" 

""July 7, 2016 Developments in PKI occurred in the early 1970s at the British intelligence agency GCHQ , where James Ellis , Clifford Cocks and others made important discoveries related to encryption algorithms and key distribution.[ 19 ] However, as developments at GCHQ are highly classified, the results of this work were kept secret and not publicly acknowledged until the mid-1990s. 

The public disclosure of both secure key exchange and asymmetric key algorithms in 1976 by Diffie, Hellman , Rivest, Shamir , and Adleman changed secure communications entirely. With the further development of high-speed digital electronic communications (the Internet and its predecessors), a need became evident for ways in which users could securely communicate with each other, and as a further consequence of that, for ways in which users could be sure with whom they were actually interacting. 

Assorted cryptographic protocols were invented and analyzed within which the new cryptographic primitives could be effectively used. With the invention of the World Wide Web and its rapid spread, the need for authentication and secure communication became still more acute. Commercial reasons alone (e.g., e-commerce, online access to proprietary databases from web browsers) were sufficient. Taher Elgamal and others at Netscape developed the SSL protocol ('https' in Web URLs); it included key establishment, server authentication (prior to v3, one-way only), and so on. A PKI structure was thus created for Web users/sites wishing secure communications. 

Vendors and entrepreneurs saw the possibility of a large market, started companies (or new projects at existing companies), and began to agitate for legal recognition and protection from liability. An American Bar Association technology project published an extensive analysis of some of the foreseeable legal aspects of PKI operations (see ABA digital signature guidelines), and shortly thereafter, several U.S. states (Utah being the first in 1995) and other jurisdictions throughout the world began to enact laws and adopt regulations. Consumer groups raised questions about privacy, access, and liability considerations, which were more taken into consideration in some jurisdictions than in others. 

The enacted laws and regulations differed, there were technical and operational problems in converting PKI schemes into successful commercial operation, and progress has been much slower than pioneers had imagined it would be. 

By the first few years of the 21st century, the underlying cryptographic engineering was clearly not easy to deploy correctly. Operating procedures (manual or automatic) were not easy to correctly design (nor even if so designed, to execute perfectly, which the engineering required). The standards that existed were insufficient. 

PKI vendors have found a market, but it is not quite the market envisioned in the mid-1990s, and it has grown both more slowly and in somewhat different ways than were anticipated.[20] PKIs have not solved some of the problems they were expected to, and several major vendors have gone out of business or been acquired by others. PKI has had the most success in government implementations; the largest PKI implementation to date is the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) PKI infrastructure for the Common Access Cards program.""  

Base One Technologies – Corporate Strategy – We are a Government Certified Women-Owned Business   
We practice Diversity Recruitment and Staffing for IT positions Base One was founded in 1994 by a women engineer who had made a career in technology research for many years. Base One has been very successful in focusing on diversity recruiting and staffing for IT projects. It has been our experience that the greater the diversity mix, the more creative the solution. As in any field the more diverse the viewpoint the more thorough your analysis. Our engineers can think out of the box. 

Because of our affiliations we have access to pools of resources among more diverse groups & individuals. We work with a large pool of minority professionals who specialize in IT skills. We are able to have access to these resources through our status as a D/MWBD firm and our affiliations. These affiliations assist us in working with resources among more diverse groups & individuals. We are also partnered with firms that are 8A certified as Minority firms, Disabled Veteran firms, Native American firms, Vietnam veteran firms, women owned firms. 

Our hub zone location keeps us close to the professional organizations of great diversity. We are active in recruiting from and networking with these community organizations of local IT professionals. This has given us access to a large pool of diversity talent. 

Base One's staff of engineers are a diverse group of professionals. This diverse network of engineers helps us to branch out to other engineers and creates an even larger network of resources for us to work with. 

The greater the diversity the more complete & thorough the analysis. The broader the spectrum of points of view the broader the scope of the analysis. We feel that a diverse team gives us a greater advantage in creating cutting edge solutions. To that end we will continue to nurture these relationships to further extend our talent pool. 

The greater the diversity mix, the more creative the solution. 

The more diverse the viewpoint, the more thorough the analysis. 

The more diverse our team, the more our engineers can think out of the box. 

This is why Base One Technologies concentrates on diversity recruitment in the belief that a diverse team gives us a greater advantage in creating cutting edge solutions."" 

Information Security Planning is the process whereby an organization seeks to protect its operations and assets from data theft or computer hackers that seek to obtain unauthorized information or sabotage business operations. 

Key Clients Benefiting From Our Information Security Expertise: Pentagon Renovation Program, FAA, Citigroup, MCI. 

Base One Technologies 

Expertly researches, designs, and develops information security policies that protect your data and manage your firm's information technology risk at levels acceptable to your business. 

Performs architectural assessments and conducts both internal and external penetration testing. The results of these efforts culminate in an extensive risk analysis and vulnerabilities report. 

Develops, implements and supports Information Security Counter measures such as honey-pots and evidence logging and incident documentation processes and solutions."" 

""Base One Technologies, Ltd. is a DOMESTIC BUSINESS CORPORATION, located in New York, NY and was formed on Feb 15, 1994. This file was obtained from the Secretary of State and has a file number of 1795583. "" 

""Serco's Office of Partner Relations (OPR) helps facilitate our aggressive small business utilization and growth strategies. Through the OPR, Serco mentors four local small businesses under formal Mentor Protégé Agreements: Three sponsored by DHS (Base One Technologies, TSymmetry, Inc., and HeiTech Services, Inc.,) and the fourth sponsored by GSA (DKW Communications, Inc.). Serco and HeiTech Services were awarded the 2007 DHS Mentor Protégé Team Award for exceeding our mentoring goals."" http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/100515p.pdf 

""Opened in 1994 as the successor to the Transitional Immigrant Visa Processing Center in Rosslyn, Va., the NVC centralizes all immigrant visa pre-processing and appointment scheduling for overseas posts. The NVC collects paperwork and fees before forwarding a case, ready for adjudication, to the responsible post. 

The center also handles immigrant and fiancé visa petitions, and while it does not adjudicate visa applications, it provides technical assistance and support to visa-adjudicating consular officials overseas. 

Only two Foreign Service officers, the director and deputy director, work at the center, along with just five Civil Service employees. They work with almost 500 contract employees doing preprocessing of visas, making the center one of the largest employers in the Portsmouth area. 

The contractor, Serco , Inc., has worked with the NVC since its inception and with the Department for almost 18 years. 

The NVC houses more than 2.6 million immigrant visa files, receives almost two million pieces of mail per year and received more than half a million petitions from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) in 2011. Its file rooms' high-density shelves are stacked floor-to-ceiling with files, each a collection of someone’s hopes and dreams and each requiring proper handling. …. 

The NVC also preprocesses the chief of mission (COM) application required for the filing of a petition for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV). Such visas, for foreign nationals who have performed services for the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan, require COM concurrence before the applicant can file a petition with USCIS. The NVC collects the requisite documents from such applicants and, when complete, forwards the package to the U.S. embassies in Baghdad or Kabul for COM approval"" 

Yours sincerely, 

Field McConnell, United States Naval Academy, 1971; Forensic Economist; 30 year airline and 22 year military pilot; 23,000 hours of safety; Tel: 715 307 8222 

David Hawkins Tel: 604 542-0891 Forensic Economist; former leader of oil-well blow-out teams; now sponsors Grand Juries in CSI Crime and Safety Investigation 
",FAKE
"Obama's Presidential Library Will Be In Chicago, Foundation Announces

President Obama's presidential library will be in Chicago, his foundation announced on Tuesday.

""The future Presidential Center will include the library, museum, as well as office and activity space for the Foundation to inspire and engage citizens here and globally,"" the foundation said in a press release.

""It wasn't as easy for Chicago to win the Library as might be expected. The city had to scramble to find a solution when using park land for the location became an issue. Hawaii and New York also had strong bids, but Chicago is where President Obama grew up politically. He was a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School for more than a decade.""

The foundation puts it simply: The Obama family was ""shaped by Chicago"" from their ""wedding day to Election Day.""",REAL
"Throughout Barack Obama's presidency, Republicans in Congress have deployed a strategy that has worked remarkably well for them: oppose, obstruct, and sabotage the Obama administration at every turn.

""The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,"" Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the Senate minority leader, said in 2010.

A few months later, McConnell acknowledged that Republicans had decided to deny President Obama any bipartisan support, not because they necessarily opposed each and every initiative, but to hurt Obama politically. ""We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,"" he said. ""Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.""

This strategy led Republicans to adopt largely unprecedented tactics of obstructionism and sabotage. But no matter how far they went, there was one line they always avoided crossing: undermining US foreign policy.

That line is now being crossed. Republicans, driven by earnest policy disagreements with Obama over his approach to Iran, are bringing the tactics they used to undermine Obama's legislative agenda into the previously sacrosanct realm of foreign policy.

""the GOP are blazing new trails in politicization of foreign policy — and debasement of their institutions""

Republicans are overtly sabotaging not just  Obama's Iran policy, but also his constitutionally enshrined authority over foreign policy. This is unprecedented. If the trend continues — Republicans have already extended their efforts to Obama's relationship with Israel — it endangers not just US policy toward the Middle East, but the very way that the United States makes foreign policy.

The possible implications for the United States and its role as global leader should worry Americans of every political stripe.

Until now, for all the tactics of obstruction Republicans used against Obama's legislative agenda, they generally treated foreign policy as sacrosanct. They got close only once before, when they threatened to block Obama's 2010 nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia. But they backed down when foreign policy graybeards from Henry Kissinger to Colin Powell told them to knock it off.

Republicans, after all, tend to prize America's role as the world's sole superpower. They see this as crucial to the future of the United States and would not put their own partisan political goals ahead of it. Even if they disagree with Obama's execution of foreign policy, and would say so openly, they refrained from sabotaging him in the way they had on domestic policy. Until the Iran talks.

Republicans are earnestly alarmed about the Obama administration's effort to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. They believe Iran is negotiating in bad faith and will exploit any deal to further its nuclear program. Though many analysts find this argument unpersuasive, it is a valid position, and it's fair play to oppose the Iran deal on those grounds. But that opposition has grown into something much bigger than that, and with consequences beyond Iran policy.

Republicans, joined by some Democrats, tried for months to pass new economic sanctions on Iran. The aim was clear: to kill the negotiations, humiliating Obama on the world stage in the process. The US is offering sanctions relief to Iran as part of any deal. By passing new sanctions while the talks are still ongoing, Congress would send the message that the president is not actually in charge of foreign policy and that the US cannot be trusted to uphold its word. Iran would have little choice but to walk away.

Republicans have not been able to pass new sanctions; Democrats, and even a number of Republicans, have seemed unwilling to so openly embarrass their own president on the world stage.

The moment the line was crossed came on January 8, when McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner took matters into their own hands. They secretly arranged for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also opposes Iran talks and has a famously poor relationship with Obama, to speak to a joint session of Congress urging them to kill the negotiations.

Even Fox News was outraged: here was a foreign ally going behind the president's back, working with an opposition party to undermine the sitting president of the United States. And Republicans were helping him do it.

""We are sailing into uncharted waters,"" Robert Kagan, a prominent foreign policy hawk who worked in the Reagan-era State Department and later on John McCain's foreign policy team, wrote in an alarmed Washington Post op-ed. ""Bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a US president’s policies is unprecedented.""

Kagan warned that in some ways, the even greater danger was that such tactics could well become routine: ""After next week,"" he wrote, ""it will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.""

After Netanyahu's visit, Republicans went further still. Forty-seven Republican senators signed an open letter, organized by superhawk Sen. Tom Cotton, to Iranian leaders hinting that they could blow up any deal between the US and Iran if they disapproved.

""Congress violates the Constitution by hosting the speech""

The mere act of senators contacting the leaders of a foreign nation to undermine and contradict their own president is an enormous breach of protocol. But this went much further: Republicans are telling Iran, and, by extension the world, that the American president no longer has the power to conduct foreign policy, and that foreign leaders should assume Congress could revoke American pledges at any moment.

""Iran's ayatollahs need to know before agreeing to any nuclear deal,"" Sen. Cotton told Bloomberg View, that ""any unilateral executive agreement is one they accept at their own peril.""

A foreign leader reading this letter — whether he or she is Iranian or not — is learning that you are better off walking away than trying to negotiate, in good faith or bad, with the United States of America.

""Between the Netanyahu invite and the Cotton letter, the GOP are blazing new trails in politicization of foreign policy — and debasement of their institutions,"" David Rothkopf, the CEO of the Foreign Policy group and a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tweeted. (I've cleaned up the abbreviations common to Twitter.)

In some ways, it looks like Obamacare all over again. Much as Republicans attempted to stop or subvert Obamacare by undermining the institutions responsible for passing and implementing it, they are now seeking to stop or subvert the Iran negotiations by weakening US foreign policy itself. And much as their brinksmanship and obstructionism on Obamacare exacerbated the partisan polarization that has broken Congress, they are now risking similar damage to the ability of the world's lone superpower to conduct its foreign affairs — well beyond just Iran policy.

There are legitimate policy disagreements over Iran negotiations in Washington, so the line between principled policy opposition and unprincipled partisan sabotage can be blurry. It may help, then, to examine how Republicans' new approach is damaging a US policy that should be less controversial: support for Israel.

The bipartisan consensus on Israel goes back decades. Republican leaders, by inviting Netanyahu to Congress behind Obama's back, and by pressuring members of Congress to side with Netanyahu against their own president, are both exploiting and endangering that bipartisan consensus.

Republicans' hope is that by forcing members of Congress to choose between Israel and Obama, Congress will side with Israel, and thus against Obama. But the risk is that some will side with Obama and against Israel — many Democrats signaled as much by refusing to attend the speech — and that support for Israel will thus become an increasingly partisan issue.

As ""pro-Israel"" becomes increasingly coded as a Republican issue rather than a bipartisan one, it will likely help Republicans win certain races, but it will substantially erode the consensus on Israel and thus risk eroding US support for Israel. If you earnestly care about Israel, and about the US-Israel relationship, then this trend should alarm you.

A premise of Republican meddling on Iran and Israel is that Congress has a right — indeed, a responsibility — for oversight of some aspects of US foreign policy. This is true, and Sen. Cotton's letter points out as an example that the Senate will have to approve any formal treaty between the US and Iran.

Still, Congress' role in foreign policy is constitutionally quite limited. For over 200 years the president has been designated as the ""sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations,"" as founding father John Marshall put it in an 1800 speech that the Supreme Court codified into constitutional law in 1936.

The idea of what became known as the ""sole organ"" doctrine is that the US government needs to be a single unified entity on the world stage in order to conduct effective foreign policy. Letting the president and Congress independently set their own foreign policies would lead to chaos.

There is disagreement over where constitutional law draws the line between what role Congress is and is not allowed in US foreign policy. But it seems awfully clear that House Speaker John Boehner going behind the president's back to negotiate with the Israeli leader violates at the very least the spirit of constitutional limits on Congress.

Indeed, a number of constitutional legal scholars — some of them quite conservative — have questioned the constitutionality of Republicans' actions.

David Bernstein of George Mason University wrote at the Washington Post that Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu ""violates constitutional norms that have been observed for generations"" and was contrary to the separation of powers. He explained, ""Direct diplomatic relations with foreign governments are exclusive in the executive."" Boehner disobeyed that.

Another constitutional scholar, Michael Ramsey, put it more simply: ""Congress violates the Constitution by hosting the speech."" The point is not that John Boehner is going to be dragged before the Supreme Court — he won't — but that Republicans crossed a line that wasn't just a matter of protocol, but of strict and meaningful constitutional limits in how foreign policy is conducted.

And that was before Sen. Cotton and 46 other Republican senators wrote the Iranian leader to tell him to disregard President Obama's promises.

It's worth pointing out there is a law specifically prohibiting US citizens from negotiating with foreign governments without official permission, and thus interfering in the foreign policy of the United States. Called the Logan Act, it's named for a state legislator who corresponded with French officials in 1798 without his government's permission because he disapproved of US policy toward France.

Cotton is not going to face prosecution for violating the Logan Act. ""No one is ever actually prosecuted under the measure,"" legal scholar Peter Spiro wrote recently. ""It’s more a focal point for highlighting structural aspects of foreign relations."" And that's the point: the letter goes way beyond the legally articulated limits on Congress' role in foreign policy.

The spirit of the Logan Act, like the ""sole organ"" doctrine, is meant to enforce the idea that the president is in charge of foreign policy. It's not supposed to be like legislation, where Obama and Congress fight it out on a somewhat level playing field. It's meant to be unified. Republicans, by trying to change that, are undermining the very premise of how US foreign policy is supposed to work.

The greatest harm, should Republicans continue this trend, would be to the ability of the US president to credibly conduct American foreign policy.

Even if you agree with Republicans that Obama's Iran talks are a bad idea, the fact that Republicans have gone beyond opposing a deal to overtly undermining US foreign policy should worry you. Republicans are now freelancing their own foreign policy, conducting shadow diplomacy with both Israel and Iran, dividing US foreign policy against itself.

Who, a foreign leader might reasonably ask, is really in charge in Washington? How can I risk negotiating with the US when Congress might sabotage any deal we strike? How can I make difficult, politically painful concessions to the US if Republicans might end up pulling out the rug from under me? How much can I really trust the US to uphold its word? How safe a bet is working with the Americans?

One of the central lessons of this dysfunctional era in American politics is that one side's overreach quickly becomes the other side's tactic. If you're a Republican, you should ask what you will think if these practices are normalized. What will you think when Democrats in Congress employ these tactics to undermine a Republican administration?

This is not to say that the world will shrug off American leadership; the US is still the Earth's most powerful and important country. But foreign policy is won or lost on the margins more often than you might think. International agreements can succeed or fail with just a smidge more or less trust between the parties. A major US foreign policy challenge this century will be competing for regional influence with powers such as China and Russia. If you're, say, the foreign minister of Myanmar, trying to decide whether to throw in with China or with America, you are going to be a little less likely to hedge toward the US if you think its foreign policy-making apparatus is fundamentally broken.

Throughout Obama's presidency, Republicans have frequently warned that he is projecting insufficient strength or will to maintain America's global standing. It seems odd, then, that their answer to this is to publicly undermine and humiliate the president — and thus sacrifice, for short-term partisan gain, the American resolve and leadership they see as so important for the world.

WATCH: 'Obama on his foreign policy goals - The Vox Conversation with the POTUS'",REAL
"In a surprising move after Marco Rubio had a strong debate performance, Donald Trump unveiled the endorsement of Chris Christie.

Donald Trump is a burning inferno that thrives by sucking the oxygen out of the room. On Friday, he did it again by announcing the endorsement of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, temporarily stepping on Rubio’s Terminator-like savagery of Trump in Thursday’s debate.

Nothing should shock in a presidential race that has been defined by its surprises, but the image of the bruising governor proudly standing behind the carrot-faced mogul at a press conference in Texas was jarring nonetheless.

“Generally speaking, I’m not big on endorsements,” Trump started, casually dismissive of the kind of establishment support his main competitor Rubio has received. “I could have had quite a few good ones. This was an endorsement that really meant a lot. Chris is an outstanding man with an outstanding family.”

Christie is also a man who has been blamed for allowing Atlantic City’s crime rate to skyrocket as his plan to turn around the casino city tanked. Trump also failed in Atlantic City with his Taj Mahal casino, which filed for bankruptcy in 2014.

According to Christie, the two came to a final decision about the endorsement and its rollout in a meeting Thursday but he had contemplated further involvement in the race when he returned home to New Jersey after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.

“I concluded along with Mary Pat and the children [to support] the person we thought to provide the best leadership for America and the person who could best make sure that Hillary Clinton never gets within 10 miles of the White House,” Christie said, trading the podium back and forth with Trump like tag-team WWE wrestlers.

“Once we made that decision, it was clear the only choice was Donald Trump. The best choice was Donald Trump. And last thing is our family is one that prides loyalty and the fact is that we have been good friends with Donald and his family for many years.”

Yet Christie sold off his list of donor emails and supporters to Rubio this morning, which was just two weeks after he kneecapped Rubio as a “robot” in the debate before the New Hampshire primary. Even when a Christie confidant was asked recently if a Trump endorsement was in the works, he demurred and said, “You never know.”

“You’re telling me it wasn’t this weird when Herman Cain was winning nationally four years ago or Michele Bachman was winning nationally? I mean, this happens,” Christie said at the time.

That same month, Christie said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren that Trump doesn’t have what it takes to be president. “I don’t think his temperament is suited for that and I don’t think his experience is,” he said.

Similarly Trump didn’t used to have nice things to say about the governor. During a visit to New Hampshire in December, Trump ribbed Christie for his Bridgegate scandal, telling a crowd that “the people of New Jersey want to throw him out of office.”

Yet today, the two were thick as thieves, perhaps motivated by the joint hate they share for Rubio, who grasped the media limelight for only a brief moment in the sun after last night’s debate.",REAL
"Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump landed his first major newspaper endorsement Sunday as the Las Vegas Review-Journal proclaimed its support for the embattled nominee.

 

 ""History tells us that agents for reform often generate fear and alarm among those intent on preserving their cushy sinecures,"" the paper said.

""It’s hardly a shock, then, that the 2016 campaign has produced a barrage of unceasing vitriol directed toward Mr. Trump. But let us not be distracted by the social media sideshows and carnival clatter. Substantive issues are in play this November,"" it stated.

 

 The Review-Journal represented Trump's first endorsement from a major newspaper, most of which have backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, or simply opposed the real estate tycoon. The Review-Journal is owned by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly has become disillusioned with Trump.

Dozens of major newspapers have endorsed Clinton. Trump was the only major-party candidate without a major paper endorsement until Saturday.",REAL
"Jeb’s tried to be what the voters want him to be, but it hasn’t been enough and on Friday, it all seemed to be drawing to a close.

Bush is polling on average at 10.3 percent in the state, behind Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. On Friday, the biggest story about his campaign was one that declared it was “running on fumes,” hemorrhaging confidence from his supporters and donors just when he needs it most. As a last resort, 24 hours before the Republican primary, he dragged his 90 year old mother, Barbara, out on the campaign trail with him for three separate town hall events.

He stood at the center of the stage, no lectern, and awkwardly dangled his stiff arms at his sides as he spoke. Thanks to his Paleo diet, he is a shell of his former self, sleek and modern in a slim-cut blazer and pants. On this particular day, he wore no glasses.

Much has been said about Bush’s demeanor throughout this campaign. He seems to vacillate between detachment and frustration with the process. At times he just seems sad, giving the sort of contemplative, spaced out looks that make for the perfect absurdist Vines. It’s not the kind of viral content a campaign hopes for, exactly, but then this is not the sort of campaign that the candidate had hoped for, either.

In Bush’s mind, the media has dictated the supposedly Democratic process in 2016 and treated it like a tabloid story, feeding the American public’s appetite for more drama (read: Trump). Too wonky and polite to serve as a lead, Bush has become a bit character in this season of America, and frankly this is not the sort of arc he was promised at the initial casting.

“We’re all part of a ‘narrative,’” he said, mockingly borrowing the language of TV political pundits. “I always thought narratives were part of a play, you know, where you just kind of play out your part. The ‘narrative’ is that there’s an ‘establishment lane’ and then there’s the ‘outsider lane’ and I’m in the establishment lane because I am the son of George H.W. Bush and the brother of George W. Bush. I got that. I’m proud of it. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

Later, as he posed for a photo, he complained to a supporter about how hard it is to break through because of the media. The media, as it was, stood huddled around him, within earshot. He made awkward eye contact and swiftly told the supporter that the media’s job of vetting presidential candidates is actually important work and, personally, he welcomes the scrutiny.

A man jostled to get his baby girl’s photo taken with “the next president of the United States,” getting into an argument with a photographer who stood in his way in the process. It was jarring to hear someone describe Bush that way, as the next president, because unlike other candidates, he doesn’t even pretend like he thinks it’ll happen.

During a speech in January, Cruz said, “When Heidi’s first lady, french fries are coming back to the cafeteria!” It was a joke, ostensibly, but you get the feeling sometimes that before they’ve even won a considerable number of delegates, candidates are making plans to redo the molding and install a hot tub in the Oval Office.

In contrast, during his speech on Friday, Bush said at one point, “I think the first thing that our president should do—” Not, the first thing that I will do as president, but, the first thing that our president should do.

And maybe that’s why he hasn’t gained “momentum,” to borrow another phrase from the pundits. Bush, a genteel WASP, spent a great deal of time on Friday condemning what he perceives to be Trump’s rudeness but what Trump’s supporters believe is his matter-of-factness. “Donald Trump, man, insulting women, Hispanics, the disabled, POWs like John McCain,” he said. “Donald Trump has never showed any interest in anybody else other than himself.”",REAL
"The drone strike that U.S. officials believe killed “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State executioner whose beheading of Western hostages came to symbolize the militants’ brutality, appeared this week as a rare success in the struggling U.S. campaign against the group.

More than a military feat, the death of the Islamic State’s most well-known spokesman, if confirmed, would be a step forward in the U.S. effort to counter the group’s sophisticated social-media operations and to up the ante in a two-way propaganda war.

Speaking the day after the strike in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, U.S. military officials said they were “reasonably certain” that the two Hellfire missiles fired from an American MQ-9 Reaper drone late Thursday killed the British militant, whose real name is Mohammed Emwazi, and a second individual.

Army Col. Steven Warren, a U.S. military spokesman, did not give details about why military officials were confident that Emwazi, 27, was dead, but he said the drone strike was carried out as planned.

Warren said officials were now working to definitively establish that Emwazi was killed. His death would be a blow to the Islamic State’s public image, Warren said, even if Emwazi was not a top operational commander. “This guy was a human animal,” he said.

In London, British Prime Minister David Cameron lauded the operation, which he described as a “combined effort” between U.S. and British forces. “If this strike was successful, and we still await confirmation of that, it will be a strike at the heart of ISIL,” he said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

A senior U.S. defense official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said three drones took part in the operation, one of them British. An American plane conducted the strike.

In a statement at 10 Downing Street, Cameron described Emwazi as a “barbaric murderer” who was the Islamic State’s “lead executioner.”

“This was an act of self-defense. It was the right thing to do,” he said.

U.S. officials said the car believed to have been carrying Emwazi and another person pulled up at a two- or three-story building, a business, around 11 p.m. local time Thursday. Emwazi went inside the building for a short time, came out and got back in the car. At that moment, the American missiles destroyed the vehicle.

The Syrian activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which monitors events in the city, reported that a drone strike targeted a car near the Islamic court in downtown Raqqa shortly before midnight. It was among a dozen blasts heard during an intense wave of airstrikes, the group said on its Twitter feed.

Emwazi appeared in a video in August 2014 as the unknown masked man with an English accent who beheaded American journalist James Foley.

Emwazi subsequently beheaded Steven Sotloff, another American journalist, and appeared in a video in which American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig was decapitated. ­He also killed David Haines and Alan Henning, both British aid workers, and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.

“It is a very small solace to learn that Jihadi John may have been killed by the U.S. government,” Foley’s parents, John and Diane Foley, said in a statement. “His death does not bring Jim back. If only so much effort had been given to finding and rescuing Jim and the other hostages who were subsequently murdered by ISIS, they might be alive today.”

Art and Shirley Sotloff, the parents of Steven Sotloff, said Emwazi’s death would change nothing for them. “It’s too little too late. Our son is never coming back,” they said. “More importantly, today, we remember Steven’s remarkable life, his contributions and [others who have] suffered at the hands of ISIS.”

The Obama administration attempted to rescue the Americans during the summer of 2014, when Delta Force commandos stormed a prison where they were thought to be held. Officials later concluded that the prisoners had been moved days before the raid.

U.S. officials have said that confirmation of Emwazi’s death will probably require information gleaned from intercepted militant communications. They say it is probably impossible to obtain a DNA sample, making it more difficult to establish his death conclusively.

“We could potentially never know” with certainty, another defense official said.

[The moment Jihadi John may have become a terrorist]

Emwazi is the best-known militant the United States has killed in more than a year of airstrikes against the group in Iraq and Syria.

Emwazi was born in Kuwait but grew up in London. He studied computer programming before gradually becoming radicalized. In 2010, British authorities detained Emwazi and barred him from leaving the country. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and later joined the Islamic State.

Emwazi was one of a group of English-speaking militants that former hostages dubbed “the Beatles.” Those former prisoners described Emwazi as a frequently brutal captor who took part in waterboardings and beatings. It’s not clear if one of the so-called Beatles was the other passenger in the destroyed car.

While the stature of Emwazi and his fellow English-speaking militants was enhanced by the propaganda effect of the execution videos, which drew intense international attention, his operational influence was limited.

Peter Neumann, director of King’s College’s International Center for the Study of Radicalization, said Emwazi was a “low-ranking officer.” Symbolically, Neumann said, his death would show that the Islamic State is reeling, which could undercut recruitment.

“It feeds into the narrative of ISIS, in its core territory, losing,” he said.

While the Obama administration has said it has contained the expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, local forces have been unable to dislodge militants from important cities. At the same time, Islamic State affiliates have spread across the region.

Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, cautioned that the Islamic State still counts on substantial support in the region.

“Killing a high-profile propagandist is in itself a significant propaganda win,” Itani said. “But this organization is extremely adaptable and, so long as it has access to an aggrieved Sunni population, will always reemerge in one way or another.”

Witte reported from London. Julie Tate and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Washington, Karla Adam in London, and Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report.",REAL
"Dems File Complaint w/DOJ Against FBI for Investigating Hillary   
It's an obviously absurd move, but considering that the DOJ has become a transparently political organization that abuses and attacks law enforcement on a regular basis including, in the Eric Garner case, the FBI, this is just how things work in the hall of mirrors that the left has made . 
The Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed a complaint with the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility on Friday against FBI Director James Comey for interfering in the Presidential election, following the FBI’s decision to open up an investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails this close to Election Day. Federal employees are forbidden from participating in political activities under the Hatch Act. 
“It is absolutely absurd that FBI Director Comey would support Donald Trump like this with only 11 days to go before the election,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Advisor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. “It is an obvious attack from a lifelong Republican who used to serve in the Bush White House, just to undermine her campaign. Comey needs to focus on stopping terrorists and protecting America, not investigating our soon to be President-Elect Hillary Clinton.” 
It's silly grandstanding and seems easy enough to dismiss.Except that bizarre and unlikely tactics, no longer are. There was outrage over MoveOn's attack on Petraeus and even most Dems thought that it was unhelpful. This attack on Comey I suspect will meet with little criticism. Some Dems will consider it a helpful preemptive move even though with his track record, Comey is as likely to hurt Hillary as he is himself.",FAKE
"October 27, 2016 
Ivy Pollard, 73, from the backend of Brighton was all set for a binge-watching session of her favourite TV series when the tradesman who said he would arrive between 7am and Midday arrived between 7am and Midday. 
‘I’d just finished skinning up the first spliff of the day when the miracle took place’ she said. ‘There was this unexpected knock at the door which I was hoping would be the new clown costume and accessories that I ordered 3 weeks ago!’ 
‘But it wasn’t! It was the guy from Swirlpool! The one thing I wasn’t expecting! Someone actually doing what they said they were going to do! The only time I experience that level of follow-through is on the toilet, or in my pull-ups, but even that doesn’t happen all that often.’ 
‘It was all a bit embarrassing actually, because there wasn’t anything wrong with the oven yet. The warranty had just expired so I knew it was only a matter of time. I thought I was being clever by booking an engineer straight away, confident that by the time he turned up, there would be something wrong with it.’ 
‘Mind you, he didn’t mind. It turns out he’s a big Game of Thrones fan as well. So we had a smoke and cracked on with the show. We had a jolly old day in the end, much to the chagrin of the other customers he was scheduled to see that day, but, then again, that’s tradesmen for you.’ Jodster",FAKE
"Labor Day is the one day every year when we come together as a nation to celebrate the achievements of the American worker and the history of the labor movement in this country. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will join President Obama (who spent the weekend meeting with G20 leaders issued a Labor Day message on September 1) as well as a variety of politicians and public officials from across the country, in commemorating the day.

You can bet that their lofty rhetoric will be accompanied by a promise to restore the nation to its manufacturing heyday.

At the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, for instance, Clinton promised to push policies that will help foster a “manufacturing renaissance.”  Not to be outdone, Donald Trump has long said he will be “the greatest job-producing president in American history.”

What neither Clinton, Trump, Obama, or any other public official is likely to do on Labor Day, however, is to level with the American worker. None of them are likely to confess the hard truth: the jobs they keep talking about bringing back to the United States are not coming back. None of them are likely to have the guts and foresight to tell the public that instead of making empty promises they will focus their energy on helping the American worker prepare for a time, in the next decade or so, in which many of the tasks they perform at their current job are increasingly automated. None of them are likely to acknowledge what is the reality: that we need to prepare collectively for “new” types of work and learn to co-exist in an economy alongside artificial intelligence and robotics.

How do we know these jobs are not returning? Consider the following evidence. First, over the last several years, a small but growing number of companies have reopened factories in the United States. Unfortunately, jobs have not returned with them because many of these plants are increasingly automated. Second, since 2009, manufacturing output has increased more than twenty percent, but that hasn’t resulted in an equivalent increase in the number of jobs, i.e., manufacturing employment has grown just five percent in the same period. Third, manufacturing output is higher than it has been for decades – it is up $2.2 trillion in 2015 from $1.7 trillion in 2009. Despite this, employment in the sector is lower than it has been since the mid-twentieth century and total employment has decreased by a third since 1970.

Automation is not the sole reason for this, but it is seen by most experts as an increasingly important factor. In 2014 almost half of the leading economists and other experts interviewed for a PEW research study said that they “envision a future in which robots and digital agents have displaced significant numbers of both blue- and white-collar workers—with many expressing concern that this will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order.”

There is no question that a portion of the jobs many of us perform today will be lost to robotics, automation, and the rise of artificial intelligence in the next few decades. A recent study by AppliedTechonomics, for instance, found that we currently have the technological capacity to automate 52 percent of the activities performed by workers in the manufacturing sectors. Moreover, the study found that manufacturing is the second most automatable sector in the global economy, just behind the services industry.

Given this reality it is bordering on malpractice that our current candidates and public officials have not done more to help prepare us all for a future in which accelerated technological change has a major impact on our labor force.

There are many steps we can take to confront that reality -- from better education and training for impacted workers, to more controversial proposals like offering incentives to corporations to encourage them not to automate at such a fast past or even providing a guaranteed minimum income to everyone in our country.

There is much that can and should be done to prepare all of us for the future, beginning with an honest discussion about the changes workers are going to face – prepared or not – in the coming years.

Labor Day 2016 is not too late to begin having this discussion. Our current crop of candidates, as well as our elected leaders, have a responsibility to all Americans to get the conversation started.

Saquib Hyat-Khan is Founder and Chief Executive at AppliedTechonomics.

Jeanne Zaino, Ph.D. is professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College and Senior Advisor at AppliedTechonomics, Public Sector. Follow her on Twitter @JeanneZaino.",REAL
"BREAKING : LGBT Group Endorses Trump, Says, “Hillary is Detrimental for Gays” BREAKING : LGBT Group Endorses Trump, Says, “Hillary is Detrimental for Gays” Breaking News By Amy Moreno November 1, 2016 
Hillary is NOT a champion for gays. 
She takes MILLIONS from countries who abuse, imprison, and execute gays. 
Clinton turns a BLIND EYE to these grotesque atrocities to gays (and women) so she can keep lining her pockets. 
She even laughed when Trump asked her to return the BLOOD MONEY to these hateful countries. 
On top of that, Clinton wants to FLOOD America with Muslin refugees from these “moderate Muslim” countries that abuse, imprison, and execute gays and women. 
These people do not want to assimilate to Western culture – they come here and spread their 7th-century HATE. 
This is why so many gays support Trump. 
From Washington Examiner : 
The Miami chapter of LGBTQ Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) announced on Monday its decision to break with the national organization to support GOP nominee Donald Trump for president. 
“We, as Log Cabin Republicans of Miami, we’re Americans first, we’re Republicans second, and we happen to be gay or allies of the LGBT community. American national security is our government’s first and foremost responsibility, then the economy – those two issues really are paramount to any American,” Miami chapter president Vincent Foster told the Washington Examiner on Monday evening. 
“Our membership has gotten behind the Republican national nominee and it’s unfortunate that other Republicans are unable to do so. Regardless of differences, we understand that a Hillary Clinton presidency is only going to be detrimental to the LGBT community and the general American population.” 
LCR announced on Oct. 22 that it would not support Trump despite his being “perhaps the most pro-LGBT presidential nominee in the history of the Republican Party” because he has “concurrently surrounded himself with senior advisers with a record of opposing LGBT equality.” 
Foster said the national organization’s decision was a “big surprise” and prompted the South Florida chapter to re-evaluate the matter. On Oct. 26, the 20 members of Miami LCR unanimously voted to endorse Trump. 
The Miami chapter has had a long-standing relationship with Trump, Foster explained. The billionaire businessman’s campaign initially reached out to the group months ago to work together in the battleground state. Foster added the campaign attended the group’s Lincoln Day dinner and has been fully supportive of them. 
“To have a Republican presidential nominee who cares so much, especially after Orlando – that resonated so much,” Foster said. 
Although LCR typically does not allow local chapters to support other candidates, the organization is allowing for flexibility in this election. The Washington, D.C.-based national group is permitting regional chapters to endorse or not endorse Trump in this election. 
Log Cabin Republicans in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Orange County, Texas and Georgia have also endorsed Trump, according to Angelo. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"It was rare for poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen to venture into the realm of politics, however, quite a few of his songs, including some of his love songs, were infused with a bleakness that confronted morality and the darkness of humanity. He also wrote a song of hope and possibility about the experiment of democracy in the United States that, perhaps, takes on a new kind of resonance in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.
Cohen was asked in 2014 if songs can offer solutions to political problems. He replied, “I think the song itself is a kind of solution.”
And so, to pay tribute to a troubadour who died at 82 and whose artistic work only seemed to get better as he aged and his voice grew deeper, here is a retrospective on some of the more philosophical and sociopolitical songs he composed.
“Joan Of Arc” (1971) Cohen declared in an interview for Rolling Stone in 1971, “Women are really strong. You notice how strong they are? Well, let them take over. Let us be what we’re supposed to be – gossips, musicians, wrestlers. The premise being, there can be no free men unless there are free women.” He believed it was just for women to gain control of the world.
With that context, this elegiac narrative takes on greater gravitas. It consists of a dialogue between Joan of Arc and the Fire, as she is burnt at the stake. The women’s movement was flourishing at the time, and Cohen saw Joan of Arc as a symbol of courage. Yet, he also recognized she may have been lonely because she had to disguise herself as a male soldier, and he imagined what it was like to fight English domination of France and in her final moments face down the fact that she would never return to what could be considered an ordinary life.
“Dance Me To The End Of Love” (1984) During a CBC radio interview in 1995, Cohen said the song came from “hearing and reading or knowing that in the death camps” during the Holocaust “beside the crematoria” the string quartet would be “pressed into performance” while “this horror” unfolded. Cohen sings in the opening, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin. Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in. Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove.” The song represents an embrace of passionate acts in the face of atrocities and death.
“If It Be Your Will” (1984) This is a truly grim song in which Cohen is probably using the specter of a benevolent oppressor or fascism as a metaphor for the next stage of a relationship. And yet, the lyrics are subtle enough that Cohen may be addressing morality and how easy it is to convince men to carry out heinous acts. He sings, “All your children here in their rags of light/In our rags of light/All dressed to kill/And end this night/If it be your will.”
“First We Take Manhattan” (1987) The song is about terrorism or militant extremism. It is told from the perspective of an individual who tried to work within the system in order to change it. That failed. Now the individual has taken solace in the “beauty of his weapons” and turned to Manhattan and to Berlin to make his or her mark.
In a 2007 interview for XM Radio, he said, “There’s something about terrorism that I’ve always admired. The fact that there are no alibis or no compromises. That position is always very attractive. I don’t like it when it’s manifested on the physical plane. I don’t really enjoy the terrorist activities, but psychic terrorism. I remember there was a great poem by Irving Layton that I once read, I’ll give you a paraphrase of it. It was ‘well, you guys blow up an occasional airline and kill a few children here and there’, he says. ‘But our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein. The whole world is still quaking.'”
What Cohen meant, albeit in a very cynical way, is the philosophies of these people have such a history of being used to justify horrible acts. He never engages with the subject fully (and probably never wanted to do so), but Cohen’s song clearly approaches the issue of state-sponsored political violence versus political violence of the individual.
“Everybody Knows” (1988) It is one of the most well-known songs he ever recorded. The wry cynicism diagnoses the realities of a cruel world. In the neoliberal age of austerity, the opening lyrics are exceptionally appropriate, “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”
Cohen sings, “Everybody knows that you’re in trouble.” Those in charge of the social order are indifferent to the pain and suffering of the masses. But are the owners and politicians capable of maintaining control? Because everybody also knows that it is coming apart.
“Democracy (1990) Cohen described in an interview with Paul Zollo that he wrote the song after the Berlin Wall came down. “Everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east, and I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.'”
That seems strikingly backward. But it motivated Cohen to ask, “Where is democracy really coming?” He thought there may be more democracy coming to the United States. From a love of America, he wrote a song that is really about the irony of America, “a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country.” He added, “This is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.”
Given the American exceptionalism of Cohen’s statement, he could have easily produced something with lyrics Lee Greenwood would have proudly belted out on stage. However, each time Cohen sings, “Democracy is coming to the USA,” there is a raw irony it, like he does not believe the forces running this nation are capable of democracy. Then, there’s the inimitable line, “I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean. I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.” It makes it clear Cohen was a disappointed idealist. Like so many, he liked the idea of America but seeing it play out on that “hopeless little screen” was never quite what he had in mind.
“The Future” (1990) For this song, Cohen’s character looks into the future, and it is not good at all. It is so frightening, in fact, that he thinks he would be willing to see fascist society restored. “Give me back the Berlin wall. Give me Stalin and St Paul. Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima.”
The song hurdles onward into more nostalgia for familiar horror, “Destroy another fetus now. We don’t like children anyhow. I’ve seen the future, baby: it is murder.” He has no hope that humanity can right itself. Civilization can try and erect a social order with a tyrant or it can unravel tyranny and push for something more just. Yet, inevitably, to Cohen’s character, there will be murder. In which case, what really is the right thing to do?
“On That Day” (2004) Cohen wrote this as a response to the September 11th attacks. It is an artifact that represents reactions to what happened. He sings, “Some people say it’s what we deserve for sins against god, for crimes in the world.” There are others who blame it on the fact that women live “unveiled” or because the country has its fortunes as well as people who are subjugated. Whatever the case may be, Cohen does not seek to settle the discussion. Rather, he seems more interested in whether those who survived were able to press onward. So he poses a rhetorical question: “Did you go crazy or did you report on that day?” Then the song abruptly ends.
“Amen” (2012) This song comes from the latter era of Cohen’s life, where the sultry nature of his music took on a much more wistful and brooding characteristic. He wrote about love but love in a time of war or love with inescapable horror all around.
In “Amen,” the character Cohen channels desperately wants to love. He must first see through the terror around him. He does not think he can love until the “victims are singing and laws of remorse are restored.” He does not think he can love until the “day has been ransomed and night has no right to begin.” He awaits some kind of redemption and only then will he be able to feel wanted again, but there is too much despair and destruction right now for the character to indulge in pleasure.
“Almost Like the Blues” (2014) We live in a world of permanent war, and so, in this gorgeously layered piece of music, Cohen grapples with atrocities he witnessed. “I saw some people starving. There was murder, there was rape. Their villages were burning. They were trying to escape. I couldn’t meet their glances. I was staring at my shoes. It was acid. It was tragic. It was almost like the blues.”
Few of Cohen’s songs are as profound. The song, which appears on “Popular Problems,” could easily be grappling with what goes through the minds of war criminals. He sings, “I have to die a little between each murderous thought, and when I’m finished thinking, I have to die a lot.” The soldier witnesses torture or is party to it. He witnesses killing or is party to it. “And there’s all my bad reviews.” It seems his superiors are unhappy with his performance. Maybe, they do not think he is killing enough. Whatever the case may be, he has lost his grip on morality entirely and finds himself confronting the scope of his sins.
“A Street” (2014) To Cohen, “Popular Problems” was all about dealing with defeat . He told the Telegraph the lyrics were about facing down failure, disappointment, bewilderment—especially the “dark forces that modify our lives.” What is a person to do?
“Recognize that your struggle and your suffering is the same as everyone else’s,” Cohen suggested. “I think that’s the beginning of a responsible life. Otherwise, we are in a continual savage battle with each other with no possible solution, political, social, or spiritual.”
While referring to “A Street,” which is about a faltering romance during war, he added, “When I say ‘the party’s over but I’ve landed on my feet . I’m standing on this corner where there used to be a street,’ I think that’s probably the theme of the whole album. Yeah, the scene is blown up, but you just can’t keep lamenting the fact. There is another position. You have to stand in that place where there used to be a street and conduct yourself as if there still is a street.”
In a very basic sense, the master of romantic despair, the high priest of pathos, has now gone up to that Tower of Song, meant people have to find ways to keep living. They have to exist, and by existing, that is in and of itself an act of resistance to all the depravity that unfolds around them.
The post The Political Songs Of Leonard Cohen appeared first on Shadowproof .
",FAKE
"Donald Trump received a key endorsement for his immigration platform: Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of the strongest proponents in Congress of restricting immigration.",REAL
"Well, we did the pre-game last night, so it's time for the Tuesday morning quarterbacking: Watch Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson take my questions and yours on Reason's Facebook page (and right here). What do you want to know about the campaign strategy ahead?",REAL
"How the Oligarchy Has Prepared the Groundwork for Stealing the Election 
In addition to the cyber manipulation of electronic voting (see http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/01/very-easy-to-invisibly-steal-us-elections/ ), Finian Cunningham explains a second method the Oligarchy has prepared that would allow the election to be stolen for Hillary. The groundwork that has been officially established indicates that a false flag cyber attack is the preferred method.
A Digital 9/11 If Trump Wins by Finian Cunningham 
There are disturbing signs that a digital 9/11 false flag terror attack is being readied for election day in the US to ensure that Donald Trump does not win. 
Such an attack – involving widespread internet and power outage – would have nothing to do with Russia or any other foreign state. It would be furnished by agencies of the US Deep State in a classic “false flag” covert manner. But the resulting chaos and “assault on American democracy” will be conveniently blamed on Russia. 
That presents a double benefit. Russia would be further demonized as a foreign aggressor “justifying” even harsher counter measures by America and its European allies against Moscow. 
Secondly, a digital attack on America’s presidential election day this week, would allow the Washington establishment to pronounce a Trump win invalid due to “Russian cyber subversion”. Invalidation is a prepared option if the ballot results show Republican candidate Donald Trump as the imminent victor. 
Democrat rival Hillary Clinton is the clear choice for the White House among the Washington establishment. She has the backing of Wall Street finance capital, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex and the Deep State agencies of the Pentagon and CIA. The fix has been in for months to get her elected by the powers-that-be owing to her well-groomed obedience to American imperialist interests. 
The billionaire property magnate Trump is too much of a maverick to be entrusted with the White House, as far as the American ruling elite are concerned. 
The trouble is that, despite the massive campaign to discredit Trump, polls show his support remains stubbornly close to Clinton’s. The latter has been tainted with too many scandals involving allegations of sleazy dealings with Wall Street, so-called pay-for-play favors while she was former Secretary of State, and her penchant for inciting overseas wars for regime change using jihadist terrorist foot-soldiers. 
As one headline from McClatchy News only days ago put it: “Majority of voters think Clinton acted illegally, new poll finds”. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article112635048.html#emlnl=Evening_Newsletter 
Trump is right. The US presidential election is rigged. The system is heavily stacked against any candidate who does not conform with the interests of the establishment. The massive media-orchestrated campaign against Trump is testimony to that. 
But such is popular disgust with Clinton, her sleaze-ball husband Bill and the Washington establishment that her victory is far from certain. Indeed in the last week before voting this Tuesday various polls are showing a neck-and-neck race with even some indicators putting the Republican narrowly ahead. 
Over the weekend, the Washington Post, which has been one of the main media outlets panning Trump on a daily basis, reported this: “The electoral map is definitely moving in Trump’s direction”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/04/dont-look-now-the-electoral-map-is-definitely-moving-in-donald-trumps-direction/?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1 
In recent days, American media are reporting a virtual state of emergency by the US government and its security agencies to thwart what they claim are Russian efforts to incite “election day cyber mayhem.” 
In one “exclusive” report by the NBC network on November 3, it was claimed that: “The US government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to undermine next week’s presidential election and is mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling.” http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-house-readies-fight-election-day-cyber-mayhem-n677636?cid=sm_tw 
On November 4, the Washington Post reported: “Intelligence officials warn of Russian mischief in election and beyond.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russia-seen-as-unable-to-alter-election-but-may-still-seek-to-undermine-it/2016/11/03/b7387160-a1cd-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html 
Apparently, the emergency security response is being coordinated by the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other elements of the Defense Department, according to NBC. 
These claims of Russian state hackers interfering in the US political system are not new. Last month, the Obama administration officially accused Moscow of this alleged malfeasance. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/07/us-russia-dnc-hack-interfering-presidential-election 
Russian President Vladimir Putin has lambasted American claims that his country is seeking to disrupt the presidential elections as “hysterical nonsense”, aimed at distracting the electorate from far more deep-rooted internal problems. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-rejects-claims-russian-interference-us-election-43103312 
The Obama administration and its state security agencies have not provided one iota of evidence to support their allegations against Russia. Nevertheless the repeated charges have a tendency to stick. 
The Clinton campaign has for months been accusing Trump of being a “pro-Russian stooge”. Clinton’s campaign has also claimed that Russian hackers have colluded with the whistleblower organization Wikileaks to release thousands of private emails damaging Clinton with the intention of swaying the election in favor of Trump. 
Wikileaks’ director Julian Assange and the Russian government have both rejected any suggestion that they are somehow collaborating, or that they are working to get Trump elected. 
But on the eve of the election, the US authorities are recklessly pushing hysteria that Russia is trying to subvert American democracy. 
Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 is quoted as saying: “The Russians are in an offensive mode and the US is working on strategies to respond to that, and at the highest levels.” 
NBC cites a senior Obama administration official as saying that the Russians “want to sow as much confusion as possible and undermine our process”. 
Ominously, the news outlet adds that “steps are being taken to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including a cyber-attack that shuts down part of the power grid or the internet.” 
Nearly two weeks ago, on October 21-22, the US was hit with a widespread internet outage. The actors behind the “distributed denial of service” were not identified, but the disruption was nationwide and it temporarily disabled many popular consumer services. One former official at the US Department of Homeland Security described the event as having “all the signs of what would be considered a drill”. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/white-house-readies-fight-election-day-cyber-mayhem-n677636?cid=sm_tw 
Could that cyber-attack have been the work of US Deep State agencies as a dress rehearsal for an even bigger outage planned for November 8 – election day? 
The Washington establishment wants Clinton over Trump. She’s the marionette of choice for their strategic interests, including a more hostile foreign policy towards Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. But Trump might prove to be the voters’ choice. In which case, the shadowy forces that really rule America can trigger a “digital 9/11”. 
It’s not difficult to imagine the chaos and mayhem from internet blackout, power, transport, banking and communications paralysis – even for just a temporary period of a few hours. Months of fingering Russia as a destabilizing foreign enemy intent on interfering in US democracy to get “Comrade Trump” into the White House would then serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that event, the US authorities could plausibly move to declare the election of Donald J Trump null and void. 
In fact the scenario could be contrived to a far more serious level than merely invalidating the election result. The US authorities could easily feign that a state of emergency is necessary in order to “defend national security”. That contingency catapults beyond “rigged politics”. It is a green light for a coup d’état by the Deep State forces who found that they could not win through the “normal” rigging methods.
Originally published: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201611061047117877-digital-9-11-if-trump-wins/ 
The post How the Oligarchy Has Prepared the Groundwork for Stealing the Election appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
"Reince Priebus, the beleaguered and balding Republican National Committee chairman, was asked a few days ago about his mane.

“How much gray hair do you think you’re going to have by December?” CNN’s Jake Tapper inquired.

“Gray is fine,” the party boss replied. “I just want to make sure I have hair.”

Alternatively, he could try a Whig.

This could be the first time in 160 years when a major American political party splits, and Priebus, the young technocrat from Wisconsin brought in to improve the Republicans’ infrastructure, is in over his head.

The Whigs were essentially undone by their inability to agree on slavery; the attempt to satisfy both sides, with the Compromise of 1850, caused Northern and Southern Whigs to part. Though the current situation is quite different, Republicans are now split by their own moral dilemma: whether to embrace as their nominee a man who stands for isolationism and ethno-nationalism and who disparages women and minorities. Priebus is preaching party unity above morality.

[Let’s scrap the GOP and start over]

If the party accepts Trump, it could consign itself to political oblivion by antagonizing women, minority groups and immigrants. If it accepts Ted Cruz instead, it risks a riot by the Trump populists and the loss of all but far-right voters. And if Priebus and his fellow Republicans try to rally around a mainstream figure such as Paul Ryan, they could salvage the party in the long run but would risk alienating the majority of this year’s GOP voters.

“Well,” Priebus said in a radio interview Thursday with former Republican senator (and Trump booster) Scott Brown, “I haven’t started pouring Bailey’s in my cereal yet, but I’ve certainly considered it.”

In fairness, there is no good option for Priebus now, except perhaps to resign if Trump secures the party nomination. His defenders point out that each time he disagrees with Trump, the criticism only emboldens Trump supporters, as it was likely to do again after Priebus said Monday that the Colorado GOP convention’s decision to award all 34 delegates to Cruz was not “a crooked deal,” as Trump charged.

But Priebus failed to act to stop Trump when he could have, or to coordinate Republicans to clear the field for a mainstream alternative. And now he compounds the damage by sticking with the same moral neutrality and happy talk of GOP unity that allowed the situation to develop.

After the Jan. 14 debate, in which Trump said he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger” and traded charges with Cruz about their constitutional eligibility for the presidency, Priebus tweeted: “It’s clear we’ve got the most well-qualified and diverse field of candidates from any party in history.”

In the Feb. 13 debate, Trump blamed George W. Bush for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Bush “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio took turns calling one another liars, and Rubio ridiculed Cruz’s Spanish skills. “Our well-qualified & experienced candidates continue to put forth serious solutions to restore prosperity & strength to America,” Priebus tweeted.

And after the March 3 debate, in which Trump spoke about the size of his genitals, Priebus tweeted that “Republican candidates are the only ones offering the course correction voters overwhelmingly want.”

Priebus sounds like a fortune cookie when he says “the impossible is always possible with unity.” But unity behind bigotry? My conservative colleague Jennifer Rubin notes that Priebus’s position requires “moral vapidity.”

This all might have turned out differently if Priebus, and other Republicans in positions of responsibility, had turned against Trump sooner. In January, he called the Trump-dominated debates “a good thing for our party.” He said he was “100 percent” sure he could rally the party behind either Trump or Cruz. He has since praised Trump for bringing “millions of new voters to our party.”

With 4 in 10 Republicans saying they wouldn’t get behind Trump in a general election, it’s clear he would lose the party more votes than he gains. But Priebus is still talking like a fortune cookie. “With unity the impossible is possible; with division the possible is impossible,” he informed Brown in Thursday’s radio interview.

Priebus spoke about the wonder of his role. “It’s unbelievable to be in the middle of history that will be talked about forever,” he said.

But history is unlikely to remember kindly a Republican chairman who turned the party of Lincoln over to a populist demagogue or to an ideologue loathed even by Republican colleagues. Hopefully those twin menaces will be enough to wig out Priebus — before his Republicans get Whigged out.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Share This 
The Clinton Foundation and its foreign donors have been an area of concern should Hillary Clinton become president due to accusations of pay-to-play scandals. Knowing this, Hillary gave her word that the Clinton Foundation would stop accepting foreign donations should she be elected president. However, a new leak just exposed her real plan for foreign donors, and it’s not looking good. Hillary Clinton 
Once again, Hillary has landed herself in the middle of more scandalous activity. With the FBI reopening her email and private server investigation and WikiLeaks continuously exposing her corruption, she can’t seem to catch a break — and she shouldn’t. Her long list of scandals continues to grow, as should her nose, after being busted lying to the American people yet again to manipulate her way into our White House. 
According to a leaked memo, Hillary’s words mean nothing. Although she promised that the Clinton Foundation would cease accepting foreign donations if she were to be elected president, a leaked memo has exposed her real plans and proven that she didn’t mean what she said. Two-faced Hillary told the public one thing, while her secret plan was for something much different. 
Thanks to WikiLeaks, the truth is again being revealed after the organization published an email that was sent to John Podesta, the Clinton Campaign chair. The email contained the leaked memo, which appears to have been crafted by Cheryl Mills, a Clinton aide, who wrote, “I connected with HRC this am regarding the steps she will take with regard to the Foundation should she announce a decision to explore a run for the Presidency,” just days before Hillary announced her run for president. 
Although she’s said otherwise throughout her campaign, Hillary’s personal preference, as indicated by the leaked memo dated April 7, 2015, is for the foundation to continue accepting money from foreign governments, The Daily Caller reports, and this could mean bad news for Hillary as five FBI field offices are currently investigating her “nonprofit” foundation due to pay-to-play allegations, although the Department of Justice did their best to suppress investigations into the corrupt Clinton Foundation. 
The leaked memo clearly shows that Hillary indicated to staffers that her personal preference is for the foundation to continue to accept money from foreign governments, even if she is elected president . What’s worse, the corrupt Clintons were hesitant to limit the foundation’s financial operations in any way, as the memo says, Hillary “does not want to limit the Foundation’s ability to operate programs now or in the future,” adding, “ we don’t want to close the door to unexpected opportunities. ” 
The memo goes on to mention a “compromise” option, where it says they could “say that the Foundation will not accept contributions from foreign governments unless that funding is part of an ongoing program or a disbursement for a completed negotiation.” However, under that option, the foundation would continue to accept money from Qatar despite Hillary’s own admission that the country is financially supporting ISIS . 
The “final option” mentioned “would mirror the 2008 [Memorandum of Understanding] agreement whereby the Foundation submits new foreign government contributions and those of a substantial size increase to an independent body (e.g. White House, State Department) for review. The obvious challenge with this is that there is no independent body to make that review.” However, as The Daily Caller notes, Hillary “did not uphold her end of the 2008 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU),” and even liberal-leaning PolitiFact ruled the claim that Hillary acted in accordance with the 2008 MOU “mostly false.” 
When is enough, enough? The Clinton crime family will never change their ways and their fake foundation is only a front for their shady deals. The Clintons’ greed for money and power is endless and nothing — not even our laws — will stand in the way of Hillary and Bill as they grab as much of both as they can. There’s only one place Hillary belongs while on this earth, and that’s not the Oval Office, it’s a cinderblock cell. After her time there is done, she has a one-way ticket to hell, where she probably hopes to overthrow the devil. That is how evil, corrupt, and power hungry she is. Her deceit and depravity know no bounds, and she would even give the devil a run for his money. Do you really want that kind of person to be our next president?",FAKE
"Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a New America fellow. He is the author of "" Jimmy Carter "" and "" The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. "" The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) What could possibly motivate a Republican to formally endorse Donald Trump and join his raucous brigade? With each primary and caucus victory, the pressure for prominent Republicans to take a stand on his candidacy greatly intensifies. But taking this step is not easy.

Announcing that you will back Donald Trump is to enter into an alliance with a person who is controversial, explosive and who can often get extremely nasty on the campaign trail.

This is someone who has repeatedly said things that offend women, Latinos and Muslims; who was slow to disavow white supremacist support and who has chosen to stoke, rather than calm, flareups of violence at his rallies.

This week, he predicted ""riots"" should he fail to be given the GOP nomination, even if he lacks the required delegate total. And even if a politician is willing to be associated with the incendiary things Trump has already said, it is impossible to know what he will do next, and that can be frightening for anyone in the political arena.

As New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie learned last week, you might even find yourself humiliated by Trump after you take the risky step of supporting and going out to campaign for him.

Thus far, Trump has received a few high-profile endorsements, including those of Christie, Sarah Palin, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, Jerry Falwell, and, at a much lower level, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. This is still a pretty limited list for someone as far ahead as Trump.

So why would any other Republicans decide to take this step? The question is becoming much more important with each week. As Trump closes in on the delegates that he needs to secure the nomination in this three-person race (though it is not clear he will reach the required majority), he will be pressing harder to secure more endorsements so that he can avoid a brokered convention in Cleveland.

Obtaining a job in a Trump administration will be a major motivating factor for many Republicans. As the possibility of a Trump presidency becomes more real, a larger number of Republicans will make the calculation that if they want to be part of his administration they will need to get off the fence sooner rather than later.

Trump is the kind of person who punishes anyone who stands in his way.

Those officials who come out in the next few weeks and play a role in helping him win some of the bigger states that loom ahead are hoping to be in a good position to be part of the White House should Trump manage to win the election.

Loyalty to party is a powerful force in our current era of polarized politics.

While the primary season is about deciding what kind of person you want to represent your party, the general election is about making sure that your party has power. Gradually the path forward for Trump's opponents is becoming less clear. If Trump demonstrates the potential to build a diverse electoral coalition that can defeat Hillary Clinton, this will be enough for some Republicans to line up behind him.

As Ben Carson explained when he announced his support, ""I didn't see a path for Kasich, who I like,or for Rubio, who I like. As far as Cruz is concerned, I don't think he's gonna be able to draw independents and Democrats unless he has some kind of miraculous change.""

These Republicans will separate their support for the campaign from the man.

Given that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate, the intense feelings that she elicits within the GOP will be enough to move some Republicans into Donald Trump's camp. There will be the moment, perhaps in the near future, when Republican turn their attention to the competition against the Democrats rather than among themselves.

If the anti-Trump coalition headed by Mitt Romney does not show any signs of strength, some Republicans may decide that it is time to heal the divisions in the party by accepting Trump to maximize their chances in the fall.

As Trump looks more and more like a winner in the party contest, there will be Republicans who actually like the candidate or at minimum are excited about what he can offer in the electoral arena who will finally step forward.

There might be a tipping point where this insurgency becomes legitimate, becoming less of a political circus than an actual competition. Once this happens, this will be a key moment for Trump to start securing a huge number of endorsements as more candidates are willing to stand up for a candidacy that once may have seemed too dangerous.

Nor will Republicans necessarily be worried about the risk of endorsing Trump only to have a brokered convention select a different candidate this summer.

If the nomination is decided at the convention, Cruz or Kasich -- or anyone else who enters the competition -- will need the support of everyone who backed Trump and have reason to court their vote.

The final factor that can move Republicans into the Trump camp will be animosity toward his opponents, particularly Ted Cruz. Though he is trying to position himself as the new ""establishment"" choice, Cruz has been as much, if not more, of an insurgent to the party than Trump.

He is also a politician who has personally burned many bridges with fellow party members in the Senate and the campaign. If Kasich no longer looks like a viable choice for a brokered convention, some Republicans might support Trump as a way to pay back their anger toward Cruz.

Taking the step of standing on the podium with Donald Trump will not be easy.

Every politician realizes the high costs that can come with this, particularly since the outcome of the fight might not be totally settled until the summer.

For many Republicans, this will come down to balancing political and self-interest with the difficulty of supporting a candidate who is genuinely distasteful to them and who risks bringing them embarrassment and anger from people they respect. But as Trump looks like the only real game in town, we'll see more Republicans deciding that this is a risk worth taking.",REAL
"WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
We have learned through Wikileaks released emails that Hillary and her team are actively disenfranchising American voters by accepting foreign donations. 
We also know that Hillary LOVES Middle Eastern countries who ABUSE WOMEN and TOSS GAY PEOPLE off buildings. 
She and her husband take MILLIONS from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 
Now, we can add Turkey to that list. 
Hillary is a disgusting, greedy little pig. 
Do you really think THIS WOMAN would fight Islamic terror? 
They FUND her. ",FAKE
"The true identity of the ISIS terrorist known as ""Jihadi John,"" who has appeared in several videos showing the beheading of hostages, reportedly has been revealed.

The Washington Post first reported Thursday, citing friends and human rights workers familiar with the case, that the man's real name is Mohammed Emwazi, a west London man who had been detained by counterterror officials in Britain at least once, in 2010.

Two U.S. government sources who spoke to Reuters Thursday said investigators believe the man is Emwazi.

According to The Washington Post and the BBC, Emwazi was born in Kuwait and studied computer programming at the University of Westminster. The university confirmed that a student of that name graduated in 2009.

""If these allegations are true, we are shocked and sickened by the news,"" the university said in a statement.

Emwazi is also thought to have traveled to Syria sometime in or around 2012.

The BBC reported that British intelligence had previously identified the man, but had chosen not to disclose his name for operational reasons.

Commander Richard Walton of the London Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command released a statement saying, ""We have previously asked media outlets not to speculate about the details of our investigation on the basis that life is at risk. We are not going to confirm the identity of anyone at this stage or give an update on the progress of this live counter-terrorism investigation.""

London-based CAGE, which works with Muslims in conflict with British intelligence services, said Thursday its research director, Asim Qureshi, saw strong similarities between Emwazi and ""Jihadi John,"" but because of the hood worn by the militant, ""there was no way he could be 100 percent certain.""

The Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King's College London, which closely tracks fighters in Syria, also said it believed the identification was correct.

The masked and hooded terrorist achieved instant notoriety when he appeared in a video released by ISIS last August that showed the beheading of American journalist James Foley. At the time, many commentators and analysts remarked on the man's distinct London accent.

The man is believed to have appeared in other videos that showed the beheading of other hostages, including American journalist Steven Sotloff, British aid worker David Haines, British taxi driver Alan Henning, and American aid worker Peter Kassig, known as Abdul-Rahman after his apparent conversion to Islam in captivity.

The man's most recent appearance came last month in a video with Japanese hostages Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa. Both men also were killed by the terror group.

The terrorist was given the nickname ""Jihadi John"" after interviews with former ISIS hostages revealed him to be part of a group of British jihadists who guarded the hostages and were dubbed ""The Beatles.""

The BBC reported that Emwazi is believed to be an associate of a known terror suspect who traveled to Somalia in 2006, and is allegedly linked to a funding network for the Somali-based militant group Al Shabaab.

CAGE said it has been in contact with Emwazi for more than two years after he accused British intelligence services of harassing him. It said that in 2010 he alleged British spies were preventing him from traveling to the country of his birth, Kuwait, where he planned to marry.

No one answered the door at the brick row house in west London where the Emwazi family is alleged to have lived. Neighbors in the surrounding area of public housing projects either declined comment or said they didn't know the family.

Neighbor Janine Kintenda, 47, who said she'd lived in the area for 16 years, was shocked at the news.

""Oh my God,"" she told The Associated Press, lifting her hand to her mouth. ""This is bad. This is bad.""

Shiraz Maher of the King's College radicalization center said he was investigating whether Emwazi was among a group of young West Londoners who traveled to Syria in about 2012.

Many of them are now dead, including Mohammad el-Araj, Ibrahim al-Mazwagi and Choukri Ellekhlifi, all killed in 2013.

He said Emwazi's background was similar to that of other British jihadis, and disproved the idea ""that these guys are all impoverished, that they're coming from deprived backgrounds.""

""They are by and large upwardly mobile people, well educated,"" he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Tuesday 8 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde Jeremy Vine already tripping his tits off 
Veteran election reporter Jeremy Vine has embarked on his usual pre-election broadcast ritual by taking a load of drugs and hallucinating maps of the USA, pie-charts and various other election-themed visages. 
The least-funny of the Vine brothers usually waits until the polls close before cracking open his thermos flask full of hallucinogens, but has decided to get on it early this year. 
“I can’t say I blame him” said Lucy Millwall, Head of CGI for BBC News. 
“This election has been impressive only for sheer scale of mind-numbing awfulness. 
“Honestly, you try pretending to give a shit about what Gary Johnson is up to without yawning. 
“It’s actually intriguing watching him dance around an empty green room, imagining he’s kicking a football marked “Florida” between Trump and Clinton. 
“We just computer-generate images around whatever he’s imagining. Technically we are ‘enabling’ him but fuck it; it’s really good telly. 
“We’re always careful to cut away from him before he starts talking to Peter, the ‘Rapiest Giraffe of Them All’.” Jeremy Vine election coverage 
Jeremy Vine has been taking LSD ever since John Major’s first election victory; the campaign proving so overwhelmingly dull that recreational drug use became BBC protocol for several weeks. 
Vine is thought to be the only one to keep this up, apart from the Chuckle Brothers, who owe their youthful energy to a vigorous cocaine regimen. 
After ballot day, it is thought that Vine will commence the mother of all comedowns, which should wear off just before his next pre-election bender for a Brexit-inspired snap election sometime next month. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"“Homicides Up 55 Percent”–Chicago Stays Vibrant > November 8, 2016, 10:44 am A+ | a- Warning   
With Black Lives Matter seemingly on ice until after the election, Hillary’s campaign made it through October without America’s monthly riot (although I’d forgotten the big black flash mob attack on white Temple University students in Philadelphia). But Chicago, America’s role model for one-party Democratic rule, remained vibrant. From the Chicago Tribune : 
Homicides up 55 percent in Chicago after another violent weekend 
For the second weekend in a row, more than 50 people were shot in Chicago as the number of homicides this year rose to more than 50 percent above the same period last year. 
More than 660 people have been killed in the city so far this year, according to data compiled by the Tribune. The number of people shot in Chicago this year is more than a thousand above what it was this time last year, from 2,620 to 3,795, according to Tribune data. 
Mayor Rahm released video of a dubious police shooting late last November. Ever since, blacks have been blasting away at blacks in vast numbers, because Black Lives Matter. Or something. 
From Friday afternoon to late Sunday, 10 people were killed and 41 others were wounded in shootings across Chicago, in addition to a man shot to death by police on Saturday, police said. 
Among the wounded was a 78-year-old man who was dragged out of a car in Englewood on Sunday and shot in the head. He was listed in serious condition. 
Five people were shot in a single attack in Uptown early Saturday morning, police said. 
I used to live in Uptown. It’s diverse! 
Two men, two women and a 17-year-old boy were shot about 1:35 a.m. in the 4800 block of North Winthrop Avenue. They were all taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in good condition. 
Law enforcement sources said none of them provided details of the shooting to investigators.",FAKE
"Tapper, the host of the network's ""State of the Union"" Sunday show and ""The Lead"" on weekdays, was picked to lead the event at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library on Sept. 16.

The prime-time debate will actually be split into two parts: One with the candidates that national polls rank as the top 10 GOP contenders, and one with the candidates who didn't make that cut.

The broad GOP field has presented a challenge for both Fox News and CNN as debate hosts.

Fox News announced a plan for an August 6 debate that would only include the 10 candidates that were at the top of the heap, as determined by an average of national polls. Fox's proposed criteria created the most consternation, partly because it is hosting the first debate, partly because it is a favorite of conservatives, and partly because its rules are more restrictive than CNN's. Some Republican Party leaders in Iowa and New Hampshire have said they feel the use of national polls stomps on their roles as the first in the nation caucus and primary states, respectively. Tapper announced that he'll moderate the debate on Sunday, at the end of his first show as CNN's new ""State of the Union"" host.",REAL
"CHARLESTON, S.C. — Emanuel AME Church swung open its doors for services Sunday, four days after a 21-year-old white man who told police he wanted “to start a race war” allegedly killed the pastor and eight congregants attending a Bible study in the church basement.

Hundreds lined up in the hot Charleston sun to climb the stairs to the sanctuary of “Mother Emanuel,” one of the country’s oldest African American churches and one with a rich history of resilience. The organist played and church bells chimed as the choir sang “Blessed Assurance.”

Worshipers from Charleston and across the country filled the pews and balcony of the church. Some watched the sermon from seats in the fellowship-hall basement — where the shooting occurred Wednesday.

“This is our house of worship,” said the Rev. Norvell Goff, presiding elder of the Edisto District of the State Conference of the AME Church, addressing the congregants. “The doors of the church are open, praise be to God.”

“No evildoer, no demon in hell or on Earth can close the doors of God’s church.”

Many in the pews fanned themselves furiously, beating back a thick heat and their fragile emotions. People fought tears, rocking back and forth. Some comforted each other in long embraces. Ushers passed out bottles of cold water. And above them all loomed the pastor’s usual seat, empty, covered by a black cloth.

In Emanuel AME’s nearly 200-year-old history, the congregation has withstood slavery, segregation, racially motivated laws to keep worshipers from meeting and fires set by angry, white mobs. But the massacre Wednesday of state Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was the church’s pastor, and eight church members left many wondering how such a horrible tragedy could occur in a place they consider a safe haven.

[For Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, shooting is another painful chapter in rich history]

“It has been tough, it’s been rough, and some of us have been downright angry. But through it all, God has sustained us and encouraged us,” Goff said. “When times of trouble come into our lives, how do we respond? Do we respond by being afraid? Or do we respond in faith?”

Goff encouraged the congregation to continue to pray and look to God for healing.

“The blood of the Emanuel Nine requires us to work for not only justice in this case, but for those living on the margins of life,” he said. “We must stay on the battlefield until there is no more fight to be fought.”

Reporters, he said, had asked him how some grieving family members who attended the bond hearing of suspect Dylann Roof could say they would forgive him. Roof, who was arrested Thursday in Shelby, N.C., about four hours away from the church, was charged with nine counts of murder and possessing a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.

The families, Goff said, were holding on to a strong faith that teaches them to love their neighbors. “God is our refuge and our strength,” Goff said. “We ought to put our hope and trust in God.”

Daniel E. Martin Jr., 52, who said his family has been on the membership rolls of Emanuel for more than 100 years, said the church would heal and grow stronger. “It’s painful and difficult, but if you know anything about the people of faith, Charlestonians, members of the church, you will understand when we come to church we receive the word of God.”

His wife, Reba Martin, 54, a steward in the church, said when she walked in the church Sunday, she thought she saw Pinckney. “Pastor was so tall,” she said. “I can almost see him standing there with all the people who sat next to him in the pulpit.”

Reba Martin said the congregation full of people who had come to share in the service was an answer to Pinckney’s dream of getting more people to come to church: “When pastor first came, our congregation was so small, he would say, ‘One day you will see the church full to the rafters.’ That happened today.”

On Saturday, Charleston police gave church leaders permission to open the church. Church leaders met in the basement, which police had cleaned, covering bullet holes.

“I was pleased when authorities made a phone call and said you can go back in Mother Emanuel,” Goff said. “The open doors of Emanuel on this Sunday sends a message to every demon in hell that no weapon formed against me shall prosper.”

Many members said they looked forward to the church opening its doors. Others were still hesitant.

“How do you bring yourself to a place where tragedy struck?” said Brandon Robinson, 26, minister of music of “Little Emanuel,” a sister church. “There is an opened wound. Someone lost a brother, a husband, a father, a sister and auntie.”

Before sunrise Sunday, sextons — keepers of the church — began clearing a path amid hundreds of flower bouquets left on the church steps by mourners. Some lit white votive candles and prayed. Others threaded long-stemmed red and pink roses through the bars of the church’s gate.

Police officers swept the church early in the morning and screened worshipers as they filed in. No backpacks were allowed in the building. At least half a dozen officers stood watch, sometimes passing out water and butterscotch candies to churchgoers.

People, shaken by the tragedy, stood looking up at the church’s white steeple and prayed.

“You have individuals across the country asking, ‘How could God allow something like this to happen?’ ” said the Rev. Branden Sweeper, 30, who was close friends with Pinckney. “Church is still the best place to be.”

“Mother Emanuel,” as members call the church founded in 1816, is one of the oldest and largest AME churches in the South. The white stucco church with towering steeples, wooden rafters and arched stained-glass windows sits in downtown Charleston on Calhoun Street. The church was the site where in 1822, Denmark Vesey, a freed slave, planned one of the biggest slave insurrections in U.S. history.

“When authorities were made aware of his plot, Vesey and a number of his followers were executed,” according to the book “African Methodism in South Carolina,” a collection of histories compiled by the AME Church.

The church was burned down by white crowds. “And even more strict regulations were imposed on Charleston’s Black Churches,” the book said. By 1834, all black churches were closed by state law. Some members of the church joined white churches, and “others continued the tradition of the African church by worshiping underground.” In 1865, Emanuel AME resurfaced with 3,000 members.

With the latest tragedy still looming large in the church Sunday, some members doubled over in grief, weeping for the victims.

“There they were in the house of the Lord studying your word, praying with one another, but the Devil also entered,” an elder said in a prayer Sunday. “And the devil was trying to take charge. But thanks be to God — hallelujah — that the devil cannot take control over your people, and the devil cannot take control of the church.”

Eartha Ugude drove eight hours Saturday from Port St. Lucie, Fla., compelled to be in the service. “I felt such a tremendous loss,” she said from her seat, 10 rows from the pulpit. “I felt helpless and tired — one more tragedy against our people.”

The shooting, she said, was cowardly. The gunman “sat amongst them.”

[Night of S.C. killings started with prayers and a plot against humanity]

Goff preached that the members should not respond to the tragedy with fear. “Do we respond by being afraid? Or do we respond in faith?” Goff asked. “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord, because it is by faith we are standing here this morning.”

Acknowledging the congregation has difficult days ahead, Goff said: “The only way evil can triumph is for good people to sit down and do nothing. We are children of God. We will march on to victory.”

The service ended with a prayer, “May the people of God say Amen.” Members who filed out of the church said they were encouraged by the sermon.

Marlene Coakley-Jenkins, whose sister Myra was killed in the church basement, said she was inspired.

“I think the message was powerful, positive and compassionate,” Coakley-Jenkins said on the church steps. “Everything the family needed at this particular time. It gave us strength and faith. It allowed us to have all the emotions that an experience like this might conjure and more.”

Someone asked her whether she was thinking of the shooter. “I pray at some point he finds God’s mercy,” she said. “God’s mercy is even there for him. We can’t afford to lose one soul on Earth. I am ready to forgive him. I have to because that would block so many blessings. Nothing grows positive out of hate.”

[This post has been updated.]",REAL
"In last Friday’s press conference, President Obama called Vladimir Putin’s incursion in Syria “an act of weakness.” It’s his pat answer when Putin misbehaves.

The White House likes to portray the Kremlin as a place filled with petulant children who don't understand what's in their own best interest and will one day rue their misguided behavior. A mixture of condescension and patience may be an appropriate tactic in child rearing. But in a dangerous world, it's a lackadaisical prescription for disaster.

Mr. Obama sees Putin's military adventure as a quagmire-in-waiting for the Kremlin. In the end, he believes, Moscow will lose more than it gains and find itself isolated and censured by the international community. This, he concludes, will leave Putin weaker than when he started.

But there’s a problem with the president's line of thinking. Actually, there are several.

First, there is no reason to believe that, just because entering a hot war in Syria is a bad idea, Putin won't pursue it with single-minded determination. After all, that is exactly what the Russian strongman did in Ukraine. Back then, Mr. Obama said it was a mistake and Putin would pay a price. And Putin did. The West tsunamied Russia with sanctions.

The problem is: Putin hasn't stopped. He is still meddling in Ukraine. He’s also messing with Georgia. In fact, most Central European countries are on Russia watch.

Second, powers inclined to “act out of weakness” can take some very dangerous and destructive steps when undeterred.

That’s what happened Dec. 7, 1941. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor out of weakness. It was a foolish and risky overreach that eventually doomed the fortune of the Axis powers. But that’s cold comfort for the 2,403 who died in the attack or the millions who had to go to war to make things right.

Sometimes it might make sense to give some actors space to ""learn their lesson."" But it’s simply irresponsible to let dangerous powers run amok in dangerous places, responding only with assurances that everything will work out in the end.

In fact, Putin is using Syria as a distraction to get Europe and the U.S. to back off on countering Moscow's mischief in Ukraine. In the Kremlin's calculus, the best way follow-up bad behavior is… more acting badly.

The White House, of course, can't really keep Moscow and Tehran from propping up Syrian not-so-strongman Bashar Assad if that is what they really want to do. In fact, Mr. Obama has effectively encouraged them to do so by negotiating at least $150 billion in sanctions relief for Iran—money that Tehran can use to bankroll the effort.

And let's face it: the Syrian civil war is going to get worse. The U.S. lacks a compelling vital interest that demands we solve the problem. Nor does it make much sense to fight it out with Moscow and Tehran over Damascus.

That said it would be wrong to ignore this disaster. And it would be wrong to condone Putin's irresponsible military gambit to bolster Assad, one of the top mass murderers of the 21st century.

Instead, the White House should be taking reasonable steps to keep the region from getting worse: bolstering allies on the frontline; working with the Europeans to stem the flow of refugees; defeating ISIS, and marginalizing Russian and Iranian influence in the region.

The president has a long Middle Eastern and European to-do list. But that’s largely the result of his failed foreign policy, which has helped empower all the wrong people while offending our best friends.

Mr. Obama has a little over a year to make amends. He needs to get started now.



James Jay Carafano is vice president of foreign and defense policy studies  The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @JJCarafano.",REAL
"News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Radio for Week of Nov. 7, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 19:35 Venezuela Hi-Tech Production in the Service of Humanity in Mississippi 
Renaissance Jackson, the organization that briefly won the mayor’s office in predominantly Black Jackson, Mississippi, has launched a campaign to purchase a coding and programming capacity and a 3-D fabrication facility. They call it “Fab Lab.” This technology, “if it is democratically controlled, could actually serve humanity,” said Cooperation Jackson spokesman Kali Akuno . These kinds of projects are crucial, “first and foremost, to satisfy some of the basic needs of our community, and -- on a deeper level -- to really put this means of production directly in our community’s hands.” High tech is “one of these areas of the so-called ‘digital divide’ that Black people have been sorely and strategically absent from,” said Akuno. “So, we are doing it for ourselves.” Obamacare “Imploding and Beyond Repair” 
The current wave of insurance rate hikes and medical service cutbacks is the predictable result of an Affordable Care Act (ACA) that “was pretty much a gift to the health insurance industry” when Congress passed it, in 2010, said Dr. John Geyman , professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. ACA “was never designed for affordability -- it’s a misnomer in the name of the bill,” he said. Obamacare is “imploding and beyond repair,” and unsustainable. “Tweeks cannot work in the long term. The main fight should be for what will save money and give universal coverage to everyone: namely, single payer national health insurance.” Dr. Geyman said single payer healthcare could save $500 billion a year -- about the same as the entire U.S. “defense” budget. The Fight for Education for Liberation in Detroit 
At a “Community Conversation on the Crisis in the Schools,” Detroit activists, educators and parents gathered to address the question: “Who Created the School Crisis, and How are We Responding to it?” Among those wrestling with the issue was Dr. Thomas Pedroni , professor of Curriculum Studies at Wayne State University. He said the decline began with the state takeover of schools in the 1990s, and worsened dramatically after the imposition of state-appointed “emergency managers.” “School could be one of the most meaningful places for our communities, but instead, it’s deadened,” Dr. Pedroni told the crowd at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. “But, we’re going to fight to get back to the place where we have culturally relevant curriculum, not just producing a test score but to develop people who are self-empowered and who know how to fight for their community.” Venezuela Weathering Financial Storm, Despite Disinformation Campaign 
“I challenge you to find one item of news that is positive to Venezuela in these last 16 or 17 years,” said Maria Paez Victor , a Venezuelan-born sociologist living in Toronto, Canada, and author of an article titled “Hating Venezuela.” Ms. Victor said the United States and its rightwing allies in Venezuela have kept up a non-stop disinformation campaign ever since the late Hugo Chavez and his Socialist Party were democratically elected in 1998. A crisis triggered by the collapse of world oil prices allowed the opposition to capture the legislature, last year, but Victor says the government is coping. “Venezuela has managed to weather a terrible financial situation, but this is bad news for corporate capitalism and for the United States, because they want Venezuela to be controlled by their lackies.” Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
"Reuters 
A juror in the trial of seven militia members charged with seizing a U.S. wildlife refuge in Oregon at gunpoint earlier this year was dismissed for bias, a federal judge said on Wednesday. 
Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case agreed to the dismissal of the juror, who formerly worked for the federal Bureau of Land Management, after U.S. District Judge Anna Brown said the juror would be questioned more closely about comments he may have made about his bias. 
“It’s a new jury, a new day, a new start,” Brown said. 
Brown said deliberations by the jury would start over. An alternate will step in for the dismissed juror. 
The attorney for Ammon Bundy, the leader of those charged, asked the court in a motion on Wednesday morning to dismiss the juror in question and order the jury to begin deliberations again or declare a mistrial. 
The jury’s integrity came under scrutiny on Tuesday when it sent the judge a letter saying one juror admitted being “very biased” as deliberations began last week. 
“Can a juror, a former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, who opens their remarks in deliberations by stating ‘I am very biased …’ be considered an impartial judge in this case?’ the letter stated, according to the motion by Bundy’s lawyer, Marcus Mumford. 
While it was unclear whether the supposed bias of the juror, identified as Juror No. 11, was for or against the government, Mumford had said further questioning of the person was needed. 
Brown interviewed the juror in private on Tuesday and said she found “no basis” for determining he was biased. Prosecutors had previously opposed additional interrogation of the jury.",FAKE
"While Hillary has yet to address today’s stunning letter by FBI director Comey, who reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigations has “opened” a probe into Hillary Clinton’s email as a result of “findings” on what the NYT reported was an electronic device belonging to Anthony Wiener, a clearly angry John Podesta, Clinton’s recently hacked campaign chair, issued the following statement in Response to FBI Letter to GOP Congressional Chairmen.
In response to the letter sent by FBI Director James Convey to eight Republican committee chairman in Congress, Hillary for America Chair John Podesta released the following statement Friday: 
Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comet’ declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call. In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen . Already, we have seen characterizations that the FBI is ‘reopening’ an investigation but Comey’s words do not match that characterization. Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant.
It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election. 
The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”
Source: Zero Hedge 
",FAKE
"« Previous - Next » 300 US Marines To Be Deployed To Russian Border In Norway 
It has long been a controversy for the United States often getting involved in affairs that shouldn't necessarily involve them. Many other countries believe that the United State is nothing more warmongers who lust for more power and authority over the many weaker countries throughout the world, hence the history of unwarranted wars that have taken place throughout. 
Some of these range from the Vietnam War, which was shown to have been a basis that never existed in the Gulf of Tonkin event. Another infamous event includes the idea to invade Iraq, which included the destruction of many innocent people, but did not assist in any way for any other country. It created more hatred however. Troops From US May Open Up Shop In Norway 
Despite all this, it is now being believed that US troops may be joining their NATO ally in Norway by stationing troops in the country of Norway. It is expected to involve over 300 marines going to Norway. This is troubling as it is the first time foreign troops have come to the country, since the devastating events of World War ll. Could this possibly be a preparation for World War lll, if the United States is coming to a country that is near Russia? 
It could affect Norway as the Defense Minister has expressed serious concern regarding the Russian military, which has continued to flex its muscles through the takeover of many smaller countries with mere ease. Norway has come under some fire about the decision to involve the United States as some believe this is not a good signal to show to someone that opposes them as it looks like they are welcoming the idea of a war . 
Some also believe that Norway should try to defend itself by reinforcing its own army rather than involving the United States troops to give them a helping hand. Some also believe that it makes them look rather weak if they are instantly calling upon their strongest ally in the United States to help them as soon as they start to have a fear of a certain situation. 
What remains unknown is what may develop upon stationing these troops. Is World War lll on the cusp of existence with the strategic and sudden move by Norway? Hopefully not, because this could easily be as devastating as all of the other wars combined, given the advancement of fighting techniques. 
This article (300 US Marines To Be Deployed To Russian Border In Norway) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
"Jordanian fighter pilots carried out devastating sorties against ISIS early Thursday, making good on their king's vow of vengeance for the horrific burning death of a captured airman -- whose hometown the jets buzzed triumphantly after the mission.

Reports from the Middle East said the latest strikes killed 55 members of ISIS, including a senior commander known as the “Prince of Nineveh.” They came a day after King Abdullah stepped up his angry rhetoric at the terrorist army in neighboring Iraq and Syria following the horrific death of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, who was burned alive in a cage in a shocking atrocity caught on a videotape released by Islamic State on Tuesday.

""The blood of martyr Muath al-Kaseasbeh will not be in vain and the response of Jordan and its army after what happened to our dear son will be severe,"" said King Abdullah in a statement released by the royal court on Wednesday. A day earlier, he told U.S. lawmakers in Washington, where he had been on a diplomatic mission when the video was released, that Jordan would fight Islamic State until it ran ""out of fuel and bullets.""

Jordanian state-run media did not specify where the strikes took place, but U.S. officials told Fox News the strikes by 20 Jordanian F-16s took place at Thursday at 1 p.m. local time near the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, and said “lots of ammunition” was expended. They said U.S. Air Force flew air refuellers and radar jammers in support.

Jordan had previously been divided on its participation in airstrikes against Islamic State, with many questioning why the country was involving itself in the fight. But rage expressed on the street and given clear voice by the king has shown public sentiment in Jordan, where the military is revered, is solidly behind the newly invigorated campaign.

Jordan’s information minister, Mohammad al-Momani told AFP: Amman was “more determined than ever to fight the terrorist group Daesh,” using another name for Islamic State, which is also commonly referred to as ISIS. And a government spokesman said Jordan would step up its role in the U.S.-led fight against the militant group.

Thursday's airstrikes came just hours after Jordan executed two militant prisoners in response to the killing of Kasseasbeh. But the pilot’s father told Reuters the two executions were not enough to avenge his son’s death.

""I want the state to get revenge for my son's blood through more executions of those people who follow this criminal group that shares nothing with Islam,"" Safi al-Kasseasbeh told Reuters.

The returning fighter jets roared over Al-Kaseasbeh's hometown in southern Jordan as the king paid a condolence visit to the pilot's family, and the monarch, himself a former general and special forces commander, pointed at the planes as he sat next to the pilot's father.

Abdullah has said Jordan's response ""will be harsh because this terrorist organization is not only fighting us, but also fighting Islam and its pure values.""

In prepared remarks delivered in Washington Thursday by Jordan's ambassador to the U.S., Abdullah said the global Muslim community is the primary target of terrorists in the Middle East.

“These criminals aim to stamp out life and rights everywhere. Their hate and murder has reached Asia, Europe, Africa, America and Australia,"" Abdullah said. ""By the brutal killing of their prisoners and captives, they seek to hold families across the world hostage to their cruelty.""

The Guardian reported that radio and television stations played patriotic songs and F-16 jets performed flyovers over the capital and Al-Kaseasbeh's hometown.

""I swear to God we will kill all those pigs,"" one man said of the terror group. ""Whatever it takes to finish them is what we will do.""

""We are all Hashemites and we are following the government with no reservations in this fight against these godless terrorists,"" a cafe patron, Yousf Majid al-Zarbi, told the paper. ""Have you seen that video? I mean really, how in humanity could this be a just punishment for any person?""

Jordan had previously been thought to be home to thousands of supporters of ISIS. The kingdom is beset by several social problems, including a sharp economic downturn that has led to high unemployment among young men, who are typically a reservoir of potential ISIS recruits. Adding to a potentially destabilizing mix are the presence of hundreds of thousands of war refugees from Iraq and Syria who have poured across the border in the preceding decade.

In recent months, Jordanian authorities have rounded up dozens of suspected ISIS supporters. In an early response to the grisly video, Jordan executed two Iraqi Al Qaeda prisoners, Sajida al-Rishawi and Zaid al-Karbouly, before sunrise Wednesday.

In Washington, lawmakers from both parties have called on the Obama administration to speed up deliveries of aircraft parts, night-vision equipment and other weapons to Jordan.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he expected his panel to swiftly approve legislation calling for increased aid. He repeated his criticism that the Obama administration has ""no strategy"" for dealing with the Islamic State group, and said he hoped the video of Al-Kaseasbeh's death will galvanize not only U.S. leadership but ""the Arab world.""

All 26 members of the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that Jordan's situation and the unanimity of the coalition battling the extremists ""demands that we move with speed to ensure they receive the military materiel they require.""

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest said the administration would consider any aid package put forward by Congress, but that the White House would be looking for a specific request from Jordan's government.

Fox News' Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"November 4, 2016 - Fort Russ News -  RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski -  


As previously reported by Russian Spring, ISIS’ media wing, and the Al-Amak agency, on the evening of November 3rd, a Russian helicopter was shot down near Palmyra in the Khveisis village district in the Syrian province of Homs.  
Later, the Ministry of Defense of Russia denied reports that Russian servicemen were killed. The ministry did confirm that during the execution of a special operation on humanitarian cargo delivery on November 3rd, a Russian military helicopter made an emergency landing 40 kilometers northwest of Palmyra and its crew was successfully evacuated by Russian search and rescue forces.  
Earlier, ISIS terrorists reported that the Russian armed force’s helicopter was shot down by a guided missile.  
The terrorists have just published footage of the rescue operation and the destruction of the Mi-35 helicopter in the desert near Palmyra. The video and photos clearly show Russian special forces on armored Tiger cars and KamA3 “Vystrel” evacuating the crew with an Mi-8 military transport helicopter. 


During the rescue helicopter’s takeoff, the damaged Mi-35 exploded, after which special forces orderly left the scene on armored vehicles and in the Mi-8. The rescue helicopter shot flares to protect against MPADS. 
On social networks, it has been suggested that the helicopter could have been detonated by special forces because of the impossibility of taking it back to base. According to another theory, the Mi-35 exploded after being hit by an MPAD rocket fired by militants. 
The Center for Reconciliation of Warring Parties in Syria subsequently reported the details of the emergency situation: “During the inspection of the helicopter by the crew on the scene, the landing area was subjected to mortar fire by militants. The helicopter was damaged, preventing it from independently returning to its air base.”  
The Russian defense ministry also specified that the Mi-35 crew did not suffer and was rapidly evacuated by the search and rescue helicopter to the Russian military base at Hmeimim in the province of Latakia. At the time, the fate of the damaged aircraft was not known. 

The Mi-35 combat helicopter was alleged to have been carrying out the military task of covering a transport helicopter delivering humanitarian aid.  


    








     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
                                                   

       Follow us on Twitter! 
                               

             Donate! 
",FAKE
"You are here: Home / US / The Sad Evolution Of Education Summed Up By One Meme The Sad Evolution Of Education Summed Up By One Meme October 26, 2016 Pinterest 
Robert Gehl reports that the City of Portland has come up with a genius idea to get America’s schoolchildren back on track. 
With our nation’s educational system in shambles and our students doing worse and worse compared with other nations (worse than Slovakia? ), school officials have decided to ban homework. 
That’s the big plan from folks whose city has the most strip bars per capita and whose motto is: “Keep Portland Weird.” 
The plan – to ban all homework in elementary schools – went into effect with the start of school this week. 
Instead, OregonLive reports , here is what the school tells students to do with their free time: “Cuddle with your parents. Play board games with your siblings. Pick up a favorite book to read or be read to. Run around and be as active as you can.” 
Officials claim that giving young kids homework doesn’t help their test scores at all … 
Why ban homework? A team of teachers at Cherry Park Elementary in the David Douglas school district in East Portland dug into the research and found that, while high school students learn more when they do homework, for elementary pupils, there is little to no evidence homework does any good. 
But further down, we discover the true motive behind their homework ban: Racism . 
Principal Kate Barker says assigning regular homework isn’t a fabulous idea at any elementary school, but especially not at Cherry Park, where at least 75 percent of students live at or below the poverty line and families speak more than 30 different languages. 
“We find that homework really increases that inequity,” Barker said. “It provides a barrier to our students who need the most support.” 
That’s right. They’re not saying homework doesn’t help. What they’re saying – and trust me, I’m a teacher – is that homework doesn’t help poor people (they mean minorities) and that if it doesn’t help poor people, then nobody should do it. 
The truth is that lower-income families have less time to spend with their children – making sure they do their homework, helping them with it. So fewer of the lower-income, minority kids do it. 
So rather than find a way to get these parents to spend more time helping their kids, they’re giving up and just banning homework altogether. 
Barker says the school will carefully monitor if students are making enough academic progress and will tweak things if they are not. But making better use of the school day, not assigning homework, will be the strategy if change is needed, she said. 
Teachers got on board with the no-homework policy once the rationale was explained, Barker said. Parents have been 100 percent in favor of the change. 
And the students? They, she said, “are cheering.” 
And that’s why our school system is failing. 
Keeping Portland weird. Weird and stupid.",FAKE
"The White House is emphasizing President Barack Obama’s willingness to take executive action to meet one of his earliest campaign promises – closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a rhetorical shift that suggests growing recognition that Congress is unlikely to take the steps needed to shutter the controversial facility.",REAL
"November 12, 2016 2703 German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said the US president-elect needs to understand NATO is more about values than business-like behavior. Share on Facebook 
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen is in panic mode. Her fear is that Trump may actually call out NATO’s uselessness…and that would mean Germany, and other NATO freeloaders, may actually have pay for their own security. 
That is why, when von der Leyen warns Trump to not even think about rapprochement with Russia, she is signaling her fear that such a rapprochement would mean the end of her and her war hungry cronies. 
When von der Leyen tells Trump that NATO stood by the US after the 9/11 attacks, and that NATO “isn’t just a business,” she is trying to kiss Trump’s ass, and admitting that NATO is in fact a “business.” 
And of course no NATO grand standing would be complete without the exhausted and fictional argument that NATO is actually useful in countering Moscow on Syria and Ukraine. 
RT reports … 
Appearing on the ZDF Thursday show ‘Maybrit Illner’, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen emotionally argued that the US president-elect needs to understand NATO is more about values than business-like behavior. 
She also went on to address some unfounded speculation circulating in Western capitals, namely that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are in a ‘bromance’ – a kind of relationship between the two leaders that would benefit bilateral ties between Moscow and Washington. 
Therefore, the Defense Minister continued, the issues of the Ukrainian conflict and the ongoing anti-terrorist efforts in the Syrian city of Aleppo are not to be taken off the table during discussions with Moscow. 
Here are some of von der Leyen remarks to Trump with regard to NATO… 
“What his advisers will hopefully tell him and what he needs to learn is that NATO isn’t just a business. It’s not a company.” 
“I don’t know how he values NATO.” 
“You can’t say ‘the past doesn’t matter, the values we share don’t matter’ but instead try to get as much money out of [NATO] as possible and whether I can have a nice deal out of it,” 
“Donald Trump has to say clearly on which side he is. Whether he is on the side of the law, peaceful order and democracy or whether he does not care about this and is looking instead for a best buddy.” 
For his part, Trump has been lukewarm on the whole NATO charade…and rightly so. RT reminds us of what Trump has said about NATO … 
During his election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly voiced skepticism towards the bloc, calling it “obsolete” in the era of fighting terrorism worldwide. 
“Maybe NATO will dissolve and that’s OK, not the worst thing in the world,” he said earlier. 
Trump, however, earlier dismissed claims he favors Putin both personally and as a political leader, saying on NBC in September: 
“I don’t know him, I know nothing about him really. I just think if we got along with Russia that’s not a bad thing.” 
Trump has also suggested that the US should not engage too much in defending European allies. 
“Hey, NATO allies,” Trump wrote in a Facebook post in July, “If we are not reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting you, I will tell you – congratulations, you will be defending yourself.” ",FAKE
"(CNN) President Barack Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the United States would ""reassess"" aspects of its relationship with Israel after Netanyahu's provocative statements leading up to Tuesday's Israeli election.

The phone call Thursday was officially described as a message of congratulations on Netanyahu's victory, but it also carried a serious warning after the prime minister opposed the creation of a Palestinian state in the last days of his campaign.

""The President told the Prime Minister that we will need to re-assess our options following the Prime Minister's new positions and comments regarding the two state solution,"" according to a White House official.

According to an official statement put out after the call, the president also emphasized the United States' ""long-standing commitment to a two-state solution"" during their conversation.

Earlier Thursday, Netanyahu walked back his disavowal of a two-state solution, a position he endorsed in an effort to appeal to right-wing voters with polls showing him facing tough competition.

U.S. officials had already said that they have been waiting to see if Netanyahu would stand behind the campaign comments nixing a Palestinian state as he moves toward forming a governing coalition.

It took two days for Netanyahu's about face.

""I don't want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution,"" Netanyahu said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell. ""I haven't changed my policy.""

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, speaking before the call, had stopped short of saying that the U.S. reassessment would include offering support for a U.N. resolution calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The resolution is opposed by Jerusalem, but U.S. officials have floated it as a possibility in the wake of Netanyahu's remarks.

Asked by Israeli news site NRG on Monday if he was ruling out the formation of a Palestinian state while he's prime minister, Netanyahu responded, ""Indeed."" He also blasted the idea of such a state given the security challenges facing Israel.

Netanyahu's comments Monday were seen as a key part to his Tuesday election victory but also ""raised significant concerns"" with senior administration officials back in Washington, who view ruling out a two-state solution as a significant setback for U.S.-Israel relations as it goes against more than a decade of American policy.

On Thursday, Netanyahu said his comments were a reflection of changing conditions on the Palestinian side, pointing to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's pact to form a unity government with Hamas, which Israel, the U.S. and most European countries consider a terrorist organization. He put the onus on Palestinian leaders to create conditions favorable for peace.

""I'm talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable,"" Netanyahu said Thursday. ""If you want to get peace, you've got to get the Palestinian leadership to abandon their pact with Hamas and engage in genuine negotiations with Israel.""

Netanyahu said he supports the same conditions for negotiating a sustainable peace that he staked out in 2009: a demilitarized Palestinian state whose leadership recognizes Israel as a Jewish state.

Netanyahu also walked back another controversial campaign remark, in which he urged his supporters to go out to counteract the effect of Arab voters who he said were rushing to the polls ""in droves.""

Earnest on Thursday said those comments ""erode at the values that are critical to the bond between our two countries.""

""I wasn't trying to suppress the vote ... I was calling on our voters to come out,"" Netanyahu said. ""I'm very proud to be the prime minister of all Israel's citizens.""

Netanyahu went on to say that he drew support from ""quite a few Arab voters"" and spoke of ""free and fair elections"" in Israel that aren't commonplace in the rest of the Middle East.

Netanyahu also shrugged off the criticism of the Obama administration.

The Israeli prime minister pointed to the ""unbreakable bond"" between the U.S. and Israel and downplayed strains in his personal relationship with Obama.

""America has no greater ally than Israel and Israel has no greater ally than the United States,"" Netanyahu said. ""We'll work together. We have to.""",REAL
"Trump Votes Are Being Flipped To Clinton There have already been multiple reports of faulty electronic voting machines The Alex Jones Show - October 28, 2016 Comments 
The election fraud is already being documented with many votes for Donald Trump flipping to Hillary Clinton. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
"President Barack Obama will play host to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Washington, D.C. next week, the White House announced Monday.

Ms. Merkel will visit the White House on Feb. 9, where she and the president are expected to discuss issues like Russia, Ukraine, counterterrorism and the challenges in the broader Middle East. The two leaders will have an Oval Office meeting followed by a working lunch.",REAL
"""It depends on what comes next,"" Pelosi told CNN's Jake Tapper in an interview set to air in full Sunday on ""State of the Union.""

Pelosi, who has been the top House Democrat opposite Boehner at the negotiating table since Boehner took the helm of the House GOP caucus in 2007, called Boehner a ""very fine person.""

Boehner announced Friday that he has decided to resign his seat in Congress effective Oct. 30.

""We can agree to disagree without being negative about each other. But, uh, yeah, I don't know if I'll miss him,"" Pelosi said. ""We just work. We barely have time for our close friends and some of our close friends are across the aisle.""

But as hardline conservatives within the House GOP caucus eye Boehner's exit as an opportunity to install a new House speaker who will be more intransigent on conservative causes and less willing to compromise with Democrats, Boehner's absence could also signal a more difficult legislative process for Democrats. While Pelosi and Boehner have engaged in numerous partisan spats over the years, Boehner ultimately drew fire from tea party conservatives in his party who wanted him to take a harder line in negotiations with Democrats -- believing that he was too quick to compromise. Just a day before Boehner announced his resignation, the top House Democrat and Republican together enjoyed the visit of Pope Francis. The two are both devout Catholics and Pelosi noted Boehner's role in helping to organize the visit. ""He had his glorious moment with the Pope coming this week. He is a devout Catholic,"" Pelosi said.",REAL
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 13 + 12 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
"Why Obama Has His Work Cut Out For Him On Getting Trade Votes

The Obama administration finds itself in the rare position of fighting alongside House Republicans this week as it tries to overcome Friday's stinging defeat to its massive trade package, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The defeat came when Speaker John Boehner split the president's agenda that passed the Senate in May into two parts: one was Trade Promotion Authority, also known as fast-track — a law that allows Obama to negotiate the deal, then have Congress pass it with an up-or-down vote, with no debate. The other was Trade Adjustment Assistance, a safety net aimed at retraining any U.S. workers who might lose their jobs as a result of the new trade package.

The simplified version of what happened is this: Democrats really like TAA. Republicans like TPA. Boehner split them into separate votes, hoping Dems and Republicans would vote for the respective parts they liked. The Obama administration really needs TPA to negotiate the trade deal, and so to torpedo the whole deal, Democrats voted down the worker assistance package in huge numbers.

So now, there's nothing to do but wait. The House voted today to give themselves until July 30 to get the votes they need to get the package passed. And by the numbers, it's clear that Obama and the House GOP have their work cut out for them in procuring those votes.

In an extremely polarized Congress, that's an unusually haphazard-looking mix of votes. To understand exactly who voted how and why, we've broken the vote down into four groups.

No on both: 143 Democrats, 49 Republicans

Who they are: Liberal democrats (including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi) and conservative Republicans.

What it means: The Democrats that have tended to be against TPP have also tended to be more liberal Dems — like Maryland's Donna Edwards and Minnesota's Keith Ellison — who have no problem breaking with President Obama. This group of House Dems are so against TPP that they were willing to sink TAA, a policy Dems tend to like. The other thing that makes this group notable? It's huge — 143 Democrats voted no on both parts of a deal the administration badly wants to pass. The question is how many (if any) Obama can peel away from this group, given that Rep. Pelosi herself, House minority leader, was willing to break with him.

The Republicans on this side, meanwhile, include many members of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of lawmakers trying to swing their leadership's agenda even further to the right, like Idaho's Raul Labrador and Michigan's Justin Amash. These Republicans who voted against the trade agenda have given a mix of reasons — they're concerned about jobs, they think the deal is too secretive, and they simply don't want to give Obama more power, for example.

Yes on both: 27 Democrats, 81 Republicans

Who they are: Pro-TPP Republicans, Obama allies, and members in centrist, contested districts.

What it means: This group includes Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the loudest supporters of TPP over the last few months. Among the few Democrats was Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee, falling in line behind Obama, and more centrist Dems like Texas' Henry Cuellar and California's Jim Costa. It also notably contains a few lawmakers facing tough reelection challenges from the other party next year — Nebraska Democrat Brad Ashford and Republicans Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Iowa's Rod Blum, and Illinois' Bob Dold. Voting for both TPA and TAA may be a way for these lawmakers to show they're capable of reaching out across the aisle.

This group also notably includes some Democrats — Kathleen Rice of New York and Ami Bera of California — who took heat from labor for their support. Labor ran ads in those states slamming those lawmakers, even saying they didn't mind if a Republican won in Bera's district, as Politico reported.

No on worker assistance, yes on fast-track: 1 Democrat, 109 Republicans

Who they are: John Boehner and the largest chunk of Republicans.

What it means: There's a reason virtually no Democrats (save Texas' Ruben Hinojosa) voted this way — this is the vote for what Republicans wanted and against the Democrat-friendly portion of the bill. Republicans have in the past viewed TAA as an expensive, ineffective, necessary evil for getting trade deals passed, as AEI's Alex Brill wrote after the vote. These are the lawmakers who took the opportunity to make it clear they see TAA as unnecessary.

Yes on worker assistance, no on fast-track: 13 Democrats, 5 Republicans

Who they are: Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and a dozen other Dems, plus a few moderate Republicans.

What it means: This tiny, Democrat-dominated group did what Boehner had expected many Dems would do — they took the opportunity to vote for worker assistance and against Trade Promotion Authority, thinking that even if a trade deal they didn't like passed, they would at least be supporting the policy they do like.

Now, there's potentially a month and a half for Obama and pro-TPP Republicans to try to get the votes they need on TAA. But not everyone is optimistic. As Maryland Democratic Rep. and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer told reporters on Tuesday, ""There's more time now. Now, whether there's – six weeks, that's what we're talking about, six, seven weeks approximately – whether there's sufficient time to bridge the gaps is probably questionable.""",REAL
"Taki's Magazine October 28, 2016 
This election is going to have unprecedented political infidelity. A good 20 percent of husbands for Trump predict their wife won’t vote with them. This is wrong for a number of reasons but the biggie is, a family is supposed to be a cohesive unit. He can’t have his better half canceling out his vote. Even if a husband wants to vote badly—say, for Hillary—his wife should stand by her man and make the same mistake. Nobody’s saying there can’t be discussions and women shouldn’t have their own political beliefs, but the final decision comes down to the guy paying the bills and she should abide by that. This is counterintuitive because we live in a feminist fantasyland, but it’s really the same as deciding where your family is going to live. A married couple agree where they’re going to go based on what’s best for the kids. If he gets an amazing job offer in Cleveland but she’s a city gal from Manhattan, she needs to accept that Ohio is best for the future of their family. Voting is the same. You’re deciding where the country is going to go based on what’s best for future generations. 
Unfortunately, this is not happening. A map of America “if just men voted” is almost completely red, whereas a map of America “if just women voted” is almost completely blue. The maps don’t differentiate between married and single, but judging by this massive split in what gender likes what candidate, we can assume the married map would be similar. Single people are a lost cause anyway. The women vote almost exclusively out of spite. They are voting for Hillary because she has a pussy, they hate Trump because he grabbed one, and they elected Obama because he makes theirs wet (they elected Trudeau because he is one). As for single men, I’m not convinced they even vote . There are also stay-at-home dads and situations where the woman is the breadwinner. This is awkward, but if you’ve made her the patriarch then her husband (a.k.a. wife) needs to vote with her. For the most part, however, we’re talking about a home where the father makes the lion’s share of the money and the woman’s contribution is using her magic powers to make babies. They have a symbiotic relationship where they’re both utilizing their greatest strengths. Patriarchs are best at driving, so he’s the helmsman. He doesn’t want to fight about it because he doesn’t want to rock the boat, but for her to turn starboard while he’s going port is to split everything in half and now the whole family is drowning. Voting against your husband is a tiny divorce. The Best of Gavin McInnes Tags: Described as ""The Godfather of Hipsterdom,"" Canadian expat Gavin McInnes is a writer who cofounded Vice Magazine in 1994. After selling his shares in early 2008, he cofounded the website Street Carnage as well as the advertising agency Rooster New York where he serves as creative director. He is a regular on the Fox News show Red Eye and recently published a book of memoirs with Simon & Schuster entitled How to Piss in Public. Follow @Gavin_McInnes on Twitter.",FAKE
"Donald Trump would not commit Wednesday night to accepting the results of the presidential election if he loses on Nov. 8, in a striking moment during his final debate with Hillary Clinton that underscored the deepening tensions in the race – as the bitter rivals defined the choice for voters on an array of issues not three weeks from Election Day.

The debate in Las Vegas, moderated by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, started with a measured discussion on policy disputes ranging from gun rights to abortion to immigration. But it ended with the candidates hurling a grab-bag of accusations and insults at each other.

Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman.” Clinton called Trump the “most dangerous” person to run for president in modern history.

The most pointed moment came when Trump – who for weeks has warned of a “rigged” election – was asked whether he will commit to accept the results of the election.

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said, citing his concerns about voter registration fraud, a “corrupt media” and an opponent he claimed “shouldn’t be allowed to run” because she committed a “very serious crime” with her emails.

Pressed again whether he’s prepared to concede if he loses, Trump again said: “I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”

“That is not the way our democracy works,” she said. “He is denigrating, he’s talking down our democracy and I for one am appalled.”

Trump responded by calling the Justice Department’s handling of her email probe “disgraceful.”

The exchange was among many contentious moments at Wednesday’s debate, which covered several issues including the national debt that have gotten little attention in the race so far – but flared with arguments between the candidates over WikiLeaks, over Russia, over the Clinton Foundation and over women’s allegations of groping against Trump.

Through the thicket of accusations and personal animus – they never shook hands on stage – the candidates tried generally to mount a closing debate-stage argument about experience.

“For 30 years, you’ve been in a position to help. … The problem is you talk, but you don’t get anything done, Hillary,” Trump said. “If you become president, this country is going to be in some mess, believe me.”

Clinton countered by contrasting some of her experiences against Trump’s. She said when she was monitoring the Usama bin Laden raid in the Situation Room, “He was hosting ‘The Celebrity Apprentice.’”

“I’m happy to compare my 30 years of experience … with your 30 years, and I will let the American people make that decision,” Clinton said.

Trump, meanwhile, again disputed the multiple allegations of groping that women have leveled against him since the candidates’ last encounter. He also said he thinks the Clinton campaign is behind the claims, charging, “They either want fame or her campaign did it.”

Clinton said, “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger.” Trump repeated that “nobody has more respect for women” than him.

Trump then shifted to blast the Clinton Foundation as a “criminal enterprise.” He pointed to donations from countries like Saudi Arabia to question Clinton’s commitment to women’s rights. He asked her if she would return money from countries that treat certain “groups of people horribly,” which she did not answer directly.

The candidates’ third and final debate now sets a bitter tone for the homestretch of the 2016 presidential campaign – a race that already stands out as arguably the most personal, caustic and unpredictable White House battle in modern politics.

Trump, slipping in the polls amid various campaign controversies, said at the last debate that Clinton should be in jail. Clinton has blasted Trump all along as temperamentally unfit for office.

Since the second debate, numerous women have come forward to accuse Trump of groping them, allegations he denies. WikiLeaks also has embarrassed the Clinton campaign by releasing thousands of hacked emails purportedly from her campaign chairman’s account. FBI files alleging a State Department official sought a “quid pro quo” to alter the classification on a Clinton server email added to the campaign’s – and Obama administration’s – woes.

The WikiLeaks controversy came up Wednesday night when Clinton asked if Trump would “condemn” Russian espionage. He denied knowing Vladimir Putin but said the issue is the Russian president has “no respect” for her.

“That’s because he’d rather have a puppet,” Clinton shot back.

Trump later said he condemns any interference by Russia in the election.

The candidates also sparred over gun rights, with the Republican nominee charging that the Second Amendment is “under absolute siege” and would be eroded if his opponent wins.

“We will have a Second Amendment which will be a very, very small replica of what we have now” if Clinton wins, Trump said.

The Democratic nominee countered, “I support the Second Amendment.”

In a graphic exchange, Trump said Clinton’s position on abortion is nearing a point where one could “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month.” Clinton accused him of “scare rhetoric.”

They also clashed on immigration, with Trump saying they need to deport “drug lords” and deal with “bad hombres” in the country. Clinton said violent offenders should be deported but then mocked Trump for not pushing his controversial border wall proposal during his high-profile meeting with the Mexican president. “He choked,” she said.

Trump said Clinton “wanted a wall” when she voted for an immigration overhaul a decade ago – and now wants “open borders,” which she denied.

To date, the mounting controversies facing both campaigns have appeared to hurt Trump more than Clinton, who gradually has expanded her lead over the GOP nominee in recent polls.

A Fox News national poll released on the eve of the Las Vegas debate showed Clinton with a 6-point, 45-39 percent lead over Trump in a match-up that includes Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Trump, in the final three weeks, is thought to be zeroing in on several key battlegrounds including Florida, Ohio and North Carolina – but the polls suggest his path to the presidency remains narrow, as even once-reliably red states like Texas are being contested by the Clinton campaign.",REAL
"An anti-abortion protester stands with a sign at Boulder County Justice Center, in Boulder, Colo., Friday, March 27. A recent survey on abortion policy shows that despite what media coverage, politicians, and frequent protests would have the public believe, plenty of Americans have nuanced opinions on the issue of abortion.

Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in the United States today, but public opinion may not be as black and white as it seems.

In a Vox survey on abortion policy published earlier this month, careful questioning of more than 1,000 respondents suggests that plenty of Americans identify neither as only ""pro-choice"" nor as only ""pro-life."" On the contrary, 21 percent said they were neither, while 18 percent said they were both.

The poll’s findings unearth the nuances in public opinion often neglected when the media, politicians, and other opinion surveys frame the abortion debate as purely two-sided. The poll could also open up discussion about the issue in ways that – as Fordham University ethicist Charles Camosy put it – involves critical thinking, and takes into account the importance of precise language and constructive engagement when tackling such sensitive subjects as the life of an unborn child and a woman’s rights concerning her body.

“We’ve framed our abortion debate all wrong. It isn’t black and white – it’s thousands of different shades of gray that exist somewhere in the middle,” Vox senior editor Sarah Kliff wrote. “This matters because by ignoring that gray space, we miss something important: there are abortion policies that a majority of Americans could agree on.”

The majority of respondents, for instance, said that they would want to hear from elected officials of both genders talking about the issue. Nearly 70 percent would not want a woman to feel ashamed to admit if she had an abortion. But when asked about abortion being completely illegal or legal, and given various options in between, the largest percentage (34) chose this answer: ""Abortion should only be legal in cases of rape, abuse, or if the woman’s health is at risk.""

A big challenge to moving the abortion debate forward is overcoming the stereotypes that have evolved as a result of years of framing the discussion in binary terms such as ""pro-life"" versus ""pro-choice,"" or ""liberal"" versus ""conservative,"" according to Mr. Camosy, who teaches Christian ethics at Fordham in the Bronx and wrote, “ Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation.”

“It is no secret that popular media have a real struggle communicating complexity,” Camosy wrote. “Thus they struggle not only to accurately describe what Americans think about abortion, but also the complex reasons many women have abortions … the reality for women is far messier and cannot be captured by a headline or Tweet.”

In other words, there’s room for discussion beyond yes or no, pro or anti. And that may be a lesson applicable to other issues, such as immigration, that appear to have divided the nation.

In an op-ed for news magazine The Week, for example, journalist Damon Linker pointed out that looking at only two sides of the immigration debate tends to lead exactly where it has gone so far: Nowhere. A viable policy, he wrote, is one that is based neither solely on moral grounds, which would give anyone who shows up at the border full citizenship, nor on the tenets of exclusivism, which would oppose the ideals of the US Constitution.

“What we're left with, then, is a position situated somewhere between the universalists and the tribalists,” Mr. Linker wrote. “We need a tightly controlled border, but with relatively liberal quotas for legal immigration, some allowances made for humanitarian refugees, and a path to citizenship for those already here. We can and should debate precisely how liberal those quotas should be, how many refugees to let in, and how arduous to make the path to citizenship.”

The path to useful policies thus lies in how we approach an issue, Camosy wrote. In the abortion debate, he added, that means avoiding using words and phrases – “radical feminist,” “war on women,” “anti-science,” or “heretic” – that lead to rhetorical victories at the cost of understanding.

Promoting meaningful discussion also requires humility and, instead of assuming the other side has a secret personal agenda, giving them the courtesy of listening to their arguments.

Such practices, Camosy wrote, “often reveals that many of us are ultimately after very similar things (such as women being able to choose to keep their baby) and we simply need to be able to talk in an open and coherent way about the best plan for getting there.”",REAL
"Email Ever wonder what’s on the mind of today’s most notable people? Well, don’t miss our unbelievable roundup of the best and most talked about quotes of the day: “ The government likes to get a bunch of people in a room and decide what’s best for us. If I were running the show, I’d have way less people and let them each have their own room. ” —Reba McEntire On government “ People ask me if I would do another Sister Act movie. All the time they ask me, pleading with me to do the film. They storm my dressing room on The View to throw the nun costume in my face. I find DVDs of Sister Act in my trunk, in my mail, sometimes in my drawers! I want to give the people what they want, but sometimes I’m not sure they really want what they think they want, you know? ” —Whoopi Goldberg On the responsibility of fame “ We hold our hands together in prayer in the hopes that God will put a dollar bill—which we signed beforehand—in between our palms, so that when we open them we can be amazed and delighted. So far it seems this privilege has only been granted to the pope. ” —Pope Francis",FAKE
"Was California The Last Weekend At Bernie's House Of Hope?

The legendary Route 66 wound its way from middle America to Southern California, a ribbon of aspiration ending on a pier reaching out into the Pacific from the coastal town of Santa Monica.

That pier still exists, a symbol of America's hopeful journey west and a touchstone for politicians such as Bernie Sanders, who brought his grandchildren there on Sunday.

Whatever happens Tuesday in California and the other states still voting, Sanders had a marvelous time on the last weekend when he could sell his dream of being the Democratic nominee for president.

That may sound harsh to the legions of Bernie Believers for whom the dream may never die. This weekend, they listened with faith to a candidate who could still speak of prospects, possibilities and promise. There was still a way to win.

But over the same weekend, Hillary Clinton almost reached her magic number of 2,383 delegates with the vote tallies in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Barring an utter collapse by her forces across the board on Tuesday, she will garner, on that night, the delegates needed for a first-ballot nomination in Philadelphia in July.

Sanders probably knows this as clearly as Clinton herself. He should be able to assess his predicament as easily as any observer who is paid to see the numbers with clear eyes.

But it also remains absolutely essential for any underdog in Sanders' position to maintain, to the very end, that the goal is within sight, victory can still be won. Without that hope, supporters will not be energized and engaged. And without energized and engaged supporters on this last Big Tuesday, everything Sanders has achieved in a year of campaigning might be in jeopardy.

A disappointing final day of multi-state voting would undercut the Sanders narrative, which is all about a populist hero vanquishing the will of the party hierarchy and slaying the dragon of the establishment.

That is why Sanders goes on feeding red meat to his stadium crowds, threatening to contest the convention and leveling accusations about coronations and rule-rigging and party corruption. He does this now because his chances of making a difference in Philadelphia depend on a strong finish in this last round of soundings of the voters' feelings.

But here is what will happen on Tuesday. By the time the New Jersey results are in, sometime after 8 p.m. in the Eastern time zone, the numbers will add up and Clinton will be the presumptive nominee. Not the official nominee, as that will depend on the convention. But she will have a clear majority of the delegates, both pledged and unpledged, reflecting the will of a clear majority of the votes cast by primary and caucus participants.

Sanders has said he will contest every last vote, including in the District of Columbia on June 14. But does anyone think he will command as much attention next weekend as he still did this past weekend?

Winning California, as Sanders may still do, will not net him enough delegates to alter the math, because the delegates will be split in proportion to the vote. That is the highly democratic model by which Democrats allocate delegates to reflect the primary voting. It means that even a fabulous Sanders breakout in the state would not prevent Clinton from winning the delegates she needs.

Only the prospect of a shocking report from the FBI probe into Clinton's use of a private email server would now seem to stand between her and a first-ballot victory at the Democratic convention.

If Sanders had some other issue in mind this weekend when he told interviewers that ""the world may look very different by the end of July,"" he did not say what it was. That is also the issue raised by the Republican Party, when it argues that Sanders is right to contest the convention. On Sunday, GOP spokesman Sean Spicer referred to the FBI probe in saying that no one should call Clinton the ""presumptive nominee.""

It might have been embarrassing for the Sanders campaign to find itself arguing in tandem with the Republicans, but such are the bedfellows of politics.

This is the moment to stop and salute what Sanders has achieved. He started as a party outsider with little national name recognition. To some extent, that anonymity helped him create his campaign in a year of national resentment against the elite and the power structure. His outsider status helped make him the focal point of a youth movement within the Democratic Party.

At his best, Sanders has wed the rebellious 1960s with the exuberance of a new generation that questions the establishment. That is a feat no one could have expected him to achieve in the polls or in the primaries and caucuses. Today, he leads in hypothetical matchups against Donald Trump by more percentage points than Clinton does. This has become his main argument for displacing Clinton as the nominee.

Who would have thought the Democratic nomination in 2016 would devolve to an argument over who might best beat Donald Trump?

Joining the Democratic Party officially for the first time, Sanders has made quite a run for that venerable institution's highest honor. But if the goal was to win by the rules, or even to win by something resembling what the rules should be, then Sanders has fallen short. He mobilized a new army, but Clinton's older version of the party prevailed.

On this last weekend in California, both candidates campaigned with vigor and an upbeat message. Sanders went to a community center in the heart of Spanish-speaking Los Angeles, and he posed for selfies with beachgoers on the Santa Monica pier. Everywhere he kept alive the notion of a contested nomination.

Clinton's many appearances included one at West Los Angeles College, a two-year community college not far from the LA airport.

At this event, she was introduced by no fewer than 17 preliminary speakers, all of them women. They included several members of Congress and an array of Hollywood actors such as Sally Fields, Elizabeth Banks and Mary Steenburgen. The crowd lasted throughout the preliminaries to cheer lustily for Clinton herself. One of those cheering and waiting for a handshake was Sarah Griebe, an events planner who lives in Los Angeles.

""I understand where Sanders supporters come from,"" said Griebe, who supported Clinton in 2008. ""It's hard when you invest so much time and energy in a candidate and they don't win. But Sanders and Clinton are pretty much on the same side. It's most important for us to continue movement forward and for the progress we've made in the last eight years to continue.""

It may be easy for the Clinton people to speak of unity at this stage of the campaign, because they see the end in sight with the nomination going to their candidate. It will be much more difficult for Sanders' troops to forget their current opposition to Clinton.

But for this one last weekend, the Sanders backers could imagine the roles reversed. And they could imagine shocking the world, eclipsing Clinton and marching on to defeat Donald Trump.",REAL
"Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria Media Roll Out Welcome Mat for ‘Humanitarian’ War in Syria By 0 49 Hillary Clinton told Goldman Sachs that a no-fly zone is “going to kill a lot of Syrians.” (cc photo: Gage Skidmore) 
As she marches toward the US presidency, Hillary Clinton has stepped up her promotion of the idea that a no-fly zone in Syria could “save lives” and “hasten the end of the conflict” that has devastated that country since 2011. 
It has now been revealed, of course, that Clinton hasn’t always expressed the same optimism about the no-fly zone in private. The Intercept (10/10/16 ) reported on Clinton’s recently leaked remarks in a closed-door speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013: 
To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. 
Other relevant characters, such as US Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Joseph Dunford ( Daily Caller , 9/26/16 ), have warned that a no-fly zone in Syria would simply intensify the conflict—which presumably isn’t the best way to hasten its end. 
Luckily for those who prefer to rally around illogic, however, plenty of media have already rolled out the welcome mat for peddlers of the “humanitarian” vision of increased Western military interference in Syria. The New York Times ‘ Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ) argues against “Obama’s paralysis” and for “more robust strategies advocated by Hillary Clinton.” 
The New York Times ’ self-appointed savior of women , Nicholas Kristof ( 10/6/16 ), invoked the plight of a young Syrian girl in Aleppo to conclude that Obama’s alleged “paralysis” on Syria “has been linked to the loss of perhaps half a million lives” in the country, as well as to “the rise of extremist groups like the Islamic State,” among other unpleasant outcomes. We have no “excuse,” we’re told, for “failing to respond to mass atrocities.” 
Never mind that the rise of ISIS has much to do with that mass atrocity known as the US invasion of Iraq, thanks to which many young Iraqi girls and other human beings have suffered rape, mutilation and death. It’s convenient for certain industries, at least, when US weapons are deemed the solution for problems US weapons helped to create in the first place. 
Furthermore, plenty of US weapons continue to flow to countries known for arming and funding ISIS and similar outfits—an arrangement unlikely to be rectified by a no-fly zone targeting the Syrian government and the Russians. 
USA Today ( 10/8/16 ), meanwhile, ran an opinion piece by an American doctor who worked briefly at a now-destroyed hospital in Aleppo, arguing that the US “should lead the way in establishing real no-fly zones, either under United Nations auspices or with the British and the French”—because “otherwise, our inaction will continue to be an embarrassment and stand as an example of our spineless irresponsibility.” 
But considering that there has already been plenty of US action in Syria—including the mistaken “pulverization” of whole families with children—it would seem we’ve already exhibited a fair amount of lethal irresponsibility. 
Beyond the opinion pages, media figures are pushing the “humanitarian” approach with varying degrees of subtlety. Meet the Press host Chuck Todd ( 10/16/16 ) recently pressed Vice President Joe Biden on the lack of a no-fly zone over Aleppo, suggesting that the Obama administration will “look back and wonder what if? What if? What if? What if?” 
Of course, no campaign for saving lives with bombs would be complete without everyone’s favorite examples of feel-good destruction from the former Yugoslavia. The Washington Post ( 9/9/16 ) hosted an opinion by Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first ambassador to the UN, Muhamed Sacirbey, straightforwardly headlined: “Western Military Intervention Saved Lives in Bosnia. It Can Work in Syria, Too.” 
Sacirbey warns that “Syria’s largest city is on the brink of starvation. Bombed from the skies and besieged on the ground, Aleppo’s 2 million residents may soon be exterminated.” Gone, apparently, are the days of factchecking, when someone at the Post might have alerted the author to the reality that the vast majority of Aleppo’s residents live in government-controlled areas and are thus not under attack by said government. 
Comparing Aleppo to besieged Sarajevo, Sacirbey determines that Sarajevans ultimately “escaped many of the horrors now awaiting Aleppo’s residents… because NATO opted (albeit belatedly and, too often, inadequately) to uphold its responsibility to protect Bosnian civilians.” 
After lauding Bosnia’s no-fly zone, Sacirbey pulls this prediction out of a hat: “Limited military intervention in Syria would save civilian lives, perhaps as many as 200 a week.” 
In their indispensable essay for Monthly Review ( 10/07 ), “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in In humanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse),” Edward S. Herman and David Peterson make it unavoidably clear that the West’s business in Bosnia had nothing to do with saving lives—and much to do with the contrary. 
The Bill Clinton administration, they note, actively sabotaged agreements to end the war at an earlier date, while “helping arm the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians and helping bring thousands of Mujahedin to fight in Bosnia.” America’s support in this case for jihadists—a secret alliance also discussed by scholar Tariq Ali ( Guardian , 9/9/06 )—further complicates the assumption that the US is somehow capable of fixing the current jihad problem. 
In predictable fashion, US media led the charge to the Bosnian intervention ( Extra! , 10-11/92 ), dutifully painting the Serbs as demonic aggressors, parroting inflated Bosnian casualty estimates and otherwise behaving as the official PR arm of the establishment. 
A similar performance was repeated shortly thereafter with Kosovo, where minimal regard was given to actual facts on the ground and the specter of Serbian-waged genocide was instead hysterically invoked. Noam Chomsky ( Monthly Review , 9/08 ) cited various reports, including from the British government, that the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army was actually responsible for more killings than the Serbs in the run-up to NATO’s bombing campaign—a project that naturally also managed to kill several thousand people. 
While Yugoslavia has now been fully dismantled, the myth of Western humanitarian intervention there has emerged unscathed; in his recent dispatch on Syria, Kristof brought up Kosovo as an example of how “the military toolbox has saved lives.” 
To be sure, “saving lives” is a much nobler goal than, say, endowing NATO with a new lease on life or clearing the way for total neoliberal assault —two outcomes of the West’s Yugoslav ventures. Hence the utility, as Herman and Peterson write, of the “edifice of lies that serves and protects the Western interventions in the former Yugoslavia—and which laid the ideological foundations for the US role in Iraq and for future so-called humanitarian interventions.” 
In Syria’s brutal war, meanwhile, humanitarian motives will presumably be utilized as a veneer for pursuing more fundamental goals, like neutralizing resistance to US/Israeli regional designs and promoting that profitable sort of chaos that produces massive arms sales. 
And just as those in the West who failed to leap onto the bandwagon in Yugoslavia were denounced as “ apologists for genocide ” and the like, opponents of increased Western military action in Syria will be increasingly assailed as pro-Assad fanatics with Syrian blood on their hands. 
One strong candidate for fanatic-hood is Greg Shupak, who in a recent Jacobin magazine dispatch ( 10/20/16 ) dared to argue that a no-fly zone “would actually represent an escalation of war that is guaranteed to harm civilians in the name of protecting them.” Emphasizing that opposition to said zone is not meant in any way “to minimize or rationalize the torture, mass killings or severe sieges enacted by the Syrian state and its allies,” Shupak continues: “The imminent question, however, is not, ‘Is the Syrian government good?’; it’s ‘Should America drop more bombs on Syria?’” 
Because, at the end of the day, humanitarian war just isn’t humanly possible.",FAKE
"November 11, 2016 Nuclear weapons: how foreign hotspots could test Trump’s finger on the trigger 
On Donald Trump’s first day in office he will be handed the “nuclear biscuit” – a small card with the codes he would need to talk to the Pentagon war room to verify his identity in the event of a national security crisis. 
Some presidents have chosen to keep the “biscuit” on them, though that is not foolproof. Jimmy Carter left his in his clothes when he sent them to the dry-cleaners. Bill Clinton had it in his wallet with his credit cards, but then lost the wallet. 
Others have chosen to give the card to an aide to keep in a briefcase, known as the “nuclear football”, together with a manual containing US war plans for different contingencies and one on “continuity of government”, where to go to ensure executive authority survives a first nuclear strike. 
The “biscuit” and “football” are the embodiment of the awesome, civilisation-ending power that will be put in Trump’s hands on 20 January. They only become relevant in very rare moments of extreme crisis, but a US president’s ability to manage crises around the world will help determine whether they become extreme.",FAKE
"Milestone House Vote Would Take Health Care Away From Millions

After dozens of votes attacking Obamacare in recent years, House Republicans' latest attempt Tuesday finally gets real.

Not in the sense that the full repeal bill will become law — it's not likely to pass the Senate and, in any event, faces a certain presidential veto even if it somehow does. What makes today a milestone is that, for the first time, House Republicans plan to vote on whether to actually take health coverage away from millions of Americans who now have it.

More precisely: 19 million of them by the end of the year, according to a recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. And with a new study showing that 60 percent of Affordable Care Act beneficiaries receiving subsidies from the federal exchange are from the South and 60 percent of them non-Hispanic whites, House Republicans would be casting votes to eliminate a program that to a large extent benefits their own constituents.

How this new reality will affect the vote count is unclear. Republicans have been solid in their opposition to the health care law. The last time the House voted to repeal the law in entirety — rather than tweak one or more small provisions — was May 16, 2013. Not a single Republican voted against it. But that was when the first enrollment period was still months away, and the vote could still largely be framed as a matter of political philosophy.

That was also before Republicans picked up 13 Democratic seats in the 2014 midterm elections, some of which are in swing districts that could swing right back to Democrats.

One of those new Republicans, in fact, could serve as the poster child for the party's potential problems with the vote: Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who represents the western suburbs of Miami, some of Florida's poorest communities. The majority-Latino district also happens to contain one ZIP code with one of the highest Obamacare enrollments in the country and is blocks away from two others.

This could be one reason why Curbelo's Spanish response to President Obama's State of the Union address last month avoided the Affordable Care Act altogether. Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, in the English response, described Obamacare as an example of ""failed policies."" Curbelo, though, spoke instead about education and the income gap — and chided Washington for not working ""toward a health economy that offers opportunities to everyone who lives in this country, not just the most privileged,"" according to a comparison done by the Miami Herald.

Other Republicans have recognized for some time that taking away access to health care for the working poor was not necessarily good politics and have advocated a ""repeal and replace"" strategy to show that the GOP also cares about the issue.

No Republican alternative to the ACA has yet emerged since the party took control of the House in 2011, and none is in today's bill, either. However, the proposal does instruct three House committees to recommend ideas to replace Obamacare, including such things as limiting medical malpractice lawsuits and giving states more flexibility in administering Medicaid.",REAL
"52 Views October 31, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
With most markets on lockdown on Halloween trading day, here is a big picture view of where the world is headed. 
Stephen Leeb: “This past week a New York Times headline that caught my eye was: “At Heart of U.S. Strategy; Weapons That Can Think.” The gist was that over the next few years the U.S. will be spending billions of dollars to make “smart” weapons, while also boosting our cyber budget by billions of dollars. It struck me as another example of how anytime we in the U.S. pound our chest about our mighty military, we always point to how much money have spent and plan to spend… IMPORTANT: To hear which legend just spoke with KWN about $8,000 gold and the coming mania in the gold, silver, and mining shares markets CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Michael O’Harlan and David Petraeus, men with exceptional military pedigrees, declare: “U.S. forces have few, if any, weaknesses and in many areas…they play in a totally different league from the militaries of other countries…Nor is this likely to change anytime soon, as U.S. defense spending is almost three times as large as that of the United States’ closest competitor, China.” 
Reassuring words? Maybe for a moment. But as soon as you think about it, they become anything but reassuring, showing that even when it comes to our most vital security issues, we make the fundamentally flawed assumption that money equates to wealth. 
I’ve long been convinced that if the U.S. continues on what appears an ever more inevitable slide, historians will point to the day Nixon dropped the gold standard as launching that skid. Gold is wealth; paper is merely money. Money can facilitate the exchange of wealth, but by itself it is just paper or entries on a computer ledger and a very poor substitute for wealth. Commodities are wealth, and many vital commodities, as we pointed in a recent interview, can’t even be purchased any more – period. Information is also wealth. And no amount of money can guarantee an edge in information. 
A few weeks ago, a 15- or 16-year-old who had recently become interested in chess wrote a letter to a chess blog asking how much he’d need to spend to become a Grand Master – how much for training, how much for practice time, coaches, etc. The only possible answer: not all the money in the world could turn a novice who’s already a teenager into a world-class player. Grand masters have a wealth of knowledge and savvy that can’t be acquired once you’re much past 7 or 8 years old. You’ve missed the boat. 
Similarly, no amount of money enabled U.S. experts to crack the cell phone of the San Bernardino terrorists. But cyber experts from Israel, which spends a lot less on cyber issues, cracked it with relative ease. Israel, along with China and Russia, are among a number of countries, mostly located in Asia, that develop the skills of their gifted children at early ages. This has left the U.S. a poor second in critical areas ranging from cyber security to super computers, which will be the most essential tools in the next generation of a gold-centered monetary system. 
Even nonbelievers should be starting to perceive the inevitability of gold replacing paper. A few metrics tell the story. First is the relationship between the dollar and economic growth. Despite the recent report of better-than-expected third-quarter GDP, the economy’s growth has been declining as the dollar has risen. In the wake of the Great Recession the dollar traded in a fairly tight range, while GDP growth in fits and starts peaked at 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014. The higher dollar has held GDP growth to less than 2 percent for the past two years. 
But commodities have begun to rise. Most major commodity indexes have climbed 10 percent or more this year. Even the temporary setback in obtaining an OPEC agreement won’t hold back real goods. Recently, for the first time since China announced its Silk Road initiative in 2013, a major article on the undertaking appeared in a major magazine, Foreign Affairs. Gal Luft , a senior advisor to the United States Energy Security Council, urged Washington to get aboard or lose out on the chance to benefit from the greatest infrastructure project in the history of civilization, many times the size of the Marshall Plan and already the destination of $1 trillion in Chinese exports this year, with dramatic growth likely for the foreseeable future. 
But instead we’re likely to continue to use our dollars in ways that bear ever less connection to real wealth. Bear in mind that any effort to hold inflation down will crumble in the face of Western economies even weaker than ours. The result is that real interest rates will remain negative, an unalloyed positive for gold. At the same time the currency used along the Silk Road will be some combination of gold, the SDR, and the yuan. As we have said before, China’s edge in critical information technologies ensures its domination in virtual currencies such as the bitcoin, which will have multiple advantages in tomorrow’s gold-based world. 
How High Will Gold & Silver Trade? How high will gold go? Much depends on how much trade the Silk Road generates. Which means that if think gold could go to five digits, you don’t need a shrink – you’re sane as can be. And let’s not overlook gold’s poor cousin, which in the end could make you even richer, silver. The energies of our future will be anchored to solar, nuclear, and wind. The solar anchor will mean that already peaking silver will become some of the scarcest wealth around. If you’re dreaming of $100 silver, your dreams will be coming true before long. 
To me it’s an ironic footnote to the Nixon years. Yes, history will record that America’s decline began when the much-maligned Nixon delinked the dollar from gold and let us conflate money and wealth. Meanwhile, though, you can make a fortune on the coming bull market in gold that will be the direct result of that decision.” 
  The Coming Super Depression,   Cyberwars, $10,000 Gold & $1,000 Silver CLICK  ",FAKE
"Sanders was on ‘Meet the Press’ again Sunday touting his polling advantage against Trump. He’s right, but there’s a key reason Hillary does worse in head-to-head matchups.

On Meet the Press, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to endorse the Republican presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, saying he would disclose his position on the presidency at a later date. On CNN, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said he would support Trump because he so strongly opposes Hillary Clinton. And on ABC’s This Week, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said it was time for Bernie Sanders to consider ending his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

In an interview on Meet the Press, Sanders sounded as if had no intention of dropping out anytime soon. Sanders said he believes he still has a chance to win the Democratic nomination by winning the California primary against Clinton.

""Right now,” Sanders said, “in every major poll, national poll and statewide poll done in the last month, six weeks, we are defeating Trump, often by big numbers, and always at a larger margin than Secretary Clinton is.""

For example, the most recent poll, the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, showed Clinton beating Trump by 3 points and Sanders beating Trump by 15 points. That means Sanders bested Clinton’s performance by 12 points. In other polls, Sanders’s lead on Clinton was less but never fell below a margin of 3 points.

Clinton has been scrutinized and attacked as a public figure for a quarter century, but Sanders—even after running for president for a year—is a relatively new figure to voters nationally. It remains to be seen how open voters will be to supporting Sanders once Republicans start airing negative attacks, especially ones that note his identification as a democratic socialist. (According to polls, being a socialist is a less attractive quality for voters than being an atheist.)

“General election polls don’t mean much until the conventions are over and you get to late summer or early fall,” said Kerwin Swint, a political scientist at Kennesaw State University. “A lot of voters don’t look at Sanders as a legitimate threat. It’s almost like he’s an imaginary candidate.”

And it’s worth adding, as Meet the Press host Chuck Todd noted, that Clinton can be expected to poll better against Trump after she officially secures the nomination and many former Sanders supporters come to her side.

Sanders also said he will continue to make the case that his positions are more in line with the Democratic base than Clinton’s.

“Our campaign is about defeating Secretary Clinton on the real issues,” he said. “I want to break up the Wall Street banks. She doesn’t. I want to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour. She wants $12 an hour. I voted against the war in Iraq. She voted for the war in Iraq. I believe we should ban fracking. She does not. I believe we should have a tax on carbon and deal aggressively with climate change. That is not her position. Those are some of the issues that I am campaigning on.”

Sanders is right about Clinton’s Iraq war vote and where she stands on breaking up the banks, a $15 minimum wage, and fracking. But is he also right about their differences on carbon tax and climate change? That claim rates Mostly True.

There’s no doubt that Sanders’s rhetoric on climate change and his plan to deal with it are aggressive and, unlike Clinton, he has advocated for a carbon tax. Clinton does, however, have a climate change plan. While some environmentalists have said it isn’t tough enough, others have given it positive reviews.

Both the Sanders and Clinton campaigns referred us to each candidate’s climate change plan. Sanders’s climate change plan is long and comprehensive. Beyond a tax on carbon, it includes an array of proposals such as banning certain drilling and mining practices; cutting tax subsidies for oil and gas companies; investing in clean energy, alternative fuels, and energy efficiency programs; and improving the national public transit system.

But some are skeptical of Clinton’s “boldness.” Pulitzer Prize-winning website InsideClimate News called Clinton’s plan ambitious but said it “falls short of bold.” The Washington Post’s editorial board said her ideas are “second best.” Environmental news magazine Grist summed up her plan as not bad but “not quite the climate hawkishness we need.”",REAL
"The head of Egypt’s forensics authority has dismissed a suggestion that the small size of the body parts retrieved since an EgyptAir plane crashed last week indicated there had been an explosion on board.

All 66 people on board were killed when the Airbus A320 crashed in the Mediterranean early on Thursday while en route from Paris to Cairo, and an international air and naval effort to hunt for the black boxes and other wreckage continues.

On Tuesday an unnamed senior Egyptian forensics official told Associated Press that he had personally examined human remains recovered from the crash site and that they suggested there had been an explosion.

Speaking on condition of anonymity he said all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small human fragments, leading him to conclude that “the logical explanation is that it was an explosion”.



He added: “There isn’t even a whole body part, like an arm or a head.”

However Egypt’s head of forensics later denounced the reports as “completely false”, state news agency Mena said.



“Everything published about this matter is completely false, and mere assumptions that did not come from the forensics authority,” Hesham Abdelhamid was quoted as saying in a statement.

Another senior forensics official told Reuters only a tiny number of remains had arrived so far and it was too early to specify whether there had been an explosion on board.

In the aftermath of the crash both the French and Egyptian leaders said that terrorism could not be ruled out, but there has been no claim of responsibility from any group.

The black box could hold clues as to why the plane crashed. Minutes earlier, smoke was detected in multiple places on board.

On Monday, the head of Egypt’s state-run provider of air navigation services, Ehab Azmy, said the plane plunged directly into the sea and challenged an account by the Greek defence minister that it made “sudden swerves” before the crash.



Azmy said radar had shown the plane was flying at its normal altitude of 37,000 feet (11,270 metres) in the minutes before it disappeared.



“That fact degrades what the Greeks are saying about the aircraft suddenly losing altitude before it vanished from radar,” he said. 



“There was no turning to the right or left, and it was fine when it entered Egypt’s [flight information region], which took nearly a minute or two before it disappeared,” Azmy added.

The Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said last week that the plane took a normal course through Greek airspace before abruptly taking sharp turns.

“The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000ft to 15,000ft and the signal was lost at around 10,000ft,” he said.

Another senior Egyptian navigation services official, Ehab Mohieeldin, meanwhile told a local broadcaster that Egyptian officials had been able to track the plane on radar for one minute before it crashed but were unable to communicate with the crew.

The same channel, CBC, was told by air accident investigator Hani Galal that the plane’s black box recorder would be analysed in Egypt if it is found intact, but would be sent abroad for analysis if it is found to be damaged.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report",REAL
"Protesters across the US were on Friday gearing up for weekend demonstrations over the election of Donald Trump, as other activists began work on plans to disrupt the Republican’s inauguration in Washington early next year.

Rowdy protests against Trump and his divisive campaign have spread to cities all over the country following his victory on Tuesday, leading to dozens of arrests and a complaint from Trump in one of his first public remarks as president-elect.

More than 10,000 people have signed up to attend a noon march on Saturday from New York’s Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters, while several other actions are planned for other cities.

“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda,” the organizers of the New York event said in a Facebook post.

Trump complained in a tweet late on Thursday that “professional protesters, incited by the media” were tarnishing his electoral success, which he said was “very unfair”. Amid intense criticism, Trump said hours later in a second post that he appreciated the “passion for our great country” shown by demonstrators.

Activists expressed determination to build momentum for major activity on 20 January, when Trump will officially enter the White House.

A “million women” march on the capital is being planned for the day of Trump’s inauguration, amid intense anger that the next US president allegedly sexually assaulted multiple women and boasted of doing so in a leaked recording.

Leftwing and anarchist groups were also making plans for protests in Washington on inauguration day, according to flyers circulating online, raising the prospect of chaotic scenes as Trump takes the oath of office.

Other activists were biding their time before mounting a response to Trump’s election. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said their movement was “grieving and mourning” following the result.

“We are bringing folks together to imagine what kinds of organizing we will need to do under a Trump presidency,” said Cullors. “I do think we can organize as we have been, and build something bigger and stronger than the hate Trump and his team have exhibited towards marginalized communities.”



Thousands of people took to the streets from Thursday night into Friday in Denver, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland and several other US cities, as well as Vancouver, Canada. The protests were for the most part peaceful and orderly, though there were scattered acts of civil disobedience and damage to property.



The rowdiest scenes were in Portland, Oregon, where about 4,000 people marched into the city centre late on Thursday. At least 29 people were arrested after a minority of protesters threw objects at officers, smashed shop windows and damaged a car dealership, the Portland police department said, declaring the demonstration a riot. Officers used pepper spray and rubber projectiles to disperse the crowd, the department added.

In Minneapolis, dozens of people marched on to Interstate 94, blocking traffic in both directions for at least an hour as police stood by. A smaller band of demonstrators briefly halted traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway before police cleared them off.



Baltimore police reported that about 600 people marched through the Inner Harbor area, with some blocking roadways by sitting in the street. Two people were arrested, police said. One of the largest demonstrations was in Denver, where a crowd estimated to number about 3,000 gathered on the grounds of the Colorado state capitol and marched through the city centre.

Earlier in the day, high school students staged walkouts across the country. Authorities told the LA Times that at least 4,000 students from the LA County school system had walked out in protest by Thursday afternoon.

Hundreds of high school students in San Francisco walked out of class too, and took to the streets of downtown, shouting “Not my president”, “My body, my choice” and “Love trumps hate” as they marched in the middle of traffic.

Malkia Williams, 15, who carried a sign that said “Pussy grabs back” – a reference to a leaked recording where Trump bragged he could sexually assault women because of his fame – said it was important for students to speak out since they could not vote.

“A lot of adults voted for Donald Trump and they think we don’t care, but we do,” she said as she marched down a busy downtown street where student activists were temporarily halting vehicles, with many honking in support. “My loved ones and friends could be taken out of this country.”

Williams said she was still processing Trump’s victory. “I still don’t feel it’s real. This is not the future we want,” she said.

In Oakland, where 30 people were arrested on Wednesday night, a crowd gathered on Thursday but the protests were more subdued than the previous evening, when a series of small fires were set, some windows were smashed and a few people threw rocks at police.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, according to a local ABC affiliate station, WISN 12, a number which later swelled to over 2,000 as the group marched downtown, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Lewis & Clark College student Gregory McKelvey, who organised a protest in Portland on Thursday, told local NBC affiliate KGW: “We think that because Trump is president, it becomes even more urgent for our city to become what people want it to be. It’s an anti-Trump protest but also a call for change in our city because we need to push for progress here.”

Elsewhere on Thursday, hundreds protested in Salt Lake City, Utah; San Francisco; Houston, Texas; and in Washington DC, where about 100 protesters marched from the White House to Donald Trump’s newly opened hotel several blocks away.

At least 200 people rallied there after dark, many of them chanting “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and carrying signs with such slogans as “Impeach Trump” and “Not my president.” 



“I can’t support someone who supports so much bigotry and hatred. It’s heart-breaking,” said 25-year-old Joe Daniels from Virginia.

While protesters marched against Trump, at least one group was preparing to take to the streets in celebration. The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said on their website they would be holding a “victory parade” in North Carolina next month. Men in KKK-style white hoods were seen walking in the state on the morning after Trump was elected.",REAL
"Next Prev Swipe left/right Twitter has been looking into the future: read the best 16 predictions Predictions are notoriously unreliable, even when they’re backed up by expert knowledge and thorough research. It’s fair to say that the good people of Twitter have used neither of these but they’ve still come up with some startling visions of the future. 
Here are the best 16 tweets. 1. The year is 2017, Marmite is the UK's official currency, old people are burned as fuel, an evil clown is PM, Brexit still means Brexit. 
— Mitten d'Amour (@MittenDAmour) October 12, 2016 2. The year is 2018. Facebook is just one long clip of James O'Brien talking to some Leave-voting idiot and hammering his head on the desk. 
— Alan White (@aljwhite) October 13, 2016 3. The year is 2020. 
A Buzzfeed article titled ""President Trump's Wars Summarised In 13 AMAZING Cat GIFs"" wins the Pulitzer Prize. 
— Dai Lama (@WelshDalaiLama) September 27, 2016 4.",FAKE
"Society might demean and bully those who are overweight or obese, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that approximately 60-70% of the population in the U.S. carries excess weight. Largely a... ",FAKE
"Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he could have prevented the 9/11 attacks had he been president in 2001 -- escalating his feud with primary rival Jeb Bush about the fatal terror strikes.

Trump, a first-time candidate, implied his stance on immigration could have kept out the terrorists who slipped into the United States and trained in the country to hijack the four commercial airliners and kill nearly 3,000 people on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration,” Trump told ""Fox News Sunday."" “I believe that if I were running things,  … I doubt that those people would have been in the country.”

The 19 hijackers crashed one airliner each into the Pentagon and the twin World Trade Center towers in New York City, roughly nine months after Bush’s older brother, President George W. Bush, took office in 2001.

Passengers in one airliner overpowered the radical Islamic hijackers, forcing the craft to crash in Shanksville, Pa., with no survivors.

The Trump-Bush feud essentially started during the second 2016 GOP presidential primary debate when Jeb Bush defended his brother against Trump’s criticism about the attacks.

“You remember the rubble at the World Trade Center? He sent a clear signal that the United States would be strong and fight Islamic terrorism, and he did keep us safe,” Bush said to huge audience applause.

Trump responded: “You feel safe right now? I don’t feel so safe.”

Bush, a former Florida governor, has since shaped his response to suggest his brother united Americans and kept then safer after the attacks.

The exchanges also have put Bush in a challenging position, defending his family while trying to distance himself from Bush political dynasty, included shortcomings in the administrations of his brother and father, George H.W. Bush.

On Friday, Trump returned to his attacks when talking on Bloomberg TV about how and why, if elected, he could best handle national emergencies.

“Blame him or don’t blame him, but (Bush) was president,” said the billionaire New York real estate mogul. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

Hours later Jeb Bush tweeted, “How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.”

Trump also said Sunday that during the debate he was just responding to Bush saying the country was safe under his brother’s watch.

“I'm not blaming anybody,” Trump said. “But the World Trade Center came down.  So when he said, we were safe, that's not safe.  … It was probably the greatest catastrophe ever in this country.”",REAL
"Imagine this: Donald Trump wooing delegates with rides on his gold-accoutered private jet. A wealthy Ted Cruz supporter wining and dining them at the Cleveland convention. Welcome bags stocked with expensive swag awaiting party activists in their hotel rooms, courtesy of a well-funded super PAC.

The already freewheeling ­Republican presidential contest is fast turning into a personal persuasion game as the candidates pursue no-holds-barred ­efforts to lock up delegates — and there are relatively few limits on how far they can go.

The jockeying has already led to accusations of unfair play. Trump has accused Cruz of luring delegates with unspecified “goodies” and “crooked shenanigans,” charges that the Cruz campaign dismissed as “falsehoods.”

Under regulations established in the 1980s, delegates cannot take money from corporations, labor unions, federal contractors or foreign nationals. But an individual donor is permitted to give a delegate unlimited sums to support his or her efforts to get selected to go to the convention, including money to defray the costs of travel and lodging.

A candidate’s campaign committee can also pay for delegate expenses. Some legal experts believe a campaign could even cover an all-expenses-paid weekend prior to the convention to meet with senior staff at, say, a Trump-owned luxury golf resort in Florida.

Given that the last contested Republican convention was 40 years ago — Gerald Ford vs. Ronald Reagan in 1976 — many of Washington’s top campaign ­finance experts are furiously paging through old Federal Election Commission opinions, trying to discern what delegates can accept.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” said Kenneth Gross, a former associate general counsel at the FEC. “And when you get into the heat of battle and the stakes are as high as they possibly can be in terms of who will be the nominee, people are going to push the envelope.”

Trump and Cruz, who have shown their relentlessness in this season’s rough-and-tumble campaign, are expected to look for every legal edge possible if neither is able to secure 1,237 delegates before the July convention. Also in the mix is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who forged an alliance with Trump on Saturday in a delegate fight in Michigan.

The candidates “will be in a bidding war for delegates,” said Brett Kappel, a veteran campaign finance lawyer who has represented Democrats and Republicans. “They’ll live like kings at the convention.”

[Trump team vows to win delegate majority as rivals prepare for open convention]

The FEC delegate rules were established long before super PACs came on the scene and offer little guidance about how such groups can lobby delegates. One possibility floated by strategists in recent days: a super-PAC-

financed war room that collects reams of personal data — political background, hobbies, family details — that can be used to target the nearly 200 activists and elected officials who are not bound to a specific candidate.

The lack of clear guardrails has left party activists feeling unsettled.

“It’s almost like we need a campaign finance system for delegates,” said Gregory Carlson, 27, who ran unsuccessfully to be a delegate in Colorado over the weekend. “This is why we need to put serious thought into this and who are immune to being paid off with below-board messages.”

Since most delegates are expected to cover their own travel and stay in Cleveland, they could be offered thousands of dollars in assistance. Just how far those payments can go has not been tested.

“If they decide to go to Cleveland via Cabo, that might be a problem,” said Anthony Herman, a former FEC general counsel.

But it’s unclear that such a perk would be made public if it were provided by a single donor. Under FEC rules, a contribution from an individual to a delegate does not have to be disclosed, as long as it was not made in coordination with a campaign or as an independent effort to boost a candidate. That means gifts could flow to delegates unseen.

“Beyond subsistence expenses, in the weeks ahead, are there cash and items of value given to these delegates?” asked Michael Toner, a Republican election-law attorney. “Is someone going to show up in the Cayman Islands in January with a three-week paid trip? That’s not going to be readily apparent before the election.”

Still, Toner added, “I think the vast majority of the deals are going to be political deals. People want attention, a seat at the table.”

[Trump still leads, but Cruz keeps winning the trickier delegate contests]

That was the case in 1976, when Ford leveraged the prestige and trappings of the presidency to try to bring uncommitted delegates over to his side. He invited entire state delegations to lunch and dinner at the White House and even hosted a group on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal to watch the July 4 bicentennial celebration in New York Harbor, according to Jules Witcover’s 1977 book “Marathon.”

Reagan tried to match him with his Hollywood connections, recruiting entertainers such as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Pat Boone to call wavering delegates.

“It was hand-to-hand combat,” said Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, who detailed the fight in his book “Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All.” “When it comes to getting delegates, it is the wild, wild West. Anything goes.”

Well, not absolutely anything. State and federal anti-bribery laws would probably forbid delegates to sell their votes outright, although it is unclear how those statutes apply to those who are private citizens rather than elected officials. Election-law attorneys noted that the Justice Department has recently stepped up its focus on campaign finance violations and could scrutinize suspicious transactions.

And most experts doubt there will be systematic efforts to try to win over delegates with cash.

“I think it’s a pretty dangerous game to play,” Herman said. “The optics are just so bad. Putting aside FEC exposure or even criminal exposure, I think the political exposure if it were disclosed and the public knew about it — it would just seem so unseemly.”

The campaigns declined to offer specifics on how they plan to woo delegates.

“Well, there’s the law, and then there’s ethics, and then there’s getting votes,” Trump convention manager Paul Manafort said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I’m not going to get into what tactics are used. I happen to think the best way we’re going to get delegates is to have Donald Trump be exposed to delegates, let the delegates hear what he says.”

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said the senator from Texas has been “building an organization that will allow us to secure the delegates we need to win should this race be determined at convention.”

[Somebody used the Colorado GOP Twitter account to tweet #NeverTrump]

Several delegates interviewed this week said they would not be swayed by inducements. They were exasperated by the suggestion that their support could be bought with money or gifts.

Wendy Day — a 43-year-old mother of four in Michigan who was elected to be a delegate for Cruz — said her delegation is looking for ways to keep their convention expenses down, perhaps by renting homes outside the city, so they will not have to depend on a benefactor to cover their expenses.

“We wouldn’t want to feel like we were being bought off,” she said, adding: “I don’t think Cruz supporters would be swayed by gifts and money. We are in this to save our country.”

Joy Hoffman, chairwoman of the Republican Party in Arapahoe County, Colo., said she would view any kind of monetary gift or offer to pay for expenses as a bribe.

The candidates can “call me and talk to me,” said Hoffman, who will be an unpledged alternate delegate to the convention. But she warned that she will not be easily dazzled.

“I already know these people,” Hoffman said. “They’ve been bugging me for months. I had breakfast with Kasich not long ago, and I’ve had conversations with the Trumps. At the end of the day, that’s nice. They put their pants on the same way, they eat the same kind of food we eat.”

O’Keefe reported from Colorado Springs. David Weigel in Rochester, N.Y., and Katie Zezima in Irvine, Calif., contributed to this report.",REAL
"Ever since African-American men were granted the right to vote with the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, programs were enacted to make it impossible for them to exercise the franchise. And needless to say, the passage of the 19th Amendment 50 years later, which opened the franchise to women, only resulted in even more programs to deny African-Americans their ability to vote in many states. All of this was quite legal under the states’ rights doctrine until the 1960s, when President Johnson and Congress finally passed the Voting Rights Act, which put the federal government in charge of monitoring the election processes of jurisdictions that were proven to have discriminated in the past. Trying to keep racial and ethnic minorities from voting is as American as apple pie.

Over the years, the right wing, which has always been hostile to the idea of “too much” democracy, worked to create an illusion that there was a great threat of “voter fraud” in America that needed to be dealt with by enacting extremely restrictive voter eligibility requirements. There is no evidence of systematic voter fraud anywhere in America, but that hasn’t stopped the right from doing everything in its power to make it difficult for ordinary people to exercise the right to vote. (If only they were as vigilant about preventing the very real threat of gun violence.)

And they have been helped in this task, unbelievably, by Democrats who are so afraid of right-wing hysteria that they actually helped the Republicans destroy one of their voting rights institutions, ACORN, when a right-wing con artist produced a doctored video to tarnish its reputation. They didn’t even wait for the facts; they immediately wrung their hands and joined the metaphorical lynching. It was a low point in recent civil rights history and it proved that voting rights activists cannot count on the political class to have their backs even when it means their own party will suffer.

Vote suppression was, of course, the way they kept African-Americans from voting during Jim Crow, so even as they destroyed ACORN, the usual suspects simultaneously worked to undermine the VRA and finally succeeded in having a right-wing Supreme Court majority overturn it. Now Republican state governments are much freer to restrict voting so that the undesirable minorities, whom they assume will vote for the Democratic Party (and rightly so since Republicans are openly hostile to them), will have a much more difficult time voting. They will naturally keep up their assault on the ability of urban black voters to participate by eliminating polling places and reducing early voting, which makes it difficult for hardworking people to participate. But the latest attacks are coming from a number of other directions, some of which are openly undemocratic, and are increasingly focused on Hispanics.

For instance, the argument in Evenwel v. Abbott, the latest voting case to come before the Supreme Court, is that only eligible voters are entitled to representation by the government. This means, essentially, that children, legal residents, former felons or the mentally ill have no representation. Obviously, it will mean that undocumented workers, many of whom are counted in the census, will not be represented. As a practical matter this will have the fortuitous result (for Republicans) of making voting districts more rural and more white. And that is the point.

Nobody knows how such a thing can be implemented because there is no count of “eligible voters” — the census doesn’t ask the question and there would be no way of determining its validity anyway. But the consensus among legal observers seems to be that the court will likely divide along the usual partisan lines and thus change the way representation is apportioned to favor white Republicans once again.

That’s not the only thing they are doing. For obvious reasons, the biggest fear among Republicans these days is no longer the threat of black Americans voting. They will certainly continue to do everything in their power to make it hard for them to exercise their rights  — they are the Democrats’ most reliable constituency. But the major threat today comes from the fast-growing Latino population. Indeed, the campaign to deport immigrants and end birthright citizenship is hugely influenced by their fear that they will be demographically smothered in a few years by the American offspring of undocumented workers. The “path to citizenship” has them terrorized as they see it as an obvious electoral advantage for the Democratic Party.

There was a time when this prospect was actually considered an opportunity for Republicans who believed that they could appeal to this voting bloc through their shared belief in family values and small business entrepreneurship. One of George W. Bush’s greatest assets was considered to be his ability to attract Hispanics and he managed to get almost 40 percent of the vote in 2000. Unfortunately for Republicans, their older white constituency wants nothing to do with this — indeed, they are repelled by the idea of being in the same party as a group of immigrants who don’t look and sound like them. George W. Bush was abandoned by his party not only because of his Iraq debacle, but because he was widely considered to be soft on immigration.

As you can see from the presidential campaign, notwithstanding the party leaders’ understanding of their electoral challenge, this has hardened into a litmus test within the party. Republican voters want immigration stopped, they want a wall, they want deportation of undocumented immigrants and they want birthright citizenship to be repealed. (The last may require a constitutional amendment, although there are some cranks who insist it can be done legislatively. With this right-wing majority, they may even be able to get that endorsed by the Supreme Court.) GOP presidential candidates are required by the older white base to be openly hostile to Latinos, which ensures they will not get their votes. In that case, since the Latino population is growing very fast and is younger than the white population, the only option (aside from ethnic cleansing) is to try to prevent them from voting for Democrats by making it difficult at the voting booth and diluting their representation. Jim Rutenberg is writing a series on this subject for the New York Times Magazine that exposes the depth and breadth of this program. It’s being road-tested in Texas where there exists a serious possibility, if they are unable to succeed in turning back the tide, of a Democratic majority in a very few years due to the rapid growth in the Hispanic population. They are pulling out all the stops from local reapportionment of city council seats to the above-mentioned Supreme Court case attempting to deny representation to people who are ineligible to vote. And unfortunately, the Republicans have one very big advantage: fear. They have managed to make the process so harrowing that many Latinos don’t feel comfortable voting even though they have a perfect right to do so. And perhaps more relevantly, they are discouraged and depressed about participating in the system because of the invective and hostility coming from so many white Americans, particularly those in power. Getting them to turn out to vote is a huge challenge. But then that’s nothing new either. Historian Rick Perlstein quoted documentation on the subject back when he was researching his book “Before the Storm” about the 1964 Goldwater campaign and the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party. It’s a memo written by a Johnson staffer outlining the GOP vote suppression scheme called “Operation Eagle Eye.” This quote from the memo says it all: “Let’s get this straight, the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration. But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.” Operation Eagle Eye was in every state in 1964, for all the good it did them. One Republican lawyer very assiduously worked in Arizona that year to keep Hispanic voters from the polls and was reputed to have been very effective at intimidation. His name was William Rehnquist. He went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. His successor, John Roberts, worked with the recount team during the infamous election theft of 2000, presided over the 2008 “voter fraud” case that allowed states to require ID, and wrote the opinion overturning the Voting Rights Act in 2014. These people play a very long game. But it’s unlikely they will be able to suppress the Latino vote forever. Their hostility may be intimidating to an older generation but the new generation is not going to accept this. And there are a whole lot of young Americans of Hispanic descent. If they vote, this right-wing program will finally fail and fail spectacularly. And it will likely take the whole Republican agenda down with it. These young Americans will never identify with such a party. These conservative bigots are sowing the seeds of their own demise.",REAL
"  The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media  53 am by Cliff Kincaid   Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media 
Members of the media continue to talk among themselves, as if they had not been repudiated by the people on November 8. Mass firings and new faces are needed if the media are going to have any hope of regaining any credibility with the public. 
Some on the far-left are waking up. Anis Shivani of the AlterNet news service asked , “Is the liberal media dead?” She answered: “One of the positives of this campaign is that despite relentless 24/7 propaganda about Trump, exaggerating his personal foibles while painting anyone not supportive of Hillary as a closet misogynist, racist or even sexual predator, the message failed to get through. In the end, no one paid any attention. Those inside the elite bubble were persuaded that they were headed for victory, hearing nothing contrary in their own ecosphere, when they were in fact doomed. The people have shown that they can tune out this noise. The media has fragmented so much that only those who are already persuaded come within the ambit of any new message, so in essence they have pounded their way into their own irrelevance (emphasis added).” 
Hillary Clinton had the endorsements of most major newspapers in the United States. Her own website declared , “By all accounts, this election is historic—and so is the list of newspapers from across the country endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. That list includes a number of papers that, for decades, have exclusively endorsed Republican presidential candidates—until now.” 
Reid Wilson of The Hill newspaper calculated that Clinton got 57 newspaper endorsements and Trump got only 2. 
In addition to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which both endorsed Hillary, some of the other notable losers included: The Columbus Dispatch endorsed a Democrat (for the first time since Woodrow Wilson), and urged voters to elect Hillary. Ohio went for Trump anyway. The Akron Beacon said that Hillary was the change this country needed. The Cincinnati Enquirer broke a century-old tradition to endorse Hillary. The Sun Sentinel editorial board urged Floridians to vote for Hillary. Florida went for Trump. The Arizona Republic broke a 120-year tradition to endorse Hillary. Arizona went for Trump. The Dallas Morning News broke a 75-year tradition of supporting Republicans to endorse Hillary. Texas went for Trump anyway. The Houston Chronicle, the largest newspaper in Texas, usually backs Republicans but endorsed Hillary. 
Among major voting blocs, one of the most amazing turnarounds can be found in the Catholic population. 
On November 2, the Catholic Jesuit publication America was reporting that Clinton was leading Trump in the polls thanks to the Catholic vote. Citing a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, Clinton was getting support from 51 percent of Catholics, compared to 40 percent for Donald Trump. This is what liberal Catholics wanted to believe and encourage. Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta was a liberal Catholic who got a job as professor at Catholic Jesuit Georgetown University. He had communicated with other campaign officials about a scheme to force the church even further to the left. Elizabeth Yore’s article at The Remnant explained the relationship between George Soros, the Clinton campaign and the Jesuit-led Vatican. 
However, exit polls show that Trump won the Catholic vote by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. What happened? 
One answer is that Catholics are bypassing the liberal media and turning to alternative sources of news and information, such as The Remnant. Another such source is Boston Catholic Insider, which argued in an article, “ Why Catholics Should Vote for Trump ,” that Hillary had a “monstrous” position on abortion that justified the gruesome procedure up to and including the time of birth. 
Another growing source of news and information for Catholics and non-Catholics is LifeSite . Its post-election stories include “Liberal media in meltdown over Trump election” and “America rejects Planned Parenthood and its party.” 
Another important development was the airing of the film “ A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing ” by the EWTN Catholic cable channel. As we noted in a previous column, the film examined how Marxists have subverted the church from within by recruiting clergy into revolutionary socialist activities that divide people and cause conflict. The film was described as “a lens into America’s cultural Marxism euphemistically called ‘progressivism.’” 
As long as the members of the liberal media continue in their old and discredited ways, without major changes in the journalism business, the alternative sources of news and information will continue to grow in power and influence. The new conservative network CRTV has just announced that Steven Crowder , from the popular show “Louder with Crowder,” is joining the new media venture. 
Even with major changes in the liberal media, such as the firing of liberal hacks and the hiring of solid conservatives, it is doubtful that viewership can be maintained. On outlets like CNN, they will continue to talk and act like they still have some credibility left. The public is laughing at them and declaring, “You’re fired.” Cliff Kincaid 
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
"With the wife of the GOP presidential candidate having taken an unpaid leave of absence from her job, the family will soon lose access to health insurance.

Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?

Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?

Sen. Ted Cruz, his wife Heidi, and their two daughters Catherine, left, and Caroline, right, wave on stage after he announced his campaign for president on Monday at Liberty University.

Sen. Ted Cruz could soon be buying his family's health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act, a law the Republican presidential candidate has vowed to repeal should he win the White House.

Sen. Cruz formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, and his wife, Heidi Cruz, began an unpaid leave of absence from her job as a managing director in the Houston office of Goldman Sachs. That meant the family would soon lose access to health insurance through Mrs. Cruz's job, triggering a need for the Cruz family to find a new policy.

The first-term senator from Texas said he is looking at options available on a health insurance exchange, or a clearinghouse of policies available to Americans who don't receive coverage through their employers. The Democrats' health care law, also known as Obamacare, created the exchange system.

Under an amendment to the law crafted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the government can only offer members of Congress and their staff health care insurance that's sold through an exchange.

""We will presumably go on the exchange and sign up for health care, and we're in the process of transitioning over to do that,"" Cruz said in an interview with The Des Moines Register.

Cruz could go without insurance, or his family could get its coverage directly from an insurance company at what would likely be a far higher rate than is available via an exchange. Doing so would mean Cruz would not get the contribution from his employer to help offset the full cost of his coverage.

Asked about his plans for health care insurance on Tuesday, Cruz's staff initially pointed reporters to his interview with the Register. Several hours later, Rick Tyler, a Cruz spokesman, said Cruz and his family had not yet settled on an option or the financial implications of such a choice.

""Let's let them make a decision on what coverage they'll get before we start speculating on every variable,"" Mr. Tyler said.

Cruz has been a vocal critic of the health care law and, in 2013, set in motion a partial government shutdown as part of an unsuccessful effort to choke off funding for the law.

In his campaign kick-off speech, Cruz pledged to dismantle the law. His advisers said that remains his plan and pointed to his comments to the newspaper from Iowa, which hosts the lead-off caucuses in early 2016.

""I believe in 2017, a new president, a Republican president, will sign legislation repealing every word of it,"" Cruz told the Register.

Democrats highlighted that Cruz is now enrolling in a program he frequently criticizes.

""The Affordable Care Act, by design, helps Americans who have gaps in employment get coverage, and it's working,"" Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Holly Shulman said. ""We encourage others to follow presidential candidate Ted Cruz to www.healthcare.gov and get covered.""",REAL
"Later this week, Pope Francis will reportedly make a moral case for combating climate change, arguing that it is mostly a problem created by humans and that we must make fundamental lifestyle and energy consumption changes to reverse course — on behalf of the world’s poor, but also on behalf of all of us. This, among other factors, could help push climate change on to the national political agenda, giving it more relevance to this cycle than it has enjoyed in previous years.

But if anything, the partisan and ideological divide over global warming is as wide as ever, and perhaps is getting worse.

That’s what a new Pew poll indicates. The Pew poll finds that worry about global warming is on the rise: Some 69 percent of Americans now say it is a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. However, Pew also finds: “views about the significance of global warming as a problem continue to diverge.”

The Pew poll finds that 68 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence of global warming. But the partisan divide is stark: 86 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents say there is evidence of it, while Republicans are split, 45-48, on the question.

That’s driven (not surprisingly) by conservative Republicans, the only ideological group that says there’s no solid evidence of climate change — and when you get deeper into the partisan and ideological breakdown, the differences get more stark:

Today, roughly nine-in-ten liberal Democrats (92%) say that there is solid evidence the earth’s average temperature is rising, and 76% attribute this rise mostly to human activity. Very few liberal Democrats (5%) say there is not solid evidence of warming. A clear 83% majority of conservative and moderate Democrats also say the Earth is warming, but just 55% say this is the result of human activity. By contrast, just 38% of conservative Republicans say that there is solid evidence of global warming. Reflecting a divide within the GOP, conservative Republicans stand out as the only ideological group in which a majority (56%) says that there is not solid evidence of a rise in the earth’s temperature (a 61% majority of moderate and liberal Republicans say the earth is warming).

Meanwhile, as David Leonardt notes, skepticism about global warming is running high among GOP voter groups, such as older voters, whites, men, and white evangelicals.

While there are reasons to doubt that Hillary Clinton will be quite the climate hawk that some advocates hope for, in her Saturday kick-off speech she leaned harder than expected into arguments for robust action to combat climate change and transition towards a clean energy economy and future. It’s often said that climate is not a motivating issue for voters, and it’s true that Democrats and advocates have not cracked this problem yet. That said, whatever the impact on the electoral outcome, it’s still plausible that climate will have a significantly higher profile this cycle than it has in previous ones.

It’s not just that Clinton appeared to signal that she will campaign on climate, as part of a broader bet on the Obama coalition of millennials, non-whites, and socially liberal college educated whites. It’s also a confluence of other factors: The Obama administration will roll out new EPA rules for existing power plans this summer, and the court battles over them will intensify. Meanwhile, President Obama will be trying to negotiate a global climate deal later this year in Paris. All indications are he’ll be talking about the issue more and more, as a key piece of his legacy. These developments may coincide with the intensifying GOP presidential primary, in which the candidates will all be showcasing the zeal with which they’d roll back Obama’s agenda — the climate piece included.

All of which seems likely to only make polarization around climate change worse. No matter what Pope Francis has to say about it.

UPDATE: I should also have noted that the Pew poll finds that worry about global warming is on the rise: Some 69 percent of Americans say it is a “very” or “somewhat” serious problem. I’ve edited the above to add that.",REAL
"#DraftOurDaughters: Pro-War Hillary Faces Backlash Over Female Draft Hillary combines equality with war against Russia Kit Daniels - October 28, 2016 Comments 
Hillary Clinton’s support for a female draft is sparking outrage as she continues to fuel war tensions with Russia. 
Clinton initially backed requiring women to register for the draft back in June, but the backlash really exploded as Clinton started taunting Russia after the last presidential debate. 
The Twitter hashtag #DraftOurDaughters is trending, with memes mocking Hillary’s “total war” policies which could easily ignite World War 3.",FAKE
"At various points in 2011, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all surged to the front of national GOP primary polls. But all along, establishment favorite Mitt Romney had one bit of comfort. He always remained ahead in the New Hampshire primary — by double digits, in fact. With the Granite State in his back pocket, Romney didn't have to worry about coming up empty in all the early contests.

But Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — this year's GOP candidates who seem most likely to get establishment support — have no such relief. Here's where they currently stand in the first two states to vote, according to the relevant RealClearPolitics averages:

My headline is generous to Rubio, who's been in fourth place in the most recent two Iowa polls, with a mighty 6 percent and 8 percent support.

Every Republican nominee in the modern system has managed to win either Iowa or New Hampshire. And it's long been believed that since Jeb Bush had little chance of winning the evangelical-dominated Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire was effectively a must-win state for him.

Bush still has time to make a comeback — millions of dollars in ad spending from his Super PAC might help — but the fact that he hasn't topped 9 percent in any poll there since August is surely setting off alarm bells in his camp.

Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has been raising eyebrows with his ""relatively light schedule"" in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, as Bloomberg's Michael Bender recently reported. New Hampshire operatives in particular are in ""disbelief"" that Rubio has ""largely ignored"" their state, Bender writes.

This seems to be deliberate on Rubio's part — an effort to lower expectations for his own performance in the Granite State, so the media doesn't consider it a must-win for him. If Bush is discredited by a loss there, Rubio seems to hope, the party will rally to him instead. Yet a decision to effectively skip both Iowa and New Hampshire is a very risky one — as Rudy Giuliani found out with his infamously failed ""Florida strategy"" in 2008.

Like national presidential primary polls, early polls of the first states to vote have frequently proven volatile and inaccurate. For instance, the eventual winners of the 2008 and 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses — Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum — were both in fifth place or lower in October of the previous year. The stability of the New Hampshire polls for Romney in 2011 and 2012 is actually rather unusual in recent years.

And the good news for Bush and Rubio, such as it is, is that most of the candidates ahead of them are the political neophytes who most observers believe will flame out eventually — Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina.

However, Ted Cruz — a candidate despised by the party establishment but who has a more traditional political background — is also ahead of Rubio in both states, and John Kasich is leading both Bush and Rubio in New Hampshire.

It certainly remains possible that there could be a late rally to either Bush or Rubio from voters in one or both early states. In 2004, for instance, John Kerry surged out of nowhere late to win the Iowa caucuses. He then won 45 other states and, of course, the nomination. As of now, though, supporters of these candidates will find little encouraging news in the latest numbers.",REAL
"GaryNorth.com November 1, 2016 
Here is a video of a recent protest at the University of California, Berkeley, the nation’s most academically prestigious tax-funded university. It is the premier state school today. It was in 1964. It was in 1880. 
This is not a threat to the social order. It is an annoyance for students who want to go to class. 
WHERE AND WHEN THE SIXTIES BEGAN 
On September 10, 1964, the Free Speech Movement began at Berkeley. Almost no one remembers why. 
The University’s Board of Regents had long imposed restrictions on what kinds of recruiting were possible on school property. Everyone involved in student government knew the rules. Every group had to be approved: fraternities, sororities, religious groups, and political activists. The underlying motivation, more than anything, was to restrict religious proselytizing: the church/state separation issue. 
There were almost no conservative political groups on any of the six campuses (San Diego was opening with under 200 undergraduates that semester). As an undergraduate, I was probably the hardest core right-winger in any of the student governments on the five campuses. I had been involved in student government. I had been president of the sophomore class (1960) and president of the Associated Men Students (1961). I was part of an elite group of campus leaders called the California Club. The president of the University, Clark Kerr, met with us once year. 
In the fall of 1964, a 26-foot strip of land close to the Berkeley campus on Telegraph Avenue had long been used by Left-wing activists for recruiting. They set up tables at the beginning of the school year. In early September, the University’s administration learned that this strip of land was actually inside the boundaries of the campus. So, the rules governing recruiting applied. 
The Assistant Dean of Students, Katherine Towle, decided to enforce the rules. She sent out a letter on September 14. 
“Provisions of the policy of The Regents concerning `Use of University Facilities’ will be strictly enforced in all areas designated as property of The Regents… including the 26-foot strip of brick walkway at the campus entrance on Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue…””Specifically, Section III of the (Regents’) policy…prohibits the use of University facilities `for the purpose of soliciting party membership or supporting or opposing particular candidates or propositions in local, state or national elections,’ except that Chief Campus Officers `shall establish rules under which candidates for public office (or their designated representatives) may be afforded like opportunity to speak upon the campuses at meetings where the audience is limited to the campus community.’ Similarly, Chief Campus Officers “shall establish rules under which persons supporting or opposing propositions in state or local elections may be afforded like opportunity to speak upon the campuses at meetings where the audience is limited to the campus community.” 
“Section III also prohibits the use of University facilities `for the purpose of religious worship, exercise or conversion.’ Section IV of the policy states further that University facilities `may not be used for the purpose of raising money to aid projects not directly connected with some authorized activity of the University…’ 
“Now that the so-called `speaker ban’ is gone, and the open forum is a reality, student organizations have ample opportunity to present to campus audiences on a `special event’ basis an unlimited number of speakers on a variety of subjects, provided the few basic rules concerning notification and sponsorship are observed… The `Hyde Park’ area in the Student Union Plaza is also available for impromptu, unscheduled speeches by students and staff. 
“It should be noted also that this area on Bancroft Way… has now been added to the list of designated areas for the distribution of handbills, circulars or pamphlets by University students and staff in accordance with Berkeley campus policy. Posters, easels and card tables will not be permitted in this area because of interference with the flow of (pedestrian) traffic. University facilities may not, of course, be used to support or advocate off-campus political or social action. 
“We ask for the cooperation of every student and student organization in observing the full implementation of these policies. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to come to the Office of the Dean of Students, 201 Sproul Hall.” 
This was reasonable. She was enforcing the rules. The Best of Gary North Tags: Gary North [ ] is the author of Mises on Money . Visit http://www.garynorth.com . He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible . Copyright © 2016 Gary North",FAKE
"Gay and lesbian couples could face legal chaos if the Supreme Court rules against same-sex marriage in the next few weeks.

Same-sex weddings could come to a halt in many states, depending on a confusing mix of lower-court decisions and the sometimes-contradictory views of state and local officials.

Among the 36 states in which same-sex couples can now marry are 20 in which federal judges invoked the Constitution to strike down marriage bans.

Those rulings would be in conflict with the nation's highest court if the justices uphold the power of states to limit marriage to heterosexual couples. A decision is expected by late June in cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.

Top officials in some states, including California, seem determined to allow gay and lesbian couples to continue to marry no matter how the court decision comes out. But some county clerks, who actually issue marriage licenses, might not go along, experts said.

In other states, a high court ruling in favor of state bans would serve to prohibit any more such unions, but also could give rise to new efforts to repeal marriage bans through the legislature or the ballot.

The scenario may be unlikely, given the Supreme Court's role in allowing those lower court rulings to take effect before the justices themselves decided the issue. But if the court doesn't endorse same-sex marriage nationwide, ""it would be chaos,"" said Howard Wasserman, a Florida International University law professor.

Marriages already on the books probably are safe, said several scholars and civil liberties lawyers. ""There's a very strong likelihood these marriages would have to be respected, no matter what,"" said Christopher Stoll, senior staff attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Gay and lesbian couples could continue to marry in the 16 states that have same-sex marriage because of state court rulings, acts of the legislature or statewide votes.

Similarly, the 14 states that prohibit same-sex couples from marrying, including the four directly involved in the Supreme Court cases, could continue enforcing their state marriage laws. That would include Alabama, where a federal judge has struck down the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but put her ruling on hold pending the high court's decision.

Of the remaining 20 states, any that fought unsuccessfully to preserve marriage bans would not have much trouble resuming enforcement. ""That state can immediately start saying we're going to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples going forward,"" said Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf.

That list might include Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Officials in some of those states refused to comment on how they would respond, citing the ongoing Supreme Court case. ""I'm just not going to speculate on what the court may or may not do,"" said Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback.

Things might be different in California, Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Virginia because top elected officials did not contest lower-court rulings in favor of same-sex marriage. Courts in those states issued orders, or injunctions, that forbid the state from enforcing the constitutional amendments or state laws that limit marriage to a man and a woman.

Typically, a participant in the lawsuit that led to the injunction has to ask the judge to undo it. But if the governor and attorney general are same-sex marriage supporters, they may have little incentive to go back into court. In California, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris both opposed Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that prohibited same-sex marriage. ""I think it's very unlikely that anyone would try to turn back the clock in California,"" Stoll said.

But Gene Schaerr, a Washington-based lawyer who has defended same-sex marriage bans, said he thinks even in states where the political leadership favors gay and lesbian unions, county clerks who actually issue marriage licenses would be on safe ground if they were to deny licenses to same-sex couples.

In Schaerr's view, only the clerks in Alameda and Los Angeles counties are bound by the 2010 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. A Supreme Court ruling rejecting a constitutional right to marry for same-sex couples would ""free the clerks in counties other than Los Angeles and Alameda to adhere to Proposition 8,"" Schaerr said.

Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, a Republican, said she supports same-sex marriage, but believes voters need to remove the marriage ban from the state constitution — and would replace it with legal protection for same-sex marriage if given the chance. Coffman said she would ""gladly defend"" such an outcome.

If same-sex marriages cease in Virginia, Attorney General Mark Herring would try to get the state General Assembly to repeal the state's statutory and constitutional bans, Herring spokesman Michael Kelly said.

Some gay rights groups and state officials said the chance the court would not come out in favor of same-sex marriage is remote.

""Recent history of the past eight months, plus all the rulings of the past 20 years, don't indicate that to us this is going to go against us,"" said Tom Witt, executive director of gay rights organization Equality Kansas. ""It could, but a giant meteor could fall on my head in the next five seconds.""",REAL
"Miami (CNN) The oppression felt by many under the Castro regime still looms large at the epicenter of Cuban America: Miami's Little Havana neighborhood.

Cuban-born Americans at the popular Domino Park chat casually in Spanish as the domino tiles click, but most of them refuse to discuss President Barack Obama's new policy of normalizing relations with the communist country.

This past weekend, Obama shared a historic handshake with Raul Castro at the Summit of the Americas, and on Tuesday, Obama told Congress he intended to take Cuba off the state sponsors of terrorism list, moves that would have been unthinkable just years ago.

The Cuban immigrants in Miami, though, are concerned that if they talk about Obama's actions, their words could travel back to Havana and cause trouble for their families.

It's a fear, said Helena Jimenez, that's very real: ""You talk the wrong way, you're put in jail, your family is hurt.""

And yet Jimenez, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba when she was 8 years old, nearly 55 years ago, supports Obama's new policy.

Speaking outside Café Versailles, the famous Cuban eatery where exiles young and old gather for café con leche, Jimenez called the U.S. embargo against Cuba a ""cane of support"" that Cuban President Raul Castro has been leaning on as an excuse for poor conditions in his country -- and now that the cane is gone, she's hopeful he could tumble and fall.

Jimenez is emblematic of a broader shift within in the Cuban population in America, one that ultimately opened up the political space for Obama to start to change the U.S. stance toward the island nation.

But the same shift in attitudes that helped pave the way for Obama's course change has also diluted some of the potency of what was once a clear political winner for Republicans. Fernand Amandi, a principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, which specializes in polling Cuban Americans, said what was once a reliable GOP base vote has now become more of a swing vote.

""Going into 2016, the Cuban American vote in Florida will arguably be even more important than ever before, because now you're going to see both sides, Republicans and Democrats, go after them in ways we haven't seen before,"" he said.

It's a transformation that makes Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio's intense opposition to the Cuba opening a potential obstacle in his presidential pitch to voters who share his background, rather than the surefire crowd-pleaser it has long been.

The senator leaned heavily on the story of his immigrant parents' exile from Cuba in his presidential announcement on Monday, and he chose Miami's Freedom Tower, which served as a landing hub for many Cuban exiles through the latter half of the 20th century, for the launch itself.

Though the 43-year-old cast himself as a leader of the future, his focus on reasserting tough sanctions and freezing relations with Cuba is seen by many, especially younger Cuban Americans, as a policy of the past.

And that was the gist of the attack launched by the Democratic National Committee when Rubio on Tuesday condemned Obama's call for Cuba to be removed from the state sponsors of terrorism list.

""For a guy who just yesterday said he wanted to be a new leader and usher in a new American century, it sure sounds like Marco Rubio is clinging to an outdated foreign policy relic from the Cold War,"" said DNC spokesman Mo Elleithee.

Distance and time have transformed the Cuban American population, and in turn, its politics.

Orlando Feliciano, a 20-year-old sophomore at Miami University, is one of those young Cubans who say it's time for change. He described his family as split along generational lines, with his mother in favor of the move and his grandparents opposed ""because they feel like, that's a strategy that the Cuban government is using to generate more money.""

But Feliciano's own view is that thawing relations is the right decision.

""I mean, Cuba has been stuck with this government for over 50 years now, and I feel like it's time for something to change,"" he said Monday on his way to class on the sunny campus. ""The people deserve it.""

Carl Meacham, director of the Americas Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it was difficult to ""pin down"" the Cuban American population as a voting bloc because of the diverse opinions within it.

""They are much more split today on the way forward than they have ever been,"" he said. ""You have more Cuban Americans supporting a change to how the United States is supporting Cuba than you have in the past.""

But it's still a potent political issue for older Cuban Americans, which helps explain Rubio's -- and the rest of the GOP field's -- Cuba focus, as older voters remain a key portion of the GOP base.

And Meacham noted that the stance on Cuba plays into the broader GOP campaign against executive overreach from the President, with Republicans portraying it as yet another example of Obama acting without congressional approval.

Part of the policy shift stems from Obama being a second-term president unconcerned with the politics of the issue -- and perhaps wanting to test his own theories of international engagement.

That's what Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami and an opponent of the thaw, said was behind Obama's move.

""He comes with a philosophy based on the idea that you make nice with your enemies and they become your friends,"" Suchlicki said. ""The President is doing this based on his own mindset, not on the reality of what is happening.""

He warned: ""The administration takes a significant risk that by taking this unilateral action, they get nothing from Cuba.""

Potential political backlash from the estimated 2 million Cuban Americans in the United States -- a huge portion of whom live in the key swing state of Florida, with a sizable enclave in heavily Democratic New Jersey -- has helped keep previous Democratic presidents from moving on promises to normalize relations.

That was the case in the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton ended up signing the Helms-Burton Act, which further entrenched the embargo and restricted the president's ability to roll it back, rather than moving toward normalization.

""[It] was good election-year politics in Florida,"" he admitted in his memoir, before acknowledging that ""it undermined whatever chance I might have if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes in Cuba.""

Meacham, who supports the policy shift, said the fact that Obama was freed from some of those concerns likely influenced the move.

""The President isn't going to have to run for office again and wasn't being overly careful with maintaining support in places like Florida, where the Cuban vote is pivotal,"" he said.

But not only do Democrats have less reason to fear a backlash on the Cuba shift, they have more Cuban voters to count on their side of the aisle.

Cuban Americans historically have been seen as a monolithic Republican voting bloc, but polling shows they have started to switch allegiances as the population has grown younger and more distant from Cuba.

Those shifts, Meacham argued, have made the Cuba issue ""one in which the train has sort of left the station.""

And they also mean that Rubio could have even less to gain by making the Cuba embargo a major issue.

""[Republicans] run the risk of losing a big chunk of support within the Cuban community"" by campaigning so aggressively against the diplomatic thaw, Amandi warned. ""It's not the type of issue where they can count on appealing to all Cuban Americans anymore.""

It is, however, the issue that entices 73-year-old Miguel Coppola, who came to the United States from Cuba on New Years' Eve 1951, to Rubio. After finishing a cafecito at the Versailles, Coppola said that ""of course"" the Florida senator will have the support of the Cuban American community.

""He's got the same values we have,"" he said, listing ""freedom in Cuba, freedom of speech, electing people in Cuba against dictatorships"" as examples of those values.

But for others, particularly the younger immigrants, it makes less of a difference.

Jimenez, who left Cuba in the late 1960s, said the Cuba issue isn't much of a deal-breaker. She said she's most interested in former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, because ""what we need in this country is a good person.""

And anyway, she said, ""It'll be hard to go back to the way we were,"" with an embargo against Cuba.

""It hasn't worked for more than 50 years, so why go back to that, you know?"" she said.",REAL
"Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani struggled to defend Donald Trump against suggestions of sexual harassment and assault during uncomfortable interviews Sunday morning, amid the uproar over a 2005 video in which Trump made lewd comments and suggested he could grab women against their will because he is a celebrity.

“You're saying that the words are wrong. How about the actions?” Chuck Todd asked Giuliani on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Well, the actions would be even worse if they were actions. Talk and action are two different things,” Giuliani said.

“I'm not implying it was made up. I said we're talking about things that he was talking about. I don't know how much he was exaggerating; I don't know how much is true,” Giuliani added. “I certainly don't know the details of it. But I do know that this is unfortunately the kind of talk that goes on among a lot of people and they shouldn't talk about this.”

Giuliani was pressed on that point during a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week.” During that conversation, Giuliani appeared to acknowledge that Trump’s description during the conversation suggested sexual assault.

“The problem isn't just the words. As both Senator McCain and Vice President Biden pointed out, what Trump is describing in that tape is sexual assault,” George Stephanopoulos told Giuliani on ABC’s “This Week.”

“That's what he's talking about. Whether it happened or not, I don't know. How much exaggeration was involved in that, I don't know. I do know there's a tendency on the part of some men at different times to exaggerate things like this. I'm not in any way trying to excuse it and condone it,” Giuliani responded.

Giuliani also signaled that Trump had not ruled out using Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities to attack Hillary Clinton during the second presidential debate. Meanwhile, Trump once again tweeted Sunday morning about Juanita Broaddrick, whose accusation that the former president raped her in 1978 was never litigated in criminal court and has been denied by the Clintons. Trump also appeared to lash out at politicians on social media who were critical of his lewd remarks.

During a tense exchange on CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper tore into the defense that Trump had merely engaged on “locker room” talk. Giuliani at one point suggested that many others have had similar conversations, which Tapper aggressively dismissed.

“First of all, I don’t know that he did that to anyone. This is talk, and, gosh almighty, he who hasn’t sinned cast the first stone here,” Giuliani told Tapper.

Tapper responded tersely: “I will gladly tell you, Mr. Mayor, I have never said that, I have never done that. I am happy to throw a stone. I don’t know any man, I’ve been in locker rooms, I've been a member of a fraternity. I have never heard any man, ever, brag about being able to maul women because they get away with it. Never.”

Giuliani said on “Meet the Press” that Trump would definitely attend Sunday night's debate and that he is “as prepared as he's ever been.” He said that Trump feels bad and that he'd like to move beyond the controversy to turn his attention to an issue-focused campaign.

Asked by Todd if Trump would bring up Bill Clinton’s infidelities, Giuliani initially said that he believed Trump would not. But he volunteered that he believed “Hillary Clinton's situation” — her role in questioning the character of the women who her husband had affairs with — was on the table to an incredulous Todd.

“What I'm talking about, the things that she has said and that have been reported in various books and magazines and other places about the women that Bill Clinton raped, sexually abused and attacked. Not Bill Clinton's role, but her role as the attacker,” Giuliani said.

The former New York City mayor dismissed questions about whether last-minute changes to the campaign’s TV surrogates Sunday morning. Originally, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus were supposed to appear on the shows.

“I don’t think anyone was going to defend his remarks. Is Kellyanne still a very strong supporter of Donald Trump,” Giuliani said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think this is a question of scheduling, not being willing to explain.”

Giuliani said that Trump was embarrassed by the comments.

“I think when he heard them, he was shocked. I'm not going to say that he didn't remember them, but they probably weren't at the top of his mind. And when he was confronted with it, he was pretty darn shocked that he had said such terrible things, and he feels terrible about it,” Giuliani said on “Meet the Press.” “He feels terrible for his family and how embarrassing it is for them; he feels terrible from his own point of view. But he also realizes he has a responsibility. And I think the last 14 months have driven that into him.”",REAL
" Twenty Years of a Dictatorial Democracy By James Bovard
 "" Washington Times "" - The 2016 election campaign is mortifying millions of Americans in part because the presidency has become far more dangerous in recent times. Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have lived in a perpetual emergency, which supposedly justifies routinely ignoring the law and Constitution. And both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have signaled that power grabs will proliferate in the next four years.
Politicians talk as if voting magically protects the rights of everyone within a 50-mile radius of the polling booth. But the ballots Americans have cast in presidential elections since 2000 did nothing to constrain the commander in chief.
President George W. Bush’s declaration in 2000 that America needed a more “humble” foreign policy did not deter him from vowing to “rid the world of evil” and launching the most catastrophic war in American history. Eight years later, Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of peace and promised “a new birth of freedom.” But that did not stop him from bombing seven nations, claiming a right to assassinate American citizens, and championing Orwellian total surveillance.
Mr. Bush was famous for “signing statements” decrees that nullified hundreds of provisions of laws enacted by Congress. President Obama is renowned for unilaterally and endlessly rewriting laws such as the Affordable Care Act to postpone political backlashes against the Democratic Party and for effectively waiving federal immigration law. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama exploited the “state secrets doctrine” to shield their most controversial policies from the American public.
While many conservatives applauded Mr. Bush’s power grabs, many liberals cheered Mr. Obama’s decrees. After 16 years of Bush-Obama, the federal government is far more arbitrary and lethal. Richard Nixon’s maxim — “it’s not illegal if the president does it” — is the lodestar for commanders in chief in the new century.
There is no reason to expect the next president to be less power hungry than the last two White House occupants. Both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton can be expected to trample the First Amendment. Mr. Trump has talked of shutting down mosques and changing libel laws to make it far more perilous for the media to reveal abuses by the nation’s elite. Mrs. Clinton was in the forefront of an administration that broke all records for prosecuting leakers and journalists who exposed government abuses. She could smash the remnants of the Freedom of Information Act like her aides hammered her Blackberry phones to obliterate her email trail.
Neither candidate seems to recognize any limit on presidential power. Mr. Trump calls for reviving the brutal interrogation methods of the George W. Bush era. Mrs. Clinton opposes torture but believes presidents have a right to launch wars whenever they decide it is in the national interest. After Mrs. Clinton helped persuade Mr. Obama to bomb Libya in 2011, she signaled that the administration would scorn any congressional cease-and-desist order under the War Powers Act.
If Americans could be confident that either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton would be leashed by the law, there would be less dread about who wins in November. But elections are becoming simply coronations via vote counts. The president will take an oath of office on Inauguration Day, but then can do as he or she pleases.
We now have a political system which is nominally democratic but increasingly authoritarian. The rule oflLaw has been defined down to finding a single federal lawyer to write a secret memo vindicating the president’s latest unpublished executive order.
By the end of the next presidential term, America will have had almost a 20-year stretch of dictatorial democracy. Our rulers’ disdain for the highest law of the land is torpedoing the citizenry’s faith in representative government. Forty percent of registered voters have “lost faith in American democracy,” according to recent Survey Monkey poll.
The United States may be on the verge of the biggest legitimacy crisis since the Civil War. Whoever wins on Nov. 8 will be profoundly distrusted even before being sworn in. The combination of a widely detested new president and unrestrained power almost guarantees greater crises in the coming years.
Neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton are promising to “make America constitutional again.” But as Thomas Jefferson declared in 1786, “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.” If presidents are lawless, then voters are merely designating the most dangerous criminal in the land.
• James Bovard is the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006) and “Lost Rights” (St. Martin’s, 1994).",FAKE
"Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Decorated ‘Hero’ Cop Caught Using His Authority to Steal $170,000 in State Fees Decorated ‘Hero’ Cop Caught Using His Authority to Steal $170,000 in State Fees John Vibes October 28, 2016 Leave a comment 
Detroit, MI – Disgraced Michigan State Trooper Seth Swanson was charged with embezzlement this week for pocketing thousands in false fees. 
The 31-year-old trooper allegedly stole $170,100 in vehicle fees through an inspections scheme that he ran, where he would forge documentation on potentially stolen vehicles. 
The Michigan Attorney General’s Office issued the following state ment detailing Swanson’s theft operation: 
“Police officers are given great trust and responsibility, and for that reason are held to a higher standard. When you break the trust you are given and in the process break the law, there are consequences, no matter who you are or what your profession. I want to thank the Michigan State Police and FBI’s Detroit Area Public Corruption Task Force for their hard work on this investigation.” 
According to investigators, Swanson was a state-certified salvage vehicle inspector since 2011. As an inspector, Swanson was responsible for overseeing salvage vehicle inspections, during which a $100 fee is collected. For over a year, Swanson allegedly pocketed these fees and forged the forms that authorized the salvage. 
Swanson is accused of applying this scam to 1,701 vehicles, bringing in a total of $170,100. 
After he was charged, Swanson was forced to resign from the police department. 
Police spokesperson Andrea Bitely told reporters that “Our office , in conjunction with the Michigan State Police and Secretary of State, are working together to make sure that all vehicles involved in this case have, actually have a proper salvage vehicle inspection, and we’ll contact the registered owners of the vehicles to make sure we arrange for now inspection in a timely manner.” 
Prior to his crimes as an inspector, Swanson was praised in the media as a “hero” in 2013 for being one of the first responders to a large pile-up. 
Swanson and his lawyers are attempting to use his past media fame as a defense in this most recent case, despite the fact that it is entirely irrelevant. 
Defense attorney John Freeman said that Swanson is still a “hero.” 
“These charges don’t detract from the fact that Trooper Swanson was a real-life hero and was a good trooper. It’s easy for people to lose sight of that fact,” Freeman said. 
Swanson was released on $10,000 bond and is currently awaiting trial. 
Below is a video from 2013 in which Swanson was hailed as a hero. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share Social Trending",FAKE
"Home / Badge Abuse / Cop Caught on His Own Body Camera Stealing Money From Unconscious Crash Victim Cop Caught on His Own Body Camera Stealing Money From Unconscious Crash Victim Matt Agorist November 1, 2016 1 Comment 
Denver, CO — A Denver cop has been arrested and suspended without pay after his own body camera footage caught him stealing $1,200 in cash from a crash victim. 
Instead of helping an unconscious crash victim, officer Julian Archuleta took advantage of the situation for his own personal gain by going through the man’s clothing and robbing him. Archuleta now faces charges of misdemeanor theft, 1st-degree official misconduct and tampering with physical evidence. 
According to an arrest affidavit, Archuleta responded to a call of shots fired in the early morning hours of October 7. The call then led to a short pursuit which ended as the car crashed. The driver got away while the passenger of the vehicle was knocked unconscious. 
Archuleta’s body camera then recorded the officer for the next 24 minutes and 40 seconds. In the footage, he took pictures of the scene and then searched the man’s clothing which had been removed by paramedics. 
In the video, Archuleta finds a stack of cash in the man’s pants with a $100 bill on top, according to the arrest affidavit. He then separates the $100 bill from the stack and a $1 bill remains on top. 
Throughout the footage, Archuleta shuffles money and rearranges paperwork in his patrol car, the affidavit said. 
According to the Denver Post, when a detective collected the cash and logged it into the property bureau as evidence, he counted $118 and did not find any $100 bills, the affidavit said. But while reviewing Archuleta’s body camera footage as part of the investigation, the detective noticed the $100 bill. 
Amazingly enough, instead of covering up the theft, the detective crossed the thin blue line and reported the inconsistency with the $100 bill to internal affairs. When confronted by investigators, Archuleta told them he would “check his war bag” to see if any of the money had slipped into a crevice in his patrol car. 
According to the arrest affidavit, Archuleta called the detective back an hour later and claimed he found 12 $100 bills that “must have fallen in his bag.” After being caught red-handed, Archuleta then turned in the money. 
According to the Post, the Denver district attorney’s office declined to prosecute the shooting suspect because of the missing cash and because Archuleta allegedly moved evidence inside the suspect’s vehicle before detectives had a search warrant, the affidavit said. 
Earlier this year, the Denver police department was equipped with body cameras. We now know why it took so long for the department to adopt them. Archuleta will now go down in history as the first Denver cop to be criminally charged based on body camera evidence. 
Like most cases of police theft, this incident is not isolated. In fact, just 2 months ago, Grants Police Department Sgt. Roshern C. McKinney, 33, was arrested after an investigation found that he’d stolen both money and marijuana from the police department. Like Archuleta, he entire theft was captured on the officer’s own body camera. McKinney has since been charged with marijuana distribution, conspiracy, and felony embezzlement. 
State police also charged McKinney’s 23-year-old girlfriend Tanicka Gallegos-Gonzales, for drug distribution and conspiracy. Both were arrested in Albuquerque and booked into the Sandoval County Detention Center, according to KOB. 
Public Information Officer for the New Mexico State Police, Elizabeth Armijo said Grants police chief, Craig Vandiver alerted state police after the department found video from Mckinney’s lapel camera that “exposed possible illicit activity by a Grants Police Department sergeant.” 
What does it say about the criminal tendency of some police officers when they are unable to practice restraint from theft — knowing that they are being recorded? Share Google + The Kali Whrite Boi 
Ok am NOT cool with corrupt criminal cops, but still this MSM puppet is infuriating. This “civilian” was fleeing a scene of “shots fired” leading the cop in a short chase before crashing. 
Stupid MSM puppets.",FAKE
"The Washington Post returned to Wisconsin this past weekend to empty union halls and a depressed workforce. The public employee union law – which barred contract negotiations on everything but base wages and limited annual salary increases to the rate of inflation, forced most unions to collect their own dues rather than having them deducted automatically by the state and mandated annual recertification of affiliates – has been more successful than even its supporters hoped.

In the state where public employee unions got their start, public workers see no need to stay enrolled, since unions cannot by law effectively advocate on their behalf. Membership in the Wisconsin affiliate of the National Education Association is down one-third; the American Federation of Teachers dropped by one-half; the state employees union fell 70 percent.

There are fewer public employees working, too, even though Gov. Walker claimed that the passage of the anti-union law would save jobs. The Wisconsin Budget Project finds that the ratio of public employees to total population is at its lowest level in at least two decades.

Overall, union membership in Wisconsin has fallen to 11.7 percent, down from 16 percent 10 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggesting a spillover into the private sector labor force as well. That will only continue if Walker gets his wish to turn Wisconsin into a right-to-work state, an effort being undertaken right now in the state Legislature.

Local unions are decreasing dues charges and walking door-to-door to persuade workers to return, but it hasn’t worked so far. The tables have been turned, from non-union workers coveting the good pay and decent benefits of their union counterparts, to demonizing them as greedy leeches that must get dragged down like everyone else. “I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” one ex-member told the Washington Post.

In many respects, the point of Walker’s anti-union crusade was to destroy the electoral muscle of the main opposition to his conservative agenda. But the most important impact of the creeping death of public unions in Wisconsin may be on take-home pay.

The Washington Post didn’t take note of this, but according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, median household income in Wisconsin is $51,467 a year, nearly $800 below the national average. And it has fallen consistently since the passage of the anti-union law in 2011, despite a small bounce-back nationally in 2013. The Bureau of Economic Analysis puts Wisconsin in the middle of the pack on earnings growth, despite a fairly tight labor market with a headline unemployment rate of 5.2 percent.

This actually undercounts the problem a bit, because it doesn’t cover total compensation. For example, in the wake of the anti-union law, public employees lost the equivalent of 8-10 percent in take-home pay because of increased contributions to healthcare and pension benefits.

Moreover, the meager earnings growth that has come to Wisconsin has mostly gone to the top 1 percent of earners. Another Wisconsin Budget Project report shows that the state hit a record share of income going to the very top in 2012, a year after passage of the anti-union law. That doesn’t include the $2 billion in tax cuts Walker initiated in his first term, which went disproportionately to the highest wage earners. (This is precisely the agenda Walker is likely to run on in his presidential campaign.) The trends mirror those in the country at large, where labor has similarly stumbled. Real hourly wages fell for almost everyone nationwide in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, except for the low-wage sector, bolstered by minimum wage increases at the state and local level. Wisconsin has not joined that movement, with its minimum wage still consistent with the federal floor, at $7.25 an hour. You can argue that squashing unions in Wisconsin had no bearing on income stagnation in the state. But you would have to ignore how the labor market works. If public employees cannot bargain for wages and benefits, they stay depressed. And employers who compete for well-educated workers, like those who take jobs in teaching and government administration, similarly don’t have to increase wages to attract their services. Blunting worker power in one sector has ripple effects everywhere else; as Larry Mishel wrote in the New York Times yesterday, “the erosion of collective bargaining is the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades.” And Wisconsin provides a salient example of that. Collective worker action was behind the biggest wage announcement in the past several years: Wal-Mart’s move to increase entry-level pay to $9 an hour this year, and $10 an hour by 2016. This will act like Wisconsin’s wage depression in reverse: retailers will be forced to compete with Wal-Mart’s slightly higher wages, and the entire wage floor will push upward. And while an improving economy, tighter labor markets and the need to retain personnel may have factored into Wal-Mart’s decision, you cannot deny the role of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to organize Wal-Mart workers. “This is not an act of corporate benevolence,” said Marc Perrone, president of UFCW, in a statement on the Wal-Mart announcement. “Walmart is responding directly to calls from workers and their allies to pay a living wage.” In fact, the last time Wal-Mart faced significant labor unrest in 2006, it raised wages as a direct result, according to Federal Reserve minutes. It, like most businesses, makes changes that benefit workers only when its reputation is threatened and poor publicity ensues. That means that worker voices play a powerful role in wage growth. Scott Walker has taken that voice away from public unions, and effectively the entire Wisconsin labor movement, which finds itself crippled. That has real consequences for middle-class wages. Since Walker wants to bring this policy menu to the rest of the country in 2016, people on Main Streets outside of Wisconsin should take note.",REAL
"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she takes the stage to speak at a fundraiser at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, Friday, Oct. 14, 2016.
Months of embarrassing leaks released by WikiLeaks and other sources related to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic leadership have time and again proven to be true , while allegations of Russia being behind the effort have not been substantiated with any evidence. Still, that’s the talking point the campaign continues to go with.
And indeed Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri today warned against believing any new things released by WikiLeaks that are embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, even though the other releases were spot on, insisting that anything else they release is “ probably fake .”
Friends, please remember that if you see a whopper of a Wikileaks in next two days – it's probably a fake.
— Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) November 6, 2016
This isn’t a brand new claim, either, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D – CA) making claims as far back as August that any future mass leaks would probably include “ Russian lies ” designed to embarrass Clinton and the Democrats.
These preemptive warnings appear to recognize the reality that more embarrassing information is likely to come out, and aiming to get out in front of the next batch by preemptively declaring them “probably” not true, whatever it turns out to be.",FAKE
"State officials announced major water cutbacks for Northern California farmers Friday, a historic step that could challenge claims the agriculture industry is getting a free pass during the state's epic drought.

The cutbacks will affect some of California's oldest water rights holders — farmers who laid claim to surface water more than a century ago — for the first time in four decades. They will not be allowed to draw water from the San Joaquin River, the Sacramento River and the delta that forms where the two rivers meet. State officials said the rivers simply don't have enough water to meet the demands of all rights holders.

This isn't the first time during the current drought that state has cut off supplies to surface water users, including farmers. The water board has already ""curtailed"" nearly 9,000 water rights this year, all of them ""junior"" water rights that were established post-1914.

But for the first time since a severe drought in the late 1970s, California is starting to tell ""senior"" water rights holders, who laid claim to surface water before 1914, that there just isn't enough water for them. The cutbacks announced Friday impact rights holders who established their claims between 1903 and 1914.

And more historic cuts could be coming over the summer. The State Water Resources Control Board said Friday that it's continuing to monitor conditions in watersheds across the state, and that cutbacks could be on the horizon for even more senior rights holders.

""Curtailment notices for other watersheds and for more senior water right holders in these watersheds may be imminent,"" the water board said in a statement.

State officials said in a conference call that the water rights being curtailed comprise 1.2 million acre-feet, but it's unclear whether the cutbacks will save quite that much. The water board has indicated in recent months that curtailments for senior rights holders were coming, leading some farmers to store extra water in preparation.

Sammy Roth writes about energy and water for The Desert Sun. He can be reached at sammy.roth@desertsun.com, (760) 778-4622 and @Sammy_Roth.",REAL
"Email 
A major political leader in France, Francois-Xavier Peron, has declared that France is about to enter into a devastating war against Islam , and its going to be extremely violent. His solution to prepare? Embrace the Christian Faith and never accept the antichrist masonic religion . 
I did an interview with Mr. Peron about this coming war, and why the Christian Faith must be the religion of the world: 
  Shoebat.com  ",FAKE
"Generic drug prices have nearly quadrupled in the past five years — and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has a plan to fix it.

On Monday, Sanders, who is also running for the Democratic presidential nomination, rolled out a proposal that would place strict limits on how quickly pharmaceutical companies could hike generic drug prices. Specifically, drug manufacturers would have to pay a rebate back to Medicaid if their drug prices grew faster than inflation. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is introducing the same bill in the House.

Generic drugs are cheaper versions of drugs that have lost their patent. But in recent years, the prices for generic drugs have been rising quickly and inexplicably. One report from pharmacy benefits manager Catamaran found that consumers paid, on average, $13.14 for each prescription of the 50 most popular generics in 2010. By 2014, they paid $62.10 — a 373 percent increase.

Sanders has previously cited federal records at hearings, showing that the prices of more than 1,200 generic medications rose an average of 448 percent between July 2013 and July 2014.

Generic drugs are typically meant to make medicine cheaper, giving patients less-expensive access to the costly drug formulations that pharmaceutical companies develop. You can see this clearly in the over-the-counter market: you can get 100 generic ibuprofen pills for $7.49 — or pay $9.99 for the brand-name drug Advil.

Generic drugs now compose more than 80 percent of all prescriptions dispensed annually in the United States, and experts think that's helped slow the growth of overall drug spending.

In recent years though, the market for generic prescription medications has become increasingly expensive, with drug manufacturers hiking up generic prices. This seems especially likely to happen when there is just one drug company making the generic, giving that manufacturer pretty complete control over the prices it wants to charge.

Consider the case of albendazole, an antiparasite drug that helps kill an infection caused by worms. It's not an especially common drug because it treats a relatively uncommon problem among lower-income populations, particularly refugees and immigrants.

Albendazole's patents expired years ago but there's still only one company that makes it, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). And recently the drugmaker has quietly hiked the price. Data published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the average cost Medicaid paid for an albendazole prescription has increased from $36.10 in 2008 to $241.30 in 2013.

This is the exact same drug; the only difference is that in the span of six years, its price tag rose six-fold.

And albendazole isn't alone — there is a lot of data showing a steep increase in generic drug prices. The National Community Pharmacist Association says its members have seen generic prices increase ""as much as 600 percent"" in recent years.

The United States is one of the only developed countries that do not negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

In Spain, the United Kingdom, and pretty much all other European countries, the government sits down with drugmakers and haggles over how much it will pay. Each country uses different negotiating tactics. The United Kingdom, for example, runs its bargaining through the National Institute for Clinical Evaluation, typically known by its acronym, NICE.

The United States works differently. Federal law bars Medicare, the country's largest insurance plan, from negotiating with drugmakers. Once a pharmaceutical company sets its price, the government-run plan that insures 49 million seniors is required to accept it.

There are thousands of private insurers, though, and they often have little clout to demand lower prices. Other countries are essentially buying in bulk, like shopping at Costco. The United States does the equivalent of going to the local grocery store — and paying more.

""We don't have a NICE in the United States,"" said Steven Pearson, founder and president of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Reviews, a nonprofit that evaluates evidence on medical tests. ""We have a system that says, ‘If it's better, we have to provide this pill, and you, the drugmaker, get to name the price.' It's not a market. It's drugmakers saying what they want.""

Sanders's new proposal wouldn't give the government the power to negotiate drug prices (although that is also an idea the Vermont senator supports).

Instead, it would require generic drug manufacturers to give Medicaid, the program that covers low-income Americans, a rebate for any growth in drug prices above and beyond overall inflation.

Drug companies will almost certainly oppose this idea, as it would cut into their profits — and, they'll argue, into their development of generic drugs. Sometimes they will cite a shortage of raw materials as a reason for the price hikes, and would likely point to that as reasons why they couldn't produce the drugs for less. Pharma is a strong lobby, and that (along with overall gridlock in Congress) would be a significant obstacle for this type of bill.

Still, the idea of rebates is not unprecedented in American health policy. Federal law requires that Medicaid get a 23 percent discount on all brand-name drugs' sticker prices. And individual state Medicaid programs are allowed to negotiate even lower prices with drugmakers if they so choose. The idea there was similar to the one in the Sanders bill: making drug prices cheaper for the program that serves the lowest-income Americans.",REAL
"Accuracy in Media – by Cliff Kincaid 
In one of her secret speeches, Hillary Clinton said, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders…” Before this comment was revealed, Adam Taylor of The Washington Post tried to assure everyone that the idea of a North American Union, like the meddlesome and bureaucratic European Union, was dead. Such talk, he said, emanated from “fringe websites” and “conspiracy theorists.” 
The Hillary speech was made to a Brazilian bank known as Itaú BBA, which describes itself as “Latin America’s largest Corporate & Investment Bank” and part of the Itaú Unibanco group, “one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates.” 
The problem for Taylor and other faux journalists is that there is a whole body of research on the topic of a “ North American Law Project ,” designed to integrate the legal systems of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The project is run out of American University’s Center for North American Studies, where students can concentrate in North American Studies . As a matter of fact, such degrees are being offered by several different colleges and universities, including Canada’s McGill University . 
Passed in 1993, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, began the process of harmonizing laws among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But the Council on Foreign Relations admits that the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. This has led to a loss of about 600,000 jobs. 
In addition to shipping jobs to Mexico, NAFTA constituted subversion of our constitutional system. President Clinton submitted NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, which would have required a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate. 
A money crash soon followed in 1995 as Mexico was hit by a peso crisis, and a U.S. bailout was arranged. Congress would not bail out Mexico, so Clinton arranged for loans and guarantees to Mexico totaling almost $40 billion through the International Monetary Fund and the “Exchange Stabilization Fund.” 
Meanwhile, pressure has been building for the creation of a “North American Community”—also known as a “North American Union”—with regular meetings involving the leaders of the three countries. On June 29, 2016, the Obama White House issued a fact sheet on this year’s “North American Leaders’ Summit.” It said, “The economies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are deeply integrated. Canada and Mexico are our second and third largest trading partners. Our trade with them exceeds $1.2 trillion dollars annually.” 
The leaders of these countries agreed to establish a “North American Caucus” to “more effectively work in concert on regional and global issues by holding semi-annual coordination meetings among our foreign ministries.” One item on the agenda was for the leaders to reaffirm “North America’s strong support for [Colombian] President Santos’s efforts to finalize a peace accord with the FARC guerrillas.” That fell apart on October 2 when a “peace deal” with the communist terrorists was voted down by the people of Colombia. 
But notice how these leaders claim to speak for “North America.” 
Going global, they also declared, “North America is committed to joint and coordinated actions to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.” 
This is U.N.-speak for global taxes and other forms of foreign aid from the U.S. to the rest of the world. 
We noted in a column last year that the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing the new global agenda that President Obama has tried to implement without the input or approval of Congress. 
Interestingly, one of those deeply involved in this global agenda, as we noted at the time, was John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama. Podesta’s emails are at the center of the WikiLeaks disclosures about the operations of the Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party. 
Podesta, founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission , went to work for Obama as a senior policy consultant on climate change. A liberal Catholic, he has been a professor at Georgetown Law School. One of the leaked emails shows Podesta saying that he applauds the work of Pope Francis on climate change and that “all my Jesuit friends say the Pope is the real deal.” 
Podesta was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe. This so-called “High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda” released an 81-page report titled, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development.” 
“In simplest terms,” explains Patrick Wood, author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation , “Sustainable Development is a replacement economic system for capitalism and free enterprise. It is a system based on resource allocation and usage rather than on supply and demand and free economic market forces.” 
In this context, Wood argues that the major significance of the transfer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is not the immediate need by the U.N. or some countries to censor websites, but to generate revenue for global purposes. ICANN will do this, he argues, through management of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the links between the Internet and networks, electronic devices and embedded technology with IP addresses. “IoT are the connections between inanimate objects and the humans that depend upon them,” he notes. To accomplish this, ICANN has devised a new IP numbering system called IPV6, described as the “ vital expansion ” of the Internet. 
“In terms of ‘follow the money,’ IoT is expected to generate upwards of $3 trillion by 2025 and is growing at a rate of at least 30 percent per year,” Wood argues . “In other words, it is a huge market and money is flying everywhere. If the UN can figure out a way to tax this market, and they will, it will provide a windfall of income and perhaps enough to make it self-perpetuating.” 
He adds, “Congress never understood this when they passively let Obama fail to renew our contract with ICANN. However, Obama and his globalist handlers understood it perfectly well, which makes the deception and treachery of it even worse.” 
Under the cover of “sustainable development,” Wood predicts the Internet will be used to construct a massive database on human activities, in order to monitor and control nations’ and peoples’ access to resources. It will constitute ultimate socialist control and a form of “digital slavery,” from which he warns there may be no return. 
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid .",FAKE
"Hipster dog only likes 80s dog food that you can’t get any more 07-11-16 A DOG hipster will only eat an obscure type of vintage dog food that he enjoys in a semi-ironic way. Labrador Wayne Hayes refuses to eat normal dog biscuits, preferring a discontinued American 80s brand of dog food called Chunkiez that his owners have to buy off the internet at vast expense. Hayes said: “I’m all about Chunkiez Beefy Mix because the box they come in has such a cool design aesthetic. It just speaks to my vibe. “I realise it’s £17 a box because they stopped making it in 1984 and there’s only one warehouse in Canada that has stock, but like everything in my life it’s paid for by my parents.” Hayes, who also claims to like postmen and fireworks, reckons he is friends with all the working class bull terriers at his local park even though they growl at him whenever he approaches. 
Share:",FAKE
"This post was originally published on this site 
On October 26, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Namibian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who has come to Moscow on a working visit to attend the sixth session of the Russian-Namibian Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation. 
The parties spotlighted the traditional high level of the two countries’ mutual political understanding. They discussed partnership prospects in many spheres, particularly energy, fishing, railway transport, mining, and supplies of food and equipment. They exchanged opinions on topical international and African issues, including the UN reform, and confirmed their shared determination to work for enhancing the United Nations’ role in global affairs. 
Ms Nandi-Ndaitwah highly evaluated Russia’s policy to promote peace and security, build up a broad international anti-terrorist front, and move towards a settlement in Syria. 
The parties expressed concern over the remaining hotbeds of tension in Africa – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Western Sahara, Sahara-Sahel region and elsewhere, and spoke in favour of conflict settlement by political means through dialogue and compromise. Related ",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) U.S. lawmakers and administration officials expressed skepticism Tuesday that Israel had access to information on the Iran nuclear talks that went beyond what the White House had already shared with Capitol Hill, following a report that the Israeli government had given them secret details.

Members of Congress were both surprised by and dismissive of a Wall Street Journal story that the Israeli government spied on the U.S.-led negotiations and leaked information on the developing deal to legislators.

More than a half-dozen lawmakers in both parties and chambers denied receiving such briefings from Israel.

""I'm not sure what the information was. But I'm baffled by it,"" Boehner told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. ""No information (was) revealed to me whatsoever"" on the talks.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, too, said he hadn't been privy to any leaks from Israeli officials and joked to CNN that he felt ""left out"" after he saw the WSJ report. Published late Monday, the article said that Israelis had eavesdropped on the confidential talks and leaked selective intelligence with the intent of rallying Democratic opposition to the developing agreement.

Israel has been vocally opposed to the emerging deal and made its concerns crystal clear to lawmakers, including in a controversial address to Congress earlier this month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The administration, which opposed Netanyahu's speech, has tried to counter Israel's lobbying for bills that would give Congress a vote on the deal, which many in both chambers oppose.

Corker hinted to reporters that he felt the Journal report was a continuation of that White House effort.

""I think y'all all understand what's happening here. I mean, you understand who's pushing this out,"" he said.

The administration, for its part, aggressively pushed back against suggestions that it hadn't been briefing Congress adequately, prompting lawmakers to search elsewhere for information on the talks.

""We have not just briefed Congress about the progress, or lack thereof, that's being made, but we've also briefed the Israelis and our other partners in the region and around the world,"" President Barack Obama said during a news conference on Monday afternoon.

He added that any agreement negotiators reach would be presented for scrutiny by all stakeholders, and said he felt there was ""significant transparency in the whole process.""

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, meanwhile, called it an ""absurd notion"" that Congress would have to rely on a foreign government to get information about the administration's negotiations with Iran.

But some Republicans maintained Tuesday that they have had to rely on other countries for information.

Corker said he gets ""a lot of information"" from foreign governments and suggested it was the White House's own fault if their failure to brief lawmakers had them turning to leaks from foreign governments. Congress has repeatedly complained about not receiving adequate information from the administration on Iran.

""If the White House was actually doing the normal advise and consent with the Senate then it wouldn't be necessary for us to get our information"" from foreign governments, Corker said.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, however, said the White House had been helpful in its briefings on the Iranian nuclear talks. Psaki pointed Tuesday to hundreds of conversations the administration has held with members.

""The extent of the administration sharing with us has been very significant and I know the administration has been briefing Israel as well,"" Kaine said.

The substance of the alleged leaks — and whether they actually occurred — was unclear on Tuesday, with Congress members' professed ignorance matched by a senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister's office calling the allegations ""utterly false.""

""The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel's other allies. The false allegations are clearly intended to undermine the strong ties between the United States and Israel and the security and intelligence relationship we share,"" the official told CNN.

But members of both parties said it was understandable the country would try to get whatever information it could.

Kaine, who noted that he hadn't received any information from Israeli officials he hadn't already gotten from the White House, said that if Israel had been trying to glean details about the talks through clandestine channels, he didn't find ""any of that that controversial.""

""I don't look at Israel or any nation directly affected by the Iranian program wanting deeply to know what's going on in the negotiation ... as spying,"" he said. ""I look at that as, that's what you would do if you're directly affected.""

And Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number two House Democrat and someone who has worked across the aisle on Iran, acknowledged that spying is not an unusual practice for most nations.

""All nations try to get as much information as they can about what's going on that affects them -- including the United States of America, as we know,"" said Hoyer, who added that he hadn't received any leaked information from Israel.

But Psaki said that the U.S. continues to share information with Israel on Iran and other shared interests even as the administration has made an effort to protect the sensitive negotiations against leaks.

""I think we've spoken in the past to our concern in the past has been about leaks of certain sensitive information. And obviously, we've taken steps to ensure that the negotiations remain private,"" she said.",REAL
"Posted on November 7, 2016 by Carl Herman 
John Hankey ’s documentary of the assassination of President Kennedy is the single most favorite of my US History students among ~100 film clips I show as a National Board Certified Teacher (shown below). John is a retired Advanced Placement US History teacher, and the best documentary I’ve found on that game-changing history revealing the US rogue state . 
John’s sharp 12-minute video, Is Donald Trump for Real? 
John has rushed to create the following 63-minute documentary connecting Donald Trump to the .01% criminal rogue state leaders: The first 27 minutes document that the Orlando “shooting” included concocted rhetoric to promote fear of so-called “radical Muslims.” This connects to FBI Director James Comey, who refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton for obvious crimes of secret State Department communications hiding Clinton Foundation looting in the billions, then attempting to destroy the e-mail evidence . This expands into CIA/US intelligence interests to recruit assets they use for rogue state actions , but pitch to assets as patriotic undercover service. John’s analysis concludes that since 9/11, any so-called “leader” fear-mongering of “radicalized Islam” are the real terrorists of the US rogue state. The head cheerleader for this fear is Rudy Giuliani, John Trump’s alleged Director of Homeland Security . 
John’s commentary for this work: 
I didn’t expect Trump to bring Rudy Giuliani into his campaign. I didn’t anticipate the speeches either of them would give at the convention. I didn’t expect Trump to pick someone as dark and dirty as Mike Pence as his vice President. Trump has tied himself, through his policies and speeches, to the perpetrators of both 911 and Orlando. That’s what I learned making this video. 
What is the lesson from the 9-11 attacks? Who did the Orlando attacks? This video answers both questions. FBI director, Comey, and the entire FBI organization, began lying and covering up, within hours, perhaps minutes, of the Orlando shooting. He is clearly implicated. This is the same Comey that is in the news right now, holding himself up as a paragon of virtue. 
I didn’t expect to learn what I did learn about the shooter: that he went along on ride-alongs with police in high school; that he told his high school friends that he wanted to be a cop; that he was hired by the state of Florida directly out of high school as a prison guard; that he got a degree in police science from the local college; that he worked for the most prestigious, high-security, government-contracted security firm in the world for the last 10 years. He received good reviews in every one of these positions from his supervisors. The FBI saw fit to not mention any of that in their discussions of him. The shooter was gay, and most definitely not devout as a Muslim. Dozens of witnesses say he was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. And he supported Hillary for president. Clearly he was expendable. 
John’s game-changing documentary on the JFK assassination, Dark Legacy, in its 2-minute trailer : 
1-minute video of George Bush, Sr.’s apparent duping delight of JFK’s assassination: 
Dark Legacy highlights in ten minutes : 
Full Dark Legacy documentary in 103 minutes : 
My context for the .01% immediate history: The Crimes The US is a literal rogue state empire led by neocolonial looting liars. The history is uncontested and taught to anyone taking comprehensive courses. If anyone has any refutations of this professional academic factual claim for any of this easy-to-read and documented content , please provide it. US ongoing lie-started and Orwellian-illegal Wars of Aggression require all US military and government to refuse all war orders because there are no lawful orders for obviously unlawful wars. Officers are required to arrest those who issue obviously unlawful orders. And again, those of us working for this area of justice are aware of zero attempts to refute this with, “War law states (a, b, c), so the wars are legal because (d, e, f).” All we receive is easy-to-reveal bullshit . When Americans are told an election is defined by touching a computer screen without a countable receipt that can be verified, they are being told a criminal lie to allow election fraud . This is self-evident, but Princeton , Stanford , and the President of the American Statistical Association are among the leaders pointing to the obvious (and here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here , here ). Again, no professional would/can argue an election is legitimate when there is nothing for anyone to count. And, duh, corporate media are criminally complicit through constant lies of omission and commission to “cover” all these crimes. Historic tragic-comic empire is only possible through such straight-face lying, making our Emperor’s New Clothes analogy perfectly chosen. The top three benefits each of monetary reform and public banking total ~$1,000,000 for the average American household, and would be received nearly instantly. Please read that twice. Now look to verify for yourself . Demanding arrests as the required and obvious public response rather than ‘voting’ for more disaster: 
The categories of crime include: Wars of Aggression (the worst crime a nation can commit). Likely treason for lying to US military, ordering unlawful attack and invasions of foreign lands, and causing thousands of US military deaths. Crimes Against Humanity for ongoing intentional policy of poverty that’s killed over 400 million human beings just since 1995 (~75% children; more deaths than from all wars in Earth’s recorded history). 
US military, law enforcement, and all with Oaths to support and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, face an endgame choice: Demand arrests , with those with lawful authority to enact it. An arrest is the lawful action to stop apparent crimes , with the most serious crimes documented here meaning the most serious need for arrests. Watch the US escalate its rogue state crimes that annually kill millions, harm billions, and loot trillions. 
In just 90 seconds , former US Marine Ken O’Keefe powerfully states how you may choose to voice “very obvious solutions”: arrest the criminal leaders (video starts at 20:51, then finishes this episode of Cross Talk ): Solutions worth literal tens of trillions to ‘We the People’: 
Again: The top three benefits each of monetary reform and public banking total ~$1,000,000 for the average American household, and would be received nearly instantly. Please read that twice. Now look to verify for yourself . We can quantify the end of the lie-started and illegal Wars of Aggression quickly into the trillions, and that said, it’s worth a lot more than what we quantify. Truth : a world in which education is expressed in its full potential to only and always begin with good-faith effort for objective, comprehensive, and verifiable data. 
** 
Note: I make all factual assertions as a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History, with all economics factual claims receiving zero refutation since I began writing in 2008 among Advanced Placement Macroeconomics teachers on our discussion board , public audiences of these articles , and international conferences (and here ). I invite readers to empower their civic voices with the strongest comprehensive facts most important to building a brighter future. I challenge professionals, academics, and citizens to add their voices for the benefit of all Earth’s inhabitants. 
** 
Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS , for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at 
Note: Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go to http://archive.org/web/ , p aste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here , here ). This entry was posted in General . Bookmark the permalink . Donate Recent Posts",FAKE
"14th Anniversary of His Passing By Joachim Hagopian
On October 25th, 2002 the last great hero of the common people in the US Senate was very likely murdered by agents of the shadow US crime cabal government otherwise known as the Bush-Cheney regime. His wife and daughter and two pilots also died in the air crash. Paul Wellstone’s story deserves to be retold and Americans need to be reminded that criminals in and out of our government still need to be punished for their unindicted crimes. This article was written as both a tribute to an outstanding American patriot and a reexamination of his probable assassination by criminals still on the loose.
Minnesota Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone was a man of integrity who was among the few politicians openly and adamantly opposing the Iraq invasion as well as the creation of the US version of Gestapo-land Security. As a fearless populist leader he’d been a constant thorn in the side ever since then President George H. W. Bush responding to the junior senator’s uncomfortable questions at a reception asked, “Who is this chickenshit?” 
Years later as the only senator up for reelection who voted against the Iraq War when Democrats held just a one seat edge over the Republicans in the Senate (with one independent caucusing with Democrats), his thorny side made him the #1 GOP target . With the Karl Rove led Republican Party just one seat away from gaining Republican control over the US Senate, Wellstone’s death gave his Republican challenger Norm Coleman the 49-49 split and, as the President of the Senate, Cheney’s tie breaking vote would deliver the GOP 50-49 advantage needed to steamroll yet more tax cuts through for the rich, unending bankers’ wars and a never seen before boom for the military-security industrial complex. Again, motive and means tilt heavily towards assassination. The facts make it more than probable.
A month prior to the November 2002 election Vice President Cheney had arranged a meeting with Wellstone, threatening him with grave consequences should he vote against the preplanned Iraq invasion. A few days later speaking to a group of war veterans, Wellstone publicly recalled Cheney’s threatening words :
“If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.”
Then just days after that, 11 days prior to the midterm election and a year to the exact day after the deadly anthrax pushed Patriot Act victory , on October 25th Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter along with three staffers and two pilots all died in an extremely suspicious plane crash.
The FBI was at the crash site within 90 minutes , indicating they’d left their Minneapolis office before the “accident” at about the same time Wellstone’s plane was just taking off that morning, indicating the possibility of pre-knowledge.
“The authors note that it would’ve taken agents at least three hours to reach the swampy and remote crash site. How they got there from the Twin Cities so quickly remains a mystery”.
Additionally, the NTSB as the national agency that normally takes the lead role investigating all US plane crashes suddenly wasn’t. The FBI moved in ahead immediately proclaiming just another bad weather accident. Yet all on the ground witnesses and reports disagree, from pilots landing at the destination airport just two hours prior to the Wellstone flight to the airport manager who less than an hour after the crash was himself flying over the crash site. The plane considered a Rolls Royce among small planes was in tiptop shape and the two pilots steeped in skilled experience.
As the feds’ rogue cops for go-to cover-ups, as in 9/11 and the anthrax attacks the year before, and the 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing s, the FBI has a long shady history of leaving its corrupt dirty fingerprints all over these well documented false flag, history changing events.
A couple of brave Democratic House members anonymously stated that they believe Wellstone was murdered. In one Congressman’s words :
I don’t think there’s anyone on the Hill who doesn’t suspect it. It’s too convenient, too coincidental, too damned obvious. My guess is that some of the less courageous members of the party are thinking about becoming Republicans right now.
An unnamed CIA source admitted :
Having played ball (and still playing in some respects) with this current crop of reinvigorated old white men, these clowns are nobody to screw around with. There will be a few more strategic accidents. You can be certain of that.
A number of other Democratic politicians at a 2 to 1 margin to Republicans have also incurred mysterious deaths holding “unpopular” views just ahead of hotly contested elections. Two years earlier while traveling in Colombia Senator Wellstone had already experienced one known attempt on his life when a bomb planted enroute from the airport was discovered. Since that plot failed, he was then sprayed with the highly toxic poison glyphosate.
As a longtime critic of the CIA and covert operations, Wellstone was targeted for assassination in both Colombia and in Minnesota by the masters of mayhem, murder and deceitful cover-ups – the FBI/CIA Criminals-In-Action at the behest of mastermind Cheney.
So far in our two-tiered justice system, murder pays off for those high up on the psychopath food chain like Cheney, the Bushes and Clintons . Renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh exposed Cheney’s “executive assassination ring.” Cheney used the CIA as well as the military Joint Special Operations Command as his personal army of hitmen reporting directly to him. (see video below)

If the neocons can live with themselves for murdering 3000 Americans on 9/11, they certainly never lose sleep over a few more targeted eliminations that include the genocidal 4 million Muslim bloodbath caused by the Bush crime family wars.
The heavy-handed Bush-Cheney push for Iraq War and a DHS congressional vote prior to their 2003 invasion cast enormous high stakes in the Senate. Then add the known history of contempt from former CIA director Bush, the Cheney threat just days prior to Wellstone’s death, a slew of brazenly contradictory crash site anomalies , and the exposed murderous means used to pass the Patriot Act and the 9/11 false flag tragedy the year prior, all of this circumstantial evidence taken together strongly points to yet more diabolical skullduggery perpetrated by Skull & Bones criminals against humanity.
The neocons grabbed the Hegelian solution they needed for waging unlimited war in the name of terrorism anywhere in the world while simultaneously at home merging FEMA into their newly created Homeland Security tasked with stripping away the rest of America’s constitutional liberties in the name of “national security.” In its first dozen years alone, deep state’s gluttonously monolithic DHS cancer has metastasized into the third largest federal department boasting near a quarter million fulltime employees. By hook, crook and murder the Cheney-Bush gang in 2003 got what they’d been wanting and plotting for years, two concurrent never-ending wars in the Middle East and the monstrous apparatus Homeland Security whose purpose is making war against the American people. Sadly the rest of the Western vassal nations play follow the leader.
If examined according to the Hegelian Dialectic of 1) problem, 2) reaction and 3) solution, a draconian formula used by deep state to manufacture increased authoritarian control over the US populace, Paul Wellstone’s death can easily be explained.
More than any other single member of Congress, the Minnesota senator posed a serious threat as the major opposition leader standing in the way of war criminals Bush and Cheney’s Iraq invasion as well as their formation of the Department of Homeland Security, two preplanned agendas rooted in the neocon think tank the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Prior to their stealing the 2000 election and their PNAC’s “Pearl Harbor” event they created called 9/11, their regime had already called for attacking Iraq for regime change and erection of the DHS cancer. The Bush-Cheney reaction to their problem Paul Wellstone was to assassinate him making it appear as an accident.
By murder once Wellstone was out of the way, the neocons’ solution sent a loud and clear message of intimidation and a death threat in order to effectively silence any other potential Congressional opponents to the war in Iraq. Wellstone’s elimination paved the way for the war criminals’ successful campaign to win national support for the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq. That said, the month before the invasion on February 15th, 10-15 million people around the world in over 600 cities assembled in massive protest against the US intervention, the biggest one day antiwar demonstration in history. But unfortunately once the US military occupation began, the antiwar movement gradually fizzled out.
And the PNAC (members of PNAC project, image left) calling for regime change in seven sovereign nations including Iraq within five years was underway. The predatory rape and pillaging of Iraq as the world’s second largest oil producer was justified by lies of Saddam’s non-existent WMD’s and ties to terrorism. Sadly the neocons who are still at the helm wreaking havoc in 2016 were able to implement an enormous new Department of Homeland Security monstrosity masquerading as public “safeguard” against terrorism. So without Wellstone and virtually no further opposition in Congress, the neocons created their multibillion dollar security state apparatchik promoting and enforcing draconian counterterrorism laws leading to increasing centralized authoritarian government control that is ushering in their New World Order.
This tried and true Hegelian strategy has also been regularly utilized to further identify deep state obstacles as problems based on perceived neocons’ threats to US global unipolar hegemony.
American Empire’s relentless efforts to isolate, weaken and target for global war designated international enemies Russia, China and Iran through propagandized demonization and orchestrating fake crises illustrate yet more examples of the Hegelian Dialectic in action. And just as the US crime cabal was successful in eliminating Wellstone as their New World Order threat, for decades the crime cabal government has been planning its war against identified American dissenters as enemies of the state who object to its heavy-handed tyranny.
Paul Wellstone’s courageous opposition to the powerful Washington establishment’s evil cost him and his family’s life. Since we Americans are now in the same crosshairs of the same still entrenched shadow assassins, it’s time to make their arrests for treason and mass murder prior to our own death and destruction.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/ . 
Source: Global Research 
",FAKE
"Video of a confrontation between a news photographer and protesters at the University of Missouri on Monday led to a dispute between journalists and the activists’ sympathizers beyond the campus walls. In response to a series of racial issues at the university, a circle of arm-linked students sought to designate a “safe space” around an encampment on the campus quad. When they blocked journalist Tim Tai from photographing the encampment, reporters complained that media were denied access to a public space.

Certainly, Tai – like any journalist – had a legal right to enter the space, given that it was in a public area. But that shouldn’t be the end of this story. We in the media have something important to learn from this unfortunate exchange. The protesters had a legitimate gripe: The black community distrusts the news media because it has failed to cover black pain fairly.

As a journalist, I understand how frustrating it is to be denied access to a person or place that’s essential to my story. I appeared with other journalists on local media in New York City to discuss our frustration over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s sometimes standoffish attitude towards the press. He is a public figure whose salary is paid with tax dollars. He is obligated to be accessible to us.

[Campus racism makes minorities drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.]

The student protesters Tai encountered, though, didn’t owe him anything. They did not represent a government entity stonewalling access to public information. They were not public officials hiding from media questions. They were young people trying to build a community free not only of the racism that has recently wracked Mizzou’s campus but also of the insensitivity they encounter in the news media: Newspapers, Web sites and TV commentary had already been filled by punditry telling black students to “toughen up” and “grow a pair.” Then, in the noisy conversation about First Amendment rights that Tai elicited, journalists compounded the insult by drowning out the very message of the students Tai was covering.

As journalists, we should strive to understand the motivations of the people we cover. In this case, black students at the University of Missouri have had a string of racist encounters on campus: The president of the students’ association was called the n-word and other black students have been racially harassed while participating in campus activities. A Missouri journalism professor wrote in the Huffington Post that she has been called the n-word “too many times to count” during her 18 years at the university. In February 2010, black students woke up to cotton balls strewn over on the lawn of the black culture center on campus. The crime, carried out by white students, was designed to invoke plantation slavery. University president Tim Wolfe resigned Monday after graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike and the school’s football players boycotted team activities to protest the very public racism he and many black students believe the school did little to address.

Establishing a “safe space” was about much more than denying the media access; it was about securing a zone where students’ blackness could not be violated. Yes, the hunger strike, the safe space and other demonstrations were protests, and protests should be covered. But what was fueling those protests was black pain. In most circumstances, when covering people who are in pain, journalists offer extra space and empathy. That didn’t happen in this case; these young people weren’t treated as hurting victims. Instead, after the confrontation with Tai, aggrieved journalists responded with a ferocity usually reserved for powerful entities with the means to inflict lasting damage on their First Amendment rights.

This wasn’t a problem with Tai’s character or his journalistic integrity; he was doing his job, and his past outstanding work speaks for itself. But in this conversation over “public space,” we’ve overlooked the protesters’ message — that conditions on campus make it an unbearable environment for black students to live and learn in. Their approach to creating a safe space should have been better conceived, but reporters should also feel a responsibility to try to understand and respect their pain, instead of rushing to judge them and panicking about an imagined assault on press freedoms.

[Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?]

Further, as reporters, we have to drop our sense of entitlement and understand that not everyone wants to be subjects of our journalism. Our press passes don’t give us the license to bully ourselves into any and all spaces where our presence is not appreciated. It’s one thing to demand access to public lands; it’s another to demand access to people’s grieving.

In many communities that historically have been marginalized and unfairly portrayed by the media, there’s good reason people do not trust journalists: They often criminalize black people’s pain and resistance to racial oppression. We saw it in coverage of Ferguson and Baltimore, when news stations seemed more concerned with the property damage than with the emotional damage that prompted it. Though peaceful protests in Ferguson had been going on for days, reporters didn’t descend on the town in large numbers until there were clashes with police. Suddenly, coverage spiked, but most of it was about “cars vandalized” and “buildings burned.” On Fox News, the channel most watched for Ferguson coverage at the height of the unrest, protesters were called “thugs.” Reporting from the protests, CNN’s Don Lemon noted, “Obviously, there’s a smell of marijuana in the air.” We heard comparatively little about the residents’ long-held grievances about police harassment and brutality.

The unfair portrayal of black people in the news media is well documented. One study analyzing news coverage by 26 local television stations, black people were rarely portrayed unless they had committed a crime. A 2015 University of Houston study found that this imbalanced coverage may lead viewers to develop racial bias against black people because it often over-represents them in crime rates. Recognizing this kind of bias in news media, black Twitter users started the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag to call out news images of Mike Brown that many felt criminalized him in his death.

That black students would be skeptical of media is understandable. We’ve already seen the kind of headlines they undoubtedly feared. In an Atlantic piece headlined “Campus Activists Weaponize ‘Safe Space’,” Conor Friedersdorf calls the protesters a mob and insists they are “twisting the concept of ‘safe space.’” Again, a journalist criminalizes black people for expressing their pain. It was another piece centering the reporter’s privilege over the students’ trauma. Friederdorf’s piece completely ignores the intolerable racial climate that forced the students to establish a safe space in the first place.

[Black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus]

There were other ways to cover these students’ protest without breaching their safe space and without criminalizing them.The human chain students formed provided ample b-roll and still photos. Students could have been interviewed outside of that space. I would have pitched a story to my editors with the headline, “Why Black Students Were Forced To Secure A Safe Space On A Public Campus.”  But to do that requires self-reflection and not a condescending, self-absorbed soliloquy about the First Amendment.

For journalists, the Missouri protests are a big news story. For the black students we’re covering, however, it’s a fight for their humanity and liberation. Tai is correct: he was doing his job. But in that stressful moment he may have failed to realize that the space he wanted to enter was a healing one that black people had worked to secure.

Black pain is not an easy subject to cover, but the lesson we can take from this encounter at Missouri is that our presence as journalists, with the long legacy of criminalizing blackness that comes with it, may trigger the same harmful emotions that led to the students’ protests in the first place.

We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person. For reparations, give us 5/3 of a vote.

Don’t criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.

This is what white people can do to support #BlackLivesMatter",REAL
"Get short URL 0 23 0 0 The integration of Crimea into the Russian legal and administrative systems is a complex process, but the majority of the key issues have already been addressed, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. 
YALTA (Russia), (Sputnik) — During the All-Russia People's Front forum in Crimea, Putin said: ""There are a lot of questions and small problems, which are invisible at first glance. The federal authorities try to do something themselves, but they do not know the local conditions… That's why the question of entering, as I said, the Russian legal and administrative framework has turned out to be a difficult process, but we have practically overcome the main issues."" 
The president also noted that one of the main impediments to progress has been the fact that local authorities, who have volunteered to oversee the integration, ""do not know how the laws and the system of Russia are organized."" Putin: Drinking Water Issue in Crimea No Longer Acute The two-day regional All-Russia People's Front forum, called the 'Forum of action. Crimea,' covered issues of energy, gas supplies, development of agricultural industry and other promising sectors of the economy.
Crimea , Russia's historical southern region, seceded from Ukraine to rejoin Russia in March 2014. Almost 97 percent of the region's population voted for reunification in a referendum. Sevastopol, which has a federal city status, supported the move by 95.6 percent of votes. The referendum was held after a coup in Ukraine in February 2014. ...",FAKE
"10 Strange Facts About Our Presidents   July 25, 2015 Subscribe 
They may well be some of the most recognizable men on the face of the Earth: Our Presidents. Think you know all there is to know from history about these men? Think again and take a look at these strange facts: Presidential Alligators 

Two different Presidents had pet alligators: John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover. 
Adams received his pet alligator as a gift from a French general, and it lived in an unfinished bathroom of the White House. Hoover’s son had two alligators that frequently roamed the White House grounds. Bet that kept the Secret Service on their toes. Greek and Latin 

James Garfield, our 20th President, could write well with each hand, but he also could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other at the same time! Try that sometime! Cool Coolidge 
Calvin Coolidge was fond of pranking the White House staff by pressing all the buttons in the Oval Office just to watch everyone run in frantically, unsure of what was wrong. The Rough Rider Roosevelt 
During a speech in Milwaukee, a failed assassin shot Teddy Roosevelt in the chest. His next words were, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” When everyone attempted to take him to the hospital, he waved them off and finished his 90 minute speech with the bullet still lodged in his chest! Now that’s toughness! Dueling Jackson 
President Andrew Jackson was involved in over 100 duels, most to protect the reputation of his wife. In one, Jackson offered his opponent the first shot. The man shot Jackson, but Jackson merely shook it off, like it was a bee sting, then shot and killed the unlucky opponent. Fashion Model Before Gerald Ford was President, he worked as a fashion model in New York City. He even made it to the cover of Cosmopolitan with Phyllis Brown in 1942. Out-Of-This-World Carter 
Before he became President, Jimmy Carter was making a speech in Georgia when he saw a UFO. He filed a report of the incident with the International UFO Bureau stating that it was a self-illuminating, bright white object hovering in the sky. Bartender-In-Chief 
Before Abraham Lincoln was the President, he was a lawyer. But before that he was he was a bartender. He owned a saloon, Berry and Lincoln, with his friend William Berry. Bushusuru 
Poppy Bush was in Asia for a trade conference. At a state event held by the Japanese Prime Minister, Bush fainted after vomiting all over the banquet host. The Japanese later coined the term “Bushusuru” meaning “to do the Bush thing” or “to vomit.” Gambling Harding 
Warren Harding loved to play poker, and during one game he bet a set of priceless White House china, which he promptly lost. 
h/t and All Images: BrainJet  ",FAKE
"Posted on October 31, 2016 by Theodore Shoebat 
A major political leader in France, Francois-Xavier Peron , has declared that France is about to enter into a devastating war against Islam , and its going to be extremely violent. His solution to prepare? Embrace the Christian Faith and never accept the antichrist masonic religion . 
I did an interview with Mr. Peron about this coming war, and why the Christian Faith must be the religion of the world: 
Courtesy of Freedom Outpost 
Theodore Shoebat is the Communications Director for Rescue Christians , an organization that is on the ground in Muslim lands, rescuing Christians from persecution. He is the author of two book, For God or For Tyranny and In Satan’s Footsteps: The Source and Interconnections of all Evil , he also has a DVD series called “Christian Militancy,” which is on Christian warfare and our fight against evil and tyranny. 
Article posted with permission from Shoebat.com Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"Matt Bevin, the Republican nominee in the Kentucky governor's race, wasn't a very good candidate.  By all accounts, he was standoffish and ill at ease on the campaign trail, and inconsistent — to put it nicely — when it came to policy.  The Republican Governors Association, frustrated with Bevin and his campaign, pulled its advertising from the state.  Polling done in the runup to today's vote showed Bevin trailing state Attorney General Jack Conway (D).

And yet, Bevin won going away on Tuesday night. How? Two words: Barack Obama.

Obama is deeply unpopular in Kentucky. He won under 38 percent of the vote in the Bluegrass State in 2012 after taking 41 percent in 2008. In the 2012 Democratic primary, ""uncommitted"" took 42 percent of the vote against the unchallenged Obama. One Republican close to the Kentucky gubernatorial race said that polling done in the final days put Obama's unpopularity at 70 percent.

So, when the RGA returned to Kentucky for the final two weeks with $1 million worth of ads, you can guess who was prominently featured.

Yup! President Obama. And, in particular, his famous/infamous comments about his policies being on the ballot during an October 2014 economic speech at Northwestern.  Here are the key 28 words from Obama: ""I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.""

Republicans clubbed Democrats in swing and GOP-leaning states with Obama's comments in the 2014 midterms. So, why not repeat the same blueprint a year later?

""Our families can't afford four more years of the liberal policies of President Obama and career politicians like Jack Conway,"" the ad's narrator says as ominous pictures of the two men are shown on the screen. ""Can you really trust Obama and Conway to make things better?""

Now, it wasn't solely Obama's popularity that cost Conway on Tuesday night. ""Conway was the anchor around Conway,"" said one Democratic strategist familiar with the polling in the contest. ""In many ways Conway is the [former Massachusetts state attorney general] Martha Coakley of Kentucky. There's just something about him that voters simply don’t want to vote for.""

Conway might not be Kentucky's cup of tea. But, Bevin, from his odd and less-than-promised primary challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) in 2014 all the way through his surprise primary win in this race and rough-around-the-edges general election campaign was far from the ideal GOP candidate either.

The difference? Conway had a ""D"" after his name — just like President Obama. And, in a state like Kentucky, that appears to be more than enough.",REAL
#NAME?,REAL
"Dr. Duke and Andrew Anglin discuss the most important vote and election of our lives! November 7, 2016 at 12:32 pm 
Dr. Duke and Andrew Anglin discuss the most important vote and election of our lives! 
Today Dr. Duke had Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin as his guest for the hour. They talked about the importance of the election tomorrow. They remarked that the Clinton campaign makes baseless accusations that the Russians could hack our voting machines to manipulate the election, but then insisting that Trump is beyond the pale for suggesting that the Hillary forces could possibly rig the vote. 
They also talked about New York Times columnist David Brooks admission on the PBS News Hour that as a result of globalization, immigration, and feminism, white men in America have been “displaced,”“shafted,” and “ruined,” and that their support for Trump is due to them “going with their gene pool.” Brooks, a Jewish Republican, says the one person he cannot support for President is Donald Trump. 
And now, a message from Andrew Anglin: 
Meanwhile, the media is admitting that voting machines will be hacked . 
We have to overwhelm the polls tomorrow. You must get everyone you know to vote . Call them right now. Don’t wait. Go through your phonebook on your cellphone and call up every single person you know who is not a totally liberal commie, and make sure they are going to vote. Offer to give them a ride if they need it. 
Let’s do this, people. 
Immediately following the show Dr. Duke got an mailbox full of emails saying this was the most powerful and inspiring radio broadcast they ever heard! Spread it around. 

Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
Click on Image to Donate! 
And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
"Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court’s complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS’s disregard of the statute’s plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit.

The court says the ACA’s stipulation that subsidies are to be administered by the IRS using exchanges “established by the State” should not be construed to mean what it says. Otherwise the law will not reach as far as it will if federal exchanges can administer subsidies in states that choose not to establish exchanges. The ACA’s legislative history, however, demonstrates that the subsidies were deliberately restricted to distribution through states’ exchanges in order to pressure the states into establishing their own exchanges.

The most durable damage from Thursday’s decision is not the perpetuation of the ACA, which can be undone by what created it — legislative action. The paramount injury is the court’s embrace of a duty to ratify and even facilitate lawless discretion exercised by administrative agencies and the executive branch generally.

The court’s decision flowed from many decisions by which the judiciary has written rules that favor the government in cases of statutory construction. The decision also resulted from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s embrace of the doctrine that courts, owing vast deference to the purposes of the political branches, are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written. What Roberts does by way of, to be polite, creative construing (Justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting, calls it “somersaults of statutory interpretation”) is legislating, not judging.

Roberts writes, almost laconically, that the ACA “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting.” That is his artful way of treating “inartful” as a synonym for “inconvenient” or even “self-defeating.”

Rolling up the sleeves of his black robe and buckling down to the business of redrafting the ACA, Roberts invents a corollary to “Chevron deference.”

Named for a 1984 case, Chevron deference has become central to the way today’s regulatory state functions. It says that agencies charged with administering statutes are entitled to deference when they interpret ambiguous statutory language. While purporting to not apply Chevron, Roberts expands it to empower all of the executive branch to ignore or rewrite congressional language that is not at all ambiguous but is inconvenient for the smooth operation of something Congress created. Exercising judicial discretion in the name of deference, Roberts enlarges executive discretion. He does so by validating what the IRS did when it ignored the ACA’s text in order to disburse billions of dollars of subsidies through federal exchanges not established by the states.

Chevron deference does for executive agencies what the “rational basis” test, another judicial invention, does for legislative discretion.

Since the New Deal, courts have permitted almost any legislative infringement of economic liberty that can be said to have a rational basis. Applying this extremely permissive test, courts usually approve any purpose that a legislature asserts. Courts even concoct purposes that legislatures neglect to articulate. This fulfills the Roberts Doctrine that it is a judicial function to construe laws in ways that make them perform better, meaning more efficiently, than they would as written by Congress.

[Bernstein: Why the Affordable Care Act is so messed up]

Thursday’s decision demonstrates how easily, indeed inevitably, judicial deference becomes judicial dereliction, with anticonstitutional consequences. We are, says William R. Maurer of the Institute for Justice, becoming “a country in which all the branches of government work in tandem to achieve policy outcomes, instead of checking one another to protect individual rights. Besides violating the separation of powers, this approach raises serious issues about whether litigants before the courts are receiving the process that is due to them under the Constitution.”

The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism’s central objective, the overthrow of the Constitution’s architecture. The separation of powers impedes progressivism by preventing government from wielding uninhibited power. Such power would result if its branches behaved as partners in harness rather than as wary, balancing rivals maintaining constitutional equipoise.

Roberts says “we must respect the role of the Legislature” but “[A] fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.” However, he goes beyond “understanding” the plan; he adopts a legislator’s role in order to rescue the legislature’s plan from the consequences of the legislature’s dubious decisions. By blurring, to the point of erasure, constitutional boundaries, he damages all institutions, not least his court.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.",REAL
"A new national poll shows Vice President Biden faring better than Hillary Clinton in match-ups against top Republican presidential candidates, as the VP weighs jumping into the race -- and meets Thursday with a top labor leader.

Fox News has learned that Biden is meeting later in the day with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. This comes after he met last weekend with liberal icon, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

He's making the rounds amid a flurry of polls showing Clinton potentially vulnerable. The latest Quinnipiac University National Poll shows Clinton polling better than Biden – who is not a declared candidate – in the Democratic primary race. But the poll gives Biden the slight edge when squared against leading GOP contenders.

""Note to Biden: They like you, they really like you, or they like you more than the others,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.

The poll shows Biden leading Republican front-runner Donald Trump, 48-40 percent. He also leads former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, 45-39 percent.

The former secretary of state also edges those candidates, but not by as much. She leads Trump 45-41 percent; she leads Bush 42-40 percent.

Both candidates narrowly lead Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. The survey comes on the heels of another showing Biden running strong in head-to-head match-ups against Republicans in key swing states.

Biden continues to weigh a potential bid, as Clinton struggles with the controversy over her personal email and server, and faces eroding poll numbers. The Quinnipiac poll showed her with her worst favorability rating yet – with only 39 percent holding a favorable view of her, compared with 51 percent who don’t.

Clinton weighed in on the Biden rumors Wednesday, saying in Iowa that, “He should have the space and the opportunity to decide what he wants to do.”

“I’m going to be running for president regardless,” she added.

The Quinnipiac poll of 1,563 registered voters was conducted Aug. 20-25. It has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.",REAL
"Hadi Would Be Figurehead to Placate Saudis by Jason Ditz, October 27, 2016 Share This 
Heavily backed by Saudi Arabia, former Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s ambition to return as the ruler of Yemen appears to be waning, with a new UN peace plan proposal making the rounds that would sideline him more or less entirely. 
Hadi’s position has been contentious from the start. “Elected” in 2012 in a UN-mandated vote in which no opposition was allowed, Hadi was supposed to serve two years in office leading to a new constitution and free elections. The constitution never happened, and Hadi extended his reign unilaterally in 2014. He resigned in January 2015 when his anti-Houthi military offensive turned sour and he lost the capital. 
The Saudis, primarily opposed to the Houthis because they’re Shi’ites, insists to this day that Hadi remains the rightful ruler, and in March 2015 attacked Yemen, vowing to reinstall him. While the Houthis have expressed openness to a unity government that ends the conflict, they’ve also opposed it involving Hadi or his vice president Ali Mushin Ahmar, who they say were too corrupt to work with in a transitional government. 
The UN plan seems largely to agree, as it would require Ahmar to resign outright, and would allow Hadi to remain only as a figurehead with no real power, instead seeking to stack the government with people both sides are likely to accept. 
The decision to leave Hadi in at all appears to be designed to placate the Saudis, who vowed to reinstall him through their war, and would be able to claim that they succeeded under this deal, even if it ultimately means Hadi doesn’t get any power. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"More Catholics are in Congress than ever before – and in positions of power. To each, however, Pope Francis' visit means something different.

Pope Francis talks with President Obama after arriving at Andrews Air Force Base Sept. 22. (First lady Michelle Obama is shown at right.) This is the pope's first visit to the United States, and he will become the first pontiff to ever address a joint session of Congress Thursday.

When Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday morning – a first for a pope – he looked out on the most Catholic Congress ever. Just over 30 percent of the lawmakers are Roman Catholic, with that group evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans.

While these members may be in agreement on religious affiliation, they’re often at odds over politics. Indeed, Francis arrives at a time of great tension on the Hill, as abortion politics plays out in a funding battle that could trigger a government shutdown next week. And because of the pope’s views on climate change, one Catholic lawmaker, Rep. Paul Gosar (R) of Arizona, says he’s boycotting the address.

Still, Catholic members are clearly honored – and excited – by the visit, which has caused them to reflect on their faith and the message of this popular pope.

Here are the views of six Catholic lawmakers ahead of the address – their hopes for healing of the body politic and the effect of their religious beliefs on their outlook as legislators.

Before he got into public service, the congressman – originally from Boston – considered the priesthood. He spent six years studying at a Catholic seminary. He views the pope’s visit through the lens of history, recalling his boyhood excitement over John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

“I was an Irish-Catholic Bostonian bursting with pride that one of our own was running for president,” Representative Connolly relates in an interview in the chandeliered speaker’s lobby of the House. “Imagine the chagrin I felt when I saw the headline of Time magazine and Newsweek at that time, saying, ‘Can a Catholic be president?’ and questioning our patriotism, our allegiance to the country.”

It was a “shock” that anyone would even ask such a question, or that the nominee would have to answer it, he says.

Connolly describes the integration of Catholics and their religion in the “great American mosaic” as coming to “full resolution” with the invitation to Francis to address the Congress – and the nation.

Can other religions, such as Islam, make a similar journey?

“I think so. America is always a work in progress,” he says. “We’re about ultimately expanding rights. Widening inclusivity. Broadening opportunity. And so acceptance and tolerance is in our future, and more of it.”

Like other lawmakers, Senator Collins says her faith “informs” her political philosophy but doesn’t “dictate” it.

For instance, she doesn’t agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings on contraception and early-term abortions. But unlike many of her Republican colleagues, she’s very glad the pope is sounding the alarm over climate change.

In her college days at St. Lawrence University, the senator took a course in Christian ethics. She was surprised that a whole unit was devoted to the environment and stewardship.

“The concept of stewardship, and that we should leave the earth in a better condition for the next generation, is very much a biblical concept,” she says. Francis’ views on that “reinforce” her own.

“This pope’s message of inclusiveness, forgiveness, mercy, and love is so appealing to me as well as to lapsed Catholics and people who aren’t even Catholic,” says Collins, who planned to bring her mother, in her late 80s, to the address.

The senator hoped that the pope “appeals to our better natures, that he preaches a message of unity and compassion for others that are less fortunate, and that he challenges us.”

Over the past 20 years, Mr. Boehner has invited three popes to speak before Congress. One finally accepted. It fulfills a dream for a man with Catholicism deeply anchored in himself.

Boehner grew up in a big working-class family – the second of 12 children. He went to Mass before school and said prayers with his football teammates and coach at his Catholic high school.

Prayer is a big part of the speaker’s life. When friends first suggested he run for Congress, he declined. But he went each morning for a month to church and prayed about it.

“Apparently, after a month, he got the answer,” says his former chief of staff Mick Krieger, in a video about the speaker.

“I have my conversations with the Lord. They start in the morning early, and they go on all day long. You can’t do this job by yourself,” Boehner has said.

The speaker had a one-on-one with Francis before the pontiff took his place in the House. After the address, the pope moved out to the speaker’s balcony to greet the crowds on the West Lawn of the Capitol.

The speaker’s office planned to record the visit from beginning to end at speaker.gov/pope.

""I think there's a lot of interest in what the pope is saying, his outreach to the poor, the fact he thinks people ought to be more religious,"" Boehner said in a video released by his office. ""He's got some other positions that are a bit more controversial. But, it's the pope!”

Italian-American, the daughter of a politician father (who was mayor of Baltimore), and a longtime public figure herself, the top Democrat in the House has an unusual history of encounters with popes.

They started in the eighth grade, when she visited Pope Pius XII in Rome with her family, she recounts to reporters. As a young woman, she stood along the papal parade route in Manhattan, thinking that Pope Paul VI had seen her waving. She knows better now, she laughs.

She speaks reverently of Pope John Paul II, whom she welcomed to San Francisco in 1987, and of the writings and speeches of Pope Benedict XVI, whom she met in Rome in 2009. He is the author of her favorite encyclical, “God is love.”

The visit of Francis to Congress “is thrilling beyond words.” He will speak as a head of state, she says, so “it won’t be a blessing.” And yet, Catholics such as herself are “overwhelmingly almost emotional about the religious experience of his coming.”

She may not agree with the church on abortion – a woman has God-given free will, in her view – but the pope’s “commitment to focusing on the climate crisis” is an “act of worship.” Ditto on his emphasis on helping the needy.

“To minister to those needs is an act of worship, to ignore those needs is to disown the God who made us. That’s how I see his visit.”

The freshman lawmaker from Miami says that “being a practicing Catholic makes me very hopeful about my role as a legislator” and what Congress can do to help the neediest people in the country and the world. His faith, he says, “indirectly” influences his policy decisions.

Representative Curbelo is a product of a prestigious Catholic boys’ school, Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami. Its motto is “Men for Others,” and he carried that interest into his work on the Miami-Dade County School Board before being elected to Congress last year. His focus in the House is on reforming poverty programs, K-12 schooling, and higher education.

Curbelo hoped that the pope would speak broadly about issues, rather than make specific policy recommendations. Highlight climate change? A good idea. Prescribe a carbon tax? Not so good. Call attention to the Syrian refugee crisis? Please. Ask the United States to take 100,000 refugees? That would be an “inappropriate” suggestion.

More than anything, Curbelo hoped Francis “inspires us and shows us that we can work together here.” Being from a swing district, the young congressman is taking a pragmatic approach to politics and is willing to compromise.

“Maybe the pope can help renew the Congress in some way,” he says.

Up in his office on the third floor of the Capitol, the second-ranking Democrat keeps a Roman Catholic prayer book that belonged to his grandmother. It’s in Lithuanian. She brought it with her and her three children when she crossed the ocean to immigrate to America in 1911.

In the old country, the book was contraband, because Russians were imposing their orthodox religion. But in America, said Senator Durbin on the Senate floor on Tuesday, his grandmother could use that prayer book freely.

The senator told this story in a windup of praise for the Constitution’s religious-freedom provisions, including that there is no religious test for elected office. The broader context was Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s recent comment that a Muslim should not be president, as well as GOP antiabortion measures in the Senate this week.

Caught as he exited the chamber, Durbin commented on the effect of Catholicism on his outlook as a legislator.

“I’ve always tried to be thoughtful about the relationship between religion and democracy,” he said. “My values guide me, but I want to make my decisions in the context of our Constitution and our democracy.”

Francis is “wildly popular” in his family and comes up at the dinner table, with praise for his decision to dress in an unadorned way and to live in a simple apartment. “A humble life. What an inspiration!”

As for the pope’s message, Durbin smiles and laughs: “It is no surprise that all of us in political life are thinking about the political impact of his message. Is it going to be more Democratic, more Republican? What is he going to say that makes us feel good or makes us squirm?”

His guess is that the pope will transcend the political and speak to larger issues.

“I have such faith in this man.... I didn’t think I would live long enough to see another pope in the mold of John XXIII, and Pope Francis has answered my prayers.”",REAL
"Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) criticized his party for a lack of ideas Wednesday in a wide-ranging and occasionally combative interview with The Washington Post’s editorial board.

Kasich, who sees the April 26 primary in Maryland as a way to increase his delegate total, argued that neither of his rivals could win the presidency, because of their negativity.

“If you don’t have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesn’t like ideas,” ­Kasich said. “They want to be negative against things. We had Reagan, okay? Saint Ron. We had Kemp, he was an idea guy. I’d say Paul Ryan is driven mostly by ideas. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of ’em, the party is knee-jerk ‘against.’ Maybe that’s how they were created.”

[Read the transcript of John Kasich’s interview with the Washington Post edtiorial board]

After Tuesday’s New York primary, where weeks of campaigning landed Kasich half a dozen delegates, the governor repeatedly emphasized his conservative credentials while taking care to define what “conservative” was.

“I’m gonna kill the Commerce Department,” Kasich said. “I don’t know why you don’t have an Education Department tied to the Labor Department.”

Kasich derided the idea of a carbon tax — “I’m not big on tax increases” — and when challenged on the math behind his tax-cut plan, which many analysts say would increase deficits, he mocked the pretenses of experts.

“The Center for a Responsible Budget — what have they ever balanced?” he asked. “When there is certainty, both on the regulatory side, on the tax side, and on the spending side, you basically get economic growth. And look, if we find out that we’re getting off the path, then we’ll have to adjust.”

For more than a month, Kasich has been mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination with the pledged delegates awarded in primaries. Tuesday’s result in New York came close to slamming the same door on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), something the senator addressed in an impromptu news conference Wednesday. While Cruz went on to call Kasich a “spoiler,” the Ohio governor agreed with him on one point: Front-runner Donald Trump was not entitled to the nomination if he failed to reach a simple majority of 1,237 delegates.

“One time I made an 83 on my math test, and I did better than everybody else, and I asked the teacher: How come I don’t have an A?” Kasich said. “The teacher said, ‘An A is 90.’ I said, ‘Oh, I get it.’ Say he gets in there with 1,100 — go get the rest of ’em.”

Kasich went on to imagine a convention where he could appeal to Trump voters by respecting them. Citing his work in Ohio to calm tensions after a police shooting in Cleveland, Kasich said he’d advanced past his “bombast years, where I was pounding on everybody.” He boasted of Ohio’s fracking boom but emphasized that the state had probably “the most” regulation of the ­natural gas industry in the country.

He also rejected the idea that he had moderated by opposing “birthright citizenship” when he was a congressman and endorsing it as a governor.

“I probably signed onto some bill,” shrugged Kasich. “Somebody probably walked up to me on the floor and said, ‘how ’bout putting your name on this?’ ”

At other points, Kasich vigorously defended his record. He said that changes to Ohio’s early voting law, opposed by Democrats, were simply fair and had been requested by local officials.

“Do you think 28 days of voting is restrictive?” Kasich asked. “How many other states have 28 days of early voting?”

Kasich made a few stabs at populism, criticizing the President Obama-era Federal Reserve for its multiple rounds of quantitative easing. To Kasich, that only resulted in companies “buying up more of their stock and making the rich richer.” He was otherwise light on criticism of the Obama administration.

On the District, Kasich dismissed the idea of statehood or a vote in Congress.

“I just don’t see that we really need that, okay?” Kasich said. Referring to the Republicans who have stopped such proposals, ­Kasich said that “they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party.”

But as he pondered the question some more, Kasich softened.

“They send me a bill, and I’m president of the United States?” he said. “I’ll read your editorials.”",REAL
"Experts Speechless! Countless People Miraculously Relieved of Serious Illness & Diseases-Must See! by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet 
An absolutely must-see! This new scientific breakthrough has been proven to cure cancer and all sorts of diseases and ailments! The results and success stories are out of this world! The FDA and government organizations do not want you to know about this!",FAKE
"We’ve looked at the arguments for the presidential candidacies of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Turning to former Texas governor Rick Perry, one might conclude he is the most underestimated candidate. Pundits who rank candidates tend to put him in the bottom tier of contenders. Like generals, however, pundits tend to fight the last campaign, and in the case of Perry that means affixing a dunce cap to his head and writing him off. He certainly has a tiny margin for error, but I tend to think voters care less about past mistakes and more about what they see before them. So what does Perry have to show them?

1. People do like a comeback story. His rotten performance ushered in a “new” Perry, more humble and studious.

2. He is a grown up. In a field of freshman senators, a couple media figures (Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee) and a rising but less experienced star from the ranks of governors (Scott Walker of Wisconsin) Perry unarguably has the advantage of 14 years as governor, a background including the border crisis and other situations demanding crisis management and the experience of having run for president once before. In a New Hampshire round table, he reiterated the argument: “Americans are going to want someone who has been tested, someone who’s got results in their background and we’re not going to choose another young, untested United States senator. I don’t think that is where Americans are going to want to go.” Again he stressed, “Rhetoric is fine. Nobody loves a barn burning speech any more than I do, but if you don’t have the record to back that up — if you’re not road-tested — then I think there is always a concern.”

3. He is the only candidate with military experience. Oddly, he rarely mentioned this in the 2012 race. He is not making that mistake this time around. “I think it’s important to understand that, and having that very real life experience of knowing what these conflicts do in terms of treasure and blood,” he said in New Hampshire. “Somehow, we thought we could stop [the Islamic State] with some simple bombing missions but that was just not the case, and now we’re left with some really, less than desirable opportunities to stop ISIS. It’s going to require our personnel to be engaged on the ground and I would suggest having experience, having a track record of dealing with issues and having experienced people who you trust who also have track records dealing with issues [is an asset].”

4. He has battled the federal government. To the extent voters are angry with Washington politicians and federal meddling, they have a champion in Perry. He battled the feds on everything from Obamacare to Environmental Protection Agency regulations. In his recent clash with the president, he castigated the president for not securing the border, and then took it upon himself to deploy the state’s national guard troops. He’s remained an advocate of state control and state-led reform on education and health care.

5. He’s an excellent retail politician with lots of free time. That is a powerful combination in early primary states where voters expect to be engaged directly and repeatedly.

6. He’s feisty but not obnoxious. Republican voters are itching for a fight and Perry is pugnacious enough to give it to them. He’s been in the trenches fighting the administration, and will not be shy about taking on Hillary Clinton.

7. There is an opening in the field. Mitt Romney did not run. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the victim of self-inflicted wounds. So if you want an experienced conservative governor who is not a Bush? That’s Perry’s spot. His biggest problem may be Walker, whom Perry will need to show is less prepared on foreign policy and less accomplished than he is. It’s a tall order, but with everyone gunning for Walker, Perry may be the beneficiary.

8.  He can handle the media. He is forceful enough and generally knowledgeable enough to push back on a tough interviewer and, as we saw on a late night appearance, relaxed enough (and sufficiently plugged into popular culture) to come across well in informal settings. He’d be smart to use non-news media to reset his image.

9. He’s a law and order figure. In defending the border and Second Amendment rights and championing prison reform, he has struck an appropriate balance between individual rights and public safety. No one will accuse him of being anti-police or, on the other hand, of defending government excess.

10. He’s led a rags to a not-very-many-riches life. No one will say he started out life with privilege or wealth. He does not have Ivy League degrees, nor does he live an ostentatious life style (he currently lives in a”1,400-square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 bath condo, full of boxes, four dogs”).",REAL
"Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property Nov 14, 2016 0 0 Now the State claims the right to tell you what you can and can’t have on your own property. 
Orono, MN – For more than a year, we have been following the story of a Minnesota man, Jay Nygard, who is routinely risking jail time because he refuses to remove a wind turbine from his property. Nygard has been in and out of court over the years, and despite a short-lived victory last October, he was recently back in front of a judge facing a contempt of court charge for refusing a court order to remove the turbines from his property. 
He did eventually remove the turbines, leaving only the cement bases because removing them would cause structural damage to their house. This was not good enough for the local government, who ignored the advice of three different engineers and demanded that they remove the bases, despite the risk of damaging the home. This is all that remains of the windmill on Nygard’s property, a concrete footing, in the ground. 
On Friday, Nygard was arrested and, according to his son, has been given six months in prison for refusing to remove the base. 
According to Kahler Nygard, Jay’s son, his father even attempted to make peace with the county and compromise on a number of different issues, but they ignored his appeals. 
“The choices for my dad were to potentially destroy our foundation in the house or go to jail, he even offered an olive branch saying he would add an easement to the deed saying when the house is demolished the pad must be removed, but that was ignored also, ” Kahler said in an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project. 
“The base was level with the ground and 4 feet cubed. We removed the top half of the concrete and used a metal cutting tool to remove the top half of the bolt assembly, rendering the structure unusable,” Kahler explained. 
“They say that we have to remove to footing 100% and have it inspected by the city, which we have three different engineers all saying we should just leave it , one of them even does contract work for the city, ” he added. 
Kahler said that although there are no ordinances against windmills, the county has a personal vendetta against his family. 
Nygard has the right to do whatever he wants with his own property, but unfortunately in a democracy such as the United States, the property rights of an individual can be overridden according to the whims of politicians and the demands of uninvolved third parties. 
Please share this story with your friends and family in hopes of keeping a good man, whose only “crime” was self-sustainability, out of jail. 
John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work , he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference , which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com. 
This article was originally featured on The Free Thought Project Vote Up",FAKE
"This is tyranny not democracy, says party with single MP 03-11-16 
UKIP has asserted that democracy can only be upheld if everyone does what they and their single MP demands. 
Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, speaking because UKIP’s elected leader was forced to resign by people who did not agree with the result, said Britain risks having its future decided by an unelected group of ideologues. 
He continued: “Democracy means something, and if it can be overridden by those who are unable to gain power legitimately it is no longer democracy but something much darker. 
“I do not care who in the media elite supports these fanatics, who are determined Britain will bend to their will and tell whatever lies it takes to get their way. 
“UKIP will certainly vote for hard Brexit in Parliament. Well, I hope we will. I’m not on speaking terms with our MP right now.” 
Share:",FAKE
"Print 
There are times that we are guilty of doing things that are offensive and we are unaware. Not knowing the culture you offend puts you in a position to seem bigoted. But are you responsible for how others perceive your words? Are you accountable to ensure that no one is ever offended by your words and actions? Is that even possible? 
It seems that this is now what is expected of DePaul University students. They are only to express themselves in ways that others will not take offense. 
The Washington Times reports : 
The nation’s largest Catholic university told a group of pro-life students that it could not display posters reading “Unborn Lives Matter,” lest they provoke the Black Lives Matter movement. 
In a letter to the College Republicans, DePaul University president Father Dennis Holtschneider said the posters contained “bigotry” veiled “under the cover of free speech,” the Daily Wire reported. 
“By our nature, we are committed to developing arguments and exploring important issues that can be steeped in controversy and, oftentimes, emotion,” Mr. Holtschneider said in the letter. “Yet there will be times when some forms of speech challenge our grounding in Catholic and Vincentian values. When that happens, you will see us refuse to allow members of our community be subjected to bigotry that occurs under the cover of free speech.” 
So to twist the popular slogan of one group to fit another group is bigoted? Would they feel this way if the sign were different? What if the sign read, “Black Unborn Lives Matter,” would that be bigoted? 
The truth is, the university is beginning to crack down on freedom of speech and expression, if those thoughts and expressions are conservative. More mind control from the left. 
Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares",FAKE
"  Bill Clinton is a sex-addicted ‘monster’ who mocked Hillary Clinton by calling her ‘The Warden’ in front of friends and privately boasted about his high notch count, according to his long-time mistress and childhood friend Dolly Kyle. Kyle, now 68, says she had a decades-long affair with   before and during his marriage and had a front-row seat to Bill’s salacious double-life in the 1970s and ’80s. Their on-again, off-again relationship ended abruptly in the 1990s, after Bill Clinton allegedly threatened to ‘destroy’ Kyle if she spoke to the media about their relationship. Kyle’s decades of observations, shared in an interview with the DailyMail.com as well as in her 2016 book The Other Woman, provide a unique perspective on the Clintons’ marriage and the couple’s treatment of the women who have accused   of infidelity or sexual assault over the years. Kyle, an Arkansas native who has since befriended several of Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers, said she was determined to come forward with her story after hearing Hillary Clinton say on the campaign trail that women who have been sexually assaulted have the ‘right to be believed’.  35  ",FAKE
"in: Mainstream Media , Politics , Propaganda Last week, I reported that the MSM was doing a great deal to try and undermine the truths that are being revealed about our government, the rigged election , and their darling, Hillary Clinton. My suspicion was that they were going so far as to set up fake websites and use skewed polls to prepare us for a Clinton victory. It appears I was not alone in that suspicion because all sorts of people began to bring up the topic of skewed polls, including the Trump campaign. Today, I noticed in the headlines that all of the “ official polls ” are telling a different story. They’re telling a story of a battle that is too close to call. Some are even saying that Trump is ahead by a point or two. Some are saying Clinton is a little bit ahead. It’s because they’ve been busted and they’re scrambling to cover the evidence of their dishonesty, of course. Politico even wrote a scathing article about the conspiratorial nature of the very idea of rigged elections . How did this happen? I believe that the combined voices of people who are sick of their baloney have made a difference. They realized that they weren’t pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes and they regrouped. Don’t let this convince you that the election is somehow magically “unrigged.” They’re just dialing back the rhetoric because it was so blatant that everyone was noticing it. It’s still a disgusting mess but the truth is our defense. Who can you trust? Here are at least two organizations who have a strong record for telling the truth: Project Veritas (It’s hard to doubt your own eyes on secret videos – find them on YouTube and Twitter ) Wikileaks (In 10 years their documents have never once been discredited – find them on Twitter and on their website ) Alternative media sites that have been around for a few years are likely to be more trustworthy than the mainstream sites, but let’s be honest. We have a bias too – nearly all of us despise Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton Money Machine that has so overloaded the system with corruption that it’s becoming obvious to even the most oblivious Kool-Aid drinker that something is awry. Check the sources. The bottom line is, don’t just blindly trust anyone. Vet your sources. Click the links the websites provide and decide whether or not the sources they’re quoting seem to be legitimate. When you see the exact same wording repeated over and over, generally it’s because it’s a talking point that someone has informed the media they are to emphasize. Have you ever noticed phrases like “an abundance of caution” or “for your own safety” getting used over and over? It’s a talking point and the collusive media is using it as a propaganda tool. Never trust a talking point. We’re all being played. I believe that the decision of who will be the next president has already been made. It would take a scandal of massive proportion to derail this train before it gets to the station on November 8th. And that’s really saying something, considering the scandals that have already been unearthed, many of which should have landed Clinton in an orange jumpsuit but have somehow been glossed over with little mention in the MSM. If you’re as worried about a Clinton presidency as I am, the biggest thing that you can do is fight for the truth to be known. Share reliable information about Hillary Clinton where everyone can learn about it. When we all raise our voices together, we are heard. Telling the truth – and doing so loudly – has never been more important than it is right now. Article first posted at DaisyLuther.com Submit your review",FAKE
"BOMBSHELL: Hillary Clinton’s Leaked Audio Proves She Rigs Elections Posted on October 30, 2016 by Dawn Parabellum in Politics Share This 
Astonishing, newly released leaked audio of Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has just surfaced, and what it reveals is damning. In her own voice, we hear the corrupt Democrat telling reporters that elections can and should be rigged to ensure who wins. This throws the validity of every government on earth in the shredder because she isn’t only talking about rigging American presidential elections. 
Since the FBI reopened their investigation into the criminal Democrat and Hillary seeks a powerful position to dictate the lives of others, it’s important to hear this audio. She is blatant when she say elections shouldn’t take place unless we make “sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” 
Hear it from her own mouth: 
Hillary clearly said, “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win. ” 
This conversation took place in 2006 during a discussion with Eli Chomsky, an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press. At the time, Hillary Clinton was running for a “shoo-in re-election” as a U.S. senator. 
Her trip, making the rounds of editorial boards, brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press. Her conversation was secretly recorded, and the audio hasn’t been released until now. 
According to Chomsky, this little audio clip has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. He claims his copy is the only copy and no one has heard it since 2006 — until now. Election rigging Democrat, Hillary Clinton 
It proves she is willing to do whatever it takes to win. With massive amounts of voter fraud already being reported in favor of the most criminal and corrupt politician of our time, in combination with this audio, it’s hard to deny that Hillary wouldn’t rig the election to win. 
Luckily, Americans are wising up to her disturbing antics. We all saw her cheat during the debates , and the proof came out in leaked emails, thanks to WikiLeaks. 
It’s important to hear this, coming directly from Hillary herself, and we can all tell that it is her voice. We all know she’s rigging this election to beat Donald Trump, but she obviously has had her hands in rigged elections before. 
It is hard to say how many elections across the globe she has influenced or just stolen. Hillary Clinton will stop at nothing to grab even a small amount of power, and she continues to prove she is as corrupt as they come.",FAKE
"While two of his potential Republican presidential opponents were dodging press and scrambling to clean up gaffes on vaccinations, Rubio on Tuesday presided over his first hearing as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.

He peppered two panels of witnesses with pointed questions on President Barack Obama's move to normalize relations with Cuba, which he called ""disgraceful.""

And immediately after the hearing, Rubio became one of the GOP's fiercest advocates for vaccinations since the issue emerged as a political football this week, asserting children should ""absolutely"" be vaccinated.

It was a senatorial move from a senatorial perch for the Florida Republican, who has told his staff to prepare as though he'll run for president in 2016, though he hasn't yet made a decision publicly.

The hearing highlighted two of his primary advantages in the potential presidential race: His measured, charismatic speaking style, and compelling personal story and heritage. But the hearing also hinted at the troubles ahead for Rubio, as he's vies for attention in a party crowded with rising stars and a different high profile issue seemingly each week. The U.S.-Cuba relations remain a less-than-glamorous storyline, and an initially packed hearing room cleared out midway through when most of the senators left to vote. And with the threat from ISIS taking center stage in the debate over U.S. foreign policy, and others with considerable foreign policy chops, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, contemplating a run, it remains to be seen whether the Cuba issue will be a sufficient launching pad to keep Rubio in the national spotlight. Rubio opened the initially full hearing with a series of assertive and pointed questions for a State Department official, seeking to pin her down on whether the U.S. would agree to limit its meetings with democracy activists as a condition for the U.S. government opening an embassy in Havana. ""Can you categorically say we will never accept that condition?"" he ultimately asked. ""It's not a real condition,"" the official replied. While the questions were incisive, they came in stark contrast to Sen. Rand Paul's prickly interview with a CNBC host on Monday, during which he shushed her and yawned while she asked questions. The interview quickly went viral and drew him negative press. And Rubio's appeal as the son of Cuban immigrants for a party seeking to make inroads with Latinos was on display during the second panel, which featured witnesses delivering testimony almost entirely in Spanish, with the help of a translator. At one point, Rubio moved to ask a question after a witness had given her answer in Spanish, interrupting the interpreter. He apologized, adding, ""I could understand."" ""I told Sen. Flake...not to worry about the translation. I'll let you know what they said later"" he joked, drawing laughter from the audience. The senator's backers believe his experience on national security issues, and particularly his leadership on Cuba, could give him a leg up on the competition in the primary. Just last month, Rubio won high praise for his command of foreign policy issues at a Koch-sponsored panel that allowed him to differentiate himself from fellow 2016 contenders Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. He emerged as the administration's most ardent critic after Obama announced in late December plans to thaw diplomatic relations with Cuba. And he's kept up the heat on the issue since, appearing on local and national media and writing op-eds hammering the move. The subcommittee chairmanship, too, doesn't come without risks. If he ultimately decides to run for president, as is expected, he'll face questions about his ability to get things done on Capitol Hill. Leadership of a subcommittee raises the expectations to deliver with concrete results — and can underscore the limits of a first-term senator's power.",REAL
"What will Lester Holt do when Donald Trump says that he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning?

Holt, 57, the most-watched daily news broadcaster in the country, has been tapped to moderate the first presidential debate Monday between Trump and Hillary Clinton. To say there is a lot riding on the night is not quite to capture it.

A record 100m Americans are expected to watch the showdown, probably making it one of the biggest television broadcasts ever. The political stakes are higher: many partisans on both sides think the fate of the republic, all 330m strong, is on the line.

Although under intense pressure from the Democratic side to play fact-checker as a bulwark against Trump’s baloney, and under equal pressure from the Republican side to stay out of it, Holt has not talked about how he sees his role. But he has shown persistence, in exclusive interviews with both candidates in recent months, in pinning the candidates down where they would rather speak unaccountably.

Hillary Clinton supporters hope that means that Holt might intervene, unlike his network colleague Matt Lauer at a forum earlier this month, should Trump repeat his lie about having opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, or should Trump roll out any of the other 48 “pants-on-fire” lies that the nonpartisan group Politifact has counted him telling.

Trump supporters may hope that a different Holt shows up, one closer to the amiable broadcaster who co-hosted a weekend morning show for 12 years. They want the man who announced the Westminster Kennel Club dog show for three consecutive years in the aughts, not a fact-checker of the nightly news.

After 35 years as a newscaster, Holt currently hosts the top-rated nightly news program in America, NBC Nightly News, attracting 7 to 8 million viewers on an average weeknight. Any doubts about the calibre of his talent that accompanied his unusual arrival in the role – amid the career implosion of his predecessor, Brian Williams – quickly dissipated. Holt drove the ratings still higher.

A native Californian who has written that he “grew up on air force bases”, Holt has reported from zones of armed conflict and natural disaster while charismatically serving up lighter stories as weekend anchor of NBC’s morning news and variety show, Today. He also plays upright bass.

Holt will encounter an unprecedented challenge, however, on Monday night, when he will mediate between two hungry candidates now tantalizingly close to claiming the most powerful post on Earth. He has interviewed both candidates in recent months, and brought a healthy journalistic antagonism to the job.

In June, Holt sat three feet away from Trump on gaudy Louis XVI chairs in Trump Tower, nearly knee-to-knee, and demanded that the candidate show evidence for a recent claim that Clinton’s private email server had been hacked. Anyone who doubts Holt’s ability to fact-check Trump should watch the exchange, in which he reduces Trump to the lame assurance, “I will report back to you.”

Two weeks later, Holt pressed Clinton on the opposite side of the email issue, confronting her with a finding by FBI director James Comey that she had been “extremely careless” in handling classified information. She ended up squirming, too.

Trump has expressed displeasure with Holt. “Lester is a Democrat,” Trump flatly told Fox News a week ago. But whether Holt checks that “fact” at the debate or not, it is false. Holt is a registered Republican.

",REAL
"In the two years since the horrific marathon bombing, Boston has been nothing less than resilient. The city has stood defiant and proud even as it painfully relived those grim events during a trial and persevered through a winter of record blizzards. But now, spring has come again, and we remember on this Patriots’ Day that if history is any guide, it holds not only the promise of Boston’s continued steadfastness, but also an affirmation from across America that Boston does not stand alone, and never has.

As far back as 1775 and predating our nation’s independence, Boston stood strong against those who would do the city harm. Punished for the singular act of dumping tea into Boston Harbor and the far broader initiatives of Massachusetts toward representative government, Boston chafed under the onerous provisions of what rebels called the Intolerable Acts. Chief among them was the Boston Port Bill, which closed Boston Harbor to commerce and effectively strangled the city. The question on the minds of many—regardless of political persuasion or sympathy—went to the crux of the future: Would Boston stand alone or would a slowly evolving fabric of national identity and purpose rally to its support?

A wide swath of colonial America responded. Support in the form of cash, goods, livestock, and crops poured into Boston, not only from surrounding Massachusetts and New England, but also from Virginia, South Carolina, and even far-off Georgia. Samuel Adams, rebel chairman of Boston’s quasi-governmental Committee of Correspondence, was quick to dispatch effusive letters of thanks for this generosity, but Adams also used these communications to emphasize the broader ramifications of Boston’s plight: If the British crown could do this to Boston, what was to keep it from visiting similar retribution on other cities?

In Farmington, Connecticut, almost one thousand people gathered to protest blocking the port of Boston and find the resulting indignities and deprivations to Boston oppressive as well as personal. “We, and every American,” the townspeople declared, “are sharers in the insults offered to the town of Boston.”

But humanitarian aid was one thing, armed rebellion in support of political ideals quite another. The spark drawing an irrevocable line between the two came on the April morning commemorated by Patriots’ Day, when British regulars marched onto Lexington Green and confronted local militia. Before the day was out, sporadic gunfire there and at Concord’s North Bridge unleashed a fury of pent-up emotions on both sides that exploded into all-out warfare. Within weeks, Boston was a city tightly guarded by nervous British soldiers and besieged by colonial militias.

Rebel leaders who fled Boston were determined that whatever happened next, the city must not stand alone. John Hancock and the Adams cousins, Samuel and John, aggressively recruited further support from throughout the colonies. These April events could not be seen as just a local Boston incident or even a Massachusetts insurrection, but rather as an American revolution. Patriots from Connecticut to New York and from Virginia to South Carolina responded and recognized that but for the spark at Lexington and Concord, Boston’s fight might very well be occurring in their own backyards.

Two hundred and forty years ago, patriots throughout the colonies recognized that the fundamental liberties at stake in Boston went well beyond its streets and thus, the fundamental duty to fight when necessary to preserve those liberties also went well beyond Boston. For my part,” a gentleman farmer from Virginia by the name of George Washington had written a few months earlier, “I shall not undertake to say where the line between Great Britain and the colonies should be drawn, but I am clearly of opinion, that one ought to be drawn, and our rights clearly ascertained.” It is no different today. We have so much in this country that is good and just, but we must not take any of it for granted. The times remain tenuous and uncertain. We will not bend to terrorism. We will not compromise principle.

Boston’s resiliency these past two years in the face of unspeakable and senseless tragedy comes as no surprise. Boston has and always will stand strong, and its resolve is a summons that America will not allow random acts of terrorism or any force to threaten the underlying fabric of our national identity. Then as now, this city calls us to patriotism and reminds us of the strength of our nation. Merely remembering Boston is not the same as standing with Boston. This Patriots’ Day we remember that only by standing with Boston can we preserve our fundamental freedoms and affirm that Boston does not stand alone.

Historian Walter R. Borneman is the author of ""MacArthur at War: World War II in the Pacific"" just published by Little, Brown.",REAL
"The Hill – by Don Rosenburg 
I always cared about the immigration issue, even before my son was killed. As a 30-year resident of southern California, I’d been noticing for years the extent to which concrete and sprawl was swallowing up the natural environs of my corner of the state. Of all states, I always thought, why is it the one that’s most beautiful and with the most arable and productive land that’s being torn up and paved over. And just how much traffic and gridlock are people willing to take, I would think to myself. Then my son, in his second year of law school, was run over three times and killed by an illegal-alien driver. That’s when I became an immigration-control activist and that’s why I can’t support Hillary Clinton , the open-borders candidate for president. 
And that’s why I’ve just filed two lawsuits; one against the Department of Homeland Security and one against the Justice Department. With the help of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), I’m pursuing a complaint against DHS for refusing to consider the environmental impacts of its mass immigration policies, a gross violation of environmental law we argue. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), all federal agencies must take a “hard look” at every “major action” they commit to and produce for the public an environmental assessment which a) explores all potential impacts of the action, and b) considers all possible alternatives. Since the law was enacted in 1970, California’s population has doubled from 20 to 40 million and DHS (including its predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services), has never published a single report exploring the possible impacts associated with its immigration policies. As we argue in our brief, if the public knew the effects of runaway population growth maybe they would have rallied that much harder for tougher enforcement and lower immigration-levels. Having ignored their obligations under the statute for so long, this could be one the biggest environmental law violations ever committed in the nation’s history. 
DHS, I must add, does write some NEPA reports. For instance, it calculates the impacts caused by its illegal-alien detainment facilities, just not for the people detained inside them then released to the public. This has to be done, we argue. America’s environmental footprint is gargantuan, the biggest in the world only next to dictatorial China. The American public’s constantly harangued that so-called “Dreamers”, that insufferably inane term, simply want an American standard of living and a piece of the American pie. But as I used to tell my son as a child, ‘wanting’ is different than ‘needing.’ America is a mere 5 percent of the world’s population, yet it consumes 20 percent of its petroleum. So every time a legal or illegal alien comes into the country and settles, the level of greenhouse gases in the world goes up just a little bit more. As for urban sprawl, between 1980 and 2000 America paved over a piece of land (much of it arable) that was around the size of Illinois . But does the correlation between population growth and environmental impact, a simple logical connection your average 3rd -grader could grasp, ever get even a moment’s discussion in the major media? For the future of our kids, it must. 
Same goes for illegal alien-crime. Routinely, we’re told there’s a “ scholarly consensus ” that illegal aliens commit fewer criminal offenses than citizens. As if this could be supportable. Most illegal aliens are absolutely skill-less and skill-less people commit far more crime on average—Never mind for now the labor markets-argument that the last thing our increasingly knowledge-based and roboticized economy needs is more skill-less workers. And nothing, of course, is stopping criminals on the run in Mexico from simply relocating here, out of the policia ’s reach. 
In any case, we know anyway that illegal alien-crime is a Rumsfeldian “known unknown”, as DOJ apparently doesn’t even bother to tally this information–My son’s death was counted as having been killed by a citizen with a driver’s license. At least for the public, that is. And that’s why IRLI and I are suing them as well. The agency has refused to comply with our requests for records on this issue. Why they can’t divulge to the American public these sorts of facts is telling in itself. After all, the Justice Department can tell me how many pick-pocketing crimes there were last year but not how many people were killed by illegal aliens. Not that this should matter in the debate over illegal immigration. Since they shouldn’t have been here in the first place, any crime an illegal alien commits against our own, like the killing of my boy, is a special tragedy. A nightmare that will occur again and again if Hillary Clinton takes the White House. 
Don Rosenberg is the founder of advocacy group Unlicensed to Kill and lives in Los Angeles County.",FAKE
"Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, will be talking about the 'state of the race' Thursday.

As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?

Mitt Romney on Thursday will give a major speech on his view of the 2016 presidential election, according to a news release from his office.

The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee will be appearing at the Hinckley Institute of Politics in Salt Lake City. The announcement said the subject of his talk was the “state of the race” but gave no further details.

Hmm. “Major speech,” “state of the race,” what’s that mean? Is Mr. Romney going to endorse Marco Rubio or (less likely) one of the other remaining GOP hopefuls?

We’d guess that’s not the case. If he were, he’d be appearing onstage with the endorsee wherever he is campaigning. That wouldn’t be in Utah. Also, his friends and aides are saying it’s not that kind of speech.

“Close @MittRomney aide says he won’t endorse or get in, but tomorrow’s speech ‘will be worth covering,’ ” tweeted NBC campaign reporter Andrew Rafferty.

Hold it a second, “get in”? It’s kind of late for that since the primaries are about half over. Yes, Romney tried to run again at the start of the 2016 cycle, but he got elbowed out of the race by the juggernaut of the Jeb Bush campaign, if you remember. So maybe he’s having second, or third, thoughts. Or hoping that other people think he might be having those thoughts even if he isn’t.

Is Romney going to anti-endorse Donald Trump? This seems more likely. Romney is clearly unhappy with the rise of The Donald, whose demeanor is the opposite of his and whose rise could mean the end of the low-tax, small-government, corporate-friendly GOP that Romney knows and presumably loves.

In recent weeks, Romney’s been sniping at Mr. Trump from the safety of social media and doing a decent job of it. His style has been to pile on when Trump is already getting pressure on certain stuff.

Thus Romney has urged Trump to release his back tax returns. He’s pushed Trump to make public off-the-record conversations with The New York Times. Most notably, he hit Trump for the latter’s slowness to disavow the endorsement of former KKK official David Duke.

“A disqualifying & disgusting response by @realDonaldTrump to the KKK,” Romney tweeted on Monday. “His coddling of repugnant bigotry is not in the character of America.”

Tough words. Also effective words, since they roused Trump to respond with a fairly predictable “loser” taunt. Romney hasn’t fallen into the trap of exchanging adolescent jibes about body parts with Trump, as Senator Rubio has. Instead, Romney’s hit him quick on political substance and then moved on.

That may change Thursday. It’s even possible Romney will join the #NeverTrump movement and say he’d never vote for Trump if he’s the Republican nominee.

Would that matter? Well, it won’t derail Trump, who at this point is only a Florida primary win away from wrapping up the GOP presidential prize. Like so many Republican establishment figures, Romney is coming to the anti-Trump battle too late, with too little, to make a difference.

What it might do is give Romney a little free media exposure at a time when the GOP establishment may be mulling over its options. If there’s a revolt at a contentious convention, whom can the establishment offer as a legitimate Trump alternative? If the old GOP wants to split and field its own third-party candidate, who might that be?

Unlike Rubio or Ted Cruz, Romney’s never lost to Trump. So Romney may be implicitly offering himself as an alternative, whatever his speech’s specific words.",REAL
"Probably not. So he needs to decide how he wants to pressure Republicans. He has several options.

Why Trump says he wants to ditch plans for new Air Force One

A group with 'People for the American Way' from Washington gathers with signs in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington Monday to call for Congress to give fair consideration to any nomination put forth by President Obama to fill the seat of Antonin Scalia.

President Obama has promised to uphold his “constitutional responsibility” to nominate a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative stalwart who died over the weekend. Now, he just needs to decide whether to try to soften Republican senators with the pick or make it a full-throated, election-year political statement.

Numerous Senate Republicans have already said they will not confirm a new Supreme Court justice before this fall's presidential elections. Given that the new appointment could tilt the court’s balance of power from conservative to liberal for the first time in decades, there is little reason to think Republicans are bluffing.

“I don’t see the Republicans just giving in and giving President Obama the opportunity to do that,” says Mark Hurwitz, a political scientist at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

So that leaves Mr. Obama with a strategic choice: What does he want to accomplish?

Constitutionally, he can’t force the Senate to vote on his nominee, but he can use Republican inaction to generate public pressure – the only tool available to him. Some Democrats have expressed the hope that Republicans will at least allow a hearing, even if they block Obama's nominee.

But even if his nominee doesn't even get a hearing, Obama can make a statement. He could put pressure on Republicans by choosing a lower court judge who has already survived a rigorous vetting process. Or he could put pressure on them by reaching out a hand in the form of a politically acceptable candidate.

Or he could do both.

One of the leading candidates to replace Scalia is District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge Sri Srinavasan, who was confirmed by the Senate 97 to 0 in May 2013. (A Republican filibuster had pushed a previous candidate to withdraw her nomination.)

“Democrats believe that unambiguous verdict on Srinivasan could make it awkward for [Senate majority leader Mitch] McConnell to block a vote on his nomination,” reported Politico.

Republicans might not be in any mood to play along, however. Even beyond the political ramifications of filling Scalia's seat, Republicans are still fuming over Democrats' move in 2013 to eliminate filibusters for lower court federal judges. Such judges can now be approved by a simple majority vote, though Supreme Court justices still must reach the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster.

“Republicans were furious about the 2013 changes,” The Washington Post reported, “and that residual anger could be a huge obstacle for any Obama nominee.”

As Obama has already made Democratic appointees the majority on nine of the nation’s 13 circuit courts, the Post notes, Republicans are unlikely to give in on Scalia's replacement easily.

That could lead Obama to nominate an overtly liberal candidate, using the political fallout from the stymied nomination to help drive voters to the polls in November.

“If Obama knows for sure that his pick is not going to get formally considered, he can go with someone who gives his party maximum political leverage,"" writes the Post’s James Hohmann.

The political maneuvering speaks to the stakes behind the nomination. It will “likely have enormous consequences for constitutional law in the nation,” affecting issues from campaign finance and affirmative action, to religious freedom and the Second Amendment, writes Jay Wexler, a professor at the Boston University School of Law, in an e-mail.

“Republicans became very aware, particularly during the Reagan administration, how important judicial nominations were,” adds Professor Hurwitz of Western Michigan University. With a presidential election looming, “they smell the White House right now, and they don’t want to lose this.”",REAL
"King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who Saudi state TV says has died, sought to counter Iran's influence in the Middle East while opposing pro-democracy movements at home.

How much do you know about Saudi Arabia? Take our quiz!

In this Wednesday, June 3, 2009 file photo, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, right, speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama, during arrival ceremonies at the Royal Terminal of King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. On early Friday, Jan. 23, 2015, Saudi state TV reported King Abdullah died at the age of 90.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who joined Washington's fight against al-Qaida and sought to modernize the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom with incremental but significant reforms, including nudging open greater opportunities for women, has died, according to Saudi state TV.

More than his guarded and hidebound predecessors, Abdullah assertively threw his oil-rich nation's weight behind trying to shape the Middle East. His priority was to counter the influence of rival, mainly Shiite Iran wherever it tried to make advances. He and fellow Sunni Arab monarchs also staunchly opposed the Middle East's wave of pro-democracy uprisings, seeing them as a threat to stability and their own rule.

He backed Sunni Muslim factions against Tehran's allies in several countries, but in Lebanon for example, the policy failed to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from gaining the upper hand. And Tehran and Riyadh's colliding ambitions stoked proxy conflicts around the region that enflamed Sunni-Shiite hatreds — most horrifically in Syria's civil war, where the two countries backed opposing sides. Those conflicts in turn hiked Sunni militancy that returned to threaten Saudi Arabia.

And while the king maintained the historically close alliance with Washington, there were frictions as he sought to put those relations on Saudi Arabia's terms. He was constantly frustrated by Washington's failure to broker a settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He also pushed the Obama administration to take a tougher stand against Iran and to more strongly back the mainly Sunni rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Abdullah's death was announced on Saudi state TV by a presenter who said the king died at 1 a.m. on Friday. His successor was announced as 79-year-old half-brother, Prince Salman, according to a Royal Court statement carried on the Saudi Press Agency. Salman was Abdullah's crown prince and had recently taken on some of the king's responsibilities.

Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Like all Abdul-Aziz's sons, Abdullah had only rudimentary education. Tall and heavyset, he felt more at home in the Nejd, the kingdom's desert heartland, riding stallions and hunting with falcons. His strict upbringing was exemplified by three days he spent in prison as a young man as punishment by his father for failing to give his seat to a visitor, a violation of Bedouin hospitality.

Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. The decision was challenged by a full brother of Fahd, Prince Sultan, who wanted the title for himself. But the family eventually closed ranks behind Abdullah to prevent splits.

Abdullah became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd. Abdullah was believed to have long rankled at the closeness of the alliance with the United States, and as regent he pressed Washington to withdraw the troops it had deployed in the kingdom since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. finally did so in 2003.

When President George W. Bush came to office, Abdullah again showed his readiness to push against his U.S. allies.

In 2000, Abdullah convinced the Arab League to approve an unprecedented offer that all Arab states would agree to peace with Israel if it withdrew from lands it captured in 1967. The next year, he sent his ambassador in Washington to tell the Bush administration that it was too unquestioningly biased in favor of Israel and that the kingdom would from now on pursue its own interests apart from Washington's. Alarmed by the prospect of a rift, Bush soon after advocated for the first time the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The next month, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks took place in the United States, and Abdullah had to steer the alliance through the resulting criticism. The kingdom was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers, and many pointed out that the baseline ideology for al-Qaida and other groups stemmed from Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

When al-Qaida militants in 2003 began a wave of violence in the kingdom aimed at toppling the monarchy,Abdullah cracked down hard. For the next three years, security forces battled militants, finally forcing them to flee to neighboring Yemen. There, they created a new al-Qaida branch, and Saudi Arabia has played a behind-the-scenes role in fighting it.

The tougher line helped affirm Abdullah's commitment to fighting al-Qaida. He paid two visits to Bush — in 2002 and 2005 — at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

When Fahd died in 2005, Abdullah officially rose to the throne. He then began to more openly push his agenda.

His aim at home was to modernize the kingdom to face the future. One of the world's largest oil exporters, Saudi Arabia is fabulously wealthy, but there are deep disparities in wealth and a burgeoning youth population in need of jobs, housing and education. More than half the current population of 20 million is under the age of 25. For Abdullah, that meant building a more skilled workforce and opening up greater room for women to participate. He was a strong supporter of education, building universities at home and increasing scholarships abroad for Saudi students.

Abdullah for the first time gave women seats on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the king and government. He promised women would be able to vote and run in 2015 elections for municipal councils, the only elections held in the country. He appointed the first female deputy minister in a 2009. Two Saudi female athletes competed in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and a small handful of women were granted licenses to work as lawyers during his rule.

One of his most ambitious projects was a Western-style university that bears his name, the King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology, which opened in 2009. Men and women share classrooms and study together inside the campus, a major departure in a country where even small talk between the sexes in public can bring a warning from the morality police.

The changes seemed small from the outside but had a powerful resonance. Small splashes of variety opened in the kingdom — color and flash crept into the all-black abayas women must wear in public; state-run TV started playing music, forbidden for decades; book fairs opened their doors to women writers and some banned books.

But he treaded carefully in the face of the ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics who hold near total sway over society and, in return, give the Al Saud family's rule religious legitimacy.

Senior cleric Sheik Saleh al-Lihedan warned against changes that could snap the ""thread between a leader and his people."" In some cases, Abdullah pushed back: He fired one prominent government cleric who criticized the mixed-gender university. But the king balked at going too far too fast. For example, beyond allowing debate in newspapers, Abdullah did nothing to respond to demands to allow women to drive.

""He has presided over a country that has inched forward, either on its own or with his leadership,"" said Karen Elliot House, author of ""On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines.""

""I don't think he's had as much impact as one would hope on trying to create a more moderate version of Islam,"" she said. ""To me, it has not taken inside the country as much as one would hope.""

And any change was strictly on the royal family's terms. After the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in particular, Saudi Arabia clamped down on any dissent. Riot police crushed street demonstrations by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority. Dozens of activists were detained, many of them tried under a sweeping counterterrorism law by an anti-terrorism court Abdullah created. Authorities more closely monitored social media, where anger over corruption and unemployment — and jokes about the aging monarchy — are rife.

Regionally, perhaps Abdullah's biggest priority was to confront Iran, the Shiite powerhouse across the Gulf.

Worried about Tehran's nuclear program, Abdullah told the United States in 2008 to consider military action to ""cut off the head of the snake"" and prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic memo.

In Lebanon, Abdullah backed Sunni allies against the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah in a proxy conflict that flared repeatedly into potentially destabilizing violence. Saudi Arabia was also deeply opposed to longtime Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom it considered a tool of Iran oppressing Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority.

In Syria, Abdullah stepped indirectly indirectly into the civil war that emerged after 2011. He supported and armed rebels battling to overthrow President Bashar Assad, Iran's top Arab ally, and pressed the Obama administration to do the same. Iran's allies Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias rushed to back Assad, and the resulting conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead and driven millions of Syrians from their homes.

From the multiple conflicts, Sunni-Shiite hatreds around the region took on a life of their own, fueling Sunni militancy. Syria's war helped give birth to the Islamic State group, which burst out to take over large parts of Syria and Iraq. Fears of the growing militancy prompted Abdullah to commit Saudi airpower to a U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremists.

Toby Matthiesen, author of ""Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't,"" saidAbdullah was not ""particularly sectarian in a way that he hated Shiites for religious reasons. ... There are other senior members of the ruling family much more sectarian."" But, he said, ""Saudi Arabia plays a huge role in fueling sectarian conflict.""

Abdullah had more than 30 children from around a dozen wives.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
"Email 
In the following interview with the X22Report Spotlight report, Dr. Jim Willie unleashes with both guns blazing on a subject I’ve been warning about for about for over two years now, which is the loss the U.S. Dollar’s status as the World’s Global Reserve Currency. 
For the simple fact that no one under the age of 70 has never known a planet earth where the U.S. Dollar has not been the World’s Reserve Currency, most Americans in particular have no idea what it will mean when we lose that status. 
The subject is not one that is taught in schools until well into the graduate school level in most cases, so unless a person has done independent research on the subject, the average American cannot comprehend how painful it will be for individual American families not IF, but WHEN the inevitable finally happens. 
Losing the World Reserve Currency status is a process, just like losing the world’s faith in the U.S. was a process. Both are processes that have been well underway for the better part of the last two decades, especially this past decade. Roughly ten years ago, 75% of global trade was denominated in U.S. Dollars, and that makes sense. After all, we’ve been the Reserve Currency. 
Over the last ten years, that figure has dropped to roughly 35% of all global trade which is now settled in U.S. Dollars, because countries are rushing to distance themselves from the U.S. for many of the reasons Dr. Willie outlines in another interview from earlier today titled, Dr. Jim Willie: Unprecedented Bond Dumping Means U.S. Dollar Collapse Ahead . 
The bottom line is this: The U.S. has grossly abused its privilege of being the World Reserve Currency, largely because we've adopted the practice of monetizing our debt by printing money out of thin air. Giving that process a fancy name like Quantitative Easing, doesn't change the reality of what it is. We print money out of thin air, and rip-off every country we've borrowed from when we pay them back with Dollars worth less than the ones we borrowed. 
Now, the world has lost all faith in the only thing that backs the U.S. Dollar in the first place: The Full Faith and Credit of the United States Government. In the interview, Dr. Willie gives a BLISTERING account of what to expect. He begins the first 30 seconds of the interview by explaining how once the U.S. Dollar is finished being phased out, a process that as I’ve said is well underway, he expects the Dollar to experience a massive currency devaluation of 30% almost instantly. 
After the initial devaluation of 30%, Dr. Willie expects there to be another another 30% devaluation six to eight months down the road, followed by a long series of 20% devaluations over the next several years, until we reach a point in about 4-5 years when our currency is completely devalued, and worth about 10% of what it is today. 
For a country with a trade deficit of over $500 BILLION, and as a country that imports over 50% of our food… that means conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable here in the United States, will soon become ordinary. Let that sink in for a moment. The unthinkable will become ordinary. The time to prepare is now. Brace yourself for a very intense interview… one of Dr. Willie’s most intense ever! 
DO NOT MISS THE SECOND VIDEO BELOW WITH CANADIAN BILLIONAIRE NED GOODMAN, AS HE LECTURES ON THE COMING COLLAPSE OF THE U.S. DOLLAR! 

As individual Americans or as families, in the past when we’ve heard news from pundits or politicians talking about issues like trade deficits, bad trade deals, or the federal debt, many times what we hear goes in one ear and out the other, because many of us cannot SEE or FEEL how those reports affect our families on a daily basis, or in our every day lives. 
The loss of the Reserve Currency is not something that might happen. It’s not something that could happen. It’s an eventually that there’s no chance of avoiding. That ship set sail far too long ago to fix the damage already done, and what lies ahead. It’s not an event where a vote is taken, and we’ll lose the status over night thanks to anything done by a U.N. vote, or by our own politicians in Washington. What's done is done, now it just has to play out. 
As explained, it’s a process, and it’s well underway. I could not be more serious when I say that conditions Americans once considered to be unthinkable in the United States, will soon become ordinary. If you’re fortunate enough to still be working, and you have an income, do not squander your opportunity to protect your family. Begin preparing. There is a reason Peter Schiff has said: The Collapse of the Dollar Will Be the Single Biggest Event In All of Human History . 
How The Coming Dollar Collapse Will Leave Americans Destitute 
An increasing number of financial experts are saying the United States dollar is no longer a reliable and dependable currency – and that its downfall is inevitable. There are even some experts who think the dollar is so unstable that the Chinese Yuan will soon become the world’s reserve currency, or currency of choice. 
“Our addictions to debt and cheap money have finally caused our major international creditors to call for an end to dollar hegemony and to push for a ‘de-Americanized’ world,” investment advisor and financial strategist Micheal Pento wrote in an op-ed piece for CNBC . 
Others agree. 
“In my view the dollar is about to become dethroned as the world’s defacto currency basically,” Canadian billionaire investor Ned Goodman said. “We’re headed to a period of stagflation , maybe serious inflation , and the United States will be losing the privilege of being able to print at its will the global reserve currency.” 
Goodman believes the US already is in another recession. The unemployment numbers are understated and the “real” unemployment number likely is closer to 15 percent, he said. 
Over half of 200 international institutional investors surveyed by the Economist think that the Yuan will eventually replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The reserve currency is the money most commonly accepted for international trade. 

Why Reserve Currencies Matter 
Having money with a reserve currency status enables a nation to dominate and control the world’s financial markets, as their currency is used for international trade and transactions. The US has the ability to maintain a $17 trillion national debt largely because the dollar is the reserve currency. 
A nation with a reserve currency can simply print money to pay its debts. 
In past centuries nations such as Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Portugal lost their status as super powers in part when their money lost reserve currency status. Reserve currencies collapse because people no longer trust or believe in the governments that issue them. 
Goodman says that the US dollar became the reserve currency in the 1970s because Saudi Arabia agreed to only accept only the dollar as payment for oil. Goodman noted that at least one major producer, Russia, is now accepting Yuan in payment for oil. 
Goodman was referring to a deal that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin made last May. Under the terms of deal, Russian companies can borrow money directly from China in exchange for oil. 
The US dollar once was backed by gold and silver, Goodman said, but now is “backed by nothing.” 
Australia Starts Using Yuan 
One of America’s oldest and closest allies may have taken the first step to ending the dollar’s reign as the reserve currency. CNBC reported that the Yuan will now be traded in Australia’s financial markets. Among other things that will let Chinese customers pay Australian firms in Yuan. China is the biggest market for Australia’s exports such as iron and coal. 
Story continues below video 

The Australian government has endorsed the deal because China is Australia’s biggest trading partner. Arthur Sinodinos, Australia’s Assistant Treasurer (treasury secretary) even went on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box show to endorse the deal. 
“It’s a big vote of confidence by both countries in the future of the relationship,” Sinodinos said. Not even recent economic problems in China seemed to dampen Sinodinos’ enthusiasm for the arrangement. 
“There’s no doubt that the Chinese authorities are having to manage issues in the financial sector to make sure that growth is sustained, but they’ve shown great skill at that in the past they were very adept at the fallout from the global financial crisis,” Sinodinos said. In other words, Sinokinos believes the Chinese are doing a very good job of managing their economy and their currency is reliable. 

How will the Dethroning of the Dollar Affect You? 
Observers disagree widely on how the end of the dollar’s reign as reserve currency would affect the US economy and average Americans. Retired neurosurgeon and pundit Dr. Ben Carson thinks it would turn the US into a third world nation and lead to unrest that would lead to martial law, as Off The Grid News recently reported. 
Goodman believes there will soon be a massive sell off of US dollars that will lead to inflation. He also suggested a way for people to protect their assets. 
“The Chinese have three and a half trillion US dollars and they’re spending these dollars as quickly as they can, and it will not be long before the rest of the world and the US will be thinking likewise. I do.” Goodman said. 
In the 1930s, everyone wanted US dollars, he said, but today they’re trying to get rid of them. He thinks that many investors are trying to spend all of their dollars to buy hard assets in order to avoid losing money invested in dollars. 
That means average people might be able to protect themselves by investing in hard assets such as gold, real estate or silver, Goodman said. 
Article posted with permission from The Last Great Stand   shares",FAKE
" The Failure of Democracy
How The Oligarchs Plan To Steal The Election By Paul Craig Roberts
 I am now convinced that the Oligarchy that rules America intends to steal the presidential election. In the past, the oligarchs have not cared which candidate won as the oligarchs owned both. But they do not own Trump.
Most likely you are unaware of what Trump is telling people as the media does not report it. A person who speaks like this:
is not endeared to the oligarchs.
 Who are the oligarchs?
—Wall Street and the mega-banks too big to fail and their agent the Federal Reserve, a federal agency that put 5 banks ahead of millions of troubled American homeowners who the federal reserve allowed to be flushed down the toilet. In order to save the mega-banks’ balance sheets from their irresponsible behavior, the Fed has denied retirees any interest income on their savings for eight years, forcing the elderly to draw down their savings, leaving their heirs, who have been displaced from employment by corporate jobs offshoring, penniless.
—The military/security complex which has spent trillions of our taxpayer dollars on 15 years of gratuitous wars based entirely on lies in order to enrich themselves and their power.
—The neoconservartives whose crazed ideology of US world hegemony thrusts the American people into military conflict with Russia and China.
—The US global corporations that sent American jobs to China and India and elsewhere in order to enrich the One Percent with higher profits from lower labor costs.
—Agribusiness (Monsanto et.al.), corporations that poison the soil, the water, the oceans, and our food with their GMOs, hebicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers, while killing the bees that pollinate the crops.
—The extractive industries—energy, mining, fracking, and timber—that maximize their profits by destroying the environment and the water supply.
—The Israel Lobby that controls US Middle East policy and is committing genocide against the Palestinians just as the US committed genocide against native Americans. Israel is using the US to eliminate sovereign countries that stand in Israell’s way.
What convinces me that the Oligarchy intends to steal the election is the vast difference between the presstitutes’ reporting and the facts on the ground.
According to the presstitutes, Hillary is so far ahead that there is no point in Trump supporters bothering to vote. Hillary has won the election before the vote. Hillary has been declared a 93% sure winner.
I am yet to see one Hillary yard sign, but Trump signs are everywhere. Reports I receive are that Hillary’s public appearances are unattended but Trumps are so heavily attended that people have to be turned away. This is a report from a woman in Florida:
“Trump has pulled huge numbers all over FL while campaigning here this week. I only see Trump signs and stickers in my wide travels. I dined at a Mexican restaurant last night. Two women my age sitting behind me were talking about how they had tried to see Trump when he came to Tallahassee. They left work early, arriving at the venue at 4:00 for a 6:00 rally. The place was already over capacity so they were turned away. It turned out that there were so many people there by 2:00 that the doors had to be opened to them. The women said that the crowds present were a mix of races and ages.”
I know the person who gave me this report and have no doubt whatsoever as to its veracity.
I also receive from readers similiar reports from around the country.
This is how the theft of the election is supposed to work: The media concentrated in a few corporate hands has gone all out to convince not only Americans but also the world, that Donald Trump is such an unacceptable candidate that he has lost the election before the vote.
By controllng the explanation, when the election is stolen those who challenge the stolen election are without a foundartion in the media. All media reports will say that it was a run away victory for Hillary over the misogynist immigrant-hating Trump.
And liberal, progressive opinion will be relieved and off guard as Hillary takes us into nuclear war.
That the Oligarchy intends to steal the election from the American people is verified by the officially reported behavior of the voting machines in early voting in Texas. The NPR presstitutes have declared that Hillary is such a favorite that even Republican Texas is up for grabs in the election.
If this is the case, why was it necessary for the voting machines to be programmed to change Trump votes to Hillary votes? Those voters who noted that they voted Trump but were recorded Hillary complained. The election officials, claiming a glitch (which only went one way), changed to paper ballots. But who will count them? No “glitches” caused Hillary votes to go to Trump, only Trump votes to go to Hillary.
The most brilliant movie of our time was The Matrix. This movie captured the life of Americans manipulated by a false reality, only in the real America there is insufficient awareness and no Neo, except possibly Donald Trump, to challenge the system. Americans of all stripes—academics, scholars, journalists, Republicans, Democrats, right-wing, left-wing, US Representatives, US Senators, Presidents, corporate moguls and brainwashed Americans and foreigners—live in a false reality.
In the United States today a critical presidential election is in process in which not a single important issue is addressed by Hillary and the presstitutes. This is total failure. Democracy, once the hope of the world, has totally failed in the United States of America. Trump is correct. The American people must restore the accountability of government to the people.
 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Videos Space Wars Likely In The Future As US, Russia Develop Satellite Weapons Mankind will have to decide whether to militarize space or not. There are very difficult negotiations in process. Moreover, the US wants to pass a bill to declare certain orbits exclusively American."" | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A United Launch Alliance Delta IV lifts off from Space Launch Complex-37 with the Air Force’s Global Positioning System (GPS) IIF-5 satellite. Recently, the Russian space agency Roscosmos kicked off tenders for three GLONASS satellites to be launched in 2017-2018. The company is expected to spend over one billion rubles ($16 million) on the program. 
The first launch is scheduled for December 25, 2017, the other two – for November 25, 2018. The satellite will be carried by a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome spaceport. 
In February and May 2016, two Glonass-M satellites were added to the GLONASS system. Currently, the system involves 27 satellites, 23 of which are in operation, two are put in orbital reserve, one is undergoing flight tests, and the last is undergoing maintenance. 
In the event of a military conflict, communication satellites would be an important target, military expert and observer Viktor Baranets said. “The current situation in space is that no satellites are protected, no matter at what orbits they are. The reason is that alongside with development of space systems, the US is running on all cylinders developing space weapons,” Baranets told Radio Sputnik. Moreover, China already joined the game, with an anti-satellite missile test in 2007. 
“Russia has its own plans too. I think that if Washington keeps ignoring Russia’s calls for the demilitarization of space, the so-called ‘combat cosmonautics’ would become reality,” Baranets pointed out. 
His words were echoed by Russian defense expert Vasily Kashin. In an interview with Sputnik China , Kashin said that modern satellites are almost devoid of any opportunity to protect themselves from the impact of interceptor missiles. 
In 2008, the Russian and Chinese governments proposed an international agreement to prevent the deployment of weapons in outer space but the US government under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama has consistently rejected launching negotiations to conclude such a treaty. 
Before Barack Obama became president, during his presidential campaign, he called for talks with Russia on anti-satellite weapons which started back in the 1970s but then was terminated by Washington. However, no progress has been made on the issue. 
Baranets said it could not be ruled out that in the future space might be militarized which would pose a threat to the entire world. “Mankind will have to decide whether to militarize space or not. There are very difficult negotiations in process. Moreover, the US wants to pass a bill to declare certain orbits exclusively American,” Baranets said. 
According to him, the defense industries of both Russia and the US are working to develope space combat systems. If the process is not stopped “space wars may be possible.” 
The expert stressed that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty between the US, the USSR and Britain should be revised. The document represents the legal framework of international space law, including prohibition of weapons of mass destruction in orbit. 
“The treaty should be revised as soon as possible. This will prevent militarization of space. Now, space is becoming a place for effective strikes against the enemy,” the expert concluded. 
In turn, Kashin assumed that anti-satellite weaponry is a new reality that should be considered while planning a possible military operation. In this new reality, Russia, China, the US, as well as India and Iran will most likely possess domestically-made sophisticated anti-satellite weapons, according to him.",FAKE
"Donald Trump, the actual Republican candidate for president, now endorsed by his party leaders, openly said he wants to exclude someone from a government job because of his race and ethnicity.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, Trump said he wants to disqualify the federal judge overseeing the Trump University case because of his ""Mexican heritage"" and membership in a Latino lawyers association:

Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had ""an absolute conflict"" in presiding over the litigation given that he was ""of Mexican heritage"" and a member of a Latino lawyers' association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. ""I'm building a wall. It's an inherent conflict of interest,"" Mr. Trump said.

This is pure racism. There's no subtlety, no dog whistle, no coded language.

Somehow this isn't too surprising. Trump is, after all, the presidential candidate who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants criminals and ""rapists,"" and he proposed banning all Muslims from entering the US.

And with this latest remark, Trump is just turning the thinly veiled subtext into text. He had already previously brought up Curiel's Mexican heritage, suggesting that there was a conflict of interest because of it but not saying it quite so explicitly.

Reading this, it's hard for me, a Hispanic American, to avoid feeling a little personally insulted. This suggests that Trump would probably dismiss my opinion — indeed, this article — because of my name. Yet millions of Americans — and a major political party — want him to be president, despite his clear racism.

Maybe the media plays a role here. After all, instead of calling it like it is, CBS News, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have called Trump's comments about Curiel ""racially charged"" and ""racially tinged,"" the weasel words the media typically uses to describe racism. It makes one wonder: What would it take for them to finally call Trump or his remarks just plainly racist? If claiming a qualified, vetted judge shouldn't be able to do his job because of his race and ethnicity isn't racist, then what the hell is?

Perhaps the problem is Hispanic people are vastly underrepresented in media. As the journalism organization ASNE found, racial minorities make up less than 13 percent of the field — despite making up about 38 percent of the total US population. That might make it harder for a lot of journalists to see just how racist Trump's remarks are.

If that's the case, maybe it would be helpful for the predominant white journalists in the field to consider: If President Barack Obama or President Marco Rubio said all white people should be banned from acting as judge in a court case against him, would that be considered racist? And how is that any different from what Trump is doing?

There should be no doubt about it now: Donald Trump is racist. He wants to exclude people from government jobs because of their race and ethnicity. That is the literal definition of racism. The media shouldn't shy away from pointing that out, and the people supporting Trump should know that's exactly what they're supporting.",REAL
"Donald Trump's October Surprise is so explicit, shocking, offensive and vile that even he felt the need to apologize -- defiantly.

In a video released after midnight Saturday, Trump expressed regret for stunning comments that surfaced Friday about women.

""Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am,"" he said. ""I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize.""

But that step -- unprecedented for a candidate loathe to ever admit a mistake -- may not be enough to rescue a campaign that is now in a full-fledged crisis . And Trump quickly attempted to pivot, criticizing Bill and Hillary Clinton in the video and suggesting he would take that argument to Sunday's debate.

""Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims,"" Trump said. ""We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.""

Trump's candidacy has revealed a long history of demeaning and shaming women. But the comments that emerged Friday go further than anything that has been attributed to him before as he seemed to bask in the power he felt his celebrity conferred to do whatever he wanted with women.

The bombshell couldn't come at a worse time for Trump's campaign as he prepares for the next debate against Clinton. And Republicans must now decide whether to stand by him or cut him loose just 32 days before the election.

The debate, co-moderated by CNN's Anderson Cooper, is especially crucial because Trump botched his first match with Clinton — and then spent the next two weeks in a cycle of recrimination, denial and feud with former Miss Universe Alicia Machado.

The political uproar over the latest revelation was so momentous that it overtook coverage of a hurricane lashing Florida and a stunning US government accusation of a Russian hacking operation to disrupt the elections.

It has been one of the cliches of the 2016 presidential race that Trump can get away with comments and outrages that would sink any normal politician. But the video tests the limits of that assumption in a way unlike any of Trump's many previous controversies.

""I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it,"" Trump said. ""I did try and fuck her. She was married.""

""I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married,"" Trump adds, after saying he took the woman -- who is identified only by her first name -- out furniture shopping.

""Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look,"" Trump says of the woman.

Before Trump stepped off a bus, he and Bush appear to see a soap actress who greets them.

""Whoa!"" Trump says. ""I've gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait.""

""And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,"" Trump says.

Trump advisers huddled in Trump Tower Friday night to plot a path forward. They clearly knew they had a problem on their hands when they moved quickly to release a statement that bizarrely blamed Bill Clinton after the Post published its story.

""This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended,"" Trump said.

There were signs that Trump's campaign was in disarray as some of his aides expressed exasperation in unusually blunt terms.

""It's appalling. It's just flat out appalling,"" a Trump adviser said.

The stunning developments are forcing a moment of reckoning for Republican Party leaders who have made a pact with a nominee many of them privately view as vulgar and unacceptable, and must now decide whether to cut him loose.

Trump was due to appear alongside Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — both pillars of the conservative movement — on Saturday. Ryan didn't withdraw his endorsement of Trump Friday but he did condemn the nominee and said Trump will no longer attend the event.

""I am sickened by what I heard today,"" Ryan said in a statement. ""Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow's event in Wisconsin.""

Every Republican office holder from GOP vice presidential pick Mike Pence — who often calls Trump ""this good man"" -- to vulnerable senators running for re-election will now face the same question: How can you stand with a nominee who would say such a thing?

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican running for re-election who stumbled this week over the question of whether Trump represented a good role model for children, quickly condemned Trump's statement.

""His statements are totally inappropriate and offensive,"" Ayotte said.

Sen. Pat Toomey, a vulnerable Pennsylvania Republican, tweeted that Trump's comments were ""outrageous and unacceptable.""

Trump's possible implosion also appeared to validate the central theme of Clinton's campaign — that a man like Trump with a colorful personal past, a life lived in the tabloids and a runaway mouth is simply not fit to be president.

Clinton and her top surrogates have been driving a narrative for months that the Republican nominee lacks the gravity, knowledge and character to sit in the Oval Office or to represent the United States overseas.

It was a case that appeared to be gaining traction given Trump's outspoken comments about Mexicans, women, Muslims and other sectors of society.

Trump's most loyal supporters sought to shrug off the latest controversy.

""We're not choosing a Sunday school teacher,"" Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager who is now a CNN contributor, told Wolf Blitzer on ""The Situation Room."" ""We're electing a leader to the free world.""

The controversy is likely to hammer Trump's standing among crucial demographics who may decide the election on November 8.

Trump had already busted established standards on rhetoric about women in this campaign, questioning last year after a tough debate whether moderator Megan Kelly was menstruating and having his words that some women were ""pigs"" and ""slobs"" thrown back at him by Clinton in the first debate.

But the revelations in the hot mic moment will surely doom any hope the GOP nominee has of improving his standing among women voters, especially highly educated, suburban women in swing states like Colorado and Pennsylvania.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, campaigning in Las Vegas, said Trump's comments ""makes me sick to my stomach.""

Trump's aides across the country seemed to feel similarly.

Asked about the reaction at a campaign field office, a Trump field staffer told CNN there were ""gasps. Collective gasps. We're trying to get our heads around it right now, but there's no way to spin this. There just isn't.""

The staffer, who is also paying close attention to Senate efforts, also added, unsolicited: ""Just think of the down-ballot effect. Brutal.""

""This is bad. I think this thing is over,"" the staffer said.",REAL
"By Patrick J. Buchanan October 29, 2016 
Should Donald Trump surge from behind to win, he would likely bring in with him both houses of Congress. 
Much of his agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, border security, deportation of criminals here illegally, repeal of Obamacare, appointing justices like Scalia, unleashing the energy industry — could be readily enacted. 
On new trade treaties with China and Mexico, Trump might need economic nationalists in Bernie Sanders’ party to stand with him, as free-trade Republicans stood by their K-Street contributors. 
Still, compatible agendas and GOP self-interest could transcend personal animosities and make for a successful four years. 
But consider what a Hillary Clinton presidency would be like. 
She would enter office as the least-admired president in history, without a vision or a mandate. She would take office with two-thirds of the nation believing she is untruthful and untrustworthy. 
Reports of poor health and lack of stamina may be exaggerated. Yet she moves like a woman her age. Unlike Ronald Reagan, her husband, Bill, and President Obama, she is not a natural political athlete and lacks the personal and rhetorical skills to move people to action. 
She makes few mistakes as a debater, but she is often shrill — when she is not boring. Trump is right: Hillary Clinton is tough as a $2 steak. But save for those close to her, she appears not to be a terribly likable person. 
Still, such attributes, or the lack of them, do not assure a failed presidency. James Polk, no charmer, was a one-term president, but a great one, victorious in the Mexican War, annexing California and the Southwest, negotiating a fair division of the Oregon territory with the British. 
Yet the hostility Clinton would face the day she takes office would almost seem to ensure four years of pure hell. 
The reason: her credibility, or rather her transparent lack of it. 
Consider. Because the tapes revealed he did not tell the full truth about when he learned about Watergate, Richard Nixon was forced to resign. 
In the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan faced potential impeachment charges, until ex-security adviser John Poindexter testified that Reagan told the truth when he said he had not known of the secret transfer of funds to the Nicaraguan Contras. 
Bill Clinton was impeached — for lying. 
White House scandals, as Nixon said in Watergate, are almost always rooted in mendacity — not the misdeed, but the cover-up, the lies, the perjury, the obstruction of justice that follow. 
And here Hillary Clinton seems to have an almost insoluble problem. 
She has testified for hours to FBI agents investigating why and how her server was set up and whether secret information passed through it. 
Forty times during her FBI interrogation, Clinton said she could not or did not recall. This writer has friends who went to prison for telling a grand jury, “I can’t recall.” 
After studying her testimony and the contents of her emails, FBI Director James Comey virtually accused Clinton of lying. 
Moreover, thousands of emails were erased from her server, even after she had reportedly been sent a subpoena from Congress to retain them. 
During her first two years as secretary of state, half of her outside visitors were contributors to the Clinton Foundation. 
Yet there was not a single quid pro quo, Clinton tells us. 
Yesterday’s newspapers exploded with reports of how Bill Clinton aide Doug Band raised money for the Clinton Foundation, and then hit up the same corporate contributors to pay huge fees for Bill’s speeches. 
What were the corporations buying if not influence? What were the foreign contributors buying, if not influence with an ex-president, and a secretary of state and possible future president? 
Did none of the big donors receive any official favors? 
“There’s a lot of smoke and there’s no fire,” says Hillary Clinton. 
Perhaps, but there seems to be more smoke every day. 
If once or twice in her hours of testimony to the FBI, grand jury or before Congress, Clinton were proven to have lied, her Justice Department would be obligated to name a special prosecutor, as was Nixon’s. 
And, with the election over, the investigative reporters of the adversary press, Pulitzers beckoning, would be cut loose to go after her. 
The Republican House is already gearing up for investigations that could last deep into Clinton’s first term. 
There is a vast trove of public and sworn testimony from Hillary, about the server, the emails, the erasures, the Clinton Foundation. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, there are tens of thousands of emails to sift through, and perhaps tens of thousands more to come. 
What are the odds that not one contains information that contradicts her sworn testimony? Cong. Jim Jordan contends that Clinton may already have perjured herself. 
And as the full-court press would begin with her inauguration, Clinton would have to deal with the Syrians, Russians, Taliban, North Koreans and Xi Jinping in the South China Sea — and with Bill Clinton wandering around the White House with nothing to do. 
This election is not over. But if Hillary Clinton wins, a truly hellish presidency could await her, and us. The Best of Patrick J. Buchanan Tags:",FAKE
"One of the most tedious moments of any presidential campaign is when everyone in the country decides they are better campaign strategists than the professionals. It’s like watching the World Series at a bar full of drunken fans in the losing team’s hometown. They all know more than the experts, or so they think, because they’ve watched a lot of baseball. This time it’s more tiresome than usual because it’s pretty much tied going into the ninth inning, and both team’s supporters are yelling their advice at the TV screen.

In recent days we’ve seen most prescriptions directed at the Hillary Clinton campaign, as the always nervous Democrats are waking up the startling reality that the flamboyant, white nationalist demagogue on the other side might just pull this off. And they have as many different ideas as there were GOP all-stars Donald Trump smoked in the primaries. These range from “She needs to take the fight to Trump and call him out” to “She should attack the Republican officials who endorse him” to “She should stop attacking him and lay out a positive policy agenda so people have a reason to vote for her” — which, to be fair, sounds like a good idea.

But the question is, if someone lays out a positive policy agenda and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Let’s take Wednesday as an example, when Clinton gave a big speech about something that is important to millions of Americans. She went to Orlando, a major city in a crucial swing state, and spoke about disability rights, expressing her plans in terms of American values of equality and inclusiveness. This is the fourth in a series of “Stronger Together” speeches the Democratic nominee has given recently about faith, community service, families and children, designed to display her values and vision for the future and show how her policies will achieve them.

Clinton also published an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Wednesday called “My Plan for Helping America’s Poor,” in which she discussed a comprehensive policy including one modeled on Rep. Jim Clyburn’s 10-20-30 plan, “directing 10 percent of federal investments to communities where 20 percent of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years,” putting “special emphasis on minority communities that have been held back for too long by barriers of systemic racism.”

Did you know about any of that? Has the press asked her questions about those issues in the now-frequent press avails she’s given over the last few weeks? Did you see any of those speeches in their entirety? Probably not. And that’s not the campaign’s fault. I get inundated with notices and press releases from the Clinton campaign, its surrogates and outside groups promoting her public speeches and other appearances. There’s no coverage of this “good news” stuff. Unless she’s thumping Trump the media is basically not interested.

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has been tracking media coverage throughout this campaign and yesterday released a fascinating study of the four weeks around the political conventions in the middle of the summer. The study’s author, Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, and its conclusions are depressing. Clinton’s so-called email scandal was the single most important story of that period, and the coverage of it was overwhelmingly negative and without context. In fact all the coverage of Clinton was overwhelmingly negative:

How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1 percent of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4 percent of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71 percent negative to 29 percent positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State. Even with the email story that dominated Clinton coverage, of course, journalists largely failed to provide the context that would allow voters to put the issue into proper perspective. The Shorenstein study was backed up by an ongoing Gallup survey that asks people to give them the first word that comes to their minds when they hear a candidate’s name. Since July 11, the words most commonly cited for Clinton are “email,” “lie,” “health,” “speech,” “scandal” and “foundation.” Trump, by contrast, brought to mind the words “speech,” “president,” “immigration,” “Mexico,” “convention,” “campaign” and “Obama.” As you can see, the Clinton words are loaded with negative judgment. Trump’s, not so much. Clinton has given prepared remarks on 22 occasions since the end of the Democratic convention. Some of these were standard stump speeches, while others were major policy addresses. She has dozens of positive ads running in media markets all over the country. But the only Clinton speech that garnered the full and interested attention of the press corps was her “alt-right” speech in Reno, Nevada, in late August. Almost all her speeches are covered the way the New York Times covered the disability speech on Wednesday: Clinton’s remarks are framed as a political ploy designed to evoke Trump’s ugly comments about a disabled reporter (which she did not discuss in the speech at all.) At the very end of the article, the reporter mentions that “some of [Clinton’s] most affecting moments on the campaign trail” come when she speaks with disabled people and their families, and that she often spontaneously brings up the subject in informal settings. There’s no reason to think she isn’t sincere about the issue, even if the campaign is subtly trying to highlight Trump’s cretinous attitudes by contrast. It’s an old truism that negative campaigning works, so it’s no surprise that Clinton’s campaign would try to leverage Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric against him. But there is plenty of positive material out there as well. It’s just the press isn’t interested, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that the voters are either. This doesn’t seem to be that kind of election. The armchair strategists who think a more positive, uplifting message is what Hillary Clinton needs to put this election away may be right. But the question is whether anyone could hear such a message above the din of cynicism and negativity that characterizes the coverage of this campaign.",REAL
"Monday night was shaky. The Bernie delegates made sure their voices were heard. Most of them were amicable, some were aggressive. While uncomfortable at times, it never veered into chaos, and it wasn’t the orgy of Hillary hate some feared. But it was impossible to ignore the tension in the room.

About an hour before the prime time speeches began, I walked the convention floor, hoping to engage a few of the Bernie delegates. What followed was a half-dozen conversations with Sanders supporters and several other brief interactions. I wanted to hear from the most fervent, the most disappointed. I wanted to know what they thought and why they thought it. What I heard was mostly encouraging and always illuminating.

Edgar Deleon, a Nebraska delegate, was the only Bernie-or-buster I encountered. He told me he was “100 percent for Sanders” and that he refused to support Clinton in November. “Why?” I asked. “Bernie Sanders is one of the most sincere, authentic public servants I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he told me. “Hillary Clinton is a confirmed fraud…everything wrong and corrupt with our political system is what she stands for.” I asked him what he would do if reduced to a choice between Trump and Clinton, and he said “Picking the lesser of two evils is still evil. Come November, my ballot will say Bernie Sanders no matter what.”

Mira Bowin, a young and insightful delegate from New York, was more measured. Asked if she planned to vote for Hillary in November, she said “It’s not November yet, and right now I’m supporting Bernie…but I have to say I’m not feeling very moved by her choice for VP or what they’ve done with TPP and the platform. I’m not feeling very courted and I have reservations.” She added that she’s “grateful to live in New York, which isn’t a swing state, so I feel free to support who I want.” To the question of Clinton or Trump, she answered resolutely: “Fascism is fascism, and fascism has to be stopped.” She may have “reservations” about Clinton’s record, but she’s aware of the dangers posed by Trump.

Another New York delegate, who wished to remain anonymous, told me she was committed to writing-in Bernie. Like many, she’s suspicious of the process, particularly after the DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks. “I’m not comfortable with the way this entire process has unfolded. I’m seeing this machine take over…this has been forced on us by the elites.” I asked her if she considered herself a Democrat or an independent. “53 years I’ve been a Democrat,” she told me. “I don’t remember not voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.” She never admitted it, but my sense was that she’d vote for Clinton if she lived in battleground state.

As I left the floor, I noticed a tall, exuberant man waving a Sanders sign near the press gallery. I approached him, confident he had something to say. “John Sasso,” he told me. “I’m from California.” One of several Sanders delegates, Sasso was here to support Sanders and no one else. “My biggest fear is that Hillary will lose in November,” he said. “Bernie brought this enthusiasm to the party, not Clinton…I think she’ll lose to Trump.” After sparring a bit over the latest polling data, I asked him if he had any loyalties to the Democratic Party. “I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve always voted for Democrats.” But this year felt…different. Although he wasn’t ready to say he’d vote for Clinton, he told me he “definitely wouldn’t vote for Trump.”

And this was a common sentiment. There was no ambivalence on the Trump question. An odious quack, Trump is a living rejection of everything progressives stand for. Bernie voters are skeptical of Clinton for a hundred different reasons – her hawkish foreign policy, her centrist capitulations, her history of distortions, etc. But no one I met in that convention hall wants him to be president. If you cut through the caricatures and listen to the delegates, here’s what you learn: Most of them got a glimpse of what the Democratic Party could be, what it should be, and then they watched it slip away. They understand that Sanders won concessions on the platform. They realize he pulled Clinton – and the party – to the left. But the delegates I spoke with see most of this as cosmetic. There’s a bit of unreason here. What, after all, did they expect? A year ago, Sanders was an afterthought; his nomination was unfathomable. And yet he nearly defeated Clinton while putting his stamp on the Democratic Party in a way no one thought possible. He changed the conversation on the left. That’s an extraordinary contribution, one most of his supporters fail to appreciate. Besides, if we ask what’s possible, not what’s ideal, a Clinton administration is hardly a disaster for progressives. Given the systemic constraints, there are limits to what a president can do. Sanders supporters often glide past the reality of a recalcitrant Congress, and Sanders himself could not muster an intelligible reply to the critical question: “But how will you pass all of this?” For all her faults, Clinton knows how to navigate the legislative swamp. Will she fight for every plank of Bernie’s platform? No. But she and Sanders are aligned on most issues, and she’s competent enough to deliver. In other words, a Clinton presidency is not the end of the republic. Nor is it a death blow to the progressive movement. This is lost on many Sanders supporters. In the end, though, they’ll come around. Much of the festering frustration is just that – frustration. It will pass. Sanders is a uniquely honest politician. He spoke to issues progressives care about in a way no candidate in recent memory has. It’s tough to see him get so close and lose. But worry not, Democrats. Nearly every Bernie delegate I spoke to hinted that they’ll support Clinton in November, and those who said they won’t conceded that a Trump administration is a nightmare. Will there be some who abstain? Perhaps. But not enough to matter. And the majority of delegates vowing to write-in Sanders or vote for a third party candidate are doing so because they live in non-swing states. And that ought to comfort panicked Democrats.",REAL
"By Rixon Stewart on September 12, 2006 
Is television an entertainment media or instrument of control, a ‘control mechanism’? In ‘Eisenhower’s Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard’s Story By wmw_admin on May 4, 2007 
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid? – Updated By wmw_admin on March 23, 2011 
The brilliant examination of the ‘Holocaust’ by Anthony Lawson has since been censored on the basis of a false Copyright infrigment. But as Lawson explains, this just another attempt to stiffle freedom of expression Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami? By wmw_admin on October 17, 2008 
With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran Trench exploded. Trick or Treat? Joe Vialls investigates The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance Letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota to Jeff Blankfort on the Israel Lobby By wmw_admin on December 8, 2006 
More than being an insider’s confirmation of the power of the pro-Israel lobby over Congress, the former US Senator’s letter also calls into question Noam Chomsky’s increasingly suspect looking motives The Oklahoma City Bombing: 30 Unanswered Questions By wmw_admin on July 11, 2003 
Timothy McVeigh may have been tried and executed, but there are still too many unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City Bombing",FAKE
"San Bernardino, California (CNN) As federal authorities attempt to piece together the circumstances surrounding last week's terrorist attack in San Bernardino , their far-flung investigation has taken them as far away as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

But they have also returned, again and again, to a much closer source of clues: The house next door to the boyhood home of killer Syed Rizwan Farook

Their efforts there are focused on a bespectacled former Walmart employee, Enrique Marquez, and his purchase of a pair of rifles used in the attack that claimed 14 lives

Marquez has acknowledged that he bought the two AR-15s for Farook several years ago.He's also told investigators about a 2012 attack plot that he says he and Farook conceived but did not carry out , U.S. officials told CNN.

Marquez told investigators that part of the reason the two abandoned their plans was that around that time, they were spooked by unrelated FBI arrests of four people charged with attempting to travel abroad to carry out jihad.

Investigators are still trying to corroborate information provided by Marquez and haven't verified details of the alleged plot. Officials caution that Marquez's claim of a 2012 attack could turn out to be false and an attempt to deflect his role in helping buy weapons that Farook later used in the San Bernardino shootings last week.

Marquez, 24, has not been charged with any crime and has told investigators he didn't know about the plans for the San Bernardino attack. Since the shootings, he has waived his Miranda rights, cooperated with investigators and provided information, according to the officials.

Marquez could not be reached for comment. No attorney has come forward.

Marquez's mother, Armida Chacon, told reporters outside her home Thursday she had no knowledge of her son's involvement in events leading up to the shooting. A sobbing Chacon said: ""He was a good person. How would I know? I didn't know,"" adding that she has not been interviewed by investigators.

""He was a good young man. Whatever I asked him to do he would do. He watched over his brothers. He helped me a lot. He was my right hand around the house,"" she said after requesting that journalists turn off their cameras before she would speak.

""I want to be left in peace. When I am ready, I will sit down and talk to you. My life changed since Wednesday,"" Chacon said. ""My son is a good person. A good person. The rest, I don't know how it happened. I want to see him.""

FBI Assistant Director David Bowdich was tight-lipped when asked about his status in the investigation at a news conference earlier this week. ""I'm not prepared to discuss Mr. Marquez at this point,"" Bowdich said.

According to county records, Marquez and Farook are related by marriage, and the address on his marriage license is the current address of Farook's father. Marquez was married last year with Farook's brother as a witness.

He converted to Islam several years ago and attended the same mosque as other members of the Farook family.

Marquez, who was a state licensed security guard until his license expired last year, checked himself into a mental health facility in the wake of the attacks, according to law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

According to officials, Marquez told investigators that he and Farook were on the path to radicalization as early as 2011. That same year, Marquez bought the first of two rifles for Farook.

Marquez gave the rifles to Farook shortly after purchasing them but did not report the transfer of ownership, two law enforcement officials said Tuesday.

Such transactions could be a violation of California law, the officials said.

Heavily armed FBI agents descended on his home on Tomlinson Avenue in Riverside early Saturday to serve a search warrant, waking neighbors with a bullhorn announcement for the occupants to come to the door. Agents ultimately forced entry through the garage. They returned a day later for a consensual search to retrieve items not covered in the scope of the warrant, according to a law enforcement official.

Agents also visited the Walmart store in Corona where Marquez worked. A spokesman for the retailer said Marquez has worked for Walmart since May, but ""the decision has been made to terminate him.""

A co-worker who asked not to be named said she was twice interviewed by FBI agents earlier this week. They asked about Marquez's personality and interests, the co-worker said.

In a brief interview with CNN, she said she told investigators she had no knowledge of Marquez using weapons or of having any link to the killers, whom she did not know. She did not associate with Marquez outside of work, she said.

Neighbors of the Tomlinson Avenue homes where Marquez and Farook lived next door to one another recalled the two working on cars together but did not know whether their relationship extended beyond that shared interest.

One neighbor, who asked not to be named, said Marquez seemed like a nice young man. ""He was a good guy,"" the neighbor said.

Another neighbor, Freddy Escamilla, said he'd recently run into Marquez on the street and that he was typically subdued, nodding hello but not saying much.

""He never really talked to anyone,"" Escamilla said, adding that he was ""really introverted. Very introverted.""

Marquez converted to Islam and attended mosque sermons on and off for a couple years, said Azmi Hasan, who has served as facility manager of the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco since 2000.

Hasan said Marquez acted goofy, describing one instance when he saw him outside the mosque laughing out loud to himself. When approached by Hasan about what was so funny, Marquez said he wasn't laughing.

Hasan said Marquez attended sermons by himself but stopped coming about two years ago. He said he ran into Marquez, who he recalled as quiet and introverted, at a party and asked why he hadn't been coming to sermons more often.

When questioned about why he wasn't coming to sermons, Marquez would say he was busy, according to Hasan. At one point, Hasan said, Marquez responded that Islam was not working for him.

Hasan said Syed Rizwan Farook's sister and brother-in-law also attended the mosque but that he'd never seen Marquez in their company.",REAL
"Project Veritas: Scott Foval Reveals Who Was Really Behind the Romney 47% Video   Tweet 
In this video, Scott Foval, the now former Field Director of Americans United For Change admits that the bartender who supposedly filmed Mitt Romney’s notorious 47% moment was not a bartender, but was a lawyer. “The lawyer took his phone and had the bartender walk around with it and set it up.”–Scott Foval",FAKE
"As a new poll shows 28% of early Republican Florida voters casting their vote for Clinton, Donald Trump is getting desperate. 
The Republican nominee begged Clinton voters to change their vote in 6 states where it’s not too late to do so. Trump wrote Wednesday morning, “So now that you can see Hillary was a big mistake, change your vote to MAKE AMERICAN GREAT AGAIN!” You can change your vote in six states. So, now that you see that Hillary was a big mistake, change your vote to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! 
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2016 
Tuesday evening Trump made the case that due to the FBI’s announcement about Clinton’s emails voters might have buyers’ remorse , “A lot of things have happened over the last few days. This is a message for any Democratic voters who have already cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton and are having a bad case of buyers’ remorse — in other words you want to change your vote — Wisconsin is one of several states where you can change your early ballot if you think you’ve made a mistake.” 
While it’s true that people in some states can change their votes, it’s not true that this rule was changed because of Hillary Clinton’s “emails” and yes, that’s a new Right wing “thing” apparently. Trump doesn’t suggest the law was changed because of Clinton, but he seems to think people will be rushing to change their mind about Clinton because of the non-surprise October “surprise!” the Republican FBI Director delivered , which was perceived to have benefited the Trump ticket. 
Days ago, Snopes debunked the notion that changing early votes is being allowed because of the FBI’s bizarre announcement that they may or may not have more emails pertaining to Clinton. 
Claim: After FBI Director Jim Comey announced that he was reviewing e-mails potentially linked to Hillary Clinton, several states announced that they were allowing people to change their early votes. mixture 
WHAT’S TRUE: Some states allow early voters to change their votes before election day. 
WHAT’S FALSE: No states changed their election laws in order to allow people who voted early for Hillary Clinton to change their votes. 
And to make this even better, that false information was based on a Fox News report that wasn’t selling the false story about Clinton, but still got some of the information wrong. This is why the Right can’t have nice things. The Left should be vigilant against allowing itself to become too insular, because epistemic closure leads to losing. 
Trump conveniently ignores his own history of email dumping, exhaustive list of lawsuits, bragging about sexual assault, dissing minorities and a Gold Star family, and national security experts investigating his ties and his campaign’s ties to Russia. 
Only a desperate candidate runs on trying to get people to change their votes to him because someone found a Clinton aide’s emails when they don’t even know what they say or if they are duplicates yet. 
While this race is far from over, if all Americans get off their butts and go vote, Donald Trump faces an uphill battle to the White House.",FAKE
"Following the shooting death of 28-year-old armed robbery suspect Michael Renard Grace Jr., surviving family members are now speaking out and demanding answers as to why a restaurant employee would have been allowed to carry a firearm at their place of business.
As if the idea of a robbery victim fighting back in self defense were something completely unfathomable, the deceased suspect’s parents are calling his death undeserved and unjustified. 
Predictably, Temia Hairston and Michael Grace Sr. told media outlet WBTV that even though their son walked into the Charlotte area Pizza Hut intent on robbing the business with two other armed men, was it just “an act of desperation ” and that they do not believe he would have hurt anyone.
Image of Michael Grace Jr. via WISTV 
“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” Hairston stated to WBTV… This is despite the fact that the most glaring and obvious possible answer to that question is that the employee carried a firearm for exactly this type of scenario. But I digress.
Via WISTV 
Police said Grace Jr and two other people tried to rob a Pizza Hut in the 3200 block of Freedom Drive. During the incident, an employee fired his own handgun and killed Grace Jr.
“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.
They said Grace Jr had fallen on hard times and resorted to crime to provide for his own child. They also said their son used to work at the same Pizza Hut restaurant where the robbery happened. They maintain he never would have physically hurt anyone during the robbery.
She said her son was shot in the head, and she thinks the shooting may have even been personal…
Sounds more like an individual with proper firearms training to me, but yeah, of course defending your own life is personal.
The family said they want Pizza Hut to release more information about the situation and acknowledge that their son used to be a Pizza Hut employee.
Hairston said she thinks the employee who shot her son needs to be in jail, and wants all parties involved in the situation to be honest about what happened.
The employee involved has reportedly been placed on leave. Pizza Hut released the following statement:
“The local Pizza Hut franchisee is fully cooperating with the Charlotte Police Department as they continue their investigation, but want to stress that the security of its staff is of utmost concern. They are providing support to the team members involved to ensure their health and well-being following this incident. The employee involved in the shooting has been placed on a leave of absence following further review.” 
Thoughts on this? Let us know in the comment section below.
",FAKE
"This item has been updated.

House Republican leaders abruptly dropped plans late Wednesday to vote on an anti-abortion bill amid a revolt by female GOP lawmakers concerned that the legislation's restrictive language would once again spoil the party's chances of broadening its appeal to women and younger voters.

In recent days, as many as two dozen Republicans had raised concerns with the ""Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act"" that would ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy. Sponsors said that exceptions would be allowed for a woman who is raped, but she could only get the abortion after reporting the rape to law enforcement.

A vote had been scheduled for Thursday to coincide with the annual March for Life, a gathering that brings hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion activists to Washington to mark the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

But Republican leaders dropped those plans after failing to win over a bloc of lawmakers, led by Reps. Rene Ellmers (R-N.C.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), who had raised concerns.

The House will vote instead Thursday on a bill prohibiting federal funding for abortions -- a more innocuous anti-abortion measure that the Republican-controlled chamber has passed before.

A senior GOP aide said that concerns had been raised ""by men and women Members that still need to be worked out."" The aide, who wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said in an e-mail that Thursday's vote will help ""advance the pro-life cause"" and that GOP leaders ""remain committed to continue working through the process [on the Pain Capable bill] to make sure it too is successful.""

Other aides said that leaders were eager to avoid political fallout from a large number of female Republicans voting against an abortion bill in the early stages of the new GOP-controlled Congress.

The dispute erupted into the open in recent days and once again demonstrated the changing contours of the expanded House Republican caucus. The 246-member caucus is seeing rifts on issues where it once had more unity. That's because there are now more moderate Republicans from swing districts who could face tough reelections in 2016 when more Democratic and independent voters are expected to vote in the presidential election.

Already this month, a large bloc of moderate Republicans voted against a spending bill that would repeal President Obama's changes to immigration policy enacted by executive action. More than two dozen Republicans from metropolitan areas with large immigrant populations also voted against an amendment to the bill that would end temporary legal protections to the children of illegal immigrants.

The abortion bill pulled Wednesday night was strongly opposed by Democrats and women's rights groups. But a similar version of the bill easily passed the GOP-controlled House in 2013 and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had vowed to bring it up for a vote.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill’s lead sponsor, had predicted Wednesday that his proposal would easily pass because it ""has overwhelming support among the American people.""

But Ellmers and Walorski had withdrawn their support and voiced concerns during meetings at the annual Republican policy retreat in Hershey, Pa. Ellmers did so again Wednesday at a closed-door House GOP meeting in the basement of the Capitol, according to several people who attended.

Seeking to rebut growing criticism from conservatives, Ellmers said on Facebook Wednesday evening that she would vote for the bill: ""I have and will continue to be a strong defender of the prolife community,"" she wrote.

But she had recently asked leaders to reconsider holding the vote, noting that Republicans had faced harsh criticism from Democrats in recent years for mounting a ""war on women"" by passing restrictive abortion legislation and other similar bills.

""The first vote we take, or the second vote, or the fifth vote, shouldn't be on an issue where we know that millennials—social issues just aren't as important [to them],"" she said in an interview with National Journal.

The opposition set off a scramble Wednesday among top GOP leaders concerned about how several ""no"" votes could be perceived by their party and the general public.

With word of the opposition spreading, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) conferred nervously off the House floor after a midday vote. From there, Scalise headed to a meeting in his office suite with Ellmers, Walorski, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) -- a lead co-sponsor of the bill -- and several other women.

In a caucus dominated by men, a meeting with top leaders requested and attended almost exclusively by women is a rare sight.

One-by-one they exited the meeting and remained tight-lipped.

Walorski said the dispute ""is no different"" than conversations that occur before votes on other legislation. When pressed to explain her specific concerns, she rushed off: ""I can't. I can't.""

Others seen exiting included Reps. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), Diane Black (R-Tenn.), Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), Susan Brooks (R-Ind.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.). Hartzler had already signaled her support for the bill to reporters. The other women declined to comment.

The impasse prompted Tony Perkins, who leads the conservative Family Research Council, to visit the Capitol Wednesday to meet with Scalise.

He cited ""a lot of misconceptions"" for causing last-minute disputes with the bill. ""We’re talking about a measure that would limit abortions after five months,"" he said. ""America is only one of four nations that allows abortions throughout the entire pregnancy.""

Women's rights groups and Democrats have denounced the legislation as dangerous and unconstitutional. In a message to group members, the National Organization for Women cited federal statistics showing that just 35 percent of rape victims report the incident to police -- and said that the bill will do nothing to increase the rate of reporting.

Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, cheered the decision of GOP leaders.

""I never thought I would see the day that the Tea Party-led House of Representatives would wake up to the fact that their priorities — outright abortion bans — are way out of touch with the American people,"" she said in a statement. ""The GOP drafted a bill so extreme and so out of touch with the voters that even their own membership could not support.""

The 22 women in the House GOP caucus are well aware that many of their male colleagues have earned the ire of Democrats and women's rights groups for talking about rape and women's rights.

At the same closed-door retreat two years ago, Republican pollsters implored GOP lawmakers to stop discussing rape on the campaign trail and on Capitol Hill. The warnings came after several candidates faced heat in 2012 -- including former congressman Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who said a woman could terminate a pregnancy resulting from a “legitimate rape,"" and Richard Mourdock, a GOP candidate for an Indiana Senate seat, who said that babies resulting from rape were a ""gift from God.""

Franks, who is an ardent antiabortion activist, has been known to take an aggressive stance on the issue in the past, often clashing with Democrats opposed to his proposals. But on Wednesday, he took a notably softer tone as he acknowledged the concerns of his colleagues.

""I’ve maintained an open heart, because I realize that all of the people involved have sincere perspectives and have knowledge and experiences and information that I don’t have,"" he said. ""So my heart is open – my desire here is not a political victory, it is to try to somehow be part of catalyzing an awakening in America to where we finally see the humanity of these little victims and the inhumanity of what’s happening to them.""",REAL
"'Racist and sexist’ complaints against Aussie lamb advert rejected   18:36 Get short URL The ad recieves complaints of being sexist and racist against white men. © We love our Lamb / YouTube The Advertising Standards Board of Australia (ASB) has rejected complaints that an advertisement for lamb is offensive to white males. Several complaints were lodged about the ad which producers say attempts to be all-inclusive with the people it features. 
Produced by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), the ad titled “You Never Lamb Alone” features a white TV presenter quickly being switched with a Bengali-Australian actor Arka Das who introduces a range of ethnicities and sexual orientations as he moves towards a barbeque cooking lamb - “the meat that doesn’t discriminate”. 
http://giphy.com/gifs/bJJo3n1aUke1G 
Most of the complaints to the Advertising Standards Board of Australia centered on the opening switch of white TV presenter Luke Jacobz to Das, after Jacobz utters the line “I’m here to address concerns that too many perky white males are contributing to the lack of diversity on our screens.” 
http://giphy.com/gifs/7nzEvHhZ1zI52 
“This advertisement clearly states ‘too many WHITE people’ in its commercial which is highly offensive,” one complaint read, according to Bandt . “Pointing out someone’s race and gender in an advertisement and then denigrating such race or gender is both racist and sexist,” another read. To whoever wrote this lamb ad, thank you for all the tongue-in-cheek jokes about 'diversity' in Australia. https://t.co/E87jCXMFr3 — she stress@pax prep (@ChattyAnny) October 26, 2016 
MLA explained that the line was “simply a nod to the common criticism that Australian television lacks diversity,” with the ASB rejecting the complaints on similar grounds. Well done MEAT & LIVESTOCK AUSTRALIA for “You’ll never lamb alone” winning the Marketing Communications: B2C and B2B award. #AMI #AMIAwards 
“The Board considered that the advertisement did not portray or depict material in a way which discriminates against or vilifies a person or section of the community on account of race or gender,” they said. 
Currently the video has more thumbs down than thumbs up on YouTube, with comments now disabled.",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are confronting the same paradox: the fate of their insurgent campaigns built on scorn for the political establishment rests on how well they play the inside game.

For Trump, the challenge is shifting from a strategy of piling up state primary wins to one that also takes into account states that award delegates in a more intricate fashion. Trump's organizational weakness in that type of contest was underscored Saturday when he was swept by Ted Cruz in the Colorado Republican convention.

Sanders, meanwhile, has to win not only more pledged delegates but also more superdelegates -- party officials and other elites who can vote however they choose -- if he wants to take the Democratic battle for the White House to the convention floor.

Trump is already making the case that the system is inherently unfair and is a symptom of the insider politics practiced by distant elites that disenfranchises grass-roots voters like those who have flocked to his campaign.

""You see what's happening to me and Bernie Sanders,"" Trump said Sunday in Rochester, New York. ""It's a corrupt deal going on.""

The 2016 campaign's shift from a simple hunt for primary wins is more than a sign that the electoral calendar is running out and routes to the nomination for both parties are beginning to narrow. It's proof that for all of its busted conventional wisdom and broken political rules, the wild presidential campaign is at a point where insurgent politics are no longer sufficient to win.

""The nuts and bolts of presidential politics is an archaic language and very few people understand it. Outsiders need insiders to be successful,"" said Republican political strategist Ford O'Connell. ""If you want to crack the Da Vinci code, you need insiders.""

Trump is doing just that. Last week, he hired Paul Manafort, a master of insider politics, to run his convention strategy.

Still, Trump and Sanders start at a disadvantage in the inside game.

Cruz, whose only real hope of heading the GOP ticket lies in a convention fight, is rolling out a delegate hunting operation years in the planning. Though he's built a political brand on being an outsider himself, Cruz has demonstrated a savvy understanding of the hidden ways of Washington and the mechanics of a presidential primary race.

The Cruz campaign has recruited delegates in Arizona and sought delegates won in Louisiana by Sen. Marco Rubio -- prompting a bewildered Trump, who won the state, to threaten legal action. Cruz also secured all of the final 13 delegates who were selected in Colorado this weekend.

The strategy is designed to prepare the way for multiple rounds of convention balloting when delegates awarded to Trump could be freed up to migrate to another candidate. It prompted more sniping between the campaigns on Sunday.

Manafort accused the Cruz campaign of ""Gestapo tactics"" and ""not playing by the rules"" in its efforts to wrangle delegates.

""I win a state in votes and then get non-representative delegates because they are offered all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign. Bad system!""

He followed up with another tweet later in the day.

""How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary?"" he wrote. ""Great anger - totally unfair!""

""More sour grapes from Trump who continues to lash out in tantrums every time he loses. We are winning because we've put in the hard work to build a superior organization,"" she said in a statement.

Trump's decision to hire Manafort, who helped quell the Ronald Reagan-inspired delegate uprising against President Gerald Ford at the 1976 convention, was a sign of evolution in his campaign.

""This is an example of Donald Trump managing,"" Manafort said Friday on CNN's ""New Day."" ""Because the campaigns come in stages, he also understood that there comes a time when winning isn't enough. But it's how you win and how much you win. He recognized that this was the time.""

It's unclear whether the move will be enough to help Trump secure the 1,237 delegates he'll need to win the nomination going into the GOP convention this summer. But the new direction is being praised as a smart move, even by Republicans strongly opposed to Trump.

""Paul Manafort is a seasoned professional and he is a smart guy,"" Stuart Stevens, senior strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 GOP campaign, told CNN on Friday. ""This is make or break for Donald Trump. He has to get to 1,237. I think if he doesn't go to Cleveland with 1,237, it's doubtful that he will be able to come out of there as the nominee of the party.""

Part of Manafort's job will be to forge links with local state party chiefs and officials influential in populating delegate slates, and to ensure that Trump is not outmaneuvered in the rules committee that will set out the parameters of the convention.

""The challenge that the Trump campaign faces right now is that Ted Cruz has spent two years working every single one of those members, every single state party chair,"" said Republican strategist Doug Heye. ""The Trump campaign is just getting to know those people.""

Trump's campaign confronts a challenge beyond Cruz's camp and the more long-shot possibility of facing down a convention coup from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is positioning himself as an alternative should both his Republican rivals fail to corral a majority of delegates in a split party.

Republican establishment insiders, who in some cases failed to thwart Trump on rival campaigns, are still trying to stop him, some with super PAC efforts targeting the billionaire with millions of dollars in advertising.

These efforts are also now increasingly turning to influence delegate slates, said Tim Miller, a former senior Jeb Bush aide now working for the anti-Trump Our Principles PAC.

""There is a role we can play, whether it is directly speaking or directly messaging to delegates or potential delegates in these states,"" Miller said.

While the Republican primary campaign has claimed much of the media coverage so far this year, an insurgent versus establishment dynamic is playing out in the Democratic primary race.

Sanders, the self described democratic socialist, has always been a political free spirit, caucusing with Democrats in the Senate as an independent but inhabiting ground to left of the mainstream party.

That leaves him with few insider credentials with the party establishment, which could become a liability as he tries to lure superdelegates.

His outsider campaign has posed a much stronger than expected challenge to one of the most powerful names in American politics.

But he faces an uphill climb to the nomination -- he would need to win 77% of the remaining delegates at stake to win the nomination.

Clinton is much further along than Trump and Sanders in the process of locking up delegate support — especially among Democratic superdelegates — many of whom have decades of stored up loyalty and connections with her family.

Clinton lost in 2008 to Barack Obama's outsider campaign that toppled her insider machine. Her 2016 campaign team has learned from its mistakes, paying far more attention to delegate calculations and individual state electoral math than she did earlier.

This has meant that even when she has lost to Sanders, she has minimized the deficit in delegates — as happened in Wisconsin last week when she lost by 13 points but only collected 10 fewer delegates than her rival. Sanders beat Clinton by more than 10 points in the Wyoming Democratic caucuses on Saturday but they both walked away with seven delegates.

""The Clinton campaign infrastructure that is in place has done a phenomenal job of securing pledged superdelegates very early on in the process,"" said Tharon Johnson, a senior Democrat from Georgia, who was southern regional director for Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. ""They have a very full, comprehensive, ground organization in states that matter the most to close out the nomination.""

Clinton currently enjoys a lead of 1,304 to 1,075 pledged delegates over Sanders. And she has also secured the endorsements of 486 super delegates compared to 38 who have declared for the Vermont Senator, according to CNN estimates.

The Clinton campaign maintains that there is no realistic route for Sanders to win the nomination. To do so, he would have to claim almost every remaining nominating contest into June by large margins, in a way that would ensure that neither he nor Clinton would approach the 2,383 delegates needed to win the nomination.

Then, Sanders would have to pull off an intricate inside game to persuade hundreds of superdelegates to desert Clinton and support him as the party's standard bearer.

That's a tall order for Sanders even if he and his allies insist the senator is best positioned to be a Republican in the November general election.

""This is what superdelegates have to grapple with, they want to win,"" Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on CNN last week. ""We are going to an open convention. Everybody is talking about a Republican open convention (but) the Democrats are going to an open convention.""",REAL
"'Budget Amendment' for More Troops in Iraq, Afghanistan   
The Pentagon has announced it will file a “budget amendment” seeking another $6 billion in funding for the current fiscal year to pay for additional overseas troop deployments above and beyond what was already in the budget for this year. 
The $6 billion request comes as an “urgent” request from the Pentagon, and would pay for additional ground troops in Iraq, the additional troops left in Afghanistan by stalling the drawdown, and to pay for escalated airstrikes around the world. 
Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord says the hope is to get the White House to approve submitting the request to Congress before next week’s election, with an eye at getting it added to the latest emergency spending bill, expected before early December. 
These “emergency” funding bills are the main way to get around spending caps, with Congress deliberately funding the Pentagon only for a portion of the year with money that, by the cap’s reckoning, was the whole year’s budget, then slipping “emergency” bills in afterwards to pay for the rest of the year, while pretending the caps still exist.  ",FAKE
"The Most Interesting Chart In The World - Part 2 By Lee Adler.   In Part 1 of this report you saw the rollercoaster shape of the European Central Bank balance sheet. The ECB’s assets grew massively under the long term loan program known as LTRO in 2011 and 2012. Then the central bank’s assets fell just as massively when the ECB allowed those loans to be repaid. You need to login to view this content. 
David Stockman’s Contra Corner isn’t your typical financial tipsheet. Instead it’s an ongoing dialogue about what’s really happening in the markets… the economy… and governments… so you can understand the world around you and make better decisions for yourself. 
David believes the world -- certainly the United States -- is at a great inflection point in human history. The massive credit inflation of the last three decades has reached its apogee and is now going to splatter spectacularly. 
This will have lasting ramifications on how governments tax and regulate you… the type of work you and your family members will have available and what you get paid… the value of your nest egg… and all other areas comprising your quality of life. Login 
David Stockman's Contra Corner is the only place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked. Subscribe now to receive David Stockman’s latest posts by email each day as well as his model portfolio, Lee Adler’s Daily Data Dive and David’s personally curated insights and analysis from leading contrarian thinkers.",FAKE
"  *Articles of the Bound* / Spy Scandals, Globalism and the Betrayal of America Spy Scandals, Globalism and the Betrayal of America November 1, 2016, 10:28 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0 
By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media 
Our top educators like to think that worthwhile social movements only come from the left, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. But the movement backing Donald J. Trump for president rejects most of what the left is preaching. These people see America losing its greatness, unique identity and national sovereignty. Hillary Clinton uses the campaign slogan “Stronger Together,” which has a patriotic appeal. But she also termed half of Trump’s supporters “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” She prefers the artificial George Soros-funded “social movements” that back her campaign. 
By any objective measure, it can be argued that the stench of globalism is starting to affect everything, even perceptions of our founding documents. It may also invite foreign penetration into the highest levels of our government. 
Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia are surprised to learn that the site of the adoption of our Declaration of Independence is now a World Heritage Site designated by the United Nations. A big plaque with the designation faces you after you get a lecture from the U.S. Park Service and prepare to enter the historic building. Referring to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the United Nations declares , “The universal principles of freedom and democracy set forth in these documents are of fundamental importance to American history and have also had a profound impact on law-makers around the world.” These are nice thoughts. But the U.N. is hardly a tribute to freedom and democracy. Ordinary patriotic Americans don’t like the idea of the corrupt United Nations claiming some form of jurisdiction over Independence Hall. 
What’s more, visitors to the Liberty Bell see a big picture of Nelson Mandela raising a clenched fist salute. The Mandela quotation that the Liberty Bell is “a very significant symbol for the entire democratic world” is featured next to the photograph. These, too, are nice thoughts. But while Mandela presided over a democratic transition that turned the whites out of power in South Africa, revelations after his death proved that he was a secret member of the South African Communist Party. He had concealed his true motives and allegiances from those who elected him. South Africa is a member of the Russian orbit of nations, known as BRICS, and some of the remaining whites are fleeing. 
The “Citizenship in the World” merit badge is now required for the highest rank in Scouting, Eagle Scout, with one of the requirements being, “Explain what citizenship in the world means to you and what you think it takes to be a good world citizen.” 
What Hillary Clinton is trying to carry forward is something that her husband talked openly about in 2003. In his “Global Challenges” speech , former President Clinton outlined a form of world government. “We cannot continue to live in a world where we grow more and more and more interdependence, and we have no over-arching system to have the positive elements of interdependence outweigh the negative ones,” he said. He went on to say, “…I think the great mission of 21st Century world is to make it a genuine global community. To move from mere interdependence to integration, to a community that has three characteristics: shared responsibilities, shared benefits, and shared values.” 
That “over-arching system” includes strengthening the United Nations, a process still underway, and currently using the alleged threat of “climate change” to build up the power of this world body and move toward a “genuine global community.” 
As president, Clinton had sent a June 22, 1993 letter congratulating the members of the World Federalist Association for meeting to give Strobe Talbott the annual Norman Cousins Global Governance Award. “Norman Cousins worked for world peace and world government,” Clinton said. Talbott, a former Time magazine columnist and U.S. diplomat who served in Clinton’s administration, was a “voice for global harmony,” Clinton said. As a Time magazine writer, Talbott had written a column openly calling for world government. Now the head of the Brookings Institution, Talbott had direct but confidential contacts with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, according to recent WikiLeaks disclosures. The book, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War , documents questionable contacts between Talbott and the Russian intelligence service. Mrs. Clinton spoke to the same World Federalist group in 1999, congratulating former CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite upon his receipt of the Norman Cousins award. 
Yet, Talbott’s continuing relationship with Hillary Clinton is not a subject that alarms the major media. 
However, the disclosure that the FBI discovered some of Hillary Clinton’s emails on the Huma Abedin/Anthony Weiner computer could also have national security implications. Were these emails shared with or hacked by our foreign adversaries? Tragically, the American people may not have the answer to this question by Election Day, November 8. But the carelessness of the arrangement is such that we have to suspect the worst, and that Hillary Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, are at the very least, security risks. It could become the biggest spy scandal since Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who was exposed as a Soviet spy. He happened to be a founder of the United Nations. Cliff Kincaid 
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0",FAKE
John Oliver’s Smear Tactics Exposed As Establishment Propaganda  ,FAKE
"Dasha Burns is a writer and works as a strategist and creative content producer at Oliver Global, a consulting agency where she focuses on leveraging media and digital technology for global development. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Bernie's Brooklyn mourned Tuesday's New York primary results as Hillary Clinton solidified her lead over the shaggy, endearing ideologue. This may be the beginning of the end for Bernie Sanders, but that doesn't mean Clinton can coast. Far from it.

But let's take a breath. I think we've all been wearing our primary goggles a little too long. The fact is that Clinton and Sanders agree on a majority of the issues when it comes to actual policy.

Yet this is not resonating with millennials: Clinton cannot repeat her ritual misstep of assuming she will get their support when she hasn't fully earned it.

To ensure a win for Democratic and progressive values in the general election, young people need to show up. And for this, Clinton needs to work harder to remind young voters that she, too, will fight on their behalf.

Just as devoted patrons of the local organic-fair-trade-small-batch coffee shop won't suddenly wake up with a Starbucks skinny vanilla latte, avid, anti-establishment Sanders supporters won't suddenly start feeling the Bern for Clinton.

So, I would urge the secretary to rethink her relationship to this demographic. Some suggestions:

--You don't believe in the kind of revolution Bernie is talking about. Show young people that you've heard the cheers for his ideas and you understand why they matter to us, and tell us — without condescension — how you're going to do better. Then, show us what your revolution looks like. Because you ARE campaigning on a progressive platform, and you DO have goals — like the New College Compact and profit sharing -- that will change flawed and failing systems.

--Don't tell young women to vote for you because we're women. But tell us to vote for you because you're going to close the wage gap. Because you'll make sure we have every opportunity afforded our male colleagues. Because with you as president our rights to our own bodies will be protected and expanded.

--Don't try to adopt Bernie's swag; it's inimitable and everyone is surprised that it worked (including him, I bet). And don't try to do ""cool"" things you think young people do; you're a grown woman and we like the gravitas and dignity that brings. So do what YOU do but show young people you'll support what they do, too.

--Policy matters, but for young voters, the intent and ideals behind those policies matter, too. If you're not going as far as Sanders on issues like education and the minimum wage, make sure we understand why and show us your goals are worth fighting for. Show us the heart behind your strategy and explain why it will work for us.

--We know how experienced you are, and that you know how to ""get the job done."" But show that you're still willing to see different perspectives and to seriously consider criticisms and counterarguments.

--Most of all, show that you're engaging with young voices. Show that you'll listen to those with few years but many ideas. Show that you're ultimately on the same side as your current opponent, because you will need his zealous support come November.

It's true that even if Clinton does all these things, some millennials may angrily disengage from the political process if she is the nominee. But as a fellow member of the cohort, I hope and believe that most will be thoughtful in their decision.

They'll see that the Republican candidate is the direct antithesis of everything that Clinton, Sanders and their collective supporters stand for.

They'll see that both the Democratic candidates stand on platforms that will move our country forward, not backward.

They'll recall that before the candidates went hoarse yelling over each other in the last debate, they spent most of the earlier debates so ""vigorously agreeing"" that a ""Glee""-style ""Don't Stop Believin'"" duet seemed almost imminent. From immigration to abortion to even campaign finance reform, rarely are the differences meaningful.

Ahead of the upcoming primaries, Clinton will need to start removing her own primary goggles and making that case to her current opponent's supporters. Because if they turn their backs before the real battle begins, her presumptive primary victory could vanish before our eyes.",REAL
"Bernie Sanders Has Strength Among White Men Pinched By The Economy

When Bernie Sanders won the primary in Michigan last week, it shook up the narrative of the Democratic race.

Sanders did so with the help of white men. If he's able to pull off a victory in Ohio, the same demographic will likely be key.

Take Jim, who describes himself, only half jokingly, as an angry white man.

""We're pissed off,"" Jim said. (Jim's asked that his last name be withheld because his union, AFSCME, has endorsed Hillary Clinton, and he supports Sanders. He can't be quoted publicly going against his union.) ""We haven't gotten raises. Our pensions have been cut. Our healthcare's increased.""

And, Jim added, Sanders speaks to that. ""Bernie, he speaks from the trenches,"" Jim said. ""We feel that he's fighting for us.""

In Michigan, Sanders won with the support of 62 percent of white men, who were one-in-three voters, according to exit polls. In 2008, in the Democratic primary in Ohio, white men turned out in strikingly similar proportions to this year's Michigan contest.

At the same time, black voters could make up a smaller proportion of the electorate and likely won't be enough to put Clinton over the top. In Michigan, Clinton won more than two-thirds of black voters and they were 21 percent of the electorate. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 90 percent of black voters in Ohio; they were just 18 percent of the electorate; and Clinton won the state, ironically, with the support of white voters, including white men.

Ryan, a member of a building trades union in Cleveland, who also asked NPR not to use his last name because his union has endorsed Clinton, feels the same way as Jim.

""She's [Clinton] seen as the centrist candidate,"" Ryan said. ""And she's a big-money candidate. And big money and centrism hasn't been working for middle-class America for the past 30 years. Since Reagan.""

When Ryan first saw Sanders speak a few months ago, something clicked. He said it was as if a politician was finally saying what Ryan had been thinking about the state of the country. Ryan was so swayed he even sent a small donation to Sanders campaign and later bought a T-shirt.

'Like NASCAR, everyone wear their patch'

At a union hall in Cleveland, both Jim and Ryan talked about rising health-care costs and trade deals that they believe have hurt much more than they helped.

Sanders overwhelmingly won voters in Michigan who thought trade deals cost American jobs — 58 percent of voters said so there, and Sanders won them 2-to-1. (One-in-three Michigan voters said they lived in a household with a union member. Clinton and Sanders split them. Likely accounting for that were black union members who went for Clinton. Those numbers are not split out in exit polls.)

Jim said he's only gotten one raise, really more like a cost-of-living adjustment, in eight years.

""You look at the stock market,"" he said, ""it's gone up I don't know how many, a couple of hundred percent. You know, my wages have gone up 2-and-a-half percent. And who's speaking to that? Bernie is. And, yeah, I think maybe he's kind of like Don Quixote. But I mean that's part of the attraction. It really is. At least for me.""

And Jim insists, this isn't about gender. He loves his congresswoman, who incidentally endorsed Sanders on Friday.

There are elements of Clinton's stump speech designed to speak to working-class men including the parts where she talks about punishing companies that ship jobs overseas. But it's clear from these interviews that Sanders' attacks on Clinton's trade record, her superPAC, her big money speeches to Wall Street banks — they are breaking through.

The money issue nags at Dave Passalacqua. He likes that Sanders gets his campaign cash from regular people.

""There's that old saying is politicians should be like NASCAR, everyone wear their patch,"" Passalacqua said. ""You know, let's see what the patches are and [Sanders] doesn't need to wear a patch, because it's his own thing.""

Passalacqua is executive vice president of the Communications Workers of America Local 4340 in Cleveland. His union has endorsed Sanders, but he's still undecided.

Passalacqua agreed to meet at a Cleveland diner along with Jim Goggin, a fixture in the city's labor community. He's an organizer for the Delaware Valley Health Care Coalition.

""It's pie in the sky,"" said Goggin, with an unmistakable Irish lilt. ""I mean, everything Bernie says, I think would be fantastic. But the fact of the matter is, that I am also a realist, and I know that you can't do that.""

For Goggin, it is all about beating the Republicans in November.

""And I wish to God that I thought he could win,"" Goggin said. ""But I don't unfortunately think he can win. Consequently, I'm with Hillary, because at least she's not going to throw us under the bus, the working people.""

Passalacqua chimes in: ""And one good thing that Bernie's been doing, though, even with Hillary, is Bernie has moved Hillary's positions on things.""

From the outside, it seems Passalacqua is having a classic voter's struggle between his head and his heart. He isn't convinced Sanders will be able to do what he's promising. Who will he vote for?

""Whoever I think is going best for me and my family is the bottom line. Whoever is going to make — not to steal Donald's line, but — America great again,"" said Pasalaqua quoting Donald Trump's catch phrase. ""Because in order to make America great again we've got to make the middle class great again. So whoever's going to do that, I think's going to be the best person. And that's who I'll end up having to vote for.""

No matter how Tuesday's vote turns out, and no matter who wins the nomination, all four men said they would support the Democratic nominee in November.",REAL
"Share on Facebook Native Americans attempting to stop a pipeline from being built on their land and water just got assistance from a large herd of wild buffalo. Indigenous culture honors American bison (known as Tatanka Oyate, or Buffalo Nation) as a symbol of sacrifice, as the bison give their lives to provide food, shelter, and clothing through the use of their meat and their hides. Native Americans maintain a spiritual tradition with bison , believing that as long as buffalo — a gift from the Great Spirit — roam free and as long as the herds are bountiful, the sovereignty of indigenous people would remain strong. And in the midst of mass arrests, mace attacks, and beatings from batons, a stampede of bison suddenly appeared near the Standing Rock protest camp. A cry of joy reportedly erupted from the Standing Rock Sioux, as they had been praying for assistance from the Tatanka Oyate during their standoff with riot police and national guardsmen. As the police response to the Sioux's ongoing nonviolent civil disobedience escalates, tribal leaders are calling on state and federal governments to respect the constitutional rights of water protectors and stop the mistreatment of the indigenous community. “We call on the state of North Dakota to oversee the actions of local law enforcement to, first and foremost, ensure everyone's safety. The Department of Justice must send overseers immediately to ensure the protection of First Amendment rights and the safety of thousands here at Standing Rock,” wrote David Archambault II , chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. “DOJ can no longer ignore our requests.” Related:",FAKE
"Itinerant Philosopher and Journalist Y ou say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avant-garde art exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students. PHOTO : Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—some of the Giants that gave European civilization its right to claim supremacy over others. What would they think if they could understand the gravity of the cultural and social decomposition brought about by the embrace of essentially an immoral and downright criminal system of social organization? It is all so noble, so civilized! Or, is it really? Think twice! I wrote my short novel, “Aurora” , after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’. What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan. ‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered. Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend. Some, very few countries are almost incorruptible, like Cuba. But Cuba is a unique country. And it is intensively demonized by Western propaganda. “La Patria no se vende!” they say there, or in translation “One does not sell the Fatherland!” But one, unfortunately, does, almost everywhere else in the world: from Indonesia to Turkey, from Kenya to India. *** “ Aurora” opens in a small cafe in an ancient city in Indonesia (which is not called Indonesia). Hans, the German head of an unnamed cultural institute is talking to his local ‘disciples’. He loves his life here: all the respect he gets, those countless women he is sexually possessing and humiliating, the lavish lifestyle he is allowed to lead. A woman enters; a beautiful woman, a proud woman, an artist, a woman who was born here but who left, many years ago, for far away Venezuela. Her name is Aurora. Her husband is Orozco, a renowned revolutionary painter. Aurora’s sister was killed in this country, because she refused to give up her revolutionary art. She was kidnapped, tortured, raped, and then murdered. Hans, the head of a European cultural organization, was involved. Aurora confronts Hans, and in reality, the entire European culture of plunder and colonialism. And that night she is joined, she is supported, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or more precisely, by his merry ghost, who is thoroughly disgusted of being used as one of the symbols of the ‘culture’ which destroyed him personally, which destroyed the very essence of the arts, and which has been in fact destroying, for centuries, this entire Planet. *** When I recently shared the plot of “Aurora” with a local ‘independent’ filmmaker in Khartoum, Sudan, he first listened attentively, and then with horror, and in the end he made a hasty dash towards the door. He escaped, not even trying to hide his distress. Later I was told that he is fully funded by Western ‘cultural institutions’. After reading it, my African comrades, several leading anti-imperialist fighters, immediately endorsed the book, claiming that it addressed some of the essential problems their continent is facing. The cultural destruction the Empire is spreading is similar everywhere: in Africa, Asia and in Latin America. 
I wrote “Aurora” as a work of art, as fiction. But I also wrote it as a J’accuse 1 – a detailed study of cultural imperialism. 
My dream is that it would be read by millions of young thinkers and artists, on all continents, that it would help them to understand how the Empire operates, and how filthy and disgraceful betrayal is. 
1 J’accuse is French for “I accuse,” and is generally used to mean an attack against social injustice. It references a 1898 newspaper article by Emile Zola who accused the French government of fabricating a charge of treason against a Jewish military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, because he was Jewish. Andre Vltchek Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “ Exposing Lies Of The Empire ” and “ Fighting Against Western Imperialism ” . View his other books here . Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter .   PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
We apologize for this inconvenience.   [email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”] Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
"Regarding the dissenting justices: Um, what the hell? Aren’t hard-line paleo-conservatives supposed to be against frivolous lawsuits? Of course they are. And of course the King v Burwell case was absolutely a frivolous lawsuit. The entire law could have potentially collapsed over a lawsuit that disputed the existence of seven words in an otherwise massive piece of legislation. Those seven words: “through an exchange established by the state.” That was the basis of the whole thing. The plaintiffs argued that based on those words, the federal government could only provide subsidies for lower income Americans who purchased insurance through a state-run exchange.

In other words, the lawsuit claimed that Obamacare insurance customers in all states that use the national Healthcare.gov marketplace shouldn’t get subsidies to help cover premium costs. What’s perfectly clear in the language, however, is that the governments of each state decides which exchange its citizens will have to use: either a state-run marketplace or the federal exchange. Case in point: Hawaii was the first state to form a state-based exchange: the Hawaii Health Connector. But just the other day, Democratic governor David Ige announced that the Health Connectors was financially unfeasible and opted to shut it down, transferring all customers to the Healthcare.gov. This is purely a state decision and therefore the subsidies ought to still apply.

In Roberts’ majority opinion, the chief justice wrote that in the context of the law as a whole (many more than seven words in length), the claim against the word usage was “untenable.” Of course. To any sentient, thinking human, untenable is right.

So, back to Scalia, Alito and Thomas. The fact that three Supreme Court justices sided with the plaintiff on Burwell proves how ideological and dumb those three justices truly are. To anyone with a basic grasp on reality, the language in the law is clear and incontrovertible. But in the far-right bubble, grasping desperately for anything that could undermine the law is de rigueur for the GOP, including nearly 60 votes so far to destroy the law in spite of the fact that President Obama would never in a million years sign such legislation. The flailing has become so pathetic that three justices in the highest court in the land sided in support of an hilariously frivolous lawsuit.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the Republican Party actively campaigned in support of tort reform, especially in the healthcare field. Indeed, tort reform is still a plank in the GOP platform. But lately, the congressional Republicans have gone all gushy for frivolous lawsuits, going so far as to sue Obama on numerous occasions. Rather than doing its job and actually, you know, legislating, Republicans from Speaker Boehner on down the line have opted instead for silly lawsuits aimed at various actions by the White House. For example, before the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed, Boehner tried to sue Obama and his Justice Department for not enforcing the law. Elsewhere, tea party senator Ron Johnson tried to sue Obama over Congress’ alleged “exemption from Obamacare.” The latter suit was egregiously and offensively frivolous since Congress isn’t exempt from Obamacare at all. In fact, the law requires members of Congress and staffers who want employee-based coverage to get it through Healthcare.gov. Obama merely authorized a rule that was requested by, yes, Speaker Boehner to continue allowing the government to share the premium costs. So, Johnson was basically suing over a semantic trick — the patently false claim that Congress was exempt from Obamacare was intended to infuriate the base and make it seem as if Congress carved out a special loophole for itself, which Obama subsequently signed. The reality is that proud Republican Ron Johnson was merely exploiting the ignorance of the GOP base, assuming it’d go around believing that Congress was truly exempt, even though it’s not at all. Obamacare expert and Yale law professor Abbe Gluck told The Washington Post on Thursday, “[The decision] sends a strong signal to people who politically oppose the law that the court understands the law and is not going to tolerate more of this frivolous litigation that tries to destroy the statute by distorting it.” Here’s to hoping Gluck is right and the Burwell decision is the end of all this nonsense. Really, we’ve reached a point when Republicans who visit the White House will accidentally spill hot coffee in their laps just so they have an excuse to hire the nearest Jackie Chiles rent-an-attorney and stick it to Obama once and for all. (For another fantastic “Seinfeld” reference, see also Simon Maloy’s takedown of the Burwell case here.)",REAL
"Written by Daniel McAdams Thursday November 3, 2016 If ISIS is such a mortal threat to the United States, why has US military action in Iraq and Syria been proceeding at such a leisurely pace? Is it possible that ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria are being used -- or even supported -- by the US and its allies as a ""regime change"" weapon against Syria's Assad government? The US pursued this policy before, when it used Saudi-trained radicals to fight a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. Those radicals became al-Qaeda... Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
"Next Swipe left/right Someone left a funny note asking the postman to move a spider 
If you have a fear of spiders, there’s nothing worse than seeing one between you and something you want: a cup of tea, the toilet, lifelong happiness … That’s what happened to the writer of this note, shared on Reddit by TheGrumpyNovelist . 
The note says: 
“Dear Mr Postman! Beholder of parcels, bringer of utility bills! I write to you on this day to ask a simple task of you. Living on the right side of my mail box is a spider, seemingly holding my mail hostage. If you could remove him for me, either by relocation or brutal murder, I would be forever in your debt. Signed, Resident” 
They added a drawing of the spider for clarity. This prompted Reddit user taybon to add “A day in the life of said spider. The human is yet to collect these items. I must protect them from fingers and flies. The parcel deliverer is arriving before previous parcels have been emptied. Perhaps if I greet him and wave at him he will notice me and…..”",FAKE
"Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ventured outside his beleaguered nation for the first time in more than four years Wednesday to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin in a surprise visit to Kremlin patrons now backing Syria’s government with military might.

The landmark trip is a powerful signal of Russia’s growing support for the embattled Syrian government as it fights an armed rebellion that includes factions backed by the West and many Middle East partners.

Russian warplanes have struck Syrian rebel targets across the country in recent weeks, allowing Assad’s forces to go on the offensive and giving the Damascus government a critical lifeline after near-constant battles since 2011.

Russia insists it is battling the Islamic State, which controls parts of Syria, but anti-government rebels and activists say few of the Russian strikes have hit the jihadists. Assad has painted his government’s military crackdown as a fight against terrorism.

But the Russian intervention has deepened tensions with Washington, which is leading separate airstrikes against the Islamic State and rejects a long-term role for Assad in Syria’s future.

[Obama’s challenge in three words: “Assad must go”]

The Pentagon and NATO allies have expressed worry over possible inadvertent encounters between Russian and U.S.-led coalition aircraft in the skies over Syria. Neighboring Turkey has accused Russia of twice violating its airspace and shot down a Russian-made drone last week.

On Friday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry is expected to meet with his counterparts from Russia and two main Assad foes — Turkey and Saudi Arabia — to discuss Syria, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Putin has made clear that Russia seeks to have a key role in any moves on Syria’s political future, apparently to ensure that Moscow does not lose its main foothold in the region.

“We are ready to make our contribution not only in the course of military actions . . . but during the political process,” Putin said, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.

But few specific details emerged from the meetings with Assad.

The extraordinary trip was announced after Assad had already returned to Damascus.

Putin thanked Assad for visiting Moscow at Russia’s request, praised the Syrian people for fighting opponents for several years “practically on their own” and said that “serious results have been achieved in this battle,” according to the Kremlin transcript.

“If it were not for your actions and decisions, the terrorism that is spreading through the region now would have made even greater gains, and spread to even wider territories,” Assad said to Putin, according to the transcript.

Putin said that at least 4,000 Islamist militants from the former Soviet Union are now fighting in Syria, and he warned that they could not be allowed to foment instability in Russia.

He also reiterated the eventual need for a political settlement to end the conflict. The West has demanded that Assad step down as part of any political transition, a condition Putin did not address in his remarks.

In the meeting with Assad, Putin said his government believes that “positive results” in military operations will lay the foundation for long-term resolution to Syria’s conflict.

“We would do this, of course, in close contact with the other global powers and with the countries in the region that want to see a peaceful settlement to this conflict,” he said.

The Kremlin meetings unfolded a day after the Pentagon’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held talks in Iraq, seeking to bolster U.S. support for Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State. Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. said Iraqi leaders gave assurances that Baghdad has not reached out to Russia to possibly expand its airstrikes.

But a group of Iraqi political leaders and influential Shiite militias have urged Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to request Russian airstrikes on Islamic State militants, the Reuters news agency reported.

[Did U.S. aid to Syrian rebels prompt Russian moves?]

Photographs released by the Kremlin also showed Assad dining with Putin and other top Russian officials, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of strikes daily against targets in Syria since bombing began Sept. 30. Russia says it is focused on fighting the Islamic State in Syria, but many of the strikes have been directed against other Islamists and more moderate forces opposed to Assad. The West says that Russia’s main goal is to prop up Assad and allow his forces to go on the offensive, not fight the Islamic State.

Russian and U.S. officials announced Tuesday that they had signed a “deconfliction” agreement to regulate aircraft and drone traffic over Syria. On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry released video of a Russian jet tailing what appeared to be an American Reaper drone over Syria. The ministry said the only aircraft legally in Syrian airspace are Russian.

Reuters on Tuesday said three Russians were killed in an artillery strike in Syria, citing an intelligence source. The Defense Ministry denied that any Russian service members have been killed in Syria. Critics have said that Russia may send unofficial forces, or “volunteers,” as it has done in the Ukrainian conflict.

There was no immediate comment from Washington on Assad’s trip. But in NATO member Turkey, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said he hoped Assad would stay in Russia.

“If only he could stay in Moscow longer, to give the people of Syria some relief,” Davutoglu told reporters in Ankara.

Little common ground between Moscow and Washington

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
"A former contestant on the reality show “The Apprentice” on Friday accused Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump of aggressively kissing her and groping her breasts during a 2007 meeting to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization.

Summer Zervos, who appeared on the show in 2006 and now owns a California restaurant, spoke about the incident at a news conference alongside civil rights lawyer Gloria Allred.

At times tearing up, Zervos said the incident occurred at Trump’s bungalow hotel suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which she visited after he suggested the two have dinner.

Zervos said Trump greeted her with an “open-mouthed kiss” and then urged her to sit close to him on a love seat before kissing her again, groping her and trying to pull her into his bedroom. Zervos said she pushed Trump away and told him, “Come on, man, get real.”

She said Trump responded by mimicking her words, “Get real,” and “thrusting his genitals” in her direction.

Zervos’s accusations came as a number of other women have stepped forward in recent days to accuse Trump of groping them or kissing them inappropriately. Also Friday, The Washington Post published the account of Kristin Anderson, 46, who said Trump reached up her skirt and groped her during an encounter at a nightclub in the early 1990s.

[Woman says Trump reached under her skirt and groped her in early 1990s]

In a statement, Trump said he “vaguely” remembered Zervos as an “Apprentice” contestant but that he “never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago.”

“That is not what I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” he said, adding that Zervos had emailed him in April asking that he visit her restaurant in California. Trump blasted the media, saying reporters are “throwing due diligence and fact-finding to the side in a rush to file their stories first,” a sign, he said that “we truly are living in a broken system.”

Trump has categorically denied other accusations. At a rally in North Carolina, he called the women’s accounts “total fiction.” He called Jessica Leeds, who told the New York Times that Trump had groped her on an airplane in the 1980s, “that horrible woman” and suggested Leeds was not attractive enough to have drawn his interest. “Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” he said.

Zervos, like the other women who have lodged allegations in recent days, said she was compelled to speak after watching a video of Trump bragging to “Access Hollywood” in 2005 that he was able to sexually assault women because he is a celebrity.

Allred said Zervos is one of “many” women who have approached her in recent days to describe experiences with Trump. Allred said several friends and family members of Zervos could corroborate that she had told them of her experiences with Trump shortly after they allegedly occurred, but Allred did not release those statements Friday.

Zervos read aloud from the email she said that she sent Trump in April 2016, which she said was an attempt to see whether the increasingly high-profile presidential candidate would consider apologizing for his behavior. She said she wrote to Trump, through an assistant, that his behavior toward her “blew my mind.”

“I have been in­cred­ibly hurt by our previous interaction,” she said she wrote. She said she received no response.

Unlike several other of Trump’s accusers, who either barely knew the business executive or did not know him at all, Zervos said she had considered Trump a mentor and role model, even after she was fired from the boardroom game show.

She said she reached out to him a year after her “Apprentice” appearance when she was traveling to New York and asked to meet to discuss a possible job at the Trump Organization.

In his Trump Tower office, she said Trump was complimentary and sounded eager to hire her. Then, she said, she became uncomfortable when, as she was leaving, he kissed her on the mouth.

Zervos said she shared the experience at the time with a friend and her parents, who urged her to view the kiss as a form of greeting. Not long after, she said Trump called her to say he was visiting California and suggested the two have dinner to discuss the job.

Zervos said Trump became physical soon after she arrived at his suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“He put me in an embrace, and I tried to push him away,” she said.

After she rejected his advances, Zervos said, Trump grew cold. She said they proceeded with their planned dinner and that Trump ordered a club sandwich for the two to share.

As they waited for dinner to arrive, Zervos recalled that Trump told her that “he did not think I had ever known love or had ever been in love.” Over dinner, he offered financial advice, suggesting that she should stop paying the mortgage on her home, leave the keys on a table and demand the bank make her a better deal, she said.

Trump soon said he was tired and urged her to leave, Zervos said. He did not cut off discussions of a possible job. Instead he suggested they meet the next day at his Rancho Palos Verdes golf course, where she was given a tour by the general manager. Ultimately, she said she was offered a job that paid half of what she had discussed with Trump.

Allred said Zervos has no plans to file a lawsuit and has no affiliation with any political campaign.

“I want to be able to sleep at night when I’m 70,” Zervos said to explain her decision to come forward.",REAL
"Hispanic Crowd Boos Marco Rubio off Stage Rafael Bernal, The Hill, October 25, 2016 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) took the stage in Orlando at Calle Orange, a Puerto Rican-themed festival, on Sunday when some in the crowd started booing, NPR reported . 
The jeering got louder as the Cuban-American senator, seeking reelection after dropping his presidential bid earlier this year, was introduced. 
And when the emcee asked for applause as Rubio took the same, boos drowned out any supporters in the crowd, NPR added. 
“Thank you for having me today,” Rubio said in Spanish. “I want you to enjoy this day. We’re not going to talk about politics today. Thank God for this beautiful day, and for our freedom, our democracy, our vote, and our country. God bless you all, thank you very much.” 
He left the stage to more boos from the crowd, according to the report. 
{snip} 
Rubio is running against Rep. Patrick Murphy (D), and the latest average of polls in the race shows Rubio ahead by about 3 points. 
Murphy’s campaign seized on the Sunday incident and blasted out video it says shows the booing. It also noted that Murphy attended the festival “with a leader for Puerto Rican communities, Rep. Nydia Velazquez,” while “Marco Rubio was booed off the stage.” 
Rubio’s campaign shared a video with The Hill Monday that it says counters what the Murphy campaign sent out and shows him being greeted enthusiastically as he moves through the crowd. 
{snip} 
Festival attendants said they disapproved of Rubio’s endorsement of Trump, who is deeply unpopular among Hispanics. 
“When we have someone like Trump, who hits our Mexican brothers, our Latino brothers, then you jump on that bandwagon after all that stuff he says not only about you personally . . . as a Latino, you’re a freaking sellout. I would not vote for him if they paid me,” Calle Orange attendant Angel Marin told NPR about Rubio. 
{snip}",FAKE
"Posted: Nov 6th, 2016 by MADJEZ   MADJEZ  ",FAKE
"Donald Trump is running a relatively lean campaign machine and, despite pledges to self-fund, so far has been able to rely more on outside donations than his own deep pockets.

Campaign finance filings this week offered a glimpse into how the billionaire businessman is running his breaking-the-mold campaign.

The third quarter report showed that Trump raised $3.9 million over the period between June 30 through Sept. 30. Of that, $2.8 million came from individual donations of $200 or less. In addition, he's put up about $1.9 million of his own money, in loans and contributions, since officially launching his bid in mid-June.

The totals show he's raised $5.8 million and spent $5.4 million to date -- which means he's spent more contributor money than his own money.

Trump, though, repeatedly has said his campaign does not want to be beholden to big-money donors. So whether he will eventually have to dig deep into his personal fortune remains to be seen.

“There is a general perception that he has all the money he needs,” however, “he’s spending less -- he hasn’t had to open his wallet – because of all the attention he’s received,” said Anthony Corrado, professor and campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine. “His standing in the polls has allowed him to essentially ride this wave of support.”

While Trump is not doing high-dollar fundraising events like other candidates, his website solicits donations all the way up to the individual limit of $2,700. Much of his financial support is coming in this way, and appears to be going a long way as Trump spends (and raises) far less than his competitors.

The money mostly has been spent on travel, lodging, telemarketers, event staging, and campaign consultants in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

""The Trump Campaign will continue to accept small dollar donations as people across the country proudly invest in Mr. Trump's vision to Make America Great Again,"" the campaign said in a statement following the public filing of the FEC numbers Thursday.

Corrado noted that this was “reminiscent of Ross Perot, who self-financed, but asked people to send in five dollars just to have skin in the game.”

Texas billionaire Perot spent $63.5 million of his own money to wage a formidable third-party race for president in 1992.

Trump told Fox News this week that he only spent “a couple of million” on his campaign so far, and “zero” on advertising due to all the free air time he has received. “I’ve spent the least money and I’ve got the best poll numbers. This is a tribute to business,” he said.

Trump has been the poll front-runner in the GOP pack for weeks, despite spending less than his competitors.

Republican candidate Sen. Ted Cruz took in $12.3 million in the third quarter, but also has spent nearly $18 million to date. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton took in $29 million and spent $25.7 million in the third quarter alone.

As the campaign draws closer to the early 2016 primary contests, however, Trump will need to spend more money, Corrado said. “We will start to see this change in the fourth quarter,” he said, pointing to Trump’s announcement that he plans to spend upwards of $20 million in the next phase of his campaign on advertising.

So far, ""his expenditures are revolving around his travel, spending the money to put on viable campaign events, gathering intelligence in the early primary states"" and promoting his brand, said Corrado. ""It reflects a grassroots approach to campaigning ... Therefore he has been able to conserve his resources to spend more as they get closer to the actual voting.""

Trump will either have to raise more or keep dipping into his personal reserves, as, according to the FEC report, his campaign only had $255,000 cash on hand as of Sept. 30.

He acknowledged as much when he told Fox News he would not be averse to taking outside money should he get the nomination. “I don’t mind spending the money. Once we get through that [primary], that’s when the party kicks in and then billions of dollars come in, everyone wants to support it and that’s a great thing.”",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards withstood nearly five hours of Republican attacks at a House hearing Tuesday.

It wasn't just about those recent controversial tapes released by David Daledian's Center for Medical Progress showing possible wrongdoing. It was also about whether the abortion giant should keep receiving more federal taxpayer dollars.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said definitely not – especially with the cuts in care Planned Parenthood has made in the last decade.

""There's a 53 percent reduction in cancer screenings, 42 percent reduction in breast exams and breast care,"" Chaffetz noted.

Republicans on the panel proposed moving those federal dollars to more worthy recipients.

""We simply want to shift the money from an organization caught doing what they were caught doing and give it to the community health centers,"" Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said.

""Shift it from the 700 Planned Parenthood clinics; give it to the 13,000 federally-approved community health centers,"" he continued. ""Take the money from the guys doing the bad things and give it to the ones who aren't.""

But Richards begged to differ – not just about the abortion provider's worthiness to receive federal funds, but about the validity of the secretly recorded videotapes used against her organization.

""The outrageous accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood based on heavily doctored videos are offensive and categorically untrue,"" Richards told the lawmakers.

She went on to say, ""This isn't really an attack on Planned Parenthood.  This is an attack on 2.7 million patients who each year choose Planned Parenthood as their health care provider.""

""The facts are on our side,"" she said. ""We're proud of the health care that we deliver every single year despite the animosity by some.""

Richards suggested Planned Parenthood deserves federal funding because of the services it provides more than 2 million visitors a year.

Live Action's Lila Rose responds to Cecile Richards' defense of Planned Parenthood at the Congressional hearing.

But while Richards was arguing how valuable Planned Parenthood is, there was a news conference nearby completely contradicting that claim.

A number of pro-life groups announced they're launching GetYourCare.org – a site showing Americans where they can easily find nearby low-cost health alternatives -- far more centers than Planned Parenthood offers.

""On the website you'll see that for every one Planned Parenthood, there are 20 federally qualified health care centers,"" Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said.

Just like Richards, congressional defenders of Planned Parenthood in the undercover video scandal attacked the undercover video production.

""This hearing today is promoted by a series of deceptively edited and purposely misleading videos,"" Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., charged.

But at the same news conference where GetYourCare.org was launched, the Alliance Defending Freedom announced that a highly regarded forensics firm, Coalfire Systems, has studied Daledian's videos in-depth.

""The videos are not edited; they're not manipulated,"" asserted Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Casey Mattox, summing up the findings on the videos.

""The full version of these videos is posted online,"" he said. ""And the only part that the world is being spared are moments like where David Daledian goes to the bathroom.""

The committee holding the Tuesday hearing with Richards is one of four congressional panels scrutinizing Planned Parenthood and the more than $500 million it gets every year from the federal government.",REAL
"Written by Daniel McAdams   We were told that we had to attack Iraq because the Saddam Hussein government made us less safe. We were told we had to bomb and kill Gaddafi in Libya because his regime made us less safe. Ditto with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Assad in Syria. Now. 15 years after 9/11, Americans are seeing through the endless wars that have lasted through the Bush and Obama Administrations. Trillions spent, untold thousands killed, societies destroyed, people displaced. A new poll sponsored by the Center for the National Interest and the Charles Koch Institute has found that Americans feel less, not more safe after a decade and a half of war. We are reaching the critical mass where Americans begin to demand a change in our interventionist foreign policy. More on the encouraging poll in today's Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.",FAKE
"Elections 2016 
Top democrats have repeatedly waved off substantial questions arising from their hacked emails by falsely implying that some of them are forgeries created by Russian hackers. 
The problem with that is that no one has found a single case of anything forged among the information released from hacks of either Clinton campaign or Democratic Party officials. 

Clinton strategist Joel Benenson, asked about an email in which Clinton campaign staffers decide to accept foreign lobbyist money, used that line on MSNBC on Sunday. 
“These emails, we have no idea whether they’re authentic or not,” he said. “Or whether they’ve been tampered with. I know I’ve seen things that aren’t authentic, that we know aren’t authentic, and it’s not surprising.” 
Jennifer Granholm, a senior adviser to the pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record, was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether the Clinton campaign should be responding to revelations revealed by Wikileaks. 
“There are reports that these have been doctored,” she told Tapper on October 19. “And Newsweek had found that, in fact, that was happening.” 
In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on October 18, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, was asked if the Russian government would impact the election by hacking voting systems. 
“What worries me the most … is between now and the election the Russians dump information that is fabricated,” Schiff warned. “To get a last minute dump of emails that contain fabricated emails that are widely reported in the press, and there isn’t enough time to fact check and demonstrate the forgery, that is what really concerns me.” 
CNN host Wolf Blitzer pushed back, “But have you confirmed that any of these emails released over the past two weeks, if you will, by Wikileaks are fabricated or doctored?” 
“You know I’m not in a position to be able to do that,” Schiff demurred. 
Everything considered, the conclusion has to be that Wikileaks emails are probably authentic and if they weren’t they would have been disproven a long, long time ago. The question is if are you willing to vote for a person that (we saw in the emails) is capable of doing very, bad, dirty stuff. And if the answer is yes then this country has a BIG, BIG PROBLEM. If Clinton Campaign Believes WikiLeaks Emails Are Forged, Why Don’t They Prove It!? Share this: ",FAKE
"WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department on Friday launched an investigation into the Baltimore police department's use of force and whether there are patterns of discriminatory policing.

The probe, announced by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, was requested by Baltimore's mayor in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who sustained fatal injuries while in police custody, and the outrage it sparked in Maryland's largest city.

The Justice Department has conducted similar reviews of U.S. police departments. An investigation of police in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white officer shot dead an unarmed black teenager last year, concluded in March that the department routinely engaged in racially biased practices.

Though the Justice Department is already investigating Gray's death and working with the Baltimore police on reform, Lynch said last week's protests pointed to the need for an investigation.

""It was clear to a number of people looking at this situation that the community's rather frayed trust - to use an understatement - was even worse and has in effect been severed in terms of the relationship with the police department,"" Lynch said on Friday.

The latest investigation will focus on allegations that Baltimore Police Department officers use excessive force, including deadly force, conduct unlawful searches, seizures and arrests, and engage in discriminatory policing, Lynch said.

""If unconstitutional policies or practices are found, we will seek a court-enforceable agreement to address those issues,"" she said.

Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings said he asked Lynch for the investigation to ""get to the bottom of the breakdown in trust between the police and the community.""

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said in a statement her goal was for the city's police to reform through an enforceable court order.

Baltimore's chief prosecutor has brought criminal charges, including one murder charge, against six officers, three white and three black, involved in Gray's arrest.

Lynch, who took office last week, traveled to the largely black city on Tuesday to meet with Gray's family as well as thank officers for their work during the protests.

Any findings of the investigation would result in civil rather than criminal charges. Departments that have been found in violation of civil rights in the past have had to enter into court-ordered improvement plans, which can include an independent monitor, required reporting of arrest data and training for officers.",REAL
"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
On Sunday, President Obama met with a 12-year-old boy who was attacked by Trump supporters while being removed from a rally. Yesterday, this young man was kicked out of a Trump rally. As he was leaving, people kicked at his wheelchair. Today, he met his President. pic.twitter.com/VI4g2tKANG 
— Steve Schale (@steveschale) November 6, 2016 
J.J. Holmes has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He and his mother, Alison Holmes, attended a Trump rally on Saturday to protest the GOP nominee’s mockery of people with disabilities. As they were being removed from the rally by security, Trump’s supporters began pushing and kicking the child’s wheelchair. 
“The crowd started chanting ‘U-S-A’ and pushing his wheelchair,” Alison said. “We were put out by security. Mr. Trump kept saying, ‘Get them out.’” 
“I hate Donald Trump. I hate Donald Trump,” J.J. said through his vocalization device. 
The next day, J.J. and his mom got to meet the President of the United States after a rally for Hillary Clinton in Kissimmee, Florida. The experience was the polar opposite of what they had experienced the day before. 
If kicking a child’s wheelchair isn’t deplorable, I don’t know what the hell is. You can watch a video of the appalling incident below. Protestor pushing a child in a wheelchair appears to be kicked by Trump supporter. Happens :03 seconds in. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/LDr6E5NHvT 
— Tom Llamas (@TomLlamasABC) November 5, 2016 
Featured image via Twitter",FAKE
"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. “Honor Our Immigrant Veterans” Replayed By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 8, 2016 Veterans By elizawhig 
“Honor Our Immigrant Veterans” from VoteVets is a video on Youtube I tripped over recently, and have watched several times. It is that good. Another Kossack may have already posted it, but I would like to get it some play. Not because I think it will change any voter’s mind, but because it deserves to be seen to remind us of who we are as Americans. We are all immigrants or the children of immigrants, and we and our relatives and grandparents have had to make tough choices that deserve to be remembered. 
I had an uncle (by marriage) who was Italian. In 1940 he was still not a US citizen, although I gather he had begun the process, so he was sent to an internment camp in Wyoming (or Montana?). While he waited for his citizenship application to be completed, he and his fellow detainees played a lot of poker. His papers were finally processed, he was made a US Citizen, then was promptly drafted into the US Army as a Sargent (Supply). And of course he was sent to…Italy. His division survived Anzio, then my uncle came into his glory. His father was someone of importance further north, so he had connections. He was able to secure excellent billets (in a castle) and good food and drink for his comrades. 
Read the Full Article at www.dailykos.com >>>> 
Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 8, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"The vast majority of Republicans want Donald Trump to be president. They've repeatedly told the pollsters, they've turned out in huge numbers for the GOP nominee's rallies, they've given him a record-breaking number of small donations and they are trying to help him win. Some of them were for Rubio, some of them were for Kasich and a lot of them were for Cruz, but they have come together in an effort to save the country from Hillary Clinton.

A small minority of Republicans do not want Donald Trump to be president. They prefer Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately for most of the Republican Party, this small group of angry dissenters includes many of the people at the top of the party -- officeholders, major donors, ""strategists,"" and ""conservative"" pundits. These people have been able to leverage their connections with the mainstream press to repeatedly attack Trump -- even though they refuse to say anything nice about Hillary.

The Republican Party is led by people who have more in common with the Clintons than with the GOP base.

Their fundamental problem is that they are closer to Hillary on most issues than they are to Republican voters. The honorable thing for them to do would be to leave the GOP altogether and work with the Democrats -- as some like Andrew Sullivan have.

But they're unwilling to do that. Instead, they take Hillary's side on every issue while claiming to be pushing the ""conservative"" line. Furthermore, it gives them an incentive to talk about everything in personal terms -- as if they would have supported someone like, say, Huckabee, if the former Arkansas governor had been nominated, even though that's not true. So instead of having an honest discussion as to whether the GOP should be a globalist party or a nationalist party, everything dissolves into personal attacks.

When this election is over, the vast majority of Republicans are going to remember that their supposed leaders -- the same officeholders, millionaires, and pundits who told them that they had to ""come together"" and support John McCain and Mitt Romney -- refused to do the same for Donald Trump. They will know that what they have long suspected is true -- the Republican Party is led by people who have more in common with the Clintons than with the GOP base. And that knowledge will affect the future of the GOP for years to come.

Laura Ingraham joined FOX News Channel in 2007 and currently serves as a contributor, providing political analysis and commentary to FNC's daytime and primetime programming. She is the Editor-in-Chief of LifeZette.com.  In addition to her role as a contributor, Ingraham is a frequent substitute host on FNC's ""The O'Reilly Factor."" As the host of the radio program ""The Laura Ingraham Show,"" she is also the most listened-to woman in political talk radio in the United States, heard by hundreds of radio stations nationwide. Ingraham previously served as a litigator and Supreme Court law clerk.",REAL
"By Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 at 9:04 pm So Donald Trump's warnings about almost non-existent voter fraud were right after all. The only problem is that it was a Donald Trump supporter who committed voter fraud by voting twice. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
So Donald Trump’s warnings about almost non-existent voter fraud were right after all. 
The only problem is that it was a Donald Trump supporter who committed voter fraud by voting twice. 
Terri Lynn Rote, 55, was booked into jail Thursday on a felony charge of first-degree election misconduct after being arrested for suspicion of voting twice, according to the Des Moines Register . 
Authorities say the registered Republican cast two electoral ballots in Polk County. She was held in jail on a $5,000 bond and released Friday. 
Terri Rote caucused for Donald Trump: Terri Rote plans to caucus tonight for @realDonaldTrump down on the east side of Des Moines pic.twitter.com/dMdeH7sX0V 
— Leigh Munsil (@leighmunsil) February 1, 2016 
This does make it pretty awkward for Republicans, especially Trump supporters who’ve been told to “monitor” areas where liberals and Democrats vote, which is actually called voter intimidation and is also against the law. 
In fact, Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the election is rigged got the Republican Party sued for voter intimidation. And now one of Trump’s own supporters is arrested over voter fraud. 
Makes sense.",FAKE
"Bernie Sanders emerged from Wisconsin with a solid victory Tuesday, prolonging his dogged but improbable bid to catch Hillary Clinton in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The senator from Vermont was leading the party’s front-runner in a state with a celebrated tradition of progressive activism — and a primary open to independent voters, a bedrock Sanders constituency.

Now, despite Clinton’s still-overwhelming lead in delegates, Sanders can claim the momentum of winning in six of the past seven states holding nominating contests across the country.

The victory was certain to energize Sanders’s supporters two weeks ahead of what will be a key showdown in delegate-rich New York, a state where Clinton hopes to put an end to Sanders’s embarrassing winning streak and reclaim control of the race against the self-described democratic socialist.

Sanders held a boisterous rally Tuesday night in Wyoming, the site of Democratic caucuses Saturday. Screams erupted and the crowd broke into chants of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” in an auditorium at the University of Wyoming in Laramie when Sanders shared the news that the networks had called Wisconsin for him.

“If we wake up the American people, and working people and middle-class people and senior citizens and young people begin to stand up and fight back and come out and vote in large numbers, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish,” he said.

Clinton had already turned her attention to New York before voting began in Wisconsin. She appeared Tuesday morning on ABC’s “The View,” held an event in Brooklyn focused on women’s issues and attended an evening fundraiser in the Bronx where attendees were asked to raise $10,000 for her campaign.

In a tweet after the polls closed, Clinton congratulated Sanders on his victory. “To all the voters and volunteers who poured your hearts into this campaign: Forward!” she wrote.

While catching Clinton in the delegate count remains a long shot, Sanders has chipped away at her onetime lead of more than 300 pledged delegates, which was down to 263 before Tuesday’s contest in Wisconsin, according to an Associated Press tally.

Sanders invested significant time in Wisconsin, not leaving the Badger State in the final four days leading up to the primary and making an unadvertised campaign stop at a Milwaukee diner Tuesday morning.

“If people come out to vote in large numbers, I think we’re going to do very, very well,” Sanders told reporters as he entered Blue’s Egg with Barbara Lawton, a former Wisconsin lieutenant governor.

Sanders aggressively sought to highlight his more insular views on trade — an issue that he’s pressed in other Midwestern industrial states — as well as Clinton’s ties to Wall Street.

Wisconsin was viewed as difficult terrain for Clinton. In 2008, the state’s Democratic electorate was 87 percent white — voters whom Sanders has consistently won in nominating contests this year. Its industrial landscape, large bloc of independent voters and substantial working class also were seen as fertile ground for Sanders’s message of rethinking U.S. trade policy.

In 2008, Clinton lost the state by 17 points — to then-Sen. Barack Obama.

This time, she campaigned lightly here, focusing strategically on cities in congressional districts that played to her strengths, including Milwaukee, where she is popular with a large African American electorate.

She highlighted that she, unlike Sanders, has been a Democrat her “whole adult life.” She emphasized her commitment to supporting Democratic candidates at the state and local levels — a salient issue for a state party that has been waging fierce ideological battles against Gov. Scott Walker (R).

“He’s won some, I’ve won some. But I have 2 million more votes than he does,” Clinton said on “The View” on Tuesday morning.

Both candidates are now set for a showdown April 19 in New York, a state where Sanders grew up, where Clinton was elected twice to the U.S. Senate — and where 247 delegates will be at stake.

Clinton plans to campaign aggressively there, in part to prevent an embarrassing upset in her adopted home state and in part to deliver a decisive victory that would further marginalize Sanders.

The Brooklyn-born Sanders plans to make New York his home base over the coming two weeks as well. While he will make some campaign stops in other states with upcoming nominating contests, aides say he plans to return to New York City most nights, reflecting the hard-to-overstate consequences of the primary.

His decision to campaign Tuesday in Wyoming was born of a desire to add to his momentum heading into New York by notching a win in the state’s caucuses Saturday, though only 14 delegates are in play.

At this time in 2008, Obama’s pledged-delegate lead over Clinton fluctuated between 120 and 140 delegates — about half of the margin by which Clinton now leads Sanders. And that doesn’t include superdelegates, the elected officials and other party leaders who are not bound by their state’s results and who so far have broken heavily in Clinton’s favor.

Sanders aims to catch Clinton in pledged delegates — those won in primary elections — once California votes June 7. Doing so would require lopsided wins in most of the remaining contests, including some in states that have demographics similar to places where he has struggled.

If Sanders catches Clinton — or gets close — both candidates would enter the party’s convention in July without enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination. That would force the party’s superdelegates — who are automatically made convention delegates — to choose the nominee, a scenario Sanders’s campaign manager reiterated during an interview Tuesday on CNN.

The Sanders campaign has started making the case to superdelegates that they should side with him because he is more electable than Clinton against Republican front-runner Donald Trump — a view the Clinton camp disputes.

In a memo to supporters Monday, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, described the Sanders strategy as reliant on “overturning the will of the voters.”

The results in Wisconsin continued many of the trends seen in previous contests.

Independents, who were allowed to participate in the Democratic primary, favored Sanders over Clinton by a 40-point margin, according to preliminary exit polls. And as in prior contests, voters rated Sanders as far more trustworthy than Clinton. Nine in 10 Democratic voters said Sanders was “honest and trustworthy,” compared with to 6 in 10 who said the same of Clinton.

Tuesday morning, as Sanders mingled with voters over breakfast at Blue’s Egg in Milwaukee, Dale Dulberger, 66, of Wauwatosa, Wis., came to greet the senator after casting his vote for him.

“I think he’s really authentic,” Dulberger, who teaches at a county technical college, said of Sanders. “I think people believe what he’s saying. His proposals are idealistic, but that’s what a president is supposed to do.”

Clinton, on the other hand, campaigned in New York City and did not mention Wisconsin’s election at either appearance.

In a preview of what is expected to be a rough-and-tumble New York primary, the New York Daily News debuted Wednesday’s front-page story, which encapsulates the challenge that awaits Sanders in the Empire State. The paper lambasted the senator for his position opposing legal liability for gunmakers after the massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in 2012. The headline: “Bernie’s Sandy Hook shame.”",REAL
"Presidents often turn more moderate to make gains in their final years. Think of Bill Clinton's 1997 budget deal, or George W. Bush's 2007 (failed) immigration reform effort, or Ronald Reagan's 1986 tax reforms. Second terms can feel like new presidencies.

President Obama's increasingly successful second term has been the exception to that rule. It's been a concentrated, and arguably jaded, version of his first term. The candidate who was elected to bring the country together has found he can get more done if he acts alone — and if he lets Congress do the same.

That has been the big, quiet surprise of Obama's second term. Congress has become, if anything, more productive. And that speaks to a broader lesson Obama has learned about polarization in Congress: Since he's part of the problem, ignoring Congress can be part of the solution.

Obama's diplomatic breakthroughs with Cuba and Iran call back to a controversial promise Obama made in the 2008 primary but seemed to abandon once he won the White House: to negotiate with dictators with few or no preconditions. This was among the biggest fights of the Democratic primary and the most radical promises of Obama's campaign — but it seemed almost completely forgotten in the first years of his presidency.

Obama's first-term foreign policy was largely defined by George W. Bush's wars. It's only been in Obama's second term that the foreign policy philosophy he previewed in the 2008 campaign has really been visible — and where Obama has shown himself to be to the left of many in the Democratic Party.

Even some congressional Democrats have balked at his negotiations with Cuba and Iran. But not only is Congress largely irrelevant to these deals (at least unless the opposition can overturn a presidential veto, which they almost certainly can't) but Obama doesn't have much pressing legislation before Congress, which makes it safer for him to anger them. In that way, Obama's increasing distance from Congress has been a boon to his foreign policy efforts.

The results will profoundly shape Obama's foreign policy legacy. As my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote, ""Obama has reestablished productive diplomacy as the central task of a progressive foreign policy, and as a viable alternative approach to dealing with countries the GOP foreign policy establishment would rather bomb. He established a viable alternative to the liberal hawks that dominated Democratic thinking during the Bush years, and held positions of influence on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign. And he developed a cadre of aides who can carry on that legacy to future Democratic administrations, and keep a tradition of dovishness alive.""

But it's not just foreign policy where Obama has swung left. When he ran for president in 2008, he opposed same-sex marriage. It wasn't until 2012 that he ""evolved"" on the issue. But by 2015, he was embracing marriage equality as part of his legacy. He even turned his home into a symbol of celebration:

Similarly, Obama has sought to use executive action to achieve in his second term what Congress wouldn't permit in his first: sweeping action on both immigration and climate change.

In some ways, the immigration action is the most telling of the two. Prior to his second term, Obama had repeatedly told immigration advocates that he simply didn't have the power to stop deportations on a significant scale. ""I am president,"" he told Univision in 2010, ""I am not king.""

But Obama eventually decided that the president had more power than he initially thought. Similarly, he is pushing strong regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Both efforts show a basic reality of Obama's second term: Rather than working to find more compromise in Congress, which would necessitate choosing different issues and agreeing to much more modest solutions, Obama is sidestepping Congress with more aggressive, more polarizing actions. To put it another way, he's prioritizing the liberal policy outcomes he promised in the 2008 campaign above the compromise-oriented political approach he promised in the 2008 campaign.

Given Obama's actions, you might expect Congress to have devolved into yet more partisan rancor and paralysis. But over the past year, the opposite has happened. Democrats and Republicans shocked everyone by coming up with a fix to Medicare's broken payments formula. The Senate agreed on a replacement to No Child Left Behind. There have been no government shutdowns or debt ceiling disasters. And Republicans have even been willing to make some common ground with Obama on trade authority.

Evidence of Congress's relative productivity can be found elsewhere, too. The Bipartisan Policy Center keeps up a ""Healthy Congress Index"" that ""tracks key metrics like substantive days in session, amendments offered, and bills reported out of committee."" Of late, Congress is looking a whole lot healthier.

Which, in a way, makes a twisted kind of sense. Obama is a polarizing figure, and his efforts to pass legislation were part of what was polarizing Congress. Obama eventually realized he couldn't solve a problem that was created by his very presence. And so he's more or less left Congress to do its own thing — particularly since Republicans won the Senate in 2014.

Now that they've stopped arguing so much over Obama, both sides in Congress have more time and more inclination to work with each other — and, surprisingly, to work with Obama on the rare occasions when there's an obvious common ground, as proved true on trade authority. The result is that even as Obama's second term has become more liberal, the agenda he's actually pursuing with Congress has become more conservative — and more successful.",REAL
"  by Jon Rappoport — Jon Rappoport’s blog Oct 31, 2016 Vote fraud expert Bev Harris exposes electronic voting machines Okay. She finally did it. On Monday, Bev Harris ( blackboxvoting.org ), the great investigator of vote fraud, appeared on the Alex Jones show and laid it all out . The GEMS vote-fraud system, “fraction magic,” the way the vote is being stolen. Not just in theory, but in fact. Listen to the whole interview and get the word out. Bev’s findings are staggering. Below the video is the original piece I did on this earlier this month. —- High Alert: the election can still be rigged Votes counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers …[A]mazingly, the vote-rigging system it describes has not gotten widespread attention. The system can be used across the entire US. As we know, there are a number of ways to rig an election. Bev Harris, at blackboxvoting.org , is exploring a specific “cheat sheet” that has vast implications for the Trump vs. Hillary contest. It’s a vote-counting system called GEMS. I urge you to dive into her multi-part series, Fraction Magic (Part-1 here ). Here are key Harris quotes. They’re all shockers: “Our testing [of GEMS] shows that one vote can be counted 25 times, another only one one-thousandth of a time, effectively converting some votes to zero.” “This report summarizes the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds.” “GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.” “Instead of ‘1’ the vote is allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.” “Weighting a race [through the use of GEMS] removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.” “All evidence that [rigged] fractional values ever existed [in the GEMS system] can be removed instantly even from the underlying database using a setting in the GEMS data tables, in which case even instructing GEMS to show the [rigged] decimals will fail to reveal they were used.” “Source code: Instructions to treat votes as decimal values instead of whole numbers [i.e., rigging] are inserted multiple times in the GEMS source code itself; thus, this feature cannot have been created by accident.” A contact who, so far, apparently wishes to remain anonymous states the following about the history of the GEMS system: “The Fractional vote [rigging] portion traces directly to Jeffrey W. Dean , whose wife was primary stockholder of the company that developed GEMS. He ran the company but was prohibited from handling money or checks due to a criminal conviction for computer fraud, for which he spent 4 years in prison. Almost immediately after being released from prison he was granted intimate access to elections data and large government contracts for ballot printing and ballot processing.” I see no effort on the part of the federal government, state governments, or the mainstream press to investigate the GEMS system or respond to Bev Harris’ extensive analysis. It’s not as if media outlets are unaware of her. From shesource.org, here is an excerpt from her bio : “Harris has been referred to as ‘the godmother’ of the election reform movement. (Boston Globe). Vanity Fair magazine credits her with founding the movement to reform electronic voting. Time Magazine calls her book, Black Box Voting , ‘the bible’ of electronic voting… Harris’s investigations have led some to call her the ‘Erin Brockovich of elections.’ (Salon.com)… Harris has supervised five ‘hack demonstrations’ in the field, using real voting machines. These have been covered by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and in formal reports by the United States General Accounting Office…” So far, her analysis of GEMS seems to be labeled “too hot to handle.” Press outlets prefer to report the slinging of mud from both Presidential candidates’ camps. Meanwhile, the actual results of the coming elections—including Congressional races—appear to be up for grabs, depending on who controls GEMS. Update: From what I understand, each state government appoints a “consultant” to manage GEMS on election night. That person would be capable of rigging the vote. Jon Rappoport The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX , and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX , Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29 th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here .",FAKE
"Just weeks ago, it did not seem that Marco Rubio needed to lose any sleep over Jeb Bush.

After all, Rubio was seen as the darling presidential candidate of the GOP establishment because of a string of impressive debate performances and a strong Iowa caucus showing.

But after a disastrous GOP debate where Chris Christie essentially left the normally cool and eloquent Rubio stammering, followed by a fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, the South Carolina vote on Saturday has become critical for the Florida lawmaker.

He must persuade people who had been ready to ditch Bush for Rubio after New Hampshire, but who got jittery after he did worse than expected, that he has recovered and is the best non-extreme Republican option for the nomination, according to the New York Times.

A Rubio supporter said the senator entered the ill-fated debate with indications from Bush backers that they would be ready to switch loyalty after the New Hampshire primary, which had been expected to seal Rubio as the best bet for the GOP establishment.

But after Christie successfully repeatedly attacked Rubio in the debate, the supporter told the Times, “those calls stopped.” Another unidentified supporter added: “Totally frozen.”

Friends, advisers and backers of Rubio says if he should finish behind Bush, it would spell real trouble for the junior senator, according to the Times.

To be sure, thus far South Carolina voter polls indicate that Donald Trump will win, perhaps with a double-digit margin over whoever comes in second place.

Rubio’s campaign has taken the blame for the fallout after the debate that hurt their candidate, saying they had made a tactical error in advising him not to hit back hard at Christie because it wouldn’t pay off.

A weaker-than-expected showing by Sen. Ted Cruz, who is pursuing conservative and evangelical voters, is seen as a potential boost to Rubio, a one-time Tea Party favorite who could pick up anti-Trump conservatives, many experts say.

Basically, many believe Rubio cannot come in lower than third, certainly not behind Bush, who doggedly has been trying to wear the establishment mantle and at the start of the election cycle seemed like the inevitable moderate GOP front-runner.

All told, the stakes are high in South Carolina, where about a third of voters remain undecided.

“When you see what happens in South Carolina,” Tim Scott, a Republican senator in South Carolina told the Times, “it will carry momentum into Nevada, and then into Super Tuesday.”

Like us on Facebook",REAL
"Duterte Calls US Admin ‘Monkeys’ for Halting Arms Sales November 02, 2016 Duterte Calls US Admin 'Monkeys' for Halting Arms Sales 
(MANILA) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte chided the United States on Wednesday for halting the planned sale of 26,000 rifles to his country, calling those behind the decision ""fools"" and ""monkeys"" and indicating he might turn to Russia and China instead. Duterte's tirades against the former colonial power are routine during his speeches and he said on Wednesday he once believed in Washington, but had since lost respect for what is the Philippines' biggest ally. The U.S. State Department halted the sale of the assault rifles to the Philippine police after U.S. Senator Ben Cardin said he would oppose it, Senate aides told Reuters on Monday. Aides said Cardin, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was reluctant for the United States to provide the weapons given concern about human rights violations in the Philippines during Duterte's bloody, four-month-old war on drugs. 
""Look at these monkeys, the 26,000 firearms we wanted to buy, they don't want to sell,"" Dutertesaid during a televised speech. 
""Son of a b***h, we have many home-made guns here. These American fools."" 
More than 2,300 people have been killed in police operations or by suspected vigilantes as part of Duterte's anti-narcotics campaign, which was the lynchpin of his election campaign. 
Duterte has vented his anger at the United States for raising concerns about the extra-judicial killings. 
""That's why I was rude at them, because they were rude at me,"" he said. 
According to procedures in Washington, the State Department informs Congress when international weapons sales are in the works. Aides said the State Department had been informed Cardin would oppose the deal during the prenotification process, thus halting the sale. 
U.S. State Department officials did not comment. 
The Philippine police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, on Tuesday expressed disappointment that police would not get the M4 rifles, which he said were reliable. 
Duterte reiterated that Russia and China had shown willingness to sell arms to the Philippines, but he would wait to see if his military wanted to continue using U.S. weapons. 
""Russia, they are inviting us. China also. China is open, anything you want, they sent me brochure saying we select there, we'll give you. 
""But I am holding off because I was asking the military if they have any problem. Because if you have, if you want to stick to America, fine. 
""But, look closely and balance the situation, they are rude to us."" Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
"Far fewer veterans than expected are taking advantage of a new law aimed at making it easier for them to get private health care and avoid the long waits that have plagued Department of Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide.

Only 27,000 veterans have made appointments for private medical care since the VA started mailing out ""Choice Cards"" in November, the VA said in a report to Congress this month. The number is so small, compared to the 8.6 million cards that have been mailed out, that VA Secretary Robert McDonald wants authority to redirect some of the $10 billion Congress allocated for the program to boost care for veterans at the VA's 970 hospitals and clinics.

Republicans and Democrats insist the problem is the department and that it needs to do a better job promoting the choice program. They also want to change a quirk in the law that makes it hard for some veterans in rural areas to prove they live at least 40 miles from a VA health site.

The government measures the distance as the crow flies, rather than by driving miles, leaving thousands of veterans ineligible.

""Veterans put their lives on the line to defend this country. The very least we can do is ensure they don't have to jump through hoops to receive the care they need and have earned,"" said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., whose vast state has just one VA hospital.

The choice program was a key component of last year's sweeping law approved in response to reports that dozens of veterans died while waiting for appointments at a VA hospital in Phoenix, and that appointment records were manipulated to hide the delays. A series of government reports said workers throughout the country falsified wait lists while supervisors looked the other way, resulting in chronic delays for veterans seeking care and bonuses for managers who falsely appeared to meet on-time goals.

The law, signed by President Barack Obama in August, allows veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment to get VA-paid care from a local doctor. It also allows veterans who live at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or clinic to get private care and makes it easier to fire VA employees accused of wrongdoing.

The choice program expands an existing program that allows veterans to get outside care for emergencies or procedures not available at the VA. Veterans have long complained about waiting months or even years to be reimbursed for private care, and many are skeptical the choice card will alleviate those problems, despite promises by the VA.

""I don't believe any of us thought that there would be a wholesale rush to leave the VA system at all, but we are still early in the program,"" Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, told reporters during a recent tour of the VA.

McDonald's bid to shift the money has met a bipartisan wall of opposition in Congress, where leaders said the landmark law they adopted last summer to overhaul VA has not been fully implemented. Taking money away from the choice program just three months after it was launched is premature, even irresponsible, lawmakers and veterans advocates said.

Miller called the plan a complete nonstarter. His Senate counterpart, Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., called it unacceptable. And Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of the law's chief authors, said Congress not only would reject the idea ""but refuse to even consider"" it.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the senior Democrat on the Senate veterans panel, said in an interview he would oppose any reallocation of funds ""so long as there are delays and issues with quality of care"" at VA.

McDonald counters that the proposal, which has not been formally submitted to Congress, would help ensure that ""every veteran receives the care they have earned and deserve regardless of where they choose to get it from.""

McDonald, who took over as VA secretary in July, said he never intended to ""gut the choice program or somehow eliminate"" it. Instead, he said, he simply seeks the kind of budget flexibility he enjoyed as Procter & Gamble CEO.

""Imagine your household. You are hungry, but you can't move the money from the gasoline account to the food account. Well, that is the situation I face,"" he said at a Feb. 11 budget hearing before the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

Louis Celli, director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation at The American Legion, the largest veterans service organization, called McDonald's explanation disingenuous.

""Draining funds from the bill short-circuits the program and ultimately hurts vets,"" Celli said, noting that VA officials had pushed for the choice program as a short-term way to expand patient access to care.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., said a veteran in his rural district drives 340 miles one-way for cardiology treatment at a VA hospital in Kansas City.

""If the VA choice program can't provide something closer for him, then we need to relook at how we are implementing that,"" Huelskamp told McDonald at the Feb. 11 hearing.

McDonald said VA officials are willing to look at the 40-mile rule to see if it needs to be changed. The VA is committed to doing all it can to ""make sure the program is robust,"" he said.",REAL
"US Keen to Keep South China Sea Nations Buying From Them, Not China by Jason Ditz, October 28, 2016 Share This 
United States determination to keep its South China Sea territorial disputes with China going rests heavily on having nations with active claims in the sea as US client states, particularly those with claims that conflict with China’s. That used to be, with several nations having such claims. 
But the US is struggling to keep those nations exclusively buying US arms. Today’s big loss was from Malaysia , which has announced they intend to buy littoral mission ships from China, instead of the United States. Details on the decision-making process are unclear, but the US problems with their own littoral combat ships breaking down, so that might’ve hurt their chances. 
It’s a comparatively small deal, but part of a growing trend. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has been making headlines for weeks with his interest in ending long-standing reliance on the US. While this has grown into complaints about general US-Philippines relations, one of the early grievances was his not liking the US dictating arms sales, and expressing interest in buying from China and Russia instead. 
If these countries start buying their arms from China, they’ll have a strong incentive to resolve maritime disputes with China diplomatically, which could severely limit their interest in having warships patrolling through the area to “confront” China. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Bias bashers Vladimir Putin Condemns Europe for Upholding Child Rape (Video) 
The Russian president voiced his disgust at a decayed and immoral culture which has overtaken the West Print ""A society that cannot defend its children today, has no tomorrow"" 
Ah, Vienna. A city that conjures up many delightful images. The world's finest coffee and strudel. Cafes where the waiters still address you as ""Mein Herr"" and they haven't changed the decor since the 19th century. The world's greatest music: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. A city of beauty and grandeur, echoes of an empire of a former age. 
And today, a city where Muslim ""refugees"" are allowed to rape 10 year old boys in public toilets. 
The Independent reports : 
A man who raped a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Austria has had his conviction overturned after judges found he may have believed the child consented. 
Police said the 20-year-old Iraqi refugee, who has not been named, assaulted his victim in a toilet cubicle at the Theresienbad swimming pool in Vienna on 2 December last year. 
The child reported the rape to a lifeguard and his attacker was arrested at the scene, reportedly telling officers in initial interviews that he was experiencing a “sexual emergency” after not having sex in four months. Theresienbad.jpg Vienna's historic pools are not safe anymore 
The ""sexual emergency"" experienced by the rapefugee was apparently similar to the one experienced by 2,000 rapefugees in the German city of Cologne on New Year's Eve 2016, when they publicly raped 1,200 German women as emasculated German men and police stood by and watched. 
Apparently some of the women were merely groped. The German government was appalled. That's why it decided to produce an illustrated manual teaching the refugees how to rape German women properly next time around. 
Not to be outdone, Austria has now decided to join its German brethren in refusing to defend even children from homosexual rape - as long as the children ""consent"": 
[O]n Thursday, Austria’s Supreme Court overturned the rape conviction and ordered a re-trial on the charge. 
[...] Supreme Court judges ruled that the first court should have established whether the attacker thought his victim agreed to a sexual act and intended to act against the boy’s will. 
We are in fact now witnessing the violent death of western civilization. It is bad enough that Europe is being inundated by hordes of invaders of a culture, religion, and ethnicity totally incompatible with the West, but most reprehensible of all is the total lack of any will to resist on the part of Europeans themselves, and especially their governments (with notable exceptions, such as the Hungarians). Far from it - they even take active steps to encourage and accommodate the invaders. 
But we all know the real threat to Europe is not from millions of barbaric non-European rapefugees, it's from Russia and Vladimir Putin. Ask Poland. Or Lithuania. Russia is hell, and Putin is the devil. Here's what the devil himself had to say about this incident: 
The Russian president said: 
[...] I can't get through my head what they are thinking over there [in Europe]. This is a result of the dilution of national traditions and values. I can't even explain the rationale. Is it a sense of guilt towards the migrants?...A society that cannot defend its children today, has no tomorrow. It has no future. 
Putin also noted that Russia as a state, has encompassed multiple ethnicities and cultures for over 1000 years, and that unlike Europe, it has a proven track record of managing inter-ethnic relations. 
Despite the presence of a vocal liberal minority, the great majority of Russians agree with their leader that if these are the kind of ""European values"" the West has on offer, it is better to remain the ""backward"" conservative society that continually draws the unfettered ire of liberal paragons in Europe and America. 
The only question is whether eastern European nations such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Poland - which are in their inherent culture and moral outlook far more similar to Russia than to the modern Germans, Americans, and French - will come to their senses in time to save themselves from the cultural rot devouring the core of the societies with which they are presently so enamored.",FAKE
"Is This A New Escalation? BLACK Chemtrails Reported Around The World! Please scroll down for video 
For many years there have been theories floating around about the potential dangers of chemtrails, the white stripes with a cloudlike appearance that can often be seen in the skies. Some have suggested that these chemtrails are not as innocent as most people tend to think and some people have even gone so far as to say that they may be biological and chemical agents. 
This kind of theory has often been dismissed in the past as faulty reasoning and paranoid thinking. The phenomenon that believers identify as chemtrails are nothing more than the perfectly innocent condensation trials left behind by all kind of air vehicles. However, recent sightings of highly unusual chemtrails might well challenge this particular line of thinking. Black chemtrails in the sky stump sceptics 
According to many witnesses from all across the world, the chemtrails or ‘condensation trials’ appearing in their local areas are not white anymore – they’re black. No scientific body or government has chosen to offer an explanation about the sudden change in the appearance of numerous trails in the sky, but many believe that it is irrefutable evidence that chemtrails are being utilised for chemical or biological testing on civilian populations . 
Sceptics have suggested that these unusual black trails might be nothing more than a shadows of a typical white condensation trail left by a plane. However, this theory has been robustly dismissed by others who have pointed out that clouds leave no shadows in the sky and therefore it would be impossible for a condensation trail left by a plane to do the same thing. 
Not all of the people who believe that chemtrails are a real phenomenon believe that they are used to covertly test chemical and biological weapons. Others have suggested that they are part of a weather modification technology, often referred to as HAARP. The chemtrails are being used to electrify portions of the sky so that they can be used for testing by scientists working in this field. 
Whatever the truth of the matter is, one thing is for sure; these black chemtrails cannot be easily explained away. 
This article (Is This A New Escalation? BLACK Chemtrails Reported Around The World!) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
"BREAKING : Trump BEATING “Federal Investigation Hillary” by 4% in Michigan’s Absentee Voting BREAKING : Trump BEATING “Federal Investigation Hillary” by 4% in Michigan’s Absentee Voting Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
Donald Trump is currently leading Crooked “Federal Investigation” Hillary by 4% in Michigan’s absentee voting. 
From WestMiPolitics.com: 
Donald Trump and the Republicans lead Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in early voting returns, Chad Livengood of the Detroit News reports . 
190,000 Republicans have turned in ballots vs. only 170,000 Dems. Nearly 160,000 independent/unaffiliated voters have also cast ballots, a group Trump consistently leads with in nearly every poll. 
Those numbers translate to: ",FAKE
"U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said Thursday he believes President Barack Obama will nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a little over three weeks.

""I think it will be a little over three weeks,"" Reid said in an interview on MSNBC, adding that he spoke to Obama about the nomination on Thursday.",REAL
"NEW YORK — His campaign in turmoil, Donald Trump sought to get back on track Wednesday with a familiar tactic: attacking Hillary Clinton.

Clinton is ""a world-class liar"" who has ""perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft,"" Trump said during a heavily promoted speech he delivered as members of the GOP continued to raise questions about his campaign organization and its ability to raise money.

In a remarkably negative speech against a presidential rival, the presumptive Republican nominee said Clinton ""may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States,"" a line that drew that drew a standing ovation from supporters packed into a meeting room at a Trump hotel in Manhattan.

Echoing attacks he has made throughout the campaign, Trump again claimed the former secretary of State has used her position to solicit contributions to the Clinton Foundation she sponsors along with former president Bill Clinton. Trump accused the foundation of accepting money from foreign governments that brutalize women and gays, and he said ""she ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund.""

Reading his speech from a teleprompter, Trump also faulted Clinton over the economy, free trade and some of her campaign contributions. Citing a string of contributors across the world, he said donors ""totally own her.""

While Trump tries to make the fall election about Clinton, the Democratic candidate seeks to do the reverse, casting Trump as wholly unqualified for the presidency. ""He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility,"" Clinton said this week.

As for Trump's attack speech, Clinton campaign spokesperson Glen Caplin said Trump offered only ""more hypocritical lies and nutty conspiracy theories,"" all in an effort to distract voters from his campaign problems. At a rally in Raleigh, N.C., following Trump's remarks, Clinton said, ""“He’s going after me personally because he has no answers on the substance.”

The Clinton team also noted in a statement that independent fact-checking organizations have frequently given Trump's statements failing grades.

Trump's speech in New York City came two days after he fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski,

The nominee-in-waiting's anti-Clinton speech — initially scheduled for last week, but delayed so that Trump could respond to the Orlando terrorist attack — is part of an attempt by the real estate mogul to move on after bad reports about the state of his campaign.

Hours after Lewandowski's dismissal, the Trump campaign filed a financial report showing it had only $1.3 million in the bank at the start of June; Clinton reported $42 million, one of the biggest financial advantages in the history of American politics.

Republicans continued to voice anxiety about the state of Trump's campaign, citing what they described as its small size, reluctance to invest in micro-targeting and other get-out-the-vote techniques and lack of message discipline.

Tom Rath, a Republican convention delegate from New Hampshire who is pledged to former Trump opponent John Kasich, said Trump's campaign trouble is not just a ""process story.""

It ""guts his strongest argument — that he is an accomplished executive who makes large organizations work,"" Rath said.

Republican consultant Bruce Haynes, founding partner of Washington-based Purple Strategies, said the Trump campaign seems to be realizing that it has a different job in the general election than it did during the primaries, and ""they have to make drastic changes fast.""

Clinton on Tuesday delivered another speech describing Trump as temperamentally unfit for the presidency, focusing on economic polices that she said would lead to a recession.

As she did in an earlier speech hitting the Republican candidate over foreign policy, Clinton said, “every day we see how reckless and careless Trump is. He’s proud of it.""

David Brock, who heads a pro-Clinton political organization called Correct the Record, said in a memo to reporters that Trump's attacks on Clinton rely on ""right-wing books"" that have been discredited. He described Wednesday's speech as an attempt to divert attention from his own troubles.

""Donald Trump's presidential campaign is melting down,"" Brock said.

In his speech Wednesday, Trump said he has built a multi-billion-dollar business, and ""that's a talent our country desperately needs.""

Attacking Clinton's stewardship of the State Department, Trump cited the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the deadly attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador, and her use of private email that is currently the subject of investigation, and, he suggested, could have been hacked by the nation's enemies.

The result has been ""one deadly foreign policy disaster after another,"" the Republican candidate said.

Trump also cited a letter from a woman whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, saying she wrote that Clinton ""needs to go to prison to pay for the crimes that she has already committed against our country.""

Trump cast the fall campaign as one pitting ""the people"" against ""the politicians"" who have ""rigged"" the system in their favor, and are symbolized by both Clintons. He also mocked the Clinton campaign slogan ""I'm with her,"" saying instead, ""I'm with you, the American people.""

Reciting his favorite campaign themes, Trump linked his opponent to open immigration refugee policies, bad trade deals, President Obama's health care plan, and the weakening of the military, and he pledged a new approach on all of those issues.

Trump and associates have described Lewandowski's firing as part of an effort to re-orient his team toward the challenges of a fall campaign. They also downplayed the fundraising report, saying they have raised millions in June and that Trump can put in his own money if necessary.

Republican critics said Trump's problems are self-inflicted, and they still hope to somehow head off his nomination at next month's convention in Cleveland.

GOP strategist Liz Mair, who has headed up a ""Never Trump"" group, said ""convention delegates — and indeed Trump himself — ought to be looking for a way out of this, whether that means delegates throwing out the rule book, or Trump withdrawing and going back to running his business.""",REAL
"(CNN) Mitt Romney delivered a sweeping broadside against Donald Trump on Thursday, laying into the Republican presidential front-runner with a sharper attack than any of the party's 2016 contenders have made against the billionaire business mogul.

""Here's what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud,"" Romney said. ""His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.""

Romney said that ""dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark,"" pointing to his ""bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.""

There's irony in Romney's speech: Just four years ago, he courted Trump's endorsement -- even after Trump had led the ""birther"" controversy against President Barack Obama, insisting that Obama release his birth certificate to prove he is an American citizen.

""He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees' -- he would have dropped to his knees,"" he said.

He said of 2012: ""That was a race, I have to say, folks, that should have been won ... I don't know what happened to him. He disappeared. He disappeared. And I wasn't happy about it, I'll be honest, because I am not a fan of Barack Obama, because I backed Mitt Romney -- I backed Mitt Romney. You can see how loyal he is.""

He said Romney thought about running again in 2016, but ""chickened out.""

Romney tweeted after his own speech but before Trump's that had the New York businessman made similar statements about the KKK and others in 2012, he would not have accepted the endorsement.

""If Trump had said 4 years ago the things he says today about the KKK, Muslims, Mexicans, disabled, I would NOT have accepted his endorsement.""

But now Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, is attempting to play the role of party elder during a speech at the University of Utah. He said any of the party's other candidates -- Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich -- would be suitable choices.

He also amplified the stakes of the election, arguing that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be damaging, as well.

The remarkable speech reflected the splintering of the Republican Party, as party leaders and statesmen increasingly rebuke their front-runner.

Romney didn't endorse a candidate -- saying that, due to the party's delegate apportionment process, he'd vote for Rubio in Florida or Kasich in Ohio, if he lived in any of those states, when they vote on March 15.

It was, in effect, an argument for a contested convention, which would come only if Trump couldn't win enough delegates to capture the nomination on the first ballot.

""If the other candidates can find common ground, I believe we can nominate a person who can win the general election and who will represent the values and policies of conservatism,"" he said.

Trump, meanwhile, is winning over working-class whites and evangelical voters who are angry with Washington's political class -- breaking turnout records in primaries along the way.

Despite Romney's scathing speech, there are few signs it will dissuade Trump's loyal core of supporters who so far have greeted his most eyebrow-raising antics with swelling support.

Nonetheless, Romney lambasted Trump on foreign policy, casting him as ""very, very not-smart"" in his comments about allowing ISIS to take out Syria's leadership and for proposing the slaughter of the families of terrorists.

""Mr. Trump is directing our anger for less-than-noble purposes. He creates scapegoats in Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for the killing of innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protestors,"" he said, adding that Trump would trample First Amendment protections.

Romney also said Trump's remarks on CBS' ""60 Minutes"" on Syria and ISIS ""has to go down as the most ridiculous and dangerous idea of the campaign season: Let ISIS take out Assad, he said, and then we can pick up the remnants.""

""Think about that: Let the most dangerous terror organization the world has ever known take over a country? This is recklessness in the extreme,"" Romney said.

The business mogul, who himself has changed positions on abortion, continued hitting Romney and the Republican establishment Thursday morning in a series of tweets.

""I have brought millions of people into the Republican Party, while the Dems are going down. Establishment wants to kill this movement!"" Trump tweeted.

Romney also mocked Trump's failed business ventures, pointing to his airline, his casino bankruptcies and more, and attacked his sexual indiscretions, too.

""There's a dark irony in his boasts of his sexual exploits during the Vietnam war, while at the same time, John McCain, who he has mocked, was in prison being tortured,"" he said

As soon as Romney wrapped up, McCain, the Arizona senator who was the 2008 GOP nominee, said he agreed.

""I share the concerns about Donald Trump that my friend and former Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, described in his speech today. I would also echo the many concerns about Mr. Trump's uninformed and indeed dangerous statements on national security issues that have been raised by 65 Republican defense and foreign policy leaders,"" McCain said in a statement.

The extraordinary effort by Romney to take down the Republican front-runner comes amid a last-ditch rush among the party's donors and loyalists to stop Trump from capturing the nomination.

After the remarks, Kasich tweeted, ""Well said, @MittRomney.""

His attack on Trump was an amalgamation of all of the attacks that other candidates and party members have made in recent weeks.

One of his top aides in the 2012 race, Katie Packer, is heading a super PAC that is launching attack ads against Trump. Another super PAC and the hardline conservative Club for Growth are also airing ads critical of Trump.

It could be too late: Trump has already won 10 of the first 15 states to vote, and he has a clear lead nationally over Rubio and Cruz.

Romney cast the coming months' elections as a crucial moment in history, citing Ronald Reagan and saying that this nominating contest is ""a time for choosing"" -- laying waste along the way to Reagan's fabled ""11th Commandment"" that Republicans not speak ill of other Republicans.

Adding to the intrigue: Romney's 2012 vice presidential running mate House Speaker Paul Ryan had a private dinner with Romney in Salt Lake City Utah last weekend, CNN has learned.

The dinner occurred while Ryan was on a trip out West to help campaign for House candidates, an aide said. But the aide maintained that the speaker only learned last night that Romney was planning to deliver a speech strongly criticizing Trump.

At his weekly press conference that happened at the same time as Romney's blistering attack on Trump, Ryan was asked about any talks he's had with Romney and the 2012 GOP's nominee's message about Trump, but he said he hadn't ""seen the content of the speech.""

""Mitt Romney is one of our party leaders, and he cares deeply about the future of the Republican party and the country,"" Ryan said, adding that ""Mitt and I are very close friends.""

In his speech, Romney called Trump's policy proposals ""flimsy, at best,"" and said he'd trigger a trade war, drive up the deficit and lead the nation into a recession.

""Even though Donald Trump has offered very few specific economic plans, what he has said is enough to know that he would be very bad for American workers and American families,"" he said.

""Now I know you say, 'Isn't he a huge business success, and doesn't he know what he's talking about?' No he isn't, and no he doesn't. His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and their workers. He inherited his business; he didn't create it,"" Romney said.

Romney also pointed to Trump's exchange about white supremacists with CNN's Jake Tapper last Sunday on ""State of the Union"" as a general election liability.

""The video of the infamous Tapper-Trump exchange on the Ku Klux Klan will play 100,000 times on cable and who knows how many billion times on social media,"" he said.",REAL
"Most are familiar with the “Jaywalking” quizzes Jay Leno regularly did on the streets of Universal Studios. They often included American civics questions. The answers were often laughably pathetic.  Unfortunately, they are representative of the general citizenry’s knowledge.

According to studies byAnnenberg Public Policy Center, only about a third (38 percent) of Americans can name the three branches of America’s government (executive, legislative and judicial), much less explain what each does.

Also surprisingly, only 32 percent of Americans could correctly identify the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land, according to the Xavier Center for the Study of the American Dream. According to this same study, only 32 percent of Americans knew how many U.S. Senators there were (100), and only 29 percent knew the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office (six years).

Voter turnout for the 2014 national election was the lowest it has been since World War II according to the United States Election Project. In a country that is supposed to be thegold standard for democracy this is simply unacceptable.

Why is this happening? One reason is the lack of emphasis put on civics education in our educational curricula. Voters don’t vote because they don’t understand the process or the power that comes from their votes.

These jarring facts are why I have been actively involved in Utah’s successful effort to pass the American Civics Education Initiative in Utah’s recently concluded legislative session.

If you don’t know it takes four balls for a walk and three strikes for a strike out in baseball, it’s not likely you’re a baseball fan. If you don't know the basics in American civics, you’re not likely to be interested in voting.

The American Civics Education Initiative is simple in concept: Students must pass a test from the 100 basic facts of U.S. history and civics taken from the same test all potential citizens must master before becoming American citizens.

This legislation, now enacted in Utah, as well as Arizona, Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota, allows students to take the test any time during their high school career and as many times as necessary to pass. By using this well-established test and the study materials that are already easily available online for free, this legislation has nearly no implementation costs.

Some 91 percent of immigrants applying for citizenship pass the civics test on their first try. I recently attended a citizenship swearing-in ceremony at Liberty Park in Salt Lake City (an appropriately named place for this inspiring event). New citizens swore an oath of allegiance to our Republic dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I saw firsthand how excited these new citizens were to become Americans, as well as the sense of pride they had in having passed the test. They knewtheir stuff.

Utah high school students will now be able to share in that satisfaction of accomplishment. As I travel around Utah to meet with students, I see how bright, enthusiastic and capable they are.  I hope that they are also inspired to participate in our democracy.

When leaving Independence Hall at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”  The question is how do we keep it?

Our republic depends on an informed, engaged citizenry. When so many of our fellow citizens don’t know how our government works — and even fewer vote — power becomes concentrated in the hands of the few. We put the bedrock concept of “We the People” at risk.

If our students don’t know how our democracy works and who we are as a people, their participation ourgovernment will continue to wane. We can’t risk that. As Representative Steve Eliason, one of the sponsors of Utah’s law, aptly said during the legislative debate, “The American Civics Education Initiative is chicken soup for our ailing civic soul.”

Utah has taken an important first step in helping bolster American civics education. Legislators across the country need to follow suit and pass similar American civics education legislation in their own states. Only then will the phrase “We the People” live up to its original intent.

Jonathan Johnson is the chairman of Overstock.com, Inc. and the co-chairman of the Civics Education Initiative in Utah.",REAL
"Print 
[Ed. – Videos are starting to come out, like the one here . Reportedly, it took 40 police officers to gain control of the situation.] 
An Israeli speaker’s talk at a London college campus scheduled for this week was canceled on Wednesday. Why? Because, according to the cancelation notice sent by the student union, “there had been controversy” when he spoke at the campus two years prior, and the hosting organization failed to disclose that when the room was booked for the talk. 
After cries of suppression of speech and vehement protests, the university stepped in and “un”canceled the talk. Hen Mazzig’s talk at University College, London, was reinstated. It would take place, as scheduled, on Thursday evening, Oct. 27. 
The response by the anti-Israel mob was swift and the attack was vicious. A protest was called. Outside the room where Mazzig was scheduled to speak, livid demonstrators screamed for murder and the end of Israel. “Intifada, Intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” They barred the entrance to the talk while pummeling the doors and windows, leering malevolently. Two thugs yanked open a window, hurling themselves into the room, launching several students inside into panic attacks. A woman inside kept repeating: “This is like the Warsaw Ghetto!”",FAKE
"Posted on November 4, 2013 by joandarc | 12 Comments 
“ If we wish to make any progress in the service of God, we must begin every day of our life with new eagerness. We must keep ourselves in the presence of God as much as possible and have no other view or end in all our actions but the divine honor. ” 
The profound and significant communication above is from St. Charles Borromeo, whose Feast Day we celebrate today, November 4th. Clearly, if we would simply use his life map as our every day goal, we would never be lost and we would always have joy, even in spite of suffering. 
St. Charles Borromeo lead the universal Church in the Counter-Reformation in the troubled but dynamic 16th century, and therefore, is associated with reform. He sought the correction of abuses and evil, addressing the excuses made for the destructive and false reformation which was spreading and creating confusion in Europe. Indeed and in fact, he is one of the great Counter-Reformers, along with Pope St. Pius V, St. Philip Neri and St. Ignatius Loyola. 
He was born on October 2, 1538 in a castle of Arona on Lake Maggiore, Italy, the second of two sons in a family of six. His father was Count Gilbert Borromeo and his mother was Margaret, a member of the Medici family. Even at the age of 12, he showed his serious and holy disposition, receiving the clerical tonsure, with another of his uncles resigning him to the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Gratinian and Felinus at Arona. At his young age, he reminded his father that the revenue, with the exception for what was spent on his necessary education for the service of the Church, was to be given to the poor and could not be applied to other more worldly uses. He learned Latin at Milan and thereafter attended the University of Pavia, and after the death of his parents, at the age of 22 he earned his doctor’s degree. 
In 1559, his uncle was chosen as Pope Pius IV, wherein Charles used all of his influence to reopen the Council of Trent in 1562, since it had been suspended in 1552. He accomplished this reopening under most difficult ecclesiastical and political climates. 
In 1563, Charles was ordained a priest and two months thereafter, was consecrated as a bishop. In this capacity, he drafted the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the reform of liturgical books and music. 
Milan failed to have an in-house bishop for some eighty years. Accordingly, Charles arrived in Milan in April of 1566 and vigorously worked for the reformation of this diocese. He sold property in the amount of thirty thousand crowns and applied the entire amount to distressed families. Charles allotted most of his income to charity, forbade himself all luxury and imposed severe penances upon himself. During the horrible plague and famine of 1576, he tired to feed sixty to seventy thousand people daily, borrowing large sums of money that required years to repay. Civil authorities fled at the height of the plague, abandoning the populace; but Charles stayed in the city where he ministered to the sick and the dying. Charles assembled the superiors of the religious communities, wherein a number of religious right away volunteered to help the stricken victims of the plague, wherein he lodged these clerics in his house. The hospital of St. Gregory looked deplorable, bringing Charles to tears, overflowing with dead, dying, sick and others suspected of being struck by the plague. St. Charles literally exhausted all his resources in relief. Indeed, houses for the sick were formed as well as temporary shelters, and lay people were organized for the clergy and a score of altars set up in the streets so that the sick could assist at public worship from their windows. He personally ministered to the dying, waited on the sick and helped those in need. The plague lasted from 1576 through 1578. 
Charles endured of all things, a speech impediment, a difficult handicap for his preaching. A friend of Charles, Achille Gagliardi, said, “I have often wondered how it was that, without any natural eloquence or anything attractive in his manner, he was able to work such changes in the hearts of his hearers. He spoke but little, gravely, and in a voice barely audible – but his words always had effect.” 
St. Charles proclaimed that children should be properly instructed in Christian doctrine and therefore, established the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. These schools at that time numbered 740, with approximately 3,000 catechists and 40,000 pupils. And so, Charles originated “Sunday-schools.” 
No love was lost in the religious order called, “Humiliati”, being reduced to few members, but still maintaining many monasteries and great possessions. They allegedly submitted to the reform, but this was done only in form, not in substance. They tried to have the pope annul the new regulations, but those attempts were refused and they failed. So, they hatched a plot to assassinate Charles. One of the priests agreed to do so for the sum of forty gold pieces (much like Judas Iscariot if you ask me). On October 26, 1569, this priest, Jerome Donati Farina, put himself at the door of the chapel in the archbishop’s house while Charles was at evening prayers with his household. While an anthem was being sung, Charles being on his knees before the altar, this cowardly assassin discharged a gun at him, wherein Farina escaped during the confusion, but the bullet struck Charles’ clothes in the back raising a bruise. Thus, they failed to murder him. 
Nevertheless, Charles directed his energies to maintain a capable and virtuous clergy. On one occasion when an exemplary priest was sick and on death’s door, Archbishop Borromeo said, “Ah, you do not realize the worth of the life of one good priest .” Charles was indefatigable in parochial visitations 
Charles worked so hard and in 1584, his health became poor. On October 24th, while on a retreat, he became very ill. On October 29th, he started off for Milan, his diocese, wherein he arrived there on All Souls Day, November 2nd, having celebrated Mass for the last time on the previous day at his birth place, Arona. He went to bed, asking for the final sacrament of the sick, with his last words being, “Behold, I come.” He died on the 4th of November, only 46 years of age. 
Charles was formally canonized by Pope Paul V in 1610. 
Charles lived the instruction of Our Lord Jesus Christ: “…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” (Mt 25:35-36) St. Charles saw Jesus in his neighbor and he was always able to recognize “Jesus in Disguise.” Let us follow his example. 
Joan 
One Hundred Saints , Bulfinch Press. 
Saint of the Day , edited by Leonard Foley, O.F.M., revised by Pat McCloskey, O.F.M. Rate this:",FAKE
"A program implemented by the National Security Agency to help the U.S. and its allies track the computers and networks used by North Korean hackers was critical in gathering information that led Washington to conclude Pyongyang was behind last year's cyberattack on Sony Pictures.

The New York Times first reported that the NSA began placing malware in North Korean systems in 2010. Originally, the purpose of the surveillance was to gain insight into North Korea's nuclear program, but the focus shifted after a large cyberattack on South Korean banks and media companies in 2013.

Fox News has confirmed that investigators have since concluded that the hackers spent more than two months last fall mapping Sony's computer systems and planning how to attack it.

In the case of the Sony Pictures hack, which knocked nearly the entire company's system offline, investigators believe that the North had stolen the ""credentials"" of a Sony systems administrator, which enabled them to familiarize themselves with Sony's network and plot how to destroy its files and systems.

The office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would not speak directly to the report, but said in a statement on Monday:

""The [US intelligence community] has been tracking North Korean intrusions and phishing attacks on a routine basis. While no two situations are the same, it is our shared goal is to prevent bad actors from exploiting, disrupting or damaging U.S. commercial networks and cyber infrastructure. When it becomes clear that cyber criminals have the ability and intent to do damage, we work cooperatively to defend networks.""

The attacks themselves, which Sony first reported to the FBI Nov. 24, are widely considered to be in retaliation for the release of ""The Interview,"" a comedy that features an assassination attempt against Kim Jong-un. Pyongyang has repeatedly denied any involvement in the Sony hack.

Skeptics have cast doubt on the official story that North Korea was behind the Sony hack, with many suggesting a disgruntled current or former Sony employee was responsible. Earlier this month, FBI director James Comey said U.S. investigators were able to trace emails and Internet posts sent by the Guardians of Peace, the group behind the attack, and link them to North Korea.

Comey said most of the time, the group sent emails threatening Sony employees and made various other statements online using proxy servers to disguise where the messages were coming from. But on occasion, he said, they connected ""directly,"" enabling investigators to ""see that the IP addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans.""

A senior military official told The Times that the evidence against North Korea that was presented to President Obama was so compelling that he ""had no doubt"" the Communist regime was responsible. The White House has imposed new economic sanctions against North Korea as a response to the cyberattack.

The Times report quotes a North Korean defector as saying that country's military first displayed interest in hacking in 1994, when it sent 15 people to a Chinese military academy to learn the practice. Two years later, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, Pyongyang's primary intelligence service, created Bureau 121, a hacking unit that has a substantial representation in the northeast Chinese city of Shenyang.

South Korea's military claims that the North has a staff of 6,000 hackers dedicated to disrupting the South's military and government. That estimate is more than double an earlier projection made by that country's Defense Ministry.

Click for more from The New York Times.",REAL
"Donald Trump has absorbed more attacks in the last two weeks from his opponents, their super PACs and the Republican establishment than any candidate I've seen in my five decades around presidential politics.

The ""shock and awe"" attack of unfriendly fire seems to have had minimum impact on his candidacy as he won two big victories Tuesday night in Mississippi and Michigan. Big Don is still standing and the establishment favorite, little Marco got routed -- finishing out of money in both contests.

Ted Cruz, who came in second in both races in Michigan and Mississippi and won Idaho, keeps fighting to remain relevant. He is having a tough time reaching beyond the evangelical base which he splits with Trump. But the finals of this election cycle could come down to Trump versus Cruz.

John Kasich came in a distant second to Trump in his neighboring state which may bode poorly for his showdown next week in Ohio, the state he governs.

Rubio is on death watch and life support and can't survive if he doesn't win his home state of Florida. Tuesday night's poor showing is not going to encourage the money guys to bet more on him and he faces a real uphill battle to beat Trump in the billionaire’s adopted state of Florida.

Trump’s battle cry ""I love Florida and they love me!"" will be tested in seven days in the first of the winner take all states. There will be no more second place finishes or silver medals. Win or lose is now the rule of the game.

We have now seen the travelogue of the Trump properties and golf courses, suffered through a full display of all his products from vodka to steaks and the men's accessories made in China.

Tuesday’s night’s Trump victory speech/press conference was like a lengthy sales pitch on Home Shopping Network.

I've never before seen a press conference in which the press is hollering ""Stop, please stop! No mas, no mas!"" No more questions, please!!”

Donald's hour long tirade and rambling speech was his revenge for the assault on him by the billionaires and their political consultants who have puffed and puffed but can't blow Donald's house down.

Onward, reality show junkies. This show is a long way from being over!

Maybe the only thing that can slow the Donald down is ""House of Cards"" Frank Underwood. Of course his presidency is in trouble, too. But this reality show is stranger than fiction!

Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
"With Marco Rubio dropping out of the Republican presidential race Tuesday, the Florida senator leaves a large cache of delegates behind. So what happens to them, and the delegates of other former candidates, at the convention in Cleveland?

The short answer is: It varies from state to state, but the Republican Party leaves enough wiggle room that the delegates of former candidates could end up being a factor in July.

""An unbound delegate is worth their weight in gold,"" Rick Wilson, a GOP strategist, told FoxNews.com. ""It's hard to speculate and there's a lot going on right now.""

Rubio, in suspending his campaign after his home-state Florida loss, leaves 169 delegates behind. Ben Carson accrued eight delegates before he dropped out of the race, while Jeb Bush picked up four. Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul each picked up one in Iowa.

And if either Ted Cruz or John Kasich drop out in the weeks ahead -- and Donald Trump still has not clinched the nomination with the necessary 1,237 delegates -- additional zombie delegates could be in play in Cleveland.

And they could hold sway.

That's because in most states, delegates become ""unbound"" and are free to support other contenders as soon as their candidate withdraws.

They don't necessarily have to gravitate toward the front-runner at a contested convention, or, in the case of Rubio's delegates, the candidate the Florida senator may ultimately choose to endorse.

They would become essentially free agents, prizes to be wooed by the candidates duking it out in Cleveland.

However some states bind their delegates to the first ballot no matter what.

In Tennessee, delegates are bound for two rounds of voting, while in Iowa, Texas, Virginia, Montana, Nevada, Puerto Rico and Washington, candidates are bound for at least one round of voting whether or not the candidate has withdrawn.

In South Carolina, delegates are bound to the candidate for the first ballot. However, if the winner is not nominated, they are bound to the candidate who finished second or third in the state.

The various state laws mean that while some of the delegates can already peel off to other candidates, many would have to wait until after a first ballot in order to be able to vote for another candidate still in the race.

It remains unclear whether front-runner Trump might be able to reach 1,237 delegates before the convention and avoid this drama. He currently has 661; Ted Cruz has 406; and John Kasich has 142.

Those, such as Kasich, who are banking on the prospect of a contested convention, where the delegates of ex-candidates and other factors could be in play, see a blueprint in past races dating back decades.

Since 1880, there have been eight contested GOP conventions and in five of those, the eventual winner did not go into the convention with a plurality of delegates.

In the 1976 Republican convention, it was the unbound delegates moving toward President Gerald Ford instead of Ronald Reagan that handed Ford the nomination that year. Ford held a slight lead going into the convention, but was shy of an outright majority.

In part by using the power of the White House, with promises of visits and patronage to woo over delegates, Ford won the nomination on the first ballot, by a slim 60 votes.",REAL
Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... I'm ok. Your turn. Go! Anonymous Coward Report Copyright Violation Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... Pretty rank these last few days. Wash day on Friday so not long till Im feeling fresh again. Have an itchy anus too. Anonymous Coward Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... My underarms smell like the end of times Anonymous Coward ( OP ) Report Copyright Violation Re: Sniff your underarms and tell us if you stink... Pretty rank these last few days. Wash day on Friday so not long till Im feeling fresh again. Have an itchy anus too. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 73271021 You need to wash everyday. Why do you Europeans walk around stinking like that? You know better than that! Go hit the shower now!,FAKE
"Who’s laughing now?

( Watch at Youtube )
And for some good comedy from Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle On Saturday Night Live’s Election Nigh wrap-up:
",FAKE
"At a Capitol Hill social club earlier this month, Marco Rubio’s top advisers huddled with supportive House members to deliver a sober update about the Florida senator’s chances.

The aides, led by campaign manager Terry Sullivan, told the group that they were not expecting to win Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two states to vote. They said they were hopeful that things would turn their way by the next two — South Carolina and Nevada — but, realistically, Rubio’s path to victory would be a months-long grind.

One attendee, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting, said the message was that “this is not going to be over in February or March as much as we would all like it to be.”

The strategy outlined that day was notable because Rubio’s campaign has sought for months to temper expectations so that the senator from Florida could peak right before voting was set to begin. Now, his team is bracing supporters for a drawn-out Republican race that it says will ultimately reward Rubio’s versatility.

With just more than a week until the Iowa caucuses, Rubio has stalled out, neither rising nor falling much from where he has been in the polls for months, either nationally or in any of the first four states. Even in his home state of Florida, which votes in mid-March, Rubio is mired in third place, well behind front-runner Donald Trump and a few points behind Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).

Rubio’s position reflects a race that has been dominated by Trump and Cruz, two outsider candidates who largely speak to different sets of aggrieved voters. Rubio had sought to present himself as a counterweight — a sunny optimist whose age, 44, and Cuban American background represented the future of the Republican party. More recently, Rubio has shifted somewhat to try to match the mood, offering more dire warnings about terrorism and more blistering attacks against President Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In recent weeks, Rubio has also been attacked from several sides as various rivals see him as a threat, running more than $22 million in negative ads against him. Right to Rise, a super PAC backing former Florida governor Jeb Bush, has been relentless in hitting Rubio. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has demeaned Rubio’s toughness and experience on the trail. And Cruz has cast him as weak on immigration.

Despite his standing, Rubio’s donors remain confident that he will win, even if he may have to do it in a way different from what they initially expected.

“I think Marco is doing fine,” said Anthony Gioia, a major GOP fundraiser in Buffalo. “He is a very good campaigner. I’m not troubled by the little short-term dips. He’s still the best candidate against the Democrats, and I think at the end of the day, that’s going to prevail.”

Rubio’s fundraising team is gearing up for an expensive next phase of battle. Lobbyist and fundraiser Wayne Berman is organizing a National Finance Leadership Call Day in Washington on Friday. Meanwhile, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is promising donors who raise $10,800 in new primary money five VIP tickets to an Iowa rally and private reception with Rubio on Tuesday.

Supporters who have heard directly from the Rubio campaign say their most immediate priority is to finish ahead of mainstream rivals Christie, Bush and John Kasich in Iowa and New Hampshire. That would position him for a final grouping with Trump and Cruz in which Rubio could be seen as the more electable choice.

Even as Rubio fights off Christie and others, though, he and his allies are also going hard after Cruz. A pro-Rubio super PAC unleashed a tough attack ad campaign against Cruz this week casting him as a flip-flopper and calling attention to his birth in Canada.

The early January meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, designed to be an update on strategy and expectations, also veered into a gripe session about Cruz, according to people in attendance.

Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), for instance, explained how she felt betrayed by Cruz on a trade bill he persuaded her to back but later abandoned, those people said. Sullivan, struck by her story, told her she clearly did not need any talking points when it came to Cruz; she should just retell that one. Love did not respond to requests for comment.

Rubio is also trying to play defense against Cruz, Bush and Christie. He is now talking about immigration — his most obvious weakness among conservatives — in a new way, as more of a national-security matter than a debate over the merits of legalizing undocumented immigrants.

“We cannot ignore the fact that ISIS has proven to have a significant understanding of the immigration policies of other countries,” Rubio said at a moderated discussion here Thursday, using an acronym for the Islamic State. Rubio is taking heat from Cruz over his membership in the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that pushed comprehensive immigration reform in 2013.

Here in New Hampshire, Rubio has railed against Christie, taking aim at his past support for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. A pro-Rubio super PAC recently aired anti-Christie ads on TV.

On the campaign trail, Rubio is trying to reach voters with different priorities as part of his strategy to compete everywhere. He speaks at length about his hawkish national security view. Lately, he has been underscoring his Christian conservative values more. He tries to personalize the topics he raises by drawing from his experience.

“I am passionate about many of the issues we face in America because I faced them in my own life,” he said at a town-hall meeting in Plymouth, N.H., this week.

On the trail, Rubio has also taken to framing the competition as a long slog.

“It’s an unusual and fun election cycle for you to cover,” he told reporters here Thursday. “But we’re going to continue to focus on winning votes, and in the end I’m very confident that when the votes are counted, I’ll have more delegates than anyone else and I’ll be our nominee.”

One label Rubio resists is the one many have applied to him disparagingly: the choice of the establishment.

“Every time I’ve ever run for office, whether it’s to the Senate or now as president, I’ve had to take on the Republican establishment. And we’re doing it again now,” Rubio said.

Even so, many backers privately say that their confidence in Rubio is rooted at least in part in the recent history of the GOP slowly weeding out renegade contenders and nominating more orthodox candidates.

Some supporters say that they just do not understand the appeal of someone like Trump, even though he has attracted large crowds, strong polls numbers and seemingly endless media attention, and has shown no signs of slowing down.

Frank VanderSloot, a billionaire head of an Idaho nutritional-supplement company, said it took him a couple of months of asking around before he could find a Trump supporter, highlighting the disconnect between many in the donor class and those in the grass roots.

“The two front-runners aren’t anywhere near the top of my list [or] on the top of any list of anyone I’ve talked to,” VanderSloot said.

Matea Gold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"Subscribe My daughter and me 
Yesterday was National Daughter’s Day! I know this because Facebook told me so; well, maybe not Mark Zuckerberg himself, but all my friends on Facebook were posting pictures of their daughters and celebrating National Daughter’s Day so it must be true, right? 
Actually, I Googled it, and guess what??? September 24 is NOT National Daughter’s Day…According to Wikipedia , National Daughter’s Day is August 11th. This little snippet in Wikipedia also stated that National Daughter’s Day originated from the Bible. I have done some more digging, and honestly, I can’t find proof for either the day or the fact that the Bible calls for it. So it got me to thinking… 
How did a day, which didn’t actually exist, go viral in just a few hours on Facebook? There has to be a need which something like this fills or else the entire Facebook population wouldn’t have jumped on it so quickly. 
Then it hit me. We love our daughters! It really is that simple. We love our daughters so much that we felt we needed to tell them so publicly on Facebook. I saw some of the cutest baby pictures and some of the sweetest words of love scroll through my Facebook feed yesterday. Mothers and fathers discussing how sweet their little girls were and exclaiming pride in the women they had become. All ages were represented. It was really quite moving, and it was a wonderful change from the politics and hatred I normally see there. 
My question is, why did we need to create a fictitious holiday to say these things. We all know our society is in desperate need of love, but yesterday also proved that our society is desperate to show love. It is OK to tell the world you love your daughter, or for that matter, your son, your wife, your husband, your life partner, your best friend, your ex, your mailman, your mother, your dog, or your local friendly hardware store worker. You don’t need a special occasion or an official day. We don’t have to all agree it is OK to do it on that particular day. 
Just love. Show it openly. Tell the world and Facebook. Do it every day. It’s in your DNA. You need it. 
I declare today National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day…every day. 
By the way… My daughter, Mallory, is intelligent, beautiful, and compassionate, and I am blessed that she calls me Mom. Just thought I would throw that in since it is National I Am Going To Post About Who I Love Day! Now faith, hope, and love remain—these three things—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13 About Melanie Tubbs 
Melanie Tubbs is a professor, pastor, mother, Mimi, and true Arkansas woman. She lives with six cats and two dogs on a quiet hill in a rural county where she pastors a church and teaches history at the local university. Her slightly addictive personality comes out in shameful Netflix binges and a massive collection of books. Vegetarian cooking, reading mountains of books for her seminary classes, and crocheting for the churches prayer shawl ministry take up most of her free time, and sharing the love of Christ forms the direction of her life. May the Peace of Christ be with You. Connect",FAKE
"Leave a reply 
Scott Adams – Last year in this blog I told you that Trump would change more than politics. I said he would forever change how you view reality. I’ll prove that to you today with a fun experiment. 
At the end of this post I will give you a link to a very short video clip showing Hillary Clinton getting off her jet and into her car. Trump supporters will say she looks like she is drunk, or unsteady for some other health-related reason. And they will say it is obvious . Now try showing the clip to a Clinton supporter and watch how they see nothing wrong with the way she is walking. 
Who is right? 
The answer is that you have no way to know. Personally, I can see it both ways, depending on what frame of mind I’m in. When people on Twitter say she looks drunk, and I look at the clip immediately after they prime me, she indeed looks drunk. When my Clinton-supporting friend says he sees nothing unusual about her walking, suddenly it looks fine to me too. 
Most of my readers today are probably Trump supporters, so you are likely to see Clinton’s walk as unsteady. Send the clip to your Clinton-supporting friend and see how much your perceptions differ on this. You’ll be amazed. 
There might be an objective reality in our world. But our brains didn’t evolve to be able to see it. Our brains only evolved to do the job of keeping us alive so we could procreate. That means the reality you see – the movie in your head – can be totally different from mine, and almost certainly is. Yet we can both get by in this world. 
Last year, when many observers were saying Trump was a stupid, under-informed clown, I was saying he was a Master Persuader. Pundits said he ignored facts because he didn’t know them or because he was a liar. I said he ignored facts because facts are useless for persuasion. Trump could learn lots of facts if he wanted to do so. But he knew it was a waste of time. These are two totally different views of reality. And yet they did not conflict. Clinton supporters still see the stupid, under-informed clown and I still see the Master Persuader. We live in totally different movies and yet we can still interact with each other, still eat and drink, still procreate when necessary. 
Reality isn’t what you thought it was a year ago. Your movie isn’t my movie. But the good news is that you have the power to rewrite the coming scenes of your movie. And those scenes can be anything that isn’t ruled out by your own observations. 
Now watch this Clinton video and notice how Clinton’s walk matches your expectations, no matter what your expectations are. That’s confirmation bias . And it is the most important thing you will ever learn. SF Source The Burning Platform Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
"Confusion reigned on Thursday over a possible debate between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.



After kicking off a media frenzy by accepting an offer to debate Sanders, Trump changed his mind at least twice in the same day when pressed about whether he was serious about the prospect. 



Addressing reporters on Thursday in his first press conference after crossing the threshold of delegates needed to become the Republican nominee, Trump reiterated his willingness to debate Sanders for charity to the tune of at least $10m.

This came after Trump’s campaign said earlier in the day that the Republican was only joking when he first expressed his openness to debating Sanders during an appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday.



“I’d love to debate Bernie – he’s a dream,” Trump said at the press conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, on Thursday.

“The problem with debating Bernie is he’s gonna lose [the Democratic race] … but I’d debate him anyway. We’ve already had a couple of calls from the networks, so we’ll see.”

He added: “If I debated him, we would have such high ratings, and I think we should take that money and give it to some worthy charity.” Trump refused to take part in any further Republican debates after the Florida primary when the field winnowed down to three candidates.

Trump’s comments echoed his remarks to Kimmel in an interview the night before, when he told the late-night talkshow host: “If I debated him [Sanders], we would have such high ratings, and I think we should take that money and give it to some worthy charity.”

Sanders, the leftwing senator from Vermont who is lagging behind Clinton in the delegate race to clinch the Democratic nomination, responded immediately in a tweet, writing:

Sanders’ campaign confirmed he was serious about the opportunity if Trump was, but an aide to Trump clarified on Thursday that the former reality TV star was joking and had no intention to actually debate Sanders. 



A debate between candidates from both parties before the conclusion of the nominating process would have been highly unusual and a potential headache for Clinton, who turned down an invitation from Fox News to debate Sanders earlier this week – citing the need to shift gears toward the looming battle with Trump in November.

“We believe that Hillary Clinton’s time is best spent campaigning and meeting directly with voters across California and preparing for a general election campaign that will ensure the White House remains in Democratic hands,” Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jen Palmieri said in a statement.

A debate during the remainder of the primary season would indeed serve as more beneficial to Sanders, offering him another public platform to make his case in what has been a grueling contest against Clinton. The senator has often referred to poll numbers on the stump that show him faring better than Clinton in a hypothetical match-up against Trump, although Clinton has countered that she has spent more than two decades in the public eye whereas Sanders has yet to be vetted at the national level.

Trump, although evidently unwilling to debate the senator, has made overtures toward Sanders’ supporters by echoing their complaints that the establishment is working in Clinton’s favor.

“The system is rigged against him,” Trump told Kimmel, referring to Sanders. “I think it’s very unfair.”

Sanders and Clinton last faced off on the debate stage on 9 March in Miami. Since then, Clinton has marched significantly closer to sealing the nomination but has still lost a series of contests to Sanders along the way.

Sanders has routinely charged that the DNC, which remains officially neutral in the primary, is aiding Clinton by limiting debates and scheduling them on weekends when there would be less of an audience. 



The senator’s disdain for party leaders escalated last week, when Sanders said he would not reappoint Debbie Wasserman Schultz as chair of the DNC if elected president and endorsed her primary opponent as she seeks re-election to Congress in south Florida.



Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and founder of the center-left thinktank New Democrat Network, wrote in a column this week that the California debate should proceed as initially planned between Clinton and Sanders.

“For the DNC to walk away from the debate now, given that Sanders has signaled his desire to proceed, will only confirm the worst suspicions of Sanders partisans,” Rosenberg wrote.",REAL
"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn 
Earlier this week, on October 24, 2016, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford sent a fascinating piece of communication, titled “ Upholding Our Oath ,” to every member of the U.S. Armed Services. 
Note: General Joseph Dunford Jr. , 60, was the 36th Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Nominated by Obama, Dunford became the 19th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 1, 2015. 
This is what Gen. Dunford wrote : 
“As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…as our country again prepares for a peaceful transfer of power to a new administration, I write to share my views regarding our mutual obligations as military professionals and rights as citizens during this election season. 
Every service member swears “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” This oath is embedded in our professional culture and underpins the values that shape and define our all-volunteer force. Beginning with General George Washington resigning his military commission, our deliberate and disciplined commitment to upholding the principle of civilian control of the military underpins not only our warrior ethos but also the expectations of how we conduct ourselves while in uniform. 
While we must always safeguard our professional integrity, extra vigilance is required during any political transition. Our individual and collective obligation during this election season is twofold. First, we must recognize that we have one Commander in Chief, and until authority is transferred on January 20, 2017, the Joint Force must remain clearly focused on and responsive to the existing National Command Authority. Second, the Joint Force must conduct itself in such a way that the new administration has confidence that it will be served by a professional, competent, and apolitical military. This is especially important in the context of delivering the best military advice. 
Every member of the Joint Force has the right to exercise his or her civic duty, including learning and discussing — even debating — the policy issues driving the election cycle and voting for his or her candidate of choice. Provided that we follow the guidance and regulations governing individual political participation, we should be proud of our civic engagement. What we must collectively guard against is allowing our institution to become politicized , or even perceived as being politicized, by how we conduct ourselves during engagements with the media, the public, or in open or social forums. 
We are living in the most volatile and complex security environment since World War II. Whether confronting violent extremist organizations seeking to destroy our way of life or dealing with state actors threatening international order, threats to our national security require a Joint Force that is ready, capable, and trusted. To that end, I have a duty to protect the integrity and political neutrality of our military profession. But this obligation is not mine alone. It belongs to every Soldier, Marine, Sailor, Airman, and Coastguardsman. Thank you for joining me in honoring our history, our traditions, and the institutions of the U.S. Armed Forces by upholding the principle of political neutrality .” 
Even without reading between the lines, General Dunford clearly has concerns about politicization of the military and its obligation and commitment to political neutrality and noninterference in politics. That the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must remind members of the Armed Forces that they must “uphold” their oath both suggests and implies that the opposite is going on, i.e., the military is politicized and there are fears that it will intervene in civilian politics. 
If this pic (below) of a young U.S. Marine is any indication, Gen. Dunford has good reasons to issue the “Upholding Our Oath” communication. 
A year ago, a Rasmussen Reports national survey of active and retired military personnel found that only 15% had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, with just 3% who viewed her very favorably. A staggering 81% had an unfavorable opinion of her , including 69% who had a very unfavorable view of her. 
A similar survey today is sure to find even higher unfavorable ratings for Hillary among those whom she would command as their Commander in Chief. 
H/t GiGi and TruthFeedNews",FAKE
"  Carol Adl in News // 0 Comments 
Hundreds of police in riot gear with heavy military equipment have evicted Dakota Access Pipeline protesters from their encampment on private land in the US state of North Dakota. Police have protesters more or less surrounded. #noDAPL pic.twitter.com/G4xGQuXpZM 
— Jason Patinkin (@JasonPatinkin) October 27, 2016 
The police reportedly arrested at least 141 Native Americans and other demonstrators who are seeking to halt construction of a controversial oil pipeline. 
Press TV reports 
At least 141 protesters were arrested on Thursday evening and Friday morning as officers attempt to clear a camp on private property in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. 
Officers in riot helmets used pepper spray and shot beanbag rounds on some of the estimated 330 protesters as helicopters flew overhead. 
Demonstrators also allegedly set a car and some tires on fire, giving the scene a war zone-like appearance. 
The protesters have been demonstrating for several months, and dozens have been arrested. Police expect additional protests, and possibly more arrests, in the coming days. 
Native American protesters had occupied the property that crosses the pipeline’s path since Monday in an effort to stop Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
The pipeline has infuriated the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists who say it threatens the region’s water supply and sacred tribal sites. The tribe’s reservation is close to the pipeline’s route. 
North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple said police were successful in clearing the camp. “Private property is not the place to carry out a peaceful protest,” he said. 
Demonstrators, however, say they aren’t trespassing on private property, citing an 1851 treaty with the US government that says the land belongs to Native American tribes. 
The Native American-led protest has grown into a larger movement in the United States, drawing in other tribes, environmentalists and advocates for Native Americans. 
The federal government has twice asked the pipeline operator to voluntarily pause construction near the tribe’s reservation while the authorities reconsider the project’s route. But courts have refused to compel a halt. 
The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe criticized law enforcement’s “militarized” response to the activists. “Militarized law enforcement agencies moved in on water protectors with tanks and riot gear today. We continue to pray for peace,” Dave Archambault II said in a statement Thursday evening.",FAKE
"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
"Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde Ooh Fuck 
“Ooh Fuck”, according to reports. 
Not much more is known regarding the statement, although some are speculating that it may have something to do with some kind of earthquake that happened in America last night. 
It is unknown if the earthquake was literal or simply a clumsy metaphor from a lazy satirist. 
“Ooh Fuck,” confirmed Democrat party spokesperson, Jay Cooper. 
“That’s all I have to say on the matter. I think it’s fairly conclusive. 
“You can direct any other questions to my secretary. I have several lines of coke to attend to.” 
“Ooh fuck,” verified Cooper’s secretary, Elizabeth King. 
“This is going to require a lot of alcohol and a fair few enquiries to the Canadian passport office- forgive me, I have said too much. Excuse me, I need to leave the room immediately.” 
Americans nationwide were either weeping while exclaiming “Ooh Fuck” or, in some cases, whooping and hollering and high-fiving while cheerfully exclaiming “Ooh Fuck!” 
A bleary-eyed Donald Trump reportedly awoke from his slumber this morning, remembered what happened last night and exclaimed “Ooh Fuck”; presumably having been hit with full magnitude of some kind of job that lay before him. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"Donate The American Way: Socialism for the Rich, Free Enterprise for the Rest 'It is political decisions, not invisible hands, that dictate the functioning of the market.' (Photo: Fed Up/Steve McFarland Photography) By Jake Johnson / commondreams.org 
While it's not entirely clear who coined the phrase ""socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest,"" its ability to provoke — and, more importantly, to describe — is beyond question. 
There are numerous variations on the saying , but each articulates a reality of which we are all, in some way, aware: The bankers who wrecked the economy, for instance, understood that they would be subjected to a different set of rules than those they were scamming with subprime mortgages . While the former have enjoyed the fruits of a bailout and an uneven recovery , those deeply harmed by the crash have struggled to regain anything resembling stability. 
Matt Taibbi has termed this systemic disparity "" the divide ""— and as the divide between the rich and the poor, between the influential and the voiceless, expands, the economic order morphs to fit the resulting power dynamic. 
Thanks to Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions that have vanquished the firewall that previously separated — however tenuously and ineffectively — corporations from the political process, the ""winners"" have been able to seamlessly convert their tremendous wealth into tremendous political influence. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, they usually get what they want. 
To call this socialism for the rich is to say that those at the top of the income distribution accrue all of the benefits and sympathies of the state, including, of course, a robust welfare apparatus . Their relationship with the state, furthermore, is effectively democratic; the views of the wealthiest are reflected in public policy. 
Those outside of this privileged class, meanwhile, are forced to endure the strictures of market discipline; when they face difficult circumstances, they are lectured , not assisted. Their views are not permitted to influence public policy; they suffer what they must. 
What does such a state of affairs mean for the prospects of those struggling for a more egalitarian future ? The title, as well as the substance, of economist Dean Baker's latest book does much to diagnose the severity of the problems progressive and radical movements face, even if it doesn't fully answer the question. 
In Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer , as in his other work, Baker doesn't tiptoe, nor does he resort to jargon when plain language will do. He comes right out with it: The rich have rigged the economy, and we're all paying for it. 
In the age of Piketty — and, indeed, in the age of Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaign brought the notion of a rigged economy to the national stage — this is not a particularly radical claim, but it has radical implications. It suggests, in short, what we already know: That far from advocating hands-off government, the rich simply want to have their own hands, and no one else's, on the rule-making apparatus. It appears that they have achieved this goal. 
George Orwell once observed that ""economic laws do not operate in the same way as the law of gravity""; that is, in effect, the central point of Baker's study. There is nothing natural about the upward redistribution of wealth we have seen over the last several decades, nor is such redistribution the result of any mystical forces beyond our comprehension or control. 
Rather, as Baker makes clear, the rules were written with this end in mind. 
""The gainers in the top 1 percent,"" he writes, ""have structured the market over the last four decades in ways that increase their share of income."" 
Systematically, Baker lays out the ways in which the wealthy are simultaneously shielded from the worst of globalization and lavished with the spoils. 
Much of the professional class, he observes, has not faced the competition that has so ravaged blue-collar workers in the United States: American doctors, for instance, have not been forced to compete with the doctors of India or Western Europe, who earn far less . The result is ""bloated"" incomes for American doctors — and the same is true of lawyers, dentists, and, indeed, the very pundits who ""earn comfortable six-figure salaries"" while ""remarking on the narrow-mindedness and sense of entitlement of manufacturing workers."" Meanwhile, wages remain stagnant for everyone else . 
That high-income professionals are protected from competition ""has nothing to do with the inherent dynamics of globalization: it is about the differences in the power of these groups."" 
""Bloated,"" also, is the pay of CEOs , which is determined not by ""market forces"" or by performance , but by a board of directors who, Baker notes, have ""little incentive to hold down pay."" 
""Directors are more closely tied to top management than to the shareholders they are supposed to represent,"" Baker adds, and they ""are almost never voted out by shareholders for their lack of attention to the job or for incompetence. The market discipline that holds down the pay of ordinary workers does not apply to CEOs, since their friends determine their pay."" 
Baker points also to the ""government-granted monopolies""— patents and copyright protections — that ""impose substantial costs on the public."" As recent scandals have made clear, this is particularly the case in the pharmaceutical industry. 
""In the case of prescription drugs alone the cost is in the neighborhood of $380 billion a year (equal to 2.0 percent of GDP),"" Baker observes. ""Washington is filled with politicians and organizations that hyperventilate about government debt and the burden it imposes on our children, but they ignore the burdens imposed by patent and copyright monopolies granted by the government."" 
In short, it is political decisions, not invisible hands, that dictate the functioning of the market. And from trade policy designed for the benefit of capital and rich nations to the rapid deregulation and growth of the financial sector, these political decisions have disproportionately rewarded economic elites at everyone else's expense. 
Baker's analysis provides much reason for pessimism: Wealth and political power are concentrated to such an extent that it will be difficult to force systemic change. It is unsurprising, then, that Baker qualifies his own proposals — from a move toward full employment to taxation of financial transactions — with the refrain, ""this is not likely to happen anytime soon,"" given the power of those who benefit from the maintenance of the status quo. 
But implicit is also reason for hope: That such concentration of economic and political power is not a natural state of affairs means that it can be radically altered. 
""Neither God nor nature hands us a worked-out set of rules determining the way property relations are defined, contracts are enforced, or macroeconomic policy is implemented,"" Baker writes. ""These matters are determined by policy choices. The elites have written these rules to redistribute income upward."" 
The rules, in short, can be rewritten in such a way that promotes the spread of wealth and resources — obscene inequality can be overcome. But Baker is an economist, not a polemicist: Thus it is unsurprising that the words ""class struggle"" do not make an appearance in his study. 
It is perfectly clear, however, that class struggle must be central to the fight for a fundamentally different set of rules: The rich have for decades waged unrelenting class war, and the consequences have been staggering. The mere extraction of concessions from above will not be enough to slacken the power the wealthiest have over the political process. 
""If we are going to change directions,"" notes sociologist Beverly Silver, ""it's going to have to come from a mass political movement, rather than something coming out of capital itself."" 
Thomas Ferguson , the Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, largely agrees with this sentiment; systemic change will take an ""uprising on the scale of the New Deal at least,"" he told me in an email, ""combined with some fissures within business, as in that earlier period."" 
Baker's analysis clearly interprets the economic context in which we find ourselves, and it is a context dictated by economic elites. ""Well, of course it's an oligarchy,"" Ferguson told me when I asked him about the popular characterization of the United States as a representative democracy, despite the torrent of corporate money that has for decades flooded the coffers of both major political parties.""The democratic element is vanishingly small at this point."" 
But the point of economic analysis, to adopt Marx's famous saying , is not merely to interpret the world in which we live, but also to change it. To do so, the reasonable proposals offered by Baker must be accompanied by mass politics of the kind Sanders embraced and harnessed to great effect. It must be a politics devoid of the delusions fostered by what Matt Karp has called "" fortress liberalism "": The notion that change trickles down from benevolent leaders. 
It's easy to be dismissive of mass movements, given the strength of the opposition: Far from diminishing under the weight of their own self-produced crises, major corporations continue to expand in both size and influence, making democratic action difficult. 
""But let's not get too gloomy,"" Ferguson urged. ""If you told me two years ago that Bernie Sanders would get hundreds of thousands of votes in many states and win many caucuses against Hillary Clinton, I'd have said you were dreaming."" 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 
Jake Johnson is an independent writer. Follow him on Twitter: @wordsofdissent 0.0 ·",FAKE
"With Election Day only three days away, tensions between supporters of the two major party candidates are running high. However, things nearly turned violent for Republican candidate Donald Trump who... ",FAKE
"0 comments 
Retired assistant FBI director James Kallstrom made history this week when he publicly endorsed Donald Trump for president. According to the Conservative Post , never before has an FBI director endorsed a presidential candidate. 
“I’m endorsing Donald Trump,” Kallstrom said on Fox News. “I’ve known him 40 years. I’ve never endorsed a candidate. He’s a good human being. He’s a generous person. He’s got a big heart. He’s done hundreds and hundreds of things for people without fanfare.” 
“He’s a good guy. He’s a patriot of this country and regardless of what he says, his acts show that he is not that person. He’s been in this Hollywood crowd that talks like that, a lot of people talk like that,” he continued, in reference to the leaked audio tape from 2005 in which Trump made lewd comments about women. 
“He doesn’t do these things. He’s a good guy. I’ve known his family from the time they were kids. Look at his children. Could you find a better family than he brought up in this country? This country is absolutely going in the wrong direction.” 
“Seventy percent of the people want change,” Kallstrom added, as reported by CP . “You’re not going to get change with Hillary Clinton. This is the woman that lied when she was on the Watergate staff. I mean, she’s a pathological liar.” 
Watch:",FAKE
"Photo of the day: Miss Russia at the international beauty contest in Tokyo AFP/East News 
Miss Russia Alisa Manenok shows off her souvenir of a stuffed cat while boarding a boat at the Lake Ashinoko in Hakone town, Kanagawa prefecture. Manenok, a Vladivostok native, entered the final Top-15 of the prestigious Miss International 2016 beauty contest held on Oct. 27 in Japan’s capital of Tokyo. However, the Russian beauty failed to make the Top-5, with Kylie Verzosa representing the Philippines winning the contest. Facebook",FAKE
"The Department of Veterans' Affairs vast health network — beset by a scandal last year over delayed care — has been listed as a high-risk federal program by congressional auditors for the first time.

The report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office, which is issued every two years, includes a broad indictment of the $55.5 billion VA program, one of the nation's largest health care systems. USA TODAY obtained the VA section of the report, scheduled for release Wednesday.

The number of aging or disabled veterans treated by the VA has grown to 8.9 million from 6.8 million in 2002, and Congress has increased funding by 85% during that time.

Yet problems with poor health care, delayed doctor appointments and leadership accountability and oversight persist, according to the report. The GAO said it keeps issuing audits identifying problems — eight just last year — but more than 100 areas of mismanagement remain unresolved, according to the report.

VA spokesman James Hutton, in a response, said the department is committed to becoming a ""model agency"" and example for other government programs to emulate.

""In many ways, (the VA health care system) is on the cutting edge of the industry. In other areas, we realize we need to make significant improvements,"" Hutton said.

Federal agencies or programs are chosen for the high-risk list by the GAO based on such factors as health or safety, delivery of services and incidents of injury or loss of life.

""These risks to the timeliness, cost-effectiveness, quality and safety of veterans' health care, along with persistent weaknesses we have identified in recent years, raises serious concerns about VA's management and oversight of its health care system,"" the report said. ""VA health care is a high-risk area.""

The VA became enveloped in scandal last year over allegations that veterans had died waiting for care at a hospital in Phoenix.

The agency's Inspector General office, which launched a probe into the allegations, found that delays contributed to the deaths of VA patients. However, inspectors concluded that delays may have contributed to the deaths of some veterans and that the falsifying of appointment records by VA staffers to hide delays is a systemic problem within the VA health care system.

Eric Shinseki, a retired general appointed by President Obama to lead the agency in 2009, resigned after claiming he had been misled about the extent of the VA problems.

His replacement, Bob McDonald, has vowed to move aggressively to revamp the VA. He launched the MyVA initiative in September devoted to improving customer service for veterans. Yet McDonald has come under criticism for not firing those responsible for the scandal despite new rules passed by Congress making it easier to dismiss employees.

The GAO report cites the falsified appointment records, and complains about a shoddy evaluation process for doctors who make mistakes, the reliance on data submitted by hospitals under review, handing out undeserved bonuses, chronically inadequate computer systems and poor training of staff.

The report said major improvements for the VA could flow from new legislation signed by Obama last summer that improves access to care and pays for more staff.But the agency has to follow through on recommendations expected from an independent review group and a bipartisan commission created by the legislation.",REAL
"Leaked Email: ‘If She Wins, Hillary Will Own The Supreme Court for the Next 30 to 40 Years’   Tweet 
This. Is. Horrifying. 
In another Wikileaks email , this time from Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council Marc Stanley to Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta dated February 11, 2016, Stanley lays out his best argument for why voters should choose Hillary over Bernie… 
(click to enlarge) 
He writes: 
I tell the voter that I like Bernie and I like Hillary, but that’s not what matters. What matters to me is that there are 4 justices on the Supreme Court who will be in their 80’s and be replaced by the next president – and that President will appoint 40 year old Justices and they will serve for 30 or 40 years.",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"in: Corporate Takeover , Economy & Business , Globalism Ivory tower economists, corporate business analysts and financial experts routinely trash any discussion that America needs to institute a national economic policy that actually benefits our own country. The mantra of unchallenged doctrine that globalism is the only path for world commerce has been intensively pushed for well over the last half century. How well did the United States fare? An honest evaluation must acknowledge the diminishing middle class has paid the greatest penalty from the corporatist sedition that has destroyed internal independence and productive prosperity. Building viable enterprises that conduct useful economic activities produce needed and desirable goods and services. Good paying jobs grow when the velocity of money flows in the “real” domestic economy. International trade can and is often advantageous if it benefits all parties involved in prosperity from the transactions. However, in the un-free framework for maximizing the corporatism structure of above and beyond any particular country jurisdiction or trade policies, the globalists have set up the exact opposite from the much lauded “Free Trade” conduit. The next argument points out the inconsistency in Economic Nationalism in the Age of Globalism , and asks: “Is economic nationalism a reaction to global integration, which in essence means cooptation and domination of national markets by the strongest multinational corporations of the richest nations? Neoliberal insist on the forces of the free market operating without government interference to protect the national capitalist class and workers. Naturally, neoliberals advocating global integration have come out against the tide of economic nationalism in any form. However, the same advocates of neoliberalism have no problem supporting corporate welfare in their own countries, a system that is a form of economic nationalism. When governments use taxpayer money to bail banks and subsidize corporations that is a form of economic nationalism, just as when they lobby to have products and services of their industries marketed in countries competing with similar products and services.” Note the error in the assumption that multinational corporatists have a beneficial relationship to any country that flies their business flag. In a perverted business culture which is now based upon the ‘ Citizens United ’ court decision that confirms previous precedents that a corporation is a person, the United States has lost the leverage to reverse the international trade practices that has clearly been the vehicle for domestic economic decline. The alternative to the surrender of sovereignty and globalist blackmail can be found in paleo-conservative populism and the economic history that built America in the 19th century. Still relevant and sound as the day it was written, Pat Buchanan on Free Trade , provides the template for a rational and constructive national economic model. “Good for global business” isn’t necessarily good for US Global capitalists have become acolytes of global governance. They wish to see national sovereignty diminished and sanctions abolished. Where yesterday American businesses suffered damage to their good name for selling scrap iron to Japan before Pearl Harbor, today [war materiel is routinely exported] to potentially hostile nations. Once it was true that what was good the Fortune 500 was good for America. That is no longer true, and what is good for America must take precedence. (Source: “A Republic, Not an Empire,” p.349 , Oct 9, 1999) “Economic Nationalism”: trade only when it helps US Rather than making “global free trade” a golden calf which we all bow down to, and worship, all trade deals should be judged by whether: they maintain US sovereignty; they protect vital economic interests; and they ensure a rising standard of living for all our workers. We must stop sacrificing American jobs on the altars of transnational corporations whose sole loyalty is to the bottom line. “America First”: Tariffs; reciprocal trade; anti-dumping America’s workers are being sacrificed to the Global Economy, and our leaders seem deaf to their distress. Impose tariffs on cheap foreign imports Prioritize the American Economy before the Global Economy by withdrawing from international organizations that imperil our financial stability & economic independence Open foreign markets to American products by requiring reciprocal trade policies Protect vital industries by passing tough anti-dumping legislation. A policy of Rational Tariffs Lower Irrational Trade Deficits is a course for a rebirth in economic vigor. Tariffs Can Restore America’s Greatness sounds like the next topic for the Donald Trump campaign to take directly to the people. Economic Nationalism is a bipartisan issue that offers hope and practical employment for the displaced and discouraged. American companies have been punished for decades under the power elite and globalist betrayers. The Wall Street crowd despises the small investor and by inference the average hard working American. The plutocrats have built much of their ill-gotten gain on the outsourcing of an independent domestic economy. Globalism is on the precipice of a world-wide implosion. The danger is not just a planetary economic depression, but an intentional political crisis that will demand even more control and loss of access to meaningful commerce. The cries that international trade will stall to a halt will be used to economically enslave the populist further. Combat this devious strategy to stamp out the diminished vestiges of national ventures with a total rejection of the internationalist “Free Trade” prototype. Demand for real jobs exists now. In order to achieve the opportunity for earning a living with dignity can be accomplished under a transition to economic nationalism. The discontent of the electorate is distinctly observable at the Trump or Sanders rallies. The frustration is real and the outcry is becoming louder. Nevertheless, the road to a solution cannot rely upon a government nanny state mentality. The globalist juggernaut is formidable, as much as it is destructive. In order to implement the conversion into a merchant economy, the bulwark blockage of crony finance and fatal usury need to be broken. The start to this process begins with an awakening that globalism is the foremost enemy to America. The elites and the entire establishment are hell bent on maintaining a corrupt system. Is it not time to regain our own economic destiny? Submit your review",FAKE
"Comments 
A private group of technical experts has reviewed meta-data about the Trump Organization’s internet usage and just concluded that the Republican nominee is using a personal email server to surreptitiously communicate from the Trump-email.com domain with a controversial Moscow-based bank, Alfa Bank. 
The timing of the Russian communications coincides perfectly with milestones throughout the election (see chart at bottom), and the very high level of secrecy deployed to hide them is going to be hard to explain away for the Trump campaign. 
Adding fuel to the building controversy, when researchers contacted Alfa Bank for comment, the Trump Organization quickly shut down the server: 
The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. 
The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.” 
But with their eyes watching, the Trump Organization casually re-connected with Alfa Bank only four days later, on a different server. All of this was captured in the Domain Name System (DNS), which is the internet’s internal directory system. DNS leaves log records all over saying how often website visits happen, and it’s the very same web services which was attacked last week , taking down Twitter, The New York Times and others. DNS is the system that routes our internet requests using names instead of numbers, and it keeps logs with IP address numbers and timestamps. 
In this case, the meta-data practically screams to experts, because it shows that there is little other traffic of any other kind by design. As we learned from Edward Snowden, the meta-data of a situation is incomplete, but it can tell you a lot. 
The new domain is owned by one of Trump’s hospitality marketing contract companies, which dispels Trump’s blown cover story that the private server is just used for marketing. 
Domain registration information also confirmed that the same marketing team works on both Trump-email.com and the new client-contact.com email addresses being used. Furthermore, the world-renowned technical expert Paul Vixie revealed that the Trump Organization went to extra-ordinary lengths to shut out all traffic that isn’t from Alfa Bank. 
There is a more sinister reason for creating a private email server that only participates in conversation with one specific party was identified by computing legend Paul Vixie: 
Earlier this month, the group of computer scientists passed the logs to Paul Vixie . In the world of DNS experts, there’s no higher authority. Vixie wrote central strands of the DNS code that makes the internet work. After studying the logs, he concluded, “The parties were communicating in a secretive fashion. The operative word is secretive . This is more akin to what criminal syndicates do if they are putting together a project.” 
Put differently, the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence. Over the summer, the scientists observed the communications trail from a distance. 
Ironically, the academics and others started looking for foreign interference in order to protect both campaigns from outside meddling. It appears as if only one of the two campaigns conspired to that end: 
The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work. 
When researchers contacted Alfa Bank for comment, suddenly the Trump Organization shut down their email domain quickly. 
Four days later, the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank resumed communications – and it was the bank who contacted the Republican nominee’s company from Moscow, somehow knowing the new code to interact with the Trump private email server. 
This new information shows that after Trump asked Putin to hack America’s election to prejudice them against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in late July, traffic between the campaign and the Russian bank spiked. 
In the end, this is yet another matter that the FBI will surely have to investigate.. The question is: will they be fair and release the files from their inquiry in the kind of “act of radical transparency” that Director James Comey imposed on Hillary?",FAKE
"Trump will also meet with retiring Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue and Linda McMahon, a prolific Republican donor, two-time Senate...",REAL
"(CNN) The Republican candidates for president gathered Thursday in North Charleston, South Carolina, for their sixth debate,, and CNN's Reality Check Team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.

The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN selected key statements and rated them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.

In discussing foreign challenges in the Middle East, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said, ""As it relates to Iran, we need to confront ambitions across the board, reimpose sanctions. They already violated sanctions after the agreement was signed by testing medium-range missiles.""

The agreement Bush was referring to was the deal reached last year between Iran, the United States and five other countries that seeks to roll back Iran's ability to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Since the signing of that agreement, Iran has indeed tested missile technology. The test violated sanctions not covered by the new deal but rather in contravention of existing U.N. Security Council resolutions. Last month, a panel at the United Nations said Iran violated existing resolutions when it tested a ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead in October.

But under the terms of the agreement reached in Vienna last year over Iran's nuclear program, the missile tests, while violating existing resolutions, are actually not a violation of the new agreement because that accord is focused on restricting Iran's path to a nuclear weapon.

In fact, the October ballistic missile test violation would not contravene the nuclear agreement brokered with Iran once it goes into effect, which the Obama administration believes will happen soon. Under the new nuclear deal, Iran will be able to conduct ballistic missile tests -- a concession to Iran included in the deal -- meaning Iran could have simply waited until after implementation of the deal to do the test.

Verdict: True -- Iran violated the sanctions, but not the nuclear weapons agreement

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas flipped on his support for ethanol, just one attack in a rapid-fire succession of them, but also the one that could matter the most in Iowa, which is a leading corn producer.

Cruz has always opposed the Renewable Fuel Standard, the fuel mandate supported by the state's ethanol interests, calling it an example of corporate welfare pushed by ""lobbyists and Democrats."" It's an issue that Cruz has taken flak over all across Iowa, with voters frequently questioning him at town halls and retail stops concerned about his view.

Cruz admits that he did co-sponsor a 2013 bill that would've ended the RFS immediately. But his current position, as outlined in a 2014 comprehensive energy bill he introduced in the Senate, is to phase it out over five years, with his policy as of now to end the RFS by 2022.

The ethanol lobby sending negative mailers about Cruz's record says that he did flip, but Cruz denies that, pointing to his bill instead of the one he co-sponsored. Cruz's personal preference, however, has always been for a five-year phase-out.

Rubio said that Obamacare is ""a certified job killer.""

In fact, Obamacare is not a job killer, according to the 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Education Trust survey released in September 2015.

The report showed that only 4% of employers with at least 50 employees said they shifted some staffers to part-time hours so they wouldn't qualify for health care, and another 4% said they were reducing the number of full-time employees they planned to hire because of the cost of health benefits. In fact, that study showed that 10% of employers reported that they were changing workers from part-time to full-time status to enable them to obtain coverage.

One reason may be that the economy has been improving. Some companies interviewed by ADP said they may increase their part-timers' hours to retain talent and reduce training costs.

As to whether employers are cutting jobs because of Obamacare, it's nearly impossible to determine from Labor Department data since the economy is recovering and adding jobs. The number of people who can only find part-time jobs has declined in recent years, signifying companies are hiring more full-time workers.

Sen. Marco Rubio took a swipe at Chris Christie when he said the New Jersey governor backed President Barack Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court in 2009. Christie hastily denied the accusation.

""While Judge Sotomayor would not have been my choice, President Obama has used his opportunity to fill a seat on the Supreme Court by choosing a nominee who has more than proven her capability, competence and ability,"" Christie said at the time. ""I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process and confirm her nomination.""

Verdict: Rubio's claim is true, and Christie's is false

Rubio also accused Christie of donating to Planned Parenthood, a highly contentious allegation, especially considering the effort among conservatives to strip the organization of its federal funds.

So it's true that Christie once said he donated to Planned Parenthood, and Rubio and his allies are holding that article up as proof. But Christie claims the quote was inaccurate. So given the ""he said, he said"" situation, it's difficult to know for sure where the truth lies.

Reality Check: Trump says Paris has the ""strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world""

Donald Trump said the terrorist attacks in Paris last year happened despite the city having ""the strictest no-gun policy of any city anywhere in the world.""

However, in France, private gun ownership, while heavily regulated, is permitted.

While French laws are restrictive, the gun laws in the UK are even more so. After a series of mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s, the UK passed a law effectively banning the private ownership of all handguns.

In defending his questioning of Sen. Ted Cruz's eligibility for the presidency, Donald Trump cited Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who Trump claimed is raising ""a serious question to whether or not Ted can do this.""

Although Tribe has weighed in on Cruz's eligibility, he has not outright questioned whether Cruz -- who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father -- would be considered a ""natural born citizen,"" the definition of which Tribe says is ""completely unsettled.""

What Tribe has questioned is whether Cruz's own originalist judicial theories -- expressed when the senator was a student in his Harvard Law class, and again on the campaign trail when speaking about potential judicial nominations -- would render himself eligible for the White House.

""Ironically, the kind of justices he says he wants are the ones that say he's not eligible to run for president,"" Tribe argued on CNN this week. ""This is important because the way this guy plays fast and loose with the Constitution, he's a fair-weather originalist.""

""No real court is likely to keep Cruz off the ballot, much less remove him from the White House if he were to win -- Bush v. Gore isn't likely to get a return engagement over this issue,"" he wrote.

But soon after the debate concluded, Tribe went further, telling CNN's Anderson Cooper that the issue is a ""serious cloud"" over Cruz and saying he can see a challenge going to the Supreme Court.

""If some secretary of state refuses to put his name on the ballot if he's the nominee, there's no way out of it other than to have Cruz or the Republican National Committee sue the secretary of state. And that issue would then have to go all the way to the Supreme Court,"" Tribe said. ""But the fact is, you know, it's a serious cloud. It has to be taken seriously. It's not just a matter of coming up with great talking points or winning some debate. I think he does a disservice to the Constitution and the country when he thinks he can slide his way, slip slide his way around this serious constitutional issue,"" Tribe said.

Verdict: True (Editor's note: We changed the verdict from false because Tribe's comments after the debate suggested a legal fight was much more likely.)

Reality Check: Cruz on the U.S. sending $100 billion to Iran

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said, ""President Obama is preparing to send $100 billion or more to the Ayatollah Khomeini. I will tell you, it was heart-breaking ...""

In 2011 and 2012, the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on Iran that included freezing some Iranian assets overseas. With the announcement of a deal in 2015, those same assets stand to be released, creating a pool of money that will be newly available to the Iranian government. The total amount of those assets is not known, but as a deal with Iran seemed imminent, some estimated that the number was as high as $150 billion.

In late July, at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deal, House Speaker John Boehner, just as Cruz said, claimed that ""more than $100 billion"" in unfrozen assets would be available to Iran.

Both the Treasury Department and the White House have disputed these estimates.

In Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew's July testimony to the Senate, he estimated that, after sanctions relief, Iran will only be able to access ""about $50 billion"" in unfrozen assets. He noted that another large portion -- about $20 billion -- was tied up in projects with China, and ""tens of billions"" comprise nonperforming loans to Iranian energy and banking interests.

The money already belongs to Iran but has been frozen, so the United States is not sending this money from its coffers to the Iranian government. Additionally, none of the parties with access to the assets have substantiated an estimate close to the figure that Cruz suggested.

Asked whether America's economy is as strong as President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address, Sen. Ted Cruz said, ""We have the lowest percentage of Americans working today of any year since 1977.""

Last month, 59.5% of Americans age 16 and older were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's higher than it was in 1977, when it ranged from 57% to 58.7%.

The share of Americans employed during Obama's terms has ranged from as low as 58.2% in mid-2011 to as high as 60.6% when Obama took office in January 2009.

Since 1977, the highest share of Americans were employed in April 2000, when 64.7% had a job.

However, the overall percentage of adults who are working isn't the best measure, since the number of retirees is growing as the nation ages. So let's look at the share of prime working age adults (age 25 to 54) who are employed. Some 77.4% of these Americans were employed in December, compared to between 71% and 72.8% in 1977.

By no measure is the share of Americans employed at its lowest point since 1977.

Reality Check: Cruz on Dianne Feinstein taking away all guns

During a discussion of proposed reforms to gun laws in the wake of recent mass shootings, Cruz claimed, ""California senator, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said if she could say to Mr. America and Mrs. America give me your guns, I'm rounding them up, she would.""

Feinstein did say something to that effect -- 21 years ago. And she was referring specifically to assault rifles, not all firearms.

Cruz exhumed the comment from a 1995 episode of ""60 Minutes,"" during which Feinstein discussed the limitations of the assault weapons ban. She talked about loopholes in the law that allowed dealers to sell assault rifles weapons at gun shows.

""If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, 'Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in,' I would have done it,"" Feinstein said. ""I could not do that. The votes weren't here.""

Because Feinstein's comments were only about assault weapons and made 21 years ago, not as part of Obama's current initiative, we rate his claim true, but misleading.

Cruz, explaining his attack on Donald Trump's ""New York values,"" asserted there are ""not a lot of conservatives coming out of Manhattan.""

There's no doubt New York City's third-most-populous borough is known more for liberal urbanites than as a bastion of conservatism. But the island is not without its Republicans.

Voter registration records indicate there are 83,970 active Republicans on the rolls in Manhattan -- only about 10% of the total number registered, but not an insignificant portion.

Some of those Republicans carry outsized influence on the national political stage. The latest federal campaign finance filings show Manhattan donors contributed $2.9 million to Republican presidential candidates, the second-highest concentration of donations in the country behind Houston.

Cruz himself has taken in $135,588 from Manhattan's ZIP codes this cycle, behind his rivals Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, but still more than many other Republicans in the race. While those numbers are far behind the campaign cash taken in by Democrats in Manhattan, the borough clearly remains a magnet for politicians of all stripes looking to raise funds.

The federal filings also don't account for contributions to outside groups like super PACs, which raise enormous amounts of money from wealthy Manhattan donors. One of the most prolific conservative political donors, David Koch, is a resident of Park Avenue.

Cruz's claim that ""not a lot of conservatives"" come out of Manhattan is, based on pure voter registration numbers, true. But the influence of the Republicans that do reside there extends well beyond the East and Hudson rivers.

During the Fox Business Network undercard debate, Carly Fiorina claimed that ""this (Obama) administration has told us they don't even bother to check Facebook or Twitter to find out who's pledging allegiance to jihadists. We can do better than this, citizens. We need to take our country back.""

On December 16, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that the department has, in fact, been examining social media when reviewing visa applications since early 2015.

""Under my leadership as secretary, we, in fact, began to consult social media in connection with conferring various immigration benefits and we will be doing more of this,"" he added. ""Any reports or partial reports to the contrary are simply false.""

Johnson did acknowledge that there were some restrictions on looking at an applicant's social media account before 2015, but said that there was no current policy prohibiting the check of an applicant's social media.

""We had policies in place regarding consulting social media, which in my judgment, particularly in this current environment, were too restrictive,"" Johnson said.

Many have criticized immigration officials for not checking the social media accounts of Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, after there were reports that she advocated jihad in messages on social media. Her comments were made under a pseudonym and with strict privacy settings that did not allow people outside a small group of friends to see them, U.S. law enforcement officials told CNN.

FBI Director James Comey said that neither Malik or her husband and fellow shooter posted publicly on social media about supporting jihad.

However, they did show ""signs in their communication of their joint commitment to jihad and to martyrdom"" in private messages, according to Comey. The comments were private communications, both by phone and social media, and the U.S. government was not monitoring them because they had no reason to. The couple were not on any terrorist watch lists, and Malik made her comments under a fake name behind many privacy settings that would have required a warrant to access them.

Even if immigration officials had looked at Malik's social media accounts, they would not have had access to her private communications.

A U.S. official told CNN that the United States only recently began routinely reviewing the social media activity of visa applications from certain countries. The exact date that these types of reviews began is not clear, but it was after Malik's application was considered, the source said.

While the policy changed only a year ago, Fiorina's claim that immigration officials don't bother looking at visa applicant's social media has been untrue for more a year.

Reality Check: Fiorina on record numbers of men out of work

""We have record numbers of men out of work, we have record numbers of women living in poverty, we have young people who no longer believe that that the American Dream applies to them,"" Fiorina said.

There were 42.1 million men who were not working in December, just below the record 42.9 million set in October 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This includes men who were not in the labor force, as well as those who are unemployed. (To be included in the labor force, you have to be working or actively looking for a job.)

While Fiorina's comment is true, it is misleading because the vast majority of men who are not in the labor force are not looking for work. They include students, retirees and those who've just given up trying to find a job.

That said, there is an employment crisis among working-age men these days. The labor force participation rate -- which includes those who are working or have looked for a job in the past four weeks -- is near record lows. The share of men ages 25 to 54 in the labor force now hovers near a record low of 88%. It stood at nearly 97% in 1965.

The Geneva Conventions are a series of treaties and rules that apply in times of armed conflict and also seek to protect people who are not or are no longer taking part in hostilities.

In a briefing with reporters on Thursday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, ""The Geneva Conventions apply for wartime; we're not at war with Iran. So, it's a moot question.""

Legal experts with whom CNN spoke tend to agree with that assertion.

""We don't have a state of declared war or actual armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran, therefore the application of the Geneva Conventions does not come into play,"" Allen Weiner, the director of Stanford's Program in International and Comparative Law, told CNN. ""Both sides have said it was an inadvertent crossing into territorial waters, where Iran is entitled to exercise criminal jurisdiction,"" Weiner added.

Steven Vladeck, a professor at American University School of Law in Washington and a CNN contributor, told CNN that ""Common Article 2 of Geneva is clear on this,"" and only applies in a state of war or armed conflict.

""There is a whole lot of daylight between animosity and armed conflict,"" Vladeck said, adding other legal mechanisms applying to international human rights law or governing the law of the sea, but the absence of direct armed conflict between the two countries negates the application of the Geneva Conventions in this case.

But legal experts said there are relevant legal provisions that Iran could be in violation of based on what occurred.

Some experts CNN spoke to did indicate that the Iranian actions may have violated customary maritime law. In a situation where a ship enters territory waters due to a technical problem or damage, a country ""would have the right to verify the problem"" but not use force to detain the sailors, according to Craig Allen, a professor of marine and environmental affairs at the University of Washington.

Rick Santorum said that President Barack Obama's policies have hurt the manufacturing sector, creating dwindling employment opportunities for the ""74% of Americans who don't have a college degree between the age of 25 and 65.""

The former senator, a Penn State alum who once called the President a snob for promoting higher education, needs to check his numbers again.

According to 2014 census data, the most recent stats available, 67% of Americans between 25 and 64 have not graduated from college. The total number of people in that age bracket is 164.8 million, and 55.2 million of them have not attained a bachelor's degree or higher.

Santorum wasn't a math major at Penn State so he can be forgiven for the miscalculation, but he should have stuck with his original estimate. For that reason, our verdict is false.",REAL
"AHEAD of his much anticipated title fight against Eddie Alvarez, Conor McGregor took some time out of his busy schedule to relax and give the readers of WWN his guide of New York. 
Pound for pound the best city in the world. It’s box office baby. 
The 9/11 memorial was sad, but not as sad as Alvarez will be when I crash land a jumbo left hook in the seemingly structurally sound facade of a face. He will come crashing down. It will be an inside job, because he prepares like a chump. 
My focus remains on the battle ahead in Madison Square Gardens but I was thrown off my preparation when I learned there is no garden. It’s just a big fuck off arena forged out of metal for the fighting God. I would say Gods, but there is only one, me, Notorious. 
I had anticipated doing my movement training with grass beneath my feet, so I headed to Central Park. It ain’t got a patch on Phoenix Park. I wouldn’t be the fighter I am today without Dublin’s back garden. Chasing the deer as a nipper helped me hone my quickness, my agility. 
I studied the deer and the stag; their movements. So don’t be surprised if I enter the octagon with four hooves and antlers. I will do anything, all it takes to win. Anyway, back to the tour, I hear they filmed some Sex and the City shit in Central Park. 
No Sex in the City for Alvarez, though. He couldn’t score in a brothel above Coppers with 20gs in his pocket. What I am saying is that my opponent is challenged in the face department. His head is like a melted lasagne left out in the sun for weeks. Not even Donald Trump would grab him by the pussy. 
Speaking of that Fanta headed prick, I’m not in his weight class ‘cus I’m not obese, but I’ll knock him out all the same. I’ll be worth more than him by the end of 205 too. Where’s my Hollywood star, fuck it, I’ll take the whole Walk. 
But, back to the tour – it would be interesting to note, the actors in Sex in the City are not as rich as me. Chumps. 
When you tour around New York, be warned, people will ask you for endless selfies if you are famous as I am. I love the fans, but obviously when in camp, you’ve got to watch what you’re eating, it can make you a little tetchy, so while reducing my food intake ahead of the weigh in, I like to reduce my selfie intake too. Running from overweight Americans barely counts for cardio, but you’ve gotta take every chance to gain the edge over your opponent. 
I was told to try the New York pizza, but can’t do that until after my victory, in the mean time I might use it to throw around at the pre-fight press conference. A scalding hot slice slapping Eddie in the face might improve his chances with the ladies. 
Peace out. I’ve off to chuck a few euro off the top of the Empire State building to let off some steam.",FAKE
"“There is a principle of communication which is very well known, and has been documented in a variety of different ways. But it comes down to, if you can make people afraid, you can make them do anything,” McDermott said. “And these warmongers are fearmongers, and they are creating as much fear in the American people as possible.”

Like Thornberry and numerous other hawks, Graham and McCain are again expressing doubts about diplomacy. “Regardless of the outcome, Iran’s threat to regional security and stability endures,” they said in a joint statement about the administration’s framework for an agreement. “Any hope that a nuclear deal will lead Iran to abandon its decades-old pursuit of regional dominance through violence and terror is simply delusional. The Obama Administration’s failure to recognize and counter this threat has only served to expand Iranian influence.”

McCain and Graham are hardly unique. Pick just about any lawmaker who voted for the war in 2002, and they are likely to be making arguments of a similar tenor now. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) argued strongly for a pre-emptive approach against Saddam, saying then that the risks of the more diplomatic strategy were “simply unacceptable.”

This month, McConnell said in a statement: ""To the detriment of international security -- specifically regarding the security of the United States, Israel and other allies, as well as preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East -- the Obama administration has always approached the goal of these negotiations as reaching the best deal that is acceptable to Iran, rather than what should be our national goal: ending Iran's nuclear program.""

One, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked in 2002, “How long can we leave Hussein alone before we need to act?” and predicted the war would be “somewhat easier than” the previous Gulf war. He has alarmed progressives by backing a bill that would require speedy congressional approval of any Iran agreement before any of the deal could go into effect. Critics of the bill say it hinders chances for a final deal, making military conflict more likely.

Schumer had nothing positive to say about the framework, releasing only a short statement after it was announced that praised negotiators for working hard. “Their announcement deserves careful, rigorous and deliberate analysis. I’ll be giving the framework a very careful look,” he said, then later endorsed the review bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), which is expected to be debated Tuesday in his Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

For Jim McDermott, who was pilloried when he was right, it’s a case of deja vu all over again, especially when he hears Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) suggest the United States could carry out a few days of bombing to take care of Iran, or when one of the lead architects of the Iraq War, former Vice President Dick Cheney, says the Iran talks convince him that Obama is “the worst president we ever had.”

“That kind of hyperbole is just over the top,” McDermott added, referring to Cheney’s charges that Obama was handing nuclear weapons to “the premiere sponsor of state terrorism in the world,” as well as Cheney’s charge that “I can't think of a more terrible burden to leave the next president than what Obama is creating here.""

“There’s just no basis for that kind of stuff at all, except in the minds of somebody who wants to create the image of fear lurking outside the back door,"" McDermott said. ""And if we don’t go out there and kill everybody in sight, well, then we’re going to have somebody break into our house.”

“They said, 'We can’t oppose you. You’re going to attack us. We know that. We just know. We’ll have to survive the initial attack, but when you get on the ground, then you’ll find out who has what power,’” McDermott recalled. “Shock and awe -- that worked for about 60 days, and then we had 14 years of what we got now. Fourteen going on 30.""",REAL
"October 31, 2016 - Fort Russ -  Ruslan Ostashko, PolitRussia - translated by J. Arnoldski - 


Once again, the Ukrainian electorate is being taken for a grand ride and being stirred up. Whether unfortunately or fortunately, our information field overlaps with the raging infofield of our neighbors, and we have the opportunity to observe in real time the nervous breakdown of particularly impressionable citizens in neighboring Ukraine.  
Some Russian connoisseurs take pleasure in this spectacle, and this are understandable. The point is that Western advisors have forced Ukrainian politicians and officials to declare their income and assets and open up testaments of this information for public access. Due to the primitiveness of the Ukrainian political class, which loves to steal a lot openly and is also full of confidence that nothing will happen, the contents of their declarations of assets was simply extravagant. 
Speaking plainly, reading the declarations of the leaders of the Maidan leaves its supporters in depression or rage. Some people particularly sensitive in nature are going mad and falling into depression at the same time. They can also be understood. It’s not pleasant for anyone to feel like a sucker and loser who has been let down in the most primitive way. 
In this sense, Poroshenko’s declaration of assets is not so impressive, since his wealth is already widely known. Some Ukrainians are even proud that Poroshenko is richer than Putin and many American presidents. But the declarations of ordinary members of the Ukrainian political class are shocking. 
For example, Verkhovna Rada deputy Demchak, the deputy chairman of the committee regulating banking operations, revealed a bank account with 2,000 UAH and 133 million UAH in cash. Besides obvious questions as to the origins of this wealth, there’s also the high trust which only a politician responsible for Ukrainian banks could have in the Ukrainian banking system.  
133 million UAH in cash looks very patriotic because the rest of Ukrainian politicians also prefer cash, but dollars or euros, not gryvnia. 
The declaration of Gontareva, the head of the National Bank of Ukraine, revealed $1.8 million and only 62,000 UAH. I think that all questions about the prospects of the Ukrainian currency’s course can be left aside, as the question as to how Gontareva has this money is what will continue to excite inquisitive Ukrainian citizens.  
In general, Ukrainian officials’ declarations are reminiscent of fragments from the works of Ilf and Petrov about petty schemers who seized too much power. Formerly poor politicians suddenly find a collection of antique paintings, tons of cash money, antique books, jewelry, and large plots of land and shares in commercial companies.  
The reactions to all of this on social networks are also fascinating. For example, social network users write that the declarations “destroyed faith in the country” or dismayed them for having been sent to the ATO for “the last 5 gryvnia” while deputies were earning millions. Other users expect a “short and merciless revolt” which, this time, is supposed to bring genuinely honest professionals to power. 
Politicians and their paid trolls are calling disgruntled citizens “pinheads” and demanding that they rejoice that they’ve been allowed to see how the successful and hard-working leaders of the Maidan live, who have by leaps and bounds been leading Ukraine towards its bright European future. 
I am especially touched by those who sincerely believe that the asset declarations are a kind of silver bullet with which the Americans are killing Ukrainian corruption. This is nonsense. As a kind of humanitarian assistance to the fraternal Ukrainian people, I’ll tell you why this happened and how it will end. 
Let’s start with the most simple. No Maidan was needed to force deputies and officials to submit declarations. Seriously, not at all. In Russia, officials have long had to submit declarations and they are meticulously studied by relevant authorities and opposition activists. This is the first point. 
Secondly, the Americans are forcing Ukrainian officials to submit declarations not because they care about ordinary Ukrainians, but because they are trying to improve the culture of the colonial administration, i.e., take out of the picture those politicians who are too stupid to organize theft even by South American standards. Roughly speaking, the declarations made it clear why Poroshenko is president. At least he knows how to use offshore companies and doesn’t stuff bags with cash. 
Thirdly, those who think that the system of declaring assets is a guarantee that there will be no more corruption are very naive people. Similar systems exist in South America, Europe, Asia, and even Moldova. This system keeps complete idiots out of government, but makes little difference overall. 
Fourthly, the only real benefit of this system is that those who are now offended over having received only 5 gryvnia can guess that these millions of euros and dollars in cash didn’t fall to deputies from the sky, but came from giving others only 5 gryvnia. Unfortunately, people haven’t realized this yet. Those who are outraged on social networks can’t even use logic to remember that the “vatniks” and “colorados”  of Donbass warned them about this before. 
Fifthly, there will be no revolt. No one was smart enough to set aside money for this, and color revolutions don’t happen without money. Ukrainian politicians will continue to plunder their fellow citizens who, after the recent scandals, now believe that the fight against corruption is going at full speed… 

Finally, judging by media reports, the Netherlands still haven't ratified the association agreement with Ukraine. There is the chance that studying the lists of Ukrainian politicians’ assets will distract Ukrainians from such sad thoughts. They will continue to believe that the Maidan was for the association agreement with the EU, not for the sake of Gontareva or Poroshenko’s millions. This means that they still have a lot of surprises awaiting them. As long as they do not admit that they made a foolish mistake, the situation will not change for the better.  


     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
                                                   

       Follow us on Twitter! 
                               

             Donate! 
",FAKE
"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in The Hill newspaper and on TheHill.com.

And the winner of the 2015 award for top member of Congress is …

Well, in keeping with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill, I have one winner for Republicans and a very different winner for Democrats.

Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., perfectly embody the polarization that prevents Congress from getting anything done on the nation’s most pressing issues, from immigration to stopping gun massacres to fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

This dysfunctional Congress deserves its dismal 13 percent approval rating from the American people. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate reached a new nadir in broken politics by inviting a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to use the Congress as a setting to disrespect the American president back in March. They acted without first consulting with the White House.

And then there was the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on the president’s nominees for judicial posts or to the Foreign Service.

Congressional Republicans have made it their everyday practice to obstruct initiatives from the twice-elected leader of the nation. That includes their recent undercutting of any efforts to deal with global warming, which are being negotiated by the president and more than a hundred other world leaders.

The GOP antipathy toward President Obama is not new, however. The bigger change is the out-of-control elbowing inside the Republican tent that came to define the year on Capitol Hill.

Republicans in the House successfully launched a coup earlier this year against then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), forcing out a man who is by any measure a strong conservative but still not conservative enough for the party’s far right. The same right wing then derailed Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) because they saw him as too close to Boehner.

The eventual winner after several weeks of embarrassing party infighting was the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate and former Ways and Means committee chair, Ryan. But Ryan won without winning the official endorsement of the rebellious Freedom Caucus, who dictated Boehner’s departure.

All this led the new Speaker, in his very first speech as the top Republican in the House, to stare failure in the face.

“Let’s be frank: The House is broken,” said Speaker Ryan. “We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”

And that is from a loyal conservative.

The real story on Ryan’s elevation is that he is by far the most conservative Speaker in recent times. His voting record is far to the right of Boehner and other GOP Speakers of the current era, from Newt Gingrich (Ga.) to Denny Hastert (Ill.).

Don’t forget: Ryan rose to prominence as the defiant right-winger who proposed, as top Republican on the budget committee, to change Medicare from a guaranteed health care program for the elderly to a limited, untested voucher plan. He also backed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations.

In almost 17 years in Congress, Ryan has been a reliable opponent of abortion rights and gay rights, and he supported President George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security.

Despite that very conservative record, the new Speaker had to deflect charges from the Freedom Caucus, conservative talk radio, websites and bloggers that he is just one more establishment Republican. That outrageous indictment fits with a Pew Research poll from May that found 75 percent of Republican voters want Congressional Republicans to obstruct, defy and challenge President Obama more frequently.

The GOP’s deference to the far right has resulted in a backlash from liberal Democrats – around the nation and on Capitol Hill — that finds expression in the presidential bid of Sanders.

Last year, my top member of Congress leapt to prominence on the power of the same backlash: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). She surfed a tide of populist anger among liberals over income inequality and the bailout of big banks and Wall Street.

This year, the 74-year-old Sanders succeeded in channeling the same energy outside the halls of Congress. Democratic voters still strongly back former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the party’s 2016 nomination. But the unleashed, defiant roar of the party in 2015 can be heard at Sanders’s political rallies.

He has been a political sensation, all year long, in every corner of the nation. He attracts energized, loud crowds by identifying the Republican majority in Congress as the tool of big business and extremely wealthy Americans including Charles and David Koch, and other plutocrats. Sanders’s anger at the power of big money is resonating among left-wingers looking to identify those responsible for rigging the economic and political system against workers, unions, students, immigrants and minorities.

Sanders succeeded in forcing Clinton to do a flip-flop and become an opponent of Obama’s Asian trade deal. He lashed her for being slow to oppose the XL Pipeline. He critiqued her 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq.

“He [Sanders] is where the heart – the economic heart and soul of the party is right now… And he’s got the outsider thing, which is so big this year,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said recently.

Sanders and Ryan are the year’s political leaders in Congress because they captured that “outsider thing” for the left and the right.

As the year ends both parties – and their leading men — are in a critical struggle over whether the “outsiders” are now in charge.

Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.

",REAL
"by MICHAEL TENNANT 
Seen any walnuts in your medicine cabinet lately? According to the Food and Drug Administration, that is precisely where you should find them. Because Diamond Foods made truthful claims about the health benefits of consuming walnuts that the FDA didn’t approve, it sent the company a letter declaring, “Your walnut products are drugs” — and “new drugs” at that — and, therefore, “they may not legally be marketed … in the United States without an approved new drug application.” The agency even threatened Diamond with “seizure” if it failed to comply. 

Diamond’s transgression was to make “financial investments to educate the public and supply them with walnuts,” as William Faloon of Life Extension magazine put it. On its website and packaging, the company stated that the omega-3 fatty acids found in walnuts have been shown to have certain health benefits, including reduced risk of heart disease and some types of cancer. These claims, Faloon notes, are well supported by scientific research: “ Life Extension has published 57 articles that describe the health benefits of walnuts”; and “The US National Library of Medicine database contains no fewer than 35 peer-reviewed published papers supporting a claim that ingesting walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce heart attack risk.” 

This evidence was apparently not good enough for the FDA, which told Diamond that its walnuts were “misbranded” because the “product bears health claims that are not authorized by the FDA.” 

The FDA’s letter continues: “We have determined that your walnut products are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs because these products are intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.” Furthermore, the products are also “misbranded” because they “are offered for conditions that are not amenable to self-diagnosis and treatment by individuals who are not medical practitioners; therefore, adequate directions for use cannot be written so that a layperson can use these drugs safely for their intended purposes.” Who knew you had to have directions to eat walnuts? 

“The FDA’s language,” Faloon writes, “resembles that of an out-of-control police state where tyranny [reigns] over rationality.” He adds: 

This kind of bureaucratic tyranny sends a strong signal to the food industry not to innovate in a way that informs the public about foods that protect against disease. While consumers increasingly reach for healthier dietary choices, the federal government wants to deny food companies the ability to convey findings from scientific studies about their products. 

Walnuts aren’t the only food whose health benefits the FDA has tried to suppress. Producers of pomegranate juice and green tea, among others, have felt the bureaucrats’ wrath whenever they have suggested that their products are good for people. 

Meanwhile, Faloon points out, foods that have little to no redeeming value are advertised endlessly, often with dubious health claims attached. For example, Frito-Lay is permitted to make all kinds of claims about its fat-laden, fried products, including that Lay’s potato chips are “heart healthy.” Faloon concludes that “the FDA obviously does not want the public to discover that they can reduce their risk of age-related disease by consuming healthy foods. They prefer consumers only learn about mass-marketed garbage foods that shorten life span by increasing degenerative disease risk.” 

Faloon thinks he knows why this is the case. First, by stifling competition from makers of more healthful alternatives, junk food manufacturers, who he says “heavily lobb[y]” the federal government for favorable treatment, will rake in ever greater profits. Second, by making it less likely that Americans will consume healthful foods, big pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers stand to gain by selling more “expensive cardiac drugs, stents, and coronary bypass procedures” to those made ill by their diets. 

But people are starting to fight back against the FDA’s tactics. “The makers of pomegranate juice, for example, have sued the FTC for censoring their First Amendment right to communicate scientific information to the public,” Faloon reports. Congress is also getting into the act with a bill, the Free Speech About Science Act (H.R. 1364), that, Faloon writes, “protects basic free speech rights, ends censorship of science, and enables the natural health products community to share peer-reviewed scientific findings with the public.” 

Of course, if the Constitution were being followed as intended, none of this would be necessary. The FDA would not exist; but if it did, as a creation of Congress it would have no power to censor any speech whatsoever. If companies are making false claims about their products, the market will quickly punish them for it, and genuine fraud can be handled through the courts. In the absence of a government agency supposedly guaranteeing the safety of their food and drugs and the truthfulness of producers’ claims, consumers would become more discerning, as indeed they already are becoming despite the FDA’s attempts to prevent the dissemination of scientific research. Besides, as Faloon observed, “If anyone still thinks that federal agencies like the FDA protect the public, this proclamation that healthy foods are illegal drugs exposes the government’s sordid charade.”",FAKE
"Home / Be The Change / Government Corruption / Hotel CEO Caught Celebrating Using Government to Make Airbnb Illegal So They Can Price Gouge Hotel CEO Caught Celebrating Using Government to Make Airbnb Illegal So They Can Price Gouge John Vibes October 27, 2016 Leave a comment 
New York, NY – Since the days of mercantilism began many ages ago, established businesses have used the government to stomp out their up and coming competition. In today’s “sharing economy” this relationship between government and big business is more prevalent than ever. 
In the case of rideshare services, Uber and Lyft, these new services have been vehemently opposed by Taxi companies, who offer a more expensive and less efficient service. Despite the fact that their service is sub-par, they are licensed and regulated by the government and thus are viewed as an accepted business by the establishment. 
The same principle is at play in the proliferation of Airbnb, the service that allows people to rent out rooms to others in a cheaper and more efficient way than hotels. Hotel companies are obviously not very happy about the rise of Airbnb, and have been lobbying the government to shut down their competition ever since the sharing economy began to threaten their bottom line. 
In New York, this lobbying has had success, and anti-Airbnb laws were passed that will force the service out of the city. 
The recently signed law will impose a $7,500 fine onto anyone who lists their property on the site. 
For anyone that did not think that the hotels in the city had a motive to force Airbnb out of the region, a Hotel executive was recently caught telling his shareholders that the passing of the new law will allow him to raise prices in his hotels. 
In a call with shareholders last week , Mike Barnello, CEO of LaSalle Hotel Properties said that the new law “should be a big boost in the arm for the business, certainly in terms of the pricing.” 
Barnello and other representatives at LaSalle declined to comment on the report, but Airbnb’s public affairs director, Nick Papas, pointed out the obvious in a recent interview. 
“They say a gaffe is unintentionally saying what you really believe – and the latest gaffe from the hotel cartel makes it clear that the New York bill was all about protecting the hotel industry’s bottom line. Albany back-room dealing rewarded the price-gouging hotel industry and middle-class families will pay the price,” Papas said. 
This is not an isolated incident either, hotel executives have actually been very open about their true motives for opposing Airbnb. In a similar call last year, Jon Bortz, CEO of Pebblebrook Hotel Trust said that Airbnb prevents him from being able to gouge customers. He literally used the word “gouge” according to the Wall Street Journal. 
In the call, he said that Airbnb takes away his “ability to price at maybe what the customer would describe as sort of gouging rates. I’d say we’ve lost a lot of that ability at this point within the major markets where these events take place.” 
The battle will be long and hard, and the government, along with these entrenched corporations, will lock up many innocent entrepreneurs. However, history has shown that innovation always wins out in the face of this type of government protectionism. After all, the record industry is now dwarfed by free streaming services, and we are lighting our homes with electric lights instead of candles. John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John is currently battling cancer naturally , without any chemo or radiation, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments please donate here . Share",FAKE
"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
"A dozen politically active pastors came here for a private dinner Friday night to hear a conversion story unique in the context of presidential politics: how Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal traveled from Hinduism to Protestant Christianity and, ultimately, became what he calls an “evangelical Catholic.”

Over two hours, Jindal, 42, recalled talking with a girl in high school who wanted to “save my soul,” reading the Bible in a closet so his parents would not see him and feeling a stir while watching a movie during his senior year that depicted Jesus on the cross.

“I was struck, and struck hard,” Jindal told the pastors. “This was the Son of God, and He had died for our sins.”

Jindal’s session with the Christian clergy, who lead congregations in the early presidential battleground states of Iowa and South Carolina, was part of a behind-the-scenes effort by the Louisiana governor to find a political base that could help propel him into the top tier of Republican candidates seeking to run for the White House in 2016.

Known in GOP circles mostly for his mastery of policy issues such as health care, Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of the Ivy League’s Brown University, does not have an obvious pool of activist supporters to help drive excitement outside his home state. So he is harnessing his religious experience in a way that has begun to appeal to parts of the GOP’s influential core of religious conservatives, many of whom have yet to find a favorite among the Republicans eyeing the presidential race.

Other potential 2016 GOP candidates are wooing the evangelical base, including Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.

But over the weekend in Lynchburg — a mecca of sorts for evangelicals as the home of Liberty University, founded in the 1970s by the Rev. Jerry Falwell — Jindal appeared to make progress.

In addition to his dinner with the pastors, he delivered a well-received “call to action” address to 40,000 Christian conservatives gathered for Liberty’s commencement ceremony, talking again about his faith while assailing what he said was President Obama’s record of attacking religious liberty.

The pastors who came to meet Jindal said his intimate descriptions of his experiences stood out.

“He has the convictions, and he has what it takes to communicate them,” said Brad Sherman of Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa. Sherman helped former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in his winning 2008 campaign for delegates in Iowa.

Another Huckabee admirer, the Rev. C. Mitchell Brooks of Second Baptist Church in Belton, S.C., said Jindal’s commitment to Christian values and his compelling story put him “on a par” with Huckabee, who was a Baptist preacher before entering politics.

The visiting pastors flew to Lynchburg over the weekend at the invitation of the American Renewal Project, a well-funded nonprofit group that encourages evangelical Christians to engage in the civic arena with voter guides, get-out-the-vote drives and programs to train pastors in grass-roots activism. The group’s founder, David Lane, has built a pastor network in politically important states such as Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and South Carolina and has led trips to Israel with Paul and others seeking to make inroads with evangelical activists.

The group that Lane invited to Lynchburg included Donald Wild­mon, a retired minister and founder of the American Family Association, a prominent evangelical activist group that has influence through its network of more than 140 Christian radio stations.

Most of the pastors that Lane’s organization brought to Lynchburg had not met Jindal. But they said he captured their interest recently when he stepped forward to defend Phil Robertson, patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” television-show family, amid a controversy over disparaging remarks he made about gays in an interview with GQ magazine.

Throughout his Lynchburg visit, Jindal presented himself as a willing culture warrior.

During his commencement address Saturday, he took up the cause of twin brothers whose HGTV reality series about renovating and reselling houses, “Flip It Forward,” was canceled last week after a Web site revealed that they had protested against same-sex marriage at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

The siblings, Jason and David Benham, both Liberty graduates, attended the graduation and a private lunch with Jindal, who called the action against them “another demonstration of intolerance from the entertainment industry.”

“If these guys had protested at the Republican Party convention, instead of canceling their show, HGTV would probably have given them a raise,” Jindal said as the Liberty crowd applauded.

He cited the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, which faced a legal challenge after refusing to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives as required under the Affordable Care Act. Members of the family that owns Hobby Lobby, who have become heroes to many religious conservatives, have said that they are morally opposed to the use of certain types of birth control and that they considered the requirement a violation of their First Amendment right to religious freedom.

The family was “committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession,” Jindal told the Liberty graduates. “None of this matters to the Obama administration.”

But for the pastors who came to see Jindal in action, the governor’s own story was the highlight of the weekend. And in many ways, he was unlike any other aspiring president these activists had met.

Piyush Jindal was born in 1971, four months after his parents arrived in Baton Rouge, La., from their native India. He changed his name to Bobby as a young boy, adopting the name of a character on a favorite television show, “The Brady Bunch.”

His decision to become a Christian, he told the pastors, did not come in one moment of lightning epiphany. Instead, he said, it happened in phases, growing from small seeds planted over time.

Jindal recalled that his closest friend from grade school gave him a Bible with his name emblazoned in gold on the cover as a Christmas present. It struck him initially as an unimpressive gift, Jindal told the pastors.

“Who in the world would spend good money for a Bible when everyone knows you can get one free in any hotel?” he recalled thinking at the time. “And the gold lettering meant I couldn’t give it away or return it.”

His religious education reached a higher plane during his junior year in high school, he told his dinner audience. He wanted to ask a pretty girl on a date during a hallway conversation, and she started talking about her faith in God and her opposition to abortion. The girl invited him to visit her church.

Jindal said he was skeptical and set out to “investigate all these fanciful claims” made by the girl and other friends. He started reading the Bible in his closet at home. “I was unsure how my parents would react,” he said.

After the stirring moment when he saw Christ depicted on the cross during the religious movie, the Bible and his very existence suddenly seemed clearer to him, Jindal told the pastors.

Jindal did not dwell on his subsequent conversion to Catholicism just a few years later in college, where he said he immersed himself in the traditions of the church.

He touched on it briefly during the commencement address, noting in passing that “I am best described as an evangelical Catholic.” Mostly, he sought to showcase the ways in which he shares values with other Christian conservatives.

“I read the words of Jesus Christ, and I realized that they were true,” Jindal told the graduates Saturday, offering a less detailed accounting of his conversion than he had done the night before with the pastors. “I used to think that I had found God, but I believe it is more accurate to say that He found me.”",REAL
"The big release of the latest National Review edition, with a cover declaring “Against Trump,” on Thursday night was above all other things a wonderful gift not just to liberals, but anyone who lives outside of the conservative tribe. Because it gives us a glimpse, however temporary, of what it feels like to be a Trump supporter. I defy readers to take one look at the cover and not feel an overwhelming surge of contempt for these establishment conservatives who love to pander to the camo-crowd when it suits them, but get fussy when the rubes rise up and start demanding real skin in the game. You want to rub their smug little faces right in Donald Trump’s ridiculous hair and ask how they like those apples.

Any discerning reader knows that, on some level, you’re meant to root for the monster to turn on Dr. Frankenstein, for the Pied Piper to take the children away, for Satan to finally come for Dr. Faustus. And so it’s impossible not to take pleasure in watching the conservative base come extract its pound of Trump-shaped flesh out of the establishment.

It’s no mystery why the National Review and their supporters hate Trump. He’s vulgar and embarrassing and he does an even better job of exploiting the right-wing rubes and their racism and their provincialism and their ridiculous sense of oppression than they do. They are, in other words, haters. And Trump dismissed them as the haters they are with ease during his press conference Thursday night where he called the National Review a “dead paper” that almost no one reads anymore.

This impression is driven home by actually reading the issue. The editors can’t quite seem to decide what their exact objections to Trump are. Is it that he’s driving the right too far in the direction of fascism or that he’s a secret liberal in disguise? Both! Whatever you need to hear! The strategy is argument through overwhelming. They’ll throw everything they’ve got, even contradictory stuff, at the reader and hope the sheer volume of words impresses them enough to vote for Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.

The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink strategy produces some hilarious contradictions. The main anti-Trump editorial, written by the editors, darkly warns that Trump isn’t the racist that his followers think he is. “Trump says he will put a big door in his beautiful wall, an implicit endorsement of the dismayingly conventional view that current levels of legal immigration are fine,” they write, even trying to get the reader to believe that Trump’s mass deportation plan is “poorly disguised amnesty”.

But then, in the writer round-up, we’re hearing a different story. “Not since George Wallace has there been a presidential candidate who made racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign,” David Boaz sniffs, adding that America “aspired to rise above such prejudices and guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to everyone.”

So which is it, guys? Is Trump offensive because he’s too nativist or because he’s not devoted enough to keeping the foreigners out? Whatever will make you not vote for him, I guess.

A similar question emerges when it comes to the conservative obsession with masculinity, which they confuse with strength. The editors write that Trump “has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug.”

On the other hand, Ben Domenech worries that Trump is “a tyrannical monarch” who he believes is too eager to “impose [his] will on the nation”. Mona Charen chimes in agreement, saying “conservatism implies a certain modesty about government.” So which is it? Does a big ego make one weak or is the problem that it makes one too strong and authoritarian? Both, I guess! Depends on if you’re more of an anxious masculinity conservative or if you’re one who likes to delude yourself into believing you’re a libertarian sort. Either way, don’t vote Trump! The self-contradictions are particularly amusing, to me at least, on the issue of women. Charen denounces Trump for his need to “constantly to insult and belittle others including, or perhaps especially, women”. But she and many of the other writers also warn the reader about Trump’s pro-choice past, insinuating that he’s not on board with the anti-choice movement. A movement, may I remind you, that is passing mandatory ultrasound and waiting period laws and other medically unnecessary regulations, for the purpose of insulting and shaming women. This self-important National Review manifesto can’t even decide how to feel about the practice of insulting and belittling people. On one hand, as Charen writes, they believe it’s a sign of “a pitifully insecure person”. What then to make of the fact that much of the anti-Trump argument is rooted in cheap shots at the man, from the you’re-a-girl insult regarding his behavior around Putin to Mark Helprin’s swipe at Trump for having “hair like the tinsel on discarded Christmas trees”. I guess everyone at the National Review is a “pitifully insecure person”, so why is it only a crime when said insulter is Donald Trump? Is it because he’s better at it than you guys? It’s tough to say what the National Review expected out of this, besides selling more issues. And even that has a strong possibility of backfiring, as this attack gave Trump an opportunity to imply, with cause, that they are using his name to bolster their declining sales. If the idea was to pry base voters off Trump, good luck with that. All this does is confirm base voter suspicions that the conservative establishment sees them as a bunch of useful idiots who are to be slapped down the second they start thinking they have a real voice in the movement. If the idea was to take a stand and lay out a clear line between the bellicose base and the more refined party elite, well, that’s backfiring, too, as the RNC reacted to all this by disinviting the National Review to partner with them in the Republican debates. In his anti-Trump screed, Ben Domenech gets on his high horse about how ours is supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people,”  which he claims Trump is threatening. Keep telling yourself that, buddy. Because it looks a whole lot like Trump’s popularity is due to “the people” revolting against a system where the establishment calls all the shots. And National Review’s flailing shows that the establishment has no idea what to do with that.",REAL
"Reinventing Democracy in America Starts by Voting, Then Building an Accountability Movement Posted on Nov 2, 2016 ( The Prophet / CC BY-SA 2.0 ) 
Voting is supposed to be a constitutional right in the United States. But the sad truth is that voting is a privilege . This reality has been made colder since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. 
Steps have been taken to curtail the impact of that decision— Shelby County v. Holder —on the 2016 general election, but voter discrimination still exists. Some Americans have fewer rights than others. Compare minorities, the poor, immigrants, felons, ex-convicts and the elderly with well-off whites, the educated and so-called 1 percenters. Whose voices do you think are heard more? The current system has been designed to maintain the status quo and keep the disenfranchised from changing their status. Discriminatory voting laws compound the problem . 
  
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, new voting restrictions are in place in 14 states this year: “The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions. Those 14 states are: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.” 
Voter suppression is nothing new. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain provides a history lesson in “ The Case Against Democracy ”: 
In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them. 
The article reviews a new book called “Against Democracy,” by Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University who argues for “epistocracy,” a word (coined by another political philosopher, David Estlund of Brown) that means “government by the knowledgeable.” Brennan believes that uninformed voters do more damage than good, so decision-making should be left to the informed. In other words, voting should not be a duty for all. 
That’s a radical idea. But in a way, such thinking aligns with how the Founding Fathers viewed the electorate, Crain acknowledges. He cites a warning from James Madison: “There are particular moments in public affairs, when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?” 
Madison wrote those words (under the pseudonym Publius) for Federalist No. 63 —an essay that was part of The Federalist Papers—to explain the concept of the United States Senate. He went on to say: 
The people can never willfully betray their own interests; but they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act. 
The difference most relied on, between the American and other republics, consists in the principle of representation; which is the pivot on which the former move, and which is supposed to have been unknown to the latter, or at least to the ancient part of them. ... 
In the most pure democracies ... many of the executive functions were performed, not by the people themselves, but by officers elected by the people, and representing the people in their executive capacity. 
... 
Besides the conclusive evidence resulting from this assemblage of facts, that the federal Senate will never be able to transform itself, by gradual usurpations, into an independent and aristocratic body, we are warranted in believing, that if such a revolution should ever happen from causes which the foresight of man cannot guard against, the House of Representatives, with the people on their side, will at all times be able to bring back the Constitution to its primitive form and principles. Against the force of the immediate representatives of the people, nothing will be able to maintain even the constitutional authority of the Senate, but such a display of enlightened policy, and attachment to the public good, as will divide with that branch of the legislature the affections and support of the entire body of the people themselves. 
Here’s another radical idea: Instead of having only a few informed people make decisions for everyone, how about we make everyone informed by providing the same, free educational opportunities for every U.S. citizen? 
Over the 240 years of the American experiment, the nation has moved away from its early ideals. Democracy has been corrupted, becoming the perverted form of corporatocracy and plutocracy we now have. The only way we can fix the defects in our system is by voting in principled leaders, then insisting they follow through on what they promise. If they do not, we must vote them out and put people in power who do. 
Start in your own community. It will require some sacrifice. 
Lee Ellis knows about all about sacrifice . He spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He has written two books on honor, “ Engaging With Honor ” and “ Leading With Honor .” He has not lost faith in the United States and believes voting is a key to restoring honor to America. 
“When you become indifferent and refuse to stand up for your ideas, you forfeit and must live by the ideas of others,” Ellis told Truthdig in a telephone interview. “You are making a choice to let someone else make your choice for you. And I think that is a terrible way to live. We cannot afford to be indifferent about these key decisions. Evaluate the risk of the candidates. There are no risk-free choices. We’re always taking a risk. Which is the most likely to pursue the principles that you feel are important?” 
Apathy is no longer an option. It’s not too late for America, but we have to act fast. Now is no time to be timid. 
Look at the water protectors in Standing Rock in North Dakota. They are putting their lives on the line for us, our planet, the fate of generations. If you are a responsible U.S. citizen who cares about the future of our world, you have a role in our survival. That starts by voting. To be a responsible voter requires being informed. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in political science or be the political equivalent of Ralph Nader . Anyone can know something . Everyone can do something . 
Research the candidates. Read up on ballot initiatives. Learn about down-ticket races. Check your sources—make sure they are trustworthy. Share what you know (in a respectful way) with friends and family and on social media. Encourage others to do the same.",FAKE
"Pakistan People gather outside an emergency ward of a local hospital in Karachi after hearing the news of a bomb blast at Shah Noorani shrine Lasbella district, Balochistan province, Pakistan, November 12, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
At least 47 people, including women and children, have been killed and over 110 others injured in a huge bomb explosion in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. 
The blast hit Shah Noorani shrine in Lasbela district on Saturday evening, Balochistan's Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti said. 
The shrine is located about 100 kilometers north of the port city of Karachi. Staff members of a local hospital in Karachi wait for casualties of a bomb blast at Shah Noorani shrine in Balochistan province, Pakistan, November 12, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
The injured, he added, would be taken to hospitals in Lasbela, Khuzdar or Civil Hospital in Karachi as there are no medical centers available in the area. 
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif denounced the bomb attack, calling on authorities to speed up the rescue operation. 
Reports say some 500 people were in the shrine when the bomb went off. 
""Every day, around sunset, there is a dhamaal (a Sufi ritual dance) here, and there are large numbers of people who come for this,"" said Nawaz Ali, the shrine's custodian. 
The Daesh terror group has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack. 
Pakistani security officials are saying the terrorist attack was in response to the killing of Jundullah chief by Pakistani police which took place in the early hours of Friday morning. 
On October 24, Daesh also claimed responsibility for the killing of at least 60 people in an attack by its terrorists on a police college in Baluchistan’s provincial capital Quetta. It was one of the deadliest attacks on Pakistan's security forces in recent years. 
In August, Daesh claimed responsibility for another attack on a gathering of mourners at a hospital in Quetta, where 70 people were killed. The attack was also claimed by Pakistani Taliban faction Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. 
Pakistan’s restive and mineral-rich Balochistan province is rife with separatist, extremist and sectarian violence and has been the scene of several bomb and gun attacks over the past years. Loading ... ",FAKE
"License DMCA The financial system in America is a scam of world proportion. All of our lives, we've been taught, and often reminded, that the so-called ""income"" tax originated with the 16th Amendment in 1913, and authorized a tax on our earnings. The IRS repeatedly claims this as their authority to tax American's wages, but is this true? Have YOU ever looked into the evidence and history of this tax to see if you actually owe such a tax, or actually even receive ""income""? Most Americans will have to say, no they haven't. So, we simply plod on taking what we've been told as true and factual, and comply by voluntarily assessing ourselves every year without another thought... except that we hate having to do it unless it is to get back some or all of what should never have been taken in the first place. With the advent of the personal computer and the internet, things have changed. What once took many months or even years of research in law libraries and other sources of actual documents now takes days or weeks... perhaps months, and what is being discovered is not only revealing, it is shocking. Is it possible that we have been deceived for over 100 years on the topic of our financial system and ""income"" taxes? Let's start with in ""income"" tax. What does the 16th Amendment actually tell us? ""The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."" The key words in this amendment are ""incomes"" and ""whatever source derived"". ""Income"" is the one which is grossly misunderstood. We will come back to what this amendment is actually speaking to further down in this article. First, we must realize how millions of people can be deceived... ""When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."" Dresden James. It's time we look carefully at the evidence of historical records and decide if this is the ravings of a lunatic, or simply a message based on actual evidence that has, at best, been misunderstood, or at worst, purposefully suppressed and manipulated for many decades. Reader beware: This will likely fundamentally change your outlook on things if you are willing to actually take the time to understand this fraud. It may seem boring and of little interest to you right here and now, but I can assure you, if you want truth, you most likely won't want to put this down until you've completed the series. Let's begin with the 16th Amendment's claimed source for the income tax. If you take a look at page iii of the preface to the 1939 Internal Revenue Code, ( click here ), you will see reference to the now standing tax laws being enacted as far back as July 1, 1862, and carried forward to today. - Advertisement - Huge portions of our modern body of lawful ""income"" tax law pre-dates the 16th Amendment. Congress published a comprehensive ""Derivation of Code Sections of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939 and 1954"" table ( click here ), dated January 21, 1992, which explicitly identifies the pre-16th origins of these still-current statutes. (Highlighted sections within pages 20-76). It must also be noted that the 1986 Internal Revenue Code is based on these enactments and is still in place today. Throughout the Derivation table, you will see that there are well over 300 examples of the pre-1913 16th Amendment throughout, proving that the ""income"" tax was not ""enacted"" through the 16th Amendment. So, we now have to ask a couple questions and look for the plain answers in the record. The first question is ""If there is substantial evidence that the income tax was not ""enacted"" in 1913, and no such tax on American's wages existed (at least for very long as it was declared unconstitutional) prior to the 16th Amendment, what law actually authorizes a tax on American's wages?"" The answer is, there is no actual law. Is there supporting evidence of this fact? Let the U.S. Supreme Court tell us the facts from those days; ""The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution has not enlarged the taxing power of Congress..."" This is brought out clearly by this court in Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., 240 U.S. 1, and Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103. ""We are of opinion, however, that the confusion is not inherent, but rather arises from the conclusion that the 16th Amendment provides for a hitherto unknown power of taxation; that is, a power to levy an income tax which, although direct, should not be subject to the regulations of apportionment applicable to all other direct taxes. And the far-reaching effect of this erroneous assumption will be made clear by generalizing the many contentions advanced in argument to support it."" Brushaber v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 11, 12, 18 (1916); ""In the former case it was pointed out that the all-embracing power of taxation conferred upon Congress by the Constitution included two great classes, one indirect taxes or excises, and the other direct taxes, and that of apportionment with regard to direct taxes. It was held that the income tax in its nature is an excise; that is, it is a tax upon a person measured by his income . . . It was further held that the effect of the Sixteenth Amendment was not to change the nature of this tax or to take it out of the class of excises to which it belonged, but merely to make it impossible by any sort of reasoning thereafter to treat it as a direct tax because of the sources from which the income was derived."" ([14-15]; Peck & Co. v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1917). Brief for the Appellant at 11, 14-15; See also Stratton's Independence, LTD. v. Howbert, 231 US 399, 414 (1913)."" (Emphasis added - ""derived from"" discussed below). ""... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation."" Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). ""It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power."" Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926). - Advertisement - ""... It manifestly disregards the fact that by the previous ruling it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation."" Evans vs. Gore, 253 US 245, 263 (1920). ""It was not the purpose or effect of that amendment to bring any new subject within the taxing power."" Bowers v. Kerbaugh-Empire Co., 271 U.S. 170; 46 S.Ct. 449 (1926); So, if there was no ""new"" tax created by the 16th Amendment, as the Supreme Court has stated over and over again, how can the IRS make our wages ""income"", and how did this tax on our wages begin? The answer comes within the second question we must ask: ""What exactly is 'income?'"" Here is where the deceit so easily enters out lives. U.S. v. Ballard, 535, 575 F. 2D 400 (1976); (see also Oliver v. Halstead, 196 VA 992; 86 S.E. Rep. 2D 858); ""The general term 'income' is not defined in the Internal Revenue Code . . .",FAKE
"Donald Trump’s rise is spurring a backlash from Latino communities across America that has the potential to prove a formidable barrier to the billionaire’s success in the November presidential election.

From Florida to Nevada, Arizona to Iowa, and countless other states beyond, there is evidence that the sleeping giant of the Latino vote is stirring. Trump’s favorability ratings with Hispanic voters are running at historic lows, while he faces an increasingly well-organized nationwide campaign to oppose him.

A Guardian exploration of three key swing states and survey of national Hispanic outreach groups has found that the presumptive Republican nominee faces an uphill struggle to repair the damage caused by his threats to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants and build a wall with Mexico.

A poll of Hispanic Americans carried out by Latino Decisions and America’s Voice in April found some 87% of Latinos felt unfavorably towards him. Significantly, almost half said they felt more enthusiastic about voting in the presidential election than they did four years ago, and 41% of those said it was because they wanted to “stop Trump”.

In Florida, groups report that new Hispanic voter registrations are running at 1,000 a week. (Some 2.6 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in Florida for this year’s general election, and about 800,000 of them have not yet registered.)

That unprecedented number corresponds – not coincidentally, Latino organizers believe – with polls that show almost nine in 10 Latino Floridians view Trump unfavorably.



In Iowa, the Latino community has been virtually silent until this year. In 2012 only 1,000 Latinos participated in the Iowa presidential caucuses; this year the number soared to 13,000 – about 25% of all registered Hispanic voters.

“Clearly they were worried about the rhetoric, specifically of Trump. We could not have mobilized the community anything like as effectively without him,” said Joe Henry of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

In Nevada, a state where almost one in five of the 1.9 million eligible voters are Latino, an aggressive push to mobilize the community has started to bear fruit among some 362,000 Latinos who are still unregistered for the November ballot.

Even in Arizona, which has voted Democratic only once in a presidential race in the past 60 years, Hispanic activists hope to bring the state into play by registering up to 75,000 first-time voters. They have already expanded by 125,000 since 2010, to a total of 536,003 registered Hispanic voters (14.4% of the overall voter pool).

“There is something new going on, something unique in the immigrant community,” said Luis Gutiérrez, a US Congress representative for parts of Chicago. “And it has something to do with the tenor and tone of the presidential race.”

To what extent Hispanic Americans will be motivated to vote by Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks is one of the great unknowns of 2016. The Latino population continues to grow at a faster pace than any other demographic, from 19.5 million eligible Latino voters in 2008 to 23.3 million in 2012, with 27.3 million projected by November. That would amount to some 12% of the nation’s electorate in 2016.

Yet the proportion who actually cast their ballot has remained stubbornly low. In 2012 it was only 48%, much lower than the figures for African Americans (66%) and whites (64%).

“The Latino vote cannot be taken for granted, even with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee,” said Sylvia Manzano, a principal of the political consulting firm Latino Decisions. “Telling Latino voters that Trump is hostile to you is one thing – getting them to the polling stations another.”

Against that backdrop of such unflexed political muscle, there are signs that 2016 may see a larger turnout. Mi Familia Vota, a not-for-profit group devoted to encouraging Hispanic participation, has reported a surge in interest in voter registration. In the first four months of this year it helped 18,450 Latinos to get on the voter rolls in six states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and Texas.

Three of those states, Florida, Colorado and Nevada, are likely to be among the handful of battlegrounds where the outcome of the fight for the White House will be decided. Small but increasingly well-organized Latino populations in North Carolina and Virginia could also prove significant.

Outreach groups have been busily encouraging the 8.8 million Hispanic immigrants who are legal US residents to take up citizenship as the first step towards voting. Nationally, average requests for citizenship reached 65,000 every month in the five months up to January, with half the applicants being Latino. That’s a modest 15% increase on the same period in the previous year.

Non-partisan groups working to increase Hispanic political participation hope to boost that number as the presidential election looms, largely on the back of Trump’s attacks. In a normal year, some 650,000 green card holders are granted citizenship; this year the groups’ goal is one million, although with the election now six months away it is not certain how many of those the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would be able to process in time for them to secure a vote by November.

Rocío Sáenz of the Service Employees International Union, which is part of a coalition that has helped 12,781 Latinos apply for citizenship in more than 300 “naturalization workshops” around the country, detects a new intensity: “There is a sense of urgency as a result of the hateful rhetoric about mass deportations, building walls, calling us criminals – this is personal for us.”

Guardian reporters in three key states sought to answer the increasingly critical question: is 2016 the year the sleeping giant of the Hispanic vote wakes up?

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Florida: it has (officially at least) sided with the winning presidential candidate in every election since 1996. All of the contests have been close, with Obama taking the state in both his presidential runs by fewer than three percentage points.



That paper-thin margin is vastly overshadowed by the potential of the Floridian Hispanic population – 24% of the total today, up from 17% in 2000. At the same time, the political affiliation of Latinos in the state has been drifting steadily towards the Democratic party, largely as a result of the influx of left-leaning Puerto Ricans to central Florida.

When you add in the Trump effect, the billionaire’s prospects appear particularly bleak in Florida where recent polls indicate that close to 90% of Hispanic voters view him unfavorably.

Latinos are registering to vote in “unprecedented” numbers to oppose him, advocacy groups say.

“There’s a lot of Latinos who are very angry with Trump,” said Vivian Rodriguez, president of the Democratic Hispanic Caucus of Florida. “That’s created a wave of Latinos who want to get citizenship and get things going to vote in this election cycle.”

The most recent figures from Florida’s division of elections showed that 1.8 million Hispanics registered to vote in February’s primaries, almost 150,000 more than the number who voted in the 2012 general election, when Obama carried the state with more than 60% of the Hispanic vote.

With the number of Hispanics who registered for the Florida primary already so high, the figures suggest there may be an extraordinarily large turnout of Latinos for the general election in November. In 2012, the increase in registered Hispanic voters after the primary was 110,000. This year, the indications are it will be much greater.



A record 2.6 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in Florida, an increase of half a million since 2012 boosted significantly by the mass influx of Puerto Rican US citizens, particularly around Kissimmee and Orlando, seeking to escape the worsening economic conditions in their homeland.



That leaves about 800,000 eligible Hispanic voters who have not yet registered and if the feedback being received by the many outreach groups in the state is accurate – the National Council of La Raza alone told the Guardian it was signing up new Hispanic voters at a rate of about 1,000 a week – not many of them are going to be supporting Donald Trump.

“Latinos are going to be voting in unprecedented numbers against the villains, the politicians who dehumanize immigrant families to score political points,” said Maria Rodriguez, executive director of FLIC Votes (Florida Immigrant Action Committee).

“We’ve already been seeing the trend of a new generation of younger Cuban Americans registering as Democrats. There’s going to be an exodus from the Republican party; lots of Latino Republicans are going to switch to no party affiliation or the Democrats.”

One of those is Luis-Carlos Fumero, a Miami-born Cuban who fits kitchens for his uncle’s condo renovation company and who fervently supported Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 campaign. This time he says he will not vote.

“I cannot support this man,” said Fumero, 25, of Trump. “This nonsense over the wall, not letting Muslims into America, what he says about Mexicans and about women, this man is loco.”

The loss of support from Miami’s Cuban Americans could be a body blow to Trump’s hopes of carrying Florida in the general election. Historically a bulwark of Republican support, the influence of Florida’s Cuban voting bloc has already waned from 46% of the state’s eligible Hispanic voters in 1990 to barely 30% today, according to Pew research.

Now there are clear signs that even that bloc might desert the Republican candidate, under the weight of Obama’s opening up of trade and travel with Cuba and with the rise of a younger generation of Cuban Americans who are less ideologically driven.

In February’s primary, the heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade was the only county in Florida that Trump lost, and although he led Hillary Clinton 41-29 among Miami’s Cuban Americans in a Bendixen and Amandi poll this month, his support level is still far below the 64% Romney received from Cuban Americans statewide in 2012.

Perhaps more worryingly for Trump, Miami’s influential Republican Cuban American political leaders continue to speak out against him. House representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo have said they cannot vote for him, and Tomás Regalado, the mayor of Miami and himself a Cuban exile, launched a searing attack on the presumptive nominee in the Miami Herald.

“He mistreats people, speaks derisively of people,” Regalado said. “A president’s biggest asset is the bully pulpit. This guy is capable of creating national and international chaos.”

Karina Ruiz de Diaz, president of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, takes the long view. “The Latino vote is still very young,” she told the Guardian. “We will reshape the state, it’s just going to take a little bit of time.”

Arizona’s electorate is in the midst of rapid change. One in five eligible voters in the state are Hispanic, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center. It estimates that 1.3 million Arizona Latinos will be eligible to vote in 2016, up from 796,000 in 2008.

Young Latinos make up a large share of the Hispanic electorate. Nearly twice as many Hispanic voters in Arizona are millennials, compared with their white counterparts, according to 2014 Pew data.

Arizona has historically been a conservative state. But the changing demographics and the prospective general election race between Trump and Clinton has activists and experts predicting that this will be the year Arizona Latinos realize their political force, and sweep Democrats in to power.

“It’s exciting for us in Arizona because we keep getting talked about as a purple state, as possibly a swing state,” said Kate Gallego, the vice-mayor of Phoenix.

That would be astonishing. Since the second world war, Arizona has only once voted for the Democratic presidential candidate: Bill Clinton in 1996. So could it happen?

“Certainly John McCain thinks so,” Gallego said, referring to comments recorded at a private fundraiser in which the long-serving Arizona senator said Trump could threaten his chances of being re-elected. “If Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket, here in Arizona, with over 30% of the vote being the Hispanic vote, no doubt that this may be the race of my life,” McCain is reported to have said.

Yet even if record turnout were to turn the solidly red state blue, Arizona’s 11 electoral votes would probably be superfluous as the outcome is unlikely to shift the dynamics of the race.

If Trump is to be the motivation that finally unleashes the electoral power of Arizona’s Latinos, the achievement will not be his alone. He will also have to credit the assistance of two of his most ardent supporters: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, the self-styled “toughest sheriff in America”, and Jan Brewer, the former Arizona governor who signed into law one of the harshest state immigration measures in the country.

In 2010, Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1070, a draconian law aimed at driving out the state’s undocumented immigrants that pushed the state to the forefront of an acrimonious debate over border security and comprehensive immigration reform.

Yet instead of disappearing, the law drew many of the state’s undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. Latinos joined forces with business leaders, concerned about the economic impact of the law. Together, tens of thousands marched through the streets of downtown Phoenix in opposition.

“We have seen many Trumps in Arizona,” said Ian Danley, a director with One Arizona, speaking after a meeting on voter suppression in Phoenix. “We were birthed out of SB 1070, which is a Trump-like policy. We weren’t prepared in 2010. We’re prepared now.”

One Arizona, a non-partisan network of Hispanic and immigrant groups working to increase Latino voter turnout in the state, has registered between 110,000 and 125,000 new voters since 2010, and helped triple the number of Latinos enrolled in the state’s early voting system. Now the network has set itself the ambitious target of registering between 60,000 and 75,000 new voters by November.

Because volunteers are restricted from telling registrants who to vote for and the group doesn’t track registrants’ party affiliation, it’s hard to assess “the Trump effect”. Anecdotally, several volunteers said it was not uncommon for registrants to ask which party Trump belonged to and then tick the opposite box.

“People are paying a lot of attention,” said Raquel Terán, the state director for Mi Vota Familia, sipping vegan horchata at a coffee shop in downtown Phoenix.

When Donald Trump came to Arizona in March, he held his rally in Fountain Hills, a predominantly white town in Maricopa County. He was joined by Brewer, the former governor, and introduced by Arpaio, the controversial sheriff who has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in an ongoing racial profiling case that found his officers had targeted Latinos during raids and traffic stops.

“We had a little problem. Some demonstrators were trying to disrupt,” Arpaio told the crowd, which began to boo and hiss. “If they think they’re going to intimidate you and the next president of the United States, it’s not going to happen – not in this town!”

“I call that the hate and fear playbook,” said Petra Falcon, a long-time Arizona activist and director of the rights group Promise Arizona. “If you want to divide a country or a state, just take out that playbook and start talking about the harm immigrants do – they come here to take your jobs. They rob. He took that playbook from Arizona and is using it nationally.”

The biggest challenge for Arizona’s Democrats remains voter turnout. There are approximately 170,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state, according to the latest data from the secretary of state’s office.

In the primaries on 22 March, 55% of Republicans cast ballots, compared with 49% of Democrats. However, registered independents, who make up the largest share of Arizona voters but are not represented by a party, could not vote in either primary.

At an outlet mall in Tempe, José Barboza and Francis Sullivan of Promise Arizona took turns approaching shoppers and sales associates with their clipboards.

Jaritma Avilez told Barboza she was registered to vote and he moved on. But later Avilez admitted to the Guardian that even though she was registered, she didn’t plan on voting in November. “I don’t feel like politics really affects my life,” she shrugged.

“In November, the Latino community is going to come out in large numbers,” Jocelyn Sida, a Nevada organizer for Mi Familia Vota, which works to increase Hispanic turnout, told the Guardian. “A lot of millennials like myself are getting involved in leadership roles to educate and engage the community, and it’s been very accepting. They’re not withdrawing, they’re not closing their doors to us. On the contrary they’re seeking us out to find ways to get involved.”

With 17% of Nevada’s electorate being Hispanic, the Latino vote certainly has the potential to deny Trump victory through strong turnout. In 2012, 70% of Nevada Latinos voted for Obama, helping him to win the state by a comfortable six-point margin.

“All the time Trump’s yelling about kicking people out the country. It’s horrible,” said Rodulfo Martinez, 60, a Las Vegas construction worker, expressing an anger felt by many. “The way he insults us isn’t right. Many of the things he says about the [border] wall and why Latinos come here don’t make sense.”

A poll last month by Latino Decisions showed that immigration reform was the most pressing issue for Nevada Hispanics. The state has the country’s largest percentage of undocumented immigrants, many of whom count registered voters as friends and family.

“Está loco,” said Vicky Legaspi, 36, echoing Fumero in Miami. A restaurant owner on Las Vegas’s working-class east side, Legaspi nearly choked on a spoon of ice cream when asked if she would vote for the celebrity businessman. “He just wants attention. He doesn’t care about this country.”

Ana Hernandez, 34, a housekeeper, said Trump was “mean” and “has a bad heart” and that she intended to vote for Clinton because “first of all, she’s not a racist”, setting a somewhat low bar.

Latino participation in Nevada’s 2016 Democratic caucus showed a 5% uptick over the 2008 contest, another encouraging sign for Clinton, who won the vote in both cycles. The primary season also saw Democrats build a 5% lead in voter registration in Nevada, while an ongoing “naturalization blitz” organized by progressive groups has brought thousands of new minority voters into the fray.

At the start of this election season, Nevada had 362,000 potential new Latino voters, including 42,000 Hispanic youth who will come of voting age this cycle and 40,000 legal permanent residents eligible for citizenship, according to Mi Familia Vota.

“It’s amazing to hear from people who never had a reason to vote, or speaking of the citizenship workshops, people who have never had a reason to become citizens until now,” said Laura Martin, associate director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (Plan), which promotes civic engagement. “We focus on low-income communities of color, so we meet lots of people at the bus station, the welfare office, or outside the dollar store. They used to not care, but now they see Donald Trump and that’s scary to them.”

Additional reporting by Mona Chalabi in New York",REAL
"Trump will also meet with retiring Indiana Sen. Dan Coats, former Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue and Linda McMahon, a prolific Republican donor, two-time Senate...",REAL
"The recent spate of protests against police brutality have changed the way the left thinks about rioting. The old liberal idea, which distinguished between peaceful protests (good) and rioting (bad), has given way to a more radical analysis. “Riots work,” insists George Ciccariello-Maher in Salon. “But despite the obviousness of the point, an entire chorus of media, police, and self-appointed community leaders continue to try to convince us otherwise, hammering into our heads a narrative of a nonviolence that has never worked on its own, based on a mythical understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.” Vox’s German Lopez, while acknowledging the downside of random violence, argues, “Riots can lead to real, substantial change.” In Rolling Stone, Jesse Myerson asserts, “the historical pedigree of property destruction as a tactic of resistance is long and frequently effective.” Darlena Cunha, writing in Time, asks, “Is rioting so wrong?” and proceeds to answer her own question in the negative.

The direct costs of violent protests are fairly self-evident. People who may not have anything to do with the underlying grievances get injured or killed, their livelihoods are impaired, the communities in which the rioting takes place suffer property damage that can linger for decades, and the inevitable police response creates new dangers for innocent bystanders. The pro-rioting (or anti-anti-rioting) argument portrays this as the necessary price of worthwhile social change. Rioting can generate attention among people who might otherwise ignore the underlying conditions that give rise to it.



It is surely the case that some positive social reforms have emerged in response to rioting. Lopez highlights the Kerner Commission and diversity efforts in the Los Angeles Police Department. But the question is not whether rioting ever yields a productive response, but whether it does so in general. Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, has published a timely new paper studying this very question. And his answer is clear: Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind.



The 1960s saw two overlapping waves of protest: nonviolent civil-rights demonstrations, and urban rioting. The 1960s also saw the Republican Party crack open the New Deal coalition by, among other things, appealing to public concerns about law and order. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson swept every region of the country except the South running a liberal, pro-civil-rights campaign; in 1968, Richard Nixon won a narrower victory on the basis of social backlash.

Determining just what caused the change in public opinion is obviously tricky. Wasow approaches the problem in different ways. One method he uses is to compare the public’s concern for civil rights and its concern for “social control,” with violent and nonviolent protests. They match up pretty closely:

Wasow has another even more persuasive method. He looks at county-by-county voting and compares it with violent and nonviolent protest activity:

Examining county-level voting patterns, I find that black-led protests in which some violence occurs are associated with a statistically significant decline in Democratic vote-share in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. Black-led nonviolent protests, by contrast, exhibit a statistically significant positive relationship with county-level Democratic vote-share in the same period. Further, I find that in the 1968 presidential election exposure to violent protests caused a decline in Democratic vote-share. Examining counterfactual scenarios in the 1968 election, I estimate that fewer violent protests are associated with a substantially increased likelihood that the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. As African Americans were strongly identified with the Democratic party in this time period, my results suggest that, in at least some contexts, political violence by a subordinate group may contribute to a backlash among segments of the dominant group and encourage outcomes directly at odds with the preferences of the protestors.

Wasow finds that nonviolent civil-rights protests did not trigger a national backlash, but that violent protests and looting did. The physical damage inflicted upon poor urban neighborhoods by rioting does not have the compensating virtue of easing the way for more progressive policies; instead, it compounds the damage by promoting a regressive backlash.

The Nixonian law and order backlash drove a wave of repressive criminal-justice policies that carried through for decades with such force that even Democrats like Bill Clinton felt the need to endorse them in order to win elections. That wave has finally receded and created space for sentencing reforms, demilitarization, an emphasis on community policing, and other initiatives that even have bipartisan support. If the violent protests in Ferguson and Baltimore supercede nonviolent protest, Wasow’s research implies that the liberal moment might give way to another reactionary era.",REAL
"(CNN) Heavily armed gunmen on Friday fired indiscriminately at guests at a hotel hosting diplomats and others in Mali's capital, the maître d' told CNN.

At least 21 people were killed in the attack in which an al Qaeda-affiliated group is taking partial responsibility.

""These people started shooting. They were shooting at everybody without asking a single question. They were shooting at anything that moved,"" Tamba Couye said of the attack at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako.

One man did yell ""Allahu akbar,"" said Couye, who was working in the restaurant where breakfast was underway. The attackers sounded like they were from northern Mali, he told ""Erin Burnett OutFront.""

Couye said an attacker chased him from the hotel but he came back later to help because his instincts told him he needed to do so to save lives.

Dozens of people were trapped in the building for hours, officials in the West African nation said, before Malian and U.N. security forces launched a counterattack and rushed guests away.

Olivier Salgado, a spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali, put the death toll at 21.

At least six people injured in the attack have been hospitalized, Health Minister Marie Madeleine Togo told state broadcaster ORTM.

Al Mourabitoun, an Islamist militant group, claimed it was jointly responsible for the attack, according to Mauritanian news agency Al Akhbar. The group announced it carried out the attack with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the news agency reported.

Al Mourabitoun said the attack was carried out in retaliation for government aggression in northern Mali, Al Akhbar reported. The group also demanded the release of prisoners in France.

Algerian jihadist and the leader of the group, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, is ""probably"" behind the attack, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said in an interview on France's TF1, but the French are not ""entirely sure.""

Belmokhtar was the target of a June U.S. airstrike in Libya. Libyan officials said he had been killed but U.S. officials never confirmed his death publicly.

The assault began about 7 a.m., when two or three attackers with AK-47 rifles exited at least one vehicle with diplomatic plates and entered the hotel with guns firing, Salgado said.

The attack, Salgado said, came as the hotel hosted diplomatic delegations working on a peace process in the landlocked country, a former French colony that has been battling Islamist extremists with the help of U.N. and French forces.

The Radisson chain said that as many as 170 people -- 140 guests and 30 employees -- had been there as the attack began.

Malian soldiers and U.N. troops had the hotel surrounded, a journalist for ORTM told CNN from the scene. Two security personnel were injured, Security Minister Salif Traore said on ORTM.

""We're still hearing erratic gunfire,"" journalist Katarina Hoije told CNN from near the scene Friday afternoon.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Radisson Blu Hotel is in an upscale neighborhood outside the center of Bamako, rising high above the dusty streets and surrounding houses. With 190 rooms and suites, it is known as a hub for international guests such as diplomats and businesspeople, and it is a 15-minute drive from Bamako-Senou International Airport.

""I think this attack has been perpetrated by negative forces, terrorists, who do not want to see peace in Mali,"" Hamdi said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday that the United States is still accounting for Americans who may have been inside the hotel.

Speaking in Malaysia, Obama said that thanks to the swift action of Malian and other security forces, lives were saved. He said the victims were ""innocent people who had everything to live for.""

The hotel attack, and the diplomats' meeting, came in a country that has struggled with Islamist extremists, especially since 2012.

Taking advantage of a chaotic situation after a military coup in March 2012, Islamist extremists with links to al Qaeda carved out a large portion of northern Mali for themselves. When the militants tried to push into the south, France, at the Malian government's request, sent thousands of troops in 2013.

The ground and air campaign sent Islamist fighters who had seized the northern region fleeing into the vast desert. The United Nations then established a peacekeeping mission in Mali that year, hoping to keep the government secure enough to continue a peace process.

Though military pressure largely drove Islamist militants from cities, they have regrouped in the desert areas, said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Washington-based Atlantic Council.

""Unfortunately, this (hotel) is a likely target"" because it is popular with international guests such as U.N. workers, Pham said.

U.S. special operations forces were helping ""move civilians to secured locations as Malian forces clear the hotel of hostile gunmen,"" said Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command.

Michael Skapoullis, who lives near the Radisson Blu, told CNN he was using the hotel's gym Friday morning when he noticed fellow exercisers leaving. He hadn't heard anything because he was listening to music, but he decided to follow.

He walked to a door leading to the hotel lobby, and that's when he saw something was wrong.

""When I opened the door, I saw, on the floor, bullets,"" Skapoullis said. ""So I gently closed the door, and ... I went back into the gym"" and eventually left the complex.

Another man who'd been in the hotel told ORTM that he heard gunshots that he initially thought were fireworks.

""Then we heard the hotel alarm. ... I walked out into the hallway, and I saw a lot of smoke,"" said the man, whom ORTM didn't name. ""Then I went back into my room to stay there.

""Later, the Malian forces came to get us. ... Thank God we are now healthy and safe.""

As news of the attack spread, media outlets and officials from a number of nations reported that some of their citizens were in the hotel or had been freed. A summary:

• One U.S. citizen was killed, a senior State Department official told CNN. ""We express our deepest condolences to the family and friends of the deceased. ... Out of respect for the family, we have no further information at this time."" Of Anita Datar, her brother Sanjeev Datar, said. ""Everything she did in her life she did to help others -- as a mother, public health expert, daughter, sister and friend.""

• ""About a dozen"" Americans were rescued, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

• Geoffrey Dieudonne, an administrative counselor for Belgium's Parliament, died as a result of the attack, Parliament said. Details about his death weren't immediately clear; he was in Bamako as part of a three-day French-language convention.

• Three Chinese nationals were killed, the political counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Bamako told media in his country. State-run CCTV reported that four other Chinese guests were rescued.

• Seven Algerians, including six members of an Algerian diplomatic delegation, are safe after being trapped in the hotel, the state-run Algerie Presse Service reported. The Algerians were freed during a counterassault by U.N. and Malian forces.

• Twenty Indian nationals, working for a Dubai-based company and staying at the hotel long-term, were safely evacuated, Vikas Swarup, a spokesman for India's Ministry of External Affairs, said on Twitter.

• Twelve Air France crew members who were staying at the hotel were safely extracted, the airline tweeted. Air France has canceled all its flights to and from Bamako as a precaution, the airline said.

• Turkish Airlines said at seven of its employees were staying at the hotel, and all had been freed by the afternoon.

• Two German nationals were able to leave the hotel, Germany's Foreign Office said.

The soldiers stormed the hotel to end a daylong siege that started when gunmen raided the hotel after attacking a military site nearby, witnesses said.

At the time, the Malian army said the attackers were affiliated with the Macina Liberation Movement. Human Rights Watch has described the group as Islamists who commit ""serious abuses in the course of military operations against Mali's security forces.""",REAL
"The letter from FBI Director Comey announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation is already being blown up into more than it is. 
Here is the letter via CNN’s Jake Tapper: FBI Dir Comey letter to congressional committee chairs re discovery of ""new emails…pertinent to the investigation"" pic.twitter.com/y4gvHiILLn 
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 28, 2016 
As Republicans cheer because they think that they have been thrown an election lifeline, read the whole letter and look at what it says. The letter does not say that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. The letter states that emails were found that were pertinent to the email investigation while looking into an unrelated matter. 
The letter FBI Director Comey reads like what it is, an update on an investigation. The FBI is dotting the Is and crossing the Ts. Comey’s letter destroys the Republican claim that there was a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s emails. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have spent months criticizing Comey’s investigation, but it turns out that they were wrong. 
It would take something unprecedented and dramatic to change the FBI’s original findings. Director Comey made it clear that the agency’s work might not be completed before the election. 
The email story that Republicans and the media love, but voters have never cared about is back in the news, but it remains an empty scandal. 
The FBI’s reopened investigation does open the door for Republicans to continue their bogus witch hunt if Hillary Clinton wins the White House. Unless voters want two more years of conspiracy investigations instead of action, today’s developments have made voting for Democrats in House and Senate contests more vital than ever.",FAKE
"The four men — two of them brothers — who turned ordinary morning commutes in Brussels into blood-soaked nightmares may have been spurred into action by fears that authorities were closing in on them, according to a note left by one of the attackers that was described by a prosecutor Wednesday.

Days before the attacks on Tuesday, counter­terrorism police had raided their Brussels safe houses. An ally who took part in November’s Paris carnage was shot and captured by authorities. And Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a 29-year-old Belgian with a thick rap sheet, wrote that he did not want to wind up in a prison cell, Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw said Wednesday.

The men — at least two of whom had direct ties to the Islamic State attacks in Paris — knew they had to act decisively. So they set out with explosives that ripped open a Brussels subway car and shattered the city’s main airport terminal, killing at least 31 people and injuring 300 in the bloodiest attack on Belgian soil since World War II.

Bakraoui detonated a suitcase full of nails, screws and powerful explosives at the airport, killing himself in the process, Van Leeuw said. So did Islamic State bombmaker Najim Laachraoui, 24, who is also believed to have prepared explosives for the Paris attacks, according to an Arab intelligence official and a European intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

An unidentified man who left an even larger suitcase of explosives at the airport is believed to still be at large, he said. That suitcase did not immediately detonate, sparing Belgium even more casualties.

The country held a national minute of silence Wednesday led by Prime Minister Charles Michel, who laid a wreath at the Maelbeek metro station in honor of the victims. Thousands of Belgians gathered in a somber ceremony in front of an ornate 19th-century stock exchange building to light candles and lay flowers.

The missive, contained in a computer that had been chucked into a garbage can near Bakraoui’s Brussels apartment, does not specifically cite recent raids across Belgium, including one that netted a key suspect in the Paris attacks. But its tone suggests a sense that the noose was tightening, Van Leeuw said.

The computer message also gives apparent insight into the organization and motivation of militants who apparently turned their attention to Brussels after pulling off the Paris attacks that killed 130 people.

In the note, Bakraoui described feeling pressure bearing down. He wrote that he was “in a hurry, no longer knowing what to do, being searched for everywhere, no longer secure,” according to Van Leeuw’s description of the message, which was not made public.

Laachraoui’s involvement draws the boldest line yet between the Paris attacks and those in Brussels. His DNA was found on explosives in the Paris attacks, and authorities believe that he was versed in the Islamic State art of assembling powerful explosives from ingredients that are readily available. His participation in two attacks suggests that the Islamic State is increasingly able to strike on European soil — although his death may also mean that he feared imminent capture by European authorities.

Terrorism experts regard bomb­makers, especially those trained in handling sensitive explosives, as among the most valuable and protected members of a terrorist organization. It is highly unusual for them to participate in suicide attacks themselves.

[Why is Brussels under attack?]

Laachraoui’s DNA was found in a Brussels apartment raided last week. The discovery of a militant cell there eventually led to the arrest of Salah Abdeslam on Friday. Abdeslam was the final at-large direct participant in the Paris attacks and is believed to have been the logistics mastermind.

The computer file that prosecutors cited Wednesday does not mention Abdeslam by name, but it says the attackers feared that if they did not strike quickly, they risked winding up in prison alongside “him.”

“If they drag on, they risk finishing next to him in a cell,” Van Leeuw said, paraphrasing the contents of the file.

Van Leeuw described the file as a “will” discovered on a computer. He did not explain why authorities believed the computer belonged to Bakraoui.

Bakraoui’s younger brother, Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, is believed to have been the suicide bomber on a Brussels subway car that blew up as it sped out of a station underneath the heart of the European Union quarter of Brussels, an area packed with embassies and international organizations. That attack came 73 minutes after the one at the airport, meaning that commuters were already reading the news of the first explosions when the carnage reached them.

Khalid el-Bakraoui appears to have been a kind of surreptitious real estate broker for the plotters, according to a European security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. Using assumed names, he rented an apartment in the Forest area of Brussels where Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found and an apartment near Charleroi, Belgium, where Paris attack mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud stayed as he plotted the violence.

Both Bakraoui brothers served prison time for violent crime, the European security official said. The announcement on Wednesday that two of the attackers were brothers highlighted another emerging tactic from the militant group: They would be the third pair of brothers involved in an Islamic State attack in Europe in the past 15 months.

European security leaders planned to gather Thursday in Brussels to discuss whether to pursue new policies that would better pool information to counter terrorism.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, visiting Brussels on Wednesday to extend his condolences, repeated past calls for sweeping new powers to be given to European intelligence agencies. “In the years to come, the [E.U.] member states will have to invest massively in their security systems,” he said.

[Brussels terrorists probably used explosive nicknamed ‘the Mother of Satan’]

Van Leeuw, the Belgian prosecutor, said the brothers had not previously been suspected of ties to terrorism.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that Turkey had deported one of the attackers to Europe in July and warned European counter­terrorism officials that it believed the man was a militant, suggesting a serious lapse by Belgian authorities. Interpol had also issued a “red notice,” effectively an international arrest warrant, for one of the suspects at the request of Belgian authorities. It was not immediately clear when that notice had been issued.

There were signs that an even bigger attack had been forestalled. Authorities found large stockpiles of bomb-building materials at Ibrahim el-Bakraoui’s apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels, the prosecutor said: 33 pounds of TATP explosives, nearly 40 gallons of acetone, 8 gallons of hydrogen peroxide, detonators, and a suitcase full of nails and screws. Both acetone and hydrogen peroxide are easily obtainable; together they can be used to make potent explosives.

It remained unclear Wednesday how many Americans had been killed in the blasts. In Washington, State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said that “approximately a dozen” Americans were injured but that “a number” of U.S. citizens remained unaccounted for on Wednesday — without providing more specific figures. He said that U.S. diplomatic missions in Brussels were working to account for all of their own staff.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry plans to visit Brussels on Friday on his return from a trip to Moscow.

Griff Witte, Missy Ryan, James McAuley and Anthony Faiola in Brussels and Brian Murphy and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

Live updates on the death toll, attack scenes and reactions around the world

Why is Brussels under attack?

At NATO headquarters, alert status raised just miles from attacks

Five stories you should read to understand the Brussels attacks",REAL
"United States – reformation or fracture? by Thierry Meyssan Observing the US presidential electoral campaign, Thierry Meyssan analyses the resurgence of an old and weighty conflict of civilisation. Hillary Clinton has just declared that this election is not about programmes, but about the question «Who are the Americans?». It was not for reasons of his political prgramme that the Republican leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate, Donald Trump, but because of his personal behaviour. According to Thierry Meyssan, until now, the United States was composed of migrants from different horizons who accepted to submit to the ideology of a particular community . This is the model which is in the process of breaking down, at the risk of shattering the country itself.
Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 26 October 2016 français Español italiano русский Deutsch Português ελληνικά Türkçe عربي During the year of the US electoral campaign that we have just weathered, the rhetoric has profoundly changed, and an unexpected rift has appeared between the two camps. If, in the beginning, the candidates spoke about subjects which were genuinely political (such as the sharing of wealth or national security), today they are mostly talking about sex and money. It is this dialogue, and not the political questions, which has caused the explosion of the Republican party – whose main leaders have withdrawn their support from their candidate - and which is recomposing the political chess-board, awakening an ancient cleavage of civilisation. On one side, Mrs. Clinton is working to appear politically correct, while on the other, «The Donald» is blowing the hypocrisy of the ex-«First Lady» to smithereens.
On one side, Hillary Clinton promises male / female equality - although she has never hesitated to attack and defile the women who revealed that they had slept with her husband – and that she is presenting herself not for her personal qualities, but as the wife of an ex-President, and that she accuses Donald Trump of misogyny because he does not hide his appreciation of the female gender. On the other, Donald Trump denounces the privatisation of the State and the racketing of foreign personalities by the Clinton Foundation to obtain appointments with the State Department – the creation of ObamaCare not in the interest of citizens, but for the profit of medical insurance companies - and goes as far as to question the honesty of the electoral system.
I am perfectly aware that the way in which Donald Trump expresses himself may encourage racism, but I do not believe for a second that this question is at the heart of the electoral debate, despite the hype from the pro-Clinton medias. It is not without interest that, during the Lewinsky affair, President Bill Clinton apologised to the Nation and convened a number of preachers to pray for his salvation. But when he was accused of similar misconduct by an audio recording, Donald Trump simply apologised to the people he had upset without making any appeal to members of the clergy. The currrent divide re-awakens the revolt of Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran values against those of the Calvinists, mainly represented in the USA by the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Methodists.
While the two candidates were raised in the Puritan tradition (Clinton as a Methodist and Trump as a Presbyterian), Mrs. Clinton has returned to the religion of her father, and participates today in a prayer group composed of the army chiefs of staff, The Family, while Mr. Trump practises a more interior form of spirituality and rarely goes to church. Of course, no-one is locked into the systems in which they were raised, but when people act without thinking, they unconsciously reproduce these systems. The question of the religious environment of the candidates may therefore be important.
In order to understand the stakes of this game, we have to go back and look at 17th century England. Oliver Cromwell instigated a military coup d’etat which overthrew King Charles 1st. He wanted to install a Republic, purify the soul of the country, and ordered the decapitation of the ex-sovereign. He created a sectarian régime inspired by the ideas of Calvin, massacred thousands of Irish Papists, and imposed a Puritan way of life. He also created Zionism – he invited the Jews back to England, and was the first head of state in the world to demand the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This bloody episode is known by the name of the «First British Civil War».
After the monarchy had been reinstated, Cromwell’s Puritans fled from England. They set up in Holland, from where some of them left for the Americas aboard the Mayflower (the «Pilgrim Fathers»), while others founded the Afrikaneer community in South Africa. During the War of Independence in the 18th century United States, we saw a resurgence of the struggle of the Calvinists against the British monarchy, so that in current manuals of British History, it is known as the «Second Civil War».
In the 19th century, the American Civil War opposed the Southern States (mainly inhabited by Catholic colonists) to the North (mostly inhabited by Protestant colonists). The History of the winning side presents this confrontation as a fight for freedom in the face of slavery, which is pure propaganda. The Southern states abolished slavery during the war when they concluded an agreement with the British monarchy). As a result, we once again saw the revolt of the Puritans against the Brititsh throne, which is why some historians speak of the «Third British Civil War».
During the 20th century, this interior confrontation of British civilisation seemed over and done with, apart from the re-appearance of the Puritans in the United Kingdom with the «non-conformist Christians» of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. It was they who divided Ireland and agreed to create the « Jewish national homeland» in Palestine.
In any case, one of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Kevin Philipps, dedicated a voluminous thesis to these civil wars, in which he noted that none of the problems had been solved, and announced a fourth confrontation [ 1 ].
The adepts of the Calvinist churches, who for the last 40 years have voted massively for the Republicans, now support the Democrats.
I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton will be the next President of the United States, or that if Mr. Trump were to be elected, he would be rapidly eliminated. But over the last few months, we have witnessed a large electoral redistribution within an irreversible demographic evolution. The Puritan-based churches now account for only a quarter of the population, and are swinging towards the Democrat camp. Their model looks like a historical accident. It disappeared in South Africa, and will not be able to survive much longer, either in the United States or in Israël. Beyond the Presidential election, US society will have to evolve rapidly or split once again. In a country where the youth massively rejects the influence of the Puritan preachers, it is no longer possible to displace the question of equality. The Puritans envisage a society where all men are equal, but not equivalent. Lord Cromwell wanted a Republic for the English, but only after he had massacred the Irish Papists. This is how it is at the moment in the United States – all citizens are equal before the law, but in the name of the same texts, black people are systematically condemned, while attenuating circumstances are found for white people who have committed equivalent crimes. And in the majority of states, a penal condemnation, even for a speeding ticket, is enough to cancel the right to vote. Consequently, white and black people are equal, but in most states, the majority of black people has been legally deprived of its right to vote. The paradigm of this thought, in terms of foreign policy, is the «two-state» solution in Palestine – equal, but above all, not equivalent.
It is Puritan thinking that led the administrations of preacher Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr. and Jr. are direct descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers), Clinton and Obama to support Wahhabism, in contradiction to the declared ideals of their countries, and today, to support Daesh.
A long time ago, the Founding Fathers built communities in Plymouth and Boston which were idealised in the US collective memory. And yet the historians are formal – they claimed to be creating the «New Israël», and chose the «Law of Moses». They did not place the Cross in their temples, but the Tables of the Law. Although they are Christians, they attach more importance to the Jewish scriptures than the Gospel. They oblige their women to veil their faces and re-established corporaI punishment. Thierry Meyssan
Thierry Meyssan Translation
Pete Kimberley",FAKE
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Carol Adl in News // 0 Comments 
The British Prime Minister has refused to withdraw her support for UK weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. 
Theresa May also refused to withdraw support for Saudi Arabia’s place on the UN Human Rights Council despite the Kingdoms atrocities in Yemen. 
During a debate at the House of Commons in Parliament on Wednesday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn confronted May over Saudi violations and called for an end to the weapons sales (see video below) 
Press TV reports: 
“The issues are being investigated… We are very clear that the only solution that is going to work for Yemen is actually to make sure that we have the political solution that will give stability in Yemen,” May told Corbyn and the parliamentarians. 
Instead of answering the direct question, May spoke about the UK government’s contribution to the humanitarian aid provided to the crisis-torn country. 
Corbyn also questioned May’s support for Saudi Arabia’s membership in the UN Human Rights Council. A crucial vote on the membership of Riyadh in the council will take place later this month. 
London has repeatedly been blamed by human rights groups, including Oxfam and Amnesty International, for fueling the Yemeni war by supplying Saudi Arabia with weapons. 
Since the conflict began last year, the British government has approved more than £3 billion ($3.7 billion) in arms sales to the Saudis and military contractors hope more deals are in the pipeline. 
Yemen has been under almost daily airstrikes by Saudi Arabia since March 2015. International sources put the death toll from the aggression at almost 10,000. 
Rights groups have also condemned the Kingdom’s crackdown on dissent and prosecution of pro-reform activists.",FAKE
"When President Truman approved the use of the world’s first atomic bomb, the weapon first had to be transported to the island of Tinian. Stowed in the hold of the USS Indianapolis in July 1945, the journey from San Francisco took 10 days. Flying time from the airfield to the city of Hiroshima clocked in at about six hours, and the bomb itself fell for 43 seconds before exploding.

These hours, minutes, and seconds of history will be front and center this Friday, when Barack Obama becomes the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima. Yet aside from anniversaries, Americans don’t think much about nuclear weapons today. Perhaps it is the cultural hangover from the Cold War, which often seemed to test the limits of how much fear societies could endure. Perhaps with the bombing of Hiroshima passing from living memory, we’ve simply lost the vocabulary for talking about the mechanics of midnight, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists famously christened the end of the world.

Instead, what is left is the absurdist shorthand: “the finger on the button.” What that cliched phrase means today is this: The US president could order a nuclear strike on, say Moscow, and the 12 million inhabitants there would be incinerated about 15 minutes later.

The apparatus of calamity constructed over the past seven decades is more lethal now than it was in the summer of 1945, and it is far easier to use. Its future is worth considering, especially by those seeking the White House. Today, the United States has more than 7,000 nuclear weapons. Of those, 2,000 are deployed, which means they can be launched on a 15-minute alert on the authority of one human being.

Nine months after Obama’s finger was first placed on the button, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his stated goals of nuclear nonproliferation. The administration’s deal with Iran and its efforts to get more than a dozen nations to surrender bomb-grade material are important steps toward checking the spread of cataclysmic weapons.

At the same time, however, the Obama administration oversaw the development of the B61 model 12, a new nuclear weapon that is small, accurate, and adaptable. In truth, this is what might be called a contradiction bomb: It is the most expensive nuclear weapon project in history, yet it is intentionally designed to get the least bang for the buck. It is a nuclear weapon that looks and feels and can be used like a conventional smart bomb. This ease — even plausibility — of use is what makes this weapon so dangerous.

The Pentagon is also in the process of taking advantage of the already extreme accuracy of missile warheads by changing their fusing mechanisms so as to increase their ability to successfully destroy the hardest targets by a factor of three. This program will vastly increase the killing power of the entire missile arsenal and, in so doing, create the appearance that the United States is preparing to fight and win a nuclear war against Russia.

Americans today have lots of pressing concerns — paying their bills, paying their debts, deciding whom to vote for. The Atomic Scientists even changed their clock in 2007 to reflect the threat posed by climate change rather than just nuclear annihilation.

The country meanwhile spent its Cold War peace dividend on decades of forgetting the stakes, on trivializing the power of the presidency. After all, what really is an affair with an intern, a torture program, a terrorist attack on a remote embassy, when there’s an immediate and existential threat one push away?

Which brings us to Peak Triviality — Donald Trump’s pursuit of the White House.

Not only did Trump not know the basics of the US nuclear triad (the Pentagon’s land, sea, and air contingent of nuclear forces), he also rejects nonproliferation, a strategy fundamental to Western military thinking since Hiroshima. Conservative military thinker Max Boot calls Trump the country’s top national security threat, though surprisingly few Republicans publicly share that view.

Lest drawing attention to this topic be perceived as fear-mongering, consider this interview Trump sat for in March with Chris Matthews:

TRUMP: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly?

MATTHEWS: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

TRUMP: Then why are we making them [nuclear weapons]? Why do we make them?

Just because one political party feels that Trump is the most suitable soul to command the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal doesn’t mean the wider electorate should lose sight of the stakes.

President Richard Nixon was famous for his “madman” theory of foreign policy, whereby his administration tried to convince leaders of enemy nations that he was mentally unstable and thus not to be antagonized. Should he win in November, Trump will have to go to extraordinary lengths to persuade friend and foe alike that he is both predictable and worthy of trust. The fate of nations may depend on it.",REAL
"Proof God is on Duterte’s Side! 
Azzmador October 29, 2016 God gave this man three missions: Kill drug dealers – stop cussing – gas kikes! 
These days it’s not very often a nation can say their leader has the approval of the Almighty God himself, but now, the Philippines can claim this distinction. 
The Washington Post : 
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made a solemn promise: no more swearing. 
Duterte, who famously cursed the pope and used a slang term that translates as “ son of a whore ” while denouncing President Obama, said he was flying back from Japan late Thursday, looking at a vast expanse of sky, listening to his colleagues snore, when he heard a voice say, “If you don’t stop epithets, I will bring this plane down now.” 
I know many of you may be skeptical of his claim, but not me. I’ve heard people claim they spoke to God many times in my life, and until now, there was always some personal agenda involved. When I was a kid, I had relatives tell me God wanted me to have a crew cut. Then there were the more famous situations like Oral Roberts saying that if his flock didn’t send him ten million dollars by a specified date, God would kill him, personally. 
Then you had guys like Ted Haggard. I’m pretty sure God told him it wasn’t a good idea to be snorting meth off the units of male prostitutes while he was the pastor of an evangelical megachurch and spiritual advisor to the likes of George W. Bush, but if so, God’s words went unheeded. 
Not so with the infamous Flip shitlord. 
“And I said, ‘Who is this?’ So, of course, ‘it’s God,’” he told Filipino journalists late Thursday. 
“So, I promise God,” he continued, “Not [to] express slang, cuss words and everything. So you guys hear me right always because [a] promise to God is a promise to the Filipino people.” God’s servant on Earth, Rodrigo Duterte, contemplating the sound of one hand killing all the drug lords. 
Now there’s a man with his priorities straight. He identifies the speaker, and makes his promise, publicly, to God and his people, that he will obey. Of course, all fascists believe in a natural hierarchy, so his obedience just makes sense. 
An important thing to note is, when God speaks, what he doesn’t say is just as important as what he said. He told Duterte, “stop cussing.” Nothing more. 
Thank goodness he did not say “stop killing criminals.” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but you never know. What a relief… 
Of course, not everyone is theologically adept, i.e. the author of the WaPo article. She took to Twitter to make some heretical and thoroughly unfair remarks. Err, to quote @astroehlein , ""Did God mention the death squads?"" https://t.co/QezjfCweEH 
— Emily Rauhala (@emilyrauhala) October 28, 2016 
No Emily, God did not mention the death squads, and any true believer knows this means he approves of them. 
Where in the Holy Bible does it say you’re supposed to allow savage drug kingpins to wage war in your streets, killing innocents by the thousands, just so they can decide who gets to sell poison to your people and in what location? I’ve never read that part. 
I cannot confirm whether or not Emily Rauhala is a Jew, but she’s WaPo’s “China Correspondent,” and her Twitter timeline reads like someone with a personal vendetta against the fantastic leader of The Philippines. 
Whatever her problem is, she’d better get a handle on it, because in ten days we’re electing a Great Christian here as well!",FAKE
"Get short URL 0 6 0 0 US President Barack Obama spoke by phone with Turksih President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and noted the need for Washington and Ankara to coordinate efforts against the Daesh group in Syria, the White House said in a press release. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Erdogan is at odds with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi over Ankara's role in US-led coalition operation in Moshul after Abadi demanded Turkish troops withdrawal from the base in the northern city of Bashiqa. ""President Obama noted the need for close coordination between the United States and Turkey to build on these successes and to apply sustained pressure on ISIL [Daesh] in Syria to reduce threats to the United States, Turkey, and elsewhere,"" the release stated on Wednesday. ...",FAKE
"Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section ",FAKE
"Email 
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry slammed the “shamelessness of Israel” on Friday, calling the Jewish State a “rogue group” that “poses a nuclear threat” and commits “terrorist attack[s]” against neighboring countries. On Friday the Korean Central News Agency released a statement attributed to North Korea’s Foreign Ministry that responded to comments Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made last week that were critical of the Hermit Kingdom. “This is an unpardonable insult and provocation to the dignity and social system in the DPRK and the choice made by its people,” the statement said of Netanyahu’s comments, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The statement then took issue with Israel’s foreign policy in the Middle East, stating: “Israel not only represents dictatorial forces for aggression that trample down the legitimate right of the Palestinian people and indiscriminately kill them but also is a rogue group that poses a nuclear threat and makes terrorist attack[s] on its neighboring countries with lots of nuclear weapons.” The statement was responding to comments Netanyahu made during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week, in which the Israeli leader repeatedly drew parallels between Iran and North Korea. “And, Prime Minister [Abe], we have something else in common,” Netanyahu began. “We are two peace loving democracies that face formidable threats from nearby rogue states.” “Both Iran and North Korea are governed by ruthless and extreme dictatorships, states that seek to bully and intimidate their neighbors, and in our case, to actually eradicate us from the face of the earth.” Noting that “Iran and North Korea have aggressive military nuclear programs,” Netanyahu repeated his plea to not allow Iran to use diplomacy to advance its nuclear program as he alleges North Korea did with the 1994 Agreed Framework. “Iran cannot be allowed to travel the road taken by North Korea.” It’s not the first time that North Korea has slammed Israel or even Netanyahu publicly. After Netanyahu criticized Pyongyang during a trip to Japan last year, the North Korean Foreign Ministry released a similar statement, which called Israel a ""cancer to peace in the Middle East.” It also accused Netanyahu of trying to use North Korea “to divert international criticism of Israel caused by its settlement activity and breakdown in the Middle East peace talks."" Similarly, in last week’s statement, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry said, “Everybody knows about the shamelessness of Israel telling lies and making fabrications and pointing accusing fingers to others to justify its criminal acts and evade the censure and condemnation by the international community.” Besides trading public insults, Israel has long been concerned about North Korea’s support for Arab states that are hostile to Israel, as well as Iran. In fact, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War North Korea actually deployed a squadron of MiG-21s to Egypt, which engaged in a firefight with Israeli F-4s. Neither side sustained any damage. More recently, North Korea has been accused of proliferating ballistic missiles and nuclear technology to Syria and Iran. In 2007, Israel destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor that was reportedly built by North Korean engineers.",FAKE
"These Jellyfish Lodges are capable of purifying waterways, collecting discarded trash, and even growing nutritious food! By Amanda Froelich 
Intriguing eco-friendly innovations are unveiled all the time, but the floating Jellyfish Lodge is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. In addition to being aesthetically appealing, the lodges can purify the land, air, and water and grow nourishing food.
Designer Janine Hung relays that the structures combine trash-collecting tentacles, aquaponic gardens, and a filtration system that all work to benefit the environment.

The solar-powered lodges utilize aquaponic technology to grow fruits and vegetables while cleaning the air with an electrostatic system. Each structure features and interior garden that thrives by filtering polluted water. Additionally, long tentacle arms which appear similar to a jellyfish’s collect drifting trash without harming wildlife.
Unfortunately, it’s not likely this design will be realized, as it only received an Honorable Mention award in this year’s Biodesign Competition , reports Inhabitat . However, it’s so neat we figured the concept needed to be shared.


An intriguing feature of the lodge is that it can test water for toxicity and start the process of treating water through a unique microbial digestion chamber. Once the water is purified, it can be returned to the surrounding environment.
If these structures are eventually created, they’d ideally be maintained by nearby residents who could utilize the foods in their holistic kitchens .

Hung hopes that the Jellyfish Lodges are eventually constructed to serve as a solution to problems plaguing the world’s waterways, including acidification and pollution .
Image Credit: Janine Hung 
Source: True Activist 
",FAKE
"The Hillary Clinton campaign is taking some hard knocks from liberals over its maladroit attacks on Bernie Sanders’ single-payer proposal. In one sense, the knocks are well-deserved. Even if single-payer markedly lowers medical expenditures, proponents such as Larry Seidman estimate that a tax increase of at least 8 percent of GDP would likely be required to finance it. That’s a heavy political lift. It’s about as much as the entire federal income tax on individuals.

Yet as proponents rightly observe, these taxes would replace many visible and invisible ways we now provide to support a health sector that consume more than 17 percent of our economy. The experience of peer industrial democracies suggests that a well-designed single-payer system would be more humane and markedly less expensive than what we have right now.

Such a system would certainly be less convoluted and bureaucratically hidebound. Aggressively deploying government power to rein in prices, a well-designed single-payer system would be more fiscally disciplined, and would probably be more effective in targeting resources to best promote public health. Sanders deserves credit for noting the real virtues of a well-executed single-payer system.

In another way, though, Clinton's critique raises uncomfortable questions that deserve greater attention. It’s commonplace (though true) to note that single-payer is beyond the current boundaries of American politics. But what if, by some miracle, liberal Democrats won comprehensive victories that created a window of opportunity in which single-payer becomes realistically possible?

Imagine what would happen were President Bernie Sanders to sweep into office backed by a Democratic congressional majority similar to what President Obama enjoyed in 2008. Imagine further that President Sanders were sufficiently fortunate and skilled after that victory to enact a single-payer system. I wonder how different our policy dilemmas would really be from what we now face in implementing the Affordable Care Act.

As I have written at length in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (and draw upon here), an American single-payer system would be more complex and kludgy than many proponents have considered or admitted. The source of these problems resides in American politics rather than the technocratic or ideological premises of our health care system. A different system operating through the same political mechanisms would produce similar complexity and kludge.

The pitch for single-payer is admirably simple: We cover every (legal) resident. We mail a Medicare card to everyone. Everyone is covered. That’s a lot easier to explain and market than it is to explain the convoluted structures of Medicaid and state marketplace plans.

This is also a caricature of how such a single-payer plan would be passed and how it would touch the lives of millions of Americans. Single-payer would immediately raise myriad intricate and divisive transition issues. It would potentially uproot thousands of critical arrangements President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Sen. Reid struggled to leave intact.

After all, ACA’s sales pitch to the healthy and insured was, ""If you like your insurance, you can keep it."" This pledge proved politically damaging when it could not be fully kept for several million people. Single-payer would be far more disruptive to even more people.

It’s telling that no fully articulated single-payer bill was ever drafted as an alternative to the ACA. Such a bill would have been no less complicated, and would probably have been more encyclopedic than the ACA was. A huge reform that creates millions of winners creates millions of losers, too.

As with ACA, the biggest winners would be relatively disorganized low-income people in greatest need of help. The potential losers would include some of the most powerful and organized constituencies in America: workers who now receive generous tax expenditures for good private coverage, and affluent people who would face large tax increases to finance a single-payer system. At least some of these constituencies would need to be accommodated in messy political bargaining to get single-payer enacted. And states would have a role to play, too, potentially replicating the messy patchwork we got with ACA reforms.

Single-payer would require a serious rewrite of state and federal relations in Medicaid and in many other matters. It would radically revise the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which strongly influences the benefit practices of large employers. Single-payer would require intricate negotiation to navigate the transition from employer-based coverage. The House and Senate would be in charge of this tension, and at risk of the negotiations among key legislators and committees who hold sway.

Single-payer would be openly or quietly opposed by virtually the entire supply side of the medical economy. We saw this dynamic during the political knife fight over ACA’s ""public option."" Early versions of the public option would have allowed consumers shopping in the state marketplaces to buy into some public insurance modeled on Medicare.

Many stakeholders who supported other aspects of ACA noisily or quietly wanted to see the public option dead. Community hospitals, medical groups, pharmaceutical and medical device companies feared precisely the outcome liberals hoped to see: a viable public insurance product that gained broad acceptance and market share, and that used Medicare’s tremendous market power to discipline providers.

These constituencies understood and dreaded the heavy hand of government across from them at the bargaining table. These constituencies helped to kill the public option. They would be a force to be reckoned with in any political process that seeks to implement a single-payer system.

Given our polarized judiciary, there would be legal and constitutional challenges, too. Whatever fine print of the ACA found its way to the Supreme Court, the real fight concerned the propriety of an expansive federal government that seeks to regulate and humanize a national health care market. Constitutional conservatives reject this vision of American government. A single-payer system would engage even more contentious issues of federalism and the reach of national government.

Some progressives hope that single-payer could provide an attractive replacement for the grubby, path-dependent logrolling that now dominates our $3 trillion health care political economy. No viable single-payer program will replace these grubby politics. That’s logically impossible, because such a program must be produced through that very same process. Barring a historically comprehensive defeat of Republicans at every level of American government, advocates for expanded health coverage will face this discomfiting reality.

Passing a single-payer plan requires precisely the same interest group bargaining and logrolling required to pass the ACA. The resulting policies will thus replicate some of the very same scars, defects, and kludge that bedevil the ACA.

Progressives should still push for basic reforms that improve our current system. I supported the public option in 2009. I still do. I hope it resurfaces in some form, particularly for older participants in the state marketplaces. It may open a pathway to a true single-payer. If it doesn’t — which I suspect it will not — it might still provide a valuable alternative and source of pricing discipline within our pathological health care market.

Whatever policy one supports, we must actually consider how this imperfect and messy process will actually play out. There’s no immaculate conception in American politics.",REAL
"Charles Koch and his network of conservative donors will not be supporting Donald Trump. They are concerned about his lack of support for free markets.

Why Ring magazine named Ali 1966 Fighter of Year – 50 years after the fact

Charles Koch, one of the nation's most prominent conservative donors, will not be financially supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump during the upcoming campaign.

Billionaire Charles Koch and his network of political donors will not be supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump, instead re-directing their focus to supporting Republicans in competitive Senate races.

Mr. Koch has raised concerns about Mr. Trump's stance on the free market. He and his network, which includes influential billionaires and millionaires, has evolved from a small group to a powerful political force with 1,600 staffers spread across 38 states. The group met this week for a weekend retreat near the Rocky Mountains.

Despite not supporting Trump, Koch said the notion he he would support Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was ""a blood libel"", as the Associated Press reported.

""At this point I can’t support either candidate, but I’m certainly not going to support Hillary,"" Koch said.

The Koch network, which has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into politics, planned on pouring a lot of money into the 2016 presidential race. Instead, they will be investing in competitive Senate races, including in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

To win the network's support, it is essential that a candidate ""believes in and will fight for free markets,"" Koch told donors behind closed doors, as energy entrepreneur Chris Wright told the Associated Press. The network's first priority should be ""to preserve the country’s financial future and to eliminate corporate welfare,"" Koch said.

""Since it appears that neither presidential candidate is likely to support us in these efforts, we’re focused on maximizing the number of principled leaders in the House and Senate who will,"" he said.

The libertarian-leaning Koch, and his brother David, disagree with Trump on a variety of issues, including immigration, trade, minimum wage, and criminal justice reform.

Trump, who Politico reported tried to mend bridges with the Koch brothers, said July was his best fund-raising month to date and claimed it was he who rebuffed the Koch brothers.

The group's main argument for not supporting Trump, as The Washington Post reported, is that supporting Trump would harm the network's credibility, making it more difficult for them to not support future Republican candidates who also differ sharply from the Koch brothers' positions on free trade and limited government.

The weekend gathering featured donors who pledged to donate $100,000 every year to groups supported by the Kochs' small-government Freedom Partners network.

A wide number of top Republican officials were also in attendance, including Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Gov. Matt Bevin of Kentucky and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, among others. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will address the group on Monday.

The Koch's decision received a mixed reaction from donors, with some saying they were unhappy with both main parties' presidential options.

""Terrible and truly awful are the two choices,"" Mr. Wright told the AP. ""We’re not going to give any money to support Donald Trump.""

Other donors, however, have expressed disappointment at the decision, saying they believe it is incredibly important to defeat Mrs. Clinton.

""I told him that it was very important that Hillary Clinton not get elected,"" Minnesota media mogul Stanley Hubbard said, as the Washington Post reported.

Koch stressed that spreading the values of limited government and free trade were more important than any political election, and that politics was just a piece of the puzzle in promoting those values.

""To address the current political crisis, our first objective is to stop the worst federal policies, regardless of who is the next president,"" Koch said. ""And we’ve got to remember that Republican presidents advance a lot of bad policies, just like Democrats.""

This report includes material from the Associated Press.",REAL
"In just a week or two, Congress will consider (actually, “consider” may be too generous a term in this instance), the negotiated agreement between Iran and the “P5+1” (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany), curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The United States and its negotiating allies claim the agreement will prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb. Opponents say that’s not so.

But—and this may upset people on both sides—the arguments for and against the agreement are not what interest me most. In fact, I am most troubled by what the debate has revealed about the disintegration of our political institutions and traditions, and of the increasing inability of those institutions to function on behalf of the American people and their interests.

Opposition to the Iran nuclear deal has been fomenting for years. Aroused and whipped by Israel’s hardline prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his troops in AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), congressional Republicans long ago decided to make this a “make or break” showdown with President Barack Obama. Forty-seven GOP senators, led by a young, freshman right-winger from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, even went so far as to write the leaders of Iran disavowing the deal before it was finalized. Few longtime students of the presidency or Congress can remember an affront of similar magnitude or possible consequence—short or long-term. The one that comes closest (even though we didn’t learn about it until decades later, and then only after all the key players were dead), was candidate Richard Nixon’s interference with the Paris Peace Talks (aimed at ending the war in Vietnam) in 1968.

What strikes me, in particular, is that the Republicans’ behavior vis-à-vis the negotiations with Iran stands in sharp contrast to the debate and the votes on the two Panama Canal treaties in 1978.

The Panama Canal issue in the 1970s was every bit as contentious as the situation with Iran is today. Negotiations of the treaties—one guaranteeing the neutral operation of the canal and the second ceding control of the canal to Panama (effective at midnight Dec. 31, 1999)—began in the Nixon administration, continued under President Ford, and were finalized by President Carter in August of 1977.

The uproar from the far right to Carter’s decision was immediate and intense; after all, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan had used the issue to bludgeon Gerald Ford in their fight for the Republican nomination in 1976, and he damn near succeeded (Reagan won the North Carolina primary largely because of the Panama Canal issue, as his chief in-state backer, the late Sen. Jesse Helms, was leader of the opposition).

Once Carter decided that he was going to agree to the treaties’ terms, Vice President Walter Mondale, congressional relations chief (and my boss at the time) Frank Moore, and the president himself divided up a call list of all 100 senators to let them know where things were headed, and to make a simple and singular request: That they not make any public statement, one way or another, until each senator had been briefed by officials from the administration—White House, State Department, Defense and the intelligence community—on the details and ramifications of either acceptance or rejection. Ninety-nine of the 100 agreed to and abided by the request; the only one who refused to do so was North Carolina’s Helms.

The ensuing debate was as vigorous and heated as one might imagine, and it went on for many months. Carter’s chief aide, Hamilton Jordan, orchestrated the administration’s campaign on behalf of ratification. Leading citizens from states whose senators were on the fence or shaky were invited to the White House for briefings and were subsequently dispatched to Capitol Hill to lobby for ratification. Newspaper editors, columnists and commentators were briefed by the president himself. My colleagues on the White House Congressional Liaison staff worked non-stop advocating and counting. Former Presidents Nixon and Ford made calls to key Republican senators; even conservative icon and Hollywood star John Wayne weighed in with his support.

On March 16, 1978, the first of two treaties (guaranteeing neutrality), was ratified by the Senate with only one vote to spare, 68 to 22; the second treaty (the one conveying the canal to Panama) was approved on April 18, 1978, by the exact same number. The vote breakdown is telling: 52 D/16 R “Aye” to 10 D/22 R “No.” Among the “yes” votes was that of Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.); Baker not only voted right, but he brought several of his Republican colleagues along with him.

It is important to note, as well, that the administration’s strategy was to reach at least 68 votes, rather than the minimum 67 required, so that no single senator could be accused of being the one who “gave away the Panama Canal.” Even so, many Democrats lost in the 1978 midterm elections and also in 1980, at least in part because of the courageous stand they took on the treaties. It will be interesting to see how political courage plays out on the Iran nuclear agreement; so far at least two Democratic senators, Charles Schumer of New York and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, have failed the test.

Were the votes on the Panama Canal treaties examples of “good old days” in American politics? Perhaps not. But they sure beat the hell out of what we are being subjected to today, and the price our representative democracy is paying as a result.",REAL
"A Book Too Dangerous To Read A Book Too Dangerous To Read? 
by Jennifer Margulis   Library Journal , which librarians read to decide what books to buy for their collections, announced last week that libraries should not carry the new book, The Vaccine-Friendly Plan : Dr. Paul’s Safe and Effective Approach to Immunity and Health, From Pregnancy Through Your Child’s Teen Years , which I co-authored with Paul Thomas, M.D., a Dartmouth-trained pediatrician who has over 13,000 patients in his pediatric practice in Portland, Oregon. 
“The author’s style is gentle and motivating,” the reviewer writes, “and he clearly cares for parents and children. Despite this, many parents will have a hard time following some of his suggestions (e.g. no manufactured baby food, no formula, no circumcision, avoid acetaminophen), as he advises parents to come to “well child visits with a signed vaccine refusal form” and specifically warns against hepatitis, chicken pox, flu, polio, and HPV vaccines, among others.” 
The review goes on: 
“VERDICT While Thomas does recommend a number of vaccines, his medical wisdom is too removed from both the AAP and the CDC (Centers   Prevention) guidelines to warrant a recommendation.” 
Don’t make this book available to library patrons. 
Don’t read this book. 
Don’t even have a conversation about safety issues with childhood vaccines. 
Instead, let’s just ignore the fact that the current rates of autism are at least 1 in 68, according to the CDC (possibly as high as 1 in 45 , also according to CDC data), that there’s a growing body of very disturbing scientific evidence showing that acetaminophen (the main ingredient in Tylenol) is triggering autism , and that American children today are plagued with allergies, asthma, and other chronic diseases (like Type 1 juvenile diabetes and leaky gut syndrome) than ever before. 
But following Dr. Paul’s recommendations to feed a baby and small child a real food, whole foods diet, stop using Tylenol , and making judicious decisions about vaccination is too difficult? A neonatologist and an obstetrician from Panama excited to read Your Baby, Your Way and The Vaccine-Friendly Plan , even as the Library Journal warns librarians against buying The Vaccine-Friendly Plan . Photo by Jennifer Margulis. 
Follow one-size-fits-all medicine as defined by the CDC and the AAP and watch your children spend the rest of their lives battling vaccine injury and chronic disease. 
Follow Dr. Paul Thomas’ vaccine-friendly plan of avoiding toxins, eating real food, getting plenty of outdoor time and sunlight, and choosing to do judiciously spaced vaccines, one aluminum-containing shot at a time (or choosing no vaccines at all), and raise happy, healthy children. 
You decide. 
  
About the Author 
Jennifer Margulis , Ph.D., is an award-winning health journalist, co-author of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan (Ballantine, 2016), and author of Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family (Scribner 2015). She has worked on a child survival campaign in West Africa, appeared live on prime-time TV in France, and been awarded a Fulbright from the United States government. She has a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A.   California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Emory. Learn more about her at www.JenniferMargulis.net  ",FAKE
"House Republicans investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Wednesday released a March subpoena issued to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, one day after she said in a nationally televised interview that she ""never had a subpoena"" in the email controversy.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the Benghazi panel, said he had ""no choice"" but to make the subpoena public ""in order to correct the inaccuracy"" of Clinton's claim.

Clinton told CNN on Monday that she ""never had a subpoena,"" adding: ""Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation.""

Gowdy said the committee issued the March 4 subpoena to Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her use of private emails while serving as secretary of state.

Regardless of whether a subpoena was issued, ""Secretary Clinton had a statutory duty to preserve records from her entire time in office, and she had a legal duty to cooperate with and tell the truth to congressional investigators requesting her records going back to September of 2012,"" Gowdy said in a statement.

The dispute over the subpoena is the latest flashpoint in an increasingly partisan investigation by the House panel, which was created to probe the September 2012 attack in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

Gowdy and other Republicans have complained that Clinton and the State Department have not been forthcoming with release of her emails and note that the State Department has said it cannot find in its records all or part of 15 work-related emails from Clinton's private server.

The emails all pre-date the assault on the U.S. diplomatic facility and consist mainly of would-be intelligence reports passed to Clinton by longtime political confidant Sidney Blumenthal, officials said.

Gowdy has said the missing emails raise ""serious questions"" about Clinton's decision to erase her personal server, especially before it could be analyzed by an independent third-party arbiter.

A Clinton campaign spokesman has said she turned over 55,000 pages of materials to the State Department, ""including all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal.""",REAL
"Drugstore chain Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) announced plans to close about 200 U.S. stores as part of its first earnings report since it merged with European drug retailer Alliance Boots last year.

Walgreens, the largest U.S. drugstore chain, said it will close the stores amid plans to boost its previously announced cost-cutting initiative by $500 million.

Walgreens expects to reduce costs by a projected $1.5 billion by the end of fiscal 2017, the company said.

""After a rigorous analysis, the company has identified additional opportunities for cost savings, primarily in its Retail Pharmacy USA division,"" the company said Thursday. ""Significant areas of focus include plans to close approximately 200 USA stores; reorganize corporate and field operations; drive operating efficiencies; and streamline information technology and other functions.""

Walgreens' spokesman Philip Caruso said the company has not yet decided which stores it will close, but it is ""not focusing on any specific geographic area."" Caruso also said there is ""no hard timeline"" for when the stores will be closed during the period for cost cutting.

The soon-to-be closed stores make up roughly 2% of the Walgreens' 8,232 drugstores in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Walgreens also said it opened 71 new drugstores in this region in the first half of fiscal 2015, including 25 relocations.

Store closings aside, Walgreens wowed shareholders with strong earnings. Shares jumped $4.94, or 5.6%, to $92.62.

Walgreens said adjusted second-quarter net earnings increased 33.2% to $1.2 billion. Second-quarter sales, meanwhile, increased 35.5% to $26.6 billion.

The U.S. retail pharmacy division, which includes Walgreens and Duane Reade stores, posted sales in the second quarter of $21 billion, up 7.4% over the year-ago quarter. Total sales in stores open at least a year were up 6.9% over the same quarter a year ago.

In December, Walgreens closed on a deal, valued at close to $16 billion, to purchase the remaining stake of European health and beauty retailer Alliance Boots that it didn't already own. The new company, which includes more than 12,800 stores in 11 countries, was renamed Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., and it took on ticker symbol WBA.",REAL
"October 30, 2016 at 1:18 PM 
Right now we are at a pivot point in this nation’s history as important as any time in the past. We have the choice over the next 9 days to elect a woman who has proven time and time again that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, operate outside and above the law. Or we can elect a person who appears to represent values quite the opposite of Killer Clinton. 
This Moonpie Mafia’s last venture into the Oval Office was filled with scandals from the very minute they entered the White House through their exit, carrying every bit of furniture and silverware they could load in their U-Haul trailer. Their body count runs to the millions when you take into account the destruction of other countries during their despotic reign And Bush was even worse. 
Have we forgotten the nearly 80 men women and children (22)of the Branch Dividians, murdered by armed goons on the direct order of Janet Reno, Killer Clinton’s hired assassin and attorney General. 
Did we forget that Madeline Albright, Killer’s Secretary of State, when she bragged about a 500,000 body count as an acceptable death toll in Central Europe, as Killer’s husband sent in his mercenaries to slaughter innocent civilians in Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia while supporting puppet regimes and war lords who murdered millions of their peoples through planned genocide. How about Rwanda with the death toll that was well in excess of 500,000. I recall Bill Clinton basically saying “Ooops. Sorry. I guess I kind of missed that one–hey Monica–how about another blow job. I really get off getting head while I shoot some cruise missiles at the people in Iraq and Afghanistan” It sure defines “Getting off” 
I guess the memory hole is just that deep. Idiots and morons will elect Killer because they either know nothing of history, don’t care about the Clinton’s death toll or actually like the idea that this psychopathic murdering mutant bitch might actually be elected to the highest office in the land. Anyone who voted for Killer votes for death by the number and democide by the millions. 
When it comes to Trump, I’m not a fan of his either. But when given the choice of Killer or Trump I am forced to chose between the lesser of two evils. BIG EVIL lives in the skin of Killer Clinton. Whatever lives in the skin of Trump is, I am convinced, is far less a danger to the Republic (in name only) than Killer Klinton and her Blood thirsty Killer Klown Klan",FAKE
"US Officials, FBI See No Link Between Trump and Russia But The Clinton Campaign Demands FBI Affirm Trump's Russia Ties. Be Sociable, Share! Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Sunrise, Fla. 
With the 2016 election campaign winding down, the Clinton campaign is ratcheting up demands for the FBI to publicly confirm the campaign’s allegations that Republican nominee Donald Trump is secretly in league with Russia. Sen. Harry Reid (D – NV) went so far as to claim the FBI has secret “explosive” evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government that it is withholding. FBI officials familiar with their investigations into the allegations, which the Clinton campaign started publicizing around the Democratic National Convention, say they’ve turned up nothing to connect Trump and Russia , leading FBI Director James Comey to decide against making any statements to that effect. 
The Clinton campaign has been making the allegations so long that they have taken to claiming “everyone knows” that they are true, and appears unsettled by the FBI’s refusal to sign off on the claims simply because they haven’t been able to find real evidence corroborating the story. 
The Trump campaign has repeatedly denied ties to Russia, but that didn’t stop Clinton from calling Trump a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin during the final presidential debate. The calls have grown since Friday’s FBI report to Congress about further Clinton emails being sought. 
With Clinton’s main campaign scandal growing in the waning weeks of the deal, some in her campaign have suggested that affirming Trump as secretly in league with the Russians would only be fair. Absent any evidence, however, it appears that won’t be happening. 
This article originally appeared on Antiwar.com. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"‘They Don’t Speak For Me’— Evangelical PhD SLAMS Religious Right Leaders Supporting Trump By Stephanie Kuklish   
Evangelical Christians have been major players in the 2016 elections with their unrelenting support of Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, but Alan Noble, Ph.D., is putting his foot down and letting the Religious Right know what they are doing is wrong. 
In a current op-ed for Vox , Noble takes to history, the Bible, and the way of the conservative to point out that somewhere in the recent past, Evangelicals have lost their sense of priority in the character of a man. When discussing the release of tapes where Trump was caught admitting to sexually assaulting women Noble stated: “Evangelicalism has been sharply divided over Trump, and so my hope was that this tape would finally persuade the remaining evangelical defenders of Trump to abandon him. But for the most part, that’s not what happened.” 
Just as we have seen numerous times in the media, while many Trump supporters were running in the other direction, there were still an enormous amount of influential conservatives battening down the hatches and riding through this storm, still defending the man. 
Men like Jerry Falwell Jr., Ben Carson, Tony Perkins, Mike Huckabee, and more , have either stayed steady with their support or have come back to the “Trump Side,” shortly after jumping ship, all taking the stance that America should focus less on character and more on policy. Noble discusses the Christian Conservative view this election season by saying : “Jalsevac makes explicit the logic of so many leaders on the religious right: Character is fundamentally private and only tangentially related the public work of policymaking and politics. Sin is still bad, but since we are all sinners, and since we are not electing a “pastor in chief,” what matters most is what kind of president the candidates would be. The real is the political. Everything else is just style.” 
Here is the kicker, though, the pushing off of character and focusing on policy way of thinking for the Christian Conservative was the complete opposite when former President Bill Clinton confessed to his indiscretions while in office. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a “ Resolution on the Moral Characters of Public Officials ,” after Clinton’s incident stating: “WHEREAS, Some journalists report that many Americans are willing to excuse or overlook immoral or illegal conduct by unrepentant public officials so long as economic prosperity prevails; and WHEREAS, Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment (1 Kings 16:30; Isaiah 5:18-25); and … Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That we, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 9-11, 1998, in Salt Lake City, Utah, affirm that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people when choosing public leaders; and … Be it finally RESOLVED, That we urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity, and the highest character.” 
Ultimately what this is saying is that if someone is placed in office with a severe lack of personal conviction, it can ultimately harm everyone involved; an entirely different viewpoint than the rhetoric they are putting forth about support for Donald Trump. And don’t be mistaken, this position was held and represented as late as 2015 when Mike Huckabee responded during an interview to the millennial viewpoint of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions by saying : “Probably not, for two reasons. One, they were infants when it all happened. And the second reason is that growing up in a moral climate in which people just don’t seem to care that much about other people’s lives. They don’t make the connection between personal character and public character. They don’t seem to think that there is a correlation. I think there is. I think if a person will lie to an individual, they will lie to a country. I think if a person is not honest with themselves, they’ll be dishonest with the voters. And so I do think character matters, I believe it always had. It doesn’t mean we elect perfect people. We don’t, we never have, we never will, but I do think that it matters that a person represents himself or herself with a level of authenticity and that doesn’t always happen Hugh, and I do think it’s one of the pitfalls of our current political environment.” Via Vox 
So while public figures like James Dobson endorse Trump with the, “We are electing a commander-in-chief not a theologian-in-chief,” he was damning the idea of not holding Bill Clinton responsible for his moral character. In 1998, while President of Focus on the Family , Dobson wrote : “As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world! Nevertheless, our people continue to say that the President is doing a good job even if they don’t respect him personally. Those two positions are fundamentally incompatible. In the Book of James the question is posed, “Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring” (James 3:11 NIV). The answer is no.” 
It seems to me the winds of the religious, political race have changed drastically and not to fit the idea that the Bible represents, but to satisfy lead religious bodies in their political views. As we are condemned for our lack of character in our everyday lives, Trump’s character is swept to the side as nothing more than a luxury for a political candidate. 
Featured Image Via The Daily Beast About Stephanie Kuklish 
I am a 30 something writer passionate about politics, the environment, human rights and pretty much everything that effects our everyday life. To stay on top of the topics I discuss, like and follow me at https://www.facebook.com/keeponwriting and https://facebook.com/progressivenomad . Connect",FAKE
"All but a handful of Detroit public schools were closed Monday as teachers — angry that the troubled district may not be able to pay them over the summer — staged a sickout.

Ninety-four of the district’s approximately 100 schools were closed, according to an announcement on the district’s Facebook page. More than 40,000 students attend the city’s schools.

Leaders of the Detroit Federation of Teachers learned over the weekend that the district would run out of emergency state funding at the end of June, according to the Detroit News.

[Rats, roaches, mold: Poor conditions lead to teacher sickout, closure of most Detroit schools]

That means that unless the state legislature passes a plan to rescue the system, Detroit Public Schools won’t be able to make payroll over the summer, leaving teachers unpaid for work they did during the school year.

Union officials said that teachers who receive their annual salary in 26 installments risk not being paid for any work they do after April 28.

“There’s a basic agreement in America: When you put in a day’s work, you’ll receive a day’s pay. DPS is breaking that deal,” Ivy Bailey, the union’s interim president, said in a statement. “Teachers want to be in the classroom giving children a chance to learn and reach their potential. Unfortunately, by refusing to guarantee that we will be paid for our work, DPS is effectively locking our members out of the classrooms.”

Teachers rallied at the school system’s headquarters Detroit on Monday morning to “protest the news that Detroit educators will not be paid for their work,” according to a news release.

On Monday evening, the union indicated that the sickout would extend for a second day on Tuesday. “We do not work for free and therefore we do not expect you to report to school tomorrow,” Bailey wrote to members.

The school system has a $515 million operating debt and a total debt that exceeds $3 billion.

Steven Rhodes, the system’s state-appointed emergency manager, warned state lawmakers in early March that the system would run out of cash April 8.

Lawmakers responded with $48.7 million in emergency funding, enough to keep the system afloat until June 30. The Senate passed a longer-term $715 million fix; the House is now debating that plan.

“I am confident that the Michigan Legislature understands the urgency of this situation and will act in a timely manner to ensure that operations of the school district continue uninterrupted,” Rhodes, a retired federal judge, said in a statement. “I am working everyday with policy makers in Lansing to move this legislation forward.”

Rhodes said that it was “unfortunate” that the union had called for a sickout, saying it was “counterproductive and detrimental.”

“I am on record as saying that I cannot in good conscience ask anyone to work without pay,” Rhodes said. “Wages that are owed to teachers should be paid. I understand the frustration and anger that our teachers feel. I am, however, confident that the legislature will support the request that will guarantee that teachers will receive the pay that is owed to them.”

Under Michigan law, teachers may not strike, but Detroit teachers have staged multiple sickouts in recent months to protest the deplorable conditions of the city’s school buildings.",REAL
"Tweet (Image via intoday.in) 
In an announcement which has shocked workers and family members of the Samajwadi party, when their senior most leader Mulayam Singh Yadav said, “Anyone from the Yadav family, who can understand clearly each and every word that I speak will be unanimously appointed as the next UP Chief Minister.” 
Mulayam Singh came to this decision after he realized that 90% of the party members nod blankly to his speeches and instructions without understanding a single word that he speaks. 
“It all started when Netaji realized that he always gave the same instructions to Shivpal, Akhilesh and Ram Gopal Yadav but they were understood differently by each of them each time. However all three of them would nod as if they had understood the same thing,” said a senior party member close to Mulayam Singh. “Obviously I myself don’t get half of his sentences, but I have become good at reading his lip movements,” he added. 
This is not the first time Mulayam Singh has been informed of it. As many as three decades ago, school teachers of Akhilesh Yadav had told Mulayam Singh that his son doesn’t listen to his father. While Mulayam mistook it for Akhilesh being a disobedient child, what the teachers actually meant was that Akhilesh hardly understands what his father speaks. 
According to sources, Mulayam Singh is currently conducting a test among family members to determine who comes closest in understanding his speech in order to accordingly finalize party positions. 
“To K!$@#$ Communal $Q#$ Q# %@bey @# #$$!@$ #$@#$@ Secular G#$#$%# @# UP, B bil #$Q$ $#$@#$$ Congrss P#!!$ #$@$ #$@ ByeP d#@# #$@$ erection,” said a family member when asked to repeat what Netaji said. 
More than half of the family members couldn’t come even remotely close. It was only Akhilesh and Shivpal Yadav who could clearly identify some of the key words from the sentence, which were ‘communal’, ‘secular’, ‘election’, ‘UP’ and ‘Congress’. 
Later, confusion turned to consternation when an outsider by name Amar Singh heard this family conversation and clearly recited what Netaji said, which was: “To keep Communal forces away and have a secular Government in UP, we will tie up with Congress party and not with BJP during next elections.” 
While Mulayam lauded Amar for the translation, Akhilesh got seriously pissed by the fact that a family conversation was heard by an outsider surreptitiously and launched into an emotional speech to his supporters. 
(The writer is the author of the book, ‘The Bogus Read’ ) Tweet About D-MAN 
A jack of many trades who now wants to master some. Born wisecracker who makes every effort to get the maximum out of life. He facebooks here and tweets here .",FAKE
"Next Prev Swipe left/right Unsurprisingly, this Ku Klux Klan leaflet has a spelling mistake The Ku Klux Klan are apparently handing out these leaflets in Louisiana ahead of the US election next week – sadly they’re so consumed with xenophobia they confused “polls” and “poles”. The Ku Klux Klan is distributing these packets in Sabine Parish, LA. Thankfully, they're asking voters go to the poles, not the polls. pic.twitter.com/4sFvFIQ7lB 
— Lamar White, Jr (@CenLamar) October 31, 2016",FAKE
"Will Trump pull a Brexit times ten? What would it take, beyond WikiLeaks, to bring the Clinton (cash) machine down? Will Hillary win and then declare WWIII against her Russia/Iran/Syria “axis of evil”? Will the Middle East totally explode? Will the pivot to Asia totally implode? Will China be ruling the world by 2025?
Amidst so many frenetic fragments of geopolitical reality precariously shored against our ruins, the temptation is irresistible to hark back to the late, great, deconstructionist master Jean Baudrillard. During the post-mod 1980s it was hip to be Baudrillardian to the core; his America, originally published in France in 1986, should still be read today as the definitive metaphysical/geological/cultural Instagram of Exceptionalistan.
By the late 1990s, at the end of the millennium, two years before 9/11 – that seminal “before and after” event – Baudrillard was already stressing how we live in a black market maze. Now, it’s a black market paroxysm.
Global multitudes are subjected to a black market of work – as in the deregulation of the official market; a black market of unemployment; a black market of financial speculation; a black market of misery and poverty; a black market of sex (as in prostitution); a black market of information (as in espionage and shadow wars); a black market of weapons; and even a black market of thinking.
Way beyond the late 20th century, in the 2010s what the West praises as “liberal democracy” – actually a neoliberal diktat – has virtually absorbed every ideological divergence, while leaving behind a heap of differences floating in some sort of trompe l’oeil effect. What’s left is a widespread, noxious condition; the pre-emptive prohibition of any critical thought, which has no way to express itself other than becoming clandestine (or finding the right internet niche).
Baudrillard already knew that the concept of “alter” – killed by conviviality – does not exist in the official market. So an “alter” black market also sprung up, co-opted by traffickers; that’s, for instance, the realm of racism, nativism and other forms of exclusion. Baudrillard already identified how a “contraband alter”, expressed by sects and every form of nationalism (nowadays, think about the spectrum between jihadism and extreme-right wing political parties) was bound to become more virulent in a society that is desperately intolerant, obsessed with regimentation, and totally homogenized.
There could be so much exhilaration inbuilt in life lived in a bewildering chimera cocktail of cultures, signs, differences and “values”; but then came the coupling of thinking with its exact IT replica – artificial intelligence, playing with the line of demarcation between human and non-human in the domain of thought.
The result, previewed by Baudrillard, was the secretion of a parapolitical society – with a sort of mafia controlling this secret form of generalized corruption (think the financial Masters of the Universe). Power is unable to fight this mafia – and that would be, on top of it, hypocritical, because the mafia itself emanates from power.
The end result is that what really matters today, anywhere, mostly tends to happen outside all official circuits; like in a social black market.
Is there any information “truth”?
Baudrillard showed how political economy is a massive machine, producing value, producing signs of wealth, but not wealth itself. The whole media/information system – still ruled by America – is a massive machine producing events as signs; exchangeable value in the universal market of ideology, the star system and catastrophism.
This abstraction of information works as in the economy – disgorging a coded material, deciphered in advance, and negotiable in terms of models, as much as the economy disgorges products negotiable in terms of price and value.
Since all merchandise, thanks to this abstraction of value, is exchangeable, then every event (or non-event) is also exchangeable, all replacing one another in the cultural market of information.
And that takes us to where we live now; Trans-History, and Trans-Politics – where events have really not happened, as they get lost in the vacuum of information (as much as the economy gets lost in the vacuum of speculation).
Thus this quintessential Baudrillard insight; if we consider History as a movie – and that’s what it is now – then the “truth” of information is no more than post-production synch, dubbing and subtitles.
Still, as we all keep an intense desire for devouring events, there is immense disappointment as well, because the content of information is desperately inferior to the means of broadcasting them. Call it a pathetic, universal contagion; people don’t know what to do about their sadness or enthusiasm – in parallel to our societies becoming theaters of the absurd where nothing has consequences.
No acts, deeds, crimes (the 2008 financial crisis), political events (the WikiLeaks emails showing virtually no distinction between the “nonprofit” Clinton cash machine, what’s private and what’s public, the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth, and the affairs of the state)
seem to have real consequences.
Immunity, impunity, corruption, speculation – we veer towards a state of zero responsibility (think Goldman Sachs). So, automatically, we yearn for an event of maximum consequence, a “fatal” event to repair that scandalous non-equivalence. Like a symbolic re-equilibrium of the scales of destiny.
So we dream of an amazing event – Trump winning the election? Hillary declaring WWIII? – that would free us from the tyranny of meaning and the constraint of always searching for the equivalence between effects and causes.
Shadowing the world
Just like Baudrillard, I got to see “deep” America in the 1980s and 1990s by driving across America.
So sooner or later one develops a metaphysical relationship with that ubiquitous warning, “Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.”
But what if they may also be further than they appear?
The contemporary instant event/celebrity culture deluge of images upon us; does it get us closer to a so-called “real” world that is in fact very far away from us? Or does it in fact keep the world at a distance – creating an artificial depth of field that protects us from the imminence of objects and the virtual danger they represent?
In parallel, we keep slouching towards a single future language – the language of algorithms, as designed across the Wall Street/Silicon Valley axis – that would represent a real anthropological catastrophe, just like the globalist/New World Order dream of One Thought and One Culture.
Languages are multiple and singular – by definition. If there were a single language, words would become univocal, regulating themselves in an autopilot of meaning. There would be no interplay – as in artificial languages there’s no interplay. Language would be just the meek appendix of a unified reality – the negative destiny of a languidly unified human species.
That’s where the American “dream” seems to be heading. It’s time to take the next exit ramp.
This piece first appeared Strategic-Culture .
 Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com .",FAKE
"According to a transition pool report, the media personalities are as follows: NBC News President Deborah Turness; CNN President Jeff Zucker and network...",REAL
"Secondary verification by google.com DKIM key Fwd: 2016 thoughts From:cheryl.mills@gmail.com To: robbymook@gmail.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, daplouffe@icloud.com Date: 2014-04-15 17:16 Subject: Fwd: 2016 thoughts Forwarded message From: Eric Schmidt <eschmidt@google.com> Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:56 PM Subject: 2016 thoughts To: Cheryl Mills <cheryl.mills@gmail.com> Cheryl, I have put together my thoughts on the campaign ideas and I have scheduled some meetings in the next few weeks for veterans of the campaign to tell me how to make these ideas better. This is simply a draft but do let me know if this is a helpful process for you all. Thanks !! Eric Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign Eric Schmidt April 2014 DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT Here are some comments and observations based on what we saw in the 2012 campaign. If we get started soon, we will be in a very strong position to execute well for 2016. 1. Size, Structure and Timing Lets assume a total budget of about $1.5Billion, with more than 5000 paid employees and million(s) of volunteers. The entire startup ceases operation four days after November 8, 2016. The structure includes a Chairman or Chairwoman who is the external face of the campaign and a President who is the executive in charge of objectives, measurements, systems and building and managing the organization. Every day matters as our end date does not change. An official campaign right after midterm elections and a preparatory team assembled now is best. 2. Location The campaign headquarters will have about a thousand people, mostly young and hardworking and enthusiastic. Its important to have a very large hiring pool (such as Chicago or NYC) from which to choose enthusiastic, smart and low paid permanent employees. DC is a poor choice as its full of distractions and interruptions. Moving the location from DC elsewhere guarantees visitors have taken the time to travel and to help. The key is a large population of talented people who are dying to work for you. Any outer borough of NYC, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston are all good examples of a large, blue state city to base in. Employees will relocate to participate in the campaign, and will find low cost temporary housing or live with campaign supporters on a donated basis. This worked well in Chicago and can work elsewhere. The computers will be in the cloud and most likely on Amazon Web services (AWS). All the campaign needs are portable computers, tablets and smart phones along with credit card readers. 3. The pieces of a Campaign a) The Field Its important to have strong field leadership, with autonomy and empowerment. Operations talent needs to build the offices, set up the systems, hire the people, and administer what is about 5000 people. Initial modeling will show heavy hiring in the key battleground states. There is plenty of time to set these functions up and build the human systems. The field is about organizing people, voter contact, and get out the vote programs. For organizing tools, build a simple way to link people and activities as a workflow and let the field manage the system, all cloud based. Build a simple organizing tool with a functioning back-end. Avoid deep integration as the benefits are not worth it. Build on the cloud. Organizing is really about sharing and linking people, and this tool would measure and track all of it. There are many other crucial early investments needed in the field: determining the precise list of battleground states, doing early polling to confirm initial biases, and maintaining and extending voter protection programs at the state level. b) The Voter Key is the development of a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them. In 2016 smart phones will be used to identify, meet, and update profiles on the voter. A dynamic volunteer can easily speak with a voter and, with their email or other digital handle, get the voter videos and other answers to areas they care about (""the benefits of ACA to you"" etc.) The scenario includes a volunteer on a walk list, encountering a potential voter, updating the records real time and deepening contact with the voter and the information we have to offer. c) Digital A large group of campaign employees will use digital marketing methods to connect to voters, to offer information, to use social networks to spread good news, and to raise money. Partners like Blue State Digital will do much of the fund raising. A key point is to convert BSD and other partners to pure cloud service offerings to handle the expected crush and load. d) Media (paid), (earned) and (social), and polling New tools should be developed to measure reach and impact of paid, earned and social media. The impact of press coverage should be measurable in reach and impact, and TV effectiveness measured by attention and other surveys. Build tools that measure the rate and spread of stories and rumors, and model how it works and who has the biggest impact. Tools can tell us about the origin of stories and the impact of any venue, person or theme. Connect polling into this in some way. Find a way to do polling online and not on phones. e) Analytics and data science and modeling, polling and resource optimization tools For each voter, a score is computed ranking probability of the right vote. Analytics can model demographics, social factors and many other attributes of the needed voters. Modeling will tell us what who we need to turn out and why, and studies of effectiveness will let us know what approaches work well. Machine intelligence across the data should identify the most important factors for turnout, and preference. It should be possible to link the voter records in Van with upcoming databases from companies like Comcast and others for media measurement purposes. The analytics tools can be built in house or partnered with a set of vendors. f) Core engineering, voter database and contact with voters online The database of voters (NGP Van) is a fine starting point for voter records and is maintained by the vendor (and needs to be converted to the cloud). The code developed for 2012 (Narwahl etc.) is unlikely to be used, and replaced by a model where the vendor data is kept in the Van database and intermediate databases are arranged with additional information for a voter. Quite a bit of software is to be developed to match digital identities with the actual voter file with high confidence. The key unit of the campaign is a ""voter"", and each and every record is viewable and updatable by volunteers in search of more accurate information. In the case where we can't identify the specific human, we can still have a partial digital voter id, for a person or ""probable-person"" with attributes that we can identify and use to target. As they respond we can eventually match to a registered voter in the main file. This digital key is eventually matched to a real person. The Rules Its important that all the player in the campaign work at cost and there be no special interests in the financing structure. This means that all vendors work at cost and there is a separate auditing function to ensure no one is profiting unfairly from the campaign. All investments and conflicts of interest would have to be publicly disclosed. The rules of the audit should include caps on individual salaries and no investor profits from the campaign function. (For example, this rule would apply to me.) The KEY things a) early build of an integrated development team and recognition that this is an entire system that has to be managed as such b) decisions to exclusively use cloud solutions for scalability, and choice of vendors and any software from 2012 that will be reused. c) the role of the smart phone in the hands of a volunteer. The smart phone manages the process, updates the database, informs the citizen, and allows fundraising and recruitment of volunteers (on android and iphone). d) early and continued focus of qualifying fundraising dollars to build the field, and build all the tools. Outside money will be plentiful and perfect for TV use. A smart media mix tool tells all we need to know about media placement, TV versus other media and digital media. Preview is disabled for emails bigger than 10KB. e-Highlighter",FAKE
"The number of middle and high school students using electronic cigarettes tripled between 2013 and 2014, according to government figures released Thursday, a startling increase that public health officials fear could reverse decades of efforts combating the scourge of smoking.

The use of e-cigarettes among teenagers has eclipsed the use of traditional cigarettes and all other tobacco products, a development that Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called “alarming” and “shocking.”

“What’s most surprising is how in­cred­ibly rapid the use of products other than cigarettes has increased,” Frieden said in an interview, adding that some e-cigarette smokers would undoubtedly go on to use traditional cigarettes. “It is subjecting another generation of our children to an addictive substance.”

The results, based on an annual survey of 22,000 students around the country and published Thursday by the CDC, detail a quickly evolving landscape of tobacco products that appeal to teenagers.

Anti-smoking advocates argue that the rise in the popularity of e-cigarettes stems in part from aggressive, largely unregulated marketing campaigns that Frieden said are “straight out of the playbook” of cigarette ads that targeted young people in earlier generations.

“These are the same images, the same themes and the same role models that the cigarette industry used 50 years ago,” said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “It’s the Marlboro Man reborn. It’s the Virginia Slims woman recreated, with the exact same effect. ... This is not an accident.”

But advocates of e-cigarettes -- small devices that heat up flavored, nicotine-laced liquid into a vapor that is inhaled -- say the worries expressed by public health officials are premature and not backed up by data.

Cynthia Cabrera, executive director of the Smoke-Free Alternatives Trade Association, an industry group, said her organization has long supported age restrictions and other measures to keep e-cigarettes out of the hands of minors. But at the same time, she said there’s no definitive evidence e-cigarettes are a “gateway” to using traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products. On the contrary, she said, many teens have tried e-cigarettes in the past already were smokers.

“We need to not lose perspective about the potential these products have to eliminate harm from combusted tobacco,” she said. “I suspect teens experiment with a lot of things. And I suspect anytime someone is not smoking a cigarette, that’s a good thing.”

“The CDC should really be jumping for joy at the fact that smoking rates are declining. This is a huge success,” added Michael Siegel, a professor and tobacco control specialist at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “Instead, they are using this as another opportunity to demonize e-cigarettes.”

Siegel said he agrees that minors shouldn’t have access to any tobacco product. But he said the CDC numbers suggest that rather than serving as a gateway to cigarette smoking, e-cigarette use might be diverting teens from traditional cigarettes, which still kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. “That’s a good thing,” he said.

While tobacco giants such as Lorillard and Altria have indeed purchased e-cigarette companies in recent years, Cabrera disputed that those marketing campaigns target underage smokers. And she said the bulk of e-cigarette marketing is still done by hundreds of small companies whose ads on the internet and other platforms target only adults.

“If you’re thinking this is Big Tobacco redux, that’s the wrong thinking,"" she said.

This much seems certain: Teens are experimenting as much as ever. Roughly a quarter of high school students and near 8 percent of middle school students still report using a tobacco product at least once during the past 30 days.

But between 2013 and 2014, the findings show, e-cigarette use among high school students had increased from 4.5 percent to 13.4 percent. Usage also more than tripled among middle school students, according to the findings. Only  among black students was another tobacco product, cigars, more popular than e-cigarettes, the CDC said.

During that same period, the use of hookahs — water pipes that are used to smoke specially made tobacco — roughly doubled for middle and high school students, also eclipsing the use of regular cigarettes.

[Seven things to know about e-cigarettes]

Meanwhile, use of conventional cigarettes sank to the lowest levels in years. According to the CDC, 9.2 percent of high school students and 2.5 percent of middle school students reported smoking a cigarette over the past month.

On the surface, that might seems like good news, given the hundreds of thousands of Americans that still die from smoking each year. And it might be. “The drop in cigarette use is historic, with enormous public health significance,” Myers said. But, he was quick to add, “the explosion of e-cigarette use among kids means these products are being taken up in record numbers with totally unknown long-term consequences that could potentially undermine all the progress we’ve made.”

Last April, the Food and Drug Administration announced that for the first time it would begin to regulate e-cigarettes, which has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States. The agency said its plan would force manufacturers to curb sales to minors, place health warning labels on their products and disclose the ingredients in e-cigarettes. The initial proposals stopped short of halting online sales of e-cigarettes, restricting television advertising or banning the use of candy and fruit flavorings that critics say are intended to appeal to young smokers.

A year later, the FDA has not finalized any new regulations involving e-cigarettes, though its top tobacco officials said in a statement Thursday the agency still plans to oversee the burgeoning market.

“In today’s rapidly evolving tobacco marketplace, the surge in youth use of novel products like e-cigarettes forces us to confront the reality that the progress we have made in reducing youth cigarette smoking rates is being threatened,” said Mitch Zeller, J.D., director of FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. “These staggering increases in such a short time underscore why FDA intends to regulate these additional products to protect public health.”

Myers said such action can't come soon enough.

""The failure of the FDA to move more quickly means we have an urgent crisis that needs to be addressed,"" he said. ""In the absence of strong governmental action, these numbers will only keep going up.""",REAL
"TUCSON, Ariz. — Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made a pair of spirited pitches here Friday night to address continuing gun violence and pass comprehensive immigration reform during a boisterous rally that drew an estimated 13,000 people to a city park.

In a departure from his usual stump speech, which focuses heavily on economic inequality, the senator from Vermont began his remarks by zeroing in on two issues that have been prominent in Arizona — and on which his positions have not always been as liberal as most others.

Sanders, who is heading into Tuesday’s first Democratic debate in a stronger position than most anyone anticipated, referenced two shootings Friday at campuses in Arizona and Texas. In Flagstaff, Ariz., a college freshman was taken into custody after he shot four people, killing one, near a residence hall at Northern Arizona University.

[Bernie Sanders says he is pulling together a plan to address gun violence]

Sanders offered his condolences and prayers, but then added: “We also know that we are tired of condolences, and we are tired of just prayers.”

“The truth of the matter is … the issue of gun violence is not going to be solved easily,” Sanders said, but he said that is no excuse not to seek common-sense solutions and to move the current debate beyond “yelling and demeaning” one another.

Sanders, who represents a state with a deep hunting tradition and little gun control, has a mixed record on the issue, including a vote in 1993 against the landmark Brady Bill. But he has pledged to develop a comprehensive package of reforms to stem violence, including stronger background checks for gun purchases and “a revolution” in the way the country treats mental illness.

[Bernie Sanders to oppose Obama’s nominee to lead the FDA]

On immigration, Sanders sought to connect with a racially mixed crowd in a state with a large Latino population by relaying the story of his father’s arrival in the United States from Poland at age 17 with little money and little ability to speak English.

“My family’s story is a story very similar to many people who are here tonight, and that story is the story of America,” Sanders said, calling it “a story rooted in family and fueled by hope.”

Sanders repeated calls he has made previously to provide legal protection for 11 million undocumented workers in the country and for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And if elected president, he said would take executive actions aimed at keeping families together.

“Our job is to bring families together, not tear them apart,” Sanders said.

Despite his inclusive tone, Sanders has in the past found himself at odds with immigration advocates at times, including a 2007 vote against a comprehensive immigration bill and voicing concerns that “open borders” are a threat to American jobs.

On Friday, he stressed his vote for a 2013 comprehensive immigration bill, and other aspects of his rally suggested a commitment to a path forward on the issue.

Among the speakers who took the stage before Sanders were 10-year-old Bob de la Rosa, who relayed to the audience that his mother had been deported and remains in Mexico.

“She tells me we are separated because she wants me to have a good education,” de la Rosa told a hushed crowd. “Kids like me need our families together.”

A mariachi band entertained the crowd gathered in the city park before Sanders took the stage at an outdoor performance center. Several audience members who sat on the stage behind Sanders held signs that spelled out “VIVA BERNIE.”

Sanders also picked up his first formal endorsement from a sitting member of Congress: Rep. Raul Grijalva, a liberal Democrat whose southern Arizona district that includes Tucson.

Grijalva  is co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Sanders helped co-found as a House member in 1991. Grijalva is also a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and in a position to help Sanders with outreach to Latino voters, one of the challenges confronting his campaign once the contest moves beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.

Grijalva told the crowd he considers Sanders a friend and shares his values.

“It’s way past time that we had a national campaign and a voice that speaks truth to power,” he said.

While the endorsement was a boost to Sanders, it also served as reminder of a big advantage that Hillary Rodham Clinton maintains in the Democratic race even as Sanders has gained or surpassed her in early state polling: More than 100 members of Congress have already endorsed Clinton.

In the nomination process, such party elites are more than just cheerleaders. Roughly one-fifth of the delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee are super delegates — elected officials and other party leaders who are not bound by voting in their states. And to this point, they’ve broken overwhelmingly in Clinton’s direction.",REAL
"Much about the 2016 campaign has bewildered pundits, but the rise and fall of Carly Fiorina fit a classic pattern.

Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?

Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina speaks at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, last October. The former business executive announced Wednesday that she had dropped out of the 2016 White House race.

Former tech executive Carly Fiorina quit the GOP presidential race on Wednesday following a disappointing showing in the New Hampshire primary, where she won only about 4 percent of the vote.

“While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them,” Ms. Fiorina said in a statement on her Facebook page.

What happened to her campaign? For a brief moment last fall Fiorina was a fast-rising star. Her crisp answers at the first undercard debate earned her a ticket to the main stage, where she shined.

She rocked Donald Trump with a sharp answer to his criticisms of her personal appearance – “I think women all over the country heard what Mr. Trump said,” she said during the debate, when questioned about the incident.

Briefly, she was a top tier candidate. In late September she was in third in polling averages, with around 12 percent of the vote.

But Fiorina never seemed to articulate a vision or distinguish her proposed policies from her rivals. She inveighed against established political elites but released little more than a simple three-page tax plan. Meanwhile, Trump was ramping up the rhetoric on immigration and sucking up vast amounts of media attention.

If Fiorina “had really come up with some interesting policy ideas based on her private sector experience she might have progressed as a candidate,” writes conservative Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin.

Fiorina also found herself the target of concerted attacks from Planned Parenthood and some liberals after her description of undercover videos dealing with the organization’s handling of fetal tissues proved to be exaggerated.

All these things took a toll and her time at the top of the polls proved brief. She dropped into the lower tier by the turn of the year and in the Iowa caucuses won only about 2 percent support.

In the end she was a classic boom-and-bust candidate, who is briefly discovered by voters due to some event, zooms up, is subjected to more intense scrutiny, and then collapses. It’s a pattern followed by such 2012 hopefuls as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain – and in 2016 by Ben Carson as well as Fiorina herself.",REAL
"Ted Cruz dominated the race for delegate seats at weekend Republican meetings nationwide, further positioning the senator from Texas to wrest the GOP presidential nomination from Donald Trump if the contest is decided on later ballots at the Republican National Convention.

In some instances, Cruz supporters won delegate seats in states that Trump won, meaning that in most cases they will be required to vote for the businessman on a first ballot. But if Trump fails to win the nomination in the first round, those Cruz supporters could switch to the senator on subsequent ballots.

The Trump campaign has assured supporters that it would begin performing better in such settings, but it still seems more focused on winning most of the remaining 15 contests through June and securing the 1,237 delegates needed before the Cleveland convention.

Trump still has a commanding lead in delegates — 845 compared with 559 for Cruz, according to the latest tally. That is likely to be padded on Tuesday, when Trump is poised to win primaries in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Given Cruz's struggles to find traction in ""Acela Primary"" states, he has shifted his focus to Indiana, which votes next month and is seen as the last best chance for the ""Stop Trump"" campaign to stop the front-runner.

[Can Clinton and Trump ride to big victories in next week’s ‘Acela primary’?]

Maine hosted the marquee weekend contest, in which Cruz won 19 of the 20 delegate seats up for grabs. The win sparked a feud with one of Trump's most senior Republican surrogates, Gov. Paul LePage.

The governor claimed that Cruz reneged on an agreement that would have permitted supporters of the three presidential candidates to fill the delegate seats the contenders won in the March caucus. That would have meant 12 seats for Cruz, nine for Trump and two for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But LePage said Cruz's team ""lied to us and broke the deal,"" adding that David Sawyer, a Cruz aide who was in the state helping the senator's supporters get elected, ""stabbed us in the back, reneged on the unity slate and betrayed the Maine people.""

""As we have seen throughout the country, Cruz’s national campaign is run by greedy political hooligans,"" he added in a state posted on Facebook. ""These are the same operatives in the Republican Establishment who worked for Mitt Romney to disenfranchise Maine delegates in 2012. They are using sneaky and deceitful operators like Sawyer to try to subvert the democratic process and take all 23 delegates. I can't stand by and watch as Cruz and the Republican Establishment forcibly overrule the votes of Mainers who chose Trump and Kasich.""

But Cruz aides said no agreement had been finalized.

""The guys in the state that helped win the caucus made the decision not to back [LePage's proposal] and put together their own slate,"" said a senior aide to Cruz who was not authorized to speak publicly about the dispute. ""These are the people that represent the interests of Maine, and we're going to stand with the grass-roots activists before we stand with establishment politicians like Govenor LePage.""

[Delegate tracker: The race to the Republican nomination]

Trump deployed former neurosurgeon Ben Carson to woo Maine Republicans, while Cruz sent former businesswoman Carly Fiorina in his absence. A Trump supporter won a delegate slot, while LePage will be one of the state's three at-large delegates.

Republicans also met Saturday at state conventions in Utah and Kentucky while party members met in congressional districts in Minnesota and South Carolina to pick their delegates.

In Utah, another state Cruz won overwhelmingly, 36 of the 37 available delegate seats were won by his supporters. His slate includes Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Mia Love. Three more seats will be awarded to state party leaders. Cruz gets all 40 votes on the first ballot.

Kentucky's GOP also formally selected 25 delegates, including Gov. Matt Bevin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul. There was less controversy at the convention in Lexington on Saturday, given that the state party controls the selection process. On the first ballot, the commonwealth's 46 delegates will go this way: Trump (17), Cruz (15), Kasich (seven) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has dropped out of the race but will also be awarded seven delegates. Delegates are free to vote as they choose on subsequent ballots.

In Minnesota, Republicans in three congressional districts elected Cruz supporters for each of the nine seats up for grabs. The state concludes its selection process next month. Rubio won the state, meaning that he will get 17 of Minnesota's votes on the first ballot, while Cruz will get 13 and Trump eight.

And Trump again failed to have his supporters win seats in South Carolina, a state he won overwhelmingly. Cruz grabbed a delegate in the 6th Congressional District, a mostly Democratic area. So did Kasich. The third position went to a publicly uncommitted delegate who privately supports Trump, according to Republicans familiar with the contest. Trump gets all 50 votes on the first ballot.

The arcane process of picking Republican delegates continues next weekend in Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Missouri and Virginia. The contests in Arizona and Virginia are expected to be most closely watched, given that Trump won the state but Cruz and other anti-Trump forces have recruited candidates to run for open seats.

On policies, Ted Cruz shifts his stance to suit a fractured GOP",REAL
"Understanding our own stories about race, and talking about them to one another, is absolutely essential if we are to become part of the larger pilgrimage to defeat racism in America. It is also a biblical story, and now a global story in which we play a central role. We all start with our own stories about race, so I will begin with mine.

Fifty years ago I was a teenager in Detroit. I took a job as a janitor at the Detroit Edison Company to earn money for college. There I met a young man named Butch who was also on the janitorial staff. But his money was going to support his family, because his father had died. We became friends. I was a young white man, and Butch was a young black man, and the more we talked, the more we wanted to keep talking.

When the company’s elevator operators were off, Butch and I would often be the fill-ins. When you operated elevators, the law required you to take breaks in the morning and in the afternoon. On my breaks, I’d go into Butch’s elevator to ride up and down and talk with him. On his breaks, Butch came to ride and talk with me. Those conversations changed the way I saw Detroit, my country, and my life. Butch and I had both grown up in Detroit, but I began to realize that we had lived in two different countries—in the same city.

When Butch invited me to come to his home one night for dinner and meet his family, I said yes without even thinking about it. In the 1960s, whites from the suburbs, like me, didn’t travel at night into the city, where the African Americans lived. I had to get directions from Butch. When I arrived, his younger siblings quickly jumped into my lap with big smiles on their faces, but the older ones hung back and looked at me more suspiciously. Later, I understood that the longer blacks lived in Detroit, the more negative experiences they had with white people.

Butch was very political, and even becoming militant—he always carried a book he was reading, such as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, stuffed into the back pocket of his khaki janitor’s uniform—but his mom certainly wasn’t. She was much like my own mother, focused on her kids and worried that her son’s ideas would get him into trouble.

As we talked through the evening about life in Detroit, Butch’s mom told me about the experiences all the men in her family—her father, her brothers, her husband, and her sons—had with the Detroit police. Then she said something I will never forget as long as I live. “So I tell all of my children,” she said, “if you are ever lost and can’t find your way back home, and you see a policeman, quickly duck behind a building or down a stairwell. When the policeman is gone, come out and find your own way back home.” As Butch’s mother said that to me, my own mother’s words rang in my head. My mom told all of her five kids, “If you are ever lost and can’t find your way home, look for a policeman. The policeman is your friend. He will take care of you and bring you safely home.” Butch and I were becoming friends. And I remember his mother’s advice to her children as vividly today as I heard those words fifty years ago.

Five decades ago, revelations about race in my hometown turned my life upside down—and turned me in a different direction. Encounters with black Detroit set me on a new path, on which I am still walking. My own white church ignored and denied the problem of race. People there didn’t want to talk about the questions that were coming up in my head and heart—questions that suggested something very big was wrong about my city and my country.

As a teenager, I was listening to my city, reading the newspapers, having conversations with people. I wondered why life in black Detroit seemed so different from life in the white Detroit suburbs. I didn’t know any hungry people or dads without jobs, and I didn’t have any family members who had ever been in jail. Why were all these things happening in the city? Weren’t there black churches in the city too? Why had we never visited them or had them come to visit us? Who was this minister in the south named King, and what was he up to? Nobody in my white world wanted to talk about it—any of it.

All of this drew me into the city to find answers to questions that nobody wanted to talk about at home. When I got my driver’s license at age sixteen, I would drive into the city and just walk around, looking and learning. I took jobs in downtown Detroit, working side by side with black men, and I tried to listen to them. That’s how I met Butch and many young men like him who had grown up in an entirely different city from me—just a few miles away.

In Detroit, I found the answers I was looking for, and I made new friends. I also met the black churches, which warmly took in a young white boy with so many questions and patiently explained the answers. When I came back to my white church with new ideas, new friends, and more questions, the response was painfully clear. An elder in my white church said to me one night, “Son, you’ve got to understand: Christianity has nothing to do with racism; that’s political, and our faith is personal.”

That conversation had a dramatic effect on me; it was a real conversion experience, but one that took me out of the church. That was the night that I left the church I had been raised in and the faith that had raised me—left it in my head and my heart. And my church was glad to see me go.

During my student years I joined the civil rights and antiwar movements of my generation and left faith behind. But that conversation with the church elder was indeed “converting,” because it led me to the people who would later bring me back to my Christian faith—“the least of these” whom Jesus talks about in Matthew 25, which would ultimately become my conversion text.

How we treat the poorest and most vulnerable, Jesus instructs us in that Gospel passage, is how we treat him: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (v. 40). My white church had missed that fundamental gospel message and, in doing so, had missed where to find the Jesus it talked so much about. My church, like so many white churches, talked about Jesus all the time, but its isolated social and racial geography kept it from really knowing him.

At the same time, black churches were leading our nation to a new place. Their more holistic vision of the gospel was transforming my understanding of faith, and my relationship to the churches was forever changed.

I had to leave my white home church to finally discover Christ himself and come back to my faith. In doing so, I discovered something that has shaped the rest of my life: I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet. What I discovered by driving from the white suburbs to the city of Detroit every day, and going into neighborhoods and homes like Butch’s, were some truths about America that the majority culture didn’t want to talk about—truths that are always more clearly seen from the bottom of a society than from the top. This different perspective continues to change me, and Matthew 25 continues to be my conversion passage.

As a teenager, I didn’t have the words to explain what happened to me that night with my church elder, but I found them later: God is always personal, but never private. Trying to understand the public meaning of faith has been my vocation ever since. How that personal and public gospel can overcome the remaining agendas of racism in America is the subject of this book.

Much Has Changed, but Much Still Hasn’t

A half century later, much has changed. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the black churches of America led a civil rights movement that changed the country and impacted the world. The historic Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Black elected officials moved into office around the country for the first time since Reconstruction. And Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States and reelected four years later. African Americans have achieved much in every area of American society, from law and medicine to business and labor, from education and civil service to entertainment, sports, and, always, religion and human rights. A new generation, of all races, is more ready for a diverse American society than any generation has ever been.

But much still hasn’t changed. Too many African Americans have been left behind without good education, jobs, homes, and families—and these factors are all connected. Perhaps most visibly and dramatically, the treatment of black men by police and a still-racialized criminal justice system in America became a painful and controversial national issue over the last few years, making visible what has been true for decades. The cases of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri;

Eric Garner in New York; Tamir Rice in Cleveland; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, along with countless other black men whose names didn’t receive national attention, have provoked a raw and angry racial debate in our nation. As I finish the final edits on this book, yet another story has drawn national attention, this time involving a young black woman named Sandra Bland, who was on her way to take a new job at Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater in Texas, until she was arrested in a routine traffic stop and died three days later in police custody.

The facts in specific cases are often in great dispute. But the reality that young black men and women are treated differently than are young white men and women by our law enforcement system is beyond dispute. A half century after my relationship with my friend Butch’s family, there is still not equal treatment under the law for black and white Americans. And that is the great moral and religious failure we must now address.

I feel a deep sadness at recent revelations that show how deep our racial divides still go. The stories of young black men, in particular, are still so different from the stories of my young white sons. As a dad who is also a person of faith, I believe that is an unacceptable wrong it is time to right.

All the black parents I have ever spoken to have had “the talk” with their sons and daughters. “The talk” is a conversation about how to behave and not to behave with police—“Keep your hands open and out in front of you, don’t make any sudden movements, shut your mouth, be respectful, say ‘sir,’” as my friend and regular cab driver, Chester Spencer, said he told his son. “The talk” is about what to do and say (and what not to do and say) when you find yourself in the presence of a police officer with a gun.

White parents don’t have to have this talk with their kids. That’s a radical difference between the experiences of black and white parents in America. Why do we continue to accept that? As a Little League baseball coach, I know that all the parents of the black kids I have coached have had the talk, while none of the white parents have had such conversations with their children. And most white parents don’t have a clue about those talks between their children’s black teammates and their parents.

It’s important now that we white people begin to understand “the talk.” Even white couples who have adopted black sons and daughters have that same conversation with their kids. As a white dad, that is a talk I don’t need to have with my two white sons, Luke and Jack, who are now ages sixteen and twelve. The fact that most white parents don’t know that this talk is even occurring is a big problem. Not being able to trust the law enforcement in your community—especially in relationship to our own children—is a terrible burden to bear. The stark difference in the way young black men and women are treated by police and our criminal justice system compared to white children is a deeply personal and undeniable structural issue for every black family in American society. For many white Americans, the tragic deaths of young black men at the hands of white police officers are “unfortunate incidents” that can be explained away. But for most black families, they are indicative of systems they have lived with their entire lives. Therein lies the fundamental difference: a radical contrast in experience and, therefore, perspective. If the mistreatment of young black men by law enforcement officials is true, if black lives are worth less in our criminal justice system than white lives are, then this is a fundamental and unacceptable wrong that it is time to correct. I know it is true. The overwhelming evidence on the operations of our criminal justice system proves it is true, even beyond the individual facts of particular cases. Believing that black experience is different from white experience is the beginning of changing white attitudes and perspectives. How can we get to real justice if white people don’t hear, understand, and, finally, believe the real-life experience of black people? Families have to listen to other families. If white children were treated in the ways that black children are, it would not be acceptable to white parents; so the mistreatment of black children must also become unacceptable to those of us who are white dads and moms. The old talk is still necessary—and it’s time to start talking together. If we do, I believe we can change the underlying patterns of personal and social prejudice that hold up the larger structural injustices in our society. The best way to change that old talk that black parents have with their children is to start a new talk between white and black parents. These conversations will make people uncomfortable, and they should. White parents should ask their black friends who are parents whether they have had “the talk” with their children. What did they say? What did their children say? How did it feel for them to have that conversation with their children? What’s it like not to be able to trust law enforcement in your own community? Pay attention, read, listen. If you are white and have African American colleagues at work or friends at your church, ask them to talk with you about this, to tell you their stories—then listen. If you don’t have any black people or other people of color in your church, it’s time to ask why. Reach out, and ask your pastor to reach out, to black and Latino churches in your community. We must find safe and authentic ways to hear one another’s stories across the racial boundaries that insulate and separate us from others. Reach out sensitively to black parents at your children’s schools. Ask to hear their stories. Talk to the black parents of your children’s teammates if they play a sport. Or maybe it’s time to realize that not having children of color at your children’s school or on their teams is a big part of the problem. Parents talking to parents and hearing one another’s stories may be one of the most important ways of moving forward in the church and in the nation. But white Americans must also take responsibility for their self-education and preparation before these talks so as to not put the whole burden of their learning on their colleagues and friends of color. White people need to stop talking so much—stop defending the systems that protect and serve us and stop saying, “I’m not a racist.” If white people turn a blind eye to systems that are racially biased, we can’t be absolved from the sin of racism. Listen to the people the criminal justice system fails to serve and protect; try to see the world as they do. Loving our neighbors means identifying with their suffering, meeting them in it, and working together to change it. And, for those of us who are parents, loving our neighbors means loving other people’s kids as much as we love our own. To put this in a religious context: overcoming the divisions of race has been central to the church since its beginning, and the dynamic diversity of the body of Christ is one of the most powerful forces in the global church. Our Christian faith stands fundamentally opposed to racism in all its forms, which contradict the good news of the gospel. The ultimate answer to the question of race is our identity as children of God, which we so easily forget applies to all of us. And the political and economic problems of race are ultimately rooted in a theological problem. The churches have too often “baptized” us into our racial divisions, instead of understanding how our authentic baptism unites us above and beyond our racial identities. Do we believe what we say about the unity of “the body of Christ” or not? The New Testament speaks of the church as one body with many members. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . For the body does not consist of one member but of many. . . . As it is, there are many parts, yet one body . . . that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Cor. 12:12, 14, 20, 25–26 RSV) Another version of 1 Corinthians 12:26 reads, “If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts share its suffering” (GW). What would it mean to share in the suffering of our brothers and sisters of color who are subjected to a racialized criminal justice system? So let’s be honest. As I said in the introduction to this book, if white Christians in America were ready to act more Christian than white when it comes to race, black parents would be less fearful for their children. Racial healing is a commitment at the heart of the gospel. If we say we belong to Christ, that mission of reconciliation is ours too. What does racial healing and reconciliation mean in the face of America’s racial divide over policing and the criminal justice system? Churches, in particular, can offer leadership in navigating us through these difficult issues. The United States has the most racial diversity of any country in the world. This diversity is essential to our greatness, but it has also given us a history of tension and conflict. It has always been the resolving and, ultimately, the reconciling of those tensions that makes us “a more perfect union.” However, that cannot happen when we ignore, deny, or suppress our racial history and journey; it can occur only when we talk about it, engage it, embrace it, and be ready to be transformed by it. Ironically and tragically, American diversity began with acts of violent racial oppression that I am calling “America’s original sin”—the theft of land from Indigenous people who were either killed or removed and the enslavement of millions of Africans who became America’s greatest economic resource—in building a new nation. The theft of land and the violent exploitation of labor were embedded in America’s origins. Later immigration of other racial minorities was also driven—at least in part—by the need for more cheap labor. Therefore, our original racial diversity was a product of appalling human oppression based on greed. Many people have come to America, involuntarily in chains or voluntarily in the hope of a better life. And our great diversity is the key to our brightest and most transforming future. Indeed, it has already been one of America’s greatest contributions to the world. I believe that most police are good cops, but it would take more than a few “bad apples” to produce all the stories that almost every black person in America has about their experience with the police. Those stories are about a system, a culture, old structures and habits, and continuing racial prejudice, and how the universal but complex relationship between poverty and crime is made worse by racism. All of that can and must change with reforms that begin with better training and transparency and more independent prosecution in incidents of lethal police violence—and end with making police more relational and accountable to the diverse communities they serve. But underneath the flaws and injustices of the criminal justice system is our unfinished business of challenging and ending racism, an agenda that is not finished and never will be. We are not now, nor will we ever be, a “postracial” society. We are instead a society on a journey toward embracing our ever-greater and richer diversity, which is the American story. The path forward is the constant renewal of our nation’s ideal of the equality of all our citizens under the law—which makes the American promise so compelling, even though it is still so far from being fulfilled. Our highest and most inspirational points as a nation have been when we have overcome our racial prejudices; our lowest and ugliest points have been when we have succumbed to them. In 2013, Time magazine did a cover story on the fiftieth anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech. In it, Time rightly said that Martin Luther King Jr. is now understood to be a “father” of our nation because he helped shape its course as much as the founding fathers did. King and the movement he led opened a new door of opportunity for the future of America. But as we are becoming, for the first time, a country with no single racial majority—having been from our beginnings a white-majority nation—we stand at another door, which many white Americans are still very fearful of passing through. Race is woven throughout the American story and each of our own stories. All of our stories can help to change the racial story of America. I hope you will join me in this hard but critical—and ultimately transforming—conversation. Only by telling the truth about our history and genuinely repenting of its sins, which still linger, can we find the true road to justice and reconciliation. Excerpted from “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America” by Jim Wallis. Copyright © 2016 by Jim Wallis. Excerpted by permission of Brazos Press.",REAL
"But then the sobering realization sets in: these are elected members of perhaps most prestigious governing body in the world.

Let this sink in for a moment: each of these dolts is chosen by voters to be one of 535 elites who are tasked with authoring and voting on legislation that impacts the entire country and beyond. Think about that. Louie Gohmert, who once said the “wall of separation” between church and state is “a one way wall,” whatever the hell that means, gets to vote on laws that could potentially and irreversibly alter the course of your life.

Our only possible defense against being utterly confounded and horrified by the power granted to men and women who have no business wielding such power, is to laugh at their flaming stupidity. Otherwise, it’d be way too easy lapse into inextricable despair and, in some cases, moron-induced alcoholism.

In spite of the rapid dumbing-down of the GOP (see also Mr. Trump), they continue to churn out more dummies.

Enter Kevin McCarthy. The Bakersfield, California Republican is the most likely conservative white-guy to ascend into John Boehner’s post as Speaker of the House. And he shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near Congress, much less a leadership post.

By now, we’re all aware of McCarthy’s admission that the congressional select committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks is almost exclusively designed to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations.

They say gaffes are merely the truths spoken out loud. This was certainly the case with McCarthy. By the way, we should underscore at this point how McCarthy isn’t just another ambitious member of Congress. He’s the House Majority Leader. So, yes, the House Majority Leader accidentally spilled the beans on one of the longest running scams in congressional history — one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer money since Ken Starr’s probe into President Clinton’s pants-parties.

Either McCarthy is incapable of reading, or he has the worst speech-writing staff in the history of American politics — and that includes Sarah Palin’s self-authored Patriotic Mad Libs. Three days after Boehner announced his resignation from Congress, McCarthy was propped up for a foreign policy speech before the John Hay Initiative. The ostensible goal was to burnish McCarthy’s political heft, but the exact opposite happened and, frankly, even the dumbest Republicans ought to be embarrassed to caucus with this idiot.

Here are some highlights:

War of radical Islam? “On” or “against” makes more sense, of course. And shouldn’t it be “lives” and not “life?” Honestly, the rest of the quotes will make this passage seem comparatively Shakespearean.

There’s no such phrase as “stem a flow.” There’s something called “stemflow.” One can also stem the flow of something, which is possibly what he meant. But “politically strategy” is just ridiculous.

“We have isolated Israel, while bolding places like Iran.” “The absence of leadership over the past six years has had a horrific consequences all across the globe.” Was anyone fired for this? How the hell is he still a contender for Speaker? “In the past few years alone, I have visited Poland, Hungria, Estonia, Russia and Georgia…” Hungria. Which is north of Freedonia and adjacent to that fake island where Balki from “Perfect Strangers” came from. “It defies belief that the president would allow the ban on Iranian oil exports to be lifted. And also stand by while Russia blackmails an entire continent, all the while keeping the place of the band on America.” I have no idea what any of that means. Which continent? Let’s get real here: we should amend the Constitution so that when any elected politician mutilates the English language this badly, their desk chair turns into an ejector-seat that summarily launches them out of Congress. Let’s get on this now before it’s too late. “We don’t have the same as difficult decision that this White House is managing the decline and putting us in tough decisions for the future.” To be fair, gaffes are part of being a public figure. Spend enough time in front of a microphone and weird crap will inevitably fall out. However, a “stem a flow” of gaffes like this is inexcusable for a leader who’s stepping into an office that’s two heartbeats away from the presidency. Again, was it his speechwriter? Was he unable to read the prepared remarks? Why was he incapable of correcting the remarks on-the-fly? Was he having a stroke? Even the party of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin should, in a sane world, stand up and in a unified voice block this nincompoop from becoming Speaker. They won’t, of course, and Boehner will likely hand his gavel over to the guy who, with a straight face, said he visited a place called “Hungria.” The good news, on the other hand, is that we’ll all have another GOP doofus to kick around for a while. Silver linings, etc. Ever since Karl Rove and the Bush administration systematically altered the political landscape making it perfectly acceptable to be completely incompetent and still get re-elected by low-information voters who think politicians shouldn’t be any smarter than the people who elect them: we’ve mostly settled for idiots. Sadly, the demystification of the presidency and electoral politics has convinced us that anyone can hold these jobs and that leaders should be “just like us.” Sorry, but the guy you might want to have a beer with shouldn’t control the nuclear launch codes or the destiny of the free world. We should demand leaders who are devastatingly smart, engaged, disciplined, centered and intellectually curious. We should be gravitationally drawn to leaders with impeccable schooling and robust speaking skills. The salient question is this: Why don’t Republicans want the same? Why are they so willing to settle for feckless trolls like Donald Trump or marble-mouthed dilettantes like Kevin McCarthy? It might be somewhat acceptable if they actually took responsibility for putting us all in tough decisions for the future, but the party of personal responsibility will never do that. And it’s hurting America.",REAL
"[Kp note: started writing on 10-29, but posted on 10-30, so I changed the date in the title.] 
Not sure what those “things” are yet, but I’m sure they’ll come. 
There’s a lot of “something” going on today, at least within me. There was a period of time today when I felt I was walking around in another dimension… definitely not here , fully, at least, and more like in a “dream” or “transparent” type of shape. It actually felt very pleasant, and very much more “at home” than living upon/in this 3D-4D-whatever type physical “world” thing. 
I have “stuff” to do, as I walk and move and BE upon this planet… even though I know I AM a BE ing of Light, yet I am here in the physical body, and I (apparently) have accepted that and know I have “physical type” areas in which to “work” (lots of quote marks in there). 
This blog will very likely always be a secondary part of my expression here, however, as my DOing and BEing primarily centers on the “Energy work” I feel is mine to do. It is particularly significant that I am in Hawai’i, formerly known as Lemuria, and performing most of the “Energy missions” over here. Somehow the islands feel like fingers of my own hand… and that has been true ever since I first arrived. 
I’m not trying to “teach” anything here. Just share the “sense” I have about all this stuff… from my viewpoint… no one else’s. 
So why am I writing this particular post? Well, as always, I felt an urgent movement to do so. And I presume I’ll be following or listening to that “movement” for my entire experience here on this planet. 
That is all for now. 
Aloha, Kp",FAKE
"Senior Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and her lawyer walked out of a recent interview with the FBI about Clinton's private email system after an investigator asked a question Mills believed to be off limits, according to a published report.

The Washington Post said that Mills and her lawyer, Beth Wilkinson, returned to the interview room after a brief absence. However, the Post reported that Mills and Wilkinson asked for breaks during the interview to confer more than once.

According to the paper, the FBI investigator's questions that caused Mills and Wilkinson to walk out were related to the procedure used to produce emails for possible public release by the State Department. Mills ultimately did not answer questions about it because her attorney and Justice Department prosecutors deemed it confidential under attorney-client privilege.

The FBI is currently investigating possible gross mishandling of classified information and Clinton's use of an unsecured personal account exclusively for government business. Investigators have already interviewed two of Clinton's top aides, Mills and Huma Abedin, and hope to be able to interview Clinton herself as they wrap up the case.

Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, told CBS' ""Face the Nation"" Sunday that she had not yet been contacted by the FBI to arrange an interview.

On Tuesday, the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch said it had obtained emails showing that a top Clinton political aide pushed the State Department to hire Bryan Pagliano, who helped manage Clinton's personal email server.

The emails show that State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, a key figure in the Benghazi investigation, was involved in Pagliano's hire. The emails also appear to show members of the State Department's IT division questioning why Pagliano, a political appointee who had worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, would be assigned to that office.

""[Kennedy] specifically said we didn't need to be [political appointees], but it sure sounds like we do,"" one email reads.

In court documents made public Monday, the State Department said it could not find any emails sent to or received by Pagliano during Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, which lasted between 2009 and 2013.

Click for more from The Washington Post.",REAL
"Media skeptic 'America Has Lost' in the Philippines as Duterte Calls for Alliance with Russia and China 
'Maybe I will also go to Russia and talk to Putin, and tell him there are three of us against the world - China, Philippines, and Russia'   Strategic Culture Foundation 
«Your honors, in this venue I announce my separation from the United States… both in military and economics also». 
Thus Philippines President Rodrigo «The Punisher» Duterte unleashed a geopolitical earthquake encompassing Eurasia and reverberating all across the Pacific Ocean. 
And talk about choosing his venue with aplomb; right in the heart of the Rising Dragon, no less. 
Capping his state visit to Beijing, Duterte then coined the mantra – pregnant with overtones - that will keep ringing all across the global South; «America has lost». 
And if that was not enough, he announced a new alliance – Philippines, China and Russia – is about to emerge; «there are three of us against the world». 
Predictably, the Beltway establishment in the «indispensable nation» went bananas, reacting as «puzzled» or in outright anger, dispersing the usual expletives on the «crude populist», «unhinged leader» . 
The bottom line is that it takes a lot of balls for the leader of a poor, developing country, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to openly defy the hyperpower. Yet what Duterte is gaming at is pure realpolitik; if he prevails, he will be able to deftly play the US against China to the benefit of Filipino interests. 
«The springtime of our relationship» 
It did start with a bang; during Duterte’s China visit, Manila inked no less than $13 billion in deals with Beijing – from trade and investment to drug control, maritime security and infrastructure. 
Beijing pulled out all stops to make Duterte feel welcomed. 
President Xi Jinping suggested Manila and Beijing should «temporarily put aside» the intractable South China Sea disputes and learn from the «political wisdom» of history – as in give space to diplomatic talks. After all, the two peoples were «blood-linked brothers». 
Duterte replied in kind; «Even as we arrive in Beijing close to winter, this is the springtime of our relationship,» he told Xi at the Great Hall of the People. 
China is already the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner, behind Japan, the US and Singapore. Filipino exports to these three are at roughly 42.7 percent of the total, compared to 22.1 to China / Hong Kong. Imports from China are roughly 16.1 percent of the total. Even as trade with China is bound to rise, what really matters for Duterte is massive Chinese infrastructure investment. 
What this will mean in practice is indeed ground-breaking; the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will definitely be involved in Philippine economic development; Manila will be more involved in promoting smooth China-ASEAN relations in all sorts of regional issues (it takes the rotating chair of ASEAN in 2017); and the Philippines will be more integrated in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). 
Three strikes; no wonder the US is out. And there’s even a fourth strike, embedded in Duterte’s promise that 
he will soon end military cooperation with the US, despite the opposition of part of the Filipino armed forces. 
Watch the First Island Chain 
The build-up had already been dramatic enough. On the eve of his meeting with Xi, talking to members of the Filipino community in Beijing, Duterte said, «it’s time to say goodbye» to the US; «I will not ask but if they (the Chinese) offer and if they’ll ask me, do you need this aid? [I will say] Of course, we are very poor». 
Then the clincher; «I will not go to America anymore … We will just be insulted there». 
The US was the colonial power in the Philippines from 1899 to 1942. Hollywood permeates the collective unconscious. English is the lingua franca – side by side with tagalog. But the tentacles of Uncle Sam’s «protection» racket are not exactly welcomed. Two of the largest components of the US Empire of Bases were located for decades in the Philippines; Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. 
Clark, occupying 230 square miles, with 15,000 people, was busy to death during the Vietnam War – the main hub for men and hardware in and out of Saigon. Then it turned into one of those Pentagon «forward operating» HQs. Subic, occupying 260 square miles, was as busy as Clark. It was the forward operating base for the US 7th Fleet. 
Already in 1987, before the end of the Cold War, the RAND corporation was alarmed by the loss of both bases; that would be «devastating for regional security». Devastating» in the – mythical - sense of «defending the interests of ASEAN» and the «security of the sea-lanes». 
Translation; the Pentagon and the US Navy would lose a key instrument of pressure over ASEAN, as protecting the «security of the sea-lanes» was always the key justification for those bases. 
And lose they eventually did; Clark was closed down in November 1991, and Subic in November 199 
It took years for China to sense an opening – and profit from it; after all during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the absolute priority was breakneck speed internal development. But then Beijing did the math; no more US bases opened untold vistas as far as the First Island Chain is concerned. 
The First Island Chain is a product, over millennia, of the fabulous tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire; a chain of islands running from southern Japan in the north to Borneo in the south. For Beijing, they work as a sort of shield for the Chinese eastern seaboard; if this chain is secure, Asia is secure. 
For all practical purposes, Beijing considers the First Island Chain as a non-negotiable Western Pacific demarcation zone – ideally with no foreign (as in US) interference. The South China Sea – which in parts is characterized by Manila as the Western Philippine Sea - is inside the First Island Chain. So to really secure the First Island Chain, the South China Sea must be free of foreign interference. 
And here we are plunged at the heart of arguably the key 21st century hotspot in Asian geopolitics – the main reason for the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia. 
The US Navy so far counted on the Philippines to oppose the proverbial, hyped up «Chinese aggression» in the South China and East China seas. The neocon/neoliberalcon industrial-military complex fury against «unhinged» Duterte’s game-changer is that containing China and ruling over the First Island Chain has been at the core of US naval strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. 
Beijing, meanwhile, will have all the time needed to polish its strategic environment. This has nothing to do with «freedom of navigation» and protecting sea-lanes; everyone needs South China Sea cross-trade. It’s all about China - perhaps within the next ten years - being able to deny «access» to the US Navy in the South China Sea and inside the First Island Chain. 
Duterte’s game-changing «America has lost» is just a new salvo in arguably the key 21st century geopolitical thriller. A Supreme Court justice in Manila, for instance, has warned Duterte that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, he could be impeached. That won’t happen; Duterte wants loads of Chinese trade and investment, not abdicate from sovereignty. He’d rather be ready to confront being demonized by the hyperpower as much as the late Hugo Chavez was in his heyday.",FAKE
"Mike Ramos and Kevin Cooper: Who tells the truth?(image by public domain) License DMCA San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos obtained the controversial capital conviction of Kevin Cooper, whose ""clemency"" petition to Governor Jerry Brown gravely puts at issue the integrity of Ramos' office. Already campaigning to be the state's Attorney General in 2018, Ramos speaks out for Proposition 66, which promises to accelerate the death penalty. Ramos attacks opponents of the death penalty as deceptive. However, recognizing that the main problem is the California Supreme Court's automatic appeal bottleneck, Ramos at best carelessly misrepresents that Proposition 66 redirects first appeals to the courts of appeal. 
This article presents excerpts concerning Kevin Cooper's case from the first part of an in-progress two-part paper, California's Death Penalty: People v. Masters v. The California Supreme Court's Carefulness Con . Earlier excerpts are presented in my OEN article, California's Death Penalty: The California Supreme Court's Carefulness Con . A further article will provide an in-depth presentation of People v. Masters , 62 Cal.4 th 1019 (2016). 
If California's death penalty is not repealed in November by Proposition 62, next up on California's ready-to-kill list (now comprising about 12 inmates) is Kevin Cooper . In 2009, by a vote of 16-11, an en banc Ninth Circuit panel let stand Cooper's death sentence. However, in a voluminous opinion , [1] beginning with the statement that ""[t]he State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,"" five of the dissenters passionately protested that the district court had not complied with the circuit's prior injunction to have a conclusive blood test performed. 
To prove family-murdered-by-hatchet charges, the state introduced a T-shirt stained with Cooper's blood (plus other suspect evidence, such as mysteriously materialized cigarette butts). Cooper protested that the blood stain must have been added by the prosecution, using a sample kept in a test tube. When checked, the test tube was full, but had apparently been tampered with. Cooper claimed that the tube must have been topped up with someone else's blood. Sure enough, the blood of two people was found in the tube. In due course, the Ninth Circuit enjoined the federal district court to have the T-shirt stain tested for preservative, so as to conclusively determine whether it had come from the sample. The laboratory duly reported that the stain contained preservative. However, the district court then allowed the laboratory to reattribute its finding to likely laboratory contamination, without requiring a retest . [2] - Advertisement - 
Besides such apparent fabrications, there were plain suppressions. Investigators paid no heed to witnesses who had seen three white people, at least one blood-stained, fleeing the scene in the primary victim's car. One of them had lost a T-shirt and a hatchet--his blood-stained pants were incinerated by the police. See From FBI Boss to Death Penalty Foe, Tom Parker's Quest to Free a Convicted Murderer , Santa Barbara Independent, Jul. 6, 2016: [H]aving put the Mafia behind bars, investigated dozens of homicides and sent two murderers to their deaths . . . during 45 years in law enforcement, Parker said he's seen too many corrupt homicide investigations to believe in the death penalty anymore. The worst of them, he said, is the Chino Hills murder case of 1983. . . ""Kevin was a car thief and a burglar, but he doesn't deserve to be where he is,"" Parker said. ""I'm convinced he was framed."" . . . The courts have called the evidence against Cooper ""overwhelming"" -- spots of Cooper's blood in the Ryens' hallway and on a tan T-shirt by the road; bloody prints of prison-issue Keds inside and outside the Ryens' house; Cooper's cigarette butts in the Ryens' station wagon; and a hatchet sheath and prison uniform button at Cooper's hideout next door. But Cooper claims this was false evidence, planted and manipulated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department to convict him. He alleges that sheriff's deputies destroyed evidence and ignored leads pointing to three white men as the murderers -- including the initial statements of the Ryens' eight-year-old son, Josh, the sole survivor. 
Victim relatives and friends, police, and prosecutors naturally insist that there is not even any lingering doubt as to guilt, [3] and they protest inordinate appellate delay. But to objective observers, Cooper's case raises deep concerns as to prosecutorial prejudice and California Supreme Court carelessness. The case is politically and racially highly charged, not only owing to the heinous nature of the purportedly black-on-white mass-murder, but also owing to the blind eye that police and prosecutor turned to the plain evidence of white culprits. 
The incriminating evidence in Cooper is almost wholly physical, depending entirely on local police testimony for its foundation. Cooper would seem a sympathetic defendant, being a mere car-thief minimum security prison walk-out, lonely and homeward bound for the holidays. Cooper raises grave questions as to the police fabricating DNA and other physical evidence, while destroying, ignoring, or corrupting unfavorable DNA, other physical evidence, and witnesses. Cooper has raised the very highest level of international concern (continuing the above quote): - Advertisement - Last fall, the influential Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an autonomous organ of the Organization of American States, recommended that Cooper be granted a reprieve, pending a new investigation. Citing in part Parker's allegations of ""endemic tunnel vision,"" the commission concluded that the U.S. had violated Cooper's rights to a fair trial, due process and equality before the law. The U.S. is a signatory to the American Declaration, a treaty that guarantees those rights. 
Cooper's last hope lies in an unorthodox ""clemency"" petition to Governor Brown, seeking not a pardon but an independent non-judicial investigation of the evidence, and a stay of execution pending its outcome. Commuting Cooper's sentence to life without parole does not seem a viable alternative, given that he has been tried twice, and Cal. Constitution, Art. 5, sec. 8 provides that ""[t]he Governor may not grant a pardon or commutation to a person twice convicted of a felony except on recommendation of the Supreme Court, 4 judges concurring."" Moreover, Cooper's incarceration for life would almost as loudly cry out for a conclusive finding as to whether the T-shirt blood stain was fabricated; and because Cooper's actual innocence is the underlying issue, a repeal of the state death penalty in November's election would not moot his petition, which the ABA extraordinarily supports: In a letter sent to Gov. Brown on March 14, the American Bar Association alleged Cooper's ""arrest, prosecution and conviction are marred by evidence of racial bias, police misconduct, evidence tampering, suppression of exculpatory information, lack of quality defense counsel and a hamstrung court system."" [4] 
It seems a toss-up whether Brown will grant the petition, given that he previously gave absurd reasons for vetoing a simple bipartisan measure to mitigate a surfeit of prosecutorial misconduct. [5] To grant it would surely require that the T-shirt blood stain be retested for preservatives, and this would seem to risk scientifically confirming premeditated, deadly, and racial misconduct, implicating police and perhaps the crime laboratory and prosecutor's office.",FAKE
"A big new State Department assessment has identified a major threat to global security. It's not ISIS or Vladimir Putin. It's not a rickety global economy or climate change or the threat of global pandemics.

Instead, the report argues, these individual problems are symptoms of a much bigger issue — namely, a slow breakdown in global governance. Many of the institutions that were created in the past century to deal with economic and security risks around the world, such as the UN and IMF, may no longer be adequate to the task.

If the authors of the report are right, then the world's biggest problems are all really about this one big thing.

The report, called the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, was tasked with a broad review of State Department policies. The point was ""not looking at the crisis of the day,"" Tom Perriello, the State Department official tasked with leading the QDDR, said in a press briefing. Instead, the report is ""trying to connect the dots across the crises, and then saying what can we learn across the dynamics that we can see.""

Much of what the report's authors saw was quite good. ""Seventy years ago, a bipartisan group of visionary Americans forged a system of modern international institutions, as well as economic and security arrangements, aimed at preventing another catastrophic world war and addressing acute human suffering,"" they write. ""This system enabled the peaceful end of the Cold War, a wave of democratization, and unprecedented improvement in the basic human condition around the globe.""

That's all true. But the QDDR worries that these institutions — things like the UN and the IMF — aren't adequate for dealing with the specific kinds of problems we see today. The UN may help the big countries cooperate with each other, but it can't stop ISIS or Syria's civil war. Nor has it been able to lock in a big new international agreement on climate change.

Together, these problems show that ""aspects of that post-World War II system are fraying."" Sometimes, it's because a hostile power is actively challenging them — Russia, for example, is actively trying to weaken the NATO-dominated regional order in Europe.

Other times, it's that these institutions are having trouble developing good answers for particular kind of problems. It's not clear, for example, how global institutions can repair failed states and stop civil wars in places like Libya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Regardless, the basic point is the same: the institutions that have made the world the safest and most prosperous place it's ever been are becoming less capable of following through on their mission. The more they degrade, the argument goes, the more danger the United States — and the world — will be in.

These arguments aren't new: academics have been making them for years. But what's interesting about their position in the QDDR is that they seem to represent the US government's actual view about the world's biggest problems.

It's no accident that the QDDR's section on priorities begins with a quote from Obama's 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly — the address was framed around an almost identical diagnosis about the need to reform global institutions in light of new challenges. ""If we lift our eyes beyond our borders, if we think globally and act cooperatively,"" Obama said, ""we can shape the course of this century as our predecessors shaped the post–World War II age."" Sound familiar?

But the QDDR goes beyond Obama's speech. It identifies four areas — preventing violent conflict and extremism, spreading democracy, promoting global economic growth, and climate change — in which the State Department needs to focus its efforts. ""Each of these priorities is based on the need for better governance across the world,"" Secretary of State John Kerry said at a presser. ""They're all linked.""

The QDDR proposes a number of ways to improve its focus on these issues. For instance, it proposes a new investment on data-driven forecasting designed to predict conflicts and mass atrocities. If State Department diplomats have a better way of knowing countries are most at risk of serious violence, the theory goes, they can know where to invest resources in order to prevent those conflicts from getting worse.

These solutions feel very small-bore compared with the scale of the problems identified by the QDDR. The report doesn't have a big plan for reforming the UN to deal with failed states, nor does it propose a groundbreaking strategy for breaking the global impasse on a climate change agreement.

That's by design. The QDDR, as an exercise, is designed to improve the way the State Department works as an organization. About one-third of the report, for example, is focused on hiring and personnel management. The whole point of the exercise is to identify what the State Department can do better without radically transforming American foreign policy priorities or proposing pie-in-the-sky new budgets that Congress will never approve.

And that's what makes the QDDR really interesting. A massive amount of government work involves identifying huge problems, like the breakdown of global governance, and then trying to implement a few small-bore strategies to chip away at the big problem. The QDDR is an unusually clear account of how that process actually works: of how small policy proposals and reforms fit into the bigger picture of American foreign policy.",REAL
"Protests in Baltimore on Saturday got intense and, on occasion, violent as demonstrators banded together to rally for answers and justice after Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died of a spinal injury after being arrested by Baltimore police.

A day of largely peaceful protests was marred by occasional skirmishes between small groups of protesters and police and some destruction of property. As a result, police briefly closed off Camden Yards baseball stadium in Baltimore, where a Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox game was ongoing. People at the game were stuck inside the stadium until police gave the all-clear.

Before Camden Yards was closed off, here's some of what was happening in Baltimore Saturday, according to some of the journalists on the scene:",REAL
"8 Things Congress Actually Did This Year

When Republicans took over both chambers of Congress in January, party leaders vowed they would prove to the country that Republicans could govern. They promised to stop with the self-made crises, such as government shutdowns, and rack up legislative accomplishments. So in the first year of a GOP-controlled Congress in nearly a decade, how well did Republicans prove they can govern?

First, there were no government shutdowns or defaults on the national debt. Immediately after the midterm election in 2014, both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner promised there wouldn't be any shutdowns or defaults on their watch. Turns out they made good on that promise this year.

But Democrats aren't exactly congratulating them for it. ""That's like saying, 'You know, they didn't blow the top off the Capitol, so clearly Republican leadership is in touch with America.' No, it takes more than that,"" said Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the widely held assumption Congress gets nothing done doesn't exactly fit this year. There was an uptick in bipartisan activity in this Republican-controlled Congress in 2015, but if you ask Democrats why that was, they'll say it's because they were a more cooperative minority than Republicans were when Democrats controlled the Senate — and that they cooperated on legislation that bolstered Democratic goals.

Whether or not keeping the government open counts as an accomplishment, here are eight legislative matters Congress did address in 2015 — and some issues that remain unresolved:

Trillion-Dollar Government Funding Bill: Right before they split for the holidays, lawmakers passed a trillion-dollar spending bill that will keep the government open until the end of next September. The measure also beefed up cybersecurity and renewed a health care program for Sept. 11 first responders. It also made changes to the visa waiver program so people who have traveled to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan in the past five years will face greater scrutiny if they wish to enter the U.S.

Tax Extenders: Paired with the government spending bill was a measure containing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks. Year after year, Congress has had to extend dozens of tax breaks that expire. In this measure, lawmakers made permanent the most popular tax breaks, such as the $1,000 child tax credit, the earned income tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers, and the research and development tax credit.

Two-Year Budget Agreement: Right before Boehner left office, he managed to reach a two-year budget deal with the White House and other congressional leaders. The agreement suspends the debt ceiling through March 2017 and increases spending by $80 billion over the next two years — an increase that's split evenly between defense and domestic programs.

No Child Left Behind Rewrite: Congress easily passed legislation to rewrite the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. Federally mandated math and reading tests will continue, but the new law cedes greater authority to states, rather than the federal government, to figure out how to use the test results in evaluating schools.

Five-Year Transportation Bill: Congress passed its first long-term bill in a decade to fund roads, bridges and mass transit systems. The measure does not raise the gas tax, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon, but found other sources of funding — such as changing customs fees and dipping into funds from the Federal Reserve.

Ended The NSA's Bulk Surveillance Program: Lawmakers passed the USA Freedom Act, which ended the government's bulk collection of phone records. Passage of the measure came after Republican senator and presidential candidate Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a two-day shutdown of the bulk collection program.

Trade Promotion Authority: Congress approved a measure to give the president expedited authority to enter a trade deal with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. Attention now turns to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which Congress is expected to consider next year — possibly after the election is over.

Medicare Reform: Known as the ""Doc Fix"" bill, this measure permanently ended automatic Medicare payment cuts to physicians. Under a law from the late 1990s, Medicare payments to doctors would be cut to keep the program's budget in check. Since then, Congress had failed every year to figure out a long-term solution to the problem.

Still, so many issues remain unresolved — not because lawmakers think they're unimportant but because partisan divisions on these ideological issues are so deep, they can't find common ground. Congress seems happy to take these issues to the voters in 2016.

Guns: After a spate of gun-related tragedies in 2015, Democrats vowed to push for gun control legislation, such as measures to expand background checks and prohibit individuals whose names are on terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms. Both measures failed in the Senate in 2015, as in past years.

Immigration: The Senate managed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul package in 2013, but attempts to move the legislation through the House failed. Efforts to resurrect immigration legislation have since languished.

Tax Reform: After the midterm election, corporate tax reform was seen as a possible area Republicans and Democrats could work together on. But at his year-end news conference, McConnell expressed pessimism about getting any tax reform accomplished with a Democrat in the White House, saying that any tax changes need to be revenue-neutral and he doubted the president would go for that.",REAL
"Share on Twitter 
Chloe Lattanzi, actress and daughter of Grammy-winning singer and Hollywood actress, Olivia Newton-John, is talking openly about the body image struggles she had as a teenager—and the things she did to combat her poor self-image. Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
Appearing on Wednesday's episode of “The Doctors,” Lattanzi revealed that she had implants and plastic surgery when she was younger because she suffered from body dysmorphia . 
Body dysmorphia is a disorder which makes people obsess over parts of their body. 
People with the disorder imagine their bodies to be severely flawed, to the point that it makes it difficult for them to function normally. 
Lattanzi spoke about her particular experience with the disorder as a teenager, and the anorexia, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression that accompanied it: 
“I went through this sort of chubby phase [as a kid]- I ate to comfort myself. I would see comments in magazines about how I was chubby. So around 16 I started to restrict food, exercise more.” Image Credit: Chris Weeks/Getty Images 
Over one summer in particular, Lattanzi lost a lot of weight, but her new thinness brought with it problems, too. 
She said she turned to plastic surgery and implants: 
“When I was in the height of my body dysmorphia, I had a whole bunch of fillers. I’ve had that all removed from my face because I like the way I look naturally.” 
Recently, Lattanzi saw some photographs of herself as a teenager and doesn't understand why she thought her appearance was so defective. Image Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images 
She says she's never shown the pictures to anyone before, but that they're a valuable tool for providing context to the mental illness from which she was suffering. 
Now, having recovered from body dysmorphia and anorexia, the 30-year-old says she regrets making so many changes to her appearance: 
“I look back at myself and I as a teenager and I’m like, 'What a beautiful young woman.' What was I thinking? Why was I so insecure?” Image Credit: Screenshot/ YouTube 
Lattanzi feels that social media's focus on appearance is a major culprit when it comes to young women struggling with negative self-image: 
“I think so many young girls are going through body dysmorphia — we’re constantly told how we’re supposed to look via Instagram and filters. There’s constant pressure for us to look perfect.” 
Now, Lattanzi says she's “stable and in a loving relationship,” but she's still plagued by some anxiety. 
She says the memory of her illness is a wound that may never completely heal. Image Credit: David Livingston/Getty Images 
Body dysmorphia affects about 1.7% to 2.4% of the general population—or one in 50 people. 
It is often accompanied by eating disorders, depression, and anxiety disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. 
Surprisingly, according to some studies, cases of body dysmorphia are more often found in men than women.",FAKE
"We Are Change 

The debut album by Cahill vs. Kalma is an extremely ambitious, experimental and emotionally powerful album recorded in NYC between 2013 thru 2016. The album has a wide array of musical styles including pop, hard rock, gypsy jazz, new wave & more. The concept album’s story focuses on dualism found in nature and the world, life vs. death, robots vs. humans, analog vs. digital, acoustic vs. electric, Cahill vs. Kalma.
Cahill vs. Kalma now available on CD , iTunes , Google Play , Amazon and more. 

Purchase a physical CD using your credit card or PayPal:
Cahill vs. Kalma Produced by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Engineered, Mixed & Mastered by Brian Herman Dave Cahill vocals, guitar, bass, synth & noise Brian Herman guitar, drums, bass, synth & noise Alex Radus backing vocals on tracks 1, 2, 6 & 8 Andy Janowiak drums on tracks 3, 5, 6, 8, & 10 Dallas Vietty accordion on track 3 Music written by Dave Cahill & Brian Herman Lyrics written by Dave Cahill Album artwork by Dennis Gatz Recorded sporadically between 2013 to 2016 SMT Studios NYC & Treefort Recording in Brooklyn ©2016 Dave Cahill & Brian Herman The post Cahill vs. Kalma Debut Album Out Now! appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"Posted on November 1, 2016 by Dr. Eowyn | 2 Comments 
For Hillary Clinton and her accomplice and protector, the Obama administration, Russia is the new, all-purpose bogeyman. 
They say the Russian government is the hacker of those revealing and embarrassing DNC, Hillary and Podesta emails that WikiLeaks has been releasing. 
Hillary even accused Donald Trump of being in cahoots with Moscow. The latest accuser is longtime Democratic strategist James Carville. 
As reported by Edund Kozak for PoliZette , in an appearance on MSNBC yesterday, Oct. 31, 2016, Carville attacked the FBI for reopening its criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling it part of a vast conspiracy to subvert American democracy. (See “ Weinered: FBI reopens investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails ”) 
Carville raged: 
“This is in effect an attempt to hijack an election. It’s unprecedented … the House Republicans and the KGB are trying to influence our democracy! [FBI Director James] Comey was acting in concert and coordination with the House Republicans. We also have the extraordinary case of the KGB being involved in this race and selectively leaking things from the Clinton campaign that they hacked.” 
As noted by Kozak, “Apparently the fact that the Soviet security agency [KGB] was disbanded in 1991 does not preclude its involvement in this vast, anti-Clinton, FBI-organized conspiracy.” 
Now, the New York Times reports (via ZeroHedge ) that in an investigation into Russia’s possible involvement in the 2016 presidential election, the FBI concludes that there’s no evidence that Trump is connected with the Russian government: 
“For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. 
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” 
Hey, James Carville, you conniving POS. This message is for you! 
~Eowyn",FAKE
"""Top Five Clinton Donors Are Jewish"" - How Anti-Semitic Is This Fact? Published: October 29, 2016 Source: Moon of Alabama 
Top five Clinton donors Are Jewish, campaign tally shows. 
Something is wrong with the above statement. Isn't it anti-semitic? Did Trump say that? Readers of that statement may assume, somewhat reasonably, that there is a club of rich Jewish people controlling the Clinton campaign and, maybe, Clinton herself. That sounds like it was taken from the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It clearly must be anti-semitic. 
It is also true . 
Facts have no bias. They can't be anti-semitic (or can they?). But while facts as such can not have a racial-religious bias, openly stating them surely can. Thus the above statement is anti-semitic. The fact itself isn't bad, reporting it publicly is bad, bad, bad. 
Who but an alt-right rag would report such at all? And for what purpose if not for spreading anti-semitism? 
Well - quot licet jovi, ... 
Jewish papers are of course allowed to report such a fact. That isn't anti-semitic. It is solely to brag about Jewish powers. Within the club that is not only allowed, but welcome. Thus Haaretz writes (sourced to the the Jewish Telegraph Agency) under the identity defining headline at the top of this post: Haim Saban, George Soros and others stand at the head of a list of wealthy donors who contributed mainly via super PACs. 
The Washington Post analysis, posted October 24, named the top donors, who are contributing $1 of every $17 of the over $1 billion amassed for the Democratic nominee’s presidential run. 
They are Donald Sussman, a hedge fund manager; J.B. Pritzker, a venture capitalist, and his wife, M.K.; Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul, and his wife, Cheryl; George Soros, another hedge funder and a major backer of liberal causes, and Daniel Abraham, a backer of liberal pro-Israel causes and the founder of SlimFast. 
Many of the big Clinton campaign donors also give to the Clinton Foundation which at times is a washing machine to put money into the Clinton's private accounts. It is kind of difficult to understand where Clinton Inc begins and where it ends. Campaign funds, Clinton foundation, speech fees, private accounts - does it even matter? Surely those who pay, to whatever Clinton entity, expect a service in return. Given the Clinton's occupations as Senator, Secretary of State and President the ask in return is unlikely to be commercial. It will be political. 
And here is why it matters that the five top donors to Clinton's campaign are Jewish, and all big supporters of Israel. (Haim Saban: ""I'm a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel."") They surely will ask for political favors in the interest of the Zionist entity. This is also the reason why Haaretz, an Israeli paper, finds the strong racial-religious bias at the top Clinton campaign tally newsworthy. Big money paid to a Clinton entity can directly effect U.S. policies towards Israel. It buys its acquiescence to Israeli escapades even when those are not consistent U.S. interests. 
Clinton's positions towards Syria, Iran and Russia (which limits Israel's freedom of action) are surely not independent of Israeli interests. 
But that is of course, anti-semitic speculation ...",FAKE
"Why Congress Doesn't Really Worry About What Most Americans Think

With each week, we have come to expect another jarring outrage from the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, the new breed of terrorists that is redefining terror.

News of the group's murder of nearly two dozen Egyptian Christians captured in Libya has topped even the horrors of the previous weeks, when the world watched a Jordanian fighter pilot burned alive in a cage and the tragedy of aid worker Kayla Mueller dying as an ISIS hostage. These events followed the videotaped beheadings of several other Western civilians in recent weeks amid a relentless campaign to recruit fresh blood from Muslim communities the world over.

Described as apocalyptic, fanatic and medieval, the Islamic State has supplanted al-Qaida in the imagination of Islamist radicals and in the nightmares of the West. Small wonder, then, that President Obama is seeking specific authority to raise the stakes. Even this commander-in-chief, so widely known for his restraint and for downplaying dangers, is ready to follow in the footsteps of the two Presidents George Bush. Like them, he is asking Congress for a clear Authorization for Use of Military Force. It is hard to imagine a path from the past he would less like to tread.

Remarkably, however, the otherwise war-weary American people seem to be on board. Even after more than a dozen years of combat in Afghanistan and a disheartening and drawn out struggle in Iraq, this country appears willing to return to the field for yet one more ""war on terror.""

The latest CNN poll says 78 percent of Americans are in favor of authorizing further actions against the Islamic State. Such an authorization, or AUMF, would be the first since President George W. Bush got one (his second) in the fall of 2002 and used it to invade Iraq.

Stunning as that number may be, it follows another sounding by CNN that showed more than 80 percent supporting the request. Another poll by NBC News and Marist College has just found that even when the Obama name is attached to the question, only 32 percent of respondents object. And an amazing two thirds of the respondents were ready to commit at least some ground troops to defeating the Islamic State.

Yet there is one group of Americans that is having far more trouble deciding how it feels about granting the president an AUMF. And that group is Congress.

Even with the latest atrocities reverberating in the media, the most common posture on the Hill has been standoffish. Many Republicans clearly favor stronger action than the president has taken to date, but they regard the current request as flawed and the president's leadership as lacking. They want him to ask, but they want him to ask for more.

Then you have the Democrats who think the three-year time frame envisioned by Obama is hopelessly broad and who blanch at any thought of a ground combat commitment. That is why the White House has explicitly abjured ""enduring offensive ground combat operations,"" quite possibly a reference to George W. Bush's ""Operation Enduring Freedom"" in Afghanistan (now the longest military engagement in U.S. history).

It may strike many as remarkable that, even with the enormities being witnessed in the Middle East, Congress can maintain its distance from the president. This is all the more stunning given the institutional interest Congress has in sharing the war power.

After all, a large part of the current public support for an AUMF is a clear preference for some kind of process and orderly decision-making before the next wave of U.S. personnel is sent in harm's way. Hardly anyone is happy about this president or any other launching a thousand airstrikes on his own.

In 2002, Congress held days of debate before authorizing what became the invasion of Iraq. In the fall of 2001, just days after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, Democrats in Congress still wanted to set some limits on the first phase of U.S. military response.

And in 1991, when the first President Bush already had several hundred thousand troops poised to smite Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, both chambers held lengthy and dramatic debates in the first two weeks of January before giving their wary assent.

In each of these cases, Congress showed a healthy awareness of the larger public debate going on around them. The individual member had to weigh his or her own conscience in the midst of that soul-searching exercise.

Today, Congress seems quite different. The heightened partisanship cemented in Congressional district lines has created safe havens where most Republicans and Democrats no longer worry about pleasing anyone other than primary voters. If the primary voter goes with the incumbent, the incumbent is almost certain to go back to Washington.

In the GOP, in particular, the risk now seems entirely in the intraparty struggle. Ask Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican who a year ago was expected to be the next Speaker of the House. His political career came to a sudden halt when his Richmond-area district decided he wasn't really Their Guy anymore.

Primaries such as Cantor's throw a permanent chill into every member in both chambers, regardless of seniority or party standing. Republican districts are now more Republican than ever, and most Democratic districts are more Democratic than ever. As fewer and fewer members have ""swing districts,"" the necessity of constant partisan emphasis grows worse and worse. Even the notion of compromise becomes hazardous.

For most members today, the kind of public opinion measured by CNN or Gallup or NBC News is just too broad and diverse and dispersed to matter. The audience that must be served is the far narrower one that cares about party and policy and issues — and works to elect candidates as devoted to their ideology and as hostile to the other party as they themselves are.",REAL
"Speaking at the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi on Thursday, Putin said Russian patience has limits. “We(‘ve) show(n) restraint so far and (haven’t) respond(ed) to our partners (sic) in the same gauche manner, but everything has its limits. We can do it,” he explained. So what is he waiting for, given endless US provocations, refusing mutual cooperation on vital issues, rejecting normal relations, heading inevitably for war unless challenged and stopped. He’s not stupid or uninformed. Russia’s intelligence capability likely matches America’s, so he knows what it’s up to in Eastern Europe, Syria, elsewhere in the Middle East, along with virtually everywhere else. Pretending both countries are “partners” defies logic. Thinking mutual cooperation with Washington is possible one day is like waiting for Godot. And things may get exponentially worse once Hillary succeeds Obama, a virtual certainty at this point by fair or foul means – likely the latter, election theft a longstanding US tradition, showing democracy in America is pure fantasy. On Thursday, screaming deceptive Western headlines outrageously blamed Russia and Syria for bombing a Syrian school in Idlib province. It was a hoax. No bombing occurred. US-supported terrorists attacked the school, killing at least six children, injuring many others. An exclusive RT International investigation determined that “a gas canister and a mine landed in a classroom in Hadaiq al-Andalus” – projectiles launched from terrorist-controlled eastern Aleppo. Yet media scoundrels irresponsibly blamed Russia and Syria – while ignoring daily eastern Aleppo shelling, US supported terrorists killing and injuring civilians in government controlled parts of the city. Long before Internet access to important information from reliable independent sources, famed humorist/social commentator Will Rogers once said: “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” Reporting then was deplorable. Today it’s beyond the pale. It’s hard imagining why anyone wastes time and money on pure rubbish – or believes television news is credible. Media misinformation proliferates. Readers, viewers and listeners are systematically lied to. Daily fare isn’t fit to print or broadcast. Mainstream editors, reporters and commentators are a virtual Noah’s Ark of scam artists. On Thursday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov called video footage of the Idlib incident shown on Western television fake – “more than ten edited fragments assembled together,” he explained. No Russian or Syrian warplanes were in the area when the attack occurred. No bomb craters existed. Damage to the school was inconsistent to a bombing. Only one wall was damaged, not the ceiling, desks or chairs. Had a bombing occurred, the blast would have destroyed or severely damaged the building. Furniture inside would have been “swept away.” “As one can see on a photo from the Russian drone, the roof of the school is not damaged and there are no bomb craters in the area adjacent to the school,” Konashenkov explained. A US drone in the area at the time of the attack has the same footage. Yet Washington concealed what should have been revealed straightaway to set the record straight. “UNICEF leadership fell…victim to a new deception of swindlers and (Al Qaeda-affiliated) White Helmets,” said Konashenkov. Washington perhaps orchestrated what happened, part of its sinister anti-Russia/anti-Syria agenda. Submit your review",FAKE
"FBI Sources believe Clinton Foundation case is “likely moving toward an indictment” Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier reports the latest news about the Clinton Foundation investigation from two sources inside the FBI. He reveals five important new pieces of information: 1. The Clinton Foundation investigation is far more expansive than anybody has reported so far and has been going on for more than a year. 2. The laptops of Clinton aides Cherryl Mills and Heather Samuelson have not been destroyed, and agents are currently combing through them. The investigation has interviewed several people twice, and plans to interview some for a third time. 3. Agents have found emails believed to have originated on Hillary Clinton’s secret server on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They say the emails are not duplicates and could potentially be classified in nature. 4. Sources within the FBI have told him that an indictment is “likely” in the case of pay-for-play at the Clinton Foundation, “barring some obstruction in some way” from the Justice Department. 5. FBI sources say with 99% accuracy that Hillary Clinton’s server has been hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, and that information had been taken from it.",FAKE
"Donald Trump, defying the pundits and polls to the end, defeated Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s presidential election and claimed an establishment-stunning victory that exposes the depth of voter dissatisfaction – and signals immense changes ahead for American policy at home and abroad.

Seventeen months after the billionaire tycoon’s Trump Tower entrance into the race, the first-time candidate once dismissed by the political elite will become the 45th president, Fox News projects.

Speaking to cheering supporters early Wednesday morning at his victory party in New York City, the Republican candidate and now president-elect said Clinton called to congratulate him, and Fox News confirms she has conceded. Despite their hard-fought campaign, Trump praised Clinton for her service and said “it is time for us to come together as one united people.”

“I will be president for all Americans,” Trump vowed, after a brief introduction by running mate Mike Pence.

TRUMP'S AGENDA: WHAT HIS ELECTION MEANS FOR AMERICA

Sounding a call to “reclaim our country’s destiny,” Trump declared: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. … America will no longer settle for anything less than the best.”

Trump will be the oldest president in U.S. history, entering the Oval Office at age 70. With her defeat, Clinton falls short in her second bid to become the first female president of the United States.

Though Clinton called Trump, her campaign initially did not concede defeat. Earlier, her campaign chairman John Podesta addressed supporters nearby in New York and said several states were “too close to call.”

Clinton herself did not appear at the rally. Podesta had urged supporters to “head home” and said they would not have “anything more to say tonight.”

Amid Trump’s victory, Republicans also were projected to hold onto their majority in the House and Senate, improving Trump’s chances of advancing his agenda in office.

A surge of support in key battlegrounds – and especially surprise victories in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – helped propel Trump to victory. The GOP nominee built a commanding lead early on with wins in heavily contested North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Iowa.

Clinton won her share of battlegrounds, including Virginia and Nevada and Colorado, but could not make up for Trump’s strong performance in other states thought to favor the Democrat.

The billionaire businessman’s victory marked a remarkable upset and turnaround, after he had been complaining amid a rough patch just weeks ago the vote could be “rigged” against him.

Clinton was still thought to have the clear advantage in the electoral map going into Tuesday’s vote, yet the polls had been tightening in the race’s closing days.

His victory could demonstrate just how much the dynamics were shifting in his favor – and perhaps how his true support was elusive all along to pollsters and others gauging the race.

Without question, his bid was helped over the last two weeks by a burst of setbacks for his opponent.

Eleven days before the election, FBI Director James Comey announced the bureau was revisiting the investigation into Clinton’s personal email server use while secretary of state, after discovering new messages on the laptop of disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of a top Clinton aide. He closed the case again on Sunday, but the political damage may have been done. And the WikiLeaks release of emails hacked from Podesta’s account became a constant distraction for the campaign, as the messages revealed infighting, internal concerns about the Clinton family’s foundation and even evidence that the now-head of the Democratic National Committee leaked town hall questions to Clinton during the primaries.

This at times overshadowed the numerous allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Trump that came out in October (which he denies), following leaked footage from over a decade ago showing Trump making crude comments about women.

Trump’s victory marks the second time Clinton was thwarted in her bid to become the first female U.S. president, having been defeated by President Obama in their 2008 primary race.

But Trump has been able to defy expectations from the start. He defeated a deep field of 16 competitors during the Republican primaries – stitching together a motivated coalition of voters invigorated by his outsider, populist message; throwing his rivals off their talking points during a raucous marathon of debates; and commanding media attention throughout with his unpredictable, learn-as-he-goes campaign style.

He also defied party orthodoxy, railing against free-trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership and staking out a sometimes-confusing set of positions on foreign policy that may yet evolve. Democrats have criticized him heavily for statements expressing admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a desire to rebuild ties with Moscow.

Trump was aided by the infrastructure of the GOP, but his campaign never came close to the juggernaut operation mounted by Clinton. While she entered the final stretch of the race with an army of high-powered surrogates, Trump’s campaign was driven mainly by him, an inner circle of family members and a rotating set of top campaign advisers. Surrogates like retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani advocated aggressively for the Republican nominee, but he remained at odds with many influential elected Republicans who in some cases – as with House Speaker Paul Ryan – endorsed him, but only reluctantly. His stances on trade as well as his hardline immigration proposals – including variations on a plan to suspend Muslim immigration from certain countries – also made party brass uncomfortable.

The late emergence of a 2005 tape showing him making crude comments about women led some congressional Republicans to abandon him entirely. But even the biggest controversies seemed only to ding Trump, whose resilience in the polls could be credited to a movement of grassroots supporters who seemed to have little interest in the nominee’s tensions with the GOP establishment and saw him as the true change-maker in the election.",REAL
"On The Streets Of Baltimore, Trying To Understand The Anger

In the early morning, as the cold set in, Anaya Maze stood next to the charred remains of a CVS store.

Holding a sign, she was the only protester left in front of a line of police officers dressed in riot gear. She is petite. Still, she faced the police officers, looking at them intently.

A few steps away were the charred skeletons of two police vehicles, the victims of an unbridled anger that burned its way through the west side of Baltimore.

Maze said she understands the anger. For far too long, she said, police have been killing black men. She says Baltimore had this coming. All the violence, she says, might finally change things.

""I see no shame in being violent to be heard,"" she said. ""Because if you can't do it peacefully then what other option do you have?""

Last night, after Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan had declared a state of emergency and ordered the National Guard into the city, rioters still roamed the streets; fires still burned and residents still stood on their stoops, on their sidewalks, trying to understand the anger that boiled over into riots.

Pierre Thomas, 37, was hanging out at the perimeter set up by police.

He said that yes, Baltimore has a history of inequality and yes the black community feels forgotten, but he didn't agree with setting properties on fire.

""Everybody is angry,"" he said. ""But there is a right and a wrong way to do it. I understand why they're doing it but I don't support it. They're trashing their own place.""

A few blocks down, Alex, who only wanted to be identified by his first name, was watching a small corner market burn down.

He pointed at the fire trucks that were trying to make their way through the street. He pointed at the police officers. He said those flames were the only way to get them to come into this part of Baltimore.

Nobody was calling for peace when Baltimore police officers were beating innocent black men, he said.

""Where was the peace when we were getting shot? Where's the peace when we were getting laid out? Where is the peace when we are in the back of ambulances? Where is the peace then? They don't want to call for peace then. But you know when people really want peace? When the white people have to get out of bed, when cops have to wear riot gear, when the cops start talking about, oh we got broken arms. Then they want peace,"" he said. ""Peace? It's too late for peace.""

The police helicopter hovered above and every once in a while, we heard the pops of tear gas. The flames from the fire got hotter, lapping over the roof of a second row house.

A woman a few steps away was in tears. She was roused from sleep by the smoke. Her house is two doors down from the burning market. She didn't know if it would survive, if the flames would turn all her possessions into ashes.

""They shouldn't be doing this, man. We live around here,"" she wailed. ""That was terrible.""

Suddenly, as a flame shot into the sky, she covered her face and darted off before I could get her name.",REAL
"The recent murders at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood center, and the political arguments that have followed, remind us once again of the connection between political polarization and terrorism.

We are used to the idea that Democrats support legal abortion while Republicans oppose it, but this has not always been the case. This came up here a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth returning to the topic now that it is in the news again.

To start with, here’s the trend in public opinion from the National Election Study. For each election year we show the average opinion on abortion on 1-4 scale (where 1 = abortion should never be legal, and 4 = abortion should always be legal) among self-declared Democrats, Independents, and Republicans:

I made the graph a few years ago, but I don’t think the polarization has gone away. Sample sizes are small in some years, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to interpret every jump in those lines, but the basic pattern is clear: no partisan polarization on abortion before 1992, lots since.

Yair Ghitza and I then broke these data down by ethnicity to see where the polarization was happening. And here’s what we found:

These lines show estimated regression coefficients predicting abortion attitude from partisanship (that is, predicting that response on the 1-to-4 scale from a party-identification variable that takes on the values -1, 0, 1 for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats), using a hierarchical model to get stable estimates for each year and for each of four ethnic groups.

As you can see, almost all the polarization is occurring among whites. (Also some among the “other” category, but they represent only a small fraction of the electorate.)

We then continued and broke down the whites by income and education:

Polarization is concentrated among upper-income and well-educated whites.

And now we can return to the news story about the killer:

This is N=1, and of course non-college-educated people can perpetrate political violence as well. But I find the statistics helpful in understanding partisan polarization more generally.",REAL
"By Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016 at 12:08 pm Donald Trump's Republican running mate Mike Pence has finally found something he's offended by, but it's not Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault or insulting African Americans or Mexicans or women or a Gold Star family. Nope. Pence is offended by a news report he hasn't read about their voter suppression efforts. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
“That’s offensive to me, that kind of language. It’s not our operation,” Indiana Governor Mike Pence said Friday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe . 
Yes, Donald Trump’s Republican running mate Mike Pence has finally found something he’s offended by, but it’s not Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault or insulting African Americans or Mexicans or women or a Gold Star family. 
Nope. 
Did Pence read the story? No. But he’s offended. So offended. Because that kind of language is offensive. Not the actual suppression of the votes, but the language, because it’s not “our operation.” 
Watch here via MSNBC’s Morning Joe : 
Twice saying he hasn’t read the article, Pence proceeded to launch into a diatribe about how offended he was by something he hadn’t read, “That’s offensive to me, that kind of language. It’s not our operation,” Pence denied. 
“Donald Trump and I want every American who has the opportunity to vote to vote in this election. And that’s our message, is to tell the American people that this country really belongs to them. That we can have government as good as our people again, but it’s going to take all of us.” 
“And you saw Donald Trump … say that people who haven’t traditionally voted Republican, we’ve got an agenda to bring our cities back…” 
Pence is twice offended, so super offended: 
“I’ve never heard anybody in this campaign talk that way. Frankly, you know, it was offensive to me to hear that being reported in the news because that’s just not the approach Donald Trump has taken to this campaign. It’s not the approach we’re taking. We’re reaching out to every American.” 
Pence then claimed Independents and even Democrats are breaking for Trump. In fact Trump and Pence are even losing groups that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. Pence then belied his own confidence by trying to shame Republicans into voting for them by saying, “It’s time for Republicans to come home” because Trump won the primary. 
Mike Pence laughed at the idea that the race is over and done, because “It’s just not what I see out there.” 
Trump also loves to cite what he “sees” and reads, and often times those things turn out to not even exist – like videos he claims to have watched. 
This explains why Mike Pence and Donald Trump ended up together. It turns out, they are not that different after all, in spite of the Republican establishment’s efforts to persuade the voters and themselves otherwise. Both Pence and Trump don’t care a whit about facts. This is more than typical campaign spin, it’s appalling in context. 
The context is that Mike Pence is willingly standing next to a man who brags about grabbing a woman’s “p*ssy” without her permission, but he is publicly saying he’s offended by language used in a report about their voter suppression efforts. 
Pence didn’t even bother to read the article, which suggests that he doesn’t care if their campaign is really suppressing voters. But why would he? 
Pence didn’t care about any of the groups Donald Trump insulted – not enough to take a public stand, so why start now. But he took a public stand was when the insult was aimed at his own campaign. 
Like Trump, Pence is also insulted by language calling out bad behavior instead of the bad behavior. 
Image: Screencap via MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” 
Mike Pence Is Fine With Trump Sexual Assault But Offended By Voter Suppression added by Sarah Jones on Fri, Oct 28th, 2016",FAKE
"Learning Horrors of War from Vets November 9, 2016 
Americans shed some guilt for sending young soldiers to war by saying “thank you for your service” but it’d be better to ask vets about their war experiences, says ex-U.S. Army chaplain Chris J. Antal who served in Afghanistan. 
By the Rev. Chris J. Antal 
Veteran’s Day too often only serves to construct and maintain a public narrative that glorifies war and military service and excludes the actual experience of the veteran. This public narrative is characterized by core beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world that most citizens readily accept without examination. 
The U.S. public narrative reconciles deep religiosity with a penchant for violence with an often unexamined American National Religion. The core beliefs of this religion include the unholy trinity of governmental theism (One Nation Under God, In God We Trust, etc.), global military supremacy, and capitalism as freedom. These core beliefs provide many U.S. citizens with a broad sense of meaning and imbue the public narrative with thematic coherence. U.S. Marines patrol street in Shah Karez in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Robert Storm) 
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning , as Christopher Hedges wrote. Yet this kind of coherence has a moral and psychological cost. The consequence of an unexamined faith in American National Religion is a moral dualism that exaggerates U.S. goodness and innocence and projects badness on an “other” who we then demonize as the enemy and kill. 
Walter Wink described this moral dualism as a “theology of redemptive violence,” the erroneous belief that somehow good violence can save us from bad violence. 
Veteran’s Day, in the context of American National Religion, enables selective remembering, self-deception, and projected valorization. In short, it serves to perpetuate lies in order to avoid facing uncomfortable truths about who U.S. citizens are and what kind of people we are becoming. 
Imagine a Veteran’s Day where citizens gathered around veterans and asked, “what’s your story?” Citizens who risk this bold step begin to bridge the empathy gap between civilians and veterans and open up the path for adaptive change and post-traumatic growth. 
I believe one citizen who approaches a veteran with the invitation, “what’s your story?” does more for the veteran than a thousand patriotic platitudes like “Thank you for your service” could ever do. 
Only a First Step 
Asking the question is only the first step. A citizen who wants to give back to veterans should cultivate narrative competence, the capacity to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories one hears or reads. The voice of veterans, if we open our ears to hear them, often provides an essential counter-narrative to the U.S. public narrative. Coffins of dead U.S. soldiers arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware in 2006. (U.S. government photo) 
Violent, sudden, or seemingly meaningless deaths, the kind of deaths often experienced by veterans, can make the world appear dangerous, unpredictable, or unjust. The experience of warfare can often undercut our sense of meaning and coherence and shatter assumptions. Because of this many veterans carry a depth of pain that is unimaginable to many citizens. 
The voice of the veterans often reveals uncomfortable truths and invites collective examination of core beliefs and assumptions, especially those that form the bedrock of American National Religion. 
Imagine a Veteran’s Day where communities join together for authentic dialogue between veterans and civilians. Such a gathering would empower veterans to share the kind of stories that would help the community face real problems. What new story might emerge in the process? How might we become a better people as a result? 
The Reverend Chris Antal was a chaplain with the US Army in Kandahar, Afghanistan and later in the US Army Reserve. While in Afghanistan, he delivered a sermon that said, “We have sanitized killing and condoned extrajudicial assassinations…” He nearly lost his job. This past April, in an open letter to President Obama, he resigned his commission in protest over the use of drones, nuclear proliferation and our government’s claims of impunity to international law. He is minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Rock Tavern, New York. More background here.)",FAKE
"Trump rape accuser skips press conference, citing threats ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Shiite militia says it is close to Tal Afar, which Turkey has warned is off limits By GPD on November 4, 2016 By Rudaw ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The Shiite-led Hashd al-Shaabi militia said Thursday that its forces are 15 kilometers from Tal Afar, a Turkmen town that Turkey has warned the militia to stay clear of. “The Hashd al-Shaabi are continuously advancing and we are just 15 kilometers from Tal Afar” and nearing the Mosul-Raqqa road, Karim Nuri, spokesperson of the Hashd al-Shaabi, told Rudaw. He said he hoped that “in a few hours” his forces will be in control of the Mosul-Raqqa road, a critical supply line for the two ISIS strongholds in Iraq and Syria. Nuri said the Iranian-backed Hashd had not received any air support from the coalition, which had from the outset opposed any role for the militia in the Mosul offensive. Tal Afar, north of Mosul city, is a predominantly Turkmen town that was captured by ISIS two years ago when the group captured large swathes of land in the north. Turkey has warned Hashd forces from entering Tal Afar, for fear the Shiite militia would brutalize the town’s population, which is divided between Sunnis and Shiites. Earlier this week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country opposed any Hashd presence in Tal Afar. “Tal Afar is a very sensitive issue for us. We definitely do not regard it [Hashd involvement] positively in Tal Afar and Sinjar. I already told this to officials clearly,” Erdogan said Saturday. “Tal Afar is a totally Turkmen city, with half Shiite and half Sunni Muslims. We do not judge people by their religious affiliation, we regard them as Muslims,” he added, “But if Hashd al-Shaabi terrorizes the region, our response would be different.” Related Posts: No Related Posts The   GPD   19 Reads Filed under World  ",FAKE
"Some Early Voters: Changing their Minds November 02, 2016 sample ballot is seen in a photo illustration, as early voting for the 2016 general elections began in North Carolina, in Chapel... 
The FBI's move to reopen investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information has some early voters changing their minds. 
Americans’ interest in changing their “early votes” has increased in recent days. The spike can be traced back to the day FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency would be probing more emails related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails. 
Comey announced Friday that the FBI would be reopening its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. As reported by The Daily Caller, based on Google Trends data, that day and in the days following Google searches for “change early vote” have increased. The states that seem to show the increase in interest include Nevada, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Arkansas. 
Other variations on the search such as “changing early vote” and “change my early vote” yielded similar results. 
Original article by The Daily Caller / Analysis by TRUNEWS. 
- Article by , Correspondent for TRUNEWS Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
"20 Foods That Naturally Unclog Arteries and Prevent Heart Attacks http://blogs.naturalnews.com/20-foods-naturally-unclog-arteries-prevent-heart-attacks/ 
By Twain Yobra 
Posted Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 03:53pm EDT 
Arteries play a vital role in the body. They transport nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. And they can cause heart attacks if they’re clogged. Well, you can unclog them naturally by eating foods rich in antioxidants, soluble fiber and healthy fats. 
Here are 20 foods that will unclog your arteries and prevent heart attacks. 
1. Pomegranate: Pomegranate is rich in antioxidants which prevents the arteries from being damaged. Research also shows that pomegranate improves heart health by reducing bad cholesterol. 
2. Spirulina: Spirulina is regulates fat levels in the blood. And it’s rich in omega 3 fatty acids, which studies show prevents heart disease. 
3. Asparagus: This vegetable is rich in vitamins and minerals that prevent blood clots and lower blood pressure. 
4. Turmeric: Inflammation is one of the main causes of arteriosclerosis, and as you may know, turmeric fights inflammation. 
5. Cranberries: The potassium in cranberries can lower blood pressure and reduce risk of heart disease by up to 40 percent. 
6. Watermelon: One study found that L-citrulline (found in watermelon) can widen blood vessels and lower blood pressure. This can actually benefit men with mild erectile dysfunction. 
7. Avocado: Research shows that eat avocados every day can clean your arteries, lower bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol. 
8. Broccoli: Broccoli contains vitamin K which prevents calcium from damaging the arteries. It’s also rich in soluble fiber which lowers cholesterol. 
9. Cinnamon: This spice unclogs the arteries of plaque build-up. Its antioxidant properties also improve cardiovascular health. 
10. Green tea: This powerful herb contains catechins which prevent absorption of cholesterol. This consequently prevents blockage of arteries. Drink 2-3 cups a day. 
11. Coconut oil: Taking coconut oil regularly can unclog the arteries and even convert bad cholesterol to good. 
12. Persimmon: Persimmon has antioxidants that reduce blood-lipid. It’s also rich in fiber which helps clean the arteries. 
13. Coffee: Research shows that drinking 2 cups of coffee a day can lower risk of heart disease by 20 percent. But excess consumption can increase blood pressure and cause anxiety. 
14. Cold-water fish: Eating these fish will fight inflammation and unclog your arteries. They include, mackerel, tuna, salmons, and sardines. 
15. Olive oil: Studies show that olive oil can reduce risk of cardiovascular disease by 41 percent. This is attributed to its ability to reduce oxidative stress and cholesterol. 
16. Spinach: This vegetable unclogs arteries because of its folate, potassium and fiber content. 
17. Orange juice: Oranges are rich in vitamin C which cleans the arteries and prevents oxidation of blood. 
18. Flaxseeds: Flaxseeds have been proven to fight inflammation, lower blood pressure and improve heart health. 
19. Raw nuts: Nuts like almonds will reduce blood pressure and fight inflammation. Use them to keep hunger at bay. 
20. Whole grains: Whole grains are rich in soluble fiber which lowers cholesterol and risk of high blood pressure. 
For more information on eating healthy and staying fit, download your FREE 3 Weeks Flat Stomach Guide to help you improve your health and physique. And like our Facebook page . You might also like…",FAKE
"Truth Revolt October 26, 2016 
As usual, Pat Condell nails it in this video commentary about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, about immigration, about Brexit, and more. 
Check out the video above — probably the best 8 minutes you’ll spend today. Condell helpfully provides related links below: 
Hillary Clinton embraces George Soros’ vision of an open border world",FAKE
"The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2, will replace the SS-18 Flies at 4.3 miles (7km) per sec and with a range of 6,213 miles (10,000km) The weapons are perceived as part of an increasingly aggressive Russia It could deliver a warhead of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 By LIBBY PLUMMER and GARETH DAVIE S Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France. The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems. The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Scroll down for video Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to replace the country’s older SS-18 Satan weapons with the new missiles amid a string of recent disagreements with the West. The Kremlin has stepped up the rhetoric against the West and carried a series of manoeuvres that has infuriated politicians in the US and UK. The pictures were revealed online by chief designers from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. A message posted alongside the picture said: ‘In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defense Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013’, the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. ‘ The RS-28 Sarmat missile is said to contain 16 nuclear warheads and is capable of destroying an area the size of France or Texas, according to Russian news network Zvezda, which is owned by Russia’s ministry of defence. The weapon is also able to evade radar. It is expected to have a range of 6,213 miles (10,000 km), which would allow Moscow to attack London and 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"One of two crew members survived the shooting down of a Russian warplane by Turkey on Tuesday, Russian officials say, and was rescued by a Syrian commando unit in an operation that ended early Wednesday.

The news comes as international tensions continue to rise over the incident. As we reported Tuesday, Turkey says the Russian Su-24 fighter jet was in Turkish airspace when it was shot down by Turkish F-16s. Turkey says it warned the Russian warplane 10 times before taking action.

Russia maintains the jet was flying over Syria at the time.

Both Russian crew members appeared to eject from the jet and parachute to the ground, but one was reportedly found dead Tuesday by a Syrian rebel group.

Russia now says the other crew member has been rescued. It was a costly mission for Russia, NPR's Corey Flintoff reports for our Newscast unit:

""Russia's defense minister said the pilot was rescued in a 12-hour operation that ended in the early hours of the morning. ""Rebel fighters in the area claim they shot one of the Russian helicopters involved in the search yesterday and then used a missile to destroy it on the ground after it was forced to land. ""Russia says one of the helicopter crewmen was killed, but the rest were evacuated safely.""

Meanwhile, Russia and Turkey continue to exchange angry rhetoric while at the same time calling for military restraint.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Wednesday that Russia could not justify its attacks on ethnic Turks in Syria under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State, and reiterated statements by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Turkey will continue to defend its airspace.

But, Davutoglu said, targeting Russia is ""out of the question,"" Reuters reports.

Also on Wednesday, Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the shooting of the plane a ""planned provocation"" that is prompting Moscow to ""reconsider relations with Ankara,"" The Associated Press reports. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the shooting a ""stab in the back.""

But Lavrov says Moscow has ""no intention to go to war with Turkey,"" the AP writes.

Russia says it is deploying an advanced anti-aircraft system to its base in Syria. Corey says the missiles appear to be guarding against Turkish planes — or planes from other coalition members, such as the U.S. or France. ""As far as we know, ISIS and other jihadi groups in Syria have no aircraft that could threaten the Russian base,"" he reports.

Moscow may be considering nonmilitary forms of retaliation against Turkey. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that ""important joint projects could be canceled and Turkish firms could lose Russian market share,"" the AP reports.

The two countries' economies are closely linked by energy purchases, tourism and other business activity.",REAL
"(CNN) A baby who had heart surgery at St. Mary's Medical Center in Florida died Tuesday, at least the ninth infant to pass away after such a procedure since the program opened at the end of 2011.

A CNN investigation calculates that from 2011 to 2013, the program had a 12.5% mortality rate for open heart surgeries, which is more than three times the national average.

""Why won't they stop?"" asked Nneka Campbell, whose baby daughter, Amelia, died after heart surgery at the hospital.

The same day the latest baby died, St. Mary's CEO Davide Carbone wrote a letter to employees about the CNN investigation, which aired Monday night, expressing support for the program and its heart surgeon, Dr. Michael Black.

""The patients we serve are afflicted with severe life-threatening conditions, and it is impossible to eliminate the risk of mortality,"" he wrote.

The hospital, which is owned by Tenet Healthcare, says CNN did not get the mortality rate right, but won't say what the hospital believes the correct rate is.

Last year in April, the Florida Department of Health sent a team of expert heart doctors to St. Mary's to review the children's heart surgery program. The head of the panel, Dr. Jeffrey Jacobs, a professor of cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins, suggested they stop doing heart surgeries on babies younger than 6 months.

The baby who died Tuesday, Davi Ricardo Brandao, was only a few weeks old when he had surgery in March for a severe heart defect called truncus arteriosus, according to his mother, Pautilia Gomes. She said her son needed a second surgery later that month.

In April, in response to an inquiry from CNN, St. Mary's spokeswoman Shelly Weiss said a patient with truncus arteriosus at St. Mary's was ""recovering well and the prognosis is good.""

Davi never left the hospital and was not quite 2 months old when he died. Gomes posted a picture on her Facebook page of an eye filled with tears and the word ""LUTO,"" which is Portuguese for ""mourning.""

According to St. Mary's, the hospital received the experts' final reviews last year in June. In his letter to employees, Carbone said that since that time, ""our mortality rate has been consistent with the national average, and does not significantly exceed the mortality rate of other programs as the CNN story alleges.""

He did not say what the hospital's mortality rate was, or whether it included Davi's death. An email from CNN to Weiss went unanswered Wednesday.

In his review last year, Jacobs, the Johns Hopkins surgeon, noted that St. Mary's was doing too few pediatric heart surgeries -- a very complex type of operation -- to get good at it. He noted that in 2013, the hospital did 23 procedures. The vast majority of hospitals in the United States that perform these surgeries do more than 100 a year, and anything less than that is considered low volume by the Society for Thoracic Surgeons.

In response to CNN's investigation, Florida's Department of Health and the Agency for Health Care Administration issued a statement Wednesday saying, ""Florida does not regulate the number of procedures performed at pediatric cardiac programs"" and that the Agency for Health Care Administration ""continues to closely monitor St. Mary's to ensure that they are following the law.""",REAL
"People over profits RI's YouTube Channel Tops 100 Thousand Subscribers and 60 Million Views 
To be more precise, our YouTube channel has 65 million views and 113 thousand subscribers - and is still going strong! Donate! An important milestone 
As RI's You Tube manager, I would like to give special thanks to Alexei Pankin, Olga Beskrovnova, Charles Bausman , Ricky Twisdale, Kristina Shumilova and David Curry as well as Elina Nigamatyanova, Riley Waggaman, Julia Rakhmetova, Mark Shumilov, Marko Marjanovic, Elina Nigamatyanova, Anna Lutskova de Bacci, Bogdan Polischuk and other contributors. 
Your donations will help us to create more original content. And please remember to subscribe to the Russia Insider YouTube Channel and share our videos on social media. 
If you have any ideas or suggestions about how to improve our channel — or if you are interested in volunteering — please send me an email . Thank you! 
RI exclusive interviews: 
The most popular videos on our channel: 
Russia Insider in Media:",FAKE
"  Michael Snyder 
I realize that this headline must sound extremely bizarre, but in this article I will explain why this could actually happen. We have just learned that the FBI has obtained a search warrant that will enable the agency to examine approximately 650,000 emails that are sitting on electronic devices owned by Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner. Now that the FBI is going through these emails, it is unlikely but still possible that a decision about whether or not to charge Hillary Clinton with a crime could be made by November 8th. Of course the most likely scenario is that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted before election day and that Americans will be voting with this scandal hanging ominously over the Clinton campaign. But if the FBI does quickly take action, it is possible that Hillary Clinton could be forced from the race before election day, and that would require the Democrats to come up with a new candidate. 
In fact, there are already calls in the mainstream media for Clinton to willingly remove herself from the race. For example, the following comes from a Chicago Tribune article entitled “ Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside “… 
So what should the Democrats do now? 
If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
But what the author of that article does not understand is that Tim Kaine would not automatically take her place if Clinton steps down before the election. In a previous article , I included a quote from a U.S. News & World Report article that explained what would happen if Hillary Clinton was removed from the Democratic ticket for some reason prior to November 8th… 
If Clinton were to fall off the ticket, Democratic National Committee members would gather to vote on a replacement. DNC members acted as superdelegates during this year’s primary and overwhelmingly backed Clinton over boat-rocking socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 
DNC spokesman Mark Paustenbach says there currently are 445 committee members – a number that changes over time and is guided by the group’s bylaws, which give membership to specific officeholders and party leaders and hold 200 spots for selection by states, along with an optional 75 slots DNC members can choose to fill. 
But the party rules for replacing a presidential nominee merely specify that a majority of members must be present at a special meeting called by the committee chairman. The meeting would follow procedures set by the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee and proxy voting would not be allowed. 
So if this email scandal forced Hillary Clinton to exit the race at the last minute, a majority of the members of the Democratic National Committee would gather to select a new nominee. 
Who would they choose? 
Let’s take a look at the top five options… 
#1 Tim Kaine 
He would seem to be an obvious choice since he is Hillary Clinton’s running mate. But to win a national campaign you need to have name recognition, and most Americans outside of the state of Virginia have very little familiarity with him. 
And at this point he has proven to have very little popularity on the campaign trail. In fact, attendance at many of his rallies in key swing states can be measured in the dozens. 
So to me it seems unlikely that the DNC would select Kaine as the replacement nominee. 
#2 Joe Biden 
Vice-President Joe Biden has far more name recognition than Tim Kaine does, and in recent days he has been touting how he believes that he would have actually won the nomination if he would have decided to run … 
Vice President Joe Biden said in a recent interview that he believed he could have beat former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination had he pursued it. 
Biden was asked in an interview with CNN Saturday if news that the FBI was re-opening their criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state made him second-guess his decision last year not to run. 
But according to the vice president, the short answer is “no.” The only thing that kept him from running, Biden said, was the recent death of his son, Beau. 
Unfortunately for Biden, he suffers from many of the same things that Kaine does. 
Biden is boring, he is not very good on the campaign trail, and he doesn’t have the sort of charisma that would motivate people to go to the polls in large numbers. 
Biden would probably represent the “safest” choice for the Democrats, but he might not be a winning choice. 
#3 Bernie Sanders 
Bernie Sanders would seem to be a logical choice since he was the runner-up to Hillary Clinton, but the truth is that there are a lot of things working against Bernie Sanders. 
First of all, he does not have any real loyalty to the Democrats. He has previously operated as an independent, and he expressed a desire to return to independent status once the campaign was over. 
Secondly, the Democratic establishment very much dislikes him, and that plays a huge role in decisions such as this. 
Thirdly, Democratic insiders fear that he would be “another McGovern” and would get absolutely wiped out in a general election. 
So even though he is very popular with the radical left, it appears that Sanders would be the least likely choice on this list. 
#4 Elizabeth Warren 
Elizabeth Warren would be very popular with the “Bernie Sanders” wing of the party, and she would enable the party to replace Hillary Clinton with another woman. 
So she is definitely a possibility. 
But she does lack name recognition, and just like Sanders there would be concern that the Republicans would frame her candidacy as “another McGovern” because of her far left policies. 
#5 Michelle Obama 
One recent survey found that 67 percent of all Democrats would rather have a third term for Obama than a first term for Hillary Clinton. 
And these days Barack Obama’s approval rating is running anywhere from +9 to +11. 
So the thought of another Obama in the White House is not as far-fetched as you might think. 
Michelle Obama has better name recognition than anyone else on this list, and she is generally very well-liked by the American people. And she has received a tremendous amount of praise for her work on the campaign trail recently. For instance, her recent speech in New Hampshire was lauded as “the most influential speech of the 2016 campaign” in a recent MSN article entitled “ In this campaign, Michelle Obama became more than just another political voice “… 
The speech, amplified by timing and met with an enthusiastic response, cemented Obama’s place as a star of the presidential race and put a defining stroke not just on how women view Trump, but also on herself as a voice of moral authority. Three months before leaving the White House, she already is among the ranks of public figures who transcend politics and title. 
“When you rise to a level like that, you see how much weight your words carry,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and executive in residence at the School of Public Affairs at American University. “We know she didn’t like politics. But she was impassioned by the language that was used, and she feels compelled to speak out. People listen to her.” 
If I were the Democrats, Michelle Obama is the one that I would select if a replacement nominee was needed, because she would give them the very best chance of winning against Donald Trump. 
Of course the Obamas are just as radical as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but the American people have become quite comfortable with them at this point. 
And I certainly hope that Michelle Obama does not become the nominee if Hillary Clinton has to step aside, because Donald Trump would have an exceedingly difficult time defeating her. 
In the final analysis, none of this is probably going to matter anyway because it is unlikely that the FBI will move quickly enough to force Hillary Clinton out before election day, but there is still a small chance that it could actually happen. 
And if it does happen, it is going to turn politics in America completely upside down. 
Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream . Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  ",FAKE
"(CNN) The Democratic National Convention kicked off Monday without its outgoing Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, following a chaotic scene at a morning meeting where she was loudly jeered by Bernie Sanders supporters.

""I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,"" Wasserman Schultz told the Sun Sentinel newspaper in an interview.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who is also the Democratic National Committee's secretary, handled the gaveling instead.

""Delegates, alternatives, standing committee members and all of our honored Democrats and other guests here in Philadelphia and all of you who have joined us by television, radio and online, here in the United States and around the world,"" she said, ""I hereby call the 47th quadrennial Democratic National Convention to order.""

Wasserman Schultz will also not speak tonight or throughout the duration of the convention, a Democrat close to her says. She will remain in Philadelphia until Friday when she formally steps down as leader of the committee.

Wasserman Schultz changed her plans as the fallout deepened from leaked DNC emails that appeared to show the committee favoring presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Sanders during the primary. It became clear Monday that the convention floor could erupt in anger if she gaveled the convention into session or sought to speak.

And the Democratic National Committee issued an apology to Sanders moments after the convention opened, likely hoping to help soothe tensions heading into the week.

""On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Sen. Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email,"" the statement said. ""These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process. The DNC does not -- and will not -- tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates. Individual staffers have also rightfully apologized for their comments, and the DNC is taking appropriate action to ensure it never happens again.""

The morning Florida delegate meeting descended into chaos when Wasserman Schultz took the stage, with critics holding up signs with the word ""emails,"" and Sanders supporters booing the congresswoman loudly, even after she began speaking.

""We have to make sure that we move forward together in a unified way,"" Wasserman Schultz said during brief remarks. ""We know that the voices in this room that are standing up and being disruptive, we know that is not the Florida that we know. The Florida that we know is going to make sure that we continue to make jobs.""

The audience was roughly half supportive of Wasserman Schultz and half detractors, though the angry participants were louder than the other half. Those attendees began to chant, ""Shame! Shame! Shame!"" while Wasserman Schultz was speaking.

Sanders tried to quell some of his dissatisfied supporters at a rally before his expected speech Monday.

""We have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine,"" Sanders said, which prompted some attendees to shout him down.

Wasserman Schultz announced Sunday she is stepping down as chairwoman of the DNC at the end of the party's convention. The drama reinforced concerns about Democratic party unity.

Former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver tried to show a unified Democratic Party on Monday, the morning after Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation.

""This happened, we knew it happened then, now is the time to go forward,' Weaver told CNN's Chris Cuomo on ""New Day"" on Monday. ""Now is the time to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.""

Wasserman Schultz talked with both President Barack Obama and Clinton before making announcing her upcoming resignation, a Democratic source said.

""Going forward, the best way for me to accomplish those goals [which include electing Clinton president] is to step down as Party Chair at the end of this convention,"" Wasserman Schultz said in the statement.

""As party chair, this week I will open and close the Convention and I will address our delegates about the stakes involved in this election not only for Democrats, but for all Americans,"" she said.

DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile will serve as interim chair through the election. She had been a CNN political commentator, but CNN and Brazile have mutually agreed to suspend their contract, effective immediately, although she will remain on air during the convention week in an unpaid capacity, CNN said. CNN will revisit the contract once Brazile concludes her role.

Separately, a Democratic operative said Hispanic leaders close to Clinton and her high command were discussing Housing Secretary Julian Castro as a possible successor to Wasserman Schultz at the DNC helm, among a number of other candidates whose name are being mentioned.

Chants of ""Debbie is done!"" and ""Debbie resigned!"" broke out at a pro-Sanders rally Sunday in Philadelphia after the news was announced.

Party officials decided Saturday that Wasserman Schultz would not have a major speaking role or preside over daily convention proceedings this week. The DNC Rules Committee has named Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, as permanent chair of the convention, according to a DNC source. She will gavel each session to order and will gavel each session closed.

""She's been quarantined,"" another top Democrat said of Wasserman Schultz, following a meeting Saturday night but before her announcement that she was leaving.

Both sides of the aisle react

Obama issued a statement, saying, ""For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful.""

And Clinton thanked Wasserman Schultz for her leadership of the party.

""I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year's historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week's events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership,"" Clinton said.

After slamming Wasserman Schultz as ""highly overrated,"" Trump, speaking at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia, knocked Clinton for being disloyal to the soon-to-be former DNC chair.

""How about that for disloyalty in terms of Hillary Clinton. Because Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been so much for Hillary Clinton,"" Trump said. ""These politicians. There's no loyalty there. No loyalty. None whatsoever.""

""It gets a little heat and they fire her,"" Trump said. ""Debbie was totally loyal to Hillary and Hillary threw her under a bus and it didn't take more than five minutes to make that decision.""

Wasserman's Republican counterpart, Reince Priebus, said, ""I think the day's events show really the uphill climb Democrats face this week.""

""The extreme left will not be satisfied by one person's resignation,"" the Republican party national chairman added.

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Clinton should follow Wasserman Schultz out the door.

""Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned over her failure to secure the DNC's email servers and the rigged system she set up with the Clinton campaign,"" he said in a statement. ""Now Hillary Clinton should follow Wasserman Schultz's lead and drop out over her failure to safeguard top secret, classified information both on her unauthorized home server and while traveling abroad.""

""I think what the signal was today is that the voices of Bernie Sanders supporters have been heard,"" he said. ""And other people, frankly, in the party, Hillary Clinton supporters, who felt this was the last straw, that she had to go, and this shows they have been heard and gives us opportunity to move forward toward November -- united to deal with the problem of Donald Trump.""

Wasserman Schultz's stewardship of the DNC has been under fire through most of the presidential primary process, but her removal from the convention stage comes following the release of nearly 20,000 emails.

One email appears to show DNC staffers asking how they can reference Sanders' faith to weaken him in the eyes of Southern voters. Another seems to depict an attorney advising the committee on how to defend Clinton against an accusation by the Sanders campaign of not living up to a joint fundraising agreement.

Before the announcement, Sanders on Sunday told Tapper the release of the DNC emails that show its staffers working against him underscores the position he's held for months: Wasserman Schultz needs to go.

""I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC, not only for these awful emails, which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don't think her leadership style is doing that,"" Sanders told Tapper on ""State of the Union,"" on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

""I am not an atheist,"" he said. ""But aside from all of that, it is an outrage and sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying to undermine my campaign. It goes without saying: The function of the DNC is to represent all of the candidates -- to be fair and even-minded.""

He added: ""But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me.""",REAL
"Email 
Election eve, one finds the nation itself to be more pathetically unaware than the leading candidates are evil (morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct), although the margin of difference is negligible. The crowds gathered to hear Clinton and Trump, t-shirts and hoodies decorated with campaign slogans, are two sides of the same mindless fascistic adoration of power, righteousness, indignation, a voluntary submission betraying the same ideological convictions of American exceptionalism and psychodynamics of gut hatred for and fear of difference from themselves and image of ethnocentric superiority. 
Study the faces as the news cameras pan the waiting lines or audiences, smugness, occasional contorted features, feigned innocence disguising certitude. The emptiness of the American public, obediently laying down before billionaire wealth and militaristic narcissism (here self-love engendered through capitalism and assisted by compulsive attachment to the hegemonic purposes of the State). Each side, contemptuous of the other, in reality, brothers/sisters-in-arms, raises to leadership the perfect expression of their own, and hence similar if not identical, needs for recognition to cover their inner nakedness of spirit and purpose. 
Trump, a bottomless pit of mammon-worship, Clinton, a sinkhole of war and aggression, express the fusion of capitalism and militarism, each in America vital to the presence and fruition of the other, that typifies the national mission of unilateral global domination. It was not always thus, although historical-institutional development pointed the direction for at least a century, when America outstripped its earlier foundations, the normalization of advanced industrial capitalism, to claim world moral-political pre-eminence based on spurious privileged association with God in carrying out His/Her divine mission of promised economic salvation. 
The formula has been a surefire winner because scrupulously backed by the real or implied threat (and use) of force, a silent militarism when not engaged in war to announce global financial-and-market penetration presumed to be uncontested (or when contested, the mark of the adversary). Exceptionalism is the ideological battering ram to knock down all opposition, and for those standing in line for the political bread-and-circuses of the two major parties, a validation of their distorted hatreds brought on by their own subordination in the great chain of capitalist being. 
If deep-down, though not consciously admitted, there is recognition of systemic rottenness in misshaping their yearnings and thwarting their present wellbeing and future prospects, this throws them, again both sides of the supposed political divide, into the arms of the Leadership Structure not unlike the authoritarian submission characterizing fascism in the transition from Weimar to Nazi Germany. (To be still in the transition phase and not to have as yet crossed the line, holds little promise of reversion to democratic government; too much has happened to suggest drawing back from the brink.) Collective ego-loss, seen in the faces of the ecstatic political faithful, the now-worshippers of power, goes a long way to explaining the candidates and their visions on offer. 
A closed system awaits the body politic. There is little room for turning left or right, when the center subsumes an already hard-bitten right and the near-ejection of the left from the political spectrum. The vanished center, however fictitious, is kept alive for purposes of self-deception and authoritative indoctrination, a useful cloak for democratic pretentions, as meanwhile the society is placed, willingly so, on a permanent footing of structural hierarchy at home, incessant intervention abroad. The interests of capitalism must be guarded (and celebrated) at all times, lest an alternative way of life become visible, founded on humane standards of international peace and societal betterment. To break out of the present imprisonment in invidious class debasement, is more painful, given long-term ideological habituation, than risking a future of freedom (of system, of conscience, of social solidarity). 
Thus, only days remain in the exercise of meaningless choice. After that, one can expect few impedances to the downward cast of policy, with increasing risks of war, class division, false consciousness to grease the rails of additional discontents as context for resentments and hatreds poisoning the atmosphere. More environmental spoliation, more gun violence, as tokens of the wayward path to fascism.",FAKE
"It’s hard to imagine a discussion on the barbarians who make up The Islamic State having anything to do with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But if Congress is going to approve any formal authorization to sanction U.S. military action against the extremist group, it needs to engineer a resolution that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

And therein lies the challenge.

How does Congress author a resolution that allows lawmakers to exercise their Constitutional authority about deploying U.S. military force -- yet doesn’t fully commit “boots on the ground?”

Lawmakers are leery about the latter because the public long ago lost its appetite for a protracted conflict. Yet at the same time, how does Congress make sure the resolution is muscular enough to actually make a difference in fighting ISIS and not just a fig leaf?

And if Congress doesn’t concoct something that is sufficiently stout, what are the consequences if ISIS hits the United States, keeps incinerating people in cages, lopping off heads or seriously threatens Israel and Jordan?

What is the composition of a resolution that doesn’t hem in the president and the military -- yet gives them appropriate agility to react and respond and fight?

And how about a time frame? How can one possibly say the U.S. is committed only to fighting this long? And if it’s open-ended, some lawmakers fret it’s not appropriate for the U.S. to wage perpetual conflicts that never seem to have exit strategies.

Notice this “resolution” to combat ISIS isn’t even called a “Declaration of War.” It’s euphemistically called an “AUMF,” short for “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” The Constitution grants Congress “war powers. But Congress has officially declared “war” only five times. The most recent was in 1941 when the U.S. entered WWII. The U.S. is very worried about declaring “war” on ISIS, lest it be perceived it’s at “war with Islam” or Muslims. So an “AUMF for ISIS” will just have to do.

Straightforward but curved. Structured but limber. A ceiling but no floor. A floor but no ceiling.

It’s almost Zen-like. Or to Goldilocks, porridge. Not too hot. Not too cold. But just right.

Chatter about crafting a resolution to manage the U.S. fight against ISIS ramped up this week. White House spokesman Eric Schultz indicated that a resolution would come “relatively soon.” Sources tell Fox News that the presentation of a draft resolution could land on Capitol Hill in a number of days.

“It was clear that leaders on the Hill wanted to get this done. It was also clear this was a priority for the president and they wanted language from the White House. They also wanted to be consulted in advance of sending that language up,” said Schultz, who characterized the talks as “robust.”

Some senior lawmakers indicated that the video of the live burning of a Jordanian pilot this week could be the impetus for increased discussions.

“I don’t know how these two things are disconnected,” said one source who spoke on the condition they not be identified.

However, other sources disagreed with that suggestion.

“They’ve been talking about this since State of the Union,” said one source. “This isn’t new.”

Still, another source said that the timing of the increased talk was natural because “they have to give us (a resolution) at some point.” The source noted that additional conversations about a resolution would intensify after President Obama presented his annual budget to Congress.

Obama dropped off his budget on Capitol Hill on Monday. National Security Advisor Susan Rice discussed the finer points of the president’s national security on Friday at the Brookings Institution after the White House sent a copy of the blueprint to the Capitol earlier in the day.

So the resolution appears to be coming together.

“We’ve gotten our hopes up before,” said a source.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has been resolute that such a request come from the White House and not be something engineered by Congress.

Sources have pointed to two prominent proposals as a potential framework for the AUMF.

One is plan crafted by California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The other blueprint comes from Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine, Virginia, and Sen. Bob Menendez, New Jersey.

Menendez is the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The panel authored such a resolution to combat ISIS late last year when Democrats still controlled the Senate. The panel approved the resolution but it never went to the Senate floor for a vote.

There are similarities between the Schiff and Kaine-Menendez proposals. Schiff’s outline bans “boots on the ground,” and limits the geographic footprint to fight ISIS to Iraq and Syria. The Kaine-Menendez offering doesn’t restrict “boots on the ground” and has no geographic structure.

The Schiff provision also would require Congress to re-evaluate the strategy after three years.

The three-year window is designed as such to force the next Congress and president to reconsider the issue.

“Boots on the ground” appears to be one of the most contentious issues in approving a resolution. One Republican lawmaker who asked for anonymity indicated they liked the Schiff plan, so long as they didn’t restrict the president from putting forces on the ground.

Another issue to resolve is whether Congress sunsets the 2001 authorization to fight in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the global war on terror and the 2002 authorization which launched the 2003 war in Iraq. Some liberal lawmakers view the 2001 provision as “war without end.” Others maintain that particular authorization must be preserved. Still, some assert that the 2002 authorization specific to Iraq requires a sunset so it may be superseded by a new authorization.

Writing an AUMF to fight ISIS is a dicey enterprise. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle want a new AUMF. And how will they find the votes to pass this though? Something on which most lawmakers can agree?

“I have always believed that when it comes to fighting a war that Congress should not tie the president’s hands,” said Boehner this week. “It’s not going to be an easy lift.”

“If we go in and rescue somebody, we have a troop on the ground. We have boots on the ground. So what is the language around ‘boots on the ground?’ ” asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.  “I think it’s going to be a challenge.”

Pelosi knows many of her members will argue for repealing the 2001 and 2002 authorizations, so the U.S. doesn’t find itself in a “boundless” war. And by the same token, some Republicans will look askance at the president’s request for Congress to grant him authority to fight ISIS. In an interview with Fox News, Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.,  suggested Obama may try to use the document for “political cover.”

“If it’s not successful, he wants the Congress to share the blame with him,” DeSantis predicted. “As the mission continues to be muddled and it doesn’t succeed, (the president will) says you guys didn’t authorize ground troops so there was nothing more I could do. My hands were tied.”

And so that’s why the mission to find the right mix of votes is going to be demanding. To pass, the administration and lawmakers must forge a resolution that’s not too hot, not too cold but just right.",REAL
"PHILADELPHIA — The leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics brought his message of religious freedom and compassionate immigration to historic Independence Hall on Saturday, speaking in his native Spanish to a wildly receptive audience.

More than 40,000 people gathered to hear Pope Francis speak at the site where colonists declared their freedom from British rule.

""Society is weakened wherever and whenever injustice prevails,"" he told the crowd to applause. He said recent immigrants to the U.S. should not be discouraged by the challenges they face.

""I ask you not to forget that like those who came before you, you bring many gifts to this great nation,"" he said. The pope concluded by leading the crowd, in English, in the Lord's Prayer.

""God bless you all,"" he said before stepping away from the podium.

Minutes before Francis spoke, he paused multiple times to bless several babies along Market Street. The crowd, which had gathered hours before the speech, was enthusiastic all day.

Francis also blessed a ""cruz de los encuentros,"" a 5-foot-tall cross symbolizing the journey of faith of Latino Catholics. He spoke from the same lectern that was used by Abraham Lincoln to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

Omar Navarro, 34, from Clifton, N.J., was excited to get a glimpse of the pope. Navarro said the pontiff's message sharply contrasts with much of the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

""The pope with not too many words will touch so many people,"" said Navarro, who is Mexican. ""Donald Trump was trying to divide immigrants from the rest of the community, but the pope is going to put them together.""

""I'm hopeful that people will listen to Pope Francis and hear what he has to say about the dignity of people, immigrant or not, and reflect on that,"" said Josefa Lopez, 63, an Argentinean immigrant who lives in West Orange, N.J. ""I think his words can change minds.""

Earlier Saturday, Francis arrived at Philadelphia International Airport to musical selections ranging from Ode to Joy to the theme from the movie Rocky. Then, after some warm smiles, kisses and handshakes, his modest Fiat was off into a city anxiously anticipating his arrival.

For many, the blockades and heavy police presence that locked down parts of the city were not a concern. Terri Desensi of Louisville, and her sister Pat Malouf of Greenwood, Miss., came with other church members, snatching a spot along the parade route seven hours ahead of the parade.

""I loved him since the day he was elected pope,"" Malouf said. ""I wanted to come and show my appreciation.""

Kammas Murphy, who teaches at a Catholic school in nearby Wilmington, Del., had a pope almost-sighting early Saturday. She was about a block away from a Mass the pope celebrated Saturday and watched the police cars and vans that escorted Francis

“We couldn’t see him walk in, but the energy was there,” the 25-year-old Wilmington native said. “It was lively.”

The Mass was at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, where he celebrated for a crowd of 1,600, most of them clergy.

The 150-year-old masterpiece of a church sits on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which cuts a swath through the city's cultural center and is home to World Meeting of Families events taking place all weekend.

The masons who built the church placed windows only in the basilica's uppermost story to protect worshipers from the anti-Catholic sentiment of the time. Francis invoked the basilica's history of ""high walls and windows"" as he urged church leaders in the United States to devote more energy to reaching out to young people and those on the periphery of society.

In a nod to Pennsylvania's homegrown saint, St. Katharine Drexel, Francis recounted Pope Leo's words to her when she complained of the needs of the missions. Leo, whom the pontiff called ""a very wise pope,"" asked Drexel pointedly, ""What about you? What are you going to do?""

""Those words changed Katharine's life, because they reminded her that, in the end, every Christian man and woman, by virtue of baptism, has received a mission,"" Francis said. ""Each one of us has to respond, as best we can, to the lord's call to build up his body, the church.""

Outside the basilica, Susan Suzi, from Hershey, Pa., and Carmen and Ann Marie Zullo of New Jersey spent three hours on their feet, hoping to see the pope. The group stayed positive, even when their vantage point failed to yield a view when Francis left the church.

The trio arrived in Philadelphia on Monday to attend the eighth World Meeting of Families, a gathering that brings together 20,000 Catholics for a week of events.

""The excitement is palpable,"" Ann Marie Zullo said. ""We're part of something special here.""

""Who thinks you are going to meet the pope, that you are going to be close enough to touch him?"" Bowes said. ""It's unbelievable.""

The city was awash in barricades, law enforcement officers and smiling volunteers. Much of the downtown area was closed to traffic, and any cars left behind were towed away.

The pope's day concluded with a ""Festival of Families"" event on the parkway, a broad boulevard expanse that runs from City Hall to the Art Museum and was fashioned, by Franklin himself, in the tradition of the iconic Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris. The event was hosted by actor Mark Wahlberg and featured musical performances by Aretha Franklin, Andrea Bocelli and others, as well as a parade of testimonials about the importance of family.

Francis addressed the crowd, saying in Spanish, ""Let us look after family, let us protect the family, because it's in the family that our future is at play.""

“Father, you speak like that because you're not married,"" Francis said, addressing those who might greet his message with skepticism. ""Families have difficulties. In families we quarrel. Sometimes, plates can fly. Children cause headaches. I won't speak of mother-in-laws.

""But in families, there is always light,"" he said.

On Sunday, Francis will meet with bishops at a local seminary, then visit with a group of inmates at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. The main event of the day, and perhaps the entire trip, will be a late afternoon Mass on the parkway expected to draw 1 million people.

At the conclusion of Saturday's families event, Francis stood at a podium and told an adoring crowd, “We’ll see each other at Mass tomorrow."" Then he turned to aides and asked, ""What time is Mass?”

The crowd laughed as an aide told him, ""Four o’clock.""

Not all the events here are church-sanctioned. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics were holding gatherings, one of which champions gay parents and their children. Francis has pleaded for compassion in the case of same-sex marriage and other family issues, but for many the church has not moved far enough.

Still, his themes of compassion, forgiveness and hope have resonated across a wide range of Catholics, lapsed Catholics, many who practice other faiths and those with no religious convictions at all.

Father James Bretzky, a theology professor at Boston College, said that bishops, who Francis calls the voice of the church, are getting the message, particularly after a speech Wednesday where the pope stressed that ""harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor.""

""It's a hard course change though for many of them,"" Bretzky said. ""If the bishops hadn't gotten the message before the meeting in D.C., they certainly can no longer deny that they've not heard the pope asking them to take a different tack.""",REAL
"Many voters aren't enthused about the prospect of a Clinton vs. Trump election. So, will they fall in line and back one – or not?

How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true

Anna Reid peeks out of the voting booth as she waits for her mother to finish voting in the Pennsylvania primaries at the Cumberland Township Municipal Building in Gettysburg, Pa., Tuesday.

Justin Schoville accomplished a rare feat for a protester at a Trump event: He managed to get himself thrown out – three times – just before Donald Trump’s maiden foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Wednesday.

“Trump is a fascist, we are a democracy!” he shouted, during his second forced exit from the hotel lobby.

Just a day before, Mr. Schoville, a research analyst in Bethesda, voted for Bernie Sanders in the Maryland primary. But if the race comes down to Mr. Trump vs. Hillary Clinton, he says he would vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, even if it might help elect Trump.

“I can’t in good conscience give my support to Hillary Clinton. She represents the establishment, the 1 percent, and her policies, I think, will only deepen the problems that have caused Donald Trump to rise in the first place, he says.

In most typical presidential elections, voters like Schoville might already have sighed and reluctantly thrown their support behind Mrs. Clinton. Presidential primary races were all but over before the cherry trees blossomed along the Potomac.

This year, however, the capital is deep into the azalea season and the passions among voters and activists backing the underdogs are still blazing.

Even as Clinton and Trump have now gained enough momentum to claim to be the “presumptive nominees” for November, many voters are showing few signs of accepting that. Will they eventually rally around the presumptive leaders?

It's an oft-repeated question every presidential campaign, but the peculiar dynamics of this race make the answer less certain.

In the past, disgruntled primary voters have rallied to the eventual nominee. By one measure, the tea party insurgents who seemingly held their nose to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012 were actually among his most active supporters during the general election. There are indicators that the same thing could happen on the Democratic side this time.

But Clinton and Trump are two of the three least popular presidential candidates of the past 24 years, according to Gallup. And the question for Republicans is reversed. If Mr. Trump wins, will the moderate and establishment conservatives rally to his cause? That answer appears less certain.

For their part, Sanders voters aren't conceding yet.

Their candidate delivered another rock-the-rafters town-hall meeting at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania last Friday, – just down the road from the site of Pickett’s charge that ended the Confederate advance north on Day 3 of the Battle of Gettysburg. But Clinton still swept four of five primaries this week, along with enough delegates to put the nomination virtually out of reach for the Vermont senator.

But while  Sanders is already shifting gears away from winning the nomination to influencing the party’s platform, many of his supporters at the polling place on the Gettysburg campus are still feeling Bern – and disappointed at the mounting prospect that Clinton will be the nominee.

Dana Suitte, who works for a printing company in Gettysburg, says she told her four sons to vote for Sanders. “I really like the fact that he wants to look at everything and change anything that’s not working,” while Clinton “comes off like a politician” and “is just running on her history with nothing original to say.”

“I think that she thinks that because a lot of black people voted for her husband they will automatically vote for her, and that’s not true,” says Ms. Suitte, who is black.

But her view could change if Clinton picked Sanders as a running mate, she says. “I would love a woman to be president, but I thought I wanted a little bit more from her.”

“The only upside is Bill Clinton’s influence in the White House with her,” she adds. “Bill Clinton was a really good president. That would be my only confidence.”

On the Republican side, it’s the antiestablishment side that triumphed, as Donald Trump ran the table with outsize wins in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Many Republicans now face what some see as an even tougher choice over whether to support Trump.

A recent Gallup poll finds that 51 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of both Clinton and Sanders, but only 28 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of both the top two GOP candidates, Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Robin Williams-Beers, a retired glass engraver who describes herself as a Christian conservative, attended a rally for Ohio Gov. John Kasich on the eve of Tuesday’s primary vote in Rockville, Md.  She stakes out a front-row seat with her home-made signs, including: “Resist the rage. Research. Think. Vote Kasich.”

In some respects, she might seem a natural supporter for Senator Cruz or even Trump, who has drawn strong support from Christian conservative voters in the South. But she says that she had health issues at the start of the primary season and used her time in bed to read up on the candidates, including Governor Kasich’s account of the impact that Bible study had on his life in his book, “Every Other Monday.” “I feel like he unifies people and our country desperately needs that right now,” she says.

She showed up at the polls in Kingsville, Md., at 6:30 a.m. to post signs for Kasich, as a volunteer, and took down the signs at 9:30. While at the polling venue, “many people asked me who would be the best vote to stop Trump,” she said in a phone interview after the vote.

Could she bring herself to vote for Trump? “That’s a very difficult thing to say in this point in time,” she says. “I’m waiting and praying. He does not have the magic number yet, and so much has happened in this election that I hope that something will stop him from becoming the nominee.”

“When the time comes, I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she says.

In an election that has so often defied expectations, polls may not get to the critical question of whether voters will be motivated to turn out to vote for the nominee.

Research shows that people who are most active for candidates who fail to get the nomination do not withdraw from general election activity but often become the most active.

“It’s a long way to November,” says Ronald Rapoport, a political scientist at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who has written extensively on Ross Perot voters and, most recently, tea party activists.

His own research, working from a unique data set of surveys over time involving some 700,000 tea party supporters, found that those who were the most active for tea party candidates like Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain were also the most active for Mr. Romney in the general election.

So, the good news for the Republican Party is that highly divisive primary contests between the tea party and establishment Republicans did not undermine support for the party’s nominee in the general election.  However, it did produce “significantly less positive ratings of the Republican Party,” he says – a factor clearly in evidence in the antiestablishment surge backing Trump.

But whether that “carryover effect” works in the opposite direction, with establishment activists willing to work as hard for Trump, is not clear.

Moreover, “Trump is scarier to people than Hillary,” a factor that could help disappointed Sanders activists get behind Clinton.

But Sharon Wildberger, a graduate student at George Washington University, also protesting Trump outside the Mayflower Hotel, isn’t one of them. She says that she strongly opposes Trump but can’t support Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy, even in a general election.

“Somebody has to beat him, but it doesn’t mean I have to vote for her,” she says.",REAL
"Thursday, 3 November 2016 'VOTE FOR ME, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO LOSE?"" 
Donald Trump has given an amazing closing speech about why he should be elected President in 2016. It can be broken down into different parts about why he should be elected according to Mr. Trump: 
1) ""People say I suffer from a pathological narcissistic disorder, am a megalomaniac, assault women, and am a sociopath. Well, suppose all of this is true. It mostly isn't true of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and look where these lightweights have gotten us today! They are total losers who have destroyed the military and the middle class. Why not give a crazy person a chance? I'm bound to be better than they are. What have you got to lose?"" 
2) I'm a great entertainer. Elect me and you'll never be bored. If I threaten some country or the other with nuclear annihilation you'll hold your breaths to see if I carry it out. It will be amazingly exciting. You'll have nothing to lose! 
3) Previous Presidents, from what I've read about only 4 of them, because of my limited attention span, have been relatively honest. Not me! I've engaged in many fraudulent business practices even cheating widows and orphans! Why not try a deceitful swindler like me? Politics is just one big con anyway! What have you got to lose with a guy like me on your side? What have you got to lose? Bing bing bong bong bing bing bing. 
4) The PC people say that Presidents should be well read and educated. And the lightweight loses who have been in the Oval office have mostly been that way. Even though I've forgotten everything I've learned, I did go to one of the best Ivy League Schools. And, remember this folks, reading is for low energy people who don't have the best brains; they are the opposite of me. Education and reading, believe me, are overrated. 
5) Hatred, bigotry, racism, strong immigration restrictions, Nativism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, advocacy of violence against one's political opponents and misogyny are part of our American heritage. I embody all of these. I am the true voice of the American people. I ""tell it like it is,"" and say things millions of Americans are afraid to say. That is why hate groups support me. 
6) People say I am a ""walking Id."" I say, so what? The id is very, very strong. It is the reptile in our brains. It's all about winning, being a celebrity and grabbing women's vaginas to show one's power. It's all about the strength and power that total losers don't have. I am an unbelievably strong winner just like my friend Putin. You need on your side. Vote for me. What have you got to lose? I truly am unbelievable."" 
With apologies to Nicholas Krisof whose 11/3/16 NYT's column sparked this. Make Keith Shirey's  ",FAKE
"The propaganda popsicle stand that is The New York Times is floating the idea that Trump supporters are calling for a new American Revolution if Hillary wins. 
But beneath the cheering, a new emotion is taking hold among some Trump supporters as they grapple with reports predicting that he will lose the election: a dark fear about what will happen if their candidate is denied the White House. Some worry that they will be forgotten, along with their concerns and frustrations. Others believe the nation may be headed for violent conflict. 
Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.” 
“People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.” 
“If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.” 
What’s ominous about this level of programming is that we know the system is already gearing up for this possibility with an election military drill that could go live at any time until a month after the election, as previously reported: 
According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after. 
It appears that the system is gearing up to handle outbreaks of violence, chaotic rallies and poll stations, and the possibility that the people of the United States may become very dissatisfied with the outcome by using military force and martial law. 
The drill could, of course, go live at any time; Homeland Security and the military are prepared to contend with a period of unrest, and restore order to a divided and broken country – regardless of whether people like their new leader or not. 
As you know, DHS is already monitoring this election and prepared to take over its ‘critical infrastructure’. The scope of this drill would, of course, take things much further: 
Hi Guys, 
I got some gouge from a former military colleague who is in contact with active duty personnel and he received an email about an upcoming drill. We need confirmation on this, but if we put it out there we might get a leaker to come forward and confirm: 
Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 
1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 
2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 
3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. 
Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military 
If the Powers That Shouldn’t Be are planning to steal this election for Hillary as hard as it appears they are , then it makes sense they’d be planning to try and clean up their mess afterward. 
Either way, the people have about reached their limit and are sick and tired of this level of corruption coming out of this government… and we know what happened the last time America finally got fed up with a tyrannical government. Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple . There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"More Filipino fisherman Arnel Balbero (R), who was held hostage for nearly five years by Somali pirates, cries as he meets his relatives after arriving at the Manila International Airport on October 28, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
Five Filipino fishermen who were released after being held hostage by Somali pirates for nearly five years have reunited with their families. 
The seafarers arrived at the airport in the Philippine capital Manila on Friday. 
""I am so happy. This is what I had been praying for every night,"" said Arnel Balbero, 33, as he was embraced by his four siblings at the airport. 
""Just to be with my family, even if we have nothing, even if we have only little to eat, I am already happy,"" he said. 
His sister, Lilia, trembled at the sight of her brother. ""It's like a miracle. We never lost hope he would be freed,"" she said. 
The Filipinos were among 26 freed hostages from Cambodia, China, Taiwan, Indonesia and Vietnam who were freed on October 22. The 26 hostages plus three others made up the crew of Naham 3, which was seized south of the Seychelles in March 2012. 
The captain of their Omani-flagged but Taiwanese-owned vessel died during the hijacking and two other crew members succumbed to illness in captivity. 
Recounting memories 
Balbero's cousin and fellow ex-hostage, Elmer, said the Somali pirates had cared little about the health of their captives. 
""We asked the pirates for medicine but they did not give us any. Instead they said, 'Where is your money?'"" said Elmer. 
The captives also said they suffered beatings at the hands of the pirates. 
""In our first week, they called it our introduction. They used bamboo to beat us,"" Arnel said. 
To survive, the Filipinos did chores for their captors, washing their clothes and even their weapons. 
""We took it as a chance to also wash. We couldn't take a bath often because they only gave us a liter of water each day,"" Arnel said. 
Hugging his two teenage daughters, Elmer said it was thoughts of seeing his family again that kept him going during his captivity. 
Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said the men were freed after a ransom was paid by the ship's owner as well as groups contracted to negotiate with the pirates, Taiwanese media reported. 
John Steed, who works with the Hostage Support Partnership, said the local community and tribal elders were involved in the ""difficult situation."" 
""These are poor fishermen. The ship had no value, they had no insurance, and of course governments don't want to be involved in these sort of negotiations either,"" he said. Sailors who had been held hostage by pirates for more than four years stand for a group photograph as they prepare to board an airplane after being released in Galkayo, Somalia, October 23, 2016. (Photo by AP) 
The sailors are believed to be among the last remaining captives seized by Somali pirates during the surge in hostage-taking in the mid-2000s. 
Piracy off the coast of Somalia has reduced significantly in recent years due to stronger international naval presence. Loading ...",FAKE
"We Are Change 

 
Remember, remember, the 5th of November, 
Gunpowder, treason and plot. 
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason 
Should ever be forgot. 
-Old English folk rhyme (anonymous)
By Barrie Zwicker (Special thanks to Truth and Shadows )
Today, November 5 th , is Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Gunpowder Day. In 2016 it’s the 411 th anniversary of The Gunpowder Plot or Gunpowder Treason, as it was first called.
It also happens to be my 78 th birthday. So I’ve been more aware of Guy Fawkes Day than most. I’m especially happy about how ubiquitous the Guy Fawkes mask has become. 
The mask was hugely popularized in the movie V for Vendetta . As stalwart 9/11Truther Kevin Barrett wrote, a year ago, in a piece entitled “ Unmasking Media Lies: Why BBC’s V-for-Vendetta Mask Piece is Fawked Up ”:
“V for Vendetta may be the most revolutionary film ever made. Its obvious message is: Let’s get out there and visit some rough justice on the treasonous bastards who created the 9/11 and 7/7 media spectaculars, and destroyed the freedoms for which we’ve been fighting for centuries. 
Watch (on YouTube) V for 9/11 Vendetta: Past, Present and Future 
It is also possible to read the film from an interior, psychological perspective: Rather than just a call to action, it’s about the psychological process of coming to terms with the 9/11 and 7/7 inside jobs, by allowing oneself to feel the overwhelming anger that is the natural response. Once one has faced the facts, overcome fear, and come to terms with one’s own righteous anger, THEN it’s time for revolution. 
The real message of the V mask is simple: We know you bastards blew up the Trade Center. We know you’re blowing up the economy. We know you’re lying to us 24/7/365. We know you’re trying to keep us poor and weak and fearful and impotent. Well, guess what? We’re not afraid of you. We’re not afraid to die. And we’re coming to get you. 
No wonder the BBC is afraid to admit what the V mask really means.” 
Yet for the first 71 years of my life I had entirely the wrong idea about the gunpowder plot: what happened, who was really behind it, and its impact on history. An impact that continues to this day. It was in 2005 that I read I read Webster Tarpley’s superb book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA right after it came off the press. He introduced me to the historical element.
True, the brazen events of 9/11 and the mind-boggling cover-up that followed opened my eyes to state-executed terror frauds and the power they deliver to the dark forces that order them. But I didn’t know from nuthin’ about the Gunpowder Plot.
Nor at that time did I appreciate that it and 9/11 are but two examples from thousands of false flag operations that have changed history.
False flag ops are the least-recognized, highest-impact category of human deceit. In terms of emotional wallop, even the most brilliant lies perpetrated by the most talented demagogues pale, in comparison to a big false flag op, for the power to manipulate the public. On this anniversary let’s look more closely at this particular false flag op for some lessons. As William Faulkner put it in his Requiem for a Nun : “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Then we will touch briefly on one of the most recent false flag ops – a leading edge digital one that perversely misappropriates the Fawkes name.
… 
On the Throne of England in 1605 sits James the First, a Protestant, the King who ordered the translation of the Christian Bible that bears his name.
As midnight approaches on November the 4th – the eve of the traditional opening of Parliament – armed agents of the King raid a basement room of the Houses of Parliament. They discover and apprehend one Guy Fawkes. His age, 36, coincides with the number of barrels of gunpowder they find with him. They find a tunnel leading to the room. Fawkes is a known agitator for the rights of English Roman Catholics. In his possession are a pocket watch (a rarity in those days).
Had he succeeded in detonating the gunpowder, the next morning King James and his queen would be mangled bodies, as would all the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Smoking rubble would be all that would remain of the Palace of Westminster complex, including historic Westminster Abbey.
So goes the palace version of the events of the late evening of November the 4 th , 1605. The English public is stunned. It’s the equivalent of 9/11. “A cataclysm,” Adam Nicolson describes it in his book God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible . Upon his arrest, according to the official account, Fawkes admits his purpose was to destroy king and Parliament.
That there was some kind of plot is not in doubt. By November the 8 th , on the rack, Fawkes names 12 co-conspirators. Those not killed where they are tracked down are found guilty of treason later in a trial lasting less than a day. They and Fawkes are hanged, drawn and quartered.
The following Sunday, November the 10 th, the King James Version of the plot is broadcast from the leading pulpit of the Church of England, that of William Barlow, Bishop of Rochester. Barlow thunders that the enemy, meaning papists, is satanic in its wickedness. The King, their hoped-for victim, on the other hand is, Mr. Nicolson writes, characterized as an unqualifiedly good man . . . virtually a Christ-figure.
Soon all the pulpits of England echo the official account. Between 1606 and 1859 the Fifth is remembered in an annual service of thanksgiving in every Anglican church, writes James Sharpe in Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day. Until 1959 , it was against the law in Britain not to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. Celebrate, because from the beginning the public was giving thanks that the realm was saved and the treasonous conspirators dispatched. For centuries effigies of Fawkes were burned.
The palace version becomes historical truth for humankind including me – duped again! – for most of our lives.
Mr. Nicolson and others now cast serious doubt on that version. Many anomalies concerning the events have surfaced.
Fawkes was not apprehended in a basement room but rather a ground floor room, one remarkably easily rented by the plotters. There was, accordingly, no tunnel. The authorship of the letter by which the King learned of the plot is murky. It was turned over to the King by the Royal Chancellor, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury.
Sir Cecil I would characterize as the Dick Cheney of his day. Because plots were common at that time Cecil had an efficient network of spies seeded among Roman Catholic dissidents. He kept tabs on all plots the spies discovered. This one featured a large cast of characters from several cities.
Cecil kept the King in the dark about the plot except for the obscure letter. The gunpowder, it turned out, was of an inferior nature, unlikely to have achieved much result. This was odd, as Fawkes definitely knew a thing or two about gunpowder. He had developed expertise with it while serving with distinction in Spain’s army against Protestant rebels in the Netherlands. It’s conceivable the gunpowder could have been switched by someone; loads of it existed because of all the hostilities. Some handwriting on Fawkes’s confession differed from the rest.
Ignored until recently is a book by Jesuit historian John Gerard, What Was the Gunpowder Plot: The Traditional Story Tested by Original Evidence . Gerard died in 1606 but his book was not published for almost three centuries, in1897, an interesting temporal fact in itself. While it’s true, as Sharpe writes, that accounts of the plot differ as per the biases of the authors, I find Gerard’s account pretty compelling. He writes:
“When we examine into the details supplied to us as to the progress of the affair, we find that much of what the conspirators are said to have done is well-nigh incredible, while it is utterly impossible that if they really acted in the manner described, the public authorities should not have had full knowledge…”
Exactly. The evidence points to a particular kind of false-flag operation. There are many variations. In some (9/11 being the leading example) an outrageous event is carried out by the perpetrators and blamed on the chosen enemy. In others (example, Gulf of Tonkin) nothing happens but a fiction blames the chosen enemy. The Gunpowder Plot is midway: a plot was underway but the precise intentions of the plotters can never be known. The main feature is that, with or without taking a hand in the plot, the Cecil elements manipulated events brilliantly.
Cecil was heavily involved in an influential London group known as “the war party.” It wanted to push James into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire, from which the group’s members hoped, among other things, to extract great personal profit.
The war party considered it politically vital to keep persecuting Roman Catholics. Sir Cecil set out, writes Tarpley, to sway James to adopt his policy by means of terrorism.
It amounts to this: Either Cecil and the war party made the Gunpowder Plot happen or they let it happen –and made sure of a brilliantly timed “exposé.” And if they let it happen they made it happen.
James himself had negotiated peace with Spain the previous year. His other advisors told him there was no chance of a general Catholic uprising and that no foreign Catholic powers were involved in the plot.
The King knew, Sharpe writes, that “the reality of Catholicism in England around 1600 was very different from the image conjured up in government propaganda and contemporary Protestant myth.” Sharpe again: “…even in the face of … persecution it seems that most of England’s Catholics remained loyal to their monarch and wanted nothing more than to be allowed to practice their faith unmolested.” (The parallel with most Muslims living in the UK and Canada today springs to mind.)
For his part, James downplayed the plot. “James and his ministers,” Sharpe writes, “showed more restraint than many modern regimes faced with similar problems.”
Nevertheless, the power of the imagery of what might have happened burned itself into the public’s psyche, and was repeatedly fanned by the Protestant and war promoting establishments.
The outcomes of this ongoing propaganda campaign are incontestable. Tolerance for English Roman Catholics is replaced by a period of terrible bloodletting for them. Numbers are killed. Catholics’ homes are burned. A string of laws is passed restricting their rights and liberties.
The English become “fixated on homeland security,“ Nicolson writes. An inclusive, irenic idea of mutual benefit between Spain and England – trade between the two countries, because of the peace treaty, had been growing –“is replaced in England by a defensive/aggressive complex.” All Catholics, of all shades, never mind their enthusiasm or not for the planned attack, are identified as the enemy.
Most significantly, war with Spain ensues. England’s course is set for a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese empires. England for various reasons comes out victorious and on these war victories the British Empire is founded in blood, deception and conquest.
… 
There’s no way of knowing whether the British Empire – and all the consequences of its rule from Capetown to Canada to Iraq to its American colonies — would have emerged anyway or in what form or at what pace, but we can see in retrospect that the Gunpowder Plot was pivotal in what did transpire.
It would be a failure of imagination not to see the parallels with 9/11 and society in our day of blanket war propaganda, teeming with covert agents, ever-encroaching surveillance, ever decreasing civil rights and liberties, and either helpless or conniving leaders.
Let’s look at false flag ops generically. It’s difficult in my opinion to over-estimate their terrible place in history, and their place in making history terrible. Think of the wars and millions of deaths that followed the Gunpowder Plot, the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbour in 1898 that kick-started the US Empire’s expansion to the Philippines and beyond, the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the USA into World War I, the torching of the German Reichstag that boosted Hitler to power and enabled his bloody grab for world domination, the assassination of John F. Kennedy that yanked U.S. foreign policy onto a warpath, the alleged attacks during LBJ’s presidency the next year by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin — attacks that simply did not take place but that provided the basis for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed 88-2 in the US Senate. That resolution constituted the “legal” basis for escalating the Vietnam War with an eventual death toll of more than 3-million. And 9/11. To name a few.
Without false flag ops most wars would be harder to launch. Some would barely be possible. Think of the unprecedented millions of peace marchers who took to the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq. If the deceptions are used to justify such wars were exposed earlier by a skeptical, independent, ferociously investigative media, we all would be living in a different world. Millions of horrible deaths and all the accompanying grief could have been avoided. And the military would have to put on bake sales to raise funds.
There always has been a yearning for peace among the normal everyday citizenry: finding meaningful work, marrying and raising a family, tilling the soil, writing poetry, inventing things, or — as Pierre Berton said was his favourite thing – “getting smashed with your friends.”
There are exceptions, but the horrible norm is that for wars to be launched, maintained or expanded the people have to be fooled. And history proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the most surefire way to accomplish that is to lumber them with an iconic outrage allegedly perpetrated by the designated “enemy” of the day. And we go on sinking ever further into the mire of deaths – the deaths of innocents, the death of promise for a better future, the death of honest history, the death of coming to grips with reality – because each new false flag op draws power from the fictions planted about all the previous ones.
And so the elites continue to hide their four aces in a rigged game. Their most closely guarded secret retains the potency of the first one. Remember, remember, the 5 th of November, the 11 th of September, Faulkner, and George Santayana’s comment that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But today we also have to remember the future. Added to the false flag ops, false flag agents and false flag organizations of old are false flag digital organisms, sent to infect particular publics. One of the most recent of which I’ve become aware is a rogue individual or group identified as ” This tricky entity “FawkesSecurity” on Monday, October 22, released via YouTube and Pastebin a bomb threat against an unidentified U.S. Government building.
I for one smell digital gunpowder.
“FawkesSecurity” claims to be associated with the Anonymous collective. The threat of violence, however, goes against everything Anonymous says it stands for. Sources at Anonymous are denouncing “FawkesSecurity” and its bomb threat.
A report on this , from which I am quoting, can be found at Examiner.com
Following is an excerpt from the message of “FawkesSecurity:”
Dear citizens of the world, ? We are anonymous. As of today 200 kilograms of composite Nitroglycerin and commercial explosives have effectively been concealed in a government building, situated in the united states of America. on the 5th of November 2012 … ? we are anonymous ? we are legion ? we do not forget ? we do not forgive ? on the 5th of November, you will expect us. 
As the Examiner report says, “the video displays many of the standard trappings of associated with Anonymous [and yet] the threat of violence is completely out of step with the ethos that guides Anonymous.” The Examiner report adds:
“Multiple social media accounts have denounced FawkesSecurity and their bomb threat. Many speculate FawkesSecurity is a false flag operation conducted by government agents in an attempt to discredit Anonymous. Others speculate that FawkesSecurity is simply misguided, and unfamiliar with the bullet proof idea that is Anonymous.”
Whatever the case, those who wrote the text above can’t punctuate or capitalize worth a damn.
The digital and physical worlds are not separate. Agents of the state infest both. Although unlikely, if the threat by “FawkesSecurity” were to be carried out today, one outcome could be to seriously besmirch Anonymous. (The question of whether Anonymous itself might be a false flag op, or is, or could be infiltrated or otherwise manipulated, is one to be asked and answered further down the rabbit hole. Such is the ultra-elusive nature of “reality” today.)
We’ve come a long way from 1605 technically, but the general scheme is the same: deception rides high, wide and ugly.
Segments of this post were originally published in an op ed page piece the author had published on November 5 th , 2005 in The Globe and Mail; others come from notes for a talk given by the author in London, Ontario November 5 th , 2011. 
The post Guy Fawkes, The Gun Powder Plot & How False Flags Have Shaped History appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.

That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, ""I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!"" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.

That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.

It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, ""fearing for his life,"" he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.

Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a ""pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force.""

Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from 2014 asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.

Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.

As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an ""officer in need of aid."" I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, ""That son of a bitch just assaulted me."" The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to ""get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer."" The young man looked up at the officer and said, ""Man ... you see I can't go."" His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, ""You see I can't go!"" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.

About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.

The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit.  One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.

The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words ""and officers under his command."" Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers  ""under the command"" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.

This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are ""totally wrong — just not true."" The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of ""very small incidents"" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.

The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.

Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.

When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as ""anti-cop.""  It is not.

When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina last year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.

Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.

The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.

Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several  NYPD  officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.

These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.

Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation.  At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.

Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers.  We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.",REAL
"Political scientists have known for years that political polarization is largely a one-sided phenomenon: in recent decades the Republican Party has moved to the right much faster than Democrats have moved to the left. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution has described it, ""Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political opposition.""

The data backing this claim up are pretty solid. The most widely-used measure of political polarization, a score of ideology based on voting developed by Kenneth Poole and Howard Rosenthal, has shown that the Republicans in the Senate and especially the House have drifted away from the center far more rapidly than Democrats. The chart below, taken from the most recent slice of their data released just last month, illustrate this pretty clearly:

Right around 1975, the Republican party sharply turned away from the center line and hasn't looked back. The Democrats have been drifting away from the center too, but nowhere near as quickly.

Every once in awhile an op-ed writer will come along and make a qualitative argument along the lines of ""no, really, it's the Democrats who are polarizing!"" Peter Wehner, a former official in three previous Republican presidential administrations, did just that in the pages of the New York Times last week. His argument amounts to the notion that since President Obama has pursued some policies that are more liberal than Bill Clinton's, ""the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right.""

Well, no -- just look at the chart above! Here's another way of looking at it: How many moderates are in each party? Here's another interesting chart from the Poole-Rosenthal data, showing the number of House members in each party who are not centrists -- that is, whose ideological scores put them on the more extreme ends of the partisan scale.

As you can see, in the most recent Congress nearly 90 percent of Republican House members are not politically moderate. By contrast, 90 percent of Democratic members are moderates. It's quite difficult to square a chart like this with a claim that Democrats are abandoning the center faster than Republicans. As the chart shows, there are plenty of centrist Democrats left in the House -- but hardly any centrist Republicans.

It's worth pointing out that none of this is happening in a vacuum -- House Republicans are become more extreme because Republican voters are electing more extreme candidates. We see many of these same patterns playing out among the electorate as well, as a massive Pew Research Study demonstrated last year.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"German Lopez:You've called the war on drugs a failure. What did you mean by that?

But we've compromised those values severely during this so-called drug war — so severely that we're actually inhibiting public safety. We're consuming gross amounts of taxpayer dollars. We are undermining human potential. And we're doing it all in a way that has a significant, if not savage, disparate impact on poor people and minorities.

That, to me, is a failure. When we can get the same aims but also save taxpayer dollars, create greater safety than we're experiencing right now, elevate human life and human potential, and not further cement racial disparities in this country but alleviate them, then we should be going in a dramatically different direction with drug policy reform. Pilot programs for prison reentry, and entire states like Georgia — which is dramatically lowering its African-American prison population, saving taxpayer dollars, and driving down crime — are showing us that we could go a different way.

Cory Booker:Overall, drug policy has gone seriously awry and is offending our value system. And marijuana is one of those drugs that's been almost pulled out of a category of other serious drugs, many of which are prescribed by doctors to deal with serious injuries — somehow this drug was pulled out, made a schedule 1 crime, and so vilified that it's created classes of criminals amid otherwise law-abiding citizens. For example, a mother who has a sick child with seizures — which we can show, medically, that marijuana, without even its intoxicating element, could severely reduce, and benefit that child — right now that person's behavior, if she's getting that life-affirming drug, is going to be called criminal. If she goes into another state that may have legalized it or legalized it medically and comes back into a state that doesn't, she's trafficking drugs across state lines — a federal offense. I'm one of those people who think our marijuana laws are way off the rails. We need to pull back and focus on things like legalizing medical marijuana; supporting states like Alaska or Colorado or Washington that want to be incubators of reform; and allowing scientists and medical researchers to test marijuana's impact on people. 



What I'm comfortable doing now is just saying, ""Hey, federal government, play catch-up here. Get into the zone we already know most Americans are comfortable in."" And we're going to stop criminalizing large segments of the country, we're going to allow scientists to study it, and we're not going to take law-abiding citizens who sell marijuana through dispensaries in the states that have legalized it and make criminals out of them.

You have drug laws that are so severely, disparately enforced against some groups. Let's take African Americans, for example: there's no difference between black and white marijuana usage or sales, in fact. You go to college campuses and you'll get white drug dealers. I know this from my own experience of growing up and going to college myself. Fraternity houses are not being raided by police at the level you see with communities in inner cities.

So equal usage of this drug, equal sale of this drug, but blacks are about 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for it. African Americans are more likely to get mandatory minimums, more likely to get about 13 percent longer sentences. It's created these jagged disparities in incarceration. In my state, blacks are about 13 to 14 percent of the population, but they make up over 60 percent of the prison population.

Remember: the majority of people we arrest in America are nonviolent offenders. Now you've got this disparity in arrests, but that creates disparities that painfully fall all along this system.

For example, when you get arrested for possession with intent to sell, you can do it in some neighborhoods where there are no public schools and it's not as densely packed as an inner city. You do it in an inner city and now you're within a school zone, so you're facing even higher mandatory minimums. So when you face that and you get out from your longer term, now you're 19 years old with a felony conviction, possession with intent to sell in a school zone.

But forget even all of that — if you just have a felony conviction for possession, what do you face now? Thousands of collateral consequences that will dog you for all of your life. You can't get a Pell Grant. You can't get a business license. You can't get a job. You're hungry? You can't get food stamps. You need some place to live? You can't even get public housing.

What that does within our country, especially in these concentrated areas where we have massive numbers of men being incarcerated, is create a caste system in which people feel like there's no way out. And we're not doing anything as a society like we know we could do. There are tons of pilot programs that show if you help people coming back from a nonviolent offense lock into a job or opportunity, their recidivism rates go down dramatically. If you don't help them, what happens is that, left with limited options, many people make the decision to go back to that world of narcotic sales.

What's more dangerous to society: someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home, or someone going 30 miles over the speed limit, racing down a road in a community? And yet that teenager who makes a mistake — doing something the last three presidents admitted to doing — now he has a felony conviction, because it's more likely he's going to get caught. And for the rest of his life, when he's 29, 39, 49, 59, he's still paying for a mistake he made as a teenager.

That's not the kind of society I believe in, nor is it fiscally responsible. It's undermining productivity. It's undermining people's ability to take care of their families. It's locking in generational problems in poverty, or even limiting opportunities.

This is so wrong that those conversations I'm having with conservatives as well as with Democrats are resonating. When you have people like Sen. Rand Paul talking about racial disparities in incarceration, when you have people like Grover Norquist standing up and talking about disparate racial impact of this problem, this convergence in understanding of fiscal conservatives, of Christian conservatives, of libertarians shows me that this is a time of great hope for our country.

So I'm not going to question people's motives. This is one of those issues, like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, where it should pull all Americans together to say enough is enough.

I went through 15 years of my life where every single day I would encounter good Americans who were being overly punished in a disproportionate way for a nonviolent drug offense, whose lives were being destroyed, who had desperation, desire, hunger just to have a shot at the American dream — yet a nonviolent drug offense was undermining their potential to contribute, to raise their kids, to have a decent life.

That's just wrong. So every day that I'm here, that echoes in my conscience and drives me forward.

Let me even go a step further, because I alluded to this point but didn't make it clear enough: the violence in my community that's driven by men who believe — and I think they're wrong, but this is what they believe — that they have no fair shot in this country; they made a mistake and they've gone into a system that often turns them out worse than they went in, in terms of their proclivity for crime.

When you take juveniles, like we do in this country, and put them in solitary confinement — other nations consider that torture — you hurt them and you scar them through your practices. You expose them for nonviolent crimes to often violent people. You expose them to gang activity.

Then you throw them back on our streets. And you tell them, ""We're not going to help you get a job. You want a roof over your head? Forget it. In fact, if we catch you trespassing on public housing authority property, we're going to take action against you. You're going to get a Pell Grant, try to better yourself through education? Sorry, you're banned from getting a Pell Grant.""

What do people do when they feel trapped and cornered by society? What I saw in my city was people getting more and more caught up in criminal activity. You can trace it way back to an early youthful offense that resulted not in us helping them, not in us intervening to empower them — but in taking children and abandoning them and saying, ""You made this mistake, and we're going to punish you, and, by the way, that punishment is going to continue every day of your life.""

Think of the statistic when I was mayor. We found out that the murder victims in our city had an 85 percent chance of having been previously arrested an average of 10 times. Some people might take a statistic like that and say, ""Well, it shows these people are whatever."" No.

If you want to judge a society, don't judge it by the kid like me who grew up in an affluent neighborhood and was given great schooling. Judge it by how we treat all of our children.

What does it say about a society when a kid makes a mistake, and we don't surround him with opportunities that we know now work? But no, we have this slippery slope of punishing teenagers for nonviolent offenses — things kids in the neighborhood where I grew up, in an affluent town, did a lot. But when these kids get caught, they begin a slippery slope into a system that often closes off their options and points them more toward crime than toward redemption. That's unacceptable to me.

So I've got a lot of missions here — to expand opportunity, empower people with education, make college more affordable — but dear god, I am driven every single day to end this nightmare that has made my nation singular in humanity for having more people behind bars for nonviolent offenses. And in terms of race and class, we now have a country that has more African Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.

This is haunting to me, especially because there's another way. I don't have to invent it; I'm not just asserting it. I know factually there's another way because I know many red states with Republican governors are showing there's a way to dramatically reduce the prison population. The governor of Georgia is bragging about a 20 percent reduction of African Americans in the criminal justice system. There are common-sense things we could be doing that we're not doing because of a lack of urgency — and that's unacceptable to me. I was taught as a kid, as Langston Hughes said so eloquently, ""There's a dream in this land with its back against the wall. To save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.""

But I'm the X Generation. We grew up after the Civil Rights Movement. And I know I'm here because of the outrageously righteous impatience of a whole lot of Americans from wildly different backgrounds — from religious folks to nonreligious folks, black folks to white folks, Christian folks to Muslim and Jewish folks, Latino folks, you name it. There was a wild sense of urgency to raise the consciousness of this country until this place couldn't stop the change. I mean, Sen. Strom Thurmond did a 24-hour filibuster trying to stop civil rights legislation. And the pressure in this country to end an outrageous injustice, a savage injustice, led to change.

To me, this issue is no less urgent. In fact, in terms of affecting poor people and minorities and devastating communities, this is an urgent issue of that magnitude — to bring a legal system that is truly a justice system.

We're all hurting for it. I don't care what your background is. You're hurting for it. You're hurting because the truth of our country — liberty and justice for all — is not being told. You're hurting for it because you're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars from your annual taxpayer expenses to support an unjust system. We're hurting for it because there's a better way to go; and not doing anything is making streets less safe, and destroying and undermining our children that we desperately need in a competitive economic environment to be contributing and not costing.

So I don't know what it's going to take, but I know one thing it's going to take is us and more people getting involved and seeing this as a cause for our country, not a cause for some people over there. This really does touch us all, and there's got to be a lot more pushing. You know the old saying — I've heard it a million times down here: ""Change doesn't come from Washington; it comes to Washington.""

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.",REAL
"Rights? In The New America You Don’t Get Any Rights! By Michael Snyder, on January 9th, 2012 
One of the unique things about the Constitution of the United States was that it guaranteed certain rights for its citizens. Those rights provided the foundation for an era of freedom and prosperity that was pretty much unprecedented in human history and dozens of other nations eventually copied many of the ideas contained in our Constitution and Bill of Rights because they worked so well. Of course our system never functioned perfectly, but when you compare it to what has gone on for most of human history, it truly was a bright light in a sea of oppression and totalitarianism. Unfortunately, our rights are now being systematically taken away from us. In America today, the politicians have convinced most of us that in order to keep us all “safe” we must give up many of our rights and move toward becoming a totalitarian police state. In the “new America”, you don’t get any rights. They tell us that giving people rights is too dangerous. Instead, you get some limited “privileges” which can be revoked at any time by the authorities. Sadly, most Americans have become so dumbed-down that they don’t even realize what is happening. 
How many Americans do you think have actually read the Constitution? 
Personally, I went through high school, college and even law school without ever being required to read the Constitution of the United States. 
Isn’t that amazing? 
Most Americans don’t even understand that they have rights because they have never even read the documents that grant them those rights. 
You can find the text of the U.S. Constitution right here . If you have never taken the time to read the whole thing, you really should. 
According to the U.S. Constitution, the following are some of the rights that we are supposed to have…. 
-Freedom of religion 
-Freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures 
-The right to due process of law 
-The right to a speedy and public trial 
-Freedom from cruel and unusual punishments 
Unfortunately, all of those rights are under attack in America today. 
In most cases, a right is not taken away all at once. Instead, opponents of these rights take what is known as an “incremental approach”. 
For example, we are told that there are certain limits on the freedom of speech. We are told that we cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater and we accept that because it sounds reasonable. But then once everyone agrees that there are “limits” on that right, the control freaks that run things just keep trying to tighten those limits in thousands of different ways until our freedom of speech is whittled away to almost nothing. 
It is imperative that we stand up for our liberties and freedoms. If we don’t defend them now, eventually they will be gone for good. 
The following are some examples of how our rights are under attack in America today…. 
The federal government has become absolutely obsessed with monitoring everything that Americans say. This chills free speech because it gives people the feeling that there is always somebody “watching”. 
It has recently been revealed that the Department of Homeland Security plans to monitor social media outlets on the Internet. If you use the wrong “keywords” or if you are a key “influencer” on the Internet, there is no doubt that someone from the federal government will be keeping tabs on you. 
The following comes from a recent RT article …. 
Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms. 
Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.” 
In particular, the powers that be seem to have become absolutely fascinated with Facebook, Twitter and blogs. 
As I have written about previously , the Federal Reserve has decided to start monitoring social media sites and blogs in order to keep track of what is being said about them. 
And as a recent Fox News article detailed, the Department of Homeland Security is also developing such a system…. 
Though still in development, DHS is looking to establish a system for monitoring “forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.” The idea is to gather and analyze publicly available information, and then use that information to help officials respond to disasters and other situations. 
So why do they have to spend so much time, energy and money keeping track of what we are all saying on the Internet? 
Why don’t they just let us be? 
One would think that the federal government has bigger problems to deal with at this point. 
Unfortunately, this trend toward endlessly snooping on American citizens is not likely to reverse any time soon. 
So could what you say on the Internet get you labeled as a “trouble-maker” or as a “potential terrorist”? 
Recently, Barack Obama signed a new law which allows the U.S. military to arrest “potential terrorists” on U.S. soil, hold them indefinitely without trial and even ship them off to Guantanamo Bay for endless “interrogation” sessions. 
The insanity of this new law was detailed in a recent article by Henry Blodget …. 
The reason this law is horrifying is not that terrorists deserve to be handled with kid gloves. They don’t. The reason it’s horrifying is that, without due process, it is too easy for the government to just declare someone a terrorist who isn’t actually a terrorist. It’s too easy, in other words, for government employees to do what everyone else does: Make mistakes. 
If you don’t think it’s possible for the government to mistakenly assume that someone is a terrorist who isn’t, read this story by Lakhdar Boumediene , who was just held as a terrorist by the U.S. government in Guantanamo for 7 and a half years. At Guantanamo, Boumediene says he was tortured for not telling his U.S. captors what they wanted to hear–that he was a terrorist. He was only eventually freed after his case went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that it might be a good idea to ask the government to present the evidence that led it to believe that Boumediene was a terrorist (the government didn’t present any). 
Sadly, according to Obama this new law just reaffirms what he already had the power to do. In his signing statement, Obama stated that he already had the authority to arrest American citizens, hold them without trial and ship them off to prison camps. 
Of course that would come as a complete shock to the original drafters of the U.S. Constitution, but very few Americans seem concerned with what the U.S. Constitution actually says these days. 
Now there is a new bill before Congress that would even give the federal government the power to instantly strip individuals of citizenship if they are suspected of being “hostile” to the United States. 
It is known as the Enemy Expatriation Act, and you can read this new bill for yourself right here . 
According to the bill, you can be stripped of your U.S. citizenship for “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.” 
So what does it mean to “materially support” hostilities against the United States? 
Does simply criticizing the government fall under that category? 
Unfortunately, when you have a law that is really vague it gives authorities the leeway to do pretty much whatever they want. 
At least we still have the Internet where we can communicate with one another and share all of this information, right? 
Well, maybe not for long. 
As I have written about previously, a new law under consideration by Congress would permanently change the Internet forever and could potentially silence thousands of important voices. That is why we must stop SOPA . It is a horrible law which could be used to brutally censor the Internet. 
Some of the biggest names in the Internet community are speaking out against SOPA. For example, a recent CNN article contained some stunning quotes about SOPA from one of the co-founders of Google…. 
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has been outspoken against the efforts. 
The bills “give the U.S. government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS (the Internet’s naming system) and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial),” Brin wrote last month on his Google+ page as Congress was considering the measures. “While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.” 
Everywhere you turn these days, our liberties and our freedoms are being attacked. There is a relentless assault on everything that it means to be an American. No matter how hard you try, it just seems like you can’t get away from it. 
For example, many of us have been so disgusted with the TSA that we simply do not fly anymore. 
Well, the TSA is not content to just monitor airports anymore. Now they are bringing their own special brand of “security” to thousands of other locations across the country as the Los Angeles Times recently detailed …. 
The Transportation Security Administration isn’t just in airports anymore. TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country. 
“We are not the Airport Security Administration,” said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. “We take that transportation part seriously.” 
The TSA’s 25 “viper” teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year. 
So even if you never fly again, there is still a good chance that you will get the “rubber glove treatment” from a TSA “viper team” at some point. 
Without a doubt, this country is slowly becoming a giant prison . 
And one group that gets targeted by the government almost more than anyone else is Christians. In America today, there is a war against Christianity. The Christian faith is being attacked in hundreds of different ways , and under the Obama administration this attack has only just intensified. 
There seems to be an obsession with pushing Christianity out of every single shred of public life in this country. For example, family members were recently banned from bringing Bibles to wounded veterans at Walter Reed National Medical Center. The following is from a recent CNSNews article …. 
In a Sept. 14 policy memorandum, Col. Chuck Callahan, chief of staff of Walter Reed National Medical Center, banned family members from bringing Bibles and other “religious items” when visiting wounded military personnel at the facility. 
Thankfully, this policy was later reversed after a tremendous national outcry, but there are dozens and dozens of other “policies” like this that have not been reversed. 
They say that we still have “freedom of religion” in this country, but there is a non-stop effort to push it into a box that is getting smaller and smaller with each passing day. 
Our 2nd Amendment rights area also being brutally assaulted. 
Restrictions on gun owners keep getting tighter and tighter and tighter. Things have gotten so bad that now even gun manufacturers don’t even know what is legal and what is not. 
The following comes from a recent article in the Washington Times …. 
Despite overseeing an industry that includes machine guns and other deadly weapons, ATF regulations for the manufacture of weapons are often unclear, leading to reliance on a secretive system by which firearms manufacturers can submit proposed weapons for testing and find out one at a time whether they comply with the law, critics say. 
The ATF recommends that manufacturers voluntarily submit weapons for case-by-case determination. But those judgments are private and, it turns out, sometimes contradictory. Critics say nearly identical prototypes can be approved for one manufacturer but denied for another. 
But it is not just the federal government that is becoming incredibly oppressive. We are seeing state and local governments all over the country also move in the direction of totalitarianism. 
Here are just a couple of examples that have been brought to my attention in recent days…. 
*Up in Massachusetts, police were recently sent to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl . 
*In St. Louis, a proposed law would make it mandatory to spay or neuter all cats and dogs and would make it mandatory to microchip all cats and dogs. 
When you step back and look at the bigger picture, a clear trend emerges. 
As 2012 began, over 40,000 new laws went into effect all over America. Some of these new laws are good, but most of them are about restricting the liberties and freedoms of individual Americans. 
We have become a nation of control freaks. 
In the final analysis, we don’t have any absolute rights anymore. Instead, what we have are “privileges” that are being systematically stripped away. 
But this is not how America was supposed to be. 
We were supposed to be the freest nation on the face of the earth. 
So what in the world happened to us? Mainstream Media Lies: 23 Things That Are Not What They Seem To Be On Television » A Dodgy Bloke 
I hate to sound like a broken record but much of the deterioration of our rights has it’s genesis with George “He kept us safe” Bush, after 9/11. Now the chickens have come home to roost, add to that the start of financial repression, and dark hungry days are ahead. I have a thesis why this is happening Government has one duty to stay in power. The Powers that be know unstable times are coming if you have a stable of loosely written laws on the books you can lock up anybody when the SHTF who gets frisky. I know this falls into the “Alex Jones” FEMA camps the tin hat crowed. Personally I think civil war or revolution is a real possibility people revolt on thier knees not on thier backs. Also another FYI watch the retirement plans of state county and city workers. How do you think those cops in the last photo will react when they find out thier retirement went up in smoke. If you don’t know what I’m talking about go back to sleep. Kevin 
A Dodgy Bloke 
Your correct that the first job (and one can say by extension only job) of government is to protect government. 
I think your incorrect regarding the pensions of the “security forces”. They will tax the rest of us to keep them financially secure for our “protection” of course. Kevin 
A Doggy Bloke 
Your correct with laws that are so written as to be used at will against whoever they want. In Jamaica marijuana is illegal yet you smell it everywhere. Count the minuets from the time you get through customs until your offered some to purchase and you won’t make an hour. It’s in essence rope that the masses collectively tie around their necks awaiting the government to rein in political opposition. 
My name is Christina Ziegler I think you should start the revolt Gutter Economist 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 – allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 – allows the government to seize and control the communication media. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 – allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 – allows the government to seize all means of transportation, including personal cars, trucks or vehicles of any kind and total control over all highways, seaports, and waterways. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 10999 – allows the government to take over all food resources and farms. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 – allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 – allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 – designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 – allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 – allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 – allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 – specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921– allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has broad powers in every aspect of the nation. General Frank Salzedo, chief of FEMA’s Civil Security Division stated in a 1983 conference that he saw FEMA’s role as a “new frontier in the protection of individual and governmental leaders from assassination, and of civil and military installations from sabotage and/or attack, as well as prevention of dissident groups from gaining access to U.S. opinion, or a global audience in times of crisis.” FEMA’s powers were consolidated by President Carter to incorporate the… 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 – grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 – assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued over a fifteen year period. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 12148 – created the Federal Emergency Management Agency to interface with the Department of Defense for civil defense planning and funding. An “emergency czar” was appointed. FEMA has only spent about 6 percent of its budget on national emergencies. The bulk of their funding has been used for the construction of secret underground facilities to assure continuity of government in case of a major emergency, foreign or domestic. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 12656 – appointed the National Security Council as the principal body that should consider emergency powers. This allows the government to increase domestic intelligence and surveillance of U.S. citizens and would restrict the freedom of movement within the United States and grant the government the right to isolate large groups of civilians. The National Guard could be federalized to seal all borders and take control of U.S. air space and all ports of entry. 
EXECUTIVE ORDER 12919 – Collects EOs 10995, 10997, 10998, 10999, 11000, 11001, 11002, 11003, 11004, 11005 and 11051 together into one new Executive Order. 
National Security Act of 1947 – allows for the strategic relocation of industries, services, government and other essential economic activities, and to rationalize the requirements for manpower, resources and production facilities. 
1950 Defense Production Act – gives the President sweeping powers over all aspects of the economy. 
Act of August 29, 1916 – authorizes the Secretary of the Army, in time of war, to take possession of any transportation system for transporting troops, material, or any other purpose related to the emergency. 
International Emergency Economic Powers Act – enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national. These powers were transferred to FEMA in a sweeping consolidation in 1979. 
For more information, goto http://www.infowars.com/deliberately-engineered-economic-collapse-in-usa-leading-to-martial-law/ Ameen 
WOW!! DB200 
“International Emergency Economic Powers Act – enables the President to seize the property of a foreign country or national.” 
Does this mean that all gold stored in Fort Knox, belonging to foreign countries, can be seized legally by the USA? 
Does this also mean that when China and the USA go to war with each other, China stands to lose quite a lot of investments? Observer 
There is NO gold in Fort Knox! Ask any local resident, many of whom have military family members stationed there. They are guarding an empty coffer. Kevin 
I thought they needed to pull this off before the conforming generations (born previous to 1946) were still a major voting block. While I see it before my eyes one would think the people that came of age in the 1960s would know better then to surrender rights to the government. 
Apparently I was mistaken. thomas jefferson 
“All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution, are null and void.” Chief Justice Marshall, Marbury v. Madison 
i will NEVER submit to this TYRANNY! give me Liberty or give me death 
and you can BET your sweet A** i WILL NOT go down without a fight 
Freedom isnt Free- But damnit its worth dying for- especially for my children- they WILL NOT live under a totalitarian regime as long as i have a breath Joshua10 
If you don’t know your rights…You Don’t Have Any! Tamara 
Do not, in your frustration, deny ANY man or woman or child their rights! As frustrating as their ignorance is, they have been lied to and are as the weak in their ignorance. The good protects the weak from the wolves. 
The wolves are gathering…. REED RICHARDS 
Michael, 
As Gutter Economist has outlined it, Rights? The masses have no rights! And they never did. But don’t worry. The masses could care less about freedom. And they never did. Evidence that the masses don’t care about freedom? Ron Paul is not the frontrunner by a very wide margin in the presidential race. He is the only candidate who is running to restore civil liberties, ending senseless, grinding people into hamburger wars, and restoring sanity to fiscal and monetaruy policy. Is that what the masses want? Of course not. But they will finally get a taste of the iron fist when the FEMA Camp roundups begin DB200 
What is a FEMA Camp? Observer 
FEMA was empowered to set up camps, mostly in highly unpopulated areas in the western US, where populations could be moved to ostensibly save them from extreme danger from such things as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, other natural disasters, that threaten their homes & communities. Each camp can hold thousands of people. Knowing the propensity of our government to “protect” us from ourselves, these camps are also capable of holding all those rounded up who are in opposition to anything the government wants at any given time. They are the modern version of the Japanese internment camps employed during WWII. Citizens opposed to government policies and practices are prime targets for placement in these camps, especially now that the NDAA says that US citizens even simply suspected of ‘terrorist’ thoughts or activities (and who defines what a terrorist is? – the government, of course) can be indefinitely held, without charge or trial. Anyone who thinks ANY current administration is wrong can now be branded a terrorist, and 99% of the commenters here, if found, could also be sent to the FEMA camps. The powers that be are just waiting for the one major calamity it would take to execute the FEMA camp orders ~ and that calamity is most probably going to be an economic one, with natural disaster (with concomitant economic collapse) a close secondary excuse to round up We, The People, who need Big Brother’s ‘help.’ Only God can help those who believe in “Live Free or Die” ~ armed insurrection will be met with instant execution, so there’ll be no need for internment at FEMA camps. Once the believers in the 2nd Amendment are exterminated, the entire geography of the United States will comprise one extremely large FEMA camp. Igos 
Do You People Know What Lies Out West??? Do You?!?! YELLOWSTONE SUPER VOLCANO! The Camps Are There So The Government Can Commit Massive Genocide. Unlike Hitler Whom Killed 6 Million The Camps Out West Will Hold Numbers So Massive It’ll Put Hitler To Shame….",FAKE
"Email 
After 12 hours of effort to hash out an agreement to cut oil production that can be presented formally to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (flag shown) in November, 14 oil ministers meeting in Vienna over the weekend gave birth to — a goose egg. Without an agreement, the November 30 gathering is likely to be irrelevant, just as the cartel itself is becoming. 
Every cartel eventually blows up due to members unwilling to abide by agreements, cheating, creating side agreements, and in general seeking their own self interests. So it is with OPEC. At the Vienna meeting, Iran complained that it is really producing more than reported, while Iraq wanted a dispensation similar to Iran’s (which has allowed the country to expand its production back to pre-sanction levels), claiming that it has a war to fight and needs the revenues. 
Venezuela, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Kuwait are each facing their own special problems — Venezuela in particular. President Nicolás Maduro made a personal trip to Vienna (some said in order to get away from the increasing unrest back home) to press the point: He needs more money to cover the increasing deficits his socialist policies are costing his government. 
At the end of the day, several things were clear: First, there was no agreement, nor is one likely. If OPEC countries can’t agree, how could any non-OPEC oil producers (such as Russia) be persuaded to go along with any agreement to cut production to raise prices? 
Second, any production cut (if there is one) would likely be borne primarily by OPEC’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia, which just completed its first (and perhaps last?) global bond offering for $18 billion initiated to slow the liquidation of its foreign reserves. Last year it liquidated nearly $100 billion of those reserves while playing the increasingly unsuccessful and costly game of chicken with U.S. producers. 
In addition, U.S. energy producers are already announcing new capital expenditures while bringing on rigs that were temporarily idled during the downturn. Nick Cunningham, writing for OilPrice.com, noted another problem facing OPEC: In January there were 5,576 DUCs — drilled but uncompleted wells — just waiting for the right conditions for them to be completed. Since then more than 500 of them have been brought online, profitably, with most of the rest, according to observers, likely to be completed by the second quarter of 2017 — barely five months from now. What OPEC ultimately is facing is the vast and increasing disparity between what it costs them to bring a barrel of oil to the surface, and what it costs for American producers to complete a DUC. Since most of the up-front costs have already been expended, the marginal cost to bring a DUC well online is way below the current price of $50 a barrel. The math is persuasive, and U.S. oil producers are reacting accordingly. 
In other words, OPEC is engaged in a game that it initiated and which it is now discovering that it cannot win and cannot quit. In the process, OPEC is becoming increasingly irrelevant while U.S. producers are pushing ahead, continuing to turn America into a country that is not only self-sufficient for its own energy needs but is also increasingly supplying the world. 
The OPEC bickering is likely to intensify as the reality sinks in that the cartel has painted itself into a corner. Venezuela is facing existential questions, while most of the others are on an unsustainable path of decreasing revenues to fund socialist welfare programs that were never affordable and are now strangling the governments. 
It’s likely that those revenues will continue to fall despite what OPEC may do (or more likely, not do) in November. Investors and producers are expecting oil prices to fall sharply, as measured by their “short” positions in the futures markets. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), there were more than 540,000 short positions (taken by those expecting oil prices to fall) as of October 11 — the most in nearly 10 years. Image: OPEC flag 
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .  ",FAKE
"It was the most audacious Donald Trump spectacle yet in a summer full of them, as the Republican presidential front-runner, in his Boeing 757, thundered over a football stadium here Friday night and gave a raucous speech to one of the largest crowds of the 2016 campaign.

But Trump’s flashy performance was about more than showmanship. His visit to Alabama was coolly strategic, touching down in the heart of red America and an increasingly important early battleground in the Republican nominating contest.

The Manhattan developer, who strode onstage to “Sweet Home Alabama,” is trying to show that his candidacy has broad and lasting appeal across every region of the country — especially here in the South, where Alabama and seven other states are holding a clustered voting blitz March 1.

The scene Friday night put an exclamation point on an extraordinary run in which the flamboyant mogul has thoroughly disrupted the presidential campaign and kindled a national discussion about not just politics but American culture itself.

“We have politicians that don’t have a clue,” said Trump, wearing a red hat on which was printed “Make America Great Again,” his slogan. “They’re all talk, no action. What’s happening to this country is disgraceful.”

He added: “We’re running on fumes. There’s nothing here. . . . We’re not going to have a country left. We need to have our borders. We need to make great deals.”

The crowd — sprawling and boisterous, though filling perhaps half of the 40,000-seat stadium — was anything but silent. People pumped their fists in the air as the ruddy-faced man with an iconic corn-silk coif took one shot after another at former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) and Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.

His speech focused heavily on illegal immigration — “We’re going to build a wall,” he declared to booming applause. And Trump basked in the early success of his campaign, noting all the states where he leads in the polls, including Bush’s Florida.

“Has this been crazy? Man! I mean, it’s been wild,” he said while suggesting that the United States should have an expedited election as in some other countries. “I’d like to have the election tomorrow. I don’t want to wait.”

Bush and his allies tried to fire back at Trump. Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, paid for a small plane to fly above the stadium towing a banner that read, “TRUMP 4 HIGHER TAXES, JEB 4 PREZ.” Bush’s campaign, meanwhile, blasted an e-mail to Alabama supporters highlighting Trump’s past liberal positions and saying they are “deeply out-of-step with the Alabama way of life.”

Trump fans came by the thousands, driving from the Florida panhandle, from Mississippi, from Tennessee and Texas. Traffic was backed up for more than a mile.

On the street, Olaf Childress, a neo-Confederate activist, gave out copies of “The First Freedom” newspaper, which had headlines about “Black-on-white crime,” “occupied media” and “censored details of the Holocaust.”

The most-enthusiastic Trump backers began arriving at the stadium at dawn, hoping to get a spot close to the stage. The first in line were Keith Quackenbush, 54, and Bill Hart, 46, co-workers at a retail giant in Pensacola, Fla.

“I’m telling you, everyone who is a worker at our store, they’re excited about Trump,” Quackenbush said. “I don’t care what race or gender, whatever age — they love Trump. This is a movement.”

The event — billed as a “pep rally” — had been scheduled for the Mobile Civic Center but was moved to Ladd-Peebles Stadium, home to the University of South Alabama Jaguars, as interest soared. Trump’s campaign claimed that more than 35,000 people had applied for tickets, but by the time his speech began, the stadium was full of empty patches of AstroTurf and grandstands.

In the run-up, Trump made the rounds on Alabama radio stations, talking politics and college football — though, like any practiced pol, he wouldn’t take sides in the rivalry between the University of Alabama and Auburn University.

As the crowd formed Friday morning, Trump tweeted from New York: “We are going to have a wild time in Alabama tonight! Finally, the silent majority is back!” He echoed Richard Nixon’s 1968 “silent majority” pitch that was aimed at attracting disaffected white Southerners.

Like other Republican candidates, Trump is making a strategic play for the South, eyeing the states participating March 1 in the so-called SEC primary — named for the collegiate sports conference — soon after the traditional early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said in an interview that Trump could “win significant support” in the South, buoyed by his hard-line views on trade and immigration as well as the GOP base’s restive appetite for an outsider. “We’re going to be strong in Iowa, New Hampshire and the other states that start it out,” ­Lewandowski said. “Then comes the South. That’s the path to the nomination.”

In Mobile, campaign volunteers wearing Trump hats and carrying clipboards collected signatures to get Trump on the primary ballot and gathered names for a voter database. Next week, Trump is to hold events in Nashville and Greenville, S.C.

Trump chose Mobile for his big rally in part because it is the hometown of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R), an immigration hard-liner who has been counseling Trump and helped him develop his immigration policy paper. Trump brought Sessions onstage. The senator put on a white “Make America Great Again” hat. (“These hats are hot as a pistol,” Trump quipped.)

But there is plenty of resistance to Trump’s candidacy here. “My plea to my conservatives is, ‘Don’t get so far out in right field that we can’t talk to anyone but ourselves,’ ” said Jack Edwards, who represented the Mobile area in Congress for two decades.

Trump is not the only contender who sees the South as a place where bids could rise or fall in the second lap of the 2016 race. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) recently made a 20-stop, seven-day road trip from South Carolina to Oklahoma that stretched nearly 2,000 miles.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will appear Saturday at a Republican luncheon in Alabama, while Bush has scheduled private events in Birmingham next Wednesday. Ohio Gov. John Kasich was here earlier this week to pick up the endorsement of Alabama Gov. Robert J. Bentley. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has a passionate grass-roots following here; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, whose evangelical background has made him a force, has made regular visits to the South.

But none have put on a show like Trump. Friday night resembled something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500. People came to see a celebrity, Trump, but also to hear his fiery call to revolutionize the nation’s politics. Many attendees said they had never attended a presidential campaign event.

Cheryl Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.

“There is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything — the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”

As the sun began to set, the sweaty throngs in the stadium snapped their heads toward the sky as the roar of a jet engine pierced the air. Here it was, gliding toward them above the Friday night lights: a gleaming Boeing 757 with “T-R-U-M-P” stretched across its navy blue body, circling twice and dipping its wing toward the sloped stadium bleachers.

The crowd roared its approval to Trump as his jet tilted away to land at a nearby airport. Minutes later, he was whisked in a caravan of SUVs past sleepy neighborhoods and the shipyard-lined coast of the Deep South to the surreal political festival.

“This is history happening right before our eyes,” said Laura Teague of Mobile, one of the few black attendees at the rally. “I’m going to help Trump make history.”

Philip Rucker in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"November 1, 2016 at 10:33 pm 
You never see these debates in Parliament on the BBC news not one bit. Just shows you all the bullshit that doesn't really have anything to do with the people of this country. They have no good intentions for our people and are only concerned about the 1%",FAKE
"Wednesday 2 November 2016 Facebook user wastes two hours sharing things to impress his insurance company 
Facebook user Simon Williams has admitted he only shares things on social media to impress other people, so trying to impress his insurance company seemed like a sensible thing to do. 
Williams said Admiral Insurance’s decision to offer better insurance deals to people with Facebook profiles that looked ‘safer’ to their quotation algorithm had led to an afternoon of frantic social activity. 
He explained, “Obviously, as a millennial social media user, I only ever share things that will impress my friends, future employers and potentially those women who happen across my Facebook profile from any of the number of dating apps I use. 
“So sharing and posting things purely to make myself look better is nothing new to me. Tweaking that for an insurance company was pretty easy. 
“I simply liked a number of Facebook pages about driver safety, signed a petition calling for lower speed limits on UK roads, added a couple of driving safety courses as Life Events, and even put a couple of posts on my historic timeline about how people are ‘driving way too fast past the school these days’. 
“Also, Driving Miss Daisy is now my favourite film, by the way. 
“It would definitely have got me cheaper car insurance. It was a flawless plan. 
“Of course, Facebook has now put an end to that – the bastards. Two hours of my life I won’t get back. 
A spokesperson for Facebook told us, “We simply can’t have a third party business exploiting the information our users share on the Facebook platform for commercial gain. 
“That’s what our advertising business is for.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"The discovery of an ancient artifact, mainly composed out of aluminum is considered as compelling evidence of ‘ancient astronaut’ visitations to Earth over 250,000 years ago. Lab tests have confirmed the age of the artifact and its mysterious composition. The idea that humanity has been visited by beings not from Earth in the distant past has captured the interest of millions worldwide.
Every once in a while, a strange discovery makes us reconsider whether or not history, as we have been told, is accurate.
What if we are missing something, and what if, in the distant past, extremely advanced technology was present on Earth?
READ: Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie 
The mysterious artifact, composed mainly out of aluminum was found in Romania during the 1970’s when the nation was under communist rule, and information about it was released to the public at the time.
Now, lab tests conducted in Lausanne, Switzerland, have revealed that the metal fragment is composed of 90 percent aluminum and the remaining 10 percent of 11 different metals.
The artifact has an approximate age of 250,000 years, reports British newspaper the Sun .
But is this artifact really compelling proof ancient astronauts visited Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago?
As it turns out, Aluminum was not created by ‘modern civilization’ until 200 years ago. Aluminium was first isolated in 1825 by Danish physicist HC Oersted, so the discovery of the piece of metal with an age such as this has been considered extraordinary by researchers.

The item was discovered in 1973 when constructors were working on the shorelines of the Mures River, in the vicinity of the town of Auid. At around 10 meters below the surface, workers were left surprised when they recovered three mysterious objects.
All of them appeared, unlike anything they had seen, and seemed to be very old.
Archaeologists were brought to the site and identified two of the objects as being fossil remains.
However, the third piece left researchers surprised. IT appeared to be a man-made artifact, composed of an extremely lightweight metal. Researchers suspected at the time that it was the end of an axe.
To confirm the theories, the objects were sent to analysis to Cluj, Romania.
Experts determined that the fossils belonged to a large –extinct— mammal that died between 10,000 and 80,000 years ago.
READ: We Are Being Lied To About Our History 
However, the third object caused confusion among experts. Scientists determined that the object was composed of a lightweight metal and was most likely manufactured due to the concavities of the object.
The Auid artifact is 20 meters long, 12.5 centimeters wide and has a thickness of 7 centimeters.

The object resembled some kind of part belonging to a complex mechanical system. However, researchers were unable to determine to what it belonged.
Deputy Director of the Romanian Ufologists Association, Gheorghe Cohal said: ‘Lab tests concluded it is an old UFO fragment given that the substances it comprises cannot be combined with technology available on Earth.’
However, not everyone seems convinced. Local historian Mihai Wittenberger doesn’t believe the object belongs to a complex mechanical device left behind by ancient astronauts. In fact, Wittenberger
believes the mysterious object may actually be a metal piece from a World War II German aircraft.
More precisely, Wittenberger claims the alleged ‘alien artifact’ was actually part of the landing gear of a Messerschnmitt ME 262.
But there’s one problem with that explanation. The mystery object is 250,000 years old.
The mysteries surrounding the artifact have not been solved, and currently, the ‘out-of-place- artifact resides in the History Museum of Cluj-Napoca, next to a sign that reads: ‘origin still unknown’.
Source: EWAO 
Related: Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie We Are Being Lied To About Our History Ancient Egyptians had electricty and batteries thousands of years ago Forbidden History & OOPARTS: Out of Place Artifacts Ooparts: Alien electronic chip with age 450 million years found in stone near Labinsk city in Russia 17 Out-of-Place Artifacts Said to Suggest High-Tech Prehistoric Civilizations Existed The 500-Million-Year-Old Dorchester Pot Should Not Exist Have Humans devolved through history? Ancient Technology, the ultimate piece of evidence The mystery of the Swiss watch from the Ming Dynasty 30 million year old giant rings in the Bosnian mountains? 2-Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Mega-Reactor Discovered in Africa 500,000 Year-Old Spark Plug Found in Rock: The Coso Artifact Researchers in China discover a 300 million year old screw embedded into rock Forbidden History: Extraterrestrial Base Inside Bucegi Mountains ",FAKE
"Islamic State militants returning to the United Kingdom could launch a chlorine gas attack on trains, the London Underground or at a football match, according to a chemical weapons expert.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer at the Joint Chemical Biological Radiological Nuclear Regiment, said the last two weeks in Syria and Iraq have seen the ""most concentrated and deadly use of chemical weapons"" since the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.

""It is very evident that ISIL are putting much time and effort into training its jihadis in the use of chlorine as a terror weapon and in particular in IEDs (improvised explosive devices),"" he wrote on 2Paragraphs.

""Virtually every foreign jihadi who returns to the U.S. or U.K. will have been exposed to training of this sort and will have a reasonable idea on how to use chlorine and other toxic chemicals as a terror weapon. In the U.K., up to 90 tons of chlorine can be purchased without any licenses,"" he wrote.

After returning from advising security forces in Baghdad last week, de Bretton-Gordon told the Daily Mirrorthat he feared a chlorine gas attack was ""highly likely,"" adding: ""This could happen on a train or tube or even at a big football match.""

De Bretton-Gordon examined the likelihood of such an atrocity on the 20-year anniversary of the Tokyo subway sarin attack, which killed 12 people and injured more than 1,000 more, causing chaos in the Japanese capital.

The Aum Shinrikyo movement used packets of the nerve agent, which they punctured with umbrella tips on the Tokyo subway during morning rush hour.

But de Bretton-Gordon said less complicated methods would be needed for a deadly chlorine attack.

""The method of delivery of chlorine at the second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, 100 years ago, would be effective on the subway today,"" he wrote.

""That is, take the top off a chlorine canister and let it 'vaporize' aka 'weaponize.'""

The expert, who has recently worked with U.K.-based charity Syria Relief advising civilians on what to do in a chlorine gas attack, founded chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) defense firm SecureBio and is a director at gas mask manufacturers Avon Protection.

His 23 years in the British Army included service as commanding officer of the U.K.'s CBRN Regiment and NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion.

De Bretton-Gordon said that ISIL had planted ""hundreds"" of chlorine IEDs in the defense of Tikrit and detonated chemical bombs north of Mosul against the Kurdish Peshmerga.

During the advance of the ISIL last year, militants gained control of a huge chlorine factory near Mosul as well as the Muthanna complex near Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein manufactured chemical weapons using mustard gas, sarin and VX.

The United Nations said 2,500 remaining rockets filled with nerve agents were degraded and could not be used to make working chemical weapons.

De Bretton-Gordon said that even if returning ISIL jihadists attempted to launch a chlorine attack in Britain, the effect ""should be minimal"" if security services are forewarned.

""Chlorine is not very toxic and the green and yellow clouds are easy to see and avoid, and it is very non-persistent only lasting for a few minutes,"" he added.

""Undoubtedly, and hopefully, the CIA, FBI, MI 5 and 6 etc. will be taking a very close look at returning jihadis and in particular anybody buying toxic chemicals.""

Earlier this month, ISIL allegedly attacked Iraqi soldiers with roadside bombs containing chlorine gas as allied forces continued a huge assault against the group in Tikrit.

Footage captured by an Iraqi bomb disposal team showed plumes of thick orange gas emerging from a detonated IED.

Iraqi Kurds also claim to have evidence that ISIL used chemical weapons against their fighters in January this year.

The use of chlorine, a choking agent that dates back to the First World War, is banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which prohibits the use of toxic agents in warfare.

Chlorine and other chemical weapons have been used ""systematically"" in the ongoing civil war in Syria, according to monitors, who accuse all parties of atrocities.

Bashar al-Assad's forces allegedly used sarin in the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians outside of Damascus and have reportedly dropped chlorine barrel bombs in recent weeks.

Iraqi Kurds were victims of the deadliest chemical attack in recent history when Hussein's air force bombed the town of Halabja, where up to 5,000 people were gassed to death in 1988.

The article originally appeared on the website of The Independent. Its content was created separately to USA TODAY.

MORE FROM THE INDEPENDENT",REAL
"President Barack Obama will propose blocking 1.4 million acres (556,000 hectares) of Arctic refuge from oil and gas drilling, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The administration plans to propose designating the area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness, the highest level of federal protection that would ban oil and gas drilling, the newspaper reported, citing people briefed on the plan. 

 

 The move is certain to spark yet another fight with Republicans, who have fought for 35 years over how to manage what is known as ANWR, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The vast region has huge petroleum reserves but also provides critical habitat for caribou, millions of migrating birds, polar bears and other wildlife.

 

 ""What’s coming is a stunning attack on our sovereignty and our ability to develop a strong economy that allows us, our children and our grandchildren to thrive,"" said the new Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska,  in a statement to the Post.

 

 ""It’s clear this administration does not care about us, and sees us as nothing but a territory. … I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska. But we will not be run over like this. We will fight back with every resource at our disposal.""

 

 The state's Republican congressional delegation, along with the new governor, Bill Walker, sent out a joint news release Sunday morning calling the action ""an unprecedented assault on Alaska.""

 

 Walker, an independent, said in a statement that he may be forced to accelerate oil and gas permitting on state lands to compensate for the new federal restrictions.

 

 ""Having just given to Alaskans the State of the State and State of the Budget addresses, it’s clear that our fiscal challenges in both the short and long term would benefit significantly from increased oil production,"" Walker said. Roughly 40 billion barrels of the state’s untapped reserves are already in federal areas where oil and gas activity is blocked or restricted, he pointed out.

 

 The announcement, which could come on Sunday, is likely the first in a series of decisions the administration will make in the coming week about Alaska's oil and gas production. The administration also plans to block part of the Arctic Ocean from drilling.",REAL
"Did Anthony Weiner say these things as part a deal to save himself? Anthony Weiner has spoken! One year ago, we all that that Donald Trump was just being funny, just being Trump, when he said that Hillary Clinton was showing poor judgement in letting Huma Abedin, wife of “perf sleaze” Anthony Weiner have access to government information. Trump called the couple a security risk, but again, we thought he was just making fun of them. As it turns out, Donald Trump’s words were eerily prophetic. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have heard by now that the FBI is reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email problems after finding evidence on devices at Anthony Weiner’s home. Earlier, we reported that FBI Director James Comey had tricked Obama’s Department of Justice and the Clintons in sending the investigation announcement letter to Congress. Some believe that Comey was attempting to force the DOJ to issue a warrant so that his agents can start reading the 10,000+ emails on Weiner’s device. 
Here Is How FBI Director Comey BAMBOOZLED The DOJ, CONGRESS, And The CLINTONS All At Once 
Now, Anthony Weiner has spoken and he may have made Comey’s job even easier, while completely bypassing the Department of Justice altogether. 
According to reports, Weiner has given permission for the FBI to access all of the information on his electronic devices, including his wifi router. . @BretBaier emails Chris Wallace while he’s on air: Weiner has given FBI permission to search computer so no warrant needed. @FoxNewsSunday 
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) October 30, 2016 I emailed that 2 sources say Weiner is cooperating w/ FBI- & co-owned laptop. Also NY FBI had info 4 a few weeks- pressure was building https://t.co/AHbQVtvQzg 
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) October 30, 2016 
In essence, Weiner is singing like a bird, and the FBI can conduct a thorough review of the emails in question. If there is criminality found on Weiner’s devices, they have a shot at it. 
Is there anything that the Department of Justice or the Clintons can do? 
Time will tell, but many believe that WikiLeaks and others are about to drop more incriminating evidence on Hillary later this week. 
Comey may have saved himself. Weiner may be trying to cut a plea deal to save himself. 
Hang on, as this ride is still picking up steam! Related Items",FAKE
"Trump Tower Surrounded By Dump Trucks In Anticipation Of Violence 11/09/2016 
DAILY CALLER 
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has surrounded the perimeter of Trump Tower with reinforced dump trucks in anticipation of Election Day violence. 
The dump trucks flank the skyscraper on all sides, and are supplemented by guardrails and heavily armed police officers. This morning, the building was not open to the general public and traffic crawled through a narrow corridor of trucks and police. On the street, supporters and protesters stood for interviews with a burgeoning press corps camped across the street. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lives in a penthouse near the top of the building, which also serves as headquarters for his presidential campaign. (RELATED: Election Day Voting Has Begun – Who Is Winning?) 
Police told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the dumping beds are filled with sand, which adds weight to each truck, in effect making it impossible to run the barrier. Police decided to circle the Tower with trucks as a hedge against car bombs, or some such similar incendiary munition delivered by car. The fleet of trucks will travel with Trump this evening to surround the New York Hilton Midtown Manhattan Hotel, where Trump is hosting his victory rally. The NYPD maintained a presence around the hotel for several days, which is also closed to the public. 
Guests staying in the hotel on unrelated business must present their keycards at a security check-point before entering the premises. 
Similar security measures will attend Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s headquarters at the Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen this evening.",FAKE
"World Socialist Web Site 
AT&T, the telecommunications and cable TV colossus, announced Saturday that it has struck a deal to acquire the pay TV and entertainment giant Time Warner. The merger, if approved by the Justice Department and US regulatory agencies under the next administration, will create a corporate entity with unprecedented control over both the distribution and content of news and entertainment. It will also mark an even more direct integration of the media and the telecomm industry with the state. 
AT&T, the largest US telecom group by market value, already controls huge segments of the telephone, pay-TV and wireless markets. Its $48.5 billion purchase of the satellite provider DirecTV last year made it the biggest pay-TV provider in the country, ahead of Comcast. It is the second-largest wireless provider, behind Verizon. 
Time Warner is the parent company of such cable TV staples as HBO, Cinemax, CNN and the other Turner System channels: TBS, TNT and Turner Sports. It also owns the Warner Brothers film and TV studio. 
The Washington Post on Sunday characterized the deal as a “seismic shift” in the “media and technology world,” one that “could turn the legacy carrier [AT&T] into a media titan the likes of which the United States has never seen.” The newspaper cited Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at Moffett-Nathanson, as saying there was no precedent for a telecom company the size of AT&T seeking to acquire a content company such as Time Warner. 
“A [telecom company] owning content is something that was expressly prohibited for a century” by the government, Moffett told the Post . 
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in keeping with his anti-establishment pose, said Saturday that the merger would lead to “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few,” and that, if elected, he would block it. 
The Clinton campaign declined to comment on Saturday. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, speaking on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” on Sunday, said he had “concerns” about the merger, but he declined to take a clear position, saying he had not seen the details. 
AT&T, like the other major telecom and Internet companies, has collaborated with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its blanket, illegal surveillance of telephone and electronic communications. NSA documents released last year by Edward Snowden show that AT&T has played a particularly reactionary role. 
As the New York Times put it in an August 15, 2015 article reporting the Snowden leaks: “The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.” 
The article went on to cite an NSA document describing the relationship between AT&T and the spy agency as “highly collaborative,” and quoted other documents praising the company’s “extreme willingness to help” and calling their mutual dealings “a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” 
The Times noted that AT&T installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs based in the US, provided technical assistance enabling the NSA to wiretap all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a client of AT&T, and gave the NSA access to billions of emails. 
If the merger goes through, this quasi-state entity will be in a position to directly control the content of much of the news and entertainment accessed by the public via television, the movies and smart phones. The announcement of the merger agreement is itself an intensification of a process of telecom and media convergence and consolidation that has been underway for years, and has accelerated under the Obama administration. 
In 2009, the cable provider Comcast announced its acquisition for $30 billion of the entertainment conglomerate NBCUniversal, which owns both the National Broadcasting Company network and Universal Studios. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission ultimately approved the merger. 
Other recent mergers involving telecoms and content producers include, in addition to AT&T’s 2015 purchase of DirecTV: Verizon Communications’ acquisition of the Huffington Post , Yahoo and AOL; Lionsgate’s deal to buy the pay-TV channel Starz; Verizon’s agreement announced in the spring to buy DreamWorks Animation; and Charter Communications’ acquisition of the cable provider Time Warner Cable, approved this year. 
The AT&T-Time Warner announcement will itself trigger a further restructuring and consolidation of the industry, as rival corporate giants scramble to compete within a changing environment that has seen the growth of digital and streaming companies such as Netflix and Hulu at the expense of the traditional cable and satellite providers. 
The Financial Times wrote on Saturday that “the mooted deal could fire the starting gun on a round of media and technology consolidation.” Referring to a new series of mergers and acquisitions, the Wall Street Journal on Sunday quoted a “top media executive” as saying that an AT&T-Time Warner deal would “certainly kick off the dance.” 
The scale of the buyout agreed unanimously by the boards of both companies is massive. AT&T is to pay Time Warner a reported $85.4 billion in cash and stocks, at a price of $107.50 per Time Warner share. This is significantly higher than the current market price of Time Warner shares, which rose 8 percent to more than $89 Friday on rumors of the merger deal. 
In addition, AT&T is to take on Time Warner’s debt, pushing the actual cost of the deal to more than $107 billion. The merged company would have a total debt of $150 billion, making inevitable a campaign of cost-cutting and job reduction. 
The unprecedented degree of monopolization of the telecom and media industries is the outcome of the policy of deregulation, launched in the late 1970s by the Democratic Carter administration and intensified by every administration, Republican or Democratic, since then. In 1982, the original AT&T, colloquially known as “Ma Bell,” was broken up into seven separate and competing regional “Baby Bell” companies. 
This was sold to the public as a means of ending the tightly regulated AT&T monopoly over telephone service and unleashing the “competitive forces” of the market, where increased competition would supposedly lower consumer prices and improve service. What ensued was a protracted process of mergers and disinvestments involving the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs, which drove up stock prices at the expense of both employees and the consuming public. 
Dallas-based Southwestern Bell was among the most aggressive of the “Baby Bells” in expanding by means of acquisitions and ruthless cost-cutting, eventually evolving into the new AT&T. Now, the outcome of deregulation has revealed itself to be a degree of monopolization and concentrated economic power beyond anything previously seen.",FAKE
"Back in 2013 these stooges were promoting the phony notion that “Arctic ice has grown to a record level!” It hadn’t. After that debacle, they claimed UN scientists had found their predictions of warming were off by 50 percent or more. They weren’t. More recently, they were pushing the false claim that the globe has been cooling ever since 1998. It hasn’t been. And, of course, when all else failed, they could always fall back on their old standby: weaning ourselves from dangerous fossil fuels won’t make any difference anyway because China would never do the same. But, of course, China is now doing so at a rate that should embarrass these jackasses. But it won’t. Because they are never embarrassed about being wrong.

So, with 2014 recently clocking in as the hottest year for the planet on record, according to every major world agency that measures such things, and with 13 of the hottest years on record all falling within the past 15 years, these clowns are getting pretty desperate for something — anything — to use to keep the denialist scam going on behalf of the most profitable industry in the history of civilization.

The latest such scam, helpfully propagated on several Fox “News” shows last week, is that the so-called “scientists” have been caught red-handed in the act of “lying” about raw temperature data! That’s right! They have been manipulating the data to exaggerate the extent of global warming!

Except, of course, they haven’t, and they aren’t…

During an episode of “Outnumbered” on Fox “News” last week, in which the hosts were outraged — outraged! — about an interview in which President Obama correctly asserted that more Americans are affected by climate change than by terrorism, Fox’s mononymously-named Kennedy interrupted the show’s guest, attorney Mark Eiglarsh, to nail him with the newest false claim of climate denialists.

Eiglarsh asked: “Is there anything factually incorrect about the statement that more Americans…?”

Eiglarsh ignored her and continued: “…More Americans are impacted by climate change [than by terrorism]?”

“What about the Telegraph report that shows the original data versus the published data? The NASA published data!” Kennedy continued. “There was a great disparity because they lied about the actual data until someone went back to these weather stations in South America and Antarctica and thought, ‘Hmm, maybe something is amiss here?’ And they realized there is a scandalous discrepancy in what we have been sold!”

Well, no, they didn’t. Setting aside Kennedy’s confusion between the Arctic and Antarctica — an easy enough mistake to make — her spirited “gotcha” assertion was still flat wrong.

She was hardly the first stooge to be taken in by it.

Days earlier, Rush Limbaugh announced: “We have documented that so much of what they say is untrue, one of the biggest is the hoax of global warming which the UK Telegraph, as a story yesterday exposes it, may be the biggest hoax in all of science ever!”

Days earlier, daffy Christian Broadcast Network host Pat Robertson dutifully parroted the same inaccurate nonsense on his “700 Club” show: “A climate expert, ya know, has come out and said that they have actually manipulated the figures to try and prove global warming.”

On the same day, on another Fox show, “The Five,” former White House Press Secretary turned Fox “News” host Dana Perino echoed the same false claim during another segment attempting to downplay concerns about global warming in favor of concerns about terrorism.

Perino said the White House is “actually kind of lucky that we don’t cover climate change as much as we should. Because yesterday, it was reported that the temperature readings have been fabricated and it’s all blowing up in their faces.”

Another host on the show declared that it was “fraud science!” Perino answered, “Yes, I agree.”

So, just as in the past — as with the bullshit report about Arctic ice, or the bullshit revelations that scientists were off in their predictions by 50 percent, or the bullshit claims about a pause or reversal of warming since 1998, or the bullshit assertion that China is unwilling to do anything about its own carbon emissions — Rupert Murdoch’s Fox “News” and its bedfellows can once again be relied upon to endlessly echo the latest bullshit-that-seems-legit-but-is-in-fact-bullshit portending to expose the great “hoax” that is global warming.

Politifact — which is not always a reliable source for news itself — decided to take a look at Perino’s version of the claim. In this case, they got it right and declared Perino’s assertion as a “Pants-on-Fire Lie.”

So here’s how this latest scam came to be taken for gospel by the incurious wingnut dupes, along with the actual facts debunking the false claim.

An opinion piece by Christopher Booker in the the Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper, declared that “Fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever!” The column was a follow-up to another Booker piece two weeks earlier, headlined “How we are STILL being tricked by flawed data on global warming,” in which climate change-denying blogger Paul Homewood was cited for having busted scientists for faking temperature data at three weather stations in Paraguay.

“In each instance,” Booker asserted, based on Homewood’s findings, “the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.”

Booker reported that Homewood subsequently discovered other similar cases where temperature recordings had been adjusted in both South America and in some locations in the Arctic, to make the average daily temperatures appear to have warmed over the past 60 years, instead of cooled, which the deniers are claiming. “In nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded,” Booker writes, before going on to describe the data as a “wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record,” as part of the “most costly scare the world has known.”

You’ll be stunned to learn that the claims by Booker, based on Homewood’s revelations — and dutifully repeated over and again by the wingnuts — are all, actually, bullshit. The “controversy” comes from adjustments made to the stream of raw data from thousands of land- and sea-based weather stations around the globe in order to keep them consistent, so that an apples-to-apples comparison of temperatures can be made over time, even as the location of weather stations — and the technology used since the mid-1800s to measure those temperatures — changes. “For instance,” Politifact explains, “local officials might move a station from a valley to a nearby hilltop. They might change the time of day when they record their measurements from sunrise to sunset. They might change the kind of thermometer they use. In the ocean, the practice once was to haul up a bucket of water. Later, the standard practice was to measure the temperature from the engine’s intake valve.” Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) must then make adjustments to some of those raw temps “to account for the human factors that would skew the data regardless of what happened with actual temperatures.” “The temperature records are based on weather station data. But people didn’t expect the data to be used for monitoring long-term climate change when they started collecting it,” the University of York’s Dr. Kevin Cowtan explained in a video debunking the first misleading Telegraph article on this a few weeks ago. “It was for recording the weather, hence the name weather station. As a result they weren’t always very careful about changes to the instruments or their usage. When we change an instrument we have to recalibrate to ensure the new instrument gives the same readings as the old one. The original weather station operators didn’t always do this. So NOAA have to do a retrospective calibration by comparing nearby weather stations.” So, yes, Homewood has “busted” NOAA scientists making adjustments to their raw data in a number of locations. The problem, however, is that when all such adjustments are examined, the changes actually lower global temperatures trends overall. The issue is perhaps best described in the Politifact piece by Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist with Berkley Earth, a group of researchers that have been funded in the past by the climate-denying Koch brothers (which is a point not noted by Politifact). Hausfather says the data cited by Homewood have been cherry-picked in order to seed doubt in climate change science [emphasis added]… “(They) look through all those thousands of stations, find a few that show big adjustments, and tell everyone that they are evidence of fraud,” Hausfather said. “You will rarely see them pick out stations likeReno, Paris, London, Tokyo, or many others where the adjustments dramatically lower the warming trend.” Hausfather and his colleagues traced how the adjustment methods changed the temperature data differently around the world since 1850. In the graph below, zero is the baseline. Above zero, temperatures have been adjusted upward, below it temperatures have been adjusted downward.   In the United States, with about 5 percent of Earth’s land area, the official data file raised temperatures compared to the original readings. But the same methods lowered the data records in Africa, and for all land-based readings taken together, the adjustments basically made no change at all (the black line). With ocean temperature trends, the efforts to compensate for the human factor lower the numbers dramatically. “The net effect of adjustments is to actually reduce the amount of global warming we’ve observed since 1880 by about 20 percent,” Hausfather said. “Folks skeptical of temperature adjustments are welcome not to use them if they’d like, but you end up with more global warming, not less.” Got that? Yes, some adjustments serve to increase the temperature trends. But, overall, the adjustments actually serve to lower the increase in temperatures across the globe over the last 150 years “by about 20 percent.” “It is important to keep in mind that the largest adjustment in the global surface temperature record occurs over the oceans,” NOAA told Media Matters in an email last week. “Adjustments to account for the transition in sea surface temperature observing methods actually lowers global temperature trends.” Want to do away with all of those adjustments, Fox “News”? OK. But if you do, the problem of human-caused global warming is even worse than climate scientists are now reporting it to be. And, by the way, though Politifact doesn’t mention it, most of the “experts” they consulted in their article disabusing the claims by Perino, Booker and Homewood all happen to be, like the Koch-funded Berkley group, noted climate change skeptics themselves. For his part, as Ars Technica’s John Timmer notes, Booker’s Wikipedia entry “shows that he has a lot of issues with science in general, claiming that things like asbestos and second-hand smoke are harmless, and arguing against evolution. So, this sort of immunity to well-established evidence seems to be a recurring theme in his writing.” None of that, naturally, disqualifies him from being a source for Fox and friends when it comes to “The Biggest Science Scandal Ever!” And it’s effective. The article earned the Telegraph a ton of traffic (there are 28,872 comments on the item, if that’s any indication) and the bulk of the chumps who clicked on the page bought the bullshit — a survey at the end asks readers if they believed global warming has “been exaggerated by scientists.” 91 percent of the 127,199 readers who answered the online poll believe it has been. Nonetheless, whether Big Carbon’s stooges have fallen for it or not, another climate change denier myth is quashed. Don’t worry though. This one will be repeated anyway, and then another will most assuredly rise up in its place soon enough. And there will be enough Fox “News” dupes — both viewers and “reporters” — willing to both buy and sell it. All meant to continue delaying necessary changes that might help stave off our planetary climate crisis, just so that the fossil fuel industry and its supporters can continue to make ever more profits for as long as possible, cause fuck all of you liberal lefty tree-hugging science-loving communists who have fallen for the great “hoax” that humanity should live on a livable planet.",REAL
"on November 13, 2016 3:09 pm · 
As predicted, Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day has emboldened racist conservatives to start harassing and attacking minorities. 
And it’s even happening in the deep blue state of California, where a woman spotted a sign hanging on the side of a building in the town of Pittsburg and snapped a photo of it. 
Twitter user James Thompson posted the image of the sign on the social media platform after his sister sent it to him. This picture was taken in Pittsburgh California. My sister texted this to me 10 minutes ago.Our democracy is being tested even in California pic.twitter.com/gDLKw54Lox 
— James Thompson (@JETBallin) November 13, 2016 
The sign clearly promotes lynching to prevent African-Americans from getting equal rights. 
“You can hang a n****r from a tree / Equal rights he will never see!” it says. 
The FBI has been notified and local police have filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the owners of the sign to remove it. 
In the wake of Trump’s surprising and depressing victory there has been a rise in the number of racist incidents in this country. In fact, there have been 139 reports of people being bullied by Trump supporters since the election night results. 
These incidents include the harassment of a Muslim teacher by a student in Georgia, and students designating water fountains “white” or “colored” at a Florida high school. 
Frankly, there are so many incidents that it’s difficult to list them all. You can find a somewhat comprehensive tally here . 
This is what Trump’s America looks like and it’s scary. And this has all happend in the course of a few days as Melania Trump continues to tell the media that her focus will be on ending bullying. What exactly does she mean by that? Is she going to call out all bullying, including the racist bullying being perpetrated by her husband’s own supporters? Or is she going to ignore those incidents and merely whine about people who criticize her husband. Because right now, she isn’t even First Lady yet and her “effort” has failed miserably. And she only has her husband to blame.",FAKE
"The House voted Friday to block federal funding to Planned Parenthood for a year and curb some abortion practices, in the chamber's first legislative response to videos showing the abortion provider's tissue harvesting practices.

The Planned Parenthood ""de-fund"" bill passed 241-187, on a nearly party-line vote.

Hanging over the debate, though, was the possibility of a government shutdown showdown. Republican leaders brought the legislation to the floor as they try to address lawmakers' outrage over the videos. Some conservatives originally wanted to demand Planned Parenthood be de-funded as part of a must-pass government budget bill; House leaders tried a different tack Friday with the two bills, which are not tied to the overall budget.

The stand-alone measures, though, stand little chance of becoming law. The Senate has not yet acted on the issue. And the bills not only face opposition from most Democrats but veto threats from the White House.

That means some conservatives could still want to tie the issue to the budget package, as a means of leverage. Congress has until the end of the month to pass a new budget, or else parts of the government could again start to shutter, as happened in 2013.

On Friday, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., downplayed the chances of such drama.

""We will pass a bill that funds the government,"" he told Fox News.

The bills approved Friday were a reaction to videos showing Planned Parenthood officials casually describing how they provide researchers with tissue from aborted fetuses. The anti-abortion activists who secretly recorded the videos say they show that Planned Parenthood is illegally profiting from organ sales. The organization says it's broken no laws and is being victimized by deceitfully edited recordings.

""Anyone who watches those videos -- they are horrific,"" McCarthy told Fox News. ""Aborting live babies for profit -- why would anybody want to spend tax dollars for that?""

The first bill would block Planned Parenthood's federal funds for a year. The other would impose criminal penalties on doctors who don't try saving infants born alive during abortions.

But with the overall government funding issue not resolved, Democrats once again have taken to accusing Republicans of playing games with the economy. The White House, in a statement released Thursday evening, said Obama called the shutdown threat ""a game of chicken with our economy that we cannot accept.""

It's a tricky situation for House Speaker John Boehner, who wants to avoid a partial government shutdown while preventing a rebellion in the ranks.

""Our leaders wave the white flag every time there's a confrontation,"" said Rep. Mark Salmon, R-Ariz. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Boehner wants to ""implement what the lobbyists want, not what the constituents of our district want.""

At a closed meeting Thursday among House Republicans, leaders unveiled internal polling that attendees said showed most people would oppose a government shutdown -- even those who have seen the videos and oppose financing Planned Parenthood.

Many Republicans argued that the polling showed a shutdown fight would be damaging and unwinnable, especially since Senate Democrats already derailed a bill erasing Planned Parenthood's funds.

""Pounding on the table doesn't turn 54 into 60 in the Senate,"" said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., referring to the number of GOP senators and the number it would take to end Democratic filibusters.

The bill by Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., would transfer Planned Parenthood's federal money to thousands of government-backed community health centers. Supporters say that would keep women's health care intact, but opponents say those centers are overwhelmed and often far from women who need them.

Planned Parenthood gets around $450 million yearly in federal payments, mostly Medicaid reimbursements for handling low-income patients, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That's around one-third of the $1.3 billion yearly budget for the organization, which has nearly 700 clinics and provides sexual disease testing, contraceptives and abortions.

Conservatives' determination to block Planned Parenthood's money has been partly fueled by the race for the GOP's presidential nomination. Several candidates used their Wednesday night debate to urge lawmakers to turn off that funding spigot.

But spotlighting GOP divisions, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., wrote Thursday to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the presidential hopefuls. Cruz wants Republicans to oppose financing the government unless Planned Parenthood's money is cut off, defending his effort during the debate by saying, ""I'm proud to stand for life.""

Ayotte, who faces her own tough re-election fight next year, wrote that she opposed risking a partial shutdown ""given the challenges and threats we face at home and abroad"" and asked, ""What is your strategy to succeed in actually defunding Planned Parenthood?""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"The Debate NATO's eastward expansion 
In this episode of The Debate, Press TV has conducted an interview with Center for Research on Globalization President Michel Chossudovsky from Montreal, and Ian Williams, a senior analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus, from New York, to discuss NATO’s biggest military build-up in Eastern Europe near Russia’s borders since the Cold War. Loading ...",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) Putting aside a sudden crisis with Iran, President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Americans in his final State of the Union address to reject the politics of tribalism and fear that have rocked the campaign to find his successor and to build a ""clear-eyed, big-hearted"" and ""optimistic"" nation.

Delivering his annual report to the nation, Obama did not name Republican 2016 candidates. But he took clear, implied shots at them nevertheless, particularly front-runner Donald Trump, as well as Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. America's destiny, the President said, was imperiled by a political system festering in malice, gridlock and in the grip of the rich and the powerful.

Obama also took on critics who accuse him of weakening American power abroad and Republicans who say he is underplaying the threat from radical Islamist groups such as ISIS. He mocked the contention that fighters on ""on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages"" represented an existential threat to America.

Rubio takes a selfie with Sen. Lisa Murkowski before the State of the Union.

Rubio takes a selfie with Sen. Lisa Murkowski before the State of the Union.

Kim Davis, center, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples, arrives before the speech.

Kim Davis, center, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples, arrives before the speech.

Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber marked the debut of new House Speaker Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Vice President Biden.

Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber marked the debut of new House Speaker Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Vice President Biden.

First lady Michelle Obama sits beside an empty chair as her husband speaks. The chair represents the victims of gun violence in America.

First lady Michelle Obama sits beside an empty chair as her husband speaks. The chair represents the victims of gun violence in America.

Obama gives copies of his speech to Biden and Ryan.

Obama gives copies of his speech to Biden and Ryan.

Biden points at Obama during the State of the Union.

Biden points at Obama during the State of the Union.

Obama reads from the text of his State of the Union address.

Obama reads from the text of his State of the Union address.

President Barack Obama delivers his final State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, January 12.

President Barack Obama delivers his final State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, January 12.

The President acknowledged that a torrent of change, technological advances and economic dislocation has left many Americans fearful of the future and anxious as social structures that have underpinned the life of the nation for decades fray. But he urged them not to fall prey to the periodic temptation that has emerged throughout history to alienate minorities and resist social change.

""Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future; who claimed we could slam the brakes on change, promising to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control,"" Obama said. ""And each time, we overcame those fears.""

""We made change work for us, always extending America's promise outward, to the next frontier, to more and more people. And because we did -- because we saw opportunity where others saw only peril -- we emerged stronger and better than before.""

Economic opportunity, security and a sustainable, peaceful planet are possible, he said, if the country could return to ""rational, constructive debates.""

""It will only happen if we fix our politics,"" he said.

In a way, Obama's seventh and last State of the Union address was a microcosm of his entire presidency: He invoked a chorus of hope and optimism about America's destiny and the transformative nature of change but was undercut by the poisoned political divides he has been unable to narrow -- and that have even grown during his presidency. Then he encountered fierce opposition from Republicans who believe he has transformed the nation by eroding its exceptional qualities and thwarting the Constitution.

Meanwhile, a foreign policy crisis raging in the Middle East after Iran seized 10 U.S. sailors exemplified the struggles in which Obama has had to impose U.S. authority in an increasingly chaotic world that has challenged his core mission of ending costly American wars abroad.

Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN that the service members would be released ""very soon."" And Obama did not address the crisis in his speech but defended the legacy-building deal reached to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program.

While Obama, in deference to his ebbing power as a lame-duck president, avoided the long list of legislative proposals that Congress has no intention of taking up, he strongly defended his domestic record, claiming credit for 14 million new jobs and a halving of the unemployment rate. He said those who claimed the economy was in decline are ""peddling fiction.""

He rebuked politicians who draw congressional districts to protect safe seats and vowed to launch a national effort to secure voting rights, an issue particularly important to minority communities. And he named Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his beloved son Beau to cancer last year, to head ""Mission Control"" in a new ""moon shot"" to cure the disease. He told conservatives who deny climate change to ""have at it"" because they were defying the world.

Obama also vowed -- once again -- to fight to close the war on terror camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, renewing one of the first promises of his presidency that has been thwarted by Congress. He called the facility a ""recruitment brochure for our enemies and was expensive and unnecessary.""

The first African-American president also offered a detailed rebuttal of the kind of politics that alienates people rather than unites them. At times, Obama was almost pleading with his audience to embrace the vision of hope and change that swept him to power and then was sullied by the bitter realities of polarized politics over a darker vision of America's character.

""What I am asking for his hard. It's easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn't possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don't matter,"" Obama said.

""But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.""

It seemed clear that the President had Trump in his thoughts.

""As frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don't look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background,"" Obama said, voicing a familiar critique of Democrats and some Republicans at the rhetoric of the billionaire real estate mogul whose populist campaign has taken American politics by storm.

""We can't afford to go down that path. It won't deliver the economy we want, or the security we want, but most of all, it contradicts everything that makes us the envy of the world.""

In the Republican response, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley also -- after criticizing Obama's policies -- offered a repudiation of Trump, decrying the ""siren call of the angriest voices.""

Obama appeared to relish the chance to take on Republican critics who have lambasted his performance as commander in chief.

""I told you earlier all the talk of America's economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close,"" Obama said.

The man who burst on the political scene by rejecting the notion that there was a red America or a blue America also diagnosed a sick political system.

""It doesn't work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic,"" Obama warned, and even accepted a share of the blame for not uniting warring political factions.

""It's one of the few regrets of my presidency --  that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There's no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I'll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

And he slammed Republicans who have responded to the spread of ISIS across much of the Middle East and the group's apparent widening of its target list to Europe and the United States, by warning that its rise is a threat to America itself.

""As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,"" Obama said.

""They do not threaten our national existence. That's the story ISIL wants to tell; that's the kind of propaganda they use to recruit,"" Obama said, warning against pushing away vital Americans allies in the Middle East by ""echoing the lie"" that the group represents Islam.

""We just need to call them what they are  -- killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed,"" he said, warning that ""tough talk or calls to carpet bomb civilians"" may work as a soundbite but don't pass muster on the world stage. Obama's comments appeared aimed at Cruz, who has warned he would carpet bomb ISIS and Rubio, who says America is waging an existential fight against radical Islamic terrorism.

The Iran incident complicated Obama's effort to counter claims by critics that the escalating chaos in the Middle East is the result of a deficit of U.S. leadership and emboldened attacks by GOP presidential candidates who contend his ""weak"" performance as commander in chief has opened vacuums exploited by U.S. enemies.

Republican candidates and lawmakers immediately seized on the incident to charge that Obama has emboldened Iran's aggressive behavior in its neighborhood by offering sanctions relief in return for a halting of its nuclear weapons program.

""This is the latest manifestation of the weakness of Barack Obama, that every bad actor ... views Obama as a laughingstock,"" Cruz said on WRKO radio.

Rubio said Iran's provocations were the result of having a ""weak president"" in the Oval Office. ""Iran is testing the boundaries of this administration's resolve. And they know the boundaries are pretty wide and this administration is willing to let them get away with many things,"" said Rubio on Fox News.

And Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner told CNN's Jake Tapper on ""The Lead"" that Obama should delay the start of his speech ""to talk about what has happened.""

Republicans agree with Obama that his presidency has been transformational -- but in a bad way. They believe he has presided over anemic growth rates, wielded executive power on immigration, gun control and climate change to thwart the Constitution, is oblivious to the severity of Islamist terrorism and has engineered an era of declining American power in the world.

Haley painted an unflattering picture of Obama's America and said the nation would soon have a chance to turn the page in remarks which also seemed to be a repudiation of Trump.

""The President's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words,"" Haley said.

""Many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels. We're feeling a crushing national debt, a health care plan that has made insurance less affordable and doctors less available, and chaotic unrest in many of our cities. Even worse, we are facing the most dangerous terrorist threat our nation has seen since September 11th, and this president appears either unwilling or unable to deal with it.""

Haley took a shot at Obama's foreign policy record, saying a Republican president would ""make international agreements that were celebrated in Israel and protested in Iran, not the other way around.""

The governor also highlighted her personal story as a daughter of Indian immigrants and draw a contrast with some of the rhetoric currently on display in the primary campaign.

""Today, we live in a time of threats like few others in recent memory,"" she said. ""During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.""

Tuesday's address before a packed House chamber also marked the debut of House Speaker Paul Ryan -- a longtime Obama rival -- on the platform alongside Biden.

And as per tradition, one Cabinet member did not attend the speech. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was named as the ""designated survivor.""",REAL
"Politics Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says UK voters ‘have to build the capability to mobilize and to organize’ against Brexit. 
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says Britain should keep its “options open” on whether or not to leave the European Union until after Brexit talks with the bloc are completed. 
During an interview on Friday with BBC Radio 4's “Today” program, Blair described the EU referendum as “a catastrophe” and said UK voters should be given the option of a second EU referendum. 
Britain should not withdraw from the EU until it becomes clearer how Brexit would impact UK’s economic, social and cultural future, Blair said. 
""The bizarre thing about this referendum is that we took a decision but we still don't know the precise terms,” he said. “There’s got to be some way, either through parliament, or through an election, possibly through another referendum, that people express their view.” 
The former premier, who was in office from 1997 until 2007, said it should be possible for the public to switch their verdict if it becomes clear the alternative negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May is going to be worse. 
Blair’s argument contrasts sharply with that of May, who has repeatedly said that “Brexit means Brexit” and that she’ll respect the referendum result. Blair had argued that Britain should stay in the EU before the referendum. 
Economic growth in the UK is expected to slow significantly next year, due to uncertainty over of the Brexit vote. 
Experts have warned that leaving the EU will severely hurt London’s position as a financial hub, unless the UK decides to keep its access to the single EU market by loosening its stance on immigration. 
If the UK loses its access to the EU’s single market, the resulting increase in the costs of doing business and exporting to the EU would hurt Britain’s competitive position in Europe. Loading ...",FAKE
"It was a showdown millions of Americans have been anticipating ever since Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton emerged as the Republican and Democratic nominees for the presidency.

Debate moderator NBC's Lester Holt navigated the candidates through three main issues, including achieving prosperity, America's direction, and securing America.

The debate fired off with questions about how each candidate plans on securing more jobs for Americans. Trump's strategy is to keep American companies from seeking cheaper work outside of America, while Clinton proposed taxing the wealthy to ""build an economy for everyone.""



 Get the latest analysis and coverage

 from your trusted CBN News political team.

But the stage heated up when Holt questioned the candidates about their tax returns, specifically asking Trump why he has yet to release his to the public.

""I will release my tax returns against my lawyer's wishes when she (Clinton) releases her 33,000 emails that have been deleted,"" Trump fired back, drawing audible cheers from the crowd.

Clinton's emails have been a constant pressure point in her campaign, leading many Americans to question their trust for the Democratic nominee.

""I made a mistake using a private email,"" Clinton responded. ""I take full responsibility for that.""

Clinton skirted the issue and neither candidate addressed the email scandal again throughout the entirety of the debate.

Another hot topic was the issue of race. The questions came under the shadow of several deadly police shootings of black men in recent weeks that has left America divided and frustrated.

Both candidates agree they must work to restore trust between communities and the police, but they took very different stances on how to lower high crime rates in cities like Chicago.

""The gun epidemic is the leading cause of death among African American men,"" Clinton argued, saying dangerous people should never be allowed to own guns.

Although Trump agreed that there needs to be better vetting of gun ownership, he emphasized ""law and order"" and better policing.

""We have to be very strong and we have to be very vigilant,"" he added.

But Clinton believes Americans need to be more vigilant about how they interect with their Muslim communities and questioned Trump's own sentiments about Muslims.

""Donald has consistently insulted Muslims abroad and Muslims at home when we need to be cooperating with Muslim nations,"" she said. ""We need to have close working cooperation with law enforcement agencies in these communities, not be alienated and pushed away as some of Donald's rhetoric unfortunately has led to""

Both candidates agreed to be vigilant against terror threats abroad and at home.

""We have to intensify our air strikes against ISIS,"" Clinton said, including taking out top ISIS commander Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.

But Trump questioned why in her more than 30 years of political experience she is just now considering this option.

""You were there and you were secretary of state when it (ISIS) was a little infant, now it's in over 30 countries and you're going to stop them? I don't think so,"" Trump said.

Clinton is known for using her decades of political experience as a leg up over political outsider Trump. But Trump believes it is her experience that is precisely the reason Clinton is unfit for the presidency.

""Hillary has experience,"" Trump said. ""But it is bad experience,"" he said, citing the Iranian nuclear deal. He calls the deal ""one of the worst deals"" any country has ever made.

Both of the candidates were eager to defend their turf right up the the last seconds of the debate, raising the anticipation many Americans have for the second round of debates next week.

Earlier in the evening social media was swarming with talk of fact-checking Trump. The social talk continued after the debate with most people posting in favor of their candidate.

CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody tweeted a brief analysis of both, saying Clinton ""stayed calm"" with a solid performance but sounding scripted.

He tweeted Trump ""started strong, then lost focus... but I'm sure his base loved fighting spirit.""

While Americans are left to decide who won their vote, one thing is clear: the fight for the presidency is not over yet.",REAL
"Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) has endorsed Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to succeed him after he retires at the end of 2016.

""I think Schumer should be able to succeed me,"" Reid said in a Friday morning interview at his home in Washington's West End.

Reid predicted that Schumer, the No. 3 Senate Democrat in leadership and a close friend, would win the Democratic leader post without opposition. He said that the other likely contender, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), would stand down for Schumer.

Reid and Durbin spoke by phone at about 11 a.m. Friday.

Reid called Schumer ""extremely smart"" and noted the brash, energetic New Yorker would have a ""different style"" than his own soft talking demeanor.

Seemingly comfortable with his decision to not run for re-election, Reid said the liberal wing of the Democratic Party should have faith in Schumer, whose ties to Wall Street fueled his fundraising prowess and helped Democrats win the majority in 2006 and expand it to a super-majority in 2009. Those ties have some liberals questioning whether Schumer should lead the party, but Reid said that Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would serve as the torch bearers for the populist wing and hold the caucus's feet to the fire.

Of his own decision, Reid said he did not want to win another term and grow old in office, saying he wanted to be remembered for his ""first 34 years"" in Congress and not the last few years.

A devout baseball fan, Reid said he never wanted to grow old and not be a real force in the Senate. ""I don't want to be a pinch hitter,"" he said.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) released a video announcing he does not intend to run for reelection at the end of his term. Reid said his decision has nothing to do with the injuries he sustained on Jan. 1, 2015. (YouTube/Nevada Senator Harry Reid)",REAL
"Antonin Scalia was a conservative giant on the Supreme Court. His death will affect this Supreme Court term, the future balance of the court, and the 2016 election.

Why Trump says he wants to ditch plans for new Air Force One

An American flag flies at half-staff in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington Sunday morning in honor of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this weekend.

The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia substantially undercuts the ability of the United States Supreme Court to decide some of the most contentious national issues currently pending at the high court.

In addition, it thrusts the nation’s highest court into a glaring spotlight in this year’s presidential election, and it sets the stage for a year-long confrontation between President Obama and Sentate Republicans over not just who should fill the vacant high court seat but how fast the nomination and confirmation process should proceed.

On a human level, Justice Scalia’s sudden death Saturday while on a hunting trip in Texas casts a pall over the institution he loved and served for nearly three decades. He is being remembered by friends and colleagues as one of the most influential justices in a generation, and perhaps in high court history.

They are praising his intellect, his wit, and a combative style from the bench that had a capacity to endear and enrage. He was a gifted writer and, at times, an uncompromising critic of judges and fellow justices with whom he disagreed.

“His brilliance and wit not only lit up a pen; they lit up a room,” said Amy Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor and former Scalia law clerk, in a statement. “He was larger than life, and it is difficult to imagine life without him in it.”

Scalia’s most enduring contribution to American jurisprudence may ultimately be his self-professed fidelity to originalism and his rejection of the concept that the US Constitution is a living document that should be liberally reinterpreted by the courts. Instead, Scalia preached the virtues of remaining faithful to the text – the actual words – in the Constitution or in a statute.

To Scalia, and the growing number of conservative scholars and judges who follow his approach, originalism is a safeguard against judges using their lifetime appointments to amend the Constitution or statutes to reflect their personal policy preferences.

He believed that it was for lawmakers to make laws and that it was for judges to confine themselves to giving no greater or lesser force to the resulting measure.

In a statement to the nation on Saturday night, President Obama praised Scalia as a “brilliant legal mind with an energetic style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.”

Obama ordered flags across the country to be flown at half-staff in honor of Scalia.

But the president also made clear that he planned to move forward with a nomination to fill the vacant seat at the high court. He called on the Senate to give his nominee a “fair hearing and a timely vote.”

The vacant high court seat is significant because the Supreme Court had been divided with five justices nominated by Republican presidents and four nominated by Democratic presidents. Now, with Scalia’s passing, the divide is four to four.

If Scalia’s seat is filled by a more liberal-leaning Democratic nominee it could substantially shift the balance of power on the high court in a liberal direction in the full range of hot button issues.

It is for that reason that Democrats are already pushing hard for a relatively quick nomination by Obama and a Senate vote this year on that nominee.

For the same reason, Republicans, who currently hold a majority of Senate seats, are insisting that the nomination and any vote be delayed until after the November presidential election.

Senator Chuck Grassley, (R) of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that standard-practice for 80 years has been that Supreme Court nominations and confirmations should not proceed during a presidential election year.

“Given the huge divide in the country, and the fact that this president, above all others, has made no bones about his goal to use the courts to circumvent Congress and push through his own agenda, it only makes sense that we defer to the American people who will elect a new president to select the next Supreme Court justice,” Senator Grassley said.

As for the ongoing work at the Supreme Court itself, what had looked to become one of the most momentous Supreme Court terms in years suddenly looks a lot less so.

In the next three months, the justices are set to hear cases examining abortion restrictions in Texas, the contraception mandate in Obamacare, and whether President Obama acted constitutionally in his executive action on immigration.

Now, with one less vote in the court’s conservative wing, the court appears split four to four between liberals and conservatives.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be significant decisions. For example, if Justice Anthony Kennedy joins his liberal colleagues in the Texas abortion case, as some analysts expect, that could lead to a 5-to-3 decision striking down all or part of the Texas abortion restrictions. That decision could be a landmark and Scalia’s absence would be felt only in the loss of what would likely be a fiery dissenting opinion.

But in the contraceptive mandate case and the Obama immigration cases, the loss of Scalia’s vote could result in a 4-to-4 tie that would leave the lower court decisions in place. Such an outcome would resolve those cases, but set no national precedent.

Legal experts note that decisions in cases that have already been heard in oral argument by the court but not yet publicly announced may change with the loss of Scalia’s vote. Those cases include a dispute testing whether unions representing public employees can require nonmembers to pay fair share fees to a union for collective bargaining. Analysts anticipated that the court might rule 5 to 4 against the unions. That outcome is now unlikely.

In addition, the court was preparing a decision in a case raising a fundamental question about the meaning of “one person, one vote,” and how voting districts are drawn in Texas. The outcome of that case is now also in doubt.

The high court is also considering a potential landmark case examining the use of race in an affirmative action plan at the University of Texas at Austin. But the loss of Scalia’s vote may not undercut a final decision in that case because Justice Elena Kagan is not participating in the dispute. So a 4-to-3 vote is possible.",REAL
"The teacher thought Feliz Diaz, like those other immigrants from the wrong side of the tracks, was weak and afraid. Someone learned a lesson that day.

Felix Diaz grew up on the wrong side of the Union Pacific railroad tracks in the town of Victorville, California. Victorville is in the Mojave Desert, 100 miles or so from Los Angeles. His father—Porfirio—worked in the cement plant and Carmen, his mother, sewed the family’s clothes. Felix was the youngest of four brothers, and the smallest, the last in line. The shirts he wore to school were hand-me-downs made of cement sacks.

The parents were in the U.S. illegally and every move they made, most of their adult lives, was weighed against the chance of being discovered and deported. The school was called Eva Dell Elementary and Felix’s third-grade teacher—Miss Appleberry—was 40 or so, but new to teaching, unsure of herself around kids, unsure of herself around Mexicans, and maybe because of that, or partly because of that, she yelled a lot. Maybe she was just a natural yeller. Here is how Felix remembers it:

At work then, as now, is the prevalent idea that anyone who doesn’t speak fluent American is at least a little slow. This idea was part of Miss Appleberry’s thinking, even though most of the students in her class were growing up in homes where little English was spoken. Miss Appleberry, in turn, spoke no Spanish. Felix Diaz—who turns 82 this July—remembers this like last week.

Not to make excuses, because there are none for this, but teaching kids who do not speak English requires patience—rope—and Miss Appleberry came to the end of hers early. Not far into the school year she brought out a paddle, and announced a spelling test. “I’m sick of you Mexicans not spelling properly,” she said.

Like everybody else, Mr. Riles walked to work. He smoked two cigarettes on the way there, every afternoon. The first one he lighted as he left his house. He walked halfway to the plant, lit his second cigarette off the first one, and dropped the butt on the ground. Felix collected Mr. Riles’ butts and made cigarettes of his own. And it was from those cigarettes he got tuberculosis.

The Mexicans—and the much smaller number of blacks in town—shared a single ward for TB patients. Felix Diaz remembers that just hours before a tubercular patient died the nurses would say, “He’s hemorrhaging,” and put up a screen to hide the spray of blood coming up out of the dying man’s mouth. That was the way Mr. Riles died and the way Felix expected to die, too. No one ever took the few minutes to explain to him what was going on, and when a doctor and a nurse came in one morning and told him they were all set to take out his tonsils that afternoon, Felix, who didn’t know what tonsils were, thought the operating room was where they took you to die.

And so the morning we were talking about he sat at his desk as Miss Appleberry announced each student’s scores, and took them one at a time into the hallway, closed the door and hit them with her paddle. Boys and girls alike. Felix remembers the flooring in the hallway was all wood and the sounds of the paddle, followed by the sounds of the 7- or 8-year-olds crying out, echoed clearly in the room. Thirty-five kids, sitting in terror or pain.

Felix shook his head no. Everyone else had gone with the teacher—and it is worth mentioning here that to this day teachers are held in higher regard in Latin cultures than they are in others. They are often called maestro or maestra—revered almost like priests.

Miss Appleberry began to scream, and in seconds whatever sweet authoritarian revenge she was enjoying in the hallway disappeared. She grabbed him, trying to jerk him out of his desk. But the desks in those days were attached to the chairs, and the chairs were bolted to the floor, and Felix and his desk did not move. Miss Appleberry shook him, still screaming, her hard, narrow face balled up like a fist, but he would not let go. She had long fingernails and she scratched his arms and they bled. But he clung to the chair.

And unlike the parking lot at a Trump rally, in the end there was a compromise. She let go of the paddle, he let go of the desk, and Miss Appleberry dragged him down the hall to the school principal, Mr. Mullen. Eva Dell Elementary did not have much money and the principal had to teach a class of his own, too. Miss Appleberry brought Felix into his classroom and announced he’d refused to take his punishment.

It was not over, though. His arm was scabbing where it had bled and he knew his father would want to know what happened. He took his friend Leo along, knowing that his father would never take his word against a teacher’s. As mentioned, teachers were almost like priests.

The principal recognized Felix’s father—maybe from the arrangements they’d made while Felix was in the hospital—and begged him to intercede with the crowd. To explain for him that he understood what happened and promised they would never see Miss Appleberry again. And good to his word, in the morning she was gone, and nobody at Eva Dell Elementary ever saw her again. Even Felix Diaz does not know what happened to her afterward.

That was Southern California, 1942, and this is the repeating lesson of American history. Which is this: Dismissing people wholesale might give you free reign to bring out the paddle, but it doesn’t mean that some of those people won’t cling to the chair.",REAL
"- 11:59 p.m. ET: Police arrested two people for looting and one for disorderly conduct, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. But most of the 10 arrests made after the 10 p.m. curfew were for curfew violation.

- 11:55 p.m. ET: Baltimore police have mad",REAL
"Posted 11/09/2016 5:13 am by PatriotRising with 0 comments VIDEO COMPILATION —- PUNDITS DECLARE DONALD TRUMP CANNOT WIN ELECTION… 
Barack Obama… 
Barack Obama 2: Donald Trump won’t be president. 
Jorge Ramos: Donald Trump can’t win without Latinos. #JorgeRamos 
Bob Schieffer: I can’t find any Republican who now thinks Trump will win (4 weeks ago) 
Krauthammer: Trump can’t win in November without cooperation from Ryan Penny Nance on Why Trump can’t win over conservative women 
Ted Cruz (in primary) Trump “cannot win a majority” 
CNN says Trump can’t win. Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising?",FAKE
"(CNN) - As he considers another run for the White House, Rick Santorum is reaching out to working-class voters, bucking the GOP on the minimum wage and touting his new book in hopes of rebranding the Republican Party.

In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley that aired Sunday on ""State of the Union,"" the former senator from Pennsylvania and 2012 Republican presidential candidate was candid on the possibility of launching another White House bid in 2016.

2016: ""I'm looking at it""

Santorum wouldn't throw his support behind a specific Republican on a list of possible 2016 White House contenders but admitted that he wrote his new book ""Blue-Collar Conservatives"" in part because he's considering launching another campaign.

""I'm looking for candidates who connect with average voters,"" he said. ""Someone who has a heart and an understanding of those difficult times those voters are going through, and whether it's Rick Santorum or somebody else - it's someone who has that appeal and connection.

""I put this book out there because I'm looking at it - whether other people join in; I hope they do. I've been talking to a lot of candidates across the country, saying, ‘you really need to look at this book and take the opportunity that's present right now to create a new image for this party. It doesn't have a very good one right now,’ "" Santorum added.

One issue that could create conflict between Republicans and average Americans is their opposition to increasing the minimum wage.

Dems seek to rally base over GOP's block of minimum wage bill

The Senate voted last month on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, but the bill failed to garner the 60 votes needed to pass. Only one Republican voted for the measure.

Santorum joins 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty as Republicans who have come out in favor of some sort of increase.

But Santorum, who long voted for minimum wage increases in his time in Congress, was quick to draw a distinction between his views on the issue and those of his former GOP presidential rival.

""I think Romney came out in favor of President Obama's increase. I'm not in favor of President Obama's increase. When I was in the Senate and when I was in the House, I did vote for minimum wage increases that were incremental,"" he said.

Asked by Crowley whether Republicans’ opposition to minimum wage increases will hurt the party's image among working-class voters, Santorum said it does and cautioned that lawmakers ""need to be reasonable about it and offer an alternative.""

The most recent polls on the issue indicate that a strong majority of Americans supports raising the minimum wage, with Republicans mostly divided on the issue.

Watch State of the Union with Candy Crowley Sundays at 9am ET. For the latest from State of the Union click here.",REAL
"Kurds Worried Turkey Will Stab Them in the Back as They Fight ISIS Turkey publicly opposes ISIS while supporting them behind the scenes Image Credits: Kurdish YPG fighters: Kurdishstruggle . 
Two months after being purged from the border town of Jarablus in northern Syria by a Turkish-led force — and just days after being targeted by Turkish airstrikes near al-Bab — Syrian Kurds now fear a “stab in the back” from Turkey’s military as plans for a U.S.-led push to clear ISIS fighters from Raqqa are carried out. 
“It is very important Raqqa is liberated,” a chief political leader of the main Syrian Kurdish party, the PYD, told Reuters . “But one point which is bothering us is that, if we go toward Raqqa, we will be stabbed from the back.” 
At the end of August, Turkish forces took part in a U.S.-led operation to eject ISIS from the northern border of Syria. Once inside Syria, however, Turkish forces — leading Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels — took aim at Kurdish fighters in the town of Jarablus, which sent them scurrying across the Euphrates River in retreat. 
The issue here is that the U.S. claims to find the Kurds useful in the fight against ISIS. The Kurds, in fact, make up a significant portion of one of the primary U.S.-supplied rebel forces in the region. As Reuters explains : 
“Kurdish militia have played a big role in the past year in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-backed umbrella group, as it has seized large areas of territory from Islamic State, laying the ground for an assault on Raqqa. 
“However, Turkey’s intervention in Syria in August in support of rebel groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner has complicated that equation, leading to clashes between them and Kurdish groups allied to the SDF.” 
The problem is one of trust. Turkey believes the Kurdish militants are aligned with the Kurdish PYD party, which the Turks believe is allied with Kurds within Turkey who’ve been waging a religious insurgency for over three decades. 
So regardless of whether the U.S. finds the Kurds useful, Turkey has made it clear it intends to sleep with one eye open for the foreseeable future. In fact, it’s taking a much more proactive stance than that. 
Last Thursday, in a campaign of airstrikes that were “the heaviest against the YPG since Turkey launched a military incursion into Syria,” Turkey targeted three Kurdish-controlled villages along the northern Syrian border. The Turkish military later confirmed it had carried out “26 strikes on areas recently taken by the Kurdish YPG militia” and “had killed between 160 and 200 combatants.” 
Turkey’s major concern is that Kurdish-controlled enclaves will physically unite, “thereby creating a de facto Kurdish mini-state along the Turkish border.” As such, Turkey has warned Kurds to keep out of towns like Manjib, which is just northeast of the heaviest fighting in Aleppo. 
This tangled web of strained alliances and old feuds will likely only grow more confusing as the U.S.-led operation to purge ISIS from Raqqa draws nearer. In any case, Turkish President Erdogan seems to have discovered a newfound independence , and the days of him obediently — even if somewhat grudgingly — bending to the U.S. will appear to be fading, as well. 
“From now on we will now wait for problems to come knocking on our door, we will not wait until the blade is against our bone and skin, we will not wait for terrorist organizations to come and attack us,” Erdogan said from his palace last week. “Let them go wherever until we find and destroy them. I am saying this very clearly: they will not have a single place to find peace abroad.” NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"Vicar sacked over orgies, hookers & porn after wife exposes his double... Vicar sacked over orgies, hookers & porn after wife exposes his double life By 0 41 
A sex addict Church of England vicar who took part in orgies, visited gay saunas and collected “perverted” pornography has been sacked after his estranged wife exposed his double life. 
Reverend James Day’s actions amounted to “conduct unbecoming and inappropriate,” a Church of England tribunal found. It has banned him from ministry for life. 
Read more 
Speaking at the tribunal in London, Birte Day said she had collected evidence showing her husband had taken part in group sex, attempted to set up meetings with prostitutes and used a fake name to meet new partners. 
She said her husband had stored “a substantial amount” of porn on his computer, which she collected on memory sticks presented to the tribunal, according to the Telegraph. 
“There were about 50 short films of men and women in scenes of sexual pleasure and orgies, at least 100 sketches of naked women being tortured and burned, a scene of a gladiator being hit and tortured, many images of naked young men… and other sexually explicit material.” 
She said her husband became increasingly open about his “sexual addiction,” adding: “He often said the two most important elements in his life were God and sex.” 
“I think James wanted to hurt me with his sexual activities and was making me feel guilty as I was just ‘not good enough,’” she said. 
Read more 
The hearing was told the vicar had also been violent towards his wife – tightening a scarf around her neck so she couldn’t breathe, spanking her as punishment for wearing shorts in front of workmen, biting her hand and spitting in her face. 
“I had to protect myself by gathering evidence to show that he was not normal, because to others outside the marriage he projected himself to be a successful and respectable person,” his wife said. 
She also referenced an email she had found from Day – who is also a psychology professor – to his friend. He wrote: “You must never desist on account of my priesthood and all to do with vocation … Perhaps I should send you photos from a gangbang I participated in … to assuage your guilt.” 
His wife also found business cards suggesting Day was visiting gay saunas in Brussels, New York and Italy. He had also created email addresses for himself under different names and identities. 
The Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal for the Diocese of Europe concluded Day’s behavior was not criminal – but that standards for clergy “must be different.” 
It said it was satisfied the assaults on his wife took place, adding the allegations made against the priest were proved in their entirety. 
Day did not attend the tribunal but did not contest the proceedings. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"It is 2007, and I am an undergraduate at the University of Tehran. I'm very particular. I take notes with Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens, in purple and green, and on this particular day I've run through the stash I keep in my desk at home. There is a small office supply store next to the university cafeteria, I've bought my pens there before. Before lunch I go to pick up some more Fineliners.

""We're out,"" says Farid, the young Kurdish boy who works in the store. ""The supplier says there won't be anymore at all.""

""Why not?"" I ask.

""They say because of sanctions, but I'm not sure,"" he says.

""Sanctions? What the heck do pens have to do with sanctions?"" I ask, surprised.

Eight years later, things are a little clearer. In 2007, we were just entering what would become a period of intense deprivation, brought on by ever-tightening UN Security Council sanctions. It would become the worst disruption of Iranian life since the Iran-Iraq War of my childhood.

Now, what seems like a lifetime later, a nuclear agreement has been signed between Iran and the P5+1. We have been promised an end to the chokehold; a brighter future for Iran. We'll see.

Those of us born after the revolution have lived our whole lives under sanctions. Following the November 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the United States imposed its first round of sanctions against Iran. Except for a brief period from 1981 to 1984, they have never been lifted. In March 1995, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order significantly expanding the scale of the embargo, preventing US companies from doing business with Iran.

But as difficult as these restrictions made the '90s, life was still far easier than in the decade before — the Iran of my childhood.

When I was a child, long lines for basic goods were routine. Throughout the Iran-Iraq War (1980 to 1988), my parents bought everything, from bread to cheese to meat, using coupons. Even items like paper, erasers, or women's nylon socks were often difficult to come by. When my parents married and moved into their first home in the early 1980s, basic household appliances were virtually impossible to find, as the combination of sanctions and war had brought both imports and domestic production to a halt. To get a refrigerator, my parents submitted their marriage contract to the neighborhood mosque, which took these contracts and tried to find necessary household supplies for new couples living in the neighborhood. I was born a few years later.

I was 4 years old before we had a phone. When I was 5 we finally bought furniture — a table and two chairs. Throughout the war we heard news of young boys perishing on the front lines, entire families wiped out by bombs. For a while, street bombings became frequent in our neighborhood, and when my father left home in the morning, my mother remained fearful till nightfall, uncertain if he would return.

I was 4 years old before we had a phone. When I was 5 we finally bought furniture — a table and two chairs.

But by the time I was a university student, the war was long over. Though sanctions persisted, Iranians had found loopholes and alternative means of getting what they needed. The worst of the deprivation was past. My classmates and I knew the hard life, we remembered it, but it had become a story, a tale for nights when we gathered around a dinner table we didn't struggle to find.

I wouldn't realize it until years later, but 9/11 was the day that a decade-long Iranian upswing began to fall apart. Despite the absence of Iranian involvement in the attack, the West steadily ramped up our isolation. When a secret uranium enrichment plant was discovered in Natanz in 2002, the isolation intensified. We were placed on George W. Bush's ""Axis of Evil,"" and then surrounded as the United States invaded Afghanistan to our east and Iraq to our west. In 2005, the conservative ex-mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defeated reformers in a presidential election, and the world's disdain came even harder.

It was difficult enough to deal with the changes he wrought at home. The university security staff we had been accustomed to — many of them young boys from the provinces — were replaced by stern-looking guards we'd never met. The cafeteria, where we had always sat down together to eat, was gender-segregated by a long blue curtain. We heard of professors being forced into retirement, and unknowns close to the administration taking up positions they were not fit for academically.

As students, it never felt as if Ahmadinejad represented us, but neither did we feel any affinity for the United States. It was Ahmadinejad who had brought a new security staff to our university. But it was America that had placed us under siege. We knew our nation's shortcomings, but in many years of cafeteria debates, my peers and I could never justify how we'd been singled out, why the world seemed to simply not like us. We began to think of ourselves as  ""the unpeopled,"" never seen by the outside world but living as we always had.

If anything, it seemed to us at the time that Ahmadinejad and Bush were similar — both, in language and deed, seemed to damage the prestige of their people in the eyes of the world. Yet the American president's embarrassing behavior did not seal off his entire country from food and medicine. We paid Ahmadinejad no heed, but the international condemnation of Iran grew louder. At first we tried to focus on school, on grades, love, art, and life, but it was difficult. Some analysts claimed then and still claim now that the sanctions weakened Iranian support for the state, but that was never the whole story. It never felt true for my friends and me. If anything, we began to echo the state: Why the double standard for Iran?

Then our lives came to a halt. In 2006, our government refused to continue implementing parts of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, significantly reducing the inspection rights of International Atomic Energy Agency personnel in Iran. In December of that year — then again in March 2007, October 2007, and March 2008 — the United Nations Security Council retaliated by intensifying sanctions.

These new embargoes effectively closed the loopholes that had allowed Iranians to get by over the past 10 years. We were no longer able to purchase goods we could access easily before. Flights to Iran by international carriers were reduced or stopped entirely. Magazines that had survived against all odds were once again threatened by paper costs they could not afford. Iranian oil exports accounted for between 60 and 80 percent of the country's revenue — suddenly, both Europe and the United States refused to buy.

The university security staff we had been accustomed to — many of them young boys from the provinces — were replaced by stern-looking guards we'd never met

Within our borders, strange men with almost no credible administrative experience tightened their grip on all sectors: the economy, the cultural space, even the heritage organization, a government body responsible for preserving historical sites. The reactionary policies of the Ahmadinejad administration coupled with the new, severe sanctions began to cripple us.

The impact of the sanctions on academia alone has been devastating. All manner of vital technical equipment became scarce, while universities across the country were not permitted to renew their subscriptions to search repositories — even in the fields of medicine and the humanities. Coursera, a platform that offers free, open online courses, has become inaccessible within our borders. Our previous ability to conduct research and contribute to world scholarship was brought to a painful standstill.

While a portion of University of Tehran graduates typically remained in Iran to work, the new sanctions provoked a mass exodus: Almost no one chooses to stay after undergraduate studies. Doors seem to close all around us. Within months of my first disappointment in the stationery store, every writing and drawing tool I used disappeared off the market for good.

The impact of sanctions outside my academic bubble is far worse. Vitamins have become hard to find. My mother's supplements disappeared off the market, as did tampons and foreign-made baby formulas. We went to drugstore after drugstore across the city but were told the same thing everywhere: The item you want is no longer being imported due to sanctions. My grandfather's German-made eye drops vanished. The Iranian ones hurt his eyes.

More critically, vital cancer medication has become excessively difficult to get ahold of. Between 2011 and 2014, while visiting sick relatives, I met patient after patient in the hospital whose condition had become critical due to delayed treatment.

""What, they expect me to sell my house to buy medication? And then what will the family be left with if I die anyway?"" asked a tall, silver-haired man I met one day. He had just started chemotherapy, months later than he should have. He died within weeks.

Almost like a joke, cancer rates appear to have climbed, as well. Some doctors blame new, low-quality domestic gasoline. While Tehran has always suffered from air pollution, we've begun to witness unprecedented levels — sometimes, looking over the gray-green haze that covers the city, it becomes impossible to breathe.

Iranian banks are cut off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunications), effectively cutting off financial communication between Iran and other countries. The private sector has been hit badly. The textile and automobile industries have been especially affected, with many plants completely shutting down entirely. Across industries, obtaining spare parts or requesting maintenance for machines has become extremely expensive, in some cases impossible. Two of Iran's main non-petroleum exports, handmade carpets and pistachios, have started piling up in basements.

All of this has sent the economy into free fall. The new sanctions led to unprecedented inflation, as high as 40 percent according to some estimates, which in turn caused a sudden spike in the price of basic commodities like milk and vegetable oil. Some crucial goods are available only on the black market, and there is no way — official or otherwise — to know how bad inflation has gotten there.

Perhaps you can imagine the 2008 American financial crisis to get a sense of what it was like — people's financial holdings falling apart within days, years of careful savings wiped out. My parents spent the first decade of their marriage in a war zone and the next 15 years trying to build on lost time, making up for all those years of deprivation. Within the span of months, almost nothing remained of that effort. My mother's clients went out of business; my father's academic and industrial research has been severely disrupted.

Perhaps you can imagine the 2008 American financial crisis to get a sense of what it was like — people's financial holdings falling apart within days

Over dinner, we talk about wartime. What it was like to live on rations. How life was lived with so little. We remember fondly our capacity for contentment, how we were all in it together.

This time it does not feel a group struggle. Under the sanctions, those who are savvy enough and amoral enough exploit others' deprivation for a profit. They function as middlemen and brokers, preying on the needs and envies of citizens. These men become wealthy, but at the cost of ordinary people turning against one another, moral and social life coming apart. During the war, I could never have told my father to get me the same doll my classmate had — each of us already had, or didn't have, the same things. But under sanctions, I have seen my uncles lambasted by their children because they didn't pay the brokers for some flashy new toy their classmate got.

In 2013, President Hassan Rouhani was elected with a mandate to stop this vicious cycle, to bring sanity and sustenance back to Iran. Despite monumental obstacles inside and outside of Iran, he has so far managed to deliver.

On July 14, 2015, a deal was announced between Iran and six world powers, including the United States. We were told that in exchange for a curtailment of our nuclear program and ongoing, rigorous inspections, the sanctions would finally be lifted.

I saw my grandfather that night. He lived through the occupation of his province during World War II, through the revolution, the war, and the sanctions years. When we discussed the news, he smiled, looking out into the distance. He read a poem: ""We are but leaves dancing to a wind.""

On the night of the agreement, I drive the streets of Tehran, trying to feel what the city felt. Valiasr is known as the longest street in the Middle East — it traverses the city from north to south. Long sycamore trees once ran the length of the road, but now they only grow in Northern Valiasr, one of Tehran's most affluent neighborhoods. This is where the crowds gather, the celebrations bringing traffic to a standstill. People are out of their cars, playing music, the sound of their whistles and applause rising above the trees in the dark.

We see luxury cars everywhere, more in one place than I've ever witnessed in Tehran before: Lexus, Mercedes, BMWs. But between them are the motorcycles of young boys who have come up from the working class neighborhoods of southern Tehran. They are easy to spot among the crowd. They wear stained T-shirts, probably smudged from a long day at work, and fake Nike shoes. As we drive south, the yelling, screaming, and happy crowds give way to the dead of night.

I have now lived three decades. I was born after a revolution, in the midst of a war. I have seen stability, I have seen chaos, I have seen bloodshed, I have seen calm, and all that lies between. Despite the agreement, we do not look forward to an uncomplicated era of plenty. Even if all goes according to plan, the legacy of sanctions cannot be erased. An economist I know from the University of Tehran put it this way: ""Sanctioning a country like this is similar to permanently disabling a human being. You might stop inflicting harm, but the damage is there forever.""

I wonder if this is true. All that we are promised by this deal — more stability, a financial recovery, more open political and social space — we have had and lost before. Who can guarantee it won't be lost again? Those of us who have seen the sinusoidal pains and recoveries of these past three decades know that much depends on the whims of a world far from our jurisdiction or oversight. We cannot make it bend, but it will bend us. For many Iranians, the end of sanctions is nothing more than the end of another chapter in a colossal, uncertain novel, still in production. You write as you live. You read as you go.

Pedestrian is a writer from Khuzestan, in southern Iran. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs and Roads and Kingdoms.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
A GRASSROOTS movement which has distilled people’s myriad frustrations and anger into one simple, catch all phrase continues to gather pace on the ground in America this morning. 
Providing a slogan to a loose affiliation of people’s desires, which often directly contradict or compromise the various factions involved, the populist movement is expanding at a worrying rate. 
‘Make American Vote Again’, the name given to vast swathes of people who feel America really needs to vote again a second time to get it right, has seen large crowds gather at numerous rallies across the United States. 
“Wrong” was the repeated phrase voiced by speakers at the rallies, as they cited the fact that America was headed in the wrong direction as evidence it needed a revolution in order to place it back on the right path. 
Many media personnel in attendance sought to press rally goers on the finer points of their plan to make America vote again, but could only shout ‘make America vote again’ repeatedly. Followers of the movement also displayed an almost violent patriotic loyalty to the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, which they claim Donald Trump would dismantle once in power. 
“It’s heartwarming to see such large crowds. But, where were you assholes yesterday,” shared one of the movement’s leaders Hillary Clinton. 
Clinton, criticised for her populism which has seen her join the calls for another vote, is looking to tap into the sort of post-Brexit come down, which saw half of Britain ‘shit their pants’ and wish they could vote all over again. 
The movement has drawn the attention of mainstream media which remains suspicious of Make America Vote Again, due to the face it is occurring online through social media channel outside the confines of the news media. 
“It goes against our values, principles and ideals, it’s not something anyone likes to see,” confirmed Republican strategist Noren Hassleback. 
“Having said that, despite the move being unconstitutional, many of the utterances bordering on being treasonous and discriminatory… they might be onto something”.",FAKE
"Russian warplanes began airstrikes in Syria on Wednesday, adding an unpredictable new element to a four-year-old war that has already drawn in the United States and allies, fueled a refu­gee crisis and expanded the reach of the Islamic State.

In Washington, the dramatic escalation of Russia’s military involvement was viewed as an affront just two days after President Obama and Russian President Vladi­mir Putin sat down to discuss means for negotiating the deep differences in their countries’ approaches to the conflict in Syria.

The strikes sharply increase tensions with Russia as U.S. officials dispute Moscow’s claim that its aircraft targeted the Islamic State, the brutal extremist group that controls much of Syria and Iraq. Instead, U.S. officials said the strikes appeared to target opponents of Syria’s embattled President Bashar al-Assad, a key Russian ally. Those hit include U.S.-backed units that were trained and armed by the CIA, officials said.

Accusing Russia of “pouring gasoline on the fire,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter vowed that U.S. pilots would continue their year-long bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, despite Moscow’s warning to keep American planes away from its operations.

“I think what they’re doing is going to backfire and is counterproductive,” Carter said.

The introduction of Russian air power — which took place with scant notice to the U.S. government — threatens to upend U.S. strategy in Syria at a time when U.S. military officials say they are beginning to discern hints of progress against the Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot that is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

It also raises the stakes over competing visions for Syria outlined this week at the United Nations, where Putin insisted that Syria’s embattled government is the key to stability after four years of bloodshed and Obama warned that the “status quo” cannot stand.

[This is Russia’s air power in Syria]

U.S. officials were particularly irked that they didn’t get much warning of the strikes, even as they make plans to resume military talks with Russia about Syria as early as next week. Discussions have been halted since last year over Russia’s support for separatists in Ukraine.

Earlier Wednesday, a Russian general posted in Baghdad showed up at the U.S. Embassy there, officials said, and told the American defense attache that airstrikes would begin about an hour later.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Russian aircraft had conducted about 20 sorties targeting the Islamic State, according to the news agency Interfax.

The Syrian state-run news agency reported that Russian planes had attacked “dens” of the Islamic State in Rastan, Talbiseh and other towns around Homs, the strategic city that Assad hopes to claim as he seeks to defend areas remaining under his control.

But U.S. officials expressed doubts in the hours after the strikes about Russian claims that the sorties targeted the Islamic State. Areas around Homs, a former hotbed of the popular revolt that began against Assad in 2011, are not known as strongholds for the group, which controls a vast swath of territory across Syria and Iraq.

Nidal Ezddin, a representative of Homs’s civil defense force, said a series of Russian strikes killed 36 people around Homs. “These bombings were not against ISIS,” he said. “They were for ISIS.”

Civil defense officials and activists also reported that some of the Russian strikes were accompanied by barrel bomb attacks by Syrian air force helicopters.

The strikes cap weeks of Russian military buildup in Syria, where Assad is battling both the Islamic State and rebel factions backed by the West. Assad’s forces­ are blamed for fueling the war that has forced more than 4 million people to flee the country, many of whom are joining a wave of asylum seekers and migrants flooding Europe.

Forces loyal to Assad hope to lay claim to Homs province, a key link between the capital, Damascus, and government strongholds on the Mediterranean coast, including the key port city of Latakia. Russia has a naval facility at Tartus, about 50 miles south of Latakia.

Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, said the strikes may be an attempt to weaken Assad’s principal adversary rather than the Islamic State.

“Amid the regime’s major losses . . . Assad’s apparent request to Moscow for military assistance seems a last-gasp appeal for help from what was a dying regime,” he said. “How far Russia is willing to go to defend its proxy interests now remains to be seen, but certainly, the dynamics of the conflict have taken a huge shift today.”

[Russia’s strategy in Syria could be work in progress]

The strikes appeared to have also hit groups backed by the United States, including rebels who have been trained by the CIA. A U.S. official said there was “no reason to doubt reports from the region that coalition-backed forces from Hama were hit,” a reference to a rebel group known as Tajammu al-Aaza based in that western Syrian province.

The leader of that group, Jamil al-Saleh, told the news organization AlSouria.net that the Russian strikes had pounded his organization’s base in Lataminah, a town roughly 30 miles north of Homs. Saleh was an officer in the Syrian army before defecting.

The U.S.-backed group also posted a video that shows fighter jets streaking across the sky seconds before the base is rattled by explosions.

[Graphic: Were Russian airstrikes really aimed at the Islamic State? ]

The CIA has trained thousands of fighters at secret bases in Jordan in an effort to bolster moderate factions against the Assad government. A Russian strike on U.S.-backed units will only intensify pressure on the Obama administration to respond.

Speaking at the United Nations, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the United States would have “grave concerns” if Russian airstrikes hit moderate U.S.-backed opposition forces­ fighting Assad rather than the Islamic State.

Also on Wednesday, Kerry told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that the strikes run counter to Russia’s stated intention to cooperate on “deconfliction,” or ensuring that mishaps do not happen in the air.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defended Russia’s actions after its parliament approved a resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria. “Russia will factually be the only country to carry out this operation on the legitimate basis of the request of the legitimate government of Syria,” he said.

The resolution came without warning in the Federation Council, Russia’s higher body of parliament, where 162 senators voted unanimously in support after a closed-door discussion — similar to a vote last year to green-light Russian military force in Ukraine.

Sergei Ivanov, the Kremlin chief of staff, said that the resolution was strictly limited to the use of Russian aviation in Syria and that ground troops would not be sent into battle.

While Russia has supplied arms to Assad for years, direct intervention seemed unlikely until early this month when Russian aircraft, tanks and troops were spotted in Syria.

Speaking in Moscow, Putin said he hoped Assad would be open to political compromise.

“I know that President Assad understands that and is ready for such a process. We hope that he will be active and flexible and ready to compromise in the name of his country and his people,” Putin told reporters, according to the Reuters news agency.

Critics say that the Kremlin is using the Syrian crisis to escape international isolation after its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, and to divert attention at home from the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The strikes also come as the Obama administration considers changes­ to its Syria strategy, including a possible expansion of military assistance to anti-Assad rebels and a new focus for a troubled effort to train an independent force to fight the Islamic State.

Murphy and Ryan reported from Washington. Daniela Deane in London, Hugh Naylor in Beirut, Carol Morello and Karen DeYoung at the United Nations, and Greg Miller, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Dan Lamothe and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report.

Why Russia is in Syria

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
"Wenjian Liu, 32, and his partner, Rafael Ramos, 40, were murdered on Dec. 20 as they sat in their squad car in Brooklyn after killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley had stated he was seeking vengeance for the deaths this summer of two unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers.

Brinsley killed himself after ambushing the officers.

With de Blasio expected to speak at Liu's funeral, police commissioner Bill Bratton told officers ahead of Saturday's wake to refrain from the ""act of disrespect"" seen at Ramos' funeral a week ago, when thousands of officers turned their backs on the mayor.

""A hero's funeral is about grieving, not grievance,"" Bratton wrote in a memo to officers.

De Blasio and Bratton entered the funeral home together for the wake as officers stood guard by the entrance, saluting both men as they went in.

The murders frayed already strained relations between the police force and de Blasio, who sharply criticized the NYPD's ""stop-and-frisk"" tactics during his 2013 campaign.

The liberal mayor also offered qualified support for the wave of protests triggered by the two black men's deaths in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, and has said he talked to his bi-racial son, Dante, about interacting with police.

Immediately after Liu and Ramos were shot, Patrick Lynch, the head of the city's largest police union, expressed scorn for de Blasio, saying there was ""blood on many hands.""

Ramos' funeral a week ago among the largest in NYPD history, with more than 20,000 officers from around the country on hand.

When de Blasio began his eulogy there, many uniformed officers turned their backs in a gesture of disdain, which Bratton called inappropriate, saying it had stolen the ""valor, honor and attention"" that was rightfully due the slain officer.

In his memo, Bratton said he understood emotions were running high among the rank and file, adding that his entreaty to the department was not a mandate and he was not threatening to discipline those who did not comply.

""But,"" he said, ""I remind you that when you don the uniform of this department, you are bound by the tradition, honor and decency that go with it.""",REAL
"At the old union hall here on a recent afternoon, Terry Magnant sat at the head of a table surrounded by 18 empty chairs. A members meeting had been scheduled to start a half-hour earlier, but the small house, with its cracked walls and loose roof shingles, was lonely and desolate.

“There used to be a lot more people coming,” said Magnant, a 51-year-old nursing assistant, sighing.

The anti-union law passed here four years ago, which made Gov. Scott Walker a national Republican star and a possible presidential candidate, has turned out to be even more transformative than many had predicted.

Walker had vowed that union power would shrink, workers would be judged on their merits, and local governments would save money. Unions had warned that workers would lose benefits and be forced to take on second jobs or find new careers.

Many of those changes came to pass, but the once-thriving ­public-sector unions were not just shrunken — they were crippled.

Unions representing teachers, professors, trash collectors and other government employees are struggling to stem plummeting membership rolls and retain relevance in the state where they got their start.

Here in King, Magnant and her fellow AFSCME members, workers at a local veterans home, have been knocking on doors on weekends to persuade former members to rejoin. Community college professors in Moraine Park, home to a technical college, are reducing dues from $59 to $36 each month. And those in Milwaukee are planing a campaign using videos and posters to highlight union principles. The theme: ­“Remember.”

[ Questions linger over Walker’s college exit as he mulls White House bid ]

But recalling the benefits that union membership might have brought before the 2011 law stripped most public-sector unions of their collective-bargaining rights is difficult when workers consider the challenges of the present.

“I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” said Dan Anliker, a 34-year-old technology teacher and father of two in Reedsburg, a tiny city about 60 miles northwest of Madison.

The law required most public employees to pay more for health insurance and to pay more into retirement savings, resulting in an 8 to 10 percent drop in take-home pay. To help compensate for the loss, Anliker said he took an additional 10-hour-a-week job.

“Everyone’s on their own island now,” he said. “If you do a good job, everything will take care of itself. The money I’d spend on dues is way more valuable to buy groceries for my family.”

Sean Karsten, a 32-year-old middle and high school reading instructor in his first year of teaching in Reedsburg, said the unions are “just not something I concern myself with.”

“I just look to keep improving my teaching in the best way I can and try to keep my nose out of the other stuff,” he said.

Walker has pointed to the unions’ membership troubles as a victory — presenting himself as a conservative warrior unafraid of taking on big battles against liberal interests.

Walker’s administration has said forcing public employees to contribute more to retirement plans and health insurance helped local governments save $3 billion. The governor also has credited the 2011 law with saving homeowners money on property taxes while giving school districts the ability to make reforms that increased third-grade reading levels and high school graduation rates. And the law has emboldened Republican state lawmakers to further challenge Wisconsin’s labor movement this year by pushing right-to-work legislation that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of paying union dues — a measure Walker has said he would sign.

“We took the power away from the big-government special interests and put it firmly in the hands of the hard-working taxpayers,” Walker told Iowa Republicans recently. “That is what we need more of in this great country. The liberals don’t like that.”

Union officials declined to release precise membership data but confirmed in interviews that enrollment is dramatically lower since the new law was signed in 2011.

The state branch of the National Education Association, once 100,000 strong, has seen its membership drop by a third. The American Federation of Teachers, which organized in the college system, saw a 50 percent decline. The 70,000-person membership in the state employees union has fallen by 70 percent.

The decline is politically significant in Wisconsin, a presidential battleground where the unions have played a central role in Democrats’ get-out-the-vote drives.

John Ahlquist, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who specializes in labor movements, said Walker had “effectively dismantled the financial and organizing structure of unions in Wisconsin.”

“Although it is too early to tell if unions are near the end of their political power here, they are in a very vulnerable position,” Ahlquist said.

The mass protests that gripped the state Capitol have subsided, but anxiety remains high in union halls across Wisconsin.

At Magnant’s meeting in King on a frigid February afternoon, union members finally began trickling in, one by one, filling a few of the empty seats.

A groundskeeper at the veterans home complained that supervisors were no longer assigning overtime based on seniority because “there was no union.” Others complained that there were no longer enough nursing assistants on shifts, while management positions seemed to grow.

“This is what we are trying to live with,” Magnant said. “But we can’t continue like this.”

Dean Johnson burst through door with a big grin on his face. Johnson, 55, told the story of how he felt so bold at work that he yelled “Join the union!” in the middle of the veterans home. A stalwart union supporter, he vowed he’d do anything to keep the movement going.

But Johnson said he could no longer do it as an employee. He told the group he was retiring — prompting a discussion about the new mantra for those choosing to leave union work: “Goodbye tension, hello pension.”

While some union members have been energized by the fight, they say they notice a new, more vocal animosity toward them. It has been particularly pronounced in rural areas, where public-sector jobs were some of the most prized gigs in town.

In King, population 1,700, Magnant said she couldn’t change a sign at the union hall without someone giving her the finger. Farther west, in Stanley, prison workers said they ditched their favorite pizza pub because the owner stood by while other customers called them “leeches.”

In Reedsburg, that tension surprised Ginny Bourgeois, 52, who clerks at a local Kwik Trip. The community had always been divided, defined as much by the factories manufacturing car parts as it was by cornfields now blanketed in snow. Still, it was a place where the community got together for spaghetti and corn feeds and filled bleachers to watch the Reedsburg Beavers play. Now, she said, people were fighting over politics at gas stations.

Still, she felt unions needed to sacrifice.

“Everyone knows teachers’ insurance was some of the best you could get,” Bourgeois added.“They do fairly well around here, and they do a good job teaching. But everyone in this town has had to tighten their belts. They should too.”

Judy Brey, a 58-year-old speech therapist who taught in the community for 22 years, said such sentiment hurt teachers’ morale. She said she grew up admiring her dad, who put six children through college on his union-supported job as a forester. “ ‘I don’t make a lot, but we’ll be okay with retirement,’ ” she said he told her. That, she was taught, was the reward for public service in Wisconsin.

“Now I’m always nervous that everyone will think they’re moochers,” Brey said. “That I’m a moocher.”

While some union members across the state knocked on doors to court members, Brey tried another strategy: finding more allies.

A day before Magnant opened the doors for a meeting at the union house in King, Brey went to a local restaurant to call to order the meeting of the Reedsburg Area Concerned Citizens.

On the top of Brey’s list was deciding guests for a planned panel discussion on the state of public education. Someone raised a hand.

“Are we getting any interest from the schools in this?” one man asked. “I haven’t seen any of the teachers out here since we were marching with them on the streets four years ago.”

At the meeting, the husband of the columnist called Walker “a pig” — which prompted the board supervisor to wonder why he was insulting pigs. They debated whether or not it’s worth it to invite Republicans to the education event, but Brey insisted it’s important to keep things balanced. Eventually, the group agreed.

“We’re getting somewhere,” Brey said as a waitress handed out checks.

But were the unions? Brey vowed not to give up on them. Two days later, she attended a union meeting that had been called to discuss possible changes in teacher retirement. Ten of the district’s 192 teachers had gathered at the meeting. They appreciated that the superintendent had previously met with union leaders even though he didn’t have to. Still, they grew agitated when discussing his proposal to reduce retirement benefits.

Another teacher, Linda Zauner, 58, said she was working to build a case that teachers wanted to keep benefits the same, but she had struggled to get teachers to respond to a survey. She said she wanted to emphasize that teachers still thought of health care as a “bargained right.”

“This is the closest thing we’re going to get to negotiations,” Zauner said.

“You have to be mean,” she said. “We never got anything by being nice. We’ve had to walk out. We got things when we banged our fists on tables.”

“Sometimes I think,” she stopped to collect the words delicately.

“Sometimes, I think, . . . that’s . . . why they came after us, Jenny. Because they thought these teachers were too demanding.”

“No, we have to fight,” Fish responded. “It’s for our students.”

Brey nodded. As long as there were teachers, she said, she’d be fighting along with them.",REAL
"Oil prices continued their fall Tuesday, as traders worried about a deal with Iran, which could increase supplies. In the meantime, U.S. oil production in 2014 was the highest since records began in 1900, according to the Energy Information Administration. West Texas light, sweet crude dropped 2.24% to $47.61 a barrel, says FactSet.

Cablevision has bid $1 to buy the New York Daily News, archrival New York Post gleefully reports.

Stymied by the Federal Aviation Authority, Amazon is testing drone delivery at a secret site in Canada, according to The Guardian.

China will start deposit insurance on May 1, another step toward scrapping government controls on interest rates.

The term “bubble” gets tossed around a lot, often improperly. In China, though, there may really be a stock bubble.

Jay Z announced a streaming music company that will be owned by artists, who seem to feel they should be paid for their work.

Do mutual fund managers who invest heavily in their own funds outperform? Why, yes.

Losing a job is always terrible. For workers over 50, it’s worse.

More than a third of Americans have no emergency savings.",REAL
"By Claire Bernish at thefreethoughtproject.com
Revelations from the Wikileaks release of John Podesta’s emails yet again prove mainstream, corporate media serves as Hillary Clinton’s personal cheerleading squad — and is devoid of any iteration of journalistic integrity.
Thanks to Wikileaks and the Intercept , in fact, we now have a list of no less than 65 mainstream “reporters” whose campaign coverage constitutes propaganda for the Clinton campaign — and no wonder, considering the obscenely lopsided drivel presented by their outlets.
As (actual) journalists Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang reported on October 9, the Intercept exclusively received documents obtained by the source known as Guccifer 2.0 evidencing Clinton campaign tactics to court journalists portraying the former secretary of state in a positive light.
“As these internal documents demonstrate,” the Intercept reported , “a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe are favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories the campaign wants circulated.
“At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be Quote: d ‘on background’ and what should be described as ‘on the record.’”
One internal strategy document dated January 2015 — months before Clinton officially kicked off her campaign in April — with the curious heading “Earned Media/Next Steps” exposes how the campaign made an albeit infrequent practice of crafting supposed news pieces from beginning to completion.
Under the — not-at-all oblique insult to the fundamentals of journalism — heading “ Placing a Story ,” the memo’s Quote: :
“As we discussed on our call, we are all in agreement that the time is right [to] place a story with a friendly journalist in the coming days that positions us a little more transparently while achieving the above goals.”
Specifically named as a suggested journalist plant is Maggie Haberman of Politico , whom they note will assist in doing “the most shaping” of the narrative they have in mind.",FAKE
"Ted Cruz did everything right in his campaign for the White House. He built a happy campaign operation that achieved all of its ambitious goals. Cruz elbowed out candidate after candidate to consolidate support among social conservatives, Tea Partiers and libertarians in the Republican field. He raised considerable amounts of money to build a political apparatus unrivalled in the GOP field.

There was only one problem. Every successful move, every stratagem that took Cruz – who dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday night after a disastrous loss in Indiana – from an ambitious Ivy Leaguer to one of the final three Republican candidates for the presidency prevented him from attaining the ultimate goal.

The Texas Republican was elected to the Senate in 2012 after winning a bitter primary as a Tea Party candidate. He was positioning himself for a White House bid almost from the get-go, travelling to Iowa for presidential cattle calls less than six months into taking office. In a legislative body that values tradition, Cruz’s undisguised ambition didn’t help him make friends. But what really alienated colleagues was his push to shut down the government in October 2013 in an attempt to defund Obamacare, the president’s signature healthcare reforms. The quixotic effort alienated almost all of his colleagues who were left calling him a “wacko bird” and viewed him as an amoral opportunist who would do anything for his own political gain.

Cruz did nothing to alter his image when he became the first candidate for the White House in 2016 to announce his campaign, in an event at Liberty University in Virginia in March last year. He was then racing to beat competitors with stronger roots in Iowa – such as Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee – to be the first out of the starting gate.



Cruz’s message that day was consistent with what the Texas senator would say every day on the campaign trail until the moment he withdrew from the race in Indianapolis on Tuesday. He told a crowd of college students: “I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America” and pledged to “reclaim the constitution”.

In fact, Cruz’s campaign was remarkable for its consistency. There was only one key issue on which Cruz changed his message significantly in the course of the campaign – Donald J Trump.

For months after Trump’s entry into the race, Cruz engaged in a virtual bear hug with the New York billionaire. Immediately after Trump said that Cruz’s Senate colleague John McCain, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, was not a hero, Cruz called him a friend.

He told reporters in Iowa in July 2015: “I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican on Republican violence. So you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump or bad about John McCain or bad about anybody else. I am not going to do it. John McCain is a friend of mine. I respect and admire him. He is an American hero. Donald Trump is a friend of mine.”

In contrast, the then candidate Rick Perry immediately condemned Trump and called on him to drop out of the race.

This pattern continued throughout 2015. As late as December, Cruz even tweeted that he thought Trump was terrific – long after other candidates had begun to condemn the frontrunner’s rhetoric.

But eventually, after Cruz’s win in the Iowa caucuses, the two turned to focus on each other. Cruz targeted Trump as a “New York liberal” who was no more a conservative than Hillary Clinton. After Trump had endured months of attacks for failing to adhere to conservative orthodoxy, this had little impact.

But Trump’s labelling of Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted” – based on the campaign rushing to inform Iowans that Ben Carson might drop out of the race after misconstruing a report on CNN just minutes before the caucuses were scheduled to begin – did have some effect.

The result was that exit poll after exit poll showed that voters thought Cruz ran a dirtier campaign than Trump and the Texas senator’s favorability numbers dropped with Republicans.

This happened even though the most personal attacks came from Trump, not Cruz. Trump tweeted an unflattering image of Cruz’s wife and threatened to “spill the beans on her” and, on the day of the Indiana primary, implied Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy. A campaign surrogate even repeatedly referenced a totally unproven tabloid story about Cruz’s personal life at multiple Trump rallies

In contrast, Cruz insisted that he was merely going after Trump’s record when he slammed the frontrunner’s past support for abortion rights and gun control and current support for allowing grown men “alone in bathrooms with little girls”, ie his contention that transgender people should use whichever bathroom they felt appropriate.

Like other candidates in the race, Cruz had no way to cope with Trump’s strange political jujitsu. Even as Cruz out-organized Trump on the ground, it was to little avail. The Texas senator’s campaign concentrated on Illinois in the final days before the 15 March primary after poll numbers showed him solidly ahead in North Carolina and Missouri.

However, the backlash among Republican voters after unrest at a canceled Trump rally in Chicago led to the frontrunner surging in the polls there, and Cruz was shut out in those crucial primaries as a result.

Cruz’s only hope was to somehow unite the GOP behind him. As the last remaining opponent to Trump, he should have been the standard bearer for the Stop Trump forces, and indeed some longtime detractors like Lindsey Graham – who had joked about him being murdered on the Senate floor just a week earlier – begrudgingly endorsed him.

As Jimmy Kimmel joked to Cruz in late March: “Yeah, what you did is you kind of held out until they found someone that they liked less than you.”

Cruz responded by saying: “There you go. It is a powerful strategy.” The problem was the strategy didn’t work.

The antagonism Cruz inspired among many mainstream Republicans made this a near impossible task. They sat on their hands and viewed Cruz as just as bad as Trump. The same factors that got him to the brink of the Republican nomination, his disdain for the “Washington cartel” and impatience with politics as usual, kept him from grasping the ring.

After a campaign in which he appealed to conservatives who were tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, Cruz could never win over those establishment Republicans he had spent the past year calling the lesser evil. That became undeniable this Tuesday.",REAL
"Ashutosh attempts suicide at protest rally, rescued while proofreading suicide note Posted on Tweet (Image via shiningindianews.com) 
Delhi police has foiled a suicide attempt by Aam Aadmi Party spokesperson Ashutosh during a protest rally organized by his party. He was apprehended when he and his team were proofreading his suicide note before attempting suicide. 
He was later sent to 14 days judicial custody where he is currently undergoing a refresher course in grammar and spelling. 
The incident happened yesterday when AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal organized an impromptu protest rally at Jantar Mantar to expose Narendra Modi, but unfortunately no one from the media turned up for the event. Crestfallen, Mr. Kejriwal decided to go back on Twitter and continue his service for his constituency when an idea crossed his mind. He shared the idea with Ashutosh and urged him to commit suicide. 
“But this is not what I was looking forward to when I joined AAP,” retorted Ashutosh. 
“No, you are not going to die. You will just attempt a suicide. We will call media to cover the event. Just imagine, you will be making headlines, you will be trending on Twitter, everyone will be talking about you. It will be so cool!” 
“Ok, you do it then if it’s so cool.” 
“No, I need to oversee the whole event. See, there are two options for you, either do it or find another party.” 
‘‘Which party will take me if I leave AAP?’ he pondered for a while and said, “Ok, let’s do it.” 
“Cool, now write a suicide note and let’s get on with this.” 
“Ok.” 
AAP party workers gathered around Ashutosh as he typed the opening line on Microsoft Word that read, “I holed Modi resoncible for my deth…” 
A crack team of 5 proof readers was formed immediately, who advised him about the correction the sentence demanded. 
He grinned and typed, “ sorry responcible …not resoncible .. ” 
“No, you can just delete the words and…” 
Another 5 proof readers were hired urgently to strengthen the team as he continued to type the letter. 
By the time he completed the letter, the language settings on MS Word had automatically turned into Spanish. 
“Done,” Ashutosh pronounced with a satisfactory smile as he beheld his creation for a few seconds before calling police to inform them about his plan. 
“Sir wait, we haven’t started proofreading yet,” implored one of the newly hired proofreaders. 
“Do you want me to die for real or what?” 
“No but at least the attempt should look genuine and not a hoax.” 
“Don’t worry, I’ve informed Darya Ganj Police Station. By the time they beat the traffic to reach here, we will not only complete the proofreading but will also complete the suicide…attempt.” 
3 proofreaders immediately started to decode the message in the letter in a separate document, another 3 changed the language settings of MS Word, and the rest started deleting the word ‘why’ which he had added at the end of every sentence. But it was too much of an ask for 10 mortals and they couldn’t even rewrite half of the letter when police arrived at the scene. 
Kejriwal tried to cover up the whole mess and handed over the letter to the police inspector, saying, “See, what Modi has done to him! He was about to commit suicide.” 
The inspector held the suicide note in front of him and mumbled, “Oh, Ashutosh. We would need some help here.” 
Experts, including the ones who decoded Nostradamus’s predictions, were flown in from various parts of the world to decipher the message in the letter, however, they haven’t quite succeeded in their endeavor as reports last came in.",FAKE
"President Obama called for an end to ""mindless austerity"" on Thursday as he announced his desire to end ""sequester"" spending cuts in his budget for 2015.

The across-the-board cuts, agreed to by both parties, have been in effect since 2013, after lawmakers were unable to produce a more strategic deficit-cutting plan. Members of both parties have problems with the cuts, which indiscriminately affect both domestic and defense programs.

Obama's proposed $74 billion in added spending — about 7 percent — would be split about evenly between defense programs and the domestic side of the budget. Although he's sought before to reverse the sequester spending cuts, Obama's pitch in this year's budget comes with the added oomph of an improving economy and big recent declines in federal deficits.

Taking a defiant tone, Obama vowed not to stand on the sidelines as he laid out his opening offer to Congress during remarks in Philadelphia, where House Democrats were gathered for their annual retreat.

""We need to stand up and go on offensive and not be defensive about what we believe in,"" Obama said. Mocking Republicans for what he called their leaders' newfound interest in poverty and the middle class, he questioned whether they would back it up with substance when it mattered.

Republicans promise to produce a balanced budget blueprint this spring even as they worry about Pentagon spending. The Senate's No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, dismissed the Obama proposals as ""happy talk."" And Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania chided the president for ""abandoning spending discipline.""

GOP lawmakers are focused primarily on reversing restraints on military spending, while Democrats and Obama are seeking new domestic dollars for education, research, health care and infrastructure. Republicans argue that spending more in so many areas would undo the hard-fought reductions in the country's annual deficit.

They also oppose many of the tax hikes Obama has proposed to pay for the increased spending.

Neither party has tender feelings for the sequester, which cut bluntly across the entire federal budget and was originally designed more as a threat than as an actual spending plan. With the economy gaining steam while deficits decline, both parties have signaled they want to roll some of the cuts back. A bipartisan deal struck previously softened the blow by about a third for the 2014 and 2015 budget years.

Both parties are generally inclined to boost spending for the military, which is wrestling with threats from terrorism and extremist groups and has been strained by budget limits and two long wars. ""At what point do we, the institution and our nation, lose our soldiers' trust?"" asked Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army chief of staff, at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Yet among congressional Republicans, there's no unanimity about where more Pentagon funds should come from — a division within the GOP that Obama appeared eager to exploit.

Some House Republicans want to cut domestic agency budgets to free money for the military — an approach that failed badly for Republicans two years ago. Some are eying cuts to so-called mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare, while others want to ignore the spending restraints altogether.

""Whatever it takes within reason to get this problem fixed is what I'm willing to do,"" said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., adding that he would be willing to consider more tax revenue ""just to get the damn thing done.""

The budget constraints stem from the hard-fought budget and debt bill of August 2011 that both parties negotiated and Obama signed into law. The threat of across-the-board cuts to virtually every federal agency was supposed to force Democrats and Republicans to compromise on smarter, less onerous spending cuts, but the measure kicked in when a supercommittee failed to reach an overall fiscal deal.

The White House said Obama's budget would be ""fully paid for"" by cutting inefficient programs and closing tax loopholes — particularly a trust fund provision the White House has been eying. Spokesman Josh Earnest said that and a few other tax tweaks would not only pay for Obama's increased spending but also offset middle-class tax cuts the president wants to create or expand.

At the same time, Earnest was quick to concede, ""No president has ever put forward a budget with the expectation that Congress is going to pass it in its current form.""

Details of what Obama will ask for in his budget began to trickle out ahead of the budget's formal release Monday. The Interior Department announced Obama would seek $1 billion for Native American schools, while Vice President Joe Biden said the budget would call for another $1 billion in aid for Central American nations.

At the Pentagon, Obama's increases would help pay for next-generation F-35 fighter jets, for ships and submarines and for long-range Air Force tankers. On the domestic side, Obama has proposed two free years of community college and new or expanded tax credits for child care and spouses who both work.

In his meeting with House Democrats, Obama also insisted that Republicans must not be allowed to use a funding bill for the Homeland Security Department to try to quash his executive actions on immigration. The White House has called that approach a ""dangerous view"" that would risk national security.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"The revolving door between politics and journalism and sometimes right back again has been spinning for a very long time.

Journalism depends so much on credibility. The recent Brian Williams scandal reminds us that this is not simply an academic issue.

Politicians and political operatives are all about the spin. Their mission isn't to get as close as they can to the truth. It's to win elections. Which means casting everything in a light most favorable to their prospects.

Not the finest or most appropriate credential for truth-seeker.

""One day they are calling journalists to spin them to write favorably about their prominent political patrons and the next minute they are sitting at the table with journalists and indistinguishable from the journalists,"" the late David Broder, an outstanding Washington Post political reporter who loathed that spinning door, once told American Journalism Review.

Yet there are people who have overcome their substantial political baggage and made that transition in a most impressive way. None more than the late Tim Russert, a onetime aide to the late New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Russert became a sterling host of NBC's Meet the Press.

Another political player who seemed to have successfully navigated those treacherous waters was George Stephanopoulos. I thought it was a truly bad idea when the former top aide to President Clinton, a hugely partisan figure, became a news analyst for ABC back in 1996. But Stephanopoulos, now ABC's chief anchor, host of its Sunday morning political talk show This Week with George Stephanopoulos and co-anchor of Good Morning America, turned out to be a pleasant surprise, shedding his political warrior past and showing journalism chops.

The recent revelation that Stephanopoulos had donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation between 2012 and 2014 not only raises serious questions about his judgment. It also disqualifies him from having anything to do with covering the 2016 presidential race. He has already said he won't moderate ABC News' Republican primary debate in February, which is a start.

So far ABC is standing firmly behind its embattled anchor. But it's early in the saga, and that could change quickly. Regardless, there is no way he should allow himself — or be allowed — to deal in any way with a contest in which Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to become the Democratic candidate for president.

Exhibit A of why that is the case came on April 26, when Stephanopoulos aggressively grilled Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which is critical of the Clinton Foundation. Stephanopoulos failed to disclose that he was a benefactor of said foundation. But even if he had, that would hardly have eliminated the problem. The issue is the donations themselves.

Making them would be inappropriate for any political journalist. But it's particularly crucial for a former Clinton consigliere. Even though he had had a public break with the Clintons, Stephanopoulos of all people should not be giving money to anything having to do with them. What was he thinking?

Sure, the foundation is a charitable enterprise. But all things Clinton tend to be closely intertwined. And there has been no shortage of suggestions that people have been ponying up to the foundation to curry favor with the Clintons, one of whom is a potential next president. There are lots of worthy causes out there with no links to Hillaryland.

One key point: Stephanopoulos' role — and that of his network, for that matter — are very different from the jobs and the forum of the ex-candidates who have made Fox News a full employment act for failed GOP presidential aspirants. Fox is a political force. ABC News is not.

Stephanopoulos' apologies have not been reassuring, certainly not the initial one. He first said he should have told his employer and his viewers about the donations, which are a matter of public record, not that he shouldn't have made them. He later conceded that the donations were problematic.

For someone so politically and journalistically astute, this was a boneheaded — and totally tone deaf — error indeed.",REAL
"With nearly all votes counted in elections for the Knesset, Israel's parliament, Benjamin Netanyahu's center-right Likud party has won at least a five-seat victory over its principal rival, the center-left Zionist Union.

Israeli media report Likud has 29 or 30 seats in the 120-member Knesset to the Zionist Union's 24 seats.

Exit polls by Israel's three main television channels initially showed Likud and the Zionist Union more or less tied. Shortly after midnight in Israel the Zionist Union Chairman Yitzhak Herzog predicted a return to power of the center-left.

But as the actual votes were counted the results were quite different.

Netanyahu must assemble a coalition of parties totaling at least 61 seats to form a new government.

If he succeeds in forming a coalition government, Netanyahu would begin a historic fourth term as prime minister of Israel.

The Associated Press says Netanyahu's victory ""likely spells trouble for Mideast peace efforts and could further escalate tensions with the United States.

""Netanyahu, who already has a testy relationship with President Barack Obama, took a sharp turn to the right in the final days of the campaign, staking out a series of hard-line positions that will put him at odds with the international community. ""In a dramatic policy reversal, he said he now opposes the creation of a Palestinian state — a key policy goal of the White House and the international community. He also promised to expand construction in Jewish areas of east Jerusalem, the section of the city claimed by the Palestinians as their capital. ""Netanyahu infuriated the White House early this month when he delivered a speech to the U.S. Congress criticizing an emerging nuclear deal with Iran. The speech was arranged with Republican leaders and not coordinated with the White House ahead of time.""",REAL
"opednews.com - Advertisement - 
I have suggested elsewhere that if we want a better future we will have to create it out of whole cloth and intend that it be 'for the highest and best good for all concerned and the planet'. 
Most of us know that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The time, space thing that is our planetary reality is occupied by dark, evil, powerful forces with no intention of moving aside to accommodate positive outcomes. 
Carl Jung has noted that ""the opposite of love is not hate, it is power"". I get this. Love nourishes and empowers the object of its attention, power seeks dominion over what it notices, is destructive. We cannot confront this power and it would be karmically harmful to do so resulting in no change. 
So, the existent power, in play for 300,000 years, must 'start' to break down before change is possible, to allow space for that change. If we want to be in control of that change we must be the dominate unified conscious intent during the breakdown of order and focus that positive intend toward a better future. 
The breakdown of order is in play right now in front of our eyes .It is remarkable and noteworthy that the U.S., the evil empire has leveled most of the Middle East, used depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq causing severe genetic damage to newborns for generations, has driven millions of hapless refugees into Europe and I hear no loud, clear voice screaming for them,us, to stop. I have just described an 'end of times, type horror story the evil doers who run the U.S. are engaged in and plan to expand around the globe. They actually plan and promote the breakdown of order, the chaos out of which they expect to rise with an absolute grip on all power. They expect us to welcome this enslavement just to stop the pain and suffering they have caused us. Again, this madness is taking place right now in front of our eyes. 
If the decent and responsible among us organize now to be that dominate unified intent, the dominate consciousness , we would control the aftermath of the planned breakdown of order. Our rulers do not imagine us capable of this since we have behaved like victims who always attract and suffer victimizers to their lives. - Advertisement - 
So that's it. We need about ten percent of us to to lightly hold the intent to create the new paradigm of existence and hold this vision while chaos descends around us. If this is an effort by 'enough' of us we will prevail. The Law of Attraction, the first universal law will assist us and attract more positive energy than thought possible. The planet herself is considered a conscious being and would certainly direct all possible positive energy to our cause-her cause. As our energy grows the energy available to evil wanes. When they sense this their testicles will shrink! 
Finally, no one need give their life to this cause rather a commitment to prevail not founded solely on self interest and a real sense of responsibility to humankind and the planet. 
The breakdown of order has begun.... - Advertisement -",FAKE
"U.S. militia girds for trouble as presidential election nears 11/02/2016 
REUTERS 
Down a Georgia country road, camouflaged members of the Three Percent Security Force have mobilized for rifle practice, hand-to-hand combat training — and an impromptu campaign rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. 
“How many people are voting for Trump? Ooh-rah!” asks Chris Hill, a paralegal who goes by the code name “Bloodagent.” 
“Ooh-rah!” shout a dozen militia members in response, as morning sunlight sifted through the trees last weekend. 
As the most divisive presidential election in recent memory nears its conclusion, some armed militia groups are preparing for the possibility of a stolen election on Nov. 8 and civil unrest in the days following a victory by Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
They say they won’t fire the first shot, but they’re not planning to leave their guns at home, either. 
Trump’s populist campaign has energized militia members like Hill, who admire the Republican mogul’s promise to deport illegal immigrants, stop Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly warned that the election may be “rigged,” and has said he may not respect the results if he does not win. At least one paramilitary group, the Oath Keepers, has called on members to monitor voting sites for signs of fraud. 
Armed paramilitary groups first gained prominence in the early 1990s, fueled by confrontations in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, culminating in a militia sympathizer’s 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. 
Their numbers dwindled following that attack but have spiked in recent years, driven by fears that President Barack Obama will threaten gun ownership and erode the power of local government. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, estimates there were 276 active militias last year, up from 42 in 2008. 
In recent years, armed groups have confronted federal authorities in a series of land-use disputes in the western United States. Federal officials fear more clashes could come after seven militants were acquitted on conspiracy charges for occupying a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. 
Many fear Clinton would push the county further to the left. 
“This is the last chance to save America from ruin,” Hill said. “I’m surprised I was able to survive or suffer through eight years of Obama without literally going insane, but Hillary is going to be more of the same.” 

EXTREMIST GROUPS EMBOLDENED 
The Oath Keepers, a prominent anti-government force that sent gun-toting members to the 2014 race riots in Ferguson, Missouri, called on members last week to monitor voting sites on election day for any signs of fraud. 
An hour south of Atlanta, the Three Percent Security Force started the day around the campfire, taking turns shooting automatic pistols and rifles at a makeshift target range. They whooped with approval when blasts from one member’s high-powered rifle knocked down a tree. 
The group operates independently, but is affiliated with a national armed movement that calls for members to defend individual rights in the face of what they see as an overreaching federal government. The movement draws its name from the notion that no more than 3 percent of the American population fought in the Revolutionary War against Britain. 
Amid the war games, Hill weighed plans for a possible armed march on Washington if Clinton wins. 
He said he doesn’t want his members leading the way, but they will defend the protesters if need be. His group will not hesitate to act if a President Clinton tries to disarm gun owners, he said. 
“I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process,” said Hill, who founded the militia several years ago. 
Trump’s candidacy has emboldened extremist groups to speak more openly about challenging the rule of law, said Ryan Lenz, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center. 
“Prior to this campaign season, these ideas were relegated to sort of the political fringe of the American political landscape,” he said. “Now these ideas are legitimized.” 
Over the past week, some prominent Trump supporters have hinted at violence. 
“If Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket,” former Illinois Representative Joe Walsh wrote on Twitter last week. Conservative commentator Wayne Root fantasized about Clinton’s death while speaking at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Sunday. 
Back in Georgia, the Three Percent Security Force wrapped up rifle practice in the midday sun. They then headed further into the trees to tackle an obstacle course with loaded pistols at their sides, ready for whatever may come. 
“We’ve building up for this, just like the Marines,” he said. “We are going to really train harder and try to increase our operational capabilities in the event that this is the day that we hoped would never come.” Share On:",FAKE
"The Richest Man.., Considered, Invested In One U.S.-Based Company – CNL! CONTINENTAL GOLD (TSX: CNL; OTCQX: CGOOF) is a well-funded advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on becoming a leading gold producer in Colombia. The Company´s 100% owned flagship Buriticá project is a large and high-grade gold deposit located 75 km northwest from Medellín. Continental´s management team has proven experience in permitting, financing and building precious metal mines in Latin America. The Company is dedicated to maximizing shareholder value while working to the highest standards of community commitment and environmental defensiveness. Symbol CNL on the TSX and CGOOF in the United States. CONTACT THE COMPANY DIRECTLY t o get more information by calling ( 416) 583-5610 or email [email protected] . Continental Gold which has one of the highest grade gold deposits in the entire world. The company’s flagship high grade gold and silver project Buritica, has extremely high 97 and 95% recovery rates for gold and silver. Buritica has gold resources of 2.97 million ounces measured and indicated and 4.4 million ounces inferred with grades averaging nearly 10 grams per ton of gold equivalent, which includes high-grade silver resources. The company has high priority targets being drilled at Buritica and a portfolio of other potential high-grade exploration projects and all projects are 100% owned. Continental Gold has roughly $100 million of cash in the bank and management also owns roughly 16% of the company. Continental Gold, symbol CNL in Canada and CGOOF in the US. 
Continental Gold (TSX:CNL; OTCQX:CGOOF) is an advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on maximizing shareholder value by becoming the leading gold producer in Colombia. 
Why Continental Gold? 
Continental Gold is an advanced-stage exploration and development company focused on maximizing shareholder value and committed to the highest standards of community and environmental responsibility. The Company´s 100%-owned flagship Buriticá project is a large high-grade gold deposit located 75 km northwest from Medellín, Colombia. On February 24, 2016, the Company announced the results of an independent Feasibility Study for the Buriticá project. Utilizing a gold price of $1,200/ounce, a silver price of $15/ounce and a US$:COP exchange rate of 1:2,850, the base case scenario resulted in an after-tax net present value at a 5% discount (NPV5) of $860 million, an internal rate of return (IRR) of 31.2% and payback of 2.3 years. 
What Differentiates Continental Gold? 
The Company´s 100%-owned flagship high-grade Buriticá project is a rare combination of size, grade, straightforward metallurgy, excellent infrastructure and growth potential. On February 24, 2016, the Company released the results of an independent Feasibility Study that indicates the Buriticá project will be a lowest quartile cost producer and an economically robust mine with modest initial capital expenditure. Once in production, Buriticá has the potential to approximately double the legal production of gold in Colombia and become the largest single gold mine in the country. 
In association with various government entities in Colombia, the Company was the first in the country to formalize small-scale mining associations, paving the way for the implementation of legal and responsible small-scale mining operations at the Buriticá project. In addition, the Company has operated a 30 tpd small-scale operating mine at Buriticá since 1992 and is one of the largest employers in northwestern Antioquia, employing over 300 people. The Company focuses on providing a safe working environment and partnering with the local communities on key social projects. 
ARI SUSSMAN – CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER – Ari Sussman has over 15 years of experience in both the natural resources and investment markets sectors. Having dedicated the majority of his career to the natural resources industry, Mr. Sussman has been instrumental in sourcing, funding and developing high-quality mineral assets. During his career, Mr. Sussman has built a strong network of business contacts throughout Latin America, and in the past decade has raised over $500 million for various resource companies Association. MATEO RESTREPO – PRESIDENT – Mr. Restrepo was Vice-President of Corporate Affairs at Prodeco Group (a Glencore subsidiary), Colombia’s third largest thermal coal producer, where he was responsible for managing the company’s key relationships with the Colombian government, non-government organizations, and national and local stakeholders proximal to its operations. He was also Director of the Colombian Office of Grupo Salinas – Banco Azteca of Mexico, where he played a pivotal role in the process of licensing and setting up operations in Colombia. Mr. Restrepo has held various positions with the Colombian Government, including Senior Counselor to the President of Colombia on Economic Recovery (2009-2010) and Advisor to the Presidency of Colombia (2005-2008). Born in Medellín, Colombia, Mr. Restrepo holds a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Berkeley College.",FAKE
"We are now at the point in this political season where everyone is hating on everyone else.

Think about it: When was the last time you saw a piece or watched a segment in which a candidate was portrayed positively?

Presidential campaigns are a tough business where every contender gets roughed up as the price of admission. But the level of vitriol—the pundits against Donald Trump and his rivals, and the candidates sliming each other—has spiraled way out of control.

It hasn’t been Morning in America for a long time. In fact, it’s pretty close to a dark and stormy midnight.

And the hyperspeed news cycle has all this unfolding at a head-snapping pace, like an endless feed of Twitter taunts.

In the deafening din of the media echo chamber, it sometimes seems like these are the sounds that break through:

--Donald Trump is a fascist threat to our way of life, says racist things and loves to attack women over their looks.

--Ted Cruz is the most unlikable man in Washington, maybe the world, and such a nutty right-winger he’d probably like to shut down the government forever.

--John Kasich is a cranky spoiler impersonating a nice guy who is staying in the race out of pure ego.

--Hillary Clinton is a deceitful woman who gets on everyone’s nerves, keeps lying about her email server and is lucky she’s not in jail.

The “war over the wives” controversy is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the gutter campaign, with Trump blaming Cruz for the posting of a nude magazine photo of his wife, Cruz blaming Trump for unsubstantiated mistress allegations in the Enquirer, and the media breathlessly following each twist and tweet.

It’s a chicken-and-egg game to assign blame for the campaign’s locker room tone to either the politicians or the journalists. Perhaps it reflects the crude and often mean-spirited tone of our culture.

Here, among thousands of possible selections, is a sampling. Let’s start with Sunday’s New York Times op-ed page, where everyone gets whacked.

Ross Douthat, a thoughtful conservative voice, says Ted Cruz looks like he’s faking it:

“The fact that he seems so much like an actor hitting his marks fits with the story of how he became Mr. True Conservative Outsider in the first place. Basically, he spent years trying to make it in Washington on the insider’s track, and hit a wall because too many of the insiders didn’t like him — because his ambition was too naked, his climber’s zeal too palpable. So he deliberately switched factions, turning the establishment’s personal disdain into a political asset, and taking his Ivy League talents to the Tea Party instead.”

On such issues as the government shutdown over ObamaCare, an exercise in “self-serving cynicism…Cruz has proceeded with several fingers in the wind; every time the conservative mood has shifted even a little, he’s shifted quickly too.” He accuses Cruz of first being obsequious toward Trump, but turning to self-righteousness now that “the name-calling and scandal-mongering have been turned against his reputation and his family.”

After that, and with a parting shot that “his cynicism can be repellent,” Douthat allows that the hard-working Cruz has earned his standing in the primaries.

On the liberal side, I have a lot of respect for Nick Kristof, but in his Times column he buys into an increasingly common myth. The headline is “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump”:

“Although many of us journalists have derided Trump, the truth is that he generally outsmarted us (with many exceptions, for there truly have been serious efforts to pin him down and to investigate Trump University and his various business failings). He manipulated television by offering outrageous statements that drew ever more cameras — without facing enough skeptical follow-up questions.

“It’s not that we shouldn’t have covered Trump’s craziness, but that we should have aggressively provided context in the form of fact checks and robust examination of policy proposals.”

While the press could always do a better job, I’d argue that there has been endless fact-checking and it hasn’t hurt Teflon Trump.

The second “failure” is that “we wrongly treated Trump as a farce.” Not all of us, Nick, but that is especially true among the Huffington Post liberal crowd (though plenty of conservative pundits fell into this trap).

But I strongly agree with Kristof’s last point: “We failed to take Trump seriously because of a third media failing: We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated….We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Also on the op-ed page, Maureen Dowd looked at President Obama “tangoing into history”—that is, enjoying his trip to Argentina and Cuba and failing to reflect the public alarm over the Brussels bombings:

“Barack Obama started off as a man self-consciously alone on stage and that’s how he is exiting. He is, for better and worse, too cool for school. His identity is defined by his desire to rise above the fray. Unfortunately, he is in politics, which is the fray…

“The president has a bristling resistance to what he sees as cheap emotion. (See: flag pin, 2008.) That has led him, time after time, to respond belatedly or bloodlessly in moments when Americans are alarmed, wanting solace and solutions.”

Well, how about John Kasich? He hasn’t offended too many people, right?

National Review Editor Rich Lowry is in the #NeverKasich camp:

“This truly is a year when the rules don’t apply. If they did, John Kasich would be back in Columbus trying to figure out whether he sells his soul to Donald Trump or endorses Ted Cruz.

“Instead, the Ohio governor is still out on the trail running a delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign. There is no appetite for his pragmatic, ‘can’t we all get along’ campaign among Republican-primary voters, who have made that abundantly clear.”

Oh, and the Times news section joins the fray by quoting Kasich associates who “recall a three-decade career in government punctuated by scolding confrontations, intemperate critiques and undiplomatic remarks.”

I could go on and on. Slate says Trump “seeks to destroy people who stand in his way, especially women, even if he looks disgusting doing it.”

New York magazine says that “unfortunately for Cruz, his logic backfires. Because if real men do not attack women, Cruz is fake as hell. In fact, he might be faker than Trump.”

Maybe, on some level, we get the elections we deserve.

This is a reality show campaign in which reality, perhaps in the form of terror attacks, sometimes intrudes. It is endlessly entertaining, but often feels like tragicomedy with no heroes.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"  Many humans are discovering they have unique abilities that science can’t explain, suggesting that we may have untapped potential beyond our wildest dreams. Since the majority of people have yet to realize this potential, there is a certain mysticism surrounding this phenomenon, which is why many perceive people with special capabilities as “superhumans.” One of the more recent superhumans to share his talent with the world is Nong Yousui , a young boy from Dahua, China.   Nong Yousui and His Superhuman Eyesight Like many babies, Nong Yousui was born with blue eyes; however, Nong’s eyes have a certain brightness that set him apart from other blue-eyed children. Later in life, he discovered that the colour of his eyes wasn’t his only unique attribute, as he claims to have perfect vision in complete darkness. Naturally, his father brought Nong to the hospital in search for answers. As his father explained , “They [doctors] told me he would grow out of it and that his eyes would stop glowing and turn black like most Chinese people but they never did.” Even though Nong can see clearly in the dark, he has difficulty seeing in sunlight and finds bright light uncomfortable. His teacher also claims that when light is shined directly into Nong’s eyes in the dark, they reflect a neon green tone. When Nong’s story first went public, a skeptical Chinese journalist decided to formally test his claim. The journalist created a set of questionnaires for the boy to complete in a controlled setting, a pitch black dark room. After completing the tests, his results clearly proved that the boy can see, read, and write perfectly in complete darkness. The World Record Academy , the organization that certifies world records, deemed Nong Yousui as the first person to be able to see in the dark and awarded him with a world record. Check out the following video about Nong Yousui and his ability to see in the dark: http://www.medicaldaily.com/chinese-boy-nong-yousui-can-see-pitch-dark-scientists-unconvinced-253207 The Scientific Debate Surrounding Nong’s Night Vision Nong’s story has generated a lot of publicity, mostly outside mainstream media (not surprisingly), though it has attracted attention from the scientific community as well. Many scientists remain skeptical of Nong’s unique eyesight because it doesn’t make sense according to human evolution. As James Reynolds , a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, explained, evolution is a slow process: “Evolutionarily, mutations can result in differences that allow for new environmental niche exploitation. But such mutations are modified over long periods. A functional tapetum in a human would be just as absurd as a human born with wings. It can’t happen.” Although evolution clearly occurred in nature, it is important to note that there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the theory of evolution and its relationship to modern-day humans. A University of Glasgow study performed in 2000 proved that modern man was not in fact descended from Neanderthals, a species believed to be our ancestors, disproving the out-of-Africa model of modern human evolution. I’m not suggesting that Darwin’s work was wrong whatsoever; I’m simply reiterating the fact that it is a theory that has been applied to humans and that specific parts of it have been disproven, including the hypothesis that we evolved from Neanderthals. With that, I think it’s presumptuous to state that the theory of human evolution negates the reality of Nong’s night vision, when we’re still searching for answers surrounding human evolution in general. Nong’s night vision seems more plausible when you consider all of the other species with similar capabilities. Numerous animals including cats and those that are nocturnal have incredible night vision due to a thin layer of cells that exists in their eyes called the tapetum lucidum (as mentioned above). When light shines directly into these animals’ eyes, their eyes appear to glow, similar to Nong’s. What We Can Learn From Nong’s Story This isn’t the first time we’ve observed incredible capabilities in human eyes. Many people have claimed to heal their eyesight naturally and there have been studies performed on humans that have successfully improved their night vision (read our article about it here ). Eyes have also been referred to as the gateway to the soul, which means they could be used as a tool to look beyond the physical world and into the spiritual. Like Nong, many other people have come forward to share their superhuman abilities with the public — abilities for which scientists have had no explanations. Many of these people are enlightened beings, such as monks who can generate heat and have supernormal mental capabilities. Another infamous ‘superhuman,’ Wim Hof , can submerge his body in ice for hours while meditating and his body temperature remains stable, an ability which still baffles scientists. Why should we automatically doubt a young boy’s uniqueness because science tells us to? It’s time we put our scientific egos aside, accept the fact that some things are inexplicable (for now), and recognize that what we deem impossible may sometimes be possible. To read more about other people with superhuman capabilities, check out our article:",FAKE
"Jane Mansbridge is the Charles F. Adams professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. As president of the American Political Science Association from 2012 to 2013, she created the Task Force on Negotiating Agreement in Politics to respond to the crisis of polarization in the federal legislature.

A suggestion on polarization: Get used to it. It’s not going away anytime soon.

Americans have not, by and large, grown grumpier over the years. But members of the two major parties have stopped speaking to one another across the aisle. They don’t vote together, either.

Three major structural changes — gradual party realignment, closer elections and inequality — largely explain the huge decline in the numbers of party members willing to vote for legislation that the other party has sponsored, and in particular the number of Republicans willing to vote for measures the Democratic Party has sponsored. None of these causes is likely to change.

A massive transition began after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. As he told then-White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers the night of the signing, ”I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” He had set in motion a train of events that, over time, would slowly lead conservative White southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. As the Southern conservatives left the Democratic Party, they left behind a relatively liberal remnant (in significant part, African Americans).

[America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.]

Democrats outside the South did not become much more liberal in the ensuing years, but the change in the composition of the party in the South made the national party more liberal and receptive to people of color. As the conservative Southerners joined the Republican Party, they also changed its center of gravity. Their perspectives and demands empowered the right wing of the party that had long chafed under the moderate Republican establishment. Evangelicals rose in strength; businesspeople fell. The Republican Party began to look for support less in Maine and more in Georgia. Its members became more extremely conservative, while the members of the Democratic Party became only a little more liberal.

With this shift, the parties in Congress became more electorally competitive. Southern conservatives leaving the Democratic Party gradually added their numbers to the Republican Party, which in 1980 won a majority of seats in the Senate (and in 1994 a majority in the House) for almost the first time since the New Deal.

The period of bipartisanship in Washington, from 1940 to 1980, was actually a period of Democratic dominance. With the Democrats in more or less permanent power, it behooved individual Republicans to play nice in order to get their bridges and roads. But by 1980, the parties began a period of intense competition.

As Frances Lee at the University of Maryland points out, when the minority party thinks it might win in the next election, it has a great incentive not to let the majority party have any “wins” that it might run on in that next election. She quotes then-House Chief Deputy Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from 2009: “If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority. We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill.”

The now-famous U-curve of income inequality in the United States shows that after a period of relative equality from about 1940 to 1980, we have today become as unequal as we were in the last Gilded Age. That U-curve of income inequality tracks uncannily the U-curve of polarization, which in 1910 was almost as high as it is now, then fell precipitously — along with income inequality — until it bottomed out in the bipartisan era from 1940 to 1980. It rose again, in exact parallel with inequality, to its present heights. Why? Inequality seems to cause polarization and polarization to some extent causes inequality.

Nolan McCarty and his colleagues at Princeton are beginning to tease out the mechanisms. In state politics, they find that states with increasing income inequality experience two polarizing effects. First, state Republican parties shift to the right overall. Second, state Democratic parties shift to the left because their moderates lose. Rich Republican donors could well be responsible for both outcomes if, as seems likely, they fund more extreme candidates in Republican districts and target the Democrats they have the best chance to dislodge, namely those in politically moderate districts.

[Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.]

The big picture is that the extraordinary growth in incomes at the top of the income distribution makes possible the discretionary money that can then be poured into politics, and those who contribute to politics are, on average, a good deal more extreme in their views than the average voter.

The gradual party realignment after 1964, the closeness of elections since 1980, and the growth in income at the top of the distribution are the three deep causes of polarization. Gerrymandering is not the cause; the Senate is as polarized as the House. Primaries are not the cause; primary reforms have had relatively little effect. Changes in the rules of the House and Senate have had some effect, as have the increasing number of hours that legislators now have to spend fundraising and the increasing number of hours they now spend in their home districts with their constituents. But of the three deepest causes, at least party realignment and income inequality are likely to continue. Close elections may well continue, too. So polarization is here to stay — for the indefinite future.

Polarization is not itself a design flaw in our constitutional system. Britain’s parliamentary system has polarization — two opposing parties and little, if any, negotiation between them. Yet our polarization is exacerbated by our Constitution’s extreme separation of powers, with its many veto points. If you combine those veto points with extreme and opposing positions, the result is deadlock. Deadlock was less of a problem in the early days of the republic, when today’s interdependence in commerce, law and order could not even have been imagined, and the national legislature did not have to pass many laws. Today that deadlock is a disaster.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.

Dana Nelson: The growth of executive power has turned politics into war

Jim Marshall: Congress could reduce polarization. It has chosen not to.

Thomas Petri: Our government is messy — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working

Alan I. Abramowitz: America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.",REAL
"Badass Patriot Has MASSIVE Surprise For Thieves Who Stole His Trump Sign   Amanda Shea   Trump supporters 
It’s become a trend for Hillary Clinton-supporters with far too much time on their hands to steal any Donald Trump sign they can get their grubby hands on. There’s no returning the “favor” by taking a Hillary sign since they are practically non-existent in almost all neighborhoods. So, one proud patriot took retaliation to new heights ensuring liberals stay away from his sign. 
The unnamed owner of the Trump sign, who is believed to be in Arizona, is aware that his sign may not cost a lot but is worth much more than the plastic it’s printed on based on what it represents — a chance to take America back. Hillary-supporters are an odd group of people who seem to believe that the Constitutional right to free speech is only bestowed upon them, along with the power to take it from anyone who says something that they don’t like. 
Perhaps this the driving purpose behind the nationwide rash of Trump sign theft, paired with the fact that they think that they’re “helping” by removing these visual statements of support from public view. Either way, where there is a Trump sign, there’s a liberal nearby waiting for their chance to make a stupid statement of their own in stealing it. 
However, this sign owner beat them to the punch by putting it in a place that was not only impossible to reach but showed his support of the GOP candidate loud and proud. It sat up high in a tall tree, keeping it out of reach for thieving liberals. Taking Trump sign to new heights to prevent it from being stolen and make a bold message at the same time. 
If liberals really want to show their support for Hillary, they’ll have to climb this massive tree and tear it down, but chances are, they’re not as tough as they think they are and prefer to stick to easy to steal signs. We commend the hero for Trump who showed his bravery in putting the sign up so high, knowing that no liberal would dare to go there since it’s so far out of their safe space and more work than they are willing to perform.",FAKE
"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
"UPDATE: June 4 -- The health insurance enrollment figures cited in this video were derived from a report that counted enrollment as of Feb. 22, which the Department of Health and Human Services published on March 10. The department released new data on June 2, detailing enrollment as of March 31. According to the new report, 7.3 million people were covered by plans purchased via the federally operated health insurance exchanges in the 34 states subject to the Supreme Court ruling, and 6.4 million of them received subsidies. The new report includes additional information about each state, but does not update the calculation of average unsubsidized premiums.",REAL
"Now that washed up Democratic “Consultant” Carville is finding a “conspiracy” between Trump and the KGB…that was disbanded in 1991. 
“Time Traveling KGB” they were labeled at RT article. 
You know, maybe 2 years ago, I made a few comments about some Kevin Costner movies, where the plot was “Russians destroying our Dollar” in one of them, and another where he was a CIA operative “because someone has to do it” along with passages about the “Federal Reserve keeps our economy safe and sound” and a bunch of other obvious CIA-injected Narrative…everyone is aware that Hollywood has a CIA Liaison officer approving the scripts, and injecting lines in it, right? 
Kevin “Hollywood Rose” Costner…a paid propagandist. Working against America. For the younger generation, I am referring to “Tokyo Rose” of WW II. 
“When everything America believes is true, is a lie, I know we’ve done our job” A CIA Director William Colby a few days before he “drowned” in a canoeing accident. Too bad JFK wasn’t able to “break the CIA into a thousands pieces” and Eli-Min-ate it. Yes, that is where these words originated: in demonic/satanic behavior..and I am a confirmed atheist. 
Illu of Sais-On….be aware patriots. Illusion and Programming take vigilance to battle.",FAKE
"The Democratic Debate Clock: Which Issues Got The Most Time

The three Democratic candidates for president met in Des Moines on Saturday night for their second debate. The CBS debate was originally going to focus on the economy but shifted gears after the attacks in Paris on Friday.

Christopher Isham, CBS News vice president and Washington bureau chief said, ""Last night's attacks are a tragic example of the kinds of challenges American presidents face in today's world, and we intend to ask the candidates how they would confront the evolving threat of terrorism.""

NPR tracked which issues got the most time during the debate. If the candidates veered off the question posed to them, we kept track of that too:

What experience would you draw on in a crisis? 3:41",REAL
"(CNN) For many Americans across the country, Donald Trump's victory is an outcome they simply refuse to accept.

""Not my president,"" protesters chanted in rallies coast to coast.

Tens of thousands filled the streets in at least 25 US cities overnight -- with demonstrations outside Trump's properties.

While most protesters were peaceful, dozens were arrested. At least three officers were wounded. And about 40 fires were set in one California city.

Here's a snapshot of the rallies across the nation:

On Thursday afternoon, more than 200 anti-Trump protesters marched from the Union Square area to Washington Square Park in Manhattan.

Some carried signs with messages such as, ""White men stop ruining everything."" They chanted, ""Trump and Pence make no sense.""

Overnight, about 5,000 people protested the real estate mogul's victory outside Trump Tower, authorities estimated. They included pop star Lady Gaga, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter.

Their concerns ranged from policies, such as Trump's proposed plan to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, to the polarizing tenor of his campaign that they say stoked xenophobic fears.

""I came out here to let go of a lot of fear that was sparked as soon as I saw the results,"" protester Nick Powers said in New York. He said he feared Trump will support stronger stop-and-frisk policies that would put many people in prison. Powers said he was also worried that Trump's victory would embolden sexist views.

At least 15 protesters at Trump Tower were arrested Wednesday night for disorderly conduct, New York police said.

About 7,000 demonstrators filled streets in Oakland on Wednesday night -- and some turned violent.

Protesters hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and fireworks at police. Three officers were injured, police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said.

Trash fires smoldered on a highway, and a downtown business was set ablaze. By Thursday morning, emergency workers extinguished about 40 fires.

""Throughout the evening, the large group splintered into smaller groups that began vandalizing numerous businesses in the downtown area,"" Oakland police said.

At least 30 people were arrested and 11 citations were issued for vandalism, assaulting officers, unlawful assembly, failure to disperse and possession of a firearm.

Three police cars from nearby Pleasanton were damaged, officials said.

A few miles away at Berkeley High School, about 1,500 students walked out of classes Wednesday. In San Francisco, more than 1,000 students across the city walked out of the school and headed to the Civic Center to engage in a peaceful protest, according to a tweet from the San Francisco Unified School District.

""People are furious, not just at the results of the election but the rhetoric of Donald Trump,"" said Ahmed Kanna, an organizer for Social Alternative at Berkeley.

In Chicago, activists marched down Lake Shore Drive -- an eight-lane expressway along Lake Michigan -- toward the Windy City's Trump Tower.

""I still can't believe I have to protest for civil rights,"" one sign read.

CNN's Ryan Young, who saw a few thousand people there, said many chanted vulgarities toward the President-elect.

""As a nation we thought we had come so far, but it seems like we're taking many steps back,"" one woman said. ""We want to come together to change that.""

In Omaha, Nebraska, authorities deployed pepper balls on a crowd of more than 200 people protesting Trump's election after they defied police orders to stay out of the streets.

Dozens of high school and college students staged rallies near the USC and UCLA campuses.

Overnight, more than 1,000 protesters rallied outside Los Angeles City Hall, including many young Latinos.

They chanted, ""I will not live in fear,"" ""Fight back, stand up"" and ""¡Si se puede!"" (Spanish for ""Yes, it can be done"").

Protesters also set on fire a piñata depicting the head of the President-elect.

Several protesters said they feared that family or friends might be deported once Trump takes office.

Brooklyn White, an 18-year-old who voted for Clinton, held a sign that said, ""Hate won't win.""

""We can't let it stop us,"" she said. ""If he's the president, then fine. But if Donald Trump is going to be it, then he has to listen.""

As many as 3,000 people joined Wednesday's demonstrations in the city, and 28 people were arrested for running into the 101 Freeway, said Los Angeles police spokeswoman Liliana Preciado. There was some property damage, but it's too early to know the exact extent, she said.

Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement, ""I understand that the results of Tuesday's election are painful for many of us, and this kind of engagement can be a meaningful part of the healing we need after such a long and divisive campaign.

""But walking and throwing objects onto freeways is dangerous for pedestrians and drivers -- and it puts a heavy burden on people just trying make it home to their families or get to work safely.""

Garcetti emphasized that the protests were largely peaceful, but said police would take quick action against those blocking traffic on interstates or vandalizing property, including news media vans.

""There is no place for the destruction of property, for the dangerous stopping of traffic,"" he said at a press conference Thursday. ""Don't lose the message here. The message is that Los Angeles stands as the great hope.""

Garcetti said 28 protesters have been arrested.

Meanwhile, protesters in Washington chanted, ""No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,"" as they marched downtown to the Trump International Hotel.

Elsewhere in the nation's capital, an illuminated sign proclaimed that the US is ""Better Than Bigotry.""

Trump supporters also rallied, showing their elation outside his current and future homes -- New York's Trump Tower and the White House.

Nicholas Elliot, a Georgetown University student, compared Trump's victory to the United Kingdom's Brexit vote to leave the European Union.

J.D. Vance, author of the book ""Hillbilly Elegy,"" said Trump supporters in middle America voted for him because so few people -- including Clinton or her supporters -- had paid attention to their plight.

""They see Trump as an agent of change and (an) agent of protest against folks who they feel have really failed in government,"" Vance said.

Now comes the hard part: finding middle ground, CNN's Marc Preston said.

""All that anger that has been contained outside of Washington, D.C., and New York that we don't see in middle America ... everyone's starting to see it,"" Preston said. ""There is a lot of healing that has got to happen.""",REAL
"Orangutan. 
Rigged. Worth trying but its not a fair game. Smartmatic style Diebold type machines and software will count the votes and the corporate controlled media will announce the results. No mention of Election Fraud or the problems of the past. Long live Mike Connell, Clint Curtis, Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, RFK Jr. and other whistleblowers who have tried to fight for our democracy. Will only get worse from here it seems. Always hopeful though. David S 
Government will win as always. Freedom will lose as always. The ruling elite control most elected officials and hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats legislate unconstitutionally from their offices. We sit upon $20 Trillion in real debt and another $250+Trillion in unfunded liabilities. Trump wishes to increase military spending and Hillary never met a war she didn’t support (on behalf of her puppetmasters of course). Our medical system is nearly completely destroyed by over a century of government micromanagement and collusion with the AMA. We have more people incarcerated than nearly every other country on earth – mostly for non-violent drug offenses – and neither candidate looks to have the courage or the desire to truly allow freedom in this area (though Trump shows the greatest hope). Our government/CIA/other black ops groups, etc. are working tirelessly to undermine governments around the world, incite violence, and provoke armed conflict – maybe even nuclear – all for the benefit of the arms cartel and banksters who profit from every war. The people of America clearly have NO interest in restoring freedom, liberty, private property rights, business rights, sound money, etc. anymore. This “rebellion” that has gotten behind Trump still needs to bear fruit with regards to demanding REAL change at the federal and state levels. What will come of the following months is to be seen, but I suspect, as with so many previous “rebellions,” these folks will go back to their televisions, iPads, and Playstations and will forget about the fundamental corruption and crony capitalism that is destroying this country so long as they get a few bones thrown their way to pacify them. Let us hope something far more profound comes of it all. Time for a drink. kimyo 
fwiw: a screencap of ‘final’ results displayed on 11/2 (apparently by accident) by nbc station wrcb-tv shows: popular vote: clinton 41,765,317 / trump 40,124,438, electoral college: clinton 343 / trump 195. 
although the early reporting showing trump with a commanding lead matches my take on american sentiment, my cynical side suspects that it is the msm’s way of getting out the later-voting clinton supporters 
if anonymous were a real thing, today’s show would be have been completely different. real hackers don’t waste their precious time defacing websites. 
ps: if trump does win, i picture zuesse as the dog, who, after years of chasing, has finally caught that darn UPS truck. growling, jowls full of brown bumper, but with a dawning comprehension on his brow, realizing ‘well, exactly what do i do now?’ Orangutan. 
Continuity of Gov’t plans have been implemented and in place. Dept of Homeland Security is now running our elections. The results will not be publicly available for review anymore according to Bev Harris. Similar to the results in California where the primary was announced for Hillary but Bernie may have actually ended up winning there. Welcome to the 1984 style Continuity of Government plan and Department of Homeland Security run elections thanks to the public’s refusal to emotionally or intellectually acknowledge the truth about 9/11 or the false flag anthrax attacks that followed. TruthTime 
Especially agree with the comment about the Anthrax attack. The criminals are still at large for that blatantly, obvious state-sponsored crime. I laughed when Obama’s Administration decided to shut down any investigation into it. 
America is a Nation of subjects who are continually subjected to the lies and falsehoods of their elected leaders. We have state crimes going far back to the era of JFK. People that still think Corruption isn’t really that bad in Washington, that it’s all a “conspiracy theory.” Carl_Herman 
Thank you for asking, GW. It’s not an “election” when it fails to meet that definition due to multiple methods for election fraud. It’s not for a “US president” therefore, but an appointed “leader.” And, it’s not reported by media, but the appointers’ propaganda minions. 
Of course, if we continue this argument with ~100 other points centered in lie-started Wars of Aggression, bankster-looting, and lying about near everything important, we can’t even call it the US as defined by our Constitution. 
So, where do we go from here? 
Start with truth. Then see what develops. Charlie Primero 
Carl, this vote shows that all the people you have been trying to “wake up” to the corruption and graft are waking up. 
This is just the beginning. Be happy. MyWikiDisQus 
It does not matter what we think or do or say anymore. The republic has been overthrown by the plutocrats who remain in power as long as the citizenry believe in the concocted and fraudulent electoral system they fabricated that selects the candidate who serves them, not the people. Participation of the masses is necessary to grant them the mandate to ensure the continuity of their reign that has continually impoverished the majority of the nation. 
In the beginning representative government in America was a wonderful experiment that has since devolved, brick by brick, decade by decade into a shell of its former creation to become a bastion of despotism. The poor are still slaves, indentured to the government by onerous debt as Negros were to their 19 century plantations masters; only the title of ownership has changed. The middle class, once a foundation of prosperity has now become an economic ghost, relegated to the status of freemen of the peasant class. 
The wealthy are richer in material possession, millionaires become billionaires and the government siphons off from the upper class to enrich itself by political favor, by statute and regulation, by ignoring the rule of equal justice under the law. 
How long will the people tolerate this abomination of corrupt authority? What will be the future event that triggers the entire country to say, “Enough!”? Will it be a complete economic breakdown of society or the devastation of nuclear war on our soil? 
“We the People” have the power, we have always possessed it. The time of reconciliation is upon us, we must balance the ledger of liberty back in our favor. The only way to peacefully do it is reject the system that oppresses us. Do not engage with them, do not obey them, tell them their lies carry no truth, we see through the veil of falsity and reject it and demand a new path to opportunity and happiness for all who are willing to work towards it. TruthTime 
The U.S. is fucked. 
But it needs to collapse now or within 100 years for people to totally realize they were duped. It is the only way to start anew. kimyo 
according to zh, trump has ohio, florida and north carolina. 
my top 3 questions: 1) will there be a thorough investigation of the clinton foundation? 2) what will he do if the next 9/11 happens on his watch? 3) will he kill cop21 and defund global warming research? diogenes 
One thing is utterly clear: if Trump wins, the wholly Wall Street owned Democratic Party gave it to him by rigging primaries to put the Clinton criminal gang on the ballot. 
Because Bernie would have won — won with the votes not only of millions of nominally “Democratic” voters who rightly can’t stomach Clinton and didn’t vote for her (whether we voted Green, or Libertarian or Trump or stayed home) — but also with the votes of millions who are voting Trump because he appears to at least not be part of the Wall Street criminal gang of hereditary oligarchs. Tim Chambers 
Looks like Trump will be President and free to do as he pleases. The Repug’s bet on Scalia’s seat has been made good. The Democrats will now have to rethink identity politics and third way neoliberalism. I wonder if Obama will try to ram through the trade agreements and a few other monstrosities now during the lame duck session. 
Bye, Bye, Hillary, bye bye. It’s the one silver lining to the overhanging clouds. What a disaster of a candidate! Such arrogant over-confidence. And what a comeuppance for the party and its big money backers! It is going to cost them a lot of money to into Trumps good graces. 
All we need now is for Trump to sell out his working class supporters for the Democrats to return to a sincere class-based politics that brings back the independent voters. They should have given Bernie his rightful chance. 
Unfortunately, what we are likely to see is another attempt by the Clintons 4 years from now against Warren. Two losses isn’t likely to dissuade that bitch in the least. 
I told you back in April and again 2 weeks ago that Trump would win!! http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/10/donald-j-trump-will-win.html Tim Chambers 
fuggetaboutit Evil Genius 
Who knows the Clintons and Waltons better than Arkansas? My favorite part was Arkansas voted 2-1 against Clinton. Ha ha ha! 
(BTW GW: There’s an error in Robert Parry’s bio…the word “broke” is missing (i.e., “broke stories”).) kimyo 
imagine if tomorrow trump says ‘yes, absolutely, we’re going to build that wall, but while we’re waiting for the check from mexico why don’t we find 500 out-of-work engineers and architects and 5,000 out-of-work construction folk and send them to flint to fix the water system. (costs him nothing, delivers grand justice) 
cnn had a bad day today, but they’d be totally f’d tomorrow. 
trump should hire some guy (me!) whose only job is to make cnn miserable, each day worse than the last. 
ps: arpaio gone is nice. cali cannabis is nice. why is this thread so inactive? Jack 
It’s time to collapse this mess and start new. Charlie Primero",FAKE
"Videos Hillary Clinton FBI PANIC! Hillary LIES In First Press Conference While A LEAKED PHOTO From Her Airplane Reveals The Truth 
0 comments Hillary is trying to present a strong front but the truth continues to emerge, in VIDEO and in PHOTOS! Hillary was traveling to Iowa when news broke of the FBI’s newly-reopened investigation of her email practices. Her plane sat on the tarmac for thirty minutes before she emerged, and, of course, the media was hungry for a statement. Last night, the press got their wish, as Hillary tried to appear strong in her first press conference following the bombshell news. Watch Hillary’s statement below: 
Mostly, Hillary is echoing her Campaign Manager, John Podesta, who is calling for the release of more information from the FBI. 
Right out of the gate, Hillary is already lying in an attempt to minimize the damage that this new investigation is causing. 
She clearly states in the video above that the FBI sent the investigation announcement to Republicans in Congress. As a former Senator, Hillary knows this to be untrue, and she is trying to paint the issue as a partisan attack. Fact check: Contrary to what Clinton said, Comey sent letter to both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. @benyc 
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 28, 2016 
Multiple media sources have reported that the FBI found new information while investigating the sexting scandal of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner is married to Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin. When asked about the reports, Hillary responded: 
“You know, we’ve heard these rumors. We don’t know what to believe and I’m sure there will be even more rumors that’s why it’s incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about because, right now, your guess is as good as mine and I don’t think that’s good enough.” 
Hillary is trying to appear defiant and in control. But, speaking of Huma Abedin, take a look at this leaked photo from inside of Hillary’s airplane after the news had broken: Image surfaces of Huma Abedin crying on plane as Clinton Campaign finds out the FBI has re-opened the email investigation. #HillarysEmails pic.twitter.com/2yIUgiYOsV 
We hate to see a lady crying, Huma, but when the company you keep includes Anthony Weiner, sometimes you have good reasons to cry. Perhaps Hillary’s Campaign is not so strong after all. Related Items",FAKE
"The Senate moved closer Tuesday to a deal to avert a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, but the proposal faced an uncertain future in the House, where Republican leaders conspicuously refused to embrace it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters he was prepared to move swiftly to extend funding for DHS through the fiscal year in a bill that is not contingent on Republican demands to repeal President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Under McConnell’s proposal, the Senate would vote first on the funding measure and then hold a separate vote on a bill to undo Obama’s new immigration initiatives. McConnell hopes to assuage conservatives who are determined to confront the president on what they see as abuse of his executive authority.

“I don’t know what’s not to like about this,” McConnell said. “This is an approach that respects both points of view.” If successful, the proposal will break a two-month deadlock over funding for the agency that is responsible for border security, airport security checks and a range of other functions.

But House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) did not immediately warm to the proposal, and it was not clear whether he could marshal enough backing in his chamber to complete the deal to keep DHS open beyond Friday, when its spending authority expires.

House Republicans will huddle behind closed doors Wednesday morning. The unsettled DHS debate is expected to be the central focus of their discussion.

The stalemate has tested Republicans’ ability to govern now that they are in full control of Congress. Senate Democrats have blocked four attempts by McConnell to move forward on a House bill that would fund the department but that ties that funding to a repeal of the president’s immigration actions, which would allow millions of undocumented immigrants a temporary reprieve from deportation.

Again on the brink

McConnell’s move represented a concession in a fight that has threatened to shut down the agency less than a year and a half after a budget standoff shuttered a broad swath of the federal government for more than two weeks in October 2013.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Democrats want assurances from Boehner that a “clean” funding bill will pass the House before they will support McConnell’s plan and allow the votes to move forward.

“Now, all eyes are on Speaker Boehner,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Asked about the emerging Senate plan, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said by e-mail: “The speaker has been clear: The House has acted, and now Senate Democrats need to stop hiding. Will they continue to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security or not?”

Exiting a House leadership meeting later on, House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) said he did not support approving McConnell’s plan. Instead, Sessions said, Congress should pass a temporary extension of funding for up to six weeks and convene a House-Senate conference to try to hammer out the differences between the two chambers.

DHS is scheduled to begin furloughing nonessential workers if Congress does not extend its $40 billion budget by Friday.

At the White House, Obama prepared to inject himself more forcefully into the debate with a town-hall-style forum planned for Wednesday in Miami, which has a heavily Latino population. The president is expected to address the funding standoff and his immigration plan. The administration has appealed a federal judge’s decision last week temporarily blocking the deferred deportations program, under which up to 5 million of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants would be eligible for renewable three-year deportation waivers. Many could receive work permits.

As the president tries to rally the public, however, Obama and his aides have limited their dealings with Capitol Hill. White House and Democratic aides said there is little the president can do, because he will not undo his immigration actions. It is up to Republicans to decide whether they are willing to shut down DHS over the issue, the aides said.

“This is not a battle with the White House. This is a battle taking place on Capitol Hill,” a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking. “Legislators on the Hill need to work on this. . . . What you’re going to see from the administration on DHS up until Friday is continuing to call attention publicly to the potential impact of shutting down DHS.”

To that end, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and two predecessors from the George W. Bush administration — Michael Chertoff and Tom Ridge — will attend a news conference scheduled for Wednesday to warn of problems that could occur if the agency is forced to begin furloughs.

Essential personnel, as many as 200,000 employees, would continue to report to work without pay during a partial shutdown. Although Johnson and the White House have said that national security would not be jeopardized, they have warned that long-term planning could be affected. In an interview, Chertoff warned of morale problems in the agency and said he thinks a shutdown would “no doubt adversely affect the nation’s security.”

“A couple days of delay [of pay] will not make a difference, but if it starts to mount up and there’s real uncertainty, people will start to feel demoralized, and that could have an impact over a long period,” Chertoff said. “You wouldn’t do this to [military] troops in the field, send them into combat but not get paid. They need to take this seriously.”

Doubts on the right

While McConnell’s plan to split off the immigration issue into a stand-alone measure opened the door to winning over Democrats, conservatives were skeptical.

“Senators arguing fund DHS but vote a separate bill to defund executive amnesty. Have you heard of Obama veto? Think we were born yesterday?” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a staunch opponent of Obama’s immigration actions, wrote on Twitter.

Meanwhile, the administration has struggled to explain how a partial shutdown would affect national security. White House press secretary Josh Earnest, asked repeatedly about it Monday, declined to say that the nation would be more at risk. Rather, he said, the situation would not improve the nation’s safety.

“It’s hard to imagine a good time for Congress to be mucking around with the funding of the Department of Homeland Security,” Earnest said. “But now seems like a particularly bad one.”

Politically, the standoff could help the White House and Democrats. Republicans drew the brunt of public anger over the 2013 shutdown, and administration aides believe the same will happen if DHS is affected at week’s end.

It is not lost on White House allies that the president is traveling to Florida, a key swing state in presidential races, for the Wednesday event, co-hosted by MSNBC and Telemundo.

“In our travels to the immigrant community, the faith community, the law enforcement community and the business community, they want someone in D.C. to do something,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “The president has done something. The political risk to the administration is only there if they stop doing something. Right now, it’s on Republicans to kind of meet the bar.”

Senior administration officials are scheduled to appear at another immigration forum, hosted by Univision, on Sunday in Los Angeles, the city with the largest number of immigrants potentially eligible for deportation relief under Obama’s executive actions.

“For the first time in a long time, the immigrant community and advocates are very aligned with the White House,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “I think the fact that he’s coming to Miami to meet with immigrant community members and take questions directly from folks speaks volumes.”",REAL
"November 3, 2016 @ 3:07 am 
Allowing any GdM to enter or remain here is suicidal. Vetting Muslims is like vetting rattlesnakes. 
@DonSpilman That Jive ngr has not changed its spots. It blamed America first as it has always done. ‘Slime’s hatred is not a function of our foreign or domestic policy, it is a function of our not being GdM. Never lose sight of Wala wal Bara and Sidi’s explanation of the Barbary Pirates to Jeffersopn, Adams & Franklin. Always bear in mind Sahih Bukhari 4.53.386 and Hedaya 2.216. Liz November 3, 2016 @ 2:41 am 
He makes it sound like muslims were totally peaceful until the big, bad west agitated them and created all this blowback. To claim that is to ignore islam’s 1400 year history of war, genocide, oppression, domination, terror, and tyrannical expansionism. Western leftist/liberal politicians merely kindled the flames of jihad that were already there.",FAKE
"  28, 2016 | Reviews   Michael Moore in New York City's Union Square Barnes & Noble to discuss his book Here Comes Trouble , September 13, 2011 ( David Shankbone / CC BY 3.0 ) Michael Moore’s “Trumpland” is a textbook illustration of how the mindset of voting for “the lesser evil” just results in self-delusion—and ever more evil. 
M ichael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
Moore’s new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is—except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he’s dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the “Elect her and then hold her accountable” stuff. He says we have a responsibility to “support her” and “get behind her,” and that if after two years—yes, TWO YEARS—she hasn’t lived up to a platform he’s fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you’ve put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon which Hillary Clinton reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions—the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that “coziness” consists of, and he claims that she’s more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
What? It wasn’t one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It’s all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a “No Fly” zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
That’s just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. “I hope she did,” screams Moore. “That’s who I want as Commander in Chief!” Hee hee hee. 
Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least “universal” healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton’s focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it’s the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn’t create “universal” healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton’s progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates “that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass.” Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore’s inclusive comments throughout his performance: “We’re all Americans, right?” 
Moore’s fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government—executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
But when he runs for president, Moore says, he’ll give everybody free drugs. 
I’ll tell you the Clinton ad I’d like to see. She’s standing over a stove holding an egg. “This is your brain,” she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. “This is your brain on partisanship.” 
 ",FAKE
"Humans Are Free Baking Soda & Coconut Oil Can Kill Cancer: Eye-Opening Evidence 
A woman diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma skin cancer located on the crown on her head managed to cure it by applying baking soda paste directly on the affected area. 
At first, when her daughter insisted, she refused, but then she decided to give it a try. After three major surgeries, the cancer returned and each time it was even worse, so she decided to trust nature and started using pure cold pressed organic coconut oil instead of water and baking soda . 
Coconut oil has cellular regenerative powers, which is why she applied the thick paste directly onto the affected area. 
Azizo, her daguhter, used only Polysporin Triple 3 Antibiotics, and she applied them only at night. 
You are allowed to use other antibiotic ointment just as a precaution against bacterial infections within the sore area. For instance, you can use colloidal silver soaked cotton as well. 
Once the wound is closed, you can stop using the ointment. Azizo continued applying the combination of baking soda and coconut oil, but she also applied cotton ball soaked in ACV and taped it to the skin. 
As a result, this induced the penetraton of baking soda to the basal cell carcinoma roots beyond the skin’s surface. Yet another even better solution for this purpose is DMSO. 
Azizo continued applying this remedy to her mother for 38 days, and finally, the woman was completely free from skin cancer and the wound healed in no time. 
You can read their story and learn more about the method she used by following this link . 
Even though this skin cancer is nor deadly as melanoma can be, it can still continue spreading on the skin if it’s not properly cured. 
If you didn’t know, tumors only thrive in acidic environments, which makes baking soda an excellent solution since it provides only alkaline environment. 
Dramatic Life and Death Story 
Vernon Johnson, recently divorced and low on cash was diagnosed with stage III prostate cancer, which metastasized into the hip area and soon developed in stage IV. 
He was supposed to be examined about the therapy he needed to undergo in several weeks, when his son suggested him to try several substances that could rapidly alkalize on a cellular level. 
Even though he ordered cesium, it never arrived, so he used baking soda and blackstrap mollases, instead of maple syrup. 
The Trojan Horse sugar should open cancer cells wide so that they could receive the highly alkaline influence of baking soda. This should eventually result in destruction of cancer cells. 
After two weeks of using this natural solution, his bone scan showed that there is no spreading of the cancer. The PSA dropped from 22 to 5 to 1 over the course of his treatment and pharmaceutical prescriptions. 
However, beside his treatment, Vernon started spending a lot of time on sunlight, switched to a healthier plant based diet and did breathing exercises on a regular basis in order to increase the oxygen delivery to the cancer affected area. 
Moreover he wrote a book called “ Vernon’s Dance With Cancer: After the Jolt ”, where he shared his experience with cancer. 
He wrote this book over five years after the original baking soda alkaline producing treatment. Five years later, he is cancer free and he gives lectures about the treatment. 
It should be mentioned that there are certain foods that produce alkalinity in the body, while certain acidic foods such as lemon and limes become alkaline in the body right after their ingestion. Make sure to incorporate baking soda in your life since it is alkaline and produces alkalinity. 
Dr. Mark Sircus is an Italian former physician who is now an alternative health practitioner. Based on his experience as an oncology surgeon, he injects baking soda solution into the blood vessels that feed tumors. 
According to Dr. Simoncini , there is no pharmaceutical anti-fungal that is more effective and safe than baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate. 
Moreover, he also claims that cancer thrives on fungal colonies which also create cancer. His claim resulted in removing of his physician certification in Italy. 
As you can see, baking soda is extremely powerful natural ingredient which should receive more attention and examination, or at least is should be considered as a complementary treatment for severe ailments and a total approach for minor ailments.",FAKE
"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. 65 US ‘journalists’ at a private dinner with Hillary Clinton’s team and John Podesta By VNN on October 26, 2016 We wanted to make sure everyone on this email had the latest information on the two upcoming dinners with reporters. Both are off-the-record. 
Hang The Bankers 
Several top journalists and TV news anchors RSVPed “yes” to attend a private, off-the-record gathering at the New York home of Joel Benenson, the chief campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, two days before she announced her candidacy in 2015, according to emails Wikileaks has published from John Podesta ’s purported accounts. 
The guest list for an earlier event at the home of John Podesta was limited to reporters who were expected to cover Clinton on the campaign trail. 
The email thread starts with Jesse Ferguson, the campaign’s Deputy National Press Secretary and Senior Spokesman, describing the venues and target audience of each gathering: 
We wanted to make sure everyone on this email had the latest information on the two upcoming dinners with reporters. Both are off-the-record. 
1) Thursday night, April 9th at 7:00p.m. Dinner at the Home of John Podesta… This will be with about 20 reporters who will closely cover the campaign (aka the bus). 
2) Friday night, April 10th at 6:30p.m. Cocktails and Hors D’oeuvre at the Home of Joel Benenson… This is with a broader universe of New York reporters. 
The “broader universe of New York reporters” includes several top news anchors for network and cable channels, many of whom are listed as a “yes” for the appearance: 
From ABC: Cecilia Vega, David Muir, Diane Sawyer (who could only stay for 30 minutes), and George Stephanopoulos. 
From CBS News: Norah O’Donnell. 
From CNN: Brianna Keilar, Gloria Borger, John Berman, and Kate Bolduan. 
From MSNBC: Alex Wagner and Rachel Maddow (“TRYING”). 
From NBC: Savannah Guthrie. 
“Yes” respondent George Stephanopoulos worked for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and was a Senior Adviser to the President during Clinton’s first White House term. Stephanopoulos does not disclose this fact when reporting on the 2016 Clinton campaign for ABC News. 
The nascent Clinton campaign invited Jeff Zucker and Phil Griffin, the presidents of CNN and MSNBC, respectively. Zucker declined while Griffin RSVPed “yes.” CNBC’s John Harwood 
Wikileaks’ release of emails from the Democratic National Committee showed then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz scheduled or attempted to schedule private meetings with both executives.Other “yes” RSVPs come from journalists who have been sighted in the Wikileaks Podesta emails, outing them as friendly or fawning towards Hillary’s campaign. 
CNBC’s John Harwood, who was also a moderator for a 2015 presidential debate, emailed Podesta frequently , practically begging for approval and access . Politico’s Glenn Thrush 
Politico’s Glenn Thrush also emailed Podesta periodically. On Monday, a newly-released email revealed a particularly humiliating incident where Thrush sent Podesta a passage from an upcoming article for his personal approval. 
“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u,” Thrush wrote. “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this… Tell me if I fucked up anything.” 
Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, Washington Bureau Chief at PEOPLE magazine, boasted two days after this confab that stories on Clinton’s campaign were generating “absolutely off the charts” traffic and asked for “color you can whisper on background” about what Hillary was up to. Joel Benenson – Clinton Chief Strategist 
The full RSVP list for Benenson’s gathering is shown in an attachment on a separate email : 
This is an off-the-record cocktails with the key national reporters, especially (though not exclusively) those that are based in New York. Much of the group includes influential reporters, anchors and editors. 
The goals of the dinner include: (1) Give reporters their first thoughts from team HRC in advance of the announcement (2) Setting expectations for the announcement and launch period (3) Framing the HRC message and framing the race (4) Enjoy a Friday night drink before working more 
TIME/DATE: As a reminder, this is called for 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 10th . 
There are several attendees – including Diane Sawyer – who will be there promptly at 6:30 p.m. but have to leave by 7 p.m. 
… 
FOOD: This will include cocktails and passed hours devours. 
REPORTER RSVPs",FAKE
"Home › GUNS › OCTOBER GUN SALES SEE MASSIVE SPIKE, SET YET ANOTHER RECORD OCTOBER GUN SALES SEE MASSIVE SPIKE, SET YET ANOTHER RECORD 0 SHARES 
[11/1/16] The FBI’s background check system for gun sales processed more than 2.3 million checks in October, setting an all-time record for the month. 
There were 2,333,539 gun-related checks processed through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, last month, according to FBI documents posted on Monday. That represents an increase of more than 350,000 checks over the previous October, itself a record. It’s also the 18th month in a row to set a record. 
With two months to go, 2016 has already seen 22,206,233 NICS checks, making it the second highest year for checks in the history of NICS with only 2015 seeing more . 
NICS checks are considered to be one of the most accurate indicators for gun sales because nearly all sales made through federally licensed firearm dealers require a check by law. The number of NICS checks in a month do not represent an exact count of gun sales for a number of reasons. For instance, many states require a NICS checks for those applying for gun carry permits, and many states do not require NICS checks for sales between private parties. 
“These statistics represent the number of firearm background checks initiated through the NICS,” the FBI said. “They do not represent the number of firearms sold. Based on varying state laws and purchase scenarios, a one-to-one correlation cannot be made between a firearm background check and a firearm sale.” Post navigation",FAKE
"BREAKING: White House Abandons TPP & TTIP Nov 11, 2016 5 0 
In a major victory for several nations and millions of people around the world, the White House has announced moments ago that Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress has said that they won’t try to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership as they know a Trump administration will be completely opposed to it. This makes the TPP, a trade agreement that has been protested on a global scale, now effectively dead in the water. As the Wall Street Journal reports : 
The failure to pass what is by far the biggest trade agreement in more than a decade is abitter defeat for Mr. Obama, whose belated but fervent support for freer trade divided his party and complicated the campaign of Mrs. Clinton. The TPP’s collapse also dents American prestige in the region at a time when China is flexing its economic and military muscle. Protesters in front of the White House. 
Donald Trump has voiced his resistance to the TPP and laid out in his plan for his first 100 days in office to include saying no to trade deals like the TPP and TTIP. For many, it is believed such trade deals would strongly and negatively impact the workforce in America. 
In addition to the TPP being dropped by the White House today, the TTIP suffered an effective defeat as well. 
As reported by Bloomberg , European Union Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said that talks between the U.S. and EU would be put on “indefinite hold” because of Trump’s victory in the election. 
“There will be a natural pause, of course, while we wait for the next administration; then, for quite some time TTIP will probably be in the freezer. Then what happens when it’s defrosted, I think we will need to wait and see. I don’t see the resumption of any TTIP negotiation in quite a long time. Whether it makes sense to have new rounds — well probably not.” 
The U.S and EU have been working on the TTIP for three years which would have eliminated tariffs on goods, enlarged service markets and bolstered regulatory cooperation. Germany’s Angela Merkel and Barack Obama have both called the TTIP a “policy priority.” 
As The Guardian has reported , both trade agreements have been clouded in secrecy and even the contents of such deals were not easily allowed to be revealed to Congress: 
“Yet that doesn’t seem to be the position of the “most transparent administration ever”. While lobbyists are given a free hand to help write the deals, even members of legislative bodies have to jump through absurd hoops just to lay eyes on the document. Draconian restrictions were put on US members of Congress if they wanted to view TPP while it was in negotiation, so much so that they were even threatened with prosecution if they talked about it. And Time magazine just reported on what Katja Kipping, a member of German parliament, had to do to see the latest version of TTIP. This included agreeing to a restricted reading time of just two hours, having a guard breathing down her neck the entire time and not sharing the contents of the agreement with anyone.” 
Though Donald Trump has voiced strong opposition to these deals, we will now wait and see if he makes good on his words. It appears though that the U.S. and EU have all but given up on the TPP and TTIP. Share the good news! 
Lance Schuttler graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in Health Science and does health coaching through his website Orgonlight Health . You can follow the Orgonlight Health facebook page or visit the website for more information and other inspiring articles.",FAKE
"Soros Paid Al Gore MILLIONS to Push ‘Aggressive US Action’ on Global Warming Liberal billionaire George Soros gave former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental group millions o... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/soros-paid-al-gore-millions-to-push.html Liberal billionaire George Soros gave former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental group millions of dollars over three years to create a “political space for aggressive U.S. action” on global warming, according to leaked documents. A document published by DC Leaks shows Soros, a Hungarian-born liberal financier, wanted his nonprofit Open Society Institute (OSI) to do more to support global warming policies in the U.S. That included budgeting $10 million in annual support to Gore’s climate group over three years.“U.S. Programs Global Warming Grants U.S. Programs became engaged on the global warming issue about four years ago, at George Soros’s suggestion,” reads a leaked OSI memo.“There has been a budget of $11 million for global warming grants in the U.S. Programs budget for the last several years,” the memo reads. “This budget item captures George Soros’s commitment of $10 million per year for three years to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, which conducts public education on the climate issue in pursuit of creating political space for aggressive U.S. action in line with what scientists say is necessary to put our nation on a path to reducing its outsize carbon dioxide emissions.”It’s unclear what year the memo was sent, but the Gore co-founded Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) was established in 2006 and lasted until it became The Climate Reality Project in July 2011. In 2008, the Alliance launched a $300 million campaign to encourage “Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” The Washington Post reported . Global Warming is NOT caused by humans: 10 Prominent Scientists Refuting 'Manmade Global Warming' with Solid Research ACP got $10 million from the Open Society Institute (OSI) in 2008, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings. OSI handed over another $5 million to ACP in 2009, according to tax filings. The investigative reporting group ProPublica keeps a database that has OSI tax returns from 2000 to 2013. TheDCNF could not find other years where OSI gave money to ACP.OSI is primarily a grant-making nonprofit that hands out millions of dollars every year to mostly left-wing causes. Now called the Open Society Foundations, Soros’s nonprofit has handed out more than $13 billion over the last three decades.OSI didn’t only plan to fund Gore’s climate group to promote global warming policies in the U.S., OSI also planned on giving millions of dollars to spur the “youth climate movement.” Greenpeace Founder: Humans Not to Blame for Global Warming “This budget item also allows for the renewal of U.S. Programs’ long-standing support of the Energy Action Coalition, which is the lead organizer of the youth climate movement in the U.S., the memo reads.“We are also including a placeholder for an additional $2 million, pending discussion about and development of OSI’s global warming agenda,” the memo reads. “There is a memo from Nancy Youman in the strategic plans binder that recommends pathways forward for OSI on the climate issue – in the U.S., as well as in other parts of the Open Society Network.” By Michael Bastasch  ",FAKE
"at 3:02 pm Leave a comment 
As the technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous and far more accurate, facial recognition and the lack of any laws or regulations around the practice is slowly starting to enter mainstream consciousness. It’s a very important issue that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. 
For example, as I highlighted in the recent post, Half of American Adults Exist in a Government Accessible Facial Recognition Network : 
Half of all American adults are already in some sort of facial recognition network accessible to law enforcement, according to a comprehensive new study. 
Conducted over a year and relying in part on Freedom of Information and public record requests to 106 law enforcement agencies, the study , conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, found American police use of facial recognition technology is a scattered, hodgepodge network of laws and regulations. 
“Looking at the sum total of what we found, there have been no laws that comprehensively regulate face recognition technology, and there’s really no case law either,” Clare Garvie, an associate at the CPT, told Vocativ. “So we find ourselves having to rely on the agencies that are using that technology to rein it in. But what we found is that not every system — by a long shot — has a use policy.” 
With that in mind, Bloomberg published an interesting article yesterday covering a couple of lawsuits against Facebook and Google regarding their facial recognition practices. 
Here’s some of what we learned: 
While millions of internet users embrace the tagging of family and friends in photos, others worried there’s something devious afoot are trying block Facebook as well as Google from amassing such data. 
As advances in facial recognition technology give companies the potential to profit from biometric data, privacy advocates see a pattern in how the world’s largest social network and search engine have sold users’ viewing histories for advertising. The companies insist that gathering data on what you look like isn’t against the law, even without your permission. 
If judges agree with Facebook and Google, they may be able to kill off lawsuits filed under a unique Illinois law that carries fines of $1,000 to $5,000 each time a person’s image is used without permission — big enough for a liability headache if claims on behalf of millions of consumers proceed as class actions. A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada. 
Facebook declined to comment on its court fight. Google declined to comment on pending litigation. 
Facebook encourages users to “tag” people in photographs they upload in their personal posts and the social network stores the collected information. The company uses a program it calls DeepFace to match other photos of a person. Alphabet Inc.’s cloud-based Google Photos service uses similar technology. 
The billions of images Facebook is thought to be collecting could be even more valuable to identity thieves than the names, addresses, and credit card numbers now targeted by hackers, according to privacy advocates and legal experts. 
And just how good is Facebook’s technology? According to the company’s research, DeepFace recognizes faces with an accuracy rate of 97.35 percent compared with 97.5 percent for humans — including mothers. 
Rotenberg said the privacy concerns are twofold: Facebook might sell the information to retailers or be forced to turn it over to law enforcement — in both cases without users knowing it. 
Now here’s some history on Facebook and facial recognition. Facebook v. Privacy Law 
December 2005 — Facebook introduces photo tagging 
October 2008 — Illinois adopts Biometric Information Privacy Act 
June 2012 — Facebook acquires Israeli facial recognition developer Face.com 
September 2012 — Facebook ceases facial recognition in Europe 
2015-2016 — Facebook, Google, Shutterfly and Snapchat sued under Illinois biometrics law. Shutterfly settles confidentially. 
May 2016 — Illinois lawmaker proposes excluding photos from biometrics law, then shelves bill after privacy advocates complain 
October 2016 — Facebook makes second attempt to get biometrics lawsuit thrown out 
The Facebook case is In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 15-cv-03747, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The Google cases are Rivera v. Google, 16-cv-02714, and Weiss v. Google, 16-cv-02870, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Chicago). 
For prior articles on the topic, see:",FAKE
"Only 3 Countries Left Without a ROTHSCHILD Central Bank The Rothschild family is slowly but surely having their Central banks established in every country ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/only-3-countries-left-without.html The Rothschild family is slowly but surely having their Central banks established in every country of this world, giving them incredible amount of wealth and power. In the year of 2000 there were seven countries without a Rothschild owned Central Bank: Afghanistan North Korea Iran It is not a coincidence that these country, which are listed above were and are still being under attack by the western media, since one of the main reasons these countries have been under attack in the first place is because they do not have a Rothschild owned Central Bank yet.The first step in having a Central Bank establish in a country is to get them to accept an outrageous loans, which puts the country in debt of the Central Bank and under the control of the Rothschilds. If the country does not accept the loan, the leader of this particular country will be assassinated and a Rothschild aligned leader will be put into the position , and if the assassination does not work, the country will be invaded and have a Central Bank established with force all under the name of terrorism. Rothschild-owned Central Bank Central banks are illegally created private banks that are owned by the Rothschild banking family . The family has been around for more than 230 years and has slithered its way into each country on this planet, threatened every world leader and their governments and cabinets with physical and economic death and destruction, and then emplaced their own people in these central banks to control and manage each country’s pocketbook. Worse, the Rothschilds also control the machinations of each government at the macro level , not concerning themselves with the daily vicissitudes of our individual personal lives. Except when we get too far out of line. The only countries left in 2003 without a Central Bank owned by the Rothschild Family were: Sudan",FAKE
"It turns out that at least one of the two military facilities attacked in Chattanooga, Tennessee -- was a gun-free zone.

If you looked closely crime scene photographs - you can see the sign -- plastered on the front of a bullet- riddled window.

Click here to follow Todd on Facebook for conservative conversation.

Four Marines were slaughtered -- a fifth wounded -- along with a Chattanooga police officer.

Authorities say the gunman, identified as 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, was killed in a shoot-out.

Abdulazeez is reportedly a Kuwaiti-native who attended high school in the Chattanooga area. The Times Free-Press posted his graduation photo – that included the phrase; “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”

The FBI says it’s too soon to speculate on the suspect’s motive – but I think we’ve all got a pretty clear understanding of what went down.

As many as 50 shots were fired -- and all the survivors could do was barricade themselves inside.

The brave men and women who staff these military recruiting stations are sitting ducks. Soft targets - is the terminology they use.

The same thing happened at the Fort Hood massacre.

In response to the shooting Homeland Security ordered enhanced security measures at federal buildings. Since they can’t carry weapons what are they going to do? How are they going to defend themselves against the next Muhammad Abdulazeez -- lock the doors, pull the shades?

It's time to arm the Armed Forces. Now, I’m sure the experts will say there’s some sort of logical reason why military personnel should not have access to firearms – but I’m not convinced. Brave Marines gunned down in a Southern city -- and that is something we cannot abide. Our elected leaders must give them at least a fighting chance.

It makes absolutely no sense that Marines and Airmen and Sailors and Soldiers who defend our nation are unable to defend themselves – on American soil.



Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

",REAL
"Authorities Friday released the names of those killed in the mass murder at an Oregon community college, a collection of male and female victims ranging in age from 18 to 67 and including a professor as well as some of his students in an introductory writing class.

At a late afternoon press conference, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin intoned the names as aides posted their pictures on a wall behind him.

They were: Lucero Alcaraz, 19, Quinn Glen Cooper, 18, Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59, Lucas Eibel,18, Jason Dale Johnson, 33, Lawrence Levine, 67, Sarena Dawn Moore, 44, Treven Taylor Anspach, 20, and Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18.

Statements were read from several families.

""We have been trying to figure out how to tell everyone how amazing Lucas was, but that would take 18 years,"" the family of Lucas Eibel said in their statement.

Eibel, who was studying chemistry, volunteered at a wildlife center and animal shelter.

Quinn Glen Cooper's family said their son had just started college and loved dancing and voice acting.

""I don't know how we are going to move forward with our lives without Quinn,"" the Coopers said. ""Our lives are shattered beyond repair.""

Hanlin also said he was raising the number of those injured in the carnage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. from seven to nine.

The announcement came shortly after investigators found at least 13 weapons linked to the gunman: six at the crime scene, including a rifle, and seven at his apartment.

All of the weapons were purchased legally, seven of them by the gunman or a relative, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It reports that investigators recovered body armor including a flak jacket at the school, and additional ammunition in the apartment.

In addition to the rifle, the shooter also carried five handguns, a law enforcement source tells Fox News.

Details on the shooter's background are slowly emerging. The U.S. Army says the gunman, Christopher Harper Mercer, flunked out of basic training in 2008.

Lt. Col. Ben Garrett, an Army spokesman, said Mercer was in service at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, starting on November 5, 2008. But by December 11, 2008, he was discharged for failing to meet the minimum administrative standards.

The Army spokesman did not say which standards Mercer failed to meet. Generally, the Army requires recruits to pass physical fitness tests and to be generally in good physical and mental health. Recruits also must score highly enough on a multiple-choice test covering science, math, reading comprehension and other topics.

Authorities say Mercer killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg before he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police. Witnesses said the gunman specifically targeted Christians.

There didn't seem to be many recent connections on the social media sites linked to the gunman, with his MySpace page just showing two friends. He appeared to have at least one online dating profile.

On a torrents streaming site and blog that appeared to belong to Mercer, posts referenced multiple shootings and downloads included several horror films and a documentary on a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

A blog post urged readers to watch the online footage of Vester Flanagan shooting two former colleagues on live TV in Virginia, while another lamented materialism as preventing spiritual development.

A MySpace page that appeared to belong to Mercer included several photos and graphics of the Irish Republican Army as well as a picture of Mercer holding a rifle.

One law enforcement official described Mercer toThe New York Times as appearing to be ""an angry young man who was very filled with hate."" Another official said investigators were poring over what he described as ""hateful"" writings by Mercer.

Mercer's father says he's as shocked as anybody else. Ian Mercer spoke to KABC-TV and several other media outlets gathered outside his house in Tarzana, California late Thursday night.

He said it's been a ""devastating day"" for him and his family and said he has been talking to police and the FBI about the shooting.

He refused to answer questions and asked that his family's privacy be respected.

Mercer ""seemed really unfriendly"" and would ""sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light,"" according to neighbor Bronte Harte, speaking to the Associated Press.

The New York Post identified the dating site as SpiritualPassions.com and reported that Mercer used the screen name ""Ironcross45,"" a possible reference to a WWII decoration awarded to Nazi soldiers.

The shooting sparked panic at the usually quiet college, more than 70 miles south of Eugene. Some students ran for their lives, while others crammed into buses taking them to safety.

Two people remain in critical condition in the ICU at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Springfield, Oregon. Doctors there say one victim was shot in the head.

One other victim is in critical condition at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, according to chief medical officer Dr. Jason Gray.He said his hospital initially received 10 patients.

Twitter user @bodhilooney posted a statement on the social network claiming that her grandmother was inside the classroom.

Hundreds went to a candlelight vigil Thursday night, with many raising candles as the hymn ""Amazing Grace"" was played.

Former student Sam Sherman said Roseburg was a ""poor town, a mill town."" Oregon's timber industry went into a tailspin 25 years ago.

""People don't generally aspire to greater things here,"" he said. ""So having a place you can go to do that is a big deal. For something that terrible to happen at such a small school is frustrating.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"link originally posted by: theantediluvian It looks like everyone is releasing their October suprises in pieces, including the Telegraph . Now we have Jesse Benton admitting to voter suppression on a hidden camera. Here's the transcript: Benton: We're doing pretty well ahhh but we don't have anywhere near the funds that Hillary's groups do so we really have to be surgical Benton: So we have a voter suppression campaign — quite frankly — targeting African Americans , and uh, and sort of, suburban moms , just bad stuff about Hillary, just trying to take their taste for her away. Female Reporter: I see, so that they don't turn out. Benton: Yeah just keep them — just try to drop her turn out two or three points Basically if they put out enough negative adds about how she hasn't supported blacks and there causes they will make it less likely they will vote for her. Realistically speaking they aren't going to votell republican and they know that. So the best they can hope for is make them mad enough at her not to vote. But looking at early voting they may have switched more than they thought and instead of bit voting they are voting trump wI'll see as election. Gets cloaer.",FAKE
"“We will have a second amendment that is a very small replica of what it is now” in a Clinton administration

Trump is being reductive: Clinton has never called for abolishing the second amendment, the right to bear arms, though she does support gun control measures such as an assault weapons ban, increased background checks and greater liability for manufacturers.

As moderator Chris Wallace noted, Clinton has said she disagrees with the supreme court’s 5-4 decision in 2008 to broadly affirm the personal right to gun ownership. Her campaign has said Clinton would prefer states have the right to enact as strict gun control laws as they see fit.

“Chicago has the toughest gun laws and the most gun deaths”



Chicago police have pushed back on the notion that the city’s gun laws have proven ineffective, noting that a huge number of gun seizures were of firearms purchased outside the city or outside Illinois, where laws are more lax. Trump is largely correct about Chicago’s homicide problem: the city is on pace to have more than 600 gun deaths in 2016.

“If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month you can rip the baby out of the womb of the mother … up to the last day.”

Clinton does not support such an extreme view on abortion, nor have courts ever ruled such a late term operation legal, or suggested that they would. States vary on how late they allow abortions – in some states there have been attempts to introduce very short time limits, including in North Dakota where a proposal in 2013 for a ban six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period was ruled unconstitutional, but in most states the time limit is at the start of the third trimester or earlier. There are nine states without specific term prohibitions, but clinics do not abort at such late terms: only 1.2% of abortions occur after 21 weeks, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

Clinton does not want “open borders”: she supports reform to let people pass background checks and pay back taxes in order to stay in the US, and she supports Obama’s executive actions to shield some migrants, such as people who were brought to the US as children. Like Obama, she supports deportation for people with criminal records.

Trump is correct: Barack Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, more than any other recent president, but he has prioritized migrants with criminal records. “Millions and millions”, however, is an exaggeration, and Obama also supports shielding millions of undocumented immigrants without criminal records, and reform for citizenship.

Obama “has thousands and thousands of people, they have no idea where they come from”



Ten thousand Syrian refugees have come to the United States in 2016, but Trump makes it sound misleadingly large.

He is patently wrong about the screening process. The US has among the most intensive screening process in the world for refugees: it requires they register and interview with the United Nations, which then must refer them to the US, refugees who pass this test then interview with state department contractors and have at least two background checks, then they have three fingerprint and photo screenings, then US immigration reviews the case, then Homeland Security interviews the refugee, then a doctor examines the refugee, and finally several security agencies perform one last check after the refugee has been matched with a resettlement agency.

The process takes 18 months to two years. The US has a very clear idea about which refugees it allows into the country.

“I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me … He has no respect for our president.”

It’s not clear whether Trump has ever spoken with the Russian president. Putin was invited to but did not attend a 2013 beauty pageant in Moscow, according to one of the oligarchs who helped organize the event. “Will he become my new best friend?” Trump wondered beforehand.

The pair may have communicated through intermediaries. In 2014, Trump told a National Press Club luncheon: “I was in Moscow recently and I spoke, indirectly and directly, with President Putin, who could not have been nicer, and we had a tremendous success.” A year earlier, Trump told MSNBC: “I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he’s very interested in what we’re doing here today.”

Last November, Trump claimed in a debate that he “got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes”. They appeared in separate, pre-taped segments and were not on set together.

Trump has repeatedly tried to do business in Russia, and his refusal to release tax returns prevents him proving that he has no assets there.

Putin has never called Trump “a genius”; he used the Russian word яркий, which means “colorful” or “flamboyant”. Trump likely heard the word translated as “bright” or “brilliant”, though its connotations are often more pejorative than not: bright in the sense of glaring and gaudy, brilliant in the sense of dazzling light. Putin also called him “talented, undoubtedly”.

“It’s not our business to decide his merits; that’s for US voters,” Putin said earlier this year. He did say, however, that he would welcome the rapprochement in Russian-American relations that Trump has suggested. You can read more about Putin’s remarks here.

“She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China or somebody else … Our country has no idea”

US intelligence officials have formally accused Russia of hacking Democratic organizations, saying they have “high confidence” that the Kremlin is behind cyberattacks on the US government, Democratic organizations and polling centers. Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on this claim, despite personal briefings with US intelligence officials.

Even his running mate, Mike Pence, has accepted the briefings, and told NBC on Sunday: “I think there’s more and more evidence that implicates Russia.” Earlier Wednesday a Russian man suspected of involvement in the hacks was arrested in Prague.

“The border patrol agents, 16,500 plus, ICE, endorsed me. First time they’ve ever endorsed a candidate”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a government agency. It does not endorse political candidates. A union representing about 7,600 ICE officials endorsed Trump in September. A group representing 16,500 of 21,000 border patrol agents similarly endorsed Trump; this does not represent all the agents.

Clinton is correct that Trump took the quote out of context: she was talking primarily about trade to Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank that eventually became Unibanco. Here’s what she said, according to a hacked email released by Wikileaks:

Clinton has flip-flopped on free trade since 2013, most notably supporting and then rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I’m a big fan of Nato but they have to pay up”

Trump is not necessarily a big fan of Nato, which he has called “obsolete”, and he’s wrong that allies do not pay for US military bases, though they do not pay perhaps as much as some Nato commanders want.

The US has urged its Nato allies to pay more for years, especially as eastern and central European allies have loudly warned about aggressive Russian action. The US currently pays about 22% of overall Nato spending, compared to Germany’s 15%, France’s 11%, the UK’s 10%, etc, and most Nato members fail to pay the 2% of GDP into defense as the alliance’s guidelines dictate. But the US does receive payments for military bases abroad from countries like Japan and South Korea, and takes profits from arms deals (sometimes to controversial clients, such as Saudi Arabia).

The US also benefits strategically through foreign military bases, which have acted as foundations for American influence abroad.

“I never said Japan should have nuclear weapons”



Trump has suggested Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons. He told the New York Times in March: “Well I think maybe it’s not so bad to have Japan – if Japan had that nuclear threat, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing for us.”

Trump has the raw numbers just about right. When Obama took office on 20 January 2009, the federal debt was $10.63tn. As of 28 September 2016, it was $19.5tn. Trump omits, however, two key points: Congress controls the government’s wallet (ie Obama cannot spend or tax without approval from lawmakers), and Obama took office during the financial crisis, when Republicans, Democrats and most economists agreed that the US needed to spend in order to counteract the collapsing economy. Pence has the right numbers but imputes too much responsibility on the president.

“When you ran the state department, $6bn was missing! Maybe it was stolen … nobody knows”

This is not correct. Trump is alluding to a March 2014 alert, about contractor spending in the Middle East and Africa, by the state department’s inspector general, who was so perturbed by careless language around the $6bn figure that he wrote the Washington Post a letter that April. His alert did not conclude that the money was “missing” he told the Post, but rather that officials had failed “to adequately maintain contract files” that created “significant financial risk”. Files were missing or incomplete regarding several dozen contracts, not the money itself, and the state department agreed to his recommendations.

Trump is right: Clinton has not been consistent on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and her language from 2010 through 2014 suggests she was broadly in support of Barack Obama’s trade deal, before eventually opposing it as a presidential candidate. As secretary of state in 2012, she said: “This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world’s total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment.”

She continued to praise it while she worked for the Obama administration, variously calling it “high quality”, “cutting edge”, “groundbreaking” and “high standard”.

The claim that Hillary Clinton “gave” the world Isis condenses and distorts a conservative view that, closer to its original form, says that that by withdrawing American forces from Iraq, Barack Obama created a power vacuum in which Isis could rise.

This argument ignores that Isis’s first segments formed out of Iraq’s civil war, while George W Bush was president, that the group gained strength in Syria’s civil war, where the US did not intervene until 2014, that Obama withdrew American forces in 2011 under the timeline agreed on by Bush and Baghdad, and that both Bush and Obama failed to come to an agreement with Baghdad over troops – in large part over a disagreement about whether American troops could be prosecuted by Iraq.

Trump supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and “surgical” intervention to remove Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, though he now claims otherwise. He also supported withdrawal from Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

The sexual allegations against Trump have not been “debunked”, though they have not been proven, either. For context, Jill Harth sued Trump in 1997 for “attempted rape” and earlier this year told the Guardian he “me up against the wall” of a child’s bedroom “and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress”. Jessica Leeds and Rachel Cooks recounted to the New York Times that Trump had groped the former “like an octopus” and kissed the latter without consent.

Reporter Natasha Stoynoff has said Trump cornered her in a room in 2005 and “within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat”. Mindy McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post a similar story, saying that Trump groped her 13 years ago, also at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida. Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant, has alleged that he groped and kissed her without consent in 2007. Temple Taggart accused Trump of advances at rehearsal for the 1997 Miss USA pageant, photographer Kirsten Anderson said Trump groped her at a nightclub in the 1990s, and Cathy Heller said he grabbed and kissed her at a Mar-A-Lago brunch in 1997.

The Trump campaign has denied the allegations. It has produced a self-professed witness, who has a history of making unproven claims, from the flight with Leeds, and a letter from the cousin of Zervos expressing doubt about her claim but not calling her a liar. “I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr Trump’s expense,” his letter said.

“I did not say that [women were not unattractive enough for him to advance on]”

Trump clearly suggested that he did not find at least one of his accusers attractive, saying “She would not be my first choice, believe me.”

“They hired people [to incite violence at rallies], they gave them $1,500 … she caused the violence, it’s on tape!”

Trump appears to be alluding to an edited video that suggests a few Democratic staffers had hired people to incite violence. One of those staffers has resigned, and said that “none of the schemes described in the conversations ever took place”. So far there is no proof that anyone was actually hired to cause violence.

“Criminally, after getting a subpoena by the United States Congress, [Clinton deleted emails]. One lie.”

Trump has the timeline correct, but not the criminality. He omits the FBI’s conclusion that there was no evidence of an intentional effort to conceal anything, and the FBI learned that a Clinton aide had asked for the emails unrelated to government work to be deleted in December 2014, months before the 4 March 2015 subpoena.

The emails were deleted at the end of March, according to the FBI, when an employee had what he called an “oh shit” moment about his previous order from Mills. The state department first agreed to produce records in July 2014.

“A four-star general who lied to the FB faces a worse deal than Clinton”

Trump did not specify a general’s name but appears to have been referring to James Cartwright. He has in the past referred to both Cartwright and General David Petraeus in his argument that Clinton benefits from some kind of double standard.

In 2015 Petraeus, a former CIA director and a four-star general, pled guilty to giving a large amount of classified information – including the identities of covert officers and war strategy – to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. During the FBI investigation, Petraeus lied to agents, according to the plea deal. But the justice department only sentenced Petraeus to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine, provoking accusations that this relatively lenient sentence was evidence of a double standard for the powerful. The justice department’s lenience toward Petraeus actually made it more difficult, in part, for prosecutors to recommend charges against Clinton.

This week Cartwright pled guilty to lying to the FBI in an investigation into leaking classified information about operations against Iran to journalists. Like Petraeus, though, the FBI found actual intentional wrongdoing in Cartwright’s case. Cartwright’s punishment could range from a $500 fine to six months in prison or, if the judge sees fit, a higher sentence.



There is no evidence that the Clinton Foundation is a “criminal enterprise”, or that its donors or the Clintons profit from the charity.

Trump appears to be alluding a garment factory built after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake in the town of Caracol, while Bill Clinton was the UN’s special envoy to Haiti and co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an organization that approved US government funded projects that added up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The IHRC approved a project between the US, Haiti’s government and Sae-A Trading, a South Korean clothing company, and it now provides 8,900 jobs to Haitians.

An eventual review by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found “mixed results” with the project, including “unrealistic initial timeframes”, delays, incomplete information in the feasibility study, and funding problems. Earlier in October, labor organizers alleged that factory managers were mistreating workers there, but an ABC News investigation found no evidence that Clinton Foundation donors profited from the project, though some were involved in the project. The US committed funding but did not participate in building the industrial park; a labor group that reviewed the factory found it had adequate oversight and had dealt with concerns, though the factory remains within the range of the often grueling garment industry.

He was correct, at least, that the Clinton Foundation has accepted millions from Middle East countries with records of repression of women and gay people. 



“I don’t buy boats, I don’t buy planes [with money the Trump Foundation], we put up the American flag, and that’s it … We fought for the right in Palm Beach to put up the American flag”

Trump is not being wholly honest about his charitable foundation, at least according to the Trump Foundation’s own documents, which show that he used its money to pay for legal settlements and even self-portraits, as Clinton said and the Washington Post has reported at length.

Trump does not come from modest beginnings. In 1978 his father gave him a loan totaling almost $1m – about $3.7m today – and acted as guarantor for the young Trump’s early projects. A 1981 report by a New Jersey regulator also shows a $7.5m loan from the patriarch, and years later he bought $3.5m in gambling chips to help his son pay off the debts of a failing casino, a transaction found later found illegal. Trump also borrowed millions against his inheritance before his father’s death, a 2007 deposition shows.

Trump has not proven that he is worth $10bn, though his tax returns, which he has refused to release, could provide a clearer picture of his worth. His financial filings suggest he has less than $250m in liquid assets, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Trump has a history of overstating his properties: he has, for instance, told the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that a New York golf club is worth $50m but also argued in court that it is worth only $1.4m.

“These people have all left. The element of surprise … all she had to do was stay there”

Isis has not left Mosul: several thousand fighters remain there and are fighting the coalition of Iraqi and Kurdish troops, backed by US airstrikes and special forces. Isis leaders have known for years that Baghdad would try to retake the city, if they have not known since they took the city.

Trump did not support leaving a residual American force in Iraq, but actually called for a complete withdrawal from Iraq, despite the likelihood of civil war or an authoritarian coup. “You know how they get out? They get out. That’s how they get out. Declare victory and leave,” he told CNN in 2007. “This is a total catastrophe, and you might as well get out now because you’re just wasting time, and lives.”

The argument that Isis rose out of the vacuum of post-withdrawal Iraq also ignores that its origins were in the country’s civil war, while George W Bush was in office, and that the terror group concentrated strength in Syria’s civil war before Barack Obama began a bombing and special forces campaign there.

Trump, when told he was for the invasion of Iraq: “Wrong”

This is a lie. In the months before the Iraq war began, Trump mildly endorsed invasion to radio host Howard Stern, who asked him whether US forces should attack. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump answered. A few weeks later he told Fox News that George W Bush was “doing a very good job”. Several weeks after the invasion, Trump told the Washington Post: “The war’s a mess.” In August 2004 he told Esquire: “Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over.”

Even in an interview cited by the Trump campaign, Trump expressed impatience with Bush for not invading sooner. “Whatever happened to the days of the Douglas MacArthur? He would go and attack. He wouldn’t talk.”

About 10.7 million people have gained jobs since Barack Obama took office in 2009 (not 15 million as the Clinton campaign sometimes claims). Growth is not stagnant, though it is not significant, and it requires context: the 2008 financial crisis that nearly collapsed the economy. According to a 2015 nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the stimulus may have increased GDP buy up to 0.2 percentage points. US growth in the second quarter of 2016 was 1.4%.

“Their [the people of New Hampshire’s] single biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring and destroying their youth”

Trump is correct that heroin deaths have increased dramatically since 2007, in part because of the abuse of painkillers and the growth of a number of powerful heroin-related drugs, such as fentanyl. According to the DEA, 10,574 Americans died from heroin-related overdoses in 2014, more than three times the number in 2010.

“Next week [the healthcare premiums] are going to go up 100%”

Trump and Clinton both accept the reality that healthcare premiums have increased since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, but Trump appears to be exaggerating wildly. On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8% a year since Obama took office, compared with 13.2% in the nine years before Obama, Politifact found earlier this year. Trump, however, is cherry-picking data from various states and providers where rates have had higher jumps. The most common healthcare plans will increase 9% on average, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“We take care of illegal immigrants … better than we take care of our vets”

This claim flies in the face of evidence and logic. Like all US citizens, veterans enjoy the basic rights and benefits granted by US law (voting rights, social security, Medicaid, etc), while undocumented migrants (non-citizens) do not. Trump has in the past tried to justify this claim by saying the US spends more on undocumented people than on veterans, but has drawn a $113bn price tag from an explicitly anti-immigration foundation. He also inflated that number.

The campaign has said the US spends $2.8bn on housing migrants in prisons, combining an estimate on prison costs and the 2016 budget for the care and processing of children who came to the US without adults. The Veterans Affairs administration has a 2016 budget of $69.7bn. Veterans and undocumented migrants alike have access to K-12 education, though few veterans would likely seek it, and veterans have access to the Affordable Care Act, military benefits and health benefits, while migrants do not.

“Our inner cities are a disaster. You get shot walking to the store, you have no education, no jobs”

Trump’s repeated claim that “African Americans, Hispanics, are living in hell” defies most of American history, from antebellum slavery through the Jim Crow decades, great depression and segregation. Even if Trump is only referring the past half century, he is still wrong by most metrics.

Data on employment, education and health show empirical evidence for the persistent reality of discrimination against black Americans, but also show major gains in the last few decades. In 2015, black people earned just 75% as much as whites in median hourly earnings, whether full- or part-time, according to a Pew Research analysis. The black unemployment rate in August 2016 was 8.1%, compared with 4.4% for white people, but still lower than for most of the last 40 years. Black life expectancy has increased from the mid-30s around 1900 to the mid-70s in 2016, according to the CDC. Education rates have similarly increased in the last 40 years, according to the census.

“We have 33,000 people a year who die from guns”

Clinton is broadly correct. The Centers for Disease Control reported 33,636 firearm deaths in 2013, and similar figures in the years preceding it.

Clinton is not quite right. A Trump contractor hired undocumented Polish workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in 1983 union members sued one of their organizers. Trump appeared in court in 1990 and blamed the contractor overseeing the project, which was for Trump Tower.

“I will not add a penny to the debt”

Estimates suggest Clinton is not wholly correct. Her proposed tax plan would add $191bn to the debt over the long term, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a conservative thinktank. The Tax Policy Center, however, estimates that she would add $1.1tn in revenue in a decade, though much of that would be offset by increased spending. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s plan would add $5.3tn to the debt.

“We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90% [of what’s given] and have the highest rating from watchdogs”

The Clinton Foundation does have high marks from charity watchdogs, which also show that the group does spend the vast majority of its donations on its own charitable programs.

Clinton says Trump has called the election ‘rigged’, while Trump says he won’t necessarily accept the election results

All available evidence shows that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare: you are more likely to be struck by lightning in the next year (a one in 1,042,000 chance, according to Noaa) than to find a case of voter fraud by impersonation (31 possible cases in more than a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014, according to a study by Loyola Law School).

Voter fraud would have to happen on an enormous scale to sway elections, because the electoral college system decentralizes authority: each of the 50 states has its own rules and local officials, not federal ones, run the polls and count the ballots. This complexity makes the notion of a “rigged” national election, at least in the US, logistically daunting to the point of practical impossibility. Thirty-one states have Republican governors, including the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Ohio; Pennsylvania only elected a Democratic governor in 2015. Polls show Trump losing even in some states where governors have strongly supported him. In Maine, for instance, the Real Clear Politics average shows him down five points.

About 75% of the ballots cast in federal elections have paper backups, and most electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet – though they have other flaws and may be vulnerable to tampering. But voter fraud to swing a major election, whether by tampering, buying votes or official wrongdoing, would quickly attract attention by its necessarily large scale.

If Trump loses the presidential election, it will be because American voters do not want him in the White House, not because of a conspiracy involving Republicans and Democrats alike at state and city levels around the nation – a conspiracy for which Trump has provided no evidence.

“Trump’s plan largely helps the wealthy and adds $20tn in debt”

Clinton is correct that although Trump’s tax plan would cut taxes for everyone, it would disproportionately help the wealthiest Americans, saving them millions of dollars and adding $5.3tn to the national debt, according to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, a conservative thinktank. She seems to be citing another analysis, by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, about the debt, and possibly overstates its estimated consequences.

That center warned that without severe spending cuts, the plan would balloon national debt “by nearly 80% of gross domestic product by 2036, offsetting some or all of the incentive effects of the tax cuts”. According to that group, half of Trump’s tax cuts would go to the top 1% of earners, and most families below the top 20% of earners would have income gains of less than 1%.

• This article was amended on 21 October 2016. An earlier version said incorrectly that North Dakota had banned abortion six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period and that the general referred to by Trump was David Petraeus. Two sections of the text have been corrected and clarified accordingly.",REAL
"In what was an emotional and contentious scene at the Rowan County, Ky., Courthouse this morning, one dramatic legal standoff came to an end when a gay couple was issued a marriage license.

James Yates and William Smith, who had tried this five times before, arrived at the courthouse just as the sun started peeking out from under the mountains on the horizon.

They walked past protesters — some condemning them and some cheering them — and entered the clerk's office.

Kim Davis, the county clerk who had stood in their way those five previous attempts, was in jail. She was held in contempt by a federal judge Thursday for refusing to hand out marriage licenses in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. So early Friday, Yates and Smith walked up to Deputy Clerk Brian Mason.

Mason was all business. He checked their licenses, asked them if they were related, took their $35 and, in about five minutes, handed them an envelope and said, ""Congratulations.""

Yates and Smith had become the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license from Rowan County.

They exited to chants of ""Love has won. Love has won.""

""I don't want her in jail,"" Yates said of Davis. ""No one wanted her in jail. We just wanted the licenses given out. This isn't a blessing. It's an official license.""

""This means, at least for this area, civil rights are civil rights and they're not subject to beliefs.""

Davis' husband, Joe Davis, was also outside the courthouse with a group of protesters who called this a moral fight.

""We don't hate these people. That's the furthest thing from our hearts,"" he said. ""We don't hate nobody. We just want to have the same rights that they have. They're saying, 'Hey we're gonna make you accept us.' But they don't want to accept our beliefs. But they want us to accept theirs.""

There is still some question about the legality of the marriage licenses handed out today, because they don't bear Davis' signature.",REAL
"Every preliminary electoral-map forecast this spring paints a bleak picture for Donald Trump in his effort to win the presidency against Hillary Clinton. The consensus is that there is only a very narrow path to victory, and that will probably shape the opening phase of the general-election campaign.

Among the earlier forecasts, the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato sees a Clinton romp in the making. A year ago, his forecast showed Democrats with an advantage in states adding up to 247 electoral votes, Republicans with an edge in states adding up to 206 and six states totaling 85 votes rated as toss-ups. Today, Sabato sees no states as toss-ups. Instead, he shows Clinton with 347 electoral votes and Trump with just 191.

The Cook Political Report shows a similarly dire map for Trump: 304 electoral votes leaning or solid for Clinton, 190 leaning or solid for Trump and 44 up for grabs. The four states Cook rated as toss-ups include three carried by Obama in 2012 (Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio) and one carried by Mitt Romney (North Carolina).

The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report offers a more conservative estimate, but one no less daunting for Trump and Republicans: 263 leaning or solid for the Democrats, 206 for the Republicans and the remaining as toss-ups. The toss-ups in this analysis are Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia.

These forecasts are the reason so many elected Republicans are worried about Trump at the top of their ticket. If he crashes, so too might their current majorities, particularly in the Senate. No wonder House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) remains a holdout in his willingness to fully embrace Trump and why Senate leaders expressed their concerns to the presumptive nominee when they met Thursday.

To hold the Senate, Republicans must fend off a series of Democratic challenges in states that are traditional presidential battlegrounds or, worse, states that have been in the Democrats’ presidential column repeatedly.

Cook’s Senate list shows six Republican-held seats as toss-up races. Three are in presidentially blue states: Mark Kirk in Illinois, Patrick J. Toomey in Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Three others are in traditional battlegrounds: Rob Portman in Ohio, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire and the seat being vacated by Marco Rubio in Florida. Only one Democratic seat is currently a toss-up, that of retiring Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

If it becomes necessary, these embattled Republican incumbents will distance themselves from Trump in an instant to run their own campaigns — but will need to defy recent history to be successful. For some years now, voters increasingly have cast their votes for Senate in line with their presidential preference. This election could become a major test of whether that trend toward straight-ticket voting in recent years can be reversed.

A counter to the electoral-map projections showing Trump a potentially sizable drag on other Republican candidates came last week, when Quinnipiac University released polls from Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. Clinton and Trump were neck and neck in Florida and Pennsylvania, and Trump led narrowly in Ohio.

Critics of the surveys asserted that the samples understated the likely size of the nonwhite vote and overstated the percentage of Republicans. It’s also worth noting that all of the surveys had a relatively high percentage of undecided voters.

More evidence is needed, and subsequent surveys will either ratify or contradict those numbers. But the three states in question are one path to the presidency for Trump. If he could hold all of the states that Romney won — by no means a certainty — and flip Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, he would become president.

Many Democrats express the belief that there are traditional GOP states that may be in play in November, starting with Arizona. Clinton strategists are not assuming major changes in the geography of the battlegrounds. To that end, the key will be to prevent Trump from bringing out disaffected white, working-class voters while energizing the Obama coalition.

The Washington Post’s Abby Phillip described one step that the Clinton campaign is planning to protect states that are must-wins this fall, which is by starting to organize as early and as robustly as possible in Midwestern states with white, working-class constituencies, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

All three states have voted for the Democratic nominee six times in a row, although Obama won Pennsylvania, where there was no real campaign, by just more than five points in 2012. That five-point margin was almost identical to the margins by which he won the contested states of Colorado and New Hampshire and is a source of potential concern for Clinton’s team.

[Nine House committee chairs endorse Trump, but not yet Speaker Ryan]

The Clinton camp has been eager to get moving on its general-election operations for weeks, knowing that it takes time and resources to build the kind of organization they need to get all of their voters to the polls in November. The persistence of the challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont notwithstanding, the leadership of Clinton’s campaign in Brooklyn is now moving ahead on that front.

Clinton’s other strategy will be to disqualify Trump to any possible persuadable voters, among them independent women, and to generate the biggest possible turnout among Latinos and African Americans.

Clinton’s liabilities as a candidate make it more difficult for her simply to run a positive campaign to win over these voters, although she will need to do that. In addition, she and her outside allies will probably emulate the strategy followed by Obama against Romney four years ago by unloading soon.

The barrage will come in the form of TV ads and other means of communication — through social media, surrogates and talking heads, all recounting the many controversial things Trump has said about women, about Mexicans, about Muslims and anything else that might be in the opposition research files.

Trump should expect an all-out assault from the Democrats starting in early June. The goal will be to make it as difficult as possible for him to gain a foothold in the places where he will need it most. Whether Trump and the Republicans, who are all scrambling to try to unify as best as they can, will be ready to answer is a major question.

Trump has proved to be largely impervious to attack in the primaries, but he’s now facing a much different electorate. If he isn’t ready for what is coming at him, the opening phase of the general election could prove decisive.",REAL
"The White House made formal veto threats Wednesday against House bills that would allow the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and change a key mandate under the Affordable Care Act, signaling a rocky start to the 114th Congress.

While White House press secretary Josh Earnest had announced Tuesday that President Obama intends to veto the first bill headed to his desk under the GOP-controlled Congress, the new Statement of Administration Policy elaborates on the president's objection to the bill.

The House version — which is identical to the one just introduced in the Senate on Tuesday by Sens. John Hoeven (N.D.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — ""conflicts with longstanding Executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the President and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests (including serious security, safety, environmental, and other ramifications),"" reads the statement, which was released by the Office of Management and Budget.

""If presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto this bill,"" it adds.

The president also laid down the gauntlet when it comes to House Republicans' latest effort to chip away at his signature health-care law. Currently the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide health insurance if they have at least 50 full-time workers, which is defined by anyone working 30 hours a week or more. The Save American Workers Act would change the definition of a full-time employee to someone working at least 40 hours a week.

Obama will reject the measure ""because it would significantly increase the deficit, reduce the number of Americans with employer-based health insurance coverage, and create incentives for employers to shift their employees to part-time work – causing the problem it intends to solve.""

""Rather than attempting once again to repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act, which the House has tried to do over 50 times, it is time for the Congress to stop fighting old political battles and join the President in forwarding an agenda focused on providing greater economic opportunity and security for middle class families and all those working to be a part of the middle class,"" the Statement of Administration Policy adds.

During his regular press briefing Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) questioned why the president was starting out the new session on such an adversarial note.

""Too many Americans are out of work, too many are working harder just to keep pace in the face of rising costs and frankly, we’ve got an awful lot of work to do,"" Boehner said. ""Unfortunately, by threatening two of these bipartisan jobs bills, the president essentially is telling the American people he really doesn’t care what they think. Well, our commitment is to stand up for the American people and their priorities, and it’s a commitment we will not break.”

Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), noted in an e-mail that 18 House Democrats voted for a similar health care bill last Congress. A companion bill in the Senate is sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.).

Polls show a clear majority of Americans support approving the Keystone pipeline, with 60 percent in a November USA Today survey saying Obama and Congress should authorize the project; 25 percent said it should not and the rest were unsure. Separate polling finds most Republicans, independents, and moderate or conservative Democrats support the pipeline, liberal Democrats and those with the most education more opposed.

Along with overall public support, Americans are bullish about the pipeline’s job-creation prospects. More than eight in 10 respondents in a Washington Post-ABC News poll said the pipeline would create a significant number of jobs, while just under half thought it would pose a significant risk to the environment.",REAL
"Nonduality and the Consciousness of 'Things' - Thich Nhat Hanh Share on Facebook Tweet 
Do animals and plants have consciousness? Are electrons alive? Thich Nhat Hanh in dialogue with University of Virginia Astrophysicist Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan. [watch video below] Caitlin Moran's Posthumous Advice for Her Daughter Caitlin Moran · 19,039 views today · My daughter is about to turn 13 and I’ve been smoking a lot recently, and so – in the wee small hours, when my lungs feel like there’s a small mouse inside them, scratching to...",FAKE
"George W. Bush famously described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” A few years into his presidency there was a survey that reported that 49 percent of Americans thought he was a “uniter” and 49 percent thought him a “divider” — a poignant reminder that Americans are so polarized, they’re even polarized about polarization.

And of course the same goes for Obama who, like Bush, spent two terms as president trying, but failing, to be a bipartisan figure.

A characteristic feature of polarization seems to be the impression that one’s own side is reasonable and that all the polarizing comes from the other side of the political aisle.

I came across an amusing example of this today, ironically from a political scientist, Gerard Alexander, who, in an op-ed entitled, “Jon Stewart, Patron Saint of Liberal Smugness,” writes:

This is just too perfect. It’s a beautiful paradox. If Alexander is right, then there is an important asymmetry in American politics, which is the thing that he’s saying conservatives don’t believe! If he’s wrong, then there is no asymmetry, which is what he’s saying conservatives believe in the first place. It’s like something out of Lewis Carroll.

I’m reminded of economist Emily Oster’s quote that economists are different from almost everyone else in society in that they assume everybody is fundamentally alike.

I also think it’s a bit odd for Alexander to describe liberals as “fixated” on Sarah Palin: it’s not liberals who nominated Palin for vice-president, or who put her on TV. Unless you want to describe William Kristol and Roger Ailes as liberals.

Also this, from Alexander:

My strongest memory of Mr. Stewart, like that of many other conservatives, is probably going to be his 2010 interview with the Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Mr. Yoo had served in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and had drafted memos laying out what techniques could and couldn’t be used to interrogate Al Qaeda detainees. Mr. Stewart seemed to go into the interview expecting a menacing Clint Eastwood type, who was fully prepared to zap the genitals of some terrorist if that’s what it took to protect America’s women and children. Mr. Stewart was caught unaware by the quiet, reasonable Mr. Yoo, who explained that he had been asked to determine what legally constituted torture so the government could safely stay on this side of the line. The issue, in other words, wasn’t whether torture was justified but what constituted it and what didn’t.

First off, let me say that this is a horrible thing to say about Clint Eastwood, who was never involved in this:

It’s interesting to see what Alexander did there. First, he changed the question from “crushing the testicles of the person’s child” (which Yoo refused to say the government couldn’t do) “zap[ping] the genitals of some terrorist” (which is, presumably, also a treaty violation but doesn’t sound so bad). Second, Alexander didn’t even say “suspected terrorist,” he said “terrorist.” But of course one of the concerns with torture is that it’s not only done on terrorists, it’s also done on people who get picked up on suspicion of terrorism, or just people who somebody thinks might have some information. Alexander gets to characterize Yoo as “reasonable” only by shifting the ground of the debate. He also describes Yoo as “quiet,” which seems pretty irrelevant to me. Personally, I’d prefer someone who yells but opposes torture to someone who is soft-spoken and supports it. Then again, I don’t personally know anyone who’s been killed by a terrorist; maybe if I did, I’d feel differently.

Anyway, the point is that Alexander demonstrates political polarization in his column, in the very way that he is castigating liberals for unreasonable for seeing themselves as more reasonable than conservatives. And, if you’d like, you could characterize this post as even more polarization, in that of all the things I could write about today, I’ve chosen this.

My point, though, as a political scientist, is that along with our very reasonable concerns about difficulties of communication between the left and the right — an often disturbing lack of national unity — comes a corresponding split in perceptions. Alexander is correct to see a tendency among many liberals to think of themselves as more reasonable than conservatives. But his column, ironically, demonstrates the symmetric tendency of many conservatives to see themselves as the reasonable ones. So, instead of mere disagreements on policy, we get disputes about the legitimacy of each side’s concerns, as well as ahistorical views such as an attribution to liberals of Sarah Palin’s fame.

None of this is new, but it has been getting worse in the past generation, and this particular column reminded me of it.

Finally, it’s data time. This is the Monkey Cage, after all. Here are some graphs from my book Red State Blue State on partisan polarization during the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars.",REAL
"This is true at both the national and state levels. Modern conservative mythology begins with Reagan, a man who tripled the federal budget deficit (which shot up to $3 trillion during his tenure) and raised taxes 11 times during the course of his presidency. Reagan didn’t shrink the size of government or grow the middle class. On the contrary, he made government more bloated, more defense-oriented, more corporatist. George W. Bush’s 8 years in office were similarly disastrous: more corporate welfare, more debt, more Utopian military campaigns, more disorder.

Today Republican governors are plunging – or have plunged – their states into one abyss after another, all under the banner of conservatism. There are almost too many examples to cite: Sam Brownback in Kansas; Bobby Jindal in Louisiana; Rick Snyder in Michigan; Phil Bryant in Mississippi; Scott Walker in Wisconsin; Chris Christie in New Jersey; Paul LePage in Maine; Rick Scott in Florida. The list goes on and on and on.

The point is obvious enough: The conservative brand is tainted.

Now that Donald Trump has hijacked the Republican Party, the conservative intelligentsia is apoplectic. Trump isn’t a real conservative, they say. He’s ideologically incoherent, they say. The assumption is that Trump is an aberration, a chimera born of anti-establishment rage. Or that he’s a threat to the “conservative movement” rather than its natural outgrowth.

Consider the latest Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative columnist Bret Stephens. Stephens writes:

There are two problems with this. First, there’s a disconnect between establishment Republicans and conservative voters. If you watch Fox News or listen to right-wing radio, it’s clear that the base isn’t animated by a coherent worldview. Many self-identify as conservative, but their conservatism is a vague stew of cultural resentment, religious certainty, and half-baked talking points. There is no consistent “conservative cause” to preserve. And if there is a genuine conservative coalition, the Know Nothings and the John Birchers are now central to it. Indeed, the GOP has cultivated these wings since its adoption of the “Southern Strategy” roughly 50 years ago.

Second, to the extent that conservative ideas have been implemented in recent years, they haven’t worked. The “conservative cause” is already crippled. Neoliberal economics, which is what conservative elites support, has gutted the country and the working class. The trade deals, the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the privatization schemes – have redistributed wealth upwards at the expense of everyone else. “Conservatives,” Stephens writes, are “supposed to believe that it’s folly to put hope before experience,” but they’ve put ideological dogma over empirical reality for decades. “Trickle-down” economics didn’t work for Reagan (revenue decreased and unemployment spiked to 10.8 percent after his initial 1981 tax cuts, for example) and it didn’t work for the Bush administrations. And yet GOP presidential candidates speak as though the contrary were true, as though history doesn’t exist. One can argue that this isn’t classical conservatism; that real conservatism involves prudence, a pragmatic respect for existing institutions, and careful responsiveness to change. But that’s not what passes as conservatism. Today’s “conservatives” are hopelessly wedded to discredited abstractions. When elected, their ideas have failed. Now voters are revolting against the establishment and choosing instead to embrace the ethno-nationalism of Trump. Stephens writes that “A Trump presidency means losing the Republican Party.” I disagree. Trump’s nomination means the Republican Party is already lost. Or perhaps it was never found. The GOP has been ideologically fractured since at least the early ’80s, when it morphed into a quasi-religious movement. The Wall Street Journal editorial board cares about tax policy and capital gains, but the Republican base doesn’t. The people voting for Trump are losers in the new economy to be sure, but they’re animated by cultural angst and identity-based fears as much as anything else. Republicans have exploited their base in similar ways for years; Trump has just taken it to another level. I’m not sure what a Trump presidency really means. But it’s not the death knell for conservatism. The GOP ruined conservatism long before Trump. If people like Stephens want to save conservatism, they need a new party, not a new candidate.",REAL
"link The oligarchy runs our society with Problem – Reaction – Solution. If anything, these leaks have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the two-party system is an illusion and the whole construct is one huge pay-for-play corporate sham. Obamacare was always meant to destroy the private health care system and usher in single-payer, government run socialist medicine. It was designed that way… and it’s “working”. Related: Link In this particular e-mail, we get to see just how fake and fraudulent our government is. Your health determines how valuable of an asset you are and it’s the main reason why we see “health tracking apparel” and “health scores,” designed by and for prominent health insurance companies in order to track your health data in-between doctor visits. Remember this quote by demon spawn Nancy Pelosi? “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” If that wasn’t telling you something at the time, maybe this will… Picture: Link In an email thread dated September 26, 2015 between Hillary and her senior policy adviser, Ann O’Leary, titled “Memo on Cadillac Tax for HRC,” Hillary wrote, “Given the politics now w bipartisan support including Schumer, I’ll support repeal w ‘sense of the Senate’ that revenues would have to be found. I’d be open to a range of options to do that. But we have to be careful that the R version passes which begins the unraveling of the ACA.” Do you still have any doubts? Sadly, there are those who have benefited from the ACA, but to a greater extent, many have seen the exact opposite of what was promised. Higher rates, less coverage, new doctors, etc… A Democrat supporting Republican legislation to destroy Obamacare on purpose. How many millions have they raked in on this deal and bilked the American people for in Obamacare penalties because they can’t afford the “affordable” health care? And the American people will look at this like a “victory” when it does unravel, even though it has been the plan all along. Which reminds me, when was the last time that the people had a victory? This just goes to show you that what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander. They knew that going in and only after the fact, can we realize this. They wanted the ganders’ money while the goose that benefits (through subsidiaries), cries to defend the ACA, making the rest of us look insensitive and unfair. Good plan… They’re all working together, folks. Obamacare was always meant to fail — on purpose — to bring in a single-payer, government-controlled socialist medicine system. Don’t believe me yet? Back in 2013, Senator Harry Reid had this to say about the ACA… Sen. Harry Reid: Obamacare 'Absolutely' A Step Toward A Single-Payer System When I speak to conservatives about health care policy, I’m often asked the question: “Do you think that Obamacare is secretly a step toward single-payer health care?” I always explain that, while progressives may want single-payer, I don’t think that Obamacare is deliberately designed to bring about that outcome. Well, yesterday on PBS’ Nevada Week In Review , Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) was asked whether his goal was to move Obamacare to a single-payer system. His answer? “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.” The plan to undermine your health and sufficiency is so diabolical and disgusting, that many would simply refuse to believe such a thing. Well, there it is folks. They don’t give a damn about you or your well-being and will do anything in their power to see that decisions about your health are made by them in the future. For me personally, the ACA has increased my premium by 300%, causing me to drop what was offered by my employer and settle with less coverage for more money using the ""marketplace."" Is this where I get to say... Thanks Obama?",FAKE
"Donald Trump, in an extensive interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, responded to critics of his barbed campaign style by saying he never would have been successful in the primary race if he had acted “presidential” and held back on hitting his political rivals – while declaring that if he doesn’t win the election this fall, he’ll consider his campaign a “complete waste.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was blunt in describing the stakes of the 2016 race as he sees it. Without a victory in the fall, he said, he won’t be able to lower taxes, strengthen the military or “make America great.”

“I will say this: If I don’t go all the way, and if I don’t win, I will consider it to be a total and complete waste of time, energy and money,” Trump said, in the interview that aired Tuesday night on Fox Broadcast Network affiliates.

The candidate addressed a range of topics in his sit-down with Kelly, from his tone to the lead-off presidential debates to his past clashes with the Fox News host.

Trump conceded that, in looking back, he “absolutely” has regrets, without going into detail. But he said if he hadn’t conducted himself in this way, he wouldn’t have come out on top.

“If I were soft, if I were presidential … in a way it’s a bad word, because there’s nothing wrong with being presidential, but if I had not fought back in the way I fought back, I don’t think I would have been successful,” he told Kelly.

Trump argued that he’s a “counter-puncher” who’s only responding to the attacks against him.

“I respond pretty strongly, but in just about all cases, I’ve been responding to what they did to me,” Trump said. “It’s not a one-way street.”

The interview was conducted on the heels of an April meeting between Kelly and the Republican candidate at Trump Tower in New York City.

Before that meeting, the two had been at odds for months – dating back to a Fox News-hosted debate last August, when Trump accused “The Kelly File” host of asking him unfair questions.

Today, Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, having vanquished 16 primary rivals and now turning his attention toward an expected general election battle against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state, while still trying to shake a primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, has sharpened her criticism of Trump as well in recent weeks, even saying Monday that he’s a “loose cannon” who would be dangerous for the country. And she said he’d return to “failed” economic policies.

Speaking with Kelly, Trump suggested the August debate actually helped prepare him for the battle ahead.

“In a certain way, what you did might have been a favor, because I felt so good about having gotten through -- I said, ‘If I could get through this debate, with those questions, you can get through anything,’” he said.

Trump pointed to that debate when asked at what moment he realized he might actually win the race. “I think that first debate meant something,” Trump said, adding that he felt comfortable with the subject matter and the people he was competing against.

At the same time, Trump tried to explain why he fired back at Kelly for confronting him about his past disparaging comments about women. “I thought it was unfair,” Trump said of the question, while noting it was the first question he’d ever been asked at a debate. “And I’m saying to myself, man, what a question.”

He added, “I don’t really blame you because you’re doing your thing, but from my standpoint, I don’t have to like it.”

As for his role in the presidential election in this year, Trump said: “I really view myself now as somewhat of a messenger… This is a massive thing that’s going on. These are millions and millions of people that have been disenfranchised from this country.”

Trump for the last several weeks has been working to reach out to members of the so-called Republican establishment in Washington he’s spent much of his campaign railing against. He met last week with GOP congressional leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan – who has held back an endorsement for now. Trump and the lawmakers came away describing the meetings as positive.

In the interview with Kelly, Trump briefly discussed his personal life, and how his older brother Fred died after a battle with alcoholism. “I have never had a glass of alcohol,” he said, calling his brother’s death the “hardest thing for me to take.”

And while defending his tone on the campaign trail, Trump also said he takes “very seriously” the responsibility of the office he’s seeking.

“I understand what's going on. And when I see the fervor, when I see 25,000 people that have seats, and not one person during an hour speech will sit down. I say, sit down, everybody, sit down.  And they don't sit down,"" he said. ""… I mean, that's a great compliment. But I do understand the power of the message. There's no question about it.”",REAL
"  Donald   says   Friedrich Trump amassed 'substantial nest-egg' from Yukon hotel before heading to New York Donald   says 
Canadians amused by the improbable presidential run of Donald Trump might be surprised to learn the role their own country played in shaping his story. 
Trump’s grandfather started the family fortune in an adventure that involved the Klondike gold rush, the Mounties, prostitution and twists of fate that pushed him to New York City. 
Friedrich Trump had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon, says an author who’s just completed a new edition of her multi-generational family biography. 
That Canadian chapter proved pivotal for the entrepreneurial German immigrant, says Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire. 
“It allowed him to get together the nest egg he’d come to the United States for,” the author and Columbia University journalism professor said in an interview. 
“Whether he could’ve accumulated that much money somewhere else, in that short a period of time, as a young man with no connections, and initially not even English, is certainly … unlikely.” 
He’d left Europe in 1885 at age 16, a barber’s apprentice whose father died young. 
Trump wanted a life outside the barber shop, far from the family-owned vineyards his ancestors had been working since they’d settled in Germany’s Kallstadt region in the 1600s carrying the soon-altered surname Drumpf. 
He sailed in steerage to join his sister in New York. 
Within five years he’d anglicized his name to Frederick; moved to the young timber town of Seattle; and amassed enough cash to buy tables and chairs for a restaurant. 
His next big move was heralded by the front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer of July 17, 1897, and its exclamatory headline: “Gold! Gold! Gold!” 
It described a resplendent scene at the port involving mountains of yellow metal and men returning from the “New Eldorado” with fortunes as high as $100,000. 
Trump sold everything and headed north. 
The move to Canada spared him financial disaster. He not only sold off two Seattle eateries, but also land in nearby Monte Cristo, Wash. — right before floods and avalanches destroyed the nearby railroad and development plans for the town were scrapped. 
Blair describes his perilous northward journey in early 1898. 
After boarding a crowded ship to Alaska, Trump trekked over mountains, through Canadian customs, and to the Yukon River where he had to build a boat from scratch and transport a year’s worth of personal supplies. 
The worst was a notorious mountain pass. The U.S. National Parks Service estimates 3,000 animals died on the White Pass, with many bones still visible today in its so-called Dead Horse Gulch. 
“Owners whipped horses, donkeys, mules, oxen, and dogs until they dropped. The bodies were not buried or even moved,” Blair writes. 
“Travellers … had no choice but to walk over the remains. As the months went by, the walls of the pass were stained dark red from the blood.” 
Trump smelled opportunity. 
He opened a canteen along the route, Blair says, where weary travellers likely stopped for a bite of Arctic roadkill. There are records for similar establishments along the route, Blair writes: “A frequent dish was fresh-slaughtered, quick-frozen horse.” 
This established a pattern for Trump’s Canadian business model. 
It’s summed up in one chapter title: “Mining the Miners.” 
Unlike other gold-crazed migrants, Blair wrote, “[Trump] realized that the best way to get [rich] was to lay down his pick and shovel and pick up his accounting ledger.” 
‘Liquor and sex’ 
In his three years in Canada, Trump opened the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel in two locations with a partner — first on Bennett Lake in northern B.C., and then moving it to Whitehorse, Yukon. 
Their two-storey wood-framed establishment gained a reputation as the finest eatery in the area, Blair said — offering salmon, duck, caribou, and oysters. 
It offered more than food. 
“The   sex,” Blair wrote. She cited newspaper ads referring obliquely to prostitution — mentioning private suites for ladies, and scales in the rooms so patrons could weigh gold if they preferred to pay for services that way. 
One Yukon Sun writer moralized about the backroom goings-on: “For single men the Arctic has the best restaurant,” he wrote, “but I     sex.” 
The Mounties initially tolerated the rowdiness. There were exceptions, according to the legendary Canadian writer Pierre Berton. People faced forced labour or banishment from town if they cheated at cards; made a public ruckus; or partied on the Lord’s Day. 
“Saloons and dance halls, theatres and business houses were shut tight one minute before midnight on Saturday,” Berton wrote in “Klondike Fever.” 
“Two minutes before twelve the lookout at the faro table would take his watch from his pocket and call out: ‘The last turn, boys!”‘ 
‘I wouldn’t call him a pimp’ 
Trump acted as cook, bouncer, waiter. 
But Blair cautions: “I wouldn’t call him a pimp.” 
She said backroom ribaldry was part of the restaurant package in those towns, and it’s not clear how the arrangement worked: “As somebody trying to attract business to his restaurant, of course he would have liquor. Of course he would arrange easy access to women. A pimp is, I think, a different business model.” 
By early 1901, trouble was brewing. 
The Mounties announced plans to banish prostitution, and curb gambling and liquor. Trump quarrelled with his partner. Gold strikes were getting scarcer. 
“The boom was over, Frederick Trump realized,” Blair wrote. “He had made money; perhaps even more unusual in the Yukon, he had also kept it and departed with a substantial nest-egg.” 
He returned to Germany with US$582,000 in today’s currency, and found a wife. But he was greeted as a draft-dodger for being away and becoming a U.S. citizen during his military years. 
So he was deported from his own country. He boarded a ship for New York, his wife pregnant with Donald’s dad. 
The elder Trump died of pneumonia in 1918, leaving behind some real estate. His son built the empire, his grandson the global brand. 
Ironically, their heir is now running for president on a platform of mass-deportation. But Donald and grandpa share some traits — an entrepreneurial spirit, and formative youthful adventures in Canada. 
Donald met his first wife, Ivana, at the Montreal Olympics. Related Posts:",FAKE
"At least nine people were arrested Wednesday and St. Louis police used tear gas to clear a street of protesters after an armed man fleeing from officers was shot and killed when he pointed a gun at them.

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said at a press conference late Wednesday night that a group of protesters who had blocked an intersection threw glass bottles and bricks at officers and refused orders to clear the roadway. Inert gas was used and when that didn't have any effect on the crowd, police turned to tear gas to clear the intersection, Dotson said. Those arrested face charges of impeding the flow of traffic and resisting arrest, he said.

In addition to the arrests, officers responded to reports of burglaries in the area and the fire department was called after a car was set ablaze, according to Dotson.

The chief blamed the crimes on people seeking ""notoriety"" in a neighborhood ""plagued by violence."" Dotson added that police would release video showing that officers gave multiple orders to clear the street and repeatedly warned that the tear gas would be used.

The latest shooting came with tensions already high in the area after violence erupted during several events earlier this month marking the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old fatally shot last year by a police officer in nearby Ferguson.

Dotson said two police officers serving a search warrant Wednesday afternoon at a home in a crime-troubled section of the city's north side encountered two suspects, one of which was 18-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey. The suspects were fleeing the home as Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him, the chief said. Ball-Bey died at the scene.

Both officers, who are white, were unharmed, according to a police report.

Dotson said four guns, including the handgun wielded by Ball-Bey, and crack cocaine were recovered at or near the home, which last year yielded illegal guns during a police search. Police are searching for the second suspect, who they said is believed to be in his mid-to-late teens.

A man and woman who were also inside the home were arrested, Dotson said.

Police obtained the search warrant because they believed the home harbored suspects in other crimes, Dotson said. He didn't specify which crimes, but noted that a killing happened on the same street Monday and a nearby market just was riddled by bullets.

That area also is near where a 93-year-old veteran who was part of the Tuskegee Airmen -- black World War II pilots -- was the victim of crimes twice within a few minutes Sunday, being robbed and then having his car stolen. The veteran was unhurt, and his car was found Tuesday blocks from where it was taken.

Roughly 150 people gathered Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the shooting, questioning the use of deadly force. Some chanted ""Black Lives Matter,"" a mantra used after Brown's death. As police removed their yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, dozens of people converged on the home's front yard, many chanting insults and gesturing obscenely at officers. Several onlookers surrounded individual officers, yelling at them.

""Another youth down by the hands of police,"" Dex Dockett, 42, who lives nearby, told a reporter. ""What could have been done different to de-escalate rather than escalate? They (police) come in with an us-against-them mentality. You've got to have the right kind of cops to engage in these types of neighborhoods.""

Another neighborhood resident, Fred Price, said he was skeptical about Dotson's account that the suspect pointed a gun at officers before being mortally wounded.

""They provoked the situation,"" Price, 33, said. ""Situations like this make us want to keep the police out of the neighborhood. They're shooting first, then asking questions.""

Some of those who protested Ball-Bey's death had already spent the morning in downtown St. Louis, marching to mark the anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Kajieme Powell. He was fatally shot by two St. Louis officers after police said he approached them with a knife. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce is still reviewing the case to determine whether lethal force was justified.

Protests have become a familiar scene across the St. Louis region since Brown, who was black and unarmed, was fatally shot by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Justice Department declined to charge Wilson, who resigned in November.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"A day after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, authorities are trying to figure out why a couple would embark on a deadly killing spree.

Was it workplace violence or Islamic-inspired terrorism or both that left 14 people dead and more than a dozen injured?

Late Wednesday night, police announced that 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik were the two lone assailants in the mass shooting.

The husband and wife team were clearly ready for a battle with police. An ATF spokesman said the couple was wearing military tactical-style clothing loaded with ammunition for a gunfight.

So far, the FBI has not ruled out terrorism as a motive in these tragic shootings. CBN News Terrorism Analyst Erick Stakelbeck shares his perspective. Click play to watch.

""We are pretty comfortable that the two shooters that we believe went into the building are the two shooters that are deceased up on San Bernardino Avenue,"" San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said.

Farook, an American citizen, had been a San Bernardino County employee for five years. His father told the Daily News that ""he was very religious.""

""He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He's a Muslim,"" Farook's father said.

On Wednesday morning, Farook and his wife reportedly dropped off their 6-month-old daughter with grandparents. Farook then went to a Christmas party for employees of the Public Health Department at the Inland Regional Center.

""He did leave the party early under some circumstances that were described as angry or something of that nature,"" Burguan said.

Around 11 a.m. local time, Farook returned to the celebrations with his wife Malik dressed in matching assault-style military fatigues and body armor and started shooting.

""Based upon what we have seen, and based upon how they were equipped, there had to be some degree of planning that went into this,"" Burguan speculated.

""So I don't think they just ran home, put on these types of tactical clothes, grabbed guns and came back on a spur-of-the-moment thing,"" he said.

Police Chief Burguan said the attack lasted ""only minutes."" But in that short period of time, the couple managed to kill 14 people and injured 17 others.

Fox News says authorities found multiple pipe bombs and other explosive devices at various locations, including three devices at the scene of the attack.

The couple was later killed by police in a shoot-out several hours after the incident.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Farook reportedly took a trip to Saudi Arabia and returned with his new wife that he apparently met online.

Speaking to reporters late Wednesday night, Farook's brother-in-law Farhan Khan expressed his grief over the tragedy.

""I just cannot express how sad I am for what happened today. I mean, my condolences to the people that lost their lives,"" he said.

Wednesday's attack was the deadliest mass shooting since Sandy Hook. President Barack Obama and some Democratic leaders immediately called for stricter gun controls.

Meanwhile, the New York Daily News ran with the controversial title ""God Isn't Fixing This"" on their front page.

The story criticized Republican presidential candidates for ""preaching about prayer"" while being silent about gun control. The paper's front page quickly became a hot item on Twitter. California already has strict gun control laws.

Meanwhile, the search for a motive continues.",REAL
"I’ll be honest: I don’t like Hillary Clinton. Personally, there’s plenty to admire about the former secretary of state: She’s incredibly bright, broadly experienced, and undeniably competent. Politically, though, she represents a broken system, a system of capitulation and obfuscation. There’s no point in denying that.

I don’t consider myself a Democrat, though I vote for Democats almost without exception. Gore Vidal once said that “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party – and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.” I tend to agree with that, now more than ever. And I suspect most people of the left do as well.

I’ve felt the Bern for months, and I’ve felt it publicly. If you’ve read any of my pieces on Sanders and Clinton, you know exactly where I stand. Bernie is the most authentic politician I’ve encountered – at any level of government. I had no illusions about his prospects of winning this race; it was always a long shot. Nor was I confused about Sanders’ ability to change government if he was miraculously elected. Everything about our system is resistant to change.

A Sanders administration would doubtless have been a disappointment for progressives, given the systemic constraints. But a Sanders presidency would have been an enormous achievement, a signal of sorts. His campaign, win or lose, is itself a muted miracle, and a reason for optimism. We now know a genuinely progressive movement is possible in this country.

But here’s the truth: Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. Primary voters should still express their will and vote for Bernie so long as they can, and Sanders should campaign until the convention, but this race is effectively over. The math is clear. Yes, Sanders is in a comparable position to Obama during the 2008 race, but this isn’t 2008, and he doesn’t have nearly the institutional support that Obama had. Progressives don’t want to hear that, and I get it – I really do. But it’s true nevertheless. To win, Sanders would need to secure roughly 72 percent of the remaining delegates, with paltry support among crucial demographics, demographics that catapulted Obama past Clinton in 2008. It’s not going to happen. And even when Sanders has won primaries or caucuses, he hasn’t won by large enough margins to alter the delegate math.

That leaves us with a regrettable – but near-certain – choice in November: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

If that’s how it unfolds, I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. This really isn’t a choice at all. Trump is a leering huckster, a first-rate con artist peddling hate to dunces. A Trump presidency would be a victory for every noxious and regressive force in our body politic. We also have no idea who he is or what he would do in office – that’s positively terrifying.

Despite the hand-wringing among progressives, President Obama moved the country forward. His triumphs were slow-going and piecemeal, but that’s his way – and it worked. The unemployment rate is 4.9 percent; 13.7 million new jobs have been added over the last 69 months; more Americans have health insurance coverage than ever; same-sex marriage has been legalized; the American auto industry was rescued from oblivion; two liberal seats on the Supreme Court were protected; U.S.-Cuba relations have opened up; we have a peaceful nuclear deal with Iran; we’re gradually shifting away from our reliance on fossil fuels; and the country has enjoyed eight years of a dignified, scandal-free administration.

Hillary Clinton, if nothing else, will preserve this progress. She isn’t leading a “revolution” and she’s not going to usurp Wall Street’s power – everyone understands that. But neither will Trump. Worse still, there’s no reason to suppose Trump can do the job. He has no experience, no platform, no ideas, and no respect for the office. He can’t be trusted on anything of import to progressives. When you consider what’s at stake, no one on the left should prefer Trump to Clinton – this a point that Sanders himself concedes, and it’s why he’ll surely endorse Clinton if she is in fact the nominee.

A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll found that a third of Sanders’ supporters said they wouldn’t vote for Clinton if she becomes the Democratic nominee. I don’t believe that will hold, but consider for a second what might happen if it does. To begin with, it would likely hand the White House to Donald Trump. Even if you reject Clinton’s positions on foreign policy and a host of domestic issues, as I do, she is still preferable to Trump. And if you’re a progressive, the fact remains: Clinton reflects your values far more than Trump. If you care about the Supreme Court, which is a conservative judge or two away from denying women autonomy over their own bodies, the choice is obvious. If you care about raising the minimum wage or reforming the criminal justice system or addressing climate change or protecting voting rights, the choice is equally obvious. Our democracy, such as it is, can sustain a competent Clinton administration. Nothing much will change, but it won’t descend into chaos either. Progressives will have to wait for an Elizabeth Warren or some other candidate to emerge. In the meantime, though, we’re staring a potential Trump administration in the face. No one knows what the hell Trump is. He’s practically an abstraction. What we know is that he’s uncorked all the racial and cultural bile this country has to offer, and he’s threatening to dump it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He must be stopped. Sanders has proven that Democratic voters – and the country more generally – will respond to a FDR-style populist, someone unafraid to say what we all know about our corporate oligarchy. Clinton isn’t that candidate, but she will hold the line far better than Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Sanders gave birth to a progressive revolt in this country, and he moved the Democratic Party to the left. It falls to his supporters to continue that movement beyond this campaign, to keep the pressure on Clinton and other elected officials. In November, however, there will be two names on that ballot, and one is infinitely better than the other. That’s the reality, unpleasant though it is. All the grumbling about voting against a candidate rather than for one, or about the dolefulness of choosing the lesser of two evils, is perfectly understandable – but it doesn’t change a thing. Politics is often about what’s possible, not what’s ideal, and this November is no different. Trump is a combustible menace; don’t think for one second that he can’t win a general election. He absolutely can win, and Sanders supporters staying home in protest will make it all the more likely. If that happens, our country becomes an international punch-line, the progressive movement dies in its infancy, and much of what Obama has accomplished will be put in jeopardy. And if none of that persuades you, recall what happened in 2000. Make no mistake: Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidency that year. Al Gore was a deeply flawed candidate, but imagine how different the world might look had he won that year. If the “Bernie or bust” crowd has its way in November, what might we say about Clinton 10 years from now? And how much damage – real and symbolic – will Donald Trump or Ted Cruz have done? Think about that before you surrender to your purism.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) The top United States commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan told Congress he has provided his chain of command with options for the drawdown of troops this year that would give both U.S. and Afghan leaders flexibility as the security situation evolves on the ground.

While the United States has close to 10,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan following the end of combat operations at the beginning of the year, the Obama administration has already announced plans to draw that number down to 5,500 by the end of this year.

Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday his recommendations deal with both the ""glide slope"" and ""locations"" for where to make withdrawals as the summer fighting season in Afghanistan gets underway.

""I have provided options on adjusting our force posture through my chain of command,"" Campbell said, adding that he ""absolutely"" favored the options without elaborating on their specificity.

""I think I provide some options both for [Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani and for my senior leadership here to take a look at what would allow us the flexibility to continue to get after the [Train, Advise and Assist] mission and the [Counterterrorism] mission"" in Afghanistan, he said.

There are currently 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and an additional 3,000 from other NATO partner nations.

Campbell told the committee he was ""concerned"" about the coming summer season, when fighting with the Taliban typically reaches its highest levels, because it will be the first fighting season for Afghan forces on their own without the assistance of coalition assistance.

""We're doing everything right now in the winter campaign to get them ready to do that,"" he said, in reference to the ongoing training and advising mission.

Many Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have voiced their concern over both the pace, and specific time frame, laid out by the Obama administration for the additional drawdown of U.S. troops. Some are drawing parallels to the quick removal of U.S. forces in Iraq at the end of 2011, and the deteriorating condition that followed.

""A lack of presence creates a vacuum, and we've seen what fills that vacuum in Syria and Iraq,"" Sen. John McCain, chairman of the committee, said in his remarks. ""The ungoverned spaces will allow terrorists to foment the same disaster in Afghanistan as we have seen in Iraq -- growing instability, terrorist safe havens and direct threats to the United States.""

And as the drawdown of the U.S. presence envisions an eventual consolidation of the U.S. footprint to Kabul, and the American embassy there, McCain says Afghan officials have also voiced concern over the strategy.

""A group of us met with President Ghani over the weekend, and he was very strong and adamant that this current plan will put the nation in danger. And I hope that our leadership will pay attention to him,"" McCain said.

Beyond Kabul and Bagram, where the American presence in Afghanistan is largest, the U.S. still maintains tactical advise and assist teams in Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Gamberi. When the U.S. draws down to the final numbers in the current plan, the presence will be restricted mostly to Kabul.

""The Taliban don't have the D-30 howitzers, they don't have the unarmored Humvees, they don't have the MI-17s, they don't have the intel fusion,"" Campbell said, voicing confidence that with continued training and good leadership, the Afghan security forces would be able to keep the country stable.

Senators also expressed concern about ISIS gaining ground in Afghanistan, especially following a U.S. drone strike earlier this week that killed a senior Taliban commander who has also expressed fealty to ISIS.

""You do have some of the Taliban breaking off and claiming allegiance toward ISIS,"" Campbell said, attributing it partly to a feeling of disenfranchisement on the parts of some Taliban members who may be looking to use ISIS tactics as a way to exploit media attention.

""It is a concern to President Ghani, therefore, a concern to me,"" he said. ""But we continue to work that with our Afghan partners and to make sure that we understand where this is going inside of Afghanistan and Pakistan.""

Campbell called the ISIS presence in Afghanistan ""nascent"" but said their presence represents ""more of a rebranding of a few marginalized Taliban, but we're still taking this potential threat, with its dangerous rhetoric and ideology, very, very seriously.""",REAL
"By Rmuse on Thu, Oct 27th, 2016 at 10:36 am To avoid climate-ending global temperature rise, it is critical for the world to transition off fossil fuels and embrace renewable, clean energy sources. Share on Twitter Print This Post *The following is an opinion column by R Muse* 
Over the past few months, there has been a dearth of good news, and if there did happen to be anything good to report it was overshadowed by the national clown show that is a typical American election. Where there has not been one iota of good news is on climate change. Even dismissing the horrible flooding, wildfires, droughts, sea level rise, melting ice caps, hurricanes and worldwide food shortages, there have only been dire reports on the level of CO2 permeating the atmosphere and the subsequent yearly record-setting rise in global temperatures. 
This week, while most Americans were living, breathing and bleeding over Donald Trump and the tortuously-long presidential campaign, the International Energy Agency offered up some good news; for the climate, the Earth’s population, and even for America. 
The good news for the planet came in the form of an announcement on Tuesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that stated according to new data, for the first time “Renewable energy sources have passed coal as the largest new source of electricity in the world.” 
It may not seem like such fantastic news, but climate scientists the world over have warned that if human beings are going to avoid that climate-ending 2-degree C rise in global temperatures, it is critical for the world to transition off of carbon-producing fossil fuels and embrace renewable, clean energy generating sources. This is particularly true for getting off dirty coal-fired electrical generation plants that are responsible for a quarter of America’s C02 emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions are one of the main culprits contributing to climate change driven by global warming. 
The IEA report revealed that solar and wind account for nearly two-thirds of current renewable energy growth and interestingly those increases are occurring in, and coming from, developing and industrialized nations alike. For a developing nation, it makes perfect sense to embrace cheaper renewable energy as opposed to any fossil fuel-generated power sources whether they are dirty coal-fired plants or not-quite-as-dirty natural gas-burning generating plants. 
The IEA also revised its earlier projections for renewable energy’s continued expansion and growth and “ significantly increased” the amount of “ green energy ” it expects to “ come on line ” over the next five years. Renewable energy includes so-called “green” sources such as biomass, biogas, eligible biomass and small hydroelectric sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both terms, “renewable and green energy,” include solar and wind generating sources and depending on the context they can be interchangeable. 
In addition to pro-renewable policies (such as the Paris climate agreement and to a lesser extent the America-China deal to roll back coal-generated emissions, there has been a significant price decline that is helping drive the growth in renewables; particularly in solar. And, the IEA projected that the worldwide costs for solar-generated power will continue declining by an additional 25 percent over the next five years. Onshore wind generated electricity costs will drop by at least another 15 percent during that same five-year period. 
Although the IEA report was incredibly good news for the entire planet, there was some extra good news in the report about America’s transition to renewable energy. According to the IEA’s Medium-Term Renewable Market Report, the United States is adding renewables at a faster rate than demand is growing. What that means for the climate is that renewables are not only covering the ever-increasing demand for electricity but are now supplanting some fossil fuel electricity. Still, America has a long way to go because wind and solar generating sources make up a small portion of America’s electricity. 
In time and if the Koch brothers allow it, America may catch up to still-developing nations where renewable energy accounts for about half of new electric power sources. Industrialization is fueling a rapid increase in demand for electricity that is best generated with cheaper renewable energy. 
Although there appears to be no down-side in this bit of good news, the growth of renewable energy does have economic implications. The dirty coal industry is facing some struggles in part due to the glut of oil and lower national gas prices, financial mismanagement, and new clean-air regulations, but the amount of CO2 driving climate change is a testament that they have had a good long reign in providing dirty fuel to generate electricity. It is noteworthy that as coal jobs may be declining the solar industry is growing and thriving to more than take up the slack in any lost coal jobs. 
The IEA couldn’t pass up the chance to note one “sticking point” in their otherwise encouraging report; “ persistent challenges of heating and transportation energy ” that renewables are not affecting. However, since the IEA only monitored and tracked the world’s transistor from oil and gas to biofuels, they note that as electric and hybrid vehicles continue to increase around the world, they will be connected to the same electrical grid that is steadily getting a little greener, significantly cheaper, and one Hell of a lot more friendly for the climate and the people. 
It is a mystery how Republicans beholden to the Koch brothers and dirty fossil fuel industry, particularly the dirty coal industry, will absorb this good news. In the past eight years, Republicans , the Kochs, their lobbyists at the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have made killing renewable energy one of their primary goals. It is likely that the IEA’s report will signal they are not winning the war on renewable energy and in the past that may have been worrisome. But now that more Americans are benefitting from renewable energy, particularly solar, Republicans will have a difficult time convincing them to stop getting free electricity from the Sun and saving the climate for their children’s future; something the IEA’s report never mentions. 
image: J Pat Carter",FAKE
"The National Rifle Association, the all-powerful guardian of Americans' gun rights and driving force of America's pro-gun policies, is arguably more influential than ever.

It has largely dominated and pretty much won the modern-day gun-control war. It has wielded its dollars and political influence over lawmakers in both parties to ensure Congress doesn't pass even a limited (and polls show, popular) expansion of gun-control laws such as universal background checks. And it has withstood the charge even as the country deals with an average mass shooting a day in 2015.

It's now safe to say the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations of all time. And according to the latest Pew Research poll, Republicans are overwhelming in favor of that.

The survey taken July 14-20 on gun rights found that just 13 percent of Republicans think the NRA has too much influence.

And that's actually down -- significantly -- from 2000, when 32 percent of Republicans (one in three!) thought the NRA had too much sway.

As you can see from the chart above, Democrats disagree with Republicans on the NRA wholeheartedly. And they are moving in the other direction.

That partisan split could provide a hint as to why Republicans are so united today behind the NRA. Some of America's biggest social-issue shifts have been driven by motives other than ideology; young people regardless of party have buoyed America's increasing tolerance of same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, for example.

Gun rights, by contrast, have magnetized Americans toward the political poles. So Republicans might be naturally lining up with the more conservative factions in their party on everything from gun rights to immigration.

[The sad reality of how we feel about mass shootings, in 3 charts]

But Republicans also have a fairly complex relationship with gun laws. And in fact, the shift described above might undersell it.

Witness their changes over time on the idea of protecting gun ownership versus controlling it. Republicans' lines are much squigglier than Democrats. But the trend among Republicans since 2008 is clear as day: gun rights over gun control. What was an even split seven years ago is now a 3-to-1 edge in favor of gun rights.

What's more, Republicans are arguably at odds with the NRA on several basic issues, such as whether to expand background checks (according to Pew, 79 percent of Republicans say yes; the NRA says no) and to expand laws keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill (79 percent of Republicans say yes; the NRA says we should focus on treating mental health issues instead).

For a deeper explanation of Republicans' position on the NRA, we should go back to when the organization was last under attack: the Clinton years. Gun laws were a major issue for Bill Clinton, and at the time, Pew writes, his campaign to limit the NRA's influence had broad support.

Clinton spent a lot of political capital to actually pass legislation limiting gun rights -- something no president has done since. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Bill requiring federal background checks for purchases from federally licensed gun dealers. One year later, Clinton signed into law a crime bill that included a ban on assault weapons.

Gun-control supporters paid a significant political price for his success. The NRA mobilized its members -- who studies have shown to be more politically active than gun-control-supporting proponents -- and in 1994 ousted many Congress members who voted for the two bills.

It seems Republicans have been coalescing in greater numbers around the NRA ever since -- though particularly in the Obama years -- partly driven by our country's increased political polarization.

As this latest survey on gun rights shows, in the gun debate, the NRA is still king.",REAL
"To watch the video of photographer Tim Tai getting pushed around by a turf-protecting scrum of protesters at the University of Missouri is to experience constitutional angst.

“You don’t have a right to take our photos,” said one protester at the university’s Mel Carnahan Quadrangle following the news that University system President Tim Wolfe and chancellor R. Bowen Loftin would resign amid an uproar about racial issues on campus.

“I do have the right to take photos,” replied Tai, a 20-year-old senior at the university who was shooting the proceedings on Monday on assignment for ESPN.com. A former staff photographer for the Columbia Missourian, Tai was forced by circumstances to double-task as he attempted to take photographs and provide civics lessons.

Following the announcement of the resignations, Tai chronicled a celebration including the protest group Concerned Student 1950. After 10 minutes or so of jubilation, said Tai in an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, protesters decided that it was time to push the media away from an encampment of tents on the quad’s lawn. ” ‘Media, get off the grass,’ ” said the organizers, as Tai recalls.

Yet he wasn’t backing up. He wanted some good shots of the tents, and that’s where the trouble started.

“You’re an unethical reporter; you do not respect our space.”

Those were just a few of the taunts that Tai received as he attempted to do his work. His references to a certain founding document persuaded precisely none of his opponents. “Ma’am, the First Amendment protects your right to be here and mine,” he said. At one point, Tai tangled with a protester about the absence of any law proscribing his presence on this disputed grass. “Forget a law — how about humanity?” protested the protester.

So much for the ideal of the American collegiate quad as a locus of tolerance and free expression. Time to usher in a new ethic of intimidation, a twist that carries some irony at the Columbia, Mo., campus. Back in February 1987, 58 protesters seeking the university’s divestiture from companies that do business in South Africa were arrested for trespassing on the quad. They were dropped in all cases but one, who secured an acquittal on the grounds that the quad was a highly public space.

“The people who were trying to impede the photographer, in effect, were trying to impede his rights to be there,” says Sandy Davidson, a curators’ teaching professor at the University of Missouri school of journalism. Nor was Tai intent on peering into the tents with his lenses. “I was not trying to get into the tents,” says Tai. “I wanted a picture of the tents, placing it in the quad … because that’s part of the story.” Regarding the restraint that the protesters were demanding, Tai felt this wasn’t the time. “I think … there are times when it’s best for photographers to put their camera down,” he says. However: “In this situation, this was national news, breaking news … at a public university and the students involved have become public figures.”

Upon checking his photos, Tai realized that the obstruction worked. “They didn’t turn out well because all the hands were in the way, and you know …,” he says. Were he to be given a redo, he’d likely just move to another spot. “At the moment, I felt I had to stand up for being there,” he says.

Tom Warhover, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, said the Tai video aligns with recent events. “The protesters all week have asked people kind of to stay out of the tent area proper, if you will, and so we’ve had many confrontations because it is a public space and … other students have a right to be there,” says Warhover, who approves of how Tai carried himself: “I’m pretty proud of Tim’s actions, both standing up for himself and his job but doing it in a way that didn’t provoke.” Through his travels, Tai has learned that on one hand, the protesters “want to protect idea of privacy and protect a safe space where not they’re not overwhelmed with the attention. On the other hand, they want to control the narrative themselves because they feel the media has not treated minority or black stories accurately.”

There’s no excuse for protesters to push a photographer in a public square; there’s no excuse for protesters to appeal for respect while failing to respect; there’s no excuse for protesters to dis the same rights that allow them to do their thing.

And there’s even less excuse for faculty and staff members at the University of Missouri to engage in some of this very same behavior. In his chat with this blog, Tai cited the involvement of Richard J. “Chip” Callahan, professor and chair of religious studies at the university. In the opening moments of the video, Callahan faces off with Tai over whether the photographer can push to get any closer to the tents. “I’m not gonna push them,” says Tai.

Moments later, the protesters resolve to throw up their hands (literally) to show Tai who owns this public roost. Callahan participates in this collective action. As Tai swivels his camera from place to place, Callahan shuffles to block the sight paths. Behold these screenshots:

Callahan, after moving a bit to the left and holding up his hands.

Callahan again, after moving to the right with hands aloft. The religious studies prof paired agility drills with his censorship.

A source with access to Callahan’s tweets (they’re “protected“) passes along these screenshots to yield some insight on his views regarding the media and the protests at the university:

Callahan didn’t respond to e-mails and phone calls. The university’s media office said it has no comment at this point on the staffers. Not only did Tai identify Callahan as the person at the start of the video, but so did Peter Legrand, a graduate who took courses from Callahan.

At the 2:00 minute mark in the above video, Janna Basler, the university’s assistant director of Greek life and leadership, adds her own thuggish sensibilities to the mix: “Sir, I am sorry, these are people too. You need to back off. Back off, go!” In her showdown with Tai, Basler lays bare how little she knows about photography. As they tussle about a woman with whom Tai had just finished arguing, Basler says, “She gets to decide whether she’s going to talk to you or not.”

Tai responds like someone who’s interested in securing images, not quotes: “I don’t want her to talk to me,” he says as Basler gets in his face. When Tai asks her whether she’s with the office of Greek life, Basler responds, “No, my name is Concerned Student of 1950.”

And the video ends with assistant professor of communication Melissa Click essentially threatening a journalist: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here.”

These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.

UPDATE: The university’s journalism school dean has released a statement reading, in part, as follows:",REAL
"Let's pretend for a moment that the biggest headlines out of Sunday night's presidential debate had nothing to do with sexual assault allegations, or non-handshakes, or threats to jail political opponents—but instead were about policy. In that bizarre alternative universe, what could we actually learn?

That the two exhausted political parties have nothing much left to offer except critiques about how lousy the other one is.

Hosted by Matt Welch; camera and editing by Jim Epstein.

Like us on Facebook.

Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.",REAL
"Meteor, space junk, rocket? Mysterious flash hits Siberia 'It was as bright as day for 5 or 6 seconds! Sensation!' Published: 29 mins ago 
(Russia Today) People in eastern Siberia have been left mystified by a flash that illuminated the sky with green light, resembling the famous Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. The event has become a hot topic for discussion, with people suggesting the flash could have been anything from a meteor to space junk or even a rocket. 
The phenomenon was observed by residents of Irkutsk Region and Buryatia Republic in eastern Siberia on Tuesday, local media reported. 
According to local witnesses, the sky was illuminated by a green light, before an object resembling a comet fell from the sky. Some locals claimed that the object was moving towards Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth.",FAKE
"The Senate map is the Democrats’ friend in the 2016 cycle. They are defending only 10 seats, while Republicans have two dozen to hold. But wait, it gets better. Seven of those 24 Republican seats are in states that President Obama won not once but twice: Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

To win the majority, Democrats need to win five of those seven seats in November 2016. (If Hillary Clinton, or another Democrat, wins the White House in 2016, then Senate Democrats need to win only four of those seven.) That’s the exact path Republicans took to the Senate majority in 2014 when, needing a six-seat gain, they won all six of the Democratic-held seats — Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia — that Mitt Romney carried in 2012. (Republicans also won two states — Iowa and Colorado — that Obama carried twice, and one — North Carolina — that Obama won in 2008 and Romney won in 2012.)

Of course, 2014 was a historically good year for Senate Republicans. The last time the party won more than nine seats in a midterm election was 1994, when it scored 10. Prior to 1994, you have to go back to 1946, when Republicans netted 12 seats.

And while the map looks great for Democrats on paper, several of those seven races look less rosy in reality. Iowa is a tough Democratic pickup unless Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) decides to retire, which he insists he isn’t going to do. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman (R) is a gifted politician and fundraiser, while the Democratic bench in the state is decidedly thin. The Democratic fields in New Hampshire, Florida and Illinois are still quite muddled. And neither Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) nor Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) are political dead men walking.

There are also two genuinely vulnerable Democrats — Sens. Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Michael F. Bennet (Colo.) — on the ballot in 2016.

Still, as the 2014 election revealed, the map and the math are huge factors in the battle for the Senate. Both are on Democrats’ side this time around.

Below are the 10 most competitive Senate contests on the ballot in 2016. The No. 1­-ranked race is the most likely to switch parties in 2016.

10. Kentucky (Republican-controlled). Sen. Rand Paul (R) is staffing, as expected, for a presidential run next year. Paul still has to figure out how he’s going to run for president and hold his Senate seat if that former race doesn’t work out. His opponent in that effort could be none other than 2014 Senate nominee Alison Lundergan Grimes, given her role as Kentucky’s chief elections officer.

9. Ohio (R). This may be the swing state at the presidential level. But Portman isn’t seen as particularly vulnerable in 2016. A lot of that is because he banked $5.8 million by the end of 2014. Another big reason is that Democrats have a slim bench in Ohio. Among the names mentioned are Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, former governor Ted Strickland, former congresswoman Betty Sutton and Rep. Tim Ryan.

8. Florida (R). Whither Marco Rubio? The Florida senator could be the odd man out in the presidential race, with fellow Floridian Jeb Bush and other establishment-friendly candidates such as Mitt Romney and Chris Christie in the mix. Consider this: Rubio is just 43 years old, and he’s got his 2016 reelection campaign to worry about. Perhaps it’s better to focus on staying in the Senate and waiting for the next opportunity.

7. New Hampshire (R). The question here is what Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) does. Democrats think there’s a decent chance she will run against Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R), but a New England College poll showed Ayotte leading that matchup by five points.

6. Colorado (Democratic-controlled). No one thought Bennet would even be in the Senate in 2016. After being appointed as an unknown in 2009, he ran a perfect campaign in 2010 and benefited from the fact that his Republican opponent was, well, not very good. Given Colorado’s swinginess, Bennet will be a major Republican target again. But whom will Republicans put forward? Rep. Mike Coffman and newly elected state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman are mentioned — they’re married — as is Rep. Scott R. Tipton.

5. North Carolina (R). Sen. Richard Burr (R) isn’t doing much to inspire confidence in Republicans about his future plans. His fundraising is weak — $720,000 on hand as of the end of September — and rumors continue to swirl about him not running again in 2016. (Burr has said he plans to run.) If Democrats can persuade former senator Kay Hagan (D) to run, this race moves up on our rankings. But even if they don’t, it’s hard to see this not being a very competitive race in a presidential year.

4. Pennsylvania (R). Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) was once the Democrats’ dream opponent for Toomey. She now faces potential criminal charges for allegedly violating the secrecy of a grand jury. The Democratic establishment does not want 2010 nominee and former congressman Joe Sestak as its nominee, but Sestak is pretty gung-ho about running again.

3. Illinois (R). State Attorney General Lisa Madigan is the Democrats’ first choice to take on Sen. Mark Kirk (R). But she has passed up so many winnable races for higher office that it’s hard to see why she would run this time. If not Madigan, then Democrats will turn to Rep. Tammy Duckworth or Rep. Bill Foster. Kirk is an excellent fundraiser and knows the seriousness of the challenge he faces. Much depends on the top of the ticket; if the Democratic presidential nominee wins Illinois by 15 points (Obama carried it by 17 points), then it’s hard to see a path to victory for Kirk.

2. Nevada (D). Reid got knocked down — hard — while working out at his home in Nevada. He got so banged up that he missed the first days of Congress and might not regain vision in his right eye. He said it won’t affect his reelection decision. The bigger question is what Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) does. Does he wait for Reid to decide whether to seek reelection? Force his hand? This is a big question in a race Republicans would love to win to stem possible losses elsewhere. Meanwhile, former lieutenant governor Brian Krolicki, who blames Reid for a 2008 indictment that Krolicki later beat, is considering running.

1. Wisconsin (R). Johnson seems unaware that he won a Democratic-leaning (at the federal level) state in 2010. He had the ninth most conservative record in the Senate, according to National Journal’s 2013 vote ratings. Democrats are banking on former senator Russell Feingold, who lost to Johnson in 2010, running for his old seat. If Feingold does run, he’ll have to put forth a much better campaign than he did five years ago. If he doesn’t, expect Rep. Ron Kind, who has been itching to run statewide for as long as we can remember, to leap into the race.",REAL
"There's a creeping anxiety in the halls of some American progressive groups — especially those aligned with labor unions and economic populism — that Donald Trump might be almost too weak a nominee, from their point of view. The worry is that he's so vulnerable that he'll tempt Hillary Clinton to run a campaign that is as anodyne as possible on policy, focused almost exclusively on Trump's personality and lack of qualifications, aiming for a landslide win that would carry no mandate.

David Frum, writing in the Atlantic from the point of view of a center-right Republican dissident, offers the opposite worry. He says Clinton faces a ""danger that neither Johnson nor Nixon had to face"" in 1964 or 1972 — the danger of a divided party that will tempt her to hew to the left to keep Bernie Sanders's supporters on board.

He cites LBJ's 1964 convention speech as an example of the kind of rhetoric Clinton should — but probably can't — offer:

Tonight we offer ourselves—on our record and by our platform—as a party for all Americans, an all-American party for all Americans. This prosperous people, this land of reasonable men, has no place for petty partisanship or peevish prejudice. The needs of all can never be met by parties of the few. The needs of all cannot be met by a business party or a labor party, not by a war party or a peace party, not by a southern party or a northern party. Our deeds will meet our needs only if we are served by a party which serves all our people.

The reality is that the 1964 election ought to carry the lesson that this is fundamentally a false choice. Johnson tried as hard as possible to run an anodyne campaign focused on the idea that Barry Goldwater was an unacceptable outlier whom even lifelong Republicans should reject.

This ""Confessions of a Republican"" ad that the Democrats ran is a great example of what it looked like.

But now ask yourself: What happened in 1965? Well, not only did Johnson win in a landslide but Democrats found themselves possessing historic majorities in the House and Senate. And they proceeded to enact a burst of progressive legislation in 1965-'66 that stands alongside 1933-'34 and 1861-'62 as the biggest legislative leaps forward in American history.

It's no coincidence that these three Congresses produced the biggest spurts of legislation. At the beginning of Abraham Lincoln's term in office, Southern representatives and senators (overwhelmingly Democrats) had literally walked out in order to support a violent rebellion for the purpose of entrenching slavery.

That left Republicans with giant majorities, and they used them to enact major legislation.

The Depression bequeathed FDR enormous majorities in 1933-'34, and, again, he used them. In 1964, enormous majorities were built on the combination of an economic boom, the emotions around John F. Kennedy's assassination, and Goldwater's extremism. And Johnson used them.

Another big burst of legislating happened in 2009-'10, where, again, Democrats had big majorities. Those early Obama years weren't quite as productive as the sheer numbers might have forecast because Mitch McConnell's determined use of the filibuster both reduced Democrats' effective margin in the Senate and generally slowed the pace of legislating. But a lot still got done.

This is the basic reality of the 2016 election — the amount of progressive stuff Clinton gets done is going to be driven more by the shape of Congress than by the content of her platform.

Clinton doesn't have a realistic chance of securing large Democratic majorities. The House districts are sufficiently tilted that even securing a narrow one would be a very steep uphill fight, and any Democratic majority would depend heavily on relatively moderate members holding Republican-leaning districts. But it's still the case that even a small Democratic majority reliant on moderate legislators would pass more progressive legislation — hiking the minimum wage, raising taxes, expanding Medicaid funding, etc. — than a Republican one.

Whether or not Democrats are able to secure that kind of majority is going to be a bigger driver of policy outcomes than whatever liberal causes Clinton pays lip service to.

And given the way House districts have been drawn, Democrats' hopes of securing such a majority depends on either swinging Republicans over to their side or else demoralizing Republicans and getting them to stay home altogether. Either way, it suggests that the basic LBJ pattern remains as valid in 2016 as it was in 1964: The choice between reassuring the center and laying the groundwork for policy on issues is a false one.",REAL
"Airstrikes Move To Syria, Target More Than Just ISIS

In a major escalation of the air campaign against Islamic extremist groups, the U.S. and its Arab allies jointly hit targets inside Syria for the first time.

The New York Times says, ""The intensity of the attacks struck a fierce opening blow against the jihadists of the Islamic State, scattering its forces and damaging the network of facilities it has built in Syria that helped fuel its seizure of a large part of Iraq this year.""

Besides the U.S., the Pentagon says that Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates ""participated in or supported"" operations against targets associated with the self-declared Islamic State.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki confirmed that ""we informed the Syrian regime directly of our intent to take action through our Ambassador to the United Nations (Ambassador [Samantha] Power) to the Syrian Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

At a morning Pentagon briefing, Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the Joint Chiefs director of operations, said there were three waves of attacks, and that coalition partners provided combat air patrols and conducted airstrikes as part of the final two waves.

""We warned Syria not to engage U.S. aircraft. We did not request the regime's permission. We did not coordinate our actions with the Syrian government. We did not provide advance notification to the Syrians at a military level, or give any indication of our timing on specific targets. Secretary [of State John] Kerry did not send a letter to the Syrian regime,"" Psaki said.

— The Islamic State in its Syrian headquarters of Raqqa.

— The al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front, or Jabhat al-Nusra, in northwest Syria.

— A shadowy group known as Khorasan that the U.S. says is planning an imminent attack against the United States and Western interests.

NPR's Deborah Amos tells Morning Edition that militants with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, were a major focus of the attacks. The Pentagon said the strikes ""employed 47 [Tomahawk cruise missiles] launched from USS Arleigh Burke and USS Philippine Sea operating from international waters in the Red Sea and North Arabian Gulf, as well as U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighter, remotely piloted and bomber aircraft deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of operations.""

According to Deborah: ""What is striking about this air campaign is that it was expanded to include the Nusra Front.

NPR's Tom Bowman says not much is known about the Khorasan group: ""The Pentagon says they took this action to disrupt an imminent attack plotting against the United States by this group that's made up of seasoned al-Qaida veterans. There were eight strikes around Aleppo targeting this group. [The Pentagon says] it had training camps, explosives and munitions productions facility, communications building and also command and control facilities.""

Gen. Mayville said that ""we've been watching"" Khorasan and that the group ""clearly is not focused"" on fighting the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad but instead had been ""putting down roots"" to work toward attacks on the U.S.

Mayville said in the first strike, which began about midnight Syrian time and involved mainly Tomahawk cruise missiles, the U.S. unilaterally hit Khorasan command and control in the country's northeast. The second wave employed F-22 Raptors in their first combat roles, as well as F-15s, F-16s and B-1 bombers, he said. The third and final wave against Islamic State militants in the east employed F-18 Hornets from the USS George H.W. Bush as well as ground-based F-16s, he said.

Mayville said the majority of support from Arab allies came in the third wave.

He showed journalists ""before and after"" bomb-damage assessment photos and video of various structures that had been hit.

An unnamed U.S. official tells The New York Times that the Khorasan group is led by ""Muhsin al-Fadhli, a senior Qaeda operative who, according to the State Department, was so close to [Osama] Bin Laden that he was among a small group of people who knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks before they were launched."" The Times says:

The Wall Street Journal reports: ""So far, more than a dozen airstrikes have hit Islamic State military targets and administrative buildings in Aleppo and Raqqa provinces in the north as well as al Qaeda's official arm in the country, al Nusra Front in the northwestern city of Idlib, the opposition said.""

What Are The Consequences?

Reuters quotes a resident in Raqqa as saying there is an ""exodus"" from the city in the wake of the bombardment. ""It started in the early hours of the day after the strikes. People are fleeing toward the countryside,"" the resident tells Reuters.

The participation of the partners ""gives the operation some legitimacy — more legitimacy in the region because Arab governments took part. There [are] political optics about this operation put together in Washington,"" NPR's Deborah Amos says, adding that the agreement to participate ""changes the stakes"" for the Arab partners.

The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner speculates that the Islamic State ""will be enraged by this — it has no effective military answers to US air power — so those Arab countries that supported or took part in the action may well now be bracing themselves for possible reprisals.""

The Associated Press quotes Rami Abdurrahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as saying, ""There is confirmed information that there are casualties among Islamic State group members.""

Speaking on MSNBC, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby says the U.S. ""is still assessing the effectiveness of these strikes.""

Later, Gen. Mayville said: ""Last night's strikes are the beginning of a credible and sustained campaign to destroy"" the Islamic State.",REAL
"Top congressional Republicans and Democrats say they've reached a deal to allow President Obama to negotiate trade deals subject to an up-or-down vote from Congress.

The ""fast-track"" legislation comes as Obama seeks a sweeping trade deal with 11 Pacific nations. It would renew presidential authority to present trade deals that Congress can endorse or reject, but not amend.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership proposes a trade agreement involving the United States, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico and seven other Pacific-rim nations.

Labor unions and others say the Pacific pact would hurt U.S. job growth and encourage other countries to abuse workers and the environment. The Obama administration rejects those claims, and says U.S. goods and services must have greater access to foreign buyers.

",REAL
"Pinterest 
Robert Gehl reports that of all the videos and images to come out of the Milwaukee riots, there’s one that is particularly chilling. 
The 2-minute video is apparently taken during the riots Saturday night following the shooting of a black, armed man who was reportedly a gang member. 
Moments after the shooting occurred, hundreds of rioters took to the streets, setting cars on fire and burning about a half-dozen businesses. Chants of “Black Power!” could be heard sporadically as well. But in this video, it appears an entire gang of black youth are seeking out and targeting white people to assault.
“Hey! We’re beating up every white person! Get every white person!” the cameraman says. 
When he witnesses someone being assaulted, he asks “Who they beatin’ up? Who they beaten’ up?” 
At one point, when they spot a “white person,” he screams “He white! Beat his shit! Beat!” 
The thug pans around looking for white people to assault. You can hear the crowd reacting, trying to point out white people. Again, he cries: “Hey! They beating up every white person!” Apparently he spots a homeless man. “Look at the f***in’ white bum! Look at the white bum!”
Throughout the rest of the video, there’s screams of white people as their racist hunt continues. 
Toward the end, shots ring out in the distance, startling the cameraman. “Who the f*** is shooting? Stop shooting!” Moments later, shots are fired much closer and the video ends.” 
This is the direct result of the Black Lives Matter racist, anti-police agenda and Barack Obama’s acceptance of their cause. 
This is Obama’s “ post-racial America .” Welcome to it, folks .",FAKE
"Nearly five years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, federal budget scorekeepers have sharply revised down the projected costs of the signature bill. In the latest projection, published by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Monday, the major provisions of the law will cost the government 11% less than they forecast six weeks ago, or $142 billion over the coming decade.",REAL
"Clinton’s campaign did just that this week, condemning Sanders for “trying to convince the next generation of progressives that the Democratic Party is corrupt.”

The notion that Sanders had to try to convince progressives of this in the first place is ludicrous. The warmongering, corporate-funded, pro-privatization Democratic Party leadership has long made it loud and clear that it is thoroughly corrupt and reactionary.

Yet Clinton and her supporters happen to be correct about one thing; they are just right for the wrong reasons.

Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. And this is a good thing.

What the Clinton camp appears to be incapable of understanding is that the Democratic Party is less and less popular among progressive Americans.

Since the rise of the Clintonian “New Democrat” almost three decades ago, the party has moved so far to the right it has little in common with the base it purports to represent.

President Obama campaigned on the promise of change, but, in many ways, his presidency — particularly in the first term — was George W. Bush lite.

The Obama administration barely even slapped the banks and financial elites responsible for the Great Recession on the wrist. Not a single Wall Street executive went to jail while, today, the very banks responsible pose just as much of a systemic risk as they did in 2008.

The Obama administration killed thousands of people, including an unknown number of civilians, with its secretive drone war. It expanded the war in Afghanistan — twice — dragged its feet on Guantánamo, backed a right-wing military coup that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing government and dropped 23,400 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries in 2015.

The Obama administration waged a McCarthyite crackdown on whistleblowers, using the World War I-era Espionage Act to clampdown on more than all previous presidential administrations combined, while drastically expanding the surveillance state.

This is the Democratic Party Americans have grown up with in the past nearly 30 years, since the rise of the Clintonism. And, in these same decades, wages have stagnated, poverty has increased and people have become more and more dissatisfied with the way things are.

It is true that Sanders’ social democratic politics are similar to those of New Deal Democrats. He often jokes that many of his policies were supported by President Dwight Eisenhower — a Republican in the 1950s.

Yet the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century is long gone.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has drifted more and more to the right — and taken much of the international community with it. During the Cold War, Western capitalist countries had to at least pretend to be concerned with fighting inequality and systemic discrimination. Today they no longer have to compete with an alternative.

As the Republican Party has shifted to the extreme, far-right, the Democratic Party moved along to the right with it. Instead of holding ground (shifting to the left was not even on the table), the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism.

The so-called “Third Way” paved by the Clintons is just another word for this process.

Hillary Clinton, a figure greatly admired by neoconservatives (who are overwhelmingly backing her over Trump), represents a continuation of this status quo — a status quo millions upon millions of Americans have said they refuse to tolerate anymore.

Americans are desperate for actual change, and Sanders has offered a new path. Clinton has flatly insisted that Americans cannot have basic things that much of the world takes for granted — single-payer health care, free public higher education, environmental policies that don’t rely on fossil fuel corporations that destroy the planet. Sanders says otherwise.

The Democratic Party is a party of corporate influence and military power. It is chock-full of 1 percenters, with leaders like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who shuts down public schools en masse and covers up police killings of unarmed black residents — or Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who is working to help loan sharks.

Many of the things that have been called for by Donald Trump, a fascistic demagogue, have already been implemented by the Democratic Party.

The Obama administration has deported more than 2.5 million people — more than any other president. It is sending Central American refugees fleeing violence back to where they are killed. The Obama administration is more and more heavily militarizing the border, a process that began with the Clinton administration’s passing of NAFTA. The Obama administration is discriminating against Muslims throughout society, with widespread police surveillance and entrapment, along with shadowy policies like the no-fly list. When Clinton’s campaign and her supporters implore Americans to oppose Sanders because he is not a Democrat, it is nothing more than a disingenuous appeal to authority. What they are really saying is loyalty to the Democratic Party is more important than loyalty to the left-wing ideals that it supposedly espouses. This is the textbook definition of rank opportunism. For them, being a loyal Democrat is more important than having left-wing politics. Under eight years of a Democratic presidential administration, life for the average working-class American, and particularly for the average working-class American of color, has not gotten better; it has gotten worse. The Clintons, the most powerful force in the Democratic Party, happen to embody everything that is wrong with it. It was under their leadership that the party took its most reactionary, and despicable, turn. Bill and Hillary gutted welfare and passed the anti-LGBTQ Defense of Marriage Act. Bill and Hillary advocated for neoliberal trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Bill and Hillary have made millions of dollars speaking for corporations and banks. Moreover, the Clintons are one of the most corrupt families in U.S. politics. The Clinton Foundation has been described by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein as a “so-called charitable enterprise [that] has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends.” Unlike that of the Clintons, Sanders’ record is not just consistent; it is squeaky clean. And it is consistent and squeaky clean precisely because Sanders is not an opportunist. Sanders, a longtime independent, is not a party hack. He is a principled leftist who is only running on the Democratic ticket because he knows this, at the present political moment, is the only way he could have a chance of winning. When it comes to third parties, the U.S. is an incredibly undemocratic country. Most of the world’s democracies have some kind of space for non-hegemonic parties. And in much of Europe in particular, where governments are based on parliamentary systems, third parties can play at least a small role in the political system. This is not so in the U.S., where there are countless obstacles to democracy in U.S. elections — with limited debates, closed primaries, unelected superdelegates and of course the electoral college. Sanders’ popularity proves that Americans are hungry for real left-wing politics, for the kind of left-wing politics the Democratic Party has long abandoned. The fact that a 74-year-old, bald and frankly unattractive man, a Vermont senator with a Brooklyn accent whom most Americans had never heard of until this year, has been doing so incredibly well is a testament to just how popular — and one might even say correct — his socialist ideas are. An enormous grassroots movement has been built around Sanders. This movement has exploded in very little time. It is led by the youth, particularly by young women and people of color. What we are witnessing right now is the resurgence of a new left throughout the U.S. — and throughout the world. Sanders is part of this much larger international trend, with figures like Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., or Podemos in Spain. And Sanders is aware of this. When he says “Not me, us,” he is acknowledging that the social movements around him are much more important than he is as a mere individual. The fact that he has responded to pressure from Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian solidarity movement demonstrates this. Those like Hillary Clinton, who are desperate to cling on to the old vestiges of establishment power, are not part of this new left-wing resurgence; they are in fact impediments to it. Even if Sanders does not win the primary, one of his many important accomplishments will be helping to expose to millions upon millions of Americans just how reactionary and corrupt the Democratic Party is. He should be thanked for this, not condemned.",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- While the Obama administration's decision to designate ISIS's atrocities against Christians and other minorities as ""genocide"" is important, many warn that it's only the beginning of the process.

""In my judgment Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in territory under its control,"" Kerry said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadist army.

It's a critical first step towards protecting Christians from ISIS and other Islamic radicals in Iraq and Syria.

""Every jihadist in the Middle East believes they can kill, kidnap, enslave and otherwise torture Christians and other religious minorities and they believe they can do it without repercussions,"" said Johnnie Moore, author of the book Defying ISIS.

In northern Iraq, Assyrian Christians are an ancient people descended from the first followers of Christ.

""As Assyrians of the Middle East we are on the verge of extinction,"" warned Juliana Taimoorazy, founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, an organization that raises awareness about the persecuted Church in Iraq.

Taimoorazy recently visited Telskuf in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq, where 200,000 Christians have fled from ISIS.

""The homes are destroyed when you walk inside,"" she said. ""Their closets are all broken, the beds are all overturned - the kitchens are destroyed.""

Secretary Kerry's genocide designation helps keep the plight of these Christians near the front of U.S. foreign policy.

Advocates wasted no time celebrating. They're already working with the State Department to ensure Christians are represented in Syrian peace talks and that property rights for those forced to flee their homes in Iraq are enforced.

""There are going to be borders redrawn, constitutions redrafted,"" Nina Shea, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told CBN News.

""It's absolutely essential that the Christians have a voice in this process or they will have no place in the new Syria or in the new Iraq,"" she warned.

There's already an effort to create a safe haven in the Nineveh Plains so that Christians, Yazidis and other minorities can return home, govern themselves and rebuild their lives without fear of extermination.

""If you care about the presence of Christianity, the Christian witness, in this very Gospel poor part of the world you will support the idea of a safe haven,"" Robert Nicholson, executive director of the Philos Project, told CBN News.

In spite of the horrors they've experienced at the hands of ISIS, Christians in this part of the world are experiencing a revival of their faith.

""They have told me repeatedly it's because of persecution that has been inflicted on them that they have grown closer to Christ that they find themselves praying more that they're thirsty for the Gospel more,"" Taimoorazy said.

Now the same advocates who pushed for the genocide designation are moving to keep up the pressure, hoping to ensure the Obama administration not only talks, but acts to protect those persecuted Christians and other religious minorities.

They hope to make real progress before the next administration moves into the White House.",REAL
"After watching Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, in Wednesday night’s town-hall meeting with Chris Matthews, I think maybe they should let Johnson in the debates so more of these voters could see exactly what they’re voting for. The risk is that while Johnson would reveal himself as a bizarre and ignorant man, he might just make Republican presidential nominee Trump look smart and competent by comparison.

When Johnson was interviewed on “Morning Joe” in early September he made one of the more memorable gaffes in campaign history when his answer to “What would you do about Aleppo?” was “What is Aleppo?” He didn’t recognize it as the name of the second-largest city in Syria, which has been in the headlines for months as a battleground where the government is fighting rebel forces. On Wednesday, Johnson said he took responsibility for his Aleppo gaffe, but further explained that he doesn’t believe that just because “a politician can dot the I’s and cross the T’s on some geographic location or the name of some foreign dictator, now we should believe them when it comes to these interventions.”

I’m not sure who believes that just because someone has educated herself about geography and foreign leadership that her ideas must automatically be followed. It’s just that most of us used to think that presidents should have some basic knowledge of facts before they propose policies. The campaign of 2016 has revealed that such qualifications are no longer considered a requirement for the job — at least not by the half of the electorate who claim to be voting for Trump or Johnson.

And then Johnson did it again. Matthews asked him to name his favorite foreign leader, and Johnson again drew a blank, finally admitting, “I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment.” Unfortunately, the exchange went on and on, with Matthews pushing and Johnson floundering, until Weld finally stepped in to cite Chancellor Angela Merkel as his favorite and the whole thing mercifully came to an end.

When asked by one of the fresh-faced young people in the crowd what he said to people who claim that a vote for Johnson is a wasted vote, the candidate told him, “A wasted vote is a vote for someone you don’t believe in.” Matthews came back with a quote from President Barack Obama from earlier in the day:

Johnson’s bizarre nonresponse was to say that Clinton and Trump are doing nothing about Medicare and Medicaid and that “we’re headed to bankruptcy with the size and scope of government.”

When asked about his views on climate change, Johnson rambled on about the coal industry going bankrupt and said he believes the free market is going to fix the problem. How would he make college more accessible to students, a matter central to the Democratic primary campaign and now integral to Hillary Clinton’s platform? Johnson said that the reason why college costs so much is that government-guaranteed student loans have “skewed supply and demand.” In other words, if fewer people go to college, tuition will go down.

A young woman asked if a Johnson administration would cut Planned Parenthood funds, and Johnson said he plans to submit a balanced budget in the first 100 days that would require 20 percent trims across the board. Asked about money in politics, he said he believes there should be no restrictions on campaign contributions. A young man asked him if he would consider rethinking his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and Johnson said absolutely not. He made it very clear that he intends to eliminate every trade barrier he can find. The theme that Johnson returned to over and over is that he believes in balanced budgets, cutting entitlements and reducing debt over everything else. Johnson did express the standard libertarian belief that he believes in civil liberties and gay rights, although he fudged his answer about abortion rights. He left out the fact that although he believes in a woman’s right to choose he also believes in a state’s right to take it away, with horrific consequences for women. He portrayed Hillary Clinton as a psycho who is going to start a nuclear war. When asked about it again later in the broadcast, Johnson said that would happen because Clinton refuses to be “seen as weak” and “she will shoot.” It was yet another absurd statement in a long line of them. There’s only one candidate who’s threatening to start a nuclear war and it isn’t Clinton. Many young people become attracted to libertarianism for a time after they read Ayn Rand’s novels and are exposed to the seductive lure of selfishness as a philosophy. Some stick with it for a while, or become standard Republicans as time goes on. But judging from the questions at Wednesday’s town hall event, this audience was not a bunch of Rand acolytes eager to talk about the moochers at Planned Parenthood or the parasites who want free college. With the exception of one or two questioners, most sounded like earnest progressives who may have voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders during the primary season. Johnson’s libertarianism is very, very different from  Sanders’ altruistic democratic socialism. Sanders believes that government has an affirmative duty to help people. Johnson believes that government is an impediment to the natural working of the free market. It’s overwhelmingly obvious that Clinton comes much closer to the Sanders philosophy than does Johnson. Given how close the election is in certain key states, a few protest votes could put Trump in the White House. As Sanders is telling anyone who will listen, “Before you cast a protest vote — because either Clinton or Trump will become president — think hard about it. This is not a governor’s race. It’s not a state legislative race. This is the presidency of the United States.” It’s also the future of the planet.",REAL
"Videos More Than 1 Million ‘Check In’ On Facebook To Support The Standing Rock Sioux Most of the ""visitors"" are not actually at the protest camp in North Dakota, where the tribe and its supporters are gathering to oppose the pipeline. The planned route crosses the Missouri River just upstream of the reservation, and the tribe says it could contaminate drinking water and harm sacred lands. | November 2, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! A protesters is arrested by police near the Dakota Access pipeline at a construction site in North Dakota, Oct. 22, 2016. (Photo: YouTube) 
More than 1 million people have “checked in” on Facebook to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation page , in a show of support for the tribe that has been rallying against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
Most of the “visitors” are not actually at the protest camp in North Dakota, where the tribe and its supporters are gathering to oppose the pipeline. The planned route crosses the Missouri River just upstream of the reservation, and the tribe says it could contaminate drinking water and harm sacred lands. Facebook allows people to check in to places even if they are not physically present. 
A broadly circulated rumor on social media over the weekend suggested that local police were using Facebook check-ins to track activists protesting the pipeline. 
Activists then called for supporters of the protest to check-in en masse, in a move designed to confuse police. 
“Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them,” one widely shared post said, according to The Guardian . 
It’s not clear who started the rumor, but the response was immediate. “The number of check-ins at the Standing Rock reservation page went from 140,000 to more than 870,000 by Monday afternoon,” the Guardian reports. Now, that number stands at more than 1.5 million. 
However, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a Facebook post Monday afternoon that it “does not follow Facebook check-ins for the protest camp or any location” and called the report “absolutely false.” 
The demonstration of solidarity from these Facebook users comes days after “police and National Guard troops arrested more than 140 protesters near a construction site,” Inside Energy’s Amy Sisk reported on All Things Considered . On Friday, there were reports of police using pepper spray against protesters they removed from land owned by the pipeline company, as we reported . 
Here’s more from our previous coverage: 
“Members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their supporters have been protesting the pipeline since it was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the summer . They are specifically trying to block the portion that is slated to run under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.” 
“Earlier this month, the Standing Rock Sioux lost a bid in federal court to halt construction, paving the way for work on the $3.8 billion pipeline to continue, as we’ve reported . Almost immediately afterward, three U.S. agencies ‘announced a halt to work in one area significant to the tribe.'”",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton’s camp late Sunday issued a significant clarification about the steps they say were taken to review thousands of personal emails before they were deleted, claiming her team individually read “every email” before discarding those deemed private.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill made the clarification in a written statement to Fox News. This comes after the former secretary of state’s office revealed last week that while more than 30,000 “work-related” emails were turned over to the State Department, nearly 32,000 were deemed “private” and deleted.

This admission raised questions over how her team decided to get rid of those messages. Merrill on Sunday clarified an earlier fact sheet that described some of those methods but did not say every email was read.

“We simply took for granted that reading every single email came across as the most important, fundamental and exhaustive step that was performed.  The fact sheet should have been clearer in stating that every email was read,” Merrill said.

Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, tried to tamp down the controversy over her exclusive use of personal email while secretary of state during a press conference last week. But the admission that she deleted thousands of messages, and her insistence that her personal server remain private, stirred the ire – and curiosity -- of lawmakers who want greater access to her communications as secretary and complain much of it may be gone forever.

Whether the assurance that “every email” was read before being either deleted or turned over eases those concerns remains to be seen.

“I have zero interest in looking at her personal emails,” South Carolina GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on “Fox News Sunday.” “But who gets to decide what’s personal and what’s public? And if it’s a mixed-use email, and lots of the emails we get in life are both personal and work, I just can’t trust her lawyers to make the determination that the public’s getting everything they’re entitled to.”",REAL
"Search  America's Trump supporters may be lured to Florida and walled in by US government to maintain peaceful transfer of power after election. Topics: Donald Trump , 2016 Presidential Election , presidential politics Wednesday, 26 October 2016 
A leaked transcript of a White house meeting reveals plans to lure the country's Trump Voters to Florida on election day and wall them in to help ensure the peaceful transfer of power. 
Voice #1: ""The traditional peaceful transfer of power after a presidential election, fundamental to our democracy, is in jeopardy. What happens if Trump somehow wins? Will Barrack and Hilary say they were just kidding about him being a truly dangerous unfit con artist and no hard feelings about that 5 year long race baiting Birther movement as US military leaders walk over to Trump with the nuclear codes?"" 
Voice #2: ""Trump will probably lose. Still, that doesn't guarantee a peaceful transition. Trump's already convinced a majority of his supporters the election is illegitimate if he loses. He's recruiting voting station vigilantes. Trump supporter sheriff David Clarke from Milwaukee said its time for 'pitch forks and torches. How many of Trump's gun loving hard core base might do something violent?"" 
Voice #1: ""I'm just thinking out loud, but what if we announce that to offset the rigged election, Trump negotiated a deal in which anyone that casts a Trump vote in Florida will have it counted as two votes from their home state. Then, we announce the greatest Trump rally of all time on election day in Florida; the largest NASCAR event; the largest Harley Davidson motorcycle convention, free assault rifles handed out as they cross the border..."" 
Voice #2: ""Where are you going with this?"" 
Voice #1: ""We lure hard core Trump voters in to Florida; get them packed in there; and then quickly unfurl a razor wire fence along the state's north border stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Then, we start construction of the real wall right next to it. That's a wall Mexico might be willing to pay for."" 
Voice #2: ""What about the Hillary supporters in Florida?"" 
Voice #1: ""We'd have to get them out somehow. Give them incentives to vote in South Carolina, or airlift them out of Florida after the election."" 
Voice #2: ""If it worked, it would get crowded down there in Florida."" 
Voice # 1: ""We could promise Trump supporters free housing."" 
Voice #4: ""Yes. We can put them in tent cities modeled after Syrian refugee camps."" 
Voice #1: ""I'm trying to be serious."" 
Voice #4: ""The Red Cross might pay for that tent city; just tell them we're quarantining people to stop the spread of a resurgent xenophobe epidemic."" 
Voice #2: ""What about after the election? It's not like we can just let them back in after the peaceful transfer of power. They're going to be upset for a while."" 
Voice #4: ""We could let a few of them back in every year. They'd have to go through 'extreme vetting'. As immigrants re-entering the upper 49, we'd need assurances they'd developed American values like tolerance for different religions and ethnicities."" 
Voice #1: ""We'll worry about what to do with them later. First we have to lure them down there."" 
Voice #4: ""What about appealing to Trump voter anti-elitism? We could tell them Florida universities will be shut down and demolished."" 
Voice #1: ""Not fair. A lot of Trump supporters want to send their kids to college."" 
Voice #4: ""They can go to Trump University."" 
Voice #2: ""Trump University doesn't have real academics."" 
Voice #4: ""We'll create some. We'll appoint Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson as chair of the 'Revisionist History Department.' Scholarly emphasis will be on how Obama and then secretary of state Hilary got us in to Afghanistan and Iraq and founded ISIS. Scottie Nell Hughes will head up the 'Ethics in Media' department. Rudy Giuliani can head the 'Institute for study of Giuliani's heroic role after the 9/11 attacks."" 
Voice #1: ""If you don't have anything practical to..."" 
Voice #4: ""We could say Trump supporters wearing T-shirts saying ""Hillary sucks, but not as good as Monica"", or ""Trump that Bitch,"" will get preferential seating at the rally. If they also claim to hate Muslim societies because of how awful they treat their women, they also get to meet Trump backstage."" 
Voice #2: ""One thing. If we actually do this, Marco Rubio is not getting out of Florida. And he thought that his little cowardly Trump endorsement video at the GOP convention wasn't going to haunt him."" 
Voice #1: ""What about Healthcare in post-election day Florida? People with MD degrees are mostly Hilary supporters. There won't be many doctors down there."" 
Voice #2: ""They'll have Ben Carson."" 
Voice #4: ""We could also send in Harold Bornstein, that doctor who wrote the fake Trump medical statement in 5 minutes. Bornstein can claim that everyone's health in Florida is astonishingly excellent; the best he's ever seen'. That way, nobody has to get any treatments."" 
Voice #1: ""Seriously, what about emergencies like gunshot wounds, heart attacks..."" 
Voice #4: ""Dr. Oz could hang out in emergency rooms and sell DVDs of his show."" 
Voice #2: ""How would post-election Florida be governed?"" 
Voice #4: ""Offer Vladimir Putin a governorship. Tell him he can put a few short range nuclear missals in Cuba; like ones that could only reach Tallahassee; as long as Governor Putin agrees to act with stronger leadership than the weak soft president Obama. 
And since Trump thinks the American media is so awful, Putin could help him reform Florida laws on journalists and free speech."" 
Voice #2: ""Would Florida get any federal money?"" 
Voice #4: ""Definitely would need some kind of Florida 'Trump tax'. This extra money would be used to offset the lack of taxes paid by Trump himself. The rest of the money would go to Trump's charity to fund any Trump purchases of autographed football helmets of evangelical athletes, or portraits of himself."" 
Voice #2: ""We could lure Trump voters to Florida with promises of VA reforms."" 
Voice #4: ""Yes. Then when they're walled in, we announce that POW military pensions will be cut in half because they let the country down by getting caught. We'll name it the 'Pathetic John McCain Endorsement of Trump VA Penalty."" 
Voice #2: ""Stop. What kind of real changes would draw Trump voters to Florida?"" 
Voice #1: ""We could tell them Florida will have the strictest bathroom laws; that correct gender will be checked by DNA analysis before anyone's allowed in a public bathroom."" 
Voice #4: ""Then, once their walled in, we'll project holograms of naked transsexuals standing next to every urinal and toilet."" 
Voice #1: ""We could lure them by saying how great the Florida beaches are."" 
Voice #4: ""Yes. Then, when in there we mandate a statewide program; a photo of every woman who puts on a bathing suit will be posted online with a video of Trump critiquing her body."" 
Voice #1: ""How do we get evangelical Trump supporters down there?"" 
Voice #4: ""We could say we're converting all Florida planned parenthood operations in to 'defense of marriage clinics' where homosexuals can be sent for conversion therapy. Anyone caught performing or having an abortion would be subject to the death penalty. Then, on Sundays as families enter churches, we'll play a looped audio tape of Trump bragging he can grab any woman's pussy he wants. 
Weigh stations will be set up at random pedestrian intersections. All females will be weighed. A database tracking weight gain will be publicly available. Biggest weekly gainers will be forced to exercise at a televised press conference as Trump mocks them while eating a McDonald's hamburger. 
Any Trump tweets between the hours of 3 and 5 AM will set off warning alarms in every Florida cell phone. The tweet will then be read by the phones voice robot until the user takes the battery out. 
On a 24 video channel, every Trump female voter in Florida cheated on by a male partner must explain why she enabled his infidelity. Then she must apologize to the women her partner cheated with, in case they were made to feel insulted or uncomfortable. 
I don't think it would hurt to build some David Duke statues in Florida. 1. They might increase Trump white supremacist voter presence. 2. They might remind Trump who David Duke is; in case somebody on TV asks him if he would denounce David Duke or the KKK. Ben Carson and Pastor Mark Burns can unveil the David Duke statues. 
On every female Florida drivers license, there will be a section filled in by Trump marked either 'yes' or 'no' indicating whether Trump thinks the woman is attractive enough to be groped sexually without consent. 
A memorial will be built at the site of the Orlando nightclub massacre. We'll erect a large lit up plastic trump face smiling next to a sign that reads 'Thanks for all your congratulations on me predicting this mass shooting by Obama backed Islamic radicals..."" 
Voice #1: ""I'm not sure if your kidding or not."" Make Keith Vosseller's  ",FAKE
"On Wednesday night, stories started pouring in from women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault — groping them or kissing them against their will much like Trump bragged about doing in a leaked audio recording.

But almost immediately, Trump surrogates and others started calling their stories into question because of the timing.

“These allegations are decades old,” senior Trump adviser A.J. Delgado told Chris Hayes on MSNBC. “If somebody actually did that, Chris, any reasonable woman would have come forward and said something at the time.” Delgado added that she didn’t find the women who talked to the New York Times “credible” because they reportedly support Hillary Clinton.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said he was “skeptical” about the “timing” of the allegations, even though he also insisted that he had “no reason to doubt” the stories.

“Talk about an October surprise,"" Scarborough said. ""There have been a thousand triggering events that would've made sense. If I had been sexually harassed by this man, the Megyn Kelly story would've given me an opportunity.""

But the timing of these reports really isn't suspicious at all. In fact, it's totally expected and even “reasonable,” to use Delgado’s words, when you understand how victims of sexual abuse respond to trauma and social stigma.

The three women who spoke to journalists at the New York Times or the Palm Beach Post all said they were inspired to come forward after hearing Trump deny on national television that he had done the things he described on the leaked tapes.

Natasha Stoynoff of People magazine also led off her story with the exchange from the second presidential debate, when Anderson Cooper asked Trump: “Just for the record, are you saying … that you did not actually kiss women without consent?”

This wasn’t just a “triggering” event, as Scarborough put it (although the harassment of Megyn Kelly was indeed triggering for survivors of abuse). This was Trump explicitly denying that he had done exactly the kinds of things these women say he did to them.

The New York Times reported that it was after the debate that one of the accusers, Rachel Crooks, emailed a reporter at the Times about her experience.

The other accuser who talked to the Times, Jessica Leeds, said that she started telling her story to people she knew about a year and a half ago, when it became apparent that Trump was “actually running for president.”

But as Leeds explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, watching the debate inspired her to write a letter to the editor to the New York Times to tell her story. That led staffers to contact her and reporters to interview her, which led to her story being vetted and published.

And Crooks had reportedly been talking to Times staffers about her experience before the debate — but it wasn’t until afterward that she actually agreed to go on the record.

There’s a tendency in our culture to automatically disbelieve victims of sexual abuse when they come forward. That’s especially true in high-profile cases against famous or powerful men, as we’ve seen just this year with Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes.

When an accuser’s story is called into question, the typical narrative is that she’s just seeking attention or a big payout, or that she has some other ulterior motive.

But if you’ve ever talked to actual victims of assault, or been one yourself, you know that coming forward is terrifying and intimidating on all kinds of levels, and that the costs often drastically outweigh the benefits.

As a purely practical matter, pressing charges can mean putting your life on hold for an investigation or a trial, and losing a lot of time and money as a result.

“It’s almost impossible for most women to respond effectively to sexual harassment,” said Patricia Barnes, an attorney and an expert on workplace discrimination, in an earlier interview with Vox. “Because to do so means they have to hire an attorney, they have to go through a complex legal proceeding that takes years, and it has an uncertain outcome at best and often fails.”

The potential payout is rarely worth it. If you go the civil route, the median settlement for a sexual harassment suit is $30,000. If you’re pursuing a criminal case, most accused rapists never see jail time.

Accusing a powerful man also means risking your career if he’s your boss, or even if he works in your industry. We heard stories along these lines from Roger Ailes’s alleged victims, one of whom said there was a “conspiracy of silence” around Ailes’s behavior because nobody wanted to “be personally and professionally destroyed” by Ailes.

Then there are the personal and emotional costs. Victims risk being shunned by their community if they accuse someone who is well-liked. They risk having their personal life, and especially their sex life, ruthlessly scrutinized by people who want to find reasons not to believe them.

Finally, sexual abuse causes trauma that may be too painful to relive in court, much less in public. It may take victims a long time to even admit to themselves that they were abused or victimized. Victims may simply want to “suppress” the experience, as Trump accuser Leeds put it, and move on with their lives. And victims often feel shame after their attack, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.

So it’s no surprise that many victims never report the crimes against them in the first place. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that they may only decide to come forward years later — because it takes that long to process the trauma, or to muster up the courage to put yourself through the reporting process, or to find the time to put the rest of your life on hold to pursue justice.

Leeds, who is 74 years old and says Trump assaulted her in the early 1980s on an airplane, explained that society’s attitudes at the time heavily discouraged victims from speaking out.

“The culture had instilled in us that somehow it was our fault, the attention that we received from men,” Leeds said. “That we were responsible for their behavior. You didn’t complain to the authorities, you didn’t complain to your boss. If something happened to you, you just bucked up and you went on.”

But despite the feminist advances of the intervening decades, this is still often true today.

Crooks, who said Trump forcibly kissed her outside an elevator in 2005, told the Times that the incident made her “so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”

But as Crooks’s then-boyfriend also told the Times: “I think that what was more upsetting than him kissing her was that she felt like she couldn’t do anything to him because of his position. ... I remember her saying, ‘I can’t do anything to this guy, because he’s Donald Trump.’”

Power imbalances, shame and trauma, the fear of social stigma — all of these are reasons why it often takes something big to encourage women to come forward. It might take hearing someone else break her silence publicly first, which can make it feel safer and less lonely for you to do the same.

It might take hearing that your attacker had other victims, which could make you feel morally obligated to help make sure he can’t do it again.

Or it might take seeing the question of whether your attacker committed sexual assault suddenly become a presidential campaign issue.",REAL
"« Reply #328 on: August 24, 2015, 07:35:18 PM » Didn't really think Putin was falsely fagging.. Oh well. The Assassination of Russia - FSB false flag bombings of 1999 https://youtu.be/y9cRoXgawVA In the fall of 1999, a wave of bloody apartment bombings swept through Russian cities, killing 293 people and causing widespread panic. Although blamed on the Chechen terrorists that the Russians were fighting in the Second Chechen War, FSB agents were caught planting the exact same type of bombs as in the other blasts later that month. The government claimed that the bomb was part of a security exercise and Vladimir Putin came to power as the next Russian President on the back of the terror wave later that year. http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a092299ryazanbomb#a092299ryazanbomb On the evening of September 22, 1999, several residents of an apartment block in Ryazan, a city about a hundred miles south of Moscow, observe three strangers at the entrance of their building. The two young men and a woman are carrying large sacks into the basement. The residents notice that the car’s plate has been partially covered with paper, although they can still see a Moscow license plate number underneath. They decide to call the local police. After several bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow earlier in the month (see September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999), their vigilance is understandable. When the police arrive, around 9:00 p.m., they uncover what appears to be huge bomb: three sacks of sugar filled with a granular powder, connected to a detonator and a timing device set for 5:30 a.m. The bomb squad uses a gas testing device to confirm that it is explosive material: it appears to be hexagen, the military explosive that is believed to have been used to blow up two Moscow blocks. The residents are evacuated. Then the bomb carted away and turned over to the FSB. (In an apparent oversight, the FSB fails to collect the detonator, which is photographed by the local police.) The following morning, September 23, the government announces that a terrorist attack has been averted. They praise the vigilance of the local people and the Ryazan police. Police comb the city and find the suspects’ car. A telephone operator for long-distance calls reports that she overheard a suspicious conversation: the caller said there were too many police to leave town undetected and was told, “Split up and each of you make your own way out.” To the police’s astonishment, the number called belongs to the FSB. Later this day, the massive manhunt succeeds: the suspects are arrested. But the police are again stunned when the suspects present FSB credentials. On Moscow’s orders, they are quietly released. On September 24, the government reverses itself and now says the bomb was a dummy and the whole operation an exercise to test local vigilance. The official announcement is met with disbelief and anger. Ryazan residents, thousands of whom have had to spend the previous night outdoors, are outraged; local authorities protest that they were not informed. However, the suspicion of a government provocation is not widely expressed and press coverage fades after a few days. It is only several months later that an investigation by the independent weekly Novaya Gazeta re-ignites the controversy (see February 20, 2000 and Fall 1999). The government’s explanations will fail to convince skeptics (see March 23, 2000). The Ryazan incident later becomes the main reason for suspecting the government of having orchestrated previous bombings. The controversy is then widely reported in the international press. [BBC, 9/24/1999; MOSCOW TIMES, 9/24/1999; CNN, 9/24/1999; BALTIMORE SUN, 1/14/2000; LOS ANGELES TIMES, 1/15/2000; MOSCOW TIMES, 1/18/2000; INDEPENDENT, 1/27/2000; OBSERVER, 3/12/2000; NEWSWEEK, 4/3/2000; INSIGHT, 4/17/2000; NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE, 4/30/2002; LE MONDE (PARIS), 11/17/2002; SATTER, 2003; MOSCOW TIMES, 9/24/2004]Entity Tags: Russian Federal Security Service, Novaya GazetaTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks, Complete 911 TimelineFebruary 20, 2000: Ryazan Bomb Was Real, Local Police Tell Independent NewspaperEdit event Yuri TkachenkoYuri Tkachenko [Source: Terror99.ru]In its February 14-20, 2000, issue, the Russian newsweekly Novaya Gazeta reports that Ryazan police officers insist that the bomb they uncovered and defused was real. On September 22, 1999, a bomb was discovered in the city of Ryazan, about 100 miles south of Moscow. After the chief bomb suspects were discovered to be FSB agents, the government claimed the bomb was a dummy and the incident was a training exercise (see September 22-24, 1999). But the bomb-squad officer, Yuri Tkachenko, is adamant that it was a professionally-prepared, military-style bomb. He defends the accuracy of his sophisticated gas-testing device which identified the explosives as hexogen. The article provokes much comment in Russia but is ignored by the government. [SATTER, 2003, PP. 29]Entity Tags: Novaya Gazeta, Yuri TkachenkoTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag AttacksMarch 23, 2000: Broadcast on Ryazan Incident Fails to End ControversyEdit event Alexander Zdanovich.Alexander Zdanovich. [Source: Terror99.ru]A team of FSB officials, led by Alexander Zdanovich, agrees to a televised meeting with angry and suspicious residents of Ryazan, hoping to put down rumors of a government provocation and shore up the credibility of the official account. In September 1999 a bomb was found in the basement of a building in Ryazan and the people arrested for planting the bomb were discovered to be FSB agents. The government then claimed the incident was merely a training exercise, but residents suspect the FSB wanted to bomb the building to create a fake terrorist incident (see September 22-24, 1999). Zdavonich apologizes for the inconvenience suffered by Ryazan inhabitants but then suggests the renewed interest in the event is a campaign ploy: “For months, there was no interest and there were no publications. The theme was activated on the eve of the presidential election with the most fantastic details in order to accuse the FSB of planning a real explosion with the death of people. This is actively used in the political struggle.” (The presidential election is only one week away.) A soldier named Alexei Pinyaev has claimed that he worked at a nearby base where hexogen was reportedly kept in sacks marked “sugar” (see Fall 1999). The commander of the base denies that there was any soldier named Pinyaev, but the Novaya Gazeta reporter who had found Pinyaev then shows pictures of him and plays a recording of his interview. The FSB will not let its three agents appear in public or allow journalists to interview them. The broadcast does not allow any discussion of a possible connection between the Ryazan incident and the apartment bombings in Moscow earlier that month (see September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999). The FSB officials did not have good explanations for the fact that local authorities, including its own FSB office in Ryazan, were not informed of the supposed exercise, or for the lack of medical resources for the thousands of people forced to spend the night outdoors. According to David Satter, a long-time correspondent in Moscow for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times who believes the Ryazan incident was a failed provocation, the broadcast only serves to increase the public’s misgivings. [SATTER, 2003, PP. 30, 261-264]Entity Tags: Alexander Zdanovich, Russian Federal Security Service, Alexei PinyaevTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag AttacksMarch 6, 2002: Russian Billionaire Berezovsky Accuses FSB, Putin of Terror PlotEdit event Boris Berezovsky.Boris Berezovsky. [Source: BBC]At a well-publicized press conference in London, where he now lives in self-imposed exile, Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky accuses President Putin of involvement in an alleged FSB plot behing the 1999 apartment bombings (see September 22-24, 1999, September 9, 1999 and September 13, 1999). After an overview of many well-known facts about the bombings and the controversial Ryazan security exercise, as well as a documentary called “The Assassination of Russia”, Berezovsky introduces the testimony of Nikita Chekulin. According to Chekulin, an explosive expert who says he was recruited by the FSB, large quantities of hexogen were purchased through his research institute, the Russian Conversion Explosives Center (Rosconversvzryvtsenter), and shipped under false labels in 1999-2000 out of military bases to cover organizations linked to the FSB. Chekulin says the FSB suppressed a governmental investigation into the scheme. “I am sure the bombings were organized by the FSB,” Berezovsky declares. “The FSB thought that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would not be able to come to power through lawful democratic means.” [BBC, 3/6/2002; GUARDIAN, 3/6/2002; WASHINGTON POST, 3/6/2002; KOMMERSANT (MOSCOW), 3/6/2002; MONITOR (JAMESTOWN FOUNDATION), 3/6/2002; SBS, 5/21/2003]Entity Tags: Nikita Chekulin, Russian Federal Security Service, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir PutinTimeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks Logged",FAKE
"FBI Found ""Tens Of Thousands Of Emails"" Belonging To Huma Abedin On Weiner's Laptop   Zero Hedge 
With furious Democrats - and the Clinton Campaign - now openly blasting the FBI's reopened investigation (as Republicans take delight for once in having a government agency reinforce their side of events), the question turns to just what emails were found on Weiner's laptop, and how damaging their contents are for the FBI to take the unprecedented step of ""intervening"" in a major political event just days before the national election. 
We first laid what was the most likely explanation yesterday , when we showed several examples of Huma Abedin emails being sent from her work email account to her personal account at , courtesy of a Judicial Watch FOIA release. Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to two personal addresses she controlled. The Washington Times reported in August 2015 that the State Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Mills used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton’s private clintonemail.com to transact State Department business. 
One email from May 15, 2009, was sent by Abedin from her State Department email to her personal email. Abedin was archiving in her personal email account an email Hillary Clinton sent her from Clinton’s private email server at . Abedin was asked to print out attachments to an email Mills sent via a private address the previous day to Clinton involving “timetables and deliverables” for her review via Alec Ross, a technology policy expert who then held the title of senior adviser for innovation to Secretary Clinton. 
However, while forwarding Hillary's emails to her personal email server for ""convenience"" is one thing, what is more troubling is the amount of redaction involved in these emails which migrated to the open email account, which as we now know ended up in Anthony Weiner's computer: in the above example, the two pages of timetables and deliverables attached to the email were 100 percent redacted, with “PAGE DENIED” stamped across the first redacted page. 
An argument can be made that the extensive redaction confirms confidential material was part of the transmission. 
This is a nuanced point being pushed by Hillary Clinton supporters such as Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald, who in an article yesterday tried to make a case citing ""sources"" (even though the FBI said that nobody has seen the content of the Weiner/Abedin emails), that "" no emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton ."" No emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton. All of this has to do with procedures followed by an aide. https://t.co/mcsBi7j7XU 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 
It remains to be seen just what is in the emails, although whether Hillary sent emails with confidential content herself, or directed, or simply allowed her closest aide, Huma Abedin to forward such emails to her outside unsecured email address (where they subsequently ended up on Anthony Weiner's notebook), is what this latest case will be all about and how it will be defended and prosecuted in the media, by the water coolers and perhaps, in court. 
However, we do know one thing: according to the NYT , the number of Huma emails that made their way to Weiner's PC was staggering: 
The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the tens of thousand 
Which brings up two more critical questions: i) when she was questioned by the FBI over the summer, did Huma reveal and admit the existence of these ""thousands"" of emails located on a personal, home computer, and ii) will the FBI be able to comb through everything in the next 10 days ahead of the election? If the answer to the second question is no, will the US presidential election really take place with one candidate currently under FBI investigation, one which could potentially lead to impeachment proceedings within weeks or days of her being elected president? 
Still, the biggest irony in this latest debacle is that it was largely predicted by Donald Trump himself back in August of 2015. It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world. 
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 3, 2015 Share This Article...",FAKE
"(CNN) CNN commentators and guest analysts offer their take on Monday night's presidential candidate debate. The opinions expressed in these commentaries are solely those of the authors.

David Gergen: Clinton crushed Trump, but was that enough?

Coming into the presidential debate, I thought that if Hillary Clinton won decisively, she would virtually lock up the election. Coming out, it was clear that she did win decisively but I suspect that the campaign will remain ferociously close.

By all traditional standards of debate, Mrs. Clinton crushed. She carefully marshaled her arguments and facts and then sent them into battle with a smile. She rolled out a long list of indictments against Donald Trump, often damaging. By contrast, he came in unprepared, had nothing fresh to say, and increasingly gave way to rants. As the evening ended, the media buried him in criticisms.

Even so, I doubt she has put him away. For one thing, Trump supporters aren't judging him by traditional standards. They have heard establishment politicians over-promise and under-deliver for so long that they crave something different. They were quick last night to see yet more signs of media bias. Trump was an angry figure, yes, but he is also giving voice to their anger. Those who are for him are likely to stick, despite his ineffectual performance.

Equally to the point, Mrs. Clinton seemingly struggled in the debate to create closer emotional bonds with voters. She has been vexed with the issue of likeability throughout this campaign and in recent months her team has become concerned about her ability to mobilize millennials in the way that Barack Obama did so successfully. Her arguments last night should have made voters think, but I am not sure they will make them march.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps Hillary did lock up the race Monday night. Trump certainly blew it. But I imagine the race goes on, and the ultimate decision will be left where it should be: with the voters. Stay tuned for the vice presidential debate next Tuesday!

S.E. Cupp: Trump (mostly) did the job

I had two criteria upon which I would judge Monday night's debate. Not ""who looked more presidential,"" or ""who fact-checked whom the best."" Those aspects go to their bases, not the voters who will determine this election outcome: undecideds.

Hillary Clinton had one job. She had to make Donald Trump look dumb. For undecideds, it will matter less that he's a bully or a liar. She has issues with trust, too. What will scare them is how unprepared he is. Every chance she gets to point this out has the potential to add points. Unfortunately for Clinton, she didn't take many of them. While she pointed out that his ""cavalier attitude"" toward nuclear weapons was dangerous, time and again, she punted at opportunities to point out how ill-informed and unprepared Trump is. Instead, she preferred to argue his vague platform on its merits. For her, this wasn't damaging, but it didn't move the needle in her favor.

In contrast, Trump mostly did the job he had to do. To move undecideds, he had to hammer one point home: Clinton is a politician who doesn't get it. Over and over again, he attacked her as more of the same, out of touch, and a politician who hasn't gotten it right. He didn't go after her character or personal issues, for the most part -- which voters know well. She outmanned him on specifics and details. But his attacks were far more effective than hers.

While Clinton was right to suggest the fact-checkers get busy on his statements -- many were misleading -- if I'm looking at who moved the needle tonight with voters, it was Trump, not Clinton. And, Robby Mook, I assure you, this anti-Trump conservative isn't grading him ""on a curve.""

Hillary Clinton did her homework on Donald Trump in the week leading up to tonight's debate, and the prep work paid off, especially when it came to his business record.

""It must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide,"" Clinton said of Trump's tax returns, turning the tables on allegations that she's hiding something in her deleted emails. ""It just seems to me that this is something the American people deserve to see.""

Clinton even took a step further and pointed out that Trump didn't pay any income tax returns in certain years, a strategy designed to chip away at the blue-collar demographic that he's cultivated in the last few years. Trump, who's worked up a populist campaign saying that the government has stiffed the little guy, put his own foot in his mouth, butted in and said ""that makes me smart.""

It was a tough attack to which Trump will need an answer in future debates.

As a Clinton supporter, it pains me to say Trump won.

Clinton was too restrained, too smart -- and as much as I hate to say it -- she was too presidential. And being presidential won't help her win the election. She spoke to the intellectuals tuning in; she did not speak to the average American.

Her advisers told her to restrain from attacking Trump. She got the wrong counsel and it could cost her the election.

Her rebuttal to Trump's incoherent rants was to chuckle and tell viewers to check in with the fact checkers. The fact checkers won't win the election for her.

She needed to take him out at the knees. We know Clinton is smart, what we needed to see was a woman who is tough and won't take nonsense from anyone. She failed to do that tonight. Tonight, she was nice. Nice won't win the presidency.

Donald spent the night sniffing constantly before he spoke. To paraphrase one tweeter: He's allergic to his own crap.

He lost the 400-pound vote but he won the debate and unless Clinton changes tactics he's going to win the election.

As a real estate mogul, Donald Trump is more than familiar with the expression ""location, location, location."" In presidential debates, it's temperament, temperament, temperament. History has not been kind to Dan Quayle's perceived weakness, George H. W. Bush's time check or Al Gore's sighs. And it won't be kind to Trump's undisciplined, defensive rants.

Trump's debate performance was a combined rehash of the insolence of his primary debates, the rambling hyperbole of his rallies, with a sprinkle of detail to bolster his message of economic populism. Although Trump scored points on that issue, he whiffed badly when confronted about his failure to release his taxes and struck out on the issues of race, birtherism and foreign policy. It was, frankly, surprising how easily Trump took Hillary's bait.

Coming into Monday night's debate, national polls were essentially tied and battleground states were tightening. With expectations set historically low, all Trump had to do was behave well enough to convince undecided voters he was in fact fit to hold the highest office in the land. In order to win the White House, Trump needs more moderates, minorities and women to support him. Yet he engaged in juvenile attacks on Hillary's looks and stamina instead of her failed record. Trump had an opportunity to put Hillary Clinton away and failed miserably. He is who is he is and continues to act unworthy of the office.

Hillary Clinton was the closer. She pulled off a victory, but only after Trump looked as if he might run away with that victory in the first half of the debate. Clinton was clearly in command of the facts, but Trump was making the simpler -- if highly inaccurate -- case for defending American jobs. Substance aside, he initially came across as caring about those who have lost jobs to trade. But Trump's initial strength unraveled as the debate progressed.

By the time it was over, Clinton unmasked Trump as a con man over his failure to release tax returns and penchant for not paying his workers. He all but acknowledged he doesn't pay taxes, saying ""they would be wasted,"" seeming more like an abusive one-percenter than a man of the people. His birther explanation made no sense, and his claim that Hillary has been ""fighting ISIS your entire life,"" was as ridiculous as his notion of stealing Iraq's oil. His denial of the well-established fact that he supported the Iraq war was a most awkward dance.

That was probably the first and last debate in presidential history to include a discussion of Rosie O'Donnell's looks. As such, it was tremendous entertainment -- pure reality TV. But it was also very hard to pick a winner. Donald Trump won on the basis of spectacle. Hillary Clinton's strategy was to rise above the occasion and let him talk himself into losing. That actually allowed Trump to land one blow after another without Clinton fighting back. She wittily put him down a couple of times. But mostly she just smiled oddly at the camera. She was, to use a Trumpism, low energy. That was a mistake.

Yes, Trump sunk to new lows when discussing the birther issue -- claiming that he helped put it to rest when he actually stirred it up. Yes, he was barely coherent on defense, taxes etc. There was a three-minute section when he detailed a phone call with Sean Hannity about Iraq. Yes, The Donald was low on specifics, too. But he did have clear themes that he rammed home. After 90 grueling minutes, I looked down at my pad and read back the key words that I'd jotted down. ""Law and order."" ""Country doing badly."" ""Bad experience."" ""Emails."" Clinton's policies on solar panels and equal pay did not cut through. It could not compete with his passion, his articulation of populist anger.

So I give this a technical win to Trump because he understood the format, he blew it apart, and he dominated the evening. But that will alienate as many people as it will attract. Moreover, I'm not even sure it'll make that big a difference. Objectively deducing who won or lost is almost impossible when partisan tensions are this high. Most viewers either agree with him or with her. And a small minority watched it and thought, ""How the hell did things come to this?"" The debate will likely harden impressions, not soften hearts. The impression is that Trump has matured into an effective champion of the working class. But Clinton looks like a president-in-waiting.

Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of ""Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between L.A. and D.C. Revolutionized American Politics.""

Out of control. That's how I'd describe the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. What a train wreck for any voter who wanted to hear details about policy. Instead, we got Trump shouting insults and one-liners, interrupting Clinton, trying to take over the conversation. Shockingly, Trump admitting to the world: He was ""smart"" not to pay his federal income taxes; he supported a return of ""stop and frisk"" policing, even though it was ruled racial profiling and unconstitutional by the courts; and he defended his family's housing discrimination practices against blacks and Latinos, essentially saying it was just something everyone did back then.

Clinton's sit-back-and-watch-him-implode strategy was frustrating at times but it worked. She could, however, show more passion when discussing her policies. On the issue of race, Clinton missed a perfect opportunity to talk more about her plan for law enforcement reforms and systematic racism in our justice system. Still for me, Trump lost the debate tonight. Talking loud and saying little shouldn't be a path to the White House.

Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has worked as a producer and as a reporter at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was named a 2010 Woman of the Year by Women in Sports and Events, is a co-author of ""Say It Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete,"" and CEO of the Push Marketing. She supports Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

Julian Zelizer: Debate unlikely to have dramatic impact

Overall, it is unclear that Monday night's debate will have a huge impact on the direction of the polls. The best moments for Donald Trump came in the first half hour, where he baited her into defending unpopular free trade deals.

There were many reasons that Hillary Clinton supporters could be pleased with her performance. At several points, Trump was irritated and angry. He delved into some of his more controversial claims. He referred to Sean Hannity as evidence to support his claims about the Iraq War.

Clinton consistently appeared poised and attacked with methodical precision. The most effective part of Clinton's attacks was to connect him to a kind of trickle-down economics and raise questions about his business record. Clinton's best moments came when she attacked him on birtherism. In the final half hour, Trump was mired deep in his Trumpian statements about women's looks and more.

But Clinton's greatest advantage remains the dynamics of the Electoral College and the continued doubts about his capacity to be president. It is very hard for a single debate to change the game. And it is unclear that this debate had the kind of dramatic moment that will fundamentally reshape public opinion -- overwhelming all of the other factors that have caused her lead to shrink. The most unfavorable moments for Trump are not worse than anything he's done before -- and those moments have not undercut his campaign thus far.

Haroon Moghul: Trump lost, but so did all of us

Near the end of Monday night's debate, Hillary Clinton looked straight into the camera to address America's allies. She wanted our friends and partners in NATO, and allies like Japan, South Korea, and others to know that we meant to honor our obligations. In that moment, Donald Trump entirely disappeared, and Clinton no longer looked like a candidate for President. She sounded like she was already President.

Trump? He managed to incorporate his very large portfolio into nearly every comment he made. Eventually I expected him to announce he knew best how to defeat ISIS because he built a hotel in Mosul. So, yes, Trump lost. But we lost, too. All of us, as Americans. It's a disaster for any democracy when there is only one responsible candidate running for office, let alone the highest in any land.

Trump's language over the campaign has been racist and authoritarian; he has indulged anti-Semites and winked at white supremacists when he was not busy with plans for mass deportations or Islamophobic bans. It's not a good thing that 100 million people are watching these two candidates debate, because 100 million people shouldn't take a would-be fascist seriously enough to debate his case for the White House.

One of my favorite new shows is Netflix's ""Stranger Things."" Unfortunately, we're the ones living in the upside down.

Haroon Moghul is a senior fellow and director of development at the Center for Global Policy. His next book, ""How to be a Muslim,"" will be out in 2017.

Civility went south fast in Monday's debate. Donald Trump lost his composure early, ranting, interrupting (over 20 times) and sniffing. (Under the weather, or out of his comfort zone?) Hillary Clinton started out soft, playing the grandmother card, but quickly escalated to tough talk and occasional sarcasm. It could hardly have gone otherwise. Clinton hit hard at Trump, bringing up his admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his ""long record of engaging in racist behavior,"" his denial at having supported the Iraq war, and his refusal to allow the American people to see his tax returns.

In doing so, Clinton did Americans a big favor: she revealed Trump's limitations. He is simply unable to make those leaps of imagination and generosity necessary to transform from a businessperson to a national political leader. The candidate who claims to do everything big showed the smallness of his thinking tonight. With his off-key rejoinders, he demonstrated repeatedly how he sees everything -- people, properties, cities, and entire countries -- in terms of how they factor into his business and personal universe, which seem to be one and the same. I'll get to Pennsylvania Avenue one way or another, he said tonight, as though the White House and his new Trump hotel are entities of equal importance. Perhaps they really are, in his mind.

Clinton alone demonstrated the composure, wisdom, and broad vision necessary for executive office. She won the debate hands down.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, a specialist in 20th-century European history and a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion. Her latest book is ""Italian Fascism's Empire Cinema."" She supports Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

The reality TV star and businessman who loves giving nicknames earned himself one tonight: ""Sniffles."" From the beginning through the end of the first debate Donald Trump seemed to have something going on with his sinuses. It seemed a fitting metaphor for a night on which the usual expert showman was seriously off his game. Besides the sniffles, Trump made faces and sighed. He scowled. He interrupted. He took innumerable drinks of water, something for which he used to mock Marco Rubio.

In so doing, Trump lost this debate to a clearly up-to-the-task Hillary Clinton. Either Trump failed to prepare, or his prep sessions did not stick.

This is a debate that will likely be studied in college communications, advertising, and gender courses for years to come. Without the benefit of a live audience cheering his one-liners, Trump seemed deflated and not on his best form at all. His constant interruptions of Clinton will do him no favors with women voters. His bragging, in effect, about forcing President Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate will not go over well with black voters. And his rambling answers at times descended into incoherence. In response to a question about cybersecurity, he mentioned that cyberattacks could be coming from ""someone sitting on their bed weighing 400 pounds."" Uh, what?

Clinton did not let opportunities go by to score points with independents or moderate voters, reminding viewers that Trump once saw the mortgage crisis as a business opportunity, and she discussed race relations in thoughtful terms. Meanwhile, Trump made truly bizarre statements, such as she has been been fighting ISIS for 30 years! and ""African-Americans and Hispanics are living in hell, you walk down the streets, you get shot."" Note to Trump: Testiness is not a presidential look.

The fact that at several points Trump was arguing with moderator Lester Holt showed that things were not going his way. In one of the most notable moments of the night, Trump's declaration that he had a much better temperament than Clinton earned spontaneous laughter from the audience at Hofstra University. As Trump might say: ""Sad.""

Unusual omissions tonight: No mentions of Trump's feuds with everyone from a distinguished Mexican-American judge to a Gold Star family. More glaringly: no discussion of immigration.

Whether viewers agree with Clinton's positions or not, she was able to articulate them in a reasonable and rational manner. She did well, and she knew it. She was obviously ready to discuss problematic issues like her emails. The grin on her face near the end of the debate was evidence that she was aware that she had had a great night. Once you've traveled the world, negotiated treaties, and testified before Congress for 11 hours, she said to Trump with a hint of mockery, then ""you can talk to me about stamina."" Mic drop. Game over. Tonight at least, Hillary Clinton won.

This was a remarkable moment in American political history. Has there been a prior event in which a candidate has so completely and remarkably demonstrated his unfitness for the presidency, in character, temperament, preparation and aptitude?

Donald Trump's now-familiar pattern of winning debates through sheer bluster and braggadocio was effective when he was facing a gaggle of opponents, all of whom had similar ideologies but less exaggerated stage personas. But faced with a single rival with clearly distinct ideas and experience and a staunchly unflappable attitude, he seemed rude, ignorant, volatile and churlish. Despite pundit assertions that Hillary Clinton had the burden of proof in this debate, the truth is that she simply needed to hold strong and let Hurricane Trump blow itself out. And she did.

Sadly, moderator Lester Holt was a non-presence in the debate. But his inability to restrain Trump proved an asset to Clinton, who spent much of the time leaning back and smiling to herself, knowing that her opponent was weaving his own hanging rope.

Jeff Yang is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal Online and contributes frequently to radio shows, including PRI's ""The Takeaway"" and WNYC's ""The Brian Lehrer Show."" He is the co-author of ""I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action.""

Donald Trump's supporters like to refer to his movement as ""The Trump Train."" Well, tonight The Trump Train went off the rails. Big time.

But for those who somehow thought, up until Monday night, that Donald Trump might somehow be qualified to be president, Monday's debate was a wakeup call. He seemed like a defensive, petulant bully who could only insult Hillary Clinton and America -- and couldn't offer a single solution, let alone details. He came across as not only dreadfully unprepared for the debate, but dreadfully unprepared to be president. Which is the truth. And it's high time all Americans know it.

In moment after moment, Hillary Clinton presented a knowledgeable and clear-eyed vision for how to help working families and continue America on the path to security and prosperity. Donald Trump, in contrast, lied, and got defensive. He was petty and insulting, and then lied some more. Lies apparently can only get the Trump train so far. Eventually it runs out of steam.

Hillary Clinton showed herself to be the kind of person you want in the White House. And Donald Trump showed himself to be the kind of kindergartner who should have his train taken away and instead given a timeout.

The conventional wisdom going into the first debate was that Donald Trump would have to tone it down and appear more presidential. Trump definitely took a more staid and steadied approach, but it didn't work. His bravado and charm were largely absent from the stage. Trump the showman can dance around policy pitfalls and distract from some of his less than successful business dealings. Sedate Donald had far fewer tools at his disposal, and looked like he couldn't wait for the 90-minute snooze-fest to end.

Hillary Clinton didn't give a memorable performance, but she didn't have to. Most Americans expect Madame Secretary to drone on, joylessly, about policy, and wave her curriculum vitae like a club against her enemies. She met expectations, which was enough, and during some of the actual policy exchanges clearly had the upper hand on knowledge and background.

Trump had huge areas of vulnerability to exploit in his opponent, and he barely touched her on them -- from Benghazi to her emails to the allegations of Clinton Foundation corruption. He will need a much stronger showing in his next debate or this thing will be over long before November.

Nayyera Haq: Trump looked more like Grumpy Cat than a leader

Trump's glass jaw was exposed throughout Clinton's onslaught of policy laden counter-punches. Trump came into this debate attempting to appeal to a broader audience, so he needed to leave behind the showmanship and bravado that worked for him in the primary and instead carry himself with presidential composure. But his calm voice lasted only 20 minutes and his listening face made him look more like Grumpy Cat than a leader, showing that rehearsed moves just don't work for him.

Trump had Clinton momentarily against the ropes early on about NAFTA and TPP, but then he allowed his emotion to take over and did not regain his own footing for the remainder of the debate. His heavy handed depictions of America's problems didn't hold up against Hillary's detailed, solution oriented answers. His snorting asides were countered with some surprising zingers from Hillary -- ""Donald criticized me for preparing for this debate. You know what else I prepared for? To be President.""

Trump crumbled under Hillary's attacks on his business record, lack of transparency on taxes, and understanding of African-American communities. By the time it came around to national security, the contrast in experience was even more clear, with Clinton nimbly moving around the globe and Trump invoking his 10-year-old son--who, he told us, is good at computers -- in a discussion of cyber security. Trump's abrupt defensiveness, especially on the issue of his temperament, allowed Clinton to come across as the champion of those who have been taken taken advantage of by big business and systemic racism. Calling this fight for Hillary.",REAL
"On Monday, Rachel Dolezal, the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, resigned in shame because she had posed as a black woman even though she is biologically white.

The outing of Dolezal seems ironic given the recent public embrace of Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner. Jenner seems to have ushered in an era of greater tolerance about the constructed nature of identity. After all, when a transgender woman is elevated to the cover of Vanity Fair, it's as though we have reached a tipping point. We can accept the idea that one's social identity can be radically transformed if it doesn't match with what one feels in the heart.

The stark difference in Dolezal's treatment forces us to ask what's the difference between claiming a gender identity versus a racial identity? Why is it that we celebrate Bruce Jenner's gender change and frown upon Rachel Dolezal's racial change?

Dolezal is disturbing for many people because she marks a cultural fault line. Like it or not, we have entered into an era of elective race -- a time when people expect that one has a right and dignity to claim the identity of one's choice.

The central issue that separates Jenner's and Dolezal's choices is deception. Jenner chose carefully how and when she would disclose herself as actually female. Dolezal's involuntary outing was staged by her angry parents who felt left behind as she chose a life associated with being a black person. The irony of the situation is certainly not lost on Dolezal's parents, who adopted several black children who became Dolezal's siblings, perhaps giving her the first taste of what it would be like to be in a black community. As much as critics try to characterize Dolezal's behavior as a fraudulent choice, sociologists and psychologists know that decisions about racial and ethnic identity are typically not merely expressive, strategic, or apolitical, but are driven by social conditions. Growing up in a family with black siblings exposed Dolezal to the reality of discrimination and made her more sensitive to its effects. It probably helped her understand the contrast between the reality of black lives and white privilege. Other similar experiences, such as marrying an African-American and having black children, also make white people more sensitive to racism. Dolezal likely became politically and socially conscious about these issues because of her experiences in an interracial family. In this sense, her parents must be proud of the child they raised. Should we indict Dolezal for her racial deceit? That depends on a number of factors. What accounts for her decision to ""become"" black instead of remaining white to advocate for racial justice? Did Dolezal feel that her white skin made her suspect as she engaged in political activism? Did she fear it would be a distraction as she attempted to gain credibility in racial justice efforts? Opinion: Passing for black? Now that's a twist Of course, she could have attained a leadership role in the NAACP as a white woman, but did the perception that she was black make people feel more objective about her performance rather than skeptical about her understanding and commitment to anti-racism? Was she aesthetically driven? Dolezal claims that she has been in love with black aesthetics since childhood. The decision to adopt a black female aesthetic for herself is a political act given that Americans in general assume black women are not aesthetically as desirable as white women. Yet, others reduce her aesthetic choices to mere cultural appropriation. People allow Caitlyn Jenner to change because she has some biological basis for believing she is female. But is this all identity is? Are we prepared to accept the implications of this view? What if Dolezal can identify one ""biologically"" black ancestor -- does this suddenly make her claim to blackness valid? If she cannot, does this failure render invalid her connections to blackness, and all of her efforts to make the world better for African Americans? In my view, hate the sin but love the sinner. Dolezal lied. She should not have lied, but she lied for reasons with which we can sympathize. I admire the way she chose to live her life as a black person. Advocating for anti-racism efforts is ethical and admirable if she wanted to claim blackness as a social identity. Those quick to throw stones well know that there are costs to living life as a black person, and once Dolezal made the switch she seems never to have looked back. I will not indict her for her choice to link herself to this community, and I would consider her claim no greater if she identified a long lost African ancestor. Dolezal's case forces us to examine our society, which made her feel that passing for a black woman was her best choice in her advocacy for African American issues. She forces us to consider whether our biology or our action is more important to identity, and should we act in ways that honor our chosen identity in meaningful ways. We should not have to be slaves to the biological definition of identity, and we should not use race or gender identities as weapons to punish one another.",REAL
"Tennessee Children with Brittle Bones Suffer in State Care as Mom Charged with SBS Turner family at visitation. Photo source: Turner family. 
by Health Impact News/MedicalKidnap.com Staff 
Chris and Keshia Turner from East Tennessee are still waiting to bring their son Brayden home since he was removed from their custody on December 11, 2014. Keshia had rushed the baby to the emergency room when his leg that had been splinted in the NICU became tight and warm to the touch. While at the hospital, an x-ray revealed a broken bone and several rib fractures. 
The following day, Keshia took Brayden to his pediatrician to follow-up on his care. There she found herself confronted with law enforcement and a Department of Children’s Services worker who demanded that she take Brayden to Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, nearly three hours away. 
That evening, Vanderbilt Medical Center Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Deborah Lowen said that Brayden’s injuries could only be abuse, and investigators and doctors allegedly stopped looking for another explanation. 
Dr. Lowen first said that it was a “classic case of Shaken Baby,” though most of the classic symptoms were not present. Later Dr. Lowen claimed that Keshia had crushed her three month old child with her hands and caused multiple rib fractures. 
The Turner’s first story is here: Baby Found with Broken Bones – Parents Assumed Guilty of Abuse and Lose Custody Keshia’s Second Child Taken 
In September of 2015, while her case was pending, Keshia delivered her second child, a baby boy named Carson, who was in perfect health. Sadly, he was removed from her custody four days after he was born because of the ongoing case involving Brayden. Both boys have been in a relative placement with their paternal grandparents. Chris and Keshia have had limited supervised contact with the children since their removal. 
Recently, the boys were evaluated by Tennessee Early Intervention System, a voluntary educational program for children ages birth through age two with disabilities or developmental delays. The program is also associated with Vanderbilt Medical Center. Both children were diagnosed with significant developmental delays. Brayden with his baby brother Carson. Photo source: Turner family. 
Brayden’s evaluation revealed that he is delayed 25% in cognitive development and 40% in adaptive, communication, social skills, and motor. He also exhibited “multiple red flags of autism.” Additionally, he has a 30 degree curvature in both feet and will require orthotics. 
Carson’s evaluation showed that he is delayed 25% in communication and cognitive development, and 40% in adaptive and motor. It was also noted that his head was “really flat.” The family was told that when he begins to walk, there is a possibility that he will need to wear orthotics. 
Additionally, both boys have low muscle tone. In light of the new developments, the family believes that this is, as Eugene Wilson at the Center for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Alliance says, “more than likely an underlying medical condition.” 
Therapy has been recommended for both children. Difficult Day at Court 
Because Keshia was the last one to care for Brayden before the emergency room visit, she is being accused of abuse in the dependency proceeding in juvenile court. 
After several days of hearings, including the presentation of medical experts on behalf of the parents, on June 25, 2016 Judge Larry Warner found Keshia guilty of “severe child abuse.” The judge cleared Chris of any finding of abuse. Because of that, the couple was advised by the father’s attorney to file for divorce, in the hope that the court would award Chris custody. Although the couple’s divorce is still pending, Judge Warner ordered immediate reunification with Chris. However, the children are still in a relative placement, and the Department of Children’s Services has not done anything to establish their reunification. There is no plan in place to get the children home with their father. Bias and Lack of Understanding Impeding the Case 
The judge’s ruling came despite the Turners having two medical experts who testified on their behalf, a radiologist and a pediatrician with experience teaching at a university as well as working in the emergency room. The two medical experts gave extensive medical testimony—comprehensive explanations of Brayden’s medical conditions— which both opined as osteopenia of prematurity. 
Going in to court, the mother’s Attorney Connie Reguli was concerned that Vanderbilt’s Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Lowen’s deposition had been filed months before the trial by Department of Children’s Services. It appeared to Attorney Reguli that once the judge read it, he had made up his mind before coming to court, leaving no room for other medical explanations. Dr. Deborah Lowen. Source: Vanderbilt University . 
Attorney Reguli points out that this is “an extremely complex” case. Because of that, the experts took painstaking measures to educate the judge about the “fragile bone state of a baby…who was premature and so small.” She says that after examining Brayden’s history, the pediatrician concluded that he had rickets of prematurity. The doctors explained in detail the medical evidence supporting their opinions, including the premature birth, the loss of amniotic fluid prior to birth, the low vitamin D levels, and the healing pattern of the bones. 
The Turner family’s experts disputed Child Abuse Specialist Dr. Debra Lowen’s conclusion. Dr. Lowen said that Brayden’s injuries were non-accidental, and therefore, must be child abuse. Attorney Reguli says that Dr. Lowen’s conclusion was drawn without being challenged on the medical research upon which she relied. When Dr. Lowen was asked to submit medical research to support her conclusion, she submitted a mere nine articles and references, some of which contradicted her own conclusion. 
In contrast, the experts called by the family provided a bibliography of over 50 articles which supported the rickets diagnosis. 
Attorney Reguli is very concerned about the court’s apparent bias and lack of understanding about the intricacies of the medical evidence, which she believes are impeding this case. She says, “The complexity of presenting the evidence is a tremendous challenge.” Further, she points out that the medical community is not in agreement on this issue, and she is concerned that it might be too complex for a juvenile court judge to understand. The Environmental Epidemic of Vitamin D Deficiency in Infants 
In August 2008, researchers Kathy A. Keller and Patrick D. Barnes published the article, “ Rickets vs. Abuse: A National and International Epidemic .” The article documents that, what was at first “believed to primarily affect the elderly and dark-skinned populations in the US,” was found “demonstrated in otherwise healthy young adults, children, and infants of all races.” 
In “ Rickets or Abuse, or Both? ” Russell W. Chesney says, “We are in the midst of an epidemic of nutritional vitamin D deficiency rickets that has been termed ‘the third wave of rickets.'” The article goes on to say, “Inherent in each wave is that infants with rickets are born to mothers who are deficient or insufficient in vitamin D themselves.” 
Dr. Teresa Hill points out in the Journal Advocate that vitamin D deficiency persists today. She says, “Vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy is considered epidemic.” 
One reason that the medical profession is not in agreement on this issue is the lack of information about the role of vitamin D deficiency resulting in metabolic dysfunction in abuse cases. Dr. Mercola reports that Dr. Ayoub, after reviewing over 3,000 pieces of medical literature, concludes that “a great number of child abuse cases may, in fact, be instances of misdiagnosed metabolic dysfunction.” 
Dr. Mercola, citing the work of Dr. Ayoub and others, says: 
“Thousands of child abuse cases may, in fact, be misdiagnosed cases of rickets caused by either vitamin D deficiency or aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, or both.” He goes on to say, “Vitamin D deficiency is a hidden problem that can actually cause bones to appear as if they’ve been broken on an X-ray, which is a sure diagnosis of abuse to the inexperienced eye.” 
Dr. Mercola says that Dr. Ayoub estimates that “there may be literally tens of thousands of misdiagnosed cases of child abuse around the country,” and that it is a “trend of misdiagnosis goes back at least 25 years or more.” 
Dr. Mercola calls this “the other side of the child abuse drama,” and he believes that “it is critical for this information to become more widely known.” He goes on to say that being informed about “how infantile rickets mimics cases of child abuse” is the best way to prevent the “traumatic injustice to parents who really have done nothing wrong, besides listening to and trusting conventional medical advice, which still does not place sufficient weight on the importance of vitamin D.” 
Dr. Ayoub asserts: 
“Modern textbooks simply do not cover rickets as textbooks of the past did, and flawed research has been used as the basis to perpetuate the misdiagnosis of healing rickets as an inflicted injury.” 
Further, he says that the current protocol for doctors does not include testing vitamin D levels in expectant mothers, who are considered “one of the most at-risk populations.” In his opinion, this is “reprehensible medical malpractice.” Apparent Conflict of Interest 
The complexity of the underlying medical condition of the child is buttressed with the conflict of interest inherent in Child Abuse Specialists, whose only role is to determine and “diagnose” child abuse. Attorney Reguli says: 
“Child Abuse Specialists aren’t doing true clinical rule-out evaluations.” 
The hospital pediatricians who are certified as Child Abuse Specialists are considered by default “state expert witnesses.” However, they are not trained in all of the medical areas that they include in their opinions of abuse. 
Further, Attorney Reguli says: 
“Doctors like Lowen have a contract with the Department of Children’s Services and have a vested interest in maintaining their relationship with them.” Subsequently, she says, “The Department has to remove children from their homes to get the money they need to fund the agency itself in the current federal funding scheme.” 
Ultimately, the children and their parents are the ones who pay the price. 
See Also:",FAKE
"By Sean Colarossi on Mon, Oct 31st, 2016 at 9:52 pm Trump used a “tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.” Share on Twitter Print This Post 
While Donald Trump has repeatedly said he took advantage of loopholes that allowed him to legally pay nothing in federal income taxes for decades, the New York Times reported on Monday that Trump may have actually crossed a legal boundary to avoid paying his fair share. 
According to the Times, the Republican nominee used a “tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.” 
The report: 
Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s. 
Moreover, the tax experts said the maneuver trampled a core tenet of American tax policy by conferring enormous tax benefits to Mr. Trump for losing vast amounts of other people’s money — in this case, money investors and banks had entrusted to him to build a casino empire in Atlantic City. 
The reason that Trump bent over backward – and potentially broke laws – to avoid paying these taxes is because he was scrambling to “stave off financial ruin.” 
This is the same man who claims he would be a great president because of his “successful” business background. 
Yet, he calls himself the “king of debt.” His businesses have declared bankruptcy six times. He has spent decades paying zero dollars in federal income taxes. He lost a billion dollars in a single year running a casino business. Reporting out tonight even suggests that he has direct financial ties to Russia. 
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his business background. 
Even as all of this information is out there, American voters still know very little about Donald Trump’s finances because he has refused to be transparent about them. 
And consider this: What Trump is hiding in his tax returns must be much worse than the already damning information that keeps coming out through good reporting. If it weren’t, he would have already released them. 
The latest New York Times story is just the latest installment of Trump’s shady business background. The media should spend the remaining week of this campaign demanding more answers from a man who wants to be in charge of the country’s pocketbook.",FAKE
"""To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables,'"" Hillary Clinton said at a New York fundraiser on Sept. 9. ""The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up."" (Video: The Washington Post / Photo: AP)

Hillary Clinton's declaration Friday night at a New York fundraiser that ""half"" of Donald Trump's supporters fit into a ""basket of deplorables"" seems, in its tersest formation, like a stupid comment to make. The New York Times's Michael Barbaro sums up that sentiment.

But my summary above is not a fair condensation what Clinton said — and the fuller context makes it clear what she was aiming at.

""To just be grossly generalistic,"" Clinton said according to a transcript from BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer, ""you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.""

She talked a bit about how Trump has interacted with that racist element and then continued. ""But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here … but that other basket are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures — they're just desperate for change. … Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.""

Trump's campaign — and Trump himself — quickly tried to make hay from the first part.

But there are two ways in which this differs from something like President Obama's ""cling to guns and religion"" comments from another fundraiser in 2008.

The first is that the ""clingers"" remark disparaged something that was positive: a person's religion or their cultural affinity for gun ownership and sportsmanship. It was a dismissal of things of which people were proud. Clinton, however, was saying that half of Trump's base was motivated by negative inclinations: racism, sexism. No one is going to say, ""Hey, how dare you disparage my family's history of being racist.""

Trump's tweet said she insulted his supporters, but Clinton clearly delineated between two groups of supporters, and she offered words of understanding to the latter. So let's break the electorate out into four groups and consider how the comment will play.

1. Clinton supporters. They support Clinton; it seems unlikely they'll be put out.

2. Racist/sexist/xenophobic/Islamophobic Trump supporters. How big a group is this? It's hard to say. Clinton's spokesman Nick Merrill tried to defend his boss's use of ""half"" by saying on Twitter that the racist/xenophobic types ""appear to make up half of his crowd"" at events. (Update: Clinton issued a statement on Saturday apologizing for implying it was ""half"" of Trump supporters.) We do know that 7 percent of Trump supporters think the candidate is racist, suggesting that they themselves don't see racism as a dealbreaker. Regardless of the actual fraction of the Trump base this group constitutes, Clinton's not likely to change their minds away from their preferred candidate, either.

3. Non-'deplorable' Trump supporters. This group will go one of two ways. They'll either a. see Clinton's remarks as insulting them as a whole, or b. be reminded that there are elements of Trump's base of support that makes them uncomfortable. That sense may spur them to be less enthusiastic to go vote for Trump in November.

But notice: Either way, there's no loss for Clinton! If she spurs some Trump supporters to reconsider, the loss is to Trump.

[Republicans think Hillary Clinton just made her own ’47 percent’ gaffe. Did she?]

4. Undecided voters. They'll go one of two ways, too, it seems. Some may think Clinton was being rude and be less likely to support her. Some may similarly be reminded about elements of Trump's base that they don't like and be less likely to back him.

This is a much smaller group than the number of Trump backers, mind you. In the current RealClearPolitics average, Trump backers are about 43 percent of the electorate and undecided voters are about 12 percent. If Clinton sways 5 percent of the (let's say) 90 percent of Trump backers who aren't ""deplorables"" to rethink their support, that's 2 percent of the overall electorate. If she loses 10 percent of the undecideds, that's 1.2 percent of the electorate.

That's assuming the shorthand here doesn't collapse into ""Clinton insulted all Trump supporters."" This is the point that Barbaro was making. Clinton may have been trying, once again, to separate out non-racist/sexist/xenophobic Trump backers by pointing to those supporting Trump who do hold those objectively deplorable views. It's a tricky line to walk — but compared with ""clingers,"" for example, she's in a slightly better position.

And then there's that other thing about Obama's ""clingers"" comment: He won anyway — twice.",REAL
"U.S. authorities said Friday there is no known threat to the American homeland in the wake of the deadly terror attacks in Paris, but cities across the country were taking precautions while intelligence officials expressed alarm over the methodology and planning that was evident behind the terrorist acts.

More than 120 people were killed when a series of apparently coordinated shootings and explosions rocked Paris, which officials said evoked memories of the deadly 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, India.

""The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are closely monitoring events in Paris and we are in contact with our counterparts in the region,"" Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. ""At this time, we know of no specific or credible threats of an attack on the U.S. homeland of the type that occurred in Paris tonight.""

It is still unclear who was behind the attacks. One U.S. counterterrorism official told CNN that the attacks resemble tactics that have been used by a number of terror groups -- including al Qaeda's focus on mass casualty and visibility, and the small, tactical nature of attacks that are more the hallmark of ISIS and its acolytes.

The official noted that Algerian terrorist groups have attacked in Paris in the past, though they don't have much capability to do what unfolded in Paris. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are still trying to determine if there are any U.S. connections with the terrorists or the victims and are working with their French counterparts to ensure there are no immediate threats to the U.S. Two additional U.S. counterterrorism officials told CNN that authorities across the U.S. have convened secure conference calls to try and gather information. And a federal law enforcement official said federal authorities are working with local police agencies around the country to task sources domestically and internationally for information about any individuals possibly associated with the attacks. They're also going back to look at whether there was any intelligence missed indicating these attacks were going to happen, the law enforcement official said, adding that the FBI is also putting additional personnel on standby to be deployed to France to offer any support such as bomb technicians and computer analysts. President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande, second from right, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo arrive at the Bataclan, site of one of the Paris terrorists attacks, to pay their respects to the victims after Obama arrived in town for the COP21 climate change conference early on Monday, November 30, in Paris. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is illuminated in the French national colors on Monday, November 16. Displays of support for the French people were evident at landmarks around the globe after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, November 13. People hold hands as they observe a minute of silence in Lyon, France, on November 16, three days after the Paris attacks. A minute of silence was observed throughout the country in memory of the victims of the country's deadliest violence since World War II. French President Francois Hollande, center, flanked by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, right, and French Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, center left, stands among students during a minute of silence in the courtyard of the Sorbonne University in Paris on November 16. A large crowd gathers to lay flowers and candles in front of the Carillon restaurant in Paris on Sunday, November 15. A man sits next to candles lit as homage to the victims of the deadly attacks in Paris at a square in Rio de Janeiro on November 15. People light candles in tribute to the Paris victims on November 15 in Budapest, Hungary. People gather outside Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on November 15 for a national service for the victims of the city's terror attacks. People write messages on the ground at Place de la Republique in Paris on November 15. People pray during a candlelight vigil for victims of the Paris attacks at a church in Islamabad, Pakistan, on November 15. French golfer Gregory Bourdy passes a peace symbol for the Paris victims during the BMW Shanghai Masters tournament November 15 in Shanghai, China. A man offers a prayer in memory of victims of the Paris attacks at the French Embassy in Tokyo on November 15. A woman holds a candle atop a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower during a candlelight vigil Saturday, November 14, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Front pages of Japanese newspapers in Tokyo show coverage and photos of the Paris attacks on November 14. An electronic billboard on a canal in Milan, Italy reads, in French, ""I'm Paris,"" on November 14. The Eiffel Tower stands dark as a mourning gesture on November 14, in Paris. More than 125 people were killed in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris on Friday. People around the world reacted in horror to the deadly terrorist assaults. Lithuanians hold a candlelight vigil in front of the French Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, on November 14. Thousands gather in London's Trafalgar Square for a candlelit vigil on November 14 to honor the victims of the Paris attacks. A woman lights candles at a memorial near the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 14. A man places a candle in front of Le Carillon cafe in Paris on November 14. A woman holds a French flag during a gathering in Stockholm, Sweden, on November 14. Nancy Acevedo prays for France during the opening prayer for the Sunshine Summit being held at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida on November 14. French soldiers of the United Nations' interim forces in Lebanon observe the national flag at half-staff at the contingent headquarters in the village of Deir Kifa on November 14. A couple surveys the signature sails of the Sydney Opera House lit in the colors of the French flag in Sydney on November 14. A woman places flowers in front of the French Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia, on November 14. Candles are lit in Hong Kong on November 14 to remember the scores who died in France. A woman lights a candle outside the French Consulate in Barcelona, Spain, on November 14. Britain's Prince Charles expresses solidarity with France at a birthday barbecue in his honor near Perth, Australia, on November 14. The French national flag flutters at half-staff on November 14 at its embassy in Beijing. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte after a speech on November 14 in The Hague following the attacks. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe becomes emotional after his speech on the French attacks during the opening ceremony of a Japanese garden in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 14. A woman mourns outside Le Carillon bar in the 10th district of Paris on November 14. The attackers ruthlessly sought out soft targets where people were getting their weekends underway. People lay flowers outside the French Embassy in Moscow on November 14. Mourners gather outside Le Carillon bar in the 10th district of Paris on November 14. ""We were listening to music when we heard what we thought were the sounds of firecrackers,"" a doctor from a nearby hospital who was drinking in the bar with colleagues told Le Monde. ""A few moments later, it was a scene straight out of a war. Blood everywhere."" People attend a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered ""all of Canada's support"" to France on Friday, November 13, in the wake of the attacks. Police show a heightened presence in Times Square in New York on November 13, following the terrorist attacks in Paris. People light candles at a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal on November 13. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, fans observe a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris before a basketball game November 13. The house lights are shut off and scoreboard dark as Boston Celtics players pause for a moment of silence for the Paris victims before an NBA basketball game against the Atlanta Hawks in Boston on November 13. People light candles at a vigil outside the French Consulate in Montreal on November 13. One of the primary reasons for alarm among U.S. counterterrorism officials is the lack of relevant intelligence before the attacks began. Intelligence agencies are looking at communications intercepts for clues as to any advanced planning or coordination, a U.S. intelligence official said. The U.S. collects overseas communications in Europe and elsewhere, and in the past, such reviews have uncovered emails and other communications that show planning, the intelligence official added. Local police departments moved quickly to place units on extra alert. In Los Angeles, extra police were deployed at critical sites like airports. In Washington, enhanced patrols were sent near the Capitol. In New York City, the New York Police Department was giving special attention and increasing its presence at soft targets such as nightclubs, theaters and museums, along with locations tied to France, another federal law enforcement official said. Authorities are also scrutinizing known terror suspects in the U.S. and boosting surveillance of them, the law enforcement officials said. ""We will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people,"" an FBI spokesperson said in a statement. ""DHS and the FBI routinely share information with our state, local, federal and international law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security partners, and continually evaluate the level of protection we provide at federal facilities."" Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
"Share This 
Despite being dead for over 7 years, it seems that Michael Jackson’s name has just been dragged back into the spotlight once again. Unfortunately for his family, it looks like bad news for the star’s estate as a woman leaked the $900,000 sex secret he had kept quiet for a whopping 30 years – and she has proof. 
Most people are aware of Jackson’s depraved past involving children – specifically, little boys. However, the most recent person to come forward is actually a woman, who states that the deceased star had molested and sexually assaulted her about 3 decades prior. 
According to LA Times , “The alleged abuse started in 1986 and occurred in such iconic locations as Neverland Ranch, the set of ‘Moonwalker,’ Jackson’s Encino mansion, and in the back of the singer’s limousine, according to papers filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.” Unfortunately for the family and Jackson’s estate, her word isn’t all the accuser was armed with . Stock image of Michael Jackson’s “Neverland” ranch 
Among the court filings are scanned copies of checks purportedly paid to her from Jackson or his entertainment companies, which she says were issued to pay her off in exchange for her silence. In all, the checks totaled a whopping $900,000 – a damning number to say the least. 
Furthermore, the largest sum, a check for $600,000, was dated in late 1993, which just so happens to be three months after Jackson found himself in yet another lawsuit, that time with a 13-year-old boy saying he had been molested by the King of Pop. Of course, the payment comes at a time where Jackson would have wanted to ensure that all of his other skeletons remained perfectly quiet in his closet. 
Oddly enough, this is the only time a female victim has come forward to allege a Jackson sexual assault. In addition to that, the woman’s lawyer, Vince Finaldi, said the case offers the first evidence that Jackson and his production company — not an insurance carrier — made direct payments to an alleged abuse victim. Michael Jackson (Source: LA Times ) 
The abuse allegedly lasted for over 3 years, beginning when the girl was merely 12 years old and ending just after her 15 th birthday. LA Times adds: 
The woman alleges that for about three years, Jackson fondled her, forced her to orally copulate him, and attempted to have sexual intercourse with her, which caused her to bleed, the lawsuit states. 
Jackson also supplied her with gifts and letters, and two of the notes were attached to the lawsuit. One of the letters ends, “I’m crazy about you. … All my love, Michael.” 
Of course, the Jackson family lawyer is saying that the entire ordeal is a made-up claim meant to do nothing more than leech off of the star’s estate. As the woman – being a sex assault victim – and her identity are being kept quiet for the time being, it’s hard to say whether she’s looking for a payout or something more. 
Although this man is dead and buried, and under most circumstances should be left to rest in peace, no sex assault victim should ever go without justice. Although money is a good way to buy silence, it certainly does not equate to anything near justice. In fact, it represents the exact opposite as it proves that if you have enough money, you can get away with anything – even sexually abusing a child. This woman deserves her day in court, and it certainly doesn’t look like the Jackson family is going to like the end result.",FAKE
"Comments 
FOX News star Megyn Kelly has finally revealed the disturbing details of the abuse and harrassment she endured at the right-wing propaganda factory. Serial sexual predator and fascist ideologue Roger Ailes lost his job as the CEO of FOX News a few months ago after anchor Gretchen Carlson publicly accused her old boss of sexually harassing her and using his position to try to extort sexual favors from her. 
As the male stars of the network rushed to defend Ailes and over a dozen women came forward to share their own stories, Kelly stayed silent – for a time. Now, she’s adding material to her upcoming memoir detailing how Ailes harassed her and threatened her job : 
“Roger began pushing the limits. There was a pattern to his behavior. I would be called into Roger’s office, he would shut the door, and over the next hour or two, he would engage in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with me—veering between obviously inappropriate sexually charged comments (e.g. about the ‘very sexy bras’ I must have and how he’d like to see me in them) and legitimate professional advice.” 
Kelly also claims Ailes offered to promote her through the ranks “in exchange for sexual favors.” At one point, she writes, he “crossed a new line—trying to grab me repeatedly and kiss me on the lips.” Upon her rebuffing his advances, she recalls, “he asked me an ominous question: ‘When is your contract up?’ And then, for the third time, he tried to kiss me.” 
After Ailes was fired (with a $40 million severance package!), he almost immediately joined the presidential campaign of fellow serial sexual predator Donald Trump. 
The fall of Ailes and the backlash surrounding Donald Trump’s “hot mic” audio comments in which he admits to sexual assault have brought the issue of sexual harassment and the ways in which powerful white men abuse women in the workplace into the forefront of the public eye. 
Men like Ailes and Trump have gotten away with their crimes for far too long; women have been forced to suffer in silence, forced to choose between their dignity and agency over their own bodies or their careers and financial well-being – a choice nobody should have to make. The more women that come forward to tell their stories, the more will follow – and hopefully we can someday geld the toxic patriarchy which silences women and allows predators to roam free.",FAKE
"‘Most wanted’ drug baron hands himself in, says life on the run... ‘Most wanted’ drug baron hands himself in, says life on the run ‘got too much’ By 0 157 
A notorious British drug baron turned himself in to the cops because the “pressure” of life on the run became too much for him. 
Robert Gerrard, of Liverpool, handed himself over to National Crime Agency (NCA) officers in Manchester after being named on a Most Wanted list of criminals. 
The 53-year-old made the arrangements through his solicitor after complaining the “ pressure of being on the run had got too much for him .” 
He was added to the UK’s Most Wanted list as part of Operation Return, a campaign to capture criminals on the lam. 
He appeared in Manchester Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday, where he was charged with conspiracy to import cocaine in a £60 million (US$75 million) plot. 
Gerrard is believed to have used Café de Ketel, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a front for international drug trafficking. 
NCA regional head of investigations Greg McKenna said: “ Robert Gerrard handing himself in shows the impact we are having with our Most Wanted campaigns. Three arrests in under a week is a tremendous result. 
“ We don’t know at this stage how long Gerrard has been back in the UK for, but he told our officers that the pressure of being on the run had got too much for him . 
“ The fugitives on our Most Wanted list really do have nowhere to hide. I would urge any of the remaining ones to take note – save yourself the trouble and hand yourself in because we will never stop hunting you and you will face justice, ” he added. 
Crimestoppers director of operations Roger Critchell said: “ The fact Robert Gerrard handed himself in to police is again an indication that when the pressure mounts, hiding places become harder to find. 
“ This is a great result as it follows two fugitive arrests in the last week from our sister campaign targeting those on the run in Spain. These campaigns really do work .” 
His next hearing will be at Manchester Magistrates’ Court on November 23. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 31, 2016 
Remington Research's summary of the polling data asserted that the race has become ""increasingly competitive"": 
Last week, we found a presidential race where Hillary Clinton held a clear advantage. This week, we find an increasingly competitive race with just eight days to go. Trump appears to be holding strong in his must-win states and Colorado remains within the margin of error. The data also show that Pennsylvania has moved into the margin of error category. 
“The presidential race remains very competitive as we move into the final stretch. Hillary maintains an advantage leading in Colorado and Pennsylvania, but at this point anything can happen,” said Titus Bond, Director of Remington Research Group 
Other state polling data came out on Sunday that also showed a close-race between Trump and Clinton, although the polls were surveyed before FBI director James Comey's announcement that they were re-opening their investigation against Clinton . Via RealClearPolitics : Florida: New York Times/Siena: Trump 46 percent, Clinton 42 percent. NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist: Clinton 45 percent, Trump 44 percent. Gravis: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 47 percent. Colorado: CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 42 percent, Trump 39 percent. Arizona: CBS/YouGov: Trump 44 percent, Clinton 42 percent. North Carolina: NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist: Clinton 47 percent, Trump 41 percent. Gravis: Clinton 49 percent, Trump 47 percent. CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 45 percent. Pennsylvania: CBS News/YouGov: Clinton 48 percent, Trump 40 percent. 
The fact that some of these polls were close even before the Comey announcement led to this observation from FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver: Both things can be true: 1) Comey impact overblown — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 31, 2016 
Radio host Steve Deace writes at Conservative Review that while early voting has been overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton, the renewed FBI investigation could ""have a potentially huge impact"" on Election Day: 
Trump was on defense on the election map as he had to defend states like Arizona, Georgia, Utah, Indiana, and Alaska that rarely go blue on Election Day. It’s quite conceivable that yet another reminder of the stench of corruption that has long surrounded the Clintons could sway the bulk of Republican-leaning undecideds Trump’s way. But that’s provided, of course, that he can withstand his compulsion to negatively influence a favorable news cycle as he’s been prone to do. Then there’s the matter of Trump’s emerging Evan McMullin headache in Utah. 
If Trump can be disciplined this final week, his campaign may have the freedom to focus its efforts on Iowa, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Those five states would get him within striking distance to 265 Electoral College votes, and then you hope you can pull an upset in Colorado, Pennsylvania, or New Mexico where Trump is visiting during the campaign’s final week. The hope is that there’s enough voters in those states wearier of Clinton’s corruption than worried about whether Trump’s fit for office. 
FiveThirtyEight currently has Trump's odds of winning the presidency at 23.6 percent in their polls-plus forecast. This week will be crucial for Trump in increasing those odds, and maybe the FBI's re-opened investigation into Clinton will help improve those odds as it becomes closer to Election Day. Tags ",FAKE
"By Brandon Turbeville In the latest development in the Johnson & Johnson talcum powder saga, a St. Louis jury has awarded a California woman over... ",FAKE
"Former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova suggested Friday James Comey’s reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was the product of a “revolt” inside the FBI. 
While speaking with WMAL’s Larry O’Connor , diGenova was asked what Comey meant by saying newly discovered Clinton emails from Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s devices “appear to be pertinent” to the FBI’s prior investigation. 
“It tells me that the original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation,” diGenova said, “otherwise they would have discovered this — and I’ll tell you why.” 
“These were found on the phone that was used by Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin,” he said. “Why was that phone not looked at originally?” 
“There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright, and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it.” 
diGenova continued: “And why this letter was sent today was very simple: the agents came to Comey yesterday, they told him about the evidence, and he said oh ‘S’, and realized that his goose was cooked, that this would prove conclusively that his original investigation was incompetent, and he knew that the agents running the Weiner case would leak it if he did not send this letter to congress.” 
“And I’ve also been told something very significant, it’s been reported that those laptops [belonging to Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson] were destroyed, they were not, and the reason is the FBI agents refused to do it.” 
diGenova went on to say he believes “there is a quiet but serious revolt against the director right now.” 
“He sent those letters today because he is in deep trouble inside the bureau,” he said. “Comey sent this letter today because he had to. He has no moral authority inside the agency right now, he’s a joke, he’s a laughingstock of the agency, and among former FBI agents, he has become an anathema.” 
Listen to the full interview courtesy of WMAL: 
Courtesy of Information Liberation Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"The Drudge Report has aggressively portrayed Ted Cruz’s sweep of all the delegates from Colorado’s Republican convention as a corrupt power grab.

The site named for Matt Drudge, who broke the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and still runs it, links to nine stories this morning with salacious headlines about the convention. Among them: “Savage: Cruz should disavow rigged Colorado election … Buchanan: Apparatchiks thieve delegates for Ted … 1 MILLION REPUBLICANS SIDELINED … Border Patrol Agents: Colorado Voters Disenfranchised.” Keep in mind that this is three days after the Colorado convention.

Our analytics partners at Zignal Labs say the Drudge attacks are breaking through on social media in a significant way. This word cloud, which tracks all Cruz mentions since Saturday, shows the extent to which Drudge has shaped the conversation about Cruz’s win in Colorado. Note the prominence of the words “cheating” and “drudge”:

This kind of squabbling will only get louder as the delegate wrestling and wrangling intensifies. And it has clearly gotten under Cruz’s skin.

In a radio interview yesterday, the Texas senator ripped into Drudge as an arm of Donald Trump’s campaign. “In about the past month, the Drudge Report has basically become the attack site for the Trump campaign,” he told conservative host Mike Slater. “So every day they have the latest Trump attack. They’re directed at me. … Most days they have a six-month-old article that is some attack on me, and it’s whatever the Trump campaign is pushing that day will be the banner headline on Drudge.”

“By the way, they no longer cover news,” Cruz added of Drudge. “When we win a state, suddenly the state doesn’t matter. You know Colorado — there was no red siren on Drudge when we won all 34 delegates in Colorado.”

Drudge responded by posting a link to a January Fox News interview in which Cruz praised the conservative site for breaking the mainstream media’s “stranglehold.""

It’s never good to pick a fight with a guy who buys ink by the barrel, as they say. Or whatever the 2016 version of that line is.

If it was just Trump complaining about the “crooked” system, it would seem like sour grapes from a guy who got out-hustled. But The Donald’s allies in the right-wing media, including Drudge and Breitbart, are trying to make Cruz’s wins seem illegitimate in the eyes of the conservative base. If Cruz wins the nomination at a contested convention in Cleveland, he will need these grass-roots activists to rally around him. If regular Drudge readers believe he did not win fair and square, they will be less inclined to do so.

Interestingly, the increasing scrutiny from Drudge comes as the Democratic National Committee begins to train more of its fire at Cruz. After focusing almost single-mindedly on Trump for months, the DNC held a press call yesterday to blast the Texan ahead of campaign stops in California. Ironically, they pushed a similar message as Drudge: “Cruz’s campaign is proving to be just as divisive for the Republican Party as his tenure in the Senate has been for our country,” said the DNC communications director. “That’s why there just isn’t a whole lot of excitement for Cruz being the Republican nominee.”

– Donald Trump says he identifies with Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” He praised the novel and its protagonist in a broader interview with USA Today that posted yesterday. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything,” the GOP front-runner told the paper. Columnist Kirsten Powers writes that she pointed out that “The Fountainhead” is “in a way about the tyranny of groupthink.” Trump reportedly sat up and told her, “That’s what is happening here.”

For those who haven't read the book since high school, Roark is an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because he is angry about changes that others made to his blueprints. He’s then put on trial for arson, but a jury acquits him after he delivers an eloquent speech about the need to always stay true to one’s self. Gary Cooper delivered the courtroom monologue in the 1949 film adaptation:

Bottom line, Roark is a self-centered individualist who steadfastly refuses to submit to the will of others. “He is presented as the author's version of an ideal man — one who embodies the virtues of Rand's objectivist philosophy,” the CliffNotes character analysis explains. “Roark is an example of free will — the theory that an individual has the power, by virtue of the choices he makes, to control the outcome of his own life. A man's thinking and values are not controlled by God or the fates or society or any external factor — but solely by his own choice.”

Is The Donald threatening to blow up the Republican Party if he’s spurned in Cleveland? He almost certainly has not thought through the implications of publicly identifying with Roark and embracing objectivism. But it’s nonetheless another revealing window into his psyche.

It’s also a reflection of how Trump does not play by the same rules that normal politicians must. In 2012, Paul Ryan tried hard to distance himself from Rand, whose work he had often praised. “I adored her novels when I was young, and in many ways they gave me an interest in economics,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2014. “But as a devout, practicing Catholic, I completely reject the philosophy of objectivism.”

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

-- Forty percent of former NFL players show signs of traumatic brain injuries, according to a groundbreaking study that will be presented at next week’s American Academy of Neurology. This is one of the largest studies performed on living NFL players, and it offers “the most conclusive evidence yet” of a definitive link between brain injury and playing football. Travis M. Andrews explains that the study is based on sensitive MRI scans called diffusion tensor imaging.

MORE ON THE REPUBLICAN RACE:

-- Phyllis Schlafly is facing backlash after endorsing Trump last month, including an attempt to oust her as the head of the Eagle Forum, the conservative group she founded 44 years ago to stop the Equal Rights Amendment. From David Weigel: ""Ed Martin, who Schlafly elevated to president of Eagle Forum in 2015, told [the Post] that Schlafly had not been ousted yet, but that it was clearly the plan of Eagle's board. In an interview with WorldNetDaily, which publishes her work, the 91-year-old Schafly speculated that her Trump endorsement and opposition to the idea of a National Convention of States had roiled her opponents.""

-- John Kasich, speaking today in Manhattan, will call his candidacy the GOP's only way out of a “path to darkness.” “Without naming Cruz or Trump, Kasich plans to indict them both,” writes Weigel, who reviewed the planned remarks.

-- Ben Carson continues to be the worst surrogate of the cycle. He admitted yesterday that his support for Trump is “purely pragmatic"" and said he'd probably oppose him “if the stakes weren’t so high.” (BuzzFeed)

-- Trump told USA Today he could envision putting Marco Rubio in his cabinet. “Yes. I like Marco Rubio. Yeah. I could,” he said. “There are people I have in mind in terms of vice president. I just haven’t told anybody names. ... I do like Marco. I do like Kasich. … I like [Scott] Walker actually in a lot of ways. I hit him very hard. ... But I’ve always liked him. There are people I like, but I don’t think they like me because I have hit them hard.”

-- MORE DELEGATE SETBACKS FOR TRUMP, in addition to the ones outlined in yesterday's 202. Per Ed O'Keefe, Trump also got outgunned last weekend in:

MORE ON THE DEMOCRATIC RACE:

-- THREE NEW YORK POLLS: With one week until the primary, Trump and Clinton are dominating:

So much for home-field advantage: That Monmouth survey finds only 29 percent of voters consider Clinton -- who has lived in the state for 16 years and served as senator for eight years -- to be a “real New Yorker,” while 28 said the same for Sanders, who left the state after high school.

-- Tensions continued to escalate in the battle for New York:

Clinton devoted a Long Island campaign event entirely to gun control, all but blaming Sanders for crime in New York City. From Philip Rucker and Abby Phillip: “Clinton convened a round table-style discussion … where she, along with the local congressman, Rep. Steve Israel (D), and gun-safety advocates hammered Sanders.... 'Here’s what I want you to know: Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. The state that has the highest per-capita number of those guns that end up committing crime in New York come from Vermont,’ Clinton said, eliciting gasps.… ‘So this is not, ‘Oh, no, I live in a rural state. We don’t have any of these problems.'""

The Post's Fact Checker gives Clinton Three Pinocchios for this line of attack: ""Clinton has carefully crafted the talking point to find the particular government data that support her point, which gives a wildly different view than how trafficking flows are tracked,"" Michelle Ye Hee Lee writes. ""We do not find the per capita measure as a fair assessment of gun flows from Vermont into New York. The difference between this point using per capita calculation and the raw number (1 percent of crime guns with source states identified in 2014 came from Vermont) is so stark that it creates a significantly misleading impression to the public.""

Sanders called for a national ban on fracking. The Vermont senator released a new ad to highlight his opposition, narrated by actress Susan Sarandon. ""Do Washington politicians side with polluters over families?"" asks Sarandon. ""They sure do, because Big Oil pumps millions into their campaigns. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for president who opposes fracking everywhere.""

-- Joe Biden said Sanders calling Clinton ""unqualified"" was not sexist but something said in the heat of a campaign. During an interview with Mic.com, the vice president was asked about Sanders’ comment and if he thought Hillary is held to a higher standard because she is a woman. “No, I don’t think she’s held to a higher standard,” he replied.

“This country’s ready for a woman,” Biden elaborated. “There’s no problem. We’re going to be able to elect a woman in this country.”

When the female interviewer asked Biden if he’d like to see a woman elected, a male aide to the VP interrupted from off camera and tried to end the interview. “That’s it,” he said. “I would like to see a woman elected,” Biden said. “I don’t mind,” he told the staffers standing off camera. “The president and I are not going to endorse because we both when we ran said, ‘let the party decide.’ But gosh almighty, they’re both qualified,” he added. “Hillary is overwhelmingly qualified to be president.”

-- “Past cases suggest Hillary won’t be indicted,"" by Politico's Josh Gerstein: A review of dozens of recent federal investigations ""suggests that it’s highly unlikely, but not impossible. The examination … found some parallels to Clinton’s use of a private server for her emails, but, in nearly all instances that were prosecuted, aggravating circumstances [existed] that don’t appear to be present in Clinton’s case. The relatively few cases that drew prosecution almost always involved a deliberate intent to violate classification rules as well as some add-on element … a Boeing engineer who brought home 2000 classified documents and whose travel to Israel raised suspicions; a [NSA] official who removed boxes of classified documents and also lied on a job application form. And former prosecutors, investigators and defense attorneys generally agree that prosecution for classified information breaches is the exception rather than the rule.… 'They always involve some ‘plus’ factor,’ one former federal prosecutor said.”

-- Bill de Blasio intimated in an interview with Katie Couric that his kids are supporting Sanders, even though he’s backing Clinton. “My kids will speak for themselves,” he told the Yahoo anchor, “but I’ll say this much, they’re the kind of young person that is going to fight for change, no matter what. And absolutely will support the Democratic nominee, whoever it is.” (Watch the full interview here.)

-- “Denmark, a social welfare utopia, takes a nasty turn on refugees,” by Griff Witte: ""Lise Ramslog was out for a stroll in Denmark when she stumbled upon hundreds of exhausted asylum seekers. 70-year-old Ramslog instantly decided to help, transporting several refugees to Sweden. Many would consider Ramslog a good Samaritan. But the Danish government has a different term for her: convicted human smuggler. Denmark is celebrated as a social-welfare utopia. Ranking high in its pantheon of heroes are those who protected Jews during the Holocaust, or who helped oppressed during the Cold War. But when it comes to those fleeing 21st-century conflicts, Denmark has gone into overdrive to broadcast hostility … While Germany continues to welcome asylum seekers, and others held doors open for as long as they could, Denmark has taken a hard line almost from the beginning. Now ordinary Danes are getting caught up in the crackdown, punished for quintessentially good deeds. 'I’m proud of what I did and will never regret ... it,' said Ramslog, her eyes welling with tears. 'But I don’t want to be known as a criminal.'""

-- Meet Trump’s “Beltway establishment guy” -- campaign lawyer and former FEC chairman Donald F. McGahn II. By Ben Terris: ""The night Trump notched his first presidential win, he took the stage and lit into special interests that he declared corrupted Washington. Over his shoulder, a ruddy-faced man licked his teeth. He appeared out of place and seemed to know it. McGahn is one of [the country’s] top election lawyers, a job so highly specialized that its practitioners are almost unavoidably ‘Washington insiders’ by definition.... For a while, McGahn's colleagues either didn't know the firm was representing Trump or didn't mind. That changed late last month when McGahn organized a meeting between the candidate and more than a dozen lawmakers at the firm [Jones Day].… Many current employees just about lost their minds.”

Lesson learned: if you tweet to Ernest Moniz about his hair, he might tweet back:

There was a cash bar at Cruz's event in Orange County:

Looks like Shailene Woodley is for Sanders:

The scaffolding keeps coming down around the Capitol dome:

More than 400 arrests were made yesterday at the Capitol in connection with Democracy Spring demonstrations. (Martin Weil)

Former senator Carl Levin now has a ship named after him:

Cindy McCain hung out with Heidi Heitkamp and Cory Booker over the weekend:

The old Washington Post building is almost gone:

-- CBS, “Meet the ‘Trump Bros,’” by Jacqueline Alemany: ""Eighteen-year-old Jack Rowe sat in the front row of a Trump rally sandwiched between friends. Rowe had some thoughts on Trump's rhetorical treatment of women, which had been dominating headlines. 'Misogyny was an issue about maybe 60, 80 years ago,' said Rowe. 'You know, ISIS is chopping off heads … We’ve got bigger fish to fry.' Young men like Rowe are a common sight at Trump rallies: Mostly white, they travel in packs. They are dudes, jocks, preps … On the campaign trail, they’re known simply as 'Trump Bros.' David Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, said Trump's appeal to young men speaks to anxiety over creeping 'political correctness.' 'It's an F-U to society, who is telling us we are a bad guy because we like hooking up with girls on spring break,' he added. And they see Trump sticking up for that. Manas, a young entrepreneur … whose Twitter bio reads 'Bros do Bro Things' and who made a point of checking himself out in his iPhone camera in selfie mode before speaking with a reporter, piped in enthusiastically. 'I love women!' he said. Trump took the stage, and they screamed.""

-- New York Times, “Trump and New York Tabloids Resume Their Elaborate Dance,” by Michael M. Grynbaum: “As newspaper assignments go, this was a delicate one. Fly to Florida. Walk into Trump’s hospital room. Witness the birth of his second daughter. Linda Stasi, a gossip columnist for The Daily News, did as she was told. ‘I called Donald, and he said, ‘You can’t come to the hospital!’’ she recalled 22 years later. ‘I said, I know, but I’m coming anyway.’ ‘O.K.,’ Trump replied. ‘Then come.’ As the presidential spotlight swings to New York … Trump is reuniting with the press corps he knows best, a boisterous tabloid culture that spawned and nurtured [his] outsize Trump personality. It is also the ink-stained caldron in which Trump, over decades, honed the method of media management, cajoling, combating, at times dissembling, that he has unleashed … in this year’s national campaign. Some Americans have been caught off guard by [Trump’s style] but New York’s media veterans detect the old playbook at work. ‘We’ve had that advantage throughout the whole campaign,’ said Daily News editor Jim Rich.”

On the campaign trail: Everyone but Clinton is in New York. Here's the rundown:

At the White House: President Obama speaks at the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument. In the evening, Vice President Biden speaks at the World FoodProgram USA McGovern-Dole Leadership Award at the Organization of American States.

On Capitol Hill: The Senate meets at 10 a.m. to resume work on the FAA bill. The House meets at 2 p.m. for legislative business. Four suspension votes are expected at 6:30 p.m.

NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:

-- A damp and cloudy morning followed by sunshine through the rest of the week. “Scattered showers with a few heavier downpours are possible this morning, bringing our early starting temperatures in the 60s back down into the 50s,"" the Capital Weather Gang forecasts. ""Rainfall should be from a tenth to a quarter inch with locally heavier totals. Clouds are slow to depart and hence temperatures slower to warm back up vs. yesterday. We’ll aim for partly sunny skies by mid to late afternoon with afternoon highs in the low-middle 60s.”

-- Police are seeking the killer of a 15-year-old boy who was stabbed to death yesterday at the Deanwood Metro stop in Northeast. No word yet on motive. (Clarence Williams and Peter Hermann)

-- Maryland lawmakers eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, marking a major shift to dependency-based treatment and education as alternatives to incarceration. (Ovetta Wiggins, Josh Hicks and Fenit Nirappil)

-- In the final hour of Maryland’s session, legislators passed a “Noah’s law.” The safe-driving bill was named after a slain Montgomery County police officer and expands the use of ignition locks for convicted drunk drivers. (Ovetta Wiggins and Josh Hicks)

-- Terry McAuliffe has now vetoed more legislation than any Virginia governor since 1998, nixing bills from the Republican legislature on hot button issues like gay rights and women's access to health care. (Jenna Portnoy)

-- The latest of those vetoes: McAuliffe blocked a bill that would require the use of the electric chair if Virginia could not obtain lethal injection drugs. The governor instead offered a “secrecy measure” that shields the identity of pharmacies who supplied the drugs. (Laura Vozzella and Mark Berman)

-- A 35-year old Woodbridge woman was accused of stabbing a three-month-old baby with a kitchen knife. (Martin Weil)

-- Police arrested a Metrobus rider in Silver Spring after he began assaulting other passengers and attempted to kick open the bus door. (Faiz Siddiqui)

Excited about baseball season? Watch this kid bust a move on first base:

A rare black rhino was euthanized in Zimbabwe after a poacher attack:

Watch a baby wallaby peek out from his mom's pouch for the first time:

Finally, check out SNL's Clinton impersonators through the years:",REAL
"Why A Vote For An Establishment Candidate Could Be A Vote For Trump In N.H.

A lot of Republicans will head to the polls in New Hampshire on Tuesday, motivated to vote against Donald Trump.

But because of a quirk in how the state party allocates delegates and how fractured the ""establishment"" field is, it could mean that an anti-Trump vote will actually be a vote for the New York billionaire.

The state party awards delegates on a proportional basis to presidential candidates based on their vote statewide and by congressional district.

But it also has a 10 percent threshold.

What does that mean? It means that if a candidate does not get 10 percent of the vote, he gets no delegates. (And this is a hard threshold — no rounding.)

What's more, not only do those underperforming candidates get no delegates, but whatever delegates they could have gotten based on their vote share go to the winner of the primary (!).

And, right now, the favorite is Trump.

Trump, after all, has been leading in the polls in New Hampshire by double digits for six straight months.

Meanwhile, the so-called ""establishment"" candidates — the kind of mainstream Republicans that usually prevail in New Hampshire — are split. And after Saturday night's debate, with Marco Rubio's lackluster performance, that establishment vote could be fractured even further.

There are 20 delegates at stake in New Hampshire on primary night. Here's a look at how the candidates are performing in the polls currently, what that could translate to delegate-wise and how the 10 percent threshold could affect things.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, here's the order of the candidates (with a line inserted to represent the 10 percent cutoff):

So let's do some math: Everyone below the 10 percent threshold — Bush, Christie, Fiorina and Carson — add up to 22 percent.

So 22 percent of 20 is 4.4. Round down, and that means, roughly, another four delegates would be added to Trump's total.

Instead of a 6-3 delegate win, Trump would get 10. Thought about another way: Some 40 percent of Trump's delegates could be coming from people who cast their votes explicitly in opposition to him — or at least for candidates running very different campaigns.

And, by the way, those delegates are bound to vote for Trump at the Republican National Convention in July, because of changes to the Republican National Committee's rules — that all states that hold their nominating contests before March 15 must award their delegates on a proportional basis, and they must be bound to the candidates.",REAL
"WASHINGTON — President Obama said Saturday that U.S. air strikes are hitting the Islamic State ""harder than ever"" amid a stepped-up U.S. campaign in Iraq and Syria.

""We’re taking out more of their fighters and leaders, their weapons, their oil tankers,"" Obama said in his weekly radio address Saturday. ""Our special operations forces are on the ground, because we’re going to hunt down these terrorists wherever they try to hide. In recent weeks, our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya.""

Much of the recent effort has been directed at the oil smuggling that is the source of much of the Islamic State's revenue. The National Security Council says coalition airstrikes have destroyed 283 oil trucks, 120 oil storage tanks, and a ""significant amount of oil field infrastructure"" in eastern Syria since Nov. 17.

The weekly radio address, which focused on terrorism for the second week in a row, was a more optimistic assessment of the war on terror than any Obama has given since the Islamic State-inspired Dec. 2 shooting in San Bernardino that killed 14 people. ""Our message to these killers is simple: we will find you, and justice will be done,"" he said.

Obama did not directly address the debate over whether to block Muslims from entering the United States, but instead emphasized that most Americans are reaching out to their Muslim neighbors ""to let them know we’re here for each other.""

""Political leaders across the spectrum — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives — are standing up, forcefully, for freedom of religion,"" he said. ""That’s the message I hope every Muslim American hears — that we’re all part of the same American family.""

In the Republican radio address, Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said Congress was doing its part by voting to tighten the visa waiver program that allows people to travel to the United States from many European countries without advance approval.

If we get the right information to the right people, we can keep terrorists on the run and off our shores,"" said Hurd, a former CIA agent.

He said the Obama also has to do his part.

""We can’t contain this threat. We have to defeat it. We need a plan and that’s why the House passed a bill that requires the president to come up with a real strategy to defeat ISIS,"" he said. ""We have to be in this for the long haul.""",REAL
"By Jason Easley on Tue, Nov 1st, 2016 at 9:38 pm The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The House Freedom Caucus is planning a secret meeting, which in typical Republican fashion was leaked to the press, to discuss ousting Paul Ryan and demanding more ransom from GOP leadership. 
Politico reported , “One of the most pressing questions preoccupying Washington is what the group will do about Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin Republican has said he intends to seek another term as House speaker but has rankled members of the group of several dozen Republican lawmakers that drove John Boehner out of the Speakership last year. The Freedom Caucus is also weighing proposals meant to empower its members, some at the expense of GOP leadership’s authority.” 
There have been early rumblings that Speaker Ryan may be open to making a few deals on policies like tax reform with Hillary Clinton if she wins the election. One of the reasons why these deals may never happen is because of the ability of far right Republicans to cause trouble. 
If Ryan’s Republican majority shrinks, he will be an even bigger hostage to the far-right wing of his caucus. The dysfunctional dynamic in the House is going to continue even if Hillary Clinton wins the election. Ryan has run into the same hurdles that John Boehner faced. House Republicans are deeply divided and unable to agree on much of anything. 
The fact that the Freedom Caucus is holding a secret meeting is a sign that nothing is going to change. If Paul Ryan doesn’t cave to their demands, they will force Ryan out of the Speaker position. 
A group of House Republicans is plotting new ways to keep the House from working properly before a new president has even been elected. 
This is a reminder that Washington is fine. It’s the Republican Party that’s broken.",FAKE
"Share on Facebook “Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.” The above quote comes from Linus Pauling, Ph.D, and two time Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (1901-1994). He is considered one of the most important scientists in history. He is one of the founders of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, who was also a well known peace activist. He was invited to be in charge of the Chemistry division of the Manhattan Project, but refused. He has also done a lot of work on military applications, and has pretty much done and seen it all when it comes to the world of science. A quick Google search will suffice if you'd like to learn more about him. This man has been around the block, and obviously knows a thing or two about this subject. And he's not the only expert from around the world expressing similar beliefs and voicing his opinion. Here is another great example of a hard hitting quote when it comes to scientific fraud and manipulation. It comes from Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and long time Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to be one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. I apologize if you have seen it before in my articles, but it is quite the statement. “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” ( source ) The list goes on and on. Dr. John Bailer, who spent 20 years on the staff of the National Cancer Institute and is also a former editor of its journal, publicly stated in a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that: “My overall assessment is that the national cancer program must be judged a qualified failure. Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a total failure.” ( source ) He also alluded to the fact that cancer treatment, in general, has been a complete failure. Another interesting point is the fact that most of the money donated to cancer research is spent on animal research, which has been considered completely useless by many. For example, in 1981 Dr. Irwin Bross, the former director of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Institute (largest cancer research institute in the world), said that: “The uselessness of most of the animal model studies is less well known. For example, the discovery of chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of human cancer is widely-heralded as a triumph due to use of animal model systems. However, here again, these exaggerated claims are coming from or are endorsed by the same people who get the federal dollars for animal research. There is little, if any, factual evidence that would support these claims. Practically all of the chemotherapeutic agents which are of value in the treatment of human cancer were found in a clinical context rather than in animal studies.” ( source ) Today, treating illness and disease has a corporate side. It is an enormously profitable industry, but only when geared towards treatment, not preventative measures or cures, and that's an important point to consider. Another quote that relates to my point above was made by Dr. Dean Burk, an American biochemist and a senior chemist for the National Cancer Institute. His paper, “The Determination of Enzyme Dissociation Constants ( source ),” published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1934, is one of the most frequently cited papers in the history of biochemistry. “When you have power you don't have to tell the truth. That's a rule that;s been working in this world for generations. And there are a great many people who don't tell the truth when they are in power in administrative positions.” ( source ) He also stated that: “Fluoride causes more human cancer deaths than any other chemical. It is some of the most conclusive scientific and biological evidence that I have come across in my 50 years in the field of cancer research.” ( source ) In the April 15th, 2015 edition of Lancet, the UK's leading medical journal, editor in chief Richard Horton stated: “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Science has taken a turn toward darkness.” ( source ) n 2005 Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis , currently a professor in disease prevention at Stanford University, published the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False . In the report, he stated: “There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false.” In 2009, the University of Michigan's comprehensive cancer center published an analysis that revealed popular cancer studies are false, and that there were fabricated results arising due to conflicts of interest. They suggested that the fabricated results were a result of what would work best for drug companies. After all, a large portion of cancer research is funded directly by them. You can read more about that story here . There is so much information out there, and so much of it is coming from people who have been directly involved in these proceedings. There is really no shortage of credible sources willing to state that we live in a world of scientific fraud and manipulation. All of this can be attributed to the “corporatocracy” we live in today, where giant corporations owned by a select group of “elite” people have basically taken control over the planet and all of its resources. This is precisely why so many people are flocking towards alternative treatment, as well as focusing on cancer prevention. Much of what we surround ourselves with on a daily basis has been linked to cancer. Everything from pesticides, GMOs, multiple cosmetic products, certain “foods,” smoking, and much much more. This is something that is never really emphasized, we always seem to just assume that donating money to charities will make the problem go away, despite the fact that their business practices are highly questionable. That being said, so many people have had success with alternative treatments like cannabis oil – combined with a raw diet or even incorporated into their chemotherapy regimen – that we should not feel as though there is no hope for the future. The official stance on cannabis is a great example of the very practice of misinformation that I'm talking about. Its anti-tumoral properties have been demonstrated for decades, yet no clinical trials are taking place. I am going to leave you with this video, as I have done in previous articles. It provides a little food for thought. Ignorance is not the answer, although this information can be scary to consider, it’s nothing to turn a blind eye towards. Related:",FAKE
"Indeed this movement has its fair share of skeptics, including Black folks quick to declare the movement dead on arrival. When I listen to these people, I can never quite detect whether they are being descriptive or prescriptive, but frequently I’m convinced it’s the latter.

There is also a more insidious kind of participant in the movement, the moderate Black folks, the Respectables, I call them, who still believe that our energies should be spent demonstrating to white people that Black people can be self-critical. One such person is Jonathan Capehart. In a recent column for the Washington Post, Capehart argues, on the heels of the release of the official Department of Justice report on the shooting of Michael Brown, that Brown is an “inappropriate symbol” for this new, burgeoning movement. The DOJ report does ultimately back Wilson’s recounting of events, that Brown reached into his car, punched him, tried to take his gun, ran after being shot, and then turned around and came forward. Thus Capehart concludes that:

I get Capehart’s play. He ostensibly believes in the rightness of the Black Lives Matter movement, and he hopes that if as a Black person, he acknowledges that “we” were wrong in our assumptions about Mike Brown’s innocence, then he, and by extension “we,” will retain the moral high ground upon which the movement is built. Our claims will be more credible to “reasonable” white people, who want to believe us, but can’t because of their innate disposition toward believing that nothing is racist, unless the N-word is used.

Moderate Black people – Barack Obama included – continue to believe that the way to bring white people into the anti-racist fold is by conceding some ground in order to gain more ground. It’s an old debate tactic, but it only works if everyone plays fair. There are two problems with this. First, those with racial privilege generally don’t play fair in racial discussions.  More than that, they play downright dirty, denying the persistence of racism, trotting out erroneous statistics, blaming Black behavior for white racism. The Ferguson Police Department, for example, has conceded nothing even after being found guilty of decades of egregious, consistent and systematic violations of the rights of Ferguson’s Black citizens. Second, Capehart implicitly concedes that it is Black people who must prove that incidents are racially inflected, rather than white people who must prove that they are not. Since we now know for a fact that Darren Wilson policed in a racially hostile city and police department, and since Ferguson residents – Michael Brown included – knew that long before a Justice Department report merely affirmed their experience, it is perfectly reasonable for Black folks to view Ferguson police and police around the country with suspicion. And it is reasonable for Black folks to want clear evidence that this incident was not racial. The DOJ’s own report foregoes such conclusions.

Moreover, though I am absolutely fatigued in my relitigation of the events of Aug. 9, I do want to point to two statements in the DOJ report on the killing of Brown, that Capehart glosses over in his attempt to be undeservedly magnanimous to Darren Wilson. First, the report states that though Wilson, knowing of the incident with the Cigarillos at the convenience store, suspected Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson of the petty crime, when he initially saw them, he told them to “walk on the sidewalk.”

They refused. Having visited Canfield Drive, and seeing the narrowness of the street, I can attest that such a request would have seemed ridiculous and unnecessarily harassing. Coupled with the generally hostile context in which the FPD polices, the resistance from the two teen boys makes sense. Wilson did not approach them and say he wanted to question them about a crime at a convenience store. He approached them and told them to “walk on the sidewalk,” according to the DOJ, or “get the fuck up on the sidewalk,” according to Michael Brown’s friend.

Then the report says that Wilson parked his car at an angle to keep the two young men from walking any further. “Wilson attempted to open the driver’s door of the SUV to exit his vehicle, but as he swung it open, the door came into contact with Brown’s body and either rebounded closed or Brown pushed it closed.”

Then the altercation where Brown allegedly reached into Wilson’s vehicle happened. Now let us lay that aside for a moment, to consider that during this entire time, Wilson has not let these young men know what his business is with them. He rolled up on them and demanded that they get on the sidewalk in a small apartment complex. Beyond that point, the report remains inconclusive on the question of the door making initial contact with Brown’s body. His friend said the officer slammed the door into Brown’s body, while Wilson says the door either rebounded closed or Brown pushed the door closed.

This is not insignificant. If these boys perceived this officer as harassing them about the sidewalk and then slamming a door into Brown’s body, then certainly Brown may have reacted aggressively. I do not know, and won’t further speculate. I will say, however, that Wilson receives the benefit of the doubt even though he works for a corrupt police department with a hostile relationship to the community. Are police always worthy of the benefit of the doubt? Are young Black men ever deemed worthy of the benefit of the doubt? Moreover, there are the pure shenanigans that took place in the grand jury in which the prosecutor used an out-of-date and unconstitutional statute about an officer’s right to shoot a fleeing suspect in his statements to the grand jury. One of those grand jurors later sued because of blatant irregularities in the legal procedure. But none of this matters in determining Mike Brown’s appropriateness for movement work. First, Brown doesn’t have to be a perfect victim to be deserving of a place in movement history. The Department of Justice would never have investigated the Ferguson Police without Brown being killed and the people rising up in protest. Second, even if, for the sake of argument, I concede that Brown did everything Wilson said he did (and I’m not conceding any of this, mind you), we must ask why we are outraged at these two young men for not respecting the rule of law in a city where a corrupt police force has exploited and abused its Black residents for decades. Those who take an oath to uphold the law and protect citizens surely are held to a higher standard than two teen boys engaged in youthful mischief. Three, there is no scenario in which a teenager or any other person should be dead for stealing cigarillos and not walking on the sidewalk. Period. The Black Lives Matter movement is asking us at base level to reject many of the assumptions that undergird our current thinking about how policing takes place in Black and Brown communities. Why are the police trained to shoot-to-kill rather than to shoot to disarm? Why do police use authority and weapons to escalate situations rather than deescalate them? And why, then, are Black men the most frequent casualties of these severe police tactics? These are not the kinds of questions that can be asked when the victim is a perfect victim. What, then, is to be gained by arguing that Wilson was justified for shooting a kid who allegedly took some cigarillos? To me, this killing is evidence at best of a piss-poor policing structure. Moreover, while some witnesses may have been mistaken, all of them were not. Just because Brown had no bullet wounds in his back, does not mean Wilson did not shoot at him as he ran away. The bullet wounds in his forearms very easily could have entered his body while he was running away. The report remains inconclusive on this point, and it is a major point. The report is also inconclusive about whether Brown was in fact charging Wilson. It concludes only that Brown was “coming towards Wilson.” Michael Brown remains an appropriate symbol of this movement. For one, his acts of resistance and refusal – and I do see them as such – pointed us to a city that balances its budget on the backs of poor Black residents. The police merely act as thuggish enforcers for the racket that constitutes city government. Beyond that, this movement, before it is all said and done, will force all of us to grow up and stop believing in the myth of our own purity. We must stop believing that our lives only have value, that they are only worthy of protection, when we’ve done everything right. Even though I am no believer in capital punishment, we do have an understanding in this country that capital punishment is reserved for capital crimes. If Michael and Dorian were two white teenagers, it would be easier for us to look at the adult and the person with more power in this situation – Darren Wilson – and hold him responsible for escalating a conflict and devastating a community over a pack of cigarettes. In his desire to placate white folks and appear reasonable, Jonathan Capehart lets Wilson off the hook. The implication of Capehart’s argument is that Michael Brown is an acceptable, justifiable casualty in this decades-long police war on a small Midwestern community. But if you believe that All Black lives matter, that is an unconscionable conclusion, one that “offends my sense of right and wrong.” As “respectable” Blacks are wont to do, the Capeharts of the world need to believe that if Black people would just “act right” and “do right,” we would be all right. But in a system of white supremacy, there isn’t that much act right in the world. Jonathan, surely you know a suit and tie won’t protect you. So we’re going to keep on marching, as you said. And we will keep holding aloft the banner of Michael Brown. We will do so, because Black folks have already tested out your theory of respectability. We’ve been trying to save our lives by dressing right, talking right and never, ever fucking up since about 1877. That shit has not worked. In an ideal world of crime and punishment, the officer would have had the legal leeway and good sense to pick these boys up, take them back down to the convenience store, make them apologize and work out an arrangement to work off the cigarillos they stole. That is one example of restorative justice and of the world we are fighting for. We are trying to get free, and that means we bring everybody with us, whether your suit is tailored or your pants sag. When the revolution comes, we will leave no one behind.",REAL
"WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS NATO calls for more troops for face-off against Putin Largest military build-up on Russia's borders since Cold War Published: 11 mins ago 
(Haaretz) NATO will press allies on Wednesday to contribute to its biggest military build-up on Russia’s borders since the Cold War as the alliance prepares for a protracted quarrel with Moscow. 
With Russia’s aircraft carrier heading to Syria in a show of force along Europe’s shores, alliance defense ministers aim to make good on a July promise by NATO leaders to send forces to the Baltic states and eastern Poland from early next year. 
The United States hopes for binding commitments from Europe to fill four battle groups of some 4,000 troops, part of NATO’s response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and concern it could try a similar tactic in Europe’s ex-Soviet states.",FAKE
"Sorry, Piers, but Joe Walsh just laid claim to the ‘Musket’ nickname with his post-election call to arms Posted at 5:26 pm on October 26, 2016 by Brett T. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 
Some are interpreting radio host Joe Walsh’s Wednesday afternoon tweet as a literal call to violence following the election, while it seems the majority are electing to point and laugh instead. At least gun control crusader Piers Morgan should be OK with it, seeing as Walsh’s weapon of choice is a musket, just as the founders envisioned when they drew up the Bill of Rights. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
You in? 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom what exactly does that mean? 
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 26, 2016 
Good question. There’s no need to alert the authorities, as plenty of people have already; it’ll be up to the powers that be to determine if “grabbing my musket” constitutes a threat, or if it’s meant symbolically. (The odds that Twitter will suspend Walsh’s account look pretty good.) @WalshFreedom Didn't you get in trouble for this once before? 
— Meredith D. (@YankeeBeatCheck) October 26, 2016 
At least once before. Grab your musket and meet me in North Carolina. 
Time to fight the Feds. 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 9, 2016 I'M GRABBING MY MUSKET is the perfect thing to scream into an old fashioned phone that isn't plugged in It's not a great thing to tweet 
— Erin Gloria Ryan (@morninggloria) October 26, 2016 
In the meantime, plenty of people aren’t exactly quivering at the image of Walsh wielding a musket — or, as the cable networks would likely call it, an assault musket. @WalshFreedom Bless your heart. 
— Swami Buttload (@MetricButtload) October 26, 2016 ""When you're an ex-congressman, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the musket. You can do anything."" https://t.co/qlNApg4Ypi 
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom Looks like .0002% of your followers are ""in"". Awkward. 
— Robert Bingaman (@robertjosiah) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom girl, you don't have a musket. 
— Christoph Fitzgerald (@kifferfitz) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom Good thinking, you'll go far with a smoothbore black-powder muzzleloader 
— Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom and what are you going to do with said musket? Really? A musket? Not a carbine? You really are out of touch 🙂 
— Dan Braxton (@BraxtonMedia) October 26, 2016 Actually, a musket would be an outdated and ineffective weapon for armed insurrection against a modern—*falls into manhole* 
— Alex Brown (@AlexBrownNJ) October 26, 2016 . @WalshFreedom you'd get droned before you could even load it 
— Matt Provenzano (@mattprov94) October 26, 2016 @WalshFreedom You gonna old yeller your candidate? seems a bit harsh.",FAKE
"You are here: Home / US / Biden Explains Why Hillary Set Up Her Email Server (This Doesn’t Help Her) Biden Explains Why Hillary Set Up Her Email Server (This Doesn’t Help Her) October 28, 2016 Pinterest 
Crazy Uncle Joe is at it again. Vice President Joe Biden, and potentially secretary of state should Hillary Clinton be elected (let that sink in for a minute), claimed that Clinton didn’t understand “the gravity” of using private servers to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. 
Social media users pointed out the obviously ridiculous nature of this defense, as many have throughout the whole email debacle. Clinton is either pathetically inept of dangerously corrupt — I’d argue that there’s a lot of both in the equation. Both options mean that she should be behind bars and not running for president. Interviewed by @jdickerson for @FaceTheNation , @VP says @HillaryClinton didnt understand ""the gravity"" of setting up own e-mail system. pic.twitter.com/abIZ1f0kvO 
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 28, 2016 So to quote Dave Chapelle: “I’m sorry officer I … didn’t know I couldn’t do that."" https://t.co/a1mLeOv0KL 
— Ben Howe (@BenHowe) October 28, 2016 
Ben Howe of Red State quoted comedian Dave Chapelle: “I’m sorry officer I … didn’t know I couldn’t do that.” Ummm, she did it specifically to evade FOIA. I'm quite certain she ""understood the gravity"" https://t.co/nZK9EBQp27 
— The H2 (@TheH2) October 28, 2016 
Twitter user “The H2” pointed out that Clinton very likely understood the gravity just fine; it’s probably why she set up the servers in the first place. The H2 tweeted: “Ummm, she did it specifically to evade FOIA. I’m quite certain she “understood the gravity.” 
Absolutely. Clinton almost certainly set up the servers to “evade FOIA,” and the inevitable failures/corruption (such as the pay-to-play operation) she would need to cover up as secretary of state. 
The thousands of emails deleted from Clinton’s servers weren’t just yoga schedules and wedding planning — the State Department admitted there were Benghazi-related emails in there. 
Clinton is responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, and it is almost a certainty that emails pointing to her involvement were scrubbed — in addition to what we already know that points to her responsibility. She understood ""the gravity"" she just thought she could ""get away with it"" #Corruption #draintheswamp #newsisback https://t.co/TrN0xUSbaX 
— Jesse Eaton (@landho69) October 28, 2016 
Jesse Eaton tweeted: “She understood ‘the gravity’ she just thought she could ‘get away with it.'” 
That about covers it. She knew what she was doing, but since she also knows where all the bodies are buried she gets to play by a different set of rules. 
We found out that President Obama, using a pseudonym, communicated with Clinton via her private email server — not her state.gov address — even though he claimed not to know about the servers until the scandal came out in the press. Why would he do that if he thought things were on the up and up and didn’t know a thing about the private server? 
That might have been part of Clinton’s insurance here as well. She may have figured that if she goes down, so does Obama. That would be pretty stupid considering Clinton found out where she sat on the totem pole in 2008, but no one ever said the woman was a genius. 
The FBI announced on Friday that it reopened the investigation of Clinton’s email scandal, and hopefully Clinton will finally be brought to justice. Not likely, but who knows?",FAKE
"By Kevin Boyle on October 29, 2016 henrymakow.com — Oct 28, 2016 I predicted Trump will win and asked my readers what the Illuminati’s game plan is. While most readers favor Trump, Kevin Boyle and others suspect his real role is to lead Americans into WW3. Americans would never follow Hillary into battle. by Kevin Boyle — (henrymakow.com) Thanks for the article on Trump . I have been thinking about trying to write such an article on my own blog for a while. The key danger seems to me to be as follows: Trump is on a project to “take back America”. From whom? Well, quite obviously … Jewish bankers. When he is elected he is in a perfect position to play the anti-banker-establishment game whilst a major war is engineered in which he will be a more than willing participant … backed by the heartfelt support of an adoring and grateful public (very much in the Hitler fashion). The international banksters will get their war and they can even publicly oppose it so that they will get everything we know they want while taking NONE OF THE BLAME. It would be incredibly dangerous for them to try to use the hated Hillary to perform this duty in the current post-Brexit, Trumpist, Euro-Revolting anti-Banking world. Such a game plan is probably looking to these people, our traditional (but increasingly hated) masters as just PERFECT. They get their war, while “anti-banker” stooges and dolts can be ascribed blame and (as usual) actually take the blame for a situation that they, THE USUAL SUSPECTS, have artfully engineered. This looks like a highly possible, even probable, narrative for future events. On the other hand it is just possible that he means what he says and that Trump really intends, like Vladamir Putin, to make his country’s culture overtly Christian again, to reduce the power and influence of the international banking cartel and set an admirable template of self-sufficiency, self-reliance and freedom for communities that other countries will rush to copy. Just possible. Highly unlikely but you never know. Here’s hoping and praying. HITLER TEMPLATE",FAKE
"Email 
I was in London last weekend to view a play, ‘When Nobody Returns’ . The play, written by British writer Brian Woolland and jointly produced by Border Crossings , Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre and Central School of Speech and Drama , tells the Greek myth known to many of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. 
A mixed cast of Palestinian and British actors delivered a riveting performance of poise and emotion. The classic text rings clear, intermingled with language we all hear every day and sets that those who know the story of the Palestinians and other downtrodden people will recognise. The inspired use of a variety of sets at differing levels and positions in the theatre in Acklam Village brings the audience right in to the heart of the drama and to the edge of their seats. The analogues nature of the occupation of Ithaka, at the heart of the play, to the story of Palestinians is clear throughout the play yet not overwrought. 
I have been a supporter of the Palestinian cause since I became politically aware in my mid-teens. This political awakening took place during the post 9-11 atmosphere in the west. As US troops draped the star spangled banner upon and tore down Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square in Baghdad, the Second Intifada raged across the Palestinian territories and Israel. As Bob Dylan once sung, we live in a political world. As I have learnt more about the history and present occupation of Palestinian land, I have always felt that the drive to free the Palestinians of their daily humiliation at the hands of the Israeli state should be led by Palestinians. 
Productions such as ‘When Nobody Returns’ provide agency to Palestinians, those Palestinians who still grind out an existence on the West Bank and Gaza and those in exile, to tell their fundamental story of loss, betrayal, despair and ultimately strength. You can see and feel this strength in the performances of the actors. Iman Aoun, who plays Penelope Odysseus’s wife, exudes the granite and dignified exterior of a war widow who refuses to be beaten by the occupier. 
If you are a supporter of Palestinian human rights and enjoy theatre of the highest quality I encourage you to plan a visit to see ‘When Nobody Returns’ and the prequel ‘This Flesh is Mine’ (drawn from Homer’s The Iliad).",FAKE
"Back in March, some of the financial sector’s leading analysts bumped the chances of a global economic recession from 20 percent to 30 percent. The chances are still minuscule, but the danger always looms. And given the tragic consequences of the Great Recession, any new indicators leading to another potential recession ought to be met with, at the very least, a tone of seriousness. Today, with the Brexit referendum passing in favor of leaving the European Union, and the subsequent decline in the British pound and, specifically, worsening indicators leading toward a British recession, there’s renewed fears of the Brexit shockfront crushing neighboring economies as well.

In the United States, meanwhile, the Republican position on Brexit seems to be based upon everything except the economic repercussions. Instead, the GOP’s posture appears to be simply blurting the opposite of whatever President Obama and the Democrats have to say about it. Indeed, the standard for any GOP argument since 2008 has been, simply put, Opposite Day. If Obama’s for it, they’re against it — even if Obama’s position was once a GOP position (the individual mandate, NSA metadata collection, predator drones, immigration reform, cap-and-trade, and the list goes on). While the GOP never really supported Brexit, they should have, especially knowing that the E.U. was one of the U.S.’s signature achievements after World War II, further assuring there aren’t continued world wars as the atomic age began. Beyond that, the possibility of a Brexit-induced recession should’ve frightened them away. However, we’re assuming the GOP is driven by rational policy choices in 2016. It’s not.

Donald Trump, for his part, isn’t interested in the justifications for, or the post-war history of Europe. He’s only really interested in taking a position because, as with his party, it’s the opposite of Obama’s and Hillary’s. Had he been less driven to blurt a reaction to a potentially cataclysmic event — an event that he was totally unfamiliar with just a month ago, and if he had thought through a strategy that was a slightly more detailed than the 140 character limit on Twitter, he would’ve picked up on a golden opportunity to link Hillary and the Obama administration to a forthcoming recession, regardless of whether it was precipitated by Brexit.

This week, while appearing on stage with Elizabeth Warren for the first time, Hillary Clinton accurately observed that the Wall Street fallout from Brexit cost Americans around $100 billion, all of which vanished when the markets reacted to the Trump-supported Brexit vote:

Average Americans weren’t the only people impacted by Trump’s beloved Brexit vote. Around 400 of his fellow billionaires (if you believe what he says about his net worth) worldwide lost $196.2 billion due to the “leave” vote. This is what Trump supports? Weird. At the very least, experts at Goldman-Sachs are foreseeing a decline in the U.S. economy from around 2.25 percent growth to two-percent straight up. Britain itself appears to be poised for a recession late this year or in early 2017. Nevertheless, Trump missed a fantastic opportunity to sidestep the Brexit vote and, therefore, to fully blame a would-be recession on Hillary Clinton and her allies in the Obama administration. Instead, if Brexit continues to disrupt the world economy, he’ll absolutely remain on-record as having supported the spark that touched off the decline. Simultaneously and moving forward, Hillary can easily marry Trump to Brexit and brand the downturn as the “Trump Recession.” Conversely, had Trump kept his self-defeating mouth shut and, perhaps, continued to mock disabled people — you know, because he has “the best words” — he could’ve solely linked Hillary and Obama to the recession, without even mentioning Brexit as an inciting incident. But, once again, Trump stepped into the pitch and, for no real political gain, took a fastball to the side of his clown-wigged noggin. Sure, Trump is politically astute enough to realize that playing Opposite Day politics plays well with his brainwashed cult-like base. They’re with him no matter what, so, in the near-term it shouldn’t matter. After all, another feature of modern GOP strategy is political expedience over long-term gains. Trump’s got a lock on around 30 percent of American voters, but he’s clearly underestimating the number of Republicans, like George Will, Glenn Beck or Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are easily capable of sidestepping a vote for Trump and supporting someone — anyone — else, not to mention the scores of moderate undecided voters. The question moving forward is whether Trump is capable of making any winnable political choices, given how he’s vowed to “have so much winning, you may get tired of winning.” Instead of positioning himself to immediately link Hillary to a sputtering economy, he’s linked himself to it. He’s, in effect, dropped the ball on two issue areas that are normally owned by the GOP: the economy and national security. According to the new ABC News / Washington Post poll, Obama’s approval on the economy is hovering around 55 percent, while Hillary has been seen more favorably than Trump on her reaction to Orlando. If Trump can’t win on these issues, he might as well give up. And I’m not sure he hasn’t.",REAL
"Tesla, ‘World’s Safest Car,’ Explodes Like a Bomb By DailyBellStaff - November 05, 2016 

Fiery Tesla Crash Sends Flaming Batteries Shooting Like Projectiles, Killing Two In World’s Safest Car … When a Tesla Model S collided with a tree in downtown Indianapolis Thursday, an inferno erupted. The crash, which killed the driver and her one passenger, sent battery cells “firing off almost like projectiles around rescuers,” fire department officials told local NBC affiliate WTHR. “It hit that tree and it bounced around and all of a sudden it just exploded,” Al Finnell, an eyewitness, told the station. -IBD 
The world’s safest car just blew up like a bomb but that message seems to be getting lost amidst the larger coverage about Tesla. 
For years and years, Tesla has never made a nickel despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars. But the company is beloved by the predictable monetary elites that seek more and more control over the rest of us. 
Founder Elon Musk offers that potential control. Every day, he works as hard as he can to ensure that sooner or later government will take away your ability to drive where you want when you want. 
Here at DB, we’ve written several articles about Tesla ( here and here , most recently). We don’t like the car and much more than that, we don’t like the implications behind it. 
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, is fairly clear about his goals. He wants to create an electric, self-driving car. And he has Tesla fans throughout the US and the world. 
Extend the logic and you come the inevitable conclusion that larger entities will have to support Tesla’s vision. These entities will surely be linked to some sort of government control. 
Don’t pay your ticket? Have a confrontation of some sort outside of the home? Or simply fall afoul of one of a plethora of rules and regulations that increasingly hem-in behavior … and you will pay the consequences in terms of your driving life. 
You will get up in the morning and your car won’t start because someone has flagged your behavior. If you do manage to get your car started, it won’t go anywhere because its driving mechanisms have been disabled. 
You’ll have to go to court. You’ll have to pay a fine. Then you’ll be able to drive again. Or maybe not. Think driving is a “privilege”? Just wait. 
We could extend this logic beyond government. It’s perfectly possible that large private entities could have relationships with government that generate similar consequences. 
Why Musk has managed to attract fans for his cars given the inevitable results of his technology is a mystery to us. His ability to continue to fund his endless automotive depredations are a mystery as well. 
It is most probable that his access to funds has a lot to do with the maturation of his technology and the increasing governmental control it offers. 
We live in a time when technology is being celebrated as an enabler of freedom but it the kinds of technology that Musk is perfecting has little to do with freedom. No doubt it could, but not in the current climate. 
There are other issues as well. Musk is running a vast corporation with other people’s money. But if you look elsewhere you will see other titanic entities are throwing their resources behind the development of technology, especially robots. 
It would be one thing if these technological innovations were being developed by entrepreneurs. But one of the biggest developer of robot technology – deadly technology at that – is the Pentagon. 
Since we’ve already seen movies about deadly robots, we’re not shocked by the idea of what the Pentagon is doing. But that doesn’t make it much better. 
How many people wake up in the morning and decide they’re going to build a robot that will kill people automatically? 
But that’s what is going on. This technology is being developed by huge corporations with virtually unlimited funds. These corporations wouldn’t exist without monopoly central banking and a variety of rules and regulations to support them and ensure they have little or no competition. 
The world today is technocratic and fascist. It is run by gigantic corporations that would not exist without laws and judicial decisions that guarantee their viability no matter how incompetently they operate. 
These corporations work hand-in-glove with governments around the world. Both the corporations and governments are run secretly by the same banking cabal that runs central banking via the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. 
In other words, the technological progress that we are supposed to celebrate is actually being organized for nefarious purposes. It wouldn’t exist in the form it does without vast entities that have turned their energies toward perfecting technology that is intended to create additional control, not freedom. 
A normal entrepreneurial society in which individuals and groups applied technology with an eye toward marketplace acceptance might end up with completely different kinds of technology. 
Many people might reject self-driving cars and killer robots – at least without proper safeguards. 
But we don’t have normal societies in the world, for the most part. Instead we have people like Elon Musk who builds “the world’s safest car,” albeit one that explodes like a bomb at high impact. 
More: 
The impact knocked the wheels off of the car before the batteries caught fire and exploded. Speckman died at the scene while her passenger, 44-year-old Kevin McCarthy, died at the hospital. 
What else do we learn? “’Lithium-ion battery cell fires are tough to put out,’ Indiana Fire Trucks Battalion Chief Kevin Jones said.” 
The Tesla Model S is “known” for being fabulously safe. As the article informs us, it achieved the highest National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rating of any car ever tested. 
Conclusion: Except when it explodes.",FAKE
"Read the Open Letter By Former Federal Prosecutors Criticizing James Comey Posted on Oct 31, 2016 FBI Director James Comey. ( Flickr / CC 2.0 ) 
Editor’s note: This open letter was published on Hillary Clinton’s website Sunday night in response to FBI Director James Comey’s recent announcement regarding the agency’s email review . See the full list of signatories on her website here . 
Sunday, as reported by the Associated Press , a group of nearly 100 former federal prosecutors and high-ranking [Department of Justice] officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations, including former [Attorney General] Eric Holder and former Deputy AG Larry Thompson, issued the following joint letter expressing serious concerns over FBI Director Comey’s departure from long-standing department protocols: 
As former federal prosecutors and high-ranking officials of the U.S. Department of Justice, we know that the impartiality and nonpartisanship of the United States justice system makes it exceptional throughout the world. To maintain fairness and neutrality, federal law enforcement officials must exercise discipline whenever they make public statements in connection with an ongoing investigation. Often, evidence uncovered during the course of an investigative inquiry is incomplete, misleading or even incorrect, and releasing such information before all of the facts are known and tested in a court of law can unfairly prejudice individuals and undermine the public’s faith in the integrity of our legal process. 
For this reason, Justice Department officials are instructed to refrain from commenting publicly on the existence, let alone the substance, of pending investigative matters, except in exceptional circumstances and with explicit approval from the Department of Justice officials responsible for ultimate supervision of the matter. They are also instructed to exercise heightened restraint near the time of a primary or general election because, as official guidance from the Department instructs, public comment on a pending investigative matter may affect the electoral process and create the appearance of political interference in the fair administration of justice. 
It is out of our respect for such settled tenets of the United States Department of Justice that we are moved to express our concern with the recent letter issued by FBI Director James Comey to eight Congressional Committees. Many of us have worked with Director Comey; all of us respect him. But his unprecedented decision to publicly comment on evidence in what may be an ongoing inquiry just eleven days before a presidential election leaves us both astonished and perplexed. We cannot recall a prior instance where a senior Justice Department official—Republican or Democrat—has, on the eve of a major election, issued a public statement where the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome, yet the official acknowledges the information to be examined may not be significant or new. 
Director Comey’s letter is inconsistent with prevailing Department policy, and it breaks with longstanding practices followed by officials of both parties during past elections. Moreover, setting aside whether Director Comey’s original statements in July were warranted, by failing to responsibly supplement the public record with any substantive, explanatory information, his letter begs the question that further commentary was necessary. For example, the letter provides no details regarding the content, source or recipient of the material; whether the newly-discovered evidence contains any classified or confidential information; whether the information duplicates material previously reviewed by the FBI; or even “whether or not [the] material may be significant.” 
Perhaps most troubling to us is the precedent set by this departure from the Department’s widely-respected, non-partisan traditions. The admonitions that warn officials against making public statements during election periods have helped to maintain the independence and integrity of both the Department’s important work and public confidence in the hardworking men and women who conduct themselves in a nonpartisan manner. 
We believe that adherence to longstanding Justice Department guidelines is the best practice when considering public statements on investigative matters. We do not question Director Comey’s motives. However, the fact remains that the Director’s disclosure has invited considerable, uninformed public speculation about the significance of newly-discovered material just days before a national election. For this reason, we believe the American people deserve all the facts, and fairness dictates releasing information that provides a full and complete picture regarding the material at issue.",FAKE
Report Copyright Violation Do you think there will be as many doom sayers if trump should get in office ? I notice here at GLP the amount of doom sayers seems to go down when a republican is in office (Bush). But when the left get in office the doomsaying increases. Now i am sure the effect is opposite. If trump gets in office i am sure the doomsaying will increase on the left side of the political spectrum. Page 1,FAKE
"A new video from Al Shabaab purportedly shows the terror group calling for an attack on Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.

According to Fox 9, the mall is one of three similar targets the terror group specifically names, including West Edmonton Mall in Canada and the Oxford Street shopping area in London.

The video purportedly shows 6 minutes of graphic images and the terrorists celebrating the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed more than 60 people.

The narrator, his face wrapped in a black-and-white kaffiyeh-type scarf and wearing a camouflage jacket, spoke with a British accent and appeared to be of Somali origin. He accused Kenyan troops in Somalia of committing abuses against Somali Muslims.

He ended the video by calling on Muslim men to attack other shopping malls in Western countries.

An image of the Mall of America is shown in the video, alongside its GPS coordinates. The mall says it is ramping up its security in response.



 U.S. authorities said there was ""no credible"" evidence suggesting a U.S. mall attack was in the works.

""We will continue to monitor events with the help of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies,"" Mall of America said in a statement. ""As always, we take any potential threat seriously and respond appropriately. Mall of America has implemented extra security precautions, some may be noticeable to guests, and others won't be. We will continue to follow the situation, along with law enforcement, and will remain vigilant as we always do in similar situations.""

Jim Kallstrom, the former assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, said the FBI has a “huge job in front of them.

“You look at the Mall of America, you look at all the malls then you start to backtrack and say you know it would be nice if we knew what comes and goes into the country,” Kallstrom told Fox News on Sunday. “We don’t have a clue.”

The Department of Homeland Security and FBI issued a joint statement Sunday saying that both agencies were aware of the video.

""In recent months, the FBI and DHS have worked closely with our state and local public safety counterparts and members of the private sector, to include mall owners and operators, to prevent and mitigate these types of threats,"" the statement read.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on NBC's Meet The Press that “there needs to be an awareness.

""We're in a new phase now, and I'm afraid that this most recent video release reflects that,"" Joshnson said during an appearance on ABC's This Week.

Al Shabaab, Somalia's Islamic extremist rebels, claimed responsibility for a Friday attack on a hotel in Somalia's capital that killed 25 people and wounded 40, the country's government said Saturday.

One Islamic extremist rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the gate of the Central Hotel, and another went in and blew himself up, a statement from Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke's office said.

Government officials were meeting at the Central Hotel at the time, and the statement said Mogadishu's deputy mayor and two legislators were among the dead. It was unclear whether the government's report of 25 dead included the two bombers.

Despite the loss of key strongholds in Somalia, Al Shabaab, which is linked to Al Qaeda, continues to stage attacks in the capital, Mogadishu, and elsewhere.

The group, designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2008, has close ties to Al Qaeda through its senior leaders. It has attracted several radical volunteers from Minneapolis and Americans began traveling to Somalia in 2007 to join the group.

Somalia's president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, condemned the Friday attack and said it would not derail efforts by his government to restore peace to Somalia, which is recovering from decades of war.

This is the second attack on a hotel in Mogadishu in less than a month. On Jan. 22, three Somali nationals were killed when a suicide car bomber blew himself up at the gate of a hotel housing the advance party of the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited the country days later.

Al Shabaab controlled much of Mogadishu during the years 2007 to 2011, but was pushed out of Somalia's capital and other major cities by African Union forces.

In Kenya, the government dismissed the Al Shabaab video.

""They're using propaganda to legitimize what cannot be legitimized. When you lead a group to go and attack a shopping mall and kill innocent shoppers that cannot be legitimized, those were not soldiers,"" Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said.

""Muslims also died in the Westgate attack. It's in our interest to ensure Somalia is stabilized because the instability affects us. The video is cheap propaganda trying to re-write history and to get more support from those support them.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from MyFoxTwinCities.com.",REAL
"After five Republican debates, most Americans know about Donald Trump’s provocative beliefs, like his desires to end birthright citizenship, stop Muslim immigration and kill families of suspected terrorists. Much less attention has been paid to Carly Fiorina’s conclusion that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, Mike Huckabee’s pledge to defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law, Rick Santorum’s claim that Islam is not protected by the First Amendment or Chris Christie’s threat to shoot down Russian planes and launch cyberattacks on Chinese leaders.

Those provocative beliefs, believe it or not, were also expressed during the five Republican debates. They were just overshadowed by the furor over Trump. It might be natural for an opposition party to sound bombastic during primary season, especially when its front-runner is blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bombast, but the debate transcripts read like a Democratic opposition researcher’s dream.

The good news for Republicans, arguably, is that their rhetoric has been so consistently over-the-top that it has started to sound routine; academics call this “shifting the Overton window,” the range of what’s considered politically acceptable. I’ve watched all the debates as well as the undercards live, but when I reviewed the transcripts, I was amazed how many radical statements had slipped under my radar. Ted Cruz called for putting the United States back on the gold standard. Marco Rubio accused President Barack Obama of destroying the U.S. military. Huckabee said Bernie Madoff’s rip-offs weren’t as bad as what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare. Lindsey Graham said his administration would monitor all “Islamic websites,” not just jihadist ones. I had even forgotten Trump’s claim that vaccines caused autism in a 2-year-old girl he knew.

Vaccines do not cause autism. Goldbuggery is crackpot economics. The U.S. military is still by far the strongest in the world. And what the government has done to people on Social Security and Medicare is give them pensions and health care. But none of those statements drew any pushback from the other Republican candidates, or, for that matter, the media moderators. Neither did Ben Carson’s assertion that if the United States had set a goal of oil independence within a decade, moderate Arab states would have “turned over Osama bin Laden and anybody else you wanted on a silver platter within two weeks,” which is wackadoodle on multiple levels.

After the first Trump-obsessed debate in August, I wrote about how the Republicans were racing to the right to try to attract the scraps of attention that weren’t going to Trump. My favorite example that night was Bobby Jindal’s promise to sic the IRS and the Justice Department on Planned Parenthood on his first day as president—basically, an impeachable crime. But that didn’t turn out to be an isolated incident. In fact, Cruz made the same promise in a later debate, except for the IRS part, presumably because he also vowed to abolish the IRS.

The Democratic candidates have also appealed to their party’s ideologically committed base during their primary debates, which, perhaps for that reason, have been scheduled at odd times when few Americans have been watching. But with occasional exceptions from socialist Bernie Sanders, who suggested that he wouldn’t mind 90 percent tax rates on the rich, they haven’t said much that felt particularly surprising or politically damaging. Debt-free college may or may not be a good idea, but it’s hard to imagine Republicans turning it into an attack line.

By contrast, the GOP debates have felt like madcap purity contests, with the candidates competing to demonstrate their commitment to supply-side tax cuts and foreign-policy belligerence, as well as their fierce opposition to illegal immigration and every imaginable government regulation. Rubio, supposedly the establishment alternative to Trump, vowed to repeal Wall Street reform in its entirety and oppose abortion without any exceptions. John Kasich, supposedly the moderate in the GOP race, vowed to “punch Russia in the nose.” Wild accusations by non-Trump candidates—that the independent Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low to prop up Obama, that Obama shows more respect to Iran’s ayatollah than Israel’s prime minister, that 300,000 veterans died last year while waiting for health care, that Obama is trying to strip away the sovereignty of the United States, that David Petraeus was prosecuted for sharing classified information with his girlfriend because Obama didn’t like him—have provoked no reaction whatsoever during the debates.

Democratic leaders have expressed glee about these nationally televised festivals of right-wing me-too-ism, but another way of thinking about them is as highly rated, mostly unrebutted advertisements for the notion that Obama is a disaster and America is in peril. So far, the Republicans have had more than 20 hours to tell the public that “the idea of America is slipping away,” that “we’re on a path to socialism,” that “America has been betrayed.” Nobody on the debate stage disagreed when, for example, Christie declared that Obama doesn’t respect the military or the police, or that Americans believed in a more prosperous future in January 2009 (when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month) until Obama “stole” that belief. You might not take Christie at his word that Obama is a “feckless weakling,” but when you hear it over and over, you might assume he must be missing at least some feck.

At times, a few of the Republican contenders have dared to challenge the magical thinking that has dominated the debates. Rand Paul has been a consistent voice against regime change as a cure for what ails the Middle East. Kasich has mocked the “fantasy” that massive high-end tax cuts would create balanced budgets. And Trump has bucked GOP conventional wisdom on foreign and domestic issues, denouncing the Iraq War as a waste of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars that could have shored up American infrastructure instead, while defending progressive taxation as a logical approach to raising revenue from those who can afford it.

When I slogged through the transcripts, I also noticed a few interesting ideas buried amid the can-you-top-this rhetoric. When he wasn’t accusing Obama of criminalizing Christianity while exalting the faith of Guantánamo detainees, Huckabee was often calling for more focus on chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer that cause so much pain and cost so much money. When she wasn’t telling whoppers about Planned Parenthood videos and Obama firing a general who never served in his administration, Fiorina kept pushing for “zero-based budgeting,” the idea that every program and agency should have to justify every dollar every year. When he wasn’t complaining that Obama cares more about anti-Muslim sentiment than anti-Semitism, Santorum suggested that veterans should get most of their care from private hospitals, and that the Veterans Administration should become a specialized center of excellence for military-focused health issues like prosthetics and PTSD.

But policy entrepreneurialism was not the gist of the Republican debates. The gist was that the survival of the United States is at risk; that Obama has been weak on ISIL and Assad and Russia and China and Iran and Hezbollah and every other distasteful figure on the world stage; that calling radical Islam by its name and “targeting the bad guys” and “taking the fight to the enemy” will solve all the problems in the Middle East. On domestic issues, the gist was that the United States in the Obama era has become a dystopia of rampant unemployment, high taxes, runaway deficits, porous borders and job-killing regulation—and that undoing what Obama did would make America great again.

These are presumably winning messages in a Republican primary. It’s not clear whether they would be in a general election. The reality of the Obama era, for all its warts, is that unemployment has dropped to 5 percent, the deficit has shrunk by two thirds, illegal immigration has plateaued, far fewer U.S. soldiers are dying abroad and Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by terrorists at home. The question is whether the run-for-your-lives talking points will crash into statistical reality, or whether they will gradually help create a new political reality.

The Democrats would say the GOP is simply defying reality—on climate, on economics, on the ease with which muscular foreign policies can fix the world, on just about everything. Then again, the GOP isn’t the party that’s hiding its debates on weekend nights. Its views may be extreme, but it’s airing its views for all to see. It’s acting like a confident party—perhaps an overconfident party—while the Democrats are acting like they’ve lost their feck.

",REAL
"(CNN) Thousands gathered in Riyadh on Friday to say farewell to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a cautious reformer who succeeded in securing broader freedoms in the conservative kingdom, but fell short in gaining greater independence for women.

Abdullah died early Friday, several weeks after the state-run Saudi Press Agency said he was suffering from pneumonia and had been admitted to a hospital . The royal court didn't release an exact cause of death. He was 90.

To ensure a smooth transition, the kingdom quickly appointed his 79-year-old half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz, to the throne. His half-brother Prince Muqrin, a decade younger, is the new crown prince.

After Friday afternoon prayers at Riyadh's Imam Turki Bin Abdullah Grand Mosque, the body of Abdullah, wrapped in a pale shroud, was carried from the mosque toward a cemetery, followed by a solemn procession of Saudi men in traditional dress.

He was later laid to rest after a simple, swift ceremony. Those present at the graveside -- the royals closest to the late king -- were then to move on to a royal palace, where they were to pay their respects to the new monarch.

The ceremony of ""al Bayaah,"" or pledging of allegiance to the new king, followed the funeral.

Condolences and remembrances poured in from all corners of the globe.

""To God we belong and indeed to him we shall return,"" said the homepage of the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News.

Bahrain, Jordan and the Palestinian territories, among others, declared days of mourning. The U.N. secretary-general praised Abdullah for his Arab Peace Initiative to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said he would lead a delegation ""in the coming days"" to pay respects.

""King Abdullah's life spanned from before the birth of modern Saudi Arabia through its emergence as a critical force within the global economy and a leader among Arab and Islamic nations,"" U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement.

Speaking to CNN's Richard Quest in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he expects no changes in his government's relations with Saudi Arabia.

""I don't anticipate anything based on the conversation we have had, no,"" he said.

In an address to the nation -- his first televised appearance since becoming king -- Salman offered his condolences to the Saudi people.

""We will, with God's will and power, adhere to the straight path this country followed since its establishment by King Abdulaziz and his sons after him, and will not deviate at all from it, since our constitution is the book of Allah (Quran) and the teachings of Prophet Mohammed,"" he said.

He also spoke of the ""desperate need"" for unity and solidarity among the followers of Islam, saying Saudi Arabia would continue to promote that.

He had already issued six royal decrees Friday, the Saudi Press Agency reported, including appointing Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz as the deputy crown prince.

Salman, who has 1.33 million followers on Twitter but follows no one, changed his Twitter handle to @KingSalman.

In the context of the kingdom's conservative circles, Abdullah was seen as a reformer and often came up against more hardline clerics.

After ascending to the throne, Abdullah took steps toward broader freedoms and invested some of the country's vast oil wealth in large-scale education and infrastructure projects.

""He was really quite (an) extraordinary figure. He was probably the most progressive and liberal-minded king of Saudi Arabia since King Faisal, which is a long time ago, in the early 1970s,"" CNN's Fareed Zakaria said about Abdullah, whom he described as ""much loved.""

""I had the opportunity to meet with him once, and what you got a sense of was somebody who really was determined to move his country forward,"" Zakaria said. ""It's a conservative country and a conservative society -- and he kept emphasizing that to me -- but he was very clear in the direction he wanted to go.""

However, resistance from conservative factions hindered some of his efforts, leaving many women, in particular, disappointed by a lack of progress toward greater independence.

Under Abdullah's leadership, the country slowly squashed al Qaeda, capturing or killing its leaders in the kingdom, forcing the remnants underground and sidelining radical preachers.

It also took a more prominent role in international affairs.

""Remember, the last time the price of oil fell like this, the Soviet Union collapsed,"" said Zakaria. ""That said, the successor is a very competent man.""

He added: ""I don't expect any major shift, but it marks a big change, and we'll have to see what the new king is like.""",REAL
"A deeply divided Supreme Court on Friday delivered a historic victory for gay rights, ruling 5 to 4 that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live.

The court’s action rewarded years of legal work by same-sex marriage advocates and marked the culmination of an unprecedented upheaval in public opinion and the nation’s jurisprudence.

Marriages began Friday in states that had previously thwarted the efforts of same-sex couples to wed, while some states continued to resist what they said was a judicial order that changed the traditional definition of marriage and sent the country into uncharted territory. As of the court’s decision Friday morning, there were 14 states where same-sex couples were not allowed to marry.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has written all of the court’s decisions recognizing and expanding gay rights, said the decision was based on the fundamental right to marry and the equality that must be afforded gay Americans.

“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined in the ruling by the court’s liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

All four of the court’s most conservative members — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — dissented, and each wrote a separate opinion.

The common theme in their dissents was that judicial activism on the part of five members of the court had usurped a power that belongs to the people.

“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” wrote Roberts, who for the first time in his tenure marked his disagreement with a decision by reading part of his dissent from the bench.

“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it,” he wrote.

Scalia called the decision a “threat to American democracy,” saying it robs citizens of “the freedom to govern themselves.”

[It’s the first time Roberts has had such a bold statement from the bench]

In a statement in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama hailed the decision: “This ruling is a victory for America. This decision affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts. When all Americans are truly treated as equal, we are more free.”

It wasn’t until 2012 that Obama declared that same-sex couples should be able to marry, and it was only last year that he said he thought the Constitution provided such a right. But by Friday evening, the rainbow colors that gay rights activists have adopted were projected onto the north face of the White House. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, Obama said, “Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we have made our union a little more perfect.”

There were wild scenes of celebrations on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court. Same-sex marriage supporters had arrived early, armed with signs and rainbow flags. They cheered at the announcement of a constitutional right for gay marriage, which did not legally exist anywhere in the world until the turn of this century. The first legally recognized same-sex marriages in the United States took place just 11 years ago, the result of a Massachusetts state supreme court decision.

Jim Obergefell, who became the face of the case, Obergefell v. Hodges, when he sought to put his name on his husband’s Ohio death certificate as the surviving spouse, said, “Today’s ruling from the Supreme Court affirms what millions across the country already know to be true in our hearts: that our love is equal.”

“It is my hope that the term gay marriage will soon be a thing of the past, that from this day forward it will be, simply, marriage,” he said.

But Austin R. Nimocks, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that supports traditional marriage, said: “Today, five lawyers took away the voices of more than 300 million Americans to continue to debate the most important social institution in the history of the world. . . . Nobody has the right to say that a mom or a woman or a dad or a man is irrelevant. There are differences that should be celebrated.”

[Opponents of gay marriage are divided on whether to resist the ruling]

The Supreme Court used cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, where restrictions against same-sex marriage were upheld by an appeals court last year, to find that the Constitution does not allow such prohibitions.

Kennedy over the past 20 years has written the Supreme Court’s most important gay rights cases: overturning criminal laws on homosexual conduct, protecting gays from discrimination and declaring that the federal government could not refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed where they were legal.

He often employs a lofty, ­writing-for-history tone, and Friday’s decision was no different.

Referring to the couples who brought the cases before the court, Kennedy wrote: “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.”

Kennedy did not respond directly to the court’s dissenters, but he addressed the argument that the court was creating a constitutional right. The right to marriage is fundamental, he said. The difference is society’s evolving view of gay people and their rights, he said.

“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest,” he wrote. “With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”

As in previous decisions, Kennedy did not spell out how courts should scrutinize laws that treated gays differently. But Mary Bonauto, who argued the case for gay plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, said that message from Kennedy’s combined opinions “is one of inclusion: Stop making rules for gay people.”

Scalia was a sharp critic of Kennedy’s style, saying it was “as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”

“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie,” Scalia wrote.

Roberts wrote a lengthy dissent that was a point-by-point takedown of the majority opinion. Gay activists had wondered whether the 60-year-old justice might take note of the increasing public support for same-sex marriage and find a way to join the majority on what they called the “right side of history.”

But he and the other dissenters said the question was not whether same-sex marriage was a good idea, but who should decide.

“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” Roberts wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”

Roberts rejected a comparison to Loving v. Virginia, in which the court struck down bans on interracial marriage. That did not change the age-old definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, he said. He raised concerns that the decision could lead to polygamous marriages — he mentioned a married threesome of lesbians called a “throuple.”

He noted that voters and legislators in only 11 states had authorized same-sex marriages, and said it was better for gay marriage to be adopted through the democratic process than by judicial order. He said religious leaders could take little comfort from the majority opinion that their beliefs would be respected.

That theme was picked up by Alito in his dissent. He said there could be “bitter and lasting wounds” from the decision and warned that the decision will be “exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

The questions raised in the cases decided Friday were left unanswered in 2013, when the justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage. A slim majority of the court said at the time that a key portion of the Defense of Marriage Act — withholding the federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages — was unconstitutional. In a separate case that year, the court said procedural issues kept it from answering the constitutional question in a case from California but allowed same-sex marriages to resume in that state.

Since then, courts across the nation — with the notable exception of the Cincinnati-based federal appeals court that left intact the restrictions in the four states at issue — have struck down a string of state prohibitions on same-sex marriage, many of them passed by voters in referendums.

Jerry Markon, David Nakamura and Sandhya Somashekhar contributed to this report.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"ALEXANDER MERCOURIS | THE DURAN R ussia’s use of its aircraft carrier in the Syrian conflict is principally intended to learn lessons for the design of more potent such warships in the future, rather than to change the situation in Syria itself. The Russian navy’s deployment of   aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean has provoked a very confused response in the Western media. 
On the one hand it is described as a major escalation, as if   was a US style super carrier. On the other hand there has been a great of deal of derision , with the ship called an obsolete rust bucket dangerous mainly to its crew. Where does the truth lie? The Admiral Kuznetsov is the first and only Russian aircraft carrier capable of launching fighter aircraft conventionally. The preceding Kiev class carriers were smaller ships, which could only launch a small number of aircraft vertically. Contrary to what reports say, Admiral Kuznetsov is by the standards of navy carriers a relatively new ship. She was launched in 1985, commissioned in the then Soviet navy in 1990, but only became operational after prolonged trials in 1995. The US navy currently operates 10 Nimitz class supercarriers. If the age of a ship is determined by its date of launch; then three of the US navy’s Nimitz class supercarriers are older than Kuznetsov; if by date of commission, then five are; if by entry into service then six are. The Russian navy had no previous experience of operating carriers, so the lengthy time scale of her sea trials between commission and entry into service is not surprising. In addition what undoubtedly extended this period before her full entry into service was the political and economic crisis Russia experienced during the 1990s. Given the severity of this crisis, it is a wonder a ship as large and complicated as Kuznetsov was brought into service at all. Either way talk of Kuznetsov as some sort of archaic ship from a bygone era is exaggerated, whilst jokes about Kuznetsov being “….practically old enough to have been deployed in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war….” are simply silly. The Admiral Kuznetsov is expected to deploy off Syria, carrying 15 warplanes, including new MiG-29K/KUB fighters and the Su-33a, shown here. Aircraft carriers as it happens tend to be long-lived ships. Coral Sea, a US Medway class carrier, served in the US Navy from 1947 to 1990. By the standards of aircraft carriers Kuznetsov is not an old ship. What is true about Kuznetsov is that because she was the first of a type of ship of which the Russians had no previous experience, and because of the fraught period during which she was commissioned and brought into service – which made it impossible to sort out her teething problems properly – Kuznetsov suffers by comparison with US navy carriers from design flaws and from engine problems. The ship’s engines are unreliable, because they are insufficiently powerful for a ship of this size. The Russians when they built Kuznetsov lacked suitable nuclear reactors for this type of ship (they were designed for the intended follow-on Ulyanovsk carrier, which because of the 1990s crisis was however never built). They also lacked conventional engines large enough for a ship of this size, which was roughly twice as heavy as the largest other ship the Russian or Soviet navy had commissioned before. The Russians accordingly came up with a complicated solution of using multiple steam turbines and turbo-pressurised boilers to make up for the lack of power of the individual engines. Like all complicated arrangements, this arrangement is unreliable and prone to breakdown, with the engines experiencing stress especially in heavy seas. To compound the trouble with the engines, they were built by a plant in what is now independent Ukraine. As political relations between Russia and Ukraine deteriorated, servicing of the engines by this plant became increasingly erratic, and has now stopped completely. It is these problems with the engines that account for the practice of accompanying Kuznetsov on long range deployments with a tug. The tug in question – the Nikolai Chiker – is the most powerful tug in the world. This same tug played a key role in successfully hauling Kuznetsov’s uncompleted sister ship Varyag from Ukraine to China in 2005, where she has now become the Chinese carrier Liaoning. The fact Kuznetsov is accompanied by a tug on long range deployments has provoked some derision. However it is common practice in any navy to accompany large surface warships with service ships, and accompanying Kuznetsov with a tug ensures in Kuznetsov’s case that the carrier will get to where the Russian naval staff are sending it. The engine problems will not affect Kuznetsov’s Mediterranean deployment when the carrier finally reaches its position. Kuznetsov suffers from other problems, which are unsurprising given that Kuznetsov is so much bigger and so different to any other ship the Russian navy has ever previously commissioned, and the unhappy times when it was launched. The arduous deployment of the Russian flotilla. Everything is harder for the Russians. (BBC) There are for example known to be problems with Kuznetsov’s water pipes, which have a history of breakdowns and of freezing up in Arctic weather. These problems too however will not affect Kuznetsov’s capabilities as a warship when the carrier finally reaches the eastern Mediterranean, and the close proximity of Russian bases in Sevastopol and Tartus means they can be dealt with quickly if they arise. Once this deployment is ended Kuznetsov will go through a lengthy refit, which unlike previous refits is intended to be practically a rebuild. With Russia developing a new range of much larger and more powerful engines, Kuznetsov’s current unsatisfactory engines will finally be replaced, and the other teething problems like the problem with the water pipes will finally be addressed. Ultimately this is a potent warship, bigger than any other carrier other than those operated by the US navy, and once the refit is done it will be a powerful asset. In the meantime the ship already provides the Russian fleet with a carrier capability matched by no other navy apart from that of the US. 
The Russian carrier passing through the English Channel. In saying this it is important to stress however that the US navy carrier force – with its 10 nuclear powered supercarriers – dwarfs the capability of any other navy, including Russia’s, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Neither the Kuznetsov, nor any other carrier the Russians might build, nor any other navy, can match or rival it. A more pertinent criticism of Kuznetsov is that though Kuznetsov is a large ship (at 55,000 tonnes standard weight and with a 305 metre length Kuznetsov is midway between a US Medway class carrier and a US Forrestal class supercarrier) the air group it carries at 40-50 aircraft is relatively small (by comparison a smaller US Medway class carrier carried an air group of 75-80 aircraft in the 1980s). This suggests that Kuznetsov is inefficient in its use of its spaces, a fact which again reflects Russian inexperience designing this sort of ship when Kuznetsov was built. However it also partly reflects differences in Kuznetsov’s intended role. At the time Kuznetsov was built the Russians did not envisage using their carriers for the sort of long range carrier type operations carried out by the US navy. Unlike US navy supercarriers Kuznetsov prioritises air defence of the fleet rather than long range strikes. That explains why Kuznetsov’s fighter aircraft take off from the carrier using a ski jump rather than steam catapults. Ski jump takeoffs put less stress on the pilots and shorten takeoff times, enabling more aircraft to take off from the carrier more quickly, which can be important in an air defence situation. The penalty is that aircraft are limited in the loads they can carry by comparison with aircraft launched by steam catapults. For air defence – the purpose for which Kuznetsov was designed – this is unimportant since fighter aircraft carrying out air defence missions only carry light air to air missiles rather than heavy air to ground missiles and bombs. However it does significantly reduce the air group’s capability to carry out long range strikes. Combined with the relatively small size of the air group, this means that Kuznetsov’s ability to carry out long range ground strikes is fractional compared to that of a US navy supercarrier. If Kuznetsov is not really designed to carry out long range ground strikes, why are the Russians deploying Kuznetsov off the coast of Syria? The plan to deploy Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean was made many months ago, long before the recent collapse in relations with the US over Syria. The decision therefore can have nothing to do with deterring the US from declaring a no fly zone over Syria, as some people are suggesting. Most likely the intention is to gain experience operating aircraft against ground targets from an offshore carrier. This is not something the Russians have ever done before. Even if Kuznetsov’s capability to do it by comparison with a US navy supercarrier is marginal, the fighting in Syria does at least give the Russians an opportunity to try it out to find out how it is done and what it involves. That way they can learn lessons that will help them with the design of the far more powerful ships that are to come (see here and here ). In other words the deployment of the Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean is essentially a training exercise. It does not merit either the derision or the hype that has been created around it.",FAKE
"Print 
In a story that predictably did not make the mainstream media, and with video surveillance very difficult to find, a massive mob of black teens viciously attacked white Temple University students, police officers and even a police horse in Philadelphia on Friday night. 
[…] 
In the limited local coverage this story did receive, the race aspect was generally avoided. It is way past time to take back the media, and fill it with truth-tellers, not apologists. 
“More than 150 teens, spread out in groups of 20 or 30, descended upon the campus at around 8:30 p.m. Friday — wreaking havoc for nearly two hours before eventually dispersing,” according to NBC 10 …. 
But there is a reason for all of this horror, according to Solomon Jones of Philly.com . It evidently boils down to the progressive canard “white privilege.” 
The black teens are feeling excluded because evil white “others” have come into their neighborhood and built rental properties for college students, raising the property values of their neighborhoods in a way that evidently excludes the angry teens, who were used to having their blighted turf unmolested.",FAKE
"When it comes to energy policy, the 2016 presidential election really isn't all that complicated.

Hillary Clinton plans to continue President Obama's strategy of pushing down carbon dioxide emissions via regulations. That means using less coal and oil and more wind and solar. Donald Trump, by contrast, doesn't much care about global warming and plans to greatly expand US oil drilling and coal mining — largely by repealing various environmental rules.

On May 26, Trump fleshed out his vision in a speech at an oil industry conference in Bismarck, North Dakota. There were no real surprises. Trump's energy policy sounds nearly identical to Mitt Romney's energy policy in 2012, only with more exclamation points. (At one point Trump actually used the phrase ""very, very pure, sweet, beautiful oil."") He's happily adopted the standard GOP playbook: fewer regulations, more domestic fossil fuel production, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and ""cancel"" the Paris climate deal. The crowd loved it.

Here were six big takeaways:

Before the speech, many reporters were wondering if Trump might finally clarify his views on global warming. This is a guy, after all, who once tweeted, ""The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."" Surely he'd like to elaborate?

Instead, Trump mostly ... ignored the issue. He talked about guns in his energy speech. He talked about rising crime in cities. He even reiterated his pledge to build a wall on the border with Mexico — evidently a hit at North Dakota oil gatherings. But he barely discussed climate change.

He did promise that upon taking office, he'd ""rescind all job-destroying Obama executive actions ... including the Climate Action Plan."" Here he's referring to a series of regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency has enacted over the past eight years to cut US carbon dioxide emissions. Trump would presumably try to scrap Obama's Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce CO2 from power plants.

I've written about how Trump might go about dismantling Obama's climate policies here. Suffice to say, this would be easier to do if a GOP-controlled Congress could pass a law taking away the EPA's authority over carbon dioxide. It'd be harder (but not impossible) for Trump to do via executive action alone.

Trump also pledged to ""cancel the Paris climate agreement"" — the deal reached last December in which every country on Earth pledged to restrain emissions and address global warming. While Trump couldn't just scuttle a global deal by himself, he could certainly undermine it by abandoning America's efforts to cut emissions.

Trump also seemed perplexed about how the Paris agreement even works, claiming it ""gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use."" This isn't true at all. Under the deal, every country submits its own (voluntary) plan for curbing emissions.

The United States is currently the largest producer of petroleum and natural gas in the world, thanks in part to the massive fracking boom that's been taking place around the country since the 2000s:

But to hear Trump tell it, we're barely producing anything at all. He wants more — much more. On his first day in office, ""American energy dominance will be declared a strategic, economic, and foreign policy goal of the United States,"" he said. ""It's about time!""

Trump dropped a few hints about how he'd try to expand oil and gas drilling. He criticized the Obama administration for keeping certain federal lands and waters off limits from drilling — including parts of Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf. (Romney proposed opening up these areas in 2012; you could likely get more production by doing so, though the impacts are often exaggerated.) Trump also attacked Clinton's proposals to regulate fracking; like Obama, she has backed rules to restrict methane leaks from natural gas operations.

At times, Trump didn't seem to appreciate that energy production is frequently outside the president's control. For instance, he blamed Obama for the fact that the number of active drilling rigs in the United States has fallen to its lowest level in nearly a decade. The rig count has indeed plummeted. But that's primarily due to the fact that the recent US oil boom has created a glut of oil worldwide, causing crude prices to crash and giving companies less incentive to drill.

""Under my administration,"" Trump promised, ""we'll accomplish complete American energy independence. Complete. Imagine a world in which our foes, and the oil cartels, can no longer use energy as a weapon. It will happen. We're going to win.""

Presidents have been promising ""energy independence"" since forever and a day, but it doesn't really make much sense. The US currently produces enough crude oil to supply about 74 percent of its needs. In theory, with vastly expanded production we could bump that up to 100 percent. But we still wouldn't be shielded from foreign oil cartels.

Oil is traded on the world market, and if tensions in the Middle East cause prices to spike, everyone is affected, regardless of where they get their crude. The easiest way to observe this is to look at Canada. Canada is a net oil exporter, a bona fide oil-independent nation. But gasoline prices in Canada still rise and fall in accordance with world events, just as they do in the United States or Japan or Europe.

There are perfectly sound reasons to boost domestic energy production — as Trump says, it can create jobs and economic activity. But ""energy independence"" is a misguided notion.

Coal production in the US has fallen off a cliff in recent years. Back in 2008, the country produced a record 1.2 billion short tons of coal. By 2015, that had fallen 25 percent. Coal mining employment has also plummeted as a result — a real blow to various communities in places like West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

There are a couple of reasons for coal's recent fall: The fracking boom has led to a flood of cheap natural gas, propelling many utilities to switch from coal to gas. But Obama's EPA has also enacted a number of strict air pollution regulations — on mercury and sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide from coal-burning plants — that have accelerated this shift to gas. (Falling Chinese steel production has also weakened demand for metallurgic coal.)

Donald Trump wants to bring back coal mining by repealing those EPA regulations. ""We're going to save the coal industry,"" Trump promised. But utilities wouldn't necessarily rush back to coal once that happened, because natural gas would still have a cost advantage. (And remember, Trump wants to expand natural gas production.) It's extremely unlikely that the coal industry would rebound to its former levels.

Indeed, even coal industry execs who support Trump are skeptical that he can bring back all those lost jobs. ""I don't think it will be a thriving industry ever again,"" coal mining CEO Robert Murray recently told Taylor Kuykendall of SNL. ""It will be an extremely competitive industry and it will be half size. … The coal mines cannot come back to where they were or anywhere near it.""

In his speech, Trump said that his energy strategy ""does include nuclear, wind, and solar."" But, he added, he wouldn't support them ""to the exclusion of other forms of energy"" — referring to fossil fuels — ""that right now are working much better.""

In his press conference with reporters before the speech, Trump elaborated: ""I know a lot about solar,"" he said. ""The problem with solar is it's very expensive."" He made no mention of the fact that solar prices have been dropping precipitously.

He also criticized wind turbines for killing birds in California. ""Wind is killing hundreds and hundreds of eagles, one of the most beautiful, one of the most treasured birds,"" he said. ""So wind is a problem."" (While this is technically true, wind turbines kill orders of magnitude fewer birds than power lines or windows or cats. And many wind developers are currently experimenting with ways to reduce bird deaths.)

""A Trump administration will focus on real environmental challenges, not the phony ones,"" Trump said. ""We'll solve for environmental problems, like the need for clean and safe drinking water."" Later he elaborated: ""My priorities are simple: clean air and clean water.""

But he gave no indication of how he'd actually do that. In the past, the EPA has been a major driver of cleaning up America's air pollution. As the chart below shows, the six most common air pollutants in the US have all fallen 72 percent since 1970 — due, in large part, to rules imposed under the Clean Air Act.

Trump made clear he's not a fan of the EPA. So he'd push for clean air and water ... how? He didn't say.

Read more: How the next president could expand Obama's climate policies — or dismantle them",REAL
"Man Wearing ‘Jewmerica’ T-Shirt Never Dreamed He’d See This Day SAND SPRINGS, OK—Feeling a mixture of intense pride and abject disbelief after news networks called the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, local man Terry Williams, who is currently wearing a T-shirt adorned with the word “Jewmerica,” told reporters late Tuesday night that he never dreamed he’d see this day during his lifetime. Nation Throws Off Tyrannical Yoke Of Moderate Respect For Women WASHINGTON—Political experts are hailing Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory early Wednesday as a resounding declaration that the nation is finally ready to cast off the tyrannical yoke of moderate respect for women that has suffocated the citizens of this country for generations. Nation Elects First Black-Hearted President WASHINGTON—Shattering a barrier long thought unbreakable in the United States, Donald Trump, the 70-year-old billionaire real estate mogul from New York, became the first black-hearted man in history to win the American presidency, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Nation’s Optimists Need To Shut The Fuck Up Right Now WASHINGTON—Saying their rosy attitude about the state of the election was not helping anything given what is currently transpiring, sources confirmed Tuesday night that the nation’s optimists need to seriously shut the fuck up as soon as humanly fucking possible. Anderson Cooper Informs Viewers CNN Just Minutes Away From First Significant Piece Of Information Of Day NEW YORK—Roughly two hours into the network’s live nine-hour-long “Election Night In America” programming block, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper informed viewers Tuesday evening he is only moments away from delivering the first piece of genuinely significant information of the day. ",FAKE
"A 23 kiloton tower shot called BADGER, fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series.",FAKE
"Posted on November 4, 2016 by DCG | 1 Comment 
Seattle proggies love to push businesses out of their city. 
From MyNorthwest.com : Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess proposed a 241 percent business license fee hike for pot shops, citing inspection and enforcement costs associated with regulating the two-year-old retail marijuana industry. 
The proposed increase, introduced at Wednesday’s budget meeting, would raise the annual licensing cost within Seattle to $3,450 from the existing $1,000 . Cannabis retailers — and one council member — immediately questioned the proposal, saying that the math doesn’t make much sense. 
“So what justified the increase other than the fact that we can do it?” asked District 2 Councilmember Bruce Harrell, citing Mayor Ed Murray’s more modest proposal for a $500 increase. “We’ve done a cost analysis that actually reflects (the increase)? It seems like we’ve exceeded it quite significantly.” 
The city’s Finance and Administrative Services department defended the cost, saying that even with the mayor’s proposed increase, the licensing fee falls $430,000 short of the city’s cost to regulate pot. The finance department projected that pot retailers will cost the city more than $700,000 next year. 
Pot growers and retailers wondered why this industry, from a license fee standpoint, must pay for its regulation in a way that other businesses, such as pawn shops and strip clubs, do not. Moreover, the city finance estimate misses a key point, said KC Franks, owner of Stash pot shops. “What about the $2 million in new sales taxes to the city?” Franks asked. “Why doesn’t their math reflect that?” Seattle Council Tax-Raising-Advocate Tim Burgess 
Burgess, who said he has no independent confirmation of the sales tax figures, conceded that the pot retailers have, “raised some legitimate objections, so I’m sure we are going to look at all of that.” 
But, he added, the pot issue speaks to a larger policy discussion about how cities pay for the cost of regulating local businesses. Typically, he said, a city uses a blend of licensing fees and taxes to get the money for necessary inspections and enforcement. Pot, he said, costs Seattle about $1 million a year to regulate, an amount which he characterized as a big burden. “This proposal was made to try to offset some of those costs,” he said 
Burgess said the licensing fee likely will go up, but he is not sure if the full council will support his proposed increase. The measure, as it is or modified, could come to a vote next week. 
Franks and other marijuana retailers characterized the proposal as a simple cash grab directed at an industry without much political clout – or as much money as people seem to think. Philip Dawdy, of the Have a Heart pot shop, wondered why an industry that is a net contributor to city coffers doesn’t have more council support? 
When the city raised business license fees to help pay for more police, he said, they consulted retail business organizations first. The pot fee, he said, was a complete blindside. “We are actually helping to balance the city’s budget thanks to sales taxes,” he said. “Why are we not someone’s priority?” 
DCG",FAKE
"Videos ‘We The People’ Against Tyranny: Seven Principles For Free Government “As I look at America today, I am not afraid to say that I am afraid.”— Former presidential adviser Bertram Gross | November 7, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! Dozens of protestors demonstrating against the expansion of the Dakota Access Pipeline wade in cold creek waters confronting local police, as remnants of pepper spray waft over the crowd near Cannon Ball, N.D., Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016. 
As history teaches us, if the people have little or no knowledge of the basics of government and their rights, those who wield governmental power inevitably wield it excessively. After all, a citizenry can only hold its government accountable if it knows when the government oversteps its bounds. 
Precisely because Americans are easily distracted—because, as study after study shows, they are clueless about their rights—because their elected officials no longer represent them—because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that their only duty as citizens is to vote—because the citizenry has failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the Constitution—because young people are no longer being taught the fundamentals of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, resulting in citizens who don’t even know they have rights—and because Americans continue to place their trust in politics to fix what’s wrong with this country—the American governmental scheme is sliding ever closer towards a pervasive authoritarianism. 
This steady slide towards tyranny, meted out by militarized local and federal police and legalistic bureaucrats, has been carried forward by each successive president over the past fifty years regardless of their political affiliation. 
Big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller. 
However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis for the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for. 
The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about. 
First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, proclaimed, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” Moreover, in questions of power, Thomas Jefferson warned, “Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast. 
The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. In appointing the government as the guardian of the people’s rights, the people give it only certain, enumerated powers, which are laid out in a written constitution. The idea of a written constitution actualizes the two great themes of the Declaration of Independence: consent and protection of equal rights. Thus, the purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant. The obvious next step, unless we act soon, is tyranny. 
The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution. If all people possess equal rights, the people who live under the laws must be allowed to participate in making those laws. By that same token, those who make the laws must live under the laws they make. However, today government officials at all levels often act as if they are royalty with salaries and perks that none of the rest of us are afforded. This is an egregious affront to the citizenry. 
Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. People are not perfect, whether they are in government or out of it. As history makes clear, those in power tend to abuse it. The government is thus divided into three co-equal branches: legislative, executive and judicial. Placing all three powers in the same branch of government was considered the very definition of tyranny. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered a curse by the Framers. 
Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. Such checks and balances include dividing Congress into two houses, with different constituencies, term lengths, sizes and functions; granting the president a limited veto power over congressional legislation; and appointing an independent judiciary capable of reviewing ordinary legislation in light of the written Constitution, which is referred to as “judicial review.” The Framers feared that Congress could abuse its powers and potentially emerge as the tyrannous branch because it had the power to tax. But they did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers as they have come to dominate modern government or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are now ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.” 
Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government. In a country as large as the United States, it is not feasible to have direct participation in governmental affairs. Hence, we have a representative government. If the people don’t agree with how their representatives are conducting themselves, they can and should vote them out. However, as the citizenry has grown lazy and been distracted by the entertainment spectacles of modern society, government bureaucrats churn out numerous laws each year resulting in average citizens being rendered lawbreakers and jailed for what used to be considered normal behavior. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they put it within the people’s reach; they teach people to appreciate its peaceful enjoyment and accustom them to make use of it. Without local institutions a nation may give itself a free government, but it has not got the spirit of liberty. 
Unfortunately, we are now governed by top-heavy government emanating from Washington DC that has no respect for local institutions or traditions. 
These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights. 
Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them. 
The answer: get un-brainwashed. 
Stand up for the founding principles. 
Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing. 
Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level. 
Most of all, do these things today. 
If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose. 
Whether we ever realize it not, the enemy is not across party lines, as they would have us believe. It has us surrounded on all sides. 
Even so, we’re not yet defeated. 
We could still overcome our oppressors if we cared enough to join forces and launch a militant nonviolent revolution—a people’s revolution that starts locally and trickles upwards—but that will take some doing. 
It will mean turning our backs on the political jousting contests taking place at all levels of government and rejecting their appointed jesters as false prophets. It will mean not allowing ourselves to be corralled like cattle and branded with political labels that have no meaning anymore. It will mean recognizing that all the evils that surround us today—endless wars, drone strikes, invasive surveillance, militarized police, poverty, asset forfeiture schemes, overcriminalization, etc.—are not of our making but came about as a way to control and profit from us. 
It will mean “ voting with our feet ” through sustained, mass civil disobedience. 
As journalist Chris Hedges points out, “There were once radicals in America, people who held fast to moral imperatives. They fought for the oppressed because it was right , not because it was easy or practical. They were willing to accept the state persecution that comes with open defiance. They had the courage of their convictions. They were not afraid.” 
Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , it will mean refusing to be divided, one against each other, by politics and instead uniting behind the only distinction that has ever mattered: “we the people” against tyranny. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News editorial policy. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
Republican Mark Kirk’s political career imploded tonight live on a debate stage in Illinois. RIP Mark Kirk’s political career. Thoughts and prayers. 
In what may be the biggest foot in mouth moment of any political campaign since Todd ‘Legitimate Rape’ Akin’s self-immolation, Kirk, who is running for U.S. Senate against the very popular Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D) to represent Illinois, decided to use the senate debate stage to go completely and profoundly racist. 
It started when Duckworth told voters about her families long military tradition, one that dates back all the way to the Revolutionary War. Her point was a good one. Her family has sacrificed for the country for generations and far too many politicians flippantly go to war without thinking about who they will put in harms way. 
“My family has served this nation in uniform going back to the revolution. I am a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation. But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound because people are quick to sound the drums of war and I want to be there to say this is what it costs and this is what you’re asking us to do. And if that’s the case, I’ll go. It’s families like mine that bleed first. But let’s make sure that the American people understand what we are engaging in and let’s hold our allies accountable because we can’t do it all.” 
Kirk interjected by saying a line that will haunt him for the rest of his very short career. 
“I had forgotten your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.” 
A problem: Duckworth’s family did fight in the Revolutionary War. Kirk assumed because she was of mixed heritage that they couldn’t have. Mark Kirk is not a smart man. She's an active DAR member. And Sen. @MarkKirk –who lied about his own military record–is questioning her family's military service. 
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) October 28, 2016 
The stunned silence both from the moderator and from Sen. Duckworth kind of say it all. 
So long, Mark Kirk. Have a good retirement! 
Featured image via YouTube",FAKE
" Russophobia: War Party Propaganda
The world’s most reactionary regime, the head-chopping, terror-sponsoring Saudi Arabian kleptocracy, was awarded the chair of the UN Human Rights Council, while Russia has been kicked out. The travesty was engineered by the Superpower of Lies to punish Moscow for resisting the U.S.-led war of sectarian massacre and regime change in Syria. The War Party is on the march, to the cheers of corporate media – and Hillary hasn’t even been elected yet.
By Margaret Kimberley “All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people.”
November 06, 2016 "" Information Clearing House "" - "" BAR "" - Did Russia invade Iraq and kill one million people? Does Russia have a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world? Did Russia occupy Haiti after kidnapping its president? Are Russian police allowed to shoot children to death without fear of repercussion? Is Russia entering its 20th year of a terror war against the people of Somalia? All of these crimes take place in or at the direction of the United States. Yet the full force of propaganda and influence on world opinion is directed against Russia, which whatever its shortcomings cannot hold a candle to America in violating human rights.
The dangers presented by a Hillary Clinton presidency cannot be overstated. She and the war party have been steadily working towards a goal that defies logic and risks all life on earth. Regime change is once again their modus operandi and they hope to make it a reality against Russia.
Nearly every claim of Russian evil doing is a lie, a ruse meant to put Americans in a fighting mood and lose their fear of nuclear conflagration. It isn’t clear if Clinton and the rest of the would-be warriors actually realize they are risking mushroom clouds. Perhaps they believe that Vladimir Putin will be easily pushed around when all evidence points to the contrary.
The unproven allegations of interference in the presidential election and casting blame on Russia as the sole cause of suffering in Syria are meant to desensitize the public. It is an age old ploy which makes war not just acceptable but deemed a necessity. The usual suspects are helping out eagerly. The corporate media, led by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post , are front and center in pushing tales of Russian villainy. Human Rights Watch and other organizations who care nothing about abuses committed by the United States and its allies are also playing their usual role of choosing the next regime change victim.
Russia lost its seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council in part because of American pressure and public relations assistance from the human rights industrial complex. The UNHRC is now chaired by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that funds the jihadist terrorist groups who caused 500,000 Syrian deaths. The Saudis are causing dislocation, death and starvation in Yemen, too, but they are American allies, so there is little opposition to their misdeeds.
The openly bigoted Donald Trump has been the perfect foil for Hillary Clinton. That is why she and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership preferred him as their rival. He made the case for the discredited lesser evilism argument and his sensible statements about avoiding enmity with Russia made him even more useful.
The United States and its allies are the cause of Syria’s destruction. Their effort to overthrow president Assad created a humanitarian disaster complete with ISIS and al Nusra fighters who love to chop off heads for entertainment. Far from being the cause of the catastrophe Russia left its ally to fight alone for four years. They even made overtures to negotiate Assad’s fate with the United States. All attempts to stop the fighting were rejected by the U.S. and NATO and sealed the fate of the Syrian people. The people of east Aleppo are being shelled by American allies but one wouldn’t know that by reading what passes for journalism in newspapers and on television. The American role in the slaughter is barely mentioned or is excused as an effort to protect the civilian population. The bloodshed was made in the U.S. and could end if this government wanted it to.
The anti-Russian propaganda effort has worked to perfection. NATO is massing troops on Russia’s borders in a clear provocation yet Putin is labeled the bad guy. He is said to be menacing the countries that join in threatening his nation. The United States makes phony claims of Russian war crimes despite having blood on its hands. The latest Human Rights Watch canards about prosecuting Assad come straight from the White House and State Department and have nothing to do with concern for Syrians living in their fifth year of hell.
There is no lesser evil between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. She is fully supported by the war party in her desire for a more “muscular” foreign policy. That bizarre term means death and starvation for millions more people if Clinton wins in a landslide. She must be denied a victory of that magnitude and any opportunity to claim a mandate. Peace loving people must give their votes to the Green Party ticket of Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. They are alone in rejecting the premise of an imperialist country and its endless wars.
The United States is the most dangerous country in the world. If it has a reckless and war loving president the threat becomes existential. That is the prospect we face with a Hillary Clinton presidency. If the role of villain is cast on the world stage she is the star of the show.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
‘Russia kills civilians, US promotes democracy ’ – Washington’s mantra for domestic consumption",FAKE
"A collection of thoughts about American foreign policy By William Blum   William Blum 
Louis XVI needed a revolution; Napoleon needed two historic military defeats; the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions; the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution; the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire needed World War I; Nazi Germany needed World War II; Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs; the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home; the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev . . . What will the American Empire need? 
“I don’t believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ready to go when an incident set things off. Ever since Gorbachev naively ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an “evil enemy” make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up.”— Diana Johnstone, author of “Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton” 
In September 2013 President Obama stood before the United Nations General Assembly and declared, “I believe America is exceptional.” The following year at the UN, the president classified Russia as one of the three threats to the world along with the Islamic State and the ebola virus. On March 9, 2015 President Barack Obama declared Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” 
Vladimir Putin, speaking at the UN in 2015, addressing the United States re its foreign policy: “Do you realize what you have done?” 
Since the end of World W Attempted to overthrow Dropped bombs Attempted to assassinate Attempted to suppress 
“The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.” 
Two flew over the cuckoo’s nest: “We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known. . . . security and freedom for millions of people around the globe have depended on America’s military , economic, political, and diplomatic might.”— 
“War with Russia will be nuclear. Washington has prepared for it. Washington has abandoned the ABM treaty, created what it thinks is an ABM shield, and changed its war doctrine to permit US nuclear first strike. All of this is obviously directed at Russia, and the Russian government knows it. How long will Russia sit there waiting for Washington’s first strike?”— 
Iran signed the nuclear accords with the United States earlier this year by agreeing to stop what it never was doing. Any Iranian nuclear a 
US General Barry McCaffrey, April 2015: “Because so far NATO’s reaction to Putin’s aggression has been to send a handful of forces to the Baltics to demonstrate ‘resolve,’ which has only convinced Putin that the alliance is either unable or unwilling to fight. So we had better change his calculus pretty soon, and contest Putin’s stated doctrine that he is willing to intervene militarily in other countries to ‘protect’ Russia-speaking people. For God’s sake, the last time we heard that was just before Hitler invaded the Sudetenland.” No, my dear general, we heard that repeatedly in 1983 when the United States invaded the tiny nation of Grenada to protect and rescue hundreds of Americans who supposedly were in danger from the new leftist government. It was all a fraud, no more than an excuse to overthrow a government that that didn’t believe that the American Empire was God’s gift to humanity. 
Since 1980, the United States has intervened in the affairs of fourteen Muslim countries, at worst invading or bombing them. They are (in chronological order) Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria. 
How our never-ending Mideast horror began: Radio Address of George W. Bush, September 28, 2002: “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.” Yet . . . just six weeks before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice told CNN: “Let’s remember that his [Saddam’s] country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.” 
The fact is that there is more participation by the Cuban population in the running of their country than there is by the American population in the running of theirs. One important reason is the absence of the numerous private corporations which, in the United States, exert great influence over all aspects of life. 
“The U.S. is frantically surrounding China with military weapons, advanced aircraft, naval fleets and a multitude of military bases from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines through several nearby smaller Pacific islands to its new and enlarged base in Australia . . . The U.S. naval fleet, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines patrol China’s nearby waters. Warplanes, surveillance planes, drones and spying satellites cover the skies, creating a symbolic darkness at noon.” (Jack A. Smith, “Hegemony Games: USA vs. PRC,” CounterPunch) 
SR’s leader Nikita Khrushchev, a native of the region, had donated Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Crimeans were always strongly opposed to that change and voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia after the US-induced Ukrainian coup in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin refers to the Ukrainian army as “NATO’s foreign legion,” which does not pursue Ukraine’s national interests. The United States, however, insists on labeling the Russian action in Crimea as an invasion. 
Putin re Crimea/Ukraine: “Our western partners created the ‘Kosovo precedent’ with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea they recognized Kosovo’s secession from Serbia legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country’s central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence is necessary . . . And the UN International Court of Justice agreed with those arguments. That’s what they said; that’s what they trumpeted all over the world and coerced everyone to accept—and now they are complaining about Crimea. Why is that?” 
Paul Craig Roberts: “The absurdity of it all! Even a moron knows that if Russia is going to put tanks and troops into Ukraine, Russia will put in enough to do the job. The war would be over in a few days if not in a few hours. As Putin himself said some months ago, if the Russian military enters Ukraine, the news will not be the fate of Donetsk or Mauriupol, but the fall of Kiev and Lviv.” 
In a major examination of US policy vis-à-vis China, published in March 2015, the authoritative Council on Foreign Relations bluntly declared that “there is no real prospect of building fundamental trust, ‘peaceful coexistence,’ ‘mutual understanding,’ a strategic partnership, or a ‘new type of major country relations’ between the United States and China.” The United States, the report declares, must, therefore, develop “the political will” and military capabilities “to deal with China to protect vital U.S. interests.” 
military from ‘hemispheric defense’—an outdated relic of World War II—to ‘internal security,’ which means war against the domestic population.”— Noam Chomsky 
Cuban baseball players who are paid a million dollars to play for an American team are not “defectors,” a word which has a clear political connotation. 
Boris Yeltsin was acceptable to American and Europeans because he was seen as a weak, pliable figure that allowed Western capital free rein in the newly opened Russian territory following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s era was also a time of rampant corruption by Russian oligarchs who were closely associated with Western capital. That corrosive culture came to a halt with the election of Vladimir Putin twice as president between 2000–2008, and again in 2012. 
Many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops. The fight isn’t against ISIS, it’s against Assad; at the next level it isn’t against Assad, it’s against Putin; then, at the next level, it isn’t against Putin, it’s against the country most likely to stand in the way of US world domination, Russia. And it’s forever. 
Connecting to the US-based Internet would mean channeling all of Cuba’s communications directly to the NSA. 
George W. Bush has been living a comparatively quiet life in Texas, with a focus on his paintings. “I’m trying to leave something behind,” he said a couple of years ago. Yeah, right, George. We can stand up some of the paintings against the large piles of Iraqi dead bodies. 
Seymour Hirsch: “America would be much better off, if, 30 years ago, we had let Russia continue its war in Afghanistan . . . The mistake was made by the Carter administration which was trying to stop the Russians from their invasion of Afghanistan. We’d be better off had we let the Russians beat the Taliban.” ( Deutsche Welle , April 2, 2014 interview) We’d be even better off if we hadn’t overthrown the progressive, secular Afghan government, giving rise to the Taliban in the first place and inciting the Russians to intervene on their border lest the Soviet Islamic population was stirred up. 
The former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in an interview in 1998 summed up exactly what the US thinks of the UN: “The UN plays a very important role. But if we don’t like it, we always have the option of following our own national security interests, which I assure you we will do if we don’t like what’s going on.” She is now a foreign-policy advisor to Hillary Clinton. 
“A leader taking his (or her) nation to war is as dysfunctional in the family of humankind as an abusive parent is in an individual family.”— Suzy Kane 
“It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy . . . The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.”— Boutros Boutros-Ghali , Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996 
“Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh, etc.”— Johan Galtung, Norwegian, principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies 
“No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein—even privileged—until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US-engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.”— Eric Margolis, 2014 
the debate on Jewish Power.”— Gilad Atzmon 
“We need a trial to judge all those who bear significant responsibility for the past century—the most murderous and ecologically destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of how they killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn’t have time to go after them one by one. We’d have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don’t need this for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment, but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual silence.”— Sam Smith 
“I have come to think of the export of ‘democracy’ as the contemporary equivalent of what missionaries have always done in the interest of conquering and occupying the ‘uncivilized’ world on behalf of the powers that be. I have said that the ‘church’ invented the concept of conversion by any means, including torture and killing of course, as doing the victims a big favor, since it was in the interest of ‘saving’ their immortal souls. It is now called, ‘democratization.’”— Rita Corriel 
“It is more or less impossible to commemorate the war dead without glorifying them, and it is impossible to glorify them without glorifying their wars.”— Paul Craig Roberts",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) The body of late Justice Antonin Scalia is lying in repose Friday inside the Supreme Court building where he built a legacy as a conservative legal icon.

More than 6,000 mourners -- including members of Congress -- began streaming by to view Scalia's casket as the court opened its doors to the public at 10:30 a.m.

Earlier Friday, all the current Supreme Court justices attended a private ceremony led by Scalia's son, Father Paul Scalia, in the Great Hall.

In the afternoon, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama visited the court to honor Scalia. They were greeted by Chief Justice John Roberts and then met with members of Scalia's family, including Army Lt. Col. Matthew Scalia, the late justice's son, and his wife, Michelle, in the Solicitor General's office.

The President and first lady stayed for roughly 25 minutes.

Sri Srinivasan and Patricia Millett, two members of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and potential nominees for Obama to pick to replace Scalia, were seen in the line of those paying their respects along with other judges on the DC circuit.

The casket was placed on the Lincoln Catafalque, which was loaned to the court by Congress for the ceremony, and a 2007 portrait of Scalia by Nelson Shanks is on display. Supreme Court police officers served as pallbearers while Scalia's law clerks served as honorary pallbearers.

""As is the tradition, Justice Scalia's law clerks will stand vigil by his side at the Court all day tomorrow and through the night,"" tweeted Kannon Shanmugam, who clerked for Scalia.

Outside the court, mourners left flowers and jars of applesauce -- a nod to Scalia's dissent in the Supreme Court's 2015 decision to uphold Obamacare, in which he wrote that the majority's opinion was ""pure applesauce.""

Scalia's funeral service is Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The justice's son will also deliver Mass for his father. Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to attend.

Other justices who have laid in repose in the Supreme Court include former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, former Justice Harry Blackmun, former Justice William J Brennan Jr., former Justice Thurgood Marshall and former Chief Justice Earl Warren.

One close family friend -- Brian Donato, 75, of Earlysville, Virginia, and the godfather of Paul Scalia -- was shaken up as he left the morning's private ceremony.

He said he studied law under Scalia at the University of Virginia, and called the justice a tough professor who'd harshly critique his logic.

Donato recalled leaving the U.S. Navy in 1967 to attend law school, and said his moving truck crashed, spilling his goods and possessions across the road. When neither the Navy, which had hired the movers, nor the moving company itself offered any financial help after the crash, he looked at the university for a lawyer to help him after that crash and found Scalia -- who won the case but wouldn't accept any legal fees.

""When I asked him what the fee was after the case, he said, 'Dinner at your house and I'm bringing my wife,'"" Donato said.

He attended Thursday's wake for Scalia, saying he saw his friend ""lying in his casket, and he looked like a guy who was just the warm loving guy he always was.""

Students on a field trip from St. Mary's High School, an Episcopal school in Raleigh, North Carolina, were among the crowd of about 200 on hand as Scalia's casket arrived.

""It's definitely a big loss for our country he was definitely a very influential figures and I don't necessarily agree with him on everything but I have a lot of respect for him as a justice,"" said Emily Weatherspoon, 17.

Larry Cirignano, an anti-abortion rights activist, said that Scalia's loss will be felt on the court. His group, 40 Days for Life, has been outside of the Supreme Court every day since Ash Wednesday.

""I'm from New Jersey originally, so he's great -- and Italian-American -- so all the way around,"" he said of Scalia. ""I was here for his swearing in. And we're sorry to see him go.""

As Scalia is remembered Friday, talk is likely to also focus across the street, to the Capitol, where the question hovers over whether Senate Republicans will successfully block Obama from winning a third appointment to the High Court.",REAL
"In early August, Donald Trump suffered a drop in the polls in the wake of an especially bad week, which included him feuding with a Muslim Gold Star family whose son died fighting for the U.S. Army in Iraq. For the Record’s week in review summarized that week as “Trump hit rock bottom and then basically tried to dig to China.”

We didn’t think things could get much worse. Boy, were we wrong! This week, Trump hit rock bottom, dug to China and then set the hole on fire.

On Friday, more women came out with accusations against Trump for sexual misconduct. Kristin Anderson told The Washington Post that Trump had groped her under her skirt in the early 90s while she was sitting next to him at a nightclub. Later Friday, a former Apprentice contestant said Trump kissed her and groped her during a meeting about a potential job. They were just two of multiple women to come forward this week with accusations against the Republican presidential nominee.

Trump and his campaign have vehemently denied the accusations. During a rally Friday, Trump called the accusations ""totally and completely fabricated"" and said the women were just making things up to become famous. He also seemed to insult the appearance of one of his accusers, a woman who said he groped her on an airplane three decades ago, when he said ""believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.""

Trump has threatened to sue at least The New York Times, to which the newspaper’s lawyer basically replied “bring it.” And his wife, Melania, demanded People magazine publish a retraction and apologize for a story that alleged Trump assaulted a People reporter who was writing a story about the couple. But Melania's demand had nothing to do with the assault allegations. Melania was just unhappy about a section of the piece that said the reporter ran into her on the street and the two had a pleasant conversation.

""The two are not friends and were never friends or even friendly,"" the letter demanding the retraction stated.

Last Friday, a 2005 Access Hollywood video was released that included Trump saying that women would let him do anything, including grabbing their genitals, because he was a star. Trump apologized for the remarks but maintains it was just “locker room banter.” The release of the tape sent his campaign scrambling and forced even those backing him to denounce his comments.

The USA TODAY Network conducted a survey of the Republican governors, senators and House members and found that 26% of them are not endorsing Trump. While some of them were ""Never Trumpers"" all along, many pulled their support for Trump following the release of the video.

On Monday, Ryan announced he wouldn’t defend or campaign for Trump ahead of the election, although Ryan didn't officially withdraw his endorsement of Trump.

Trump was not thrilled at the rebuke. On Tuesday, he unleashed his wrath on Ryan and other members of his party who he felt had spurned him. At one point he tweeted: “Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.”

Trump spun the denunciations by Congress members as a good thing, declaring that he could finally do what he wanted with the election now that the “shackles” were off.

Trump has sucked up a lot of the oxygen this week, but a steady stream of hacked emails from Wikileaks has sent reporters digging through the Clinton team’s dirty laundry as well. Every day this week, emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta have been released. The Clinton campaign has neither confirmed nor denied whether the emails are real, but they have accused Russia of doing the hacking in an effort to help Trump.

So far, there haven’t been any major bombshells in the emails, but there are definitely some cringe-worthy moments.

One email by Clinton campaign aides mocked some Catholics and evangelical Christians. Another raised questions about the impartiality of then a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile during the Democratic primary. Brazile forwarded a question to be used in a town hall to the Clinton campaign. (It also was strange that Brazile had the question ahead of time in the first place.) One email categorized two high-profile Latino politicians who Clinton was trying to get an endorsement from as “needy Latinos.” And another email had a campaign staffer discussing conversations he had with Department of Justice officials as the DOJ dealt with the timing of their public release of Clinton's State Department emails.

Here are some more details of some of the juicier emails.

•           Michelle Obama on Trump comments: They’ve “shaken me to my core” (USA TODAY)

Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former GOP primary competitor of Trump’s, often appears on TV in support of his former rival. On Friday, he did so to discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct against the Republican nominee. In a heated interview on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ Carson repeatedly asked for BBC News reporter Katty Kay’s microphone to be turned off when she asked him if he thought the women making accusations against Trump were lying. He finally responded: ""It doesn’t matter whether they’re lying or not.""",REAL
"Hillary Clinton's recent pneumonia diagnosis raises questions about how previous presidents dealt with health crises, and why Mrs. Clinton's health has become a flashpoint issue during this campaign.

During an event commemorating Sept. 11, 2001 on Sunday, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton excused herself early after becoming ""overheated."" Mrs. Clinton's physician, Lisa Bardack, revealed that the candidate was dealing with pneumonia, which had been diagnosed on Friday.

Politically, the timing was not ideal. The revelation came as the Clinton campaign has been hit by a wave of conspiracy theories elevated by the Donald Trump campaign and his supporters about the candidate's health over the past few weeks, with many online theorists questioning whether Clinton was well enough to be president.

Is Clinton being held to a double standard because she is a woman?

For most presidential candidates throughout history, presidential health concerns have not seemed to concerned the public nearly as much as this election, raising questions about what makes this campaign different.

A recent report from NBC News on Clinton's health posed the question of why Clinton's diagnosis was hidden until hours after her Sunday near-collapse and wondered if Clinton would ""accept the obligation to inform the public about her health."" But for much of history, such an obligation did not exist.

According to Gallup, many presidents have maintained silence on their respective health problems. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in office, Ronald Reagan underwent secret surgeries, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously went to great lengths to give the public the impression that he was fully mobile after his battle with polio even though he spent much of his life in a wheelchair. Grover Cleveland once disappeared from the White house for a full four days so that he could have a tumor removed on a yacht, away from prying reporters, according to NPR. John F. Kennedy ""suffered from more ailments, was in far greater pain and was taking many more medications than the public knew at the time or biographers have since described,"" the New York Times reported in 2002.

And that's only to name a few.

These presidents all kept their physical ailments secret in order to project an image of strength and reliability to the public, a standard that was maintained through much of the history of the office until relatively recently. As candidates' lives have become increasingly open to scrutiny on the internet and various taboos in media about candidates' personal lives have been broken, it has become much more difficult for a candidate to hide an illness.

In response to increasing transparency, presidential candidates have begun to come forward with health problems early on in their campaigns, including Dick Cheney's heart issues and John Kerry's successful battle with prostate cancer before his campaign began, according to Gallup. At the time of the Mr. Kerry campaign, 92 percent of voters, both Republican and Democrat, said that they were not concerned about his ability to serve as president.

In contrast, Clinton's health has become an increasingly important issue for voters during this election. A Rasmussen Report survey from before Sept. 8 shows that 86 percent of likely voters say a candidate's health is important to their vote, with 43 percent who characterize candidate health as  ""Very Important."" Some 17 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of GOP and unaffiliated voters said that Clinton's health was a legitimate concern for them. Those numbers could rise after news of Clinton's diagnosis.

While Clinton's desire to keep her health issues quiet is nothing new on the presidential front, the response from her opponents has proven intense. As a female candidate, she has proven more susceptible to accusations of ""weakness"" from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters, in contrast to Mr. Trump's ""strongman"" image. The Trump campaign has had a great deal of success in presenting the Republican candidate as a traditionally masculine figure that fights rather than compromises, representing his opponents as weaker and incapable of making the tough decisions necessary to run the country.

In contrast, Clinton's transparency about her health opens herself up to rhetorical attacks along this line.

Even before her diagnosis became public, however, Clinton was already under attack for similar reasons, with many fringe conservative sites sharing fake medical records as ""proof"" that she does not have the physical strength to effectively lead the country, according to USA Today.

While Trump stands to benefit from Clinton's diagnosis, neither candidate has released a complete medical report to the public.",REAL
"Solar-powered Pipe desalinates 1.5 billion gallons of drinking water a year for California Nov 7, 2016 25 1 
Solar power and water desalination are two of the most important things to lock down in the modern age. Produces an endless source of drinking water and electricity is what we need to guide us through the unknowns of a changing climate . 
This is why an incredible project like The Pipe needs global attention. 
The machine can generate 10,000 MWh each year and additionally turn 4.5 billion liters (or 1.5 billion gallons) of salt water into drinking water in that time. 
It was unveiled at the Land Art Generator Initiative in Santa Monica, California. 
“LAGI 2016 comes to Southern California at an important time,” write Rob Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, co-founders of the Land Art Generator Initiative . “The sustainable infrastructure that is required to meet California’s development goals and growing population will have a profound influence on the landscape. The Paris Climate Accord from COP 21 has united the world around a goal of 1.5–2° C, which will require a massive investment in clean energy infrastructure.” 
It’s an immense and beautiful structure. 
“Above, solar panels provide power to pump seawater through an electromagnetic filtration process below the pool deck, quietly providing the salt bath with its healing water and the city with clean drinking water,” the design team writes in their brief. “The Pipe represents a change in the future of water.” 
“What results are two products: pure drinkable water that is directed into the city’s primary water piping grid, and clear water with twelve percent salinity. The drinking water is piped to shore, while the salt water supplies the thermal baths before it is redirected back to the ocean through a smart release system, mitigating most of the usual problems associated with returning brine water to the sea.”",FAKE
"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › PHARRELL WILLIAMS BEGS WOMEN TO VOTE HILLARY: SHE’S DISHONEST, BUT SO ARE YOU PHARRELL WILLIAMS BEGS WOMEN TO VOTE HILLARY: SHE’S DISHONEST, BUT SO ARE YOU 0 SHARES 
[11/3/16] Music producer and singer Pharrell Williams bashed Donald Trump at an industry conference on Tuesday and said his defeat in the upcoming presidential election would be “easy” if every woman in America voted to elect Hillary Clinton. 
“If all the women in this nation decided to vote and support the first female candidate, there’d be nothing to worry about,” Williams said in an interview at Variety ‘s Inclusion summit at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills. “It’s that easy.” 
“Has she been dishonest about things? Sure. Have you?” Williams said of Clinton, before insisting that “she don’t lie no more than any other politician does.” 
The Happy singer endorsed Clinton in March 2014, telling GQ magazine: “We’re about to have a female president. Hillary’s gonna win.” 
Asked about increasing polarization during the presidential campaign, the Grammy-winner paused and then pleaded with women to “save the nation” by not electing another “destructive” male president. 
“That silence in this room right now is often what I feel when you see some of the things that are being said, not just about my culture, but about women,” Williams said . “I’m praying that women come together and save this nation. You think about the destructive things that have come from mankind, it’s mostly men.” Post navigation",FAKE
"“I was never given any kind of dress code. I was never asked beforehand to show my wardrobe.” Streeter (left) and the 76ers home court at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia 
“I also felt it was important to express the ongoing challenges and ongoing injustice we face as a black community within the United States of America — that’s very important to me,” Streeter said. “Yes, we live in the greatest country in the world but there are issues that we cannot ignore. This can’t be ignored.” Advertisement - story continues below 
“I was angry, extremely, extremely angry and disappointed and honestly brought to tears by all of it. It broke my heart,” she said. “Honestly, I was very excited about being able to perform the national anthem. I was really looking forward to that.” 
Firstly, pro tip: The more times you say “honestly” about something, the more it becomes exponentially less likely to the listener that they will believe you’re being honest. In this case, I believe Streeter honestly wanted to make a point, not sing the national anthem, which is the matter of contention here. 
The national anthem is sung to honor the heroes who have served (and died) for our country before major events. It isn’t time to make a point or “have a discussion” (a discussion, may I add, that usually takes the form of a monologue from whatever social justice warrior is giving it — who usually acts surprised and disappointed when people have a real discussion and push back against their disrespect of the flag). 
If you’re singing the national anthem, it isn’t about your opinions. It isn’t about your talent. It isn’t about what you’ve done. Advertisement - story continues below",FAKE
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter “If it does indeed turn out that there is relevant physical evidence, if this evidence is carefully collected and analyzed, and if this analysis leads to the identification of several facts concerning the UFO phenomenon, then will be the time for scientists to step back and ask, what are these facts trying to tell us? If those facts are strong enough to lead to a firm conclusion, then will be the time to confront the more bizarre questions. If, for instance, it turns out that all physical evidence is consistent with a mundane interpretation of the causes of UFO reports, there will be little reason to continue to speculate about the role of extraterrestrial beings. If, on the other hand, the analysis of physical evidence turns up very strong evidence that objects related with UFO reports were manufactured outside the solar system, then one must obviously consider very seriously that the phenomenon involves not only extraterrestrial vehicles but probably also extraterrestrial beings.” ( source )   The quote above comes from Peter Andrew Sturrock , a British Scientist, and an Emeritus Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University. Sturrock and a number of other notable scientists around the world came together during the 1990’s in order to examine the physical evidence that is commonly associated with the UFO phenomenon. One example used by Sturrock in his analysis, was a photo taken by two Royal Canadian Air Force pilots on August 27th, 1956, in McCleod, Alberta, Canada. ( “Physical Evidence Related To UFO Reports”– The Sturrock Panel Report – Electromagnetic Effects ) ( source ) ( source ) The pilots were flying in a formation of four F86 Sabre jet aircraft. One of the pilots described the phenomenon as a “bright light which was sharply defined as disk-shaped,” that looked like “a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” Another pilot managed to photograph the object, as you can see above. The sighting lasted for a couple of minutes, and this specific case was analyzed by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who estimated (from available data) that the luminosity of the object (the power output within the spectral range of the film) to be many megawatts. The Sturrock Panel also found it to be the case that a strong magnetic field surrounding the phenomenon or object was a common occurrence. Maccabee published his analysis in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (“Optical Power Output of an Unidentified High Altitude Light Source,” published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 13, #2, 1999). He also published one in 1994 titled “Strong Magnetic Field Detected Following a Sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object,” in the same journal (8, #3, 347) Dr. Jacques Vallee, notable for co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA, and for his work at SRI International on the network information center for ARPANET , a precursor to the modern Internet, also published a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration titled “Estimates of Optical Power Output in Six Cases Of Unexplained Ariel Objects With Defined Luminosity Characteristics.” ( source )( source )   This particular case is also referenced in this paper. One thing is for certain, it’s one of multiple strange phenomena that has and continues to interest a large portion of the scientific community. Here is a video of former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer speaking about the fields around these objects, and what some of them were doing to military planes. Let’s just be clear, these objects are commonly seen, tracked on air radar, and tracked on ground radar simultaneously. This is something that has happened hundreds, if not thousands of times. This is information that’s been made public over the past few years. For example, a declassified Defence Intelligence Agency document shows one (out of thousands) great example. It details how two F-4 interceptor pilots reported seeing an object visually, it was also tracked on their airborne radar. Both planes experienced critical instrumentation and electronics going offline at a distance of twenty-five miles from the object. Here is an excerpt from the report: “As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4. ” (source) The report also described how a smaller object detached from the bigger object, turned inside the arc of the F-4 itself, and then rejoined the original object. This incident lasted for several hours. I decided to use this example because it has a number of declassified supporting national security documents, which goes to show how seriously this event was taken. “Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source, NY Times) It’s only now that more people are starting to become aware of this information. Here is a quote from Senator Barry Goldwater before the de-classification of all of these files: “This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified.” – Senator Barry Goldwater , Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (source) Below is a great clip from author and researcher Richard Dolan , taken from The Citizens Hearing On Disclosure summing it all up in one short speech. 
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"NBC's Baghdad Bob: There Is No FBI Investigation of Hillary November 4, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
Remember when Hillary Clinton was insisting that there was no FBI investigation of her, just a security review, even when the FBI rejected that claim? 
Well Andrea Mitchell, NBC's own Baghdad Bob, isn't giving up that claim so easily. Even while the rest of the Clinton clique is screeching against the FBI for investigating Hillary like bats from the nether regions of left-wing hell, Mitchell is sticking to the old spin. There is no FBI investigation of Hillary . Close your eyes and say it three times. The FBI is not investigating Hillary. It's not. It's not. 
In a complete state of denial on Thursday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell interrupted live coverage of Donald Trump speaking at a Florida campaign rally to supposedly “fact-check” the candidate for citing a bombshell report that the FBI was conducting an extensive investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail and charitable foundation scandals. 
Mitchell refused to accept reality: “Just a lot of fact-checking to do. She's not under criminal investigation. In fact, it's not an investigation. It's just a review of the e-mails. She did not lie to the FBI, according to James Comey. There was no grounds to prosecute her. So there are no lies, there’s no criminality.” She fretted: “I don't know even where to start....but I mean, we have to put it in some context.” 
The context is that defending Hillary Clinton has become a mental illness. 
But as I wrote earlier this week, fact checking has become a media term for insisting on the primacy of its alternate reality even when it flies in the face of actual reality. There is no FBI investigation of Hillary. Anyone who believes that is probably some sort of right-winger who listens to what the FBI actually says, rather than what NBC says that the FBI says. ",FAKE
"A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a mostly facetious article about six events that could occur to flip the polls in favor of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and then I assessed how much each would matter. No single occurrence, apart from the preposterously unlikely event of Barack Obama endorsing Trump, seemed to have a ton of power on its own. Non-silly scenarios included the release of new and questionable Clinton e-mails, a month of passable behavior from Trump, and a serious health setback for Clinton. What the column failed to consider, however, was the power of a few of these incidents occurring at the same time. We’ve now seen new unfavorable e-mail stories (this was inevitable), two weeks of moderately controlled behavior from Trump (the previous record had been about two days), and a genuine health issue for Clinton (a near-collapse during a 9/11 ceremony). We also saw a small but foolish gaffe from the Democratic nominee on Friday night, when she dismissed fully half of Trump’s supporters as part of a “basket of deplorables,” which she defined as “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” At a time when Trump should have been further on the defensive, contending with almost comically devastating revelations about his approach to charity (more on that in a bit), he is instead pulling even with his rival. Rumors of Clinton’s failing health—which had been easy to write off because they were so obviously orchestrated—have become legitimate concerns. There’s no use in discussing Clinton’s e-mails here, at least for now. It’s not just that there are plenty of other outlets that will further beat that horse—so much so that the Washington Post editorial page has hollered ’nuff. It’s that nothing we’ve learned is likely to move anyone’s opinion. The general narrative out there, whether that’s fair or not, is that Clinton is untrustworthy. The bottom line, in horse-race terms, is this: the drumbeat persists. There’s only slightly more use in dwelling on Trump’s streak of good behavior. Yes, he has kept his impulses under control for a couple of weeks, a near-miracle, especially given the rise to power of campaign chief Steve Bannon, widely viewed as the high priest of full-freak Trumping. (While Trump has said plenty of recent things to appall the sober-minded, like resurrecting a promise to steal the oil of any place we bother to invade, he has said them calmly, rather than in a way that makes news.) So this is an important development, especially if Trump starts to notice how big a friend he has in silence. But one ludicrous outburst changes that, and those used to come at about one per cockcrow, so we’ll have to see if he can keep the lull going. Unfortunately, the near-collapse of Clinton on Sunday from feeling “overheated”—now diagnosed as pneumonia—does call for some sentences. (Clinton’s line about the “basket of deplorables” might have caused a blip, but it has now been overshadowed.) The video of her seeming to buckle is terrible and heartrending, and it feels almost indecent to witness. But now the rumors of Clinton’s failing health—which had been easy to write off because they were so obviously orchestrated, with help from Rudy Giuliani, no less—have become legitimate concerns. It’s easy to dismiss symptoms like extended coughing, especially with a candidate who must endure countless hours and speeches on the campaign trail. It’s impossible to dismiss being overcome at a commemoration for 9/11, the sort of event during which every political bone in your body is telling you, “Do not make news. Do not make news. Do not make news.”

The setting for Clinton’s overheating was especially unfortunate. You could argue (and I have) that Clinton’s health doesn’t matter that much, politically, because not many of those who favor her over Trump—a split viewed by many of Clinton’s supporters as akin in severity to God versus Satan—will suddenly prefer him instead. But voters do think a lot about national security, and, if you believe Scott Adams, “When a would-be commander-in-chief withers—literally—in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe.” Is Adams right? He might be—or at least right enough that two out of a hundred voters could change their minds, which is all that it takes. Clinton’s health problems are just the latest example of how fortune so often works in favor of Trump. They hit just after the publication of a remarkable piece of reporting by *The Washington Post’*s David A. Fahrenthold, who revealed that the candidate’s record of philanthropy seems to be close to nonexistent. Apparently, Trump is so pathologically stingy that even organizations to which he claimed to donate had received no money. Worse, his own family foundation took in nothing from Trump himself after 2008, relying instead on funds from outside donors. Even worse: Trump illegally redirected $25,000 of the money toward the fund-raising committee of Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who was deciding on whether to pursue a lawsuit against Trump University. Even worse than that: Donald Trump spent $20,000 of his charity’s money to purchase a six-foot-tall painting of—maybe you guessed it?—Donald Trump. That would all be poor optics, as they say, except that news of Clinton’s health came in and dwarfed everything. But let’s suppose that investigations of Trump’s charity come back to the fore, as they probably will. They will still have close to zero effect on most Trump supporters. Those who still believe Trump is a benevolent fellow have already had to process several container ships full of cognitive dissonance and don’t mind a few tons more. Those who believe Trump is a non-benevolent fellow—and this includes many, probably most, of his supporters, to judge by what they write and say—already know he’s a rascal. They accept that. The thing is, he’s their rascal. For those who find such loyalty hard to understand or accept, recall that Trump, in the eyes of many voters, is the only candidate who has bucked the bipartisan globalist consensus and seemed to mean it. Just imagine if you were on the left but, among both Democrats and Republicans running for office, nearly everyone in political life had long expressed indifference to climate change and had views on abortion that ranged from strongly pro-life to weakly pro-life. Then along came one candidate who loudly insisted on combatting global warming and fighting for a woman’s right to chose. On the minus side, he also said nasty things about coal miners and fetuses, repelling everyone. Would you be tempted to forgive him?

This brings us, finally, to a much-discussed recent essay in the Claremont Review of Books called “The Flight 93 Election,” written by one “Publius Decius Mus.” Decius—who writes as if he were born in 1850, meaning he was probably born well after 1980—is one of those intellectuals who, because of Trump’s positions on immigration, trade, and war, forgive Trump for his many sins. The use of Flight 93 is an allusion, of dubious taste, to the hijacked plane in which passengers heroically charged the cockpit on 9/11—the point being that Trump versus Clinton is possible death versus guaranteed death. “Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect,” Decius writes. “So what? We can lament until we choke the lack of a great statesman to address the fundamental issues of our time.” Decius has not been alone in his mind-set. Trump supporters know he’s a uniquely risky candidate, but they make the case for gambling on him all the same—no matter the poor track record of huge political rolls of the dice (our recent wars come to mind). They feel things are very bad, and many Americans agree. This is why Trump is again pulling even with Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, we understand one another less and less across this divide. One side says, “I know how bad you think things are out there, but you have no idea how bad Trump is.” The other side says, “I know how bad you think Trump is, but you have no idea how bad things are out there.” It’s a conversation designed to fail, leaving only hardened factions. All that remains, at this point, is to wait and count up. The polls, while technically within the margin of error, still favor Clinton. Yet the energy, on balance, seems to favor Trump. Even when John McCain briefly led Obama in 2008, he never attracted swooning and feverish supporters, at least not when he wasn’t addressing a hospital. Obama did, and Trump does. Many Americans seem to want an excuse to vote for him, and the rise of Bannon seems, ironically, to be leading to a more controlled candidate. If he keeps cool and collected during the debates, even if he calls for plundering the globe’s energy supplies, he probably comes out ahead. So no one can relax anymore. On the plus side, we’ll enjoy the extra oil. Full ScreenPhotos: The Art of the Donald: Alison Jackson Pictures Trump’s “Me Time” The torch will be passed, and a new leader must be capable of gripping it securely. Will he prove equal to the challenge? As commander in chief, would the candidate use military force responsibly—and tastefully? Above all, success in the Oval Office requires an ability to sit still for long hours of exacting prep work. America needs a leader who won’t flinch under fire, whether literal, metaphoric, or tonsorial. There is not a black America or a white America or a Creamsicle-hued America (waterproof and evenly applied). There is only a United States of America. When the candidate looks in the mirror, a president should stare back. With newfound confidence, he is now ready to fill Lincoln’s mittens.",REAL
"President al-Assad: United States and its Western allies are to blame for failure of latest ceasefire 
November 3rd, 2016 
Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad asserted that the United States and its Western allies are to blame for the failure of latest ceasefire, because terrorism and terrorists are for them a card they want to play on the Syrian arena. 
In an interview given to the Serbian newspaper Politika , President al-Assad said that Russia is very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans base their politics on a different value as they use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world. 
President al-Assad pointed out that Western countries wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, either militarily or by supporting the terrorists. 
Following is the full text of the interview: 
Question 1: Mr. President, why has the latest Syria ceasefire failed? Who is to blame for that? 
President Assad: Actually, the West, mainly the United States, has made that pressure regarding the ceasefire, and they always ask for ceasefire only when the terrorists are in a bad situation, not for the civilians. And they try to use those ceasefires in order to support the terrorists, bring them logistic support, armament, money, everything, in order to re-attack and to become stronger again. When it didn’t work, they ask the terrorists to make it fail or to start attacking again. So, who’s to blame? It’s the United States and its allies, the Western countries, because for them, terrorists and terrorism are a card they want to play on the Syrian arena, it’s not a value, they’re not against terrorists. For them, supporting the terrorists is a war of attrition against Syria, against Iran, against Russia, that’s how they look at it. That’s why not only this ceasefire; every attempt regarding ceasefire or political moving or political initiative, every failure of these things, the United States was to be blamed. 
Question 2: But which country is supporting terrorism? Saudi Arabia? Qatar? 
President Assad: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey… 
Journalist: Turkey? 
President Assad: Because they came through Turkey with the support of the government, direct support from the government. 
Journalist: Directly? 
President Assad: Direct support from the government, of course. 
Journalist: With money or with armament? 
President Assad: Let’s say, the endorsement, the greenlight, first. Second, the American coalition, which is called “international coalition,” which is an American. They could see ISIS using our oil fields and carrying the oil through the barrel trucks to Turkey under their drones… 
Journalist: This is the Syrian oil? 
President Assad: In Syria, from Syria to Turkey, under the supervision of their satellites and drones, without doing anything, till the Russians intervened and started attacking ISIS convoys and ISIS positions and strongholds. This is where ISIS started to shrink. So, the West gave the greenlight to those countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and actually those countries, those governments are puppets; puppets to the West, puppets to the United States, they work as puppets, and the terrorists in Syria are their proxy, the proxy of those countries and proxy of the West and the United States. 
Question 3: But money for marketing this oil, who has the money? Turkey? 
President Assad: In partnership between ISIS and Turkey. Part of the money goes to ISIS because this is how they can make recruitment and pay salaries to their fighters. That’s why ISIS was growing before the Russian intervention, it was expanding in Syria and in Iraq. And part of the money is going to the Turkish government officials, mainly Erdogan himself and his family. 
Journalist: Erdogan himself? 
President Assad: Of course, of course. They were directly involved in this trade with ISIS. 
Question 4: Mr. President, do you believe the Russians and Americans can ever agree over Syria? Can Russia and the USA be partners in the war against terrorists in Syria? 
President Assad: We hope, but in reality, no, for a simple reason: because the Russians based their politics on values, beside their interest. The values are that they adopt the international law, they fight terrorism, and the interest that if you have terrorists prevailing in our region, that will affect not only our region but Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. So, the Russians are very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans based their politics on a different value, completely different value, their value is that “we can use the terrorists.” I mean the Americans, they wanted to use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world. 
Question 5: The situation about bombing the Syrian Army near the airport in Deir Ezzor… How did the American air attack on the Syrian Army happen? Was it a coincidence or not? 
President Assad: It was premeditated attack by the American forces, because ISIS was shrinking because of the Syrian and Russian and Iranian cooperation against ISIS, and because al-Nusra which is Al Qaeda-affiliated group had been defeated in many areas in Syria, so the Americans wanted to undermine the position of the Syrian Army; they attacked our army in Deir Ezzor. It wasn’t by coincidence because the raid continued more than one hour, and they came many times. 
Journalist: One hour? 
President Assad: More than one hour. There were many raids by the Americans and their allies against the Syrian position. At the same time, they attacked a very big area; they didn’t attack a building to say “we made a mistake.” They attacked three big hills, not other groups neighboring these hills, and only ISIS existed in Deir Ezzor. There is no… what they called it “moderate opposition.” So, it was a premeditated attack in order to allow ISIS to take that position, and ISIS attacked those hills, and took those hills right away in less than one hour after the attack. 
Journalist: ISIS attacking Syrian position after American…? 
President Assad: Less than one hour, in less than one hour, ISIS attacked those hills. It means that ISIS gathered their forces to attack those hills. How did ISIS know that the Americans would attack that Syrian position? It means they were ready, they were prepared. This is an explicit and stark proof that the Americans are supporting ISIS and using it as a card to change the balance according to their political agenda. 
Journalist: And after that, America said sorry, huh? 
President Assad: They said they regret, they didn’t say sorry. [laughs] 
Question 6: Mr. President, who is responsible for the attack on the Red Cross convoy near Aleppo, and what weapons were used for the destruction of the Red Cross convoy? 
President Assad: Definitely the terrorist groups in Aleppo, because those are the ones who had an interest. When we announced the truce in Aleppo, they refused it. They said “no, we don’t want a truce.” They refused to have any convoys coming to eastern Aleppo, and that was public, it’s not our propaganda, it’s not our announcement, they announced it. And there was a demonstration by those militants to refuse that convoy. So, they have interest in attacking that convoy, we don’t have. It wasn’t in an area where you have Syrian troops, and at the same time there were no Syrian or Russian airplanes flying in that area anyway. But it was used as part of the propaganda, as part of the narrative against Syria in the West; that we attacked this humanitarian convoy, because the whole war now in Syria, according to the Western propaganda, is taking the shape of humanitarian war. This is the Western mask now; they wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, and when I say intervene it means militarily or by supporting the terrorists. 
Journalist: This is like the situation in former Yugoslavia, in the war in Yugoslavia, also in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the war in Kosovo, humanitarian problems. 
President Assad: It’s a different era, maybe, a different shape, but the same core, what happened in your country, and what’s happening now in our country. 
Question 7: And the Western propaganda spoke about the problem of using the chemical weapons and the barrel bombs. 
President Assad: The same, to show that you have a black-and-white picture; very very bad guy against very very good guy. It’s like the narrative of George W. Bush during the war on Iraq and on Afghanistan. So, they wanted to use those headlines or those terms in their narrative in order to provoke the emotions of the public opinion in their countries. This is where the public opinion would support them if they wanted to interfere, either directly through military attacks, or through supporting their proxies that are the terrorists in our region. 
Question 8: I see the news in the last days, the Amnesty International condemned a terrorist group for using the chlorine, the chemical weapons in Aleppo. 
President Assad: In Aleppo, exactly, that happened a few days ago, and actually, regardless of these chemical attacks, we announced yesterday that the terrorists killed during the last three days more than 80 innocent civilians in Aleppo, and wounded more than 300. You don’t read anything about them in the Western mainstream media. You don’t see it, you don’t hear about it, there’s nothing about them. They only single out some pictures and some incidents in the area under the control of the terrorists just to use them for their political agenda in order to condemn and to blame the Syrian government, not because they are worried about the Syrians; they don’t care about our children, or about innocents, and about civilization, about infrastructure. They don’t care about it; they are destroying it. But actually, they only care about using everything that would serve their vested interests. 
Question 9: And now, your army… you are the supreme commander of Syrian military forces. Your army now has not any chemical weapons? 
President Assad: No, we don’t. Since 2013, we gave up our arsenals. Now, no we don’t have. But before that, we have never used it. I mean, when you talk about chemical weapons used by the government, it means you are talking about thousands of casualties in one place in a very short time. We never had this kind of incidents; just allegations in the Western media. 
Question 10: Mr. President, when do you think the Syrian war will end? 
President Assad: When? I always say less than one year is enough for you to solve your internal problem, because it is not very complicated internally. It’s becoming more complex only when you have more interfering by foreign powers. When those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we can solve it as Syrians in a few months, in less than one year. That’s very simple, we can, but providing that there’s no outside interference. Of course, that looks not realistic, because everybody knows that the United States wanted to undermine the position of Russia as a great power in the world, including in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been looking how to destroy Iran for years now, and Syria could be one of the places where they can achieve that, according to their way of thinking. But if we say that we could achieve that situation where all those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we don’t have a problem in solving our problem. 
How? First of all, by stopping the support of the terrorists by external countries like the regional ones like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and by the West, of course, mainly the United States. When you stop supporting terrorists in Syria, it won’t be difficult at all to solve our problem. 
Question 11: Mr. President, is it true that Syria is the last socialistic country in the Arab world? 
President Assad: Today, yes. I don’t know about the future, how is it going to be. We are socialist, but of course not the closed type. 
Journalist: Humane socialism, because your government is supporting the education with the subvention, like the Swedish-type socialism. 
President Assad: I don’t know a lot about the Swedish-type, but let’s say that in Syria, we have an open economy, but at the same time we have a strong public sector, and that public sector played a very important role in the resilience of the Syrian society and the government during the war. Without that public sector, the situation would have been much more difficult. So, we’re still socialist, and I think the war proved that the socialism system is very important for any country, taking into consideration that I’m talking about the open socialism, that could allow the freedom of the public sector to play a vital role in building the country. 
Question 12: And your big companies… this is the state companies or private companies? 
President Assad: We have both. But usually in such a situation, the public sector always plays the most important part. As you know, the private sector could feel the danger more and could suffer more and in some areas could quit the whole arena, the economic arena, because of the insecurity. So, that’s why you have to depend in such a situation more on the public sector, but still the private sector in Syria plays a very important part beside the public. 
Question 13: And you have very very tolerance atmosphere with other churches, Christians, Muslims, and… 
President Assad: It’s not tolerance, actually; they are part of this society. Without all different colors of the society – Christians, Muslims, and the different sects and ethnicities – you won’t have Syria. So, every Syrian citizen should feel fully free in practicing his rituals, his traditions, his beliefs. He should be free in order to have a stable country. Otherwise you won’t have Syria as a stable country. But I wouldn’t call it tolerance. Tolerance means like we accept something against our will; no, Muslims and Christians lived together for centuries in Syria, and they integrate in their life on daily basis, they don’t live in ghettos. 
Question 14: No separate schools for Muslims, for Christians, young people, no? 
President Assad: No, no. You have some schools that belong to the church, but they are full of Muslims and vice versa. So, you don’t have, no. We don’t allow any segregation of religions and ethnicities in Syria, that would be very dangerous, but naturally, without the interference of the government, people would like to live with each other in every school, in every place, in every NGO, in the government, that is the natural… That’s why Syria is secular by nature, not by the government. The Syrian society has been secular throughout history. 
Question 15: And, Mr. President, it’s been one year since Russian air forces took part in the Syrian war, how much has Russia helped you? 
President Assad: Let’s talk about the reality. Before the Russian interference, ISIS was expanding, as I said. When they started interfering, ISIS and al-Nusra and the other Al Qaeda affiliated groups started shrinking. So, this is the reality. Why? Of course, because it’s a great power and they have great army and they have great firepower that could support the Syrian Army in its war. The other side of the same story is that when a great country, a great power, like Russia, intervene against the terrorists, in coordination with the troops on the ground, and in our case, it’s the Syrian Army, of course you’re going to achieve concrete results, while if you talk about the American alliance, which is not serious anyway, but at the same time they don’t have allies on the ground, they cannot achieve anything. So, the Russian power was very important beside their political weight on the international arena, in both ways they could change the situation, and they were very important for Syria in defeating the terrorists in different areas on the Syrian arena or battlefield. 
Question 16: Is the Syrian society divided by the war today? 
President Assad: Actually, it’s more homogenous than before the war. That could be surprising for many observers because the war is a very deep and important lesson for every Syrian. Many Syrians before the war didn’t tell the difference between being fanatic and being extremist, between being extremist and being terrorist. Those borders weren’t clear for many, because of the war, because of the destruction, because of the heavy price that affected every Syrian, many Syrians learned the lesson and now they know that the only way to protect the country and to preserve the country is to be homogenous, to live with each other, to integrate, to accept, to love each other. That’s why I think the effect of the war, in spite of all the bad aspects of any war like this war, but this aspect was positive for the Syrian society. So, I’m not worried about the structure of the Syrian society after the war. I think it’s going to be healthier. 
Question 17: And a question about the American presidential elections; who would you like to win in USA presidential elections, Trump or Hillary? 
President Assad: I think in most of the world, the debate about this election is who’s better, Clinton is better or Trump. In Syria, the discussion is who’s worse, not who’s better. So, no one of them, I think, would be good for us, let’s say, this is first. Second, from our experience with the American officials and politicians in general, don’t take them at their word, they’re not honest. Whatever they say, don’t believe them. If they say good word or bad word, if they were very aggressive or very peaceful, don’t believe them. It depends on the lobbies, on the influence of different political movements in their country, after the election that’s what is going to define their policy at that time. So, we don’t have to waste our time listening to their rhetoric now. It’s just rubbish. Wait for their policies and see, but we don’t see any good signs that the United States is going to change dramatically its policy toward what’s happening in the world, let’s say, to be fair, or to obey the international law, or to care about the United Nation’s Charter. There’s no sign that we are going to see that in the near future. So, it’s not about who’s going to be President; the difference will be very minimal, each one of them is going to be allowed to leave his own fingerprint, just personal fingerprint, but doesn’t mean change of policies. That’s why we don’t pin our hopes, we don’t waste our time with it. 
Question 18: Mr. President, the last question: The relation between Serbia and Syria, do you have any message for people in Serbia? 
President Assad: I think we didn’t do what we have to do on both sides in order to make this relation in a better position, before the war. Of course, the war will leave its effects on the relation between every two countries, that would be understandable, but we have to plan for the next time because your country suffered from external aggression that led to the division of Yugoslavia and I think the people are still paying the price of that war. Second, the war in your country has been portrayed in the same way; as a humanitarian war where the West wanted to intervene in order to protect a certain community against the aggressors form the other community. So, many people in the world believe that story, the same in Syria; they use the same mask, the humanitarian mask. 
Actually, the West doesn’t care about your people, they don’t care about our people, they don’t care about anyone in this world, they only care about their own vested interest. So, I think we have the same lessons, may be a different area, we are talking about two decades’ difference, maybe different headlines, but actually the content is the same. That’s why I think we need to build more relations in every aspect; cultural, economy, politics, in order to strengthen our position, each country in his region. 
Question 19: But Syrian government, you and Syria’s state, supporting Serbia in the problem of the Kosovo? 
President Assad: We did, we did, although the Turks wanted to use their influence for Kosovo, in Kosovo’s favor, but we refused. That was before the war, that was seven or eight years ago, and we refused, in spite of the good relation with Turkey at that time. We supported Serbia. 
Journalist: Mr. President, thank you for the interview, thank you for your time. 
President Assad: Not at all. Thank you for coming to Damascus. 
The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95",FAKE
"The Daily Sheeple 
by Jake Anderson 
Anomalous signals from deep space often evoke a quick pulse of gossip and speculation about aliens that dies off soon thereafter, when scientists are able to explain it. Usually, the explanation involves a natural cosmic process — an asteroid, space detritus, or frequencies from an exploded star. 
Sometimes, however, the signals are too mysterious to explain. There’s a reason why you may have seen a sustained social media buzz regarding aliens this past week. A few days ago, two scientists from Laval University in Quebec released a paper arguing they may have just received our first communication from extraterrestrials. 
First, a bit of context. This has been an exciting decade for those of us who stargaze in awe, wondering how many sentient beings live in this incomprehensibly enormous universe of ours. First, the search for exoplanets accelerated dramatically, aided by the Kepler telescope, which has identified over 1,000 planets outside of our solar system. 
While scientists have long known that our Milky Way galaxy alone probably contains several hundred billion planets , the ability to study them had eluded us until fairly recently (this ability will be exponentially augmented when the James Webb telescope allows us to analyze exoplanets’ atmospheres and search for traces of industrial gasses). Additionally, the discovery of Earth-like exoplanets — some of which are conceivably close enough to visit in a few decades — has tantalizing ramifications for our near future human race. 
Earlier this year, scientists announced the incredible observation of a series of inexplicable brightness frequencies from the star KIC 8462852, which led many to speculate the signals could have been originating from a Dyson sphere , a theoretical megastructure by which an advanced alien race (a Kardschez type 2 civilization ) could harness the power of its sun. The newest discovery from this star has made it even more unlikely that the signals are from natural causes. 
The newest strange signals hail from a gaggle of some 234 stars identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, the two astronomers who discovered the anomalies, discussed them in their paper , which was originally titled “Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” 
“We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an [extraterrestrial intelligence] signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis,” they wrote. 
“The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis.” 
Of course, it is far from certain that these are actual alien messages. In an interview with none other than Snopes.com , Borra claimed he never actually used the word ‘probably’ and that further confirmation was needed. 
The director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute , Andrew Siemion, issued an admonishing response: 
“You can’t make such definitive statements about detections unless you’ve exhausted every possible means of follow-up.” 
So why is everyone so excited? The discovery appears to match a prediction Borra made in 2012 when he claimed aliens could very well use intermittent bursts of laser as a means of communication. 
For his part, Siemion plans to use his Breakthrough Listen Initiative to more closely assess several stars from the 234 sample. Meanwhile, Borra andTrottier, Borra’s graduate student, will continue observing the mysterious signals. 
It’s an exciting decade for space research. With plans for a mission to Mars in the hopper, as well as an exploratory probe that will be sent to the moon Europa, we may be witnessing the rebirth of the Space Race. What better incentive could there be to venture further into space than the call of an alien species? 
Let’s hope that by the time we meet them, our own species will have transcended its addiction to war and unsustainable resource allocation. We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
Contributed by The Anti-Media of theantimedia.org . 
The “Anti” in our name does not mean we are against the media, we are simply against the current mainstream paradigm. The current media, influenced by the industrial complex, is a top-down authoritarian system of distribution—the opposite of what Anti-Media aims to be. At Anti-Media, we want to offer a new paradigm—a bottom-up approach for real and diverse reporting. We seek to establish a space where the people are the journalists and a venue where independent journalism moves forward on a larger and more truthful scale. 
Share: Rate:",FAKE
"NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Att’y General Loretta Lynch Pleads The 5th When Asked Questions About Obama’s Iran Ransom Payment “Every Obama administration official and department involved in the Iran Deal appear to be running for cover,” the source said. “Like we feared, the Iran deal is turning out to be a disaster and Iran is emboldened in its aggression. Evidently Attorney General Lynch and the Department of Justice have decided ‘refusal to cooperate’ is their best strategy. by Geoffrey Grider October 28, 2016 Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments 
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered. 
In an Oct. 24 response , Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran . Loretta Lynch Pleads the Fifth To Protect Obama In Iran $1.7 Billion Hostage Money 
The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon . 
The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran. 
“It is frankly unacceptable that your department refuses to answer straightforward questions from the people’s elected representatives in Congress about an important national security issue,” the lawmakers wrote. “Your staff failed to address any of our questions, and instead provided a copy of public testimony and a lecture about the sensitivity of information associated with this issue.” Obama on Iran payment: ‘We do not pay ransom’ 
“As the United States’ chief law enforcement officer, it is outrageous that you would essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries,” they stated. “The actions of your department come at time when Iran continues to hold Americans hostage and unjustly sentence them to prison.” The lawmakers included a copy of their previous 13 questions and are requesting that Lynch provide answers by Nov. 4. 
When asked about Lynch’s efforts to avoid answering questions about the cash payment, Pompeo told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration has blocked Congress at every turn as lawmakers attempt to investigate the payments to Iran. 
“Who knew that simple questions regarding Attorney General Lynch’s approval of billions of dollars in payments to Iran could be so controversial that she would refuse to answer them?” Pompeo said. “This has become the Obama administration’s coping mechanism for anything related to the Islamic Republic of Iran—hide information, obfuscate details, and deny answers to Congress and the American people.” Obama Administration Finally Admits $400M To Iran Was Ransom For Hostages 
“They know this isn’t a sustainable strategy, however, and I trust they will start to take their professional, and moral, obligations seriously,” the lawmaker added. 
In the Oct. 24 letter to Rubio and Pompeo, Assistant Attorney General Kadzik warned the lawmakers against disclosing to the public any information about the cash payment. 
Details about the deal are unclassified, but are being kept under lock and key in a secure facility on Capitol Hill, the Free Beacon first disclosed . Lawmakers and staffers who have clearance to view the documents are forced to relinquish their cellular devices and are barred from taking any notes about what they see. 
“Please note that these documents contain sensitive information that is not appropriate for public release,” Kadzik wrote to the lawmakers. “Disclosure of this information beyond members of the House and Senate and staff who are able to view them could adversely affect the diplomatic relations of the United States, including with key allies, as well as the State Department’s ability to defend [legal] claims against the United States [by Iran] that are still being litigated at the Hague Tribunal.” 
“The public release of any portion of these documents, or the information contained therein, is not authorized by the transmittal of these documents or by this communication,” Kadzik wrote. Congressional sources have told the Free Beacon that this is another part of the effort to hide details about these secret negotiations with Iran from the American public. 
One senior congressional source familiar with both the secret documents and the inquiry into them told the Free Beacon that the details of the negotiations are so damning that the administration’s best strategy is to ignore lawmakers’ requests for more information. 
“Every Obama administration official and department involved in the Iran Deal appear to be running for cover,” the source said. “Like we feared, the Iran deal is turning out to be a disaster and Iran is emboldened in its aggression. Evidently Attorney General Lynch and the Department of Justice have decided ‘refusal to cooperate’ is their best strategy. But this is dangerous and ultimately won’t protect them from anything.” source SHARE THIS ARTICLE Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING",FAKE
"A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire.



US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a $34,995 Gold Elite three-day package.

Trump University staff were instructed to get people to pile on credit card debt and to target their financial weaknesses in an attempt to sell them the high-priced real estate courses.

The documents contained an undated “personal message” from Trump to new enrollees at the school: “Only doers get rich. I know that in these three packed days, you will learn everything to make a million dollars within the next 12 months.”

The courses are now subject to legal proceedings from unhappy clients.



Judge Curiel released the documents, which are central to a class-action lawsuit against Trump University in California, despite sustaining repeated public attacks from Trump, who had fought to keep the details secret.

Curiel ruled that the documents were in the public interest now that Trump is “the front-runner in the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, and has placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue”.

Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing ... [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

Curiel, who is Hispanic, is American and was born in Indiana.

Trump went on to attack Curiel further on Twitter on Monday and at a press conference in New York on Monday.

The playbook contains long sections telling Trump U team members how to identify buyers and push them to sign up for the most expensive package, and to put the cost on their credit cards.

“If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite,” the document states.

If potential students hesitate, teachers are told to read this script.

As one of your mentors for the last three days, it’s time for me to push you out of your comfort zone. It’s time for you to be 100% honest with yourself. You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals. I’m looking at your profile and you’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be. It’s time you fix your broken plan, bring in Mr. Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it. Remember you have to be 100% honest with yourself!

Trump University staff are instructed in how to persuade students to put the cost of the course on their credit cards, even if they have just battled to pay off debts.

Trump staff are told to spend lunch breaks in sign-up seminars “planting seeds” in potential students minds about how their lives won’t improve unless they join the programme. They are also told to ask students personal questions to discover weaknesses that could be exploited to help seal the deal.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who has also sued Trump University, renewed his attacks on Trump on Tuesday. “You are not allowed to protect the trade secrets of a three-card Monte game,” Schneiderman said ahead of the document’s release. “If you look at the facts of this case, this shows someone who was absolutely shameless in his willingness to lie to people, to say whatever it took to induce them into his phony seminars,” Schneiderman said.",REAL
"** Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here. **

Buzz Cut:

 • Syria casts shadows on 2016 Dems

 • Kerry claims U.S. could still strike

 • Congress not waiting on Obama

 • President tries to pacify unions on ObamaCare

 • What a bunch of clowns

SYRIA CASTS SHADOWS ON 2016 DEMS - As Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton crisscross the nation and the globe raising their public profiles (and padding their donor lists) ahead of potential 2016 presidential bids, the Obama administration’s stumbles on Syria are posing serious problems. The Democratic base is in an uproar over the proposed strikes, but neither Biden nor Clinton can politely distance themselves from the president’s policies. They own them. But they can begin a long, slow march away from their president.

Biden could face grilling at steak fry - Vice President Joe Biden heads to Iowa Sunday for Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry. The Des Moines Register reports that President Obama’s friction with Harkin and other liberal lawmakers about Obama’s now-shelved request for congressional backing for strikes against Syria could complicate what is usually a casting call for presidential contenders in the home state for the first-in-the-nation nominating caucus.

Job chat in South Carolina - The White House announced Vice President Joe Biden will discuss jobs and infrastructure at the Port of Charleston in South Carolina Monday. South Carolina traditionally hosts the second presidential primary.

At least he warned us! - Vice President Joe Biden called House Republicans “Neanderthals” for resisting Democrats’ ultimately successful effort this year to add men in same-sex couples to the Violence against Women Act. Biden, speaking at a celebration of the act’s 19th anniversary at his official residence, prefaced his “Neanderthal” claim thusly: “I'm going to say something outrageous.” He also touted his legislative expertise: “I think I understand the Senate better than any man or women who’s ever served in there.”

WILL HILLARY ADDRESS SYRIA ON WORLD STAGE? - Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Scotland today to speak to the graduating class at St. Andrew’s University. With Britain already backed out of a U.S. coalition for Syria strikes and strong public sentiment there against joining the conflict, what will America’s former top diplomat say? In speeches earlier this week, Clinton voiced general support for President Obama’s Syria policy, but steered clear of his call for airstrikes, preferring to speak of “a strong response” led by the U.N.

Kerry crunch - With her successor stranded in Geneva trying to win weapons talks with his Russian counterpart, a little help from Clinton would surely be appreciated. But will Clinton be willing to sidle up to the unpopular war plan?

Huma rushes back to Hillary - Following her husband Anthony Weiner’s crushing defeat in the New York mayoral election on Tuesday, Huma Abedin, the longtime right-hand woman to Hillary Clinton, is back. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines, told TPM on Thursday that Abedin has returned to her position as director of the former secretary of State’s team.

Hillary staffs up - The departure of President Obama’s top economic adviser, Gene Sperling, first reported by Fox Business, provides some more manpower for Hillary Clinton’s policy team.  From the NYT: “If Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for president in 2016, Mr. Sperling, 54, is expected to join her team, a quarter-century after he played a prominent role in her husband’s first presidential campaign.” Sperling will be replaced by Obama’s former budget boss, Jeffrey Zients.

Corruption probe touches Hillary - WaPo reports federal investigators are probing a senior campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Minyon Moore, as they seek to build a case against D.C. businessman Jeffrey Thompson for his role in launching a shadow campaign to elect D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray.

Trickles down to Virginia governor race - WaPo also reports Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, the longtime top fundraiser for the Clintons, will not return a donation to his 2009 governor campaign from Thompson.

[WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel: “These questions stretch beyond shady money funneling to Gray and Clinton campaigns. Mr. Thompson had reason to have friends in high places, since his accounting firm served as a significant government contractor.”]

With your second cup of coffee... Liberal pundit Peter Beinart looks at the generation gap that could trap Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the Daily Beast in The Rise of the New New Left : “If the Millennials challenge Reaganite orthodoxy, they will likely challenge Clintonian orthodoxy, too.”

KERRY SAYS ATTACKS STILL POSSIBLE - After the first day of weapons talks, Secretary of State John Kerry maintained that the U.S. is still poised for a unilateral military strike against Syria, despite a political impasse in Washington and President Obama’s tabling of his request for congressional approval. Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov continue their discussions today in Geneva over a Russian offer to help secure Syria’s chemical weapons.

[Watch Fox: Richard Grenell, former State Department spokesman, appears in the 10 a.m. ET hour]

Not a game - “Expectations are high. They are high for the United States, perhaps even more so for Russia to deliver on the promise of this moment. This is not a game, and I said that to my friend Sergey when we talked about it initially.” – Secretary of State John Kerry at a press briefing.

Obama to reprise Syria stance - President Obama will sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for Sunday’s installment of “This Week.”

Dr. K weighs in – From Charles Krauthammer’s syndicated column, The fruits of epic incompetence: “Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner. Now a world statesman, he takes to the New York Times to blame American interventionist arrogance — a.k.a. ‘American exceptionalism’…”

Some donuts, though, ARE exceptional - Krispy Kreme opened its first store in Moscow on Thursday. WaPo reports nearly 200 people eagerly waited for the store to flip on the famous “hot now” sign.

[WSJ: “Russian President Vladimir Putin may be crude, but he knows how to exploit weakness. And he's sure acting like he has spotted an easy mark in President Obama.”]

FOX NEWS SUNDAY PREVIEW - John Roberts, sitting in for Chris Wallace, hosts Reps. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, to discuss the challenges of securing chemical weapons in civil war-torn Syria, and the potential pitfalls of relying on Russia.

CONGRESS NOT WAITING ON OBAMA - Campaign Carl Cameron - “Could the rare, bipartisan emergency meeting of the nation’s top four congressional leaders Thursday signal that Hill leaders have given up hope of real help from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue on solving looming fiscal crises?

Congress has learned to expect little from President Obama where budget matters are concerned. And the president's zig-zagging struggle for a coherent Syria policy has led many to conclude that the president is no longer becoming a lame duck. He is one.

House Speaker John Boehner, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, sat down with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to discuss the possibility of a government shutdown at the end of this month, raising the $16 trillion federal debt limit debt in the next five weeks and dealing with the next round of ‘sequestration’ spending caps.

Democrats and Republicans are light years apart on how best to deal with these fiscal issues.  Most will be handled with a series of delaying tactics that will keep the government operating but ignore the hard choices needed for lasting solutions.

Those fights will be fierce and could take the government to the brink, or over it. But the one politician in the mix who no longer worries about future elections is, of course, President Obama. On the Hill, friends and foes alike are already seeing signs that he is now thinking and acting that way.” – Carl Cameron

Boehner in a bind - Conservativemembers of House Speaker John Boehner's caucus are demanding a vote on a measure to defund ObamaCare as part of ongoing budget talks. Conservative lawmakers rejected a compromise plan from leadership earlier this week. Boehner told reporters: “I'm well aware of the deadlines… I think there's a way to get there… There are a million options that are being discussed by a lot of people.”

Baier Tracks: Don’t blame the messenger… “As the Obama administration is having horrible problems trying to contain the Syria crisis, House Speaker John Boehner appears to be having real problems controlling his Republican caucus.

Some Republicans say it’s being trumped up by the media with headlines like this in the NYT: “Boehner Seeking Democrats’ Help on Fiscal Talks.”

The problem: It is all true. This could be a bumpy road to Sept. 30 and a continuing resolution to fund the government, and an even bumpier ride to raise the debt ceiling by mid-October.” – Bret Baier

The last time there was a shutdown - Glen Bolger of top GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies reviews how the public blamed Republicans for the 1995 -1996 government shutdowns and how the party’s standing quickly diminished. Then-President Bill Clinton’s approval level bounced to 60 percent while a plurality (48 percent) of respondents blamed Republicans for the shutdown. The same share of voters approved of how Clinton handled the budget negotiations, with only 22 percent approving of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s approach.

[“The anarchists are winning...” --Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. in a press briefing Thursday ,following a meeting with top congressional leaders to discuss avoiding a government shutdown]

OBAMA, BIDEN TRY TO SOOTHE UNION OBAMACARE ANXIETY - President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will meet with labor leaders at the White House this afternoon after the nation’s largest union, the AFL-CIO, issued a scathing resolution against ObamaCare. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying to head off an expected carve-out for unions getting socked by new ObamaCare regulations.

[Ed. note: Labor leaders are likely to ask a common question in Washington these days: If big business, big insurance and Congress have all gotten special exemptions from the burdens of the law, why not them?]

Mopping up after ObamaCare - Breitbart: “Indiana University is firing 50 maintenance and custodial workers and shifting them to a temp agency to avoid incurring Obamacare costs.”

[Defending Medicare Part D - Former Congressional Budget Office boss Douglas Holtz-Eakin offers his new study for the American Action Forum on how Medicare Part D has beat cost estimates by 48 percent and how the CBO has reduced its cost projection by $100 billion]

NEW EVIDENCE IN IRS SCANDAL - Daily Caller: “House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Dave Camp vowed that ‘there will be consequences’ after revealing secret emails that… IRS official Lois Lerner sent to her colleagues suggesting collusion between the IRS and Democratic operatives… ‘Tea Party Matter very dangerous… Counsel and Judy Kindell need to be in on this one… Cincy should probably NOT have these cases,’ Lerner said in a February 2011 e-mail…”

DEMS BLOCK CRUZ ON BENGHAZI - Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, offered legislation to create a joint select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya. Cruz sought unanimous consent to pass the resolution Thursday. Senate Democrats refused.

‘STAND YOUR GROUND’ HEADS TO HILL - Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week on “stand your ground” laws.

Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM

BELTWAY SPELLING BATTLE - Members of Congress will battle reporters in the centennial installment of the National Press Club’s spelling bee on Wednesday. Congressional contenders in the benefit for the club’s Journalism Institute include Sens. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Tim Kaine, D-Va. Fox News Chief White House Correspondent Ed Henry will be among those going to bat for the media team.

YOU’D THINK THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE INJURIES…

 AP - “Pennsylvania police said a minivan with two clowns inside crashed outside the York Fair… The minivan was also pulling a trailer with a clown car. Police said the driver, 83-year-old James Billingsley of York, also known as ‘Dimples the Clown,’ suffered a minor bump on the head. His passenger clown, 77-year-old Norman Clouser of York, was unhurt. Police said ‘Dimples’ was wearing clown shoes but the oversized footwear apparently didn't play a role in the crash.”

AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…“A month ago, [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad] was a war criminal and [Russian President Vladimir Putin] was a pariah for covering in the U.N. on the poison gas attack. And because of how flummoxed our president is, Putin is now a statesman, a partner in peace, and he's in a position where he can lecture the United States of America.”  – Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News. Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here. To catch Chris live online daily at 11:30 a.m. ET, click here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"Tweet Home » Silver » Silver News » It’s Going to Change RADICALLY With Silver – HUGE Demand Coming | Cliff High 
Data mining expert Cliff High says the economy is much worse than most people think, and that bubble is going to pop after Election Day. Inflation is also coming, and that will be very positive for precious metals . High contends, “ Gold and silver are going to rise relative to the falling currencies. Gold and silver in actual purchasing power will also rise. They won’t be saying an ounce of gold bought a good suit 100 years ago and an ounce of gold will buy a good suit now. That’s going to change, and it’s also going to change radically with silver . Also, in our data sets between 2019 and 2024 , silver becomes the metal to have… You need to have silver . 
2017 Gold Pandas and 2017 Silver Pandas Are Now Available! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion!",FAKE
"Watch CNN and NY1's Democratic debate, moderated by Wolf Blitzer, Thursday, April 14 at 9 p.m. ET.

Milwaukee (CNN) Two candidates vying to take down their parties' front-runners could get big boosts if they win Tuesday in Wisconsin .

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is leading Donald Trump in the Badger State's polls. And a Bernie Sanders win would mark his sixth victory over Hillary Clinton in the last seven states to vote.

It's the last big test until April 19, and each candidate has a lot to win — or lose.

Here are five things to watch Tuesday:

Wisconsin is the first electoral test of whether he's paying a price.

But the polls show Cruz with a 10-point lead in Wisconsin -- and if that margin grows Tuesday, it'd be a sign that the controversies swirling around Trump's campaign are taking their toll.

Still, Trump was inflating expectations Monday in La Crosse.

""I really believe tomorrow were going to have a very, very big victory. Very very big,"" he said. ""You know, I've been up here a lot. And I love it, and the people I love.""

""His team doesn't understand how these processes work so any time they lose they scream, 'The election's been stolen from us,'"" Cruz said Monday on WISN radio in Wisconsin. ""It's just silliness.""

A loss would dent Trump. But it would crush Cruz, who has retail politicked his way across the Badger State as if it were Iowa in recent weeks.

He'll try to pick up 42 more in Wisconsin: 18 that go to the statewide winner, plus 24 more chosen three apiece by the state's eight congressional districts.

Part of Wisconsin's importance to Cruz is that the calendar soon shifts to shakier ground for him. He's favored in the winner-take-all South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska contests, but could lose big in the next contest on the calendar, New York on April 19, and then Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware the following week.

""Just a couple of weeks ago, all of the media commentators were saying Wisconsin was a state that I could not compete and do well,"" Cruz said Monday in Kenosha. ""They were saying it was a state that was a natural state for Donald Trump. The state historically has been a purple or even a blue state at times. It's a state that is, that is very heavily based on manufacturing, that has a lot of union members and working class members. Supposedly, it was Donald Trump's sweet spot, and yet I think the people of Wisconsin, they're looking at the records of the candidates, and they realize that Donald screams and yells a lot, but he has no solutions.""

He was swept in the South, and bloodied in the Rust Belt. But when the race shifted West, Bernie Sanders won five out of six states, regaining his footing and bolstering his argument to take the race all the way through the last contests on June 7.

A win in Wisconsin would give him a significant boost just as the race heads to New York -- the state where he was born, and which Clinton represented in the Senate. It would also give him victories in six out of the seven states in the month leading up to it -- helping to fuel the passion and small-dollar donations driving his candidacy.

At a rowdy Monday evening rally in Milwaukee, Sanders talked repeatedly about ""momentum"" -- touting poll results, his growth from 2015 and a string of recent victories.

""Tomorrow, if there is a good turnout here in Wisconsin, if there is a record-breaking turnout here in Wisconsin, we are going to win here as well,"" he said.

How problematic is a loss for Clinton?

Clinton's campaign has downplayed the Wisconsin primary for weeks, arguing that the state's results won't tip the delegate count significantly in either direction. The former secretary of state wasn't even in Wisconsin on Monday -- instead campaigning in New York, where she faces a closer-than-expected contest in two weeks.

For more than a month, Clinton has tried to shift her attention to Republicans and the general election. Yet much like Clinton against then-Sen. Barack Obama in 2008, Sanders' persistent presence won't allow it.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook is telling supporters not to worry.

In a memo posted on Medium Monday evening, Mook wrote: ""Sanders has to win the four remaining delegate-rich primaries -- New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey -- with roughly 60% of the vote. To put that in perspective: Sanders has thus far won only two primaries with that margin: Vermont and New Hampshire.""

He calls the campaign's delegate lead ""nearly insurmountable.""

Rubio, in fact, still has more delegates than Kasich.

""He's just a stubborn guy,"" Trump said of Kasich. ""He's stubborn. He doesn't want to leave.""

Wisconsin, just like Michigan and Illinois before it, is the sort of state where Kasich ought to have a strong showing. Public polls have showed him within striking distance of Trump for second place -- and finishing ahead of Trump would be a major boost.",REAL
"On Super Tuesday, Donald Trump continued his surprise series of wins, gaining seven out of the 11 states in play that day. In response, many are asking: Why have establishment candidates had such a hard time in this year’s Republican nomination contest?

Some suggest that Republicans who bother to vote in the primaries are farther to the right than the Republicans as a whole – and are unimpressed with the  somewhat more moderate establishment candidates. Others suggest that  less-educated citizens who don’t usually vote are turning out just to vote for Trump.

These may be part of the answer. But we offer a different suggestion to explain Trump’s meteoric rise: The GOP establishment is out of touch with its base. Trump actually represents Republicans better if you examine beliefs issue by issue.

[How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: Most voters aren’t ideologues]

To investigate, we have teamed up with Pollfish, a start-up survey platform, to track American public opinion on 11 key campaign issues weekly during the election season. Pollfish’s survey platform delivers online surveys to almost 200 million potential respondents. We specifically target smartphone owners in the United States. Our sampling technique is best described as randomly targeting people of a sample of adults in the U.S. with smartphones. Using highly technical statistical techniques to adjust for non-response (a legitimate concern in all surveys) coupled with demographic breakdowns of the voting population derived from Big Data on all registered voters in the U.S., we monitor public opinion on these issues broken down by the general population and by party, and compare it to leading political figures in the 2016 primary season.

Let’s look here at opinion on three highly divisive and partisan issues:

On all three issues, most Democratic politicians (including both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders) agree very strongly or strongly. The “establishment” Republican candidates (including both Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) disagree very strongly or strongly.

But where do Republican voters stand? Let’s compare them to the general population to see.

[How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: the role of white identity and grievances]

If you look at the figure below, you can see that only 20 percent of the general population supports a complete abortion ban, even in cases of rape and incest – and only 25 percent of Republican voters do. Cruz and  Rubio advocate this position. Trump breaks with the GOP establishment – and agrees with the nearly 60 percent of Republicans who support the right to abortion in these circumstances.

[Donald Trump may be showing us the future of U.S. rightwing politics]

Less than 35 percent of the general population would oppose any additional gun regulation or control. More than 50 percent support at least some increased gun regulation.

On both abortion and guns, less than 15 percent of the general population holds the neutral position; 75  percent hold strong or very strong views. On guns, the Republican voters agree with their elites; all Democratic candidates favor increased gun control while all of Republican candidates favor no additional gun control.

[Okay, so what would a Trump presidency be like?]

We find that 35 percent of the general population strongly support government action to reduce differences in income inequality; 20 percent strongly oppose; and 45 percent hold positions that are either neutral or soft. However, there is a partisan divide. Most Democratic voters do strongly support such measures. Sanders strongly advocates this position; we have defined Clinton as neutral on the issue, both in her rhetoric and her policy proposals, although this may change in coming months.

Republican voters are less clearly aligned – and are certainly not as cleanly aligned with the Republican elite. Trump, Cruz, and Rubio’s tax plans would massively redistribute after-tax income to the highest earners, although that’s not what their rhetoric says. Despite proposing the largest tax cuts, Trump calls CEO pay “a joke and disgraceful,” but offers no policy solutions, and has specifically advocated for the end of the hedge fund carried interest loophole.

We asked a total of eight questions, all framed to measure whether people hold strong or moderate positions on hot-button issues. We consistently found that people were more likely to hold strong opinions on one side or the other than they were to be neutral or mildly opinionated. In other words, public opinion was very polarized. This indicates that elite polarization (i.e., the distance between the policy positions of Republican and Democratic lawmakers) has certainly rubbed off on the general population, at least to a small extent.

But here’s something interesting. Across these three representative issues, 60 percent of the Democratic electorate supports Democratic candidates’ policies strongly (or more so). But only 35 percent of the Republican electorate supports their candidates’ positions.

Does this misrepresentation matter to the voters? It’s hard to know. In 2012, 92 percent of self-identified Democrats voted for Barack Obama, while 93 percent of self-identified Republicans voted for Mitt Romney. Only 6 and 7 percent, respectively, crossed over to vote for the “other” party’s candidate.

If Trump secures the Republican nomination, a greater proportion of Republican voters may cross over, or the Republican Party may splinter on policy, losing pro-immigration business leaders.

But the Democratic candidates are further from the Republican base than Trump is. And Trump’s breaks with Republican orthodoxy may actually be closer to the beliefs of the Republican base. He breaks left to match Republican voters’ beliefs on abortion – and he breaks even further right to match those voters in his extreme positions on on opposing immigration and any pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

In other words, Trump’s apparent hodgepodge of moderate and conservative positions may actually make him a more representative Republican presidential candidate than the establishment candidates we’ve seen in the past eight years.

It’s certainly possible that Trump’s candidacy will pull the Republican Party back towards the views of Republican voters.

Notes on methodology: We sampled about 1,000 American smartphone users once a week for five weeks between Jan. 11 and Feb. 12, 2016. The total respondents is 4,209. We then model each question using a Bayesian hierarchical regression with age, race, gender, education, race, and party identification. We then weight the obtained probability estimates based on total counts of likely voters derived from the TargetSmart voter file.

Tobias Konitzer is a Ph.D. candidate in communication at Stanford University.

David Rothschild is an economist at Microsoft Research. Find him on Twitter @DavMicRot and PredictWise.com",REAL
"At Shadowproof, we believe part of what made the 2016 Presidential Election so agonizing was the endless stream of punditry we were inundated with on a daily basis. Sometimes it masqueraded as valuable analysis and critical journalism. Most often, these pieces were clearly, as author Aldous Huxley might say, excruciating orgasms of self-assertion.
Shadowproof’s staff collaborated on this collection of the worst punditry written during the campaign. Many of these individuals deserve the label of hack. They should be forever remembered for compounding the trauma of this election.
Additionally, we know we probably missed some gems that deserve recognition. We would like our readers to submit what they consider to be the worst of the worst, and on Thursday, November 10, we will publish a collection nominated by our readers. Share your picks in the comment section below or send us an email .
DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY Jonathan Chait —”Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, And Marxism Has Always Failed” We won’t see a red tide sweep the United States any time soon, but that hasn’t kept liberal writers from trying, and failing, to malign leftists. The most energized pundit was Jonathan Chait, writer for New York Magazine. In this piece championing liberalism , Chait took part in what’s become a formulaic liberal undertaking: warning of the specter of Marxism or any leftist ideology imbued with even the faintest hint of red.
Arguing liberalism “works” not only means ignoring its past and present failures, but it also speaks to a deep-seated fear among the liberal commentariat. They are afraid a genuine leftist ideology is enticing to the young and disillusioned. Even Bernie Sanders, as benign and unthreatening as he was, faced a torrent of diatribes for advocating some of the most genial socialist policies, including the right to a “living wage.” Someday, there will be an independent socialist movement, and it will be truly vindicating. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
Further Reading: “ Oh, Good, It’s 2016 And We’re Arguing Whether Marxism Works “ 
Courtney Enlow —”An All-Caps Explosion of Feelings Regarding the Liberal Backlash Against Hillary Clinton” Bourgeois feminists invested in the Clinton brand inundated readers with banal fan-fiction dressed up as politics. One of the most superficial justifications for a Hillary Clinton presidency came from one Courtney Enlow who penned an “all-caps explosion of feelings” for the former Secretary of State. Enlow spends the entire body of her article yelling because “Hillary cannot yell”, so on her behalf she etches out a stream of incoherent complaints in all caps.
“Fuck everything, I’m with her,” Enlow concluded. It might as well be the mantra of every liberal supporter of Clinton. Her article not only neglects to address a single policy issue but it also—intentionally or otherwise—paints all detractors as misogynists, unwilling to pass the torch to a woman, and white, thereby erasing countless people of color who condemned Clinton for actions she’s taken, and the policies she’s supported throughout her political career. This shallow examination of Clinton as a beer buddy instead of a politician with a direct hand in the material consequences, which impacted innumerable communities, is now normal. This is the way so many dissect political candidates and a preview of what is in store for Americans after Clinton’s inauguration. (Roqayah Chamseddine)
Further Reading: “ Hillary Clinton vs. Herself ” by Rebecca Traister 
Max Fisher — “Is Hillary Clinton really the foreign policy super-hawk she is portrayed to be?” Clinton has a reputation as a hawk. It won her praise during the 2016 election from neoconservatives, who ardently supported President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. She supports a no-fly zone in Syria. She was a fierce advocate for regime change against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya after meeting with Westernized Libyan exiles and played a key role in pushing the U.S. government to war. She is a big believer in targeted assassinations with drones. She voted for the Iraq War when she was a senator. Nevertheless, Fisher wrote a piece during the primary intended to undermine all the scrutiny of her foreign policy record.
It was a response to the New York Times profile by Mark Landler on how she became a hawk. Fisher made several distinctions without a difference, suggesting she is “hawkish on failed states, civil wars, and humanitarian crises; dovish toward adversarial or hostile states.” He penned this marvelous sentence after summarizing her record supporting interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria: “That is just a large number of wars or military interventions, and it’s easy to see why Clinton has been judged as hawkish as a result,” as if the wars just happened to Clinton like bad bouts of the flu and there’s nothing much she could do about it. Then, Fisher reasoned it is hard to know what a president will do in terms of foreign policy because it is beyond American control. Except, what Fisher does not get is that America is a massive empire, and the U.S. most certainly has the ability to determine whether pouring gasoline on the fire is the right thing to do. (Kevin Gosztola)
Paul Krugman – “Plutocrats and Prejudice” Casting Sanders as myopic and money-obsessed was a convenient way for pundits to water down his actual platform, which included demands for universal healthcare and an end to mass incarceration. However, Krugman’s argument went beyond that. It joined the trend of weaponizing identity politics and cast Clinton as the candidate, who understood minority communities better even though she once called black people “super predators.”
Krugman claimed Sanders believes “money is the root of all evil,” while Clinton believes “money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right.“ It helped to deflect conversation about Clinton’s relationships with Wall Street elites or her support for welfare reform that ravaged communities of color. It also enabled Clinton to respond to critiques of President Barack Obama with suggestions that an angry old white man was trying to hijack the Democratic Party. (Brian Sonenstein)
Further Reading: “ The Pastrami Principle “ 
Amanda Marcotte – “Let’s storm the Sander’s he-man women-haters club: Hillary plays the gender card, while Bernie fans rage” It is possible no one put in as much effort to simplify the Democratic Primary contest as a battle of the sexes as Salon’s Marcotte . In the early months of the primary, she painted Sanders supporters as an all white and male obstacle to history, and Sanders himself as their belligerent leader intent on denying American women their dream of a potent symbol in the White House.
Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record relished the kind of work Marcotte did because it effectively erased the thousands of young women who had legitimate policy disagreements with Clinton. In this particular piece, she put forth “evidence” of the gender dynamic by publishing two photos she took of a rally in Iowa. One showed a crowd full of hopeful women of all ages she said were united by their love of Katy Perry and adorned with “Glitter, unicorns, and Disney princess memorabilia.” Another showed the scraggly crowd of “cantankerous young men” Sanders attracted. Again, identity politics cleverly distracted from a necessary conversation on the issues and records of the two presidential candidates. (Brian Sonenstein)
Further Reading: “ Why I’m supporting Clinton over Sanders: Liberals don’t need a savior but someone who can actually get things done in Washington “ 
Joy Reid – “Come on, Bernie, Time to Level With Your Dreamers” Like many careerist grifters, Reid supported Hillary Clinton in the primary and tried to undermine any populist progressive movement in the Democratic Party. This particular column was so trollish it needed to be read by gaslight.
Claiming Sanders supporters were part of an “angry movement” and out of their senses, Reid told Sanders in May, before many primaries occurred, he needed to concede the race and tell his supporters to stop living in an “alternate reality.” And she further distinguished herself by trying to manipulate Sanders voters into believing their concerns were products of racism and sexism, even though Sanders typically won all younger voters, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender. (Dan Wright)
Michael Tomasky – “Get Of My Lawn, Bernie Kids! Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton” In the film, “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood shouts at kids to get off his lawn because he struggles with diversity and America as a more inclusive society. For Tomasky, the “threat” to his “lawn” was different. It is millennials, who possess an ambitious vision for a better and just world that goes beyond the confines of establishment politics; you know, young people who seek to unravel the messes created and amplified by the failures of Tomasky’s generation.
For this column, Tomasky, a 56 year-old white man with a very nice home in suburban Washington, D.C., that could be found on Zillow, haplessly wielded the politics of privilege. It was written in first person and teemed with the kind of self-absorbed narcissism, which was a hallmark of the vote scolding genre of writing so many of us were subjected to during the election. After he was challenged by Sanders supporters, Tomasky copped out and declared, “I haven’t the slightest idea. But none of you Sanders supporters has the slightest idea of what the future holds either.” He went on to mock supporters for being assertive, even though it was his performance that provoked thousands of supporters into understandable outrage. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ An Ode To My Berniebro Trolls “ 
GENERAL ELECTION Jonathan Chait — “Jill Stein Explains Her Plan To Stop Trump By Electing Him President” A small percentage of U.S. citizens, who voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, had their votes counted as, can you guess? Votes for Jill Stein. However, there is a genre of liberal punditry that goes back more than a decade. It lectures and berates every citizen, who would dare to vote for a third-party candidate. It says they help Republicans and seeks to blame them for wars, poverty, famine, armageddon—just about anything bad that occurred after voters dared to support another choice than one of the two candidates the capitalist system foisted upon them.
Chait is magnificent at writing these types of asinine columns. Through spectacular misdirection, he maintained Stein believed Clinton will lead to fascism. He ignored the kernel of Stein’s remarks that sparked this spittle; in particular, how failure to improve the material conditions of lower and working class Americans fuels right-wing extremism. If anyone needs to demonstrate why our choices get progressively worse each election, they can point to columnists like Chait, who foster this kind of half-baked discourse. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ Ralph Nader Still Refuses To Admit He Elected Bush ” 
Jamie Kirchick – “Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left” Few screeds backfired on their authors as marvelously as this piece. None of the individuals smeared in the piece actually ever expressed support for Trump. In fact, each of them had records, where they denounced him before Kirchick accused them of being Trump Lovers. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent reacted , “Area man willfully confuses refusal to unthinkingly parrot all criticism of Trump with ‘admiration’ of him.” On top of that, it brought further controversy to The Daily Beast after it published a story by a straight writer who was outing Olympians as gay. (That egregious piece was removed.)
Kirchick’s piece was one of the earlier articulations of the argument that the Kremlin wants Trump to be U.S. president, which now saturates media. He reasoned leftists critical of Clinton “validated” Trump and so, therefore, they were feeding into the agenda of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It seems rather boring and uninspired at this point. He and other neoconservatives had it rough during the election because they were no longer relevant, and in order to be relevant, they had to openly identify with the Clinton campaign. Maybe, there’s a role for Kirchick in the pundit class under a Clinton presidency. He regularly contributed to the Los Angeles Times over the past months. Or maybe this cretinous drool monger now carries too much of a risk of damaging a media organization’s reputation that editors will steer clear of him. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ If Trump wins, a coup isn’t impossible here in the U.S. “ 
Eli Lake – “Now Clinton Knows How Scooter Libby Felt” The failed presidency of George W. Bush left many neoconservatives scrambling to hold onto power and relevance, but neocons like Lake believe they have found the sunny-side up around the Clinton campaign. With Clinton and friends celebrating the support of Iraq war cheerleaders Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and David Frum, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to beat the yoke of the old regime off former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and convicted felon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
In his piece, Lake celebrated Libby’s reinstatement to the D.C. Bar and feebly tries to compare Clinton’s alleged mistreatment by the FBI with Libby’s, noting a tangential connection to FBI Director James Comey. Lake claimed Libby was “tried and convicted in the press before the trial” (and also convicted after the trial). It amounted to a preview of how we can expect neocon pundits to behave under a Clinton presidency. (Dan Wright)
Matt Yglesias — “Against Transparency” There are hundreds of journalists against transparency, some who are in the closet and some who are very public about their views. Concerned about how the Clinton campaign struggled with coverage of the former secretary of state’s emails, Yglesias fully outed himself and advocated for increased restriction on the types of government records that can be released to journalists and the public. He argued emails and other electronic records produced with “conversational” communication tools should not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Yglesias displayed a severe misunderstanding of FOIA and neglected to mention the existence of key privacy exemptions and “deliberative process privilege.” These are supposed to protect officials so they can have frank conversations that will most likely remain secret. Beyond that, Yglesias’s column represented the growing disdain against information that exists among liberal pundits, who seem to believe if these things are secret the right-wing echo chamber will not be able to make Clinton’s life miserable. Yet, of course, organizations in this echo chamber will always find something to spin against Clinton. Yglesias knows this, and that made his call to restrict a major tool for government accountability even more dumb. (Kevin Gosztola)
Further Reading: “ The lesson of Hillary’s secret speeches is she’s exactly who we already knew she was ” 
The post The Worst Takes Of 2016 Election: An Unforgiving Retrospective appeared first on Shadowproof .
",FAKE
"Israeli official secretly visits Dubai: Report ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Afraid of What? The Woman Who Accused Trump of Raping Her at 13 Just Dropped Her Lawsuit By GPD on November 4, 2016 Bloom said earlier this week that Doe/Johnson didn’t appear at a planned press conference because she had received death threats and was in fear for her life. Illustration by Jim Cooke 
A woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her at a party when she was just 13 years old has voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit, according to court records. The woman, who has gone by the pseudonyms Jane Doe and Katie Johnson, was a no-show at a much hyped press conference earlier this week with celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom. Jezebel previously detailed the bizarre backstory behind two lawsuits Johnson filed against Trump and celebrity sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who she said also raped her at a party in 1994. A group of men worked for a year to push the rape allegations into the news, while preventing access to Johnson. No journalist has ever been able to speak to her directly in person or confirm her existence. However, her attorney, Thomas Francis Meagher of New Jersey, has told Jezebel he’s met with his client on several occasions and has gotten to know her “quite well.” 
According to court records, Johnson/Doe voluntarily dismissed the suit on the afternoon of November 4. No other information is provided in the filing. 
Read more here",FAKE
"PHILADELPHIA — Charging that Donald Trump “wants us to fear the future and fear each other,” Hillary Clinton took him on with the most powerful line in her party’s tradition.

“Well, a great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago, during a much more perilous time: ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'”

Clad in white, the color of the women’s suffrage movement, she noted her special role: that this convention marked “the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for president.” It was, she said, happy news “for grandmothers and little girls and everyone in between.”

But she spoke first of her hopes for the country and how her vision and approach to governing contrasted so sharply with her opponent’s divisive, angry and self-centered campaign.

“Don’t believe anyone who says: ‘I alone can fix it.’ Those were actually Donald Trump’s words in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us.”

She made clear that she had no intention of ceding economically discontented  voters to Trump.

“Democrats,” she declared, “are the party of working people.”

“My primary mission as president will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages, right here in the United States,” she said. “From my first day in office to my last. Especially in places that for too long have been left out and left behind.”

This was a convention in which the word “we” was invoked by speaker after speaker, from President Obama to the Rev. William Barber as a talisman and a commitment. In the hour before Clinton spoke, Barber gave a stirring stem-winder of a sermon that ended with the whole convention shouting “Alleluia!”

Clinton embraced the communitarian theme, signaling that her “Stronger Together” slogan would remain at the heart of her campaign.

“Every generation of Americans has come together to make our country freer, fairer and stronger,” she declared. “None of us can do it alone. That’s why we are stronger together.”

And she underscored the other side of that catchphrase by warning that Trump would divide the nation.

“Powerful forces are threatening to pull us apart,” she said. “Bonds of trust and respect are fraying. And just as with our founders, there are no guarantees. It’s truly is up to us. We have to decide whether we’re going to work together so we can all rise together.”

As she often has in the past, Clinton cited as her guiding principle a favorite teaching from her Methodist faith: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.”

She included a lengthy tribute to Bernie Sanders, whom she praised for having “put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong.”

And she pledged to live up to the hopes that inspired their engagement. “Your cause,” she said, “is our cause.”

She struck populist themes that should resonate with Sanders’s backers. “Wall Street can never ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again,” Clinton said. She attacked big money in politics and promised fairer trade deals, a higher minimum wage and an expansion of Social Security benefits. It was a speech that ratified the progressive thrust of the party’s platform and its move in a more progressive direction.

Her speech capped a star-studded, thematically coherent and methodically organized convention that contrasted sharply with a shambolic Trump gathering in Cleveland that most leading Republicans shunned.

She faced the challenge of following a passionately persuasive address on her behalf by Obama, much as Obama had to follow a similarly successful speech by Bill Clinton four years ago.

Her style was very different from Obama’s. She spoke quietly, deliberately and often affectingly, particularly when discussing her mother, who was abandoned by her parents and “was saved by the kindness of others.” It was a powerful speech in which she combined the personal with policy, a vigorous defense of the Obama record with an insistence that she would tackle the problems left unsolved and the injustices that still needed righting.

 Again and again, she came back to Trump’s shortcomings and hypocrisies. She charged he was “in the pocket of the gun lobby” and displayed that her party is no longer fearful of the gun issue.

Sounding a theme her campaign has signaled it will drive home, she highlighted Trump’s failure to pay many who had worked for him — “People who did the work and needed the money, and didn’t get it – not because he couldn’t pay them, but because he wouldn’t pay them.”

And she noted Trump’s statement: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do . . .”  She clearly enjoyed reciting the next line: “No, Donald, you don’t.”

In the primaries, Trump’s opponents were fearful of attacking him until it was too late. Clinton showed she would be a happy warrior with no compunction about taking him on.

Democrats have often criticized themselves as putting too much faith in policy. She embraced her persona as someone who proudly sweated policy details. And she promised a campaign rooted in a moral challenge to her opponent: “Yes, the world is watching what we do.”",REAL
"Print 
This election remains more heated than any other in modern history – and for many, it has become a call to arms, even if only metaphorically. 
Despite the fact that DNC operatives have been exposed as the ones inciting violence at rallies – Robert Creamer and Scott Foval for example – and working overtime to bus in illegal voters and rig the vote – the media is going out of its way to paint Trump supporters and grassroots Americans as the ones plotting violence. 
Most recently, they are latching onto comments made by former congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative radio host, who suggested he would ‘pick up a musket’ if Trump loses the election. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
You in? 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
Did Walsh mean to imply violence? That is certainly how the media is portraying it, as his comments spark controversy and fuel fire to the debate over the nearing election. 
The irony that his commentary drew from the imagery of founding-era patriots who stood up to tyranny was deeply lost on the left, who see opponents to Hillary in black and white terms – racist, xenophobic, utterly deplorable and inherently violent. 
CNN followed up, asking Walsh what he meant by statement. 
via CNN : 
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
[…] 
Walsh … did respond to CNN’s Jake Tapper via Twitter when he asked: “What exactly does that mean?” 
“It means protesting. Participating in acts of civil disobedience. Doing what it takes to get our country back,” he responded to Tapper. https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/791382994783133696 https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/791382994783133696 
His heated rhetoric is a response to the endless episodes of fraud, dirty trick and foul play by the Hillary campaign, as it seems that she will stop at nothing to become the first female POTUS – just the sort of abuse of power that the founders warned about. 
1775-76 erupted in response to a long train of abuses – acts of oppression and hostility listed in the Declaration of Independence that is being largely repeated in modern day America. 
Could Hillary’s reported election victory – or Donald Trump’s defeat – signal civil unrest and a new wave of resistance, particularly if the results are widely viewed as fraudulent or “rigged”? Trump, for one, has certainly been talking up the possibility of a stolen election. 
The scenario is plausible enough that the Pentagon and Homeland Security have been carrying out secret drills in the lead up to the election to prepare for the possibility of a martial law response to violence or civil unrest. 
As SHTF detailed in an exclusive report, a whistleblower has come forward on the ominous contingency plan to keep and/or restore order if the populace revolt against the establishment’s “selection” for president: 
If there is any truth to it, the 2016 election could be a kick-off for total tyranny. 
According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after. 
Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York 
1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre. 
2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed. 
3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario. 
Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military 
At this point, no one can say for certain what will happen in the aftermath of November 8, but it is clear that millions and millions of Americans are dissatisfied with the status quo, troubled about the economic realities perpetuated by the Fed and angry that Hillary may be put in the Oval Office rather than a jail cell, despite a trail of corruption with virtually no end. 
How far will things go? 
And will things ever be reset without a new American Revolution? 
Article posted with permission from SHTFPlan shares",FAKE
"Based on the possibility that you will become the nominee of the Republican Party, and perhaps the  president of the United States, I offer you the following thoughts on what you need to do as this unusual primary season approaches its homestretch.

I do this out of dedication to my country and Party.  I want Republicans to win the presidency and I am worried about the harm that will be done if Secretary Hillary Clinton becomes president.

Your loss in Wisconsin on Tuesday is a sign that your style of campaigning is catching up to you.

You have done a powerful job of energizing some 35 to 40 percent of Republican primary voters and you have made the Republican Party more attractive to lower-income, working Americans who typically question whether the GOP cares about them.  But getting to 50 percent is your problem and many of your recent statements and tweets are driving away the people you need to close the deal.

If you want to close the gap and win a majority of the Party, you need to:

1. Stop fighting with everyone and don’t be so nasty.  When you tweet unflattering pictures of Senator Cruz’s wife and threaten to “spill the beans” about her, question Ben Carson’s faith, offer to pay the legal bills of those who engage in violence, fault POWs, or accuse President Bush of being a liar, you push away voters you need to get to 50 percent.  If you keep acting like this, you will keep your 40 percent -- they love it – but you’ll never hit 50 percent.  It’s too hot, too much, too often.  Pick smarter fights and do so in a less belittling and pejorative manner.  You can make provocative points and be true to yourself if you would only be smarter about how and when you fight.

2. Get your facts right.  Think about how much stronger you would be if you supported your statements with accurate facts or anecdotes.  If you had said “a small group” of Muslims cheered from rooftops in New Jersey on September 11th, no one could have faulted you.  Same thing when you say we “send nothing” to Japan, or when you misstate the trade deficit with China. You often fudge up your poll numbers too.  You regularly show that facts are malleable to you, and that raises doubts about your substantive knowledge on all sorts of matters.

3. Learn more policy.  Your comments about abortion were a double-edged disaster.  You alienated everyone.  They showed you are not familiar with the background of an important emotional issue.  Anyone aware of Right to Life’s thinking knows, mothers are not criminals.  You need to take the time to learn a variety of issues. You might think everyone in Washington is stupid, but there are a lot of smart people in that town who actually care about issues and you should find the ones you trust and listen to them. No one expects you to memorize arcane policy points.  But it will be harder for you to reach 50 percent if voters think you can’t demonstrate sufficient knowledge to sit in the Oval Office.

4. Make policy announcements.  You’re an outsider with business experience and people want to hear what you would do if elected, beyond building a wall.  On energy policy, corporate welfare, agriculture policy and dozens of other matters, you would surprise people and grow your support if you gave a small number of actual policy addresses.  The point will be less what you say about each specific matter (so long as you demonstrate some level of fluency and expertise) and more that you’re capable of doing it.  Some one-third of the Party supports you because they think you’re tough.  You would make inroads with other voters if they thought you were thoughtful.

5. Stop citing polls.  Politicians who talk about polls do so to show the election is all about them.  But elections are not about politicians.  Elections are about the hopes and dreams of the voters and especially now, voters want someone who can lift up our country, defend us, and grow the economy.  I get that you talk about the polls to show you’re a winner.  But if and when you start losing more contests, the polls will define you as a loser. What will you talk about then?  It’s better to knock it off now.  And of course, all the recent polls show you are losing to Hillary.

You got yourself to where you are today by demonstrating an uncanny, powerful, outsider’s bravado.  But the gap between 40 percent and 50 percent support is immense.  The higher hanging fruit is tough to get, and you won’t likely earn that support if you stay on your current path.

The Super Tuesday news conference you held at Mar-A-Lago and your policy speech (on a TelePrompter) to AIPAC were your two best moments demonstrating there is more to you than bravado.

Whatever you do, just remember, you can’t win if you can’t earn a majority.

Former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer was the primary spokesperson for President George W. Bush. He served as spokesman during the historic presidential recount, September 11th, two wars and the anthrax attack. His best-selling book, ""Taking Heat,"" details his years in the White House. Since leaving the White House, Ari has worked extensively in the world of sports. He has helped Major League Baseball deal with its controversies, as well as its opportunities, and he has worked for the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. He also helps advise several major corporations about their communications issues through his company, Ari Fleischer Sports Communications.",REAL
"BREAKING : Wikileaks Reveals More Clinton “Quid Pro Quo”– Bill Meets With Saudi Prince in D.C. BREAKING : Wikileaks Reveals More Clinton “Quid Pro Quo”– Bill Meets With Saudi Prince in D.C. Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016 
As we all know by now, the Clinton Foundation is one GIANT SCAM designed to fill the pockets of the Clintons, and they’re rich bastard pals. 
Thanks to Wikileaks there’s no longer “doubt” over the crooked dealings at that corrupt and disgusting foundation. 
We also have learned how the Clintons make their hundreds of millions. 
Quid pro quo – or PAY TO PLAY. 
During Hillary’s time at the State Department, she would sell favors and access. 
After she had left, he and Bill kept it up, using their political power and influence to help foreign countries like Morrocco and Saudi Arabia. 
Two Islamic countries that ABUSE, IMPRISON, and EXECUTE WOMEN AND GAYS. 
In a leaked email recently released from Wikileaks we see that Bill Clinton was meeting with the Saudi Prince as recently as September of last year. #PodestaEmails22 : This is it: Quid pro quo 
— MicroSpookyLeaks™ (@WDFx2EU7) October 29, 2016 
The Clintons are the most corrupt, greedy, and repugnant political family of our lifetime. 
Neither one of the blood-sucking leeches should be allowed within 500 feet of the White House ever again. This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter.",FAKE
"  DCG | 2 Comments 
Rules are for little people. 
From Daily Mail : Hillary Clinton did not disclose ‘expensive gifts,’ free vacations, and complimentary private jet travel her family received from business interests while she was at the State Department, according to leaked emails and federal disclosure records reviewed by the DailyMail.com. 
Long-time Clinton aide Doug Band claimed in a confidential 2011 memo published by Wikileaks this week that he helped obtain free vacations and personal travel for Bill Clinton and his family as part of his duties. 
During Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, she did not report any gifts or travel reimbursements for herself or her spouse in her financial disclosure filings. 
‘In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,’ wrote Band in the Nov. 16, 2011 memo to attorneys conducting an internal review of the Clinton Foundation. 
He added that his job involved ‘supporting [Bill Clinton’s] family/personal needs (e.g., securing in-kind private airplane travel, in-kind vacation stays, and supporting family business and personal needs).’ 
The memo did not say whether Hillary Clinton was one of Bill Clinton’s family members who received vacations, gifts, or personal travel. Band did not respond to request for comment. 
In November 2011, according to the memo, the telecommunications company Ericsson agreed to give Bill Clinton $400,000 in private plane travel. The company also paid the former president an additional $750,000 to speak at its conference that month in Hong Kong. 
It was the largest speaking fee Bill Clinton had received up until that point, and with the added plane fare, the payment reached well over $1 million. 
Although Hillary Clinton reported in her disclosure filings that her husband received a $750,000 honorarium for the speech, she did not disclose the additional $400,000 in private plane expenses from Ericsson in the spousal income or gifts and reimbursements sections . 
In another Nov. 17, 2011 email, Band complained that Bill Clinton was not required to submit an internal conflict-of-interest disclosure form – unlike other top officials at the Clinton Global Initiative – despite the fact that the former president received ‘expensive gifts’ for his home from CGI sponsors . Bill Clinton and Doug Band 
Bill Clinton ‘does not have to sign such a document even though he is personally paid by 3 CGI sponsors, gets many expensive gifts from them, some that are at home etc,’ wrote Band. 
Hillary Clinton did not disclose any gift or travel expenses that she or her husband received while at the State Department. The federal disclosure form requires officials to report gifts to themselves or a spouse totalling more than $350 from a single source, such as ‘tangible items, transportation, lodging, food, or entertainment’ and ‘travel-related cash reimbursements.’ 
However, a federal official does not have to disclose gifts to a spouse that are ‘totally independent of their relationship’ – for example, business-related benefits that a spouse receives from his employer. While many of the companies involved in CGI and Bill Clinton’s for-profit business had interests before the State Department, government ethics experts said it can be difficult to determine whether a gift to a public official’s spouse is connected to their relationship . 
It is also unclear whether Hillary Clinton travelled on any of these ‘personal trips’ and ‘in-kind vacations,’ which Band wrote were given to Bill Clinton’s ‘family.’ The Clintons have a 36-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who is also involved in the Clinton Foundation. 
A spokesperson for Clinton’s campaign did not respond to request for comment. 
According to the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, failure to report certain gifts in a financial disclosure form could violate the Ethics in Government Act or the Federal False Statements Act. 
Federal laws ‘require full disclosure of such expensive gifts and reimbursements when special interests use a spouse to target a government official,’ said Ken Boehm, chairman of the NLPC. 
‘The just-disclosed emails of Clinton associate Doug Band that Bill Clinton and his family members benefitted from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free travel and gifts from special interests while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State raises substantial ethical and legal issues because the Financial Disclosure reports filed by Secretary Clinton does not show these expensive gifts and reimbursements,’ said Boehm. 
DCG",FAKE
"October 27, 2016 @ 11:59 am 
I’m voting for him – but will be very quiet about it. 
I believe there Are many out there who are doing the same. Islam is not gay-friendly. It’s the leftist idiot who would believe that it is despite a mountain of evidence showing the truth about Islam. 
However – too many follow the company line. It is getting very demanding these days, and frankly very strange. But doesn’t the left always do that? Whatever problem there is within the right – at least there is enough room, and more than the case now with the left. Well – at least for this ‘cis’ white male. AndyT October 27, 2016 @ 11:39 am 
As a gay man I despair of my fellow gays. Here in the UK most have this “poor refugee” mentality. By time the penny finally drops it will be too late BareNakedIslam October 27, 2016 @ 12:34 pm 
Andy, while the majority still have that “poor refugee” mentality, I have seen a number of gay people commenting here and/or emailing me who know the truth. They’re just afraid of the ridicule they will get by talking about it in within their liberal circles. Manual Paleologos October 27, 2016 @ 10:56 am 
The irony is that the LGBTQWERTY community is almost uniformly liberal. They support the people who are stoning them, throwing them from buildings, and hanging them. They have ceded any influence with the political Right, as no matter what the Right does, they will not get any meaningful Gay support. That means that just or unjust, there is absolutely no upside to supporting Gay issues. There is a small upside from the Christian Right, to pissing on them. 
Meanwhile, although we disagree on some major issues, we are probably their best friends. We are the people who would die to protect them.",FAKE
"Silver’s model gives Trump a 19 percent chance of winning the election. Right now he has Clinton taking the popular vote by seven points and absolutely crushing Trump in the Electoral College, 353 to 184. Considering that the polarized electorate means each candidate is starting out with a floor of probably 50 million or so votes, these numbers indicate Trump is performing no better against Clinton than a rock covered in orange spray paint would. The GOP’s only chance might be to toss him overboard at the convention and nominate an inanimate carbon rod.

If nothing else, the reduction of this election to the numbers for each candidate reminds us that, for all the sturm und drang up to this point, this election is, like every other presidential election, a fight between two candidates and two competing visions. (As much as Trump can be said to have any vision anyway.) For anyone exhausted by the screaming and unpleasantness of this Democratic primary campaign, it is nice to now catch our breath beneath the solid foundation of math before the conventions and the official general election kick-off sprays us all with its stink. Because Trump’s ego isn’t going to take losing very well. And if the NRA’s new anti-Clinton ad is any indication, neither are the lunatics who have thrown their support behind him.

But if the poll numbers aren’t enough for you, there is the reaction to them by Trump dead-enders, who at this point are the equivalent of flight attendants passing out peanuts and ginger ale while oxygen masks are dropping from the ceiling, the pilot is openly sobbing over the intercom and both wings are on fire.

For example, Roy Edroso points us to this post over at the conservative blog Powerline, which contains this gem of a paragraph:

It is a bit early to be pulling out the “Our candidate would have this election in the bag if we just allowed only white people to vote” line. Mitt Romney at least had the decency to wait until after he lost the 2012 election to take that data point for a walk in public. Or take this one, from National Review’s Rich Lowry, who finds it “remarkable” Trump is competitive in battleground states considering that he is not running a real campaign. For one thing, this is not true. Polls show Trump getting crushed in battleground states. For another, Lowry’s evidence for Trump’s “remarkable” effort is that Clinton has spent $140 million on ads in battleground states while Trump has spent – wait for it – nothing. Literally, he has spent less on ads in battleground states than I spent on lunch on Wednesday. What Lowry misses is that the $140 million is mostly “reserved time” in the future. Clinton spent $26 million running battleground state ads in June. The remaining $114 million has been spent on airtime for ads that will run in the future. In other words, Trump’s numbers are already sinking and the Clinton campaign has yet to unleash a good 80 percent of its ad buy to date. Of course, Silver has been wrong before, mostly because he didn’t want to believe his own polling model. This time he is actually accepting what the polls are telling him. And there is plenty of evidence to back him up. National polls consistently give Clinton the lead and show Trump’s support cratering. All of that said, of course, there are always unknown or unforeseen events that could throw everything into chaos. But at the end of the day, this is still a choice between two people, one of whom is wildly unpopular, terrifying and embarrassing to the majority of voters. For all the easily panicked liberals who worry about not taking Trump seriously, right now the signs point to a comfortable Clinton win. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s math. Everyone take a deep breath. There may be four months and lots of ugliness to get through, and it is imperative that the electorate still goes out and demolishes not just Trump but the toxic brew of nativism and xenophobia that is Trumpism. But the end of this whole mishigas of an election is almost in sight.",REAL
"Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader Recently Had Their First Public Conversation (Video) Posted on Oct 26, 2016 
The renowned activists have an important discussion about America’s current “electoral extravaganza,” climate change, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as several other topics in an nearly hour-long interview.",FAKE
"And it looks like that time is nigh. Clinton is starting to deliver public orations again, as consultants start to eye the chessboard and grassroots activists start to gin up support and raise ducats for a campaign-in-waiting. There's no doubt that we're still several steps short of a critical mass -- let alone an announcement from the former secretary of state and presidential aspirant herself. But whatever dam had been previously holding back the flood has started to show some signs of cracking, and the discussion has begun anew.

We must pause here at the outset and offer praise to Clinton for doing everything in her power -- by which I mean, nothing at all -- to delay the sort of advance-hype for the 2016 election cycle that we might otherwise be in up to our waist. See, as long as Clinton says nothing definitive about whether she's running, she effectively ""freezes the field."" Other Democratic contenders can't start contending. Republican rivals who lack real game have to keep their mouths shut as well. We're not drowning in stories, speculating about when Andrew Cuomo is going to visit Des Moines (though I'm sure Des Moines can't wait), and no one is getting tumescent over the tricksy consultants Martin O'Malley is hiring.

And that's great for America! Most people can't wait to keep right on waiting to spend their every waking hour reading about the 2016 election. I don't know if there is some large group of non-partisan, single-issue voters whose primary desire is to be allowed to not have to contemplate elections four years before they happen, but if such a voting bloc exists, they all owe Hillary Clinton their support, for being a force for good in this area. They should also stop reading now, because I'm going to cave in, and try to highlight what's interesting about these recent developments.

Despite Clinton's best field-freezing efforts, we were never destined to live in a world where hot speculation over her presidential prospects were restrained. The biggest news that came out of Clinton's appearance on ""60 Minutes"" alongside President Barack Obama was Obama playfully calling interlocutor Steve Kroft ""incorrigible"" for asking whether he was endorsing Clinton for president. Days later, people went nuts over a Public Policy Polling poll that found that the state of Texas was ""in play"" for Clinton. And grousing from political speculators over Clinton's coyness began to manifest itself. Chris Cillizza wrote a post insisting in one breath that ""Clinton likely won't have as much time to luxuriate in not working -- and not thinking about whether she wants to run in 2016 -- as she might want,"" and admitting in the next, ""It's hard to pinpoint a particular date but it's hard to imagine her being able to wait much beyond the 2014 midterm elections.""

If I'm not mistaken, Bill Clinton also launched an ""office of Bill Clinton"" website after his term ended, so if you wanted to hew to safe assumptions, you would probably just contend that Hillary Clinton is following the same practice. But CNN continued in an altogether different vein, contending that the photo was ""attention-grabbing,"" that there was special meaning in the way her old website sent visitors to the new one that was a de facto reason to speculate on her presidential ambitions, and that there was a special mystery in the way that the ""site was purchased through a service allowing the purchaser to remain anonymous.""

It's not uncommon, of course, for political luminaries to find themselves the beneficiaries of supporters who want to build a ""campaign-in-waiting."" Back in 2008, Ed Rollins tried to do much the same for Mike Huckabee. Similar efforts were made on behalf of Jon Huntsman and Mitch Daniels. The efforts didn't amount to much. Huntsman was the only one of the three who ran, and he didn't get much out of the odd surreal motorcycle ads that were created ahead of the launch beyond low-single digits in most national polls. Rollins, failing to earn Huckabee's assent, migrated to the campaign of Michele Bachmann. It was a strange arrangement, and it did not end well.

But what Clinton supporters may have brewing could end up being a thing apart. For starters, this undertaking is going to move real money. My colleague Michael McAuliff offers a game prediction: when the next round of campaign filings are perused, you're going to see donations in the amount of $20.16 moving in Clinton's direction. With Carville's imprimatur, Ready For Hillary PAC is going to catch some of that scratch for its coffers. That means the unannounced Clinton ""campaign"" is going to have a double-freeze on the field -- money will be piling up in her corner from the grassroots, and big institutional donors will remain leery of backing someone else's horse until an official decision from Clinton makes it okay to mull backing an O'Malley or a Cuomo.

More importantly, these supporters aren't taking a flier on an unknown. If you recall the draft effort to bring Gen. Wesley Clark into the 2004 campaign, in the apparent belief that his military background would be a compelling ""x-factor"" in the Democratic field, this isn't it. DraftWesleyClark did a respectable job -- in the opening two-week stretch of Clark's campaign, they raised over $3.5 million. But Clark ran from an underdog position, never manifested much facility for communicating on the stump, badly miscalculated by avoiding the Iowa caucuses (where the entire campaign storyline shifted in John Kerry's favor), and ended up as one of the field's semi-respectable also-rans -- not a guy who'd proved worthy of being ""next in line.""

Pareene suggests that the ""rebranding"" efforts the GOP is currently embarked upon might serve as a vital check against the possibility of a return to the paranoid style of Clinton bashing. But between now and 2016, there's going to be a midterm election. The vagaries of redistricting makes the GOP's retention of a House majority a rather easy hang. In the Senate, they have a puncher's chance at returning Harry Reid to minority status, and even if they don't, their filibustering super-minority is working out just fine. By the time the dust has settled on Election Night 2014, the GOP may well declare their ""rebranding"" to have been a success.",REAL
Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
"Top Clinton Ally Caught Accepting $20k Foreign Donation AUFC president Brad Woodhouse knowingly accepts money from bank in ""Belize"" Infowars.com - October 26, 2016 Comments 
Project Vertias has released a fourth video in its latest series uncovering corruption connected to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 
“In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort,” the video reports . “Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did.” 
Soon after the transfer was made, “the ‘donors’‘niece’– another Project Veritas Action journalist – was offered an internship with Creamer.” 
“The more money that was promised to Creamer, the more access Project Veritas Action journalists seemed to get,” it continues. 
Nearly a month after providing AUFC with the “foreign donation,” AUFC president Brad Woodhouse discovered Project Veritas project and mysteriously returned the donation. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP  ",FAKE
"What is going on with WikiLeaks? 28/10/2016 tweet WikiLeaks director and founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFadyen has died at age 76. The cause of death is yet unknown. His ‘fellows in arms’ have flocked online to post their farewells, including WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. 
“ We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light ,” the Centre for Investigative Journalism team wrote on its Twitter. We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, the CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light. http:// tcij.org/gavin-macfadyen 
— CIJ (@cijournalism) 10:59 PM – 22 Oct 2016 
MacFadyen was a pioneering investigative journalist and filmmaker, who back in 2003 founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), an organization that helped break several major stories and has trained a number of prominent journalists. Gavin Macfadyen was mentor to Assange (and his closest friend in London), to WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, Joseph Farrell and many others. 
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:03 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
He was a mentor and friend to famous whistleblower and co-founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, as well as the director of the publication. Paying tribute to their head, WikiLeaks published a post on the group’s Twitter account saying MacFadyen “ now takes his fists and his fight to battle God .” Gavin Macfadyen, beloved director of WikiLeaks, now takes his fists and his fight to battle God. Sock it to him, forever, Gavin. -JA pic.twitter.com/7zyzs1Qxxk 
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 3:33 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
The post is signed “ JA ,” indicating that the phrase belongs directly to Julian Assange, with WikiLeaks claiming that, despite the whistleblower being deprived of internet access in his suite in the Ecuadorian embassy for a week now, he has been able to contact them and is “ still in full command. ” 
The CIJ team also published an address from MacFadyen’s wife and member of Julian Assange’s Defense Fund, Susan Benn, who described her husband as a “ larger-than-life person, ” with gratitude and respect. 
“ He was the model of what a journalist should be… He spearheaded the creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for ethical and hard-hitting reporting. Gavin worked tirelessly to hold power to account. 
“His life and how he lived it were completely in sync with the principles that he held dear and practiced as a journalist and educator – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, ” Benn wrote . 
Recounting her husband’s achievements, she said he had produced and directed more than 50 investigative documentaries covering diverse and multiple countries and problems. She also noted that he had been banned from apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union for his investigative work, and was also attacked by British Neo-Nazis. 
In his professional career, MacFadyen shed light on topics like child labor, pollution, the torture of political prisoners, neo-Nazis in Britain, UK industrial accidents, Contra murders in Nicaragua, the CIA, maritime piracy, election fraud in South America, South African mines, as well as many others. He worked on investigative television programs for PBS’s Frontline, Granada Television’s World in Action, the BBC’s Fine Cut, Panorama, The Money Programme, and 24 Hours, as well as Channel 4’s Dispatches. 
The cause of MacFadyen’s death has not yet been made public. In the original post from his wife Susan, she wrote that he had died from “ a short illness, ” but that line has now been removed. Did you know: Gavin Macfadyen was arrested with Bernie Sanders, was a body double for Nick Nolte & was banned from South Africa & the USSR? 
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 
Twitter has been full of tributes from his colleagues and like-minded people. Even the hacktivist organization Anonymous has spoken out. Our deepest condolences Gavin MacFadyen, we’ll never forget your investigative journalism https:// twitter.com/wikileaks/stat us/789878110816702464 … 
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) RIP, Gavin Macfadyen. You were larger than life, truly one of a kind. https:// twitter.com/gijn/status/78 9925620784439296 … 
— Sheila Coronel (@SheilaCoronel) Gavin MacFadyen, purest and bravest human I’ve ever met. The countless people that love you are with you now, sending u our love and thanks! pic.twitter.com/ypPSn0jrwR 
— Matt Kennard (@KennardMatt) We send our loving thoughts to Gavin MacFadyen and his family at this very difficult time. pic.twitter.com/hZKiIlujaA 
— The Whistler (@Whistler_News) Gavin MacFadyen, always kind & supportive of young journalists & filmmakers. Can never forget your booming laugh. Thank you my friend. — Kevin Pina (@AcrossMediums)",FAKE
"October 27, 2016 Solar winds triggered a giant geomagnetic storm this week, raising fears that they could cripple power supplies. The charged particles are coming from a coronal hole on the sun that is currently facing Earth. If Earth’s magnetic field was hit by charged particles the effects could also include radar and satellite interference, causing problems phone and internet networks and navigation services. Power grid operators in the US were put on alert yesterday following concerning space weather forecasts. But the impact could be felt all over the world. Warnings were issued by the operator of the biggest power grid in the US, PJM Interconnection LLC, as well as by Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages high-voltage power lines across North America, reports Bloomberg . These were the result of US Space Weather Prediction Center raising a ‘serious’ G3 level storm alert, though the alert was later downgraded to a less severe G2 storm. ‘Voltage corrections may be required, false alarms triggered on some protection devices’, said the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center. ‘Drag may increase on low-Earth-orbit satellites, and corrections may be needed for orientation problems’. The ‘moderate’ G2 warning remains in affect today. The solar storms could potentially affect telecommunications and power infrastructures all over the globe. The UK’s Met Office space weather forecast for today said: ‘Elevated solar winds are expected throughout the period, with G1-G2 minor to moderate geomagnetic storms forecast.’",FAKE
"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:19 UTC © Jen Psaki President Obama holds news conference at the White House. As an American, someone raised to believe truth and justice will prevail, I am appalled at the foreign and domestic policies of my country's government. The level and scope of the deceit with which the Obama administration has laid out onto the world stage is embarrassing. For the first time in my 61 years I realize why some figures in our history were ashamed of being known as American. Our leaders have shamed us, done irreparable damage to our heritage and our legacy as a people, and still most of my countrymen sit idle. America today reminds me of a traveling circus, three rings of evil clowns entertaining a peanut gallery of onlookers. Or are we participant clowns? For over the better part of Barack Obama's presidency we've witnessed the most respected nation transformed, step-by-step, into one of the most dreaded empires the world has ever known. 300 million people, all their ancestors, and their future generations will pay the overwhelming cost of Obama's mistakes and malfeasance in office. While I do not personally believe this man is evil, I am sure the people behind him are. The lies, the impact, the unbelievable devastation these people have unwrapped, it spells the end of a perfect dream for humanity. I wonder as I type this, how many people reading it will realize how true my words are. John Kirby, the spokesperson for the US Department of State is a prototype for all that is wrong with our nation. He is a mirror reflection of Secretary of State John Kerry, who is in turn a further reflection of Barack Obama and the people who stand behind. They lie, cheat, steal, kill, maim, or at best coerce in order to achieve goals their constituency (the people) have no inkling of. All of us knew politicians have always been liars and crooked, but the degree to which we can be betrayed is unheard of today. This press conference on the alleged bombing of Aleppo hospitals by Russia, it is damning, damnable evidence of what I am saying. This is, of course, if one watches intently and then reasons. Compare what Kirby says, with what you have seen or read from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Measure the tone and content of this unique message. Bear with me, and I'll help you convict these warmongers of their crimes. The Circus of Liars I must point out that Barack Obama has had more State Department spokespersons than any president in history. First there was Sean McCormack, from 2005 to 2009, a leftover from the Bush administration. After McCormack's tour of administration liar in chief, he joined Boeing in 2009 and serves as the as vice president of Communications in Government Operations. McCormack left the Obama administration to more or less help Hillary Clinton and the ""clique"" extend the growth of companies like Boeing. This Washington Post piece (amazingly) condemns both Hillary Clinton and McCormack for their apparent collusion to morph policy into business with, guess who? Why Mother Russia, of course. Philip J. ""P.J."" Crowley made his ""deal with the devil"" from 2009 to 2011. The 2011-2012 recipient of the General Omar N. Bradley Chair in Strategic Leadership (? The Military ties to State) is a War College bred and reared Pentagon puppet. The fact most recent State Department liars are former military begs the question; ""Why is our foreign policy institution lined with CIA, spooks, War College graduates and command grade military officers?"" Crowley is an interesting example of how our foreign service is infested with war hawks and military industrial minions. To Crowley's credit, his candidness in the wake of the mistreatment of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and his subsequent resignation redeemed this old soldier by comparison to his colleagues. He is emblematic of a system that uses good soldiers in order to mislead the people, and to misdirect our policies toward the wrong goals. Crowley is pretty much off the radar now, but somehow still semi-loyal to the Obama-Clinton team. His tweets on Twitter hum the Democratic Party line. He's now a Fellow at The George Washington University Institute for Public Diplomacy, which means he's been let out to pasture. Next we come to Victoria Jane Nuland, the pin-up girl of soulless and reprehensible US bureaucrats. From my perspective, as someone who has covered the Ukraine civil war extensively, Nuland in Kiev reminds me of the worst parts of the rise of Nazi Germany. I cannot possibly be bombastic enough in characterizing this Hillary Clinton spawn. It is not my nature to be unkind, or less than a gentleman, but this woman is no lady. Her hacked conversation, with fellow psychopath, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, lives in infamy amidst volumes of horrid US intentions. ""Fuck the EU"", along with the clear regime change the Obama White House was behind, should have spelled resignation for this demonic Washington witch. She, and her colleague Pyatt, are complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the Donbass. Nuland, who most agree will be Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State should she reach office, is the most deadly psychopath the American people could possibly put in charge of our foreign service. For the Russians who still have to deal with her, I am sure 20 minutes looking at her is unbearable. This is America fiddling, while our reputation abroad burns. She is the queen of regime change, she and her husband children of the ideology America needs to forcefully alter world governments. This is the ""WOW"" persona, the caricature of disastrous Washington policy. Don't take my word, research Nuland starting here , and see where it leads. Jen Psaki lied so well, and stuck up her nose to the dissenting press so expertly, she graduated the US State Department right up to the White House. Those of us who winced at her nonchalant misrepresentation of facts, also understand she is part of the clique that now inhabits the halls of power in Washington. Psaki is part of a country club that runs it all. If the Democrats win in November's presidential election, people like Psaki will become monsters, an empowered American politburo kin to the worst fascists in history. Psaki is the official cheerleader now, of a White House campaign to create a legacy for the worst president in American history. Catch her Twitter feed, and figure out why in the world Barack Obama would want to be a Wired Magazine editor for a day. Despite her pallid and docile appearance, make no mistake, this Obama minion is as deadly as Nuland, maybe even more so. I recall Psaki launched a social media attack on Russia that was nearly universally ridiculed as ""hash tag diplomacy."" Her ""hot mic"" comment on her own points on Egypt at a press conference as being ""ridiculous"", they remind me of Obama being caught promising then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev he'd ""fix"" the ABM missiles issue if he won in 2012. What makes this spokesperson so dangerous is her forward enthusiasm, and her seeming happy-go-lucky satisfaction with being part of the biggest lie ever perpetrated. Lying is transfigured into truth, a job well worth doing. Good God. Finally we come to John Kirby, Naval War College trained mouthpiece for Emperor Caligula (look him up and compare to our presidents) and whichever Nero we elect next. A Public Affairs Officer (PAO) at the command level in the US Navy, he's what many former military people would refer to as a first class boot licker. I'm a squid myself, so I am familiar with the type. Kirby would climb a tree to tell a lie, if ordered to do so, and show righteousness in doing so. Kirby, Kerry, the whole Obama administration is utterly absurd. This recent press conference reveals just how out of bounds US policy is. Furthermore, Kirby's contention the Syrian war cannot end without airpower being grounded is likewise idiotic. The State Department's stance on Russia's hammering of jihadists only makes sense, if the overthrow of Assad and his legitimate government is a goal. John Kirby: Syrian War Won't End Without Grounding Aircraft - this is the headline that calls our attention to the fact Assad is about to wreck Washington's plan. Regime change has become such a common term now, that media consumers are immune to what it really means. Since the first Bush took office, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more governments have been turned upside down than at any time since World War II. And the ""Kirbys"" of the world are accomplices to massive world chaos. Kirby's ""Russians in body bags"" threat has pushed the Kremlin's panic button now. We have descended into crisis policy, an all or nothing lunacy that can only end in war. Three Rings of Evil Clowns These people are all deplorable. But compared to the linchpins of war they speak for, each is insignificant by comparison. This message for instance, the New York Times headline ""U.S. Officials Say Russia Probably Attacked U.N. Humanitarian Convoy"", it did not originate with them. Our new ""probably"" dogma is a function of a failing freedom, the complete takeover of a free press by western oligarchs that make Russian mafia types seem impotent. Watching this evil circus reminds me of a twisted horror movie, a guttural glimpse at wicked clowns betraying the children they are supposed to love and entertain. The Soros and Rockefeller types, those Rothschilds and the Goldman Sachs sharks, Silicon Valley fakers and Wall Street urchins the Clintons take money off of, the whole mess in our nation's capital stinks to high heavens. Just how my countrymen stomach it leaves me breathless and clueless at times. America is taking part in a wider broadcast of the movie The Truman Show these days. Raised up to believe in freedom of the press and the merits of democracy, my countrymen have been conditioned to rely on their media, their leaders, and the seeming implausibility that one group can take over the world. Well, a group has taken over half of it, and with the proper time and funding, this can be proven. Since I or some other researcher has no such investigative grant, the case against these evil clowns goes untried. The Nation , Slate, Global Research, RT, and myriad independent media attempt to dissent. But trillions of dollars flow back and forth fueling the paranoiac message - Russia is the enemy again! The first ring of circus clowns wield more power than Xerxes, the Bilderbergs probably even believe their own cause - perpetuating the elite order is, after all, a noble genetic cause. In the second ring business types and the oh-so aggressive and ambitious, they will literally do anything to succeed. The Clintons, Bushs, and Obamas out there are the master puppets. Their mission is pretty clear, pay the devil his due and cash in. It's really as simple as all that. Today's Washington is a bit like Chicago during Capone's time. Once the ""Man"" has you, he's got you but good. La Cosa Nostra hasn't got anything on the numbers games along the Potomac. The little crime bosses, grown up from their internships and grant designations, they pepper every institution in America. As they graduate, God knows what goals the Kirbys of the world set out to achieve. In the wider center ring, it's easy to see the Clinton Foundation workers really do drink Bill and Hillary's Kool Aid. Mind washed into believing in the ultimate bullshit, naïve middle intellectuals become squirming opportunists, oblivious to the fact they sold out. The ""Man"" has got them, and early on. Meanwhile, the whole mess is cloaked in the guise of democracy, and hidden underneath people's fear they'll be called conspiracy theorists. George Orwell's 1984 seems to have been written to exclude the possibility complete control could be achieved. But isn't that how complete control is ultimately achieved? Above the center ring, high up on the flying trapeze, liberty defies death. The people are doing a high wire act without a net. We are the third ring of clowns, only we are hesitant to see our role as sellouts too. America is life under the big top, with our favorite pop stars handing out peanuts. I don't know how you feel about it, but I feel utterly betrayed.",FAKE
But he still takes some time out for Twitter feuds.,REAL
"Belgian authorities missed a chance to press a key terrorism suspect for intelligence in the days ahead of the suicide bombings that struck the capital, prosecutors said Friday, acknowledging a significant security lapse that may have allowed his allies to attack unimpeded.

Even as the men involved in Tuesday’s attacks were racing to strike, fearful that authorities were closing in on them, investigators did not ask the attackers’ jailed ally, Salah Abdeslam, about his knowledge of future plots, Belgian federal prosecutors said Friday.

Abdeslam, believed to be the logistics chief of the Islamic State’s November attacks in Paris, was apprehended March 18, apparently spurring one of the Brussels attackers to write that he feared capture by the police. But after Abdeslam’s arrest, investigators concentrated solely on the Paris attacks. Abdeslam was questioned for two hours last Saturday, the day after he was captured in a raid at a Brussels safe house — and then no other discussions were held until after Tuesday’s attacks, when he refused to speak further, prosecutors said.

The failure to push Abdeslam for concrete intelligence — even as close associates were known to be on the loose — adds to an emerging picture of intelligence agencies, police forces­ and criminal investigators that repeatedly failed to take advantage of opportunities to avert the attacks on Tuesday, the worst single day of violence in Belgium since World War II.

“We cannot exclude that, if everybody had been perfect, this could have gone differently,” Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens told a special session of Parliament convened Friday to question top security officials about the lapses.

The acknowledgment from the prosecutors came as authorities conducted raids across Brussels and in France and Germany, an indication that they were still hotly pursuing terrorist plots and that the network may spread across a wide stretch of Europe.

Two Belgian Islamic State fighters threatened that “this is just the beginning of your nightmare,” in a video released Friday. “Know we have other targets and we are determined,” said a man identified as Abu Abdullah al-Beljiki, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist propaganda.

Belgian commandos and bomb-disposal units on Friday swept through a district at the heart of the Brussels attack probe. The raids followed police operations in France and Germany that displayed the expanding crackdowns that increasingly connect the last two terrorist blows in Europe: November’s bloodshed across Paris and Tuesday’s twin-site suicide bombings in Brussels that killed at least 31 people — including at least two Americans.

Among those arrested in the latest roundups was a French suspect who officials believe was directing a plot for an impending attack in France. The investigation touched off a series of related police raids in Belgium on Friday.

The police actions came as Secretary of State John F. Kerry touched down in Brussels to discuss strategies about how to combat the Islamic State with top European leaders. Kerry met with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel before joining a Europe-wide security meeting to examine ways to counter militant reach into the continent. Officials have raised alarms about potential threats from citizens returning after fighting with the Islamic State and other groups.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting with Michel, Kerry defended Belgium’s security efforts. He said that it appeared to him at first glance that the Brussels attackers were moved to act because they feared being apprehended by authorities.

“That tells you the dragnet is closing in. It tells you law enforcement is in fact having an impact,” Kerry said. “It may not have worked out as everyone might have wished here, but if that is true . . . it tells you a lot about what’s beginning to become effective.”

But even Abdeslam’s attorney has suggested that his client may possess knowledge that could avert future terrorist attacks on European soil, further highlighting the lapse by Belgian investigators not to press Abdeslam for intelligence ahead of the Brussels attacks. The prosecutors said that they were slowed by the doctors’ treatment of the gunshot wound to the leg that Abdeslam suffered in the raid before his capture.

Abdeslam was not “up to date” about the Brussels attacks, his attorney, Sven Mary, told the Europe 1 radio network on Thursday.

But, Mary said, “I would not want him to stop talking for lots of reasons. To stop talking could face us again with other Zaventems and other Bataclans, and I would perhaps like to avoid that.”

He was referring to Brussels Airport in Zaventem, where two suicide bombers struck on Tuesday, and the Bataclan nightclub in Paris that was a target of the November attacks.

In raids across Brussels on Friday, police detained three people, including in a large operation in the Schaerbeek area, which has become a focal point of investigations into Tuesday’s attacks. Dozens of black-clad security officers swarmed a wide avenue to detain one person, setting off fears in a city still on edge from the recent violence.

Belgian TV aired amateur footage of the detention that appeared to show a man who had been shot in the leg being dragged away from a tram stop by counterterrorism police while a bomb-disposal robot waited nearby. Belgian prosecutors said the man was arrested in connection with a French raid a day earlier.

In Germany, authorities held a man who was deported from Turkey in July alongside Brussels suicide attacker Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 29, over suspicions of trying to fight in Syria. A German official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear whether the man detained Thursday had direct ties to Bakraoui.

[Families still in desperate wait for news after attacks]

Both Bakraoui and his 27-year-old brother, Khalid el-Bakraoui, who also blew himself up on Tuesday, were on a U.S. terrorism watch list ahead of the attack, according to a U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

It was not clear whether they had been on the U.S. “no-fly” list.

Neighbors said Friday that the Bakraoui family appeared unexceptional in the diverse Laeken area of Brussels. The brothers’ father was a butcher and their mother is a housewife. As for the siblings themselves, “they seemed very nice people, never the thugs with the caps who make people scared. Absolutely not,” said Fatima, 31, a family friend and neighbor who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.

Belgium’s federal prosecutor said Friday that the suspect detained in a raid the previous night in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil is believed to have connections to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the deceased ringleader of the November attacks that left 130 dead.

Reda Kriket, a 34-year-old French citizen, had been convicted in a Belgian court in July of participating in the activities of a terrorist group, the prosecutor said. French authorities said that he had been planning an imminent attack on their country.

Meanwhile, the list of the Brussels victims became clearer.

At least two Americans were killed, a U.S. official said Friday, but their names were not disclosed.

Also among the dead from the airport bombings: a Dutch brother and sister who lived in the United States. They were Alexander Pinczowski, 29, and Sascha Pinczowski, 26, said a representative for their family, James Cain.

Cain, the father of Alexander Pinczowski’s fiancee and a former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, said the siblings had hoped to become U.S. citizens.

The Belgian Foreign Ministry announced that André Adam, a former ambassador to the United States, died in the attacks.

Britain, China and France also confirmed at least one citizen each among the fatalities, while the Netherlands confirmed one citizen in addition to the Pinczowskis.

James McAuley, Missy Ryan, Annabell Van den Berghe and Souad Mekhennet in Brussels and Adam Goldman, Lindsey Bever and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.

In Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is in retreat on multiple fronts

Anti-terrorism crackdowns may have spurred attackers, Belgian prosecutor says

The many missing pieces in the Brussels attacks investigation",REAL
"Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized Monday for misstating that he served in the military's special forces while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on 'CBS Evening News.'

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before the House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing on the Department of Veterans Affairs budget, Feb. 11, 2015. McDonald apologized Monday, Feb. 23, 2015, for misstating that he served in the military's special forces. McDonald made the erroneous claim while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on 'CBS Evening News.'

Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized Monday for misstating that he served in the military's special forces.

McDonald made the erroneous claim while speaking to a homeless veteran during a segment that aired last month on ""CBS Evening News.""

In a statement released Monday by the VA, McDonald said: ""While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement.""

The VA website says McDonald is an Army veteran who served with the 82nd Airborne Division. The Huffington Post website, which first reported on McDonald's mistake, noted Monday that the 82nd is not considered part of special forces.

McDonald said he remains committed ""to the ongoing effort to reform VA.""

The White House issued a statement Monday saying, ""We take him at his word and expect that this will not impact the important work he's doing to promote the health and well-being of our nation's veterans.""

President Barack Obama chose the former Procter & Gamble CEO to take over the scandal-plagued VA last year, and McDonald took office last July. The questions about McDonald's service come as TV newsmen Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly have had their claims about covering foreign wars called into question.",REAL
"Written by Adam Dick Friday November 11, 2016 Ron Paul, known for his promotion of the United States following a noninterventionist foreign policy, presented Thursday his take on the prospects of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as president. Paul set out his analysis in an extensive interview with host Peter Lavelle at RT. Paul started off the interview saying that he is keeping his “fingers crossed” regarding Trump’s potential foreign policy actions. Paul says he views favorably Trump’s comments in the presidential election about “being less confrontational with Russia” and criticizing some of the US wars in the Middle East. Paul, though, notes that Trump has presented “vague” foreign policy positions overall. Paul also comments that a good indication of how Trump will act on foreign policy issues will be provided by looking at who Trump appoints to positions in the executive branch and from whom Trump receives advice. Regarding Trump’s foreign policy advisors and potential appointees, Paul expresses in the interview reason for concern. Paul states: “Unfortunately, there have been several neoconservatives that are getting closer to Trump, and, if he gets his advice from them, then I don’t think that is a good sign.” Even if Trump wants to pursue a significantly more noninterventionist course than his recent predecessors in the presidency, Paul warns that the entrenched “deep state” that favors foreign intervention and war, special interests that have “sinister motivation for these wars,” and media propaganda that “builds up the war fever” can provide significant headwinds against Trump pursuing such an objective. Watch Paul’s interview here: Related",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump's campaign is undergoing a major staff shake-up with less than three months to Election Day, adding two officials to top posts overseeing his struggling campaign and signaling a shift toward campaigning as a scorched earth outsider in order to win.

Trump has named Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and a former investment banker, to the post of chief executive and promoted Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster to his campaign, to the position of campaign manager, Conway confirmed to CNN early Wednesday morning.

The addition of Bannon -- known for his brass-knuckled demeanor and his website's sharp tone -- came hours after reports surfaced that Roger Ailes, the recently ousted head of Fox News, will begin to advise Trump as he prepares for the presidential debates. The influence of both men lays the groundwork for unleashing Trump this fall from the more traditional presidential candidate framework, which Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort's leadership was brought on to create.

Manafort, the campaign's chief strategist, will stay on in his campaign chairman role, Conway said.

""I look at it as an expansion of the team. Paul remains as chairman,"" Conway told CNN.

Manafort himself said it was an ""exciting day for Team Trump"" in an emailed memo to the campaign staff that was provided to CNN by a campaign source. He added that he will provide the ""big picture, long-range campaign vision"" that will guide the campaign to victory in November.

But sources close to the campaign told CNN that while Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates will remain on staff, they will return to their Washington, D.C. base largely sidelined.

Instead of Manafort's attempts to make Trump a more traditional candidate, Bannon will take over as Trump's top adviser, giving Trump free rein to run as the outsider candidate who won the Republican primaries.

Bannon's ascension solidifies an informal, mutually beneficial relationship between Breitbart, which has unapologetically championed Trump, and the campaign. The website, which Bannon has been closely involved with since its launch in 2007, has also been a center for conspiracy theories about Clinton's health as well as stories about Bill Clinton's alleged treatment of women.

The campaign's changes came as tensions mounted inside Trump's campaign in recent weeks and as Trump's relationship with Manafort soured to the point that several people close to the campaign warned that a major staff shake-up might be imminent, sources close to the campaign told CNN.

The staffing shake-up follows several weeks of negative headlines and alarming polls for Trump who is trailing Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in nearly every key battleground state and lagging in the latest national polls.

Trump decided on the changes this weekend after speaking with campaign donors at a fundraiser in The Hamptons, including Rebekah Mercer, a high-profile GOP donor with longstanding ties to Conway, who shared her concerns with Trump about the direction of the campaign, a source told CNN.

Trump then called Conway on Sunday from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to express his displeasure with the direction of his struggling campaign, sources close to the campaign said.

Notably, he made the decision without input from his adult children who were off traveling during the weekend, sources close to the campaign said.

Donald, Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump have been influential advisers in the campaign and key mediators between Trump and Manafort, often also guiding their father to mollify his rhetoric and run a more conventional campaign.

Trump's call to Conway came the same day Trump also met with Ailes at the same golf club.

Returning from an overseas vacation, Trump' son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top campaign official, convened a meeting at Trump Tower with Manafort, Gates, Bannon and Conway on Trump's orders to announce the shift in roles, sources said.

The Trump campaign denied that Ailes would be taking on any role with the campaign and campaign aides also received a memo Tuesday slapping down those reports, according to a source close to the campaign.

In a statement from the campaign Wednesday morning outlining the changes, Trump said he was willing to do ""whatever it takes to win this election.""

""I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years. They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win,"" Trump said in the statement. ""I believe we're adding some of the best talents in politics, with the experience and expertise needed to defeat Hillary Clinton in November and continue to share my message and vision to Make America Great Again.""

Second major shake-up of the summer

The shake-up marks the second major change in the top rungs of the billionaire's campaign.

Trump just two months ago fired his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after weeks of internal fighting between Lewandowski and Manafort, who was initially brought on to oversee Trump's efforts to stave off the possibility of a contested convention.

As the campaign shake-up neared, campaign aides pointed fingers at each other, the campaign's pollsters quarreled over strategy and the friction between Trump and Manafort became apparent.

Both Trump and Manafort discussed the friction in their relationship with friends in recent days, and a close associate described Trump as frustrated at the state of the race, leveling complaints that he has been the victim of bad advice from his political team.

""Mr. Trump doesn't trust him anymore. That's it. Pure and simple,"" a source familiar with the tensions told CNN, adding that Trump's gaffes and controversial statements in recent weeks have been fueled in part by his ""exasperation"" with the campaign's management.

""When Mr. Trump doesn't feel comfortable with the way things are managed or the way things are, he has a tendency to try to do everything, thus his exasperation becomes apparent. It manifests itself,"" the source said.

Several people in touch with Trump or his top political advisers in recent days said they had heard a shake-up was possible. But some cautioned that such chatter was predictable and inevitable when any campaign faces tough times.

Trump's decision to overhaul his campaign's leadership came as recent polls showed Clinton thrashing Trump in the key battleground states and even gaining a lead in several states that typically lean Republican, such as Georgia.

And the decision also follows a slew of self-inflicted wounds since the Democratic National Convention wrapped, with Trump exchanging barbs with the parents of a slain US soldier, reigniting intra-party tensions by initially declining to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan in his reelection bid and ultimately suggesting that ""Second Amendment people"" could act to keep Clinton from appointing liberal Supreme Court justices should she become president.

Trump's campaign advisers have sought to refocus him, including through a pair of scripted policy speeches on the economy and terrorism that offered a stark contrast to Trump's freewheeling style.

But Trump has repeatedly said he is resistant to change and reiterated that Tuesday in an interview with a local news station in Wisconsin.

""I am who I am. It's me. I don't want to change. Everyone talks about, 'Oh are you going to pivot?' I don't want to pivot. You have to be you. If you start pivoting you are not being honest with people,"" Trump told WKDT.

Lewandowski, who is now a CNN political commentator, has continued to informally advise Trump, according to sources familiar with their ongoing conversations.

Lewandowski said Tuesday evening on CNN that while Trump may try to be ""more inclusive,"" Trump ""knows who he is internally.""

""What he's going to do is remain true to himself, which is what this campaign has been about,"" Lewandowski said.

Internal finger pointing abounded in recent days as recent media accounts have portrayed a campaign in disarray and at-times feuding with frustrated GOP leaders. Differences between the Trump campaign's pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Conway, who was promoted to campaign manager, were also the source of recent tensions.

The source noted that Lewandowski had issued a similar campaign memo when Manafort was hired in a volunteer capacity with the campaign.",REAL
"The roster of speakers at the convention to officially nominate Donald Trump is a colorful mix of political leaders, entertainers, personalities and the candidate's family members -- in keeping with his campaign's unorthodox style. The presumptive GOP nominee's wife, Melania Trump, will speak on Monday, the convention's opening night. Daughter Tiffany Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. will address the convention Tuesday evening. Trump's younger son, Eric, will speak on Wednesday. Thursday's program includes a speech by daughter Ivanka Trump -- a key figure in her father's inner circle -- followed by the billionaire businessman's speech Thursday night accepting the GOP nomination. Newly-minted Trump running mate Mike Pence will speak on Wednesday evening.

""I wake up this morning to find out that I'm speaking at the Republican National Convention,"" Tebow said. ""It's amazing how fast rumors fly and that's exactly what it is -- a rumor.""

Each night of the four-night gathering in Cleveland will center on a different theme, such as security, immigration and the economy.

The first night's focus will be on security and immigration, with discussions of the Benghazi attack and the U.S. border. Speakers include Jamiel Shaw, whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant, and Cotton. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa -- the first female combat veteran elected to the Senate -- will also speak, as will Rep. Ryan Zinke, a former Navy Seal. Benghazi attack survivors Mark Geist and John Tiegen will also speak at the convention Monday night. A late Monday speaking addition is Pastor Mark Burns, a prominent African American evangelical leader, Bloomberg reported Sunday. On the second night, speakers will emphasize the economy. Presenters include Dana White, the UFC president, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose name appeared on some VP shortlists, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia will also, as will Ben Carson, a Republican primary rival-turned-Trump supporter. The third night will feature Indiana Gov. Pence, as he's officially nominated for vice president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- running mate finalist through the end of last week -- is also slated that evening. So is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Ted Cruz, the GOP primary runner-up to Trump, who has yet to endorse the nominee-to-be. Also speaking Wednesday night will be Eileen Collins, a pioneering woman astronaut, and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was thrust into the national spotlight following the Orlando terror attacks. An additional prominent Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio, will speak on Wednesday night. After a bruising primary fight against Trump, including a bevy of attacks questioning the front-runner's physical attributes, Rubio later decided to seek re-election to his Senate seat. It was unclear until late this weekend whether Rubio would be on the convention speaker's list. Tennis balls bounced from Cleveland ""event zone"" — but not guns Trump himself will speak on the fourth and final night. RNC Chair Reince Priebus will speak that night, as will business leaders such as Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, who caused a stir in May when he revealed that he financed several lawsuits, including the one brought by Hulk Hogan, against Gawker. While much of the journalism community bemoaned the thought of a billionaire suing a news outlet into oblivion -- Gawker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June and will be sold in an auction next month -- others celebrated Thiel's secret legal battle, which he described as ""specific deterrence."" It appears Trump may support Thiel's efforts. The GOP nominee said earlier this year that he intends to ""open up"" libel laws, making it easier to sue news organizations. But after a Florida jury awarded Hogan $140.1 million in his case against Gawker, Trump signaled that such reform might not be necessary. ""I might not have to, based on Gawker. Right?"" he said. A number of other Republican lawmakers, business leaders, and celebrities are also slated to appear. That includes actor and director Scott Baio, best known for his roles on ""Happy Days"" and ""Charles in Charge""; Willie Robertson, star of ""Duck Dynasty""; and former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, among others. a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers. a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers. Notably, many Republican leaders have also said they will skip the convention, a list that includes former President Bush 41 and 43, former GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney, and several current GOP lawmakers.",REAL
"“You can’t be in a rush to do the wrong thing, either,” she said. “This is serious stuff.”",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Romney's condemnation, made here at the Stein Eriksen Lodge before hundreds of his donors and business partners, highlighted the ill will between the last two GOP nominees for president.

The former Massachusetts governor harshly criticized Republican candidates such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, as well as super PACs such as Jeb Bush's well-funded Right to Rise group, for not stopping Trump in the primary. The two candidates largely avoided attacking Trump for much of their campaigns. He made the comments before many of the individuals who had helped fund those very candidates.

""Ted Cruz was basically praising Donald Trump through the whole process until the very end,"" Romney told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who was hosting the discussion. As for Kasich, ""he was in well after the time there was no possible pathway to becoming the nominee.""

Romney's broadsides were warmly received by many of his allies, earning a 21-second round of applause when he wondered aloud about the future of the GOP.

""I find this so troubling, and I know a lot of folks are saying, 'Mitt just get off your high horse on this and get behind the guy.' But these things are personal. I love this country. I love the founders. I love what this country is built upon and its values and seeing this is breaking my heart,"" Romney said. The 2012 nominee was visibly emotional and appeared to tear up when making the remarks. Yet Romney still preached tolerance. He declined to criticize previous speakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who pitched Trump to the well-heeled crowd this weekend, and said he would not try and sway the GOP elites assembled here to abandon their nominee. And he recognized as legitimate the notion that some Republicans may choose to back Trump solely to prevent Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court nominees, calling it a ""darn good reason."" The day before, Romney had told Blitzer in an interview that he worried about the moral fraying of society should Trump become the nominee: ""I don't want to see trickle-down racism,"" he said. Donald Trump: Mitt Romney 'let us down' Donald Trump: Mitt Romney 'let us down' And before the crowd here on Saturday, Romney used another former president as an example of how society is shaped by his example. ""Bill Clinton's dalliances in the White House affected the sexual inclinations and practices of a generation, and probably beyond,"" he said. But Romney was also challenged by some questioners who were trying to whip up support for Trump. Romney has pledged to never support Trump, and many of his fund-raisers feel similarly. ""We've got to get behind him,"" one man implored the crowd. ""These are the cards we've been dealt."" Romney was also pressed as to why he accepted the endorsement of Trump during his 2012 presidential run given Trump's zest for ""birtherism,"" or the idea that President Barack Obama was not born into the United States and is thus ineligible to be president. Romney said he saw Trump's comments as ""nutty"" but not disqualifying. Now, the pair are using one another as political foils, with Trump blasting his GOP predecessor. On Saturday in Tampa, Florida, he called Romney someone who ""let us down"" and writing on Twitter that Romney ""choked like a dog."" The former Massachusetts governor brushed off the attacks. ""I have dogs. I don't know dogs choking,"" Romney said to laughs. ""That's an insult that somehow doesn't work."" Romney did, though, express some regret over his failed 2012 campaign, saying that he, like Bush, had failed to connect his economic vision with average, middle-class voters. But for now, Romney said he was trying to remain focused on the future, though he has now ruled out serving in the next White House. ""Had there been a President Bush or a President (Marco) Rubio or a President (Scott) Walker, I might've been happy to be a part of their administration,"" Romney said.",REAL
"When Theodore Roosevelt was president of the New York City police board, he discovered that reporters made remarkably effective assistants. Roosevelt would invite the correspondents on his midnight rambles through the seedy sections of the city, where he sought out corrupt patrolmen. He understood the bitterly competitive nature of the newspaper business in New York in the 1890s, and he recognized the pressure the papers felt to deliver headlines that would arrest readers’ attention. “A Baghdad Night,” shouted the Commercial Advertiser after a typical trawl. “Roosevelt in the Role of Haroun Alraschid. Police Caught Napping.”

The board president took pains to cut a dashing figure. “Sing, heavenly Muse, the sad dejection of our poor policemen,” the World lyricized. “We have a real Police Commissioner. His name is Theodore Roosevelt. His teeth are big and white, his eyes are small and piercing, his voice is rasping. He makes our policemen feel as the little froggies did when the stork came out to rule them.” The papers didn’t uniformly like Roosevelt — the mockery in the World’s tone was evident — but they couldn’t resist the stories he gave them.

David Greenberg rightly begins “Republic of Spin,” his history of spin and the American presidency, with TR. Roosevelt won the New York governorship on the strength of “Rough Riders,” a shamelessly self-promoting account of his exploits in the Spanish-American War; from there he vaulted into the vice presidency and, upon the murder of William McKinley, the presidency. Roosevelt employed the publicity tools that had won him office to work the levers of power. He made himself a story no Washington reporter could pass up, gathering around him a coterie of correspondents whose inside access required strict adherence to ground rules he set. They could quote him only with his express permission. A French writer whom Roosevelt wanted to impress was included in one of the “seances,” as the gatherings were called, and emerged with a notebook of revealing remarks from the American chief executive. The gist shortly appeared in the press. Roosevelt denied having said anything of the sort or even having spoken to the man. He later explained his apparent duplicity: “Of course I said it, but I said it as Theodore Roosevelt and not as the President of the United States!”

What worked for one president became institutionalized, as successful practices do. And the institutionalization of presidential spin paralleled the permeation of spin throughout American life. Greenberg neatly weaves a history of public relations into his political tale; we see the emergence of PR as an accepted and eventually respected industry during the 1920s and after. Equally crucial was the evolution of technology. To get his message to millions, Roosevelt had to work through the press; his fifth cousin, nephew by marriage and progressive protege Franklin Roosevelt exploited the capacity of radio. The new broadcast medium’s apparent absence of spin made its spin all the more powerful. FDR’s radio addresses were cast as fireside chats, with the president speaking simply to his fellow Americans as though they were all sitting around a communal hearth. The first chat set the tone. At a moment when the banking system was paralyzed, when millions of Americans had no idea whether they would ever again see their hard-earned deposits, when the chill of the Great Depression clutched at hearts all across America, Roosevelt’s calm voice came into living rooms and bedrooms like that of a reassuring father and told Americans that everything was going to be all right. They believed him. And their belief became the crucial last link in Roosevelt’s rescue of the banks.

The success of the spin didn’t prevent Americans from realizing they were being spun, and Greenberg devotes another theme of his story to critiques of the whole business. From H.L. Mencken to Hannah Arendt and Garry Trudeau, nearly everyone who has commented on modern politics, modern communications or simply modern life has weighed in on the struggle to shape the terms of debate of democracy. The critiques themselves, meanwhile, contributed to another part of Greenberg’s story: the evolution of what amounted to anti-spin defense systems on the part of the media. Responsible journalists had always sought to counter presidential claims with sources of their own, but during the decades of World War II and the early Cold War, a certain symbiosis developed between big government and big media. Citing national security, presidential administrations would warn the media against peering too closely into the black box of policy, and the media obliged.

But when the Vietnam War went badly, and the Pentagon Papers revealed that administrations had been lying about the war for years, and when Watergate, which grew out of the Pentagon Papers, showed that the deceit went far beyond anything touching national security, the cozy compact was blasted to bits. The media went into full opposition mode. Almost everything every administration official uttered or published was presumed to be dangerously misleading; the radar of the anti-spin systems tracked the enemy missiles from launch and sent interceptors to destroy them.

It didn’t help the government side in its contest with the media that its high ground was soon seized by conservatives who claimed that government was not the solution to America’s problems but the problem itself. Yet, as Greenberg notes, even the anti-government government forces had their spin specialists, with Ronald Reagan being one of the best. How else to explain the Gipper’s ability to walk away from the train wreck of Iran-contra with barely a scratch?

Which leads to the most basic question of all: Does any of this matter? Greenberg guides the reader through six ages of efforts to manage the news (“Age of Publicity,” “Age of Ballyhoo,” etc.), culminating in today’s comprehensive “Age of Spin.” Yet even in our present advanced era, Greenberg declines to grant the spin machines decisive credit. The Reagan revolution, he says, was marked by shrewd management of the media, but it succeeded on its merits. “The idea that Reagan and his team used their media proficiency to fool the public into buying a conservative agenda belonged to the tradition of frustrated protests of antagonists unwilling to credit a rival’s successes. By and large Americans knew what they were getting with Reagan.” Nor is the resistance President Obama has encountered from the Republicans on health care and other issues due to a failure of his spin skills. “You know, I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are going to be some people who just don’t agree with me,” Obama told “60 Minutes,” with Greenberg nodding silently.

Perhaps the spinners offset one another, the way the twin rotors of large helicopters do. Perhaps the American people have become inured to decades of message-massaging. Greenberg’s title suggests disdain for its subject: “Spin” is a label usually reserved for what one’s opponents do. Yet Greenberg is far from categorically critical. “If spin is used for misleading, it is also used for leading,” he writes. “Throughout history, presidents, using the machinery of spin, have contributed to wartime hysteria and baleful complacency, resentment and fear. But they have also given us the golden flares of inspiration that moved the public, in their own times and for decades after.”

Which shows that historians can do it, too.",REAL
"Artwork by Anthony Freda, AnthonyFreda.com 

Trump claims that Clinton’s policy on Syria would lead to World War 3. 
Let’s fact check … 
The Washington Post points out that a vote for Clinton is a vote for escalating military confrontation in Syria and elsewhere: 
In the rarefied world of the Washington foreign policy establishment, President Obama’s departure from the White House — and the possible return of a more conventional and hawkish Hillary Clinton — is being met with quiet relief. 
The Republicans and Democrats who make up the foreign policy elite are laying the groundwork for a more assertive American foreign policy, via a flurry of reports shaped by officials who are likely to play senior roles in a potential Clinton White House . 
*** 
The studies, which reflect Clinton’s stated views, break most forcefully with Obama on Syria …. call[ing] for stepped-up military action to deter President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russian forces in ­Syria. 
*** 
Most of the studies propose limited American airstrikes with cruise missiles to punish Assad …. 
*** 
Last year, Obama dismissed calls for a no-fly zone in northwestern Syria — a position advocated by Clinton — as “ half-baked .” 
*** 
Even pinprick cruise-missile strikes designed to hobble the ­Syrian air force or punish Assad would risk a direct confrontation with Russian forces, which are scattered throughout the key ­Syrian military bases that would be targeted. 
“You can’t pretend you can go to war against Assad and not go to war against the Russians,” said a senior administration official who is involved in Middle East policy and was granted anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations. 
The most liberal presidential candidate still running – Green Party candidate Jill Stein – says: ""It should clear to everyone that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for war."" — @ajamubaraka Watch live: https://t.co/0B6NJLNY5j 
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) October 13, 2016 Under Hillary Clinton, we could very quickly slide into nuclear war with her declared policy in Syria. I call for a #PeaceOffensive . 
She explains : 
Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war with Russia. Let’s be clear: That’s what a no-fly zone means. It is tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia. 
*** 
Clearly the Democrats are incredibly embarrassed about the nature of these [email] revelations, and they’ve created a smokescreen here to try and distract from that. But that smokescreen is pushing us to the brink of warfare with Russia now, where you have the U.S. head of defense, Ashton Carter, talking about nuclear war. We just did a dry run dropping fake nuclear bombs over Nevada. This is really dangerous stuff; this is not pretend. So we need to take a deep breath here, we need to step back and stop beating the war drums. In this context, Hillary Clinton is talking about starting an air war with Russia. Which could slide—you know, we’re on the verge of nuclear war right now. 
*** 
The most likely nuclear threat right now is with Russia. There’s no doubt about that. When you have Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the prime minister of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, saying that the threat of nuclear war is hotter now than it has ever been in all of history, you’ve got to take that pretty seriously. And when you have Hillary Clinton then beating the war drums against Russia, and essentially saying that if she’s elected that we will declare war on Russia—because that’s what a no-fly zone over Syria amounts to. Shooting down Russian warplanes. 
*** 
Hillary Clinton is a disastrous nuclear threat right now in a context where we’re already off-the-charts in the risk of nuclear war. She has stated in this context that she’s essentially opening up a battlefront with Russia. So to my mind, this emerges as the clearest and most present danger. 
Prominent liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Huffington Post, in an essay bannered “ Hillary Is the Candidate of the War Machine “: 
It is often believed that the Republicans are the neocons and the Democrats act as restraints on the warmongering. This is not correct. Both parties are divided between neocon hawks and cautious realists who don’t want the US in unending war. Hillary is a staunch neocon whose record of favoring American war adventures explains much of our current security danger. 
Just as the last Clinton presidency set the stage for financial collapse, it also set the stage for unending war. On October 31, 1998 President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act that made it official US policy to support “regime change” in Iraq. 
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime. 
Thus were laid the foundations for the Iraq War in 2003. 
Of course, by 2003, Hillary was a Senator and a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, which has cost the US trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and done more to create ISIS and Middle East instability than any other single decision of modern foreign policy. In defending her vote, Hillary parroted the phony propaganda of the CIA: 
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members… “ 
After the Iraq Liberation Act came the 1999 Kosovo War, in which Bill Clinton called in NATO to bomb Belgrade, in the heart of Europe, and unleashing another decade of unrest in the Balkans. Hillary, traveling in Africa, called Bill: “I urged him to bomb,” she told reporter Lucinda Frank. 
Hillary’s record as Secretary of State is among the most militaristic, and disastrous, of modern US history . Some experience. Hilary was a staunch defender of the military-industrial-intelligence complex at every turn, helping to spread the Iraq mayhem over a swath of violence that now stretches from Mali to Afghanistan. Two disasters loom largest: Libya and Syria. 
Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.” 
Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has been Hillary’s relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August 2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration Assad must “get out of the way,” backed by secret CIA operations. 
Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by unending war, and no place poses a great threat to US security. More than 10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for worldwide terrorist attacks. 
The list of her incompetence and warmongering goes on. Hillary’s support at every turn for NATO expansion, including even into Ukraine and Georgia against all common sense, was a trip wire that violated the post-Cold War settlement in Europe in 1991 and that led to Russia’s violent counter-reactions in both Georgia and Ukraine. As Senator in 2008, Hilary co-sponsored 2008-SR439 , to include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. As Secretary of State, she then presided over the restart of the Cold War with Russia. 
It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it’s all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security . 
Jakob Augstein notes in Der Spiegel: 
Trump would probably be the better choice in the question of war and peace than Clinton. 
Clinton has expressly expressed the wish to establish a flight ban on Syria, or parts of it. *** In truth, it would be an act of war. The risks are unpredictable. Above all, the risk of a military conflict with Russia. 
*** 
The highest soldier of the United States of America, General Joseph Dunford, President of the United States General Staff of the United States Forces, is certain. To control the entire airspace over Syria would mean war with Syria and Russia. Dunford’s predecessor in office estimated a few years ago that an effective flight ban over Syria would involve the use of 70,000 soldiers and a monthly cost of $ 1 billion. 
But the bottom line is Clinton’s proven historical track record … she’s at least partly responsible for war after catastrophic war and coup after disastrous coup in Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Haiti, Honduras and other countries around the world. 
And it’s interesting, indeed, that the Neocons who got us into the Iraq war have endorsed Clinton instead of Trump . 
Trump might speak in a crude, knee-jerk manner … but Clinton is probably more likely to actually get us into war .",FAKE
"To its critics, President Obama’s strategy to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is weak and incoherent. Even some of the staunchest U.S. allies and partners in the fight worry that the time for what they see as the administration’s incremental approach has long since passed.

The White House maintains that its strategy is comprehensive and that it’s working. Sharp increases in airstrikes and Obama’s recent decision to deploy Special Operations troops, officials say, are part of a fundamental change in the military’s mission developed this fall, along with a new diplomatic push to end the distraction of Syria’s civil war.

In his Sunday-night address to the nation following last week’s San Bernardino, Calif., shooting, Obama outlined the elements of the strategy, assuring Americans that there is a viable plan underway to decimate the Islamic State where it lives. “We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us,” he said, using an alternative name for the militants.

But the White House is clearly frustrated by its failure to communicate the elements of that plan and what it believes has been accomplished.

“Yes, there is a strategy,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry snapped in a speech Saturday. “I know the criticism. We all hear them. . . . But that doesn’t mean it’s wisdom.”

The administration’s insistence that its prudence and patience will pay off — vs. charges of too little, too late — have been the two opposing narratives of the 18-month battle against the Islamic State and the four-year Syrian war it has now overshadowed.

An examination of the recent course of events on the military and diplomatic fronts and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and experts provide fuel for both arguments.

For more than a year after the Islamic State blitzkrieg swept across Syria and through Iraq to the Baghdad suburbs in the early summer of 2014, U.S. military operations, including airstrikes and training of local ground troops, were in what a coalition spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, called “crisis mode, just trying to keep the barbarians off the gate.”

The Iraqi army had fallen apart. In Syria, as civil war raged in the west, the militants consolidated their control over the north-central and eastern areas of the country, with virtually free access to Syria’s border with Turkey to infiltrate tens of thousands of foreign fighters and equipment.

Airstrikes begun by the United States and its coalition partners — Europeans in Iraq and Arab states in Syria — were tactical, focused on targets of opportunity and the need to prevent collapse. While domestic critics and allies in the region called for more strikes, more support for Syrian rebels, more U.S. boots on the ground and no-fly zones, the administration demurred.

In a broad assessment in August, the Pentagon determined it had succeeded in its initial goals of stopping further Islamic State expansion and reestablishing the foundations of a viable Iraqi military. Amid repeated failures in Syria to organize and arm a rebel force to fight against the militants in Syria, it found hope in the establishment of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab force that has driven the militants from much of the Turkish border.

Adoption of what the military says is its first real operational strategy, following the chaos of the initial year, was marked by September’s change of command of the Baghdad-based headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State. “You have done what was necessary,” U.S. Central Command Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III told departing Lt. Gen. James L. Terry.

The new commander, Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, was charged with “operationalizing” the mission, Warren said.

“We always wanted to get into a position where we could apply multiple points of pressure at once, across the whole battle space,” said a senior administration official. “We’re now in position to actually do it. It’s not going to be perfect, it’s not going to be linear, it’s going to be extremely hard.”

Military and administration officials, most speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal decision-making, listed the elements of the comprehensive offensive against “core ISIL” on the ground in both Syria and Iraq.

In Iraq, the focus has been on cutting Islamic State supply lines into Mosul, the militant bastion in the northwest, in preparation for an eventual ground assault, and applying simultaneous pressure along militant front lines stretching south to the city of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad. “These are not blitzkrieg gains,” Warren said, “but painstaking, incremental work against a dug-in enemy” now made more effective with the ability to integrate airstrikes with a more organized and robust ground force.

Obama has authorized a new, Iraq-based Special Operations task force to conduct ground raids against Islamic State leadership targets in both Iraq and Syria. Administration officials have described a snowballing cycle in which more raids will take more leaders off the battlefield and provide more intelligence to plan still more raids. But it is unclear when the force, initially to number about 100, will be deployed.

Syria, with its separate wars against the Islamic State and between forces of President Bashar al-Assad and rebels seeking to unseat him, is far more complicated.

Regional allies such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, who once flew strike missions along with U.S. warplanes, have largely dropped out, an absence the United States hopes to make up with new agreements with France and Britain.

The “whole battle space” concept includes simultaneous airstrikes along the eastern border with Iraq to further cut militant supply lines, on Islamic State-controlled oil fields, and in the north-central area, where Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces who have captured a wide swath of territory along the border from the militants are organizing to attack the de facto militant capital of Raqqa.

Obama has authorized the deployment of 50 Special Operations troops, the first official U.S. boots on the ground in Syria, to join those forces to assess their readiness and help develop tactical plans, although the Americans are not expected to arrive for several months, defense officials said.

In southern Syria, anti-Assad rebels have met with significant success against government forces, but the Islamic State, sensing an opening, has begun moving into the area. The United States is sending more money and equipment, including heavy, long-range artillery, to Jordan, both to protect its own border and to engage militant targets inside Syria.

But given the new threat to the homeland, the administration’s claims of incremental success have left scornful critics asking why it does not do more. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday what he hoped to hear in Obama’s speech, presidential hopeful Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) replied: “That he’s going to change his strategy and come up with a regional army to go in destroy the caliphate in Raqqa. . . . The president doesn’t have a strategy.”

Mutual frustration has also been ongoing between the United States, as coalition leader, and regional allies, with some calling for a more aggressive U.S. policy. The United Arab Emirates said last week that it was willing to send ground forces into Syria — something Obama has consistently refused — if others would do the same as part of an international force.

But the region’s governments, including Turkey, are also deeply divided among themselves, leaving the administration as both whipping boy for their complaints and mediator for their disagreements as it tries to implement a broad strategy. In recent weeks, as Kerry has launched a diplomatic effort to bring the civil war to an end in order to shift attention to the counterterrorism fight, Obama himself has intervened in a series of conversations with regional leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman.

Nowhere is the dissention more acute than in northwest Syria, where rebel groups separately backed by the United States and Europe, the Persian Gulf Arab states and Turkey are locked in a melange of battles, often beside forces of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, against Assad’s military.

The entry of Russian warplanes and Iranian troops on Assad’s side in western Syria has further complicated the situation, increasing the conundrum of how to take back the nearby, remaining 60-mile strip of the Syria-Turkey border in Islamic State hands.

The coalition has said it is ready to launch an all-out air offensive to drive the militants out of the area, located north of Aleppo, Syria’s most-populous city, but not until there are opposition forces on the ground ready to occupy the terrain. And the more the rebels are engaged in the Russian-aided fight against Assad, the less willing they are to switch their attention to the border.

U.S. officials say that a small force of opposition fighters in the area, including about 130 Syrians trained by the Americans in Jordan who are in direct communication with U.S. forces, have had some success. But their operations are still rudimentary. To delineate their lines from those of the Islamic State and avoid their own casualties from coalition airstrikes, they light tires on fire and warn pilots to avoid the smoke.",REAL
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Andrew Midkiff 
Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Historia – Bel99TV The Great Swindle –‘Big business has no shame”– 1940s rationing & monopoly bank control of U.S. economy made farmers over-produce causing large stockpiles of food, and the prices plummeted, farmers became depressed and financially squeezed. “Sales Dollar Arguments”– history repeats… Share this:",FAKE
"B y BAR executive editor Glen Ford B arack Obama tried to woo Republicans into a “Grand Bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. Bill Clinton let loose the banks. But Donald Trump’s destruction of the Republican Party will allow Hillary Clinton to “gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle.” The rich are about to get their best deal yet. “The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class.” When Donald Trump took a wrecking ball to the Republican Party he provided the unexpected catalyst for completion of the corporate project begun by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other white Democrats in the 1980s, with the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). To counter relentless attrition of whites to the GOP in their home states, these beleaguered, mostly southern Democrats sought national corporate funding to turn their party decisively to the right. They reckoned, correctly, that a steady stream of corporate capital would allow them to control the new wave of Black voters and politicians that had been mobilized by Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, while strengthening the hand of the South in national Democratic Party calculations. Bill Clinton became the first DLC president in 1992, and moved swiftly and methodically to narrow the ideological differences between the duopoly parties. He completed much of Ronald Reagan’s agenda, claiming it as his own; destroyed welfare “as we knew it”; vastly expanded the mass Black Incarceration regime; pushed NAFTA through Congress over the objections of majorities in his own party; engineered the corporate monopolization of broadcast media; and removed the last safety straps from Wall Street banks. “Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo.” In foreign affairs, Clinton initiated what was to become the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention, dismantling and partially occupying the socialist nation of Yugoslavia. In the process, Clinton arranged the deployment of thousands of foreign jihadists to Bosnia and Kosovo, thus keeping operational the network created by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the previous decade in Afghanistan. In Africa, Clinton conspired with Uganda and exiled Tutsi rebels to overthrow the Hutu majority government in Rwanda, setting off a bloodbath in 1994, followed two years later by an invasion of Congo that has killed more than six million people — and still counting. Barack Obama was the second DLC president (although he lies [3] about his membership). He, too, moved with unseemly haste to reach a “Grand Bargain” with the GOP — not of necessity, since he had won a huge electoral mandate with the overwhelming financial backing of Wall Street, but as a matter of ideological principle. In January of 2009, before even taking the oath of office, Obama told the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post that all “entitlements,” including Medicare and Social Security, would be “ on the table [4] ” for cutting in his administration. Obama’s first project, now considered the centerpiece of his legacy, was to resurrect the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s corporate health insurance scheme, adopted by Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1996, and made into state law by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, in 2006. Obama’s Affordable Care Act was, literally, written by lobbyists for the insurance and drug industries, and is now collapsing like a poorly constructed house at the end of its mortgage. “For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his ‘Grand Bargain.’” With the Democratic majority in Congress in no mood to tamper with Social Security and Medicare, Obama tried to maneuver the targeted entitlements into a financial crisis trap. He named two dependable reactionaries, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, as co-chairmen of his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility, also called the Commission on Deficit Reduction. They dutifully recommended $4 trillion in budget cuts, mostly to social programs, including cuts to Social Security. Although the full commission did not endorse the chairs’ recommendations, and the Congress failed to pass bills modeled on the document, Obama used the Simpson-Bowles formula as a basis for negotiating what he hoped would be a “bipartisan” (GOP plus Obama and a minority of Democrats) massacre of entitlements. For the better part of two years Obama debased himself, all but begging the Republicans to consummate his “Grand Bargain.” Congressional Black Caucus chairman Emanuel Cleaver, of Kansas City, called the deal a “ Satan’s Sandwich [5] ,” but Obama continued to pursue a political marriage made in hell until the 2012 reelection campaign clock called a halt to the spectacle. “A de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie.” The quest for a Grand Bargain was Barack Obama’s failed attempt to best Bill Clinton in erasing the distinctions between the two major parties – to create a de facto super-party of the bourgeoisie. It was the Republicans who ran away from the altar. And the Democrats did eat much of the Satan’s Sandwich, through sequestration and austerity that ravaged social programs by other means. Why did the Republicans reject the deal? Although both halves of the duopoly ultimately answer to Wall Street, the Republicans, like any other party, have an institutional interest in winning office. It is true that Obama had crafted a deal that any Republican would love, but it was still his deal, and he planned to run for reelection as an historical dealmaker. Probably just as importantly, the Republican Party is the White Man’s party, meaning, white supremacy is its organizing principle, central to its identity among much of the masses. To embrace Obama, no matter how advantageous to their big business patrons, was a hug too far for the GOP. Racism doomed the Grand Bargain – Hallelujah! A New, Bigger Bargain Recently released Wikileaks emails reveal Hillary Clinton speaking to bankers at Morgan Stanley in 2013, a year after the debacle. “The Simpson-Bowles framework and the big elements of it were right,” she said. Thanks to Donald Trump’s demolition of the Republican Party, the conditions have been created for Hillary Clinton, as DLC President #3, to achieve what #1 and #2 could not: gather the whole of the ruling class under the same party banner, in one Big Tent, where the grandest of bargains can be conceived and achieved without crossing an aisle. With most of the ruling class and its attendants having vacated the building, the Republican Party has been reduced to Donald Trump and his “deplorables,” as Hillary calls them. Trump’s opposition to corporate trade deals violated the Holy Grail against prohibiting capitalists from moving money and jobs around the world as they see fit, and his reluctance to support regime change as an inherent right of American exceptionalism has frightened and outraged the military industrial complex, the national security establishment, and all sectors dependent on the maintenance of empire. “An inherently unstable arrangement.” Clinton’s Big Tent is not a temporary, election season dwelling. It is how she plans to govern. The exodus from the GOP has suddenly transformed the Democratic Party into the primary political instrument of the ruling class, while at the same time the party nominally represents most of the folks who are abused and misused by that ruling class. It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and will soon be wracked by splits, as a post-Trump GOP attempts to lure its fat cats back and the darker and poorer constituencies consigned to the latrine area of Hillary’s high class tent break to the Left for air. But in the interim, Clinton will have a unique opportunity to cut grand austerity deals with all the “big elements” of Simpson-Bowles, to renege on her corporate trade promises, and to wage war with great gusto in the name of a “united” country. Ever since the Democratic National Convention it has been clear that the Clintonites are encouraged to consider everyone outside of their grand circle to be suspect, subversive, or depraved. Their inclusive rhetoric is really an invocation of a ruling class consensus, now that Trump has supposedly brought the ruling class together under one banner. In Hillary’s tent, the boardrooms are always in session. Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/hillary_big_tent_grand_bargain",FAKE
"At the Pentagon, ""we have duplicated staff, and we have staffs that are four and five times larger than they were during the Vietnam War,"" said McCain. ""We have to get rid of the duplicate ways in the Pentagon and get rid of sequestration because it is destroying our ability to fund the nation.""",REAL
"(CNN) A pair of dramatic raids Friday in France led to the killing of three terrorists -- one suspected in the fatal shooting of a policewoman and four hostages, the other two in the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine -- and to the freeing of more than a dozen people being held hostage.

The French government's work is not over. There's still a lot of healing to do, a lot of questions to answer about how to prevent future attacks, and the pursuit of a woman wanted in the policewoman's shooting.

Hollande: We are proud of our police

Hollande: We are proud of our police 01:04

Hollande: We are proud of our police

Still, as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, ""The nation is relieved tonight.""

•The wife of suspect Cherif Kouachi and the girlfriend of hostage taker Amedy Coulibaly-- Hayat Boumedienne -- exchanged 500 phone calls in 2014, according to Paris prosecutor Francois Molin. The wife told investigators that Cherif and Coulibaly knew each well.

• Cherif Kouachi, a suspect in the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, visited Yemen in 2011 and French authorities were aware of his contacts with terrorist organizations in Yemen and Syria, Molins said at a press conference.

• The government of Yemen has launched an investigation into a possible al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula link to the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack, Mohammed Albasha, Yemen's spokesman in Washington, tweeted Friday.

• Four hostages were killed and 15 survived in the standoff between an armed terrorist and police at a Paris kosher grocery store on Friday, according to Israeli government sources who characterized a phone conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President François Hollande.

• U.S. President Barack Obama said he wants the people of France to know that the United States ""stands with you today, stands with you tomorrow"" after this week's terror. He told a crowd in Tennessee that ""we stand for freedom and hope and dignity of all human beings, (and) that's what Paris stands for.""

• The FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement across the United States discussing the Paris terrorist attack this week and the sophistication of the tactics, a U.S. law enforcement source told CNN. The bulletin says the attacks demonstrated ""a degree of sophistication and training traditionally not seen in recent small armed attacks,"" the official said.

A salesman, who identified himself only as Didier, told France Info radio that he shook one of the gunman's hands at about 8:30 a.m. as they arrived at the business. Didier said he first thought the man, who was dressed in black and heavily armed, was a police officer.

As he left, the armed man said, ""Go, we don't kill civilians."" Didier said, ""It wasn't normal. I did not know what was going on.""

The gunmen told police that they wanted to die as martyrs, Yves Albarello, who is in France's Parliament, said on channel iTele. The area, meanwhile, was locked down -- with children stuck in schools, roads closed and shops shuttered.

Shortly before 5 p.m., gunshots and at least three large explosions pierced the relative silence. .

Soon after, men could be seen on the roof of the building where the brothers had holed up. Four helicopters landed nearby.

Word came that the brothers were dead and that a man who had been hiding in the building was safe, said Bernard Corneille, the mayor of nearby Othis.

At the same time, in a different setting near Paris's Porte de Vincennes about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, a similar crisis played out at a kosher store.

Like Cherif Kouachi, a man claiming to be Coulibaly called BFMTV on Friday. At the scene, witnesses heard Coulibaly demand freedom for the Kouachi brothers, according to police union spokesman Pascal Disand.

Law enforcement swarmed the area. Dozens of schools went on lockdown.

A resolution came a few minutes after the Dammartin-en-Goele climax, in the form of explosions and gunfire. Up to 20 heavily armed police officers moved into the store. They came out with a number of civilians.

Not everyone made it. Hollande said four people were killed. Israeli government sources told CNN that Hollande told Netanyahu that four hostages were killed and 15 were rescued. Molins said four hostages were killed by the gunman before police stormed the market.

In a speech Friday night, Hollande called the Porte de Vincennes deaths an ""anti-Semitic"" act.

He urged his countrymen not to respond with violence against Muslims, saying, ""Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.""

""Unity"" he said, ""is our best weapon.""

That kind of military language is apt when you're talking about two deadly attacks and violent standoffs in a few days.

It's something that a man, who asked to be called simply Teddy, understands. He was outside Henri Dunant elementary school in Dammartin-en-Goele on Friday, hoping to pick up his young son.

And, eventually, the students did leave the school -- accompanied by police officers who held their hands and, in some cases, lifted them onto an awaiting bus that would take them to safety.

""It's like a war,"" Teddy said. ""I don't know how I will explain this to my 5-year-old son.""

This ""war"" erupted two days ago, when a pair of heavily armed men -- hooded and dressed in black -- entered the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine known for its provocative, often profane, take on religion, politics and most anything else.

They burst into a meeting, called out individuals, and then executed them. The dead included editor and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier and four other well-known cartoonists known by the pen names: Cabu, Wolinski, Honore and Tignous.

Authorities followed a lead Thursday morning from a gas station attendant near Villers-Cotterets, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Dammartin-en-Goele, whom Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Said Kouachi, 34, reportedly threatened as they stole food and gas. Police think the brothers may have later fled on foot into nearby woods.

As the suspects moved, the French government -- including more than 80,000 police deployed across the country -- also didn't stand still.

Some of them tried to prevent more bloodshed, which might have something to do with nine people detained after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Investigators also dug to learn about the attackers.

Both men had ties to Islamist extremists.

Said, the elder of the Kouachi brothers, spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving weapons training and working with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to U.S. officials.

His younger brother, Cherif, has a long history of jihad and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria ""to go and combat the Americans.""

""I was ready to go and die in battle,"" he said in a deposition. ""... I got this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television. ... I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis.""

A man claiming to be Cherif told CNN affiliate BFMTV in a phone call before he was shot and killed Friday that he was sent to carry out the massacre by al Qaeda in Yemen and that the late Anwar al-Awlaki financed his trip. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the recording.

Al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim scholar and cleric who acted as a spokesperson for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in 2011 by a CIA drone strike.

Cherif and Coulibaly were involved in a 2010 attempt to free an Algerian incarcerated for a 1995 subway bombing. Coulibaly was arrested with 240 rounds of ammunition for a Kalashnikov rifle and a photo of Djamel Beghal, a French Algerian once known as al Qaeda's premier European recruiter.

The Western intelligence source said that Coulibaly lived with Boumeddiene, his alleged accomplice in the police shooting, and that the two traveled to Malaysia together.

Charlie Hebdo columnist: 'They didn't want us to be quiet'

A unity rally will be held Sunday ""celebrating the values behind"" Charlie Hebdo, said British Prime Minister David Cameron, who will travel to Paris to attend.

And the magazine itself -- whose former offices were firebombed in 2011, on the day it was to publish an issue poking fun at Islamic law and after it published a cartoon of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed -- will go on as well, even without its leader and most talented staffers. It's set to publish thousands of copies of its latest edition next Wednesday.

Patrick Pelloux, a columnist for the magazine, told CNN that ""I don't know if I'm afraid anymore, because I've seen fear. I was scared for my friends, and they are dead.""

He and many others are defiant.

""I know that they didn't want us to be quiet,"" Pelloux said of the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers.""They would be assassinated twice, if we remained silent.""",REAL
a reply to: windword Shall I post videos of Hillary laughing at death and mayhem? They are both terrible people. Period end of story. A vote for either one is a vote for idiocy. Hillary was heard calling mentally challenged children 'f*g ree-tards' and caught on record blurting out the terms 'stupid k*e and 'f*ing Jew b*d'. Your hypocrisy is showing again. edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given),FAKE
"Many Americans have become increasingly concerned over the role of money in politics, and back more populist approaches to reducing political donations. Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner, authors of Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, argue that populist approaches such as imposing low contribution limits on parties, distort the campaign finance system in ways that benefit a small group of partisan purists at the expense of the broader electorate. This in turn pushes candidates towards ideological extremes. They write that reformers should consider a more party-centered campaign finance system which would channel money to candidates through highly transparent and broadly accountable party organizations, which would then lead to less polarization.

Since the 2010 Citizens United decision, there has been increasing concern over the role of money in politics. However, our new research indicates that populist approaches to curtailing money in US politics might actually be contributing to contemporary problems in the political system, including the bitter partisan stand-offs and apparent insensitivity of elected officials to the concerns of ordinary Americans.  Populist approaches to campaign finance reform tend to focus on eliminating the potential for corruption by setting relatively low contributions limits to candidates and parties.   But such limits rarely stop the flow of money into politics. Instead they affect the channels through which that money travels into politicians’ accounts. And increasingly, that flow pours in from highly ideological donors who tend to pull party candidates toward the extremes.

Our main argument in our new book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail, is that constraints on party organizations have forced candidates to rely heavily on ideological sources of funds.  While party organizations tend to be highly pragmatic, preferring to support moderate candidates who reflect the views of the broader electorate, other kinds of donors – both large and small – favor highly ideological candidates. The demise of party funding relative to other sources (due to restrictive campaign finance laws and judicial decisions) has contributed to the decrease in moderate officeholders in statehouses.

Our view of party organizations runs counter to recent party “network” theorists who discount the importance of the formal party organizations. They claim instead that the party is really made up of the partisan network of allied interest groups, donors and activists who coordinate to help party candidates.  While we embrace this view of the party coalition, we think organizational forms matter a great deal. The professionals who work in party organizations seek chiefly to win elections. As a by-product of this motive, they support moderate candidates who have the broadest possible appeal to voters, particularly in competitive districts.  The wider partisan network, in contrast, is dominated by “purist” donors who want to elect people who agree with them on narrowly-based issue areas.  Laws that restrict party organizations ineluctably shift power to the purists who seek ideological policy goals, sometimes at the expense of winning elections. Hence the subtitle of our new book: “When Purists Prevail.”

A main thrust of our argument is that party-friendly campaign finance laws should help decrease the ideological gap between the major political parties in the states and in the US Congress.  Our findings bear this out.

Ideological Donors and their Impact on Legislatures

One key finding shows that different types of donors allocate their funds differently across incumbents from different ideological backgrounds.  In each of the plots in Figure 1 below, the line indicates the proportion of funds from that source being contributed to incumbents at each point across the ideological spectrum. Note how party organizations concentrate their funds on moderates rather than those at the extremes. This type of distribution is unique among the actors we looked at. Issue groups give more to ideologues, particularly on the right side of the spectrum, while labor unions give overwhelmingly to liberal candidates. Individual donors and business groups tend to give across the spectrum but with a decided tilt toward conservatives (and they certainly do not favor moderates).

Figure 1 – Donations to incumbents across the ideological spectrum

What are the consequences of these patterns? We ultimately show how campaign finance laws, which affect the flow of money, shape the ideological make-up of state legislatures.  Figure 2 below shows the ideological distribution of legislators for states with contribution or fundraising limits on parties (top) and for states without either of those limits. Legislatures in unlimited states show considerably less polarization. The disparity between the two sets of states is like going from one competitive legislature that experienced considerable bipartisanship such as Indiana (which is less polarized than Congress) to another that is as polarized as Oregon (which is even more polarized than Congress). Our book illustrates other ways of assessing polarization with similar results.  We conclude that states that grant parties freer access to financing tend to have less polarized legislatures.  The potential implication is that such states provide more opportunities for bipartisan compromise and effective governing.

Figure 2 – Ideological distribution of legislators in states with and without campaign finance laws

Based on our results, we ultimately provide some insights for how we might approach campaign finance reform in a different way.  Specifically, we argue that reformers should consider a “party-centered” campaign finance system that boosts the influence of the pragmatist wing of the party.  To accomplish this strategy, reformers would have to give up on long-held assumptions about the value of imposing relatively low contribution limits on parties as a way to thwart corruption. Low contribution limits on parties distort the campaign finance system in ways that tend to benefit partisan purists at the expense of the broader electorate.   These purists have the means and motive to finance candidate campaigns by mobilizing passionate factions of like-mined donors throughout the nation, and through “Super PACs”, which are financed by mega-donors giving millions.

For this reason we encourage reforms that build canals to channel the flow of money through highly transparent and broadly accountable party organizations. The strategy of erecting dams through contribution limits to hold back money does not work, and favors a relatively small group of purists.  To be sure, our position may not be popular because party organizations have a tainted legacy of machine politics in the minds of many. But a vast body of research on democratic politics indicates that parties play several vital roles, including aggregating interests, guiding voter choices, and holding politicians accountable with meaningful partisan labels.  It may be time for reformers to help facilitate this role for parties, rather than have the party organizations be increasingly overshadowed by other actors in the political system.

This article is based on the new book, Campaign Finance and Political Polarization by Raymond J. La Raja and Brian F. Schaffner.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

About the author

 Ray La Raja – University of Massachusetts Amherst

 Ray La Raja is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and associate director of the UMass Poll. He is author of Small Change: Money, Political Parties and Campaign Finance Reform (U. Michigan Press 2008) and editor of New Directions in American Politics (Routledge, 2013). He is founding editor of The Forum, an electronic journal of applied research in American politics.

Brian Schaffner – University of Massachusetts, Amherst

 Brian Schaffner is a Professor in the political science department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on public opinion, campaigns and elections, political parties, and legislative politics. He is co-editor of the book Winning with Words: The Origins & Impact of Political Framing, co-author of Understanding Political Science Research Methods: The Challenge of Inference, author of Politics, Parties and Elections in America (7th edition). His research has appeared in over two-dozen refereed journal articles, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Political Research Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly.",REAL
"Terrorism Threat: Trump is Right — Profile, Profile, Profile Written by Selwyn Duke Email 
You do it. I do it. He does it. She does it. The guy down the block does it. Everyone engages in profiling — continually. 
For example, if you see a bunch of rough-hewn young men walking down the block and you move to the other side; if you patronize the deli with the clean-cut guy behind the counter and not the one with the tattooed, body-pierced, greasy-haired Greenwich Village retread; or prefer a 50-year-old school bus driver for your child to a 22-year-old one, you’ve engaged in profiling. How about when a mother would choose a 17-year-old girl to babysit her child but definitely not a 17-year-old boy because most child molestation is committed by males? Is that fair? After all, just as most Muslims don’t engage in terrorism, most young men don’t molest children. But life’s not fair. And anyone who thinks a profile is invalidated simply because most members of the group in question don’t conform to it, doesn’t understand profiling. 
As Dr. Walter Williams has put it, profiling is a method by which we can make decisions based on scant information when the cost of obtaining more information would be too high. For example, since you can’t spend a month living with a prospective babysitter, getting to know him personally, we have to use “an observable or known physical attribute as a proxy or estimator of some other unobservable or unknown attribute,” as Williams has put it . It’s the same with airport security, where thousands of people must be screened within a short time. And doctors profile, too; to use some examples Williams has cited, black men have a prostate cancer rate twice that of white men, physicians check women and not men for breast cancer even though men occasionally develop it, and recommend prostate exams for men over 40 but not for 25-year-olds. When a doctor does this, is he guilty of “racism,” “sexism” and “ageism”? 
What all this reflects is simply the reality of “diversity.” And given that criminality isn’t the one area of life where differences among groups suddenly cease to exist, it’s not surprising that authorities, instead of checking their brain at the door, also use profiling. In their realm, the practice is used to determine the probability that a given individual has committed a crime or has criminal intent. And a profile can include many factors. For example, I’m a member of perhaps the most profiled group in the nation — men — who police view more suspiciously than women because men commit an inordinate portion of the crime. Young people are also viewed more suspiciously for the same reason. 
Aside from sex and age, other factors in a criminal profile can pertain to dress, behavior, the car being driven, whether a person is out of place in a given neighborhood and many other things — including race, ethnicity and religion. And this is where we have to be careful not to descend into prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
Of course, we have to know what that would be. Here’s a good example: if you bat not an eye at profiling men or young people but then complain about profiling Muslims or blacks, you’re prejudiced. If you insist that considering racial factors is “racism” but don’t call the profiling of men and the young “sexism” and “ageism,” you’re prejudiced. And if after having been made aware of this double standard, you persist in it, you are, practically speaking, a bad person. 
This point cannot be made often enough. There are only two kinds of profiling: Good profiling and bad profiling. Good profiling considers all relevant factors, in accordance with legitimate criminological science; bad profiling does not. Yet propagandists, and the genuinely misguided, have convinced people that the truth is precisely the opposite of what it is: that not cherry-picking — refusing to exclude certain relevant racial factors from a profile — is so-called “racial profiling” and is wrong. (They descend into further inanity in claiming that profiling Muslims is “racial profiling” even though “Islam” is not a race.) 
I wrote “certain relevant racial factors” because the anti-profiling crew has no problem profiling whites. For example, we often hear that mass shooters are inordinately white; the kicker here is that this is untrue . As I demonstrated in 2014 by analyzing data provided by left-wing site Mother Jones , whites commit mass shootings in accordance with their overall percentage of the population (interestingly, the only group overrepresented in this category was Americans of Asian descent). This brings us to another point: leftists engage in profiling no less than anyone else. 
They just do it all wrong. 
Consider: immediately following the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, MSNBC suggested it might have been perpetrated by pro-lifers (profile: “white Christians”). CNN opined that it could have been the handiwork of militia types (profile: “white Christians”). Of course, probability dictated the culprits were precisely who they turned out to be: Muslims. This brings us to the last point: the Left engages in projection when it complains that comprehensive profiling reflects prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
In reality, the Left’s profiling is all about prejudice and unjust discrimination. 
As Dictionary.com informs , a prejudice is “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.” The assumption that the San Bernardino terrorists were Muslim wasn’t a prejudice, but simply a reflection of criminological knowledge. Likewise, that 87 percent of those targeted by the NYC police’s stop-and-frisk program were black or Hispanic didn’t reflect prejudice, but the reality that 96 percent of all crimes in NYC are committed by blacks and Hispanics. 
In contrast, the Left’s profiling is not about scientific correctness but political correctness, not about what a group does but what it is . Can a group be profiled? Christians, yes; Muslims, no. Whites, yes; blacks, no. Men, yes; women, no. Heterosexuals, yes; homosexuals, no. It is all prejudice, all of the time. 
Unfortunately, none of the arguments above, no matter how well or how often stated, will do anything to purge this leftist prejudice. To paraphrase satirist Jonathan Swift, “You cannot reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.” Leftists are divorced from Truth and operate based on feelings, and a misbegotten emotional attachment cannot be remedied with an intellectual approach. Instead, political correctness must die. Until exhibiting such means what speaking the Truth does now — scorn, ostracism and career destruction — until it is rooted out from the culture-shaping media, academia and entertainment, we’ll be left with the Left’s profiling and not the right profiling. 
How could this be accomplished? By counteracting the social code of political correctness and its attendant social pressure with social pressure designed to deny posturing leftists their illusory high ground; turn a source of moral preening into a source of shame. To oppose proper profiling is to harm our society. To support unjust double standards in profiling is to be prejudiced. And doing this even after hearing the truth, is to be a bad person. 

, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
No product advertisements. 
Please post comments in English. 
Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
"Abigail Marsh almost lost her life in a car accident. She was avoiding a dog in the middle of the street, and suddenly found her own life in danger. But a complete stranger stopped, got out of his car, helped her to safety, and then drove off, never even telling her his name.
Why did he do it though? That was the biggest question Marsh found herself asking, and it changed the course of her life. She has since made a career out of understanding the human capacity to care for others; where it comes from; how it develops. Marsh wondered why people do selfless things, and resolved to find out. She soon realized very little work had been done on this topic.
Altruism is a voluntary, costly behaviour that benefits only the other. And Marsh wanted to know what made some people more altruistic than others:
The actions of the man who rescued me meet the most stringent definition of altruism, which is a voluntary, costly behaviour motivated by the desire to help another individual. So it’s a selfless act intended to benefit only the other. What could possibly explain an action like that? One answer is compassion, obviously, which is a key driver of altruism. But then the question becomes, why do some people seem to have more of it than others? And the answer may be that the brains of highly altruistic people are different in fundamental ways. 
To really figure it out, she did the opposite of what one might expect, however. She started on the opposite end by analyzing psychopaths. People with this disorder are missing the desire to help other people. They are often cold, uncaring, and antisocial individuals. But they’re not typically insensitive to other people’s emotions, just to the signs that other people are distressed:
The part of the brain that’s the most important for recognizing fearful expressions is called the amygdala. There are very rare cases of people who lack amygdalas completely, and they’re profoundly impaired in recognizing fearful expressions. And whereas healthy adults and children usually show big spikes in amygdala activity when they look at fearful expressions, psychopaths’ amygdalas are underreactive to these expressions. Sometimes they don’t react at all, which may be why they have trouble detecting these cues. Finally, psychopaths’ amygdalas are smaller than average by about 18 or 20 percent. 
But in her Ted Talk, Marsh brings us back to altruism. She says that her main interest isn’t about why people don’t care for others, but why they do. “ So the real question is, could extraordinary altruism, which is the opposite of psychopathy in terms of compassion and the desire to help other people, emerge from a brain that is also the opposite of psychopathy?” she asks. 
Extraordinary altruists have done things like give a healthy kidney to a complete stranger. But why?
“T he brains of these extraordinary altruists have certain special characteristics,” she says. “ They are better at recognizing other people’s fear. They’re literally better at detecting when somebody else is in distress. This may be in part because their amygdala is more reactive to these expressions. And remember, this is the same part of the brain that we found was underreactive in people who are psychopathic.” 
“And finally, their amygdalas are larger than average as well, by about eight percent,” she adds. 
What’s intriguing is that, when people were asked why they gave their kidney to a complete stranger, they didn’t know how to answer. They didn’t consider themselves unique or special, but normal, just like everyone else. They just did it, because that’s who they are. Even more intriguing is that the people the donors were giving their kidneys to weren’t in a close circle that somehow already connected them through other loved ones. They were totally removed human beings. And that’s pretty extraordinary:
I think the best description for this amazing lack of self-centeredness is humility, which is that quality that in the words of St. Augustine makes men as angels. And why is that? It’s because if there’s no center of your circle, there can be no inner rings or outer rings, nobody who is more or less worthy of your care and compassion than anybody else. And I think that this is what really distinguishes extraordinary altruists from the average person. 
But the main lesson of Marsh’t talk is even more fundamental than all of this. “ I also think that this is a view of the world that’s attainable by many and maybe even most people. And I think this because at the societal level, expansions of altruism and compassion are already happening everywhere,” she explains. 
Marsh believes that we all have the ability to take ourselves out of the center of the circle and extend the circle of compassion outward, so it brings in even total strangers. It looks like a globe outlined with people from all over the world holding hands in unity, in support, in love.
Watch Marsh’s full Ted Talk below:

 
",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton plans to kick off her long-expected 2016 presidential campaign on Sunday, two Democratic sources told Fox News.

The sources said the former secretary of state is expected to first reveal her decision to voters via social media. The sources added that, as has been widely expected, Clinton will then head to key early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire next week.

Clinton would be the first Democratic candidate to confirm a run for the White House, and she is considered the clear frontrunner to win the party’s nomination. If she were to win in 2016, she would be the first female U.S. president.

Sources say, in advance of her announcement, Clinton has been holed up in recent days behind closed doors in policy meetings. The meetings have covered a range of subjects, including national security as well as domestic topics like the economy.

Clinton would join the race after two Republicans -- Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky -- already declared. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also is expected to announce his plans next week. Despite not being an official candidate, Clinton has faced immense scrutiny from the media, and Republicans, over her use of personal email while secretary of state and her family foundation's acceptance of foreign donations. On Friday, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus said Clinton ""has left a trail of secrecy, scandal and failed liberal policies that no image consultant can erase.""

The specific timing of Clinton's announcement is unclear, though one source told The Guardian she will declare her candidacy through Twitter at noon Sunday. The tweet reportedly would be followed by a video and email announcement, and then a series of conference calls announcing her tour, which starts in Iowa.

On Friday, two Democrats who are weighing whether to challenge Clinton also appeared to needle her looming candidacy.

""I think history is full of examples where the inevitable front-runners are inevitable right up until they are no longer inevitable,"" former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley told Fox News. ""What I've heard all around the country is that people want new leaders, they want to hear the voices of new leaders and they want to start a robust debate about the issues our country faces.""

Former Democratic Virginia Sen. Jim Webb also told Fox News ""people are looking for leadership that they can trust"" and leaders who say what they believe ""rather than massaging issues to try to get to ... one political safety zone or another, who will really take the risk of leadership.""

Asked whether Clinton has done that in her career, Webb said: ""You'll have to ask her.""

On Monday, Clinton’s political team – from senior advisers to state operatives – was put on alert for a presidential campaign announcement.

A Democratic official earlier told Fox News that Clinton’s approach in next year’s election will illustrate that as a presidential candidate “she fights for every vote and takes nothing for granted"". This would be in sharp contrast to her failed 2008 run, when she was considered the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee but failed to see the burgeoning rival campaign of now-President Obama.

The plan in 2016 is to have Clinton try to “connect with real people” better than she did eight years ago, according to a Democratic official with knowledge the announcement plans and strategy.

Clinton started the campaign clock ticking last week when her team signed a lease for a massive new campaign headquarters at Pierrepont Plaza in Brooklyn, New York that occupies at least two floors. The campaign has at least 35 staffers in New York City alone.

That action by Team Clinton means that by FEC rules, she has 15 days since the signing of the lease to file the paperwork officially for a 2016 presidential run because her expenditure on the lease was purportedly over $5,000.

Sources said the bulk of Clinton staffers who have been hired already started moving into the campaign headquarters in Brooklyn this past Wednesday -- another sign the announcement is imminent.

The Clinton campaign continues to scoop up key campaign operatives, with both Karen Finney and Oren Shur recently joining her VIP team. Finney will work as strategic communications adviser, and Shur as director of paid media, according to a Clinton spokesperson.

Fox News’ Ed Henry and Serafin Gomez and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Will Hillary Clinton Get America Back on Track? Posted on Oct 31, 2016 U.S. Embassy London / CC BY-ND 2.0 
The parallels are striking. In the last decades of the nineteenth century – the so-called “Gilded Age”— America experienced inequality on a scale it had never before seen, combining wild opulence and searing poverty. 
American industry consolidated into a few giant monopolies, or trusts, headed by “robber barons” who wielded enough power to drive out competitors. A few Wall Street titans like J.P. Morgan controlled the nation’s finances. 
These men used their huge wealth to rig the system. Their lackeys literally deposited stacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators, prompting the great jurist Louis Brandeis to tell America it a choice: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.“ 
We face a similar choice today. 
Advertisement Square, Site wide 
Then, America chose democracy. President Theodore Roosevelt, railing against the “ malefactors of great wealth ,” broke up the trusts. And he pushed Congress to end the most blatant forms of corruption. 
His fifth cousin, FDR, went further – enacting social insurance for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled; a minimum wage and forty-hour workweek; the right to unionize; compensation for workers injured on the job; and strict limits on Wall Street. 
In other words, between 1870 and 1900, American capitalism got off track. Between 1901 and 1937 (the effective end of the New Deal), America put capitalism back on track. 
We’re now in the Second Gilded Age, and American capitalism is again off track. It takes about three generations for Americans to forget how our system, unattended, goes wrong. And then to right it. 
Inequality is now nearly at the same level it was in the late nineteenth century. Half of all families are poorer today than they were a decade-and-a-half ago, the pay of CEOs and Wall Street bankers is in the stratosphere, and child poverty is on the rise. 
Meanwhile, American industry is once again consolidating – this time into oligopolies dominated by three or four major players . You can see it in pharmaceuticals, high tech, airlines, food, Internet service, communications, health insurance, and finance. 
The biggest Wall Street banks, having brought the nation to the brink of destruction a few years ago, are once again exercising vast economic power. And big money has taken over American politics. 
Will we put capitalism back on track, as we did before? 
The vile election of 2016 doesn’t seem to offer much hope. But future historians looking back on the tumult might see the start of another era of fundamental reform. 
Today’s uprising against the established order echoes the outrage average Americans felt in the late nineteenth century when they pushed Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act, and when Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan fulminated against big business and finance. 
One hundred twenty years later, Bernie Sanders – the unlikeliest of presidential candidates – won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates in the Democratic primaries, and pushed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to adopt many of his proposals. 
At the same time, Donald Trump – a faux populist – has laid bare the deep discontents of America’s white working class, which both parties have long neglected. Not incidentally, Trump has also jeopardized the social fabric of America and nearly destroyed the Republican Party. 
Hopefully some of America’s current elite will conclude, as it did at the turn of the last century, that they’d do better with a smaller share of a growing economy fueled by a flourishing middle class, in a society whose members feel the system is basically fair, than in one riven by social and political strife. 
History has proven the early generation of reformers correct. While other nations opted for communism or fascism, Americans chose to make capitalism work for the many rather than the few. 
If Donald Trump is elected next week, all bets are off. 
But if Hillary Clinton assumes the presidency, could she become another Teddy or Franklin D. Roosevelt? 
You may think her too much of an establishment figure, too close to the moneyed interests, too cautious. But no one expected dramatic reform when each of the Roosevelts took the reins. They were wealthy patricians, in many respects establishment figures. Yet each rose to the occasion. 
Perhaps she will, too. The timing is right, and the need is surely as great as it was over a century ago. 
As Mark Twain is reputed to have quipped, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”",FAKE
"That may soon be possible thanks to a provision tacked onto this year's National Defense Authorization Act, which the House of Representatives is set to pass this week.

The provision was added as an amendment during a late-night session at the end of last month during which the legislation authorizing the nation's military activities for 2016 was drafted.

According to a white paper prepared for Congress by the Army opposing the amendment, the measure would allow the unregulated distribution of up to 100,000 Colt .45s, more formally known as .45-caliber semiautomatic M1911 handguns.

The provision, added by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), changes parts of federal rules that were meant to boost rifle skills in the country under a program dating back to Teddy Roosevelt. Under existing law, which was updated in 1996, the Department of Defense makes surplus military rifles available to the public through something known as the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which has a regional headquarters in Rogers' state.

Rogers' amendment would change language in the law that specifies certain rifles allowed in the program to include the much broader category of ""firearms.""

Although the marksmanship program aims to educate youth about safety and shooting, according to the military's white paper, ""There is a significant risk of approximately 100K semi-automatic handguns that are virtually untraceable, being released into commerce.""

That's because although the amendment specifies that the weapons cannot be sold to people who are barred by law from having guns, the CMP sells guns over the Internet, and has no mechanism to verify who is making purchases. By law, the CMP ""can sell ... only to members of CMP affiliated clubs who are also U.S. citizens, over 18 years of age and who are legally eligible to purchase a firearm,"" according to eligibility requirements posted on its website. On top of that, although the CMP is allowed by law to sell guns across state lines, it is not covered by the Gun Control Act, and is not required to keep records tracking purchasers.

The Army noted in its opposition that the Department of Justice has tracked an average of nearly 1,800 Colt .45s being used in crimes every year over the last decade, including a significant but unspecified number of those guns that were originally military surplus.

A spokesman for Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said his boss agreed with the Army and would try to strip the amendment.

""This provision, which the Army has said it does not want or need, could potentially put nearly 100,000 untraceable .45-caliber military-grade handguns on our streets,"" the spokesman, Michael Amato, said in an email. ""This provision is an unnecessary risk.""",REAL
"Posted on November 7, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog 
By George Eliason, an American journalist living in Ukraine. 
“The purpose of ” Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audiences emotions, motives, and reasoning. 
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche. 
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill-informed, or irrelevant.” 
What if the strife, rumor, and clamor were part and parcel of an Inform and Influence Operation against Americans to determine the election outcome? Bear with me for a moment as I lay out the proofs. The quote above is from an early 2015 article with the practitioner showing what it could look like in the civilian world. 
” What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.” – Joel Harding 
IO or IIO (Inform and Influence Operations) as defined by the US Army includes the fields of psychological operations and military deception. All of this is used in the civilian world the same way by private contractors. 
In this election, private contractors were hired to focus their capacity to influence the American population. This is proven and you deserve a step by step look at it if you are voting. 
What Project Veritas shows is damning evidence of what I have been documenting in the emigre series articles since spring 2016. 
By using mainstream media, they started an integrated approach which includes influencing their political opponent’s decision making. Media is given messages that follow the same themes and fill the entire information space by using an across the board effort. The effort drowns out any other message. 
According to the Observer, this has been happening throughout the election cycle to benefit Hillary Clinton. “ Rather than informing voters to enrich democracy , the mainstream media has developed a feedback loop between support for particular candidates and the political agenda they intend to support. The freedom of the press is necessary for a democracy to function.” The article further points out that it was the media that helped rig the primaries against Bernie Sanders. 
Wikileaks has clearly shown the interplay between mainstream media and the Clinton campaign. And they have shown clearly that most of the mainstream media are working to influence the election . This goes beyond partisan electioneering. All of this follows the exact pattern, a well planned Information Operation against the American public . 
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was also the Ex-Officio Board Member of the BBG . The BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors) run RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty). Most of the 8-member board, appointed by the President of the United States, are the who’s who of powerful media moguls in film, news, print, and radio. Appointment to the BBG is like being awarded an ambassador position for the media industry. It’s also why big media carries the same line or themes. 
The 7th member of the board of directors which runs RFE/RL is Mathew Armstrong . He is a longtime friend and mentor to retired Brigadier general Joel Harding. He provides Harding a lot of access and influence in media. Armstrong’s background is public relations. He is an expert in IO and IIO operations. His bio: Author, lecturer, and strategist on public diplomacy and international media . He has worked on traditional and emerging security issues with both civilian and military government agencies, news organizations, think tanks, and academia across several continents. 
In what appears to be a conflict of interest, at least two BBG board members are working actively for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. 
Karen Kornbluh is helping refine and to get Hillary Clinton’s message out. ” All of them are names to watch if Clinton wins — and key jobs at the FCC and other federal agencies are up for grabs.” 
According to her bio : Karen founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program and is a senior fellow for Digital Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Karen has written extensively about technology policy, women, and family policy for The Atlantic , The New York Times and The Washington Post . New York Times columnist David Brooks cited her Democracy article “Families Valued,” focused on “juggler families” as one of the best magazine articles of 2006. 
Michael Kempner is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of MWW Group, a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, and may get a greater role if she is elected . Kempner is a member of the Public Relations Hall of Fame. Michael Kempner hired Anthony Weiner after the sexting scandal broke in 2011. 
Jeff Shell, chairman of the BBG and Universal Filmed Entertainment is supporting a secondary role by being an honor roll donor to the Atlantic Council . While the BBG is supposed to be neutral it has continuously helped increase tensions in Eastern Europe. While giving to the Atlantic Council may not be illegal while in his position, currently, the Atlantic Council’s main effort is to ignite a war with Russia. This may set up a major conflict of interest. 
According to journalist Robert Parry “The people that will be taking senior positions and especially in foreign policy believe “This consensus is driven by a broad-based backlash against a president who has repeatedly stressed the dangers of overreach and the need for restraint, especially in the Middle East.” 
Parry goes on to say that at the forefront of this is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO. Their main goal is a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. 
The Atlantic Council is the think tank for the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition) which is associated with NATO. The CEEC has only one goal. The question to candidates that mattered is “Are you willing to go to war with Russia?” Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. 
The Central and Eastern European Coalition represent the various Central and Eastern European countries to the US government. What makes them special in an election is that they control a 20 million person strong bloc vote in key states across the country and sway elections by themselves. The price of a Clinton win is war with Russia. 
While the rest of the BBG board support Clinton’s proposed policy of closing Syrian airspace, the CEEC wants it because it will mean direct conflict with Russia. Hillary Clinton’s first foray into Islamic politics led to genocide and made the way for ISIS setting up training camps in Kosovo. Hillary Clinton has been friendly with jihadists for as long as she has had a national political career. According to US Special Forces on the ground in Syria training the moderates, there are NO moderates to train . 
Green Berets are forced to train jihadis that they know will eventually attack us. Support our troops? Give them good, honorable missions. They deserve better, don’t they? 
As you go through the above links, the information is staggering. Shown are large groups of people strategically located in swing states that will do anything to get her elected. The question is why? 
Politically, we have a two party system. If you say you are Republican, people have at least a general idea of what you mean. For Democrats, it’s no different. There are different kinds of politics that fit easily under each umbrella. But the point is they are recognizable and we know where they stand on issues. 
Tell me, what are OUNb beliefs? OUNb is a political party and set of beliefs just like Republican or Democrat. The reason I am asking is that you can’t tell me. The odds are you haven’t heard about it before. When the Atlantic Council or The Project for the New American Century takes all the senior positions in the Clinton White House, it will be filled with OUNb and similar political partisans for the first time without dissenting voices. 
“Unity to act when required has been the diaspora’s mantra – this cannot be disputed . 
As time moves on, we see that things take a natural course. We see that two wings of the OUN – (OUNb)Banderivtsi and (OUNm)Melnykivtsi – are working actively on the international level, working in partnership and currently are in strong negotiations about becoming a single entity again.” 
The OUNb political party started under Stepan Bandera and their political beliefs are quite literally Nazi. In the 1930’s they swore undying loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the Diaspora was directing Waffen SS battalions from America secretly even as other Ukrainian emigres were fighting them. The UCCA is the head of OUNb thought in America and now they want America to celebrate their totalitarian beliefs with them. If you disagree with totalitarian politics, you are the enemy. After a brief description of what kind of beliefs the people have from the Atlantic Council that are taking up cabinet positions, the proof it is happening now follows. 
The OUNb were the SS that manned the concentration camps during the Holocaust. They successfully murdered 3 million war prisoners by starving them to death. The OUNb killed over 250,000 Jews, 500,000 Ukrainians, and committed the first Holocaust at Babi Yar. Today the UCCA is funding and running the volunteer battalions raping and killing in Donbass the same way. 
They and the other emigre group leaders are also behind buying the media headlines and reach, damage control, and the Information Operation against Americans today. If you want to know what American politics will look like within a few years, look at Ukraine. 
There are people who live abroad, who do not feel fully accepted as a minority, and here there is a phenomenon which I call long-distance nationalism. . .The members of the diaspora create for themselves an image of the home land, which is a stronger emotional investment than the country in which they live…One negative consequence of the diaspora experience is the emergence of what Ander-son calls non-responsible politics: diaspora participation in the politics in the country with which they identify can often be toxic, and their impact can be felt through the funding of particular political figures, nationalist propaganda, and even weapons…- Multiculturalism, memory, and ritualization: Ukrainian nationalist monuments in Edmonton, Alberta – Pers Anders Rudling 
With the field day the Emigres and paid media had with Donald Trump over David Duke, they forgot to tell you that Ukrainian emigres supporting Hillary Clinton hired Duke in Ukraine as a professor of history and sent their American kids to learn there. Almost all Ukrainian politicians have been through this fascist education system known as MAUP . The Ukrainian American and other likeminded ethnics are the people that will fill the senior foreign and domestic cabinet positions. 
“ OUNb leader Ivan Kobasa also took responsibility of making sure the Ukrainian-Americans received the proper secondary education at Ukrainian nationalist schools(MAUP) in Ukraine. From the mid-2000’s enrollment in this educational system has skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands. Today almost all members of the current Ukrainian government are graduates of this ideological system that was taught to them by moderates like David Duke who is also a graduate of the MAUP system.” 
“I do care about social and economic issues affecting every American, but given the war in Ukraine, there is only one issue that we as Ukrainian Americans must focus on: Ukraine . 
The Ukrainian issue “trumps” all other personal issues! 
A vote for Trump is a vote against Ukraine! 
When it comes to U.S. elections, Ukrainian Americans are a statistically minor, divided, unorganized voting group. The Central and East European Coalition is a coalition of U.S.-based organizations that represent their countries of heritage, a voting group of over 20 million people. The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Ukrainian National Association are member organizations of the CEEC. Americans of East and Central European heritage can make a significant difference and influence the election result if their attention is focused.” Ukraine Weekly The Presidential Election: Can We Make A Difference 
Hillary Clinton’s response is she will defend Ukraine’s borders! Even though it has no eastern or northern border to defend. She has guaranteed to start a war with Russia if she is elected. 
Not only is Clinton buying the media through these second parties, but they are hiring professional, former military psyops professionals to deny pertinent information from voters and disrupt her political opponents message. At the same time, they are paying an across the board mainstream media to simultaneously publish articles and video that lift her campaign up, disrupt, destroy, and drown out alternate messages. 
Wikileaks noted this when it exposed the Clinton campaign’s program to incite violence and obfuscate the point. The Huffington Post example of this is” Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar , rampant xenophobe , racist , misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S”. 
“ We understand the Clinton camp has hired beaucoup and Zwanzig (a lot) of trolls, we also understand the Kremlin has done the same. We just do not know if Trump has followed suit. From a counterintelligence perspective, this is confusing as heck. 
One of the really neat things about this election is seeing all my information operations and information warfare friends on social media, contributing and commenting, looking darned intelligent! Theirs is normally the voice of reason, maturity, and intelligence.” Joel Harding 
By systematically and continually attacking the voter’s psyche, Americans are being treated in the same way our government treats countries they overthrow . The right to make an informed vote has been denied to support any particular candidate. 
What does an Inform and Influence Operation entail against the American public? Read the following carefully. The term “anti-western” refers to anyone that disagrees with whom he is working for. In this case, he works for the Ukrainian Emigres. This also covers Syria. Every media outlet or journalist writing about these subjects that aren’t carrying the line he lays out is the enemy. These are the tactics being used today during the election. 
“I am building a database of planners , operators, logisticians, hackers, and anyone wanting to be involved with special activities I will call ‘inform and influence activities’. I have received a few different suggestions to help organize operations – of all sorts – against anti-Western elements. No government approval, assistance or funding. This skirts legalities. This is not explicitly illegal and it may not even be legal, at this point. That grey area extends a long way. I am only trying to assess the availability of people willing to participate in such efforts. Technology, equipment and facility offers are also appreciated. If you would like to be included in my database, please send a tailored resume to joel_harding@” 
If you don’t think this is possible , this has been going on around you for a long time. look at the credentials of retired Brigadier General Joel Harding and decide for yourself. But first look at what he promises he can do for you when you hire him. 
“ Information operations and warfare, also known as influence operations, includes the collection of tactical, operational and strategic information about a competitor as well as the dissemination of information and propaganda in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an competitor or adversary in the corporate, government or military realm. 
It is our job to maximize your advantages over your competitor while minimizing your competitor. We work on the national level down to the individual level. We seek to give you every advantage possible in order to advance your position, increase your reputation, and maximize your standing in your field.” 
“ Bio- Joel Harding spent 26 years in the Army ; his first nine years were spent as an enlisted soldier, mostly in Special Forces, as an SF qualified communicator and medic, on an A-Team. After completing his degree, Joel then received his commission as an Infantry Officer and after four years transitioned to the Military Intelligence Corps. 
In the mid 1990s, Joel was working in the Joint Staff J2 in support of special operations, where he began working in the new field called Information Operations. Eligible Receiver 1997 was his trial by fire, after that he became the Joint Staff J2 liaison for IO to the CIA, DIA, NSA, DISA and other assorted agencies in the Washington DC area, working as the intelligence lead on the Joint Staff IO Response Cell for Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze . Joel followed this by a tour at SOCCENT and then INSCOM, working in both IO and intelligence. 
Specializing in Russian Information Warfare for the past 30+ months. Consultant, advisor and subject matter expert on Information Operations, Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy with more than 19 years practical, policy in IO, SC and PD. 35 years experience in broader defense and national security matters. I have lectured all over the world about Information Warfare and Cyberwar and have spoken at numerous conferences. I am currently focusing on the Ukraine/Russia information war with a simultaneous heavy emphasis on the accompanying hybrid war. I currently teach classes about Russian Information Warfare and a second class on Propaganda/Agitprop. Specialties: Information Operations/Information Warfare, Public Diplomacy, Strategic Communication, Counter-Disinformation, Electronic Warfare, Deception, Operational Security, Cyberwar, Intelligence, Special Forces and Special Operations. Primary author Ukraine National Strategy for Information Policy, submitted in 2015 and again in 2016.” 
With his resume, no guess work is needed to understand how effective his friends are. Before going further, ask yourself if this is what elections are supposed to be? 
As a litmus test take Hillary’s name out and put down what is known just through Wikileaks in a list. Put McCain’s name, Kucinich, Paul, Bush, and ask yourself would this be an acceptable candidate? Add what’s been shown here. Is there an acceptable candidate? 
If any of them would be acceptable, sorry like many others you drank the kool-aid already. 
“ I’ve seen how our heroes, activists , journalists, and celebrities have completely sold their souls to support something no person with an iota of morality would do. I’ve seen them say and do things to derail candidates who would have been a million times better for those less fortunate around us. It’s unfortunate most pretend to fight the establishment, to act like they love the people more than they love the struggle and the relevance that it brings them. I am not one of those and I won’t continue to be until the good Lord takes me.” Cesar Vargas 
Hillary Clinton is not a Nazi. But every position of relevance will be filled with people that really are political Nazis. They are technically integral nationalists. They look down on democracy in any form. At least now you know what kind of government you are voting for. 
Regardless of who wins, there are 2000 tanks, artillery, and rockets pointed my way, waiting for this election to be over. I am an American that lives in Donbass, and wrote many of the early breaking stories and much of the background about the conflict in Ukraine. 
If you cannot objectively look and see a more sophisticated version of what happened here through 2014 is going on, I can’t help you. Soon the OUNb will order the volunteer battalions to start killing civilians on a large scale again. I will go back to reporting on the war. 
If all these things weren’t being done, I would keep it simply about policy. Russia is not an enemy of the United States. Instead, I believe I am witnessing a quiet coup that demands legality in America. 
If this Information Operation is allowed to win the 2016 presidency, then elections are fruitless. Every other election will be based on the same strategy. They will have to be for any candidate to win. 
Your voice, your views, your informed choice will no longer matter. The IIO practitioner kills dissent. That’s their job. They’re only doing their job.",FAKE
"Emails discovered during investigation of Jew Anthony Wiener sending dick pics to jailbait! 
HA! 
New York Times : 
Newly discovered emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server were found after the F.B.I. seized electronic devices once shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday. 
The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election. 
In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.” 
… 
“Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the director himself notes they may not even be significant,” said John D. Podesta, chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. 
He added: “It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.” 
Mrs. Clinton, arriving Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, waved at members of the media gathered on the tarmac but ignored shouted questions. 
HA! 
She won’t even take questions! 
There was no damage control plan again – just like when she collapsed on 911! 
I’m not really sure how it makes sense that Weiner would have these on his phone, or why the FBI would seize the phone of his wife because he was sending dick pics to jailbait (unless he was using her phone to send them, lel) – but I’ve always said, Weiner is a funny Jew! 
I never thought he would turn-out to be this funny! 
Original article follows. tfw you just lost the game 
OH YES YOU READ THAT HEADLINE RIGHT, SIR. 
YESSIREE DOG. 
I knew James Comey was a pretty cool guy when a Negro in Congress asked him to investigate me and he was like “Yeah, dat nigga hot as a muffuggah. Watchoo want ah invesegate how much azz he be kickin in dem toobs? Get the fug outta here with that shit, dawg.” 
And now: total bro confirmed. 
RT : 
The FBI has learned of more emails involving Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she headed the State Department, FBI Director James Comey told several members of Congress, telling them he is reopening the investigation. 
“ In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of email that appear to be pertinent ” to Clinton’s investigation, Comey wrote to the chairs of several relevant congressional committees, adding that he was briefed about the messages on Thursday. “ I agree that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation. ” 
The FBI director cautioned, however, that the bureau has yet to assess the importance of the material, and that he doesn’t know how long that will take. 
Stocks fell after Comey’s announcement, CNBC reported. 
More like the sky just fell. 
And underneath it we see Jesus Christ himself wearing a MAGA hat, smiling like a smug Pepe and whispering “lock her up.” Yo dawg, we heard you like America. So we sent Jesus Christ himself to make sure Donald Trump gets elected. 
Seriously, people. Even if you don’t necessarily believe in Christianity, you have to admit that this is some kind of divine miracle that just happened here. 
Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, praised the decision to reopen the case. 
“Now that the FBI has reopened the matter, it must conduct the investigation with impartiality and thoroughness,” he said in a statement. “The American people deserve no less and no one should be above the law.” 
Almost 15,000 new Clinton emails were discovered in September. 
In mid-October, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, promised at least “four new hearings” after Congress returns from recess in November based on the new emails, which lawmakers received but have not been made public. 
“This is a flashing red light of potential criminality,” Chaffetz said. 
The new evidence points to a “quid pro quo” arrangement between the FBI and the State Department, he noted. 
Welp. 
That’s it. 
It’s over. 
There is just no way with an open investigation hanging over her head, and the FBI openly stating that it is so severe they have to act immediately, that she can possibly be elected. 
I do understand that there is no evidence that Hillary’s own people care if she is a criminal or not when it comes to polling, but this seriously demoralizes them, making them much less likely to vote. At the same time, it is a massive morale boost to the Republicans who aren’t necessarily on the Trump Train but hate Hillary, ensuring that they’ll go out and vote. 
Seriously guys. I did have my doubts. But this clears them up. We are 11 days away from the election. 
And this drops. 
And I guarantee Team Trump has something to drop next week. The Russian conspiracy might even be memed into reality and Putin might drop the hidden server. Assange still has something big. 
We won, guys. 
Honestly, I’ve got tears in my eyes right now. 
God Bless America.",FAKE
"Protests and vigils have erupted in major cities and smaller towns across the United States in response to Donald Trump's election as the 45th president last night. Students in California also participated in a walk-out, and there were protests at some college campuses. It turns out it's important for everyone to vote, but also to vote in the correct way.

Protesters chanted various anti-Trump slogans, with some calling attention to Hillary Clinton's apparent victory in the popular vote. The protest in New York City was organized by Socialist Alternative NYC, which blamed the Democratic Party for failing to stop Trump, insisting the party should have nominated Bernie Sanders instead of Clinton. Based on the results, where Trump performed at about the level of the last two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, while Clinton received millions of votes fewer than Barack Obama did, any other Democratic nominee would have done better.

Some protesters burned American flags, but there were no immediate reports of violence at the demonstrations—protests in the Bay Area last night over Trump's victory did descend into violence, and may do so again. Anti-Trump protests are not a new thing this election cycle, nor is violence, although these are the first after the democratically-held election on Tuesday. In Mid-October, video released by James O'Keefe's Project Veritas showed a Democratic operative bragging about hiring protesters to incite violence at Trump rallies. In March, Trump, then in the midst of his run of primary wins, said protests like the ones that occurred in Chicago outside the Trump Tower had ""energized"" his supporters. Those protests also did not have specific messages on policy. In June, I wrote that attacks by anti-Trump protesters on Trump supporters because of the danger he posed as an imperial president was an exercise in blame-shifting. ""Those so concerned about what Trump might do to the country that they feel called to stalk and attack Trump supporters should take a long look in the mirror instead,"" I wrote. ""It'll have the added benefit of not building more support for Trump, as violence against his supporters certainly will."" The tactics and the attitudes underlying them continued, and probably helped Trump pull off one of the biggest upsets in modern presidential history.

Outside of demonstrations surrounding specific police shootings, and the anti-Trump protests, there seem to have been few major protests in the U.S. in the last eight years over the kinds of policies—like U.S. wars overseas and even immigration policy—that purportedly animated protests during the Bush years. Certainly, the candidate produced by the party that claims to be concerned about these issues did not reflect an electorate that voted based on those issues. Clinton was the architect of a number of U.S. interventionists and an advocate of policies like the drug war that contributed to the refugee crisis at the southern border. The Obama administration ramped up deportations, and has continued to rip families apart into its last year.

Trump's election has already re-ignited concern about these issues. The left has rediscovered the usefulness of limited government power, as Robby Soave noted Tuesday night. Although Republicans retained control of Congress in the elections, a number of Republican members did not endorse Trump. While failed presidential candidate Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is a pro-interventionist fan of executive power, others, such as Kentucky's Sen. Rand Paul, could become important advocates of limited executive and government power and non-interventionism. Arizona's Sen. Jeff Flake, another Republican who didn't endorse Trump, meanwhile, is likely to press Trump and Republicans on immigration. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan tweeted a picture of himself, Kentucky's Rep. Tom Massie, and Rand Paul, with the the caption ""We're putting the band back together #teamliberty"".

On one level, the protests are a neat demonstration of the First Amendment, and would be so if the roles were reversed, although I'm skeptical if tonight's protesters would feel the same way. A progressive friend suggested Trump supporters would have gotten violent if Clinton won—not an uncommon belief. Clinton called the idea that Trump might not accept the outcome of the election, as protesters appear to be doing, ""horrific."" The protesters are also risking the salience of the message against policies there is now an opportunity to try to push a new president in a better direction on, and avoid the bipartisan continuity of the war on terror and related policies from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.

Donald Trump may personify the problem of unchecked executive power, but the problem is with how the system has developed into that position. Many Obama voters believed they were voting for ""change,"" but President Obama brought a lot of Bush policies along with him. Guantanamo Bay is still open, the U.S. is engaged in military operations in at least half a dozen countries, the post-9/11 security apparatus remains in place. Obama did not personify the solution to unchecked executive power or violent U.S. foreign policy. The solutions have to be codified (and, woah, actually are, in the Constitution), with a rollback of the decades-long project of accumulated executive power and a restoration of co-equal branches of a Constitutional government. If the debates are again made about personalities, the opportunity for positive change could be lost, yet again.",REAL
"0 427 
“That’s going to be you,” the Academy of Excellence teacher allegedly warned a 12-year-old Muslim student after showing the class a movie about the 9/11 attacks. And if that sounds outrageous, brace yourself because it gets a lot worse. 
No wonder the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Arizona are siccing the U.S. Dept. of Justice and the U.S. Dept. of Education on this travesty of a public charter school and this shameful example of an educator’s sorry a**. Heather Weaver from the ACLU’s national office reports they’ve filed formal complaints on behalf of the Muslim student and his family. 
Asli Noor and her five children are refugees who settled in Phoenix, Arizona after fleeing Somalia. Like most parents, she wants opportunities and a good education for her children. And for many families — especially those living in low-income neighborhoods — that means a public charter school like the sadly misnamed “Excellence Academy.” 
The boy and his eight-year-old sister (referred to in the complaint as A.A. and F.A.) had started the 2015-2016 school year when the family’s new set of troubles began. 
According to the complaints, an “Academy of Excellence” teacher named Faye Myles began “singling out” the then 11-year-old, sixth grade Muslim student as the 2015-16 school year began for “disfavorable treatment because of his faith and nationality.” 
‘Another time, when A.A. raised his hand to answer a question, his teacher snapped at him — “All you Muslims think you are so smart” — in front of the entire class.’ 
Oh, and then the boy recalls the math and science teacher for grades 5-8 digressing into a special kind of lesson in civics and current events. 
‘I can’t wait until Trump is elected. He’s going to deport all you Muslims. Muslims shouldn’t be given visas. They’ll probably take away your visa and deport you. You’re going to be the next terrorist, I bet.’ 
Faye Myles also allegedly found other ways to wound her young Muslim student with her bigotry. She repeatedly denied him the right to pray during recess, which is hard to imagine ever happening to a Christian student. The child also claims his “Academy of Excellence” teacher would also would tell him to “shut up” and punish him during class “downtime” when the other students were allowed to talk with each other. 
The bus rides home added to the child’s misery as his classmates began to follow the teacher’s example and pile on the insults. 
‘On the bus ride home, A.A.’s classmates took up his teacher’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant crusade, taunting him about the fact that his visa would be revoked because he is a Muslim, calling him a “terrorist,” and accusing him of planning to blow up the bus.’ 
The child, of course, started feeling anxious and physically ill “with a stomach ache” and had no desire to return to the “Academy of Excellence.” 
In January, Asli Noor met with school officials to complain about these incidents. Three days later, the school asked her to pick her son up early because he had supposedly tried to open the school bus’ emergency window. Noor demanded they verify these accusations with footage from the security camera but school officials refused. 
And then Brenda Nelson, an “Academy of Excellence” board member, printed out two “voluntary” withdrawal forms for A.A. and his younger sister F.A. She then allegedly ordered Ms. Noor to sign them, saying: 
‘Get your kids out of here. I don’t want them here.’ 
When Asri Noor begged for time to find another school for her children, Brenda Nelson callously refused. 
Unfortunately, these incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry in publicly-funded schools are happening more frequently. Think Progress reports that even in schools where teachers try to fight it, Trump-inspired bullying is a serious issue. 
‘In spite of some teachers’ valiant efforts to teach students about Trump, it would appear that schoolchildren already invoke the candidate’s name to scare their Latino and Muslim classmates, referencing the candidate’s harsh claims of Latino criminals and Muslim terrorists.’ 
And, sadly, it’s not just the kids. 
‘A predominantly Latino elementary school in California was graffiti-tagged with the words “Build the wall higher” last week, alluding to Trump’s policy plan to build a southern U.S. border wall to keep out undocumented immigrants.’ 
And in case you assume the “Academy of Excellence” teacher is one of those mean white Trump supporters, you’re wrong. Apparently, she’s a mean black Trump supporter. @KhaledBeydoun The teacher works at Academy of Excellence & her name is Faye Myles per the article. She should be called out. pic.twitter.com/BbL3YdzEG8 
— John Q Archibald (@JohnQarchibald) October 30, 2016 
Featured image: Lynn Koenig via Getty Images . Share this Article! ",FAKE
"Windham, New Hampshire (CNN) Donald Trump pumped up his attacks on Hillary Clinton's character Saturday night by suggesting that the former secretary of state is not mentally fit to be president.

""She took a short-circuit in the brain. She's got problems,"" Trump said, seizing on Clinton's explanation that she ""short-circuited"" a recent answer about her truthfulness in discussing her email server.

""Honestly, I don't think she's all there,"" he added.

The attacks flowed from the Republican nominee as he once again tore into Clinton as ""unstable,"" ""unbalanced"" and ""totally unhinged.""

Trump's stepped-up attacks on Clinton come as he has been falling in a slew of recent battleground states and national polls and as top Republicans have fretted about Trump repeatedly knocking himself off message by engaging in controversies rather than focusing on Clinton.

While Trump in the last week escalated a feud with the parents of a fallen U.S. soldier and opened a party rift by saying he was not yet ready to endorse the Republican speaker of the House, Trump on Friday launched into a lengthy and focused attack on Clinton during his rallies, and built on those attacks on Saturday.

""She's a liar. She is a horrible, horrible human being,"" Trump told a crowd of supporters gathered in a sweltering New Hampshire high school gym. ""She's incompetent and I don't' think that you can even think of allowing this woman to become president of the United States.""

But before taking the stage in New Hampshire, Trump previewed the ""short-circuit"" line of attack online, tweeting earlier Saturday that ""anybody whose mind 'SHORT CIRCUITS' is not fit to be our president! Look up the word 'BRAINWASHED.'""

And in a video posted on his Facebook page earlier Saturday, Trump's campaign suggested Clinton was ""melting down,"" calling her ""robot Hillary.""

Clinton's use of the term ""short-circuited"" came as she answered a question Friday at a gathering of black and Hispanic journalists about her recent assertion in a Fox News interview that FBI Director James Comey said she had been ""truthful"" in discussing her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. Clinton's claim in that interview has been widely debunked as false.

""I was pointing out in both of those instances, that Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful. That really is the bottom line here,"" she said. ""What I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly. I may have short-circuited, and for that, I will try to clarify.""

Stumping Saturday night, Trump also alleged that the terrorist group ISIS is dreaming of a Clinton presidency.

""Remember, remember, remember ISIS is looking, folks. They dream of Hillary Clinton,"" Trump said. ""They look at her and they say this can't be happening to us. How great is this.""

Trump's latest barrage of attacks against Clinton -- while not a departure from his brand of personal and aggressive attacks against his opponents -- did mark an escalation in his attacks, just as Clinton and her allies are stepping up their attacks against Trump.

Clinton has accused Trump of being ""temperamentally unfit"" to be president and a slew of top former government officials have raised questions about Trump's character and his fitness to become the next commander-in-chief.

""The character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief,"" Morell wrote, pointing to Trump's ""obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights"" and ""his routine carelessness with the facts.""

Trump also pushed back on those attacks on Saturday.

""I get a kick out of these dopey, dopey, dopey people. These stupid foolish people when they talk about, ""Can we trust Donald Trump with nuclear? Can we trust him?"" Trump said. ""You know, it's a whole little narrative. They'll spend a billion dollars on this but the people aren't buying it.""",REAL
"Thomas DiLorenzo https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/obamas-definition-high-integrity/ 
When Obama’s press secretary was asked today what he thought of Dirty Donna Brazile’s rigging of the Democratic debates by giving Hitlery the questions (from CNN, where she worked but has now been fired) in advance, he responded by praising her as “a person of the highest integrity.” 
To the lunatic left fringe their ends always justify any means. 6:41 pm on October 31, 2016",FAKE
"Tonopah Test Range Google Earth imagery 7/22/2016 page: 1 37.785314° -116.765487° lots of cars 37.788909° -116.756991° buildings removed 37.761840° -116.760566° new building 37.723731° -116.730658° new radar berm Happy hunting. Note they cut this really close to the north edge of the runway, as if someone ordered this imagery and Google poached it. Tonopah is the Area 51 site. These look like the White Sand targets I've fired at. (above) edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given) edit on 26-10-2016 by thesungod because: (no reason given) The only things missing are the ""commercial gravel pits."" That is how the mining tailings are covered up. Posted a thread on this here Looks like something (maybe F-117 or something else) being moved into a hangar 37.798244, -116.774809 The only things missing are the ""commercial gravel pits."" That is how the mining tailings are covered up. I would presume since available imagery would show large amounts of ""Muck"" which is the technical term for the rock left over (Tailings are actually something else) they would eat the cost associated with trucking it elsewhere or using previously excavated areas on site. Rumors persist that the proposed underground, mobile, MX system was mocked up and extensive tunnels were dug in and around the NTS and Nellis etc. which could also be used for storing the muck. Otherwise a giant pile of the stuff would be a dead giveaway new topics",FAKE
"Australia to hunt down anti-vax nurses and prosecute them for disobeying the medical police state 
  Vicki Batts Tags: vaccination , Australia , medical police state (NaturalNews) Is there some sort of race to see which country can eliminate the rights of its people first? It is certainly beginning to feel like there must be something going on, since government overreach looks like it is reaching an all-time high across the world.While countries like Australia demonize other nations for their lack of progressiveness, recent developments suggest that its government is taking away people's freedom to think for themselves, slowly but surely chipping away at those who have dissenting opinions. The evidence? The newly released vaccination standards provided by The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia in response to what the organization described as, ""a small number of nurses and midwives promoting anti-vaccination via social media.""In their statement, they wrote that the board was merely taking the time to make its expectations in regards to vaccination and vaccination advice very clear to registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives. ""The board expects all registered nurses, enrolled nurses and midwives to use the best available evidence in making practice decisions.""This sentiment might have been acceptable, if it wasn't coupled with the organization also prompting people to tattle on each other. You see, the board is also urging members of the public to come forward and report nurses and midwives who may be expounding anti-vaccination beliefs. Surely anyone who goes against the grain deserves to be punished?If the medical industry was as strictly regulated as it purports itself to be, perhaps so many people wouldn't be dying each year from medical errors. An estimated 18,000 to 54,000 people in Australia lose their lives to medical mistakes each year – but the industry continues to insist that its those pesky thoughts that are really putting people in jeopardy. How dare anyone want to help people and think for themselves at the same time?In their statement, the board noted that any reports will not be taken lightly. ""The board will consider whether the nurse or midwife has breached their professional obligations and will treat these matters seriously.""To make matters worse, not only will these brave nurses and midwives be reported by people who may once have been their friends or colleagues, but the promotion of what the government deems ""misleading or deceptive information"" is a serious offense.And boy, will they take it seriously. Under national law, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency is able to prosecute anyone who commits such an act. While we all know that the true deception lies in the promotion of vaccines as a public health necessity, we also know that mainstream medicine will do anything to protect their precious immunizations.Dr. Hannah Dahlen, a professor of midwifery at the University of Western Sydney and the spokeswoman for the Australian College of Midwives, told The Guardian that nurses and midwives are respected individuals who play an important role in society, and that she believes that people take their advice quite seriously. She went on to say, ""I agree that they have a very serious obligation to provide the best available evidence, and it is of course concerning that some are taking to social media in order to express a position not backed by science.""But are concerns about what's in vaccines really not backed by science? Many people might say that continuing to ignore the evidence that there are horrible toxins like glyphosate and mercury in vaccines is what goes against science .In a rather ironic statement, Dahlen declared, ""The worry is the confirmation bias that can occur, because people might say: 'There you go, this is proof that you can't even have an alternative opinion.' It might in fact just give people more fuel for their belief systems.""Legislating dissenting opinions into extinction, and persecuting those who are raising awareness about a very real problem is proof that alternative opinions are not allowed. That's really all there is to it; it's biased, unjust and frankly, more befitting of the very governments Australia speaks out against. Sources:",FAKE
"Comments 
Mark Cuban has been vocally outspoken about the 2016 election after learning the dark truth about Republican nominee Donald Trump. Initially, Cuban actually supported Trump’s candidacy as someone independent from politics as usual, but as he (and we all) learned more about the dark past of The Donald’s dirty dealings , sexual predations and more, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner threw himself wholeheartedly into the political arena, culminating with front row seats to the last presidential debate. 
Cuban sat down with local radio broadcasters to discuss rumors that his anti-Trump stance might cost him ticket sales for his NBA franchise. Mark Cuban probably, literally dropped the mic after this response: 
“You know what, when it’s all said and done, I’d rather lose every penny than have Trump as president because I care more about the future of my family, my children than I do about my pocketbook. And so if it means we play to empty arenas, I’m down with that.” 
“Maybe I pick up some fans. Maybe I lose some fans. I don’t know,. I’ve heard it from both. I’ve had people say ‘there’s no way I can support you. I can’t go to another Mavs game.’ And I’ve had people say ‘you know what? We’re buying Mavs tickets.’ What I’ve heard more often than anything is, ‘are you gonna be this way once the election’s over?’ And the answer is no. You’ve known me forever Newy and I’ve been apolitical my entire adult life and only because I know Donald and I know my feelings about what he would be like as president have I gotten this involved but come November 9, it’s all Mavs all the time.” 
Mark Cuban is a shining example of how any American should approach the political arena, which he does by placing integrity over ideology and the good of the country in his viewpoints above the simple view of his bank account’s short term health. Luckily, Cuban is a franchisee in the NBA, which is far and away America’s most progressive major sports league, which doesn’t guarantee ongoing success, but does mean that the typical NBA fan values tolerance and diversity over racial segregation and hatred.",FAKE
"Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence suddenly canceled a campaign appearance on behalf of embattled Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump Saturday -- a growing sign of dissension in Republican ranks as calls mounted for Trump to step down after a sex tape emerged Friday.

CNN reported that Pence was canceling the even with House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump had been scheduled to appear but he also canceled Friday after the tape emerged.

A top Pence advisor says Pence was not disinvited but decided not to go of his own accord.

Influential Republicans have been reaching out to Pence about what role he might be willing to play in the event that Trump drops out, said two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. They didn’t identify those gauging Pence’s interest privately.

Caught on tape making shockingly crude comments about a married woman he tried to seduce, Donald Trump declared in a midnight video, ""I was wrong and I apologize."" Yet even as he did so, he claimed the astonishing recording was ""nothing more than a distraction"" and argued his words were not nearly as egregious as former President Bill Clinton's marital affairs.

""I've said some foolish things,"" the Republican presidential nominee said in a taped apology posted on his Facebook page early Saturday morning. ""But there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women.""

Turning to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Trump accused her of having ""bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated"" her husband's ""victims.""

Trump's 90-second statement capped a jarring day that threatened to sink his presidential campaign and sent Republicans into a panic with early voting well underway in several states and a little more than a month until Election Day.

On Friday afternoon, The Washington Post and NBC News released a 2005 video on which Trump describes trying to have sex with a married woman. He also brags about women letting him kiss and grab them because he is famous.

""When you're a star they let you do it,"" Trump says. ""You can do anything.""

He adds seconds later, ""Grab them by the p----. You can do anything.""

Within hours, the shock of the video led to widespread condemnation from inside Trump's own party. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was sickened by Trump's comments, while a one-sentence response from GOP's chairman was devastating.

""No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever,"" said Reince Priebus, who had stood by Trump through his past provocative comments.

Ryan added tartly that Trump was ""no longer attending"" a joint campaign appearance set for Saturday in Wisconsin. Trump himself later said in a statement that he would be preparing for Sunday night's debate instead.

Other Republicans, painfully aware of Trump's possible impact on their own political fates, were quick to chime in. New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who is locked in a close race, called his comments ""totally inappropriate and offensive.""

By the time Trump posted his video apology, three Republican members of Congress had called on Trump to abandon the race. Among them was Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who called Trump's words ""some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine.""

Pence was ""beside himself"" and his wife was furious, according to a person familiar with their thinking. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to share the private discussion.

On the tape, Trump is caught on a live microphone while talking with Billy Bush of ""Access Hollywood."" The candidate is heard saying ""I did try and f--- her. She was married."" He also uses graphic terms to describe the woman's body and says he frequently tries to kiss beautiful women.

""Access Hollywood"" said a recent Associated Press story about Trump's lewd behind-the-scenes comments as star of ""The Apprentice"" led it to dig through its archives and turn up the previously unaired tape. It was recorded during a bus ride while Trump was on his way to appear in an episode of the soap opera ""Days of Our Lives.""

Trump offered a half-hearted apology shortly after the video was released, saying he was sorry ""if anyone was offended."" Only hours later, after the scope of the damage became clear, did he release the video statement.

Trump appears alone in the video and appears to be reading off a script. He closes the video by suggesting he'll raise Bill Clinton's affairs again in the coming days.

""See you at the debate,"" he says.

Hillary Clinton seized on Trump's quotes from the 2005 video, calling them ""horrific."" She said in a Twitter message: ""We cannot allow this man to become president.""

But she had her own problems Friday with sudden revelations.

The WikiLeaks organization posted what it said were thousands of emails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, including some with excerpts from speeches she gave to Wall Street executives and others — speeches she has declined to release despite demands from Trump.

The excerpts include Clinton seeming to put herself in the free trade camp, a position she has retreated from. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her dream was ""a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.""

Trump strongly opposes current U.S. trade deals and insists Clinton is too cozy with Wall Street to reform it.

Friday's developments came two days before Trump and Clinton are to meet in the second presidential debate, with the Republican urgently in need of a strong performance. After his uneven showing in the first contest, public opinion polls have showed Clinton pulling ahead in nearly all battleground states, some of which are already in the midst of early voting.

There were plenty of other problems for Trump on what surely was one of the worst days of his two-year drive for the White House.

His advisers planned for him to spend a quiet Friday preparing for the debate and meeting with border security officials. But the day was quickly consumed by a series of controversies, including Trump's unsubstantiated claim about immigrants in the U.S. illegally voting in the election and his questioning the innocence of five black teenagers exonerated in a 1989 rape case.

Then, there were new signs of unusual links between Trump and Russia. For the first time, the U.S. publicly blamed the Russian government for hacking the Democratic National Committee and accused Moscow of trying to interfere with the American election. Diplomats also told the AP that Russia had lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations over a U.N. official's condemnations of Trump.

Also in the mix Friday: New questions about the Trump campaign's finances. With roughly a month until Election Day, the campaign has yet to schedule the $100 million in television advertising that his campaign boasted about just two weeks ago.

The campaign has just half that amount scheduled, and late this week shifted ad money around rather than increasing its overall investment, suggesting a bit of penny-pinching even as the clock winds down.",REAL
"The Yale Record Just Published The BEST Non-Endorsement Of A Candidate EVER! By Marty Townsend on October 27, 2016 Subscribe 
The Yale Record , America’s Oldest College Humor Magazine, has NOT endorsed Hillary Clinton – in a most spectacular way. 
The Yale Record is based in the college town of New Haven, Connecticut and was founded by Edward Anthony Bradford , James Heartt VanBuren , Samuel J. Elder , E.H. Lemis , and Henry Ward Beecher Howard in 1872, publishing their first weekly issue on September 11, 1872. They gleefully point readers to their lengthy Wikipedia page to prove their validity, claim the invention of the word “hot dog,” and ponder whether the face of the New Yorker would look different if they hadn’t been doing what they’re doing. 
The Record adopted “Old Owl” as their mascot over a century ago, but the actual date of acquisition wasn’t recorded anywhere. The mascot , described as a connoisseur of Cutty Sark , is: “… a congenial, largely nocturnal, 360-degree-head-turning, cigar-smoking bird who tries to steer the staff towards a light-hearted appreciation of life and the finer things in it.” 
From Wikimedia Commons available under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. 
With such an illustrious past, how could anything they produce not be spectacular? Let’s see what Old Owl had to say. 
The non-endorsement begins with a simple explanation of why they aren’t endorsing any candidate: “In its 144-year history, The Yale Record has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. In fact, we have never endorsed any candidate for president. This is, in part, due to our strong commitment to being a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization, which mandates that we are ‘absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.'” 
And: “The Yale Record believes both candidates to be equally un-endorsable, due to our faithful compliance with the tax code.” 
With that explained, one would ordinarily assume they were done. But no, they had a bit more to say : “In particular, we do not endorse Hillary Clinton’s exemplary leadership during her 30 years in the public eye. We do not support her impressive commitment to serving and improving this country—a commitment to which she has dedicated her entire professional career. Because of unambiguous tax law, we do not encourage you to support the most qualified presidential candidate in modern American history, nor do we encourage all citizens to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all by electing Secretary Clinton on November 8. “The Yale Record has no opinion whatsoever on Dr. Jill Stein.” 
So there it is… absolutely the best non-endorsement EVER. 

Featured image courtesy of Heat Street . About Marty Townsend 
Active in Michigan with several groups and organizations, including the National Action Network (NAN), Occupy Detroit, Save Michigan Public Schools, Dearborn PTA Council, Michigan Petitioners, and several other small groups working together to make Michigan a better place. Concentrates on educational issues, but also covers human interest, liberal politics, Michigan, environmental issues and Detroit, including the fight against Emergency Managers, the Education Achievement Authority, and fighting the corporate take-over of Michigan and the United States. Buy me a <a href="" cup of coffee Connect",FAKE
"There's evidence that when weighing Donald Trump versus rival Ted Cruz, many Republican leaders have become more concerned about Senator Cruz.

Donald Trump speaks to a crowd on Jan. 4, 2016, in Lowell, Mass. Thousands attended the rally in packed Paul E. Tsongas Center Arena at the Lowell campus of the University of Massachusetts.

Is the Republican establishment – or at least some of it – coming to terms with the possibility that Donald Trump will be the GOP presidential nominee?

A number of signs in recent days indicate that’s the case. Or, to be more specific, there’s evidence that when weighing Mr. Trump versus rival Ted Cruz, many Republican leaders think Senator Cruz the greater danger. That’s an implicit admission that they’re beginning to think Trump might not be, you know, so bad.

Let’s go to the list: Earlier this month, right-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks unloaded on Cruz, saying the Texas senator’s speeches are full of a sort of “pagan brutalism.” Since then, two former Republican Senate majority leaders, Trent Lott and Bob Dole, have indicated they think a Cruz nomination would be cataclysmic for the GOP and lead to widespread losses down the ticket.

Then this week, the Republican governor of Iowa, Terry Branstad, said flatly that he hopes anyone but Cruz wins his state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. True, Governor Branstad cited Cruz’s opposition to ethanol subsidies, crucial to Iowa’s economy, as the reason for his opposition. But the open and vehement nature of the anti-endorsement indicated a high level of political enmity.

“It is no surprise that the establishment is in full panic mode,” Cruz told reporters after hearing of this news.

Why does this imply anything about Trump? Well, the Iowa caucuses are now less than two weeks away. The New Hampshire primary is within three. The primary season moves quickly through South Carolina and other states after that. If the Republican Party as an entity is to exert influence on the nominating process, now is the time.

Many have expected Republican leaders to band together against Trump, given that some party figures see him as an existential threat to the GOP in its current form. That doesn’t seem to be occurring.

“The sort of GOP effort against Trump that many anticipated is happening instead vs. Cruz,” tweeted Sunlight Foundation political analyst Richard Skinner on Thursday.

Yes, this description of the state of play is a bit simplistic. The Republican establishment is not a cohesive entity chaired by the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller. Many GOP journalists and public intellectuals continue to worry that Trump, with his belligerent populism, will push the party so far from its small-government roots that it will become unrecognizable.

“What we’re seeing is the attempt at the normalization of Trump on the right, and defining conservatism down. Can be resisted and defeated,” tweeted right-leaning Weekly Standard editor William Kristol earlier this week.

But the fact remains that the legislative, Washington wing of the party now seems inclined to cut Trump slack. Mr. Dole, the party’s nominee in 1996, said in a New York Times interview that Trump could probably work with Congress, because “he’s got the right personality and he’s kind of a dealmaker.”

It may be as simple as that. Trump, for all his insults, is the kind of person members of Congress understand. He’s a businessman who knows that deals aren’t all one-sided, and a political neophyte who would be willing to defer to their judgment. That’s the theory, anyway.

Cruz? He’s proved that the only legislative opinion he listens to is his own, in the view of the establishment. Many in the GOP believe he pushed them into the 2013 government shutdown and then blamed their lack of courage for the shutdown’s inevitable collapse.

Consider this: Back in the 2008 campaign, questions arose about whether nominee John McCain was a “natural born citizen,” and thus eligible for the presidency under the Constitution, because he was born in the Canal Zone. The Senate quickly moved to pass a nonbinding resolution affirming Senator McCain’s citizenship. When Cruz became embroiled in the same question, because of his Canadian birth, that did not happen.

“I just don’t think the Senate ought to get into the middle of this,” said majority leader Mitch McConnell of the issue on ABC News’s “This Week” earlier this month.

Does the GOP establishment think it can block Cruz, then turn to oppose Trump and boost someone else? Maybe, but it’s getting late to pull off that kind of maneuver. Trump may rocket through the first primaries, and then, who could head him off? Jeb Bush? (Hey, he’s at 10 percent in some New Hampshire polls!)

Are GOP figures counting on influencing someone who’s not that easy to push around? Sure, Trump knows little about the day-to-day operation of government. That doesn’t mean he’ll be Silly Putty in Senator McConnell’s hands. He’s a billionaire with little vested interest in the party per se.

“He might well completely ignore Congress’s wishes and just do whatever feels right to him on any given day. Trump’s primary goal over the past several decades has been to enhance the Trump name. What policies that translates into is anyone’s guess,” writes Seth Masket at Vox.

Or does the party leadership still think that somehow or other, without its involvement, Trump is just going to lose?",REAL
"SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt, March 14 (Reuters) - On the eve of fresh talks with Iran, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said it was unclear whether an interim agreement over its nuclear power program was within reach.

""I can't tell you whether or not we can get a deal, whether we are close,"" Kerry told a news conference on Saturday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, where he attended an Egyptian investment summit.

""The purpose of these negotiations is not just to get a deal, it is to get the right deal,"" he added.

The United States and five other major powers -- Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia -- will resume negotiations with Iran in Lausanne, Switzerland, from Sunday. They hope to clinch a framework agreement by the end of the month.

The two sides would then seek to negotiate by June 30 a final agreement to would curb Iran's most sensitive nuclear activities for at least 10 years. In exchange, sanctions on the Islamic Republic would gradually end.

Kerry expressed concern again that a letter to Iran last week from Republican senators may have undermined the talks. The letter warned Iran that any deal made by President Barack Obama might last only as long as he remained in office -- a highly unusual intervention in U.S. foreign policy-making.

Kerry said he would assure Iranian negotiators and Europeans allies during the upcoming talks that Congress did not have the authority to change the deal.

""As far as we're concerned, Congress has no ability to change an executive agreement,"" Kerry said, adding that ""important gaps"" still remained between the sides.

The letter followed a speech to Congress earlier this month by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned that Obama was negotiating a ""bad deal"" with Iran. Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak about Iran without consulting the White House or Democrats.

With Israel preparing to elect a new government next week, Kerry said the United States hoped that whatever the outcome it would help push forward the peace process with Palestinians.

""President Obama remains committed to a two-state solution,"" Kerry said, adding ""he remains hopeful that whatever choice that people of Israel make, that there will be an ability to be able to move forward on those efforts.""

He declined to elaborate on the prospects of resuming the talks, with an election just days away.

Peace talks broke down in April 2014 after nine months of negotiations led by Kerry, with the long-standing goal of a two-state solution no closer.

Abbas has steered clear of taking a position on the Israeli election, saying only that he was ready to work with who wins. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Editing by Larry King)",REAL
"Black Activist Blasts Hillary Clinton Over Wikileaks Revelation Eric Garner's daughter speaks out against Clinton campaign for using her father's death Infowars Nightly News - October 28, 2016 Comments 
Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, blasts Hillary Clinton campaign over discussions staffers had about her father’s death, as revealed in WikiLeaks emails. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force",FAKE
"Reprinted from fair.org by Janine Jackson Militarily Armed Police License DMCA 
While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away so they can return to presenting their own chin-stroking as what it means to take climate change seriously , independent media continue to fill the void with actual coverage. 
One place you can go to find reporting is The Intercept ( 10/25/16 ), where journalist Jihan Hafiz filed a video report from North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies continue their stand against the sacred site--trampling, water supply--threatening project. 
Hafiz reports that after a morning of prayer, Standing Rock activists 
were attacked by police forces who used pepper spray and beat protesters with batons"". Dozens of officers, backed by military trucks, police vans, machine guns and nonlethal weapons, violently approached the group without warning. 
As the demonstrators attempted to leave, the police began beating and detaining them. Several Native American women leading the march were targeted, dragged out of the crowd and arrested. One man was body-slammed to the ground, while another woman broke her ankle running from the police. The military and police trucks followed the protesters, as nearly a hundred officers corralled them into a circle. Among the arrested were journalists--including Hafiz--a pregnant 17-year-old and a 78-year-old woman. - Advertisement - 
Once jailed, Hafiz and others were refused phone calls and received no food or water for eight hours. Women were strip-searched, two women fainted from low blood sugar and another had her medication taken away. 
On her release, Hafiz was told, ""Your camera is being held as evidence in a crime."" 
That crime, of course, would be journalism . And it's hard to believe law enforcement would feel so cavalier about treating it that way if more reporters were actually committing it. Protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline License DMCA - Advertisement - 
Since the last time FAIR checked on how much coverage corporate media were giving the Dakota Access struggle ( FAIR.org , 9/22/16 ), ABC and NBC have ended their blackout, airing one story apiece on their national news shows: NBC 's Today show (10/11/16) had 71 words about the arrest of actor Shailene Woodley at the site, and ABC 's Good Morning America (10/23/16) ran 70 words on how ""a protest over construction of an oil pipeline turned violent."" 
For news from Standing Rock, people would do better to follow #NODAPL on Twitter , and check out resources like SacredStoneCamp.org and Indian Country Today . View Ratings | Rate It http://fair.org 
FAIR , the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. We work to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media ( more... )",FAKE
"(CNN) It began with the arrests of a handful of children in 2011. Since then, it's exploded into the biggest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.

It all starts with graffiti

A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.

A sandstorm blows over damaged buildings in the rebel-held area of Douma, east of Damascus, on September 7, 2015.

A man's body lies in the back of van as people search for the injured after airstrikes allegedly by the Syrian government on a market in a rebel-held Eastern Ghouta town on August 31, 2015.

A man's body lies in the back of van as people search for the injured after airstrikes allegedly by the Syrian government on a market in a rebel-held Eastern Ghouta town on August 31, 2015.

A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.

A refugee carries mattresses as he re-enters Syria from Turkey on June 22, 2015, after Kurdish People's Protection Units regained control of the area around Tal Abyad, Syria, from ISIS.

A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.

A Syrian child fleeing the war gets lifted over fences to enter Turkish territory illegally near a border crossing at Akcakale, Turkey, on June 14, 2015.

A Syrian boy receives treatment at a local hospital following an alleged chlorine gas attack in the Idlib suburb of Jabal al-Zawia on April 27, 2015.

A Syrian boy receives treatment at a local hospital following an alleged chlorine gas attack in the Idlib suburb of Jabal al-Zawia on April 27, 2015.

Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.

Nusra Front fighters inspect a helicopter belonging to pro-government forces after it crashed in the rebel-held Idlib countryside on March 22, 2015.

Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.

Rebel fighters dig caves in the mountains for bomb shelters in the northern countryside of Hama on March 9, 2015.

A man gives medical assistance as two wounded children wait nearby at a field hospital in Douma on February 2, 2015.

A man gives medical assistance as two wounded children wait nearby at a field hospital in Douma on February 2, 2015.

A long-exposure photograph shows a rocket being launched in Aleppo on October 5, 2014.

A long-exposure photograph shows a rocket being launched in Aleppo on October 5, 2014.

Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.

Medics tend to a man's injuries at a field hospital in Douma after airstrikes on September 20, 2014.

Volunteers remove a dead body from under debris after shelling in Aleppo on August 29, 2014. According to the Syrian Civil Defense, barrel bombs are now the greatest killer of civilians in many parts of Syria. The White Helmets are a humanitarian organization that tries to save lives and offer relief.

Photographs of victims of the Assad regime are displayed as a Syrian army defector known as ""Caesar,"" center, appears in disguise to speak before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. The July 31, 2014, briefing was called ""Assad's Killing Machine Exposed: Implications for U.S. Policy."" Caesar, apparently a witness to the regime's brutality, has smuggled more than 50,000 photographs depicting the torture and execution of more than 10,000 dissidents. CNN cannot independently confirm the authenticity of the photos, documents and testimony referenced in the report.

Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.

Rebel fighters execute two men on July 25, 2014, in Binnish, Syria. The men were reportedly charged by an Islamic religious court with detonating several car bombs.

A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.

A giant poster of al-Assad is seen in Damascus on May 31, 2014, ahead of the country's presidential elections. He received 88.7% of the vote in the country's first election after the civil war broke out.

A Free Syrian Army fighter fires a rocket-propelled grenade during heavy clashes in Aleppo on April 27, 2014.

A Free Syrian Army fighter fires a rocket-propelled grenade during heavy clashes in Aleppo on April 27, 2014.

A U.S. ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.

A U.S. ship staff member wears personal protective equipment at a naval airbase in Rota, Spain, on April 10, 2014. A former container vessel was fitted out with at least $10 million of gear to let it take on about 560 metric tons of Syria's most dangerous chemical agents and sail them out to sea, officials said.

A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.

A man holds a baby who was rescued from rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo on February 14, 2014.

Residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, on January 31, 2014.

Residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency at the besieged al-Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus, on January 31, 2014.

An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.

An injured man is helped following an airstrike in Aleppo's Maadi neighborhood on December 17, 2013.

Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.

Syrian children wait as doctors perform medical checkups at a refugee center in Sofia, Bulgaria, on October 26, 2013.

Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.

Residents run from a fire at a gasoline and oil shop in Aleppo's Bustan Al-Qasr neighborhood on October 20, 2013. Witnesses said the fire was caused by a bullet from a pro-government sniper.

The U.N. Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.

The U.N. Security Council passes a resolution September 27, 2013, requiring Syria to eliminate its arsenal of chemical weapons. Al-Assad said he would abide by the resolution.

A handout image released by the Syrian opposition's Shaam News Network shows people inspecting bodies of children and adults who rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces on August 21, 2013. A week later, U.S Secretary of State John Kerry said U.S. intelligence information found that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including more than 400 children. Al-Assad's government claimed that jihadists fighting with the rebels carried out the chemical weapons attacks to turn global sentiments against it.

An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.

An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq on July 18, 2013.

Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.

Rebels launch a missile near the Abu Baker brigade in Al-Bab, Syria, on January 16, 2013.

Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.

Syrians look for survivors amid the rubble of a building targeted by a missile in the al-Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo on January 7, 2013.

A rebel fighter prepares the wires of a car-mounted camera used to spy on Syrian government forces while his comrade smokes a cigarette in Aleppo's Bab al-Nasr district on January 7, 2013.

A rebel fighter prepares the wires of a car-mounted camera used to spy on Syrian government forces while his comrade smokes a cigarette in Aleppo's Bab al-Nasr district on January 7, 2013.

A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.

A father reacts after the deaths of two of his children in Aleppo on January 3, 2013.

The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.

The bodies of three children are laid out for identification by family members at a makeshift hospital in Aleppo on December 2, 2012. The children were allegedly killed in a mortar shell attack that landed close to a bakery in the city.

Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.

Smoke rises in the Hanano and Bustan al-Basha districts in Aleppo as fighting continues through the night on December 1, 2012.

Rebels celebrate next to the remains of a Syrian government fighter jet that was shot down at Daret Ezza, on the border of the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, on November 28, 2012.

Rebels celebrate next to the remains of a Syrian government fighter jet that was shot down at Daret Ezza, on the border of the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, on November 28, 2012.

An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

An Israeli tank crew sits on the Golan Heights overlooking the Syrian village of Breqa on November 6, 2012. Israel fired warning shots toward Syria after a mortar shell hit an Israeli military post. It was the first time Israel fired on Syria across the Golan Heights since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Relatives of Syrian detainees who were arrested for participating in anti-government protests wait in front of a police building in Damascus on October 24, 2012. The Syrian government said it released 290 prisoners.

Relatives of Syrian detainees who were arrested for participating in anti-government protests wait in front of a police building in Damascus on October 24, 2012. The Syrian government said it released 290 prisoners.

A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.

A Syrian rebel walks inside a burnt section of the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo hours before the Syrian army retook control of the complex on October 14, 2012.

Smoke rises over the streets after a mortar bomb from Syria landed in the Turkish border village of Akcakale on October 3, 2012. Five people were killed. In response, Turkey fired on Syrian targets and its parliament authorized a resolution giving the government permission to deploy soldiers to foreign countries.

Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.

Free Syrian Army fighters are reflected in a mirror they use to see a Syrian Army post only 50 meters away in Aleppo on September 16, 2012.

A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.

A Syrian man carrying grocery bags dodges sniper fire in Aleppo as he runs through an alley near a checkpoint manned by the Free Syrian Army on September 14, 2012.

Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.

Family members mourn the deaths of their relatives in front of a field hospital in Aleppo on August 21, 2012.

A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.

A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover as a Syrian Army tank shell hits a building across the street during clashes in the Salaheddine neighborhood of central Aleppo on August 17, 2012.

Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.

Rebel fighters with the Free Syrian Army capture a police officer in Aleppo, Syria, who they believed to be pro-regime militiaman on July 31, 2012. Dozens of officers were reportedly killed as rebels seized police stations in the city.

People gather on May 26, 2012, at a mass burial for victims reportedly killed by Syrian forces in Syria's Houla region. U.N. officials confirmed that more than 100 Syrian civilians were killed , including nearly 50 children. Syria's government denied its troops were behind the bloodbath.

An injured man gets treated in a Damascus neighborhood on April 3, 2012.

An injured man gets treated in a Damascus neighborhood on April 3, 2012.

Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.

Syrian refugees walk across a field in Syria before crossing into Turkey on March 14, 2012.

Supporters of al-Assad celebrate during a referendum vote in Damascus on February 26, 2012. Opposition activists reported at least 55 deaths across the country as Syrians headed to the polls. Analysts and protesters widely described the constitutional referendum as a farce. ""Essentially, what (al-Assad's) done here is put a piece of paper that he controls to a vote that he controls so that he can try and maintain control,"" a U.S. State Department spokeswoman said.

Suicide bombs hit two security service bases in Damascus on December 23, 2011, killing at least 44 people and wounding 166.

Jamal al-Wadi of Daraa speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.

Jamal al-Wadi of Daraa speaks in Istanbul on September 15, 2011, after an alignment of Syrian opposition leaders announced the creation of a Syrian National Council -- their bid to present a united front against al-Assad's regime and establish a democratic system.

Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.

Syrian children walk over bricks stored for road repairs during a spontaneous protest June 15, 2011, at a refugee camp near the Syrian border in Yayladagi, Turkey.

Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.

Anti-government protesters demonstrate in Daraa on March 23, 2011. In response to continuing protests, the Syrian government announced several plans to appease citizens.

An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, south of Damascus, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.

An injured man lying in the back of a vehicle is rushed to a hospital in Daraa, south of Damascus, on March 23, 2011. Violence flared in Daraa after a group of teens and children were arrested for writing political graffiti. Dozens of people were killed when security forces cracked down on demonstrations.

Pro-government protesters hold pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, during a rally in Damascus, Syria, on March 18, 2011. Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria since 2000, when his father passed away following 30 years in charge. An anti-regime uprising that started in March 2011 has spiraled into civil war. The United Nations estimates more than 220,000 people have been killed.

Pro-government protesters hold pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, during a rally in Damascus, Syria, on March 18, 2011. Bashar al-Assad has ruled Syria since 2000, when his father passed away following 30 years in charge. An anti-regime uprising that started in March 2011 has spiraled into civil war. The United Nations estimates more than 220,000 people have been killed.

As Arab Spring demonstrations overthrow governments across the Middle East, a group of children in Daraa, southern Syria, are arrested and allegedly tortured for scrawling graffiti on a school reading ""the people want to topple the regime.""

Outrage over the arrests turns into protests and a brutal crackdown

Protesters clash with Syrian security forces on the streets of Daraa in March 2011.

As the bloodshed gets worse, the opposition gets organized

The West calls for Assad to quit, but Russia and China have other ideas

Meanwhile, the influence of Islamist groups grows in rebel ranks

The U.N. brokers a ceasefire that falls apart almost immediately

As refugees flee, the U.N. accuses Syria of crimes against humanity

Barack Obama announces his 'red line' in Syria for the first (but not last) time

Two years in, 60,000 are dead, and the U.S. says it will send aid to rebels

February 2013: The U.S. The U.S. promises to send food and medical supplies -- but not weapons -- to Syrian rebels. It's the first such move since the conflict began two years before, in an effort to hem in the radical Islamist groups vying for influence in Syria. More than 60,000 people are now dead and nearly a million have fled the country.

European nations join the list of countries sending weapons into Syria

Syria crosses Obama's 'red line,' and the U.S. prepares to attack

John Kerry goes off script, and the Russians pounce

140,000 are dead in Syria as peace talks go nowhere fast

ISIS declares an independent state in Iraq and Syria

The U.S. launches airstrikes on ISIS in Syria

Kurdish forces, backed by U.S. strikes, take back Kobani from ISIS

ISIS seizes Palmyra and blows up its priceless ruins

Donors pledge more than $10 billion to Syria

February 11, 2016: Diplomats from more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Russia, Diplomats from more than a dozen countries, including the United States and Russia, agree in Munich, Germany, to a ""cessation of hostilities"" -- a temporary halt in fighting that commonly happens at the start of a peace process -- and to the delivery of aid. Terrorist groups, including ISIS and al-Nusra, are not included in the deal. The partial truce does not take hold a week later as originally hoped, but there are renewed efforts to implement the deal the following Friday",REAL
"Home › SOCIETY | US NEWS › STATE OF GEORGIA FIRES PASTOR BECAUSE OF HIS FAITH; GOVERNMENT DIDN’T “APPROVE” BIBLICAL SERMONS STATE OF GEORGIA FIRES PASTOR BECAUSE OF HIS FAITH; GOVERNMENT DIDN’T “APPROVE” BIBLICAL SERMONS 0 SHARES [10/27/16] In the latest turn of events in the United States Government’s war against Christianity, a Pastor is now being required by a Federal court to turn over the transcripts and notes of all of the sermons he has ever conducted. A minister who was hired by the Georgia Department of Public Health was recently fired because of his faith, and sermon contents. Dr. Eric Walsh, a Seventh-day Adventist lay minister, is suing the State of Georgia Department of Public Health for religious discrimination. 
A very simple question should cross your mind as you read this report, should my pastor’s sermons be approved by the Government or God? 
The state of Georgia inquired that the pastor relinquish his sermons to the government, according to federal court documents. 
“Please produce a copy of your sermon notes and/or transcripts,” Attorney General Samuel Olens wrote to attorneys representing Dr. Eric Walsh. 
Dr. Walsh refuses to comply with the request because in May 2014, when Walsh was hired by the District Health Director; another government official asked him to submit copies of his sermons for review. He complied, and two days later he was fired. 
His attorneys said the government was curious about sermons Dr. Walsh delivered on health, marriage, sexuality, world religions, science, and creationism. He also preached on what the Bible says regarding homosexuality. 
Since the event, Dr. Walsh has filed a federal lawsuit charging state officials with engaging in religious discrimination. 
“He was fired for something he said in a sermon,” attorney Jeremy Dys told me. “If the government is allowed to fire someone over what he said in his sermons, they can come after any of us for our beliefs on anything.” 
Dr. Walsh has assembled a powerhouse legal team comprised of Parks, Chesin & Walbert along with First Liberty Institute, one of the nation’s most prominent religious liberty law firms. Post navigation",FAKE
"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
"  Two More Hollywood Films For Men That Leave Today’s SJW Movies In The Dust Two More Hollywood Films For Men That Leave Today’s SJW Movies In The Dust Bob Smith 
Bob Smith is a man in search of the truth. His favorite quotes are, ""We're all fools on this earth, and I can be no different""; ""I know it's true, I read it at the LIE-brary""; and ""The truth is not misogynistic, it's just the truth"". November 11, 2016 Culture 
Today we are going to take a quick look at two epic Clint Eastwood films, one of which is a well-known, Western classic ( The Outlaw Josey Wales ). The other one is a little-known, under-the-radar gem, which showcases the psychotic insanity of the deranged Western female ( Play Misty for Me ). 
Both of these superb RPO films will leave any red-pill male feeling wholly satisfied, shortly after viewing them, and, well, that’s what these movie reviews of your old Uncle Bob’s are all about, are they not…helping you find the bona fide gold nuggets amid the endlessly steaming piles of SJW Hollywood crap? Yes indeed. 
So let’s get crackin’. 1. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976 – Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Bill McKinney, John Vernon) 
Clint Eastwood directed and starred in this sweeping, extremely well-crafted, post-Civil War epic film, and the cinematography and direction are undeniably excellent. But Eastwood’s portrayal of the Southern-sympathizer, Josey Wales, who has a major score to settle after Union troops burn his house down and murder his wife and children, is in itself a major cinematic achievement. 
Out for blood and taking no prisoners, Eastwood’s merciless Josey Wales thunders across the plains and prairies of the American West, blowing scores of Northern soldiers away in the process, as he makes a desperate dash towards Mexico, and what he hopes will be sanctuary. But Wales gets sidetracked along the way, collecting a stray dog and a few stray human beings as well, which proves that the only thing a man can truly count on in this life is change. 
There’s a great scene early on in the film, involving Josey Wales’ partner in crime, Jaimie (played by Sam Bottoms), where he starts babbling incoherently, while faking a state of fever-induced delirium from underneath a blanket, as the two outlaws are confronted by a pair of backwoods yahoos who are looking to collect the bounty that has recently been placed on Wales’ head. 
Here, we clearly see the behavior of the typical, frightened, woefully outmanned beta male, as character actor Len Lesser (who portrays the overmatched bounty hunter Abe) starts yapping and barking in a very loud voice, while jerking around excitedly, shortly after getting the drop on Eastwood’s alpha-male killing-machine. 
If you’re an alpha male and you’re in good shape, you’ve undoubtedly seen similar beta-male behavior. Probably at a bar, when some paunchy beta asswit, who’s sitting with his cucked crew, has had one too many beers and starts cutting you down in a passive-aggressive manner, from your periphery, as he barks and yaps in an excited voice about how tough he used to be, or how he doesn’t need to lift weights to be a man, or how he doesn’t think it’s cool to wear tight shorts (a hostile barb born of envy, uttered because he feels his package is inadequate). Yup, you know the routine. 
In the film’s wow-we-almost-had-a-gangbang scene, featuring a somewhat-turned-on Sondra Locke (see above photo; Locke portrays Kansas-born settler, Laura Lee), as she’s confronted in the back of a covered wagon and dragged outside by a group of lusty Comancheros, which was obviously a blatant exaggeration, because, as we already know, all rapes are committed by totally unattractive, deranged, horribly evil, light-skinned men who smell badly and have absolutely zero neck tattoos—“ E , ” etc.—Clint’s character comes riding to the rescue out of the hills and guns the would-be rapists down, which probably made SJWs and feminists at the time scream with unbridled outrage at the theater screen, “She was giving her consent ! Didn’t you see it ? It was in her eyes ! It’s her right to express herself sexually, with however many men she might choose ! Murderer! Creeper! Pussy-blocker !” 
Unfortunately, just like today, there were feminists and SJWs aplenty back in 1976. Their numbers have been growing with a vengeance since roughly the mid-1960s, and after more than 50 years in the saddle, they still keep going round and round in circles, yelling preprogrammed buzzwords and catch-phrases, while unknowingly speeding up the destruction of freedom of speech, but hey, Uncle Bob, tell us something we don’t already know, and yeah, I’ll get back to the film review now. 
My favorite scene in the movie occurs when Josey Wales (who, now that I think about it, is a bit of a white knight, hmm…), rescues a Native American woman who is about to be double-teamed against her will by a pair of drunken white trappers. 
Eastwood’s mad-dog character ultimately gets the drop on the would-be bounty-collectors, and he blows them straight to hell in an impressive hail of gunfire, which, I’ll have to admit, is pretty darned cool in itself. I mean, that’s why we watch films like this, isn’t it – for the violence, and the babes, and the red-pill messages? Well, there are plenty of those to be had in this no-holds-barred, epic Western film. 
Maybe I’m going to have to rethink this movie in terms of it being perceived as a wholly red-pill film. Clint’s character stepped up and stopped a potential gangbang, as well as a three-way, and nobody asked him to do it. So this might have been a sly, Hollywood warm-up for the series of blatant white knight films we see today, but I don’t really want to think that way about Clint, so I won’t. I’ll just gulp down a quick blue pill right now—ah, much better. 
I mean, Clint played Dirty Harry Callahan, for chrissakes, in a film that I will hopefully be reviewing at a later date, if I don’t get hit by a truck driven by an illegal alien who’s sporting 20 arrests for murder while having no driver’s license; or lynched by a swarm of rabid SJWs who are on the hunt for any white male who isn’t a media CEO or a billionaire. 
The film bogs down a bit after about the two-thirds mark, in my opinion, but it still gets high marks across the board in every other critical category. If you haven’t seen it, rectify that soon. You can’t miss by watching this top-drawer, RPO film for men. 2. Play Misty for Me (1971 – Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills) 
Unless they are over-the-top, laughingly ridiculous, obviously fictional slasher films, red-pill movies like this one just don’t get made in Hollywood any longer. 
When you think of Clint Eastwood, you usually think of Dirty Harry , or The Outlaw Josey Wales , or Unforgiven , or Gran Torino, but Clint made a few obscure films that were both solidly red pill, and truly excellent movies, although they’ve been swept under the rug and locked away in the film vaults by today’s liberal-leaning film-hiders. 
In this well-directed, highly suspenseful thriller, Carmel-by-the-sea disk jockey, Dave Carver (Clint Eastwood) lives a freewheeling, alpha male lifestyle, regularly banging out an assortment of hot women who listen to his live jazz broadcasts on a nightly basis. Carver is living the dream, pounding most of the available hot babes, and thoroughly enjoying his rightfully appointed alpha male privilege (or is that white male privilege?…er…SJW moment there, sorry). 
That is, until Jessica Walter’s psycho-stalker character, Evelyn, walks into his life. 
Now, you may have encountered a few of these yourself. Or maybe it’s just me. Sometimes I think I have an invisible sign on my forehead that only the initiated can read, which proclaims, “If you’re hot and insane—I’m your guy.” But Clint Eastwood shows us exactly what it’s like to be pursed by an attractive, psycho, female stalker. From writing creepy notes to him in lipstick on his mirror, to cutting up his clothing, to attacking his cleaning lady in a fit of jealous rage, Clint’s disk-jockey character quickly begins to realize that he bit off a hell of a lot more than just pussy when he started banging actress Jessica Walter’s batshit-crazy Evelyn. 
I’ve always had a feeling that actresses who were really good in these psycho roles, were just being themselves. But I could be wrong about that. (I was wrong once before—it was in the third grade and she didn’t really love me.) Be that as it may, Jessica Walters really brings her A-game in the role of the totally unhinged Evelyn. If you’ve ever had a relationship with a woman like this one, watching the film will send chills down your spine, and result in some serious flashback imagery. 
(Have you ever done this—what Clint is doing in the above photo—namely, hold and comfort a crazy woman who somehow managed to weasel her way into your life, by skillfully turning you into both an enabler and a caretaker…if so, I definitely feel your pain. And I’ll bet Clint has experienced it a time or three himself, or he probably wouldn’t have done this film.) 
Play Misty for Me is absolutely worth watching for myriad reasons; but the most important reason of all, I wholeheartedly believe, is because it will clearly demonstrate to you, in no uncertain terms, the subtle and overt signs that a man absolutely has to be able to recognize, in order to avoid being blindsided by a psychotic, unhinged female. And for that reason alone, it’s a must-see classic, no doubt about it; when Clint’s character ultimately gets revenge on his tormentor, at the very end of this excellent RPO film, you’ll feel all warm and fuzzy inside, too—and in a weird, viscerally satisfying way—which makes the whole experience just that much more gratifying. 
By boycotting all modern SJW Hollywood cinema, you are sending a message to the power structure that is loud and clear—you are not being fooled by their deliberate attempts to poison people’s minds and socially engineer them to be pussified, dumbed-down, blue-pill-sucking robots. 
Always research the plot lines of any films for which you are seriously considering buying a ticket, or renting on DVD. And if you smell an SJW rat, don’t spend your money. It’s that simple. In the end, it’s just like investigating a potential LTR candidate. You have to conduct your due diligence. Otherwise, you might just get taken for a ride.",FAKE
"56 Views November 14, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
As the bond market continues to melt down, interest rates rise and the Dollar Index surges above 100, legend Art Cashin gave one of his most important interviews ever to King World News about a Trump presidency, the New World Order, gold, Brexit, the Great Depression, and why we will see panic before the end of the year. 
Eric King: “In Trump’s acceptance speech he said that we are going to have massive infrastructure spending. Is that bearish for gold? I don’t think so.” 
Gold Market Hit As Druckenmiller Sells Art Cashin: “No. That on the face of it would not be a reason to sell gold. One of the things that may have concerned Druckenmiller was not so much your scenario of fiscal spending and building roads and highways, but the fact that despite what the Fed has been doing, the money supply has not been showing any velocity. That’s a topic you and I have discussed time and time again and it’s one of the holdups to gold because if it gets no velocity that’s deflationary. 
In fact, the largest growth in money stock is in cash — green pictures of dead presidents — and that is deflationary because that does not have a lending factor that money in a bank would have. So those are two deflationary trends in money and that tends to weigh a little bit on gold and doesn’t allow it to fulfill its promise that you would expect in a somewhat inflationary period.” 
Eric King: “Victor Sperandeo, a former associate of George Sorors, said to me this will be ‘pure money printing.’ That we are going to print trillions of dollars and build infrastructure — talk about how you view that. Obviously there are going to be jobs created and it will be great for infrastructure, so it will juice the economy, but what are the longer-term ramifications?” 
Art Cashin: “On the face of it, it looks good. As you said, there will be jobs created and there will be improvements in roads and airports and so on. However, the other shoe to fall is that Mr. Trump is also committed to revamping the tax code. And those two things should lead to a massive increase in the deficit. And we are already deeply in debt, so people like Rosenberg and others feel like it will have virtually no impact. 
On the face of it the stimulus program should be great for the economy, but because you are in such a high level of debt it might not work out that way. He and others point out that if fiscal stimulus were the answer then Japan would be the king of the world with all of those bridges to nowhere that they built. Japan spent a lot of money, built up their deficit, and their economy never really turned around.” 
Eric King: “Going back even further than that and looking at the Great Depression, the United States was struggling and then FDR devalued the dollar by revaluing the price of gold higher. Those public works projects then got underway, the massive public works projects that built so much of the infrastructure here in the United States, Art. And that did turn the stock market around. It turned many things around — commodities, etc — but then it rolled over by 1937-1938 and then the war came. Is this infrastructure spending program something that can look good for a little while and then it will just roll over like we saw in 1937-1938?” 
Art Cashin: “It can. And the problem (during the Great Depression) was that the thing didn’t click, as it were. It didn’t lead to the next step. You hire people, you do the road projects, you do whatever, and then you want to see them go out and spend and business begin to borrow and banks to lend. And in ’37 and ’38 that never fully kicked in. U.S. Experiences Second Stock Market Collapse From 1937 To 1938 
You had high government officials, in frustration, go to Congress and testify: “We couldn’t get it started. We just couldn’t get it started.” 
For all of the deficit spending, for all of the government programs, it never fully worked. That’s the fear. Again, if you go back to Japan, clearly they spent trillions of Japanese yen in massive building projects and it never kicked in, it never took over. The people continued to worry and hold onto their money. 
A Worried Public Is Hoarding Cash As I’ve told you before, this whole thing about helicopter money and whatnot, if Bernanke flew over your house and dropped a million dollars in brand new money, and you were so worried that you got up and hid it in the garage until you figured out what the economy was going to do…And that is virtually what has happened to us for the past seven years. 
They have tried all kinds of increases in money supply but it has never kicked in and people are so terrified that they are not spending, and basically, as I said, the large amount of growth was in cash. So they are putting it in the mattress, not even in the bank.” 
Eric King: “Art, for so many years on King World News you have been talking about this lending and spending not kicking in, and you have used that Bernanke analogy over and over again. It’s not normal for you to beat up on a point as much as you have. But earlier you brought up Japan, and then when we covered the Great Depression you discussed 1937-1938, and the the testimonies before Congress from people saying, ‘We just couldn’t get it started.’ Did you know all along that it was going to unfold this way to some degree with the lack of lending and spending? Did you know that from history?” 
Art Cashin: “I had a fear of it and it became pretty evident after some of the first things they (central planners) did. It is not a very difficult game. Every week the Federal Reserve reports the Money Supply and the Federal Reserve of St. Louis reports the Monetary Stock, which is the amount of raw money that the Fed adds in. “We Just Couldn’t Get It Started” – Monetary Stock Plunging 
“That Shouldn’t Be” For a year now, despite all the things you have heard, despite all the programs and ‘pump-priming’ and Yellen and all the doves, the Monetary Stock has not increased all year. That shouldn’t be. 60-Year Velocity Of Money Stock Hitting New Lows 
If money has velocity, then you can see the economy begin to move up. If it gets too much velocity, then you get to see inflation. But so far we are not getting a high dose of either. Although, if you ask somebody standing in the supermarket if they have inflation they might give you a bit of an argument. But by government standards it’s not quite there yet.” 
Eric King: “Along those same lines, Art, you’ve warned repeatedly about Weimar Germany and the experience of the 1920s. This idea that there can be no inflation and then suddenly it just kicks in and then all hell breaks loose. You’ve warned so many time about that. Is that what’s in front of us?” 
Art Cashin: “You will begin to know it. Everybody talks about the Weimar Republic where they actually printed cash money and flooded the system. It wasn’t just the bank reserves — they actually flooded the system with paper money. And amazingly, amazingly, it was a while before that actually kicked in in an inflationary manner. And as you alluded to, I’ve said this time and time again, it’s one of those things like spontaneous combustion — it’s there and it’s there and it’s there and suddenly it bursts into flames. And when it bursts into flames it consumes everything about it. And that’s when you can have a runaway inflation. 
But so far it has not burst into flames. And that is why to even some degree the Fed is frustrated, hoping to get inflation up above 2 percent. And they may be in a position where, be careful what you wish for. Because if they get 2 percent and above it could suddenly combust and things could begin to move rather rapidly.” 
Eric King: “Art, let me ask you this about the Trump presidency. It seems like for those people out there who, as he said, felt lost, the lost Americans, and for those out there who really felt like they were having globalism shoved down their throats in Europe and in the United States, this seemed to be a moment in time where there was going to be some backtracking. The borders were going to be closed, there would be some protectionism — we all know the plusses and minuses of that — but how did you view this Trump election and him becoming president, the idea that the elite got sand kicked in their face and that this New World Order would be slowed down, if only for a moment?” 
Donald Trump’s Shocker And Why Brexit Is Nowhere Near Over Art Cashin: “I view it as yet one more extension of what looks to be a populist revolt that is sweeping the world. You saw the beginning of it with Brexit, and you have too many pundits on TV saying, ‘Well, that ended quickly in reverse.’ Brexit is nowhere near over. But the reason that markets didn’t continue to spiral (downward) is that they realized that Brexit has basically been postponed. They haven’t gone in and declared Article 50. Once they start the process in motion, the consequences of Brexit are going to be there and they are going to be drastic. 
Now, if you take Trump’s election as the second leg of populism, the next thing you look for is the December 4th referendum in Italy. And there’s a good chance that will cause the government to fail and Italy will be right back in the middle of a major European crisis, and we’ll be right back where we were with Greece (only much larger in scale). So this game is far from over and we could see further panic as we head into the end of the year.” 
Eric King: “Ahead of what’s going to happen in Italy, because I think that will unfold as you just predicted, Art, a Trump America going forward and this idea that the elites have been pushing globalism down everybody’s throats with NAFTA and so many things that have happened around the world. The globalism and the push to eliminate national boundaries, we’ve seen that in Europe and of course they had talked about combining Canada, the United States and Mexico into one regional unit. This idea that globalism has taken a huge blow here, is that true? Or did it just slow it down? What will a Trump presidency mean in that sense?” 
“You’re Fired!” Art Cashin: “We’ve got a lot of things to see. Over the next week or two you are going to see whom he appoints to the cabinet and who holds him under their sway. It would appear, however, because of the size of his commitment, he’s got to address globalization and global trade. He’s got to go back and revisit even NAFTA. 
I think some of his early attempts will be reasonably good. He will do some fiscal stimulus, some building and repairing, hopefully getting the tax structure in better order. But that will not be the end of it. He can pivot a bit but he can’t completely abandon it (his campaign promises). People will have to watch what he does. 
Now, he may cleverly hire some people and put burdens on their shoulders. If after six months things don’t work out, he can revert to his TV personality and say, ‘You’re fired,’ to show the American people that he’s staying on top. But for now…KWN encourages everyone around the world to listen to one of legendary Art Cashin’s greatest audio interviews ever discussing the gold market at length, including the recent takedown in gold and what to make of Druckenmiller selling, what to surprises to expect in key markets as Trump becomes president, and what impact massive public works projects will have on the United States, inflation, gold, bonds, and much more, by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
***KWN has now released the extraordinary KWN audio interview with whistleblower Andrew Maguire, where he discusses the gold and silver smash, at what price the large sovereign wholesale bids are located, and much more, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Greyerz – Historic Shocker, A Difficult Road And A Major Short Squeeze About To Unfold CLICK HERE. 
© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
"Dr. David Duke and Prof. Kevin MacDonald on Duke’s overwhelming victory in the debate November 3, 2016 at 10:24 am 
Dr. David Duke and Prof. Kevin MacDonald on Duke’s overwhelming victory in the debate 
Today Dr. Duke talked about his senatorial debate last night, including the attempt by Black Lives Matter activists to attack him and his police escort and the so-called moderator debating with him. Despite him being the target of attacks from all sides, Dr. Duke was judged the winner by 95% of the respondents to the NBC on-line poll. 
Professor Kevin MacDonald then joined the show and talked about the significance of the debate and the election. This is an amazing show that you don’t want to miss. 

Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. 
Click on Image to Donate! 
And please spread this message to others.",FAKE
"Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review and a former CNN producer and correspondent. Follow her @FridaGhitis . The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) The unmistakable smell of hypocrisy permeating the latest congressional hearings on Benghazi is so pungent that few people believe the claims from the panel's leaders that they are only searching for the truth. Almost three-quarters of Americans now believe the investigation is motivated by a quest for political gain rather than by a genuine wish to get at the facts.

It's no wonder. Other national tragedies, other terrorist attacks, other major failings of U.S. operations overseas have received limited attention -- sometimes none at all -- from congressional investigators. A comparison of the way Congress responded to other U.S. security disasters that deserved close scrutiny strongly suggests all you need to know about the partisan, electoral politics at play in Washington today.

To be sure, the events of Sept. 11, 2012 , in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens , and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi constituted a calamitous failure and most certainly warranted a congressional investigation.

But that investigation already happened, over and over and over. What we see now is clearly political theater, a maneuver by the Republican majority aimed at eroding support for the likely Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Vast majorities of Democrats and independents see it that way, and almost half of all Republicans agree.

While Benghazi has been the subject of seven congressional investigations, in addition to one by an accountability review board, there are countless cases where Congress spent little time and money examining what went wrong.

For example, Congress does not appear particularly interested in looking at what caused the disaster a few weeks ago, when the U.S. bombed a hospital operated by the charity Doctors Without Borders, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, even though the mistake cost nearly two dozen lives and harmed America's efforts in the area.

But that tempered interest is hardly a fluke. In fact, the enthusiasm with which Congress has jumped to investigate the Benghazi debacle is unprecedented.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, a Joint Inquiry in Congress looked at five previous major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks against the U.S. to see where intelligence had failed. The incidents included the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the 1999 ""Millennium"" plot, and the strike on the USS Cole in 2000.

These were not minor or inconsequential terrorist operations. They were deadly and they foreshadowed what came later. The embassy bombings, two simultaneous explosions in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, killed more than 200 people and left more than 4,000 injured.

Congress held a handful of hearings, but no formal investigation. The investigation was conducted by the FBI and ultimately resulted in the indictment of several men, including one Osama Bin Laden.

Not one of these five terrorist plots against the U.S. produced a level of congressional interest even remotely approaching what we see now on Benghazi and on Hillary Clinton. No investigation took as long. Even that joint congressional investigation was completed in 10 months.

If congressional leaders believe concern for the safety of diplomatic personnel warrants the magnitude and duration of their efforts, it's curious that Congress spent so little time reviewing the Africa embassy bombings, or any of the many other attacks on American diplomats who have died in the line of duty over the years; people like 33-year-old John Granville, a diplomat working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, shot to death in Khartoum, Sudan in 2008, or David Foy, 51, killed in a massive blast outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan in 2006.

If the issue is the failures of security, of intelligence, or of judgment that have cost the lives of U.S. citizens on dangerous assignments, it's curious that the events of an awful day in late 2009 at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan did not merit this kind of scrutiny. That was when seven Americans working for the CIA were killed when a man who was supposed to be an informant, invited by American agents to be the base, turned out to be a radical jihadi, a suicide bomber who blew himself up. The dead included Jennifer Matthews, 45, one of the CIA's top al Qaeda experts. That incident was investigated by the CIA, not Congress.

If it's terrorism that justifies the obsessive attention to Benghazi, it's interesting that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the worst terrorist attack before 9/11, was not the target of a slew of congressional panels the way Benghazi is. The only report from Congress on the Oklahoma bombing was privately released by Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who was searching for an elusive ""foreign connection."" The attack, which killed 168 people, was investigated by the FBI.

Yes, all of those happened years ago. But what about the Boston bombings of April 2013? They did warrant an investigation by the Homeland Security Committee, which produced a couple of reports. That's a minuscule investigation compared with the Benghazi work by congressional committees including, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Senate Committee On Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and others, each of which has already conducted its own investigation and issued its own report.

What happened in Benghazi back in 2012 was horrific and it is crucial that the U.S. learns from its mistakes. Investigating what exactly went wrong is an imperative. But what is unfolding in Washington is not about that. History proves it. That's the whiff so many people detect. We know what it is.",REAL
"Posted on November 3, 2016 by Charles Hugh Smith 
Let’s set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead , and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes. 
The corruption of pay-to-play and the commingling of public and private influence is not the failing of an individual–it is the logical conclusion of a thoroughly corrupt political system. 
Given the incentives built into politics as usual , public/private pay-to-play doesn’t just make sense–it is the only possible maximization of the political system . 
Cobble together a multi-million dollar private foundation, millions of dollars in speaking fees from big-money contributors, conflicts of interest, the secrecy of private email servers, pay-to-play schemes and corrupted loyalists planted in the Department of Justice, and the inevitable result is a politics as usual money-harvesting machine that lays waste to the nation, supporters and critics alike. 
All the Clintons did is assemble the parts more effectively than anyone else. Now that the machine has scooped up hundreds of millions of dollars in “contributions” and other loot, vested interests and corrupted loyalists within the federal government will do anything to protect the machine and its vast flow of funds. 
The nation’s political system needs a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of politics as usual won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption. 
That will require rooting out the incentives that made the Clintons’ perfection of corruption both logical and inevitable.",FAKE
"  Carol Adl in News , World // 0 Comments 
Russia has failed to win re-election to the United Nations Human Rights Council. 
President Putin was beaten by Hungary and Croatia in a vote by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly on Friday. 
For the first time since its inception in 2006, Russia will not be a member of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after being narrowly beaten by Croatia in a vote. 
More than 80 human rights and aid organizations had urged UN member-states to vote Russia off the council because of its military support to President Bashar al-Assad during the crisis in Syria. 
Saudi Arabia on the other hand was successfully re-elected despite criticism from human rights organizations. 
RT reports: 
Saudi Arabia sailed through the Asian ballot with 152 votes, and will represent the region on the UNHRC alongside China, Japan and Iraq for the next three years. 
South Africa, Rwanda, Egypt and Tunisia were chosen from the African group, Cuba and Brazil from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the US and the UK will represent the Western bloc, which comprises Western Europe and North America. 
Over the next term, which will last between 2017 and 2019, the 14 chosen members will be tasked with formulating the UN’s official position on conflicts occurring around the world, as well as the domestic policies of member states. 
The elections took place against a backdrop of criticism from non-governmental human rights organizations, who say that the body has been hijacked by oppressive regimes looking to deflect criticism and drive their own agendas. 
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International produced a joint statement earlier this year condemning Riyadh for “an appalling record of violations” in Yemen, where it has conducted a bombing campaign against Houthi rebels since 2015, which has resulted in the deaths of up to 4,000 civilians. The two organizations called for Saudi Arabia, a member of the UNHRC since it was created in 2006, to be suspended – to no avail. 
Saudi Arabia used its power in the council to block an outside inquiry into the campaign last month, while leading a successful resolution that placed the responsibility of investigating human rights abuses in the hands of its allies, the exiled Yemeni government. 
Saudi Arabia carried out 157 executions domestically last year – the highest number in two decades, and is on pace to match the number this year. Critics of the regime have often faced detention, while women do not enjoy autonomy and equal status before the law.",FAKE
"[White might burning courtesy Informed Content .] =By= Juan Cole W hether Trump wins or loses (and in my view there isn’t much chance he can win), he will leave behind a toxic legacy of increased racial and religious hatred, which he has deliberately stirred up in order to take the focus off his policies– policies that will hurt workers and will throw even more money at the super-wealthy. This use of racism to divide the working class and whip up support for the business classes is as old as American capitalism.
Trump has whipped up sentiment against Latinos and immigrants (a minority of Americans of Latino ancestry is first-generation immigrants) by loudly proclaiming that they are guilty of all kinds of crimes. In fact, violent has fallen 48% in the US since the early 1990s, yet in the past 25 years immigration has soared. Research shows that immigrants commit less crime than the native-born. It isn’t hard to figure out why. First, those who don’t yet have citizenship are afraid of being deported, so they keep their noses clean. But more importantly, and contrary to what Trump alleges, immigrants are go-getters who have taken the big step of leaving home to accomplish something. They are highly motivated to succeed and often bring with them a great deal of human capital. As for jobs, immigrants aren’t stealing them from the native born. They are doing different jobs than locals with the same educational attainments. That’s because they often don’t have as good English skills or can’t afford to turn down menial jobs. The hatred against immigrants Trump has fostered is based on a set of lies, lies that are easily shown to be falsehoods. But it is a little unlikely that this hatred of foreigners will subside Wednesday , whatever happens. 
Trump has given aid and comfort to the American far right. With his racist dog whistles (and often just unadorned racism) he has emboldened the Ku Klux Klan, Alt-right and other disgusting organizations. David Duke of Louisiana has been encouraged to run for the senate and is pledging to be Trump’s biggest supporter. This genie will be hard to put back into its lamp. 
Trump has encouraged hatred for Muslims in the US on an unprecedented scale. Hatred for Muslims has already been adopted as a latent platform by the Republican Party, but they are usually at least a little more subtle about it. If Trump can succeed in discriminating against Muslim-Americans, he can then proceed to discriminate against the rest of us on one pretext or another. Muslim-Americans are only 1% of our population. There isn’t actually any danger of them taking over the country or imposing their religious law, and most terrorism comes from the far right or from overseas, not from native-born Muslim-Americans. Trump supporters have already burned down a mosque in Florida, have assaulted Muslims (and Sikhs, whose men wear turbans) all over the country, and some Trumpists have plotted terrorism against Muslims. 
Trump has left a legacy of contempt for women and a resurgent patriarchy. He has juvenilized women and hurled slurs at them. He accused Megyn Kelly of being on her period when she asked him sharp questions. He boasted about grabbing strangers by the genitals. His message is that women should be judged not by their intelligence, hard work, or character but by their breast size and figure and the symmetry of their faces. 
Trump has taken optimistic trend lines and pulled them down into Sheol with him. He has diminished our country, traumatized our children, and made us laughingstocks in the urbane capitals of the world. He leaves us a large bequest, tied up with a bow, of hatred and prejudice, smelling like the piece of dog shit that is Donald Trump 
Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
"A South Korean naval vessel fired five shots as a warning to a North Korean patrol boat that briefly moved south of the countries' disputed boundary line in the Yellow Sea, Seoul's defense ministry said Monday.

A South Korean military official told the Yonhap news agency that the North Korean vessel retreated northward after the warning shots were fired into the water. However, the incident underscores the heightened hostilities between the two Koreas.

The brief encounter came hours after the United Nations Security Council condemned North Korea's launch of a long-range rocket that world leaders described as a banned test of ballistic missile technology and South Korea's president called another ""intolerable provocation.""

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un went ahead with the launch just two hours after an eight-day window opened early Sunday, and a month after the country's fourth nuclear test. He ignored an appeal from China, its neighbor and important ally, not to proceed, and, in another slap to Beijing, he chose to launch the rocket on the eve of Chinese New Year, the country's most important holiday.

China and the United States have been negotiating the text of a new Security Council sanctions resolution since Pyongyang's Jan. 6 nuclear test, which it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. That claim has been met with outside skepticism.

The U.S., backed by Japan and South Korea, wants tough U.N. sanctions reflecting Kim's defiance of the Security Council. But diplomats say China, the North's key protector in the council, is reluctant to impose economic measures that could cause North Korea's economy to collapse — and a flight of North Koreans into China across their shared border.

The 15-member Security Council strongly condemned the launch and pledged to ""expeditiously"" adopt a new resolution with ""further significant measures"" — U.N. code for sanctions. The word ""robust"" referring to the measures was in an initial draft, but was dropped in the final statement.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power told reporters that ""it cannot be business as usual"" after two successive North Korean acts that are ""hostile and illegal.""

""What's important is that the Security Council unites,"" Power said. ""China is a critical player. ... We are hopeful that China, like all council members, will see the grave threat to regional and international peace and security, see the importance of adopting tough, unprecedented measures, breaking new ground here, exceeding the expectations of Kim Jong Un.""

He said a new resolution should ""do the work of reducing tension, of working toward denuclearization (of the Korean peninsula), of maintaining peace and stability, and of encouraging a negotiated solution.""

""I believe the council needs to work together for a new resolution,"" Liu added, indicating that China may want negotiations with the United States to be widened.

Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, whose country is also a North Korean ally, said: ""It has to be a weighty resolution, but it also has to be a reasonable resolution"" that doesn't lead to North Korea's economic or humanitarian collapse, or further heighten tensions.

Russia's goal is to see six-party talks aimed at denuclearization resume, he said, but in the current atmosphere that's unlikely because the North Koreans ""have been very unreasonable"" and are challenging the entire international community.

""We think this is wrong for their national interests ... for the Korean Peninsula ... for the region,"" Churkin said.

North Korea, which calls its launches part of a peaceful space program, said it had successfully put a new Earth observation satellite, the Kwangmyongsong 4, or Shining Star 4, into orbit less than 10 minutes after liftoff, and vowed more such launches. A U.S. official said it might take days to assess whether the launch was a success.

But in Pyongyang, North Koreans celebrated the launch with an official fireworks display Monday night, state broadcaster KCTV reported, according to CNN.

Japan's U.N. ambassador, Motohide Yoshikawa, told reporters the missile, which went over Japan and landed near the Philippines, was ""a clear threat to the lives of many people.""

The Security Council underscored that launches using ballistic missile technology, ""even if characterized as a satellite launch or space launch vehicle"" contribute to North Korea's development of systems to deliver nuclear weapons and violate four Security Council resolutions dating back to the North's first nuclear test in 2006.

North Korea under Kim Jong Un has pledged to bolster its nuclear arsenal unless Washington scraps what Pyongyang calls a hostile policy meant to collapse Kim's government.

In a development that will worry both Pyongyang and Beijing, a senior South Korean Defense Ministry official, Yoo Jeh Seung, told reporters that Seoul and Washington have agreed to begin talks on a possible deployment of the THAAD missile-defense system in South Korea. North Korea has long decried the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, and Beijing would see a South Korean deployment of THAAD, which is one of the world's most advanced missile-defense systems, as a threat to its interests in the region.

In a statement, North Korea's National Aerospace Development Administration, in typical propaganda-laden language, praised ""the fascinating vapor of Juche satellite trailing in the clear and blue sky in spring of February on the threshold of the Day of the Shining Star.""

Juche is a North Korean philosophy focusing on self-reliance; the Day of the Shining Star refers to the Feb. 16 birthday of Kim Jong Un's father, former dictator Kim Jong Il. North Korea has previously staged rocket launches to mark important anniversaries.

Fox News' Jonathan Wachtel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
By Lizzie Bennett I wrote a few days ago about vehicle preparedness in winter. I want to follow on from that today with things you should be thinking of if you find yourself caught outside in... ,FAKE
"[Photo: US missiles found in ISIS stronghold in Mosul, Iraq.] =By= Kurt Nimmo Editor's Note Reports continue of active U.S. support of ISIS while at the same time the U.S. serves a support role with Iraqi forces in their efforts to retake ISIS controlled areas in Iraq. Also reported by the Pentagon is that what is learned in the Iraqi actions will be applied in Syria. When the US has a jockey on every horse in the race, it does mean that U.S. interests are likely to be served no matter who crosses the finish line. T he Iraqis found missiles at an Islamic State base in Mosul stamped with USA and DOD.
The discovery did not warrant a headline on CNN or The New York Times. 
“Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul,” reports Iran’s al-Alam News Network , citing a local source. 
“The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war,” an Iraqi security official told an Arabic-language media outlet. 
In early 2015 Qasim al-Araji, the head of the Badr Organization in Iraq, told parliament he had evidence the US armed the Islamic State, according to a report carried by the Arabic language Almasalah . 
Iranian media and other sources claim US military aircraft dropped weapons in areas held by the Islamic State. 
“The Iraqi intelligence sources reiterated that the US military planes have airdropped several aid cargoes for ISIL terrorists to help them resist the siege laid by the Iraqi army, security and popular forces,” Iraqi intelligence claimed in December, 2014. 
“What is important is that the US sends these weapons to only those that cooperate with the Pentagon and this indicates that the US plays a role in arming the ISIL.” 
In January 2015 Iraqi MP Majid al-Ghraoui said American aircraft delivered weapons and equipment to ISIS southeast of Tikrit, located in Salahuddin province. 
“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” the leader of the committee Hakem al-Zameli said, according to the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. 
Last February Iran’s FAR News Agency reported the Iraq Army shot down two British planes delivering weapons to the Islamic State. 
Both the Islamic State and al-Nusra are in possession of US-made BGM 71E TOW anti-tank missiles. 
The London-based organization Conflict Armament Research (CAR) previously reported that ISIS fighters are using “significant quantities” of arms including M16 assault rifles marked “property of the US government.” 
CAR has documented a CIA-Saudi program begun in 2012 that has provided thousands of tons of weaponry to “insurgents” (jihadi mercenaries) in Syria. The weapons are shared with the Islamic State. 
“Conflict Armament Research was able to trace the serial numbers of weapons recovered by Kurds battling ISIS in Eastern Syria back directly to the CIA-Saudi weapons airlift program,” notes Brad Hoff for Levant Report. 
If Hillary Clinton is elected next week the restocking of the Islamic State’s arsenal and the war in Syria will continue. 
“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states that had donated to the Clinton Foundation. Saudi Arabia had chipped in at least $10 million, and Boeing added another $900,000 as Secretary Clinton made it her mission to get Saudi Arabia the planes with which it would attack Yemen,” writes David Swanson . 
Clinton is well aware the Gulf Emirates arm and provide logistical assistance to the Islamic State. 
“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region,” Clinton wrote in an email to John Podesta . 
Clinton did not mention Obama’s secret authorization in 2013 that armed jihadis fighting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The deal allowed the Saudis to arm jihadis with US weapons. It also permitted the CIA to train the mercenaries on how to use the weapons, including anti-tank missiles, The New York Times reported. 

Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
We apologize for this inconvenience. Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
"Trending Articles: Trending Articles: The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation   Source: Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg 

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating and troubling article detailing how aggressively the Department of Injustice moved to stymie efforts of FBI agents who wanted to investigate pay-to-play criminality with regard to the Clinton Foundation. Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. The Justice Department under President Obama never met a powerful person it cared to prosecute. Indeed, under Eric Holder’s crony reign (same now with Loretta Lynch), it’s been apparent for a very long time that senior leadership at the DOJ see the institution’s primary role to be the coddling and protection of oligarch criminals, especially those in the financial sector (see: Must Watch Video –“The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime” ). 
The death of the rule of law in America, otherwise known as the two-tier justice system, has been a key topic of mine since the very beginning. In fact, I think it is the number one cancer plaguing our society at this time. As I warned in the 2014 post, New Report – The United States’ Sharp Drop in Economic Freedom Since 2000 Driven by “Decline in Rule of Law” : 
In my opinion, the U.S. is living on borrowed time. The entrepreneurial spirit is still very much alive, and a lot of innovative things are happening in the tech area, but other than that, the U.S. economy looks very much like a third word oligarchy. From my perspective, we need to reinstate the rule of law at once. The bad actors amongst the rich and powerful will continue to feast relentlessly on the productive parts of the economy so long as they they are never held accountable for their crimes. Simply put: The rule of law must be restored immediately. 
When it comes to the restoration of the rule of law, there is simply no time to waste. 
The rule of law has not been restored, a realization that is consistently reenforced by the lengths to which the Department of Justice goes to protect the powerful. Yesterday’s WSJ article gives us an additional glimpse into how that happens behind the scenes. 
Here are a few excerpts from the article, FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe : 
The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. 
The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter. 
New details show that senior law-enforcement officials repeatedly voiced skepticism of the strength of the evidence in a bureau investigation of the Clinton Foundation, sought to condense what was at times a sprawling cross-country effort, and, according to some people familiar with the matter, told agents to limit their pursuit of the case. The probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity. 
Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case. 
Early this year, four FBI field offices—New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark.—were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling, according to people familiar with the matter. 
Los Angeles agents had picked up information about the Clinton Foundation from an unrelated public-corruption case and had issued some subpoenas for bank records related to the foundation, these people said. 
The Washington field office was probing financial relationships involving Mr. McAuliffe before he became a Clinton Foundation board member, these people said. Mr. McAuliffe has denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyer has said the probe is focused on whether he failed to register as an agent of a foreign entity. 
In February, FBI officials made a presentation to the Justice Department, according to these people. By all accounts, the meeting didn’t go well. 
Some said that is because the FBI didn’t present compelling evidence to justify more aggressive pursuit of the Clinton Foundation, and that the career anticorruption prosecutors in the room simply believed it wasn’t a very strong case. Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case. 
“That was one of the weirdest meetings I’ve ever been to,” one participant told others afterward, according to people familiar with the matter. 
Anticorruption prosecutors at the Justice Department told the FBI at the meeting they wouldn’t authorize more aggressive investigative techniques, such as subpoenas, formal witness interviews, or grand-jury activity. But the FBI officials believed they were well within their authority to pursue the leads and methods already under way, these people said. 
According to a person familiar with the probes, on Aug. 12, a senior Justice Department official called Mr. McCabe to voice his displeasure at finding that New York FBI agents were still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. Mr. McCabe said agents still had the authority to pursue the issue as long as they didn’t use overt methods requiring Justice Department approvals. 
The Justice Department official was “very pissed off,”according to one person close to Mr. McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant. Others said the Justice Department was simply trying to make sure FBI agents were following longstanding policy not to make overt investigative moves that could be seen as trying to influence an election. Those rules discourage investigators from making any such moves before a primary or general election, and, at a minimum, checking with anticorruption prosecutors before doing so. 
“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” Mr. McCabe asked, according to people familiar with the conversation. After a pause, the official replied, “Of course not,” these people said. 
For Mr. McCabe’s defenders, the exchange showed how he was stuck between an FBI office eager to pour more resources into a case and Justice Department prosecutors who didn’t think much of the case, one person said. Those people said that following the call, Mr. McCabe reiterated past instructions to FBI agents that they were to keep pursuing the work within the authority they had. 
Others further down the FBI chain of command, however, said agents were given a much starker instruction on the case: “Stand down.” When agents questioned why they weren’t allowed to take more aggressive steps, they said they were told the order had come from the deputy director—Mr. McCabe. 
Others familiar with the matter deny Mr. McCabe or any other senior FBI official gave such a stand-down instruction. 
In September, agents on the foundation case asked to see the emails contained on nongovernment laptops that had been searched as part of the Clinton email case, but that request was rejected by prosecutors at the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Those emails were given to the FBI based on grants of partial immunity and limited-use agreements, meaning agents could only use them for the purpose of investigating possible mishandling of classified information. 
Some FBI agents were dissatisfied with that answer, and asked for permission to make a similar request to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. McCabe, these people said, told them no and added that they couldn’t “go prosecutor-shopping.” 
The above revelations, in conjunction with the email server probe being reopened by the FBI, is why I now think Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning the Presidency. As I noted in Friday’s post, Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election : 
The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. 
It’s not just me saying it though. Even longtime Clinton supporter Doug Schoen is revisiting whether he can continue to support Clinton. As he wrote in an Op-ed published at The Hill : There will be no goodwill or honeymoon period for Clinton. Her first 100-days agenda will take a backseat to partisan divisions and polarization with little chance of constructive legislative action occurring. We have seen that a hyper-partisan, gridlocked Washington is bad for the country. There is no reason to believe that Clinton’s tenure will be anything but more of the same in this way and, most likely, a lot worse. Further, Russian President Vladimir Putin said (tongue-in-cheek) that we are not a banana republic.‎ I greatly fear we could become one if Secretary Clinton is elected president. Our national security will continue to be jeopardized by ongoing investigations by the FBI, and potentially the Justice Department and Congress, putting us at immediate risk of more assertive actions in Europe, Middle East and Asia by the Russians and Chinese. Moreover, we simply cannot face a situation where the president elect may need or want a pardon from the president to govern. Or worse yet, need to pardon herself after she takes office. As of now, I have no confidence that either of those questions will be answered by Election Day or that we will have full clarity on an investigation into what could be as many as 650,000 emails that found their way to Weiner and Abedin’s computer. However, in good conscience, and as a Democrat, I am actively doubting whether I can vote for the Secretary of State. I also want to make clear that I cannot vote for Donald Trump as his world view and mine are very different. For more on the Clinton Foundation, see:",FAKE
"Who has Trump picked for his Cabinet so far?

Donald Trump is filling put his White House team with Cabinet picks and other top aides.",REAL
"Food mixology: When eaten together, these foods can boost health 
  Isabelle Z. Tags: nutrients , food pairings , turmeric (NaturalNews) If you are making a conscious effort to eat nutritious food, you are already stacking the odds in your favor when it comes to your health and well-being. However, eating all the organic fruits and vegetables in the world is not going to do much for you if your body is not prepared to absorb the nutrients they contain.To be clear, eating a diet that is rich in organic produce, whole grains, and a reasonable amount of healthy fats is always preferable to a diet full of fried food, sugar and processed foods. However, if you want to maximize the benefits of your smart eating choices, you should try some of these food pairings to enhance nutrient absorption and give your health a boost. Milk and honey Your grandmother might have offered you a glass of warm milk with honey when you struggled to fall asleep as a child, and this tried-and-true combination has stood the test of time for good reason: it is a very effective pairing for your health. An amino acid found in milk known as tryptophan is used by the brain to make melatonin and serotonin, while the carbohydrates in honey can help with the uptake of tryptophan. Turmeric and black pepper The active ingredient in turmeric, curcumin, has anti-inflammatory properties, but it tends to be poorly absorbed by the body. Interestingly, the piperine found in black pepper can help boost its absorption significantly, which is why many supplements contain both ingredients. Try cooking a dish that contains generous amounts of turmeric , like curry, and add a sprinkling of black pepper. A tiny pinch of pepper can enhance your absorption of curcumin by more than 2,000 percent! Green tea and lemon If you are drinking green tea for its extraordinary antioxidant content, you might want to start adding some organic lemon juice to your cup. That's because Purdue University researchers have discovered that mixing green tea with lemon juice can significantly boost the amount of antioxidants that are available for your body to absorb. The catechins in green tea can help protect your body against cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease. Olive oil and tomatoes These two Mediterranean diet staples go hand in hand, and it's easy to see why. Tomatoes contain antioxidants that can protect your body from disease, and adding a small amount of healthy fat to carotenoid-rich foods like tomatoes can increase its absorption. Try making a simple salad of chopped tomatoes drizzled in extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to reap the benefits. The lycopene in tomatoes is also better absorbed when they are heated first, so take this one step further and make a tomato sauce or pizza sauce by cooking tomatoes and adding olive oil and www.herbs.news ""="""" target=""_blank"">www.herbs.news"">fresh herbs like oregano. Beans and cauliflower People who follow plant-based diets often rely on beans to get iron, but this type of iron is not as easily absorbed by the human body as iron that comes from meat sources. You can increase your body's absorption of the iron from beans by consuming a food that is rich in vitamin C at the same time, and cauliflower fits the bill quite nicely. Pair cauliflower with green beans or garbanzos to give your body an iron boost. You can also try other iron and vitamin C pairings , like strawberries with oatmeal.While all of these foods are quite healthy on their own, if you are looking to increase your intake of certain nutrients, make sure you are opting for food pairings and preparation methods that will boost absorption so you can reap the most benefits. Sources:",FAKE
"Tweet Widget by Yohannes Woldemariam 
The minority ethnic regime in Ethiopia now faces multiple rebellions. The regime’s foreign friends are part of the problem. “Faced with increased intrusion into their lands by so-called international investors, by displacement and by the breakdown of their social fabric, Ethiopians are mobilizing to resist.” The once formidable government coalition “is beginning to unravel.” The Deteriorating Situation in Ethiopia by Yohannes Woldemariam 
This article previously appeared in Pambazuka News . 
“ The revolts are widespread and they appear beyond the power of the state to control and put down.” 
The revolts in Ethiopia have the potential for creating radical, beneficial changes in the political order or instigating complete chaos that crosses its borders and destabilizes the entire fragile Horn of Africa region, for the outcomes of such uprisings have varied considerably from country to country. These protests can be the catalyst for building a new and democratic Ethiopia or end up in tears and disillusionment, as in Libya, South Sudan and many other places in the world. Countries emerging from dictatorships are particularly vulnerable and Ethiopia is certainly under a vicious dictatorship. 
The events in Ethiopia are being described as “Intifada,” “Ethiopian Spring” or as something akin to the Color Revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China. During the uprising in 2005 protesting the rigged election, the late chief of the Tigrean Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) and Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, did say that there would not be any more Color Revolutions in Ethiopia. That uprising was put down with hundreds dead and thousands in concentration camps. 
This time, however, the revolts are widespread and they appear beyond the power of the state to control and put down. Apparently, Mr. Zenawi spoke prematurely. Technological innovation is a very important part of this current political mass mobilization, which is why the government has moved with cutting Ethiopia off from the internet and dismantling satellite dishes from the homes of ordinary citizens. Drawing on satellite television, mobile phones and the Internet, the revolts are spreading. Within seconds, activists send their messages against the tyranny. Unsurprisingly, the TPLF oligarchy is extremely fearful of social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and the diaspora media. 
In this piece, I want to reflect on three points: 
1. The celebrity factor: Feyisa Lilesa versus Prime Minister Halemariam Desalegn 
2. Mr. Abay Tsehaye’s reference to Rwanda 
3. The newly declared State of Emergency 
The celebrity factor: Feyisa Lilesa versus Prime Minister Halemariam Desalegn 
In the wake of the Rio Olympics, the profile of the Ethiopian uprising got a boost from Feyisa Lilesa , with his heroic act of crossing his arms on winning the silver medal for marathon, a signature symbol of solidarity of the oppressed Oromo nation to which Feyisa belongs. The influence of the celebrity athlete for social change is formidable, and Feyisa has emerged as a powerful voice for the struggle of his Oromo people, causing nervous shivers in the beleaguered regime. What the death and imprisonment of thousands of Oromos couldn’t accomplish in Ethiopia was achieved by his symbolic act at the finish line. Now the whole world is clued into the terrible conditions in Ethiopia and beginning to learn about the plight of the Oromo people. 
Other Ethiopian athletes have since used their successes to follow suit. Ebsa Ejigu, Tamiru Demissie and Hirut Guangul have used their international successes to publicize the plight of their country’s men and women to an international audience. This trend is likely to continue now as other athletes and celebrities are losing their fear of retaliation and becoming more and more willing to participate in what has become a growing national movement. Yes, these athletes will pay a price. Lilesa is now separated from his wife and children and beckoning an unknown fate. Life in exile will not be easy even for famous athletes. But compared to those losing lives and limbs to bullets in Ethiopia, it is a small price to pay. They are heroes, and their names are already inscribed in history books. 
“These athletes will pay a price.” 
The TPLF reaction to Lilesa’s heroic act can be gleaned from statements given by PM Hailemariam Desalegn. Although the PM is from the Wolayta ethnic group, which was traditionally relegated to the periphery of the Ethiopian mainstream, he has become a willing accomplice and spokesman for the TPLF. Most people regard him as an accidental PM who happened to be in the right place and at the right time when his powerful boss, PM Meles Zenawi, passed away in the summer of 2012. He was handpicked as Zenawi’s deputy because he wasn’t a threat and, as a non-Tigrean, served as a convenient cover and a token representing “diversity” for the TPLF. He is so loyal to the late PM, he still refers to the Meles “vision” in his public pronouncements. Most Ethiopians know that he is just a figurehead with no real power. Yet, in an interview conducted with the online Foreign Policy.com, he is quoted as saying: 
“It’s me who sent [Lilesa] to Rio for the Olympics, and we expected him to come back after winning the medal. . . . [T]his is not the capacity of the man himself. It’s something which has been orchestrated by someone else from outside.” 
It is remarkable that the PM has the audacity to say he sent Feyisa Lilesa to the Olympics, as if Feyisa needed his charitable permission. It is crystal clear that Feyisa earned his place in the Olympics. 
One can readily concede that he may have acquiesced to nepotism by sending to the Olympics the unqualified son of the head of the sports federation, Robel Kiros Habte , who made Ethiopia a laughing stock with his hopeless performance in a swimming race. But no one can doubt that Feyisa went to the Olympics because he was Ethiopia’s best hope for the marathon. And he delivered in no unmistakable terms by winning a silver medal competing with the best and the elites in the world. It is hard to believe that Desalegn referring to Feyisa actually said: “This is not the capacity of the man himself” – thus exposing his own pomposity, shallowness and contempt for the Oromo hero. Clearly, Desalegn has sold his soul to the TPLF devil. To suggest that Feyisa cannot think for himself and act on his own is inexcusably ignorant and arrogant and unbecoming of a prime minster. 
“Desalegn is a sellout with little dignity, reading and parroting whatever script is given to him by the TPLF.” 
Feyisa is not only a fine athlete; he is also a dignified, proud, principled and articulate Oromo and Ethiopian, as he amply demonstrated during the press conference in the Washington D.C. rally where Congressman Chris Smith also spoke. Also, in a direct reply to the PM’s insult, Feyisa quipped: 
“I was not surprised by his comments because individuals who are always controlled by others tend to assume everyone is that way as well. . . . Unlike the prime minister, I make my own decisions and speak for myself.” 
Indeed, Desalegn is a sellout with little dignity, reading and parroting whatever script is given to him by the TPLF. The pretentious PM has replaced the real world with a make-believe virtual world. It is for this reason that he is unable to see realities on the ground; he is temporarily sheltered behind a wall whose mortar is sychophantic servitude and a wicked willingness to say and do anything to appease his TPLF benefactors. 
It is beyond regrettable that Desalegn is unable to see the rapid downside toward further chaos and civil war in Ethiopia that is due to the abject misery and oppression suffered by the people who are subjected to the policies of those he is serving and to whom he has sold his soul. He calls himself a born-again Christian with a straight face. How would Jesus himself, who stood up to the hypocritical Pharisees and threw the money-changers out of the temple in Jerusalem, have regarded a man like Desalegn, who is in bed with the TPLF elites who are the modern day equivalent of the Pharisees in Ethiopia and whose words and actions rarely match? The human suffering that is the result of the violent and continuous repression cannot be seen from inside their ideological castles resting on the thin air of empty rhetoric and shameless self-promotion. 
Desalegn would be well advised to keep his mouth closed to spare himself more disgrace. He has already sunk into the deep end of an abyss. It is depressing to see a human being selling out his people and becoming a slave of oppressors. 
Invoking the specter of Rwanda 
The TPLF ideologue and one of the real powers behind the throne, Mr. Abay Tsehaye, in an interview with the pro-government Radio Fana, compared the situation of Rwanda in the early 90s to the current situation in Ethiopia. He correctly stated that Rwanda was comprised of only two ethnic groups (the Hutu and the Tutsi), really not much of a country, and was on the verge of disintegration. He went on to say that reconciliation occurred and the country recovered. In Ethiopia with over eighty ethnic groups, if the situation goes “out of control,” he concluded, Ethiopia will cease to exist as a country. Every thoughtful person worries about this. However, one can reasonably surmise from his analysis that Ethiopia under the control of his Tigray-dominated government, who make up only six percent of the Ethiopian population, is his guarantee for holding the country together. Mr. Tsehaye fails to recognize the draconian hegemonic policies of his regime as the very reasons for the grim state of affairs in the country. As the Ethiopian uprising makes clear, the various ethnicities are no longer buying TPLF shenanigans and see the TPLF itself as the main cause of Ethiopia’s predicament, as the country descends into possible civil war. 
For anyone willing to see the truth, Ethiopia is in a state of turmoil due to the exploitation of the long-suffering people of Oromia, Ogaden, Gambella and other ethnic groups by the TPLF elite in partnership with international enablers such as China and the United States, the principal rivals in Africa and the Horn region. The TPLF exploitation, in which valuable resources and political roles are dominated by a minority elite that has transformed itself into an oligarchy, has created highly rebellious resentment by the victims while reinforcing a sense of ethnic identity and consciousness. Faced with increased intrusion into their lands by so-called international investors, by the displacement and stunted developments they experience and by the breakdown of their social fabric, Ethiopians are mobilizing to resist. 
“The various see the TPLF itself as the main cause of Ethiopia’s predicament, as the country descends into possible civil war.” 
The government’s state-driven development projects financed by international investors and partners bypass the rural peasants and pastoralists, alienating the people and reinforcing the politics of deep ethnic hierarchy. Recent events have made it clear that TPLF’s “constitutional federalism” has more to do with its divide-and-rule strategy and its elitist allocation of national resources, comparable to actions of the former Soviet Communist Party, which retained tight control over its regions through local parties. The TPLF set up People’s Democratic Organizations, local versions of the ruling party, which squeezed out traditional authority. 
The co-opted ethnic leaders from these regions have either completely lost credibility, are sitting on the fence, or are jumping ship to support the resistance. Key former government figures like Junedin Sado are breaking their silence and speaking out with scathing attacks on the regime. He has apologized to the Ethiopian people for the time that he served under the regime. The so- called coalition that the TPLF built is beginning to unravel. Some Amhara and some Oromo are coming together against the TPLF, overcoming but not necessarily forgetting, the legacy of the historic oppression by Amhara elites which began with Menelik II. 
Abay Tsehaye and TPLF leaders will need to face reality — if they have it in them to be truly concerned about Ethiopian unity. Oromo historical grievances are not myths, as some revisionist history asserts. Oromo land is the most fertile and lush in Ethiopia, in contrast to the northern Ethiopian highlands with its rugged mountains and thin soils contributing relatively little to national economic production, but the Oromo have been alienated from control over their land throughout the 20th century first by the Amhara and now by the new TPLF overlords. 
Acutely divided societies in which no single faction can impose its view might find an ability to arrive at political compromises in a constitutional form. But in Ethiopia, the hegemonic Amhara and now the Tigreans have excluded others from real power-sharing making true constitutionalism elusive. The leaders see the state as a prize to be won, a basis for private accumulation and patronage. But there is not enough patronage to go around, and those excluded from it mobilize their co-religionists and ethnic groups in an increasingly unmanageable opposition. 
The State of Emergency 
In response, the TPLF is relying on intensified repression by security forces, ethnic loyalists and the army. And for the first time in twenty-five years, the regime has declared a State of Emergency , clearly showing how rattled it is by the rebellion in the country. The Prime Minster announced : 
“The cause of this (state of emergency) is that anti-peace forces in collaboration with foreign enemies of the country are making organized attempts to destabilize our country, to disrupt its peace and also to undermine the existence and security of its peoples.” 
This response undoubtedly means more sticks and further erosion of civil liberties in the country but is unlikely to quell the unrest. One of the targets of the State of Emergency is the Internet and Social Media. PM Desalegn did make it a point to rant against diaspora media and the Internet during his appearance in September at the United Nations General Assembly: 
“In fact, we are seeing how misinformation could easily go viral via social media and mislead many people, especially the youth…Social media has certainly empowered populists and other extremists to exploit people’s genuine concerns and spread their message of hate and bigotry without any inhibition...it is critical to underline one matter which is usually given short shrift, both by the media and others. It is simply hypocritical to deny that some of our countries have been targets for destabilization activities carried out with no accountability by people and groups who have been given shelters by States with whom we have absolutely no problems.” 
The regime that Desalegn serves is responsible for suffocating the Ethiopian people by denying them any alternative media. The Ethiopian government is one of the top jailers and harassers of anyone daring to publish or practice independent journalism within the country. Now, Desalegn is shedding his crocodile tears about his inability to control and suppress social media and broadcasting emanating from the diaspora. While he has a point about the inherent potential for the abuse of social media, the regime is responsible for bringing criticisms on itself. In the absence of media freedom in the country, social media and broadcasting from the diaspora acquired enormous significance for Ethiopians hungry for information. It is clear that Ethiopians no longer trust the regime and have little confidence in official government news, which in reality is mostly propaganda. 
“The Ethiopian government is one of the top jailers and harassers of anyone daring to publish or practice independent journalism.” 
Authoritarian regimes adopt various forms of censorship to depoliticize the population and prevent the questioning of their legitimacy. By definition, authoritarian regimes demand strict submission by the media to their political authority. They do so by publishing or broadcasting deceptions in order to maintain their power structures. For example, the regime’s media censored Feyisa’s symbolic gesture in Rio while proclaiming that Feyisa is a national hero and welcome to return home, without any consequences. 
The advent of the Internet has somewhat leveled the playing field by empowering regular Internet users to become content producers by utilizing decentralized and distributed networks such as social media. These uses of media pose a great danger to dictatorial regimes, which are moving to subvert, block social media and limit internet use, as in Ethiopia today. 
China is the leading culprit in creating the technology to enable censorship, which it is sharing with the Ethiopian government. This suppression of the media will not succeed. Freedom-loving people find ways to circumvent these barriers and make determined efforts to stay informed – and, in turn, to inform the whole world. Yohannes Woldemariam is an educator and author. This article previously appeared on the Huffington Post’s Contributor platform. [2]",FAKE
"Republicans have rallied behind Donald Trump in recent weeks, as the businessman and reality-TV star cleared an all but assured path to the party’s presidential nomination. Trump has narrowed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s lead to 3 percentage points, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The margin of error for the poll is plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

Clinton leads trump 46 percent to 43 percent, marking a significantly smaller margin between the two likely nominees and the first time Clinton has not led Trump by double digits since December. In April, Clinton led Trump by 11 percentage points, 50 percent to 39 percent, according to a NBC News/WSJ poll.

Insofar as individual polls mean anything, the swell of support for Trump could suggest that Republican voters are accepting their presumptive nominee after his win in the Indiana primary earlier this month, and after Senator Ted Cruz, Trump’s final primary opponent, dropped out.

The poll comes out amid new bitterness in the Democratic primary battle. NBC points out just 66 percent of Democratic voters who prefer Sanders will support Clinton in a matchup against Trump, underscoring the challenge she faces in winning over necessary votes in the general election.

According to the poll, Clinton and Trump have one thing in common: both are currently the two most unpopular likely presidential nominees, with 54 percent of registered voters who have a negative opinion of Clinton and 58 percent having a negative opinion of Trump. If nominated at such rates, they would also be the most unpopular candidates since the poll began in 1984.",REAL
Clinton emails on trade deal held until after election,REAL
"Reps. Kevin McCarthy, R-California, Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Daniel Webster, R-Florida, are the three candidates vying for the post, and the winner becomes the favorite to become second in line to succeed the President of the United States.

But Thursday's vote inside the House GOP conference is just the first step. The candidate who gets the Republican party's internal nod still has to be approved by the full House of Representatives on October 29. And that's where things can get tricky.

If the Republican nominee can't garner 218 votes on the House floor, then Boehner will remain the speaker. And the potential for multiple rounds of votes on the House floor could open up the election to other candidates beyond the three that are in the race now. It would also prolong the deeply divisive and public process for House Republicans, who are hoping to chart a new path forward and prove they can make the dysfunctional Capitol work.

The three candidates will make their pitch to GOP colleagues at a ""candidate forum"" on Thursday morning in a conference room in the basement of the Capitol. Each gets three minutes to make a speech before answering questions from members. At noon, the 247 members of the House Republican conference gather in the ornate Ways and Means Committee room to vote. Under the House GOP conference rules, the three candidates are not allowed to make their own speeches. Instead each can designate one supporter to make a three-minute address nominating them for the post. Then up to two additional supporters can speak for another minute each on the candidate's behalf. To win the GOP nomination, a candidate needs a simple majority of all House Republicans -- or 125 votes. (That number could change if any House Republicans are absent or opts not to vote in the election.) Boehner plans to vote for McCarthy before heading to New York to tape an appearance on ""The Tonight Show,"" according to a spokesman. The delegate from American Samoa, Amata Radewagen, who doesn't get a vote on the House floor, does get to cast a vote for speaker inside the conference meeting. RELATED: John Boehner to appear on 'The Tonight Show' Three members serve as ""tally clerks"" and collect the ballots and count how many votes each candidate receives. Once all the ballots are counted, a representative of the conference will announce the results, along with the vote totals. If no candidate gets a majority of the conference on the first vote, a second ballot circulates with the names of the top two vote-getters, and a winner is announced after those ballots are counted. The new speaker can't take the gavel from Boehner until the full House of Representatives votes. Unlike the private contest on Thursday, the floor vote is covered live by C-SPAN's television cameras inside the House chamber. Each member of Congress is called on in alphabetical order to stand and announce their choice for speaker. The winner must win the votes of a majority -- 218, if everyone in the House is present -- in order to win. The vast majority of House Democrats are expected for to vote for former Speaker and current Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. House Republican conference rules require that GOP members support their party's nominee on the floor, but many conservatives have ignored that rule in recent elections. That's where any drama will occur. If the GOP nominee fails to get a majority, the contest on the House floor could go to multiple ballots. Boehner will remain the speaker until a majority of the House votes to elect a new candidate. The last time it took more than one ballot to elect a speaker was in 1923 when it took nine ballots over the course of three days. And you don't need to be in the House to get the job. The Constitution does not require that the speaker be someone currently serving in Congress, but all who have been elected to the post have been House members. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Jeff Sessions received votes in the January 2015 election . And two years earlier, David Walker, the former head of the General Accounting Office, received one vote",REAL
By Warren Woodward Everyone knows that wireless “smart” meters communicate via microwaves. What was unknown until now is that additional frequencies are transmitted in the 2 to 50... ,FAKE
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by DCG | 7 Comments 
From Campus Reform : Grinnell College (a private liberal arts college in Iowa) is promoting a guide to help students avoid “cultural appropriation” this Halloween , warning that some costumes could be considered “deplorable and problematic.” (Gee, wonder where they got the idea for the word “deplorable?”) 
The guide provides several examples of costumes that might fit the definition of “cultural appropriation,” defining the term as “the act of displaying people’s cultures in a disrespectful or condescending manner.” 
The guide, called “My Identity, Not Your Costume,” goes on to list several examples of “offensive” Halloween costumes, featuring pictures of Grinnell students holding photos of costumes that would be considered disrespectful towards their culture. 
In one instance, the guide shows a picture of a burly white man dressed in lingerie with a sash proclaiming “Call me Caitlyn,” referring to Caitlyn Jenner. The photo is held by a Grinnell student wearing a “National Coming Out Day” pin, and includes a caption stating, “the misrepresentation of my identity bothers me because people categorize me by my looks and may not understand my culture.” You just don’t understand this culture… 
Another example of culturally appropriated Halloween costumes, according to the guide, is “using other cultures as accessories to appear more hip/interesting without adequate understanding or permission ,” one example of which is a picture of someone dressed as a Hindu deity being held by an Indian student and the message that such costumes are “deplorable and problematic.” 
It then warns students that if their costumes take “defining characteristics of another culture” without “permission , or understanding of the historical background behind the said culture,” then these costumes might be too offensive to wear. 
The guide then concludes with two questions the school thinks students should consider before selecting a Halloween costume, asking, “Does your costume perpetuate stereotypes or inaccurately portray my culture as a joke?” as well as “Why would I find your ‘Halloween costume’ to be offensive?” 
Campus Reform reached out to Grinnell for a comment on the matter but did not receive a response in time for publication. 
To donate to Campus Reform , go here . 
DCG",FAKE
"in: War Propaganda , World News (image credit: ALEXEY DRUZHININ / RIA NOVOSTI / Kremlin pool / AFP) In September 2015, at the behest of its legitimate government, Russia began aerial operations to combat ISIS and al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. Numerous other likeminded groups are involved, just as cutthroat, just as ruthless, just as extremist, masquerading as “moderate rebels” when none exist – supported by Washington, NATO , Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Gulf States, Jordan, Israel and Turkey. They’re massacring civilians, killing government soldiers defending them, using chemical and other banned weapons, committing gruesome atrocities. Why does it pretend “moderate” fighters are involved when none exist? Why does it insist on separating nonexistent “moderates” from terrorist groups it’s combating when all anti-government forces are the same? Why isn’t it targeting all armed groups wanting Assad toppled and Syrian sovereign independence destroyed? It’s the only way to free the country from the scourge its facing – supported by Washington and its rogue allies, NATO and regional ones. Why did it halt its aerial operations to liberate eastern Aleppo, declaring a unilateral ceasefire, a so-called humanitarian pause – a major blunder, accomplishing nothing? Ongoing since October 18, it’s letting US-supported terrorists infesting the city replenish their ranks, regroup and mobilize for heavy attacks, largely harming civilians Moscow says it wants protected. Last Saturday evening, Russia ended its humanitarian pause because US-supported terrorists in eastern Aleppo prevent civilians from leaving, holding thousands hostage as human shields, including the sick and wounded. Yet it ceased aerial attacks, yielding the advantage to dark forces it’s sworn to eliminate. What kind of strategy gives them the upper hand? It gets worse. On October 26, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov issued the following statement: “The Russian Aerospace Forces and the Syrian Air Force have been sticking to a moratorium on air strikes for the past eight days. They are staying out of a 10-km (six-mile) zone around Aleppo.” “Six humanitarian corridors, field kitchens and first aid stations are open for civilians leaving eastern Aleppo 24 hours a day.” “Russia and the Syrian government are ready to resume ‘humanitarian pauses’ in Aleppo if they receive guarantees from international organizations confirming readiness to evacuate the sick and the wounded as well as civilian population from the rebel-held areas.” Fact: Maintaining an airstrike moratorium aids Washington, its rogue allies and terrorists in eastern Aleppo they support. Fact: What good are humanitarian corridors if eastern Aleppo residents are prevented from using them, risking death or serious injury if they try. Fact: International organizations have no control over terrorists in eastern Aleppo – or anywhere else in the country. So what good are their “guarantees” if made? Fact: As long as Russia continues making the same mistakes repeatedly, the struggle to liberate Syria will likely go on interminably without resolution – a forever war, while countless thousands more civilians will die, be seriously injured and endure hardships people in Western societies can’t imagine, victims of US imperial ruthlessness. A handful of eastern Aleppo civilians alone escaped via a humanitarian corridor. According to one now free, their relatives were seized, imprisoned and tortured. The only way to liberate thousands of others is by relentlessly smashing their terrorist captors, eliminating them – not giving them breathing room to mobilize for greater attacks. Washington is delighted with Moscow’s ceasefire and humanitarian pause, serving US imperial interests, State Department spokesman admiral John Kirby saying: “We welcome the stated intention to extend this pause, and we hope that this extension will be more successful…than it has been thus far” – meaning the longer it continues, the greater the benefit to US-led dark forces, the worse off trapped Syrians in eastern Aleppo will be, the longer the struggle to liberate Syria will go on. Submit your review",FAKE
"Speaking at a joint press conference Thursday morning at the White House with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Obama makes extended comments regarding the 2016 election, and its unprecedented political polarization. 

 

 ""I have been blamed by the Republicans for a lot of things,"" the president said. ""But to be blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting is... novel.""

 

 ""I’m not going to validate some notion that the Republican crackup that’s been taking place is a consequence of actions that I’ve taken,"" he said. 

 

 ""I don’t think I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example,"" he said. ""I don’t recall saying, 'Hey, why don’t you ask me about that.'""

 

 ""It's not as if there's a massive difference between Mr. Trump's position on immigration and Mr. Cruz's. Mr. Trump may be more provocative in terms of how he sighs, but says them, but they're not that different.""

 

",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
IN THE immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shock win in the US presidential election, there were fears many people would become lost in grief, voicing their anger and sadness in all directions in a bid to vent their sense of profound fear and apprehension now that a person who has repeatedly uttered reprehensible beliefs occupies the most powerful position in the world. 
However, this proved not to be the case as WWN found out when it talked with numerous people in America and around the world, who exemplified the pride the human race now had in itself after being able to greet the horrific news in a calm and measured way. 
“It is when we’re faced with adversity, when hate shows it now owns the map, that we must forge a new path together to the brighter future we all want, but that future will be after a nuclear winter obviously,” a sobbing wreck of a man and a proud American, Philip Henry shared with WWN, as he polished his shotgun and thought about taking a walk alone to his shed out back. 
“The election clearly divided people, but it is time for the people to come together. Love trumps hate. A rising tide lifts all boats,” New Yorker Sarah Klein shared as she boarded a small sail boat, unsure of where she was going, “I have no idea how to sail but I’ll live like Kevin Costner in Waterworld if I have to,” she added. 
Many people echoed the sentiments of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech in which the Democrat urged everyone to work with Donald Trump and give the man who called Mexicans rapists and murderers and called for a ban on Muslims the benefit of the doubt. 
“Trump Tower doesn’t look all that structurally sound, we’re talking what? A few sticks of dynamite and the whole thing comes down. Just asking for a friend, obviously,” shared another New Yorker we spoke to. 
It is believed the number of people placing their children in pods and launching them into space in the hope they reach a more tranquil planet with a brighter future elsewhere are still in the minority. 
The rational and reasoned response was also experienced outside of America where, although people acknowledged the fact they’ve heard every word uttered from the president elect, they suspect everything will be fine. 
“Sure, what difference does it make, be grand I’m sure,” shared Dubliner Rebecca Kelly, fresh from pulling out all of her hair in a panic, and disconnecting her TV, radio and internet for at least four years. 
“Never felt better,” offered a hooded figure holding a flaming torch in one hand and a rope in the other.",FAKE
"Military An American soldier talks with Saudi troops. (File photo by the US Army) 
A US congressman has warned that American troops could be prosecuted for providing military support to the Saudi war on Yemen. 
Ted Lieu made the warning in a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, saying the US government’s denial of target selection for Saudi airstrikes in Yemen does not excuse Washington from legal responsibilities. 
“I find it deeply troubling that the US apparently has no advanced knowledge of what targets will be struck by jets that are refueled by US personnel with US tankers,” Lieu said in his letter. 
“The US would appear to be violating LOAC [laws of armed conflict] and international standards by engaging in such direct military operations if US personnel are not aware if targets are civilian or military, if the loss of life and property are disproportional, or if the operation is even militarily necessary,” he noted. A Yemeni boy walks past a mural depicting a US drone and reading: ""Why did you kill my family."" (Photo by AFP) 
Pointing to the 18-month involvement of the US in Saudi war on the Yemeni people, the Democratic congressman stressed that Washington had knowledge of a bombardment campaign hitting civilian targets, including schools and hospitals, multiple times. 
“US personnel are now at legal risk of being investigated and potentially prosecuted for committing war crimes. Under international law, a person can be found guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes. Under US law, a person can be found guilty for conspiring to commit war crimes,” Lieu wrote. 
The Pentagon has been providing logistic and surveillance support to Saudi Arabia in its military aggression against Yemen, the kingdom’s impoverished southern neighbor, which has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis since its onset in March 2015. 
The unprovoked war started by a coalition of Saudi-allies in an attempt to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstate former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of the Riyadh regime. 
Washington has on several occasions criticized the Saudi regime for its crimes against humanity in Yemen, but has shown no sign of ending its support for Riyadh. US Representative Ted Lieu of California addresses delegates on the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention at Wells Fargo Center on July 28, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by AFP) 
In August, the US State Department approved the sale of more than 130 Abrams tanks, 20 armored recovery vehicles and other equipment worth about $1.15 billion to Saudi Arabia. 
Saudi-led bombardments have struck hospitals, markets and other places where civilians gather. 
In September, Amnesty International reported that a US manufactured bomb had been used in a Saudi strike against a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen’s northwestern province of Hajjah which claimed the lives of 19 people. 
In October, more than 140 people lost their lives and over 525 others sustained injuries after Saudi military aircraft struck a hall in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a, where rows of people were attending a funeral. Yemeni rescue workers pull out a victim from amid the rubble following a Saudi airstrike against a packed funeral site in the capital, Sana’a, on October 8, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Jamie McGoldrick said last month that the death toll from the Saudi military aggression could rise even further as some areas had no medical facilities, and that people were often buried without any official record being made. Loading ... ",FAKE
"Twitter brings out the best in nobody, and this week that includes two of the most prominent people in Washington's national security establishment: New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department senior adviser Marie Harf.

Their Twitter fighting is ostensibly over a technical issue in the Iran negotiations; Sanger had published a story reporting Iran had developed new nuclear fuel, which he suggested was a major embarrassment for the administration and bad for the Iran nuclear deal.

Harf basically argued that Sanger had misunderstood and misinterpreted the latest nuclear development. And, on balance, Harf's criticisms are correct, and Sanger's story elided some technical issues that make it clear this is nowhere near as big of a deal as he claims. But like so many arguments in Washington over Iran, it's about much more than that.

On Monday, Sanger reported in the Times, based on a new study, that ""Tehran's stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent over the last 18 months of negotiations."" Sanger framed this as embarrassing for the Obama administration and a step back in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The development ""poses a major diplomatic and political challenge for President Obama,"" Sanger wrote, ""partially undercutting the Obama administration's contention that the Iranian program had been 'frozen.'""

Harf, who is currently acting as State Department spokesperson, said later she was ""perplexed"" by the story's contentions, pointing out that Iran had not violated any agreements and arguing that Sanger had overblown a minor development into a major issue. ""The notion that this is some big issue of concern of negotiation is more manufacturing a controversy than actual reality,"" she said.

What was interesting, watching this unfold, is that it prompted two entirely separate conversations. One, among mostly conservative national security writers and think tankers, expressed dismay at the Obama administration's defensiveness and its apparent refusal to acknowledge the cold, hard facts spelled out in the study. The other, among arms control experts, actually dug into those facts and ultimately ended up siding with Harf.

The first issue, as a number of people pointed out, is that Sanger had used the phrase ""nuclear fuel"" to describe the growth in Iran's nuclear program, which is both true and misleading. Iran has produced a specific category of nuclear fuel called low-enriched uranium (LEU), which is used for power plants or other peaceful purposes, not for nuclear warheads.

Sanger implies that this goes against the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), Iran's 2013 temporary nuclear agreement with the US, meant as bridge until final negotiations are concluded this summer. In fact, Iran's development of more LEU is within the agreement, so for Sanger to write that it ""undercuts"" anything is incorrect.

Once the final nuclear deal with Iran comes into effect, based on the framework of that deal that was agreed upon in April, Iran will still be allowed to produce LEU — but it will only be allowed to keep a small stockpile on hand. The idea here is that LEU in itself is not terribly dangerous, and that both the production and the stockpile will be under close international monitoring to make sure Iran doesn't try to turn the LEU into highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is dangerous. However, the deal will limit how much LEU Iran is allowed to have on hand at any given time; the country will be required to ship it out or else convert it to, for example, fuel rods.

This gets to the heart of Sanger's argument: he is correct that Iran is building up a much larger stockpile of LEU than it will be allowed to have if the final deal comes into effect. To be clear, this activity does not violate any agreements currently in force. However, if the deal comes into effect, and if Iran wants to comply with that deal, then it will have to convert almost all of that LEU into some other form, such as fuel rods, or ship it out of the country. There is nothing preventing Iran from doing all of this in a way that complies with the deal.

A representative tweet from the arms control community, which seemed to collectively roll its eyes at Sanger's story:

""Iran's LEU is up somewhat, yes, but contrary to headline, it doesn't 'complicate' talks. IranDeal will cut [the size of Iran's LEU stockpile] to 300kg,"" Arms Control Association director Daryl Kimball wrote, calling Sanger's story ""a superficial analysis.""

It's also important to point out that Iran is developing this new LEU under the view of the international community in its officially declared facilities. If the Iranians really wanted to cheat, they would almost certainly construct a secret facility somewhere — as they've done in the past — and do it there.

That does not mean that it's great news that Iran is enriching more LEU. Certainly, everyone's lives would be easier if Iran unilaterally surrendered its entire nuclear program or at least took no more steps toward nuclear development. But Iran is continuing to conduct the sorts of nuclear activities that it is allowed under the JPOA (a deal that even Sen. Lindsey Graham, an Iran super-hawk, now supports), which should not be particularly surprising. It is a real stretch to argue, as Sanger does, that this enrichment ""poses a major political and diplomatic challenge"" to the Iran deal.

This is, in many ways, a repeat of the same argument that Washington has been having since 2013, when the JPOA was signed and the US and Iran began down the road to a nuclear deal. Supporters of the deal, joined since April's framework agreement by a chorus of arms control experts, say the deal is about the best feasible option we have for limiting Iran's nuclear enrichment.

Iran hawks argue that this is all based on a false premise that the Iran nuclear program is actually the core problem. Rather, they believe, the real problem is inherent to the Iranian regime itself, and that because the nuclear deal will not force regime change, it elides and thus perpetuates that problem.

This is why you see so much arguing between these two sides over every little technical blip along the way. For Iran hawks, episodes like this one just prove there is no such thing as a ""good"" nuclear deal because Iran is so inherently evil that it will find a way to exploit any deal to its advantage. Deal supporters and arms control experts, meanwhile, see that the deal will dramatically limit Iran's nuclear development, as well as make it much harder for the country to cheat, and thus go a long way to prevent both a nuclear bomb and the need for a disastrous war with Iran.

This is why you get lots of arguments over questions like ""Is Iran violating the JPOA in spirit, if not in letter?"" because for Iran hawks everything Iran does violates the spirit of the agreement because Tehran can only ever be dishonest and warlike.

It's why people on both sides spend lots of time debating the degree to which Iran is ""rational."" If Iran is rational, the incentives of the deal are much more likely to lead it to comply. But that word ""rational"" ends up becoming very hard to define and clear standards very hard to set. Was the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 rational? If it wasn't, does that mean America is incapable of rationally responding to incentives, and must be destroyed for the sake of world peace?

You can see how these debates almost immediately veer away from the factual into the theoretical and the indefinable. They are also, by the way, only tangentially related to technical issues such as whether Iran's latest LEU enrichment violates the JPOA. These debates are maddeningly unanswerable and unending. Most people in Washington who work on this issue, having long ago exhausted their arguments on this many times over, try to avoid rehearsing the debate. But that is not always the case on Twitter, even if you're David Sanger or Marie Harf.",REAL
"On the way into the Colorado Republican Party's state convention in Colorado Springs Saturday morning, a Ted Cruz supporter waved a big broom with the letters ""CRUZ"" fastened to the top.

The convention took place in a hockey arena, and the prop is probably familiar to most sports fans. The Cruz supporter was looking for a sweep, and a sweep was what he got.

Cruz picked up all 34 Republican National Convention delegates that Colorado Republicans awarded this week. Delegates backing Cruz won all three spots in each of the state's seven congressional districts, as well as 13 statewide slots.

The Colorado win follows a similar outcome in North Dakota, where Republicans elected a mostly Cruz-approved slate of delegates at a state convention last week. Those two delegate hauls, along with more complex delegate maneuvering in states like Louisiana that had already held their primaries and caucuses, highlight a growing organizational gap between Cruz's campaign and frontrunner Donald Trump's.

As recently as last month, the Cruz campaign insisted that he was fighting to win 1,237 delegates and clinch the GOP nomination outright, though Cruz told the Denver Post on Saturday that a contested convention is a ""very significant possibility."" Cruz also expressed confidence that he would win in such a scenario.

The Texas senator has become the candidate of choice for many Republicans simply trying to stop Trump. Cruz's organizational successes offer hope to them that he will succeed in blocking Trump's path. Though many of them stop short of saying they'd like Cruz to be the eventual nominee.

Most political observers didn't figure Colorado would play a role in the Republican primary, after the state declined to hold a binding primary or caucus. Still, Congressman Ken Buck, who chairs Cruz's Colorado campaign, said, ""dozens of volunteers have been working since December"" in Colorado to vet delegate candidates and organize at local caucuses and regional meetings.

On Saturday morning, Cruz volunteers wearing bright orange shirts swept through the arena, handing out glossy sheets listing the campaign's preferred delegate candidates. The campaign also blasted out text messages to convention attendees, listing their delegate choices.

""We put 15 delegate [candidates] forward,"" said Buck, who won a spot as a delegate himself. ""We looked at people that had run and won in the past. We looked at people who had been supporting Cruz for a long time. We looked at elected officials who knew how to run campaigns.""

That organizational effort was a stark contrast to Trump's campaign, which only had a handful of volunteers distributing delegate candidate lists. The Trump slate was riddled with errors.

According to NBC News, the Trump campaign failed to put forward a candidate slate in some of the earlier district-level contests. In another congressional district, two of the candidates they urged voters to back did not, in fact, make it onto the ballot.

""What this says for the Trump campaign is, you need to get your stuff in gear,"" said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. ""Because you're about to get your clock cleaned on the easy stuff. A lot of folks look at, we just won the primary. The isn't about just winning the primary. It's about winning delegates. You get your delegates wherever and however you can.""

Indeed, the Trump campaign has made changes in recent days, bringing in longtime Washington operative Paul Manafort to play a role in convention preparation, as well as broader campaign strategy.

Manafort was asked about the result in Colorado on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday and responded, ""I acknowledge that we weren't playing in Colorado and they did.""

He went on to criticize the pro-Cruz efforts as too aggressive, making an accusation of ""Gestapo tactics"" in various local party conventions.

Steele praised the Cruz campaign's organizational efforts, but cautioned against reading too much into the Colorado and North Dakota convention victories when looking forward to a possible Cleveland floor fight.

""Going into a state and grabbing unbound delegates and getting commitments and all that is not the same as going into a convention hall where overlaying everything is the RNC rules,"" he said.

Having a political and legal staff that understands the party's regulations and guidelines are key, he said, giving the Cruz campaign the advantage on that front.

But Steele argued that another important factor is, ""having delegates on the floor and relevant committees,"" Steele said, primarily the Rules Committee, which will shape the convention proceedings.

""The Trump team is going to be competitive on that front, because they've got a lot of delegates, and the ability to put their people on that committee and have weight on that committee,"" said Steele.

Both campaigns will spend the next two months gearing up for a historic floor fight. That's because while Trump may still secure the delegates he needs to avoid one, there's no chance he can do so until June 7, the very last day of the primary calendar.

Clarification: This post has been updated to reflect Cruz's recent comments entertaining the notion of a contested convention. An earlier version stated only that Cruz was insisting he would win enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination before the party's convention in July.",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
President-elect Donald Trump is giving a lucky 3 million people the unique chance to escape the United States before it resembles the sequel to Mad Max Fury Road, WWN can reveal. 
Speaking to CBS, Trump confirmed his intention to deport over 3 million illegal immigrants who have a criminal record when he assumes office in January, prompting many American citizens to curse illegal immigrants’ good fortune. 
“Many desperate people who are currently living in fear will not be as lucky as these deportees,” confirmed political expert Conor Franken, outlining just how fortunate some illegal immigrants are. 
The fallout from the announcement has already been met with widespread derision coming from Trump’s political opponents as he revealed the figure of 3 million was plucked directly from his arse. However, signs are emerging that many people have welcomed the news. 
“How do I get deported?” querzied US citizen and LA native Max Schulmann, “Do you think I’ll be one of the lucky ones if I just rip up my passport, get a parking fine and start speaking Spanish?” 
Large queues of people seeking to win big with deportation have already begun forming at the Mexican and Canadian borders. Sadly, many have been turned away for not meeting the minimum requirement Trump has placed on qualifying for deportation which requires people to be a murderring rapist drug dealer from Mexico who bleeds the economy dry by signing up to Obamacare. 
In the wide ranging interview with CBS, Trump also took the time to row back on over 200 elections pledges he made including stances on a border wall, Hillary Clinton and Obamacare. 
“The days of politicians lying and cheating the American people are over, it’s now Donald’s turn,” Trump said, concluding the interview.",FAKE
"Obama To Limit Police Acquisition Of Some Military-Style Equipment

President Obama said military-style equipment used by police departments ""can alienate and intimidate local residents and send the wrong message,"" as he ended federal transfers of such weapons to local law enforcement.

Obama's remarks, made in Camden, N.J., are an attempt to ease tensions between police and minority communities in the wake of several high-profile police-involved shootings.

Under new recommendations, police forces will be banned from acquiring some types of military-style equipment from federal agencies. The proposal was one of several made by a White House task force that Obama is putting into place using an executive order on Monday.

According to a report issued by the White House, the task force recommended banning the sale of some equipment — such as tracked armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft and high-caliber weapons and ammunition — after weighing their utility to local police and the ""the potential negative impact on the community if the equipment was used arbitrarily or inappropriately.""

Local police departments can still buy this equipment on their own. They just can't buy them from the feds or buy them using federal money.

""Obama's visit to one of New Jersey's poorest cities comes as he seeks to ramp up federal funding for community policing initiatives in the wake of a series of high-profile incidents that have frayed trust between officers and residents in Ferguson, Mo., New York and Baltimore, among other cities. ""Camden has long been among New Jersey's most crime-ridden cities, but reforms over the past two years have led to falling crime statistics and an increased number of officers in the community.""

Based on a fact sheet distributed by the White House, here are a few other initiatives Obama will highlight Monday:

— Police Data Initiative will help police departments across the country track things like use of force and police stops. Data scientists will help some police departments polish an early warning system, using data to flag problems.

— Twenty-one jurisdictions will also release big data sets that will help ""communities gain visibility into key information on police/citizen encounters.""

— The White House will release a body-cam tool kit that will help police plan and implement body-cam programs.

— The Department of Justice ""will begin taking applications for grants designed to advance the practice of community policing in law enforcement agencies through hiring, training and technical assistance, the development of innovative community policing strategies, applied research, guidebooks, and best practices that are national in scope.""",REAL
"Email 
Who would have thought right? Hillary’s campaign establishing what appears to be some very close ties with the largest social media company (Facebook) on the Internet, right in the midst of her presidential campaign? It’s not enough that Hillary has Google hiding various stories from Clinton search queries, but it looks like she had to go and get Facebook on board to help her cheat as well. But should Trump supporters take any issue with that? 
Sure, there’s been issues in the past with Facebook banning conservatives for merely looking at their monitors the wrong way, but all that changed this week right? If you recall, earlier this week we learned that despite donating huge amounts of money to Hillary’s campaign, allegedly Mark Zuckerberg betrayed Hillary Clinton, and actually jumped on board the Trump Train … or is there more to this? In the video below I dig a bit deeper into both these stories… 
Emails Show Connection Between Facebook Executive, Clinton Campaign 
… kept the interactions with Clinton private … 
A new WikiLeaks email dump shows Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg eager and willing to be involved in helping Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 
Sandberg’s role in helping the research-driven Clinton campaign was revealed in a WikiLeaks email from Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. 
“I have arranged for Sheryl Sandberg and her researcher to be available on 5 March at 10 am to step through the research on gender and leadership by women,” Mills wrote in a February 2015 email. 
Two months after that meeting, Sandberg offered to do more for the campaign in response to an email from campaign chairman John Podesta expressing sympathy for the death of her husband. 
“I still want HRC to win badly ,” Sandberg wrote in May 2015. “I am still here to help as I can. She came over and was magical with my kids.” 
Facebook has said that Sandberg was acting in a private capacity in sharing research with the Clinton campaign. Sandberg kept the interactions with Clinton private, and did not formally, publicly endorse Clinton until early 2016. 
However, she kept in touch with the campaign. In August 2015, she emailed Podesta offering to put him in touch with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , a staunch opponent of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump . 
“Mark is meeting with people to learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action and it’s hard to imagine someone better placed or more experienced than you to help him,” she wrote. 
“He’s begun to think about whether/how he might want to shape advocacy efforts to support his philanthropic priorities and is particularly interested in meeting people who could help him understand how to move the needle on the specific public policy issues he cares most about,” she added. 
“He wants to meet folks who can inform his understanding about effective political operations to advance public policy goals on social oriented objectives (like immigration, education or basic scientific research),” she wrote. 
The WikiLeaks emails from Podesta’s account imply a meeting was arranged later that month. 
SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS ARE ACTUALLY GOVERNMENT CREATIONS: 
If you doubt that the CIA made Google, and Google made the NSA, but you don’t read the following: save your worthless drivel for someone who cares. If you don't have the facts presented, how can you presume to dispute then? Conversely, if you dispute the facts presented with evidence stacked higher than Mt. Everest, by all means… let’s hear it, but support your opinions with FACTS, not platitudes.",FAKE
"Politics US Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton listens as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks during an event at University of New Hampshire September 28, 2016 in Durham, New Hampshire. (Photo by AFP) 
Former US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders has denounced Republican nominee Donald Trump as a “political coward” over a voter suppression report. 
Sanders condemned Trump after a report that the Republican's presidential campaign has three ""voter suppression"" drives intended to lower turnout for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, and to help Trump winning the White House. 
""Anybody who is suppressing the vote because they know that those people will vote against them is a political coward,"" the Vermont senator tweeted. 
“If you don’t have the guts to run for office on your ideas @ realDonaldTrump , then you shouldn’t run for office at all,” he said in another tweet. 
A senior adviser to Trump acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek that the Republican team has ""three major voter suppression operations underway."" 
Sanders – a former primary rival of Clinton – suspended his campaign in July and endorsed the former secretary of state, despite leaked emails that showed top officials at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) privately planned to undermine Sanders’s presidential campaign. 
Sanders had earlier said that he would not endorse Clinton for president until they meet and he could measure her commitment to combating wealth inequality, and other issues that powered his presidential campaign. 
Sanders’ emphasis on US income inequality and the influence of corporate money on elections and the government helped him attract millions of voters to his campaign. Loading ...",FAKE
"(Before It's News)
As advanced as our Job Posting Analytics have become—including the ability to filter by keyword search, employer, region, title, skill, or certification—there’s something that no filter or datapoint can replace: viewing the actual job posting.
Now within Job Posting Analytics reports in Analyst and Developer , users can view the full text of the most relevant and recent job postings tailored to their search.
Not only will the viewable postings be filtered by the selected variables, but the keyword searched will also be highlighted in the full posting text. This extra detail makes it even easier to analyze how employers are asking for certain credentials.
With the quick addition of new filters, the postings displayed can be narrowed from all in New York, to all in New York that mention “javascript,” to all in New York that mention “javascript” from Oracle Corporation.
The real power of this new functionality is in the context it provides. Now, users can step into the shoes of the employer and understand exactly what kind of talent they’re seeking in prospective candidates. We’re thrilled to see how this new functionality will empower users to better align programs with employer needs, identify emerging skills and occupations, and more.
Over the next few weeks, our development team will be working to increase the number of viewable postings from five to at least 50.
The post Now Live: View Full Text of Job Postings appeared first on Emsi .",FAKE
"Email If you can’t get enough enamel pins, then it’s time to start freaking out, because this Etsy shop is all about them. With hundreds of unique designs for you to mix and match, it’s easy to get lost in this enamel fan’s wonderland. Check it out: Or maybe enamel isn’t for you. Not a problem. Forget about the pins, in that case, and get ready to explode the moment you see this little guy: A ! He’s a bulldog puppy, he’s 2 months old—oh, and did we mention he has the most adorable face anyone has ever seen? Bulldog isn’t doing the trick? Hey, that’s totally okay! Let’s move on. Here’s an incredible pizza. And here’s a grilled cheese you need in your belly ASAP. We have collected it for you. It is here to annihilate your mind. How’s that? Are you now slobbering uncontrollably from the food? Has the food melted you to a quivering puddle of yes? If not, keep scrolling, because we’re just getting started. We will find just the thing. What about this diabolical optical illusion that is going to destroy your mind. Total brain collapse in three…two…one… Did that work? Surely you have lost it and you can’t even handle it and you love it so much it is so you. No? Fine…What else…Perhaps this is the thing that will wreck you at last: a badass vintage car. Go ahead and flip out: Still nothing? You are not yet blowing up with joy? Okay. Don’t worry. The GIF of the dog who is trapped in the toilet will now transform your body into rubble: Jesus. Let’s go back to the enamel store for a sec, maybe we scooted off it too quickly. It really is a great store. Hard enamel. Soft enamel. Lapel pins. Regular old pin-pins. If you like enamel AT ALL then it should only take one look at this set of OMG-worthy pins and you’ll be out of control with joy: What?? What do you want from us? What do you need? We will collect it here. You crave Bill Murray in public? Here is Bill Murray in public: Beautiful pic of biggest waterfall? There. It is done. Look. Look at these things. There must be",FAKE
"Kidney Protective Liver protective The table below reveals in detail what parts of the coconut palm are responsible for producing these aforementioned biological effects. Click to view the fully enlarged versions of the table here . In support of these findings, the GreenMedInfo.com database presently contains research on the coconut palm’s potential therapeutic value in preventing and/or treating over 50 different conditions , and expressing 16 different beneficial biological effects. You can view the supporting studies on our coconut research page . The new study, titled “ Cocos nucifera (L.) (Arecaceae): A phytochemical and pharmacological review ,” also reviewed the toxicity literature on the coconut palm’s various constituents and found there was no evidence of acute toxicity, and only low toxicity associated with chronic exposure. The study summarized the story of the coconut palm’s fascinating spread around the world as follows: The plant is originally from Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and the islands between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From that region, the fruit of the coconut palm is believed to have been brought to India and then to East Africa. After the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope, this plant was introduced into West Africa and, from there, dispersed to the American continent and to other tropical regions of the globe.” The review also summarized the traditional healing applications of the coconut palm. This is an important, complementary data set, because though many of the traditional uses have not yet been tested and validated by science, they may actually work exceptionally well for these conditions in actual practice. The traditional uses were also summarized in the following paragraph: In Brazil, extract from the husk fiber of C. nucifera is used to treat diarrhea (7). In Papua New Guinea, the leaves and roots of young plants are chewed as treatment for diarrhea and stomachaches (8,9). In Fiji, coconut oil is used to prevent hair loss and coconut water is used to treat renal disease (10). In Ghana, people use coconut milk to treat diarrhea (11). In Guatemala, the husk fiber extract is used as an antipyretic, to reduce renal inflammation, and as a topic ointment for dermatitis, abscesses, and injuries (12). In Haiti, a decoction of the dry pericarp is used for oral treatment of amenorrhea, and the oil is applied as an ointment to burns (13); an aqueous extract from the husk fiber is also used for oral asthma treatment (14). In India, infusions made with the coconut inflorescence are used for the oral treatment of menstrual cycle disorders (15). In Indonesia, the oil is used as a wound ointment, the coconut milk is used as an oral contraceptive, and fever and diarrhea are treated with the root extract (16–18). In Jamaica, the husk fiber extract is used to treat diabetes (19,20). In Mozambique, the fruit is consumed by men as an aphrodisiac (21). Peruvians use the aqueous extract of the fresh coconut fiber orally for asthma, as a diuretic, and for gonorrhea (22). In Trinidad, bark extract is used orally for amenorrhea and dysmenorrhea, and bark tea is used to treat venereal diseases (23). In Mexico, coconut is used to treat various disorders associated with urogenital tract infection by Trichomonas vaginalis (24). A decoction of the white flesh of the fruit is used in rural Malaysia to treat fever and malaria (25). In Kenya, the fruit is used to relieve skin rash caused by HIV infection (26). The study concluded, Cocos nucifera is a widely dispersed plant that has important pharmacological effects with low toxicity. Furthermore, medicinal use of C. nucifera has an environmental appeal, since this plant is widely used in the food industry and use of discarded plant parts will reduce waste and pollution. The pharmacological effects of the plant differ according to the part of the plant or fruit used. Antioxidant activity predominated in the constituents of the endocarp and coconut water. In addition, the fiber showed antibacterial, antiparasitic, and anti-inflammatory activities. Only the ethanolic extract of the root had depressant and anticonvulsant action on the central nervous system. Coconut water seems to have protective effects, e.g., on the kidney and heart, and antioxidant activity, as well as a hypoglycemic effect. For more information on the amazing properties of coconut, read the following popular articles on the topic:",FAKE
"October 28, 2016 Venezuela crisis enters dangerous phase as Maduro foes go militant In a curious convergence of events on the same day last week, four Venezuelan provincial courts issued identical rulings, state governors quickly hit Twitter to celebrate, then the election board emailed a short but bombshell statement. Opposition hopes for a referendum to recall President Nicolas Maduro were dashed, on grounds of fraud in an initial signature drive. The vote was off. For many in the opposition, that settled a years-old debate about the nature of Venezuela’s socialist government, uniting them in conviction they are now fighting a dictatorship. Their new militancy heightens the risk of unrest as the South American OPEC member of 30 million people grapples with a dangerous economic and political crisis. “Can anyone in the world now really doubt that Venezuela is living in tyranny?” said housewife Mabel Pinate, 62, dressed in white among thousands of protesters who took to the streets against Maduro on Wednesday. “We are sick of this. It’s time to toughen up and do what we must to save Venezuela,” added Pinate, whose husband was fired from state oil company PDVSA by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez and whose two children have gone abroad.",FAKE
"Cable news is in trouble. The Pew Research Center reports that the median daily audience for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC is down about 11 percent since 2008.

The Washington Post's Paul Farhi sees a grim future for the industry. He argues that cable news outlets are pretty much where newspapers were a decade ago: their audience is aging, their medium is being disrupted by new technologies, and the next generation of viewers is developing habits and preferences that they're poorly placed to serve. (This is probably a good moment to note that I'm a contributor to MSNBC.)

The networks may still be making money — in 2014, Fox News managed $1.2 billion in profits, while CNN cleared $300 million and MSNBC made a bit more than $200 million — but Farhi suggests ""the cable news networks will face bankruptcy the same way Ernest Hemingway once described a character’s financial demise: 'Gradually and then suddenly.'""

Perhaps that's right. But while Farhi's account of cable news outlets' woes focuses mainly on the cable part of the equation, it's also worth considering the problems all three networks are having with the news itself.

The rise of the three major cable news networks were all driven by stories they dominated. CNN was made by the 1991 Gulf War. It wasn't just the first time it passed the networks in ratings; it was the first time CNN showed that it could beat the networks in coverage. You can still feel the surprise in this New York Times article from 1991:

The shooting in the Persian Gulf began tonight with the three broadcast networks committed to covering the war on a 24-hour basis, although their image as news leaders was damaged by the Cable News Network's early dominance of the coverage ... he networks' image was certainly not helped when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said he was following the attacks on Baghdad on CNN. At least one network station, an NBC station in Detroit, decided to quit its network's coverage to run CNN's. And NBC finally was compelled to interview CNN reporters on the air to get information out of Baghdad.

Fox News, for its part, saw basically exponential growth around 9/11, and then again around the 2008 campaign and Obama's election. MSNBC's rise was driven by the backlash to the Bush administration, and particularly to the Iraq War:

The network held those gains in the first half of the Obama era, as liberals went from terrified to triumphant. But as liberals have gone from triumphant to a bit depressed and checked out, viewership has begun to decline.

The recent rise of cable news — particularly Fox and MSNBC — came in a period when the news — particularly political news — was unusually interesting.

Between 2000 and 2012, we saw a contested US presidential election, the largest terrorist attack ever on US soil, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, repeated wave elections, a global financial crisis, the first black president, the rise of the Tea Party, the fight over Obamacare, and the first states to legalize gay marriage and marijuana — and much more. It's been a weirdly interesting, consequential period in American politics. And so the cable news networks, which could devote 24 hours a day to covering these stories, benefited.

But now it's an unusually dull period in American politics. Congress is gridlocked, and is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. The US, thankfully, isn't reeling from a terrorist attack or a financial crisis. We haven't invaded Iran, at least not yet. And it's not just cable news that's losing viewers because of it. Turnout in the 2014 election was the lowest it's been in 70 years.

You see this, I think, in the specific fortunes of the cable networks. Farhi reports that MSNBC lost 14 percent of its audience in 2014, and Fox lost 2 percent. But CNN prime time — which swung away from politics toward covering plane crashes and airing documentaries — is up 10 percent in 2015.

Which is all to say that Farhi may be right about the long-term decline of cable news — over some extended period of time, both network and cable channels are going to be diminished by whatever it is the internet creates in their place.

But year to year, a lot of the ups and downs might just be the appeal of what's actually in the news. If President Scott Walker goes to war with Iran, MSNBC's ratings are going to go up. If President Hillary Clinton takes away everyone's guns, Fox is going to boom. But for now, relative peace and stability are bad news for cable news.",REAL
Top Dems want White House to call off Part B demo — The next cancer drug shortage,REAL
"Ho'oponopono: Healing For Ourselves & Our World Nov 14, 2016 0 0 
We live in a world that is guided by the universal law of cause and effect. What we as individuals, groups of people, communities, societies and countries put out into the world through our thoughts, manifests. What we put into our collective consciousness has an effect. The cause being the thought. Everything is energy. All things have an energetic effect. We are all responsible for the shape of our lives and our world. We are all connected and bound together through this principle. When we hurt one another, whether intentionally or not, it is truly important for us to find forgiveness and healing. “I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” 
This is Ho’oponopono. These four sentences. It is a healing tool we can utilize for forgiveness. At this time, we may offer it to our newly elected world leaders, friends, family or a situation such as the turbulent US presidential election. For those of us unfamiliar with Ho’oponopono, these four sentences offered to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as an example, may feel like an instant trigger of built up internal emotions as many people have been going through anger, fear, hurt, confusion, and sadness both during and after this election. This healing modality can help take us from those feelings to feelings of deep forgiveness, acceptance, love and peace. 
“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” – Paul Boese 
If there is a need to heal hurtful differences you have had with others around the issue of this election, then you are in right the place right now by reading this piece. What is Ho’oponopono? 
Ho’oponopono is the Hawaiian ritual of forgiveness, and it belongs to an ancient system of teachings called Huna (Hu=Knowledge, na=represents Wisdom). The Hawaiian islands also go by ‘The Land of Aloha’, the land of love. It is in this essence and spirit of Aloha that we find Ho’oponopono. 
We all share a common path. Along that path, there is only one great universal power that accompanies us, and that is the power of unconditional love. It is the essence of God, and the place where compassion and unity spring forth. Ho’oponopono also means “compassion in action”. It helps us move past the duality behind good and evil, which is where we become separate from one another through judgment and condemnation. Through 4 simple sentences, Ho’oponopono can bring us to inner peace, harmony and unity. It offers us a solution to solving a problem while returning us to our divine plan. 
A paradigm shift: “I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” 
“Ho’oponopono is a spiritual-soul method of purification that cleanses us from fears and worries, destructive relationship patterns, and any religious dogmas and paradigms that oppose our personal and spiritual development. It cleans out the blockages in our thoughts and cell structure, for our thoughts are made manifest in our body. This is the paradigm change.” 
When we notice disturbances in our harmony and thought process because of a person, event or situation, then we can take this conflict and make a Ho’oponopono: I’m sorry (add the person’s name). We come to a stillness, and connect within our being. We contemplate, recognize and accept the problem, and ask for support through courage and peace. Please forgive me. We view the problem and all of its nuances, and we go within our own heart to seek out any part we may share in the problem. We take on 100% responsibility for the existence of the problem within us, another and our world. (100% responsibility=100% power). This could, for example, be in the form of a past experience where we have been hurt, and we are thus intensifying the current situation with the past. Perhaps we ourselves have made a judgement that has contributed to the conflict. These are all examples of things that require healing from within. I love you. Forgiveness takes place unconditionally, and we pardon ourselves and others. Thank you. With these words we express our faith and trust, and we let go. A prayer of gratitude may be offered to end. 
“If we can accept that we are the sum total of all past thoughts, emotions, words, deeds and actions and that our present lives and choices are colored or shaded by this memory bank of the past, then we begin to see how a process of correcting or setting aright can change lives, our families and our society.” – Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona 
It has been through Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len, who took over the leadership of the Foundation of I Institute, that Ho’oponopono became known throughout the world. 
He spent 4 years working in the psychiatric department of the state prison in Hawaii, which had conditions described as “the hell”. Thirty prisoners were confined there. There was a chronic shortage of security and staff. Many employees put in their notice as soon as possible after beginning employment, and even handcuffed prisoners were known to inflict violence upon staff. 
While Dr. Hew Len worked there, he never met with a single prisoner. Instead, he spent his days in his office reading their case reports several times daily. With each prisoner’s report, he looked inward, and asked himself what darkness, negativity, power and hatefulness could possibly be within him that it too could be in another, and thus exist in his world. When he found something within himself, he did a Ho’oponopono. 
After 1.5 years, the atmosphere and mood of the prison hospital had completely altered. After 18 months, none of the prisoners needed to wear handcuffs, and they walked freely. People came happily to work, and the illnesses declined. Therapeutic conversations could then be held with the inmates, and after 4 years all of the inmates, except for 2, were completely cured. The institution closed. 
How was this possible? Through Ho’oponopono, Dr. Hew Len worked to continually cleanse his own heart, and take 100% responsibility for the existence of the prisoners in his life. 
This study has been well documented, and Ho’oponopono is now an acknowledged therapy in the USA. There are also more than 50 studies for forgiveness at the diplomatic level. 
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you, and tomorrow you will be where your thoughts will bring you.” – James Allen 
Another form to do the Ho’oponopono is to begin with I love you for unification at the beginning: “Before the sun goes down, forgive.”– Hawaiian Proverb 
Please, take the time to say it aloud. Some people have reported that it has had a miraculous effect when they even whispered it. Looking into your own eyes in a mirror while saying those 4 healing sentences can also be quite a testament to it’s extraordinary effect. 
“Forgiveness is not a one-time thing, forgiveness is a lifestyle.” – Dr. Martin Luther King 
If we all practice Ho’oponopono, look within, forgive, heal and love, then perhaps we can begin to see a shift in our lives as well as in our governments. Through cleansing what we have witnessed during this election season, there is hope for a deep shift within and without. It’s time to love ourselves and each other more. We all need more love. Let’s open ourselves to Ho’oponopono as a way to heal our inner and outer world. 
Deepest love and appreciation to Ulrich E. Dupree for writing the book, ” Ho’oponopono: The Hawaiian Forgiveness Ritual As The Key To Your Life’s Fulfillment”. This little book has been with me for 2 years now. Thus, a lot of the information I have shared in this article has come from it. I am grateful for the balance, peace and healing that it continues to bring into my life. 
This is the website of Dr. Ihaleakalal Hew Len. 
To read testimonials of peoples’ experiences during and after Ho’oponopono, click here . 
Finally, Aloha International has a wonderful list of books and resources (some free) to help understand more about the Huna healing art of Hawaii and Hawaiian Shamanism. 
If you have other resources or references that may help people heal through Ho’oponopono and Huna, please leave a link in the comment section for us to all access and, thus, from which we can continue to heal and grow. 
Peace begins with me. I am a part of the Universe. When I change, the world changes too. Peace begins with each and every one of us. 
“There is only one corner of the Universe you can be sure of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley 
Aloha, ‘I see the divine in you, and I see the divine in myself.’ May we all find the healing we need, and may we all treat ourselves and others with respect, dignity, compassion, acceptance and love. When we heal ourselves, we heal the world. Peace be with me, and peace be with you. 
Ulonda Faye is a certified wellness practitioner, holistic esthetician, and Rejuv Miracles Practitioner. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she offers online and in-person education in holistic skincare, self-love, beauty rituals, and life coaching.",FAKE
"Grass-roots activists were instrumental in derailing the previous attempt by Congress to overhaul immigration laws, in 2007. This time, they have yet to ignite a similar fire.

Coordinated rallies last week to oppose the current bipartisan immigration legislation drew sparse crowds, with fewer than 10 people showing up for a protest in Dover, Del. The number of phone calls to lawmakers' offices opposing the bill has been a fraction of what it was six years ago. As a discussion topic on conservative talk radio in recent...",REAL
"Tuesday, 1 November 2016 Kim Kardashian: The Queen Of Selfies 
The world wide web has been crashing, due to suffering from withdrawals of Kim Kardashian's daily selfies. Kim was the queen of breaking the internet with her big booty, and it wasn't always from her sitting on it! Once upon a time, Kardashian fans felt so empowered by her nakedness, they would to bow to her tweets 1000 times a day, masterbate to her on Instagram 400 times a day, and drool at her snapchat videos 2000 times a day hoping they could see more selfies. 
Things changed inside a Paris Hotel when 5 super villains robbed Kim of her biggest selfie moment. Fans were outraged and began rioting around the world when they learned the robbers didn't post any photos online showing Kim's booty & her boobs all tied up. 
In a press conference, the Kardashian family let the world know that the online trolls are real and keep haunting them in person like the boogie man. Kris Kardashian says the trolls have not stopped the family from living their normal reality TV life in the limelight because she hired more super heroes as body guards that are ready to take on the villains! Meanwhile, Kanye is still loving himself publicly, Kylie continues eating pizza filled with love letters from her number one stalker fan, and the rest of the family is estatic that the focus is back on them for a minute. 
Kim Kardashian has been offline for a month, yet fans refuse to believe this is the end of her booty selfies online. The world wide web hasn't stopped praying for Kim, they desperately await her selfie comeback so they can have meaning in their lives and feel empowered once again. Make DeniseVasquez's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
"President Obama on Tuesday followed through on his vow to veto bipartisan-backed legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, marking his first veto of the Republican-led Congress and only the third of his presidency.

The president, in a brief statement, claimed the bill would ""circumvent"" the existing process for reviewing the pipeline, which would extend from Canada to Texas.

""The Presidential power to veto legislation is one I take seriously,"" Obama said. ""But I also take seriously my responsibility to the American people. And because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest -- including our security, safety, and environment -- it has earned my veto.""

The decision, while expected, was met with tough criticism from Republicans -- and tees up another showdown with Congress in the coming days as GOP leaders try to override.

""It's extremely disappointing that President Obama vetoed a bipartisan bill that would support thousands of good jobs and pump billions of dollars into the economy,"" Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. ""Even though the President has yielded to powerful special interests, this veto doesn't end the debate.""

McConnell's office said the Senate plans to vote on overriding sometime before March 3.

But so far, congressional leaders have not demonstrated they have the votes to override, which takes a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

The Keystone bill garnered 62 yeas in the Senate, but they would need 67 to override. In the House, the bill got 270 votes -- but they would need 281 to override.

It remains unclear whether moderate lawmakers could be swayed to switch in the coming weeks.

While Tuesday's veto marked only the third of Obama's presidency -- fewer than any U.S. president since the 19th century -- his sparing use of the presidential tool is likely to change. With Republicans now in control of Congress, their efforts to chip away at the president's health care law and other legislative accomplishments are just as likely to be met with Obama's veto pen.

To date, Obama rarely has used the veto in part because Democrats for six years controlled at least one chamber in Congress -- acting as a buffer to prevent unwanted bills from ever reaching the president's desk. That buffer is now gone.

A look back at past presidencies, especially where control of the White House and Congress was split during at least one point, shows far more liberal use of that presidential power.

In the Clinton presidency, the president issued 37 vetoes in his two terms. President Ronald Reagan issued 78. President George W. Bush issued 12. His father issued 44.

Not since the Warren G. Harding administration has the number of vetoes been in the single digits; Harding issued six.

The Keystone bill is as contentious an issue as any for Obama to fire his first veto shot of the new Congress.

First proposed in 2008, the Keystone pipeline would connect Canada's tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries.

The White House has said repeatedly it would wait to make its decision about whether to let the project go forward until after a State Department review. It regards the legislation as circumventing that process.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"November 2, 2016 Will Obama recognize Palestinian state? 
US President Barack Obama will be stepping down from eight years in office in January, but not before at least one more last ditch effort to save a foreign policy legacy marred by failure. 

According to Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Vice President Jonathan Schanzer, the White House try one more last ditch effort to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making moves ranging from sanctioning US citizens who do business with Israeli settlements all the way to possibly recognizing a Palestinian state. 

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Schanzer said that the Obama administration’s first course of action might be to adopt a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the settlements. 
Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
"Pinterest 
Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is clearly not in good health, and for a couple of campaign events she actually managed to do, we have more video of her failing health which the liberal mainstream media tries to sweep under the rug . 
On Thursday, Clinton struggled to climb the steps of her campaign plane on her way to a rally in Winston Salem, North Carolina. 
The rainy day had Clinton holding an umbrella as she labored her way up the stairs. Live Satellite News posted the video and noted that Clinton appeared to be “mumbling to herself.” 
Clinton almost missed a stair, and as The American Mirror pointed out, from the time she left her motorcade all the way up the plane stairs, Clinton seemed “wobbly and unsteady.” 
Watch the video below yourself where Clinton appeared to be pained as she climbed the campaign plane stairs: 
The American Mirror posted another video, this time from The Last Stand, in which Clinton couldn’t tackle an approximately 18-inch step without assistance. The title of the video referenced Clinton’s “Stronger Together” campaign slogan — one that she apparently has taken literally thanks to her clearly failing health. 
As you can see in the second video, the man who assisted Clinton didn’t just happen to be there and thought it would be nice to extend a hand to the elderly woman. No, he bounded over to Clinton when she neared the step. He stood nearby in what looked like an effort to be ready to help her descend the single step or steady her on the platform. 
Now, some who haven’t followed the campaign closely may think that this is nit-picky, but it isn’t. It’s a little odd on its own, but when you add it to the mountain of evidence over the years of Clinton’s failing health, it says a great deal. 
Can you imagine the media uproar if Donald Trump exhibited a tenth of the issues Clinton has on the campaign trail? You don’t have to — just this week Trump took 90 minutes “off” of the campaign trail to open his new Washington hotel, Washington Trump International, and CNN’s Dana Bash managed to ask a question that served as a dig. 
“For people who say you’re taking time out of swing states to go do this,” Bash asked. Trump, with his hectic schedule that more than puts Clinton to shame, wasn’t having it: “For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting, because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then goes home and sleeps. Yet you’ll ask me that question.” 
He’s right. There have been numerous examples of Clinton’s failing health that have barely gained media attention aside from her collapse at a Sept. 11 memorial this year that forced the biased media to reluctantly cover it. 
The media is in the bag for Clinton, there’s no doubt about it . They may not note her clear health issues that she refuses to disclose the public, but we will.",FAKE
"The Iraqi Air Force has bombed the convoy of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq's western Anbar province, the Iraqi military said Sunday.

The condition and location of al-Baghdadi were not known, the military said. It did not say when the strike occurred.

The military statement said al-Baghdadi, 44, had been heading to Karabla, near the Syrian border, to attend a meeting with ISIL commanders, Al Arabiya and other media outlets reported.

""The location of the meeting was also bombed and many of the group's leaders were killed and wounded,"" the statement said.

Iran's Fars news agency said several Arabic-language media outlets in Iraq have quoted ""informed military sources"" as saying al-Baghdadi had been killed and that no one in the convoy survived the attack. Reuters, however, cited hospital officials and Karabla residents as saying al-Baghdadi was not among the dead.

Also Sunday, the Combined Joint Task Force that coordinates the international effort against the Islamic State said it had staged 24 airstrikes on ISIL in Syria and Iraq on Saturday. The strikes conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve ""further limits the group's ability to project terror and conduct operations,"" the task force said in a statement.

The Islamic State has taken control of a large swath of Iraq and Syria in brutal fighting. Dominated by Sunni Arabs from Syria and Iraq, the group claims religious, political and military authority over Muslims worldwide as it attempts to build a state ruled by strict Sharia law.

The U.S. designated Baghdadi a terrorist four years ago, authorizing a $10 million reward for information leading to his death or capture.  There have been reports in the past that al-Baghdadi had been attacked or even killed, including last November, but he reportedly retains his iron grip on ISIL. The Islamic State's No. 2 leader, Ahmad al-Hayali, reportedly was killed by a U.S. airstrike in August, U.S. officials have said. Al-Hayali, also known as Hajji Mutazz, was killed in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.

The National Security Council said Mutazz, al-Baghdadi's deputy, ""was a primary coordinator for moving large amounts of weapons, explosives, vehicles and people between Iraq and Syria.""

Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed ""caliph"" of the Islamic State, made news in the U.S. in August when the family of  Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker who died in February while being held by the Islamic State, claimed their daughter had been repeatedly raped by the ISIL leader.

Mueller, 26, from Prescott, Ariz., was taken captive in Syria in August 2013 while leaving a Spanish Doctors without Borders hospital in Aleppo.

Al-Baghdadi brought her to live at the home of Abu Sayyaf, a Tunisian in charge of oil and gas revenue for the group, counterterrorism officials said. The details of Mueller's treatment were initially reported by several Yazidi girls who were held at the house, including a 14-year-old and her sister who managed to escape in August 2014. The sisters' version has been corroborated by U.S. officials.

According to the accounts by the Yazidi girls, many Yazidi women passed through the Sayyaf house on the way to being given as ""presents"" to Islamic State fighters. They said rape was a ""reward"" for military victories. The Yazidis are an ancient religious sect, based mostly in Iraq, that has faced savage treatment from ISIL.",REAL
"WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Conservative political advocacy groups supported by the billionaire Koch brothers plan to spend $889 million in the 2016 U.S. elections, more than double what they raised in 2012, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

The newspaper said the goal was announced to donors at a weekend meeting in Rancho Mirage, California, hosted by Freedom Partners, a business lobby at the center of the Koch brothers' political operation. The Post cited a person who attended the gathering.

The money will be doled out by a network of 17 organizations funded by industrialists Charles and David Koch, who have become a major force in conservative politics in recent years, and other wealthy donors. The network raised $407 million for the 2012 campaign.

During the 2012 election cycle, the national Republican Party collectively spent about $675 million, according to election data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Post said the $889 million would be spent on field operations, technology, policy study and other expenses.

The Freedom Partners network spent almost $300 million on November's congressional elections, in which Republicans won control of the Senate and retained their majority in the House of Representatives.

The potential field for the Republican presidential nomination is fairly crowded and the Post said the Koch group was still considering whether it would support candidates in the Republican primaries, which could dramatically shape the campaign and possible lead to intraparty conflict.

Senators Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, all of whom are mentioned as possible presidential candidates, took part in the Rancho Mirage meeting, the Post said.

The newspaper said the Freedom Partners network included Americans for Prosperity and funded groups such as Concerned Veterans for America, the Libre Initiative and Generation Opportunity. (Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Peter Cooney)",REAL
"It’s a curious feature of American life that when four innocents are killed by a gunman in Chattanooga, or when a young white supremacist opens fire inside a historic AME Church in Charleston, we talk about loosening gun safety laws.

In the aftermath of this week’s murders, Donald Trump managed the near-impossible—sounding like a mainstream Republican politician—when he argued, “Get rid of gun free zones. The four great marines who were just shot never had a chance.” He is hardly alone in proposing this solution to the epidemic of gun violence. “These terrible tragedies seem to occur in gun-free zones,” said Rand Paul in January. “The Second Amendment “serves as a fundamental check on government tyranny,” Ted Cruz has said.

But if these Second Amendment-purists really think that guns make places safer, if they really think that guns are an important check on government and safeguard of liberty, then why do so many of them keep their workplace—the U.S. Capitol—free of firearms?

For almost two centuries and until very recently, ordinary citizens had free run of the Capitol. Ironically, as Congress has become less hospitable to gun safety laws, and as conservative Republican legislators have grown more strident in their desire to see citizens carry open and concealed weapons everywhere—in churches and schools, on college campuses, at bars and restaurants—the one venue that has grown more gun-free, more secure and more restrictive is the building they work in.

Until 1983, there were no metal detectors at the entryways to the Capitol. No staff and member identification badges. No requirement that American taxpayers reserve advance tickets, queue up in a subterranean visitors’ center and be guided through a select few rooms of the complex. The only areas truly off limits to non-credentialed individuals were the Senate and House floors, though in extraordinary times, even these rooms became public space.

When Union soldiers converged on Washington in the spring of 1861, the Sixth Massachusetts took refuge in the new House and Senate chambers. John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s young staff secretary, ventured over to inspect the “novel” scene. “The contrast was very painful between the grey haired dignity that filled the Senate Chamber when I saw it last and the present throng of bright-looking Yankee boys,” he observed..” Hay reclined on a leather sofa toward the rear of the chamber and gazed at the “wide-spreading skylights over arching the vast hall like heaven blushed and blazed with gold.” He thought it a fitting place to quarter the troops.

It took extraordinary circumstances for armed militiamen, citizens and congressmen to mingle freely on the House floor. But the stark contrast between now and then raises a poignant issue: Why should Congress be the only gun-free zone in America?

At exactly 2:32 on the afternoon of March 1, 1954, gunfire emanating from multiple points in the gallery interrupted legislative business on the crowded House floor, where 240 members of Congress were debating an immigration reform bill. The assailants—four Puerto Rican nationalists armed with German Lugers—created instant bedlam. Bullets “crashed through the table of the majority leader and chairs around it,” reported the New York Times, “and struck near the table of the Minority Leader and beyond.” At first, many House members mistook the gunfire for firecrackers. When they realized the gravity of their situation—they were sitting ducks, easy targets for unidentified gunmen who enjoyed a direct line of site—members dove behind their seats and crawled their way to the cloakrooms.

Capitol Police officers, with the aide of several spectators and one congressman, worked to subdue the attackers, while teenaged House pages dodged bullets to carry Rep. Alvin Bentley, a 35-year-old Republican from Michigan who had been gravely wounded, off the floor. Against odds, Bentley survived his injuries.

Remarkably, the attack in 1954 spurred no fundamental changes to Capitol security. The same cultural traditions that made the Capitol a natural dormitory for Civil War soldiers made it unthinkable that Congress would bar citizens from freely accessing and wandering its halls. The democratization of American politics from the 1830s onward reinforced a widely held conviction that, no matter how unrepresentative the makeup of the House and Senate might be of society at large, the national legislature was a people’s body, and its buildings belonged to everyone.

That began to change amid the turbulence of the late sixties. In 1967, with civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations assuming an increasingly strident tone—including several disruptive protests from the House and Senate galleries—Congress passed a new measure stipulating, among other provisions, that it be made a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years in prison, to carry or discharge a firearm in the Capitol. Still, even after the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in the Senate wing in the early morning hours of March 1, 1971, ostensibly to protest U.S. military operations in Laos, Congress took few precautions. As late as 1983, visitors were required to pass through metal detectors at the doors to the Senate and House galleries, but not upon entering the building itself, where they remained free to walk most corridors and inevitably happened across dozens if not hundreds of congressmen on days when either chamber was in session. At most, they were asked to open their handbags and purses for a manual inspection.

The status quo changed on the evening of November 7, 1983, when a bomb tore through the walls of the Senate Republican cloakroom and also badly damaged the office of Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd. Fortunately, no lives were lost.

In response to the attack, Congress finally tightened Capitol security in a significant way. Whereas visitors had been able to access the building through 10 doors, now the Capitol Police only allowed the general public to use four, each outfitted with a metal detector. In later years, x-ray machines were added. Furthermore, staff members were now required to wear official badges that would allow them access to newly restricted areas. Reporters, accustomed to enjoying free run of the building, found themselves limited in their movement.

“There were a lot of older staff people and members around who thought it was just terrible to have metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs around,” recalled former House Clerk Donnald K. Anderson in an official oral history.

Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in 1983, many members balked at the idea of restricting access and tightening security, particularly where representatives of media outlets were concerned. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, warned that “to cut off access—free, spontaneous, adventitious and often calamitous—between senators and the accredited members of the press gallery would be to change our institution. It would begin to cut us off from the people who send us here.”

“It’s a sad day for the American government when any constituent has to go through a security guard to see a Congressman,” said Robert H. Michel, the House Republican leader.",REAL
"in: Faith , US News On October 31st, most people will simply ignore the dark side of Halloween. The vast majority of the population will dress up in costumes, go to parties and eat candy without ever even considering where the holiday came from or what certain people are doing behind closed doors. But the truth is that Halloween night is one of the biggest nights of the year for witches, occultists and Satanists. All over America, those that are deep into the dark arts will be contacting the dead, casting spells and conducting blood sacrifices. As you will see below, there is a reason why animal shelters across the country ban the adoption of black cats this time of the year. But even our “innocent” Halloween traditions such as dressing up in costumes, “trick or treating” and carving jack-o’-lanterns all have their roots in ancient pagan practices . And every year the costumes for our young girls become even more sexually suggestive, the horror movies become even more demonic, and the public’s fascination with the occult just continues to grow. It truly is a festival of death, but most people don’t seem to care. In fact, experts are telling us that Halloween has now become America’s second biggest holiday. According to the National Retail Federation , nearly 70 percent of all Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, and spending is expected to shatter the all-time record… According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, total spending for Halloween is expected to reach $8.4 billion, an all-time high in the survey’s 11-year history. U.S. consumers are expected to spend an average of $82.93, up from last year’s $74.34, with more than 171 million Americans planning to partake in Halloween festivities this year. To give you some context, total Halloween spending for 2009 came in at just 4.7 billion dollars. So to say that the celebration of Halloween is growing would be a tremendous understatement. Sadly, most people have no idea where this holiday originally came from. The truth is that a long time ago Catholicism attempted to “Christianize” an ancient pagan holiday known as Samhain … The origins of Halloween are Celtic in tradition and have to do with observing the end of summer sacrifices to gods in Druidic tradition. In what is now Britain and France, it was the beginning of the Celtic year, and they believed Samhain, the lord of death, sent evil spirits abroad to attack humans, who could escape only by assuming disguises and looking like evil spirits themselves. The waning of the sun and the approach of dark winter made the evil spirits rejoice and play nasty tricks. Believe it or not, most of our Halloween practices can be traced back to these old pagan rites and superstitions . On the Wiccan calendar, Samhain is one of the most important points on “the wheel of the year”. Wiccans believe that it is the day when “the god dies”, and subsequently they celebrate his rebirth at Yule. It is also a time when they believe that the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, and so it is an opportune time for them to contact the dead. The following is much more on what Wiccans believe about Samhain from wicca.com … Samhain, (pronounced SOW-in, SAH-vin, or SAM-hayne) means “End of Summer”, and is the third and final Harvest. The dark winter half of the year commences on this Sabbat. It is generally celebrated on October 31st, but some traditions prefer November 1st. It is one of the two “spirit-nights” each year, the other being Beltane. It is a magical interval when the mundane laws of time and space are temporarily suspended, and the Thin Veil between the worlds is lifted. Communicating with ancestors and departed loved ones is easy at this time, for they journey through this world on their way to the Summerlands. It is a time to study the Dark Mysteries and honor the Dark Mother and the Dark Father, symbolized by the Crone and her aged Consort. Originally the “Feast of the Dead” was celebrated in Celtic countries by leaving food offerings on altars and doorsteps for the “wandering dead”. Today a lot of practitioners still carry out that tradition. Single candles were lit and left in a window to help guide the spirits of ancestors and loved ones home. Extra chairs were set to the table and around the hearth for the unseen guest. Apples were buried along roadsides and paths for spirits who were lost or had no descendants to provide for them. Turnips were hollowed out and carved to look like protective spirits, for this was a night of magic and chaos. The Wee Folke became very active, pulling pranks on unsuspecting humans. Traveling after dark was was not advised. People dressed in white (like ghosts), wore disguises made of straw, or dressed as the opposite gender in order to fool the Nature spirits. The ancient practices described in those paragraphs sound very similar to what we do today in many ways, but without a doubt some of the traditions have evolved. For example, instead of carving turnips, those that celebrate Halloween carve pumpkins today. You may not realize this, but Wicca is actually one of the fastest growing religions in America. And on October 31st, Wiccans all over the nation will get together to conduct rituals and cast spells. Here is a blurb from Wikipedia about the Wiccan belief in “magic”… During ritual practices, which are often staged in a sacred circle , Wiccans cast spells or “workings” intended to bring about real changes in the physical world. Common Wiccan spells include those used for healing , for protection, fertility, or to banish negative influences. [63] Many early Wiccans, such as Alex Sanders , Sybil Leek and Alex Winfield , referred to their own magic as “ white magic “, which contrasted with “ black magic “, which they associated with evil and Satanism . Sanders also used the similar terminology of “ left hand path ” to describe malevolent magic, and “ right hand path ” to describe magic performed with good intentions; [64] terminology that had originated with the occultist Helena Blavatsky in the 19th century. Some modern Wiccans however have stopped using the white-black magic and left-right hand path dichotomies, arguing for instance that the colour black should not necessarily have any associations with evil. [65] If you are not familiar with these things, you may scoff at such practices. But the cold, hard reality of the matter is that they are very real. The dark side has power too, and those that have come out of witchcraft can tell you some stories that will stand your hair on end. Wiccans think of themselves as “good”, and so they tend to reject blood sacrifices and things of that nature. But for those that are deeper into the occult, blood sacrifice is an essential part of Halloween. As I mentioned above, many animal shelters all over the nation ban the adoption of black cats this time of the year … It’s the week of Halloween, and maybe you don’t know this, but if you suddenly wanted to adopt a black cat, you would probably have a hard time. That’s because thanks to their association with witchcraft, accepted wisdom holds that Halloween is a time when people ritualistically mutilate black cats. To test if this really was still accepted wisdom, I contacted some animal shelters near to our Los Angeles office, and they all told me they wouldn’t let me adopt a black cat. One, The Lange Foundation—the type of animal rescue that takes in cats from city shelters before they can be euthanized—was willing to talk to me on the phone and explain: If someone were to call and ask specifically for a black cat, that would trigger the policy. “I would say ‘not today!’” said one of the foundation’s board members, Diana Nelson. You may not want to believe it, but animals will be killed and little children will be abused on Halloween night. The following is what one ex-witch has shared regarding her experiences… My parents told me before we went around the neighborhood we were going to go by the church (Mormon Church) to get some candy there. The church was very close to my grandmother’s house, and I knew so from going often. We went to the church and what happened next made my blood curdle. I was given candy, but that was just a preclude to the sexual abuse that would happen in a satanic ritual. On Halloween Satanists use young children, such as myself, as sexual idols to worship. Other children receive a far worse fate. Death. I know for some this is more than you can even think to believe, but it is true. I can barely write these words because the pain of the truth is almost more than I can bear. If it wasn’t for the grace and love of Jesus Christ, I would not even be here writing this at all. You may say “it doesn’t mean that to me”, but you are just fooling yourself. Could you take a Satanic Black Mass and turn it into a celebration of Jesus? Of course not. And yet so many Christians fully embrace Halloween and pretend that there is nothing wrong with it. For the record, Satanists absolutely love Halloween. The following comes from the official Church of Satan website … Satanists embrace what this holiday has become, and do not feel the need to be tied to ancient practices. This night, we smile at the amateur explorers of their own inner darkness, for we know that they enjoy their brief dip into the pool of the “shadow world.” We encourage their tenebrous fantasies, the candied indulgence, and the wide-ranging evocation of our aesthetics (while tolerating some of the chintzy versions), even if it is but once a year. For the rest of the time, when those not of our meta-tribe shake their heads in wonder at us, we can point out that they may find some understanding by examining their own All Hallows Eve doings, but we generally find it simpler to just say: “Think of the Addams Family and you’ll begin to see what we’re about.” Satanists consider Halloween to be one of the most important “holidays” of the year. On page 96 of the Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey wrote the following… 
“After one’s own birthday, the two major Satanic holidays are Walpurgisnacht (May 1st) and Halloween.” Isn’t that lovely? Despite all of this, most Christians in America will happily celebrate Halloween on October 31st. In fact, one recent survey found that just 8 percent of all Christian pastors want their congregations to skip the holiday altogether. Instead, most of them want their members to invite people to a “Christian version of Halloween” at their churches. The following comes from Charisma … Two-thirds (67 percent) encourage church members to invite friends and neighbors to a fall festival, trunk-or-treat or judgment house. Pastors at bigger churches (those with 250 or more in attendance) are most likely to ask church members to invite their neighbors (86 percent) to an event at the church. Those from small churches (50 or less in attendance) are least likely (48 percent). If the gospel is preached, I am all for people going to church on October 31st. But all too often these “alternative celebrations” are nothing more than repackaged versions of the same Satanic holiday that the world is celebrating. I like how Pastor Jamie Morgan described what our approach to this day should be… Setting aside a day to celebrate evil, darkness, witchcraft, fear, death and the demonic brings disdain to God. Period. A Christian celebrating Halloween would be like a Satan worshiper putting up a nativity scene at Christmas while singing, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” The two just don’t go together. Jesus has nothing in common with Satan (2 Cor. 6:14), and neither should we. And the truth is that God has wanted us to have nothing to do with occult practices from the very beginning. The following is what Deuteronomy 18:9-13 says in the Modern English version … 9 When you enter into the land which the Lord your God gives you, you must not learn to practice the abominations of those nations . 10 There must not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or who uses divination , or uses witchcraft , or an interpreter of omens, or a sorcerer , 11 or one who casts spells , or a spiritualist , or an occultist , or a necromancer . 12 For all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord , and because of these abominations the Lord your God will drive them out from before you. 13 You must be blameless before the Lord your God. There will be many people that will read this article and will continue to celebrate Halloween just as they normally do. If that is you, then you need to understand that engaging in dark practices can open up doors to spiritual darkness for yourself and your entire family. If you do that, then that is your choice, but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord. Submit your review",FAKE
"FBI Investigates Saudi Wife-Abusing Clinton Foundation Donor in Straw Donor Scheme November 2, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
It's midnight in America. And the Clintons and the Democratic Party keep finding ways to cover themselves in glory. I'm sure the line on this will be that the FBI is acting ""inappropriately"" by investigating this. Investigating political corrupt ion interferes with corrupt politicians being elected. 
The FBI is investigating an alleged illegal donation scheme involving a wealthy Saudi family that supports Democratic Florida Senate candidate Patrick Murphy. 
Murphy, who has covered himself in glory so often already, is denying everything. And I mean absolutely everything. 
The Murphy campaign declined to say whether the candidate is aware of the FBI probe 
What's your name? I decline to answer that question. 
Murphy, 33, is running against Rubio, the incumbent Republican, in a race that could help decide which party controls the Senate in 2017. Rubio currently leads Murphy by an average of 5.6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics. 
The FBI investigation, however, relates to Murphy’s first run for the House in the 2012 campaign cycle. 
The allegation — originally submitted by a Republican super PAC run by a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — is that Murphy’s high school friend and major political donor, Ibrahim Al-Rashid, coordinated a “straw donor” scheme to boost Murphy. 
Murphy knows nothing! 
Murphy’s campaign declined to say whether Murphy’s attorneys had discussed the FBI investigation with Al-Rashid’s attorney. 
Uh-huh 
Al-Rashid is the son of a powerful and politically connected Saudi billionaire. He’s been a major financial benefactor of Murphy’s, giving almost $400,000 to his campaigns and to outside groups supporting the Florida congressman. 
Here's how some of these donations worked. 
One example within the alleged scheme: A woman who describes herself in federal donation reports as the “owner” and “property manager” of a Texas-based company, Limestone Property Management, gave Murphy’s campaign $300. 
But she is neither the property manager nor the owner of the Texas-based company. In fact, she doesn’t work there. 
She lived in Miami at the time and was Ibrahim Al-Rashid’s “cleaning lady,” according to a Miami-Dade Police Department report filed in 2012 over a home burglary at Al-Rashid’s property. 
Texas property manager vs Saudi's cleaning lady. That's quite a difference. 
Murphy has been forced to return Al-Rashid's donations before for purely Islamophobic reasons. 
Al-Rashid’s three sons have followed in their father’s political footsteps, contributing large sums to top Democrats, including Rep. Patrick Murphy (D., Fla.), whose Senate race could help decide which party controls the Senate in 2017. 
Murphy has already returned a portion of al-Rashid’s donations due to his involvement in a domestic assault incident. 
Ibrahim al-Rashid allegedly forced his way into his estranged wife’s Pennsylvania home, where al-Rashid allegedly “grabbed her by the wrist, struck her about the head and face with a closed fist then threw her to the ground,” according to a copy of the police report viewed by the Free Beacon. 
Following the 2014 incident, al-Rashid allegedly sent his wife a text message stating, “I am not sorry this time I hope you die in hell,” according to the police report. 
Murphy, a longtime friend of al-Rashid, was recently forced to donate around $16,000 in campaign funds to domestic violence groups after the assault charge became a public liability for the campaign. Murphy also returned all of the donations made by al-Rashid during the last three political cycles. 
Is the Clinton Foundation involved in this? Do the Clintons do their business in golden and marble toilets? 
Nasser al-Rashid, one of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest figures and an adviser to the country’s royal family, has donated somewhere between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, putting him in an elite category of prominent donors. 
The Clintons. If there's dirt anywhere, you'll find it on them.",FAKE
"By Justin Gardner The Colorado cannabis industry has quickly gone from bud to full flower, as indicated by a new in-depth data analysis by the... ",FAKE
"The annual Conservative Political Action Conference begins this week, a three-day event hosted by the American Conservative Union where activists, officeholders, campaign consultants and others will hear from a dozen or so potential Republican presidential candidates – among them Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz.

Last year’s series of Pew Research Center reports on political polarization used a 10-item scale of ideological consistency to place Americans into five categories: consistently conservative or liberal, mostly conservative or liberal, and mixed. By that metric, 9% of the public overall is consistently conservative, including 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners; most of the remaining Republicans and leaners were “mostly conservative” (33%) or had a mixture of liberal and conservative views (37%).

Here are five facts drawn from our package of reports about consistent conservatives:

Consistent conservatives participate in politics at higher rates than most other ideological groups. Political engagement tends to be highest among the most consistent conservatives and liberals, the Pew Research survey found. Half of consistent conservatives, for example, said they had contacted an elected official within the past two years – the highest level of any of our five groups. (The corresponding figure for all Americans, by the way, was 28%.) Consistent conservatives also ranked high on other measurements of political engagement, such as donating money (26%), attending campaign events (24%) and volunteering on a campaign (12%).

Conservatives had outsize influence in the November midterm elections. Although consistent conservatives make up only about 9% of the total adult population, they vote at higher rates than people elsewhere on the ideological spectrum: 78% said they always vote, compared with 49% of the general public. Consequently, a report we published a few weeks before the 2014 midterms estimated that consistent conservatives would make up 17% of the November 2014 electorate.

Conservatives would rather live in small towns or rural areas than anywhere else. Our research found an overwhelming preference among the most conservative Americans for nonurban lifestyles: 41% of consistent conservatives said they would live in a rural area if they could live anywhere in the U.S., and 35% picked a small town; just 4% said they’d prefer a city.

Similarly, three-quarters of consistent conservatives said they’d rather live in a place where “the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away,” and just 22% said they’d choose to live where “the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.”

When it comes to raising children, conservatives prioritize responsibility, faith and hard work. When we asked our American Trends Panel about the three most important traits to teach children, 61% of consistent conservatives cited “being responsible,” and about as many (59%) identified religious faith as particularly important; hard work was chosen by 44%. While responsibility led among all five ideological groups, and hard work was among the top three for all but consistent liberals, religious faith was chosen by significantly more consistent conservatives than all other groups.

Conservatives gravitate toward Fox News. A separate Pew Research report on polarization and media habits found that 47% of consistent conservatives (and 31% of people with mostly conservative views) cited Fox News as their main source for news about government and politics; no other news source came close. And 88% of consistent conservatives said they trusted Fox News – by far the highest level of trust by any ideological group of any single news source among the 36 we asked about.",REAL
"Professor Shares Insights on Paranormal, Cannibalism and Vampires. # Edward777 0 
Durham University lecturer Richard Sugg deals with history and analysis of esoteric themes as well as corpse medicine in European history, vampirism in ancient and modern Europe, ghosts and poltergeists. He deals with how society sees these subjects, some explanations, some items that have no scientific explanations, and even the psychological basis for these topics. Some of these you may have heard about, most of his research is probably new to listeners. Tags",FAKE
"posted by Eddie In an email between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, the former first lady and secretary of state cites “ Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region ” to accuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia of “ providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [or ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region .” Citing the need to “ use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets ,” the candidate told Podesta the current developments in the Middle East were “ important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country .” In the same email, Clinton seemed to claim Turkey needed to be reassured of America’s willingness to “ take serious actions, ” an effort that “ [could] be sustained to protect our national interests ” in the region. In another piece of correspondence from 2012, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, Amitabh Desai , claimed the Ambassador from Qatar would “ like to see [Bill Clinton] ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for [his] birthday in 2011 ,” adding that the small but rich nation occupying the Qatar Peninsula would “ welcome [the Clinton Foundation’s] suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health .” Desai added that while Qatar had already “ allocated most of their $20 million … [they were] happy to consider projects we suggest .” Al Jazeera , a Qatar-based, state-funded news organization, recently ran a list of “ revealing, juicy and quirky emails ” leaked by WikiLeaks. In its list, the news organization went over the “pay-for-play” scheme involving the Clinton Foundation, going so far as to mention an email confirming the king of Morocco offered $12m “for the endowment” — as long as Clinton was willing to take part in a meeting. Nevertheless, the state-funded broadcaster failed to bring up the Qatar connection. Unfortunately for the organization, Wikileaks promptly noticed the omission. In a post on Facebook , the WikiLeaks official page said, “ Al Jazeera’s list of juiciest Wikileaks forgets to mention the revelation that Qatar funds both ISIS & Bill Clinton. ” On Twitter, the convenient lapse wasn’t forgiven. Promptly after WikiLeaks pointed out the omission, users began pressuring Al Jazeera to explain why the publication failed to link Qatar to ISIS and Clinton. Despite the public outrage, few, if any, news organizations reported on Al Jazeera ’s bias. In a period of America’s history in which news organizations parrot what one of the most powerful political dynasties in the country keeps on repeating to exhaustion — accusing foreign governments of “rigging” the U.S. election without offering any proof to back their claims — it’s interesting to observe that the mainstream media failed to pick up on this story. Is it that Qatar’s and Saudi Arabia’s involvement with ISIS — while backing their favorite candidate — is a difficult issue to report on? Or is the media’s refusal to cover this topic rooted in fear that thoroughly addressing it will help her lose the presidential election? Only time will tell.",FAKE
"Two Systems of Justice In America: One for the Ultra-Wealthy … Another For Everyone Else 
Billionaire Peter Thiel said yesterday: 
If you’re a single-digit millionaire … you have no effective access to our legal system. 
Thiel is saying even plain vanilla millionaires can’t afford justice in America. 
Fordham Law School professor and criminal justice expert John Pfaff notes that – using 2007 numbers – many states’ entire budgets for legal defense for people who can’t afford a lawyer is in the single-digit millions: 1. As of 2007, four states’ ENTIRE INDIGENT DEFENSE BUDGET were “single-digit millionaires.” 
Maine: $9.6M",FAKE
"Planned Parenthood: Abortion pill usage now rivals surgery October 31, 2016 The Planned Parenthood logo is pictured outside a clinic in Boston, Massachusetts, June 27, 2014. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter 
Abortion pill usage has almost overtaken surgical alternatives as legalization of infanticide faces a major chance of repeal. in election 2016. Two medications used to induce abortion won US approval in 2000, but Pro-Life activists successfully implemented legislative restrictions. In 2014: Abortion medication was used in 43 percent of pregnancy terminations at Planned Parenthood clinics. in 2010: Up from 35 percent according to previously unreported figures by Planned Parenthood. In Ohio, Texas and North Dakota: Demand for medication abortions tripled in the last several months to as much as 30 percent of all procedures in some clinics. States with no restrictions: Up to 55 percent in Michigan, 64 percent in Iowa. Studies: Drug induced abortions kill the child up to 95 percent of the time. The abortion pill was approved in France in 1988. Guttmacher Institute: Pill used in 91 percent of abortions in Finland, 80 percent in Scotland. 1 million of the more than 2.75 million U.S. women who have used the abortion pill received it from Planned Parenthood. Federal data: Overall U.S. abortion rates have dropped to a low of 16.9 terminations per 1,000 women aged15-44 in 2011, down from 19.4 per 1,000 in 2008. U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows abortion pills to be used as far as 10 weeks into pregnancies. Planned Parenthood said both types of abortion typically cost from $300 to $1,000. 
(NEW YORK CITY) American women are ending pregnancies with medication almost as often as with surgery, marking a turning point for abortion in the United States, data reviewed by Reuters shows. 
The watershed comes amid an overall decline in abortion, a choice that remains politically charged in the United States, sparking a fiery exchange in the final debate between presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 
When the two medications used to induce abortion won U.S. approval 16 years ago, the method was expected to quickly overtake the surgical option, as it has in much of Europe. But U.S. abortion opponents persuaded lawmakers in many states to put restrictions on their use. 
Although many limitations remain, innovative dispensing efforts in some states, restricted access to surgical abortions in others and greater awareness boosted medication abortions to 43 percent of pregnancy terminations at Planned Parenthood clinics, the nation's single largest provider, in 2014, up from 35 percent in 2010, according to previously unreported figures from the nonprofit. 
The national rate is likely even higher now because of new federal prescribing guidelines that took effect in March. In three states most impacted by that change - Ohio, Texas and North Dakota - demand for medication abortions tripled in the last several months to as much as 30 percent of all procedures in some clinics, according to data gathered by Reuters from clinics, state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates.",FAKE
"BREAKING: Obama ATF Accused of Covering Up Political Element in Firebombing of GOP HQ 
“I am not of the mindset that any vote not for Trump is a vote for Hillary, but a vote for Trump is a vote against Hillary. And I need to vote against Hillary. I need to vote against the media.” 
Hunter noted the extreme bias exhibited by the media who refused to fact-check Clinton at the last debate, and what he sees as the difference between what a Trump and a Clinton presidency would look like: 
“A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don’t know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won’t even be a media to hold her accountable.   
Although Hunter didn’t want to tell NeverTrumpers how they should vote, he asked them to think about how important it is to keep Clinton out of office: 
“I’m not saying you should support him, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of opposing her. If, or when, Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office, she needs to have as little support as possible. Frankly, she needs to be damaged. The mainstream media won’t do it; they’re in on it.” 
“A simple protest vote for a third party or a write-in of my favorite comic book character might feel good for a moment. It might even give me a sense of moral superiority that lasts until her first executive order damaging something I hold dear — or her first Supreme Court nominee. But the sting that will follow will far outlive that temporary satisfaction. “ 
“I oppose much of what Donald Trump has said, but I oppose everything Hillary Clinton has done and wants to do. And what someone says, no matter how objectionable, is less important than what someone does, especially when it’s so objectionable. A personal moral victory won’t suffice when the stakes are so high. As such, I am compelled to vote against Hillary by voting for the only candidate with any chance whatsoever of beating her — Donald Trump.”  ",FAKE
"Saudi’s threaten OPEC oil freeze over Iran row November 04, 2016 A gas flame is seen in the desert near the Khurais oilfield, Saudi Arabia June 23, 2008. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji/File Photo 
Saudi Arabia has threatened to cancel the scheduled OPEC oil freeze by raising output over row with Iran. OPEC sources: Saudi Arabia threatened to raise oil output steeply to bring prices down if Iran refuses to limit its supply. According to four OPEC sources: Clash occurred at last weeks experts meeting designed to work out details before official Nov. 30 gathering. OPEC source: ""The Saudis have threatened to raise their production to 11 million barrels per day and even 12 million bpd, bringing oil prices down, and to withdraw from the meeting.” OPEC Source: The Saudi threat followed objections by Iran, which said it was unwilling to freeze its output. OPEC Source: Saudi threat to raise output came as a surprise even to Riyadh's Gulf OPEC allies. Non-Iranian OPEC Source: ""We felt as if they (the Saudis) wanted the meeting to fail.” Saudi Arabia has increased output since 2014 to record highs of around 10.5 million-10.7 million barrels per day. In September: OPEC agreed at a meeting in Algeria on modest preliminary oil output cuts in the first such deal since 2008. Iran has reported its output at 3.85 million bpd in Sep., and said they will only cap output at 12.7 percent of OPEC's total ceiling - or 4.2 million bpd. Ali Kardor, managing director of NIOC: ""Working in oil industry is like operating at war fronts and we have to preserve our trenches by raising our production capacity as much as we can.” Kardor: “The next OPEC meeting is near and we will never cease to recapture our quota in the organization.” OPEC Secretary-General Mohammed Barkindo: I am ”optimistic"" a final agreement will be reached. OPEC delegate: ""People can look at it from different angles. The fact that discussions are still going on is a positive one. They are going to work on it, close to the ministers’ meeting.” 
(DUBAI/LONDON) Old disputes between Saudi Arabia and rival Iran resurfaced at a meeting of OPEC experts last week, with Riyadh threatening to raise oil output steeply to bring prices down if Tehran refuses to limit its supply, OPEC sources say. 
Clashes between the two OPEC heavyweights, which are fighting proxy wars in Syria and Yemen, have become frequent in recent years. 
Tensions subsided, however, in recent months after Saudi Arabia agreed to support a global oil supply limiting pact, thus raising the prospect that OPEC would take steps to boost oil prices. 
But a meeting of OPEC experts last week, designed to work out details of cuts for the next OPEC ministerial gathering on Nov. 30, saw Saudis and Iranian clashing again, according to four OPEC sources who were present at the meeting and spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. 
""The Saudis have threatened to raise their production to 11 million barrels per day and even 12 million bpd, bringing oil prices down, and to withdraw from the meeting,"" one OPEC source who attended the meeting told Reuters. 
OPEC headquarters declined to comment on discussions during the closed-door meetings last week. Saudi and Iranian OPEC delegates also declined official comments.",FAKE
"WATCH As Chris Cuomo Tells Rudy Giuliani: You Live In Fact-Free ‘Trumpland’ By Andrew Bradford   
There was a battle royale this morning on CNN, and when it was over with, host Chris Cuomo made sure Rudy Giuliani was reduced to rubble. 
The interview began with Cuomo telling the former New York City mayor that he didn’t smile very much at last week’s Al Smith charity dinner when Hillary Clinton took a few comedic jabs at him: “You looked like Grumpy Cat.” 
Sullen and sour, Giuliani said Clinton should be in prison and wearing an orange jumpsuit. But when Rudy began trying to filibuster, Cuomo interrupted him and said he while he might not agree with the decision the FBI made to not charge Clinton with any wrongdoing when it came to her email server, Giuliani wasn’t entitled to make things up: 
Next, Giuliani began ranting about some “bribe” that predated the email controversy, and that was when Cuomo shut him down with one line : “My entire life because you’re so accurate and all of a sudden, you’re in Trumpland and the facts are all over the place.” 
As if he hadn’t been embarrassed enough, Giuliani then attempted to start talking about the recent announcement that Obamacare premiums will rise by as much as 25 percent in 2017: “As a result, because the Democrats forced this down the Republicans’ throat, the ACA, they decided to punish them. And they won’t work with the Democrats to fix any of the problems that they could fix.” 
Cuomo was ready for that line, too, and again lit into his guest : “Oh, that’s a bunch of nonsense. They created it themselves. They cut out bipartisan support.” 
When it was over with, you could tell by the look on Rudy’s face that he knew he had just been bested. Maybe Trump should rethink letting the unhinged Giuliani be one of his main surrogates. He really stinks at it. 
Here’s both parts of the interview: 
Featured Image Via YouTube Screengrab About Andrew Bradford 
Andrew Bradford is a single father who lives in Atlanta. A member of the Christian Left, he has worked in the fields of academia, journalism, and political consulting. His passions are art, music, food, and literature. He believes in equal rights and justice for all. To see what else he likes to write about, check out his blog at Deepleftfield.info. Connect",FAKE
"This post has been updated.

Soledad O’Brien, former CNN news anchor extraordinaire, was met with a puzzling situation last Saturday. She was co-hosting a massive Earth Day extravaganza on the Mall. She was standing in front of a crowd she estimated at 250,000 people. She had a microphone. But she was talking and nobody was listening.

“The event’s hosts, newscaster Soledad O’Brien and Black Eyed Peas bandleader Will.I.Am, appeared to have a rough time of it,” The Washington Post’s Chris Richards wrote. “O’Brien, either frustrated by glitchy teleprompters or perhaps not clear on how a concert works, actually shushed the crowd at one point.”

O’Brien’s problem reflected what some see as a problem with Earth Days of recent vintage. Even as companies, celebrities and the likes of My Morning Jacket and No Doubt stand by to do what they can for the planet, what they’re doing doesn’t seem to amount to much.

“Launched in 1970 as a protest against corporate environmental misconduct, Earth Day has become a planet-hugging marketing frenzy for companies themselves,” the Wall Street Journal wrote in 2008. “Makers of everything from snack chips to sport-utility vehicles now use April 22 to boast about their efforts to help save the planet.”

‘Twas not always so. When Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson (Wis.) saw the waters off Santa Barbara, Calif., turn black in 1969 after what was then the worst U.S. oil spill, organizing a rock concert was not on his mind. Faced with ghastly images of oil-covered birds and meager attempts to soak up oil slicks with straw, he wanted to build a coalition across political parties — across country and city.

“Gaylord’s unique contribution is that he was the first person to see the political importance of conservation, that it could be used to mobilize people,” Denis Hayes, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day, said after Nelson’s death in 2005. “He recognized the partnership between traditional conservation issues and the new emerging urban and industrial issues. Largely forgotten is that he was the first and most important to help us build bridges between environmental concerns and organized labor.”

It worked. Twenty million people came out on April 22, 1970, to rally, raise hell and clean up.

“The reason Earth Day worked is that it organized itself,” Nelson said. “The idea was out there and everybody grabbed it. I wanted a demonstration by so many people that politicians would say, ‘Holy cow, people care about this.'”

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970, the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973. In a country where Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had caught fire less than a decade before, a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, signed executive orders and legislation that would begin the process of cleaning up the nation.

Then, even as the Earth kept warming up, a long, cold winter set in.

“Ten years later, it has become popular in some circles to write the obituary of the environmental movement, to refer to the passing of the ‘golden era’ for environmentalism,” Nelson wrote in 1980. “It is asserted that public interest has waned, that new worries have captured attention, that inflation, the energy crisis, and international conflict have superseded if not wiped out public concern over environmentalism.”

But the “golden era” really was a golden era. Nelson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, but momentum had stalled.

“One could argue that there has been no major environmental legislation since 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed a bill aimed at reducing acid rain,” the New Yorker wrote in 2013 after the Senate tabled what would have been a landmark bill on carbon emissions. “Today’s environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970. It’s also vastly less successful.”

Nelson had envisioned Earth Day as a “teach-in.” When Earth Day returned in 1990, it “sought to ‘enlist’ people in a well-defined movement, not to enable them to work out their own vision of how they might make a difference,” as Adam Rome, who wrote a book about the celebration, told the New Yorker.

So, the United States still hasn’t ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The messaging of the day may be lost amid promotional products and greenwashing. But we do have Earth Day T-shirts and hoodies.

As Hal Harvey, environment-program director for a funder of prominent environmental groups, told the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is we let ourselves be happy with gestures rather than substance.”",REAL
"This post was originally published on this site 
The concept of evolution should not be limited to the scientific assertions around Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but ought to include the more general idea that people and processes constantly evolve in response to the forces that surround them. We evolve from childhood into adulthood, and, ideally, from self-centeredness toward the good of larger entities like our community or nation (and now, faced with climate change, the good of our planet). Political arrangements have evolved from the divine right of kings into still–evolving democratic systems. 
A Supreme Court justice’s orientation toward evolution in this basic sense determines whether he or she is a strict originalist (a nicer word for fundamentalist), or sees the Constitution as a living document that must be responsive to changing conditions. No founding father composing the second amendment could have foreseen the surfeit of guns decimating our country today. 
Such evolutionary processes are alive, dynamic, an unstoppable juggernaut pervading every aspect of reality. Against them, even the determination not to evolve has evolutionary effects, as we have seen in the bizarre presidential process of the past year. A Neanderthal candidate has helped awaken a generation of young women, and ideally young men also, to evolve beyond being victims of crude chauvinist stereotypes. 
The whole cosmos has been evolving for 13.8 billion years, from energy to matter to, here on earth, life and self-conscious life. Evolution is the context of our reality, the story all humans share. This story is beginning to seep into collective consciousness in a way that may yet render obsolete divisions such as those between Shia and Sunni, let alone between “radical Islamic fundamentalism” and the “post-Enlightenment West.” We all evolved from the same mysterious source. Every differentiation in that largest context, by race, tribe, religion, ethnicity, feels arbitrary and abstract. 
It is not surprising that fundamentalism in whatever form has often found the evolutionary paradigm threatening, because it implies a challenging dynamic of change that feels insecure. For many believers, to generalize unfairly, religion provides behavioral rules that can be a source of security and comfort even as they are used as excuses to remain exclusive and resist evolving. 
Within each world religion, there are minority enclaves (the Sufis in Islam, Zen practitioners of Buddhism, Catholic mystics like Teilhard de Chardin) who understand that their spiritual discipline is an opportunity to evolve toward inclusivity, toward looking within at fears and projections rather than looking outward for enemies, and toward expanding our identifications and responsibilities beyond the national to the planetary. 
Far from being a benign, feel-good process, evolution is often painful, one step forward, two back. Take the tortured but necessary demise of the American coal industry. No one wants to see the debilitating effects of unemployment on real people with real families, but so far the technology of coal burning hasn’t evolved a way not to accelerate global warming. 
We humans are supposedly not built to respond effectively to long-term threats like changes in climate, but, late in the game as it is, we do seem to be collectively learning what is at stake and evolving locally and globally. Entrepreneurs are rapidly bringing to market solar, wind, and other cleaner and more sustainable energy sources. 
Unfortunately, negative and harmful processes can also become subject to an evolutionary juggernaut. Since 1945 weapons systems have evolved (more accurately, we have evolved them) to a level of complexity and destructive power that we are already powerless to control. The Pentagon is reported to be spending its usual vast sums on research into computer-controlled robotic drones capable of making their own autonomous decisions about who is an enemy. The defense establishments of other great nations are presumably up to the same mischief, or soon will be, because the arms race never stops evolving. Or won’t until we embrace a new way of thinking: that we must evolve to survive. 
We, we the nations, are hopelessly complacent in our present reliance upon deterrence as a workable security system. As the fellow falling from the hundredth floor said as he passed the sixtieth: so far so good. The system, an emperor with no clothes solemnly worshipped by legions of self-confident experts, is too complex not to be subject to breakdown at any moment, perhaps by accident, perhaps where NATO and Russia push up against each other in Eastern Europe, perhaps in Kashmir. 
The threat of nuclear extinction provides a new context for the obsolete parochialism of the world’s major religions. If this threat isn’t enough to accelerate the ecumenical impulse, what is? As people of diverse spiritual worldviews acknowledge that they have in common the possibility of annihilation, our shared anxiety can energize evolution toward inclusivity and nonviolent solutions to conflict. The world is in a race between fundamentalists and arms manufacturers on the one hand, and evolutionaries who see clearly both the futile dead-end of the arms race and the possibility of a security built upon the truth of interdependence, which appears in similar form in all the religions as the Golden Rule. We will live together or die together. As we treat others, so we will be treated. Whether they each understand this or not, this is the hidden-in-plain-sight background behind the Trump-Clinton mud-wrestle. 
Will the arms manufacturers and the politicians in league with them evolve in the face of the nuclear threat in a way similar to our positive responses to the challenge of climate instability? I live in Maine, where the state’s largest private employer is the Bath Iron Works. They are building three of a new kind of guided missile destroyer that is contoured to hide from radar. Each one costs 4 billion dollars. Recently I had a conversation with an Iron Works employee. I made the assumption that, given his job, he would be hawkishly supportive of a robust military. Not at all. His exact parting words were “I’d be much happier building solar panels.” Related ",FAKE
"For many Americans who have long felt threatened, the election of Donald Trump raises deep-seated fears that they could again become targets of hatred and prejudice.

Demonstrators protest against President-elect Donald Trump in front of the Trump International Hotel in Washington Thursday.

A Muslim mother of four, Nadia has for the most part escaped overt racism in her tiny hometown about an hour outside New York.

But lately, her 8-year-old daughter has been having nightmares. Amid calls during the presidential campaign to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, it feels like something has changed in the atmosphere, says Nadia, who asks that her last name not be used.

At a parent-teacher conference last week, a student, 8 or 9 years old, came up to her and said, “When Donald Trump gets elected, you’re going to get deported,” she says.

There was no question to her where the behavior came from, and on Tuesday night, it felt like voters sent her an inescapable message: That behavior was an acceptable part of the new America.

“We have these no-bullying initiatives, and then we are showing kids that bullies can win,” Nadia says. “I don’t know how we can reconcile that in the future.”

On Wednesday night and again Thursday, shock, sadness, anger, and fear spilled across the nation in protests against the election of Mr. Trump.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched, lighted fires, and chanted anti-Trump slogans. The boldest and brashest talked of secession on social media. But for many, like Nadia, acceptance has come in waves of bitter disbelief.

To them, the election of Trump directly contradicts the values they cherish and associate with America. Interviews with women, people of color, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community across the country reveal deep-seated fears that Trump’s words and behavior have too often embodied what they have spent their lives opposing: racism, sexism, homophobia, and a white patriarchy that for centuries has shared its power only reluctantly.

In the wake of Tuesday’s election, these voters – particularly in liberal cities and states – are struggling to come to grips with a nation they say they hardly recognize. America’s promise to embrace all, before so bright, now seems perceptibly dimmer.

“There was a staggering amount of shock,” says Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Edmund G. Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles. “This was an extraordinarily intense campaign, and we’re seeing a lot of angst and concern, especially in communities that were talked about in a negative way.”

As a woman of mixed black and Persian parentage, Shirin Shoai identified deeply with President Obama in both 2008 and 2012. This year, she had connected as a woman with Hillary Clinton – and been appalled by Trump’s offhand remarks about sexual assault.

On Wednesday morning, she couldn’t believe what she saw when she woke up.

The notion that millions of her fellow citizens could support Trump was frightening for what it said about the depth of the divide within America, she says. As a psychotherapist in Berkeley, Calif., her job is to forge connections between people. She wonders now if the nation is capable of it.

“I think it’s going to take a lot of work to get us together as a country,” Ms. Shoai says. “It requires a kind of empathy and availability to that other person that I don’t know on a national scale that we have.”

For Jessie Earl, the concern stems from the discrimination she has faced as a transgender woman. In many ways, she has been fortunate, she says. Even in the small, conservative town in New York State where she grew up, she was often surrounded by supportive friends and family. Still, the sting of bigotry is familiar.

Last week, she went into a bathroom in a building close to the Los Angeles office where she works as a digital editor. A woman, upon seeing her, said loudly that it seemed a man had made his way into the ladies’ room. A supervisor was called in, who defused the situation, Ms. Earl says.

“But that was terrifying to me,” she says. “I wanted to hide.”

Earl worries that Trump, through his words and actions, would legitimize that sort of discrimination.

“It’ll tell people that that behavior is acceptable,” she says. And while she lives in Southern California, where such incidents are less likely to take place, she knows that others are not so fortunate.

“I have friends in North Carolina who are transgender,” she says. “I don’t want them to live in a society that says it’s OK to ostracize them.”

Among immigrants and the Hispanic community, the fear of what a Trump administration might mean is perhaps even more palpable.

Two years ago, US-born Paola Hernandez married Emmanuel Ramirez, and now the Tucson, Ariz., couple has an 18-month-old daughter. But Mr. Ramirez is here illegally, having sneaked across the US-Mexico border 14 years ago.

He can apply for legal status through his wife. But he hasn’t begun the process because he can’t afford to hire an attorney, which can cost $8,000. Ramirez, a native of Mexico, has worked for years as a dishwasher and cook.

Trump “said he would do raids, and there are so many families that would be affected because we’re here illegally,” says Ramirez.

The risk of estrangement is more emotional than physical for Debbie Yen.

The millennial daughter of Chinese-American immigrants in California’s Orange County, Ms. Yen says her parents shaped who she has become – teaching her to value integrity, to stay calm in the face of adversity, and to take the high road.

But they voted for a man that, to her, embodies the opposite of all those things.

“I can’t help but feel disappointed in them,” says Yen, a freelancer who works in production. “Everything that I’ve been raised up to this point to be is the exact opposite of what Trump has done and said and been throughout his campaign.”

Amid the disillusionment, however, most of those interviewed said they wanted to learn from the loss, keep fighting for progress, and – perhaps most importantly – reach out to the other side.

“I understand the anger, the feeling of betrayal,” says Earl in Los Angeles. “But it doesn’t help if you just yell at someone. That just adds to the environment of not listening” that led the country to where it is in the first place.

Her new goal, she says, is to engage more with people who view the world differently than she does. She doesn't believe everyone who voted for Trump is a bad person; but she does want to better understand where they’re coming from.

“We don’t expose ourselves to other people’s ideas. So we’re not seeing each other as people,” she says.

Shoai, the Berkeley therapist, plans to start working with a group called “Sidewalk Talk,” which invites people on the street to stop and share their feelings for about 10 minutes. She laughs sheepishly as she explains the concept.

“Things like that that sound really ‘woo-hoo,’ soft,” Shoai says. “But we just need to be more vocal about that stuff. If half of the country is feeling really left behind, there’s something going on that we need to know about.”

“That’s sort of my sadness and my hope.”

Nadia also urges action. “We’ve been sitting on the sidelines for too long,” she says. “If we’re going to turn this around, we have get out there.”

To make her own small mark, she intends to run in her town’s next school board elections. And she hopes others across the country – especially the millions of people who voted with a vision of a united America – will take similar steps.

“We are Americans,” she adds. “We define what America will be.”

Lourdes Medrano contributed to this report from Tucson, Ariz.",REAL
"In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program.

The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in student debt, reforms that have already begun to reduce loan payments to the government. For more than two decades, budget analysts have recalculated the projected costs of about 120 credit programs every year, but they have never lowered their expectations of repayments this dramatically. The $21.8 billion revision—larger than the annual budget for NASA, or the Interior Department and EPA combined—will be tacked onto the federal deficit.

“Wow,” marveled Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “Whether or not it’s good policy to help borrowers with their payments, it’s obviously costly for taxpayers.”

The 40 million Americans with student loans are now saddled with more than $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. And with higher education costs rising much faster than inflation, the already massive program has been growing at a spectacular clip; direct government loans alone increased 44 percent over the last two years despite an aura of austerity in Washington. The Obama administration has tried to ease the burden for some borrowers by reducing their payments to 10 percent of their income and forgiving their loans after 20 years; this year, the Education Department plans to make all borrowers eligible for that “pay-as-you-earn” relief.

Student loan defaults increased somewhat last year, but the department says the primary drivers of the unprecedented “re-estimate”—budget-wonk jargon for the update of expected loan costs—were Obama’s policy changes, the recent ones as well as the upcoming ones. And because of a quirk in the budget process for credit programs, the department can add the $21.8 billion to the deficit automatically, without seeking appropriations or even approval from Congress.

That’s a big quasi-bailout, increasing the deficit nearly 5 percent. The White House budget office was unaware of any larger re-estimates since the current scoring rules for credit programs went into effect in 1992. As a January Politico Magazine feature on the government’s unusual credit portfolio reported, the Federal Housing Administration has stuck more than $75 billion worth of similar re-estimates onto Uncle Sam’s tab over the last two decades, most of them after the recent housing bust led to a cascade of FHA-backed mortgage defaults. But it’s never had a one-year shortfall quite as drastic as this.

It’s not yet clear whether this will be a hefty one-time revision, or a harbinger of oceans of red ink as millions more borrowers get relief on their payments to the government. Several reports by Barclays Capital have warned that Obama’s generosity to borrowers could leave the student loan program as much as $250 billion in the hole over the next decade. And behind closed doors, officials in the White House budget office and the Treasury Department have criticized the Education Department’s loan models as overly optimistic, with some officials pushing internally for third-party audits.

But administration officials said there’s no reason to think this year’s shortfall will recur. They believe that their budgets going forward will accurately reflect their new efforts to help borrowers limit their payments, that pay-as-you-earn will be “baked into the cake.” Historically, re-estimates for the better and for the worse have tended to cancel each other out across the government. In fact, this year, the government’s credit portfolio increased to $3.3 trillion, larger than any U.S. bank’s, but the re-estimates for all the programs besides student loans netted out to less than $1 billion.

The administration argues that even the $21.8 billion student loan shortfall is a relative pittance for the Education Department’s $740 billion book of direct loans, the second-largest government credit portfolio after FHA mortgage guarantees.

“Any re-estimate should be considered in this context,” says White House Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Emily Cain.",REAL
"On Saturday, Donald Trump threatened to revoke the credentials of The New York Times after the newspaper published a report detailing the ""failing"" effort by Republican Party operatives to ""save Mr. Trump from himself.""

On Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate doubled down, slamming the Times on Twitter and vowing to never change.

""The newspaper's going to hell,"" Trump told a rally Saturday at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. ""They've got a couple of reporters in that newspaper who are so bad — I mean lack of talent. But it's going to hell.

 

 ""So, I think maybe what we'll do, maybe we'll start thinking about taking their press credentials away from them,"" the Republican nominee added, drawing cheers from the crowd.

 

 ""Maybe we'll do that. I think so. I think so.

 

 ""When they write dishonest stories, we should be a little bit tough, don't we agree?""

 

 Many in the audience yelled ""yeah.""

 

 The Times report, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, detailed efforts by staffers to keep Trump on script, focus more on policy and tone down his inflammatory rhetoric and combative style.

 

 It was based on interviews with 20 Republicans, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him,"" according to the Times.

 

 The article also described a meeting Trump had with GOP political consultant Karl Rove and casino magnate Steve Wynn during the primaries — from which Rove emerged ""stunned"" that the nominee knew little about campaign basics.

 

 Trump slammed the Times for using anonymous sources, saying ""I don’t think they have any names.""

 

 In an overall attack on the press, Trump said that it was his biggest competitor in this campaign, not Hillary Clinton.

 

 ""I'm not running against crooked Hillary,"" he said. ""I’m running against the crooked media.

 

 ""That’s what I’m running against, I’m not running against crooked Hillary.""

Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, also pushed back against the media during an appearance Sunday on CNN.

""Contrary to the New York Times's nameless sources story, the campaign is moving forward and very strong,"" he said. ""We raised over $132 million in the last two months.""

He noted that Trump had visited key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida repeatedly and was ""starting to get traction in those states.""

However, recent polls have shown Trump's numbers sagging badly in those battleground states, notably hurt by his critical comments about the Muslim parents of a fallen US soldier, and what some saw as his suggestion that ""Second Amendment groups"" -- gun lovers -- take their dislike for Clinton into their own hands.

Manafort repeated the Trump claim that his Second Amendment remark was meant purely as an exhortation to vote.

But even one of Trump's top advisers, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, conceded Sunday that the candidate needed to communicate ""more effectively.""

""He's got to wrestle in his own heart, how does he communicate who he is, what he believes, the change he thinks he can bring to America,"" he said on ABC.

""He does need to communicate -- and I think he can -- more effectively.""

The CNN interviewer also asked Manafort about mounting pressure on Trump to release his tax returns after Clinton released hers on Friday.

The channel broadcast video of Trump urging Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in 2012, to release his returns at the time, saying, ""If you didn't see the tax returns, you would think there is almost, like, something wrong.""

Manafort repeated Trump's explanation that he is under audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

""When that's completed, he'll release the returns,"" Manafort said, adding that Clinton's returns showed income coming from ""people who benefited from her State Department term as well,"" referring to her time as secretary of State.

""I haven't seen stories on that yet.""

Trump has revoked the press credentials of several media outlets, including Politico, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. 

 

 ""I'm no fan of the Washington Post, although they have been much nicer lately, I must say,"" Trump said Saturday. ""Maybe I'll let them back in. they’ve been much better.""

 

 He also ripped CNN for its coverage of him saying that President Barack Obama was the ""founder"" of the Islamic State — a remark he later said was sarcastic, ""but not that sarcastic.""

 

 ""CNN is so disgusting,"" Trump said. ""Their ratings are going down big league.

 

 ""You know why? Because I refuse to be interviewed. And I get high ratings, what can I say?

 

 ""These people are so dishonest.""

 

 He later praised an article from The New York Post, which detailed his contributions as a developer to New York City.

Material from AFP was used in this story.",REAL
"Originally appeared at The Blog Mire 
Following on from her recent piece for Time magazine , in which she so eloquently explained why America is indispensable and exceptional, TheBlogMire brings you an exclusive piece in which Mrs Clinton explains why an indispensable and exceptional nation must have an indispensable and exceptional leader. 
(Warning: May contain traces of satire) 
If there’s one core belief that has guided and inspired me every step of my career in public service, it’s this: I am an exceptional woman. A great, unselfish, compassionate woman, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy. And when you add up all my advantages, it’s clear I’m indispensable too – someone all others can look to for leadership. 
And what I’m really excited about is not just that I’m indispensable, but that I’m about to become President of the indispensable nation. An indispensable nation needs an indispensable woman. An indispensable woman needs an indispensable nation. It’s a match made in heaven, which is why I am asking you to help me break the glass ceiling on November 8th – so that together we can become even more exceptional than we already are. 
So what makes me so indispensable? 
I’m indispensable in part because of my love for our armed forces. Our military is the greatest in history, with the best troops, training and technology, and I believe it is a travesty that we are not using it to its full potential. It’s essential we do everything we can to support our men and women in uniform, and I intend to do just that by sending our brave soldiers on important missions around the globe from day one of my presidency. 
I’m indispensable because of my commitment to the truth. Throughout my career, I’ve always sought to stay close to the truth. I know that there’s a lot of folks out there who say I’m corrupt. But those who know me closest will tell you that this isn’t the real Hillary. Ask those who know me best. Ask my husband Bill. He’ll tell you. Ask my campaign chairman John Podesta. He’ll tell you. Ask Lloyd Blankfein, CEO at Goldman Sachs. He’ll tell you. Ask some of our closest allies in places like Saudi Arabia. They’ll tell you. They will all tell you about the real Hillary, and that my commitment to honesty and fighting corruption is second to none. It may even be my most exceptional quality. Alongside humility. 
I’m also indispensable because of my network of alliances and supporters. You only have to look at who they are. Has there ever been a candidate in the entire history of our exceptional nation that has managed to get the backing of the entire media and corporate America? I don’t think so. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? I humbly submit that it speaks volumes that some of the most important people in our exceptional country are prepared to place their trust in me. 
I’m indispensable because, unlike Donald Trump, I don’t need to rely on the help of people like Vladimir Putin and countries like Russia to help get me elected. Can you imagine me having to rely on Putin and Russia to get elected? Of course I’ve had to bring Putin and Russia up in this campaign from time to time, not because I want to keep bringing Putin and Russia into it. In fact, the only reason I’ve occasionally mentioned Putin and Russia is not because I want to keep talking about Putin and Russia, but because I have to keep taking about Putin and Russia because Trump is depending on Putin and Russia to get him elected and so I have to draw attention to Putin and Russia. But trust me, if I had my way I wouldn’t bring Putin and Russia up at all. 
I’m indispensable because of my commitment to helping countries get rid of their dictators, and establishing democracy and peace. Like Libya, for example. We came. We saw. He died. And the Libyans got their liberty. 
Most of all, I’m ­indispensable — and exceptional — because of my values. 
Take my commitment to human rights, which I have shown by being one of the most vocal supporters of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, right up to a few seconds before the thing inside her becomes a human. 
Take my commitment to raising money, which my husband and I have shown through our tireless work with the Clinton Foundation, and in making hundreds of speeches for various organisations. 
Take my commitment to making the world a better place, which I’ve shown time and time again by saying things like “love trumps hate”. Which it does, doesn’t it? I’m proud of that expression. 
But with all of these advantages comes ­responsibility – I need to lead the world. You need me to lead the world. Because if I fail to lead, I will leave a vacuum that lets extremists, Putin and Russia, haters, bigots, the intolerant, Putin and Russia, the severely backwards , the Julian Assange’s of this world,Putin and Russia – Baskets of Deplorables – take root everywhere. 
Of course, being exceptional doesn’t mean that other people don’t also have something to offer — maybe they do. But I have an unparalleled ability to be a force for peace, progress and prosperity around the world, which I intend to demonstrate on day one of my presidency, by standing up to Putin and Russia and showing Putin and Russia who’s boss. 
I’ll never stop doing good. Never. That’s what makes me great. I’m good because I’m great, and I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll never stop. 
That’s why I’m indispensable. 
Let’s keep me exceptional. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
"Empty bleachers and a hostile student body greeted Trump vice presidential nominee Mike Pence in Virginia on Saturday at one of the most religiously conservative schools in the country.

Trump’s VP nominee railed against Hillary Clinton in Northern Virginia on Saturday afternoon—but he chose to do it at an evangelical Christian college with a history of anti-Trump sentiment. Students protested outside, while inside students stood in silent protest until they were ejected mid-speech.

The protests and poor attendance at the speech at Patrick Henry College illustrate the challenges that Trump has appealing to evangelical Christians, especially younger ones, who are turned off by his tone, his campaign ideas and his personal history—and are not at all assauged by his choice of Pence for his running mate.

“The PHC student body as a whole is very anti-Trump. A lot of them say, ‘I don’t like him but I’m going to turn up my nose and vote for him because I like Hillary even less.’ But overall there is a severe disgust with Trump,” said Sebastian Lopez, a junior studying political theory at the school who was protesting the speech, holding a sign for hours outside in the blazing mid-day sun.

“I don’t think that Mike Pence is a bad person, but I think he has made an alliance with someone who is completely unacceptable from a libertarian, conservative or progressive standpoint,” added Christian McGuire, a junior at Patrick Henry College studying American politics who was also demonstrating against Pence.

Pence’s visit is not the first misstep by the Trump campaign in Virginia. Donald Trump flubbed his speech in Northern Virginia earlier this month when he lectured the affluent locals in the audience as if they were the Rust Belt—“You’re doing lousy over here,” he remarked—and then listed factory closures in far-flung areas of the state that were hours away, as well as a plant that closed in North Carolina.

Patrick Henry College is located in Loudoun County, the affluent swing district an hour from Washington, D.C., that voted for Bush twice, and then Obama twice. It’s as close to a must-win county as it gets.

But locals weren’t interested in hearing what he had to say. When Marco Rubio visited in February during the Republican primaries, students and local residents crammed into the room, filling the bleachers, the gymnasium floor and the balconies above to get a glimpse of the presidential candidate. The road outside the college was jam-packed. Parking was a nightmare.

“There are certainly students who support Trump, though most are not enthusiastic. He was rarely the first choice in such a crowded primary field,” said Tim Kocher, a spokesman for the Patrick Henry College Republicans. “I believe Trump has a solid base of support around 15-20%, but many students simply have not made up their minds as far as the presidential race goes.”

When Pence visited Saturday, the room was half-empty—a whole set of retractable bleachers sat empty and discarded near the stage; no admiring crowds leaned over the balcony to get a better look at the politician; parking was a breeze. This lackluster turnout took place at a school which in fall 2015 registered just 294 students, yet had about as many White House interns during the Bush administration as Georgetown University, with its nearly 18,000 students.

“I’m a B-list Republican celebrity,” Pence said self-deprecatingly, as he thanked attendees for showing up on a beautiful, cloudless Saturday afternoon. It was funny because it was kind of sad, and it was sad because it was kind of true.

Pence also spoke as if he did not quite understand whose ticket he was on. “We believe in free trade,” he said, as if Trump had not run a campaign slamming international trade. The governor also slammed Hillary Clinton’s plan to tax the rich, as if the Republican nominee had not taken aim at Wall Street during his populist run for the White House. Americans are “tired of politicians who divide our country to unite their support,” he said, as if Trump had not run a campaign that regularly disparaged Muslims, foreigners and women.

As if to bolster this point, a group of protesters critical of Trump’s rhetoric on Islam revealed their T-shirts during Pence’s speech, engaging in a silent protest of the Republican ticket as they were slowly escorted out.

Even the students who supported the Trump-Pence ticket seemed to be doing so with an air of resignation, buoyed only by the threat they believe Hillary Clinton poses to the country.",REAL
"Waking Times 
“If the matrix gives you Trumpocalypse, then use secret alchemical means to create matrix-shifting Trumpocalyptic lemonade.” ~ Rob Brezsny 
When people asked Carl Jung, who actually met Hitler, how he manipulated the psyche of the German people, Jung replied, “Hitler didn’t manipulate the psyche of the German people, he was the psyche of the German people.” 
If, as Mark Twain said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” and you’re still wondering how this racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, “grab-them-by-the-pussy” candidate somehow made his way into the presidency, then look no further than a mirror. For far too long you have given into the idea that an authority will save you. You were under the delusion that you needed someone to rule over you. That delusion has led to someone who just so happens to want to rule over you. Are you really that surprised? 
If you’re not careful your own Stockholm syndrome will have you thinking the state is moral and just and wants to empower you to be free. It doesn’t. It’s the complete opposite, in fact. It wants you to remain blindly subservient to its outdated laws and its chain of obedience which leads right up the immoral-laden ladder to the president who holds the violent monopoly on power. 
This isn’t about who won the presidency. This is not about bipartisan fuckery. This is about the illegitimacy of any presidency, ever . This is about the illegitimacy of authority and the immoral nature of entrenched power. The state is unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent, and who ever rules over it is thereby illegitimate; whether it’s the orange-headed, spoon-fed baby of a man, FrankenTrump, vomiting hate and racism through narcissistic, ignorant, misogynistic, and bigoted bully tactics, or the status quo queen, Killary Clinton, spewing Military Industrial Complex rhetoric from her plutocratic pulpit backed by greedy corporations from Wall Street calling themselves “persons” backed by even greedier corrupt banksters with their vampire-tentacles in every country’s pie. As Larken Rose said, “The only “us versus them” that matters is not about race, religion, nationality, or income level; it is about aggressors and their victims.” 1.) They Sheepishly Assume They Need Someone to Rule Over Them 
“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” ~ Lysander Spooner 
It’s not your fault, really. You were born and raised in a culture that conditioned and brainwashed you into believing that you must answer to someone. From your authoritarian upbringing to your indoctrinated school years, you were propagandized and persuaded into thinking people are inherently bad so they must be led by people who are… somehow not bad? Huh?! 
Here’s the thing: people are, for the most part, a product of their environment. We’ve all been programmed to be kowtowing statists by an extremely unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent state. To break the cycle, we must break our addiction to being ruled over by such a state. We must reprogram our programming. Unlearn what we have learned. Recondition the precondition. It’s time to rise up and become an author of self (self-authority). 
This is your life; not your parent’s life, not your peer’s life, not your state’s life. As Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.” It begins by admitting that you need neither masters no rulers, neither president nor queen, to rule over you. It begins by empowering yourself and taking responsibility for your own power. 2.) They Falsely Assume Leadership Means Rulership 
“I find it extremely liberating to see that I was the cause of all my problems. With this realization, I have also learned I am my own solution. This is the great big gift of personal accountability. When we stop blaming external forces and own up to our responsibility we become the ultimate creators of our destiny.” ~Jenna Galbut 
Contrary to popular statist dogma, it is possible to have rules (cosmic law; Golden Rule; non-aggression principle) without the need for rulers and masters. Through bottom-up leadership as opposed to top-down leadership. It begins by not being an ignorant statist who gives his/her power to a tyrannical state. It begins by speaking your own truth to power, and then becoming a leader of your own. It begins by being proactive with the power you’ve wrestled back from the state and then leading by example. It begins by realizing that nobody –no president, no king, not even God– can give you permission to be free. In fact, every single president from Washington to Trump only had power because people believed it. Without that petty belief, they were nothing more than charismatic, fallible men. 
You, and you alone, must become a freedom unto yourself. And that may require a little revolt. Especially if you discover that you’re not so well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.” 3.) They Ignorantly Assume Voting and Taxation are Moral and Just 
“If taxation without consent is robbery, the United States government has never had, has not now, and is never likely to have, a single honest dollar in its treasury. If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.” ~Lysander Spooner 
Taxation without consent is immoral. There is no way to wriggle out of this profound truth. It’s especially immoral in a state where violence is threatened if you do not consent. Most naïve statists assume they must pay taxes in order to live freely. When, really, it’s the exact opposite of that. You’re only free if you’re able to choose to pay taxes or not without the threat of violence or imprisonment hanging over your head. Otherwise it’s just soft slavery. Deep down, we’re all anarchists. We know, inherently and instinctively, that all transactions should be voluntary. We’ve just been programmed to make an exception for the state. 
Voting is indirectly violent, as the result directly forces majority rule on the minority who did not consent. Voting is a profound futility, an egregious gamble. As Robert Rorschach said, “If the outcome of a vote is unknown, then voting is tantamount to gambling. If the outcome of a vote is known, then voting is futile.” Most naïve statists have been conditioned to believe that voting is the only way to change things, that one must do it from the inside. Nothing could be further from the truth. Real change only occurs outside the doing-things-over-and-over-again-and-expecting-different-results ballot box. No matter what, you’re only ever going to get a puppet popping out. Trump just happens to be the latest jack-in-the-box, albeit orange, ugly, and dumb. 4.) They Blindly Assume Their Nation State is the Greatest Nation State 
“Don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anyone else. If you don’t believe, what is not true will dissolve in front of your eyes. Only what is true will remain, because what is true doesn’t need anyone to believe it” ~ Don Miguel Ruiz 
Men never act so contentedly (and conveniently) evil as when they do so from a patriotic conviction. With hyper-nationalized perspectives whipping their brains into xenophobic scrambled eggs, and border-worshipping divisiveness cutting them off from any authentic engagement with the rest of the world, statists are the new dogmatists. They are brainwashed extremists, worshiping law and order, power and violence, and grossly outdated notions of how to be a flourishing human in an ever-changing world. They assume waiving a flag is an honorable thing. When flags are nothing more than propagandized “bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead ( Arundhati Roy) .” 
“Flags don’t unite us” as Belfast surmised; “they only reinforce our false sense of entitlement to lands we were born into by sheer chance.” And yet the inured statist myopically moos, ignorantly sneering at other nations from a platform of convictions gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from “authorities” who have had their own convictions spoon-fed to them by parochial forefathers who themselves didn’t have the courage to question the legitimacy of authority. As Mark Twain cryptically stated, “To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.” Indeed. Avoid the tautology (and the Trumpocalypse). Progressively evolve. Liberate yourself from the outdated ill-reasoning that you ever needed a chain of obedience, let alone a president. 5.) They Tragically Assume Violence is the Answer 
“Like all great ideas, anarchism is pretty simple when you get down to it –human beings are at their best when they are living free of authority, deciding things among themselves rather than being ordered about.” ~Clifford Harper 
This is by far the worst of the five outdated assumptions. The fact that people still think that peace comes from waging war is mind-boggling to those of us who have freed ourselves from the state and discovered empathy and compassion from our interdependence with each other as free human beings in solidarity with leaving a healthy world for our children. 
It’s simple, really. To become a better human all you need is a simplified perspective: Your birth place –Earth, your race –Human, your politics –Freedom, your spirituality –Love. It’s so easy it’s stupid. All it requires is a shedding of your statist skin, and a transformation into a free human being who seeks to free others from the sickness of statism. 
The only way all of us win is through horizontal democracy that’s void of centralized government. In other words: no masters, no rulers. In short: democratic anarchy. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora peoples did it through the Iroquois Confederacy, living in authentic democracy for hundreds of years before the tyranny of the state ruined everything. So it’s not some far-fetched utopian dream. If they did it, so can we. Democratic anarchy, combined with the non-violent non-aggression principle , has the potential to usher in an age of peace, and a progressively sustainable evolution for our species. Read more articles by Gary ‘Z’ McGee . About the Author 
Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. Like Waking Times on Facebook . Follow Waking Times on Twitter . This article ( Trumpocalypse & 5 Ridiculously Outdated Assumptions Every Statist Makes ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright. 
~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
"But the numbers were a boring datapoint in an otherwise historical, emotional night . Well before the first state was called, the Clinton campaign changed her Twitter profile picture to read “ History made ” and released a video that spotlighted the barrier she had broken. Her crowd was packed with cheering women and fathers who had brought their daughters to witness the celebratory event in Brooklyn .

Hillary Clinton officially became the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday night. But it was sealed with pomp and circumstance on Tuesday. Victories in New Jersey and New Mexico, and early results from California , gave her enough pledged delegates to claim a majority. That, combined with her substantial lead among superdelegates, gave her enough to informally claim the nomination.

Forty-four presidents have been elected in the United States over the past 228 years. Not once have voters had the option to choose a female candidate in a major party. Until this cycle.

To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want—even president. Tonight is for you. -H pic.twitter.com/jq7fKlfwGV

""It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now. But don’t worry, we’re not smashing this one. Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,"" Clinton said. ""It’s the first time in our nation’s history that a woman will be a major party’s nominee.""

She noted that her mother was born on the day that Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. She remarked that the first convention dedicated to women’s rights happened in the state where she stood that evening: New York, at Seneca Falls in 1848 -- “when a small but determined group of women and men came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights.""

“We all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you,"" Clinton said.

Gender wasn't an undertone; it was the backbone of the evening, and it gave the strongest indication to date that Clinton won't be shying away from the topic as she pivots to the general election.

The question is, how will it work?

In an interview last week, Clinton's top adviser, Joel Benenson, argued that trepidation over having the first major female candidate on the ticket -- to the extent it exists -- was unwarranted.

""There were a whole lot of people who said, 'Oh there is no way the country is ready for an African-American president.' Not only was it ready for him. He is one of only six or seven presidents to be elected and re-elected with 50 percent of the vote or more and with two electoral colleges landslides,"" he said.

Other top strategists predicted on Tuesday that Clinton's gender, on the whole, would be a net plus -- invigorating voters in ways that they, and political observers, couldn't adequately anticipate. Anita Dunn, a longtime Democratic operative, recalled the cover of the Chicago Tribune the night that Barack Obama clinched the nomination eight years ago: “Obama Makes History."" Anticipating the history you're about to make doesn't prepare you for the moment you actually make it, she noted.

""There is a difference between thinking hypothetically about the first woman President and Hillary Clinton actually becoming the first female nominee of a major party, and I think for many women they will find themselves unexpectedly emotional about this,"" Dunn said via email. ""There is also the reality that Donald Trump was sent by central casting to be the male foil in this not-buddy movie!""

Clinton, as Dunn sees it, couldn't ask for a better opponent than the one she's getting: a braggadocios businessman with a lengthy history of misogynistic comments. And it helps that Donald Trump has had an objectively abysmal start to his general election, rattled and criticized over a series of racist remarks he's made about an American judge of Mexican heritage who is overseeing a case involving his for-profit university.

Indeed, Trump's stumbles have been profound enough to spark a reassessment of strategy among Democrats. As the general election gets underway, some now see deftness in Clinton getting out of her opponent's way. ""If the past couple of weeks are any indication, Donald Trump is his own worst nightmare, and they should not get in the way of him screwing himself up. Let Trump do Trump,"" said Mo Elleithee, the Democratic National Committee’s former communications director who served as a senior spokesman for Clinton during her 2008 campaign.

Elleithee wasn't calling for Clinton to ignore her opponent entirely, just to make the affirmative case against his candidacy and let the other wounds be self-inflicted. Other top Democrats said they'd continue to prod Trump in order to disqualify him further with voters. ""Trump has proven himself very thin-skinned, so poking him and focusing on his intemperance and intolerance can draw new eruptions and produce unexpected rewards,"" said David Axelrod, Obama's longtime advisor.

On Tuesday night, Clinton seemed to side with Axelrod's theory of the case, pivoting quickly to her opponent and echoing the themes of her withering speech last week, when she painted Trump as equal parts unstable and unqualified.

""Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander in chief. And he is not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico, he is trying to wall off Americans from each other,"" she said at one point. ""When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,' that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’”",REAL
"TRUTH: No Apartheid in Israel, Says Black South African Politician Oct 28, 2016 Previous post Any black South African who claims there is apartheid in Israel is either uninformed or blatantly dishonest, says a member of parliament in Pretoria. 
According to Kenneth Meshoe, chairman of the African Christian Democratic Party faction, any attempt to compare Palestinians’ experience in Israel with the former racist regime is offensive to individuals who suffered under the system of racial separation. 
Whatever challenges the Arab minority in Israel faces, the reality of life here cannot be compared to his experiences growing up, he insists. 
“There is freedom of movement in this country that we never had in South Africa,” Meshoe told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) during a visit to Jerusalem last week. “Benches and bathrooms said ‘whites only.’ We could never take ‘white’ transportation. Most white doctors would not treat black patients, only white ones. And those who were willing to treat black patients out of compassion – many of them would ask the patients to enter their clinics through the back door so they wouldn’t be seen by the white patients in the lobby. I don’t know if it was illegal for white doctors to treat black patients, but the reality was that very few did.” ‘Perpetuating Propaganda’ 
According to Meshoe, “Some South Africans who say there’s apartheid in Israel are only repeating things they’ve heard from other people, not because they’ve actually seen it themselves. They are just perpetuating propaganda. 
“Other people – politicians – are only thinking about their needs, and the statements that will serve their needs. They ask ‘what do I gain [by claiming there is or is not apartheid in Israel] and then make a decision. So they are perpetuating something that that they know very well is a lie.” 
Meshoe said he first visited Israel several years after Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. He joined a church delegation to the Holy Land and used the opportunity both for a religious pilgrimage and a political education, but the latter came as a surprise. 
“On that trip, I deliberately looked for anything that looked like apartheid. I took a bus to the center of Jerusalem, but blacks, Jews, Arabs and 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up .

 Buzz Cut:

 • The Full Ackbar: Right warns Obama war plan is a trap

 • More votes set on amnesty plan

 • GOP confidence grows while Dems get jitters

 • Biden: ‘Run on what we have done’

 • When you care enough to steal $10,000 worth of underpants

THE FULL ACKBAR: RIGHT WARNS OBAMA WAR PLAN IS A TRAP

 In a blistering column, influential conservative columnist Matthew Continetti calls President Obama’s request for congressional authorization for the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria a “trap” and says he would “happily” vote it down. “If the threat of ISIS is as dire as the president says it is in the preamble of his resolution,” Continetti writes, “then not only does the president already have the authority to strike granted to him by Article II of the Constitution and the 2001 and 2002 war resolutions, he also should not cavil or hesitate in unleashing every means at his disposal to confront and defeat the enemy.” Continetti goes on to say, “I also cannot help thinking that the presidential request is little more than a trap, a bone thrown in the direction of the cloakroom to distract from the collapse of America’s position in the Middle East and the approaching deadline for nuclear talks with Iran. How better to provoke infighting among both Republicans and Democrats, to switch the debate from sanctions against Iran to ‘Rand Paul versus Marco Rubio for the soul of the GOP,’ than to start a debate over presidential war powers as the war is going on.”

ISIS grabs ground - Fox News: “Islamic State fighters reportedly seized most of a western Iraqi town on Thursday, in fighting taking place mere miles from an air base where hundreds of U.S. Marines are training Iraqis. Reuters, quoting local officials, reported Thursday that ISIS militants had overrun much of the town of al-Baghdadi. One local Iraqi official told Reuters that, ""Ninety percent of al-Baghdadi district has fallen under the control of the insurgents.""

Not even a little ‘hasty’? - “Well first it wasn't hasty. Just because I didn't know what the plans were, didn't mean the plans weren't in place for weeks. We have been planning for weeks a range of contingency options…We always have a range of options we can take when we're talking about a high threat post."".”– State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki on “The Kelly File” discussing the weapons and equipment abandoned in Yemen by U.S. forces.  Watch here.

A question of selfie control - Buzzfeed released a video Thursday showing the commander in chief using a selfie stick and smiling at himself in the mirror to help promote ObamaCare. It delighted many in the media. The Washington Post called it, “cute” and “catchy,” while People Magazine gets in on the action suggesting, “judging by the president's expert selfie stick form, it seems like his meeting with Kim Kardashian last year really paid off.” Not mentioned in the stories: the video was reportedly shot on the same day the world learned ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller was dead.

“Evil is real. There is no light grey. Murdering innocent people to move a political point of view has been, is and always will be evil.” – Former President George W. Bush in a lecture at University of Mary Hardin-Baylor on Wednesday.

ELIE WIESEL WILL ATTEND NETANYAHU SPEECH

 “[W]riter, political activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, will attend Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu’s] congressional speech regarding Iran on March 3,” reports the Observer. “A full-page advertisement declaring Mr. Wiesel’s intention to attend the controversial speech will appear in The New York Times on February 14th to be followed by The Washington Post.”

[WSJ: “Senate Republicans on Thursday moved to officially welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. ahead of his planned speech to Congress next month, the latest development in a saga that has roiled politics in both countries.”]

MORE VOTES TO COME ON AMNESTY PLAN

 The Hill: “The Senate is going to vote again on a procedural motion to consider a bill reversing President Obama’s executive actions on immigration and fund the Department of Homeland Security. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.] filed a motion to hold additional votes to end a Democratic filibuster of the bill, setting up as many as three more attempts. The votes are expected to take place the last week of February, as Congress will be out of town next week for a recess…Funding will lapse after Feb. 27.”

Cost, logistics of Obama immigration plan raise concerns - Fox News: “Though forecasting turn-out of applicants is largely a guessing game, DHS predicts as many as 1.3 million people may apply in the first six months alone…There's also the cost of the plan, officially known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, estimated at $324 million to $484 million over the next few years, according to DHS documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.”

Power Play: Fight over funding - Democratic strategist Penny Lee and former Republican Senate staffer John Hart join Power Play host Chris Stirewalt to discuss the $40 billion Homeland Security bill that would stop the president’s executive action on immigration. Are Republicans picking the right bill for a fight? And can Congress come to an agreement? Watch here.

DeMint seeks peace with old rival McConnell - Politico: “Jim DeMint paid a personal visit Thursday to an old rival: Mitch McConnell. DeMint, a former South Carolina senator and now president of The Heritage Foundation, met one-on-one with McConnell in the GOP leader’s Capitol suite as DeMint pitched Heritage’s ‘opportunity’ agenda. Things appeared to go over more smoothly with McConnell than they did last month with the House, where DeMint was confronted over his sister organization’s strict ratings of lawmakers’ conservatism…”

WITH YOUR SECOND CUP OF COFFEE...

 Relatively little is known about the history of the peoples of the British Isles prior to the arrival of Roman legions in the 1st Century, A.D. But one durable belief is that the more placid peoples of the south who would live under Roman rule were a breed apart from the wild, savage tribes to the north, known to the Romans as Picts. But a new book from Benjamin Hudson, a professor of history and medieval studies at Penn State, is turning that discussion around. While Roman history focuses on the Picts as uncivilized enemies as the Romans began to try to expand the empire’s boundaries into northern England, Hudson’s book argues that “they weren't different, they were merely Britons that the Romans didn't conquer.” While Hudson’s research shows a glimpse of life and culture without the Roman influence, it also makes the case that the bias of Roman historians created a false delineation between residents of the south and residents of the north prior to their arrival.

Got a TIP from the RIGHT or LEFT? Email FoxNewsFirst@FOXNEWS.COM

GOP CONFIDENCE GROWS WHILE DEMS GET JITTERS

 Fox News polling guru Dana Blanton writes: “…by a 10-point margin, more Republicans are looking forward to the 2016 campaign than dreading it. That’s the opposite of how they felt about the start of the 2012 campaign in 2011. At that time, they were more likely to say they were dreading the race by 10 points. The poll finds the same reversal of sentiment among Democrats. They were looking forward to the 2012 campaign by 8 points, while now they say they are dreading the start of the 2016 campaign by 5 points. Republicans might be looking forward to 2016 because they are more confident about their party’s chances. Fully 78 percent of Republicans think the GOP candidate is going to win the next presidential election, while just 63 percent of Democrats feel that way about their party’s candidate. The results are almost the same when the hypothetical race is between a generic Republican and Democrat Hillary Clinton: 76 percent of Republicans say their candidate will win, while 67 percent of Democrats think Clinton will prevail.”

Walker and Carson at the head of the class - In the latest Fox News poll, voters got to rank the 2016 contenders with letter grades. Among Republican voters, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., gets the highest marks of the bunch with a B, followed by Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who both earned B-, all remaining contenders earn C+ or below. Among all voters, Dr. Ben Carson, Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., and Hillary Clinton all earn C+, which is still better than President Obama who earns a C.]

“Listen I’m a big Scott Walker supporter, and he hasn’t announced anything, but you know I’ll be supporting Scott Walker.” -- Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to CQ Roll Call

Rand looks to move up Kentucky presidential pick - Lexington Herald-Leader: “Requesting help to avoid a ‘costly and time-consuming legal challenge,’ U.S. Sen. Rand Paul is asking members of the Republican Party of Kentucky to create a presidential caucus in 2016 that would happen well ahead of the May primary election. In a letter dated Feb. 9, Paul told GOP leaders that an earlier presidential preference vote would give Kentuckians ‘more leverage to be relevant’ in the wide-open competition for the Republican presidential nomination…The letter went out to hundreds of Kentucky Republicans ahead of the party's 54-member executive committee meeting March 7 in Bowling Green, where Paul will pitch the caucus idea to members for a vote…‘If I choose to also seek the presidency, I will do so to serve the people of Kentucky and the ideas that I ran on and have worked for,’ he wrote. ‘I believe I can keep helping the people of Kentucky as senator, but I think there is no doubt I could help them even more as president.’”

[Paul will be spending the weekend in Florida giving speeches at the Orange County Lincoln Day Dinner today and the Republican Party of Sarasota rally Saturday.]

Club for Growth to host Florida cattle call - WaPo: “Six potential 2016 candidates have accepted invitations to speak at the private gathering Feb. 26-28 at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, according to a knowledgeable official who shared the information with The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity. They are Former Florida governor Jeb Bush; Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas; Indiana Gov. Mike Pence; and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.”

Rubio nabs Perry’s top money man - US News: “When former Texas Gov. Rick Perry released a list of 80 donors last week who would serve on the advisory board of his political action committee, there was one glaring omission: The Republican moneyman who helped steer his finance effort in his last run for president. George Seay, the Dallas-based investor and well-connected grandson of former Texas Gov. William Clements, felt he had a duty to support Perry’s late entry into the 2012 White House campaign and without hesitation signed on as his Texas finance chairman. Not this round. Seay has already pledged to help Florida Sen. Marco Rubio if the freshman GOP lawmaker decides to turn the ignition on a 2016 presidential bid, a prospect that looks increasingly likely.”

[Rubio kicks off his national book tour today with an appearance in West Des Moines Iowa. Other stops include South Carolina, Nevada and New Hampshire.]

Perry wraps up New Hampshire trip - Dallas Morning News: “Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Thursday that voters have had enough of a ‘young, attractive’ and inexperienced president and will be looking for a proven leader in 2016. Perry, who is considering a second run for president, wrapped up a two-day trip to New Hampshire with a speech at the Strafford County Republican Committee’s Lincoln Day Dinner.

Kasich calling out GOP’s old guard - Cleveland Plain Dealer : “Gov. John Kasich's presidential deliberations are accelerating, as evidenced not only by an upcoming trip to South Carolina announced this week but also by the prominent Republican advisers entering his political orbit. Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, met recently with Team Kasich, according to GOP sources in Columbus plugged into Kasich's network. One Republican said a separate dinner meeting included former U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, the first primary state. Richard Allen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served as national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, also attended the dinner….”

[Gillespie remaining neutral - In a Facebook post, former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie offered a clarification: “Just saw a news report about John Kasich seeking my thoughts on the presidency. I was happy to share some with him (we've known one another more than two decades!), as i've done with others, but I'm going to remain neutral in the nominating process. The article didn't really make that clear.”]

[Watch Fox: Rick Santorum sits down for the latest 2016 contender interview on “Special Report with Bret Baier” tonight at 6 p.m. ET.]

Shalom, y’all - Former Gov. Mike Huckabee departs this weekend for a trip to Israel.

Carson grabs leader of Gingrich’s winning S.C. team - Dr. Ben Carson has named Ruth Sherlock, a former Newt Gingrich operative, as his South Carolina state director.

POWER PLAY: TROUBLE AT CAMP HILLARY

 Keeping tabs on Team Hillary, news of a disagreement within the campaign provide fodder for strategists. Democratic strategist Penny Lee and former Republican Senate staffer John Hart join Power Play host Chris Stirewalt to discuss the struggle among Clinton’s courtiers. WATCH HERE.

[In the latest Fox News poll, among Democratic voters Hillary gets a B+ and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren tie at B-.]

BIDEN: ‘RUN ON WHAT WE HAVE DONE’

 The Hill: “The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee should embrace the notion of a third term of the Obama presidency, Vice President [Joe Biden] said Thursday, during a speech at Drake University in Iowa. ‘I call it sticking with what works,’ Biden declared. The address was billed as a chance for Biden to explain some of the ideas introduced in President Obama's recent State of the Union address, but the vice president repeatedly returned to a discussion of how he saw the contours of the presidential race…The vice president said the election would be ‘all about’ either continuing the Obama economic policies or shifting to Republicans' ‘top-down’ vision. ‘Run on what we have done. Own what we have done. Stand for what we have done. Acknowledge what we have done,’ Biden said.”

[Would you like to watch the video again of when Biden used the archaic term for an inseparable friend, “butt buddy,” to refer to a former congressman? Of course you would.]

Come out come out, wherever you are - Des Moines Register: “National GOP operatives [posted] a mobile billboard at the vice president's events Thursday that tries to push the idea that Hillary Clinton's absence from the 2016 presidential campaign trail means she's ‘hiding from voters.’ ‘As her poll numbers show, when Hillary is campaigning, she's much less popular. What's the only way not to seem like she's campaigning? Go into hiding,’ Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer wrote in a news release Tuesday.”

[#HillaryCandyHearts - The inveterate Hillary hazers of America Rising is getting into the holiday spirit with not-so-sweet virtual conversation hearts about Hillary on Twitter.]

‘90s Nostalgia - In a NYT op-ed with former Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Clinton calls for the Children’s Health Insurance Program to be extended.

#MEDIABUZZ: MEDIA MAYHAM

 This week Howard Kurtz welcomes former CNN anchor Piers Morgan and former ABC News President David Westin to discuss Jon Stewart stepping down, Brian Williams being suspended, the death of Bob Simon, and President Obama saying the media overhype the threat of terrorism. Watch “#mediabuzz” Sunday at 11 a.m. ET, with a second airing at 5 p.m.

 

 WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO STEAL $10,000 WORTH OF UNDERPANTS

 Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Atlanta police are searching for a shoplifter who appears to have Valentine’s Day sales in mind. A woman pilfered 785 pairs of panties at the Victoria’s Secret at Lenox Square Mall on Saturday, Officer Ralph Woolfolk said Thursday. The suspected thief put the panties in three shopping bags in a raid on the store lasting two hours and absconded, Woolfolk said. Retail for the panties was estimated at more than $10,000.”

AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES…

 “The government doesn't make money, it takes it, and it takes it from enterprises that are successful. [President Obama] simply will not recognize, although I'm sure he's been told since he's never been in the private sector, that when you write a law with specific details, people are going to work within those details to try to minimize expenses. It's rather elementary, but he still doesn't get it.” —Charles Krauthammer on “Special Report with Bret Baier” Watch here.

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News.  Want FOX News First in your inbox every day? Sign up here.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C.  Additionally, he authors the daily ""Fox News First"" political news note and hosts ""Power Play,"" a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including ""The Kelly File,"" ""Special Report with Bret Baier,"" and ""Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.""  He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.",REAL
"A white male gunman killed three people, including one police officer, and injured nine others Friday at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. The gunman has been identified as Robert Lewis Dear. It's still not clear what the shooter's motive was, but it's clear that he started his shooting spree at Planned Parenthood and stayed there.

It's also clear that threats, vandalism, and violence against abortion providers and clinics have escalated since this summer, when anti-abortion activists released deceptively edited videos that accused Planned Parenthood of ""selling baby parts.""

Back in September, CBS reported that the FBI had noticed an uptick in attacks on reproductive health care facilities since the first video was released by the anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress (CMP). There were nine criminal or suspicious incidents (including cyber attacks, threats, and arsons) from July, when the videos first came out, through mid-September.

An FBI Intelligence Assessment at the time found these attacks were ""consistent with the actions of lone offenders using tactics of arsons and threats all of which are typical of the pro-life extremist movement."" Moreover, the report said it was ""likely criminal or suspicious incidents will continue to be directed against reproductive health care providers, their staff and facilities.""

Less than two weeks after CBS reported that, another abortion clinic was firebombed in California. It was the fourth arson at a Planned Parenthood location in as many months.

""The toxic rhetoric directed at Planned Parenthood has dangerous consequences,"" said Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a press release at the time. ""It sends a signal that using violence to close clinics and intimidate healthcare professionals and women is 'OK.' It is not.""

Since 1977, according to NAF, there have been eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 186 arsons against abortion clinics and providers.

Abortion providers have seen ""an unprecedented increase in hate speech and threats"" since the CMP videos came out, Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, said in a statement Friday. Incidents of harassment at Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold in July, when the videos came out, over June, according to a motion for preliminary injunction that NAF filed this month against CMP and its founder David Daleiden.

""We have been quite worried that this increase in threats would lead to a violent attack like we saw today,"" Saporta said.

In an October feature at Broadly, Callie Beusman interviewed Saporta and representatives from other reproductive health groups. They all blamed the videos for an increase in violent rhetoric and action.

Sasha Bruce, senior vice president of campaigns and strategy at NARAL, told Beusman that while hateful and intimidating rhetoric against abortion providers is nothing new, the ""intensity and the level"" is notable of late. ""It is not common that you hear about three arsons in a row; it is not common that you hear about this level of vandalism,"" Bruce said.

Notably, the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood health center where the shooting happened is operated by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains — one of the targets of CMP's videos. One of the doctors featured in those videos was harassed by anti-abortion activists at her home, according to NAF's motion against CMP:

Major pro-life groups have condemned the shooting, including National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life, Operation Rescue, and Christian Defense Coalition. David Daleiden of CMP, the architect of the anti-Planned Parenthood videos, also condemned the shootings.

To some pro-choice advocates, it's ironic to hear these condemnations from Daleiden and from Operation Rescue in particular. Operation Rescue's senior vice president, Cheryl Sullenger, was once jailed for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic. The group has a history of extremist rhetoric against abortion providers; for years the group protested Dr. George Tiller, who was shot and killed in 2009, and called him ""Tiller the Killer."" The man who murdered Tiller, Scott Roeder, was active on Operation Rescue message boards. And Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, who was recently detained and denied entry into Australia for his extremist writings, is on the board of Daleiden's Center for Medical Progress.

Shootings at abortion clinics are rare, but attacks on clinics like vandalism and arson are common. Incidents of harassment that don't rise to the level of criminal activity are so common as to be routine, according to volunteers who escort women's health patients past anti-abortion clinic protesters. And, they argue, these minor incidents can escalate — after all, Scott Roeder vandalized an abortion clinic shortly before he killed George Tiller.

""Although anti-abortion groups may condemn this type of violence when it happens, the way that they target and demonize providers contributes to a culture where some feel it is justifiable to murder doctors simply because they provide women with the abortion care they need,"" said Saporta of NAF in her Friday statement.

Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, cautioned on Friday that we still don't know the motive for the shooting. But she also said that PPRM shares ""the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country.""",REAL
"Speaking at a brief news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, after news broke of the FBI looking into Anthony Weiner’s emails, Hillary Clinton insisted that the FB  ",FAKE
"AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” Videos By Amy Moreno November 2, 2016 
Don’t listen to the LYING North Korea style media, who say minorities do not support Trump. 
The truth is, Donald Trump has AMAZING minority support. 
And his Hispanic support in Florida is outstanding! 
At one Miami precinct, voters began a parade-like storm, shouting “USA” and “Make America Great Again” as they arrived at the polls to vote for America First! 
Watch the video: @realDonaldTrump latinos storming precinct 10 sw Miami to vote for our one and only president Trump!! pic.twitter.com/liu4LDey4z 
— El Galope Finca (@ElGalopeFinca) October 31, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"Egypt's airstrikes came in response to the mass beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians by IS militants in Libya. The Libyan government has called for the US-led coalition in Syria and Iraq to turn its attentions to Libya.

Did Pluto's icy heart sink into that depression all by itself?

A man is comforted by others as he mourns over Egyptian Coptic Christians who were captured in Libya and killed by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group, in the village of el-Aour, near Minya, 220 kilometers (135 miles) south of Cairo, Egypt, Monday, Feb. 16, 2015. Egyptian warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday in swift retribution for the extremists' beheading of a group of Egyptian Christian hostages on a beach, shown in a grisly online video released hours earlier.

Egypt claims to have launched airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Libya, in retaliation for the gruesome execution of 21 Egyptian Christians shown in a video released Sunday. The mass murder threatens to open a new front in the greater battle against the self-declared Islamic State, potentially drawing Western powers once more into military intervention in Libya.

Egyptian state television declared that government warplanes struck targets in the eastern Libyan city of Darna, a militant stronghold on the coast about 150 miles from the Egyptian border. The BBC reports that the strikes, made in coordination with the military of the recognized Libyan government based in Tobruk, targeted ""camps, training sites and weapons storage areas"" of the IS affiliate in Libya. According to a Libyan air-force commander, 40 to 50 militants were killed in the strike, Reuters reports.

The Associated Press reports that a second airstrike is underway.

The strikes were made in response to an IS video released Sunday showing the execution of 21 Egyptians, all Coptic Christians, at the hands of masked IS supporters. The Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy writes that the video, shot in IS signature style, shows that the group's Libyan branch has ""the numbers, the wherewithal, and the operational security to hold 21 captives for weeks and then carry out a highly-produced murder show in a beach without fear of intervention from Egypt or anyone else.""

But Mr. Murphy also notes that Egypt's ability to respond is limited.

[Egypt's] military is mostly trained for domestic control and running the expansive business empires of its senior officers. What Egypt will actually be able to do about the group in Libya - rather than its hundreds of followers in the Egyptian Sinai peninsula - remains to be seen. However, the days of ignoring IS in Libya will be over. Unlike in Iraq, where there's a central government to work with, or in Syria, where there's both a strong national army and outside support for Bashar al-Assad's side of the fight against Syria, Libya barely has any functioning institutions anymore. The country could prove richer pickings for the group long term - than its two current struggles to the east.

Already the recognized Libyan government in Tobruk has called for the US-led coalition attacking IS forces in Syria and Iraq to turn its attentions to Libya. Libyan Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni, speaking to Reuters, asked for Western military intervention against IS and Al Qaeda members he says are present in his country.

Reuters notes that the Islamist rival government in Tripoli, a group called Libyan Dawn, says it has no affiliation with either IS or Al Qaeda. The New York Times adds that at least three groups among the multitude fighting in Libya's civil war have declared loyalty to IS, ""one in each of the country’s component regions: Barqa in the east, Fezzan in the desert south, and Tripolitania in the west, around the capital.""

In a commentary published in the Daily Telegraph, Shashank Joshi warns that ""it’s important to separate [the IS] role in Libya from the broader civil war there. Not every Libyan opposition faction is jihadist, and acting as if it were, by taking firm sides, is a recipe for disaster.""",REAL
"On this day in 1973, J. Fred Buzhardt, a lawyer defending President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case, revealed that a key White House tape had an 18...",REAL
"Politicians make many campaign promises they don't intend to deliver on. But Netanyahu's promise Monday to never agree to a Palestinian state fits his record.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks as he visits a construction site in Har Homa, east Jerusalem, Monday March 16, 2015, a day ahead of legislative elections. Netanyahu is seeking his fourth term as prime minister.

With Israel's final pre-election polls pointing to a difficult road for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stay in power, he spent his final days on the campaign trail throwing red meat to his base.

Pro-Likud robocalls warned Israeli voters that only Mr. Netanyahu has the strength to stand up to ""Hussein Obama."" Campaign ads compared Israeli dock workers and regulators to Hamas militants and called his opponents tools of shadowy foreign financiers (a strange charge given his own close ties to US casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson).

But on Monday the prime minister delivered his show stopper: Vote for me and I'll kill what's left of the peace process stone dead.

Though not his precise words, that was their meaning. And this is one campaign promise that voters could probably take to the bank. If that promise helps tip the electoral balance in his favor, it would mean the road to a Palestinian state that was at the heart of the Oslo Accords signed over 20 years ago has come to a dead end.

""I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory, gives territory away to radical Islamic attacks against Israel,"" he told NRG, a pro-settler news website owned by Mr. Adelson.

He warned in the interview that if the more dovish Zionist Union headed by Isaac Herzog won, the new government would ""do the bidding"" of the international community. That was code for freezing settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and focusing on a Palestinian peace deal drawn on the borders that prevailed before 1967's Arab-Israeli war – all leading to the creation of a ""Hamastan"" in Jerusalem.

Without a Palestinian state and Israel's evacuation of at least some of the settlements it has built on land captured in 1967, what's left of the so-called peace process becomes a farce. There simply isn't that much more to talk about.

To be sure, it's a somewhat academic question at this point. There has been no process to speak of for years, US Secretary of State John Kerry's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. When it was announced that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was stepping down from his role as the so-called Quartet's special envoy on Middle East peace – after 8 years on the job – it was the first he'd been heard from on the issue in quite some time.

While spending most of his tenure talking about ""transformational change"" for Palestinians through investment promotion, Mr. Blair was also tending to his growing consulting empire, whose clients include companies like JPMorgan Chase and governments like Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi. Middle East peace, particularly the creation of the Palestinian state that the ""Quartet"" – the UN, EU, US and Russia – says is key, steadily receded from view.

But at least lip service was paid to that ultimate goal by all concerned – including Netanyahu. In 2009, in a speech following President Barack Obama's Cairo address, in which the then-new US leader spoke of a new chapter for the Palestinians, Netanyahu said as long as there were strong US security guarantees for Israel and a recognition of the Jewish state by the Palestinian Authority that ""we will be ready ... to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside a Jewish state.""

Almost six years on, he has repudiated that position.

It was no mistake that one of his last campaign stops Monday was in Har Homa, a Jewish settlement of 20,000 people wedged between Jerusalem and the ancient Palestinian town of Bethlehem. Netanyahu approved construction work on Har Homa during his first term as prime minister, in 1997. On Monday he confirmed what has long been suspected – that settlements like Har Homa were established to make any Palestinian claims on parts of Jerusalem impossible.

""We will preserve Jerusalem's unity in all its parts,"" he told voters. ""We will continue to build and fortify Jerusalem so that its division won't be possible and it will stay united forever.""

The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas views East Jerusalem as its future capital, and that portion of the city is considered occupied by Israel under international law.

Since the late 1990s a network of concrete walls, checkpoints, Israeli-only roads, and settlements in the West Bank has hemmed in and divided Palestinian population centers, effectively chopping into pieces the territory that was meant to be the heartland of a Palestinian state. Integrating them into something resembling a working economic and political whole would require settlement concessions. And Netanyahu has now promised he will never make those concessions.

Turnout in voting Tuesday has been brisk. Haaretz reports that about 14 percent of eligible Israelis had voted by 10 AM local time, a clip 20 percent faster than in the country's two previous elections. The final polls projected Likud slipping. Israel's Channel 2 had Likud down to 20 seats in its final poll on Friday, with the Zionist Union projected at 24.

Yet even if Herzog's party wins more seats, Netanyahu will still have a path to power. Smaller right-wing and religious parties could pull enough seats to form a governing coalition – with Netanyahu once again at the head of the table.

A likely partner for Netanyahu is Naftali Bennett, head of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party. Indeed, Netanyahu said his first call – after the election results are in – would be to Mr. Bennett. His party favors formal annexation of the major settlement blocks in the West Bank's ""Area C"" and has compared the creation of a Palestinian state to ""suicide"" for Israel. Area C covers about 60 percent of the West Bank, and intersperses the Palestinian towns and cities.",REAL
"26 WikiLeaks bombshells on Hillary you need to know Most explosive revelations that could keep Clinton out of White House Published: 5 mins ago Leo Hohmann About | | Archive Leo Hohmann is a news editor for WND. He has been a reporter and editor at several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas and also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. Print Hillary Clinton with top aide Huma Abedin. 
WikiLeaks has provided a treasure trove of inside information on what Hillary Clinton really thinks about important issues such as trade and immigration, but Clinton herself has chosen not to answer questions about the revelations. 
She has focused instead on criticizing the Russians as the source of the hacks, despite the fact there is no proof of Russian involvement. 
The emails also shed light on how the Clinton campaign interacts with Wall Street banks, with friendly media, and how it worked to undermine the candidacy of Democratic rival Bernie Sanders with the help of the DNC. 
WikiLeaks says it has about 50,000 emails from the private Gmail account of John Podesta, a senior Democratic Party official who has served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a senior adviser to President Obama. He was the author of Obama’s climate change policy. John Podesta 
In February Podesta moved seamlessly from the White House to become chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. 
Here are some of the most explosive revelations from the WikiLeaks email dumps featuring Podesta’s account and others. 
Preference for Muslim Americans In 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, Michael Froman, a former Citibank executive, sent Podesta a “list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level, plus a list of Native American, Arab/Muslim American and Disabled American candidates.” The Arab American list came with a special note to exclude Arab Christians – they had to be both Arab and Muslim.As New Republic reports, Obama’s eventual cabinet appointments ended up almost entirely as Froman recommended.Froman ultimately became the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis. 
Shielding Obama In a March 4, 2015, email to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s eventual campaign chairman Podesta asks if they should withhold email exchanges between Clinton and President Obama that were sent over Clinton’s private server.The day before Podesta sent his email to Mills, the House Benghazi Committee privately told Clinton to preserve and hand over all her emails.The email from Podesta to Mills says: “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will.” An email exchange between Podesta, Paul Begala, and Clinton pollster GQRR shows the Clinton campaign was pushing the Muslim Obama narrative back in January 2008. Included was a survey of Obama “negative facts” such as this one: “Obama (owe-BAHM-uh)’s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world’s most populous Islamic country.” The pollster writes “we have reworked the Obama message into the survey, as requested.” 
Secret speeches to Wall Street Hillary Clinton was so enraged that Bill Clinton was forced to cancel a paid speech at Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley in 2015 that she “needed a cool down period.” The email chain, on March 11, 2015, before she formally launched her campaign, includes top aides to both Hillary Clinton and former President Clinton, and reveals that Hillary’s future campaign aides were concerned about the political impact of Bill giving a speech to a Wall Street bank. “Morgan Stanley is coming down,” wrote Robby Mook in an email to top Clinton aides.Top aide Huma Abedin explained that Hillary would not be happy about it, writing: “HRC very strongly did not want him to cancel that particular speech. I will have to tell her that [Bill] chose to cancel it, not that we asked.” Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial firms, a point of contention during this year’s primary, were the subject of an email to Podesta. Excerpts from some of the speeches had been flagged by Clinton’s research team, including the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on issues. It was just part of “making sausage” in the political arena, she said, that certain positions on issues needed to be kept hidden from the public. Some “flags” in Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches were noted in a Jan. 25 email from campaign research director Tony Carrk to top Clinton advisers, including Clinton’s declaration that “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Countless establishment media outlets parlaying themselves as “fact checkers” tried to downplay this email by saying it was “mostly about trade,” not immigration, as if the words “open borders” were never mentioned. But the email exchange also shows how Hillary’s about-face on the TPP trade deal was mere pandering to Bernie Sanders’ voters and had no basis in reality in terms of how she really feels about trade deals. In a speech at Goldman-Black Rock on Feb. 4, 2014, Carrk pointed out, Clinton admitted she’s “Kind Of Far Removed” from middle-class struggles due to “The Economic, You Know, Fortunes That My Husband And I Now Enjoy.” Clinton, in other speeches, boasted of her ties to Wall Street, an issue primary opponent Bernie Sanders continually raised. Clinton still has refused to release transcripts of her paid speeches while blasting Donald Trump for not releasing his tax returns. 
Working in tandem with ‘friendly’ media WND reported Tuesday emails showing reporters, editors and contributors not just advocating for Hillary Clinton but apparently colluding with the campaign. Univision Chairman Haim Saban urged the Clinton campaign to hit Donald Trump harder over immigration. The Boston Globe tried to time a Clinton opinion piece to do the most good in New Hampshire. CNBC’s John Harwood urged Clinton campaign chairman Podesta to watch out for then-GOP candidate Dr. Ben Carson. Democratic National Committee official and CNN contributor Donna Brazile apparently tipped off the Clinton campaign to a potentially difficult CNN town-hall question on capital punishment during the Democratic Party primary season. Brazile adamantly denies it . In a July 2015 email, New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich appeared to ask permission from Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, to use certain quotes of the presidential candidate in an article. Palmieri replied, suggesting he remove a reference Clinton made to Sarah Palin and delete Clinton’s statement, “And gay rights has moved much faster than women’s rights or civil rights, which is an interesting phenomenon.” CNBC correspondent John Harwood, who was widely criticized for posing biased questions to Donald Trump as a primary debate moderator, effectively served as an adviser to the Clinton campaign, emailing Podesta with the subject line “Watch out.” The warning was regarding GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson, who “could give you real trouble in a general (election).” Maggie Haberman, a former Politico reporter who now works for the New York Times, was described in a January 2015 memo as having “a very good relationship” with the Clinton campaign. “We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed,” the memo said. 
Demeaning Catholics Podesta discussed fomenting “revolution” in the Catholic Church with a progressive activist while Hillary’s now-communications director Jennifer Palmieri mocked Catholics who speak out against the liberal social causes of the Democratic Party. “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” Sandy Newman, president and founder of the nonprofit Voices for Progress, wrote Podesta in February 2012 . The email, among the third batch released by WikiLeaks, was titled “opening for a Catholic Spring? just musing.” Podesta tells Newman of progressive organizations he and his colleagues created to recruit members of the church who can lead a revolution when the time is right.“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this,” the Clinton campaign chairman writes. “But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.” Clinton, who has accused Trump of praising Putin, called the Russian leader in a 2014 speech “engaging” and “a very interesting conversationalist.” Excerpts from Clinton’s speeches were contained in a document emailed to Podesta to point out quotes that could harm the campaign. 
Collusion with DOJ Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton’s work-related emails, contending it showed collusion between the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign. Fallon wrote that “DOJ folks” told him a court hearing in the case had been planned. The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, Podesta met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department. Lawyers also told the Clinton campaign in emails that Hillary’s private email scandal “ smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc .” 
Entanglements with foreign governments King Muhammad IV of Morocco made a $12 million pledge to fund the Clinton Global Initiative conference, but only if the likely presidential candidate attended the event as a speaker. Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, wrote in a January 2015 email that “if HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.” Then she warned: “She created this mess and she knows it.” Hillary ended up not attending but her husband Bill did. An email from Hillary Clinton’s account to Podesta on Aug. 17, 2014, said Saudi Arabia and Qatar were “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Critics have pointed out that the Clinton Foundation has received considerable funding from the two Middle East nations. In a leaked 2013 paid speech to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, Hillary said Jordan and Turkey “can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Two years later she called for a 550 percent increase in the number of Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. largely from United Nations refugee camps in Jordan. 
Insider’s insider had sway over DNC A WikiLeaks email dump on July 22 revealed that Debbie Wasserman Schultz used her position as head of the DNC to work in concert with the Clinton campaign to undermine the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt. Schultz was forced to resign over the emails. Issues used to undermine Sanders’ campaign included his faith, or lack thereof. The Clinton campaign tried to reschedule the Illinois presidential primary to lower the chances a moderate Republican would get a boost following the Super Tuesday primaries. “The Clintons won’t forget what their friends have done for them,” wrote Robby Mook, who later became Clinton’s campaign manager, in the November 2014 email to Podesta.",FAKE
"The struggle continues for a binding treaty to #StopCorporateAbuse By Adam Parsons Posted on November 9, 2016 by Adam Parsons 
In the last week of October, civil society came another step closer to achieving a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations (TNCs) and other business enterprises with respect to human rights. Delegates from many large social movements and networks met alongside state representatives at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, to further proceedings for an open-ended intergovernmental working group set up two years ago. Despite considerable opposition from Western powers to a binding treaty in any form (particularly the United States, United Kingdom and other countries of the European Union), activist groups are now ramping up the struggle as part of a Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples’ Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity . 
The fact that this process is now an official part of the UN agenda is itself remarkable. Since the 1970s, there have been a long series of failed attempts to develop binding international systems to regulate corporations for their human rights violations. The abortive efforts to create a code of conduct for TNCs through the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) were completely thwarted by the early 1990s, until fresh proceedings were launched in 1998 under a subordinate body of the then-Human Rights Commission. In 2003, the Sub-Commission approved a ‘non-voluntary’ set of norms that could hold TNCs accountable, although these were rigidly opposed by the business sector, and ultimately declared to have ‘no legal standing’ by the Human Rights Commission. 
As an alternative, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie, who became renowned for pursuing a less ambitious or ‘partnership’ approach to corporate regulation. His UN Guiding Principles, when eventually released in 2011, were accepted by all governments but remain voluntary and non-binding, only calling on corporations to act with due diligence. Civil society organisations wholly decried the inadequacy of the proposed follow-up mechanisms, which they stated even risked undermining efforts to strengthen corporate responsibility and accountability for human rights. 
Against this background, it was therefore a huge step forward in 2013 when a grouping of countries, predominantly from the Global South, called for a renewal of efforts towards a legally binding framework to regulate the activities of TNCs and to provide appropriate protection, justice and remedy to the victims of human rights abuses. An historic resolution was adopted by a majority of States (again mostly from the Global South, including Russia and China) at the Human Rights Council in June 2014, establishing an intergovernmental working group with the mandate of drafting a legally binding instrument. It is the first time in almost 25 years that a UN intergovernmental body is dedicating itself to the regulation of corporations, which is set to be an intensive process with considerable hurdles if a genuine legal regime for TNCs is to be eventually agreed and implemented. 
‘Damage to life’ 
The case for holding TNCs to account for their activities could not be tighter, considering the gap that exists in the international legal architecture which means they cannot be prosecuted directly for human rights abuses. Yet the harm that TNCs are wreaking is well-documented, referred to by the Global Campaign as ‘damage to life’; for example, through repressing social struggles and resistance, causing pollution in the extractivist industries, displacing indigenous peoples from their land, exploiting workers through poor labour conditions, and so on. Over several years, a Permanent People’s Tribunal has given representatives from affected communities the opportunity to testify on the socio-environmental impacts of harmful corporate activities, and to highlight the numerable cases that demonstrate how TNCs are able to act with effective impunity. Indeed it is the consistent work of many human rights defenders that has brought the issue of corporate impunity to the agenda of the Human Rights Council, leading to demands for the rights of affected persons to be central to a binding treaty, both in terms of regulation and remedy. 
Campaigners talk of an entire ‘architecture of impunity’ that has protected the operations of TNCs for decades, and placed the rights of corporations above the rights of people through the privatisation of legal norms and institutions. Some of the largest TNCs have greater economic power than many nation states, while their tremendous political power is reinforced and protected on a legal level by a multitude of norms, treaties and agreements. Often described as a new global corporate law, or the lex mercatoria , it is made up of mechanisms such as the Investor to State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions and arbitration tribunals that are enshrined in bilateral trade agreements; or the International Monetary Fund’s imposed structural adjustment programs (now replicated in Europe under the so-called Competitiveness Pact policies); or the World Trade Organisation’s dispute-settlement system. While the rights of TNCs are shielded by this complex global legal framework based on trade and investment rules, there are no adequate counterweights or enforceable mechanisms to control the social, cultural, environmental or labour impacts of their operations. The result is a normative asymmetry between the binding norms that protect investor interests, and the soft law that reduces TNCs obligation to respect human rights to mere voluntary measures. 
A binding treaty to regulate the activities of TNCs could therefore provide a vital counterpoint to the controversial free trade and investment agreements that are being continually negotiated in secret, without any democratic legitimacy. As the UN’s Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, Alfred de Zayas, has forcefully argued , these ongoing agreements—such as the TTIP, TPP, CETA and TISA—are all prepared without the inclusion of key stakeholders or parliaments, and are thus in direct violation of international human rights law. They also enable international investors to override the national sovereignty of democratic States, and seek to impose their own system of ‘arbitration’ that isn’t required to adhere to any nation’s law and constitution. Inequality and asymmetry are built into the legal foundations of the current trade and investment regime, which is solely intended to serve the immediate profits of investors, speculators and transnational enterprises, at the wider expense of social and economic progress. 
Inverting the normative pyramid 
In this context, the implications of mainstreaming human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice through a legally binding instrument are potentially radical and transformative. The basic intent of civil society proposals is to invert the international normative pyramid to place the rights of social majorities at the top, hence the repeated calls for a final treaty to obligate States to introduce a binding human rights supremacy clause into all trade and investment agreements they sign, in conformity with the principles of the UN Charter. The repeated calls for States to comply with their extraterritorial obligations in the area of economic, social and cultural rights—as set down in the Maastrict Principles —is also central for ensuring that human rights can assume their rightful role as the legal basis for regulating global trade and finance. 
As a result of invoking the pre-eminence of these hierarchically superior norms, it could require renegotiating all existing trade and investment agreements, and could certainly overturn the investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) regime, as well as the secretive corporate arbitration system in its entirety. Indeed if States and TNCs were truly compelled to respect and comply with the conventions, recommendations and declarations that are the established basis of international human rights law, then it could lead to an exhaustive list of necessary reforms to the global economic system: strict regulations on financial transactions and speculation, the closure of tax havens, the cancellation of illegitimate public and sovereign debt, the reversal of privatisations on public goods and services to ensure the right to food and health, and so much more. 
This greater vision is upheld by a joint civil society proposal to elaborate an International People’s Treaty , which aims to go much further than articulating the need for control mechanisms to halt human rights violations committed by TNCs. The growing demand for access to justice is also linked to the ideal of creating international law “from below,” and establishing “peoples’ sovereignty over the commons” by opposing the expansion of TNCs into sectors that should be controlled by communities and citizens. As part of a work-in-progress, the current base document for global consultation has a lengthy section on alternatives to the dominant socioeconomic paradigm, emerging from the experiences and proposals of the many social movements, scholars, activists and affected communities who are resisting the growing power of TNCs in their diverse spheres. 
A radical alternative proposal 
At the centre of these proposals is the need to promote effective mechanisms for the realisation of fundamental human rights as governments formulate a new international political, economic and legal order, based upon an equitable distribution of wealth and respect for nature. The principle of sharing is therefore recognised as the basis of all transitional measures that promote cooperation and solidarity, as emphasised in the section of the People’s Treaty on envisioning new economies: 
“To address the basic needs of more than half of the world’s population and end the disruption of the vital cycles of the Earth system, global and national economies have to redistribute wealth to reduce asymmetries under the limits of nature. Some sectors and countries still need to improve their wellbeing while others need to reduce their overconsumption and waste. Well-being for all will only be sustainable when we share what is possible and available. The real challenge is not only to eliminate poverty but, more importantly, to eliminate the concentration of wealth and power and achieve economic and social justice based on rights.” 
No doubt many will dismiss this broader vision of global equity and justice as politically unrealistic, in light of the growing number of corporate abuse scandals across the world, and the continuing disregard for basic labour and human rights standards in many developing countries. Campaigning groups are still trying to resist corporate capture of the process for a binding treaty through the Human Rights Council, and are calling on all States to at least participate in good faith, considering the overt antagonism of the European Union during the first session held in 2015. The prospect of achieving a concrete draft proposal next year in line with progressive civil society demands is currently less than optimistic, even with the staunch support of countries like Ecuador, Cuba and Bolivia. Without massive, continual and unending support from ordinary citizens for securing the basic socioeconomic rights of all—as envisioned in STWR’s flagship publication , Heralding Article 25 —the balance of power will remain firmly in the hands of transnational capital and its servile political representatives. 
Nevertheless, the treaty process remains an important opportunity for interlinking popular resistance struggles, building counterpower, and slowly cracking the immense wall of corporate impunity. It is a process that should concern not only human rights activists, but everyone who campaigns for a more democratic, sustainable and egalitarian world that places people and nature ahead of transnational corporate interests. 
Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World’s Resources . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
"The movie star created a stir during her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award acceptance speech at Sunday night's Oscars, when she said: ""To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else's equal rights. It's our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.""

The comment was a hit in the moment, with Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez effusing their support.

Now, likely 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and other Democrats are using those comments as a way to raise an issue that's been central to their party's economic message in recent years.

""I think we all cheered at Patricia Arquette's speech at the Oscars -- because she's right,"" Clinton told an audience of women working in Silicon Valley's technology industry in California on Tuesday.

Other Democrats praised Arquette's comments, too. Among them were House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, Perez, the Labor secretary, and Valerie Jarrett, one of President Barack Obama's top White House aides. Amen! ""It's our time to have wage equality once and for all in the United States of America."" - Patricia Arquette #Oscars #WomenSucceed — Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) February 23, 2015 I agree w/ what @PattyArquette said at the #Oscars: All people should get #EqualPay for equal work. When women succeed, America succeeds! — Tom Perez (@LaborSec) February 23, 2015 Congrats @PattyArquette! Thx for using your speech to advocate for #EqualPay and for understanding that when women succeed, America succeeds — Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) February 23, 2015 Democrats have pushed a bill intended to close the pay gap between men and women by offering new legal protections to women who complain that they're being underpaid relative to their male peers, and by having the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collect gender and racial pay data. The bill failed to clear the 60-vote procedural threshold in the Senate last year -- and it's all but certain not to advance now that Republicans control both the House and the Senate, leaving Democrats to raise the issue on the presidential campaign trail instead. Republicans argue there are already enough protections on the books to ensure women have the right to equal wages. Clinton's comments come as The New York Times reports she plans to make her gender -- and potential to break the ""glass ceiling"" and become America's first female president -- a central theme in her widely expected 2016 campaign. During her speech Tuesday, Clinton recalled being pregnant while working in an Arkansas law firm that had no maternity leave policy. She also called the tech industry the ""wild west,"" and said it needs to be more welcoming to women. ""As women, let's do more to help all women lead on and succeed,"" she said. ""You don't have to run for office,"" Clinton said. ""Although if you do, more power to you.""",REAL
"Iran, Finland sign 4 MoUs in Tehran Wed Oct 26, 2016 10:15PM Iranian President Hassan Rouhani meeting with the President of Finland Sauli Niinisto at the presidential palace in Tehran. © AFP 
Yusef Jalali Press TV, Tehran 
Finland’s president has paid an official visit to Iran to boost mutual ties. During the visit, the 2 countries signed documents on cooperation in such areas as energy, ICT and environment. Loading ...",FAKE
"White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said he would “neither defend nor criticize” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s decision to announce the new developments in the Hillary Clinton email saga, a neutral stance that contrasts with the criticism coming from the Clinton campaign and other Democrats. Mr. Comey had revealed Friday that the […]",REAL
"The FBI announced Friday it had uncovered news emails related to its investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton‘s handling of classified information while conducting a separate investigation into the pervy sexting habits of former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner of course is the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin who herself figures prominently in Clinton’s email scandals.

The FBI announced Friday it had uncovered news emails related to its investigation of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton‘s handling of classified information while conducting a separate investigation into the pervy sexting habits of former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner of course is the estranged husband of Hillary’s closest aide, Huma Abedin who herself figures prominently in Clinton’s email scandals.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump saw this coming from a mile away, fingering Weiner as a potential national security threat all the way back in August of 2015. “It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.”

Abedin recently announced the couple’s separation after Weiner became embroiled in a new series of embarrassing online sexting scandals, including one allegedly involving an underage girl that prompted the FBI to investigate.

One month earlier, Trump said he didn’t like the thought of “Huma going home at night and telling Anthony Weiner all of these secrets.”

Trump was sounding the alarm about Weiner as early September 2013, when he wrote that Huma should “dump the sicko Weiner” because he was “a calamity who is bringing her down with him.”

Click to read more from Heat Street.",REAL
"A top U.S. military commander warned that Russia’s modern military is now “far more capable” than that of the Soviet Union, saying Moscow is “messaging” the United States that “they’re a global power.”

The warning over Russia’s military might from Adm. William Gortney, head of U.S. Northern Command, is the second in as many months.

Gortney disclosed to Congress in March that Russian heavy bombers flew more ""out-of-area patrols"" last year than in any year ""since the Cold War."" On Tuesday, he affirmed that Russia’s “long-range” flights are rising – and occurring in places they haven’t before, like near Canada, Alaska and the English Channel.

He also confirmed there are two Russian Navy ships off the shores of the United States, reportedly near Cuba and Venezuela.

The comments are the latest sign of military and other tensions rising between the U.S. and Russia, which is accused of stoking the fighting in eastern Ukraine despite international sanctions and condemnation.

Gortney described Russia’s intervention in Ukraine as part of a “new doctrine,” which they’re employing.

“The Russians have developed a far more capable military than the quantitative, very large military that the Soviet Union had,” he said.

In sheer numbers, the Soviet Union’s military was still much bigger than Russia’s today. According to statistics published in The Washington Post, the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s had more than 5 million in its armed forces, and even more in its reserves. Today, its armed forces number fewer than 1 million, with its reserves at 2 million – roughly comparable to the total forces of the U.S., but smaller than the total NATO force.

“We watch very carefully what they're doing,” Gortney said, while noting that Russian aircraft are “adhering to international standards that are required by all airplanes that are out there.”

CNN also reported Tuesday that Russian hackers were able to breach a White House computer system after a successful cyber-attack on the State Department. The White House has not publicly confirmed this.

Meanwhile, Gortney revealed Tuesday that China has three ballistic missile submarines capable of hitting the U.S.

On the bright side, he said: “China does have a no-first-use policy, which gives me a little bit of a good news picture there.”",REAL
"Jay Parini , a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His newest book is "" Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal,"" which is forthcoming in October.

(CNN) Bernie Sanders, my Vermont senator and, indeed, a friend of many years, is now running for president . He noted at his announcement (with a familiar note of wise irony): ""People should not underestimate me.""

To most Americans, of course, Sen. Bernie Sanders is only a name, if that. He is barely known to the general public, which makes him a very long shot indeed to win election to the highest office in the nation.

Those who follow politics a little more closely will possibly think of him as some left-wing kook that only the most liberal state in the union would ever dream of electing to the Senate, as we did in 2006. Let me add this, as someone who has followed him closely (and with admiration) for a long time: When people stop to listen to Bernie, they realize that -- whether or not they agree with his ideas -- he is, without a question, an authentic voice who speaks without fear.

And nobody should underestimate him.

I remember when Bernie was mayor of Burlington; it is the largest city in Vermont (which isn't saying much). I met him then, and his voice struck me as something not quite heard before. He spoke with a throaty Brooklyn accent, and he was Jewish -- not your typical Vermonter.

He served as mayor of this progressive town on the shores of Lake Champlain with remarkable energy for many years, listening closely to what people had to say, learning about politics at the local level, making a real difference in the daily lives of hard-working people.

He was never a Democrat -- and isn't yet. He's a progressive, holding his seat in the U.S. Senate as an independent, although he votes with the Democrats on major issues.

When Bernie decided to run for Jim Jeffords' seat in the House of Representatives in 1988, many considered him a long shot. I remember hosting a fundraising event at my farmhouse, where Bernie held the floor for almost two hours, answering questions with a forthrightness that stunned those who had never encountered in person his fierce, funny, entertaining, passionate voice. Bernie won that seat, again and again.

Make no mistake about this: Vermont isn't just a rainbow-colored state full of ex-hippies and leftists in berets. It's an agricultural economy, and Bernie has understood this well. He has thoughtfully supported Vermont's dairy-farming community over many years. He has also been a strong supporter of Vermont's hunting culture -- much to the annoyance of many on the left, who wonder why the NRA doesn't attack him.

I was never prouder of Bernie than during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He was a singular and somewhat lonely voice in the House, strongly opposing the 2003 invasion. He saw vividly that this was the worst foreign policy move in American history, one with endless repercussions.

He was especially outraged by the outing of former CIA spy Valerie Plame in 2006 by an official from the Pentagon, and he suggested in several fiery speeches that is was time for a serious investigation of how we got into the Iraq War in the first place.

This was typical of Bernie: The clear voice in the midst of the crowd, the man who says no when somebody needs to say it loudly.

So what would it look like if, by some bizarre chance, Bernie caught fire and became President?

He would certainly work hard for universal health care, which has been a passion of his. I've heard him rail against the efforts of insurance and drug companies to undermine a system -- the single-payer system -- that has worked well throughout Europe for decades, reducing the costs of health care and actually improving it as well.

He would not be Wall Street's best friend. Indeed, he didn't support President George W. Bush in his efforts to bail out the bankers, and wrote an open letter to Henry Paulson, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, protesting that bailout. Famously, on December 10, 2010, he gave an eight and a half hour speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate opposing the reinstatement of Bush-era tax cuts, a vivid piece of rhetoric worth looking at closely by anyone who wants to understand Bernie's views.

He is a socialist, of course. How many American politicians have ever said this aloud? And what does he really mean by that term?

Bernie knows what he's doing. By proclaiming himself a socialist, he is drawing attention to the fact that large corporations and banks, many with international bases, have controlled American public policy for a very long time, usually to the detriment of working people.

And it's working people who seem mostly to interest Bernie Sanders. He has been one of only a few voices in the Senate in the past decade who has consistently pointed out that extreme right-wing factions funded by ""millionaires and billionaires"" (one of Bernie's favorite mantras) have held sway over American politics for as long as anyone can recall.

And this sway has usually operated to the detriment of people who actually repair roads, serve meals, deliver the mail, drive trucks and teach in schools.

But does he actually have the slightest chance of winning the Democratic nomination? And if he won it, could he defeat a Republican candidate with billionaires at his or her disposal?

He's not crazy. In fact, he's probably the sanest person in the presidential sweepstakes. But he can't win, and he knows that. What he will do, however, is move Hillary Clinton on matters of importance to progressives: The restraining of Wall Street and large corporations, the scandal of how America allows its political campaigns to be funded and the welfare of working class Americans, who seems pathetically easy to persuade -- again and again -- to vote against their own economic interests.

A steep climb looms before him. But I applaud Bernie Sanders. I hope he soars and that his brave and commonsensical voice is heard.",REAL
"The Latest On Paris Attack: Manhunt Continues; Brothers Were On No-Fly List

French authorities are still on the hunt for two brothers suspected in an attack against the headquarters of a satirical magazine in Paris that left 12 people dead.

The two chief suspects, named as Said and Chérif Kouachi, 34 and 32, remain at large. Investigators believe Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen in 2011 to receive weapons training with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports, citing U.S. officials who've been briefed on the case.

Both of the brothers have been on the U.S. no-fly list for years, U.S. officials tell NPR.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that the French capital is on its highest alert level, and 800 soldiers and riot police have been called on to guard the city. Schoolchildren, Eleanor said, are being kept inside for recess.

To add to the tension, there was a shooting on Paris' southern edge that killed a police officer and wounded a street sweeper. Bernard Cazeneuve, France's Interior Minister, said those shootings had not been linked to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Overnight, one of the three suspects, identified by French media as 18-year-old Mourad Hamyd, was reported to have turned himself in.

Cazeneuve said nine people had been detained in connection to the attack.

Local officials say mosques were targeted across the country late Wednesday and early today. There were no reports of injuries, and it's unclear if they are linked to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But Cazeneuve said the country would not tolerate any attacks on places of worship.

This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We'll move quickly to correct the record and we'll only point to the best information we have at the time. Refresh this page for the latest.

Update at 5:55 p.m. ET. Suspects Were On U.S. No-Fly List

NPR has confirmed that both Cherif and Said Kouachi have been on the U.S. no-fly list for years. They're also in the central U.S. database of people who pose a known or potential terrorist threat, worldwide: the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.

Update at 3:15 p.m. ET. Eiffel Tower Goes Dark

In honor of the victims of Wednesday's attack, the Eiffel Tower turned off its lights. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted a series of images showing the famous landmark going dark.

Update at 1:03 p.m. ET. No Link:

Bernard Cazeneuve, France's Interior Minister, said authorities had not found a link between today's shootings and the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

— Police found Said Kouachi's ID in a car used by the men to get away. As soon as they learned that name, police launched a manhunt and searched the home of the Kouachi brothers.

— Nine people are presently in custody in connection with the attack.

— Two people who looked like suspects were seen in Villers-Cotterêts, where police launched an intense search near a gas station.

— Police have heard from more than 90 witnesses and are reviewing Internet use and surveillance to try to find the two men.

— Cazeneuve said Said Kouachi had never been accused or convicted of a crime like his brother but had surfaced at the ""periphery of some investigations.""

Update at 12:36 p.m. ET. Dusk In Paris:

The sun has now set in Paris, reporter Lauren Frayer tells our Newscast unit.

She's at the Place de la République, where she says for the second night in a row people are streaming in for an impromptu vigil.

Lauren reports that the city only came to a halt at noon today for a moment of silence. But even though there is man hunt ongoing, Parisians have gone about their business: shops and restaurants are open and the metro is running.

Asteris Masouras, a freelance journalist in Paris, has been tweeting from the scene — pictures of demonstrators carrying posters that read Je Suis Charlie and others leaving candles at the foot of the statue in the center of the square.

Masouras also tweeted a video that shows the crowd whispering La Marseillaise, France's national anthem.

France's Interior Ministry says that more than 88,000 personnel have deployed across France to help with security after the attacks.

In the Paris district alone, 9,650 personnel were deployed, including more than 1,000 military personnel.

Update at 10:16 a.m. ET. The Younger Suspect's Name:

There is some variance in the way the name of the third suspect in this case is being reported. For now, based on reporting by the AFP and other French outlets who have spoken to classmates, we will call the suspect Mourad Hamyd.

Earlier, we had named him as Hamyd Mourad.

Update at 9:44 a.m. ET. 'Stupidity Will Not Win':

Update at 7:19 a.m. ET. Not Linking Suspects To Terrorist Groups:

Counterterrorism officials have been careful not to link the two main suspects to terrorist groups, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston tells our Newscast Unit.

One of the men, Chérif Kouachi, was convicted on terrorism charges in 2008. He served 18 months for helping to funnel fighters from France to Iraq.

What's unclear, said Dina, is what happened to Kouachi after that. It's unclear whether he has ever traveled to Syria and it's unclear whether he has developed links to terrorist groups — including the Islamic State — since 2008.

Judging by the shot patterns left on a police cruiser yesterday, what is clear is that the two suspects were very comfortable using high-powered weapons. It's likely, Dina said, that they received some military training. The question is where.

Update at 6:44 a.m. ET. Roads Shut Down:

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports that police have shut down all roads in and out of Paris.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton also spoke forcefully about the 'deep fault line' of racism, noting that 'millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.'

How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is applauded by the president of the US Conference of Mayors, Sacramento. Mayor Kevin Johnson (l.) and the conference vice President, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Saturday June 20, 2015, at the U.S. Conference of Mayors 83rd Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Hillary Rodham Clinton issued an emotional plea Saturday following the South Carolina church shooting, calling for ""common-sense"" gun control reforms and a national reckoning with the persistent problem of ""institutional racism.""

Three days after nine black church members were gunned down in Charleston, the Democratic presidential contender said the country must take steps to keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

Regulations, she said, can be passed while still respecting the Second Amendment and ""respecting responsible gun owners."" The US Constitution's Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms.

""The politics on this issue have been poisoned, but we can't give up,"" Ms. Clinton told the US Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco on Saturday. ""The stakes are too high. The costs are too dear.""

In 2013 Congress rejected legislation that would have expanded background checks on firearms sales and banned some semi-automatic weapons.

While public opinion is sharply divided on the issue of gun rights vs. gun control, the scientists who research it are not, as Christian Science Monitor's Alexander LaCasse reported in April:

Does owning a gun make your home more dangerous? Most professionals who research the effects of gun ownership say yes.  This is what David Hemenway, a professor at Harvard's School of Public Health saw when he began sending out monthly surveys almost a year ago to scientists engaged in research in public health, criminology, or other social sciences. A clear majority found that a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide, makes women more likely to be victims of homicide, and make homes more dangerous. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, titled, "" There's scientific consensus on guns – and the NRA won't like it,"" Hemenway writes:  ""Scientific consensus isn't always right, but it's our best guide to understanding the world. Can reporters please stop pretending that scientists, like politicians, are evenly divided on guns? We're not."" [Among the general public, support] for gun ownership was  most pronounced among whites who believed that crime rates in the United States are on the rise. This belief runs counter to crime statistics, which in particular have found that the  gun homicide rate has plunged by 49 percent since its peak in 1993.

President Barack Obama has blamed the continued national political inaction on the issue on the influence of the National Rifle Association, the leading gun rights lobbying group.

While Clinton did not propose any specific legislation in her address, she's previously supported limits on gun sales and extending the assault weapons ban.

On Friday, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who's challenging Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, called for an assault weapons ban, stricter background checks and tougher requirements to buy a gun.

""I'm pissed,"" he wrote in an email to supporters. ""It's time we called this what it is: a national crisis.""

As the Christian Science Monitor's Brad Knickerbocker noted on Friday, advocates on both sides promptly staked out their now-familiar positions after the shooting:

National Rifle Association board member Charles Cotton wrote, “Eight of [Pinckney’s] church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence,  said in a statement: “[E]very day, 88 lives are lost in shootings across our nation. Most of these tragedies are preventable through sensible solutions that just keep guns out of the wrong hands: solutions like expanding Brady background checks on all gun sales, and shutting down the small number of ‘bad apple’ gun dealers that supply almost all crime guns.”

Clinton's remarks also marked a forceful entry into the heated topic of race relations, an issue that's become a major theme of her campaign. Clinton called race a ""deep fault line"" in America, noting that ""millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives.""

The problem of racism was not limited to ""kooks and Klansmen,"" she said, but included the off-hand, off-color jokes, as well as whites not speaking up against poverty and discrimination.

In previous appearances, Clinton has taken up a number of issues that are important to African-Americans, calling for changes to the criminal justice system, voting laws and assistance for minority small business owners. Her campaign is trying to motivate the coalition of minority, young, and liberal voters that twice elected Obama to the White House.

""We can't hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America,"" she said. ""We have to name them and then own them and then change them.""",REAL
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Paul Joseph Watson Another reason as to why Ryan tried to sabotage Trump’s campaign? Hillary Clinton’s campaign circulated the name of one of Paul Ryan’s relatives as a potential Supreme Court pick, suggesting a conflict of interest that could feed in to the Republican Speaker of the House’s dislike for Donald Trump. An email released in part 19 of the Wikileaks Podesta dump features an article sent by Hillary advisor Sara Solow to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and Hillary’s foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan on February 29, 2016. The piece draws attention to Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “She was confirmed by without any Republican opposition in the Senate not once, but *twice*. She was confirmed to her current position in 2013 by unanimous consent – that is, without any stated opposition. She was also previously confirmed unanimously to a seat on the U.S. Sentencing Commission (where she became vice chair),” reads the email. “Her family is impressive. She is married to a surgeon and has two young daughters. Her father is a retired lawyer and her mother a retired school principal. Her brother was a police officer (in the unit that was the basis for the television show *The Wire*) and is now a law student, and she is related by marriage to Congressman (and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan.” Earlier this month, Ryan said that he would no longer defend or campaign for Donald Trump. A poll released this week found that nearly two thirds of Republicans trust Donald Trump more than Ryan to lead the GOP. Many Trump supporters speculated that Ryan was involved in the leaking of the infamous Billy Bush tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, as part of a plot to sabotage the Republican nominee’s campaign. Could the fact that one of his relatives is being touted as a likely Clinton Supreme Court pick be another reason as to why Ryan – who has been accused by many of being in bed with the Washington establishment – has abandoned his support for Donald Trump?",FAKE
"Although only a fifth of constituencies have returned their official results thus far, the referendum looks set to pass by an overwhelming margin. According to the Guardian, current estimates suggest that close to 65 percent of voters voted to legalize same-sex marriage.

Opposition leader David Quinn, the director of the Iona Institute, has already conceded the vote, tweeting, ""Congratulations to the yes side. Well done."" The Iona Institute also issued a statement congratulating the yes supporters on their win.

Turnout was bolstered by the #hometovote campaign, which encouraged Irish citizens living abroad to return home to cast their ballots in the referendum.

As it became increasingly clear that the referendum was going to pass, jubilant Irish people took to Twitter to celebrate. Pictures purporting to show actual rainbows over Irish cities as the vote went on were particularly popular:

But people also had all sorts of other ways of celebrating. Like this one, from Ireland's Minister of State for Equality:",REAL
"Pinterest 
C.E. Dyer writes that the disaster that is Obamacare is about to get worse for many people enrolled in the health insurance marketplace. On Monday, the Obama administration confirmed that premiums will skyrocket for many people next year, according to the Associated Press . 
The AP reported: 
Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less. 
Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles. 
In some states, the premium increases are striking. In Arizona, unsubsidized premiums for a hypothetical 27-year-old buying a benchmark “second-lowest cost silver plan” will jump by 116 percent, from $196 to $422, according to the administration report. 
But HHS said if that hypothetical consumer has a fairly modest income, making $25,000 a year, the subsidies would cover $280 of the new premium, and the consumer would pay $142. Caveat: if the consumer is making $30,000 or $40,000 his or her subsidy would be significantly lower. 
Larry Levitt, who follows the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said of the increases: “Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period.” 
Donald Trump’s campaign spokesman, Jason Miller, said in a statement on Monday: “This shows why the entire program must be repealed and replaced.” Miller added, “While (Hillary) Clinton wants to expand the failed program known as Obamacare, Mr. Trump knows the only way to fix our nation’s failing health care system is complete and total reform.” 
Reports have warned that this was coming down the pike for some time; however, HHS’s confirmation ahead of open enrollment beginning Nov. 1 — one week before the election — is likely to cause major headaches for many people. 
This debacle is not unexpected either — it’s exactly what President Obama and Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton wanted to happen. 
Obamacare was never the end goal. Rather, it was a stepping stone toward single-payer, government-run healthcare. That is a big reason why Obama wants Clinton to become president — his legacy is at stake. 
Obama’s legacy is largely wrapped up in Obamacare and what it leads to. Clinton tried to push this first step during her time as first lady and failed, but the conditions will be ripe for her to go even further should she be elected. 
If Clinton becomes president, there’s no doubt that her next step will be to move to single-payer healthcare. Obamacare is bad, there’s no doubt about it, but single-payer government healthcare would be even worse.",FAKE
"In several surreptitiously recorded video conversations, Scott Foval, the former national field director at Americans United for Change, admits to “bird dogging” — planting agitators at — Donald Trump’s rallies to draw negative media attention.

Foval describes colluding with Bob Creamer, co-founder of consulting group Democracy Partners, to “put people in the line, at the front . . . to get in front at the rally, so that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there.”

“To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions,” Foval explains. “You have to train them to bird dog.”

Among Foval’s trainees, he says, are “mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit.”

“Over the last 20 years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel, and a shower.  And I put them in a program,” he brags. “Like, I’ve done that.”

Americans United for Change subsequently cut ties with Foval, according to a statement from the group’s head, Brad Woodhouse.

O’Keefe and Project Veritas have been criticized in the past, however, for strategically editing footage to make false accusations.

In 2013, O’Keefe settled a suit for $100,000 after editing a recording with an ACORN employee who subsequently lost his job. Similarly, after O’Keefe and an associate posed as donors affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in a sting operation at NPR, The Blaze examined the edited video against the raw footage and found manipulative editing.

And contrary to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s hunch, political trickery (real or alleged) isn’t exclusive to either party. In August, Politico reported that Steven Wessel, a convicted con man unaffiliated with Donald Trump’s campaign, “catfished” the Republican presidential nominee’s opponents to gather information “about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump.” Assuming a variety of fake online identities, including that of a female solicitor in England, Wessel gushed in emails, phone calls and Twitter messages about (made-up) extramarital affairs with the likes of the late Lee Atwater, showered marks with gift cards to the swanky Mandarin Oriental, and invited them to go pheasant-hunting in Scotland — all in an apparent attempt to glean more about the operatives and their intentions regarding Trump. Among Wessel’s targets: Republicans Rick Wilson and Cheri Jacobus, and libertarian consultant Liz Mair. According to the report, “The targets of the scheme do not believe that Wessel, described by his own lawyer as mentally ill, was acting alone.” “The questions were of such a degree of granularity and specificity and political acumen that unless [Wessel] had political experience it would be hard for him to come up with them,” said Wilson, head of a pro-Sen. Marco Rubio super PAC during the primaries. Wilson “suggested the possible involvement” of the defunct Make America Great Again PAC. The second installment of undercover videos is scheduled to drop Tuesday.",REAL
"FERGUSON, Mo. — Unrelenting protests over the death of an unarmed black teen here last summer thrust this St. Louis suburb and its 21,000 residents into an international spotlight and ushered in a year of national changes.

Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, fatally shot Michael Brown Jr., a black 18-year-old, on Aug. 9, 2014. The encounter lasted just two minutes, but the shooting led to months of massive and, at times, violent protests. The world watched as crowds hurled bottles and looted liquor stores, while police in military gear threw tear gas and clashed with those on the streets.

Under the slogan #BlackLivesMatter, Ferguson protesters kicked off a movement around alleged incidents of police misconduct leading to rallies in several cities with such cases. Although a grand jury did not indict Wilson and the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges against the officer, Brown's violent death prompted a national look at alleged racial profiling, police brutality and the relationship between police officers and communities of color.

""A year later, all I can say is that Mike Brown, his death, his murder, have given me a new sense of purpose in life and that is to always be a truth teller and to stay true to why I came out on Aug. 9,"" says Johnetta Elzie, 26, who emerged as leader in the Black Lives Matter movement as the protests developed. ""I didn't come because there was an organization that asked me to come. I came because I was tired of seeing black people dead in the street by the hands of police officers.""

#BlackLivesMatter coalesced into a partnership of leaders and organizations. Last month, in Cleveland, hundreds of protests came together for the inaugural Movement for Black Lives Convening. Elzie and others regularly fly to cities where a fatal police encounter has occurred to support local protesters.

Brown's death and the protests that followed also turned the spotlight on other controversial deaths, including Tamir Rice, 12, shot while playing with a toy gun on Nov. 22 by a Cleveland police officer; Walter Scott, 50, shot on April 4 by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer while allegedly running away; and most recently, Samuel DuBose, 43, shot on July 19 during a traffic stop by a University of Cincinnati police officer.

""Hearing statistics of police brutality incidents can be jarring, but seeing new cases every few days forces you to acknowledge the pervasiveness of police brutality,"" said Keisha Bentley-Edwards, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin who studies race, adolescence and academic and social development.

""Seeing the impact on an actual person, their families and their communities personalizes these incidents beyond numbers,"" she said.

In Ferguson, the police chief, a local judge and a city manager, who are all white, resigned after a Justice Department review found that the Ferguson Police Department engaged in a broad pattern of racially biased enforcement that permeated the city's justice system, including the use of unreasonable force against black suspects. Two of the city's new leaders, interim Police Chief Andre Anderson, who began work July 22, and Interim City Manager Ed Beasley, who was hired June 9, are black. Ferguson's population is 67% black.

Police departments elsewhere sought to buy body cameras, while other departments added training on diversity, community engagement, bias and how to de-escalate tense encounters.

At the national level, President Obama created a Task Force on 21st Century Policing and banned the sale of some kinds of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies.

""Policing has taken a hard look at itself,"" said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. ""There has been a renewed emphasis on looking at how we hire, how we train, how we investigate, how we release information to the public. All of these aspects have had a seismic impact on policing.""

Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs, said police departments are studying the findings of President Obama's task force and looking at ways to implement its recommendations.

""It's safe to say police officers are a little bit more cautious about what they are doing and how they approach their work today,"" Stephens said.

Yet police are also frustrated, he said. Police budgets have remained flat, making it impossible for some departments to modernize equipment, boost training and increase salaries to retain and recruit the best people, he said.

Some police officers have grown weary of constant comparison to those police officers who abuse their power. Fear of provoking the next Ferguson has made some officers unwilling to be aggressive at their jobs, said James Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. Pasco credits aggressive policing tactics for making communities much safer and lowering crime rates over the past 20 years.

""(Darren Wilson) will be forever scarred and forever affected by this and so will every other officer every time they think of the event,"" Pasco said. ""It's going to have a chilling effect on their willingness to undertake that kind of appropriately aggressive policing.""

For Elzie, one of the Black Lives Matter organizers, the changes have yet to go far enough. This year, she will work toward legislation passed to hold police accountable for any misconduct.

""I hate that it keeps happening and we have to keep paying attention to these deaths,"" Elzie said. ""That is depressing.""",REAL
"( New York Times Results by County) The media won’t tell you this but Donald Trump CRUSHED Hillary Clinton in the recent election in three key areas: For one, the above results by county show that he picked up a significant amount of the counties in the US. The picture is clear that most counties in America voted for Trump . Secondly, the media is also hiding from you that Trump CRUSHED Hillary in the Electoral College (EC). As of today, most if not all media outlets show that Trump won the election with only 279 EC votes. But the truth is Trump also won Michigan with 16 EC votes and Arizona with 11 EC votes for a total of 306 EC votes. Hillary only won 228 EC votes but it looks like she barely won New Hampshire which should put her at 232 EC votes. As a result, Trump won 57% of all EC votes. HIllary turned in the Democratic Party’s worst Electoral College performance in 28 years. With only New Hampshire left to be called, Clinton has turned in the Democratic Party's worst Electoral College performance in 28 years pic.twitter.com/APU85Ty50q 
— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODradio) November 9, 2016 Thirdly, in total states it was a landslide. Trump won 31 states to 19 states won by Hillary or 62% of the states. The mainstream will argue that Hillary beat Trump in the popular vote which appears accurate. According to the NYT she won 59,923,027 to Trump’s 59,692,974 for a difference of only 230,053 or 0.4%. But in California and New York Hillary beat Trump by a combined 4 million votes. If not for these two huge liberal states, Hillary would have gotten shellacked in the popular voting as well. The mainstream media will not tell you but Trump won BIGLY! 
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
"Former President Bill Clinton might want to keep the racism accusations to himself from now on -- after ripping Donald Trump for a slogan he's used repeatedly since his 'Comeback Kid' days.

The 42nd president on Wednesday, while stumping in Orlando for Hillary Clinton, suggested Trump’s campaign rallying cry, “Make America Great Again,” is racist code.

“I’m actually old enough to remember the good old days, and they weren’t all that good in many ways,” Clinton said. “That message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you?”

The crowd roared as Clinton continued. “What it means is ‘I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago, and I’ll move you back up on the social totem pole and other people down,’” he said.

The problem is, Clinton himself has used the same phrase several times in the past.

He used it repeatedly while running for president in 1991 and 1992, declaring at one Little Rock, Ark., event, ""Together, we can make America great again.""

And in a campaign ad for his wife in 2008, Bill Clinton said, ""It's time for another comeback, time to make America great again.""

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway pointed to the inconvenient footage in calling the former president's allegations about Trump's slogan a ""disgrace."" 



“That performance is really something,” she said Friday on “Fox & Friends.” “Bill Clinton is known as a very strong campaigner, a great voice in politics -- but not this cycle.”",REAL
"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke Š Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
Privacy Policy 
By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
"Share on Twitter 
For Robin Roberts, losing her mother while she was in the midst of her own fight for her life was an especially hard blow. Roberts's mother had always been there for her through every illness and injury. 
When she needed her mom the most, however, Roberts swears that she could hear her voice, encouraging her not to give up on life. Image Credit: Mireya Acierto/Getty Images 
As PopSugar reports, on a recent episode of “ Harry ,” the “Good Morning America” co-host tearfully recounted the days she spent in the hospital after a bone marrow transplant. Famously open about her battles with breast cancer and a rare bone marrow disease, Roberts tells host Harry Connick Jr. that she had reached the point where the fight was too much for her: 
“There was a time when I sent everybody away, and I was in my room, and I just felt like I'm slipping away. I just couldn't.” 
One of the things that had made Roberts feel like giving up was the fact that her mother was no longer there by her side. However, she was soon to find that her mom was closer than she realized. She tells Harry: 
“I kept hearing this voice, 'Robin! Robin! Robin!' And suddenly, I open my eyes, and it's ... my nurse Jenny. She's looking at me. That was my mother's voice. I am convinced, when I was hearing that, even though it was Jenny, it was my mother's voice I was hearing.” 
Roberts believes that at her point of “ greatest isolation ,” her mother used Jenny to call her back, to remind her to keep fighting. 
Jenny, Roberts says, was “invaluable” during this time. Acknowledging the bond between Roberts and her nurse, Harry surprised Roberts by reuniting her with nurse Jenny and another nurse who had cared for her. An emotional Roberts was able to thank them for not only everything they had done for her, but for what they have done for countless others: 
“Thank you for being our lifeline. Thank you for being there— not only for us, but for our caregivers ... for our loved ones.” ",FAKE
"By Catherine J Frompovich When I was in private practice as a consulting natural nutritionist, often I had moms ask my opinion about their young boys playing football. That was long before “sports... ",FAKE
"By Brig Asif H. Raja on November 1, 2016 
Asif Haroon Raja 
The ISI had developed its long arm capability during the tenures of Gen Akhtar Abdur Rehman, Lt Gen Hamid Gul (VT editor) and Lt Gen Javed Nasir as DG ISI. It was owing to this capability of hitting the chosen target outside the frontiers of Pakistan that the ISI earned the reputation of a dreaded outfit and the best in Asia. The long arm began to shrivel when Benazir Bhutto was PM from 1988 to 1990 and Gen Waheed Kakar was COAS and Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi had replaced Gen Javed Nasir. This change in posture was a result of pressure of the US and the West, pressing Pakistan to refrain from meddling in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and in India, or else it will be declared a terrorist state. Pressure was mounted at the behest of India which had become strategic partner of USA and Israel in 1991/1992 and darling of the West. 
After the occupation of Afghanistan by 1, 50,000 Soviet forces in December 1979, Pakistan under Gen Ziaul Haq had decided to provide refuge to about 5 million Afghan refugees and to support the Afghan Mujahideen in their resistance. The US came forward with a package of $ 3.5 billion in June 1981 after making a measured assessment that Pakistan had the will and capability to fight the proxy war. The offer was accepted only when it was conveyed that the ISI will coordinate and conduct the entire war without the aid of CIA and that the US and others would restrict their support to provision of funds and weapons/equipment only. As a Frontline State, Pakistan suffered a great deal throughout the Afghan war at the hands of KGB-KHAD-RAW-AlZulfiqar nexus and Afghan armed forces, but achieved the miracle by defeating and pushing out Soviet forces in February 1989. After achieving its objective without employing a single soldier, the US abandoned Pakistan as well as the Mujahideen who had sacrificed 1.5 million people and had helped the US in becoming a sole super power. 
Once Pakistan fell from the grace of USA and it was put under sanctions on account of its covert nuclear program suspected to be geared towards making an Islamic bomb, it came under the shadow of black star. Pakistan’s nuclear program became an eyesore for India, Israel and USA. It faced the whole brunt of fallout effects of ten-year Afghan war that had been fully supported by the US led free world. USSR that had shrunk to Russian Federation was highly bitter, while India was perpetually hostile. Iran was not so friendly owing to its reservations over the developments in Afghanistan. Explosive situation in Afghanistan due to civil war and power tussle among the seven Mujahideen groups impacted the security of Pakistan. 
Start of armed insurgency in IOK in late 1989 and India pumping in over 700,000 troops into the Valley had its effects on Pakistan’s security dynamics. In 1990/91, both sides had come close to war. Internally, the society had become militarized due to the Afghan war and sectarianism fomented by Iran and Saudi Arabia had created serious law and order situation in Punjab. PPP and PML-N acrimoniously tussled with each other for power because of which no govt could complete its mandatory 5 years tenure. 
Fragmentation of USSR and demise of communism on account of its military defeat in Afghanistan and increase of influence of Pakistan and India decreasing its influence in Afghanistan had vexed India. It feared that Pakistan may exploit the situation in IOK and liberate it with the help of over 60 Jihadi groups and take its revenge of the humiliation it had suffered in East Pakistan in 1971. It dreaded that Pakistan may replicate its model of supporting the Mukti Bahini. Sensing the gravity of the situation, India started propagating that Pakistan is behind the insurgency in IOK and that the ISI is funding, training and launching terrorists from Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK). It urged the UN and world powers to rein in Pakistan and restrain ISI from conducting cross LoC terrorism. 
The US, both Republicans and Democrats, had been constantly wooing India to join its camp since early 1950s, but India preferred the Soviet camp, although it professed to be non-aligned. It was elated when India feeling orphaned after the collapse of USSR fell like a ripe apple into the waiting arms of USA and both became bedfellows in 1991. Once its newfound love sought help from her paramour, the latter stood behind her and sternly cautioned Pakistan to lay its hands off IOK. Change in circumstances compelled Pakistan to restrict its support to the Kashmiris in distress to moral, political and diplomatic levels only. The Kashmir oriented Jihadi groups based in AJK and in Southern Punjab however continued to extend support to the Kashmiris seeking right of self-determination as provided for in the UN resolutions. Indian security forces equipped with draconian laws and license to kill without any fear of accountability or censure by the UN and world powers carried out inhuman torture, employed massive force, and used rape as a weapon to break the will of the freedom fighters. The UN and international community turned a deaf ear to the cries of Kashmiris. 
Despite the fact that IOK had become the most militarized region of the world (one soldier for 17 civilians), and Kashmiris had suffered over 100,000 fatalities, 10,000 rapes, detention of thousands in secret dens and destruction of their property, the freedom fighters kept the torch of liberty aglow. The heroics of Kashmiris against heavy odds had a telling effect on the morale of Indian Army and paramilitary forces in IOK. Soldiers suffered from demoralization and homesickness; cases of suicides, desertions, killing of seniors and comrades by soldiers, and indiscipline jumped up at an alarming rate. Officers and men dreaded posting to Kashmir, while rate of compassionate cases wanting posting out from Kashmir shot up. A stage came when recruitment in Army dropped to rock bottom levels. The then Indian Army chief had to appear on the TV and run an ad campaign to appeal to the youth to join the Army on better pay scale and perks. Kashmir had become a perforated wound for India and economic cost was becoming unbearable. It was becoming difficult for India to hide its massive human rights violations and barbarities of Indian security forces. 
Here I may add that the Indian Army had suffered humiliation at Dras-Kargil in 1999 at the hands of handful of Mujahideen and irregulars of Northern Light Infantry. It was eventually bailed out by the US led G-8 by exerting immense pressure on Pakistan to immediately vacate the captured territories. The Indian armed forces went through another embarrassment in 2002 when it had to sheepishly withdraw from its western border after a ten-month standoff during which it had constantly huffed and puffed but couldn’t pick up courage to cross the border. Aggressive response of Pak armed forces had taken the steam out of their chauvinism. 
Unfortunately, all that was gained on the Kashmir front and on the military front was wasted away after Gen Musharraf wilted under the US pressure in 2003 and decided to take steps to please USA and India. Reining in Kashmir focused Jihadi groups, allowing India to fence the LoC and signing peace treaty with India in January 2004 changed the perspective. It helped Indian military to suppress Kashmir freedom movement. Earlier on, Musharraf had submitted to all the 7 demands of Washington in September 2001. Free hand given to CIA and FBI had enabled the two to establish their network in FATA and gain control over airports and seaport in Pakistan. Intelligence acquisition in FATA was taken over by CIA and ISI pushed on the back seat. 
Indo-Pak peace treaty in 2004 enabled RAW to ignite FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Baluchistan and Karachi. While RAW assisted by CIA, NDS, MI-6 and Mossad made full use of its long arm to bleed Pakistan with the help of proxies, Pak security forces and ISI remained handicapped. The so-called friends pushed Pakistan to fight terrorism but secretly backed the terrorists. The US kept twisting the arm of Pakistan that if ISI meddled into India or Afghanistan it will be declared a rogue outfit. Perforce, the ISI undertook protective measures only, but its defensive actions were more often breached because the so-called allies stabbed Pakistan in the back. As a consequence, RAW and its strategic partners carried out one-sided covert war while the ISI at best tried to ward off the attacks. In spite of defensive policy of the govt and ISI, and Pakistan suffering much more human casualties than any other country in the war on terror, ISI was blamed to be in collusion with Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Haqqani Network, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). These were termed as strategic assets of military establishment to overcome conventional inferiority against arch enemy India. The lost intelligence space In FATA/KP was gradually recovered when Lt Gen Shuja Pasha took over as DG ISI and Gen Ashfaq Kayani as COAS in 2008. 
All the terror attacks that took place in India between 2001 and 2008 were pinned on JeM and LeT and their connection was made with ISI. Since Pakistan made no effort to disprove Indian contention even after it was revealed by Indian investigative agencies and Home Ministry officials that Hindu terror groups and Indian military intelligence officers were involved in the attacks, it became easier for India to further strengthen its narrative of portraying Pakistan as a terror abetting state and a nursery of terrorism. India’s narrative was boosted up by its strategic allies. The US dubbed Pakistan as the most dangerous county in the world. Pakistan’s overall defensive policy and apologetic stance emboldened its detractors to keep whipping and bleeding it without fear of tit for tat response from ISI. 
Other than the salvos fired by the Indo-Afghan-US-Israel nexus on Pak Army and ISI, Pakistan political leadership of major political parties also view the two premier institutions with distrust. Both PPP and PML-N in line with their 2006 Charter of Democracy made efforts to enfeeble ISI and keep Army under their thumb. First attempt was made by Benazir Bhutto when she replaced Lt Gen Hamid Gul with retired Lt Gen Kallue in 1989 and next tasked Air Marshal Zulfiqar to cut ISI to size under the garb of reforms. PM Yusaf Raza Gilani tried to civilianize ISI in August 2008 by placing it under Ministry of Interior. Kerry Lugar Bill in 2009 and Memo scandal in 2011 were other attempts to curtail military’s power. Nawaz Sharif has a history of locking horns with every Army chief and has still not got out of the hangover of Gen Musharraf. Although he didn’t clash with Gen Raheel but at times civil-military relations became tense. 
It has now been conclusively established that RAW and NDS in unison and backed by other agencies are deeply involved in proxy war in Pakistan since 2003 and have inflicted tens of thousands of cuts on the body of Pakistan and its people. Series of conspiracies have been hatched and launched to destabilize and fragment Pakistan. RAW-NDS nexus backed by CIA is continuing to use Afghanistan as a launching pad for terror attacks in Pakistan. In order to scuttle CPEC, focus of attacks is on Baluchistan and KP. India is keeping the LoC on fire. So far it has violated 2003 ceasefire agreement 178 times and killed 19 civilians and injured 80. 
The anti-Pakistan foreign agencies are making full use of TTP, Jamaat Ahrar, Lashkar Jhangvi, BLA, BRA, BLF and MQM as proxies. London is a safe haven for MQM leadership and Baloch rebel leaders, while Afghanistan has provided sanctuaries to TTP runaway leaders in Kunar, Nuristan and Nangarhar. Besides these strategic assets, the detractors are also making use of NGOs, human rights activists and segment of media to make Pakistan a compliant state of India. Since HN, JeM, and LeT are not playing the game of foreign agencies, they are dubbed as terrorist groups and strategic assets of Pak Army/ISI. They want Pakistan to take strict action against them or else face isolation and sanctions. 
It was in the backdrop of this concern of US and India that the Dawn News published a story on October 6. The planted story was allegedly furnished by someone from within the PM House where a national security conference presided by the PM and attended by Foreign Secretary, Punjab Chief Minister, COAS, DG ISI and National Security Adviser was held. The invented story written by Cyril Almeida gave an impression of serious rift between civil and military leadership and that while the govt wanted to proceed against the defunct militant groups, the ISI didn’t. Probable motive of concocted story was to demean the Army/ISI and to reinforce Indo-US stance that Pak Army and ISI were in league with terror groups. The types of Hussain Haqqani, Ayesha Sadiqa, Farzana Bari and several other liberal journalists assembled in London two days ago to play up this story. MQM (Altaf) hosted them. To ascertain the truth, a high powered committee comprising members from three intelligence agencies will carry out inquest. 
Having collected tons of evidence, yet Pakistan takes the barbs and whips without a whimper and doesn’t pick up courage to strike back. The long arm of ISI remains sheathed for reasons best known to the policy makers. It implies our leaders have decided to give a free hand to our enemies to continue bleeding Pakistan without any fear of retaliation or even protest. Going by the well-established concept that ‘offence is the best defence’, until and unless the ISI pay back the RAW and NDS in the same coin, one sided bleeding of Pakistanis will continue. Long arm must be unsheathed. 
The writer is retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of 5 books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, DG Measac Research Centre, and Member Executive Council PESS. Related Posts:",FAKE
"Obama's immigration initiative could protect some 5 million people from deportation. But a court ruled against the plan, with critics saying Obama overstepped his executive authority.

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

In Nov. 2014, President Obama speaks about immigration at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas. Obama's plan to protect from deportation an estimated 5 million people living in the United States illegally suffered another setback Monday, Nov. 9, 2015, in a ruling from a New Orleans-based federal appeals court. In a 2-1 ruling, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas-based federal judge's injunction blocking the administration's immigration initiative.

President Obama wants to protect from deportation an estimated 5 million people living in the United States illegally but a federal appeals court said no.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Mr. Obama Monday in a 2-1 decision that upheld a Texas-based federal judge’s injunction blocking the immigration plan.

Obama's plan would defer deportation for some 5 million illegal immigrants, including children brought to the US illegally, parents of American children, and those with long-standing ties to the country.

Obama’s initiative has faced sharp criticism since it was announced in November 2014. Republican leaders have accused the president of overstepping his authority by taking executive action. Instead, they say, the president should be working with Congress and enforcing the immigration laws already in place.

""President Obama should abandon his lawless executive amnesty program and start enforcing the law today,"" Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a news release. Gov. Abbott has been at the forefront of the opposition to Obama’s immigration plan, even leading a charge in suing the president to block the initiative.

At the heart of the issue is an overwhelming number of illegal immigrants. With an estimated 11 million people in the United States illegally, the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have enough resources to deport them all.

As Judge Carolyn Dineen King wrote in a 53-page dissent to Monday’s decision, ""Although there are approximately 11.3 million removable aliens in this country today, for the last several years Congress has provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with only enough resources to remove approximately 400,000 of those aliens per year.”

As such, she said, Obama’s action to defer deportations is ""quintessential exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”

The basic concept of “prosecutorial discretion” is that there aren’t enough officers to enforce every law against every law breaker, so officials must set priorities. As such, Obama is “merely moving them to the back of a very long line of potential deportees,” not granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, The Christian Science Monitor’s Warren Richey wrote in November 2014.

""We strongly disagree with the 5th Circuit's decision,"" a White House official, who requested anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about a legal matter still underway, told the Associated Press. ""The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.""

Now, the Obama administration can request a re-hearing. But an advocacy group, National Immigration Law Center, is pushing for a Supreme Court appeal. Any chance at implementing Obama’s plan before he leaves office in 2017 could be slipping away.

Twenty-six states have challenged Obama’s immigration initiative in court. The coalition asserted in December 2014 that Obama overstepped his presidential authority. At the time, Mr. Abbott said the president’s job is to “execute the law, not de facto make law.”

“The president’s independent executive action tramples the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said in a news release then. “The president is ignoring his responsibility to enforce laws passed by Congress and attempting to rewrite immigration laws, which he has no authority to do.”

This isn’t the first time Obama has been accused of abusing executive power. While many of the high-profile accusations have centered around the Affordable Care Act, others include Obama’s recess appointments in 2012 and his denouncement of the Defense of Marriage Act.

This report includes material from the Associated Press.",REAL
"Pin 1 
( ANTIMEDIA ) When it comes to brute force, law enforcement and private security currently have the upper hand on the ground in Standing Rock, North Dakota. They’re employing armored vehicles, riot gear, tasers, rubber bullets, pepper spray, sound cannons, and other shows of force against peaceful opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. 
But unlike most of the corporate media, the Internet is taking note of the struggle at Standing Rock and is trying to do its part to contribute to the protests. Over the weekend, unconfirmed reports emerged that police were using Facebook check-ins at Standing Rock to track individuals who arrived at the location to join water protectors. 
As word spread of the apparent news, the Internet stepped up to neutralize the power of the police-surveillance state. 
Shortly after, Facebook users from around the country and world began checking into Standing Rock, which registers as Cannon Ball, North Dakota, in an effort to confuse police. According to a statement many posters are copying and pasting: 
“ The Morton County Sheriff’s Department has been using Facebook check-ins to find out who is at Standing Rock in order to target them in attempts to disrupt the prayer camps. SO Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them. This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes. “ 
Others merely checked in while still others added their own commentary. “ If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor ,” wrote Patrick Quinn below his check-in. 
“ Messing with fascists ,” Luba Petrusha commented. 
While the troll effort is exciting, it’s unclear whether the efforts are having an effect. According to Snopes, a self-described fact-checking blog whose conclusions are generally reliable , police claim they are not using Facebook to track protesters. Snopes reported “ [a Morton County] officer explained not only that they were not using Facebook check-ins as a gauge of anything, but that the metric presented no intelligence value to them. The rumor suggested that protesters cited Facebook check-ins as a manner in which police could target them, but check-ins were voluntary — and if police were using geolocation tools based on mobile devices, remote check-ins would not confuse or overwhelm them.” Sign up for the free Anti-Media newsletter the establishment doesn't want you to receive 
Snopes also claimed it spoke to protesters within a large camp at Standing Rock who said they did not issue a call to Internet users to check in. Nevertheless, they reportedly said they appreciated the show of solidarity. 
Regardless of whether or not the online check-ins have any effect, the Internet has played a decisive role in the developing events in North Dakota. Livestreams have documented serious violations of free speech and the right to protest, and Facebook was accused of blocking such footage on at least one occasion. Amid the ongoing lack of mainstream coverage , the independent media has successfully drawn attention to the Standing Rock protests. 
Considering the establishment has come out in full force in North Dakota, from their use of surveillance to their haphazard employment of heavily armed police, the increasing number of check-ins at Standing Rock shows just how much technology empowers people. 
Even if police aren’t scouring social media and the check-ins fail to produce any tangible result, the rapid mobilization of efforts highlights a growing sense of opposition to unjust and exploitative power — and thanks to the Internet, the world is watching. 
This article ( Here’s Why Everyone on Facebook Is Checking into Standing Rock, North Dakota ) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org . Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to . ",FAKE
"Memes Breaking: Hillary cancels public appearance due to a large crowd of people chanting ""Lock Her Up!"" The New York Times featured a photo of Hillary Clinton being welcomed to an early voting site in Pompano Beach, Florida on Sunday. Apparently, she didn't stay too long at her rally location at the Pompano Beach Amphitheater. Clinton almost melted at the sight of Trump signs surrounding her and people yelling ""Lock Her Up!"". A police escort shared what happened: Share on Facebook Posted Tuesday, November 01, 2016 Suggested Videos",FAKE
"What if Hillary Clinton is in legal hot water and she knows it but won’t admit it? What if she has decided to go on the offensive and make her case that she did nothing unlawful with her emails that contained state secrets?

What if the essence of her defense is that other secretaries of state used non-secure email devices and thus it was lawful for her to do so, as well as the point that none of her emails was “marked classified” at the time she sent or received them? What if these defenses do not hold up to even cursory examination?

What if the other secretaries of state to whom she refers are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice? What if neither of them diverted all of their emails to a private server? What if neither of them sent or received state secrets -- secrets that under the law of the land are marked “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret,” not “classified” -- using a non-secure email account?

What if neither of them hired an information technology expert and paid him to divert both a standard State Department email stream and a secret State Department email stream to a private server in one of their homes?

What if neither Powell nor Rice is currently running for president? What if neither Powell nor Rice has had his or her behavior as secretary of state referred to the FBI for a criminal investigation by the inspector general of the State Department?

What if the law of the land is that a document or email contains state secrets by virtue of the information or data in the document or email and not by virtue of any warning label? What if the legal definition of a ""state secret"" in the U.S. is ""information the revelation of which could cause harm to the security of the United States""?

What if it is the law of the land that people in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted are required to recognize the secrets when they see them and protect them from intentional or inadvertent revelation?

What if it is the law of the land that everyone in the government to whom state secrets are entrusted receives a multi-hour tutorial from the FBI on how to protect state secrets? What if the successful completion of that tutorial is a legal prerequisite to the receipt of a national security clearance and thus the receipt of state secrets?

What if that tutorial reminds the people to whom secrets are being reposed that it is their legal obligation to recognize and accept and understand the law before they can receive any state secrets? What if, in order to confirm that understanding, all people who receive the tutorial are required to sign an oath at the end of the tutorial recognizing, accepting and understanding the law and agreeing to be bound by it? What if Clinton signed just such an oath?

What if Clinton had no intention of complying with the oath she signed at the time she signed it? What if we know that because we know she hired the information technologist to divert her emails the same week she received the FBI tutorial? What if she never told the FBI that she planned to divert all her emails -- including those that would contain state secrets -- to a private non-secure email server in her home?

What if it is the law of the land that the failure to secure state secrets is a felony, known as espionage? What if it is the law of the land that espionage can be committed by a person who intends to expose state secrets or by a person who doesn’t care if she exposes state secrets? What if the FBI explained to Clinton in her first day as secretary of state that the grossly negligent exposure of state secrets constitutes espionage?

What if before Clinton was secretary of state, she was a U.S. senator from New York for eight years? What if during that time, she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee? What if during her time in the Senate, she was exposed to hundreds of military-related state secrets?

What if Clinton is smart enough and shrewd enough and experienced enough to recognize a state secret when she sees one?

What if the FBI has seen emails in which Clinton ordered subordinates deliberately to avoid State Department secure channels of communications and to send state secrets to her through channels she knew were not secure? What if Clinton passed on state secrets to others who had no security clearances? What if she did so knowing she was sending state secrets from her non-secure server to other non-secure servers?

What if Clinton sent or received more than 2,000 emails that contained state secrets? What if she authored more than 100 of them herself? What if some of the 2,000 emails were so secret that the FBI agents investigating her lack the security clearances to view those emails?

What if Clinton did all this so that she could keep her behavior as secretary of state secret and away from all officials in the State Department outside her inner circle, away from the president and away from the American people? What if she orchestrated and carried out a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act?

What if the FBI is onto her? What if the Democrats are not?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.",REAL
"""Donald Trump is the nominee, whether people like it or not,"" the former House speaker, during a question-and-answer session at a hedge fund conference in Las Vegas, told attendees Thursday. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, made clear he would support the nominee.

But that doesn¹t mean Boehner supports what Trump is pitching on the campaign trail. Asked, rapid fire, whether he supported Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S., his proposal to build a wall on the border of Mexico and the New York billionaire¹s plan to aggressively use tariffs to attack foreign trade competitors, Boehner repeatedly answered with one word: ""No.""

He also said Trump¹s foreign policy stance, laid out in a speech two weeks ago, didn't align with his views. Still, Boehner said, ""Anybody who doesn't think Donald Trump can win, just watch.""

Boehner¹s comments come two weeks after saying, during a question-and-answer session at Stanford University, that he and Trump were ""texting buddies."" It was at that same event that he called then-GOP presidential candidate and regular Boehner tormenter Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, ""Lucifer in the flesh."" Cruz has since suspended his campaign, clearing the way for Trump to secure the title of ""presumptive nominee"" for the party. Boehner, in an unsolicited comment, couldn't hide his feelings on that front. ""Thank God the guy from Texas didn't win,"" he said. As all eyes in Washington were on Trump¹s meetings with top GOP lawmakers, Boehner weighed in on the decision by his replacement as speaker -- the lawmaker Boehner pushed, lobbied and cajoled to take the job, Paul Ryan -- not to immediately endorse Trump. ""I think Paul was just being cautious,"" Boehner said, adding that he ""doesn't have any doubt"" things will ""get smoothed over."" He also made clear he had no regrets about his decision to leave Congress. ""Every day I read the news, I¹m reminded of how happy I am that I¹m not in the chaos,"" Boehner said with a chuckle.",REAL
"Important aspects of Trump's foreign policy play on America's weariness as global cop. It's his extreme prescriptions that worry voters.

As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?

In recent weeks Donald Trump has offered one provocative foreign-policy pronouncement after another, reflecting his view that America can no longer afford to pay for the world’s security and prosperity.

The United States, he says, should leave a NATO alliance where wealthy Europeans are mooching off a “poor” US for their national defense needs. Asian partners also need to prepare for an era of American retrenchment – to the extent that allies Japan and South Korea might want to acquire their own nuclear weapons, he suggests.

And then, of course, there’s the matter of his envisioned southern border wall – which he says Mexico must either pay for or face a cutoff of the billions of dollars that Mexicans working in the US send back home each year.

Such proposals may leave most of Washington’s foreign-policy elite gasping for breath, but they resonate with a significant slice of the American public for a couple of key reasons, national security and opinion experts say.

For one thing, many in the US have tired of America’s role of superpower and sympathize with the idea that playing the world’s policeman has gotten too expensive and offers diminishing returns. Then there’s the fact that much of Mr. Trump’s more extreme thinking on US relations with the world has been around in milder forms for years – and has even picked up steam under President Obama.

For instance, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates caused a stir when he used his farewell tour of Europe in 2011 to castigate European allies for not paying their fair share of the alliance defense bill. And Mr. Obama, elected as a kind of antidote to the interventionist George W. Bush, has as president espoused a more domestically focused America. He recently lamented to The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg about the “free riders” who can afford to pay more than they do now but rely on the US for their security.

From there, it’s not much of a leap to nod and cheer at Trump’s take on an overburdened America, experts say.

“Trump is effectively speaking to a widespread feeling in the American public of frustration with aspects of being the global hegemon, the big man on the world stage,” says Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies. “He speaks to a deep-seated feeling, and he gets a response.”

Americans have a “gut reaction” when they hear Trump say, as he told The New York Times, that for too long the US has been the world’s “big stupid bully” being “systematically ripped off by everybody,” says Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow specializing in defense spending at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“People off the top of their head say, ‘Yeah, that’s right!’ when they hear someone saying we’re too much of the world’s policeman or that others aren’t paying their fair share,” Mr. Korb says.

One reason Americans can relate to Trump’s worldview is that they have already been exposed to the broader thinking that lies beneath his more extreme specifics – through Obama, Korb adds.

“In a lot of what Trump says, there’s a ring that’s familiar to people,” he says, and part of that “familiarity” comes from the Obama presidency.

“Obama has delivered a kind of retrenchment that was a reaction to Bush, who was viewed as overly interventionist,” he says. “So when Trump talks about America paying for the world when it needs to pull back and fix things up at home, people think they’ve heard it before and it has a grain of truth for them.”

Korb notes that all of Obama’s past Defense secretaries have upbraided European allies for not paying their fair share into NATO.

“If you go back and take a look at what [Robert] Gates and [Leon] Panetta and [Chuck] Hagel said, they all carried the message that ‘You guys have to do more,’ ” he says. “People may be fuzzy on the specifics,” he adds, “but they remember the general idea that our allies in Europe and Asia aren’t stepping up to the plate the way even the president thinks they should.”

As long as Trump is talking in terms of greater burden-sharing among allies, the public is broadly with him. Most Americans feel the US is less respected on the world stage but at the same time favor a greater degree of shared leadership in global affairs, recent surveys from the Pew Research Center in Washington suggest.

And according to a Pew survey taken a year ago, only about half of Americans have a favorable view of NATO – with the alliance’s detractors higher among Republicans.

But Americans appear to part ways with the Trump foreign policy vision when general feelings confront specifics.

Any misgivings over NATO do no translate into support for abandoning the alliance, says Dr. Kull of the University of Maryland, citing his own research. Similarly, views that Asian allies should take on more of their own defense do not translate to support for Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons.

“Yes, there is pretty strong thinking that our allies for too long have been relying on our generosity, but does that mean the public thinks we should pull out of NATO? No,” Kull says, “about two-thirds don’t think so.”

That number was among the findings of a study his group recently did for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

While Americans may approve when Trump the businessman talks about the US needing a “better deal” with the world, that does not mean they are looking for a revolution in world affairs, Kull adds.

“There was support for NATO [in the Chicago Council survey] and there is support for the basic international order” of security alliances and trade relations, he says – “and that’s where Trump departs from the general public.”

Of course, for dealmaker-in-chief Trump, threats to abandon NATO or Asian allies could simply be starting-points for negotiation. But Kull points to surveys showing Trump’s unusually high negatives for a presidential candidate, and he suggests that misgivings about how a President Trump would conduct relations with the world are part of that.

“People may be unhappy about things, but they aren’t looking for a president to turn global affairs upside down or put the world order at risk,” he says. “They’re not ready to say that’s how presidents act, or that that’s how America acts in the world.”",REAL
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Pamela Geller 
The bombshells about this criminal are now breaking daily. It’s not a question of Trump, it is an imperative that Hillary be defeated. If the people choose Hillary, then they must and will be punished. “Wikileaks: Bill Clinton Boasts of Hillary’s ‘Working Relationship’ with Muslim Brotherhood,” By John Hayward, Breitbart , October 26, 2016: 
In a speech Bill Clinton gave at the home of Mehul and Hema Sanghani in October 2015, revealed to the public for the first time by WikiLeaks, former President Bill Clinton touted Hillary Clinton’s “working relationship” with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt as an example of her diplomatic skills.President Clinton also gave his wife a lot of credit for negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, in a passage that began with the standard Democrat “stuff happens” shrugging defense for foreign policy failures: 
Finally, we live in a world, as I said, that’s full of good news and bad news. The United States cannot control it all, but we need a president who’s most likely to make as many good things happen as possible, and most likely to prevent big, bad things from happening. You can’t keep every bad thing from happening; who’s most likely to be able to get people involved in a positive way. Even the people who don’t like the Iran nuclear agreement concede it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for the sanctions. Hillary negotiated those sanctions and got China and Russia to sign off – something I thought she’d never be able to do. I confess. I’m never surprised by anything she does, but that surprised me. I didn’t think she could do it. The Chinese and the Russians to see past their short-term self-interest to their long-term interest and not sparking another nuclear arms race. 
And when the Muslim Brotherhood took over in Egypt, in spite of the fact that we were (inaudible), she developed a working relationship with the then-president and went there and brokered a ceasefire to stop a full-scale shooting war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which on top of what was going on in Syria and the (inaudible) Jordan would have been a calamity for the world. 
And when we were trying to reset our relations with Russia under President Medvedev, she and her team negotiated a New START Treaty, which limits warheads and missiles. And she lobbied it through the Senate. She had to get 67 votes, which means a lot of these Republicans who say that they don’t like her now are just kidding for election season. They trusted her, and she got it passed. You can’t get 67 votes in the Senate without a lot of Republican support. And I don’t know about you, but with all this tension and Mr. Putin trying to affect the outcome of the conflict in Syria, I think it’s a very good thing that we’re in a lower risk of any kind of accidental nuclear conflict with the Russians. She did that. 
You’ll rarely find a more tortured political framing of the Iran debacle than Bill Clinton boasting that the sanctions Barack Obama lifted were super-awesome, as even those who don’t think those sanctions should have been lifted agree. 
Mr. Clinton’s version of the Iran sanctions leaves out a few details , such as Russia’s keen financial interest in keeping Iranian energy out of the European market, and China’s desire to use Iran sanctions as a geopolitical bargaining chip. 
But the part about the Muslim Brotherhood is most interesting. If anything, he is selling Hillary Clinton’s “working relationship” with Egyptian Islamists short, because she used American diplomatic leverage for Morsi’s benefit even before he got elected, warning Egyptians about “backtracking” to a military regime at a key moment of the post-Mubarak campaign, when Morsi was running against a former member of Hosni Mubarak’s military. There have long been rumors that more subtle forms of U.S. “ pressure ” were used to secure Morsi’s office, as well. 
Then again, in public pronouncements, Clinton called Hosni Mubarak’s tottering regime “stable” and cautioned her Obama Administration colleagues against “pushing a longtime partner out the door.” 
A few days ago, declassified State Department documents revealed Clinton’s talking points for a 2012 meeting with Morsi hailed his election as a “milestone in Egypt’s transition to democracy,” and stated that she was to offer the Muslim Brotherhood leader “technical expertise and assistance from both the U.S. government and private sector to support his economic and social programs.” 
Clinton was also supposed to privately offer Morsi assistance with his police and security forces, which would be conducted “quite discreetly.” 
After Morsi was gone, she declared herself exasperated with Egyptian political culture and declared herself a cynical “realist.” That is pretty much the opposite of what everyone in the Obama Administration was saying while the “Arab Spring” was in the midst of springing its little surprises on autocratic but America-aligned (or at least America-fearing) regimes, which we were all supposed to feel guilty about selfishly supporting for so long. 
As for Clinton’s superb working relationship with Morsi, that eventually ended with Morsi’s wife railing against Clinton for supposedly dismissing him as “a simpleton who was unfit for the presidency,” and threatening to publish letters from Clinton to Morsi that would damage the former U.S. Secretary of State. Meanwhile, Mohammed Morsi is developing a solid working relationship with the Egyptian penitentiary system . 
Egypt has one of those icky military governments again, and while it won’t have fond memories of Hillary Clinton’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood regime, it will most likely work with whoever wins the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Therefore, a prospective President Hillary Clinton probably won’t suffer too much from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appalling lapses in judgment. 
Courtesy of Pamela Geller Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"Russian experts collecting evidence of anti-govt chemical attack in Aleppo – Defense Ministry ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Your premier federal government employee and veteran shopping program By GPD on November 2, 2016 Interest-free shopping starts here CLICK IMAGE TO START SHOPPING >>>>> 
Veterans can skip unnecessary credit card fees by using the convenient federal government shopping program powered by PayCheck Direct ® . It is designed to extend the reach of one’s wallet by allowing veterans to buy what they want and need today and make interest-free payments over 12 months. 
Veterans looking for great gifts for the holidays can find something for everyone at PayCheck Direct. The Movie Lover: 4K TVs and popcorn makers The Cook: Rachael Ray, Le Creuset, Cuisinart Kids: Wonder Woman to Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Chip the Dog The Tech Head: Apple watches, Samsung Virtual Reality headsets The Fashionista: Frye boots, Michael Kors handbags 
With the VTN member shopping program powered by PayCheck Direct , federal government employees and veterans can enjoy: Paying no interest Low, convenient payments over 12 months Paying no fees † No credit checks Thousands of name-brand products 
This shopping program provides convenient and affordable buying assistance for both planned and unexpected purchases. From the fun of a new laptop or living room set to the comfort and convenience of a new bed, all the necessities are available up to each person’s purchase limit. Purchase limits are based on individual federal government employee or veteran income, so budgets stay on target. 
Shop online 24/7 at www.mypaycheckdirect.com/gov or place orders by calling PayCheck Direct Customer Service at 866-441-9160, Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. CT. Each time an order is placed, the PayCheck Direct systems automatically confirm that the purchaser meets all eligibility requirements (age, income, tenure and employment status) as well as purchase limit. 
Start shopping the PayCheck Direct program today. It’s easy, affordable and interest free. 
To learn more about purchase limits, payments, our return policy and other important details about the program, go to your shopping website and click on Customer Service or see your installment agreement generated during the checkout process. PayCheck Direct ® is operated by Bluestem Enterprises, Inc. 
†See details on installment agreement generated during the checkout process. Related Posts:",FAKE
"The Millennial Vote is being treated like a Magical Unicorn in the 2016 election. It is seen as something valuable and mysterious. As Dan Schwabel, at Quartz, in a piece modestly entitled The complete guide to winning the millennial vote this election recently noted:

As we head into November’s US elections, all candidates are vying for the millennial vote—and for good reason. Millennials are ... a critical bloc for any campaign. 69.2 million are now eligible to vote, which is more than double compared to the past decade. When added together with Gen-X voters, 2016 represents the first time young people have displaced the Baby Boomer vote. At the same time, millennials are historically less likely to vote than their older peers, with only around half having voted in the last presidential election. Knowing this, there’s no question that all political parties will be pushing hard to get them to the voting booths this fall.

I, too, covet the kids' allegiance. Yet I – an aging Boomer – confess to finding the Millennials mystifying. I am the father and co-owner of three of them (plus one Gen Xer). I know more than a few others. They're Everywhere, and deeply enigmatic.

Yet I have a theory that could provide the key to resolving their riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. They have not yet found, but absolutely must conceive and declare, their own Narrative.

Let the candidates take note. Making this strong demand of them would be an act of tough love. It could pay huge dividends.

A quick glance at the new generation gap. Betraying just how old a fogey I am, let me recount a bit of conversation from a few years ago with a lovely Young Fogey Millennial, discussing a column of mine in the long lost ParcBench.com. It was about how the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones (through, respectively, Revolution, Won’t Get Fooled Again, and Sympathy for the Devil) stopped an impending communist takeover of America and the West. Let's add Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth.

The Young Fogey’s response stopped me cold: “That’s really interesting. I’ve heard of the Beatles.” So who am I to judge? And yet….

The sociologists and pollsters obsessively study these magical unicorns with something like the ardor of an anthropologist encountering a newly discovered tribe in the Amazon basin. Their earnest scholasticism is interesting but does not resolve the enigma. Schwabel summarizes some of the pollsters’ observations:

The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Shapers survey found the top five most concerning world issues for young people are climate change, large-scale conflicts, religious conflicts, poverty, and government accountability. … Socioeconomic wellbeing is also important, as 20% of millennials are living in poverty, many whom are unemployed, underemployed, or have even given up on finding a job. These young voters want politicians to close the poverty gap and regulate student loans so that they aren’t poor and in debt. The same Harvard poll found that millennials feel the division between rich and poor is worse than before they were born. Finally, they want the government to be more transparent and less corrupt. After the recession and the following bailouts, they became more suspicious of politicians, and they have to work harder to earn their trust back. A mere one in every four millennials says they can trust the government always or most of the time.

Sounds true. Yet as Winston Churchill purportedly once demanded of a waiter, “Take away this pudding, it has no theme.” The poll results similarly do not reveal a theme.

Every generation needs to write its own story. We Boomers were great at generating drama, manufacturing meaning for our lives, and achieving glory. Time for the Millennials to step up and top us.

A few years ago, a group of collegiate Millennials came to interview me. They had the usual surly attitude toward us Boomers. We had, they seemed to believe, Ruined Everything. I told them point blank, to their astonishment, that they were dead wrong about us. We Boomers have a great track record and are weary and waiting for them to step up, wrest power from us, and use it for Good. They were astounded.",REAL
"A study conducted at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Queensland, Australia has recently shed new light on what could become the next big cancer treatment: the blushwood berry. 
Via AlternativeNews 

This naturally occurring fruit contains compounds that began killing off cancer cells almost immediately when studied in the laboratory. The Guardian Reports Scientists have managed to destroy cancerous tumors by using an experimental drug derived from the seeds of a fruit found in north Queensland rainforests.
The drug, called EBC-46, was produced by extracting a compound from the berry of the blushwood tree, a plant only found in specific areas of the Atherton Tablelands. A single injection of the drug directly into melanoma models in the laboratory, as well as into cancers of the head, neck and colon in animals, destroyed the tumours long-term in more than 70% of cases, the study’s lead author, Dr Glen Boyle, said.
“In preclinical trials we injected it into our models and within five minutes, you see a purpling of the area that looks like a bruise,” Boyle, from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute said.
“About 24 hours later, the tumour area goes black, a couple of days later you see a scab, and at around the 1.5 week mark, the scab falls off, leaving clean skin with no tumour there. The speed certainly surprised me.”
Researchers believe the drug triggers a cellular response which cuts off the blood supply to the tumor by opening it up. That’s why we see a bruise-like situation forming in the tumour,” Boyle said. “This seems to lead to an activation of the body’s own immune system which then comes in and cleans up the mess.”
It has been used by veterinarians in about 300 cases of cancer in companion animals including dogs, cats and horses. There was no evidence EBC-46 would be effective to treat cancers that had spread to other parts of the body, known as metastatic cancers, Boyle said.
The drug is being developed as a human and veterinary pharmaceutical through QBiotics, a subsidiary of the company which discovered the drug, called EcoBiotics. The company is also examining the potential for a blushwood plantation. Ethical approval was recently granted for phase 1 human clinical trials, but even if those proved successful, it was unlikely the drug would replace conventional chemotherapy treatment, Boyle said.
“Chemotherapy is still used because it is very effective for a lot of people,” he said. “But EBC-46 could perhaps be used in people who, for some reason, chemotherapy doesn’t work [for], or for elderly patients whose body can’t sustain another round of chemotherapy treatment.” The preclinical trial was funded by QIMR Berghofer and the National Health and Medical Research Council and the results were published in the journal PLOS One.
Healthy & Natural World Reports :
Blushwood Berries – Where they Come From Blushwood berries are the fruit of the blushwood tree, which is known to grow in only one region of the world: the rainforests of Far North Queensland, Australia. These tropical trees are not found anywhere else on the globe, but grow in abundance near Australia’s northeastern tip.
These particular trees need very niche conditions to thrive—conditions which can only be found in specific portions of Far North Queensland, Australia. Considering their usefulness as proven by the latest cancer research published in PLOS One , some are wondering if they could be grown in a greenhouse environment, so that people all over the world could benefit from their cancer-killing properties.
Blushwood Berries – What kind of Cancer they Eradicate The researchers at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, headed by Dr. Glen Boyle, used an experimental drug produced from the seeds of blushwood berries called EBC-46. They used this drug to treat spots of melanoma (the most deadly form of skin cancer) on dogs, cats and horses.
The subjects were diagnosed by veterinarians and given a poor prognosis, most being considered candidates for euthanasia prior to participating in the study. Amazingly, these animals that had been on death’s door prior to the study had their melanoma tumors disappear after treatment in the lab by Dr. Boyle and his team of scientists.
Tumors were Gone within 48 Hours When the EBC-46 was injected into the cancerous cells on the subjects, the tumors reacted by turning a dark color, then falling off. The derivative from the blushwood berry is thought to cut off oxygen supply to the cancer cells, allowing for the removal of tumors without the need for surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
The researchers reported that most of the subjects’ tumors—previously considered a lost cause by veterinarians—were gone within 48 hours of being injected with EBC-46. Under the microscope, the individual cancer cells began shriveling up and dying within mere moments of coming into contact with the EBC-46.
",FAKE
"Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about polarization in politics. Need a primer? Catch up here.

David Broockman is an assistant professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Academic hand-wringing rarely changes political institutions. But political science researchers’ recent obsession with political polarization seems to be having some impact. These researchers argue that polarization has “put the nation at risk” and are championing reforms meant to stem it.

The remedies proposed are many — from reforming campaign finance to changing the primary system — and all share a common theme: By shifting more political power to everyday people, academics believe that extreme politicians would be encouraged to heed the public’s centrist demands.

The widespread view that citizens are more centrist than politicians seems obvious, but it’s actually misleading at best. And worse, it’s endangering our democracy.

Voters Are Not All Centrists

Most voters support some liberal policies and some conservative policies. Academics have long taken this as evidence of voters’ underlying centrism.

But just because voters are ideologically mixed does not mean they are centrists at heart. Many voters support a mix of extreme liberal policies (like taxing the rich at 90 percent) and extreme conservative policies (like deporting all undocumented immigrants). These voters only appear “centrist” on the whole by averaging their extreme views together into a single point on a liberal-conservative spectrum.

This makes those who celebrate voter centrism rather like the fabled statistician who drowned in a river that was 2 feet deep on average. Even if voters are centrist on average, they can be quite extreme on many particular issues.

The result? Reforms that empower voters may not push politicians further to the center — instead, they may encourage politicians to pander to extreme views popular among voters. Indeed, where they have been enacted, many changes that reformers favor — like public funding of elections and top-two primaries — have resulted in politicians doing just this. By seeking to further empower voters in the name of reducing polarization, well-meaning reformers may actually be encouraging dangerous extremism.

Political scientists and pundits alike argue that it would improve governance to devolve political power from the political elites who know the most about politics and policy to the voters who know the least. Polarization scholars hold these uninformed voters in the highest esteem because they look the most centrist on a left-right spectrum. They are also Donald Trump’s base.

Yes, you read that right. Political scientists have long exalted the centrist wisdom of those who now constitute some of Trump’s strongest supporters — the poorly educated authoritarian xenophobes who are attracted to a platform suffused with white supremacy, indulge in unapologetic nationalism and use violence to silence opponents. As commentator Jacob Weisberg has written, these extreme voters’ views are a mix of “wacko left and wacko right” — the key credential one needs to qualify as centrist by scholars’ most popular definition.

Trump’s popularity among these voters should have been no surprise. Their penchant for extremism on many issues has been visible in public polling for years. Indeed, it has been visible for decades: Modern public opinion research itself was founded scholars who had just witnessed World War II and had good reason to be fearful of mass publics’ extremist tendencies.

Yet despite our own country’s populist past, many scholars today resist acknowledging public extremism is even possible. (Reviewers of my research, for example, dismissed as simply too “doubtful” the idea that voters might have some views more extreme than those of elected officials.) A simple conceptual error has blinded them to the true character of the Trump coalition.

Dismissing the public’s susceptibility to extremism is not only naive — it is dangerous. With anti-majoritarian institutions like six-year terms for senators, the Founding Fathers empowered elites to serve as a check on unwise popular passions.

Reformers may find the Founding Fathers’ ideas outmoded. After all, if the public is a homogenous centrist mass, why be afraid of unchecked popular control?

Trump’s rise brings the founders’ wisdom into sharp focus. However, reformers have by now already eliminated nearly every institutional safeguard that would once have stood in Trump’s way to the Oval Office. In previous eras, party elites would be able to more easily foil his nomination at the Republican convention; financial contributions to his competitors would be less limited; and state legislators could have refused to pledge their state’s electoral votes to him. As with insurance plans canceled right before a catastrophe, the upside of these safeguards is only fully apparent when a demagogue like Trump is already doing damage.

This is not to say that elites always have innocent or correct intentions. Outright oligarchy is no better than outright direct democracy, and conservative elites may even have inadvertently abetted Trump’s rise. The point is that the Founding Fathers were right to allow elites and voters to serve as checks and balances on each other. Today’s reformers have altogether forgotten the merits of one side of this equation.

One reason scholars play down the benefits of allowing elites to serve the function the Founding Fathers envisioned is that they characterize today’s political elites as highly extreme. The empirical evidence for this view is also much flimsier than many realize. Today’s politicians strategically exaggerate their disagreements, but on many issues these disagreements are substantively small by historical standards. Indeed, where yawning disagreements existed 50 years ago around issues of trade, regulation, race, taxation, redistribution and foreign policy, there is now a Washington consensus on such matters to which both parties largely subscribe.

Today’s elites certainly take some extreme positions. But the prospect of President Trump does put the allegedly wholesale extremism of today’s elites in perspective. Trump seeks to shatter countless tenets of the Washington consensus in the name of shameless nationalism and overt xenophobia. If he gets his way, the United States would be plunged into a deep recession and millions of lives would be thrown into disarray. That is real extremism.

Students of polarization and pundits alike bemoan a “disconnect” between extreme elites and centrist voters, arguing that voters must urgently be empowered to resolve it. But what if voters would actually like to see today’s politicians become more extreme on many issues? What if many voters actually do, at the end of the day, agree with Trump? In that case, reforms that empower voters may have less appealing effects than supporters argue.

Advocates of reforms would be wise to consider this possibility as they upend centuries-old institutions in the name of democracy. Faithful representation of public opinion is scarcely the sole standard to which representative democracy aspires.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: Republicans created dysfunction. Now they’re paying for it.

Dana Nelson: The growth of executive power has turned politics into war

Jim Marshall: Congress could reduce polarization. It has chosen not to.

Thomas Petri: Our government is messy — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working

Alan I. Abramowitz: America today is two different countries. They don’t get along.

Jane Mansbridge: Three reasons political polarization is here to stay",REAL
"Clinton's campaign, which started raising money for the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties this quarter through the Hillary Victory Fund, also raised $18 million in the joint fundraising effort, meaning the campaign raised a total of $55 million for the quarter.

In all, the Clinton campaign has raised $112 million for the primary since launching in April. Heading into 2016, the campaign has roughly $38 million cash on hand, according to aides.

The haul, which is larger than even some Clinton aides expected, puts a big number on the board that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- her main primary challenger -- is unlikely to top.

""Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have joined together and powered this historic campaign, we are now heading into Iowa and New Hampshire with the resources we need to be successful,"" Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, said in a statement on Friday.

""Helping Democratic candidates win up and down the ticket is a top priority for Hillary Clinton which is why she's also proud to be doing her part to ensure Democrats have the resources we need to win."" CNN reported earlier this week that Clinton raised at least $21 million at fundraisers she personally headlined in the fourth quarter of 2015, a number that almost guaranteed she would break the $100 million goal. The Democratic front-runner headlined a total of 58 fundraisers in the fourth quarter, a pace identical to the 58 events she headlined in the second and third quarters of 2015. The labor-intensive process, which required Clinton to criss-cross the country on both the campaign and fundraising trail, saw the former secretary of state headline fundraisers in 20 states and Washington, D.C. Thirteen events were in New York, the most of any state, and six were in California. The fourth quarter also saw Clinton get more help than usual on the fundraising trail. Former President Bill Clinton headlined dozens of fundraisers in 14 states and Washington, D.C., including events in Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio, during the fourth quarter. While it will be difficult for Sanders to turn in a bigger haul than Clinton, the Vermont senator is expected to bring in a sizable haul, largely buoyed by his strong online contributions. Since launching his campaign, Sanders has solicited over 2.3 million donations and raised over $40 million -- including a sizable $26 million in the third quarter. Aides have said that the campaign is focused on surpassing 1 million donors by the end of the year. Like Clinton, Sanders also signed a joint fundraising effort with the DNC this quarter, starting to raise money for the national party in November. Clinton aides boasted on Friday that 94% of their donations were in increments of $100 or less and more than 60% of donations were from women. Sign up for CNN Politics' Nightcap newsletter, serving up today's best and tomorrow's essentials in politics.",REAL
"The mutually beneficial campaign detente between Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) came to an end on the debate stage here Thursday.

The two Republican presidential candidates, locked in a tight race to win the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, argued over whether Cruz meets the constitutional requirements to serve as president and whether Trump is a trustworthy conservative or is tainted by what Cruz called “New York values.”

Theirs was far from the only battle that broke out in the sixth GOP debate of the 2016 campaign season. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) had intensely personal clashes with both Cruz and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Rubio and Christie are both hoping to emerge from the crowded Republican field as the establishment’s champion against the forces of insurgency that Trump and Cruz represent.

Until recently, it was in both Trump’s and Cruz’s interest to avoid a direct confrontation. Cruz was leery of alienating Trump’s supporters — who might come to him, if the incendiary billionaire were to self-destruct. Trump, for his part, did not consider Cruz much of a threat.

On Thursday, they went so far as to question each other’s fitness to govern.

Trump contended that Cruz’s birth to a U.S. citizen in Canada might disqualify him from becoming president because the Constitution decrees that only a “natural born citizen” may hold the office.

“There’s a big question mark on your head. And you can’t do that to the party. You really can’t,” Trump told Cruz.

The senator from Texas retorted that Trump was motivated more by his political prospects than any constitutional concern.

“I recognize that Donald is dismayed that his poll numbers are falling in Iowa,” Cruz said. “But the facts and the law here are really quite clear. Under long-standing U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.”

Then it was Cruz’s turn to go on offense.

Repeating something he first said in a radio interview, Cruz charged that Trump had “New York values” — invoking that city’s reputation, particularly in red-state America, as the bastion of the liberal elite.

“I can frame it another way,” Cruz said. “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan. I’m just saying.”

Trump responded with indignation, saying New York City is home to “loving people, wonderful people.” He recalled the fall of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, noting the “smell of death” that pervaded the city for months.

“I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York,” Trump said. He added, “That was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

As Trump and Cruz argued over the latter’s constitutional qualifications to be president, the other candidates struggled to get a word in. Rubio drew applause when he interjected, “I hate to interrupt this episode of Court TV, but I think we have to get back to what this election ought to be about.”

However, when Rubio and Cruz got their chance to go at it, theirs turned out to be an esoteric back-and-forth over the consistency of their Senate votes, particularly on immigration.

After Rubio ticked through votes that he described as flip-flops and political opportunism on Cruz’s part, the Texan said: “He had no fewer than 11 attacks there. I appreciate you dumping your oppo research folder on the debate stage.”

At that point, former Florida governor Jeb Bush interjected: “This latest back-and-forth between two backbench senators, it explains why we have the mess in Washington, D.C.”

Christie, who has often dismissed the Senate as nothing more than a debating society, interrupted another argument between Cruz and Rubio over taxes, saying: “You’ve already had your chance, Marco. You blew it.”

The disputes that broke out during the debate, which was sponsored by Fox Business Network and included the GOP’s seven leading presidential hopefuls, have been simmering on the campaign trail in recent days. The event gave the candidates a chance to confront one another face to face, rather than through their stump speeches, surrogates and allied super PACs.

Among the Republicans, several battles are going on at once. Where Trump and Cruz are each looking to win the caucuses by claiming to be the one who can slay the old order, the field also includes a host of current and former governors and senators.

Nearly as important as which candidate comes in first place is the question of which will emerge from what is being called the “establishment lane.”

Rubio repeated his charge that Christie, the governor of a heavily Democratic state, has a record too liberal for a conservative party. He noted that Christie once supported Common Core educational standards, backed some gun-control legislation and supported Obama’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“Our next president has to be someone that undoes the damage Barack Obama has done to this country,” Rubio said. “It cannot be someone that agrees with his agenda. . . . Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports.”

Turning to face Rubio, Christie accused the senator of being loose with his facts and manufacturing indignation because Christie has emerged as a political threat. He reminded Rubio that he had once called him “a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed,” but that “he’s changed his tune.”

Christie recalled October’s debate, when Rubio responded to an attack from Bush by saying someone had convinced him that Bush had to hit his onetime protege. “It appears that the same someone who has been whispering in old Marco’s ear, too,” Christie said.

As the leading candidates feuded, Ben Carson — the mild-mannered retired neurosurgeon who briefly topped the polls — urged civility. “We have to stop this because, you know, if we manage to damage ourselves and we lose the next election and a progressive gets in there and they get two or three Supreme Court picks, this nation is over as we know it,” he said.

The call did not stop Bush from going after Trump, describing his rival as “unhinged” for his policies on immigration and Muslims and misguided in his plans for high tariffs on Chinese imports.

“This would be devastating for our economy. We need somebody with a steady hand being president of the United States,” Bush said.

Trump responded with an attack on Bush’s personality.

“We don’t need a weak person being president of the United States,” Trump said, returning to an old insult that Bush is ­“low-energy.” “We don’t need that. We don’t need that.”

Trump brushed off criticism of his demeanor, saying, “I will gladly accept the mantle of anger.”

“Our military is a disaster,” he said. “Our health care is a horror show. Obamacare, we’re going to repeal it and replace it. We have no borders. Our vets are being treated horribly. Illegal immigration is beyond belief. Our country is being run by incompetent people. And yes, I am angry.”

The debate came just 48 hours after President Obama delivered the final State of the Union address of his presidency, which included sharp condemnation of the angry GOP rhetoric over Muslims, immigration and other issues. At the debate, the candidates flung zinger after zinger in an attempt to outdo one another in delivering the most visceral condemnation of both Obama and Clinton, his first-term secretary of state and the leading Democratic presidential candidate.

Christie called Obama “a petulant child” and likened his State of the Union to “storytime” because it painted, in Christie’s view, too rosy a picture of the country.

“We are going to kick your rear end out of the White House come this fall,” Christie said of Obama.

The language was just as strident in discussing Clinton. Bush suggested that she “might be going back and forth between the White House and the courthouse” because she is under FBI investigation for her email practices. Then Rubio stepped up the rhetoric and charged that Clinton was “disqualified from being commander in chief.”

When co-moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Cruz about a New York Times report Wednesday that he failed to properly disclose loans from Goldman Sachs and CitiBank during his 2012 Senate campaign, Cruz used the moment to slam “the mainstream media.”

“Yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other,” Cruz said. “But if that’s the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.”

Although Ohio Gov. John Kasich did not figure in the more contentious exchanges, he sought to appeal directly to frustrated middle- and working-class families.

“People are upset,” he said. “You’re 50 or 51 years old and some kid walks in and tells you you’re out of work and you don’t know where to go and where to turn. Do we have an answer for that? We do.”

David A. Fahrenthold in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"Donald Trump spent a day in January 2014 hobnobbing with politicians at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The billionaire mogul touted legalizing gambling with state Rep. Steve Crisafulli, speaker of the Florida House, and two other wired Florida Republicans, plugging his properties as potential sites for casinos.

But as they tapped putts on the manicured greens, something else was on Trump’s mind: Jeb Bush.

“He was trashing Jeb and, quite honestly, I don’t think he’s ever held Jeb in high regard,” said Crisafulli, a Bush supporter who said he was “uncomfortable” with the conversation and defended the former Florida governor to Trump. “I’ve met with Mr. Trump on several occasions, and he’s constantly had things to say about Jeb. . . . He’s always had a negative connotation about Jeb.”

Trump’s jeering that day was a harbinger of the taunts and derision that the 2016 GOP front-runner has directed at Bush on the campaign trail this summer.

The feud between the leading Republicans, which has escalated in recent days, is shaping up as a defining dynamic at this early stage of the race. And considering Trump’s dominant status in polls and Bush’s fundraising ability, the tensions between the two are likely to be a factor for weeks or months to come as each candidate attempts to topple the other on his way to the nomination.

The 2016 campaign is only the latest manifestation of decades of discord between Trump and the Bush family. Since the gilded 1980s, when Trump and George H.W. Bush rose as forces in their respective spheres, the relationship between Trump and the Bushes has been a melodrama — veering between displays of public affection and acerbic insults.

At the core, there are clashes of style, manner and class between the Bushes — a patrician clan of presidents, governors and financiers who have pulled the levers of power for generations — and Trump, a hustling New York City deal-maker who turned his father’s outer-borough real estate portfolio into a gold-plated empire.

“The Bushes were never Trump’s cup of tea,” said Roger Stone, a longtime confidant and former adviser to Trump. Asked why the Bushes often have kept Trump at arm’s length, he said: “He’s not from old, WASP money. The Trumps didn’t come on the Mayflower.”

‘He’s not up to snuff’

Trump shrugs off the suggestion that his rivalry with the Bushes is rooted in pedigree, although he is open about his animosity toward them; he characterizes his relationship with former president Bill Clinton, for instance, as far closer.

He lashed out at former president George W. Bush over the war in Iraq during his tenure. He turned on Bush’s father when he raised taxes during his term as president, despite pledging not to do so.

But Trump reserves particular, personal ire for Jeb Bush, whose first name he commonly mocks by drawing it out in a slight drawl. One Trump associate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly, said of Trump: “He’s very smart, he’s driven and he has two goals: one, to be elected president, and two, to have Jeb not be president.”

In a 35-minute interview this week with The Washington Post tracing his history with the Bushes, Trump unleashed a hailstorm of scorn. He found 33 ways to skewer the family — about one put-down per minute.

On Jeb Bush: “I mean, this guy. I don’t think he has a clue.”

On George H.W. Bush: “I really liked the father — really like him as a person. But I hated his ‘read my lips, no more taxes,’ and then he raised taxes monstrously.”

On George W. Bush: “He didn’t seem smart. I’d watch him in interviews and I’d look at people and ask, ‘Do you think he understands the question?’ ”

And back to Jeb: “He’s not up to snuff. . . . Jeb is never going to bring us to the promised land. He can’t.”

Trump was especially accusatory when he talked about Jeb Bush’s work in investment banking. After leaving the governor’s office in 2007, Bush was an adviser to Lehman Brothers and, later, Barclays, making between $1.3 million and $2 million a year. Trump called Bush’s role at Lehman a “no-show job” and suggested it was a reward for helping direct Florida state funds to the firm, whose collapse in 2008 helped kick off the Great Recession.

“That’s a Hillary Clinton kind of situation,” Trump said, referring to the Democratic front-

runner. “This is huge. Let me ask you: Why would you pay a man $1.3 million a year for a no-show job at Lehman Brothers — which, when it failed, almost took the world with it?”

Asked whether he thought Bush was ready to steer the nation’s economy, Trump said, “Steer it? He can’t steer himself.”

Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman, said Trump “is trafficking in false conspiracy theories” about Lehman.

Responding to Trump’s broader criticisms, Miller highlighted the developer’s past ties to Democrats and liberal causes.

“While Trump was attending New York liberal cocktail parties and trashing conservatives and Republican presidents any chance he got, Jeb was the most conservative governor in the country, cutting taxes, reining in the size of government and protecting life,” Miller said.

In Florida, Bush’s associates have been flummoxed by the pace and intensity of Trump’s assaults. Former governor Bob Martinez, a Bush friend and supporter, asked, “Is this the way he acts when he’s negotiating with somebody?”

“Some find it entertaining, some find it odd,” Martinez said. “This is not the normal fare you get, certainly.”

Bush has begun firing back on the stump, though not with Trump’s vigor and mostly without naming his opponent. “There are some people running, they’re really talented about filling space — about saying big things,” he said Wednesday in Pensacola, Fla. “They think that volume in their language is a kind of a version of leadership. Talking is not leadership. Doing is leadership.”

Al Cardenas, another Bush friend, suggested Trump’s motivation is pure politics: “He wants to win this thing, he sees Jeb as the big gorilla with the big super-PAC money and someone who would eventually be the one facing him in the homestretch.”

Cardenas also surmised that Trump had been a non-factor in Bush’s mind.

“In a thousand conversations I’ve ever had with Jeb, I’ve never heard Donald Trump mentioned once until last year,” Cardenas said. “He was just not a part of ‘Jeb world’ in any way that I recall.”

Trump fondly remembers one of his first encounters with the Bush family patriarch. It was 1988, and he hosted George H.W. Bush for a presidential campaign fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel, the palatial New York property Trump owned at the time.

“I remember Don King was there,” Trump said in the interview. “Big Don King. . . . He’s shaking Bush’s hand and saying, ‘Only in America!’ And, you know Don King’s voice. It’s like Pavarotti, right?”

Trump soured on Bush when he increased taxes, but they eventually made amends. In 1997, Trump said, Bush asked him to host a fundraiser for his son, Jeb, who was running for Florida governor. Trump agreed. The event was in his apartment at Trump Tower.

It was not merely a political favor. Trump had been trying to persuade Florida lawmakers to allow his company to manage casinos on tribal land.

“I had a fundraiser and raised about $1 million, which in those days was a lot of money,” Trump said. “In fact, I remember [Jeb Bush] saying, ‘It was the most successful fundraiser I’ve ever had.’ ”

Trump said George H.W. Bush wrote him “a beautiful note thanking me for helping with his son.”

Nevertheless, Trump’s swipes at the elder Bush continued and extended onto the pages of his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve.” In it, he said the 41st president “failed to comprehend that he was in the bubble created by the American presidency and simply lost touch.”

In that same book, Trump praised Jeb Bush as a “good man” who is “exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future. . . . I believe we could get another president from the Bushes.”

Trump’s unpredictable commentary led most Bush insiders to keep their distance. Nicholas F. Brady, a family intimate and former treasury secretary, said in an interview that the Bush circle has rarely overlapped with Trump, politically and socially.

As for the pot shots at Jeb these days, Brady said, “He must understand that Donald’s way of expressing himself is different. He tends to short-hop problems and that’s his style. We can’t do much about that.”

Former ambassador Mel Sembler, a Bush family friend and fundraiser, said he attended the 1997 event at Trump Tower and suggested that the current animus must be “newfound.”

“You don’t have animosity toward somebody and then put on a fundraiser in your home,” Sembler said. “I would never put on a fundraiser — and I put on an awful lot of them — unless it was somebody I really felt like would be a great political leader.”

‘I have never tried to click’

In 1999, as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush was consolidating the Republican establishment behind his 2000 presidential candidacy, Trump explored a run of his own in the Reform Party, which grew out of the 1992 independent run of Ross Perot that many Republicans were convinced cost Bush’s father his reelection.

Trump went on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and said Bush had not been forthcoming enough about his problems with alcohol. Later that fall, Trump made a splashy visit to Miami, Jeb Bush’s adopted home town. Rallying Cuban Americans in Little Havana, Trump knocked George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore by saying that his wealth made him more qualified to be president than the two descendants of politicians because they were, as he put it, “anointed.”

In the end, Trump did not run. But by George W. Bush’s second term in the Oval Office, Trump had become a thorn in the president’s side. In the run-up to Bush’s 2004 reelection, Trump criticized his management of the Iraq war. By 2007, he declared that Bush was “a horrible president — possibly the worst in the history of this country.”

Trump said in the Post interview that he blames Bush for the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group, which has seized parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

“I was very much opposed to the war in Iraq,” he said. “The brother went in and destabilized the entire region. If [Jeb’s] brother didn’t do that with Iraq, I don’t think you’d have a destabilized Middle East right now.”

During Jeb Bush’s two terms as governor, even as his business interests expanded in South Florida, Trump shunned him.

“I’ve never tried to click,” he said. “If I devoted time to being friendly with them, don’t you think I’d be friendly with them?”

Instead, Trump cultivated ties to Bush allies in Tallahassee, inviting them to play golf or to dine with him in Manhattan or South Florida.

Recounting one outing with former state House speaker Will Weatherford (R), Trump said: “I think they were more impressed with my golf game than anything else, if you want to know the truth. . . . I shot 72.”

Weatherford said this week that he did not remember Trump shooting 72.

“Mr. Trump seems to always have an optimistic view of his abilities,” Weatherford wrote in an e-mail. “I respect him and his candidacy, but I am a Jeb Bush supporter like most current and former public officials in Florida.”

Ed O’Keefe in Pensacola, Fla., contributed to this report.",REAL
"A few dozen Paul backers -- many of whom donned red ""Stand With Rand"" T-shirts -- quietly made their way down the middle aisle and out the door during Bush's speech. Once outside the main ballroom at the Gaylord National Convention Center, where Bush was speaking, they rowdily gathered and denounced the man many see as the Republican Party's leading candidate for president in 2016.

""We're here at CPAC, and I almost think it's a joke having Jeb Bush here because he doesn't stand for conservative principles,"" said Timothy Simons, 21, the Connecticut chairman of Young Americans for Liberty and one of the Paul supporters who walked out.

""I was part of the walkout, and I'll tell you why,"" said Allen Skillicorn, vice chairman of the Kane County Republican Party in Illinois. ""If Jeb Bush is nominated, Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States. ... How is he any different?""

""I barely know any Jeb Bush supporters that are our age,"" said Charlton, who was decked out in Paul gear. ""No one our age is getting out there and saying, 'Jeb Bush is the one who will help us bring freedom back to America.'""

Ben Levitt, 23, said he came to Washington all the way from Canada just to check out CPAC. He said he may live an hour from the U.S. border, but he has plenty of views about Jeb Bush and why he's no different than his brother and father.

""More wars, more debt, more government,"" Levitt said of what the Bushes are about. ""I mean, a fiscal conservative can't really say, 'Oh, I really love George W. Bush.' You just can't. I loved it for eight years. I loved the Iraq war and all that. I finally saw the light, so to speak, and got really into Ron Paul and that message.""

Inside the auditorium, Bush was well aware that many young conservatives were hostile to him, a fact that was underscored by the tough questions he got from moderator Sean Hannity. Bush refused to cede potential voters, however, saying of those who were booing, “I’m marking them down as neutral. I want to be your second choice.""

His session was dedicated almost entirely to domestic policy, a departure from many of the other speeches by would-be 2016 presidential candidates at CPAC. Bush touted Florida's economic growth under his leadership from 1999-2007, and gave examples of policies he had enacted that would please conservatives.

On immigration, Bush stressed the importance of securing the U.S. border, and he emphasized that immigration policy should be focused on ""economic-driven immigrants"" who bring specialized skills. He also spoke frankly about the need to create a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. ""The simple fact is that there is no plan to deport 11 million people,"" Bush said. ""We should give them a path to legal status where they work … and contribute to our society.” Some in the crowd cheered, but there were plenty of boos, too.",REAL
"The Republican party was struggling to heal its deep wounds on Thursday, as House speaker Paul Ryan claimed he was “very encouraged” by his meeting with Donald Trump but again declined to endorse him.



In a series of eagerly watched meetings on Capitol Hill that drew placard-waving protesters and hundreds of reporters, the presumptive Republican nominee held peace talks with GOP leaders in a bid to unify around something more than hostility toward Hillary Clinton.

Ryan and Trump issued a joint statement that hailed “a very positive step toward unification”, adding: “We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal.”

Ryan admitted last week that he was not ready to throw his weight behind Trump, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to withhold his endorsement after a primary election plagued by extraordinary rancour. Despite growing pressure from his own ranks, he declined again on Thursday.

“I think we had a very encouraging meeting,” he told reporters afterwards. “Look, it’s no secret that Donald Trump and I have had our differences. We talked about those differences today. That’s common knowledge.

“The question is, what is it we need to do to unify the Republican party and all strains of conservative wings in the party? We had a very good and encouraging conversation on just how to do that.”

It was important to discuss “core principles” that tie Republicans together, added Ryan, who was running mate to Mitt Romney four years ago and is seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2020.

These included the constitution, separation of powers and supreme court.

“I was very encouraged with what I heard from Donald Trump today,” Ryan said. “I do believe that we are now planting the seeds to get ourselves unified and bridge the gaps and differences, and so from here we’re going to go deeper into the policy areas to see where that common ground is and see how we can operate from those same core principles.”

But he admitted: “This is a process. It takes a little time. You don’t put it together in 45 minutes.”

Asked specifically whether he was endorsing Trump and what was holding him back, the speaker sidestepped by replying: “The process of unifying the Republican party, which just finished a primary about a week ago – perhaps one of the most divisive primaries in memory – takes some time.”



He added: “It’s very important that we don’t fake unifying, we don’t pretend unification, that we truly and actually unify so we are full strength in the fall. I don’t want us to have a fake unification process here. I want to make sure that we really, truly understand each other.”

Trump’s insurgent campaign has put him at odds with the Republican establishment and won him almost 11m votes, giving him a strong hand in the negotiations. An increasing number of Republicans in Congress have called on Ryan to accept the popular will, despite his objections to Trump on both substance and tone, including his call for a temporary ban on Muslims.

Ryan acknowledged: “It’s really kind of unparalleled, I think. He has gotten more votes than any Republican primary nominee in the history of our country and this isn’t even over yet … It’s really a remarkable achievement.”

The challenge is to keep adding voters without subtracting any through a positive vision based on core principles, he added. “Here’s what we agree on: a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a disaster for this country. It’s effectively a third Obama term.”

Ryan met Trump behind closed doors for 45 minutes at the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters in Washington along with chair Reince Priebus.

Although he declined to offer specifics on the issues discussed, Priebus described the meeting as a “positive step towards unification” in an interview with MSNBC shortly after its conclusion.

“It was a positive mood, it was a mood of cooperation and a feeling of, it’s time to unify the party. And I think both parties wanted to do that,” he said.

The RNC chair also sought to downplay Ryan’s reluctance to endorse Trump, saying the expectation had been that the primary would continue for another month or two.

“I think everyone was caught a little off guard by how quick it all ended. I think we all were surprised,” Priebus said.

Trump and Ryan were then joined for a second meeting with other members of the House Republican leadership team: majority leader Kevin McCarthy, majority whip Steve Scalise, conference chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers and deputy majority whip Patrick McHenry.

McMorris-Rodgers, like Ryan, has yet to back Trump as the party standard-bearer, while McCarthy and Scalise have said they will support the nominee.

Trump then met with the Senate Republican leadership at the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was characteristically mum when returning to the Capitol after his sit-down with Trump, offering only that it was “a very good, constructive meeting”.

John Cornyn, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, used similar words to describe the meeting in a tweet that showed him posing alongside Trump.

Cornyn later told reporters on Capitol Hill that he expected the party to ultimately unite behind Trump.

Among the issues discussed was immigration, Cornyn added, including Trump’s broader tone on the subject.

“There is a way to talk about these issues that isn’t offensive to people,” he said.

A handful of Republican senators joined Trump’s meeting with the leadership: Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Rob Portman of Ohio and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.

Sessions, one of Trump’s chief surrogates, has criticized Ryan’s reluctance to endorse Trump.



“I think he made a mistake on that. I’m not sure what was in his mind,” Sessions told reporters on Capitol Hill this week. “But I think that can be repaired.”



Although Senate Republican leaders have been more willing to rally behind Trump, their members find themselves in a decidedly precarious position. Twenty-four Senate Republicans are up for re-election in November, with many facing tough races in key battleground states.

Wicker, who chairs the NRSC, the organization tasked with keeping the Senate in Republicans’ control, has already committed to backing Trump. Following the meeting, the senator reiterated his support for the nominee while adding Trump and GOP leaders had “a very positive and productive conversation today aimed at unifying the party for victory this fall”.



As the lawmakers huddled with Trump for what is expected to be the first of many meetings, protesters gathered outside to show their disdain for the former reality TV star. Professional organisers from Code Pink held up signs stating “Stop hatred against immigrants”, “Islamophobia is unAmerican” and “Trump is a racist”. Other protesters included so-called Dreamers, immigrants brought to the US as children, from the advocacy group United We Dream. A giant Trump mask and a cardboard coffin were displayed.

Hundreds of journalists flocked to the scene of the meeting, even as the Republicans in attendance declined to address the cameras. A handful of lawmakers who did not participate in the meeting did, however, offer their perspective on what to expect as Trump presses forward with his charm offensive on Capitol Hill.

Chris Collins, a representative from New York who is backing Trump, said he was “baffled” at the assertion by some of his colleagues that they would not vote for Trump in November. But he was confident about Trump’s ability to win over those still on the fence through one-on-one meetings.

“People will see the Donald Trump I know, not necessarily the one you see in the rallies,” Collins said.

Trump’s overtures while in Washington extended even to his fiercest critics. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who exited the race in December and has openly declared that Trump would destroy the Republican party, told reporters on Thursday that the two had a “cordial, pleasant” phone conversation.

Graham said the 15-minute call centered predominantly on national security, and he provided Trump with his assessment of the nuclear accord with Iran and the war against Isis.

Steps away from the chaos, Democrats at the US Capitol used the opportunity to portray Republicans as belonging to the “Party of Trump”.

The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, said the meetings served as “the latest sign that the Republican leaders in both houses are marching lockstep with Donald Trump”.

The Nevada senator aimed his fire in particular at McConnell, who threw his support behind Trump last week when it became all but certain that the real estate mogul had clinched the nomination.

“Donald Trump is everything that the Republican leader and his party could ever want in a nominee. His policy positions are identical to the Republican party platform,” Reid said in remarks on the Senate floor.

He then proceeded to tie the GOP to Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric toward immigrants and women, pointing out that Republicans in Congress have blocked action on immigration reform and policies such as equal pay for women and paid family leave.

“Trump owes his candidacy to the Republican leader and to the policies that he’s led,” Reid said. “It was an obstructionist, anti-woman, anti-Latino, anti-Muslim, anti-middle class, anti-environment, and anti-Obama and anti-everything Republican party of the last eight years that made Donald Trump a reality.”

Reid’s counterpart in the House of Representatives, minority leader Nancy Pelosi, took a similar approach in tying congressional Republicans to Trump.

“Since when have the House Republicans been so concerned about intolerant statements and discriminatory ideas?” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said he read Ryan and Trump’s joint statement “with amusement” and commented: “I don’t know anybody here who’s going to lose any sleep over the meeting.”

Earnest told reporters: “Speaker Ryan has described his view that the entire Republican party, including the presumptive nominee, should rally behind the agenda that Speaker Ryan has put forward. I think the reason he may be encountering some difficulty is he’s the speaker of the House. He should be implementing that agenda already.”

He accused the Republicans of inaction over releasing funds to combat the Zika virus, the Puerto Rico financial crisis and the opioid abuse epidemic.

“Unfortunately the Republicans seem much more focused on the elections than they do on embracing the results of the last elections that gave them a majority in Congress.

“If Republicans had much conviction about their agenda, they’d be trying to implement it now” rather than trying to convince Trump and their own members, Earnest added. “I think that’s why there might be skepticism both inside and outside about whether Republicans actually do have a governing agenda.”",REAL
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"Tomorrow, the U.S. election will take place, and for most Americans, the day couldn’t come soon enough. People aren’t anticipating the 2016 election because they’re looking forward to seeing either... ",FAKE
"Republicans enter the fall campaign in moods ranging from grim foreboding to howling despair. They fear that Donald Trump will not only lose but lose so big he will take hordes of other candidates down with him, costing the GOP control of the U.S. Senate and even the House. This election could be the party's worst debacle since 1964.

Republicans don't seem to have prepared for an even bigger catastrophe that could occur Nov. 8: a Trump victory. In that case, they wouldn't be stuck with him for the next two months. They would be stuck with him for the duration of his presidency, and they would have to answer for him forever.

They are in the position of a bride who, on the eve of her wedding day, knows she's making a mistake. If she backs out, she'll bring a mess down on her head. But if she doesn't, she'll be caught in a snare that will be painful and hard to escape, with consequences she will have years to regret.

The first harm from Trump is that he would be the new identity of the party. Forget the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Never mind what Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan propose. He would be the one defining the national agenda. If President Trump wanted to intern Muslims, launch drones against Mexico or put David Duke up in the Lincoln Bedroom, his fellow Republicans would wear the stain.

One of the miseries they have suffered in recent months is waking up each day anxiously wondering what new folly their candidate is about to commit. It's bad enough having to put up with his insulting of a gold star mother, not knowing that Russia has invaded Ukraine, accusing Barack Obama of founding the Islamic State, and retweeting white supremacists.

But all this amounts to an ignorant egomaniac running his mouth. In the White House, Trump would be acting, not just talking. He would possess powers that can be wielded in all sorts of destructive ways. As Republicans have learned from Obama's use of executive authority, it's hard to stop a determined president from doing whatever he damn well pleases.

Scrap NAFTA? Carry out indiscriminate bombing of the Islamic State? Refuse to come to the aid of a NATO ally attacked by Russia? Bring back torture, using methods that would make Dick Cheney weep?

Turn over decisions to advisers who couldn't find their way out of an elevator if you gave them a map and a compass? Dump Melania and start dating? The question is not whether Trump would make bad choices in the White House—only which ones and when.

Since he wrapped up the nomination, Republicans have been hoping Trump would change his reckless style, listen to people who know more than he does, avoid pointless fights and generally behave like a responsible adult. Their hopes have been in vain. He either can't change or sees no reason to.

Winning the election would turbocharge Trump's worst impulses. He would have new grounds to ignore GOP leaders and indulge his every whim. If that approach gets him elected, why would he behave any differently as president?

Maybe Trump would drag the country through four years of chaos and stagnation, trailing broken promises and aborted schemes. Or maybe he would handle the job so irresponsibly that he would provoke his impeachment and removal—an eminently plausible scenario.

The latter outcome would have some special downsides for Republicans. One is that it would saddle them with the herculean chore of defending him at his worst. Another is that it would derail any policy ideas they hope to advance. Then there's the political cost in the next election.

Compared with these nightmares, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have all sorts of advantages. It would give Republicans a unifying focus, mobilize them to block liberal policies, open the way for new conservative leaders to emerge and offer the party a chance to rebound at the polls in 2018. If she were to be embroiled in a White House scandal brought on by her own disregard for the rules, even better for the GOP.

Republicans might remember British statesman Benjamin Disraeli's explanation of the difference between a misfortune and a calamity. For his chief rival to fall into the river, he said, would be a misfortune. The calamity would be if someone pulled him out.",REAL
"Sniveling Cowards and NeverTrumpers Mitt Romney and John Kasich Reach out to Trump Sniveling Cowards and NeverTrumpers Mitt Romney and John Kasich Reach out to Trump Politics By Amy Moreno November 9, 2016 
Donald Trump won the 2016 election in an epic and historic victory. 
He cleaned Hillary’s clock. 
This is what Trump’s electoral map looks like. 
This looks like a country UNITED. 
Trump’s victory was a thrashing of the political and media elite – the American people rallied against global stooges like Mitt Romney and John Kasich, two morons who unsuccessfully attempted to STOP Trump every step of the way. 
Kasich did not vote for Trump, opting instead to help Hillary by writing-in John McCain’s name. 
Now, however, these twp clowns have changed their tune and tweeted out war congratulations to Donald Trump. 
Screw them. Best wishes for our duly elected president: May his victory speech be his guide and preserving the Republic his aim. 
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) November 9, 2016 The American people have spoken and it’s time to come together. Congratulations President-elect @realDonaldTrump . 
— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) November 9, 2016 Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"Actions by the Obama administration and several states have given the United States momentum in addressing climate change.

Smoke rises from the Colstrip Steam Electric Station, a coal burning power plant in Colstrip, Mont., in this 2013 file photo.

When it comes to the fight against climate change, the United States is often cast as a laggard – if not an outright pariah.

But that portrait is quietly changing.

On one hand, the fundamentals of America’s conflict over the human role in climate change remain unchanged. A cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions remains a nonstarter in Congress, and 41 percent of Americans say global warming has more to do with natural causes than human activity, according to Gallup.

But executive actions by the Obama administration, combined with a host of new laws in key states, mean that the United States is actually already taking significant action against climate change. Not only are these actions making an appreciable dent in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, they are beginning to change how other countries see America’s leadership on the issue.

""The fact that the US is taking these issues more seriously than we were doing five years ago, that means other countries are going to take it seriously as well,"" says Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University Law School.

President Obama has made climate change a focus of his second term agenda and a cornerstone of his legacy as a whole. But facing opposition in Congress, he has turned to executive action and regulation, principally through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Mr. Obama's stated emissions pledge – made in partnership with China last winter – is to cut carbon emissions to 26 to 28 percent of 2005 levels within the next decade. The pledge is tied to the Clean Power Plan (CPP) – a suite of new EPA regulations to limit greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. It is expected to go into effect later this summer.

But what makes the CPP feasible, experts say, is what states have already been doing.

“States have been leading the way for a long time in terms of clean energy,” says Elizabeth Ouzts, a spokeswoman for Environment America, an environmental advocacy group.

Seven states have adopted broad caps on emissions, and 28 states have introduced renewable energy requirements, according to a recent report from Environment America. According to the report, state and federal policies currently in action or about to go into action – including the CPP – can hit the targets laid out in the China deal.

""The path has been paved with state-level success and ambition, and the Clean Power Plan directly rose from the success we’ve seen at the state level,"" says Anna Aurilio, director of the Global Warming Solutions program at Environment America.

She says incidents of extreme weather, such as hurricane Sandy and the ongoing drought in California, have served as wakeup calls.

""People are starting to connect the dots between extreme weather events and the need to act on climate change,"" she says.

The first of several deadlines to comply with the CPP standards is 2020, and most states are already two-thirds of the way toward compliance, says Kenneth Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. [Editor's note: The original version of this story misspelled Mr. Kimmell's name.]

""Most states will exceed that 2020 timeline just based on what they’ve already done,"" he adds. ""We do think states are poised to cost-effectively and successfully comply with the Clean Power Plan.""

That means that American negotiators should be able to walk into the United Nations climate change conference in Paris this December with some momentum.

""We always believed that when the US took action domestically it could lead the rest of the world, and that’s in fact what we’re seeing,"" says Ms. Aurilio of Environment America.

The agreement between China and the US ­– the world's No. 1 and 2 polluters, respectively – helped give America more credibility on the world stage. And the CPP helped give America credibility with China.

""We wouldn’t have gotten the commitment from China if hadn’t looked like we were about to implement Clean Power Plan,"" says Mr. Kimmell of the Union of Concerned Scientists. ""I think our seriousness will result in positive action by other countries.""

He adds that he was in Sweden and Denmark recently, talking with people involved in international climate negotiations.

""There's a recognition that it's real,"" he says, referring to US action on reducing carbon emissions.

Many challenges remain, however. On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the EPA improperly streamlined the regulation process when it established new standards for emissions of mercury and other toxic substances.

The EPA says the ruling “does not affect the Clean Power Plan.” But others say it throws the EPA’s entire regulatory regime into question. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R), who comes from the coal-producing state of Kentucky, said the ruling affirmed his advice to state governors to ignore the new power plant regulations.

Regardless of the varying interpretations of Monday's ruling, the CPP is likely to face both legal and legislative challenges. And the US can’t think that the CPP is enough, says Aurillo.

To keep global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius – the consensus scientific target for preventing the worst consequences of global warming – the US must cut its carbon emissions at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by mid-century.

""We should’ve got started with all these steps 20 years ago; the fact we’re taking them on now means we’re going to have to work harder,"" she says.

But she sees reason to hope.

""We’ve seen countries like China, that have never before constructively engaged, come to the table,"" she adds. ""This is a very hopeful time in what has otherwise been a pretty long period of very little action and progress on the global front, so this is huge.”",REAL
"By Les Visible on November 4, 2016 Visible Origami — Nov 4, 2016 Dog Poet Transmitting……. Welcome to Origami my dear friends. This is the number 779 posting at this blog. I don’t know what that means but it’s a lot of posts. We hope that some of them will have been of value to you. We like to talk about Love a great deal here. We spent decades studying in the Hermetic and Occult Sciences where abstruse concepts and complex schematics are the general nature of the various systems that exist in these areas of inquiry. I used to have some facility with them. I could talk about them in a knowledgeable way. Whether I actually had any real and useful knowledge is another thing. At least I could talk about these subjects as if I knew what I was talking about. Time went by and it became more and more apparent to me that knowing a great deal about certain subjects did not necessarily convey a power of operation in them. I studied palmistry for some time. I knew what all the lines and mounts, digits and bracelets and sundry meant. I knew which hand meant whatever it meant in relation to the other hand but… what I did not have was the single most important element. I did not have the intuitive feed. I studied the Tarot and esoteric astrology and various systems of mind control that hearkened back to earlier times. I studied a lot of things because I had a real thirst for arcane information but I lacked the intuitive feel in all of them except esoteric astrology and in the matter of the Tarot I did have some amount of facility in the areas where fortune telling was not a consideration. I always felt that using the Tarot for fortune telling was unfortunate behavior. Not only did it make you dependent on a method that, except in very rare circumstances, proved to be both deceptive and inefficient but… why seek to read the future when you could change the future? Meditation on the Tarot archetypes will transform your mental state and the very construction of it. This meditation will awaken the archetypes in you so that they resonate in your being with the world external to you. This doesn’t mean difficult conditions will not come upon you. What it means is that you will be on a shorter and faster track to illumination of some kind; we won’t be going into that today. I studied and I studied and I studied and I learned to parse and debate and state, within the parameters of the science and even in a comparative sense with other sciences but I didn’t know anything of value in the sense that I could apply what I had learned to real time accomplishments and achievements in the manifest in a supernatural manner. Sure, this kind of thing happens on a regular basis in my life but not because I have anything to do with it. All of this takes me back to the words of The Preacher in Ecclesiastes; “vanity, all is vanity,” and “there is nothing new under the sun.” It has taken me more years than I wish it had, to learn that only Love is worth the pursuit of it and the Love of the Ineffable is the greatest Love of all. Nothing that I have learned in all of the mystery sciences is the equal of this understanding, nor do any of them have anywhere near the value of it. Here is what I have learned, Love God. I am not speaking in a religions sense because in these times you can’t swing a dead cat in a condo closet without hitting a false prophet. False prophets come in all sizes. They are not all the equal of the Anti-Christ, whoever that might be, like The Pasto and the Anti-Pasto. A false prophet is anyone who manipulates the emotional and mental bodies of their fellows for personal gain, even if that gain is only influence, influence of this kind usually transforms into personal profit on some level. It might be material gain. It might be sexual favors. It might be psychopathic gratification of some kind and it can take place in a small country church just as easily as in a mega church or a massive television ministry. The Aquarian Age is upon us and as a result, all of the long entrenched and much- changed over time- religions are on their way out. The collective faith of humanity is being shaken to its roots and the old ways are passing away. This does not mean that the true teachings of the true teachers will pass away but they will be presented in a new light that is relative to the needs of a new age. The Aquarian Age is supposed to be The Age of Brotherhood and that tells me that the avatar will appear in the collective human heart, where a place has been prepared for it. It will not appear where the false self is occupying the space necessary for the indwelling divine to reside. One does not need to be a follower or practitioner of any particular dogma or form of ritual. One needs only to Love the divine who is one’s own higher self and the reason for this is that that higher self will draw our true self up into its aura of influence, or rather reveal itself to is as our true self. We are all divinity in the process of discovery and unfoldment and Love is the means and the mechanism that can accomplish this. As we reject and expel all of what is false and extraneous in ourselves, we make room for the indwelling divine. Once we have driven all of it out of ourselves, the divine will come forth in our hearts and reign over all things from the throne room within. I have no further use or need for occult information. I am not in the market for anything that is on the market. I can be very glib about some of these things because of a very good memory and an analytic mind that has not lost its objectivity and which doesn’t play favorites in terms of what I want people to think, that is their area of authority and has nothing to do with me but… all the glibness and capacity for articulation in the world is not going to serve the deeper needs of humanity. It might gain you followers and it might get you on some talk circuit and book signing tours and you can lecture to your heart’s content at New Age conventions and seminars and you’ll just be one more Tom Fool among all the rest of the Gleem smiling androids, who pander to the gullible the world over. It will, guaranteed, also get you in the kind of trouble for which I will run long distances to avoid. Put yourself on a pedestal or allow others to do it for you and you might as well paint a target on your back at the same time. The divine and his angels and emissaries see all of this. They see every montebank and charlatan. They see into every sincere and corrupt heart and judgments are passed concerning what phases and states you will be taken through to wake you the Hell up. I would prefer to sidestep the hard massage of Karma upon my being. Love the ineffable and everything else will take care of itself. Love the ineffable with all the intensity that you can muster and your intensity will grow and grow; “success is speedy for the energetic.” God is watching. We need to get into a fluid and continuous mindset of certitude concerning this. We need to remind ourselves through every day that God is watching. God is looking at the world through our very own eyes. We may have convinced ourselves that we alone are seeing and that we alone have access to our mind and heart but this is assuredly not the case. God is everywhere, after one fashion or another. When one has brought their heart and mind to the assurance of the endless presence of God in our being and all around us and yet magically and mystically apart as well, then we will begin to resonate with that ubiquitous presence and it will move through us in an active expression of itself. There was a saint, named St Denis , who is the patron saint of Paris. They cut off his head and he picked it up and put it under his arm and walked off with it. Do I believe this happened in the exact details given? I don’t know. What I do know is that there have been many similar stories. One similar is to be found in Autobiography of a Yogi. Look into the tales that are recorded concerning Appolonius of Tyana (the links will take you to a fuller study of his life) and many, many another unusual character, who has walked among us here over the ages. Some of them had a vast reservoir of occult knowledge and some of them were in possession of divine Love. Some had both. I would prefer to be one of those who carries the love of God in my heart and I want for nothing more. I don’t need to know all of these complexities and these complexities go on and on forever. There are just so many of them. If you have ever looked into Tantra then you have some idea of how intricate the complexities can be. I am not equal to the possession of such information. As fine a mind as I have I am a simple fellow and I can get into trouble very quickly when I get out of my depth and I have no desire to test those waters. So I say to you all, seek the source of all knowledge worth having. Seek the reservoir of immeasurable Love. Seek the source of every good and righteous thing and Love it with all the force that is possible for you and anything you do need to know will be given to you at the time you need it. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all else will be added unto you.” End Transmission…….",FAKE
"Republicans professed they remained resolved not to fund the Department of Homeland Security without provisions reversing President Barack Obama's expansion of deferred action immigration programs that would allow up to 4.7 million potential recipients to stay and receive work authorization. Democrats, meanwhile, showed no willingness to soften their insistence on ""clean"" DHS funding, arguing that Republicans could now pursue their case against Obama in court instead of in Congress.

With just 10 days before DHS funding runs out, the likelihood of a mini-shutdown seemed high on Tuesday. The congressional recalcitrance wasn't abating, and most lawmakers were home in their districts. Monday night's decision by a U.S. district judge in Texas appeared not to have altered the odds. Behind the public pronouncements, however, talk was turning to another way.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's preliminary injunction preventing DHS from moving forward on Obama's executive action sparked a bit of chatter Tuesday about a short-term funding bill for DHS. Such a bill would last months (as opposed to the end of September), would be clean of any policy riders, and would allow the lawsuit filed by 26 states against Obama's immigration actions to play out in court before Congress fully weighs in.

Aides on both sides of the aisle were reluctant to discuss such a deal for short-term DHS funding, saying it had not come up in any serious way during party gatherings. One Republican aide, who like others would only talk on condition of anonymity, said such an option would only be negotiated toward the end of the funding deadline, if no other solutions are available. Even then, the aide added, it was unclear if the GOP would go for it.

""Right now, for many members, this is about setting a precedent for how things operate for the next two years,"" another GOP aide said. Outside groups on the conservative pole said they agreed.

""I think there is going to be a lot of skepticism about moving a clean, short-term"" funding resolution for DHS, said Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action for America. ""There is always a promise there will be a fight on something and there is always an excuse to delay that fight. We are in the middle of it right now. ... To lose that momentum and punt for 30 days doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.""

Congress has a rich history of kicking cans down the road. That's what representatives have already done with DHS funding, separating the agency' budget from the rest of the government in negotiations last year to allow for the current debate over Obama's executive action. To do it again would be a remarkable example of indecision.

But Hanen's ruling and a shortened funding bill may just be the type of off-ramp that some Republicans have been seeking to get the DHS issue behind them without incurring the wrath of their conservative base. As Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a staunch opponent of Obama's executive actions, said last week: ""My objection to the DHS funding is I don't want to do anything that gives the president the ability to fund the executive amnesty. If a court issues an injunction then I think it would be appropriate for us to consider the possibility of funding appropriations during the pendency of the injunction.""

Any short-term DHS funding bill would inevitably have to win the backing of some Democrats, considering how many Republicans would remain in opposition. But Democratic aides said on Tuesday that they, too, weren't particularly interested in seeing a standoff extended for a matter of months.

Partially, it's because the legal case over deferred action will last far longer than that, making it unlikely that clearer answers will come in the spring. Marshall Fitz, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, said the administration's appeal of Hanen's ruling may be decided in several weeks. An appeal on whether states have standing to sue the administration, however, could take up to a half-year. Then there will be separate court proceedings over the legal merits of the executive action, provided standing is proven.

""The fight on DHS is not just about executive action on immigration,"" said a Senate Democratic aide. ""It is do we think Republicans should extract policy concessions for keeping all or part of the government open. Our side says absolutely not.""

The third actor in this saga, the White House, has so far stayed away from the congressional wrangling over DHS funding, except to offer support for Democratic demands for a clean bill. Asked about a stopgap option, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post that the Hill should pass a bill without riders that funds DHS for the full year.

Anything less would go against the public warnings of DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who has been emphatic that short-term funding prevents the department from carrying out border security plans, hiring more Secret Service agents and funding new grants for state and local law enforcement.",REAL
"Choose a topic Choose a topic All information, data, and material contained, presented, or provided on REALfarmacy.com is for educational purposes only. It is not to be construed or intended as providing medical or legal advice. Decisions you make about your family's healthcare are important and should be made in consultation with a competent medical professional. We are not physicians and do not claim to be. Any views expressed here-in are not necessarily those held by REALfarmacy.com © 2016 REALfarmacy.com",FAKE
"Donald Trump has had a very tough three weeks on the campaign trail, from a bad first debate to the “Access Hollywood” video to the recent flood of allegations that he groped and made unwanted sexual advances toward several women.

And yet Trump trails Hillary Clinton by just four points in the new Washington Post-ABC News poll — a number that is pretty par for the course for the 2016 election.

But the Post-ABC poll also makes this clear about what Trump is up to these days: He's doing almost everything wrong, and he's doing nothing to grow his support and actually put himself in a position to win.

Trump has spent the better part of the past week arguing that his comments on tape were just “locker room talk,” attempting to cast doubt on the accusations made against him by an increasing number of women and pressing the case that the Clintons' misdeeds are worse than the ones he's alleged to have committed.

The problem is that a majority of voters are buying none of it.

So why hasn't he lost much ground — at least in this poll (other polls last week showed him losing much more and down double digits)? Part of it is rank partisanship. About 4 in 10 likely voters appear willing to give him a pass on most of the things described above.

Those who appear unconcerned are largely GOP-leaning voters already supporting Trump. And that's probably why he remains at 43 percent in a four-way matchup with Hillary Clinton, Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein.

But that brings us back to the problem that has plagued Trump since the GOP primary: his inability to grow his support among the general electorate. Trump is doing basically nothing in response to his problems these past few weeks that is being met with broad support.

He has long run, and continues to run, a campaign that is very much focused on the Republican Party base, and that base doesn't seem to have deserted him at this point. But that base alone is also insufficient to win an election in the United States.

Trump remains in this race almost completely despite himself and with an assist from Clinton's own popularity problems. Those are problems, we would note, that are largely due to things she did before this campaign — in contrast to Trump. He'll probably see the head-to-head number from this poll showing him down only four points and think he's doing just fine and could still win.

If so, he will be missing the point entirely.",REAL
"Breitbart – by Deborah Danan 
TEL AVIV – Donald Trump told a Republican rally in Jerusalem on Wednesday that he loves Judaism and will work to make “America and Israel safe again.” 
“I love Israel and honor and respect the Jewish tradition and it’s important we have a president who feels the same way,” Trump said in a video message via satellite to several hundred Israelis and Americans who had gathered for the event. 
“My administration will stand side-by-side with the Jewish people and Israel’s leaders to continue strengthening the bridges that connect not only Jewish-Americans and Israelis, but also all Americans and Israelis,” Trump said. 
“Together we will stand up to enemies, like Iran, bent on destroying Israel and her people, together we will make America and Israel safe again,” he added. 
The event, organized by Republicans Overseas Israel on the rooftop of a restaurant overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, was titled “Jerusalem Forever,” in protest of the recent UNESCO resolutions that erased Jewish and Christian connections to the holy city. 
Last week, Trump slammed the resolution as a “one-sided attempt to ignore Israel’s 3,000-year bond to its capital city” and “further evidence of the enormous anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations. 
Trump’s running mate Mike Pence also addressed the event via video, saying that Jerusalem is “the eternal undivided capital of the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” 
“Donald Trump and I stand with Israel because Israel’s fight is our fight, because Israel’s cause is our cause,” he said. “Israel is our most cherished ally.” Pence added that he and Trump “understand that Israel is not hated by her enemies for what she does wrong but rather for what she does right.” 
“Like the U.S., Israel is hated by terrorists and the failed states that support them. She is hated by too many progressives, because she is successful and her people are free,” he said. 
Pence also said Israel’s military defends the Jewish state with “decency, humanity and restraint.” 
Trump’s adviser on Israel affairs, David Friedman, came to Israel for the event. He promised the crowd that if Trump were elected he would treat Israel very differently than the Obama administration. 
He added that Trump would make good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 
“Under a Trump administration there is going to be no daylight between the U.S. and the State of Israel,” he said. “If there are disagreements they will be handled in private as is done between close friends.” 
According to Friedman, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in Israel are expected to vote for Trump. 
Many of the Trump supporters at the rally were sporting red “Make America Great Again” hats and said they believed he was the most pro-Israel candidate to lead America. 
“I’m here today to show support for Donald Trump as he is standing with us, supporting us here in Israel,” the Times of Israel quoted Reuven Ashenberg saying. Ashenberg, originally from Teaneck, New Jersey, now runs the Republican party’s campaign in Beit Shemesh. 
“He’s the only candidate that’s pro-Israel and we need to show him our support as we’re rallying around the right choice, to help ‘Make America Great Again,’ and thereby helping Israel become great again as well,” Ashenberg said. 
Abe Marks, who hails from New York and now lives in Jerusalem, said his biggest concern about Hillary Clinton would be who she appoints to the Supreme Court. Her choices “will be destructive to American freedoms and the American way of life.” 
Marks admitted that while he was not completely “enamored” by Trump, he likes that “he’s not part of the big boys’ club.” Clinton, Marks said, was “under the thumb of the New World Order” and as such he’s “very, very scared of her.” 
Marks added that, most crucially, Trump will fulfill his campaign pledge to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem. 
“They all promise it, but he will actually do it. He has nothing holding him back,” he said.",FAKE
"After issuing orders to the crowd of roughly 1,000 to disperse, police began forcefully and aggressively pushing protesters, checking them with their batons. At least 35 people were arrested, police said.

Even as there was no room to move, police officers continued to push protesters and reporters, with some toppling over in the fray. Police pepper-sprayed several protesters.

In a message to the San Diego Police Department, Trump applauded the officers' response to the protesters.

""Fantastic job on handling the thugs who tried to disrupt our very peaceful and well attended rally,"" Trump tweeted. ""Greatly appreciated.""

Some protesters sitting in a public square refused to move as police officers in riot gear moved in, leading to several arrests. The clashes began after Trump supporters flooded into the streets following the event at the San Diego Convention Center. As bottles fly between protesters & Trump supporters, police move in forcefully, pushing people back with batons pic.twitter.com/o9djxKAHAh — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 28, 2016 A few altercations broke out between supporters of the presumptive Republican nominee and protesters opposed to his campaign, particularly Trump's views on immigration. Supporters & protesters now throwing bottles & other objects at each other pic.twitter.com/HOpZvZc5Yr — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 27, 2016 Scores of police officers, clad in riot gear and clutching batons, separated the two groups. As protesters and supporters lingered in the streets, some individuals on both sides began throwing eggs, bottles and other objects at each other. As the situation intensified at moments, with several volleys of bottles being tossed between the sides, police officers moved in, forcefully and at times aggressively pushing back Trump supporters, protesters and media caught in the scrum with their batons. But while some violent altercations did break out, the two sides mostly shouted and chanted at each other. Protesters, some of whom waved Mexican flags, shouted ""F--- Trump"" and immigration-focused slogans. Trump supporters countered with chants of ""USA, USA"" and ""Build that wall,"" prompting responses of ""F--- your wall."" This guy with the Free Hugs sign keeps trying to separate protesters & supporters to prevent fights pic.twitter.com/tyQvbXCfio — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) May 27, 2016 One man, wearing a ""Free Hugs"" shirt, repeatedly stepped between the two sides, seeking to prevent physical altercations.",REAL
"40 Views November 09, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News 
Today former U.S. Treasury Secretary just warned that Trump could be assassinated. 
(King World News) Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people… SPEAKING OF GOLD… To find out which company is set to become one of the highest grade producing gold mines on the planet and is one of the greatest precious metals investment opportunities in the world CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored 
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts continues: It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. 
Will The Elite Make A Move Against Trump? It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trump’s victory. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government. 
With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia’s border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful. 
Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washington’s EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed. 
We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance. 
Trump Could Be Assassinated If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable, Trump could be assassinated. 
Trump said that he will put Hillary in prison. He should first put her on trial for treason and war crimes along with all of the neoconservatives. That would clear the decks for peace with the other two major nuclear powers over whom the neoconservatives seek hegemony. Although the neoconservatives would still have contacts in the hidden deep state, it would make it difficult for the vermin to organize false flag operations or an assassination. Rogue elements in the military/security complex could still bring off an assassination, but without neocons in the government a coverup would be more difficult. 
Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the people’s dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president. 
We won’t know what to expect until we see who are the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. If it is the usual crowd, we will know Trump has been captured. 
The Discredited Mainstream Media A happy lasting result of the election is the complete discrediting of the US media. The media predicted an easy Hillary victory and even Democratic Party control of the US Senate. Even more important to the media’s loss of influence and credibility, despite the vicious media attack on Trump throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign, the media had no effect outside the Northeast and West coasts, the stomping grounds of the One Percent. The rest of the country ignored the media. 
I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Assured that Hillary was the sure winner, they were unprepared to put into effect plans to steal the election. 
Hillary is down, but not the Oligarchs. If Trump is advised to be conciliatory, to hold out his hand, and to take the establishment into his government, the American people will again be disappointed. In a country whose institutions have been so completely corrupted by the Oligarchy, it is difficult to achieve real change without bloodshed. ***ALSO JUST RELEASED: After Trump Shocker, One Market Is In Freefall! And What Is Happening In The Gold Market Is Unbelievable! CLICK HERE. 
***KWN has now released the extraordinary audio interview with Egon von Greyerz, where he gives KWN listeners a look what is really happening behind the scenes globally and in the gold market, and you can listen to it by CLICKING HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW. 
© 2015 by King World News®. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. However, linking directly to the articles is permitted and encouraged. About author",FAKE
"By Amanda Froelich at trueactivist.com
The new “right to disconnect” law mandates that a company with 50 employees or more cannot email an employee after typical work hours.
If you’ve ever been with friends or family members over the weekend then received an urgent email from work, you’re aware of the dread that fills your stomach and causes your mood to dip. Being unable to fully disconnect from work can have mental and physical health implications, which is why unwarranted contact by the workplace is soon to become illegal in France.
Credit: Wall Street Journal
Already, the country gives its employees 30 days off a year and 16 weeks of full-paid family leave; this latest initiative is only making France more popular. According to BBC News , the new “right to disconnect” law will mandate that a company with 50 employees or more cannot email an employee after typical work hours. The amendment is largely a result of studies showing that people have an increasingly difficult time distancing themselves from the workplace.
Good relays that the law seeks to make sure the French citizens are able to fully enjoy their time off. Said Benoit Hamon of the French National Assembly:",FAKE
"Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says Bernie Sanders added fuel to the fire that raged at last weekend’s chaotic Democratic convention in Nevada, criticizing him for choosing to denounce party leaders before condemning violence in a written statement.

“She says that Bernie’s adding fuel to the fire? She just added fuel to the fire,” Jones said Tuesday, shortly after Wasserman Schultz said in an interview that Sanders’s response to reports of a scuffle and threatening behavior by some of his supporters was “anything but acceptable.”

The problem that we have right now is that there has been this concern on the part of Bernie’s people that the DNC has been on Hillary’s side. ... First of all, Bernie did say, in his statement, that he’s against the violence. Also, if you want to talk about violence, only one person’s been arrested — it was a Hillary Clinton supporter, Wendell Pierce, arrested for assaulting a Sanders supporter. So, if you’re going to come out and you’re going to talk about violence and you’re the DNC chair, you have to be fair about it. I don’t think she was fair. I think she actually made it worse now. We have to pull these people together. That did not happen.

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski went farther than Jones on Wednesday, calling for Wasserman Schultz to resign.

“This has been very poorly handled from the start,” Brzezinski said. “It has been unfair, and they haven’t taken him seriously, and it starts, quite frankly, with the person that we just heard speaking [Wasserman Schultz]. It just does. ... She should step down. She should step down.”

Fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes, meanwhile, said Tuesday that it’s clear that Wasserman Schultz’s fingers are on the scale.

“It is clearly the case that when given truth serum, Debbie Wasserman Schultz vastly prefers Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, obviously, and to the extent that there are things that can be done institutionally and marginally to facilitate that outcome, they are being done,” Hayes said.

As the Democratic presidential nominating contest drags on — with the Republican race already over — left-leaning pundits are increasingly pinning the blame for disunity on the party boss, instead of the underdog candidate who refuses to drop out. Sanders might be stubborn, but Wasserman Schultz drove him to it by favoring Clinton from the start. Or so the argument goes. And the situation in Nevada seems to have turned up the heat on some long-simmering tensions.

Top complaints include briefly suspending the Sanders campaign’s access to a voter database and scheduling half as many primary debates (six) as the Republicans did — and putting half of those events on weekend nights, allegedly to minimize exposure and insulate the front-runner.

The database suspension was a penalty imposed after Sanders acknowledged that a staffer improperly exploited a software glitch that allowed him to view confidential voter information held by the Clinton campaign. The DNC eventually sanctioned four additional debates, though only three have been held and there is no date for the fourth.

The left side of the media has been criticizing Wasserman Schultz’s handling of the primary process for a while. “Fire Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” blared a to-the-point headline on the Huffington Post in December. On the same day, Slate declared that “Debbie Wasserman Schultz is acting just like the villain Bernie Sanders says she is.""”

More recently, Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce called for Wasserman Schultz’s ouster in March (though for reasons unrelated to the 2016 primary),

The liberal press isn't alone in its frustration. As The Fix’s Janell Ross wrote in January, “Wasserman Schultz’s list of enemies just keeps growing” — a list that includes some fellow Democrats and progressive advocacy groups. The consternation dates to at least 2014, when Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote a lengthy piece about unhappiness with her performance.

As of Thursday morning, a MoveOn.org petition calling for Wasserman Schultz to resign had 76,146 digital signatures. A similar petition at Change.org had 60,525. Another on CREDO Action’s website had 86,291.

It’s clear that Wasserman Schultz is in a difficult spot — one she almost certainly didn’t anticipate at the beginning of the election season. Sanders made the Democratic race far more competitive than anyone imagined. But as he delays the inevitable, Wasserman Schultz finds that she, too, is being cast as a divisive figure by the media.

On top of it all, the perception could be virtually impossible to shake. While Sanders will ultimately be judged by the extent to which he rallies supporters to Clinton in the general election, Wasserman Schultz is already being judged by moves she made early in the primary season that can’t be reversed. Sanders backers might always believe their candidate didn’t get a fair shake, and those accusations will probably be part of Wasserman Schultz’s media narrative for a long time to come.",REAL
"Russian experts collecting evidence of anti-govt chemical attack in Aleppo – Defense Ministry ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board “Wikileaks is the Mossad, Stupid, Not the Russians, We are playing them like a fiddle…” Assange (sort of) By GPD on November 3, 2016 
[Editor’s note: John Pilger was identified long ago as an Israel operative by author Jeff Gates. Wikileaks by VT and Zbigniew Brzezinski. RT was identified some time ago as “penetrated.” Both RT and Sputnik News have been used and, to some extent, “turned” to seem propaganda-like, more than usual and to make them an easy target. This is huge damage to Russia. g] 
In a John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday courtesy of Dartmouth Films, whistleblower Julian Assange categorically denied that the troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year have come from the Russian government. 
“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told the veteran Australian broadcaster as part of a 25-minute John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films. 
Assange, who spoke with Pilger at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been for four years, also accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House. Assange claims ‘crazed’ Clinton campaign tried to hack WikiLeaks 
“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick – for example faint – as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states.” 
Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude to Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign. 
Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50,000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and a close associate of the current presidential frontrunner. 
The Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a joint statement in October, claiming they were “confident” that the Russian government “directed” this year’s leaks. 
Moscow has rejected the accusation, with presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov calling the claims “nonsense,” while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “public bickering with Russia” before the US election is probably a “smokescreen” to draw the voters’ attention away from serious domestic issues. Related Posts:",FAKE
"Email Print In every competition out there, there will be a winner and a loser. It’s just the way that competitions work. Literally everywhere you go there are competitions going on and there are always winners and losers. When we are children, we are always taught to be gracious losers. Yes sometimes losing a tough competition hurts, but if you accept it graciously, people will always praise your character. The problem with today’s young generation is that they have forgotten how to lose graciously. Since the announcement that Donald Trump has won the presidential election, liberals have been protesting this victory. They’re literally ignoring everything that has been taught to them since we were children. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the result; Trump won the election and that is a fact. But these protests continue and there is one person that seems to be the mastermind behind it. That would be the ultra liberal billionaire George Soros. He was also responsible for financing some of the protest groups that was designed to have violence at the Trump rallies. During the election season, it was discovered that Soros was behind some of the protestor’s actions. He was paying them to create a scene and cause violence that would have the media talking about the Trump rallies. Now this shouldn’t have been happening in the first place but it was. And now that Trump has been elected president of the United States, there are people that are out on the streets protesting his victory. It’s a little ironic considering that liberals were the ones that were complaining about how Trump wouldn’t accept the election results if fraud was detected. Here is the issue though. There are people out on the streets that are protesting a presidential election. These are the same people that were the ones inciting violence at the Trump rallies. And those people were paid by Soros to start, so it’s likely that he is the one that is paying them to start civil unrest now. And there is a specific reason that Soros wants to have violence at the protests. That would mean that President Obama would have to declare Martial Law. This is how it works. It’s literally a domino effect. There are people out protesting the election results. But when they start having mass amounts of violence at the protests then the entire country is going to start noticing. If that happens then there is going to be pressure on the president to solve it. President Obama would then declare Martial Law. Martial Law is when the president has to suspend transfer of power due to the fact that there is a “National Emergency.” Therefore if that would happen then Trump wouldn’t be able to see the White House because Obama would still be the president of the United States. There is a good chance that this has been the back up plan for some liberals all along. And there is proof out there that the protests are staged. There are protests going on all over the United States and in one part of the nation, Austin, Texas, they found the buses that were used to bring the people in. Again these are planned in order to create civil unrest. And there is more proof. The signs that the people brought to the protests were all created and printed by groups related to the Soros cause. You can’t just print thousands of signs on a whim. These events have to be planned and thought out. And that is exactly what was happening. Finally the last bit of proof was that the Democrats and Soros have paid people to protest and create a disturbance at Trump events before. Since they have done it in the past, they are definitely going to do it now. And the Democrats are willing to pay them to create this disturbance. But the scariest part about all this is the fact that people are actually volunteering to protest the election just because Trump won. Again we are taught from a young age to accept defeat with graciousness. Right now they are acting like a bunch of spoiled kids because they didn’t get their way. And now there is a possibility that Obama is going to declare Martial Law because of these protestors. They couldn’t accept the fact that the country spoke and they wanted Trump in charge. But now they are actively interfering with a Democratic election because they want to complain about the choice. Again this is all most likely due to Soros. And he has had a hand in it before. He wants to see a globalized country and that means that he will do whatever he can to make it happen. That includes ordering an attack on Trump Tower in Chicago . That was where some of the protests in the country were happening. But he also had a hand in trying to fix the election. In 16 States they were using voting machines that were being produced by Soros controlled companies . Of course that meant that he was going to do what he could to rig the election. It most likely wouldn’t have mattered if you voted Trump; the machines were going to submit for Clinton. Share this article to show people that Soros has a plan for all of these protests. He wants to make sure that they create enough of a civil disturbance that Obama will declare Martial Law and stop the transfer of power from him to Trump. That way the globalist agenda could still happen. H/T: Conservative Daily Post However the best option is to not engage with the people that are out there. It’s like handling a two-year-old child that is throwing a temper tantrum. If you just ignore them they will settle down. Therefore just ignore the protestors and don’t engage with them. 
If you haven’t checked out and liked our Facebook page, please go here and do so. Leave a comment... ",FAKE
"Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is getting support from unions members across the county that includes a mix of long-time political backers and potential voters apparently wary of party frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street and Big Business.

Sanders has already gotten support from one of the country’s most influential labor leaders, Larry Cohen, the outgoing president of the roughly 700,000-member Communications Workers of American.

Cohen cited Clinton’s failure to publicly oppose giving President Obama so-called “fast-track” approval on trade deals under the pending Trans Pacific Partnership legislation, which unions argue, if approved, would send manufacturing jobs overseas.

He also told The Huffington Post that organized labor is not a rubber stamp for the Democratic Party “and certainly not for corporate Democrats.""

And the grassroots group Labor for Bernie 2016 has already pulled support from hundreds of union members with similar concerns.

“While we come from different unions and backgrounds, our goal is a government that carries out the will of the people, not prop up the profits of the 1 percent at the expense of the rest of us,” reads a letter on the group’s website that already has 1,109 signatures.

Some AFL-CIO chapters have also expressed support for Sanders, including ones in South Carolina and Vermont, which has resulted in group President Richard Trumka reminding state and local divisions of the labor federation that only national leadership can announce an endorsement, as reported first by Politico.

Though Trumka was in fact citing existing bylaws, the announcement was seen by some as an attempt to quell the Sanders uprising, considering Clinton and her well established campaign, right now, have a much better shot at beating Republicans in the 2016 White House race.

Democratic-leaning strategist Kelly Grace Gibson told FoxNews.com this week that Clinton and Sanders each have a grassroots following, though perhaps not composed of exactly the same people or groups. And she argued that a unified endorsement like the one the AFL-CIO gave President Obama late in his 2008  primary race against Clinton has a bigger impact.

“The purpose of the whip-cracking is … Trumka is trying to maintain the importance and weight of the endorsement,” she said.

Republican leaning strategist and lobbyist Matt Keelen say that ""at the grassroots level, most Democrats, at least those being talked about in the news anyway, are not particularly thrilled with (Clinton’s) corporatist, crony capitalist, Democratic strategy.”

Clinton, Sanders and fellow Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, reportedly have been invited to meet privately and separately with the members of the AFL-CIO’s executive council when they gather in late July in suburban Washington.

Meanwhile, Sanders, a progressive, continues to draw large crowds at campaign events, including 10,000 recently in Madison, Wis., more than 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa and 7,500 this week in Portland, Maine.

Sanders also has significantly cut into Clinton’s lead, according to a recent CNN/WMUR New Hampshire primary poll.

The poll shows Sanders has cut the lead from 38 percent to 8 percent in roughly the past two months, 43-to-55- percent, compared to 51-to-13 percent in May.

That Sanders is now getting union support and financial backing is no surprise, considering he has been a long-time champion for organized labor.

The top-5 campaign committees and leadership PACs for Sanders since 2009 are Sheet Metal Workers ($27,500); Communications Workers of America ($23,000); American Postal Workers ($20,000) Unite Here ($20,000) and Machinists/ Aerospace Workers Union ($20,000), according to OpenSecrets.org.

The group LaborUnionReport.com also conducted an informal survey recently in which respondents favored Sanders over Clinton 76 percent to 11 percent and reportedly cited such factors as Clinton's silence on the trade pact, her having worked for the Rose law firm, which helped employers fight unions and her having been a member of the Walmart board of directors.

Still, Sanders, a self-described socialist, will have a difficult path to victory even if he wins the union endorsement, considered essential for any Democratic presidential candidate.

Beyond Clinton’s much larger war chest, she also has a far bigger and more-organized campaign operation and Capitol Hill endorsements.

The Hill reports Clinton has endorsements from at least 26 of the 69 Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“I think it’s clear to say that Clinton is the candidate for most members of Congress and the Democratic establishment,” Sanders told the newspaper.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Donald Trump keeps saying that voter fraud could cost him the election, a charge that threatens confidence in US elections. But there's no evidence the type of fraud he alleges is rampant.

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wait for his arrival at a campaign rally at the University of North Carolina Wilmington on Aug. 9. The GOP presidential nominee claimed Clinton supporters could vote 15 times without a voter ID law.

Donald Trump has been claiming, of late, that if he loses in November, it will be because the election was “rigged.” After all, he says, look at the big, enthusiastic crowds he attracts at his events.

Of course, massive crowds do not necessarily foretell victory. Often they are more a sign of passion and devotion, or the entertainment value of a candidate, and don’t guarantee success – as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders saw in his losing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mr. Trump, it appears, is preparing the groundwork to lose, as his poll numbers in key electoral battlegrounds sink. In the meantime, he’s calling on his supporters to register online as volunteer election observers, and in the process is also gathering voter contact information and asking for contributions. So in a way, the “rigged election” cries are just another avenue for voter engagement.

But more ominously, Trump threatens to delegitimize the outcome in November, if he loses and convinces his supporters that Hillary Clinton stole the election. That could undermine the very fabric of American democracy.

“Something like this is unprecedented, as far as I know – where a major presidential contender openly raises doubts about the legitimacy of an election before the vote, and without any evidence,” says Matthew Kerbel, political science chairman at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

What’s more, it would be “extraordinarily difficult” to rig a presidential election in the way Trump suggests, Professor Kerbel says. “You’re talking about rigging an election in the Electoral College, where you would have to rig a combination of states.""

Perhaps the biggest protection to US elections is their decentralized nature. The US Constitution and federal law give states broad leeway in how they run elections, resulting in a multitude of voting systems, even within states. So to rig the results of a national election at the ballot box or with absentee ballots, a vast conspiracy would be required.

Trump has centered his allegations of planned cheating in a handful of key states. In Pennsylvania, he has bemoaned the fact that the commonwealth does not require a voter to present photo identification to cast a ballot.

“We don't want to see people voting five times, folks,” Trump said last Friday in Altoona, Pa. “I don’t even know, maybe you should go down and volunteer or do something. But without voter ID, there's no way you're going to be able to check it properly.”

Earlier in the week, in Wilmington, N.C., Trump suggested that Clinton supporters could now vote “15 times” for her, given the federal appeals court ruling last month rejecting the state’s voter ID law. The law, which also ended same-day registration and shortened the state’s early-voting period, had a racially “discriminatory intent,” the ruling said.

Trump has also raised the prospect of voter fraud in Ohio, another critical battleground state.

But the kind of cheating Trump envisions on a mass scale is virtually impossible to pull off – including in states that don’t require the showing of a photo ID. Even in such states, to vote 10 or 15 times, one would have to go to 10 or 15 different polling places and provide the names and addresses of people who live in those precincts and had not yet voted.

The call for “Trump Election Observers” creates the appearance that in-person voter fraud is common. But election experts call the rate of such fraud vanishingly small. In 2014, an investigation by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, found only 31 credible incidents of voter impersonation out of 1 billion votes cast in the US between 2000 and 2014.

To put that number in perspective, someone is more than three times more likely to win the jackpot in Pennsylvania's Cash 5 lottery as they are to have impersonated another voter.

What’s more, Professor Levitt points out, people in states with voter ID laws did not have greater confidence in the integrity of their elections than voters in states without such laws.

“The factor that really influences whether people think the elections are fair? Whether their preferred candidates win,” Levitt writes.

Another issue for the Trump campaign is the matter of a 1982 court order that limits the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge the eligibility of voters at polling places. The order bars the RNC “and its agents” from engaging in voter intimidation, especially in areas with large minority populations. The Trump campaign could plausibly be judged “an agent” of the RNC, says election law expert Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine, and thus the Trump observers’ activities could risk violating the order. And that, he says, could extend the order beyond its Dec. 1, 2017, expiration.

Trump’s warnings of a rigged election could have another offshoot: suppressing his own vote. One recent poll shows a decline in the likelihood that Trump supporters will turn out, a trend that election data guru Nate Silver suggests may be linked to Trump’s message about fraud.

In addition, a recent experiment by two academics suggested that the message of a “rigged election” was less effective at mobilizing voters than a more positive message, “registering is quick, easy, and free.”

Trump voters already appear primed to believe that if he loses in November, it will be because the election was rigged. A Bloomberg poll released last week found that 34 percent of all voters, and 56 percent of Trump voters, believe the election results will be rigged.

In a poll of North Carolina voters last week by the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, fully 69 percent of Trump supporters said they believed that if Clinton wins the election, it will be because the election was rigged.

Of course, American history is replete with examples of election hanky-panky over the years, including ballots being cast by dead people.

The contested presidential election of 2000, which boiled down to a 537-vote margin in Florida and ultimately a ruling by the Supreme Court, remains a hotly debated episode. In 2004, some Democrats were convinced that their nominee, John Kerry, was the victim of voter fraud in Ohio – a state that, had he won, would have handed him the election.

What’s different now is that Trump’s charges are being leveled well before Election Day. And he’s not even focused on what could pose a real threat to the integrity of American elections: hackers.

“There’s vital interest in our election process,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at a Monitor breakfast Aug. 3. ""We’re actively thinking about the election and cybersecurity right now.""

In a phone call Monday, Secretary Johnson offered federal assistance to state officials in managing the risk to voting systems.

For Trump, the claim that fraud could swing the election is losing its salience, as his poll numbers head south. Irregularities matter only in a close election, and as of now, it’s not looking close. But no one is calling the election over, and the “rigged election” argument isn't going away.",REAL
"Insider Leaks Bill’s 2-Word Nickname For Hillary, Exposes Dirty Sex Habits Posted on October 26, 2016 by Robert Rich in Politics Share This 
Bill and Hillary Clinton just can’t stay out of the spotlight these days, and the most recent leak about them could be the most damaging yet. As it turns out, someone once close to the duo just came forward to share Bill’s revealing nickname for his wife — but the worse comes as their dirty bedroom habits were exposed. Bill and Hillary Clinton (left), Photoshopped image of Hillary (right) 
It’s no mystery that Bill Clinton is a sexual deviant, but the most recent account given by the woman who had a 3-decade affair with the man is damning, to say the least. According to an exclusive interview given to Mail Online , Dolly Kyle was behind the scene’s long enough to not only know the two’s darkest secrets but even their dirty sexual habits – and now, she’s telling everyone. 
The connection between Dolly and Bill began when she was just 11-years-old. He was about 13-years-old at the time, but Dolly states that there was an immediate attraction, even then. As the years progressed, the two became romantically involved and stayed that way through several of their marriages over the next 30 years. Dolly Kyle (Source: Mail Online ) 
The real affair began in 1974 just after Dolly divorced her first husband, and although Bill wasn’t married yet, he would be within the year. Although she was never interested in sharing the intimate details of the relationship, she states that she snapped when she heard Hillary recently say that all sexual assault victims have the “right to be believed.” 
Knowing full well just what Hillary had done – between the threats and the lies – to the many women who either had an affair with or were sexually assaulted by her husband Bill, Dolly knew she had to do something about it. Unfortunately for Hillary, Dolly is now coming forward with the dirty 2-word nickname Bill husband once called Hillary, among other things. 
According to Mail Online , Bill approached Dolly at their high school’s 35-year reunion to talk about “ the warden ” – a.k.a. Hillary. Saying he was unhappy with his life and marriage, this was the least significant account Dolly had to share. A very unhappy Bill and “the warden” Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online ) 
In fact, Dolly recalls that Bill mentioned something about having a baby to her. Although she thought he was saying he wanted to have one with her, he was actually talking about Hillary. He wanted to put to bed the rumors that Hillary was a lesbian, even though everyone in their hometown already knew it to be true. 
Dolly states that the worst came when she met Hillary for the first time. “In that moment I noticed that the woman emitted an overpowering [body] odor of perspiration and greasy hair. I hoped that I wouldn’t gag when she got in my car,” she said. “The sandal-shod woman with lank, smelly hair stood off to the side and glared at everyone.” Bill and Hillary Clinton (Source: Mail Online ) 
No wonder Bill went elsewhere to fulfill his “sexual addiction,” as Dolly referred to it. After all, what else can you do when you’re married to a stinky woman who doesn’t shower and isn’t attracted to men anyways? Although an affair is never justified, it’s easy to sympathize with Bill on this one. But, I digress. 
The bigger point here is what the two are willing to do in order to remain in power. Most people know that you can’t trust Hillary as far as you can throw her – which isn’t very far – so the fact that she has any supporters is beyond baffling at this point. This woman is corrupt and fake to the core. Let’s just hope all of America wakes up to this reality before it’s too late and she can do any more damage than she already has.",FAKE
"TRUMPED! LIBERAL NEWS OUTLET BLOOMBERG POLL CONCEDES TRUMP BEATING CROOKED HILLARY IN FLORIDA by IWB · October 27, 2016 
by Geoffrey Grider DONALD TRUMP HAS A SLIM ADVANTAGE IN FLORIDA AS CRITICAL INDEPENDENT VOTERS NARROWLY BREAK HIS WAY IN THE MUST-WIN BATTLEGROUND STATE, A BLOOMBERG POLITICS POLL SHOWS. I can’t speak for south Florida , but as a longtime resident of north Florida I can promise you that there is a near frenzy of support for Donald Trump here. Over the past year I have seen endless amounts of Trump signs, stickers and banners. I saw a fair amount of pro-Bernie stuff as well. But pro-Hillary advertising? It’s practically non-existent, I haven’t even seen half a dozen stickers and absolutely zero lawn signs. So I find it astonishing when I turn on the “news” and hear the libs talking about Hillary’s double-digit lead over Trump. It’s not true, don’t believe it. Donald Trump is doing great and is on track to win the White House in just under two weeks. The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found . In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent. DONALD TRUMP RALLY IN SAINT AUGUSTINE DRAWS TENS OF THOUSANDS: 
With over 4,000 people already inside the Saint Augustine Amphitheater, I took 60 seconds to do a walk-thru of just a fraction of the thousands of people in the overflow section who stood there for hours waiting to see Donald Trump. This is the type of support Trump has here in Florida. Among independents , Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent in a head-to-head contest. When third-party candidates are included, Trump picks up 1 point with independents while Clinton drops to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson taking 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein getting 5 percent. “This race may come down to the independent vote,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “ Right now, they tilt for Trump . By a narrow margin, they opted for Obama over Romney in 2012.” Trump’s showing in this poll is stronger than in other recent surveys in the state. Trump is also surging ahead of HIllary in Ohio and and is rapidly closing the gap in Pennsylvania. CNN ANCHOR’S STUNNED WHEN FACT CHECKER CONFIRMS HILLARY’S CORRUPTION:",FAKE
"  Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Trump and all the other far right leaders are Zionist stooges By Ian Greenhalgh on October 27, 2016 Naming Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain and Marine Le Pen in France, the UN accused them of employing ""fear"" tactics similar to those of the Islamic State group. [Editor’s note: U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has really hit the nail on the head here. Not only has he correctly pointed out that Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine LePen, Geert Wilders and the rest of the far-right leaders employ the tactics of fear and bigotry but he also correctly identifies their agenda as being the promotion of hatred with the eventual result that ‘colossal violence’ will ensue. However, he does not go far enough in exposing these scumbags, most likely because he knows he would be placing himself in the crosshairs of the Zionists who stand behind these puppets. What went unsaid is that all of these people are stooges for the Zionists and Israel, they are tasked with creating horrible divisions in our societies, turning white against brown and black, Christian against Muslim, indigenous against migrant. This is the Zionist agenda to weaken and enslave via the strategy of divide and conquer, as laid out in the Protocols of Zion. They want to destroy our nations by promoting inter-racial hatred and violence; they want to see the nation states of the west burn down in a wave of racially motivated violence; that is why Trump spouts such hateful and disgusting rhetoric against Mexicans, blacks and Muslims, it is to promote a race war that would devastate America. Ian]",FAKE
"Home › HEALTH | US NEWS › CONTROVERSIAL NEW ‘ANTI-FAMINE’ GMO POTATO STRAINS APPROVED CONTROVERSIAL NEW ‘ANTI-FAMINE’ GMO POTATO STRAINS APPROVED 0 SHARES [11/3/16] The US Department of Agriculture has given its seal of approval to two new strains of genetically engineered potatoes. By using double stranded RNA, the potatoes have been engineered to resist the pathogen responsible for the Irish potato famine. 
There could be two new potatoes hitting the soil next spring after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signed off on two more genetically modified potatoes from Simplot, an agribusiness based in Idaho, on Monday. 
The only obstacle for the new potatoes becoming available on the market is a voluntary review process from the FDA, much to the chagrin of GMO skeptics. 
Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology, expressed concern for not only the FDA’s voluntary testing program but for the genetic modifying process the potatoes have undergone, in an interview with RT. 
“ It makes sense on paper, ” he said of the potatoes that are purported to be resistant to blight – the pathogen responsible for the Great Famine. However, one of the issues is that the effects of modified these genomes are largely unknown. 
“ When we tamper with the genome in the way that they’ve been doing with genetic engineering in our food supply, you end up increasing allergens, toxins, new diseases or other problems – causes massive collateral damage in the DNA” he said. 
But blocking the blight is not the only selling point of these scientific spuds. In addition, they are meant to be engineered to prevent bruising and black spots, have a reduction of a chemical that creates carcinogens when cooked at high temperatures and also ship better. 
However, all of these benefits could be a curse in disguise. The method used for engineering these potatoes is called double stranded (ds) RNA, meaning the genes of an organism have been reprogrammed or silenced. Post navigation",FAKE
"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › TRIGGERED: JOURNALIST SNOWFLAKES SCARED TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE ‘TURNING ON THE MEDIA’ TRIGGERED: JOURNALIST SNOWFLAKES SCARED TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE ‘TURNING ON THE MEDIA’ 0 SHARES 
[10/28/16] Triggered journalists from across the nation are bemoaning the treatment members of the press are receiving at Trump campaign rallies from the Trump supporters the media routinely misrepresents as ignorant racists, fascist Nazis, or disenchanted working whites. 
With increasing regularity, these journalist snowflakes are “reporting” their victimization at the hands Trump supporters who chant mean things like, “CNN sucks” and call them names like “presstitutes.” 
For members of the media elite, the occasional taunts and jeers signal a dangerous threat to the free press. During an interview with Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer breathlessly asked Trump’s campaign manager to ask Trump to stop calling out the press at his rallies because he is scared “there could be an ugly incident” between Trump supporters and the “hardworking young journalists” who cover his rallies. 
A quick review of media stories over the last two weeks reveals more than a dozen articles in major publications with the same “journalists victimized by Trump supporters at rallies” narrative. Trump supporters endure long waits, messy parking, and often obstructed view seating to rally for their candidate. The press, on the other hand, is given their own entrance, sectioned off seating, and protection from event security and the Secret Service. 
After an exhaustive search, this Breitbart reporter could find exactly zero incidences of members of the media being physically attacked or assaulted at Trump rallies. None of this has stopped the misleading characterization of Trump supporters creating a “menacing” and “dangerous” environment for these special snowflakes. 
The narrative sprung up briefly in August when NBC ‘s Katy Tur wrote a long piece in Marie Claire in which she gives her account of her confrontational relationship with Trump and the backlash his “insults” on her reporting created with his supporters. Here is a small piece from her “no-holds-barred” account: 
I was six months into covering the Trump campaign for MSNBC and NBC News, and there I was, in the belly of a World War II battleship, in a press pen made out of bicycle racks, surrounded by thousands of whipped-up Trump supporters. 
… 
Trump decided to go further in Mount Pleasant, pointing his finger squarely at me and launching a personal attack as millions of Americans watched at home. 
“What a lie it was,” Trump said, referring to the claim that he had left the stage abruptly. “What a lie. Katy Tur. What a lie it was. Third. Rate. Reporter. Remember that.” The crowd’s boos ricocheted off the iron hull of the USS Yorktown. 
Just a few days after the Tur piece was published, two other NBC press employees — Frank Thorp and Ali Vitali — tweeted out pictures and videos of Trump supporters showing insufficient deference to the press. It was so very traumatic that it inspired several stories, including this one in Real Clear Politics . Post navigation",FAKE
"Financial Markets , Market Manipulation , U.S. Economy Clinton Foundation , FBI warrant , investigation of Hillary , James Comey FBI , Weiner laptop admin 
Stewart Dougherty presents the 2nd part of his disembowelment of the Clinton crime machine. The Weiner email bomb dropped in the middle of this. As it turns out, the Weiner lap-top mishap appears to a “Black Swan” of sorts that eluded Hillary’s tentacles of control. In the piece below, Stewart presents useful background knowledge and intellectual tools with which to help you analyze and interpret the next sequence of events before and after the election (assuming the election is not postponed). 
The information that emerges from the Weiner laptop is going to blow people’s minds – John Titus, Best Evidence Productions, in an upcoming Shadow of Truth 
Author’s Preface: We are far more interested in markets than politics. To us, free markets represent liberty in motion. But today, politics, and particularly the most corrupt political institution on earth, the Federal Reserve, have markets in a hammer-lock. At this point, we have to understand what is happening in politics in order to understand what is likely to happen in markets. We write a great deal about politics at this critical juncture in order to help you understand markets and achieve the financial freedom you desire and deserve. 
Regarding the breaking Clinton-scandal developments, we believe that in addition to the 650,000 emails retrieved from the Abedin / Weiner computer which are going to show a level of corruption in this nation never before even imagined let alone proved, the FBI’s decision to re-open the investigation was related to the Bundy acquittals on October 27, 2016. We believe that government officials are looking up the barrel of a full-blown American revolution. Not the shooting kind, but rather something much worse for them: complete moral rejection of government and Establishment corruption by the PRODUCTIVE CLASS in America, which threatens to rapidly spread into and cripple the American economy just ahead of the holiday selling season. 
The National Retail Federation has just reported that 25% of shoppers are waiting for the election outcome prior to deciding how much they are going to spend during the holidays, something the NRF has never seen before. If principled, productive people feel that this election was stolen from them by Clinton and Establishment corruption, they are going to shut down. They are going to WITHDRAW THEIR FINANCIAL CONSENT from a rigged, dirty system that is looting them and destroying their futures. While the government can effectively deal with many kinds of protest, it cannot even begin to deal with a general economic boycott by the productive class, even if it is just at the margin. (All profits are at the margin.) The consequences of such a boycott upon general business activity; tax receipts at all levels from municipal to federal; the stock and bond markets; and the national mood, with its extraordinarily complex and critical interconnections and ramifications would be monumental, and perhaps beyond all American precedent. 
Despite a multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded Federal legal onslaught in the case against the Bundy’s and their co-defendants, the jurors re-confirmed something communicated throughout history. Namely, that while there are a very few things that universally disgust human beings, one of them is bullies. The people are not pleased, and the Establishment knows it is in trouble. Now on to our article.] 
The Clinton Syndrome Curse: A Clinton – Obama Co-Presidency. (The Clinton Syndrome: Part 2) 
In Part 1, we defined the Clinton Syndrome as a psychological condition in which voters develop a favorable attitude toward a political predator who deceives, disdains, swindles and abuses them. It is a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome, but much larger in scope and scale, as demonstrated by the fact that tens of millions of American voters currently exhibit the pathological condition. This Syndrome was identified by Inferential Analytics (IA), an accurate and reliable forecasting method we have developed and use. You can read a detailed explanation of the syndrome in our first article on the subject: “The Clinton Syndrome: The Establishment’s Weapon for National Conquest (Part 1)” LINK 
In this article, Part 2, we delve deeper into what the 2016 presidential election is really all about, and outline the consequences that will occur should the Clinton Syndrome prevail on November 8 th . The Clinton Syndrome has resulted in a potentially deadly national disease which will wreak havoc if it spreads out of control at this time. 
We regard as an existential threat to the United States the fact that tens of millions of American voters have no idea how deeply fraudulent the entire 2016 presidential campaign has been, from the very beginning. If Donald Trump had not appeared out of nowhere, this would never have been an election at all, but rather an orchestrated, planned enablement of the Clintons and their Establishment handlers to engage in unprecedented corruption, regime change and outright plunder. 
If successful, this still-active effort to fraudulently inject the Clintons into the power seat will become a multi-trillion dollar gift to the Establishment elite who know exactly how to profit from Clinton graft and corruption; will destroy what is left of the American economy, which simply cannot sustain four more years of intense looting and fraud; and will result in the outright overthrow of the American form of governance by a deadly new political system that we call “crony communism (outlined in our article: Crony Communism: Hillary Clinton’s Game Plan for America. LINK 
The people have been so confused and deceived by the multi-billion dollar avalanche of deliberately concocted lies and propaganda about this election that they don’t even know who is running for President on the Democrat ticket. 
Hillary Clinton has both a co-presidential and a vice presidential running mate, neither of which is Tim Kaine, a corrupt political suck-up and hack who was selected precisely because he will do exactly what he is told, not matter how criminal or immoral. 
Clinton’s co-presidential running mate is Barack Hussein Obama; her vice-presidential candidate is the United Nations. This is the Establishment’s Dream Team, cooked up to make the fastest possible progress toward their crony-communist and globalist overthrow of the United States. The Establishment realizes that the people are waking up fast to what is being done to them and their country. Therefore, they have put their corrupt machinations into high gear in order to beat the clock, which is ticking loudly. 
When people say that a vote for Clinton means four more years of Obama, they have their arithmetic wrong. A Clinton victory means eight more years of Obama in the next four, and a total knock-out for the nation. 
The Mainstream Media’s (MSM) deliberately false narrative is that Obama has been campaigning non-stop for Clinton because he wants to protect his “legacy,” and believes that Clinton will do this for him. 
This is yet another of the “Big Lie” mind bombs that have been dropped onto the American people’s heads during this colossally fraudulent, dishonest and propagandistic Establishment onslaught to get Clinton elected. 
This narrative is meant to suggest that Barrack Obama wants to retire, and then ride out the rest of his life looking upon his “legacy.” 
There are two problems with this story. First, Obama’s legacy is already blowing up in his and the entire nation’s face, so there is nothing Clinton will be able to do to salvage it. Obamacare and the Iran Deal are just two examples among dozens of the collapse of Obama’s so-called legacy, which would much better be called a national damnation. 
The second problem is that Obama is only 55 years old and has not given even ONE indication our model can detect that he actually wants or intends to retire. (Soros, one of his champions, is 86 years old and still wreaking havoc worldwide. These people never stop until the Reaper drops in.) In fact, what we see in Obama is the exact opposite: he demonstrates a strong desire not only to remain on the political stage, but to assume a larger presence upon it. 
Speaking at a rally in Philadelphia on September 13, 2016 (while Hillary was at home recovering from “pneumonia”), Obama said, “It’s good to be back on the campaign trail.” He then said, “I really, really, REALLY want to elect Hillary Clinton.” (Please carefully consider that sentence, because it is a textbook example (although just one of hundreds over the years) of Obama’s pathological Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He did not say, “I really, really, REALLY want YOU [the people to whom he was speaking] to elect Hillary Clinton,” but rather, “I really, really, REALLY want to elect Hillary Clinton,” making the people’s national election all about himself. Comments such as this are extraordinarily important to our analysis, and their significance has been borne out time and again over our 15+ years of doing this work. Paradoxically, the smallest factors often have the greatest implications. 
Later in the same speech, Obama boasted (our comments added within brackets): “More Americans are working [in part time, minimum wage jobs], more have [100% subsidized] health care, incomes are rising [for the establishment elite], poverty is falling [according to false, politically doctored numbers] and gas is $2.00 a gallon. Thanks, Obama!!!” In Obama’s narcissistically crippled mind, the entire United States economy is a function of one thing and one thing only: him. Narcissists in positions of power are extremely destructive (e.g. Obamacare), because they are completely out of touch with what is happening in the real, as opposed their self-flattering fantasy world. In any event, this kind of campaign bragging, swagger and grandiosity is not indicative of someone who plans to retire from politics in the next few weeks. 
Obama’s clear desire to remain in the game makes him valuable to Clinton, while also making Clinton valuable to him. Intersecting motives are where deals get done. And a Clinton – Obama collaboration would be ideal for the Establishment. Obama has been the gift that keeps on giving to the elite, as they have raked in trillions from his presidency. They want as much of Obama as they can get, because he is a money machine. (For example, witness Obama’s continuing efforts to ram the TPP, an Establishment fraud against the people, down the nation’s throat. Obama does whatever the Establishment tells him to do, in the full knowledge his “Library” Slush Fund will be richly rewarded for his efforts, just as the Clinton Slush Fund has been enriched by more than $1.8 billion, with a “b,” for the Clinton sell-out of people to the elite.) 
Obama is the most internationally-traveled president in the nation’s history, having made 51 international trips to 56 different countries during his two terms in office. It is as if he has been running for international office, and now we can see that he has been. His globetrotting has required strength, stamina and energy, the exact physical attributes that Clinton, who has been pictured requiring assistance to climb a short set of stairs, lacks. Given her health issues, Clinton cannot possibly perform on a global stage going forward; she will be lucky to successfully navigate the White House. 
This presents a problem. For the Establishment agenda to be fully executed, Clinton needs international support, and ideally, that international mandates be imposed upon the United States. But she will not be capable of traveling internationally to seal the deals that must get done. 
This is where Obama comes in. While he would never step “backwards” into a role such as, for example, Secretary of State (an ego-wounding demotion), his passion for continued political involvement would find an excellent home at the United Nations. 
In this Inferential Analytics scenario, Hillary Clinton will get Obama placed in a high level United Nations position. The United States pays for roughly 25% of total United Nations annual budget, far more than any other nation, and still has clout even though more and more countries are turning their backs on America. 
Other nations would support the idea of a senior role for Obama if it were made clear to them that his mission would be to continue the “fundamental transformation” of the United States that he promised during his 2008 campaign and has been conducting ever since. This “transformation” has done extreme damage to the United States, and while it has been a disaster for America, it has been good for the rest of the world. Finally, they see a means by which to bring the United States to heel. The idea of the further weakening of the United States will sound to them like a very good deal. The one assurance they will seek is that in exchange for giving Obama an important role at the U.N., Obama will get Clinton to agree not to incinerate the northern hemisphere in a nuclear war, at least not until they have finalized their preparations for it. 
A Clinton – Obama co-presidency will be a double body-blow to the nation, with Clinton turning it into a corrupt, crony-communist Establishment lootocracy from within, and Obama destroying it from without. 
Leveraging the United Nations, Clinton and Obama can effect two personal agendas they have long sought: gun control, and a multi-million person “open borders” invasion of America. The first agenda will disarm the people, which has been Job #1 in every communist takeover in history; the second will ensure that the “Last American Presidential Election” occurs on November 8, 2016. In the future, presidents and all other politicians and government agency heads will be appointed by the Establishment, exactly as happens in communist regimes. While there might be “show elections,” the outcomes will have been pre-determined at every level far in advance. 
A Clinton – Obama co-presidency will also ensure that other Establishment objectives are met. These include the institution of carbon taxes (an enormous and unprecedented new revenue source and looting opportunity); the passage of the TPP (an Establishment bonanza); and the maximum-possible imposition of the New World Order regime change agenda upon the nations and their people. 
While Obama could advance the Establishment’s aims in virtually any high level position at the U.N., a role that would make him particularly deadly at the outset would be Co-chair of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), joining current head Filippo Grandhi. 
Obama could make his appointment a matter of smooth sailing by stating his belief that the United States is a large, wealthy, relatively under-populated nation that could rapidly absorb a large number of immigrants. By promising to tap into the country’s private wealth, Obama could warrant that all new immigrants would be fully covered by the country’s comprehensive welfare system upon arrival, which is exactly what happens today. This idea would be intoxicating to the new Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who was the former head of the UNHCR and is an avowed socialist. 
The United Nations currently reports the existence of more than 60,000,000 displaced persons and refugees in the world. If the United States pledged to take in, say, 5,000,000 of them, senior U.N. officials would be delighted. What would they have to lose? Dealing with the integration and cost issues would be America’s problem, not theirs. The U.N. could pass a resolution, written by Obama in such a way as to make it convertible into an Executive Order by Clinton, mandating the acceptance of these refugees by the United States. Clinton would put up her hands and say, “I didn’t do it. The U.N. did it, and we must do our “fair share,” while also complying with international law and being decent and responsible international citizens.” 
As we have pointed out in the past, the United States government is irredeemably bankrupt by any accounting definition one wishes to use. With $20,000,000,000,000.00 in on-the-books debt, another $10,000,000,000,000.00 in debt projected to be added over the next decade (it will be far greater than this, given current trends), and at the very minimum another $120,000,000,000,000.00 in unfunded debt and contingent liabilities, there is absolutely no way the government can ever pay its obligations. So you might wonder, how could the government possibly pay for an immigrant invasion of this magnitude? 
The answer is, the government won’t pay for it; the people will. This is what crony communism is all about. It is estimated that today, there is roughly $70 trillion in private wealth in America. Assuming that half of it, or $35 trillion belongs to the cronies and is off-limits, this leaves $35 trillion that is available for expropriation and looting. While this is certainly not enough to fix America’s fiscal problems, not even close, it could fund 4 years’ worth of radical fiscal adventurism as well as crony communism regime change. 
As Hillary Clinton has repeatedly said during this campaign, “We are going to go where the money is,” and if you don’t take that statement seriously, we believe you are making a very big mistake. She and top colleagues such as Sanders and Warren have said in plain English, at a high decibel level that they are coming for your money, and they are, because in their minds, you don’t deserve to have any. Just as Obama once famously said, in a rare, honest, off-script, non-tele-prompted moment, “If you have a business, you didn’t build that,” he and his fellow crony communists also believe, “If you have saved some after-tax money, you don’t deserve to have that.” To them, any savings you possess represent funds the government should have gotten its hands in the first tax cycle, but didn’t. They intend to rectify that error going forward. 
We have outlined this theme to demonstrate that this election is about an agenda that very few people understand, because it has deliberately been withheld from them. In actuality, the voters have no idea what Clinton truly stands for, or what the Establishment agenda, which she fully believes in and will implement, really is. The stakes in this election are therefore greater than those of any other election in our nation’s history, in our view. This is why the Establishment has spent billions of dollars rigging it. They intend to collect trillions in plunder on the other side, but they can only do so if it goes their way. As we have already seen, they will stop at nothing to get what they want. 
Some Implications of a Clinton – Obama Co-presidency: 
Here is a snapshot of the forecast generated by IA in the event of a Clinton – Obama victory: The Clinton – Obama Co-presidential regime will be the most secretive and non-transparent presidency in U.S. history. Clinton will become invisible, just as she often has during the campaign, not just for health reasons, but because she will turn her back on everyday citizens, whom she disdains, once she gets the prize she has sought her entire life. Obama will make secret deals all over the world (think of the secret Iran cash payments and deal, and his behind-the-scenes agitating for TPP, but on a much larger scale, as illustrations). Every one of these deals will be a dagger in the nation’s back. The American people will never again know the truth about what actually goes on behind government doors, or about the corruption that infects the entire political and establishment system. The political class will never again allow itself to suffer Wikileaks-like exposure. Politics will shift to a CIA-like “need to know” model, where information is doled out selectively and in piece-parts. Only a very few at the top will know the overall agenda, and the full set of tactics being employed to achieve it. Anyone who compromises or exposes the system will simply be executed. (Seth Rich comes to mind.) Going forward, the people will know absolutely nothing about what is really happening in Washington, D.C., or about the D.C. / Wall Street and Establishment initiatives. Orwell’s prophecy, “1984,” which is already quite real, will become even more so. The United States will experience an accelerating Brain Drain. Forward-thinking people will realize that America’s slide into predatory crony-communism can and will never be reversed, and that it will be impossible for them and their loved ones to get ahead in such a corrupt, suffocating environment. (Imagine being scolded, lectured, insulted and talked down to on a regular basis by people like Clinton, Obama and Warren, because that is exactly what will happen.) Progressive countries will put out the welcome mat for hard-working, principled, skilled, entrepreneurial Americans. No one will want America’s whining, lazy, non-productive, “entitled” mooches. That’s just a fact. Virtually every nation anyone would actually want to move to for a better opportunity grades potential immigrants according to age, education, language proficiency, skills and likelihood to be productive. Prospects are disqualified if they do not earn a sufficient score. No sensible nation on earth wants to bring in do-nothings whose only capability is to leech off its producers. Productive Americans who remain in the country for their own reasons will quietly adopt a John Galt mindset, sidestepping the corruption and crony communist expropriation by shutting down, dropping out and fading off the radar screen. This will result in an immediate slow-down of business activity, which will ultimately lead to economic collapse. Given that all profits are at the margin, relatively small percentage declines in sales can entirely wipe out income. The John Galt effect will result in the collapse of the nation’s many Ponzi schemes, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, pensions (government and private) and the biggest one of all, Government Debt. These schemes simply cannot be maintained in a dramatically slowing business environment, no matter how much private wealth is looted. Government will take draconian steps to shut down all non-government-sanctioned news and information outlets. Their prime target will be the Alternative Media, which will only be further empowered, and embraced by the people. A powerful Resistance movement will spread like wildfire. Nonetheless, people should fill their minds with as much truth as they possibly can right now, because it will become much harder and more expensive to find in the future. Today’s Alternative Media is the greatest gift any people in history have ever received, and people should leverage it as best they can while they can. A steady retreat by government officials and establishment elitists to their multi-trillions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded bunkers will occur, as they seek to hide from the American people, who will be waking up by the additional tens of thousands every day. A Federal Reserve December rate hike has a 0% chance of happening if Clinton is elected; there is a 100% chance of a rate hike if Trump is elected. The Fed is a totally political organization, and they will do everything they can to punish the voters and scorch the economic earth if the people choose Trump over the Establishment agenda the Fed has been 100% behind. If Clinton wins, people will IMMEDIATELY be bombarded with MSM reports about the implications of the 2016 election upon the 2018 mid-term and 2020 general elections. This will be part of a full-scale effort to inject mass quantities of Hopium into the Trump supporters’ brains, and get them to focus not upon the rigged election of 2016, but on the “next” election where, they will falsely be told, their vote will “really count!” In the meantime, the Establishment will be doing everything necessary to ensure that the 2018 and 2020 “elections” are completely rigged, fraudulent and meaningless. A massive move into real money will begin, and this will be the subject of our next article. There are developments in this sphere that you must know about, and one of the most important Inferential Analytics themes we have ever examined was triggered on October 27, 2016. We will have a full description in the next week or so. 
In conclusion, the 2016 election is an existential event for the United States. W believe that the situation is becoming so unstable that you have little time to do everything you can to prepare, and get your personal houses in order. We are writing to help as best we can, while we can. 
Stewart Dougherty 
Stewart Dougherty is the creator of Inferential Analytics, a forecasting method that applies to events proprietary, time-tested principles of human instinct, desire and action. In his view, forecasting methods not fundamentally based upon principles of human action are unlikely to be reliable over time. He is a graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Business School and has developed IA over a period of 15+ years. 
October 31, 2016",FAKE
"Now that FBI’s reopened Hillary investigation, can THIS be far behind? (Hint: Bill, fire up the jet!) Posted at 2:15 pm on October 28, 2016 by Doug P. 
As we’ve reported, FBI Director James Comey said he would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server in light of new information: WHOA! FBI director tells Congress Hillary investigation reopening ‘due to recent developments’ (here’s the letter) https://t.co/SfcQhxBWzI 
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 28, 2016 
Can “total coincidence” number two be far behind? I think it's time for another Lynch/Clinton tarmac meeting https://t.co/IzD7715mA7 
— Kelly Riddell (@KellyRiddell) October 28, 2016 
We wouldn’t put it past them … again . Trending",FAKE
". FBI Wants you to Believe It Examined 650,000 Emails in 691,000 Seconds In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrong... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/fbi-wants-you-to-believe-it-examined.html In no surprise to anyone paying even marginal attention, the FBI’s clearing Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in its briefly reopened investigation — however, the time the agency took to reach this conclusion is not only bereft of logic and reason, it constitutes the most hubristic of insults to the public’s intelligence. In just 691,000 seconds from announcement to conclusion, FBI Director James Comey wants you to believe agents thoroughly examined over 650,000 emails newly ‘discovered’ on Anthony Weiner’s computer — including any threads resulting, as well as all attachments — before deciding Clinton innocent of wrongdoing.We, the people of this planet, are just not that stupid — nor are we even mildly amused by this farcical bullshit passed off as a credible investigation.Seriously.Indeed, the lightning pace of this putative second investigation not only boggles the mind, it forces uneasy questions concerning the true motivation and apparent exceeding necessity to ensure Hillary Clinton walks away scot-free amid rapidly mushrooming evidence of flagrant corruption and mendacious collusion.Just a cursory comparison of two investigations shows such marked differences it would be impossible not to question legitimacy of the FBI’s findings.In the summer of 2015, the FBI commenced its first probe into the former secretary of state’s use of a private email server during her tenure in office, after John Giacalone — then Director of the National Security Branch — met with Comey to voice concerns emanating from the Intelligence community about classified information possibly handled carelessly.For nearly a full year — 365 days, or 31,536,000 seconds — a sizable task force of FBI agents pored over an enormous cache , first comprised of 30,000 emails, but later totaling 44,900 after additional documents not originally handed over by the Clinton camp to the State Department were discovered. This means — rounding off the rough estimate of one year — the bureau combed an average of just over 123 documents every day. While that might seem to be manageable with a slew of investigators on the job, a basic comparison of the two probes proves the literal inanity of the reopened investigation.Later in the day on October 28, Comey announced the commencement of the secondary probe — albeit to the consternation of current and former officials who felt his telling Congress broke a number of investigatory guidelines, including possibly influencing the outcome of the presidential race.According to Comey, an additional 650,000 documents located on the computer of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s now-disgraced and estranged husband Anthony Weiner deserved careful scrutiny for pertinence and relevance to the original investigation of the Democratic nominee.Public and official speculation predicted a months- or years-long investigation, even with substantial manpower dedicated to the task.But on Sunday, November 6, in yet another shocker of an announcement from the FBI director, Comey inexplicably declared nothing of relevance to the Clinton investigation —“ no new conclusions ”— had been revealed in its secondary probe. This means — again rounding for brevity to eight days the total length of the investigation — FBI agents inspected some 81,250 documents each day. Granted, both estimates have been averaged and roughened, but only for comparison’s sake — and that contrast doesn’t survive the scantiest litmus test of believability.Not at all.Before the nay-sayers jump in with a there’s no comparison deflection, consider the following points.Although an algorithm or program combing those documents might indeed retrieve subjects of interest to investigators — keywords, germane subjects, accordant people’s names, and the like — in no way would such technological gatekeepers reveal subtle nuance as has been displayed in emails published by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton, campaign chair John Podesta , and the Democratic National Committee.Such fine gradations of meaning, naturally found in the English language but also purposefully employed to throw off investigators and interlopers, could not possibly be revealed by artificial means — at least not that quickly and particularly not with currently-available technologies.Still not convinced?Consider that if such technology did indeed exist to that discerning level of scrutiny in our heightened and overarching surveillance and police states, no criminal would ever roam free.Law enforcement departments and the National Security Agency together have amassed astonishingly voluminous data sets on every person in this country, including through emails and online activities. A technology advanced enough to comb for subtleties in language would hone in on criminal behavior and activity with incredible frequency.And while NSA programs have been revealed to hunt for keywords, there are limits to its effectiveness — no terrorist plot has yet been halted in progress because the intelligence to discover it hasn’t yet solidified to that point.Technology experts immediately weighed in claiming such technology does indeed exist, is frequently employed, and can do the job perfectly in a mere eight days — no worries.But, as Wikileaks rebutted in a number of tweets, it isn’t quite so simple.Emails between Clinton, her campaign staff, the DNC, and other insiders have proven to be a literal trove of revealing details — including Hillary’s use of the name of aide Huma Abedin as a deflection, and President Obama’s use of a pseudonym to communicate on the private server in an attempt to thwart future investigators.Programs and algorithms would have to be fed such information, but not all of those pseudonyms were known — and that represents only one such complication. Even working around the clock, as Comey alleged the FBI did in its second probe, 82,000 documents daily isn’t even worth comparing to the 123 averaged each day in the initial investigation. So, what are we to believe about the clearing of Hillary Clinton for a second time?That’s up to you — to each of us — to draw a conclusion.But to characterize that second investigation as anything other than a charade to placate an irate public would be criminal willful denial of conspicuous evidence — criminal willful denial that the utter bullshit the FBI just brazenly served the American people doesn’t somehow stink. By Claire Bernish Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
"Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and a vice president at New America . He is the author of "" Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad. "" This is an updated version of an article originally published February 19.

(CNN) This is how top national security reporters Souad Mekhennet and Adam Goldman of the Washington Post, who broke the story that Mohammed Emwazi has been identified as the notorious ISIS terrorist known as ""Jihadi John,"" describe him : ""a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.""

They go on to say that Emwazi ""was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London"" and attended the University of Westminster, which is a university in London that was founded in the early 19th century.

Emwazi poses something of a problem for the Obama administration's narrative about who becomes a terrorist and why. Last week, the administration hosted a three-day conference on ""Countering Violent Extremism,"" which is a government euphemism for how best to deal with Islamist terrorism.

We heard from Obama administration officials and even the President himself that terrorism has something to do with lack of opportunities and poverty. Obama said that ""we have to address grievances terrorists exploit, including economic grievances.""

He said, ""when millions of people -- especially youth -- are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas...""

The President did acknowledge that terrorists can be rich like Osama bin Laden, who was the son of a Saudi construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. It's hard to imagine someone with more opportunities. Think the Trump family Saudi-style, minus the bling, and throw in a deep admiration for the Taliban.

But, in fact, Osama bin Laden is more the rule than the exception. Take not only Emwazi/Jihadi John, but also the notorious British terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who attended the London School of Economics and who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002.

Nearer to home we can also point to the Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was not only an officer in the U.S. Army and a psychiatrist, but is also from a comfortably middle-class family in Virginia.

These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.

""Who becomes a terrorist?"" turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, ""Who owns a Volvo?""

We found that more than half of the terrorists had attended college, making them as well-educated as the average American. Two of our sample had doctoral degrees, and two others had begun working toward their doctorates.

None of them had attended a madrassa.

Of course, large-scale insurgent groups such as ISIS and the Taliban recruit foot soldiers who join the cause to get a paycheck. But the people running these organizations are in it for ideological reasons.

The diagnosis that poverty, lack of education or lack of opportunities have much to do with terrorism requires a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. This diagnosis leads to the prognosis that all we need to do to solve the terrorism problem is to create societies that are less poor, better educated and have more opportunities.

Kepel researched the 300 Islamist militants who were tried in the wake of the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Around one in five were professionals such as engineers, a quarter worked as government employees, just under half were artisans or merchants, one in 10 were in the military or police, and only one in 10 were farmers or were unemployed. Of those who were students, around a third were studying in the elite fields of medicine and engineering.

There are, of course any number of exceptions to the prototypical middle-class terrorist. The terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris last month and the Copenhagen café that was hosting the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks earlier this month were from the margins of society.

But for every example of poverty or lack of opportunities as a purported rationale for terrorism, it's easy to supply important counterexamples. The ""underwear bomber"" Umar Abdulmuttalab, who tried to set off a bomb on a U.S. passenger jet flying over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, is the son of one of the richest men in Africa and attended University College London, which routinely rates among the best universities in the world.

Anwar al-Awlaki, the late leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who tasked the underwear bomber to blow up an American plane over an American city, was studying for his Ph.D. at George Washington University before he took up arms with al Qaeda. Awlaki's father was a Cabinet minister in Yemen.

So if it's clearly not deprivation that is driving much Islamist terrorism, what is?

For that we must turn to ideology, specifically religious ideology. And this is where the Obama administration has to perform some pretzel logic. It is careful to explain that the war on ISIS is not a war on Islam and that ISIS' ideology is a perversion of the religion. Fair enough. But the administration seems uncomfortable with making the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist forms of Islam that are intolerant of other religions and of other Muslims who don't share their views to the letter.

The Taliban and other Islamist terrorist groups are not, of course, secular organizations. To treat them as if they were springs from some combination of wishful thinking, PC gone crazy and a failure to accept, in an increasingly secularized era, that some will kill in the name of their god, an all-too-common phenomenon across human history.

Indeed, while ISIS and like-minded groups and their fellow travelers are not representative of the vast majority of the world's Muslims, their ideology is rooted in Salafist ultra-fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, and indeed they can point to verses in the Quran that can be interpreted to support their worldview.

A well-known verse in the Quran commands Muslims to ""fight and slay the nonbelievers wherever you find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem [of war]."" When bin Laden made a formal declaration of war against ""the Jews and the Crusaders"" in 1998, he cited this Quranic verse at the beginning of his declaration.

ISIS' distinctive black flags are a reference to a supposed saying of the Prophet Mohammed that ""If you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khorasan then go to them, even if you have to crawl, because among them will be Allah's Caliph the Mahdi.""

In other words, coming out of Khorasan, an area that now encompasses Afghanistan, will come an army that includes the Mahdi, the Islamic savior of the world. The parent organization of ISIS was al Qaeda, which, of course, was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

Last year, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi named himself caliph, which means that in his own mind and in the eyes of his followers he is not only the leader of ISIS but the overall leader of Muslims everywhere.

These beliefs may seem like a crazy delusion to most of us, but it's important to understand that they are theological in nature, and this theology is rooted in ultra-fundamentalist Islam.

ISIS sees itself as the vanguard army that is bringing back true Islam to the world. This project is of such cosmic importance that they will break any number of eggs to make this omelet, which accounts for their murderous campaign against every ethnic group, religious group and nationality that they perceive as standing in their way. ISIS recruits also believe that we are in the end times, and they are best understood as members of an Islamist apocalyptic death cult.

What does that mean for policy makers? It means that the only truly effective challenges to this reasoning must come from Islamic leaders and scholars who can make the theological case that ISIS is an aberration. This, too, is an Islamic project; it is not a jobs project.",REAL
"For Democrats who might be rooting for Donald Trump, thinking he would be easy to beat in November, I have some advice: Be careful what you wish for.

In his campaign, or rampage, Trump has done more than take a sledgehammer to the Republican Party. He almost seems to be reinventing politics in a way that makes both major parties seem hidebound, sluggish and concerned mostly with self-perpetuation — which, in fact, they are.

When he announced his candidacy, no one outside of Trump’s household dreamed he would be dominating the Republican field with three weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses. Given the way he has set the agenda for the campaign, it’s tempting to call him a master strategist — except I don’t believe he has a strategy. Or needs one.

Instead, Trump is guided by instinct. The whole campaign has been like his stream-of-consciousness Twitter feed or his improvisational jazz-riff campaign speeches. He tests a new theme and gauges the response. If it’s working, he pushes harder; if not, he moves on. Kick out the illegal immigrants and build a wall on the border. Bar Muslims from entry because they might be terrorists. Abolish gun-free zones, even in schools.

Many of Trump’s positions are abhorrent. Many are inconsistent with traditional American values, Republican Party dogma, various articles of the Constitution and Trump’s own views in the past. But substance is, in a way, less important than style. Trump couldn’t possibly do half of what he promises, and probably doesn’t really want to do much of the rest.

The important thing is that Trump, by being transgressive in the way he speaks, gives listeners the license to be transgressive in the way they think. When he rails against “political correctness,” he’s talking about the manners and courtesies that many of us would call being “civil.” But his in-your-face bullying strikes a chord with the large segment of the Republican electorate that is tired of being polite: lower-middle-class, non-college-educated white voters who have not prospered over the past two decades and see demographic change as a threat.

Trump was quick to understand how angry the Republican base is with the party establishment. Vote for us, GOP leaders said, and we’ll stop illegal immigration, repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash spending to the bone, reduce the long-term federal debt and basically stop everything President Obama is trying to do. They failed to deliver — and now someone is calling them on it.

For Trump, saying outrageous things that would end any other politician’s campaign or career is no risk. On the contrary, it’s a necessity. His appeal to primary voters involves a bald-faced appeal to racial and ethnic animus; he gives his supporters permission to bemoan the fact that “they” — Mexicans and Muslims, primarily, but also African Americans and uppity women — are changing the nation.

Trump’s arena-size rallies have become set pieces in which big, boisterous crowds get to act out their “Make America Great Again” fantasies. If protesters didn’t show up to advocate the Black Lives Matter movement or tolerance toward Muslims, Trump would have to hire actors to play those parts. Antagonists are necessary for the moments of catharsis when interlopers are identified, scorned and physically ejected. It is theater, not politics, a symbolic enactment of the grand purification Trump promises.

The other candidate touching a nerve with the cultural and economic left-behinds — minus the racism — is Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, who is also kind of an un-politician. This is a bad year to rule anything out, so maybe Sanders will win both Iowa and New Hampshire and go on to seriously challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. But if he falls short, the eventual GOP nominee will face a formidable and experienced politician who cannot possibly run as anti-establishment.

If the Republican nominee is Trump, do you believe for a minute he would consider himself bound by the things he said during the primaries? I don’t.

Trump can hardly back away from his categorical pledge on immigration — to expel 11 million undocumented migrants and build a wall along the border with Mexico — so maybe that would energize Latino voters in support of Clinton. But he would do everything possible to lower passions among other loyal Democrats — while stoking them among the new “take back the country” voters he hopes to turn out.

How disgusted is the country with traditional politics and politicians? Democrats had better explore that question — or be surprised by the answer.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.",REAL
"Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she plans to run for reelection for her House seat and serve out her full term as DNC chair.

She is slated to wrap up her term as DNC chair in January 2017 and speculation has swirled around a possible run by the congresswoman.

Wasserman Schultz said she has ""gotten tremendous encouragement from constituents"" in her district, Floridians and donors, but ultimately decided against a Senate run.

Former Gov. Charlie Crist, another Florida Democrat, also said this week that he would not seek the seat currently held by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is up for reelection in 2016.

Rubio is eying a presidential run and has said he would not campaign to keep his Senate seat if he decides to run for president. Wasserman Schultz's announcement opens a wider path for two of her Democratic colleagues in Florida's congressional delegation who are considering a Senate run: Reps. Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson. Wasserman Schultz insisted that Democrats would have a strong field of potential hopefuls to retake the Republican-held seat. ""Whether it's against Marco Rubio or in an open seat there is a real opportunity to make sure that we have the leadership that Floridians can count on,"" she said.",REAL
"February 4, 2016, in Charleston, SC. 
And this? April 16, 2016 at Southwest College, Los Angeles. 
And this, less than two months ago on Sept. 11, 2016? 
On Thursday, October 26, 2016, Hillary was in Lake Worth, Florida for a rally. 
She walks up to the cheering crowd, as a bearded guy in sunglasses hurries to her side. 
He extends his left hand to Hillary; she clutches it tightly. The man then helps her to make a step up onto the platform. 
Just one step. 
Here’s the video: 
Later that day, Hillary leaves Florida for another rally in Winston Salem, North Carolina. 
Walking up a flight of 15 steps to board her campaign plane, while holding an umbrella in her left hand and clutching the handrail with her right, and “mumbling to herself” (according to Live Satellite News ), Hillary appears to be wobbly and unsteady. Halfway up the steps, she stumbles, tilting her umbrella down (0:17 mark). 
Hillary turned 69 two days ago on October 26, but moves like a disabled old woman.",FAKE
"Getty - Jemall Countess/Stringer The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
Megyn Kelly is a bit of a hot commodity nowadays, though one might not be able to tell that from the ire she is drawing from Trump fans. 
The Week, and other publications, kicked up a media frenzy this summer by speculating that Megyn Kelly was leaving Fox News, much to the delight of her Trump-supporting detractors: 
Megyn Kelly's contract at Fox News will expire after the election, and the star anchor has publicly confessed that she doesn't know what's going to happen after that. “I've had a great 12 years here, and I really like working for Roger Ailes. I really like my show, and I love my team. But, you know, there's a lot of brain damage that comes from the job,” she told Variety this spring. Image Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for People.com 
In an “exclusive” report from Breitbart, the bigwigs at the network were purportedly forming an alliance to “block” her, and in an eye-opening bit of potential foreshadowing for TrumpTV , the website wrote: 
At least one top talent inside Fox News has confirmed to Breitbart News that a major talent meeting among various different hosts is scheduled, and they are considering leaving with Roger Ailes to form a new network to compete with Fox. 
“Everyone here hates Gretchen and Megyn,” the anonymous source reportedly told the website. Gretchen Carlson would later leave Fox News . 
Of course, Roger Ailes was to be forced out after he was blitzed by sexual harassment accusations from a number of female employees, including a claim by Megyn Kelly. New York Magazine reported : 
According to two sources briefed on parent company 21st Century Fox’s outside probe of the Fox News executive, led by New York–based law firm Paul, Weiss, Kelly has told investigators that Ailes made unwanted sexual advances toward her about ten years ago when she was a young correspondent at Fox. Kelly, according to the sources, has described her harassment by Ailes in detail. Image Credit: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images 
Ailes would find safe harbor with the Trump campaign , whose presidential nominee Donald Trump later found himself under siege from sexual assault accusations . Recently, Vanity Fair published a story that the two media potentates had a “ falling out .” 
In August, Fox News appointed two executives to attempt filling Ailes' shoes: Bill Shine and Jack Abernethy, who were named as co-presidents. Due to a colossal media merger of AT&T and Time Warner, CNN executive Jeff Zucker is believed by some to have the inside track on taking over at Fox News. The Hollywood Reporter writes : 
CNN’s Jeff Zucker who, having worked for GE when he ran NBC, might be considered a more logical bridge to AT&T and, if rebuffed, might likely be open to the Murdoch sons' interest in having him come to run Fox News. 
The Murdoch brothers are not believed to share their father's conservative sensibilities, and thus there are concerns that the two would reshape the network into a much less conservative one. Image Credit: Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images 
With Sean Hannity riding high as a conservative pundit on the strength of his vocal Trump support, his ratings have even eclipsed Kelly's... at least for now. There is a strong belief by many that the host's unwavering support is an audition for TrumpTV, should The Donald lose the election. 
It's in this tumultuous environment — filled with intrigue at the network and turmoil across the media landscape — that Megyn Kelly's future has become uncertain. A leaked discussion of her contract negotiations sheds more light. 
As reported by Politico: 
Contract negotiations between Megyn Kelly and Fox News Channel have spilled into the media, with Fox News interim CEO Rupert Murdoch talking on the record to The Wall Street Journal (which he also owns via his other company, News Corp.) about the matter. 
According to the Journal's Joe Flint, “Mr. Murdoch said in an interview that she is important to the network and he hopes to get a contract signed 'very soon,' but noted, 'it’s up to her.'” 
Then Murdoch hinted, not unsubtly, “We have a deep bench of talent, many of whom would give their right arm for her spot.” 
As noted by the publication, Kelly is shopping around her talents as well, booking an expected appearance as co-host of ABC's “Live with Kelly!” Image Credit: Paul Morigi/Getty Images 
Megyn Kelly is also seeking a more lucrative contract: 
Flint reports that Kelly, who will make around $15 million this year, is aiming to get north of $20 million per year with her new contract. He also said he wants to keep Bill O'Reilly on as the channel's 8 PM host. O'Reilly's contract is also up next year. 
Murdoch also attempted to put rumors of a less conservative Fox News outlet to rest in the Wall Street Journal interview: 
“We’re not changing direction…that would be business suicide.” 
If TrumpTV indeed becomes a reality, the winds of change may shift again. Fox News will have a very different look — with or without Megyn Kelly — as a feud looms over who is the real “conservative” leader in cable news. ",FAKE
"Donald Trump has a go-to response whenever someone asks whether the angry impulsiveness he displays on the campaign trail befits a U.S. president — whether voters should trust him with his “finger on the trigger,” as the question is often phrased.

He opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

That’s always his answer. And it proves, according to Trump, that behind the bluster is a man of sober judgment who won’t rush the country into a war it will come to regret.

The problem with Trump’s logic is that, in 2002 — before the invasion — he actually said he favored going into Iraq. We learned this Thursday night when BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up an old interview Trump gave to shock jock Howard Stern, of all people.

In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

This is a good get. It shows that, once again, Trump is selling revisionist history to his backers.

But it’s also probably unlikely to change the minds of many people. The GOP front-runner has said that he was against the invasion so many times over the course of months that it is cemented as truth for those who support him. Until Thursday night, there hadn't been much reason to doubt Trump's version of events, because there had been scant evidence to contradict him.

And even now, it's likely Trump backers will look at this comment and think, He was put on the spot and didn't give a strong answer; maybe he hadn't thought it through yet and maybe he came to oppose it later.

This what Trump does. He strategically picks claims that are difficult to fact-check. In this case, it took months for someone to find the interview with Stern, which — having been conducted outside the mainstream news media — was tucked away in a place that journalists wouldn’t immediately think to look.

BuzzFeed appears to have been on the case for a while. In September, after Trump said during a debate that he was the “only person up here that fought against going into Iraq,” Kaczynski wrote that “there’s no record of Donald Trump being against the Iraq War before it started.”

True enough. But finding “no record” isn’t the same as finding proof to the contrary, which BuzzFeed didn’t turn up until Thursday. Others have tried to fact-check Trump’s Iraq invasion opposition, too, but they always seemed to be groping around for a way to prove a negative — that the Manhattan billionaire didn’t state his anti-war position as “loud and clear” as he claims today.

Proving a negative is always difficult and often unconvincing. There’s always a chance that you’ll miss something.

That’s what happened in November when the media tried to debunk Trump’s assertion that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. The media was left to prove that something Trump says happened didn’t happen. Reporters did their best, but all Trump needed to vindicate himself among supporters was to turn up a few clips talking about small groups of celebrating Muslims.

It didn’t matter then that Trump’s original claim about 9/11 was a wild exaggeration. And it almost surely won’t matter now that his supposed opposition to the Iraq invasion appears to be revisionist history.",REAL
"CLEVELAND—You could be forgiven for wanting to pop a valium at the end of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night. The Republican nominee painted a stark picture of a Hobbesian America that is nasty, brutish and short.

Trump essentially used the most important speech of his campaign – and perhaps political career – to yell fire in a crowded theatre. He warned that we are in “a moment of crisis” and made the case that these desperate times call for desperate measures.

While the message seem tailored to the same disaffected and angry working-class voters who fueled his primary victories, he clearly wanted to convince a national audience that things are so bad right now that they should swallow whatever doubts they have to take a chance on him.

“Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored,” he declared.

Trump is the crisis candidate. If voters feel safe, confident and hopeful in November, his team knows he will lose. To win, he does not just need to convince Americans that the country is on the wrong track – they already believe this – but that we are in the midst of an existential crisis.

“The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he said, repeatedly touting himself as “the law and order candidate.”

He spoke of a violent crime wave, murderous illegal immigrants “roaming free,” innocent children “sacrificed on the altar of open borders,” and an America “shocked to its core.” He described the current environment as “more dangerous … than, frankly, I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.”

Then he suggested that elites are covering up how bad things have gotten. “I will tell you the plain facts that have been edited out of your nightly news and your morning newspaper,” he declared.

Trump also spoke of “growing threats from outside” the country. “After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before,” he said. “This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.”

The newly-minted nominee grasped for the mantle of change agent without offering many specifics. “A change in leadership is required to produce a change in outcomes,” he said.

-- Clocking in at 76 minutes, it was the longest acceptance speech at any major party convention since 1972 – drawing comparisons to Fidel Castro. Yet Trump never tried to be uplifting or inspiring.

When he’s not reading from a teleprompter, he can be charming and magnetic. He can also be somewhat self-deprecating, which supporters find ingratiating. But he did not try to be in this setting.

“In a remarkable departure from past GOP conventions, Trump made no mention of God, religion or his faith,” Philip Rucker and David Fahrenthold note.

-- “ Making America Afraid Again” is how David Maraniss sums up the week.

-- The Post’s Editorial Board calls Trump “the candidate of the apocalypse”: “No doubt, for many of his listeners, his words expressed a deeply felt emotional reality. There is real fear in the land; real pain. But it will take real leadership, not the wishful, demagogic brand Mr. Trump embodied Thursday night, to address this.”

-- Many of the claims don’t hold up under scrutiny. Our in-house Fact Checkers challenge the accuracy of 25 different assertions Trump made last night. “The dark portrait of America … is a compendium of doomsday stats that fall apart upon close scrutiny,” Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee write. “Numbers are taken out of context, data is manipulated, and sometimes the facts are wrong. When facts are inconveniently positive — such as rising incomes and an unemployment rate under 5 percent — Trump simply declines to mention them. He describes an exceedingly violent nation, flooded with murders, when in reality, the violent-crime rate has been cut in half since the crack cocaine epidemic hit its peak in 1991.” (Max Ehrenfreund has more on why Trump’s crime stats were cherry picked and misleading; read an annotated version of the full transcript here.)

“If reality does not conform to what Trump needs reality to be to support his case, he will invent a new reality,” E.J. Dionne writes.

-- An array of key Republican thought leaders expressed angst and alarm about the tenor of Trump’s speech. Here’s a sampling of the reaction:

A conservative blogger in the Never Trump camp:

The editor-in-chief of the conservative Richochet.com:

A GOP pollster who specializes in outreach to young people:

The conservative columnist at the NYT:

The mainstream media was also taken aback by the gloom—

The Financial Times’s U.S. columnist:

A culture reporter for the New York Times:

-- Trump really does want to be the New Nixon.

As promised earlier this week, his speech heavily drew on and echoed Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech at the 1968 convention.

“I am your voice,” Trump said, saying that he will fight tirelessly for millions who have been “forgotten.""

Like Nixon, Trump is clearly motivated by profound grievance and a yearning to be shown respect by elites who have never taken him seriously. He bragged at both the beginning and the end of his speech about how many votes he received in the primaries and how he proved the pundits wrong. ""Oh, we love defeating those people, don’t we?” he asked the crowd. “I am with you. I will fight for you. And I will win for you.”

“I wonder what my dad would think of my tremendous success,” Trump said late in the speech. But he did not sketch out autobiographical details that could have made him more relatable. In Nixon’s 1968 RNC speech, for instance, he spoke poignantly about being a poor boy in California listening to the train go by at night and dreaming of a better future. We got nothing like that from Trump, perhaps because the billionaire does not have those kinds of stories to tell…

-- A textbook cult of personality: Trump did, however, present himself as a white knight who is singularly capable of restoring order.

“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he insisted.

“I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police,” he said at another point. “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me.”

Wonkblog’s Jim Tankersley compares the text of Trump’s speech last night to Reagan’s speech at the GOP convention in Detroit in 1980: “Most strikingly, Reagan warned voters to place their faith in free people, not powerful leaders. ‘'Trust me' government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what's best for us,’ he said. ‘My view of government places trust not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs -- in the people.’”

In this vein, Post opinion blogger Alexandra Petri describes the final night of Trump’s convention as a “creepy, fascist infomercial”: “Donald Trump is selling America a miracle juicer. The juicer is Donald Trump. It is orange and it will never let you down. If you order now, Donald Trump will send you another one free.”

-- More broadly, Trump clearly believes in his heart that government is the solution to our problems. This is, of course, should be anathema to intellectually honest movement conservatives and is totally at odds with 36 years of orthodoxy.

The political editor at BuzzFeed, who previously wrote for the conservative Free Beacon:

-- Trump rejected other core tents of modern conservatism, as well. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he said.

-- But Trump now owns the Republican Party – at least until November. The audience cheered and applauded for a lot of lines that conservatives in the not distant past would have booed a Democrat for saying. He sounded protectionist and isolationist themes. Sure, not everyone was applauding. And perhaps some in the audience didn’t understand what exactly he was referring to. But the crowd was with him.

-- Trump’s alarmism makes it imperative for Democrats to offer a counter-narrative next week.

Most Democrats are still far too dismissive of Trump’s chances. They discount him at their own peril. Just ask Jeb, wherever he’s hiding out this week.

Remember Bill Clinton’s speech at the Charlotte convention in 2012? He effectively laid out the case that the economy had improved dramatically compared to what Obama had inherited when he took office in Jan. 2009.

Obama himself speaks next week in Philadelphia, and you can bet he’ll try to rebut the picture that Trump painted of the economy and the country.

-- It’s all over but the SHOUTING. My ears are still ringing a little bit after Trump basically yelled his entire speech. A lot of male pundits have taken heat for saying Clinton shouts when she talks; these guys ought to call out Trump for doing so last night.

A ton of online buzz was about the yelling—

-- To his credit, Trump again showed he can be self-disciplined when he wants to be – for a night. Normally he ad-libs in response to a chanting crowd, but he mostly kept chugging along and sticking to the script. As the crowd chanted “lock her up” – a mantra of this convention – Trump didn’t take the bait. “Let’s defeat her in November,” he replied.

A few minute later, a protestor to his left disrupted his speech and held up a sign that said “Build bridges, not walls.” Trump stood patiently, if a little perturbed looking, as the crowd drowned her out with chants of “USA.” At a normal rally, he’d rile up the audience into a frenzy by yelling, “Get ‘em out of here!” But last night, he took a dramatic pause before bellowing, “How great are our police?” The crowd loved it.

-- Looking to the next 100 days, many Republican experts believe Trump did little to expand his appeal beyond the base. “It may be that this speech was so unusual–relentlessly negative and high decibel–that it will punch through more the analysts realize,” National Review Editor Rich Lowry writes. “But it’s hard to believe it’s going to widen his appeal. He didn’t even seem interested in trying to show voters that he has more range than he is shown over the last year. This was a Trump rally dressed up with fancy trappings and a ballon drop afterwards. Surely, Trump’s attitude is that this approach got him this far so why change? And that is the gamble of his entire campaign.”

The former communications director for the NRSC:

-- A coming out party for the GOP:

Another notable moments from last night that will be remembered was when billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel told the convention, “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.” It was the first declaration of its kind, and most of the delegates stood and cheered.

Then, in his speech, Trump referred to the massacre of “49 wonderful Americans” at a gay nightclub in Orlando and promised to “protect our LGBTQ citizens.” The crowd cheered.

Trump paused. “As a Republican, I have to say, it is so nice to hear you cheering,” he said.

What a sea change. The official party platform, ratified earlier this week, continues to oppose gay marriage. But the times, they are a changin’.

Even the running-mate Trump picked to appeal to social conservatives got in on it:

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:

WE MAY FIND OUT HILLARY'S V.P. CHOICE THIS AFTERNOON, even though she is not expected to formally announce her choice until tomorrow:

-- The headline in The New York Times is “Tim Kaine Seems Likely for Hillary.” The Wall Street Journal says “Kaine Seen as Clinton’s VP Pick.” The AP’s Ken Thomas and Matthew Barakat write that “Kaine, 58, has been a favorite … since the start.”

-- The timing: Kaine has a series of fundraisers scheduled in Massachusetts on Friday and Saturday. “If the Virginia senator cancels, that’s a strong indication he’s been picked,” the Boston Globe’s Annie Linskey reports. “Kaine’s first fundraiser is set for noon Friday at the University of Massachusetts Club in Boston. On Saturday Kaine is scheduled to be on Nantucket at the Chanticleer Garden for a 5:30 pm reception.""

“Text messages could go out from the campaign announcing the pick as soon as Friday after an event she’s holding here in Orlando,” Linskey adds. “Clinton is appearing at the site of the Pulse nightclub shooting this morning, making it unlikely that a selection would be announced before then.”

-- Elizabeth Warren does not think it’s her: ""I think if it was me, I'd know it by now,"" the Massachusetts senator told Stephen Colbert last night.

-- Some Democrats caution against discounting Tom Vilsack, per John Wagner and Anne Gearan.

-- There’s a push among some lefties to prevent HRC from picking Kaine or Vilsack. They grumble that the Virginian is too close to the financial services industry and the Ag secretary is too close to “corporate agri-business.”

-- Kaine signed a bipartisan letter just this Monday urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to “carefully tailor its rulemaking” regarding community banks and credit unions so as not to ‘unduly burden’ these institutions with regulations aimed at commercial banks, Anne Gearan reports. “At issue are compliance rules under Dodd-Frank.” Kaine also signed a second letter on behalf of regional banks seeking relief from liquidity reporting requirements. Critics say both requests help banks of many sizes avoid oversight.

-- Kaine brushed the criticisms aside: “People are going to say whatever they want, but I’m strongly for the regulation of the financial industry,” he told reporters in Northern Virginia. “If you spend a lot of time over regulating credit unions and community banks, you are basically letting a lot of the big guys off easily.”

-- Kaine also said he’s undecided on TPP and still open to voting for it. “I see much in it to like,” he told The Intercept, calling the deal an “upgrade” of labor standards, environmental standards and intellectual property protections. But he also voiced concerns about the “dispute resolution mechanisms.”

-- Teasing reporters, Clinton tweeted pictures of Cory Booker from her official account:

THE OLYMPICS ARE SHAPING UP TO BE A DEBACLE:

-- Waterways surrounding Rio’s Olympic Park are so sewage-infested and filthy that they “bubble with sulfur and methane gases,” while dead fish float atop the surface. There are public health concerns for athletes and visitors. (Dom Phillips)

-- Ten people suspected of planning terrorist attacks during the games were arrested. Members of the gang had declared loyalty to ISIS and were in negotiations to buy an assault rifle over the internet. (Dom Phillips)

-- Researchers found traces of Zika occurring in the common “Culex” species of mosquito in Brazil, a potentially alarming discovery that could portend wider transmission of the virus. (Dom Phillips)

-- Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan both publicly disagreed with Trump for saying the U.S. would not necessarily come to the aid of a NATO ally if it is invaded by Russia. The Senate Majority leader called NATO “the most successful military alliance in the history of the world” in a Facebook chat with The New York Times. “The speaker believes the U.S. should defend our NATO allies,” a Ryan spokeswoman said. “My hope is that if Donald is elected president, we can convince him to change his mind on it,” said Marco Rubio. “I’m 100 percent certain how Russian President (Vladimir) Putin feels,” said Lindsey Graham. “He’s a very happy man.” (AP)

-- “The ‘alt right’ finds a home inside the Republican convention,” by David Weigel: Geert Wilders strolled toward Quicken Loans Arena, drawing the usual amount of double takes. “‘He heads the Freedom Party in the Netherlands,’ [Rep. Steve King] explained to a delegate who was wondering about the fuss. … In another year the far-right Wilders would not have made it past the perimeter. He has proposed moratoriums on new Muslim immigration to his country and a similar halt on mosque construction. But the rise and nomination of [Trump] had inspired Wilders — and expanded his American fan base. He was just one of many people who might have been labeled extremists, and whose views are rejected by the old elite of the Republican Party, but who attended the convention and related events with a sense that their politics were finally winning.”

Many members of “racially conscious” and anti-immigrant alt-right movement came to Cleveland to celebrate Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP. ""They held meetings, co-hosted parties and happily met the news media. Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, held a cheeky sign encouraging journalists to “interview a ‘racist.’”

-- As Ted Cruz continued to dig in on his refusal to endorse Trump, the nominee said the crowd booing the Texas senator is evidence that the GOP has coalesced behind him. From Sean Sullivan and Philip Rucker: Addressing donors at a closed-door lunch, Trump said that he, Reince Priebus and campaign chairman Paul Manafort knew what they were doing when they let Cruz speak. ""I am not going to call him Lyin' Ted anymore, but he did sign the pledge and it was pretty definitive. He isn't a team player,” Trump said, people in the room told Sean Sullivan and Phil Rucker report. “At the Thursday lunch, Trump also called criticized Jeb Bush and John Kasich, who skipped the convention and are not backing Trump. ‘If I got beaten as bad as Kasich got beaten by me I wouldn’t support him either,’ Trump said of Kasich … Trump praised Marco Rubio and Rick Perry, who voiced support for Trump during their convention remarks. Rubio delivered brief remarks in a pre-recorded video and did not attend. Trump also took a dig at Mitt Romney.”

-- Cruz manager Jeff Roe, responding to Chris Christie criticism of his boss’s speech, said the New Jersey governor ""turned over his political testicles long ago."" (The Chris Stigall Show)

-- Donald Trump Jr. said they can win without Cruz’s endorsement: “We knew what was coming. We let him do it. We were the bigger men,” he told NBC.

-- Trump ally Roger Stone suggested that The Donald could back a primary challenger to the Texas senator when he’s up for reelection in 2018. (Huffington Post)

-- A lip reader told “Inside Edition” that, as Cruz walked off stage, Trump can be seen on video asking his daughter, “Do you think I made a mistake?”

-- Ross Douthat praises Cruz in his NYT column: “The future is (unknown) — but you can make sure that when the history of the present year is written, your place won’t be with those timid and temporizing souls who surrendered both their party and their dignity to Trump. That’s what Cruz earned himself last night: not a better chance at the presidency, but a profile in political courage that will be remembered no matter what happens to his political ambitions henceforth. And it’s yet another irony of this most ironic year that it would be the most overtly Machiavellian of Republican politicians who would keep his honor, and pass a test that so many politicians of more conspicuous high-mindedness have failed.”

-- Though Mike Pence’s Cleveland introduction speech was overshadowed by Cruz, many conservatives were nonetheless impressed -- and see him as a tame, straight-laced figure to help balance Trump. Support for the Indiana governor has grown since Trump's prolonged and awkward roll-out of his running-mate.

-- “Pence’s role: Be to the GOP what Trump cannot,” by Ed O'Keefe: “Indiana Republican Craig Dunn said that his state’s governor ... ‘is going to be a firefighter’ — extinguishing political blazes caused by Trump. Pence is widely expected to carry out the key duty of defending Trump among Republicans still skeptical of his candidacy. He is likely to be called on to clarify Trump’s ever-shifting views on policy ... In the coming weeks, Pence plans to play an active role as one of the main conduits between the Trump operation and the GOP donor class.""

-- Trump settles on a preferred Super PAC. There have been half a dozen entities jockeying to be the main pro-Trump vehicle, which has confused donors and hampered fundraising, Matea Gold reports. There’s also been confusion since the nominee spent the primary season trashing Super PACs. “Trump and his running mate have both expressed willingness to headline fundraisers for Rebuilding America Now, according to Ken McKay, the group's chief strategist (formerly Chris Christie’s campaign manager). Such appearances are permitted by the Federal Election Commission, as long as the candidates do not solicit more than $5,000. Pence offered an explicit statement of support for the group that was shared during a presentation to several dozen donors at the Ritz-Carlton Wednesday.” The group aims to raise $100 million.

-- The Trump campaign said it raised $3.5 million in a 24-hour period that included Pence’s acceptance speech. While impressive, that’s still less than half the $6.4 million Bernie Sanders raised in a 24-hour period after winning the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Matea notes.

--  Bloomberg got ahold of the guest lists for six of the suites in Cleveland: “Some names were predictable, like Sheldon Adelson … Others are more surprising, like Todd Ricketts, whose family spent millions of dollars bankrolling an anti-Trump campaign during the Republican primary. Ricketts, whose family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team, attended the convention as an Illinois delegate and was invited to a suite because of his longtime support for the party, despite not having contributed to Trump … Two other prominent anti-Trump donors, Paul Singer of New York and Richard Uihlein of Wisconsin, were also represented. While Singer skipped the convention, his staffers were in town and made the guest list of a suite for convention donors.” See the six-page list here.

-- “FEC Dems trolling for violations at GOP convention t-shirt stands,” from the Washington Examiner: “Democrats on the Federal Election Commission are trolling through the Republican National Convention looking for violations of elections laws, even at the t-shirt stands. Commissioners Ann Ravel and Ellen Weintraub are here looking into what vendors are offering and if they are following the rules. They are paying attention to groups also looking for violators at the convention. Weintraub even took a picture, posted on Twitter, of one vendor's stand and wrote, ‘We're on it — RNC vendors appear to be compliant!’ She was reacting to a tweet from a staffer for the Sunshine Foundation who is also here searching for violations big and small.”

-- Trump’s Muslim ban continues to evolve: “We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism,” he said, “until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place.” He did not specify what that means. Hasn’t France been “compromised by terrorism,” for instance? But the line played well with the crowd.

— ZIGNAL VISUAL: Zignal Labs tracked more than 6.4 million cross-media mentions of the Republican convention. On social media, at least, Melania Trump's plagiarism was the hottest story of the convention. That was followed by Cruz's snub of the nominee. Thursday tied Tuesday for most convention-related mentions, at 1.7 million.

Among the ""undercard"" speakers, Peter Theil received the most online reaction:

Here's some of how Clinton's campaign responded:

Ivanka Trump, the candidate’s oldest daughter, tried to present her dad as a champion for working moms. “I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat,” the 34-year-old said. “More than party affiliation, I vote based on what I believe is right for my family and my country.”

Oh boy -- this gif of Trump touching his daughter awkwardly... (click to watch):

-- In case you were wondering,  Sanders plans on being ""a unifying force"" in Philadelphia. A spokesman said he has “no plans” to channel Cruz and snub Clinton. “He’s not Ted Cruz, in so many ways,” said Michael Briggs. He'll host a pre-Philadelphia meeting with many of the 1,900 delegates representing him to talk about what ""he’s accomplished in the past year and where we go from here,"" per John Wagner.

Here's video of the Code Pink protester who made it into the arena (click to watch):

In response to online chatter that she made a Nazi salute while speaking at the convention, Laura Ingraham posted this:

The RNC's chief strategist agreed -- live on television -- with a congressman that Cruz is an ""a--hole"":

Neocons are falling away from the GOP because of Trump and his comments about NATO:

Estonia's president, whose country's very survival Trump threatened with his flip comment, responded as well:

Another scene from Cleveland, via the Washington Examiner:

Outside of Cleveland, Michele Bachmann posted this about Black Lives Matter:

On the campaign trail: Clinton is in Orlando and Tampa, Fla.

At the White House: Obama holds a bilateral meeting with Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, followed by a joint press conference.

On Capitol Hill: The Senate and House are out.

NEWS YOU CAN USE IF YOU LIVE IN D.C.:

-- Expect SCALDING hot temps to usher us into the weekend, per the Capital Weather Gang’s Friday morning forecast. “Ready to rumble in the heat dome? Mid-to-upper 90s for afternoon high temperatures feel closer to 100+ (even by lunch hour!) thanks to nearly-oppressive dew points near 70 degrees. Any early clouds dissipate quickly, but we could have another batch of clouds during the afternoon give us some natural shade at times. Isolated thunderstorms, especially north of town, can’t be ruled out completely.”

-- The Nationals lost to the Dodgers 6-3.

-- A transit union is suing Metro on behalf of Seyoum Haile, a Metro mechanic who was fired after last year’s deadly L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident. Union officials are seeking reinstatement for Haile, saying his actions should have only resulted in a temporary suspension. (Martine Powers)

-- George Washington University said it is bringing in outside counsel to assist in investigating allegations against men’s basketball coach Mike Lonergan, after players complained about “verbal and emotional abuse” and player mistreatment by the six-year-coach. (Des Bieler)

-- A 68-year-old man was pumping gas in Southeast D.C. yesterday morning when a robber walked up and shot him. Then he hopped into his car and sped off in broad daylight. Police are calling it “senseless murder.” (LaVendrick Smith and Lynh Bui)

Michelle Obama did carpool karaoke with James Corden and Missy Elliott:

The Saturday Night Live cast put together a bunch of sketches from the convention:

Go inside the convention in 360 degrees with The Post's video team:

In this pro-Clinton video, a Trump impersonator tweets instead of picking up the red phone:

""Young Turks"" host Cenk Uygur went off on Alex Jones after Jones crashed his livestream at the convention:

Watch video footage of the moments before an unarmed therapist Charles Kinsey was shot by North Miami police:

Kinsey spoke about the shooting from the hospital:

This six-year-old stole the show at the convention with her rendition of ""America the Beautiful"":",REAL
"""One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign,"" he said.",REAL
"Miami (CNN) Hillary Clinton is poised to reveal her vice presidential candidate Friday in a message to supporters, people close to the search say, and is planning to make her first appearance with her running mate at a campaign rally in Miami on Saturday.

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has emerged as a leading contender after a methodical search, several Democrats close to the campaign say, receiving spirited backing from President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton.

In selecting the battleground of Florida to make her public announcement, Clinton is hoping to seize the spotlight from Republicans after their convention in Cleveland. She is set to visit Orlando and Tampa on Friday, but her new partner is not expected to join her until Saturday at a rally here at Florida International University, where the student body is more than half Hispanic.

Kaine speaks fluent Spanish, and last week, Clinton beamed at a Virginia rally as he declared: ""Estamos listos para Hillary!"" or ""We are ready for Hillary!""

Clinton has yet to reveal her choice beyond her tight inner circle, fearful of it leaking before a well-orchestrated weekend rollout is set into motion. Her campaign, looking to build their email and text list, has offered supporters the chance to be the ""first to know"" their vice presidential pick, much like Barack Obama did in 2008.

The focus of her search in the final days also centers on Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, according to several Democrats close to the process, confident either Kaine or Vilsack would fit her chief criteria of being a strong governing partner and ready for the presidency.

""She's not going to be waffling at the 11th hour like (Donald) Trump,"" one Democrat close to the process said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding the selection. ""By now, she knows who she wants and will be confident in her choice.""

She also was considering Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who would be the first Hispanic candidate on the party's ticket, or Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who would be the first African-American vice presidential nominee. Democrats close to the process said Perez and Booker had considerable strengths, far beyond their diversity, but their limited experience in national security and government made them less likely to be selected.

The consensus, even among several Democrats close to other finalists, is that Kaine will be tapped as Clinton's vice presidential candidate. Yet others close to Clinton still cautioned against counting out Vilsack, who has the most state and federal governing experience and the longest personal relationship with Clinton.

For Clinton, the selection of a running mate opens a new and important chapter in her political life.

Her first presidential campaign ended long before any serious consideration of a running mate began, so this phase of her campaign is uncharted terrain, a moment where she can choose her own partner.

She was deeply involved in the selection of Al Gore to be her husband's running mate in 1992, but this choice is hers. Her husband favors Kaine, people close to him say, but one added this week: ""He gets a say, but doesn't have a vote on this.""

The weekend debut of the Democratic ticket is designed to build anticipation for the party's convention starting Monday in Philadelphia. After they are formally nominated, Clinton and her new running mate are expected to embark on a bus tour to key campaign battlegrounds, similar to the ""First 1,000 Miles"" caravan in 1992 that took the Clintons and Gores to eight states on their way to winning the White House in November.

For her part, Clinton has intentionally not informed anyone who has gone through the vetting process of her final decision, Democrats close to the process said, in hopes of keeping her choice a secret until the last possible moment.

Booker, who often fires up audiences for Clinton, appeared with other Democrats in Cleveland on Thursday to push back against Trump and Republicans, who have spent the week assailing her character.

""I don't know who the nominee is,"" Booker told CNN's Jake Tapper Thursday. ""The good thing about it is she has tremendous choices.""

But two Democrats close to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and one close to Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, both of whom were on Clinton's list of contenders, said Thursday they were all but certain they had not been selected.

Warren told Stephen Colbert on CBS' ""Late Show"" that she thought ""if it were me, I would know it by now.""

All the finalists have met with Clinton at different times, Democrats close to the process say, including Perez, Booker and Warren during one-on-one meetings last Friday at Clinton's home in Washington. But this week, the Clinton campaign had a meeting with top Warren aides, trying to work out a surrogate schedule for her for the rest of the summer and fall, leading Warren's team to believe she had not been chosen.

The selection of either Brown, Warren or Booker would influence the balance of power in the Senate. Their replacement would be named, at least initially, by a Republican governor in their state, and Clinton is intent on trying to win a Democratic majority in the Senate.

Clinton started this process before her primary fight with Bernie Sanders ended with what aides described as a ""fluid"" list, including several potential running mates. Several were eliminated, including Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and James Stravidis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO and a retired four-star Navy admiral.",REAL
By Amanda Froelich It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between... ,FAKE
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by Daisy Luther 
Let’s talk about Wikileaks . 
First of all, the organization was founded by Julian Assange back in 2006. Their website explains what they are all about: 
“WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying, and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.” 
In the 11 years that they’ve been publishing documents, they have not been disproven a single time. Their record for authentication is perfect. (Learn more here and here .) 
So this means that a person would be pretty silly to disregard anything in the reams of information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Clinton Foundation, and the political shenanigans that would put the Machiavellis to shame. 
Here are 21 of the most important things that have come out about Hillary Clinton, that unfortunately, no one is reporting on in the mainstream. In the interest of brevity, each topic has a link to an article that goes deeper into the leak. (In no particular order.) John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign had a nice cozy dinner with Peter Kadzik, one of the top officials in the Department of Justice…the day after the Benghazi hearing . Kadzik’s son also asked for a job on the Clinton campaign, and, the icing on the corruption cupcake? Kadzik led the effort to nominate Loretta Lynch, who famously met with Bill Clinton on her private plane right before Hillary’s interrogation about Emailgate. ( source ) We all knew that the Clinton Foundation was just a way for the Clinton family to launder money, and now there’s proof. Zero Hedge writes, “…today’s Wikileaks dump included that memo which reveals, for the first time, the precise financial flows between the Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.” A pundit called this leak “The Rosetta Stone of the Clinton Foundation,” meaning that with this document, all of their shady financial dealings could be unraveled and translated. ( source ) Clinton is unable to speak for very long without a podium to lean on . Numerous leaked emails reference how certain interviews have to be kept short because she’d be without one. And this article references a very interesting reason why this may be the case – surprisingly it isn’t related to her health. ( source ) The leaks also show that Clinton intends to do her best to restrict the Second Amendment. Brian Fallon, the national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, wrote, “ Circling back around on guns as a follow up to the Friday morning discussion: the Today show has indicated they definitely plan to ask bout guns, and so to have the discussion be more of a news event than her previous times discussing guns, we are going to background reporters tonight on a few of the specific proposals she would support as President – universal background checks of course, but also closing the gun show loophole by executive order and imposing manufacturer liability .” According to an analysis on The Daily Sheeple, “Imposing manufacturer liability means that after Sandy Hook, Bushmaster and Remington Arms would have been prosecuted for having a hand in the murder of children and school staff members for firearms that were legally sold.” ( source ) The campaign was concerned that the sexual escapades of Bill Clinton could be likened to those of another disgraced celebrity, Bill Cosby . Political operative Ron Klain sent an urgent email saying that Hillary should anticipate the following questions, ” How is what Bill Clinton did different from what Bill Cosby did? Is his conduct relevant to your campaign? You said every woman should be believed. Why not the women who accused him? Will you apologize to the women who were wrongly smeared by your husband and his allies?” ( source ) Clinton’s campaign deliberately leaked an embarrassing photo of a swimsuit-clad Bernie Sanders to the press, ironically insinuating that it was proof he was bought off by Wall Street. Perez Hilton wrote, “ Bernie Sanders lounges at elite Martha’s Vineyard pool, summer 2015 after helping raise money from Wall Street lobbyists .” ( source ) Clinton admitted she is out of touch with the middle class in a speech to Goldman-Black Rock in 2014. “And I am not taking a position on any policy, but I do think there is a growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged. And I never had that feeling when I was growing up. Never. I mean, were there really rich people, of course there were. My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn’t believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed because the life I’ve lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy , but I haven’t forgotten it.” ( source ) She made this rather NWO remark at a 2013 paid speech to Brazilian bank Banco Itau: “ My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders , some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” ( source ) In a leak of yet another paid speech, this time to the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago in 2013, Clinton said that Jordan and Turkey “ can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.” Meanwhile, if Clinton has her way , we will be warmly welcoming 65,000 refugees a year, which makes Obama’s 10,000 a year look like small potatoes. ( source ) Clinton blackmailed the Chinese by telling them that the US would base missiles in the region if they didn’t exert some control over North Korean aggression. “ So China, come on. You either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them ,” she purportedly told the audience at a Goldman Sachs conference in June 2013. ( source ) In May 2015, Clinton was no longer Secretary of State but was ready to announce she was running for President when she was invited to attend a summit in Morrocco. The implication from the leaked emails was that a $12 million “donation” from the king of Morocco was dependent on Clinton attending the summit. Human Abedin, usually loyal to her boss, had concerns . “ If HRC was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter. She created this mess and she knows it. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin wrote to Robbie Mook in a November 2014 email. Incidentally, Clinton didn’t attend. Bill and Chelsea went instead and the $12 million donation was not forthcoming. (source ) Podesta attacked Clinton’s primary election rival Bernie Sanders for criticizing the Paris climate change agreement. “ Can you believe that doofus Bernie attacked it? ” said Podesta. ( source ) Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria . “ My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,” she told employees of the bank in South Carolina, which had paid her about $225,000 to give a speech. “We used to be much better at this than we are now. Now, you know, everybody can’t help themselves. They have to go out and tell their friendly reporters and somebody else: Look what we’re doing and I want credit for it. ” (source ) There is indeed a definite link between the Clinton campaign and what MSM is allowed to say. The campaign has colluded directly with media spokespersons that read like a Who’s Who in American Media : Dan Merica from CNN, Haim Saban of Univision, John Harwood of CNBC and the NY Times, Rebecca Quick of CNBC, Maggie Haberman of NY Times and Politico, John Harris of Politico, Donna Brazile formerly of CNN, Roland Martin of TV-One, Marjorie Pritchard of The Boston Globe, and Louise Mensch of Heat Street. ( source ) As everyone knows, the DNC deliberately screwed Bernie Sanders out of the nomination ( Bonus: Wikileaks also released some of the DNC’s voicemails on the topic ). There are emails that prove who is actually pulling HRC’s puppet strings and that puppeteer is George Soros . The shadow government is not just a conspiracy theory – it really exists and Hillary’s job is to keep George Soros happy. ( source ) Excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street read like a guide to two-faced treachery. In them, she clearly points out that sometimes you “need” to lie. “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” ( source ) Wikileaks emails show that back when she still worked for CNN and before she became an employee of the Clinton campaign, Donna Brazile gave Hillary the questions in advance for her “impromptu” CNN Town Hall questions. ( source ) The campaign got to “approve” articles in influential publications like NY Times, HuffPo, CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, MSNBC, and Politico, showing a massive collusion with the mainstream media, who has hounded Trump relentlessly in an effort to distract from HRC’s abysmal candidacy. ( source ) Through the treasure trove of Wikileaks emails, we can gain an accurate picture of how Hillary really feels about us all (spoiler: basket of deplorables, basement dwellers and right wing conspirators) ( source ) President Obama knew the whole time that her emails were not coming from the secure State Department server. Cheryl Mills wrote to John Podesta, “ W e need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov .” You see, Obama’s emails all have to be from”whitelisted”addresses. So someone, somewhere, added her nonsecure email to his whitelist. ( source ) 
And finally, here’s the real reason that treacherous shrew is involved in politics. And let me tell you, it isn’t because she yearns to make things better for anyone but herself. (emphasis mine.) 
At the Goldman Sachs Builders and Innovators Summit, Clinton responded to a question from chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, who quipped that you “go to Washington” to “make a small fortune.” Clinton agreed with the comment and complained about ethics rules that require officials to divest from certain assets before entering government. “ There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives, ” Clinton said. ( source ) Together, we cannot be ignored. I am on a mission between now and the Presidential Election on November 8th and I hope that you will join me. I am going to work day and night to provide the coverage that the mainstream media is not. It isn’t until we combine all of our voices that we can make people listen to the scandals, the rigging, and the corruption, not only in this election but in the system in general. Please join your voice with mine by liking, sharing, and spreading the word. Together, we cannot be ignored. Together, we are an army. Courtesy of Daisy Luther Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is literally losing red states by the day, so what is the Republican presidential nominee doing? He is sending angry tweets to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

Instead of dealing with the fact that his campaign is literally burning to the ground, Donald Trump is once again planted in front of his TV obsessing over his media coverage.

In case anybody thought that Trump’s tweet at Scarborough was one-off today, the Republican nominee also attacked CNN’s Don Lemon:

A day after threatening the life of his Democratic opponent, Donald Trump isn’t trying to fix his campaign. Instead, Trump is whining about the media and his coverage.

Trump exists in his own universe. The presidential campaign is a distant second in his mind to his endless cravings for positive attention and publicity. Hillary Clinton is making a play for the deep red state of Utah, while Donald Trump is busy angry tweeting at Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon.

The Republican Party might have been better off with no nominee at all because they are being run into the ground by fraudulent businessman Donald J. Trump.",REAL
"Politics Poland Establishing New Territorial Defense Force to Fight ‘Russian Threat’ 
Poland's right-wing government is creating a new military arm to counter the supposed Russian threat, as well as planning to double the size of Poland's armed forces Originally appeared at Sputnik 
The Polish government has given a final go-ahead to the planned creation of a territorial defense force, which local media were quick to call the “personal army” of Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz. Sputnik Poland discussed the issue with Polish politician and commentator Mariusz Olszewski. 
“ Macierewicz is a very efficient politician and defense minister and his ability to place [the territorial defense force] under his personal command, rather that the president’s is nothing short of a political masterpiece, ” Mariusz Olszewski told Sputnik Poland. 
He added that the new force was obviously meant for use inside the country against the so-called “death squads” trying to destabilize the political situation in the country. 
“If this is really what is happening, then the government’s fears are fully justified,” Olszewski chuckled. 
In the event of an armed conflict the territorial defense units will be called up to secure their designated areas, stamp out attempts to stoke up ethnic and religious conflicts and attempts to destabilize the country. 
When asked whether it means that the Territorial Defense Force (TDF) would serve as a kind of “personal police” for the ruling Law and Justice party, Mariusz Olszewski said that it would rather serve the national security minister. 
“The very list of threats the TDF is supposed to deal with looks a bit strange though as we have no internal threats, neither have we any regional or ethnic minorities here,” Olszewski said, adding that the real threat to the powers-that-be came from people who “use Western money to destabilize the country through media ‘death squads’ and challenge the constitutional order in Poland.” 
“I am also worried by Ukrainian media saying that it could take the Polish army just five days to reach the border of the Second Polish Republic [prior to 1939 — Ed.]. This is exactly the kind of misinformation Western propaganda was spreading about Russian troops needing just 24 hours to reach Warsaw. Someone is trying to pit Eastern European countries against each other, to make people believe that war is imminent,” Mariusz Olszewski warned. 
While admitting that security was something no country should ignore, he added that a country the size of Poland might need a territorial defense force, but only as a backup to the regular forces, “not as the mainstay of national defense as our defense ministry wants us to believe. This is either someone’s mistake or just a PR stunt.” 
“Poland needs ground forces, an Air Force and, to a lesser extent, a Navy. As for territorial defense, it is just a smokescreen meant to hide what is really happening in our army,” Mariusz Olszewski emphasized . 
The Territorial Defense Force (TDF) is a planned military reserve component of the Polish armed forces which is currently being formed. 
Plans call for the force, once fully active, to consist of 35,000 part-time volunteers. Poland plans to deploy the new territorial defense units on its eastern border and to transfer the acting brigades there with an eye to becoming one of the largest NATO armies in Europe. 
Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said that the deployment was aimed against Russia, describing it as a ""measured, proportionate"" response to ""the prospect of aggressive Russian action."" 
He also supports the idea of significantly boosting the Polish armed forces, from the current 80,000 servicemen to some 150,000.  ",FAKE
"This is the second of a two-part series looking at the path to victory for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Click here for the first story: How Donald Trump could win

(CNN) Hillary Clinton has advantages heading into the final stretch of the campaign that any presidential candidate would envy: a fleet of popular surrogates, a mountain of cash and an opponent who is often sidetracked by self-inflicted wounds.

Yet the Democratic nominee enters this home stretch in a dead heat against Donald Trump, according to a CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday.

The close contest heading into the fall underscores Clinton's vulnerabilities on trust and honesty -- and her need to summon a relentless and efficient ground game, even if many of her voters are fueled more by revulsion toward Trump than excitement about her.

But in many ways, the nation's changing demographics make this Clinton's race to lose.

""In a sense, Trump can't win this election,"" said veteran pollster Neil Newhouse. ""But Hillary can lose it.""

In order to succeed where 17 Republican candidates failed to beat Trump, Clinton must maintain an incessant focus on her unpredictable rival and persuade voters that he lacks the temperament, character and knowledge required of a potential commander-in-chief.

Clinton has already adopted an aggressive approach this week. She's held briefings for reporters on her new campaign jet two days in a row. She slammed Trump's character and failure to release his tax returns. And she blasted his business career, which is at the center of his campaign as full of ""scams"" and ""frauds.""

That is one way of trying to keep the conversation away from the private email server and accusations about the Clinton Foundation that appear to have hurt her standing in recent weeks.

""I don't really pay attention to polls,"" she told reporters on her plane Tuesday. ""When they are good for me, and there have been a lot of them that have been good for me recently, I don't pay attention. When they are not so good, I don't pay attention. We are on a course that we are sticking with.""

A senior Clinton campaign official predicted single-digit battles across the swing states that will decide the election. But ultimately her campaign stresses it expected a close race and single digit battles in swing states, but believes it has multiple routes to 270 electoral votes and that Trump has a much narrower path

Some Clinton critics have, however, warned that her approach in August -- spending much of the month fundraising away from TV cameras after the Democrats' successful convention in Philadelphia -- lacked the go-for-broke energy of her rival.

""Trump is running a high-risk campaign right now. They have to, because they are behind and have eight weeks to go,"" Newhouse, who was a pollster for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said before Clinton upped the pace after Labor Day.

""I don't think her campaign has shown any real guts or faith in their candidate. They're not bold. They are setting themselves up for a potential loss by a thousand cuts.""

It is without dispute that the hurdles for Trump are enormous. With assistance from teleprompters, he has becomed more disciplined as a candidate, but he has yet to convince voters in swing states, where Clinton leads most polls, that he is fit to be president.

For Clinton, the demographics of the electorate work in her favor, and she appears to be reassembling the Obama coalition that was decisive in the 2008 and 2012 elections. She leads Trump among voters under the age of 45 by 54% to 29% and among non-whites 71% to 18%, according to the CNN/ORC poll.

Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake noted that Trump has consistently trailed by about 12 points where Romney was among married women in 2012. Romney also ran strong among white women -- and led President Barack Obama in exit polls among white women 56% to 42%.

Trump's campaign has yet to show any real effort to improve his image among women, beyond his attempt to appear more moderate with his minority outreach to African-Americans.

Trump is also some 20 points behind his Democratic opponent among college-educated women, Lake said, compared to Romney and 2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain, who were about 5 and 8 points behind, respectively.

Beyond that, the demographic where Trump runs strongest -- non college-educated white men -- is dropping as a share of the electorate each year.

""So he is relying on an ever-diminishing pool of votes, where she is relying on an ever-expanding portion of votes,"" Lake said. To win, she said, ""He would need to win the first debate; he would need to have a collapse of Democratic turnout; and he would really need to close the race with independents and women.""

The likelihood of those factors falling into place is slim. But the one way to put the race in reach for Trump, she said, ""is to assume that it's out of reach.""

So the key for Clinton will be getting those vital constituencies out to vote. That's where her high-powered roster of surrogates comes in.

Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and her primary foe Bernie Sanders remain highly popular among key sectors of the Democratic coalition.

They will be vital to driving up swing-state turnout in Democratic strongholds like Cleveland, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, and parts of Florida that could decide the election.

Clinton is certain to seize on any foreign policy or temperamental missteps by Trump to bolster her argument that her foe is a ""loose cannon"" who can't be trusted with America's nuclear arsenal.

His efforts to reach out to minorities in recent weeks have managed, in some cases, to further alienate them. His campaign has yet to demonstrate it can string together, not just a couple of good days, but a good two months, given his disadvantages on the electoral map.

And beyond just having a good first debate later this month, Trump must force Clinton into making some mistakes to have a chance of winning, strategists said.

The two candidates face similar hurdles in the sense that both may find it almost impossible to change voters' opinions about them at this point. After all, Clinton and Trump are the most unpopular nominees of any major party in memory.

Both Clinton and Trump are widely distrusted. In the CNN/ORC survey, only 42% had a favorable impression of the former secretary of state while the real estate mogul was barely better with 45%.

Clinton clearly has work to do on the trust issue, though. Fifty percent of voters said Trump was more honest and trustworthy. Only 35% chose Clinton.

""People just don't trust Hillary Clinton, and they don't trust her -- not on the basis of one single thing -- but on the basis of whole collections of things going back over 20 to 30 years,"" said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, noting that voters cite an array of her controversies from Whitewater to her email server.

The trust factor -- as well as the sense among many voters that they can't relate to Clinton or understand her as person -- loom as challenges for the former secretary of state, because there is no one thing she can do in the next two months to fix those issues.

Because of the depth of distrust, voters are unlikely to give her the benefit of the doubt if something goes wrong, or she faces a new set of revelations, Hart said.

""They're locked in terms of who she is on the issue of integrity,"" Hart said. ""There is not an individual issue that she can address and that has a tremendous negative effect. All of this is baked in.... It doesn't mean that she's going to lose the election. It's like driving your car on the shoulder: that's fine, unless a car nudges you over and then you've got nothing going for you.""

The trust factor -- as well as the sense among many voters that they can't relate to Clinton or understand her as person -- loom as challenges for the former secretary of state, because she has been trying to do that throughout the campaign, but has only a short time before voters begin casting absentee ballots.

A month ago, when she led Trump by double digits in the polls, Clinton's odds of victory looked good. Historically the candidate who led in the polls two weeks after the conventions went on to win the election.

But this campaign has defied patterns of history before. Clinton's campaign warned against overconfidence, in part to keep Democratic voters engaged.

Though Obama's numbers are above 50% -- no small achievement for a late-second-term president, Clinton always faced a historically difficult feat as a candidate seeking the third successive term for the Democratic Party.

Moreover, her three decades in politics made her a particularly ill-suited choice for an electorate whose chief desire is change. She's effectively an incumbent with dynastic baggage facing an outsider candidate in Trump who built a campaign on voter mistrust of establishment politicians.

But Clinton allies argue that her dual-pronged message has been more succinct this time than it was in 2008.

While many swing-state voters say in interviews they have no idea what her message is, her strategists say it is piercing through in local markets where she is advertising: the idea that she will put families first while Trump would put himself first; and that Americans are ""stronger together"" while Trump would be a divisive force.

Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic strategist who is now executive director of the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, pointed to one ad that Clinton ran just before the Nevada caucuses that he said was a perfect distillation of that message. It was one featuring a little girl who was afraid that her parents would get deported. Clinton told the girl to let her worry about it.

""It's incredibly hard for any positive message to break through"" in this toxic political climate, Elleithee said. ""If she can make this: 'I've got your back' argument compelling enough, she can chip away"" at voter distrust.

That work is important not only to help her win but also to help her govern, he said. ""She needs to address that issue now and continue until after the election.... She could win this race comfortably with no positive message, but they should not mistake a comfortable win for a mandate.""",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
WITH 400 schools shut and 200,000 students not attending lessons, striking teachers have provided children with an insight into what their life will be like on the dole after they leave school. 
“It obviously wasn’t the ASTI’s intention, but it’s an interesting lesson for my three lads, sitting around on the couch, bored out of their holes thinking ‘is this it? Is this all I can do?’ That’s basically the dole like. Things being largely out of your control. Good to get training in early,” shared concerned parent Olwyn Nelligan. 
As youth unemployment remains worryingly high in Ireland at over 15%, teachers striking for better pay have inadvertently given their students a window into what life will be like post-second level education for many of them as despite being keen to learn and further themselves all they have is free time on their hands. 
“Teachers are striking for better pay, and if they were granted it, it would could serve as a way for the government to show it cares about education standards in Ireland and those who provide it,” explained one teacher on strike, pleading with the government to show the education sector the respect it deserves. 
A government spokesman did respond when we put the teacher’s concerns to them earlier today. 
“We. Don’t. Care. I thought that was pretty obvious. Have you not being paying attention to our policies for the last few years at all?” the spokesman responded. 
“Having said that teachers are the rock bed of the foundation of the first steps of a child’s life, blah, blah, blah,” the spokesman added. 
The government refused to comment on ongoing funding concerns with several IT colleges, or lengthy waiting lists for third level students wishing to access counselling services. 
Some 99% of the country was backing the ASTI’s bid to be paid for supervision work until they learned it may require an increase in their taxes in order to fund it.",FAKE
"10 Steps To Rolling The Perfect Joint Posted today Looking to enjoy a little bit of “relaxation”? You’ll probably want to practice the lost art of joint rolling. With just 10 easy steps, anyone can roll the perfect joint… but enjoy responsibly! Step 1: Fill the tub. Step 2: Get the weed—the dark fruit, the bush that grows in the shadow of the valley of the shadow of weed, the jester’s hiccup, the liquid daydream fresh from the ice-cube tray, the wisdom tooth of the vegetables ogre, Israeli nightshade, the Arizona iced tea of drugs, the dad baffler, the sweet teen poison, the sickly crop of the wind farm, the flower the devil dares not pick—out of your fridge. Set it aside. Step 3: A filter keeps fire from squirming into your throat and laying its eggs in your brainstem. Build the filter by pouring a mixture of egg whites and ground hen bones into a filter mold, and leave it at your parents’ house over a long weekend to set. Step 4: Get your rolling paper by stripping a few inches of skin off the Paper Wretch with a hot carrot peeler. It may take a few tries to get a good swath! Step 5: To break up the weed, place it on an active fault line in a bowl full of gravel. Step 6: Once a major tectonic event has ground your weed, pound it into a paste using a book about a curious incident. Step 7: Wrap your index finger in paper and feed the weed paste into your port. A chilly sensation means your body has accepted the paste and will pass it on. A prickling sensation means your body has rejected the paste and will hopefully pee it out someday. Step 8: Seal the joint by licking your papered-up finger like a naughty little thing. You’re filthy, aren’t you? Step 9: Remove finger, twist paper, and voilà! The perfect joint for any mouth. Step 10: Dunk the joint in the tub so you aren’t tempted to smoke it and become insane. Start over at step one! 
Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get it right on the first try. Like all things in life, practice makes perfect!",FAKE
"JERUSALEM, Israel -- The confrontation between Russia and Turkey entered its second day after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet on its border Tuesday.

Turkey's president said he didn't want to escalate the situation, but he needed to protect Turkey's borders and defend its allies inside Syria.

Russia's Ministry of Defense condemned the attack and announced three steps it would take after the incident: bombing attacks would be escorted by fighter jets, air defenses would be increased, and military contacts with Turkey would be suspended.

After the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin used exceptionally strong language. He called the incident a ""stab in the back"" and promised ""significant consequences"" to Turkey.

He said Russia would not tolerate such atrocities. Russia's foreign minister cancelled his upcoming trip to Turkey.

As tensions rise over Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane, CBN's Erick Stakelbeck discusses how President Vladimir Putin's unpredictability may reverberate across Europe. Watch our Q&A to understand the geopolitical dynamics of a region fraught with chaos:

Putin also accused Turkey of collusion with ISIS.

""We stated many times the fact that a large amount of oil and oil products are being transferred to the territory of Turkey from the territories seized by ISIS,"" Putin said. ""That is how these gangsters are receiving their financial support.""

""Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace,"" Obama said. ""I think it is very important right now for us to make sure that the Russians and the Turks are talking to each other, find out exactly what happened, and take measures to discourage any kind of escalation.""

Turkey -- a NATO member -- asked NATO for an emergency meeting. It was the first time in 50 years a NATO member's plane shot down a Russian plane.

""I have previously expressed my concerns about the implications of the military actions of the Russian federation close to NATO borders,"" NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said. ""This highlights the importance of having and respecting arrangements to avoid such incidents in the future. As we have repeatedly made clear, we stand in solidarity with Turkey and support the territorial integrity of our NATO ally Turkey.""

It remains to be seen if NATO will invoke Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Turkey and Russia both produced evidence they said proved their version of events.

Turkey said the Russian plane violated its airspace after 10 separate warnings. Russia said its plane was targeted over Syrian territory.

After the plane was shot down, Syrian rebel forces aired a video showing them destroying one of the Russian helicopters sent to rescue the pilots. It appears the pilot of the fighter jet died and the co-pilot was rescued.

Russia and Turkey have a long history of tense relations and the incident exposes two competing alliances seeking to dominate the region: Russia and Shi'ite Iran on the one hand and Sunni Turkey on the other.

When Putin brought Russia into the Syrian civil war, retired U.S. General Jay Garner told CBN News he introduced a new danger to the region.

""In the air, it will be a big problem if he puts fighter aircraft in there and they begin to put in airstrikes against rebel forces while we're putting in airstrikes against Assad forces,"" Garner said. ""How do you 'de-conflict' all that? It's a tinderbox.""

Russia moved in to fill the power vacuum the United States filled for decades in the Middle East. Incidents like this one can ignite a spark that sets the tinderbox aflame.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Democrats in Washington have begun discussing how to encourage Sen. Bernie Sanders to end his campaign without alienating his legions of supporters, as party leaders grow eager to unite the party behind Hillary Clinton and provide a more robust defense for her candidacy.

In private conversations on Capitol Hill, senior Democrats are weighing how to persuade Sanders to step aside without appearing as if they are trying to strong-arm him out of the race. In a phone call last month, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid made the case to Sanders why it would make sense for him to leave the race after New Jersey and California vote on June 7, according to sources familiar with the conversation.

The widespread view, according to interviews with senators, House members and senior party officials, is that Sanders needs to see the writing on the wall himself: That he has no mathematical possibility to win the race and would be better-served to see his agenda enacted if he urged his backers to support Clinton.

""We will walk out of our convention with a nominee,"" Rep. Xavier Becerra, a California Democrat and active Clinton surrogate, told CNN. ""We should be able to walk into the convention in a consolidating mode.""

Some top Democrats privately say Clinton should consider the ultimate way to bring the progressive firebrand's supporters into the fold: Choose Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as her vice presidential pick.

Senators and aides say they've felt reassured after recent discussions with Sanders and his advisers that he won't be a destructive force once voting concludes in mid-June. But Sanders has publicly vowed to take his fight to Philadelphia, something that could deprive the party of a critical month of healing and has spawned fears of unrest at the July nominating convention.

If he doesn't drop out, the options on how to persuade him to quit boil down to this: Propose potential process reforms, including gutting the role of superdelegates in choosing the next nominee, give him a prime speaking slot at the Democratic Convention and even dump the head of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a controversial figure among Sanders' supporters.

So far, Sanders has not suggested publicly that his fight could be over after California, a state he has barnstormed in recent days as he tries to pull off an upset against Clinton.

""Our campaign has been dismissed and written off more times than I can count,"" Sanders said Wednesday in Palo Alto, California. ""We're going to leave California with enormous momentum going into the convention. And I believe we've got a real shot to come out of that convention with the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.""

Behind the scenes, discussions between the Warren and Clinton camps have been markedly increasing, especially as the freshman senator has begun to a play a more prominent role attacking Donald Trump, according to a source close to Warren.

And that has only spawned increased chatter that Clinton could pick Warren, who has not endorsed either candidate and is the only female Senate Democrat not to back Clinton.

Reid has spoken out publicly against Clinton choosing a senator as a running mate whose state has a Republican governor -- like Massachusetts -- fearing the vacancy would allow a Republican to be appointed and pad the GOP's majority.

But sources familiar with the situation tell CNN that Reid is open to the possibility of Warren as Clinton's running mate, in no small part because it would help unite the party after a long primary season.

""She can take away (Bernie's) power by showing there's no division within the party,"" said one Democratic source who is advocating Warren's selection.

It's uncertain when Warren would endorse Clinton, but the senator's allies believe she doesn't want to appear as if she's pushing Sanders to quit before he's ready to leave the race. Yet she also takes her role as a party uniter ""seriously,"" according to the Warren source.

Much of how the party reacts after Tuesday's primaries will be dictated by Sanders' own actions, officials say. If he stays in the race, softens his rhetoric against Clinton and begins the process of healing the party, there will be less consternation. But if he blasts what he considers a rigged system, berates Clinton for her corporate donations and paid speeches to big banks on Wall Street and calls for a revolution at the convention, Democrats are bound to push back.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Clinton backer, said his ""preference"" would be for Sanders to ""take a hard look"" after Tuesday and conclude he has no viable path to the nomination. He said he had no problem with Sanders continuing his campaign until July because he's confident that the party would be able to unite against Trump.

""One thing I'm slightly worried about is the tone and tenor of the convention,"" Murphy added. ""We're going to need a very positive unified convention. He's going to have send very clear signals to his delegates that he wants them to be vocal and loud in support of Hillary in our convention.""

Even if Sanders were to win California, where polls show the race with Clinton in a dead-heat, the math looks grim for him to win the 2,383 delegates to become the nominee. He would need 67% of the remaining pledged delegates to take the lead over Clinton in pledged delegates alone after the District of Columbia votes on June 14. Clinton's lead in superdelegates, however, means she is the only candidate who can secure enough delegates to win the nomination before the convention.

Reid, in an interview with the Associated Press Wednesday, made his strongest comments yet about Sanders' bleak chances, saying the ""math is the math"" and that ""sometimes you just have to give up.""

""I think he better do a little mathing,"" Reid said.

The comments are significant because Reid -- who backs Clinton -- has avoided criticizing Sanders through the course of the campaign. Reid is perhaps Sanders' closest friend in the Senate; the two had an emotional call when Reid informed Sanders he was backing Clinton in February. And Sanders' wife, Jane, hugged Reid and thanked him for staying neutral before the Nevada caucuses as well.

But Reid and Democrats know they need the support of Sanders to help bring his dedicated backers behind Clinton. After the Nevada convention last month spawned angry protests from Sanders' supporters, many argue that the senator has to play a major role to unite the party -- or risk electing Trump. Reid has made the case repeatedly to Sanders, and others have publicly as well.

""My sense is if he believes as passionately about the issues he's been talking about on the campaign trail,"" Becerra said, ""then, after June 7, there's a passionate need for him to be advocating for someone in the White House who will make much of what he is talking about a reality.""

Murphy also was optimistic that Sanders would exit gracefully.

""He's going to be an incredibly impactful spokesman for Hillary,"" Murphy said. ""Once the president and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie get behind Hillary, that's going to be impactful. I'm not wringing my hands on whether it happens next week or next month.""",REAL
"Cardinal Vincent Nichols says: “Britons could learn a lot from the ‘vibrant’ faith of Muslim migrants” British people have much to learn from the “vibrancy of the Muslim faith” of new immigrants including refugees, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has said. UK Telegraph Cardinal Vincent Nichols said immigrants had been enduring a worsening “atmosphere of fear” in the months since the EU referendum with the members of the public casually voicing hatred in a “self-indulgent” way. (Self-indulgent? I wonder what this French priest would have to say about that?) H e accused politicians of “trading in fear” and said media stories constantly portraying immigration in a negative light were proving “corrosive of our best nature”. In an interview with the BBC , he insisted that increasingly secular British society could learn much from the faith of new arrivals whether Muslims or followers of other religions. “Of course what we have to learn too is from the vibrancy of the Muslim faith that comes here. H e added: “I think the immigration crisis is real and it needs concerted effort to address it,” he said. “It needs to be addressed realistically with resources and proper legislation, but it’s almost impossible to do that in an atmosphere in which fear and hatred are the dominant features. “It does nobody any good, this somewhat self-indulgent way in which people have begun to express themselves and their distaste and their hatred of people who they see as different. “And that is creating a culture of fear among people who have been welcomed here.”",FAKE
"Print Fairfax County, Virginia, voter Jena Jones told WND and Radio America she found this Democrat insert included with her absentee ballot, among others 
Democratic Party officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, are categorically denying that pro-Democrat campaign materials were included in the same envelope as a voter’s absentee ballot, arguing that pamphlets were sent in a separate mailing to absentee voters from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, or FCDC. 
Earlier this week, Jena and David Jones shared their story of finding more than they expected in the envelope that contained her ballot. (See images of the materials Jena and David say they found at the end of this article. Also included are two images from Democrats showing what they say is confusion on the part of the voters.) 
“I found a letter from the governor of Virginia asking me to please vote Democrat and ‘help keep Virginia blue’ this year,” Jena explained. “Then I got a letter from the Fairfax County Democratic Committee, giving me a step-by-step, yes-and-no what I should vote for as far as the meal tax and all those other things on the ballot.” 
In recent days, at least two more people contend they received the same materials in the envelope with their absentee ballots. 
After the report was first published, and shared on Facebook by David Jones, Fairfax County Democratic Committee Executive Director Frank Anderson replied to David’s post to dispute their account of what the ballot envelope contained. 
“These materials were NOT sent in the same envelope as the ballot. The ballot is mailed separately by the Office of Elections. Political parties are free to mail items to voters who request absentee ballots. The two envelopes arrived at the same time,” commented Anderson. 
That triggered a quick back-and-forth between David Jones and Anderson. 
“I hate to tell you but you’re wrong. All items came in one envelope,” Jones said. 
Like the reporting you see here? Sign up for free news alerts from WND.com, America’s independent news network. 
“Impossible. That letter came out of my office. We never have access to other people’s ballots,” replied Anderson. 
“Then it seems those that sent the ballots have access to YOUR letters,” said Jones. “Who should I believe? You or my lying eyes?” 
Anderson then stated that political parties are informed when anyone requests an absentee ballot, and mailings are sent to those voters to promote Democratic Party candidates and positions on ballot initiatives. 
“I am literally sitting down the hall from the place where those envelopes are stuffed. We are a political office and have no business handling anyone’s ballots. You can believe what you want to believe,” concluded Anderson. 
The Virginia Department of Elections did not respond to repeated attempts for a response. But after seeing reports from WND and Radio America, Anderson protested the premise of the story. 
“Please stop spreading these absurd allegations that are just hearsay from a misinformed voter who cannot verify his claim,” stated Anderson in an email in which he also explained why he believed the Jones account could not be accurate. 
He shared a photo sent by State Sen. Scott Surovell, showing his absentee ballot envelope next to a separate envelope containing Democratic Party advocacy. 
In a formal interview, FCDC Communications Adviser Bruce Neilson told WND and Radio America the Jones version of what the ballot envelope contained cannot be true. 
“It’s not possible,” said Neilson, who then explained how absentee voters are approached by the local Democrats. 
“Voting is a sacred privilege and a right of every citizen,” he said. “The activity of voting is also a public record. The Fairfax County Democratic Committee receives a notice of everyone who has requested an absentee ballot. We get that information as public information on the day the ballot is mailed. 
“The same day the ballot is mailed, our volunteers prepare materials to advise voters what the Fairfax (County) Democratic Committee knows to be Democratic positions on the ballot,” said Neilson, noting the materials include fliers on candidates and ballot proposals like the meals tax. 
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Bruce Neilson: 
However, he insists those materials are never sent with the ballot itself. 
“That material is mailed in a separate envelope, labeled with our initials – FCDC – and our return address in Fairfax, Virginia, and would be received either the same day, perhaps the day before or the day after she received her official absentee ballot from the government,” Neilson said. 
“It’s a separate mailing. It’s a separate stamp. It’s a separate envelope. It’s very easy to confuse where they came from if you have all those materials on the table at the same time while you’re filling in your votes,” he said. 
Jones is standing by her story 100 percent, as is her husband. David says it’s a very clear memory. 
“Jena opened the envelope that contained her ballot, the green sample ballot, the two-sided letter from the governor and card with kids on it saying ‘go vote’ or something of that nature. There was also the return envelope, which I signed,” David said. 
The coverage of Jena’s story has also elicited similar stories from two other Fairfax County voters. Both of them commented on Reddit. 
“I can confirm this. I live in Herndon, VA (Fairfax County) and also received these materials in my absentee ballot. I thought it was fishy at the time but didn’t look into it,” stated a comment by a reader using the handle thisisaterriblename. 
Get the hottest, most important news stories on the Internet – delivered FREE to your inbox as soon as they break! Take just 30 seconds and sign up for WND’s Email News Alerts! 
Another, under the Reddit handle Nightingale-Nights, said the same thing happened to them and posted similar photos to the ones David and Jena shared last week. 
Neilson said there is no way the county government, which sends out the ballots, could be including partisan materials in the envelope containing the ballot. 
“They don’t have our materials,” he said. “Our materials are printed for us, by our printer, and we have complete control over our materials in our office, and they come from our office in our mailing. They don’t go anywhere else. 
“It’s not possible that the county government is distributing partisan Democratic materials. It’s never happened before. I’m not aware of it happening now. And I don’t think that it would happen anywhere in the future,” Neilson said. 
There are only a few known complaints of stuffed ballot envelopes in Fairfax County, leading David Jones to believe an individual in the government is responsible. He accepts the explanation that the Fairfax County Democratic Committee is not responsible for what he and Jena discovered with her ballot. 
“I understand Frank’s comments about his office has nothing to do with the ballots. I believe that,” Jones said. “I think what we are seeing here is a person that actually stuffs and mails the ballots is taking it upon themselves to add in extra material. I don’t see how Frank’s office could be held accountable for what’s in the ballot envelope. But it does seem odd that others are now reporting similar issues.” 
Neilson said there is zero chance of that scenario being true. 
“I just can’t imagine that happening because of the internal controls that we have on the literature that we mail,” Neilson said. 
He also said the internal controls at the county government are air tight. 
“I am an election official. On Election Day, I serve in a non-partisan capacity for our county election office,” Nielson said. “I can assure you, you have Democrats and Republicans working in the office. You have plenty of oversight of the voting process, and there’s no way that a partisan political piece was mailed with her ballot. There is no way that happened.” 
The following are three images of the Democratic Party materials Jena and David Jones say they found stuffed inside the absentee ballot: 
The following are two images from Democrats who say the voters must be confused:",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump's vice presidential search turned into a head-spinning melodrama Wednesday as candidates vying for the spot hopped on planes and phones to perform frenzied, last-minute try-outs.

For much of the day, Indiana was the unlikely center of the political world -- all thanks to a flat tire.

Trump's plane hit something when it landed Tuesday night, resulting in a popped tire, according to a source familiar with the process. That kept Trump in the state longer than he expected after campaigning with Gov. Mike Pence, setting off a last-minute scramble of high-profile travelers to the Hoosier State as the clock ticked down on his VP decision.

Concerned Trump was unsure and torn about his choice and maybe leaning in a direction they didn't like, his children -- Eric, Don Jr. and Ivanka -- hopped on a plane early in the morning to reach him. Trump and his children wound up having breakfast with Pence at the governor's mansion.

The plane malfunction set off a domino effect with others: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich flew to Indianapolis to meet with Trump on a private jet provided by Fox News host Sean Hannity, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN. He was later seen leaving a hotel in the same motorcade as Trump's children.

Trump spoke to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie over the phone for a conversation that included talk about the vice presidency.

And Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions arrived in Indianapolis to meet with Trump to serve as another adviser as the presumptive GOP nominee makes his final decision on a running mate.

Earlier in the day, a Trump spokesperson said the meetings were held in Indiana to allow Trump more time with Pence.

The process of choosing a vice presidential partner is a crucial one that often provides early insight into how a nominee might approach the presidency. Most presumptive nominees operate their vice presidential search under intense secrecy with potential candidates sneaking to cloak-and-dagger meetings to avoid the press and maintain the element of surprise ahead of the final announcement. But not Trump, whose search has been remarkably public over the past week.

Trump's search is entering its final phase. Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman, told CNN Wednesday evening that Trump will make his announcement Friday in New York.

Trump later tweeted: ""I will be making the announcement of my Vice Presidential pick on Friday at 11am in Manhattan. Details to follow.""

The presumptive nominee has not yet made a final decision. But he said in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier that he was trimming his short-list.

""I'm narrowing it down. I mean I'm at three, potentially four. But in my own mind, I probably am thinking about two,"" he said.

Trump has spend the past several days publicly giving potential running mates a trial run on the campaign trail. And the feverish endgame of his search suggests a penchant for intrigue, an unpredictable streak and -- above all -- a desire to make a splash as the comings and goings Wednesday triggered a media circus.

The lobby of the Conrad Hotel in Indianapolis suddenly became the epicenter of the 2016 campaign -- with reporters and passersby straining for a sighting of Trump or any of his possible running mates, speculation running rife about the former reality star's intentions.

Next door, at The Capital Grille, local politicians and lobbyists buzzed about what the future held in store for homeboy Pence, who rocketed up the list of possible vice presidential nominees after spending significant face time with Trump in the last few days.

Donald Trump Jr. summed up the whirlwind developments with a tweet: ""Amazing trip to Indiana today. Fast but very productive.""

With Trump's mind not yet made up, the intrigue focused attention on exactly what kind of qualities the GOP presumptive nominee is looking for in a running mate.

One of the biggest questions is whether he will opt for someone with a reputation as a partisan scrapper who could defend him in the media and lambast Democrat Hillary Clinton, or if he will choose someone viewed as a safer political partner who could bring more sobriety to his volatile campaign.

One source said Trump wants a ""fighter"" and Christie -- the tough talking former prosecutor -- fits the bill.

""I'm getting attacked from all sides,"" Trump told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. Though he was not in Indianapolis on Wednesday, Christie, one of the first major politicians to back Trump before he captured the nomination, is still very much under consideration, multiple sources told CNN.

""Trump's gut is Christie,"" one source said. The New Jersey governor spent the day in back-to-back meetings in Washington as he leads Trump's transition team.

Trump spoke of his kinship with Christie, with whom several sources said he talks every day.

""I tell you, Chris Christie is somebody I've liked a long time; he's a total professional. He's a good guy, by the way, a lot of people don't understand that,"" he said on Fox News.

But on Wednesday, Trump told Fox: ""I just want to pick up somebody that's solid, who's smart. I'm not looking for an attack dog. Frankly, I'm looking for somebody that really understands what we're talking about.""

And if Trump wants someone more conventional, he could turn to Pence. The Indiana governor has credibility with social conservatives who are among the most suspicious of Republican Party constituencies towards Trump.

Trump and Pence met privately before a fundraiser in Indianapolis on Tuesday evening, and then Pence got a try-out at a rally in nearby Westfield. The Trumps and Pences dined together at the Capital Grille in Indianapolis, staying past midnight.

A source close to Pence told CNN's MJ Lee that when asked about the vice presidential race it ""sure feels like Pence."" But noting the sheer unpredictability of dealing with the man making the decision, they emphasized: ""This is Trump we are talking about.""

When CNN asked how the breakfast with Pence went on Wednesday, Trump gave a thumbs-up. An adviser said the encounter was ""cordial"" but added that the billionaire had yet to finalize his decision on a running mate.

At Tuesday's rally, Pence slammed Clinton, saying that ""to paraphrase the director of the FBI, I think it would be 'extremely careless' to elect Hillary Clinton as president.""

On Wednesday afternoon, Pence said he was ""humbled to be a part"" of the process.

""Trump's giving it very careful consideration,"" he told reporters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. ""I'm just honored to be on that list.""

Even potential rival Gingrich offered extensive praise for the Indiana governor on Wednesday night.

""A lot of people who are a little jittery about Donald Trump would feel reassured talking with Pence,"" Gingrich told Fox News. ""My strength is totally different: I'm an outsider.""

A Trump adviser, however, disputed conventional wisdom that Pence could steady or moderate the voluble Republican presumptive nominee on the stump. In fact, this person said, having him as a more temperate running mate could prompt Trump to become even more unconventional.

""Mike is not going to go and defend Trump the way he needs it -- the way a Newt or a Christie would, or even the way a Sessions has,"" the adviser said.

Some donors are pressuring Trump to pick Gingrich as his vice president.

A source close to Sheldon Adelson told CNN that the casino magnate spoke to Trump and said that ""he liked Newt.""

Marking the unpredictability of the state of affairs, Trump was still making calls to people in recent days.

Trump even reached out again to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under former President George W. Bush, after a donor encouraged him to make the call over the weekend. Rice, though, doesn't want the job, according to a separate source familiar with the process.

At a fundraiser in the Hamptons last weekend, The New York Times reported: ""When an attendee suggested Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, Mr. Trump said they had irreconcilable differences over the Iraq War.""",REAL
"Taking Care of Your Eye Health the Natural Way Ad 728×90 – HBS Account – 2149237058061490 http://blogs.naturalnews.com/taking-care-eye-health-natural-way/ 
By Jade Rich 
Posted Monday, October 31, 2016 at 12:09pm EDT 
Keywords: best foods for eye health , beta-carotene , Cataracts , eye health , foods that contain antioxidants , Free Radicals , lutein , macular degeneration , maintaining healthy eyes , meso-zeaxanthin , natural vision training , naturally occurring antioxidants , ocular migraines , optic nerve damage , protect your eyes , vitamin C , Vitamin E , zeaxanthin 
When most people think about their eye health , the first thing that comes to mind is whether or not they need to wear glasses. Although your vision is a major part of your overall eye health, there are actually many more things that you need to be concerned about. For example, there are a staggering 56 common disorders that can plague your eyes. These issues range from cataracts to ocular migraines. Fortunately, there are many natural methods you can utilize to help keep your eyes healthy. 
Nutrients Your Eyes Need 
There are three nutrients that are known to be critical for maintaining healthy eyes: Lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin. Each of these nutrients serves as an antioxidant that helps protect your eyes from the damaging effects of free radicals. As Natural News has pointed out before, free radicals are the main basis of all injuries, illnesses and deaths. 
Antioxidants are the only way to fight free radicals, so it’s a good thing that these three nutrients are found naturally in the human eye. But what happens when something interrupts this process? Sadly, you can end up with a long list of eye health problems that may even lead to blindness. 
Instead of merely sitting back and allowing this to happen, you can be proactive and start taking supplements. The good news is that lutein and zeaxanthin supplements are easy to find. Research has discovered that most of these supplements also contain meso-zeaxanthin, although this isn’t usually disclosed on the label. In fact, it sounds likely that this recently discovered eye nutrient is a natural byproduct of lutein and zeaxanthin. 
Of course, this doesn’t absolve the supplement companies of their duty to report whether or not meso-zeaxanthin is present in their products. However, their negligence also doesn’t reduce the natural reliance that your eyes have on all three of these nutrients. In addition to stocking up on these supplements, it is also wise to increase your intake of other naturally occurring antioxidants, including Vitamin E, Vitamin C and beta carotene. 
Food Sources 
There are many foods that contain antioxidants . Carrots are perhaps the most well-known resource for eye health because they are so rich in beta carotene. It would be a mistake to think of carrots as the prime resource, though. You can also turn to oranges, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and dark berries for a mixture of necessary vitamins. These are some of the best foods for eye health. Even better, you can derive lutein and zeaxanthin directly from food sources such as eggs, pistachios, corn, peppers and kale. With enough of these food items in your diet, you can avoid the cost of supplements while still keeping your eyes extremely healthy. 
Additional Eye Health Tips 
If you are a smoker who is also concerned about eye health, now is a good time to carefully consider quitting. Unfortunately, people who smoke have an increased risk of developing macular degeneration, optic nerve damage and cataracts. If you begin abstaining from tobacco products now, though, your odds of ending up with one of these eye health complications will begin to decline. 
Other easy steps you can take to protect your eyes include always wearing sunglasses during sunny days and steering clear of computer screens as much as possible. If you use a computer for work, take a 20 second vision break every 20 minutes. 
Ultimately, combining the proper nutrients with easy tips such as wearing sunglasses will help keep your eyes healthy throughout your life. If you’re currently dealing with issues such as light sensitivity and vision loss, you may also be able to naturally regain control of your eye health by using natural vision training and other eye exercises. This is definitely a better option than undergoing a surgery that has an extensive list of serious risks and usually leaves patients still needing eyeglasses. As usual, the natural way is better! 
About the author: 
Jade Rich is an LPN and Director at an Inpatient Rehabilitation Center. As a mother of three children, she is always looking for natural ways to keep her kid’s eyes healthy. She knows from experience that another way to do this is by scheduling them for routine eye exams. This helps with early detection and prevention. It’s best to schedule this during the back-to-school season. During the visit, their pediatrician examines their eye alignment and gives a test for visual acuity. 
Sources:",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton expressed regret Saturday for calling half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables,” but she stood by her sharp criticism of her Republican rival. Mrs. Clinton said she was “grossly generalistic” when she took aim at Mr. Trump’s backers at a Friday fundraiser in New York, characterizing many as racist, sexist and homophobic. “That’s never a good idea,” she said […]",REAL
"2016 presidential campaign by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
An architect of regime-change, coups, no-fly zones, rule of the rich and mass incarceration is about to become Commander-in-Chief, yet the bulk of what passes for the Left is “engaged in a 1930s-style ‘united front’ against a ‘fascism’ that was never a threat in 21 st century America.” Donald Trump, the orange menace, didn’t have a chance of becoming president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a 21 st century fascist and threat to life on Earth. Fighting Ghost Fascists While Aiding Real Ones by BAR executive editor Glen Ford 
“Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent.” 
Hillary Clinton’s impending -- and totally predictable -- landslide victory on November 8 will prove only that there never was any danger of a “fascist” white nationalist takeover of the U.S. executive branch of government in 2016. That was always a red (or “orange”) herring, a phony “barbarians at the gate” threat that -- as Wikileaks documents confirmed -- John Podesta and Hillary’s other handlers fervently hoped would convey “lesser evil” status to their manifestly unpopular candidate. 
There was nothing particularly devious or out of the ordinary in the Hillary camp’s favoring Donald Trump or, alternatively, Ted Cruz. It is standard Democratic Party practice to position themselves just to the left of the Republicans. In a duopoly electoral system, victory lies in where the cake is cut. By hugging close to the GOP’s flanks, national Democratic candidates can lay claim to a “center-left” spectrum of political space that encompasses a clear majority of U.S. public opinion on most issues. By this calculus, Democrats are supposed to win, unless they are tripped up on the closely related issues of race (failure to “stand up” to the Blacks) and foreign policy (failure to “stand up” to whoever is the designated foreign enemy). 
Race is the trickiest part of the equation, since white supremacy is embedded in the American political conversation, hiding just beneath the surface of most discourse on social and economic policy. 
“His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites.” 
Trump thought he could win by combining an overt white racist appeal with an anti-corporate message that laid the blame on Wall Street for (white) American job losses and falling living standards. He also calculated -- correctly, it turns out -- that in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown, many white Americans were more upset about their own economic and social status than they were angry at Russians; that they wanted regime change at home more than abroad. 
Both of Trump’s central policies backfired, dooming his campaign. His overt racism probably weakened his appeal to whites, who have given majorities to national Republicans since 1968 but whose self-image is that they are not, as individuals, racist. (Certainly, white women found further reason to reject his candidacy.) Much more spectacularly, Trump’s anti-“free trade” stance and opposition to regime change and military confrontation with Russia and China drove most of the Republican-allied section of the ruling class straight into Hillary Clinton’s imperial Big Tent. 
At the national level, the duopoly system, as we had known it, virtually ceased to exist – a fact dramatically driven home by the near-universal corporate media rejection of Donald Trump, the candidacy they had done so much to create. The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election, a potential historic opening to a far wider space of progressive political struggle, including on the moribund electoral level. With the ruling class gathered in one Big Tent, and the overt racists occupying the imploded shell of the GOP, the system itself was in disarray. What was once two vibrant parties of the ruling class, with a virtual monopoly on the totality of the electorate, had become one ruling class party plus a hollowed-out husk, at least temporarily occupied by white nationalists under the leadership of a narcissistic and incoherent billionaire, yet without enough funds to mount a competitive general election campaign. 
“The near-collapse of the duopoly system was the great fracture of the 2016 election.” 
In these pages, we had been saying since last year that Donald Trump could not win; that Bernie Sanders’ fate would be sealed in the southern primaries; and that, although ruling class money would insure Clinton an election by landslide, it could not buy her legitimacy among a significant section of the Democratic “base,” who would now be pushed to the latrine area of her Big Tent. As we wrote on May 18 of this year: 
“Outsized fear of Trump is hysteria. These days, the ‘brown shirts’ wear blue. Hillary is the candidate of Wall Street, War and Austerity – not Trump, the racist America Firster. And, he can’t win, anyway – not with tens of millions of ‘moderate’ Republicans and most of the party’s funders rushing into Hillary’s welcoming embrace.” 
But sadly, hysteria does reign in most of the “left” precincts of America. Those who did not hesitate to kick Hillary when she appeared to be “down” -- in those heady days when they imagined it was possible she could lose to Sanders -- are terrified to kick her when she is “up” and primed to take the helm of the hyper-power. They are engaged in a 1930s-style “united front” against a “fascism” that was never a threat in 21 st century America, where a different kind of dictatorship of the rich (but also a fascism) has made brown-shirts (and Klansmen) utterly superfluous. These trembling leftists refuse to oppose the modern manifestation of fascism, which is now firmly entrenched in power with Hillary as its champion, in favor of a crusade against an “orange” menace that did not have a ghost of a chance of seizing national power. They have made themselves perfectly irrelevant and useless -- except, of course, to the fascists-in-charge. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .",FAKE
"For the past two months, Donald Trump has presided over a political team riddled with turf wars, staff reshuffling and dueling power centers.

But the tensions are more than typical campaign chaos: They illustrate how Trump likes to run an organization, whether it’s a real estate venture or his presidential bid. Interviews with current and former Trump associates reveal an executive who is fond of promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him.

Whether the drama of recent weeks has been cathartic or calamitous is an open question — and one that is increasingly important as the general election phase of the campaign unfolds. The tumult has often dominated news coverage, stepping on Trump’s own campaign message and averting the spotlight from missteps by leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.

“It is definitely dysfunctional compared to, say, Ace Hardware Store,” said David Carney, a veteran Republican political strategist. But, he added, “it is not fatal in and of itself.”

Honed over decades in business and now suddenly under the glare of a national contest, Trump’s style offers a glimpse of the polarizing management techniques he would carry into the White House. In fashioning his campaign after his real estate and entertainment projects, the mogul has inspired supporters and alarmed critics with his brazen moves.

[Trump once revealed his income tax returns. They showed he didn’t pay a cent.]

“He’s always the man in charge,” said Edward Rollins, the veteran Republican strategist who is working for a pro-Trump super PAC. “From his people, he gets what he needs. He makes them compete. Sometimes it gets the juices flowing, sometimes it spurs conflict. If he needs to, he steps in to settle it.”

Rollins pointed to the relationship between Trump’s 42-year-old campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his 67-year-old campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, as a prime example of how Trump handles people. While they have worked just steps from each other in recent weeks at Trump Tower in New York, the pair — contrasts in age, experience and personality — have a simmering rivalry over stature and responsibilities within the candidate’s orbit. And Trump doesn’t seem to mind.

“One day, Manafort goes up and Corey gets set back. The next day, Corey can move up to the forefront. Trump is at the center, watching it all and seeing it all,” Rollins said.

Trump’s firing last week of Rick Wiley as his national political director is a case study in how being close to Trump is usually the best way to influence him. A mantra for Trump’s campaign advisers has long been, “If you aren’t close to the principal, you aren’t anywhere,” according to one person on staff.

The abrupt dismissal was typical Trump — reminiscent of his NBC television show, “The Apprentice,” which spawned the catchphrase “You’re fired!”

[Trump’s bad bet: How too much debt drove his biggest casino aground]

Wiley, who joined the Trump campaign in April with a headstrong persona and establishment pedigree, did not endear himself to many of the grass-roots activists and Trump allies who had been working for the campaign for months, including Karen Giorno, who started as Trump’s Florida director and is now in charge of 10 Southeastern states.

According to multiple people familiar with the situation, Giorno grew unhappy with Wiley throughout May, telling friends that he was unresponsive to her and, in her view, too forceful in asserting his strategy.

Eventually, Giorno voiced her complaints directly to Trump. It worked. Wiley’s exit was announced Wednesday. In a statement, the campaign said Wiley was “hired on a short-term basis.” Wiley did not respond to a request for comment.

Giorno said Trump’s loyalty “goes beyond anything I’ve experienced in politics.” She also described Trump as a boss constantly testing his employees and turning the tables on them.

“He’ll ask questions — and if you don’t know the answer, you can tell that he’s disappointed that you don’t know it,” she said. “But then, he’ll brief you.”

On Florida matters, Trump has always been “extraordinarily curious — tell me more about what’s going on in Florida; give me the snapshot,” Giorno said. “As I am telling him information, he’s actually feeding me more information.”

From his 26th-floor office in New York, Trump — who through a spokeswoman declined to be interviewed for this article — is attempting to bend the nature and norms of a presidential campaign to his unpredictable and outsize personality, eschewing the top-down, consultant-heavy mode used by most candidates.

[Trump’s businesses boom as he runs for president, financial disclosure show]

Rather, Trump functions simultaneously as his own big-picture strategist and micro-managing chief executive. He has gotten involved in intramural skirmishing that has engulfed his campaign, both stoking and calming tensions depending on the circumstances.

“His style can be what I call ‘hands off, hands on.’ He gives people space to think and work and doesn’t get involved in everything each day, but he is the kind of person who can swoop in in a second and change everything,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide who was let go from the campaign last year following disagreements with Lewandowski and controversy over past racially charged posts on Facebook. “He monitors it all and he comes to check in on things when you don’t expect him.”

Trump’s fondness for stirring internal competition was on display during his Atlantic City heyday, when he pitted his casinos against one another — much to the dismay of some of the executives who ran them. He encouraged the Trump Castle to compete for customers against the Trump Plaza hotel and casino and, later, his third casino, the Trump Taj Mahal.

Trump liked the sparring while others worried about cannibalizing customers; in the end, for a variety of reasons, the three casinos went through corporate bankruptcies.

Trump’s method contrasts sharply with that of Clinton, who operates her corporate-style campaign from a sprawling headquarters in Brooklyn with legions of professional aides. Unlike Trump, her aides say, Clinton does not offer daily input on personnel or brewing internal debates.

“He takes in information from people around him,” Lewandowski said. “We look at that as surround-sound advocacy that gives him the totality of an issue. Then he is decisive. People shouldn’t be surprised he’s involved. Of course he’s involved. It’s his campaign and his money.”

Carl Paladino, a businessman and political operative from Buffalo, N.Y. who is the co-chairman of Trump’s New York campaign, recalled when Trump called him months ago ahead of the New York primary and asked him to take the position.

“He said: ‘Carl, let’s do it. Let’s go.’ He didn’t have to say anything else. He trusted me to do what he needed me to do,” Paladino said. “He knows that . . . if you get in my way, I’m going to knock you down.”

Such general directives demonstrate the level of trust Trump regularly places with many of his closest supporters. He continues to have faith in them when they collide, as has been the case with Manafort and Lewandowski.

Manafort, who declined to comment for this article, was brought into Trump’s circle in March when Trump started to fret that he might be headed for a contested Republican convention and would need someone who could navigate that thicket. This month, he was given the title of campaign chairman and chief strategist.

Manafort calls Trump “Donald,” unlike Lewandowski, who calls the candidate “Mr. Trump.” He also does more freelancing than Lewandowski in terms of building relationships and arranging his own media appearances.

Trump at times seem to play the two off of each other. Manafort appears to relish being a strategist and chairman more than the manager Lewandowski. Lewandowski, who prides himself on having been at Trump’s side since the campaign’s start, regularly takes the lead on overseeing events, operations and Trump’s travels.

Even as Manafort and Lewandowski seek to exhibit and expand their influence on the campaign, there is no doubt within the campaign that Trump is the ultimate arbiter.

Sometimes that means drawing conclusions on topics that more traditional campaigns would outsource to aides. Other times, it means his counsel comes from just one person: himself.

“Trump is micromanager on the most important things but not all things,” said Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York and a Trump ally who has known and observed Trump for decades. “On the most important things, he realizes you have to be a micromanager. He’ll delegate to a point. He has in his head what he wants to do and his issues, and he’ll hold onto them instead of sharing those big decisions.”",REAL
"Under new overtime rules, employees will be injured as well.

The Labor Department’s change to the overtime rule is a harsh blow to millions of small businesses and their employees. According to NFIB research, approximately 44% of small businesses would be affected. The department claims that 4.2 million workers could potentially benefit from the change. That’s not consistent with the department’s own analysis.

In fact, buried within the regulation, the department projects that many workers won’t receive any additional pay and that others will lose pay. According to Labor, 60% of the newly eligible employees don’t work overtime right now. The department also estimates that the average hourly pay rate will decline in 2017. The talking points say this is a raise for workers, but the economic analysis says something completely different.

Most small businesses have razor-thin margins, and they cannot simply raise prices to cover higher costs without losing customers. Moreover, the median personal income for small business owners is roughly $68,000 annually, according to NFIB research. Big corporations can trim shareholder dividends, cut CEO pay or move production facilities out of the country. Those aren’t options for most small firms.

Employees will be injured as well. Managers who haven’t punched a clock in years will have to go back to filling out a time sheet. They will even have to take into account work from home such as checking email or fielding a phone call. Essentially, they’ll be demoted from their management positions to hourly jobs.

The overtime rule is another government mandate that makes it costlier and more difficult to run a business and create jobs. NFIB surveys its members every month to identify their top concerns. Government regulations consistently rank at the top.

Every minute that business owners must devote to keeping records, filling out paperwork and dealing with government inspectors is a minute they don’t have to run their businesses. Every dollar it costs to comply with all of those rules is a dollar they cannot reinvest in new jobs, better equipment or customer service.

Juanita Duggan is president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business.",REAL
"Former vice-presidential nominee and governor of Alaska Sarah Palin made her first foray into the 2016 presidential race Tuesday by announcing she is endorsing Donald Trump.

""I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President of the United States of America,"" Palin said in a statement from the Trump campaign announcing the endorsement.

She later appeared alongside Trump at a campaign event at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa

“You’re putting relationships on the line for this country because you’re willing to make America great again,” she said at the rally. “I am here because like you, I know it’s now or never.”

“I’m in it to win it because we believe in America,” she added.

Trump told supporters he was “greatly honored” to receive Palin’s support.

“She’s the woman that from day one I said I needed to get her support,” he said.

Palin, who became a symbol of the Tea Party movement following the 2008 presidential election, is the highest-profile backer for a Republican contender so far in the race.

In her endorsement speech, Palin praised Trump for bringing up controversial issues to create “a good, heated primary,” while taking aim at what she called “establishment candidates” in the race.

“They’ve been wearing political correctness kind of like a suicide vest,” she said.

The endorsement comes less than two weeks ahead of the critical lead-off Iowa caucus, where Trump is locked in a dead heat with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

In the statement announcing the endorsement, Trump's campaign described Palin as a conservative who ""helped launch the careers of several key future leaders of the Republican Party and conservative movement."" The statement also quoted Cruz as once saying he ""would not be in the United States Senate were it not for Gov. Sarah Palin...She can pick winners.""

Campaigning in New Hampshire, Tuesday, Cruz responded to Palin's endorsement of Trump, saying ""regardless of what Sarah intends to do in 2016, I will remain a big, big fan of Sarah Palin.""

Trump's national political director Michael Glassner previously worked with Palin, who was a virtual newcomer to the national political arena when McCain named her as his running mate.

Palin is expected to join Trump on Wednesday for campaign events in Norwalk, Iowa and Tulsa, Okla.

“Even with a record number of candidates and internal calls to become more inclusive as a party, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin remain two of the GOP’s most influential leaders,"" Mark Paustenbach, Democratic National Committee Press secretary, said in a statement responding to the endorsement.

""Their divisive rhetoric is now peddled by everyone from Ted Cruz to Marco Rubio.  Americans deserve better than what Trump and Palin have to offer, but it seems like the other Republican candidates would rather follow in their footsteps,” the statement continued.

Palin's endorsement was not the only one Trump received Tuesday. While campaigning at Iowa's John Wayne Birthplace Museum, he received an endorsement from the western film actor’s daughter, Aissa Wayne.

Wayne said the country needs a strong and courageous leader like her father, and that he would be offering his endorsement if he were still alive.

Trump said he was a big fan of Wayne and that the actor represented strength and power — which, he said, the American people are looking for.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Maria Herrera, a 62-year-old retired casino housekeeper, feels no affinity for Marco Rubio even as he aims to make history as the first Hispanic president of the United States. As she explained: “He’s Cuban. I’m Mexican.”

“Rubio says things that are not good for Mexicans,” Herrera said, adding that she supports Hillary Clinton. “I would never vote for him just because he’s Latino.”

Rubio, whose parents are from Cuba, and Ted Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, are competing to be the first Hispanic in the White House — and casting unprecedented attention on the nation’s growing Hispanic vote.

But in several key swing states — Nevada, Colorado, Florida and Virginia — most Latinos are not Cuban. Most lean Democratic — and identify more with their country of origin than with the broader terms, Hispanic or Latino, for those from Spanish-speaking countries. Most also oppose both Rubio’s and Cruz’s positions on immigration reform. All of that, in addition to long-standing tensions between Cuban and Mexican immigrants, could dash the GOP’s hopes that Cruz or Rubio could do what few Republicans have been able to do in a presidential election: attract significant Hispanic support.

[Rubio’s cousin, a Democrat, says Marco has his love but not his vote]

Mexicans account for nearly two-thirds of the Latinos in the United States — about 35 million people. Cubans are the third-largest group, after Puerto Ricans, with just 2 million people, or only 3.7 percent of the Latino vote, according to the Pew Research Center.

In interviews in wedding chapels and casinos, all around this city of stretch limos, slot machines and neon signs, Mexicans who make up so much of the workforce said it would be far more meaningful to elect the first Mexican American president than the first Latino. Many said they would vote for a non-Latino over a Cuban American.

In two days of interviews, not a single Mexican said he or she supported Rubio or Cruz, and even some Cubans said they don’t plan to support either Cuban American candidate.

Part of the friction between Mexicans and Cubans comes from the starkly different reception they get when they arrive in the United States. Cubans who reach U.S. shores are almost automatically granted residency and eligibility for food stamps and other welfare benefits because of a special policy for those coming from the communist island — many arriving through Mexico. Mexicans who enter without legal papers live under the threat of deportation.

There are cultural distinctions, too. They speak with different accents, celebrate different customs and eat different foods. Mexico is soccer-obsessed, while Cuba loves baseball.

“Except for the fact that they both speak Spanish, everything else is totally different,” said Carlos Artiles, 50, a bartender at the Florida Café Cuban Bar & Grill, where the eggs come with stuffed potatoes and fried plaintains. Artiles, a Cuban, quickly became a citizen, but he sees firsthand how Mexicans, including his wife, try unsuccessfully for years and “pay thousands of dollars to attorneys to help. It’s completely unfair.”

“No way” will Mexicans rally around presidential candidates just because they are Cuban, he said.

“Like oil and water” is how Alejandro Carrillo, a Mexican salesman, describes Mexicans and Cubans. He said he believes that Cubans have it easier in the United States and often act as though they are better than Mexicans. As he shopped in Moda Latina, looking at cowboy boots and hats, Carrillo said the differences between Cubans and Mexicans extend right down to how they dress: “I never once saw a Cuban who wore boots.”

About 30 percent of Nevada’s population and 20 percent of its electorate is Latino. Mexicans far outnumber any Latino group here, but Cubans command an outsize influence.

Cuba had a thriving casino business when Fidel Castro seized control in 1959, and many Cuban casino workers fled the island and moved to this gambling mecca. For decades, Cubans have been influential in business, Spanish-language media and politics — just as they are in South Florida, home to the greatest concentration of Cubans.

Otto Merida, a prominent Cuban here who ran the Latin Chamber of Commerce for 40 years, said, “It would be a dream to have a Cuban American in the White House,” and he likes Rubio.

But early on, Merida signed up to support former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. “If he could catch fire,” Bush would do very well with Mexican Americans because he is married to a woman born in Mexico, he said.

Andres Ramirez, a Democratic strategist in Nevada, said that despite differences, many Cubans and Mexicans get along. Some Hispanics — no matter the nationality — will vote for a candidate “just because they’re a Latino, just like some people will vote for a woman because she is woman — but that is not the majority.”

“Surnames can matter, but people vote on policy and platforms,” Ramirez said.

Rubio, whose wife is the daughter of immigrants from Colombia, has shown more ability to win over non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida than Cruz has in Texas, when they ran their Senate races, according to exit polls. Rubio campaigns, in both English and fluent Spanish, about being the son of immigrants who came to America for a better life for their children.

But Fernand Amandi, managing partner of Bendixen & Amandi International, which frequently surveys the Hispanic community, said that in a presidential election, Rubio will face much more intense opposition because Democrats will highlight the fact that he yanked his support for comprehensive immigration reform. Cruz unequivocally — “today, tomorrow, forever” — opposes giving citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, a great number of whom are Mexican.

Not all Mexicans interviewed were in the country legally, and some have legal status but not citizenship, and so they are not eligible to vote. But those Mexicans who are citizens, such as Herrera, who was washing her clothes in a laundromat, said they plan to vote for Clinton. The Republicans and Democrats are holding caucuses in Nevada next month, in the first primary-season voting in the West, right after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Herrera said she was more interested in having the first female president than the first Latino president. What Clinton says is more appealing to her than what she hears from Rubio or Cruz, she said.

Many Cubans lavished praise on Rubio, who lived in Las Vegas as a child while his father worked as a hotel bartender and his mother as a maid. A few said they like Cruz but not enough to consider voting for him.

And several Cubans said they support Trump, the candidate most despised by Mexicans. Trump has referred to some Mexicans as “rapists” and promised to build a gigantic wall on the border to keep Mexicans out.

“Trump says what others won’t. He fears nothing,” said Elizabeth Abad, 46, who left Cuba a decade ago, became a U.S. citizen and works at the Florida Café. “I like his toughness.”

Sergio Perez, 47, owner of the Florida Café and the Havana Grill, where Rubio recently held a big rally, also thinks Trump is the best candidate “in these difficult times.” Perez said people are anxious and cannot afford the same life — not even the same amount of groceries — they once had. “Nobody felt good this Christmas,” he said, adding that Trump, a businessman, knows how to build things and put people to work.

“It’s a dream to have a Cuban guy as president,” he said about Rubio, whom he called “a beautiful guy, smart, charming. He could be a great vice president.”

But don’t expect Mexicans to vote for him because, Perez said, “Eighty percent of the Mexicans don’t like the Cuban people.”",REAL
"Republican White House hopeful Ted Cruz easily defeated frontrunner Donald Trump in the race to be the party nominee for the 2016 presidential election in the Saturday caucus in Wyoming.

With all votes counted, Texas Senator Cruz won 66.3 percent of the ballots in the western state, far ahead of his nearest rival, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who earned 19.5 percent of the vote, US media reported.

The Texas senator unanimously won Hot Springs, Goshen, Uinta and Campbell counties, as well as Sweetwater, Sheridan, Laramie, Converse and Fremont counties. Donald Trump won Teton County and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won Albany County.

 

 One county — Crook — didn’t commit to any of the candidates.

 

 Cruz is “the only principled and unwavering conservative” in the race, Dick Shanor said before being chosen to represent Laramie County at the national GOP convention.

 

 “Ted has proven he is not subject to the influence of D.C. insiders. Nor is he a mainstream, status-quo type of guy,” Shanor said. “He is truly a virtuous man.”

 

 More than 200 people took part in the Laramie County convention at a community center in Cheyenne. They wrote their preferred candidates on blue notecards and deposited them in a cardboard box at the front of the room as their names were called.

 

 Rubio finished second for the day, narrowly losing in Converse and Teton counties. In Laramie County, Khale Lenhart tried unsuccessfully to get fellow Republicans to send him to the national convention as a Rubio supporter.

 

 “One candidate stands out for his ability to bring his message of conservatism to people who haven’t heard it before,” Lenhart said of Rubio. “He is the best opportunity for our party to build something larger that lasts.”

 

 Trump’s over-the-top persona played poorly in Wyoming except for Teton County, where he edged Rubio.

 

 “Anybody but Mr. Trump,” said John Wheeler, a Laramie County participant. “He thinks he can win the election because he’s a billionaire.”

 

 Cruz can claim he has momentum from Wyoming headed into next week’s big primaries in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and elsewhere. He hasn’t won Wyoming yet, however. More than half of the state’s available GOP delegates remain unallocated.

 

 Republicans will choose another 14 delegates at their state convention in Casper in mid-April. The other three are the state GOP chairman, national committeeman and national committeewoman.

 

 Wyoming will send a total of 29 delegates to the national convention, more than any state of similar size because of its strong Republican leanings.

 

 Cruz is the only active GOP candidate to have campaigned in Wyoming. He pledged at a rally near Cheyenne last year to reverse federal regulations affecting the coal industry.

 

 Many in Wyoming are disillusioned with President Barack Obama’s policies. Market forces have caused a downturn in the state’s fossil fuel-reliant economy. Republicans also blame federal regulation for impeding oil, gas and coal extraction.

 

 Sen. Marco Rubio won a Republican primary in Washington DC. Nineteen delegates are at stake.

The biggest prizes will be on Tuesday, when primaries are held in five delegate-rich states -- Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio.",REAL
I Dont Actualy Like Trump thoif yu like him then your an idiot,FAKE
"Hillary Clinton's election fraud finally exposed. California stolen from Bernie Sanders! page: 1 link With all the talk from MSM of Russians interfering with US elections. Rumors of Soros owning new computer voting machines that can easily be programed to steal election. If you don't think that the DNC won't steal an election if they can. Think again. a reply to: Doctor Smith Intuitively, we all know that Hillary is capable of attempting to steal an election. Your video, combined with the many e-mails provided by WikiLeaks, confirms that she does indeed have an army of cronies out there breaking federal and state election laws, to not only cheat Bernie Sanders, but to get her into the White House again too. Hillary is indeed a Nasty Woman, just as Elizabeth Warren confirmed this past Monday. link This is the stuff that needs a independent investigation launched pronto. If it is found out 100% it is a fix, what then? I guess there could be a sweeping write in movement for Bernie..or just vote for Stein a reply to: Doctor Smith Now the million dollar question is what are ""we"" the people going to do about it ? originally posted by: SaturnFX This is the stuff that needs a independent investigation launched pronto. If it is found out 100% it is a fix, what then? I guess there could be a sweeping write in movement for Bernie..or just vote for Stein Vote for Pee Wee Herman if you want. Just don't vote those Clinton criminals in again. But if you really want to stop her, you have to vote for Trump. Compared to Hillary, Trump is Honest Abraham Lincoln. new topics",FAKE
"Boston magazine has a long take on William Weld, former Massachusetts governor, currently Libertarian vice presidential candidate.

The main takeaway, after some of the usual slightly sneery scene-setting about weirdo libertarians (reported from July's FreedomFest in Las Vegas) and the lovely color detail of the patrician Weld being amazed he's staying in a New York hotel whose price is three digits beginning with ""one""?

That while Weld totally thinks of himself as libertarian and has for a long time, he's also a guy who just likes to do strange and challenging things as a lark, like writing novels, and hates being bored and likes being in the political mix.

An unnamed former adviser says ""There's nothing more he would like than to be flying around the country on somebody else's dime, flying first class, and talking to political reporters all day."" Another unnamed former staffer says of Weld ""He is old money, white, and fucking brilliant...Everybody tries to distance himself from those traits when running for office, and he always embraced them and made them his own.""

Reason has written quite a bit on some conflicts between Weld and libertarianism as most define it, despite Weld's long-time affection for that self-identification, and this profile is decent on explaining that aspect of the Weld/Libertarian story.

The profile by Simon van Zuylen-Wood sums up that conflict:

Weld's strategy isn't to try to defend libertarian ideas. Instead he articulates the ones he thinks disaffected centrists want to hear. When Johnson suggests abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, Weld raises an eyebrow and clarifies that he wouldn't go that far. When asked about gun control, Weld suggests the formation—cue a million Libertarians choking on their dinner—of a massive new FBI task force.... .... I ask him, at random, about climate change. He advocates pragmatic, mainstream, and essentially unlibertarian ideas about the urgent need for governing bodies to prevent the rise of global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius. These aren't ideas his free-market brethren take kindly to. He smiles. He doesn't care: ""I'm running as myself.""

Weld to Reason TV in May on why Libertarians can trust him:",REAL
"Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated who Bernie Sanders would be meeting with Thursday at the White House. He is scheduled to meet with President Obama.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Hillary Clinton marked her place in American history Tuesday night, declaring victory in the Democratic presidential race.

“Thanks to you, we’ve reached a milestone,” she told cheering supporters in Brooklyn, saying for the “first time in our nation’s history” a woman would lead a major-party ticket.

Clinton hit the magic number of 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination on Monday night, as news organizations called the race for her based on support from superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials who have a vote at the convention and pledged to back her over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Clinton waited until six states held a final round of contests Tuesday to declare victory, which will solidify her lead in pledged delegates earned through primaries and caucuses as well as her advantage in the overall popular vote.

Clinton picked up an easy win in New Jersey and also claimed victories in New Mexico and South Dakota. Sanders, meanwhile, won the North Dakota caucuses and the Montana primary.  The AP, CNN and NBC all called California for Clinton early Wednesday.

Clinton celebrated with supporters at Brooklyn Navy Yard and highlighted the historic nature of her win.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” said Clinton, who was framed by American flags draping the walls and in a row behind her. “It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible.”

A video that played prior to her speech spliced images of pivotal moments in the fight for women’s equality in the U.S. — from the suffragettes and the women’s liberation movement — with shots of her climbing stairs to address supporters.

The White House released a statement late Tuesday night saying that President Obama called both Clinton and Sanders, congratulating them ""for running inspiring campaigns"" and Clinton for hitting the magic number of delegates needed to secure the Democratic nod. The statement also said Obama and Sanders would meet at the White House on Thursday.

An endorsement of Clinton by the president is expected as early as this week.

Sanders has vowed to fight all the way to the nominating convention in Philadelphia, yet he is already coming under pressure from party officials to concede — the way Clinton did in her campaign against then-senator Barack Obama in June 2008 — with Clinton’s lead over Sanders more than double the advantage Obama had at the same time.

In her speech Tuesday night, Clinton made a direct appeal to the working-class voters who’ve been supporting Sanders and Trump. “So many of you feel like you’re out there on your own, that no one has your back — well I do.”

“Let there be no mistake: Sen. Sanders, his campaign and the vigorous debate about how to raise incomes, reduce inequality, increase upward mobility have been very good for the Democratic Party and for America,” she said. “It never feels good to put your heart into a cause and a candidate you believe in and to come up short,” she said. “I know that feeling well,” Clinton said to laughter.

Speaking in Santa Monica, Calif., late Tuesday night, Sanders thanked supporters for being ""part of the political revolution.""

""Our vision will be the future of America,"" he said, adding later that he would ""continue the fight"" to the final primary a week later in Washington, D.C. He acknowledged the odds against him were ""steep,"" but again vowed to press on to the July convention.

Clinton's win in the Democratic race marks a historic moment in American politics.

From India’s Indira Gandhi to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Angela Merkel, many other nations have elevated women to their highest office. Yet the United States has been slow to do the same, with Clinton’s presumptive nomination coming exactly 100 years after the first woman, Jeannette Rankin, was elected to Congress.

“The U.S. has fallen far behind other countries in women’s political engagement in particular,” said Terry O’Neill, the head of the National Organization for Women, the nation’s largest organization of feminist activists. “We have huge barriers to women achieving these positions in the United States,” with only 20% female representation in the U.S. Congress, she said.

Polls suggest a matchup with Trump could be close, with Clinton ahead by just 2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, though Democrats are hoping the former secretary of State can increase her margin as the party unites behind a single candidate. That could depend on the tone that Sanders takes and whether his passionate, but disappointed, supporters begin to view the election as a referendum on Trump.

Clinton took Trump on with the same message she’s been delivering in stump speeches. “When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,' that’s code for let’s take American backwards.""

The former first lady wrapped up her speech by paying tribute to her mother, who “taught me to never back down from a bully,"" which she said ended up being “pretty good advice.”

""I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party's nominee,"" said Clinton.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made an appeal to Sanders after announcing her support for Clinton on Tuesday morning.

“Bernie knows better than anyone what’s on the line in the election and that we at some point have to unify as we go forward,” Pelosi said on ABC’s Good Morning America.

In Sacramento, one Sanders supporter's view of Trump suggested Clinton's best hope of unifying the party may be the New York billionaire.

Aileen McDuff, 25, said she voted for the Vermont senator but will support Clinton if necessary. She's frightened, she said, of what a Trump presidency would be like.

""Everything he says is frightening,"" she said.",REAL
"MARION, Ind. — What started as a handful of Donald Trump supporters heckling Ted Cruz from across the street outside a campaign stop here Monday afternoon turned into a contentious debate between the Republican presidential hopeful and at least one of them on the eve of the Indiana primary.

The Trump backers yelled jeers like ""Lyin' Ted!"" and ""Hey Cruz, do the math!"" — a reference to Cruz's delegate deficit in the GOP race.

Some Cruz supporters tried to drown out the men out with pro-Cruz chants and counter-insults. Then, when it looked like Cruz was about to leave and things would simmer down, the senator strolled over to engage the men, who were smoking and holding up Trump signs.

In a back-and-forth with one of the men, who afterward repeatedly refused to provide his name to reporters and said he was from Ohio, Cruz said of Trump: ""This man is lying to you and he's taking advantage of you.""

He added: ""If I were Donald Trump I wouldn't have come over and talked to you. ... I would have told the folks over there go over and punch those guys in the face.""

The man accused Cruz of lying on that point. Cruz said it was beyond dispute.

""You'll find out tomorrow. Indiana don't want you,"" the man told him at one point. He also repeatedly interrupted Cruz and tried to mock him.

""Sir, America is a better country — "" said Cruz.

""Without you,"" the man quipped.

""A question everyone here should ask — "" the senator later said.

""Are you Canadian?"" another man said. ""Are you Canadian?"" the man Cruz was speaking to repeated.

The question Cruz was actually trying to raise: ""Do you want your kids repeating the words of Donald Trump?""

The man also took aim at Cruz over his remark that he would ""carpet bomb"" Islamic State militants.

""Those are your words. Carpet bomb. I added the women and children because that's what you're going to be doing when you carpet bomb somewhere.""

Cruz shot back: ""It's interesting that you added women and children because your candidate, Donald Trump, came out and said he would order our military to kill the women and children, the wives and children, of terrorists, which is a war crime.""

Polls show Trump is leading Cruz in Indiana. A loss would be a devastating blow to Cruz's already struggling campaign. Trump is also campaigning in the state Monday.",REAL
"President-elect Donald Trump has said he plans to deport two to three million undocumented immigrants with criminal records from the country immediately – and has insisted that he will build his wall. 
Via AlternativeNews 

In his first extensive interview since he won the White House, Trump is reassuring his supporters that he will deport or incarcerate up to three million ‘gang members’ and ‘drug dealers.’
In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that airs on Sunday evening – his first since winning the election – Trump insisted that he will build the wall along the US-Mexico border that was a vital part of his presidential campaign.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million – it could be even three million – we are getting them out of the country or we are going to incarcerate,” Mr Trump told 60 Minutes. “Be we’re getting them out of the country, they’re here illegally.”
He explained that once the border is “secure”, then the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will assess the status of the remaining undocumented immigrants in the country.
“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that,” he said. “But before we make that determination… it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.” When asked if he actually intends to build the wall along the southern border, Mr Trump simply replied, “Yes.” However, Mr Trump explained that the wall along the 1,900 mile border would probably not be as grandiose as he promised – describing an iteration of the boundary between the two countries that essentially already exists. “There could be some fencing,” he said. “For certain areas I would [accept a fence], but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this, it’s called construction.”
The President-elect’s comments about mass deportations stand at odds with a statement made by Paul Ryan, the highest ranking Republican, on Sunday morning. “We are not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump’s not planning on that,” Mr Ryan told CNN. “I think we should put people’s minds at ease: That is not what our focus is. That is not what we’re focused on. We’re focused on securing the border,” he added. “We think that’s first and foremost, before we get into any other immigration issue, we’ve got to know who’s coming and going into the country – we’ve got to secure the border.”
Mr Ryan’s remarks seemed to indicate yet another U-turn in policy proposals for the President-elect. On Friday, he told the Wall Street Journal that he would more than likely keep some parts of the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as “Obamacare”, rather than completely repealing it.
“Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced,” Mr Trump told the newspaper following his 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama. “I told him I will look at his suggestions and, out of respect, I will do that.” While Mr Obama said he felt “encouraged” by the Thursday meeting, a signifcant number of Americans believe Mr Trump’s election will mark a dark, new phase for the United States, as he intends to dismantle much of the sitting President’s legacy.
Millions of protesters took to the streets after election night to protest over Mr Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton. While the New York businessman did win enough electoral votes to make it to the White House, Ms Clinton took the popular vote – more than any US president in history, with the exception of Mr Obama.
Protests filled roads in major cities, like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and echoed with chants of “not my president” and “dump Trump”. Dissenters are using the protests to rebuke the racism and bigotry promoted by the Trump campaign, as manifested through policy proposals like building a wall along the border, mass deportations, and the blockade of Muslim immigrants.
Mr Trump’s victory has galvanised white supremacists across the country, as a wave of reported hate crimesreaches new highs. Neo-Nazi and Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin exalted Mr Trump as a “God Emperor” following Tuesday night’s election results.
“Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible,” he wrote. “[T]he White race is back in the game. And if we’re playing, no one can beat us. The winning is not going to stop.” The Ku Klux Klan also announced a victory parade for the beginning of December in North Carolina.
Civil rights organisations are preparing themselves for the incoming Trump administration. The American Civil Liberties Union published a full-page ad in the New York Times with an open letter threatening to sue Mr Trump. “if you do not reverse course and endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality,” the ACLU wrote, “you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at your every step.”
Source : (Independent UK) 
",FAKE
"Reuters 
On a rooftop overlooking the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, around 200 American-Israeli fans of Donald Trump gathered to proclaim their support for the Republican candidate, convinced he will be Israel’s best friend if elected. 
Wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, the small crowd, ranging from Holocaust survivors in their 80s to grinning teenagers in Trump t-shirts, said they didn’t care about the sexual assault allegations against the candidate or the online anti-Semitism of some of his supporters. 
“Trump will let Israel be itself and make its own decisions, that’s what I like,” David Weissman, a 35-year-old from Queens, New York, who moved to Israel three years ago, said at the event late on Wednesday. 
“He’s not a saint, but look at his achievements. He’s not afraid to identify the enemy as radical Islam, and he’s not going to support the two-state solution,” he said, referring to long-standing efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians. 
Trump has said that the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct fabricated their stories to damage his campaign. 
Others at the rally said they liked the fact that Trump was promising to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and would not berate Israel for building Jewish settlements in occupied territory. 
“It’s very important that he becomes president,” said Connie Gordner, 82, who moved to Israel from Jacksonville, Florida, 21 years ago. “If Hillary Clinton becomes president, we’re dead.” 
The rally was organized by Republicans Overseas Israel, which estimates that there are 300,000 U.S. citizens living in Israel or in Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians seek for their own state. 
Even if only a third of those cast absentee ballots, organizers believe it could have an impact in some swing states, come Nov. 8. Marc Zell, co-chairman of the non-profit group, believes around three-quarters of American-Israelis support the Republican party and its candidate. 
In an impassioned speech to the small crowd, David Friedman, Trump’s adviser on Israel, heaped criticism on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton for her decisions as secretary of state and said Trump was Israel’s greatest hope. 
“Under Trump, the United States will never pressure Israel into accepting a two-state solution or any other solution that is against the wishes of the Israeli people,” he said, to whoops, cheers and a few shouts of “Crooked Hillary”. 
While the motley crowd was unabashed in its Trumpian fervor, polls indicate that most Jewish Israelis favor Clinton over Trump, by 40 percent to 31 percent. 
The critical element is American-Israelis who retain the right to vote in U.S. elections. Some estimates suggest more than a quarter of them live in settlements, which tend to have a more conservative, national-religious outlook. Trump’s messages have been designed to appeal to their sentiments. 
On Wednesday, he delivered a minute-long video to the rally, playing up his connections to Judaism through his daughter’s marriage, saying it enhanced his respect for the faith. 
“My administration will stand side-by-side with the Jewish people and Israel’s leaders to continue strengthening the bridges that connect not only Jewish Americans and Israelis but also all Americans and Israelis,” he said. 
“Together we will make America and Israel safe again.”",FAKE
"Anxiety grows among GOP congressional staffers By Wayne Madsen Posted on October 28, 2016 by Wayne Madsen 
With their bosses away campaigning, some for their political lives, a number of Republican staffers in Congress are growing anxious over their future employment. With the Senate now favored to be transferred to Democratic control, GOP staffers for members up for re-election on November 8, as well as Republican staffers assigned to various Senate committees and subcommittees, are shopping around their resumes. 
Although more senior staff can always expect to find employment with Washington’s many lobbying firms and policy-wonkish institutes and foundations, that is not necessarily the case with younger staffers who may find their future options being limited to Starbuck’s baristas and Uber drivers. 
On the House of Representatives side, Republicans are expected to lose a number of seats in a Democratic wave but GOP control of the House, barring a dramatic shift, is expected to remain in Republican hands. However, staffers for GOP members who are in close races or facing certain defeat are also scurrying around Washington looking for future employment. 
In what could be termed poetic justice, many Republican staffers who helped push their bosses’ memes against government “entitlement” programs, including unemployment benefits, may be among the first in line at District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland state unemployment offices come December. Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report . Copyright © 2016 WayneMadenReport.com 
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required) . This entry was posted in Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
"Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts October 26, 2016 Pentagon Retreats on Enlistment Bonus Collection Efforts 
Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday ordered a suspension in efforts to seek repayment of thousands of enlistment bonuses and tuition assistance mistakenly paid to members of the California National Guard. 
""While some soldiers knew or should have known they were ineligible for benefits they were claiming, many others did not,"" Carter, who is in Europe meeting with U.S. allies, said in a statement. 
""This process has dragged on too long, for too many service members,"" he said. ""Too many cases have languished without action. That's unfair to service members and to taxpayers."" 
Last week the Los Angeles Times reported that about 10,000 California National Guard troops had been ordered to repay enlistment bonuses - some of more than $15,000 - that were improperly given to them. The newspaper said audits revealed the California Guard had overpaid troops in order to entice them to join and meet enlistment targets more than a decade ago. 
Senior Defense Department officials have been told to assess the bonus situation and establish a ""streamlined, centralized process"" by the start of next year, Carter said in the statement. 
""The objective will be to complete the decision-making process on all cases as soon as possible - and no later than July 1,"" he said. 
The issue has caused outrage in Congress. Members from both parties have called on the Pentagon to drop efforts to reclaim the bonuses. 
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News on Tuesday that if the Pentagon did not drop the effort to reclaim re-enlistment bonuses, lawmakers would move legislation on the issue. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE!  ",FAKE
"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
"PITTSBURGH—Hillary Clinton on Saturday drew a contrast between how she and Republican rival would conduct their first 100 days in office, zeroing in on his contention that he would sue the women who have accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Speaking to reporters on her campaign plane Saturday night, Mrs. Clinton and her running […]",REAL
"The consent decree between Cleveland and the Justice Department emphasizes community policing, an approach that involves law enforcement closely working with the local community to guide best practices. In particular, the city vowed to establish a commission that will act as a link between the Cleveland police department and community groups. ""We will have community policing as part of our DNA,"" Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said.

The agreement also promises new guidelines, improved training, and more oversight for use of force. As part of these changes, the Cleveland police department will reform and strengthen existing watchdog agencies. The mayor will also appoint an inspector general that will watch over the police department, and a civilian will be in charge of the police force's internal affairs unit.

Among the reforms, police officers will be required to stop pistol whipping people in the head, and document each time they unholster their guns.

An independent monitor will oversee all of these changes. The city will only be relieved of federal oversight once a federal judge agrees that the police department has met a specific set of standards for reform detailed in the agreement.

A brutal Justice Department report in December found Cleveland police officers used excessive deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons; unnecessary, excessive, and retaliatory force, including Tasers, chemical sprays, and their fists; and excessive force against people with mental illness or in crisis, including one situation in which officers were called exclusively to check up on someone's well-being.

In one case, a police officer shot at an unarmed man wearing only boxer shorts as he was fleeing from armed assailants:

An incident from 2013 in which a sergeant shot at a victim as he ran from a house where he was being held against his will is just one illustration of this problem. ""Anthony"" was being held against his will inside a house by armed assailants. When officers arrived on scene, they had information that two armed assailants were holding several people inside the home. After officers surrounded the house, Anthony escaped from his captors and ran from the house, wearing only boxer shorts. An officer ordered Anthony to stop, but Anthony continued to run toward the officers. One sergeant fired two shots at him, missing. According to the sergeant, when Anthony escaped from the house, the sergeant believed Anthony had a weapon because he elevated his arm and pointed his hand toward the sergeant. No other officers at the scene reported seeing Anthony point anything at the sergeant. The sergeant's use of deadly force was unreasonable. It is only by fortune that he did not kill the crime victim in this incident. The sergeant had no reasonable belief that Anthony posed an immediate danger. The man fleeing the home was wearing only boxer shorts, making it extremely unlikely that he was one of the hostage takers. In a situation where people are being held against their will in a home, a reasonable police officer ought to expect that someone fleeing the home may be a victim. Police also ought to expect that a scared, fleeing victim may run towards the police and, in his confusion and fear, not immediately respond to officer commands. A reasonable officer in these circumstances should not have shot at Anthony.

This is just one of many examples of police officers using ""poor and dangerous tactics"" that often put them ""in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk,"" according to the report.

The Justice Department attributed many of these problems to inadequate training and supervision. ""Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it,"" the report said. ""Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs.""

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department at the time of the investigation, argued that fixing these issues is crucial for both the general public and police. ""Accountability and legitimacy are essential for communities to trust their police departments, and for there to be genuine collaboration between police and the citizens they serve,"" he said.

For Cleveland, settling with the Justice Department to reform its police force averts a costly court battle. But it also could help alleviate tensions with a community that has long seen its police department as overly aggressive and even abusive.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump on Monday stood by his comments that former President George W. Bush did not keep the country safe since he was president during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Trump insisted he isn't ""blaming anybody,"" but repeatedly reminded Fox News viewers that the ""worst attack in the history of our country"" occurred on Bush's watch and suggested that the attacks could have been prevented.

""The fact is we had the worst attack in the history of our country during his reign. Jeb (Bush) said we were safe during his reign. That wasn't true,"" Trump said. ""And I'm not blaming anybody and I'm not blaming George Bush, although if you look at his three primary agencies, they hated each other, they weren't talking ... And a good leader would've made sure that they would get along and talk and lots of other things happen.""

Trump walks on stage with his family after he was declared the election winner on November 9. ""Ours was not a campaign, but rather, an incredible and great movement,"" he told his supporters in New York.

Trump walks on stage with his family after he was declared the election winner on November 9. ""Ours was not a campaign, but rather, an incredible and great movement,"" he told his supporters in New York.

Trump apologizes in a video, posted to his Twitter account in October, for vulgar and sexually aggressive remarks he made a decade ago regarding women. ""I said it, I was wrong and I apologize,"" Trump said, referring to lewd comments he made during a previously unaired taping of ""Access Hollywood."" Multiple Republican leaders rescinded their endorsements of Trump after the footage was released.

Trump faces Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the first presidential debate, which took place in Hempstead, New York, in September.

Trump delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention in July, accepting the party's nomination for President. ""I have had a truly great life in business,"" he said. ""But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country -- to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people.""

Trump delivers a speech at the Republican National Convention in July, accepting the party's nomination for President. ""I have had a truly great life in business,"" he said. ""But now, my sole and exclusive mission is to go to work for our country -- to go to work for you. It's time to deliver a victory for the American people.""

Trump speaks during a campaign event in Evansville, Indiana, on April 28. After Trump won the Indiana primary, his last two competitors dropped out of the GOP race.

Trump speaks during a campaign event in Evansville, Indiana, on April 28. After Trump won the Indiana primary, his last two competitors dropped out of the GOP race.

Trump -- flanked by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz -- speaks during a CNN debate in Miami on March 10. Trump dominated the GOP primaries and emerged as the presumptive nominee in May.

Trump -- flanked by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, left, and Ted Cruz -- speaks during a CNN debate in Miami on March 10. Trump dominated the GOP primaries and emerged as the presumptive nominee in May.

In June 2015, during a speech from Trump Tower, Trump announced that he was running for President. He said he would give up ""The Apprentice"" to run.

Trump speaks in Sarasota, Florida, after accepting the Statesman of the Year Award at the Sarasota GOP dinner in August 2012. It was shortly before the Republican National Convention in nearby Tampa.

Trump speaks in Sarasota, Florida, after accepting the Statesman of the Year Award at the Sarasota GOP dinner in August 2012. It was shortly before the Republican National Convention in nearby Tampa.

Trump poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2011. Trump had been executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants since 1996.

Trump poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2011. Trump had been executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants since 1996.

Trump appears on the set of ""The Celebrity Apprentice"" with two of his children -- Donald Jr. and Ivanka -- in 2009.

Trump appears on the set of ""The Celebrity Apprentice"" with two of his children -- Donald Jr. and Ivanka -- in 2009.

For ""The Apprentice,"" Trump was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2007.

For ""The Apprentice,"" Trump was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January 2007.

Trump wrestles with ""Stone Cold"" Steve Austin at WrestleMania in 2007. Trump has close ties with the WWE and its CEO, Vince McMahon.

Trump wrestles with ""Stone Cold"" Steve Austin at WrestleMania in 2007. Trump has close ties with the WWE and its CEO, Vince McMahon.

Trump attends the U.S. Open tennis tournament with his third wife, Melania Knauss-Trump, and their son, Barron, in 2006. Trump and Knauss married in 2005.

Trump attends the U.S. Open tennis tournament with his third wife, Melania Knauss-Trump, and their son, Barron, in 2006. Trump and Knauss married in 2005.

Trump attends a news conference in 2005 that announced the establishment of Trump University. From 2005 until it closed in 2010, Trump University had about 10,000 people sign up for a program that promised success in real estate. Three separate lawsuits -- two class-action suits filed in California and one filed by New York's attorney general -- argued that the program was mired in fraud and deception. Trump's camp rejected the suits' claims as ""baseless."" And Trump has charged that the New York case against him is politically motivated.

A 12-inch talking Trump doll is on display at a toy store in New York in September 2004.

A 12-inch talking Trump doll is on display at a toy store in New York in September 2004.

An advertisement for the television show ""The Apprentice"" hangs at Trump Tower in 2004. The show launched in January of that year. In January 2008, the show returned as ""Celebrity Apprentice.""

An advertisement for the television show ""The Apprentice"" hangs at Trump Tower in 2004. The show launched in January of that year. In January 2008, the show returned as ""Celebrity Apprentice.""

Trump dips his second wife, Marla Maples, after the couple married in a private ceremony in New York in December 1993. The couple divorced in 1999 and had one daughter together, Tiffany.

Trump dips his second wife, Marla Maples, after the couple married in a private ceremony in New York in December 1993. The couple divorced in 1999 and had one daughter together, Tiffany.

Trump and singer Michael Jackson pose for a photo before traveling to visit Ryan White, a young child with AIDS, in 1990.

Trump and singer Michael Jackson pose for a photo before traveling to visit Ryan White, a young child with AIDS, in 1990.

Trump signs his second book, ""Trump: Surviving at the Top,"" in 1990. Trump has published at least 16 other books, including ""The Art of the Deal"" and ""The America We Deserve.""

Trump attends the opening of his new Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1989.

Trump attends the opening of his new Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, in 1989.

Trump uses his personal helicopter to get around New York in 1987.

Trump uses his personal helicopter to get around New York in 1987.

Trump was married to Ivana Zelnicek Trump from 1977 to 1990, when they divorced. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.

Trump was married to Ivana Zelnicek Trump from 1977 to 1990, when they divorced. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.

Trump attends an event to mark the start of construction of the New York Convention Center in 1979.

Trump attends an event to mark the start of construction of the New York Convention Center in 1979.

Trump stands with Alfred Eisenpreis, New York's economic development administrator, in 1976 while they look at a sketch of a new 1,400-room renovation project of the Commodore Hotel. After graduating college in 1968, Trump worked with his father on developments in Queens and Brooklyn before purchasing or building multiple properties in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those properties included Trump Tower in New York and Trump Plaza and multiple casinos in Atlantic City.

Trump stands with Alfred Eisenpreis, New York's economic development administrator, in 1976 while they look at a sketch of a new 1,400-room renovation project of the Commodore Hotel. After graduating college in 1968, Trump worked with his father on developments in Queens and Brooklyn before purchasing or building multiple properties in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those properties included Trump Tower in New York and Trump Plaza and multiple casinos in Atlantic City.

Trump, center, wears a baseball uniform at the New York Military Academy in 1964. After he graduated from the boarding school, he went to college. He started at Fordham University before transferring and later graduating from the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.

Trump, center, wears a baseball uniform at the New York Military Academy in 1964. After he graduated from the boarding school, he went to college. He started at Fordham University before transferring and later graduating from the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school.

Trump, center, stands at attention during his senior year at the New York Military Academy in 1964.

Trump, center, stands at attention during his senior year at the New York Military Academy in 1964.

Trump, left, in a family photo. He was the second-youngest of five children.

Trump, left, in a family photo. He was the second-youngest of five children.

Trump at age 4. He was born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Trump in New York City. His father was a real estate developer.

Trump at age 4. He was born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Trump in New York City. His father was a real estate developer.

President-elect Donald Trump has been in the spotlight for years. From developing real estate and producing and starring in TV shows, he became a celebrity long before winning the White House.

President-elect Donald Trump has been in the spotlight for years. From developing real estate and producing and starring in TV shows, he became a celebrity long before winning the White House.

Trump was referencing how in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks top law enforcement and intelligence agencies including the CIA and the FBI weren't coordinating as closely as they do now.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump's rivals for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said during the last Republican debate that his brother, the former president, ""kept us safe."" Trump on Friday reopened that feud and challenged that assertion.

""How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe,"" he tweeted.

Trump even suggested Monday that the Bush administration ""knew in advance"" the U.S. would be attacked.

""CIA Director George Tenet knew in advance that there was going to be an attack,"" Trump said.""He knew in advance that there was going to be an attack.""

While Tenet did go to the White House two months before 9/11 with intelligence reports suggesting al-Qaeda was plotting a terrorist attack on the U.S., Tenet did not know when or how those attacks would unfold and he did not know how reliable the intercepted chatter was.

Former Trump political aide Roger Stone, who is also a well-known conspiracy theorist, pushed a similar line hours before Trump called into Fox News, tweeting that Tenet ""admitted he had 60 day advance warning of attack on America-and did nothing.""

Stone also tweeted two days before that "".@realDonaldTrump is right - Bush Admin knew of attack on America 60 days in advance- did nothing.""

Trump also said Monday that tougher immigration policies like the ones he would implement if he became president would have thwarted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Those hijackers entered the U.S. legally, but Trump said he would have implemented tougher visa standards to prevent their entry into the country in the first place. It's unclear what those standards would have been.

Trump also said he would have had a ""massive whistleblower system"" to gain advance knowledge of the attacks. He did not explain how such a system would work.

The latest sparring between Trump and Jeb Bush is just the latest in a series of feuds that have marked the two contenders' relationship through the primary.

Trump has repeatedly knocked Bush over his last name -- suggesting there should be no more Bushes and Clintons in the White House -- and claimed that the former Florida governor is too ""low-energy"" to take on the job of commander-in-chief.

After first resisting to engage the brash billionaire, Bush has in recent months taken Trump on directly and forcefully, this weekend explaining on CNN's ""State of the Union"" that he has ""grave doubts"" about Trump's preparedness to handle the responsibilities of president of the United States. Bush also linked Trump's candidacy to the antics of Trump's reality show, ""The Apprentice.""

But Trump's criticism of the two Bushes is doing more than just dragging the former Florida governor and one-time establishment favorite for the nomination into a mud fight. It's also provoking Jeb Bush into repeated impassioned defenses of his brother's tenure as president, which remains contentious.

Jeb Bush struggled early in the campaign to call his brother's decision to invade Iraq a ""mistake"" -- a judgment that today has broad consensus -- as he almost reflexively defended his brother.

And Jeb Bush did it again this weekend, in the face of Trump's latest attack over 9/11:

""My brother responded to a crisis, and he did it as you would hope a president would do. He united the country, he organized our country and he kept us safe. And there's no denying that. The great majority of Americans believe that,"" Bush said.",REAL
"Email 
The decision whether to allow the commercialisation of the first genetically modified (GM) food crop (mustard) in India rumbles on. As I have previously discussed here, the bottom line is government collusion over GM crop technology (that is not wanted and not needed) with transnational agribusiness, which is trying to hide in the background. 
The real story behind GM mustard in India is that it presents the opportunity to make various herbicide tolerant (HT) mustard hybrids using India’s best germ plasm, which would be an irresistible money spinner for the developers and chemical manufacturers (Bayer-Monsanto). GM mustard is both a Trojan horse and based on a hoax. 
Various high-level reports (listed here) have advised against introducing GM food crops to India. Allowing for not one but three GMOs (which is what the GM mustard in question constitutes, when we include its two crucial GM parental lines) is according to campaigner Aruna Rodrigues a serious case of regulatory ‘sleight-of-hand’, permissible due to diluted rules to ensure easy compliance. 
If allowed to go through, India will be forced to accept a highly toxic and unsustainable technology suited to monocropping. HT GM crops would be particularly unsuitable for its agriculture given the large number of small farms growing a diverse range of crops alongside mustard that contribute towards agricultural biodiversity and, in turn, diverse, healthy diets. 
The processes being used to push through GM mustard are, according to this writ by Rodrigues, based on fraud and unremitting regulatory delinquency. She argues that the whole system is in addition being protected by a subterranean process of regulation that has also broken India’s constitutional safeguards by keeping the biosafety data hidden from the nation. 
Rodrigues says, “These matters require criminal prosecution.” 
New development 
The government has now told the Supreme Court (SC) that it won’t release GM mustard without the court’s say so. At the same time, however, it strongly opposes the writ filed by Rodrigues. 
In an affidavit response to Aruna Rodrigues’ writ, however, the Union of India revealed something that merited a press release from the civil organisation Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues (presented in full below this article). 
According to the press statement, the government’s response contained an admission by the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) itself that no claim had been made in any documents submitted to it that HT Mustard DMH 11 out-performs non-GMO hybrids. 
So then, what is the point of GM mustard? And what were all the claims being made in media about GM mustard outperforming non-GMO hybrids by 25-30% in yield? 
According to the press statement, that claim was also made by the developers (Dr Pental and his team at Delhi University) and is clearly recorded by the media. It also notes that the claim of superior yield was implied in the Supreme Court (SC) during a ‘hearing’ (24 October) on India’s import bill for edible oil. 
The press statement says: 
“It is now clear, by the GEAC’s own admission, that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best non-GMO cultivars and this includes hybrids against which this mustard was not tested.” 
Navdanya and Aruna Rodrigues ask: 
“Therefore, what is the Union of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to just make hybrids? Given that it does not outperform our non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking.” 
They conclude that this HT Mustard DMH 11 is not needed – which is in fact the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops! 
HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on the domestic production of mustard oil, which was a major reason why it was being pushed in the first place. The argument was that GM mustard would increase productivity and this would help reduce imports of edible oils. Implicit in this was that India’s farmers were unproductive and GM would help overcome this. 
While it is clear that India’s imports of edible oils have indeed increased, this is not as a result of an underperforming home-grown sector. India essentially became a dumping ground for palm oil. Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Then import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. 
This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms. It therefore came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme. 
Supporters of GM twisted this situation to call for the introduction of GM mustard to increase productivity. 
Now their arguments on virtually each and every count have been shown to be erroneous and constitute little more than a cynical ruse to facilitate Bayer-Monsanto GM food crops and associated agropoisons entry into India. 
PRESS RELEASE 
UNION OF INDIA REPLY AFFIDAVIT 20/21 OCT 2016 
GEAC STATES: “NO CLAIM MADE THAT DMH 11 OUTPERFORMS NON-GMO HYBRIDS” 
“No such claim has been made in any of the submitted documents that DMH 11 out-performs Non-GMO hybrids. The comparison has only been made between hybrid DMH 11, NC (national Check) Varuna and the appropriate zonal checks — MSY of 2670 Kg/ha has been recorded over three years of BRL trials which is 28% and 37% more than the NC & ZC respectively”. (Ref. U of India Reply Pg 55 point 86-88) 
Petitioner Comment: 
With this statement, the Union of India effectively buries its own ‘raison d’être’ for its HT Mustard DMH 11. The following points may be noted: 
(a) The claim of a 25-30% increase in yield may not have technically been made in the SC. This adherence to a technicality is mischievous to the extreme, but much more moot is that the Regulators by this argument cut the grass from under their own feet. 
The above yield is indeed the claim by the Developers, clearly recorded by the Media and strangely in the SC by implication, by bringing in the issue of our import bill for edible oil in the ‘Hearing’ of the 24th. The claim is: 
· That the superior yield of this HT mustard DMH 11, (that despite there being NO TRAIT for YIELD in the Barnase-Barstar system with the Bar gene glufosinate), through its HYBRID-MAKING capability is superior to Non-GMO cultivars in the Country. 
(b) The Petitioners’ have proven without doubt based on RTI data that DMH 11 field trials were fraudulent, and specifically on the question of DELIBERATELY poor-yielding Comparators used in the field testing of HT Mustard DMH 11 in the BRL I & II field trials . 
NOTE: By this statement the Government concedes the argument that DMH 11 does not out-yield India’s best NON-GMO cultivars and this includes HYBRIDS against which this mustard was not tested in BRL I &II trials (2010-11 onwards). Therefore, what is the Union-of India’s point? Is this HT mustard being introduced because of its ability to JUST make HYBRIDS? Given that it does not outperform our Non-GMO hybrids, the argument collapses on its essential lack of science and reasoned thinking. 
CONCLUSION 
· This HT Mustard DMH 11 is NOT NEEDED (the first step of a risk assessment protocol for GM crops ) 
AND 
· This HT mustard DMH 11 will make no impact on DOMESTIC production of Mustard Oil leave alone the import oil bill of which mustard and Rape together are less than 2% of the total oil import (of 14.3 million Metric Tonnes in 2015-16) 
Aruna Rodrigues: Petitioner GMO PIL Mo: 098263 96033 
Indra Shekhar Singh, Media Spokesperson, Navdanya",FAKE
"President Obama invoked his “Yes we can” 2008 campaign slogan Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, leaving little doubt that his declaration that Hillary Clinton was “fit” and “ready” to be commander-in-chief was a baton-passing of his eight years in office — a legacy that Republican nominee Donald Trump immediately attacked as “Owning the 3rd Term.”

Capping another night of Trump bashing — briefly interrupted by the official nomination of Tim Kaine to be Clinton’s vice presidential running mate — Obama declared, “There has never been a man or a woman – not me, not Bill, nobody – more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America,” at the same time accusing Trump of peddling ""fear"" and a pessimistic vision of the country.

‎Republicans immediately fired back, with party Chairman Reince Priebus issuing a statement saying, “Tonight reinforced that the Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine ticket is nothing more than two career DC insiders who want nothing more than to continue the failed Democrat status quo.”

He pointed to what he called the president’s “failed legacy in the Middle East” and said, “Our country cannot afford four more years like the last eight, which have left us less prosperous, less safe, and less free.”

Without question, the sitting president depends on his former secretary of state to help preserve his legacy, and fend off recurring Republican attempts to repeal ObamaCare, upend environmental regulations and more. But Republicans point to the other side of the picture – a debt nearing $20 trillion, tensions growing in America’s cities and an Islamic State threat that even top security officials suggest is growing in its reach and unpredictability.

“Our country does not feel 'great already' to the millions of wonderful people living in poverty, violence and despair,” Trump tweeted Wednesday night.

Obama, though, tried to frame the election as a choice between pessimism and optimism, as he set the stage for Clinton to accept the nomination Thursday night.

“America is already great. America is already strong,” Obama said. “And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump.”

Clinton surprised the crowd by showing up onstage with Obama at the end of his speech, the two of them hugging and waving to delegates who were holding up ""thank you"" signs.

Obama’s address was delivered shortly after delegates finalized the party’s 2016 ticket. In an overwhelming voice vote, they nominated Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine for vice president.

Kaine himself, after starting off talking family and faith, shifted gears in the second half and shelved his nice-guy persona to deliver a broadside against Trump, as he accepted the VP nomination from his party.

“Hillary has a passion for kids and families. … Donald Trump has a passion too: It's himself,” Kaine said. The senator was merciless after that. He went on to mock Trump, imitating his Queens accent when he says, “Believe me.”

“We're gonna destroy ISIS so fast -- believe me! There's nothing suspicious in my tax returns -- believe me!” Kaine bellowed, as the crowd roared with laughter. “Here's the thing. Most people, when they run for president, they don't just say ‘believe me.’ They respect you enough to tell you how they will get things done. … You cannot believe one word that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.”

While he was speaking, the Trump campaign was firing out press releases ripping Kaine as a “job killer” and part of the Washington establishment.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had considered an independent presidential run before ruling it out, made a late appearance Wednesday – with an endorsement that could help Clinton reach out to vital independents whom Trump also is courting, and a bagful of zingers aimed squarely at his fellow billionaire.

“Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s run his business. God help us!” Bloomberg said, calling him a “dangerous demagogue” and claiming it’s “imperative” to elect Clinton.

The focus of the third convention night was heavy on gun control, global warming and even national security, an issue largely absent from the first two nights.

Together, the speakers Wednesday set the stage for Clinton to deliver her nomination acceptance speech and close out the convention Thursday night, after becoming Tuesday the first woman in U.S. history nominated for president by a major party.",REAL
"Housing In 2015: Four Reasons For Optimism (And One For Worry)

Six years ago, homebuilders and Realtors were facing brutal business conditions: millions of Americans were losing their jobs and homes.

As 2015 begins, hiring is strong and economic indicators are pointing up. Could this be the year when the housing market finally breaks out of its tepid recovery and takes off?

Economists see several reasons why 2015 might be a banner year for homebuying — and not just in San Francisco and Miami.

They also see One Big Factor that potentially could block a buying binge.

Before considering that possible downer, let's first look at the upside:

When companies are hiring, would-be homebuyers feel more confident about taking on mortgage debt.

During the recession, companies kept slashing positions, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 10 percent and frightening potential homebuyers. But job growth has been strong lately, with employers adding 321,000 jobs in November. The unemployment rate has tumbled to 5.8 percent.

As that good news sinks in, optimism is rising. The Conference Board's latest Consumer Confidence Index shows confidence is running 19.5 percent higher than a year ago.

Home prices just took a breather, which helps.

From January to October, home prices rose 4.5 percent nationally, according to the latest S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index. That gain was subdued compared with October 2013, when home prices jumped 11 percent higher than the previous year.

But slower price appreciation in 2014 may have set the stage for a buying surge in 2015. That's because buyers need the right combination of steady income, decent savings, low interest rates and reasonable home prices to jump into the market.

The Labor Department's latest jobs report showed an uptick in wages, and the surging stock market has been boosting savings. Mortgages have been holding below 4 percent for 30-year fixed rates.

And now the decelerating growth in home prices may be creating an affordability opportunity that will attract buyers in early 2015.

When millions of Americans were losing their homes in the recession, many started moving into apartments. That shift caused rents to soar.

""With rents now rising at a seven-year high, historically low [interest] rates and moderating [home] price growth are likely to entice more buyers to enter the market in upcoming months,"" Lawrence Yun, the National Association of Realtors' chief economist, said in a release.

The Census Bureau says just 36 percent of Americans under age 35 own a home. In 2007, that figure was 42 percent.

Some young people enjoy renting, but a recent survey by Fannie Mae showed 9 in 10 would prefer to own. They have been held back by tight lending standards that have made it tough to get around their heavy student debts and light savings.

But in December, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced programs that would allow first-time buyers to get homes with down payments of just 3 percent, instead of 5 percent.

That lower amount would allow creditworthy but cash-strapped young buyers to qualify for mortgages. ""If access to credit improves, we could see substantially larger numbers of young buyers in the market,"" Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Realtor.com, said in his 2015 outlook.

But there's one reason for pessimism.

For years, many economists have been saying mortgage interest rates would rise. In 2015, they finally may be right.

That's because the Federal Reserve, which has held down both short- and long-term interest rates since 2008, has been signaling a coming change. The Fed is expected to allow rates to drift up, probably starting this summer.

Industry economists generally expect mortgage rates to reach 5 percent by year's end. That would still be quite low by historical standards, but after having such cheap mortgages for so long, even a modest rate increase could scare off buyers, according to Lindsey Piegza, chief economist for Sterne Agee.

""A rising monthly payment — thanks to rising interest rates — could cause an unwelcome sticker shock for many potential homebuyers,"" she said.",REAL
"shorty Dispatches from Eric Zuesse 
O n November 1st, The Intercept headlined “HERE’S THE PROBLEM WITH THE STORY CONNECTING RUSSIA TO DONALD TRUMP’S EMAIL SERVER” , and the reporting team of Sam Biddle, Lee Fang, Micah Lee, and Morgan Marquis-Boire, revealed that: “Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation. The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did.” 
The Intercept team concluded their detailed analysis of the evidence by saying: Franklin Foer is an American warmonger and p.r. agent, a Democrat, and former editor of The [scurrilous Neocon] New Republic. Foer was a 2012 Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. “Could it be that Donald Trump used one of his shoddy empire’s spam marketing machines, one with his last name built right into the domain name, to secretly collaborate with a Moscow bank? Sure. At this moment, there’s literally no way to disprove that. But there’s also literally no way to prove it, and such a grand claim carries a high burden of proof. Without more evidence it would be safer (and saner) to assume that this is exactly what it looks like: A company that Trump has used since 2007 to outsource his hotel spam is doing exactly that. Otherwise, we’re all making the exact same speculation about the unknown that’s caused untold millions of voters to believe Hillary’s deleted emails might have contained Benghazi cover-up PDFs. Given equal evidence for both, go with the less wacky story.” 
However, they failed to dig deeper to explain what could have motivated this smear of Trump: was it just sloppiness on the part of Slate, and of Foer? Hardly — it was anything but unintentional: A core part of the Democratic Party’s campaign for Hillary Clinton consists of her claim that Donald Trump is secretly a Russian agent. This is an updated version of the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s campaign to “root communists out of the federal government,” and of the John Birch Society’s accusation even against the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that, “With regard to … Eisenhower, it is difficult to avoid raising the question of deliberate treason.” 
Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. Neoconservatism has emerged as today’s Republican Party’s Establishment, and (like with the Democratic Party’s original neocon, U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing”) they’ve always viewed Russia to be America’s chief enemy, and they have favored the overthrow of any nation’s leader who is friendly toward Russia, such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad. Hatred and demonization of Russia is the common core of neoconservatism — the post-Cold-War extension of Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Neoconservatives — in both Parties — are the heirs of the Republican Party’s hard-right, which now, even decades after the 1991 end of communism and the Soviet Union, hate Russia above all of their other passions. 
Both Slate and especially Foer have long pedigrees as Democratic Party neoconservatives — champions of U.S. invasions, otherwise called PR agents (‘journalists’) promoting the products and services that a few giant and exclusive military corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Dyncorp, and the Carlyle Group, offer to the U.S. federal government. I’ll deal here only with Foer, not with his latest employer (in a string, all of which are neocon Democratic ‘news’ media). Foer wrote in The New York Times , on 10 October 2004, against ‘isolationist’ Republicans, who regretted having supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he headlined about them there, “Once Again, America First” , equating non -neoconservative Republicans with, essentially, the pro-fascist isolationists of the 1930s. He concluded that they would come to regret their regret: “Conservatives could soon find themselves retracing Buckley’s steps, wrestling all over again with their isolationist instincts.” That’s how far-right Franklin Foer is: he’s to the right of those Republicans. .. On 7 June 2004, Foer, in a tediously long, badly written and argued, article in New York Magazine , “The Source of the Trouble” , described the downfall of The New York Times’s leading stenographer for George W. Bush’s lies to invade Iraq, their reporter Judith Miller. He closed by concluding that “the source of the trouble” was that Miller was simply too earnest and tried too hard — not that she was a stenographer to power: .. “People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what. ” .. (She was anything but “trying to get at the truth of what’s what.” She was the opposite: a mere stenographer to George W. Bush and to the Administration’s chosen mouthpieces, such as the anti-Saddam exiled Iraqi Ahmad Chalaby.) O n 20 December 2004, when the question of whether to bomb Iran was being debated by neoconservatives, Foer, who then was the Editor of the leading Democratic Party neoconservative magazine, The New Republic , headlined in his magazine, “Identity Crisis: Neocon v. Neocon on Iran” , and he introduced a supposed non-neocon from the supposedly non-neocon Brookings Institution, Kenneth Pollack, to comment upon the conflict among ( the other Party’s ) neocons: “In part, the lack of neocon consensus [on whether to, as John McCain was to so poetically put it, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’ ] can be attributed to the nature of the problem. Nobody — not the Council on Foreign Relations, not John Kerry’s brain trust — has designed a plausible policy to walk Iran back from the nuclear brink. Or, as Kenneth M. Pollack concludes in his new book, The Persian Puzzle, this is a ‘problem from Hell’ with no good solution.” But, actually, both Pollack and Brookings are Democratic Party neocons themselves; and among the leading proponents of invading Iraq had been not only Pollack but Brookings’s Michael O’Hanlon . Brookings had no prominent opponent of invading Iraq. (Brookings has a long history of neoconservatism , and routinely leads the Democratic Party’s contingent of neocon thinking, even urging a Democratic administration to have its stooge-regimes violate international laws .) The real reason why neocons (being the heirs of the far-right extremists’ Cold-War demonization of Russia, even after communism is gone) wanted to conquer both Iraq and Iran, was that both countries’ leaders were friendly towards Russia, and were opposed by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia, which family quietly worked not only with the U.S. government but with Israel’s government, against both Iraq and Iran, as well as against Syria — those three nations (Iraq, Iran, and Syria) all being friendly toward Russia, which both the Saudi aristocracy, and not only the U.S. aristocracy, hate. It’s not just the conservative ‘news’ media that are neoconservative now. The so-called ‘liberal’ media are so neoconservative that, for example, Salon can condemn Donald Trump for his having condemned Hillary and Obama’s bombing of Libya. Salon condemned Trump’s having said “We would be so much better off if Qaddafi were in charge right now” — as if Trump weren’t correct, and as if what happened after our overthrow and killing of Qaddafi weren’t far worse for both Libyans and the world than what now exists in Libya. (But, of course, for Lockheed Martin etc., it is far better). CBS News and Mother Jones condemned the Trilateralist Joseph Nye for having veered temporarily away from his normal neoconservatism. Then, Nye wrote in the neocon Huffington Post saying that David Corn of Mother Jones and Franklin Foer of The New Republic had misrepresented what he had said, and that he was actually a good neocon after all. Nye closed: “In any case, I have never supported Gaddafi and am on record wishing him gone, and also on record supporting Obama’s actions in recent weeks. We now know that Gaddafi’s departure is the only change that will work in Libya.” Sure, it did. Oh, really? It’s Trump who is crazy here? More recently, Foer headlined at Slate, “Putin’s Puppet: If the Russian president could design a candidate to undermine American interests — and advance his own — he’d look a lot like Donald Trump.” Foer proceeded to present the view of Trump that subsequently became parroted by the Hillary Clinton campaign (that Trump=traitor). Wikipedia has a 450-person ”List of Republicans opposing Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016″ , and it’s almost entirely comprised of well-known neoconservatives — the farthest-right of all Republicans, the people closest to Joseph R. McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Foer cited many neoconservative sources that are not commonly thought of as Republican, such as Buzzfeed; and he even had the gall to blame the Russian government for having made public its best evidence behind its charge (which was true ) that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was no authentic ‘democratic revolution’ such as the U.S. government and its ‘news’ media said, but was instead a very bloody U.S. coup d’etat in Ukraine , which was organized from the U.S. Embassy there, starting by no later than 1 March 2013 , a year beforehand. Foer wrote: “The Russians have made an art of publicizing the material they have filched to injure their adversaries. The locus classicus of this method was a recording of a blunt call between State Department official Toria [that’s actually ‘Victoria’] Nuland [a close friend of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney] and the American ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. The Russians allegedly planted the recording on YouTube and then tweeted a link to it — and from there it became international news. Though they never claimed credit for the leak, few doubted the White House’s contention that Russia was the source.” To a neoconservative, even defensive measures (such as Russia’s there exposing the lies that America uses to ‘justify’ economic sanctions and other hostile acts against Russia) — indeed, anything that Russia does against America’s aggressions against Russia, and against Russia’s allies (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Viktor Yanukovych) — anything that Russia does, is somehow evil and blameworthy. And, of course, America’s aggressions are not. The U.S. government and its neocon propagandists are outraged that some people are trying to expose — instead of to spread — their lies. The American government isn’t yet neocon enough, in the view of such liars. About the author =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS Print this post if you want. Share This:",FAKE
"posted by Eddie Has Hillary threatened her BFF & Aide? 10,000 new emails on Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner’s computer. They were in a file marked ‘Life Insurance’. Huma had the goods on Hillary and is now running for her life?! With the scandal/criminal/clincher emails now available to the authorities that were on Humas server, Huma’s days a numbered. The plot continues to thicken, and there seems to be no end to Hillarys corruption. From The Next News Network The plot thickens in the Hillary Clinton criminal FBI investigation as leaked information aledges Huma Abedin kept the thousands of newly discovered emails in a folder labeled ‘life insurance’ on her home computer. Some are calling it Huma’s own ‘Deadman Switch’ to be activated if Hillary ordered her death. Meanwhile Huma hasn’t been seen on the campaign trail, at Hillary’s side, all weekend. 
BREAKING: WARRANT JUST ISSUED FOR HILLARY CLINTON’S TOP AIDE HUMA ABEDIN’S EMAILS 
A warrant was just issued for Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin’s email after the Justice Department stonewalled initial requests by the FBI. Hillary’s days are numbered… And so are Huma’s. source:",FAKE
"Posted on October 26, 2016 by Eric Zuesse. Eric Zuesse For the very first time, on October 25th, a high federal official, the “SIGTARP” or Special Inspector General for the TARP program that bailed out the largest financial institutions and their top investors after the 2008 economic crash, is now making a specific proposal to hold the top-level crooks accountable for the incentive-systems they had put into place motivating their employees to pump-and-dump ‘investments’ during the growth-phase of the ‘free market’ Ponzi game that existed since 2000 when the end of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act and the start of totally unregulated financial marketeering went wild after 2005 and came crashing down in 2008. Despite the deregulation that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (and both political parties in Congress) instituted, there still remained on the books some laws that high financial executives were breaking, but the SIGTARP has now come to an impasse in trying to obtain the evidence that will enable investigations to proceed against the top executives, and so she is coming out to urge cooperation of the rest of the government in order to enable it to happen. The SIGTARP, Christy Goldsmith Romero, urges : A PROPOSAL TO BRING ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE “INSULATED CEO” I propose that Congress remove the insulation around Wall Street CEOs and other high-level officials by requiring the CEO, CFO and certain other senior executives to sign an annual certification that they have conducted due diligence within their organization and can certify that that there is no criminal conduct or civil fraud in their organization. According to a Reuters report from Patrick Rucker, titled “Wall St. Rescue Fund Watchdog Says U.S. Bank Heads Too Insulated” , “Wall Street executives are too shielded from prosecution and should answer for misdeeds committed by underlings, the watchdog for a multibillion-dollar [federal-government] bailout [of the mega-banks] said on Wednesday.” This article, dated Wednesday October 25th, continued: “Senior banking officials should attest each year that their companies are free of criminal fraud and civil abuse, said Christy Goldsmith Romero, special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. ‘Every executive should be able to conduct due diligence,’ she told Reuters in an interview. ‘If they are too big to do that, then they are too big, period.’” That policy, if honestly placed into practice, would likely result in lengthy prison terms for many of the people who are the big-dollar political donors; and so it can’t possibly happen. But the very fact that someone in a federal-government capacity has finally said publicly that it needs to happen is shocking enough. The article continues: “U.S. taxpayers have invested more than $400 billion since the crisis, mostly in large Wall Street banks. Goldsmith Romero leads a staff of roughly 140 investigators examining possible abuse of the TARP program.” Romero on Wednesday sent to Congress her agency’s 550-page investigative report (not linked-to by Reuters but here ) on that subject, and Rucker continued: “Goldsmith Romero said the report also described cases where executives are complicit in fraud but the highest-ranking officials are walled off. ‘The knowledge stops,’ she said. ‘It resides at lower levels and stops there. And in many cases, I think that’s by intentional design.’” The reporter, Mr. Rucker, makes clear how grave this situation really is: “Goldsmith Romero has never before suggested a reform of the financial system. She said that she felt compelled to speak up this time after facing so many cases where senior executives seemed out of reach from prosecutions.” So: although the aristocrats’ immunity will not be removed, a federal official has now had the courage to state that it must be removed. Elizabeth Warren, a U.S. Senator who held off from making any endorsement during the Presidential primaries, is now campaigning for Hillary Clinton to become President — the same candidate that Wall Street executives are overwhelmingly funding to win the Presidency — but Warren is already verbally supportive of what Romero is urging. On September 15th, David Dayen at The Intercept bannered, “Elizabeth Warren Asks Newly Chatty FBI Director to Explain Why DOJ Didn’t Prosecute Banksters” , and he reported that on that day: “Warren released two highly provocative letters demanding some explanations. One is to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, requesting a review of how federal law enforcement managed to whiff on all 11 substantive criminal referrals submitted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a panel set up to examine the causes of the 2008 meltdown. The other is to FBI Director James Comey, asking him to release all FBI investigations and deliberations related to those referrals.” Warren’s campaigning for Clinton, who has always been against accountability at the top in the U.S., is drastically inconsistent with this public display of supporting such accountability, and is therefore untrustworthy. I (who until now had always voted only for Democrats) earlier reported the fundamental dishonesty of the Democratic Party’s elite about precisely this matter: — Privately, Obama had told Wall Street executives that he would protect them. On 27 March 2009, Obama assembled the top executives of the bailed-out financial firms in a secret meeting at the White House and he assured them that he would cover their backs; he promised “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks” . It’s not on the White House website; it was leaked out, which is one of the reasons Obama hates leakers (including such heroes as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange). What the DOJ’s IG indicated was, in effect, that Obama had kept his secret promise to them. Here is the context in which Obama said that (from page 234 of Ron Suskind’s 2011 book, Confidence Men ): The CEOs went into their traditional stance. “It’s almost impossible to set caps [to their bonuses]; it’s never worked, and you lose your best people,” said one. “We’re competing for talent on an international market,” said another. Obama cut them off. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that,” he said. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” It was an attention grabber, no doubt, especially that carefully chosen last word. But then Obama’s flat tone turned to one of support, even sympathy. “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem,” he said. “And I want to help. But you need to show that you get that this is a crisis and that everyone has to make some sacrifices.” According to one of the participants, he then said, “I’m not out there to go after you. I’m protecting you. But if I’m going to shield you from public and congressional anger, you have to give me something to work with on these issues of compensation.” No suggestions were forthcoming from the bankers on what they might offer, and the president didn’t seem to be championing any specific proposals. He had none: neither Geithner nor Summers believed compensation controls had any merit. After a moment, the tension in the room seemed to lift: the bankers realized he was talking about voluntary limits on compensation until the storm of public anger passed. It would be for show. He had been lying to the public, all along. Not only would he not prosecute the banksters, but he would treat them as if all they had was “an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem.” And he thought that the people who wanted them prosecuted were like the KKK who had chased Blacks with pitchforks before lynching. According to the DOJ , their Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force (FFETF) was “established by President Barack Obama in November 2009 to wage an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes.” But, according to the Department’s IG , it was all a fraud: a fraud that according to the DOJ itself had been going on since at least November 2009. — If this matter that Romero is raising will be coming up during a Hillary Clinton Administration, the lying about it will simply continue, that’s all. Barack Obama is no less vicious a liar than Hillary Clinton is, but she’s not nearly as skillful a deceiver as he is, but that’s the only real difference between them. She’ll get the job done for the political megadonors, just the same, like she always has. However, if Donald Trump is to be President, then no one can intelligently say what his policy on accountability would be — other than that he’ll work with Congress to get an independent prosecutor to investigate the criminal allegations against Hillary Clinton, including the ones that the untrustworthy FBI alleges that it has already investigated in an impartial manner. Regarding the specific issue that Romero is implicitly also urging, the reinstatement of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton and the Republicans terminated in 2000 and which had limited bank-size, Trump is on record as demanding that it be done . (That’s one of the reasons why he has been receiving far less from Wall Street than Hillary Clinton has been. Wall Street loathes Trump. Almost everything in this ‘election’ is nearly the opposite of what is commonly presumed.) For the first time in recent memory, there really is an important difference between the two major-Party Presidential candidates. The last time it happened was 2000, when the far-right candidate, George W. Bush ‘won’. This time around, it seems likely to be repeated (and maybe this time by a landslide): the far-right candidate Hillary Clinton will probably win — same result, just different nominal parties this time around. In an important sense, this year’s George W. Bush is Hillary Clinton. (He demanded regime-change in Iraq; she demands regime-change in Russia.) This year’s Al Gore is Donald Trump. Except that this time the big issue isn’t global warming, but instead nuclear war against Russia. Of course, GW Bush was bad on both issues (denying climate-change, and demanding “regime-change in Iraq” where the Moscow-friendly dictator Saddam Hussein ruled). But so too is Hillary (who followed up her ardent advocacy for regime-change in Iraq, by regime-change in Moscow-friendly Libya, and regime-change in Moscow-friendly Ukraine, and regime-change in Moscow-allied Syria; and who is now pushing for regime-change in Russia itself, and thus unchallenged U.S.-aristocracy control over every other nation’s aristocracy). All of this election-year, the supposedly big issue was bigotry, but the thing that’s actually destroying this country and the entire world is class — rich versus poor; the super-rich crushing everyone else — and the ‘news’ media are controlled not by the many poor but by the very few super-rich. And this is why Romero’s call for justice is, sadly, just a cry into the wind. Regarding politics, one has no reason to trust what one hears from the politicians, reads in the newspapers and magazines, or hears or sees on radio and TV. The elite scams are overwhelming from all of the Establishment sides. But finally, an obscure federal official, Ms. Romero, the SIGTARP, has spoken her conscience, despite knowing that she’ll only be punished for it once she’s out of office. Unlike the Democratic Party politicians, she’s not grandstanding. She’s instead truly heroic, speaking truth to power, and really meaning it — and ready to face the consequences for having done it. It’s remarkable. It’s Quixotic, in a really heroic way: pathbreaking, even if that path leads only to a brick wall. At least it will expose to the public the extent to which the system itself is their enemy. Not Mexicans. Not Blacks. Not Whites. Not Muslims. Not Christians. Not Jews. Not Russians. Not men. Not women. Not even (though bigots are dangerous fools) bigots against any such group. The system, right here in the U.S., needs to be changed. Nothing can authentically be blamed on any “not us” target — either for invasion, or otherwise. Romero wants to cancel the immunity of aristocrats — the people who control this country .",FAKE
"Trump To Host Facebook Live Nightly Show Until Election Day 
But her opinion of Sulzberger wasn’t very high: “But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he’s not going to do a lot more than that. Hillary would have to be the one to call.” 
Tanden believed that Clinton also needed to get more minority and women reporters in her corner to keep her campaign afloat. Advertisement - story continues below 
“He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social media,” she concluded. “So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent, to defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw – I pushed pir to do this a yr ago.” 
I’m not positive it’s acceptable to refer to pundits (or anyone) as “brown” anymore. 
But maybe it worked. After all, schulzburger the wuss did endorse Clinton last month.",FAKE
"The decision by The New York Times to run a front-page image on Sunday of President Obama -- and family -- leading a march to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights clashes, while leaving out of the image former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, apparently was mirrored in the ""official White House photo"" of the event.

The official White House blog's Sunday entry on the Alabama march led with a similar image, focusing on Obama and his family, as well as civil rights figures, but leaving out the Bushes.

Both images show Obama walking alongside Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, and even Al Sharpton, as they led thousands across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The White House blog does acknowledge in the caption that the Bushes were there, and the photo at the bottom of the page includes them off to the side.

Part of the problem may have been the staging of the event itself.

Basil Smikle Jr., a Democratic strategist and former advance team member for the Clinton White House, noted that the Bushes were not standing directly next to the Obamas. He told Fox News he would have liked to see both presidents together, at least in the New York Times photo.

""Both presidents should have been close together,"" he said.

Regardless, the Bushes were standing but a few feet away from the first family and were included in other photos.

A spokeswoman for the Times told FoxNews.com that the newspaper did not crop the Bush family out of the original image for the front-page display.

Still, the decision not to run a photo that did include them drew criticism on Monday.

""This is a stunning example of media bias,"" said Deneen Borelli, a Fox News contributor and outreach director for the conservative FreedomWorks.

The Associated Press also ran a variety of photos after they crossed the bridge, some of which show the Bushes and some of which do not. However, it appears the AP did not run photos showing the Bushes before they marched across the bridge.

The Times' article on the event did mention the Bushes' attendance, after the jump. The article notes that in 2006, he signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.",REAL
"The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., today is holding its first Sunday service following a horrific shooting that killed nine members of a Bible study group there.

Dylann Roof, 21 — who has apparently expressed strong racist and white supremacist views — is charged in the Wednesday night killings, in which nine members of a Bible study group at the historic black church were shot dead. Emanuel AME's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pickney, was among those killed.

As parishioners and visitors fanned themselves against the heat of the first day of summer, the service opened at 9:30 a.m. EDT to filled pews. Hundreds more gathered outside the church.

The service opened with the hymns ""Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow"" and ""Blessed Assurance.""

The Rev. Norvel Goff said: ""we still believe prayer changes things. ... prayer not only changes things, it changes us.""

""Many hearts are broken and tears being shed,"" he said. ""Through it all we are reminded that we serve a God who still cares.""

Delivering the sermon later, he acknowledged ""it has been tough. It has been rough. Some of us have been downright angry.""

But, he said, ""We have shown the world how we as a group of people can come together and pray and work out things that need to be worked out, to make a better state and place to live.""

He thanked Gov. Nikki Haley for making sure ""the perpetrator that committed that heinous act was pursued and captured and brought back to South Carolina.""

He also thanked Charleston Mayor Joseph Ripley and law enforcement.

""I have no problem with doing it,"" he said to loud applause.

""We have difficulties ahead, but the only way evil can triumph is for good folks to sit down and do nothing,"" he said.

Earlier, the Rev. John H. Gillison prayed that ""in life there are ups and downs. There are dark days, but there are also bright days.""

He called on God to ""guide and strengthen those families who were victimized,"" and referring to Wednesday's tragedy said ""the devil tried to take charge.""

""But the devil cannot take control of your people and cannot take control of your church,"" Gillison said.

NPR's Debbie Elliott, reporting from the church, says: ""It's a very emotional day for the city of Charleston. People are gathering, bringing flowers, weeping, praying, and preparing for this very difficult morning.""

Debbie adds: ""This is all happening at the same time that police officers and their dogs are doing searches of the parking lot and preparing the church to be a safe place for people to come and remember this morning.""

The Rev. Randolph Miller, pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, tells CNN: ""We must continue to preach [forgiveness] and drive it home. It won't happen overnight, but we must not stop preaching forgiveness.""

""Hopefully one day it will sink in and bring a change,"" he said.",REAL
"Why Time Magazine’s Joe Klein Is So Wrong About Hillary Clinton Rebutting the absurd claims of my namesake. November 4, 2016 Joseph Klein 
Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has just penned an article entitled “Why Hillary Clinton Is the Only Choice to Keep America Great.” I feel duty bound to respond to at least the most absurd of the comments made by namesake and author of Primary Colors, the novel based on about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992. 
The other Joe Klein laments that Hillary has been so “severely damaged in the course of the 30-year battering she’s received at the hands of extremists and the media.” Sorry, but Hillary’s wounds are self-inflicted. Her lies, greed and corruption go back decades and have now reached a crescendo with the dual scandals of her use of a private server for State Department business while she was Secretary of State and of the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation. 
“There is one part of Trump that is indisputably real: his ego,” the other Joe Klein wrote, as if Hillary were the epitome of humility and grace. 
“Those who would put Clinton’s failings in the same league as Trump’s depravities are delusional,” declared Klein. I agree with his statement, but for precisely the opposite reason that he advances. Trump did not abuse a public office for personal gain. He did not “hand pick” (Hillary’s word) an ambassador to serve in one of the most dangerous countries in the world and then never respond to his multiple requests for enhanced security, let alone pick up the phone and contact Ambassador Chris Stevens directly. ""The government was not able to save four lives, to keep four lives safe. How can you keep a country safe?"" asked Stevens’ former fiancé in a rhetorical question that Hillary would be unable to answer. Trump did not lie to the families of those slain in Benghazi, as Hillary did. Trump did not put national security at risk by using a private server for government e-mails in order to evade the Freedom of Information Act, as Hillary did. 
In short, anyone who thinks that Hillary’s proven record of recklessness, mendacity, and indifference is not more troubling by several orders of magnitude than Trump’s “depravities” is “delusional.” 
The other Joe Klein complains that Trump deals in “stereotypes” - “the blacks,” “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims,” “the women” and, yes, even “the veterans.” Yet much of Hillary’s pitch is gender-based. Elect her because she is a woman. And she attacks millions of people who support her opponent with vile epithets – “deplorable,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “Islamaphobic,” and – for good measure - “irredeemable.” 
The other Joe Klein charges that Trump is “about all that has gone wrong in our society, and nothing of what has gone right.” To paraphrase Bill Clinton, that would depend on what your definitions of “wrong” and “right” are. Is Hillary Clinton really right when she parrots Black Lives Matter’s stereotypical attacks on what she herself has characterized as white “privilege” and “systemic racism” in this country? Is she right when she leaps to conclusions about police “brutality” aimed against African-Americans before the evidence in specific cases is carefully examined? I don’t think so. 
Hillary also represents the political correctness and anti-religious bigotry of the secular left elite that many Americans believe are what truly have gone wrong in our society. At the Women in the World Summit last year, for example, Hillary said that in order to fully secure the reproductive rights of women, “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Hillary demeaned the sincerely held religious belief in the sanctity of life held by millions of Americans, reminiscent of President Obama’s contemptuous ‘clinging to religion’ quote back in 2008. 
Hillary’s key supporters and top aides have targeted the Catholic Church in particular for their notion of progressive reform. “There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church,” wrote Sandy Newman, president of Voices for Progress, in an e-mail to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. In response, Podesta picked up on the “spring” theme. He wrote, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.” 
When Time Magazine’s Joe Klein talks about what is right or wrong in American society, he should get out of his Washington D.C. bubble more often and actually speak with the American people about their day-to-day concerns. Even if Hillary Clinton ends up winning the election, the country will remain divided and she will have no mandate whatsoever to advance her progressive agenda.",FAKE
"Despite all the talk that Pope Francis’ address to Congress wouldn’t be political or partisan, it turns out it was both. And, as I predicted here in Salon, it definitely leaned to one side of the aisle. In fact, if you were a conservative Republican, Thursday morning in the Congress was not your finest moment, as Pope Francis laid bare all the ways that the Republican agenda counters Catholic social teaching, from its harsh treatment of immigrants to its fossil fuel-burning disdain for the natural world.

And Francis’ call for politicians to work for the common good was an implicit rebuke to the do-nothing, obstructionist GOP agenda that’s in service to their corporatist, Chamber of Commerce overlords. “Your own responsibility as members of Congress is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation. …You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics,” he said.

Here are the five key moments in Francis’ speech that made conservatives squirm more than any others:

The shout-out to Dorothy Day. Francis commended four Americans in particular, whom he held up as examples of pursuing the common good: Abraham Lincoln, for his pursuit of liberty; Martin Luther King Jr., for his commitment to nonviolence and pluralism; Trappist monk Thomas Merton, for his commitment to dialogue and peace; and Dorothy Day, for her “social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”

None of them are exactly conservative, but Day in particular is noted as a radical social activist. She founded the Catholic Worker Movement, which took root during the Great Depression, and urged Catholics to form small, autonomous communities to lead simple lives devoted to the gospel and serving the poor. In addition to being a socialist, Day was outspoken in her support of pacifism and labor rights. “I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history. This would be one of the very, very few times that somebody as radical as Dorothy Day was mentioned,” Sen. Bernie Sander told the Washington Post.

The abortion switcheroo. In defiance of the specific guidance not to try to score political points by clapping at partisan applause lines in Francis’ speech, congressional conservatives leapt to their feet the moment Francis delivered the Vatican’s standard coded language about abortion, mentioning “our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.” Imagine their shock when he immediately followed that with, “This conviction had led me, from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty.” Psych.

Catholic social teaching has long put opposition to the death penalty on the same plane as opposition to abortion, most famously with Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin’s “seamless garment” doctrine, which held sway in the mid-1980s as progressive bishops reminded Catholics that opposition to the death penalty and nuclear war was just as important as abortion

Calling arms deals “money drenched in blood.” Speaking of death, what about all those arms deals the Republicans are so fond of? Francis wanted to know who is selling the bad guys all these weapons and why: “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?” The answer, according to the pontiff, is “money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.” I’m sure the GOP and all the defense contractors who give them money will get right on that. Reminding the GOP we’re all foreigners. As in his speech at the White House on Tuesday, Francis felt the need to once again remind those who are making intolerance toward immigrants their political stock-in-trade that they, like him, are likely the descendants of immigrant families. “[M]illions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom,” he said, adding, “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descended from immigrants.” Catholic social teaching reminds Catholics of their duty to “welcome the stranger.” In one of the most moving passages of his speech, Francis said, “Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities.” Confronting the climate naysayers. Francis made it clear that combating climate change, development and technology can coexist. He explicitly rebuked many conservative critics of his climate change encyclical “Laudato si,” who claim that he is anti-commerce and wants to stifle development or reduce the world to subsistence-level farming to stop climate change. “The right use of natural resources, the proper application of technology and the harnessing of the spirit of enterprise are essential elements of an economy which seeks to be modern, inclusive and sustainable,” he said, adding, “In this regard, I am confident that America’s outstanding academic and research institutions can make a vital contribution in the years ahead.” On the plus for conservatives side, Francis did talk about the need for “the voice of faith to continue to be heard,” but in the case of this particular voice, conservatives probably wish he would just be quiet. Patricia Miller is the author of “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church.” Her work on politics, sex and religion has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, Huffington Post, and Ms. Magazine.",REAL
"Three masked gunmen killed 12 people, including two police officers, and wounded 10 when they opened fire Wednesday in Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices – a dramatic escalation from previous threats and attacks on the satirical magazine.

While Charlie Hebdo’s provocative, no-holds-barred satire has provoked violent backlashes before, nothing in its history compares to Wednesday's deadly attack.

French authorities are hunting three masked gunmen believed to have killed 12 people, including two police officers, and wounded 10 when they opened fire in the magazine's offices in central Paris.

How Charlie Hebdo responds to Wednesday’s attack remains to be seen. But if the past is any indication, the magazine will stick to its mission of skewering a wide range of targets: from French politicians and police to religious leaders and historical figures. Charlie Hebdo prides itself on upholding France’s venerable tradition of unfettered mockery in the name of free speech and expression. It also considers itself in opposition to religious backwardness of all faiths.

“We’re a newspaper against religions as soon as they enter into the political and public realm,” Editor-in-Chief Gérard Biard told The New York Times in 2012, adding that religious leaders, and Islamic leaders in particular, have manipulated their followers for political purposes.

Charlie Hebdo was founded in 1970 by journalists from Hara-Kiri, a satirical publication that was banned that year for mocking the death of former President Charles de Gaulle. The magazine takes its name from the Charlie Brown cartoons originally re-printed in its pages. It has a reputation of for “garish front-page cartoons and incendiary headlines,” The BBC reports. ""Drawing on France's strong tradition of bandes dessinees [comic strips], cartoons and caricatures are Charlie Hebdo's defining feature.""

That includes violent or sexually explicit drawings of the pope, nuns, or the police that are guaranteed to offend the public. ""Anything to make a point,"" The BBC writes.

Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire has made it a lightening rod in French society. The magazine angered many Muslims in 2006 when it reprinted cartoons of Muhammad that had originally appeared in Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. As The Christian Science Monitor reported at the time:

The reprinted cartoons prompted a lawsuit by two French Muslim groups, which accused Charlie Hebdo of slander. The magazine was later acquitted.

The magazine’s offices were firebombed in November 2011 after it published a cartoon of Muhammad with the title “Charia Hebdo” and a cover that promised “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing,” The Guardian reports.

And in 2012, the French government condemned Charlie Hebdo for again publishing several crude caricatures of Muhammad, some of which depicted him naked. The government condemned the decision to publish them as “irresponsible at a time of violence and unrest across the Islamic world” and urged the magazine to reconsider. When the magazine refused, the French government closed embassies, consulates, cultural centers, and schools in about 20 countries and increased security at the magazine’s offices.

With a weekly circulation of about 30,000, Charlie Hebdo has never been a top seller. It stopped publication from 1981 to 1992 for lack of resources and has recently issued appeals on its website for financial support. It may now find that its current plight taps a wider vein of sympathy.",REAL
"For months, if not years now, various activists and journalists have been dreaming of an Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign.

Ideological media bias is greatly overstated by partisans, but bias in favor of interesting stories and against dull outcomes is massive and quite real. Barack Obama's 2007-2008 upset of Hillary Clinton was one of the best political stories of my lifetime, while Clinton's utter domination of the 2014-2015 invisible primary is one of the least fascinating. What's more, as Vox's Ezra Klein has argued, a Clinton-Warren race would give Democrats an interesting clash of ideas around the role of finance in the 21st century economy.

Unfortunately for the click-counters and cable news ratings, the Clinton-Warren race isn't going to happen. But if it's the ideas you're interested in, it's worth paying attention to former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley who is officially launching his campaign today and actually running on the issues people want to hear about from Warren.

In a March 20 op-ed for the Des Moines Register, O'Malley outlined an aggressive plan for financial reform that would go well beyond the provisions of the existing Dodd-Frank legislation.

These ideas would, if implemented, radically alter the role of finance in American society. Large financial institutions would have to act in an extremely risk-averse (and not-so-lucrative) manner and likely become substantially smaller besides. The Obama administration — and mostly likely Clinton — would argue that this is unnecessary for financial stability and risky for the economy as a whole.

But to populists, that's precisely the point. These ideas would move beyond a narrow focus on the stability of the financial system to a broader attack on finance's role as one of the commanding heights of the American economy.

In my experience, it is a lot easier to get people to click on articles about bank regulation if you can put Elizabeth Warren in the headline. O'Malley is not the same kind of draw.

If there's anything worth talking about regarding the 2016 Democratic nomination, O'Malley's critique of the Clinton-Obama-Clinton record on financial regulation is the thing to talk about. In an era of more polarized politics and more unified parties, this is the biggest cleavage in Democratic Party politics. The establishment view is that banks should be regulated for stability, and bankers should be taxed for redistributive purposes. But many activists and intellectuals want a further-reaching attack on the ""financialization"" of the economy and the political system — an attack that could be pursued in part through new legislation, but largely through more vigorous use of the existing regulatory and prosecutorial channels.

It would be more convenient for many of us if Warren were serving as standard-bearer for this alternative view. But the fact is that she isn't running, and O'Malley is. Covering the actual controversy makes more sense than pining for Warren.",REAL
"We’re not electing a drinking buddy, we’re electing a president. Likeability is a smoke screen. And yes, it’s sexist besides.

With her latest primary wins, Hillary Clinton is all but guaranteed the Democratic nomination. But exit polls in some of the states where she has been victorious indicate that she is far from guaranteed the presidency. More pointedly, polls make it clear that if Hillary wants to win she may have to find the courage to admit something most women are afraid to.

While a majority of recent Democratic voters deemed Clinton trustworthy, Democrats who ranked honesty as the most important quality in their decision chose Bernie Sanders. Additionally more than half of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of her. Clinton’s favorability numbers are still better than Donald Trump’s. But the question is not really whether a majority of American voters will choose Donald Trump. They won’t. The question is whether enough voters opposing his candidacy will turn out—on Election Day and as volunteers beforehand— for Hillary Clinton to win.

The even larger question, however, is why so many voters have such strong negative reactions to Hillary Clinton in the first place. After all, many of the same voters who disdain her for being “dishonest” will cheer for her husband. You know the one who actually did lie to all of us. Remember “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”?

Of course for many the distinction between how the two Clintons are viewed is clear. He’s a man and she’s a woman. We’ve all heard it said before, “A woman is called ‘difficult’ for behavior that gets a man hailed as ‘assertive.’” Bill Clinton is not seen as a liar, but simply as a mischievously rakish leader who was economical with the truth. Hillary, on the other hand, is a lying harpy.

I’m sure that sexism has played a role in how Hillary Clinton is perceived and critiqued by some. Because no woman in the public eye as much as she is or as long as she has been is immune to sexist critiques. (I get them regularly.) But the reality is that the real difference between Bill and Hillary Clinton is a difference all of us have faced in life, whether in junior high, or the office. Bill is simply more likable.

In the same way George W. Bush was seen as more fun and friendly than his more intellectually accomplished and responsible brother Jeb, Bill is preferred by most people with a pulse over his more responsible wife. Every election we hear about the importance of the so-called “beer test,” as in “who do voters want to have a beer with?” Hillary Clinton screams a lot of things, but person you want to chill with in your free time is not one of them. (Which is why President Obama’s backhanded compliment of Clinton as “likable enough” landed like the diss that it was.)

But I believe the real problem for Hillary Clinton is not that her husband is more likable than she is, but that it is obvious that she cares so much—like a lot of women do. I remember a conversation I had with a female friend just before an important meeting I was supposed to have with a prominent media person. I was nervous because for a variety of reasons I suspected the person I was meeting with might not be a personal fan of mine. When I finished laying out my concerns my friend—who is significantly more successful said: “This is the difference between men and women. Why do you care if he likes you or not? You got the meeting because his boss’s boss thinks you’re qualified, and if they tell him to work with you, he will.”

This may sound like a fairly unimportant anecdote in the context of a presidential campaign but for some of the women I’ve shared it with over the years it is revelatory. The reason: because women are taught early on to spend much of our time, energy and social capital pleasing others. Boys are taught to be smart. Girls are taught to be smart—but not at the expense of being popular, and certainly not at the expense of being pretty. Because after all, accomplishments ultimately mean very little in the big scheme of things if when it’s all said and done you’re a woman who is perceived as unattractive, unlovable and unlikable.

Hillary Clinton, the candidate voters don’t trust, was deemed the most trustworthy presidential candidate on terror following the recent Brussels attack. But of course that’s not quite the same as being loved or liked, but it does seem to indicate that plenty of Americans know that the job of president is far too serious to be decided the same way we decide who we want to sit with in the cafeteria in high school.

Instead of trying desperately to generate laughs on “Saturday Night Live” or “Broad City” or some other outlets her team of advisors have convinced her are essential to making her likable enough to win, she should finally do something most of us would never have the courage to do but wish that we did, which is to say this: “I know I’m not what you’d call likable and that you may not like me or think of me as a fun beer date. But I’m really qualified, and for a job this serious I think that’s what should matter. After all, do you care whether your heart surgeon is likable?”",REAL
"Which bulletin was worse, though? The news in April that he was being dropped by WIBC in Indianapolis, a booming talk powerhouse that played home to Limbaugh’s radio show for more than two decades, or the news this week that the talker’s new address on the Indianapolis dial is going to be WNDE, a ratings doormat AM sports station that has so few listeners it trails the commercial-free classical music outlet in town?

The humbling, red-state tumble is just the latest setback for the conservative talker who has seen his once-golden career suffer a steady series of losses recently.

Divorced from successful, longtime affiliates in places like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Indianapolis, Limbaugh’s professional trajectory is heading downward. That’s confirmed by the second and third-tier stations he now calls home in those important media markets, and the fact that when his show became available, general managers up and down the dial passed on it. Apparently turned off by the show’s hefty price tag, sagging ratings, and disappearing advertisers, Limbaugh continues to be a very hard sell.

It’s a precipitous fall from the glory days when the host posted huge ratings numbers, had affiliates clamoring to join his network, and dictated Republican politics. All of that seems increasingly distant now. With his comically inflated, $50 million-a-year syndication deal set to expire next year, Limbaugh’s future seems uncertain. “Who would even want someone whose audience is aging and is considered toxic to many advertisers,” askedRadioInsight last month.

For Limbaugh, the troubles were marked by key events from 2012 and 2013. The first came in the form of Limbaugh’s Sandra Fluke implosion, where he castigated and insulted for days the graduate student who testified before Congress about health care and access to contraception, calling her a “slut” and suggesting she post videos of herself having sex on the Internet. The astonishing monologues sparked an unprecedented advertiser exodus.

The following year, as the host struggled to hang on to fleeing sponsors, radio industry giant Cumulus Media decided to negotiate its Limbaugh contract in public, making it clear through the press that the company was willing to cut ties with the pricey host in major cities where Cumulus owned talk radio stations. In the end, Limbaugh stayed with Cumulus stations, but the company sent a clear signal to the industry: Limbaugh was no longer an untouchable and general managers weren’t clamoring to hire him. Since then, the talker’s fortunes have only faded.

Another looming problem? Conservative talk radio is a “format fewer advertisers are interested in buying because of its aging audience,” noted radio consultant and self-identified Republican Darryl Parks. Limbaugh himself recently conceded a generational disconnect: “Now that I’ve outgrown the 25-54 demographic, I’m no longer confident that the way I see the world is the way everybody else does.”

That disconnect may be fueling Limbaugh’s waning political influence. Once a mighty player whose ring wasconstantly kissed by Republicans, this campaign season seems to be unfolding with Limbaugh on the sidelines, his clout and his ability to drive the conversation seemingly surpassed by other conservative mediaplayers.

Here’s a perfect example. In April, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin conducted an awkward interview with Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, asking the Hispanic candidate about Cuban food and if he’d answer at least one question in Spanish. Limbaugh immediately castigated Halperin’s Q&A on his show, but nobody seemed to pay much attention to his complaints.

Fast-forward one week and syndicated conservative columnist Ruben Navarrette lodged similar complaints about the interview. (i.e. “This was bad journalism, bad form, and bad manners.”) Except this time the complaint went viral and Helperin was quickly forced to apologize. At BuzzFeed, a writer marveled at how Halperin’s controversial interview had gone unnoticed for nine days. But it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Limbaugh highlighted the interview right away. It’s just that nobody cared about the talker’s critique at the time. Limbaugh’s unfolding major-market woes will do little to boost his faltering influence. Last year he was bounced off a high-profile station in Los Angeles, shipped down the dial, and deposited on a has-been outlet (KEIB) that today has trouble securing a 1.0 rating, according to Nielsen ratings. Note that his forced farewell from WIBC in Indianapolis was likely painful. The station hosted the talker for 22 years before announcing in April it was time for him to go. Especially embarrassing for Limbaugh was the fact that WIBC is sticking with its conservative talk radio lineup, it just no longer wanted Limbaugh to be a part of it. Then, after WIBC announced it was dropping Rush, no stations in the market stepped forward to pick him up, which meant Limbaugh then had to be bailed out by iHeartMedia. Formerly known as Clear Channel, iHeartMedia owns the syndication company that produces and sells Limbaugh’s radio show, Premiere Radio Networks, and iHeartMedia owns hundreds of radio stations. So with no Indianapolis takers in sight, iHeartMedia was forced to shoe-horn Limbaugh onto its own, lowly rated all-sports channel in the market. (The station will soon be simulcast via a new iHeartMedia FM translator signal in the Indianapolis market.) “There’s no way iHeartMedia would’ve placed Limbaugh on an owned Sports station if the company had any other affiliation options in the market,” noted RadioInsight when the news broke on Tuesday. “But when everyone one else says no and you need to save face, options become limited.” That same desperate scenario is playing out in Boston, where Premier hasn’t been able to find a new home for Limbaugh. This, after WRKO announced it was dropping the show. One station owner recently told the Boston Globe that Premiere had offered the Limbaugh show four times, and four times the station turned it down. Fact: Years ago station owners lined up for the chance to pick up Limbaugh’s powerhouse program. Now, rumors are still swirling in Chicago that talk radio powerhouse WLS is poised to drop Limbaugh. The move was first reported in March and quickly denied by WLS’s owner, Cumulus Media. But Limbaugh’s ratings are clearly down in the Windy Cindy. According to a March report in the Chicago Tribune, Limbaugh’s WLS show ranks 24th in the market, drawing 121,000 listeners in a metropolitan area of roughly 10 million people. “The Chicago rumors come as no surprise to me,” wrote consultant Parks, “as three different Cumulus executives have told me on different occasions they wish they could get rid of Limbaugh’s show and they can’t sell it.” Ratings and revenue. That’s what the radio business has always revolved around. These days, Limbaugh’s having trouble delivering either.",REAL
"Bill Scher made the argument from the left as well as anyone could, while this piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, coming from the center-right, was more predictable and vexing. (Paul Waldman took a shot at it back in August, here.) The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump followed and endorsed Seib’s argument. But those takes rely at least in part on the notion that if Republicans gain the Senate, they’ll either have an incentive to help “govern” – or they’ll shame themselves in the eyes of the American public if they don’t. Unfortunately, neither premise is true.

In fact, I’m concerned that worsening political dysfunction perpetuates itself by convincing more Americans that politics is futile. The Obama coalition in particular – younger, less white, less well off than even prior coalitions of Democrats – has gotten so little that’s tangible from its history-making turnout in 2012 (and yes I’ve read that Krugman piece and I mostly agree.) The prospect of its coalescing to become a permanent force in American politics has been at least postponed, if not thwarted entirely, by the deliberate GOP sabotage of the political process.

For me, the backdrop to this depressing midterm election is not merely ISIS and Ebola, but continued unrest in Ferguson, Mo., where it seems unlikely Officer Darren Wilson will face consequences for shooting Michael Brown. From New York to Los Angeles, the issue of police violence just gets worse. There’s increasing activism on the issue, which is great to see – the crowds that turned out for “Ferguson October” over the weekend, and into Monday, were inspiring.

Yet little of the activism is tied to voting, at least partly because the electoral system has done so little to solve the problem, even in cities with liberal mayors. New York alone has paid a half billion out to the victims of police abuse just since 2009. I’m excited by the new young leadership on police issues even as I’m worried about this election – and maybe that combination makes me uniquely unable to deal with the notion that Democrats losing the Senate next month could have a silver lining.

Bill Scher reprised his Politico argument on MSNBC’s “Up with Steve” on Saturday, continuing to press the case that Republicans will suffer politically “if they look like a completely dysfunctional party incapable of governing.” (Scher, unlike Seib, holds out no false hope that the GOP will get its act together and compromise with Obama if it wins back the Senate.)

But Republicans already look like a completely dysfunctional party incapable of governing, and they’re on the verge of another great midterm win. A year after the government shutdown, it’s shocking even to me how little it ultimately cost the party politically. Everyone knew that October 2013 polls weren’t as important as October 2014, and that the GOP would have a year to recover – but even I didn’t believe that they would, so completely.

The shutdown cost the economy $24 billion in growth. It showed the nation the incompetence of House GOP leadership. It exposed the civil war in the Senate. The country saw that the party was craven, dysfunctional, agenda-free and not merely incapable of governing, but uninterested in it. After the shutdown, the share of voters identifying themselves as Republican dropped to 25 percent in Gallup polling, the lowest level in 25 years, and polls showed Democrats might have a shot at taking back the House.

But a year later, Republicans are in no danger of losing the House and have a better than even chance to take back the Senate. Even at the time, it was clear that a feckless, frenetic media — which immediately went on to treat Obamacare web site glitches as just as catastrophic as the GOP’s shutdown debacle — would let the party off the hook. Yet so have voters. The Republican base is more than content to have its leaders do nothing but block and sabotage Obama. And the Democratic base still disproportionately sits out the midterms, which lets the obstructionists dominate the agenda. Seib holds out hope that a GOP Senate might be able to deliver on immigration reform. Continued Beltway optimism about that prospect is delusional. Given that the Senate already passed a (slightly bipartisan) bill, GOP control won’t change anything. Sadly, even the president fell for the fiction that the House would eventually take up the issue for far too long, postponing executive action on deferring deportations so that he couldn’t do it before the midterms – and now there’s worry about depressed Latino 2014 turnout as a result. Let’s hope nobody in the White House falls for that again. Scher takes special comfort from the fact that 2016 looms, giving the GOP “the opportunity to work out its dysfunctional family issues under the white-hot spotlight of a presidential campaign.” There’s no doubt 2016 will be much better for Democrats. The base turns out for presidential elections, and the Senate map that year will be as tough on Republicans as it is in 2014 on Democrats, forcing the GOP to defend more seats and offering their rivals more pickups. All of that is a given. But even a 2016 rout is unlikely to force Republicans to focus on a policy agenda and commit to governing again. All they have to do is thwart the plans of President Hillary Clinton, or whomever, and reap the rewards two years later. Until the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in voter turnout is corrected, American politics is an endless feedback loop of futility: little or no policy change leads to a discouraged electorate, which ensures little or no policy change, which guarantees more voter apathy. Democrats may yet keep the Senate, and if they do it will come down to greater grassroots and national emphasis on turning out unmarried women voters (more on that later this week). But if they don’t, there will be no silver lining. Sure, it will be entertaining to watch de facto House Speaker Ted Cruz make life even more miserable for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s a given that the 2016 Republican primary race will be as big a freak show as 2012 (and maybe even with Mitt Romney again too!) But this optimist no longer believes the GOP will pay any lasting price for more cartoonish dysfunction. But the rest of us will, for a long time.",REAL
"Thursday 10 November 2016 by Matt Ward Swansea City ‘will win Premier League at a canter’ confirm pollsters 
Swansea City are nailed on favourites to be crowned Premier League champions in 2017, it has emerged. 
Polling companies predict the Welsh outfit will have the league sewn up by mid-March at the latest, powered by nearly 300 goals from former Wrexham full back, Neil Taylor. 
“Public opinion tells us The Swans finish firmly in top spot, with Crystal Palace, Brentford and MK Dons securing the Champions League places,” said lead researcher, Simon Williams. 
“Taylor’s goal tally will obviously be a major factor and we predict around 30 of them will come in a 41-0 rout of Liverpool at Anfield in January. 
“That might surprise some people, but there’s a complex research formula behind all of this and the margin of error is so small only a complete lunatic would bet against it – we’ve spoken to nearly 40 people. 
“Yep – the smart money’s on Swansea.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"What is going on with WikiLeaks?   Defend Democracy 
WikiLeaks director and founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism Gavin MacFadyen has died at age 76. The cause of death is yet unknown. His ‘fellows in arms’ have flocked online to post their farewells, including WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. 
“ We are extremely sad to announce the death of Gavin MacFadyen, CIJ’s Founder, Director and its leading light ,” the Centre for Investigative Journalism team wrote on its Twitter. 
MacFadyen was a pioneering investigative journalist and filmmaker, who back in 2003 founded the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ), an organization that helped break several major stories and has trained a number of prominent journalists. 
Gavin Macfadyen was mentor to Assange (and his closest friend in London), to WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, Joseph Farrell and many others. 
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:03 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
He was a mentor and friend to famous whistleblower and co-founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange, as well as the director of the publication. Paying tribute to their head, WikiLeaks published a post on the group’s Twitter account saying MacFadyen “ now takes his fists and his fight to battle God .” 
The post is signed “ JA ,” indicating that the phrase belongs directly to Julian Assange, with WikiLeaks claiming that, despite the whistleblower being deprived of internet access in his suite in the Ecuadorian embassy for a week now, he has been able to contact them and is “ still in full command. ” 
The CIJ team also published an address from MacFadyen’s wife and member of Julian Assange’s Defense Fund, Susan Benn, who described her husband as a “ larger-than-life person, ” with gratitude and respect. 
“ He was the model of what a journalist should be… He spearheaded the creation of a journalistic landscape which has irrevocably lifted the bar for ethical and hard-hitting reporting. Gavin worked tirelessly to hold power to account. 
“His life and how he lived it were completely in sync with the principles that he held dear and practiced as a journalist and educator – to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, ” Benn wrote . 
Recounting her husband’s achievements, she said he had produced and directed more than 50 investigative documentaries covering diverse and multiple countries and problems. She also noted that he had been banned from apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union for his investigative work, and was also attacked by British Neo-Nazis. 
In his professional career, MacFadyen shed light on topics like child labor, pollution, the torture of political prisoners, neo-Nazis in Britain, UK industrial accidents, Contra murders in Nicaragua, the CIA, maritime piracy, election fraud in South America, South African mines, as well as many others. He worked on investigative television programs for PBS’s Frontline, Granada Television’s World in Action, the BBC’s Fine Cut, Panorama, The Money Programme, and 24 Hours, as well as Channel 4’s Dispatches. 
The cause of MacFadyen’s death has not yet been made public. In the original post from his wife Susan, she wrote that he had died from “ a short illness, ” but that line has now been removed. 
Did you know: Gavin Macfadyen was arrested with Bernie Sanders, was a body double for Nick Nolte & was banned from South Africa & the USSR? 
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 4:20 AM – 23 Oct 2016 
Twitter has been full of tributes from his colleagues and like-minded people. Even the hacktivist organization Anonymous has spoken out. Gavin MacFadyen, always kind & supportive of young journalists & filmmakers. Can never forget your booming laugh. Thank you my friend. 
Earlier this year, MacFadyen gave an interview to RT’s Going Underground program to talk about the publication of leaks related to US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the most recent of which have been emails from the account of her aid, John Podesta. The barrage of sometimes shocking revelations has proven to be a bit of a thorn in the side for Clinton’s election campaign. In the interview, he said that the documents released so far are merely a drop in the ocean of the information WikiLeaks is receiving, and was hopeful that while “ there’s only one known Snowden, ” there may be other whistleblowers who will keep shedding light on injustice and other major global pain points.",FAKE
"Archives Michael’s Latest Video Did America Really Pass The Test? – Hillary Clinton Is Going To Win The Popular Vote By A Wide Margin By Michael Snyder, on November 9th, 2016 
The 2016 election was a test, and it would be easy to assume that since Donald Trump won the election that America passed the test. Unfortunately, it may not be that simple. A closer look at the numbers reveals a very sobering reality. Yes, Donald Trump won far more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton did, and that means that he is on track to become our next president . But Hillary Clinton is going to win the popular vote, and it is likely to be by a very wide margin once all the votes are counted. 
As I write this article, Hillary Clinton has a lead of 218,000 in the popular vote, but most of the votes that have not been counted are on the west coast. 
In California, Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by a 5,482,166 to 2,966,654 margin, and only 68 percent of the vote has been counted so far. So assuming that the ratio stays about the same the rest of the way, Clinton is going to add at least a million more votes to her lead just from the state of California. 
Up in Washington state, Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump by more than 370,000 votes, and only 60 percent of the vote has been counted there so far. So she could easily pick up another 200,000 votes in that state. 
When everything is all said and done, it seems very likely that Hillary Clinton will have received well over a million more votes than Donald Trump did in this election. 
So the truth is that the American people chose Hillary Clinton, but because of some electoral college magic Donald Trump is the winner of the election. 
And I am certainly very, very happy that Hillary Clinton is not going to be our next president. Four years under her “leadership” would have likely been the final nail in the coffin for our nation. My hope is that she will now disappear from national politics for good. 
But just because she is not going to be our next president does not mean that we passed the test. 
In this election, the American people were faced with a very stark choice. Hillary Clinton is the most wicked politician that our country has ever seen, and over the past three decades the American people have gotten to know exactly who she is and what she stands for. 
And despite knowing exactly what they would be getting, more Americans voted for her than voted for Donald Trump. 
If every vote counted equally, she would be our next president. 
I certainly don’t mean to rain on the Trump parade. Christians, conservatives and patriots are right to celebrate this victory by Donald Trump. But the truth is that I don’t believe that we did actually pass the test that we were faced with. 
As a nation, we willingly chose Hillary Clinton by a pretty substantial margin. 
And don’t think that the radical left is going to forget that Trump lost the popular vote. Already, violence and protests have erupted all over the nation. 
Shortly after Trump declared victory, riots broke out in Berkeley, San Jose and Oakland … 
“Not my president! Not my president!” chanted anti-Trump rioters in Berkley, California as they light flares and storm the streets. 
Riots erupted in Berkley, San Jose and Oakland shortly after the announcement of Donald Trump as president-elect. Rioters are breaking into stores, vandalizing cars and shooting flares. 
One woman in Oakland was hit by a car on Highway 24 just after midnight and has suffered serious injuries after. When she pulled over to the right shoulder, she was surrounded by anti-Trump rioters, who vandalized her car and broke the back window, according to CHP officers. 
There were reports of protesters burning American flags in some areas of the country, and there were even brawls outside of the White House . 
And once the sun set on Wednesday night, the protests started again. According to USA Today , “thousands of demonstrators” have hit the streets in New York City… 
In New York, thousands of demonstrators blocked off streets around Trump Tower near the busy intersection of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” and “p—y grabs back,” a reference to tape of a Trump conversation from years back in which he One woman protester was topless while another climbed on top of a tree to see the activity. Taxis, city buses and passenger vehicles stood at a standstill. 
In Boston, radical leftists were organizing a giant protest against Trump … 
Far-left organizers are planning a mass protest in Boston against President-elect Donald Trump, citing the need to “immediately start fighting against him.” 
Approximately 2,300 people have indicated they will gather outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston tonight for a “Boston Against Trump Rally.” According to the Facebook event page, another 5,000 people say they may be interested in attending. 
“Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. We need to immediately start fighting against him. We need to build a movement to fight racism, sexism, and Islamophobia,” the event description says. 
Sadly, this could be the beginning of a new era of protests, rioting and civil unrest. 
Instead of coming together behind the new president, the radical left seems ready to go to war. 
So even though Trump won the election, the truth is that our troubles may only just be starting. More than half the country didn’t want Trump, our nation was already more divided than it has been in decades before he won, and it won’t take much for many of our big cities to descend into utter chaos. 
Without a doubt, we should be very excited that Donald Trump won the election, but an election victory is not going to magically make our problems go away. 
When faced with the most monumental election in any of our lifetimes, Hillary Clinton received the most votes from the American people, and the consequences for that decision may be far more severe than most people are now anticipating. 
About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.",FAKE
"Tweet 
Neeraj Pandey is all set to release the sequel to his 2008 thriller drama A Wedenesday. The movie is titled A Wednesday: Re-Modified , and is centered on PM Modi’s masterstroke to abolish Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes. 
The protagonist is an old chai wallah who is frustrated after serving chais from morning to evening to affluent people. The poor chai wallah is highly irritated when people emerge from luxurious cars offer notes of 500 and 1000 to him and ask “Chacha Chuttey kar do”. He sees it as a mockery to his honest profession at the hands of people who have no worth of Gandhi’s ideals or his currency notes. 
Tired of large currency notes and the people who flaunt them he climbs to the roof top of an under construction building and calls the RBI Governor to share his ‘Man ki Baat’. He asks the governor to ban 500 and 1000 currency notes from Wednesday onwards. If not, he would detonate bombs kept in Chaipatti dabbas delivered as a Diwali gift by him to all banks in the city. The conversation that ensues is as below: 
(Disclaimer: This conversation is in Hindi) 
Chai Wallah (CW) : Aapke ghar me cockroach aata hai to aap kya karte hai Governor saab.Aap unko paalte nahi maartey hain. Ye dono note kaala dhan ban kar mere ghar ko ganda kar rhae the aur aaj main apna ghar saaf karna chahta hoon. 
Gov: Tum ho kaun? 
CW: Main wo hu jo apne pocket me itna chiller le kar rakhta hai ki kbhi usse koi 500 ka kbhi 1000 ka chutta karwa leta hai. Main wo hun jo month end hone pe ye sochta hai ki is baar savings account me minimum balance maintain hoga ya nahi, ya is baar IT walo ne kitna tax kaata hoga. Main wo hoon jo mahiney ki aakhri taarikh pe office jata hai to uski biwi har do ghante baad phone kar k puchti hai ki chai pee ki nahi, khana khaya ki nahi. Dar asal wo ye jaan na chahti hai ki salary mili ki nahi. 
Main wo bhi hu jo kabhi Credit Card k line me fasta hai, kbhi Aadhar card k. Main wo bhi hoon jo saal me do baar SALE season ka wait krta hai. .Main wo hu jo jab shaan se apne imaandari k two wheeler pe nikalta hai to kbhi Mercedes ko side deta hai, kbhi Fortuner ko. Gaadi koi bhi brand ki ho bewajah side hota mai hi hoon. Bheed to dekhi hogi na aapne. Bheed me se koi bhi working class ko dekh lijiye main wo hoon. I am just a stupid Chai Wallah, sorry common man wanting to equalise everyone’s debts. 
Gov: Aaj Achanak Ye Stupid Comman Man Kaise Jag Gaya, wo Bhi 100 kilo chai patti k saath. 
CW: Kyun, Jag gaya to taklif ho rahi hai ?? Jindgi bhar ghut – ghut ke marte rahna chahiye tha mujhe…Dusro ko apne saamne amir hote dekhte rehna chahiye tha mujhe .. aur ye achanak nahi hua hai Governor sahab, Yu kahiye ki time nahi mila , fijul k media k uljhano me aur Videsh se kala dhan laane k chakkar me ye kaam jara neglect ho gaya, Lekin der aaye durast aaye.. Wo dono notes aaj hi ban honge… 
Gov: Lekin ye do hi kyun? Aur bhi to hain 100 aur 50 k notes? 
CW: Bas 100 aur 50 hi to hai humare paas saab inko ban kiya to khayega kya common man. 
Gov: Tumhara koi apna kareebi kya tumse jyada rich hai ya jyada badi gaadi hai uske paas jisne tumahre Chai wala hone ka majak udaya? 
CW: Kyun..mujhe us din ka wait krna chahiye jab koi apna, mere se jyada paise kama kar mujhe beijjat kar k chala jaaye. Jaan na hi hai to suniye. Ek marwadi tha jo roj mere dukaan pe aata aur 7 rupaye ki ek cutting chai pi k chal jaata. Naam nahi jaanta tha uska bas Udhaar khaatey me uska phone number rakha tha maine aur naam rakha tha Udhaari. Ek din wo ek kaali mercedes me aya aur 1000 ke dus note de kar bola “Chacha udhaar utaar dena aur KEEP THE CHANGE”. 
Gov: To tum ye us last k english sentence k badle me kar rhe ho? 
CW: Nahi nahi nahi…English me itna weak bhi nahi hoon. I always knew what CHANGE is. After all we brought the CHANGE in 2014. par ye acceptable nahi hai saab..ki koi bhi meri chai dukaan k saamne apne kaale dhan ki kaali gaadi me, kaale suit me aakar, apne kaale dhan k 1000 k note ko futkar kara le. Unhe fakra hai apne badi gaadiyon pe, 1000 aur 500 ki gaddiyon pe, Hawala transactions pe…mujhe fakra hai khud pe..ki main aise logon k 1000 aur 500 ke notes ko ban karwa raha hoon. 
Gov: Tum saabit kya karna chahte ho? 
CW: Main saabit kuch nahi krna chahta . Governor saab main bas aapko yaad dilana chahta hoon ki people live in poverty by force and not by choice. Aapko kya lagta hai ki jo log kaala dhan rakhte hain wo system se jyada inteligent hai? Arey internet pe ‘how to hide money in India’ search kar k dekhiye, teen sau baawan sites milengi ki kaala dhan kaise chupaye. 
Gov: Tumhari ye home made add salt to toothpaste wali philosophy galat hai ..ye sahi tarika nahi hai. ? logon ko time to do. 
CW: Haan..lekin aaj main tarikey k baarey me nahi! Natijey k baarey me soch raha hoon. Aap log saksham hai aise logon se niptaara paaney k liye. Par nahi..Why are you not nipping them in the bud. Mujhe yakin hai ki jo us din wo Udhaari apne black money ka note de kar Keep the change bola tha..wo ek bahut bada sawaal tha. Ki hum to aise hi black money hoard kar k amir ban jaayenge…ki tumse1000 aur 500 k futkar maangenge..Tum kya kar loge. Yes! They asked us this question… on a Monday, mocked us on a Tuesday… I am just replying on A Wednesday! 
(Reported by Citizen Satirist Aayush . Originally published here .)",FAKE
"The Kremlin on Friday played down the possibility of a grand coalition with the West to strike the Islamic State in Syria, despite personal visits by French President François Hollande to both Washington and Moscow following a spate of horrific terrorist attacks tied to the militant group.

“At the moment, unfortunately, our partners are not ready to work as one coalition,” Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s personal spokesman, told reporters during a conference call on Friday.

Peskov’s comments came less than 24 hours after Putin sounded hopeful notes at a meeting with Hollande in the Kremlin, where he said Russia “was ready to cooperate with the coalition which is led by the United States.”

[Putin says Russia ready to coordinate with West]

But Russia has sought cooperation on its terms, providing diplomatic and now military shelter to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attacking rebel groups that include the Islamic State but also more moderate opponents of Assad backed by Western countries. President Obama and other Western leaders have sought to bring Putin into a U.S.-led coalition instead, a force that Putin has called illegal because it is launching airstrikes in Syria without Assad’s permission.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius raised the prospect Friday that Assad’s troops could be used against the Islamic State, but only in the context of a political transition in Syria that would remove Assad from power, French news media reported. The Islamic State, a heavily armed al-Qaeda offshoot also known as ISIS and ISIL, has declared a caliphate in tracts of Iraq and Syria under its control and has claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks against Russia and the West.

The opposing goals of Russia and Assad’s opponents burst into conflict Tuesday when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane that was allegedly in its airspace. Russian and Turkish political analysts have said the plane was more likely targeted because Russia had been bombing Turkish-trained Turkmen rebels in Syria’s north.

One pilot of the Su-24 attack aircraft was killed after parachuting from the stricken plane. Another was rescued, but a Russian marine was killed in the operation.

Putin called the shootdown a “stab in the back” and has refused to take phone calls from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since.

“There have been requests from Erdogan of a telephone conversation in the past two days,” Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters Friday, the Interfax news agency reported.

When asked why Putin had not taken those calls, he said: “We see Turkey’s non-readiness to bring elementary apologies over the aircraft incident.”

Erdogan has also formally asked for a meeting with Putin when the two join other world leaders in Paris on Monday for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Peskov said Putin has been informed of the request but has not said whether he would meet with Erdogan.

Russia is introducing widespread sanctions against the Turkish government because of the shootdown. The Russian government took aim at deep tourism ties between the two countries on Friday, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia would cancel a free-visa regime with Turkey, a move that would likely be reciprocated by the Turkish government.

Putin’s two-month-old intervention in the Syrian civil war was seen as a way for Russia to break out of international isolation after the West imposed sanctions over Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and its backing of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Peskov said Putin and Hollande on Thursday did not discuss the possibility of repealing the European Union’s financial and individual sanctions against Russia.",REAL
"Donald Trump's campaign has ended fundraising events meant to support the Republican Party's get-out-the-vote efforts in next month's elections.

Aides to the Republican nominee told Fox News on Tuesday that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee for the GOP and the campaign, held its most recent fundraiser on Oct. 19 and no more such events were scheduled.

The move, which was first reported by The Washington Post, cuts off a key money source for Republicans hoping to keep hold of both houses of Congress.

""We’ve kind of wound down,"" Trump national finance chairman Steven Mnuchin told the Post. ""But the online fundraising continues to be strong.""

By contrast, the Post reported that Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign has scheduled 41 fundraising events between now and Nov. 4. The former secretary of state was scheduled to make her last personal fundraising appearance Tuesday in Miami.

Mnuchin told the paper that the real estate mogul was focusing on making his final pitch to the voters at a campaign events rather than raising money in the final two weeks of the race.

""We have minimized his fundraising schedule over the last month to emphasize his focus on political [events],"" Mnuchin said of the candidate. ""Unlike Hillary, who has been fundraising and not out and about, he has constantly been out and about.""

According to the Post, the Republican National Committee had collected $40 million through Trump Victory as of Sept. 30.

RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the organization ""[continues] to fundraise for the entire GOP ticket.""

Meanwhile, Politico reported Tuesday that the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was putting $25 million into seven Senate races deemed crucial in determining the balance of power on Capitol hill.

Click for more from The Washington Post.",REAL
"DEVELOPING: Afghan's main intelligence agency has confirmed that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the mysterious one-eyed leader of the Taliban who has had a $10 million price on his head since 9/11, is dead, a development that could signal a power struggle within the group.

Abdul Hassib Seddiqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, said Wednesday that Mullah Omar died in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi in April 2013.

""We confirm officially that he is dead,"" he told The Associated Press.

The White House said the reports of Omar’s death “are credible,” and a senior U.S. official told Fox News that Omar has been dead since April 2013, likely due to a liver or kidney issue.

The Office of President Ashraf Ghani also released a statement confirming Omar's death.

""The government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, based on credible information, confirms that Mullah Mohammad Omar, leader of the Taliban died in April 2013 in Pakistan,"" the statement said. ""The government of Afghanistan believes that grounds for the Afghan peace talks are more paved now than before, and thus calls on all armed opposition groups to seize the opportunity and join the peace process.""

Afghan government sources told the BBC early Wednesday morning that Omar, who went into hiding after U.S. forces drove the Taliban from Kabul for harboring Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden while his forces plotted and executed the attacks on the World Trade Center, may have been been dead for as long as three years. Rumors of his death have surfaced previously, but this is the first time they have been addressed by top government sources.

There was no immediate comment from Washington, where a long-standing reward of $10 million had been offered by the State Department for information leading to Omar's capture.

Earlier, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi rebuffed Wednesday's reports of Omar's death, according to Sky News.

""According to my information Mullah Omar is still alive and leading the movement,"" Ahmadi said.

The cause of Omar's death was not known. A report in the Express Tribune newspaper of Karachi, Pakistan, quoted a member of the Taliban's central leadership council who said Omar had died of tuberculosis in early 2013 and had been buried somewhere in Afghanistan. The paper, citing Taliban sources, reported that a new leader of the Islamist group would be elected before July 31.

Nasir Shansab, a former Afghan industrialist who has advised many groups in the region, said Wednesday's report of Omar's demise ""certainly"" seemed more credible than past rumors. Shansab said, however, that Omar's fate was largely irrelevant.

""Whether Mullah Omar lives or died years ago is in my view fairly marginal,"" he said. ""Whatever the Taliban does is really Pakistan. Pakistan makes the decisions and Pakistan is in total control of what the Taliban do.""

The reclusive Omar, of whom only a few photos are known to exist, has not been seen publicly since his fall from power in 2001, leading to several reports of his demise.

Earlier this month, a message purporting to be from Omar was released backing peace talks with the Kabul government. The statement said the talks were necessary to ""bring an end to the [foreign] occupation and to establish an independent Islamic system in [Afghanistan]."" However, that message was in the form of a text statement published on a Taliban website rather than an audio or video recording, fueling rumors that Omar was dead or otherwise incapacitated.

In recent years, the Taliban had become increasingly divided among rival factions, with some insurgents opting to pledge their allegiance to ISIS. However, Omar still enjoyed the loyalty of many local figures.

The Taliban's succession process could become complicated.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a top Omar deputy, was reportedly next in line to head the Taliban. He was freed from a Pakistani prison in September 2013, though it’s unclear if he’s been able to rejoin the terror group’s leadership, according to the Express Tribune.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor was reportedly named a top deputy to Baradar in 2010, and Mansoor has since become the Afghan Taliban’s acting chief.

Mansoor is now reportedly vying for the Afghan Taliban top post, a rise opposed by Mullah Omar’s eldest son, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoub, who is also trying to become the group's leader, according to Pakistan’s The News.

Mansoor has had his Taliban reputation “widely damaged for spreading news of Mullah Omar’s death,” according to the Express Tribune.

In the wake of the departure of NATO combat forces at the end of last year, the Taliban have stepped up attacks on Afghan troops, which are now in charge of security in the country.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Share on Facebook It should be evident if you’re following news concerning the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota that tension continues to escalate between protestors supporting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and riot police. The big deal? A four-state Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to uproot sacred burial ground, poison the Missouri river, and make null an 1881 treaty ensuring the property belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. In addition to being maced and beaten with batons, activists have been tased and even shot with rubber bullets . Despite the violence taking place, tribal leaders continue to ask all “water protectors” to maintain peaceful relations and rely on prayer as the only weapon used to halt construction of the DAPL. After watching videos of the mass arrests and beating that have taken place , many have asked how those employed by the State can continue to terrorize weaponless protestors. Surely, some form of cognitive dissonance must be taking place? For some, most likely, and that's undoubtedly what inspired at least two officers to turn in their badges today. According to an activist named Redhawk, there have been reports of at least two officers turning in their badges after acknowledging that the battle against the American people is not what they signed up for. On Facebook, the activist wrote : “You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions. We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. The comments on the ordeal have been quite positive. Charlotte Holywater Vincent wrote, “Brave to stand up for what is right ! To hand over years of training and service in a little metal badge and then stand on the side of humanity.” Ron Hemming, who reportedly is a retired deputy in Washington, shared his thoughts: “As a retired deputy in Washington state, I would have refused to go on a detail such as this. As I am also part native blood, I stand with my relatives on the front line protecting the water from the black snake. Be safe, stay strong.” Related:",FAKE
"SPECTRE Is Real: Federal Shadow Government # www.youtube.com 225 
The shadow government has fully come into the light. The Rothschild central banking system has been defined as the 'octopus' aka devilfish that ""feeds on nothing but gold."" 
Today we go one step further and unveil the dark spiritual entity behind the shadow government. This entity is encoded within the Papal regalia of Vatican City which controls all countries under the law of the seas (Maritime Law) discretely. 
This video exposes the HEAD of the shadow government. For the COMPLETE breakdown of the Papal Regalia please visit theJonathankleck via YouTube. Tags",FAKE
"The Supreme Court on Monday made it harder for prosecutors to convict those who make violent statements on Facebook and other social media, saying it is not enough that an ordinary person would find the rants threatening.

In its first examination of the murky rules regarding conduct on the Internet, the court moved cautiously while throwing out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man whose postings, delivered in rap-lyric style, suggested killing his estranged wife, federal law enforcement officials and even a kindergarten class.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., noting that Anthony Douglas Elonis had said he intended his postings to be fictitious and even therapeutic, said a defendant’s state of mind had to be considered.

But the opinion offered little in the way of specifics about what must be proved for a conviction, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. criticized the opinion as more confusing than enlightening.

“This failure to decide throws everyone from appellate judges to everyday Facebook users into a state of uncertainty,” Thomas wrote in dissent.

The narrow opinion said it was not necessary to address whether the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech protected Elonis’s Facebook statements. The opinion also declined to take a position on whether it would be enough for a conviction to show that a defendant had been reckless in making inflammatory statements, as Alito proposed.

For the justices, it was sufficient for now, Roberts wrote, to correct a misinterpretation by most lower courts that the poster’s intent is immaterial and what matters only is how the message is received.

Roberts defended the majority’s go-slow approach. “Such prudence is nothing new,” he wrote.

Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law “for centuries required the government to prove criminal intent before putting someone in jail. That principle is especially important when a prosecution is based on a defendant’s words.”

He added, “The Internet does not change this long-standing rule.”

Groups battling domestic violence and advocating for victims said they worried the ruling would make it harder to convict those who make threats and said the ease and accessibility of social media have made the problem worse.

“The Internet is the crime scene of the 21st century. The laws governing social media require swift interpretation to keep pace with the ever-advancing criminal activity in this space,” said Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. She said the justices had left victims in jeopardy.

“Threats play a central role in domestic abuse and is a core tactic that many abusers employ,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, adding that threats cause devastating harm “regardless of whether the abuser intended to threaten or only intended to vent or to make a joke.”

Writing about his estranged wife, Tara, Elonis had posted: “There’s one way to love you but a thousand ways to kill you. I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts.”

At oral argument six months ago, justices seemed to agree there was a need for more than the “reasonable person” standard — which says that a reasonable person would consider a particular statement to be a threat — but there was no consensus on exactly what that standard should be. The limited ruling issued Monday and the length of time required to produce it indicated that no such agreement on a different standard had emerged.

Roberts said there is “no dispute” that the state-of-mind requirement is satisfied “if the defendant transmits a communication for the purpose of issuing a threat, or with knowledge that the communication will be viewed as a threat.”

But Alito, who agreed the case should be sent back to lower courts, said the decision left too many unanswered questions.

“The court refuses to explain what type of intent was necessary,” Alito complained. “Did the jury need to find that Elonis had the purpose of conveying a true threat? Was it enough if he knew that his words conveyed such a threat? Would recklessness suffice? . . . Attorneys and judges are left to guess.”

[Supreme Court case tests the limits of free speech on Facebook and other social media]

Paraphrasing the famous holding from Marbury v. Madison that it is the court’s prerogative to say what the law is, Alito said the court was announcing, “It is emphatically the prerogative of this court to say only what the law is not.”

The justices were considering a federal law that makes it a crime to communicate “any threat to injure the person of another.”

Prosecutors said there was no doubt Elonis was doing that on his Facebook feed during a two-month period in 2010. His wife had left with their two children, and Elonis, then 27 and working at an Allentown amusement park, grew increasingly despondent and angry.

He was fired and responded with a post about being a nuclear bomb about to explode. He pondered making a name for himself by shooting up an elementary school.

That brought a visit from an FBI agent, and the prolific Elonis later posted a fantasy about slitting the agent’s throat and turning her into a “ghost.”

Elonis was convicted after a judge told jurors that the government needed to prove only that Elonis made the statements and that a reasonable person would foresee that the words would be interpreted as “a serious expression of an intention to inflict bodily injury or take the life of an individual.”

Elonis served three years of a 44-month sentence before being released from prison.

The Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld the conviction, saying Elonis’s subjective intent in writing his postings did not matter.

The Morning Call reported in April that Elonis had been arrested by police in Freemansburg, Pa., on charges of hitting his girlfriend’s mother with a pot.

The cases is Elonis v. U.S.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama will try to reassure a nervous nation on Sunday that he has a plan to defeat the fast-evolving threat of terrorism, as fears multiply of ISIS attacks on the homeland and public trust in his handling of the threat has dipped to record lows.

Obama's rare 8 p.m. ET Oval Office address reflects growing anxiety that the global showdown with the extremist group has now spread to U.S. soil following a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California , that authorities are treating as terrorism.

His appearance comes at a time of public disquiet over terrorism and a political debate over the threat, now consuming the 2016 campaign , raging at levels not seen since the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001 . Obama has also struggled to convince critics he has a viable strategy for destroying ISIS in the Middle East and has been accused of downplaying the threat from the group for political reasons.

Obama will use Sunday night's address to pledge to use of every available tool to keep American people safe and destroy ISIS, senior administration official says.

The gravity of the occasion is underscored by Obama's decision to use the symbolic power of the Oval Office for only the third time in his presidency, following addresses on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the end of the Iraq war in 2010.

In a new CNN/ORC poll released on Sunday, 60% of Americans disapproved of Obama's handling of terrorism -- up nine points since May. Two thirds of those polled, meanwhile, said they disapproved of the president's handling of ISIS.

The poll was conducted before the attacks in San Bernardino and also showed a shift in public opinion on how to tackle the group -- with a majority -- 53% -- for the first time saying the U.S. should send ground troops to fight ISIS. And 68% said the American response to the group's rise had not been sufficiently aggressive.

Those figures reflect Obama's struggle so far to convince critics he has a viable strategy for destroying ISIS in its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria and after he has been accused of downplaying the threat from the group for political reasons.

The figures tracked with a a Washington Post/ABC News poll last month, after an ISIS rampage in Paris but also before the California attack, that found that a record low of 40% of Americans approved of Obama's handling of terrorism and only 35%

""He will reiterate his firm conviction that ISIL will be destroyed and that the United States will draw upon our values -- our unwavering commitment to justice, equality and freedom -- to prevail over terrorist groups that use violence to advance a destructive ideology,"" said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.

Sunday's address also seems to be an implicit acknowledgment that Obama has failed to convince Americans that he is prepared to take on the ISIS threat, amid widespread criticism of his strategy and rhetoric on the issue that keeps being overtaken by events.

Republicans have redoubled attacks following the California killings to fire up a hawkish party base ahead of early nominating contests and to suggest that Obama's policy isn't working and that the president does not understand the threat.

""Why on earth did the Obama administration not know this ahead of time and stop them before they carried out this terror attack?"" Cruz said of the California shooting.

""Moving forward, this is not going to be the last attempt to attack the homeland,"" Rubio said.

""People are dead. A lot of people are dead right now,"" Trump said on CBS ""Face the Nation"" on Sunday.. ""So everybody wants to be politically correct, and that's part of the problem that we have with our country.""

The real estate mogul also said he would ""live tweet"" the President's address.

Other candidates have warned the United States is in a war of civilizations with radical Islam and that a new ""world war"" has reached U.S. soil.

Such political fury complicates Obama's effort to ease public fears of terrorism and to build support to confront two critical problems -- the expanding battle against ISIS and its evolving tactics and his own political vulnerabilities on the issue.

His speech comes at an alarming moment.

Terrorism experts are warning that the San Bernardino attack could be the harbinger of a much more acute threat to U.S. soil.

'More of what we can expect'

""Unfortunately I think it is more of what we can expect in the future -- whether it is copy cats or whether you have, again, either ISIS-aligned or inspired or ISIS-directed individuals,"" said Dean Alexander, director of the Homeland Security Research Program at Western Illinois University. ""It might instigate ISIS to take a more proactive approach to send individuals here to the U.S. or to try to recruit.""

Such a ""self radicalization"" scenario by Muslims on U.S. soil has long been feared by anti-terrorism experts who say such attacks are nearly impossible for the administration to detect and stop.

But critics say he has consistently underplayed the threat from ISIS because its rise conflicts with his assurances that he has severely degraded the threat from global terror -- a key legacy issue as he nears the end of his second term.

""Instead of being contained, they're conducting or inspiring spectacular terrorist operations on multiple continents -- including now in the United States. ISIS affiliates are spreading across the Middle East and south Asia.""

Under increasing pressure to toughen his rhetoric, Obama is also likely to use his address to counter claims the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself.

""They can't beat us on the battlefield, so they try to terrorize us into being afraid, and changing our patterns of behavior, and panicking, and abandoning our allies and partners, and retreating from the world,"" Obama said at a press conference in Malaysia last month.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie rejected the idea that Muslims would be offended by the use of specific terminology to describe the threat.

""Now when you say radical Islamic jihadist, they understand, the rest of the Muslim community understands,"" Christie said on ""Face the Nation.""

But Clinton said on ABC News ""This Week"" that throwing around such terms actually helped the extremists.

""It helps to create this clash of civilizations that is actually a recruiting tool for ISIS and other radical jihadists who use this as a way of saying, 'We are in a war against the West -- you must join us,'"" she said.

""We must never accept the premise that they put forward because it is a lie,"" Obama said in February.

""Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders. They are terrorists.""",REAL
"Errol Louis is the host of ""Inside City Hall,"" a nightly political show on NY1, a New York all-news channel. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Years ago, when I hosted a daily talk-radio show, one of the cardinal rules laid down by my program director was to avoid booking guests or taking phone calls from listeners who wanted to debate abortion, gay marriage or the death penalty. All three issues -- and especially abortion -- were considered a conversational dead-end, on which nearly all intelligent adults have already made up their minds.

Any sort of abortion ""debate"" would inevitably turn into a shoutfest yielding circular arguments, bad feelings and bored listeners.

I thought about that rule of thumb as I read about the elaborate media hoax ginned up by the Center for Medical Progress, a right-wing group trying to discredit and defund Planned Parenthood.

Taking a page from the falsehoods and selectively-edited videos that brought about the defunding and bankruptcy of the left-wing advocacy group ACORN, the Center for Medical Progress strategy is to create a narrative, claim that its videos constitute damning evidence, and repeat that story enough times to give politicians the ""proof"" they need to attack Planned Parenthood.

That plan appears to have fizzled already, with the failure of a Senate vote this week to defund Planned Parenthood. But that won't stop the anti-abortion advocates, who will always see themselves as just one more rally, prayer vigil or media hoax away from ultimate victory.

Despite the extensive preparation and deceit that went into the plan, the hoax won't shift the country's decades-long stalemate over abortion by so much as a millimeter. As it says in the book of Ecclesiastes: ""What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.""

By law, women getting abortions can voluntarily donate the tissue from that procedure to medical research, and by law the abortion provider can request nominal reimbursement $30 to $100 in most cases -- for saving, packing and shipping the tissue to a research firm.

The details of the process are enough to trouble anyone: non-medical people don't talk about the price of requesting, removing and shipping organs and pieces of flesh from place to place. Most of us would freak out if we listened to professionals in the local hospita l, funeral home or medical examiner's office discuss details of how a dying person's request to have their body parts donated for transplants or scientific research actually gets carried out.

It turns out that cadavers, livers, kidneys, eyes and other organs don't walk themselves over to the local hospital or medical school for free.

So let's acknowledge up front that some startling, even grisly conversations will inevitably follow when women getting an abortion agree to donate the stem cells and other tissue to scientific research. But that doesn't equate to selling body parts.

Transcripts of the videos created by the Center for Medical Progress show instances of the hoaxers posing as medical middlemen, trying to lure Planned Parenthood staffers into talking about how money gets paid to abortion providers who take nominal reimbursements for moving body tissue from clinics to research facilities.

And in case after case, what emerges is medical professionals highly aware and cognizant of their duty to be careful and ethical about their words and actions.

""Really their bottom line is, they want to break even. Every penny they save is just pennies they give to another patient. To provide a service the patient wouldn't get,"" says Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood Federation.

Later in the same conversation she says: ""we're not looking to make money from this. Our goal is to keep access available. And if we do something that makes a target, that just removes access for everybody.""

And later: ""Our goal, like I said, is to give patients the option without impacting our bottom line. The messaging is this should not be seen as a new revenue stream, because that's not what it is.""

On and on it goes, in each of these supposedly ""bombshell"" videos, forming what could be called an inkblot conversation, similar to the Rorschach tests in which the viewer looks at an inkblot and describes what picture they see.

To those already convinced that abortions should be safe, legal and rare, it looks like Planned Parenthood is responsibly doing exactly what a medical provider should. People who already want to ban all abortions everywhere will see the conversations as some nefarious trade in baby parts.

In other words, the videos are less an investigative expose than a mirror in which a divided nation can look at its view on abortion.",REAL
"Posted on October 29, 2016 by Isaac Davis 
“How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate?” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts 
The world economy is designed to fail through the mechanism of a banking system that requires all users of money to pay usury every time a transaction takes place. In this way, the financial systems of the world can be manipulated into a managed collapse, thereby causing global chaos so that the world’s nations and citizens can be tricked into demanding a global currency managed by a global elite. 
Problem, reaction, solution. Economic hit man John Perkins wrote about this strategy as it was used in the 20th century to bring developing nations under the control of the international monetary fund and transnational profiteers, and at present this scheme is being globalized. 
“If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire.” ~John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man 
For decades now, the dollar has been in a slow burn style of collapse, and while many journalists, primarily outside of the mainstream, have been warning the world about how and why this is happening, we’re quickly approaching a turning point, where the slow burn moves into something more severe. While at first glance this seems like a frightening potentiality, the truth is that an economic collapse may very well be our best chance at freeing ourselves from the rule of the Gods of Money . A Whistleblower Warns Us and Gives Us Hope 
Speaking to Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog news , former Wall Street banker and former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration , Catherine Austin Fitts explains why the slow burn is about to come to an end. 
“The system has the capacity with monetary policy in one sense to keep going forever if the force and military capacity is there to do it, but at some point, you burn through the fat, you burn through the muscle and then you have to change institutions.” ~ Catherine Austin Fitts 
During the financial crisis of 2008, the government was able to prevent an uncontrolled firestorm collapse of the system by colluding with the chiefs of the financial sector, giving them bailouts of extraordinary magnitude , then inflating the dollar by the Federal Reserve’s introduction of quantitative easing . Eight years later, this tactic has reached its limit, however it has given the public significant reason and time to understand why our economy functions the way it does, and people are losing faith in our leadership. 
“It’s going to be extremely difficult to get people to continue to pay their taxes when they’re highly confident the money’s not being spent legally and it’s going to the advantage of small parties or things that they don’t understand. And so you can’t move further without institutional overhaul.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts 
The thing that frightens her most is the fact that groups within the U.S., such as ALEC , are already calling for changes in the law and even a new constitutional convention to overhaul these institutions. The financial sector has already been operating outside of the law and beyond the constitution for some twenty plus years, and if we haven’t been using the constitution, she notes, then why do they wish to change it? 
“If you want to enforce the Constitution or fix things, that’s what you do. The reason you get a Constitutional Convention is you want to tear it up because you’re worried, now that people realize the extent of the corruption, that they’re going to try and enforce.” ~Catherine Austin Fitts 
Her warning is that as people continue to wake up to the corruption of our government and financial rulers, the entrenched elites who are fully invested in destroying the middle class will fight tooth and nail to prevent us from holding them accountable, by means of bringing more Draconian laws into place to protect themselves. 
In this light, the economic war that is brewing isn’t completely technical, it is social as well, quickly becoming class warfare. The world’s financial elite are in grave danger of being held to the fire for their crimes, and surely they know they how quickly things can change in favor of the populous, as historical events like the French Revolution have shown. Prepare Now 
As individuals stuck in the debt-slave matrix , there is very little we can do to challenge this sort of massive global scheme as it’s happening, however, preparing now for collapse is our best chance of chucking our burden of debt to these people, if they are even human , and of creating a future without such obvious criminal financial tyranny holding us back. 
Working now to expose these criminals is imperative so that when the ball drops, ordinary people understand why, how and who is truly to blame, thereby making resisting to the takeover possible. Taking care of personal emergency preparations by gathering healthy storable foods , networking in your community, and having plans in place to survive are absolutely necessary at this stage, and once this is done, efforts to awaken others are critical. 
View the full interview here : Read more articles by Isaac Davis . 
Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here . This article ( Financial Whistleblower Explains What’s About to Happen to the Economy ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"Trump’s Gettysburg Address against the New World Order ‹ › Professor and Attorney Rahul Manchanda worked for one of the largest law firms in Manhattan where he focused on asbestos litigation. At the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) in Vienna, Austria, Mr. Manchanda was exposed to international trade law, arbitration, alternative dispute resolution, and comparisons of the American common law with European civil law. He later worked for one of the largest multi-national law firms in Paris France, Coudert Frères, where he focused primarily on international arbitration, arbitration agreements, the enforcement of foreign arbitration awards against multinational parent corporations, piercing the corporate veil, arbitration venue choice, and foreign policy. In Paris, Mr. Manchanda analyzed and compared the American legal system with its British, French, Russian, German, and Chinese counterparts. Mr. Manchanda also has extensive technical experience in Federal Patent Prosecution and Intellectual Property issues working for Milde Hoffberg & Macklin LLP and Moses & Singer LLP, and has contributed to the issuing of patents in the areas of biotechnology, organic chemistry, biopharmaceuticals, electrical and mechanical engineering, computer software and technology, and internet business methods. He was recently the Keynote Address Speaker for Hamline University School of International Law on the 60th Anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, as well as a Chief Speaker for the Civil Rights Litigation Update Seminar on Balancing Inalienable Civil Rights and National Security in the Post-911 Era. Professor Manchanda is also a Faculty Member for LawLine.com, an online Continuing Legal Education (“CLE”) program designed to educate Attorneys all across the country on cutting edge issues of Immigration Law and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation as well as a second CLE on the Foundations of International Law, as well as 5 different Immigration Law/Deportation Defense Seminars for Rossdale CLE. Click here to watch a portion of his 2 hour lecture on Immigration and Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation or The Foundations of International Law. You can also watch some of his many appearances on FoxNews, CNN, CourtTV, NBC, and other major media networks on some of the most notable cases in global history, here. He has also given multiple lectures as one of the first pioneering immigration law practitioners who merged Criminal Defense Law and Immigration/Deportation Defense Law in such lectures with other immigration law luminaries in LexisNexis Presents a Complimentary Webinar: Criminal Law and Immigration Intersection 101 and Immigration Reform and the Workplace: An Overview of Legal and Legislative Developments. At Boston University, Mr. Manchanda received a Bachelors degree in Biology, where he distinguished himself in the chemical and biological sciences, doing extensive research in organic chemistry, in both field and laboratory work relating to organic synthesis and isolation, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, structure determination, and production of synthetic bio-active natural products. At BU, Mr. Manchanda also was on the BU Shotokan Karate Team as well as a Lead Tenor with the Marsh Chapel Choir, also finding time to be a Teaching Fellow in Molecular Cell Biology, Organic Chemistry, and a private tutor in Calculus based Physics and Organic Chemistry. He also attended Yale University where he studied Molecular Cell and Evolutionary Biology. He served on the Pace University School of Law’s Mentor Program where he received his Juris Doctor degree. Attorney Manchanda graduated from the Wooster Prep School in Danbury Connecticut where he was a Varsity Letterman in Soccer, Wrestling, Tennis, and Lacrosse, as well as Lead in the Drama Program. For more than 14 years, his internationally recognized law firm has a formidable presence in Federal and State Criminal, Civil, International, and Immigration Courts throughout the United States pertaining to Master, Individual, and Final Hearings, Naturalization Interviews, Writs of Habeas Corpus, Writs of Corum Nobis, Marriage Cases, U.S. Embassy and Consular Processing, American Citizen Services, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of State liaison, 440 Motions to Vacate, Amend, or Expunge Criminal Convictions, Aggravated Felonies, Drug Smuggling Cases, Stokes Hearings, Political Asylum, Taxation, Hardship, Removal of Condition Hearings, National Security, and Adjustment of Status Interviews. He served as an American Immigration Lawyer Association (“AILA“) Committee Member for the Congressional/Advocacy Committee, the Department of Labor (“DOL“) Committee, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (“EOIR“)/District Counsel/Political Asylum Committee. Attorney Manchanda also proudly served on the New York State Bar Association Empire State Counsel Program, which is a small group of Attorneys who serve the poor without charge, helping people who otherwise could not afford legal counsel to achieve justice. Attorney Manchanda also proudly serves as a Member of the American Bar Association Advisory Panel, a group of Attorneys that informs the ABA’s priorities and decisions by providing opinions about the direction of the ABA and issues facing the profession. Attorney Rahul Manchanda of Manchanda Law Office PLLC has also traveled extensively throughout the world where he has fought for peace and mutual understanding by and between the United States and different countries overseas. His work, observations, and travels have been published and been received to make foreign policy decisions by the International Atomic Energy Agency (“IAEA”), the US RAHUL MANCHANDA IN TEHRAN IRANCongress, US Senate, US Executive Branch, as well as countless other think-tanks, foreign and domestic governmental agencies, NGOs, foreign and domestic policy institutions, such as can be found here. Attorney Rahul Manchanda’s ceaseless and tireless work advocating peace, universal human and civil rights, and the avoidance of war and conflict has truly transformed the world, perhaps even helping to stop World War 3, for which he has been viciously attacked online and personally by warmongers, enemies of global peace, and religious extremists. In addition to Mr. Manchanda’s extensive international litigation practice in Federal and State Criminal Defense Law, Immigration Law, Deportation and Removal Defense Litigation, Family Law, International Law, and Civil Litigation, he has advised on, been consulted on, prepared, and filed tens of thousands of Arraignments, Trials, Hearings, Non-Immigrant and Immigrant Visa Petitions including, but not limited to: H-1B1, B, C, D, E, L, O, P, H-3, J, K, M, R, S, T, and U Visas, as well as I-130 and I-140 Immigrant Petitions with accompanying Adjustment of Status (I-485), Extraordinary Ability Petitions, EB-1, EB-2, EB-3, EB-5, Investment Based Visas, PERM, RIR, and Regular Labor Certification Applications with the Department of Labor, Political Asylum, Marriage Cases, Stokes Interviews, Naturalization/Citizenship, Agricultural, 245(I), CSS/Lulac/Zambrano, LIFE Act, Removal of Conditions, Criminal and Overstay Waivers, and Aggravated Felony and CMT Defense. Attorney Manchanda has succeeded for his Clients in Deportation and Removal Proceedings, Asylum, Employment Based Visa Petitions including PERM/Labor Certification, Business Immigration Visas, and Family Based Immigration Petitions, for tens of thousands of people, for more than 14 years. He taught Immigration Law at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the City University of New York located in Manhattan New York. He has also successfully advised on and appeared in Criminal Court throughout New York for many different types of State and Federal Criminal Defense Matters. He was sworn in and admitted to practice in the highest courts in New York State as well as in the Federal United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the Federal United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the United States District Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the United States District Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He has been an active member of the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, the New York County Lawyers Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Phi Alpha Delta International, the Global Interdependence Center (“GIC”), the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Network 20/20, and the Asia Society. He regularly participated in conferences with the House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, Capitol Hill, the Center For Strategic and International Studies (“CSIS”), and the Council on Foreign Relations (“CFR”) in Washington, D.C. pertaining to counter-terrorism and foreign policy in South Asia, as well as completing counter-terrorism training with Security Solutions International (“SSI”). He served on a New York Committee on State Regulation of Immigration Law in front of the New York State Senate. He served on the Board of Directors and Sponsor of the US-India Institute (“USINI”), a non-partisan foreign policy advisory board and think tank located in Washington, D.C. focusing on critical geo-strategic issues of national security, defense and economic relations between the U.S. and India, informing and educating key policy makers in the U.S. and India on issues of common interest, and advocating the importance of achieving and maintaining peace through Rahul Manchanda Attorneystrength and economic freedom. He served as the U.S.-India Political Action Committee (“USINPAC“) Co-Chairman for New York where he impacted U.S. Foreign Policy on issues of concern to the Indian American community in the United States, providing bipartisan support to candidates for Federal, State and Local office who supported the issues that were important to the Indian American community, including research, support, and advocacy towards the successful passage of the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act, signed into law on October 8, 2008 after more than three years of contentious bi-partisan and bi-lateral negotiations. Recently Attorney Manchanda was awarded the prestigious Hind Rattan Award for his outstanding services, achievements, and contributions in his field for “keeping the flag of India high” as an NRI/PIO by the NRI Welfare Society of India, an award bestowed on only 30 “eminent” NRIs/PIOs around the globe every year, and for making contributions in strengthening India’s economy. Attorney Manchanda was also Knighted by the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Justice of London England, given the appellation and nobility of Sir Rahul Manchanda. Attorney Manchanda also served on the Paris Conference Presidential Desk of the European Association of Lawyers (“AEA“), a highly selective network of international law firms with a presence in most of the world’s countries. He is also a member of the Indian American Lawyers Association of Manhattan New York as well as the Manhattan Committee on Foreign Relations, which is a private organization that promotes foreign policy and international affairs dialogue between policy makers, researchers, and other high level analysts and the Committee’s membership. Attorney Manchanda is also on the Advisory Council for the Republican National Lawyers Association. Attorney Rahul Manchanda is also a Member of the Queens District Attorney’s Office Defense Attorney Database for new cases assigned to Assistant District Attorneys and a Member of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce. Additionally Rahul Manchanda is the founder of the India Anti-Defamation Committee Ltd which is a premier civil rights organization dedicated to fighting and eradicating racism, discrimination, and hatred directed towards people from the Indian subcontinent. Rahul Manchanda is also a Freemason. Mr. Manchanda has appeared as International Law Expert regularly on major media television program channels such as Fox News, CNN, Court TV, and NBC on such television programs as Dayside, Studio B with Shephard Smith, Fox and Friends, Heartland with John Kasich, Live from CNN with Kyra Phillips, the Live Desk with Martha McCallum, Anderson Cooper 360°, the O’Reilly Factor, Nancy Grace, Banfield & Ford Courtside, Best Defense with Jami Floyd, Justice with Jeanine Pirro, and the Catherine Crier Show on the most publicized and globally newsworthy of international legal issues and cases. You can watch many of these appearances here. He is also featured in Newsweek Magazine‘s Top Attorneys in the United States of America in 2013, and Top Immigration Lawyers in the United States of America in 2012 Showcases. His in depth expertise in International Affairs, State and Federal Criminal Defense Litigation, Consular Processing Issues, Immigration Law, Foreign Affairs, Customs Law, and High-Level Scientific Training has enabled Attorney Manchanda to secure solutions for his Clients in a quick, efficient, and accurate manner for more than 13 years. Mr. Manchanda is fluent in French, English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. He has also studied Russian, Latin, and Hebrew. His hobbies include Politics, International Affairs, and Soccer. In his spare time, he enjoys Chess and Classical Music.",FAKE
"October 28, 2016 at 10:00 am 
OMG, a Confederate Flag at school! Minds have been warped forever! “We can’t have that, the truth being spewed out in public like that, people might think they actually have rights!” 
“What will you do without freedom” (William Wallace) I don’t know about how others feel, but, in my mind, we’re quite far from true freedom. You need to dispose rubbish? Better have your permit. Need to take a shit, better get your permit. Birth and Death certificates log you in and out and you’re property. 
The dehumanizing of the species is well underway. Your number is 8675309.21 Like rats in a cage, we eat, shit, and breathe. Our cage is our own minds, manipulated beyond measure by unscrupulous bastards with a greed that can never be quenched. It’s unfortunate that there are those that exist with a superiority complex and think their shit don’t stink. That superiority complex leads to wars. We’re the most advanced, civilized monkeys on the planet, but you steal my bananas, we’re goin’ to war. 
A Confederate Flag? They get their undies in a bundy over a Confederate Flag? 
Yep, we must lie to our children and not tell them our true history. We must protect them from the psychological trauma of the truth! “Yes Jimmy, everything’s lollypops and rainbows!”“Here, take some more Ritalin and STFU!” 
Pharmacy regulars, it seems most parents on some damned drug too. “Well, I gotta get the kids pills, I may as well get some for me, as long as I’m there.” Hey Dr. Feelgood, what’s up? 
“Mother’s Little Helpers” told the story decades ago. Now, snoop in anyones “Medicine Chest” and you’ll discover an array of concoctions, herbals, stimulants, downers, mood enhancers, sleeping pills, wake up pills, stay awake pills, two in the morning, two at noon, two at bedtime, repeat every day until your dead. 
You want to live forever? I don’t. I suspect bigger and better things await my arrival, at least, I hope so.",FAKE
"Colorado Springs, Colorado (CNN) Ted Cruz on Saturday clinched the support of every pledged delegate in Colorado, capturing all of the final 13 delegates who will go to the national convention in July and demonstrating his organizational strength in the all-important delegate race.

Even though voters didn't head to the polls Saturday, Cruz's strength here could help deny Donald Trump the 1,237 delegates that he needs to clinch the nomination.

Cruz's victory Saturday, combined with delegates he had already earned, hands him 30 of the 37 delegates across the state who are legally bound to support him on the first ballot at the convention, along with four other delegates who gave him verbal commitments of support.

""Today was another resounding victory for conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who care about the future of our country,"" the Cruz campaign said a statement. ""Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and tonight's incredible results in Colorado have proven this: Republicans are uniting behind our campaign because they want a leader with real solutions who will bring back jobs, freedom, and security.""

Earlier in the afternoon, Cruz had urged state Republicans here at the Broadmoor Arena to help him defeat Trump.

""If we continue to stand united, we are going to win this Republican nomination. We are going to win the general election. We are going to win the state of Colorado and we are going to turn this country around,"" Cruz said to huge cheers from the arena floor.

In yet another sign of his airtight ground game, Cruz spoke before a huge screen displaying his slate of delegates for the final 13 spots, and he noted that his slate was also printed on the bright orange T-shirts that his many volunteers were wearing on the state convention floor.

Trump's campaign, by contrast, initially distributed fliers listing the campaign's national delegate candidates that were riddled with errors. The flier displaying the Trump slate is supposed to be the tip sheet that party members use to fill out their ballot. But on the first slate that the Trump campaign was giving out, more than a half dozen of their delegate candidates were listed with the wrong delegate number. At least one of the delegate numbers corresponded to a delegate supporting Cruz.

The Trump campaign reprinted the flier, but the second flier also included several errors.

Before the voting began, Trump campaign adviser Patrick Davis said in an interview that the team had been given ""incomplete"" information by the Colorado Republican Party about delegate numbers.

Later in the evening, as the votes were being counted, senior Trump adviser Alan Cobb said several supporters had told the campaign that their ballot number had changed numerous times or that their name did not appear on the party's official list of national delegate candidates even though they had filled out the proper paperwork.

Alan Cobb, the senior adviser to Trump, said the campaign was looking into the reports of balloting problems and was not ruling out a challenge to seating the Colorado delegation at the national convention in July.

A spokesman for the state party said it was looking into the reports but had no immediate comment.

It was unclear how much confusion that caused, but the Trump campaign has acknowledged that it did not expect to win any delegates in Colorado.

While there was fervent enthusiasm for Cruz, former New Hampshire Sen. John E. Sununu, who was Ohio Gov. John Kasich's surrogate at the gathering, was greeted with polite applause.

""We've got to unify behind that candidate who will win,"" Sununu told the crowd, pointing to Kasich's strength in general election polling matchups with Hillary Clinton. Kasich, however, had not won any delegates as of Saturday afternoon.

Trump campaign surrogate Stephen Miller, a policy adviser to the real estate magnate, drew a warmer response by opening his speech with a focus on the issue that helped carry Trump to the top of the Republican field: Immigration.

""Do you think the United States of America needs to secure its border?"" Miller asked the crowd, which shouted ""Yes"" in response. Before even mentioning Trump's candidacy, Miller went on to read letters from parents who he said had lost their children to ""illegal immigrant violence.""

""These Americans deserve a voice and I am going to give it to them today,"" Miller said. ""It's the powerless who are standing up behind Mr. Trump.""

Cruz dominated the intricate delegate selection process of the Colorado Republican Party, and in this pivotal swing state, a strong campaign organization has often made the difference between defeat and victory in the race to the White House.

In this first round for the GOP, Team Cruz once again proved its mettle -- far outpacing the efforts of Trump and Kasich in the scramble for delegates at each of the congressional district gatherings this week.

By late Friday, Cruz had swept all the available delegates in the state's seven congressional districts.

In the final rounds of a messy and chaotic process Friday, candidates vying to be one of Colorado's delegates lined up along the walls of the ballroom at a Doubletree hotel here waiting their turn to deliver campaign speeches. ""You have 10 seconds. Go!"" a party official barked as the first candidate stepped to the microphone Friday morning.

Cruz volunteers seemed to be everywhere, working the hallways where party members were crammed shoulder to shoulder among vendors peddling Cruz infinity scarves and Trump-style ""Make America Great Again"" hats. In one corner, a hot pink handwritten sign lured the undecided over to talk to ""Cruz Persuasion Teams.""

The ballroom floor was littered Cruz campaign slates (the tip sheets indicating which delegates are endorsed by the campaign). Scattered across the room were glossy copies of the ""Donald Trump Voter Guide,"" which is actually an anti-Trump pamphlet distributed by one of the super PACs that is trying to defeat him.

Amid all the jostling, shouting and chaos throughout the day Friday, delegates aligned with Cruz won again and again.

Trump still maintains a wide lead over Cruz in the delegate count as the two candidates attempt to win the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination.

But at a time when a contested convention looks increasingly likely, there was palpable disdain for Trump's candidacy among the GOP faithful here. His string of unforced errors, nasty tweets and controversial policy statements in recent weeks have clearly taken a toll.

""The momentum against Trump at the activist level is just frothing,"" said Josh Penry, a former state senator who was Marco Rubio's state chairman in Colorado. ""There was a time when Trump could have competed in Colorado. That time has long since passed. ... Among the activists, the tide has turned against him dramatically.""

Trump canceled a planned rally in Colorado this week as he focused his efforts on New York, which holds its critical primary on April 19.

While Trump had some fervent supporters here at the state convention, it was clear from the speeches delivered by delegate candidates that his appeal has worn thin for many Republicans -- a testament to how much work the real estate magnate would have to do to unite the party if he becomes the nominee.

At Thursday night's gathering for Colorado's 7th Congressional District, 19-year-old student Angel Merlos urged the crowd to elect him as a Cruz delegate to the convention, because he said the nation's values and morals were at stake if Trump were to become the Republican nominee.

""Morality is about how you act, how you speak, and how you carry yourself,"" Merlos said in interview after his brief speech in Arvada. ""I believe Trump has no morals because he lies about many things. ... He contradicts himself on everything.""

""He thinks he knows what will help the immigration problem, but he doesn't,"" Merlos continued. ""He talks about a wall -- that may do something. I don't know exactly what it will do. But he uses immigrants to help him build his buildings, and yet he's so cruel and harsh"" when he talks about them, Merlos said.

Delegate candidate David Head ran as an ""unpledged"" delegate in the hope of serving as a voice against Trump on the floor of Republican convention in July.

""I think he would be a disaster for both the Republican Party and the country,"" said Head, who owns an insurance business in Westminster, Colorado, with his son.

""He confuses intimidation and bluster with straight talk and honesty. I think he is anti-woman. I think he is saying whatever he thinks will sell to get him a vote, and I think he's playing on the fears and prejudices of a lot of people to intimidate people into voting for him.""

Libby Szabo, a Jefferson County Commissioner who won a slot as a Cruz delegate to the national convention, said as a conservative, she was troubled by Trump's recent comments about punishing women who have illegal abortions. (Trump backed off that position after an uproar from opposite sides of the political spectrum.)

""I like that he has started a dialogue in our party that we need to have. I just don't see him as being consistent,"" Szabo said. ""One week he says one thing, the next week he says another thing.""

Trump campaign looks to step up operation

Beyond the simmering anti-Trump sentiment here, Cruz's strength in the delegate chase in Colorado (as well as states like North Dakota, Louisiana and Tennessee) has once again exposed the deficiencies of Trump's organizing operation, which is scrambling to catch up.

Trump's allies insist there is still time to streamline their delegate wrangling operation and time to persuade even those who are resistant to his brand of politics at this moment.

One Trump adviser said they entered the Colorado GOP contests with the expectation of winning ""zero delegates"" -- and were pleased at the end of the day Friday that they had won two alternate delegates pledged to Trump in Congressional District 4.

""This is just the beginning of a four-month process to convince the unpledged delegates and alternates in Colorado that Donald Trump means what he says, he's going to make America great again,"" said Davis, a Colorado-based political consultant who joined the Trump team this week after Trump's campaign manager fired their Colorado state director.

In conversations with Cruz supporters, Davis brushed off questions about Trump's poor standing in general election match-ups with Hillary Clinton, arguing that ""polls taken today, six months away from November, are garbage, and will not be predictive on election day.""

As for Cruz's clear organizational advantage, Davis said Trump's team remains undaunted.

""This is an insider's game,"" Davis said, as he waited for the final votes of the day to be tabulated. ""Nowhere in America, including Colorado, are insiders the heart and soul of the Trump campaign.""

But the question is whether Trump can get geared up in time to win that insider's game.

His campaign announced an expanded role this week for veteran GOP operative Paul Manafort, who is managing convention activities for Trump -- just as he did for the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.

Becky Mizel, a Trump volunteer who was the former chair of the Pueblo County Republican Party in Colorado, said she wasn't discouraged by Trump's poor showing in the state.

""Cruz has a very strong organization here,"" she said when asked about the obstacles her candidate had faced. One of Cruz's most powerful allies, she noted, was the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, which circulated ubiquitous blue fliers touting Cruz delegates at every voting location this week.

Mizel credited the head of the group, Dudley Brown (who she counts as a friend), with ""organizing the Cruz machine with the legislators who have decided to go and block Mr. Trump.""

""The average person on the street is working or raising their kids -- they aren't political junkies like the caucus attendees are -- and those are the people that are attracted to Mr. Trump,"" she said.

At the same time, Mizel said she was relieved that the Trump campaign now seems to grasp the gravity of the task before them as they prepare for the possibility of a contested convention.",REAL
"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name => Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin isn't happy. Credit: VDare.com. 
St Thomas Aquinas told us that one of the pleasures enjoyed by the blessed in Heaven was to contemplate the sufferings of the damned in Hell. Apparently if you get to Heaven there is a sort of balcony you have access to where you can stand and watch the sinners down below being prodded, scorched, and flayed. 
Far be it from me to bandy theology with the Angelic Doctor, but I’ve always thought that divine justice should have a bit more charity in it than that. Whatever: Down here in the terrestrial sphere, there’s no doubt that one of the pleasures of winning an election is seeing the torments of the losers. 
One of the first losers out of the gate, on Wednesday morning, was the curiously named Steven Thrasher [ ] of BuzzFeed. It’s not the “Steven” that excites my curiosity, it’s the “Thrasher.” Mr. Thrasher is a homosexual ; indeed, he basks in the glory of having received the 2012 Journalist of the Year award from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. I know it’s Neanderthal of me, but I can’t help wondering whether “Thrasher” is an assumed name, meant to signal something to those in the know…but that’s idle speculation on my part. 
So here was Mr. Thrasher on Wednesday morning: 
This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close. 
People of color, women, Muslims, queer people, the sick, immigrants: all are threatened by Donald Trump. They need your love, your warmth, your support Hold tight to the ones you love, America. Hold tight to the ones you love living in black and brown and yellow and native skin. Hold tight to us, because we will have to face white people who think we are rapists. We will have to face a nation that wants to stop-and-frisk us. Hold tight to us, because mass incarceration is actually going to get worse, and more of our brothers and sisters are going to be disappeared … This is a terrifying moment for America. Hold your loved ones close, Guardian , November 9, 2016 
It goes on—or thrashes on—for another six hundred words in the same vein. 
Homosexualists were very much to the fore in this kind of hysteria , although I can’t recall anything Donald Trump has said on the subject, and I doubt on a priori grounds that homosex bothers him in any way. 
For another example, here was lesbian writer Cathy Renna [ ]at Huffington Post, November 10th. Get yer hankies out: 
This election was a hate crime. Not physical but psychological, and one that may well lead to legal and physical manifestations that would very much be categorized as hate crimes. 
I saw and heard about such pain and fear on social media and personally as we realized Trump would take the election. And it has not let up. I checked on several people who were expressing a level of fear that seem like it could lead to self-harm. 
A Vote For Trump Was A Hate Crime , November 11, 2016 
That one also continues for over 600 words. 
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is not homosexual, although he does have eccentric tastes: According to Wikipedia, he once dated Maureen Dowd. I’m afraid that brings to my mind a limerick the late Robert Conquest wrote about Ms. Dowd’s approximate U.K. equivalent, Brigid Brophy. The limerick is much too vulgar for a family website, so I’ll leave you to look it up for yourselves. 
Mr. Sorkin unbosomed his feelings about the Trump victory in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old daughter: 
The Trumpsters want to see people like us (Jewish, “coastal elites,” educated, socially progressive, Hollywood …) sobbing and wailing and talking about moving to Canada. I won’t give them that and neither will you. 
Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President ,Vanity Fair, November 9, 2016 
Ms. Sorkin can of course make up her own mind about moving to Canada. It’s not actually an option for her Dad, though. He’s a convicted drug felon. [ Aaron Sorkin Says He Used Drugs , AP, August 3, 2001] And Canada doesn’t give settlement visas to felons. 
Casting around for targets on which to vent their spleen, the CultMarx crowd didn’t even spare the celebrity fluff magazines. Here’s a gal named L.V. Anderson, an associate editor at Slate previously known as an expert on Ziploc bags , breaking a butterfly on the wheel, the actual butterfly in this case being People magazine . [ Amoral PEOPLE Magazine Is Already Fawning Over How “Cute” Trump’s Family Is .[November 9, 2016] ORDER IT NOW 
“Amoral”! People , you see, has done what they habitually do when someone gets elected President: they’ve posted pictures of Trump’s family—actually of his daughter Ivanka Kushner and her kids—whom the magazine describes as “cute.” 22 photos of Ivanka Trump and her family that are way too cute https://t.co/AZdq7b2Gwa pic.twitter.com/e6cSxQAft1 
— People Magazine (@people) November 9, 2016 
That has Ms. Anderson sputtering: 
Trump and Kushner both played key roles in the most hate-filled presidential campaign in modern history. They worked tirelessly to elect a demagogue … 
Trump and Kushner, more than anyone else, normalized Donald’s patent unfitness for the presidency. 
And now, People is normalizing their moral bankruptcy by pretending that they are just average celebrities, as harmless as the Kardashians. 
End sputter. Are the Kardashians really harmless , though? Discuss among yourselves. 
And then of course there was the Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitlery-Hitler brigade. British Lefty historian Simon Schama on BBC Radio November 8th, quote: “Democracy often brings fascists to power. It did so to Germany in the 1930s. And so in my view it has done this evening.” [ Fury at BBC Radio 4 as Simon Schama compares Donald Trump election win to rise of HITLER , By Cyrus Engineer, Express.co.uk, November 9, 2016] 
It’s all been wonderfully delicious to watch. In a simile that I like very much, one of my email correspondents, who lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, told me that, quote: 
There are few in my zip code with whom I could share the joy of this moment. I can report that the apparatchiks are all walking around dazed and despondent, like Japanese schoolkids who have just heard the emperor announce the capitulation on the radio . 
Added to the pleasure of hearing such wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Left is the spectacle of establishment Republicans like Paul Ryan falling into line behind The Donald. The English language has the idiom “rats deserting a sinking ship.” I can’t think of a phrase that expresses the reverse thing, rats scampering to get back on the ship as she hoists sail and starts to pick up speed, but there really ought to be one. 
If St Thomas Aquinas got it right, and Heaven is half as much fun as this, I’m going to be very good indeed from now on in hopes of getting there at last. 
If you go before me, save me a space on that balcony. 
To take set this in a global perspective: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow remarked to me the other day that an American election is the Greatest Show On Earth. 
He’s right of course, and that’s hopeful for the human race at large. 
Our election will surely have been an encouragement. In many European nations, just as here, a smug, entrenched political elite has been pushing a sentimental globalist ideology whose benefits to their own people have long since passed the point of diminishing returns. 
We see this in the great crisis of illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East. We’ve been chronicling the crisis on VDARE.com: the great floods of illegals into Germany, France, Greece, and most lately Italy. [ Italy Becomes A Leading Destination For Migrants, Matching Greece , NPR, November 6, 2016]We’ve told you about the sneaky euphemisms: “refugees,” “asylum seekers,” “migrants,” and so on. 
No doubt some small proportion of the numbers are genuinely fleeing from something. The great majority, though, it’s plain from the news pictures, are middle-class young men from sub-Saharan Africa and reasonably stable places like Pakistan, looking for a Western lifestyle. 
It’s overwhelmingly a problem of illegal immigration. And rising numbers of Europeans are mad as hell that their governments, far from doing anything to stop it, are actively encouraging it. 
There you see the commonality with Trumpism in the U.S.A. Illegal immigration has been a signature Trump issue. Trump’s success in the election this week has given heart to Europeans fighting for the sovereignty of their own countries and the integrity of their borders. 
Here’s a relevant quote from one of those Europeans: 
[Ronald] Reagan spoke of “Poland’s struggle to be Poland.” And today, three decades later, history is about to repeat itself in the United States and in several West European countries. Of course, I am not comparing our current political elite with the Communist dictatorships with their prison cells for dissidents, but the fight of a nation to be itself, remain itself and defend its identity, that fight is also being waged today. 
We are witnessing America’s struggle to be America, and the struggle of several European nations, among them the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany and many others to preserve their identity and liberty, to remain the Netherlands, Britain, France, Germany. Everywhere, patriots are on the march. We are living the Patriot Spring. 
Geert Wilders: The Patriot Spring – Breitbart , January 26, 2016 
That was Dutch dissident Geert Wilders. He is the leader of a political party over there, the fifth-largest in the Dutch parliament, with twelve seats in the House and nine in the Senate. That hasn’t stopped the Establishment bringing Wilders to trial for “hate speech” after he promised an election rally that there would be fewer North Africans in Holland under a government run by his party. [ Europe’s Show Trials Are Where America’s Anti-Speech Regime Is Going, By Alex Grass, The Federalist, November 6, 2016] Wilders’ trial is ongoing. ORDER IT NOW 
Patriots in European nations—the counterparts to those of us who write and broadcast on websites like this one—live under real threat. It’s not just the threat of show trials, either. Wilders has 24-hour police protection and sleeps at undisclosed locations. 
That’s the fate of honest patriots in societies under the soft totalitarianism of Political Correctness. This week’s election in the U.S.A. has given them new hope. Here’s Geert Wilders’ stirring statement on his hopes for the President Elect: 
My hope—and expectation—is that Donald Trump will follow in Reagan’s footsteps, that he will stand firm, speak the truth, concede nothing and, in doing so, inspire Western Europe to protect its freedoms against Islamization. 
America has just liberated itself from Political Correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same! 
Geert Wilders For Breitbart: The Second American Revolution Has Come, by Geert Wilders, November 9, 2016 
The key takeaway here: Wilders’ phrase “the Patriot Spring.” I don’t know if he coined that himself or borrowed it, but it’s something to watch out for across the pond in coming months. 
There are elections all over in Europe next year: Germany in February and September, the Netherlands itself in March, France in April, May, and June, Hungary in May, Norway in September, Czechia in October. 
It could be that we’re looking at not just a Patriot Spring over there—but a Patriot Year. 
If that comes to pass, it will have been partly under the inspiration of Donald Trump and our country, the U.S.A.— “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.” 
John Derbyshire [ ] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. ) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books . He’s had t w o books published by VDARE.com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT ( also available in Kindle ) and From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013 . His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com . (Reprinted from VDare.com  ",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump is issuing a dire warning to his supporters: You're getting ripped off.

""The system, folks, is rigged,"" Trump told supporters at a rally Monday night in Albany, New York. ""It's a rigged, disgusting, dirty system.""

Trump is coming to grips with the creeping possibility that he could narrowly lose the Republican nomination at a contested GOP convention despite landing in Cleveland with the most delegates. And his latest comments follow a series of victories by Ted Cruz's well-oiled delegate wrangling machine at state and county Republican conventions, most recently this weekend when the Texas senator swept the Colorado Republican convention -- wins that are fueling Cruz in the event neither of the two men capture the 1,237 delegates needed to avoid a brokered convention.

And with party elites continuing to rally around efforts to derail and delegitimize his candidacy, Trump is feeling the heat -- and using it to sow new outrage with his backers.

""I say this to the RNC and I say it to the Republican Party. You're going to have a big problem folks because there are people that don't like what's going on,"" Trump said at a Rochester, New York, rally on Sunday during which he referred to the party's nominating process as ""crooked"" or ""corrupt"" seven times during his speech.

He also called attention eight times during that speech to the ""millions"" of votes he has pulled during the primary -- nearly 2 million more than Cruz.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus said the rules that Trump is criticizing are ""nothing new.""

At a rally in San Diego, Cruz told Trump: You lost, fair and square.

""Donald, it ain't stealing when the voters vote against you. It is the voters reclaiming this country,"" Cruz said Monday. ""65,000 people voted in the state of Colorado. They just didn't vote for you. They voted for our campaign.""

But voters at Trump rallies are already sharing the front-runner's outrage.

""Here is the Republican Party, instead of listening to its constituents -- to the majority of America -- who are saying this is what we want, they're not backing him up. Instead they're rallying against him, which in turn, they're rallying against us,"" said the 37-year-old from Saratoga, New York.

Amy Almy, a 48-year-old hairdresser who also attended Trump's rally Monday, said she now feels ""naïve"" for not realizing that ""everything was so fixed.""

""You see what's happening to me and Bernie Sanders,"" Trump said Sunday in Rochester, New York. ""It's a corrupt deal going on.""

Six in 10 Republican voters said in a recent CNN/ORC poll that if no major candidate earns a majority of the delegates headed into the convention, those delegates should nominate the candidate who entered with the largest pool of delegates. That candidate would most almost certainly be Trump.

Trump's opponents, meanwhile, are shaking off accusations of foul play and saying Trump is failing to follow the rules.

""So what? So what? That's not how it works,"" Black said. ""If he can't get a majority of the delegates, somebody else will and that's the person that won it fair and square.""

""It's about the delegates, it's not about his ego,"" Black added of Trump, who has benefited from winner-take-all primary rules in several states to earn a larger share of delegates than he has votes.

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner on Monday night took to Twitter -- one of Trump's favorite stomping grounds -- to troll Trump.

""How on earth are you going to defeat ISIS if you can't figure out the @cologop convention?"" Gardner tweeted, one of several in a string from his account.

Black downplayed the potential of a fractured Republican Party should Trump fail to cinch the nomination at a brokered convention, but Trump's allies are painting a disastrous picture.

""If there are shenanigans, it's not straightforward, all of those millions of people that Donald Trump has brought into the arena are not going to stay there, and the Republicans are going to lose,"" former presidential contender turned Trump supporter Ben Carson said late last month on Fox News. ""It's going to be absolute destruction.""

Jesse Benton, the chief strategist to a pro-Trump super PAC, described an equally grim outcome.

""It would be such a suicidal move for the party to nominate anybody besides Donald Trump,"" Benton said. ""If they decide to push millions of people out of the process, it's going to be devastating.""

But while Trump and his supporters are warning of an establishment effort to subvert the popular outcome, the billionaire is also beginning to look for ways to outgun his opponents within the confines of the system.

His hire came after Trump only recently came to the realization that he could very well win more delegates than his opponents and yet still leave the Cleveland convention without the crown he has been seeking.

Trump placed a call to his longtime and now informal political adviser Roger Stone on March 25 and asked if party elites could truly ""screw"" him out of the nomination at a brokered convention, according to a source with knowledge of the conversation.

Stone recommended Trump hire Manafort and by the end of the weekend, Manafort was on board.

But while those gears quietly churn with his blessing, Trump's outrage is only growing louder.

""We've got a corrupt system. It's not right,"" Trump said on Sunday. ""And we've got to do something about it.""",REAL
"Sent: Sun Oct 25 [11:49:45] 2009 
Subject: Re: Honduras 
Sounds good. 
There will be those who take a hard line on the elections, but perhaps some fence-sitting countries could be persuaded on conditional recognition. I’ll flag it for Tom and Craig. 
From: H 
Sent: Mon Oct 26 07:27:12 2009 
Subject: Fw: Honduras 
All of this did not print last night, It stopped after Fourth! [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] 
From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 8:06:12 AM 
To: humaabedin [Redacted] 
Subject: Fw: Honduras 
The emails also include an exchange between Abedin, Clinton personal assistant Lauren Jiloty, and Iris Anaya, the assistant to sugar magnate and Clinton Foundation donor Alfonso Fanjul concerning a request for special access to Clinton. On October 13, 2009, Anaya emailed Abedin seeking to arrange a meeting between Fanjul, the CEO of Florida Crystals, and Clinton. Jiloty responded the next day, asking that Anaya talk with Clinton scheduler Lona Valmoro about “setting up a meeting.” Fanjul donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and was a Bill Clinton co-chairman in Florida. 
In an October 26, 2009, email exchange, power attorney and Hillary Clinton financial supporter, Charlie Ann Syprett, contacted Doug Band, apparently seeking help in getting around U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) restrictions on U.S. citizens’ ability to travel to Cuba. Syprett ostensibly wanted a waiver from the restrictions to enable people from her organization, SYC Charitable Foundation, to travel to Cuba, noting “we are not asking for something out of the ordinary.” 
The emails also show that Valmoro sent Clinton’s government schedule to the unsecure email addresses of numerous members of the Clinton Foundation staff on October 16, 2009, again on October 18, 2009, and on October 25, 2009. The emails also include discussions of personnel matters and appointments on Clinton’s unsecure account, which may run afoul of federal privacy law. 
This is the thirteenth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin. The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department requiring the agency to produce “all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a ‘non-state’.gov email address” ( Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)). Previous records releases documented special Clinton State Department consideration for Clinton Foundation supporters (see here , here , and here .) 
“We’ve once again uncovered classified information in Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is frankly remarkable that the FBI and Justice Department are only now investigating Abedin’s connection to Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.” Post navigation",FAKE
"The illuminati card ‘Enough Is Enough’ a harbinger of things to come? 

For more than two decades the infamous Illuminati Card Game, created in 1994 by Steve Jackson, has been proven to be a remarkably accurate when it comes to the prediction for future events.

Already several worldwide events had their own card prior to the evening happening.

Now The US elections are behind us and Donald Trump has been elected as the next US President, once again there are two cards which really stand out.

Both cards bear a striking resemblance to Donald Trump.

The first card ‘Charismatic Leader’ shows a man speaking to a fanatic crowd with the following text:

The increased power takes immediately effect. 


The second card ‘Enough is Enough’ shows the likeness to Donald Trump with a bullet whizzing by his head with the following text: 
At any time, our snipers lay you in every place. Have a nice day. 


Now that Donald Trump has come so far to become the 45th president, the people in power want him stopped before he causes any more upset to their status quo. It means that he will become a target.

Some of their methods to stop Donald Trump: Sabotage, economic crisis, civil unrest, false flag operations, cyber attacks and if they have no success to stop him then it is quite possible that they play their last card: Assassination.

Very disturbing is also the warning of Baba Vanga, a Bulgarian-born prophet - who died in 1996 aged 85, and who had an alleged prediction success rate of 85 per cent.

She correctly predicted that the 44th President of the United States would be an African-American and this black President (Obama) would be the last US President.

Obama technically remains President until Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2017 but if Baba Vanga’s prediction would be correct again then something will happen with Donald Trump before January 20, 2017 and Barack Obama will serve a third term with all its consequences.

Baba Vanga’s prediction and especially the second card could be a warning for an upcoming assassination attempt against Donald Trump? 


UFO Sighting Hotspot 
SOURCE ",FAKE
"When officers finally caught up to him late Monday, he made good on his threat, police said: He pulled out a gun and killed himself.

Lamb was the suspect in two killings: that of Ethan Schmidt, who was shot in the head in his office on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and of Amy Prentiss, who was found shot to death at a home in Gautier, a coastal city about 300 miles away from the university.

A candlelight vigil is scheduled Tuesday evening at Delta State to remember Schmidt.

The hunt for Lamb brought together campus police and city police, as well as the Mississippi Highway Patrol, Bolivar County Sheriff's Department and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. At some point, Lamb spoke with police and told them ""he wasn't going to jail,"" Gautier Police Chief Dante Elben said. Late Monday, officers spotted Lamb pull over his car near Greenville and run into the woods. Soon afterward, they heard a single gunshot and found Lamb's body. Lamb taught at Delta State with Schmidt. He lived with Prentiss, 41. But beyond that connection, authorities have not disclosed a motive. ""We're not going to speculate on a motive until we have facts in hand,"" Cleveland Police Chief Charles Bingham said. posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" CNN affiliate WLOX posted a copy of the letter that read: ""I am so very sorry. I wish I could take it back. I loved Amy and she is the only person who ever loved me."" At a midnight news conference, Delta State University President William LaForge said that Lamb had taught at the school for a while and had been teaching online geography courses. He recently asked to take a reduced load of classes for medical reasons, said LaForge, who did not elaborate about Lamb's supposed medical issues. Lamb's death ended a surreal day for students and staffers at Delta State, about 115 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The school was locked down throughout the day, its buildings cleared. Only 250 of the 1,150 students remained on campus, confined to their dormitories. Classes are canceled for Tuesday but counselors are on hand to meet with anyone who needs help, said LaForge. ""It was probably the scariest thing I have been through in a while,"" said Dean Arnold, a student who had Schmidt as a professor. A photo on the Delta State University website shows Ethan Schmidt, left, and Shannon Lamb at a holiday party. Schmidt and Lamb taught together at Delta State. A photo on the school's website shows them standing side by side, smiling at a 2013 holiday party. That same year, Schmidt thanked Lamb in the acknowledgments of his book says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. A biography of Lamb posted on the school's website says he received his Ph.D. from Delta State in 2014, and has taught geography and social sciences education courses there. Lamb, he said, was a talented musician who played guitar and harmonica. ""You know, you would have never have thought that something like this would happen. You'd want to be like him and play guitar,"" he said. Schmidt's Delta State biography says that he taught undergraduate courses in American history, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 2007. Schmidt had written several books and scholarly papers and had expertise in Native American history. ""It's going to be shocking because I have Mr. Schmidt three out of five days,"" Arnold said. ""It's going to be a lot different without him."" Before working at Delta State, Schmidt taught for six years at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he received the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2011. ""We lost one of our beloved professors today,"" Michelle Roberts, vice president of university relations at Delta State, told reporters. ""We are grieving on this campus.""",REAL
"Getty - Saul Loeb/AFP The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
Sean Hannity took to the radio on Wednesday and was upfront about how he really feels about conservatives who refuse to vote for Trump. 
He kicked off his explosive rant by telling his listeners that he's “pissed,” and said: 
""In 13 freaking days, we are either going to make a decision to keep screwing the country up or we are going to try and fix it. That's what's at stake here. 
You want to get 95 million Americans back to work, you want to get the economy going, you want a president that has the courage to say 'radical Islam.' 
You want to not bring in refugees from countries that have laws that are the antithesis of our constitutional values. 
You want to control the borders, you want become energy independent, you want to eliminate Obamacare, you want to fix are dilapidated piece of crap educational system, this is your chance."" 
Then, he went nuclear on the “Never Trump” movement. 
You can listen to Hannity's full rant, below : ",FAKE
"posted by Eddie Ever wonder how cellphones went from being a point of wealth to household commodity? Well, there’s reason to believe that the accessibility of cellphones isn’t purely coincidental. The thought originated with metadata and the possibilities made possible through the documentation of information that cellphones provide, through both backdoor access and the location data each phone provides. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, is an incredibly secret court that answers to no one and, has autonomy in not only their proceeding and rulings, but, is also highly-classified. Through this system, President’s George Bush and Barrack Obama have enabled their own domestic surveillance practices. Although, The NSA is heavily involved as well. In doing so, the government has created programs and jobs that are specific to collecting and translating meta-data. The government would have you believe that meta-data is not as invasive as specific data, but, let’s consider it this way. Imagine your coordinates being reported by the second, from the time you wake in the morning, during your commute to work, and whichever plans you have afterwards. This data system gives insight into each particular location, phone call, and the duration of said phone calls to these data collectors. Imagine being able to see each and every step your better half or child has throughout the day, and you notice they stops at location that seem unusual or speak/communicate with numbers/people unfamiliar to you while having access to the duration of those calls. Although, this leaves an opportunity for misconception, but, it also brings us to an objective truth, how revealing metadata can be. Edward Snowden, a former NSA employer who specialized in technology in the cyber division, released classified documents involving both government programs that enacted policies, and, FISA court rulings on said programs. These revelations brought his need to flee for asylum in China, and then and currently, Russia. Snowden’s attempt of transparency let Americans learn just how much census data has changed and the contracts deployed between the government and the major communications companies, such as AT&T. These companies have made millions by granting backdoor access and data to the government. Yet, this isn’t all bad. Local officials have occasionally solicited access, through communication companies, to find criminals and perpetrators of crime. For example, in 2013 California officials used the data and cellphone accessibility to find the murderer that slaughtered a man, his wife, and their two children. Until the solicitation, the local officials weren’t close to right suspect. After collaboration, the local officials were able to find, through metadata collection, analysis, and cellphone GPS, the exact location of the murderer. So, you tell me, do you think your phone is as private as you think? Written by Anthony A Fabrikant. From Around the Web Founder of WorldTruth.Tv and WomansVibe.com Eddie ( 8889 Posts ) 
Eddie L. is the founder and owner of WorldTruth.TV. and Womansvibe.com. Both website are dedicated to educating and informing people with articles on powerful and concealed information from around the world. I have spent the last 36+ years researching Bible, History, Alternative Health, Secret Societies, Symbolism and many other topics that are not reported by mainstream media.",FAKE
"Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will not seek re-election, he said in an interview with The New York Times published Friday. Reid has led the Senate Democrats since 2005.

In a video posted Friday morning, Reid thanked his constituents for allowing him to serve the state of Nevada. (Watch the video above.)

My life’s work has been to make Nevada and our nation better. Thank you for giving me that wonderful opportunity. https://t.co/dwy2rDWYhO

In the video, Reid said he will work to help the Democrats take control of the Senate again, noting he felt it was ""inappropriate"" to ""soak up all those resources on me, when I can be devoting those resources to the caucus."" Reid also warned Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) he'd be working hard until the end of his current term.

""My friend Sen. McConnell, don't be too elated,"" Reid said. ""I'm going to be here for 22 months, and you know what I'm going to be doing? The same thing I've done since I first came to the Senate.""

McConnell released a statement Friday on Reid's announcement, saying he looks forward to working with Reid until his time in office is over.

“Nothing has ever come easily to this son of Searchlight,"" McConnell said. ""Underestimated often, his distinctive grit and determined focus nevertheless saw him through many challenges. They continue to make him a formidable opponent today.""

Reid, who broke some ribs and bones in his face after an accident that occurred while he was exercising at home in January, said his recent injuries were not the reason he decided to retire.

Reid has served in the U.S. Senate since 1987, and acted as senate majority leader from 2007 to 2015. Before working in the Senate, Reid was a congressman representing Nevada in the 1980s, and before that served as the lieutenant governor of Nevada.

When I was a boy, I dreamed of being an athlete. I listened to those baseball games on the radio, and I envisioned myself as a man out in center field at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park in Boston. But the joy I’ve gotten with the work that I’ve done for the people of the state of Nevada has been just as fulfilling as if I had played center field at Yankee Stadium.

The job of Minority Leader of the United States Senate is just as important as being the Majority Leader. It gives you so much opportunity to do good things for this country. And that’s what I am focused on.

But this accident has caused Landra and me to have a little down time. I have had time to ponder and to think. We’ve got to be more concerned about the country, the Senate, the state of Nevada than about ourselves. And as a result of that I’m not going to run for re-election.

I am going to be here for another 22 months, and you know what I’m going to be doing? The same thing I’ve done since I first came to the Senate.

We have to make sure that the Democrats take control of the Senate again. And I feel it is inappropriate for me to soak up all those resources on me when I could be devoting those resources to the caucus, and that’s what I intend to do.

Someone with my background, my upbringing, to have the experiences I’ve had is really a miracle. And I want you to know that I am so grateful for your invaluable support. I have done my best. I haven’t been perfect, but I’ve really tried my hardest to represent the people of the state of Nevada.",REAL
"As Halloween approaches, here are some terrifying plants and fungus you never want to run into. 

Plants are not usually thought of as particularly scary. Here are 10 plants and fungus that will leave you with goosebumps on your skin. 

Bleeding Tooth Fungus 
This fungus is inedible (though not toxic), and can be found in North America, Europe, Iran, and Korea. 

Young, moist fruit bodies can ‘bleed’ a bright red fluid that contains pigment known to have anticoagulant properties similar to heparin. 

If you find yourself exploring the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, or North Carolina, you may run into this bloody fungus. Try not to scream. 

Red Tide 
The red tide of ‘algal bloom’ is a phenomenon that occurs in areas of the ocean that contain high concentrations of algae. The water turns red and red tides are considered to be the inspiration behind the Biblical blood ocean. 

Algal blooms happen all over the world and the algae differs from body of water to body of water. The effect of the red tide can be fatal to sea creatures and humans who consume seafood contaminated with the toxin. 

Although not all red tides are poisonous, their decomposing process can deplete the water of its oxygen, forcing animals to relocate or die. 

Venus Flytrap 
The venus flytrap is probably one of the most popular creepy plants. It is known for its predatory behavior towards small flying insects. Its trapping mechanism is made of what looks like a ‘mouth’, or two leaves whose hairs sense prey and toothlike cilia that keep the prey from escaping. 

The venus flytrap can even tell the difference between live prey and non-prey like raindrops. The flytrap will let small prey that wouldn’t be worth the energy of digestion go. 

Nonetheless, these creepy little plants are inspiration for many horror film monsters and would be a nightmare if they were human sized. 

Brain Cactus 
Varieties of mammillaria elongata, native to Mexico, grow in many different shapes and sized. The most distinctive of all is the ‘brain cactus’. 

As the brain cactus matures, it looks more and more like a human brain. Imagine stumbling upon this prickly organ in the middle of the desert on a dark night! 

Gympie Gympie Tree 
The gympie gympie tree has a reputation as the most painful tree to exist. Its stinging hairs deliver a very potent neurotoxin and severe stinging. The effects of rubbing against this mean tree can even be fatal to humans. 

To be affected, all you have to do is slightly touch the plant and you will feel the effects of the toxins, which can include aching joints, swelling under the armpits, and a burning sensation. 

If you are unfortunate enough to be stung by this tree, be sure to remove the hairs or they will continue to release the poison into your body. 

Doll’s Eye is a plant that is native to Northeast America. 

It’s highly poisonous berries resemble eyeballs are ripen in the summer, staying until the frost. Just in time for Halloween! 

Corpse Flower 
This flower actually smells like rotting flesh in order to attract pollinators like beetles and flies. 

The plant can grow up to 10 feet tall, and although it is called “the world’s largest flower”, it is actually made up of thousands of small flowers. 

Octopus Stinkhorn 
These mushrooms start out looking like traditional Mario-style mushrooms but mature and erupt their red tentacles to attract flies. These tentacles smell horrible and attract the flies so they can transport their “gleba” to another location for reproduction. 

 ",FAKE
"  RT 
The record shows Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton is the ‘Queen of War’. 
She is fully supported by virtually the whole US establishment; a bipartisan, neocon/neoliberalcon, regime change/”humanitarian” imperialist axis. 
On the opposite side, for all his personal pathology problems and incoherent twitter-mouth ramblings, Donald Trump seemed to be on the money when he said that if elected, Hillary would use Syria to unleash WWIII. 
To check out if that holds, let’s start with an essential backup. 
The ‘Queen of War’, at the final US presidential debate in Las Vegas: ""A no-fly zone [in Syria] can save lives and hasten the end of the conflict."" 
The ‘Queen of War’, in one of her 2013 speeches to Goldman Sachs, published by WikiLeaks: a no-fly zone would ""kill a lot of Syrians.” 
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: a no-fly zone in Syria “would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia."" why_hillary_won_t_unleash_wwiii_-_rt_op_edge.png 
Predictably, the Clinton (cash) machine has been relentless promoting Hillary’s no-fly zone. Whenever cornered, the machine switches the narrative to Russian hacking of the DNC. Edward Snowden, who knows a thing or two about cyberwarfare, stresses there is no solid proof Russian intel hacked the Democratic/Clinton machine. And if they actually did it, the NSA would know. The fact the NSA is mum reveals this is no more than information war. 
Pass the missile launchers, please 
Trump seems to have been more on the money when he insisted how Hillary will be outsmarted – as she already was in the past – when dealing with President Putin, who she has demonized as Hitler. 
I have shown how Hillary will be prevented from launching WWIII because her no-fly zone is already implemented in Syria by Russia. And the Pentagon – reflecting Dunford’s comments - knows it, no matter how emphatically soon-to-be-unemployed Pentagon head Ash Carter threatens “consequences.” 
The Pentagon ranks Russia and China as the number one and two “existential threats” to US national security, in that order. And the US government reserves for itself the privilege of a nuclear “first-strike”– which Hillary supports (but not Trump); this is part of the 2002 Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. 
The relentless hysteria now crystallized as Cold War 2.0 has led scores of analysts to game the actual – terrifying - possibility of a US-Russia hot war. As much as the Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine may now lie in the dust – exactly because Washington refuses to back down from “first-strike”– only armchair Dr. Strangeloves get their kicks with the possibility of fighting a nuclear power. Dunford does not seem to be one of them. 
What Hillary Clinton will certainly do is to double down on proxy wars, Vietnam/Afghanistan-style. So expect a President Clinton to authorize full weaponization of those Beltway-loved “moderate” Al-Qaeda-in-Syria rebels with plenty of shoulder-held missile launchers. This could easily get out of control – with lethal, yet not nuclear, consequences. 
That’s exactly the point made by Mikhail Rostovsky in Moscow daily Moskovsky Komsomolets; if Hillary ratchets up tensions, “things could get out of hand.” 
Also expect not so proxy ratcheting up of tension in the South China Sea; after all it was Hillary who claimed ‘mothership’ of the pivot to Asia; and it was Hillary who steered intra-South East Asian maritime disputes into the boiling cauldron of wider US-China competition. 
And if that was not hard boiled enough, US frustration will be at an all-time high after Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s own pivot to China. 
Say hello to my new Sarmat 
A case can be made that official Moscow is carefully getting ready to work with a Clinton – as in Obama III – presidency, with Hillary, a devil they know well when she was Secretary of State, to be dealt with as a pragmatist, unwilling and unable to plunge US-Russia relations into total incandescence. 
A Clinton presidency for its part should know better than overestimate Russia’s financial “weakness.” 
The national debt of Russia is only 17.7 percent of GDP; for the US it is a whopping 104.17 percent of GDP, or $19.2 trillion. Russia in 2015 had a trade surplus of $150 billion, while the US had a trade deficit of $531.5 billion. The current account surplus of Russia was 5.1 percent of GDP, or 65.8 billion, while the US ran a current account deficit of 484.1 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP. 
Besides, Russia has all the natural resources it needs; unlike the US government, which believes it needs an empire of bases overseas and ten aircraft carrier task forces to secure the resources it lacks. 
Moreover, as much as the Pentagon may continue to be infested by neocon cells, sound generals are also able to identify key Russian signals – such as the unveiling of the RS-28 Sarmat nuclear missile, which NATO calls Satan 2. The Sarmat delivers monster warheads of 40 megatons; boasts a top speed of seven kilometers per second; and is able to outfox any anti-missile shield system anywhere.",FAKE
"After Terrorizing America With Zika Scaremongering, MSM Admits Zika Doesn't Cause Brain Deformities The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/after-terrorizing-america-with-zika.html The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably stupid and ill-informed about nearly everything in the natural world. Today, after months of printing fear-inducing ""Zika terrorism"" stories that scared America half to death while convincing the government to funnel billions of dollars into Zika vaccine research for Big Pharma, the Washington Post now admits it had no idea what it was talking about . But rather than admitting its own science writers were scientifically illiterate propagandists pushing quack narratives as news, the paper now blames other scientists for the gross error by publishing a headline that's once again dishonest and deceptive: ""Scientists are bewildered by Zika's path across Latin America,"" it proclaims.Bewildered about ""Zika's path?"" The story headline should actually read, "" Zika HOAX revealed... it doesn't cause brain damage after all ."" (You can read it here ). Washington Post has been shamelessly pushing the Zika HOAX for months... with no apology to readers In the story, writers Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff essentially reveal that what the Washington Post has been writing about the Zika virus has been based entirely in government propaganda and pandemic lies pushed by the CDC, which of course has close ties to the criminal vaccine industry: Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Yes, the Washington Post now says the scientists are ""bewildered"" that their apocalyptic scare stories that caused female athletes to skip out on the Rio Olympics and scared tens of millions of Americans into poisoning themselves with DEET (a neurotoxic chemical) turned out to be total hogwash. DEET, by the way, combines with carbamate class pesticides to cause neurological dysfunction in humans , which coincidentally increases the number of people who watch CNN or read the Washington Post. For the record, no one who reads Natural News or alternative media websites is surprised by this revelations that has left mainstream scientists ""bewildered."" It's not bewildering to me. I called Zika a total hoax from day one, pointing out that the brain deformities were caused by larvacide chemicals dumped into the water supply , not by Zika. If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects... Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post's own graphic (partial list): Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections... ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections... TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections... ZERO birth defects From the WashPost article: Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” Gee, really? The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil You don't have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . ""...[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,"" says WashPost. Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that's the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. Apparently, there isn't a single ""official"" scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW... Let's throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don't deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They're all so incredibly stupid, they couldn't survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren't giving up hope just yet... science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults. Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can't wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika ""scientists"" goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief. Via the WashPost: “Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn't even make any sense. Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: “Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I'm a real scientist saying all this As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world's leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that's the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It's all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science As you've also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn't interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They've got an agenda to push, and it doesn't matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there's no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official ""science"" was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health ""officials"" were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child. By Mike Adams Dear Friends, HumansAreFree is and will always be free to access and use. If you appreciate my work, please help me continue. 
Stay updated via Email Newsletter: Related",FAKE
"4 Things To Watch At The First Presidential Debate

The first presidential debate tonight is shaping up to be one of the most-watched political events ever, with a potentially Super Bowl-size audience.

Here are four things to watch for as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump take the stage at Hofstra University on Long Island.

Donald Trump ""won"" the primary debates by dominating his opponents, often by name-calling and bluster. This one will be different.

Instead of facing multiple opponents, he will be doing something he's never done before — face off against just one opponent (and in this case an experienced one) on a debate stage.

Trump's goal is to present himself as a plausible president, someone voters can imagine as commander in chief. And he has work to do, since majorities of voters say he doesn't have the judgment or qualifications to be president. So Trump needs to show a basic command of policy — and in particular, his own policies. He has made so many contradictory statements about his plans for Syria, ISIS, tax reform and crime fighting that he will have a real thicket to untangle.

Trump wants to reach those voters who won't want to vote for Clinton but are worried about his temperament. Does that mean the new ""teleprompter Trump"" will show up tonight? He has proven that he can maintain a little more discipline in a set-piece speech, but there are no teleprompters in a 90-minute debate.

And although Trump benefits from low expectations, his team isn't even trying to make him out to be the underdog. On Sunday morning, Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, called him ""the Babe Ruth of debating.""

Clinton has the much tougher task tonight. She has the burden of high expectations.

The former senator and secretary of state, who has now been through two presidential campaigns, is an experienced debater who knows policy inside and out.

But her job is very hard — Clinton has to convince voters who don't want to vote for Trump but haven't warmed up to her that she is likeable, honest and trustworthy. And she has to press her case that Trump is unqualified to be president without being overly aggressive or ""harsh.""

Gender communications research shows that debaters who are on offense win, and those that are on defense lose. But being on offense for a woman is tricky. Male debaters who are aggressive are perceived positively; female politicians who are aggressive in debates are perceived negatively.

So Clinton has to stay on offense without being angry. All of that advice about ""smiling"" that drives Clinton's supporters nuts? It's unfair, but that's just the way it is, says Brett O'Donnell, a veteran Republican debate coach: ""People like to see a happy warrior. Clinton has to look like she's enjoying herself even if she's not.""

Both campaigns have been working the refs hard. Trump has said the debate system is ""rigged"" against him, and he falsely accused NBC's Lester Holt, the moderator for tonight's debate, of being a registered Democrat. Holt is an experienced journalist who happens to be a registered Republican.

The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, has complained about a double-standard. It says the media creates a ""false equivalence"" between Trump's falsehoods and Clinton's, even though numerous fact checks have shown that Trump prevaricates many more times than Clinton does.

In the recent NBC commander-in-chief forum, Clinton's top aides said moderator Matt Lauer grilled Clinton a lot more intensely than Trump. And they say that for tonight's debate the moderator and the TV networks — with the crawl at the bottom of the screen — have a responsibility to fact-check Trump in real time.

There are three phases to a debate:

First, the pregame expectations-setting and referee-massaging, which has been going on at a furious pace over the past week.

Second, the debate itself.

And third, the post-debate spin.

Debates are not forums to score policy points. They are tests of character and demeanor. And they are often judged not in their totality, but by ""moments"" — the zingers and put-downs that the candidates prepare in advance. Those moments — ""Where's the beef?"" ""You're no Jack Kennedy,"" ""There you go again"" — help determine who voters think won or lost the debate.

But there are many debates that were ""won"" in the hours after the candidates left the stage by the campaign that was more adept at getting its narrative into the media.

Follow along with the NPR Politics team's coverage of tonight's debate, which starts at 9 p.m. ET, at npr.org and on many NPR member stations.",REAL
"Ancient Sumerian Writings Reveal The Earth Was Ruled By Eight Immortal Kings For 241,200 Years Please scroll down for video 
More than a dozen copies of a mysterious text referred to as the Sumerian King Lists have been uncovered over the years by archaeologists in regions as disparate as ancient Babylon, Susa, and Assyria. They are all believed to be copies of a single original manuscript which is thought to have been written during the Third Dynasty of Ur by most historians, although some believe it might have been written even earlier. The best-preserved example of this ancient text is called the Weld-Blundell Prism and is on public display in the Ashmolean Museum. An ancient text tells of alien rulers of ancient Earth 
The Sumerian King Lists have baffled historians ever since they were uncovered by modern human beings. The text describes a fascinating period in history when beings referred to as gods ruled over humankind of tens of thousands of years. The manuscript makes reference to eight kings who ‘descended from heaven’ who ruled for an astonishingly long period of 241,200 years. Each of these deified kings met their end during the Great Flood which devastated the population of the world. After the flood, the text claims that another ‘kingship was lowered from heaven’ and that these beings took up control of the people of Earth once again . 
For a long time, it has been believed that the stories of these incredibly long-lived kings, their eventual demise, and their replacement were simply the mythology of the ancient civilization who compiled the Sumerian King List. However, some have speculated that the text might not be mythology at all. The fact that the kings are said to have descended from heaven has led a few people to suggest that they might have been of an otherworldly origin. This would mean that their incredibly long reigns over the cities might be literal rather than metaphorical as these alien beings might have had much longer lifespans than human beings. They may have even been immortal. 
This article (Ancient Sumerian Writings Reveal The Earth Was Ruled By Eight Immortal Kings For 241,200 Years) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with full attribution and a link to the original source on Disclose.tv Related Articles",FAKE
"What to do when the October surprise aimed at your opponent flops and your polls are bad, so bad, really bad? 
How about more propaganda! 
The losing Trump campaign’s latest Hail Mary is to try to fool voters with a last ditch media propaganda push by recruiting volunteers to blitz talk radio with “talking points” and “monitor” discussions and callers. 
Shared by Talk Show host and Editor-in-chief of Right Wisconsin.com Charlie Sykes: Welp. Trump campaign planning ""talk radio blitz."" Recruiting volunteers to call shows with talking points. https://t.co/eWR5qLKRjR 
— Real Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 31, 2016 
From the Trump campaign’s call to action: 
Trump Talk Radio Blitz 2016 Help get Donald Trump elected! Please sign up below to volunteer to call into talk radio over the final days of this Presidential campaign and tell Wisconsin’s voters why you support Donald Trump. We are looking for volunteers to sign up as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain and/or a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller. 
Thank you for your willingness to help elect Donald Trump and Mike Pence this very important election year! 
What will these call captains do? Oh, “monitor” other the show and discussions, give talking points — you know, propaganda: 
I am willing to help! (check all the apply) I am willing to serve as a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Call Captain, taking responsibility to monitor and recruit other callers for one or more talk radio programs between now and election day 
I am willing to be a Trump Talk Radio Blitz Caller and select one or more 15 minute segments for local talk radio shows to call into and promote Donald Trump’s campaign 
Call “Captains” will be in charge of entire shows to make sure the Trump message gets out and “monitor” discussions lest anyone bring any facts to the air: 
Call Captains will sign up to be responsible for an entire talk radio program or programs between now and the election to 1) help recruit callers to call in and promote Donald Trump’s campaign throughout the program for that day, 2) remind Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers who have sign up of their commitment to call into the show, 3) help ensure your Trump Talk Radio Blitz Callers are prepared to discuss the show’s topics, 4) monitor the show and the discussions, and 5) report your successes back to the campaign. 
Paid for by the Trump campaign: 
I mean, it’s working so well for the Trump spokespeople, especially those propaganda artists embedded on a certain cable network. Why not organize non-professionals to give the same talking points and disseminate them in a way that appears “organic”. LOL, I kid. If you’ve run into these people in a comment section or forums you know they have the campaign message down so exactly as to be a screaming siren of talking points. 
So when you hear screaming tinfoil about fake polls and accusations that Hillary Clinton committed treason even though she was actually cleared, you needn’t worry that your entire country has gone insane. 
This is the last gasp of a sinking campaign trying to fool the voters with media propaganda dished out by “volunteers”.",FAKE
"The latest winter storm to rattle the Eastern USA was poised Monday to deal battered Boston only a glancing blow while blasting several states in the South and East.

Despite bitterly cold temperatures, Boston was happy for a respite from snow after a weekend storm dumped 16.5 inches on the city, pushing the winter total to 8 feet — and counting.

Boston's forecast called for a few more inches Tuesday, far short of what was rolling toward less well-equipped areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and Maryland.

Washington, D.C., not known for its prowess in handling big storms, was bracing for between 4 and 8 inches of snow, most of it falling early Tuesday and tapering off during the morning commute. With up to a foot forecast farther south, in Roanoke and Richmond, Va., Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared a statewide emergency.

Non-essential travel was discouraged, and thousands of students throughout the region will get another day off Tuesday, courtesy of Winter Storm Octavia.

Bitter cold temperatures were adding to the region's woes. Washington's high temperature was forecast to reach 25 degrees — about 20 degrees below average for the date.

Frigid temperatures plagued New England on Monday. Mount Washington, N.H., recorded a low of -34 degrees with a wind-chill factor of -87. A New York City hiker who activated her emergency personal locator beacon in the state's Presidential Range amid minus-30 temperatures and 100-mph winds was found dead Monday.

In Kentucky, a section of Interstate 71 near Louisville closed Monday shortly after the snow started. Parts of the state could see more than a foot of snow, the National Weather Service said.

""For Louisville, it could be one of the worst (snowstorms) in 10 years,"" said meteorologist Joe Sullivan.

In Nashville, homeless shelter volunteer coordinator Robb McCluskey said he was worried that a few inches of slush, ice and snow would keep drivers from bringing people to the shelter and keep church congregations from delivering dinner.

""That's the big issue,"" McCluskey said, ""seeing how others are going to survive it.""

Jacksboro, Tenn., reported a midday total of a half inch of ice on the ground.

The Weather Channel reported that ""snow, sleet and freezing rain will make travel difficult, and winter storm warnings have already been posted for almost 47 million people.""

That could translate to 4 inches of nasty ice and snow as far south as northern Georgia.

Atlanta forecasters cautioned about possible black ice for the morning commute after a day of cold rain and overnight temperatures dipping below freezing.

Frigid temperatures were reported all across the northeastern USA Monday morning: Erie, Pa., dropped to minus-18 degrees, tying the city's all-time record low temperature, according to the National Weather Service. Cleveland's minus-8 degree reading broke a daily record low previously set in 1904.

Daily record lows were also tied or broken in Detroit, Baltimore, Syracuse, Toledo, Trenton, N.J., and Wilmington, Del., the Weather Channel reported.

Boston fell to minus-3 degrees, its coldest reading since January 2004, while Philadelphia bottomed out at 3 degrees, its coldest since January 2005, meteorologist Matt Lanza reported.

Airlines took notice of the cold and snow, canceling more than 1,000 flights nationwide Monday and more than 300 for Tuesday. Monday's cancellations were scattered across airports from New England to the Deep South as lingering disruptions from the weekend's blizzard mixed with the latest winter storm.

Still, no region has faced more winter difficulties than eastern Massachusetts. In Boston, the 58.5 inches of snow so far this month makes February 2015 the city's snowiest month on record, the National Weather Service reported. That's 10 times what the city typically receives in February.

The city's 2014-15 winter is the third-snowiest on record, with more than 95 inches recorded so far. The city is only 12 inches away from its snowiest winter ever — based on records dating to the 1870s.

""It's certainly not a record that we want,"" Mayor Marty Walsh told the Boston Herald. ""It looks like a record we can get.""

Contributing: Doyle Rice, Ben Mutzabaugh, Michael Winter and Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY; Matthew Glowicki, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal; Stacey Barchenger, The (Nashville) Tennessean, Associated Press.",REAL
"Home › POLITICS › FBI FOUND “TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS” BELONGING TO HUMA ABEDIN ON WEINER’S LAPTOP FBI FOUND “TENS OF THOUSANDS OF EMAILS” BELONGING TO HUMA ABEDIN ON WEINER’S LAPTOP 5 SHARES 
[10/29/16] With furious Democrats – and the Clinton Campaign – now openly blasting the FBI’s reopened investigation (as Republicans take delight for once in having a government agency reinforce their side of events), the question turns to just what emails were found on Weiner’s laptop, and how damaging their contents are for the FBI to take the unprecedented step of “intervening” in a major political event just days before the national election. 
We first laid what was the most likely explanation yesterday , when we showed several examples of Huma Abedin emails being sent from her work email account to her personal account at , courtesy of a Judicial Watch FOIA release. Of the more than 160 emails in the latest Judicial Watch release, some 110 emails – two-thirds of the total – were forwarded by Abedin to two personal addresses she controlled. The Washington Times reported in August 2015 that the State Department had admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and Mills used personal email accounts to conduct government business in addition to Clinton’s private clintonemail.com to transact State Department business. 
One email from May 15, 2009, was sent by Abedin from her State Department email to her personal email. Abedin was archiving in her personal email account an email Hillary Clinton sent her from Clinton’s private email server at . Abedin was asked to print out attachments to an email Mills sent via a private address the previous day to Clinton involving “timetables and deliverables” for her review via Alec Ross, a technology policy expert who then held the title of senior adviser for innovation to Secretary Clinton. However, while forwarding Hillary’s emails to her personal email server for “convenience” is one thing, what is more troubling is the amount of redaction involved in these emails which migrated to the open email account, which as we now know ended up in Anthony Weiner’s computer: in the above example, the two pages of timetables and deliverables attached to the email were 100 percent redacted, with “PAGE DENIED” stamped across the first redacted page. 
An argument can be made that the extensive redaction confirms confidential material was part of the transmission. 
This is a nuanced point being pushed by Hillary Clinton supporters such as Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who in an article yesterday tried to make a case citing “sources” (even though the FBI said that nobody has seen the content of the Weiner/Abedin emails), that “ no emails being examined by FBI were to or from Clinton .” Post navigation",FAKE
"(CNN) Donald Trump believes he would ""absolutely"" be a force for bipartisanship, but in an interview this weekend neither Republicans nor Democrats escaped a barrage of attacks from the GOP presidential candidate.

Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates.""Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead,"" she said in her announcement video. ""Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey.""

Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid. ""I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States,"" Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23.""These are all of our stories,"" Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. ""These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant.""

Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House.""So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again,"" Trump told the crowd at his announcement.

Trump flung criticism at politicians spanning the spectrum from presidential primary opponents Jeb Bush and Ben Carson to the Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and the man he hopes to succeed, President Barack Obama, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Sunday on ""State of the Union.""

And he lamented the House Select Committee on Benghazi's questioning of Clinton , a hearing he called ""very partisan"" that ""hurts both parties"" and ""hurts the country.""

""The level of hatred between Republicans and Democrats was unbelievable. The level of -- I've never seen anything like it,"" Trump said. ""I'm going to unify. This country is totally divided. Barack Obama has divided this country unbelievably. And it's all, it's all hatred, what can I tell you. I've never seen anything like it...I've gotten along with Democrats and I've gotten along with Republicans. And I said, that's a good thing.""

Tapper asked Trump if his presidency would result in an era of bipartisanship.

""I absolutely think so,"" he said, adding, ""I will be a great unifier for our country.""

Still, for all the talk of bipartisanship and unity, Trump did not pull punches as he vigorously took on his opponents.

Trump hit Bush, the former governor of Florida, and Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, with the same line of attack -- one he has frequently used against Bush, but has only just begun using against Carson, whose reserved and calm tone strongly contrasts with Trump's brash appeal.

""(Bush is) a low-energy person. By the way, Ben Carson is a very low-energy person. We need high-energy people,"" Trump told Tapper. ""I think Ben Carson is a very low-energy person. Actually, I think Ben Carson is lower energy than Jeb, if you want to know the truth. We need strong energy.""

Trump also knocked both Bush and Carson for the support they receive from super PACs, groups that can take in unlimited amounts of money.

The developer dinged super PACs as a ""big fat scam"" and a ""disaster"" in the ""State of the Union"" interview, a line of criticism that he brought out more arduously than ever this weekend, just days after the super PAC backing his candidacy shuttered its operation after the group's ties to the campaign drew scrutiny last week.

But Trump suggested that he may turn his sights away from Bush and toward Carson.

That's because Carson is now the man to beat in Iowa, stealing first place from Trump (who was relegated to second place) in two polls released Thursday and Friday.

""The thing with Ben is he's got a very good PAC, and he's got people running his PAC, and in my opinion, he's got people all over Iowa from his PAC, and they are running -- Ben doesn't even go to Iowa that much. And he's doing well in Iowa?"" Trump said. ""I did talk about Jeb because I thought Jeb was going to be the front-runner. Obviously, he's no longer the front-runner. I probably won't talk about him so much anymore.""

Trump tied in his ""low-energy"" attacks with what he dubbed the ""medieval times"" that the world is currently living in -- saying that as ISIS beheads people, the U.S. needs a strong leader.

But as to whether he would approve a special forces operation to rescue hostages being held by ISIS -- similar to the one that resulted in the death of an American soldier this week-- Trump demurred.

""I think I might, but I'd have to look at the situation,"" Trump said.

Pushed further to explain what the Trump doctrine would be in such situations, Trump explained that it ""is very simple.""

""It's strength. It's strength. Nobody is going to mess with us. Our military is going to be made much stronger,"" Trump said.",REAL
"Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence By Michael Snyder, on October 26th, 2016 
Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country. 
At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day… 
A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that. 
More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square. 
But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax… 
Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first. 
And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June … 
This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day. 
We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika. 
There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece… 
On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?” 
Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt. 
On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope. 
There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating. 
Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge. 
For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election… 
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president. 
Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” 
And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today … 
“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election. 
Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another. 
Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 . 
If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then. 
And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month … 
As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. 
But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome . 
Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House. 
Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it.",FAKE
"Everyone getting hammered tonight for bad reasons 11-11-16 
BRITAIN is to get hammered as usual tonight but for bad reasons, not celebratory, end-of-the-week ones. 
Alcohol is selling briskly across the UK as adults prepare to get blackout drunk not because the weekend is here but because the weekend is here and Donald Trump is president and Leonard Cohen is dead. 
Nikki Hollis, from Peterborough, said: “Normally I’m skipping merrily into the land of drunkenness, a carefree sense that none of it matters, but tonight I’ll be lurching there. 
“I wouldn’t be surprised if I haven’t killed two bottles of wine by 10pm in my despair, as opposed to last week when I polished off two bottles before News at Ten out of sheer joie de vivre. ” 
She added: “And tomorrow’s hangover will be a black cloud of gloom clearly revealing that everything in the world is shit. While last week it just seemed like that.” 
Pub landlord Bill McKay said: “We’re expecting a fairly dark atmosphere in here tonight. We probably won’t do the quiz.” 
Share:",FAKE
"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke © Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
"Home › POLITICS | US NEWS › SECRET RECORDINGS FUELED FBI FEUD IN CLINTON PROBE SECRET RECORDINGS FUELED FBI FEUD IN CLINTON PROBE 0 SHARES [11/3/16] Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said. 
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said. 
The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies. 
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment. 
The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton. 
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said. 
These details on the probe are emerging amid the continuing furor surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure to Congress that new emails had emerged that could be relevant to a separate, previously closed FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement while she was secretary of state. 
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI when asked about Mr. Comey’s disclosure of the emails. 
Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation. 
At times, people on both sides of the dispute thought Mr. Capers agreed with them. Defenders of Mr. Capers said he was straightforward and always told people he thought the case wasn’t strong. Post navigation Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 Warning : array_key_exists() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/content/p3pnexwpnas07_data02/05/3222705/html/wp-content/plugins/widget-options/core/functions.widget.display.php on line 182 RESOURCES",FAKE
"Next Prev Swipe left/right A perfect mashup of “Stranger Things” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” Will Byers needs cheering up when he gets back from the Upside Down, in this wonderful animated mashup of Stranger Things and the classic festive special A Charlie Brown Christmas .",FAKE
"(CNN) The Republican establishment is making the most of the chance it had long sought to finally say this to Donald Trump: You crossed the line.

Ever since announcing his presidential run last month, the brash, unfiltered billionaire businessman has created headaches for the party. Particularly, his comments equating some Mexican immigrants to rapists and criminals left GOP leaders struggling to appease those Trump had offended without alienating conservative voters attracted to his views on combating illegal immigration.

But on Saturday, Trump seemed to hand party bosses and the pack of 2016 Republican presidential candidates a golden chance to take him down at almost no political cost -- while making themselves look magnanimous. The spark for the latest political firestorm came when the New York real estate billionaire questioned on Saturday whether Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran who languished in a prisoner of war camp for more than five years, was a genuine ""war hero because he was captured.""

""I like people that weren't captured, OK?"" Trump said, drawing gasps and ""boos"" from a conservative crowd in Iowa.

What transpired within minutes of those inflammatory comments was telling. The GOP pile-on was swift and outspoken. McCain might be a controversial figure with plenty of enemies in Washington but he's universally regarded as a rare example of pure heroism.

The Republican National Committee, which stays neutral in the GOP primary and rarely weighs in on political debates, made the unusual move of publicly condemning Trump's remarks.

'No place in our party'

""There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably,"" RNC spokesman Sean Spicer said on Twitter.

While the GOP was shy in responding to Trump's tirade against Mexico, it became clear on Monday that the party's hierachy was not going to be bitten by the Donald again.

""Right now what you are seeing is the party taking a dramatic shift this weekend -- taking Donald Trump head on,"" Mitt Romney's former senior political advisor and CNN contributor Kevin Madden told Wolf Blitzer. ""This is their chance to really draw some stark contrasts about the direction of the party. This is an opportunity for a lot of these candidates.""

One after another, Trump's fellow GOP presidential candidates were quick to go after the former host of the reality TV show, ""The Apprentice.""

""Enough with the slanderous attacks,"" former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tweeted. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain's, said Trump had ""crossed a line today that will offend most every one that I know,"" and predicted that American voters would only have this message to Trump: ""You're fired.""

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that Trump's shot against a man who refused to take early release from the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison because his comrades could not come too disqualifed the billionaire as a potential commander in chief.

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, an Air Force veteran -- who is languishing in the polls and needs every headline he can get -- upped the ante -- calling on Trump to ""immediately withdraw"" from the 2016 race altogether.

Trump, by alienating sectors of the GOP electorate, is already breaking all the normal political rules, so it's not surprising he didn't choose to return to the high ground. True to form, he decided to intensify the row rather than walk away, or simply apologize, penning an opinion piece in USA Today, that was scathing of the media, the ""establishment"" and McCain.

""The reality is that John McCain the politician has made America less safe, sent our brave soldiers into wrong-headed foreign adventures, covered up for President Obama with the VA scandal and has spent most of his time in the Senate pushing amnesty. He would rather protect the Iraqi border than Arizona's,"" Trump wrote.

One Republican candidate chose not to join the torrent of criticism of Trump. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was effusive in praise of McCain, who once called him a ""wacko bird"" but trod carefully on Trump, possibly hoping to appeal to the billionaire's supporters should he eventually exit the race.

""I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else,"" he said. ""I'm not going to do it.""

Hillary Clinton, enjoying a rare moment out of the political spotlight, also took a chance to have a shot at the ""hate (Trump) is spewing"" towards Mexicans and stood up for her old Senate buddy McCain.

Even the Obama White House, no friend of McCain, pounced on the opportunity to fan the flames of a controversy that Democrats hope will damage the Republican political brand. Spokesman Josh Earnest praised McCain's ""remarkable"" service.

The GOP's swift and nearly unanimous criticism of Trump's remarks about McCain was particularly striking in light of how the party dealt with an earlier political row set off by his highly controversial comments -- even if it marked an easy political choice.

In his presidential announcement speech last month, Trump said that some people entering the United States from Mexico were ""rapists,"" ""criminals"" and ""drug dealers."" The comments flew in the face of the GOP's desperate need to improve its standing with the increasingly influential demographic of Hispanic voters which are vital in general election swing states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado.

The episode suggests that though candidates like Bush and Rubio know very well the perils of estrangement from the community, they are not yet at ease with the base of their own party, which remains vociferously opposed to any immigration reform that would bring millions of illegal immigrants -- eventually -- into the U.S. fold.

More immediately, there is increasing speculation on whether Trump's broadside against McCain would turn out to be the moment when the billionaire's political bubble bursts -- in a way that would offer some relief to the GOP leadership.

A new ABC/Washington Post National poll on Monday had Trump leading the Republican field on 24% but his number dropped into the single digits in samples taken on Sunday following his McCain comments, albeit in a small sample size.

Madden predicted that Trump's bombast would indeed sooner or later begin to take a toll on his poll numbers.

""It's the beginning of the end -- part of the process. This information is going to start to get to voters,"" he said. ""They are going to see a revelation in his character right now as well as his temperament that is going to lead them to look at other candidates.""

While it could be the case that Trump's remarks could narrow what many analysts already think is a virtually non-existent path towards the GOP nomination, that doesn't necessarily equate to an early exit for the reality show star.

For now, the McCain clash seems to leave Trump where he most likes to be -- in the middle of a raging storm of publicity generated by himself about himself, while taking shots at the media and the Republican political establishment. It's the kind of behavior that gave his presidential run a fast start among a certain sector of the Republican electorate in the first place.",REAL
"Report Copyright Violation World's Oldest Person Had Smoked For 76 Years actually, i think i remember a few of these people over the years who had hit significant milestones had had at least some 'bad' habits, such as smoking or drinking (but probably not to excess). Guess it depends on the person.World's oldest person turns 115Aug. 22, 2006. 05:30 AMASSOCIATED PRESSISABELA, Puerto Rico — The world's oldest person celebrated his 115th birthday Monday, offering advice on healthy living at a party where he was serenaded by a well-known Puerto Rican singer.Emiliano Mercado del Toro, who was a boy when the United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, attributed his long life to a healthy diet and avoiding alcohol.""I never damaged my body with liquor,"" said Mercado, who quit a 76-year smoking habit when he was 90.Mercado was declared the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of Records last year.""I never thought I would last so long,"" he said.An ambulance carried him to an outdoor plaza where family, friends and the mayor gathered for the party. His favourite performer, Iris Chacon, crooned a birthday tune set to mariachi music.""I feel happy,"" said the wheelchair-bound Mercado, who has difficulty hearing and has been blind for four years. He lives with a niece in the northwestern coastal town of Isabela.Mercado was recruited into the U.S. army in 1918, during the last months of the First World War. He was still in training when the war ended in November of that year.As a young man, Mercado said he worked for 50 cents US a day driving animals loaded with sugar cane to processing centres.The mayor of Isabela, Charlie Delgado, said a residence for the elderly would be named for Mercado in honour of a man who ""ate healthy, had no major vices and who has put this island on the world stage.""Guinness had recognized another Puerto Rican as being the world's oldest person. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias Jordan died May 29, 2004, after a bout with pneumonia. She was 114.Get great home delivery subscription deals here! Anonymous Coward ( OP )",FAKE
"November 5, 2016 - Fort Russ Exclusive -  Interview and translation by Jafe Arnold (J. Arnoldski) -  



Eduard Popov, born in 1973 in Konstantinovka, Donetsk region, is a Rostov State University graduate with a PhD in history and philosophy. In 2008, he founded the Center for Ukrainian Studies of the Southern Federal University of Russia in Rostov-on-Don. From 2009-2013, he was the founding head of the Black Sea-Caspian Center of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, an analytical institute of the Presidential Administration of Russia. In June 2014, Popov headed the establishment of the Representative Office of the Donetsk People's Republic in Rostov-on-Don. He has actively participated in humanitarian aid efforts in Donbass and has been a guest contributor to various Donbass media, such as the Lugansk-based  Cossack Media Group.  Popov has actively contributed to Fort Russ since June, 2016. 
*** 
Fort Russ Special Editor Jafe Arnold: Dr. Popov, for nearly half a year already, you have regularly submitted your commentary on global events to Fort Russ. You’ve covered a number of topics ranging from European politics and the war in Donbass to the possibility of a Third World War breaking out over Syria and the future of Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalism. Before we begin discussing a number of related questions, what would you like to say to your readers at Fort Russ?  
Dr. Eduard Popov:    I consider the rare and somewhat unexpected honor to address you, dear readers of the wonderful analytical site Fort Russ, to be some kind of reward for my future contributions. I see this not as a right, but as a sacred duty of the author before his readers. 

We live in different countries, speak different languages, and share different (ranging from more or less similar to diametrically opposite) worldviews and political opinions. Nevertheless, to some extent, we are all like-minded. The common denominator for all of us is the strong belief that the world is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to only one correct doctrine.  
The history of mankind has seen and will probably still see more than a few attempts at organizing an ideological and political monopoly. The ideology of the American New World Order that claims universality and all-inclusiveness is nothing original and not even clever. As a historian of political ideologies, revolutionary communism in its Trotskyite and Khrushchevite variants also immediately comes to mind, which also claimed for itself the role of ending world history.  
But the era of American domination over the world awaits its finale and is maybe more imminent than many of us expect. I see my own personal mission as an author at Fort Russ to help prepare this finale, which depends on the efforts of every one of us.  
Restoring the violated principle of national sovereignty instead of the idea of one nation’s global domination, restoring the ‘blooming complexity’ of the world’s cultures instead of an imposed and dull liberal “post-culture”, and affirming solid moral principles instead of immoral promiscuity - this is a sample program which is shared by the majority of humanity. Most of humanity is opposed to the dominant quasi-religion of American neoliberalism or, rather, the ideology of Pax Americana is opposed to the majority of humanity.  
The events in the former Ukraine and Donbass have become some of the reference points determining each of our’s moral position. People from different countries and with opposing political views, from ultra-right to ultra-left, have expressed support for the people of Donbass. And I am very grateful to Fort Russ for constantly striving to present the truth of these events. I’ve had the opportunity to personally observe the astonishing events in Donbass, and I can say that Donbass’ fate is still far from sealed. Together, we are contributing to a more just alternative not only for Donbass, but for all of humanity.  
    Eduard Popov (left), DPR representative in Rostov-on-Don, with Moscow DPR representatives 
Arnold: In this context, how do you assess the state of the ongoing global information war? Are resources like Fort Russ helping to turn the tide against the Atlanticist narrative or “Pax Americana”? Is bringing together such “like-minded people” the main goal of this information war?   
Popov: It’s difficult for me to assess the state of the whole front of the information war - I don’t possess complete information and don’t consider myself a specialist in this sphere. I’m simply a political analyst and historian specializing in some topics that are relevant in today’s world.  
Nevertheless, I have no doubt as to the benefit that “new media” brings to the resistance movement. Let me explain these terms. New media means independent publications that do not legally fall under the category of media, but fulfill the same function. This applies to different websites and groups on social media. The “resistance movement” (I don’t think the origin of the term needs to be explained) is a synonym for anti-globalism or, as has become fashionable to say now, the anti-mainstream.   
If De Gaulle’s movement fought against the Nazi occupation of France with weapons in hand, then today’s fighters of the resistance fight mainly with information against an occupant operating not so much with direct physical violence as with distanced coercion, i.e., informational, psychological, economic, and political force, etc.  
Can it be said that the fight against this new occupation is more difficult? As a historian by education and a philosopher (my doctoral dissertation was on the political philosophy of conservatism), I believe that the world has now arrived at the complete breaking point of one historical epoch and the beginning of another. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so wrong to compare the current era with the era of the collapse of the Roman Empire, first and foremost because ahead of us is most likely a dark ages comparable to the early Middle Ages, and a new Great Migration of peoples. Of course, not everything is the same, but I won’t focus on this now. I’ll just say that there are not too many reasons for historical optimism.  
Resources such as Fort Russ have taken on the extremely important mission of speaking the truth in an epoch of great lies. “Big” official publications in Europe are filled with lies. And this is not only my opinion. All the thinking, honest europeans with whom I’ve discussed the situation of the press in ‘united Europe’ also think so. Hence why, as my friends in European countries have noted, independent media has a growing circle of readership. In my opinion, this trend is a long-term one.  
As for what I believe is necessary to concentrate efforts on, the first step has already been done. The minimum social anti-mainstream has been formed in Europe. This has been done primarily thanks to the efforts of the independent press. But in my opinion, the task fulfilled at this first stage has goals primarily centered around negation, i.e., proving what is wrong and dangerous in globalism.  
The anti-mainstream wields an unusually rich diversity of worldviews and ideological shades ranging from Marxism to certain currents of fascism to even clerical monarchism. Why not use this methodological richness for forming a united, anti-globalist intellectual front? Then we can proceed to solve constructive tasks, such as discussing the foundations of a future, more just world order.  
In no case should the resistance movement identify as marginals - this is precisely how the “Ministry of Truth” tries to present it. If a number of new media take on the mission of creating platforms for intellectual discussions with others, then this will undoubtedly become one of the main tasks of the information war. Even the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, spoke of a newspaper as a center not only of publications, but as a center for party work. I don’t know if the creators of new media have read Lenin, but they are acting according to his methodological precepts.  

Arnold:  A t the present moment, o ne of the centers of attention of the information war and what you called the “resistance” is the threat of a Third World War being unleashed by the US. Russian experts have different opinions on how realistic such a turn is. Considering that you say there is little reason to be historically optimistic, what do you think?   
Popov: The topic of WW3 is really actively being discussed in Russian expert circles, yet all the while has the status of some kind of fantasy. But as I said earlier, we are now witnessing the breaking point of not only a historical period (what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the American Century century lasting since 1945), but a change in historical epochs.  
This can be compared with the collapse of the Roman Empire or the collapse of the Middle Ages and the onset of the Modern Age. The Russian philosophers of the emigration in the 1920’s foresaw this shift of epochs and called it the New Middle Ages. Perhaps this was also an anticipation of fascism, which lasted a comparatively brief historical period.  
In my opinion, this also anticipates the New Middle Ages, but with only one necessary correction: this will be a new early Middle Ages, not the High Middle Ages of great Romano-Germanic culture which the Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontyev considered to be the highest achievement of humanity, but the “dark ages” that preceded it - barbarism, the plague, the collapse of the great ancient cultures, and the mass migration of peoples. A very vivid impression of these centuries is offered by the German epics (the genesis of the historical basis of the Nibelungenlied dates back to the dark ages and the invasion of Attila the Hun) and Scandinavian mythology, especially the tale of the death of the gods.  
This change of epochs is primarily being prepared on mental grounds. I believe that the conditions are ripe for this: the Western world has finally turned into a post-Christian and partially anti-Christian entity. It’s difficult for me to say whether Europe has enough life left in it to oppose the new onslaught of the Caliphate - I have in mind Muslim migration to the European continent and the expansion of Salafist networks. The answer is more likely no than yes.  
America is also going through very difficult times, although its difficulties are of an entirely different nature. Wallerstein long ago said that the age of American domination is coming to an end and will end with a grandiose crash. This conclusion is in a certain measure shared by the ideologist of Pax Americana, Brzezinski, who called to negotiate, not to prevent, but to slow down the collapse of the American Empire. 
The Americans have a very high level of strategic thought. Both times that America entered a world war on the European continent, it achieved grand strategic successes with very little blood shed (compared to the European Allies and Axis). There are many works that, substantiated by references to historical sources, show that the US stood behind the scenes of WW2 and pushed European rivals to war. The US entered the war as the most powerful economy on the planet and came out with the status of a superpower, the successor to the British Empire. The US’ GDP increased 10 times in only a few years. 
We can also see outstanding, though not as tremendous achievements of American geopolitics in WW1. Europe was gushing blood, but the United States profited from and became stronger because of the war between European competitors, even the British. Now that the age of the USA is coming to an end, they are faced with the threat of having to drastically reduce their appetites, busy themselves with overhauling renovations at home, and turn from the lord of the world into a first among equals.  
I am almost sure that the US will not go down the path of isolationism for psychological (the inertia of imperial power is very strong) and economic reasons. This means they will continue down the path of foreign expansion. 
Russia and China are becoming all the more stronger and independent rivals of the US. Russia is increasing its military power, while China is increasing its economic power, even though it should be noted that China and the US are vitally needed by each other as economic partners at the present stage. Meanwhile, Europe does not wield geopolitical subjectivity and remains the US’ junior partner, but this is threatening its overall economic and productive capacity which is surpassing the US.  
I’ll suggest an opinion and perhaps re-invent the wheel: the “Arab Spring” was sponsored by the Americans in order to organize a new great migration of peoples to Europe. In the long and even medium term, the Islamic World is not an ally of the US, but in the short term such an alliance is possible. American strategists are using the mixing of peoples and languages to greatly weaken their European competitors.  
Other tools are being used against China and Russia, and this toolbox is quite large. The Americans have attempted to wage a cheap war against Russia by creating a powerful protest movement against President Putin. Perhaps we can already say that this venture failed. The Russian people and other peoples of the Russian Federation, unlike their Ukrainian neighbors, wield historical and state wisdom and are ready to endure hardships in the face of an external enemy. This makes war almost inevitable. Time is working against the US and for Russia. 
By 2020 or 2025, the program of rearming the Armed Forces of Russia should be completed, and the economy is not in the best condition, but can still cope with crises. Therefore, I’ll repeat, war is an inevitable way out of the impasse.  
Will this be a real Third World War? In my opinion, this is unlikely. In one of my articles , I’ve already employed the notion of a “flank war.” The Americans are largely fighting by proxies - Polish, Ukrainian, and Muslim-Salafist ones, etc. The almost inevitable (in my opinion) victory of Hillary Clinton will add psychological motives to this war. What is entailed in this scenario? Two things: (1) the Russians and Americans will fight without the use of strategic nuclear weapons and on fronts far away from US shores - otherwise, the cure for the American Empire, war, would be worse than the disease; (2) I am sure that the American hegemon will be defeated in this war. And this offers the opportunity to begin to liberate Europe, and for Russia this means the opportunity to finally throw off the burdensome shackles of American tutelage.  


To be continued… 

     Follow us on Facebook!                                                   
                                                   

       Follow us on Twitter! 
                               

             Donate! 
",FAKE
"The 2016 presidential election is shaping up as an unpopularity contest of unprecedented proportions.

Assuming, as now appears most likely, that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz becomes the Republican nominee, the general-election ballot is set to feature a choice between two candidates more negatively viewed than any major-party nominee in the history of polling.

Trump is, by far, the furthest underwater: The latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll puts his net favorability rating at minus-41. A breathtaking 65 percent of registered voters see him negatively, versus 24 percent with a positive view, making him the most unpopular major party presidential candidate ever recorded. Cruz is at minus-23, with 49 percent viewing him negatively, 26 percent in a positive light.

To underscore the challenge facing the GOP, neither candidate has been viewed more positively than negatively by voters since the start of the campaign.

Clinton, by contrast, has a healthier (and more volatile) history with voters. Polls showed her favorables slightly ahead of her negatives when she formally launched her campaign last April. But her trajectory is unnerving. The new WSJ-NBC numbers have Clinton minus-24 (with 56 percent viewing her unfavorably and 32 percent favorably), almost double the gap just one month earlier.

“This is unprecedented,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “It will be the first time in the history of polling that we’ll have both major party candidates disliked by a majority of the American people going into the election.”

Pause to let that sink in, to compare this dyspeptic situation with previous elections — and consider the implications for governing.

Some historical perspective: All three candidates are more unpopular than the losing presidential candidate at any point during the past five election cycles, according to Gallup data.

If the nominees are Trump and Clinton, said Republican pollster David Winston, “You’re probably looking somewhere in the neighborhood of three out of 10 Americans having a negative view of both. You could have a very frustrated electorate by the time we get to Election Day.”

It sounds oxymoronic, but voters could elect a president that a majority of them view unfavorably. Assuming Clinton has the advantage over Trump, said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, “she is going to be elected, if she wins, in minus territory, which is something we’ve never had before.”

Voters’ assessments of candidates between April and Election Day tend to stay stable; the notable exceptions were Bill Clinton in 1992, who moved from minus-11 to plus-7 in the WSJ-NBC poll, and Barack Obama in 2008, who rose from plus-7 to plus-21. Hillary Clinton, given the roller-coaster nature of her ratings, may have the capacity to rise again.

Still, the unpopularity of the leading candidates reflects both their unique characteristics as polarizing personalities and the broader political sorting of the American electorate. As voters assemble themselves into reliably and increasingly intense red and blue blocs, their assessments of the opposing side harden.

Which raises questions about the potentially grim aftermath.

“Electing either Clinton or Trump with these type of unfavorable numbers immediately means a weakened president without the power to persuade from the day she or he [is] sworn into office,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

History teaches that a new president’s approval rating rises between Election Day and the inauguration. Americans become more charitably disposed to their new leader once the campaign has concluded, if only briefly.

Given these bargain basement favorability numbers, will the 45th president enjoy that luxury? Does presidential popularity even matter in an era of congressional gridlock?

Some political scientists think not, citing a shift in the locus of presidential authority away from legislating. “Presidential power is no longer the power to persuade,” said Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg. “Popularity at one time was a major factor in a president’s ability to govern, but we are in the era of the institutional president, where presidents rely on their administrative powers and the powers of the office, and less on public opinion.”

If Clinton is elected, said Middlebury College political scientist Matthew Dickinson, “the fact that she may be one of the most unfavorably viewed presidents is not going to make a huge difference, because she’s likely going to be running into a House controlled by Republicans and the Senate’s going to be close either way. That’s what really eats into your ability to govern, rather than your favorability ratings.”

Perhaps. But the unfolding unpopularity contest cannot be a healthy sign for our democracy, nor a good omen for the presidency to come.

Read more from Ruth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Governors and legislatures across the country are considering increasing their state tax on gasoline, amid a combination of falling pump prices and depleted transportation-construction funds.

At least eight states have proposed increasing their gas tax, as Washington also looks for ways to find money for highway and transit projects.

Recently falling gas prices have made the situation more urgent. But state and federal coffers that pay for such projects have been moving deeper into the red for years as Americans drive less, vehicles are more fuel efficient and construction costs have increased.

Still, motorists appear resistant to a tax hike, despite gas prices at a roughly six-year low and state taxes on gasoline in some cases having not been increased in the past 20 years.

The situation also presents a dilemma for elected officials.

They are responsible for keeping roads and bridges safe and fulfilling pressing needs to build more transportation infrastructure but must make the politically unpopular request for higher taxes to help meet those demands.

In New Jersey, for example, a poll released this week by Farleigh Dickenson University’s Public Mind found respondents opposed increasing gas taxes by a more than two-to-one margin, 68-to-24 percent.

The pollsters said residents see the need for road repairs but want policymakers to look beyond “overtaxed wallets” to find the revenue.

“It’s a calculation not without risk,” New Jersey Assemblyman John Wisniewski said on Wednesday. “But we are flirting with disaster by not investing in infrastructure.”

Wisniewski, a Democrat, has a plan to increase the state gas tax by 25 cents a gallon with amendments to ensure the money goes toward its intended purpose, instead of becoming slush fund revenue.

He told FoxNews.com that his argument before constituents would in part focus on the state’s urgent need for more rail tunnels underneath the Hudson River, to get commuters to work in New York, and the bridges across the state that are in desperate need of repair, including a county-owned one closed last week by the state because it was “structurally deficient.”

Gov. Chris Christie -- a potential 2016 White House candidate and one of several Republican governors in at least eight states considering a tax increase -- mentioned neither the gas tax nor transportation-funding issues last week in his State of the State address.

In addition to New Jersey, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, South Dakota, Tennessee and Utah are considering increasing their state gas tax to bail out under-funded transportation budgets.

Louisiana transportation officials say they have a $12 billion backlog in road repairs, which has prompted lawmakers to consider several options to increase revenue, which includes replacing the gas tax with a sales tax on all fuels.

Republican governors in Iowa and Michigan have taken different approaches -- letting voters decide.

In Iowa, Gov. Terry Branstad says improving roads is a 2015 priority and is asking state lawmakers to help him craft a bipartisan solution. He has expressed openness to a plan in which each county holds a referendum to increase the sales tax on gas and diesel fuel by 1 percent.

“Without action, Iowa's roads and bridges face an uncertain future,” he said recently.

The existing 22-cents-a- gallon tax has remained unchanged since 1989.

In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder has agreed to spend an additional $1.3 billion a year for roads and other transportation program, if residents in a May 5 referendum vote to increase the sales tax from 6 to 7 percent, according to USA Today.

In Washington, D.C., the average price of gas was $2.50 a gallon when the new, Republican-controlled Congress convened earlier this month, which sparked talks about increasing the federal tax on gas and diesel fuel for the first time in more than 20 years.

But GOP leaders are tamping down expectations, leaving no clear solution to the funding problem.

""I don't know of any support for a gas tax increase in Congress,"" Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate GOP leader, recently said.

The federal tax on gas is 18.4 cents a gallon and 24.4 cents a gallon on diesel fuel. They were last increased in 1993.

Fuel taxes bring in about $34 billion a year to the federal Highway Trust Fund, but the government spends about $50 billion a year. The trust fund has been the main source of federal transportation aid to states for more than 60 years.

Congress has kept transportation programs teetering on the edge of insolvency since 2008 by repeatedly transferring just enough funds from the general treasury -- and making corresponding spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget -- to meet obligations for a few more months or, in one case, as long as two years.

But finding acceptable spending cuts to offset the transfers gets more difficult each time.

Even President Obama has rejected the notion of a gas-tax increase, while calling on Congress to pursue other bipartisan measures to fund infrastructure.

Obama mentioned infrastructure five times in his State of the Union address on Tuesday and renewed his call to instead fund projects with revenue from eliminating tax “loopholes” for U.S. companies with overseas holdings.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suspended his Republican presidential bid Wednesday afternoon, joining former HP executive Carly Fiorina in exiting the 2016 race after a disappointing finish in the New Hampshire primary.

Sources say Christie met with staff in person Wednesday in Morristown, N.J., and also held a conference call to announce his decision to his campaign team.

The announcement was widely expected, after the two-term governor returned home after his loss Tuesday night to weigh his options.

Christie had finished sixth in the primary contest, while Fiorina finished seventh.

In a statement on Facebook, Christie said, ""I ran for president to say that the government needs to once again work for the people, not the people work for the government. And while running for president I tried to reinforce what I have always believed - that speaking your mind matters, that experience matters, that competence matters and that it will always matter in leading our nation…. And so today, I leave the race without an ounce of regret.""

The decision to drop out immediately kicks off the race in the rest of the still-crowded GOP field to scoop up their support. And it marks the end of the 2016 road for two candidates who showed political promise earlier in the race – only to watch their support fade as the elections themselves neared.

Christie was banking on a solid performance in the New Hampshire contest, seen as more friendly territory for the Northeast governor who did poorly in Iowa. But even as he touted his executive experience, the other current and former governors in the race outflanked him Tuesday night.

While the tough-talking Christie received widespread attention for his aggressive criticism of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at Saturday’s debate, that spat seemed to hurt Rubio more than it helped Christie. Rubio finished fifth, but Christie ended up well behind the freshman senator, pulling just 7 percent in the state.

His exit from the race completes a drastic turnaround in the governor’s political fortunes. In 2012, he delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention, after having gained national political fame for taking on the state’s public employee unions and his no-nonsense approach to governing. His periodic confrontations with hecklers captured on film also made him somewhat a YouTube star.

But he was politically damaged by the scandal in his administration over subordinates blocking traffic on the George Washington Bridge, in a seeming act of political retribution against a local mayor. Christie has denied knowledge of the decision, but has struggled ever since to get out from under the cloud of controversy.

His persona as the “telling it like it is” candidate also seemed to take a backseat last year to Donald Trump, who if anything was more brash, more unscripted, more confrontational than Christie. In the crowded field, he struggled to break through.

For a time in late 2015, Christie looked like he could be in contention for second place in New Hampshire. He was devoting time and resources to the state, and gaining attention for his impassioned and personal remarks on drug addiction – in a state where heroin addiction and treatment is a major election issue.

But in the end, voters gravitated more toward Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who finished second Tuesday. Trump easily won the Republican contest, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz finished third.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Rubio finished fourth and fifth, respectively, followed by Christie.

Meanwhile, Fiorina, who was the only female GOP candidate in the 2016 running, called it quits Wednesday after failing to crack the top five in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night.

“While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them,” Fiorina said in a written statement.

She added, “I will continue to serve in order to restore citizen government to this great nation so that together we may fulfill our potential.”

Fiorina entered the tumultuous Republican primary in April. She promoted herself as an outsider with business experience and argued that as the lone woman in the GOP field she was best positioned to oppose likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After a standout performance in the first undercard debate, Fiorina rose to the mainstage and soared in the polls in the fall. But her momentum quickly stalled and by the end of the year she had dropped back down.

Fiorina's first major foray in to politics was in 2010, when she ran for Senate in California and lost to incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer by 10 points.

Throughout her presidential bid, Fiorina emphasized her meteoric rise in the business world. A Stanford University graduate, she started her career as a secretary, earned an MBA and worked her way up at AT&T to become a senior executive at the telecom giant.

But she was also dogged by questions about her record at Hewlett-Packard, where she was hired as CEO in 1999. She was fired six years later, after leading a major merger with Compaq and laying off 30,000 workers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"For The Small Price Of $2.3 Million, You Could Own This Beautiful, Self-Sufficient Island Posted on Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox. Thank you for subscribing. We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously x 
By Brianna Acuesta This island costs less than most celebrity homes. 
A Scottish island by the name of Tanera Mor is for sale, as its permanent residents recently moved out and put the island, along with its cafe, post office, schoolhouse, and 9 homes, on the market. 
The island boasts stunning views, traditional houses that have been recently restored, and self-sufficiency that is unmatched on other islands. 
The 760-acre isle is powered by wind turbines and generators and has a freshwater treatment plant. It’s part of a group of other islands called the Summer Isles and has an established tourism business that brings in a bit of revenue. 
This particular island is the biggest in the isles and is located just 1.5 miles away from the Scottish coast. 
The scenery itself is reason enough to buy this island, or any of the three lots that are being offered separately. It’s got 7 miles of cliffs, coves, and beaches to meander and relax on and you can walk across the whole island easily because it’s only 1.6 miles long. 
Over 164,000 native trees were recently planted to combat severe winds, giving the island a more natural feel. Despite the winds, the surrounding waters are said to be ideal for aquatic hobbies such as sailing, fishing, and diving; there’s even a historic pier to utilize for some of these activities. Also listed on the website for this property is that it’s common to look out and see porpoises, dolphins, basking sharks, and otters close by. 
Included in the sale are four neighboring small islands that are completely uninhabited but contain tidal pools and other treasures. Considering a nice apartment in a big city like Manhattan costs just as much and has considerably less space, this deal may seem like a steal. While you might be giving up that city vibe, you’d be replacing it with amazing views and a relaxing life. 
Would you consider buying this island? Please share, like, and comment on this article! 
Featured Image Credit: Tim Winterburn 
This article ( For The Small Price Of $2.3 Million, You Could Own This Beautiful, Self-Sufficient Island ) via NB is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com Tags:",FAKE
"Email 
While the recent police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott has led to increased scrutiny on police activities in North Carolina, police-community relations are not the only reason racial tensions are flaring. While encounters with police officers can radically differ depending on the race of those involved, access to economic resources tend to follow a similar pattern. Although racial gaps regarding wealth, incomes, and healthcare are nationwide issues, observing them from a statewide perspective can help understand why specific communities feel maltreated. 
A UNC Chapel Hill study found that the income and wealth disparities between African Americans and whites in North Carolina are far worse than the national average. It states that: 
…black households, at the median, claim only about 13 percent of the wealth and, stunningly, about 4 percent of the net worth of white households. The corresponding figures for the nation are bleak: 15 and 13 percent respectively. Median wealth for white households is roughly seven times that of black households…Nationally, black households have about half the home equity of whites. In North Carolina, it’s about a third. 
The study goes on to state that half of all black households in North Carolina have under $100 in savings. At the median, black heads of household aged between 50 and 65 own $17,000 in assets compared to white households’ median of $143,000, which seriously hampers older, black workers from retiring comfortably. This data paints a picture of a state that fails to allow black communities from advancing economically and obtaining some semblance of equality. 
The issue is further exasperated by lack of access to health insurance. A North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services study found that 13% of North Carolina whites have no health insurance as compared to 22% of blacks. 16% of whites were reported to be in “fair or poor” health as compared to 23.2% of blacks. The Kaiser Family Foundation research shows that the majority of non-elderly uninsured North Carolinians were minorities: 30% Hispanic and 14% black, while 10% were white. This is especially concerning considering minorities experience disease at a higher rate than American whites, and visit the doctor at much lower rates. The result: communities most in need of medical assistance are least likely to attain it. 
This imbalance is in part due to the state government’s failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, something which would have significantly reduced the coverage gap between those receiving Medicaid and those obtaining income-based subsidies. The North Carolina Justice Center finds that, had the expansion gone through, 500,000 low-income North Carolinians would have health insurance who currently don’t have it, and over 1,000 unnecessary deaths would have been prevented. 
While the protests in Charlotte appeared to be a backlash against apparent police brutality, underlying economic factors also come into play. A breaking point will eventually be reached by those living in undesirable economic situations which they view as consequential of a racist and unfair system. The case of North Carolina is a particularly negative one, but the principles outlined in this research are not unique to North Carolina. Americans cannot expect race relations to cool until access to income, wealth, and healthcare are equalized and structured in a fair, equitable manner.",FAKE
"Sacred Medicine Wheel of Four Brothers(image by open) DMCA ""The elders knew peace would not come on the Earth until the circle of humanity is complete; until all four colors sat in the circle and shared their teachings."" The sacred medicine wheel of the four directions is for all extents and purposes a mandala, a visual depiction of the universe, our Earth and our inner universe . It's symbolism is simple and primal, and through these qualities it is powerful and meaningful. Representing the intersection of duality and polarity , four is recognized as symbol for completion. In nature this symbolism is illustrated in the cycle of four seasons -- spring, summer, winter and fall -- derived from the flow of cycles between two solstices and two equinoxes of our orbit, as well as the elements of nature: air, fire, water and earth. Four is also reflected in the four aspects of the self: the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional. Mathematically, the symbolism of four it is represented in the four forms of arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) while philosophically, comprehensive human thinking encompasses four dimensions: the thesis (is it so?), antithesis (is it not so?), synthesis (are both so?) and nullesis (are neither so?) Correspondingly, this matrix of four is presented in the beginning of practically every creation story, from Genesis to the Popol Vuh (the Mayan creation story). Nearly all creation stories start with the polarities of Heaven and Earth, and male and female. In this respect, this matrix of four is the basis of most creation stories as well as being depicted in every cross-like symbol shared by so many religions (the Christian cross, the Hindu swastika, the Egyptian ankh etc.) The four Vedas (Sanskrit for ""knowledge"") are the foundational scriptures in Hindu theology, while the cross symbol adopted by Christianity, Judaism and Islam, its presence in the creation story, and its basis in the four worlds of the Kabbalah reflect its major significance to those teachings. Indeed, all peoples share traditions that include the symbolism of four directly (or subtlety) as part of their core belief systems -- as I explore in detail in the article, The Common Origin of Religions and Theology . And it is this universality of the cross symbol and the unanimous celebration of the matrix of four, symbolically and philosophically, in Hindu, Taoist, Native American, Egyptian, Celtic and Judeo-Christian theology and symbolism that most clearly illustrates its commonality to human spirituality and understanding of our world. - Advertisement - But perhaps no group has lived so completely in unity and reverence to the seasonal cycles of Earth Mother and the universal system, as the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, now known as North America. Most significantly, the Hopi believe we are living in the fourth world. Hopi tradition states the first world was Endless Space, the second was Dark Midnight, the third was the Age of Animals and the fourth is the World Complete. Four migrations were written upon four sacred tablets which man was supposed to undertake once in this fourth world -- to separate into smaller tribes, divided by color, and began to migrate in four different directions, settling in new lands. The Medicine Wheel Prophecy: The Polarity of Institutions vs. Individuals 
""At the beginning of this cycle of time, long ago, the Great Spirit made an appearance and gathered the peoples of this Earth together, and said to the human beings, ""I'm going to send you to four directions, and over time I'm going to change you to four colors, but I'm going to give you some teachings, and you will call these the Original Teachings; when you come back together with each other, you will share these so that you can live and have peace on Earth, and a great civilization will come about"" 
""And so He gave each of us a responsibility, and we call that the Guardianship. To the Indian people, the Red people, He gave the Guardianship of the Earth"" To the South, He gave the yellow race of people Guardianship of the Wind"" To the West, He gave the black race of people Guardianship of the Water"" To the North, He gave the white race of people Guardianship of the Fire"" Each of the four races went to their directions and learned their teachings"" [but] some of the brothers and sisters had forgotten the sacredness of all things, and all the human beings were going to suffer for this"" The elders knew peace would not come on the Earth until the circle of humanity is complete; until all the four colors sat in the circle and shared their teachings -- then peace would come on Earth."" 
~ Source : A Cherokee Legend by Lee Brown, Cherokee 
I have watched with dismay and horror over the last few years especially, and my lifetime in total, as the powers that be, every institution of each type -- religious, government, corporate and media -- have interjected and overwhelmed the discourse of the collective conversation, stifling the development of the discussion and thus the development of our thinking and being. This happens concerning practically every subject -- topics are reduced to a consideration of limited polarities. This reinforces polarity in the human mind, which is trained from birth to look for opposites: Good/Evil, Right/Wrong, Left/Right, Thesis/Antithesis. - Advertisement - 
The very inquiry into the origins of human thinking and being is posed through the duality of polarity, and yet it is most often considered a singular polarity. Why are we the way we are? Is it the result of nature, or nurture? The debate of nature versus nurture is posed in a single distinct polarization, yet the best question itself supersedes the mindset of the singular polarity. Traditionally, the question is viewed philosophically as a trinity of options -- the thesis (nature), antithesis (nurture) and synthesis (both) of one and the other. And yet, in its natural state, this mode of thinking is more comprehensively a matrix of four: thesis, antithesis, synthesis (both) or neither -- the mindset of infinite alternative potential. 
Such comprehensive thinking is uncommon today, as the institutions of the status quo have worked to maintain limited, polarizing collective narratives (particularly through the corporate media) so as to keep control of the way we think, and therefore, behave. But, when we understand how duality and polarity can be used against us, we soon come to see there are many holes in the institutional faรƒยงade. Sometimes it is their actions that expose them, but quite often it is what they say and how they say it -- or what they don't say -- that provides clarity into their real motivation: domination. Four Types of Institutional Lies 
There are four basic types of institutional/political lies, which directly correlate to the four basic forms of arithmetic. Like all effective lies, each type involves some nugget of truth. The first type of lie is the addition of information: Sometimes the addition of a small bit of (generally false) information can change the story entirely. The second type of lie is the subtraction of information: The removal of small key components can result in entirely different meaning. The third type of lie is the multiplication of information: Exaggerations of situations and related information are included in its presentation, to dilute or emphasize. The fourth type of lie is the division of information: The facts are interlaced with 'disconnects' which separate or underplay the significance of information. 
This approach is often used to cover institutional prejudices and bias; to maintain the appearance of objectivity among institutional leaders. The four main categories of human prejudice are racial, religious, institutional/national and cultural heritage/history. Often prejudice is simply based on the pigment of one's skin, or other inherited features, but sometimes it is much more nuanced and complicated than that, particularly where a history of conflict exists. And while human prejudice is typically based on these four distinctions, the specifics of each are near limitless.",FAKE
"NTEB Ads Privacy Policy SHAMEFUL: Weather Channel Using Children In New Video To Promote Climate Change Hoax The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016. by Geoffrey Grider November 3, 2016 There are lots of people who don’t agree with man-made climate change. Weather Channel founder John Coleman is one of those people. 
“Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” Job 38:3,4 (KJV) 
Listen to what he thinks of his former channel’s use of indoctrinating children to promote Climate Change propaganda: 
“Right or wrong, using children to promote a point of view borders on immoral. Even knowing that climate change is not happening, it is far beneath my values to use children to promote this truth,” Coleman told Climate Depot. “I know without a doubt that there is no significant threat to the future climate of Earth from the industrialized civilization we have created and the drastic climate changes predicted by the Al Gore clan and the UN’s IPCC are not occurring and are based on an invalid theory. But I will not stoop to the use children to promote my position.” Weather Channel using children to promote Climate Change hoax: 
The Weather Channel released a climate change video featuring young children attempting to convince their parents of the seriousness of the issue. The video, entitled ‘When Kids are Talking Climate – Maybe it’s Time to Listen!’ was released on November 1, 2016. 
Kids : ‘Dear Mom and Dad: ‘The science is clear’",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama had some blunt words for Sen. John McCain for questioning the honesty of Secretary of State John Kerry -- telling his former campaign rival to, in essence, back off.

""When I hear some, like Sen. McCain recently, suggest that our secretary of state, John Kerry, who served in the United States Senate, a Vietnam veteran, who's provided exemplary service to this nation, is somehow less trustworthy in the interpretation of what's in a political agreement than the Supreme Leader of Iran -- that's an indication of the degree to which partisanship has crossed all boundaries,"" Obama said Saturday evening at a press conference in Panama City, Panama.

The President's critique of the Arizona Republican, who is also a Vietnam War veteran, came after McCain suggested Kerry is purposely misinterpreting the framework of the nuclear deal in order to gain domestic support as negotiators work towards a final agreement.

""John Kerry is delusional,"" McCain said Thursday on the radio program ""The Hugh Hewitt Show."" ""I think you're going to find out that they had never agreed to the things that John Kerry claimed that they had.""

The sniping between the two stems out of the two competing interpretations of what's actually in the framework nuclear agreement struck in Switzerland between the United States, its allies and Iran.

The Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khamanei, has suggested that Iran will not agree to inspections of their military facilities and demanding that sanctions will need to be lifted on Day 1, the day the deal is signed. U.S. officials have indicated the deal agreed to says otherwise, that it includes intense inspections and calls for sanctions to be lifted gradually.

McCain's remarks seemed to touch a nerve with Obama, who went after the senator without being specifically asked about his comments suggesting that seemed McCain was almost backwards in giving the Supreme Leader of the Iran the benefit of the doubt over a U.S. secretary of state.

""When you start getting to the point where you are actively communicating that the United States government and our secretary of state is somehow spinning presentations in a negotiation with a foreign power, particularly one that you say is your enemy, that's a problem,"" the President said. ""It needs to stop.""

McCain wasted no time responding directly to the President on Saturday evening.

""These widely divergent explanations of the nuclear deal must be fully explained and reconciled if we are to give serious consideration to this agreement,"" he said in a statement.

McCain followed up more pointedly in a tweet, writing, ""So Pres Obama goes to #Panama, meets with Castro and attacks me - I'm sure Raúl is pleased.""

Kerry, appearing on ABC's ""This Week"" on Sunday morning, defended his sales job of the deal, saying he stands by ""every fact"" of the agreement that he has laid out.

This tees up what had already promised to be a testy week ahead between Obama and Congress.

On Monday, lawmakers will return from a two-week spring recess for its first session since the announcement of the framework agreement. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will start moving on a bill which would attempt to give Congress a vote to kill the deal.

The White House has repeatedly called for the legislation, spearheaded by Republican Sen. Bob Corker, to be changed so that it would not be binding. It has warned that it could undercut the administration's hand at the negotiating table with Iran -- a sentiment the president echoed from Panama on Saturday before returning to Washington.

""What I'm concerned about is making sure that we don't prejudge it, or those who are opposed to any deal whatsoever try to use a procedural argument essentially to screw up the possibility of a deal,"" Obama said. ""I don't understand why it is that everybody is working so hard to anticipate failure. ""

This is not the first battle between the 2008 rivals for the presidency. McCain has harshly criticized the Obama administration over its handling of several foreign policy issues, such as the American role in Iraq.",REAL
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter We are having a New Moon in Scorpio on October 30th in most places around the world, and during the early hours of October 31st in Australia and New Zealand. It will occur at 5:38pm Universal Time ( click here for your time zone). advertisement - learn more New Moons bring in a new wave of energy for the upcoming month. It is the beginning of the first half of the lunar cycle, which is when the Moon is waxing (gaining light), while the Full Moon is the transition into the second half, when the Moon is waning (losing light). Therefore, the energy of the New Moon serves as more of a guidepost for those first 10-14 days of the cycle. Scorpio: Powerful, Deep, Intense, and Passionate Scorpio is a primal and passionate sign about desires, fears, and intensity. As a ‘fixed sign’ ruled by Mars and Pluto, it holds a high concentration of power that can be used to control or to transform. It likes and seeks what is real and refrains from anything that is lacking substance. The deep merging of two individuals or parties, whether it be sexually, financially, or resourcefully, is Scorpio territory. This sign seeks loyalty, yet it must be earned after a period of being under scrutiny. It wants to know what is hidden beneath the surface to decide on how much trust is to be earned. Scorpio is about willing to look at and even embrace the deepest, darkest, and scariest aspects of others, oneself, and the world around us. It is the sign of death and rebirth, love and hate, as it is the sign of extremes. An example of all of this is how we have Halloween followed by ‘All Saints Day’, and then followed by ‘All Souls Day’ back to back during Scorpio season. The shadow side of Scorpio is that it can be manipulative and controlling in a very calculated way. While the scrutinizing of others is to gain trust, it can also be about getting some sort of advantage to have more control over a person or situation. Although Scorpio seeks hidden aspects of others, it can be very guarded about one’s own secrets. advertisement - learn more New Moon Conjunct Mercury and Trine Neptune Mercury is also in Scorpio moving away from a conjunction with the Sun that was exact 3 days before on October 27th. In the days leading up to this New Moon, many people could have experienced important communications, ideas, deep thoughts, or some sort of mental efforts towards joint resources/efforts, money, sexuality, and/or some sort of strategy. Whatever it is, think of it as something that has been ‘gathered’ or ‘set-up’ to be implemented or expanded on in this moon cycle and in the coming months. The New Moon (with Mercury separating) is also in a trine with Neptune, which could assist us with our imagination, creativity, intuition, dreams, visions, and spiritual connection. Due to the nodes also being involved, there may also be a connection with how our past can help our future. For some lovers, it can be a time of feeling like soulmates. This energy is strong until November 2nd. Venus Conjunct Saturn, Mars In Capricorn Square Uranus The day before the New Moon, Venus made a conjunction with Saturn, which initiated a new 14 month cycle between the two. Venus is about fun, love, relationships, beauty, and pleasure while Saturn is serious and more concerned with responsibilities, structure, discipline, and commitments. Therefore, many of us will experience some sort of merging of these themes both in either favourable or unfavourable ways. Occurring in Sagittarius, it can be related to our beliefs, visions, travel, education, publishing, or marketing. Mars, a ruler of Scorpio, has been in the ambitious sign of Capricorn since September 27th. This has been an excellent time to really make things happen in terms of reaching our goals, and it will last until November 8th/9th. During this New Moon, Mars is separating from a square with Uranus which was stronger in the 2 days prior. At worst, their could have been sudden change, separation, instability, and the need to take some sort of action as a result. For some people, it could have of been rebellion or wanting to break free from a controlling situation. In other cases it could of positively brought innovation towards our ambitions. These are just some examples of how it could be manifested, but whatever it is for each of us, it has created the landscape for some new beginnings. Mercury and Sun Sextile Pluto, Venus Trine Uranus During the first week of the Moon cycle, Mercury (followed by the Sun) will be in a harmonious aspect with Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto, being the modern ruler of Scorpio, indicates that this is an excellent time to expand on what was initiated during the previous week when Mercury was conjunct the Sun. Powerful thoughts, communication, or deep research to assist us in our careers, managing or earning resources/money, or implementing some sort of structure or strategy to help gain some of sort of success and fulfill a goal. Venus is trine Uranus and will be strongest on November 4th-5th. This can be a fun and exciting time, and luckily it will fall on the weekend. This is a great time to connect with people, attend social events, especially since Venus is in Sagittarius, it is a good time to explore and try new things that can bring you enjoyment. This can be a great time for lovers as well with potential breakthroughs. Things To Consider And Making Intentions For This New Moon Look at everything that has played out for you in the last week prior to this New Moon. The next 10 days following it is a significant time to make a great effort to expand on what has been initiated, and take steps to move beyond anything challenging that has occurred. Your intentions for this Lunar Month should be related to improving on and/or facilitating the positive qualities of Scorpio energy into your life. This includes (but not limited to) improving your ability to earn or manage money/resources, tapping into and harnessing your inner power and sexual energy better, facing your fears, trying to understand complex things, seeing beyond fakeness or deceit, and becoming more in touch with what is real. The best time to make your intentions for the Moon cycle is during the first 24 hours following the New Moon but it could even be done within the first 3 days. The closer to the New Moon, the better. The exact time will be at 5:38pm Universal Time, but you can click here to find out what it will be in your time zone. — Have you ever had a personal astrology reading? For a limited time, Carmen is offering a 33% discount on personalized readings/consultations based on your exact birth date, time, and location. Click here for more information. 
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"SHOCKER!!! Left Wing MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews has just endorsed Donald Trump for president In the meantime, Hillary Clinton has just ordered a fireworks display to celebrate her winning the election on Nov. 8th. But this could blow up in her face! Hillary Clinton may have lit the fuse for her victory celebration a little too soon — by planning an Election Night explosion of fireworks over the Hudson River in New York City. NY Post NYC Cops and firefighters were blown away by Clinton’s hubris in planning the fireworks display, which would eclipse the shower of blazing sparkles that preceded the balloon drop at July’s Democratic National Convention. Somebody asked “If she loses, will she take the displsy over to the East Side and sell it to Trump for half-price?”",FAKE
"Pressure Is On Trump, Sanders In Crucial Contests Tuesday

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton currently lead the delegate counts for the presidential nomination. But because of the difference in how both parties award their delegates, Clinton's is the more commanding lead.

Tuesday's Democratic contest in Michigan, the biggest prize of the day, is key for Bernie Sanders to show he can turn things around. His campaign has argued that Clinton has ballooned her lead because of black voters in the South.

Now, many of those Southern contests are over (though there is another Tuesday in Mississippi).

But the question remains: Can the Vermont independent senator appeal to Northern black voters? They make up roughly a quarter of Michigan's Democratic electorate. He believes his economic message can resonate with them and working-class whites hurt by trade. Polls, though, have shown the former secretary of state with double-digit leads going into Tuesday.

Sanders is facing a difficult problem: This past weekend, he won three of four contests, but, because his wins were in smaller caucuses, and Clinton won by a huge margin in the primary in Louisiana, Sanders only wound up winning three more pledged delegates than Clinton. (Pledged delegates are derived from the margins candidates win in voting in various state primaries and caucuses.)

Maintaining that kind of pace will not help Sanders catch Clinton, who is 195 delegates ahead. Sanders needs 53 percent of all remaining delegates to win a majority of pledged delegates. And with each passing contest, that hill becomes even steeper. With superdelegates, those unpledged party leaders and elected officials, factored in, Sanders needs a whopping 60 percent of all remaining delegates. That's a very difficult aircraft carrier to turn around, given the Democrats' proportional system of allocating delegates.

Yes, superdelegates can change their votes, and it's true they have never not gone with who won the pledged majority, but even in 2008, when Barack Obama defeated Clinton, and won more superdelegates, not all that many superdelegates peeled off from Clinton. What's more, Clinton has a far bigger lead with them now than she ever did in 2008. Clinton already has nearly two-thirds of all superdelegates publicly in her corner. (And, by the way, they were created in the 1980s for precisely this purpose — to give party leaders a lever to prevent the nomination of what they view as an unelectable candidate after Democrats were soundly defeated in 1984.)

All that said, the pledged-delegate margin remains the most important number to watch. Clinton would prefer to win the nomination outright based on voting — and not because party leaders put her over the top. There's lots of talk of the GOP civil war, but if there was an outcome in which one candidate won the delegates from actual voters and the other won the nomination because of party insiders, you can bet there would be an equally ugly Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer.

But unless Sanders starts winning soon and big, that's all theoretical and moot. The Democratic race, at this point, doesn't look close to heading toward anything like that.

For Republicans, though, Trump is ahead, his lead is less dominant because it's a four-person race — and the candidates keep splitting the vote.

On Tuesday, Michigan has the most delegates in play with 59, far less than on the Democratic side, in part because Republicans have far fewer delegates overall, but also because of the state's history of voting Democratic.

Trump has been leading the polls there by double digits, and he needs another big win. The other contests of the day, though — in Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii — hold far more delegates combined (91) than Michigan. There hasn't been any good polling in Mississippi, but Trump hopes to pull off a win there like he did in neighboring Louisiana over the weekend. If Louisiana is an indicator, though, Cruz could give Trump a run for his money.

If Cruz pulled that off, it would be yet another example that he could use to say he's the principal alternative to Trump — and not Marco Rubio. This past weekend, Cruz, who trails Trump by 84 delegates, made a strong case for that. He won the biggest share of the delegates out of a handful of contests with wins in Kansas and Maine — and he nearly picked off Trump in Louisiana and Kentucky.

Rubio finished third everywhere on Saturday, except in Maine, where he finished fourth. He made up for it some in Puerto Rico on Sunday, winning there by such a big margin that he took all of the territory's 23 delegates.

The GOP political establishment couldn't think of a worse possible choice than having to pick between Trump and Cruz, who might be the least liked person in Congress among his colleagues.

And then there's John Kasich. The Ohio governor is hoping to surprise the field in Michigan. He should do well there. He's a Midwesterner. But he's polling double digits behind Trump, and some polls have had Cruz either in second or a close third. If Kasich is far behind in Michigan or even finishes third behind Cruz, it's hard for him to make a case that he has a real chance at the nomination.

He'll likely stay in for the winner-take-all March 15 contest in his home state of Ohio, but what's his sell for staying in after that — aside from maybe trying to keep Trump below a majority heading into the convention by picking off votes and delegates where he can in more moderate places?

Because of the crowded field, unlike the two-person race on the Democratic side, Trump currently still needs 53 percent of all remaining delegates to win the nomination. But he has only won the majority of delegates in five of 20 states so far.

That's not to say anyone else on the GOP side has a better chance of winning a majority — Cruz needs 59 percent of all remaining delegates, Rubio 68 percent and Kasich 75 percent.

The candidates hope to start racking up more lopsided wins, as the contest rules change on March 15. That's when states can pick however they want to award delegates. Some states, like Florida, Ohio, Arizona and New Jersey, are winner take all; others are more hybrid. All of that is to say there could be some funky results, spikes and dips ahead that could sway the race in a potentially unknown direction.

But clearly, at this point, Trump is in the driver's seat. He has solid support with his hardened base that will get him a lot of delegates before June when the contests are eventually over. The question that still remains for him is: Will he grow his support?

Through 20 contests, he has averaged 35 percent of the vote. He's cracked 40 percent in five states so far and 50 percent in just one (New Hampshire). That's why he's been publicly calling for candidates, like Rubio, to get out of the race.

The theory of the establishment coalescing behind a single candidate to beat Trump might not hold true, but what might be true is Trump needs the field to shrink to get a majority before the convention.

How many states vote? Four: Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Mississippi. (All four vote on the GOP side, but just Michigan and Mississippi vote on the Democratic side.)

When do polls close? 8 p.m. ET (Mississippi), 9 p.m. ET (Michigan — most polls close at 8 p.m. ET, but some counties are in Central), 11 p.m. ET (Idaho), 1 a.m. ET (Hawaii).

How many delegates are at stake? 316 combined (338 if 22 Democratic superdelegates are included):

Remind me what happened on Super Tuesday? Trump won big, picking up victories in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Cruz won his home state of Texas and also Oklahoma and Alaska. Marco Rubio eked out his first victory — in the Minnesota caucuses. That was enough to guarantee that both senators would be in the race until at least March 15, when more states become winner-take-all, including Rubio's must-win home state of Florida.

For the Democrats, Clinton won Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Sanders won Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.

Did anything happen after Super Tuesday? Yes. On the Democratic side, Sanders won the caucuses in Maine, Kansas and Nebraska. Clinton won by a huge margin in the Louisiana primary.

On the GOP side, Cruz won the most delegates out of this past weekend with wins in Kansas and Maine on Saturday. Trump pulled off narrow victories in Louisiana and Kentucky. Rubio won the Republican primary in Puerto Rico on Sunday by more than 50 percent of the vote, giving him all 23 delegates (which, by the way, is as many delegates as in New Hampshire).

What is the current delegate count? On the GOP side, Trump has 384 delegates. In second place is Cruz with 300. Rubio has 151 and Kasich 37. Remember, the Republicans need 1,237 delegates to get the nomination.

On the Democratic side, Clinton leads with pledged delegates 672 to 477 for Sanders. With superdelegates factored in (458 for Clinton), her total balloons to 1,130 to Sanders' 499 (with just 22 superdelegates).",REAL
"Home / Badge Abuse / “Isolated Incident” Every Police Dept in America Failed to Meet Minimum Standard for Use of Force “Isolated Incident” Every Police Dept in America Failed to Meet Minimum Standard for Use of Force Jay Syrmopoulos June 19, 2015 1 Comment 
(TFTP) — In a blistering rebuke of the current state of policing in the United States, a report issued by Amnesty International USA stated that all 50 U.S. states failed to meet international standards on use of deadly force by law enforcement officers. 
The stunning report lays bare the fact that U.S. police are killing without any formal obligation to respect or preserve human life. 
In an interview with The Guardian , Amnesty USA executive director Steven Hawkins said the report’s findings revealed a “shocking lack of fundamental respect for the sanctity of human life.” 
“While law enforcement in the United States is given the authority to use lethal force, there is no equal obligation to respect and preserve human life. It’s shocking that while we give law enforcement this extraordinary power, so many states either have no regulation on their books or nothing that complies with international standards,” Hawkins said. 
With recent protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, over police killings, there has been an ever-growing spotlight being shined on the culture of policing. 
Amnesty analyzed each of the 50 U.S state’s statutes regarding use of lethal force. They then compared them against the United Nations accepted principles of only using lethal force “in order to protect life” in “unavoidable” instances after first attempting to utilize “less extreme means.” 
UN guidelines go on to state that officers should identify themselves and give a clear warning of the intent to use deadly force. 
The report found that none of the 50 states met these international standards for using lethal force, stating: 
“None of the laws establish the requirement that lethal force may only be used as a last resort with non-violent means and less harmful means to be tried first. The vast majority of laws do not require officers to give a warning of their intent to use firearms.” 
The U.S. constitutional standard is less stringent, as set by a 1985 Supreme Court case Tennesse v Garner. The court held that an officer may use deadly force to prevent a suspect from escaping if “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” 
Even so, 13 U.S. states failed to meet that constitutional standard, instead choosing to use extremely vague language in their statutes, which can be manipulated to allow for force use well beyond accepted standards. For example, North Dakota allows for deadly force against “an individual who has committed or attempted to commit a felony involving violence,” without ever defining what level of violence would warrant lethal force. 
Nine states have absolutely no statutes on the books regarding officer use of lethal force– Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming – as well as Washington D.C., meaning that inevitably police investigate themselves based on some arbitrary standard. 
The analysis found that only eight states had a requirement of a verbal warning before engaging in the use of deadly force. And in nine states, police can legally use lethal force during a time of rioting. In Pennsylvania, for example, a statute on use of force declares use of lethal force legitimate if “necessary to suppress a riot or mutiny after the rioters or mutineers have been ordered to disperse.” 
Amnesty’s report states that in following international standards, all fatal incidents should be mandatorily reported and impartially investigated. The U.S. does no such thing, as the FBI runs a completely voluntary database. 
According The Guardian: 
The report also suggests taking action at all levels of government, making recommendations to the president, Congress and the US justice department, along with state legislatures and individual law enforcement departments. Amnesty suggests that laws be brought into compliance with international standards at every level, and that the justice department oversee a national commission “to examine and produce recommendations on policing issues, including a nationwide review of police use of lethal force laws … as well as a thorough review and reform of oversight and accountability mechanisms”. 
Hawkins went on to say that he expects pushback from the police and their unions, but stated, “with so much attention on law enforcement and its use of lethal force within the US, in the next legislative session this report will produce some energy for change.” 
The push for police accountability is now reaching a fever pitch in the U.S., as the current policing paradigm is unsustainable. With so many great ideas for systemic reform on the table, and so many great minds pushing for accountability, it seems only a matter of time before the current “good ole boy” power structure comes crumbling down. 
Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu . Share Google + Isaid Dilligaf 
Defund these assholes and take their toys away…NOv is coming Police…YOU are about to be outnumbered and outgunned for the first time in your pussy lives, you are going to really earn your money….America is about to grind you up and spit your filthy ass out for all your abuses against us…Time to pay the piper cowards… Social",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on October 29, 2016 Morgan Chalfant — Washington Free Beacon Oct 28, 2016 
U.S. and Russian military jets reportedly had a close encounter in Syrian airspace several days ago. 
AFP, citing U.S. officials, reported Friday morning that a Russian fighter jet flew dangerously close to a U.S. jet in airspace over eastern Syria on Oct. 17, nearly two weeks prior. 
A Russian jet escorting a larger spy aircraft flew into the vicinity of the U.S. warplane, moving to “inside half a mile” from the American plane, according to Air Force Lieutenant General Jeff Harrigian. #BREAKING Russian, US jets had near miss over Syria: US officials 
— AFP news agency (@AFP) October 28, 2016 
“I would attribute it to not having the necessary situational awareness given all those platforms operating together,” Harrigian further stated, according to AFP. 
An unnamed defense official said that the Russian aircraft “was close enough you could feel the jet wash of the plane passing by.” 
The U.S. and Russia have set up a line of communication to avoid clashes in airspace over Syria. In this incident, the American pilot reportedly attempted to communicate with the Russian warplane but was unsuccessful. 
Harrigian also reported an increase in close encounters between American and Russian military jets in the region in the past six weeks. He said that Russian jets have intentionally flown close to U.S. warplanes about once every 10 days. 
Tensions between the United States and Russia have been exacerbated over the situation in Syria in recent weeks, following a failed ceasefire deal and suspension of communications between the two countries. 
Russian and Syrian jets have bombed civilians and U.S.-backed rebels in Aleppo, drawing ire from America. Moscow has threatened to shoot down coalition jets that target Bashar al-Assad’s forces with air strikes in Syria, after reports indicated that the Obama administration would consider targeting Syrian government forces with strikes.",FAKE
"The world is about to change drastically . Will you be ready for it? 
The Future Doesn’t Need Us… Or So We’ve Been Told. 
With the rise of technology and the real-time pressures of an online, global economy, humans will have to be very clever – and very careful – not to be left behind by the future. 
From the perspective of those in charge, human labor is losing its value, and people are becoming a liability. 
This documentary reveals the real motivation behind the secretive effort to reduce the population and bring resource use into strict, centralized control. 
Could it be that the biggest threat we face isn’t just automation and robots destroying jobs, but the larger sense that humans could become obsolete altogether?",FAKE
"Print This Post After 3 Years of Suffering 19 Year Old Girl Dies from Gardasil Vaccine Injuries Kate was very tall for her age and a very accomplished athlete before receiving the Gardasil vaccine. She died at the age of 19 after suffering for years. 
Health Impact News 
The film VAXXED continues to be shown in new cities across the U.S., with the film crew also traveling to these cities to sponsor Q&A sessions after the filming. Producer Del Bigtree states that the story of the CDC whistleblower and cover-up told in the film is “ Bigger than Watergate. ” 
The film crew also films parents of vaccine damaged or vaccine killed children who turn out to view the film and tell their own stories. Each city they go to reveals incredible stories of families who have suffered from vaccines, and wish they had known more about the risks before agreeing with doctors who seldom, if ever, discuss the side effects and risks. 
In the video below, a tearful mother tells the story of the biggest decision she ever made and will regret the rest of her life, when she allowed her teen-aged daughter Kate, a tall and accomplished student athlete at the time, to receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine. 
Her health began to decline, and the last 3 years of her life she suffered in terrible pain and had to be on a feeding tube. She tragically died at the age of 19. 
Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com. Young women whose lives were destroyed by Gardasil. More information about Gardasil Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here . Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? eBook – Available for immediate download. 
One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.” 
However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines. 
The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary. 
Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field. 
In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual. 
Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot. 
These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions. 
In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe. Read : Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? on your mobile device!",FAKE
"Britain looking forward to bonfire night because it can’t afford to put the heating on 05-11-16 
BRITAIN’S enthusiasm for firework displays is really about avoiding extortionate heating bills, it has been confirmed. 
Researchers discovered that, rather than being excited about synchronised explosions, most attendees are actually looking forward to getting the feeling back in their extremities without laying awake worrying about money. 
Zero-hours courier Sarah Smith, 33, said: “It’s not just the bonfire, there’s the body heat from the crowd too. What a treat.” 
Nurse Tom Logan, 27, added: “I couldn’t give a shit about fireworks. 
“I’d rather be at home watching Luther , but it’s so cold that I have to wear gloves and a hat inside. If getting warm means standing in the mud, in the dark, listening to people go ‘ooh’, that’s a small price to pay – and much better value than EDF.” 
Both said that they would be leaving before the finale, however, as it would inevitably be soundtracked by Katy Perry’s Firework , like every display since 2010. 
Share:",FAKE
"‘That’s the CRAP young people pay attention to.’ Team Hillary trashes millennials #PodestaEmails21 Posted at 1:24 pm   Sam J. 
Sorry millennials, Team Hillary doesn’t think much of you or your taste in pop culture. 
In fact in this particular email, “Michael” calls you trivial and the the things you like, “crap.” 
Because nothing inspires millennials like calling them young and dumb. How do we get dumb young people to support Hillary? We get morons like @MileyCyrus & @katyperry to knock on doors! https://t.co/RbJl04WZuG pic.twitter.com/ude7XFherP 
— Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) October 28, 2016 
Enter Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and a horde of other “pop culture” icons who appeal to the young and dumb. @derekahunter @benshapiro Combine that with BJs from Madonna and the youth outreach is complete! How did we lose to this? #rhetorical 
Oh yeah! Totally forgot about Madonna’s promise … oddly enough Hillary didn’t really climb all that much in the polls after that. @derekahunter @MileyCyrus @katyperry For a good laugh give both of them a civics test. 😂 
— Dale Mitchell (@thurzday60) October 28, 2016 
THAT would be hilarious.",FAKE
"To understand what ails Hillary Clinton, let’s rewind past Iowa and New Hampshire – two years back, in fact, to a speech in New Orleans before the National Auto Dealers Association and these words:

“The last time I actually drove a car myself was 1996. I remember it very well. Unfortunately, so does the Secret Service, which is why I haven't driven since then.”

That one passage underscores three of Clinton’s present-day woes: she’s lived in a cocoon for well over two decades; she’s not all that entertaining; there may be no limit to what she and her husband will do for a quick buck (that one appearance earned Hillary a $325,000 honorarium).

Speaking of Clinton’s motoring skills, there’s a fourth problem: rather than turn into the skid caused by alarming droves of young and women voters jilting her for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, she’s overcorrected – trying too hard to pawn herself off as a feverish progressive; leaning too hard on “Lean In” adherents to stay true to the sisterhood.

It’s one way to parse Thursday’s Democratic debate in Milwaukee: would Clinton continue her February fishtailing, or find a smarter way to pull out of the skid?

Here are three observations.

1. Did Hillary Alter Her Message? Yes – and it began with her opening statement.

Clinton noted voters’ anger toward the economy (isn’t it more like frustration?), singling out “young people” as those most furious, and sounded Bernie-lite in calling for “unaccountable money” to be taken out of the system and claiming that America’s economy is rigged “for those at the top” (but certainly not those industrious souls giving six-figure speeches).

Credit Clinton with waking up to 2016 reality. Which didn’t come easy – not until New Hampshire’s gobsmacking.

In 1992, Bill Clinton had the luxury of running in a pre-digital time when the Democratic hard left, beaten down after three presidential meltdowns, offered little in the way of resistance. In 2008, having voted for the Iraq war, Hillary was too late to wake up to liberal Sturm und Drang.

In 2016, Clinton understands the kooky old guy to the right of her on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee stage (physically, not philosophically) is on to something – and she wants in on his act.

And so it’s official: Hillary Feels the Bern . . . until Bernie’s out of the race.

2.  Is Bernie Serious About Winning This? We can quibble over the small stuff – like the batch of spending ideas doubling the national debt. Or how he’d win a single vote in Congress.

Not unlike Donald Trump, Sanders is an implausibly electable candidate who’s cornered the market on “you’re being ripped off” simplicity: “The American people are tired of establishment politics, tired of establishment economics. . .”

The problem: preaching the (Democratic) socialist gospel isn’t a blueprint for victory beyond the most lilywhite of Democratic electorates. Sanders needs to call out Clinton in more glaring terms. Otherwise, he’s gum on her shoe – a protest vote that won’t win many states and, as we’ve already seen post-New Hampshire, will get rolled in the contest that counts most: the delegate count.

Take the issue of illegal immigration as an example of how Sanders falls short. In trying to clarify his 2007 Senate vote against a Senate reform plan, he opted to get all prickly about children’s lives rather than prick holes in Clinton’s record – beginning with not being consistent on immigration.

It wasn’t the only opening he missed.

Sanders could have asked how Clinton could credibly bemoan the state of Black America, having watched her husband sign welfare reform and federal sentencing laws, or why she now espouses gay rights having opposed same-sex marriage in 2008.

Sanders’ trump card – and Hillary’s Achilles heel – is authenticity; he believes what he says; she says what she believes will win the moment.

If Sanders wants to prevail beyond a random few states, he has to drive home that argument. Waiting until the debate’s closing minutes to remind Democrats that she ran against Obama, not him, doesn’t cut it.

3.   On, Wisconsin . . . To Nevada and South Carolina. The drinking game only a fool would have accepted: imbibing whenever Clinton tossed a line to those voters she most immediately needs (well, that and Bernie saying “billionaires” or “Wall Street”).

For a Nevada that’s almost 28 percent Latino (50 percent above the national average) and votes on the Democratic side a week from Saturday: “[H]ard-working immigrant families, living in fear, who should be brought out of the shadows so they and their children can have a better future”.

For a South Carolina that’s almost 28 percent black (compared to 1% in New Hampshire) and holds its Democratic primary the following Saturday: “African-Americans who face discrimination in the job market, education, housing and the criminal justice system”.

Toss in a shout-out here or there to women (equal pay for equal work) and Hillary was the grizzliest of pander bears. Her jacket may have been acid-yellow; her intentions were transparently black and brown.

Milwaukee lays claim to several innovations – the first steel automobile frame and outboard gasoline engine (the latter courtesy of a local named Ole Evinrude), not to mention the ice-cream sundae.

The city’s also home to “sewer socialism” and the idea that the natural counter to the Industrial Revolution was to spruce up society with new sanitation systems, municipally-owned utilities, and better schools and parks.

Hillary Clinton’s challenge moving forward: convincing her party that Bernie’s socialism is a losing proposition for her party, even with the “Democratic” modifier.

And if that doesn’t work in Nevada and South Carolina?

This race will wind up in the sewer.

Bill Whalen is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he analyzes California and national politics. He also blogs daily on the 2016 election at www.adayattheracesblog.com. Follow him on Twitter @hooverwhalen.",REAL
"Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is adding a veteran New Hampshire political operative to his team as he continues mulling a possible 2016 presidential bid, the latest sign that he is seriously preparing to launch a campaign later this year.

Jim Merrill, who worked for former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and ran his 2008 and 2012 New Hampshire primary campaigns, joined Rubio’s fledgling campaign on Monday, aides to the senator said.

Merrill will be joining Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC to focus on Rubio’s New Hampshire and broader Northeast political operations.

""Marco has always been well received in New Hampshire, and should he run for president, he would be very competitive there,"" Terry Sullivan, who runs Reclaim America, said in a statement. ""Jim certainly knows how to win in New Hampshire and in the Northeast, and will be a great addition to our team at Reclaim America.”

News of Merrill’s hire was first reported by The New York Times.",REAL
"The Islamic State terror group (ISIS) Tuesday issued a claim of responsibility for Sunday's attack on a Texas cartoon contest featuring images of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

The claim was made in an audio message on the group's Al Bayan radio station, based in the Syria city of Raqqa, which ISIS has proclaimed to be the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate. It is the first time ISIS has taken credit for an attack on U.S. soil, though it was not immediately clear whether the group's claim was an opportunistic co-opting of a so-called ""lone wolf"" attack as its own.

The message described the shooting suspects as ""two soldiers of the caliphate"" and added ""We tell America that what is coming is more bitter and harder and you will see from the soldiers of the Caliphate what harms you.""

The message also said the contest, which was being put on by a group known for controversial rhetoric about Islam, ""was portraying negative images of the Prophet Muhammad.""

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, told Fox News Tuesday that the attack was terrorism and at the very least inspired by ISIS.

McCaul also said in the days leading up to the attack, a joint FBI and Homeland Security bulletin was circulated and security for the event had been ramped up as a result, in Garland understanding that it was a target.

An investigation following the attack revealed a striking connection between at least one of the gunmen and a Twitter account based overseas, suggesting that ISIS operatives had knowledge of the attack beforehand and that the same fighters encouraged the shooters, a counterterrorism source told Fox News.

One British-based jihadi in Syria who does not tweet on a regular basis sent out a message within an hour of the attack, praising both men.

Another established ISIS Twitter account suggested he had been in contact with one of the gunmen just prior to the attack, using messages such as he tried to reach him but just missed him. The source said the social media appeared to show encouragement and mentoring.

The contest had been expected to draw outrage from the Muslim community. According to mainstream Islamic tradition, any physical depiction of Muhammad — even a respectful one — is considered blasphemous, and drawings similar to those featured at the Texas event have sparked violence around the world.

Authorities say the suspects, identified as Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, drove up to the building where the contest was being held in the Dallas suburb of Garland and opened fire. An unarmed school district security guard was wounded before a Garland police officer returned fire and killed both men.

Soofi had a long standing hatred of police and had studied overseas in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to a Facebook account that has since been disabled.

He once owned a pizza and hot wings restaurant in Phoenix called Cleopatra, but sold it years ago as it was struggling, the New York Times reports.

Public records showed that Soofi and Simpson were living in the same apartment complex in Phoenix, but it was not clear if they lived together, according to the newspaper.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement Monday that law enforcement authorities are investigating the men's motives and all circumstances surrounding the attack.

Court documents show that Simpson had first been noticed by the FBI in 2006 due to his ties to a a former U.S. Navy sailor who had been arrested in Phoenix and was ultimately convicted of terrorism-related charges. In 2010, Simpson was arrested one day before he was scheduled to fly to South Africa to undertake what he claimed were religious studies at a madrassa. Recordings played at Simpson's trial indicated that he was using his studies as an excuse to travel to Somalia to link up with militant fighters there.

Despite the more than 1,500 hours of recorded conversations, including Simpson's discussions about fighting nonbelievers for Allah, whom he referred to as ""kuffars"" the government prosecuted him on only one minor charge — lying to a federal agent. He faced three years of probation and $600 in fines and court fees.

There have been numerous attacks in Western countries believed related in some way to the group, which holds roughly a third of Iraq and Syria.

In October, Canada was hit by two terror attacks by so-called ""lone wolves"" believed to have been inspired by the Islamic State group. In Ottawa, a gunman shot and killed a soldier at Canada's National War Memorial and then stormed Parliament before being gunned down. Two days earlier, a man ran over two soldiers in a parking lot in Quebec, killing one and injuring the other before being shot to death by police.

Fox News Catherine Herridge and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"  Daisy Luther 
According to a report in the New Yorker, James Comey , Big Kahuna of the FBI, went full-on cowboy in releasing details of the new Clinton email inquiry. Apparently, the Department of Justice advised him not to release the information just days before the presidential election. 
Gosh. I wonder if the same advice would have been given if it was Donald Trump who was being investigated by the FBI. 
Comey explained his decision in a letter to FBI employees : 
“We don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed. I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record.” 
The DoJ – and by DoJ I mean Attorney General Loretta Lynch , who famously had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton to talk about her non-existent grandchildren – is implying that Comey is not playing fair and that the move is inconsistent with the rules which have been designed to make it seem like they are not interfering in an election. 
Here’s Comey’s letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: 
Really? 
The DoJ thinks that the public shouldn’t know that the person they may be voting for is being investigated by the FBI? 
That’s the most absurd thing I have heard for quite some time, and considering this election, that’s really saying something. 
This is from the New Yorker report, emphasis mine. 
On Friday, James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting independently of Attorney General Loretta Lynch , sent a letter to Congress saying that the F.B.I. had discovered e-mails that were potentially relevant to the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server. Coming less than two weeks before the Presidential election, Comey’s decision to make public new evidence that may raise additional legal questions about Clinton was contrary to the views of the Attorney General, according to a well-informed Administration official. Lynch expressed her preference that Comey follow the department’s longstanding practice of not commenting on ongoing investigations, and not taking any action that could influence the outcome of an election, but he said that he felt compelled to do otherwise . 
Comey’s decision is a striking break with the policies of the Department of Justice, according to current and former federal legal officials. Comey, who is a Republican appointee of President Obama, has a reputation for integrity and independence, but his latest action is stirring an extraordinary level of concern among legal authorities, who see it as potentially affecting the outcome of the Presidential and congressional elections. ( source ) Is this investigation the iceberg to HRC’s Titanic campaign? 
Hillary Clinton has said she finds the development “unprecedented and deeply troubling.” (source ) 
Oh, I’ll bet she does. 
I’ll bet if Trump had been the target of the investigation she would have been up on the stage, gripping the podium to stay upright , saying how wonderful it was that Comey decided to break the news so that voters could be aware that they might be voting for someone who was suspected of having broken federal laws. I’ll bet she’d be saying that the public has a right to know if a candidate was under investigation. I’ll bet she’d take the high road and say that those elected to the office of President of the United States have to be above and beyond reproach. 
Of course, when it’s her, things are a little different, aren’t they? 
We do have a right to know. We absolutely have a right to know that a person who could be elected to know all of the secrets was careless when she only knew some of the secrets. It seems like a no-brainer that the public should know that a candidate is being investigated for a second time for being criminally negligent with information entrusted to her. 
And the fact that we know has severely damaged Clinton’s campaign. Although previous polls were incredibly skewed to the point of being outright fake , it looks like the mainstream is now trying to save face with a new batch of polls. A poll from ABC news and the Washington Post , both hotbeds of liberal voters, has shown that her lead has dropped to within a single point over Donald Trump due to the Clinton email scandal. 
“About a third of likely voters say they’re less likely to support Clinton given FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure Friday that the bureau is investigating more emails related to its probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. “ 
Finally, some people are actually paying attention to the character of Hillary Clinton. 
But it may not be enough. There was one finding that was astonishing to me, even though it probably shouldn’t be: 
“Given other considerations, 63 percent say it makes no difference.” 
Meanwhile, on social media, the FBI emails are somehow not a trending topic. It certainly appears that Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Buzzfeed are blacking out the topic. My biggest question is this: Why now? 
Why did James Comey, who has probably committed career suicide, along with a potential actual “suicide” via a shot to the back of his own head like others who have run afoul of the Clintons, feel the need to break the news, particularly after giving her a pass during the last investigation? 
Opponents will jump on the fact that he’s a Republican and will say that he did it for political reasons. 
They won’t admit that perhaps he felt guilty for being complicit in letting her off the hook in the first investigation into the Clinton email negligence. 
They will never, ever admit that maybe his integrity and belief in the office he holds made it impossible for him to keep quiet until after the election and that, perhaps, when he was given a chance to right a previous wrong, he took it. Clinton isn’t taking it gracefully. 
Clinton’s complaints, which have appeared in the press around the world, make her look even worse than she did before. 
This is from The Telegraph , a UK publication: 
Hillary Clinton was furiously fighting to keep her Presidential bid on track on Saturday night as her lead in the polls narrowed, after the FBI’s bombshell announcement that it had reopened its investigation into her emails. 
James Comey announced on Friday afternoon that fresh evidence had emerged for his investigation into whether Mrs Clinton was criminally negligent in her handling of classified material. 
On Saturday, the latest poll of polls by tracker site RealClearPolitics put Clinton 3.9 percentage points ahead of the Republican nationwide, down from 7.1 points just 10 days previously. 
But wait – it gets better: 
The Clinton campaign has responded with what amounts to a declaration of open warfare against Mr Comey, alleging that his actions are backed by a political motive. And Mrs Clinton herself called the decision “unprecedented” and “deeply troubling”. 
“It’s pretty strange to put something like that out with such little information right before an election,” she complained, addressing cheering supporters at a rally in the must-win state of Florida. 
Democrats questioned the timing of the agency’s decision, which comes as polls showed Mrs Clinton’s lead falling just 10 days before the presidential election. 
“This is like an 18-wheeler smacking into us, and it just becomes a huge distraction at the worst possible time,” said Donna Brazile, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. 
“The campaign is trying to cut through the noise as best it can. 
“We don’t want it to knock us off our game. But on the second-to-last weekend of the race, we find ourselves having to tell voters, ‘Keep your focus, keep your eyes on the prize.’” 
Hillary’s campaign manager sounds pretty desperate to me. As for the complaints from HRC, they just make her sound like the out-of-touch, money-grabbing, power-hungry, deceitful",FAKE
"Share on Facebook 
MoveOn.org is a George Soros NGO…and George Soros NGOs have nothing to do with charity or justice, and everything to do with political leverage, and in extreme cases government insurrection. 
We have seen Soros begin destructive movements to remove those he deems unsuitable to govern in a variety of countries, most recently in Ukraine, with the Soros sponsored Maidan coup. 
Now it looks like Soros may be setting his sights on sabotaging the forthcoming Trump presidency. 
We do know, thanks to Wikileaks, that George Soros was a huge supporter of Hillary Clinton, as Hillary Clinton was always looking out of George Soros’ best interests. 
We are certain Trump’s victory is a bitter pill for globalist Soros to swallow. Between Putin and Trump, Soros may finally be starting to feel his power on the world stage falter. 
We will see if MoveOn.org’s call to protest has legs, or if it will gradually fizzle and fade, in much the same way we can only hope Soros will eventually do. 
NBC’s Katy Tur said… 
“It’s surreal in NYC. People are walking around like zombies with thousand yard stares.” 
Zerohedge reports … 
Seemingly unwilling to accept the results of the democratic selection of the nation’s leader for the next four years, hundreds of grieving Hillary Clinton supporters – egged on by George Soros’ MoveOn.org – are laying siege to Trump Tower in New York City. Screaming “Fuck Donald Trump”, yelling “Not My President”, chanting “Pussy Grabs Back”, and burning the American flag, it appears these young millennials are just the kind of deplorables this country should be proud of… 
MoveOn.org released this press release on Wednesday, calling on people to take to the streets: 
Americans to Come Together in Hundreds Peaceful Gatherings of Solidarity, Resistance, and Resolve Following Election Results 
Hundreds of Americans, dozens of organizations to gather peacefully outside the White House and in cities and towns nationwide to take a continued stand against misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. 
Tonight, thousands of Americans will come together at hundreds of peaceful gatherings in cities and towns across the nation, including outside the White House, following the results of Tuesday’s presidential election. 
The gatherings – organized by MoveOn.org and allies – will affirm a continued rejection of Donald Trump’s bigotry, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny and demonstrate our resolve to fight together for the America we still believe is possible. 
Within two hours of the call-to-action, MoveOn members had created more than 200 gatherings nationwide, with the number continuing to grow on Wednesday afternoon. 
WHAT: Hundreds of peaceful gatherings of solidarity, resistance, and resolve nationwide 
WHEN / WHERE: Find local gatherings here . Major gatherings include in New York City’s Columbus Circle and outside the White House in Washington, DC . 
RSVP: Please email press@moveon.org to confirm attendance. 
“This is a disaster. We fought our hearts out to avert this reality. But now it’s here,” MoveOn.org staff wrote to members on Wednesday. “The new president-elect and many of his most prominent supporters have targeted, demeaned, and threatened millions of us—and millions of our friends, family, and loved ones. Both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands. We are entering an era of profound and unprecedented challenge, a time of danger for our communities and our country. In this moment, we have to take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends—especially those of us who are on the front lines facing hate, including Latinos, women, immigrants, refugees, Black people, Muslims, LGBT Americans, and so many others. And we need to make it clear that we will continue to stand together.”",FAKE
"Editor's note: The following column appeared in The Hill newspaper and on TheHill.com.

#BlackLivesMatter is fast becoming its own worst enemy.

It lacks an agenda, it is antagonizing the black community’s top white political allies, including Democrats running for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination, and it is not finding common ground with any of the Republican majority in Congress.

The catalyst for the movement was outrage over the deaths of young black men like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers who arguably used excessive, even deadly force. But where is the list of solutions to the injustices it so often decries?

The movement’s failure to get its collective act together carries real danger for the political clout of the African-American community in the 2016 elections and beyond.

With the movement potentially discouraging black American trust in Democrats, #BlackLivesMatter is increasing the odds of a sharp drop in black voter turnout in 2016. Already Democrats privately worry that without President Obama on the ballot, the black vote will decrease the turnout needed to keep the White House and win back the Senate.

That is more likely to happen if black voters get caught up in the anger that the BlackLives movement has directed at the political structure. The potential absence of black voters who have become discouraged — about a quarter of the nation’s Democrats — would be more devastating than any Republican plan to require voter identification, reduce the number of polling places in black neighborhoods or cut back on early voting.

When BlackLives activists denounce the Democratic National Committee for issuing a resolution in support of police reform, they are hurting themselves with party officials. When they say that all political parties try to “control or contain” black liberation, they are also damaging faith in the political system, especially among young people.

When they interrupt Democrats running for the presidential nomination, such as Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, they are alienating longtime political allies and their supporters. When they videotape Hillary Clinton after she generously agrees to meet with them privately — in an apparent attempt to embarrass her — they are distancing themselves from the likely Democratic nominee. And imagine how local and state officials will react now to any request for a meeting with the group.

Meanwhile, they are not finding common cause with Latinos, even as immigrants are being attacked by the Republican candidates for the presidential election. Have you seen BlackLives interrupting Donald Trump’s events? Where is the outreach to Republicans?

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is one the most outspoken leaders in either political party on the racial inequities of prison reform. “I see an America where criminal justice is applied equally and any law that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed,” he said in his announcement speech. If change is the goal, where is the alliance with the senator?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, has declared on the campaign trail that “the war on drugs has been a failure.” He told an audience last month “everyone makes mistakes” and that society needs to “reach out” and “embrace those people and say, ‘If you’re not a violent offender, if you’re not dealing drugs to our children, we need to get you treatment rather than prison.’ ”

Earlier this year, the Brennan Center for Law and Justice published a collection of essays highlighting the bipartisan consensus among national politicians that there is a need for sentencing reform, called Solutions: American Leaders speak out on Criminal Justice. Clinton, O’Malley, Paul, Christie and fellow presidential candidates Jim Webb, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio each penned essays for the Brennan Center on the need for reform.

And it’s not just those running for the Oval Office — leading congressional Republicans like Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tea Party favorite Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) have all endorsed proposals to relax the federal sentencing laws. Grassley has said he wants to move on a bill this year to do just that.

A bipartisan bill, the Safe, Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act authored by Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin and Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, has about three-dozen bipartisan co-sponsors in the House already. If #BlackLivesMatter protesters were chanting “Pass the SAFE Justice Act now!” they could find themselves in position to make significant change. Somehow they are blind to the opportunity.

It has been said that politicians see the light once they feel the heat. If only the energy and passion of #BlackLivesMatter protesters could be harnessed in something constructive rather than destructive.

Lobby Congress, hold voter registration drives, quiz candidates on their plan for sentencing reform, but don’t heckle the candidates and incite violence by calling for cop-killing. The movement could be critical to securing and mobilizing black support for criminal justice reform that actually would improve black lives.

I am reminded of something my father, who trained boxers, once told me.

He said even the best fighters know fear is like fire. It can cook your food and light your home. It can also burn your house down and kill you. The key to controlling fear or fire is turning it to a constructive purpose.

Now if only #BlackLivesMatter will harness its own fire into the urgent cause of criminal justice reform.

Juan Williams is a co-host of FNC's ""The Five,"" where he is one of seven rotating Fox personalities.

",REAL
"Comments of the Week: Here Comes Trouble Posted on Oct 26, 2016 torbakhopper / CC BY-ND 2.0 
As is to be expected, if not applauded, the closer we get to the Nov. 8 election, the more debates and divisions have appeared in discussions about the headlines of the moment. 
During the week that ranged from Oct. 16-23, those headlines included additional revelations from WikiLeaks’ trove of Pedesta emails regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as well as various writers’ takes on how to vote this time around, and news of the ongoing Dakota Access pipeline protest. 
As for the how-to-vote issue, Jonathan Mitchell posted a short and direct comment under this story about Clinton’s famous hawkishness when it comes to envisioning and enacting American foreign policy on the world stage: 

Reader Helen Hanna, like many others who took in Robert Reich’s piece titled “The Incalculable Damage of Doing Whatever It Takes to Win,” noticed and remarked upon Reich’s gloss-over of Democratic Party leaders’, and in particular Hillary and Bill Clinton’s, proclivity for doing damage in the interest of maintaining power: 

That said, it’s not as though commenters were about to give Donald Trump a pass, either. Take Ignatius J. Reilly’s rejoinder to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway’s “5-point plan to defeat Islam,” as Trump and his team conceived of it (and Juan Cole wrote of it): 

Touché. 
Another point of contention on the comment boards last week had to do with how to evaluate WikiLeaks’, and by extension Julian Assange’s, latest release of documents in the Pedesta emails. Though some commentators like Naomi Klein and Glenn Greenwald have spoken up about particular aspects of WikiLeaks’ current m.o., in the thread under Alexander Reed Kelly’s Truthdigger of the Week column on Assange , reader JJG noted how, like him or not, Assange and his organization are providing a public service that professionals working in the mainstream press (who are supposed to be skilled in curating and redacting sensitive material) are not generally delivering on these days: 

We’ll give Opa Westphal the last word this time, ending on an up note (in terms of the shout-out to other commenters) and a cautionary note at the same time. This one was posted under Chris Hedges’ latest column , “How Power Works”:",FAKE
"18 SHARE The Amish in America have committed their vote to Donald Trump guaranteeing him the Presidency. (AP Photo / Dennis System) 
COLUMBUS, OH (AP) — History was made today in Columbus, Ohio when more than 3 million Amish poured into the city to see the American Amish Brotherhood (AAB), an organization which acts as an informal governing body for the Amish community, endorse Donald Trump for president. That number represents a significant portion of the total Amish population, which the United States Census Bureau says numbers more than 20 million men and women nationwide all pledging their vote to Trump for President. With the full force of the Amish community behind him, Donald Trump is now mathematically guaranteed to win the presidency in November. 
The organization typically meets once a year and the meetings usually consist of about 300 Amish leaders who meet to discuss the challenges, such as urban sprawl, that face the community. This year, however, the organization wanted as many people in attendance as possible so they can effectively instruct all Amish men and women of legal voting age to cast their vote for the flamboyant Republican nominee. 
The Amish, who are direct descendants of the protestant reformation sect known as the Anabaptists, have typically stayed out of politics in the past. As a general rule, they don’t vote, serve in the military, or engage in any other displays of patriotism. This year, however, the AAB has said that it is imperative that they get involved in the democratic process. 
“Over the past eight years, the Democratic Party has launched a systematic assault on biblical virtues,” said AAB chairman Menno Simons. “We have seen more and more Christians being persecuted for their faith; we have seen the state defile the institution of marriage. Now, they want to put a woman in the nation’s highest leadership role in direct violation of 1 Timothy 2:12. We need to stop this assault and take a stand for biblical principles. Donald Trump has shown in both action and deed that he is committed to restoring this country to the Lord’s way.” 
According to statistician Nate Silver of the website fivethirtyeight.com, there are no possible scenarios in which Hillary Clinton can win with Donald Trump carrying the Amish vote. 
“The Amish have their highest numbers in perennial swing states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa,” Silver noted. “They also have strong numbers in reliably Democratic states like Michigan, Illinois, and New York, meaning that Hillary will lose those states as well. There is also a sizeable community in Florida which, while not as large as it is in the Midwest, is still large enough to turn Florida for Trump. Over the next two weeks, you can expect Hillary to enter into a state of freefall in all of my predictive models.” 
The Clinton campaign issued a written statement to the AAB asking them to reconsider their decision. 
“I don’t believe that Donald Trump is the person who best represents your interests,” Clinton wrote to the AAB. “As a career real estate developer, he represents a clear threat to your simple way of life. As former first lady of Arkansas, I understand the concerns of rural Americans more than any candidate in this election. I implore you to consider all of the facts before voting for my opponent.” 
Most pundits believe that Mrs. Clinton’s plea is too little too late. 
During a press conference in Manhattan, Trump thanked the AAB for their support and promised to put the Amish to work maintaining government buildings, which he said would save taxpayers millions because “the Amish do great work for a very low price.” 
Though Clinton has pledged to stay in the race until the very end, many of her campaign workers have already resigned. According to the Associated Press, it is expected that the Clinton campaign will lose 50% of its staff over the next two weeks. There is a general mood of hopelessness and despair in the Clinton camp, and many simply want to cut their losses. 
“It looked like she was going to win this election easily,” said Paul Horner, a campaign worker in Ohio, “But this is what happens when you wake a sleeping giant. Cleary, Mrs. Clinton took far too much for granted in this race, and we are all now paying the price. It’s really sad to see the campaign end this way.” 
If you are interested in learning more about the Amish community and the AAB, you can contact the Pennsylvania Amish Heritage Museum at (785) 273-0325. TAGS ",FAKE
"Hillary Rodham Clinton is running as the most liberal Democratic presidential front-runner in decades, with positions on issues from gay marriage to immigration that would, in past elections, have put her at her party’s precarious left edge.

The moves are part of a strategic conclusion by Clinton’s emerging campaign: that it can harness the same kind of young and diverse coalition as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, bolstered by even stronger appeal among women.

Her approach — outlined in interviews with aides and advisers — is a bet that social and demographic shifts mean that no left-leaning position Clinton takes now would be likely to hurt her in making her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year.

The strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign. It factors in that a majority of independent voters already support same-sex marriage and the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that Clinton endorsed this month.

The game plan also hinges on a conclusion by Clinton strategists that the broad appeal of issues such as paid family leave, a higher minimum wage and more affordable college will help outweigh any concerns about costs. And while the early liberal tilt focuses on domestic issues more likely to drive voters this cycle, Clinton will also have to win over liberal voters still skeptical of her hawkish reputation on foreign policy.

The campaign’s overall calculus relies on a mix of polling — including both internal and public surveys — internal focus groups and what advisers described as gut feelings about the national mood. It also reflects what Clinton backers say are her firmly held personal convictions and her pragmatism.

“Her approach to this really is not trying to take a ruler out and measure where she wants to be on some ideological scale,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said. “It’s to dive deeply into the problems facing the American people and American families. She’s a proud wonk, and she looks at policy from that perspective.”

[How Hillary Clinton is running against parts of her husband’s legacy]

Clinton’s full embrace of same-sex marriage in the first days of her campaign was followed by clear statements in favor of scrapping get-tough immigration and incarceration policies — many of which took root during her husband’s administration. She has also weighed in with liberal takes on climate change, abortion rights and disparities in income and opportunity between rich and poor.

All are issues that have been divisive in the past for both Democrats and Republicans. But none are now judged to be radioactive for Democrats, which gives Clinton more elbow room.

By taking such positions, aides and advisers hope Clinton will not only inoculate herself against a serious challenge from the left in the primaries, but that she also will be able to push on through the general election. Her campaign believes American public opinion has moved left not only since Bill Clinton won election in 1992 on a centrist platform, but also since Barack Obama won on a more liberal one.

Republicans — as part of a broader critique of her trustworthiness — accuse Clinton of flip-flopping on some positions and hiding on others, such as free trade, to cater to the liberal base.

“Clinton’s already moved her position leftward on numerous hot button issues to the base, including immigration, gay marriage, Wall Street and criminal justice reforms,” conservative America Rising PAC director Colin Reed wrote in a position paper Friday.

“Clinton’s moves reinforce all her worst attributes as a candidate and hurt her image among voters of all stripes,” Reed said. “Progressive voters know that she’s not truly one of them,” while swing voters “see a desperate politician staking out far-left positions that are outside of the mainstream of most Americans.”

Many political strategists also say Clinton will be hard-pressed to re-create Obama’s winning coalition and that the 30 percent to 31 percent non-white turnout that some of her outside backers are projecting may be out of reach. Exit polls show non-white turnout was 28 percent in 2012 and 26 percent in 2008. Clinton will have to expand Hispanic support, increase turnout among independent women and still hold on to a large share of black voters who were drawn to the first African American major-party nominee.

The bold stance on immigration is widely seen as one way to jump-start the expansion of Hispanic support Clinton will need, although advisers say she had already made up her mind about citizenship and there was no reason to put off an announcement. When outlining her position in Nevada, where 1 in 4 residents is Hispanic, she made a point of saying that no Republican would go as far — and alleged that the GOP wanted immigrants to have “second-class status.”

“People often talk about the electorate moving left,” said Clinton senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan. “I think it’s more that the electorate is just getting more practical. For Hillary Clinton, that matches her evidence-based approach. The arguments that persuade her are evidence-based and progressive.”

He cited the growing consensus that mass incarceration is expensive and unworkable, and that the country is never going to deport all of the more than 11 million people who are here illegally.

[Clinton campaign’s dilemma: What to do with Bill?]

Advisers do not dispute that Clinton has a finger to the wind of the national mood, but they insist the timing and substance of her positions are not driven by polling. The still-cautious candidate has declined to make clear her position on two key proposals that many liberals oppose: the Keystone XL pipeline and Obama’s free-trade deal.

Sullivan also noted that some of Clinton’s early proposals “cut against the grain” of political liberalism, such as her emphasis on improving the playing field for American small businesses.

Clinton will debut policy proposals to ease lending bottlenecks for small businesses on campaign trips to Iowa and New Hampshire this week. The impetus came largely from conversations Clinton had in the run-up to the campaign and a six-month policy review led by Sullivan that looked at how Clinton might address a variety of national concerns.

“The thing she is most interested in is not what position is most popular, it’s what do people worry about,” Sullivan said.

Clinton’s 2008 campaign was so focused on polling data and the consequences of saying the wrong thing that it sometimes appeared paralyzed. Some of that campaign’s infamous staff battles focused on the advice from senior adviser Mark Penn, a pollster, to avoid more liberal positions in the primary that year for fear they would hurt her in a general election contest.

This time is different, backers say. “The strategic advantage the Democrats have is that the distance between our base and the middle is shorter than for Republicans,” said Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a longtime Clinton confidant.

In other words, Clinton’s strategists say, she does not face the same whiplash as Republican candidates who seek to dial back hard-right positions on issues such as abortion or immigration adopted during a competitive primary.

Senior campaign officials acknowledged that trade is a divisive and fraught issue for Democrats and for her. Clinton’s past support for the Pacific free-trade pact makes her current silence awkward at best, but her advisers are gambling that the issue won’t leave an enduring rift within the party.

Clinton campaign leaders and outside loyalists also bridle at the perception that she is less of a progressive politician than, say, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). They point to Clinton’s early career as a crusading lawyer in Arkansas and lifelong professional commitments to improving women’s lives.

[The making of Hillary 5.0: Re-imagining the Clinton brand]

Warren has said she isn’t running but has declined so far to endorse Clinton. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is running a strongly populist challenge to Clinton, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley — who has suggested Clinton is too hesitant and poll-driven — is expected to enter the race this month.

“If Clinton and other candidates are not seen as standing with Warren on the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] trade deal and a number of other economic issues critical to working families, it could create an even greater sense of urgency” to get Warren into the race, said Gary Ritterstein, an adviser to the support group Ready for Warren.

The clearest shift in national attitudes, and Clinton’s own, has come on same-sex marriage. She moved from saying she considered marriage to be between a man and a woman when she was first lady to backing civil unions as an alternative to marriage in 2008 to full support of gay and lesbian marriage now.

Public opinion polling suggests she is on safe ground, despite ongoing legal fights in several states. The firmest opposition to gay marriage is centered in red states and among Republican voters unlikely to consider voting for Clinton.

Pew Research polling shows that in August 2008 — when Clinton endorsed Obama as the Democratic nominee — 52 percent of Americans opposed legal same-sex marriage and 39 percent supported it. The same poll now shows 54 percent support for such marriages while 39 percent are opposed.

Shifts on criminal justice issues are less dramatic, but there are bipartisan efforts now to repeal some of the harshest and least flexible laws on the books for two decades. Outrage and revulsion over police killings of black men over the past year made the issue more urgent for many young, African American and socially liberal voters.

Last month, Clinton gave an address calling for dramatic changes in policing and prosecution to lessen the rate of incarceration. The remarks echo calls among both Democrats and some Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“Two or three years ago,” said Clinton policy adviser Ann O’Leary, “that speech might have been seen as a very left-leaning speech.”",REAL
"Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:08 UTC © Peter Nicholls / Reuters Downing Street insists that the government will ""make a success"" of Brexit, despite a leaked audio recording of UK Prime Minister Theresa May predicting companies could abandon Britain if it leaves the EU. Speaking to a group of Goldman Sachs bankers on May 26 before the EU referendum, then-Home Secretary May said the economic arguments for remaining in the bloc were "" clear. "" In a leaked audio recording of the talk, published by the Guardian, May also claims membership in the EU makes Britain ""more safe."" ""Being part of a 500-million trading bloc is significant for us. I think, as I was saying to you a little earlier, that one of the issues is that a lot of people will invest here in the UK because it is the UK in Europe. ""If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence? So I think there are definite benefits for us in economic terms."" May went on to say Britain was more secure inside the EU. ""There are definitely things we can do as members of the European Union that I think keep us more safe,"" she said. A Downing Street spokesman did not comment directly on the recording, but insisted Brexit is in the UK's best interests. ""Britain made a clear choice to vote to leave the EU and this Government is determined to make a success of the fresh opportunities it presents,"" he said. ""David Davis made very clear in the House of Commons last week the importance the Government places on financial services across the UK in the negotiation to come, as has the Chancellor in recent weeks. ""We want a smooth and orderly exit from the European Union, which would be in the interests of both Britain and the EU."" Labour politicians accused May of deceiving the British public over the impact of leaving the EU's single market and called on her to be ""honest."" Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer tweeted: Andrew Gwynne, shadow minister without portfolio, said: ""As if we needed it, this recording is cast-iron evidence of how Theresa May and other senior Tories have been saying one thing in private about the economic impact of Brexit and another in the comfort of Tory conference halls. ""It's plain that she recognises what a disaster it would be for Britain to lose access to the single market, so why doesn't she be honest with the British people and say how she plans to retain it?"" Comment: When it comes to leaks in the UK, where the press is very tightly controlled, it's a sure bet that the govt wanted the public to hear this. The 'long goodbye' continues.",FAKE
"Ferguson, Missouri (CNN) A day of civil disobedience that saw several arrests ended Monday with rowdy protesters throwing rocks and bottles at police.

The St. Louis County police said frozen water bottles were thrown at officers, prompting them to order the crowd to disperse or face arrest.

""Safety, our top priority, is now compromised. This is no longer a peaceful protest. Participants are now unlawfully assembled,"" the department tweeted

(1/2) Safety, our top priority, is now compromised. This is no longer a peaceful protest. Participants are now unlawfully assembled.

Earlier, a top St. Louis County official declared a state of emergency, saying violence had marred demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death

""The recent acts of violence will not be tolerated in a community that has worked so tirelessly over the last year to rebuild and become stronger,"" St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger said in a statement.

The executive order put St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar in charge of police operations in Ferguson and the surrounding areas, Stenger said.

During the day Monday, roughly 200 demonstrators marched from Christ Church Cathedral to the Thomas F. Eagleton United States Courthouse in St. Louis. The protesters carried signs, chanted and prayed and demanded the Justice Department take action.

At the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, protesters hung a banner from two balloons. It read, ""Racism still lives here #fightback.""

One of those protesters, Johnetta Elzie, who has been a mainstay of the demonstrations and goes by Netta, tweeted minutes before her arrest, ""If I'm arrested today please know I'm not suicidal. I have plenty to live for. I did not resist, I'm just black.""

Later Monday, another group of protesters blocked part of Interstate 70 in Earth City, Missouri. Some of them held yellow signs that said, ""Ferguson is everywhere.""

Protesters held hands and formed a line across the highway. About 20 minutes later, troopers cleared the roadway, walking with protesters toward the shoulder and apparently arresting some of them in a nearby parking lot.

Monday's acts of civil disobedience came after a night of violence that left Ferguson on edge.

Peaceful marches in the St. Louis suburb planned by day on Sunday were shattered that same night when gunfire broke out, sending protesters and police scattering to safety.

The alleged gunman, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris of St. Louis, is hospitalized in critical condition and in police custody. The St. Louis County Police Department said officers shot the teenager after he unleashed a ""remarkable amount of gunfire"" at police -- a characterization the man's aunt contends is not true.

Prosecutors have charged Harris with four counts of first-degree assault on law enforcement, five counts of armed criminal action and one count of discharging a firearm at a motor vehicle, St. Louis County Police Department spokesman Sgt. Brian Schellman said.

Belmar said earlier that Harris used a stolen handgun to fire at officers.

Harris is being held on a $250,000 bond, Schellman said.

Harris' aunt, Karen Harris, said her nephew attended the protests because he was friends with Brown. Recounting what other family members who were with Tyrone Harris described, the aunt said Tyrone Harris wasn't carrying a gun and never fired at police.

He was ""running for his life"" just like everyone else, she said, when the gunshots were fired.

The anniversary observations of Brown's shooting death by a white Ferguson police officer started off peacefully Sunday.

Vigils honored him throughout the day. Attendees observed four and a half minutes of silence to signify the four and a half hours Brown's body lay on the street after the unarmed black teen was shot last year.

But the new gunfire shifted the focus Sunday night.

When officers first saw the suspect, he was running away after exchanging gunfire with an unknown person, police said.

Some gunfire rang out as reporters were talking to Ferguson's acting police chief, Andre Anderson. A startled Anderson continued speaking with a steady burst of gunfire in the background. Crowds scattered.

Detectives in an unmarked SUV turned on its emergency lights and pursued the suspect, only to be shot at, according to Belmar. The bullets hit the vehicle's hood and windshield several times, Belmar said.

As the detectives got out of the car, the suspect allegedly turned around and fired again.

Then he ran toward a fenced area, where he continued firing -- until officers struck him multiple times, Belmar said.

The four plainclothes officers involved in the shooting have between six to 12 years of experience, he said. They have been placed on administrative leave.

""We cannot continue, we cannot talk about the good things that we have been talking about, if we are prevented from moving forward with this kind of violence,"" Belmar said, adding that those resorting to violence are not protesters.

""Protesters are people who are out there to effect change,"" he said. There were ""several people shooting, several rounds shot.""

By Sunday night, police presence had turned heavy, and rumors about the shooting flew.

Police and protesters faced off in a tense standoff on West Florissant Avenue, not far from Canfield Drive, where Brown was shot.

Several objects were thrown at police and some businesses damaged, the St. Louis County Police Department said. A journalist was attacked and robbed in a parking lot. Three St. Louis County police officers were injured: One was struck in the face by a brick, while two others were pepper-sprayed.

Police, with helmets and shields, pushed crowds back and called in tactical units.

""We're ready for what? We're ready for war,"" some in the crowd chanted.

In a separate incident early Monday, a man wearing a red hooded sweatshirt shot two teens, 17 and 19, in the chest, the St. Louis County Police Department said.

Both were hospitalized with injuries not considered life-threatening, authorities said.

The teens were walking on a sidewalk near where Brown was killed a year ago.

Amid the chaos, some appealed for calm.

""Please pray for peace in Ferguson tonight and forever,"" Danny Takhar tweeted. ""And the police department really needs to look at what they did last year and today.""

Others posted a video of what they described as a shooting victim in Ferguson lying on the streets bleeding.

""Please get him some help! He's bleeding out,"" a voice said off camera.

""This kind of behavior from those who want to cause disruption and destroy the progress from this past year will not be tolerated,"" the city's mayor and City Council said. ""We are asking for our citizens and businesses to be diligent and to be watchful for those who want to cause harm to our community.""

The details of what happened on August 9, 2014, and the days of protest that followed have become a polarizing topic in Ferguson and America as a whole.

Brown's killing by Officer Darren Wilson sparked outrage and protests nationwide against what some described as racial bias by the police.

A grand jury didn't indict Wilson, and the U.S. Justice Department also declined to bring criminal charges, but the feds did issue a report that found the Ferguson Police Department and the city's municipal court had engaged in a ""pattern and practice"" of discrimination against African-Americans, targeting them disproportionately for traffic stops, use of force and jail sentences.

Brown's killing sparked weeks of protests that at times intensified into street fires and looting of businesses. Police fired tear gas in response, sparking more tensions.

But protesters -- many of whom are skeptical of the local and federal inquiries into the case -- point to examples of police misconduct exposed in the wake of Brown's death. The case also led to new policing strategies, including the introduction of police body cameras.",REAL
"WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents   RT 
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), facing criticism over its classification of carcinogens, has reportedly been advising its scientific experts not to publish internal research data on its 2015 report on “probably carcinogenic” glyphosate. 
The IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review, according to Reuters. The agency told Reuters on Tuesday that it tried to protect the study from “external interference,” as well as protect its intellectual rights, since it was “the sole owner of such materials.” 
The scientists had been asked earlier to release all the documentation on the 2015 report under US freedom of information laws. 
The groundbreaking review, published in March 2015 by the IARC – a semi-autonomous agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) – labeled the glyphosate herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is a key ingredient of Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller well-known under the trade name ‘Roundup.’ It is one of the most heavily used herbicides in the world and is designed to go along with genetically-modified “Roundup Ready” crops, also produced by Monsanto. 
The IARC’s report caused problems for both the notorious agrochemical giant and the agency itself. 
The report sparked a heated debate around the use of Roundup, and caused several EU countries – including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands – to object to the renewal of the glyphosate’s EU license. The vote on prolonging the glyphosate license for 15 years failed several times in June 2016, but the license was temporarily extended for 18 months during last hours before its expiration. 
The controversial report has seemingly made the IARC a target for attacks from multiple directions, and raised scientific, legal, and financial questions. 
Various critics, including those in the chemical industry, said the IARC’s evaluations are fuel for “unnecessary health scares,” since the IARC allegedly studies the potentially harmful substance itself, and not a “typical human” exposure to it. It remained unclear whether the critics urged a WHO body to test the potentially carcinogenic chemical on humans. 
The critics also brought up other controversial statements from the IARC, over whether such things as mobile phones, coffee, red meat, and processed meat could cause cancer. 
The agency defended its methods as scientifically sound and “widely respected for their scientific rigor, standardized and transparent process and…freedom from conflicts of interest.” Numerous freedom of information requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a US conservative advocacy group, have since been turned down with this reasoning. 
E&E Legal told Reuters that it is pushing a legal challenge over whether the documents in question belong to the IARC or to the US federal and state institutions where some of the experts work. Basically, it’s being decided whether the IARC, as part of the WHO, is truly independent and free from “conflicts of interest.” 
According to Reuters, officials from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be questioned by a congressional committee about why American taxpayers fund the cancer agency, which faces much criticism over its allegedly faulty classification of carcinogens. 
“IARC’s standards and determinations for classifying substances as carcinogenic, and therefore cancer-causing, appear inconsistent with other scientific research, and have generated much controversy and alarm,” a letter from US Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz to NIH director Francis Collins states, as quoted by Reuters. 
The Oversight Committee demanded a full disclosure of NIH funding of the IARC, and even money spent in relation to the cancer agency’s activities. 
IARC opponents from scientific circles vowed to provide their data on the matter. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which believes glyphosate is “unlikely pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans,” promised to release its raw data on the subject as part of its “commitment to open risk assessment.” The food safety watchdog made this statement in late September, and still has to deliver the promised information. Share This Article...",FAKE
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, December 5, 2012.
NEW YORK — As the bizarre 2016 presidential election nears its end, activists in the United States are considering the prospects for war and peace under the next administration.
And with Hillary Clinton leading comfortably in most polls, the Democratic nominee’s militaristic record, as well as her promises to expand the use of force, are sparking concern.
“Clinton is one of the biggest war-mongers the country has,” Joe Lombardo, co-coordinator of the United National Antiwar Coalition , told MintPress News.
“She pushed for the bombing of Libya and the regime change in that country. She has supported a no-fly zone in Syria, which can put the U.S. in direct conflict with Russia.”
On the campaign trail, Clinton has repeatedly advocated a “no-fly zone” in Syria, an aggressive move necessarily accompanied by a widespread bombing campaign, similar to those in Iraq and Libya, which were followed by expanded interventions to impose regime change.
Senior U.S. military pilots have warned that the proposal could plunge the United States into direct conflict with Russia, whose air force is currently deployed over Syria.
In September, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate that the prospect “requires us to go to war against Syria and Russia.”
‘Kill a lot of Syrians’ “It is critical that we not be confused about what Clinton’s promise of a no-fly zone will mean,” Meredith Aby of the Minneapolis-based Anti-War Committee told MintPress.
“It is an escalation of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and it will mean an increase in casualties.”
In 2013, Clinton herself admitted in a paid speech to Goldman Sachs, obtained and released by WikiLeaks in September, that her proposal would “kill a lot of Syrians.”
“To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas,” she said.
Beyond Syria, Clinton has also threatened to attack and “totally obliterate” Iran , and she has repeatedly promised to take the United States’ ties with Israel “to the next level.”
In August, after accusing Russia and China of hacking U.S. computer systems, she warned : “We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”
‘A voice for war since 2002’ US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk in Jerusalem, Israel, Monday, July 16, 2012.
These statements, along with Clinton’s long, unbroken record of supporting military interventions, have anti-war activists eying the future warily.
“Many in the anti-war movement understand the dangers of a Clinton presidency,” Aby said.
“From her resume it is fairly obvious she will be a hawk, more so than President Obama and President Clinton. She has been a voice for war since 2002 when she voted for war in Iraq.”
Beyond Clinton’s explicit threats of wars, her administration may also seek to expand the use of “soft power,” ranging from diplomatic assistance and military aid to subversion and coups, in pursuit of its foreign policy goals.
“She has called for boosting U.S. support for Israeli missile defense systems and supports helping Israel with technology to fight in Gaza,” Aby said, adding:
“On the campaign trail, she has denounced the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as a threat to Israel. And while she hasn’t campaigned on it, she is no friend of Latin America. Her own emails show the role she played in helping provide support for the coup in Honduras.”
Lombardo also noted that regions further removed from the headlines than flashpoints like Syria could face similar threats from a Hillary Clinton administration.
“The Philippines is heating up and Clinton has a history in Latin America, where there are many places that the U.S. would like to see regime change,” he said.
‘A very unpopular president from day one’ In the waning months of the campaign, both Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, have emerged as historically unpopular candidates , more so than others in the era of scientific polling.
Indeed, while Trump’s aggression has kept his popularity below Clinton’s, she recently surpassed the bellicose billionaire as the least-liked candidate in history.
A poll released by ABC News and the Washington Post on Tuesday showed Clinton’s unpopularity had reached a record-breaking 60 percent, while Trump’s stood at 58 percent.
Despite her jingoism and promises to expand U.S. military efforts far beyond those of Barack Obama, organizers hope this public disdain may give them room to maneuver.
“Although Clinton will win the presidency, she will be a very unpopular president from day one, which will give us the political space to organize opposition to her foreign policy,” Aby said.
Lombardo agreed. “Clinton is very unpopular, and while the election of Obama put a damper on the anti-war movement, I believe we will see that turn around under Clinton.”
He also noted the growth of domestic social movements, like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, that could herald a resurgence in mobilization.
“There is a downturn in the economy, distrust of the government and the system as a whole,” Lombardo said. “The connections with the wars abroad and the wars at home is clear to more and more people. I think a movement against increased war can be explosive and powerful during a Clinton administration.”
But he added that there was much work to be done. “Although anti-war sentiment in the U.S. is high, the anti-war movement in weak compared to where it was in the past.”
‘No optimism, only apprehension’ A woman with the words “hands off” painted on her face takes part in a protest organized by the Stop the War coalition calling for no military attack on Syria from the U.S., Britain or France, across the road from the entrance of Downing Street in London, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013.
As the clock ticks down to the election, numerous organizations have launched new efforts they hope will preempt the war drive expected to start soon after Jan. 20.
Along with other groups and individual supporters, the United National Antiwar Coalition launched a “Hands Off Syria Coalition” and accompanying statement against further U.S. intervention in the war-torn country.
The effort “is getting a tremendous response,” Lombardo said.
Other organizations, including the ANSWER Coalition and International Action Center , have called for protests against the inauguration in Washington.
“There’s no optimism, only apprehension,” International Action Center co-director Sara Flounders told MintPress. “People know in their bones that a larger war is coming. From the first day of a new administration, we need to send an angry warning.”
But with the United States fatigued from a grueling election season that has left few residents with positive impressions of either candidate, widespread distrust of the political system may deny the new president the mandate he or she would need to embark on new military adventures.
“I think people are less naive now then they were eight years ago,” Aby said. “People understand that foreign policy is not an issue that truly separates the two major party candidates.”",FAKE
"WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama pledged to press an aggressive policy agenda during his final year in office, while also acknowledging the recent rise in terrorism threats to the U.S. will present a new challenge for his administration.

Mr. Obama, in a news conference Friday, made the case that he has shown over the past year he is far from a lame duck, pointing to the restoration of U.S. ties with Cuba, the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, and the Iran nuclear deal. He vowed to make similar...",REAL
"Documentaries . Al Gore Made Nearly $200 Million from the Global Warming Scam — Likely to Become the World's First 'Carbon Billionaire' Ten years after the release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, none of the film's dire climate... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/al-gore-made-nearly-200-million-from.html Ten years after the release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, none of the film's dire climate change predictions have come to pass. However, in the decade since the documentary was produced, its creator has raked in millions of dollars from the entire ""global warming"" scam, and is now poised to become "" our first carbon billionaire .""In the 2006 film, Gore made a number of wild claims regarding what we could expect to see happening over the next few years due to global warming, but virtually all of his alarmist prognostications have turned out to be false. Arctic didn't melt, polar bears are thriving For instance, the film predicted that that the Arctic could become ice-free within the next decades, and that polar bears would begin drowning. Both claims were untrue.As reported by Investor's Business Daily:""In the mid- to late-2000s, Gore repeatedly predicted that an ice-free Arctic Ocean was coming soon.""But as usual, his fortune-telling was wrong. By 2014, Arctic ice had grown thicker and covered a greater area than it did when he made his prediction.""And the polar bears?The Daily Caller reports:""A new study by Canadian scientists once again debunks the notion polar bears are currently being harmed by global warming. Researchers with Canada's Lakehead University found 'no evidence' polar bears are currently threatened by warming ."" Kilimanjaro's snow hasn't disappeared Another prediction made in the film was that Mt. Kilimanjaro would be snow-free ""within the decade."" But in fact:""In 2014, ecologists actually monitoring Kilimanjaro's snowpack found it was not even close to being gone. It may have shrunk a little, but ecologists were confident it would be around for the foreseeable future."" Extreme weather has failed to materialize In Inconvenient Truth, Gore also forecasted that storms would begin occurring more often and at higher intensities.Wrong again, Al:""Gore's claim is more hype than actual science, since storms aren't more extreme since 2006. In fact, not even findings from the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) support Gore's claim.""The IPCC found in 2013 there 'is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.' ""The IPCC also found 'no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century' and '[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.'""Gore should probably take these findings seriously since he shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 with the IPCC for its work on global warming."" Despite false claims, Gore grows richer from climate change myth Although Gore's claims have been thoroughly debunked by a number of experts, he has been quietly amassing a huge fortune based on the climate change scam.Mad World News reports:""Gore's wealth went from $700,000 in 2000 to an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015 thanks to his environmentalist activism. Gore and the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management made nearly $218 million in profits between 2008 and 2011 from a carbon trading company they co-founded. By 2008, Gore was able to put a whopping $35 million into hedge funds and other investments."" Science Fights Back:",FAKE
"A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety. But the prisoner, Donta Allen, 22, later spoke to the media, including The Post, and allowed himself to be identified.

In a phone interview, Allen said he had been in the van with Gray and told police he heard “light banging.” He said the police report incorrectly characterized his statements to authorities and that he “never ever said to police that [Gray] was hurting himself.”

Allen, who is on probation for an armed robbery conviction, declined to comment further.

The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.

Prosecutors on May 1 announced they had charged six officers in connection with Gray’s death. One officer faces a second-degree murder charge, three others are charged with manslaughter. The remaining two face charges including second-degree assault and misconduct in office.

[Gray’s life is a study in the sad effects of lead paint on poor blacks]

Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.

Police have said they do not know whether Gray was injured during the arrest or during his 30-minute ride in the van. Local police and the U.S. Justice Department both have launched investigations of Gray’s death.

Jason Downs, one of the attorneys for the Gray family, said the family had not been told of the prisoner’s comments to investigators.

“We disagree with any implication that Freddie Gray severed his own spinal cord,” Downs said. “We question the accuracy of the police reports we’ve seen thus far, including the police report that says Mr. Gray was arrested without force or incident.”

Capt. Eric Kowalczyk, chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, declined to comment on the affidavit, citing the ongoing investigation. The person who provided the document did so on condition of anonymity.

The affidavit is part of a search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport. It does not say how many officers were in the van, whether any reported that they heard banging or whether they would have been able to help Gray if he was seeking to injure himself. Police have mentioned only two prisoners in the van.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has admitted flaws in the way officers handled Gray after they chased him through a West Baltimore housing project and arrested him. They said they later found a switchblade clipped to the inside of his pants. Batts has said officers repeatedly ignored Gray’s pleas for medical help and failed to secure him with a safety belt or harness in the back of the transport van.

Video shot by several bystanders has fueled the rage in West Baltimore. It shows two officers on top of Gray, putting their knees in his back, then dragging his seemingly limp body to the van as he cries out.

Batts has said Gray stood on one leg and climbed into the van on his own.

The van driver stopped three times while transporting Gray to a booking center, the first to put him in leg irons. Batts said the officer driving the van described Gray as “irate.” The search warrant application says Gray “continued to be combative in the police wagon.”

The driver made a second stop, five minutes later, and asked an officer to help check on Gray. At that stop, police have said the van driver found Gray on the floor of the van and put him back on the seat, still without restraints. Police said Gray asked for medical help at that point.

The third stop was to put the other prisoner into the van. The van was then driven six blocks to the Western District station. Gray was taken from there to a hospital, where he died April 19.

Batts has said officers violated policy by failing to properly restrain Gray. But the president of the Baltimore police union noted that the policy mandating seat belts took effect April 3 and was e-mailed to officers as part of a package of five policy changes on April 9, three days before Gray was arrested.

Gene Ryan, the police union president, said many officers aren’t reading the new policies — updated to meet new national standards — because they think they’re the same rules they already know, with cosmetic changes. The updates are supposed to be read out during pre-shift meetings.

The previous policy was written in 1997, when the department used smaller, boxier wagons that officers called “ice cream trucks.” They originally had a metal bar that prisoners had to hold during the ride. Seat belts were added later, but the policy made their use discretionary.

Ryan said that until all facts become clear, he “urged everyone not to rush to judgment. The facts as presented will speak for themselves. I just wish everyone would take a step back and a deep breath, and let the investigation unfold.”

The search warrant application says that detectives at the time did not know where the officer’s uniform was located and that they wanted his department-issued long-sleeve shirts, pants and black boots or shoes. The document says investigators think that Gray’s DNA might be found on the officer’s clothes.",REAL
"Watch Erin Burnett's live interview with Carly Fiorina on ""Erin Burnett Outfront"" on Tuesday at 7 p.m. EDT on CNN.

(CNN) Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for president on Monday, becoming the first declared female candidate to seek the Republican Party's nomination.

""Yes, I am running,"" Fiorina said on ABC's ""Good Morning America."" ""I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works. I understand the world; who's in it.""

The ex-Silicon Valley executive and long-shot White House contender has never held public office. In 2010, she unsuccessfully ran for Senate in California, losing to Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

She is now one of only a few women ever to seek the Republican Party's nomination for president -- among them, former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who was a candidate in 2012, and former North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who made a brief run in the 2000 cycle.

Fiorina has been laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign over the past few months, traveling to early states like Iowa and New Hampshire and meeting with activists and donors.

Casting herself as an outside-the-beltway candidate with years of private sector experience, she has been particularly critical of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her work in government.

On Monday, Fiorina said Clinton ""clearly is not trustworthy.""

""She has not been transparent about a whole set of things that matter,"" Fiorina said on ABC, ticking off Benghazi, Clinton's use of personal emails at the State Department as well as foreign donations that the Clinton Foundation has received.

""If you're tired of the sound bites, the vitriol, the pettiness, the egos, the corruption; if you believe that it's time to declare the end of identity politics; if you believe that it's time to declare the end of lowered expectations; if you believe that it's time for citizens to stand up to the political class and say enough, then join us,"" Fiorina says.

Fiorina also announced the news of her campaign on various social media outlets including Twitter. She is set to participate in an online town hall with supporters Monday afternoon, then travel to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina later in the week. Her new book, ""Rising to the Challenge,"" is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.

Standing out in what is expected to be a crowded Republican field that includes far better-known candidates like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, will be a significant challenge for Fiorina.

But political strategists say Fiorina, an articulate communicator and energetic retail politician, could very well have a moment in the race, particularly as she makes an appeal to voters who are drawn to a non-establishment candidate.

Fiorina could also be a galvanizing force in an election where on the other side of the political aisle, Clinton -- the widely presumed Democratic frontrunner -- has indicated that she plans to make gender issues one of the central themes of her campaign.

Marty Wilson, an executive vice president at the California Chamber of Commerce who managed Fiorina's 2010 Senate campaign, said one potential obstacle for Fiorina will be building up a national donor base when she hasn't had to raise money for a political campaign since 2010.

""She's a very talented candidate and connects well with voters,"" Wilson said. ""The problem is after 2010, she was no longer a candidate. So mail lists and email lists tend to atrophy when they're not in use.""

Fiorina has recruited veteran political strategists to help run her campaign.

In February, Fiorina supporters announced the establishment of Carly For America, a super PAC to support her eventually potential presidential campaign. Fiorina has enlisted Steve DeMaura, the former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, to be the super PAC's executive director.

Fiorina is best known for her time at HP, a company she led from 1999 to 2005. Her controversial tenure at the firm gave Boxer plenty of political ammunition in the 2010 race, and the issue could once again emerge a vulnerability for Fiorina in her campaign for president.

As CEO, Fiorina spearheaded a divisive merger with Compaq as she sought to rebrand the firm and boost its relevance in the tech world. Some HP employees were unhappy with Fiorina's leadership style and what they said was a lack of engagement with colleagues, and members of the Hewlett and Packard families have been openly critical of her role at the company

But Fiorina continues to defend her time at HP. As CEO of a major corporation, she says, she gained critical executive skills that would serve her well in the White House.

""HP requires executive decision-making, and the presidency is all about executive decision-making,"" Fiorina told CNN in February.",REAL
"The parents of an American woman held by the Islamic State group said in a statement on Tuesday that they have been notified of her death.

The White House said Kayla Jean Mueller's family received a message from her captors over the weekend, which was authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community, the Associated Press reports.

 

 On Friday, the Islamic State group released a statement claiming Mueller had been killed in a Jordanian airstrike in Raqqa, Syria. The Jordanian government said later that it was ""highly skeptical"" about the extremists' statement.

Mueller, who is from Prescott, Arizona, was captured by militants in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013. U.S. officials acknowledged last year that a 26-year-old American woman was being held by the group, but did not identify her out of fears for her safety.

Mueller's family honored her dedication to humanitarian work in their statement on Tuesday, according to The Arizona Republic. ""We are so proud of the person Kayla was and the work that she did while she was here with us. She lived with purpose, and we will work every day to honor her legacy,"" the statement read.

""Our hearts are breaking for our only daughter, but we will continue on in peace, dignity, and love for her,"" the family said.

The family also released a letter that Mueller wrote while in captivity in 2014, BuzzFeed notes. ""I know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I'm doing,"" Mueller wrote. ""[I] have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.""

""In how she lived her life, she epitomized all that is good in our world,"" he said. ""No matter how long it takes, the United States will find and bring to justice the terrorists who are responsible for Kayla’s captivity and death.""

Mueller had been working in Turkey assisting Syrian refugees, according to a 2013 article in The Daily Courier, her hometown newspaper. She told the paper that she was drawn to help with the situation in Syria.

""For as long as I live, I will not let this suffering be normal,"" she said. ""It's important to stop and realize what we have, why we have it and how privileged we are. And from that place, start caring and get a lot done.""

A 2007 article about Mueller from the same newspaper said she was a student at Northern Arizona University and was active in the Save Darfur Coalition. A statement from the office of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Mueller graduated in 2009 and had worked to help people in need in India, Israel, the Palestinian territories and in Arizona.

Mueller is the fourth American to die while being held by Islamic State militants. Three other Americans - journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and aid worker Peter Kassig - were beheaded by the group.

Journalist Austin Tice, of Houston, Texas, disappeared in August 2012 while covering Syria's civil war. It's not clear what entity is holding him, but it is not believed to be the Islamic State group or the Syrian government, his family has said.

""We are heartbroken to share that we've received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller, has lost her life. ""Kayla was a compassionate and devoted humanitarian. She dedicated the whole of her young life to helping those in need of freedom, justice, and peace. In a letter to her father on his birthday in 2011, Kayla wrote: 'I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine. If this is how you are revealed to me, this is how I will forever seek you.' 'I will always seek God. Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love; I find God in suffering. I've known for some time what my life's work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.' ""Kayla was drawn to help those displaced by the Syrian civil war. She first traveled to Turkey in December, 2012 to provide humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees. She told us of the great joy she took in helping Syrian children and their families. ""We are so proud of the person Kayla was and the work that she did while she was here with us. She lived with purpose, and we will work every day to honor her legacy. ""Our hearts are breaking for our only daughter, but we will continue on in peace, dignity, and love for her. ""We remain heartbroken, also, for the families of the other captives who did not make it home safely and who remain in our thoughts and prayers. We pray for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Syria.""",REAL
"Waking Times 
The political system we have today is not the democratic republic it pretends to be. National elections are orchestrated public relations events, engineered to serve the complex interests of the plutocracy and shadow government . The perception of differences between major party candidates is limited to within a narrow spectrum of mainstream ideology, and voting has become a tool used by the oligarchy to routinely refresh the illusions of choice and consent. 
Indoctrinated to believe this system is mandatory for human prosperity and security, consideration of alternatives is practically unthinkable to the citizenry. Most have their entire lives and fortunes invested in this game, and as such, a truth this heavy is simply too much to process and too painful to accept. Obedience and compliance to state and culture have their sleepy, comfortable perks, but the natural inclination of the human spirit is to gravitate towards truth and freedom. When this is ignored or denied, inner peace is impossible, and outer chaos inevitable. 
For this, the free-thinker will always emerge as the winner in a contest against the statist, for, it is the soul who needs no illusions and carries no attachments which can look upon the ashes of ruin and give them credit for being the first signs of new bloom. 
Now that the unbelievable spectacle of election 2016 is complete, here are some critical things that free-thinkers can take away from this rather insane and revelatory experience. 
1.) The mainstream, corporate media is unashamedly here to convince and distract you, not to inform or empower you. Most media outlets, including many alternative outlets, have fully exposed themselves as partisan organizations with no commitment to objectivity or logic. We are at last free from the chokehold of this organized form of propaganda and ideological occupation. 
2.) People still do not yet understand the true nature of government as an organization which derives its power and authority from the superior application of violence. They don’t yet fully understand that in order for government to offer a solution to a problem, it must first create that very problem. Many are still unready to admit that we are ruled by a plutocratic, oligarchical, corporate state that does not take orders from elected politicians. 
Because of this, there are now plenty of opportunities to inspire and awaken people with serious information. 
3.) Social chaos and mindless incivility has been properly revealed as a reflection of inner chaos, fear and disharmony. It’s clear now that many have been trained to choose team loyalty over personal independence. To choose destructiveness instead of creativity, to build echo chambers instead of round tables, to relish conflict over curiosity, and to seek the comfort of group-think over the uncertainty of individuality. 
These programs are socially engineered diseases and their chief symptoms are violence in word and deed. This is out in the open now, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. 
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” ~ Pogo 
4.) There is no place on planet earth where free-thinking people can enjoy voluntary community and peaceful coexistence without interference by the state and its sympathizers. Sad, but true. The entire world is colonized by statist ideology and there is no where to run or hide from this mindset. Yet, there is sufficient living freedom in this revelation alone, because from anywhere now, we can openly engage in any one of a million simple acts of revolution and independence , and they will be witnessed and absorbed by those most in need. 
5.) At long last, some of the darkest, ugliest and most difficult to look at issues are bubbling up into mainstream consciousness. The long and well-documented history of occultism , pedophilia, human-trafficking, human sacrifice, Satan worship and dark ritual among the world’s ruling elite can finally be openly discussed without instant mindless backlash. The proverbial black cat is out of the bag now, and there has never been a better time to participate in the work of waking people up to the high crimes of the elite. Final Thoughts 
In 2016 your personal awakening counts more than your vote , for the only thing that can turn the tide on endless war, unstoppable surveillance, the strategy of tension, weaponized stress , environmental ruin, and unchecked debt-slavery, is a large enough and spiritied enough class of fearless, righteous individuals. Until free humanity emerges victorious from the mental slavery of the state, we will get the president that we deserve. 
Enjoy this excellent elucidation of this point by Carey Wedler: Read more articles by Dylan Charles . About the Author 
Dylan Charles is a student and teacher of Shaolin Kung Fu, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, a practitioner of Yoga and Taoist arts, and an activist and idealist passionately engaged in the struggle for a more sustainable and just world for future generations. He is the editor of WakingTimes.com , the proprietor of OffgridOutpost.com , a grateful father and a man who seeks to enlighten others with the power of inspiring information and action. He may be contacted at . This article ( 5 Key Revelations for Free Thinkers to Consider After Election 2016 ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Dylan Charles and WakingTimes.com . It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement. 
~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family…",FAKE
"In President Obama's interview with Matt Yglesias on foreign policy, he did something interesting when pressed on how he squares support for human rights with a foreign policy that has included a number of alliances with dictators. Obama said that the US could only do so much, and that sometimes he has to ""recognize the world as it is"" and make practical tradeoffs. And, he said, ""The trajectory of this planet overall is one toward less violence, more tolerance, less strife, less poverty.""

On the surface, it seemed like a dodge, an argument that the US doesn't have to worry too much about promoting democracy and human rights, which will arise naturally. But Obama returned to this point at the very end of the interview, and said something that's crucial to understanding his worldview and the role he sees American foreign policy playing in the world:

Obama's point here is that the arc of history bends naturally toward democracy and human rights, and that the best thing the US can do is not to solve every crisis individually — which can sometimes make things worse — but rather to help bend that arc in the right direction globally.

The world is, in the long view, getting much better for human beings: people are healthier, freer, and safer than they've ever been, and those trends are holding. The best thing the United States can do for the world, Obama thinks, is strengthen the forces that drive this progress.

In this long view of foreign policy, the best weapon in the war for human rights and democracy isn't the US military or economic sanctions; it's the forces of human progress themselves.

That the world is getting much better is, at this point, an undeniable fact. People live longer and healthier lives than they ever have. Deaths from war are at an all-time low. After the Cold War ended, democracy spread rapidly, and is now the dominant form of government worldwide.

But Obama also has a theory of why humanity has gotten better. Modern creations like the global economy, a US-led global network of alliances, and international institutions like the UN, in this thinking, all work together to, in the aggregate, reduce suffering and promote freedom.

Obama lays this out in one paragraph, right at the beginning of the interview. It's the golden ticket to understanding everything he says later on:

I think it is realistic for us to want to use diplomacy for setting up a rules-based system wherever we can, understanding that it's not always going to work. If we have arms treaties in place, it doesn't mean that you don't have a stray like North Korea that may try to do its own thing. But you've reduced the number of problems that you have and the security and defense challenges that you face if you can create those norms. And one of the great things about American foreign policy in the post-World War II era was that we did a pretty good job with that. It wasn't perfect, but the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be.

There are two things to understand how boring-sounding international institutions can help accelerate the forces of history like this. First, institutions provide material things — medicine, financial assistance, economic growth — that make people's lives longer and richer. Second, they deter and co-opt bad actors, and encourage what you might call good international behavior.

The American-led alliance system, for example, deters aggression in Europe and East Asia; Russia's bad behavior in eastern Europe likely would have been a lot worse if NATO didn't exist to deter it, for example, or if the EU didn't exist to organize sanctions. More broadly, the ever-expanding webs of international trade ties and political organizations such as the EU make war costly and cooperation with the global community more desirable. By making wars more costly, institutions help protect the spread of democracy, which in turn further reduces the likelihood of war because democracies tend not to fight each other.

The United States is far from the only player in these international institutions by their very nature, but as the single most powerful and most important member, the US has been crucial to bringing other countries on board, and helping to enforce and maintain that liberal international system.

Of course, you can't credit international institutions alone for the spread of prosperity and democracy: these are huge, complicated historical phenomena with lots of causes. But Obama is quite right to say that the design of the post-World War II international order, and its expansion after the end of the Cold War, have helped protect and encourage the long-term historical trends.

That's fine for the long view, but Obama also has to manage foreign policy now, day-to-day. And, on that view, it can look like he's significantly less active on global human rights. Obama hasn't seriously challenged Chinese authoritarianism or Saudi theocracy. Iran and Russia pose major threats to stability in Europe and the Middle East. And North Korea is still North Korea.

In the Vox interview, Obama's direct response to this line of criticism is pretty weak: the Internet will fix it. ""I am a firm believer that particularly in this modern internet age, the capacity of the old-style authoritarian government to sustain itself and to thrive just is going to continue to weaken,"" he said.

Still, his longer-view, implicit argument is a great deal stronger: the best way to deal with authoritarianism in the long run is to build up the global institutions that have accelerated positive trends worldwide — and to prevent other countries from weakening those institutions and trends.

China is a good example of this. As a rising power that has been at times hostile to Western power, it was widely expected to challenge the US-dominated global order — potentially catastrophically — and in some cases it has. But, since 2008, the country has generally worked within and even endorsed that international system. This was mostly out of self-interest, but the Obama administration has worked to make sure that China's self-interest and that of the international system lined up. The result has been China buying into those positive trends of the status quo, rather than overturning them.

For example, China helped the United States and global economic institutions rescue the global economy after 2008 by refraining from turning to trade protectionism. According to Tufts Fletcher School Professor Dan Drezner, that's evidence that ""China is not proposing a serious challenge to what the liberal international order looks like."" China benefits from a fairly open international trading regime and would suffer if security competition with the United States ramped up.

Roping China into these systems demonstrates Obama's strategy in action. Throughout the interview, he mentions the need to get China on board with helping maintain global institutions: ""you've got to step up and help us underwrite these global rules that in fact help to facilitate your rise,"" he says, addressing China's leaders.

Obama has attempted to integrate other bad actors into the global system to make them less likely to cause trouble. The opening to Cuba is the clearest example, but so too are his overtures to Iran on nukes and the original (if ill-fated) Russia reset. ""We can't guarantee that [Iran makes] a rational decision [on nukes] any more than we can guarantee Russia and Mr. Putin make rational decisions about something like Ukraine,"" he said. ""But we've also got to see whether things like diplomacy, things like economic sanctions, things like international pressure and international norms, will in fact make a difference.""

And while these bad actors are co-opted or contained, by sanctions or international isolation, the rest of the world will continue to improve, bringing more states into the global system and depriving its enemies of potential allies. That'll make it harder for these states to sustain aggressive foreign policies — and even brutal repression at home — in the face of long-run international pressure.

This long-run vision is, in many wells, quite compelling. But it doesn't do a whole lot for protestors in Hong Kong, Saudi women demanding the right to drive, or Ukrainians gunned down by Russian troops in Donbas. What about abuses that are happening now?

That's where Obama's recognition of America's policy limits kick in. Yglesias calls this Obama's Undoctrine: avoid costly and counterproductive mistakes, particularly military ones. In the area of human rights, that means avoiding ostentatious pressure that might backfire.

For instance, Obama avoided openly embracing Iran's green protest movement in 2009, and he's kept support for the Syrian rebels to a relative minimum. That's because, in a lot of these cases, Obama thinks high-profile American statements or actions can backfire.

Instead, Obama argues, we have to take human rights wins where can get them. Not every issue is amenable to American pressure or direct action. ""Our successes will happen in fits and starts, and sometimes there's going to be a breakthrough and sometimes you'll just modestly make things a little better,"" he says.

This may not always be a satisfying approach to spreading human rights — long-views rarely are — but it has the virtue of being a smart one.",REAL
"It only takes a few moments to share an article, but the person on the other end who reads it might have his life changed forever Today's Top Stories",FAKE
"October Sky, Good Harbor Beach MA(image by Richard Turcotte) License DMCA Religion is what gives people hope in a world torn apart by religion - Jon Stewart Our Constitution granted each and every one of us the freedom to believe or not believe as we decide. That protection applies to all of us, and when one group has decreed by some spiritual osmosis that their version of the unverifiable and occasionally insane has been decreed as the new Law, then it is up to the rest of us to put that crazy back where it belongs: away from public influence. It's done enough damage as it is. Mankind offers a long history of reliance on others by religious believers with the former being no more intelligent or enlightened than the average man/woman on the street (often far less, if history--or current events--is our guide). Personal thought and introspection have accordingly been relinquished--then, and certainly now. Those presumably more enlightened individuals [bear with me] in turn define and explain their versions of truths, beliefs, and obligations--all in the context of a judging, to-be-feared-and-obeyed, person-like Entity. No small measure of self-interest factors in to their assessments. Keeping ardent followers sufficiently agitated about some loving Deity's wrath [an oxymoron on a grand scale!] allows those professing a direct phone line to the One and Only all the time and opportunity they need to preserve their political and economic advantages without so much as a peep from those loyal supplicants. Hell of a racket.... The current crop of Its spokespeople earn kudos for the ways in which they have fashioned very creative takes on what they claim to be The One and Only Word. Perhaps it's time that we all recognize and simply accept [assuming we accept any kind of theology to begin with] that one religious conviction is in fact no more rational--or irrational--than another. With so many contradictory beliefs, either there is some other unifying and overarching principle, or we will continue to sabotage ourselves and the future of generations to follow by fighting to assert we're right and everyone else is wrong. We own that choice. By its very nature the Source of our Universe is unfathomable. We simply do not have the means or capabilities to define with certainty that great mystery--try as we do. So instead, a great many among us have fashioned a notion that some human-like-but-slightly-better-and-bigger-person-like God/Allah/Whatever created all. Furthermore--apparently--only some know just what It wants from us. That is so convenient, isn't it! - Advertisement - That also frees up some thinking time on the part of those same loyal followers. Why think if someone else is willing to do all of that hard work for us, Right? Aside from that perk, this ceding of rational contemplation is a problem. Always has been. It will continue to be. For all of us, that must change. Acquiescence--or silence--each carry consequences. Were they limited to those followers disinclined to ponder their marching orders, we would certainly have at least one less set of concerns on our plates. If only.... Any honest reading of American history does not suggest a Christian nation that has had secularism forced on it in recent years by liberal forces, but the opposite. Ours is a country that has always been basically secular but has always had to contend with a loud-mouthed minority of theocrats who periodically succeed at using government to push religion until the forces of secularism beat them back again. It's obvious why conservative Christians would like to believe otherwise. Believing they're an oppressed group being denied their birthright is a lot more fun than accepting that they are an oppressive group trying to steal basic freedoms from everyone else. Ignorance, narrow-mindedness, self-serving behaviors, paranoia, fears, and the full range of irrational, fact-challenged nonsense do not manifest themselves inside a protective bubble. The more we collectively permit the subtle infiltration of curiously hypocritical mandates into policy-making, the more certain we can be that outcomes will benefit only very few. Basic math skills tell us that when only a few ""win,"" most lose. That's not a good place for us to be. - Advertisement - Adapted from a blog post of mine View Ratings | Rate It http://richardturcotte.com/ 
Looking Left and Right: Inspiring Different Ideas, Envisioning Better Tomorrows Rich Turcotte is a retired attorney, former financial advisor, and now a writer. The mission: informing others about the significance and impact of Peak ( more... )",FAKE
The president refuses to say he’d hold to the tradition of avoiding public comment or political attacks on the successor.,REAL
"19 mins ago 3 Views 0 Comments 0 Likes It's fair to say, Europe's been shocked by Trump's   Europe's   Trump's   RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air      ",FAKE
"Next Swipe left/right Koala gets so excited it runs head-first into a tree Mason, a baby Koala at the Port Stephens Koala sanctuary in Australia, gets so excited he runs head-first into a tree.",FAKE
"Print 
You know, canoes? Those boats that you powered around the lake when you went to summer camp? Betcha didn’t know they were the epitome of evil — of white privilege, genocide, and a whole host more of crimes against social justice. 
So saieth Misao Dean, professor of English at the University of Victoria in Canada, who shared her views on CBC Radio , which reveals in its intro that Dean wrote the book on the evils of canoe appropriation. Its title is “Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism.” 
You can listen to the interview here , or if you have something more important to do (what could be more important?), be advised that Heat Street provides portions of the enlightening Q & A. For example, when asked whether we should look at the canoe as a non-controversial symbol or as a symbol of colonialism, Dean responds: 
Absolutely a symbol of colonialism. It seems to me that this narrative we tell ourselves about the canoe about how canoeing makes us in touch with nature, how canoeing makes us in some way guiltless of the terrible things that the Canadian government and Canadians in general did to First Nations people. 
If you prefer the dissenting view, scroll down to the comments section of the CBC Radio page, where reader Patrick Saunders opines, “Academia has become a sit-com. A not really funny, sad-in-a-car-crash-sorta-way sit-com.” Then there’s this from Kawartha Cottager: 
As soon as the ice is out of the lake I am going to head to the cottage and burn down my boat house so myself and my family will no longer be tortured by those symbols of colonialism like my canoes, kayaks and worst of all my Laser sailboat, that other symbol of colonialism. Those Euros arrived on sailboats back in the 15th century after all. Once I am done that, I will head back up the hill behind the cottage and torch my outhouse so I can destroy that ultimate symbol of colonialism…..the toilet seat. 
Well, garsh —if no one’s going to take this seriously, what’s a social justice warrior to do?",FAKE
"Facebook says users can't stop it from using biometric data   Bloomberg 
Facebook Inc.'s software knows your face almost as well as your mother does. And like mom, it isn't asking your permission to do what it wants with old photos. 
While millions of internet users embrace the tagging of family and friends in photos, others worried there's something devious afoot are trying to block Facebook as well as Google from amassing such data. 
As advances in facial recognition technology give companies the potential to profit from biometric data, privacy advocates see a pattern in how the world's largest social network and search engine have sold users' viewing histories for advertising. The companies insist that gathering data on what you look like isn't against the law, even without your permission. 
If judges agree with Facebook and Google, they may be able to kill off lawsuits filed under a unique Illinois law that carries fines of $1,000 to $5,000 each time a person's image is used without permission -- big enough for a liability headache if claims on behalf of millions of consumers proceed as class actions. A loss by the companies could lead to new restrictions on using biometrics in the U.S., similar to those in Europe and Canada.",FAKE
"California plays an outsized role in American agriculture. The state grows one-third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts. That includes 99 percent of almonds, 95 percent of broccoli, 90 percent of tomatoes, and 74 percent of lettuce.

So you'd think that the California's four-year drought and severe water crisis would have a devastating impact on our produce.

But that hasn't really happened — certainly not yet. Recently, the US Department of Agriculture reported that US supermarket prices rose just 2.9 percent in 2014, and were only expected to increase 2 to 3 percent in 2015. Those numbers are basically in line with average annual increases over the past 20 years.

What's more, the USDA currently projects that overall fruit and vegetable prices will barely budge in 2015 — despite the severe and ongoing drought in California. So what's going on?

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Russ Parsons lists several factors at play here. A key one is that the cost of growing produce only makes up around 10 percent of the retail price you actually see at the supermarket. There's also transportation, packaging, and distribution, plus various mark-ups.

The prices of many foods ""are driven more by market demand than drought""

That means that difficult conditions for farmers won't necessarily send food prices at the grocery store skyrocketing. There could also be countervailing factors at play. For example, oil prices have been falling around the world since last June, which, as the USDA notes, can help cut down on food transportation costs.

In a similar vein, a 2014 study from the University of California, Davis on California's drought pointed out that grocery store prices for nuts, wine grapes, and dairy food ""are driven more by market demand than by the drought."" As such, that study concluded that California's water crisis wouldn't greatly affect consumer prices across the nation.

Parsons also points out that California's farmers aren't all being equally devastated by the drought. Some agricultural regions of the state, particularly on the coast, have been less affected than areas like the Central Valley. What's more, some farmers facing water shortages have also experienced favorable temperatures and growing conditions — strawberry farmers are one example — which has blunted the impact.

Add it all up, and you get a mixed picture. Carrot prices have risen 48 percent in the last year — but strawberry prices have fallen 8 percent. Asparagus has fallen 7 percent. The vast majority of those fruits and vegetables all come from California. There's no single drought story here.

There's also another important angle here. Many of California's farmers have found ways to adapt to water shortages, albeit in ways that could have long-term ramifications.

Groundwater pumping has replaced up to 75% of lost surface water

The one that's gotten a lot of attention is groundwater pumping. The federal government has been cutting back on the amount of water delivered to farmers in the Central Valley, due to lower-than-expected snowfall and runoff from the Sierra Nevada mountains. To compensate, many farmers are pumping the water out of underground aquifers that have accumulated over hundreds of years.

That has helped stave off short-term disaster. The UC Davis study found that, in the Central Valley, groundwater pumping has helped farmers replace about 75 percent of the water they've lost due to cutbacks from reservoirs.

The problem is that those underground aquifers are getting depleted rapidly — and, since they built up over a long period of time, they don't recharge easily. A 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that the Central Valley's aquifers don't refill completely even during California's ""wet"" periods (because pumping doesn't totally stop). What's more, in a few areas, groundwater pumping causes the ground to sink permanently, which means they can hold less water in the future.

That means farmers are losing a crucial buffer against both this drought — if it persists — and severe droughts to come. Agriculture is thriving for now. But what about the future? (For its part, the state of California has begun regulating groundwater withdrawals, but rules on sustainability will only be slowly phased in between 2020 and 2040.)

Of course, just because supermarket prices are staying steady doesn't mean the drought has been completely painless. As that UC Davis study mentioned above noted, farmers have suffered heavy impacts.

That study, which came out in June 2014, estimated that farmers faced direct costs of about $1.5 billion last year — including $1 billion in revenue losses (about 3 percent of the state's agricultural value) and $500 million in additional groundwater pumping costs. There was also a loss of about 17,100 jobs. The costs were particularly high in the Central Valley.

This year, the costs could be even higher. A recent survey by the California Farm Water Coalition estimates that roughly 41 percent of irrigated farmland will lose delivery of at least some surface water in the spring and summer. All told, some 620,000 acres of farmland will likely go fallow, with potential losses to farmers reaching $3 billion or more.

Could things get so bad that eventually consumers at the grocery store notice? It's tough to say. The USDA keeps warning that, at some point, ""the ongoing drought in California could have large and lasting effects on fruit, vegetable, dairy, and egg prices."" But that hasn't happened yet. For now, it's been a lot more painful for farmers than for food shoppers.

-- A guide to California's water crisis — and why it's so hard to fix",REAL
"Super Tuesday Brings Harsh Light And Heartaches On The Morning After

The results of the biggest voting day in the presidential contest thus far may not have been everything that front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had hoped, but they were enough to set the course for the remainder of the nominating season.

And they were surely enough to intensify the pressure on their respective rivals.

For believers in Bernie Sanders' promise of a ""political revolution,"" Super Tuesday may have seemed like the end of a dream.

And for Republican office-holders and party officials anxious about having Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, Super Tuesday must have been a nightmare.

Sanders went down in seven of the 11 states holding Democratic events, winning in only four where the Democratic vote was relatively small. These included his home state of Vermont, where he won with 86 percent amid turnout lower than it had been in 2008.

Worse yet for Sanders' crusade, Clinton dominated in the competition for pledged delegates to the nominating convention. Because her victory margins were so large in several populous Southern states, including 2-1 in Texas, her share of the delegates far exceeded her rival's. She also won in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas and Massachusetts.

Having begun the night with a modest lead in pledged delegates, Clinton wound up with 544 to Sanders' 349. And when you include the so-called superdelegates (who go to the convention by virtue of their elected or party office), Clinton's lead expands to 1,001-371. As big-state contests loom in Michigan, Ohio and Florida over the next two weeks, Clinton needs only to break even in delegate allocations to maintain her formidable advantage.

Small wonder, then, that Clinton once again spoke generously of Sanders in her victory speech, turning her guns instead on a likely upcoming foe.

""I congratulate Sen. Sanders on his strong showing and campaigning,"" she said, before offering this implicit salute to Sanders' populism: ""Because this country belongs to all of us, not just those at the top.""

Soon enough, she was pivoting to her preferred targets across the aisle.

""The stakes in this election have never been higher,"" said Clinton, ""and the rhetoric we're hearing on the other side has never been lower. Trying to divide America between us and them is wrong, and we're not going to let it work.""

Sanders had spoken early in the evening, right after Vermont was called in his column.

""This campaign is not just about electing a president,"" he said, ""it's about transforming America. We are not going to allow billionaires and the superPACs to destroy American democracy.""

By the time the evening was over, Sanders had added wins in Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota. But the contests in Colorado and Minnesota were caucuses, with relatively few participants. Taken together, his vote total in the four states he won was about 430,000. Clinton won 530,000 in Georgia alone, and larger totals still in Massachusetts and Texas.

Losing in Massachusetts had to be the hardest blow for the Sanders forces to bear. The state borders Vermont, but Sanders was not able to replicate his smashing win in neighboring New Hampshire from Feb. 9. He did win the counties nearest his own state, and most of the counties outside the Boston metropolitan area. But it wasn't enough. Clinton edged him by fewer than 2 percentage points, taking 45 delegates to Sanders' 43.

But if there was disappointment in the Sanders camp last night, there was panic in the ranks of establishment Republicans at the thought of Trump as their party champion.

After his string of victories on Super Tuesday, his chances of capturing winner-take-all states down the road are all the greater, making his nomination in July no worse than an even bet.

In fact, given his growing lead in delegates, Trump's main obstacle now may be not another candidate but the prospect of an open convention where neither he nor anyone else has the votes for a first-ballot victory.

After Trump scored big February wins in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, party officers and congressional leaders began taking him on in public and in private. House Speaker Paul Ryan called him out for his apparent reluctance to denounce former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. There was talk in the media of Republican candidates detaching themselves from the party's nominee in the fall.

Yet on Super Tuesday there seemed little sign of this same unease within the Republican primary electorate. Trump won seven of the states holding primaries, including Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas in the South. At the same time, unlike other Republicans who in the past have run the table in Dixie, Trump wrapped up two more states in New England: Massachusetts and Vermont.

Noting that Republican turnout had been up again, across the board, while Democratic turnout fell shy of 2008, Trump added this:

""I think we're going to be more inclusive ... more unified, and I think we're going to be a much bigger party. [The GOP] has become more dynamic. It's become more diverse. We're taking from the Democrats.""

Trump did yield the biggest prize of the day to rival Sen. Ted Cruz, who won his home state of Texas along with the adjoining state of Oklahoma.

""Thank God for the Lone Star State,"" crooned Cruz as he thanked his supporters in Stafford, Texas. Cruz made much of having beaten Trump in three states, claiming this made him the best alternative to the New York business mogul. (Hours later Cruz increased his total to four states, after the Alaska caucuses went his way.) Cruz also said the other candidates — who would be Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson — should ""prayerfully consider"" abandoning their own campaigns to unite behind him.

It was immediately apparent that none intended to do so. Rubio, who had hoped to establish himself as the last bright hope of the anti-Trump forces, settled for a first-place finish in Minnesota's caucuses (his first win of the year) and two second-place showings in Georgia and Virginia.

Rubio had high hopes for both of those states. The former borders his home state of Florida, and the latter had high concentrations of suburban Republicans, to whom he had directly appealed. Rubio did come within a few percentage points of Trump in Virginia, but still fell short. He had a strong finish in Minnesota, but the caucus was lightly attended and his vote total was barely over 41,000.

But with his flair for seeing the bright side, Rubio noted that Trump's vote totals on Super Tuesday had not matched Trump's poll numbers ""in state after state."" Rubio saw that as a sign of his own success in challenging the front-runner. Rubio had begun bearding Trump in the Feb. 25 debate and traded insults with him throughout the weekend, repeatedly calling him ""a con artist,"" among other things.

Kasich, for his part, came within a whisker of eclipsing Trump in Vermont and added another, more distant second-place finish in Massachusetts. He made it clear he would be in the race at least through Michigan (March 8) and Ohio, his home state, a week later. Kasich has been widely regarded as campaigning for a vice-presidential offer at this point, although he continues to suggest he could be the unity candidate against Trump.

Carson once again indicated he was ""not going anywhere,"" blaming his single-digit shares of the vote to the system he was fighting, calling it a ""complex web.""

In the end, of course, all this persistence on the part of his rivals may make it easier for Trump to divide and conquer. The more rivals remain, the more the anti-Trump vote is diluted, making it easier for him to prevail with a plurality of the vote, state by state, all the way to the convention.",REAL
"President Obama told the U.N. General Assembly 18 months ago that he would seek “real breakthroughs on these two issues — Iran’s nuclear program and ­Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

But Benjamin Netanyahu’s triumph in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections keeps in place an Israeli prime minister who has declared his intention to resist Obama on both of these fronts, guaranteeing two more years of difficult diplomacy between leaders who barely conceal their personal distaste for each other.

The Israeli election results also suggest that most voters there support Netanyahu’s tough stance on U.S.-led negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program and his vow on Monday that there would be no independent Palestinian state as long as he is prime minister.

“On the way to his election victory, Netanyahu broke a lot of crockery in the relationship,” said Martin Indyk, executive vice president of the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. “It can’t be repaired unless both sides have an interest and desire to do so.”

Aside from Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, few foreign leaders so brazenly stand up to Obama and even fewer among longtime allies.

In the past, Israeli leaders who risked damaging the country’s most important relationship, that with Washington, tended to pay a price. In 1991, when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir opposed the Madrid peace talks, President George H.W. Bush held back loan guarantees to help absorb immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Shamir gave in, but his government soon collapsed.

But this time, Netanyahu was not hurt by his personal and substantive conflicts with the U.S. president.

“While the United States is loved and beloved in Israel, President Obama is not,” said Robert M. Danin, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “So the perceived enmity didn’t hurt the way it did with Shamir when he ran afoul of Bush in ’91.”

Where do U.S.-Israeli relations go from here?

In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s elections, tensions between the two sides continued to run hot. The Obama administration’s first comments on the Israeli election came with a tough warning about some of the pre-election rhetoric from Netanyahu’s Likud party, which tried to rally right-wing support by saying that Arab Israeli voters were “coming out in droves.”

“The United States and this administration is deeply concerned about rhetoric that seeks to marginalize Arab Israeli citizens,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters aboard Air Force One. “It undermines the values and democratic ideals that have been important to our democracy and an important part of what binds the United States and Israel together.”

Earnest added that Netan­yahu’s election-eve disavowal of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians would force the administration to reconsider its approach to peace in the region.

Over the longer term, a number of analysts say that Obama and Netan­yahu will seek to play down the friction between them and point to areas of continuing cooperation on military and economic issues.

“Both sides are going to want to turn down the rhetoric,” Danin said. “But it is also a structural problem. They have six years of accumulated history. That’s going to put limits on how far they can go together.”

The first substantive test could come as early as this month, when the United States hopes that it can finish hammering out the framework of an agreement with Iran.

Netanyahu strongly warned against making a “bad deal” during his March 3 address to a joint meeting of Congress, an appearance arranged by Republican congressional leaders and criticized by the Obama administration for making U.S.-Israeli relations partisan on both sides so close to the Israeli election.

If a deal is reached and does not pass muster with Netanyahu, he is likely to work with congressional Republicans to try to scuttle the accord.

“The Republicans have said they will do what they can to block a deal, and the prime minister has already made clear that he will work with the Republicans against the president,” Indyk said. “That’s where a clash could come, and it’s coming very quickly.”

The second test — talks with Palestinians — could be even more difficult. In his September 2013 address to the United Nations, Obama hailed signs of hope.

“Already, Israeli and Palestinian leaders have demonstrated a willingness to take significant political risks,” Obama said in his speech. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “has put aside efforts to shortcut the pursuit of peace and come to the negotiating table. Prime Minister Netanyahu has released Palestinian prisoners and reaffirmed his commitment to a Palestinian state.”

Today, the signals could not differ more. The Palestinian Authority has said that after it joins the International Criminal Court at The Hague on April 1, it will press war crimes charges against Israel for the bloody Gaza conflict during the summer. Israel, which controls tax receipts, has pledged to punish the Palestinian Authority by freezing its tax revenue.

The United States, which gives hundreds of millions of dollars of economic aid to the Palestinian Authority, would be caught in the middle. It has been trying to persuade both sides to stand down, but Netanyahu’s declaration that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch makes that more difficult.

“Now it’s hard to see what could persuade the Palestinians” to hold up on their ICC plans, Indyk said. “That has nothing to do with negotiations, but if both sides can’t be persuaded to back down, then they will be on a trajectory that could lead to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority because it can’t pay wages anymore.

“That could be an issue forced onto the agenda about the same time as a potential nuclear deal.”",REAL
"Why has Donald Trump’s appeal come to be so different than that of the Republican Party and its longer-term leaders? The complex answer rests on the paucity of ideas and leadership skills on the part of the rest of the dwindling field of Republican presidential candidates—but it also includes a failure on the part of party leaders and pundits to understand the people they thought they were leading. They have equated past electoral support with philosophical alignment. We are seeing, through Trump, that the connection between the two, always tenuous, is easily severed.

One of the reasons the Republican elite has dealt so ineffectively with Trump is that it has never understood that they don’t control the masses who have voted for them, believing that its “dog whistles” could always bring the straying back into line. The forces that they have ridden to power, however, are much stronger than they imagined—and quite different from what they thought they were so deftly manipulating.

Their lack of understanding of their “base” can be seen in Charles Murray’s 2012 book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Clueless to the extent that cultural background influences people and, like so many of today’s elite, believing in an American meritocracy, Murray asserts that the “trends I describe exist independently of ethnic heritage.” This points to a major blind spot of the soon-to-be former leaders of the Republican Party. The irony is that they use ethnic division to attract votes though they have long believed, with Murray (and with contradiction notwithstanding), that the successful in America rise through their individual worth, not their backgrounds. Everyone, the elite believe (at least the Republican elite), wants to join them. They even believe that one’s cultural orientation (ethnic, class and more) has become a personal choice.

So obtuse are they that it is no wonder that “The Rise of Trump”™ blindsided them.

Murray applauds what he describes as a new class structure in America led by “a small subset: the people who run the nation’s economic, political, and cultural institutions.” This imagined pyramid of power unintentionally outlines the difference in theory and practice for the Republican elite—and explains just why they have been paralyzed by the presence of an actor within their ranks who comes from the top but does not share the illusions of the elite. Theirs is, as a result, an example of paralyzing cognitive dissonance.

By claiming that people are successful by their own merits, the Republicans have elided “above the line” consideration of why certain groups of people are not as successful as others … and so, of necessity, have also ignored the fact that not everyone can “make it.” Safe in their imagined meritocracy, they ignore the role luck has played in their climbs to the top, leaving their less fortunate followers searching for someone or something to blame for their own lack of elite status. Teachers are blamed for the failures of their students, immigrants are responsible for unemployment among the native-born, and welfare cheats are keeping taxes high. Someone else is always getting the break, the less fortunate come to believe. Deserved legacies of success are being stolen away.

As most anyone from any cultural background knows, the isolation of the very rich from everyone except others of their economic status and the people who serve them has a very long tradition in America as elsewhere in the world. Walled estates and patrolled neighborhoods have been standard for eons. Yet, as if the situation of today’s meritocracy were something new or different, Murray writes that

Actually, this is a problem both ways. When the truck driver does not also understand the priorities of Yale professors, a dialogue between the two can never be established. Murray has unwittingly bought into one of the reasons for the resentments of “red state” conservatives toward the “East Coast elite,” that the elite need knowledge while the rest do not. This is the problem liberals such as John Dewey were trying to address through creation of a system of education based on the concept of the citizen as informed decision maker and that conservatives such as Walter Lippmann resisted, believing the population best served by an informed elite crafting choices for the population as a whole. That the divide between the professor and the teamster has been in existence since the early years of English colonization of America should be apparent to anyone who has made even the briefest study of the history of American culture. Murray does try to base his vision of the “new lower class” in history, but it is a history that takes as truth the myth of “industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity” as the basic aspects of American culture. This has not really been the case at all. Murray taps into other long-term myths, claiming that early “Americans may not have been genteel, but, as a people, they met the requirements of virtue.” This sort of self-congratulatory vision of history is common to the myths within any culture or ethnic group. Unfortunately, it also can lead to resentments, to feelings that virtues unrewarded are actually cases of rewards stolen by the undeserving. It also can lead to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and destruction of an elite in the Republican Party that neither understands—nor is understood by—its supporters. By the time of the 2012 Republican National Convention with its catchphrase of “We Built It,” the myth of an American individualism that led to a meritorious elite of “builders” had become the basis for a successful cult that could now explicitly show its political muscle. The “Tea Party,” the major manifestation of this new cult of individualism, however, is much more than a simple political movement. It is a reflection of that cultural belief that “outside” forces have conspired to dampen individual initiative, that if people could only be left alone, they could work miracles for themselves. Its attitudes are those behind the mania for guns that grew so strong over the first decade of the 21st century, stronger than it had ever been in American history. Guns, it is imagined, can keep at bay those who would keep one down. And there is a belief, a cultural conspiracy theory, if you will, that there are such enemies. Trump plays on this more directly than do the Republican leaders he is on the verge of superseding. They, in order to keep up their imaginary view of their own worth, hid their pandering to the worst instincts of Americans. Trump, with no such illusions, does not. Without any sort of real philosophical underpinning, the new individualism reflects the sort of inchoate yearning that crosses political boundaries and that Donald Trump, of course, has tapped into so well. His followers aren’t conservatives, not as the Republican elite define the term (supporting lower taxes for the rich, smaller government, etc.), but are people who believe their legacy has been stolen, that their failure to also make it into the elite is the fault of forces well outside of their own lives. They aren’t even Republicans, except by convenience. This article is adapted from passages in Chapter Six of Aaron Barlow’s book “The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth” (Praeger, 2013).",REAL
"Is This Why Comey Broke: A Stack Of Resignation Letters From Furious FBI Agents   Source: Zero Hedge 
Conspiracy theories have swirled in recent days as to why FBI Director James Comey reopened Hillary's email investigation after just closing it back in July concluding that, although Hillary had demonstrated gross negligence in her establishment of a private email server, that ""no reasonable prosecutor"" would bring a case against her. Democrats, after lavishing Comey with praise for months on concluding his investigation in an ""impartial"" way, have since lashed out at him for seeking to influence the 2016 election cycle with Hillary herself describing his recent actions as ""deeply troubling"". Republicans, on the other hand, have praised Comey's recent efforts as an attempt to correct a corrupt investigation that seemingly ignored critical evidence while granting numerous immunity agreements to Clinton staffers. 
According to the Daily Mail , and a source close to James Comey, the decision, at least in part, came after he ""could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI"" who ""felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist."" 
James Comey's decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI , including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director. 
'The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary,' said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. 
'Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,' said the source. 'They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.' 
According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. 
He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. 
'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued. 'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. 
Though we're sure there are many facets behind Comey's decision making process, we can all be quite certain, at this point, that he's not motivated by a desire to make friends having now alienated just about everyone in Washington, both in law enforcement and in both political parties. In fact, after Tim Kaine just last week praised Comey as a ""wonderful"" career public servant with the ""highest standards of integrity"" .... 
...everything has now been turned on it's head with Hillary calling his latest moves ""unprecedented and deeply troubling""...seemingly implying an attempt, on the part of Comey, to ""rig"" the election from Trump . 
Meanwhile, President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch are apparently also ""furious"" with Comey over his recent decision. 
His announcement about the revived investigation, which came just 11 days before the presidential election, was greeted with shock and dismay by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the prosecutors at the Justice Department. 
'Jim told me that Lynch and Obama are furious with him,' the source said. 
'Lynch and Obama haven't contacted Jim directly,' said the source, 'but they've made it crystal clear through third parties that they disapprove of his effort to save face.' 
And while the decision to reopen the case may appease FBI agents and republicans, in the short-term, we suspect it does very little to restore overall faith in his competence. As such, we continue to question just how long Comey can hold out before being forced to resign his post. At a bare minimum, in light of his continued questionable judgement and serious doubts raised about the integrity of the first investigation, we fail to understand how an independent investigation into Hillary's email server isn't warranted. 
OOOOh! The remorse! The GUILT ! I can almost feel it from here! 
Get off it, ....you jabbering, fast talking, asshole. 
Statements? ... 'Reopening investigations' (Is that a maybe you wiil have a couple of interns fiddle with Emails a little longer?) and then having legal promptly announce they will take MONTHS and MONTHS to complete the case? .... We Have AN ELECTION LOOKING AT US! ..We need to know who the bad guys are. But, then we already know, don't we? 
No, a resignation is in order. .. Declare a 'conflict of interest' and turn states evidence would be more like it. .... You - Are - A - Crook Dir Comey. 
I know ZHers are getting tired of seeing this but for the benefit of any little clueless FBI junior G-Men out there that can still read English:",FAKE
"  Charles Hugh Smith 
There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance. 
We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. 
If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the Ruling Elite and the non-elites, it is this chart of wages as a share of the nation’s output (GDP): 46 years of relentless decline, interrupted by gushing fountains of credit and asset bubbles that enriched the few while leaving the economic landscape of the many in ruins. 
The Ruling Elite once had an obligation to uphold the social contract as a responsibility that came with their vast privilege, power and wealth (i.e. noblesse oblige ). 
America’s Ruling Elite has transmogrified into an incestuous self-serving few unapologetically plundering the many. In their hubris-soaked arrogance, their right to rule is unquestioningly based on their moral and intellectual superiority to “the little people” they loot with abandon. 
Rather than feel a responsibility to the nation, America’s Elite views the status quo as a free pass to self-aggrandizement. 
Much has changed in America in the past 46 years. Not only have wages and salaries declined as a share of “economic growth,” but the wealth that has been generated has flowed to the top of the wealth/power pyramid (see chart below). 
Social mobility has also declined drastically: Restoring America’s Economic Mobility , as has trust in government and key institutions. 
As Frank Buckley, the author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America observed: 
“In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center.” 
The top .01% has seen its share of the household wealth triple from 7% to 22% in the past four decades, while the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the bottom 90% has plummeted from 36% to 23%. 
As I described in America’s Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired and Now That the Presidential-Election Side Show Is Finally Ending…. , the economy is rapidly undergoing structural changes that tend to reward the top 5% class of technocrats and managers and the top .1% with millions in mobile capital, while leaving the bottom 95% in the dust. 
Rather than address this rising inequality directly and honestly, the Ruling Elite has parroted propaganda and policies that protect their gains while obfuscating the reality that most American households have been losing ground for decades, a decline that has been masked by replacing real income with rising debt. 
The ceaseless parroting of the Ruling Elite and the Mainstream Media that prosperity has been rising for everyone is nothing less than the destruction of truth. This propaganda has one purpose: to mask the inequality and injustice built into the American status quo. 
The rapid concentration of wealth has also concentrated political power in the hands of a few who seamlessly combine public and private modes of power. 
This wealth and power protects the Ruling Elite from the perverse consequences of their dominance. Their precious offspring rarely serve at the point of the American military’s spear, they never lose their jobs or income when corporations shift production (and R&D, etc.) overseas, and they are never replaced with illegal immigrants paid under the table. 
Rather, the Ruling Elite is pleased to pay immigrants a pittance to care for their children, clean their luxe homes, walk their dogs, etc. 
This is why we’re enraged: we bear the consequences of the Ruling Elite’s dominance. The system is rigged to benefit the few, who use their wealth and power to protect themselves from the destructive consequences of their self-serving dominance. 
This rage is as yet inchoate, sensed but not yet understood as the inevitable result of a broken system and a predatory Elite that exploits the system to maximize their private gain by any means available . 
ELECTION NOTE: As I write this Tuesday evening, it appears Donald Trump may win the presidency. For those who cannot understand how anyone could possibly vote for Trump, please read the above essay again and ponder what people were voting against by voting for Trump . 
They may well have been voting against the corrupt, self-serving status quo rather than voting for the individual Donald Trump. 
There are very few opportunities for powerless non-elites to register their disapproval of the nation’s Ruling Elite and the corrupt status quo. Voting for an outsider in a national election is one such rare opportunity. 
As I noted in October, The Ruling Elite Has Lost the Consent of the Governed (October 20, 2016). 
If you still don’t understand how Trump could win, please read the above essay as many times as is necessary for you to get it: the status quo of corrupt self-serving insiders generates injustice and inequality as its only possible output.",FAKE
"Three days before Florida’s climactic primary, Marco Rubio sank deep into a black leather armchair on his campaign bus. He had just spent 25 minutes smiling wide for supporters at a high-end boutique selling $150 candles. “Don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!” he shouted from the third step of a wood-paneled staircase. Now, on his parked bus, the afternoon sunlight shut out by drawn blinds, the smile was gone. The candidate knew it was already over.

“There will be a reckoning,” he warned.

“There will be a reckoning in the mainstream media, where all these networks and cable networks are going to have to ask themselves why did they give so much coverage for the sake of ratings,” he said. “There will be a reckoning in the conservative movement, where a lot of people who for a long time have espoused conservative principles seem to not care about those anymore in rallying around Donald Trump because they like his attitude.

“I think there are a lot of people in the conservative movement who are going to spend years and years explaining to people how they fell into this and how they allowed this to happen.”

For now, though, it is Rubio’s reckoning that’s at hand. And not just because of Trump or cable television networks.

Rubio’s strategy was always an inside straight—overly reliant on a candidate’s ability to dominate free national media in order to outperform, outwit and eventually outlast a wide field of rivals. It was sketched out by an inner circle of advisers who believed they could eschew the very fundamentals of presidential campaigning because they had a candidate who transcended.

That's exactly what happened in 2016; it just turned out Rubio wasn’t the one transcending.

Even before his picturesque launch at symbolic Freedom Tower in Miami last spring, Rubio’s aides were hardly the only ones who saw in Rubio an answer to the Republican Party’s prayers: a young, charismatic and Hispanic conservative, the son of a bartender and a maid with remarkably broad appeal across a GOP spectrum riven by ideological and stylistic divisions. He’d been plastered on the cover of Time as “The Republican Savior.” Rubio was the kind of rare talent who could win a primary and then articulate a conservative message that resonated in a fast-changing country in the general.

And he scared the daylights out of the Democrats.

So while other campaigns touted “shock and awe” fundraising networks and precise, psychographic analytics and voter targeting operations, Rubio’s tight-knit group of mostly 40-something bros believed wholeheartedly that they didn’t need a specific early-state win. They didn't need a particular political base. They didn’t need to talk process. They didn't need a ground game. They didn’t need to be the immediate front-runner.

All they needed was Marco.

Their confidence bordered on arrogance. Sure, his closest advisers—campaign manager Terry Sullivan and media strategists Todd Harris and Heath Thompson—were right that their candidate was likable. He began the race as the second choice of many Republican primary voters. They just never figured out how to make voters embrace him as their first.

Trump was drawing away the cameras they had banked on lifting their rising star, sucking up all the media attention as he dominated media cycle after media cycle, setting the parameters of the 2016 debate, day after day. Suddenly, their telegenic candidate couldn’t get on TV.

And when Rubio stumbled, as all candidates do, there was no infrastructure to catch him, no field program to lift his support, no base to fall back upon.

All they had was Marco.

As Jeb Bush was quickly beset by leaks, backbiting and inflated expectations, Rubio’s campaign more closely resembled the Barack Obama model of 2008 from the start. It was a close-knit group, led by Sullivan, Thompson and Harris, with Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director since 2011, Rich Beeson, the deputy campaign manager, pollster Whit Ayers and a few others in the innermost circle.

They held conference calls three times a week to stay on the same page, and based their headquarters only a few blocks from Capitol Hill to better coordinate with Rubio when the Senate was in session. Sullivan ran a tight ship. In the early months of the campaign, he insisted on personally signing off on every expense above $500. The limit was later relaxed but symbolic of a campaign that knew it had to scrimp to compete with Bush, whose super PAC hauled in $100 million in the first half of 2015.

The campaign spared no expense in setting up events to be television-friendly. There were invariably press risers, tidy backdrops and television lighting to portray Rubio, quite literally, in the best imaginable light.

But one of the things Sullivan seemed least interested in was field offices. The campaign would force volunteers and supporters to pay for their own yard signs, posters and bumper stickers.

Rubio seemed to agree. In August, he was due to open his Iowa state headquarters the morning after flipping pork chops at the state fair, but he bailed at the last minute. The reason: heading back to Florida for his children’s start of school. The grand opening would be delayed for 10 days, and it would occur without Rubio. He wouldn’t announce a state director to run operations in the crucial caucuses for another month.

It was a fitting episode for a campaign that had bragged about how staff could work just as well out of a Starbucks with a laptop. The campaign wouldn’t announce supporters in Iowa’s various regions until January 2016, and only then under intensifying pressure from allies. And when campaign officials announced their “field offices,” they wouldn’t say exactly where they actually were, making it all but impossible for volunteers to volunteer.

It’s not that Rubio’s team didn’t know the data science that powered Obama’s two campaigns or that studies showed that door knocks and personal phone calls are among the most effective means to get out the vote. It’s that they’re expensive and time-consuming. And Rubio’s team thought they had figured out a better way: targeting exactly their voters with pinpoint precision online, on TV and in the mail.

“It’s almost like they wanted to prove they could win without doing some of the stuff people have to do to win,” said one Rubio supporter very familiar with the campaign’s planning. “Were they just fucking lazy or arrogant?”

In fact, they had designed a campaign to fit neatly with Rubio’s own conception of himself as master political communicator.

“Marco is convinced, and perhaps rightly so, that he has the skills to convince anyone,” said Dan Gelber, who served for eight years in the Florida Legislature with Rubio, including two as the Democratic counterpart when Rubio was GOP speaker. “He really believes that if you give him an audience, he can turn them to his way of thinking.”

Donors were unnerved by it, though. So Terry Sullivan outlined the plans to some of Rubio’s supporters at a closed-door strategy session at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas in October.

The campaign’s goal, Sullivan explained, was simply to put Rubio “in front of as many voters as possible as often as possible,” according to an attendee. And that meant getting free media coverage and buying paid television ads. So the campaign had locked in ad rates early—paying as little as 10 cents for every dollar spent by Bush’s super PAC. At times, they’d spend far less than Bush’s allies and still out-advertise them.

The team wanted Marco to sell himself on TV, not rely on second-rate surrogates or volunteers. And that meant less focus on door-knocking or volunteer phone-calling.

Donors and early-state supporters who had grown accustomed to presidential-level coddling and attention pushed back. And by December, Optimus, the firm paid nearly $900,000 to run Rubio’s analytics operation, prepared a public memo to quiet the critics. The memo described a hypothetical Midwestern state with 150,000 likely voters (roughly the expected Iowa turnout at the time) and one candidate at 20 percent, trailing another at 30 percent.

It was clear to everyone it was about Rubio and Iowa.

In it, Optimus made the case that running a ground game “missed the elephant in the room” as it nudged support up less than 1 percentage point. “You’ve got a 10 point gap you need to close,” the memo read.

“All this is not to say that door knocking doesn’t work. We know it does,” the memo concluded.

Sullivan put it most succinctly to the New York Times in December: “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”

The ground-free strategy surprised Democrats and even some of Rubio’s rivals.

“This isn’t even a question in the mind of anyone who’s worked on presidential campaigns,” Dan Pfieffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, told POLITICO earlier this year. “You have to build an extensive and aggressive ground operation to win.”

Ted Cruz had invested more in ground operations than any other Republican, and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, told POLITICO he was surprised how few ground troops any of his opponents were mobilizing.

""It’s a huge investment; it’s a huge investment of resources when a lot of people might not know how many resources they have, so I understand why they don’t do it,” Roe said. But there’s an advantage: ""The ground game just never goes away.""

",REAL
"“I’ve got my six-month, regular cancer checkup in June, and so I’m saying I hope they don’t come out with any kind of decision, just in case it’s bad news, until after,” Hines said. “You always get nervous, usually a day before or day of, going for a checkup. But I think I started a little more on the worrying ahead of time.”

Hines, 59, has been relying on health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces to help cover the costs of those checkups. But she has the misfortune of residing in a state, Virginia, where the federal government is operating that marketplace. Because of that, she could end up losing her tax subsidy to help purchase coverage right at the time her health takes a dive for the worse.

The Supreme Court will issue a ruling this month on a lawsuit engineered by conservative activists alleging that a brief phrase in the law -- “exchange established by the state” -- means subsidies can only be provided to individuals residing in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. Should the justices side with Obamacare's critics, Hines would be one of an estimated 6.4 million people in 34 states whose subsidies will disappear. Many will be forced to drop their health insurance because of heightened cost.

For someone like Hines, who has had breast cancer three times, most recently in 2009, this presents a Hobson's choice. She considers health care coverage essential and must get screenings twice a year to ensure her cancer doesn't come back. But she has little money to afford insurance on her own. A former public relations professional, she’s devoted her life to caring for her ailing, octogenarian mother, and currently works part-time as an educator at the aquarium near her home in Virginia Beach. Her low income qualifies Hines for a subsidy that cuts the price she pays by about half, to $200 a month.

“I could probably manage another year,” Hines said when asked if she could afford the coverage without the subsidy. She would have to draw down more of her retirement savings to pay for health care. But doesn’t have enough money to hold on to health insurance until she turns 65 and becomes eligible for Medicare, she said.

Hines was one of six people the Huffington Post featured in a report this March on the case surrounding Obamacare's subsidies. At the time, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the case and the prospect of those subsidies potentially disappearing was becoming less abstract for those in states with federally run exchanges. The clock is ticking even louder now. And so, we decided to catch up with those we interviewed to see how their circumstances, health and mental well-being has changed.

Lucas had an aortic aneurysm in 2010, so he has to keep monitoring his heart condition. Even though his most recent tests came up clean in May, Lucas knows the computed tomography (CT) scan he needs as part of his checkup every two years would cost him $11,000 without insurance, instead of $50 now. He also knows his prescriptions would run to $2,600 every three months rather than $65 with insurance. Lucas, who is self-employed, earns $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he said.

Lucas might be shielded from the ramifications of a ruling against the subsidy if Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) persuades the GOP-majority state legislature to go along with his proposal to set up a state-run exchange. But as Lucas takes stock of the court decision to come, he's struck by what he sees as dramatically misplaced priorities among lawmakers in Washington.

“Billions of dollars in corporate welfare to oil companies and whatnot, you know, and that’s not a problem for them, but I’m a person who gets $2,400 a year in subsidies to help pay for my insurance -- and I pay almost three times that much in taxes, so it’s not like I’m taking them on the negative side,” Lucas said.

Blitz turns 33 on Monday. Since birth, he has dealt with aortic valve stenosis, meaning he has a heart valve that is too narrow. He recently received good news from his cardiologist that he can delay an expensive major operation he thought he’d need this year. But he will have to undergo a less serious procedure at a later date.

All this would be difficult to handle on its own. But it's compounded by the problems Blitz has had in navigating the health care law. He ended up with a plan he doesn't recall picking. He lost his subsidy of $30 a month even though his income level should qualify him for some tax credit. And he assumed that his home state would get rid of all Obamacare exchanges entirely if the court ruled against the subsidies (in fact, state Republicans have passed a bill saying that Arizona won't set up a state exchange. The federal one will remain regardless).

Were he to ultimately lose the subsidy, Blitz would figure out a way to pay for his insurance. He calls himself ""fortunate"" in that regard, compared to those who don't have savings to dip into or expenses to cut or friends to rely on. But Blitz's fortune -- if you want to call it that -- comes at a cost, and it underscores how the damage from a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs extends beyond those who currently receive tax credits.

Without the subsidies, most of the low- and moderate-income people using the health insurance exchanges will exit the exchanges, leaving those with the greatest health care needs -- people like Blitz with medical conditions -- as an increasing share of the market. Because people with greater medical needs generate more medical bills, that would increase expenses for insurance companies, forcing them to increase premiums. Those higher premiums, in turn, would lead more people to drop coverage. In the industry, they call this a “death spiral.”",REAL
"Comments 
A man who was believed to be on ecstasy has reportedly had a five hour chat with a hand after a girl he was trying to chat up told him to “talk to the hand ‘cause the face ain’t listening”. 
Simon Webber, a twenty six year old used car salesman from Worcester, England, claims to have had a “really good chat” with “the hand” and hopes they can “grab a coffee” some time in the future. 
“The hand was totally peng mate,” claimed Mr Webber during a catch up with Wunderground earlier today. “The girl who owned the hand was well fit so I tried to talk to her but she actually turned out to be a bit of a dick and told me to talk to her hand. I’m really glad now because I instantly hit it off with the hand.” 
“I’ve not connected with anything like that since the time I took acid while I was camping in the Lake District and met a goat named Boris in the forest,” continued Mr Webber. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got more in common with things than people, it’s like I can’t have a good conversation with something unless they’re not able to answer me back.” 
“Me and the hand talked about all kinds of stuff,” revealed a reminiscent Mr Webber. “Brexit, the U.S. elections, diseases that have been eradicated, the potential dangers of genetically modifying food, chemtrail and all sorts of other really interesting things. She’s a great listener, I didn’t get her number but I’m sure I’ll see her around. Hopefully we can hang out again, I don’t want to be getting ahead of myself but I think she could be the one.” 
According to Stacey Poole, the owner of the hand, she had her Saturday night ruined by “some little creature” who was following her around the club all night. 
“I was just trying to have a good night but that little cretin wouldn’t leave me alone,” complained Stacey. “He tried to talk to me but he was off his nut so I gave him the old ‘talk to the hand’ line and put my hand in his face. The daft twat took it literally and started talking to my hand, at first it was kind of funny but I couldn’t get rid of him, he was following me everywhere, eventually I just had to leave. He ruined my night.” ",FAKE
"They came close in Iowa, but just fell short of claiming victory. Tuesday night in New Hampshire was a different story.

The political outsiders have taken control of this election.

Donald Trump won Tuesday night’s Republican primary in New Hampshire. By a margin of 34 percent to 16 percent for John Kasich, Trump proved that his slogan of “Make America Great Again” resonates with voters – in a big way.

On the Democratic side, self proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders edged Hillary Clinton out by 20 percentage points. His message railing against the rigged economy, special interests that control Washington and pledging to give Americans universal healthcare and free college tuition brought together a larger coalition of young voters than the one Barack Obama built in 2008.

To my mind, Tuesday night’s results show that there are finally politicians who understand how marginalized, disenfranchised and betrayed a majority of Americans feel. It’s both Republicans and Democrats, including the 42 percent of Americans who now identify as independent because they think the two parties don’t represent their values and positions.

We are seeing a full scale rejection of the political establishment. This is a threat that we did not take seriously enough over the past few years, as evidenced by the fact that most rejected Trump as a clown and a joke. His ideas on illegal immigration and placing a temporary ban on Muslims ruffled our national feathers even though a majority of Republican primary voters agreed with him. That’s how out of touch our political class has become.

Indeed, 46 percent of GOP voters say they feel betrayed by Republican politicians. Trump won 32 percent of that group.

We did the same thing to Bernie Sanders who began this race upwards of 50 points behind Hillary Clinton. We said a socialist could never win. And he may not be able to win a national election, but we are seeing an electorate so starved for an honest and trustworthy politician that they will make allowances for ideologies that they may not have considered before.

Sanders has argued about oligarchy and money in politics and has been his whole career. He doesn’t flip flop or evolve on his advocacy for the average American.

Sanders is just Bernie Sanders. And Donald Trump is just Donald Trump.

We are living in a time when trust in Americans institutions has collapsed. A recent Pew survey shows that less than 20 percent of Americans trust the government always or most of the time. And a CNN poll showed that 60 percent think the American Dream is unachievable today.

Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that America is in revolt. Honesty and trustworthiness matters more than whether a candidate has experience or can win in November according to voters. And the establishment isn’t delivering anything resembling what the American populace desires in their political leaders.

I see a clearer path to the nomination for Trump than for Sanders, but there is no doubt that Americans have spoken and they’re done with business as usual.

Douglas E. Schoen has served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. He has more than 30 years experience as a pollster and political consultant. He is also a Fox News contributor and co-host of ""Fox News Insiders"" Sundays on Fox News Channel at 7 pm ET. He is the author of 12 books. His latest is ""The Nixon Effect: How Richard Nixon’s Presidency Fundamentally Changed American Politics"" (Encounter Books, February 2016). Follow Doug on Twitter @DouglasESchoen.",REAL
"Wikileaks Just Released Her Full Isis Donor List With Names! 
WikiLeaks just finished the job that started few months ago! Hillary just got killed! She is not going to survive this! It’s too much! Pure treason! 
According to Conservative Daily Post: Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton are the founders of ISIS. We have proven that through emails and documents leaked from WikiLeaks, but liberal media outlets still refuse to cover it. 
After all, they are still more focused on what Trump said eleven years ago than what Hillary has actually done. 
Because of brave patriots like Julian Assange, we have been given more evidence that Hillary Clinton is more connected to ISIS than we originally believed. 
An email was leaked between Clinton and John Podesta indicating that: “Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region” to accuse Qatar and Saudi Arabia of “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [or ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” 
Citing the need to “use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets,” said Hillary to Podesta while arguing the current developments in the Middle East were “important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country.” 
Odd that Clinton argues Saudi Arabia and Qatar are helping fund ISIS when Hillary’s largest donations come from those two countries. 
In another correspondence from 2012, the Director of Foreign Policy at the Clinton Foundation, Amitabh Desai, set up a meeting with Bill Clinton for five minutes in exchange for a $1,000,000 “birthday check.” 
The email adds that the small but rich nation occupying the Qatar Peninsula would “welcome the Clinton Foundation’s suggestions for investments in Haiti — particularly on education and health.” Desai added that while Qatar had already “allocated most of their $20 million … they were happy to consider projects we suggest.” Like this? Share it now.",FAKE
source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
"Russia stops shipping Soyuz space rockets to France 28.10.2016 | Source: AP photo French newspaper Les Echos reported that Russia's state-run corporation Roscosmos will would not deliver Soyuz rockets to Arianespace of France. First off, Russia demands the receipt of the funds blocked in connection with the Yukos case. A statement from Roscosmos says that the Russian company will not work for free. ""No money - no products,"" Les Echos quoted a message from the corporation. It goes about 300 million euros, which Arianespace was supposed to pay to Roscosmos, but the funds were frozen by the Court of Arbitration in The Hague in the case of former Yukos shareholders . Previously, Roscosmos had won a case in France about the arrest of accounts of the state corporation in the Yukos case. ""They acknowledged that our arguments were correct, but we will continue defending our interests,"" director of communications at Roscosmos, Igor Burenkov said. On April 11, France arrested $700 million of Roskosmos and Space Communications money in connection with a judicial decision on the case of Yukos. Interestingly, NASA plans to purchase seats for its astronauts on board the Soyuz spaceship as Boeing and SpaceX seem to be unable to prepare their spaceships on time. US-based commercial companies Boeing and SpaceX are developing their own manned spacecraft - Starliner and Dragon. The deadline is near, so Houston has decided to consider a possibility to buy extra seats on board Russia's Soyuz. NASA hopes that at least one of the private spaceships will be able to perform operational tasks by the end of 2017 or early 2018. For the time being, one of the six necessary seats on the Soyuz spaceship costs the US nearly $82 million. By 2019, the price will increase. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru",FAKE
The online comment fits closely with his campaign platform.,REAL
"GET VISIBLE! Advertise Here. Find Out More Reactors Dooms The Nuclear Industry By Yoichi Shimatsu 9-17-16 A murky web of international supply chains is being exposed in the flawed-steel parts scandal rocking the French and Japanese nuclear industries. “Serious anomalies” have been discovered in key steel components for the European Pressurized Water Reactor (E-PWR) being constructed at Flamanville, France, on the English Channel. The recent exposure of brittle steel has led to a sullen admission by nuclear-tech supplier AREVA of metallurgical defects in at least 400 different types of reactor parts produced by its subsidiary Le Creusot Forge since 1964. Oddly, nearly identical inconsistencies in steel alloys were found in parts imported from Japan for the Flamanville project. Dozens of steel items, which have also been supplied to nuclear plants worldwide, were produced by the Japan Casting and Forging Company (JCFC), a joint venture of three of that nation’s biggest defense contractors, including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metals. Its industrial base in Kitakyushu on the southern island of Kyushu was a major hub of weapons production by Yawata, the forerunner of Nippon Steel, which supplied the Imperial Navy, including the armor for the super-battleship Yamato, and Mitsubishi Aircraft, which built the Zero attack plane. The list of defective steel parts reveals how the allied French and Japanese nuclear industries are now joined at the hip like mutant twins. Mitsubishi and AREVA are partnered in the ATMEA third-generation PWR design program. AREVA is a shareholder in Japan Steel Works, based in northern Hokkaido, a producer of 6-ton single-cast reactor vessels. TEPCO has been allied with AREVA for the decommissioning of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. These interlocking relationships hidden under global marketing campaigns make it difficult to tell where key components are actually sourced. How did Le Creusot Forge evade detection of its defective components for more than two decades? What accounts for the chronic failure of the French and European nuclear-regulatory agencies, along with the UN watchdog IAEA, to properly inspect key parts for the world’s biggest nuclear reactors? Did defective steel have a role in innumerable accidents and leaks at nuclear plants in Japan, Britain, France and the United States? Is endemic bribery of high-ranking politicians and state bureaucrats by the energy industry at the root of a blanket cover-up of radioactive releases and equipment breakdowns at nuclear stations worldwide? While the quick answers are obvious to anyone who’s not a nuclear apologist on the secret payroll, further exposure of the ugly details is important toward breaking the code of silence that grips the nuclear sector and large utility companies along with their political flunkies, who together comprise a nuclear mafia that operates exactly like an organized crime family. Meltdowns in the Works It’s important to remember that AREVA and Mitsubishi represent the “creme de la creme” of the global nuclear industry as producers of third-generation PWRS and advanced pressurized water reactors (APWRs). Other major players are still stuck with antiquated systems such as boiling water reactors (BWRs), including Hitachi-GE, Toshiba-Westinghouse, and their Russian and Chinese competitors. These nuclear players, beset with the wreckage at Fukushima, still try to redeem their horrid performance record with slick graphics and fast talk, as if those meltdowns in Japan never happened. If the undisputed technology leaders are covering up hundreds of defective components, then the rest of the pack must be over their heads in production problems and technical failures. The global scale of Areva and Mitsubishi’s debacle is just one indicator of a grossly inefficient and incompetent global nuclear technology industry. Among the nuclear facilities stuck with shoddy components from Creusot, JCFC and Mitsubishi: Reactor vessel cover heads (RVCH, sealing below and on top of the cylindrical reactor vessel): - 15 reactor closure units in the United States; - 3 units in Sweden - 1 in Brazil - in planning, Hinkley Point in Britain, the Sinop plant in Turkey, a project in Jordan, proposed plant in Indonesia, and 10 planned reactors in Vietnam. Steam Generators (SG), a high-pressure chamber that powers the electricity turbines: - 15 units in France; - 10 units in Belgium, now under guard due to terrorist threats; - 6 units in Mexico JCFC channel heads, which move coolant water into the steam-pressure unit: - 18 reactor vessels at 9 nuclear plants in France; - 13 reactor vesselss at 6 nuclear plants in Japan, including two restarted Mitsubishi reactors at Kyushu Electric’s restarted and operational Satsuma-Sendai plant, located near several faults. JCFC also produces 5-ton reactor vessels, which are cast as single block and not welded as in the more vulnerable Chinese and Russian designs. The durability of these PWR vessels, which operate under high temperature and pressure, has been fundamentally challenged by the rapid breech of the much heavier and thicker-walled boiling waters reactors at Fukushima. Mitsubishi had planned to install neutron reflectors to raise efficiency while limiting high-speed particle damage to APWR reactor vessels, but has so far failed to admit how these reflectors can act like beryllium mirrors that intensify chain reactions inside nuclear bombs. Notably, the U.S. Department of Energy withdrew its participation in Mitsubishi APWR development immediately after the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, which proved that nuclear reactors are bombs waiting to be detonated. Zones of Weakness Suspecting quality-control problems at the Flamandville project, l’Autorite de Surete Nucleaire (ASN), or French nuclear safety authority, in 2014 ordered AREVA to conduct material tests on its steel components. That occurred seven years after the E-PWR project was started at the existing nuclear plant site in view of Jersey and Guernsey islands and located on the same peninsula as Calais. In April 2015, the ASN announced: “The results of these tests revealed the presence of a zone in which there was a high carbon concentration, leading to lower than expected mechanical toughness values. Initial measurements confirmed the presence of this anomaly in the reactor vessel head and reactor vessel bottom head of the Flamanville European Pressurized Reactor (EPR).” That is bad news indeed, since it was the top head that got blown off at the Fukushima Dai-ichi No.3 reactor on March 15, 2011, sending a mushroom cloud into the jet stream moving toward North America while showering cascades of metallic micro-pellets containing radioactive isotopes over northern Japan. The bottom head plates of all three melted-down reactors at Fukushima were breached, allowing molten uranium and plutonium to flow like lava into the soil below the plant and subsequently releasing an unstoppable stream of radioactive isotopes into the Pacific Ocean to cause the greatest extinction event in human history. Even though nuclear engineers predict most criticality “events” in civilian reactors to be less damaging than the Fukushima catastrophe,, the vulnerability of the vessel heads is a serious threat that can wipe out all of France’s agricultural and livestock production overnight, as well as pose a lasting threat to public health across Europe. Chernobyl is proof of that. Not Quite Carbon Copies The mechanical lab tests on the Creusot heads showed 0.22 percent of carbon content in the steel alloy, significantly higher than the 0.16 limit. While a variance of 0.06 percent may not seem like much, it could mean the difference between a near-accident and a reactor breach that ends in a total meltdown. Carbon is the prevalent alloy in the steel-making process. A higher carbon content forms stronger bonds with steel atoms by creating a cubic cage-like structure. As shown in carbon-steel knives, however, an increasing amount of carbon makes hardened steel more brittle. In contrast, low carbon steel is softer but also more ductile. Malleability or “toughness” (as in resilience) is desirable in pots, kettles and nuclear reactors, since these vessels must expand when heated and shrink while cooled, without breakage or fracturing after repeated use. Pressurized water reactors operate at temperatures of more than 300 Celsius and internal pressures of about one metric ton per square inch. In event of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, however, both temperature and pressure can rise rapidly. There can also be an additional threat from the Wigner effect of neutron bombardment, which blows apart iron atoms in the crystal matrix of steel. Inside pockmarked steel, radioactive releases hasten a reactor breach. Under sufficient heat and cooling, steel anneals, or rebuilds its crystal structure. But that will not happen during a meltdown due to rising internal temperatures, as shown at Fukushima, ad water-cooling becomes a futile gesture once a reactor is holed. A folk saying often wrongly attributed to King Richard III goes: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost. for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost” . . . and so on to the loss of a kingdom. The global nuclear industry is now suffering an avalanche of losses due to a minuscule surplus of 0.06 percent of carbon in steel, sparking a change of events that threatens the future of nuclear power. Complicated Traceability The only publicly stated recommendation from the French nuclear authority was to install a mechanical analysis laboratory inside the Creusot Forge facility in the Saone-et-Loire district. A modern engineering facility like Creusot already has equipment with computer controls and monitoring systems, which have failed to solve the carbon anomalies. Technology may have reached the limits of materials science, and the brittleness program may not be fixable. Omitted from the ASN safety review, AREVA, Le Creusot Forge, JCFC or Mitsubishi is any mention of the underlying cause of the potentially dangerous “anomaly” in the carbon content of steel components. Exactly where and when in the production process does the metallurgical ratio structure of steel become inconsistent? For people unfamiliar with steel-making, a basic perception problem is rooted in the assumption that steel is impermeable. At the nano-level, however, the lattice of iron is a sponge-like material, which allows passage of gases like oxygen (the cause of rust) and carbon monoxide (which depletes rust). Despite its limitations, no other metal can match the strength and cost-effectiveness of steel. In the steel-making process, carbon is released inside a blast furnace by burning coke, a porous form of coal after its impurities have been removed by intense heat. The burning coke melts the pellets of ion ore. Carbon monoxide gas from coke combustion is reductive(removes oxygen) and restores iron oxide (rust) back into pig iron. Then oxygen is introduced to bond with the carbon monoxide to form carbon dioxide, which is then removed from the blast furnace. In the next phase, oxygen lowers carbon levels inside the steel, emitting more carbon dioxide, leaving the end product of low-carbon steel with fairly uniform consistency. It is not possible to maintain uniformity of carbon content through many rounds of reheating. The steel block is repeatedly heated for hot forging, which involves heavy-duty hammering of the metal after it becomes ductile in a gas-fired oven. The forging required for curved reactor vessel covers and channel heads likely puts sufficient stress on the steel to displace carbon atoms. The final results can be affected by the uneven contours of the object and differing densities of the metal, especially where it has been heavily forged, potentially causing displacement of carbon into denser clusters. That at least is a plausible explanation for the carbon anomalies as opposed to the closed-mouth silence from the nuclear industry, which has been totally unable to explain why it produces hundreds of types of products with metallurgical flaws. There are possible industrial design solutions to this morass of failed production techniques, but that’s none of my business. Then again, there may be no solution to the fundamental problem of carbon drift in steel-making, at least nothing that is within reasonable cost to a nuclear industry already beset by 300-percent contact overruns at Flamanville. Qualifications at Question Who am I to impudently challenge the entire nuclear establishment over issues of quality-control that are heading toward another Fukushima-scale disaster? One does not have to be a genius to figure out what’s wrong with the nuclear industry. My blue-collar competence comes from being a former licensed welder and a millwright (an equipment fixer) at U.S. Steel Southworks in Chicago and also in the seamless tube mill at Republic Steel in Gary, Indiana, where products of large dimension on a massive scale were produced from molten steel to build oil tankers and the Alaska pipeline. Working in the industry can inspire cynicism about corporate assurances of product quality. Once on the midnight shift at the 92-inch plate mill, I witnessed an entire train of defective inch-thick steel clanking back to the steelworks. Instead of lining a super-tanker, the vast stacks of brittle metal was left to rust in a huge pile of scrap. Inspection reports were routinely fudged or completely faked to placate the corporate bosses, who’d do anything to fill an order to earn revenues for the near-bankrupt facility. On the other hand, there were outstanding moral examples of otherwise unheralded team leaders and champions of workers’ rights, but that’s another story, which the latecomer to Southside Chicago named Barack Obama knows nothing about. The nearly century-old mill, a vast maze of wreckage on the shore of Lake Michigan where long ore ships from open-pit mines in Minnesota docked, was littered with giant ingots glowing red as they set to cool, the only trustworthy source of heat against the icy winter gusts. Despite the constant risks of injuries and accidental death, metalwork was still practiced as an art by older workers at the fire-spewing ovens, as they judged the readiness of steel in its stages by noticing subtle changes in its glowing hue, faint differences in the smell of its fumes, and the onset of scintillating sparks. My knowledge of steel actually began before then as a weekend blacksmith during university days, when I helped my welding instructor set up forges in an old barn near the rocky site of the fateful war dance of The Prophet Tenskwatawa who emboldened Chief Tecumsah’s Shawnee warriors against the encroaching 4th U.S. Infantry in the Indiana territory during the year prior to the War of 1812. Blood and steel on the land that was once the world’s greatest stand of hardwood forest, since decimated down to flat fields of gene-modified corn and soybeans. Although a power hammer was installed in the beamed barn with hard effort, the dull mechanical beast was rarely used since nothing could match the ring of a hammer dropping in rhythmic cadence onto red-hot metal over an anvil. At the forge, my hand turned the rotary bellows to raise blue flames out of the self-made coke, while my eyes stared into that fiery cradle of every civilization that has ever risen and fallen since the start of the Iron Age, from the Hittites and the Mycenaeans of Homer, the Aryan realm of Zoroaster to the Mauryan Empire of the Buddhist king Asoka, to ancient China, Rome, the Arab world and Europe, and culminating in the Industrial Revolution, on down to that very hour when B-52s were mercilessly pummeling Vietnam with tons of ordnance. Steel holds the power over life and death, crafted into swords or ploughshares, and therefore must be imbued with virtue and justice, as pledged by every master swordmaker and authentic gunsmith. Only in our time has a crazed pseudo-scientific priesthood willfully and foolishly violated the sacred union of fire and metal, so that their abominable faith in atom-splitting can be “proven” in a false cosmology disguised as scientific theory, while bringing devastation upon humanity, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Chernobyl and Fukushima, and on until their abuse of technology ends with the total extinction of life on this planet. The demented cult of nuclear believers have since thrown their support behind Shinzo Abe, a minion of the apocalyptic guru of the Aum Shinrikyo cult and his predecessor, the founder of Sukyo Mahikari, Yoshikazu Okada. In an exhortation that resonates in today’s defect-ridden global nuclear industry, the militarist Okada urged his followers to “plant nuclear bombs everywhere, and to occasionally detonate an atomic explosion” to keep lesser peoples in fear and servitude. Every reactor is a time bomb ticking down to zero hour. That heinous injunction, which explains the murderous secrecy of Japan’s nuclear industry, and for that matter of the entire global nuclear sector, is the only explanation for the installation of defective reactors in more and more countries. Intentional or not, their common endgame is mass death through the spread of radioactivity, sending a plague of cancer everywhere and afterthe Fukushima meltdowns the start of a global extinction event. Theirs is the mad vision of the Final War preached by Shoko Asahara, now apparently pardoned of the death penalty for his role in the gassing 20,000 subway commuters at the morning rush hour in Tokyo, that opening act in this last harvest of souls. Against grotesque lies of the deceivers, along with public indifference and mental servitude, rusted metal must be purged with fire. After iron is refined in smoke and purified in flames to become steel, and metal rod is hammered into blade, then as a thin blue wave ripples toward the tapered edge, ready for quenching with a thrust into cold water, the sword is tempered. Honest men will rise and step forward to their calling so that life might triumph over evil.",FAKE
"A new decree by the Russian government would refuse driver's licenses to transgender people, as well as other several other groups. The Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights reports Decision 1604 made on Jan. 6 adds new classifications to a list of “medical conditions and medication restrictions to driving.” The list includes “all transgender people, bigender, asexuals, transvestites, crossdressers, people who need in a sex reassignment.” These restrictions, in the association’s estimation, could ensnare women with underdeveloped breasts, a man with a thin beard, or anyone interested in BDSM. Amputees and people under 4’11” could also be prevented from driving.",REAL
"It is always interesting to watch democracy in action and Iowa is ground zero.

Many political pundits and media analysts complain about the attention Iowa receives from candidates and the media because it goes first. But it also is a state filled with people who are willing to pay attention, to go to small events and forums (more than 1,500 have been held) and to show up at a caucus on a cold, often snowy night to participate in a ritual few states duplicate.

Millions of dollars are spent on TV commercials (over 60,000) and organization that Monday night produced a record turnout.

Iowa doesn't always produce the eventual winners but it does eliminate the losers. With 17 Republican candidates starting this process, there are really only three or four real candidates now with voter support and sufficient monies to go on to the remaining contests.

With a record voter turnout in Iowa, the winner, Ted Cruz goes on with his extraordinary organization and conservative supporters with a big upset.

Marco Rubio, the best debater, came on strong and gained real momentum. He came very close to coming in second. Certainly he has to be viewed as a very serious candidate and the best bet to become the establishment candidate.

Trump is Trump and his special appeal to new voters and the angry anti-Washington element will go on, too, but with unpredictable results. He also paid a price for missing the last debate and fighting Fox News.

Ben Carson held his 10 percent base, but his candidacy is short lived and beyond Iowa has minimal support.

The biggest losers are Bush, Christie and Huckabee. Bush spent the most money and dropped like a rock.

Christie's bluster, unlike Trump’s, didn't sell. He has no money and no future in this race.

And Huckabee, who won this race eight years, and thought he could be a serious challenger against Romney in 2012, was a bottom dweller getting less than 2 percent of the vote. He raised no money and has no appeal and barely has enough money left to buy a bus ticket back to Arkansas. He quickly waved the flag of surrender and wisely quit the race.

One more may make the cut after Iowa, but this is the field now and it will be fascinating to watch.

Monday night’s win is a giant victory for Cruz and his team. He won in spite of a greater turnout than in years past and benefited from the dramatic increase in new voters. And now on to New Hampshire!



Edward J. Rollins is a Fox News contributor. He is a former assistant to President Reagan and he managed his reelection campaign. He is a senior presidential fellow at Hofstra University and a member of the Political Consultants Hall of Fame. He is a strategist for Great America PAC, an independant group that is supporting Donald Trump for president.",REAL
"When I woke up on Thursday morning, the world was different (again). While I slept, nine people were murdered attending Wednesday night Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Rev. Daniel L. Simmons, Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, and Susie Jackson lost their lives during a midweek service in which they welcomed a newcomer, Dylann Storm Roof, who would later turn a gun on them, careful to leave a living witness to recount the details of what happened. It does not escape me that it was witnessing — a term used to refer to an act of Christian discipleship where one shares their faith with nonbelievers — that likely resulted in Roof’s invitation to join the weekly gathering, and it was the need for an (eye)witness that led him to intentionally spare the life of one of the victims.

The racist and terrorist act was premeditated and deemed a hate crime, even though some media pundits insisted that it was motivated by antagonism towards Christianity, not black people. I believe it was both. The shooting was not only an assault on black humanity, it was an attack on black faith, which is one of the few things black folk have left in the face of so much loss, despair and ongoing oppression. For generations, black folk have turned to their religious faith and to the church for comfort during times of social injustice (as evidenced in the rich and storied history of Emanuel Church).

Now, one of the few safe spaces that black folk can seek out for refuge has been turned into a crime scene.

Roof’s targeting of a place of worship is an attempt to compromise the safety and sanctity of the black church. Before Wednesday night, the black church seemed to be one of the few places left where black folk could assemble in public and feel seen, recognized, heard, loved and welcome. (We know from the not-so-distant past that those spaces are not the private communities in which we live, not store parking lots, not Walmart stores, not public parks, not street corners, not swimming pools, not even our homes.)

And, truth be told, while traditional black churches are safe spaces from white supremacy, they have long been unsafe spaces for folk who are gender non-conforming, same-gender loving, or women. It is important, as we hold up the black church as a whole after this tragedy, that we also hold it up to scrutiny, so that as we do the work of making church spaces safe again, we make sure that they are safe for all of us, all of the time.

I believe this moment is an opportunity for the black church to re-establish itself through the proven resiliency of black faith, and become a safe and welcome space for all believers. This is a moment to understand that in order to fight and resist white supremacy we must also dismantle and fight its co-conspirators: homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. Many times churchfolk and skinfolk are afraid of the wrong things. It is white supremacy, not nonheterosexuality, that threatens the lives and legacies of black folk in this country. It is white supremacy, not premarital sex or babies born out of wedlock, that jeopardizes our survival. It was white supremacy, not insanity, that caused Dylann Roof to walk into a black church intending to walk out with blood on his hands. We need healing that is corporate, collective, consistent and accountable.

The victims of the shooting should not have to be martyrs, hashtags, or statistics to show, once again, that our country continues to fail at holding white supremacy accountable for the death it perpetuates. This is a moment of love but also of accountability. We can hold well-meaning white allies accountable for being speechless while we are being senselessly murdered, and being sensitive and offended when we express our outrage. We can hold our policymakers accountable, insisting that the Confederate flag, a symbol of anti-black hate, be removed from government spaces (to make them safe for people of color). We can hold our churches and places of worship accountable, requiring inclusivity over conservatism, and demonstrating agape love out in the open.  We can hold ourselves and our loved ones accountable, in all the ways we need and all the ways we know, because, as Audre Lorde taught us, our silence will not protect us. We are living in a moment where being black is equally commodified and criminalized, where black people are fighting for dignity, security, humanity and the very right to blackness. This moment is a reminder that in a so-called post racially progressive world, being black remains simultaneously the most marketable, profitable, co-optable and dangerous identity marker one can hold. To be black is to be vulnerable no matter where you are and no matter where you go. To be black is to carry a marker on your skin that racists will use to identify you and in some cases kill you. Despite claims of colorblindness, or so-called transracialism, the black victims in church on Wednesday night could not claim whiteness to save themselves. It was, in fact, the pervasive lie of whiteness that cost them their life. If ever there was a place where black folk believe themselves to be free, it is within the walls of the church. There we dance, cry, pray, praise, shout, sing and testify. The doors are always open. Despite the personal challenges I have with the church, it has remained a beacon of hope, a place of healing and possibility, a refuge in times of trouble, and a safe space for lost souls and people in need, regardless of race. As a non-church-attending black woman who identifies as a Christian, I refuse to relinquish my faith to this tragedy. I refuse to allow Roof’s hate to be the end of the story. I refuse to concede that we cannot, as a people, carve out spaces for each other and make room for one another (including difference) within and without the four walls of the church. This is for white girls who pretend to be black girls when white supremacy isn’t enough. This is for black Christians who believe respectability will save our lives in the face of perpetual anti-black hetero-patriachal white supremacy, when evidence to the contrary is consistently given. This is for those of us seeking hope and holding on to faith but lacking patience. This is not enough, but it is a beginning.",REAL
"0 comments 
Hillary Clinton’s trouble staying sober has been just one of the many scandals she has faced this election season, and a newly-surfaced video isn’t going to help her reputation for being a complete lush. 
The footage was captured and shared by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker ahead of a June 1st rally in Newark, New Jersey, where Clinton appeared with rock musician Jon Bon Jovi. 
In the short clip, the Democratic nominee appears unusually jovial, singing and dancing for no apparent reason, as if she had just had a few drinks in the middle of the day. 
See it for yourself: 
— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) June 1, 2016 
As The Political Insider points out, it might be okay for your average American to toss a few back in the middle of the day, but it isn’t fine when an alcoholic wants to be leader of the free world. 
Do you think Hillary has a drinking problem? Leave your opinion in the comments section!",FAKE
"For most of the past two years, it looked like Bashar al-Assad's campaign to hold on in Syria was working. Syria's weak, uncoordinated, and increasingly Islamist rebels were being gradually pushed back. And while ISIS had seized vast parts of the country, it and Assad appeared to tolerate one another in a sort of tacit non-aggression pact designed to crush the Syrian rebels. It seemed that Syria, and the world, would be stuck with Assad's murderous dictatorship for the foreseeable future.

But in the past few weeks, things appear to have changed — potentially dramatically. The rebels have won a string of significant victories in the country's north. Assad's troop reserves are wearing thin, and it's becoming harder for him to replace his losses.

A rebel victory, to be clear, is far from imminent or even likely. At this point, it's too early to say for sure what this means for the course of the Syrian war. But the rebels have found a new momentum against Assad just as his military strength could be weakening, which could be a significant change in the trajectory of a war that has been ongoing for years.

Bashar al-Assad's forces are losing ground against the rebels, for example in northern Idlib province, where two recent rebel victories show how strong the rebels have gotten. First, in late March, Assad's forces were pushed out of Idlib City, the region's capital. Second, in late April, rebels took Jisr al-Shughour, a strategically valuable town that lies on the Assad regime's supply line in the area and near its important coastal holdings.

""Jisr al-Shughour is a good example of how the regime is, indeed, losing ground,"" Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, told me. ""Most observers were surprised at how quickly it fell, given that it is a town of some strategic importance.""

While rebels' most dramatic victories are in Idlib, they're advancing elsewhere as well. They've seized towns in the south and have repelled Assad offensives around the country.

""Losses in Idlib and the southern governorate of Deraa have placed great pressure on Assad,"" Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, writes. ""Frustration, disaffection and even incidences of protest are rising across Assad’s most ardent areas of support on Syria’s coast — some of which are now under direct attack.""

Bonsey concurs. ""Rebels have seized momentum in recent weeks and months,"" he says. ""The regime is clearly weakening to an extent that was not widely reflected in the English-language narrative surrounding the conflict.""

Recent regime defeats reflect growing unity among the rebels as well as fundamental weaknesses on the regime's side.

The Idlib advance, in particular, was led by Jaish al-Fatah, a new rebel coalition led by several different Islamist groups. While the coalition includes Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise, the jihadis don't appear to dominate the group.

""The operations also displayed a far improved level of coordination between rival factions,"" Lister writes, ""spanning from U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades, to moderate and conservative Syrian Islamists, to al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and several independent jihadist factions.""

Rebel coordination is nothing new in Syria. But this coalition stands out for its size and breadth.

""The number of fighters mobilized for the initial Idlib city campaign has been significant, and that's been just as true in subsequent operations in the north,"" Bonsey says. ""The level of coordination we've seen over several weeks, on multiple fronts, is something that we have rarely, if ever, seen from rebels in the north.""

And as the rebels have gotten more united, the regime has gotten weaker. The basic problem is attrition: Assad is losing a lot of soldiers in this war, and his regime — a sectarian Shia government in an overwhelmingly Sunni country — can't train replacements quickly enough.

Bonsey calls this an ""unsolvable manpower problem."" As a result, he says, Assad is becoming increasingly dependent on his foreign allies — Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah specifically — to lead the ground campaign.

But Iran has shown limited willingness to commit heavily to areas like Idlib, and rather is concentrating principally on defending the regime's core holdings around Damascus and the coast. According to Bonsey, ""it's a matter of priorities,"" which is to say that their resources aren't unlimited, and they've (so far) preferred to concentrate them in the most critical areas.

Iran's involvement in conflicts in Iraq and Yemen on top of Syria has left it ""really overstretched,"" according to Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. The cumulative resource investment has ""certainly had an impact on Assad losing territory in Syria,"" he concludes.

""For the regime, the status quo militarily is not sustainable,"" Bonsey says, and ""Iran's strategy in Syria does not appear sustainable. The costs to Iran of propping up Assad's rule in Syria are only going to rise with time, substantially. And what's happened with Idlib in recent weeks is only the latest indication of that.""

Bonsey, like most Syria experts, does not believe Assad is on the road to inevitable defeat.

""While much of the subsequent commentary [to the Idlib offensive] proclaimed this as the beginning of the end for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, we are still a long way from that,"" Lister writes.

For one thing, Iran sees the survival of the Assad regime as a critical strategic priority, as it allows Iran to supply Hezbollah and maintain a close ally in the Levant. Any post-Assad government is likely to be Sunni-dominated,and quite hostile to Iran. Tehran is probably willing to go to some lengths to keep that from happening, and Iranian intervention in the war has been a significant force.

""In strict military terms, there isn't yet a direct threat on the strategically essential territory that the regime and its backers continue to control,"" Bonsey says, ""and there isn't yet a reason to think the rebels are capable of threatening"" such a region.

Since Assad can't crush the rebels in their strongholds, then, the conflict is looking a lot like a stalemate — which it already was before this rebel offensive began.

Moreover, the unity of this new rebel coalition could collapse. The broad alliance we've seen in Idlib is held together by victory: the more they push back Assad, the more willing they are to cooperate. But if Assad's forces start beating them, the ideological and political fault lines in the coalition could cause rebel groups to turn on one another. It's happened — many times — before.

The ""big question now,"" according to Bonsey, is ""how the regime and its backers choose to respond to these defeats."" A major decider, in other words, is Iran. But as long as they see protecting the Assad regime as vital, they are likely to do what it takes to keep his core territory intact.",REAL
"The Passion Behind Standing Rock Protest October 29, 2016 
Police arrested more than 140 Native American and environmental protesters challenging an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, a project touching the raw nerves of water and global warming, reports Dennis J Bernstein. 
By Dennis J Bernstein 
The months-long struggle to stop the Dakota Pipeline near the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota has raised passions among Native American activists and environmentalists who have clashed with police trying to sweep the protesters aside. 
To explain the intensity of the resistance, I interviewed Bill Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and chairman of the International Indian Treaty Council, which has supported the North Dakota pipeline protests. 
In late August, the Treaty Council joined forces with the local tribes of The Standing Rock Sioux and appealed to the United Nations to intercede and take formal action in support of the their fight against the construction of the Dakota pipeline over sacred Indian lands. Native American activist Bill Means 
“We specifically request that the United States Government impose an immediate moratorium on all pipeline construction until the Treaty Rights and Human Rights of the Standing Rock Tribe can be ensured and their free, prior and informed consent is obtained,” stated Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault, and the Treaty Council, in their joint appeal to U.N. human rights officials. They requested actions by four U.N. human rights Special Rapporteurs citing “ongoing threats and violations to the human rights of the Tribe, its members and its future generations.” 
The interview preceded this week’s latest round of arrests. 
Dennis Bernstein: Bill Means, your work with the American Indian Movement as a co-founder and your knowledge of the treaties, and how many times are broken, and how they’re broken by the United States government, has always been enlightening and important. I know you are monitoring Standing Rock, and have taken an active stand, as a current board member of the International Indian Treaty Council. 
Why don’t you just say first what it signifies at this point, in the struggle. And then some of the things that come to mind in terms of what you’ve been observing about it. 
Bill Means: Well, first of all the overall struggle against global warming is really the backdrop to Standing Rock. And that’s the reason why I think so many people around the world, and the tribes all over America, are beginning to find affinity and support and solidarity with the people at Standing Rock, because it represents this world-wide struggle for sacred Mother Earth. So having that backdrop we’ve got various types of good news, and some sad news. 
Of course, the very good and healthy news is we had the first baby born on the base of the Missouri River, at the Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock, which was beautiful. Born with the midwives there, and all the attention and support of the community. The women came forward and brought this new life here into this world at Standing Rock. So we hope that this young child will have a Mother Earth that she can be proud of, that she can grow up in that’s clean, and has clean water, and so that represents the future. 
Also developing was the fact that our good friend and colleague, Miss Amy Goodman, had her case thrown out … by a federal judge in Bismarck, North Dakota. Where he said that she’s a journalist, doing her job, and she shouldn’t have been charged with these type [of] charges in the first place, and completely threw the charges out. So that’s a good development, as well as several other people she was arrested with. So I think that’s a beginning to turn the table on the illegal use and manipulation of the law to prevent legal, shall we say, dissent, to prevent people that are protesting legally and peacefully from their acts of courage. So that was good news, on that front. 
And then, of course, we have the ongoing problem that people have recorded …, massive trucks, semis carrying pipe. And so they are anxiously and quickly trying to get as much pipe laid towards the Missouri River as humanly possible, before there’s any type of interruptions of specific places they can’t go, which we know right now is being held up from crossing under the Missouri River. And we’re hoping that this extends itself out to other areas. The #NoDAPL water Protectors took non-violent direct action by locking themselves to construction equipment. This is “Happy” American Horse from the Sicangu Nation, hailing from Rosebud. August 31, 2016 (Desiree Kane, Wikipedia) 
And so right now the company, the DAPL, Dakota Access Pipeline people are, where they can, they’re still building as fast as they can without any regard to the restraining orders or any regard to the federal authorities that asked them to quit and to cease and desist from building until the tribe, and other proper authorities have been, shall we say, counseled with, have been involved in some type of negotiation on [these] whole various issues of treaty rights, water rights, environmental issues. And so there’s plenty of law that needs to be settled but yet the Dakota Access pipeline continues to be built. 
So we have in the face of these positive developments, we have yet to see the company cease and desist in the other areas. 
DB: Bill, let me ask you to … step into that role for a moment and talk about the stand that the council has taken and the significance in history in terms of this stand, and this place, that we’re talking about in North Dakota. 
BM: Well, first of all to give you a larger picture, the Missouri River, as you know, covers about four states, and bisects the state of South Dakota from north to south, I should say north-west to south-west. Also, including North Dakota, and Montana, and Iowa, and a little bit of Nebraska. So, having said that, you get that picture in your mind, they built at least four dams on the Missouri River that are directly built on Indian treaty land. 
See, in our treaty of 1868 and 1851, those two treaties significantly for time immemorial set the borders of the Great Sioux Nation on the east bank of the Missouri River. And the 1851 treaty was even past east of the Missouri River. So you see those treaties being violated from the beginning of building all these dams. Because the dams are built on federal reservations and flood, primarily, federal Indian land. 
So there’s many communities, including Standing Rock, which was flooded by the Oahe Dam, built in Pierre, South Dakota, in that region, which flooded not only Standing Rock but Cheyenne River Reservation. And then you have Yankton Reservation flooded twice, once by the Gavins Point Dam, and another time by the Fort Randall Dam. […] There’s a famous act known as the Pick-Sloan Act of federal government that was passed back in the ’40’s that allows these dams to be built. 
And so we have a situation where [there is] the continued violation of treaty rights and water rights. The water, by treaty, belongs to Indian people. Now, Indian people have the philosophy that the water belongs to everyone. But we have to maintain these treaty rights and these water rights. And there’s a famous case in the water rights that says, “All the water necessary for the survival of Indian people should be granted in any kind of negotiation, should be under the jurisdiction of the Indian tribes.” And that was a famous case up on the Milk River in Montana. And so it’s called the Winters Doctrine of Federal Indian Water Law. So that’s kind of a doctrine that’s been there for many, many years. 
Now, in spite of that, the government began to develop these dams on the Missouri River, and […] the Missouri River was never litigated, that is, the water was never divided up like it is, say, on the Colorado River over further west. And so, since their water rights have never been litigated, the water has not been quantified like who owns what drop of water, who owns this bank, who owns that bank, has not been decided. 
And so, in our mind, in the federal law’s mind, we still have authority over the Missouri River, not only by treaty but by federal Indian water rights. So that’s the idea and the legal fight for Indian people. And that’s how Standing Rock got involved because of all these dams being built on the Missouri. 
And there’s also the issue not only of the environmental issues, in which the federal government is required by law to do what they call environmental impacts statements, environmental impact study, which is supposed to give warning. [But] they’re supposed to give the impact of these massive development projects on the people. Not only Indian people, but non-Indian people. 
So a lot of these rules and regulations are either being trampled on by the corporate entities or ignored by the federal government, or given some kind of a lip service to state government, or what they call the Public Utilities Commission. So this is kind of the backdrop, where we have state and federal authorities negligent throughout this process, historically, and even today, in protecting the rights of not only American Indians, but American citizens. So this is why we fight. Activists carry the American Indian Movement flag at a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Flickr John Duffy) 
DB: We saw their struggle at Wounded Knee, many of their struggles, but a big one at Wounded Knee. Bill also is on the Board of the International Treaty Council, and they’re working with the local tribes in this struggle. And, Bill, can I ask you to just talk a little bit about the stand that the Treaty Council has taken and how you’ve been working with the local tribes legally, if you will? 
BM: Ah, yeah, we’ve been working in two areas. [First] helping them to organize through the National Lawyers Guild– legal defense for those water protectors that are being charged with various crimes as they do their legal, and peaceful, protests to the pipeline. So that’s one area that’s very important. And we want to give kudos and strength to the National Lawyers Guild for lending that support, and other lawyers both that work for the tribe and others. 
Another area that’s significant is that the International Indian Treaty Council along with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe filed [a] human rights complaint with the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of the United Nations under the Human Rights Laws and Protocol that the United States has agreed to as being part of the United Nations. 
Here we’ve presented the evidence of which I’ve talked about–federal/state regulations, treaty rights, water rights that are facts in law–and presented those human rights as human rights violations in the struggle of Indian people to maintain clean water, and access to clean water, and drinking water. So we presented to specific, what they call, repertoires. These are people that study the issues, internationally in the Human Rights Commission. And those special repertoires, or the issues they’re studying, of course, is the special repertoire on water, the special repertoire on indigenous peoples, the special repertoire of sacred places. 
As you know, in Syria and in other wars around the world, these armies, these militants, these people have destroyed many, many graves, artifacts, in an attempt to promote their way of life. And so this has become an international issue. […] The DAPL pipeline in particular has destroyed graves already. And so all these issues, whether it’s water, whether it’s the rights of Indigenous people, are now being studied by the United Nations. And the United States has to answer these questions as party to these human rights treaties that they signed. 
So, we have pressure being exerted internationally by the United Nation’s human rights system. While all these other issues are going on both locally, in the courts from the water resisters, as well as the water protectors, as well as the tribe itself in federal court. So we have a court case going against various federal agencies, and now some negotiations are taking place with the Department of the Army which handles Corps of Engineers, which governs the river ways and waterways of America. Also, we have involved the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice. So we can tell from those various words that they have significant interests in these issues. 
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is totally within the Department of Interior. And, of course, the Department of Justice is supposed to be protecting us, the Indian people, the American people from these corporate carpetbaggers, and these corporate interests that continue to ignore the laws of the United States and treaty laws. 
So, here we have three agencies now involved in trying to carry out negotiations and what they call “consultations” with the tribes and the local communities of non-Indians who are also protesting. 
DB: There’s a couple things in terms of the terminology I want you to expand on, but first of all, in terms of the graves… you say that sacred grave sites, burial sites have already been destroyed. Who would have been in those graves? 
BM: Well, these ancient sites, some of our ancestors were buried along the river, as you know, we have a saying in our language which goes “water is life.” So in respect for the life, many times historically our people were buried overlooking the river, overlooking the water. And that attachment goes back centuries, in our culture the role of water [is] as the first medicine to our people. And the role that water plays in humanity, and its need for purity. Its need to allow our people to grow, to live. 
And so, this is one of the areas that historically our people were buried and then, as this pipeline goes, there’s even a federal act for that called American Indian Graves and Historical Preservation Act. And in that federal law, federal entities and companies are supposed to consult and they’re supposed to work with Indian tribes when they come across these ancient burial grounds. Activists protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Flickr John Duffy) 
And so, these go back for many centuries, some of these burial grounds, as well as fairly modern day areas. So rather than consult, they generally just go through and destroy them. Or when they do consult, their way of consulting is they call the local state university, have the anthros come out, dig up the bones that are left and haul them off to the university, in total disrespect for our culture, for humanity, for our way of life. 
And so, this is a problem that has [been] seen time and again with these pipelines, these development projects, in and around the Missouri River, especially because water being life, there’s a lot of, shall we say, generations that have grown up around that river, and continue to live in those areas. So that’s why it’s important. It would be akin, I guess, like if we went in and started digging up maybe some famous cemetery. You know, what if we went to say the National Military Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. and started digging them up. 
DB: …over there at Arlington, where they have the ceremonies every year. 
BM: Yeah, if we went there and started digging them up, or maybe to the Cathedral of Saint John, in New York. And where they have their burial ground, outside there in New York, we go there and start digging up and say we want to look for the size of the heads, or we want to study the white man, in these Indian universities and Indian colleges. People would be outraged. But, yet, when it’s Indian people calling for justice for destroying our culture, and our historical artifacts, and our graves, somehow we get ignored. Somehow we get a dual standard of justice when it comes to Indian people. 
And so, we have to make this resistance in order to send a message to America that, “We’re still here as Indigenous people.” Not only here in America but wherever the minerals, wherever the clean water still exists, that’s where Indigenous people are today, all over the world. 
DB: And, to put this in the political context, obviously there’s a presidential election going on. Have any of these candidates expressed any sympathy for the Indigenous community for this case against destroying sacred burial grounds and digging up graves, so that universities can study the bones? Has anybody stepped forward? Have you been impressed by any of the politicians? 
BM: Ah, no not at all. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump said there’s a war on coal, and that he’s going to stop that war. Now, coal is probably the most devastating form of energy production that we have in America, or in the world. So that gives you an idea about his concern about Mother Earth. Hillary, on the other hand, has only paid lip service to Indian issues. We haven’t heard her come out on the DAPL pipeline, or any other pipeline. She did say that she changed her position on the XL pipeline, which President Obama stopped, along with some white ranchers in Nebraska, and Indian people that worked together–what they called the CIA, Cowboy and Indian Alliance, which is getting stronger by the day, where white people and Indian people have come together–to protect their land. 
And so, the candidates, they haven’t even voiced a public statement, for sure. And it only comes out when asked maybe in a local rally or something, then they give basically lip service, and talk about window dressing on the issue. 
DB: Before we let you go, and this is something I’ve really been wanting to speak with you about. I think one of the most powerful parts of this movement is that the Indigenous community is really taking the lead. They’ve really come together and opened the door in a way that white people and all people can sort of come in and be a part of it. But the fact is, that… and the power is, we now refer to the protestors as water protectors, or water resistors, this is through the Indigenous communities vision of life which is really a vision in the context of global warming, it’s the only vision that can save us. People gather in Seattle to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, September 2016. (Flickr John Duffy) 
BM: Exactly right. I think that what Indigenous people have to offer the world is the fact that we have to build our policies and our governments around the future of Mother Earth. And so whether you’re left or right, we all have to live on the Earth. Whether you’re left or right, you have to drink water, water that is pure. 
And, so these basic issues of human life are what Indigenous people have been calling for respect, all these years. It’s only when we protest that it brings this issue into the forefront of the rest of the world, where they decide hey, maybe this global warming does have an impact on Indigenous people, because it’s impacting us. Whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s in the United States, Latin America. The pollution has gotten so bad that it’s beginning to affect our daily lives. And so, until you respect Earth itself, and the power of Mother Earth, then you will never respect the future of our future generations, and those who come after us. 
The Indian philosophy of life is that we have to look seven generations ahead when we make these decisions about development, about exploitation of natural resources, about all these extractive industries. What harm does that do to our Mother, the Earth? And what is the impact on the future generations? So that’s the philosophy that’s beginning to come out in terms of political variations in government policy around the world, is that we really have to, no matter what form of government you have, you have to be able if you look at Mother Earth as the leading policy, as the primary very function of government – just protect the Earth, not corporations. And so, until we can do that then I think we’re in a losing battle. 
And we hope that these types of struggles, which we have no intention of changing because it’s going on all where Indigenous people are around the world, which is now 400 million Indigenous people who still speak their language, still have their traditional government, still have their culture and language. These are the people who are protecting the Earth. And we hope to enlarge that Earth protective family, to include each and every American, each and every citizen living on Mother Earth. Native American activist Leonard Peltier’s FBI headshot (Wikipedia) 
DB: Bill, it’s almost a tradition with us in terms of remembering Leonard Peltier. Now, last we spoke you gave President Obama an F for keeping his promises in terms of really making a difference in the Indigenous communities of North America. Do you think, and what would you say, do you think he could raise his grade from and F to a D or a C, if he decided to take a courageous action and finally, finally free Leonard Peltier? 
BM: Yes, I think he really could because Leonard Peltier represents the treatment the United States government has given to Indian people throughout the history of this great country. And so until we can deal with the basic issues of human rights and justice, then I think Indian people will always be on the bottom rung of the ladder of social justice. And so I think it’s up to President Obama, before he leaves to try to take this one act of clemency, in which everyone will be able to sit down at the table and say, “Leonard Peltier is finally free. He’s going home. He’s going to see his children, for the first time in 41 years.” And we hope and we pray that that happens before the president goes out of office. 
Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .",FAKE
"Jenice Armstrong, Philly, October 26, 2016 
The Temple attacks were about troublemaking teens–not race. 
The youngsters who jumped those college students as they walked to campus Friday night are delinquents who need to be put in check before it’s too late. 
They were nothing but miscreants who took out their aggression and misdirected rage on random passersby. Why? Because they felt like wilding out that night. They were out to create chaos, so they did. 
So, don’t talk to me about gentrification in North Philly. 
Don’t talk to me about poverty. 
Don’t talk to me about race relations. 
Those are whole other conversations and not what these attacks were about. 
No one was safe from these teens that night. Not the six Temple students who were injured. Not the Temple police officer knocked from her bicycle by a 15-year-old. Not even a police horse. Anyone could have gotten caught up in that madness. 
According to news reports, a crowd of 150 youngsters started gathering after an Instagram advertised an 8 p.m. meet-up at the AMC North Broad Street 7 (formerly the Pearl Theater at Avenue North), on Broad Street near Oxford at the southern end of the campus. 
{snip} 
Most of the high schoolers who responded to the online posting were good kids looking to socialize. But then the delinquents did what they often do and ruined it for everybody. 
According to police, a group of 20 to 30 boys and girls in their early to late teens randomly attacked Temple students as they returned from a football game at Lincoln Financial Field. 
{snip} 
People keep trying to make this a racial thing because at least two of the victims were white and all of the assailants were African American. They make that assumption even though we don’t know the race of the other injured students. (Lots of African Americans go to Temple.) Nor do we know the race of the injured officers. 
Street violence is street violence. It knows no skin color. {snip} 
{snip} 
Another student, a junior environmental science major who didn’t give her name, told a website called theTab.com, “My boyfriend ran and got away but the second I tried to run, they grabbed me by my hair and started beating my head and back. 
“I remember shoes coming for my face and after that I heard other kids from the group saying, ‘Yo chill, yo chill, it’s just a girl,’ and they pulled my attackers off me.” 
{snip} 
Temple has promised increased security, but when it comes to random street violence, anything can happen to anyone–black or white.",FAKE
"Email 
The liberal internet sites and some in social media actually believe that the acquittal on all charges brought against the Bundys and five others last week for their peaceful protest and occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon was a sign of white privilege . One outlet, even allowed a black columnist to write that white privilege was now ""weaponized."" 
Consider the moronic claim of Chauncey Devega at Salon , ""Just consider: An all-white jury acquitted militant religious fundamentalists whose avowed aim is hurting the U.S."" 
Excuse me? Hurting the US? How so Mr. Devega? 
Well, according to Mr. Devega, ""Despite the overwhelming evidence against the Bundy militants, on Thursday a federal jury in Portland acquitted them of federal weapons and conspiracy charges. This shocked many observers. It should not have."" 
""Black Americans and other people of color often talk about how there is one legal system for 'them' and another for 'us,'"" he added. 
What is this evidence of which he speaks? Well, he doesn't quite tell us. He never mentions any laws that were broken. It's not against the law to keep and bear arms . It's not against the law to go and occupy an area that is supposed to be under the people's control per the Constitution. Technically, per the Constitution, the land does not belong to the central government. It's not against the law to hold a press conference there. It's not against the law to address your government for grievances. 
In fact, all those things are a part of the law! 
Oh, and what does Mr. Devega have to say about this photo with a black man standing with LaVoy Finicum and Pete Santilli ? 
Does that look like white privilege to you? Did LaVoy Finicum receive white privilege Chauncey? I don't think so. The tyranny you are supporting murdered him in cold blood and now a jury has determined that they were doing nothing wrong that should have warranted their arrest nor his murder. 
How about the months these men sat in jail in Oregon while being denied bail? Was that white privilege? What about the fact they are facing similar trumped up charges in Nevada from something that took place two years ago, and are still sitting in jail? Is that white privilege Chauncey? 
He then went on to ask if Muslims did this would it be terrorism. I can answer that, yes. However, the reason why I can affirm that is because they would have created violence, just as they are taught to do in the Koran as they follow in the footsteps of their founder, Muhammad. They usually do. The only violence at Bundy Ranch or in Oregon was the result of the Oregon State Police , the FBI , and the Bureau of Land Management . Those were the people with guns pointed at citizens, despite Devega's claims otherwise. 
If that was not enough, Devega forgot that a Native American woman, Sheila M. Warren, testified on behalf of… the defense! Was that your white privilege Mr. Devega? 
""As the social-media hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite signals, there is a dual system of justice in the United States of America One exists for white people — especially white conservatives and other members of the right wing — and a separate one for people of color and Muslims,"" added Devega. ""This is white privilege weaponized through the law."" 
Devega is not the only one to put forth this nonsense. 
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof also claimed this acquittal may have been racially motivated. 
Other people on social media chimed in making the same ridiculous claims without ever once citing any law that was broken. Terrorism is legal when ur white https://t.co/ewFsaRpJVJ",FAKE
"The aircraft carrying 66 people was about 175 miles from the Egyptian coast when it disappeared, travelling at an altitude of 11,000 metres (37,000ft).



The plane had left Paris at 11.09pm on Wednesday (21.09 GMT/07.09am Thursday AEST) and disappeared at 2.30am Paris time, about 45 minutes before it was scheduled to land, and only 40 seconds after it left Greek airspace and entered Egyptian space over the Mediterranean.

The Greek defence minister, Panos Kammenos, said on Thursday that after entering Egyptian airspace the plane fell 6,706 metres (22,000ft) and swerved sharply before it disappeared from radar screens.

On Friday he said debris from the plane, including a “body part”, two seats and suitcases, had been found by Egyptian vessels in the Mediterranean sea. Egypt’s military said it had found personal belongings and parts of the wreckage 180 miles north of the coastal city of Alexandria.

The plane was carrying 56 passengers and 10 crew: two cockpit crew, five cabin crew and three security personnel. The airline said two babies and one child were on board.

The nationalities of the passengers were as follows: 30 Egyptians, 15 French citizens, two Iraqis and one person each from Britain, Belgium, Sudan, Chad, Canada, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Portugal and Algeria.

An Airbus A320, which is considered a safe and reliable plane. Nonetheless, the model has been involved in safety incidents in the recent past, including the Germanwings tragedy in March 2015 that claimed 150 lives. It was also the aircraft Chesley Sullenberger landed on the Hudson river in 2009.

EgyptAir said the captain had 6,275 flying hours, including 2,101 on the A320; the co-pilot had 2,766 flying hours. The plane was manufactured in 2003.

Airbus said it was aware of the report about the plane but otherwise made no comment.

Egypt’s aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, has said the Airbus A320’s sudden disappearance was more likely caused by a terrorist attack than technical failure. But the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said on Friday that there was “absolutely no indication” of why the flight came down.

The aircraft passed through airports in Tunisia and Eritrea in the four journeys it made on Wednesday before the Paris-Cairo flight, but no warning flags were raised. EgyptAir’s vice-chairman, Ahmed Abdel, said there were “no reported snags” from the crew in Cairo or Paris, nor was there any special cargo or notification of dangerous goods on board.



The area of the Mediterranean where the plane went down is heavily trafficked and much monitored, within reach of British listening posts in Cyprus, close to Israel and near to the US Sixth Fleet.

An Egyptian army spokesman says searches are continuing in the area where the debris was found. The location is the centre of a major international air and sea operation to find the aircraft’s two black box flight recorders, which might hold the key to what happened.

The water in that section of the Mediterranean can be 2,000 metres (6,500ft) deep. The equipment involved in the search for MH370 is able to search depths of at least 6,000 metres.



If the EgyptAir A320 is the same as the Germanwings model that crashed last year, it will have two recording components: a cockpit voice recorder, which tapes what the pilots say, and a flight data recorder, which stores some of the 2,500 technical measurements in a modern aircraft.

Both are stored at the back of the aircraft and wrapped in titanium or stainless steel, to best survive a crash. They are able to withstand one hour of 1,100C heat and weight of up to 227kg. The boxes can take years to be found – two years in the case of Air France flight 447, which disappeared in 2009 in the Atlantic.

Greece’s lead air accident investigator, Athanasios Binis, said: “The most important thing is that the plane’s two black boxes are found. If the cockpit flight recorder and flight data recorder are found, along with wreckage, then a real investigation can begin.

“There are three reasons for a plane [to go down]. Meteorological, technical and human. The first has now been ruled out because the weather was quite good. Whether a technical factor or human factor, either inside or outside the plane, is to blame remains to be seen. All possibilities are open.”

François Hollande, the French president, said: “We have a duty to know everything about the cause and what has happened. No theory is ruled out and none is certain right now.



“When we have the truth we will draw our conclusions; whether this was an accident or something else, perhaps terrorist. We will have the truth.”

Panos Kammenos, the Greek defence minister, said: “The plane carried out a 90-degree turn to the left and a 360-degree turn to the right, falling from 37,000 to 15,000ft and the signal was lost at around 10,000ft.”



The Egyptian prime minister, Sherif Ismail, said it was too early to rule out any explanation for the incident, including terrorism: “We cannot exclude anything at this time or confirm anything. All the search operations must be concluded so we can know the cause.”



Serafeim Petrou, the head of Greece’s air traffic controllers board, said: “The plane did not give any vocal or electronic signal before it disappeared,” adding that “nothing can be excluded” on causes: “An explosion could be a possibility but, then, so could damage to the fuselage. I think at this point we are talking about wreckage, wreckage at the bottom of the sea and tracing the cause is going to take time.”

Jean-Paul Troadec, the ex-president of the French air accident investigation bureau, said “we have to remain very careful” about possible causes. “We can make certain hypotheses … there’s a strong possibility of an explosion on board from a bomb or a suicide bomber. The idea of a technical accident, when weather conditions were good, seems also possible but not that likely. We could also consider a missile … If the crew didn’t send an alert signal, it’s because what happened was very sudden. A problem with an engine or a technical fault would not produce an immediate accident. In this case, the crew did not react, which makes us think of a bomb.”

The director of Greece’s Civil Aviation Authority, Konstantinos Lintzerakos, said air traffic controllers were in contact with the pilot as the plane passed through Greek airspace, and that he did not report any problems. Controllers tried to make contact again with the pilot 10 miles before the flight exited the Greek flight information range, Lintzerakos added, but the pilot did not respond.",REAL
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. PLEASE DONATE TO KEEP BARE NAKED ISLAM UP AND RUNNING. Choose DONATE for one-time donation or SUBSCRIBE for monthly donations Payment Options GET ALL NEW BNI POSTS/LINKS ON TWITTER Subscribe to Blog via Email 
Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address CONTACT: barenakedislam@gmail.com Top Posts",FAKE
"Meeting small business capital, technology and labor needs and relieving their regulatory burden could drive new boom.

The economy has experienced 75 straight months — more than six years — of private sector job growth. Yet some areas still have not recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, and nationally, under-employment exceeds pre-recession levels. How can we increase the speed of job creation?

A critical part of the answer lies with America’s small businesses, which create over 60% of net new private-sector jobs and employ nearly half of America’s workforce. Helping them expand — to get their ideas off the ground — is one of the best ways to support economic growth and needs the continued focus of both elected officials and the private sector.

Political debates on economic growth tend to focus on taxes. But taxes are just one big issue facing small businesses. A report released by Babson College — “The State of Small Business in America”  — underscores that fact. It provides a window into small businesses’ most pressing needs, and it can serve as a blueprint for addressing them.

As we’ve seen through Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, entrepreneurs across the country are facing barriers to growth. Based on a survey of over 1,800 small businesses, the report pinpoints four major challenges that cut across industries: the need for better access to capital, less burdensome regulations, more qualified workers and ability to better assimilate information technology. Let’s consider each.

Capital. Securing financing remains a major barrier to growth. The net result is that, across all sources, while the median funding request is $100,000, businesses typically secure just $40,500. Small business owners overwhelmingly rely on banks for funding, but banks face more stringent regulatory requirements that have restricted lending and made loans harder to obtain. Closing the gap between what businesses seek and receive would lead to more hiring, investment, and growth. It would also reduce the common practice of credit card borrowing, where high interest rates can lead to financial difficulties. Business owners suggest a reconsideration of terms, loan size and paperwork, and more than one in four call for increased transparency in the borrowing process. Policy discussions around credit access must recognize the need to balance the needs for both regulatory protection and economic growth.

Regulation. Nearly 60% of respondents have difficulty understanding and managing government regulations and laws. Companies spend about 200 hours annually on compliance. Governments should lessen this burden without compromising consumer and environmental protections. Streamlining agencies’ approval processes, for instance, can help small businesses open their doors sooner and expand more rapidly. In addition, simplifying the tax code would be a boon to small businesses, allowing them to spend less time and money on compliance.

Skills. Overwhelmingly, a major hiring challenge was finding employees with the right skillsets — a challenge even greater than salary requirements and competition for candidates. Small businesses are increasingly looking for tech-savvy workers who also have the required licenses and certifications. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey identifies 5.8 million openings — the second-highest level on record — reflecting a mismatch between company needs and applicants’ skills.

More collaboration between state and local workforce development programs and the private sector can help address this skills gap, and community colleges have an important role to play, too. Programs and curriculum need to align with job needs in growing industries to ensure that graduates leave with the skills necessary to get hired. Some governments have begun subsidizing internships, recognizing there is no substitute for on-the-job training. Cooperative programs among small businesses in each industry can also share in the costs of professional development.

Technology. Small businesses recognize technology as essential to productivity and success. But accessing modern technology is perceived as costly and requires skills that many businesses lack. Better technology is also urgently needed to protect against the increasing threat of cybercrime, which 40% of respondents are not prepared to handle. In fact, one in five have been victims of cybercrimes, part of a disturbing global trend in which businesses are becoming hackers' preferred target. Given advances in the affordability of technology, technological literacy can be improved through increased access to resources, enhanced training and clearer government cyber-security standards.

Small businesses face other challenges, but progress in these four areas would provide a significant boost to local hiring — and to national economic growth. More than six years into a sluggish recovery, we must do more to help small businesses drive a new generation of growth — and put the next generation of Americans to work.

Lloyd Blankfein is chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. Michael Bloomberg, a former New York City mayor, is founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Warren Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Michael E. Porter is a professor at Harvard Business School.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns, go to the Opinion front page, follow us on Twitter @USATOpinion and sign up for our dailyOpinion newsletter.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton Hits Unfavorability High of 60%, Higher Than Trump October 31,   
Remember last week when Hillary Clinton was shopping around for White House drapes and the ""popular"" wisdom was that she was inevitable? That was fun. Wasn't it. Now she hit an unfavorability rating high of 60 percent. That's higher than Trump. 
It also means that the candidate who claims she's going to bring Americans together is disliked by most of the country . 
Clinton is seen unfavorably by 60 percent of likely voters in the latest results, a new high. Trump is seen unfavorably by essentially as many -- 58 percent. Marking the depth of these views, 49 percent see Clinton ""strongly"" unfavorably, and 48 percent say the same about Trump –- unusual levels of strong sentiment. 
The extent of partisan antipathy in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, is remarkable: Ninety-seven percent of Trump supporters see Clinton unfavorably; 90 percent, strongly so. Ninety-five percent of Clinton supporters see Trump unfavorably -– again, 90 percent strongly so. 
But remember Hillary is ""inevitable"". 
Now the Clinton campaign has decided to go after the FBI under the assumption that people like Hillary more than the FBI. That may be a slight misjudgment. And by slight, I mean huge. Because not only is the FBI more popular than Hillary, so are major landfills, UFO cattle mutilations and a number of international war criminals.",FAKE
"Fragment of Old Tax Bill Meant to Undercut Muslims' Claim to Important Mosque by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This 
While the UNESCO resolution which recognized the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as a “Muslim holy site of worship” was barely reported around the world, and considered fairly non-controversial, Israeli officials have been expressing fury over the matter for two solid weeks. 
And the Muslims may have a huge, ancient mosque that has been a key part of Islam for 1,300 years, but Israel has a small strip of papyrus they found in a cave, which they’re pretty sure is a far more conclusive document, since it mentioned the word Jerusalem and was written in Hebrew. 
Israeli officials have claimed that the UNESCO resolution, in recognizing the mosque as important to Islam, was tantamount to denying Israel’s absolute and eternal control over the entire city of Jerusalem. Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev said the papyrus strip proved Jerusalem “was and will remain the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” 
The al-Aqsa mosque was built on a site which is believed to have previously housed an important Jewish temple, and some Israelis advocate the eventual destruction of the mosque and the construction of a new temple, though the details of such a construction would be hugely religiously complicated, and since the destruction of the mosque would undoubtedly start a massive war, it is considered unlikely. Still, the far-right government wants to ensure that they have some international precedent for their claim to the territory. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Turkey and the United States have agreed on a military plan to push Islamic State militants from a strip of territory along the Turkish-Syrian border in what represents a major expansion of Turkey’s role in the conflict, according to a senior U.S. official.

The agreement capitalizes on successes that Kurdish forces have had in pushing Islamic State fighters out of the region but stops short of creating a formal no-fly zone that the Turks have long requested, said the official, who did not want to be named because he is not authorized to discuss the agreement publicly.

The move follows Turkey's  announcement last week that it will allow U.S. aircraft striking Islamic State targets in Syria to use the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, something the U.S. has long sought because the base is close to the militants' movements. Turkey said its aircraft would join the air campaign against the Islamic State in Syria.

Turkey, a member of NATO, also called for ""consultations"" with the alliance after militant attacks on border posts in Turkey. NATO said it will hold the talks Tuesday.

Turkey's moves come as a boost to the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State. The country had been reluctant to participate in the coalition because of the risk of direct clashes with forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose ouster is a top Turkish priority.

The United States views extermination of the Islamic State as the focus of the coalition air campaign in Syria, and has avoided conflicts with Assad’s forces, who are fighting the Islamic State among many rebel groups.

Ege Seckin, an analyst at IHS Country Risk, said the U.S. is reluctant to establish a no-fly zone along the Turkish-Syrian border because it would require an extensive military effort to counter Syrian air defenses and risks bringing the U.S. into direct conflict with the Assad regime.

In a speech on Sunday, Assad expressed confidence that his government would prevail over rebel forces, but acknowledged his military faced manpower shortages and had lost terrain to rebels during a civil war that is now in its fifth year.

Turkey's newly active role also complicates its relationship with the Kurds, who have fought for an independent state inside Turkey's borders for years. Kurds in Syria are among the most effective ground fighters against Islamic State militants, and an expansion of Turkey’s role in Syria could pose a threat to those Kurdish forces.

Over the weekend Turkish aircraft struck a Kurdish camp in northern Iraq that Turkey considers home to a Kurdish terrorist group. The attack could end a long truce between the government and those Kurdish forces.

Turkey's fear is that Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq may unite to press anew for an independent state.",REAL
"This is a story about the swing voter. The voter who, days before the election, doesn’t know if she wants to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton — or, hell, maybe Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.

You're going to hear a lot about these mythical middle-ground people in the runup to the election. You can just search ""swing voter"" to see how common this narrative is:

This is because many pundits think swing voters decide elections. They think swing voters — or ""floating voters"" — are large in number and just sitting in the middle, waiting to be convinced by one party or the other to vote for them. So this is the picture in their heads:

But increasingly, this picture is wrong. As the parties polarize, it’s becoming much easier to for Americans to choose sides, even if they don’t identify as Republican or Democrat. So when they go to vote, they act like partisans.

Back when there were more voters who might change their minds, campaigns were based on persuasion, and persuasion pulls you toward the middle. But when everyone’s mind is already made up, that means the way to win an election is to rile up people on your own team.

A few years ago, Smidt, who works at Michigan State University, was trying to reconcile two things.

One was that there were more and more people identifying as independents, rather than Democrats or Republicans.

That should've meant that there were a huge number of people who were willing to change their minds, since they weren't partisan.

But Smidt also noticed that over this time period, the presidential election maps didn't change much. It was “much more rigid.""

One way to reconcile these two things was to believe that independents were no longer participating, which means there were fewer nonpartisan voters.

But Smidt had another question: Are these self-labeled nonpartisans actually willing to vote for Republicans one election and Democrats in another?

So he decided to study historical surveys that asks Americans about how they voted. He came up with four groups for the respondents:

He did this for every year going back 50 years.

What he found was simple, though shocking: Even though more and more people don’t align with a party, they still consistently behave like reliable partisans and repeatedly vote for the same party.

In other words, swing voters are dying.

Most voters look at where the parties stand on the issues, and then they pick one that best reflects their own views. But if you don’t pay enough attention to tell the parties apart, then you won’t know which party you agree with. That makes you more likely to swing between parties.

So if we redraw the picture at the top, it would look like this. Notice how similar the two sides look to her:

And it used to be common for people with less political knowledge to switch the party they supported from election to election — whether or not they voted.

But over time, this party switching has become far less common:

This is because now even low-information voters can tell the two parties apart:

In 1960, both partisans and nonpartisans were much less likely to say there was a big difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Now almost all strong partisans would say yes — and even half of nonpartisans would say yes.

In short, voters are more confident that they know exactly what they’re voting for when they look at the “D” or the “R” next to a candidate’s name — no matter how partisan they are.

And it's not just about partisanship.

A modern-day person with low political awareness can tell the parties apart just as well as someone who had high awareness in 1968:

It's not that the people have changed. Rather, it's the parties.

Let's go back to the drawing at the top of the story. Here's where we were in the 1950s, where a low-information voter would look at the parties and not be able to tell the difference.

But over the past 50 years, the two parties have evolved very distinct platforms.

In the 1968 election, neither Republican Richard Nixon nor Democrat Hubert Humphrey articulated clear views on what he would in Vietnam. ""This ambivalence and deliberate obfuscating can create opportunity to win voters over,"" Smidt said.

Before Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party didn't have an anti-abortion position.

At the 1996 State of the Union, Bill Clinton said, ""The era of big government is over.""

It was a lot harder to pin down each party to specific issues, especially for those who weren't paying close attention. But now the party lines are clear on abortion, taxes, climate change, health care, same-sex marriage — the list goes on. That's why when we look at how much Republicans and Democrats agree in the House and Senate, we see more and more polarization:

You could argue that voters clearly knowing which side they’re on is a good thing. But in the 1954 study ""Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign,"" political scientists argued that what we need from an electorate is diversity — in other words, we can't just have rigid voters with ideal views, but also detached voters with rational views. Those are the people who allow our political system to more efficiently get things done.

As Smidt writes, ""Even the 'least admirable' voters enrich our democratic political system by providing it with the flexibility and indifference that it needs.""

If more and more voters are either on your side or the opponent’s side, that means winning elections is simple: You have to get your people more excited, and get the other side less excited.

This means that candidates have little incentive to talk to people in the middle — people who don't make consistent partisan decisions in the voting booth.

Just think about the 2016 election in this framework: Voters in Utah, who are traditionally Republican, don't like Donald Trump. But because the party positions are so polarized, it's too far a jump for them to support a Democrat like Hillary Clinton. So as Smidt points out, many would rather jump to a third party candidate.

Trump was supposed to be the most nontraditional candidate in modern American politics — someone who was shaking up the electorate. But on November 8, when you look at the election map, it'll probably look a lot like past election maps. Maybe a few states will switch over, but most of America will likely have voted the same way.

The president-elect will have won on the backs of riled up partisans, and people would be swing voters — except they’re not because they picked a side long ago.

Clarification: I initially called Smidt’s research an experiment, but it’s more so a study of historical data, which I’ve clarified in the piece.",REAL
"Videos American And Saudi Weapons Recoverd From ISIS Positions In Mosul An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” | November 8, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! This Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015 photo shows, photos of gunsmith Bahktiyar Sadr-Aldeen as a child, center, and his father, right, hung on a wall at his shop, in northern Iraq. Sadr-Aldeen, has seen his business shoot up by 50 percent since ISIS took over the Iraqi city of Mosul. 
Mosul, Iraq — Since the beginning of Operation: Inherent Resolve, the Islamic State has shown itself to be a very shadowy force. Many people assume they know where the group originates, with some admitting to it’s connection to US foreign policy decisions and regional allies. Others ignore this, and even the curious will only go so far. Now, as the group’s stronghold in Mosul is surrounded, Iraqi forces find yet more IS stockpiles of Saudi and American weapons and supply. 
Mosul has been under assault by Iraqi forces for around a month now, as they clash with IS. The offensive followed a surge in US troops to Iraq , the majority being special forces and accompanying marines. Exactly what those forces will be doing is unclear. Shortly after the battle’s activation, a US Navy SEAL was reported KIA (Killed In Action) by an IED blast . Officials were careful not to directly connect the operatives death with the Mosul battle. 
Five other Americans– three marines , a Delta Force operative and another Navy SEAL –and a Canadian special forces soldier have died since 2014. This is only that we know of, since the statuses of thousands of military contractors and other forces are unknown. 
Iraqi militia commander Uday al-Khaddran reported the weapons after capturing former Islamic State positions. According to GeoPolitics Alert , the weapons are of Saudi origin, and are by no means an isolated incident. Iraqi forces have reported Saudi and even American supplied ISIS weaponry and food shipments since the war began. Militiamen believe the weapons are, in part, being transported by the Turkish government. 
US manufactured missiles were also allegedly retrieved from the cleared IS area’s. In this case, according to Reports Afrique , Iraqi commanders believe the weapons were dropped to ISIS by coalition planes . Such claims, once again, have circulated throughout the war. 
An anonymous Iraqi official recently stated that front line troops “ always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them.” The commander went onto claim ISIS fighters are even transported by US aircraft to medical facilities in Syria and countries friendly to the group. 
In 2015, Iraqi commanders reported they’d begun shooting down coalition craft seen aiding the group. Iraq’s parliament disclosed that year that two British planes seen aiding the enemy were shot down, with wreckage photographed . The government of Iraq called on western leaders to claim the crash, but no response ever came. 
Commander Al-Khaddran also accuses the Turks of sending advisors to aid in IS artillery, and other operations. Since these kinds of reports first surfaced nearly two years ago, they’ve been largely disregarded. It’s only recently, with Hillary Clinton’s email leaks allegedly confirming Saudi Arabia funds ISIS, that the mainstream can re-examine these reports. 
Turkish special forces operatives have been stationed outside Mosul for months now without Iraq’s approval. Turkey’s prime minister was brazen in telling Iraqi’s leadership to “know your place” when asked to pull troops out. American officials, who also train Syrian rebels in Turkey–the majority of which are linked to jihadist groups–approve of the forces in northern Iraq. All of these operations, from rebel training to Turkish troop deployments, have coincided with a brutal government crackdown on Turkish media . 
Clinton was emailing her campaign chairman in 2014, advocated for pressure on Saudi Arabia because they “are providing clandestine financial and logistical support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Saudi government officials, Daily Caller reports , has donated over $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.",FAKE
"On Friday morning, a US airstrike killed Abu Alaa al-Afri, a senior leader in ISIS, whom the US says it considers the organization's second-ranked leader.

This isn't the first time al-Afri has been reported dead — though the US government has allegedly verified his death.

But if (as seems likely) al-Afri is dead, this will be yet another instance in which ISIS's No. 2 official has been killed. In August of last year, for example, a US airstrike killed Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, then identified as the group's No. 2.

This continues a trend that news consumers may recognize from counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, in which the group seemed to lose one third-in-command (after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) after another.

As some Twitter wags noted, this all harks back to a 2006 Onion article, ""Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.""

But what's actually going on here? Why is the US killing so many ISIS deputies while somehow failing to hit leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? And does it even matter when you kill top-level ISIS officials?

Analysts have developed a few theories as to why the US keeps hitting second-in-commands but not the leader. One of the most plausible is that Baghdadi is a much harder target, whereas the nature of the No. 2 job involves exposing oneself to greater risk of being targeted.

As a leader, Baghdadi serves as ISIS's chief executive and ideological head. He doesn't have to move around all that much or actually go out in the field; his job mostly involves issuing orders and, on occasion, making propaganda tapes.

That means he can sit wherever he's hiding out, avoiding the kind of contact with the outside world that makes it easier for US intelligence agencies to find you.

However, not every ISIS leader has the luxury of doing that. Baghdadi's top subordinates, the ones he gives orders to, have to go out in the field and run ISIS operations. If you command a major combat theater in Iraq, for example, you actually have to be in that part of Iraq. If you run ISIS finances, you need to make sure the extortion and oil operations are running smoothly.

When you're out actually doing the work — managing ISIS outposts, talking to people lower down on the food chain — you can't hide away like Baghdadi does. That makes it easier for US electronic, satellite, or human intelligence assets to find you — and serve up targeting data for an airstrike.

This difference in responsibilities probably explains why the US, despite targeting Baghdadi multiple times, hasn't managed to kill him — and yet has successfully taken out many of his deputies.

""That would be my guess,"" Will McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me.

While the US government is understandably trumpeting its alleged strike on al-Afri, there's reason to suspect that killing the group's No. 2 isn't actually all that consequential.

Groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda are bureaucratic by design, so they are often able to deal with drone-struck senior officers by rapidly promoting new people to replace them.

This theory got some quantitative support in a 2014 study by the University of Georgia's Jenna Jordan, who found that so-called ""decapitation"" strikes — in which the US killed a senior leader of a terrorist group — had little effect on reducing violence from that group.

In the paper, Jordan argues that this is because al-Qaeda is a bureaucratic organization: It has something like a formal command structure, division of labor, clear assignment of responsibilities, and the like. This allows lower-level leaders to take over after one is killed.

And this would likely apply to ISIS as well.

""Each individual decapitation doesn't cripple the organization,"" Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me.

So al-Afri's killing probably will not, in itself, be that consequential for ISIS's future.

That said, Gartenstein-Ross pointed out that al-Afri had ""strong connections within the al-Qaeda network."" ISIS and al-Qaeda are at war in Syria, which distracts and thus weakens both of them, and there is little reason to believe that this is changing.

But Gartenstein-Ross points out that the possibility of rapprochement, while already quite low, may have just gotten a little lower with al-Afri's killing.

""Given his connections, [there was] a danger that he could be involved in rapprochement between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State,"" he said.

However, the ideological and personal gaps between the two groups will likely remain too wide to bridge anytime in the near future. That would have been true even if al-Afri had lived. So his death is probably not a substantial change for ISIS's prospects.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Loretta Lynch was sworn in as the new U.S. attorney general on Monday, replacing Eric Holder. Lynch, the country's first African-American woman to serve in the role, had her nomination held up more than five months over politicking in the Senate.

""Ladies and gentlemen, it's about time,"" said Vice President Joe Biden at the swearing in ceremony.

The highly politicized five-month battle to choose Obama's next attorney general came to a close Thursday when the Senate finally voted 56-43 to confirm Lynch

But the delay of her nomination neared record-breaking proportions. Republicans leading the Senate refused to bring her nomination up for a vote until Democrats cut a deal on abortion language in an unrelated bill. That legislation passed Wednesday, setting up Thursday's vote and ending the latest partisan Washington standoff.

Ten Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the only senator not to vote.

Obama tapped Lynch to replace Attorney General Eric Holder in November and her nomination cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. Still, she waited longer than the seven most recent U.S. attorneys general combined for a vote on the Senate floor, after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted on first finishing work on an unrelated bill.

Loretta Lynch's father, Lorenzo A. Lynch, was in the Senate gallery watching when the historic vote took place confirming her daughter as the first African American female attorney general.

""The good guys won. That's what has happened in this country all along,"" Lorenzo Lynch told reporters. ""Even during slavery. Levi Coffin was a founder of the Underground Railroad. Even during slavery. A white man fought against slavery. So all over this land good folks have stood in the right lane, in the right path.""

A two-time U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Lynch takes on the high-profile job at time when America faces a series of challenges, from dealing with strained relations and deep distrust in some cities between the police and the communities they serve, to criminal justice reform, to confronting the ongoing threat of terrorism.

Lynch, 55, has earned a reputation as a highly qualified, but low-profile prosecutor who has a good relationship with law enforcement and a history of handling tough cases well.

She is a good listener and a skilled consensus builder, qualities that will help her succeed at Justice, said Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who served under Lynch on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, a group that meets regularly to advise the Justice department on policy matters.

""In that [attorney general] job you are at the center of so many of the emerging, significant, pressing issues not only in this country but around the world. There's probably no job in government as diverse and challenging as being attorney general of the United States,"" Heaphy said. He added that building support for initiatives both within and outside the department is an important part of the job.

""She will be good at getting people to work well together. I think that's a strength of hers. I saw that on the committee,"" Heaphy said.

Lynch's portfolio will include addressing voting rights, white-collar crime and policy reviews, as well as public corruption, an area in which she has vast experience.

In a statement, Obama said America will be better off with Lynch leading the Department of Jusice.

""Loretta's confirmation ensures that we are better positioned to keep our communities safe, keep our nation secure, and ensure that every American experiences justice under the law,"" Obama said in a statement shortly after the vote.

Lynch's experience on civil rights case, like helping win the convictions of New York City police officers who sexually assaulted Haitian immigrant Abner Louima, will be important as her office tackles closely watched investigations in recent police conduct cases, including the still unexplained death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man while in police custody.

""She's seen and understands the injustices that have taken place in the past and so therefore she's uniquely also equipped to deal with what's going on and do the kinds of investigations that will restore faith to Americans in their justice system,"" said Rep. Greg Meeks, D-New York.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lynch grew up 60 miles to the east in Durham, North Carolina. Her father was a fourth-generation Baptist minister; her mother, an English teacher and school librarian. As a child, Lynch rode on her father's shoulders to his church, which served a meeting place for students organizing anti-segregation boycotts in the early 1960s, she told the Judiciary panel at her January confirmation hearing. Lynch eventually graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Speaking at her nomination announcement in November, Lynch highlighted the fact that the Justice Department is named for an ideal.

""This is actually appropriate, because our work is both aspirational, and grounded in gritty reality,"" she said. ""Today, I stand before you so thrilled, and, frankly, so humbled to have the opportunity to lead this group of wonderful people who work all day and well into the night to make that ideal a manifest reality.""

At a conference meeting with all the nation's U.S. attorneys a few years ago, Heaphy was put in charge of organizing a presentation showing the attorneys as they were 20 years before. Lynch shared a picture of herself with her college cheerleading squad.

""Loretta sent me a picture of her as a Harvard cheerleader in a pyramid,"" he said. ""She was comfortable sharing this with Eric Holder and other department leaders. She laughed at herself.""

""I don't think she's just tough, there's a humanity, there's a human touch that she has that will also serve her well,"" he said. ""Nobody is going to mistake that she's in charge, but her humility and sense of humor will come through.""",REAL
"Email 
To view photojournalist Orin Langelle’s new online photography exhibit If Voting Changed Things is to accept a challenge. Don’t expect a passive viewing of simple, aesthetically pleasing photography or a mindless stroll through apolitical eye candy. The challenge should be apparent from the title of the exhibit: It is a riddle, a fragment, an incomplete sentence awaiting your contribution. To view his display is to realize that there is no single way to finish the statement. Langelle invites you to see the complexity of the world through his lens, but to draw your own conclusions about the meaning of the images. 
If Voting Changed Things… people would vote. They don’t. Only 58% of eligible voters did in the last presidential election. Recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans feel disenfranchised by the 2016 presidential election process and candidates. They aren’t proud or hopeful about the outcome, and half of Americans feel helpless. There is no emphasis on issues that matter to them. Election discussion centers around voting for the least worst candidate, which makes civic duty seem like an exercise in self-denial and a concession that our aspirations are not achievable. 
Of course, the counter is that if you don’t vote, you’re giving someone else the power to make decisions for you. But that perspective ignores the range of opportunities for civic engagement and citizen action: Protesting, demonstrating, picketing, civil disobedience, rallies, striking, tax resistance, boycotting, sit-ins, sabotage, hacking and DDoS, tree-sitting, resistance, law-breaking, insurrection, rebellion, revolution. Langelle’s images of protest activity outside of national conventions in 1972 and 2004 raise the question of whether voting, and the electoral circus that accompanies it, is about citizen empowerment or an explicit and ceremonial abdication of power by citizens to a status quo elite. Which leads to the observation that… 
If Voting Changed Things… they wouldn’t let us do it. Chomsky wrote that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.” Photographs from 1972 and 2004 capture moments outside of the system, beyond the framing of the acceptable discourse. Protesters explicitly reject governmental authority through symbols, slogans, caricatures, and artwork. The elephant pulling a coffin through Miami’s city streets conveys a belief that political parties are leading us to death and destruction. The black hoods and orange jump suits communicate that protesters in Boston, relegated to a “Free Speech Zone,” have become the equivalent of Guantanamo Bay detained terrorist suspects. It is not accidental that the media ignores or minimalizes these displays of collective action. In 2016 delegates—the people who were there (never mind viewers at home)—at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions remarked that they were unaware that protests were occurring outside throughout. Langelle deftly illustrates that this is because authorities have increasingly managed and marginalized protest behavior. Which demonstrates that… 
If Voting Changed Things … this exhibit wouldn’t be necessary. For many, Langelle’s work will be shocking because it lays bare the evolution of policing and the criminalization of dissent. Photos of the 1972 demonstrations include arson, sabotage, gratuitous nudity, and graffiti that challenges, “Amerika—Love it or Destroy it,” and yet not a single police officer is identifiable among the activists. The activists are in the streets, climbing in trees, occupying fields and grassy lawns, neighborhoods and parks. Contrast this with images of Boston Police in 2004, appearing ready for war in riot gear; armed with Tasers, guns, clubs; a menacing and ubiquitous presence atop scaffolding towers. Because of new draconian laws, protesters have been herded into holding pens of chain link fences and razor wire, surrounded by surveillance cameras, concrete, and girders. The photos depict a world that has changed drastically in thirty years, and which has militarized against, marginalized, and narrowly framed the acceptable boundaries of citizen dissent. Moreover… 
If Voting Changed Things … it wouldn’t contrast so distinctly with other forms of citizen action. There is a humor and a vibrancy to “the people” that Langelle juxtaposes brilliantly against the sterile and colorless state apparatus. There is a diversity of skin color, age, gender among the protesters. Their slogans are racy, their clothing is colorful and fun. They wield musical instruments, engage in “guerilla theatre” and share poetry. They engage in property destruction with irony—wearing clogs as they break windows and asking through their graffitti with (gallows) humor if the protest restraint area represents the “Land of the Free?” Their defiance comes in the form of patches, to be worn on the derriere, sold by a young girl in a flowered dress. They paint their faces and wear straw hats. 
The stark reality of the state is helmeted, with dark gray protective gear and weapons to enforce compliance. The only colors are the red, white, and blue banners and flags that appear more as a hypocritical challenge to the popular movements than a patriotic display. It is evident that Langelle sees a dour system that is oppressive and lifeless. Voting is a part of that system, a reinforcement of its values and an affirmation of the status quo. 
If Voting Changed Things… marginalized groups wouldn’t be in the streets. The electoral process in America has produced and validated a government that has produced institutional racism, militarization within and from our society, mass incarceration, crippling debt, perpetual war, homelessness, a failed health care system, eroding and ineffective education, and environmental exploitation. If Voting Changed Things… we wouldn’t have a 1%. We wouldn’t allow the .01%, 16,000 Americans , to hold as much wealth ($9 trillion) as 80 percent of the nation’s population – some 256,000,000 people – and as much as 75 percent of the entire world’s population. We wouldn’t allow the five largest white landowners in America to own more agricultural land than all of black America. If Voting Changed Things… demographics wouldn’t be used as a basis for electoral strategies. We would vote away the cleavages that exist across generations, racial and cultural groups, religious affiliations. But we don’t, because we can’t. 
If Voting Changed Things… would we be where we are? The work of Orin Langelle may offer you a lens from which to answer that question. Or to find your own conclusion to the sentence. 
If Voting Changed Things can be viewed online at: If Voting Changed Things: Exhibit Online . It is also on display at the ¡Buen Vivir! Gallery for Contemporary Art in Buffalo, NY until December 2 nd . 
Dave Reilly is professor and chair of political science and director of international studies at Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he serves as president of the faculty union and moderator for the Black Student Union.",FAKE
"Los Angeles (CNN) Hillary Clinton is on the cusp of declaring victory as the Democratic nominee after a long and protracted battle with Bernie Sanders. But she has one very serious problem: The Vermont senator isn't giving up.

Clinton and her husband have barnstormed across California at a furious pace in recent days -- seeking to avoid yet another humiliating defeat by Sanders on the same night she should easily win the delegates needed to go past the 2,383 mark and clinch the nomination.

""I'm very proud of the campaign we're running here, and I believe, on Tuesday, I will have decisively won the popular vote and I will have decisively won the pledged delegate majority,"" Clinton said on CNN's ""State of the Union.""

By all objective measures, she and her allies argue that the race is over. The delegate math, the money, the millions of votes in her column -- all point to her inevitability as the nominee.

Sanders, however, shows no sign that he is preparing to exit the stage.

Facing a strong possibility that he could carry in California, he vowed, in no uncertain terms this weekend, to lead his ""movement"" on to the convention in Philadelphia.

At a news conference in L.A.'s Little Tokyo Saturday, he railed against the press and the news networks for counting superdelegates in their tallies.

""It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,"" Sanders said. ""At the end of the nominating process, no candidate will have enough pledged delegates to call the campaign a victory. That will be dependent upon superdelegates. In other words, the Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention.""

The first female presidential nominee of a major political party could find herself shadowed by Sanders' intensive campaign to sway hundreds of superdelegates despite winning fewer contests and votes.

Some Democrats worry that would put the Democratic Party at a disadvantage by making it harder for Clinton to unify the party and turn her full attention to Donald Trump.

From a pure mathematical perspective, the Democratic Primary in Puerto Rico Sunday leaves Clinton on the verge of becoming the nominee, 29 delegates shy of the magic number, according to CNN estimates. On Tuesday, 694 delegates will be at stake in the Democratic contests -- including 475 in California alone, but Clinton is likely to win many of them.

While the math is not on his side, Sanders showed defiance and determination as he swept through California all weekend, charging Trump with trying to divide the country, and Clinton with advocating for ""small, incremental changes"" when ""We want to transform this nation.""

A robust showing Tuesday could give Sanders a strong closing argument in his pitch to superdelegates.

Speaking for more than an hour Saturday night outside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the flame of the Olympic torch flickered brightly above him, he urged his followers to dismiss those who claim his path is impossible.

""If we can win, and win big here in California and in the other states, and in Washington D.C., we are going to go into the Democratic convention with enormous momentum,"" Sanders told thousands of young supporters, many of whom were wearing ""Bernie or Bust"" buttons. ""With your help, I believe, we will come out with the nomination.""

For Sanders, the long Democratic primary is coming to an end amid feelings of astonishment and regret. When he launched his presidential bid a year ago, advisers say, winning wasn't his chief goal. He wanted to make sure Clinton had a competitive race. And that, he has done in spades.

While advisers say he is serious about taking the primary fight to the Democratic convention, he also is mindful of keeping his pledge to keep Trump from winning the presidency. He has yet to reconcile those competing forces, aides say, but that rests at the heart of what he decides to do next.

Sanders refuses to say what his goal would be if he does not win the nomination. He will not even engage on those kinds of questions at this point in the process.

Advisers say he is intent on trying to change the Democratic nominating process, particularly the superdelegate system and the series of closed primaries in states across the country. But that could be a tall order, considering he just joined the party to run for president.

While this week will almost certainly decide the race, Sanders' supporters insist that it will result in nothing more than a mathematical muddle. Whatever the networks decide to do in terms of calling the race, Sanders adviser Tad Devine said, ""I don't think that's going to affect things.""

""The networks or the press can characterize what happens in any way they like -- you guys have a right to do that -- and so do we,"" he said.

Sanders' argument for continuing on, Devine said, ""is pretty straightforward that the delegates that have been elected by voters -- no one has enough of them to claim the nomination of the party.""

""So if you're going to win the nomination of the party you're going to win it with superdelegates, and even the Democratic National Committee -- officially, their spokesperson -- is out on the record saying that superdelegate's votes should not officially be counted until the convention itself,"" Devine said.

Sanders' advisers also note that regardless of the results on Tuesday night—when voters go to the polls in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota—the Vermont senator intends to compete in Washington D.C. on June 14 when it holds the final contest of the primary season.

They believe they have a strong case to make to superdelegates that Sanders has gained strength over the course of the primary process while Clinton's candidacy has weakened.

They note that while Clinton, for example, dominated in large states with diverse populations early in the process, polls show Sanders leading Clinton among young minority voters in California by a wide margin. Beyond that, Sanders has continued to pound the argument that potential general election matchups show that he would be a stronger candidate against Trump.

""If the Democratic leadership wants a campaign that will not only retain the White House and regain the Senate and win governor's chairs all over this country, we are that campaign,"" Sanders said at a rally in San Diego Sunday night.

Clinton has pointed out that in 2008, she was in Sanders' position: in second place after a hard-fought campaign against Barack Obama.

""By some standards, I actually led a little bit in the popular vote, but I fell a little short in the pledged delegates,"" she said on ""State of the Union."" ""So I had a decision to make. A lot of my supporters said, hey, let's keep going, let's make sure that we go to the convention. I said, no. I ran to become president because I have deep values and beliefs about what should be done in our country.""

While Sanders' next moves are difficult to predict, the bigger obstacle for Clinton may be the fervency of his supporters, particularly those who constitute the contingent who call themselves ""Bernie or Bust.""

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found that a quarter of Sanders' supporters nationally said they would not support Clinton in a general election against Trump, while 75% said they would.

The Clinton-resistant contingent of Sanders supporters was even higher in California in the recent USC Dornsife/LA Times poll. In that survey -- which may have prompted Clinton to ramp up her campaign schedule here—Sanders led Clinton 44 percent to 43 percent among registered voters. (The Vermont senator led her by double digits among voters who decline to state a party).

Among voters who are supporting Sanders in the primary, only 65% said they would support Clinton in November.

Those die-hard Sanders fans were out in force at his events in Los Angeles this weekend. In interviews, many said they either planned to either write in Sanders in November or vote for the Green Party ticket.

""I've been watching the Clintons for a very long time and I think there are some serious integrity issues and some character flaws, I'll say to be nice—which Bernie doesn't have. He's been consistent for 40 years and that's something I have to respect,"" said Danny Garcia, a 36-year-old business consultant, who said he has been a Libertarian-Republican for most of his life before supporting Sanders.

""I'm Bernie or Bust, there's no Hillary on my agenda,"" said Garcia, who was signing up volunteers to go to Philadelphia during Sanders' rally Saturday night. ""She's using her usual tactics, which are to manipulate the populace, discourage voters, stop people from getting out, and trying to control the media narrative, which she's been pretty good at.""

Courtney Wold, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Los Angeles, said though she likes and respects Clinton, she plans to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in November if Sanders does not clinch the nomination.

""The first rally he had me in tears, along with everyone that was around us. We were all collectively crying about how profound the message was,"" Wold said, as she waited for Sanders to speak at the Coliseum this weekend. ""My generation -- not speaking for the generation entirely, but for me specifically -- I feel sort of disenfranchised. I went to school; I got a college degree and then I left with a huge amount of debt.""

""I've sort of come to terms with the fact that I'll never own a home,"" Wold said. ""But I don't want that for my children -- and Bernie's the only one who truly spoke to that.... We like Hillary. We think she's done a lot for women -- and I think that's great -- but I'm not voting based on my gender, I'm voting based on a platform.""

Many Sanders backers recoil at the notion that he should bow out Tuesday once Clinton has mathematically clinched the nomination with a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates. They will be with him, they say, all the way through Philadelphia and beyond.

""Absolutely he should stay and fight,"" said Gary Frazier, a leader of the group called 'Black Men for Bernie.' ""Whether he will or not, that remains to be seen. But you cannot start a political revolution that exposes the corruption in the political system and then expect us to get behind that same political system.""",REAL
"Mike Pence? Full disclosure: I served as head of the Super PAC seeking to draft Pence into the 2012 presidential race. Having long been persuaded of Pence’s superior leadership qualities, I’m even less objective than usual.

We called Pence “The Conservative Champion” and for good reason. Then, in 2012, Pence made the right decision: to run for governor of Indiana. That was an opportunity for distinguished public service. As it happened, it was also a perfect boot camp for the vice presidency.

The Honorable David McIntosh, now president of the powerful Club For Growth, was the one who encouraged Pence to come back into electoral politics. McIntosh later served as the guru of the Draft Pence For President Super PAC. In my recent exclusive interview McIntosh recalled:

When I was vacating my Congressional seat to pursue an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial run, in 2000, I wanted my seat to be occupied by a true conservative and someone of high integrity and commitment to public service.  I turned to Mike Pence. He had run unsuccessfully in 1988 and 1990 and by 2000 had achieved considerable success, and affluence, as a syndicated talk radio host. Mike replied that he no longer aspired to public office but would, together with his wife Karen, pray on my request and determine whether they sensed a calling. Several months later I encountered Mike at the Indiana State Fair. I asked him about whether he had reached a conclusion. He replied that he and Karen recognized that he could not shirk the duty. Pence went on to run, and win, and serve America with distinction in the Congress and then to serve splendidly as governor of Indiana. If elected to the vice presidency he will again serve America magnificently.

One of the reasons that Pence showed himself extraordinary may have faded from general memory. It has not faded from mine. Nor has it been forgotten, or forgiven, by the left, who are now highlighting this, much to my delight. In 2010 Pence gave a major speech at the Detroit Economic Club. As the center-left ThinkProgress.org then reported:

The first item of Pence’s five-point for the economy is a “sound monetary policy.” Pence elaborated that he believes a return to the gold standard could create such a policy: PENCE: Before I move on, I’d like to note, in the midst of all that’s happened recently — massive borrowing and spending, QE2 — a debate has started anew over an anchor to our global monetary system. My dear friend, the late Jack Kemp, probably would have urged me to adopt the gold standard, right here and now in Detroit. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, encouraged that we rethink the international currency system including the role of gold, and I agree. I think the time has come to have a debate over gold, and the proper role it should play in our nations monetary affairs. A pro-growth agenda begins with sound monetary policy.  (Emphasis supplied by ThinkProgress.)

The elitist left is misguidedly neurotic about the gold standard. Properly designed the gold standard favors labor and debtors slightly over capital and creditors and hence carries majority rank and file support among the labor and ethnic left. Timothy B. Lee wrote at the elite left Vox on July 15th, Trump should ignore his running mate’s bad ideas about monetary policy, with reference to the same speech:

It is perverse how the left has reviled Friedman when he was, as he most often was, right, while being deferential to him when he was demonstrably wrong. The international gold standard had ceased operations in 1914. In 1922, it was replaced, in the immortal words of the great French economist Jacques Rueff, by a “grotesque caricature.”

The Economist described that system, quite correctly, as “a mess.” It called itself a gold standard without playing by the rules of the gold standard. The Interwar so-called ""gold standard"" was a hybrid between Jabberwocky and Calvinball. The true gold standard was  but a dim memory by the onset of the Great Depression for which it was framed. The misguided fixation of “many economists” – deluded by the Eichengreen Fallacy -- on the role of “the” gold standard in worsening the Great Depression is contradicted by history.

Conservative apostate David Frum, writing in The Wall Street Journal, also stubbornly continues to misunderstand the gold standard. Frum does however astutely observe some similarities between William Jennings Bryan and Donald Trump:

This is a similarity previously noted by David Klinghard in US News and World Report and by Tim Reuter at Forbes.com. It is apt in some ways but not in others.  Bryan, by prescribing depreciation through ""free coinage of silver,"" lost three presidential races. Trump provides a counsel of general prosperity and has thus far gone from victory to victory and is on track to astound the Frums of this world in the general election.

It is disappointing that the erudite but curiously tone-deaf Frum fails to note that the ravaging of small farmers was caused by the post-Civil War restoration of the gold standard at pre-war parity. This forced a painful secular deflation. We are back in the jaws of deflation, this time Fed-induced. Trump twice has stated his appreciation for the gold standard, the very platform on which McKinley soundly beat Bryan. And the gold standard, properly done, is not an instrument of deflation.

Paul Krugman and his ""plovers"" will rave on against the gold standard. Let them. To adapt a tweet by Neo-Keynesian economist Austan Goolsbee: Roses are red. Violets are pink. Don’t listen to aurophobes. No one cares what they think. To wit:",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- For four months, the Republican Party and its many presidential hopefuls have laid into likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over donations to a family foundation. That these attacks contradict the GOP's broader stand on campaign finance -- and call into question their own weighty burden of donor conflicts -- hasn't troubled them at all.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called contributions to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation “thinly veiled bribes.” The nation can’t afford the “drama” represented by those donations, according to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina asked Clinton to explain why contributions to the foundation “don’t represent a conflict of interest.” And the Republican National Committee has made the donations a central part of its campaign against Clinton.

In embracing this critique of the Clinton Foundation, Republicans are investing in a view of money in politics that they have otherwise rejected in recent years: that spending money to gain influence over or access to elected or appointed officials represents a conflict of interest or an appearance of corruption or could even lead to outright corruption.

Since 2010, the conservative Supreme Court majority has rejected this argument as a reason to regulate campaign finance in their Citizens United, McCutcheon and Williams-Yulee decisions. Most leading Republican federal officeholders now take the view that spending of any sort on campaigns should not be impeded by legal restrictions as fears of corruption are overblown.

So the critical piling on Clinton Foundation donations creates a problem for Republicans, especially those running for president. If contributions to the foundation, a 501(c)(3) entity not involved in political campaigns, create a valid source of corruption concern, then what are we to make of the hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed donations to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that have worked to elect Republicans over the past three elections?

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door for unlimited corporate, union and, ultimately, individual spending on elections, Republicans have maneuvered to use so-called dark money nonprofits to fund large portions of their electoral efforts. Dark money spending on federal races exceeded $400 million in the 2012 presidential election and $200 million in the 2014 midterms with the vast majority of those dollars going to aid Republican candidates, according to previous analysis by The Huffington Post.

The public is not privy, however, to the sources of funds fueling a large part of the Republican electoral apparatus and a smaller part of Democratic efforts. Party leaders and wealthy donors have increasingly worked through nonprofits that are not required to disclose their funding sources.

Republicans, including those now running for president, defend dark money groups as a means to protect what they argue is the First Amendment right of donors to engage in political activity without ""retaliation."" Perhaps, that retaliation would come in the form of stories informing the public about how those donors are seeking to influence public policy.

The very limited record on dark money shows that those funding these groups -- just like those funding super PACs, which must identify their donors -- include many high-powered corporate and individual interests with well-connected lobbyists in search of favors. HuffPost reports have found that dark money groups tightly connected to congressional and party leadership, both Democratic and Republican, have received large sums from pharmaceutical, insurance, banking and online payday lenders seeking specific policy changes while retaining lobbyists previously employed by those very leaders.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has his Right to Rise Policy Solutions, which is playing an increasingly important role in his not-yet-declared, super-PAC-centered presidential campaign. Rubio's advisers run the Conservative Policy Solutions group in collaboration with an affiliated super PAC. And potential candidates like former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are all running around the country fueled by funding from undisclosed nonprofit groups.

In 2012, Walker faced a recall election after labor unions in his state rebelled over legislation gutting public employee union rights. His recall campaign coordinated with a band of nonprofit political groups, led by the Wisconsin Club for Growth, to promote Walker and his policies in a positive light. Walker aides worked closely with the outside groups, and the governor directly raised undisclosed contributions for the effort.

John Menard Jr., considered the wealthiest man in Wisconsin, was another big donor to the save-Walker effort. The billionaire owner of the chain store Menards gave $1.5 million to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, according to a report by Yahoo News. During Walker’s term in office, Menard’s company received $1.8 million in tax credits from an economic development corporation led by the governor. He also received help in his battle with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources as Walker defanged the watchdog agency.

The same failure to see their own conflicts applies to candidates elected since the Citizens United decision precipitated the dramatic rise in dark money. Both Paul and Rubio were elected to the Senate in 2010 with $2.3 million and $2.7 million, respectively, in allied spending by groups that do not disclose their donors, including the Karl Rove-founded Crossroads GPS and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Thanks to its bankruptcy filings, it is known that for-profit Corinthian Colleges made contributions to Crossroads GPS. While the dates and amounts of those donations are still hidden, Rubio’s strong support for Corinthian is well-established. In 2014, he pleaded with the Department of Education for leniency for the company as it faced a fraud investigation.

No one doubts that huge sums of dark money will again be spent supporting presidential candidates in the 2016 election. While the public will be able to consider whether the corporations, billionaires and foreign governments that contributed to the Clinton Foundation would hold undue sway over a Clinton White House, they will not even know the identities of those pouring in the secret donations.",REAL
"Poor gut health and food allergies: More research is linking gut health to hormone regulation . Obesity Inflammation as a result of poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle Genetic susceptibility Toxicity in the form of exposure to pesticides, toxins, viruses, cigarettes, excessive alcohol, and harmful chemicals Excessive amounts of stress, as well as a lack of rest Natural Treatments For Hormonal Imbalances 1. Consume Healthy Fats Your body requires different types of fats — including saturated fat and cholesterol — to create hormones that help keep inflammation levels low, boost metabolism, and promote weight loss. Coconut oil and avocado are great sources. 2. Incorporate Healing Herbs Adaptogen herbs are a class of healing plants that work to promote hormone balance and fight off various diseases. Research has found that various adapotogens can improve thyroid function , reduce anxiety and depression , support adrenal gland functions , and more. Keep Evolving Your Consciousness Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. 3. Improve Your Gut Health Taking care of the gut is becoming of increasing concern, especially since it’s been found to cause autoimmune reactions, including arthritis and thyroid disorders . Many things contribute to an unhealthy gut, including: Antibiotics and medications like birth control Diets high in refined carbohydrates, sugar, and processed foods Diets low in fermentable fibers Dietary toxins such as industrial seed oils Chronic stress Chronic infections 4. Avoid Conventional Body Care Products Many commercial products are laden with potentially-harmful chemicals including: DEA, parabens, propylene glycol, and sodium lauryl sulfate. Instead, do your research and find natural products made with essential oils, coconut oil, shea butter, and castor oil. 5. Exercise Regularly (Especially Interval Training) High intensity interval training (HIIT) has been popularized in recent years for its ability to quickly and efficiently get and keep the body in shape, but the University of Notre Dame Medical School in Sydney also discovered that : “HIT is associated with increased patient compliance and improved cardiovascular and metabolic outcomes and is suitable for implementation in both healthy and ‘at risk’ populations.” 6 . Sleep More, Stress Less Seems easier said than done, right? But not getting enough sleep can mess with your hormone schedule. Cortisol, for example, is the primary stress hormone, and is regulated at midnight. If people go to bed late, they never find relief from their sympathetic flight/fight stress response. One report published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism found that : “Stress can lead to changes in the serum level of many hormones including glucocorticoids, catecholamines, growth hormone and prolactin.” 7. Limit Your Caffeine And Alcohol Consumption Caffeine can stay in your system for up to six hours, and the chemical can affect the central nervous system, raising your heart rate, increasing alertness, and altering the way your brain produces hormones. We’ve come to accept synthetic treatments as our first step toward bettering our health, but what’s even more important is understanding your condition, what causes it, and taking holistic approaches before succumbing to anything else. 
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle. 
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here. 
""If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group."" - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune",FAKE
"Legal Insurrection – by Leslie Eastman 
About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law. It fully went into effect this June, with the opening of the first clinic . While there is no data on the number of California assisted-suicides, Oregon recorded over 130 last year as part of their legalized physician-assisted death program. 
Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead. 
Stephanie Packer, a wife and mother of four who was diagnosed with a terminal form of scleroderma, said her insurance company initially indicated it would pay for her to switch to a different chemotherapy drug at the recommendation of her doctors. 
…But shortly after California’s End of Life Option Act, which authorizes physicians to diagnose a life-ending dose of medication to patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live, went into effect, Ms. Packer’s insurance company had a change of heart. 
“And when the law was passed, it was a week later I received a letter in the mail saying they were going to deny coverage for the chemotherapy that we were asking for,” Ms. Packer said. 
She said she called her insurance company to find out why her coverage had been denied. On the call, she also asked whether suicide pills were covered under her plan. 
“And she says, ‘Yes, we do provide that to our patients, and you would only have to pay $1.20 for the medication,’” Ms. Packer said. 
Packer attends meetings with others suffering from terminal illnesses. She indicates that the tone of those meetings have changed since the California assisted-suicide law was enacted. 
“As soon as this law was passed – and you see it everywhere, when these laws are passed – patients fighting for a longer life end up getting denied treatment, because this will always be the cheapest option.” 
Packer attends a support group for terminally ill patients. She said legally sanctioned suicide has changed the tone of the meetings, which used to be “positive and encouraging.” With patients under new societal pressure to kill themselves, she said meetings “became negative, and it started consuming people. And then they said, ‘You know what? I wish I could just end it.’” 
Concerned about the enormous potential for abuse, a the national organization, Patients Rights Action Fund, has created a website for patients like Packer. The online resource offers a place for patients, family members, concerned friends to report possible coercion, failure to identify depression or other patient mental health concerns, and complications that arise from the overdose prescription or other aspects of the assisted-suicide process. Were you or someone you know pressured to use assisted suicide, misleadingly known as ‘death with dignity’ or ‘aid in dying’? Did you or a loved one have a chronic, life-threatening illness and personal circumstances where you/they felt like suicide or assisted suicide was your only option? Did a doctor advise you or someone you know of a prognosis of 6 months or less that was wrong by months, years, or even decades? Were you or a loved one denied coverage for a life-sustaining treatment or medication by your HMO or insurance company? 
During his Gettysburg Address describing the first 100 days in office if he is elected President, Donald Trump indicated he would work to replace Obamcare with health savings accounts, remove barriers to purchasing health insurance across state lines, allow states to manage Medicaid funds and speed up drug approval inside the Food and Drug Administration. 
However, his election would be too late help many terminally-ill Californians who are now experiencing the unintended, but quite predictable, consequence of yet another feel good progressive policy.",FAKE
"I am a rock n roll nigger https://youtu.be/G8SoVfTVLrk Daniel W. McCullar 
As a mix blood American, any time I hear someone in the black community use the N word in any way or form, I hear and see ignorance. When I hear someone outside the black community use it, I see nothing less than a disease spreading. It is a term that should be nothing less than unacceptable. No other racial group uses derogatory terminology to describe themselves. Using the excuse that you are taking control of it is a Bullshit Juvenile excuse. Jay 
Thanks for the comment my nigga Guy 
Although I am not hispanic, I understand the slang pretty well and have employed many over the years ! 
You would be surprised at the what comes out of there mouths about, blacks and whites, including thouse who come from other Countries in South America, as well there feelings and attitudes of anyone they consider different in appearance ! 
We as the white race, don’t have anywhere near the market cornered, as to racial predigest and racism in general. Just ask the Jews or Palestinians about that ! 
We just understand it more from our own little perspective of the world around us, but it is prevalent all over no matter where you happen to be at or from ! Mr.864 
She said the in N word on Facebook bet she don’t have the guts to say it in person further more for every white racist that call blacks N word that don’t offend us you wanna know y u don’t have to be black to be call a N word we as black people use it to insult our ancestors then we think it’s cool for whites to say it truth be told white people are Niggas also u wanna know why well look the word up and u will see we are not niggas we are negros nigga or niggas is jus another word for stupid dumb and ignorance so look at u now who the nigga now um damn shame for a fucked up world Guy 
So what do you consider a white Honkey or Cracker to be ? Considering I was one who watched the original Archie Bunker and Gladys shows and thought they were great. I never liked Gov Wallace and thought what the cops did in Selma Alabama and Little Rock was just wrong ! I have always believed Mr King was right, while thinking that Sharpton and Jackson are in it just for the Money and political opportunities and believe the the BLM has done some good, but has been hijacked by out side influence, that sees political gain to be won, on the behalf of Hillary, who I think will absolutely destroy the intercity’s, by keeping herself and her kind in power, over the backs of African Americans and others, she deems deporables ! Mr.864 
I’m not racist I’m jus stating facts why whites get mad when they came out with BLACK LIVES MATTERS . Then they say they are thugs an terrorist how so when whites rally up and sit at the store and everywhere else with a bunch of bikers but they tell the blacks oh they in a bike club shitting me half of them KKK if not all police is the biggest gang of America they get mad cause we sale drugs truth be told the police the one putting drugs on the streets we don’t own boats plans for that matter to go get drugs at the end of the day the world is jus fucked up period Mr.864 
Further more fuck Jessie Jackson I’m from Greenville to he ain’t did shit for that community beside rebuild his old apt complex and added his name on where was he when the police killed my friend in fountain inn SC an took him back to the jail after the fact he was dam near dead then tried to say he hung himself where the justice for that Guy 
Mr.864. Just about every Black Man, Woman and Child in N.& S. Carolina knows that, Justice lives in the bottom of every toilet in every jail, in just about every Southern State, in the South, that the white cracker shits in and calls it truth ! 
Now we as the whites, have learned to refine the obvous racism that still exist, to the point of having a Black President to make it look legit for the world to see ! 
What do you suppose President Putin see’s when he shakes hands with Obama, just a man or a black man ? 
Personally I belive that racism is part of the our genetic make up, considering man has been making slaves for many thousands of years, out of all races, including white and black ! 
I just don’t act upon my inherited prejudice, nor choose to pass it on to my children. 
I think that is what makes the difference. Realizing it’s there, but choosing not to act on the difference, is what separates me from the others. Who, just make lip service to there ingrained predigest, while knowing full well, they don’t believe a word that comes out of there mouths ! 
When I see you, I see a black man, who is just as frail or strong as i am, wanting the same as I do in life and just asking for the chance to work for it ! 
If on the other hand, if you are a white or black thug or punk gang banger, it dosen’t matter, you will be treated as such ! Mr.864 
You right I never said u was wrong one time we both are human we both have and opinion at the end u see things your way I see things my way I know u not racist u know I’m not racist but at the end of the day can u say u can live in a black community with u jus being the only white people in the neighborhood check this my home paid for own my land also tell me y a police sit by my yard asking me ? Bout the white guy in my yard and then start to as random? Do u think it’s right with out the proper cause Guy 
No, I don’t think I want to live were you do, considering I am too damn old and set in my way’s to want to, besides I don’t think my wife is going to want to move quite yet ! My oldest son moved to Alaska a few years ago with his wife and dogs and they enjoy it a lot, both got good jobs and doing well, even bought a house on a acre of land, for about half of what you would pay for one around one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
Brentwood was once know as a red necked farming town of about 1100 people, when I was a kid growing up here. My family have been farming for generations. The hispanics were our hired labors living in labor camps, and the blacks were shown the City limit lines by the police ! 
My Mom was considered progressive and we had a black nanny named Pearly, live with us for many years durring the summers, while Mom ran the ranch. I loved her much, she was a good woman, as wide as she was tall, would read to me and my sister, and made incredible apple pies. I first meet her when I was 2 living in Richmond CA, to when we moved here in the mid 50’s, into the house my Mom built, that I still live in today. Pearly’s children came to my sisters wedding. 
Now, Brentwood is a City of 50.000, I don’t recognise it any longer, but it’s core is still farming. There are black families living on my street, in houses built where there were once orchards, and going to the schools I did. I have a family I would consider white trailer trash, living in the house next door, that once had garden tour buses come to see the yard and have tea parties ! 
My attitude is, people are people. I really don’t give a damn who you are, be respectful of me and keep up your home and property to show your pride in ownership and you should expect the same from me ! We can be friends and neighbors, sharing a beer at a barbecue I throw on July 4th and at Christmas, and go fishing once in a while in my bass boat ! 
As to the other thing you mentioned, I think about Cops being randomly nosey, asking about me because I was the white guy sitting in your yard in a all black neighborhood ? What fucking business is it of his ? If he asked me, I would politely tell him to go F off and then shut the hell up !f he pushed it, there would be complaints filed against him the next day and perhaps speeking to his Chief and maybe the City Counsel as well, depending on the situation ! It’s not a good idea to piss me off, cause I not only get mad, I get even too ! Mr.864 
Get mad about what that’s childish to get mad cause we voice our opinion my dad married to a white women my uncle married to a white women Im white a women an u know what we bout to get married my neighbor are not bad I don’t stay in a violent neighborhood everyone stay on my road is family members at the end of the day I ask do u think the police was right for asking me ? In my yard I’m 33 I know right from wrong also Guy 
I am a little confused, which is not hard to do. 
I think you are asking me, if it was okay that, the cop’s who had stopped outside of your yard, ask you over, and question you about some white guy, who was in your yard, visiting with you ? Correct ? 
If that is right ? then my answer is NO ! HELL NO !! Unless the guy is a known gangster with a rap sheet a mile long ! And even then, there are way’s and means for the Cop’s to go about there business to conduct there investigations, with out asking people about there’s. That’s why the Detectives make the big bucks, to covertly investigate, with out shooting off the alarm bells ! 
For some local flat foot to come up to you on your own property, and start pumping you for information, with out any justifiable cause is against your Constatutional rights, illegal, immoral and he can go take a flying leap off a short bridge ! 
I know it’s done all the time, and cops seem to have every excuse in the book to want to try it. 
But my point is simply to smile at him, tell him to have a nice day and walk away, you don’t ow him a thing. If he still wants to push it, then tell him you don’t have to talk to him, unless your lawyer is present ! That will usually set them running ! 
I see too many stories about people getting into all sorts of trouble, because they start flapping there gums, thinking they are cool, and just digging an even deeper hole for themselves to fall in. 
Cop’s know from training, how to push our buttons, and rely on our own stupidity to sink our boat as the results ! Mr.864 
Yes he did I was asking u do u think he was in the right Guy 
Damn Dude ! I was afraid you were going to tell me that this actually happened to you !? 
It totally freaks me, that it could and would, but dosen’t really surprise me anymore that it does, considering that many City’s had “Stop & Frisk” on the books untill only recently ! But supposedly it has been done away with, according to the Court’s recent rulings. Fat chance of that really happening. Cops will just come up with a new way of doing there thing of harassing people, for there :Fishing For A Crime” scene. 
I am sorry that it has, and wish I could do something to stop it ! Knowing that, because of the color of my skin, is probably the only reason why it doesn’t or hasn’t to me ! Except when I was a kid living in Berkeley CA, then I got hassled by the cops quite a bit, because of the hair down to my butt, they all thought I was a drugged out hippy, which a lot of the time, was true. I got slammed around by them quite a bit, shot at and gassed a few times, then arrested and served time in jail and probation, for things that now are not considered a crime anymore ! For some of the crap I use to do and the people I ran with, I am lucky to be still breathing. 
Unfortunately that is the times we all live in, and certainly it is unfair to you to be victimised because of it. I hope you filed a complant against this ass hole to seek retrabutin !! Mr.864 
I understand that I’ve did things in my life I’m not happy bout can’t sleep at nite the nightmare i have I jus take it one day at a time and think God I’m still breathing truth be told I almost lost my life 5 times before I was 20 and the only thing slowed me down from the streets is my first son he’s 13 now my middle son 11 and my baby boy is 6 and I have a lil girl that jus turned 1 so I thank God a lot cause I have something to live for haven’t been to a club in 15yrs it feels good to be out the streets and doing some good for a change only thing I have did to make my life complete is going back to church but I’ll go when I’m ready but I do read the Bible so there for I don’t forget where I come from I respect u and don’t know u it’s actually good we had this chat everything u told me I took that inconsideration truly I thank u I don’t know everything but I don’t mind listen Mr.864 
I stop dealing drugs a few yrs ago actually until I find a job that pays 14 a hr when my ma first found out she had cancer I use to make sure I would not go home unless I had 5000 a week in my pocket to help my ma with her medical bills and medicine she fought that cancer for 10yrs right before she died 6 yrs ago I promise her I wouldn’t sale anymore and that was a promise I keep 20,000 at the end of the month I had to put in a lot of blood and tears for what I did and my ma was not proud of the blood money I was bringing into the home but when she seen what I was actually doing with my money I think she respect me to a certain degree and i accepted that sometimes she would accept nothing from me I’ve been locked up 8 times and started dealing weed,coke,guns,pills at the age of 12 honestly my ma use to beat me when she found out but I never stopped I caught my first charge at 21 by the time I was 25 I had did everything I could possibly do I think I had a good run in life I never had my father after the fact he was a big time drug dealer and him and ma got a divorce and he got on his on product and lost everything he been sober for 18 yrs he doing good but I never hated him for what he did in life actually it made me stronger I had a step dad but only he was good for is taking me fishing far talking to bout men things he did cause he didn’t know how to cause he had 6 girls but at the end of the day he raised me from the time I was 6 until he passed he was good man in his own ways and till this day I thank God for each parent I had in my life with No regrets I jus wish the world become a better place Guy 
Hey ! At least you are still alive, and hopefully clean and sober, with a family that loves you ! That, is a lot more than some of the people you knew when, you were running the streets, i’ll bet. Consider yourself Mr.864 to be blessed ! 
Never a father figure in my life, just a strong willed, old fashioned, no nonsense Mom, who drove her father into Oakland from Brentwood everyday at the age of 13 in 1924. She introduced me to the YMCA in Oakland when I was 13. Took a lot of backpacking trips with them, to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, to visit the Havasupai Indians that lived there, hiked all over California Montana, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Europe. Backpacking and hiking, should be a mandatory class in H.S., especially to inter-city kids, who never get out and see the real world, except concrete pavement and maybe a city park ! 
I understand why you did, what you did, you will receive no condemnation from me for it ! Some of the people I ran with were totally vicious animals to the point of, wondering if they were at all human or not ! Hell’s Angels, and there bud’s, were some I knew and partied with, in the late 60’s while living on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, even ran into some original Black Panthers along the way, now thouse guys were freaky and strange, always talking about revolution and wanting to blow white people up ! 
What saved me was, getting the hell out of there, moving to a small town in the mountains, finishing my college education there, later meeting a good woman, who put up with my Bs and marrying her, we have been together 43 years, produced two fine son’s, that are a joy to us. I became a small business man as owner, operator of a landscape contracting company for 35 years, first working for retail and wholesale nurseries and other landscape companies to gain experience. Never went into farming with the family, my brother was the one who did that with my Mom, my sister has her life with her husband 40 years. But to say, I was born with dirt under my fingernails and will probably die that way, is close to the truth, sometimes I rather talk to plants than people, because it’s easer that way, and they don’t give me grief like people do. 
Hey ! If you want to shoot me an email sometime, I am not against it. I can be reached at [email protected] After all, this is a open and public forum, and maybe you are not all that comfortable as the result. Suit yourself. Mr.864 
I’m still alive cause god showed me away.where I didn’t have to hold people for ransom or in a drug trade shoot out all the time he made me realize I was only making memories in the streets.but I’ll never think I’ll live to tell a lot of people who didn’t know me my life style jus feel like before some of the White’s judge us blacks they should actually look at the community we lived in if we lived in a drug neighborhood it wasn’t by choice that’s for damn sure we adapted to the fine cars clothes and everything that came with it only thing about it a small price came with also Guy 
Good to hear. Now what are you doing ? Mr.864 
Doing father dutys Guy 
So what ‘s that for you ? What line of work are you in, how many rug rats you got running around, your wife work or is she a stay at home mom ? What’s the town or City like you live in ! Got any hobbies, or are you sports nut’s 
Just curious, is all, sure it’s none of my busies and mean no offence or none taken, if you don’t want to talk. Guy 
I hope your education dose not reflect the way you write. But if it dose, god help us all, because you are the next generation and inheritors of what has been left, to you, so you can build onto it for the, betterment of the future generations ( your children and there children’s children ) to come ! Mr.864 
As long as I graduated from high school I’m happy long as my job allow me to bring him 15 to 1600 every two weeks I’m happy my education ain’t got nothing to with how I shorten my word like everyone else in life I be willing to bet I go to a interview and talk jus like the white people and come out with a job didn’t know education had to do with the problems thats going on in the world all my kids straight A students what about your kids are they me speaking my thoughts and opinions don’t have nothing do with how I write I’m not in school anymore I feel I shouldn’t have to prove shit to no one but my self and my kids Guy 
Of course you are a proud father and well you should be. Don’t we all as parents, want and expect our children to be better than we were ? I think that is only natural. 
My son’s both graduated from Collage and are set in there lives, both in there early 30’s, one married and living in Alaska working as a City Planner and the other is still here at home, finishing up his education. Cheaper that way. 
There mother and I din’t get past a two year community collage degree, with me going into business as a landscape contractor 35 years. 
You are right, your education has nothing to do with any of the crap that occurring. You don’t have anything to prove to me and your thoughts and opinions are just that, Your’s alone, and who the hell am I to criticise !? 
Mr.864. You talk the way you want and feel comfortable in, and i will just listen and offer commentary once in awhile, if it’s okay with you. Mr.864 
I like listening to older people it makes me more wiser an not dumb like some American u only have wisdom from being wise Hugh Culliton 
Call me pre-millennial, but I find it baffling that anyone, regardless of where they think it’ll go, would lack the judgement to realize that creating a permanent record of such potentially personally damaging actions IS A TERRIBLY STUPID THING TO DO? 
In addition to unprofessional conduct, she should also have been fired for such criminal idiocy. Guy 
I don’t agree at all ! Or, perhaps it comes from your firm belief that, you have never done something dumb, rash or saying something that would be considered even remotely offencive, by someone else ? Hmmm ! Hugh Culliton 
On the contrary – it’s precisely BECAUSE I know that I’ve done and said dumb things, and that the recording of such things makes them vulnerable to being hacked, that I find it baffling that one would want such personal – and completely normal – incidents of lack of judgement permanently recorded on-line. 
We live in the world of total on-line, or even on-networked-computer collection of data. As a high school teacher, I deal with this every time I teach teens internet safety. That’s why I see it as being a generational trend by people who’ve grown up with their entire lives on line. Such an environment means that, while on the up-side, we can out trolls, racist LEOs and nasty pedophiles, it also means that everyone need to be very, very careful with all data and information they store on-line. 
However, in this case we have someone – not acting as a private citizen – but as a uniformed representative of the state – in a time of very tense relations between law enforcement and the public, taking personal images of a highly offensive nature. Mistake or not – it’s out there, and this action still betrays a serious lack of the judgement expected from a law enforcement officer. Guy 
She, and everyone else who speaks in public ! 
Trump has been made keenly aware of that fact, as the results of what he said 20 yrs ago, is now coming back to bite him, as well Clinton ! 
Thank’s for taking the time to further explain your point, and now that you have. I tend to agree with you, although I still believe that the treatment to this young and naive lady, was harsh ! 
But considering she works in a public tax supported office, it’s to be expected. To bad she din’t have the common sense to see it ! Hill Billy",FAKE
"Not even a week after coordinated attacks in Brussels, Belgium, killed 31 civilians, and barely 24 hours after an ISIS attack in Iraq that killed 25, another tragedy: a blast in Lahore, Pakistan, has taken the lives of at least 56 adults and children, with the approximate death toll still rising.

A single suicide bomber’s explosion rocked Gulshan-e-Iqbal park in Lahore on Sunday. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Punjab province health advisor Khawaja Salman Rafique provided a statement estimating that approximately 200 more were injured in the blast, many of them families enjoying a peaceful day at the park in the heart of the city. According to local police chief Haider Ashraf, the bomber detonated near the section of the park containing children’s amusement park rides. Pakistani prime minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif has already expressed his deepest remorse for the victims and those affected, firmly condemning those responsible for the attack.

In a statement, the White House decried “this cowardly act in what has long been a scenic and placid park,” and pledged to “continue working with our partners in Pakistan and across the region, as together we will be unyielding in our efforts to root out the scourge of terrorism.”

Narendra Modi, the prime minister of neighboring India, also condemned the attack.

The second-largest city in Pakistan, Lahore has long been considered the cultural capital of the turbulent nation. The placement of this attack, especially considering the environment of family fun and repose that the park afforded, sends a clear message of terror.

This is a breaking news story. We’ll be adding new information as it becomes available.",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
A NEGLECTED wooden pallet is said to be suffering from severe self esteem issues after it failed to be selected for a nearby bonfire by local youths, WWN understands. 
The pallet, left unattended for weeks behind a Lidl was not one of 70 pallets chosen to form part of a structurally suspect bonfire pile on a field in the Waterford area of Europe, prompting the pallet to spiral into an existential spiral which saw it question its own self worth. 
“I don’t know what I did wrong, but… I’m obviously hideous,” the pallet shared, which until last month had a family of 400 cans of Polish beer living on top of it. 
“You see the lads coming, pulling shapes and you think finally, I’ll feel special, feel wanted, but they never chose me. I just wanted to be doused in petrol and consumed by a raging hot fire, like any other of my kind,” added the pallet, who admitted at least a third of him was moderately soggy after being discarded in a puddle. 
“Ugh, what’s the point anymore, it’s going to rain so much between now and next Halloween, I’ll be rotten and unlovable by then,” the pallet concluded, full of anguish. 
There is some hope for the pallet, however, as a local hipster restaurant which has just opened in the city needs something to serve its food on that isn’t a plate.",FAKE
"Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Cleveland Indians Worried Team Cursed After Building Franchise On Old Native American Stereotype CLEVELAND—Having watched in horror as their team crumbled after a 3-1 World Series lead, members of the Cleveland Indians expressed concern Thursday that the organization has been cursed for building their franchise on an incredibly old Native American stereotype. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Nurse Reminds Elderly Man She’s Just Down The Hall If He Starts To Die DES PLAINES, IL—Assuring him that she’d be at his side in a jiffy, local nurse Wendy Kaufman reminded an elderly resident at the Briarwood Assisted Living Community that she was just down the hall if he started to die, sources reported Tuesday. ",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) A central theme of Carly Fiorina's nascent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is that she is uniquely positioned to neutralize the historic potential of Hillary Clinton's 2016 bid.

But first, she has to introduce herself to voters, who in large part don't know who she is.

On the day she announced her candidacy, Fiorina sat for two interviews with ABC's ""Good Morning America"" in New York. Then she hopped on a phone for a mid-morning press call with 65 journalists. After lunch, she was off to Yahoo News' studio for a live sit-down with anchor Katie Couric, followed by a question-and-answer session using the live-streaming app Periscope. That evening, she joined Megyn Kelly on Fox News.

The next day was no different: Fiorina navigated eight interviews, including Glenn Beck's radio show, CNN and ""The Late Show with Seth Meyers."" Seven more interviews were scheduled Wednesday, followed by five press availabilities over the weekend in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Fiorina's exhaustive schedule is emblematic of candidates who enter the race without a lick of national name ID. For a candidate whose name barely registers in CNN/ORC polls conducted regularly since November , Fiorina — and upstart candidates like her -- must rely on the media's megaphone to get her name heard. Even better-known contenders like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, did a media blitz after announcing their presidential bids.

""Candidates with lower name identification must jump at virtually every opportunity to garner media coverage,"" said Republican political consultant Ellen Carmichael, who managed press outreach for Herman Cain's presidential campaign in 2011, a candidate who started out virtually unknown. ""For some, this means creating their own news by saying things the media deems controversial. For others, it means answering every media inquiry and agreeing to every interview that comes your way. More established candidates, however, have the luxury of passing on requests.""

That's one luxury that Clinton is enjoying.

Since her presidential campaign announcement on April 12, Clinton has not held a formal press conference. While on the campaign trail, she has responded — reluctantly at times -- to roughly eight questions from journalists.

Even that count is a charitable one, given that some responses have been little more than short exclamations, such as, ""I'm having a great time, can't look forward any more than I am,"" which she said in response to a question about her strategy in Iowa. When a reporter in New Hampshire asked about her next stop on the campaign trail, she merely said, ""Oh, onward.""

Clinton has been so reclusive in the first weeks of her candidacy that the New York Times started publishing questions their reporters would have asked her that day on the campaign trail if they had had the chance.

At this early stage in the race, Clinton doesn't need to rely on the media to reach her core supporters. She has a Twitter feed with 3.47 million followers and a new Facebook page that has grown to 800,000 online supporters since her announcement in April. This week her campaign launched a web series called, "" The Briefing ,"" which it intends to use to combat what they consider unfriendly media coverage.

It would be hard to see how any other candidate could take such a brazen go-it-alone approach.

Of course, Clinton's absence from media interviews does not come without consequence.

This is one of the few instances in which die-hard liberal Sanders and conservative Fiorina are in the same boat: The CNN/ORC poll in April found that just 5% of Democratic voters would consider supporting Sanders, compared to 69% for Clinton.

As the campaign progresses, Clinton will become more available for press questions, Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson told CNN. But as the frontrunner 19 months until the general election, her campaign strategists know that journalists will still continue to cover her regardless of whether she answers questions.

Her lesser-known opponents—on both sides of the aisle—don't have that benefit.",REAL
"Four former top economists in Democratic administrations signed a letter taking Bernie Sanders's campaign to task for touting a document by University of Massachusetts economist Gerald Friedman that purports to show that Sanders's policies would boost the American growth rate to more than 5 percent.

Alan Krueger, Austan Goolsbee, Christina Romer, and Laura D'Andrea Tyson all served at one time or another as chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers under either Barack Obama or Bill Clinton; their letter isn't signed by three other CEA chairs from Clinton's tenure: Janet Yellen (who's busy running the Fed), Joseph Stiglitz (who's well to the left of this group), and Martin Baily (who tells me he didn't know anything about it).

The letter cites Friedman's assumption that the economy would grow by 5.3 percent under Sanders, and comments, ""No credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes."" Further, the economists argue that making this kind of claim undermines ""our party’s best traditions of evidence-based policy making and undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic.""

Somewhat ironically, this group of empirically minded wonks doesn't actually offer an empirical critique of the study they are worried about — relying simply on their authority as Democratic Party luminaries to bat it down.

This controversy is, on one level, almost totally meaningless. No president in any era operating under any set of circumstances has managed to pass a complete legislative agenda, and the combination of partisan polarization, an entrenched House GOP majority, and the extremely ambitious nature of Sanders's agenda makes it totally inconceivable that a Sanders administration would pass all of its policy proposals.

Asking what would happen if the entire Sanders agenda is enacted is a little like asking what would happen if Sanders brought his mid-range game to the Golden State Warriors. To the extent that anyone is backing Sanders because they have read Friedman's paper, the fact that none of this is going to happen is a bigger problem than any questions about Friedman's forecasts.

However, on another level, the Friedman paper and the attacks on it from Democratic Party wonks are an interesting window into how the primary is playing out behind the scenes. Clinton has achieved such overwhelming party insider support that the Sanders campaign is largely cut off from access to the kind of para-party policy wonk universe that would allow Sanders to release campaign proposals that pass muster by the traditional rules of the game.

But he's managed to make a virtue out of this weakness and harness it to the larger significance of the Sanders project — an effort to turn the Democratic Party into a more ideological party that operates more like a progressive mirror image of the conservative Republican Party and less of a broad coalition of interest groups mediated by technocrats.

The headline conclusion of Friedman's paper is that under Bernienomics, ""the growth rate of the real gross domestic product will rise from 2.1% per annum to 5.3% so that real GDP per capita will be over $20,000 higher in 2026 than is projected under the current policy.""

That is a very high rate of growth.

When Jeb Bush promised 4 percent growth, centrist-to-liberal economists were derisive, and even the most Jeb-friendly economists wouldn't quite endorse the claim. Friedman is promising even more than that, and the CEA letter reflects a similar level of skepticism.

I asked Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, one of the more left-wing and Sanders-friendly economists in the Washington policy world, what he thought of the 5.3 percent target. He, in the nicest possible way, suggested it is unrealistic:

Obviously opinions differ considerably about the merits of various aspects of Sanders's agenda. But it's on these questions of slack, full employment, and labor force growth where Friedman departs most clearly from the economic consensus.

Consider this chart, laying out Friedman's view of how Bernienomics will impact the employment rate, or the share of the adult population that has a job:

Reasonable people can (and will) disagree about how Sanders's plans would impact the labor market. But virtually every expert I've ever discussed this with believes that one reason the employment rate has declined since 1999 is that old people are a larger share of the population today than they were 17 years ago. The main reason the CBO expects the employment rate to fall in the future is that this aging process is set to continue. This means the ""full employment"" level of employment is simply lower than it was in the past.

Friedman, by contrast, appears to believe that the full employment level is right where it was in the waning days of the Clinton administration, and that with good policy we can get back there.

Friedman does not, however, discuss the demographic change issue at all in his paper. Instead, in a footnote he argues that ""women’s employment will be encouraged by the Paycheck Fairness Act, which will raise the wages of women, encouraging more to seek paid employment."" No empirical evidence is offered that such a modest piece of legislation will have an impact this large, nor is much made of the fact that a large share of the growth benefit of the Sanders agenda is being attributed to this consensus Democratic policy, rather than to his more unusual positions.

Conversely, some of Sanders's more distinctive signature ideas would almost certainly depress labor force participation even in a sympathetic view.

For example, if you made college free, some young people who would otherwise work full time would instead go to school and work part time. Some students who currently work part time would reduce their hours or cut back to zero. A proponent of free college would likely describe these as benefits of the free college universe — and certainly foreign countries where college is much cheaper than the United States see fewer school-age people in the labor force.

By the same token, Sanders's ""Medicare for all"" and expanded Social Security plans would almost certainly increase the number of people who retire early. Free health care would make it easier to be retired for a year or five before Social Security benefits kick in, more generous Social Security would reduce the amount of intact savings people need once the benefits do kick in, and the higher taxes to finance the Medicare-for-all plan would make working slightly less lucrative.

None of that is necessarily a bad thing — reducing old people's need to toil is a very nice idea — but, like free college, it tends to cut against Friedman's view that Bernienomics will create a surge of employment.

It's noteworthy that the former CEA chairs criticizing Friedman didn't bother to run through a detailed explanation of their problems with the paper. To them, the 5.3 percent figure was simply absurd on its face, and it was good enough for them to say so, relying on their authority to generate media coverage.

And to an extent, mission accomplished. The coverage has been generated. But for better or for worse, the entire premise of the Sanders campaign is that the existing Democratic Party establishment needs to be overthrown, so imperious dismissals by establishment figures don't really hurt Sanders. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, told Danielle Kurtzleben that the economists in question are ""the establishment of the establishment"" and claimed to be unbothered by the criticisms.

""That does not bother us at all,"" he told her. ""What bothers us is the fact that the U.S. has more kids living in poverty than nearly any major country on earth.""

Bernie sympathizers like the Week's Ryan Cooper and veteran left-wing political operative Jeff Hauser simply view the letter signers as non-credible, referring to an old Goolsbee column and to Tyson's service on corporate boards.

To Sanders skeptics, this style of response is itself worrying. Paul Krugman, for example, wrote about the letter and said, ""If your response to these concerns is that they’re all corrupt, all looking for jobs with Hillary, you are very much part of the problem.""

The dismissals of the critiques of Friedman's praise for Sanders's plan are, in a way, more telling and informative than either the Friedman paper or the critiques of it. Sanders and his core constituency simply don't care.

Sanders is running a style of campaign that's very unusual for a prominent Democrat but extremely common for a Republican. Marco Rubio, for example, has proposed a large tax cut, a balanced budget amendment, an increase in defense spending, and to prevent any cuts in Social Security or Medicare for people currently at or near retirement.

This is, obviously, not possible, but it hasn't been a problem for Rubio in the GOP primary because the 2016 GOP primary — like the 2012, 2008, 2000, 1996, and 1988 primaries — haven't been about who has the best policy plans. It is about how conservative ideology should be defined and — among those who share a similar definition — who is its most effective champion. The 1980 and 1976 GOP primaries were about whether the Republican Party should be a vehicle of the conservative movement or whether it should continue in the Eisenhower/Nixon/Ford model of right-leaning interest group brokerage — with the conservatives winning in 1980 and never letting go.

Democrats for almost all of this time have not defined themselves as a mirror image of the conservative GOP. Instead, they are a left-leaning coalition of interest groups looking for group wins that tends to downplay ideology. This is why, historically, evaluating ""plans"" has been a very important part of Democratic politics.

Sanders's campaign against Hillary Clinton is more like Ronald Reagan's battle with Gerald Ford than like the Obama-Clinton primary of 2008. As part of his political revolution, Sanders wants to change the Democratic Party (which he historically was not even a member of) into a much more ideological political party. Consequently, for Sanders the point of taking policy positions is much more about showing where he stands and who his friends and enemies are than it is about the details of policymaking. What he would actually do as president, after all, is going to be constrained by political realities and his ability to mobilize the public

To Sanders's critics, of course, this is just gross irresponsibility that neglects the best traditions of the Democratic Party and raises serious questions about Sanders's ability to do serious policy analysis when the time comes to make choices. But to his fans, fetishizing wonky details is just a way of circumscribing policy proposals to what can be uncontroversially modeled in a world where obtaining and deploying concrete political power — not drawing up more and better white papers — is the crucial task for progressive politics.",REAL
"A subject not often discussed is the topic of how to repair strained or broken relationships. It is one that comes up in everyone’s life, so it will be useful to make a few suggestions about it here. We will talk about relationships from friends, family, and lovers.
Relationships among friends we will treat first. The first step in this process is to make an evaluation to determine whether the relationship is worth saving or rehabilitating. It is a simple fact of life that some relationships have an expiration date; when two people no longer have anything in common, or their paths take them in divergent directions, it may be difficult to find common ground. In this situation, it is always better to let the relationship die a natural death slowly, rather than rapidly. Abrupt terminations may leave the other party with negative feelings, and this should be avoided if at all possible.
There are some instances where repair is not possible. When someone has committed a fundamental violation of trust or respect, this is a warning sign that the person was never a friend in the first place. Another point to keep in mind is that repair of a broken relationship requires—no, demands—the participation of both parties. If the other person is unwilling to participate in the process, then your efforts will be futile, and will come to nothing.

Once we have determined that the friendship is worth repairing or sustaining, the next step is to decide how to make the first approach to the other party. In this we must try to evaluate the reasons for the problems in the first place. We should make an honest assessment about how things got to where they are. Did someone say or do something that caused hard feelings on the other side? Was there some intervening cause that made the two parties diverge in plans and activities? These types of questions must be honestly and repeatedly asked. We have a tendency to minimize our own hurtful actions and exaggerate those of others, and this must be kept in mind.
The key rule at this point is to try to put ourselves in the shoes of the other party. We must try to see things from our friend’s perspective. For many people this can be difficult, as it involves getting past our own feelings of hurt or rejection and into the shoes of the other person. And yet it is essential. Very frequently the reasons for strained or broken friendships lies in the fact that there is some problem going on in the other person’s life. Only by being a perceptive student of human nature can we divine the cause. Sometimes the only thing that caused the strained relationship was some misunderstanding that was easily curable.
Keep in mind that we must try—at least in our own minds—to discover the source of the other person’s problem. This is not always possible, as human beings are not always rational. But we can at least make the effort. I remember in the film Hoffa that there was a great line from Jack Nicholson. He told one of his men, “Real problems, real grievances can be resolved. They can be negotiated. But imaginary grievances? That man is going to hate you for life.” I have no idea if Jimmy Hoffa every actually said this, but it sounds like something he would have said. He meant that we should avoid hurting the pride of our friends. We should be acutely aware how it is sometimes the intangible slights that can most rankle with a man.
When you have decided to make the first step, it is always better to initiate contact directly. Do not wait for the other person to do it. Depending on the circumstances, this should be done discreetly and without too much in the way of overpowering insistence. There is a certain type of finesse that a man should have at critical times, and this is one of them. The approach should be direct, but neither insistent nor demanding. A fish is best hooked with a lure gently laid.
Of vital importance here is that the approach be sincere. One should genuinely want to contact the other party. Sincerity is the glue that binds friendships together and permits their longevity. There should be no hypocrisy or falsity in any of our dealings with friends. This kind of thing is immediately apparent and, once detected, its whiff surrounds the offending party like a permanent cloud. If the other party is receptive to the approach, we can then gradually feel our way forward, taking care to avoid the reasons why the friendship became strained in the first place. Things may never quite go back to what they were, but at least we can find solid ground for a new frame of reference.
Two examples will suffice here. The historian William Shirer worked closely with famed correspondent Edward R. Murrow when the two were in Germany in the 1930s. Yet after the war was over, the two grew apart. Shirer’s account of the estrangement suggests that he was repelled by Murrow’s enthusiastic adoption of the anticommunist hysteria of the time. Shirer found himself gradually blackballed from most major news networks before being forced out completely. He broke with Murrow over these events. Many decades later, he approached Murrow; all venom spent, the two were able to find common ground again.

Another example makes the same point. Theodore Roosevelt was a strong-willed, insistent man, to say the least. He was in a position to choose his successor as president, and to this end he selected a man very different from him, the affable and rotund William Howard Taft. Taft eventually began to find Roosevelt an overbearing and unwelcome presence in his life. The two men eventually broke completely, a result of their personality differences and different conceptions of leadership. To his credit, Roosevelt eventually approached his old friend privately to patch things up. They were never the same, of course, but at least some cordiality was restored.
Relationships with family are of a fundamentally different sort. Because we are linked by bonds of blood (or perhaps marriage), it will be more difficult to disentangle ourselves from those with whom we have become estranged. On the other hand, it may be easier to repair such grievances, or at least find common ground, since there may be more shared experiences with the other party that act in our favor. The key here is not to expect too much. Although shared history and common blood may work in our favor, they can be counterbalanced to some extent by the fact that irrational family antagonisms can run deeper than those from strained friendships. Patience and persistence are most important here, perhaps more so than friendships with those unrelated to us.

Repairing strained relationships with lovers is perhaps the most difficult. When a man and woman have been united in the past through the coital act, an entirely different set of emotions and motivations come into play. Relationships between lovers can fail or become strained for an infinite number of reasons, and it would be impossible to discuss all of them here. It is enough for me to state my opinion that it is nearly impossible to bring an intimate sexual relationship back to what it was after it has been broken.
Strained is one thing; broken is quite another. My own experience leads me to believe that once a sexual relationship is done, it is done. One cannot really go back to what it was before. Amicable dealings are certainly possible, and happen all the time; but I would not call this friendship. I would call it an uneasy equilibrium. Love’s inflammatory presence scorches all it leaves in its wake.
Read More : 5 Proven Ways To Stop Obsessive Thoughts 
",FAKE
"We Are Change 
Donald Trump on Saturday was quickly ushered off the stage by Secret Service agents in the middle of a campaign speech in Nevada after an incident in the crowd near the front of the stage.
Secret Service rushes Trump off stage at Reno rally https://t.co/n82d9jXopX 
— Chrissy (@omgitsmechrissy) November 6, 2016 
Video shows that Trump was in the middle of his speech when the incident occurred. He was looking into the crowd, his hand over his eyes to block the glare from the stage lights, when Secret Service agents grabbed him and escorted him off the stage. Trump ducked his head as he left the stage. The crowd panicked with frightened looks on their faces, as the Secret Service and police tactical units rushed in to quickly arrest the man. Video on twitter shows the moment that the Secret Service and law enforcement took down the man. Got footage of man who was detained by police and Secret Service after @realDonaldTrump was rushed off stage by USSS agents pic.twitter.com/FVEieSYj5w 
— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 6, 2016 
Early unconfirmed reports suggest a man was armed in the crowd according to some witnesses. One witness said that they were in the crowd when an unknown guy creeped toward the stage staring at Trump. The witness then proceeded to get the attention of four bigger guys surrounding them and confronted the man. The man then freaked out and reached into his pocket to grab what looked like a gun.” According to the witness the man was mumbling about “the delegates.” “ I was in the crowd, me and my dad saw a guy creeping toward the stage staring at trump. i got the attention of 4 big guys around me and we confronted him and when we did he spurged out and reached into his pocket to grab what looked like a gun. when we tackled him to the ground and between punches he kept saying something about “the delegates”? he must have the delegates. sorry i’m pretty shaken up right now. “ With one person in the crowd shouting “he’s got a gun.” The man was then detained by police officers, Secret Service agents and SWAT armed with assault rifles and taken to a side room for questioning. The suspect is seen below. Trump returned to the stage minutes later and proceeded to continue his speech before thanking the Secret Service and police. “Nobody said it was going to be easy for us, but we will never be stopped. We will never be stopped. I want to thank the Secret Service. These guys are fantastic.” 
~Donald Trump, said.
Luke breaks down the details in the video below of the attempted assassination of the anti-establishment candidate Donald Trump.
It’s worth noting that the last Trump assassination attempt also occurred in Nevada when Michael Sandford a British citizen attempted to grab a police officer’s gun and shoot Donald Trump a few weeks ago.
Julian Assange was right when he said earlier today to John Pilger that “anti-establishment Trump Wouldn’t Be Allowed To Win.” Although Julian just missed how he would be stopped.
(THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY AND WILL BE UPDATED AS NEW DETAILS BECOME AVAILABLE.) The post #BREAKING: SECOND Assassination Attempt On Trump In NV; Suspect Detained (LIVE BLOG) appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"After 9/11, George W. Bush favored isolation and military action over diplomacy – an approach that didn't win over other countries. Now, the US could again find itself on the outs with others if it rejects the Iran nuclear deal.

Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee (r.) listens as Secretary of State John Kerry (l. foreground) testifies at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Thursday, July 23, 2015, to review the Iran nuclear agreement.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush played down diplomacy in favor of isolation and military action – unilateral American action if necessary – for dealing with rogue states like Iraq and Iran.

The approach never won the broad support of global powers, instead leaving the United States essentially isolated and criticized, rather than supported, as it sought to address the regime of Saddam Hussein. When Mr. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, America was left to largely go it alone.

More than a decade later, the US could once again find itself on the outs with the rest of the world if, after years of painstaking negotiations with other world powers, it ends up rejecting the Iran nuclear deal, some foreign policy experts say.

“After the invasion of Iraq, the United States became the issue in international relations,” says Robert Litwak, director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. “If the US rejects this agreement – after its acceptance elsewhere as a fair deal – the US, not Iran, will become the issue again.”

The potential for America to find itself isolated again over a crucial international security issue could have a deep impact among the US public. Americans’ dislike for being the odd man out in international affairs is seen in polls consistently showing a preference for US-led diplomacy over go-it-alone military intervention. That may help explain why opponents of the Iran deal emphasize that they want “a better deal” with Iran, not no deal at all.

Obama administration officials have seized on the isolation argument, backed by signs that the other powers involved in the negotiations – three European powers, Russia, and China – are already moving forward with Iran based on an assumption that the nuclear deal is done and sanctions on Iran will start to be lifted by the fall. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was in Tehran last week, and European businesses are flooding into Iran to secure a slice of the anticipated boom as the government starts spending in big-ticket projects again.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been quick to issue warnings about the threat of America’s isolation, arguing within days of the deal’s signing in Vienna July 14 that if Congress were to vote down the deal, “Our friends in this effort will desert us.”

The rest of the international community would blame the deal’s failure on the US, Secretary Kerry says. Other powers would lift their sanctions, and Iran, freed from both sanctions and constraints on its nuclear program, would ramp up its uranium enrichment – raising again the specter of military action to halt Iran’s nuclear progress.

“We will be viewed as having killed the opportunity to stop [the Iranians] from having weapons,” Kerry said in remarks aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” July 19. Iran, he added, “will begin to enrich again, and the greater likelihood is what [President Obama] said the other day – you will have a war.”

It is this argument – that either Congress approves the deal or it condemns the US to fighting on its own a war with Iran – that has irked some in Congress.

“You have turned Iran from being a pariah into now Congress, Congress being a pariah,” Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Kerry when he appeared before the committee last Thursday.

Senator Corker noted in particular his dissatisfaction with what he said was the administration’s portrayal of a stark choice for Congress between the deal negotiated and a go-it-alone military intervention.

“With every detail of the deal that was laid out [in classified briefings by senior administration officials to members of Congress], our witnesses successfully batted them away with the hyperbole that it’s either this deal or war,” he said.

Some Middle East experts worry that rejection of the deal would leave the US and Israel isolated, both in the region and internationally. That is especially true as Gulf Arab states appear to be coming to a consensus of support for the deal – especially in light of the reinforced US strategic support that the Obama administration has been pledging to help counter a deal-emboldened Iran.

America’s isolation in the wake of congressional rejection of the deal would be all the stronger, says Mr. Litwak of the Wilson Center, because it would appear to the rest of the world that the US was turning back to a post-9/11 faith in “regime change” as the only way to deal with rogue states.

The prevailing thinking after 9/11 “was that behavior modification wouldn’t get you there – so you had to deal with [rogue states] through regime change,” he says.

Mr. Obama shelved the “rogue state” concept for dealing with countries like Iran and instead framed it as an “outlier on international law,” Litwak says – an approach more to the liking of the international community.

But critics of the deal say it is actually Obama who is exposing his belief in “regime change” – by promoting a deal that counts on the Iranian government’s transformation over the coming decade.

“You can’t understand the nuclear deal with Iran without believing that in the decade ahead, there will be regime change in Tehran – although they [the deal’s proponents] call it regime transformation,” says Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

The “irony” that Mr. Dubowitz sees a decade after Bush’s “axis of evil” is that once again, it is “regime change” that the US would deploy to deal with Iran – although, he says, it’s in a form more palatable to the world.

“It’s regime change, but in a sense it’s being flipped on its head,” Dubowitz says.

“In the place of the right advocating force and coercion, you have the left saying, ‘Don’t worry about the details of this deal, because in 10 years’ time when some of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program are gone, it won’t matter,’ ” he says. “They really believe the deal will have set in motion a chain of events that will change the nature and behavior of this regime.”",REAL
"0 88 0 1 After running one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in US history, the Trump brand has taken a hit -- literally. 
In 2007, Donald Trump was granted a coveted spot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work on his reality show, “The Apprentice.” With limited real estate, the decision to enshrine reality stars on the sidewalk has always been controversial. 
Trump’s star has become especially unwelcome. — MEFeater Magazine (@mefeater) October 26, 2016 
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a man dressed as a city worker used a sledgehammer and pickaxe to deface the presidential hopeful’s star, removing the brass star and scraping his name from the sidewalk. — Ol' QWERTY Bastard (@TheDiLLon1) October 26, 2016 
According to Deadline , the vandal has been identified as Jamie Otis, who said he intended to remove the entire section of sidewalk in order to sell it at auction. Proceeds, he said, would go toward supporting the multiple women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. 
The stars are maintained by the Hollywood Historic Trust, and the group has already said that the individual responsible will be prosecuted ""to the full extent of the law,"" and repairs are already underway. — Adelle Nazarian (@AdelleNaz) October 26, 2016 
""The Hollywood Walk of Fame is an institution celebrating the positive contributions of the inductees,"" said Leron Gubler, head of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, according to Deadline. ""When people are unhappy with one of our honorees, we would hope that they would project their anger in more positive ways than to vandalize a California State landmark."" 
If found guilty, the individual responsible could face up to three years in jail and a fine of $10,000. 
The Trump star has been vandalized on a number of occasions since he began his presidential campaign. In January, a vandal spray-painted a reverse swastika over the star. — afterglow (@afterglow2046) October 26, 2016 
Two similar incidents occurred over the summer. In June, a mute sign was spray-painted over the spot. One month later, a street artist erected a miniaturized wall around the star, a reference to the Republican candidate’s proposal to construct a barrier along the US-Mexico border. 
Of course, given that his divisive rhetoric on the campaign trail appears to be affecting his brand, Trump may soon start defacing his own properties. Amid rumors that the billionaire is removing the Trump name from his hotels, the Trump organization has announced plans to launch a new brand under the less identifiable name ""Scion."" ...",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton is firing back at Donald Trump after he announced his new tax plan Monday and promised that the United States would reach amazing new heights under his presidency.

The GOP nominee was on his best behavior during his latest campaign stop, managing to stay on topic and never lose his cool despite interruptions by protesters.

Speaking at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump laid out his plans for America's economy.

""We will make America grow again. I want to jump-start America and it can be done and it won't even be that hard,"" he vowed.

Among his ideas were the following proposals:

Trump also took some time to slam Clinton's economic plans, saying she punished Americans for working and doing business in the United States.

Clinton wasted no time firing back, calling Trump's plans a re-packaging of old Republican ideas.

""Today in Detroit he's got, I don't know, a dozen or so economic advisers he just named. Hedge fund guys, billionaire guys, six guys named Steve,"" Clinton told supporters at a campaign rally in Kissimmee, Florida. ""They wrote him a speech and he delivered it in Detroit. They tried to make his old, tired ideas sound new.""

She said that, unlike Trump, she would be a ""small business president"" and create jobs.

""If Trump were able to implement what he's proposing, heaven forbid, it would cost three and a half million jobs. He would actually reduce jobs,"" she warned.

Meanwhile, the latest round of national polls show Clinton leading her GOP rival by double digits.

But Trump's hour-long speech on a key issue - the economy - could be another sign that the Republican candidate is ready to begin working with the GOP to get his campaign back on track.",REAL
"Iran's foreign minister and lead negotiator in nuclear talks with the United States has been ordered by the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader to stop shouting and yelling at Secretary of State John Kerry during negotiating sessions.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told his country's state controlled media in a recent interview that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has instructed him to stop yelling at Kerry and other top U.S. officials during the talks.

Reports about Zarif's temper first emerged in the Iranian press last November, when the United States and Iran agreed to extend talks through June of this year.

Zarif is said to ""frequently shout at Western diplomats"" with such force that bodyguards have been forced to enter the negotiation room.

During one incident described by Iranian officials to the press, European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton, a chief western negotiator, admitted that Zarif had been shouting, and she had gotten used to it.

Abbas Araqchi, an Iranian diplomat who is also a member of the negotiating team, is reported to have said in an interview that during past negotiations in Geneva, Zarif ""shouted"" at Kerry and spoke to him in a manner ""unprecedented"" in the history of U.S. diplomacy.

Zarif appeared to cop to this behavior during a recent interview with the state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), according to an independent translation of the report provided to the Washington Free Beacon.

Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
"Baltimore leaders say the first night of the city's seven-day curfew effectively worked to calm the violence that erupted only 24 hours earlier.

     

They're now hoping it's a sign of things returning to normal as schools in the city re-open their doors. But they admit there is still much work to be done to repair buildings ruined in the riots -- and to fix people's heartbreak.      

     

On Tuesday, Baltimore residents locked arms to join forces with more than a thousand police officers and 2,000 National Guardsmen to enact the first night of the city's 10 p.m. curfew. 

    

Some defiant demonstrators refused to leave. But that resistance lasted only about 30 minutes, until officers fired flash bangs and tossed smoke canisters.

""I think the biggest thing is that citizens are safe; the city is stable,"" Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said. ""We hope to maintain it that way.""

Tuesday night was a far cry from Monday when rioters torched cars, tossed debris at police, and tore apart businesses.

Officers only arrested 10 people Tuesday, compared to more than 200 on Monday.

It's an image many Baltimore residents and church leaders spent their Tuesday trying to erase. They hit the streets to work together and clean.

""We're all frustrated. We just need to find a better way to deal with this,"" Baltimore resident Alfonzo Timmons said.

In the midst of Monday's chaos, one overwrought Baltimore mother was hailed a hero.

     

When Toya Graham spotted her teenage son on live television throwing rocks at police, the single mom marched down to the street and fought to drag him home -- giving him a severe talking to on the way.

     

She told reporters she didn't want to see her son lost to violence -- or police brutality -- like Freddy Gray, the young man whose death in police custody first sparked the protests only a week ago.

    

But some pointed out that Baltimore's problems are much older and deeper than that one death.    

  

""This has been going on a long time. This is not new and we should not pretend that it's new,"" President Barack Obama said.

Repairing relations between people and police is going take time in this city. They now also have to find ways to rebuild businesses.

""It breaks my heart because those of us who are from Baltimore know how hard we fought for those stores,"" Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

    

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Orioles are playing an afternoon home game at Camden Yards.

     

But there is a twist. 

     

The game will be closed to the public. Only the players and the press will be allowed in the stadium, not fans.",REAL
"The crowd gathered in the streets outside the OC Fair & Event Center as Trump addressed several thousand supporters at the Center's amphitheater. At least one police car was damaged and several scuffles broke out amid the hectic scene.

Protesters blocked a main intersection, impeding traffic, and officers with the Orange County Sheriff's Department and Costa Mesa Police Department worked to disperse the crowd, ordering protesters out of the streets.

About 20 people were arrested, the Orange County Sheriff's Department tweeted late Thursday night after the protests had cleared.

Lt. Mark Stichter, the Sheriff's Department's public information officer, could not provide an official estimate on the number of protesters, but demonstrators could be seen filling the intersection of Fairview Road and Fair Drive.

Several scuffles broke out between Trump supporters who were leaving the rally and people in the streets who accused them of being racists. One Trump supporter was visibly bloodied after being punched in the face. A @realDonaldTrump supporter just got punched in the face as a scuffle broke out in the street: pic.twitter.com/3h3Fllm3V3 — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) April 29, 2016 Several people damaged a police car, smashing its back window before jumping on it and kicking its doors. As a crowd formed around the car, police officers in tactical and riot gear moved into action, forming a perimeter around the crowd before forcing the demonstrators to move down the road. People jumping on police car outside @realDonaldTrump rally. Window smashed few minutes earlier pic.twitter.com/SOsFarQEVr — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) April 29, 2016 While some demonstrators shouted insults and slurs at police officers, others focused on delivering a message of protest against the Republican front-runner's rhetoric. Several protesters told CNN they were demonstrating against Trump's rhetoric on illegal immigration. Some were seen carrying Mexican flags as they marched in the street. Other demonstrators shouted insults and slurs at police officers. ""I'm against Trump's nativist and nationalistic agenda, which divides people and is very hateful of the other,"" he said. While Banuelos simply marched through the streets, he called the property damage and anger some demonstrators expressed Friday night ""the symptom of hate speech"" and said he did not believe any individuals were taking advantage of the protest. ""I think people are tired of these messages of hate,"" she said.",REAL
"- < It’s Not Broken, So Let’s Break It–“California Set To Let Public Schools Teach Primarily In Spanish” > November 8, 2016, 10:21 am A+ | a-   
From The Daily Caller : 
Reporter 
6:10 PM 11/06/2016 
California isn’t even close to a swing stat",FAKE
"America’s Streets Will Run With Blood- Mike Adams 
VIOLENCE IN AMERICA-AMERICA’S STREETS WILL RUN RED WITH BLOOD 
Hillary is going down. But don’t make the mistake of thinking it is over! As Mike Adams says in the following video. It does not matter who wins, the streets will run red with blood. 
Listen to what Mike Adams has to say in the following video. If this video does not convince you to prepare to be on your own, then nothing will.",FAKE
"Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate and billionaire Republican donor, has made up his mind: He's supporting Donald Trump, and other Republicans need to fall in line.

Adelson's endorsement, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, matters because he's very wealthy and very willing to spend his wealth to elect Republicans. He spent as much as $150 million trying to defeat President Obama in 2012. His pro-Trump argument boils down to three points: Any Republican is better than a Democrat, Hillary Clinton in particular would be worse, and Trump's CEO experience has to count for something.

As Republicans, we know that getting a person in the White House with an ""R"" behind his name is the only way things will get better. That opportunity still exists. We must not cut off our noses to spite our faces.

Adelson almost certainly won't be the last prominent Republican to rationalize supporting Trump like this. Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan seem to be working toward a rapprochement. Senate Republicans up for reelection are still dancing around outright endorsing Trump but are refusing to publicly denounce him either.

And if anyone had reasons to be skeptical about Trump, it's Adelson, a hard-liner on Israeli security. Trump promised to be ""neutral"" on Israel-Palestine — although he later backed away from that stance — and to enforce the Iran deal. Adelson has been telegraphing for months that Trump might be acceptable to him. His rationale — ""The alternative to Trump being sworn in as the nation’s 45th president is frightening,"" he wrote — is likely to show up in other Republicans' statements between now and November.",REAL
" Watch Hillary Clinton’s Concession Speech Video
“Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a president for all of our country...
“I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we all share...
“You represent the best of America, and being your candidate has been one of the greatest honors of my life. I know how disappointed you feel, because I feel it too.... Donald Trump's Victory Speech ",FAKE
"Leaders of Gulf nations unnerved by Washington's nuclear talks with Iran and Tehran's meddling across the Mideast look to President Barack Obama to promise more than words and weapons at Thursday's Camp David summit.

They want commitments from Obama that the United States has their backs at a time when the region is under siege from Islamic extremists, Syria continues to unravel, Iraq is volatile and Yemen is in chaos.

""I think we are looking for some form of security guarantee, given the behavior of Iran in the region, given the rise of the extremist threat. We definitely want a stronger relationship,"" said Yousef Al Qtaiba, the United Arab Emirates' ambassador to the United States.

""In the past, we have survived with a gentleman's agreement with the United States about security. I think today, we need something in writing. We need something institutionalized.""

What are the expectations for Obama's meetings with Gulf Cooperation Council countries — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman?

Weapons sales. A renewed call for a coordinated missile defense system. More joint military exercises. Better cooperation on cybersecurity, as well as maritime or border security. Making the countries' defense systems work in concert.

""I don't believe there's a single GCC country that doesn't think a defense shield for the region is a bad idea. I think everyone's on board,"" Qtaiba said. ""The challenge is how do you turn on a regional defense system when different countries are purchasing different equipment and at different paces? How do you link it? How do you get the radars to talk to each other?""

A high-level Saudi official told The Associated Press in Riyadh that his country wants a defense system and military cooperation similar to what the U.S. affords Israel. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to disclose details of the Saudis' wish list at the summit, said they also want access to high-tech military equipment, missiles, planes and satellites, as well as more technology and training cooperation with the U.S.

The U.S. and five other nations are working to finalize a deal intended to stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for easing penalties that are choking the Iranian economy. The White House says the Gulf countries would be better off with an agreement that blocks Iran's path to an atomic weapon.

But the nuclear deal is not the only source of unease.

Arab allies feel threatened by Iran's rising influence and they fear a nuclear pact will embolden Tehran. They worry that the deal would unlock billions of dollars that Iran might decide to use to further intrude in countries or support terrorist proxies.

Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Obama will have to work hard to convince the Arab allies that they do not need to fear fallout from any nuclear deal.

""Right now they feel that they have no support from this administration so he has a steep hill to climb,"" said McCain, pointing to Saudi Arabia's decision to act unilaterally in Yemen.

McCain, R-Ariz., said that's why the Saudis gave Gen. Lloyd Austin, head of the U.S. Central Command, only ""an hour's notice they were going to strike Yemen."" Saudi Arabia has led airstrikes against Iranian-backed rebels who have toppled the Yemeni government.

Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic, but declines to say exactly what kind of reassurances Obama is prepared to offer at Camp David.

""I can just tell you in general terms that they have to do with the intensifying and strengthening of the security-military relationship between the United States of America and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, as well as dealing with new challenges that we face in the region, foremost of which is the Iranian interference in the affairs of the countries of the region,"" Kerry said Friday in Paris.

He said U.S. officials were fleshing out a series of commitments that will create a ""new security understanding, a new set of security initiatives,""

Standing by his side, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said he expected the summit would lead to ways that ""joint action will be more effective and more expansive in all areas, whether it relates to cybersecurity or defense against ballistic missiles or military training or equipping.""

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate panel overseeing foreign aid, warns against the U.S. offering a massive arms package in exchange for Gulf nations' support of a nuclear deal. Graham, R-S.C., said he isn't opposed to upgrading the military capabilities of Arab allies, but ""if it has a hint of being connected to the Iran deal, I will do everything I can to make sure they never get one bullet or one plane.""

Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wonders if there is anything the United States can do that would reassure the Gulf states when it comes to Iranian expansionism in the region.

""It seems to me that where they most want reassurance is where the U.S. is both least able and most unwilling to provide it,"" he said. ""My guess is that the summit is going to leave everybody feeling a little bit unsatisfied.""",REAL
"For those who are too young or too unwilling to remember, a trip down memory lane. 
1969 – Debut: Hillary speaks at Wellesley graduation, insults Edward Brooke, Senate’s lone black member. 
1973 – Watergate committee: Says Chief Counsel Jerry Zeifman of Hillary’s performance, “She was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” 
1978-79 – Cattlegate: as wife of Arkansas governor, she invests $1,000 in cattle futures, makes $100,000. 
1978 – Whitewater: Clintons borrow money to launch Whitewater Development Corporations. Several people go to prison over it. Clintons don’t. 
1992 – Bimbo eruptions: Bill and Hillary swear to Steve Kroft on “60 minutes” Bill had nothing to do with Gennifer Flowers. 
1992 – Private investigators: “We reached out to them,” Hillary tells CBS’ Steve Kroft of Bill’s women. “I met with two of them to reassure them they were friends of ours.” They also hire PIs to bribe and/or threaten as many as two-dozen of them. 
1993 – Health care reform: Hillary heads secret health-care task force, sued successfully for violating open meeting laws. Subsequent plan killed by Democratic-controlled House. 
1993 – Waco: Hillary’s DOJ authorizes armed assault against religious community in Waco, 80 dead, many of them children, more than half racial minorities. 
1993 – Travelgate: Hillary orchestrates firing of travel office employees, replaces them with her own people. Independent Counsel Robert Ray calls her sworn testimony “factually false” but can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt it was ”knowingly false.” 
1993 – Vince Foster: White House counsel and reputed Hillary lover is found dead in Fort Marcy Park. The DOJ opens a separate investigation of possible obstruction of justice by Hillary and her cohorts for blocking search of Foster office. 
1994 – Chinagate: Hillary meets with disgraced fixer Webb Hubbell. A week later Clinton Indonesian money man James Riady gives Hubbell $100,000 “job.” Hubbell never talks. Reads the NYT headline, “Payment to an Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project.” 
1994 – Filegate: Hillary henchman Craig Livingstone improperly requests and receives FBI background reports on several hundred individuals. Multiple investigations follow. 
1994 – November elections: Due in no small part to health-care fiasco, Dems lose Senate and House for first time in nearly 50 years. 
1995 – Chinagate: Hillary convenes secret meeting with Bill and Dick Morris. They launch what Thompson Committee calls “the most corrupt political campaign in modern history.” 
Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton! 
1995 – Pay to play: The $100,000 donation to travel with the Clintons on trade missions morphs from a discreet expectation into the price of admission. Independent counsel investigates. 
1995-96 – Thompson Committee: The Clintons “pulled down all the barriers that would normally be in place to keep out illegal contributions, pressured policy makers, and left themselves open to strong suspicion that they were selling not only access to high-ranking officials, but policy as well.” 
1996 – Blizzard of lies: Hillary dodges imaginary “sniper fire” in Bosnia’s Tuzla airport. 
1996 – Ron Brown death: Nine days later embattled Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who hates being “Hillary Clinton’s being mother-f—ing tour guide,” leaves Tuzla on final, fatal flight to Croatia. 
1996 – Enron connection: Brown goes to Croatia to broker a sweetheart deal between the neo-fascists who run the country and the Enron Corporation. Despite his death, the deal goes through, ends very badly. 
1996 – Ron Brown cover-up: Pathologists find an apparent bullet hole in Brown’s head. He is buried without autopsy. Head X-rays are lost. Three pathologists and photographer have careers wrecked for going public. 
1995-96 – Thompson Committee: “Millions of dollars were raised in illegal contributions, much of it from foreign sources.” 
1996 – TWA Flight 800: Hillary is in family quarters with Bill and Sandy Berger when plans are launched to cover up real cause of the destruction of the aircraft. 
1996 – Blizzard of Lies: In a New York Times op-ed titled “Blizzard of Lies,” the usually restrained William Safire famously calls Hillary “a congenital liar.” 
1997 – Pay to play: Johnny Chung tells Thompson Committee he funneled $100,000 from the Chinese military to the DNC. “The White House is like a subway. You have to put in coins to open the gates.” 
1998 – Monica: “There isn’t any fire,” Hillary tells Matt Lauer about the “smoke” surrounding Monica Lewinsky accusations. ”The great story here is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband.” 
1999 – FALN: Clinton pardons 16 lethal Puerto Rican terrorists to boost Hillary’s chance to win N.Y. Senate seat. She supports move until outrage mounts. 
1999 – Christopher Hitchens: “Like him, [Hillary] is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying demagogic improvisations.” 
2001 – Pardongate: Clinton pardons 140 people on final day of office, including cocaine dealer, drug-dealing brother, Whitewater pal and billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. Hillary’s brothers Hugh and Tony both implicated during subsequent investigation. James Comey investigates, finds no illegality. 
2001 – Furnituregate: The Clintons leave the White House with $134,000 worth of items that they, once the story breaks, have to return or pay for. 
Please share with your Republican friends who seem comfortable with this woman returning to the White House. Unless, they get a royalty every time the suffix “gate” is applied to a word, they are in for a rough four years. 
Media wishing to interview Jack Cashill, please contact . Receive Jack Cashill's commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Jack Cashill's alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
"link originally posted by: JinMI Lots of discussion over the past months. Who we're for or who we're against and platitudes of statements...some not so much. Whomever you decide to give your vote to honestly does not concern me nor should mine concern you. The debates, arguments and discussions are fun and generally informative. Vote for who you would, even if it takes a few hours. I've seen quite a bit of conversation of folks not wanting to vote at all. What does this prove? What is this standing (sitting) against? Your disapproval of the two party system or maybe you think the whole thing a charade? My opinion would leave me to believe that if your going to attempt to rebel against the system it would be a secure third party vote or a vote for the future so to speak. We as Americans need to take back our power over Government. There is more than just the Presidency at stake and to me I would think that not voting at all is a contribution to the apathy that has us in the situation we are in. Whether it be Trump or Drumf or Hillary or Shillary or Stein or Johnson or Joe Blow, I would urge you to vote! If you are not voting at all, would you please elaborate as to why? I'm trying to imagine the next president of the USA being Joe Blow. Well now President Blow, what do you think of the Cannabis trade with Mexico? Anything to declare?",FAKE
"in: News Articles , Preparedness\Survival Back in the early days, before writing about any one aspect of prepping, I had to do a lot of research. Online resources were meager so there was a lot of trial and error involved as I formulated my own preparedness strategy. Sadly, as I look back, there was considerable error. Who knew? The good news is that the school of hard prepping knocks has taught me a thing or two. This is especially true when it comes to last minute preps. Now that I am lot smarter, I thought it might be fun to put on my thinking cap and come up with a list of ten last minute preps that could be put into place if I had a modicum of warning that a storm or other disruptive event was brewing. There are two parts to this list, things to do and things to buy. Things To Do 1. Top Off Vehicles with Fuel I never let our two cars go under half a tank but even so, 100% full is always a better option than 50%. Hopefully I will get wind of the pending event soon enough to beat the crowds. 2. Do the Laundry It is not that I hate doing laundry but rather I get lazy about it. It is not unusual to have to do six loads at a time, simply due to procrastination. Given a brewing storm, you can bet the laundry will get done and while I am at it, the bedding will also get changed. 3. Inventory Prescription Drugs With my Ammo Can First Aid Kit already stocked and set aside, I will want to do a quick check on prescription meds and if necessary, get them refilled. 4. Charge All Electronic Devices Compared to six years ago, my home is overrun by electronic devices. Three Kindles, three iPads of varying ages, and four laptop computers, and two iPhones make up a motely crew of electronic devices that hold a wealth of both reference material and amusements. All can be charged using portable solar devices (which are pretty darn cheap these days), but if I am stuck indoors for any length of tine, solar is not going to help. 5. Set Out Spare Lanterns, Flashlights, and Batteries Why wait until the power is out before digging out your emergency light sources? As I say this, I am confident in the knowledge that I already have a flashlight in every room of the house as well as a portable lantern. Still, this would be a good time to check to ensure their batteries are fully charged. 6. Gather Fresh Biomass Rather than use up my back stock of charcoal and wood, I would prefer to burn the odd branches, twigs, leaves I find on the ground. They work perfectly in both my Solo Stove and EcoZoom rocket stoves . Plus, biomass is free for the taking. Things to Buy 7. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables As an experienced prepper I have a good supply of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables. But once a #10 can or pouch is opened, the 25 year shelf life is reduced to one or two years. For that reason, if a short term disruptive event is predicted, I will want to pick up fresh vegetables and fruits that require no refrigeration and can be eaten raw. The nice thing about fresh fruit and vegetables is that most last-minute disaster shoppers will be hitting the packaged and canned goods aisle. Let them. I am already well-stock with canned goods and want as much fresh stuff as I can get. 8. Wine and Spirits Not everyone consumes alcoholic beverages but here in my household, we do enjoy a nightly glass of wine or a cocktail . That said, I do not stockpile spirits to any great extent due to space considerations. My pre-event checklist would definitely include bottled beverages of the alcoholic type. 9. Paper Plates and Disposable Cups and Eating Utensils Water may be at a premium and where as I will want to use stored water for drinking and hygiene, using it for cleanup is not high on my list of priorities, Instead, I am going to want disposables. It might be a good idea to pick up extra trash bags as well. The goal is not to have to dig into long term emergency preps unless absolutely necessary, 10. Dark Chocolate You are going to be stressed so accept that. Get yourself some chocolate – okay a lot of chocolate – and ride things out while indulging in your favorite chocolate treat. If chocolate is not your thing, then perhaps some cookies or graham crackers or just this once, some seriously unhealthy packaged caramel corn. The Final Word Some of my selections may have surprised you but that’s okay. They were meant to inspire you to come up with your own last minute prepping strategy. Why not sit down right now and make up your own list and share it with the rest of us.? Just don’t forget to include the chocolate! Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation! Submit your review",FAKE
"The two presidents stood in the East Room on Tuesday afternoon, united in their goal of defeating the Islamic State but separated by a stylistic gulf as vast as the Atlantic.

On the left, facing the cameras, was François Hollande, war president. He spoke of “cowardly murderers” who “dishonor humanity,” of a “relentless determination to fight terrorism everywhere and anywhere,” of “an implacable joint response,” of “hunting down their leaders” and “taking back the land.”

On the right stood Barack Obama, President Oh-bummer.

“That’s going to be a process that involves hard, methodical work. It’s not going to be something that happens just because suddenly we take a few more airstrikes.”

“It’s going to be hard. And we should not be under any illusions.”

Could the Paris attacks have been prevented?

Obama, in Turkey last week, responded to those who believe he isn’t tough enough on the Islamic State. “Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said.

Tough talk won’t defeat terrorists — but it will rally a nation. It’s no mere coincidence that the unpopular Hollande’s support has increased during his forceful response to the attacks, while Obama’s poll numbers are down.

The importance of language was very clear at the White House on Tuesday, even in translation.

There was little difference in their strategies for fighting the Islamic State, but Hollande was upbeat and can-do, while Obama was discouraging and lawyerly. It was as if the smoke-’em-out spirit of George W. Bush had been transplanted into the body of a short, pudgy, bespectacled French socialist with wrinkled suit-pants.

From my fourth-row perspective, Obama was still and contained, while Hollande’s sweeping gestures kept setting off bursts of camera-shutter clicks. The Frenchman brought Mediterranean heat (“dismantle and destroy”), while the American was Lake Michigan-cool (“There is a potential convergence of interests between the various parties”).

It’s not as if Obama lacks emotion (he rubbed his face and appeared to blink back tears as Hollande spoke of the young American woman killed in the Paris attacks) or passion (he spoke movingly about the need to admit Syrian refugees). But when he spoke of war and terrorism, it was to play down and reassure. “My fellow Americans, let’s remember we faced greater threats to our way of life before,” he said.

Obama had moments of loft in his lengthy opening statement. He spoke of the “murderous” Islamic State and the “madness” of terrorism as a “scourge that threatens us all.” It “must be destroyed,” he said. But he turned defensive when he reminded everybody that a 65-nation coalition has been fighting the Islamic State “for more than a year,” and he recited its “progress.” Later, Obama said the task was to “accelerate” the “success” already seen. Rather than a new approach, Obama said the United States and allies “must do even more.”

Hollande — whose capital, after all, is the one that was just attacked — had a greater sense of urgency. “The Paris attacks generated a lot of emotion, but that’s not enough,” he said. “We must act. And for a number of days now, I have been trying to convince, convincing all the countries that can act, to do so. . . . Today I am here with Barack so that we can act with greater intensity and coherence as well.”

Asked about Turkey shooting down a Russian military plane, the two men had the same response — to avoid escalation — but voiced it in very different ways. The cerebral Obama said “this underscores the importance of us making sure that we move this political track forward.” The visceral Hollande said, “The only purpose is to fight against terrorism” and the Islamic State.

When Laura Haim of France’s Canal+ TV network asked if there was a deadline for ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, both men had the same policy: no timetable. But what they said after that highlighted their different styles.

Hollande spoke of a new era. “There is a new mind-set now,” Hollande said. “And those who believed that we could wait” now realize “the risk is everywhere . . . . We, therefore, must act.”

“Syria has broken down,” he said. “And it is going to be a difficult, long, methodical process to bring back together various factions within Syria to maintain a Syrian state.”

Maybe you can motivate people when you sound so discouraging. But it’s hard.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"High-fat Ketogenic Diet for Weight Loss 
by Paul Fassa Health Impact News 
Ever since the inception of the high-carb low-fat diet for heart health promoted in the U.S. since the 1960s, obesity has continued to climb exponentially. For over a half century, health “authorities” have claimed that consuming saturated fats would make you fat. 
It’s not true. 
Despite national compliance to the lipid theory for heart disease dogma from media, medicine, and government, obesity rates among the low and no-fat consumers have climbed exponentially, even among young children, and heart disease has remained the number one cause of death from disease. Fat Dogma Diminishing Slowly as Processed Carbs and Oils Truth is Revealed 
Though still not popularly embraced by the public, mainstream media, and most dieticians, more and more recent evidence points to added sugars in processed low-nutrient high-calorie carbohydrate foods created with toxic phony fats as sources of arterial inflammation. Inflammation is the source of most disease, including cardiovascular and heart disease. 
So, the saturated fat or lipid theory for obesity and heart disease is without scientific merit. And the synthetic fats offered as substitutes for unprocessed whole natural animal and plant fats and used in high-carb processed foods have been the source of every ailment or health disorder saturated fats were blamed for, and more. 
Independent medical researchers and practitioners have recently, over the last decade or so, determined refined or processed carbs, such as table sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as major causes of obesity, metabolic disorder syndrome (aka pre-diabetes), and ultimately diabetes 2. Those two items are ubiquitous in beverages and processed foods, even the ones that don’t taste sweet, which are constantly advertised on TV. 
The processed food industry has exploited fat phobia to produce most of the refined carbohydrate foods, usually prepared with partially hydrogenated trans-fatty acid oils, which have become popular among consumers since the low or no-fat dietary dogma was proclaimed. 
Fully hydrogenated oils constitute margarine products. Both types of synthetically derived processed vegetable oils shower your cells with trans-fatty acids. And trans-fatty acids are considered unusual toxins by your body’s cells. Using a Ketogenic Dietary Approach for Reversing Ill Effects of Lipid Theory Misinformation 
The term “ketogenic” is derived from attaching the suffix “-genic” to the word “ketone.” Ketones are produced in the liver from fat. As ketones are produced more, a state of ketosis is created. Ketosis allows fat to be converted into energy instead of storing it as fat. Ketosis even promotes reducing existing excess body fat by converting it into energy. 
A ketogenic diet produces ketones in lieu of glucose for cellular energy, or if insulin is not being utilized, as is the case with insulin resistance or diabetes 2, to provide fuel for cellular energy. It’s a process produced by the liver. It’s a clean enough process to avoid fatty liver, which has also become epidemic lately. Ketosis reduces the need for insulin to metabolize glucose from carbohydrates. 
Consuming smaller amounts of organic whole carbohydrates is healthy. But the processed carbohydrate foods that comprise the majority of SAD (Standard American Diet) consumers are nutritionally void and filled with toxic strangers to our cells and are stored as fat to isolate their toxicity. Eventually, the stored toxins are secreted from those fats, creating autoimmune illnesses. 
One of the most efficient saturated fats for ketosis is virgin coconut oil. Instead of long chain triglycerides that most other healthy fats contain, coconut oil is comprised of medium chain triglycerides, which are most easily converted into ketones. 
So consuming healthy fats, not trans-fat substitutes, and cutting back considerably on processed or refined carbohydrates is proving to increase health and reduce obesity and all the problems associated with it, including diabetes and heart disease. 
Most of us have mistakenly assumed the ketogenic diet for weight loss is a spinoff of the Atkins Diet for weight loss – lots of meat, nothing else. The popularized Paleo diet over this last decade has also been associated with ketogenic dieting. 
But factually, the ketogenic diet is high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet. The ketogenic diet is the original diet which was started in the 1920s at Johns Hopkins Hospital to cure children of epileptic seizures where drugs were not effective. Most modern-day versions of a low-carb diet, such as Atkins, Paleo, etc., are some version of this original ketogenic diet. 
The low carbohydrate aspect of the ketogenic diet should include only unrefined carbohydrate foods, unprocessed and fully intact with their nutrients. The standard American diet (SAD) is overwhelmed with refined flours and sugars and toxic factory farm meats. 
Swedish diet doctor Andreas Eenfeldt, M.D., explains that consuming too much whole protein animal foods, especially meat, can lead to excess protein. This excess protein easily converts into more glucose in the body and raises your insulin levels. This compromises optimal ketosis. 
Most vegetarians assume that a ketogenic diet is not for them. They fail to recognize that nuts, avocados, cold pressed avocado and olive oil, and coconut oil are plant based. Fudging with non-meat animal products such as real butter from grass fed cows or eggs from truly free range chickens is another route toward ketosis. Fat doesn’t have to be from bacon, though many low-carb dieters lean that way. Recent Science Contradicts Bogus Science of Fat Consumption Creating Obesity 
This past year (2016), two studies have confirmed what Health Impact News has known for well over a decade: Eating whole healthy fats, even saturated fats, is healthy and reduces body fat, eliminating the precursor to diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. (Source) 
One study dealt with obese subjects divided into two groups, both were put on very low calorie ketogenic (VLCK) diets. The researchers purpose was to determine what effects supplementing the test group with DHA omega 3 to determine the effects of omega-3 fatty acids. 
Keep in mind that omega-3 fatty acids are derived directly from fish fats and other animal sources as well as indirectly from flax and chia seeds. It’s a healthy type of fat. 
They discovered that after six months, both groups lost almost the same amount of weight, averaging around 20 kg (44 lbs), and both groups demonstrated similar changed “biological parameters,” such as stable insulin levels, lower triglycerides, LDL cholesterol, C-reactive protein, and increased leptin among other more esoterically labeled markers. What they were looking for in the DHA omega-3 group was discovered by concluding the DHA omega-3 group had better anti-inflammatory markings. 
But the ketogenic diet alone produced the same effect without the improvement of anti-inflammatory markers from DHA omega-3 fatty acid supplementing. Combining a ketogenic diet with omega-3 supplementing seems like a great idea. (Source) 
Another 2016 study that focused on whether weight loss from a ketogenic diet was mostly from fat mass and not muscle mass had similar weight reductions of 20 kg (44 lbs) in less time, four months. Amazing! 
The researchers concluded: “The VLCK (very low calorie ketogenic) diet-induced weight loss was mainly at the expense of FM [fat mass] and visceral mass [fat surrounding organs], preserving muscle mass and strength (emphasis added).” (Source) 
So there you have it, a summary of the apparent paradox of high-fat dieting to lose body fat, prevent diabetes, and protect heart health. There’s much more available at Health Impact News . Time to wake up from that low-fat diet dogma that has ruined the health of millions of its adherents. 
Comment on this article at CoconutOil.com. 
Sources:",FAKE
"As Congress's vote on a resolution to disapprove the administration's nuclear deal draws ever nearer, the math for President Obama is looking better and better.

The magic number of Senate supporters the president needs to ensure that the deal stands is 34. Currently, he has 30. So he needs to pick up just four more to preserve the agreement — and there are still 14 remaining undecided Democrats in the chamber, several of whom have already made positive comments about the deal. So Obama has a lot of options.

And tellingly, after a month of intense criticism of the deal from the right and from pro-Israel groups, only two Senate Democrats have been swayed to oppose the deal so far: Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Bob Menendez of New Jersey. They'll be joined by, it appears, every single Senate Republican.

But that wouldn't be enough to sink the deal. If opponents want to block the sanctions relief that's crucial to the agreement, they need to assemble a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate that can override a promised veto from Obama. And that's impossible to reach without a lot of Democratic votes, as I wrote in July:

Deal opponents once hoped that the agreement would become politically toxic, leading to many Democratic defections. But that hasn't happened. Instead, the key swing votes — including some of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, like Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly — have been won over by the administration.

The state of play in the House is tougher for outsiders to gauge, but opponents appear to be well short of the 44 Democratic opponents they need there — just 14 Democrats have said they'll vote to kill the deal, according to the Hill. Again, the deal's opponents would need a veto-proof majority in both the Senate and the House to keep the sanctions in place.

According to a Friday report from Eli Lake and Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View, deal opponents have already resigned themselves to losing the vote eventually. Furthermore, they write, ""Many Republicans now acknowledge in private that they were handed both a political and a policy defeat on the nuclear deal.""

Now that the deal looks so likely to be upheld, the new question is whether Democrats can save President Obama from having to veto it in the first place.

There wouldn't be any policy stakes here — achieving this would simply save the president from the embarrassment of Congress passing a resolution condemning his administration's foreign policy.

For that to happen, 41 Senate Democrats would have to vote to filibuster the GOP's planned disapproval resolution — meaning Obama would need to win over 11 of the remaining 14 undecided Democrats in the chamber. That's a tall order, but given that only two Democratic senators have opposed the deal so far, it doesn't seem completely out of the question.

The vote will likely take place in mid-September. But if you want to keep track yourself beforehand, here are the remaining undecided Democratic senators. Again, the administration needs to win four of their votes to uphold the deal, and 11 for a filibuster that would make a veto unnecessary:",REAL
"Vice President Joe Biden, in Germany this weekend to help reach a diplomatic solution to Russian aggression in Ukraine, said Ukrainians “have a right to defend themselves"" but did not address the possibility of the United States sending weapons to them.

Biden is in Munich with Secretary of State John Kerry to back the German-French diplomatic effort, which he says is ""very much worth the attempt.""

Biden said he and other U.S. leaders think they should “attempt an honorable peace"" but that they also believe the Ukrainian people ""have a right to defend themselves.""

He suggested that the impact of economic sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions will get worse if leaders refuses to accept a peaceful resolution and continue to escalate the conflict, the White House said Saturday.

Russian military forces started taking control of parts of eastern Ukraine in late-February 2014, after protesters and other Ukrainian residents helped oust Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. And within weeks, Russian began its ultimately successful effort to annex the eastern Ukraine region of Crimea.

In response to recent calls in Washington and Kiev for the U.S. to give the outgunned Ukrainians such lethal weapons as anti-tank and anti-mortar systems to fight Russian-backed separatists, Moscow said earlier this week that such a move would be a threat to its national security.

While in Munich, Biden also met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to discuss the diplomatic efforts and to pledge U.S. support for the Ukraine economy as it pursues reforms, according to the White House.

Still, Biden remains skeptical about whether Russian officials will comply with a diplomatic solution, saying they will be judged by their actions on the ground, ""not by the paper they sign.""

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande traveled to Kiev on Thursday and Moscow on Friday.

They are trying to secure a peaceful resolution to the conflict based on the Sept. 24, 2014, Minsk agreements.

Poroshenko is pushing for a quick cease-fire and insists that the conflict must be resolved, not frozen.

""There is no temporary solution,” he said at the Munich Security Conference, amid the flurry of international diplomacy to calm the Ukraine conflict.

Poroshenko also renewed Kiev's call to be provided with defensive weapons, something that's opposed by European countries.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Videos Police Violence Escalates As Provocateurs Infiltrate Standing Rock, #NoDAPL Protests While reporting from the Dakota Access pipeline protests, MintPress News reporter Derrick Broze witnessed the actions of destructive forces which have infiltrated the peaceful Native-led movement and provoked increasingly violent responses from law enforcement. | November 6, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! The remnants of a vehicle burned on North Dakota Highway 1806 on the night of Oct. 27. Non-peaceful forces embedded on the side of the water protectors were seen burning the vehicle and two armored vehicles over the protests of water protectors. (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 

STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION, North Dakota — Police violence has escalated and destructive forces have entered the fray in recent weeks as “water protectors” in North Dakota have continued their fight against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. 
On Nov. 2, police targeted water protectors from the Sacred Stone, Oceti Sakowin, and Red Warrior camps with pepper spray and rubber bullets in response to their peaceful efforts to stop the destruction of the gravesites Alma Parkin and Matilda Galpin, Indigenous women who once owned the nearby Cannonball Ranch. 
“Water protectors building a makeshift bridge across the Cannonball River were met by riot police firing less-than-lethal munitions at point blank range and indiscriminately blasting OC Spray on peaceful unarmed people,” the Camp of the Sacred Stones reported on Nov. 3. 
The Native communities who oppose the pipeline prefer to call themselves water protectors as a way to signify that their fight is one in defense of the health of the water in the pipeline’s path, specifically the Missouri River. 
“The bridge was torn down per the orders received by Morton County from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers . Morton County police then unleashed pepper spray and tear gas on water protectors standing in the river with their hands in the air.” 
More than 100 people were injured in the violence which came just one day after President Barack Obama told Now This News that he was monitoring the situation closely and exploring possible ways to “reroute” the pipeline. 
“We’re going to let it play out for several more weeks and determine whether or not this can be resolved in a way that I think is properly attentive to the traditions of First Americans,” Obama said. 
Watch “President Obama says they’re examining ways to ‘reroute’ the Dakota Access Pipeline” from 2016 NowThis Election: 
Police and protesters turn violent 
The week preceding Obama’s statement took a violent turn, as law enforcement raided camps and destructive forces positioned on the side of the water protectors made themselves known. 
Militarized riot police raided two frontline camps on Oct. 27, making 107 arrests as they deployed pepper spray, stun guns, and physical force in response to a crowd of unarmed water protectors who were blocking the path of pipeline construction. The water protectors attempted to keep police and pipeline workers from accessing the construction site by setting fires to barricades, but police were able to eventually remove everyone from the frontline camps and reclaim the land where the pipeline is slated to be built. Water protectors face off with a police line off North Dakota Highway 1806. Law enforcement wear riot gear as they prepare to remove the frontline camp. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
Later that night, a bridge on North Dakota Highway 1806, just north of the Red Warrior and Oceti Sakowin camps in Mandan, was the scene of another standoff between law enforcement and citizens opposed to the pipeline. 
Although stationed on the water protectors’ side of the bridge, a small group of individuals did not seem to hold the same values or practice the same tactics as the larger, Native-led movement against the pipeline. 
Watch “Water Protectors face off with police #NoDAPL” from MintPress News: 
In stark contrast to the water protectors’ many actions of peaceful prayer and ceremony, the atmosphere at the bridge the night of Oct. 27 was more reminiscent of an outdoor rave. The protesters on the bridge set fire to an SUV, and threw rocks and other objects at a row of armored vehicles operated by law enforcement. This small faction of non-peaceful protesters and officers briefly tossed smoke bombs back and forth. 
Officers eventually lit two smoke bombs on the north side of the bridge before parking two armored vehicles at the exit to the bridge, preventing water protectors and protestors from evacuating in that direction. All law enforcement vehicles were gone within a matter of minutes, and protesters climbed aboard the armored vehicles before setting fire to them. 
When several water protectors came to the bridge, they told those setting the fires and instigating violence that this isn’t what they want for the movement. 
“If you feel uncomfortable, if you don’t like this action, go back to camp,” one of the men shouted back at the water protectors. 
Saying prayer had failed, the small group of non-peaceful protesters said they were now fighting “by any means necessary.” 
The fires they set burned throughout the night, as neither law enforcement nor fire department personnel ever arrived at the scene to extinguish the flames. Gabriella Scarlett, a water protector from Canada, signals for peace as a fire barricade burns off County Road 134. Behind her, water protectors establish a fire barricade to hold police back from the site of construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
Agitators make their presence known 
On Oct. 28, water protectors and elders arrived on the scene to retake the bridge from the agitating faction in all-black clothing, a tactic for protests and marches known as “black bloc.” There were no more than 20 of these provocateurs, and they all traveled together in five older pick-up trucks. Several fights broke out on the bridge as the agitators clashed with those calling strictly for prayer and ceremony, and the agitators were run off the bridge and back to the camps within an hour. 
Siouxz, the head of security on the frontline camp off North Dakota Highway 1806, said those who started the fires were not with the water protector movement. 
“ Seven Council has came and they are very ashamed of the behavior of some of the non-traditional people here who can’t respect our ways and how we want to make this prayerful,” Siouxz told MintPress News. 
“We’re here to protect the water, not initiate a riot or some violent protest, which is the image that the whole world is getting right now. Our elders have come together to condemn all of these wrongful actions like catching things on fire.” 
Apparently intent on forcing their tactics upon the movement, these outside forces appeared uninterested in listening to the Standing Rock Sioux or other Native water protectors. 
Although the black bloc tactic has been used as a legitimate way for protesters to shield their identities from law enforcement, it has also been exploited by law enforcement. Police masquerading as black bloc activists have been exposed at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy , and at protests in 2007 in Quebec , and police posed as activists to infiltrate the Occupy movement. A water protector stares down police along County Road 134, in Mandan, North Dakota, north of Red Warrior Camp. Law enforcement wear riot gear as they prepare to remove the frontline camp. Oct. 27, 2016 (Derrick Broze for MintPress) 
“Solidarity becomes the hijacking or destruction of competing movements, which is exactly what the Black Bloc contingents are attempting to do with the Occupy movement,” Chris Hedges, a progressive independent journalist and activist, wrote in a scathing criticism of the black bloc’s presence during the Occupy movement. 
Law enforcement isn’t the only institution going undercover to infiltrate activist groups. Corporate entities also have a history of attempting to spy on peaceful, law-abiding activists . A 2013 report by the Center for Corporate Policy found that a large number of corporations are hiring former law enforcement, CIA, NSA, FBI, and military employees to act as spies. 
In the report, titled “ Spooky Business ,” Gary Ruskin wrote: 
“Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON — have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.” 
Considering what is known about corporate agitation, it is possible that the provocateurs were hired by Energy Transfer Partners , the company behind the pipeline, the banks financing the pipeline, or, really, any company that benefits from the pipeline in any way. 
Ultimately, though, whether the agitators were police, corporate lackeys, or activists practicing a failed strategy, their actions do not represent the whole of the water protector movement and should not be used to discredit or delegitimize it. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"TRUNEWS 10/26/16 Jeremy Wiles |   October 26, 2016 Will Deutsche Bank’s derivatives be the spark which ignites the Western financial system? Today on TRUNEWS, Rick Wiles raises the alarm about Germany’s biggest bank bracing for a potentially catastrophic earnings report Thursday, and NATO redeploying forces to Russia’s doorstep. Rick also speaks with Jeremy Wiles, the CEO of KingdomWorks Studios, about his harrowing new film “ ”, which details the apathy German Christians displayed toward the Holocaust during World War 2, and the warning American evangelicals MUST heed everyday while the lives of the unborn are slaughtered domestically. 
Today’s Audio Streamcast. Click the audio bar to listen: <span itemprop=""name"" content=""TRUNEWS 10/26/16 Jeremy Wiles |  ""></span> <span itemprop=""description"" content=""""></span> <span itemprop=""duration"" content=""4490""></span> <span itemprop=""thumbnail"" content=""http://static.panda-os.com/p/1305/sp/130500/thumbnail/entry_id/0_jgdktlmn/version/1 /acv/62""></span> <span itemprop=""width"" content=""350""></span> <span itemprop=""height"" content=""25""></span> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/products/video-platform-features"">Video Platform</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Management"">Video Management</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Video-Solutions"">Video Solutions</a> <a href=""http://corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Player"">Video Player</a> 
Right-click to download today’s show to your local device in mp3 format: Streamcast MP3 
Email: | Twitter: @EdwardSzall | Facebook: Ed Szall DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP on Apple and Google Play !   How To Listen To TRUNEWS 
Here on our show pages, there are two ways to listen to TRUNEWS. The first is to use the embedded player on the page. It is the black bar that you see above. Just click the arrow on the player for today’s broadcast. If you prefer to save the program to listen to it later on your PC or mobile device, just click the ‘DOWNLOAD MP3’ link above to archive that particular streamcast. Streamcast Archives",FAKE
"The announcement by House Speaker John Boehner that he is retiring at the end of October stunned Washington where life is all about grabbing power and holding on to it, often until death they do part.

At a meeting with reporters, Boehner said, “My first job as speaker is to protect the institution.”

Really? Is that why Ohio voters sent him to Washington in 16 elections and his Republican colleagues elected and re-elected him speaker? Did he take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the institution of the House or the Constitution, which, if followed, offers protection enough?

In 2010, I interviewed Boehner when he was minority leader and I asked him to cite the most important lesson he learned when Republicans lost their hard-won House majority in 2006. He replied, “Our team failed to live up to our own principles.”

Failing to live up to GOP principles, indeed, failing to articulate what those principles are, was largely the reason for the increase in conservative members who then demanded either action or the speaker’s head. They got his head. Whether that means his successor will do a better job is open to question.

On July 28, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) expressed the frustration of many conservatives by filing a “motion to vacate the chair,” for the purpose of ousting Boehner from the speakership. Meadows’ resolution charged Boehner with using “the power of the office to punish Members who vote according to their conscience instead of the will of the speaker,” providing for “voice votes on consequential and controversial legislation to be taken without notice and with few Members present,” using “the legislative calendar to create crises for the American People, in order to compel Members to vote for legislation” and failing to comply with “the spirit of the rules of the House of Representatives, which provide that Members shall have three days to review legislation before voting.” That last one had been a promise made by Republicans, should voters return them to a congressional majority.

Most conservatives understand that with a Democrat in the White House and an insufficient GOP congressional majority to override presidential vetoes they can’t always, or maybe even mostly, have their way. But they would like to see Republicans at least employ some of the tactics Democrats shamelessly use when they hold the majority, such as the “nuclear option” employed in the Senate in 2013, which allowed a majority vote instead of a “supermajority” to advance confirmation votes on judicial nominees and executive branch appointments.

At a minimum, conservative members want to see their convictions articulated by the leadership and to fight the left with conviction in hopes that getting their positions heard will influence voters. Instead, in too many instances, conservatives have seen their views ignored and the Republican leadership in both houses knuckle under to Democrats out of fear of being called names or getting blamed for a government shutdown.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich notes that previous government shutdowns over matters of principle worked in Republicans’ favor, notwithstanding how they were portrayed by the media. In an email to me, he writes: “We closed the government twice in 1995 and ’96 and became the first re-elected House Republican majority since 1928. Our supporters realized we were serious and rewarded us for the effort. The Republicans closed the government in 2013 and won a big election in 2014.”

In my 2010 interview, Boehner bemoaned the size and cost of big government, saying, “I came here for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government and that has not been what’s happening. We don’t need any more programs; we need to undo a lot of programs.”

On Boehner’s watch, the debt has increased nearly $4 trillion, according to figures published by the U.S. Treasury.

It is one of many reasons conservative voters are increasingly fed-up with Congress and for the rise of “outside” presidential candidates. The frustration cuts both ways and it is also a major reason Boehner has decided now is the time to hang it up before Meadows’ resolution can be put to a vote.

Cal Thomas is America's most widely syndicated op-ed columnist. He joined Fox News Channel in 1997 as a political contributor. His latest book is ""What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America"" is available in bookstores now. Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribune.com.",REAL
"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
Add another group to the list of people who won’t be voting for Donald Trump. Oh, a few of them might but after they see this ad for Trump, I’m betting the majority will laugh and vote for Hillary Clinton. 
Earlier in the month, Trump attended a Bollywood concert for charity. It was organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group that was founded by a rich Indian-American named Shalli Kumar, who is looking to be the Hindu Sheldon Adelson. The Indian community is heavily Democratic so good luck with that. 
Trump came to the event, lit the Diya — it’s doubtful that he had any idea what it was — and then spoke. He pandered told the attendees that “the Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House,” promising they will “defeat radical Islamic terrorism.” 
This inspired Kumar to make an ad which will be playing 20 times a day on Indian-American channels. He refused to say how much it cost the campaign to buy that much time but we can guess that Mr. Kumar is helping foot the bill. He previously has given almost $1 million to a fundraising committee which benefited both Trump and the RNC. 
There is a lot to laugh about in the ad, bt Trump’s inability to pronounce Hindi words takes teh cake. It is such an obvious bit of pandering, even for him. 
The ad starts with a wish for a Happy Diwali , a holiday I am certain Trump is ignorant of. The cut to Trump’s orange face is a bit jarring after the pretty lights and flowers. 
Kumar wanted to draw a similarity between Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The PM’s campaign had used a clever catchphrase which loosely translates to “This time a Modi government.” Kumar wanted Trump to replace Modi’s name with his own. In Hindi, that is “Ab ki baar Trump sarkar.” Don’t get ahead of me, now. 
In the ad, which uses footage of Trumps speech at the charity concert, a 2008 photo of the hotel which was attacked by Islamic militants in Mumbai gives way to a picture of PM Modi. Then back to Trump who tries to speak the short Hindi phrase. It’s something one must see to believe. 
Make sure you aren’t drinking anything as you may endanger your computer. 
“Approved by Donald Trump?” Well, I guess so. This ad is not just pandering, it is awful. I hope the Indian American community laugh this off and then go vote against this man who only shows interest in their culture when it might get him votes. 
Oh, and Happy Diwali! May the light burn away any bad times and welcome the good. 
Featured Image by Kena Betancur/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
"  Carol Adl in News , UK // 0 Comments 
A Tory councillor believes that homeless people in Bradford city centre should be ‘grabbed by scruff of the neck’ and ‘dealt with’. 
The comments by David Heseltine, a Conservative Party Councillor in Bradford caused outrage during a meeting of the Council’s regeneration overview and scrutiny committee. He said : 
“The tramps and drunks sleeping in doorways. What we need to do is get them by the scruff of the neck and deal with them. People have said they’d go into Bradford if they were eliminated.” 
He claimed that while plans to redevelop the city centre were all well and good, the investment had been ruined by the homeless. 
So what exactly does Mr Heseltine envisage when he suggests grabbing the homeless “by the scruff of the neck” and eliminating them? 
EvolvePolitics reports: 
Why Councillor Heseltine believes that perpetrating an assault on the homeless would rectify the problem is a mystery. He would be better advised to encourage his colleagues to work towards providing people with homes, opportunities for employment, improving mental health services and providing interventions for alcohol and drug addiction. 
The ‘Nasty Party’ Councillor said that he had spoken to people who claimed that they would not visit Bradford city centre due to the number of drinkers and beggars. 
Heseltine is correct in his assertion that Bradford council – like many other councils – places the town centre aesthetic above the needs of those that live in and around them. However, his suggestions for dealing with the problem of homelessness are utterly reprehensible. These are people, not dogs or vermin to be disposed of to make your town look just a little better. 
Most people are never more than three paychecks away from being homeless. Our elected representatives would be well advised to remember that.",FAKE
"Home / Badge Abuse / Cop’s Attempt to Abuse His Authority During Fit of Road Rage is Shutdown by Informed Citizen Cop’s Attempt to Abuse His Authority During Fit of Road Rage is Shutdown by Informed Citizen Matt Agorist June 14, 2016 9 Comments 
Baldwin, AL — Jonathon Hinote was out with a friend enjoying a boat ride this weekend when he was stopped, harassed and promised a citation for legally practicing his freedom of speech. 
The incident began as Hinote was attempting to pull out into traffic. According to Hinote, he was trying to merge onto the highway, when Pritchard police officer Lopez pulled behind him. Lopez, according to Hinote, became impatient and laid on his horn. 
“I gave him the finger for beeping at me to pull out into oncoming traffic when I had a 20 ft trailer behind my truck,” recalls Hinote. 
After Hinote had expressed his feelings about being honked at, the officer became enraged and proceeded to abuse his power. 
Flipping the bird has been ruled to be free speech many times over. In fact, in a 14-page opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit addressed the specific action of flipping off cops when it ruled that the “ancient gesture of insult is not the basis for a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or impending criminal activity.” 
However, we’ve seen citizens pepper-sprayed, assaulted, and arrested for this act of free speech. And, as the video below shows, police could not care less about protecting your free speech if it’s something they don’t like. 
“What gives you the right to flip me off at the intersection?” asks the officer, apparently oblivious to the Bill of Rights. 
Hinote attempts to explain that the officer was honking at him which sparked the hand gesture. 
“If somebody comes up to you and flips you off, what would you do?” asks the clearly oblivious officer. 
Well officer, if someone flips off those of us in the citizen class, we can’t do anything about it, because it is an act of free speech and being offended gives you no legal right to initiate violence or attempt to detain that person at all. 
However, because this officer has a badge and a gun, he is able to detain otherwise entirely innocent people for his own personal vendetta. 
Hinote then proceeds to explain to Lopez that the Supreme Court has, in fact, ruled that flipping the bird is 100 percent protected — even when it’s aimed at police officers. 
When the officer is schooled on the law, he does what many other officers do and tries to turn freedom of speech into ‘disorderly conduct.’ But he’s dealing with someone who clearly knows his rights. 
“Am I being detained?” asks Hinote. 
“Yes, see those blue lights? You are being detained,” replies officer Lopez. 
Hinote knows he did nothing wrong, so he stands his ground. Eventually, the officer realizes he has no legal basis for the stop and backs down, but not before threatening an act of extortion through the mail. 
Below is an example of how police can and will act out their rage with impunity — for the simple fact they have a badge and a gun. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist Share",FAKE
"Congratulations, Republicans! You won the Senate majority! Now, can you hold on to it for more than two years?

Looking at the 2016 Senate map, there’s reason for doubt. Republicans will have to defend 24 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. And the raw numbers don’t even tell the whole story. Seven seats held by Republicans — Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — were carried by President Obama in 2008 and 2012. And there is chatter about potential Republican retirements in Arizona and Iowa. If either John McCain or Chuck Grassley decided to call it a career, each of those races would be major Democratic targets.

On the other side of the coin, Republican takeover opportunities are few and far between. By far, the most endangered Democrat is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who survived in 2010 but could face Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), who won a second term Tuesday with more than 70 percent of the vote. Reid has said he will run again, although his demotion from majority leader to minority leader might make him rethink those plans. The only other Democrat who starts the 2016 cycle in serious jeopardy is freshman Michael Bennet (Colo.), who, like Reid, was a surprise winner in 2010. The convincing win by Cory Gardner (R) over Sen. Mark Udall (D) on Tuesday in the Rocky Mountain State will undoubtedly energize Republicans, though it’s less clear what the GOP bench looks like in a race against Bennet.

Outside of those two seats, there’s almost no vulnerability on the Democratic side. Even if Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) or Barbara Mikulski (Md.) decide not to run again, both sit in very, very Democratic states — particularly at the federal level.

To win back the Senate majority in two years, Democrats will probably need to net four (if they hold the White House in 2016) or five (if they don’t) seats. Republicans control 52 Senate seats in the 114th Congress, but Sen. Mark Begich (D) is behind by 8,000 votes in Alaska and is likely to lose, and chances for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) don’t look great in Louisiana’s Dec. 6 runoff.

Gaining five seats is not out of the question for Democrats — though it might be a bit of a stretch — given the Senate map of 2016. Of the 10 most vulnerable seats listed below, Republicans hold eight. The No. 1 race is the most likely to flip party control in 2016.

10. Kentucky (Republican-controlled): As Tuesday’s election showed, Kentucky isn’t exactly fertile ground for Democrats. But something interesting happened even as Mitch McConnell walloped Alison Lundergan Grimes: Democrats held on to their majority in the state House. That means Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) can’t count on changing state law to be able to run for president and Senate at the same time. Hence, a possible open seat.

9. Florida (R): Sen. Marco Rubio (R) has suggested that he won’t run for both president and reelection to the Senate in 2016. If he pursues the former and isn’t on the Senate ballot, this becomes an open-seat race in a true swing state in a presidential year — in other words, a good opportunity for Democrats. If Rubio passes on a White House bid or drops out with enough time to mount a Senate bid, Republicans would probably feel better about holding this seat.

8. Ohio (R): Sen. Rob Portman is one of several Republican members of Congress who have been mentioned (or mentioned themselves) as possible White House contenders. So, this could end up being an open seat. If Portman decides to run for reelection, his deep connections to donors through his work as National Republican Senatorial Committee vice chairman should ensure that he will be a financial behemoth. Portman is not terribly polarizing, and there is no obvious Democratic recruit waiting in the wings.

7. New Hampshire (R): The Granite State was one of the few bright spots for Democrats nationally as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) beat back a challenge from Scott Brown. It could be a Senate battleground again in two years if Gov. Maggie Hassan (D), who won reelection Tuesday with 53 percent of the vote, decides to take on freshman Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R). There is also considerable chatter among conservative activists about a primary challenge to Ayotte, though it remains to be seen whether a serious one might materialize. And, just to make things more complicated, Ayotte is likely to be in the vice presidential mix no matter who wins the Republican presidential nomination.

6. North Carolina (R): The GOP picked off a seat here Tuesday. It’s safe to assume, however, that if the environment wasn’t so good for the GOP, Kay Hagan would still be a senator come January. Her colleague, Sen. Richard Burr (R) is up for reelection in 2016, and even if he doesn’t retire — he has raised very little money the past two years, which is usually a precursor to retirement — he is likely to find himself targeted.

5. Colorado (Democrat ic-controlled): Bennet probably doesn’t want to think about 2016 yet. He just finished a stint as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, during which his party lost the Senate majority and he became the first chairman in more than four decades to lose a home-state colleague in the process. But Bennet won by the narrowest of margins in 2010 and probably would have lost had Ken Buck, the Republican candidate, not said some unhelpful things.

4. Pennsylvania (R): 2010 was about as good a year as a Republican could hope for in Pennsylvania. And Sen. Pat Toomey (R) still won with only 51 percent of the vote. In a presidential year, Toomey’s challenge will be even more serious. Republicans haven’t carried the Keystone State at the presidential level since 1988. One thing working in Toomey’s favor: a relatively weak Democratic bench. State Attorney General Kathleen Kane apparently has no interest in running for the Senate. The only person actively looking at a bid is former congressman Joe Sestak, who lost to Toomey in 2010.

3. Illinois (R): The first big question that needs to get answered in this race is whether Sen. Mark Kirk (R) will run again. Kirk, who suffered a severe stroke in early 2012, has insisted that he plans to seek a second term, but even some Republicans are taking a wait-and-see approach. Democratic speculation — matter what Kirk does — will center on state Attorney General Lisa Madigan, but she seems a much more likely 2018 challenger to Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R). Assuming Madigan is a no-go, look for Rep. Tammy Duckworth to be at the top of Democratic wish lists.

2. Nevada (D): Reid will soon no longer be majority leader. The question is whether he wants to be minority leader and whether he sticks around. He’s got bad approval numbers and is staring at a potential matchup with Sandoval. Tuesday’s election was actually pretty big here. Not only did Sandoval cruise to reelection with 71 percent of the vote — 71 percent! — the GOP also cruised in the lieutenant governor’s race, a huge proxy war that Reid badly wanted to win. That means Sandoval can run in 2016 without worrying about the governor’s seat going to a Democrat.

1. Wisconsin (R): Sen. Ron Johnson starts the 2016 election cycle as the most vulnerable senator on the map. He’s undefined in the eyes of many, and he’s running in a state that has gone Democratic in seven straight presidential elections. To boot, there are rumors that Democrat Russ Feingold, whom Johnson unseated in 2010, may run.",REAL
"Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has apparently had enough of the fig leaf most presidential candidates wear as their unofficial spring costume the year before the election actually happens.

That is a bold stroke, but entirely in keeping with the go-for-broke style the junior senator from Texas has exhibited since first challenging the Republican establishment's candidate for the Senate in 2012.

Cruz, who officially announced his candidacy for president in a midnight Monday tweet and video, has not been the buzz candidate so far in the party's 2016 discussions — nor the media's. In fact, he has seemed at times a bit of a faded rose, a skyrocket that spent much of its sparkle. There was the debacle over his brinkmanship in the 2013 government shutdown. That was followed by countless run-ins with Republican colleagues in the Senate.

But Cruz is still a barnburner on the hustings and a potential game changer in the presidential contest. While he is not among the leaders in national polls of Republicans, he has an undeniable appeal to the base voters, who dominate in primaries — especially in red states. And polls at this stage are largely meaningless.

So it makes sense for him to step out early and go big doing it. In fact, there are at least five good reasons for him to make his move as the first major full-fledged candidate.

1. Cruz needs to cut through the noise and confusion created by the expanding GOP field. Given all the talk on the right about finding a fresh face, why not give the media one relatively fresh face to focus on right now? In recent days, the campaign theme on the Republican side has been, ""The more the merrier."" That may be great grist for the media's mill — as we love to do candidate profiles and lists that look like brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament. But that's not helping Cruz. As static about countless prospective candidacies has grown, Cruz has struggled to get his signal through. Cruz had hoped his status as the enfant terrible of the Senate's backbench would make him newsworthy in early 2015. But right now that distinction has been commandeered by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who is seven years younger than Cruz (and has been in the Senate less than three months).

2. Getting in first should help Cruz raise money. The biggest challenge facing Cruz at the moment is money. And the fastest way to raise real money is to get out there with a real campaign and ask for it. His home state is one of the top sources of political money, of course, as it has been for decades. But Cruz is competing for Texas donors with former Gov. Rick Perry, who has been aggressive about locking down oil money and other wealthy politicos in the Lone Star state, much as he did in his first campaign four years ago. Rand Paul also has a claim on many Texas dollars, having grown up in the state his father served in Congress. The Paul name is still highly revered by many Texas conservatives. Jeb Bush and other candidates will also find adherents here, so Cruz needs to defend his home court aggressively.

3. Skipping the ""exploratory committee"" phase cuts through the usual persiflage that surrounds nascent candidacies. If you're running and you know it, why not say so? Real men needn't horse around with exploratory committees. Aren't average news consumers confused by the dance of seven veils that all those coy candidates perform every four years? More serious students of the process may appreciate the nuances and legal uses of shadow campaigns, but even they often find them to be annoying ploys to prompt multiple ""announcement"" stories. So dispensing with this business serves not only to elevate the seriousness of the Cruz bid, but also to reinforce his image as a straight shooter, a regular guy who calls things by their right names. The Cruz campaign manifesto, just now hitting the stores, is titled A Time for Truth.

4. The early declaration bolsters Cruz's bid to be the standard-bearer for the party's conservative activists. There are many wannabes who'd like to run in this lane. Indeed, only a few are going the other way and appealing to the straight-up establishment side of the party (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio). So, to hold off the legion of competitors on the right, Cruz needs to break the tape and stand apart from the mere prospects, such as Rick Santorum, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and others who would be his natural rivals on the right, if they decide to run. Getting in early may discourage some of this crowd — and also serve to eclipse some of the boutique candidates such as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.

5. The sooner Cruz gets in, the longer his long-shot candidacy will last. Even if he is washed up after the first four voting events, he will have had 10 months of formal candidacy now that he's in. That should be enough not only to test the market but to maximize his media exposure. Not all his media attention will be positive, of course, but Cruz thrives on attacks and uses them to enhance his credentials as a crusader for the cause. It might well serve Cruz to battle through the first few primaries, bow out relatively early and return as a ticket-balancer at convention time. The most overlooked element of the presidential nominating game is that it has two winners: the presidential nominee and the running mate. The candidates always deny interest in it, but scarcely anyone ever turns down the VP spot when it's offered. There is no better springboard to the top of the national ticket than the lower half of that ticket.",REAL
"Of course, all the contenders genuflected at the memory of Reagan while trashing President Obama’s Iran deal — yet nobody mentioned Reagan’s role in bolstering the Iranian hardliners by violating an embargo to sell them arms in exchange for help to the Nicaraguan contras and a possible hostage release.

We learned as well that when it comes to Donald Trump vs. the right wing media, it’s Trump 2, conservative media personalities 0. Just like Trump got Fox to bow to him after he savaged Megyn Kelly following the last debate, he humiliated radio host Hugh Hewitt – unbelievably, a “panelist” at this CNN debate — by getting Hewitt to say that it wasn’t Trump’s fault that he confused the Kurds with the Quds force. “It was my fault,” Hewitt told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and he seconded that Thursday night.

Hewitt also lobbed a softball question to Trump (which he actually kind of flubbed) giving him a chance to blast President Obama’s Syria policy, and some of his 2016 rivals for not supporting military intervention in 2013. It looked as if Trump’s campaign against Hewitt as a “third-rate” radio host asking “gotcha” questions – backed by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter – actually worked.

Oh, if you’re waiting for me to tell you definitively who “won” the debate, and who might begin to rise or fall in the polls as a result? I’m sorry, I really have no idea. Dr. Ben Carson looked like he confused his One-A-Day vitamin with Lunesta; he was barely able to keep his eyes open and talked in sleepy non-sequiturs. But I thought Carson blew the last debate, and he rose in the polls. So what do I know?

Jeb Bush clearly had another mediocre night, which he can’t afford. He came out kind of peppy – even Trump praised his “energy” – and accused Trump of exactly the kind of special interest lobbying he rails against, saying the real estate mogul gave him money back when he ran for governor, and then unsuccessfully lobbied to place casinos in Florida. But Trump denied it and loudly talked over Bush; there was brief confusion about whether the former governor was telling the truth (PolitiFact later confirmed it); and the moment faded.

Likewise, Bush was later given a chance by CNN’s Jake Tapper to call Trump out on a Twitter insult to Bush’s Mexican-born wife Columba. Bush started strong, demanding an apology, but then faded again as Trump filibustered.

But Bush’s worst moment was when Hewitt asked him – in another kindness to Trump – about the fact that a lot of his foreign policy advisors worked for his brother, the last GOP president, who got us into disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump then jabbed Bush – “Your brother, and your brother’s administration, gave us Barack Obama” – which led Bush to retort, “My brother kept us safe.” As if he didn’t remember his brother was president during the Sept. 11 attacks. It was that kind of night for Jeb!

Trump didn’t have a great night either, but he has one thing in common with Reagan – so far he’s seemed to share an impermeable outer political coating with the Teflon president. He engaged in a juvenile spat with Rand Paul early on that ended in his insulting Paul’s looks, and looking kind of silly. Carly Fiorina absolutely owned him when she was asked about the episode when Trump clearly insulted her appearance —  ‘Look at that face!’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘Would anyone vote for that?” — then insisted he was actually talking about her “persona.”

“Women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” Fiorina shot back. “I think she’s got a beautiful face and I think she’s a beautiful woman,” Trump countered, with characteristic sexism, but looking uncharacteristically sheepish. This was an establishment crowd, heavy on donors, and they were tougher on Trump than the Fox audience was. Perhaps most damaging, Trump himself seemed relatively “low-energy” – his constant jibe against Bush. He told reporters later that it was his attempt at looking presidential, but whatever: he was much less a factor than in the last GOP go-round. Still, pundits have predicted Trump’s decline before, including after his boorish performance in the last debate, and they’ve been wrong. Trump himself crowed about a Drudge Report poll showing him the winner of the debate, again. That poll was right last time, so who knows. Once again, lots of the punditocracy claimed Sen. Marco Rubio was one of the debate winners, but that’s crazy. The young Florida senator fell flat on his face with an early joke about the California drought: “I brought my own water!” he said with a big dumb smile. That was a twofer: He made fun of a local tragedy on a day when the death toll of the state’s drought-fueled wildfires continued to mount, and he reminded everyone of his humiliating big-gulp moment when he got to reply to Obama’s State of the Union address two years ago. When Trump dinged Rubio – accurately — for having the worst absentee record in the Senate, Rubio essentially defended it by saying Congress isn’t getting anything done. So he stopped doing his job because it was frustrating? In the real world, he’d get fired. Score one for Trump. Anyway, lots of smart-ish folks thought Rubio did well in the last debate to0, but he went nowhere in the polls. Fiorina probably had the best night — if you don’t fact check anything she said. She flat out lied about what the doctored, bogus Planned Parenthood videos showed, claiming they featured a still living intact aborted fetus, killed for its organs, when they did no such thing. When she insisted she’d call Iran’s Supreme Leader to call off the recent nuclear deal on her first day as president, the CNN moderators missed a chance to ask her why, as CEO of Hewlett Packard, she skirted anti-Iran sanctions — rather like the night’s patron saint, Ronald Reagan — and sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment to the anti-U.S. regime. She was allowed to misrepresent her awful HP record, and inaccurately trash Hillary Clinton on Benghazi and her controversial email practices. Still, she’s a poised, practiced debater, and she may get another small bump in the polls. I don’t think any of the rest, including the occasionally statesmanlike John Kasich, did enough last night to significantly change their campaign standing. Gov. Scott Walker was a bit more energetic but probably didn’t make enough of an impression to reverse his sinking fortunes. Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Mike Huckabee continued stridently narrow-casting to the far-right evangelical community, which might matter if Trump suddenly left the field. But the twice divorced libertine billionaire and born-again Republican is leading among that group, too. Whoops, I haven’t mentioned the pumped up, inauthentic “It’s not about me, guys” flailing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Oh well. Now I have. At any rate, the seemingly interminable three-hour debate – I accidentally typed “three-month debate,” because that’s how it felt – worked against anyone who had a good moment or two. Still, remember that most post-debate predictions were wrong last time. Once again, we learned that the GOP has moved far to the right of Ronald Reagan – but little else.",REAL
"Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) has been able to count on his Facebook page for stalwart support during his long-running battle with the House Republican leadership, including a successful effort to oust House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

“Keep up the great work,” read a comment posted last week. “We the people thank you for ridding us of John Boehner!”

But in recent days, the tone of the comments on Meadows’s page, and those of the other members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, have changed significantly.

“You truly should be ashamed,” one commenter wrote Thursday. “The people in the caucus will be held responsible come election day.”

“You should all be replaced,” a critic told Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.). Another called Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho), one of the most persistent thorns in Boehner’s side, “a RINO establishment lap dog” and “another go-along to get along phony who will GLADLY step on the throats of the Conservative electorate.”

Things may never be the same for the Freedom Caucus after most of its members moved last week to support Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as the next House speaker. Suddenly, they may not be conservative enough for some in the party.

The groundswell of support from hard-core conservative voters that emboldened the group as it battled Boehner and the GOP establishment seemed to subside for the first time in months. That has put its members in the unfamiliar position of defending their right flank.

“Look, I imagine that there’s theoretically a chance that [we] all went from being radical extremist crazies to Washington sellouts in 12 hours,” said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus leader. “But maybe a more likely narrative is that we really think that this is a good step for the conservative movement. And it’s up to us to try to explain that to people, and that’s what we’ve been doing.”

They would seem to have a lot of explaining to do.

The anger over Ryan’s ascent has been fueled by voices across the conservative media landscape. On the Internet, sites such as Breitbart.com and the Drudge Report have pumped out a steady stream of anti-Ryan stories casting doubt on his record, while such prominent commentators as Erick Erickson, Ann Coulter and Mickey Kaus have sharpened their teeth and urged conservatives to contact lawmakers and tell them to spurn Ryan.

Particularly brutal have been the syndicated talk-radio hosts who have helped foment the anti-establishment outrage that has kept Donald Trump atop the GOP presidential race and forced Jeb Bush, a well-financed mainstream conservative, to undertake a campaign shake-up.

Laura Ingraham last week called Ryan “basically John Boehner with better abs” and featured segment after segment attacking Ryan’s positions on trade and immigration. She also mocked his desire to spend his weekends with his family.

Another influential host, Mark Levin, lambasted Ryan as a creature of the establishment elite. “I think it’s time, ladies and gentlemen, to choose a speaker from outside the House of Representatives,” he told his audience Wednesday. “This is the best the Republican establishment can do; it’s just not good enough.”

And the biggest conservative talker of them all, Rush Limbaugh, on Thursday called Ryan a favorite of the Republican “donor class” and “the new Cantor” — a reference to former House majority leader Eric Cantor, who was ousted last year in a GOP primary.

Meanwhile, the man who did the ousting — Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) — counts himself among the roughly 70 percent of Freedom Caucus members who say they are willing to support Ryan.

“When they make decisions, it’s not in haste,” Brat said of the caucus. “And so I would ask the American people: Hold your fire. Wait till you see exactly what our group is doing, and I think you’ll see that it’s coherent, it makes sense.”

One problem for Brat and his Freedom Caucus colleagues is that Ryan has remained mum for the most part on his intentions. When he spoke to the House Republican Conference on Tuesday, Ryan set out conditions for agreeing to serve as speaker, including an end to the House rule allowing a speaker to be ousted by a simple majority.

Ryan appeared to soften on that point in meetings with lawmakers later in the week, and Freedom Caucus members say Ryan privately discussed other concessions, including a restructuring of the House Republican steering committee and adherence to the “Hastert rule” requiring a majority of Republicans to support any measure put on the floor.

But Ryan mentioned none of those items in the letter he sent to colleagues Thursday agreeing to serve. He opted instead for gauzy generalities: “We can make the House a more open and inclusive body — one where every member can contribute to the legislative process. We can rally House Republicans around a bold agenda that will tackle the country’s problems head on. And we can show the country what a common-sense conservative agenda looks like.”

That has left a cadre of tea party insurgents, most elected no more than five years ago, in the position of defending their willingness to trust implicitly a 17-year incumbent with a long record of negotiating spending deals with Democrats and backing immigration reform measures that are deeply unpopular on the right.

The latter has proved to be especially toxic for Ryan in conservative circles, to the point that his chief partner in pushing reform legislation, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), said he “had Republican members who are friends of mine saying: ‘Don’t say anything good about Paul Ryan! Don’t say anything at all about Paul Ryan!’ ”

“There’s a small group that wields an inordinate influence and power over the group,” Gutierrez added. “They are slaves and captives to Laura Ingraham.”

Meadows said Thursday that he and like-minded members were more concerned that Ryan might have made contradictory pledges to different groups while courting support last week. And he suggested that Ryan might be at risk of fraying the House GOP anew if he didn’t make a clearer statement before Thursday’s speaker vote.

“It’s important that a down payment be made in order to keep that supermajority intact,” he said.

A handful of House hard-liners, perhaps 10 to 15, remain proudly outside the pro-Ryan camp; most continue to back Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), a backbencher who has emphasized procedural reforms.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking, really,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a Webster backer, said of the Freedom Caucus.

“If you’ve got problems with a man today, and the man tells you, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll be a different person’ — it doesn’t happen,” said Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), who said he has received more than 100 calls over two days from constituents opposing Ryan.

But others say they are willing to take the heat from the base. Commentators and activists might be exercised about Ryan’s immigration positions, they say, but lawmakers are more focused on how he’ll run the House.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) noted that Webster, whom the Freedom Caucus had previously endorsed for speaker, is not considered to be particularly conservative.

“It never was about the most perfect guy with the most perfect voting record; it’s about the person that’s willing to govern in a way that allows conservative ideas to at least come to the forefront, which he has said he is willing to do,” Salmon said. “I think conservatives all over the country ought to be doing cartwheels. . . . We’ve been dealing with eating crumbs off the table. Now we’ve got an opportunity to sit at the table and actually partake in the meal.”

Some simply say they are confident that their constituents will trust them to make the right decision. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said calls to his office were running 2 to 1 against Ryan, but he said passions were at “a much lower level” than after he voted for Boehner in January.

Asked Thursday if he expects pitchforks back home, Buck said he did not: “I’m the guy with the pitchfork.”",REAL
"As demonstrations erupted in Cologne on Saturday over New Year's Eve sexual assaults and robberies blamed largely on foreigners, Chancellor Angela Merkel called for stricter laws regulating asylum seekers.

Merkel, who has been particularly outspoken in welcoming refugees to Germany, told a two-day meeting of the Christian Democrats in Mainz that tighter restrictions would be ""in the interest of citizens, but also in the interests of the great majority of the refugees who are here,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.

""When crimes are committed, and people place themselves outside the law ... there must be consequences,"" she told reporters after the meeting, the BBC reported.

Party leaders agreed on a proposal to strengthen the ability of police to conduct checks of identity papers, and also to exclude foreigners from being granted asylum who had been convicted of crimes and sentenced to terms even as light as probation. The measures would require approval by parliament.

The sharper tone follows reports in Cologne that some 1,000 men — many intoxicated — robbed, sexually assaulted and in some cases raped women during celebrations on New Year's Eve.

""Refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, foreigners, friendly or evil, new or long-time residents: It doesn't matter,"" the newsmagazine Der Spiegel said in an editorial. ""It seems as though the time has come for a broad debate over Germany's future — and Merkel's mantra 'We can do it,' is no longer enough to suppress it.""

Police initially identified the suspects as up to 1,000 men ""of Middle Eastern origin,” but later backtracked as public officials cautioned there was little information on whether those involved were migrants. Of the 32 suspects identified by police in Cologne, 22 are asylum seekers, the German Interior Ministry said.

One suspect was carrying a document with Arabic-German translations of sexist phrases and threats, which mass-circulation tabloid Bild published on Saturday.

As the uproar over the assaults gathered strength, thousands of demonstrators, from the left and right, turned out in Cologne for a day of protests Saturday.

The protesters included the anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement and the right-wing extremist Pro Cologne party. At one point, police fired tear gas and used water cannon to break up a PEGIDA rally after protesters threw firecrackers and bottles at officers, Agence France-Presse reported.

One group carried signs saying, ""No violence against women."" Another banner read, ""Migrants out.""

Demonstrators from the political left chanted, ""Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,"" Buzzfeed reported.

Some 1,700 police, many in riot gear, were on hand to control the crowds, the DPA news agency reported.",REAL
"Human remains washed ashore Wednesday, as officials continued their search for seven Marines and four soldiers in waters off the Florida Panhandle, where a military helicopter had crashed during a training exercise.

“We have confirmed that we have had some human remains wash ashore in the area where our search and rescue team have begun a larger scale operation,” Andrew Bourland, a spokesman for the Eglin Air Force Base, told The Washington Post.

Bourland also said that debris from the aircraft had been located.

The Army UH-60 Black Hawk is believed to have gone down in the water and foggy conditions were reported in the area at the time of the crash, though it is too soon to say what might have caused the mishap.

At a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Maj. Gen. Glenn H. Curtis, the Adjutant General for the Louisiana National Guard, said the Black Hawk pilots had thousands of hours of flight experience and were “instructor pilots,” which indicates that they were experienced and qualified enough to train other pilots.

According to Curtis, it is one of the highest designations pilots in the Army can receive.

A second Black Hawk that participated in the exercise returned to base after take-off due to the weather conditions, Curtis said.  That helicopter landed safely and all personnel on board were accounted for.

“One of them started to take off and realized that the weather was a condition then turned around and came back,” said Curtis, who spoke from Hammond, La.

According to a Pentagon official who spoke anonymously to the Associated Press nearly 12 hours after the craft was reported missing, all 11 service members are presumed dead.

Foggy conditions in the search area have made the operation more difficult, Bourland told The Post. But with the break of dawn, efforts ramped up.

“We’ve got some daylight, but it is overcast and quite foggy,” Bourland said earlier on Wednesday. “It is having an impact on getting the full-scale rescue moving now.”

Local authorities, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the Coast Guard were involved in the search efforts, according to a news release.

The helicopter carrying highly trained Marines in a special operations unit, was on a night training mission outside the base, which is near Valparaiso, Fla. Crews were dispatched after the Eighth Coast Guard District Command Center got a report of a downed military aircraft late Tuesday evening, the release stated. A “debris field consistent with a military aircraft” was located at around 1:30 a.m. CST on Wednesday,  according to the Coast Guard release.

The helicopter does contain a flight data recorder, the Army said on Wednesday, that can be recovered as investigators try to determine what caused the accident.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of the members involved in this incident,” Layne Carter, search and rescue mission coordinator, said in the release. “We are aggressively searching for possible survivors involved in the crash.”

The Marines are part of a Camp Lejeune-based special operations group and the soldiers are from an Army National Guard unit based out of Hammond, La.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the Marines, soldiers and family members of those involved in this mishap. We are working closely with all parties involved to locate our Marines and the Army aircrew as soon as possible,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Osterman, commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Special Operations Command said in a statement.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the crash reinforces the fact that military personnel are “at risk whether in training or in combat.”

“Our thoughts and prayers with them,” Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said, while speaking on Capitol Hill.

The names of the aircrew and Marines are being withheld while the search and rescue mission is ongoing.

“Today, as you can imagine, is a tough day for the Louisiana National Guard and the Marine Corps,” Curtis said. “At this hour, our priorities are search and rescue for our soldiers and Marines. And secondly to take care of our families. This will remain a search and rescue operation.”

[This post has been updated multiple times.]",REAL
"by Vladimir Golstein, via The Duran 
Political discourse of American mass media is inundated with another wave of Russophobia and fear mongering. Besides the obvious military threat (Russia’s nuclear arsenal), or the challenges to the US foreign policy (the conflicts in Ukraine or Syria), a new fear has been introduced into the news: the US political system is endangered by Russia’s computer hacking, informational warfare, and its support of Donald Trump. 
The newspaper titles sound like a commercial for the upcoming Invasion of the Body Snatchers sequel. The Washingon Post announces: “Russia Is Now a Threat. The US Should Treat It Like One.” Time magazine raises the stakes: “Russia Wants to Undermine Faith in the U.S. Election.” 
The Atlantic warns of the “The Dangers of the Putin-Trump relationship,” articulating the already familiar litany of complaints: “Russia is directly interfering in the US elections … it is a dangerous escalation that threatens the integrity of the US electoral process.” While US Today allows notorious neocon named Max Boot to discover not just the threat, but an actual war. His “Time to Get Real About Russia Cyber War,” is rather blunt: “Our democracy is under attack by Russia, but almost no one is treating the situation with the gravity it deserves.” 
Well, nobody treats the situation with the gravity it deserves because they are treating it with much greater gravity. In fact, some of the commentators are so grave, that they are ready to give in already. Zack Beauchamp concludes his tirades against Russian hacking in the following manner: “Russia’s strategy is even more dangerous that it appears. Not only does it undermine democracy using the press but it actually gets the press to undermine itself. And there’s not much we can reasonably do about it, either.” 
Reading all this, one might think that the former Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal , has been resurrected along with his 1949 battle-cry: “The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers.” 
What is behind this Russophobia? A real Russian threat? A smokescreen intended to cover failed policies of recent administration? The meeting between the Russophobic minds of a particular candidate (Hillary Clinton) and a particular group of voters (neocons)? 
I believe that these Joe McCarthy type accusations against both Russia and Trump seem to pursue only one goal: to give the veneer of respectability to the neocons’ and other Republican luminaries’ desertion of their own party. Thus, endless “confessions” of reformed Republicans and hardcore neocons , expressing their born-again zeal for the Democratic Candidate, Hillary Clinton. 
The neocons are not switching parties because they’ve seen the light. They are enamored with Hillary Clinton’s record of foreign policy and her willingness to embrace the US globalist claims. As reported by Rania Khalek in Intercept , Robert Kagan, one of the leading neocons, the co-founder of the notorious PNAC (Project for the New American Century, the blueprint of the recent policies of aggression and regime change intended to cement US hegemony in world affairs), has been on the record for quite some time: “I would say all Republican foreign policy professionals are anti-Trump,” Kagan told …at a “ foreign policy professionals for Hillary ” fundraiser… –I would say that a majority of people in my circle will vote for Hillary.” 
The neocons are very public about their desertion, and bear it as a badge of honor. Dubious honor, since in their pursuit of an ideal candidate for their agenda, neocons do not just betray their former party, but the very foundations of American democracy: the two party system. 
Their desertion reveals that American political system has finally internalized Francis Fukuyama proud words about the end of history. We’ve reached the consensus; there is no need to argue or challenge, history has ended, the truths are revealed and they are now the property of the elites united into one globalist Imperial party bent on equating American prosperity with the American hegemony over world affairs. 
To any objective observer it is clear that is not Russia that endangers US democracy but the political corruption, the rule of 1% oligarchy, and mad pursuit of PNAC policies. Even greater danger to democracy lies in the neocons’ desertion to the Hillary camp. 
Unsavory as the corporate rule and globalism might be, one can argue for and pursue these goals, provided they leave the room for the alternative vision. It is this neocons’ dismissal of the alternatives that betrays the very foundations of democracy, at least, in the way, a political philosopher Karl Popper formulated them in his celebrated 1945 treatise, Open Society and Its Enemies . 
The list of neocons and other prominent Republicans rushing toward one party system has been compiled by Eleanor Clift in Daily Beast at the end of June, and had obviously grown since then. Some of them, Max Boot in particular, are pretty explicit about the reasons for his desertion: in his May 8, 2016, article in LA Times , Boot announces simply that, “The Republican Party is Dead.” 
Why? Because it is no longer led by the likes of McCain, Rubio and Romney, for whom Boot served as foreign policy advisor, but by Donald Trump, “the ignorant demagogue” intending to break up “the most successful alliance in history — NATO.” Furthermore, Trump has “kind words for tyrants such as Vladimir Putin.” Indeed, how can anyone in the US political establishment have kind words for Putin? We keep our kind words only for “our SOBs.” 
The simplicity if not poverty of this argumentation makes it difficult to distinguish it from exaggerations, simplification, or ignorance, for which neocons consistently fault Trump. But neocons were never friends of irony; otherwise, they would not make statements about NATO’s spectacular success with a straight face. 
The alliance that followed every whim of its paranoid members, such as Baltic Republics or Poland, and which intended to drag Ukraine into NATO pushing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation? If this is success, how does one define failure? And talking about exaggerations: “The risk of Trump winning, however remote, represents the biggest national security threat that the United States faces today.” 
As if being “dead” is not bad enough, Boot feels the need to drive a stake into the heart of the Republican Party: the party is stupid . Writing for NYT , the publication that never misses a chance to print something nasty about Republicans, Boot bemoans Republican complicity with Donald Trump phenomenon: “How the Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump.” 
Why can’t there be an alternative to the neocons’ doctrines of world domination in the form of a populist, nationalist movement that wants Americans to take care of Americans first, before overextending the country’s economic and military reach? And should this alternative be immediately called stupid? 
Yet, for many neocons, it is Hillary or bust. James Kirchik goes out of his way trying to convince his fellow conservatives that it is Clinton who is a true conservative, and therefore, the last American hope: “It’s come to this: Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss.” 
Referring to a profound conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott, Kirchik observed that Oakeshott “defines the conservative disposition as one that ‘prefers small and limited innovations to large and indefinite’ ones and ‘favors a slow rather than a rapid pace, and pauses to observe current consequences and make appropriate adjustments.’ … Clinton is the candidate of the status quo, something that conservatives, by definition, are supposed to uphold.” 
Kirchick fails to mention, however, that it is Clintons’ and Obama’s implementation of neocons’ policies which is nothing short of revolutionary. Military adventures, drastic regime changes, alliance redrawing, the willingness to sacrifice American lives and money in their pursuit, all these misguided policies that meet no political resistance –that’s what revolutionary. 
Trump’s realism and pragmatic approach to politics appears as revolutionary only to the ideologues who refuse to pause in their drive to reshape the modern world according to their childish dreams. 
This radical reworking of democratic and conservative process of slow incremental improvements into the hegemony of corporate sponsored elites is indeed revolutionary: a modern day version of Lenin’s hegemony of proletariat and its avant-garde, the elite party, all over again. 
Hillary Clinton is as conservative as Brezhnev, who, in his failure to modify or change the radical agenda set up by the party of Lenin and Stalin, was indeed, a conservative. Only an intellectual of Kirchick’s magnitude can see something Oakeshottian in this embrace of one party system. 
As someone who lived under one party rule in the former Soviet Union, I fully appreciate Popper’s rather minimalistic, but fundamental view of democracy, as the society that boasts a two party system and which guarantees the ease of deposing a ruling party in case of its failures. 
Karl Popper insisted on the necessity and practical usefulness of the two-party system, so that the loss of power would lead to self-scrutiny and therefore improvement. While the two parties and their loyal press try to police each other, they keep each other busy, allowing the rest of the citizens to live in peace and pursue their goals without too much interference or control. 
Obviously, all this goes down the drain with the one party system of globalists and the elites, the party that mocks and dismisses as ridiculous or deplorable anyone who happens to challenge it. 
In his The Open Society and its Enemies Popper proposes a rather paradoxical, yet extremely sensible theory of a democratic society. What is important for Popper, is not the discovery of a perfect government, but a much more mundane and pragmatic question: how to avoid the blatantly bad ones. And democracy does it better than any other system. Insisting on this pragmatism, Popper highlights the following syllogism: 
And we do not base our choice on the goodness of democracy, which may be doubtful, but solely on the evilness of a dictatorship, which is certain. Not only because the dictator is bound to make bad use of his power, but because a dictator, even if he were benevolent, would rob all others of their responsibility, and thus of their human rights and duties. This is a sufficient basis for deciding in favor of democracy—that is, a rule of law that enables us to get rid of the government. No majority, however large, ought to be qualified to abandon this rule of law.” 
Popper wrote this elucidation for The Economist ; where he explains his paradoxical thought in the following manner: 
In ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ I suggested that an entirely new problem should be recognized as the fundamental problem of a rational political theory… how can we best avoid situations in which a bad ruler causes too much harm? 
When we say that the best solution known to us is a constitution that allows a majority vote to dismiss the government, then we do not say the majority vote will always be right. We do not even say that it will usually be right.” 
For Popper, the two-party system is a requirement not because any of these parties possesses the truth, but because they can lose, be removed from power, and thus given a chance to think things through and improve. Consequently, it is the very possibility of losing, and therefore improving, that makes democracies dynamic and progressive: 
From the point of view of the new theory, Election day ought to be a Day of Judgment. As Pericles of Athens said in about 430 BC, ‘although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.’ Of course, we may misjudge it; in fact, we often do. But if we have lived through a party’s period of power and have felt its repercussions, we have at least some qualifications for judgment…In order to make a majority government probable, we need something approaching a two-party system…. for such a system encourages a continual process of self-criticism by the two parties.” 
For Popper, the two –party system is preferable since “an inclination to self-criticism after an electoral defeat is far more pronounced in countries with a two-party system than in those where there are several parties.” It is this self-criticism of a losing party; this desire to reform and modernize that provides healthy development for democracies. 
The rule of the last two decades did not improve the economic life of the majority of Americans; in fact, it resulted in the drastic redistribution of wealth. It didn’t bring peace to the world stage. In fact, we are standing on the threshold of nuclear confrontation. 
Yet, in the manner of the Germany in 1930s, we are rapidly overstepping democratic principles for the sake of one party and its global ambitions, of the consensus formulated by the PNAC, Council of Foreign Affairs, Atlantic Council, and other think tanks, along with the State Department, and the press, all of whom argue for the same policies all over again. Even now, weeks before the elections, we are reading about the same bureaucrats in Pentagon, CIA, or State Department, haggling for the place in the future Hillary cabinet. 
It is those rascals that can be sent home, who are worthy of being voted in. And conversely, it is those rascals, who want to stay in power no matter how wrongheaded, dangerous, or unpopular their policies are that should be thrown out. 
There is no absolute truth in politics, there is no end of history, and there is no one size fits all. Popper understood it much better than Fukuyama. History never ends: parties should continue to lose, and thus given a chance to come up with better policies for the next election. Only when Democratic Party is forced to take a back seat, it will contemplate on how it can improve, and offer new policies for the country. 
Propping up Hillary as the best embodiment of the failed policies, allowing the same bankers, diplomats, and generals to metastasize into next election and hold the same key positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, CIA or Treasury, is ultimately, the embrace of one party system; it provides a profound disservice to the United States and its democratic tradition. 
At the last presidential debate this electoral season, Hillary Clinton pretended to be appalled by Trump’s hypothetical refusal to accept the results of the November elections. Mass media echo chambers went into the override mode bemoaning Trump’s disrespect for the venerable political tradition of peaceful transition of power. Trump was never in power, however. 
What is truly appalling is the real, not the hypothetical threat of turning US into a one party system, the system which is so entrenched that it can only mock, dismiss, and conspire to denigrate its opponents. Maybe Mr. Forrestal was right after all. Russians, or rather Soviets, are here, but they do not hack the emails, they write them. Rate this: ",FAKE
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"San Diego (CNN) Hillary Clinton is back in the Golden State. Bernie Sanders, seemingly, has been living here.

The former secretary of state begins a five-day swing through California on Thursday that she hopes will result in a victory that convinces Sanders and his supporters that it's time to unite against Donald Trump.

But Sanders shows no signs of going away. The Vermont senator, who has used a bus to traverse the state, headlined over 27 rallies and forums last month, and is expected to have a jam packed schedule the week before Tuesday's primary.

Clinton had planned to campaign this week in New Jersey ahead of that state's Tuesday primary, but the campaign decided instead to fly to San Diego for a speech on foreign policy that will also go directly after Trump, as well as tout her own experience as secretary of state.

Clinton will argue that the choice in 2016 ""goes beyond partisanship"" because Trump is ""unlike any presidential nominee we've seen in modern times and he is fundamentally unfit for the job,"" Jake Sullivan, Clinton's senior policy adviser, said in a statement.

The speech shows the predicament Clinton is currently in: She is committing five days to battle Sanders in California, a solidly Democratic general election state, while also trying to focus on the presumptive GOP nominee.

""I wonder why Secretary Clinton and her husband Bill are back in California,"" Sanders sarcastically told reporters Wednesday in Spreckels, California. ""I thought we had lost it. It was all over but I guess Secretary Clinton maybe is looking at some polling would suggest otherwise.""

The non-stop campaigning -- coupled with a small ad buy, dozens of surrogate events and targeted get out the vote efforts -- is more than Clinton's senior aides expected to commit to California months ago.

Aides acknowledge Clinton could lose the state, despite polls showing her up narrowly. Internal polling has Clinton up double digits in New Jersey, aides said, and their thinking is that it ""doesn't make sense"" to be in the Garden State while the race in California is still ""tight.""

""Clearly California is a big state and I am going to do everything I can to meet as many voters as possible,"" Clinton told CNN on Tuesday. ""I was proud today to be endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown and we are going to keep working as diligently and tirelessly as we can to get as much voters to turn out and vote for me next Tuesday.""

""I will tell you that in every state that we have gone into, we have taken on the entire Democratic establishment,"" Sanders said in response to a question about Brown's endorsement. ""It's not surprising to me that, you know, we will have the Democratic establishment supporting Hillary Clinton.""

At the same time, the former secretary of state doesn't need to win California — or even come that close — to win the nomination on Tuesday.

Clinton currently needs 70 delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination, according to CNN's estimate, a number she is likely to win from the New Jersey primary. Because results from New Jersey will come in hours before California, top aides assume that most news networks will call the Democratic Primary on Tuesday before results come in from the West Coast. And since delegates are awarded proportionally — this isn't winner-take-all as some of the big GOP contests were -- a Sanders win in California wouldn't make a much of a dent in her lead.

But Clinton aides said they were aware that losing California to Sanders would be embarrassing for her campaign and could hand the Vermont senator the needed momentum to justify staying in the race through Democratic convention in July.

Sanders has continued to rail on the superdelegate system throughout California, blasting the ""Democratic establishment"" for allowing Democratic elected officials and party insiders to have a vote in who the party nominates.

""It is a pretty dumb system,"" Sanders said in Monterey, California on Tuesday about the fact so many party insiders are behind Clinton. ""It's an unfair system, it's a dumb system, and it's a system we will change.""

But Sanders, with a win in California, hopes he will be able to turn the system to his advantage. Sanders and his aides have argued for weeks that a win in California will help the Vermont senator convince super delegates currently backing Clinton to support him instead.

So far, though, the effort has been largely fruitless: Clinton has maintained a sizeable superdelegate lead and Sanders has only been able to flip one delegate.

In an attempt to lower the stakes in California, the Clinton campaign has instructed surrogates to say that they ""expect"" California to be a close contest, but to downplay its importance in picking the eventual nominee.

""Even if Senator Sanders wins each of the remaining contests by 32 points, Hillary Clinton will still have earned the majority of pledged delegates and popular vote,"" read talking points distributed to supporters on Tuesday.

Clinton will continue to largely ignore Sanders in California, aides said, a tactic Clinton employed in late May during a string of events in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Her speech Thursday will begin drawing from her record as secretary of state, defending what some Republicans have said will be a liability for her in a race against Trump.

""She will reflect on her experience making the tough calls and doing the hard work of protecting our country,"" Sullivan said. ""She'll reaffirm her conviction that strong, principled American leadership makes both the United States and the world more secure.""

Sullivan added: ""And you will hear in her speech a confidence in America and our capacity to overcome the challenges we face while staying true to our values -- a strong contrast to Donald Trump's incessant trash-talking of America.""

Sanders, however, is expected to continue to draw contrast with Clinton as primary day in California gets closer. He spent Wednesday hitting Clinton for opposing an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial drilling tactic.

""Sec. Clinton does not support a ban on fracking,"" Sanders tweeted on Wednesday. ""Instead, she would simply impose a few more regulations on it. Not good enough.""",REAL
"  DCG | 7 Comments 
From Daily Mirror : Rows of tatty tents line the pavements of Paris as refugees exiled from Calais find a new place to set up camp. 
The number of UK-bound migrants sleeping in illegal camps in Paris has increased by a third since the destruction of the Calais Jungle , it has emerged. 
It raises the prospect of the French capital turning into the new hub for thousands of asylum seekers seeking a new life in Britain. 
Paris’s first official refugee camp is due to open within the next few days, and it is expected to become a magnet for even more refugees. The new facility will be men only, and only take 400 migrants at a time. Even then, they will only be able to stay for a maximum of ten weeks at a time. It will open close to the Gare du Nord Eurostar hub, from where high speed trains travel to and from London. 
A total of 5,596 people have been evacuated since the operation to raze the Jungle shantytown in Calais began on Monday morning. While most have been bused to some 450 resettlement centres around France, up to 5,000 more are thought to have travelled away independently . 
Heloise Mary, a member of France’s office for the welcome and accompaniment of migrants , said numbers in Paris had shot up. Referring to a camp close to the Stalingrad Metro in the north of Paris, she told the BFM news channel: “We’ve gone from two thousand to three thousand in two days with the closure of Calais.” 
DCG",FAKE
"Who's Winning The 2016 Race — On Facebook And Twitter?

While the 2016 presidential hopefuls are hitting the road in places like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the race is also taking off on social media.

Let's start with Twitter: With nearly 3 million Twitter followers, Hillary Clinton is way ahead of the other potential candidates:

Clinton only started tweeting in June 2013, and she tweets sparingly — though she seems to be ramping up this week. It's a calculated mix of her opinions on political news, photos from her travels and work to empower women and girls as well as family photos.

It was on Twitter that she finally posted a long-anticipated response to her recent email debacle on March 4: ""I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."" That tweet received more than 10,000 favorites. This week she got more political, weighing in on the House Republicans' budget, and expressing frustration that the Senate is stuck on a bill that would create a fund for human trafficking victims and is continuing to block Loretta Lynch's confirmation as attorney general.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is taking the lead on Facebook. Paul's politician page has 1.9 million likes and 228,537 people were ""talking"" about him as of Tuesday:

In his Facebook posts, he can be seen behind podiums and on political trips. He also links to articles and video clips he's featured in and infographics that express his views on topics from legalizing marijuana to Loretta Lynch. He also denounces his (potential future) competition.

But it seems Clinton isn't even in the game on Facebook. She doesn't have a verified Facebook page, just a topic page with more than 400,000 likes. That's still more than Jeb Bush's 163,000, even though he appears to be doing all the right things — using hashtags, tagging friends like Benjamin Netanyahu, and posting selfies, baby pictures and vintage photos of his mom, Barbara Bush, and his wife, Columba:

While verified public pages could not be found for some — Vice President Joe Biden, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley or former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — many had more than one verified account. For example, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (who has said she will not run) has two Twitter handles: @senwarren and @elizabethforma; one is her official Twitter account as senator of Massachusetts and the other is her official personal account, in which she describes herself as senator. In one photo, she wears a pink blazer and in the other a blue blazer. The difference in looks is subtle, but she divides the content — on one account she tweets politics and on the other she cheers on the Patriots.

All the numbers so far pale in comparison to accounts that are making big waves on Facebook or Twitter (see Katy Perry's 66 million or President Obama's 56 million followers). But the 2016 race is still, technically, anybody's game — so the next great social candidate might just be one good tweet or selfie away.",REAL
"The path to total Dictatorship: America’s Shadow Government and its silent coup Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law By John W. Whitehead - October 27, 2016 “Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people . Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech 
Unaffected by elections. Unaltered by populist movements. Beyond the reach of the law. 
Say hello to America’s shadow government. 
A corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country, this shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. 
No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government— also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group” —may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year. 
To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments. 
The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law. 
Yet it is the second shadow government —also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government. 
The Deep State, which “ operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power ,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government. 
So who or what is the Deep State? 
It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal   in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “ a hybrid of national security and   ”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees. 
It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics. 
These are the key players that drive the shadow government. 
This is the hidden face of the American police state that will continue long past Election Day. 
Just consider some of the key programs and policies advanced by the shadow government that will continue no matter who occupies the Oval Office. 
Domestic surveillance. No matter who wins the presidential popularity contest, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. Thus, on any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Local police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, etc. Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike—including homes. Coupled with the nation’s growing network of real-time surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. 
Global spying. The NSA’s massive surveillance network, what the Washington Post refers to as a $500 billion “ espionage empire ,” will continue to span the globe and target every single person on the planet who uses a phone or a computer. The NSA’s Echelon program intercepts and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax and email message sent anywhere in the world. In addition to carrying out domestic surveillance on peaceful political groups such as Amnesty International, Greenpeace and several religious groups, Echelon has also been a keystone in the government’s attempts at political and corporate espionage . 
Roving TSA searches. The American taxpayer will continue to get ripped off by government agencies in the dubious name of national security. One of the greatest culprits when it comes to swindling taxpayers has been the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), with its questionable deployment of and complete mismanagement of millions of dollars’ worth of airport full-body X-ray scanners, punitive patdowns by TSA agents and thefts of travelers’ valuables. Considered essential to national security, TSA programs will continue in airports and at transportation hubs around the country. 
USA Patriot Act, NDAA. America’s so-called war on terror, which it has relentlessly pursued since 9/11, will continue to chip away at our freedoms, unravel our Constitution and transform our nation into a battlefield, thanks in large part to such subversive legislation as the USA Patriot Act and National Defense Authorization Act. These laws completely circumvent the rule of law and the rights of American citizens. In so doing, they re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, is the map by which we navigate life in the United States. These laws will continue to be enforced no matter who gets elected. 
Militarized police state. Thanks to federal grant programs allowing the Pentagon to transfer surplus military supplies and weapons to local   without charge, police forces will continue to be transformed from peace officers into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, will continue to keep the masses corralled, controlled, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. 
SWAT team raids. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by local police for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties will continue to rise. Nationwide, SWAT teams will continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. 
Domestic drones. The domestic use of drones will continue unabated. As mandated by Congress, there will be 30,000 drones crisscrossing the skies of America by 2020, all part of an industry that could be worth as much as $30 billion per year. These machines, which will be equipped with weapons, will be able to record all activities, using video feeds, heat sensors and radar. An Inspector General report revealed that the Dept. of Justice has already spent nearly $4 million on drones domestically, largely for use by the FBI , with grants for another $1.26 million so police departments and nonprofits can acquire their own drones. 
School-to-prison pipeline. The paradigm of abject compliance to the state will continue to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. School districts will continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. 
Overcriminalization. The government bureaucracy will continue to churn out laws, statutes, codes and regulations that reinforce its powers and value systems and those of the police state and its corporate allies, rendering the rest of us petty criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to this overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal. Consequently, small farmers who dare to make unpasteurized goat cheese and share it with members of their community will continue to have their farms raided. 
Privatized Prisons. States will continue to outsource prisons to private corporations, resulting in a cash cow whereby mega-corporations imprison Americans in private prisons in order to make a profit. In exchange for corporations buying and managing public prisons across the country at a supposed savings to the states, the states have to agree to maintain a 90% occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. 
Endless wars. America’s expanding military empire will continue to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. 
Are you getting the message yet? 
The next president, much like the current president and his predecessors, will be little more than a figurehead, a puppet to entertain and distract the populace from what’s really going on. 
As Lofgren reveals, this state within a state, “concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue ,” is a “hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.” 
The Deep State not only holds the nation’s capital in thrall, but it also controls Wall Street (“which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater”) and Silicon Valley. 
This is fascism in its most covert form, hiding behind public agencies and private companies to carry out its dirty deeds. 
It is a marriage between government bureaucrats and corporate fat cats. 
As Lofgren concludes: 
[T]he Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change … If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. 
In other words, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , as long as government officials—elected and unelected alike—are allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution, the courts and the citizenry, the threat to our freedoms remains undiminished. 
So the next time you find yourselves despondent over the 2016 presidential candidates, remember that it’s just a puppet show intended to distract you from the silent coup being carried out by America’s shadow government.",FAKE
" Purchasing Loyalty with Foreign Aid By Jacob G. Hornberger
 FFF "" - A dispute that is taking place between Saudi Arabia and Egypt indirectly demonstrates the nature of U.S. foreign aid. After dumping a walloping $25 billion in foreign aid to help the Egyptian military dictatorship’s economic woes, the Saudis are hopping mad.
Why?
Because last month in the United Nations, contrary to Saudi Arabia’s wishes, Egypt voted in favor of a Russian resolution on Syria.
In the world of foreign aid, that’s a super no-no. When a regime has received $25 billion from another regime, it is expected to vote the way its benefactor wants it to vote.
In a remarkable admission regarding foreign aid, at least in this particular case, the New York Times , in an article on the matter, wrote, “The Saudis may have thought they were buying loyalty .” The Times article pointed out that to punish the Egyptians for their independence, “The state-owned Saudi oil company, Aramco, postponed a promised shipment of 700,000 tons of discounted oil in October, and the spokesman for Egypt’s oil ministry said the fate of November’s shipment remains unknown.”
Although the New York Times would probably be reluctant to describe U.S. foreign aid in the same way, that’s precisely what it is — a way to purchase “loyalty” from foreign regimes, including dictatorships. The U.S. government loves to put foreign regimes on the federal dole because once that happens, U.S. officials know that they have bought them, lock, stock, and barrel. Once a regime is on the dole, it inevitably becomes dependent on it.
The racket works like this: The IRS collects money from hard-pressed U.S. taxpayers, which U.S. officials use to send millions of dollars in foreign aid to foreign regimes.
The foreign regimes then use the money to buy weaponry to fortify their hold on power or to just to line the pockets of government officials.
It doesn’t matter to U.S. officials what the tyrants do to people within their country. They can abuse them, incarcerate them, torture them, or kill them. None of that matters to U.S. officials.
What matters to U.S. officials is the international arena. Like votes in the UN. Or public support for U.S. invasions, coups, interventions, assassinations, kidnappings, and the like. Or joining coalitions of the willing. That’s when U.S. officials expect “loyalty,” in the form of blind support, which was what Saudi Arabia was expecting from the Egyptian tyrants.
And heaven help any nation that takes the “wrong” position. The U.S. will respond in the same way the Saudis have responded to the Egyptians. It will threaten to do very bad things to the nation that opposes a U.S invasion, coup, or resolution within the UN. When a nation is on the U.S. dole, U.S. officials expect “loyalty.”
Americans can’t do anything about foreign aid by the Saudi government. But they can do something about U.S. foreign aid. What they should do is demand that it be ended, immediately.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.",FAKE
"Congressional Republicans face a major test this week as they seek to pass a budget that makes both fiscal and defense “hawks” happy, and the big story right now is that Republicans may not resolve the impasse between the warring camps. But they very well might — and at that point, a bruising political battle with Democrats will unfold as Republicans move towards a Congressional vote on repealing Obamacare (a key pillar of the GOP fiscal blueprint) and a possible presidential veto looms.

Gearing up for the fight to come, the Senate Democratic caucus will release a report this morning that previews how they will prosecute the political case.

First, though, Republicans have to find a way to unify. Politico and Roll Call report this morning that the House GOP leadership will try a new strategy to resolve their internal divisions.

Here’s how it will work: The House will hold votes on both a budget that the fiscal “hawks” want (which would balance the budget in 10 years with no new revenues and less defense spending) and on a budget that the defense “hawks” want (which would balance the budget in 10 years with no new revenues and more defense spending, while not counting it as spending that busts the sequester caps conservatives want to keep in place). Such are the parameters of responsible GOP budgeting in this Congress.

Whichever gets more votes will be the winner, whereupon the effort will begin to reconcile that budget with the Senate GOP version (presuming one passes). If Republicans fail to unify, there will be countless stories about their failure to govern, and it will raise the possibility of a lot more chaos ahead. But if they do agree on a budget, a whole new chapter begins.

Thus, the forthcoming report from the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Center will argue that the spending cuts that are detailed in the GOP blueprints — such as the repeal of Obamacare (while keeping its savings) and the block-granting of Medicaid to states — would “take affordable health coverage away from millions of Americans.” And it will argue that, to get to its goal of balance within 10 years with no new revenues, the House and Senate GOP fiscal blueprints go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the real impact of the spending cuts that would be required to accomplish that goal:

Says Senator Chuck Schumer: “Fuzzy math, sleight of hand, and arithmetic acrobatics can disguise but not change the fact that the Republican budgets would devastate programs that the middle class relies upon.” Meanwhile, the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that 69 percent of the cuts in the GOP budgets would have to fall on programs helping people with lower incomes.

But will Republicans pay any political price for any of this? One key thing to watch will be how GOP Senators up for reelection in states carried by Obama handle the politics of it. Meanwhile, most House Republicans are cossetted away in safe districts where GOP voters are presumably happy to be told that it’s perfectly possible to balance the budget in 10 years with no new taxes while hiking defense spending, with the vast bulk of any cuts (to the degree that they’re detailed at all) falling on people with low incomes, even as relatively few of the cuts hit programs that serve older Americans.

* ISRAEL SPIED ON IRAN TALKS: The Wall Street Journal reports that senior White House officials learned soon after negotiations began over Iran’s nuclear program began that Israel was spying on the talks, as part of a broader effort to undermine the possibility of a deal:

This could conceivably give some skittish Congressional Democrats the cover they need to side with Obama on any eventual nuclear deal with Iran. On the other hand, the Benjamin Netanyahu speech arranged by Congressional Republicans was supposed to accomplish that, too, but it’s still unclear whether it will.

* ISRAELI AMBASSADOR LOBBIES HOUSE DEMS: Meanwhile, Politico reports that Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer held a dinner last night with a number of House Democrats. According to one of them

This is yet another reminder that, if there is a deal with Iran, many Democrats may find themselves forced to choose between the Israeli government and the Obama-led one.

* VOTE ON LORETTA LYNCH DELAYED UNTIL MID-APRIL? Bloomberg News reports that Senate Republicans may not put up Loretta Lynch’s nomination as attorney general for a vote until at least mid-April, because of a partisan dispute over a human trafficking bill. Democrats are filibustering it due to an anti-abortion provision; Republicans are saying Lynch won’t move until that dispute is resolved.

That would mean the vote on Lynch could come five months after she was first nominated. While Lynch would be the first female African American attorney general, the delay could also make history in another way, one that doesn’t reflect particularly well on Republicans.

* CAMP HILLARY IS PSYCHED ABOUT CRUZ PRESIDENTIAL RUN: Hillary advisers think Ted Cruz’s presidential announcement is very much in her interests:

Well, okay. It’s not clear to me that the lack of any serious challenge to Clinton will end up benefiting her, but we’ll see.

* THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE ATTACK ON JEB BUSH: Byron York previews it: Conservative activists are complaining that Jeb Bush, turning his years in business after his tenure as Florida governor, was not vocal enough in publicly joining the Republicans’ “desperate attempt to stop Obamacare.”

Ted Cruz launched his presidential run on the premise that only he possesses the heroism and perseverance required to fully vanquish Obama’s efforts to destroy America. Watch for the “where were you while there was still a chance to defeat Obamacare BEFORE it began enslaving millions?” line to emerge as a key attack.

* AND OBAMACARE IS A DISASTER, PART 973: The Associated Press reports:

Better get the Supreme Court to do something about this right quick!",REAL
"With the average of polls showing rival Hillary Clinton ahead six percentage points less than a month before the GOP convention in Cleveland, embattled Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been fired.

“The Donald J. Trump Campaign for President, which has set a historic record in the Republican Primary having received almost 14 million votes, has today announced that Corey Lewandowski will no longer be working with the campaign,” the campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “The campaign is grateful to Corey for his hard work and dedication and we wish him the best in the future.”

According to NBC News, Trump called Lewandowski this morning to inform him of his firing after an emergency meeting with family members and top advisers to right the ship, and to plot a more serious campaign strategy.

The announcement comes hours after an explosive GQ profile of Hicks revealed disturbing incidents of alleged abuse directed at the 27-year-old national press secretary from Lewandowski.

“You made a big f***ing mistake; you’re f***ing dead to me,” Lewandowski allegedly told Hicks after she expressed interest in leaving the campaign recently, bringing her to tears, according to former Trump operative Sam Nunberg. While Lewandowski denied GQ’s reporting, the hotheaded campaign manager, of course, first grabbed the spotlight away from his boss when he was arrested for yanking a female Breitbart writer, an act he denied happened but was caught on camera. While the charges were eventually dropped, Trump remained loyal and committed to Lewandowski even as reports emerged that Lewandowski had a history of making abusive, sexist, and sexual remarks to his female coworkers. According to reaction from at least one “senior adviser” to the Trump campaign, Lewandowski’s ouster was welcome news:",REAL
"New details are emerging about Nikola Tesla’s rumored “Death Ray” technology being in the possession of Russia. Declassified FBI documents reveal that the technology actually exists and was hidden from the public after his death. 
Via UsualRoutine 

Published after 73 years of being kept from the public, the declassified documents vindicate conspiracy theorists. They claim that many of Tesla’s innovations were far ahead of his time but were suppressed by the mainstream scientists.
According to Sputnik News, Russia has developed a unique radio-electronic weapon to disable enemy drones. The device will soon enter service with the Russian Armed Forces. This is according to a United Instrument Corporation (UIC) spokesman.
Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defense) journal editor-on-chief Igor Korotchenko revealed that the test unit uses ultrahigh frequency impulses to disable aircraft electronics. Similar to the effects of an EMP burst, it renders them useless in a combat environment.
Russia Unveils New Weapon, Based On Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray? “With its effective range apparently not exceeding one kilometer, this weapon may be used against UAVs flying right above the battlefield,” Korotchenko also added that similar weapons were currently being developed not just in Russia but also in the US and other countries.
Alexander Perendzhiyev, a military political analyst said that the weapon can be used not just against aircraft but against all systems with microelectronic elements. The new weapon is especially effective when used against devices with hi-tech microelectronic systems frying their circuits.
According to Your News Wire, there are currently no details suggesting that Nikola Tesla’s death ray was the basis of the new Russian weapon. There are many who believe that the famous inventor created weapons of mass destruction. However the majority of Tesla’s work involved those for domestic use. Most notable these is the Alternating Current or AC.
For now, the declassified FBI documents reveal nothing except that the death ray is in fact real and not just a figment of imagination. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace, mentioned in the declassified FBI records as having advisers discuss “its effects.” One these includes those dealing with the wireless transmission of electrical energy.
",FAKE
"Get short URL 0 9 0 0 NATO is tracking the movement of the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, considering its presence in the international waters close to the alliance's member states acceptable, Germany’s Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday. 
BERLIN/BRUSSELS (Sputnik) — On October 15, the Russian Northern Fleet’s press service said that a group of warships headed by the aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov and accompanied by the Pyotr Veliky battle cruiser, the Severomorsk and the Admiral Kulakov anti-submarine destroyers, and support vessels was sent to the Mediterranean to hold drills and strengthen capabilities. 
NATO officials have expressed concerns that the group could be used to support Damascus in the ongoing Syrian civil war. ""It is acceptable that the Russian aircraft carrier operates in the international waters, though considering the current situation we will keep a close eye on it,"" she said. ...",FAKE
"For political observers, 2016 feels like an earthquake — a once-in-a-generation event that will remake American politics. The Republican party is fracturing around support for Donald Trump. An avowed socialist has made an insurgent challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination. On left and right, it feels as though a new era is beginning.

And a new era is beginning, but not in the way most people think. Though this election feels like the beginning of a partisan realignment, it’s actually the end of one. The partisan coalitions that defined the Democratic and Republican parties for decades in the middle of the twentieth century broke apart long ago; over the past half century, their component voting blocs — ideological, demographic, economic, geographic, cultural — have reshuffled. The reassembling of new Democratic and Republican coalitions is nearly finished.

What we’re seeing this year is the beginning of a policy realignment, when those new partisan coalitions decide which ideas and beliefs they stand for — when, in essence, the party platforms catch up to the shift in party voters that has already happened. The type of conservatism long championed by the Republican Party was destined to fall as soon as a candidate came along who could rally its voters without being beholden to its donors, experts and pundits. The future is being built before our eyes, with far-reaching consequences for every facet of American politics.

The 2016 race is a sign that American politics is changing in profound and lasting ways; by the 2020s and 2030s, partisan platforms will have changed drastically. You may find yourself voting for a party you could never imagine supporting right now. What will that political future look like?

Today’s Republican Party is predominantly a Midwestern, white, working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West. Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities.

In both parties, there’s a gap between the inherited orthodoxy of a decade or two ago and the real interests of today’s electoral coalition. And in both parties, that gap between voters and policies is being closed in favor of the voters — a slight transition in the case of Hillary Clinton, but a dramatic one in the case of Donald Trump.

During the Democratic primary, pundits who focused on the clash between Clinton and Sanders missed a story that illuminated this shift: The failure of Jim Webb’s brief campaign for the presidential nomination. Webb was the only candidate who represented the old-style Democratic Party of the mid-20th century — the party whose central appeal was among white Southerners and Northern white “ethnics.” Even during the “New Democrat” era of Bill Clinton, white working-class remnants of that coalition were still important in the party. But by 2016, Webb lacked a constituency, and he was out of place among the politicians seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, which included one lifelong socialist (Bernie Sanders) and two candidates who had been raised as Republicans (Hillary Clinton and, briefly, Lincoln Chafee).

On the Republican side, the exemplary living fossil was Jeb Bush. Like his brother, Jeb pushed a neo-Reaganite synthesis of support for a hawkish foreign policy, social conservatism, and cuts in middle-class entitlements to finance further tax cuts for the rich. From the Reagan era until recently, the GOP’s economic policies have been formulated by libertarians, whose views are at odds with those of most Republican voters. In March of this year, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 68 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters opposed future reductions in Social Security benefits — almost the same amount of support found among Democrats and Dem-leaning voters (73 percent). Republicans who supported Trump were even more opposed to Social Security benefit cuts, at 73 percent. And even among those who supported Kasich, 62 percent opposed cuts in Social Security benefits — even though Kasich, himself, is in favor of cutting entitlements.

As country-and-western Republicans have gradually replaced country-club Republicans, the gap between the party’s economic orthodoxy and the economic interests of white working-class voters in the GOP base has increased. House Republicans repeatedly have passed versions of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which is based on cutting Social Security and replacing Medicare with vouchers.

Except for Trump, all of the leading Republican candidates—Cruz, Bush, Rubio, Kasich—favored some version of the Ryan agenda. By contrast, Trump was the only leading GOP candidate who expressed the actual preference of most Republican voters, declaring his “absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is. Not increase the age and leave it as is.” Trump is now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

If Trump is defeated, what is left of the GOP establishment might try to effect a restoration of the old economic dogma of free trade, mass immigration and entitlement cuts. But sooner or later, a Republican Party platform with policies that most of the party’s core voters reject will be revised or abandoned—over the objections of libertarian Republican party donors and allied think tanks and magazines, if necessary.

Why is this all happening now? Because the decades-long “culture war” between religious conservatives and secular liberals is largely over.

Most culture-war conflicts involve sexuality, gender, or reproduction (for example, abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, and same-sex marriage). The centrality of culture-war issues in national politics from the 1960s to the present allowed both major parties to contain factions with incompatible economic views. For a generation, the Democratic Party has included both free traders and protectionists — but support for abortion rights and, more recently, gay rights have been litmus tests for Democratic politicians with national ambitions. Conversely, Republicans have been allowed to disagree about trade and immigration, but all Republican presidential candidates have had to pay lip service to repealing Roe v. Wade and outlawing abortion.

Social issues spurred a partisan realignment by changing who considered themselves Democrats and Republicans. Over decades, socially conservative working-class whites migrated from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party, especially in the South. Socially moderate Republicans, especially on the East Coast, shifted to the Democratic coalition. Now, there’s little disagreement within each party on social issues. Liberal Republicans are as rare as Reagan Democrats.

Like an ebb tide that reveals a reshaped coastline, the culture war remade the parties’ membership and is now receding. In its absence, we are able to see a transformed political landscape.

The culture war and partisan realignment are over; the policy realignment and “border war” — a clash between nationalists, mostly on the right, and multicultural globalists, mostly on the left — have just begun.

For the nationalists, the most important dividing line is that between American citizens and everyone else—symbolized by Trump’s proposal for a Mexican border wall. On the right, American nationalism is tainted by strains of white racial and religious nationalism and nativism, reinforced by Trump’s incendiary language about Mexicans and his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

But while there is overlap between nationalists and racists, the two are not the same thing. The most extreme white nationalists don’t advocate nationalism as a governing philosophy in our multiracial country; they hope to withdraw from American life and create a white homeland within the nation-state. Nationalism is different than white nationalism, and a populist American nationalism untainted by vestiges of racial bigotry might have transracial appeal, like versions of national populism in Latin America.

The rise of populist nationalism on the right is paralleled by the rise of multicultural globalism on the center-left.

For multicultural globalists, national boundaries are increasingly obsolete and perhaps even immoral. According to the emerging progressive orthodoxy, the identities that count are subnational (race, gender, orientation) and supranational (citizenship of the world). While not necessarily representative of Democratic voters, progressive pundits and journalists increasingly speak a dialect of ethical cosmopolitanism or globalism — the idea that it is unjust to discriminate in favor of one’s fellow nationals against citizens of foreign countries.

This difference in worldviews maps neatly into differences in policy. Nationalists support immigration and trade deals only if they improve the living standards of citizens of the nation. For the new, globally minded progressives, the mere well-being of American workers is not a good enough reason to oppose immigration or trade liberalization. It’s an argument that today’s progressive globalists have borrowed from libertarians: immigration or trade that depresses the wages of Americans is still justified if it makes immigrants or foreign workers better off.

The disagreements within both parties on trade is a living example of the inchoate policy realignment. Every major Republican presidential candidate supported free-trade agreements — with the sole and major exception of Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, who routinely slams free-trade deals and has called for the reintroduction of certain tariffs on foreign goods.

Likewise, the current opposition of many Democratic politicians to free-trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership reflects the residual influence of declining manufacturing unions within the party According to a March 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, by a margin of 56 percent to 38 percent, Democratic voters believe that free-trade agreements have been good for the U.S. Among Republicans, those numbers are almost reversed: by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, a majority of Republicans believe free-trade has been a bad thing. Among younger Americans, who tend to prefer Democrats to Republicans, support for free trade is high: 67 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say trade agreements are good for the country. Even progressives who campaign against trade deals feel obliged by the logic of ethical cosmopolitanism to justify their opposition in the name of the labor rights of foreign workers or the good of the global environment.

For the next decade or longer, as the parties’ stances adjust, this “border war” that has succeeded the “culture war” will define and remake American politics.

The outlines of the two-party system of the 2020s and 2030s are dimly visible. The Republicans will be a party of mostly working-class whites, based in the South and West and suburbs and exurbs everywhere. They will favor universal, contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort—programs like Social Security and Medicare. But they will tend to oppose means-tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and their families cannot enjoy.

They will oppose increases in both legal and illegal immigration, in some cases because of ethnic prejudice; in other cases, for fear of economic competition. The instinctive economic nationalism of tomorrow’s Republicans could be invoked to justify strategic trade as well as crude protectionism. They are likely to share Trump’s view of unproductive finance: “The hedge-fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”

The Democrats of the next generation will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities. They will think of the U.S. as a version of their multicultural coalition of distinct racial and ethnic identity groups writ large. Many younger progressives will take it for granted that moral people are citizens of the world, equating nationalism and patriotism with racism and fascism.

The withering-away of industrial unions, thanks to automation as well as offshoring, will liberate the Democrats to embrace free trade along with mass immigration wholeheartedly. The emerging progressive ideology of post-national cosmopolitanism will fit nicely with urban economies which depend on finance, tech and other industries of global scope, and which benefit from a constant stream of immigrants, both skilled and unskilled.

While tomorrow’s Republican policymakers will embrace FDR-to-LBJ universal entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, future Democrats may prefer means-tested programs for the poor only. In the expensive, hierarchical cities in which Democrats will be clustered, universal social insurance will make no sense. Payroll taxes on urban workers will be too low to fund universal social insurance, while universal social benefits will be too low to matter to the urban rich. So the well-to-do in expensive, unequal Democratic cities will agree to moderately redistributive taxes which pay for means-tested benefits—perhaps even a guaranteed basic income—for the disproportionately poor and foreign-born urban workforce. As populist labor liberalism declines within the Democratic party, employer-friendly and finance-friendly libertarianism will grow. The Democrats of 2030 may be more pro-market than the Republicans.

Of the two coalitions, which is likely to prevail most of the time?

While progressives claim that nonwhite Americans will become a majority, this is misleading for two reasons. To begin with, according to the Census Bureau, from this point until 2060, there will be only limited growth in the African-American population (a rise from 13.2 percent to 14.3 percent) and the Asian-American population (5.4 percent to 9.3 percent) as shares of the whole. The growth of the nonwhite category by 2060 is driven overwhelmingly by the increasing Latino share of the population, from 17.4 percent to 28.6 percent.

Second, Latino Americans increasingly identify themselves as white. Between the 2000 Census and the 2010 Census, about 7 percent of Hispanics changed their self-description from “some other race” to “white.” At the same time, according to the Census Bureau, three-fourths of “white population growth” in 21st-century America has been driven by individuals who declared themselves white and of Hispanic origin. If increasing numbers of Hispanics identify as white and their descendants are defined as “white” in government statistics, there may be a white majority in the U.S. throughout the 21st century.

More important than unscientific Census classifications will be how the growing Latino population votes. Trump’s unpopularity among Latino voters is likely to help the Democrats in the short run. But Democrats cannot assume they’ll have a solid Latino voting bloc in the future. In Texas, in particular, Republicans have been successful in winning many Latino voters, all the way back to Senator John Tower and Governor George W. Bush. In Texas’ 2014 elections, Republican gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott won 44 percent of Latino Texans. Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn did even better, with 48 percent.

In the coming decades, it is possible that Latinos will be reliable Democratic voters and condemn the Republican Party to minority status at the presidential level, if not everywhere. But it is also possible that as Latinos assimilate and intermarry, they will move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, following a trail blazed in the past by many “white ethnic” voters of European descent, including Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans.

The policy realignment of the present and near future will complete the partisan realignment of the past few decades. And though it’s impossible to know exactly how it will end, one thing is clear: In 2016, the old political system is crumbling, and a new American political order is being born.",REAL
"Senate Democrats To FBI: Put Up Or Shut Up About Emails (TWEETS) By Darrell Lucus on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
If there was any doubt that FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that the FBI was reviewing potential evidence in the Hillary Clinton email affair backfired spectacularly, it was erased on Saturday night. Four top Senate Democrats gave Comey an ultimatum –give us a full accounting of what you know about this, and do so by Monday. 
Senators Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Tom Carper, and Ben Cardin fired off a “what the hell is going on here?” letter to Comey and his nominal boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, demanding answers about Comey’s “vaguely worded” letter on Friday afternoon. They are the ranking members of the Senate committees that were most involved in the email server investigation–Intelligence (Feinstein), Judiciary (Leahy), Homeland Security (Carper), and Foreign Relations (Cardin). 
Read the full letter here, courtesy Cardin’s Twitter feed. 
— Senator Ben Cardin (@SenatorCardin) October 30, 2016 
In a colossal understatement, they pointed out that the letter didn’t answer any questions, but in fact left a lot of them unanswered. For one thing, Comey’s letter didn’t clarify whether the FBI even had the emails in its custody, let alone had a chance to review them. Comey also didn’t say whether Hillary sent the emails, or if they even had anything to do with the investigation. Additionally, it represented a radical departure from FBI and Justice Department policy against doing anything that could potentially influence an election. 
The Senators also noted that Comey had told his own troops that he didn’t know just how significant those emails were, and that there was a possibility that his letter would be “misunderstood.” In light of the fact that this letter has already been misunderstood, Feinstein, Carper, Leahy, and Cardin want Comey and Lynch–in truth, Comey–to give the Senate “detailed information” about the FBI’s actions no later than the close of business on Monday. To not do so, they add, “would be irresponsible and a disservice to the American people.” 
There were already a number of reasons why Comey should be very afraid. For one thing, at the time, the FBI had not even obtained a warrant for the emails it discovered on the laptop of longtime Hillary aide Huma Abedin while investigating her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, for inappropriate texts with a teenager. So Comey felt the need to alert the House and Senate about these emails, when his people hadn’t even asked a court to review them. 
We also know that Comey’s rumored excuse–that the emails were likely to be leaked unless he told Congress about them first–doesn’t wash. Judge Jeanine Pirro , no fan of Hillary, thinks Comey could have easily solved that problem by privately notifying the committee chairmen and putting them on notice that he would know who was behind any leaks. 
But on Sunday afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the FBI hadn’t gotten a warrant for those emails despite knowing for at least a month that those messages were potentially relevant to the email server case. It finally obtained a warrant on Sunday night. How is Comey going to explain that to the Senate, especially since he knew how explosive this could have been? 
It’s no wonder that Comey’s own troops are steaming mad at him, according to Newsweek and Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald. Here’s what Eichenwald has learned, by way of review. Word from inside @FBI . FURIOUS at Comey, think he's mishandled public revelations from get go. ""Outrageous incompetence"" one agent told me. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …his original decision to lay out info on clinton case, then opine on what it meant outside of criminal findings, infuriated these folks.. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 Re: anger within @FBI at Comey. I am getting this at the Special Agent, ASAC and SAC level. Those are the troops. (Most of em GOPrs)…. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 …for Comey to have so angered ppl at the field office level is really, really bad. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 If Comey's improper comment on ongoing investigation changes polls, @FBI reputation as apolitical will never recover cause of his screwup. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 29, 2016 
While Feinstein, Leahy, Carper, and Cardin played good cop, their boss, Minority Leader Harry Reid, played bad cop, accusing Comey of breaking the Hatch Act . I wouldn’t quite go that far. But when the best-case scenario is that Comey was grossly incompetent, that isn’t good. 
Comey’s actions may not have risen to the level of criminal conduct. However, it is clear beyond any doubt that he cannot lead. Eichenwald has talked to a number of DOJ officials from both parties who feel the same way. Every current/former Dept. of Justice official I speak 2, GOP or Dem, says Comey must resign/be fired 4 election interference. All outraged. 
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) October 30, 2016 
Unless Comey has a very good explanation for this–and frankly, I doubt there is one–we need to hear only two things from him after he briefs the Senate. He needs to apologize to the American people, and he needs to resign. 
( featured image courtesy FBI Flickr feed, part of public domain) About Darrell Lucus 
Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC . Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook . Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello. Connect",FAKE
"0 407 
An unidentified supporter of Republican presidential candidate and alleged unregistered sex offender Donald Trump took to violently harassing members of the media at a Saturday night rally held in Phoenix, Arizona. 
The man, wearing a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt, screamed into the press area, “You’re going down! You’re the enemy! You’re the ones working for the devil!,” before adapting the crowd’s “USA” chant into “Jew-s-a,” all the while continuing to scream at the members of the media in the press pen. 
Candace Smith, of ABC, was one of the reporters to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on tape. She posted video of the disturbing press area encounter to Twitter, a video which is featured below. This is the man who started chanting “JEW-S-A” at the media pen. Does anyone know what those hands signs mean? pic.twitter.com/64yseZFSVZ 
— Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) October 29, 2016 
Smith included in the text accompanying her video post a question, saying in reference to seemingly intentional hand gestures on the part of the Trump supporter, “Does anyone know what those hand signs mean?” 
Smith got at least a couple noteworthy and credible responses. 
Clayton Swisher, whose Twitter bio reads that he is an “investigative reporter and author,” suggested that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures are a variation of the “88” hand sign used by white supremacists and described by the Anti-Defamation League as follows: 
‘One of the most popular white supremacist symbols is the numeric symbol 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (substituting letters for numbers, 88 means HH, i.e., “Heil Hitler”). It is thus not surprising that white supremacists occasionally attempt to display 88 as a hand sign.’ 
— Clayton Swisher (@claytonswisher) October 30, 2016 
A Twitter user identified as Marisel Morales suggested that the hand gestures were the “Scwhurhand,” which is a German salute used in court. @CandaceSmith_ It's a German salute known as Schwurhand 
— Marisel Morales (@57MCM) October 29, 2016 
A Twitter user with the username “@puppymnkey” countered, however, that the Trump supporter’s hand gestures didn’t quite match the Schwurhand, and instead pointed to a hand gesture version of the number “666” employed by conspiracy theorists, a group almost certainly the man at the Trump rally. @57MCM @CandaceSmith_ nope. That salute is with pinky and index finger touching. It could be this given he's Infowars idiot pic.twitter.com/u953UYor2K 
— Boycott Trump SCION (@puppymnkey) October 30, 2016 
Nick Corasaniti of The New York Times was another member of the press to capture the man’s disturbing behavior on film. 
His video, which runs a bit after Smith’s video concludes, is featured below. 
In this second video, the man can be heard saying that “We’re run by the Jews, okay?” Guy chants “Jew-S-A” in front of press pen pic.twitter.com/2yqgA6dD4k 
— Nick Corasaniti (@NYTnickc) October 29, 2016 
At the same rally, Politico’s Ben Schrekinger captured an image of a man he said “had been staring at the press for some time” and was “holding an object.” 
Security, Schrekinger says, was notified of the man’s behavior. Bearded man's been staring at press for some time. Television reporter said he is holding object + notified security pic.twitter.com/phDvXFGgGw 
— Ben Schreckinger (@SchreckReports) October 29, 2016 
Trump has long targeted the press in his incitement antics, as put on full display in his campaign rallies. He claims that the media has collaborated to “rig” the election against him by supposedly dishonest coverage of his campaign on their part. ",FAKE
"Email 
The Politico/Morning Consult Poll finds that 41 percent of voters think widespread voter fraud could cause the GOP nominee to lose the election. Amid Trump's increased warnings about a ""rigged election,"" 73 percent of Republicans think the election could be stolen from him, compared to 17 percent of Democrats. 
Over the past week, Trump has cast doubt on the American electoral system, saying he believes the results will be ""rigged"" at many polling places. 
""The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD,"" Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday. 
Trump has also encouraged supporters to keep an eye on voting locations to prevent fraud, which some say is a ploy to intimidate voters. 
Trump is trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the polls following sexual assault and harassment allegations from multiple women. 
The Politico/Morning Consult poll showed Clinton leading Trump by 5 points, 46 to 41 percent. 
In a RealClearPolitics polling average, Clinton leads Trump by 5.5 points, 47.7 to 42.2 percent. 
While Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and even Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, have tried to reassure the electorate about the reliability of the election system, the poll released Monday found 60 percent of Americans think it is necessary to question the accuracy of the election results. 
The poll was conducted among 1,999 registered voters Oct. 13–15 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race to succeed Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, a shocking move that throws the House into chaos.

Boehner, R-Ohio, holds a copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 7, 1992, as Sen. Don Nickles, D-Oklahoma, looks on. Both men proclaimed it was a historic day when the Michigan House ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which would require that any Congressional pay raises not go into effect until after the next election.

Boehner, R-Ohio, holds a copy of the Constitution on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 7, 1992, as Sen. Don Nickles, D-Oklahoma, looks on. Both men proclaimed it was a historic day when the Michigan House ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, which would require that any Congressional pay raises not go into effect until after the next election.

Boehner at a Capitol Hill news conference on February 6, 1995. He has had a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1990. Before that he was a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives for six years.

Boehner at a Capitol Hill news conference on February 6, 1995. He has had a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1990. Before that he was a member of the Ohio State House of Representatives for six years.

Boehner dumps out coal, which he called a Christmas gift to President Clinton, during a news conference about the federal budget on December 21, 1995. Many government services and agencies were closed at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 as a Republican-led Congress battled Clinton over spending levels.

Boehner dumps out coal, which he called a Christmas gift to President Clinton, during a news conference about the federal budget on December 21, 1995. Many government services and agencies were closed at the end of 1995 and beginning of 1996 as a Republican-led Congress battled Clinton over spending levels.

President George W. Bush signs into law the federal education bill No Child Left Behind at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, in 2002. The law offered the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better-prepared students in a competitive world. Boehner, second from right, backed the bill.

President George W. Bush signs into law the federal education bill No Child Left Behind at a high school in Hamilton, Ohio, in 2002. The law offered the promise of improved schools for the nation's poor and minority children and better-prepared students in a competitive world. Boehner, second from right, backed the bill.

Boehner, center, and fellow Republican House members sing Boehner's birthday song during a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2006. Boehner served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 to 2011.

Boehner, center, and fellow Republican House members sing Boehner's birthday song during a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 17, 2006. Boehner served as the House Minority Leader from 2007 to 2011.

Boehner, center, looks on as President Barack Obama speaks with then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the East Room of the White House on February 23, 2009. Boehner and Obama have butted heads over the years.

Boehner, center, looks on as President Barack Obama speaks with then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in the East Room of the White House on February 23, 2009. Boehner and Obama have butted heads over the years.

Boehner, an avid golfer, talks with Tiger Woods while golfing at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2009.

Boehner, an avid golfer, talks with Tiger Woods while golfing at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2009.

Boehner voices his concerns about the health care reform bill championed by Obama during a news conference in Washington on October 29, 2009.

Boehner voices his concerns about the health care reform bill championed by Obama during a news conference in Washington on October 29, 2009.

Boehner hugs his wife, Debbie, after addressing the crowd at the NRCC Election Night watch party on November 2, 2010, when Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives. Boehner met his wife in college, and they have been married since 1973.

Boehner hugs his wife, Debbie, after addressing the crowd at the NRCC Election Night watch party on November 2, 2010, when Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives. Boehner met his wife in college, and they have been married since 1973.

On January 5, 2011, Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, during the first session of the 112th Congress.

On January 5, 2011, Boehner wipes away tears as he waits to receive the gavel from outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, during the first session of the 112th Congress.

Boehner presents golfing legend Arnold Palmer with the Congressional Gold Medal at a special ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol in September 2012.

Boehner presents golfing legend Arnold Palmer with the Congressional Gold Medal at a special ceremony in the Rotunda of the Capitol in September 2012.

Boehner is sworn in as the speaker of the House after his re-election in January 2013.

Boehner is sworn in as the speaker of the House after his re-election in January 2013.

Boehner speaks to the media after a meeting with President Obama at the White House in October 2013, the second day of the federal government's recent shutdown. The White House squared off with Republican rivals in Congress over how to fund federal agencies, many of which were forced to close, leaving a fragile economy at risk.

Boehner speaks to the media after a meeting with President Obama at the White House in October 2013, the second day of the federal government's recent shutdown. The White House squared off with Republican rivals in Congress over how to fund federal agencies, many of which were forced to close, leaving a fragile economy at risk.

Reporters question Boehner as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol as the government stalemate continued in October 2013. President Obama signed a bill on October 17 that ended the 16-day shutdown and raised the debt ceiling.

Reporters question Boehner as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol as the government stalemate continued in October 2013. President Obama signed a bill on October 17 that ended the 16-day shutdown and raised the debt ceiling.

Boehner blasts conservative groups during a press conference in December 2013 after passing a compromise budget deal aimed at removing the threat of another government shutdown. Fed up with criticism from conservative advocates, Boehner said they were ""misleading their followers."" He followed up with: ""Frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility.""

Boehner blasts conservative groups during a press conference in December 2013 after passing a compromise budget deal aimed at removing the threat of another government shutdown. Fed up with criticism from conservative advocates, Boehner said they were ""misleading their followers."" He followed up with: ""Frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility.""

The image of the Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is displayed in a monitor of a camera as he talks with reporters in his office in the Capitol in November 2014 in Washington.

The image of the Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is displayed in a monitor of a camera as he talks with reporters in his office in the Capitol in November 2014 in Washington.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner await the arrival of President Barack Obama for the State of The Union address on January 20 in the House Chamber of the Capitol.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House John Boehner await the arrival of President Barack Obama for the State of The Union address on January 20 in the House Chamber of the Capitol.

U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Speaker of the House John Boehner as they depart the annual Friend's of Ireland luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 17.

U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Speaker of the House John Boehner as they depart the annual Friend's of Ireland luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 17.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani (right) expresses his country's gratitude for America's fiscal commitment and military sacrifices during an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress with Vice President Joe Biden (left) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol March 25 in Washington.

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani (right) expresses his country's gratitude for America's fiscal commitment and military sacrifices during an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress with Vice President Joe Biden (left) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol March 25 in Washington.

Pope Francis walks with Speaker Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden after delivering a speech to Congress in Washington on September 24.

Pope Francis walks with Speaker Boehner and Vice President Joe Biden after delivering a speech to Congress in Washington on September 24.

John Boehner has been the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011, making him second in line for the presidency, behind the vice president. On September 25, Boehner told colleagues he's stepping down as speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. Look back at his career in politics so far.

John Boehner has been the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2011, making him second in line for the presidency, behind the vice president. On September 25, Boehner told colleagues he's stepping down as speaker and will leave Congress at the end of October. Look back at his career in politics so far.

The move came without warning as House Republicans were in a closed-door meeting to select their nominee for speaker, with McCarthy's wife and kids in the room. Boehner subsequently postponed the vote.

""I think I shocked some of you, huh?"" McCarthy told reporters following the decision.

""If we're going to unite and be strong, we need a new face to do that,"" McCarthy said, adding that he did not want to win the race on the House floor with only enough votes to squeak by.

A source close to McCarthy told CNN the decision to drop out came down to ""numbers, pure and simple,"" adding that ""he had the votes to win the conference vote, but there just wasn't a path to 218"" -- the number of votes needed to lock down the speakership on the House floor.

The uncertain future of House GOP leadership comes less than a month before Congress must take action to raise the debt ceiling to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its debt obligations -- a critical vote conservatives have in the past sought to stall in order to pull concessions from Democrats.

Asked if that affected his decision, McCarthy acknowledged: ""Well, that wasn't helpful.""

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, described McCarthy's move as ""courageous,"" saying this is ""exciting"" for the party because there is now a ""wide open"" race for speaker.

""Because of his verbal blunder last week there were some of us that were very apprehensive and this going to create great unity among Republicans,"" Rohrabacher said.

Meanwhile, not one to miss an opportunity, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested he was partly responsible for McCarthy's failed bid, days after he suggested McCarthy wasn't tough enough for the job.

""They're giving me a lot of credit for that because I said you really need someone very, very, tough and very smart. Ya know smart goes with tough, I know tough people that aren't smart that's the worst. We need smart, we need tough, we need the whole package,"" Trump said at a campaign stop Thursday in Las Vegas.

The announcement immediately set off a round of speculation about who could win the job. Perennial candidates floated included Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy — both of whom ruled it out explicitly. Several House Republicans said Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland was considering it, and others suggested Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

""I would consider it,"" Walden said when asked by CNN about members floating his name for speaker. But he said he's not actively campaigning and noted that some are pushing the idea of an interim speaker. Several candidates have suggested a senior or retiring member should serve as speaker for the next 14 months and pledge to not run again. Rohrabacher suggested Texas Rep. Joe Barton or Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers.

Boehner said in a statement he will remain in his post until a new speaker is elected, though he has yet to announce the date for the new vote.

""I'm confident we will elect a new speaker in the coming weeks. Our conference will work together to ensure we have the strongest team possible as we continue to focus on the American people's priorities,"" he said in a written statement.

Boehner also canceled a scheduled appearance Thursday night on ""The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,"" an NBC spokeswoman said.

Republican Study Committee Chairman Bill Flores twice dodged reporters' questions about whether he would rule out his own run, but also spoke against the idea of a caretaker.

""An interim will not give us the opportunity to cast that big bold vision that we need. Interims are caretakers, caretakers tend to do safe things,"" Flores said. ""The electorate put us here in November of 2014 to take big steps, and we need to find the leader that will help us take those big steps. ... The other thing that happens with interim is you have people trying to run for the permanent position, and so you have all the distractions we've gone through the last two weeks. We don't need that.""

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who late last week jumped into the speaker's race, called an impromptu news conference less than an hour after Republicans began pouring out of the GOP conference meeting. The Utah Republican said he was also ""absolutely stunned, surprised and shocked.""

Chaffetz said he would continue to campaign for the top House post and said ""we need to find somebody that our whole body can unite behind and do what were elected to do.""

""I do believe it is time for a fresh start. That was the whole genesis for my campaign, but we need to have a lot more family discussion,"" he said. ""I think we have a lot of internal fracturing that's happening. And we need to figure out a way to unite the party.""

Westmoreland joked said he is thinking about it, joking that, ""I'd like to talk to my wife first.""

Asked why he thought he could get 218 votes he said, ""I don't know that I can, but all I can say is I'm willing to try.""

Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and someone who had been viewed as a contender for the job, immediately said he is not interested.

""While I am grateful for the encouragement I've received, I will not be a candidate. I continue to believe I can best serve the country and this conference as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee,"" Ryan said in a statement.

With conservatives again floating his name, Gowdy said he will not run for speaker. Asked if he would reconsider and join the race if his GOP colleagues urged him to get in, he replied, ""No.""

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus that opposed McCarthy's bid, said the decision creates a ""brand new race for speaker.""

""I am not the one,"" McCarthy told the stunned Republicans in the meeting, according to Huelskamp.

Huelskamp also took shots at McCarthy, saying the majority leader was campaigning for the top post until ""three hours ago"" and said the lack of ""advance notice"" was characteristic of the ""stunts"" that have defined Boehner's leadership as speaker -- including his surprise resignation the day after Pope Francis addressed a joint meeting of Congress.

And just as McCarthy got a brief heads up moments before that announcement, McCarthy also gave Boehner notice shortly before Thursday's conference meeting, a Boehner aide told CNN.

Members had no indication the move was coming. ""Totally stunned,"" Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said on CNN.

Westmoreland met with McCarthy in his office this afternoon and said he didn't expect him to endorse anyone.

""What Kevin has done is extremely selfless, and I think he's done a brave and courageous thing,"" said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas. ""He was close to being right there and he chose to unite the conference rather than waging battles. ""

Speaking on CNN, Rep. Walter Jones said the current unrest reminds him of the late 1990s. Newt Gingrich stepped down as speaker and Rep. Bob Livingston was selected to take over but quickly removed himself from consideration after it was revealed he had an extramarital affair.

Jones told CNN that he was looking out for the institution and not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.

""I think when a person has been a member of the Congress — which is a very sacred duty, quite frankly, in my opinion — and they are elevated to become a leader of a party -- could be either party, Republican or Democrat -- that those in leadership must be above reproach,"" Jones said.

""And all I was doing, not trying to single anybody out, but was to say in this makeup of office — the majority office and the speakers office -- all the members should be made to say I have nothing in my background that could be of embarrassment to the Republican conference, the House of Representatives or the American people,"" he added. ""That's all this was about.""",REAL
"The man who spoke softly but carried a big stick Bill Federer remembers military philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt Published: 1 min ago Print Theodore Roosevelt 
Theodore Roosevelt was born Oct. 27, 1858. His wife and mother died on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 1884. He wrote in his diary “The light has gone out in my life.” Depressed, he left to ranch in the Dakotas. 
Returning to New York, he entered politics and rose to assistant secretary of the Navy. He resigned during the Spanish-American War, organized the first Volunteer Cavalry, “the Rough Riders,” and captured Cuba’s San Juan Hill. Elected Vice-President under William McKinley, he became America’s youngest president in 1901. 
Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to invite an African-American, Booker T. Washington, to dine in the White House on Oct. 16, 1901. A Southern Democrat newspapers condemned him it, as printed in the Memphis Scimitar: “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a n- to dine with him at the White House. It would not be worth more than a passing notice if Theodore Roosevelt had sat down to dinner in his own home with a Pullman car porter, but Roosevelt the individual and Roosevelt the president are not to be viewed in the same light.” 
In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt warned: “The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is a dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us.” 
In 1917, the New York Bible Society had Theodore Roosevelt write a message which was inscribed in a pocket New Testament & Book of Psalms given to World War I soldiers: “The teachings of the New Testament are foreshadowed in Micah’s verse (Micah vi. 8): ‘What more does the Lord require of thee than to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’ Do justice; and therefore fight valiantly against the armies of Germany and Turkey, for these nations in this crisis stand for the reign of Moloch and Beelzebub on this earth. Love mercy; treat prisoners well, succor the wounded, treat every woman as if she was your sister, care for the little children, and be tender to the old and helpless. Walk humbly; You will do so if you study the life and teachings of the Saviour. May the God of justice and mercy have you in His keeping. – (signed) Theodore Roosevelt.” 
Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore! 
Theodore Roosevelt, in his book “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (NY: George H. Doran Co., 1916), wrote: 
Armenians … for some centuries have sedulously avoided militarism and war … are so suffering precisely and exactly because they have been pacifists whereas their neighbors, the Turks, have not been pacifists but militarists. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, p. 61, 64) 
Armenians, have been subjected to wrongs far greater than any that have been committed since the close of the Napoleonic Wars…the wars of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in Asia. Yet this government has not raised its hand to do anything to help the people who were wronged. … This course of national infamy … began when the last Administration surrendered to the peace at-any-price people, and started the negotiation of its foolish and wicked all inclusive arbitration treaties. Individuals and nations who preach the doctrine of milk-and-water invariably have in them a softness of fiber which means that they fear to antagonize those who preach and practice the doctrine of blood-and-iron. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, p. 111) 
American eye-witness of the fearful atrocities, Mr. Arthur H. Gleason (New York Tribune, Nov. 25, 1915)… Serbia is at this moment passing under the harrow of torture and mortal anguish. Now, the Armenians have been butchered under circumstances of murder and torture and rape that would have appealed to an old-time Apache Indian. … 
Even to nerves dulled and jaded by the heaped-up horrors of the past year and a half, the news of the terrible fate that has befallen the Armenians must give a fresh shock of sympathy and indignation. Let me emphatically point out that the sympathy is useless unless it is accompanied with indignation, and that the indignation is useless if it exhausts itself in words instead of taking shape in deeds. … If this people through its government had not shirked its duty … we would now be able to take effective action on behalf of Armenia. 
Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving a sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. … The principles of the peace-at-any-price men, of the professional pacifists … will be as absolutely ineffective for international righteousness. … This crowning iniquity of the wholesale slaughter of the Armenians … must be shared by the neutral powers headed by the United States for their failure to protest when this initial wrong was committed. … The devastation of Poland and Serbia has been awful beyond description and has been associated with infamies surpassing those of the dreadful religious and racial wars of the seventeenth-century Europe. … 
Weak and timid milk-and-water policy of the professional pacifists is just as responsible as the blood-and-iron policy of the ruthless and unscrupulous militarist for the terrible recrudescence of evil on a gigantic scale in the civilized world. The crowning outrage has been committed by the Turks on the Armenians. They have suffered atrocities so hideous that it is difficult to name them, atrocities such as those inflicted upon conquered nations by the followers of Attila and of Genghis Khan. 
It is dreadful to think that these things can be done and that this nation nevertheless remarks ‘neutral not only in deed but in thought,’ between right and the most hideous wrong, neutral between despairing and hunted people, people whose little children are murdered and their women raped, and the victorious and evil wrong-doers. … 
I trust that all Americans worthy of the name feel their deepest indignation and keenest sympathy aroused by the dreadful Armenian atrocities. I trust that they feel … that a peace obtained without … righting the wrongs of the Armenians would be worse than any war. … 
Wrongdoing will only be stopped by men who are brave as well as just, who put honor above safety, who are true to a lofty ideal of duty, who prepare in advance to make their strength effective, and who shrink from no hazard, not even the final hazard of war, if necessary in order to serve the great cause of righteousness. When our people take this stand, we shall also be able effectively to take a stand in international matters which shall prevent such cataclysms of wrong as have been witnesses…on an even greater scale in Armenia. (T. Roosevelt, Fear God, pp. 377-383) 
In his book “Fear God and Take Your Part,” 1916, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: 
Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. 
If the peoples of Europe in the 7th and 8th centuries, and on up to and including the 17th century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. 
A contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt was the English author G.K. Chesterton, who wrote of Western Christian civilization (“The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Volume XX,” Introduction and Notes by James V. Schall, Ignatius Press): “They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.” 
Theodore Roosevelt continued in “Fear God and Take Your Part,” 1916: “Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Jan Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.” 
Brought to you by AmericanMinute.com . 
Discover more of Bill Federer’s eye-opening books and videos in the WND Superstore! Receive Bill Federer's American Minutes in your email BONUS: By signing up for these alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name *",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama announced Thursday that a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in January accidentally killed two innocent hostages, including one American.

Multiple U.S. officials told CNN the hostages, Warren Weinstein , an American, and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto , were killed by a U.S. military drone that targeted the al Qaeda compound.

""As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,"" Obama said Thursday morning in the White House briefing room, where he apologized on behalf of the U.S. government.

The White House also disclosed Thursday that two Americans, both al Qaeda operatives, were also killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations in the same region.

Earnest said at a press briefing Thursday that Obama did not specifically approve the operations that killed the Americans, but that the strikes were within the bounds of policy guidance.

Earnest said Thursday that the families of the hostages will be financially compensated by the U.S. government. He would not disclose the details of that compensation.

American officials at the time had ""no reason to believe either hostage was present"" when the operation was launched on a compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. U.S. officials also did not know that Farouq or Gadahn were present at the targeted sites and ""neither was specifically targeted,"" Earnest said in a statement.

Earnest said during the briefing Thursday that U.S. officials believed with ""near certainty"" there were no hostages at the target site and that the strike was carried out after ""hundreds of hours of surveillance"" on the al Qaeda compound and ""near continuous surveillance in the days leading up to the operation.""

""Unfortunately that (assessment) was not correct and the operation led to this tragic, unintended consequence,"" Earnest said.

""Analysis of all available information has led the Intelligence Community to judge with high confidence that the operation accidentally killed both hostages,"" Earnest said in a statement. ""No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy.""

Obama directly apologized during his televised address to the families of the two hostages who were killed in the drone strike and said he spoke Wednesday with Weinstein's wife and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Obama did not refer to the operation as a drone strike and Earnest would not confirm that the operation was carried out by drone strike.

""As a husband and as a father, I cannot begin to imagine the anguish that the Weinstein and Lo Porto families are enduring today. I realize that there are no words that can ever equal their loss. I know that there is nothing that I can ever say or do to ease their heartache,"" Obama said Thursday.

Officials are conducting thorough independent investigation of the operation to ensure this type of incident is never repeated. Earnest said the Office of the Inspector General was conducting an investigation.

A senior administration official told CNN that the review began in January after the drone strike occurred, but said the review so far suggests the operation ""was by the book until we realized these people (the hostages) were in there.""

""The concern is not about anything other than this is a colossal tragedy,"" the official said. ""This doesn't seem to be raising any process flags ... But everyone is still going through this, and no one is resisting that.""

And Earnest told reporters the death of the hostages ""raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made"" to the protocol for launching counterterrorism operations.

""To put it more bluntly,"" Earnest said. ""We have national security professionals who diligently followed those national security protocols...and yet it still resulted in this unintended but very tragic consequence and that's why the President has directed his team to conduct a review to see if there are lessons learned, reforms that we can implement to this process.""

The death of an American hostage

Weinstein was an American USAID contractor whose work focused on helping Pakistani families, Obama said, and was captured by al Qaeda in August 2011. The other hostage, Lo Porto, was an Italian aid worker and had been held by al Qaeda since 2012.

Weinstein's wife, Elaine Weinstein, said Thursday in a statement that she and her family ""are devastated by this news,"" but said Weinstein's captors are ultimately responsible for his death.

""We were so hopeful that those in the U.S. and Pakistani governments with the power to take action and secure his release would have done everything possible to do so and there are no words to do justice to the disappointment and heartbreak we are going through,"" she said.

She added that her family does not yet ""fully understand all the facts surrounding"" her husband's death, but said the family looks forward to the results of the investigation Obama said was underway.

The U.S. never recovered Weinstein's body and did not conduct a DNA test to determine his death, several sources told CNN, adding that multiple intelligence sources confirmed their deaths based on circumstantial evidence and a CIA assessment.

Renzi, the Italian prime minister, expressed his condolences on behalf of his country to the families of Weinstein and Lo Porto.

""I express my deepest sorry for the death of an Italian, who has dedicated his life to the service of others,"" Renzi said in a statement. ""My condolences also go the family of Warren Weinstein.""

The decision to go public

The information on the killings had been classified until Obama directed officials to declassify the information and share it Thursday.

Obama said he decided to release the information because ""the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth"" and because the U.S. ""is a democracy committed to openness in good times and bad.""

Earnest emphasized that the counterterrorism operation that killed the hostages was ""lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies"" in a statement earlier Thursday and Obama said an ""initial assessment indicates that this operation was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region.""

But Obama still stood by U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the region, which have been criticized for their heavy reliance on drone strikes and resulting civilian casualties.

""Since 9/11, our counterterrorism efforts have prevented terrorist attacks and saved innocent lives, both here in America and around the world. And that determination to protect innocent life only makes the loss of these two men especially painful for all of us,"" Obama said Thursday.

The White House said the strike occurred in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, a haven for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but did not specify in which country the strike occurred.

Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday declined to comment on the news of the strikes.

Elaine Weinstein, who resides in Maryland, specifically thanked their senators, Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, and congressman, Rep. John Delaney, for ""their relentless efforts to free my husband.""

Cardin, Mikulski Delaney expressed their sorrow at Weinstein's death in statements Thursday morning and recalled their efforts to try and secure their constituent's release.

""I have tracked Warren Weinstein's status since he was first taken hostage in 2011. The United States government, including members of my staff, worked tirelessly to bring him home safely,"" said Cardin, who recently became the top Democrat on the foreign relations committee.

He added that he received a ""preliminary briefing"" from CIA Director John Brennan and said he requested ""a full account of the events that led to"" the hostages' deaths.

Delaney called Weinstein's killing ""a sobering national security and government failure"" and said he was ""saddened, disappointed and outraged that our government was not able to bring Warren home.""

""The loss of Warren is devastating, a tragic event that we must never forget,"" Delaney said. ""As Warren's representative, I feel like his country failed him in his greatest time of need. I'm determined to ensure that Warren's story is not forgotten, that we get to the bottom of why Warren wasn't found and how he was killed.""

He also called for a broader effort to reassess the U.S. government's policies and procedures for securing the release of American hostages held abroad and called for the need for a top U.S. official focused specifically on the location and release of American hostages — ""someone who wakes up every morning"" focused on freeing hostages.

""A much broader analysis needs to be launched and we're going to push it really hard to make sure that we're really pursuing this really hard as a top priority for the united states of America,"" he said on CNN.

Mikulski in a statement said she has ""many questions about how this tragedy occurred"" and said she was ""truly heartbroken"" to learn the news of Weinstein's death.

""Dr. Weinstein dedicated his life to improving the conditions of others all around the world and his legacy is truly immeasurable. His humanitarian service, and that of Mr. Lo Porto, stands in stark and shining contrast to the depravity of their captors,"" Mikulski said.

House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also shared their condolences Thursday and lauded Obama's decision to launch an independent investigation into the drone strike that killed the hostages.

""As President Obama indicated, this is not a time for excuses,"" Boehner said at a news conference. ""We need all the facts for the families, and so that we can make sure that nothing like this ever happens again in our efforts to keep Americans safe.""

Pelosi said she was ""so saddened by the deaths of the two hostages"" and called Obama's remarks on the deaths ""very moving.""

""He took full responsibility as commander in chief; apologized to the family for the tragedy. And I look forward to what he called for, the declassification of all the information related to the strike, so that the families will know the facts and so will the public,"" Pelosi said Thursday morning.

Lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees said they would be investigating the operation that killed the two hostages.

Vice chairwoman of the Senate committee Dianne Feinstein said the committee ""has already been reviewing the specific January operation that led to these deaths"" and said she will now review that operation ""in greater detail.""

And Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House committee, said his committee would look into the operation.

""In the weeks ahead, we will be examining this operation to make sure that the high standards that have been set were, in fact, met, and whether there are any other steps that can be taken to further reduce the risk of loss of innocent life,"" Schiff said in a statement.",REAL
"Iran is encouraging its terror allies to pursue the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s children by publishing personal information about them, including photographs of the kids lined up in crosshairs, and declaring, “We must await the hunt of Hezbollah.”

The publication of the personal information and biographies of Netanyahu’s children follows an Israeli airstrike last week that killed several key Hezbollah leaders and an Iranian commander affiliated with the country’s hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iranian military leaders affiliated with the IRGC threatened in recent days harsh retaliation for the strike and promised to amp up support for Hezbollah as well as Palestinian terrorist organizations.

The information was originally published in Farsi by an Iranian website affiliated with the IRGC and quickly republished by Iran’s state-controlled Fars News Agency.

In addition to biographical details and pictures of Netanyahu’s children, the Iranians provided details about the families of former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon.

Click for more from the Washington Free Beacon.",REAL
"Just weeks before he's expected to launch a presidential campaign, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) teamed up on Wednesday with GOP colleague Mike Lee (R-Utah) to unveil a comprehensive set of proposals to overhaul the tax code.

""Our hope here isn't to pick winners and losers. Our hope here is to trigger economic growth,"" Rubio told reporters. He added that he believes ""the vast majority of Americans"" would see tax cuts if the plan was implemented.

Under the Lee-Rubio plan, the seven current tax brackets would be condensed to just two -- 15 percent for people earning up to $75,000 or married couples earning up to $150,000, and 35 percent for higher-income earners. Corporations would pay a top tax rate of 25 percent, a drop from 35 percent. The plan also would eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends, create a new $2,500 child tax credit, and eliminate most deductions, except for mortgage interest and charitable giving.

Rubio said the plan would serve as his economic and tax blueprint should be announce plans to run for president, as expected, or if he opts instead to run for reelection in 2016. But in his remarks he again declined to signal which race he's leaning toward for 2016. He defended his decision to unveil a comprehensive, specific plan that might open him up to attacks by would-be GOP opponents or Democrats.

""I've tried to govern myself in my entire time in public service by being specific about ideas,"" he said. He reminded reporters about his 100-point reform plan when he was speaker of the Florida House.

""I think people should expect more of their candidates -- no matter what they're running for,"" he added. ""And if in fact we've reached a point in our republic where being detailed about what you would do is a hindrance to winning an election, we're in bad shape, because what are you supposed to then vote on?""

Rubio is expected to formally launch a presidential bid next month and is planning to hold more fundraisers next week as he ramps up his operations, according to aides familiar with his planning. On Monday night, the senator dined in Washington with Sheldon Adelson, the casino executive who spent nearly $100 million helping GOP candidates during the 2012 presidential cycle.

Lee, a first-term senator who is also up for reelection in 2016, didn't answer a question about whether his appearance with Rubio signaled he's supporting his Florida colleague for president.

But Rubio quickly jumped in and joked: ""I hope so.""",REAL
"St. Louis County Police announced on Sunday that they had made an arrest related to the two officers who were shot during a protest on Thursday in Ferguson, Missouri.

St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that authorities had brought charges, including assault in the first degree, against 20-year-old Jeffrey Williams. Williams is from the St. Louis area and had been on probation for receiving stolen property.

Williams had been involved in protests on the evening that the shooting occurred and had ""acknowledged"" firing shots, according to McCulloch. McCulloch said that Williams, who is African-American, may have been firing at someone other than the police.

""We don't know him,"" said Tony Rice, the founder of Ground Level Support, who has been protesting since August

After naming three young male protesters who were regularly at the demonstrations, Rice told HuffPost, ""I don't think there is a male 20-years-old that regularly protest outside of them.""

""I think I can speak for the protester community in saying we don't know him,"" said Rice.

After the press conference, press swarmed Alicia Street when she helped source the first picture of Williams. Street, 29, has been actively involved in protest since August as well and says she was unfamiliar with Williams as well.

""I have never seen him at a protest. I cannot recall that I even seen him that night. We know a lot of people out there, we really do. I even showed pictures to other regular protesters and they said they didn't know him,"" Street told HuffPost.

The shooting came during protests after Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson announced that he would resign. One of the officers was shot in the face and the other was shot in the shoulder, but both survived the attack.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement on Sunday that the arrest was a testament to good collaboration between federal and local authorities.

“This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated. The swiftness of this action is a credit to the significant cooperation between federal authorities and the St. Louis County Police Department,"" Holder said. ""The ATF’s ballistic imaging technology has played a critical role in the ongoing investigation. I commend both the ATF and St. Louis police for their tremendous work in identifying this suspect.""

President Barack Obama condemned the shooting on Thursday, posting on Twitter that ""violence against police is unacceptable."" Holder also called the shooter a ""damn punk"" last week.

Read the full complaint against Williams below:",REAL
"A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. By Jim Willie
The Western central bank franchise system is totally broken, totally insolvent, and totally corrupt. It invites the Gold Standard return. The entire financial system is built upon a debt-based monetary system. The debt saturation process has run its full course. The central bank heads have been covering the sovereign debt for the last five years, having rendered their balance sheets as ruined.
Debt is at obscene levels, like $19.7 trillion for the USGovt. No debt limits are in place anymore, a signal that most likely it has already defaulted. A hidden game is underway, with control lost to the creditors, even as they attempt to salvage their debt holdings. The major central banks continue to manage badly the great game, where money is fake phony and a farce.
A titanic battle is underway, where the Eastern nations are discarding their USTreasury Bonds, and doing so in tremendous volume while they set up the many platforms and pieces to the Gold Standard. 
The US Federal Reserve monetary policy of hyper-inflation has failed to revive the USEconomy, failed to legitimize the debt securities, failed to halt the financial corruption, and failed to stem capital destruction. The official monetary policy has only succeeded in preventing the failures of almost all big Western banks.
They are all insolvent, mostly supported by narco money laundering in the hundreds of $billions. The Eastern super-powers are leading a campaign to put aside the US$-based financial system, isolate it to the sidelines, while arranging a new system. The Gold-based system will be complete with its currency, sovereign debt securities, transfer systems, global offices, and debt rating agencies, maybe even debit cards. The East strives to install the Gold Standard as the remedy to the ongoing global financial crisis. The West has made exactly no movement toward solution, remedy, or enforcement against bond.
Four graphs display the broken unfixable bizarre situation: Graph 1 – BALANCE SHEET DESTRUCTION Central bank balance sheets could take decades to normalize, so the conventional thinking goes. Their balance sheets will never return to normal. Most assets of toxic paper are far more worthless than junk bonds. A normalization process would require at least 50 years of more financial repression and deep corruption.
A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. The risk of war rises. 

The big Western banks find themselves in an impossible Catch-22 situation. The markets are addicted to QE and its destructive money hyper inflation. Federal Reserve policymakers have acknowledged that their $4 trillion balance sheet will not shrink any time soon. Also, Bank of England officials talk of crisis fighting tools as semi-permanent fixtures. In Asia, the Bank of Japan has developed a new monetary policy framework that features admitted infinite QE. The financial crisis the balance sheet volume to GDP ratios for the Bank of England and USFed have peaked at around 25%, the highest level ever recorded. Uncharted territory has been entered.
The USFed balance sheet ratio to GDP previously reached 23% in 1940 during World War II. The Bank of England ratio approached 20% in the 1730s during the South Sea Bubble scheme, 1816/17 during the Great Re-coinage, the 1830s/1840s following other wars, and in the immediate aftermath of WW2. In every scenario above, the central banks managed to unwind their balance sheets. But then the great unwinding took decades, up to 60 years in some cases. This time is different. No economic growth is anywhere remotely on the current horizon, nothing sufficient to unwind the tremendous debt burden.
This is where the conventional analyst turns stupid, even locked in fantasy. They assume the GDP growth has been around 3% in recent years, when it has been closer to minus 4% or minus 5% each year since 2008 in a fierce recession with strong feedback loops. We are not on the verge of economic expansion, which can relieve the balance sheet toxicity, but rather a financial reform to sweep away the USDollar and to render its USTreasury Bonds as near worthless paper. The next chapter will be centered upon the Gold Standard, first in trade payment, next in bank reserves, finally in currencies. 
The installation of the Gold Standard will render almost all US$-based debt securities as toxic paper, much like African Govt Bonds. QE might have bought time for the big US banks, but it guaranteed the kill of the USEconomy as host, and the default of the USGovt debt. No semblance of return to normalcy can come. This is why war is being vigorously pursued, to retain power.
Graph 2 – CONCENTRATION OF CENTRAL BANK ASSETS Big Central Bank assets have jumped the fastest in five years to $21 trillion. The toxic sovereign bond bubble is the largest bubble in history. Four major central banks control 75% of all central bank assets. Any currency reform must come from a major nation and its lead. The majority of the world’s central bank assets are controlled by four sites: China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. The next six each account for an average of 2.5%, namely the central banks of Brazil, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia. The major nations control toxic vats of deeply impaired debt paper which nobody wants.

The big four central banks are often called the major central banks. They are from the so-called industrialized nations, when in fact they are from former industrial states with a strong leaning toward New Third World status. They control the global financial structure and rig markets in order to keep it stable. If any changes are to come to the USDollar and the King Dollar reign of terror, the reform will be done by a major central banks with support from an alliance of other nations. Do not expect reform. Instead expect a revolution from the East, as it installs the Gold Standard in certain key spots. The best one can expect is a dual financial universe, where the USDollar is gradually phased out.
Graph 3 – Dumping of USTreasury Bonds in Worldwide Trend A truly massive international dumping of USDollars has entered a second powerful phase. The Saudis and China recently dumped huge blocks of USTreasury Bonds. Foreign central banks liquidated a record $346 billion in USGovt debt securities in the last 12 months, the trend having accelerated. Numerous factors contribute to the dumping, which manifests the fading global confidence in the USDollar. Amplified Quantitative Easing (QE) volume soaks up the large volumes dumped on the bond market, further eroding the faith in fiat currency.
One month ago, a troublesome sharp decline was seen in the USTreasurys held in custody, which is the formal way to describe central bank holdings kept at the USFed computer banks. The amount fell by over $27.5 billion in a single week, the biggest weekly drop since January 2015. One month later the trend continues with powerful force, enough to capture global attention. The custody volume fell sharply again by another $22.3 billion in the past week, pushing the total amount to $2.805 trillion, another fresh post-2012 low. 
The foreign central banks have continued their relentless liquidation of US debt securities held in the USFed’s official custody account. History is being made, as global sentiment and conditions are changing in fierce mode. The King Dollar throne is having its legs removed, kicked out, and cut off. Most financial analysts refuse to put the factors in such stark terms, but the Jackass does so naturally and without hesitation. Three dynamics can be identified as the principal proximal factors, detailed in the Hat Trick Letter for the October edition in the reports.

A month ago was observed a massive $343 billion in USTreasury sales by foreign central banks in the period July 1st 2015 to July 1st 2016, something truly unprecedented in size. Fast forward to the latest monthly update, which was posted as July data. All have gone worse. The running latest 12 months (LTM) in foreign central bank sales shot up to a new all time high $346.4 billion. Thus over one third of a $trillion in USTreasurys were sold in the past 12 months. Recall that in three months late in 2015, the Chinese sold $250 billion in USTBonds, which forced the IMF inclusion of the RMB into their formal basket of currencies. The dumping has been global, massive, and without precedent. China is the major seller, while the Saudis are the newest sellers. The broken Outhouse of Saud requires the funds to offset the collapse of the Petro-Dollar, and to backstop the country’s soaring budget deficit made worse by the obscene Yemen War.
The official story is told that private investors, both foreign and domestic, are soaking up hundreds of $billions in central bank holdings being sold on the bond market. The other dubious story is that bond yields are rising slightly, given the newfound concerns the USFed, the Bank of Japan, and maybe even the EuroCB will soon taper their purchases.
The bigger factor (surely not private investors) is the USFed ramping up hidden QE volume in a huge way, buying the massive bond dumpings, all kept secret and quiet so as not to disturb the pristine AAA rating of the USTBond toxic paper. Expect continued debt monetization of theUSGovt deficit, of which perhaps 75% is supported by the African style printing press. The USEconomy cannot grow its way out of the debt. They will monetize it until it default on the global stage.
The QE process cannot take in all the dumped USTBonds without psychological damage. The USDollar confidence is eroding globally. Faith in the USDollar is eroding very quickly. The nation is moving along in the US isolation process, identified as rogue nation on the financial front, terrorism front, laced vaccine front, and war front. Just the Jackass opinion.
Graph 4 – Evidence of USTBond Bubble (versus Diamonds) The USTreasury Bond bubble is the second biggest asset bubble is history, behind the residential real estate bubble in the last decade. The USTBonds are a massive sanctioned Ponzi Scheme, signifying the default of the USGovt debt and failure of its sovereign bond. The Elite controllers talk of a flight to safe haven, when in reality it is a leap into a black hole and toxic vat. Motive is to keep USGovt borrowing costs to minimal levels while the debt soars toward the $20 trillion mark. The gigantic black hole attracts legitimate capital from around the world. All will be subject to heavy losses. The USTreasury Bond asset bubble is supported by three major forces: the USFed monetary hyper inflation , the Interest Rate Swap derivative contract , the bond carry trade managed by Wall Street banks . More details are provided in the Hat Trick Letter for October.

The relation between top tier assets should remain stable, such as diamonds, special gemstones, classic art works & sculptures, special jewelry items, icon properties, and more. However, the bond price for USGovt debt has gone haywire, rising far beyond anything reasonable. Check out an unusual chart above, for the bond value versus the standard benchmark diamond price. This is a clear visible nasty bond bubble, which will burst just like the US housing market bubble that nobody in the mainstream moronic arenas expected. The Jackass correctly forecasted the housing market bust one year before it occurred. No longer are diamonds a girl’s best friend. It is USTBonds.
GOLD TRADE NOTE INTRODUCTION The Gold Trade Notes for trade payment might be coming into view, initially with commodity transfers, later swap contracts, and finally gold-backed short-term notes which supplant the USTBill. One might think of used newspapers on the floor, or of the dodo bird.
The trade might be made in exchange for either goods delivered or USTBills held. Detect a growing connection to finished goods being withheld from delivery. This is probably another sign of refusal of USTBills as payment.
As footnote, be sure to know that the preliminary steps to the Global Currency RESET will not be laid out in full disclosure for public benefit. It represents a tremendous investment opportunity for the elite, which they never tend to share. 
In fact, the RESET might be well along before it is even recognized. End to EuroRaj main thoughts and open analysis, for which much gratitude is given. The Jackass believes a few critical elements to the RESET are in place. More details on DIP Financing feature is included in the September Hat Trick Letter report.
***A major hitch obstacle can be inferred. Payment in USD terms might be the clot in the artery. Demands might be for hard asset swaps, and the contract security from large scale commitment of commodities, facilities, and property. The swap trade is coming into view, a presage of the Gold Trade Note.*** 
The Jackass concludes the USD rejection could be lifting its head within a gathering storm, without clear identification. It is indeed difficult to identify all the elements when hidden deals at the highest level are underway, and friction is omnipresent. The Bobcat Corp rejection of USTBills at Pacific ports is a clear story. For every one story recounted, there are 10 to 20 not yet heard.
My firm belief is that in Asian banking systems, they do not want the USTBills anymore. The banks in Asia are trying to dump them in heavy volume, not accumulate more worthless toilet paper. Finally the sharp blowback from printing QE money has hit. The USFed monetary policy saves the big insolvent banks, but kills capital. The result has finally seen manifested in USD global rejection, or at least hints toward the same. Asian banks still hold vast sums of USTBonds. They are not going to announce the rejection, but instead fight behind the walls for better terms of payment, even as they pursue the Gold Trade Note for payment at ports. It is coming, like daybreak follows the long night.
NEW SCHEISS DOLLAR & GOLD TRADE STANDARD In time, expect an eventual refusal by Eastern producing nations to accept USTreasury Bills in payment for trade. The IMF reversal decision assures this USTBill blockade in time, and might accelerate the timetable. The United States Govt cannot continue on five glaring fronts of gross negligence and major violations. These violations have prompted the BRICS & Alliance nations to hasten their development of diverse non-USD platforms toward the goal of displacing the USDollar while at the same time take steps toward the return of the Gold Standard.
The New Scheiss Dollar will arrive in order to assure continued import supply to the USEconomy. It will be given a 30% devaluation out of the gate, then many more devaluations of similar variety. The New Dollar will fail all foreign and Eastern scrutiny. The USGovt will be forced to react to USTBill rejection at the ports. 
The US must accommodate with the New Scheiss Dollar in order to assure import supply, and to alleviate the many stalemates to come. The United States finds itself on the slippery slope that leads to the Third World, a Jackass forecast that has been presented since Lehman fell (better described as killed by JPM and GSax).
The only apparent alternative is for the United States Govt to lease a large amount of gold bullion (like 10,000 tons) from China in order to properly launch a gold-backed currency. Doing so would open the gates for a generation of commercial colonization, but actual progress in returning capitalism to the United States. The cost would be supply shortages to the USEconomy, a result of enormous export increases to China.
The colonization has already begun, with secret deals galore. It is very unclear what deals are being struck in order to arrange for the USGovt to have a proper gold reserve hoard, for backing a new legitimate USDollar. Meetings at very high level are in progress, with little if any popular representation, only elite members present. Failure to produce a legitimate bonafide gold-backed currency would mean the United States must proceed with the New Scheiss Dollar, an illegitimate fake phony farce of a currency. 
It would be subjected to a series of devaluations. The result would be heavy powerful painful price inflation from the import front. The effect would be to reverse a generation of exported inflation by the United States. The entire USEconomy would go into a downward spiral with higher prices, supply shortages, and social disorder. However, the rising prices would come from the currency crisis, and not so much from the hyper monetary inflation. That flood of $trillions has been effectively firewalled off. 
Source: Jim Willie — Golden Jackass 
Via: Silver Doctors 
",FAKE
"The election in 232 photos, 43 numbers and 131 quotes, from the two candidates at the center of it all.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) It might be the best job in town -- at the worst possible time.

President Barack Obama is suddenly searching for a new Supreme Court justice after the death of conservative icon Antonin Scalia left a rare vacancy at the pinnacle of U.S. jurisprudence.

Normally, an open spot on the exalted bench -- complete with a lifetime tenure and a boatload of benefits -- would have those who labor in the law's dusty obscurity salivating at the chance to crown their careers in the black robes of the nation's highest court. And candidates with political inclinations have extra incentive to covet this particular seat, as it comes with a chance to tilt the ideological balance of the court and shape the nation's future for decades.

Scalia speaks at the University of Minnesota as part of the law school's Stein Lecture series on October 20, 2015, in Minneapolis.

Scalia speaks at the University of Minnesota as part of the law school's Stein Lecture series on October 20, 2015, in Minneapolis.

U.S. President Barack Obama greets Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts at Obama's inauguration for his second term of office.

U.S. President Barack Obama greets Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts at Obama's inauguration for his second term of office.

Scalia conducts a naturalization ceremony for 16 new U.S. citizens during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's historic Gettysburg Address on November 19, 2013, at Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Scalia conducts a naturalization ceremony for 16 new U.S. citizens during the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's historic Gettysburg Address on November 19, 2013, at Gettysburg National Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Scalia and his wife, Maureen, arrive for a state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House on March 14, 2012, in Washington.

Scalia and his wife, Maureen, arrive for a state dinner in honor of British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House on March 14, 2012, in Washington.

Scalia testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 5, 2011. The justice testified on ""Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States.""

Scalia testifies during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 5, 2011. The justice testified on ""Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States.""

Scalia listens as U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at the the Federalist Society's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner at Union Station in Washington, on November 15, 2007.

Scalia listens as U.S. President George W. Bush speaks at the the Federalist Society's 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner at Union Station in Washington, on November 15, 2007.

Heather Myklegard, Scalia, Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. President George W. Bush walk through the Rose Garden before Kempthorne is sworn in as the new interior secretary at White House on June 7, 2006, in Washington.

Heather Myklegard, Scalia, Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. President George W. Bush walk through the Rose Garden before Kempthorne is sworn in as the new interior secretary at White House on June 7, 2006, in Washington.

Scalia calls on people during a question-and-answer period at the American Enterprise Institute on February 21, 2006, in Washington. Scalia delivered the keynote address about foreign law and the debate about how it is used in American Law during the seminar called ""Outsourcing Of American Law.""

Scalia calls on people during a question-and-answer period at the American Enterprise Institute on February 21, 2006, in Washington. Scalia delivered the keynote address about foreign law and the debate about how it is used in American Law during the seminar called ""Outsourcing Of American Law.""

Surrounded by security, Scalia walks in the annual Columbus Day Parade on October 10, 2005, in New York City.

Surrounded by security, Scalia walks in the annual Columbus Day Parade on October 10, 2005, in New York City.

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice David Souter, Justice William Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice John Paul Stevens file out of the U.S. Supreme Court Building to attend funeral services for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 7, 2005, in Washington.

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice David Souter, Justice William Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice John Paul Stevens file out of the U.S. Supreme Court Building to attend funeral services for Chief Justice William Rehnquist on September 7, 2005, in Washington.

The casket of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist lies in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court as Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor, left, walk past on September 6, 2005, in Washington.

The casket of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist lies in the Great Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court as Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor, left, walk past on September 6, 2005, in Washington.

Scalia shakes hands with U.S. Marines Corps Maj. Gen. Robert C. Dickerson, commanding general, upon Scalia's arrival at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for an official visit on March 12, 2004.

Scalia shakes hands with U.S. Marines Corps Maj. Gen. Robert C. Dickerson, commanding general, upon Scalia's arrival at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for an official visit on March 12, 2004.

Scalia speaks to a crowd gathered at the Religious Freedom Monument in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to celebrate Religious Freedom Day on January 12, 2003. Scalia complained that courts have gone overboard in keeping God out of government.

Scalia speaks to a crowd gathered at the Religious Freedom Monument in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to celebrate Religious Freedom Day on January 12, 2003. Scalia complained that courts have gone overboard in keeping God out of government.

U.S. Supreme Court justices pay their respects in front of the casket of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger during a prayer ceremony in the Great Hall at the Supreme Court Building in Washington on June 28, 1995.

U.S. Supreme Court justices pay their respects in front of the casket of former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger during a prayer ceremony in the Great Hall at the Supreme Court Building in Washington on June 28, 1995.

Retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, right, administers the oath to Scalia, as Scalia's wife, Maureen, holds the Bible on September 26, 1986. Scalia was the 103rd person to sit on the court.

Retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, right, administers the oath to Scalia, as Scalia's wife, Maureen, holds the Bible on September 26, 1986. Scalia was the 103rd person to sit on the court.

Scalia, seen in a 1986 photo, was the first justice of Italian-American heritage and passed through confirmation with a unanimous vote.

Scalia, seen in a 1986 photo, was the first justice of Italian-American heritage and passed through confirmation with a unanimous vote.

Scalia appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in Washington on August 6, 1986.

Scalia appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings in Washington on August 6, 1986.

Scalia works in his office in Washington on July 28, 1986. Scalia, who was appointed in 1986, was the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court.

Scalia works in his office in Washington on July 28, 1986. Scalia, who was appointed in 1986, was the longest-serving justice on the Supreme Court.

President Ronald Reagan announces the nomination of Scalia to the Supreme Court on June 17, 1986, as a result of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's retirement.

President Ronald Reagan announces the nomination of Scalia to the Supreme Court on June 17, 1986, as a result of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's retirement.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday, February 13, was one of the most influential conservative justices in history. He was 79.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead on Saturday, February 13, was one of the most influential conservative justices in history. He was 79.

But this time, things are different.

Whoever accepts Obama's nomination will walk into a wall of political fire. A pitched battle is already raging over Scalia's seat, embroiling the White House, Congress and presidential candidates eager to whip up grass-roots activists.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz insisted Monday that Obama will nominate a successor to Scalia.

But for all their troubles, whoever is chosen could very well not end up with the job.

Senate Republicans are warning that they may not even grant Obama's nominee a hearing, saying it should be up to the next president to fill the vacancy.

A nominee could be left hanging in limbo for a year with no guarantee that, even if a Democrat wins in November, they'll end up on the court. Of course, if a Republican wins the White House, they can forget it.

At worst, if the GOP relents and holds confirmation hearings, the nominee could emerge so damaged by the political tumult that their reputation could be shredded along with their hopes of one day reaching the Supreme Court.

For Obama's next nominee, the ordeal will be many times worse. And there doesn't seem any obvious way for Obama to shield his pick.

""It is possible that he could bend this like Beckham and get it through,"" Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University told CNN's Jim Scuitto. ""But I wouldn't bet on it it. The fact is, you are replacing a conservative icon. Any moderate nominee is going to move this needle to the left on the court and it is going to be a battle royale.""

The sudden opening on the court is emerging as a top issue in an already vicious White House campaign, and threatens to expose the eventual nominee to the full fury of the conservative political, legal and media machine.

So it would be no wonder if a candidate might choose to take a pass on the partisan anger that surrounded the likes of Clarence Thomas, who did make it to the court. Ronald Reagan's nominee, Robert Bork, and Harriet Miers, George W. Bush's White House counsel and Supreme Court pick, did not make it through the acrimonious process.

It would be difficult to see, for instance, why one often-mentioned potential presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General who is running for a Senate seat, would instead opt for a Supreme Court spot that might be a mirage.

There might also be a case for the President to take on a pass on someone like Sri Srinivasan, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who many see as a Supreme Court justice in waiting.

Srinivasan, who has historic potential as the first Indian-American on the high court, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate for his current post. But his supporters might see a nomination now as a waste, given the risk that he could be burned by a bitter confirmation process and left too stigmatized to be viable in future.

So what type of nominee might be willing to take on such a poisoned chalice?

For sure, whoever is picked would have to be a rare glutton for punishment. But some legal experts believe the White House will still have no trouble drawing up a list.

""Number One -- most judges, if they are not sitting on the Supreme Court, toil in relative anonymity,"" said Professor David Ryden of Hope College, Michigan, whose research focuses on the how the Supreme Court influences the electoral process. ""They are human beings. There is the lure of the limelight and there is the honor of being named.""

Daniel Franklin, a Georgia State University political science professor and author of the book ""Pitiful Giants: Presidents In Their Final Term,"" said that for lawyers, the Supreme Court is the equivalent of the big leagues. That could mean that even a nomination as challenged as this one is special.

""If you say, you have a remote chance of playing center fielder for the Dodgers, I would take it,"" he said. ""It is still a pretty big deal.""

There are some potential ways out of the imbroglio for Obama that involve finding an unorthodox candidate who might be flattered by a nomination.

Since the effort to replace Scalia comes in the twilight of his presidency, Obama has much less leverage than when he picked Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in his first term.

That means he may have no choice but to settle on someone less palatable to liberals but who might increase his minimal chances of winning a confirmation.

""The president is on the ideological spectrum at one point and the Senate is on the ideological spectrum on another,"" said Franklin. ""Even in a normal circumstance, the President has to meet the Senate somewhere in the middle with his preference while getting someone as close to his preference as possible.""

Franklin added: ""Now, he has to move that point closer and closer to the Senate's point of preference.""

If Obama's priority is to get a justice confirmed at all costs, he could call Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's bluff and name a moderate, establishment Republican who GOP senators would feel forced to support -- perhaps someone like GOP Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah or Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi as the nominee, Franklin said.

But that approach -- effectively installing a pro-life nominee with big abortion cases looming -- would enrage Obama's liberal backers.

Still, it would move the court incrementally left on some issues from where it stood when Scalia was alive. And since Hatch and Cochran are 81 and 78 respectively, they would unlikely be a choice that would haunt the President for decades.

Such a scenario, however, seems remote given the political ire of the times. Obama seems more likely to take a more nakedly political route.

He could pick someone he knows is unlikely to be confirmed, but who would be willing to do a service for their party and become a cause celebre throughout election season.

A politician already locked in the heat of partisan battle might work in this case -- that's why the names of Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey have been floated. Neither have re-election races in 2016 and both are rumored to have presidential ambitions that might benefit from a spell in the national partisan spotlight.

And if for some reason their colleagues found it impossible to block them in the Senate's clubby atmosphere, there are worst places to end up than on the Supreme Court.

Another approach would be to choose a candidate who is a woman or a minority -- perhaps someone from the Hispanic community -- who could be crucial in driving up Democratic turnout in November.

Stalwart Republican opposition to such a nominee would enable Democrats to paint the GOP as prejudiced and motivated by considerations other than legal reservations -- and perhaps might embarrass some swing-state Senate Republicans up for re-election.

And even some judges already on lower courts might be willing to serve as a political placeholders for such a strategy, said Ryden of Hope College.

""Judges have their own political preferences and agendas and there are many on the federal court bench ... who would fit that label and be happy to collaborate on a strategy with the White House -- even if they weren't the ones who would immediately benefit from it,"" he said.",REAL
"Al-Qaeda's Assault on Aleppo Continues Despite Lack of Progress 
Rebels are doing a lot of dying but not taking much ground so far Print Originally appeared at The Moon of Alabama 
For four days now al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra aka Fatah al-Sham) and assorted other ""rebel"" groups have tried to attack Aleppo from the west to break the siege on al-Qaeda associated groups in east-Aleppo. The New York Times in now openly admitting that CIA supported groups are acting under al-Qaeda's operational command. The piece though, which belonged on page one, was in the back of the paper. There is no public outcry over this disturbing fact. 
The attack on west-Aleppo had been talked about for over two weeks and the defenders are well prepared. waleppoattack.jpg 

As can be seen on the map above the areas al-Qaeda and its allies managed to capture so far are only small rural outskirts. Every attempt to attack actual city estate under roof was repelled by the defenders. Small infiltrations like shown in the map were immediately cleaned up. The marked area is back in the hands of the Syrian army. It is estimated that the several thousand attackers have so far lost more than 500 men. A 1,000 more are likely injured. Every attack has to be carried over mostly open land and is received by heavy artillery fire. Air attacks ravage their supply and preparation ares. 
The attackers launched over 20 suicide-vehicle bombs so far but only a few reached their targets and their damage was limited. Yesterday one suicide vehicle bomb, ready to be launched for a new attack, was hit by a missile from a Syrian helicopter and exploded at its preparation and launching position. Over 60 ""rebels"" were killed by it and their attack had to be call off. 
The good news is that the defense is holding. The bad news is that the al-Qaeda ""rebels"" received huge amounts of artillery missiles and launchers from their ""western"" and Gulf sponsors. Several hundred have been launched at the densely populated areas of west-Aleppo. More than a 100 civilians have been killed by them and several hundred civilians were wounded. Some of the missiles contained gas and people had to be taken to hospital with extreme breathing difficulties. The UN envoy condemned these attacks as ""possible war crimes"". 
The whole attack operation was launched under the direct supervision of al-Qaeda in Syria leader Abu Muhammad al-Golani. He was shown in pictures at the ""rebel"" headquarter of the attack discussing further operations. 
Despite any progress on their part the al-Qaeda forces seem far from giving up. More attacks to break the siege are expected. We can be sure that some of their surprises are still in store. But the defenders are ready and the Syrian army is said to prepare for a large counter operation which may include a serious effort to liberate east-Aleppo of the al-Qaeda occupation. 
Other fronts in Syria are relatively quiet. The Turks have been told by Russia to stop all air attacks within Syria. The message has been received. The Turkish plan to occupy Al Bab east of Aleppo is unlikely to happen as it would be out of range of the Turkey based artillery and have no air support. The U.S. would like to go to Raqqa but has no proxy ground force to do that. Some Obama officials are now arguing for more U.S. boots on the ground in Syria. Will Obama agree to that mission creep?",FAKE
"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] 43-Year-Old Can’t Get Over The Amount Of Kids In Local Night Club October 26, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , LIFESTYLE Share 0 Add Comment 
A COUNTY Waterford man is currently undergoing psychiatric treatment today after he was unable to get over the amount of ‘kids’ in a local night club last night. 
Michael Roache, 43, is said to be suffering from a rare form of temporary psychosis, which forces him to repeat himself continually for its duration. 
“It started after he arrived home last night,” wife Deirdre Roache recalls, “I thought nothing of it until this morning, when I found him staring at the ceiling in bed, murmuring the same thing over and over again: ‘I can’t get over the amount of kids in here'”. 
Worried, the mother of children immediately called her local care doctor, who in turn referred him to a psychiatric unit for further testing. 
It is understood the self-employed man was overwhelmed when he entered the popular nightclub in the city centre, triggering something in his head and sending him into a loop. 
“He kept saying over and over again that he couldn’t get over the amount of kids in the place,” friend Dermot Ryan told WWN, who is also way too old for night clubs, “We just went in for a late drink because we were working late. It’ll be the last time I go into that fucking place. I felt so old”. 
Mr. Roache is currently being treated for verbal looping at the psychiatric unit, and doctors have suggested temporarily moving him to an old folks home in a bid to ‘snap him out of it’. 
“This kind of thing is common in the over 35’s,” Dr. Kevin Maher explained, “Hopefully an hour or two in the old folks home will neutralize his psychosis. He should have known better going to a nightclub at his age, though”.",FAKE
"That was President Barack Obama's message to American consumers on Tuesday as he discussed near six year-low gas prices in an interview with The Detroit News ahead of a visit to Michigan on Wednesday to tout the recovery of the auto industry and the growth of American manufacturing.

""I would strongly advise American consumers to continue to think about how you save money at the pump because it is good for the environment, it's good for family pocketbooks and if you go back to old habits and suddenly gas is back at $3.50, you are going to not be real happy,"" Obama said.

But instead of returning to ""old habits,"" Obama advised Americans to save their money, ""or better yet"" use the savings to buy a new car, for example.

He said Americans should ""not believe that"" gas prices won't rise again, explaining that demand for oil in booming countries like China and India will continue to rise, kicking costs back up. Oil prices have dropped more than 50% in recent months, falling below $50 a barrel for the first time since 2009 on Monday. Many members of Congress are counting on gas prices to remain low, however, as they hope to use the low prices as an opportunity to increase the gas tax for the first time in more than two decades. As he touts the results of his bailout of the auto industry on Wednesday, Obama will also promote fuel efficiency at the Ford plant he is set to visit, which produces alternative fuel vehicles and small cars, The News reported. Obama gave the newspaper a preview of his speech Wednesday, in which he is expected to tout the resurgence of the auto industry and the boom of American manufacturing -- two key points of his plan for economic recovery, and elements he hopes will become a part of his legacy as president. ""The auto industry has led a resurgence of manufacturing in America,"" Obama said. ""The quality of the cars has gotten so much better that we are competitive — not just in SUVs — but up and down the line. The branding of American cars is back to where it should be. Michigan's unemployment rate has fallen faster than the overall employment rate.""",REAL
"Record numbers say no to proposed handgun ban 
Steve   
A new poll released by Gallup has found that a record amount of Americans are opposed to gun control measures . 
The survey found that 76 percent of respondents, over three quarters, believe that a ban on civilian ownership of handguns should not be made law. 
The findings represent a four-point increase on the same survey from last year, in addition to an all-time high for the past three decades. 
The poll also found that almost two thirds, 61 percent, are “against” a ban on semi-automatic rifles, or “assault weapons”as the corporate media refers to them. 
That figure represents a full ten-point increase on previous findings, and is an all time record high since polling began on the issue 20 years ago. 
Just 27 percent, less than a third, say they support a ban on handgun ownership, while only 36 percent, support a semi-automatic ban. an eight-point decline on previous findings. 
In addition, gun sales have been hitting record highs for months on end. 
In a summary of the new poll, Gallup seemed surprised, by the findings, describing waning support for a gun ban as a “paradox”: 
Perhaps paradoxically, opposition toward a ban has increased against a backdrop of multiple mass shootings and terrorist attacks in which the perpetrators used assault rifles. These guns were used in high-profile incidents, including the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, and the mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. 
The findings reveal just how out of step Hillary Clinton’s position on gun control is with the majority of Americans. 
Hillary is a staunch gun control proponent. Wikileaks releases have revealed that Hillary plans to implement strict gun control measures by executive order. 
Clinton purportedly plans to open gun manufacturers to lawsuits by crime victims, a move that critics say would do nothing to reduce crime, but would bankrupt–and eventually end–gun manufacturing in the United States. This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 10:30 am Share this article",FAKE
"Get short URL 0 8 0 0 A parliamentary inquiry reports that there are four Ku Klux Klan-affiliated groups currently operating in Germany. © AP Photo/ Markus Schreiber Strangers in Their Homeland: Germans Leaving Germany En Masse Due to Migrants While the groups have very low membership, they are suspected of committing at least 68 crimes in Germany since 2001. Their members also include at least two police officers, though it remains unclear whether they are still on the force.
“The low membership numbers cannot discount the danger that emanates from such organizations,” Left Party politician Monika Renner told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. 
Germany is currently seeing a surge in hate crimes following the acceptance of an estimated one million refugees last year. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany’s intelligence agency, recorded 990 hate crimes in 2014, and 1,408 in 2015. 
The BfV also recorded 75 arson attacks on refugee centers in 2015. There were just five such attacks in 2014. © AFP 2016/ Sven Hoppe “One thing is clear – a state under the rule of law can never accept racist violence. We need to do everything we can to quickly catch the perpetrators and rigorously punish them,” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas stated.
Amnesty International has stated that their researchers observed an 87 percent increase in hate crimes between 2013-2015. “With hate crimes on the rise in Germany, long-standing and well-documented shortcomings in the response of law enforcement agencies to racist violence must be addressed,” Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s European Union researcher, stated . “There are many factors that point to the existence of institutional racism with German law enforcement agencies. This question needs to asked, and it needs to be answered… This is not a time for complacency, but for law enforcement agencies to take a long, hard look in the mirror.” 
The nation has also seen a rise in sexual assault, theft, and rape, especially by people with refugee status. There has been a noticeable uptick since the mass attacks on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. ...",FAKE
"Dakota Access pipeline protesters occupy Hillary Clinton campaign HQ Dakota Access pipeline protesters occupy Hillary Clinton campaign HQ By 0 65 
The campaign headquarters of Hillary Clinton in Brooklyn, New York, was taken over Thursday by protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline being constructed in North Dakota and three other states. They’re demanding the candidate declare where she stands. 
READ MORE: Arrests as North Dakota cops remove pipeline protesters from private land (PHOTOS, VIDEO) 
Surrounding a drum circle and teepee in the middle of Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters in Brooklyn was a coalition of Bernie Sanders supporters, environmentalists and members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, all demonstrating against the planned 1,172-mile, $3.78 billion pipeline known as the Dakota Access. 
The activists who call themselves “protectors, not protesters” are demanding Clinton openly take a position on the Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL. 
The main protests are ongoing in North Dakota, where police ordered evacuations of activists demonstrating on private land reserved for the crude oil project. Other demonstrations have been held in the other states where the pipeline is scheduled to cross into, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. 
Other Clinton campaign offices were also targeted in solidarity on Thursday, including the one in Seattle, Washington. 
 ",FAKE
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Melissa Dykes 
This. Is. Horrifying. 
In another Wikileaks email , this time from Chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council Marc Stanley to Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta dated February 11, 2016, Stanley lays out his best argument for why voters should choose Hillary over Bernie… 
(click to enlarge) 
He writes: 
I tell the voter that I like Bernie and I like Hillary, but that’s not what matters. What matters to me is that there are 4 justices on the Supreme Court who will be in their 80’s and be replaced by the next president – and that President will appoint 40 year old Justices and they will serve for 30 or 40 years. 
He goes on to say that voters shouldn’t want Republicans making decisions about issues like Obamacare, Citizens United, voter rights, etc. and that Bernie is “a 20-1 horse” versus Hillary as a “1-1 or even 2-1 horse”. 
Can you imagine it? Hillary being able to personally nominate four out of nine Supreme Court justices for life ? 
Hillary will own half the Supreme Court and for long after she’s gone. 
That’s seven out of nine… or the entire Supreme Court, basically. 
Think about that for a second. Just let it sink in. Melissa Dykes is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media with Aaron Dykes, a site that offers teleprompter-free, unscripted analysis of The Matrix we find ourselves living in. Melissa and Aaron also recently launched Revolution of the Method and Informed Dissent . Wake the flock up! Don't forget to follow the D.C. Clothesline on Facebook and Twitter. PLEASE help spread the word by sharing our articles on your favorite social networks. Share this:",FAKE
"232 photos, 131 quotes and 43 numbers that tell the story of America's craziest election.",REAL
"By Fred Reed October 28, 2016 
Oh good. The world reaches a crossroads, or probably a road off a cliff, just when I want to relax and watch gratuitous violence on the tube. To judge by the rapid drift of events aboard our planetary asylum, the talons of Washington and New York on the world’s throat are fast being pried a-loose. The Global American Imperium is dying. Or so it sure looks anyway. 
I say talons of “New York and Washington” because America’s foreign policy, forged in those two cities, belongs entirely to them. Americans have no influence on it. Further, none of what the Empire does abroad is of any benefit to Americans. Do you care at all what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, or the South China Sea? Do you want to pay for it? America has been hijacked. 
And the Empire prospereth not. It prospereth very not. Consider the recent record of the world’s hyperpower: 
Washington does not have control of Afghanistan, and obviously is not going to. 
Washington does not have control of Iraq, and appears unlikely to. 
Washington did not back Iran down, and isn’t going to. 
Washington did not back Russia down in Ukraine and Crimea, and isn’t going to. 
Washington did not back China down in the South China Sea and, while this is perhaps not over, the Empire seems to be losing. 
Washington has not backed North Korea down and is not going to. 
In the Philippines, President Duterte has told Obama to “go to hell” as being “the son of a whore,” which may be taken to indicate latent hostility. He is vigorously seeking rapprochement with China. While Washington may have him murdered, it seems to be losing control of the Little Vassals of ASEAN. 
Turkey seems to be cuddling up to Russia–that is, looking East like Duterte. Maybe Washington can turn this around temporarily, but there-s a whole lot of wavering going on. 
Meanwhile Washington thrashes around impotently as per usual in Syria, and, though the jury remains out on this one, looks to have poor prospects. If Washington–AKA New York–loses here, after doing so in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Afghanistan, the Empire will beyond redemption be on the downward slope. 
The United States is not in danger. The Empire is. This is not good. Empires, the Soviet Union notwithstanding, seldom go quietly. Either Washington gambles on war of some sort against Russia, or Russia and China, in the desperate hope of reversing things, or the Empire gets slowly eaten. Or not so slowly. Once one country pries itself loose, many may rush for the door. 
New York may go for calculated war against Russia–say, cyberwar expected not to turn into shooting war, shooting war in Syria not expected to turn into global shooting war, global shooting war not expected to turn into nuclear war. This will be a crapshoot. Note that America has badly misguessed the outcomes of every war since Korea. 
This is why the American election actually matters, unusual in Presidential contests. It is Blowhard against Corruption, a swell choice, but Trump is firmly against war with Russia, and Hillary for. Her military understanding is that of a fried egg. 
The woman is both a fool and a knave but, it seems, Trump has talked trash, and therefore she will likely be President. Weirdly, the future of the world depends on how an excited electorate of political middle-schoolers responds to one candidate’s dirty talk. From a curmudgeon’s point of view, it is pretty funny. It is funnier if one lives outside of the radiation footprint. 
But back to business. The seaboard Axis of Evil needs a war because almost every tide runs against it. Proximately, the Axis has pushed China, Russia, and Iran together against the Empire. (First rule of empire: Do not let the dissidents unite.) Many signs suggest that the world, or much of it, is beginning to see China as its future. The BRICS, the SCO, the NDB, the AAIB–all exclude the US. China becomes the major trading partner of country after country. The twilight deepens. 
Not all goes wrong for the Empire–not yet, but things are getting spooky. On the European Peninsula of Asia, countries remain docile, especially England and, much more importantly, Germany. Yet even among Washington’s European harem, there seem to be faint stirrings of a forgotten independence. As I understand it, Germany’s businessmen would very much like to end Washington’s sanctions on Russia and improve trade with China, which would be greatly to the benefit of the Peninsula. Washington won’t let them. It can’t. If the Europeans did what would be good for themselves, and looked to Eurasia, then the fat lady, already warming up, would burst into full bellow. 
Which, methinks, raises the likelihood that Washington will in desperation do something phenomenally stupid. At this writing Hillary’s camp seems to be prepping the public for war with Russia. The telescreen tells us day after day that Putin is Hitler, that Russia is expanding, that the Russkies are hacking the election, that they cause indigestion and falling hair. Is this just Hillary waggling her codpiece in the expectation that Moscow will demurely back down, as God intended? Or will she again send other people’s children to fight for her in somebody else’s country? 
The larger picture, assuredly obvious to New York, is truly grim–for New York, not for Americans. China has a huge population of a billion Han Chinese, versus two hundred million Caucasian Americans–these being the scientific, technological and entrepreneurial brains of the Empire. One must not notice this, but you can bet that New York and Beijing do. Economically China is growing hugely, advancing technologically at a high rate, building rail lines that now extend from the Chinese Pacific coast to Madrid. It will increasingly dwarf the Empire no matter what happens–short of a world war. 
The curtain falls in ways unnoticed. China recently launched a communications satellite, the world’s first employing quantum cryptographic links, which cannot be intercepted. The intention of this, as well of the QC link from Beijing to Shanghai, is to keep the NSA off China’s back. A small thing, perhaps. Yet if successful and adopted en masse by other countries weary of Washington’s meddling, the result will be a loosening of the Empire’s grip on everybody’s communications. 
For the Empire it is, as Elvis sang, “now or never.” Lenin spoke of “useful idiots.” Ours aren’t even useful, but they call the shots. The Best of Fred Reed Tags:",FAKE
"Memorial Day is a time to remember those who gave their lives to protect this country.

It is a day when the focus on those sacrifices will be through commemorations with bugle calls and wreath layings instead of the controversies that have dogged the Department of Veterans Affairs. Yet, even as the ceremonies get underway, another debate involving the federal hiring preference for veterans is brewing.

President Obama focused on their sacrifice Friday with a Prayer for Peace proclamation:

“Since America’s earliest days, proud patriots have forged a safer, more secure Nation, and though battlefields have changed and technology has evolved, the selflessness of our service members has remained steadfast. They have stepped forward when our country was locked in revolution and civil war; fought threats of fascism and terrorism; and led the way in securing peace and stability around the globe. They have sacrificed more than most of us could ever imagine — not for glory or gratitude, but for causes greater than themselves.”

He called on Americans to observe a National Moment of Remembrance beginning at 3 p.m. local time and requested “the flag be flown at half-staff until noon on this Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels throughout the United States and in all areas under its jurisdiction and control.”

There will be ceremonies at cemeteries across the nation, including at Arlington National Cemetery at 11 a.m.

“Whether at Gettysburg, one of our country’s first national cemeteries, or at Cape Canaveral, our most recent dedication, each VA national cemetery is a sacred place of honor befitting the great deeds and sacrifices of the fallen,” said VA Secretary Robert McDonald.

Memorial Day brings some relief from a double-barrel shot of controversy last week. Last Monday, McDonald drew strong criticism from Republicans for comparing lines at Disney amusement parks to the long wait times veterans have experienced at VA hospitals. A couple of days later, Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) revealed that more than 4,200 veterans were mistakenly declared dead by VA from 2011 to 2015.

Now another issue is emerging.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has advanced legislation that would limit the federal hiring preference provided to veterans and certain close relatives. The bill still would give them preference points or preferential listing when first hired, but not for each new federal job after that, as is now the case.

That broader, long-standing preference won’t go down without a fight.

A statement from the American Federation of Government Employees said it “has long been an advocate for veterans preference and the principles it stands for. We strongly oppose this provision.”

The American Legion supports the larger National Defense Authorization Act that includes the preference limiting provision. But Ian de Planque, legislative director of the veterans service organization, said it will work to keep the preference in its current form.

“It’s worked for a long time,” he said. “It’s been a good thing.”

Vet, one of 4,200 mistakenly declared dead by VA, feels ‘resurrected’

Senators call for VA chief to resign over Disney remark",REAL
"This post has been updated.

A day after again declining to apologize for her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton told an interviewer Tuesday that the arrangement was a mistake and that she is ""sorry"" for it.

“As I look back at it now, even though it was allowed, I should have used two accounts. That was a mistake. I’m sorry about that. I take responsibility,” Clinton said in an interview with ABC News.

The statement was the furthest Clinton has gone in showing remorse for the arrangement, which mingled her work and personal communications and kept them outside the regular State Department e-mail system. The FBI is investigating whether the system, maintained on a privately owned computer server at Clinton's New York home, jeopardized classified information.

In interviews Friday with NBC and Monday with the Associated Press, Clinton had declined to apologize, even as she said the arrangement was a poor choice that she regrets. She told NBC interviewer Andrea Mitchell that she is sorry the issue is confusing for people, but insisted that she had done nothing wrong.

She would not apologize, she told the AP, because “what I did was allowed.”

Republican critics had begun to use the question of an apology against her, undermining the campaign's plan to address the complex e-mail issue more directly and with greater humility. Questions about the private system have contributed to Clinton's slide in the polls, with more people saying they do not trust her.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll this month found that 53 percent of Americans now see Clinton unfavorably. That rating rose by 8 percentage points since earlier in the summer, tipping the balance to a majority of Americans now seeing her in an unfavorable light.

Clinton turned over copies of roughly 30,000 e-mails at the State Department's request late last year, nearly two years after she left office. At the same time she directed that a slightly larger number of e-mails stored on the server be destroyed because she deemed them personal and not part of her government business. Initially she refused to turn over the server, but did so in August.

Clinton told ABC that she did not send or receive classified material on the account and said she is “trying to be as transparent as I possibly can.”

Late Tuesday, the campaign sent a message to supporters in Clinton's name reiterating the apology. Donors and activists have been complaining to the campaign headquarters for weeks that the e-mail issue was being mishandled, and it largely is their concern and disappointment Clinton is trying to head off.

""I wanted you to hear this directly from me,"" this e-mailed statement to supporters said. ""Yes, I should have used two email addresses, one for personal matters and one for my work at the State Department. Not doing so was a mistake. I'm sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.""

Clinton went on to stress, as she regularly does, that her personal account was ""aboveboard,"" and that ""nothing I ever sent or received was marked classified at the time. ""

Despite the campaign’s effort to more directly confront its problems stemming from the e-mail saga, Clinton’s own reckoning with it still seemed grudging.

In March, she insisted that she had done everything by the State Department book and had nothing for which to answer; last month she said that she “gets it” that voters have questions. That was a significant shift — as was the decision to stop insisting the controversy was a manufactured Republican hit job.

But until now, Clinton had always said that although she would make a different choice today, there was nothing inherently wrong with setting up the system as she did.

Clinton’s reversal on making an apology echoed the protracted 2008 campaign discussion of whether she would say she was wrong or sorry about her Senate vote in support of the Iraq war.

In both cases, Clinton adopted a narrow and somewhat lawyerly stance at first, then came to a more direct show of remorse.",REAL
"As the deadlines near for Iran and world powers to reach an agreement on the country's nuclear program — the first, on March 31, for a basic political framework — negotiations are focusing on what kind of program Iran can have. How much uranium and plutonium can it have? How many centrifuges can it use to develop more fuel? How long will restrictions be in place?

There's one fact, though, that is taken as assumed: Iran very badly wants a nuclear program. So badly that it has been willing to press ahead with the program, secretly as well as overtly, despite Western and UN sanctions that have crippled its economy, and despite repeated US warnings of possible military action.

Iran claims its program is entirely peaceful, but there are major reasons to doubt this, and it is generally taken as a given by analysts that the country has at least taken just-in-case steps partway toward building a bomb. Some facilities seem to serve little plausible function beyond nuclear weapons capability, though a point that Western intelligence agencies have made in the past is that building the capacity for making a bomb is not the same as deciding to make a bomb.

Whatever Iran's intentions, though, the country's dedication to nuclear enrichment even at such enormous costs can seem bizarrely counterproductive. So why is Iran so set on its nuclear program? There is no one dominant answer, but rather a few plausible explanations, some of which go against the most common Western perceptions and misperceptions of how Iran works. There is probably some truth to all of them.

Consider Tehran's view for a moment: Israeli and American leaders have been talking for years about bombing Iran or invading it outright. The Bush administration named Iran part of its ""axis of evil,"" alongside Iraq, which it invaded months later. For much of the last decade, the US has had thousands of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, both Iran's neighbors.

Iranian leaders appear to sincerely believe that the United States is bent on their government's destruction. For example, the United States helped Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his brutal, years-long war against Iran, in which he killed thousands of Iranians, including with chemical weapons. It is difficult to overstate how traumatic the years-long war was for Iranians, how badly they want to prevent another such war. And nothing deters chemical weapon attacks like a nuclear weapon.

You will hear Iranians frequently mention Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner that the US military accidentally shot down in 1988, killing 290 civilians. In Iran, this is still frequently viewed as deliberate. Imagine you're an Iranian leader seeing all this. You might want a nuclear deterrent.

Also consider the timing of the program. When the ayatollahs came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution, they at first cancelled the country's nuclear program, but then re-started it after Saddam invaded in 1980.

""Tehran wanted to guard against a future surprise analogous to Iraq's repeated use of chemical weapons,"" writes Shahram Chubin of the Carnegie Endowment. More recently, Iran has been embroiled in low-level proxy conflicts with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and with what it sees as a defensive conflict against the hostile West.

It's important to remember that Iran sees itself as isolated in the world, despite intimations of occasional Russian or Chinese support. Save for proxies such as Hezbollah and the Syrian government, it sees the Middle East as largely aligned against it. It is also important to remember that its leaders, in power only since 1979, feel weak and isolated. Current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in particular has never been very confident in power.

That sense of insecurity feeds into a rational desire for deterrence against external threats, but it also creates a less rational belief in anti-Iran conspiracies or an impending American invasion. When the US threatens to bomb Iran to stop a nuclear program, Iranian leaders can misread this as a desire to destroy the Iranian state itself, which would make them more likely to want a nuclear deterrent, which only makes the US threaten more strenuously.

Iran's national pride runs deep, and with good reason: It has been an active center of cultural, scientific, religious and political thought for many centuries. It's also still upset, again with reason, about decades of Western interference during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The nuclear program is a way in which Iran affirms, to itself and to the world, that it is an advanced and sovereign nation. It's a way of saying: we are not inferior to the world powers, even though you treat us that way, but are in fact equals.

It's also a way of defying what Iran sees as continued Western efforts to control, exploit or weaken Iran. The more that the world tells Iran it cannot have a nuclear program, the more important building such a program becomes for the cause of Iranian nationalism.

This is part of why Iranian leaders so often state that they want world powers to affirm Iran's right to enrich uranium and to respect Iran's ""dignity"" — a word that top officials use frequently. This isn't posturing — they really mean it.

In November 2013, as nuclear talks got underway, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif released a video articulating Iran's position. He spent very little time talking about actual nuclear policies — the meat and potatoes of the negotiations — and lots of time saying things like, ""We expect and demand respect for our dignity."" He frequently mentioned phrases such as ""equal footing"" and ""mutual respect."" The video was taken as bizarre and inexplicable by Americans, because they could not see that this demand for respect was not a side issue — it was central for Iran.

There was a brief moment, after the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 (both Iran's neighbors) where Tehran seemed eager to strike a deal with the West over its nuclear program. There are many reasons that fell apart — Dick Cheney personally worked to torpedo any communications, for example — but a crucial one was Iranian politics.

Iran's anti-US hard-liners took the parliament in 2004, and the presidency in 2005 with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The hard-liners turned the nuclear program into something of a partisan wedge issue, using it to weaken reformers and moderates who wanted to compromise the program to soften relations with the West.

""Both Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used the nuclear issue to stigmatize reformists, depicting them as defeatists willing to negotiate away Iran's interests,"" Chubin writes. ""Their use of the nuclear issue as an instrument of partisan politics ended the phase when the nuclear program was supposed to be a national issue. And debate was actively discouraged.""

This was great politics for Ahmadinejad and other hard-liners. But it made it much more difficult for him or other Iranian leaders to compromise on the program. They were too invested in the program, politically, to back down — even if backing down would have been in Iran's national interests.

""By 2010,"" Chubin writes, ""the divide over Iran's nuclear program had more to do with domestic politics-and very little to do with what many of the key players actually wanted to see happen.""

Ahmadinejad is out of power, but the hard-liners are still powerful. They have particular influence over Khamenei, who as supreme leader is the ultimate decision-maker. Because of the way Khamenei came to power — his religious credentials are weak, and his political credibility never as strong as predecessor and national founder Ruhollah Khomeini — he's long caved to hard-liners, who he fears could turn against him.

Since Iran become the Islamic Republic in the 1979 revolution, it has seen the Middle East as a battleground for its influence. This is meant as both defensive and offensive; ever since Saddam invaded, Iranian leaders have feared that hostile, Western-backed Arab leaders could do them terrible harm. And Tehran sees pro-American Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia as inherently hostile.

But Iran is also expansive and aggressive in the region, supporting proxy terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah both as a deterrent against American or Israeli threats and as a way to project its power. In the context of this regional struggle for power, a nuclear weapon starts to make a lot more sense. Not as something that Tehran would want to actually use, but as a way to get away with other sorts of trouble-making.

Clifton W. Sherrill of Troy University explained in a 2012 issue of Nonproliferation Review how Iran could use a nuclear weapon as not just a deterrent but a way to give itself cover for bullying its neighbors and generally projecting more power in the region, where competition for influence is already high, and the stakes are enormous.

""The regime believes nuclear weapons would deter foreign military strikes targeting the Iranian homeland, making the Iranian use of conventional military force abroad less risky,"" Sherrill writes. ""At a minimum, possession of nuclear arms would allow Iran greater policy flexibility in the Middle East.""

That likely means using proxy groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, even more aggressively to threaten and bully other countries in the region. That also means pushing harder to support pro-Iran militant groups in countries such as Syria and Yemen where Iran sees itself as competing for influence. The idea is that Iran can be more brazen and aggressive with these non-nuclear threats because its nuclear weapon would scare other countries out of retaliating.

That bullying could also have implications for energy politics; Iran might feel it could force ""demands in the Persian Gulf regarding disputed islands or natural gas fields"" or ""desires regarding production quotas"" within OPEC, Sherrill warns. And he points to nuclear-armed Pakistan as an example of how this all can happen:

Despite widespread misconceptions to the contrary in the US — often pushed by politicians who wish to play up the Iranian threat for political gain — there is no reason to believe that Iran wants to launch an offensive nuclear strike against the US, Israel, or any other country.

The well-established logic of nukes would make any war against other nuclear powers a loser for Iran. This is because powers such as the US and Israel have what is called second-strike capability, meaning that even if Iran got off a nuclear strike, the country would still be destroyed by the retaliation. There is no cost-benefit calculation by which an offensive strike would make sense for Iran.

As Sherrill explained, ""It is highly unlikely that the Islamist regime plans to actually detonate a nuclear weapon in an offensive attack. Both of the obvious targets, the United States and Israel, have a second-strike nuclear arsenal capable of threatening the Islamist regime's survival.""

Some argue that Iran's leaders are inherently irrational because of their religion and would be willing to launch a suicidal war against the US or Israel. As Newt Gingrich once put it, for example, ""It's impossible to deter them. What are you going to threaten?""

The seemingly sole piece of evidence that Iran's leaders have spent the last 36 years secretly plotting a suicidal war is the idea that their interpretation of Shia Islam foretells of a messiah who will return on the apocalypse. While Ahmadinejad did reference this idea many times, he was alone in this, as Matt Duss of the Foundation for Middle East Peace explains, and was widely rebuked by Shia scholars and his own country's political and clerical establishments.

Actual readings of Iran's official Shia theology by actual religious scholars, Duss finds, reach the opposite conclusion that Newt Gingrich did: Iranian leaders see it as their religious duty to preserve their system, not destroy it in a fiery war with Israel. As scholar Mehdi Khalaji told Duss, ""As the theory of the guardianship of the jurist requires, the most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime, even by overruling Islamic law.""

Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that Iranian leaders are just as rationally invested in self-preservation as anyone else. You can't hold up a political system as complex and besieged as Iran's without being shrewdly self-interested. If Iran's Islamic regime were really looking for a suicidal war in which to martyr itself, the eight-year war with Iraq offered many such opportunities, none of which they took.

There are a number of reasons that Iran wants a nuclear program and has taken steps toward a nuclear bomb. Some of those reasons are rational and others are not. But a desire to launch an offensive strike against another country is not one of them.",REAL
"Next Prev Swipe left/right The announcement for Wales’ first female bishop attracted quite a crowd The Church in Wales has elected its first female bishop, and the historic announcement drew the most underwhelming crowd* you could possibly imagine. Church in Wales gets first female bishop. Do watch 30-sec clip of Archbishop's historic announcement, if only for crowd shot at the end… pic.twitter.com/tJZZO5xQdv 
— Kaya Burgess (@kayaburgess) November 2, 2016 
*nine and half people",FAKE
"Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to cement her standing as the rightful leader of the Democratic Party here Friday, but two of her challengers launched a fierce counterattack against her and a party establishment they see as trying to hand her the 2016 presidential nomination.

What began as a routine forum of candidate speeches evolved into a surprisingly dramatic day at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley issued thinly veiled attacks on Clinton and the party leadership.

Speaking from the dais, with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sitting a few feet away, O’Malley blasted the party’s limited number of sanctioned debates as a process “rigged” in favor of the front-runner. The DNC is holding six debates, only four before February’s first caucuses in Iowa, which O’Malley argued is a disadvantage for all the candidates and a disservice to Democrats generally.

“This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before,” said O’Malley, who has struggled to gain traction in the polls. He added: “We are the Democratic Party, not the undemocratic party.”

Sanders — who later told reporters he agreed with O’Malley — lamented low Democratic turnout in last year’s midterm elections and said the party must grow beyond “politics as usual” if it hopes to produce the level of voter enthusiasm required to retain the White House in 2016.

“We need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of that establishment,” said Sanders, who is an independent but caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.

Asked later whether he was speaking specifically about Clinton, he told reporters, “I’ll let you use your imagination on that.”

The barbs from Sanders and O’Malley came as Clinton and her campaign flexed their organizational muscle here. The front-

runner and her top aides worked aggressively behind the scenes this week to secure commitments from party leaders pledging to be delegates for her in next summer’s nominating convention in Philadelphia.

Clinton’s organizational push sent a clear signal to Vice President Biden, who has been weighing a late entry into the 2016 campaign, that he would begin far behind her.

In her address to a ballroom full of DNC members, Clinton sought to position herself as the undisputed Democratic standard-

bearer. She fired up the party faithful with a call to arms against Republicans as dangerously out of touch and peppered her remarks with gibes at current GOP front-runner Donald Trump — including a suggestion that his hair, although natural, is dyed like her own.

“The party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump,” Clinton said. She mocked Trump for suggesting that she did not understand women’s health issues and that he would be a better advocate. “Now that’s a general election debate that’s going to be a lot of fun,” she said.

Clinton said that Trump is getting most of the media attention this summer but that the other Republican candidates are making statements that ought to scare mainstream voters. “They’re Trump without the pizazz and the hair,” she said.

Clinton made no reference in her speech to the controversy surrounding her use of a private ­e-mail server while secretary of state. When asked about it later in a news conference, Clinton said: “I have said repeatedly that I did not send nor receive classified material, and I’m very confident when this entire process plays out, that will be understood by everyone. It will prove what I have been saying.”

Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee raised eyebrows when he touted himself as ­scandal-free in his remarks. He later said this was not “a direct swipe at anybody.” But pressed on how Clinton has handled the ­e-mail issue, Chafee said: “The rules are the rules, and we all have to adhere to them, and when you don’t, you suffer the consequences. Unfortunately this is self-

inflicted.”

The fifth declared candidate, former senator Jim Webb of Virginia, did not attend because he was taking his daughter to college.

O’Malley used his time onstage to highlight his dissatisfaction with the DNC’s management of the debates. He argued forcefully that as Trump and other Republican candidates dominate news coverage with inflammatory rhetoric, Democrats would be wise to hold more, not fewer, nationally televised debates to highlight the differences between the parties.

“Will we let the circus run unchallenged on every channel while we cower in shadows under a decree of silence in the ranks? Or will we demand equal time to showcase our ideas?” O’Malley asked.

He slammed what he called a “cynical move” to limit the debates to six and to hold the only New Hampshire debate on a Saturday night in mid-December, the peak of the holiday shopping season.

“Whose decree is this exactly?” he asked provocatively. “Where did it come from? To what end or purpose?”

Wasserman Schultz, who was visibly miffed by O’Malley’s speech, said in an interview Thursday that she had consulted widely with past DNC chairs, as well as with the campaigns, before setting the debate schedule.

“We felt like this structure for actual debates was really the best one that could give maximum exposure that voters need to make a decision but that also would be manageable and give the candidates the opportunity and the time to go out and campaign in a retail way,” she said.",REAL
"FoxNews.com October 27, 2016 
With less than two weeks to go, the race for the White House has narrowed as Hillary Clinton now has a three-point advantage over Donald Trump. 
That’s within the margin of error of the national Fox News Poll of likely voters. 
Clinton is ahead of Trump by 44-41 percent. Another one-in-ten back a third-party candidate and four percent are undecided. Last week she was up by six points (45-39 percent) and before that by seven (45-38 percent). 
The poll, released Wednesday, finds Clinton leads 49-44 percent in the head-to-head matchup. That 5-point advantage is at the edge of the error margin. She was up 7 a week ago (49-42 percent). This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 6:33 am Share this article",FAKE
"1591 Views November 04, 2016 60 Comments Moveable Feast Herb Swanson 
2016/11/04 02:30:02Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day. 
The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week. 
The Saker stated moderation policy will apply eg ‘no caps’, no obscenity … etc to all post. 
The Cafe is now open for business … come on in and have a good time. 
Saker Webmaster The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95",FAKE
"John A. Boehner never landed the really big deal he craved. Not the $4 trillion tax-and-entitlement deal he reached for in 2011, not the repackaged version a year later and not the immigration overhaul he sought in 2014.

He most clearly learned the limits of his power midway through his nearly five-year tenure as House speaker when he scaled down his ambitions for “Plan B” — a tactical gambit aimed at forcing Democrats to preserve Republican tax cuts. Conservatives rebelled because those making more than $1 million would have faced tax increases, and Boehner (Ohio) was left reading the “Serenity Prayer” to his Republican colleagues.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” the speaker said.

That utter defeat left him unable to “go big,” as he liked to say, his effort to find a legacy-defining piece of legislation coming largely to a close. In the three years since, he mostly has been treading water.

This month, Boehner found himself in much the same position as before. But conservatives weren’t revolting over tax cuts or a farm bill or health-care legislation. This time, they were after his job.

On Friday, he decided to spare his party another fight, particularly one that was all about him. In the same basement room where he abandoned “Plan B,” he announced his resignation, ending a run as speaker that came to be defined by internal revolts and missed opportunities.

[What John Boehner told me the night before he was quitting]

On Sept. 17, Republicans swore in their 247th member, giving them their largest House majority since 1930. Yet Boehner could never please his most conservative members. Fiscal deals negotiated with President Obama produced more than $2 trillion in savings and made the GOP’s tax cuts permanent for 99 percent of workers, but the far right painted both deals as sellouts.

Despite his early years as an agitator, Boehner never overcame the image that the conservatives saw: a country club Republican who loved to play 18 holes of golf and drink merlot afterward while cutting deals. In an era of shouting and confrontation, on talk radio or cable TV, Boehner’s easygoing style did not fit.

“John was fighting the 21st-century battles with 1990s tools, and you can’t just do that with a president of either party who is willing to push the envelopes of executive power,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), one of the lead rebels, said after Boehner’s surprise announcement Friday morning.

Aside from a Quixotic effort to cajole support for immigration legislation, Boehner has been stuck with a caucus bitterly divided between those willing to accept incremental progress toward conservative goals and those, like Mulvaney, willing to blow up the normal courtesies and practices in Washington.

“It’s like the Marine Corps: You spend 90 percent of your time on 10 percent of your guys,” Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), an Iraq war veteran who still serves in the Marine Corps Reserve, said Friday. “I think that’s what ended up happening with Boehner toward the end, the last year or two. There was so much time dealing with fractious stuff inside the conference that it took a lot of time away from doing other things.”

Boehner decided to retire, effective Oct. 30, after his emotional reaction to Pope Francis’s visit on Thursday to the Capitol. The speaker spent the night at an Italian restaurant on Barracks Row with close friends and then Friday morning at his regular diner two blocks from the Capitol, where he affirmed his decision.

It was a long fall from September 2010, when Boehner and his leadership team introduced the “Pledge to America,” their governing document touted in the final days of the midterm election campaign that delivered a Republican House majority.

[How speakers of the House became an endangered species]

That 2010 class — 87 Republicans strong — ushered Boehner into the speaker’s chair but brought with it dozens of lawmakers from deeply conservative districts that distrusted all of Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike. Dozens of the freshmen became loyal foot soldiers to leadership, but they also feared that their biggest political risk would come in a Republican primary, not from a Democrat in a general election.

That meant that when the most conservative members aligned themselves with outside conservative groups pushing for a harder line, these more moderate Republicans sometimes bucked Boehner out of fear.

The first warning sign for the new speaker came within weeks of him taking over, when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the fiscal expert for the caucus, presented a proposal for cutting about $40 billion from the 2012 federal agency budgets. The freshmen revolted, citing the “Pledge to America” and its call for $100 billion in cuts. Never mind that the fiscal year was half over; they wanted deeper reductions.

Boehner gave in, sending his troops back to draw up greater cuts to appease the right flank.

That scenario played out repeatedly throughout his term, most dramatically in the summer of 2011 when Boehner and Obama — after a much-hyped round of golf at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland — entered into negotiations aimed at a $4 trillion fiscal package of spending cuts and entitlement reforms.

Some called it the “grand bargain,” but Boehner called it the “big deal.” During one bargaining session in the White House Cabinet Room, he grew frustrated about the inability to reach an agreement, as Obama sat to his left and his deputy, then-Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), was on his right.

“I didn’t want this job to have a big title. I want to do big things,” Boehner told the group, according to a Democrat in the room.

[The Fix: John Boehner just sacrificed his career for the good of the GOP]

But as the talks grew close, Boehner balked at a demand from Obama for more than $1 trillion in tax increases.

The two leaders traded blame in dueling news conferences. As often happened, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), stepped into the breach to reach a compromise that left conservatives griping.

The pattern repeated with more negotiations and retreats later that year and, after another McConnell-brokered compromise passed in late 2012, the new Congress was sworn in. A ragtag group of Republicans moved to deny Boehner the speaker’s gavel for a second term — the first of what would become effectively three coup attempts against him.

With Democrats voting for their leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the conservatives tried to get enough Republicans to deny Boehner the majority. They had no alternative, no real plan, and it fell apart after several members prayed on whether to spare Boehner.

“Gone are the days when the leaders decide what the conference is going to do,” Rep. Lynn Jenkins (Kan.), who has been a low-level member of GOP leadership, said in the spring of 2013.

Boehner thought of retiring at the end of 2014, but Cantor lost in a stunning upset to a conservative who has linked arms with others against Boehner. With no heir apparent, he soldiered on through another coup attempt during a speaker vote in January and, as he said Friday, he had decided privately to retire at the end of this year.

But those botched coup attempts also sowed the seeds of an idea that would haunt him: that if they ever got enough rebels together, they could force a vote to deny him a majority from the Republican side of the aisle.

No speaker had ever lost his gavel under such a scenario, and his friends said that Boehner never wanted to rely on Democratic votes to keep the job. As a fight unfolded over the past two months about federal funding for Planned Parenthood, it became clear that 30 or more Republicans may have been willing to oust him if he extended government funding without a fight over the group.

The institution would endure a grueling ballot, and members he liked would have to take tough votes on Boehner’s behalf. So on Friday morning, a day after ­Francis’s address to a joint meeting of Congress, in the same room where his other fights ended, Boehner turned to the “Prayer of Saint Francis” to announce his retirement.

“For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life,” he said.",REAL
"OK, in the ’90s, the Clintons backed some bad things. But they backed some good things. Whatever. The ’90s aren’t what matters. The future is.

With the election less than two months away, there still remains plenty of cause for concern regarding the black vote and Hillary Clinton. Clinton and the Democrats inevitably were going to win the lion’s share of the black vote, but that has never been enough. Clinton needs to win a share of the black vote similar to Barack Obama’s to ensure that the Democrats retain the White House. And black voters need to flex their electoral might to show that 2008 and 2012 were not flukes buoyed by America’s first black president. Presently, neither seem foregone conclusions, and the majority of the uncertainty resides with young black voters.

As a young black voter myself I’ve heard countless reasons why black millennials may not want to vote for Clinton this year. While each argument may consist of some valid points, on average they display a myopic naïveté that undermines the progress they intend to forge and projects some of the less desirable narratives attributed to millennials.

I’ve spoken to older African Americans too, and many remain perplexed by the willful disenfranchisement expressed by this younger generation. Also, this generation’s fixation on the Clintons of the 1990s—with an emphasis on their faults and not their successes—instead of the Clintons of today remains baffling to the older generation.

African Americans do not condone Hillary’s “super predators” comment from 1996; nor do they embrace Bill’s tough on crime policies, which were an extension of the policing measures of the two previous presidential administrations. Yet America was far less racially progressive in the 1990s than it is today.

And besides, the Clintons’ policies on racial questions didn’t begin and end with crime. They actively sought the black vote, welcomed the opinions of African Americans, and hired African Americans for administration and cabinet positions at rates that were previously unheard of. He defended and saved affirmative action at a moment when it was on death row. It’s disingenuous of people to forget all these good things.

Additionally, older African Americans remember how Bill Clinton won traditionally Republican states such as Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky on his way to the White House in 1992. The Clintons dismantled Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which hinged on stoking the racial animus of white Americans to win Southern states and secure the presidency for Republicans. That’s a big part of why the GOP became hell bent on destroying the Clintons.

And while they failed at that, they succeeded at defeating Al Gore, his chosen successor, and facilitating racial divisions. The parallels between unprecedented Republican attacks on Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s presidencies due to their ability to create radical electoral shifts by engaging and enfranchising African Americans should be obvious for anyone who reexamines the 1990s.

Yet irrationally, some young black voters have instead chosen to fixate on the mistakes of the Clintons, and parrot the disparaging conservative rhetoric of the 1990s regarding them. And in doing so, black millennials may be contributing to creating another improbable window for a divisive Republican candidate to claim the presidency.

In addition to a bizarre mis-recollection of the 1990s, these black millennials also exude a desire for perfection and a reluctance to settling. Since neither candidate is perfect in their eyes, they say they are now forced to chosen between the lesser of two evils, and they argue that there is an inherent injustice in being forced into this situation. Plenty of young white millennials who supported Bernie Sanders expressed similar sentiments.

But this amounts to willful disenfranchisement. Willfully disengaging or voting for a third party candidate who more closely embodies their idea of perfection seems an adequate recourse for some young black voters instead of settling for one of the two major candidates. Yet the collective impact of this action will only result in stunting the progress black millennials hope to achieve.

The increased weight of black voices in American society does not stem from a national, progressive moral epiphany or even the presence of the Obamas in the White House. Our louder voice exists now because African Americans voted at unprecedented rates for two consecutive presidential elections, and our enhanced electoral voice forced America to listen to us. In 2012, 66 percent of eligible African American voters voted, surpassing the percentage of white voters—for the first time in history—by 2 percent. In 2008, 65 percent voted.

The young black voters who remain reluctant to vote for Clinton assume that our societal influence has become the new norm. They have remained focused on striving to improve American society and simultaneously oblivious to the profound threat posed by a Trump presidency for African Americans and other minorities. This is a privileged perspective that older African Americans struggle to comprehend.",REAL
"As seasons change, nasty sicknesses can begin to spread. Keeping up with health during these times is of utmost importance. Making this amazingly healthy tonic could save your life. 

Have you ever heard of the Master Tonic, otherwise known as Fire Cider? If you haven’t, now is a good time to learn! 

Making your own Fire Cider is quick and easy, but first it is important to understand why it works so well. 
Fire Cider is powerful because of its ingredients. It is designed to stimulate blood circulation, helping to detox the bloodstream. 
It is a natural remedy for many health bugs including the common cold. It is naturally antiviral, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and anti-parasitic. This tonic is said to have the ability to cure chronic conditions, stubborn diseases, and antibiotic-resistant infections. Many people swear by it! 
Ingredients: 
Organic raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar has many amazing properties and is a natural antiseptic and anti-fungal. It is also great for digestion, detoxifying, and much, much more. 

Onions contain diuretic, antibiotic, and anti-inflammatory properties. Studies show that onions are an effective expectorant which makes them useful for infections like the common cold, flu, and persistent coughs. Onions also contain quercetin, which can help prevent heart disease by stopping cholesterol from attaching to arterial walls and blood platelets from sticking together and forming clots. 

Horseradish is naturally antibacterial and anti-parasitic. It can also stimulate the immune system. Horseradish has warming properties and acts as an expectorant as well. It can also help open up sinus passages and increase circulation. 

Ginger can boost your immune system, and help with chills, colds, and fever. It is also great for upset stomachs. 

Garlic has the ability to destroy gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. This is important in an age where antibiotics kill all bacteria in the body, both good and bad. Garlic has the ability to only kill bad bacteria while allowing healthy bacteria to live and take care of the immune system. Garlic is also a powerful antiviral that can target colds, the flu, and upper respiratory infections. It is also an anti-fungal. 

Hot Peppers can help boost your immune system and can act as a natural decongestant and have warming properties. This makes them pain-relievers.",FAKE
"We Are Change 
We will being keeping track of all election anomalies, poll rigging, blocking of the polls, and other shady voting fraud tricks throughout the day that may be used to rig the election this will be updated periodically all day so check back for new information. To make this easy to read and to inform you the voter we will break this down into sections by state in alphabetical order just like I did in August, for the Democratic primary . We really hope that we won’t have fill up this whole list and that many remain blank oh yeah and oh good friend James O`Keefe and crew are out there want to become famous? Go ahead rig the election we dare you..
If you're committing #VoterFraud , we're going to find you. #VeritasIsEverywhere #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/qHULNMuEQ4 
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 8, 2016 

If you have a tip regarding any type of electioneering you may email me at An0nKn0wledge@protonmail.ch or Andrew@wearechange.org.
Edward Snowden shows how easy it is to HACK into a US voting machine with a £24 memory card ALABAMA: 
ALASKA: 
ARIZONA: 
ARKANSAS: 
CALIFORNIA: 
COLORADO: 
CONNECTICUT: 
DELAWARE: 
Washington District of Columbia: 
FLORIDA: 
GEORGIA: 
HAWAII: 
IDAHO: 
ILLINOIS: 
INDIANA: 
IOWA: 
KANSAS: 
KENTUCKY: 
LOUISIANA: 
MAINE: 
MARYLAND: 
MASSACHUSETTS: 
MICHIGAN: 
MINNESOTA: 
MISSISSIPPI: 
MISSOURI: 
MONTANA: 
NEBRASKA: 
NEVADA: 
Clinton’s Campaign Just Got Busted Impersonating Union Nurses in Nevada 
NEW HAMPSHIRE: 
NEW JERSEY: 
NEW MEXICO: 
NEW YORK: 
Misleading NYC Election Mailer Could Be Bad News for Trump, Sanders 
NORTH CAROLINA: 
NORTH DAKOTA: 
OHIO: 
VOTER FRAUD! Before The OH Primary, Voters Noticed Something STRANGE On The Ballot… Do You See It? 
OKLAHOMA: 
OREGON: PENNSYLVANIA: 
View post on imgur.com ""My name is Brittany Foreman… and today I witnessed Voter Fraud."" #VoterFraud ILLEGAL. Please SHARE pic.twitter.com/5Plk8FszuT 
— Philly GOP (@PhillyGOP) November 8, 2016 
In Philadelphia tailing a pastor's bus that's bussing people to the polls. #VeritasIsEverywhere & we will catch your #VoterFraud . @PhillyGOP pic.twitter.com/FY9UPOQolp 
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) November 8, 2016 

Puerto Rico: 
RHODE ISLAND: 
SOUTH CAROLINA: 
SOUTH DAKOTA: 
TENNESSEE: 
TEXAS: 
UTAH: 
VERMONT: 
VIRGINIA: 
Virgin Islands: 
WASHINGTON: 
WEST VIRGINIA: 
WISCONSIN: 
WYOMING: 
 
The post Live Blog: Voting Fraud Exposed Nationwide appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"Donald Trump said it; Jeb Bush said it, too.

Frankly, a whole range of people have used the term ""anchor baby"" this week in public discussions about Trump's immigration-related policy ideas -- ideas that include an end to the nearly 150-year-old practice of granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

It's the former, known as ""birthright citizenship,"" which is delineated in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And as all sorts of public figures have discussed the future of the 14th Amendment this week, the more colloquial -- many say pejorative -- term ""anchor baby"" has come up over and over again.

But the anchor baby, while potent politically, is a largely mythical idea.

Here's the basic concept: People, namely women, come to the United States illegally and give birth to children, generally for the specific purpose of bolstering legal attempts of the child's parents remain in the United States or even become citizens themselves.

Looser definitions suggest ""anchor babies"" can simply be intended to help illegal-immigrant parents access taxpayer-financed public education and/or social services through their citizen children -- another political hot button, to be sure. (Even here, the law limits those benefits to the children themselves.)

But usually the debate has been about the residency of the parents, who after all are supposed to be using the child as their ""anchor.""

This is the definition that has little legal underpinning. For illegal immigrant parents, being the parent of a U.S. citizen child almost never forms the core of a successful defense in an immigration court. In short, if the undocumented parent of a U.S.-born child is caught in the United States, he or she legally faces the very same risk of deportation as any other immigrant.

The only thing that a so-called anchor baby can do to assist either of their undocumented parents involves such a long game that it's not a practical immigration strategy, said Greg Chen, an immigration law expert and director of The American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade group that also advocates for immigrant-friendly reforms. That long game is this: If and when a U.S. citizen reaches the age of 21, he or she can then apply for a parent to obtain a visa and green card and eventually enter the United States legally.

In order to apply for such an option, the parent of a so-called anchor baby would need to do all of the following.

If a person has lived in the United States unlawfully for a period of more than 180 days but less than one year, there is an automatic three-year bar on that person ever reentering the United States -- and that's before any wait time for a visa. So that's a minimum of 21 years for the child to mature, plus the three-year wait.

And, for the vast majority of these parents, a longer wait also applies. If a person has lived in the United States illegally for a year or more, there is a 10-year ban on that person reentering the United States. So, in that case, there would be the 21-year wait for the child to mature to adulthood, plus the 10-year wait.

All told, the parents of the so-called anchor baby face a 24-to-31-year wait to even enter the United States, much less obtain a visa and green card or become a citizen.

Want proof? See Sections 212(a)(9)(i) and 212 (a)(9)(ii) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) -- or spend an afternoon in your nearest, severely backlogged immigration court.

[Immigration Court backlog grows to more than 450,000 cases]

Immigration courts routinely reject claims that an undocumented parent must remain in the United States to care for a U.S. citizen child. The main but rare legal exceptions are for children who are so seriously ill or profoundly disabled that one parent must care for them full-time, or for a child in need of medical care unavailable in their parents' home country.

These parents are given something called ""humanitarian parole,"" Chen explained. And this is very rarely applied to people already living in the United States illegally. It is more often given to the parents of, say, an Afghan war burn victim who want to accompany their child to the United States for medical care. And, even then, humanitarian parole is generally granted for limited period of time.

Alternatively, these parents can apply for something even more rare: an extreme hardship exception, according to Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard University Law School’s immigration and refugee clinical program. Very rarely they can apply for a waiver that may allow them to reenter the United States sooner, Anker said. But if that request is denied, there is no form of appeal available. Decisions are final.

Yes, it is true that some undocumented immigrants come to the United States and have children with or perhaps even because of the mistaken belief that this will strengthen a legal bid to remain in the United States. Mistaken beliefs have spurred previous surges in illegal immigration -- including last year's.

And it is true that some people -- such as breast-feeding mothers, children brought to the United States illegally as children and others -- have benefited from the immigration system equivalent of proprietorial discretion, known as ""deferred action.""

But with the exception of an Obama administration program known as DACA (limited to an estimated 1.2 million young adults brought to the United States illegally as children) and a second program currently blocked by a federal court that would have granted deferred action to another 300,000 people (mostly the parents of those eligible for DACA), deferred actions typically come with a short and limited timeline. They also do not include a pathway to a visa or legal work in the United States. And these programs did not exist when the concept of an ""anchor baby"" was politically popularized, so it becomes harder to accept the idea that having an ""anchor baby"" was the express goal of many people immigrating illegally.

It's also important to note that, as of August 2014, only about 550,000 DACA applications had been approved, according to a Pew research Center analysis of federal data. And even these applicants must wait until their 21st birthday to begin the lengthy process described above to attempt to help an undocumented parent. And ""attempt"" is the key word here.

And if you're still skeptical, here's the real proof that having a baby in the United States does little to help an undocumented parent remain in the United States, there's this:

In 2011, there were at least 5,000 children in state custody or foster care because an undocumented parent or parents has been deported, according to a study released by the Applied Research Center, a New York-based think tank that focuses on racial and social justice issues. Some estimates put that figure even higher today. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent mandatory reports to the Senate that among other things revealed that during 2013, the agency deported 72,410 people who told federal authorities they have one or more U.S. citizen children.

Each of these children and their parents certainly know the ""anchor baby"" is not real.",REAL
"A prominent Republican consultant — who isn’t working for any of the 2016 presidential candidates and has been right more times than I can count — said something that shocked me when we had lunch recently. He said that Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) had about the same odds of becoming the Republican presidential nominee as former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

Jaw-dropper, right? After all, the conventional wisdom is that Bush, the son and brother of presidents, is the Republican standard-bearer, while Cruz, a conservative’s conservative, is a factor, sure, but not someone who could actually win the nomination.

How, I asked the consultant, could he say such a thing? He explained it this way.

Think of the Republican field as a series of lanes. In this race, there are four of them: establishment, tea party, social conservative and libertarian. The four lanes are not of equal size: Establishment is the biggest, followed by tea party, social conservative and then libertarian.

Obviously, the fight for the top spot in the establishment lane is crowded, with Bush and possibly Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading at the moment. Ditto the social-conservative lane, with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum pushing hard there. The libertarian lane is all Sen. Rand Paul’s, but, as I noted above, it’s still not that big.

This leaves the tea party lane, which is both relatively large and entirely Cruz’s. While Paul looked as though he might try to fight Cruz for supremacy in that lane at one time, it’s clear from his recent moves that the senator from Kentucky is trying to become a player in a bunch of lanes, including social conservative and establishment. So, Cruz is, without question, the dominant figure in the tea party lane.

What that means — particularly in the early stages of the primary process in places such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — is that he will probably be able to win, place or show repeatedly, racking up enough strong-ish performances to keep going even as the establishment and social-conservative lanes thin out. (Cruz’s ability to raise money, which remains a question, is less important for him than it is for other candidates — especially those in the establishment lane. His people are going to be for him no matter how much — or little — communicating he does with them.)

The trick for Cruz, the consultant said, is to hang around long enough to be the preeminent figure not only in the tea party lane but also in the social-conservative lane. (Cruz is decidedly conservative on social issues and talks regularly on the campaign trail about his faith. ) The complicating figure in that consolidation effort is Huckabee, who is (a) likely to run, (b) an ordained Southern Baptist minister and (c) likely to be able to stay in the race for an extended period because of the number of early Southern primaries.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Cruz is able to outlast Huckabee (as well as Carson and Santorum). If you combine the tea party and social-conservative lanes, that’s a pretty wide berth for any candidate hoping to be the GOP nominee. Is it as wide as a consolidated establishment lane behind Bush or Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? No one knows just yet, but it’s probably pretty close.

So watch Cruz. The combination of his running room as the race’s one true tea party candidate, his debating and oratorical skills, and his willingness to always, on every issue, stake out the most conservative position make him a real threat.

The 10 candidates with the best chance of being the Republican candidate in 2016 are ranked below. The No. 1 candidate has the best shot as of today.

10. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Pence hasn’t ruled out a run, though he’s probably got to choose between running for president and reelection in 2016. One recent development: Pence expanded Medicaid in Indiana after negotiating some concessions from the Obama administration — though we’re not sure whether this would help or hurt him in 2016.

9. Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor is giving every indication he is running. If he does, he will be a factor because of his strong following among social conservatives. An NBC-Marist poll released Sunday showed him on top of the field in Iowa.

8. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Jindal is the résumé candidate in the GOP field. He’s shown us little besides that, though, apart from occasionally tossing some red meat to the conservative base. The latest example: not backing down from his comments on “no-go zones” for non-Muslims in Europe.

6. (tie) Cruz. See above. Remember that although he is roundly derided by his colleagues — Democrats and Republicans — in the Senate, he may be closer to how the GOP base feels on most issues than anyone else running.

6. (tie) Ohio Gov. John Kasich. After lying dormant for a few months after his convincing 2014 reelection victory, Kasich will spend two days this week in South Carolina. That trip will spark some buzz about whether he will run, but Kasich may have waited too long — Walker, another Midwestern governor from a swing state, is on the rise.

5. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Increasingly, it’s looking as if Christie missed his window for running for president in 2012. A new Rutgers-Eagleton poll shows that his favorable rating in New Jersey has dropped to 37 percent — after topping out at nearly 70 percent. And it’s not just his home state. Polls of likely GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show that he is the most unliked Republican not named Donald Trump.

4. Paul. Speaking of people whose stock is dropping, the senator’s vaccine comments continue to baffle us — especially because he continues to play the victim card. Yes, there is a segment of the GOP that probably likes the idea that Paul is taking on the “liberal media.” But there’s also a much bigger portion of the party that will look at his vaccine flap and see Ron Paul 2.0.

3. Rubio. Yes, his path to the nomination is complicated by Bush’s all-but-announced candidacy. But if Republican voters are looking for a fresh face who could, theoretically, expand the party’s appeal, then Rubio could be the dark horse in the race.

2. Walker. The Wisconsin governor is clearly ascendant right now, thanks in large part to his strong speech at an Iowa confab a few weekends ago. His ham-handed handling of an evolution question, however, and his decision not to answer questions in London during a trade mission are not good signs.

1. Bush. The former Florida governor remains the top dog , and he got a big break when Mitt Romney opted not to run. Bush probably would have remained No. 1 even if Romney had got in, but the 2012 nominee’s exit makes Bush the obvious choice for GOP establishment types — read: big donors — to rally around.",REAL
"Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the man is winner. Trump didn’t just wallop his opponents Tuesday — he crushed them. Up 41 percent in Delaware, 40 percent in Rhode Island, 37 percent in Pennsylvania, 33 percent in Maryland, 30 percent in Connecticut, he’s estimated to have won 110 delegates, versus five for Kasich and three for Cruz.

If the race for the GOP nomination were a Little League game, the mercy rule would be imposed.

Here’s where we stand today. Ted Cruz is mathematically eliminated from winning the Republican nomination before the convention in Cleveland. John Kasich has now won a single state — Ohio — where he is governor. If ever there were a series of states that would at least theoretically be fertile territory for him, it would be the Northeast, home of the last vestiges of Republican moderates. Yet, he didn’t crack 30 percent anywhere. Republicans can talk all they want about Never Trump and trying to stop him at the RNC in Cleveland. They can talk about changing the rules and holding out hope that a white knight candidate will emerge. It isn’t going to happen. Either Trump is the nominee or he’ll burn the whole thing to the ground. If you’re a gambler, go all in on the former.

It is worth stepping back, however, and noting that Trump’s hammerlock over the party — and his ascendancy within the GOP — is astounding. He’s a political amateur who never held elected office; he’s a xenophobe, a bully, and a misogynist and he has run directly against the leadership of the party he hopes to lead. Yet, today he stands on the cusp of winning the nomination of the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. I know we’ve all become inured to Trump’s insults, his know-nothingness, and his crudeness, but it can’t be said enough — truly we are living in a political moment unlike anything that any of us has seen before.

Here’s what might be even more amazing: Trump’s position as the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is not the most remarkable political event this year. Rather, it’s that the Democratic Party is poised to nominate the first woman to be a major party candidate for president. Somehow this constantly seems to be forgotten; and whether you like Hillary Clinton or despise her, that America is poised to nominate a woman for president is a big deal.

Tuesday night, Clinton racked up four more primary wins, including the delegate-rich states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Only in Rhode Island did Bernie Sanders thwart her. Early on in the evening, before all the races had been called, he gave a “victory” speech in West Virginia that not only left unmentioned the evening’s results, but plowed forward with confidence about the road ahead. It’s a fitting metaphor for the Sanders campaign, which increasingly seems to operate in a realm completely divorced from reality. Sanders cannot and will not win the Democratic nomination. Period.

Indeed, in her victory speech, Clinton — as she has increasingly done — simply ignored Sanders. Instead she aimed her daggers at her real target, Donald Trump. The Democratic race will continue, but for all intents and purposes, it is over. Clinton can now begin her pivot to the general election, and Sanders can play out the string.

What we now with some certainty is that we’re only a few months away from an historic, unprecedented presidential campaign — and no matter which candidate wins on Election Day, history will be made.",REAL
"A former military intelligence officer claimed Tuesday that the White House was delaying the announcement of its decision to file desertion charges against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was released by Taliban-aligned militants last year in exchange for five Guantanamo prisoners.

In defending claims he originally made Monday on ""The O'Reilly Factor"" that Bergdahl would be charged, retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Bill O'Reilly that there was ""no doubt"" the White House was dragging out its decision.

His original accusation had resulted in a strong denial from the Pentagon earlier in the day.

""They said there's no time limit on this decision. (Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John) Kirby even said there's no pressure ... Of course, the moment you say that, there's pressure,"" said Shaffer, who works at the London Center for Policy Research. ""What they didn't say was more compelling than their denial.""

Shaffer, who believes the White House's alleged decision to delay its announcement is politically motivated, added that he stands by ""all of those facts,"" referring to his report on Monday that Bergdahl's lawyer has been given a statement of charges.

Kirby, meanwhile, on Wednesday stood by his claim that no charges have been filed. Asked whether there was political pressure to delay the charges, he said, ""that is the most ludicrous claim I've heard in the last few days.""

Maj. Gen. Ronald F. Lewis, the Army's chief of public affairs, put out a statement Tuesday afternoon calling the reports, including a similar one by NBC News, ""patently false.""

""To be clear there have been no actions or decisions on the Sgt. Bergdahl investigation,"" he said. ""The investigation is still with the commanding general of U.S. Army Forces Command who will determine appropriate action -- which ranges from no further action to convening a court martial.""

Kirby earlier said Bergdahl ""has not been charged,"" and no charges have been referred. ""No decision has been made with respect to the case of Sgt. Bergdahl, none,"" he said. ""And there is no timeline to make that decision."" He said he would not ""speculate"" about what might happen in the future.

Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl's lawyer, did not comment when reached by Fox News earlier Tuesday.

Shaffer said Monday that Bergdahl's attorney has been given a ""charge sheet"" outlining the section of the military justice code Bergdahl allegedly violated.

""As a corporate entity, the Army has decided that they want to pursue Bergdahl for this violation,"" Shaffer said.

Shaffer said there's a ""huge battle"" going on inside the Obama administration, as some try to ""suppress"" this development. ""This is shaping up to be a titanic struggle behind the scenes,"" he said.

Shaffer said the Army ""wants to do the right thing,"" but the White House ""wants this to go away.""

He said: ""The White House, because of the political narrative, President Obama cozying up to the parents and because of he, President Obama, releasing the five Taliban ... The narrative is what the White House does not want to have come out.""

Bergdahl was held for five years before his release was secured in 2014.

But while the president joined with Bergdahl's parents in the Rose Garden at the time in celebrating his return home, the prisoner swap swiftly became a matter of severe controversy. Fellow soldiers accused Bergdahl of deserting his post on a base in Afghanistan in 2009. And the trade itself, of his freedom for five Guantanamo prisoners, drew criticism in Congress from lawmakers who said it sent a troubling signal.

On Monday, former diplomat Richard Grenell claimed the administration has ""sent the message"" that the U.S. will negotiate on such matters. He cited an alleged offer, made around the same time as Bergdahl's release, by the Qatari government to trade two Americans held in Qatar for an Al Qaeda agent held in a U.S. federal prison. The Obama administration denies there was any deal. Those prisoners were ultimately released over the past two months.",REAL
"As soon as Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) shocked his fellow Republicans by withdrawing from the race for House speaker, Paul Ryan knew what was coming.

“I will not be a candidate,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a release issued less than 20 minutes after McCarthy’s stunning Thursday announcement, in an immediate bid to cut off any pressure for him to do a job he has repeatedly said he does not want.

But this time, it didn’t take. By mid-afternoon, outgoing speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had spoken to Ryan at least twice, trying to convince the reluctant congressman that he was the only man who could save House Republicans from their self-created chaos.

By day’s end, after hunkering down for two hours in his ceremonial office a few steps from the House floor, after listening to pleas from friends to take the reins of the bitterly divided Republican caucus, he emerged, declining to explicitly state his plans.

“I’ve got no news for you guys,” Ryan told reporters, exiting the Capitol. “I’ve got nothing to add right now. . . . This is not the time or place, guys.”

Boehner and several other prominent Republicans are turning to their party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee out of desperation, believing that he is the only member of the House with the stature to be speaker. Two other members, Reps. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), have announced their candidacies, but they are widely seen as too inexperienced or underwhelming to handle the job.

Although Ryan has the standing and experience — at 45, he has already been in office 17 years — it is not clear that he is suited to the role, either. He has never held an elected leadership position, never had to spend hours listening to every complaint possible from rank-and-file lawmakers. A self-styled policy wonk, Ryan prefers to spend time in a committee room cobbling together legislation than working the fundraising circuit in New York and Florida — a modern-day requirement of any House speaker.

Even if Ryan does win the job, some supporters question whether the most respected member of the House Republican Conference would be able to tame the divisions to push a unified agenda: The same 30 to 40 conservatives who have helped usher Boehner toward the door, and who appeared ready to deny McCarthy the job, plan to be just as hard on whoever the next speaker is when it comes to showdowns with President Obama and Democrats.

“He’s still going to have to deal with the same dynamic,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a leader of the small moderate wing and a backer of Ryan’s ascension. “That may be part of the reason why he’s denying this so far — he knows the dynamic.”

Yet by 6:15 p.m. Thursday, as McCarthy increased the pressure on Ryan to run for the job and the Capitol press corps camped outside his office, Ryan’s spokesman resorted to Twitter.

But everything has changed, according to his colleagues.

As they voted on the House floor late Thursday, Ryan was besieged by his GOP colleagues. As the lawmakers huddled, Ryan aides canceled his fundraising and political events for the next

48 hours, a move interpreted by his friends as a signal that he had gone from a hard “no” to undecided after speaking with Boehner.

His party’s elder statesmen, long enamored with Ryan’s policy inclinations since his days as a disciple of Jack Kemp, said he needed to answer the call. But that doesn’t mean the door is shut.

“Knowing him, if it becomes clear to him, as it is to so many others, that he’s first among peers, he may do it,” William J. Bennett, an education secretary in the Reagan administration and a close friend of Ryan, said in an interview Thursday.

The situation is more dire than the one Ryan confronted two weeks ago when Boehner, under intense pressure from the right flank, shocked the House Republican Conference by announcing his plan to resign Oct. 30, setting

Oct. 29 as the original date for a full vote of the House on his successor.

Walking out of that Sept. 25 meeting, Ryan said then — and has consistently repeated — that he did not want the job and that it would be a terrible one for a man with three school-age children living in Janesville, Wis., 75 miles southwest of Milwaukee.

His long game, according to those close to him, is not rising up in the House. He has been touted as a potential treasury secretary in a GOP administration. He declined to run for president this time, but he still has a couple of decades ahead of him.

That future could crumble if he listens to his colleagues. Not since Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) left as speaker in 1986 has anyone retired from that job in good standing. Today’s House is more rife with pitfalls than it was even a decade ago.

Many of his colleagues, such Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, were calling on him Thursday to gamble his future to meet the present need.

“I would say, unequivocally, if I could choose the perfect person to be speaker, today, for this conference, it would be Paul Ryan,” Flores said.

Karoun Demirjian, Kelsey Snell and David Weigel contributed to this report.",REAL
"Libyan fighters are celebrating a major victory on Tuesday: They've driven ISIS out of parts of Benghazi, eastern Libya's largest city, building on advances in and around the city on Sunday.

ISIS isn't just losing in Benghazi. In its home base in Syria and Iraq, it's lost up to 30 percent of its territory from its peak in August 2014. And it's tried expanding abroad, officially declaring a wilayat — which literally means ""province"" and refers to ISIS's foreign franchises — in roughly a dozen countries.

These ISIS franchises showed some initial successes, for example in Libya, but since mid-2015 they have been struggling. Many of ISIS's wilayat have stopped growing and begun shrinking. Some ISIS affiliates have been wiped out altogether.

""The Islamic State has encountered one serious obstacle after another as it has tried to expand its presence beyond Syria and Iraq,"" Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO of the consulting firm Valens Global, writes with threat analyst Nathaniel Barr in War on the Rocks on Tuesday. ""These stumbles have gone largely unnoticed by the international media.""

Gartenstein-Ross and Barr examined seven ISIS expansion attempts and found that each had serious problems. In every case, the ISIS franchise they looked at has either suffered a major battlefield defeat, had members targeted and killed in significant numbers by rival jihadist groups, or was defeated outright.

""Overall, [ISIS] is having significant troubles expanding. Joining ISIL can be a fatal decision,"" Gartenstein-Ross told me, using another name for ISIS.

The first example he pointed to was a group called the Islamic Movement in Uzbekistan (IMU). IMU is a decades-old jihadist group with ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In August, it formally pledged itself to ISIS, working with the already-established Afghanistan-based ISIS franchise.

Over the course of the next several months, the Taliban, once IMU's ally, sought out and killed IMU fighters in a targeted campaign aimed at destroying the group. This culminated in a November purge, wherein the Taliban killed 100 IMU fighters and allegedly captured its leader, wiping out the group entirely.

""What America and its agents could not do in 14 years, the Taliban did in 24 hours,"" one IMU supporter tweeted at the time.

ISIS's troubles in Algeria are, if anything, more dramatic. The group officially recognized a wilayat there, largely made up of former al-Qaeda fighters, in 2014. In October 2014, ISIS's Algerian branch captured a French mountain climber and beheaded him on tape.

The beheading attracted the attention of Algerian security forces, which shortly thereafter killed the group's leader. Later, in May 2015, Algerian forces killed five ISIS commanders and the overwhelming majority of its ground fighters in two days of fighting. Today, Gartenstein-Ross says, ISIS in Algeria is a ""paper wilayat,"" with only six or seven fighters to its name.

ISIS's Yemen wilayat is in even worse shape.

You'd think Yemen would be the perfect opportunity for ISIS: It has no functional government and is in the midst of a civil war with major sectarian overtones. But the group has been riven by public infighting; Gartenstein-Ross and Barr documented roughly 100 defections in the past several months — out of a force estimated to be at most 1,000, and possibly much less.

""This outfit in Yemen is not very strong,"" Will McCants, director of the Project on US Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, tells me. ""They're, at the moment, a pretty bit player in that conflict.""

Even relatively powerful ISIS franchises are having problems. The Libya branch lost its hold on the Libyan city of Derna in December, pushed out by a coalition of rival militant groups. Today, it controls only one major population center — the town of Sirte — and about 173 miles of coastal territory.

""In Libya, where they're strongest, they only control a thin strip along the coast,"" McCants says. ""It's not nothing, but it's not nearly as impressive as what they control in Syrian and Iraq.""

These cases, according to Gartenstein-Ross and Barr, are representative of ISIS's struggles to expand beyond Iraq and Syria.

""The group has stumbled or even fallen flat in almost every country where it has tried to establish a new wilayat,"" Gartenstein-Ross and Barr write. ""The group’s failures as it tries to expand beyond Syria and Iraq could cast doubt on its entire global caliphate project.""

ISIS's struggles to expand reveal some major weaknesses inherent in the group's ""DNA,"" as Gartenstein-Ross puts it, that limit its efforts to expand.

First, the group makes enemies out of other jihadist groups. Its ideological and strategic model depends on its claim to be the prophesied Islamic caliphate and its ability to prove that claim by holding territory. Other militant groups, in ISIS's mind, must submit to ISIS and hand over their territory — or be destroyed.

""That's a constant — they don't play well [with others],"" McCants says. This leads to conflict with other jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which perceive ISIS as a threat and so move to crush new franchises as they're forming.

This is particularly problematic for ISIS because it thrives most in civil wars with sectarian elements — places where other jihadist groups already operate.

""Derna was always gonna be a tough nut to crack, because that's jihadist central in Libya,"" McCants says. ""AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] has long roots in Yemen, and has been more successful in exploiting the chaos.""

Second, ISIS's showiness — the penchant for ghoulish murders and slick social media — can attract the attention of enemies before ISIS is really ready to take them on.

""That's one of the things that got them into trouble in Algeria,"" Gartenstein-Ross says. ""The ostentatious beheading of [the French mountain climber] drew counterinsurgent resources down on them in a way that they weren't ready for.""

Finally, ISIS is, weirdly enough, too top-down and bureaucratic. It isn't very good at selecting leaders who work well with locals or mediating internal, local disputes in its franchises.

""Despite their rebellious nature, they're a very rigid organization internally,"" Gartenstein-Ross explains. ""In Yemen, the central leadership ended up contributing to that branch falling apart under the weight of a leader that the ISIL members don't agree with.""

Despite ISIS's defeats in the Libyan cities of Benghazi and Derna, the group is still deeply entrenched in Sirte — and getting a number of new recruits. Its Egypt branch has withstood repeated assaults from the Egyptian government and has managed to pull off a number of high-profile terrorist attacks. And that's to say nothing of Boko Haram, which pledged itself to ISIS last year and is now recognized as Wilayat Nigeria.

""Around January 2015, when I finished the first draft of [my ISIS] book, it was laughable,"" McCants says of the franchises. ""Then when I had to go back and revise four months later, I had to completely change the section. In that short time, they had made such a rapid advance. They've gotten stronger since then.""

So the point is not to dismiss the franchises entirely. Rather, it's to recognize that they are not, as is often portrayed in the media, a sign of ISIS sweeping across the globe. It's an attempt by a terrorist group with very serious problems to try to create some breathing room outside of its troubled core holdings.

ISIS thrives on a narrative of victory. Now that the group's defeats in Iraq and Syria are too numerous and prominent for anyone to reasonably deny, the group has increasingly turned to the franchises to continue selling its narrative of constant territorial growth.

""They have this narrative of momentum; it's clearly very important to drawing people to the group, drawing organizations to ISIS,"" Gartenstein-Ross says. ""This is an area of great vulnerability if [the truth] were widely known.""

ISIS's affiliates help ""maintain the fiction that this is an empire on the march,"" McCants says.

No matter how you judge the success of the franchises — and here, McCants is less optimistic than Gartenstein-Ross — both agree that any victories abroad don't come close to outweighing the losses the group has taken in Iraq and Syria.",REAL
"After Donald Trump presented a dark picture of the country at his convention in Cleveland last week, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats plan to project a more optimistic and inclusive vision of the future when they convene here starting Monday.

But the challenge for Clinton and her newly minted running mate, Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.), will be to avoid becoming cheerleaders for the status quo and instead infuse that hopeful tone into an argument for change that could galvanize a frustrated and divided electorate.

Democrats promise four nights of speeches and entertainment that will highlight the core theme of Clinton’s campaign: “Stronger together.” The program will alternate among political heavyweights led by President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, celebrities such as Katy Perry and Lena Dunham, and everyday Americans whose aim will be to make Clinton appear more appealing and approachable.

Clinton’s advisers are confident that the Philadelphia festivities will present a far more united Democratic Party than Republicans were able to display at their convention, which was repeatedly marred by outbursts of dissent and division.

Central to that mission is the Monday night speech by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who is charged with trying to rally his fervent supporters behind Clinton’s banner after a bruising primary battle, although there is lingering resistance to Clinton among some of his loyalists.

The harsh tone of Trump’s convention — symbolized by the anti-Clinton chants of “Lock her up!” — gives the Democratic nominee-in-waiting and her allies an opportunity to expand her appeal to disaffected voters who are hungry for change but perhaps reluctant to embrace Trump and the brand of politics he enunciated in Cleveland. At the same time, the Democrats similarly risk overreach in their denunciations of Trump.

Another danger is that if protests outside the arena turn violent, it could mar the party’s effort to provide a united and relatively peaceful contrast to the Republican event.

“The Republicans painted a black canvas with maybe a little stripe of red, which would be Donald Trump’s tie,” Democratic pollster Peter Hart said. “Unexpectedly, the Democrats end up with a white canvas and a chance to paint it in any direction that they wish.”

[In his most important speech ever, Donald Trump echoes Richard Nixon]

All year, Clinton has struggled to find a message that both energizes the Democratic faithful and reaches to a different part of the general electorate disenchanted with politics as usual. This will be her challenge on Thursday night, when she becomes the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major party.

“If she is so concerned about the progressive revolt that days one, two, three and four [of the convention] are saying, ‘I’m Bernie Sanders Lite with pantsuits,’ then this whole group turned off by Trump has nowhere to go,” said Henry Olsen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

But Housing Secretary Julián Castro, who was in the competition to become Clinton’s running mate, noted the importance of energizing the coalition that helped Obama win two elections.

“We need an infusion of motivation and energy to remind folks that we can’t take this election for granted,” he said. “The nature of modern presidential elections, given the country’s partisanship, is that these are close elections. It’s probably not going to be a blowout, and people need to understand how important their individual vote is.”

Four days of programming at the Wells Fargo Center will showcase the Democratic Party’s diversity and progressivism, designed to help as many voters as possible identify with Clinton and the rest of the ticket. The speakers will be white, black, Latino and Asian; Christian, Jewish and Muslim; old and young; gay and straight; male and female. There is expected to be a heavy focus on issues such as immigration, gay rights and gun control.

Having watched the Republicans fight among themselves in Cleveland, Democrats will arrive in Philadelphia full of confidence. But some in the party suggest that, like much about Trump over the past year, what looks to be a problem for him does not always become one.

“We need to be agnostic on just how negative its consequences will be or indeed whether they’ll be negative at all,” said William Galston, domestic policy adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Galston added, “The idea that Donald Trump’s convention speech allows Democrats to put any product they want on the shelf and expect the consumers to buy it is an optimistic proposition that I can’t embrace, and I hope the Clinton campaign won’t either.”

Democratic leaders have no doubt that their convention will contrast sharply with that of the Republicans.

“We just saw four days of some of the angriest people possibly in the United States of America — chaos, vitriol, confusion, plagiarism, mismanagement of a convention the likes of which we’ve not seen in either party in modern times,” said former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter (D).

Clinton enters her convention with a majority of Americans questioning her honesty. She has an opportunity to speak to a huge audience beyond the delegates assembled at the Wells Fargo Center, but many of those voters will be looking on skeptically.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, noted that the underlying mood in the country puts Clinton at some risk as she campaigns to extend the Democrats’ hold on the White House to a third consecutive term.

“What Clinton cannot do is get herself in the position of defending the status quo, and that’s going to be a challenge, because she is the essence of the status quo,” Ayres said. “If she lets this [election] get defined as change versus status quo, where Trump’s change and she is not, that’s one way she can lose this thing.”

Trump’s coalition potentially cuts across traditional party lines, and as a political outsider, he has shown a particular ability to attract support from what he called “forgotten” Americans, many of them white and working class. “People who work hard but no longer have a voice: I am your voice,” Trump said in Cleveland.

[Donald Trump positions himself as the voice for ‘the forgotten’]

Olsen suggested that Clinton could peel away some of that support with the right message aimed at the right segment of Trump’s base — such as white, working-class women. He said Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, set him up to talk to these women with her introductory speech but that the candidate failed to do so.

On Friday in Tampa, Clinton previewed how she would rebut Trump’s declarations, including his suggestion that he alone could fix what ails the country. “I can’t really imagine him on a white horse,” she quipped.

Clinton said: “We will offer a very different vision. It’s about building bridges, not walls, between people. It’s about making the economy work for everyone, not just those at the top. It’s about embracing our diversity that does make our country great.”

The convention’s nightly themes focus on unity. Opening night, Monday, will be “United together: Putting families first” and feature addresses by first lady Michelle Obama and Sanders, as well as Astrid Silva from Nevada, a “dreamer” brought to the United States as a child by parents who are illegal immigrants.

Tuesday’s theme is “A lifetime of fighting for children and families” and will be headlined by Bill Clinton and “the mothers of the movement,” whose sons and daughters were killed in police and other shootings.

Wednesday night, “Working together,” will star Kaine, President Obama and Vice President Biden. Many Democrats expect that Obama will reprise the role Bill Clinton played at the 2012 convention in Charlotte by delivering not only a full-throated endorsement of onetime rival Hillary Clinton, but also a point-by-point defense of his record and the economic gains under Democratic leadership.

On Friday, Obama gave a taste of how he would respond to Trump’s dark portrayal of the state of the country. “This idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people,” he said. “I hope people, the next morning, walked outside, and birds were chirping, and the sun was out.”

The convention will reach its crescendo on Thursday night with the theme “Stronger together,” when Clinton will give her acceptance speech and be introduced by her daughter, Chelsea.

Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said: “This convention will crystallize the fight that she’s already fought and what she will do going forward for American families as president. Hillary Clinton and Democrats will effectively make the case over these four days for an America that’s at its best when we work together to solve our problems.”

Democrats thought the Republican convention focused too much on Trump’s personality and offered generalities but few policy proposals to back them up — especially on the economy and jobs.

In Philadelphia, Democrats are expected to remind voters that the economy was roaring during Bill Clinton’s presidency and has improved considerably during Obama’s. Yet they also will acknowledge that there is more to do.

“There is an opening for someone who can create some hope that she knows how to make things better with some specific ideas,” said Ayres, the Republican pollster.

Striking the right tone on the state of the country, and the proper balance between a celebration of the Democratic base and an appeal for broader unity, remain the biggest tests for Clinton.

“I don’t think the American public desires to have ‘Happy days are here again,’ ” Democratic pollster Hart said. “The ability to condense the Clinton message into something which is both hopeful and realistic would make a huge difference.”",REAL
"Don’t Root, Root, Root for the Racist, Red-Face Team from Cleveland Paul Thornton, Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2016 
How I wish it were the Dodgers who took the field Tuesday night in Cleveland. Yes, we’re all sad in Los Angeles that our team is now one year closer to celebrating the 30th anniversary of its last World Series appearance, but this goes beyond provincialism and wounded civil pride. 
The Dodgers deserved the chance to humiliate a Cleveland baseball team that not only persists in identifying itself as the “Indians,” but also resurrected the laughably racist, red-faced mascot Chief Wahoo just in time for the playoffs. 
For those who haven’t kept up with the baseball drama, here’s a summary: The Cleveland team drew the curtain on its regular-season minstrel show in the spring, having replaced Chief Wahoo on its caps with a vintage red “C.” It never officially retired the offending mascot, but Wahoo remained confined only to uniform sleeves throughout the regular season, leading reasonable people to believe that the team ownership had finally seen the light where other franchises such as the NFL’s Washington Redskins remained defiantly in the dark, and was easing its fans into the post-“Indians” era. 
Or so we thought. Chief Wahoo reappeared when the Cleveland team began its impressive playoff run against the Boston Red Sox, and he hasn’t left. He remained stitched on hats and held aloft by adoring Cleveland fans as the team convincingly defeated the Toronto Blue Jays, even surviving a legal attack by advocates of Canada’s indigenous peoples that threatened to forbid even so much as the use of the term “Indians” while the team was on Canadian soil. 
{snip} 
It’s tempting to look past all this and take pity on a city that’s had it as rough as Cleveland. The Cubs’ championship drought has famously lasted for 107 baseball seasons, but the Cleveland team boasts a pitiable 67 years without a World Series title. Beyond sports, Cleveland’s decline as an important American metropolis is arguably unmatched, having tumbled from a population peak of 900,000-plus in 1950 to less than 400,000 today. {snip} 
But Cleveland? Hey, I know some generous, wonderfully caring people from that part of Ohio, which makes wishing for their team’s brutal defeat personally difficult. But being on the right side of a moral dispute isn’t supposed to be easy, especially when the team in question isn’t the evil Washington Redskins and its infernal owner, Daniel Snyder. Cleveland’s municipal misery doesn’t excuse the disgraceful exalting of Chief Wahoo any more than white men’s economic hardship makes Donald Trump’s popularity OK. 
{snip}",FAKE
"Leave a reply 
Greg Hunter – There are numerous reports on the alternative media of documents being given to WikiLeaks to counter the corruption and lawlessness of the Obamas and Clintons. AG Loretta Lynch has been reportedly blocking an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation that many say is a “global charity fraud” and a “huge criminal conspiracy.” 
The leaked emails and documents show corruption between the Justice Department and Hillary Clinton. These documents and emails also show a grand cover-up of the true treason that has taken place in the highest offices of the U.S. government. 
The mainstream media (MSM) have been committing fraud on shareholders and the public by holding themselves out as “news organizations” when, in fact, they are functioning as propaganda for the Clinton campaign. It’s no surprise that the nation’s biggest newspaper, USA Today (GCI), has had its share price cut in half in the last a year. Reuters is laying off 2,000 people, and quarterly profits at the New York Times have fallen by 95%. The public is not buying the lies and propaganda the MSM is selling for the Democrats and the Clinton Campaign. 
Internet researcher Clif High says both the MSM and the Democrat Party are dying. He says by 2020, the Democrat party will not exist, and the MSM will be well on its way to its death. 
Join Greg Hunter as he talks about these stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up. SF Source USA Watchdog Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
"Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would not abandon Russians living in southeast Ukraine to Ukrainian nationalists, RIA news agency quoted him as saying in a documentary due to be broadcast later on Sunday.

More than 9,000 people have been killed in fighting in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops since April 2014. Moscow says Ukrainian nationalists pose a threat to ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the region.

According to RIA, Putin also said Russia would continue to improve its nuclear arsenal, but added that it would not wield the ""nuclear big stick.""",REAL
"Hillary Clinton has cancelled all upcoming campaign events following the FBI’s announcement that they are reopening their email server investigation. 
Via YourNewsWire 
The reopening of the case has sent the Clinton campaign into complete chaos, according to reports . According to “Citizens for Trump” Special Projects Director Jack Posobiec, Hillary is looking to get out of the media spotlight for a while.
Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) October 29, 2016 

In a tweet, he stated: “Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC.” The Clinton campaign want to focus on states that Hillary lost serious ground in – like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Michigan.
Has the latest email scandal finally brought Hillary to her knees? Will there even be an election on November 8th, or will we be watching Hillary Clinton go on trial? It seems like anything is possible right now.
",FAKE
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 15 + 14 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
"Freddie Gray, whose death triggered Monday’s rioting in Baltimore, may have intentionally tried to injure himself in a police van, according to another prisoner in the vehicle, the Washington Post reported late Wednesday night.

The Post said the unidentified prisoner, who was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him, reportedly said he heard Gray “banging himself against the walls” and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.

The prisoner’s statements were contained in an investigative document obtained by the paper, which said it was unclear if there was any additional information to support the theory.

Gray, who is black, was arrested April 12 after he ran from police. Officers held him down, handcuffed him and loaded him into the police van. While inside, he became irate and leg cuffs were put on him, police had said. At some point, he suffered a severe spinal injury and was unconscious when the van arrived at a police station.

Authorities have not explained how or when Gray’s spine was injured. He died April 19.

The death of Gray sparked riots earlier this week in Baltimore as protests turned violent resulting into major property damage throughout the city and around 200 arrests

Tuesday, the city started to enforce a curfew starting at 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. More than 3,000 National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers were called into the city to make sure no more violence took place in the city. Baltimore stayed quiet throughout the night Wednesday as well.

Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has also come under fire after a senior law enforcement told Fox News Wednesday that she ordered police to stand down.

The source, who is involved in the enforcement efforts, confirmed to Fox News there was a direct order from the mayor to her police chief Monday night, effectively tying the hands of officers as they were pelted with rocks and bottles.

The claim follows criticism of the mayor for, over the weekend, saying they were giving space to those who ""wished to destroy.""

Rawlings-Blake has defended her handling of the unrest, which grew out of protests over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody.

The mayor, in an interview with Fox News' Bill Hemmer on Tuesday, denied any order was issued to hold back on Monday.

""You have to understand, it is not holding back. It is responding appropriately,"" she said, saying there was no stand-down directive.

She said her critics have a right to their opinion.

Baltimore police are expected to finish their investigation Friday and turn the results over to the city’s state’s attorney office, which will decide whether to seek indictment. Six police officers, including a lieutenant and a sergeant, have been suspended.

Fox News' Leland Vittert and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"How to contact WikiLeaks? What is Tor? Tips for Sources After Submitting 
This key's fingerprint is A04C 5E09 ED02 B328 03EB 6116 93ED 732E 9231 8DBA BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK mQQNBFUoCGgBIADFLp+QonWyK8L6SPsNrnhwgfCxCk6OUHRIHReAsgAUXegpfg0b rsoHbeI5W9s5to/MUGwULHj59M6AvT+DS5rmrThgrND8Dt0dO+XW88bmTXHsFg9K jgf1wUpTLq73iWnSBo1m1Z14BmvkROG6M7+vQneCXBFOyFZxWdUSQ15vdzjr4yPR oMZjxCIFxe+QL+pNpkXd/St2b6UxiKB9HT9CXaezXrjbRgIzCeV6a5TFfcnhncpO ve59rGK3/az7cmjd6cOFo1Iw0J63TGBxDmDTZ0H3ecQvwDnzQSbgepiqbx4VoNmH OxpInVNv3AAluIJqN7RbPeWrkohh3EQ1j+lnYGMhBktX0gAyyYSrkAEKmaP6Kk4j /ZNkniw5iqMBY+v/yKW4LCmtLfe32kYs5OdreUpSv5zWvgL9sZ+4962YNKtnaBK3 1hztlJ+xwhqalOCeUYgc0Clbkw+sgqFVnmw5lP4/fQNGxqCO7Tdy6pswmBZlOkmH XXfti6hasVCjT1MhemI7KwOmz/KzZqRlzgg5ibCzftt2GBcV3a1+i357YB5/3wXE j0vkd+SzFioqdq5Ppr+//IK3WX0jzWS3N5Lxw31q8fqfWZyKJPFbAvHlJ5ez7wKA 1iS9krDfnysv0BUHf8elizydmsrPWN944Flw1tOFjW46j4uAxSbRBp284wiFmV8N TeQjBI8Ku8NtRDleriV3djATCg2SSNsDhNxSlOnPTM5U1bmh+Ehk8eHE3hgn9lRp 2kkpwafD9pXaqNWJMpD4Amk60L3N+yUrbFWERwncrk3DpGmdzge/tl/UBldPoOeK p3shjXMdpSIqlwlB47Xdml3Cd8HkUz8r05xqJ4DutzT00ouP49W4jqjWU9bTuM48 LRhrOpjvp5uPu0aIyt4BZgpce5QGLwXONTRX+bsTyEFEN3EO6XLeLFJb2jhddj7O DmluDPN9aj639E4vjGZ90Vpz4HpN7JULSzsnk+ZkEf2XnliRody3SwqyREjrEBui 9ktbd0hAeahKuwia0zHyo5+1BjXt3UHiM5fQN93GB0hkXaKUarZ99d7XciTzFtye /MWToGTYJq9bM/qWAGO1RmYgNr+gSF/fQBzHeSbRN5tbJKz6oG4NuGCRJGB2aeXW TIp/VdouS5I9jFLapzaQUvtdmpaeslIos7gY6TZxWO06Q7AaINgr+SBUvvrff/Nl l2PRPYYye35MDs0b+mI5IXpjUuBC+s59gI6YlPqOHXkKFNbI3VxuYB0VJJIrGqIu Fv2CXwy5HvR3eIOZ2jLAfsHmTEJhriPJ1sUG0qlfNOQGMIGw9jSiy/iQde1u3ZoF so7sXlmBLck9zRMEWRJoI/mgCDEpWqLX7hTTABEBAAG0x1dpa2lMZWFrcyBFZGl0 b3JpYWwgT2ZmaWNlIEhpZ2ggU2VjdXJpdHkgQ29tbXVuaWNhdGlvbiBLZXkgKFlv dSBjYW4gY29udGFjdCBXaWtpTGVha3MgYXQgaHR0cDovL3dsY2hhdGMzcGp3cGxp NXIub25pb24gYW5kIGh0dHBzOi8vd2lraWxlYWtzLm9yZy90YWxrKSA8Y29udGFj dC11cy11c2luZy1vdXItY2hhdC1zeXN0ZW1Ad2lraWxlYWtzLm9yZz6JBD0EEwEK ACcCGwMFCwkIBwMFFQoJCAsFFgIDAQACHgECF4AFAlb6cdIFCQOznOoACgkQk+1z LpIxjbrlqh/7B2yBrryWhQMGFj+xr9TIj32vgUIMohq94XYqAjOnYdEGhb5u5B5p BNowcqdFB1SOEvX7MhxGAqYocMT7zz2AkG3kpf9f7gOAG7qA1sRiB+R7mZtUr9Kv fQSsRFPb6RNzqqB9I9wPNGhBh1YWusUPluLINwbjTMnHXeL96HgdLT+fIBa8ROmn 0fjJVoWYHG8QtsKiZ+lo2m/J4HyuJanAYPgL6isSu/1bBSwhEIehlQIfXZuS3j35 12SsO1Zj2BBdgUIrADdMAMLneTs7oc1/PwxWYQ4OTdkay2deg1g/N6YqM2N7rn1W 7A6tmuH7dfMlhcqw8bf5veyag3RpKHGcm7utDB6k/bMBDMnKazUnM2VQoi1mutHj kTCWn/vF1RVz3XbcPH94gbKxcuBi8cjXmSWNZxEBsbirj/CNmsM32Ikm+WIhBvi3 1mWvcArC3JSUon8RRXype4ESpwEQZd6zsrbhgH4UqF56pcFT2ubnqKu4wtgOECsw K0dHyNEiOM1lL919wWDXH9tuQXWTzGsUznktw0cJbBVY1dGxVtGZJDPqEGatvmiR o+UmLKWyxTScBm5o3zRm3iyU10d4gka0dxsSQMl1BRD3G6b+NvnBEsV/+KCjxqLU vhDNup1AsJ1OhyqPydj5uyiWZCxlXWQPk4p5WWrGZdBDduxiZ2FTj17hu8S4a5A4 lpTSoZ/nVjUUl7EfvhQCd5G0hneryhwqclVfAhg0xqUUi2nHWg19npPkwZM7Me/3 +ey7svRUqxVTKbXffSOkJTMLUWqZWc087hL98X5rfi1E6CpBO0zmHeJgZva+PEQ/ ZKKi8oTzHZ8NNlf1qOfGAPitaEn/HpKGBsDBtE2te8PF1v8LBCea/d5+Umh0GELh 5eTq4j3eJPQrTN1znyzpBYkR19/D/Jr5j4Vuow5wEE28JJX1TPi6VBMevx1oHBuG qsvHNuaDdZ4F6IJTm1ZYBVWQhLbcTginCtv1sadct4Hmx6hklAwQN6VVa7GLOvnY RYfPR2QA3fGJSUOg8xq9HqVDvmQtmP02p2XklGOyvvfQxCKhLqKi0hV9xYUyu5dk 2L/A8gzA0+GIN+IYPMsf3G7aDu0qgGpi5Cy9xYdJWWW0DA5JRJc4/FBSN7xBNsW4 eOMxl8PITUs9GhOcc68Pvwyv4vvTZObpUjZANLquk7t8joky4Tyog29KYSdhQhne oVODrdhTqTPn7rjvnwGyjLInV2g3pKw/Vsrd6xKogmE8XOeR8Oqk6nun+Y588Nsj XddctWndZ32dvkjrouUAC9z2t6VE36LSyYJUZcC2nTg6Uir+KUTs/9RHfrvFsdI7 iMucdGjHYlKc4+YwTdMivI1NPUKo/5lnCbkEDQRVKAhoASAAvnuOR+xLqgQ6KSOO RTkhMTYCiHbEsPmrTfNA9VIip+3OIzByNYtfFvOWY2zBh3H2pgf+2CCrWw3WqeaY wAp9zQb//rEmhwJwtkW/KXDQr1k95D5gzPeCK9R0yMPfjDI5nLeSvj00nFF+gjPo Y9Qb10jp/Llqy1z35Ub9ZXuA8ML9nidkE26KjG8FvWIzW8zTTYA5Ezc7U+8HqGZH VsK5KjIO2GOnJiMIly9MdhawS2IXhHTV54FhvZPKdyZUQTxkwH2/8QbBIBv0OnFY 3w75Pamy52nAzI7uOPOU12QIwVj4raLC+DIOhy7bYf9pEJfRtKoor0RyLnYZTT3N 0H4AT2YeTra17uxeTnI02lS2Jeg0mtY45jRCU7MrZsrpcbQ464I+F411+AxI3NG3 cFNJOJO2HUMTa+2PLWa3cERYM6ByP60362co7cpZoCHyhSvGppZyH0qeX+BU1oyn 5XhT+m7hA4zupWAdeKbOaLPdzMu2Jp1/QVao5GQ8kdSt0n5fqrRopO1WJ/S1eoz+ Ydy3dCEYK+2zKsZ3XeSC7MMpGrzanh4pk1DLr/NMsM5L5eeVsAIBlaJGs75Mp+kr ClQL/oxiD4XhmJ7MlZ9+5d/o8maV2K2pelDcfcW58tHm3rHwhmNDxh+0t5++i30y BIa3gYHtZrVZ3yFstp2Ao8FtXe/1ALvwE4BRalkh+ZavIFcqRpiF+YvNZ0JJF52V rwL1gsSGPsUY6vsVzhpEnoA+cJGzxlor5uQQmEoZmfxgoXKfRC69si0ReoFtfWYK 8Wu9sVQZW1dU6PgBB30X/b0Sw8hEzS0cpymyBXy8g+itdi0NicEeWHFKEsXa+HT7 mjQrMS7c84Hzx7ZOH6TpX2hkdl8Nc4vrjF4iff1+sUXj8xDqedrg29TseHCtnCVF kfRBvdH2CKAkbgi9Xiv4RqAP9vjOtdYnj7CIG9uccek/iu/bCt1y/MyoMU3tqmSJ c8QeA1L+HENQ/HsiErFGug+Q4Q1SuakHSHqBLS4TKuC+KO7tSwXwHFlFp47GicHe rnM4v4rdgKic0Z6lR3QpwoT9KwzOoyzyNlnM9wwnalCLwPcGKpjVPFg1t6F+eQUw WVewkizhF1sZBbED5O/+tgwPaD26KCNuofdVM+oIzVPOqQXWbaCXisNYXoktH3Tb 0X/DjsIeN4TVruxKGy5QXrvo969AQNx8Yb82BWvSYhJaXX4bhbK0pBIT9fq08d5R IiaN7/nFU3vavXa+ouesiD0cnXSFVIRiPETCKl45VM+f3rRHtNmfdWVodyXJ1O6T ZjQTB9ILcfcb6XkvH+liuUIppINu5P6i2CqzRLAvbHGunjvKLGLfvIlvMH1mDqxp VGvNPwARAQABiQQlBBgBCgAPAhsMBQJW+nHeBQkDs5z2AAoJEJPtcy6SMY26Qtgf /0tXRbwVOBzZ4fI5NKSW6k5A6cXzbB3JUxTHMDIZ93CbY8GvRqiYpzhaJVjNt2+9 zFHBHSfdbZBRKX8N9h1+ihxByvHncrTwiQ9zFi0FsrJYk9z/F+iwmqedyLyxhIEm SHtWiPg6AdUM5pLu8GR7tRHagz8eGiwVar8pZo82xhowIjpiQr0Bc2mIAusRs+9L jc+gjwjbhYIg2r2r9BUBGuERU1A0IB5Fx+IomRtcfVcL/JXSmXqXnO8+/aPwpBuk bw8sAivSbBlEu87P9OovsuEKxh/PJ65duQNjC+2YxlVcF03QFlFLGzZFN7Fcv5JW lYNeCOOz9NP9TTsR2EAZnacNk75/FYwJSJnSblCBre9xVA9pI5hxb4zu7CxRXuWc QJs8Qrvdo9k4Jilx5U9X0dsiNH2swsTM6T1gyVKKQhf5XVCS4bPWYagXcfD9/xZE eAhkFcAuJ9xz6XacT9j1pw50MEwZbwDneV93TqvHmgmSIFZow1aU5ACp+N/ksT6E 1wrWsaIJjsOHK5RZj/8/2HiBftjXscmL3K8k6MbDI8P9zvcMJSXbPpcYrffw9A6t ka9skmLKKFCcsNJ0coLLB+mw9DVQGc2dPWPhPgtYZLwG5tInS2bkdv67qJ4lYsRM jRCW5xzlUZYk6SWD4KKbBQoHbNO0Au8Pe/N1SpYYtpdhFht9fGmtEHNOGPXYgNLq VTLgRFk44Dr4hJj5I1+d0BLjVkf6U8b2bN5PcOnVH4Mb+xaGQjqqufAMD/IFO4Ro TjwKiw49pJYUiZbw9UGaV3wmg+fue9To1VKxGJuLIGhRXhw6ujGnk/CktIkidRd3 5pAoY5L4ISnZD8Z0mnGlWOgLmQ3IgNjAyUzVJRhDB5rVQeC6qX4r4E1xjYMJSxdz Aqrk25Y//eAkdkeiTWqbXDMkdQtig2rY+v8GGeV0v09NKiT+6extebxTaWH4hAgU FR6yq6FHs8mSEKC6Cw6lqKxOn6pwqVuXmR4wzpqCoaajQVz1hOgD+8QuuKVCcTb1 4IXXpeQBc3EHfXJx2BWbUpyCgBOMtvtjDhLtv5p+4XN55GqY+ocYgAhNMSK34AYD AhqQTpgHAX0nZ2SpxfLr/LDN24kXCmnFipqgtE6tstKNiKwAZdQBzJJlyYVpSk93 6HrYTZiBDJk4jDBh6jAx+IZCiv0rLXBM6QxQWBzbc2AxDDBqNbea2toBSww8HvHf hQV/G86Zis/rDOSqLT7e794ezD9RYPv55525zeCk3IKauaW5+WqbKlwosAPIMW2S kFODIRd5oMI51eof+ElmB5V5T9lw0CHdltSM/hmYmp/5YotSyHUmk91GDFgkOFUc J3x7gtxUMkTadELqwY6hrU8= =BLTH",FAKE
"Comments 
Conan O’Brien asked comedian Louis CK who he’s choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in this years election, his answer was amazing! He said: 
“I’m going to vote for Hillary because… I think she’s great! It’s not a lesser of two evils. I think she’s great, she’s really talented and I think she’s super smart, I would take her over anybody else that would do it. To me it’s really exciting to have the first mother in the White House, it’s not just about the first woman, it’s about the first mom. Because a mother she’s got it! A mother just does IT. She feeds you, and teaches you, she protects you. She takes care of shit.” 
“We’ve had 240 years of fathers. Father after father. Bald Father. Fat Father. Every kind of Father. Fathers are ok. I’m a dad, you’re a dad. A GREAT father can give his kids about 40% of their needs. Any mother, even a not even trying mother can give 200%!” 
Watch the rest here, because the ending is truly the best part:",FAKE
"The party apparatus exploits and exacerbates these fraidy-’crat jitters. Whenever something major looms—an election, a State of the Union address, a major Senate vote, a gravitational ripple—my e-mail box turns into a Wailing Wall of Democratic fund-raising messages bearing subject lines such as “Worried,” “Be Afraid,” “Why Haven’t We Heard from You?,” “All Hope Is Lost,” and “DOOMED,” which isn’t how General Patton would have fired up the troops. The heebie-jeebie-ing is even worse on social media during the election cycle; social media make everything worse if you open up the sluices, turning even stoics into headless chickens. A few years ago such Aunt Pittypat palpitations inspired a viral poster that showed President Obama making a bold gesture with the message EVERYONE CHILL THE FUCK OUT, I GOT THIS! And yet, after nearly two terms of Obama’s unruffled, unrattled mastery of the long game, his confidence doesn’t seem to have energized Democrats en masse with a “Forward march!” spirit. When Democrats contemplate their navel, they still see a panic button.

‘Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus” goes an adage much beloved by pundits always looking for a convenient platitude to rest their elbows on. (Or chins.) Caricatured another way, Republicans are cast as the Daddy Party (jaw-jutting, decisive, disciplinarian, financially prudent, militarily assertive: meat), Democrats are the Mommy Party (huggy, permissive, socially concerned, globally cooperative: veggies). Such gender stereotypes may have outlived whatever hinky usefulness they ever had, as stereotypes are wont to do, but beneath the sexual cosplay of Republican executive blue suits versus Democratic mom jeans (which President Obama was accused of fancying by no less a fashion arbiter than Sarah Palin) is a forked dynamic deeper than any policy differences or identity politics. Republicans are driven by anger; Democrats, riven by anxiety. Anger stokes Republicans to lash out, their grievances, real and imaginary, kept at a raging boil by Fox News, Matt Drudge , radio talk-show hosts, and similar mayhem artists. Anxiety pincushions Democrats into a defensive crouch waiting for the ceiling to cave, their blood pressure spiking with every alarming headline in The New York Times, of which there is never a shortage.

Not all Democrats, naturally, otherwise the party would have gone the way of the Pony Express, political architect Karl Rove’s vision of a permanent Republican majority having come to pass. Yet there does seem to be an intestinal queasiness in the institutional identity that’s chronic and unworthy of its ancestors. When I was a stripling in the never dull 60s, Democrats didn’t quaver as if a wagon-train attack lurked around every bend. Activated by adversity, they appeared outgoing, future-striding, and firm-resolved: dashing John F. Kennedy, happy warrior Hubert H. Humphrey, steer-wrangling Lyndon Baines Johnson, and, radiating in the background, the chromo image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the greatest president, and perhaps the greatest figure, of the 20th century. The Republican adults in charge came across as somberly dour (Richard Nixon) or apocalyptically dire (Barry Goldwater). The bloody morass of Vietnam, the urban riots and campus upheavals, the assassinations of J.F.K., his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr., and the druggy saturnalia of the decade eroded the faith in liberal progress and took the bright shine off social engineering. When Nixon swept the board in his re-election victory of 1972 over George McGovern, winning 49 states, it was as if a dark visor had been lowered over the future for liberal Democrats, nothing ahead but charred landscape. Undone by hubris and thirsty vengeance, Nixon did the country a favor by befouling himself over Watergate, opening a respite of hope for Democrats (the improbable success of Jimmy Carter in time for the bicentennial), only to have it smushed beneath the golden hammer of Ronald Reagan, with whose two-term presidency the Democrats are still reckoning.

It wasn’t only that Reagan was popular, racking up a second-term victory that equaled Nixon’s 49-state total and scored the highest electoral-college vote in history (525 out of a possible 538), leaving liberals thunderstruck. It wasn’t only that he was the first pontiff of the unfettered free-market capitalism that has become the economic dogma of our time (even if the actual record of his administration wouldn’t pass Ayn Rand’s inspection). Reagan’s dandiest trick was inverting the personae of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, turning the character roles inside out. Optimistic, affable, rhetorically broad-gestured and bold-colored, a mega-dose of vitamin D, the former movie star opened a picture window on the majestic vista of “Morning in America,” where the skies were big and blue and the hills alive with the sound of jingle-jangle spurs. In political, media, and public awareness, perceptions turned topsy-turvy, placing Republicans high in the saddle and challenging the horizon while nit-picking, nay-saying Democrats clung to the status quo as if it were the schoolmarm’s apron strings. A gross caricature, but gross caricatures are what the Beltway press eats for brunch, and, apart from a leonine few, Democrats became gun-shy of proposing any F.D.R./L.B.J.-scaled domestic programs or making anything resembling dovish cries. The party lost labor muscle—Reagan’s crackdown on the air-traffic controllers’ union in 1981, when his threat to fire more than 11,000 striking controllers carried the day, was a crippling defeat from which unions never recovered—and shifted attention to knowledge workers, who didn’t have the same organizational strength and loyalty in the non-unionized, neoliberal economy. “Though [Michael Dukakis] lost the [1988] election after being defamed in the infamous Willie Horton ad … , his platform won him a following among white-collar professionals in the metropolitan areas of the Sunbelt, West, and Northeast,” historian and political analyst Lily Geismer wrote in the winter 2016 issue of Jacobin magazine. “Four years later, the [Democratic Leadership Council]’s golden boy, Bill Clinton, placed high-tech growth and suburban professionals at the forefront of his policy vision in his own presidential bid.” The “triangulation” strategy and small-ball initiatives (school uniforms, etc.) practiced and proposed by Clinton once he was in office weren’t just wily poker tricks but a recognition of the political realities of the post-Reagan era. Expansive, ebullient, and popular, Clinton was finely tuned to the public’s mood, sensed just how far to push. Fat lot of good it did him. Oh, sure, he made mistakes, some of them beauts—such is the frailty of man, especially one with a hearty appetite—but the telenovela that unfolded was an orchestrated takedown that nearly succeeded. Whitewater, the Monica Lewinsky uproar, the Starr Report, the nightly kangaroo courts of cable-news panels, the impeachment debate and vote—all were a preview of coming distractions. The rabid harrying of Clinton was a dress rehearsal for the Swift Boating swarm-attack mode that would be mounted against even the most mainstream, dry-cleaned, neatly pressed Democratic candidate, often with the sneering assistance of putative liberals giving their class snobbery some exercise. When we consider the barrage of racism, paranoia (rumors of FEMA camps), derangement (the “birther” conspiracies, the rise of Glenn Beck), and unprecedented insults delivered by the Republican-held Congress that Barack Obama has Jedi-deflected, we will look back on his presidency as a marvel of levitation as so much of the country seemed intent on plunging into the mire. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, as looks likely, the Swift Boating will return in armada force and be crewed by insane clown posses. Factor into that the fear of an “enthusiasm gap” (the Republicans have so far pulled far more people to their caucuses and primaries than have Democrats); the tasty prospect of Bill Clinton, feeling a little frisky or blabby, upstaging and embarrassing the Hillary campaign; the as yet unplumbed depths of the political and popular culture’s misogyny, especially against older women, doubtless reviving the Mommy Party business with a vengeance; and television’s slavish royal-carpet lay-down for Donald Trump (assuming he’s the nominee, with ideally Marco Rubio as his Howdy Doody running mate). It’s been a helluva arc from Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt to this.",REAL
"Mothers whose children have been killed by police officers marched in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to call attention to police brutality and racial injustice.

The Million Moms March was sponsored by Mothers for Justice United, an organization of mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and others, and the Coalition for Justice. The march moved from the U.S. Capitol to the U.S. Department of Justice, where demonstrators demanded changes in police practices.

Maria Hamilton founded Mothers for Justice United and helped organize the march of mothers and their supporters. Hamilton's 31-year-old son, Dontre Hamilton, was shot 14 times and killed by a former Milwaukee police officer.

""This is a call for everybody to wake up,"" Hamilton said as the march began Saturday afternoon. ""We are here on behalf of our babies to tell the United States government that we aren't going anywhere. We aren't going to continue to keep burying our babies. Do something and do it now.""

Hamilton said as moms walked through the streets they aimed to honor ""stolen lives"" in solidarity. ""We will continue to lift our babies up,"" she said. ""They live through each and every one of us. They are gone physically but we have our own personal angels now.""

As demonstrators moved through the streets Saturday, some in the crowd shouted, ""No justice. No compromise,"" and ""Black lives matter.""

Many of the mothers and other protesters held photos of young men and women killed by law enforcement officers. Others clutched bright yellow balloons, flowers and held hands.

Mothers for Justice United, which also includes family members, clergy and concerned citizens, is focused on halting the killing of unarmed people of color by police and vigilantes through direct action, legislation and community building, the group says.

Marion Gray-Hopkins, whose 19-year-old son Gary was killed by a police officer in Maryland in 1999, told NBC News she planned to participate.

""Enough is enough,"" Gray-Hopkins told the network. ""We need to put about some changes in laws and practices that will stop the senseless killing of our unarmed children.""",REAL
"Can Huckabee Overcome The 'New Car Smell' Of Other Candidates?

This post was updated at 11:40 a.m. ET.

That's the message the GOP presidential hopeful is already conveying as he makes another bid for the presidency.

""We need the kind of change that really could get America from Hope to higher ground,"" he said, officially launching his campaign Tuesday in Hope, Ark.

To recapture the magic that propelled him to second place in 2008, he needs to re-embrace his roots and downplay the political celebrity he has created in the past eight years.

""What he's got to do is draw a contrast that shows, 'I'm not just a talk show host and I'm not just a Baptist minister, but I governed for over a decade and we achieved results in a very Democratic environment,' "" said Iowa conservative activist Bob Vander Plaats, who chaired Huckabee's winning 2008 campaign in the first caucus state. He is so far undecided this go-around.

That message was also evidenced in the video that Huckabee rolled out last week.

The video was vintage Huckabee, harking back to how he took on the Clinton machine of the 1990s in what was then a very Democratic state. That's a valuable weapon he has now that he didn't eight years ago, with other Republican candidates now arguing they're best equipped to take on Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.

Huckabee boasted of his populist record, touting his work raising family income and cutting taxes during his decade-long tenure as governor.

There were no clips of his eponymous talk show or his 2008 stump speeches except for the address he made to the GOP convention that year.

""I'm not a Republican because I grew up rich,"" he declared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. ""I'm a Republican because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life poor, waiting for the government to rescue me.""

His runner-up slot enabled him to dig out of his humble beginnings. A Fox News contract and radio show soon followed, and Huckabee and his wife were able to build a 8,224 square-foot Florida beachfront home worth $3 million.

""Janet and I, neither of us grew up thinking we'd see salt water in person,"" Huckabee told the Northwest Florida Daily News last year of the mansion he and his wife called home. ""We both grew up dirt poor in Southern Arkansas ... For us, growing up, the thought that we would ever put our feet in salt water, no that would never happen.""

The newfound financial freedom was reportedly one reason Huckabee passed on a 2012 bid, despite his rumored disdain for the eventual nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. In order to do so, he would have had to sever his media ties, which were his main source of income.

That's why it surprised many when he announced, without much warning, in January of this year that he would be stepping down from his Fox News Saturday evening show, Huckabee. But it was also a clear signal to those skeptical he would leave the lucrative private sector to re-enter the political arena that he was serious this time.

Huckabee was underestimated early on in 2008 in Iowa, too. He didn't even begin registering in polling there until the summer of 2007 and never surged into the lead until December of that year. He ended up winning the caucuses by 9 points.

He starts off the 2016 cycle not having to go from Pizza Ranch to Pizza Ranch praying supporters will show up, as Vander Plaats once recalled their team had to do, but with a sure buzz and a reservoir of good feelings once he heads to the state this week. He still trails Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the latest surveys, but there's no clear front-runner yet.

That's both good and bad news for Huckabee. There are higher expectations this time around, both on fundraising and the crowds he will draw and the poll numbers he can expect as he becomes a candidate yet again.

""While people still genuinely like Gov. Huckabee and they trust Gov. Huckabee,"" Vander Plaats said, ""there's still a certain flirtation with the new car smell of new candidates.""",REAL
"The San Francisco medical examiner's office determined the parts were human remains and the body had been dismembered, Officer Grace Gatpandan said.

""We do have people of interest that homicide investigators are speaking to,"" she said. Detectives are also reviewing surveillance camera footage and officers are looking for a suspect. She declined to identify the suspect.

The suitcase was found Wednesday afternoon on 11th Street in the Mission District. Police closed four blocks while they investigated.

The Los Angeles Times reported that remains were also found at three locations within a three-block radius. Asked about the reporting, a police spokeswoman told CNN there are no updates.

There were other items around the suitcase, Gatpandan said. The gender and age of the person were unclear, she said.",REAL
The move would make it easier for the Trump administration to demolish the exchanges.,REAL
"Donald Trump’s call on Monday to bar all Muslims from entering the United States provoked a variety of reactions from Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, ranging from silence to gentle disapproval to full-throated condemnation. But only one, so far, has visited a mosque this week to speak up for religious tolerance and American unity.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) attended a Friday afternoon prayer service at the Islamic Center of the North East Valley in Scottsdale, with his wife, Cheryl, and two of his four sons. In remarks there, he did not mention Trump by name but offered a stout rebuke of Trumpism following what he called “a difficult week in Washington.”

“It wasn’t so much the legislative calendar as it was the rhetoric that came forth, mostly from the presidential campaign,” Flake said. “That is not in keeping with the values and ideals that have made this country the shining city on the hill that it is. We are a better country than has been on display this week.”

Flake delivered his remarks from the perspective of one of 16 Mormons in Congress. He is a descendant of some of the original Mormon settlers of the West, and he compared the tribulations that adherents of his own religion have faced to those Muslims have faced and are facing today.

And, he said, Mormons and Muslims aren’t so different, really:

There is, as I mentioned, much that separates Mormons and Muslims, but we do collaborate on a number of things — in helping to bring relief after natural disasters. We cooperate, our two faiths, on the translation of ancient texts, and there is much in the history and the tradition and even some doctrine that is common between us. As Mormons and Muslims, we trace our lineage to father Abraham. While we may not agree on the divinity or the prophetic calling of Jesus and Mohamed, we all revere them as inspired teachers and leaders. Early persecution drove Mohamed from Mecca to Medina. Early Mormon persecution drove the Mormons from Illinois to Utah. I have ancestors buried along that trail. The principle of the fast is embraced and practiced by both of our religions. My two boys there — a couple of years ago, I took them to an island in the middle of the Pacific to test our survival skills. They got more of a fast than they wanted to. But we both practice the fast in different ways, as well as the responsibility and the obligation to care for the sick and the needy. That is something that is central to both of our faiths.‎ Muslims make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. The Mormon hajj is to our holy temple. Because like Muslims, Mormons do not drink alcohol, our trip to the temple is usually followed by a stop at Dairy Queen. Ice cream is about all we Mormons have; I’m not sure if there’s a corollary for Muslims.

Flake closed his remarks with an appreciation for the Muslim soldiers who have fought in Americas wars, the Muslim first responders who have put themselves in harm’s way — including in San Bernardino, Calif., this month — and for Muslims who give generously to charity.

“There can be no religious test for those who serve in public office; we do not tolerate religious discrimination in the workplace, or in the neighborhood,” Flake said. “The slogan on the Statue of Liberty — ‘give us your poor, your tired, and your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ — contemplates no religious test for those who reach our shores. … My hope and prayer today is that the isolated voices calling for division are overwhelmed by the chorus of voices like those in this room today calling for acceptance, for tolerance and inclusion.”",REAL
"The leading Republican presidential candidates are fighting for the spotlight as they charge into Tuesday night's primary debate, with Marco Rubio releasing a biting new ad ripping his former political mentor and Donald Trump suggesting he's arrested Ben Carson's rise in the polls.

Carson, for his part, has spent the last several days sparring with the media and his rivals over reports questioning his personal story, which is the crux of his campaign.

""I am trying to move on,"" Carson told Fox News. But his campaign manager also says Carson will punch back if an opponent challenges him on stage Tuesday night -- suggesting a departure for Carson from past debates, where he mostly avoided the fray.

The prime-time debate, hosted by Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, will be held at 9 p.m. ET, from Milwaukee, preceded by an earlier 7 p.m. ET debate with lower-polling candidates.

This is the first time that just eight candidates will be on the main stage, a change that could give the contenders more time to explain their positions and engage each other.

Florida Sen. Rubio, in the hours before the debate, launched a striking ad against GOP rival Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. The ad plays clips of Bush, before the 2016 campaign, praising Rubio.

""I'm a huge Marco fan,"" Bush says in one clip. In another, he says, ""He's probably the most articulate conservative on the scene today.""

The text of the ad blares: ""Jeb Bush before his phony attacks.""

Bush, the former front-runner, has struggled in every debate so far, and Rubio is no doubt angling for the edge against him in Tuesday's showdown. At the last debate, Rubio deftly parried a critique by Bush of his Senate absences.

Rubio is currently third in most national polls, followed closely by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who by many accounts had the stand-out moment in the last debate by slamming the CNBC moderators for allegedly unfair and off-topic questions. Speaking with Fox News on Monday, Rubio said the polls have been ""up and down,"" but ""what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on the message of my campaign.""

Still tangling for the lead are Carson and Trump.

Speaking with Fox News, Trump pointed to the most recent polling in saying he's back on top.

""I'm No. 1 in the polls, as you know, in every single -- I think I'm No. 1 in every single state. I'm now No. 1 again in Iowa. I had lost Iowa for a period of time, and I didn't quite understand it,"" Trump said.

Trump has shown no hesitation about going after Carson, for everything from his past writings about having anger issues growing up, to stories questioning elements of his personal narrative, to Carson's statement that Egypt's pyramids were built by the biblical Joseph to store grain.

""He's having a hard time. The pyramids are solid structures. You can't put grain in the pyramids because they're solid structures,"" Trump said.

Trump, who hosted ""Saturday Night Live"" over the weekend, also made headlines overnight by suggesting a ""boycott"" against Starbucks over its holiday cups that are missing winter or Christmas scenes. But then Trump added, ""Seriously, I don't care.""

In a reminder of one of the key issues he's running on, though, Trump released a new policy paper Tuesday focusing on U.S.-China relations.

His campaign claims that under a ""Trump administration trade will flourish. However, for free trade to bring prosperity to America, it must also be fair trade.""",REAL
"Report Copyright Violation OFFICIAL ONLINE NATIONAL DONALD TRUMP POLLS UPDATED IN REAL-TIME Traditional media outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX and ALL major newspapers nationwide have been proven to be 100% corrupt. The masses have ‘caught on’ and have turned to social media as the new, dominant news source.All polling records shown on this website are 100% accurate and reveal the true national polling numbers, which are completely our of sync with the fraudulent MSM results shown nightly. [ link to www.donaldjtrumppolls.com ] Go Vote!! The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Thomas Jefferson",FAKE
"The water crisis in Flint, Mich., is just the tip of the iceberg – and if you think that it can’t happen in your community, you’re sadly mistaken. The aging water infrastructure in this country is deeply flawed. Many of the 150,000 public water systems that serve more than 300 million people are based on rusting, leaky pipes and decades-old plans that— if not corrected and replaced— will have devastating and long-lasting effects on our communities.

The disaster in Flint, which began in 2014 when the city switched its water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-saving measure, is likely brewing in many other communities. It is inconceivable to me that in the most developed nation on the planet, we have exposed families and young children to the poisonous effects of lead. And it is almost criminal to me that water supply officials were unaware that the water pumping through a large American city was endangering the community. That level of negligence is beyond comprehension.

The dangerous, detrimental effects that lead can have on a developing brain and body are well-documented. In 1978, a largely successful campaign to remove lead from home paint products resulted in a new law, after it was found that small children could mistakenly eat paint chips and be exposed to lead poisoning. When it comes to levels of lead in water, no true amount is safe. However, in 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established an action level for lead in public drinking water at 15 micrograms per liter, and required water supplies to routinely test household tap water to check lead levels.

These laws and others were established to protect our citizens from both indirect and direct exposure to the harmful compound. A person can be directly exposed to lead by drinking contaminated water with unsafe levels, while indirect exposure can occur when a person inhales contaminated water particles through steam or vapors.

Once lead enters the human body, the heavy metal attaches itself to cells that can begin to build up in bones or major organs like the liver or kidneys. It disrupts the normal cellular biology of the organ and can lead to chronic diseases. However, the most dangerous damage lead poisoning can inflict is on the brain, especially in young or unborn children. If lead is deposited in a developing fetal brain, it can disrupt the normal function and cause irreversible damage. The same can happen in young children whose brains are still maturing.

The consequences can result in low IQ, severe delays in cognitive function, significant disruption in the memory center of the brain, learning disabilities and other neurological deficits. The devastating part of this diagnosis is that it is, for the most part, irreversible. Patients exposed to acute lead poisoning can be treated through chelation, which is a method used to filter out the lead. However, for children chronically exposed over a period of time, the damage cannot be undone.

This makes the preventable crisis in Flint all the more devastating.

I read that the Obama administration is planning to pick Dr. Nicole Lurie to act as a “czar” and fix the crisis in Flint, but I urge her to look further than just Michigan. Lurie and others must start to seriously evaluate other areas of America where the people are most susceptible to a disaster such as this. The government failed the city of Flint, it must act now to protect the rest of us.



Dr. Manny Alvarez serves as Fox News Channel's senior managing health editor. He also serves as chairman of the department of obstetrics/gynecology and reproductive science at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. Click here for more information on Dr. Manny's work with Hackensack University Medical Center. Visit AskDrManny.com for more.

",REAL
"By Mike Maharrey Voters in Florida have approved a ballot measure legalizing medical marijuana, taking a big step toward nullifying the unconstitutional federal prohibition of... ",FAKE
"Who has Trump appointed to his cabinet so far?

Donald Trump added three new men to his list of cabinet picks Friday. Get to know them.",REAL
"Written by Jacob G. Hornberger Thursday October 27, 2016 Several weeks ago, contemporaneously with the release of Oliver Stone’s excellent movie Snowden, friends and admirers of Edward Snowden launched a campaign to have President Obama pardon him for disclosing the NSA’s super-secret illegal surveillance scheme to the American people and the world. The reasons for the pardon request were excellently summarized in an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times entitled “ Pardon Edward Snowden ” by Kenneth Roth and Salil Shetty. Not surprisingly, the US national-security establishment and its assets within the mainstream press oppose a pardon for Snowden because, they say, he endangered “national security” with his disclosure of the NSA’s top-secret illegal surveillance programs. But notice something important: Every time someone discloses “national security” state secrets, the east coast doesn’t fall into the ocean, California isn’t hit by earthquakes, and the federal government isn’t taken over by communists, terrorists, Muslims, illegal immigrants, or drug dealers. Nothing ever happens! That’s because, as I point out in my ebook “ The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State , ever since the federal government was converted into a national security state in the 1940s, the term “national security” has been nothing more than a way to shield criminal wrongdoing on the part of the national-security establishment. Remember MKULTRA? It was a highly classified operation on the part of the CIA. It involved drug experimentation on unsuspecting Americans. It was enveloped within the concept of “national security.” It was also a criminal operation. Once it came to light, the CIA ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records so that the American people would never discover all the dark and sordid details of this Nazi-like program. The United States remained standing notwithstanding the revelation of the CIA’s national-security state secret. Consider the CIA’s assassination attempts, in partnership with the Mafia, against Cuba’s president Fidel Castro during the 1960s. Those assassination attempts were national-security state secrets. They were also criminal in nature. In fact, they were no different, in a criminal sense, from the assassination of Orlando Letelier by Chile’s DINA, the Chilean CIA-NSA type organization with which the US partnered in the aftermath of the US national-security state’s coup that brought military strongman Augusto Pinochet into power in 1973. Did the United States collapse when the CIA’s assassination plots were revealed to the world? No more so than Chile collapsed when DINA’s assassination plots were revealed to the world. Speaking of DINA, for years the US national-security establishment kept its role in orchestrating the coup in Chile secret from the American people. CIA Director Richard Helms even knowingly lied to Congress when asked about the CIA’s activities in orchestrating the coup. Why did Helms intentionally lie to Congress? To protect “national security,” of course. The CIA’s position was that if people were to discover the role that the US government played in orchestrating the Chilean coup, “national-security” would be threatened. But when the US role in the coup was ultimately disclosed, what happened? Nothing! Well, except for the fact that Helms got convicted for lying to Congress. He was lucky though. They let him off the hook with a misdemeanor plea and probation. When he returned to the CIA, he was hailed by his subordinates for his heroic effort to protect “national security.” Of course, he wasn’t as lucky as DNI Chief James Clapper, who didn’t get prosecuted at all for lying to Congress about the existence of the NSA’s illegal surveillance scheme. Why did Clapper lie to Congress? To protect “national security,” of course. But when the super-secret illegal scheme ultimately came to light, what happened to the United States? Nothing! Another false and fraudulent use of the meaningless term “national security.” It was no different with respect to the CIA’s kidnapping-murder of Rene Schneider, the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. The CIA felt that it needed to keep its plot against Schneider secret on grounds of “national security,” including its smuggling high-power guns into the country and later its paying off the killers to keep them silent. Once again, they maintained, “national security” dictated secrecy. But when the CIA’s role in Schneider’s kidnapping-murder was ultimately discovered, nothing happened. The United States continued standing. Interestingly, not one single US official was ever charged in the felony-murder of Rene Schneider, whose only “crime” was standing in the way of the US national security establishment’s illegal and unconstitutional (in both Chile and the United States) plot to replace a democratically elected president with a brutal unelected US-supported military general whose forces proceeded to round up, incarcerate, torture, rape, execute, or assassinate tens of thousands of innocent people — that is, people whose only crime was believing in socialism. It was the same with the murder during the coup of two American men, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, a murder in which US national-security state officials were complicit. Of course, they kept their involvement in the murder secret under the principle of “national security.” Horman’s “crime” was that he had learned of US complicity in the coup and planned to disclose it to the world. In the eyes of Chilean and US national-security state officials, that obviously constituted a threat to “national security.” Teruggi’s “crime” was that he was a socialist who had opposed the US government’s war in Vietnam. Despite the fact that a top-secret US State Department investigation revealed that US intelligence had played a role in their murder, not one single US official has ever been indicted, much less summoned to appear before Congress to explain why they murdered two innocent American citizens. In a moral sense, it’s not Snowden who needs a pardon. It is the US national-security state that needs a pardon from him … and from the American people for converting our nation into a charnel house of secret, dark, illegal, nefarious actions under the guise of the sham term “national security.” Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation . Related",FAKE
"Is anyone qualified to judge The Donald?

Donald Trump’s insistence that he couldn't get a fair hearing from a “Mexican” judge in the case over alleged fraud at Trump University makes you wonder who could fairly judge Trump, presuming he had the veto power over judges he seems to think he deserves. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has offended so many different people and groups that it could be difficult to find anyone suitable.

It couldn’t be the Indiana-born son of Mexican immigrants because Trump said Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn't possibly judge someone who has proposed to put a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump also ruled out Muslim judges because he has proposed to bar foreign Muslims from entering the country.

And that’s just the beginning. No Asians? Trump mocked their accents when he described negotiating trade deals. No disabled judges? He cruelly imitated a handicapped journalist. No one from Iowa? He called Iowans “stupid” when they supported rival candidate Ben Carson. And, given the way Trump has derided certain women as “disgusting animals” and “dogs,” no female judges — unless, as late-night host Stephen Colbert suggested this week, they’re a 10 on Trump’s beauty scale?

This twisted Trumpian logic — only a bigot is qualified to judge a bigot — might be amusing if it weren’t so sad and disturbing. The nation is on the verge of having a major party presidential candidate so reflexively venomous that news organizations keep lists of all the people he has gone out of his way to insult, one of which contains 224 recipients of Trump invective. Among any president’s most important tools is the power to persuade, and it’s hard to persuade people you’ve called stupid and ugly. Not to mention that a president should help, not undercut, the ability of parents to teach their children to respect authority figures.

Most troubling, of course, is Trump’s apparent cluelessness about the independence of judges, the rule of law, and the system of checks and balances. The famously litigious businessman seems to regard the court system as a tool for settling scores rather than as a means for achieving justice.

Based on no evidence but his own irritation at rulings he deems insufficiently deferential, Trump has accused Curiel of bias, called for him to be investigated and vaguely suggested he’d come back after being elected president and get even.

If Trump really believes the judge is biased, his legal team could make a formal legal request for recusal. It hasn't, because it has no grounds for doing so. Instead, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has resorted to innuendo and threats, which makes you wonder how a President Trump would react to Supreme Court decisions he didn't like.

If Trump had the least bit of curiosity or sense of history, he’d know the battle over whether judges must recuse themselves over identity politics has long been settled. Yes, black judges can rule on civil rights cases and gay judges on same-sex marriage. Luckily for Trump, all judges are required to handle even the most obnoxious defendants fairly and decide cases on the legal merits.

Trump isn’t the first presidential candidate to attack judges. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich did it even more toxically in 2011, saying if he were president he’d ignore Supreme Court rulings he disagreed with and have judges hauled before Congress to be interrogated. It’s a little disorienting now to hear the mercurial Gingrich, said to be on Trump’s list of possible vice presidential choices, call Trump’s disparaging of Curiel’s Mexican heritage “inexcusable,” even as Gingrich says Trump’s complaint about “politicized justice” is valid.

It’s not. Republican leaders have it right when they say Trump’s attack on Curiel, suggesting that the judge can't do his job because of his ethnicity, is “the textbook definition of racism,” as House Speaker Paul Ryan put it.

After Ryan's rebuke, Trump toned down his rhetoric and said he had been ""misconstrued."" But once you've rolled in racist muck, it's hard to wash away the stench.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.

To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.",REAL
"Videos #NoDAPL Spills Over: Musicians Boycott Dakota Access Pipeline CEO’s Record Label & Festival ‘I do not play for oil interests. I do not play for companies who defile nature, or companies who attack demonstrators with trained attack dogs and pepper spray,’ declared singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Be Sociable, Share! A water protector stares down police off highway 134, October 27. (Photo: Derrick Broze) 
AUSTIN, Texas — When it comes to the Dakota Access pipeline, musicians want to stop the music. 
Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation building the controversial $3.8 billion pipeline, also owns Music Road Records, a small record label which presents the annual Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Austin, Texas. 
The Indigo Girls announced in September that they would not be playing at the next festival, slated for May 2017. 
Reaffirming their support for “ Standing Rock, the Standing Rock Sioux, their friends and allies in protecting their sacred land and water by stopping the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and all pipelines that carry dirty oil and threaten massive ecosystems, ” the folk rock duo also encouraged other musicians to cancel their plans to perform at the festival. 
Emily Saliers, one half of the Indigo Girls, recently explained that she hadn’t realized Warren was responsible for both the pipeline and the music festival until a fan alerted her to the connection via Facebook. 
“Once we found out, we immediately started talking about what can we do to rectify the situation and our presence in something that is completely the antithesis of what we stand for as artists and as allies for Native communities,” Saliers told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman on Thursday. 
In addition to playing at the festival twice, Saliers and her musical partner, Amy Ray, also contributed a song to a tribute album published by Music Road to honor the legacy of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Saliers and Ray said they reached out to Browne and the other musicians on the album, then contacted Warren to inform him of the growing boycott. VIDEO: Emily Saliers of the @Indigo_Girls reads letter to #DAPL CEO Kelcy Warren, urging him to halt construction on Dakota Access pipeline pic.twitter.com/gD98Uu7rdY 
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 4, 2016 
Ray read from the letter to Warren on Democracy Now!: “Sadly, we realized that the bucolic setting of your festival and the image it projects is in direct conflict with the proposed Dakota Access pipeline, a project your company, Energy Transfer Partners, is responsible for spearheading. This pipeline violates the Standing Rock Sioux nation’s treaty rights, endangers the vital Missouri River, and continues the trajectory of genocide against Native peoples.” 
In a statement published by Indian Country Today Media Network , Browne vowed to donate all the profits from the Music Road tribute album to the Standing Rock “ water protectors .” Like Saliers and Ray, Browne said he’d been unaware of Warren’s involvement in the pipeline when he met him and agreed to have Music Road produce the album. He continued: “I do not play for oil interests. I do not play for companies who defile nature, or companies who attack demonstrators with trained attack dogs and pepper spray. The list of companies I have denied the use of my music is long. I certainly would not have allowed my songs to be recorded by a record company whose owner’s other business does what Energy Transfer Partners is allegedly doing — threatening the water supply and the sacred sites of indigenous people.” 
Amy Goodman noted in a Nov. 3 editorial co-written with Denis Moynihan that, “Kelcy Warren is a Texas oil billionaire several times over, and might not be easily deterred by a threatened boycott.” 
The notion that Warren may not be moved by a boycott isn’t stopping music fans from taking up the cause. A group of activists and fans from Denton, Texas, are asking musician Hal Ketchum to end his association with Music Road, and they’re planning to protest his concert there on Wednesday night. 
In addition to dabbling in the music industry, Warren and Energy Transfer Partners also spend millions influencing U.S. elections . Energy Transfer Partners PAC spent over $869,000 in the 2014 and 2016 federal election cycles, according to OpenSecrets , a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. 
Andrew Wheat, research director at Texans for Public Justice , an Austin-based nonprofit that tracks the influence of money and corporate power, told MintPress News that Warren, himself, has spent far more influencing elections on the state level. He was awarded a position on the board of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, likely due to his largesse.",FAKE
"Jeb Bush had some cleanup work to do yesterday.

The former Florida governor showed a keen grasp of policy during a 20-minute interview with Megyn Kelly that aired Monday night, appearing relaxed as he defended positions that don’t sit well with much of the Republican base.

But then there was Iraq.

It’s a politically explosive topic for Jeb for two big reasons. The war became a quagmire, and it's so closely associated with his brother.

Megyn’s question was quite explicit: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?”

Bush answered as if it was 2003.

“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got,” Bush said.

But that’s an answer framed around our state of knowledge 12 years ago, in the face of a massive campaign by his brother’s administration to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

So Bush either misheard the question, as he now says, or answered the way he did because it’s easier to frame an explanation that ropes in the prominent Democrats who supported the invasion in that post-9/11 period.

Bush tried to clarify things by calling into Sean Hannity's radio show with this admission: ""I interpreted the question wrong, I guess.""

So would he have sent troops to Iraq, knowing what we know now?

""I don't know what the decision would have been--that's a hypothetical,"" said Jeb.

Obviously, Jeb Bush doesn’t want to get painted into a corner where he says he would not have invaded Iraq based on what we know today, that Saddam didn’t have illegal weapons. If he uttered those words, there would be thousands of stories about how he’s renouncing his brother’s legacy, trying to prove his independence, and on and on.

What bothers me, though, is the way the media are clobbering Bush not for the substance of his answer, but on linguistic grounds. What happens next—you know the pattern—is that the noise gets so loud that everyone—left, right and center—has to deal with it. So rather than having a debate about Iraq and foreign policy and where Bush stands today, we’re having a shoutfest about semantics. It's the media as parsing police.

So let’s return to the substance:

When Megyn followed up by asking if the decision was a mistake, Jeb talked about faulty intelligence and the lack of early focus on security in Iraq: “By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush.”

No daylight, nothing to see here.

The first indication that Jeb felt the need to clarify came on CNN’s “New Day,” where conservative commentator Ana Navarro, a surrogate for Bush, said she’d been in touch with him by email. “I said hey, I am a little confused by this answer, so I am wondering did you mishear the question, and he said yes,” Navarro explained. She also opined that “people are salivating to see Jeb throw his brother under the bus.”

A less generous interpretation came from Laura Ingraham, the Fox News contributor, on her radio show: “You can’t still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do. If you do, there has to be something wrong with you,"" she said.

And it leads to mockery, such as this Roger Simon column in Politico on how Jeb is supposed to be the smart one in the family. The headline: “Was Jeb dropped on head as a child?”

It’s safe to say this issue will not quietly fade away. It’s a version of  the larger problem Jeb faces, however unfairly, because of his last name: Is the country ready to hand the White House to a third member of the Bush family in a quarter century? And Iraq becomes a kind of shorthand for that, the most controversial and consequential decision of George W.’s presidency, whose aftershocks are still being felt today.

What was also fascinating, as Jeb defended his stance on a path to legalization for immigrants who broke the law, was this comment: “Do you want people to just bend with the wind, to mirror people's sentiment? Whoever is in front of you? 'Oh, yes, I used to be for that but now I'm for this.' Is that the way we want to elect presidents?”

That’s his way of saying he’s going to run the campaign he wants and he’s not going to unduly pander to the right wing, that voters who don’t agree with him on Common Core or immigration can look elsewhere.

At the same time, Bush doesn’t speak in punchy sound bites, which could hurt him, and he tends toward the low key, which can translate as a lack of passion.

But he did throw down the gauntlet here: “I've had 20 press gaggles. I don't have, you know, I don't do town hall meetings. Don't screen the questions. Don't have a protective bubble like Mrs. Clinton does. Don't have town hall meetings or roundtable discussions where I pick who gets to come and I screen the questions and the press has to behave a certain way.”

Jeb, who hasn’t officially declared, had not given an interview in two months until he sat down with Megyn Kelly. If he does a few more, does that put pressure on the woman who also carries some baggage because of her last name?

Click for more from Media Buzz

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"Neil Gabler has discounted political polarization as the cause of congressional inaction (“Is America too old to be bold?”). In fact, both parties have discovered that driving their bases to the poles is key to winning elections. Party strategists have discovered that it is much easier and cheaper to motivate the base than it is to convince centrists and the undecided.

This electoral strategy leads to extreme rhetoric and constant attacks on the other party in a concerted effort to produce outrage among committed believers.

It is no surprise that it has also produced political gridlock.",REAL
"A combat veteran with PTSD wasn’t allowed to fly with her service dog. So she sued. ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Vertical Pools Help Heal Wounded Combat Veterans Seeks Positive Doers To Help Make It Happen By VNN on October 31, 2016 The Vertical Pool was inspired by the anticipated need of the returning wounded, and veterans of all past conflicts, who have limited options for recovery and healing at home. Even if they’re within an hour of a VA hospital, it can be a challenge to get there without assistance. A heated, sanitized, filtered, compact pool in the back yard, house, garage, means convenient, private, daily immersions for exercise, traction, rehabilitation, and recovery. These pools should be available to veterans without convoluted forms and wait times. Simply a doctor’s prescription should put them on a list for immediate consideration. VetPools.org (an effort to raise funds to donate these pools to vets) was formed with the specific objective of helping improve upon the methods and manners by which America receives and treats her returning wounded. The most formidable military force in the world deserves a commensurate comprehensive recovery, reintegration program focused on body, mind, and spirit for those who require assistance. The purpose of this message is to inform interested and connected parties of the desire to hand this product and mission off to veterans who would then become The Vertical Pool LLC and VetPools.org . They could be instrumental in healing themselves and their fellow veterans, as well as civilian America from the physically challenged to the physically fit. Interestingly, while initially intended for veterans, the retail market has turned out to be women. As only one person, innovator/owner of The Vertical Pool and founder/director of VetPools.org , I cannot fulfill this objective alone. The R&D, pool product, and non-profit are all paid for in full, no debt or encumbrances. This “on-demand” pool can be manufactured as needed without excessive, costly inventory and/or storage space. I do not advertise this product because one person cannot build, deliver, and install more than 5 pools in two months. Career options with this DME device and non-profit include owning, manufacturing, marketing, selling, donating, fund-raising, case managing, delivering, installing, and teaching The Vertical Pool’s diverse functions and benefits. This pool is efficient in energy, water, and space; critical qualities in this, the 21st century. A group or collective of 3 to 7 individuals might be prudent to start the program. I would remain teacher, mentor, and guide for years to come while others slip into the ownership of this product and its sister non-profit organization. Please share this idea with any and all contacts who might have the connections to give some veterans a lead to a worthy endeavor and career. To get involved contact; Director, Peter G. Hold",FAKE
"Lynch warned that inaction from the Senate would cause ""a serious lapse"" in the government's ability to protect Americans.

A day earlier, Obama urged Congress ""to work through this recess and identify a way to get this done.""

""This needs to get done,"" he said during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

The National Security Agency's bulk metadata collection program, which has allowed the NSA to collect and store phone data on millions of Americans, will sunset on Monday unless Congress passes legislation by midnight on Sunday.

Obama and Lynch have endorsed the USA Freedom Act, the bill to make changes to the Patriot Act that overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives but came three votes shy of passage in the Senate this weekend. Obama said Tuesday that bill ""strikes an appropriate balance; our intelligence communities are confident that they can work with the authorities that are provided in that act."" Under that plan, phone companies would store their customers' metadata and the NSA would need to obtain a specific, targeted warrant to get a customer's data. His comments came after the Senate failed in a rare overnight session this weekend to pass the USA Freedom Act or a short-term extension of the Patriot Act's expiring provisions as reform opponents and the staunchest anti-surveillance advocates stood firm on their positions. The Senate now stands in recess until next Sunday, though Senate dealmakers are working this week to find a way to keep the programs from lapsing. Obama pressed the Senate to work through the recess to find ""a way to get this done."" ""The House of Representatives did its work,"" Obama said. ""The Senate did not act.""",REAL
"Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied   Source: Wall street on parade 
Disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner and His Wife, Longtime Hillary Clinton Aide, Huma Abedin 
Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network. 
Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.) 
That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media. 
The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin. 
Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow . Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage.",FAKE
"  Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside By VNN on October 31, 2016 The newly opened FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server marks ""a potential Constitutional crisis"" for the country. 
Chicago Tribune 
Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday’s FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state? 
We’ll find out soon enough. 
It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump , the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect. 
FBI director James Comey ‘s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious. 
This can’t be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin , and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been “reckless” with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution. 
So what should the Democrats do now? 

If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: 
They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place. 
Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. 
Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta . Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails. 
What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands. 
The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton’s political action committee — should begin demanding it. 
But what will Hillary do? 
She’ll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence. 
She’ll remind the nation that she’s a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been. 
Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the “Year of the Woman.” Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas. 
If you take a step back from tribal politics, you’ll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She’d never be hired. 
As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn’t remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids. 
And there was no prosecution of Hillary. 
That isn’t merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous. 
And during this presidential campaign, Americans were confronted with a two-tiered system of federal justice: one for standards for the Clintons and one for the peasants. 
I’ve always figured that, as secretary of state, Clinton kept her home-brew email server — from which foreign intelligence agencies could hack top secret information — so she could shield the influence peddling that helped make the Clintons several fortunes. 
The Clintons weren’t skilled merchants. They weren’t traders or manufacturers. The Clintons never produced anything tangible. They had no science, patents or devices to make them millions upon millions of dollars. FBI’s Comey acted out of ‘obligation’ to lawmakers, fear of leak to media 
All they had to sell, really, was influence. And they used our federal government to leverage it. 
If a presidential election is as much about the people as it is about the candidates, then we’ll learn plenty about ourselves in the coming days, won’t we? 
Listen to the Chicago Way podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin. Guests are Tribune cartoonist Scott Stantis and former White House Chief of Staff William Daley: www.chicagotribune.com/kasspod",FAKE
"Hezbollah’s Candidate Becomes Lebanese President After Sunni Compromise Posted on Nov 1, 2016 
By Juan Cole / Informed Comment 
Lebanon finally has a president, Michel Aoun . In accordance with the country’s national pact, he is a Maronite Christian (a Catholic uniate church), and happens to be a former general. The US and Israel won’t be pleased that he is a strong ally of the Shiite Hizbullah party-militia and a backer of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. (Most Levantine Christians are either neutral or pro-Assad; virtually none support the Syrian rebels, now mainly fundamentalists). 
Well, Americans who are eager for their own presidential election to be over with should imagine what it would be like for the contest to go on another 2.5 years before it was resolved. That’s what Lebanese have had to put up with. Of course, it has a parliamentary form of government, so most power is anyway in the hands of the prime minister and the cabinet. But still and all, not being able to elect a president has been a black mark on the parliament. The parliament, which hasn’t been able to supply the Lebanese with water, electricity or garbage collection, and which has twice extended its term of service since 2013, so that it is well past its sell-by date, could hardly take more black marks. 
Lebanon has been deeply polarized since 2004, when it was occupied by thousands of Syrian troops who had originally come during the civil war of 1975-1989. Syria liked the then president, and wanted to see his term extended for three years without a new election, which contravened the constitution. Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri angrily resigned over this Syrian pressure, and then, it is likely, the Syrian secret police or a Lebanese client of same, blew Hariri up on 14 February 2005. 
Maronite Christians and Sunni Arabs (Hariri was Sunni) then mobilized in vast crowds to demand that Syria withdraw from Lebanon beginning March 14 (which became their name). They were countered by the Shiite Hizbullah, which had demonstrated in favor of Syria on March 8. But in the end Syria couldn’t stay, and withdrew its troops. 
In a great irony, one of the demands of March 14 was that Gen. Michel Aoun be allowed to return to Lebanon, which he did. But after a while he left the coalition and allied instead with Hizbullah and Syria. 
Advertisement Square, Site wide 
Politics in Lebanon is kaleidoscopic. 
In the past nearly two and a half years, Hizbullah has been trying to get Aoun elected. But the election of the president is by parliament and it needs a 2/3s majority to prevail. Anti-Hizbullah forces just stayed away from scheduled votes and denied the chamber a quorum. There are 128 members of parliament ordinarily, but one resigned last year and so there are only 127 (since no new parliamentary elections have been held since 2013). On Monday, Aoun fell short of the required 86 votes for a 2/3s majority on the first ballot. After that, the candidate could be elected with a simple majority. The next two votes were voided because they turned up 128 ballots, meaning someone voted twice. On the fourth ballot the box was brought in the center of the parliamentary chamber and a close eye was kept on it, so only 127 votes were cast. Aoun received well over the required majority at that point, with 83 votes. Another 36 protest votes were case blank, and 7 were voided because of unspecified irregularities. 
Aoun succeeded because he was not boycotted by the Future Bloc of Saudi-backed Sunni politician Saad Hariri (son of the slain former PM). Hariri had had his own candidate, Sleiman Frangieh, who, however, is just as pro-Syrian as Aoun. 
Hariri used to be fabulously wealthy (his father had worked in Saudi Arabia and built the family fortune there), but the rumors are that his wealth is largely gone. He has had trouble paying his employees, from all accounts. Saudi Arabia considers Lebanon to be too pro-Iranian, and cut it off from a $3 bn grant, and Hariri had depended deeply on Saudi backing. He faces opposition in his own party. So some analysts (see the al-Jazeera clip below) think that Hariri has been so weakened that he finally agreed to let Aoun become president. 
Aoun’s platform is strengthening the Lebanese army to fight ISIL and al-Qaeda and doing something about the burden of 1.5 million Syrian refugees (Lebanon is only a country of 4 million). 
His election is a win for Hizbullah, his long-time ally, but since Hariri joined in backing him, it isn’t really a loss for the Sunni Arabs of Lebanon, who may be making their peace with the likelihood that the al-Assad regime will survive in some form. Lebanon’s Sunnis had strongly supported the Syrian revolution of 2011 and after, and tend to be favorable toward the remnants of the Free Syrian Army. But many of them have to be concerned about the influence among the rebels of an al-Qaeda-linked group, the Levantine Conquest Front, and the continued challenge of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Both al-Qaeda and Daesh had footholds in Syrian villages along the Lebanese border. 
Aoun says his first order of business is to have parliament change the country’s unwieldy electoral law, which distributes seats on a sectarian basis (and on the basis of an outdated set of statistics going back in some cases to the 1930 census). 
Lebanon held successful municipal elections last spring. But most Lebanese are not holding their breath that governmental gridlock will end any time soon. And with Depression-style unemployment, the country has other problems than the political ones. TAGS:",FAKE
"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Cher Finally Cracks Time Travel October 28, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS Share 0 Add Comment 
AFTER over 27 years of research into quantum mechanics and temporal displacement technology, pop icon Cher has finally found a way to turn back time, WWN can exclusively reveal. 
Cher, mostly aged 70, made the stunning announcement at a press conference held outside her particle physics collider facility in Miami, while on break from her busy schedule of Las Vegas residency shows and Einstein-Rosen bridge construction. 
The legendary singer announced that as of 3:47am eastern time, the barrier separating humankind from the ability to journey backwards through the clouds of time, to meddle with the past and perhaps find a way to take back terrible things said to a loved one in a moment of anger, undoing any pain and hurt caused in the process. 
“It’s time travel, baby, please listen,” said Cher, surrounded by a complex network of computers and shit. 
“I’m going to be the first, baby, to travel through time, baby, please listen. Ever since the late 80s, baby, I’ve been wanting to turn back the clock, and after all these years, baby, you have to listen, I’ve found the key to stepping into a vortex travelling at greater than the speed of light, vanishing in front of your eyes but reappearing instantaneously at a pre-determined point in the pa-ah-ast”. 
The singer gave a quick rendition of the Shoop Shoop Song and then dematerialised.",FAKE
"What the heck are those bulges underneath that bright green pant suit you are wearing Hillary? You know the one you wore when you couldn’t walk up the steps without assistance back in February? The suit that is in the viral photo that adds to the speculation that not all is well with your health? 
Via TruthAndAction 

A private fundraiser was held at the house of Lisa and Joseph Rice in Charleston, SC. A picture of Hillary needing strong-armed assistance to walk up several steps has given more visual evidence that something is seriously wrong with Hillary.
Scroll Down For Video Evidence Below! Her health appears to be a very real issue, with brain glitches that result in confused speech and disconnected thoughts, the inability to walk unassisted at times, and her chronic cough. However, Hillary will become president, even if it kills her, and it appears with her health issues becoming less easy to hide from the public, it will kill her.
Though her doctor, Dr. Bardack, gave her a clean bill of health back on July 28, 2015 in a letter stating she was fit to run for president, her behavior suggests otherwise. A neurologist, viewing the recent health issues displayed by Hillary, such as her exceptionally long bathroom break during the debate, suggests that Clinton is demonstrating signs of post-concussion syndrome. This disorder can “severely impact her cognitive abilities”
Check out the video that shows the bulges on her back under that bright green pantsuit on the next page. Some suggest that it is a life saving vest. What do you think? Is Hillary wearing a flack jacket under her pantsuit or is there something else that she hiding from the world? As more evidence accumulates, from brain glitches to extraordinarily long bathroom breaks, the DNC will eventually have to address her health issues one would think.
Now there is the mystery of the bulge under the green jacket she was wearing when she was unable to walk up the steps at a North Carolina fundraiser. As a reminder, Hillary suffered from blood clots in 2012. Could this bulge under her jacket be a LifeVest Wearable Defibrillator?
In 2012, Hillary suffered from a “transverse sinus thrombosis [blood clot] is a rare condition of a clot forming in the venous sinus cavities surrounding the brain,” Kassicieh told Breitbart, that resulted after Hillary’s fall.
These venous sinuses drain blood out of the brain. The [injury] incidence is only about 3 per 1,000,000 adults. The transverse sinus is less commonly affected than the main sagittal venous sinus. The cause of transverse sinus clots is not well understood although trauma and dehydration have been described as risk factors. Mrs. Clinton suffered from both.
If her seizure like episodes are tied to an impaired heart, than the bulges could be the LifeVest.
Here’s a video of the fundraiser event in the Rices’ home. Pay special attention to Hillary’s back in the beginning of the video: 
Did you notice those strange bulges on her upper back, although she was wearing a roomy coat-jacket?
Here’s a screenshot from the video, with painted red arrows pointing to the bulges:

Below are more (cropped) screenshots I took from the video. I highlighted the bulges with yellow arrows and circles:

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit thinks Hillary’s bulges are from a defibrillator vest.
From the website Zoll.LifeVest :
What Is the LifeVest Wearable Defibrillator?
The LifeVest wearable defibrillator is a treatment option for sudden cardiac arrest that offers patients advanced protection and monitoring as well as improved quality of life.
The LifeVest is the first wearable defibrillator . Unlike an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), the LifeVest is worn outside the body rather than implanted in the chest. This device continuously monitors the patient’s heart with dry, non-adhesive sensing electrodes to detect life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms. If a life-threatening rhythm is detected, the device alerts the patient prior to delivering a treatment shock, and thus allows a conscious patient to delay the treatment shock. If the patient becomes unconscious, the device releases a Blue™ gel over the therapy electrodes and delivers an electrical shock to restore normal rhythm.
Those strange bulges on her back add to the many indicators of Hillary Clinton’s ill health (see links below) which the mainstream media continue to dismiss . Presidential candidates are required by law to release their medical records. It is high time for Hillary to do so.
Pause the video at 13 seconds and check out the bulge.
",FAKE
"BNI Store Nov 6 2016 Like a good little sharia-compliant female, Prince Charles’ wife Camilla removes her shoes to enter a mosque in Abu Dhabi, but the Prince of Wales keeps his shoes on The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have visited the spectacular Sheikh Zaved Grand Mosque to promote religious tolerance. ( HAH! ) UK Daily Mail Charles was dressed in a linen suit and striped tie, while Camilla wore a blue headscarf, long jacket and trousers. Visitors to the mosque must remove their footwear, BUT Charles walked round in black shoes while his wife went barefoot with her head covered. The mosque was established in 2008 and sits at the entrance to Abu Dhabi City Island. It aims to work with research centres and religious, educational and cultural institutions within the United Arab Emirates and across the world.",FAKE
"The banner headline on the Drudge Report the morning after Wednesday’s presidential forum screamed “HILLARY AND THE EAR PEARL.” The story it linked to was from Infowars.com, the website of radio host Alex Jones, a crazy person who believes the government has a special tornado weapon and used it to attack Oklahoma in 2013. Citing a tweet from actor and right-wing troll James Woods, Infowars wondered if Clinton had been “wearing an earpiece during last night’s presidential forum,” as indicated by pictures that “appeared to show Hillary with some kind of flesh-colored device embedded inside her ear.”

So was it a flesh-colored earpiece as Infowars insisted? Or was it a pearl-colored earpiece as Drudge claimed? No one can say, but the ad hoc investigative group of conspiracy theorists and crackpot celebrities seems pretty convinced that Hillary Clinton had someone secretly feeding answers into her ear during the forum. The “evidence” was convincing enough that Donald Trump’s son — the elephant-butchering one, not the off-Broadway “American Psycho” one — tweeted out a link to the Infowars story.

So congratulations, everyone: we’ve officially reached the “Presidential Candidate Cheats Via Secret Radio Technology” stage of the 2016 election. It’s arrived a bit early this year, but this conspiratorial story line has become a recurring fixture of presidential campaigns thanks to the internet’s inexhaustible capacity to prey on gullibility and partisan reflexes.

The “secret earpiece” story made its first big splash in the latter stages of the 2004 presidential election, when blogger Joseph Cannon noticed an odd bulge in the back of George W. Bush’s suit jacket during an early October debate. “Bush seemed to have a wire, or an odd protrusion of some sort, running down his back,” Cannon wrote. “Apparently, Fearless Leader used an earpiece during the confrontation.”

The speculative accusation might have remained confined to the liberal blogosphere had it not been for the efforts of the website you’re reading at this moment, Salon.com, which published half-skeptical write-ups of the circumstantial evidence surrounding the Bush “wire” and contacted NASA scientists for image analysis of the “Bush bulge.” From Salon, the story jumped to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which managed to obtain derisive denials from Bush campaign staffers. The “bulge” even became the centerpiece of a David Letterman riff. Fervent speculation aside, no direct evidence was ever produced indicating that Bush was wired during his debate with John Kerry. After Bush won re-election a month later, the issue receded back into the shaded corners of the internet.

Almost exactly four years later, as a young Democratic senator from Illinois took to the debate stage, it was the conservative blogosphere that found itself on secret earpiece patrol. During the Oct. 7, 2008, presidential debate, blogger Ann Althouse wrote that she had “noticed that Obama was wearing an earpiece” and posted a photo of the alleged device in Barack Obama’s ear. She quickly reconsidered her analysis and recognized that she was looking at light reflecting off Obama’s ear but left open the possibility that a secret earpiece might still exist: “Just because the thing I saw wasn’t there doesn’t mean there wasn’t something there that I didn’t see.”

The 2012 election was largely free of any prominent earpiece speculation, though some chain emails bounced around, accusing Obama of wearing an earpiece and having a suspicious Bush-like suit bulge. That cycle’s primary example of overwrought “he’s a cheater” attacks were directed at Republican contender Mitt Romney, whom liberal bloggers accused of consulting crib notes during the first debate with Obama (Romney was actually holding a handkerchief). The relative lack of earpiece mania in 2012 has been more than compensated for in 2016, with this ridiculous story about Hillary Clinton’s clandestine listening device featured prominently on one of the world’s most heavily trafficked political websites and endorsed by the son of the Republican nominee. Other Clinton-related conspiracies have proved to be remarkably persistent this cycle (her allegedly failing health being the most prominent among them). So there’s an excellent chance that this one will stick around, too. The question that arises from all this is why the “earpiece” phenomenon keeps popping up election after election, in defiance of consistent debunking and a lack of evidence to support the allegations. “These sorts of beliefs are dependent on if you have a conspiracy worldview, and then on your partisanship,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami who’s written extensively about political conspiracy theories. “People point fingers at the other side.” Basically, if you’re already predisposed to believe that a candidate from the other party is going to cheat, then you’re more likely to take at face value an allegation that he or she cheated during a debate. When someone presents you with grainy screen captures of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton and claims that they show telecommunications equipment hidden on their bodies, your partisanship enables you to bridge the sizable gap between the poor evidence and the firm conclusion that someone offstage was whispering into the candidate’s ear. These cheating allegations tend to take the form of a secret earpiece simply because that’s really the only way someone participating in a nationally televised presidential debate could conceivably cheat. “It’s just like when Hillary Clinton goes on [“Jimmy Kimmel Live”] and opens the pickle jar,” Uscinski explained, referring to a humorous feat of strength that Clinton performed to mock questions about her health and that conspiratorial conservatives claimed was rigged. “The only way she could have cheated in that test . . .  was to have a preopened pickle jar. It’s sort of obvious that if people are going to be predisposed to thinking that cheating was taking place, that would be the method in which it would be done.” I don’t know whether Matt Drudge and Donald Trump Jr. actually believe that Clinton was wired up during this week’s president forum, but they’re nonetheless legitimizing that idea in the minds of people who are already apt to believe it.",REAL
"Next Swipe left/right At least Tesco are giving shoppers a bit of warning this year It’s November, which can mean only one thing – incessant Christmas reminders for the next two months. At least Tesco are giving shoppers a bit of a heads up this time…",FAKE
"President-Elect Donald Trump preached national unity and vowed to ""reclaim our country's destiny,"" in his victory speech, which was delivered around 3:00 a.m. in New York City. Rival candidate Hillary Clinton had already called Trump to concede, he told the crowd.

""She fought very hard,"" he said. ""Hillary has worked very long and hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.""

Trump then turned to the business of healing the vast political divide. He promised to be a president for all Americans.

""For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I'm reaching out to you for your guidance and your help, so that we can work together and unify our great country,"" he said.

The president-elect claimed to have a ""great"" economic plan, though he offered no details. He closed by thanking his most vocal supporters—his family, Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Jeff Sessions, Ben Carson, and others—and assuring the American people that ""you'll be so proud of your president"" by the time his reign comes to an end.

Trump's election has sent shockwaves: the markets are in free-fall, Democratic voters are petrified, and the media has no idea what just happened.

Libertarians should be girding themselves for four years of the federal government trampling their freedoms—but of course, we've come to expect that regardless. As I wrote on Facebook earlier tonight, it's perhaps moments like this where the case for the libertarian vision of a constrained government is most powerful:

I'm watching MSNBC as I write this, and I just heard Lawrence O'Donnell say the following:

That didn't take long: the left is interested in limited government again. Would have been nice to have them with us during Obama's eight years in office, but we'll take what we can get, I guess.",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"The Democratic National Committee is offering its ""deep and sincere apology"" to Bernie Sanders, his supporters and the entire party for what it calls ""the inexcusable remarks made over email.""

Incoming interim party leader Donna Brazile and six other officials said the emails ""do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.""

It wasn't signed by the outgoing DNC head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who announced Monday that she will not gavel in her party's national convention.

""I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention,"" Wasserman Schultz told the Sun Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale, according to The Associated Press.

In the wake of an email scandal, Wasserman Schultz said Sunday that she will resign her post as chairwoman of the DNC after the Democratic National Convention. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said it was ""her decision"" to step down.

Clinton is all set to accept the Democratic Party's nomination for president. She will be the first woman ever to rise to such a position.

But that story is taking a backseat to the controversy brewing inside the Democratic Party.

Thousands of leaked emails show a supposedly impartial DNC working to secure the nomination for Clinton, even trying to paint the Jewish Bernie Sanders as an atheist to voters in the South.

The scandal comes as no surprise to Sanders' supporters who see Clinton as too establishment and cozy with Wall Street.

""I think the Clinton people stole it. The corruption has become more well-known with the WikiLeaks and such,"" claimed one Sanders supporter.

Meanwhile, Clinton has hired Wasserman Schultz to be a part of her campaign, according to Townhall.com. The Democratic presidential candidate sent an email to supporters, announcing Wasserman Schultz would become the ""honorary chair"" of the 50-state program to make sure Democrats win at the polls across the country.

Opponents of the Florida congresswoman heckled her at a breakfast of state delegates Monday, shouting, ""Shame!"" and ""You're ruining our democracy!""

Supporters of Sanders displayed paper signs that said ""E-mails"" on one side and ""Thanks for the 'help' Debbie,"" on the other.

Wasserman Schultz told the crowd during the uproar that ""we have to make sure that we move together in a unified way.""

The Hill.com reports that ""allies"" of Clinton believe Wasserman Schultz should not even stay on as DNC chairwoman during the convention. The news outlet says one ally referred to what happened at the Florida breakfast as a reason.

""It's causing the distraction no one wanted at the convention,"" one Clinton ally said, according to The Hill.

Wasserman Schultz's resignation after the convention, however, doesn't mean the end of the disunity problems. Liberals unhappy with Clinton's vice presidential pick, Sen. Tim Kaine, are looking to cause a stir.

""There's talk about walking out of the vice presidential or presidential acceptance speech. There's talk about total silence, remaining seated, turning backs,"" Normon Solomon, with the Bernie Delegates Network, said.

Even with this drama, the reality is Clinton will be the nominee. She then faces the challenge of reaching out to disgruntled progressives, while striking a more moderate tone for the General Election.

""It has been the Democratic Party's history that once the nominee is established and we know who that's going to be and we rally the troops and folks tend to come inside the tent. Of course, there are those who are not coming in the tent and they were never coming in the tent and that's okay,"" Leah Daughtry, CEO of the DNC, said.

All eyes will be on Sanders to see what he says to delegates Monday evening.

Meanwhile, Kaine will be facing the biggest speech of his career.

Liberals aren't happy he's the vice presidential choice and conservatives think he's too liberal, which leads many Democrats to believe he's just right.

The reality about Kaine is that once people know him, they tend to like him - even if they disagree with him.  And he's never lost an election.

""I am so excited. I've known Tim Kaine for many years and so I know his heart. I know his heart and his commitment,"" reflected Alexis Herman, former secretary of labor.

Coming off one of the biggest days of his life Sen. Kaine walked through his Richmond neighborhood with his wife Anne to Saint Elizabeth Catholic Church. It's where the couple has worshipped for three decades.

Inside, Kaine got emotional at times and even sang a solo in the choir. Although he has worked to reduce abortions, he's come under fire for his support of pro-choice policies.

But at the DNC his position is just right.

""He's a committed Catholic, a social justice Catholic. He takes that very seriously. His work in politics is his outreach,"" Daughtry said.

Several hundred Democrats followed Kaine's example by gathering in Philadelphia at an interfaith service Sunday.

Rev. James Forbes of the Riverside Church says this week Americans will see a vastly different vision for the future.

""I would wish that the world gets a chance to see two major options - an option that they remember from people who are angry, who are afraid -- versus a group that's willing to risk possibilities that could probably do it together, but that the prospect of our working together is even brighter,"" Forbes told CBN News.

So far, it's been a mixed bag but the week is young.",REAL
"Obama faces a Republican leadership that appears united in opposing his decision to fill the seat as well as a crop of Republicans facing re-election who have lined up behind their leaders.

Those vulnerable GOP senators are crucial to any White House strategy for filling the seat held by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Democrats would need 14 defections from GOP ranks to break a filibuster and confirm a nominee. So far, no GOP senator has indicated he or she is ready to vote for an Obama nominee.

The White House said Friday that Obama will move ahead. Obama on Thursday called key Senate leaders, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, part of the customary consultation once considered essential to laying the groundwork for a warm reception for an eventual nominee.

But the president did not appear to make much headway with the GOP leaders. Hours after the call, an op-ed penned by McConnell and Grassley was published in The Washington Post restating their case for why Obama should leave the job of naming a nominee to the next president.

""It is today the American people, rather than a lame-duck president whose priorities and policies they just rejected in the most-recent national election, who should be afforded the opportunity to replace Justice Scalia,"" McConnell and Grassley wrote.

Grassley's name on the piece signaled the Iowa chairman is now firmly in line with leadership. Earlier in the week, the chairman had suggested he might be open to holding hearings on an Obama nominee, a statement that buoyed Obama and his allies and confused the GOP message.

If Obama has any hope of winning, he'll need more than a muddled message.

Obama's hopes rest first on persuading Grassley to hold hearings in his committee. Then McConnell would have to agree to a vote by the full Senate, where the president would need 60 votes to break a filibuster.

The Hill notes vulnerable GOP senators in competitive re-election races are feeling the heat over the issue, including New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, whom the Concord Monitor took to task for her ""knee-jerk fashion” call for post-election confirmation hearings.

 

 ""Certainly there’s nervousness on the part of Republicans about what an absolute refusal to hold any hearings might do to GOP candidates in swing states,"" John Ullyot, a GOP aide and former senior Senate aide, tells The Hill.

 

 ""If Republicans hold hearings, that takes a lot of the pressure off their candidates in swing states who are in some cases in tough races.""

 

 The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

 Related Stories:",REAL
"(128 fans) - Advertisement - 
Michael Moore has made some terrific movies in the past, and Where to Invade Next may be the best of them, but I expected Trumpland to be (1) about Trump, (2) funny, (3) honest, (4) at least relatively free of jokes glorifying mass murder. I was wrong on all counts and would like my $4.99 back, Michael. 
Moore's new movie is a film of him doing a stand-up comedy show about how wonderfully awesome Hillary Clinton is -- except that he mentions Trump a bit at the beginning and he's dead serious about Clinton being wonderfully awesome. 
This film is a text book illustration of why rational arguments for lesser evilist voting do not work. Lesser evilists become self-delusionists. They identify with their lesser evil candidate and delude themselves into adoring the person. Moore is not pushing the ""Elect her and then hold her accountable"" stuff. He says we have a responsibility to ""support her"" and ""get behind her,"" and that if after two years -- yes, TWO YEARS -- she hasn't lived up to a platform he's fantasized for her, well then, never fear, because he, Michael Moore, will run a joke presidential campaign against her for the next two years (this from a guy who backed restricting the length of election campaigns in one of his better works). 
Moore maintains that virtually all criticism of Hillary Clinton is nonsense. What do we think, he asks, that she asks how many millions of dollars you've put into the Clinton Foundation and then she agrees to bomb Yemen for you? Bwahahaha! Pretty funny. Except that Saudi Arabia put over $10 million into the Clinton Foundation, and while she was Secretary of State Boeing put in another $900,000, upon   reportedly made it her mission to get the planes sold to Saudi Arabia, despite legal restrictions -- the planes now dropping U.S.-made bombs on Yemen with U.S. guidance, U.S. refueling mid-air, U.S. protection at the United Nations, and U.S. cover in the form of pop-culture distraction and deception from entertainers like Michael Moore. 
Standing before a giant Air Force missile and enormous photos of Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore claims that substantive criticism of Clinton can consist of only two things, which he dismisses in a flash: her vote for a war on Iraq and her coziness with Wall Street. He says nothing more about what that ""coziness"" consists of, and he claims that she's more or less apologized and learned her lesson on Iraq. 
What? It wasn't one vote. It was numerous votes to start the war, fund it, and escalate it. It was the lies to get it going and keep it going. It's all the other wars before and since. She says President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013. She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011. She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. She has backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan. She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq. She does not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing. She has consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel. She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi. She has not hesitated to warn that she could obliterate Iran. She is eager to antagonize Russia. She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine. She has the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers. She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation. She supported President Bill Clinton's wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress. She has advocated for arming fighters in Syria and for a ""No Fly"" zone. She supported a surge in Iraq even before President Bush did. 
That's just her war problem. What about her banking problem, prison problem, fracking problem, corporate trade problem, corporate healthcare problem, climate change problem, labor problem, Social Security problem, etc.? 
Moore parts company from substantive critique in order to lament unproven rightwing claims that Hillary Clinton has murdered various people. ""I hope she did,"" screams Moore. ""That's who I want as Commander in Chief!"" Hee hee hee. - Advertisement - 
Then Moore shamelessly pushes the myth that Hillary tried to create single-payer, or at least ""universal"" healthcare (whatever that is) in the 1990s. In fact, as I heard Paul Wellstone tell it, single-payer easily won the support of Clinton's focus group, but she buried it for her corporate pals and produced the phonebook-size monstrosity that was dead on arrival but reborn in another form years later as Obamacare. She killed single-payer then, has not supported it since, and does not propose it now. (Well, she does admit in private that it's the only thing that works, as her husband essentially blurts out in public.) But Moore claims that because we didn't create ""universal"" healthcare in the 1990s we all have the blood of millions on our hands, millions whom Hillary would have saved had we let her. 
Moore openly fantasizes: what would it be like if Hillary Clinton is secretly progressive? Remember that Moore and many others did the exact same thing with Obama eight years ago. To prove Clinton's progressiveness Moore plays an audio clip of her giving a speech at age 22 in which she does not hint at any position on any issue whatsoever. 
Mostly, however, Moore informs us that Hillary Clinton is female. He anticipates ""that glorious moment when the other gender has a chance to run this world and kick some righteous ass."" Now tell me please, dear world, if your ass is kicked by killers working for a female president will you feel better about it? How do you like Moore's inclusive comments throughout his performance: ""We're all Americans, right?"" 
Moore's fantasy is that Clinton will dash off a giant pile of executive orders, just writing Congress out of the government -- executive orders doing things like releasing all nonviolent drug offenders from prison immediately (something the real Hillary Clinton would oppose in every way she could). 
But when he runs for president, Moore says, he'll give everybody free drugs. - Advertisement - 
I'll tell you the Clinton ad I'd like to see. She's standing over a stove holding an egg. ""This is your brain,"" she says solemnly, cracking it into the pan with a sizzle. ""This is your brain on partisanship."" hillary and bush",FAKE
"By wmw_admin on November 3, 2016 The Saker — The Saker.is Nov 3, 2016 Last May I wrote an article entitled Counter-propaganda, Russian style in which I explained that far from banning or censoring the western anti-Putin/anti-Russia campaign, the Russia media reported about it in meticulous detail. Half a year later, not only is this still true, but the level of coverage has now sharply increased. Check out this screenshot from the latest (and most watched) weekly news show: Putin bashing reported on Russian TV. Click to enlarge Remember that roughly 80% plus of the audience watching this are strong supporters of President Putin. You can imagine what they think when they see these reports. The fully understand that the West hates Putin so much precisely because Putin is one of them, a real Russian who cares for the interests of the Russian people. So when the West demonizes Putin, it is really all the Russian people who are demonized and their conclusion is simple: the West does not hate Putin, the West hates *us*. As for “Blame it on Putin” – it has now become a real joke. One of the main effects of this kind of demonization is that the Russian public fully understands that there is no way back. In practical terms, most Russians believe that even if Russia pulled out of Syria, stopped supporting the Donbass or even decided to hand Crimea to the Ukies, the West would still continue to demonize Russia and try to subdue her . Furthermore, the Russians remember that the only time when the West liked Russia was when she was run by the drunken Eltsin and his coterie of Jewish oligarchs who pillaged Russia and whose reign had consequences similar to what a major war would result in. Any other Russia is simply unacceptable to the AngloZionist Empire. Seen in this light, the alliance of the West with both the Nazis in Kiev and the “moderate terrorists” in the Middle-East makes sense. This is not fundamentally different from the European’s alliance with the Ottomans during the Crimean War or the USA supported Japan against Russia in 1905 (only to then end up fighting against Japan a few years later). As long as X is anti-Russian, the West support X. It’s that primitive and that stupid. The Ukronazi regime in Kiev has understood that it has only one “commodity” left which it can sell to the West: its rabid russophobia. And since they are desperate, they make desperate and, frankly, comical efforts. Check out the new symbol of the Ukie military intelligence service: The Ukies point a dagger at the heart of Russia. Click to enlarge I don’t think I have ever seen the Ukie inferiority complex better illustrated. The Latin sentence “ Sapiens Dominabitur Astra ” (“the wise will rule the stars”) is a nice touch as it combines a non-cyrillic (Latin) alphabet, a reference to European astrology in the Middle Ages and a typically Ukrainian (cosmic) megalomania. Yet another proof, if needed, that all the Ukraine is is an “anti-Russia”. Make no mistake though, there is absolutely no fear of the West in Russia. Most Russians believe that the Russian armed forces are more than enough to keep West in check. And they are quite correct. But there is this acute awareness that were in not for the Russian military, Russia would be treated just like Iraq. In the meantime, the Russia media is gleefully feeding the Russian public every bit of russophobic propaganda produced in the West. Future generations will probably study this period and wonder at the absolutely mind-boggling stupidity of a western propaganda machine which is apparently completely oblivious at the impact of its propaganda on a nuclear superpower. The Saker",FAKE
"Last year, during the early days of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump boldly promised, “I’m gonna win the Hispanic vote.”

The past few days have suggested he was wrong. After Trump’s immigration speech focused on deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants and building a wall at the US–Mexico border, several of his top Latino advisers resigned or threatened to resign. And a new, huge survey shows Trump isn’t just losing the Latino vote — he’s losing it by far more than the past few decades of Republican presidential candidates.

The survey, by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions, found that if the election were held today, 70 percent of registered Latino voters would vote for Hillary Clinton. Only 19 percent would vote for Trump. About 2 percent said they won’t vote for president, 4 percent said they’d vote for someone else, and 4 percent said they’re undecided or don’t know.

The findings are quite credible: The survey was huge, reaching 3,729 Latino registered voters online and by phone between August 19 and 30. It has a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.

The findings are incredibly damning for Trump. To put this in context, this means that the Republican Party and Trump have effectively eliminated any gains the party made with Latino voters under President George W. Bush, who supported immigration reform that would have allowed unauthorized immigrants to gain legal status.

In 2000 and 2004, Bush got 35 and 40 percent of the Latino vote. That was up from the share of the vote that Ronald Reagan (35 and 37 percent), George H.W. Bush (30 and 25 percent), Bob Dole (21 percent) got. It was also higher than what John McCain (31 percent) and Mitt Romney (27 percent) got in subsequent elections.

Trump’s numbers, then, are below the previous six Republicans to run for president. And they’re especially low at a time when the Latino population has grown — from 14.8 million people in 1980 to 55.2 million in 2014.

As for why Trump has so little support among Latino voters, it’s basically what you'd expect: 70 percent said that Trump has made the Republican Party more hostile to Latinos. And 68 percent said that Trump’s views on immigrants and immigration made them less likely to vote for Republicans in November.

Meanwhile, 75-plus percent of Latino voters said President Barack Obama’s actions on immigration — such as letting undocumented immigrant youth stay in the country — made them more likely to vote for Democrats. And 64 percent said Hillary Clinton’s views on immigrants and immigration made them more likely to vote for Democrats.

So Republicans seemed to be on a downward trend with Latino voters after George W. Bush. But with Obama, Clinton, and Trump, that slide seems to have sped up by quite a bit.",REAL
"Nigerian Novelist Wonders Why Everyone Loves Hillary November 3, 2016 Daniel Greenfield 
Why does everyone love Hillary Clinton? It's hard to say. Her unfavorable ratings have hit 60%. That makes her more popular than 
1. The Bubonic Plague 
2. ObamaCare 
3. Osama bin Laden's corpse 
It's not much to go on. But the Atlantic decided to run a piece by Chimamanda Adichie titled,""Why Is Hillary Clinton So Widely Loved?"" 
Your response to seeing the name Chimamanda Adichie was probably huh. Unless you're a gender studies student at an Ivy. In which case you know exactly who she is and love her. Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian novelist whose ""We should all be feminists"" is big in those circles. 
The Clinton campaign is unbearably awkward and this panegyric by Adichie was an obvious attempt to channel some of that canned Obama poetry. And like most Hillary branding, it fails badly. 
There are howlers like, ""There are millions who admire the tapestry of Hillary Clinton’s past"" and ""There are people who, when Hillary Clinton becomes the first woman to be president of the United States, will weep from joy"". It's not quite a hymn to Comrade Stalin. Nor is it getting there by any means except a tow truck. 
And then there's the phrasing. Oh the phrasing. ""Hillary Clinton was guilty immediately when she stepped into the view of the American public as the first lady of Arkansas."" 
This is an awkward attempt to channel that Obama poetry, but instead it reads like a DVD manual badly translated from the Japanese. 
The Atlantic piece is full of lines that straddle the border between tin-eared propagandistic cliche and just bad writing. 
""She was a lawyer full of dreams: 
""She was guilty of not being a traditional first lady. She offended the old patriarchal order."" 
Then there's the theme of the article, which is to just deny reality. 
""A conservative writer labeled her a congenital liar when she was first lady, and the label stuck because it was repeated over and over—and it was a convenient label to harness misogyny. If she was a liar, then the hostility she engendered could not possibly be because she was a first lady who refused to be still and silent. “Liar’ has re-emerged during this election even though Politifact, a respected source of information about politicians, has certified that she is more honest than most politicians"" 
The perfect timing for that defense would have been not right after Hillary Clinton shouted at a rally that she had been in New York on 9/11. But don't worry. Hillary is more honest than most politicians. A site supporting her said so. 
"" Other words have been repeated over and over, with no context, until they have begun to breathe and thrum with life. Especially “emails.” The press coverage of “emails” has become an unclear morass where “emails” must mean something terrible, if only because of how often it is invoked."" 
How about ""Classified emails""? Or ""illegal server""? Or ""violation of regulations dealing with the handling of classified material""? That's got lots of context. Or ""cover-up"". 
""The people who love Hillary Clinton know that the IT system at the State Department is old and stodgy, nothing like a Blackberry’s smooth whirl. Hillary Clinton was used to her Blackberry, and wanted to keep using it when she became secretary of state."" 
People who love Hillary know that she love high tech Blackberry. Hillary love Blackberry. She is a lawyer full of dreams who fights for the children of migrant workers and loves their smooth whirl. Politifact thrums with life. Says her Blackberry is more honest than the iPhone. Hillary has many dreams of thrumming Blackberries whirling smoothly that offend the traditional stodgy patriarchal order IT system. 
""The American conservative media saw an opportunity to blow the “emails” story out of proportion, soon followed, almost bashfully, by the rest of the American media"" 
Is that how it works in Nigeria? Because that's not how it works in America. 
""There is no objective basis on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent."" 
They're both mammals? They need oxygen to live? They're better writers than Chimamanda Adichie. 
""The people who love Hillary Clinton see the failings of the general American media, where news entertains rather than informs. They bristle when benign stories about her are covered with an ominous tone"" 
They bristle and they hug their Blackberry and weep for they fear that the patriarchal stodgy IT systems will prevent Hillary from being the thrumming First Lady of North America. 
""They know that she is a bit too careful, but they understand that she has to be, that she cannot afford spontaneity."" 
You would think with all those six figure speeches, she could. afford a little 
""her actions so falsely magnified, that she leaned into caution, wrapped herself in a kind of caution that sometimes makes her appear stilted "" 
And wrapped in her caution, her whirling Blackberry in one hand, she bristled at the public, retracting her quills and occasionally hissing in an informed fashion for the children of migrant workers who admired the tapestry of her past. 
""There are millions of Americans who do not have the self-indulgent expectation that a politician be perfect. They are frustrated that Hillary Clinton is allowed no complexity. "" 
Get Beyonce on the phone. I think Adichie has got another hit.",FAKE
"Barring that, what will actually happen is that Obama will veto the bill. Darn, so close, guys. And we were all so sure the 62nd time would be the charm.

Now, this was only possible because the Senate passed a similar bill through the budget reconciliation process, which is not subject to minority filibusters and allows bills to pass with a simple majority vote. So Ryan didn’t really do anything different than his predecessor John Boehner would have, legislatively speaking. But he did get to tweet out a spiffy new: #OnHisDesk. Which in Washington is now preferable to the actual hard work of writing and passing legislation that might impact your constituents’ lives in tiny but positive ways.

Hashtags and demagoguery aside, what the GOP has actually done is start off the New Year – and the 10-month push to Election Day – by voting to take away healthcare from millions of Americans.

The larger point here is that, while it is still early in his tenure, so far the best evidence suggests that Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives is going to be pretty much as worthless as Boehner’s, at least this year: Do the bare minimum to keep the lights on and the government performing its basic functions, then placate the GOP’s angry right wing by letting them pass “messaging” bills that President Obama will laugh right out of the Oval Office.

We’ve already seen the House take on an omnibus spending bill just before Christmas that Ryan needed Democratic votes to pass while the GOP’s Freedom Caucus was screaming for his head. This was pretty much how Boehner used to operate. The former speaker was an amiable party hack who didn’t really want to shut the government down to placate the gremlins that run through right-wingers’ minds whenever they see a line item for Planned Parenthood in the government’s budget. Such shutdowns might get the base excited, but they are bad for the business leaders and lobbyists who so recently held some semblance of control of the party

So Boehner would listen to the extremists, pat them on their heads, pay lip service to the idea that, say, repealing Obamacare was worth giving thousands of federal employees indefinite and unpaid vacations, and then at the last minute go negotiate with Nancy Pelosi to keep the lights on. This was a terrible way to run the nation, and it eventually cost Boehner his job.

There was never any reason to believe any of this would change with Ryan at the helm. But when the GOP was begging him to take the job, party leaders sold him as the only man who could unite his fractious caucus. Ryan himself promised the far right that he would return to them some of the power Boehner had yanked, that he would listen to their concerns without condescension, and that he would take action on the issues most important to them. He was helped by Boehner secretly negotiating one final spending deal with Obama, which allowed Ryan to pass the latest omnibus while telling conservatives that, gosh darn it, he hated to vote for such a monstrosity but his wily predecessor left him no choice. None of this is to say that Ryan and Boehner are ideologically similar. Ryan has long been a zealot on supply-side economics, demonstrating a Randian belief in radically cutting the size of government, mostly on the backs of the poor. Boehner, on the other hand, while generally conservative, never met an ideological principle he wouldn’t trade away for a bottle of Scotch and someone else paying his greens fees. But Ryan is pragmatic enough to understand his goals are unreachable by full-frontal assault. So you get him passing the omnibus and following it up with this latest attempt at repealing Obamacare. You have him slamming President Obama’s mild executive actions on guns (over which at least one Republican is threatening to shut down part of the executive branch), which keeps anyone from noticing the giant gift the business wing of the party is about to hand Volkswagen and its lobbyists after the automaker was caught earlier this year in a systemic violation of the Clean Air Act. In terms of the results he’s getting in the House, Ryan is basically Boehner with cleaner lungs and minus the rambling, wine-drunk press conferences. It remains to be seen whether this two-faced act will carry out through the entire year. The far right has been grumbling, and Ryan’s approval ratings have dropped. If the GOP thinks it has a real shot at winning the White House while retaining control of both houses of Congress, Ryan might be able to keep the right wing in line by pointing out the bonanza that will result for them with President Ted Cruz in the Oval Office. But if a Democrat takes the oath of office a year from now, far-right Republicans – and the GOP electorate in general – will be screaming very loudly for his scalp.",REAL
"Migrant Crisis Disclaimer 
We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, systemic change will be inevitable and unavoidable. 
Anyone suggesting or promoting violence in the comments section will be immediately banned, permanently. Daily Stormer Presents: Dr. David Duke © Copyright Daily Stormer 2016, All Rights Reserved",FAKE
"Republican leaders vow to show that they can govern effectively by following through on a budget. But that will take compromises both within the Republican caucus and with the president.

Two Sunday attacks add to recent rise in fatal shootings of US police

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky (l.), joined by Senate majority whip John Cornyn of Texas, speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill on last month. The Republican leadership team faces an early test of its capacity to govern with this year's annual budget process, which began this week with the release of the White House budget on Monday.

The new GOP-controlled Congress, keen to prove that Republicans can govern, is faced with its first big test in Governing 101: the president’s $4 trillion budget proposal, delivered to Congress on Monday.

Appropriating money to pay for government is a basic function of Congress. Now that Republicans rule the roost under the Capitol dome, they’re promising to tackle this job properly: to have both houses agree on a budget blueprint by the April 15 deadline, to work out the details in 12 annual spending bills, to have both chambers agree on those bills, and send them to the president for his signature in time for the start of a new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

It’s a tall order. The last time Congress got to Step 1 – agreeing on a budget blueprint – was 2009. Since then, it’s been a perilous process, remembered for fiscal cliffs, a budget showdown, and forced across-the-board cuts (the dreaded “sequester”) that were never meant to be.

House speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky both say there will be no more shutdowns or fiscal cliffs. Yet both essentially declared the president’s budget dead on arrival – setting the stage for a fiscal food fight.

That doesn’t bode well for their governing pledge.

“To govern means to compromise,” says William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. “If Republicans want to prove they can govern, then the president and Congress will have to show they can compromise.”

As it stands, the president has started out with “a very clear ideological position that is almost 180 degrees opposite of the Congress,” says Mr. Hoagland, who has a long history of budget experience on the Hill.

The White House budget increases spending, raises taxes, and projects a $1.8 trillion trim to the deficit over a decade. Leaders of the House and Senate budget committees, on the other hand, plan a blueprint that balances the budget in 10 years. Republicans oppose tax and spending increases, though both parties are concerned about automatic spending cuts to the military.

John Feehery, former spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R) of Illinois, says it’s “essential” that Republicans return to the regular budget process.

“If Republicans do this right, and they pass all the appropriations bills in regular order and get them through the House and Senate, they can present them to the president in a series of legislation that makes it awfully difficult for the president to veto,” he says.

At that point, he explains, the argument is no longer about the size of the pie, just the pieces of it – and which party’s priorities are included in those pieces.

Whether the Republicans succeed will come down to political will and patience. “There’s definitely going to have to be compromise,” says Feehery.

He says he is encouraged by Senator McConnell’s “promise to govern” as evidenced in last week’s passage of the Keystone pipeline bill. It gained the backing of nine Democrats after three weeks of debate and a much more open amendment process than was afforded Republicans under former majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada.

Also working in the leaders’ favor, he says, are voters. They may not care if Congress does its budget work, but sure do notice when it doesn’t. Republican presidential candidates, especially former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, will also want to see a Congress that’s functioning again, Feehery says.

But even with a GOP majority, just approving a budget blueprint – which only requires a majority vote in both houses – could be difficult. Conservative hardliners in the House will make their demands, while moderate Republican senators facing tough election battles in blue or purple states will make theirs, says Hoagland. Twenty-four Senate Republicans are up for election in 2016, compared to only 10 Democrats.

The process gets harder once committees take up to appropriation bills, which unlike the budget blueprint,will be subject to Democratic filibuster in the Senate and will have to clear a 60-vote threshold to pass. Republicans hold a 54-seat majority.

Even if McConnell can keep all Republicans with him on key votes – also a tall order – he still needs six Democrats to pass spending bills.

There’s simply no getting around it, if Republicans want to prove they can govern, they’ll have to compromise. So will the president. On opening day of the budget process, neither seemed in a compromising mood.",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- Forty-three years after the Supreme Court established the right to a safe and legal abortion in Roe v. Wade, the stakes have never been higher for those on both sides of the abortion debate. States have enacted 288 new abortion restrictions in the past five years that have shut down a slew of clinics across the country, and the next president could nominate Supreme Court justices who will determine the fate of legal abortion for decades to come.

But even as abortion access for millions of women hangs in the balance, the issue has somehow been neglected by presidential debate moderators, causing the issue of reproductive rights to fade from the 2016 race. The Democratic candidates haven't been asked about reproductive rights at all in any of their four debates, and the Republicans have only been asked about abortion and funding for Planned Parenthood in the first two of the six debates they've participated in so far.

Advocates working for and against abortion rights are baffled by the silence.

“There are real and important differences between candidates here, and it's a loss for American women that they haven't been explored,” said Jess McIntosh, a spokeswoman for EMILY’s List, a group that helps elect pro-choice women to office.

NBC moderators did not ask how Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) new health plan, released just two hours before the Democratic debate the network hosted Sunday, would handle public funding for abortion, and did not press Hillary Clinton on her view that federal restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion should be repealed. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) haven't been asked in the past four GOP debates about their opposition to allowing victims of rape or incest to get abortions, a position that is significantly more conservative than those held by prior Republican presidential nominees.

The only abortion-related question GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has fielded during a debate was back in August, when Fox's Megyn Kelly asked him about his 1999 comment that he was ""very pro-choice."" His stance on abortion is much murkier these days, but no other moderators have chosen to ask him about it.

Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, wants candidates on both sides to explain whether they support public funding for abortion or the kinds of clinic regulations that conservative states have passed to make it difficult for abortion providers to stay open.

“Pro-life Americans would love to know whether candidates support health and safety standards for women who are exposed to great risks in abortion clinics,” said Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for AUL.",REAL
"Donald Trump and called out Hillary Clinton for her many lies. 
""I bet if Donald Trump had a brick for every lie Hillary has told he could build two walls,"" she told the enthusiastic crowd in attendance. 
""As a thirteen year old even I know Hillary Clinton is working for her own success and ways to control my life, my family’s life and your lives… She wants to make it Hillary’s America… not The Peoples’ America,"" she added. 
Indeed, Hillary Clinton has told about as many whoppers in her lifetime as her husband Bill, whose famous lie was ""I did not have sex with that woman, not one time."" Her lies also compete in close proximity to those of Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah . 
There is definitely a great joke here that two walls could be built if Hillary's lies were combined, but the sadder reality is that she's even being considered for the White House. In fact, it's amazing that she can get any support. Oh wait, perhaps the only support she actually has come from people she pays to support her, and even that seems to be with reluctance .   shares",FAKE
Parker covered the Trump campaign and transition for the Times.,REAL
"Get Ready For A Fight To Replace Scalia

So it's only fitting that news of his death at age 79 ignited an immediate and partisan battle over who might take his place on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., said the vacancy should not be filled until the new president takes office. And Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee, which would oversee any nomination, said it's ""standard practice over the the last 80 years"" for lawmakers to not nominate and confirm such nominees during a presidential election year.

But Democrats are crying foul, pointing out the Senate confirmed Ronald Reagan's nominee Anthony Kennedy by a vote of 97 to 0 in the election year of 1988. (Grassley's staff now says it should have said ""nominated and"" confirmed.)

President Obama said Saturday evening that, ""I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in — due time.""

The top Democrat in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, called on the president to make a nomination ""right away.""

""Failing to fill this vacancy would be a shameful abdication of one of the Senate's most essential Constitutional responsibilities,"" Reid added.

There are nearly 11 months until a new president takes office, and in the interim, the high court will operate with only eight justices. That means if the jurists tie 4 to 4, the ruling in the lower court would stand, an issue that could have implications for the president's immigration and environmental initiatives; the availability of abortions; voting rights and redistricting; and affirmative action in higher education.

""The American people deserve to have a fully functioning Supreme Court,"" said Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ""It is only February.""

The Senate had been scheduled to take frequent breaks for much of 2016, working in home districts and preparing for the forthcoming elections. But the sudden death of Justice Scalia, and the vacancy it creates, could put pressure on lawmakers to spend more time at work, in Washington. To win confirmation, a Supreme Court nominee effectively needs 60 votes. The newest member of the bench, Elena Kagan, was confirmed with just five Republican votes in 2010, and a few of those lawmakers have since left Congress.

President Obama has already named two justices to the court, Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine two years ago, he stressed his emphasis on diversifying the ranks of the federal judiciary by appointing more women and minorities.

A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said only 36 high-court nominees have been rejected between 1789 and 2010. Eleven were voted down outright, and the remainder were either withdrawn or tabled or otherwise never received Senate votes.

The most recent happened in 1987, when lawmakers nixed the nomination of Robert Bork by a vote of 58 to 42.

There's no deadline or timetable for considering a Supreme Court nomination. CRS said Kagan waited 87 days between her nomination and a final vote. Justice Clarence Thomas waited 99 days after his nomination by President George H.W. Bush. And Bork 's nomination took 108 days.",REAL
"BROOKLYN, N.Y.—With a critical primary contest just days away, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders met on a Brooklyn stage Thursday night for what could be their final debate.

And, unlike their first debate many months ago and others in between, the candidates did not pull a single punch, underscoring the high stakes for both of them: Clinton, wanting to wrap up the primary and focus her energy and resources on the general election; Sanders, hoping to prolong the race through the summer.

""If you’re both screaming at each other, the viewers won’t be able to hear either of you,"" CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer said at one point during the debate at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Given both Clinton and Sanders’ intimate familiarity with the state, each  tried to hammer home policy differences through a New York lens, from issues such as Wall Street influence to gun control to foreign policy as it relates to Israel. But the arguments put forth echoed messages each has been pushing for some time, and aren’t likely to influence the outcome of Tuesday’s contest in New York.

Sanders has stepped back from questioning Clinton’s qualifications, but he did re-engage on his concerns about her judgment.

""Does Secretary Clinton have the intelligence, the experience to be president? Of course she does, but I do question her judgment,” he said. “I question a judgment which voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of this country; voted for virtually every disastrous trade agreement which cost us millions of decent-paying jobs. And I question her judgment about running super PACs which are collecting tens of millions of dollars from special interests, including $15 million from Wall Street.”

For her part, Clinton questioned Sanders’ depth of knowledge, invoking a New York Daily News editorial board meeting in which the Vermont senator struggled to answer questions on breaking up big banks and on foreign policy. “I think you need to have the judgment on day one to be both president and commander-in-chief,” she said.

Clinton also reminded the audience of her connections to New York and to President Obama, whose legacy she says she would like to build upon. “The people of New York voted for me twice to be their senator,” she said. “And President Obama trusted my judgment enough to ask me to be secretary of state for the United States.”

Clinton’s embrace of Obama throughout this primary process figures to help mobilize key coalitions that propelled his presidential victories, especially in the diverse and voter-rich New York City. She has argued that she has not only more pledged delegates than Sanders, but also more votes—even more than Obama had in building his lead over her in 2008, she noted. She is also hoping to calm concerns among Democrats that a prolonged primary would hurt the party in the general election, noting that the race between herself and Obama eight years ago went on longer than this one has and the party was still able to unite and win that November.

“Where we stand today is that we are in this campaign very confident and optimistic,” she said, but “I’m not taking anything for granted, or any voter or any place.”

For his part, Sanders continued to mobilize his base in a way that underscored Clinton’s potential vulnerabilities in trying to unite the party down the road.

“Establishment politicians are never going to address the crises we face,” he said of his rival. “You can’t take money … and expect the American people to expect you’re going to stand up to these special interests.”

The race has become much more heated in recent weeks, a notable shift in a party primary that had been largely, and unconventionally, cordial, especially in contrast to the Republican contest. Sanders has escalated his attacks in an effort to keep pace, raising questions about Clinton’s judgment, harping on her vote for the Iraq War and her acceptance of large sums of money for speeches given to Goldman Sachs and Verizon, among others.

Sanders again called on Clinton to release the transcripts of her paid speeches. She deflected, even when pressed again by the moderators, by pushing Sanders to release his tax returns.

For her part, Clinton has hit Sanders on the issue of gun control, invoking the families of Sandy Hook Elementary School victims, and criticizing her opponent over legal loopholes that give immunity from lawsuits to gun manufacturers. “We hear a lot from Senator Sanders about the greed and recklessness of Wall Street,” Clinton said. “But what about the greed and recklessness of the gun lobby.”

Asked about the daughter of the Sandy Hook principal calling on Sanders to apologize for his stance on the issue, the Democratic socialist declined, but said he supported the right of the families to sue the manufacturer of the AR-15 used to kill children in the massacre. The issue of gun control figures to be a mobilizing factor among Democrats, particularly in New York, a state that both candidates claim as home turf: Clinton is a current resident who represented New York for eight years in the U.S. Senate, and Sanders was born and raised in Brooklyn.

But each see the significance of the state differently. Clinton hopes an overwhelming win here will halt Sanders’ momentum and bring the primary closer to a conclusion, allowing her to shift focus to the Republican opponents. For Sanders, who has won the past seven contests but still lags behind in the delegate count, a win would keep alive some hope of clinching the nomination and deliver a blow to the Clinton campaign’s morale.

Defeating Clinton in her adopted home state appears unlikely at this point for Sanders. The former secretary of state leads by nearly 14 points there, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. One recent NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll shows Clinton has expanded her lead over the past few days. The two candidates were tied in upstate New York, according to the poll. Sanders does best among younger voters (under age 45) and those who consider themselves very liberal.

New York’s closed primary system will also pose a challenge for Sanders, as independent voters are a key part of his base. The campaign has worked to persuade such voters to register as Democrats in order to vote for him. After having twice won New York statewide, Clinton is no stranger to campaigning in the state. She has won endorsements from unions and the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who ran her Senate campaign, as well as African-American leaders. Clinton’s message of building upon the legacy of Obama figures to serve her well there.

But Sanders was able to draw 27,000 people for a rally in Greenwich Village. The image of a packed Washington Square Park, near the campus of NYU, captured the energy his campaign has generated, particularly among young people. The event also underscored a challenge Clinton could have if she becomes the nominee in galvanizing Sanders’ supporters for a victory in the general election.

While Clinton continues to pile up delegates even as Sanders wins states, given the proportional allocation involved, his continued presence and influence have prolonged the race. He has also continued to show overwhelming fundraising prowess, hauling $44 million recently, which forces Clinton to take time away from the trail to raise money.

Clinton will attend fundraisers in California over the weekend before heading back to campaign in New York City. After the debate, Sanders boarded a plane to Rome for meetings at the Vatican, and is expected to return Saturday evening.

Sanders has pledged to stay in the race through to California in June. Asked if he would take the fight all the way to the Philadelphia convention, he said: “I think we're going to win this nomination, to tell you the truth.”

The Clinton campaign, however, believes the momentum, math, and map will be in her favor next week and beyond.

“I'm going to work my heart out here in New York until the polls close on Tuesday. I'm going to work in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland, all the way through California,” she said. “And when we end up with the number of delegates we need, we will unite the party and have a unified convention.”",REAL
"As he tries to charm Republicans still skeptical of his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has a challenge: On several key issues, he sounds an awful lot like a Democrat.

And on some points of policy, such as trade and national defense, the billionaire businessman could even find himself running to the left of Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic rival in the general election.

Trump is a classic Republican in many ways. He rails against environmental and corporate regulations, proposes dramatically lower tax rates and holds firm on opposing abortion rights. But the presumptive GOP nominee doesn't fit neatly into a traditional ideological box.

""I think I'm running on common sense,"" he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ""I think I'm running on what's right. I don't think in terms of labels.""

Perhaps Trump's clearest break with Republican orthodoxy is on trade, which the party's 2012 platform said was ""crucial for our economy"" and a path to ""more American jobs, higher wages, and a better standard of living.""

Trump says his views on trade are ""not really different"" from the rest of his party's, yet he pledges to rip up existing deals negotiated by ""stupid leaders"" who failed to put American workers first. He regularly slams the North American Free Trade Agreement involving the U.S, Mexico and Canada, and opposes a pending Asia-Pacific pact, positions shared by Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.

""The problem is the ideologues, the very conservative group, would say everything has to be totally free trade,"" Trump said. ""But you can't have free trade if the deals are going to be bad. And that's what we have.""

Trump long has maintained that he has no plans to scale back Social Security benefits or raise its qualifying retirement age. The position puts him in line with Clinton. She has said she would ""defend and expand"" Social Security, has ruled out a higher retirement age and opposes reductions in cost-of-living adjustments or other benefits.

""There is tremendous waste, fraud and abuse, but I'm leaving it the way it is,"" Trump recently told Fox Business Network.

It's a stance at odds with the country's top-ranked elected Republican, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has advocated fundamental changes to Social Security and other entitlement programs. But it's also one that Trump argues keeps him in line with the wishes of most voters.

""Remember the wheelchair being pushed over the cliff when you had Ryan chosen as your vice president?"" Trump told South Carolina voters this year, referring to then-vice presidential candidate Ryan's budget plan. ""That was the end of that campaign."" Ryan was Mitt Romney's running mate in 2012.

Complicating the efforts to define Trump is his penchant for offering contradictory ideas about policy. He also has taken recently to saying that all of his plans are merely suggestions, open to later negotiation.

Trump's tax plan, for instance, released last fall, called for lowering the rate paid by the wealthiest people in the United States from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

Trump described it as a massive boon for the middle class. Outside experts concluded it disproportionately benefited the rich and would balloon the federal deficit.

Close to clinching the nomination, Trump now appears to be pulling away from his own proposal. While he still wants to lower taxes for the wealthy and businesses, he now says his plan was just a starting point for discussions and he would like to see the middle class benefit more from whatever changes he seeks in tax law.

""We have to go to Congress, we have to go to the Senate, we have to go to our congressmen and women and we have to negotiate a deal,"" Trump said recently. ""So it really is a proposal, but it's a very steep proposal.""

Trump has a similar take on the minimum wage. Trump said at a GOP primary debate that wages are too high, and later made clear that he does not support a federal minimum wage. Yet when speaking about the issue, he says he recognizes the difficulty of surviving on the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

""I am open to doing something with it,"" he told CNN this month.

On foreign policy, Trump already appears working to paint Clinton as a national security hawk who would too easily the lead the country into conflict.

""On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,"" Trump said at a recent rally, He listed the countries where the U.S. had intervened militarily during her tenure as secretary of state and pointed to her vote to authorize the Iraq war while she was in the Senate.

Trump's own ""America First"" approach appears to lean more toward isolationism. One of his foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, recently described it as a ""third way.""

""This doesn't fit any of the boxes,"" Phares said.

Clinton has advocated using ""smart power,"" a combination of diplomatic, legal, economic, political and cultural tools to expand American influence. She believes the U.S. has a unique ability to rally the world to defeat international threats.

She argues the country must be an active participant on the world stage, particularly as part of international alliances such as NATO. Trump has criticized the military alliance, questioning a structure that sees the U.S. pay for most of its costs.

""No, I think I'm much tougher than her on foreign — and I think we won't have to use it,"" Trump recently told Fox News when asked whether he might come to Clinton's left on some foreign policy issues. ""You know, I appear that I might — maybe to the left. I believe in very, very strong defense. I believe in world peace. I want to help other countries.""",REAL
"A series of legal setbacks have halted the government’s intensive preparations to move forward with President Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, even as community organizations continue a rapid push to get ready for the programs, according to U.S. officials and immigrant advocacy groups.

Since a federal judge first blocked the new programs in February, the Department of Homeland Security has suspended plans to hire up to 3,100 new employees, most of whom would be housed in an 11-story building the government has leased for $7.8 million a year in Arlington, Va. That building, in the Crystal City area, is now sitting mostly unused, DHS employees say.

Yet inside and outside the Beltway, community groups are mobilizing, educating immigrants and training volunteers to help them apply for relief, even though it remains unclear whether the program will ever begin. Most recently, a foundation headed by billionaire George Soros, undaunted by the court rulings, pledged at least $8 million to that effort.

“We’re full speed ahead,” said Josh Hoyt, executive director of the Chicago-based National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of pro-immigrant groups that have held more than 700 information sessions on the new programs and trained more than 2,000 volunteers to aid immigrants in applying for them.

Obama announced in November that up to 5 million illegal immigrants would be eligible to be shielded from deportation — including undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents — as long as they met certain criteria. One of the signature initiatives of his presidency, the plan also expands a 2012 program that has deferred the deportations of more than 600,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children and has granted most of them work permits.

But after Texas and 25 other states sued the administration, calling the moves unconstitutional, a federal judge in Texas in February put them on hold until the case is resolved. A federal appeals court recently upheld that injunction, with legal observers now saying the court fight could last until late in Obama’s term. The 2012 program remains unaffected.

The legal battle highlights the explosive nature of the immigration debate, which has emerged as an early issue in the 2016 presidential race even as immigration legislation remains stalled in Congress. The fate of Obama’s executive action benefiting immigrant parents, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, will resonate into the next administration. Most Republican presidential candidates have pledged to overturn Obama’s immigration actions, while leading Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has strongly endorsed them.

As soon as Obama took his actions on Nov. 20, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “immediately began efforts to implement those initiatives,’’ said Marsha Catron, a DHS spokeswoman. The next day, the agency leased a 280,000-square-foot building on Crystal Drive in Crystal City to house DAPA employees, according to DHS documents sent to Congress.

The building came fully furnished but required about $26 million in start-up costs, including $2.7 million for workstation and desktop equipment, documents show. Those costs were to be funded with fees collected from immigrants who had applied for other government programs, and DHS says DAPA would have no impact on any existing programs.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of DHS, is central to managing the nation’s immigration system and processes more than 6 million citizenship and other applications and petitions each year.

The plan also called for 1,000 employees, mostly new hires, to start up DAPA in Crystal City and 400 staffers at other service centers nationwide to process applications for the expanded 2012 program for immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children. That program is known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Over time, however, Citizenship and Immigration Services projected that a total of 3,100 new employees might be needed for the two programs, which were expected to cost up to $484 million per year and be paid for by the $465 application fees required for each applicant.

By mid-February, DHS was days away from beginning to accept applications for the expanded DACA program, with the first DAPA applications to follow in May.

But on Feb. 16, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas issued his ruling temporarily blocking both. Citizenship and Immigration Services “immediately took steps to ensure the agency ceased its preparations,’’ said Catron, who added that DHS is “disappointed” by that decision as well as the May 26 one by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upholding it.

Since then, “everything is on hold,” said Kenneth Palinkas, president of National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, which represents about 12,000 Citizenship and Immigration Services employees. Current employees who had been offered jobs in Crystal City have had the offers put on hold or rescinded, he said.

As for the Crystal City building, only the first floor is being used to train employees, about 30 at a time, on various aspects of immigration law, said Palinkas, who recently toured the facility.

Federal contractors, some of whom were also slated to work in Crystal City, have also been affected. DHS has canceled a request for proposals for a new mail and file room operations center to be staffed by about 400 contractors, documents said.

“It’s kind of come to a screeching halt,’’ said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which helps immigrants with legal and other issues. She said the Obama administration “is being very cautious. . . . They feel that injunction was very clear, that they’re not able to do anything.”

But immigrant advocacy groups feel differently, she said, because activists are confident that the administration will eventually prevail in the courts. “There is a sense of being undeterred, that we are going to continue planning,” she said. “We need to make sure that the infrastructure is in place and ready to go.’’

Across the nation, immigration advocacy organizations and other community groups are training people who will act as “navigators” — helping immigrants determine whether they are eligible for DAPA , locate key documents such as school transcripts and fill out the application. Activists describe the training as similar to that for another key Obama initiative, the Affordable Care Act, which also used navigators to help people enroll for health insurance.

“The reality is you can’t turn on a switch in people’s lives and all of the sudden 5 million people pour into the gates of DHS and move into the application process,’’ said Ken Zimmerman, director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Foundations, of which Soros is founder and chairman.

Zimmerman said the $8 million the organization is making available will go to a variety of community groups and will fund things such as new computer software to help them process applications. He said the foundations may donate more.

In the Washington area, CASA — a Maryland-based immigrant advocacy group — is continuing the DAPA informational sessions it has been holding in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware since Obama’s announcement in November.

At first, “hundreds and hundreds upon hundreds” of people showed up, said George Escobar, CASA’s senior director of human services. Since then, he said, “obviously interest has waned a little” amid frustration over the legal setbacks.

“Our job is to keep people motivated,” added Escobar, who believes it is “highly likely” that DAPA will survive the court challenge. “We will continue to prepare for it,” he said.",REAL
"  14, 2016 How To Plan Farmer’s Calendar All Year Round 
A farmer’s work is never done. You’d think that in the winter when there are no crops to tend or hay to mow, there may be some time to take a break, and that’s somewhat true, but not really. 
Winter is actually one of the busiest times of year; in addition to taking care of the animals, clearing snow, and keeping things running, you need to plan and prep for the next year. 
Winter appears to be a time of sleep and relaxing by the fire, but for a homesteader, there is no such thing. If you have cows to milk and chickens to feed, then you still have to take care of that. Then there are all of the other tasks that you have to do: clearing the roof, bringing in firewood, making impromptu repairs. 
Winter is a great time of the year to make a plan for what you need to do in the spring, summer, and fall to make your homestead successful. 
We’ve put together a calendar of things to do in the winter to help make your homestead successful all year round. 
Check your Stockpile 
Winter is a great time to check your stockpile for several reasons, but the primary reason that we’re adding it to the calendar is so that you can decide what to plant in the spring. 
If you’re running out of green beans but still have a ton of corn, you can adjust your crops accordingly. Plant more beans and less corn. The same thing goes for canned meals and condiments. If you’ve just about eaten all of your beef stew and salsa but still have a ton of chicken soup left, adjust accordingly. 
You can also determine whether you’re best using your crops. Say you had a bumper crop of apples and made pie filling, applesauce, apple cider vinegar , and apple butter. Now you’re out of pie filling but still have 32 quarts of applesauce. It seems like you may want to adjust how you use your apples next year. 
Make a chart and record your findings so that you can compare to last year and make your adjustments. You don’t want to use your entire stockpile. 
It’s good to have enough for a couple of years, but you don’t want to can 6 months’ worth of apple butter and 5 years’ worth of okra, especially two years in a row. 
Concentrate on Your Herbs/Winter Crops 
I don’t know about you but I love herbs. They’re great for adding flavor, and for using medicinally. Since they’re easy to grow inside , you can grow them year round. Since you’re likely slam busy all summer and fall, wait until winter to harvest and store your herbs. This is a good time to make your essential oils and medicinal blends , too. 
If you live in a moderate climate, you may be able to grow some winter crops such as garlic, kale, carrots and potatoes during the winter. They’re easy to grow and won’t take up hardly any time. Search the internet for crops that will grow in the winter according to your zone . 
There are also early spring edibles that you can start growing and have ready to eat while you’re waiting on those peppers and tomatoes to grow. 
Start Your Seeds 
If you live in a zone where you have short summers and you want to grow crops that have a long growing period, start them inside as early as February. That way, you’ll have healthy seedlings or young plants to transplant when the weather warms up. Your garden will have a great start before the snow is even off the ground! 
Make a To-Do List for the Coming Months 
Plan your summer. Sit down and make charts of what you’re going to plant, how much of it you’re going to plant, and where you’re going to plant it. Keep in mind soil types and compatible plants when you’re making your chart. 
Think about your animals. Do you want to breed? Do you need more eggs? Did you put back enough meat this year? Are your chickens cramped and need a new coup? How about the barn – does it need repairs? Is the tractor running rough? Do you need any new equipment? Make a list by month of all these projects that you need to address. 
Plan Your Expenses 
Now that you’ve sat down and planned your crops and equipment repairs and made a list of other things that you do, then plan how much you’re going to need to spend versus when you’ll need it and when you’ll have the money to do it. Try to project any equipment replacements or repairs that you’ll need, too. Remember to allow for any unexpected expenses. 
You don’t have to stop with just the next year. Do a five-year plan, then adjust as needed. Keep adding a year every winter. This will really help keep you on track as long as you actually refer back to the list and follow it as much as possible. 
Make Syrup 
If you live in an area where you have birch or maple trees, late winter is when you can gather the sap from the trees and make your syrup for the year. Just FYI, it’s a bit of work to make, but it’s free and you can sell it for a great profit. That’s assuming your family doesn’t make you keep it! 
Do all of the in-house repairs. Think about those creaky stairs, unpainted rooms, loose carpets and wobbly stools that you’ve been meaning to fix all summer. Now’s a great time to get all of that stuff done so that you can check it off the list. Video first seen on TacticalIntelligence . 
Help Your Animals Adapt 
Winter affects different animals in different ways. Chickens will likely slow down production when the weather changes. You can head this off a bit by making sure that they’re snug and warm, but make sure that the coop stays well-ventilated. Keeping your hens happy will make your breakfast a happy event, too. 
Cows and horses, on the other hand, may need to be fed more so that they have enough energy to stay warm and (in the case of cows) keep producing quality milk. If you’re new to homesteading study up on your animals before winter so that you’ll know what to do to keep your animals safe and healthy. 
Winter is definitely a bit slower than the rest of the year, but there are plenty of things that you can do to maintain and improve your farm. Relaxing a bit isn’t a bad thing, either – you work your buns off the rest of the year, so give your brain and your body a break. 
Have Some Family Time 
Farms are a ton of work and though we all squeeze in “together” time while we work, cleaning out the chicken coop together just isn’t the same as picking up a Redbox or heading out for pizza and an evening of fun. There’s so much work to be done in the other months that it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle and forget to have some fun. Now’s your chance! 
Educate Yourself 
Winter is a great time to use your mind instead of your back. Farming, homesteading, sustainability, and prepping are ever-changing beasts, so take the downtime to catch up on the latest news and ideas that are available all over the net. 
Feel free to go old-school and buy some books and magazines to get some new ideas about how to move your farm forward. Think about planting guides, new equipment, new prepping ideas, or ways to help keep your animals healthy naturally. 
Another good subject to study up on is the plants that you’re growing. If you don’t know all about each plant that you grow, take this time to learn. Not all plants like the same types of soil. Some like rich, loamy soil, some like sandy soil. Some grow great next to each other and others, such as tomatoes and potatoes, shouldn’t be grown together. 
Just knowing these small facts will increase your yield and even improve the quality and flavor of your crops. 
If you have anything else to add to the winter calendar to-do list,   
We can all learn from each other, but never forget the ways our forefathers made their own food, harvested their own plants and made their own medicines to survive during gloomy   1 total views, 1 views today",FAKE
"Surprised About Donald Trump's Popularity? You Shouldn't Be

There are a lot of surprising things about Donald Trump's campaign. He has been atop polls almost constantly for nearly five months. Contrast that to GOP primaries of recent past, in which a series of ""front-runners"" have come and gone before a nominee was chosen.

Likewise, he seems not only immune to fact checks but is helped when he is perceived to be a victim of media targeting — even when he has made blatantly untrue claims and refused to back down.

Wednesday provided the latest Trump news that shocked (shocked!) many: Nearly two-thirds of likely GOP primary voters said in a Bloomberg poll that they supported his proposal to block all Muslims from entering the U.S. — a proposal that many legal scholars say would be unconstitutional and that many of Trump's GOP opponents blast as ""un-American.""

But when you look at Americans' attitudes, not only on that specific question of Islam but toward politics in general, a lot of things that have surprised the political establishment about Trump aren't surprising at all.

Let's start with that Bloomberg poll. One important caveat of this poll is that it's primary voters, not all GOP voters. Conventional wisdom says that primary voters (of either party) tend to have more extreme views than voters writ large, but they are who pick a nominee.

It's true that Americans view Muslims more negatively than they do any other major religious group, as Pew found in a 2014 study. On a ""feelings thermometer"" of 0 (most ""cold"" or negative) to 100, Muslims scored a 40, on par with atheists' 41. At the other end were Jews, Catholics and evangelical Christians, at 63, 62, and 61, respectively.

In addition, a majority of Americans — 56 percent — believe Islam is ""at odds with"" American values, up from 47 percent in 2011, according to a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. The results are even more extreme on a partisan level, with 76 percent of Republicans agreeing with that idea.

In another new PRRI survey, 67 percent of Republicans said that ""U.S. Muslims have not done enough to confront extremism,"" along with 45 percent of Democrats.

Especially in a time when fear of an extremist Islamist terrorist group dominates the news, surveys like these show why some people might be particularly inclined to jump onto the Trump bandwagon.

As a Trump supporter told a focus group this week, ""We have to do something."" And Trump has brought forth the biggest ""somethings"" of all candidates.

Trump may be appealing to people who already have misgivings about Islam (or, prior to that, immigrants), but of course, it's not those attitudes that are driving his campaign. After all, his popularity has held, regardless of which topic he has chosen to focus on.

Rather, a bigger phenomenon may be at work in why Trump and his ideas are so popular: polarization. It's not clear whether Americans are growing more polarized ideologically (that is, whether their ideas are growing further apart politically). What is clearer is that Americans are experiencing more affective polarization — that is, regardless of where their views are moving, liberals increasingly dislike conservatives, and conservatives increasingly dislike liberals.

For a real-world spin on this, consider that 30 percent of consistent conservatives and 23 percent of consistent liberals say they'd be unhappy if their children married someone of the opposite party, according to a 2014 Pew poll.

""Regardless of whether or not their political beliefs are separate, the degree of dislike and distrust between the parties is really high,"" said Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies political misinformation. ""Democrats and Republicans live in different worlds. So what's Trump tapping into? I think it's this idea that the world is going bad.""

A few things have driven this dislike, as polarization expert and Vanderbilt University professor Marc Hetherington told NPR last month:

— the rise of ""gut-level"" issues like terrorism, guns and abortion as political topics; 

— the way race helped re-sort the political map in the past century; and 

— how closely matched the two parties are. (Think about how much easier it is to hate a sports rival who's a constant threat to your team than one who's way worse or way better.)

What it creates is distrust. Americans' levels of trust in the federal government are at nearly the lowest levels on record, as Pew reported last month.

""More polarization begets poor performance, which begets worse trust, which gives you worse performance, which, of course, gives you more frustration,"" Hetherington said.

A Lack Of Trust And A Want For 'Change'

Notably, trust is lower among Republicans during a Democratic administration (just as trust is low among Democrats during GOP administrations) — and trust is exceedingly low among Republicans right now.

All of that creates a perfect environment for a Trump to arise right now in the Republican Party. Lack of trust in government means Americans — particularly non-Democrats — may be particularly willing to vote for an ""outsider.""

Similarly, as Hetherington explained, Democrats were willing to vote for the ""outsider"" Obama after eight years of a George W. Bush presidency. Obama and Trump's rhetoric may be vastly different, but Americans' willingness to vote for change — even if untested — is the common factor here.

Polarization may also contribute to why Trump seems to have a Teflon skin when it comes to fact checks. He has over the years claimed that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. and, more recently, that there were ""thousands and thousands"" of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the attacks on the World Trade Center. He hasn't disavowed those ideas — even given repeated fact checks.

And, more important, his supporters haven't abandoned him. In fact, they've become more intensely supportive.

Polarization once again may be at work. When people increasingly dislike their countrymen across the aisle, it could reasonably make them more susceptible to ""motivated reasoning"" — loosely defined as what happens when one's reasoning process is clouded by emotions (such as hatred of the other party) and other pre-existing biases.

Motivated reasoning can happen when new information challenges one's worldview. As political scientists from Appalachian State University wrote in a 2012 article, ""When individuals engage in motivated reasoning, partisan goals trump accuracy goals.""

In these situations, people ""vigorously defend their prior values, identities, and attitudes at the expense of factual accuracy.""

Getting back to Trump, this could lead his supporters to believe some of his more brazen claims about Muslim hatred toward other Americans, Sept. 11 celebrations, black-on-white homicide rates or immigrants and crime.

To be clear, the willingness to believe in unsupported ideas is bipartisan. To take an extreme example, according to research from Dartmouth College political science professor Brendan Nyhan, Democrats were, as of 2006 (that is, during the Bush administration), roughly as likely to believe that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job as Republicans were, as of 2010, to believe that Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

The point is that in this low-trust, highly polarized environment, when one party is always suspicious of the other, things that might have surprised Americans just a few decades ago are commonplace now.",REAL
"After a tireless campaign to unbind Republican delegates to ‘vote their conscience’ at next week’s convention, the anti-Trumpers were trampled at a marathon rules committee session.

were pushing a proposal designed to stop Trump in the days leading up to the Republican convention next week. The proposal would unbind Republican delegates from how citizens in various states voted and allow them to vote instead based on their personal consciences.

For weeks, members of the rules committee had been urged to support this rebel effort. One delegate said she had received some 400 emails urging her to support the so-called conscience clause.

It all converged late Thursday night, after an exhausting day of mind-numbing, obscure rules changes. Then came the dramatic moment, a vote that one 40-year rules committee veteran said had ""obviously been the subject of more pre-convention publicity than any rules matter ever in living memory.""

The incessant campaign of the anti-Trump rebellion rankled some of the delegates committed to the New York businessman. “The people who sent all those emails: It’s over, folks,” proclaimed Iowa delegate Steve Scheffler while the committee debated the proposal. “Let’s get behind our nominee right now.”

The results were disastrous: Not only did the #NeverTrump delegates lose on their issue by an overwhelming number, but the Republican delegates voted to strengthen the binding of delegates.

Using procedures to their advantage, pro-Trump forces on the committee shut down the #NeverTrump effort with ease. In the end, the anti-Trump delegates failed event to get a tallied vote on the “conscience clause”—they were shouted down in a voice vote. They were denied even the chance to debate the initiative.

“This angst isn’t going to go away just because we paper over it with rules,” said Sen. Mike Lee, a rules committee delegate from Utah and a urging Trump instead to make the substantive case to Republican delegates for why they should support him.

Not long after his speech, the senator walked out of the rules committee. He told The Daily Beast he didn’t want to comment on what happened inside.

Unbinding proponents never expected to gain a majority of committee members. Instead, the anti-Trump Republicans set their sights on securing 28—a quarter—of the committee’s 112 members, which would have sent the proposal to the convention floor as a “minority report.”

Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate leading the unbinding effort, claimed throughout the last week that the anti-Trump Republicans had secured the necessary 28 votes, citing the movement’s internal whip count. A Wall Street Journal last week found 20 members open to consider unbinding delegates.

Yet a , published the day before the failed vote, found only five committee members in support of allowing delegates to vote their conscience.

The anti-Trump Republicans now plan to take their fight to the convention floor next week. Under their interpretation of party rules, delegates have always been free to vote their conscience.

The #NeverTrump movement’s last chance to stop Trump will be through a last-minute challenge on the convention floor, when state delegations participate in the official vote for the presidential nomination.

Usually, each state delegation chairperson simply announces the state delegates’ vote count, as it has been pre-assigned by party rules. But an anti-Trump delegate could contest his or her state’s vote count and ask for, essentially, a redo of votes while on the convention floor—and the delegates hope to switch their votes away from Trump during the recount.",REAL
"Hillary To Be Indicted After Election: Trump Responds To FBI Investigation Clinton scrambles following FBI announcement on new email evidence Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments 
Alex Jones breaks down the FBI’s Friday announcement on the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server as new evidence surfaces. 
The new data was reportedly uncovered during a separate investigation into Anthony Weiner – the husband of Clinton ally Huma Abedin. 
FBI Director James Comey cited “recent developments” for the bureau’s decision in a letter to committees and lawmakers today. 
“In previous congressional testimony, I referred to the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had completed its investigation of former Secretary Clinton’s personal email server. Due to recent developments, I am writing to supplement my previous testimony,” Comey wrote. 
“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation. I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” 
These new revelations could undoubtedly spell trouble for Clinton as Trump has vowed to fully investigate her actions upon winning the election. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"It seems like every few weeks we get a new explanation for why Jeb Bush should continue running president. As the summer dragged and Donald Trump shot to the top of the national polls while Jeb’s support began to soften, Jeb’s plan was to use the debates to offer himself as a serious alternative to Trump, someone who could fix problems and get things done. He did that, and his numbers kept dropping. But not to worry, Jeb said as we transitioned to autumn, things will turn around once the mailers are sent out and the TV ads start airing in the early primary states. The mail went out and the ads were aired, and his numbers kept dropping. Here we are in late October, and JebWorld has a new rationale to offer: forget about the polls and forget about the early states, it’s all about money and delegates, and we’ll outlast everyone else.

Mike Murphy, the head of Jeb’s super PAC, Right to Rise, gave a big interview to Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenberg this week in which he laid out pretty much every facet of his strategic thinking regarding Jeb’s candidacy. His group has been blasting Iowa and New Hampshire with millions of dollars in pro-Jeb propaganda for the last several weeks, only to see his candidate’s numbers keep dropping. So it was revealing when he described how he sees the race shaking out once the voting starts and insisted that the early states won’t matter:

BLOOMBERG: During that period, you expect several candidates to be clumped together as far as delegates are concerned. MURPHY: Yeah, for a while, for a while. I mean February’s not really about delegates, it’s about media momentum. BLOOMBERG: When do you expect that to change? MURPHY: March 15 is the big day. On the 16th, I don’t think anybody will have a mathematical lock, but there definitely will be a very strong leading candidate.

As Dave Weigel notes, this is the same thinking that animated Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, which is weird given that Paul was an outsider running on an ideologically heterodox platform, while Bush is the concentrated essence of establishment Republican politics. The argument here is that Jeb, unlike other candidates, will have the financial resources to stay in the race basically forever, and once the other candidates flame out, their voters will come home to Team Bush. What they’re basing that assumption on is anyone’s guess, given that Republican voters seem to show nothing but growing contempt for Jeb as time goes by. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 44 percent of Republican primary voters could not see themselves supporting Bush.

Team Jeb has a different view of things, obviously. In Murphy’s vision of the 2016 primary, there are two “lanes” for candidates. “I’m more interested in what percent of the electorate is considering Jeb versus others,” he explained. “I’m interested in lanes, kind of the Grievance Lane versus the Optimistic Lane.” Jeb, obviously, falls into the Optimistic Lane. Candidates like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee are the Grievance Lane inhabitants. But what about the other candidates? Specifically, what about Marco Rubio? He’s the big threat to steal away Jeb’s establishment support, so what does Murphy think of him?

Well, while Jeb is in the Optimistic Lane, Rubio is in the – wait for it – Cynical Lane: MURPHY: What’s interesting about Marco’s campaign – and in the end I think all the essential truth of the stuff bubbles up to the voters and they sort it out pretty well – is there’s a cynicism to it. It’s cynical to run as the creature of new, fresh, while it’s all secret dark money. Maybe from one person, we don’t know. It’s cynical to say, “I’m going to take the lead on defeating this horrible Iran deal that we all hate,” and broadcast your ads to defeat that deal only on the Fox Network, where everybody is already against the deal, instead of running those ads on MSNBC to pressure Democratic senators that were the outcome to beating that deal. Cynically use it just to raise your name ID among Republican primary voters who already agree with you on the deal. There is a cynicism behind the young, fresh brand that I think is going to catch up with him. Jeb himself previewed his anti-Rubio strategy earlier this month, questioning Rubio’s leadership capabilities and suggesting the young first-term senator wasn’t up for the rigors of the presidency. What Jeb and Murphy are doing here is a version of what Hillary Clinton tried to do to Barack Obama in 2008. If you’ll recall, Obama spent basically the entire month of February 2008 dunking on Hillary, winning primary after primary and running up the delegate count. That prompted Hillary to attack the “Hope and Change” basis of Obama’s campaign and portray herself as someone who know how to do more than give speeches. “The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect,” she said of Obama’s message, laying on a thick layer of sarcasm. “Maybe I’ve just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be.” John McCain picked up the attack during the general election, casting Obama as an empty suit and a “celebrity.” That strategy did little to stop Obama, even though Hillary still commanded the loyalty of a massive chunk of the party. The same attack might have a bit more potency against Rubio, given that Republican voters have had it drilled into their heads that first-term senators make bad presidents. The problem for Jeb is that he doesn’t have the credibility with Republican voters to make this attack stick. They already dislike him and have shown no interest in buying what he’s selling, and nothing Jeb does seems to change that.",REAL
"PHILADELPHIA -- In the same city where the framers met to craft the Constitution, Democrats triumphantly chose Hillary Clinton as their White House nominee Tuesday night, the first woman to ever lead a major political party into the general election.

""If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say I may become the first woman president but one of you is next. Thank you all. I can't wait to join you in Philadelphia. Thank you!"" Clinton proclaimed.

Clinton's fierce primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, was the one who put her over the top, pulling a procedural move that allowed him to give her his delegates.

It was an emotional day as Clinton supporters anticipated the historic moment and Sanders supporters faced reality.

""It is with enormous pride that I cast my vote for Bernie Sanders,"" the Vermont lawmaker's brother, Larry Sanders, declared.

Several other party leaders and speakers addressed the convention, but the crowd came alive when former President Bill Clinton took the stage.

Clinton took Democrats through his life with Hillary by telling stories about her as a wife and mother while reminding them of her credentials.

""She's been around a long time. She sure has. And she's sure been worth every single year she's put into making people's lives better. I can tell you this: if you were sitting where I'm sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every long walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything,"" Clinton said of his wife.

""She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is,"" Clinton continued.

Now that they have a nominee, Clinton supporters hope to use the party planks to bring the Sanders faithful back into the fold.

Even though the climate is not as liberal as Sanders supporters would like here in Philadelphia, Democrats approved their most liberal platform, which stands in stark contrast to the platform passed by Republicans last week in Cleveland.

Here's what you need to know about the visions and values of America's two political parties: It's a tale of two paths – two futures for America with two political platforms.

""It really kind of gives a roadmap for the party's principles,"" said Teege Mettille, a DNC delegate from Wisconsin.

On nearly every issue there's a distinction between the Democratic and Republican Party platforms.

""We produced, by far, the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party,"" Sanders proclaimed.

On abortion, Democrats turned their backs on 40 years of policy as they call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment – a law signed by President Jimmy Carter that prohibits the use of federal tax dollars for abortion.

It's a move that alienates one in three Democrats, according to Democrats for Life.

Michael Wear, a former faith adviser to President Barack Obama, calls the move ""disappointing and misguided.""

""I think the decision we have to make is whether we will continue to be an open tent, welcoming the people who disagree on such a core moral issue as the sanctity of life or whether we're going to become a more strident, closed off, frankly, less inclusive party,"" Wear reflected.

On other social issues the differences in the platforms are vast.

""There are things that are written in that platform that have never been written in there in the history of the party,"" Brandon Weathersby, with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said.

Republicans call traditional marriage the ""foundation for a free society"" and acknowledge traditional families as ideal for raising healthy kids who are less likely to get in trouble.

The Democratic platform, however, calls for expanding rights for LGBT Americans.

On the environment, Democrats call for a carbon tax, while Republicans oppose it.

""One of the things that we thought was really amazing - even though we're here as Hillary Clinton delegates, how proud we were that you could hear and see Bernie's voice in that platform to be the most progressive platform in our lifetime that the Democratic Party's every passed,"" David Mettille, a Wisconsin delegate, said.

Sanders backers represent a growing gap between Democrats and Republicans on Israel.

Even though the platforms include similar language about Israel, both parties oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel through the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Republicans take it further, calling the BDS movement anti-Semitic and call for legislation to stop actions that limit commercial relations with Israel.

During the drafting of the Democrats' platform, debate about Israel caused so much passion that police had to wade into the audience as activists shouted down delegates.

Sen. Sanders backed a measure to ""end the occupation"" of Palestinians. Liberal activists also called for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip.

""It is apparently the most progressive platform we've ever had, but it's far from what we wanted,"" Hillary Keys, a Sanders supporter, said.

Keys says this is only the beginning. They're leaving Philly to focus on electing the most liberal candidates they can to every office, from dog catcher to president.

In this election, more than ever before Americans have a clear choice between two very different visions.

It's also a time when Christians have a chance to make a major impact.

""There's an anxiety in our culture. It should be the Christian voice that is not echoing the despair but offering a voice of possibility and the love and a future in Christ and a security in Christ,"" Wear said.",REAL
"Nashua, New Hampshire (CNN) Jeb Bush took the podium at the mainstay presidential primary event ""Politics & Eggs"" in Manchester Friday morning, flanked by photos of his father and older brother.

The pictures of the two presidents, Bush said, ""bring back really fond memories.""

And yet, the likely 2016 presidential candidate would prefer that New Hampshire voters ignore them.

As the former Florida governor mulls a presidential bid, his biggest political asset among establishment figures and donors—his family—is a liability with activists. And it's a particularly acute problem in the Granite State, home to the first-in-the-nation primary that helped sink President George H.W. Bush's re-election bid in 1992 and supported President George W. Bush's biggest primary challenger, John McCain, in 2000.

In a two-day swing through the state featuring stops in Concord, Manchester and Nashua, the younger Bush sought to reverse his family's fortunes.

""I'm going to have to show my heart, show who I am, tell my story,"" he said. ""It's a little different than the story of my brother and my dad. This may come as a shock to you, but you have brothers and sisters so you may appreciate this: We're not all alike. We make our own mistakes in life, we're on our own life's journey.""

Thursday night in Concord, Bush joked that he is not running ""to try to break the tie between the Adams family and the Bush family""—the only two in American history to produce father-and-son presidents.

He was self-effacing when asked about a match-up with Hillary Clinton, which would mean one of their two last names had been on primary or general election ballots in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

""I have enough self-awareness to know that that is an oddity,"" Bush said.

He also tried to disarm his skeptics. Asked at the New Hampshire GOP's summit—the event that drew the entire Republican field into the state for Friday and Saturday—about the prospects of a dynastic Clinton vs. Bush election, he said: ""I don't see any coronation coming my way, trust me.""

""I mean, come on,"" he added. ""What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?""

Bush hasn't officially entered the presidential race yet. But his Right to Rise political action committee has hired three key staffers in New Hampshire. Rich Killion, a Concord-based strategist who worked on Mitt Romney's 2008 campaign and has guided scores of local races, will lead Bush's efforts in the state. Rob Varsalone, who was George W. Bush's top in-state aide in the 2004 election and is close to Sen. Kelly Ayotte, and Nate Lamb, who was Scott Brown's field director in his unsuccessful Senate race last year, are also on board.

At the New Hampshire GOP summit, Bush sought to strike a forward-looking tone.

""We will not win if we just complain about how bad things are,"" Bush said. ""We also have to offer a compelling alternative so that more and more and more people join our cause.""

He didn't mention any GOP foes by name, but—through the cloak of an assault on President Barack Obama—took a veiled shot at the three freshman Republican senators who have entered the race so far: Florida's Marco Rubio, Texas's Ted Cruz and Kentucky's Rand Paul.

Bush said that ""accomplishment matters"" and, suggesting that his time as Florida governor is better preparation than Congress, added: ""The big desk is different than perhaps United States senator or another job.""

Bush didn't throw much red meat to hardline conservatives, standing by his controversial stand in favor of immigration reform during his stops in New Hampshire, downplaying the importance of same-sex marriage and defending his calls for higher education standards, even as he said the federal government shouldn't push Common Core on states.

But his biggest selling point was the eight years he spent as Florida's top executive, saying his record is an ""I'm-not-kidding conservative one.""

The summit's attendees—particularly those who remembered the Bush family's first two presidents—said it wasn't his policies that concerned them, less than one year away from the state's primary.

""The Bush family has been terrific, but I think we need a change,"" said Jim McHugh, a 63-year-old consulting business owner from Portsmouth.

""It's probably not fair to him, simply because his dad and his brother were president, but I think I would like to see someone new,"" said Donna Slack, a 66-year-old Greenland retiree.

""I certainly don't have anything against him personally. I think he did a wonderful job in Florida,"" she added.

Bush earned strong reviews, though, from University of New Hampshire students—both of whom were in their early teenage years when Bush's brother was president, and who weren't alive when his father left office.

""He's extremely personable, compared to some other candidates,"" he said. ""Some crowds I've seen him speak at are not exactly his type of conservatives, but I think he really knows how to adapt to every situation.""

Michael Raccio, 21, another UNH student, said Bush ""really impressed me,"" but he'll probably back a more conservative contender, like Cruz, because Bush ""didn't address illegal immigration, and he has a shaky record on that.""

""I was looking for him to address why he was in favor of giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in addition to giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, and he never mentioned a thing,"" he said. ""So I'm still left with a couple questions.""",REAL
"Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email => 
I was born on July 20, 1944, the day of the failed officers’ plot against Adolf Hitler. That means I preceded the official dawning of the nuclear age by exactly 369 days, which makes me part of the last generation to do so. I’m speaking not of the obliteration of two Japanese cities by America’s new “wonder weapon” on August 6th and 9th, 1945, but of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo on July 16th of that year. When physicist Robert Oppenheimer , the “father of the atomic bomb,” witnessed that explosion, the line from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita , that famously came into his head was: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 
How apt it still remains more than seven decades later, at a moment when nine countries possess such weapons — more than 15,000 of them — in their arsenals, most of which are now staggeringly more destructive than that first devastating bomb, and as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare points out today, some of which are closer to possible use than at any point in at least a couple of decades. For those of us who lived through the years of bomb shelters, atomic movie monsters , the Cuban Missile Crisis (which left me, age 18, fearing I might be toast in the morning), the rise and fall of antinuclear movements, and nuclear nightmares of a sort I still remember vividly from my youth in a way I no longer recall the dreams of last night, it’s a horror to imagine that nuclear war is still with us; even more so, because, in Election 2016, we have a presidential candidate who is not only ignorant about those weapons in hard-to-believe ways, but who wonders why “we can’t use them,” and who might months from now have his finger on that “nuclear button” (or rather command of the nuclear codes that could launch such a war). Don’t tell me that this isn’t a living nightmare of the first order. 
I find it eerie in the extreme and unnervingly apt that the Clinton campaign has brought back a living icon of our nuclear fears, the little girl from the 1964 election who appeared in the famous (or infamous) “ Daisy ” ad President Lyndon Johnson ran against Republican contender Barry Goldwater (who, in retrospect, seems like the soul of stability compared with you know whom). She was then seen counting to 10 as she plucked petals off a daisy just before an ominous, echoing male voice began the countdown to an atomic explosion that filled the screen. Now, that girl, Monique Luiz , a grown woman, is shown saying , “The fear of nuclear war we had as children, I never thought our children would ever have to deal with that again. And to see that coming forward in this election is really scary.” 
She’s now 55 years old and, however the Clinton campaign may be using her, there’s still something deeply unnerving for those of us who had hoped to outlast the nuclear age simply to see her there more than five decades later. And if you think that’s unnerving on the eve of the most bizarre presidential election in memory, then read today’s piece by Michael Klare and imagine just how unsettling, in nuclear terms, the years ahead may prove to be.",FAKE
source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments,FAKE
"Americans must be vigilant in light of a terror threat calling for attacks at malls such as the Mall of America in Minnesota, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Sunday.

""If anyone is planning to go to the Mall of America today, they've got to be particularly careful,"" he said on CNN's ""State of the Union."" ""There will be enhanced security there, but public vigilance, public awareness and public caution in situations like this is particularly important, and it's the environment we're in, frankly.""

Johnson’s comments came after the release of a video Saturday that was purported to be from the Somali militant group al-Shabab and called for attacks on malls in the United States, Canada and Britain. The video used footage of the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi and specifically mentioned the Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.; West Edmonton Mall in Canada; and Westfield mall in Stratford, England, among others, as potential targets.

The video called on Muslims to conduct these attacks independently and quickly. “So hurry up, hasten towards heaven, and do not hesitate, for the disbelievers have no right whatsoever to rejoice in the safety of their lands until safety becomes a reality in Palestine and all the lands of Muslims,” an English-speaking narrator says in the video, provided by the Site Intelligence Group.

Johnson said Sunday that groups such as al-Shabab are ""relying more and more on independent actors to become inspired"" and ""attack on their own.""

He also said there was a need for a comprehensive approach to fighting the ever-present threat posed by terror groups, including the Islamic State, which is variously known as ISIS and ISIL.

""Groups like ISIL, al-Shabab, AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] are now publicly calling for attacks, either through the Internet, through videos, through publications, which means that we need to respond militarily,"" he said. ""But we also have to have a whole government approach to law enforcement.""

DHS Undersecretary Suzanne E. Spaulding elaborated on such an approach during a Senate hearing last fall. She noted that government officials routinely work with the private sector to understand the scope of threats they face and to share information and training. For instance, she said the DHS and the Energy Department regularly provide threat briefings to energy company CEOs and other executives about physical threats and cyberthreats. She also referenced the 2013 attack in Kenya.

""In the wake of the terrorist attack on the shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, DHS and the FBI engaged more than 400 major malls across the United States to facilitate table-top exercises based on a similar attack involving active shooters and the use of improved explosive devices,"" Spaulding told lawmakers, according to a transcript.

The Mall of America released a statement Sunday indicating that it takes potential threats seriously and that it had increased security.

Johnson also said Sunday that he hopes Congress this week will ""finally come together"" and pass an appropriations bill that would not defund DHS. Should it be defunded, his headquarters staff would be ""dialed back to a skeleton,"" he said on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""

Johnson has condemned House Republicans for their efforts to defund DHS over President Obama's immigration executive action.

""I'm a little frustrated, frankly, because when I talked to my friends on the Senate side, they say, 'Go talk to the House.' And when I go talk to my friends on the House side, they say, 'It's not me, I passed my bill. Go talk to the Senate,'"" he said Sunday.

Johnson also dived into the debate over how to refer to the Islamic State.

On ""Fox News Sunday,"" he said that calling the militant organization an Islamic group gives it ""more dignity than it deserves."" He said the president's refusal to tie the militant organization to ""radical Islam"" is more about not giving the group religious ""legitimacy"" than about being politically correct.

""To say that they are in any form Islamic cedes to them a playing field that they would like to be drawn into,"" he said.

After making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Johnson also addressed the National Governors Association winter meeting in Washington, where he again outlined the consequences of an agency shutdown.

Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott (R), in an interview, disputed as ""baloney"" warnings by Johnson of the potential impact on states and cities, noting that all essential personnel would still be on the job even if funding is halted.

Abbott also said that in light of the recent court ruling blocking implementation of the president's executive actions, it is now the Democrats who stand as the major obstacle to passing legislation in Congress. ""It would be irresponsible,"" he said, for Democrats to block action this week.

Brady Dennis and Dan Balz contributed to this report.",REAL
"By Jason Easley on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 2:37 pm Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace tried to blame Hillary Clinton for the email scandal that Republicans created and got destroyed by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. Share on Twitter Print This Post 
Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace tried to blame Hillary Clinton for the email scandal that Republicans created and got destroyed by Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook. 
This exchange between Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook highlighted why the email scandal isn’t working for the GOP. 
Video: 
Transcript via Fox News Sunday: WALLACE: The last question I want to ask you is that you’re acting as if it was the director who brought this into the election when the fact is that it was Hillary Clinton who brought this into the election. 
I want to go back to the e-mail exchange on March 2nd, 2015, when The New York Times broke the story about Hillary Clinton using private e-mails. We’re going to put it up on the screen. 
Clinton adviser Neera Tanden, “Why didn’t they get the stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy.” 
Campaign chairman John Podesta, “Unbelievable.” Tanden, “I guess I know the answer, they wanted to get away with it.” 
Robby, it was Clinton who delayed and it was Clinton who brought this into the presidential campaign. 
MOOK: And it is Secretary Clinton who has said this was a mistake. It is Secretary Clinton who cooperated fully with the investigation. And it was Secretary Clinton who accepted the outcome of that investigation. And what secretary Clinton is doing now is saying, if there’s new information, get it out on the table. Let’s get it out. These could be duplicates. 
Again, it’s been reported these e-mails may not have been sent or received by Secretary Clinton. We don’t know anything. And this close to an election, this unprecedented announcement of new information, when – when, again, it’s been reported by Yahoo! News that – that the FBI may have not even seen it. That – that – that Director Comey sent this unprecedented letter shortly before the election when he doesn’t even know what the information is. That’s disturbing. And we’re just asking him, get everything out there that he knows. 
Fox News has no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Clinton, so they have been reduced to whining about why she didn’t release the emails sooner. What Wallace left out was that the release of Clinton’s emails represented an unprecedented level of disclosure. 
Hillary Clinton didn’t cause this email scandal. House Republicans misused their Benghazi Select Committee to go on a fishing expedition for Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
Robbie Mook destroyed Fox News with facts, because unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton hasn’t worked to keep information hidden from the public. Trump has not released his tax returns, medical records, or an accounting of his business dealings with Russia. Trump has been the least transparent nominee in more than 40 years. 
Republicans and conservative media are blaming Clinton for the scandal that they created as justification for continuing the investigations of her after the election. 
Clinton’s campaign manager was able to wipe the floor with the Republican talking points because at the end of the day the email scandal remains a conspiracy about nothing.",FAKE
"Home | World | Trump Reveals American Muslim Solution Trump Reveals American Muslim Solution By Michael Ainsworth 10/11/2016 21:21:28 
Many U.S. Muslims prefer Sharia law 
WASHINGTON D.C. – USA – President elect, Donald Trump has today made his plans for Muslims in America known to reporters. 

Donald Trump visited the White House today to meet with outgoing president Barack Hussein Obama on plans for the transference of power. To say the meeting was edgy and cold would be an understatement. 
Trump’s landslide victory at the recent U.S. elections caught many off guard, and liberals are all still in deep shock that their delegate Hillary Clinton was not elected. 
After the meeting at the White House, when asked about Muslims, Trump was at first hesitant about revealing his plans, but then answered emphatically that Muslims are a danger to the national security of the nation. 
No Sharia 
“I have already spoken in depth about Muslims. Our solution will be humane and just. Their religion is abhorrent and cannot be trusted. We cannot trust Muslims in our cities, our streets, our jobs. Look what happened in the San Bernardino shooting or the Orlando massacre? These atrocities were all committed by Muslims on U.S. citizens going about their daily lives. We can’t have this savagery amongst us. That’s why I’m calling for every Muslim to be registered in a database. We need to find out who the devout ones are, who the others are. We need to know if they own guns, and we need to stop their permits. We need to know and watch every Muslim in this country, and when the time comes I will make the final decision. We need to detain them until all the attacks stop. Detain or deport. We’ll give them a choice. Let’s not forget their mosques either, shut them down, we can and will do that. They have no place in America, a Christian God loving country.” 
Another reporter asked about Muslims who wish to visit the United States. 
“It’s common sense. We have no choice. There is already a no-fly list in place for known terrorists and criminals. Our policy in the name of Homeland Security will be that all Muslims are potential terrorists. Until the war of terror is over, this will be our policy. They can go and visit some other country, but Muslims will not be welcome in America while I am president.” 
As reporters rushed to ask further questions, Trump halted them and moved on with his entourage. 
There are fears for many Muslims in America today, as attacks on their person have risen by 25% already since Trump’s election victory. Many are now making plans to leave of their own volition. Share on :",FAKE
"in: General Health , Medical & Health , Sleuth Journal , Special Interests I’ve written many articles on the hazards and drawbacks of getting a mammogram, which include: 
• The risk of false positives . Besides leading to unnecessary mental anguish and medical treatment, a false cancer diagnosis may also interfere with your eligibility for medical insurance, which can have serious financial ramifications 
• The risk of false negatives , which is of particular concern for dense-breasted women 
• The fact that ionizing radiation actually causes cancer and may contribute to breast cancer when done over a lifetime. 
Results published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) show that women carrying the BRCA1/2 gene mutation are particularly vulnerable to radiation-induced cancer 1 
• The fact that studies repeatedly find that mammograms have no impact on mortality rates As so expertly demonstrated in the video above, created by Dr. Andrew Lazris and environmental scientist, Erik Rifkin, Ph.D., it’s easy to misunderstand the benefits of mammograms. Mammograms are said to reduce your risk of dying from breast cancer by 20 percent, but unless you understand where this number comes from, you’ll be vastly overestimating the potential benefit of regular mammogram screening . Most doctors also fail to inform patients about the other side of the equation, which is that far more women are actually harmed by the procedure than benefit from it. 1 in 1,000 Women Is Saved by Regular Mammogram Screening While 10 Undergo Cancer Treatment for No Reason Incredible as it may sound, the 20 percent mortality risk reduction touted by conventional medicine actually amounts to just 1 woman per 1,000 who get regular mammograms. How can that be? As explained in the video, for every 1,000 women who do not get mammograms, 5 of them will die of breast cancer. For every 1,000 women who do get mammograms, 4 will die anyway. The difference between the two groups is 20 percent (the difference of that one person in the mammogram group whose life is saved). On the other side of the equation, out of every 1,000 women who get regular mammograms over a lifetime: HALF will receive a false positive. So while they do NOT have cancer, about 500 out of every 1,000 women getting mammograms will face the terror associated with a breast cancer diagnosis 64 will get biopsies, which can be painful and carry risks of adverse effects 10 will go on to receive cancer treatment for what is in actuality NOT cancer, including disfiguring surgery and toxic drugs or radiation. Surgery, chemo and radiation are all risky, and dying from the treatment for a cancer you do not have is doubly tragic All things considered, the evidence seems quite clear; most women should probably avoid mammograms, as they cause far more harm than good. Many studies have now come to that conclusion, and the most recent research, 2 published just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, again hammers home that point. Harms of Mammography Eclipse Benefits For this study, the researchers analyzed U.S. cancer statistics collected by the government in order to estimate the effectiveness of mammography. By comparing records of breast cancers diagnosed in women over the age of 40 between 1975 and 1979 — a time before mammograms came into routine use — and between 2000 and 2002, three key findings emerged. 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 The incidence of large tumors (2 centimeters or larger) has declined, from 68 percent to 32 percent The number of women diagnosed with small tumors has increased, from 36 to 64 percent The incidence of metastatic cancer, which is the most lethal, has remained stable This may initially sound like good news for mammograms, but in absolute numbers, the decrease in large tumors was actually rather small — a mere 30 tumors less per 100,000 women. Meanwhile, the dramatic increase in small tumors was mostly attributed to overdiagnosis — an estimated 81 percent of these small tumors did not actually need treatment. The fact that metastatic cancer rates remained even suggests we’re not catching more of them, earlier. Instead, we’re catching and treating mostly harmless tumors. The researchers also found that two-thirds of the reduction in breast cancer mortality was attributable to improved treatment, such as the use of tamoxifen. Breast cancer screening only accounted for one-third of the reduction in mortality. Lead researcher Dr. H.Gilbert Welch explains the findings of the study in the video above. As reported by WebMD: 9 “The upshot, according to Welch, is that mammography is more likely to ‘overdiagnose’ breast cancer than to catch more-aggressive tumors early. What’s more, the researchers said that while breast cancer deaths have fallen since the 1970s, that is mainly due to better treatment — not screening. Welch noted the current study’s findings have nothing to do with women who feel a lump in the breast. ‘They need to get a mammogram,’ he stressed. But, Welch suggested, when it comes to routine screening, women can decide based on their personal values.” Screening as Personal Choice When speaking to NBC news, Welch went on to say that “screening is a choice. It’s not a public health imperative.” 10 At present, most conventional cancer specialists do view mammograms as an imperative, although recommendations vary depending on who you listen to. As of last year, the American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends women of average risk should have their first mammogram at age 45, followed by an annual mammogram up until age 55. Women 55 and older should have them every other year. 11 Meanwhile, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends waiting until the age of 50, and only getting a mammogram every other year thereafter. 12 In response to heated debate over the varying guidelines, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring insurance companies to cover mammograms regardless of age. Not surprisingly, the ACS has sharply criticized the latest study. In a statement, chief cancer control officer of ACS, Dr. Richard Wender, said: “These conclusions are bold, attention-grabbing and should be taken with a grain of salt — actually, an entire spoonful.” The problem with Wender’s attitude is that this is by no means the first or only study suggesting that mammography has been vastly oversold. In fact, a number of studies have now refuted the validity of mammography as a primary tool against breast cancer. The Evidence Overwhelmingly Refutes Routine Use of Mammography Other studies that support the findings of the featured study include the following: ✓ Archives of Internal Medicine, 2007 : A meta-analysis of 117 randomized, controlled mammogram trials. Among its findings: Rates of false-positive results are as high as 56 percent after 10 mammograms. 13 ✓ Cochrane Database Review, 2009 : This review found that breast cancer screening led to a 30 percent rate of overdiagnosis and overtreatment, which actually INCREASED the absolute risk of developing cancer by 0.5 percent. The review concluded that for every 2,000 women invited for screening throughout a 10-year period, the life of just one woman was prolonged, while 10 healthy women were treated unnecessarily. 14 ✓ New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), 2010 : This study concluded that the reduction in mortality as a result of mammographic screening was so small as to be nonexistent — a mere 2.4 deaths per 100,000 person-years were spared as a result of the screening. 15 ✓ The Lancet Oncology, 2011 : This study described the natural history of breast cancers detected in the Swedish mammography screening program between 1986 to 1990, involving 650,000 women. Since breast lesions and tumors are aggressively treated and/or removed before they can be determined with any certainty to be a clear and present threat to health, there has been little to no research on what happens when they are left alone. This study however, demonstrated for the first time that women who received the most breast screenings had a HIGHER cumulative incidence of invasive breast cancer over the following six years than the control group who received far less screenings. 16 ✓ The Lancet, 2012 , showed that for every life saved by mammography screening, three women are overdiagnosed and treated with surgery, radiation or chemotherapy for a cancer that might never have given them trouble in their lifetimes. 17 ✓ Cochrane Database Review, 2013 : A review of 10 trials involving more than 600,000 women found mammography screening had no effect on overall mortality. 18 ✓ NEJM, 2014 : Drs. Nikola Biller-Andorno and Peter Jüni published a paper in which they describe the findings of an independent health technology assessment initiative to assess the effectiveness of mammography, of which they were a part: 19 “First, we noticed that the ongoing debate was based on a series of reanalyses of the same, predominantly outdated trials … Could the modest benefit of mammography screening in terms of breast-cancer mortality that was shown in trials initiated between 1963 and 1991 still be detected in a trial conducted today? 
Second, we were struck by how nonobvious it was that the benefits of mammography screening outweighed the harms. 
The relative risk reduction of approximately 20 percent in breast-cancer mortality associated with mammography that is currently described by most expert panels came at the price of a considerable diagnostic cascade, with repeat mammography, subsequent biopsies and overdiagnosis of breast cancers — cancers that would never have become clinically apparent … 
Third, we were disconcerted by the pronounced discrepancy between women’s perceptions of the benefits of mammography screening and the benefits to be expected in reality. The figure shows the numbers of 50-year-old women in the United States expected to be alive, to die from breast cancer, or to die from other causes if they are invited to undergo regular mammography every [two] years over a 10-year period, as compared with women who do not undergo mammography … The Swiss Medical Board’s report was made public on February 2, 2014. 20 It acknowledged that systematic mammography screening might prevent about one death attributed to breast cancer for every 1,000 women screened, even though there was no evidence to suggest that overall mortality was affected. 
At the same time, it emphasized the harm — in particular, false positive test results and the risk of overdiagnosis … The board therefore recommended that no new systematic mammography screening programs be introduced and that a time limit be placed on existing programs. In addition, it stipulated that the quality of all forms of mammography screening should be evaluated and that clear and balanced information should be provided to women regarding the benefits and harms of screening.” ✓ British Medical Journal (BMJ), 2014 : A Canadian study put the rate of overdiagnosis and overtreatment from mammography at nearly 22 percent. 21 ✓ JAMA Internal Medicine, July 2015 : Here, researchers concluded mammography screenings lead to unnecessary treatments while having virtually no impact on the number of deaths from breast cancer. A positive correlation between breast cancer screening and breast cancer incidence was indeed found, but there was no positive correlation with mortality. 22 , 23 ✓ Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, September 2015 : The conclusion of this study is stated right in the title, which reads: “Mammography screening is harmful and should be abandoned.” 24 , 25 In short, the authors concluded that decades of routine breast cancer screening using mammograms has done nothing to decrease deaths from breast cancer, while causing more than half (52 percent) of all women undergoing the test to be overdiagnosed and overtreated. According to lead author Peter C. Gøtzsche, had mammograms been a drug, “it would have been withdrawn from the market long ago.” It’s Time to Revise the ‘When in Doubt, Cut It Out’ Mentality Going back to where we started, even when using the cancer industry’s own statistics mammography comes up short, provided you understand what the 20 percent actually means. To reiterate, the difference between getting routine mammograms and not getting them is that the life of 1 in 1,000 women is saved. Four die even with mammograms, compared to five deaths among those who do not get screened. And again, 10 of those 1,000 screened women will be treated for cancer even though they do not actually have it. Clearly the choice is yours. If you find comfort in thinking you may be that one person who is saved, then by all means follow your heart or gut instinct. Just be clear about the risks, because the chances are far greater you could be one of the 10 who ends up undergoing chemo or a mastectomy for a tumor that would not have caused you harm. As noted by Dr. Joann Elmore of the University of Washington School of Medicine: 26 “We get credit for curing disease that never would have harmed the patient. We receive positive feedback from patients thanking us for ‘saving my life,’ alarming feedback from patients with ‘missed diagnoses’ and no feedback at all from patients whose cancer was overdiagnosed. The mantras, ‘All cancers are life-threatening’ and ‘When in doubt, cut it out’, require revision.” Solid Evidence for Vitamin D as a Cancer Prevention Tool Mammograms are portrayed as the best form of “prevention” a woman can get. But early diagnosis is not the same as prevention. And when the cancer screening does more harm than good, how can it possibly qualify as your best hope? I believe the evidence really speaks for itself when it comes to mammography. The same can be said for research into vitamin D, which repeatedly shows that optimizing your vitamin D level within a range of 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) provides impressive cancer protection. I believe testing your vitamin D level is one of the most important cancer prevention tests available. Ideally get tested twice a year. There are exceptions, of course. If you feel a lump in your breast, a mammogram may be warranted, although even then there are other non-ionizing alternatives, such as ultrasound, which has been shown to be considerably superior to mammography, especially for dense-breasted women who are at much higher risk of a false negative when using mammography. One of the most recent studies 27 looking at vitamin D for breast cancer found that vitamin D deficiency is associated with cancer progression and metastasis. As noted by Stanford University researcher, Dr. Brian Feldman: 28 “A number of large studies have looked for an association between vitamin D levels and cancer outcomes, and the findings have been mixed. Our study identifies how low levels of vitamin D circulating in the blood may play a mechanistic role in promoting breast cancer growth and metastasis .” Having higher levels of vitamin D has also been linked to increased likelihood of survival after being diagnosed with breast cancer. 29 In one study, breast cancer patients who had an average of 30 ng/ml of vitamin D in their blood had a 50 percent lower mortality rate compared to those who had an average of 17 ng/ml of vitamin D. I am really grateful that the medical community has embraced vitamin D and started using it. However, it’s important to understand that the best way to get vitamin D is from sensible sun exposure, and if you’re really interested in optimal health and healing you will do everything in your power to get it. This is one of the reasons I moved to Florida. I have not swallowed vitamin D in over 8 years and still have levels over 60 ng/ml. There are many other benefits of sunlight exposure other than vitamin D. Over 40 percent of sunlight is near-infrared rays that your body requires to structure the water in your body and stimulate mitochondrial repair and regeneration. If you merely swallow vitamin D and avoid the sun, you are missing a primary benefit of sensible sun exposure. If you are stuck in the winter and have low vitamin D, it is probably best to swallow oral vitamin D like a drug, but please recognize that this is a FAR inferior way to optimize vitamin D levels and you are missing many important biological benefits when you avoid sun exposure. You can learn more about vitamin D’s influence on cancer and other health problems in my previous article, “ The Who, Why and When of Vitamin D Screening .” The fact of the matter is there are many strategies that are far more beneficial in terms of breast cancer prevention than mammography. So if you’re hitching your fate on mammograms, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice. For key dietary guidelines and lifestyle strategies that can help reduce your cancer risk, please see my previous article, “ Top Tips to Decrease Your Breast Cancer Risk .” Another excellent resource is Dr. Christine Horner’s book, “Waking the Warrior Goddess: Dr. Christine Horner’s Program to Protect Against and Fight Breast Cancer ,” which contains scientifically validated all-natural approaches that can protect against and treat breast cancer. Submit your review",FAKE
"Breitbart October 31, 2016 
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe. 
These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes. 
Lockheed Martin 
When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers. 
But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year. 
Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel . 
How much money did James Comey make from Lockheed Martin in his last year with the company, which he left in 2010? More than $6 million in compensation . 
Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor . The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010. 
According to records , Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010 . 
In 2010 , Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department. 
HSBC Holdings 
In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings. 
“Mr. Comey’s appointment will be for an initial three-year term which, subject to re-election by shareholders, will expire at the conclusion of the 2016 Annual General Meeting,” according to HSBC company records . 
HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation . For instance, HSBC Holdings has partnered with Deutsche Bank through the Clinton Foundation to “retrofit 1,500 to 2,500 housing units, primarily in the low- to moderate-income sector” in “New York City.” 
“Retrofitting” refers to a Green initiative to conserve energy in commercial housing units. Clinton Foundation records show that the Foundation projected “ $1 billion in financing ” for this Green initiative to conserve people’s energy in low-income housing units.",FAKE
" Does The U.S. Government Really Know Who Hacked Democrats’ Emails? By Kassia Halcli
 "" PBS"" - The hacking and public release of Democratic campaign and committee emails made the news and a presidential debate, with more leaks expected to come.
This week, WikiLeaks published more emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Nearly 20 batches of campaign emails were released over the last month, in addition to Democratic National Committee emails released earlier this year.
In the final presidential debate on Oct. 19, Clinton said documents released by WikiLeaks were part of Russian espionage on the U.S. She called on Republican candidate Donald Trump to acknowledge the Russia connection and condemn such actions.
“She has no idea whether it’s Russia, China, or anybody else. She has no idea,” said Trump.
“I am not quoting myself. I am quoting 17, 17 intelligence agencies. Do you doubt 17 military and civilian agencies?” Clinton asked.
“Our country has no idea,” Trump responded.
Clinton was citing the Oct. 7 statement from the U.S. intelligence community saying it was “confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions.”
Analysts say, however, that the ability to determine who cyber attackers are, where they’re located and sometimes who ordered their operations is rarely definitive and comes in degrees of confidence.
Beyond the government’s headline assertion that Russia is to blame, “it’s important to parse the public statement pretty closely,” said Susan Hennessey, a national security fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They’re being really careful in their word choice.”
The Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security said in a statement earlier this month that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
But that statement does not mean that the U.S. has “direct evidence of senior official-level involvement,” Hennessey said.
Without more definitive statements, it’s difficult for some technical experts to take the government’s word on faith, she and others have said.
“There’s no evidence that this was done by the state itself, only evidence it was done by non-state actors that might be Russian-speaking,” said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of the cyber security consultancy firm Taia Global, referring to the evidence available to the public.
That evidence, which was released by private threat assessment companies rather than official channels, indicates hackers used Cyrillic keyboards and operated during Moscow working hours.
But indicators of identity like timestamps, language preferences and IP addresses “can be manipulated or faked rather easily,” said Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.
Trump has a point when he says we can’t know for sure, said Cris Thomas, an information security professional known online as Space Rogue.
“I don’t know what [evidence] they have that couldn’t have been faked,” Thomas said.
Sophisticated attackers have learned how to tamper with the technical indicators to mask their identity, or at least send analysts in the wrong direction.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, hired by the Democratic National Committee to assess its breach, wrote a blog post attributing the hack to two separate Russian-intelligence affiliated groups, Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear.
Alperovitch classed both as sophisticated actors, writing on CrowdStrike’s blog that their “tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none.”
Fancy Bear is “very, very good at deception campaigns,” said Brian Bartholomew, who co-authored a report about the deception tactics that complicate attribution.
But, he added, the group has recently seemed “a little more lax” about getting caught.
Carr asked, if these hacks are a ploy by Russian President Vladimir Putin to install what Clinton has called “a puppet” at the helm of a Western democracy, why leave such obvious technical indicators in their wake?
“That’s not even sloppy,” Carr said. “That’s just ignorant.”
“Perhaps [Russia] wanted it traced back to them to show that they’re flexing their geopolitical muscle,” Schwartz said.
Deception, however, “is exceptionally difficult to pull off at the level that is going to withstand the amount of scrutiny the government will put on it,” said Jason Healey, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative.
Another complicating factor is that the first intrusions into the DNC go back more than a year, well before Trump, purported to be Putin’s favorite candidate, was perceived as having a reasonable chance of winning the Republican Party’s nomination.
To think these hacks were in service of a farsighted, cunning plan designed by the Kremlin is “imputing a level of insight and ability to understand and predict the U.S. electoral system that certainly no one in the United States has demonstrated,” Hennessey said.
A more likely explanation, she said, is that the hackers were conducting low-threshold espionage but ending up finding information that could be opportunistically released.
The U.S. government has swaths of intelligence and the ability to operate beyond laws that constrain private sector threat assessment companies, said Guerrero-Saade.
“As the public, we should really understand that there’s a lot more at play behind the scenes,” Bartholomew said.
Judging by the practice established by its three previous attribution claims, the government is unlikely to release substantiating evidence, in order to guard U.S. sources and methods.
The world of cyber crime “feels like the Wild West, but it’s not to say that nothing can be known,” Guerrero-Saade said.",FAKE
"Former CIA director and retired Gen. David Petraeus says the biggest threat to long-term stability in Iraq isn’t the Islamic State -- but instead, Iran-backed Shiite militias.

“What has happened in Iraq is a tragedy — for the Iraqi people, for the region and for the entire world. It is tragic foremost because it didn't have to turn out this way,” Petraeus told The Washington Post.  “The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years. What transpired after that, starting in late 2011, came about as a result of mistakes and misjudgments whose consequences were predictable.”

Petraeus, who continues to advise the Obama administration on Iraq despite his recent guilty plea for leaking classified information to his former mistress, says there is plenty of blame to go around for the chaos in the region.

But Petraeus told the Post he thinks Iraq and coalition forces are making progress against ISIS.

""In fact,"" he said, ""I would argue that the foremost threat to Iraq's long-term stability and the broader regional equilibrium is not the Islamic State; rather, it is Shiite militias, many backed by -- and some guided by -- Iran.""

He told the Post the Iran-backed militias returned to the streets of Iraq in response to a fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani during a moment of “extreme danger” and acknowledged this prevented ISIS from continuing its offensive into Baghdad. But he said the militias went after Sunni civilians as well as extremists, ""and committed atrocities against them.”

What’s resulted is that the group has been both part of Iraq’s salvation but also its the most serious threat in the campaign to get the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to believe they have a say, Petraeus argued.

Petraeus, 62, admitted to having an affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, following his resignation as CIA director. Prosecutors claimed that while Broadwell was writing her book in 2011, Petraeus gave her binders with classified  information he kept while he was top military commander in Afghanistan.

In addition to working with the Obama administration, Petraeus has started to re-enter public life. He’s a scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and has taken a job at KKR & Co., a private-equity firm known for its large corporate takeovers.",REAL
"Trump World’s Darkest Side November 8, 2016 
Donald Trump’s campaign has exposed and spoken to the real pain and profound alienation of many Americans, but the candidate also has exploited those emotions with lies and appeals to prejudice, says Michael Winship. 
By Michael Winship 
When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce , who covers politics for Esquire magazine and has toiled in our scrivener’s trade, as far as I can tell, since the late 1970s. 
I know, technically, he’s a couple of years younger than I am, but he writes with the fierce wit and well-aimed anger to which I aspire, and as this wheezing milk train of a presidential campaign clanks into the final station, few have been as perceptive when it comes to trying to figure out just what the hell has happened to America this year. Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Photo credit: Grant Miller/RNC) 
Charlie Pierce has done so with great style throughout, but now, thanks to Donald Trump and just hours before Election Day, he has come to the end of his watchdog rope. He wrote on Saturday that Trump — to whom he refers as El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago — had “managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity.” 
Pierce was talking about Trump’s reaction after President Obama responded to an elderly heckler wearing a military tunic at a Friday campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. 
As the crowd booed the man, Obama said, “Hey! Listen up! I told you to be focused, and you’re not focused right now. Listen to what I’m saying. Hold up. Hold up! … Everybody sit down, and be quiet for a second… First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might’ve served in our military and we got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don’t boo, vote.” 
In other words, the President showed poise, grace and yes, class. But shortly after, here’s how the moment was seen through Trump’s eyes at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania: “There was a protester and a protester that likes us,” Trump said. “And what happened is they wouldn’t put the cameras on him. They kept the cameras on Obama. … He was talking to a protester, screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say he became unhinged.” 
Unhinged? Really? We all know that Trump seems to get his news from an implanted electrode picking up propaganda signals from the Planet Mongo. But there comes a point when the lies piled upon lies become too much for even the fairest and most equable of us. Hearing Trump’s demonstrably false description of what happened at Obama’s rally, Charlie Pierce finally had it. 
“Maybe it was because it was so ludicrously provable a lie,” he wrote. “[Trump] didn’t care. He never has cared. His contempt for the democratic processes and for the norms of self-government is matched only by the deep contempt he has for all the suckers who mistake his contempt for the American experiment for their deep disappointment in it. He has measured their intelligence by his heavily leveraged net worth and found them hilariously lacking. 
“We are all the subcontractors who build his indomitable ego for him and, as such, he can stiff us according to his customary business plan. His campaign long ago became a sickening charade performed by a grotesque charlatan.” 
The Scene in Reno 
And so it is. Look, too, at how Trump and his followers at a rally in Reno, Nevada, on Saturday responded to a man with a “Republicans against Trump” sign. Before someone shouted “Gun!” and the moment turned even uglier, Trump had looked down and said, “Oh we have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign. How much are you being paid, $1,500?” As the crowd booed, Trump said, “Okay. Take him out.” The run-down PIX Theatre sign reads “Vote Trump” on Main Street in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. July 15, 2016. (Photo by Tony Webster Flickr) 
The protester, a Reno resident named Austyn Crites, described himself as Republican and a fiscal conservative. He told The Guardian he was grateful to the police who removed him from the auditorium for interrogation — they kept him from being further kicked, choked and pummeled by the gang of Trump supporters who surrounded him. 
Still, he said, “The people who attacked me — I’m not blaming them. I’m blaming Donald Trump’s hate rhetoric, … The fact that I got beat up today, that’s just showing what he’s doing to his crowds.” 
Throughout the campaign, whenever Trump has egged on his followers, I’ve thought of that line in Young Frankenstein, when the angry Transylvanian villagers are told by the local police inspector, “A riot is an ugly thing, and I think that it is just about time we had one.” 
Remember what Trump said when a protester was dragged out of a February rally in Las Vegas: “I love the old days — you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. … I’d like to punch him in the face.” 
By now, you’ve heard it all before and the litany of lies, outrageous claims and insults has climbed so high that many of us have become numb and weary from the sheer repetition of Trump’s buffoonery. You can only go to so many demolition derbies before the sight of flaming car wrecks becomes routine. 
Dog Whistles 
What’s more, you can argue that far more insidious and frightening are the dog whistle attacks appealing to the baser instincts of the bigoted and ignorant. The latest: the closing ad from the Trump campaign that, with anti-Semitic overtones, points fingers at “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class.” Former   speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore) 
As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo , “The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO)… This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas… This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.” 
Here is something Charlie Pierce wrote back in May . Trump, he said, “is riding on a wave of pain that he never has felt.” 
“He is riding on a wave of anxiety he never has encountered. Beyond their love of him, there is no indication that he is as deeply aware of what has powered his rise as the people whose fear, and doubt, and, yes, hatred has powered his rise. Their job is still to wait in line, cheer on cue, and give him the devotion that he has earned because, after all, he is He, Trump, and they’re not, and that will never change.” 
Add it all up and to me, this is what it comes down to: Do you want to live in a United States where anger, prejudice and fear rule, and dissent is viewed as treason, or in a country where we try to meet every issue from terrorism to education with clear eyes and a rational mind? 
This year’s choices are far from perfect, but nonetheless a choice must be made. To quote a founding father who believed in such things: liberty, once lost, is lost forever. This could be democracy’s last stop. Vote. 
Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship .",FAKE
"This post was originally published on this site 
The first Russian-Egyptian anti-terrorist exercise, dubbed Defenders of Friendship-2016 was held on October 15-26. 
It took place in the desert, between the Egyptian cities of El-Alamein and Alexandria. 
The Russian Airborne Troops arrived in the African continent for the first time. 
Over 500 Russian and Egyptian paratroopers took part in the drills. 
More than 15 helicopters and planes, 10 items of air-droppable military hardware were involved. 
Russian and Egyptian servicemen practiced localization and elimination of militant groups in desert conditions. 
Foreign representatives, including ambassadors and military attaches, were present in the capacity of observers. 
Egyptian military are going to use the experience of the Russian Airborne Troops in the fight against international terrorism. 
In 2015, Russia and Egypt held their first joint maritime exercises in the Mediterranean near Alexandria. 
Next Russia-Egypt joint drill may be held in Russia next year. Related ",FAKE
"The rogue work of one nonconformist scientist could one day enable us to grow cheap replacement body parts. Humanity in general and humans in particular have one dream: to live longer than the allotted age. If we could live forever, well, that’d be just swell, never mind the consequences.
However enamored to the idea of just swapping out old organs for newer, flawless ones, we’re still a long way from mass producing body parts. Sure, there might be a few unorthodox laboratories secretly catering to the specific needs of the 0.01 percent, but these do nothing to benefit the rest of mankind. The reason behind this is that living matter is incredibly well-structured and its organized form is hard to grow outside of living things.
For example, you could multiply and grow liver cells in a lab but you would end up with an organic mass unable to serve any useful function. That’s because a liver is much more than a number of hepatic cells; these cells need to form tissue, which is fed by blood vessels and crisscrossed by a network of neurons. All this needs to sit inside a scaffold called the extracellular matrix (ECM). Huh, another matrix keeping things together.
COLORED IN BLUE ARE HUMAN CELLS GROWING ON AN APPLE SLICE SCAFFOLDING
When growing organs in the lab, scientists don’t have a lot of options regarding the scaffolding they use. It’s either sourced from live animals and cadavers or 3D printed from proprietary materials. Both these practices are time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. Well, maybe not anymore.
We used an apple and it cost pennies.
Meet scientist-entrepreneur Andrew Pelling. Also a professor at the University of Ottawa, Pelling knows the only way to truly understand the world around us is to be curious and open-minded. That is how he got worldwide recognition for growing human ears from apple slices.
In order to do this, Pelling and his team came up with some “minor modifications to well-known decellularization protocols that are typically applied to existing organs and tissues.” Decellularization is the process through which cells are flushed out from tissue, leaving behind only the extracellular matrix. Scientists have been doing this for decades, but never before has been fruit used to grow human ears.
So how did they manage this feat of biohacking? Easy. Pelling’s wife is a musical instrument maker so she carves wood for a living. The scientist simply asked his wife to sculpt some ears from Macintosh apples. After removing all the apple cells from the apple ear, Pelling was left with a ready-to-use, cheap cellulose scaffold.
“As weird as this is, it’s actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized,” Pelling told the audience during a Ted Talk. “ And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me,’ Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?’ And I’m like, ‘You’ve come to the right place.’” 

The importance of this endeavor goes far beyond the shock value of using something as unassuming as an apple to potentially make us live longer. In a very unexpected way, fruits and veggies could help improve the lives of many sufferers. The thing is, you have to set them in a Petri dish rather than a plate.
Sensing the importance of their project, Pelling and his team posted the instructions online as open-source. That way smaller laboratories on a tight budget could one day come up with solutions “to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen.” 
That would leave us with more time to come up with great ideas, a process that coincidentally happens in the same kitchen.
“ Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord.” 
Imagine using asparagus stalks to grow new neurons and them implanting them in the bodies of those with damaged nerve connections. If researched properly, this technology has the potential to save millions. It goes without saying that an unconventional, creative way of thinking needs to be in place way before mainstream science can accept the fact that the solution to so many of our problems is right there in front of us.
In the meantime, don’t forget your fruits and vegetables. You know what they say, “an apple a day might save you from having to wear the same pair of tired-ass ears for the rest of your life.” Or so I’ve heard.
Source: UFOholic 
",FAKE
"Four students were arrested Saturday after police discovered a shooting plot involving Summerville High School in Tuolumne, Calif.

Among the evidence, deputies said they found a list of the names of the targeted victims. Tuolumne County Sheriff Jim Mele said the students confessed.

When asked what they said, Mele responded: ""that they were going to come on campus and shoot and kill as many people as possible.""

The sheriff's department said they were contacted on Wednesday by school administrators regarding students who were making threats against faculty and staff.

""As each one of them was identified they were removed from campus,"" Robert Griffith, Summerville Union High School District Superintendent, said. ""Their parents were called.""

Deputies said the four students were in the beginning stages of the plot, and no one was hurt.

""I can't imagine getting a phone call that something like that had happened at that school,"" Kristin said.

Deputies said the suspects were in the process of obtaining the weapons they were going to use in the attack.

All four students were arrested for conspiracy to commit an assault with deadly weapons. Their names will not be released because they're juveniles.",REAL
"Guy Wondering How Much Longer To Keep Picture Of Dead Friend As Profile Pic SANTA CLARA, CA—With several weeks now having passed since the tragic death of his old college roommate, local man Keith Bisbee told reporters Friday he is uncertain just how long he has to continue using a photograph of his departed friend as his F... New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. Nation Too Terrified To Look At What Trump’s Recent Rise In Polls Attributed To WASHINGTON—Claiming it felt queasy just thinking about what the cause could be, the nation’s populace said Monday it was too terrified to look at what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s recent rise in the polls was attributed to. ",FAKE
"Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is blasting CNN for relying in large part on old polling to determine who makes their prime-time debate stage next month.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO has been rising in the polls since what was widely seen as a breakout performance in the first Aug. 6 Fox News-Facebook debate where lower-polling candidates squared off.

But in determining who makes their prime-time debate on Sept. 16, CNN plans to count a number of polls from the three weeks before the August debate, when Fiorina's numbers were low. The calculation could well exclude her.

""It's frustrating to say the least if CNN is putting their thumb on the scale,"" Fiorina told Fox News on Friday.

CNN plans to take an average of major polls from July 16 to Sept. 10, and allow the top 10 on the prime-time debate stage in Simi Valley, Calif. Others will be invited to an earlier debate. However, the Fiorina camp says because there were far more polls taken in the three weeks before the debate than since, CNN will be weighting pre-debate polls more than three times as heavily as post-debate polls. They argue it doesn't make sense to rely so heavily on old polling.

""It doesn't seem right to me,"" Fiorina said Friday.

Since the Aug. 6 debate, a Fox News poll has Fiorina in seventh place nationally with 5 percent, a significant increase from a pre-debate poll that put her in 12th place with 2 percent.

A post-debate Rasmussen poll put her in a tie for fourth with 9 percent and this week's Quinnipiac poll has her in eighth place with 5 percent. Some key state polls have her doing even better.

""I'm also comfortably within the top five in virtually every statewide poll that has been taken since that debate,"" Fiorina said Friday.

A CNN spokeswoman told Fox News that ""we believe our approach is a fair and effective way to deal with the highest number of candidates we have ever encountered.""

However, the Fiorina campaign blasted both CNN and the Republican National Committee for ""rigging the game"" to keep her off the main stage. Fiorina has also nudged CNN to simply take more polls to remedy the situation.

""To be clear, if Carly isn't on the main stage, it will not be because her rise in the polls can't overcome lower polling from July, but because only two of CNN's chosen polling companies have released polls at all since the first debate,"" a Fiorina campaign aide told Fox News.

An RNC spokesman told Fox News the party is legally barred from interfering with the media's rules.

Still, Fiorina told Fox News on Thursday she wants the RNC to take charge.

Fox News' Serafin Gomez and Howard Kurtz contributed to this report.",REAL
"News, information and analysis from the black left. Black Agenda Report for Week of Oct 31, 2016 Submitted by Nellie Bailey a... on Mon, 10/31/2016 - 20:45 Venezuela The Missing Black Movement Ingredient: Self-Determination 
The Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations will hold a National Black Political Convention on Self-Determination, November 5 and 6, in Washington, DC. “If you go through history, the fundamental thing that we’ve confronted is the loss of our self-determination as a people,” said Black Is Back chairman Omali Yeshitela . The Coalition has put forward a 19-point position on the need to put self-determination at the center of Black struggles. The 19 points “give us the beginning of some kind of a plan,” said Yeshitela. “It says, specifically, here is our view on self-determination and the subject of reparations, Black women, the question of police invasion and brutality in our community,” and many other issues. The “Moment of Truth” for the Empire 
“We are entering a new moment in American history,” said Dr. Anthony Monteiro , the Duboisian scholar and Black Radical Organizing Committee activist. “It is a moment of truth for the ruling class, for the ruling elite. What do they do when they are trumped at home -- forgive the pun -- and trumped internationally?” he asked. “Do they back off of empire, do they readjust, do they become peaceful, or do they up the stakes and attempt to resolve all problems with war abroad and oppression at home?” Dr. Monteiro is one of the planners of a Revolutionary Science for Radical Times conference, in Philadelphia, December 9 and 10. Hard Times in Venezuela 
Despite what the corporate media are telling you, Venezuelans are not starving and the Socialist Party government will not be toppled any time soon. However, the rightwing opposition “is smelling blood” due to an economic crisis that “has made it very difficult for people to get access to imported goods, and many goods are very expensive,” said political science professor George Caccariello-Maher , of Drexel University, author of We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution . Corruption, smuggling and money speculation are serious problems, said Caccariello-Maher. However, the strength of the Left lies in the nation’s grassroots organizations and communes. “It would be very difficult for an opposition government to come in and attempt to throw them off their land” or return property to the private sector, he said. Happy Birthday, Rev. Pinkney! 
Benton Harbor, Michigan, human rights leader Rev. Edward Pinkney, currently serving a 2 ½ to 10 year sentence on election tampering charges, turned 68 years old this month. Marcina Cole , a courtroom observer at Pinkney’s trial, teamed up with David Sole , of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice, to throw a birthday party for Pinkney, in absentia, in Detroit. “He’s definitely in support of other inmates, doing ministry work, and looking forward to being out very soon,” said Cole. She reported that Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka visited the political prisoner on October 19. “This was historical,” said Cole. “They know how powerful Rev. Pinkney is” -- and that he has allies on the outside. Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.",FAKE
"=By= Jimmie Moglia Editor's Note The mechanism of control of the population is hiding in plain sight. It is the unwavering focus on self. Whether it is self-help, self-exploration, the inner self, the inner child, the focus is inward and a lifetime of tra",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) The House Benghazi committee took its best swings at Hillary Clinton in a day-long hearing Thursday -- but the former secretary of state remained mostly calm throughout the hearing, save for a few animated moments in which she struggled to mask her contempt for her Republican inquisitors.

The panel's seven Republicans tried to prove Clinton ignored U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens ' requests for additional security before the September 11, 2012, attacks during which Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

But Clinton -- seeking an October trifecta after delivering a strong performance in the first Democratic presidential debate last week and then watching Vice President Joe Biden decide to sit out the race, bolstering her chances at the party's nomination -- gave them little new fodder.

Here are 11 takeaways from the hearing, one for every hour it lasted.

There would be no moment of exasperation like the one Clinton had made at a Benghazi hearing two years ago, when she asked of the attackers' motives: ""What difference, at this point, does it make?""

Clinton spoke slowly in a measured tone -- careful to keep any anger or frustration in check even as Republicans attacked her.

She even tugged at the heartstrings of those who were watching the hearing on television, saying that insinuations that she deliberately blocked requests for increased security are ""very personally painful.""

""I would imagine I've thought more about what happened than all of you put together. I've lost more sleep than all of you put together,"" Clinton said.

The following morning, one source told CNN that Clinton HQ was ""ecstatic.""

""That was a president sitting there,"" the source, a Clinton campaign aide, said.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, pushed Clinton hard over her use of a private email server -- mocking her as ""the most transparent person ever.""

He demanded to know the search terms her attorneys used to sort through which emails were work-related and therefore should be turned over to the State Department and which were personal.

""You might have made more mistakes -- we don't know,"" Jordan said.

Clinton appeared a bit thrown, unable to answer questions about how, specifically, her lawyers combed through her emails.

""I have been releasing my emails to the public,"" she said, a reference to the State Department's court-ordered release of her work emails.

The hearing started at 10 a.m., and Jordan's line of questioning didn't begin until 7:45 p.m. If Republicans were hoping Clinton would be worn down, it didn't happen. But they did manage to push the portion about Clinton's private server into prime-time television. It was a risk, as some news outlets -- like Fox News -- had already cut away from the hearing.

The email questions did push Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings over the edge, though, as he lambasted Republicans for trying to ""badger you into a gotcha moment.""

""We're better than that. We are so much better. We're a better country,"" an impassioned Cummings said to Clinton. ""And we are so much better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign.""

She said she couldn't recall.

One of the most compelling -- and informative -- moments of the day unfolded shortly after 7 p.m. during an exchange with Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind., who repeatedly asked whether Clinton had spoken with Stevens after he was sworn in as the U.S. ambassador to Libya in May 2012 and before his death on Sept. 11, 2012.

""We don't know the answer. Did you ever personally speak to him after you swore him in in May?"" Brooks asked Clinton, her voice raising with emotion. ""Yes or no please.""

""Yes, I believe I did,"" Clinton replied. ""I don't recall.""

It was a moment that will almost certainly be referred back to again and again, particularly by critics who believe Clinton did not do enough to secure the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi. It was reminiscent of those five words that still reverberate from her 2013 testimony: ""What difference does it make?""

Her voice was calm. She stood her ground. But Clinton bluntly explained that there are many diplomatic personnel working in dangerous conditions -- not just Libya.

""We have diplomatic facilities in war zones,"" Clinton said. ""We have ambassadors that we send to places that have been bombed and attacked all the time.""

""Had you talked to him in July, he would have told you that he had asked to keep the security in Libya that he had,"" Brooks said. ""He was told no by your State Department.""

Much of the focus in the lead-up to the hearing hasn't been on Clinton at all, but on the panel's chairman, Trey Gowdy.

The former prosecutor's carefully laid plans for the hearing were thrown into a tailspin when Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy put Gowdy on defense by claiming the committee was scoring political points by dragging Clinton's poll numbers down. Gowdy spent weeks trying to show that the work is only focused on getting the truth -- not Clinton.

But Gowdy's lines of questioning -- hitting Clinton about her friends and her emails -- will do little to erase doubts about his committee, especially as Democrats continue their threat to pull out altogether.

It's unclear whether it sullies his future, though: Gowdy ultimately wants to leave Congress when the committee work concludes and become a federal judge, which would require a Republican in the White House.

Gowdy was unable to say what was different between Thursday's event and the last time she testified.

""I don't know that she testified that much differently today than the previous times she's testified,"" Gowdy told CNN.

The biggest player in Thursday's hearing might not have been in the room at all.

The committee's chairman, Gowdy, made Blumenthal the focus of the first 10-minute period in which he questioned Clinton. He highlighted negative remarks Blumenthal had made about other members of President Barack Obama's administration.

""You know, Mr. Chairman, if you don't have any friends who say unkind things privately, I congratulate you, but from my perspective, I don't know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of four deaths of Americans,"" Clinton said.

The committee has already interviewed Blumenthal. Democrats got frustrated enough with the GOP's comments about him that they moved to make public the transcript of that interview -- but Republicans voted down that motion.

Said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California: ""I have to say, I just don't understand the preoccupation with Sidney Blumenthal.""

7. Schiff and the Democrats who had Clinton's back.

Clinton had a good ally on the panel in Schiff, who is the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. The closest member on the panel to classified intelligence, he gave her a lot of cover on the ""fog"" that happens in unfolding situations.

He also was a bit of yin to Cummings' yang, in that his sharp attacks on his Republican colleagues have been overwhelmingly calmly delivered, while Cummings opted for more flash and bang.

Both have allowed Clinton to deliver pure, emotionally powerful statements -- staying above the fray while the panel members handle throwing barbs.

Clinton had more friends in the audience. Several Democrats made appearances in the hearing room throughout the day. At one point, Clinton turned and said to them, ""You've got my back -- literally!""

8. All about the emails.

Despite Republicans' assurances that Clinton's use of a private email server wouldn't be a primary focus of the hearing, the seven GOP members kept coming back to her emails.

Brooks piled two stacks of Clinton's emails on her desk -- a taller set from 2011 and a shorter collection from 2012.

Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, asked Clinton why she had never given Stevens her personal email address.

He then pushed Clinton on whether Stevens had her home address, fax number or cell phone number, too -- reminding her that her friend Blumenthal does.

Others pressed the same issue. It was part of an attempt by Republicans to demonstrate that Stevens' requests for additional security were ignored by Clinton because she didn't offer him enough access.

""Help us understand how Sidney Blumenthal had that kind of access to you, Madam Secretary, but the ambassador did not,"" Gowdy said.

The problem for Republicans, who appeared overly focused on what has become a political hot button, is that most of the resources the committee has are in the form of emails, thousands of documents they've received from the State Department about what happened in Libya and Benghazi. That limits their ability to press Clinton on records obtained otherwise.

What about Thursday's marathon hearing will give the GOP new ammunition in the fight against Clinton and her performance on Benghazi? The revelations that she told both a top Egyptian official and her own family that the attack was premeditated and, respectively, carried out by an known terror group will likely be used against her.

Jordan read out a conversation she had with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil the day after the Benghazi attack in which she told him: ""We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest."" And he also read from an email to her family right after the attack in which she wrote: ""Two officers were killed today in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group.""

Clinton explained the discrepancy between those sentiments and the administration's repeated statements in the days after the attacks that the attacks were spontaneous as largely due to fast-moving intelligence assessments in a chaotic period.

But to Republicans, they are likely to be seized on as evidence that the administration was not upfront about the nature of the attacks. Many in the GOP have long maintained that the Obama administration wanted to conceal the attacks' ties to terrorists out of fear that would undermine a central argument in President Barack Obama's re-election campaign -- then in its closing weeks -- that he had been effective in fighting terror.

Jordan submitted the former secretary of state to a dramatic period of questioning when he alleged that she and other Obama administration staff tried to blame the attack on the consulate on an anti-Muslim YouTube video to avoid undercutting Obama's claims that he had crushed al Qaeda.

""You could live with a protest about a video, that won't hurt you, but a terror attack would,"" Jordan said, saying that Americans could accept, reluctantly, compatriots being killed abroad but ""what they can't live with is when their government is not square with them.""

Clinton rejected the claim, saying in the desperate hours after the attack that information on the true nature of the assault on the compound by a mob was unclear.

""I am sorry that it doesn't fit your narrative, congressman,"" Clinton said. ""I can only tell you what the facts are.""

11. 'I really don't care what you say about me.'

At the end of the 11th hour -- and after a brief coughing fit -- Clinton could no longer hide her contempt for the Republican-led committee, and particularly Gowdy.

""I really don't care what you say about me. It doesn't bother me a bit,"" she said while defending Admiral Michael Mullen, who helmed a previous Benghazi investigation.

She added: ""I can't help, Mr. Chairman, that you all don't like the findings"" of previous reviews.",REAL
"10/27/2016 TRUTH REVOLT http://youtu.be/PsVNKmb6jEc There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is r ... Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 INDEPENDENT The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. The thr ...",FAKE
"Home / #Solutions / Taxpayers Shell Out $100K to Pay for Cops Caught Eating Weed & Assaulting People in Pot Shop Video Taxpayers Shell Out $100K to Pay for Cops Caught Eating Weed & Assaulting People in Pot Shop Video Claire Bernish October 27, 2016 Leave a comment 
To settle a federal lawsuit stemming from a highly controversial raid on a cannabis dispensary — in which three nefarious cops were caught on surveillance video munching and edibles and making degrading comments about a disabled woman — taxpayers will be forced to shell out $100,000 via the City of Santa Ana, California. 
In addition to the payout for damages to the store, the Orange County Register reports, misdemeanor charges against a dozen people accused of operating the dispensary illegally will be dropped. 
On May 26, 2015, a group heavily-armed Santa Ana cops used a battering ram to storm Sky High Holistic with guns drawn , smashed surveillance cameras and confiscated recording equipment, and proceeded to make disparaging comments toward customers, some of whom were disabled. 
In particular, these unabashedly power-tripping police suggested they should have assaulted a partially blind paraplegic woman — who was not only confined to a personal mobility unit, but had readily complied in the frightening encounter. 
“Did you punch that one-legged old Benita?” a male officer of the law asks a female colleague as cameras recorded their conversation. 
“I was about to kick her in the fucking nub,” the female officer of the law glibly replies. 
Fortunately for the customers-turned-victims, cameras recorded the officers as they slowly completed the raid in a manner akin to a fraternity party — a few play darts while having a crude and wholly unprofessional conversation, while one samples what appears to be a marijuana edible he then shares with his buddies. 
One camera remained surreptitiously hidden, evading officers’ efforts to cover their tracks in this armed burglary, and — when its video evidence went viral — proved to the world how unprofessional, abusive, and criminal these cops actually are. 
According to allegations in the now-settled civil rights lawsuit, these errant officers devised a scheme to shut down dispensaries operating without a permit after Santa Ana voters passed a ballot measure allowing 20 dispensaries to operate following a lottery — for which Sky High had not been selected. 
“The settlement of civil rights claims and dismissal of criminal actions shows Santa Ana is taking responsibility for improper actions it took, including the raid of Sky High Holistic, in support of its lottery-based marijuana regulation ordinance,” District Attorney Michael Pappas told the Register by email. 
After a yearlong battle, misdemeanor charges were finally brought against three of the cops — petty theft for those who chowed down on the shop’s edible protein bars and cookies, and vandalism against the cop who destroyed all of the dispensary’s cameras. 
Well, except that one . 
Those charges are pending, and none of the three, who were initially suspended after the video went viral, remain employed with the Santa Ana Police Department — though law enforcement refused to elaborate for the Register on whether they had been terminated or had simply resigned. 
Should former Officers Jorge Arroyo and Nicole Lynn Quijas be convicted of petty theft, they face a maximum six-month jail sentence and $1,000 fine. Former Officer Brandon Matthew Sontag faces up to 18 months in jail and a $2,000 fine for both the petty theft and vandalism charges if he is found guilty. 
Pappas also noted the fight continues to have thousands in stolen cash and items returned to the rightful owners, as does his pursuance of a second lawsuit for an unspecified monetary amount in damages in the Orange County Superior Court. 
Although the meager settlement is somewhat a victory for the victims — one of whom was a neighboring physician whose office had power and water cut during the incident — video evidences an armed and violent raid undertaken by cruel cops who appear as if they’ve discovered an enjoyable new sport. 
Indeed if justice were truly to be served, all of the officers involved would be locked behind bars for performing a violent raid on a store providing a service to consenting customers on a voluntary basis. Share Social Trending ",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Videos Amnesty Intl: Western Backed Syrian Rebels Must End Unlawful Attacks In W. Aleppo Up to 48 people including 17 children have been killed in civilian areas of government-controlled western Aleppo since the offensive began, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. Be Sociable, Share! A screenshot showing Syrian rebels using an American made BGM-71 TOW missile. 
The fierce offensive on western Aleppo city launched by armed opposition groups on 28 October has been marked by indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas that cannot be justified as a way to break the relentless siege that has sparked a humanitarian crisis in eastern Aleppo, Amnesty International said. 
Up to 48 people including 17 children have been killed in civilian areas of government-controlled western Aleppo since the offensive began, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights. The goal of breaking the siege on eastern Aleppo does not give armed opposition groups a license to flout the rules of international humanitarian law by bombarding civilian neighbourhoods in government-held areas without distinction Samah Hadid, Deputy Director of Campaigns at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office 
“Armed opposition groups have displayed a shocking disregard for civilian lives. Video footage shows they have used imprecise explosive weapons including mortars and Katyusha rockets, whose use in the vicinity of densely populated civilian areas flagrantly violates international humanitarian law. Armed opposition groups must end all attacks that fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians.” 
On 30 October an alleged “toxic gas” attack took place in al-Hamdaniyeh and al-Assad areas of western Aleppo causing dozens of injuries according to the Syrian state news agency SANA. 
“Chemical weapons are internationally banned and their use is a war crime. Such weapons cause immense suffering and health damage. Their use can never be justified and regardless of who is behind this attack all parties to the conflict must halt the use of all prohibited weapons of war,” said Samah Hadid. Be Sociable, Share!",FAKE
"President Obama says he first learned from news reports that his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, used a private email account during her tenure, amid reports the White House and State Department may have known as far back as last August that Clinton did not use government email.

“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” Obama told CBS’ Bill Plante, in response to a question of when the president learned of Clinton’s use of a private email account for conducting government business.

Obama, in an interview with CBS aired Sunday, continued to stand by his claims that “the policy of my administration is to encourage transparency… and that's why my emails -- the BlackBerry that I carry around -- all those records are available and archived and I'm glad that Hillary has instructed that those emails that had to do with official business need to be disclosed.”

His comments came as Politico.com reported that Clinton’s staff made the decision to keep the news of the emails quiet after the White House, State Department and Clinton’s personal office learned in August that House Republicans had been given information showing that Clinton used a private email account to conduct official government business.

During the CBS interview, Obama praised Clinton: “Let me just say that Hillary Clinton is and has been an outstanding public servant; she was a great secretary of state for me.”

The White House struggled Friday to respond to the Politico report.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday that a few officials noticed Clinton wasn’t using a .gov email address. However, he did not say when they noticed and if it raised any red flags. Earnest also brought up the notion that he would not be surprised if Obama learned about it from “newspapers.”

Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarret told Bloomberg News Friday morning she never received an email from Clinton’s private address and did not know if Obama or any other official did either.

According to Politico, the White House, State Department and Clinton’s personal office knew in August that the former secretary of state had used a private email to conduct official business. The State Department became aware while the agency was preparing a batch of 15,000 emails requested by House Republicans in the Benghazi investigation.

“State Department officials noticed that some of the 15,000 pages of documents included a personal email address for Clinton, and State and White House officials conferred on how to handle the revelation,” Politico wrote. “But those involved deferred to Clinton’s aides, and they decided not to respond.

It is unclear who at the White House did the conferring. Jamal Ware, spokesman for the Republican-led Select Committee on Benghazi, confirmed that he noticed Clinton was included on messages at the address hdr22@clintonemail.com when going through State Department documents in “late summer,” and then more on documents in February.

However, Ware told The Associated Press on Thursday that it wasn’t until Feb. 28, just days before the scandal broke, that the State Department acknowledged Clinton only used personal email while in office. After that, the committee, chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., announced it has subpoenaed all of Clinton’s emails relating to Benghazi – including any communications from her personal email and server, as well as texts, attachments and pictures.

The Associated Press earlier this week quoted an anonymous source saying the White House counsel's office was also not aware of Clinton's exclusive use of personal email during her tenure, and only found out as part of the congressional investigation.

Clinton has drawn criticism for using a private server during the four years she was a top official in Obama’s cabinet. Her use of personal emails has raised questions as to whether all important messages were secure and if they were turned over for congressional investigations and lawsuits.

She tried to dampen the growing controversy with a tweet Wednesday, saying she wanted the State Department to quickly release the emails during her time as secretary of state. But a senior State Department official told Reuters on Thursday the task would take time.

""The review is likely to take several months given the sheer volume of the document set,"" the official said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"(CNN) Sen. John McCain is chastising GOP leaders for failing to embrace Donald Trump as the choice of millions of voters, laying out his most extensive views to date about Trump at the top of the ticket. He's also repudiating some of the presumptive nominee's comments -- particularly about prisoners of war.

In a wide-ranging ""State of the Union"" interview in his campaign office in Phoenix, McCain criticized party leaders who are reluctant to back Trump, saying they are ""out of step"" with voters who have chosen the controversial businessman as the GOP standard-bearer. He defended Trump for being a strong and ""capable"" leader, particularly on foreign policy. He called on Trump to choose a running mate who could ""unite the party,"" possibly Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, even as he strongly defended his 2008 choice of Sarah Palin.

But he also urged Trump to ""retract"" his criticisms of prisoners of war while blasting Trump's personal attacks during the primary campaign as off-putting.

""Frankly, I have never seen the personalization of a campaign like this one, where people's integrity and character are questioned,"" said McCain, the veteran senator of nearly 30 years and his party's 2008 presidential nominee. ""It bothers me a lot. Because you can almost violently disagree with an issue, but to attack their character and their integrity -- then those wounds take a long time to heal.""

Asked if Trump should continue calling Hillary Clinton ""corrupt Hillary,"" McCain said: ""Well, I wouldn't, but I'm not one to tell him how to campaign except on the part of uniting the party.""

McCain, 79, said he'd back the nominee since GOP voters have had their say.

""You have to draw the conclusion that there is some distance, if not a disconnect, between party leaders and members of Congress and the many voters who have selected Donald Trump to be the nominee of the party,"" McCain said when asked about the comments by House Speaker Paul Ryan and his close friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, both of whom have so far refused to back Trump.

""You have to listen to people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party,"" McCain said. ""I think it would be foolish to ignore them.""

At the same time, McCain would not commit to appearing on the same campaign stage as Trump, a tacit acknowledgment of the balancing act the Arizona senator needs to perform as he faces re-election this fall. He needs to court Trump backers in a state that the candidate handily won during the primary season, while also reaching out to independents, Latinos and women voters -- many of whom view the real estate mogul unfavorably.

""A lot of things would have to happen,"" McCain said when asked if he would stump with his party's nominee. He said there'd have to be a condition first: ""I think it's important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans, not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.""

McCain was referring to Trump's jaw-dropping comment last year on POWs, when he said, ""I like people that weren't captured.""

""I'd like to see him retract that statement. Not about me, but about the others,"" said McCain, who was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Asked if he'd like Trump to retract his statements that many undocumented Mexican immigrants are ""rapists"" and criminals, McCain was more circumspect.

""Oh, I don't know,"" McCain said. ""I think that it's important that we understand the importance of the Hispanic vote in America. Many states -- in Arizona, more than 50% of the kids in school are Hispanic. After the 2012 election, as you know, we laid out a blueprint and part of it was outreach to the Hispanic community. I think we ought to recognize that the Republican Party has to do that.""

Despite having a friendly relationship with Hillary Clinton when the two served together in the Senate, McCain was sharply critical of the likely Democratic nominee, saying she would run a feckless foreign policy in the mold of Barack Obama. Trump, he said, would provide a much stronger dose of American leadership around the world.

""Well, I think American leadership, he emphasizes that and I think that's important,"" McCain said when asked what specifically he likes about Trump's foreign policy platform. ""This president doesn't want to lead. Hillary Clinton was secretary of state for four years -- tell me one accomplishment that she can point to besides she flew more miles than any other secretary of state in history.""

As a leading defense hawk, McCain, the Senate Armed Services Chairman, said he wanted to use his influence to ""steer"" Trump and the party toward Ronald Reagan's view of national security.

Asked if he had confidence that Trump could be like Reagan, McCain said: ""I think that he could be a capable leader. I don't think anybody is -- no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time.""

Still, McCain is worried that Trump's toxicity among Latinos could hurt him in his tough re-election race, where he's expected to face Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in the fall campaign.

""There is a Hispanic vote, which I have to continue my good relationship with because of the turmoil that exists in the whole national campaign,"" McCain said, adding that every incumbent has to recognize the ""great turmoil"" that exists partly because of Trump's rhetoric and hardline immigration positions.

Asked if the Trump effect was ""good or bad"" for him in the fall, McCain said: ""I don't think he affects it. I think that with 100% name ID people know me, but having said that, there is turmoil out there as we just discussed.""

Given his long service on Capitol Hill, McCain knows full well that being an incumbent is a vulnerability with the approval rating of Congress at rock-bottom.

""Anybody in this environment that would take a re-election in stride or for granted does not have an appreciation for the tumult that's out there amongst the electorate, and I'm confident of victory but to take anything for granted would be foolish.""",REAL
"The Trump effect: Jack in the box and Obama's change 09.11.2016 Donald Trump, having won the US presidential election, thanked his rival Hillary Clinton for her struggle, even though Clinton refused to speak to her supporters and sent the head of her election headquarters to speak for her instead. ""America will no longer settle for anything less than the best. We must reclaim our country's destiny and dream big and bold and daring. We have to do that. We're going to dream of things for our country, and beautiful things and successful things once again. I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America's interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone,"" Trump said in his speech. ""Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream. I've spent my entire life in business, looking at the untapped potential in projects and in people all over the world,"" he also said. The Americans already joke that Trump's best post-election joke would be sending Hillary Clinton to Libya as an ambassador. Trump's victory has come as a shock for the Russian opposition. Ukraine remains in a state of shock as well as the Ukrainian administration was hoping for Clinton's support in the struggle against Russia. Print version Font Size To be honest, no one was expecting Donald Trump to win. It is worth recalling that from the start of the presidential campaign, everyone saw Trump as a clown and an absolute outsider of the campaign, while Hillary Clinton was seen as the leader. This years' presidential election in the United States has been, perhaps, the ""dirtiest"" and most scandalous election from the point of view of all the compromising materials that the candidates had to face in their campaigns. At some point, the leaders of the Republican Party were opposed to their own candidate. So why Trump? If one looks at recent polls by Gallup Foundation and other institutions of political sociology, one can see a huge percentage of ordinary Americans who do not trust both the election procedure and the existing political elites in both the Republican and the Democratic Party. According to the majority of US citizens, federal politicians do not represent the interests of the people - they represent the interests of certain corporations. Most importantly, many Americans understand that this is a system that they live in. Donald Trump with his slogan ""Make America Great Again!"" is a jack-of-the-box, who is not associated with all this party and, more broadly, backstage responsibility that has been blooming on Capitol Hill for many years. Hillary Clinton, is an old paralytic witch, whose laughter makes one shudder, but she carries the function of an appendage of American multinational corporations in politics. Donald Trump and his simple and somewhere populist decisions has challenged to revise both domestic and foreign politics of the United States. He has questioned the USA's membership in NATO and the funding of multiple US bases all over the world. Trump wants to give up on all that and use the money for the USA, and this is what US tax-payers are looking forward to. Common Americans are fed up with ideas of world hegemony and international confrontation. The American people are tired of corruption and excessive spending on the maintenance of their exceptional status. Donald Trump has promised to change all this. Donald Trump is indeed unpredictable in both negative and positive terms because he has never worked in any forms of the US government. He has zero experience in international affairs, which makes him an absolutely unpredictable persona, journalist Vladimir Poznerб a US citizen, believes. Democrats should have listened to what the people were saying. There were many petitions on the website of the White House to withdraw the Magnitsky Act, lift sanctions against Russia and revise USA's relations with the Russian Federation. What did the Democrats do? They deleted those petitions and reset website vote counters. Will the new USA try to improve the relations with Russia? Here is what Trump said about Russia a while ago: ""I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event. ""And you know what?"" he continued. ""They want to be friendly with the United States. Wouldn't it be nice if we actually got along with somebody?"" The US-Russian relations appear to be just a tiny part of the visible displeasure of American voters with the US political system. One can recall Al Gore, who received the majority of votes of citizens, but a minority of votes of electors. George W. Bush took office as president, but the American society did not have the degree of discontent and tension that one can see now. If the ""Gore scenario"" reoccur, America will face mass riots. Ordinary people are tired of the policy that had been formed in the USA after the Cold War. The US expert community that called Trump an absolute outsider, admit their defeat. Sociologist and professor at Princeton University, Sam Wang, said that the entire (sociological) industry has failed in the presidential election in the United States. Other experts have found a cause for Trump's triumph. Michael McFaul, former US Ambassador to Russia, tweeted: ""Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded. Well done"". There were no Russian observers in the US election. Suffice it to recall Putin's remarks about the banana country: ""Does anyone really think that Russia could influence the American people's choice in any way? The number of mythical, dreamt-up problems include the hysteria - I can't think of another word - that has broken out in the United States about the influence of Russia on the current elections for the US president. What, is America a banana republic?!,"" Putin said. ""Correct me if I am wrong. America is a great power,"" Putin said. The US expertocracy, as well as party policy-makers have long ceased to regard the American society as a standalone entity policy. Rather, they see the American society as a mass of people that one can easily manipulate with. Roughly speaking, the development of American democracy has led to the formation of a decorative role for the society. Yet, as we can now see, propaganda and manipulations do not have the last say, not even in the USA. British experts had also excluded the victory of the Brexit vote. They did not even believe that UK citizens would vote to leave the EU. They also hoped for mass manipulations and media propaganda. In general, Donald Trump has managed to grow into a universal, popular candidate. Who knows, maybe he will make America great without destroying the whole world for the purpose. Will he be change that Barack Obama failed to bring to life? Politonline",FAKE
"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Disabled veterans find freedom in water By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016 Disabled veterans 
By Emily Cochrane 
Anthony Lopez was surrounded by fish. 
Hundreds engulfed him on a recent Sunday morning as he dove off the coast of Pompano Beach, just a 10-minute boat ride from shore. 
“You’re in a different world,” said the retired U.S. Marine Corps corporal. “We’re not naturally supposed to be there, so it’s really awesome to see this stuff first hand.” 
For the 28-year-old, scuba diving is a world where he can let go of the painful reminder of a 2009 vehicle rollover accident in Camp LeJeune, North Carolina: the muscle spasms from the blunt trauma to his back, the phantom pain in his left hand where all but one finger was amputated. 
Read the Full Article at www.miamiherald.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 4, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"Wednesday 9 November 2016 Democrats begin search for candidate who knows how to use email 
Officials inside the Democrat party have begun a party-wide search for a candidate who knows how to use email. 
Party strategists have decided that an inability to use email properly has cost them the White House, and that an aptitude for email will be a real vote winner in 2020. 
As one DNC insider explained, “Trump has won the presidential election off the back of our inability to convince the American public we can set up and use a modern email service. 
“If we can just address that one hurdle we can win back the White House in four years time. 
“You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who is good with email, would you? Anyone? 
“I don’t care about their policy objectives, or political views, or their religion – just promise me they know a blind-copy from a reply-all, and we’ll back them all the way. 
“It’s the only reason we lost. Yes, it is, shut up.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"In April, President Obama announced the framework of a deal that he said would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“We only have three options for addressing Iran’s nuclear program” -- cutting a deal with Iran, “starting another war in the Middle East” or “hope for the best.”

In deploying his favorite rhetorical device, the president reaffirmed to the world he only really saw one option: cutting a deal with Iran no matter the cost.

If after witnessing six years of President Obama’s weak and feckless foreign policy wasn’t enough to embolden the regime in Tehran, President Obama’s comments in April must have convinced the mullahs they had the American president right where they wanted him.

The price for President Obama’s penchant for negotiating from weakness is now clear. The deal announced with much fanfare by the White House two weeks ago comes nowhere close to the deal President Obama promised the American people he’d get.

Far from the promise of preventing “Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” the deal brokered by President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry guarantees that the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror will be a nuclear threshold state in the next 15 years, but probably much sooner.

The details of the breadth and scope of President Obama’s capitulations to Tehran are startling, even by his standards. But most alarming of all is the realization that President Obama decided to elevate an evil and illegitimate third-rate autocracy.

In order to ensure that the damage done by President Obama can be repaired, we need to learn the lessons of his failures.

They began long before he reached the White House, when during his campaign for the presidency he announced his willingness to meet, without preconditions, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea.

When American presidents speak, leaders around the world, both friends and foes, listen. And the listening begins long before the president is sworn into office. In addition, how candidates aspiring for the presidency now talk about Iran will send a clear signal to the world about their foreign policy vision. Our allies and adversaries alike want to know whether America will continue the retreat from the world begun by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or will America return to its indispensable leadership role in the world?

Making that case begins now, by making it clear to the American people and the world that this is President Obama’s deal with Iran, not America’s deal with Iran.

The next President must campaign for the office on the principle that has long guided American foreign policy toward Iran – that the regime cannot have mastery of dangerous nuclear technologies. Period.

The next president must re-impose the sanctions waived by President Obama and work with Congress to impose new crushing sanctions on Iran’s leaders for their ongoing support for terrorism and brutal human rights abuses.

This will require engagement with our European allies to lead them toward a different approach to Iran than the Obama-Clinton approach. Part of this reengagement must make it clear that European security does not benefit by empowering Iran’s terrorist proxies and missiles that can hit Europe’s cities. But the rest of the world also needs to realize that if Europe intends to pursue a strategy that empowers an unreformed Iran, America will put our security interests first.

The next president must give Iran a choice: change your behavior, or face the collapse of your economy due to U.S. pressure.  Despite its inflammatory rhetoric, Iran’s clerical dictatorship has immense vulnerabilities. Iran’s economy continues to suffer from inflation and unemployment while rampant corruption plagues the state at all levels.

A strategy of pressure will not just focus on Iran’s economy, but also its regional position. For Iran’s leaders to make painful concessions they have avoided thus far, they need to understand that there are consequences for their actions. The U.S. should undertake a systematic effort to isolate Iran in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic, its clients and proxies, should find no sanctuary in the region. The U.S. must do all it can to counter Iran’s nefarious plots in places like Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Syria or Yemen.

This will be advanced by shoring up our alliance with Israel. The first step will be an end to the threatening rhetoric from senior U.S. officials warning of Israeli isolation and dismissing Israeli government leaders “who know what they’re talking about.”

President Obama’s capitulation has made it more difficult, but not impossible, to prevent a nuclear Iran.  He has failed with Iran because he has failed as president.  This may be the best deal that a weak president can achieve, but a strong, trusted and respected America can do much better.

Those who aspire to lead the greatest nation on Earth cannot wait until 2017 to begin making the case for a new approach toward this critical issue to the American people, and the world.

Republican Marco Rubio represents Florida in the U.S. Senate. He is a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016.",REAL
"With early voting opening as early as next week in North Carolina, Democrats may get an initial leg up in the election.

A cyclist rides past a sign directing voters to a primary election voting station early, in Phoenix. Early voting kicks off next week in North Carolina, the first in a two-month run of voting through key swing states where non-whites and young adults could give one of the presidential campaigns a decisive advantage before Election Day.

Two months prior to Election Day, the first votes of the 2016 election will be cast next week in the battleground state of North Carolina.

With early votes expected to make up 50 to 75 percent of ballots cast in North Carolina and other key swing states, the next two months could prove even more critical than Nov. 8th in deciding who will be the 45th president of the United States.

The influence of early voting has been growing, and the major American political parties know it.

“This is going to change the dynamics in [battleground] states, so that you will expect to see early rallies timed when the early voting opens up likely in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina,” Prof. Paul Gronke, founder and director of the Early Voting Information Center and a professor at Reed College, told NPR. “The candidates travel schedule will reflect this because they want to follow up this kind of enthusiasm and get people to the polls right away.”

Historically, early voting has favored the Democrats in some key states, and in 2008 35 percent of votes are cast before the election according to the Associated Press. That's up from 22 percent in 2004.

In 2008, for example, Barack Obama won 58 percent of the pre-election day votes to Sen. John McCain's 40 percent and managed to win Colorado, Florida, Iowa and North Carolina even though on election day more people in those states voted for Senator McCain – which speaks to the overall enthusiasm young and minority American Democrats felt for Obama.

The 2012 presidential election saw a less dramatic divide between the Republicans and Democrats when it came to early voting. Mitt Romney pulled in more early Republican voters than the party usually sees, but the process still favored the Democrats with Obama ultimately winning the election.

The debate surrounding early voting splits down party lines. Democrats argue that restricting voting in any way is an attempt to limit the turnout of minority and low-income voters who tend to vote Democrat. Republicans say the restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud. Mr. Trump is particularly worried about the election being rigged and has asked individuals to monitor polls to ensure Democrats do not attempt to vote multiple times.

For Trump, the early voting challenge will be with Hispanic, black, and first-time voters who are more likely than white people to vote early, but tend to vote Democrat. Trump is lagging in the polls with these demographics now. Combined with the fact that Trump’s campaign organization is significantly behind Hillary Clinton’s in putting paid and volunteer workers into key swing states, and spreading the “get out and vote” message, Trump may struggle in early polls.

“A campaign with a superior voting operation can make a difference, and right now Donald Trump has shown little sign of organization,” Ryan Williams, a former senior staffer to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told the Associated Press, adding that Trump only just hired a national field director.

Mrs. Clinton has been pushing for early voting since last June as a part of her voting rights platform, which includes repairing the Voting Rights Act and automatically registering voters when they turn 18, unless the opt out. She has strongly opposed attempts to limit the right to vote, such as the recently overturned voter ID law in North Carolina.

Some 37 states and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast ballots by mail or at polling sites before Nov. 8.

Early votes can also help reduce the logistical effort needed to get out the vote on Election Day.

“We can’t say this will be locked up with early voting, but it can absolutely make a huge difference,” Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns and political engagement, told the Washington Post. “Every early voter we get is one less person we need to mobilize on Election Day.”

Some worry something critical could happen between when early voters cast their ballots and the official Election Day – and that could make them reconsider their choice. However, people who vote early are typically decidedly in one camp or the other.

“Early ballots will come in not much earlier than a week or a week and a half before the election and when we have asked people about whether they have any regret or they would have changed their minds, very few said they would change their minds,” Professor Gronke told NPR. “You may not want them to cast their ballots early but many are ready to do so.”",REAL
"Home » Headlines » World News » *Breaking: Huma Abedin Thrown Off Hillary’s Campaign Plane! 
Whelp, that didn’t take long. The fallout has begun for the Clinton Campaign. Huma Abedin has reportedly been thrown under the bus thrown off the plane… 
#Hillarysemail Huma Abedin is not on the plane with #HillaryClinton today. She must be freaking out especially since she signed this doc. pic.twitter.com/KOwI5rN1pW 
— Trump Street Team FL (@ChatRevolve) October 29, 2016 
An image surfaced today of Huma in tears as she learned of the FBI reopening the criminal investigation: Anthony Weiner Gave FBI Permission To Search Devices, No Warrant Needed – https://t.co/tWZiq1T5t8 
And perhaps the biggest news of the today, after Obama’s DOJ attempted to cock block Comey’s reopened investigation by denying the FBI’s search warrant request of Weiner’s laptop, Anthony is now fully cooperating with the investigation: Anthony Weiner Gave FBI Permission To Search Devices, No Warrant Needed – https://t.co/tWZiq1T5t8",FAKE
"Home | World | Britain No Longer a Sovereign Democracy Britain No Longer a Sovereign Democracy By Anzu Legion 03/11/2016 13:41:13 
LONDON – England – Britain is no longer a sovereign democratic nation when 17.5 million people who voted for Brexit can be swept aside with illegal injunctions. 


When Britain is being ruled by those who wish harm upon these shores from foreign nations, and pander to other nations to invade, then there is no reason to believe that we are living in a democratic sovereign nation. 
This is the case when 17.5 million people voted on June 23 to leave the European Union, only to be overstepped by a few treasonous vipers who misled the High Court possibly due to corruption at the highest levels of the system. 
The EU referendum was a legally bound vote with promises from the political establishment that the result would be respected. 
To have the wrath of 17.5 million people on you will not be a nice thing, it will not be pleasant because the people never forget, and the coming election will result in some major changes. 
We are currently embroiled within a constitutional crisis, where the will of the people is being superseded by a few litigational scum bags who do not realise the enormity of their decision to thwart the will of the people. 
Boycott 
You have condemned all members of parliament who supported Remain to unemployment. You will never be voted in again, including Theresa May who shoehorned herself into the role of prime minister. 
Guyanese Gina Miller, who was instrumental in this decision is not even British, she is some investment banker cunt with no mandate to thwart the EU referendum. 
As for the judges involved, you have no right to undermine the will of the people. It is most certainly a question of corruption at the highest levels where these supposed upholders of law, are working against the law and undermining democracy and Britain’s sovereign rights. 
17.5 million people voted for Brexit and 17.5 million people will have their say in 2020 when the right people will be put in charge. 
The people never forget.",FAKE
"Ever since Wikileaks and hacking groups began releasing incriminating evidence against the Democrat National Committee and their presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the US establishment has... ",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's colorful presidential campaign heads to the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday, where the billionaire businessman is sure to expand on his controversial comments about immigrants.

He'll travel to Laredo, Texas, for a tour with U.S. border patrol agents.

The trip comes as Trump dominates the Republican presidential contest -- both in the polls and in the headlines. He sparked a fierce debate among Republicans last month when he referred broadly to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists . He angered many Republicans this weekend by questioning John McCain's status as a war hero. And on Tuesday, he escalated a verbal war with Lindsey Graham by releasing the South Carolina senator's cell phone number.

A chapter of the National Border Patrol Council, the agency's union, invited Trump earlier this month to tour one of the most active parts of the border with the agents who work there. Hector Garza, the president of the chapter, told CNN earlier this month that he wanted ""to give Donald Trump a state of the border"" and a ""boots on the ground perspective.""

Garza, a border patrol agent, said his invitation was not an endorsement of Trump's presidential run, saying that his group regularly invites politicians -- including previous tours with GOP Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Blake Farenthold of Texas.

He also invited Sen. Ted Cruz, who is also vying for the Republican presidential nomination, last month.

Garza said his organization's only goal is to encourage policies that will lead to a strong border and a safer environment for his fellow agents. The Laredo chapter is one of the largest in the country, Garza said, representing about 1,400 border patrol agents.

While he would not comment on Trump's controversial remarks about Mexican immigrants, Garza said agents posted near Laredo ""do see a lot of aliens with a criminal history,"" and said that while not all are criminals, a ""large number"" have criminal backgrounds.

Trump first told CNN he had been invited to the border by a group of border patrol agents during a phone interview two weeks ago. The visit will be Trump's fourth to the border, by his count.

""I'm the only one that speaks their language,"" he said.",REAL
"Email 
These people are sick and evil. They will stop at NOTHING to get their way. Laws mean nothing to them, because they mean nothing to their President and his regime… 
A California man says a stranger hurled expletives and set his truck on fire Thursday after seeing a pro-Donald Trump sticker on the bumper. 
Hao Lee had taken his 2-year-old son fishing on a pleasant November afternoon in Sacramento. He parked his white Dodge Ram truck with a pair of Trump stickers on the bumper along Garden Highway. 
“About a couple hours into fishing I heard someone yelling out ‘F’ Trump,” Lee told KTXL. 
Lee and his son were only about 50 yards from where his truck was parked, near the edge of the river. TRENDING ON 100% Fed Up ",FAKE
"Rand Paul may very well already be on his way out of the Republican presidential campaign, but he’s going out with a bang, not a whimper, forcefully rebuking his Senate colleague and Republican presidential rival, Ted Cruz, for being the root of Senate dysfunction.

Paul told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade that he believed Cruz’s petty politics and disregard for Senate decorum have made him an ineffective legislator, writing off the Texas freshman’s future in the senate: “He is pretty much done for”:

Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem. I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing , I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result.

In July, Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the effective leader of the Republican Party, a liar on the Senate floor. Days later, his Republican colleagues refused to grant him the 16 votes needed to pass a simple procedural vote as a public rebuke of his outburst. This week, McConnell got his revenge, denying (for now) Cruz the government shutdown over Planned Parenthood he so desperately wanted to prop up his presidential campaign. Of course, that didn’t stop the stunts from Cruz — he tried to offer up a “referendum” on McConnell’s leadership this week before being summarily shutdown by his fellow Republican senators.

Of course, Paul is mostly just backing up the senior senator from his home state of Kentucky, as he actually opposes the continuing resolution set to pass this week to keep the government operating for the time being. Paul, like Cruz, is in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood, even if that means shutting down the government over it. He just disagrees with Cruz’s tact: I would defund not only Planned Parenthood but hundreds and hundreds of regulations, hundreds and hundreds of wasteful programs. I would take them all out, put them on the table and say ‘You know what Democrats, it doesn’t take 60 votes to defund something, it’s actually going to take 60 votes to fund any of these programs,’ vote on them one at a time and we will see how many of these crazy programs get 60 votes. My guess would be very few, but that would take the courage to let the spending expire and start anew and let new programs all require 60 votes to pass Paul and Cruz would appear to be natural allies, with their Tea Party base of support and their libertarian bents, but since entering the Senate, the two have had markedly different styles. Cruz has been on a seemingly non-stop rant against the D.C. establishment while Paul has forged friendships and close political alliances with the party’s top leaders as he works double-time to keep his Senate seat while running for president.",REAL
"In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris last week, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said Monday that the United States must resume heavy surveillance of mosques. As president, Trump said, he would consider shutting down some mosques.

""I would hate to do it, but it's something that you're going to have to strongly consider because some of the ideas and some of the hatred -- the absolute hatred -- is coming from these areas,"" Trump said in an interview on ""Morning Joe.""

This isn't the first time Trump has said he's willing to consider closing down mosques, which some critics say would be a violation of the country's religious freedom protections. During an interview with Fox Business in late October, Trump said he was unsure if he would close mosques, but said, ""You’re going to have to certainly look at it.”

During the Monday interview on ""Morning Joe,"" co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Trump if closing down mosques would only incite more hatred.

""There's already hatred,"" Trump said. ""The hatred is incredible; it's embedded. It's embedded. The hatred is beyond belief. The hatred is greater than anybody understands. And it's already there. It's not like, what, you think that they think we're great people? It's already there. It's a very, very sad situation. And I know so many people, Muslims, who are such unbelievably great people, and they are being so badly tarnished by what's happening now. It's a shame.""

Trump said the United States needs to resume its surveillance of mosques, especially in New York City, where he says such surveillance has ceased. He said that has been ""a mistake.""

[Conservative suspicions of refugees grow in wake of Paris attacks]

""You're going to have watch and study the mosques because a lot of talk is going on at the mosques,"" Trump said ""And from what I heard, in the the old days -- meaning a while ago -- we had great surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City. And I understand our mayor totally cut that out. He totally cut it out. And I don't know if you brought that up, and I'm not sure it's a fact, but I heard that under the old regime we had tremendous surveillance going on in and around the mosques of New York City and right now that has been totally cut out.""

At one point, host Joe Scarborough asked Trump if he agrees that only a small percentage of Muslims are violent radicals.

""Yes,"" Trump responded, ""but it's a tremendous amount of horror and damage and vitriol. I mean, if you look at what's happening... this is something that needs to be stopped. And we have to be very strong. We have to be vigilant, and we have to be intelligent.""",REAL
"Close to the end of the March 25 testimony in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial for his role in the April 25, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the government submitted a series of exhibits with chats from the defendant. One described wanting  President Obama to win the Presidential election as the “lesser of two evils” but asserting “killing Muslims is the only promise [Obama or Mitt Romney] will fulfill.” One joked about sex even while discussing studying the Quran. Another described transferring from UMass Dartmouth (in reality, Dzhokhar was already failing out), joking about transferring to an Ivy League school, but ending by saying “I wanna bring justice for my people.” These were chats with no context, simply read by an FBI agent, without even any guidance about with whom Dzhokhar was chatting.

About the only one that made sense was one from December 25, 2012 that read “Doing something with Tamerlan,” Dzhokhar’s older brother who would go on to be killed in a police shoot out after the attack. “I’ll hit you up in a bit bro.”

But when the defense tried to introduce related chats, noting how religious Tamerlan had become and explaining that the older brother had influenced Dzhokhar so much he had been sober for a month, the witness said he wasn’t sure it was about Dzhokhar’s older brother.

It was just an example of the degree to which the prosecution in the marathon trial are cherry picking narrowly from the complex cultural world of Dzhokhar, a Chechen immigrant who grew up steeped in American culture in Cambridge, MA.

Twice, the prosecution got caught in efforts to cherry pick too narrowly. On Tuesday, terrorism consultant Matthew Levitt took the stand to “decode” the boat on which Dzhokhar had tried to “shed some light” on his and his brother’s actions, showing confidently how everything Dzhokhar wrote on the boat must have derived from propaganda he had read written by Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric whose work has continued to exercise influence years after the US killed him in a drone strike. But the defense got Levitt to admit that — along with not speaking Arabic — Levitt had only reviewed the Awlaki related materials from Dzhokhar’s computer, considering neither the Quran nor Chechen culture in his analysis. Levitt also admitted to being paid $450 an hour for analysis that consisted of connecting dots that came pre-selected for him from the prosecution.

Evidence submitted by the defense on March 31 revealed that Dzhokhar had spent more time at Pornhub, Craigslist, Manga sites, and free TV downloads than anything extremist (though that doesn’t account for what he was doing on Facebook or the Russian equivalent, VKontakte, the two sites where he spent most of his time). The defense also submitted evidence that suggests someone moved the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire to Dzhokhar’s computer the morning he left for Russia on January 21, 2012, which may have been an effort to clear it from Tamerlan’s computer before any border crossings where his computer might be searched.

On March 10, a different FBI Agent, Stephen Kimball, read and interpreted Dzhokhar’s tweets. “I shall die young” said one. “September 10th baby, you know what tomorrow is. Party at my house!” After he had presented Dzhokhar’s online life as if everything presaged jihad, defense attorney Miriam Conrad exposed how little he understood. A Russian rap song, a Comedy Central skit, a soccer team, all presented as something else. Kimball hadn’t even clicked through Dzhokhar’s links on some of the tweets, which would have made the source clear. Nor did he check pictures before he declared a picture of a mosque to be Mecca; according to the defense, it was actually Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. He had, until being called on it by the defense, simply been parroting a narrative written by the prosecution. And it’s not just Dzhokhar’s online life that has been reduced to one flat interpretation. The defense briefly pointed out that a hard drive belonging to Tamerlan included Russian bombing materials, in addition to Awlaki materials. That was excluded from the testimony. None of this has an impact on guilt or innocence. “It was him,” Dzhokhar’s lawyer Judy Clarke started her opening argument, admitting her client had laid a bomb at the race that maimed and killed horribly. Dzhokhar will surely spend the rest of his life in prison, if he’s not executed. And yet the government has gone to great lengths to tell a simplistic story of two brothers who read some online magazines by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, made some bombs in the kitchen once used by their mother, and then killed three and injured hundreds at the marathon (this, in spite of the fact that the prosecution has presented ambiguous evidence about how the most lethal bombs used at the marathon were made). Dzhokhar — and in those moments when he gets mentioned anymore, Tamerlan — are presented as foreign terrorists responding to Arabic propaganda, not even Chechen ones, because that doesn’t fit the easy narrative the public is being presented. All those parts of Dzhokhar’s rap-listening, dope-smoking life that make him a quintessential American have been left unmentioned. Yet that American side to Dzhokhar committed this crime as surely as the propaganda written in Yemen did. Again, none of this will change the guilty verdict. What it will do, however, is sustain a fiction the FBI and the prosecution seem to want to preserve badly, that discovering terrorists, even retroactively, is a matter of simply decoding pre-selected dots rather than complex understanding. Discovering terrorists, in this flattened narrative, is about rooting out the foreign rather than discovering the terrorism that might be very much part of America.",REAL
"In sunny Palm Beach, Florida, the remaining brain trust of Carson's failed presidential bid will try to find a way to keep his political aspirations afloat.

Ben Carson’s campaign for president may be over. But his campaign for vice president is just beginning.

Just a week after the former neurosurgeon Donald Trump, The Daily Beast has learned that members of Carson’s brain trust have set up a meeting in Palm Beach, where Carson has a plush mansion, on March 29 to discuss plans for the future.

This Avengers-like crew includes Ben Carson Jr., Robert Dees (who joined the campaign as chairman before Carson dropped out), Ed Brookover (the most recent campaign manager), treasurer Logan Delaney and former senior adviser Mike Murray.

The agenda, according to multiple sources familiar with the plan, will include a discussion of what to do with the massive 700,000-person mailing list they’ve accrued, the PAC connected with the campaign (which has already been for Carson as a potential vice presidential pick), and possibly establishing a formalized speaking program for the doctor.

But the main focus of the meeting, sources familiar with the gathering told The Daily Beast, will be to put Carson in the best position to be offered the vice presidential spot by Trump should the mogul become the nominee.

Delaney and Dees did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Beast. Shermichael Singleton, who is now handling media requests alongside longtime Carson ally Armstrong Williams, refused to answer any question as well. “Thank you for the email, but we’re not interested,” he simply responded.

Brookover joined the Trump campaign already, as announced in a press release from the campaign last Friday. The release said that he would be heading up a ""Delegate Selection Team.""

“I need to direct all inquires to Hope at Mr. Trump's campaign,” referencing Hope Hicks who is a spokesperson for the mogul’s camp.

This further melding between the Carson and Trump campaigns comes after former Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett joined Trump’s camp as an adviser earlier this year.

The news of this meeting arrives after Carson has made intimations that he was promised some sort of position in a potential Trump administration. However, it is unclear if the meeting itself will include any members of the current Trump campaign.

But no one, Carson included, has really been coy about the fact that he’s willing and able to ride this out to the end with the oompa loompa-hued frontrunner at his side.

After he ended his campaign at the Conservative Political Action Conference two weeks ago, Carson also announced that he would be heading up the My Faith Votes, which intends to mobilize Christian voters in the general election. According to the group’s website, Carson is their “National Honorary Chairman.”",REAL
"By Catherine J Frompovich When I published the article, “Glyphosate Contaminates the Global Ecosystem: The Damning New PAN Report”, I mentioned a law firm as a resource because of the lawsuits it has... ",FAKE
"Administrators at the popular online forum Reddit have been accused of censorship after quarantining a subreddit titled 'european.'

Subreddits, which are also known as communities, are forums dedicated to specific topics.

“The administration has decided to censor free speech for Europeans and they quarantined the subreddit on the 12th of May 2016,” says a note on the subreddit link. With the subreddit set to private, the note adds that “You must be a moderator or approved submitter to visit.” Visitors to the subreddit were also urged to continue their discussions on Voat, another online forum.

The question of bias in social media has erupted recently. The Reddit accusation came just days after anonymous allegations that contractors at Facebook deliberately suppressed conservative news on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook has denied any political bias, saying there is “no evidence” of the alleged activity.

Reddit told FoxNews.com that the 'european' subreddit violated the forum's content policy. ""Quarantines on Reddit are rare - there are thousands of vibrant conversations flourishing on the site every day,"" it explained, in an emailed statement. ""Subreddits are quarantined only when the content is clearly offensive to the broader Reddit community.""

Quarantining aims to prevent the content from being accidentally viewed by those who do not wish to do so.

""A subreddit is quarantined when there are concerns that its content is extreme and could be offensive to people outside of that community,"" explained Reddit. ""The quarantine process doesn’t end the conversation; it adds an opt-in measure so that people have the choice to join the conversation,"" it added.

Restrictions on a quarantined subreddit include requiring an explicit opt-in, requiring an account with a verified email address, no use of custom images and the removal of revenue generation.

Related: Reddit updates content policy, bans a 'handful' of groups that exist 'solely to annoy' others

The ‘european’ quarantining prompted a mixed reaction elsewhere on Reddit. Some users say that racist views were expressed on the subreddit, while others say that it hosted a range of opinions and cite the importance of open dialogue.

Reddit, which had over 277 million unique visitors last month, uses teams of volunteers to moderate subreddits.

The forum updated its content policy last year, consolidating multiple rules and policies into a single set of guidelines.

A blogger with an interest in numbers, who uses the name Curious Gnu, recently crunched a Reddit dataset of 4.6 million comments and noted that 78 percent of Reddit threads with over 1,000 comments mention Nazis or Hitler. The blogger found that around 2.6 percent of comments in the ‘european’ subreddit mentioned Nazis or Hitler. A slightly higher percentage of comments on the ‘AskHistorians’ subreddit mentioned Nazis or Hitler, with around 2.75 percent of comments on the ‘history’ subreddit referencing the topics.

Related: No censorship in Chinese Internet, says China's top censor

Reddit prohibits illegal content, spam, publication of someone’s private and confidential information, sexually suggestive content featuring minors and anything that incites harm or violence against an individual or group of people. Content that harasses, bullies, or abuses individuals or groups is also banned.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Posted on October 31, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in News , US // 0 Comments A man dressed as Freddy Krueger and an accomplice have shot five people at a large Halloween party in San Antonio, Texas. 
Early Sunday a man dressed like the fictional serial killer from the film ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ opened fire on a large crowd after an argument turned violent. 
The shooters are still at large. 
Kens5 reports: 
The shooting happened on the 2900 block of Aspen Meadow around 5 a.m. on Sunday. One of the residents who did not want to go on camera said he was throwing the party with his housemates and was taking fees at the door. RELATED CONTENT Two Teenagers Dead And 17 Injured In Florida Nightclub Shooting 
He said several men he did not know showed up to the home and started a fight with his friends. He said the argument escalated into a shooting. 
He said several people who attended the party captured part of the fight on Snapchat. This later reportedly helped police identify that there were two shooters involved. He said one man had a shotgun and the second man had a hand-gun. 
There were five people who were injured in the shooting. Police said that one injured woman tried to drive to the hospital, but wrecked her car along the way. Jasmine De Hoyos, who attended the party, said there were more than a hundred people at the home. She said she helped one of the victims who got shot in the arm. 
“I kind of applied pressure to the wound to make sure he didn’t bleed out. A couple of his friends were there with us. So, we were trying to keep him calm,” said De Hoyos. 
No arrests have been made and police are still searching for the shooters. 
“I’m kind of sad that this happened in this neighborhood because I like living here. It’s a really good neighborhood. It is what it is, and we’re just going to keep an eye out and try to keep each other’s back,” said Jeremy Collins, another neighbor. 
The resident of the home who did not want to go on camera said one of his friends who got shot in the stomach is still in critical condition.",FAKE
"Report: It Still Nowhere Near Okay To Act Like Donald Trump Close Vol 52 Issue 44 · Politics · Election 2016 · Donald Trump 
ITHACA, NY—In the hours since the Republican nominee’s stunning election to the nation’s highest office Tuesday night, reports have confirmed that, regardless of circumstance, it is not even remotely close to okay to act like Donald Trump. “Just to be perfectly clear, speaking or behaving in a manner similar to President-elect Trump is just as unacceptable now as it has ever been,” the reports stated, adding that in zero percent of cases is it even borderline permissible to conduct oneself either personally or professionally in a fashion akin to Trump, and that has not changed in the past two days. “In fact, acting like Mr. Trump does for even a moment will result in a wide range of negative social—and in some cases, criminal—consequences for you personally. Put simply, you should not be engaging with the world in any way comparable to Mr. Trump. This was true before he was elected, and it will be true long after he’s gone.” At press time, the reports’ findings were being summarily dismissed out of hand by roughly 45 percent of the nation’s population in a manner identical to that of Donald Trump. Share This Story: WATCH VIDEO FROM THE ONION Sign up For The Onion's Newsletter 
Give your spam filter something to do. Daily Headlines ",FAKE
"Print 
[Ed. – Coming soon to a — oh, wait. It’s already here .] 
Pupils at a primary school were forced to chant “Allahu Akhbar” and “there is no God but Allah”, an appalled father has claimed. 
The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. 
He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24. 
The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” … 
The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils.",FAKE
"Over the last six years, the Obama administration has been trying to address global warming with a flurry of rules aimed at reducing US carbon-dioxide emissions. First there were stricter fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. More recently, the EPA proposed sweeping carbon regulations for coal-fired power plants (known as the ""Clean Power Plan"").

The overarching goal was to cut US greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That, the administration believed, would help advance global climate talks.

But all of Obama's moves so far have been insufficient to get to that 17 percent cut by 2020. As recent analyses from the Rhodium Group and the Clean Air Task Force have argued, the US also needs to reduce methane emissions dramatically to get there:

Carbon-dioxide is the biggest greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. But it's not the only one. There's also methane. The US burns a lot of methane — known as ""natural gas"" — for energy. But when methane leaks out of oil and gas wells or pipelines and into the atmosphere, it acts as a potent greenhouse gas. (The White House says it's 25 times as effective at trapping heat as carbon dioxide. Other scientists say 34 times.)

In 2012, the EPA estimated that methane accounted for roughly 8.7 percent of US greenhouse-gas emissions (though this may be an underestimate). But experts have warned that methane leaks could be poised to grow in the coming years.

Thanks to the fracking boom, US energy companies have been extracting more and more natural gas from shale formations. On one level, that's good news for climate change: utilities are now burning more natural gas for electricity instead of coal, which means lower carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

The problem is that all this new drilling increases the risk of methane leaking into the air — and those leaks are undermining the climate benefits of the gas boom.

In theory, it should be doable to plug these methane emissions, which can come from leaky pipelines or faulty drilling operations. Many companies already use infrared cameras to detect leaks and plug them. And they have financial incentives to do so — after all, these companies would rather capture that methane and sell it for money than just have it float off into the air.

Many oil and gas companies are already taking steps to detect and plug leaks

Still, the White House wants to make sure these leaks really get plugged. So, on Wednesday, it announced a goal of cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025.

This would be done through a combination of guidelines for voluntary actions by the industry and a hodgepodge of new regulations crafted by the EPA and other agencies. Some rules would focus on methane leaks from new oil and gas wells. Others would focus on pipelines used to transport the natural gas. The Interior Department is updating standards for drilling on public lands.

The White House noted that the oil and gas industry has already managed to cut methane emissions 16 percent since 1990 through voluntary measures. ""Nevertheless,"" it added, ""emissions from the oil and gas sector are projected to rise more than 25 percent by 2025 without additional steps to lower them.""

Some environmental groups said the White House's plan didn't go far enough. For example, the EPA is currently only working on rules to reduce emissions at new oil and gas wells — and only much later will they work on rules for existing wells, which are by far the biggest source of emissions.

""While setting methane standards for the first time is an important step, failing to immediately regulate existing oil and gas equipment nationwide misses 90% of the methane pollution from the industry,"" Conrad Schneider of the Clean Air Task Force said in a statement.

Jayni Hein, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, agreed: ""EPA's steps announced today would trim the sector's methane releases by about a third. We can and should go farther by regulating existing oil and natural gas sources.""

By contrast, many oil and gas companies don't want new regulations at all — they argue that the industry is already curbing methane leaks as is. ""Emissions will continue to fall as operators innovate and find new ways to capture and deliver more methane to consumers,"" said Jack Gerard, head of the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. ""Existing EPA and state regulations are working. Another layer of burdensome requirements could actually slow down industry progress to reduce methane emissions.""

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that there are other sources of methane besides oil and gas. In 2012, according to the EPA, roughly 30 percent of methane in the United States came from natural-gas and petroleum operations (though, again, that may be an undercount).

Obama is relying on voluntary measures for methane in agriculture

-- By contrast, 36 percent of US.methane emissions came from agriculture. The beef and dairy industry is a major contributor here: when cows belch, they produce methane (known as ""enteric fermentation""). Other sources include decomposing cow manure, as well as methane from rice cultivation.

-- Another 18 percent came from landfills. When food and other trash decays in a landfill, the organisms that feed on that trash emit methane into the atmosphere.

The Obama administration has been working on steps to cut methane in these areas, too. Back in March, the EPA announced it would come up with standards to reduce methane from all future landfills. It will then solicit public comments on whether to regulate landfills that have already been built.

As for cow burps, however, the administration is relying on purely voluntary measures for now. In June 2014, the EPA unveiled a ""partnership"" with the dairy industry to speed up the adoption of methane digesters that turn cow dung into energy. The hope is to reduce methane emissions from the dairy sector 25 percent by 2020.

Further reading: Obama has promised to cut US emissions 17% by 2020. Is that still possible?",REAL
"With ideological extremism on the rise in Congress, President Barack Obama argued during his State of the Union that America must reform its elections.

""If we want a better politics, it’s not enough to just change a congressman or a senator or even a president,"" Obama said. ""We have to change the system to reflect our better selves.""

Obama was less clear on how, exactly, America might pull this off. The president criticized gerrymandering — the process by which parties draw oddly shaped, highly partisan congressional districts — and called for campaign finance reform and repealing restrictions to voter access.

These reforms, however, have gone nowhere. In the meantime, the incentives have only increased for politicians to stake out maximalist positions, with little structural reward for moderates who anger their bases.

It raises the question: Does anybody out there have a better idea?

Anne Kim, a policy editor at Washington Monthly and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, has proposed a new way to help fight polarization of Congress.

In an essay published in the winter 2016 issue of Democracy, Kim calls for the creation of one ""at-large"" congressional seat in every state, chosen by voters statewide.

We currently determine our House seats by slicing up a state's map into a bunch of different smaller segments, except for states with very small populations that only get one at-large representative. Under Kim's plan, every state with more than two representatives would get an ""at-large"" House member — someone who would be accountable to the whole state, rather than a narrow sliver of it.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias has already advanced the idea of using at-large districts to reduce polarization. These plans envision treating the representatives as one at-large group, to be doled out proportionately after a statewide vote.

Kim's proposal is more modest and perhaps more practical. By only asking for states to add one at-large seat, the plan preserves the benefits of the basic idea without requiring a wholesale transformation of how we conduct congressional elections.

Federal and state law would have to be changed to make it possible. But doing so, Kim says, would likely create several dozen House seats that are by definition not gerrymandered — and, as a result, are more responsive to the actual demands of their constituents.

""This seems like a simple and easy-to-understand mechanism to get moderate Americans a little more excited about a way for their voices to actually be heard,"" Kim says.

Voters across a state are significantly more moderate than those in a gerrymandered district. Having a bloc of House members picked through statewide elections, Kim says, would make it at least more likely that there's an institutional incentive for politicians to move to the center.

""The creation of new 'plurality-moderate' at-large seats in many states would increase the number of competitive seats while bolstering the odds for moderate candidates,"" Kim writes in her Democracy essay. ""Challenging the status quo might be an excellent and concrete opportunity to test moderate muscle.""

There's also precedent for these kinds of seats. Before 1967, at-large districts existed in southern states as a way to prevent African Americans from getting elected to Congress. But that doesn't mean they couldn't be brought back now to serve a new purpose, Kim says.

It would take an act of Congress — and thus a rare moment of bipartisan consensus — for the plan to be enacted.

But in our interview, Kim argued that her plan could help an embattled Republican leadership that wants to regain control of a nomination process increasingly ceded to hardcore conservatives.

""It's a way to defang the Tea Party. ... I'm not sure the GOP has gotten any favors by allowing that wing of the party to get as powerful as it has been,"" Kim says.

She added: ""If the GOP has learned anything about reasserting the power of the establishment, this is certainly the way to do it. Because it would give GOP moderates a voice.""

The idea sounds interesting, but it's unclear if at-large House members would reduce political polarization even if it were somehow implemented, according to experts interviewed for this story.

""I think most political scientists would tell you that this is a nonstarter. For one thing, we already have 50 at-large districts — states — and the Senate is just as polarized as the House,"" said Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford University who has done extensive research on polarization.

American politics is moving inexorably to the margins, and even in a statewide vote the candidate will have to win a primary, Fiorina noted. In other words, there's just not much reason to believe gerrymandering is the main culprit here.

""Single-member or at-large, safe district or competitive, the candidate has to win a primary dominated by the wingnuts,"" Fiorina said.

Matthew Dickinson, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, had a more measured response to the idea. He, too, noted that the Senate is highly polarized, and questioned the premise that gerrymandering was the key contributing factor to the rise of extremism in Congress.

""It's an interesting proposition,"" Dickinson said of Kim's proposal, ""but I suspect it will have less of an impact in reducing polarization than the author thinks.""

But Dickinson raised a possible counterargument to the counterargument. Yes, the Senate is very polarized. But is the Senate polarized at least in part because the House is?

Dickinson pointed to an academic paper from 2011 that argued this point, noting that many of the highly partisan senators of today began as highly partisan members of the House.

""The polarization in the House has directly contributed to polarization in the Senate,"" write Sean M. Theriault, of the University of Texas Austin, and David Rohde, of Duke University.

In addition, Kim, the author of the Democracy piece, also pushed back on the idea that the Senate and the House were equally driven by party factionalism.

""The Senate is polarized, but it's not nearly as polarized as the House,"" she said. ""The most extreme member of the Senate is not as extreme as the most extreme member of the House.""

Kim also acknowledged that the plan would not represent a ""silver bullet"" for the problem. But with Democrats and Republicans in Congress moving further apart than ever before, she said, it seems worth trying.",REAL
"Posted on October 27, 2016 by Baxter Dmitry in Middle East , News // 0 Comments 
At least 36 children are dead and over 50 suffering allergic reactions after receiving measles vaccinations under a UN-sponsored program in the rebel-held north of Syria. 
Doctors in clinics in the towns of Jirjanaz and Maaret al-Nouman in the northeastern province of Idlib said children started falling ill shortly after the vaccinations were administered. 
The mass vaccination drive was part of a high profile international effort to ensure the brutal civil war does not result in an outbreak of measles. 
Reports on the number of children vary and are expected to climb. Relief organizations just over the border in Turkey said the loss of life was extensive, rising as high as 36 plus more than a dozen other children in a life-threatening conditions. 
The Syrian rebel government, which controls the area of Idlib province and is attempting to oust Assad, had been administering the program with international support. They have since announced the immunization project has been stopped. 
Parents accused rebel government health authorities of failing to store the vaccines properly, and of supplying out-of-date medication. But opposition officials denied accusations of negligence, saying that the vaccines came from Unicef and WHO, and that the same batch had successfully vaccinated 60,000 schoolchildren in 30 locations in recent days. “It’s very bad. The figures of dead we are getting go into the 30s. Children are dying very quickly,” said Daher Zidan, the coordinator of the medical charity, Uossm. “We think it will get worse.” 
But the rebel government are blaming the Assad government. “ Primary investigations point to a limited security breach by vandals likely connected to the regime, which has been attempting to target the medical sector in Free Syria in order to spread chaos, ” the rebel ministry said in a statement. 
The WHO said it was urgently checking the reports and could not confirm the toll. Other well-followed Syrian monitoring groups said there had been deaths. 
“ At least 36 children have died and 50 others are suffering from poisoning or allergic reactions after measles vaccinations in Jirjanaz, in Idlib province ,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.",FAKE
"We need a true conservative to run third party. Not to win. Just to save the GOP from total ruin. Suicide? No—it would be seen as heroic.

Conservatives and the Never Trump movement are discouraged and rightfully so. Despite 60 percent of Republicans voting against Donald Trump this primary season, he is now the presumptive GOP nominee. A plurality of the voters have essentially allowed a stranger in our house.

The problem of conservatives staying home on Election Day is something that needs to be reversed. If it is not, Republicans will likely lose not just the White House but their majority in the Senate. Their fight to hold it is an uphill battle already, but conservatives staying home would result in a Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Already at risk are incumbents Kelly Ayotte, Mark Kirk, Ron Johnson, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt and John McCain, as well as the seat being vacated by Marco Rubio.

There are three ways to avoid conservatives being disenfranchised and not participating in November. First, the delegates at the Republican National Convention could stage some sort of coup that sees Trump lose the nomination. But this is not going to happen. Republicans are resigned to Trump as the nominee and delegates won’t rock the boat.

Next, Trump finds a way to connect with and energize those on the legions on the right that say they will not vote for him. His relationship with conservatives has always been tenuous. Trump has had more positions on conservative issues than there are in the Kama Sutra. From four different positions on abortion in less than four days to not being willing to raise the Social Security retirement age to even pushing for the individual mandate. He has said he hates Obamacare, but he wants to just replace it with a better version of it—of course, Trump says he will do so by making “great deals.”

Reconciliation is a long shot. It seems clear that the division within the Republican Party is vast and will not be repaired until, at the very earliest, after the election. Trump unifying the GOP is as likely as my going on a date with Jennifer Lawrence.

This leaves us with the third option: a viable third-party presidential candidate whom conservatives would be excited about. Were a Ben Sasse, Tom Coburn, James Mattis (who already declined once), even a Mitt Romney or other conservative would improve the odds for many Senate Republicans just by energizing the conservative base. Without this viable third-party candidate, House and Senate Republicans are going to lose.

Let’s not kid ourselves; we conservatives hold no illusion that a third-party candidate would be able to capture the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency. The best this candidate could hope for would be no candidate hitting 270 and the election going to the House of Representatives, where skillful lobbying would secure the presidency. But the chances that the election turns to the House are minimal. We’re probably looking at President Hillary Clinton, and we know it.

Being the viable third-party presidential contender is a suicide mission of sorts. It is a form of self-sacrifice that demonstrates a willingness to endure the hardships of the campaign trail. Granted, it could also be argued that it is a sign of stupidity. From endless fundraisers and rubber chicken dinners to having every facet of your life picked apart by opponents and the press, it is not an enjoyable experience. In fact, it’s likely that what you will be remembered for will be some flaw that was exposed. Just ask Rick “Oops” Perry, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, John “Flip Flop” Kerry, Michael “Willie Horton” Dukakis, and numerous others.

If and when Trump loses in November, this third-party candidate would be scapegoated by Trump supporters as the reason that Trump lost. It would be pure fiction, as Trump will be the reason for his own loss. The misogyny, the xenophobia, the childish insults, the utter lack of actual policy and the paucity of understanding of the issues will be his downfall. Voters already know who Trump is and what he represents. Given the level of fanatical zeal with which Trump’s supporters attack opponents, especially online, this third-party candidate will face a vicious amount of backlash and harassment.

However, this candidate would be fondly remembered in conservative circles. After the general election, the Republican Party will begin to rebuild. The third-party candidate who ran to save vulnerable House and Senate Republicans would be an immediate leader whose voice would carry weight. On top of this, he or she would have endeared themself to these vulnerable Republicans whom they ran to save. Their campaign will have the benefit of being creating a lot of IOUs.

Conservative leaders have soul searching to do and conversations to have. They know that Donald Trump is imperiling Republican majorities in the House and Senate. They know that they need to coalesce behind a viable third-party candidate whose campaign would energize the depressed conservative base and ensure they vote to save vulnerable Republicans in November. They know that it is not too late to beat back the Trumpkins and give conservatives an energy boost that would have them out on the front lines fighting to save GOP candidates over the next six months.",REAL
"Leave a reply 
On the October 27, 2016 Fox News Special Report Brett Baier digs deep into the latest Wikileaks release. It’s clear two of Hillary Clinton’s top aides were left completely in the dark about the email server. There is evidence of Bill Clinton lining his pockets. 
Baier also takes a look at Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Florida. SF Source The Right Wing Conspiracy Oct. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
"Insists ISIS Capital Will Be Attacked With 'Forces Available' by Jason Ditz, November 02, 2016 Share This 
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter today confirmed that negotiations with Turkey are ongoing related to the upcoming invasion of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital city of ISIS. Carter suggested Turkey’s involvement would only happen “ further down the road .” 
The US announced that it intends to launch an invasion of Raqqa very soon, will conduct the operation concurrent with the ongoing invasion of Mosul in Iraq, and that Kurdish YPG forces will be providing the vast majority of the forces for this offensive. 
That’s irked Turkey, particularly the last part, as Turkish officials repeatedly warned the US against allowing Kurds anywhere near Raqqa and have suggested their own involvement was contingent on there being no Kurds involved. 
Carter’s comments suggest the US plan to invade without Turkey is unchanged, and that they intend to try to placate Turkey about the involvement of the YPG by giving them some involvement in the post-ISIS situation in Raqqa. Turkey is particularly keen to ensure that their own allies end up in control of Raqqa, and that’s likely the main incentive of this deal. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz",FAKE
"Here's Why All These Political Cattle Calls Matter

Stop us if you've heard this one before — the vast field of GOP presidential hopefuls is gathering in a critical early state this weekend to give speeches, woo voters and court activists. That's what's been happening nearly every weekend since the beginning of the year, with Republican groups, influencers and politicians each hoping to attract top-tier candidates to their event.

With national Republicans trying to limit debates this year, the multifaceted events have become the new normal for both candidates and the media. On Saturday, both announced and likely GOP candidates will head to Iowa for the next one, where freshman GOP Sen. Joni Ernst will hold her inaugural ""Roast and Ride.""

So far, there have been at least a dozen different cattle calls since January. And if it feels like there's been a lot of cattle calls this year, maybe that's because there's a lot of cattle. For lesser-known candidates in such a crowded field, the different events offer a chance to try to and catch fire with often little investment or infrastructure needed.

""You have a megaphone from the inside out,"" said longtime Iowa GOP strategist Tim Albrecht. ""There's no other place these candidates can go where they will see 200 media confined to one location. That's potentially 200 stories they wouldn't have otherwise gotten. With these kinds of events, it's a very low bar to participate and to even be invited.""

And in Iowa – a state where GOP voters insist on meeting their candidates early and often – the guaranteed national attention has also been a boon for state and local Republicans.

""Everybody is a beneficiary of these events, whether it's the local county party, the state party the campaigns and the voters,"" Albrecht said, ""because this gives Iowans the opportunity to see these candidates and potential candidates on the same stage, back to back, to directly compare how each of them would handle a particular situation. These are a wonderful way for Iowans to gauge candidates on an Iowa stage who eventually want be on the world stage.""

To national observers, the cattle calls have become the new debates and a way for hopefuls, who haven't been getting as much attention, to boost their profile, so they can ultimately make it onto the debate stage later this year.

""A lot of the folks in the field not named [former Florida Gov.] Jeb Bush, [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker, or [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio, they don't have very high name ID,"" national GOP strategist Ford O'Connell said. ""That's why the cattle calls are taking on an added importance in the way we haven't seen before.""

The field will naturally be winnowed down after the first few states vote early next year. But until then, if candidates aren't able to get momentum before the debates, ""donors aren't going to open up their wallets,"" O'Connell said.

The burst of early events in 2015 helped some candidates jump to the head of the pack nationally. Albrecht pointed to Walker's breakout performance at the Iowa Freedom Summit this past January as one example. While he noted that Iowans had been wowed by his speeches already the previous year, the first major cattle call gave the Wisconsin governor the momentum he needed.

""There was serious buzz after that event,"" said Albrecht, a former top aide to Gov. Terry Branstad, R-Iowa. ""Scott Walker has real star power.""

He also pointed to former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — who performed well at last month's Iowa Lincoln Day Dinner and had a big crowd outside her room — and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — who needs a comeback after not living up to the hype in the state four years ago — as candidates who have shone at the events.

Both will be at Ernst's event this weekend — only Perry and Walker will be riding motorcycles along the GOP senator, though. Seven candidates will be in attendance, including Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Fiorina and Perry have yet to see much evidence of what activists say have been good performances. Both are still mired in single digits in both early state polls and national surveys, the latter of which will determine whether they make it onto the debate state during the first faceoff in August.

That makes their continued performance in such cattle calls all the more important along with building their political operations.

""Everything's been turned on its head, because of the capping of the debates and the calendar,"" O'Connell warned. ""You know if you're not on the first one or two debate stages, it's going to be hard to get past New Hampshire.""",REAL
"0 Add Comment 
REMEMBER the dress debacle last year when billions of online users across the world were at war with one another over whether or not a dress was black and blue or white and gold? Well, prepare to engage in battle yet again folks with this viral picture that’s totes dividing the internets. 
Uploaded to numerous social media channels yesterday morning, this picture of a Syrian man has gone viral after users struggled to figure out whether or not he was covered in white rubble from an airstrike – or if he was just all shiny and covered in some kind of silly oil. 
“Once you see it, you just can’t see anything else,” posted one absolute genius, who pretty much summed up the whole picture with one epic tweet containing just 40 characters. 

Whilst many internet players were quick to point out that the Aleppo man was shiny or covered in plastic, others corrected them by pointing out that the man was actually covered in concrete dust from an Assad led airstrike which launched an illegal barrel bomb that killed at least 15 people, many of whom were women and children. 
“It’s crazy how your eyes deceive you like that,” pointed out another user of the internet web, “I’d say the guy didn’t know what hit him after his picture went viral”. 
In fact, on closer inspection, it becomes obvious that the man is covered head to toe in chalk like material, probably from exploding concrete and falling rubble, as well as what appears to be ketchup on his forearm. Instagram user @reuters, who originally posted the snap, confirmed the red residue was in fact blood, sending the internet into yet another meltdown.",FAKE
"The fledgling rebellion against electing John Boehner to a third term as House speaker gained momentum over the weekend, as nine conservative Republicans declared they intend to vote against the Ohio Republican when the House convenes on Tuesday.

Among them, Reps. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Ted Yoho, R-Fla., also have announced they will challenge Boehner for the position.

""We lack a leadership and we lack vision of where the country's going,"" Yoho told Fox News on Monday. ""It's just not me feeling this.""

Yoho said he'll keep his hat in the ring, even after Gohmert announced his own bid on Sunday.

The odds of the effort unseating Boehner remain slim. Sending the election to a second ballot would require 28 votes against Boehner. No election of a speaker of the House has gone that far since 1923, when Frederick Gillette, R-Mass., won re-election on the ninth ballot. The vote is typically a formality and split along party lines.

Yoho said Monday, though, that reaching a second round is their goal and ""we fully anticipate to get there.""

The nine members who have declared their opposition to Boehner are Yoho and Gohmert, and Reps. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla.; Paul Gosar, R-Ariz.; Steve King, R-Iowa; Dave Brat, R-Va.; Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind.; Water Jones, R-N.C.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky.

""We have heard from a lot of Republicans that said, 'I would vote for somebody besides Speaker Boehner, but nobody will put their name out there,'"" Gohmert told ""Fox & Friends"" on Sunday morning, in announcing his own bid. ""That changed [Saturday] with Ted Yoho."" Gohmert also hinted that at least one other member would launch a challenge from within the GOP.

Bridenstine, who released a statement late Sunday referring to the rebels as a ""Gang of Nine,"" hinted that more of his colleagues would make their opposition to Boehner public, vowing ""Monday, we will be in double digits.""

Jones, the North Carolina congressman, told The Washington Times that as many as 18 conservatives will look to vote against Boehner.

A Boehner spokesman said Sunday that the speaker was selected in November as the House Republican Conference's choice and that ""he expects to be elected by the whole House this week.""

Though Republicans have built their majority under Boehner's leadership, most of the opposition to Boehner stems from the belief among some conservative members that he caved by agreeing last month to a $1.1 trillion federal spending bill, which averted another partial government shutdown. Those members believe Boehner did not do enough to punish President Obama for sidestepping Congress over immigration reform.

“After the November elections gave Republicans control of the Senate, voters made clear they wanted change,” Gohmert said. “We were hopeful our leaders got the voters’ message. However, after our speaker forced through the (spending bill) by passing it with Democratic votes and without time to read it, it seemed clear that we needed new leadership.""",REAL
"Rank-and-file Democrats and independents are considerably more likely than Republicans to take a rosy view of foreign trade, and have been for several years, according to Gallup polling data.

This in tension with the impression you would get from reading articles about the congressional politics of Trade Promotion Authority, where the vast majority of opposition is coming from Democrats, with Republicans singing the virtues of free trade.

Part of the issue here is that Gallup is asking, in general, whether foreign trade is more of an opportunity for the US or more of a threat. The congressional debate is about a specific economic agreement, some of whose provisions are only loosely related to trade.

Another possible explanation is that trade is currently identified in the public's eye with Barack Obama, who has been heavily promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But the timing on this doesn't quite work out — enthusiasm for trade among self-identified Republicans has been in a long-term decline since the early days of the Bush administration. It's perhaps related in some more generic sense to conservatives' greater nationalism.",REAL
"Fox News admits that Bill O'Reilly didn't actually see 'guys gun down nuns in El Salvador' or witness any bombings in Northern Ireland. Why Fox News is unlikely to suspend Bill O'Reilly for his exaggerations.

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

Why are authorities slow to call the Ohio State attack 'terrorism'?

Political commentator Bill O'Reilly seen here in 2013 attending the National Geographic Channel's ""Killing Kennedy"" screening in Washington. The Fox News Channel host initially contested allegations that he embellished his past as a war correspondent.

""That's really what separates me from most of these other bloviators,"" Fox News host Bill O'Reilly once said before he found himself in the midst of a scandal about whether he's exaggerated the dangers of his past combat reporting, ""I bloviate, but I bloviate about stuff I’ve seen. They bloviate about stuff that they haven’t.”

It turns out O'Reilly is no different from the other bloviators.

In a statement quietly made to the Washington Post Friday, Fox News admitted that O'Reilly exaggerated about at least one of his reporting experiences, about seeing Irish terrorists bomb fellow citizens in Belfast. In a separate statement, O'Reilly adjusted his recounting of another reporting episode that was called into question, about seeing nuns murdered in El Salvador.

Left-leaning publication Mother Jones touched off the controversy last month when it questioned O'Reilly's statements regarding his role in the aftermath of the Falklands conflict and compared him with Brian Williams, who was recently suspended from NBC Nightly News for exaggerating his reporting. Since then, for nearly two weeks, O'Reilly has been on the defensive against claims that he, too, exaggerated past combat reporting experience.

Throughout, Fox News has dismissed the accusations as “nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates.”

O'Reilly, in classic form, responded to the charges angrily, calling them “garbage” and the Mother Jones reporter a “liar” and a “guttersnipe.”

But it turns out there have been at least three instances in which O'Reilly's claims have been discredited.

First stop on the ""Bloviate-gate"" train: Northern Ireland, where O'Reilly claimed in his book ""Keep it Pithy,"" that he's ""seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

When the Washington Post pushed Fox News on the matter, a Fox News spokesman said Friday that O’Reilly was not an eyewitness to any bombings or injuries in Northern Ireland. Instead, he was shown photos of bombings by Protestant police officers.

""By that logic, we've all ""seen"" the ISIS beheadings first hand,"" pop culture site Complex cracked.

Next stop, El Salvador. On at least two separate occasions, O’Reilly claimed to have seen the murder of four American nuns in El Salvador.

“I’ve seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador,” he said on his radio program in 2005. On his Fox News program, “The O’Reilly Factor,” he said in 2012, “I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.”

The only problem? O’Reilly arrived in El Salvador months after the brutal killings and could not have witnessed them, liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, reported.

O’Reilly responded in a statement to Mediate last week in which he was describing photos of the murdered nuns, not the crimes themselves.

“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered,” he said in the statement.

Last stop, Florida. In his 2012 book, ""Killing Kennedy,"" O'Reilly claimed that he ""heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide,"" of Lee Harvey Oswald's associate, George de Mohrenschildt in a house in Florida in 1977.

It turns out O'Reilly wasn't even in Florida when Mohrenschildt committed suicide, according to phone recordings CNN acquired.

According to the phone recording, O'Reilly called Gaeton Fonzi, an investigative reporter who was known for his work on JFK's assassination, and asked if he had heard any personal details about Mohrenschildt's suicide. ""I'm coming down there tomorrow,"" O'Reilly is heard saying to Fonzi. ""I'm coming to Florida.""

So what does this mean for Fox and O'Reilly?

Not much, probably.

As the Monitor's Peter Grier pointed out, ""he’s a political commentator, not a news anchor...Bloviation might be judged to be part of his job...That’s part of its appeal.""

What's more, O'Reilly is intensely popular and a cash cow for Fox News, so this shouldn't dent his reputation at the cable network, which thrives on controversy.

In fact, the scandal helped boost ""The O'Reilly Factor"" ratings: viewership has gone up 11 percent since it started.

In other words, regardless of the findings, O'Reilly and his bloviating aren't likely to disappear from Fox News anytime soon.

[Editor's note: The original story mistakenly indicated that Bill O'Reilly made his comments about what separates him from other bloviators during the current scandal. In fact, he made those remarks well before recent events.]",REAL
"Nearly simultaneous explosions targeted a Turkish peace rally Saturday in Ankara, killing at least 95 people and wounding hundreds in Turkey's deadliest attack in years — one that threatens to inflame the nation's ethnic tensions.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said there were ""strong signs"" that the two explosions — which struck 50 meters (yards) apart just after 10 a.m. — were suicide bombings. He suggested that Kurdish rebels or Islamic State group militants were to blame.

The two explosions occurred seconds apart outside the capital's main train station as hundreds of opposition supporters and Kurdish activists gathered for the peace rally organized by Turkey's public workers' union and other groups. The protesters planned to call for increased democracy in Turkey and an end to the renewed violence between Kurdish rebels and Turkish security forces.

The attacks Saturday came at a tense time for Turkey, a NATO member that borders war-torn Syria, hosts more refugees than any other nation in the world and has seen renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels that has left hundreds dead in the last few months.

Many people at the rally had been anticipating that the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, would declare a temporary cease-fire — which it did hours after the bombing — to ensure that Turkey's Nov. 1 election would be held in a safe environment.

Television footage from Turkey's Dogan news agency showed a line of protesters Saturday near Ankara's train station, chanting and performing a traditional dance with their hands locked when a large explosion went off behind them. An Associated Press photographer saw several bodies covered with bloodied flags and banners that demonstrators had brought for the rally.

""There was a massacre in the middle of Ankara,"" said Lami Ozgen, head of the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions, or KESK.

The state-run Anadolu Agency said the attacks were carried out with TNT explosives fortified with metal ball-bearings.

Turkey's government late Saturday raised the death toll in the twin bomb blasts to 95 people killed, 248 wounded. It said 48 of the wounded were in serious condition — and a doctor's group said many of them had burns.

""This massacre targeting a pro-Kurdish but mostly Turkish crowd could flame ethnic tensions in Turkey,"" said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute.

Cagaptay said the attack could be the work of groups ""hoping to induce the PKK, or its more radical youth elements, to continue fighting Turkey,"" adding that the Islamic State group would benefit most from the full-blown Turkey-PKK conflict.

""(That) development could make ISIS a secondary concern in the eyes of many Turks to the PKK,"" Cagaptay said in emailed comments, using another acronym for IS militants.

Small anti-government protests broke out at the scene of the explosions and outside Ankara hospitals as Interior Minister Selami Altinok visited the wounded. Some demonstrators chanted ""Murderer Erdogan!"" — referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom many accuse of increasing tensions with Kurds to profit at the ballot box in November. Erdogan denies the accusations.

Later Saturday, thousands gathered near Istanbul's main square denouncing the attacks and also holding the government responsible.

The Turkish government imposed a temporary news blackout covering images that showed the moment of the blasts, gruesome or bloody pictures or ""images that create a feeling of panic."" A spokesman warned media organizations they could face a ""full blackout"" if they did not comply.

Many people reported being unable to access Twitter and other social media websites for several hours after the blasts. It was not clear if authorities had blocked access to the websites, but Turkey often does impose blackouts following attacks.

At a news conference, Davutoglu declared a three-day official mourning period for the blast victims and said Turkey had been warned about groups aiming to destabilize the country.

""For some time, we have been receiving intelligence information based from some (Kurdish rebel) and Daesh statements that certain suicide attackers would be sent to Turkey... and that through these attackers chaos would be created in Turkey,"" Davutoglu told reporters, using the IS group's Arabic acronym.

""The (Kurdish rebels) or Daesh could emerge (as culprits) of today's terror event,"" Davutoglu said, promising that those behind the attacks would be caught and punished.

Davutoglu said authorities had detained at least two suspected would-be suicide bombers in the past three days in Ankara and Istanbul.

Authorities had been on alert after Turkey agreed to take a more active role in the U.S.-led battle against the Islamic State group. Turkey opened up its bases to U.S. aircraft to launch air raids on the extremist group in Syria and carried out a limited number of strikes on the group itself. Russia has also entered the fray on behalf of the Syrian government recently, bombing sites in Syria and reportedly violating Turkish airspace a few times in the past week.

On a separate front, the fighting between Turkish forces and Kurdish rebels flared anew in July, killing at least 150 police and soldiers and hundreds of PKK rebels since then. Turkish jets have also carried out numerous deadly airstrikes on Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq.

Erdogan condemned Saturday's attacks, which he said targeted the country's unity, called for solidarity and canceled a planned visit Monday to Turkmenistan.

""The greatest and most meaningful response to this attack is the solidarity and determination we will show against it,"" Erdogan said.

Critics have accused Erdogan of re-igniting the fighting with the Kurds to seek electoral gains — hoping that the turmoil would rally voters back to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. Electoral gains by the country's pro-Kurdish party caused the AKP, founded by Erdogan, to lose its parliamentary majority in a June election after a decade of single-party rule.

The attacks Saturday, which even surpassed twin Al Qaeda-linked attacks in Istanbul in 2003 that killed some 60 people, also drew widespread condemnation from Turkey's allies.

Turkey's state-run news agency said President Obama called Erdogan to extend his condolences. The Anadolu Agency, citing unnamed officials, said Obama told Erdogan the United States would continue to side with Turkey in the fight against terrorism. It quoted Obama as saying the U.S. ""shared Turkey's grief.""

Erdogan earlier said the twin bombings aimed to destroy Turkey's ""peace and stability."" Anadolu said the two leaders agreed to talk more in the coming days.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent her condolences, calling the attacks ""particularly cowardly acts that were aimed directly at civil rights, democracy and peace.""

""It is an attempt at intimidation and an attempt to spread fear,"" she said. ""I am convinced that the Turkish government and all of Turkish society stands together at this time with a response of unity and democracy.""

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said ""there can be no justification for such a horrendous attack on people marching for peace... All NATO allies stand united in the fight against the scourge of terrorism.""

Saturday was the third attack against meetings of Kurdish activists. In July, a suicide bombing blamed on the Islamic State group killed 33 peace activists, including many Kurds, in the town of Suruc near Turkey's border with Syria. Two people were killed in June in a bomb attack at the pro-Kurdish party's election rally.

""This attack (Saturday) resembles and is a continuation of the Diyarbakir and Suruc (attacks),"" said Selahattin Demirtas, leader of the Turkey's pro-Kurdish party. He held Erdogan and Davutoglu's government responsible for the latest attack, saying it was ""carried out by the state against the people.""

In the aftermath of the Ankara attack, the PKK declared a temporary cease-fire. A rebel statement said Saturday the group is halting hostilities to allow the Nov. 1 election to proceed safely. It said it would not launch attacks but would defend itself.

The government has said there would be no letup in its fight against the Kurdish rebels.

""Our operations (against the PKK) will continue until they lay down arms,"" Davutoglu said late Friday.",REAL
"Notable names include Ray Washburne (Commerce), a Dallas-based investor, is reported to be under consideration to lead the department.",REAL
"Project Veritas 4: Robert Creamer's Illegal $20,000 Foreign Wire Transfer Caught On Tape   Zero Hedge 
Project Veritas has just released Part IV of it's multi-part series exposing numerous scandals surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign, including efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies and, at least what seems to be, illegal coordination between the DNC, Hillary For America and various Super PACs. 
Part IV focuses on a $20,000 foreign donation made by an undercover Project Veritas journalist to Americans United for Change (AUFC). Ironically, shortly after the $20k donation wire was released, the contributor's ""niece"" was offered an internship with Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners. 
In the new video, Creamer says: “Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters … I am in this campaign mainly to deal with what earned media with television, radio, with earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising.” He also mentions a conference call discussing a woman potentially coming forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior. 
Creamer, a seasoned Chicago activist who is married to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose Republican opponent, Joan McCarthy Lasonde has called for her to resign over her husband’s activities, also talks about his work with Barack Obama, whom he says he has known since the 1980s, when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago: “He’s a pro, I’ve known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago.” 
Elsewhere, Creamer adds: “I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the… the health care bill, for trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.” 
In the effort to prove the credibility of the undercover donor featured in the videos and to keep the investigation going, Project Veritas Action made the decision to donate twenty thousand dollars to Robert Creamer’s effort. Project Veritas Action had determined that the benefit of this investigation outweighed the cost. And it did. 

“First thing, like I said, thank you for the proposal. And I’d like to get the $20,000 across to you. The second call I’m going to make here is to my money guy and he’s going to get in touch with you and auto wire the funds to you,” said the PVA journalist. 

Creamer told the PVA journalist to send the money to Americans United for Change. Shortly after the money was released, the “donors”“niece” - another Project Veritas Action journalist - was offered an internship with Creamer. 

In an effort to see how far Creamer would go with the promise of more money, another Project Veritas journalist posing as the donor’s money liaison requested a meeting with Creamer. During that meeting, Creamer spoke about connections he had with Obama and Clinton. 
AUFC President, Brad Woodhouse, subsequently returned the money, after Project Veritas started to release their undercover videos, citing ""concerns that it might have been an illegal foreign donation."" Oddly, Woodhouse was not terribly concerned about the ""legality"" of the donation when he chose to accept it a month prior. 
In an unexpected twist, AUFC president Brad Woodhouse, the recipient of the $20,000, heard that Project Veritas Action was releasing undercover videos exposing AUFC’s activities. He told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the twenty thousand dollars. He said it was because they were concerned that it might have been an illegal foreign donation. Project Veritas Action was pleased but wondered why that hadn’t been a problem for the month that they had the money. 

While the latest video focuses on the "" $20,000 illegal foreign contribution"" from an undercover Project Veritas journalist , the following comments from Robert Creamer were also rather intriguing in light of recent White House efforts to vehemently deny any connections between he and President Obama. 
""Oh Barack Obama's was the best campaign in the history of American politics, I mean the second one, I mean the first was good too. I was a consultant to both, the second one, was everything hit on every level and every aspect. 

He's a pro. I've known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago . 

I was just at and event with him in Chicago actually, on Friday last . He is just as good as ever. I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues. Helping to run issued campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the...the health care bill...trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues."" 
* * * 
As a reminder, video 3 directly linking Donna Brazile and Hillary Clinton to efforts to disrupt Trump events. 

Video 2 provided the democrat playbook on how to commit ""mass voter fraud"": 

Video 1 revealed DNC efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies: Share This Article...",FAKE
"New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie roared into Sunday after a fierce debate performance hours earlier in which he slowed rising, fellow GOP presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, with the New Hampshire primary ahead.

“He’s a good guy, but he’s just not ready to be president,” Christie told “Fox News Sunday,” after attacking Rubio for his inexperience in running government. “I felt justified because I’ve been saying this for a long time.”

Christie is one of three GOP candidates with governor experience competing with Rubio for the so-called “Republican establishment” vote and trying to stay alive in the race, with insurgents Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also in the top tier.

“I am tested and prepared and ready,” said Christie, arguing that Barack Obama becoming president as a one-term senator, like Rubio, has been a disaster for the country.

“We don’t need another on-the-job training,” he said. “I’m glad the American people saw (Rubio’s debate performance) before they made another mistake.”

In response to Christie’s attacks at the ABC debate Saturday night in New Hampshire, Rubio, R-Fla., stumbled and repeated himself several times about Obama’s running the country.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who like Christie is banking on a good showing in independent-minded New Hampshire, dismissed the notion that he’s competing with Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for the establishment vote, despite having a career that includes 18 years in Congress.

“I am not an establishment candidate,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “And I’m not an anti-establishment candidate.”

He cited his individual efforts to reform welfare and the Pentagon and repeated that his 2016 platform includes a “path to legalization” for illegal immigrants in the country, while also calling for the completion of a wall along the southern U.S. border.

He also dismissed the notion that New Hampshire is do-or-die for his campaign.

“All I have to do is finish well,” he said. “I have the best ground game.”

Bush, who like Rubio is from Florida, and was considered a mentor to the senator, on Sunday continued his efforts to move ahead of Rubio.

“The simple fact is, I’m a leader,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “Marco Rubio is a gifted speaker. But we’re competing for president of the United States, not the back bench of the Senate.”

Trump was hit hard by Bush in the debate for his support of eminent domain, with Bush pointing out that Trump tried to take property for an ""elderly woman"" in Atlantic City for a casino parking lot.

""Shush,"" Trump said to Bush as he tried to respond to the attack.

Trump said several times Sunday that he thought he won the debate.

He also told Fox News that he has a “good team” in New Hampshire and called last week’s Iowa Caucuses, in which he lost to Cruz, “complicated.”

The billionaire businessman also suggested he would like to challenge Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election.

Trump suggested that Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, is perhaps a “Communist.”",REAL
"posted by Eddie For the first time, scientists have observed a two-headed shark growing in an egg. This catshark ( Galeus atlanticus ) lives only in the western Mediterranean, at depths of 330 to 710 meters (1,082 to 2,329 feet), and is considered near threatened. Workers on a research vessel collected the embryonic fish as part of an expedition that retrieved 797 embryos from the western Mediterranean sea. It had two brains, four eyes, two mouths, twenty gills (double the usual ten), and two notochords — a developmental precursor of the spine. The two heads fused at the neck. Inside, it had two hearts, and a doubled digestive system that fused together where two stomachs met at a single intestine. When an animal has two heads it is said to exhibit dicephaly. The condition is relatively rare in the animal kingdom but has been seen in many different groups, from snakes to dolphins to people. You can see the shark in this figure, drawn from a paper in the Journal of Fish Biology where the researchers describe their discovery. Figures (d) and (e) depict another shark embryo with a single head. Two-headedness is believed to happen in all animals with spines. But it’s rare enough that it’s never been spotted in an egg-laying shark before. As recently as 1992 , some researchers believed that the uncommon body structure was the result of twins incompletely merging together. But now it’s widely accepted that the cause is actually an incomplete separation of one embryo into two. No one has yet offered a conclusive explanation for what causes this to happen. The two-headed shark embryo described in this paper would probably not have survived had it developed — though it won’t get the chance to try. When the researchers spotted the doubled shark through the translucent walls of its egg, they split the egg open and preserved the embryo for study. Read the original article on Tech Insider . Source:",FAKE
"Politicians Will Feel the Heat From Rising Temperatures Posted on Nov 4, 2016 
By Kieran Cooke / Climate News Network New research shows that the hotter it gets, the quicker the pace of political change. (Gabor Dvornik via Flickr) 
LONDON—Voters who feel good about life—whether it is to do with their job, their marriage or even the success of their sports team—are more likely to support their politicians. On the other hand, those who are disgruntled and fed up are more prone to want a change of political leadership. That, at least, is the received wisdom of political pundits. Rising temperatures New research indicates that, in future, climate change—and specifically rising temperatures—could also be a key factor in undermining and determining political longevity. The hotter it gets, the theory goes, the quicker the pace of political change. 
Nick Obradovich, a researcher at Harvard University in the US, has conducted what is described as the first ever investigation into the relationship between temperature, electoral returns and future climate change. 
In a study published in the journal Climatic Change , Obradovich sets out to substantiate the idea that climate change, by threatening feelings of wellbeing, will lead to a quicker turnover of politicians and political parties. There is no doubting the thoroughness of his research: altogether, Obradovich analysed more than 1.5 billion votes cast in nearly 5,000 elections in 19 countries ranging from Argentina to Zambia between 1925 and 2011. This data was then set alongside meteorological records. The analysis indicates, says Obradovich, that “warmer than normal temperatures in the year prior to an election produce lower vote shares for parties already in power, driving quicker rates of political turnover”. “ Warmer than normal temperatures in the year prior to an election produce lower vote shares for parties already in power, quicker rates of political turnover” The study also finds that voter disgruntlement is more pronounced in warmer countries where average annual temperatures are above 21°C . “In these warmer places, voter support shrinks by nine percentage points from one election to the next, relative to office bearers in cooler electoral districts,” the study finds. Countries lacking historical electoral data—including those in sub-Saharan Africa already feeling the impact of climate change—were not included in the research. Obradovich also uses climate models to predict future voter behaviour, suggesting that the pace of political change in many countries between now and the end of the century is likely to considerably speed up. “Climate change may increase the frequency of democratic turnover most in warmer, poorer nations,” says the study. Fickle electorates Global warming is a complex problem that can only be tackled through international agreement and long-term planning. Obradovich says that faced with ever more fickle electorates, politicians in future will be tempted to focus on short-term policies instead of adopting longer-term strategies. This could not only hamper the fight against climate change but also cause economic and political upheaval. “Turnover in nations with weak democratic institutions can up-end political stability—if incumbents in weak democracies foresee a greater risk of losing office, they sometimes employ electoral fraud and pre-electoral violence to maintain power,” says Obradovich. “If these methods fail, incumbents’ loss occasionally precipitates post-electoral violence that can in turn induce broader civil conflict.” 
Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues 
Advertisement",FAKE
"EXCLUSIVE: A World Food Program initiative that handed out hundreds of millions of dollars of food vouchers has been confronted with ""persistent"" diversion and sale of the vouchers to middlemen for cash by the growing flood of Syrian refugees in neighboring Jordan and Lebanon, according to its internal auditors.

One reason for the diversion:  the agency  did not have systems in place to identify valid recipients, and its procedures were “not detailed enough to provide assurance that voucher transfers reached the correct beneficiaries in the correct amount,” the auditors have said.

The full extent of the desperation voucher sales was not made clear in the most recent audit document obtained by Fox News, which covered WFP operations from July 2013 to March 2014.

During the audited period,  however, spending on the Jordan and Lebanon voucher programs amounted to more than $230 million in 2013 alone-- nearly three-fourths of  the $317 million that WFP spent  that year on vouchers across the entire region affected by the Syrian conflict.

A WFP spokesman, declaring that the agency has taken steps to meet the problem, indicated to Fox News that the cash-outs were continuing  at a reduced rate.

The voucher issue is only one of a host of challenges that cloud the WFP relief effort in Syria and neighboring countries. One of the most glaring is that  much of the Syrian food distribution is  in the hands of charities and non-government organizations picked by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, which is considered by many critics to be too close to the Assad regime, and WFP “was not involved in the assessment or selection of these charities,” according to the agency’s  auditors

Nor could WFP check consistently on how well those agencies were reporting: in all,  according to the recent internal audit, less than 40 percent of its distribution sites were visited  in 2014 by WFP or what auditors called a “third-party facilitator” who went where WFP staffers couldn’t.

Moreover, that “facilitator”  was not required to report on the results in the same way that WFP staffers do, including an assessment of the “impact” of WFP programs, meaning how well they actually worked.

CLICK HERE FOR THE AUDIT REPORT

Beyond all that is the brutal reality of Syria’s ongoing war:  as WFP spokesman told Fox News in response to questions about the food delivery audit, “insecurity and access continue to be WFP’s greatest challenge inside Syria.”

A big part of the problem is that the agency is still being handcuffed by the Assad regime in getting aid to hundreds of thousands of desperate people across the country.

The WFP spokesman cited a report by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, which noted that between December 2014 and the end of February 2015, “719,000 people have been denied access [to U.N. relief convoys] or are waiting for approval by the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic at the national and governorate levels.”

The same report also noted that relief had managed to reach about 158,000 people during that period—roughly 18 percent of the total mentioned.

The fact that huge problems have arisen in making sure  food relief gets to the suffering  as planned are not exactly surprising  in  a relief operation as massive, chaotic and dangerous as  the one that the war is continuing to generate.

The U.N. overall has appealed for some $8.4 billion  to cover the relief effort this year for Syria and its neighbors—roughly the size of the annual U.N. peacekeeping budget—even as the brutal civil war continues calamity and additional waves of refugees.

Overall, some 12.2 million people are currently said by the U.N. to need humanitarian assistance, with 7.6 million of them Syrian internal refugees, and the remainder now living in surrounding countries.

At the same time donor fatigue may be setting in:  after the $8.4 billion appeal,  the U.N. claimed that some $3.8 billion in pledges had been received. However,  the U.N.-managed Financial Tracking Service (FTS) notes that so far, only some $1.5 billion has been received.

Specifically for its Syria response plan this year, WFP has so far received about $137 million, according to FTS—less than 20 percent of its $714 million announced requirements.

The huge size of the required effort also calls for extra caution in dealing  with the “high-risk” problems the WFP auditors have uncovered.  For its part, a WFP spokesman told Fox News that many of the issues detailed in the recent audit were under control—although how much was still not exactly clear.

When it came to checking on distribution efforts by charities it had not selected, the spokesman said,WFP continues to “as much as possible monitor distributions organized by all its partners throughout the country”—a sizeable caveat.

At the same time that the spokesman acknowledged that the Syrian Arab Red Cross, or SARC, “collaborates with other charities” outside WFP’s ambit to support food distributions,  he added that the Syrian organization “provides detailed reports to WFP” on the activities of the charities it works with.

The extent to which WFP can cross-check those reports, however, is part of the problem the auditors were noting. The spokesman also said that in 2014 WFP had carried out 76 percent of its planned 1,760 monitoring visits in 2014, “in a very unpredictable and volatile context” a significantly higher number than the auditors indicated.

The spokesman added, however, that much of this “significant achievement” was the result of the “third-party monitors” that auditors had said used different, and less discriminating, measures of the actual achievements of the aid deliveries.

This year, the spokesman said, “WFP is further enhancing its monitoring capacity”  by adding more WFP field monitors—and also more of the third-party monitors that auditors had criticized.

Likewise, the spokesman said, WFP voucher programs had been overhauled. The agency, he said, had purged an electronic voucher system in Lebanon, deactivating those deemed invalid, and declared that “encashment trends are decreasing” in both Lebanon and Jordan--without specifying by how much.

He also did not answer a Fox News question asking how many people  in Lebanon had received such electronic cards overall.

The spokesman also underlined one of WFP’s bigger new achievements: the launching of a school feeding program in Syria that he said currently reaches almost 112,000 children, along with 75,500 young children who get specialized nutrition support.

To put that in perspective, however, the U.N.’s 2015 Strategic Response Plan for Syria declares that “more than 5.6 million children” are in need of some kind of assistance, about  2.5 million children under age 5 need food aid, and some 370,000 need special nutritional help.

George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter:  @GeorgeRussell  or on Facebook.com/GeorgeRussell",REAL
"Scott 
It’s really amazing to see how little of the blame is going to Clinton herself. It was her decision to set-up a private email server. It was her decision to serve as Secretary of State while accepting millions from foreign governments. It was her decision to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while unofficially running for President. It was her decision to call millions of Americans deplorable. 
We have very little idea of what a Trump presidency will amount to. My best guess has been that he will be a Jimmy Carter cubed in Berlusconi packaging. 
Recall that even though Carter has been the best former President of the modern era, he came to Washington as an outsider with his Georgia team. Despite having ben a governor and thus knowing how to draft legislation and get bills passed, he famously got little accomplished despite having a Democratic party majority in the House and Senate. 
Trump is likely to spend his first year, and conceivably his entire Presidency, with all of the Democratic party and enough of the Republican party against him to stymie him, fighting for the right to govern. And that assumes he has an agenda beyond the very few goals he has articulated consistently: getting out of “bad” trade deals and entering into better ones; reducing immigration and deporting many undocumented immigrants (and building his famed wall); investing heavily in infrastructure; making NATO members pay their share of its budget (the theoretical level, 2% of each nation’s GDP, is largely footed by the US); cutting back our involvement in overseas conflicts; cutting taxes; and repealing Obamacare. 
The only initiatives where the Republicans might back him solidly are cutting taxes and ending Obamacare, and even then, given the lobbying power of Big Pharma and the health insurers, the Republicans might not be as willing to pull the trigger on Obamacare as all their kvetching would lead you to believe. 
There is one more Trump campaign promise that will serve as an important early test of his seriousness as well as his survival skills: investigating Clinton. Even if Obama pardons her, as our Jerri-Lynn Scofield has predicted, it will be critical for Trump to carry out a probe of the Clinton Foundation’s business while Clinton was Secretary of State. 
If Trump is to cut the cancer of the neocons out of the policy establishment, he has to have them on the run. It is a reasonable surmise that Clinton’s enthusiasm for war was due at least in part to heavy Saudi support of the Foundation. Showing that American’s escalation in the Middle East, which Obama tried with mixed success to temper, was due in part, and perhaps almost entirely, to the personal corruption of the Secretary of State, would keep the hawks at bay, particularly if other prominent insiders and pundits were implicated in Clinton Foundation influence-peddaling. 
It will be hard for Trump to do much to alter the course of the military-surveilance complex unless he can hamstring the warmongers. Just as Warren has argued relative to bank regulations, “personnel is policy.” If Trump is a fast learner, he’ll see that that is just as true on the foreign policy front. 
Finally, those on the left need to turn the blame cannon aimed squarely at them back on the professional hacks who are truly responsible. Despite their tiresome chest-beating about meritocracy, these Acela corridor bubble-dwellers are constitutionally incapable of holding their fellow club member accountable. Their preening self regard repelled hard-working Americans who’d done the right thing, as in gotten an education, and if they were older, launched a career, bought a house and started a family, only to struggle harder and harder while seeing any vestige of security and hope of improved living standards erode. And unless they were at the top of the professional classes, they felt defeated by not being able to pay for their kids to go to college and being uncertain as to how to advise them with their educations and job prospects. 
The Democrats under Clinton and Obama abdicated the duty of the elites, which is to improve the conditions for, or at least limit harm to, the members of the communities they lead. Even Bill Clinton did remember that the most important duty for a Democrat is to create jobs, even if he did so by presiding over a rise in household debt and a stock market bubble. 
Young people, who poll well to the left of their elders, have inferred a lesson that the labor movement forgot: the exercise of power includes being willing to inflict punishment in the form of withholding support. Look at how diminished organized labor has become by casting its lot with the feckless Dems who’ve sold them out again and again. Hillary tried the Clinton “They have no where to go” trick one time too many, kicking the left after she only narrowly beat Sanders. And the left decided to return the favor. She made clear she has no intention of representing them. They heard her message loud and clear and acted accordingly. 
As reader aab : 
The big question to me is, take over the hollow shell of the Democratic Party, or crush it with a new party. Is it possible to take over the Ds — as weak as it is now as a party — without being corrupted and co-opted? I now hate my former party to such a degree, I find myself recoiling at having anything at all to do with it. But given all the institutional constraints, it still may be smart to try; the answer is above my pay grade, as they say. 
This is an important question to consider as we see how the Democratic party responds to this well-deserved defeat. 0 2 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"Published on Oct 27, 2016 by Jeff Quitney The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… 
more at http://quickfound.net 
‘The 30th Infantry Division –“Old Hickory” as this combat infantry division was affectionately called by military people both in and out of it. This National Guard Division is shown in North Carolina and Tennessee, and in combat. It rightfully earned its name as “the Work Horse of the Western Front.” Colonel Quinn appears and explains the clothing, equipment and food available to the combat infantryman.’ 
“The Big Picture” episode TV-211 
Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30th_In… ) 
The 30th Infantry Division was a unit of the Army National Guard in World War I and World War II. It was nicknamed the “Old Hickory” division, in honor of President Andrew Jackson. The Germans nicknamed this division “Roosevelt’s SS.”. The 30th Infantry Division was regarded by SLA Marshall as the number one infantry division in the European Theater of Operations (ETO), involved in 282 days of intense combat over a period from June 1944 through April 1945… 
The 30th Infantry Division arrived in England, 22 February 1944, and trained until June. It landed at Omaha Beach, Normandy, 11 June 1944, secured the Vire-et-Taute Canal, crossed the Vire River, 7 July, and, beginning on 25 July spearheaded the Saint-Lô break-through of Operation Cobra. 
During Operation Cobra, on both 24 and 25 July, the 30th encountered a devastating friendly fire incident. As part of the effort to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, U.S. Army Air Force bombers from England were sent to carpet bomb a one by three mile corridor of the German defenses opposite the American line. However, Air Force planners, in complete disregard or lack of understanding of their role in supporting the ground attack, loaded the heavy B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with 500-pound bombs, destroying roads and bridges and complicating movement through the corridor, instead of lighter 100-pound bombs intended as antipersonnel devices against German defenders. Air planners switched the approach of attack by 90 degrees without informing ground commanders, thus a landmark road to guide the bombers to the bombing zone was miscommunicated as the point to begin the bombing run. Start point confusion was further compounded by red smoke signals that suddenly blew in the wrong direction, and bombs began falling on the heads of the U.S. soldiers. There were over 100 friendly fire casualties over the two days, including Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces. 
The 30th relieved the 1st Infantry Division near Mortain on 6 August. The German drive to Avranches began shortly after. The 30th clashed with the elite 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and fierce fighting in place with all available personnel broke out. The 30th frustrated enemy plans and broke the spearhead of the enemy assault in a violent struggle from 7–12 August. After the liberation of Paris, the division drove east through Belgium, crossing the Meuse River at Visé and Liège on 10 September. Elements of the division entered the Netherlands on 12 September, and Maastricht fell the next day. Moving into Germany and taking up positions along the Wurm River, the 30th launched its attack on the heavily defended city of Aachen on 2 October 1944, and succeeded in contacting the 1st Division on 16 October, resulting in the encirclement and takeover of Aachen… 
After a rest period, the 30th eliminated an enemy salient northeast of Aachen on 16 November, pushed through Alsdorf to the Inde River on 28 November, and then moved to rest areas. On 17 December the division rushed south to the Malmedy-Stavelot area to help block the powerful enemy drive in the Battle of the Bulge… Share this:",FAKE
"The FBI, the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, and the Israelis are in cahoots ‹ › Jonas E. Alexis graduated from Avon Park High School, studied mathematics and philosophy as an undergraduate at Palm Beach Atlantic University, and has a master's degree in education from Grand Canyon University. Some of his main interests include the history of Christianity, U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book , Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism: A History of Conflict Between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism from the first Century to the Twenty-first Century. He is currently teaching mathematics in South Korea. He plays soccer and basketball in his spare time. He is also a cyclist. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Zionism and the West. Alexis welcomes comments, letters, and queries in order to advance, explain, and expound rational and logical discussion on issues such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, the history of Christianity, and the history of ideas. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, Alexis asks that all queries be appropriately respectful and maintain a level of civility. As the saying goes, “iron sharpens iron,” and the best way to sharpen one’s mind is through constructive criticism, good and bad. However, Alexis has no patience with name-calling and ad hominem attack. He has deliberately ignored many queries and irrational individuals in the past for this specific reason—and he will continue to abide by this policy. By Jonas E. Alexis on November 4, 2016 ""Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians."" …by Jonas E. Alexis 

My dear friend Mark Dankof has recently sent me an article which documents that a 17-year-old Israeli firm named Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization has been working with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, and DHS’s Customs and Border Protection since 2009. There is more: 
“U.S. state and local law enforcement agencies use Cellebrite’s researchers and tools as well, as does the U.S. military, to extract data from phones seized from suspected terrorists and others in battle zones. 
“In July, months after the unknown third party provided the FBI with a method for getting into the San Bernardino phone — an iPhone 5C running iOS 9 — Cellebrite announced that it had developed its own technique for bypassing the phone’s password/encryption lock. And the company is confident that it will be able to deal successfully with future security changes Apple may make to its phones in the wake of the San Bernardino case… 
“Data extracted from phones has eclipsed data extracted from desktop and laptop computers in recent years, since the former can yield not only detailed logs about a user’s activities, interests, and communications, but also, in many cases, map the user’s whereabouts over weeks and months to produce a pattern of life.” [1] 
Bloomberg itself confirmed that Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization has indeed been working with the FBI. [2] CNN calls Cellebrite “the mysterious ‘outside party’…” [3] 
This shouldn’t be a surprise at all, for we know that the NSA and the Israelis are almost two sides of the same coin. The New York Times itself agrees with the prevailing view that “the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200.” [4] One can reasonably say that Israel has a way in which the NSA is loused up: “Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians. In many cases, the NSA and ISNU work cooperatively with the British and Canadian spy agencies, the GCHQ and CSEC. The relationship has, on at least one occasion, entailed the covert payment of a large amount of cash to Israeli operatives.” [5] 
Solomon Ehrmann, a Viennese Jew, would have been pleased with what Israel has been doing. In a speech delivered at the B’nai B’rith in 1902, Ehrmann envisioned a future in which “all of mankind will have been jewified and joined in union with the B’nai B’rith.” When that happens, “not only the B’nai B’rith but all of Judaism will have fulfilled its task.” [6] 
Baruch Levy, one of Karl Marx’s correspondents, would have agreed. He declared: “The Jewish people taken collectively shall be its own Messias…In this new organization of humanity, the sons of Israel now scattered over the whole surface of the globe…shall everywhere become the ruling element without opposition…. “The governments of the nations forming the Universal or World-Republic shall all thus pass, without any effort, into Jewish hands thanks to the victory of the proletariat…Thus shall the promise of the Talmud be fulfilled, that, when the Messianic epoch shall have arrived, the Jews will control the wealth of all the nations of the earth.” [7] 
Well, Judaism is seeking to fulfill “its task” through the state of Israel, which we all know by now is based on the Talmud. [8] But Solomon, Levy, and others could not understand that no force is strong enough to impede the triumph of Logos in history. Julian the Apostate tried but failed miserably. Voltaire, Helvitius, d’Holbach, D’Alembert, Lametrie, Diderot, and nearly all the leading lights of the French Revolution tried. Not a single one of them succeeded because they were essentially fighting against the moral and political order, which is based on reason. 
If Hegel is right, that reason will triumph in the end, then Solomon, Levy and their minions cannot win. Their evil work is actually drawing them closer and closer to destruction. These people will continue to fail because they are blind to higher realities. They cannot not see that ultimate reason is the beginning and end of human history. They should have at least read Hegel’s position on the philosophy of history. 
World history, Hegel tells us, “is governed by an ultimate design…whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason,” [9] and sometimes this divine and absolute reason has a cunning way of working itself out in history, irrespective of what evil men intend to do. This “divine and absolute reason,” says Hegel will “realize its end” in due time. [10] 
The carnal man simply cannot understand this “cunning of reason” because he is again blind to higher metaphysics. Higher realities goes back to Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle and was refined by people like Aquinas. It states that there is a mathematical, philosophical, moral, and political order in the universe and it is bigger than human beings. 
Heraclitus wrote: “Listening not to me but to the Logos…” [11] According to scholar Eva Brann, Heraclitus “directs us not to intellectual self-reliance, not to seek some truth, but to comprehend and follow this truth: that said b the Logos.” [12] This Logos, according to Heraclitus, is both “a maxim and Wisdom Inarnate.” According to Brann’s interpretation of Heraclitus, “This great Logos has a wisdom, or rather it is the Wise thing, and this Wise Thing has a maxim, or rather it is that practical principle which guides everything through everything, relates all things to all things…” [13] 
What Heraclitus and others of that era were trying to establish is that there is an order in this universe, which is undeniable. There is a mathematical, philosophical, esthetic, political and moral order. Any deviation from that order has serious consequences, including intellectual death. And anyone who studies the universe from a rational and truthful standpoint can recognize that order. 
Even physicists and mathematicians like P. C. W. Davis, Sir Fred Hoyle, John D. Barrow, Frank J. Tipler, Sir Martin Rees, among others, have come to realized that the mathematical order in the universe demands an explanation. [14] That explanation cannot be attributed to chance at all. [15] 
Rees himself argues that there are basically six numbers that sustain the physical properties of the entire universe. If you change any one of those six numbers (such as the strong nuclear force, gravitational force, etc.) “even to the tiniest degree, there would be no stars, no complex elements, no life.” Rees adds, “Had these numbers not been ‘well tuned,’ the gradual unfolding of layer upon layer of complexity would have been quenched.” [16] 
Well, these numbers are “well tuned” because they were based on what the Greeks and St. John call the Logos, which the carnal mind ultimately rejects. This “absolute reason,” says Hegel, will bring about the end of history. 
But looking at all the evil and chaos in this world, obviously the carnal man would think that there cannot be an “infinite power, which realizes its ends.” But Hegel would respond by saying that this is why this “infinite power” is “cunning” and is more powerful than human beings. 
This “infinite power,” according to scholar Robert C. Tucker’s interpretation of Hegel, “fulfill its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions.” [17] 
The carnal mind simply lacks vision and insight to understand all this because he limits himself only to the primitive idea that the material universe, as Karl Sagan hubristically propounded, “is all that is or was or ever will be.” [18] 
The carnal mind cannot see that the materialist position lacks intellectual rigor to explain simple things like love, hate, justice, truth, hatred, etc. The best that the carnal mind can offer here is to posit that those things are simply illusions. As Nobel Laureate Francis Crick put it years ago in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis : “The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” [19] 
Richard Dawkins makes the same assumption when he argues that the universe is “just electrons and selfish genes,” therefore “meaningless tragedies…are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune.” [20] 
The word “meaningless” itself implicitly assumes something called “meaningful.” And both words again assume that there is a “law” by which to differentiate what is “meaningful” and “meaningless.” And a law assumes a “lawgiver.” That’s what the carnal mind like Dawkins is promiscuously trying to deny! Perhaps people like Dawkins need to think goodness that they have never met people like Kant. 
[1] Kim Zetter, “When the FBI Has a Phone It Can’t Crack, It Calls These Israeli Crackers,” The Intercept , November 1, 2016. 
[2] Yaacov Benmeleh, “FBI Worked With Israel’s Cellebrite to Crack iPhone,” Bloomberg , March 30, 2016. 
[3] Jose Pagliery, “Cellebrite is the FBI’s go-to phone hacker,” CNN , April 1, 2016. 
[4] See James Bamford, “Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal,” NY Times , September 16, 2014. 
[5] Glenn Greenwald, “Cash, Weapons, and Surveillance: The U.S. Is a Key Party to Every Israeli Attack,” The Intercept , August 4, 2014. 
[6] Quoted in Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 331. 
[7] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1066. 
[8] Marissa Newman, “Netanyahu reported to say legal system based on Talmud,” Times of Israel , May 8, 2014. 
[9] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 28. 
[10] Ibid., 35. 
[11] Quoted in Eva Brann, The Logos of Heraclitus: the First Philosopher of the West on Its Most Interesting Term (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011), 15. 
[13] Ibid., 21. 
[14] See for example John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Paul Davis, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space (New York: Touchtone, 1984); Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (New York: Rinehart, 1988). 
[15] See Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997). 
[16] Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 161. 
[17] Robert C. Tucker, “The Cunning of Reason in Hegel and Marx,” The Review of Politics , Vol. 18, NO 3, July 1956: 269-295. 
[18] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Book, 1980 and 1013), xxii. 
[19] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3. 
[20] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 132. Related Posts:",FAKE
"Share on Facebook Share on Twitter The healing art of Reiki has been practiced and taught around the world for many years, with many believing its origins to be as ancient as those of humans themselves. With scientific research now emerging attesting to the ability of human thoughts, emotions, and intentions to affect the physical material world, an increasing number of scientists, quantum physicists in particular, are stressing the importance of studying factors associated with consciousness and its relation to our physical world. One of these factors is human intention.   Reiki essentially uses human intention to heal another person’s ailments. Practitioners usually place their hands on the patient in order to channel energy into them by means of touch. It can be roughly defined as using compassionate mental action and physical touch, energy healing, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, or quantum touch. The popularity of this practice is exemplified by the fact that, as of 2000, there were more ‘distant healers’ in the United Kingdom than therapists practicing any other form of complementary or alternative medicine, and the same goes for the United States. ( Barnes PM, Powell-Griner E, McFann K, Nahin RL. Complementary and alternative medicine use among adults: United States, 2002 . Adv Data. 2004. May 27;( 343 ):1–19. [ PubMed ]) Quantum physicists have been advocating for the effectiveness of such treatment for some time. For example, Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory — winning him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 — stated that he “regards consciousness as fundamental” “ and derivative from consciousness.” He also maintained t hat “everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Distant healing involves factors associated with consciousness. Eugene Wigner, a well-known theoretical physicist and mathematician, emphasized that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Richard C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, takes this idea even further in his article “The Mental Universe,” published in the journal Nature :   A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial—mental and spiritual. With so much evidence to support these ideas and with so many studies published on the subject, that this field remains the subject of ridicule to many in mainstream academia is simply baffling. A study published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine, as seen in the US National Library of Medicine, demonstrated that a women with special abilities was and is able to accelerate the germination of specific seeds for the purposes of developing a more robust seed stock. The study determined that this woman could induce plant seeds to grow shoots and roots several cm long within 20 min using mentally projected qi energy. For a selected list of downloadable peer-reviewed journal articles reporting studies of psychic phenomena, mostly published in the 21st century, you can click HERE . Distant Healing Intention Therapies (DHI): An Overview of the Scientific Evidence Did you know that clinical trials testing the effectiveness of DHI have been being conducted since the mid-1990s? Serious scientific inquiry has been ongoing and continues to this day, with both systematic and meta-analytic reviews being published, many of which have concluded that, with nearly half of all the published studies on this topic exhibiting statistically significant results, further study is desperately needed. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. A number of studies involving DHI experiments using simple life forms and animals have also reported statistically significant results, which have been seen under randomized and blinded conditions which include enzymes, fungi, yeast, bacteria, cancer cells, red blood cells, fibroblasts, tendon cells, (tenocytes), and bone cells. Distant Mental Interactions With Living Systems (DMILS) Hundreds of experiments in this area, which is closely related to DHI, have been conducted as well. DMILS is not concerned with healing, but rather with searching for measurable empirical evidence that A can affect B in any way, rather than if A can heal B. These studies investigate the influence of A’s intention on B’s physiological state — a process referred to as “remote intention.” They further examine the influence of A’s attention on B’s physiological state while A gazes at B over a 1 way video link, called “remote staring.” Last but not least, they study the influence of A’s intention on B’s attention or behaviour, which is referred to as “remote helping.” The effects of distant mental interactions are measured using electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, and electrocortical activity (EEG electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume pulse, brain blood oxygenation [MRI], and electrogastrogram [EGG]). These studies have yielded remarkable results which have since been successfully repeated in laboratories around the world. An Overview Of The Scientific Evidence DHI is very popular as an alternative healing method, but scientific experiments thus far have failed to produce clinical results which can be reliably assessed. As Dean Radin ( Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences ) argues: The contradiction between persistent popularity and lack of clinical effectiveness may be due on the one hand to some healers, in some contexts, who do seem to produce remarkable outcomes, and on the other hand by conventional RCT protocols that may be incompatible with the nature of DHI phenomena. Tools must match the requirements of the subject, and if the right tools are not available, then new ones must be devised. In other words, it is inadvisable to use a sledgehammer to study the surface structure of a soap bubble. On the other hand, DMILS experiments, which relate to distant healing, more clearly indicate the existence of genuine interactions between people at a distance. As Dean Radin explains, this offers up some challenges: But the proof-of-principle offered by DMILS experiments more clearly indicates the existence of genuine interactions between distant people. This presents us with an evidence-based enigma worthy of serious consideration. However, for many researchers, the mere concept of distant healing continues to elicit significant resistance for two main reasons. The first is based on the assumption that “action at a distance” is impossible because it violates one or more physical or biological laws. The second is founded on the neuroscience-based assumption that the mind is identical to the brain, in which case it does not make sense to propose that the brain activity we call “healing intention” can interact with anything outside of the brain’s own body ( source ) While it’s quite clear that healing at a distance hasn’t yet been proven scientifically, DMILS effects do indeed manifest shifts in physiological measures, lending credibility to reports of distant healing being successful. Dean Radin himself maintains that “the implications of DHI for basic science epistemology and ontology and for pragmatic efforts to improve health healing are vast, deep, and perennially intriguing.” A Few Other Strange Reported Anomalies I find it interesting to consider how much scientific investigation into ‘psychic’ phenomena has been conducted by the Department of Defense. In the United States, for example, they had project Star Gate, which lasted more than two decades before being unexpectedly shut down. ( source ) One of the most popular projects within that program was remote viewing. According to a declassified report which has since been published in multiple journals: To summarize, over the years, the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the [remote viewing] phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise. . . . The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions. ( source ) I just want to make it clear that psychic phenomena have been investigated at the highest levels of government, and probably still are. Who knows what information from these programs remains classified? And why do so many mainstream scientists criticize this research when scientists working at the highest levels of government are studying it? This topic has piqued the interest of more than just Western intelligence agencies, as China also actively works to identify individuals with extended human capacities. For example, a paper published in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in September 1981 in the journal Ziran Zazhi (Nature Journal) tilted “Some Experiments on the Transfer of Objects Performed by Unusual Abilities of the Human Body” (Shuhuang et al., 1981) reported that ‘gifted children’ were able to teleport small physical objects from one place to another. ( source ) A publication titled “Exceptional Functions of the Human Body” also makes some extraordinary claims, reporting highly accurate parapsychological effects, including clairvoyance, psychokinetic effects, and more. ( source ) A report published in 2010 by retired research chemist Dong Shen describes an experiment involving mental teleportation of bits of paper out of a sealed plastic film container. Fascinatingly, these methods were taught to others with a success rate of 40 percent. ( source ) “The results of the Chinese p-Teleportation experiments can simply be explained as a human consciousness phenomenon that somehow acts to move or rotate test specimens through a 4th spatial dimension, so that the specimens are able to penetrate the solid walls/barriers of their containers without physically breaching them.” – Eric Davis, Ph.D, FBIS ( source ) 
Source Used & Suggested Reading:",FAKE
"[Photo: Chiquibul Forest Reserve near Guatemalan border: top showing significant illegal clear cuts. while the bottom shows the beginnings of cutting. Credit: Tony Rath .] =By= Jeff Abott Editor's Note The forests, waterways, and tribal homelands are under growing threat across Latin and South America. Increasingly, the indigenous peoples are taking strong stands against the illegal activities, as well as the government sponsored intrusions into the Reserves. It seems that they are virtually the only ones willing to stand in the way of the decimation of their homelands, and of the wild rainforest on which out planet depends. The rainforest is essentially the lungs of the planet and it is being continuously destroyed. A cross Guatemala, indigenous communities are organizing to challenge logging in the country’s vast forests. These communities are concerned with the impact that both legal and illegal logging will have on their watersheds and on the environment.
On June 15, concerned residents from the highland Ixil Maya municipality of Nebaj, Quiche staged a protest outside the municipal building to express their concern with the steady increase in trucks leaving town loaded with lumber. 
The action was organized by residents and members of the Indigenous Authority of Nebaj in order to pressure the state authorities to strip the nine companies of their licenses to exploit timber on private lands. Residents raised concern over the fact that the deforestation affects everyone in the area. 
Following the protest, concerned residents in the neighboring Ixil municipality of Chajul blocked and detained several trucks transporting lumber from the region for a number of hours. They demanded that the National Institute of Forests, or INAB, and the Division for the Protection of the Environment cease their operations and described the amount of lumber being taken from the local forests as “excessive.” 
The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj also issued a statement to INAB asking them to take action. But the government body declined to act and issued a statement that they are planting new trees for every one that is cut down. But this response did not satisfy concerned residents. “We went to the government bodies and issued statements asking to cease extending licenses for the exploitation of forests,” said Caty Terraza, the communications representative for the Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj. “They told us that they are sowing new trees, but how long will it take for those trees to grow to the same size as the trees that were there before?” 
The companies involved in logging operations responded to the protests by significantly reducing the number of trucks transporting lumber from mountains. According to residents, however, it is unclear if this will continue into the future. 
The mobilization of communities organizing to challenge logging operations in the highlands of Guatemala represent a growing concern over the destruction of the environment by companies. This challenge to logging companies reflects the understanding of communities of the vital part forests play in the protection of the water sources. 
“The trees serve us and the animals,” Terraza said. “The loss of trees is drying up the aquifers. As a youth and as human, I must think of my future, and what I’m leaving my children.” Other communities held similar protests following the actions taken in the Ixil region. On June 26, a similar action was held in Santa Cruz del Quiche, the department’s largest city. Once again protesters were demanding that authorities stop issuing licenses for the exploitation of forests. Increase in Logging across Guatemala 
Guatemala is home to vast forests and jungles, but these regions have increasingly come under threat to deforestation. Critics blame uneducated campesinos clearing land for agriculture as one of the prime culprits. This does represent a threat, but there are other bigger threats, including lumber companies, and organized crime. The protest over logging industry activity in indigenous regions occurs at a time in Guatemala of increased concern over deforestation, and comes after the historic march for water in April 2016. Community representatives, nongovernmental organizations, and activists see a connection between forests and water. The Guatemalan government, too, maintains a campaign of reforestation, but this has not stopped companies from cutting down forests for the valuable woods, or the razing of forests by narco-traffickers in the northern department of Petén to build landing strips. 
The Guatemalan Ministry of the Economy actively promotes the investment of companies interested in exploiting the country’s nearly 2 million acres of forests. Logging companies and lumber traders have taken an interest in the vast forests of the highlands of Guatemala, where they can find rare hard and soft woods, such as teak, mahogany, oak and the more common pine. These resources can fetch hefty prices at market. 
The exportation of lumber and products produced from wood from Guatemala has increased significantly. From 2013 to 2014, lumber exports increased 8 percent, from $6.7 million dollars to $8.6 million. This continues the long trend of the increase in the exportation of lumber and wood products, such as furniture. 
But this increase in export of lumber brings the companies into conflict with indigenous communities. According to research by Guatemalan environmentalist and researcher, Juan Skinner, the indigenous regions of the country on average contain more forest cover than the non-indigenous regions of the country. 
A 2005 report that Skinner authored highlights that municipalities that are less than 25 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 12 percent. Whereas regions where the population is more than 75 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 35 percent. Guatemala’s Mayan communities are not alone in their concern with the destruction of forests. The southern Xinca community of Quesada, Jutiapa has long taken steps to protect the forests that make up their communal territory. The Xinca people are one of the many ethnicities that make up Guatemala. The rural community in the southern department of Jutiapa has held their forest as communal lands since the 1850s, with subsequent generations continuing to protect the mountain and the forests. Today the forests represent 80 percent of the more than 13,500 acres of land, with the remainder utilized for crops, such as coffee and maize. “Our ancestors left us the land and a group to protect our mountain,” said Jak Mardogueo Ogorio, a representative of the communities’ Directive Council. “All this was passed down through the generations, and we continue this today. In order to cut a tree down, you first must receive permission from the council.” The community leaders have also barred any large-scale logging operations. “We don’t permit companies to operate in our forests,” Ogorio said. “In past epochs companies tried to negotiate for access to the forests, but they always wanted more. How many years for a new tree to grow? Up on the mountain there are trees that you cannot encircle with three people. This is what we are protecting.” 
Ogorio and the other 13 members of the community council work directly with the residents to build awareness of the importance of the forests through regular meetings, trainings and a campaign to build alternative cooking stoves that utilize less firewood. In August and September 2016, the council implemented the insulation of 400 cooking stoves in conjuncture with Utz Che, a Guatemalan non-governmental organization. 
“This project allows us to slow deforestation because the stoves use less firewood, and there is no need for more and more wood,” Ogorio said. “These stoves allow us to protect our forests.” 
Community leaders of Quesada maintain vigilance over the threat of forest fires on communal lands for which they receive funding from INAB. This has generated work opportunity in a region where there are not many options. 
The community of La Bendición in the southern department of Esquitla is one of the few regions on Guatemala’s southern coast not dominated by sugar and African oil palm plantations. Residents of the small community were displaced by the country’s 36-year-long internal armed conflict. At the end of the war they negotiated the purchase of a 5,500-acre coffee farm through the Land Fund in 2000 for about $1 million, far more than the value of the land. 
When the families already burdened by debt arrived in 2001, they were shocked to learn that the land was not in the state that the Land Fund had promised. There were no rivers, as they were promised there would be, and the high winds meant that their crops were damaged, and there was no paved road. But there was a forest that contained an aquifer. Disappointed residents quickly left the community, leaving just 53 families of the original 170. 
Residents continued to be burdened by debt, despite the rich forests. In 2002, the Land Fund proposed a solution: sell the forest. “The same Land Fund that assisted us in purchasing our land was pressuring us to sell the forests in order to resolve the debt,” said Veronica Hernandez, a 47-year-old community leader. “But we refused because if we would have sold our forests, we would have been left without water, or with contaminated water.” Since refusing to sell the land to logging interest, the community has organized to maintain the forests, and protect them from illegal logging and from forest fires. The residents also hold regular community-wide meetings to work to train everyone on the importance of the forests, and to guarantee that no one goes up into the mountain to cut down the precious trees. 
Residents have also worked to develop projects like those being implemented in Quesada in order to decrease their impact on the forests. These stoves and solar projects are received across the community to great success. The residents’ resolve to protect their forest was further strengthened following the April 2016 water march, when thousands of campesinos marched to demand the protection of Guatemala’s water sources. 
“The April march was important for us and other communities along Guatemala’s coast,” Hernandez said. “It has strengthened our drive to protect the forests and the mangroves along the coast.” 
Despite the fact that the community was able to hold off the lumber interests following the purchase of the land, Hernandez and the other residents maintain vigilance to guarantee that no company comes to exploit their land and forests. “These companies always come into our communities to rob from us,” Hernandez said. “They then leave us with all the costs.” 
Back in Nebaj, the Indigenous Authority is working to replicate the awareness in La Benedición and Quesada over the importance of forests. 
“We are trying to inform community members of the impacts of deforestation,” Terraza said. This sharing of information is strengthened through the local Ixil University, which works to build awareness, and bring higher education to the region. 
“But we have to do more,” Terraza added. “We must struggle to guarantee that people know what the impacts are.” 
The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj stated that they are considering other actions, including the continuation of pressure on the state bodies, including INAB, the continuation of protests, and the direct action of blocking trucks transporting lumber. 
“[INAB] is an institution of the state,” Terraza said. “If we have all these trees, then it is because we have protected the forests for some time; our ancestors also protected these forests. It should not be so easy for them to arrive and issue licenses to companies to exploit the forests.” 
Source: Z Magazine ( N0v 2016 ) 
  Nauseated by the Had enough of their lies, escapism, omissions and relentless manipulation?",FAKE
"Kenyan refugee kills co-worker, self 3 others shot by 'hard worker' fired from job Published: 6 mins ago 
ROANOKE, Va. (AP) — A refugee from Kenya killed one former co-worker, wounded three others and then killed himself Tuesday in a workplace shooting that authorities are still trying to unravel in Virginia, police said. 
Getachew Fekede, 53, had entered the U.S. through a refugee immigration program and worked for the railcar manufacturer FreightCar America before being fired in March when he stopped showing up for work, Roanoke Police Chief Tim Jones told reporters. 
A neighbor told the Associated Press that Fekede quit his job over being harassed by a co-worker. Clarence Jones said Fedeke would send money to his mother back in Kenya and had grown concerned about his finances.",FAKE
"Most Latino voters intend to support Democrat Hillary Clinton, but the more traditional conservatives are split between Republican Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson, who is beginning to court their vote.

Protesters face off with a supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump outside the Phoenix Convention Center as the candidate gives a speech on immigration in Phoenix, Wednesday.

The last week of the presidential race has focused on immigration, culminating with a visit to Mexico by Republican nominee Donald Trump and a campaign rally in Phoenix.

Suggested solutions to illegal immigration and security have ranged from amnesty to border walls, but it has left most Hispanics supporting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and tossed others afield.

""I'm going to flip, but not flop. I am no longer supporting Trump for president, but cannot with any conscience support Hillary [Clinton],"" Massey Villarreal of Houston told NBC Latino after Trump's Wednesday night speech.

Mrs. Clinton currently has the lion's share of support from the nation's Hispanics, with as much as 76 percent of the vote, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in July.

Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico and Libertarian candidate for president, aims to siphon off the rest. On Monday, his campaign hired Lionel Sosa, who has worked for multiple Republican presidential campaigns beginning with Ronald Reagan's, to coordinate his outreach to American Hispanics, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Mr. Sosa declared in a June op-ed in the San Antonio Express News, ""If my party winds up electing Donald Trump, I’ll have to bid farewell, hoping that one day soon, it comes to its senses.""

He expressed his affection for the traditional values of the Republican Party. ""Here's my quandary,"" he wrote. ""If my party's left me, where do I go?""

Sosa has gone to Mr. Johnson's campaign, and 16 percent of Hispanics have done the same, according to a Fox News Latino poll in August. Trump currently has 17 percent of the Latino vote, compared to Mitt Romney's 27 percent and former President George W. Bush's 44 percent.

""The appeal of Johnson is that there is part of the Latino electorate who don't trust either Clinton or Trump,"" Ariel Armony, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in Latino politics, told Fox News Latino.

In that sense, American Latinos are no different from the rest of the United States, as both Clinton and Trump have some of the lowest favorability ratings in recent political history. This mistrust is leading some Americans who otherwise support Republicans or Democrats to consider a third-party vote for the first time, The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Johnson, especially with the experience of Sosa, may also appeal specifically to some Latino voters looking for immigration solutions. His platform on immigration is, not surprisingly, Libertarian.

""We want immigration – we are a nation of immigrants,"" Johnson told a Saturday rally in Boston.

He described his immigration solution: a simple work visa program that would give immigrants a means to enter the country, receive a Social Security card so they can pay taxes, and go to work, often doing jobs most Americans don't want.

Johnson's is one of many ideas playing to a complex reality: Most Americans want some immigrants, but they want them to adapt to local culture, and many fear the current situation, the Monitor's Peter Grier wrote earlier this week.

But because immigration touches many Hispanics so personally, the question of how to solve it leaves many wondering where to go.",REAL
"0 comments 
This is just too rich! The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops that Clinton and her aides turned over during the EmailGate investigation… and then agents REFUSED to do it. Now, the laptops have been subpoenaed and the FBI is just waiting for Congress to ask for them. Oh goody! All that evidence is about to come back into play along with Weiner’s laptop that has over 10,000 emails of Huma’s dealings with Hillary Clinton. Good times. Stick a fork in them… I’d say they may just be about done. 
Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova is the one that broke this explosive revelation. Hillary Clinton must be having multiple panic attacks right about now. I guess we are going to see just how well her health holds up over her corruption being exposed. I understand that she looks dead tired over all this. I’ll bet. Her lies are finally beginning to catch up with her. They should have long ago. 
From The Daily Caller: 
Agents within the Federal Bureau of Investigation never destroyed laptops given to them by aides of Hillary Clinton as previously reported , a Washington D.C. lawyer with a source close to the Clinton investigation says. 
Washington D.C. attorney Joe DiGenova said on The David Webb Show on SiriusXM Friday night that despite the FBI agreeing to destroy the laptops of Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson as part of immunity deals made during the initial investigation of Clinton’s email server, agents involved in the case refused to destroy the laptops. 
“According to the agreement reached with the attorneys who handed over their laptops, the laptops were to be destroyed per the agreement after the testimony was given –the interviews were given – – by the attorneys. The bureau and the department agreed to that,” DiGenova said. “However the laptops contrary to published reports were not destroyed and the reason is the agents who are tasked with destroying them refused to do so. And by the way the laptops are at the FBI for inspection by Congress or federal courts.” 
DiGenova said the laptops have already been subpoenaed and the FBI is waiting for Congress to ask for them. 
I’m sure Donald Trump is all smiles over these developments. In the end, Hillary Clinton was her own worst enemy and Donald Trump’s biggest supporter in this election. 
“When I found out last Sunday that those laptops — by the way from somebody who is involved in the investigation by the FBI– had not been destroyed contrary to published reports, I could not believe that the Republicans had not gotten their hands on them even yet,” DiGenova said. Neither can I… come on GOP… you’ve just been handed the keys to the kingdom here. Time to go in for the kill. Don’t blow it this time. Related Items Terresa Monroe-Hamilton 
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net . She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com . She also does research at KeyWiki.org . You can . NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter .",FAKE
"Swiss volunteer firefighters: It’s ok to be a bit tipsy when reporting for duty Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 23:00 Get short URL A Swiss firefighter helps a volunteer during a save and rescue drill in Zurich's Letzigrund Stadium April 19, 2008. © Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters Volunteer firefighters along with other emergency workers operating heavy vehicles in Switzerland will be able to turn up on the job slightly tipsy under new government plans that are due to take effect on January 1. 
Those working voluntary in the “blue light” industry who respond to urgent situations will no longer be penalised for being a tad merry so long as their blood-alcohol level doesn’t go over 0.50 percent, which is the limit for all other drivers, Reuters reports. 
READ MORE: Clown arrested for drunk driving in Alabama (PHOTOS) 
Describing the change as “necessary,” the Swiss Federal Roads Office said relief organizations are becoming more dependent on those who are not on duty or call. 
“The government is addressing the need for the best possible recruitment of personnel in the event they are needed for unexpected rescue operations,” FEDRO said in a statement. 
The blood-alcohol level currently stands at 0.10 percent for volunteers in the emergency service sector. 
Zurich emergency services commander Peter Wullschleger said a full drinking ban still remains in force for all professional firefighters on duty or on call. 
He added that the easing of restrictions was aimed at smaller communities where there is a shortage of professional firefighters who then rely on volunteers at short notice. 
“With the ban, theoretically it would have been impossible for somebody enjoying even a nice glass of red wine during the Christmas holidays to fulfill their duty in the event of an emergency,” Wullschleger told Reuters.",FAKE
"PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S LOBBYING GETS AGGRESSIVE. Congress may have spent August away from Washington but Planned Parenthood’s campaign to convince lawmakers to protect the group’s funding followed them back to their home states. Power Post has more.

“Lawmakers will raise the stakes when Congress returns next week by threatening to defund the group through the federal appropriations process. Planned Parenthood’s counter-offensive is widespread and varied and is unfolding inside and outside the Beltway. The group has been organizing rallies, flooding lawmakers’ town hall meetings, commissioning polls, shelling out six figures for television ads and hiring forensics experts to try to discredit undercover video footage that sparked the controversy. The success of these lobbying efforts will be tested when Congress returns and must move a short-term spending bill to keep the government open. Some conservatives in both chambers are pushing to defund Planned Parenthood, even if a standoff with Democrats leads to a government shutdown.”

FEDERAL WORKERS EXPECTED TO GET A PAY HIKE IN JANUARY. The stalled appropriations process in Congress means uncertainty for federal agencies and their workers but the White House isn’t waiting around for lawmakers to decide the fate of federal worker pay. Federal Eye’s Eric Yoder reports that President Obama sent a letter on Friday detailing plans for a 1.3 percent pay raise for federal workers.

“It prevents what would be a much higher raise from being paid under the complex laws governing federal pay raises should no raise number be enacted into law by the end of the year. Congress could yet set a different figure, but the appropriations bills for 2016 so far have been silent on a raise. That continues a pattern that resulted in 1 percent raises being paid by default in January 2014 and 2015.”

RATE HIKE AT THE FED STILL LIKELY. Speculation has been rampant in recent months over when the Federal Reserve will increase U.S. interest rates and the Wall Street Journal reports that all signs still point to a rate increase this year.

“Inside the Fed, advocates for holding off a rate boost beyond this year aren’t getting much traction. In Jackson Hole, Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota was an isolated voice among officials for sustaining near-zero interest rates. He has lost his share of battles over policy, including the decision last October to end the Fed’s bond-buying program.”",REAL
"By David Haggith, the Great Recession Blog . 
As we near Halloween, the US stock market looks like it’s whistling past the graveyard near the end of a year that I predicted would be the dawn of “the Epocalypse.” (By that, I meant an economic apocalypse, the likes of which we’ve never seen.) 
So far, however, that prediction has not manifested. In fact, the market’s fibrillating heartbeat in this graph exhibits a preternatural and eery calm. But it is too calm — too calm to be natural. The stock market plunged on my predicted schedule at the start of the year in what turned into the worst January in the US stock market’s history. Then, suddenly, it was resurrected, great death defied; but, after a rapid recovery it lost consciousness and now behaves more like the walking dead. 
I have never seen a more rigged looking stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has been flatlining in the narrowest range possible for almost four months. Coincidence, or has the Fed clandestinely set a threshold below which it will not let the market fall, just like it does openly for inflation — in order to make sure that nothing happens economically that would push voters toward Donald Trump? Is the Federal Reserve rigging the stock market in order to drag itself through this monstrous election cycle alive? 
While the Fed is barred by law from buying stocks, it has been creating money for its banking proxies to buy stocks ever since the Great Recession hit. It’s common knowledge and also confessed this year by Fed officials , that the Fed has been pumping up the stock market; but I’m asking are they taking new extraordinary measures behind the scenes? The market now looks like it has been pushed as high as it will go and is being held against that ceiling by some mysterious levitating force. 
Donald Trump recently made it clear that he’d love to put a stake in the heart of the Federal Reserve by firing Janet Yellen … if he could. The prospect of such an acrimonious relationship with a president, telegraphed so clearly by a candidate with a strong chance of winning, surely puts the Fed in a fearful state of self-preservation. All creatures in a state of self-preservation — especially the hideous ones — will do nearly anything to survive. 
I can’t say that I know the Fed is doing anything new or different than what it has done for the past seven years; but I can say with certainty that this stock market doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in the past seven years … or even that I’ve seen anytime in my career. 
John Rubino of DollarCollapse.com calls it “The Boredom Before the Storm” and observes … 
With all the surprising and disturbing things going on – Brexit, China’s soaring debt, US/Russia/China saber rattling, the unique US presidential race, the cyber attack that shut down big parts of the US Internet – you’d think that an unsettled world would be reflected in skittish financial markets. Instead we’re getting the opposite, with stock price movements becoming more and more placid as the year goes on. 
Indeed. Like Rubino, I find it strange that, with so much disturbing news around the world, the stock market looks like a sea that is a smooth as glass (compared to how the market’s ups and downs have looked at any other time). You’d think there was never a season more calming to the nerves of investors than the last four months, even as Wall Street daily screams out its fears about a possible Trump victory. 
In case you don’t think the above graph looks highly suspect, consider that the Dow has now closed below its fifty-day moving average every day without falling below its two-hundred-day moving average for thirty-two sessions. That may not sound like any technical big deal, but what that means is that the Dow has traded within the range of those two averages for the longest time in twenty-seven years ! In fact, the current stretch is three days longer ( and running ) than what the Dow managed back in 1989. (That’s just as far back as I had time to research to try to find a period that came close.) Is the White House also in on the fix … if a fix it is? 
At a time when Barrack Obama has been boasting that his administration brought the national deficit down (and when I suspect the Obama Admin. would like to tamp it down as much as possible to make Democrats look good for the election), Federal government spending just leaped 67% in August over the month before and 23% over the year before. Another way of saying that is that this spending surge created a deficit for August that was 40% higher than last August’s deficit. 
Why would the Obama administration risk losing its bragging rights over lowering the deficit so close to the election unless something more important than those bragging rights was at stake? (The president can, after all, do things by executive order to slow spending.) It could, of course, simply be that the King Pin and his henchmen recognized no one was buying their story, so they gave up maintaining the charade. Or … it could be that the economy began sinking so badly that massive efforts were needed to shore things up behind the scenes. Or … ? 
While I don’t know the reasoning for the spending explosion at a time when the Obama wants to firmly establish his legacy as our savior from the Great Recession, I will note that there is nothing like a massive burst of last-minute government spending on top of whatever the Feral Reserve might be doing to superficially float the economy a little longer. If your boat starts leaking badly and you’re only a hundred yards from shore, the best solution is to power quickly toward shore, not spend time trying to make lasting repairs. No October surprise this October … so far … boo! 
October has a reputation for being a nasty month for the stock market. It’s the month in which you had usually better buckle your seatbelt because October has seen more stock market crashes than any other month. Sixty-percent of the largest one-day drops in the US stock market have happened in October. 
This Halloweenish month has broken more volatility records than any other month. That makes it especially odd that the VIX, which tracks market volatility, hasn’t been this steady in any month since the months that preceded the Great Recession. (Everyone thought everything was fine then, too.) 
As short volatility market positions continue to build – largely as a consequence of central banks suppressing volatility to prevent recessions – maverick money manager Jesse Felder is warning the end result of the volatility trade could be a very painful lesson for investors with significant stock market repercussions. Having started out at Bear Stearns before co-founding his own multi-billion-dollar hedge fund, Jesse Felder is now more at home educating the masses on the truth in financial markets through his blog The Felder Report …. Felder expresses his concern that the lack of volatility will inevitably create more volatility, the likes of which have never been seen before. “I’m not calling for a stock market crash … but if you want to look at what’s the probability of that type of an event, it’s probably got to be as high as it’s ever been.” ( Business Insider ) 
Felder also says in a television interview that another sign of “way too much complacency” in the stock market is that… 
…we’re seeing financial stress; everybody’s dismissing it…. It’s big-time denial. 
Investor complacency or even irrational exuberance are the hallmarks of the final days before a stock-market bust because markets crash when people are most blind. (If they weren’t blind, they’d see the problem coming and avert catastrophe.) Everyone was complacent in 2007 about all warnings, just as no one now seems to care that the market has plowed its mushy head into a ceiling that is slowly squishing down upon it. 
This October looks more sloppy than choppy, and that’s … in spite of just entering another reporting period of fairly weak earnings, in spite of the European Central Bank talking about backing away from quantitative easing, in spite of the US national debt hitting twenty-trillion dollars, in spite of the Federal Reserve edging toward a possible interest-rate hike now that inflation and employment have met the Fed’s stated targets, in spite of the Bank of Japan holding back on its QE, in spite of China looking like another round of collapse is imminent, in spite of the largest and oldest banks in Europe teetering on collapse, in spite of the great European unwind called “Brexit,” in spite of a proxy war between the US and Russia flaring up in the Middle East, and in spite of that scary, red-haired Chucky doll named Trump. 
Hmm. Is history’s calmest stock market in the midst of all that a sign of peak complacency or irrationality? Or is it a sign that the market is being firmly fixed in place by the Fed and the government? Either way, looks like a crash is imminent. You decide. I’ll just note that the market looks as calm as the eye in the middle of the hurricane that is, itself, surrounded by hurricanes. 
While the ride has been mysteriously quiet for the last four months, note that the trend over those months is ever so gradually downward. So, if the fix is in, it is a fix that is barely holding, despite all the Fed and the government can throw at it. 
Are investors just treading water, as some commentators explain, waiting until the election decides who is president. If so, that’s something they have not done with this level of calm in any previous election cycles. Or are the Fed and the Gov lifting with all their combined might in hidden ways to try to hold up a lowering ceiling so that no one will suspect the Obama-praised Obama recovery is already dead? 
I don’t actually know. I just want to make the stinking peculiarity of this zombie economy abundantly clear.",FAKE
"Police Use Tear Gas, Arrest 9 During Protests In St. Louis

Police used tear gas and arrested nine people during protests in St. Louis on Wednesday.

Demonstrators gathered after police shot and killed an 18-year-old they say pointed a gun at them. Police said protesters threw bottles and bricks at them, so they deployed armored vehicles and teams of officers in riot gear.

""The Rev. Renita Lamkin of St. Charles, who regularly attended protests in Ferguson, went to Page Avenue with several other clergy members Wednesday evening. She accused the police of engaging in an overly aggressive response. "" 'There has to be a better way, but the better way is not to terrorize an already terrorized community,' she said. 'How they deal with the situation is classist and dehumanizing. The people here don't matter as much to them.' ""Kayla Reed of the Organization for Black Struggle also said she believed officers were too aggressive toward a crowd 'that never was all that big.' She claimed officers gave no warning firing canisters of smoke and tear gas.""

Police defended their actions, saying they warned protesters that the gathering had been deemed an unlawful assembly.

As The Associated Press reports, officers were serving a warrant at a home in that neighborhood Wednesday afternoon. They encountered two suspects.

""The suspects were fleeing the home as [18-year-old Mansur] Ball-Bey, who was black, turned and pointed a handgun at the officers, who shot him,"" the AP says. Police say they found four guns and crack cocaine at the home.

""Police said a 33-year-old white officer with seven years on the force and a 29-year-old white officer with nearly seven years experience fired their weapons after Ball-Bey pointed his gun at them. ""A black male in his mid to late teens escaped and remains at large. Police said they recovered a 9-mm gun with 'an extended magazine' from Ball-Bey that had been reported as stolen in Rolla, Mo. They also recovered three other guns at the scene.""

Of course, these protests come at a time when tensions in the St. Louis area are running high. The last few weeks have been marked by events commemorating the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The protests and clashes with police extended through the night. One vacant house was set on fire and the Post-Dispatch says police have received reports of businesses being set on fire.",REAL
"Donald Trump expanded his commanding delegate lead Tuesday night by winning primary contests in Illinois, North Carolina and the winner-take-all state of Florida, prompting Senator Marco Rubio to suspend his campaign and bringing the Republican front-runner one step closer to securing the party’s nomination for president. While Trump lost the winner-take-all state of Ohio to the state’s governor, John Kasich, slowing his potential path to the White House, the billionaire developer remains the odds-on favorite to become the party’s standard-bearer in July, absent a convention-floor fight that could see G.O.P. leaders elevate Kasich or Ted Cruz in defiance of the Republican electorate.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton also cleaned up Tuesday, shaking off her surprise loss last week to rival Bernie Sanders in Michigan by winning Ohio, Florida, Illinois and North Carolina, delivering a much-needed jolt of momentum to her campaign. Sanders gave Clinton a run for her money in each state, picking up a share of the night’s delegates, but remains hundreds of delegates behind in the overall count—a gap that may prove insurmountable, especially if Sanders is unable to convince Clinton’s hundreds of superdelegates to switch sides. (As of 7:00 A.M., the Missouri presidential primaries both remained too close to call, with Trump and Clinton ahead by just 0.2 percent each.)

Despite Trump and Clinton’s dominating performances, Tuesday’s results all but guarantee that both races will continue until this summer, and, in the G.O.P.’s case, potentially after. Sanders controls a massive campaign war chest, as well as the proven ability to continue raising huge sums of money—the Vermont senator raised more than $5 million in the day following his victory in Michigan—and has indicated he is willing to spend big to win, all the way until the Democratic National Convention in July. On the Republican side, the window is closing to prevent Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the G.O.P. nomination, but party leaders have made no secret of their intentions to block him, no matter what. Even if Trump surpasses that threshold, establishment party figures have indicated they could change convention rules or even launch a conservative third-party challenge—a suicide mission, but one some Republicans see as a necessary corrective to the existential threat posed by Trump’s insurgent candidacy. Either way, Cruz and Kasich are likely to remain in the race for the long haul, ensuring a three-month slog to what is sure to be a chaotic convention in Cleveland.

In an election season defined by roiling anger toward Washington elites and economic policies that have contributing to a widening income gap, Kasich’s rousing victory in Ohio, and gee-whiz positivity, may be just a blip amid the wider revolt driving Donald Trump and, to a lesser extend, Bernie Sanders. Clinton has managed, with some success, to absorb that populist rage, running to the left by condemning Wall Street greed and turning against trade deals she previously supported. The Republican establishment, however, which long held together its unwieldy coalition of economic elites and working class whites by merging a pro-business platform with social conservatism, may not survive in its current form.

The astounding popularity of Trump, a nationalist with little ideology beyond his belief that he is the sole candidate capable of restoring American greatness, has exposed the lie at the heart of the party: the majority of the conservative base doesn’t care about small business principles. They just want someone who will keep immigrants out and tell it like it is. After all, the limited-government ideology preached by the G.O.P. may have made their lives worse. Whether or not Trump can secure the delegates he needs to lock up the Republican nomination—a feat that will require winning some 60 percent of all remaining delegates from here on out—the damage to the G.O.P. will have been done.",REAL
"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have made headlines recently for their alleged problems with the law . Trump, who in April of 2016 was named as the defendant in a lawsuit filed by Katie Johnson, is scheduled to appear before a court on December 16, 2016. The lawsuit alleges Trump, along with former banker billionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, raped Johnson when she was thirteen. The incident allegedly happened in the 1990s. Epstein, who was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution in 2008, has also been associated with former President Bill Clinton, whose name appears in “ flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the ‘Lolita Express, ’” a term used in association with Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet. The jet was allegedly set up with beds where Epstein and guests “ had group sex with young girls .” The lawsuit was first filed in April , but U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Stevenson threw the suit out in May because Johnson then failed “ to state a civil rights claim .” The plaintiff was representing herself at the time, claiming to be unemployed and having only $276 to her name. In June, Johnson went on to refile the suit in the Manhattan federal court. This time around, Johnson filed the suit under the name “Jane Doe,” asking $75,000 plus attorney fees. But in September, Johnson dropped her lawsuit, only to have it refiled weeks later with three affidavits instead of two. While Trump is scheduled to appear in court for a status conference in December in reference to this case, it still requires more information before it leads to a trial or settlement. In contrast to Trump’s case, Clinton’s brush with the law is taking place at a different, more advanced level — but is still not close enough to conviction to ruin her chances of being elected. Just over a week before Americans head to the polls to cast their ballots, the FBI announced it would be reopening its the probe into presidential nominee and former secretary of state Clinton’s use of a private email server. The announcement followed the discovery of an email stash found on a laptop that belonged to former congressman Anthony Weiner. Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a longtime Clinton aide. She claims to have been unaware that her emails were on Weiner’s device. Though the FBI has announced it obtained a warrant to review the 650,000 emails, it is unlikely the agency’s investigation will achieve any results before election day. The FBI is seeking to determine whether the messages found on Weiner’s computer include any classified information or evidence that may indicate Clinton undermined U.S. national security. In an article for Law Newz , Ronn Blitzer attempts to answer some of the questions the public might raise now that the FBI has announced the probe, attempting to determine how Clinton’s legal future will look if she’s elected president. While the law “ is hazy, ” Blitzer writes , he goes over several scenarios. First, he explains “ it’s highly unlikely that an indictment would come before November 8 .” If it happened, however, “ the indictment itself wouldn’t mean that Clinton could no longer run, as an indictment is only an accusation, not a convictio n.” Theoretically, he continues , “ the Electoral College could … go rogue and not vote for Clinton, even if their states tell them to .” Another possibility is that Clinton would be pressured, either by the DNC or the public, to “ give up her candidacy. ” In the case Clinton wins but is indicted before her inauguration, “ she could try to play beat-the-clock and hope to take office before her case concludes .” But if she’s both indicted and convicted before the inauguration and then sentenced, “ she may be deemed incapacitated, in which case Section 3 of the 20th Amendment kicks in and the Vice President-Elect, in this case Tim Kaine, would become President .” But if Clinton wins the election and is inaugurated as the investigation is carried on, “ Clinton would luck out ,” Blitzer explains , “ due to the philosophy that Presidents — and only Presidents — [sic] are immune from prosecution while in office .” Since the House of Representatives determined in 1873 that a president may only be impeached over offenses committed after their inauguration, Blitzer writes , impeachment over the email scandal isn’t likely to take place. And even if she’s convicted after moving to the White House, “ President Hillary Clinton could pardon herself .” These scenarios could all play out fairly similarly in Trump’s case, assuming the rape lawsuit filed against him leads to a conviction. But whether Clinton or Trump is elected, their federal or FBI probes may result in nothing more than footnotes in the grand scheme of things — especially once we’re faced with the realization that elected officials are required to meet lower standards of conduct than the rest of us . Only after the FBI probe is finalized will we know if Congress is willing to tackle the presidential immunity rules. source:",FAKE
"On a late July day this past summer, a roar filled the sky over Cairo. It was the sound of Barack Obama’s capitulation to a dictator.

Eight new American fighter jets, freshly delivered from Washington, swooped low over the city, F-16s flying in formation. As they banked hard over the city’s center, they trailed plumes of red, white and black smoke—the colors of the Egyptian flag.

For Egypt’s brutally repressive president, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the spectacle was a triumph, symbolizing not only his militaristic power at home, but also his victory over an American president who had tried to punish him before surrendering to the cold realities of geopolitics.

Just two years earlier, Sisi had seized power in a military coup, toppling Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected successor to Hosni Mubarak, himself a strongman of 30 years pushed out in early 2011 by mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In the summer of 2013, Sisi followed his coup with a brutal crackdown that would have done Saddam Hussein proud. His security forces arrested thousands of people, including much of his political opposition, and in one bloody day that summer, they gunned down some 1,000 pro-Morsi protesters (or more) who were staging peaceful sit-ins. The massacre was shocking even by the standards of Egypt’s long-dismal human rights record.

Obama was appalled. “We can’t return to business as usual,” he declared after the slaughter. “We have to be very careful about being seen as aiding and abetting actions that we think run contrary to our values and ideals.”

Several weeks later, Obama halted the planned delivery of U.S. military hardware to Cairo, including attack helicopters, Harpoon missiles and several F-16 fighter jets, as well as $260 million in cash transfers. He also cast doubt on the future of America’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt—a subsidy on which Cairo depends heavily, and much more than the United States sends to any country in the world aside from Israel.

But a fierce internal debate soon broke out over whether and how to sanction Egypt further, a fight that many officials told me was one of the most agonizing of the Obama administration’s seven years, as the president’s most powerful advisers spent months engaged in what one called “trench warfare” against each other. It was an excruciating test of how to balance American values with its cold-blooded security interests in an age of terrorism. Some of Obama’s top White House aides, including his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, and the celebrated human rights champion Samantha Power, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, urged the president to link further military aid to clear progress by Sisi on human rights and democracy. But Secretary of State John Kerry, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Hagel’s successor, Ash Carter, argued for restoring the aid. Trying to punish Sisi would have little effect on his behavior, they said, while alienating a bulwark against Islamic radicalism in an imploding Middle East. “Egypt was one of the most significant policy divides between the White House and the State Department and the Department of Defense,” says Matthew Spence, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.

For months, Obama tried to split the difference. In meetings and phone calls with the Egyptian ruler, by now paranoid and resentful about America’s intentions, Obama and Kerry urged Sisi to respect human rights, while also seeking his help in countering the the metastisizing Islamic State in nearby Syria and Iraq. Sisi did little of either.

In the end, Obama folded. This past March, he called Sisi once again, this time to explain that he would release the cash transfers and delayed hardware—including the F-16s—and end the administration’s threats to block the larger $1.3 billion annual aid package.

“We caved,” says a former senior administration official who participated in the debates.

In a long conversation recently, Rhodes, the speechwriter turned national security aide who has been with Obama from the beginning of his presidency, didn’t mince words when it came to the years-long internal battle over Egypt. “We’re in that sweet spot where everyone is pissed off at us,” Rhodes told me.

And not just about Egypt. The persistent problem of how to deal with American-allied strongmen has long tripped up a president who prefers pragmatic solutions to moral purity but has been unable to find much of either in the Middle East. While every U.S. president struggles to balance values like democracy and human rights with national security, Obama has struggled more than most because of the vast gap between his inspirational rhetoric and the compromises he has made with thuggish world leaders, especially—but by no means exclusively—in a Middle East where authoritarian heads of state from Riyadh to Cairo have cracked down with renewed vigor after the unsettling protests of the Arab Spring.

“The rhetoric got way ahead of the policymaking,” says Michael Posner, who served as Obama’s top State Department official for human rights and democracy in his first term. “It … raised expectations that everything was going to change.”

“He’s never quite melded his rhetoric with his policies,” says Dennis Ross, who served as Obama’s top Middle East aide in his first term. Adds Robert Ford, who was Obama’s ambassador to Syria before resigning in frustration over the president’s policy there: “It seems like we are swinging back to the idea that we must make a choice between supporting dictators or being safe.”

Their views were echoed in many of more than two dozen recent interviews with current and former administration officials, members of Congress, experts and activists—interviews that revealed a striking degree of frustration and disillusionment. Many Obama supporters started out believing that the president had grand ambitions for replacing George W. Bush’s militaristic posture with a more enlightened and progressive approach to the world before coming to believe they had misread a president who was not the idealistic internationalist they had thought he was.

In hindsight, it seems clear that Obama came to office far more focused on showing the world that the Bush era was over than on any coherent strategy of his own for advancing human rights or democracy.

But it didn’t seem that way at the time: Obama’s aides entered the White House full of plans for “dignity promotion”—a favorite phrase of Power’s meant to signal a contrast with Bush’s post-9/11 talk of “democracy promotion” and his second-term “Freedom Agenda” that many came to equate not with Bush’s lofty goal of “ending tyranny in our world” but with imposing Western values on countries like Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint.

",REAL
"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Bishop Williamson on Putin, Putin’s Meeting with Pope Francis, and the Fr. Gruner-Russian Meeting Essential Reading Soros/CIA Plan to Destabilize Europe By Wayne Madsen on September 28, 2015 
The same forces that orchestrated the various ‘colour revolutions’ and the ‘Arab Spring’ are behind Europe’s migrant crisis. Wayne Madsen explains The Essene Gospel of Peace II By wmw_admin on April 26, 2007 
Translated by Purcell Weaver and Edmond Szekely from its original Aramiac, a language that today few know but 2000 years ago was the language that Christ spoke and taught with In ‘Eisenhower’s Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard’s Story By wmw_admin on May 4, 2007 
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets; many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. The Illuminati Chronicles Part II By wmw_admin on November 28, 2007 
A Short History of the New World Order Part II By cyberpatriot@hotmail.com Aug. 10, 1973 – David Rockefeller writes an article for the “New York Times” describing his recent visit to Red China: “Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also […] The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure Dov Zakheim 9/11 Mastermind Video By wmw_admin on May 15, 2010 
Using legal injunctions, Dov Zakheim’s lawyers forced this website to remove an article we posted with the same title; which tells us he may have something to hide. Seems like others also think so as this video indicates. Watch it while you still can Holocaust, Hate Speech & Were the Germans so Stupid? – Updated By wmw_admin on March 23, 2011 
The brilliant examination of the ‘Holocaust’ by Anthony Lawson has since been censored on the basis of a false Copyright infrigment. But as Lawson explains, this just another attempt to stiffle freedom of expression",FAKE
"Email 
Hillary Clinton swiped State Department furniture to decorate her Washington home, a former member of her security detail has alleged to the FBI. 
“Early in Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, she and her staff were observed removing lamps and furniture from the State Department which were transported to her residence in Washington, DC,” an agent on the detail told the FBI. 
The agent “does not know whether these items were ever returned to the government,” according to FBI notes. 
The agent was assigned to Clinton in 2009, at the start of her term, but was not on the detail when Clinton left in 2013. 
The accusations were part of 100 newly released pages of interview notes of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified material. 
The department flatly denied the latest charges, saying Clinton took home only property that she owned.",FAKE
"Clinton certainly has the resume to be a strong presidential contender: two terms as the first lady during her husband's popular administration, eight years as a U.S. senator from New York and four as a widely-acclaimed secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Not to mention that she has already mounted a presidential bid once before, during the 2008 Democratic primary. With quite a following among Democrats -- particularly women -- and an expert campaigner as a husband, Clinton is one of the frontrunners for the 2016 nomination. In fact, if the Iowa caucuses were held today, a Public Policy Polling survey found she would win 58 percent of the vote, outstripping the runner-up, Vice President Joe Biden, by a margin of 41 percent. Now the question is whether or not Clinton will decide to throw her hat in the ring in 2016. After her term as secretary of state ends this year, she has declared her intention to take a year off from politics entirely. And after that? Clinton says that she does not want to run in 2016, but that hasn't quashed hopes to the contrary. -- Sarah Bufkin",REAL
"Trump and Sanders get all the attention for their passionate support. But supporters at a Hillary Clinton rally are passionate, too – in their own way.

As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?

Retired deputy sheriff Debbie Boyd wears her support for Hillary Clinton at a rally at the University of California, Riverside, on Wednesday.

The retired deputy sheriff wears a white straw hat on which a miniature Hillary Clinton doll sits, surrounded by flowers and little American flags. Red, white, and blue peace signs clatter around her neck, and “Hillary” stickers adorn her cheeks. She even carries around a picture-book biography of Mrs. Clinton that she hopes to get autographed.

“She sends a message to little girls about what it means to be a leader,” says Ms. Boyd, a mother of two, when asked what excites her about her candidate.

Few others standing in line for the Clinton rally at the University of California, Riverside on Tuesday wear their support as overtly as Boyd, a former Republican who switched parties to vote for Barack Obama in 2008. The orderly, almost quiet scene outside the venue seems to illustrate one of the most persistent criticisms leveled against Clinton: her lack of likability, expressed in part by a relative disinterest among her supporters.

And when placed beside the more outspoken advocates for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – some of whom came to the Tuesday rally to protest Clinton’s candidacy – or the outrage that marks followers of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, Clinton voters do appear almost dispassionate.

But none of that means the former secretary of State fails to inspire, her supporters say. To them, the ability to excite and rile up a crowd is less important than experience, a sense of respect, and the skill to negotiate one’s way out of a problem. These voters say they choose to show their enthusiasm in less sensational ways, whether it’s donating to Clinton’s campaign or encouraging others to educate themselves and turn out to vote.

“I’m not looking for someone to entertain me,” says Boyd, as she squats on the grass to add tinsel to her “Hillary” poster. “I’m looking for someone to lead this country.”

Which isn’t to say passion doesn’t exist among Clinton supporters. Inside the Johnson Family Practice Center at UC-Riverside, a current of anticipation runs through the gathering – an intimate affair that is typical of Clinton’s rallies. When she at last appears just after 6 p.m., the crowd cheers, waving campaign-issued balloons and posters.

“We are very enthusiastic,” says Sebastiano Grasso, a local artist, dismissing any suggestion that Clinton is unable to galvanize her supporters. “We’re just not punching people, yelling at people.”

Others, like Carrie Lucas, say they show their enthusiasm with actions, not words. Ms. Lucas, a ballroom dancing instructor from Corona, Calif., says she donates to the Clinton campaign with every paycheck.

“I put my money where my mouth is,” she says.

Denise Davis, a school administrator at the University of Redlands, defends Clinton’s ability to move her constituency.

“If you’ve ever seen her live in person, she’s completely energizing,” Ms. Davis says, recalling how she managed to convince her mother to vote for Clinton over President Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries. “She went to see Hillary speak and that’s what swayed her decision.”

But Davis's support for the former secretary of State goes beyond optics. To her, Clinton embodies progress that is earned over decades.

“She’s very much interested in progressive, social change, and she’s in a position to make that change happen,” Davis says. “She would be the first female president – that’s huge in itself. But she has the best ability to make change happen.

“That’s what fires me about her.”

Likability was not always a criterion for electability. Indeed, the Founding Fathers would “be horrified by the modern presidential campaign,” Slate’s John Dickerson noted in 2012.

“In their day,” he wrote, “no man worthy of the presidency would ever stoop to campaigning for it.”

Particularly since the advent of television, however, the charm factor has haunted many a losing candidate.

“There’s an assumption that the candidate you want to win is the candidate you prefer to” hang out with, says Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington. “It becomes a cue for whether [or not] you trust this person, whether they’ll understand people like you, whether they’ll have your interests at stake, whether they get what it’s like to be a real American living in this country right now. It’s all rolled up in this term called ‘likability.’ ”

“I don’t think Hillary Clinton … comes off as a warm and fuzzy person you want to hang out with after work,” she says.

And it shows, at least in the polls. As of mid-May, only 40.2 percent of Americans saw Clinton as a favorable candidate, according to the Huffington Post, which tracks data from more than 400 surveys nationwide. Mr. Trump is doing just worse, with 38.7 percent of voters viewing him as favorable in the same period. The figures represent some of the lowest favorability ratings for presidential candidates in American history.

For Clinton, the problem is that “it’s hard from the outside to think of any non-career or pre-career aspect to her life,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. “Except for a few grandma references, she presents herself as a résumé and policy brief.… It’s hard from the outside to have a sense of her as a person; she is a role.”

Yet the folks at the Clinton rally on Tuesday applaud her rational approach, saying they support her precisely because she is about her work and not her celebrity.

“She has done so much for this country,” says Earlene Freeman, a retired registered nurse, as she leans on her walker. “She will better represent the values that I have; she wants people to reach their potential.”

“And it’s time for a woman to be president,” she says.

Clinton’s younger supporters seem to be thinking along similar lines.

“Her approach is very analytical,” says Callie Scoggins, a senior at Redlands East Valley High School, about a half-hour drive from Riverside. “She won’t be quick to do something without considering the consequences.”

“What it comes down to,” adds Tyler Washington, a new graduate at Riverside, “is that the other candidates are like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, offering magical rewards. Clinton is like the mom telling you to eat your vegetables.”

That may not make her likable, he says, but “those thinking with their brains understand what’s more important.”

“We don’t need a slogan,” adds Mr. Grasso, the artist. “We need solutions.”",REAL
"This post was originally published on this site 
If Hillary wins, I’m talking the loved ones into a hundred foot deep bunker or a southern hemisphere island. 
Did you know Russia has the Sarmat ICBM that reaches all parts of America and Putin thinks Americans, who were, for the most part, not badly touched, the way Russians were, in previous world wars, should know how horrific war is? 
If we have WWIII, and it looks like we will, you and I will suffer, terribly, if we live. 
Snowflakes are voting for WWIII and they don’t know it. Related ",FAKE
"The Obama administration has made ""virtually no progress"" to increase transparency and accountability for its lethal drone program, a new report has concluded, with only months left to spare before the White House hands control of the targeted killing apparatus to a successor.

The report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center said the administration is failing to release fundamental information about the program or to significantly overhaul it — even after a 2015 strike mistakenly left American contractor Warren Weinstein and Italian hostage Giovanni Lo Porto dead.

""We have seen relatively few successes,"" said Rachel Stohl, a researcher at the center. ""The administration has been unwilling to provide the number of strikes, even in aggregate; the number of civilian casualties that they estimate that have occurred because of those strikes; the legal justification, unless required by court order, that allows the program to continue; so even on the most basic levels, what is the program doing, we don't know.""

A bipartisan task force called on the White House nearly two years ago to reconsider its reliance on targeted killing of suspected terrorists, in part, because the strikes may be doing more harm than good by fomenting hatred overseas. But Stimson researchers said they've uncovered little evidence anything like that reorientation has happened.

A senior administration official told NPR the White House goes to ""extraordinary lengths"" to avoid civilian casualties.

The official added: ""Unlike our enemies, which deliberately and pointedly violate the law of armed conflict, the United States takes great care to adhere to the fundamental law of armed conflict principle of distinction, which requires that attacks be directed only against military objectives and that civilians and civilian objects not be the target of attack.""

At least nine nations now have weaponized drones, and four have used them, the report said. ""It's important that the United States establishes good policy and sets an international precedent that demonstrates leadership and responsibility and transparency over the program because other countries are going to follow the U.S. lead,"" Stohl said.

U.S. government officials have walked a fine line on the drone program, which is supposed to be secret. Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden addressed the strikes in his new book and an opinion article in the New York Times Sunday, when he wrote: ""I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.""

Days earlier, lawyers for the Obama administration appeared in an appeals court in Washington, D.C., to fight a demand by the American Civil Liberties Union for legal justifications and ""summary strike data,"" including the numbers and identities of people killed by weaponized drones.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the administration can't have it both ways.

""The law of the drone campaign should not be a secret, nor should the CIA be permitted to withhold basic information that would allow the public to understand the implications of the government's policies,"" Jaffer said. ""This is particularly the case since so many senior officials have spoken so freely about drone strikes.""",REAL
"By Claire Bernish at thefreethoughtproject.com
In a country continuing to shirk the ordinary, Iceland’s Pirate Party — an amalgamation of anarchists, libertarians, and hackers, who want to ban digital surveillance — is predicted to win the country’s national elections this Saturday.
This collection of free-thinkers have upturned the traditional Western political paradigm and hopes to use online public polls to shape governmental policy and end all Internet spying.
Although the Pirate Party formed just four years ago, its popularity has skyrocketed — most likely for unconventional tactics aligning loosely with libertarianism — the promotion of privacy rights and personal freedoms, and simultaneous shrinking of Big Government.
Edward Snowden has been offered the safe haven of Icelandic citizenship should the Pirates likely victory come to fruition — which makes sense, given the party’s anti-establishment roots.
In fact, the Pirates have experienced astonishing success in a short time — taking the nation’s longstanding political traditionalists off-guard in the process — even the group’s founder, a programmer and former Wikileaks activist, is stunned.
Asked whether she expected the explosion of enthusiasm for the nascent Pirate Party — which now leads in public polls with 22.6 percent — founder Birgitta Jónsdóttir decisively told the Washington Post , “No way.”
But considering growing frustration with ever-increasing Western governments — and all of the surveillance programs, police state tactics, and chill on personal liberties — the rise of the Pirates, who describe themselves as neither right nor left but a radical mix of both, hardly seems too shocking.
“People want real changes and they understand that we have to change the systems,” Jónsdóttir asserted, “we have to modernize how we make laws.”
According to the Pirates’ website , “The Icelandic Pirate Party was founded on November 24th, 2012 based on the political ideology of the Swedish Pirate Party, which Richard Falkvinge founded in January 2006, to bring about internet copyright reform.”",FAKE
"It's been a big week for abortion news.

Carly Fiorina's passionate (if inaccurate) depiction of a Planned Parenthood sting video was one of the most memorable moments of last week's GOP debate. And the House of Representatives on Friday passed two abortion-related bills — one aimed at cutting federal funds to Planned Parenthood, the other at punishing doctors who fail to provide medical care to infants that survive abortion attempts.

Given all this, you could be forgiven for thinking there's been a public-opinion shift against abortion rights in the U.S.

Abortion is one of those rare issues in which public opinion never seems to budge all that much. Americans are still more or less where they were on whether they think it should be legal as in 1975, just after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. That is, with the largest share of Americans somewhere in the murky middle.

According to Gallup data, by 29 percent to 19 percent, Americans think it should be legal in all circumstances. But a majority — 51 percent — say it should be legal in only certain circumstances — in cases of rape, incest or where the mother's life is threatened, for example. That number has barely changed in 40 years.

Those kinds of data stand in stark contrast to what's available about other social issues. Consider same-sex marriage, for example, where public opinion has swung dramatically toward legalization in the past decade.

Or take the death penalty — upticks in crime and opposition to government spending are two factors that have driven Americans' opinions on this topic back and forth over the years.

Abortion isn't like that. Strong majorities have consistently opposed overturning Roe since 1989, today by nearly 2 to 1.

That's perhaps even more surprising when considering what's happened over the past 40 years: a patchwork of state laws passed to define very specific restrictions on abortion, a decline in teen pregnancy, and increasing political polarization. All of that has apparently neither caused nor been the result of big shifts in national public opinion on abortion.

So what's going on?

It might have to do with another fact about public opinion on abortion — it's a topic for which the realities are anything but black and white, which is exactly how the arguments are all too often framed in the political arena.

A majority of Americans support legal abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. But a majority also oppose it in the second and third trimesters. Most support it in cases of rape or incest, but most oppose it if the mother simply can't afford another child.

Those opinions get much messier when you dive deeper into the research.

""Not only is opinion remarkably stable ... it is deeply contradictory,"" said Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. When people are asked, "" 'Is it murder?' people say yes,"" Bowman said. But if asked, "" 'Should it be a personal choice between a woman and her doctor?' a large majority say yes.""

In one poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 43 percent of Americans identified as both ""pro-life"" and ""pro-choice."" Those labels are their own source of uncertainty.

Since the mid-1990s, the share of people who consider themselves ""pro-choice"" (by Gallup's count) has fallen moderately — even while opinions on abortion circumstances have held steady. (Still, a majority — 50 percent — consider themselves ""pro-choice,"" while 44 percent say they are ""pro-life."")

These contradictions may be why public opinion holds so steady.

""When that [contradiction] happens on a public policy issue, when there are deep contradictions, most people pull away from an issue,"" Bowman said. ""They don't see any reason to resolve the tensions in their opinions. So that leaves the topic up to the pro-life and the pro-choice activists. And those groups don't really represent most people.""

Why Planned Parenthood is the focus

So if most Americans don't firmly oppose abortion, one might say it's foolhardy for Republicans, like this week's GOP debate participants, to stake such firm anti-abortion stances.

But abortion is an issue that fires up the bases of both parties. It's one of the top issues used by Republicans and Democrats to motivate, fundraise and organize.

What's more, though, the latest abortion fight isn't focused on the larger issue of abortion itself. It's been about Planned Parenthood. And recent surveys suggest that public opinion on the organization is more malleable than opinion on the topic of abortion.

Today, a plurality of Americans — 37 percent — view Planned Parenthood favorably, according to a recent Monmouth poll (with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points). But just three years ago, the same poll found that far more people — 55 percent — viewed the organization favorably.

It's just one survey, but it suggests that making the abortion debate about Planned Parenthood (and taxpayer money) may be a more successful tactic for the GOP than trying to pass laws restricting abortion itself.

Of course, that doesn't mean a shutdown over the issue would be a good idea for the GOP. The Republican Party's favorability rating fell sharply during the October 2013 partial government shutdown — making it one area where public opinion does tell a clear story.",REAL
"And the agency was ready for the critics. “The only people with reason to oppose the rule,” White House Senior Advisor Brian Deese told reporters on a press call Wednesday, “are polluters who knowingly threaten our clean water.”

So who are those willful polluters? Congressional Republicans, along with a select group of Democrats from farm and energy-heavy states, who are already pushing legislation aimed at crippling the rule in both Houses. They’re characterizing it, as they do most EPA regulations, as a “power grab” and an overreach, and are vowing to destroy it the same way, presumably, they want to be allowed to destroy waterways.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) summed up the overwrought sentiment nicely in his reaction to the rule’s release. “The administration’s decree to unilaterally expand federal authority is a raw and tyrannical power grab that will crush jobs,” he said. “These leaders know firsthand that the rule is being shoved down the throats of hardworking people with no input, and places landowners, small businesses, farmers, and manufacturers on the road to a regulatory and economic hell.”

Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who is sponsoring a bill with Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) that would overturn the rule, called it “reckless and unwarranted” in a statement, and vowed to “work tirelessly to stop this expansion of federal control.”

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, in announcing the rule this morning, in fact pointed out that the agency has received over one million public comments on the rule since it was proposed last year. And it was based, she emphasized, on the best available peer-reviewed science.

McCarthy also took care to stress that the rule has been changed from the proposed version to clarify that it does not apply to ditches or groundwater, and that agriculture will continue to be exempted. The rule “does not interfere with private property rights or address land use,” she elaborated. “It does not regulate any ditches unless they function as tributaries. It does not apply to groundwater or shallow subsurface water, copper tile drains or change policy on irrigation or water transfer.” “Farmers, ranchers, and foresters are all original conservationists, and we recognize that,” McCarthy said. Farmers are nonetheless some of the strongest opponents of the rule, along with other business interests New York Times identifies as “property developers, fertilizer and pesticide makers, oil and gas producers and a national association of golf course owners” — again, polluters that, under the status quo, are getting away with it. Those in favor of the rule, on the other hand? Aside from the usual groups interested in protecting the environment, which are all pretty thrilled, it’s backed, per one poll, by 80 percent of voters and, per McCarthy, 80 percent of small business owners. Craft breweries are also big fans: “Beer is about 90 percent water, making local water supply quality and its characteristics, such as pH and mineral content, critical to brewing,” a coalition of beer companies wrote to the EPA in 2014. President Obama, too, stood up for the rule Wednesday, asserting in a statement that it  “will provide the clarity and certainty businesses and industry need about which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, and it will ensure polluters who knowingly threaten our waters can be held accountable.”",REAL
"Ben Carson’s debate night in Houston can be summarized in one line: “Can somebody attack me, please?”

Okay, his “fruit salad” line was pretty good, too, but it was his plea for negative attention that perfectly captured his irrelevance. He was so desperate for a chance to speak that he figured a verbal assault from one of his opponents — which, by rule, would entitle him to a response — might be the only way he’d get to talk.

CNN, which broadcast the debate and supplied the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, didn’t even pretend that the retired neurosurgeon is still a factor in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Carson received just six questions in more than two hours and got only 11 minutes and 10 seconds of speaking time — roughly half the allotment of Ted Cruz and about a third of Donald Trump’s share, according to a tally by Politico.

[Why is Ben Carson still running for president?]

Managing talk time is always difficult, especially in a debate as fractious as Thursday’s. Trump, Cruz and Marco Rubio bickered, interrupted and shouted over one another constantly. But it’s philosophically challenging, too: Should a moderator try to grant equal time to every candidate or focus more heavily on the leaders?

It depends. In November, when I interviewed Fox Business Network anchors Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo before they moderated a GOP debate featuring eight candidates, they acknowledged some imbalance is inevitable but said they would attempt to dole out time more or less evenly.

Their efforts made sense at that stage of the race — three months before the start of primary balloting, a point where polls aren’t very good predictors. On the day of that debate (Nov. 10), Trump and Carson were in a virtual tie atop the Republican field, according to the Real Clear Politics national average.

Carson, of course, has plummeted since then; it was just too early for moderators to judge who was or was not legit and to hand out speaking time accordingly.

But by now, it’s very clear that Carson has no shot to be the Republican nominee. While each of the other remaining candidates has managed to finish second or better in at least one of the first four primary states, Carson hasn’t placed higher than fourth. Those are real results — not polls. He hasn’t done well in the Midwest, Northeast, South or West. He has a very small constituency that is sticking by him, but there is zero reason to believe he's got a shot.

It’s hard to understand why he’s still in the race, in fact.

Debate moderators should be slow to dismiss candidates, allowing for the possibility of an improbable comeback. Perhaps that’s why John Kasich, whose own viability is in serious doubt, got almost exactly as much speaking time as Rubio.

But Carson is so far out of the running that it would have been difficult to justify giving him much air. This was the last debate before Super Tuesday. The purpose was to help voters in the upcoming states — and elsewhere — choose among the candidates who could actually represent the Republican Party in the general election.

Carson just isn’t one of them. And every minute devoted to him was a minute deducted from a real contender. This kind of thing is a judgment call, and CNN got the judgment right.",REAL
"AIDS “Patient Zero” Not the Source of the Outbreak Although responsible somewhat for the spread of AIDS, he didn't bring it to the US Image Credits: frolicsomepl/Pixabay . 
Scientists have managed to reconstruct the route by which HIV/Aids arrived in the US – exonerating once and for all the man long blamed for the ensuing pandemic in the west. 
Using sophisticated genetic techniques, an international team of researchers have revealed that the virus emerged from a pre-existing epidemic in the Caribbean, arrived in New York by the early 1970s and then spread westwards across the US. 
The research also confirms that Gaétan Dugas, a French-Canadian flight attendant, was not the first person in the US to be infected, despite being dubbed “Patient zero” in a study of gay men with Aids in 1984. Based on that study, author Randy Shilts named Dugas in 1987 and wrote that “there’s no doubt that Gaëtan played a key role in spreading the new virus from one end of the United States to the other.”",FAKE
"The climate change plan announced by the Obama administration Monday is not as aggressive as plans by some other countries. But it suggests the US is serious about the issue and gives the country new credibility in climate talks.

As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?

President Obama speaks about his Clean Power Plan in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Monday The president is mandating even steeper greenhouse gas cuts from US power plants than previously expected, while granting states more time and broader options to comply.

The Obama administration's new rules to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from existing power plants have helped propel the United States to a leadership role in international efforts to curb global warming, some analysts suggest.

Monday's announcement of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is being seen as a significant step forward for the US and for the international process.

""This is a case of leading by example,"" says Elliot Diringer, executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a climate- and energy-policy think tank in Arlington, Va. ""The rest of the world has been waiting a long time for the US to demonstrate the kind of leadership we're seeing now.""

The plan adds to the US's diplomatic credibility on climate, adds Andrew Deutz, director of international government relations for The Nature Conservancy. And that is as significant as the emissions goals, he suggests.

But how strict are the emissions goals themselves? Is the US on the verge of becoming a world leader in cutting carbon emissions?

There’s no easy way to compare the climate efforts of different nations, specialists say, because negotiators working on a Paris treaty are taking a ""pledge and review"" approach. Each country chooses its own targets, based on a range of factors.

The Clean Power Plan aims to cut CO2 emissions from existing power plants to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It is part of a broader Obama administration plan to cut carbon emissions economy-wide. The goal for that broader plan is to reduce all CO2 emissions to between 26 and 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

The European Union, by contrast, aims to cut emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels – a more-aggressive target – by 2030. Some European countries not in the EU, such as Norway and Iceland, aim to at least match the EU targets. Switzerland aims for 50 percent cuts.

Meanwhile, China, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore are using 2005 as the base year for their targets, like the US. Canada, New Zealand, and Japan have proposed emissions cuts of 25 to 30 percent by 2030. China and Singapore have pledged to significantly reduce their carbon intensity – the amount of carbon produced per unit of gross domestic product. Their goal is to see that their emissions peak by 2030.

Still others, such as Mexico, South Korea, Ethiopia, and Morocco, have set another, even softer baseline, offering to cut emissions between 32 and 64 percent, compared with what their emissions might have been in 2030 if emissions followed a ""business as usual"" path.

Of particular interest are India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa, which have yet to submit plans, notes David Waskow, who heads the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute in Washington. Along with China, these countries fall into a category of newly industrialized nations whose economic aspirations could lead to troubling emissions paths.

""People have tried to devise all sorts of formulas to suggest what an equitable distribution of effort would be,"" says Mr. Diringer. So far, none has stuck.

Still, Monday's announcement gives the US fresh credibility in dealing with climate change. This new credibility first emerged last November, says Mr. Deutz, when Mr. Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly announced their national offerings toward a new global climate pact during a summit in Beijing. For its part, China committed to capping emissions by 2030, with renewable energy sources accounting for 20 percent of the country's generating capacity. The country also would reduce its carbon intensity by 60 to 65 percent by 2030.

""That did a couple of things,"" Deutz says. ""It put the US out there with a significant, credible target. It demonstrated that China was prepared to commit to an international target as well. And the fact that the US and China were moving together helped to unlock the negotiating space.""

That played out in interesting ways a month later at global climate talks in Lima, Peru.

""Suddenly the US became a credible, positive force in the negotiations, getting a lot more respect than it had previously,"" he says. ""It also meant that some countries that were hiding behind the US couldn't do that, and they were exposed.""

Now, with the Clean Power Plan, which covers a sector of the economy responsible for 31 percent of the country's carbon emissions, the White House has added meat to the bones of its broader, international offering, Mr. Diringer says.

How all this plays out in Paris remains to be seen. Counting EU countries as a single entity, so far 22 countries have proposed their individual contributions to a new treaty. Taken together, these represent 56 percent of global emissions. But the commitments fall far short of what it would take to put the world on track to meet its current global-warming objective – holding global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Many developing countries view as inadequate the emissions plans industrial countries have offered so far. Other difficult issues that don't involve emissions targets also remain to be solved.

And even with a fully operational Clean Power Plan, a new administration faces a lot of work to achieve the overall emissions reductions Obama has put forward to the Paris meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, notes Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

Still, the Clean Power Plan represents ""a very important step"" in fulfilling the US's commitment, Mr. Meyer says. ""Given the history at the state level with things like renewable-electricity standards and energy efficiency programs, we think it's quite likely that the US could overachieve the standard"" in the Clean Power Plan.",REAL
"November 2015 Ads Hillary visits voters early polling stations, thus BREAKING THE LAW on camera – yet again nothing happens to her Oct 26, 2016 Previous post 
N.C.G.S. §163-166.4(a) No person or group of persons shall hinder access, harass others, distribute campaign literature, place political advertising, solicit votes, or otherwise engage in election-related activity in the voting place or in a buffer zone. 
The buffer zone will be 50 feet from the entrance to the polling place except where deemed by the Wake County Board of Elections to be necessarily closer, but no less than 25 feet from the entrance to the polling place. There will be publication of information regarding the entrance location and distance of the buffer zone no later 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. VA fails to properly examine thousands of veterans By Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016 VA 
Thousands of veterans may have been improperly diagnosed by the VA. 
The federal department admits it was improperly testing for traumatic brain injuries from 2007 through 2015. 
Nate Anderson has served in the United States Army for 12 years. 
“There’s a promise that we make to service members, that if you serve and you put your life on the line or sacrifice in whatever way you do, we’ll take care of you. I didn’t know what that was going to look like, it’s certainly not what I saw,” Anderson said. “This is something the VA should have been prepared for.” 
He enlisted after 9/11. 
“It was time in my generation that the desire to serve was strong,” he said. 
Fast forward to 2008, Anderson was assigned to his first unit at Fort Bragg and deployed to central Afghanistan. 
Read the Full Article at wncn.com >>>> Related Posts: The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on October 29, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"A documentary about campus rape contains the damning stories of many victims. But what about the alleged perpetrators?

Of course, the next four years will see considerably more crying over peer pressure, soured romances, less-than-excellent grades, and horrible cafeteria food. But the dangers sketched in this documentary facing young women on campus are far graver than the ordinary stuff of growing pains—they revolve around sexual assault.

The stories in the documentary are brutally evocative. “Two of us were sexually assaulted before classes had even started,” says Annie Clark, a former student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You just stay there, and you hope you don’t die,” says Andrea Pino, another former UNC student, of being raped during her sophomore year at a fraternity party. Clark and Pino both filed federal complaints against UNC and have become leading activists in the fight to end campus rape.

High-profile alleged campus rapes have led the news agenda in the last year. Emma Sulkowicz, a senior at Columbia University, has become the face of the movement with her “Carry That Weight” performance art activism—a pledge to haul her mattress around campus as long as her alleged assailant, Paul Nungesser, remains at the school.

While there is little dispute that sexual assault is being poorly handled by universities, not everyone agrees on how schools are attempting to remedy the situation. Many are concerned that the refurbished systems to adjudicate campus sexual assault are kangaroo courts, where the accused is presumed guilty until proven innocent—even when there’s no evidence beyond he-said-she-said reports.

“The Hunting Ground” presents one side of this fraught debate, and a very powerful and disturbing one at that. It features interviews with dozens of young women, and a few men, who recount horrifying details of their sexual assaults and subsequent lack of concern from school and law enforcement authorities.

It does not feature testimony or representation from the victims’ alleged attackers, or any voice dissenting from the narrative focus that campus rape has become something of an epidemic, which is either being overlooked or appallingly dealt with by authorities.

In the film, Kinsman says she had a drink at an off-campus bar one night and is “fairly certain there was something in that drink,” because she woke later to Winston raping her. She claims both the school and Tallahassee police failed her.

The filmmakers don’t mention that two toxicology reports following the alleged rape found no drugs and little alcohol in her system. Nor do they note that, at a hearing in December, Kinsman didn’t say she had been drugged or unconscious. This isn’t to say the attack didn’t happen, but merely the documentary might have made clear the full array of evidence.

The movie has succeeded on this front. New York magazine film critic David Edelstein, who is planning college visits with his daughter, a junior in high school, wrote in his review that he “found myself jotting rape school next to several of the candidates.”

These documentaries are never unbiased. If they were, they wouldn’t be as emotionally compelling. In “Blackfish”, a heartbreaking documentary about the mistreatment of killer whales at Sea World and other water theme parks, Sea World is the cruel, money-grubbing man in the suit. Surely some who have worked with killer whales there would disagree, but their testimonies don’t fit the documentary narrative.

As compelling as “The Hunting Ground” is, it perpetuates a panic about the campus rape crisis that distracts from a rational assessment of the issue. It would have done better to expose its villains in front of the camera—and let them hang, or convincingly defend, themselves.",REAL
"Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have among the highest unfavorability ratings of recent presidential candidates. Their success shows how US politics is changing.

Will Trump's plan to register Muslims make it to The White House?

Tesla under Trump: How will electric cars fare under the next president?

John McCain defies Donald Trump on torture: 'We will not waterboard'

Audience members listen as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Clinton Middle School Saturday in Clinton, Iowa.

It is possible, perhaps even probable, that this fall’s election will be contested between two of three most disliked presidential candidates of at least the past quarter century.

And it is possible, perhaps even probable, that this is not a coincidence.

A  Gallup survey released Saturday shows that Donald Trump has the highest unfavorability rating (60 percent) of any presidential candidate since the polling firm started tracking the figure in 1992. For her part, Hillary Clinton ranks third (52 percent) with the no-new-taxes-breaking George H.W. Bush of 1992 at No. 2.

In other words, the 2016 presidential election could be decided between two people that the majority of Americans, according to Gallup, don’t like politically.

How is this possible?

Actually, it makes complete sense. In fact, one could argue that such a contest would perfectly befit the current political era.

At a time when partisanship has taken new and more rigid forms, the result has been an America increasingly wary of the other side. Many Americans are increasingly motivated to vote against candidates rather than for them.

Mr. Trump and former Secretary of State Clinton symbolize this shift in different ways, but they speak to the shrinking middle of American politics. As the national parties have less and less in common, their national candidates likewise have less in common, leaving voters with a starker choice that they are just as likely to oppose as embrace.

Indeed, political scientists note that Americans are  more neatly “sorted” into the two parties than they have been in recent history. In other words, conservatives support Republicans and liberals support Democrats.

No more “blue dog” Democrats who want to reform welfare. No more Northeast Republicans who want to address climate change.

It means there is a brighter line between the national Democratic and Republican Parties than there has been in decades, because there is less internal pressure to moderate. If, increasingly, everyone in the party is left-of-center (or right-of-center), the party naturally shifts left (or right).

The result is two sharply different visions for America, two sharply different sets of solutions.

Another result is the vanishing swing voter. (See the Monitor’s  Cover Story on the subject.) A larger share of American voters might  register as independents than as Democrats or Republicans, but they don’t act that way. Those independents who reliably turn out to vote tend to take sides just like the partisans, voting in consistently partisan ways.

“People are more confident in their opinions when they see polarized parties,” Corwin Smidt, a Michigan State University political scientist, told the Monitor. “They think, ‘Well, if the choices are so stark, it’s just not a gray area at all.’ ”

And so they worry about the “other side” winning, according to research by Emory University political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster. They found that voting behavior is increasingly guided by this “negative partisanship.”

This fall, it seems, American voters might have a lot to vote against.

Trump has become the Republican front-runner precisely because of his lack of broader appeal,  argues pollster Frank Luntz in the Financial Times.

“No high-polling presidential candidate in the modern era has so intrepidly drawn the ire of so many within the American  electorate,” he writes. “Yet in rendering one voting bloc utterly apoplectic, he has appealed viscerally to another. The balance of middle ground politics is not, shall we say, Mr. Trump’s bailiwick.”

His calls for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and a temporary ban on all noncitizen Muslims entering the country are antithetical to those outside his conservative base, which partly explains their appeal within it.

“He’s simply raising an important issue nobody else has the courage to talk about,” Mr. Luntz adds, paraphrasing the Trump voters’ reasons for supporting the billionaire.

For Clinton, the issue is less ideological than historical. She is facing a  perceived lack of trustworthiness that dates back to her husband’s administration – and has been exacerbated by her handling of  State Department e-mails.

Yet the same trends that have vaulted Trump to front-runner status are apparent in the Democratic primary process, too.

Bernie Sanders could topple Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. And he is an avowed socialist talking about a revolution.

“In Sanders’s vision, a massive grassroots uprising will shatter the constricting limits of today’s political debate and thrust forward long-time liberal goals such as single-payer health care and free public-college tuition,”  writes Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic. “For Sanders’s growing army, it’s an exhilarating prospect.”

For Republicans, it is appalling.

To some degree, this is what primaries do: push candidates toward the extremes. But there is a mounting sense that, as the parties move further apart, this year represents something new – or at least more intense.

While the experience might be temporarily cathartic, evidence suggests it might not be ultimately satisfying. As Congress has become more sorted, Americans’ confidence in it has declined. Americans have less confidence in Congress than they do in any other major American institution – and have since 2010 – according to  a Gallup survey.

After all, a revolution entails one side “winning” – not likely in a political environment where each side is becoming more entrenched to stop the other.

“On both sides, the energy is with candidates … offering the dream of a clean sweep and a blank sheet on which to rewrite the nation’s priorities,” writes Mr. Brownstein. “Yet because the candidates offering such fundamental change are largely misdiagnosing the reasons for today’s impasse, it’s unlikely they could break it even if they capture the presidency.”

Their misdiagnosis? Brownstein suggests that it’s unlikely one side can ignore the other to rewrite the nation’s priorities.

“Given the nation’s underlying partisan divisions, the only way to advance bigger ideas may be through compromises across party lines that neither side is discussing much yet.”

What this primary campaign has done, perhaps, is highlight the shifting political topography and distance between those party lines.",REAL
"Knoxville, Tennessee (CNN) President Barack Obama's ambitious proposal to give millions of Americans more affordable access to a community college education and what he called a ""ticket to the middle class"" is unlikely to become law any time soon.

His plan is to partner with states and fund the first two years of community college for Americans ""willing to work for it."" The White House will work to push this plan through Congress ""in the next few weeks,"" Obama promised.

But with a roughly $60 billion price tag over the next 10 years, the proposal may have little chance of getting through the wall of Republican deficit hawks that now control both houses of Congress.

Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both Republican senators from Tennessee, joined Obama on Air Force One and at the community college during Obama's speech, but neither want Obama's plan to become federal law.

That's despite the fact that Obama called his proposal bipartisan, noting that similar policies have been implemented by Tennessee's Republican governor and Chicago's Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Asked whether he would support Obama's proposal, Corker said ""Oh no, no, no, no, no,"" instead urging other states to take the president's initiative, and do something similar themselves rather than create ""a whole new bureaucratic federal program.""

Sen. Alexander, chairman of the Senate's education committee and the former education secretary, echoed that in a statement on Friday saying states should follow Tennessee's lead.

Obama's proposal, dubbed America's College Promise, wouldn't be the first broad-sweeping proposition that didn't get far in Washington, but --aided by a presidential push -- could still make inroads throughout the country by way of state and local initiatives.

""It's not necessarily all about bills and funding,"" said Maine's Sen. Angus King who serves on the Senate Budget Committee. ""Sometimes it's about the bully pulpit and raising the profile of an issue.""

King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, pointed to the President's previous ambitious proposal for universal early childhood education in 2013. It hasn't produced results on Capitol Hill, but has spurred attempts to provide Pre-K education in King's state of Maine.

And while Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage since Obama called for an increase during last year's State of the Union, dozens of states and municipalities have since passed laws to create a higher minimum wage on their own.

""Setting the national agenda is an important part of what the presidency is,"" King said.

King said Obama is ""definitely in the target zone"" with his proposal, but said there would be a challenge to find the $60 billion, which he called ""a big number."" While he supports Obama's idea, King said he wouldn't endorse the proposal outright until he reviews the plan's funding mechanism, which remains a massive question mark.

And King was thrilled to learn that Obama committed in his speech to working with Alexander on a bill King cosponsored that would shrink the size of the federal student aid application form, which has more than a hundred questions -- something college affordability advocates have pushed for in recent years.

Obama's proposal would give states a huge break -- with the federal government picking up three-quarters of the cost of waiving community college tuition for the first two years, and leaving states to fund the rest.

""States would have to do their part too. For those willing to do the work and for states and local communities who want to be a part of it, it could be a game changer,"" Obama said.

Emphasizing that there are ""no free rides in America,"" free tuition would be contingent on students getting good grades, enrolling at part-time and following through on earning their degree.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz told reporters on Air Force One recognized that the $60 billion plan was a ""significant investment.""

""But it's one the president believes is worthwhile because we need to make sure that America's young people are getting the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century economy,"" Schultz said.

Obama modeled the proposal on a Tennessee program started under Republican Gov. Bill Haslam a year ago.

""Why not just build on something that works?"" Obama said at Pellissippi State Community College on Friday.

Haslam launched the Tennessee Promise, a program that covers the cost of tuition and fees of a certificate or degree at any of the state's community colleges after students already kick in whatever financial aid they can get.

But higher education experts stress that the Tennessee program doesn't make a community college education ""free"" since students incur many other costs to attend college -- from living expenses to lost wages.

Lauren Asher, President of The Institute for College Access & Success, said Obama's plan is different (and, she said, better) since it would waive tuition costs and let students use federal aid, like Pell Grants for the neediest students, go toward expenses other than tuition.

And Obama's focus on community colleges was also a welcome message, just one of the many steps the administration has taken to address college access and affordability, Asher said.

""The President is rightly calling attention to the importance and value of community colleges and of education and training after high school,"" Asher said. ""What the President is proposing has the potential to help low-income students.

Nicholas Wyman, CEO of the Institute for Workplace Skills and Innovation, a consulting firm, called Obama's focus on community colleges and skills-driven, vocational training a much-needed step to boost the U.S. economy.

The number of job openings could halve the unemployment rate, but a massive gap between the skills of prospective employees and those in demand is holding the economy back. And by elevating community colleges, Obama is helping to destigmatize what many view as bottom-rung institutions.

""Companies want to employ people with strong academics, but they also want to employ people with strong workplace skills. A lot of the community colleges offer that and unfortunately a lot of the four year colleges don't,"" Wyman said. ""This is an opportunity to move the community college system into the 21st century.""

Obama also hit on a note that is a focus of Wyman's consulting firm, addressing the need to connect community colleges and employers who could benefit from the neatly-tailored skills of a community college graduate.

And even if Obama's proposal flops in Washington, Wyman, who has travelled around the country, asserted that states are ""hungry for reforms.""

""There's a lot of states who would look at this and often as you know states don't like being told what to do,"" Wyman said, and maybe they'll now take the initiative themselves.",REAL
"From his condemnation of journalists to his racially tinged attacks on a judge presiding over a lawsuit related to Trump University to his feud with New Mexico GOP Gov. Susana Martinez, there's one thing in common about the mounting Trump controversies: The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is aiming to make the entire 2016 campaign about himself.

American politics is littered with larger-than-life personalities. But no presidential candidate in living memory has built a campaign so exclusively on the foundation of his own personal, brand, self-congratulatory rhetoric and life story as Trump. And don't expect anything different if he makes it to the White House.

""You think I'm going to change?"" he told reporters at a press conference this week. ""I'm not going to change.""

Trump has prospered by being the loudest, most unapologetic salesman of self in politics that most seasoned observers have ever seen. He is not just the figurehead of his own campaign -- his personality is the campaign, as evidenced by stump speeches, press conferences and endless television and radio interviews that add up to an unstoppable torrent of self-promotion.

""The Trump campaign is not about any cause, it is all about Trump,"" said Peter Wehner, who has watched candidates and presidents up close as an aide in the last three Republican administrations. ""His campaign is all about him. How he treats other people is all about him -- whether one is praised and patted on the head or cruelly mocked depends on what you have said about him.""

Trump's self-aggrandizement has become a dominant theme of the presidential campaign.

The billionaire boasts about his wealth, his portfolio of gleaming buildings and golf resorts, soaring poll numbers, the size of his crowds, his ""crazy"" television ratings, how Mexicans will love him, how his book is an all time best-seller and how his 757 jet is superior to Air Force One.

It's an ego-driven strategy that would doom most politicians.

But, so far, Trump's unique, personal and unconventional campaign style has worked. He's dispatched his rivals in a bloated Republican field and is now locked in a tight general election duel with Hillary Clinton. His style could even help him win over disaffected workers who also seem themselves as victimized by the political and economic establishment.

Still, there are major questions about whether a personality-driven campaign -- lacking the traditional organizational and field skills -- can be successful during a complex national contest.

The Clinton campaign is working overtime to make Trump's personal mythologizing look like a fatal flaw. The former secretary of state is mounting a two-pronged strategy that centers directly on Trump's persona. She hopes to make a case that his volatile personality makes him unsuitable to be commander-in-chief and to use incidents from his colorful character and business career to deconstruct Trump's carefully built self image.

Trump's allies dismiss the idea that his campaign style lacks the gravitas and temperament required of a President, arguing that his tirades against the press, for instance, are merely a result of unfair coverage.

""Many of the reporters know the facts, but choose to write horrible stories about him or portray him in a negative light,"" Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson told CNN's ""New Day"" on Wednesday, adding that if Trump becomes President he will have wide public support. ""So it's not going to get to the point of a temperament question because the people will be behind Mr. Trump.""

Trump is hardly alone in getting high on himself: Self-confidence is synonymous with politics.

But presidential candidates typically take pains to mask their personal ambition in a flurry of detailed policy positions and ostentatious attempts to feel the voters' pain.

Peter Feaver, a former aide to President George W. Bush, said Trump's reliance on his personality is unique.

""This persona is actually one he has been honing for decades,"" said Feaver, a former senior National Security Council official, noting that unlike other big personalities that took aim at the presidency, Trump lacked core ideological convictions.

""Take Ronald Reagan for instance. He clearly had a persona that was built up over decades but even more he had a governing philosophy even as he was developing a persona,"" Fever said. ""Trump doesn't have that. He just has the persona.""

Feaver also notes the irony that after spending eight years lambasting President Barack Obama as a hubristic, self-obsessed figure, Republicans are about to nominate someone who takes those perceived deficiencies to extremes.

The presumptive GOP nominee is not known for introspection. But he seems to agree with critics who say the campaign is almost exclusively about himself.

""A very good musician said Trump is the greatest in the world without a guitar, meaning without an instrument. I've got to stand up here by myself,"" Trump said in California last week, explaining his unique style of political performance art.

He want on to boast how a good friend -- who was ""by the way, one of the most successful people in the country, in the world"" -- asked him how he was able to hold such large audiences in the palm of his hand.

""I said, 'You know, honestly, it's not hard because there's so much love in the room. It's unbelievable.'""

Such comments, laced throughout Trump's public appearances, reveal a politician apparently intoxicated with his own magnetism and brimming with self belief.

And they contrast with the stump speeches of more conventional political nominees -- which sag with policies designed to lure various constituencies of a party and cliched invocations to a higher national purpose and political unity that Trump's speeches conspicuously lack.

His public appearances, while hitting top political points on illegal immigration, free trade and U.S. allies who he says are fleecing America, are effectively a list of his personal triumphs -- that seem like the obsessions of a billionaire and have little in common with his heartland audiences.

He frequently relates the tale of his new hotel in Washington in the city's old Post Office building which he says will come in under budget and ahead of schedule and will be ""a higher-quality hotel than anybody ever saw before."" And he often recalls the media frenzy as he and his wife Melania descended the escalator at Trump tower to launch his campaign last year, saying it ""looked, literally, like the Academy Awards.""

Trump's implicit case is that his personality is so dominant, his presence alone makes the need for detailed policy proposals moot. That's why when he vows to rescue health care for veterans, he doesn't say how he will get it done. He promises to bring back jobs from Mexico and China -- again without revealing his approach. He says he will ""knock the hell out of ISIS"" but doesn't detail a credible military strategy.

Given the billionaire's somewhat ill defined political creed and unpredictable style, no one can say for sure what his presidency would be like.

But if the campaign is anything to go by, one thing is certain: it would be all about Trump.",REAL
"With more and more people learning about the importance of eating healthy and safe produce, consumer demand for all things “organic” has skyrocketed. In the US alone, annual organic food sales have... ",FAKE
"« on: Today at 09:20:29 PM » Nintendo Cuts Full-Year Sales, Operating Profit Forecasts 26 October 2016 , by Yuji Nakamura and Takashi Amano (Bloomberg) - Boost from Pokemon Go fails to make up for sales outlook slump- Shares decline in European trading after results release Logged",FAKE
"AT&T sold access to customer data to law enforcement – report Published time: 26 Oct, 2016 18:10 Get short URL © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters New documents show telecommunications giant AT&T sold customer data to local law enforcement departments for a record-making $100k to $1 million last year. The company is currently seeking a $85 billion acquisition deal for Time Warner. 
Documents show the telecommunications giant was not only working with US Drug Enforcement Agency but routinely sold customer data to local police departments who were investigating a range of crimes from murder to Medicaid fraud. The documents were first reported by The Daily Beast. AT&T provides the leads, then investigators just happen to find the exact same evidence through police work: https://t.co/d01Uc4iWYm — The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 25, 2016 
Under its secretive program called Hemisphere, AT&T could search trillions of call records and analyze cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom they speak and potentially why. 
The documents also show the company only required an administrative subpoena, a lower-level legal document which – unlike a search warrant – does not require authorization from a judge. Police departments paid anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million a year for access to the Hemisphere program. Under the agreement, police were prohibited from disclosing use of the program to the public or even in court. 
“Like other communications companies, if a government agency seeks customer call records through a subpoena, court order or other mandatory legal process, we are required by law to provide this non-content information, such as the phone numbers and the date and time of call,” AT&T told the Beast in a statement. Must read: AT&T spying on citizens to make millions mining data for police & govt surveillance w/o a warrant https://t.co/VDSqCwOqL7 pic.twitter.com/NWe1tjJC7W — Anna Massoglia (@annalecta) October 25, 2016 
Because of the ban on disclosing the existence of the Hemisphere program, law enforcement agencies were covering their bases by later seeking a court order for a wiretap, or trailing a suspect to gather evidence equivalent to what they had acquired through Hemisphere. 
Unlike other telecommunications providers, AT&T stores metadata – call time, duration, location data – of its customers going back to 2008. AT&T was one of the first companies to be exposed for its role in government surveillance when it shared its customer’s metadata with the NSA. 
Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician and whistleblower, revealed details about the NSA installing network hardware at a San Francisco, California site known at Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications, beginning in 2002. 
“I knew this wasn’t legal because the NSA is not supposed to do domestic spying,” Klein told RT in an interview in 2015. He said the engineering documents showed “they were tapping into the main data flow on the internet and sending that data down to the secret room.” 
“I knew that was totally illegal. The apparatus itself did not provide for any kind of selection it was just a vacuum cleaner sweep of everything. That violates the Fourth Amendment right there which requires warrants for specific information,” Klein said. 
AT&T was also known to have a “partnership” – through its Hemisphere program – with the DEA for the purpose of counter-narcotics operations. 
The revelations come as AT&T’s proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner has surveillance critics and privacy advocates alarmed. 
Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told the Daily Beast he opposed the merger because it would allow AT&T ""to use Time Warner’s content as bait to invade every aspect of the lives and habits of its nearly 30 million wired customers of its broadband and television services – many through its DirecTV subsidiary – and its more than 100 million wireless subscribers."" 
“It’s commercial surveillance,” Chester told the Beast, noting that through mobile devices, AT&T can even pinpoint the geographical locations of users.",FAKE
"In the coming weeks, Americans will embark on the painful process of filing their tax returns. While this annual ritual leaves most people confused, depressed and overwhelmed, many will be faced with the additional step this year of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars if they chose not to purchase health insurance under ObamaCare for 2014.

Under the individual mandate required by the president’s new health care law, Americans for the first time must pay the higher of two penalties if they are uninsured and did not enroll in ObamaCare last year—either $95 per adult and $47.50 per child under 18, or 1 percent of their yearly household income above the $10,000 tax filing threshold. That means an individual earning $50,000 will face a penalty of $400 this year, and fines could reach up to $2,448 per person or up to $12,240 for a family of five.

Unfortunately, these penalty rates will only continue to climb. Next year, penalties will more than double for those who do not enroll in ObamaCare in 2015, costing the same individual earning $50,000 per year a whopping $800, and families up to tens of thousands of dollars.

No American should be forced into the president’s one-size-fits-all health care mandate. Health care should be based on the fundamental principle of freedom, and Americans should be able to have the ability to make their own health care decisions without fear that the government will extract onerous penalties from them.

That is why we reintroduced The ObamaCare Opt-Out Act of 2014 in the Senate last week, important legislation that will allow Americans to opt-out of the individual mandate for health insurance coverage required by ObamaCare. This bill would allow individuals to either notify their state or the federal health care exchange, or use their tax filing to opt-out of ObamaCare and avoid the penalty.  According to the tax-services provider H&R Block, this would impact about 4 million uninsured Americans in 2015.

After four years of ObamaCare, hardworking Americans continue to see their health care costs rise while their coverage choices diminish. It is far past time for American families to once again have the freedom to make their own decisions about what is best for their families.

As the 114th Congress gets underway, we will continue to make this bill a priority and work to restore Americans’ freedom to buy affordable health insurance that works for them because they know what’s best for their families, not the Obama administration.

Republican John Barrasso represents Wyoming in the U.S. Senate. He serves in the Senate as a member of both the Energy and Environment Committees. Follow him on Twitter@Sen.JohnBarrasso.",REAL
"Another Primary Night's Results Confound (At Least Some) Expectations

The latest day of primary voting was bad news for one leading candidate, good news for another and a setback for popular campaign narratives in both parties.

You may have heard that Hillary Clinton was about to extend her Super Tuesday dominance to Mississippi and Michigan, putting the campaign of Bernie Sanders on the ropes once and for all. The Clinton story seemed all the more plausible given her feisty show in her seventh debate with Sanders and the struggle he seemed to have in more populous states.

And you may also have heard the reports of Donald Trump's momentum finally stalling out. Over the weekend, in votes in Kentucky and Louisiana, late-deciders had broken against him. Trump still won those states, of course, but only because so many people voted early for him.

This Trump scenario made sense given the millions of dollars in attack ads paid for by rivals and by independent superPACs opposed to his nomination.

But not so fast. As it turned out, it was the Clinton juggernaut that lost a wheel in Michigan — while Trump's model stayed very much on track. He lost late-deciders again, but it mattered even less than it had in the earlier tests.

Sanders, for his part, once again defied expectations. Michigan responded to his assault on trade deals, while not entirely buying Clinton's late attacks on his voting record on the auto industry bailout.

Clinton may also have been expecting higher turnout among African-Americans, who backed her with 65 percent of their vote but did not supply enough votes to overcome Sanders' advantage outside of metropolitan Detroit. Clinton also failed to win the county that is home to Flint, the city with lead-poisoned water that she had made the focus of her campaign.

Once again, Sanders reprised his astounding dominance of the youth vote, taking 87 percent of the votes of those under 30. He also won an overwhelming number of counties, large and small, throughout the state.

Yet another storyline that crashed and burned Tuesday concerned a candidate running well out of the money so far this season. This was the myth known as ""the emergence of John Kasich,"" the Ohio governor many hoped might become the establishment alternative to Trump.

Kasich went all-in for Michigan in hopes of generating momentum ahead of his do-or-die primary in his home state on March 15. But Kasich finished third, a hair or two behind Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He may still win Ohio next week, but he will not be a factor anywhere else on a day when three other top-10 states will vote (Florida, Illinois and North Carolina).

For his part, Cruz once again showed himself the master of the small state event (he won in Idaho) and the second-place finish (Michigan, Mississippi, Hawaii). Despite his maddening failure to defeat Trump in Southern states with big populations of evangelical white Protestants, Cruz has hung tough and racked up delegates.

He is now just 99 delegates behind Trump. If he could win a few of the winner-take-all states, he could catch him, although the prospects of that appear increasingly remote. And if there is any GOP candidate with a chance of preventing Trump from reaching 1,237 delegates for a first-ballot nomination, it is now Cruz.

It might help Cruz stop Trump if his fellow freshman senator, Marco Rubio, dropped out rather than contest his home state of Florida next week. But Rubio has vowed to remain for that test, even though he remains behind Trump in Florida polling and must battle Cruz and Kasich for votes there.

Truth be told, Tuesday was a night of total frustration for Rubio, demonstrating how utterly his campaign strategy has failed. He not only finished third or worse in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii — he won exactly zero delegates for the night. His delegate count is now further behind Cruz than Cruz is behind Trump.

Rubio was the young and charismatic candidate many Republicans had hoped would step up as the anti-Trump. But Rubio's recent attempts to do so with personal putdowns and constant attacks may have backfired, judging by his performance since he adopted Trump's slashing speaking style. Setting aside a small-turnout event in Minnesota and a primary in Puerto Rico, Rubio has now staggered winless through two-dozen primaries and caucuses.

In the cold light of the day-after, it is possible the results from Tuesday will look different. Had Clinton eked out another 20,000 votes or so in Michigan, the headline might have been about her crossing the halfway point in pursuit of the 2,383 delegates needed to nominate on the first ballot at the July convention in Philadelphia. She has 1,221 now. Sanders has 571.

The most frustrating element of the battle for Sanders is that even his best night since New Hampshire did not avail him in the delegate tally. Clinton's 66-point dominance in Mississippi won her nearly all that state's cache of 36 delegates, while Sanders' razor-thin margin in Michigan meant the two candidates split that state's 130 delegates almost evenly.

All of that makes it difficult for Sanders to overcome Clinton's delegate lead, even if he continues to best her in the voting booths from here through June. Sanders strategist Tad Devine is fond of saying the race is a marathon, not a sprint, but winning a race of any duration still requires you to finish first.

Sanders needs to make a habit of doing just that, and by wider margins than his breakthrough in Michigan gave him. Still, however steep the climb may appear, this Tuesday made it harder than ever to count the Vermonter out.",REAL
"Being an utter cock no barrier to success 09-11-16 THERE is no ‘glass ceiling’ for utter cocks any more, it has been confirmed. Donald Trump’s election success has been hailed as a victory by the cock, arsehole and bellend communities, who have for centuries struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream society. Total cock Roy Hobbs said: “Farage gave us hope, Trump has given us freedom. No longer will being an utter penis be frowned upon. “I can polish the ‘No Turning’ sign at the end of my driveway with pride, and drive my white 2011 BMW 7 Series right up anyone’s arse without fear of reproach. “The world told me I was wrong. But I was right, or rather if I was wrong it doesn’t matter any more. “I am an utter cock, hear my cry.” 
Share:",FAKE
"at 1:10 pm 3 Comments 
WAR is a racket. It always has been. 
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. 
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. 
– From Major General Smedley Butler’s War is a Rackett 
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them. 
The piece was published at The Nation and is titled: Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? Look at Their Donors . 
Read it and share it with everyone you know. 
W ashington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people. 
As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket. 
How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city’s so called bipartisan foreign policy elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened Pandora’s box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military contractors. DC’s think “tanks” should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles and not as gathering places for refugees from academia. 
According to the front page of this past Friday’s Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of “liberal” hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO. 
Indeed, I warned about this in last week’s piece: U.S. Foreign Policy ‘Elite’ Eagerly Await an Expansion of Overseas Wars Under Hillary Clinton . 
The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya experience. 
The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi’s murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died.” President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy establishment, which is spoiling for more war. 
The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria. 
The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments , notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow . Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute , which has received funding from Saudi Arabia , the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy. 
As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style. 
And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings? 
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously told Colin Powell , “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it,” predictably says of this current moment , “We do think there needs to be more American action.” A former Bush administration top adviser is also calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria. 
The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria. 
The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination. 
It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home). 
The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report. 
As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place. 
The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country. 
Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors. 
It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes. 
It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America, to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the White House, must face visible opposition. 
Thank you Mr. Kucinich, I couldn’t agree more. 
For related articles, see:",FAKE
"Does anyone like Trump as a person ? The answer in No. It's not about that, it never was. This is about a giant middle finder to the DC Establishment. As a Citizen we only have one way to express our displeasure with DC. We are as divided as I've ever seen. This is not acceptable. If young people can't open businesses we have failed them. They can't. Trump is a tool we need for real change. He blew up the GOP. Our friends on the other side wanted Bernie. But, it was rigged against Bernie. Now you are going to support the very person who rigged your Primary. You almost blew up the DNC, but the job is not complete. We can not hand this crap to our younger generation. We will not. Only a billionaire can get this far on his own. He will be checked by Congress. Join us in giving the middle finger to the slave masters controlling our future. This Country belongs to us. Not a handful of wealthy families. This isn't about Trump. He's a tool in more ways than one. This is about cutting restraints and letting the American People go. At least, that's the way I see it.",FAKE
"One Veteran’s War on Islamophobia Nate Terani and Nick Turse, October 31, 2016 Share This 
Originally posted at TomDispatch . 
Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves , my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities. 
I think I softly snorted and slowly shook my head. 
Already two books behind me, Kill Anything That Moves might as well have been written by someone else in another lifetime. In some sense, it was. 
It takes effort for me to dredge up the faded memories of that work, a Kodachrome-hued swirl of hundreds of interviews on two continents over the course of a decade. But this particular question was easy enough to answer. Almost all the Americans I interviewed had seen combat, but most American veterans of the war hadn’t. Many had little or no real opportunity to commit war crimes. Case closed. 
But that question caused me to recall a host of related queries that churned around the book. Questions by skeptics, atrocity-deniers, fair-minded interviewers attempting to play devil’s advocate. A favorite was whether the book was ""anti-veteran."" That, too, was a head-shaker for me. 
""How could that be?"" I would respond. After all, the book owed its genesis to veterans. Veterans were key sources for it. Veterans provided the evidence. Veterans provided the quotes. Veterans even supplied the title. The book was, to a great extent, the history of the war as described to me by veterans. The story I told was their story. How could that in any way be anti-veteran? 
Many of the vets I spoke with viewed their truth-telling as a form of patriotism, of continuing service to country. Nate Terani’s inaugural TomDispatch essay follows in the same American tradition. His eyes were opened to the abuse of military power while living in Iran as a boy. Later he would join the U.S. Navy and wear the stars and stripes with particular pride. September 11th and all that came after – notably the demonization of his Muslim faith in his homeland – imbued him with a new mission, one he now views as no less sacred than his military service. 
From Smedley Butler to Andrew Bacevich , Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning , Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Iraq Veterans Against the War , the U.S. armed forces have produced a steady stream of truth-tellers and whistleblowers, men and women willing to serve their country in profound ways during trying times. There’s no bronze star for activism, no Navy Cross for unpopular or contrarian opinions, no Purple Heart for the hard knocks involved in speaking out against war crimes or Islamophobia or laying bare information vital to the American public. Veterans who dare to do so have sometimes walked a cold, lonely road far from the warm glow enjoyed by summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Those who do so exhibit a special form of courage that may even exceed the bravery of the battlefield, the courage to stand tall and make oneself a target, a courage deserving ( with a nod to Thomas Paine ) of the love and thanks of man and woman. ~ Nick Turse 
Tehran, USA Fighting Fundamentalism in America By Nate Terani 
I’m not an immigrant, but my grandparents are. More than 50 years ago, they arrived in New York City from Iran. I grew up mainly in central New Jersey, an American kid playing little league for the Raritan Red Sox and soccer for the Raritan Rovers. In 1985, I travelled with my family to our ancestral land. I was only eight, but old enough to understand that the Iranians had lost their liberty and freedom. I saw the abject despair of a people who, in a desperate attempt to bring about change, had ushered in nationalist tyrants led by Ayatollah Khomeini. 
What I witnessed during that year in Iran changed the course of my life. In 1996, at age 19, wanting to help preserve the blessings of liberty and freedom we enjoy in America, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Now, with the rise of Donald Trump and his nationalist alt-right movement, I’ve come to feel that the values I sought to protect are in jeopardy. 
In Iran, theocratic fundmentalists sowed division and hatred of outsiders – of Westerners, Christians, and other religious minorities. Here in America, the right wing seems to have stolen passages directly from their playbook as it spreads hatred of immigrants, particularly Muslim ones. This form of nationalistic bigotry – Islamophobia – threatens the heart of our nation. When I chose to serve in the military, I did so to protect what I viewed as our sacred foundational values of liberty, equality, and democracy. Now, 20 years later, I’ve joined forces with fellow veterans to again fight for those sacred values, this time right here at home. 
""Death to America!"" 
As a child, I sat in my class at the international school one sunny morning and heard in the distance the faint sounds of gunfire and rising chants of ""Death to America!"" That day would define the rest of my life. 
It was Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1985. I was attending a unique school for bilingual students who had been born in Western nations. It had become the last refuge in that city with any tolerance for Western teaching, but that also made it a target for military fundamentalists. As the gunfire drew closer, I heard boots pounding the marble tiles outside, marching into our building, and thundering down the corridor toward my classroom. As I heard voices chanting ""Death to America!"" I remember wondering if I would survive to see my parents again. 
In a flash of green and black uniforms, those soldiers rushed into our classroom, grabbed us by our shirt collars, and yelled at us to get outside. We were then packed into the school’s courtyard where a soldier pointed his rifle at our group and commanded us to look up. Almost in unison, my classmates and I raised our eyes and saw the flags of our many nations being torn down and dangled from the balcony, then set ablaze and tossed, still burning, into the courtyard. As those flags floated to the ground in flames, the soldiers fired their guns in the air. Shouting, they ordered us – if we ever wanted to see our families again – to swear allegiance to the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini and trample on the remains of the burning symbols of our home countries. I scanned the smoke that was filling the courtyard for my friends and classmates and, horrified, watched them capitulate and begin to chant, ""Death to America!"" as they stomped on our sacred symbols. 
I was so angry that, young as I was, I began to plead with them to come to their senses. No one paid the slightest attention to an eight year old and yet, for the first time in my life, I felt something like righteous indignation. I suspect that, born and raised in America, I was already imbued with such a sense of privilege that I just couldn’t fathom the immense danger I was in. Certainly, I was acting in ways no native Iranian would have found reasonable. 
Across the smoke-filled courtyard, I saw a soldier coming at me and knew he meant to force me to submit. I spotted an American flag still burning, dropped to my knees, and grabbed the charred pieces from underneath a classmate’s feet. As the soldier closed in on me, I ducked and ran, still clutching my charred pieces of flag into a crowd of civilians who had gathered to witness the commotion. The events of that day would come to define all that I have ever stood for – or against. 
""Camel Jockey,""""Ayatollah,"" and ""Gandhi"" 
My parents and I soon returned to the United States and I entered third grade. More than anything, I just wanted to be normal, to fit in and be accepted by my peers. Unfortunately, my first name, Nader (which I changed to Nate upon joining the Navy), and my swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, were little help on that score, eliciting regular jibes from my classmates. Even at that young age, they had already mastered a veritable thesaurus of ethnic defamation, including ""camel jockey,""""sand-nigger,""""raghead,""""ayatollah,"" and ironically, ""Gandhi"" (which I now take as a compliment). My classmates regularly sought to ""other-ize"" me in those years, as if I were a lesser American because of my faith and ethnicity. 
Yet I remember that tingling in my chest when I first donned my Cub Scout uniform – all because of the American flag patch on its shoulder. Something felt so good about wearing it, a feeling I still had when I joined the military. It seems that the flag I tried to rescue in Tehran was stapled to my heart, or that’s how I felt anyway as I wore my country’s uniform. 
When I took my oath of enlistment in the U.S. Navy, I gave my mom a camera and asked her to take some photos, but she was so overwhelmed with pride and joy that she cried throughout the ceremony and managed to snap only a few images of the carpet. She cried even harder when I was selected to serve as the first Muslim-American member of the U.S. Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard . On that day, I was proud, too, and all the taunts of those bullies of my childhood seemed finally silenced. 
Being tormented because of my ethnicity and religion in those early years had another effect on me. It caused me to become unusually sensitive to the nature of other people. Somehow, I grasped that, if it weren’t for a fear of the unknown, there was an inherent goodness and frail humanity lurking in many of the kids who bullied and harassed me. Often, I discovered, those same bullies could be tremendously kind to their families, friends, or even strangers. I realized, then, that if, despite everything, I could lay myself bare and trust them enough to reach out in kindness, I might in turn gain their trust and they might then see me, too, and stop operating from such a place of fear and hate. 
Through patience, humor, and understanding, I was able to offer myself as the embodiment of my people and somehow defang the ""otherness"" of so much that Americans found scary. To this day, I have friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, and the military who tell me that I am the only Muslim they have ever known and that, had they not met me, their perspective on Islam would have been wholly subject to the prevailing fear-based narrative that has poisoned this country since September 11, 2001. 
In 1998, I became special assistant to the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy and then, in 1999, I was recruited to serve atthe Defense Intelligence Agency. In August 2000, I transferred to the Naval Reserve. 
In the wake of 9/11, I began to observe how so many of my fellow Americans were adopting a fundamentalist ""us vs. them"" attitude towards Muslims and Islam. I suddenly found myself in an America where the scattered insults I had endured as a child took on an overarching and sinister meaning and form, where they became something like an ideology and way of life. 
By the time I completed my military service in 2006, I had begun to understand that our policies in the Middle East,similarly disturbed, seemed in pursuit of little more than perpetual warfare. That, in turn, was made possible by the creation of a new enemy: Islam – or rather of a portrait, painted by the powers-that-be, of Islam as a terror religion, as a hooded villain lurking out there somewhere in the desert, waiting to destroy us. I knew that attempting to dispel, through the patient approach of my childhood, the kind of Islamophobia that now had the country by the throat was not going to be enough. Post-9/11 attacks on Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere were not merely childish taunts. 
For the first time in my life, in a country gripped by fear, I believed I was witnessing a shift, en masse, toward an American fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism that reflected a wanton lack of reason, not to mention fact. As a boy in Iran, I had witnessed the dark destination down which such a path could take a country. Now, it seemed to me, in America’s quest to escape the verydemons we had sown by our own misadventures in the Middle East, and forsaking the hallmarks of our founding, we risked becoming everything we sought to defeat. 
The Boy in the Schoolyard Grown Up 
On February 10, 2015, three young American students, Yusor Abu-Salha, Razan Abu-Salha, and Deah Shaddy Barakat, were executed at an apartment complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The killer was a gun-crazy white man filled with hate and described by his own daughter as ""a monster."" Those assassinations struck a special chord of sorrow and loss in me. My mom and I cried and prayed together for those students and their families. 
The incident in Chapel Hill also awoke in me some version of the righteous indignation I had felt so many years earlier in that smoke-filled courtyard in Iran. I would be damned if I stood by while kids in my country were murdered simply because of their faith. It violated every word of the oath I had taken when I joined the military and desecrated every value I held in my heart as a sacred tenet of our nation. White nationalists and bigots had, by then, thrown down the gauntlet for so much of this, using Islamophobia to trigger targeted assassinations in the United States. This was terrorism, pure and simple, inspired by hate-speakers here at home. 
At that moment, I reached out to fellow veterans who, I thought, might be willing to help – and it’s true what they say about soul mates being irrevocably drawn to each other. When I contacted Veterans For Peace , an organization dedicated to exposing the costs of war and militarism, I found the leadership well aware of the inherent dangers of Islamophobia and of the need to confront this new enemy. So Executive Director Michael McPhearson formed a committee of vets from around the country to decide how those of us who had donned uniforms to defend this land could best battle the phenomenon – and I, of course, joined it. 
From that committee emerged Veterans Challenge Islamophobia (VCI). It now has organizers in Arizona, Georgia, New Jersey, and Texas, and that’s just a beginning. Totally nonpartisan, VCI focuses on politicians of any party who engage in hate speech. We’ve met with leaders of American Muslim communities, sat with them through Ramadan, and attended their Iftar dinners to break our fasts together. In the wake of the Orlando shooting , we at VCI also mobilized to fight back against attempts to pit the Muslim community against the LGBTQ+ community. 
Our group was born of the belief that, as American military veterans, we had a responsibility to call out bigotry, hatred, and the perpetuation of endless warfare. We want the American Muslim community to know that they have allies, and that those allies are indeed veterans as well. We stand with them and for them and, for those of us who are Muslim, among them. 
Nationalism and xenophobia have no place in American life, and I, for my part, don’t think Donald Trump or anyone like him should be able to peddle Islamophobia in an attempt to undermine our national unity. Without Islamophobia, there no longer exists a ""clash of civilizations."" Without Islamophobia, whatever the problems in the world may be, there is no longer an ""us vs. them"" and it’s possible to begin reimagining a world of something other than perpetual war. 
As of now, this remains the struggle of my life, for despite my intense love for America, some of my countrymen increasingly see American Muslims as the ""other,"" the enemy. 
My Mom taught me as a boy that the only thing that mattered was what was in my heart. Now, with her in mind and as a representative of VCI, when I meet fellow Americans I always remember my childhood experiences with my bullying peers. And I still lay myself bare, as I did then. I give trust to gain trust, but always knowing that these days this isn’t just a matter of niceties. It’s a question of life or death. It’s part of a battle for the soul of our nation. 
In many ways, I still consider myself that boy in the school courtyard in Tehran trying to rescue charred pieces of that flag from those trampling feet. It’s just that now I’m doing it in my own country. 
Nate Terani is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served in military intelligence with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He is currently a member of the leadership team at Common Defense PAC and regional campaign organizer with Veterans Challenge Islamophobia . He is a featured columnist with the Arizona Muslim Voice newspaper. 
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook . Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead , and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World . 
Copyright 2016 Nate Terani",FAKE
"Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents ‹ › Since 2011, VNN has operated as part of the Veterans Today Network ; a group that operates over 50 plus media, information and service online sites for U.S. Military Veterans. Morning Joe Destroys Corrupt Clinton Foundation (Laughable) “Total Corruption” By VNN on October 28, 2016 'Pay for Play' and 'Quid Pro Quo' 'Shut Down The Foundation' 
Inside the Clinton’s Foundation and Personal Gains They are bragging that they can shake down foundation clients, for Bill Clinton money… This is sleazy… Joe Scarborough. 
Follow the money.",FAKE
"Johnson & Johnson Lose Third Multimillion Dollar Case Over Baby Talc Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay over $70 million in third cancer case Posted on November 1, 2016 by Carol Adl in News , US // 0 Comments 
Big Pharma giant Johnson & Johnson has lost yet another legal battle in a row over its talcum powder which allegedly causes cancer. 
A St. Louis jury awarded over $70 million dollars to a California woman as a result of her lawsuit which claimed that her ovarian cancer was caused by years of using Johnson & Johnson’s baby talc. 
The trial started on September 26th and ended on October 27th and is the third successful lawsuit this year against Johnson & Johnson. RELATED CONTENT 
Deborah Giannecchini of Modesto, California was diagnosed with the disease in 2012 and accused the company of ‘negligent conduct’ in making and and marketing the baby powder. 
The lawsuit claimed Mrs Giannecchini contracted the disease after using baby powder in an intimate area. 
Jim Onder, Mrs Giannecchini’s lawyer, said: ‘We are pleased the jury did the right thing. They once again reaffirmed the need for Johnson & Johnson to warn the public of the ovarian cancer risk associated with its product.’ 
However, the company has rejected there is any risk to using their product – even in intimate areas – and will appeal the massive award. 
Carol Goodrich, spokesman for the company said: ‘We deeply sympathize with the women and families impacted by ovarian cancer. We will appeal today’s verdict because we are guided by the science, which supports the safety of Johnson’s Baby Powder.’ 
Earlier this year, two other lawsuits in St Louis ended in jury verdicts worth a combined $127million. But two others in New Jersey were thrown out by a judge who said there wasn’t reliable evidence that talc leads to ovarian cancer, an often fatal but relatively rare form of cancer. 
Ovarian cancer accounts for about 22,000 of the 1.7million new cases of cancer expected to be diagnosed in the US this year. 
About 2,000 women have filed similar suits, and lawyers are reviewing thousands of other potential cases, most generated by ads touting the two big verdicts out of St. Louis – a $72million award in February to relatives of an Alabama woman who died of ovarian cancer, and a $55million award in May to a South Dakota survivor of the disease. 
Much research has found no link or a weak one between ovarian cancer and using baby powder for feminine hygiene, and most major health groups have declared talc harmless. Johnson & Johnson, whose baby powder dominates the market, maintains it’s perfectly safe. 
But Onder of the Onder Law Firm in suburban St Louis, which represented plaintiffs in all three St Louis cases, cited other research that began connecting talcum powder to ovarian cancer in the 1970s. 
He said case studies have indicated that women who regularly use talc on their genital area face up to a 40 per cent higher risk of developing ovarian cancer.",FAKE
"Republicans say Social Security’s support for people with disabilities will be 'broke' next year; the Obama budget suggests the system needs only a patch. But both sides agree: Something must be done by 2016.

Why are Americans more open to torture than other nations?

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont (l.) talks as committee chairman Sen. Michael Enzi (R) of Wyoming listens during a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington earlier this month

In the wake of Republican victories in the election last fall, pundits warned that Congress would be at loggerheads with President Obama on a number of budget issues in 2015, including over highway funding and the Department of Homeland Security.

Not high on the list of hot topics: Social Security.

Yet the vaunted social insurance system is suddenly a hot part of the fiscal debate in Washington – and it's not waiting for 2016 elections. The new Obama budget proposes a patch to the program’s support for people with disabilities, but Republicans say the system needs an overhaul, not a Band-Aid.

How urgent an issue is this? Specifically, how real is the financial trouble for the disability program?

The two sides are far apart on their characterizations, but they agree that something needs to be done, and a good case can be made that the reality is between the extremes.

Many Democrats and liberals say, in effect, that Social Security’s Disability Insurance program is in trouble only if Republicans refuse to rubber stamp Mr. Obama’s fix.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont, the top member of the Democratic caucus on the Senate Budget Committee, accused Republicans of trying “to manufacture a crisis where none exists.”

On the Republican side, Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, who chairs that panel, says that “by December of next year, the program will be broke.”

What's new is that after years of talk about Social Security's solvency and the need to reform it (or not), Congress has come to its first definitive fork in the road on the issue. Perhaps the problem isn’t as dire as Republicans say it is, but Obama also might not have a slam-dunk case for his patch.

A good many economists agree with the Republican view that reforms are needed to keep the system solvent – and the sooner they’re enacted, the better it will be for the nation’s fiscal health.

Here are key facts behind the rhetoric:

These facts suggest that Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah had a valid point when he argued this week on the Senate floor that “having a joint trust fund exhaustion as a target doesn’t solve any fundamental financial problem facing ... Social Security.”

At the same time, Democrats have a point when they note that rebalancing the tax revenues between the two trust funds has been done by Congress many times in the past.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes that Congress has reallocated tax receipts between these two funds in the past, but generally accompanied by reforms to Social Security.

House Republicans are seeking to block any such reallocation, unless it’s accompanied by reforms to shore up Social Security so promised benefits can be paid beyond 2033.

The Social Security trustees said in their 2014 annual report that although Congress may consider another rebalancing, such a move ""might serve to delay DI reforms and much needed financial corrections for OASDI as a whole.""

Regardless of whether the tax flows are rebalanced, the two programs may call for differing reforms to bolster their solvency.

In the old-age program, possible fixes include asking high-earning Americans to shoulder bigger tax burdens, modestly raising the retirement age, and adjusting the inflation index used for benefits (so that annual cost-of-living increases aren’t so big).

On the disability side, changes might include expanding incentives for people to work rather than rely on DI benefits. “Increasing employment among individuals with disabilities could improve their economic well-being and increase their autonomy while also reducing the fiscal strains on Social Security,” Stanford University economist Mark Duggan argued at a Senate hearing this week.

The disability program has grown markedly in recent years. By 2012 it was accounting for 18 percent of all Social Security benefits, up from 10 percent in 1970, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Much of the expansion stemmed from demographics, as an aging population included more people developing disabilities in their later work years, a 2013 CBO analysis concluded. But it also found the growth in the program to be related to 1984 legislation that loosened the definition of conditions qualifying as disabilities, and in fluctuations in the economy – such as the long jobs drought following the 2008 financial crisis.

“The DI rolls have barely grown for the last two years,” notes Kathy Ruffing of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That slowdown coincides with an easing of demographic pressures on the program, as the baby boomers retire, as well as the improving economy.",REAL
"We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Dentist Waiting Room Contains Disproportionate Number Of Boating Magazines November 11, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS , LIFESTYLE Share 0 Add Comment 
PATIENTS waiting for treatment in a Waterford dental clinic have informed WWN of the curious ration of magazines about boats to magazine about any other topic in the waiting room. 
Maguires Dental on St. Kenneth’s street in Waterford city appears to have four magazines about maritime affairs in it’s 9-strong pile of reading literature, with the remainder of the browsing material consisting of 5-year-old issues of Heat, Bella, and an Argos catalogue from 2012 with the back cover ripped off. 
Declan Hanlon, in for a filling, spoke exclusively to WWN about the difficulties in passing the time in the waiting room when one hasn’t got much interest in yachting or yacht maintenance. 
“I’m here over an hour like, and I’ve read up on Ashton Kutcher getting divorced from Demi Moore, the price of an electric shower, and how to make sure you’ve hired the right people to de-barnacle the side of your boat” said Hanlin, sounding kinda funny because his jaw is sore. 
“Whoever puts out the magazines, take a bow. I’ve seen some terrible reading material in waiting rooms in my time, but Jesus Christ this stuff is the worst. Trust me, if you’re coming to this place, you sure as fuck don’t need to learn about boat maintenance”. 
When pressed for better magazines in the waiting room, staff at Maguire Dental said they’d have a root around in a skip at the weekend, if they had time.",FAKE
"Over half of non-Donald Trump voters in Tuesday’s Republican primaries say they would consider a third party or independent candidate should the businessman pick up the Republican nomination for the White House.

The Fox News exit poll taken among voters in Missouri, Illinois, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, shows that six-in-ten non-Trump GOP voters would consider a third party candidate if the general election matchup was Trump versus Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Four-in-ten Republican primary voters overall would consider a third party or independent candidate, while approximately five-in-ten of late deciders would consider the same choice, Fox News’ exit poll said.

Trump himself has repeatedly raised the possibility of running an independent campaign should he be treated “unfairly” by the Republican Party, despite signing a pledge to support whoever the eventual Republican nominee may be.

Billionaire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was understood to have been considering a third party run in recent months, but eventually decided against a run after concluding that there was not a viable route to victory, and his candidacy would likely hand the Republicans the White House.

",REAL
"Next Prev Swipe left/right A very accurate pisstake of craft beer culture If you want a nice pint of Bishops Bellend, or something to eat served out of a vintage ambulance in the vaping section in the back, this craft beer knob knows just the place.",FAKE
"Marco Rubio said Sunday that he believes sexual orientation isn't a choice, but he is opposed to courts deciding on marriage for same-sex couples.

""I believe that sexual preference is something that people are born with,"" he said on CBS's ""Face the Nation.""

Rubio also said that he believes marriage should be ""between one man and one woman"" but insisted ""it's not that I'm against gay marriage.""

""States have always regulated marriage, and if a state wants to have a different definition, you should petition the state legislature and have a political debate,"" he said. ""I don't think courts should be making that decision, and I don't believe same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.""",REAL
" How Putin Derailed the West
By Mike Whitney “Nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
— Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era”, 1971
“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria .not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”
— Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Third Presidential Debate
 "" Counterpunch "" - Why is Hillary Clinton so eager to intensify US involvement in Syria when US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have all gone so terribly wrong?
The answer to this question is simple. It’s because Clinton doesn’t think that these interventions went wrong. And neither do any of the other members of the US foreign policy establishment. (aka–The Borg). In fact, in their eyes these wars have been a rousing success. Sure, a few have been critical of the public relations backlash from the nonexistent WMD in Iraq, (or the logistical errors, like disbanding the Iraqi Army) but–for the most part– the foreign policy establishment is satisfied with its efforts to destabilize the region and remove leaders that refuse to follow Washington’s diktats.
This is hard for ordinary people to understand. They can’t grasp why elite powerbrokers would want to transform functioning, stable countries into uninhabitable wastelands overrun by armed extremists, sectarian death squads and foreign-born terrorists. Nor can they understand what has been gained by Washington’s 15 year-long rampage across the Middle East and Central Asia that has turned a vast swathe of strategic territory into a terrorist breeding grounds? What is the purpose of all this?
First, we have to acknowledge that the decimation and de facto balkanization of these countries is part of a plan. If it wasn’t part of a plan, than the decision-makers would change the policy. But they haven’t changed the policy. The policy is the same. The fact that the US is using foreign-born jihadists to pursue regime change in Syria as opposed to US troops in Iraq, is not a fundamental change in the policy. The ultimate goal is still the decimation of the state and the elimination of the existing government. This same rule applies to Libya and Afghanistan both of which have been plunged into chaos by Washington’s actions.
But why? What is gained by destroying these countries and generating so much suffering and death?
Here’s what I think: I think Washington is involved in a grand project to remake the world in a way that better meets the needs of its elite constituents, the international banks and multinational corporations. Brzezinski not only refers to this in the opening Quote: , he also explains what is taking place: The nation-state is being jettisoned as the foundation upon which the global order rests. Instead, Washington is erasing borders, liquidating states, and removing strong, secular leaders that can mount resistance to its machinations in order to impose an entirely new model on the region, a new world order. The people who run these elite institutions want to create an interconnected-global free trade zone overseen by the proconsuls of Big Capital, in other words, a global Eurozone that precludes the required state institutions (like a centralized treasury, mutual debt, federal transfers) that would allow the borderless entity to function properly.
Deep state powerbrokers who set policy behind the smokescreen of our bought-and-paid-for congress think that one world government is an achievable goal provided they control the world’s energy supplies, the world’s reserve currency and become the dominant player in this century’s most populous and prosperous region, Asia. This is essentially what Hillary’s “pivot” to Asia is all about.
The basic problem with Washington’s NWO plan is that a growing number of powerful countries are still attached to the old world order and are now prepared to defend it. This is what’s really going on in Syria, the improbable alliance of Russia, Syria, Iran and Hezbollah have stopped the US military juggernaut dead in its tracks. The unstoppable force has hit the immovable object and the immovable object has prevailed so far.
Naturally, the foreign policy establishment is upset about these new developments, and for good reason. The US has run the world for quite a while now, so the rolling back of US policy in Syria is as much a surprise as it is a threat. The Russian Airforce deployed to Syria a full year ago in September, but only recently has Washington shown that it’s prepared to respond by increasing its support of its jihadists agents on the ground and by mounting an attack on ISIS in the eastern part of the country, Raqqa. But the real escalation is expected to take place when Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017. That’s when the US will directly engage Russia militarily, assuming that their tit-for-tat encounters will be contained within Syria’s borders. It’s a risky plan, but it’s the next logical step in this bloody fiasco. Neither party wants a nuclear war, but Washington believes that doing nothing is tantamount to backing down, therefore, Hillary and her neocon advisors can be counted on to up the ante. “No-fly zone”, anyone?
The assumption is that eventually, and with enough pressure, Putin will throw in the towel. But this is another miscalculation. Putin is not in Syria because he wants to be nor is he there because he values his friendship with Syrian President Bashar al Assad. That’s not it at all. Putin is in Syria because he has no choice. Russia’s national security is at stake. If Washington’s strategy of deploying terrorists to topple Assad succeeds, then the same ploy will be attempted in Iran and Russia. Putin knows this, just like he knows that the scourge of foreign-backed terrorism can decimate entire regions like Chechnya. He knows that it’s better for him to kill these extremists in Aleppo than it will be in Moscow. So he can’t back down, that’s not an option.
But, by the same token, he can compromise, in other words, his goals and the goals of Assad do not perfectly coincide. For example, he could very well make territorial concessions to the US for the sake of peace that Assad might not support.
But why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he continue to fight until every inch of Syria’s sovereign territory is recovered?
Because it’s not in Russia’s national interest to do so, that’s why. Putin has never tried to conceal the fact that he’s in Syria to protect Russia’s national security. That’s his main objective. But he’s not an idealist, he’s a pragmatist who’ll do whatever he has to to end the war ASAP. That means compromise.
This doesn’t matter to the Washington warlords .yet. But it will eventually. Eventually there will be an accommodation of some sort. No one is going to get everything they want, that much is certain. For example, it’s impossible to imagine that Putin would launch a war on Turkey to recover the territory that Turkish troops now occupy in N Syria. In fact, Putin may have already conceded as much to Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan in their recent meetings. But that doesn’t mean that Putin doesn’t have his red lines. He does. Aleppo is a red line. Turkish troops will not be allowed to enter Aleppo.
The western corridor, the industrial and population centers are all red lines. On these, there will be no compromise. Putin will help Assad remain in power and keep the country largely intact. But will Turkey control sections in the north, and will the US control sections in the east?
Probably. This will have to be worked out in negotiations, but its unlikely that the country’s borders will be the same as they were before the war broke out. Putin will undoubtedly settle for a halfloaf provided the fighting ends and security is restored. In any event, he’s not going to hang around until the last dog is hung.
Unfortunately, we’re a long way from any settlement in Syria, mainly because Washington is nowhere near accepting the fact that its project to rule the world has been derailed. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? The bigshots who run the country are still in denial. It hasn’t sunk in yet that the war is lost and that their nutty jihadist-militia plan has failed.
It’s going to take a long time before Washington gets the message that the world is no longer its oyster. The sooner they figure it out, the better it’ll be for everyone. Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition . He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com .",FAKE
"The downing of a Russian warplane by Turkish F-16s over the Syrian border has split two obstinate strongmen deeply involved in Syria’s increasingly crowded civil war: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Officials from both countries on Wednesday discounted the possibility of direct conflict over the downing. “We are not going to wage a war on Turkey,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters, although he said Moscow viewed the attack as a “planned provocation.”

The Turkish government offered its condolences for the deaths of a Russian pilot and a marine in the downing of the plane and an attempted rescue of its crew, Russia’s first combat fatalities in the country’s two-month-old airstrike campaign in Syria.

But the incident has revealed the potential for conflict between foreign powers supporting and opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad despite a shared opposition to the Islamic State. In particular, Russian airstrikes against Turkish-backed rebel groups have fomented deep frustration in Ankara.

“There is a clear message from the Turks with this downing of a Russian jet,” said Mustafa Alani, a Middle East expert at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center. “It is a check on Russia’s policy in the region. Russia can’t do whatever it wants.”

Russia says its Su-24 bomber did not violate Turkish airspace, but Turkish officials say it did. Putin hypothesized Tuesday that even if the plane did briefly enter Turkish airspace, it was not a threat.

[This is the Russian plane that Turkey just shot down]

In Moscow at least, the event is being seen as something larger than an attack on an errant jet.

“The conflict happened because Russia was attacking rebel groups allied with Turkey,” said Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, when asked about the possibility of an accidental clash. “It’s wrong to say that this happened because of anything like crowded skies.”

The Russian Defense Ministry announced in a statement Wednesday that Russian fighter jets will now escort the bombers, and Moscow will move into Syria powerful new ground-to-air missiles that can reach across the country and far into Turkey from the Russian air base in the province of Latakia on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

Additionally, analysts say, Russia will choose from a menu of asymmetric responses in retaliation against Turkey, including informal economic sanctions and providing military aid to Turkey’s enemies, including the Kurds.

“Of course, Russia is going to intensify strikes on that part of Syria and on those groups that are affiliated with Turkey,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Russian political analyst. He added that Russia probably would not scale back its deployment in Syria because of the incident.

On Wednesday evening, Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu, reported that Russian airstrikes targeted Turkish aid vehicles in the Syrian border town of Azzaz, killing at least seven drivers. The town is a hub for supplies being delivered from Turkey to Syrian rebels fighting government forces in the nearby city of Aleppo. The details of the incident could not be assessed independently.

Shady al-Ouaineh, a media ­representative for Determined Storm, a rebel group associated with the Free Syrian Army, said in a telephone interview that Russia had dramatically intensified air raids in rebel-held areas of Latakia province. Syrian government forces and allied Shiite militiamen from Iraq, backed by Russian air cover, have been trying to advance on some of the last opposition holdouts in the province, said Ouaineh, close to where the Russian jet was shot down.

“It is clear Russia is taking out its revenge on us here,” he said.

[NATO faces new Mideast crisis after downing of Russian jet by Turkey]

Russian attitudes toward Turkey, which were reasonably friendly a year ago, have turned cold with alarming speed. Most Russian tour operators stopped selling travel packages to Turkey on Wednesday. Protesters in Moscow pelted the Turkish Embassy with eggs and rocks, shattering windows. Russian lawmakers introduced a bill that would criminalize denying that the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire was a “genocide.” The issue remains highly sensitive: Turkey acknowledges that atrocities occurred but has long denied that what took place constituted a genocide.

Last December, Russia diverted a planned gas line away from Europe to Turkey in order to spurn the West. That project’s fate is also now in doubt.

“The consequences are going to be significant,” Lukyanov said.

Russia will seek retribution against Turkey but wants to avoid antagonizing the West, Baunov said. “If this becomes a fight between Russia and the West, then that goes against the goals of the intervention in the first place: to escape international isolation connected to sanctions,” he said.

Those sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and backed separatist rebels in Ukraine’s southeast.

President Obama, meeting with French President François Hollande in Washington on Tuesday, said that Turkey had a right to defend its airspace and accused Russia of attacking moderate opposition groups as opposed to the Islamic State. Russia has said it carries out airstrikes only against terrorist organizations.

“They are operating very close to a Turkish border and they are going after a moderate opposition that are supported by not only Turkey but a wide range of countries,” Obama said. At the same time he discouraged “any kind of escalation.”

[U.S., France to press allies for more assets in fight against the Islamic State]

The frantic Russian search for the missing bomber crew was marred by the death of a marine on an Mi-8 helicopter hit by an antitank missile.

“One on board was wounded when he parachuted down and killed in a savage way on the ground by the jihadists,” Alexander Orlov, the Russian ambassador to France, told Europe 1 radio. “The other managed to escape and, according to the latest information, has been picked up by the Syrian army and should be going back to the Russian air force base.”

Putin has promised the Russian public a limited engagement in Syria, with no ground forces, to limit casualties. Although the Syrian army has managed to halt a rebel offensive, Russian air power has not yet led to a significant turn of the tide in the war.

“Turkey dealt a major blow to Putin, and now he’s been placed between a rock and a hard place,” said Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “There could be mission creep where Russia will get entangled in an unwinnable war.”",REAL
""" 'Your armed forces on Monday carried out focused air strikes in Libya against Daesh camps, places of gathering and training, and weapons depots,' the military said in a statement, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

""It was the first time Egypt confirmed launching air strikes against the group in neighboring Libya, suggesting President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is ready to escalate his battle against militants seeking to topple his government.

""The military said the dawn strike, in which Libya's air force also participated, 'achieved its targets accurately' and the pilots returned to base safely, the Egyptian military said, as state television ran brief footage of a fighter plane taking off in darkness.""",REAL
"President Obama is plotting with his attorney general to get our guns.

The president will purportedly  bypass Congress and crack down on small scale gun sellers. Fox News reports the plan would require gun sellers to order background checks on prospective buyers and tighten laws for gun sales to those who have committed domestic-abuse offenses.

Click here to sign up for Todd’s American Dispatch – a  must-read for conservatives!

If the White House really wants to crack down on gun violence -- maybe they should enforce the laws that are already on the books.

But that's not the point. This president ultimately wants to disarm the nation.

The primary reason our Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment was to protect all the other amendments.

Just after the Muslim terrorist attack in San Bernardino the Washington Post found that 53 percent of voters oppose a ban on assault weapons -- a record high.

The American people seem to understand what the president does not -- guns keep our families safe.

So instead of declaring war on law-abiding gun owners  -- maybe the president ought to declare war on the true threat facing our nation -- radical Islam.

The National Rifle Association accused the president of pulling a “political stunt” and Republican presidential candidates have widely condemned the president’s gun-control plans.

“The president is a petulant child,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told ""Fox News Sunday."" “Whenever he doesn’t get what he wants…this president acts like a king.”

“It is delusional, dangerous, not to mention unconstitutional,” she said. “We have a long list of criminals who own guns, who routinely purchase guns. We know who these people are, and we are not prosecuting any of them.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott summed up it up best in a tweet:

""Obama Wants to impose more gun control. My response? COME & TAKE IT.""

Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is ""God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values."" Follow Todd on Twitter @ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

",REAL
"Sen. Bernie Sanders is calling out Donald Trump for withdrawing his offer to debate, an apparent attempt to goad the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and self-described “tough guy” into reconsidering ahead of California’s big June 7 primary.

Sanders said Friday night on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that he would still “love” to debate Trump and essentially asked him to reconsider.

“First he said he would do it,” the Democratic presidential candidate said. “Then he said he wouldn’t. Then he said he would, then he said he wouldn’t do it.

“So I would hope that if he changed his mind four times in two days changing the fifth time (would be possible.) You know, Trump claims to be a real tough guy, pushes people around. Hey Donald, come on up and let's debate about the future of America.""

 



Trump recently suggested he would debate Sanders after Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton declined a Fox News Channel offer to debate him.

However, Trump apparently changed his mind after getting 1,237 delegates on Thursday, the number needed to clinch the GOP nomination.

“Now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second-place finisher,” Trump said Friday through his campaign. “As much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders -- and it would be an easy payday -- I will wait to debate the first place finisher in the Democratic Party, probably Crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.”

Clinton is now just 73 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to clinch her party’s nomination, with 913 still at stake, including 475 in California.

Sanders has won nearly as many state contests as Clinton, including a string of wins in the past couple of months but has just 1,542 delegates.

The Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist has been campaigning furiously in liberal-leaning California -- in hopes of winning or at least taking a sizeable number of delegates.

He has vowed to keep his campaign alive into the party’s July nomination convention, and more delegates could give him more influence over the party’s platform.

California has one of the most expensive media markets in the country. With campaigns having already spent so much of their money on earlier races, a national TV debate with Trump could certainly help Sanders.

He first learned about Trump cancelling the debate offer at campaign event earlier Friday in Los Angeles County, with his remarks sounding like the ground work for his HBO comments.

“I heard he was going to be debate. Then I heard he was not going to debate, then I heard he was going to debate. Well I hope that he changes his mind again. (Trump’s) known to change mind many times in the day. He’s a big tough guy. Mr. Trump what are you afraid of? Why won’t you debate here in California?""",REAL
"EDITOR’s NOTE: This story was originally published on May 1. It has been updated to include the news that Pataki has announced his presidential campaign.

The tall man in a blazer burst into the Chipotle in the middle of the afternoon. He had a smile, a TV camera following him and the jovial air of a man who expects to be recognized.

“George Pataki, from New York,” he said, shaking hands with the first two diners he met. “We’re doing the non-Hillary tour. We’re actually saying ‘hi’ to people.”

Then the tall man moved on, to quiz the next table about their food. (“Chicken burrito? I gotta try something new.”) When he was gone, the first two diners wondered: Who was that? Do they not have Chipotle where he lives?

“It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m from New York,’ ” said Aaron Lee, 22. “What are you doing here, then?”

Officially, what George E. Pataki was doing was flirting — for the fourth time in 16 years — with the idea of running for president of the United States.

A few weeks ago, Pataki was in New Hampshire: raising money, and telling people that he was close, close, close to making a decision. “I’m strongly leaning toward making the run,” he told a radio station in New Hampshire.

This happened three times before. Every other time Pataki flirted with running, he didn’t [On Thursday, the Republican ex-governor of New York announced that this time, he is actually is running].

Spring is the flirting season in American politics: in the early part of this year, more than 20 politicians were officially “considering” or “exploring” a run for president. The key to understanding this strange every-four-years ritual is to understand that there are two kinds of flirting.

For the big-name candidates, the presidential flirt is a useful, temporary, legal dodge. They will run. They are essentially running already. But they don’t want to admit it yet, because that would bring on tighter fundraising rules.

For the others — particularly the eight or so who have fallen out of the political spotlight — the flirt can be an end in itself. It allows them to experience some of the most pleasant parts of a campaign: audiences, media attention, a chance to raise money. And then it lets them escape before they have to face the less-pleasant parts. Such as getting crushed.

This time, apparently, Pataki is ready to take that risk.

“I make a joke that every four years, there’s the Olympics, there’s the World Cup and I come to New Hampshire thinking about running for president,” Pataki told a crowd of 15 people during a speech at a Sea-Doo and snowmobile dealership in Laconia, N.H.

Nobody laughed. Then Pataki said this election was different: “This time, in all honesty, I see things differently.”

Pataki, 69, has already lived a remarkable political life. The son of a postman, he unseated liberal icon Mario Cuomo (D) in a 1994 governor’s race — one of New York’s legendary upsets. Pataki then won second and third terms by large margins. He led New York through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the rebuilding of Ground Zero.

But he has not held office since 2007. Since then, his political star has faded somewhat.

“Who is Bloomberg?” a “Jeopardy!” contestant said in January while looking at a photo of Pataki.

The category was “New York governors,” and the clue was “He took New York into the 21st century.”

“No,” host Alex Trebek said. The other two contestants stared blankly at the same photo, without buzzing in, until time ran out.

Another sign: There used to be a museum about Pataki in his hometown of Peekskill, N.Y. It opened after he left office, complete with an exhibit where schoolkids could see Pataki’s gubernatorial desk.

Then, in 2013, it closed. Its leaders thought maybe more schoolkids would visit if it was a Web site.

“Basically, it would be like a monkey flying out of a unicorn’s [posterior]” if Pataki won the 2016 Republican nomination, said Florida-based GOP strategist Rick Wilson. If Pataki got into the GOP primary, he would face obstacles that go far beyond his meager name recognition. He is pro-choice. He signed strict gun-control laws. He let state government spending grow rapidly.

In recent polls, his best showing has been 1 percent.

“Let’s just say a meteor strikes the first debate and kills everyone except Pataki, who is stuck in traffic. Let’s hypothesize for a moment,” Wilson said. He thought. No. It still wouldn’t be Pataki. They’d find somebody else.

But despite those long odds, Pataki came to New Hampshire last month for his eighth flirting-related visit since September. He later made a ninth.

“I know I can appeal — not just to Republicans and conservatives — but to independents and intelligent Democrats as well,” Pataki told an audience of eight College Republicans at the University of New Hampshire.

This is the heart of Pataki’s pitch to voters. He’s a Republican who won big in a blue state. He’s a reformer who would tame Washington’s bureaucracy. “I go there today, and it’s like I’m on an alien planet,” Pataki said of Washington. “They are an insular world. They talk a language you don’t understand.”

In New Hampshire, Pataki’s crowds were not big. At the official opening of his super PAC’s office in Manchester, for instance, 25 people turned up. And one of them turned out to be an incognito staffer for Donald Trump. Think about that. If this was an intentional act of flirter-against-flirter espionage (which the Trump staffer denied), it might be the most pointless dirty trick in the history of American politics.

Nevertheless, wherever Pataki went, the crowds were pleasant and admiring.

“Under a Pataki administration,” one man asked him at a diner, how would Middle East policy change?

This is one of the things that makes flirting worthwhile: for an ex-politician, it is an unlocked door back into the American political arena.

That can mean new audiences for men used to audiences. The same College Republicans, for instance, had recently hosted a 2016 flirter whose odds are even longer than Pataki’s: former Virginia governor James Gilmore III (R). Gilmore left office in 2002.

“I mean, thank God for Wikipedia,” said UNH senior Elliot Gault, 22.

And the same kind of magic works on the news media. Before former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee (D) announced he was exploring a presidential run on April 9, The Washington Post had not quoted him about anything in nine months.

In the weeks after that, The Post quoted him eight times. Er, nine.

“Clinton is just too hawkish,” Chafee said in an interview, repeating his signature attack line on the Democratic front-runner, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The other great thing about flirting is the money. While you flirt, you can raise it. And if you don’t run, you can spend it anyway.

In 1999, for instance, Pataki flirted with a campaign, then gave up and endorsed George W. Bush. In 2007, he did it again. “I was very serious about it” that time, Pataki says now. “But: Mayor Giuliani.” The former New York City mayor was in the race, and Pataki didn’t think there was room for two New Yorkers. So he got out.

Both times, Pataki raised more than $1 million in donors’ money. Both times, the New York Times reported, Pataki spent it — giving to allied Republican candidates, paying for Pataki’s travels, and paying a circle of Pataki’s own advisers, strategists and fundraisers.

“I was very serious about it,” Pataki says. “But everywhere I went, people had committed to Mitt Romney.” He pulled the plug but still raised and spent more than $600,000 via a political nonprofit.

This year, Pataki is raising money again — for a super PAC called “We the People, Not Washington.” Among those leading the fundraising are several Pataki associates who got paid from the money he raised in past flirtations. Aides wouldn’t say how much he’d raised or spent this time.

“Because he was my friend, I wouldn’t feel cheated [if Pataki didn’t run]. I’m never one to say that a guy should be a suicide lunatic,” said Peter Kalikow, a New York real estate titan who donated to Pataki’s super PAC this year. In the last presidential cycle, Kalikow was a major backer of another long shot: pizza executive Herman Cain.

Pataki’s aides said they had a strategy ready if their man really got into the race. He’ll stand out in the debates with his genial wit and executive experience. Then he’ll surge in New Hampshire, by appealing to libertarian-leaning . . .

Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

“When I heard the name, I was like, ‘Pataki. Pataki. Pataki.’ But I didn’t know that he was the mayor of New York,” Tony Coutee, 42, a crane operator who was at the second table Pataki visited in that Manchester Chipotle, said incorrectly. After Pataki left his table, Coutee said, “I Googled him and found out.”

While the two of them were talking, Pataki was into a full-blown, campaign-style restaurant schmooze. He bumped elbows with the grill man. He walked back to greet employees in the walk-in cooler (“He just shook my hand and I said I didn’t want to be on camera, and he asked if I was on parole,” one said, bewildered.) Pataki went through the line and loudly asked if he could leave a tip.

Then he came back and sat down with Coutee and Soto. “I’m trying the chicken burrito,” Pataki told them.

The two men quickly got up to leave.

“Kinda normal,” Soto said of this only-in-flirting-season interaction, a pseudo-conversation with a pseudo-candidate, who never said what he was running for. “But abnormal.”

Anu Narayanswamy in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"VIDEO : Hillary Worshipper Rachel Maddow IN TEARS Over Reopened FBI Investigation VIDEO : Hillary Worshipper Rachel Maddow IN TEARS Over Reopened FBI Investigation LOL By TruthFeedNews October 29, 2016 
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow broke down into tears live on the air while reporting on the FBI reopening their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after finding new evidence on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. 
Media analyst Mark Dice has the story. 
Watch the video: 
Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. ",FAKE
"The Israeli leader may be able to form a more stable government than his last, but he had to run hard to the right in the campaign and reverse his stance supporting a Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets supporters at the party's election headquarters in Tel Aviv, Wednesday, March 18, 2015. Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party scored a resounding victory in the country's election, final results showed Wednesday, a stunning turnaround after a tight race that had put his lengthy rule in jeopardy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 11th-hour campaign decision to swerve deep into right-wing territory – reversing his support for a Palestinian state and urging supporters to counter “droves” of Arab voters – has paid off in a stunning victory.

His Likud party, trailing its leftist opponents in the final polls, not only closed the gap but surged to a six-seat victory over the Zionist Camp’s 24 seats in national elections Tuesday, according to a near-complete tally Wednesday morning.

The clear margin will almost certainly give Mr. Netanyahu a fourth term as prime minister. And while President Reuven Rivlin called Tuesday night for the two top parties to form a national unity government, both rejected the idea.

Netanyahu now looks much better positioned to build a right-wing nationalist government that would allow him to govern unfettered by the wide ideological differences that doomed his previous coalition.

“Dear friends, against all odds, we got a great victory for the Likud party,” he said in a jubilant election night speech at Likud headquarters in Tel Aviv, to chants of “Bibi! Bibi! Bibi!”

The fiercely fought campaign, which just days before the election seemed headed toward a major political upheaval, was in many ways a referendum on Netanyahu. The two main campaign slogans were, “Only Netanyahu” and “Just not Netanyahu.”

With turnout increasing to 68.4 percent, and nearly a quarter of the votes cast for Likud, the voters’ answer was clear. But the political and social cost – never mind the $60 million price-tag of holding elections – remains to be seen. Once the confetti settles, and Netanyahu turns to the task of actually trying to rule a deeply fractured country besieged by enemies, he will be facing many of the same challenges – but with few fresh ideas, and perhaps fewer friends.

“I was very disappointed with the fact that there was no real discussion about the issues,” Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein of the Likud party told reporters Tuesday night in Tel Aviv. “It was probably one of the lowest campaigns we had, and we wasted the opportunity as a country and a society, because when exactly are we going to discuss the real issues if not during an election campaign?”

Netanyahu called early elections last fall after firing two of his coalition partners, Finance Minister Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni of the Hatnua party. He argued that he couldn’t govern effectively with such an ideological gap. One of the divisive issues was the coalition parties' opposition to a bill that would have formally identified Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, a move some saw as undermining its democratic nature and marginalizing the country’s 20 percent Arab population.

At the time, another Netanyahu victory seemed a pretty sure bet. But Ms. Livni’s decision to partner with the Labor party’s Isaac Herzog gave the prime minister a run for his money, attracting voters with their more moderate position on Palestinians as well as their commitment to socioeconomic issues. As of the final polls last Friday, they were projected to win by three to four seats.

So Netanyahu, widely recognized even by his foes as a shrewd politician, abruptly switched tack. After weeks of promoting himself as the only leader who could protect Israel against Iran, Hamas, and the Islamic State, he started talking about the things that were hurting Likud’s traditional blue-collar base – the skyrocketing cost of housing and groceries. He vowed to appoint as finance minister Moshe Kahlon of the Kulanu party, a former Likudnik from a humble background whose monopoly-busting policies reduced charges for cellphone plans by 90 percent.

Netanyahu also openly cannibalized votes from estranged right-wing allies like Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party and Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu. A day before the vote, he declared that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch, reneging on a 2009 pledge of support for the two-state solution to the Middle East conflict.

That puts him on a collision course with the Obama administration, which is already fuming over his bombastic speech to Congress two weeks ago in which he criticized a potential Iran nuclear deal. But the reversal appears to have played well with his base.

As early indications Tuesday showed an uptick in Israeli Arab voter turnout, Netanyahu warned his supporters that “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls,” putting a right-wing government in danger if they didn’t get out of their homes and vote.

When exit polls came in Tuesday night, it was clear that his tactics had paid off. All three Israeli TV news channels showed him pulling even with the Zionist Camp led by Mr. Herzog and Ms. Livni, with each party getting 27 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and one poll putting Likud at 28.

But only Wednesday morning was the full picture clear. With 99 percent of the votes counted, Likud is projected to get 30 seats to the Zionist Camp’s 24. Its victory came at the expense of estranged Netanyahu allies. Mr. Bennett, a rising star in the last elections, had to settle for eight seats; Mr. Lieberman was relegated to a record-low of six. Mr. Lapid of Yesh Atid, who as a rookie in 2013 captured 19 seats, also suffered and was downsized to 11.

“We had an atmosphere of a neck-and-neck race, and when you have such an atmosphere we know that … first of all you increase the turnout,” says Abraham Diskin, a political scientist and former statistician for the Central Elections Committee. “Second, the two really leading parties are gaining power from the satellite parties, and that … really happened here.”

The two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, got seven and six, respectively, and could well become coalition partners for Netanyahu. He is also courting Mr. Kahlon, whose Kulanu party secured a solid 10 seats.

The Joint List, a bloc of Arab parties, made history by becoming the third-largest bloc for the first time, with 14 seats, while the left-wing Meretz party barely squeaked into the Knesset with four.

Prof. Avi Degani, a pollster and president of the Geocartography Knowledge Group, told reporters Wednesday morning that the unexpected surge from Likud was due in part to inaccurate polling that may have galvanized long-time Likud supporters who were on the fence.

“People who supported Likud got scared…. They say, I leave my fear and my inability to decide and I’m going to save the right and the Likud.”

That certainly describes voters like Ran Ohayon, who was considering abandoning Likud but changed his mind on the eve of elections.

“There’s a serious threat,” he said, sipping a foamy coffee outside a trendy Tel Aviv café on Tuesday. “We haven’t been in this situation since the [1973 Yom] Kippur War.”

“There’s a lot of people thinking like me, and you will see that in the election,” he said.

And he was right.",REAL
"Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took his protest of the Iran nuclear agreement to the U.S. airwaves on Sunday.

""This deal will both threaten us and threaten our neighbors,"" Netanyahu said on CNN's State of the Union.

Netanyahu, who also appeared on NBC's Meet The Press and ABC's This Week, said the proposal will leave Iran's nuclear infrastructure in place.

The Israeli leader spoke days after the U.S., allies and Iran reached the framework of an agreement in which the allies would reduce sanctions on Iran if it gives up the means to make nuclear weapons.

The parties will now try to work out the details of a final agreement, with a deadline of June 30.

President Obama and aides said diplomacy is the only alternative to military action against Iran's nuclear program.

In his weekend radio address, Obama said the agreement would deny Iran the plutonium and enriched uranium needed to build a nuclear weapon.

""Moreover,"" Obama said, ""international inspectors will have unprecedented access to Iran's nuclear program because Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world, If Iran cheats, the world will know it.""

In his television appearances, Netanyahu said the United States and its allies should intensify economic sanctions on Iran in order to force it to give up more of its nuclear program. He also questioned the effectiveness of inspections, saying Iran has cheated in the past.

""I'm not trying to kill any deal,"" Netanyahu said on NBC. ""I'm trying to kill a bad deal.""

Netanyahu also said the framework will lift sanctions on Iran too quickly, improving its economy. He told ABC that Iranian leaders will use the new money ""to pump up their terror machine worldwide.""

Iran, meanwhile, says its nuclear program is designed for peaceful energy purposes, not weapons.

In his radio address, Obama said he is looking forward to the debate with critics over Iran.

""As president and commander in chief, I firmly believe that the diplomatic option — a comprehensive, long-term deal like this — is by far the best option,"" Obama said. ""For the United States. For our allies. And for the world.""",REAL
"This post was originally published on this site 
The criminal investigation underway over Anthony Weiner’s alleged child sex infraction has a couple of characteristics that make it especially awkward for Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, the estranged wife of Weiner and close companion of Hillary. 
Ed Timperlake points out to me that in an underage sex investigation, all electronic communications of the investigative target are pursued. This probably led to the grand jury that was announced 11 days ago issuing a subpoena for all of the devices in the possession of Weiner and his family, including Huma. As Lucianne Goldberg quipped, they even seize the Speak & Spell toys in these cases. This grand jury is in New York, possibly less politically supervised than the first Hillary email investigation. 
Evidently, some of these devices were not turned over in the first investigation and contained “pertinent” emails. We do not know with certainty, but some reports indicate the pertinent emails may have been found on Weiner’s laptop. Recall that the initial investigation did not convene a grand jury and did not, therefore, have subpoena power. It is possible that Huma Abedin misled the FBI over the existence of pertinent emails on her then husband’s computing devices. 
So what could have been on the laptop Carlos Danger used for sexting? 
Adam Yoshida, with a background in information technology consulting for affluent and powerful people emails: 
…Clinton [was] using e-mails seemingly like most people use IMs or text messaging. Her holding onto Blackberries (and seven switching back to older models when the software was upgraded) [demonstrates this]. It might even explain at least SOME of the motivation for the e-mail server itself. I’ve seen plenty of cases where a powerful person says basically, “I want my e-mails on this thing” and, regardless of whether it’s a good solution, people respond, “ready-aye-ready.” 
So, what could they have found on Weiner’s computers that would have caused such alarm? 
I’d think one of two things: 
1) Either that Huma signed in her e-mail account at one point and, presumably, it being Exchange or IMAP, dumped the whole account onto the computer and that account has plenty of e-mails between her and Clinton that were deleted. 
Or – 
2) There’s mention of Huma having a Yahoo account to which she would forward things for printing purposes. This struck me right away because, of course, printers are often difficult to configure as are e-mail accounts. It struck me as strange, yet very believable, that she mentioned that she’d forward stuff to that Yahoo account to print them. I mean, printing in theory should be platform agnostic, but – if you’re technically unsophisticated – you might have serious problems trying to setup an e-mail account or a printer on a device. Thus I imagine a scenario where she has a portable machine that either she can’t (or can’t be, for some reason) configured to use her home printer and a desktop machine (I imagine an slightly-older iMac here) that’s physically connected to the printer that serves as a shared “family computer” or whatever. She either can’t setup the e-mail account on that computer (perhaps it requires a VPN or something like that) or doesn’t want to, so she forwards everything that she wants to print to the Yahoo account that she does have setup on that computer. The FBI takes this computer as part of the Weiner investigation and, bam, they find thousands of e-mail messages – again, evidence of what was destroyed earlier. ",FAKE
"  Three local military veterans to receive recognition   31, 2016 veterans 
BY STEVEN MAYER 
Three military veterans from Bakersfield will be among more than 100 honored Sunday at an event in Sacramento designed to recognize former soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen who now serve the needs of veterans in their own communities. 
David L. Jackson, Deborah K. Johnson and Wayne Wright — each of whom work in veteran assistance or support capacities in Bakersfield — will be honored at the sixth annual “Spirit of Veterans Day — Saluting Community Service Excellence” Ceremony. 
Held at the B.T. Collins Army Reserve Center, the annual gala was established in 2011 by what is now the VFW Auxilliary, Post 67 with the assistance of Rep. Doris O. Matsui, D-Sacramento. 
  www.bakersfield.com >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The   31,    ",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) Donald Trump will become the 45th president of the United States, CNN projects, a historic victory for outsiders that represents a stunning repudiation of Washington's political establishment.

The billionaire real estate magnate and former reality star needed an almost perfect run through the swing states -- and he got it, winning Ohio, North Carolina and Florida.

The Republican swept to victory over Hillary Clinton in the ultimate triumph for a campaign that repeatedly shattered the conventions of politics to pull off a remarkable upset. Clinton conceded to Trump in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Speaking at a victory party in New York, Trump was gracious toward Clinton and called for unity.

""We owe (Clinton) a very major debt of gratitude to her for her service to our country,"" Trump said. ""I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.""

He added: ""I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.""

Trump won with 289 electoral votes compared to 218 for Clinton, according to CNN projections.

Trump's supporters embraced his plainspoken style, assault on political correctness and vow to crush what he portrayed in the final days of his campaign as a corrupt, globalized elite -- epitomized by the Clintons -- that he claimed conspired to keep hard-working Americans down.

His winning coalition of largely white, working-class voters suggests a populace desperate for change and disillusioned with an entire generation of political leaders and the economic and political system itself.

Now, Trump faces the task of uniting a nation traumatized by the ugliest campaign in modern history and ripped apart by political divides exacerbated by his own explosive rhetoric -- often along the most tender national fault lines such as race and gender.

Trump is sure to follow his own playbook

Trump will be the first president to enter the White House with no political, diplomatic or military executive experience. His victory will send shockwaves around the world, given his sparse foreign policy knowledge, haziness over nuclear doctrine, vow to curtail Muslim immigration and disdain for US alliances that have been the bedrock of the post-World War II foreign policy.

His promises to renegotiate or dump trade deals such as NAFTA and to brand China a currency manipulator risk triggering immediate economic shocks around the globe.

Trump, 70, will be the oldest president ever sworn in for a first term and will take the helm of a nation left deeply divided by his scorched-earth campaign. His victory was built on fierce anger at the Washington establishment and political elites among his grass-roots voters, many of whom feel they are the victims of a globalized economy that has resulted in the loss of millions of jobs.

His victory ends Clinton's crusade to become the first woman to ever rise to the nation's highest office. It's a humiliating chapter in the long political career of Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Trump's win also deals a painful rebuke to President Barack Obama, whom he pursued for years with his birtherism campaign built on the false premise that Obama was born outside the United States. Now Trump will have the power to eviscerate Obama's political legacy -- including the Affordable Care Act, the latter's proudest domestic achievement.

But there are deeper, more fundamental questions about Trump's presidency that will be key to his capacity to unify a deeply divided country and appeal to Americans who will feel outraged and disgusted by his victory.

He's got the attention of the whole world

Trump's campaign was built on rage, falsehoods and singling out culprits for the ills of modern America, including undocumented migrants, foreign nations such as China and Muslim immigrants.

He mocked a disabled New York Times reporter, vowed to use the power of the presidency to put Clinton in jail and pledged to sue women who accused him of sexual assault.

Trump has promised to build a wall on the southern border and make Mexico pay for it, and to deport undocumented migrants. He has vowed to reintroduce interrogation methods for terror suspects that are more extreme than waterboarding.

So the demeanor that Trump will adopt as president and the manner in which he will behave will be closely watched -- not just in the United States, but among nervous leaders abroad.

One of the many uncertainties about Trump's coming presidency is how his White House will interact with Republicans in Congress — and whether he and GOP leaders will heal their rift from the campaign.

Republicans repelled a Democratic bid to recapture the Senate, giving the GOP control over Capitol Hill and the White House.

That means it would fall to the GOP either to rubber stamp policies likely to mark a break from conservative orthodoxy or to provide a check on the power of Trump, who has shown every sign he will use executive power aggressively.

House Speaker Paul Ryan will face intense pressure from pro-Trump members of his own coalition to cooperate with the new president.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to hold Trump's feet to the fire to ensure he lives up to his promise to appoint justices who could ensure a generational conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Clinton apparently failed to reassemble the diverse coalition that helped Obama win the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

The events of Clinton's terrible final week on the campaign -- the revival of her email controversy by FBI Chief James Comey and a damaging drip, drip, drip of revelations by WikiLeaks which her campaign says was orchestrated by Russian intelligence -- could have helped consign her to defeat.

There also is the question of Trump's temperament. Clinton repeatedly warned that he was unfit to control the nuclear codes because he could be baited with a tweet.

Obama passionately denounced Trump as intellectually and temperamentally unfit to succeed him in the Oval Office.

But now, he will be forced to greet his successor on the morning of Inauguration Day in January, and look on while he is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.",REAL
"November 1, 2016 Pope Francis Commemorates 500th Anniversary Of Protestant Reformation 
Pope Francis is in Sweden to kick off the commemoration of 500 years since the Protestant Reformation. The reformation started in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the church door to denounce what he saw as abuses by the Catholic Church. 
Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,",FAKE
"Share This 
Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan today claimed the US and other members of the Saudi-led naval blockade of Yemen had captured four ships with arms which they are claiming both came from Iran and were bound for Yemen, where they would’ve delivered the weapons to the Houthi movement. 
The vice admiral claimed the US “knows” both where the ships came from and where they were going because they interviewed the crews of the captured ships. Only one of the four putative weapons ships was validated by the United Nations as being an actual smuggling attempt. 
Donegan went on to claim that he believes Iran is “connected in some way” to recent incidents of missiles fired at a US ship off the Yemeni coast, though the Pentagon conceded one of those incidents likely never happened, and he offered no evidence of Iranian involvement in anything else. 
The allegations were likely made by way of justifying US attacks on the Yemeni coast, as well as justifying Saudi Arabia’s ongoing naval blockade of Yemen, which Saudi Arabia recently denied is happening.  ",FAKE
"WHO Cancer Agency Under Fire for withholding ‘carcinogenic glyphosate’ Documents IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review RT.com - October 27, 2016 Comments 
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), facing criticism over its classification of carcinogens, has reportedly been advising its scientific experts not to publish internal research data on its 2015 report on “probably carcinogenic” glyphosate. 
The IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review, according to Reuters. The agency told Reuters on Tuesday that it tried to protect the study from “external interference,” as well as protect its intellectual rights, since it was “the sole owner of such materials.” 
The scientists had been asked earlier to release all the documentation on the 2015 report under US freedom of information laws. 
The groundbreaking review, published in March 2015 by the IARC – a semi-autonomous agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) – labeled the glyphosate herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is a key ingredient of Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller well-known under the trade name ‘Roundup.’ It is one of the most heavily used herbicides in the world and is designed to go along with genetically-modified “Roundup Ready” crops, also produced by Monsanto. 
The IARC’s report caused problems for both the notorious agrochemical giant and the agency itself. 
The report sparked a heated debate around the use of Roundup, and caused several EU countries – including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands – to object to the renewal of the glyphosate’s EU license. The vote on prolonging the glyphosate license for 15 years failed several times in June 2016, but the license was temporarily extended for 18 months during last hours before its expiration. 
The controversial report has seemingly made the IARC a target for attacks from multiple directions, and raised scientific, legal, and financial questions. 
Various critics, including those in the chemical industry, said the IARC’s evaluations are fuel for “unnecessary health scares,” since the IARC allegedly studies the potentially harmful substance itself, and not a “typical human” exposure to it. It remained unclear whether the critics urged a WHO body to test the potentially carcinogenic chemical on humans. 
The critics also brought up other controversial statements from the IARC, over whether such things as mobile phones, coffee, red meat, and processed meat could cause cancer. 
The agency defended its methods as scientifically sound and “widely respected for their scientific rigor, standardized and transparent process and…freedom from conflicts of interest.” Numerous freedom of information requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a US conservative advocacy group, have since been turned down with this reasoning. 
E&E Legal told Reuters that it is pushing a legal challenge over whether the documents in question belong to the IARC or to the US federal and state institutions where some of the experts work. Basically, it’s being decided whether the IARC, as part of the WHO, is truly independent and free from “conflicts of interest.” 
According to Reuters, officials from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be questioned by a congressional committee about why American taxpayers fund the cancer agency, which faces much criticism over its allegedly faulty classification of carcinogens. 
“IARC’s standards and determinations for classifying substances as carcinogenic, and therefore cancer-causing, appear inconsistent with other scientific research, and have generated much controversy and alarm,” a letter from US Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz to NIH director Francis Collins states, as quoted by Reuters. 
The Oversight Committee demanded a full disclosure of NIH funding of the IARC, and even money spent in relation to the cancer agency’s activities. 
IARC opponents from scientific circles vowed to provide their data on the matter. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which believes glyphosate is “unlikely pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans,” promised to release its raw data on the subject as part of its “commitment to open risk assessment.” The food safety watchdog made this statement in late September, and still has to deliver the promised information. NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"Thursday 10 November 2016 by Davywavy Donald Trump to leave America for a younger, sexier country 
President-elect Donald Trump has already got a much younger, sexier county lined up to replace America in his affections. 
Concerns have already been raised after Trump demanded America enter into a pre-nup before he takes the oath of office. 
Trump, who has already been accused of screwing Mexico when he thinks he can get away with it, defended his roving eye by saying that ‘any President’ would check out hot, available countries and there was nothing wrong with it. 
Trump’s penchant for ‘exotic’ foreign names is well recorded, and the people of Brunei Darussalam are already concerned after he commented on ‘getting his tongue around their name’. 
Meanwhile, members of NATO and the UN have been told to ‘put out or get out’ in what is being interpreted as a direct demand for favours. 
“Look, if Puerto Rico weren’t a protectorate, I’d already be all over them. If I weren’t already their president and, you know, Is that terrible? Is it?”, he told reporters. 
“And the Russian Republic. Daughter of the Soviet Union, sure, but they’re only 23 years old. And they’re big, voluptuous, you might say. That’s pretty sexy, am I right? 
“I wonder if they’ve got a, you know, opening I might fill.” 
North Korea, who are into uniforms and BDSM, have already signalled their willingness to enter into an affair with the President no matter what the consequences for him at home. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"Markets collapse as Donald Trump is projected to win 09.11.2016 | Source: Pravda.Ru International stock indexes have declined against the backdrop of the news about Donald Trump's leadership in electoral votes in the US presidential election. Investors were counting on Hillary Clinton's victory. World stocks indices collapsed on Tuesday, 8 November, as Donald Trump is expected to win the battle and take office as the next President of the United States. Earlier, The New York Times has changed its forecast for Trump's victory from 80 to 95 percent. The futures on major US stock indices fell in the range of 3-4%, OTC trading data showed. Dow Jones fell by 3.5% (650 points), S&P 500 - by 4,26%, NASDAQ - by 4.1%. Japan's Nikkei 225 fell by 3.98% (to 682.88 points) China's Shanghai Composite dropped by 1.32% (to 41.66 points), the index of Chinese ""blue chips"" CSI300 - by 1.18% (39.65 points), the Hong Kong Hang Seng - by 2.85% (646.73 points). South Korea's KOSPI dropped by 2.43% (48.64 points). Australian ASX200 - by 1.64% (86.29 points). Donald Trump's projected victory in the US presidential election has led to the fall of the US dollar against other major currencies. The dollar has weakened against the Japanese yen by 3.46% and by 2.2% against the euro ($1.1265). The price of Brent crude oil fell to $ 44.5 per barrel. Futures for Brent fell by 3.75% and are currently trading at 43.9. The price of US Treasuries shows a positive dynamics, while gold futures have grown by 4%. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"Taking Social Security benefits early comes with a price, yet more than 4 in 10 Americans who are 50 and over say they'll dip into the program before reaching full retirement age.

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 44 percent report Social Security will be their biggest source of income during their retirement years.

Full benefits begin at 65 or 66 for those born between 1943 and 1954. Americans can begin collecting as early as age 62, but with benefits reduced by up to 30 percent, according to the Social Security Administration.

""One thing we know for certain is that claiming early can have long-term repercussions on your fiscal security as you age,"" said Gary Koenig, vice president of Financial security at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

Koenig said benefits increase significantly for those who wait, rising around 8 percent more for each additional year past age 66 and up to 70, when benefits max out.

""So we encourage people to delay as long as possible,"" he said.

But waiting is a luxury many Americans don't have.

Ken Chrzastek of Chicago began drawing Social Security benefits at age 62 and pulled $50,000 out of an IRA after losing a retail job two years ago. He has been unable to find even part-time work. ""Hiring a 62-year-old is a liability for a company,"" he said.

The poll found that Americans 50 and over have multiple sources of income for retirement but that Social Security is the most common by far. Eighty-six percent say they have or will have Social Security income. More than half had a retirement account such as a 401(k), 403(b), or an IRA. Slightly less had other savings. About 43 percent had a traditional pension.

The average age at which people expect to start or have started collecting Social Security benefits is 64. Just 9 percent said they would wait until after they turned 70.

While the retirement age has been rising in recent years, particularly for women, the average American still retires relatively early, at age 64 for men and age 62 for women, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Charles Jeszeck, director of education, workforce and income security for the Government Accountability Office, said there is no one right answer to when people should take Social Security, especially since increases in life expectancy are not spread out evenly between the rich and poor, or between ethnic groups.

Included in any discussion about Social Security are lingering questions about its solvency.

The Social Security trust fund has been running a surplus every year since 1984. Those surpluses are forecast to stop sometime around 2020, as more boomers start claiming benefits.

The Social Security Administration says interest income from the fund should be able to bridge this gap until 2034. At that point, without changes, payments could shrink but not disappear.

Gary Burtless, a Brookings Institution economist, said that people taking benefits early — or late — should have no impact on the trust fund. ""It costs the government roughly the same amount,"" he said.

Among the presidential candidates, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have called for an expansion of Social Security. Donald Trump said during a debate in March, ""It's my absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is.""

Many Americans worry that they won't have enough to live on once they stop working, the poll said.

Among those with incomes under $50,000, 58 percent say they feel more anxious than secure about the amount of savings they have for retirement. People with higher incomes appear less anxious, but still 40 percent of those with incomes of $100,000 or more worry whether their savings will be sufficient.

Alison Cowen, 57, said she doesn't see any path for her to retire_ever. ""Not unless a miracle happens,"" she laughed sarcastically. ""I just don't have enough to live on for the rest of my life.""

The poll said a quarter of workers over 50 say they never plan to retire, a sentiment more common among lower-income workers.

Cowen, a saleswoman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, said she didn't save that much when she was younger, and a messy divorce 10 years ago meant she had to start over. ""I've got $20,000 in the bank, but I would need to figure out a way increase that substantially before I could ever think of retiring,"" she said.

The AP-NORC Center survey was conducted March 8-27 by NORC at the University of Chicago, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It involved online and telephone interviews with 1,075 people aged 50 and older nationwide, most of whom are members of NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak panel. Results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.",REAL
"Walling them out, or walling us in? Shall we wall off Canada, too? By Jim Hightower Posted on November 3, 2016 by Jim Hightower 
Evading security cameras in the remote expanse along the U.S. border, three Guatemalans waited till dusk to slip illicitly into our country. 
This is the stuff of Donald Trump nightmares—and if he were to witness such a scene, we can only imagine the furious rants that would follow. 
But Trump will never see this scene or even know about it, because he’s facing south, fulminating against Mexicans and assuring his faithful followers that he’ll stop illegal entry into the U.S. by building a “ beautiful, impenetrable wall ” across our 2,000-mile border with Mexico. 
Meanwhile, the scene described took place way up north, where rural Vermont connects to Canada. As the New York Times recently reported , “This area is a haven for smugglers and cross-border criminal organizations.” 
With so many of our nation’s political and security officials obsessed with the southern border, more and more criminal action—including the smuggling of people, drugs, and weapons—has plagued our 5,500-mile Canadian border, the longest in the world between two countries. 
Running from the Atlantic to the Pacific through sparsely populated and heavily wooded terrain, there’s often no clear demarcation of where Canada ends and the U.S. begins. Some farms, homes, and businesses actually sprawl across the border. 
Only about 2,000 agents patrol this vast stretch, and officials concede they don’t even have a good guess of how many people and how much contraband is coming across, or where. 
So, the question for Mr. Trump is: Shall we wall off Canada, too? And how much of our public treasury, democratic idealism, and international goodwill shall we dump into the folly of militarizing both borders? 
By simply thinking we can wall the world out, we’ll be walling ourselves in—and that’s suicidal. 
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s the editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown . Distributed by OtherWords.or g . Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .",FAKE
"(CNN) The thing about women, Donald J. Trump once wrote, is that they ""have one of the great acts of all time.""

""The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,"" he continued. ""The person who came up with the expression 'the weaker sex' was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye -- or perhaps another body part.""

The provocative passage, along with several others, is contained in a chapter devoted to women in Trump's 1997 book, ""The Art of the Comeback.""

His words on women have newfound relevance in 2016 as Trump's enigmatic relationship with the opposite sex is front and center in his campaign for President.

The comments play on potential vulnerabilities for his likely general election opponent -- but they also highlight Trump's own significant hurdles with female voters as he tries to win their votes in November.

He went on to connect Clinton with her husband's marital indiscretions.

In a testy exchange, he told Cuomo he raised the issue as retribution for Clinton ""playing the woman's card to the hilt"" in the campaign.

Trump raised that notion last week during his victory speech in New York, suggesting her appeal to female voters, based solely on gender, was her only asset.

""She's got nothing else going on,"" he said.

The intense scrutiny of the campaign has also renewed interest in Trump's crude banter about his sexual conquests and desires on Howard Stern's radio show.

His controversial remarks then and during the 2016 campaign have taken a toll on his image among female voters.

The women standing by him

But for all the women who have voiced their collective disapproval in polling numbers, those closest to the billionaire businessman insist he's a model husband and father -- supportive, nurturing, and empowering.

Some women who have worked for Trump offer a similar assessment: Despite his controversial public comments, he is a giving and inspirational boss, they say, and treats female employees no differently than their male counterparts.

Still, it is difficult to paint a full portrait of Trump's dealings with women, because many who have worked with him over the years have no interest in talking publicly about a candidate who has shown no hesitation in striking back at his critics.

A number of Trump's former female colleagues contacted by CNN did not return calls. Some refused to talk on the record. One prominent former Trump colleague hung up abruptly on a reporter, explaining that she had no interest in being hounded by the press.

Hence, the lingering question: What's the deal with Donald Trump and women?

The perception that Trump has a problem with females stems, in part, from high-profile clashes over the years in which he's called them names and ridiculed their appearance.

Trump has said he loves women, finds them beautiful, and is not a sexist.

Twice divorced by the time the book was published, Trump's views on women were shaped by what he saw as the aggressive behavior of females around him.

He wrote of a married socialite who propositioned him on a ballroom dance floor as her husband looked on and about a bride-to-be ""jumping on top of me wanting to get screwed"" in his limousine a week before she was due to be married.

""The level of aggression was unbelievable,"" he wrote of the dance floor incident. ""This is not infrequent, it happens all the time.""

""Their sex drive makes us look like babies,"" he wrote of women at another point in the same book.

Living up to his mother

Trump opened the chapter on women by writing that part of ""the problem"" he has with them is ""having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump.""

He recalled his mom as ""smart as hell"" and as ""a really great homemaker and wife to my father.""

He came to see his mother's supporting role as a model not just for his own situation, but for any man who wants to succeed.

""For a man to be successful he needs support at home, just like my father had from my mother, not someone who is always griping and bitching,"" he wrote. ""When a man has to endure a woman who is not supportive and complains constantly about his not being home enough or not being attentive enough, he will not be very successful unless he is able to cut the cord.""

The passage did not explore the possibility of a woman as the family's primary wage-earner.

Trump wrote that his ""big mistake"" with his first wife, Ivana, was ""taking her out of the role of wife and allowing her to run one of my casinos in Atlantic City, then the Plaza hotel.""

She did an excellent job at both, he wrote, but once she took on those roles ""work was all she wanted to talk about.""

""I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business,"" Trump wrote. ""Ivana worked very hard, and I appreciate the effort, but I soon began to realize that I was married to a business person rather than a wife.""

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump has said his wife, Melania, would make a great first lady.

Melania Trump, a former model who has designed her own jewelry line for QVC, has emerged as an important advocate for her husband, driving the argument that he treats everyone equally.

She has spoken about the importance of her career, but described herself in an interview with Parenting Magazine as a ""full-time mom"" to her son Barron. ""That is my first job.""

Melania has tried to explain the paradox of Trump and women by saying that when her husband is attacked, ""He will attack back, no matter who you are.""

""He encourages everybody, if you're a man or a woman,"" she said during an April 12 Trump family CNN town hall.

His daughter Ivanka, a successful businesswoman in her own right, said during the CNN town hall that he taught her that there ""wasn't anything that I couldn't do if I set my mind to it."" She also praised him for hiring ""incredible female role models"" in ""the highest executive positions at the Trump organization.""

But Trump has repeatedly stumbled into controversy with his asides about women over the past year, and his approval numbers among women have spiraled downward.

The Republican Party was already facing a deficit among women voters. In 2012, Barack Obama led Mitt Romney among female voters by about 11 points -- with a particularly steep deficit among single women. (Romney beat Obama by 7 points among married women, who have generally viewed the GOP more favorably).

In a March Quinnipiac University poll, 60% of women said they would not vote for Trump in a general election -- a reflection of his poor approval ratings among women in a wide variety of national polls.

His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, predicted Trump's image among women would improve as the campaign progressed. His aides have pointed out that he trounced his rivals among Republican women in recent GOP primaries, including Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut (though that is hardly a good measure of how he would fare in a general election).

""Donald Trump's numbers are going to be strong with women because they want the same thing that everybody else wants,"" Lewandowski said in a telephone interview.

""They don't vote based on gender. They vote on competency -- and that competency includes making sure that the nation is secure, which Donald Trump has pledged he will do, making sure we don't have illegal immigrants pouring across the border, and making sure individuals have opportunities for jobs.

""Those are the things that cut across socio-economic status, they cut across gender, they cut across race.""

Beyond focusing on those broad themes, however, Trump has done little to try to shore up his weaknesses among women voters.

His various stumbles haven't helped. He angered both abortion-rights supporters and opponents, for example, when he said during an MSNBC town hall that women who have abortions should be punished if the procedure is outlawed—and then quickly reversed himself.

His personal critiques of women's looks on the campaign trail have been pointed.

When an anti-Trump super PAC cut an ad that used a revealing photo of Melania from her days as a super model, Trump blamed Cruz. ""Be Careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife,"" he tweeted.

He offended some female voters when he re-tweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz, a Goldman Sachs executive, next to Melania. ""A picture is worth a thousand words,"" the caption said.

Angered by the tweets, Cruz warned his then-adversary to ""leave Heidi the hell alone,"" and told reporters: ""Strong women scare Donald.""

Trump insisted the press stirred up the controversy. ""The media is so after me on women,"" the real estate magnate tweeted on March 26. ""Wow, this is a tough business. Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump.""

But female voters seem increasingly skeptical as Trump prepares to take on Hillary Clinton, who is running to be the first female president.

Some women who have worked for Trump say they find it difficult to reconcile some of his statements and written opinions with the way he treated them.

Jill Cremer worked as a vice president overseeing real estate development at the Trump Organization for a decade beginning in 1998.

She said it was a hard decision to leave, and she only learned after working elsewhere just how good she'd had it.

""He was a fantastic employer,"" said Cremer, still a real-estate executive in Manhattan. ""I don't have one bad thing to say about him.""

She said Trump ran the office as a meritocracy and was refreshingly unconcerned about educational pedigrees.

Though she went to work for Trump at the relatively young age of 30, she said he put her on projects that challenged her and forced her to grow.

""He'd say, `I believe in you. I'm gonna give you this -- now go run with it,"" Cremer recalled.

""And I did it,"" she said.

Cremer said Trump has made some cringe-worthy public comments involving women over the years, but she said he never talked that way to her or in her presence.

""I don't know how to explain it,"" she said. ""But, when you're on the inside, it's different.""

Lili Amini, who manages Trump's golf club in Palos Verdes, offered a similar description of her billionaire boss.

Amini, who was identified by a Trump campaign aide as a female employee who could talk about his management style, said she met Trump in 2005 when she accompanied her father to work at the sprawling resort overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her parents owned a flower business and maintained the plants and flowers at the Trump facility.

She was 27 at the time and studying to be a buyer in the fashion world.

She said Trump walked up and asked her father: ""Who's this?""

He introduced his daughter and the two struck up a conversation. By the end of it, Amini recalled, Trump told her: ""I want you to work here.""

She said she didn't know anything about running a food and beverage operation at the time, and didn't even know what job she was being offered. But after discussing the offer with her parents she decided it was too good to pass up.

She started out as the small events coordinator and, with Trump's mentoring and support, has worked her way to general manager.

She said Trump would periodically show up at the resort and each time he did would encourage her to learn everything she could about some new aspect of the business.

He was always encouraging, she said, and always professional. He taught her, she said, to never doubt herself. ""He's been a great motivator,"" she said. ""Impossible is never a word that I use in my vocabulary.""

Amini said Trump never made her feel like she got the job because she was a woman or that she was being second-guessed based on her gender after she rose through the ranks.

""It's just about the work,"" she said. ""It's always about the work.""

Trump received more mixed reviews from Barbara Res, who worked for Trump from 1978 to 1996 and helped oversee the construction of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

Res said she had good working relationship with Trump and that it was an unusual move for him to hire her in 1978, because there were so few women working in the construction industry.

But Res, who wrote about her experiences in her book, All Alone on the 68th Floor: How One Woman Changed the Face of Construction, said Trump became less approachable and accessible over time.

In an essay for the New York Daily News, Res wrote that Trump was ""nasty to the people who work for him,"" that he could ""be very abusive and curt"" and had an ""incredible temper ... he lashes out at everyone.""

""Of all the people I know who worked for or with Trump, including contractors, lawyers, architects, employees, only a very few actually like him,"" Res wrote in the New York Daily News. ""Some respect him, some don't. Many hate his guts.""

But she said he had a good eye for talent, and had several strong women working for him in her heyday. He told her she was ""a killer"" and that wanting to be liked by her subordinates was a weakness.

""Later, he would hire and promote many people with questionable qualifications,"" Res wrote in her New York Daily News essay. ""I could see, over time, his growing need to be coddled and agreed with,"" she wrote, adding that by the 1980s, he ""had taken to decorating his office with beautiful women.""

""He changed,"" Res said in a telephone interview. ""I think it was fame and fortune, absolutely.""

In his book, Trump wrote: ""I don't know why, but I seem to bring out either the best or worst in women.""

He reiterated that ""they're really a lot different than portrayed,"" and ""far worse than men, far more aggressive.""

He praised their intelligence and said they should be saluted for their ""tremendous power, which most men are afraid to admit they have.""",REAL
"Get short URL 0 8 0 0 A police officer of the Venezuelan state of Miranda was fatally shot and another was wounded during an anti-government protest, local police said. 
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – On Tuesday, the opposition-led National Assembly voted to initiate impeachment proceedings against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, claiming he had violated democracy, to which the president accused lawmakers of trying to stage a parliamentary coup. 
""The deceased official got a gunshot wound in the abdomen. He died when he was being tended to in the Los Salias clinic. Another one is wounded in the arm,"" Miguel Mederico, the spokesman for the Miranda police, said on Twitter on Wednesday. Funcionario fallecido recibió impacto de bala en abdomen. Falleció cuando lo atendían en clínica de Los Salias. El otro está herido en brazo — Miguel Mederico (@MiguelMederico) October 27, 2016 
​Earlier on Wednesday, opposition leader Henrique Capriles initiated a large-scale peaceful protest across the country to defend the nation’s right to a referendum on Maduro's recall. According to media reports, police in some Venezuelan cities started to use tear gas against the opposition protesters. Este video muestra momentos cuando dispararon durante protestas en Los Salias. https://t.co/inB2fkITSO — Miguel Mederico (@MiguelMederico) October 27, 2016 ...",FAKE
"Report: Saxophone Still An Okay Vehicle For Self-Expression While declaring that the musical instrument was by no means ideally suited to the task, a report released by the National Endowment for the Arts Thursday concluded that the saxophone nevertheless remains a fairly decent vehicle for expressing one’s ... Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. New Report Finds Voters Have No Idea How Outraged They Supposed To Be About Anything Anymore WASHINGTON—Saying that at this point, they were just taking their best guesses at how they should react to each new scandal that emerged about the presidential nominees, voters across the country admitted Monday they had no clue how outraged they are supposed to be about anything anymore. Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign BROOKLYN, NY—In response to the FBI’s announcement that its investigation of him had produced new evidence that could pertain to its probe of the Democratic presidential nominee, Anthony Weiner reportedly sent an apology sext early Monday morning to the entire Hillary Clinton campaign. Nation Too Terrified To Look At What Trump’s Recent Rise In Polls Attributed To WASHINGTON—Claiming it felt queasy just thinking about what the cause could be, the nation’s populace said Monday it was too terrified to look at what Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s recent rise in the polls was attributed to. Anthropologists Discover Isolated Tribe Of Joyful Americans Living In Remote Village Untouched By 2016 Election WALDPORT, OR—A team of anthropologists announced Friday it had discovered an isolated tribe of blissful Americans who have never been exposed to the current presidential campaign or its candidates, noting that the newly identified population lives contentedly in a remote village completely untouched by the 2016 race. ",FAKE
"Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016 
Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine and every one of their Democratic surrogates have pivoted to attacking Russia’s role in the WikiLeaks release of John Podesta’s emails when asked about their subject matter. 
So thorough is this particular talking point that both Howard Dean and Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D., N.M.) blamed the Russians when asked about a totally separate matter involving quid pro quo accusations within the State Department. 
So long as they’re asked about WikiLeaks, Team Clinton will just power through . This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:33 am Share this article",FAKE
"Mitt Romney is moving quickly to reassemble his national political network, calling former aides, donors and other supporters over the weekend and on Monday in a concerted push to signal his seriousness about possibly launching a 2016 presidential campaign.

Romney’s message, as he told one senior Republican, was that he “almost certainly will” make what would be his third bid for the White House. His aggressive outreach came as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — Romney’s 2012 vice presidential running mate and the newly installed chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — announced Monday that he would not seek the presidency in 2016.

Romney’s activity indicates that his declaration of interest Friday to a group of 30 donors in New York was more than the release of a trial balloon. Instead, it was the start of a deliberate effort by the 2012 nominee to carve out space for himself in an emerging 2016 field also likely to include former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Romney has worked the phones over the past few days, calling an array of key allies to discuss his potential 2016 campaign. Among them was Ryan, whom Romney phoned over the weekend to inform him personally of his plans to probably run. Ryan was encouraging, people with knowledge of the calls said.

Other Republicans with whom Romney spoke recently include Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and Rob Portman (Ohio), former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman, former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, former Missouri senator Jim Talent and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah).

In the conversations, Romney said he is intent on running to the right of Bush, who also is working vigorously to court donors and other party establishment figures for a 2016 bid. Romney has tried to assure conservatives that he shares their views on immigration and tax policy — and that should he enter the race, he will not forsake party orthodoxy.

On New Year’s Eve, Romney welcomed Laura Ingraham, the firebrand conservative and nationally syndicated talk-radio host, to his ski home in Deer Valley, Utah. Romney served a light lunch to Ingraham and her family as they spent more than an hour discussing politics and policy, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

“He was relaxed, reflective and was interested in hearing my thoughts on the American working class,” Ingraham said in an e-mail Monday. “He was fully engaged and up to speed on everything happening on [the] domestic and international front. To me, it didn’t seem like he was content to be just a passive player in American politics.”

Romney’s undertaking to re-engage and pursue anew the GOP’s leading financial and political players began Friday, when he told a private gathering of donors, “I want to be president.” He also told them that his wife, Ann, was “very encouraging” of another campaign.

Romney is considering attending this week’s meeting of the Republican National Committee in San Diego and is working on a new message about economic empowerment, advisers said.

“He’s a lot more focused in these calls on developing a path to victory and talking through a message, rather than talking about money,” said Spencer Zwick, Romney’s 2012 national finance chairman. “Mitt Romney has proven that he can raise the money.”

This comes as Bush — another favorite of the Republican elite — is holding meetings with party leaders and financiers as he explores his campaign. Bush and Romney have overlapping political circles.

Many of Romney’s past supporters may feel torn — not only between him and Bush but also among Christie, Walker, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and other Republicans who are weighing a run. Some already have publicly aligned with Bush and others.

“They’re competing hard and it’s going to get complicated for Bush,” said former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). “But Romney still has to prove that he has the ability to reach out to ordinary, hardworking people and emote — smiling with one eye and crying with the other.”

Romney’s outreach extends beyond his cheerleaders to onetime foes as well. He called Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who relentlessly attacked Romney on the stump and debate stage in 2012 during his presidential run. Gingrich said he told Romney, “There are no front-runners” in the 2016 race. “We have runners, but no front-runners.”

Romney is measuring how much of his 2012 operation would gear up behind him again. He is particularly intent on rebuilding his past political infrastructure in New Hampshire, where he owns a vacation home in Wolfeboro. The state, which holds the first presidential primary, ignited his 2012 campaign when he won it resoundingly in a crowded field.

As of Monday, Romney had secured the backing of his top two New Hampshire-based advisers, Thomas D. Rath and Jim Merrill.

“He called me right after the Patriots beat the Ravens, so we were both in good moods,” Merrill said. “It was a good conversation. He was very clear that he is seriously considering a run. I’ve been with Mitt Romney since March 2006, so if he decides to do it, I’ll be there for him.” Rath, a former New Hampshire state attorney general, concurred in a separate interview: “I’ve been with Mitt Romney for eight years. If he’s in, I’ll make the coffee or drive the car — whatever he needs.”

Romney also has called Brown, who ran unsuccessfully for Senate from New Hampshire in 2014, as well as former governor John Sununu, who was a surrogate for Romney in 2012 but has close ties to the Bush family after serving as chief of staff under then-president George H.W. Bush.

Judd Gregg, a former U.S. senator from New Hampshire who backed Romney in 2008 and 2012, said, “He’s reaching out to people. My sense is he feels strongly he has an opportunity to do what was incomplete last time. He figures there’s a lot of buyer’s remorse now and that his message is a good message and it’ll resonate.”

Romney is also paying attention to Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses, calling his former Iowa strategist, David Kochel. Romney, however, has not connected with Iowa Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley or Joni Ernst. “I haven’t talked to him in two years,” Grassley said Monday.

One Romney adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said, “Mitt’s a very restless character. He is not the type to retire happily, to read books on the beach. . . . He believes he has something to offer the country and the only way he can do that is by running for president again.”

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the GOP presidential nominee in 2008, was skeptical of a Romney candidacy and endorsed the idea of a “dark horse” run by his longtime friend in the Senate, Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

Eric Fehrnstrom, a former Romney spokesman, ticked through issues that he said were motivating Romney to try again. “At home our economy is still not as strong as it could be,” he said. “Long-term growth is in doubt. And around the world there’s really deep concern that America’s leadership has unraveled and hostile forces have filled that vacuum.”

Romney’s national finance network — which raised roughly $1 billion on his behalf for the 2012 campaign — came alive in the hours after he declared his interest in a 2016 bid.

“When the news broke Friday, my phone started blowing up with texts, calls and e-mails from people that had donated to the campaign before and pledging their help,” said Travis Hawkes, a Republican donor in Idaho who served on Romney’s national finance council. “They say, ‘Let me know when you need my credit card number.’ My response to everyone has been, ‘Let’s just slow down and see what happens.’ ”

“I don’t know, man, it’s a free country,” McCain said of a possible Romney campaign in 2016. “I thought there was no education in the second kick of a mule. . . . I respect his judgment, he’s a strong leader.”

Dan Balz, Matea Gold and Paul Kane contributed to this report.",REAL
"The tentative deal reached this weekend between the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders includes a debate Thursday at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

MSNBC announced Sunday it will host the debate, scheduled for 9 p.m. Eastern with Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow moderating. New Hampshire's first-in-the nation primary is Feb. 9.

Clinton and Sanders are in a tight race before Monday's Iowa caucuses, and Clinton trails the Vermont senator in New Hampshire, raising the possibility that the Democratic front-runner could lose the first two contests. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has trailed them by wide margins.

The Democratic National Committee says it's reached an agreement in principal to have the party sanction and manage more debates during the primary schedule, including the New Hampshire debate.",REAL
"TJ Mott I've been a developer for the past seven years. Currently I'm in the aerospace industry and work with a variety of programming languages and operating systems. 
Stephen worked for an Initech that sold specialized hardware: high-performance, high-throughput systems for complex data processing tasks in the enterprise world, sold at exorbitant enterprise prices. Once deployed, these systems were configured via a management app that exposed an HTTP interface, just like any consumer-grade router or Wi-Fi access point that is configurable through a website (e.g. 192.168.0.1). 
Stephen worked with a diverse team of American engineers who were finishing up the management application for a new model. The product was basically done but needed a little bit of testing and polish before the official release. They expected several months of post-release work and then the project would go into maintenance mode. 
Then disaster struck. A pointy-haired boss somewhere up in a fuzzy area of the organization chart simply labeled “Here be VPs” discovered the large salary difference between American engineers and off-shore workers, and decided American engineers were far too expensive for software “maintenance”. The company decided to lay off 300 software engineers and hire 300 fresh-out-of-college replacements in a foreign country with much lower labor rates. The announcement was overshadowed by the fanfare of the product’s release and proudly billed as a major “win” for the company. 
Stephen was lucky enough to stay on and shift to other projects, the first of which was to assist with the transition by documenting everything he could for the new team. Which he did, in hundreds of pages of explicit detail, explaining how to use the source control repository for the project, execute and log unit tests, and who to contact when they had questions regarding the hardware itself. After that, he devoted himself to other projects. Months turned into years and Stephen assumed by the silence that the handover was successful and he’d never see the management app again. 
Of course that isn’t what happened. 
There’s an old joke on the Internet called “How to shoot yourself in the foot” (http://www.toodarkpark.org/computers/humor/shoot-self-in-foot.html) that lampoons the complicated process of shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages. Here is one such entry: 
370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 300-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot returns deep-fried. 
Three years after the management app was passed off to the new offshore engineer team, a new panic was boiling through Initech. The management application was as slow as molasses, buggier than flies in soup, with a user interface that was battered and deep-fried in a nonsense language that vaguely resembled English. It also crashed a lot, each time requiring a power reset to bring the system back up. 
Initech had simmered along by only shipping the original version, but now they had this expensive, powerful product with three years worth of hardware and firmware updates that the management app could not configure and thus were not available to customers. Several important customers canceled their support contracts rather than pay for half-baked updates that rarely worked, and many prospective customers passed them right by when basic features printed in the product brochure were “unavailable for demo”. They were falling behind in the industry. 
It was bad enough that management finally decided to do something. 
That something was to toss the offshore team and see how many of their old laid-off engineers they could scoop up, which was, not surprisingly, few. As one of the few original engineers who still worked there, Stephen was whisked away from his current projects to assist. 
With a bite-sized portion of the old team re-assembled, they set to work to unscramble the situation. Stephen noticed that the last source control check-in was from three years ago. Upon further inspection, he realized that not one of the offshore engineers had ever committed. 
He called up the offshore office to see if they had their own repository. The last few remaining offshore workers didn’t know, and when told to search every system they had, they replied they couldn’t because their local manager had sold all of their computer equipment on an auction site upon learning of their impending layoffs. 
He then contacted the hardware team in hopes that maybe somebody had a clone of the offshore team’s repository, but the hardware guys claimed the software team was laid off three years ago and they were not aware of an offshore replacement team. 
With no current source code, and an old repository that hadn’t been committed to in three years, Stephen and the team were left with no choice but to pick up exactly where they left off three years ago… [Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet . Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!",FAKE
"Home › HEALTH › TOP DOCTORS: CHEMOTHERAPY ONE OF DOZENS OF PROCEDURES SHOWN TO ‘GIVE NO BENEFIT’ TOP DOCTORS: CHEMOTHERAPY ONE OF DOZENS OF PROCEDURES SHOWN TO ‘GIVE NO BENEFIT’ 0 SHARES 
[10/27/16] VICKI BATTS – Chemotherapy is arguably one of the medical industry’s biggest frauds . Perhaps that’s why it recently landed on a list of ineffectual treatments drawn up by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AMRC). 
The list was created by 11 top specialists, who were each asked to think of five treatments they felt provided little to no patient benefits. And surprise, surprise – chemotherapy was one of them. Doctors from the AMRC said that chemotherapy cannot cure terminal cancer, and may bring unneeded distress in the final months of life. The Guardian reported: 
“The treatment is ‘by its very nature toxic’, the college said. “Therefore, the combination of failing to achieve a response and causing toxicity can ‘do more harm than good.'” 
Do more harm than good? You don’t say. 
Research has shown that in some hospitals, up to 50 percent of cancer patients are dying, not from their disease, but from chemotherapy drugs. For the first time ever, researchers actually looked at the numbers of patients who were dying within 30 days of chemotherapy administration , which could indicate that the treatment was the cause of death rather than the cancer. What they found was horrifying. 
The study, which was conducted by Public Health England and Cancer Research UK, found that the average 30-day mortality rate across England was about 8.4 percent for lung cancer and 2.5 percent for breast cancer. But, in some hospitals, those numbers were much higher. For example, at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, the 30 day mortality rate for palliative chemotherapy for lung cancer was 28 percent. In Milton Keynes, the death rate for lung cancer treatment soared up to 50.9 percent. 
The research revealed that the death rate for lung cancer patients was higher than average in several areas, including Blackpool, Coventry, Derby, South Tyneside, Surrey and Sussex. 
The data also revealed that about 1-in-5 people who underwent palliative care for breast cancer at Cambridge University Hospitals died because of chemotherapy treatment. 
Of course, the industry was quick to defend their practices, with doctors suggesting that these occurrences could simply be the outcome of data problems, noting that even a few deaths could skew statistics. 
However, no one really argued with the fact that chemotherapy is indeed a toxin. It doesn’t discriminate; it kills cancerous cells and healthy cells – and therein lies the rub. It may kill the cancer, but not without increasing your risks of getting cancer again in the future. 
A 2004 study also found that cytotoxic chemotherapy does very little towards enhancing cancer survivors’ 5-year survival rates. The research, which was led by scientists from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Northern Sydney Cancer Centre of the Royal North Shore Hospital, located in Sydney, Australia, raised serious questions about the actual efficacy of curative and adjuvant chemotherapies. 
What they found was that in Australia chemo only contributed 2.3 percent to the 5-year survival rate in adults, and in the U.S., that number dropped to 2.1 percent. These findings suggest that overall, chemotherapy truly provides very little benefit to any patient’s survival. In their conclusion, the study authors wrote, “As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.” 
The AMRC urges doctors and patients to question whether or not particular treatments are necessary. After all, unwarranted and harmful treatments are truly anything but medicine . Post navigation",FAKE
"A 23 kiloton tower shot called BADGER, fired on April 18, 1953 at the Nevada Test Site, as part of the Operation Upshot-Knothole nuclear test series.",FAKE
"With House Republicans pushing for a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood, Speaker John Boehner's leadership is again under scrutiny – and under fire.

House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio holds a news conference following a House Republican caucus meeting at the Capitol in Washington earlier this month. REUTERS/

House Speaker John Boehner likes to say he learned all the skills he needs for his current job during his childhood years in Ohio – mopping floors in his dad's bar and growing up with 11 brothers and sisters. In a two-bedroom house. With one bathroom.

That’s got to teach a person patience, and the Republican speaker has an abundance of it. Some say too much, especially when it comes to the latitude he gives his rebellious right-wing faction – such as right now.

With just 10 days before the federal government runs out of money, GOP hardliners are threatening the second widespread government shutdown in two years, this time over federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

They’re also considering a rare maneuver to oust Mr. Boehner from the speaker’s chair. It’s not the first time they’ve plotted to get rid of him.

Yet Boehner – “the coolest cucumber I know,” as one of his colleagues puts it – has been calmly exploring the options as the GOP leadership holds more than a half dozen “listening” sessions with members of the divided caucus. He still hasn’t found a funding solution that will satisfy everyone. He might not be able to. But pushing and prodding in his own unperturbed way, he won't stop trying.

“What Boehner does is, he’s very patient. He lets things play out for a while. He doesn’t get mad…. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t,” says John Feehery, former spokesman for Denny Hastert, the longest serving Republican speaker.

It’s the tactics – not the ideology – that separate the speaker from his right flank. In 2013, when tea partyers forced a 16-day partial government shutdown over Obamacare, Boehner was as opposed to the Affordable Care Act as they were.

But he repeatedly warned against a shutdown. Failing to persuade, he eventually joined in, leading the way on several measures to delay or defund the president’s signature domestic program. On Day 16, after having exhausted all his options, he gave up the fight – and received a standing ovation from his caucus, hardliners included, for his efforts.

As he explained to the former late-night television host Jay Leno last year, “You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.”

This time, Boehner is again in lockstep with the right flank on the substance of the issue. Videos showing officials of Planned Parenthood, a women’s health provider, discussing the sale of aborted fetus parts for scientific research are “gruesome,” he has said, and the federal government should stop funding the group.

Yet neither he nor Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky want to shut down the government over it. Trying to defund Planned Parenthood with a Democratic president in the White House is an “exercise in futility,” as Senator McConnell put it.

At a closed-door GOP caucus meeting last week, the House leadership shared internal polling that showed that two-thirds of respondents in 18 GOP swing districts oppose shutting the government to try to stop funding Planned Parenthood, according to Politico. In 2013, the GOP’s approval ratings plummeted in the wake of the shutdown.

That doesn’t mean much to Rep. John Fleming (R) of Louisiana, who belongs to the House Freedom Caucus, a group of more than 40 hardliners formed this year to challenge the GOP leadership. Congressman Fleming says he’s one of 31 members who have pledged not to vote for legislation – be it a short-term or long-term budget – that funds Planned Parenthood. “That’s my conscience vote.”

And so the speaker has been patiently rolling out other options – investigations of Planned Parenthood in the House, legislation to freeze funding for the organization, and an abortion-related bill. Both bills passed the GOP-controlled House on Friday, but will be blocked by Senate Democrats.

And that’s where another leadership proposal comes in. In order to actually get a defunding bill to the president’s desk, they’ve proposed using a legislative process known as “budget reconciliation” that only needs a majority vote to pass. It would get to the president all right, but he would veto it.

Hardliners say they aren’t interested in this “show vote.” Instead they seem determined to press for the shutdown, and try to put the blame on the president.

As the speaker cycles through his options and the calendar clicks closer to a shutdown, some of his allies are getting frustrated with the repeated clashes. There was another one earlier this year over immigration and funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Boehner supporter Rep. Devin Nunes (R) of California calls the hardliners “right-wing Marxists” who use extreme tactics to promote themselves – and then offer no realistic, alternative plans. The speaker, he says with exasperation, “let’s these guys get away with everything.”

Take the case of Rep. Mark Meadows (R) of North Carolina, who in July filed a rare motion to “vacate the chair” and call a new election for the speakership. Such a move hasn’t been tried in 105 years – and it didn’t succeed then.

The speaker could have killed off the Meadows resolution in the Rules Committee, which the speaker controls – but he didn’t. He could have brought it immediately to the floor for a vote he would have won, and stamped out the spark before it caught fire – as some of his allies urged. He didn’t.

""He chose not to press his advantage and divide his caucus,"" said Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma.

In July, Boehner called the Meadows move “no big deal,” but right-wingers are talking about returning to it after the pope’s visit this week. It is unlikely to succeed but nothing is certain.

Intraparty division is not new in Congress, says former House historian Ray Smock. He recalls the civil rights era, when both parties had deeply divided caucuses. But this is different, he says, because of the uncompromising wing of Boehner’s party.

“I think Boehner is seriously trying to run the House the way it’s supposed to be run, but this has been a losing proposition for him since the advent of the tea party,” says Mr. Smock. “You’ve got an awful lot of members in that caucus that don’t really care that government functions well. They’re elected as antigovernment people.”

Which raises the question: What’s the point of patience with recalcitrants?

Mr. Feehery says the free rein Boehner gave the tea partyers during the last shutdown could have been meant as a learning experience for them – but it simply emboldened them. Now it’s time for the speaker to make an example of a few people “and just kick them out of the conference.”

But then, Feehery admits, right-wing media would have a field day with that, and so would the “antiestablishment” presidential candidates.

And that’s not the Boehner way. “Members get not just second and third chances, they get repeated chances to operate as members of the team,” says Congressman Cole, a Boehner ally.

One thing’s certain: Democrats will not agree to defund Planned Parenthood. Boehner knows that. Eventually, he’ll have to work with Democrats to pass a “clean” funding bill that leaves the women’s health care provider alone.

What happens between now and then, though, is anybody’s guess.",REAL
"November 11, 2016 
Following America’s shock election result, a voter has complained of increasing polarisation in the country between people who agree with her and “ignorant scum”. 
“I just don’t recognise this country any more,” she said sadly. “I remember a time we could discuss things in a civil manner, with everyone being respectful of each other’s opinions.” 
“Nowadays this seems to be impossible, due to the existence of people who obviously must be racist, misogynist knuckle-dragging arsewipes since they disagree with me.” 
She also expressed concern that her political opponents harboured authoritarian tendencies, and said the sooner they were rounded up and put into camps the better “so that a more inclusive and tolerant political discourse can flourish again”. YaBasta",FAKE
"Bob Dole said Wednesday that Ted Cruz at the top of the GOP ticket would mean ""wholesale losses"" for the party in Washington and across the country.

“I don’t know how he’s going to deal with Congress,” Dole said in an interview with The New York Times. “Nobody likes him.”

Dole, a former Kansas senator, was the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 1996.

Donald Trump would ""probably work with Congress,"" though, Dole mused, because he's ""kind of a deal maker.""

Dole characterized Cruz as an ""extremist"" unwilling to work with his own party. The Times' Maggie Haberman notes that Dole's comments reflect a larger tension that establishment Republicans feel with Cruz, who portrays himself on the campaign trail as their antithesis.

Last month, Dole told MSNBC that he might oversleep and not vote next November were Cruz the Republican nominee.

Dole also lamented Wednesday that Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor he supports for president, still ""needs to break out,"" and that moderate Republicans seem to have had a tougher time reaching voters this cycle.

Should Hillary Clinton take on Cruz in a general election, she'd win easily, he said.

So who could stop Cruz from getting the nomination?

""I think it's Trump,"" Dole told the Times.

A Cruz aide sought to capitalize on Dole's take on the race by branding him as an ""establishment icon"" who favored Trump over the Texas senator — an effort to cast Cruz as the true outsider candidate in the field.",REAL
"0 5 0 0 Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — A device being developed will attach to a soldier’s upper and lower legs to generate electricity that is needed to power a growing array of high-tech gadgets in a soldier’s backpack, the US Army announced in a press release on Wednesday. ""Just by walking, soldiers could generate power,"" the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center’s Project Engineer Noel Soto said in the release. ""We are converting the movement of the knees when you walk into useful power."" 
Field tests on the device are expected to begin in 2017, the release explained. Progressive Soft Exoskeleton: as Comfortable as Everyday Pants (VIDEO) ""The goal is to reduce the amount of batteries used by soldiers, or to be able to extend the mission with the same load,"" Soto noted. ""Soldiers are carrying a heavy load and a lot of that weight, 16 to 20 pounds for a 72-hour mission, is due to batteries.""
Soldiers now carry multiple electronic devices that aid in strategy, communication and navigation, including computers, radios, mobile phones, battlefield situational displays and navigation tools, according to the release. ...",FAKE
"Watch ""The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer"" Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET for an interview with Rand Paul.

Louisville, Kentucky (CNN) For Rand Paul, it's all led to this moment.

Since riding the tea party wave into the Senate in 2010, Paul has carefully built a brand of mainstream libertarianism -- dogged advocacy of civil liberties combined with an anti-interventionist foreign policy and general support for family values -- that he bets will create a coalition of younger voters and traditional Republicans to usher him into the White House.

The test of that theory began Tuesday when the Kentucky senator made official what has been clear for years: He's running for president.

""Today I announce with God's help, with the help of liberty lovers everywhere, that I'm putting myself forward as a candidate for president of the United States of America,"" Paul said at a rally in Louisville.

Paul immediately hit the campaign trail for a four-day swing through New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada -- the states that traditionally vote first in the primaries and caucuses.

In his speech, he called for reforming Washington by pushing for term limits and a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. He argued that both parties are to blame for the rising debt, saying it doubled under a Republican administration and tripled under Obama.

""Government should be restrained and freedom should be maximized,"" he said.

The line-up of speakers who introduced Paul sought to paint the senator as a nontraditional candidate with diverse appeal, and by the time he got on stage, he was the first white man to address the crowd.

The speakers included J.C. Watts, a former congressman who's African-American; state Sen. Ralph Alvarado, who's Hispanic; local pastor Jerry Stephenson, who's African American and a former Democrat; and University of Kentucky student Lauren Bosler.

""He goes everywhere. It doesn't matter what color you are. Rand Paul will be there,"" Stephenson said, firing up the crowd.

So far, Paul joins only Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as a declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. ""His entry into the race will no doubt raise the bar of competition,"" Cruz said in a statement welcoming Paul into the race.

But the field is certain to grow in the months ahead with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham and others eyeing a campaign. Marco Rubio, a Florida GOP senator, is expected to launch his campaign next week.

Bush, who said his 2016 decision is a ""while off,"" told reporters in Colorado Springs on Tuesday that ""libertarianism definitely has a place in the GOP"" but stressed that he differs with Paul on foreign policy.

For now, the nomination is up for grabs with no clear front-runner. Paul came in third place at 12% in a CNN/ORC International Poll of Republicans. Bush led the pack at 16% while Walker came in second at 13%.

But Paul, 52, will split from his father in one important way: his approach to the campaign. Where Ron Paul often focused on creating a libertarian movement, Rand Paul is planning a more strategic, less purist operation that could have a hope of competing in a general election.

The elder Paul sat on stage at the rally on Tuesday with his wife, though he's not expected to be a public face for his son's campaign. He merely attended the event as a ""proud papa,"" a source close to the senator said.

Elected in 2010 with strong tea-party support, Rand Paul quickly rose to national fame in part due to his father's back-to-back White House runs in 2008 and 2012, but also because of Rand Paul's willingness to fight fellow Republicans.

He engaged in a war of words with Chris Christie two years ago over national security and federal spending and, more recently, he's taken swipes at Bush over issues like Common Core and medical marijuana.

While he bills himself as a conservative realist, Paul still tries to wear the mantle as the Republican most reluctant to take the country into war.

The cautious foreign policy dance has drawn criticism from his father's supporters, who say Paul has become too moderate, and from hawkish Republicans who fear he wouldn't go far enough as commander in chief to tackle problems overseas. Democrats and some Republicans, meanwhile, have accused him of flip-flopping and pandering to donors.

On Tuesday, the Foundation for a Secure & Prosperous America -- a hawkish group from the right -- released a $1 million television ad buy against Paul's foreign policy, which hits the airwaves nationally on cable, as well as in the key early states that Paul will visit this week.

Paul had been silent on the Iran deal until his speech on Tuesday, when he vowed to oppose any deal that doesn't guarantee Iran gives up its nuclear ambition.

He also sought to sound aggressive on terrorism. ""The enemy is radical Islam and not only will I name the enemy, I will do what ever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind,"" he said.

In an interview later Tuesday, Paul argued that the ad was ""crazy"" and represented what he called the ""the naivety of the neocons.""

""These loud, sort of juvenile voices putting pictures of bombs on ads, these are the people who are so reckless that it would be a grave danger to our country to ever have these people in charge of our country,"" he said in an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

In the same interview, Paul also weighed in for the first time on the religious freedom debate that took center stage last week after an Indiana law -- which has since been changed-- came under fire for what critics said was discrimination against gay and lesbian couples getting married.

The 2016 Republican field largely came out in defense of the law, standing by the rights of small business owners such as florists and bakers to decline participating in same-sex weddings. Paul said he felt the law was ""unnecessary"" and that the country's founding fathers would be ""aghast"" that laws needed to be in place to protect religious rights.

""That being said,"" he added. ""I think the law ought to be neutral and we shouldn't treat people unfairly.""

Asked which takes precedence, religious liberty or same-sex marriage rights, Paul said, ""freedom.""

""I don't think you can have coercion in a free society very well,"" he said. ""So I would think we ought to try freedom in most of these things.""

Paul is actually running for two offices at the same time, trying to hold onto his Senate seat while also running for president. Kentucky's election laws say candidates can't appear on a ballot twice, but with reluctant support from McConnell, a Kentucky powerhouse, the state's GOP will likely change its presidential preference vote from a primary to a caucus. That would allow Paul to get around the rule.

His interest in the Oval Office has never really been a secret. Shortly after the 2012 presidential election, he started crisscrossing the country to paint himself as a nontraditional Republican eager to court voters who don't typically live and vote in red areas.

He spoke at historically black colleges and universities, as well as Democratic strongholds like inner city Detroit and the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on criminal justice reform and civil liberties, two issues he believes can bring more people into the Republican Party.

""Liberal policies have failed our inner cities,"" he said Tuesday. ""Our schools are not equal and the poverty gap continues to widen.""

But Democrats are eager to paint Paul as another member of the ""same old Republican Party.""

""On issue after issue his policies are the same as the rest of the GOP, but even more extreme, and will turn back the clock on the progress we have made,"" said Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a statement.

As one of the few national politicians who went to Ferguson, Missouri, Paul frequently boasts that there is no ""bigger defender of minority rights in the Congress"" than himself.

He's steered clear of such hot-button issues more recently. Last week, for example, he was one of the few Republicans who didn't weigh in on religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas that critics argued would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

Paul has also worked to maintain a following that includes a large swath of young voters who he partly inherited from his father. Heavy on tech and social media, his political team has opened an office in Austin, Texas, and will soon establish one in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like clockwork, Paul frequently holds up his phone during his stump speech and declares that what people do on their smartphones is ""none of the government's damn business.""

His nontraditional style is complemented by Paul's wardrobe. The senator is known for wearing blue jeans with boots and a blazer when he's on the trail, and during the winter, he opts for a turtleneck and sport coat rather than a tie.

And while he's not media shy—he's given hundreds of interviews in the past year alone—Paul can get short-tempered with reporters. He shushed a female interviewer in February, and last fall he blew up at a reporter who asked a question about foreign aid to Israel.",REAL
"(7 fans) - Advertisement - 
Hillary Clinton is very sincere and is committed to economy, employment, refugees, immigration and health reforms as a means of making lasting change in the US and in the world. Now we need to take concrete action and not waste time in rhetoric. Hillary Clinton is committed to build an infrastructure of education, employment, health care, small business, free press, electrical power, communications and transportation. Hillary Clinton has a deep commitment. She is active in our educational and development community, include her involvement with the government and with leaders. She played an important role in offering outreach to the people including women and children. We must vote for her. We should remember that the first condition for economic reforms is good leaders, and employment. Good leaders and employment opportunities are necessary not only for the economic growth but also for the security, physical well being and psychological comfort of the American citizens. US has always been demonstrated a decent and sustained growth rate because of a fully functioning democratic system. The pillars of the US democratic system include regular elections, peaceful transfer of power, American people's involvement in all development programs, and a reliable power among the states. This has enabled US to pursue a policy of economic liberalization, massive educational improvement and of providing a solid investment in a long-term perspective. Yes, US still suffers from unemployment, and faces challenges; these problems seem solvable soon. US needs to establish and implement long-term policies of economic growth. It should also create a well-organized and comprehensive development vision that all the political leaders should agree to follow. Making appropriate investments in our roads, electrification, and extension services would help considerably in improving Americans lives. Increasing investment in basic education and health care are important in ensuring that the poor participate meaningfully in the economic growth. A lack of education and health care hurts the poor today. And finally, President Hillary Clinton must focus on generating high rates of sustainable growth while ensuring that the benefits of that growth is spread to all parts of states. As we know, the solutions are the same everywhere, have a society based on equity and justice for everyone. - Advertisement - As we know, most countries do the opposite. Discrimination against women and children today is as bad as decades ago. It's always the issue of the privileged not caring, the poor get hurt and people of color and women especially get hurt the most. Thus, vote for Hillary Clinton, because the role of the leaders is more important and they can assist people's movements for economic growth. - Advertisement -",FAKE
"After he managed to win support from his warring caucus, the full House is expected to elect Ryan as speaker on Thursday. But he won't have much time to celebrate, because he will immediately confront a series of divisive issues that could undermine his hold on the speakership just as he reaches the pinnacle of his career.

At the heart of the list: fiscal fights that have badly divided the GOP since it took control of the House in the 2010 elections. Congress must raise the national borrowing ceiling -- or risk the first-ever default on U.S. debt -- by November 3 and then pivot to a high-stakes debate over funding the government the following month.

The outgoing speaker, John Boehner of Ohio, is trying to take the debt limit off the table for Ryan, but he's running into familiar obstacles that could force the Wisconsin Republican to deal with the matter after he takes the top job.

""If you think about what the debt is -- it's what happened in the past -- so I think that the speaker is trying to clean that up for before he leaves,"" Republican Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida told reporters, but he admitted that might not be possible with time running out before Boehner's last day at the end of this week.

And Ryan will soon command the lead House GOP role in budget talks with the White House -- a discussion centered on raising domestic and defense spending by roughly $76 billion, and one bound to anger the same conservatives the likely new speaker wooed last week. President Barack Obama and Democrats on the Hill are insisting that any increase in national security spending be matched dollar for dollar with more money for domestic programs.

But a deal with the White House could undermine the pledge Ryan has privately been making: that he would restore ""regular order"" and let congressional committees drive policy -- not the speaker's office.

Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told CNN that if Ryan agrees to get rid of budget caps it will be a ""mixed bag"" since it will please defense hawks but anger small-government conservatives.

""I suspect it would stir up the rank and file. And when you get the rank and file at the grass-roots level, other folks get stirred up within the conference,"" Sanford said.

Sources familiar with the leadership discussions with the White House say there remains a possibility of a deal to scrap the automatic cuts known as sequestration for one year, but the two sides still are not in agreement over how to pay for the spending increases.

Moreover, everything is on hold until House Republicans try to raise the debt ceiling this week -- and there is no consensus within the ranks on how to proceed. Senate Republicans want to extend the debt ceiling until 2017 to take the issue off the table during an election year. House Republicans were forced last week to pull back a proposal crafted by a group of conservatives, that conditioned any debt increase to more spending cuts and a regulatory freeze, because it didn't have enough support to pass. GOP leaders are still trying to come up with a proposal that includes some type of reforms their members can point to in return for increasing the nation's borrowing authority.

All but two House Democrats signed a letter to Boehner on Friday demanding he move a ""clean"" extension of the debt limit -- one without conditions -- and warning that ""failing to do so will plunge the nation into default for the first time in American history, risking economic catastrophe.""

But some House Republicans say that a short-term increase should be pursued, potentially putting the issue in Ryan's lap.

Rep. David Brat, the Virginia Republican who unseated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor last year, said Ryan should pair a debt ceiling increase with dollar-for-dollar spending cuts -- an idea Democrats strongly reject.

""Leadership promised the American people that,"" Brat said. ""We don't want to go back on that if we give our word.""

Rooney said it's possible that leaders could be forced again to take up a clean debt limit to avoid a default. While he'll oppose that approach, and noted Ryan voted against it last time, the Florida Republican said no one should blame Ryan for the struggle to avoid an economic crisis.

""If you really hold Paul Ryan responsible for a clean debt limit vote in his first day on the job, I think that's a little unfair to say that that's on him, especially since he's worked so hard at the issues which really do directly deal with the debt and trying to fix that problem,"" Rooney said.

Yet if Ryan or Boehner try to jam a debt ceiling bill through, they can expect outrage from their right flank.

""I can't vote for a bill dropped on my desk 24 hours before the vote,"" said Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-South Carolina, a member of the House Freedom Caucus.",REAL
Should the U.S. Continue to Support Israel?,REAL
"The move will help Trump consolidate the Republican Party apparatus under his leadership now that he has become the party's presumptive presidential nominee.

It marks an official departure from Trump's claim that he's self-funding his campaign, and allows him to repay himself for the money he has already spent, if he chooses to do so.

Under the deal, the Trump campaign and the RNC will establish two committees: Trump Victory and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee.

Trump Victory -- for which the maximum contribution is $449,400 -- will benefit 11 states whose Republican parties are part of the agreement: Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Notably absent from that list: swing states. The only big general election battleground included is Virginia. The agreement doesn't cover states like Ohio, Florida and Colorado, where the race could be won or lost. Helping Trump Victory will be Lew Eisenberg, the RNC's finance chairman. He'll work with Trump finance chairman Steve Mnuchin. ""Lew Eisenberg is going to do an outstanding job leading this effort,"" RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement announcing the deal. ""Lew has already helped the RNC raise a record $135 million in support this cycle, and I have every confidence his track record of success will continue in this new role."" The Trump Make America Great Again Committee is a joint fundraising committee between the RNC and Trump's campaign. Joint fundraising committees are a regular part of the presidential election process. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has announced similar groups with the Democratic National Committee. The biggest benefit of the joint committees is that they allow donors to write checks much larger than the $2,700 limit for individual candidates. The joint fundraising agreement's structure will allow Trump to raise money not just for the general election, but for the primary -- taking advantage of a window to bring in extra money before he officially accepts the GOP's nomination. That could potentially allow Trump -- who regularly boasted that he was self-funding his campaign -- to reimburse himself for some of the millions of dollars he shelled out during his primary election fight. Trump, however, said on Wednesday that he has ""absolutely no intention of paying myself back for the nearly $50 million dollars I have loaned to the campaign."" It's not unusual to see states that aren't up for grabs in November included in joint agreements, because federal law limits the amount donors can give to $10,000 per state under such deals -- which means the more states that are included, the more money the candidate and the party can ask from each donor. Candidates also tend to include state parties they have strong relationships with as another way to exert control over the money raised. For instance, Mitt Romney's joint fundraising agreement in 2012 funneled money to Utah and Massachusetts -- states where Romney owned homes and had existing relationships. The $449,4000 limit includes a maximum limit of $2,700 for the Trump campaign's general election fund, $33,400 for the RNC, $110,000 for the 11 state parties and hundreds of thousands of dollars for party's building, legal and convention funds. ""We are pleased to have this partnership in place with the national party,"" Trump said in a statement. ""By working together with the RNC to raise support for Republicans everywhere, we are going to defeat Hillary Clinton, keep Republican majorities in Congress and in the states, and Make America Great Again.""",REAL
"Go to Article 
“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government .”— John Lennon 
How do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered , tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed , hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons , detained in cages and kennels , sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs? 
Politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair. 
No matter who sits in the White House, the shadow government will continue to call the shots behind the scenes. 
Relying on the courts to restore justice seems futile. 
Indeed, with every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts, largely lacking in vision and scope, rendering narrow rulings focused on the letter of the law. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. 
Even so, justice matters. 
It matters whether you’re a rancher protesting a federal land-grab by the Bureau of Land Management, a Native American protesting an oil pipeline that will endanger sacred sites and pollute water supplies, or an African-American taking to the streets to protest yet another police shooting of an unarmed citizen. 
Unfortunately, protests and populist movements haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one. 
It doesn’t matter who the activists are (environmentalists, peaceniks, Native Americans, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, or the Bundys and their followers) or what the source of the discontent is (endless wars abroad, police shootings, contaminated drinking water, government land-grabs), the government’s modus operandi has remained the same: shut down the protests using all means available, prosecute First Amendment activities to the fullest extent of the law, and discourage any future civil uprisings by criminalizing expressive activities, labelling dissidents as extremists or terrorists, and conducting widespread surveillance on the general populace in order to put down any whispers of resistance before it can take root. 
Thus, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional. 
Just recently, in fact, an Oregon jury rejected the government’s attempts to prosecute seven activists who staged a six-week, armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 
In finding the defendants not guilty—of conspiracy to impede federal officers, of possession of firearms in a federal facility, and of stealing a government-owned truck—the jury sent its own message to the government and those following the case: justice matters. 
The Malheur occupiers were found not guilty despite the fact that they had guns in a federal facility (their lawyers argued the guns were “as much a statement of their rural culture as a cowboy hat or a pair of jeans”). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they used government vehicles (although they would argue that government property is public property available to all taxpayers). They were found not guilty despite the fact that they succeeded in occupying a government facility for six weeks, thereby preventing workers from performing their duties (as the Washington Post points out, this charge has also been used to prosecute extremist left-wingers and Earth First protesters ). 
Many other equally sincere activists with eloquent lawyers and ardent supporters have gone to jail for lesser offenses than those committed at the Malheur Refuge, so what made the difference here? 
The jury made all the difference. 
These seven Oregon protesters were found not guilty because a jury of their peers recognized the sincerity of their convictions, sympathized with the complaints against an overreaching government, and balanced the scales of justice using the only tools available to them: common sense, compassion and the power of the jury box. 
Jury nullification works. 
As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive .” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.” 
Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just. 
In a world of “ rampant overcriminalization ,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “ a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.” 
Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises : 
If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights ; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer. 
In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes. 
Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. 
This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime. 
Of course, the powers-that-be don’t want the citizenry to know that it has any power at all. 
They would prefer that we remain clueless about the government’s many illicit activities, ignorant about our constitutional rights, and powerless to bring about any real change. 
In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, jury nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government. 
For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants. 
Nullification is one way of doing so. 
Various cities and states have been using this historic doctrine with mixed results on issues as wide ranging as gun control and healthcare to “ claim freedom from federal laws they find onerous or wrongheaded .” 
Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror. 
The reality with which we must contend is that justice in America is reserved for those who can afford to buy their way out of jail. 
For the rest of us who are dependent on the “fairness” of the system, there exists a multitude of ways in which justice can and does go wrong every day. Police misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct. Judicial bias. Inadequate defense. Prosecutors who care more about winning a case than seeking justice. Judges who care more about what is legal than what is just. Jurors who know nothing of the law and are left to deliberate in the dark about life-and-death decisions. And an overwhelming body of laws, statutes and ordinances that render the average American a criminal, no matter how law-abiding they might think themselves. 
If you’re to have any hope of remaining free—and I use that word loosely—your best bet remains in your fellow citizens. 
Your fellow citizens may not know what the Constitution says (studies have shown Americans to be abysmally ignorant about their rights), they may not know what the laws are (there are so many on the books that the average American breaks three laws a day without knowing it), and they may not even believe in your innocence, but if you’re lucky, those who serve on a jury will have a conscience that speaks louder than the legalistic tones of the prosecutors and the judges and reminds them that justice and fairness go hand in hand. 
That’s ultimately what jury nullification is all about: restoring a sense of fairness to our system of justice. It’s the best protection for “we the people” against the oppression and tyranny of the government, and God knows, we can use all the protection we can get. It’s a powerful way to remind the government—all of those bureaucrats who have appointed themselves judge, jury and jailer over all that we are, have and do—that we’re the ones who set the rules. 
We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent. 
Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm. 
Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences. 
The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other. 
What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same. 
In other words, when it’s time for the government to crack down—and that time is coming—it won’t matter whether we supported Hillary or Trump, whether we stood with the pipeline protesters or opposed BLM, or whether we spoke out against government misconduct and injustice or remained silent. 
When the government cracks down, we’ll all suffer. 
Here’s the thing: the government wants a civil war. 
The objective: compliance and control. 
Its strategy: destabilize the economy through endless wars, escalate racial tensions, polarize the populace, heighten tensions through a show of force, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation. 
The government has been anticipating and preparing for such a civil uprising for some time now. 
Those protests in Ferguson , Baltimore and Baton Rouge to protest police brutality? The militarized police “ clad in Kevlar vests, helmets, and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas ” turning towns into war zones? The kenneling of pipeline protesters in North Dakota? 
Those were just dress rehearsals for the government to work out the kinks in its operating manual on how to deal with civil unrest. 
They were also previews of what’s in store if we continue to challenge the powers-that-be. 
After all, it’s hard to persuade anyone to stand against tyranny when all you can promise them as a reward is persecution, prosecution and a one-way trip to the morgue. And when the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—the government always wins—it can seem pointless, even foolhardy, to dare to challenge the system. 
So how do you not only push back against the police state’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means? 
You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics. 
Employ militant nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience , which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches. 
Take part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level (in other words, think nationally, but act locally). 
And then, as I explain in more detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , nullify everything. Nullify the court cases. Nullify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.",FAKE
"WASHINGTON - A State Department official deliberately cut several minutes of videotape from a news briefing dealing with sensitive questions about U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations before posting the footage to its website and YouTube, the agency said Wednesday.

In the Dec. 2, 2013, briefing, a reporter asked about the department's denial earlier that year of secret talks between Washington and Tehran. Those discussions had been periodically occurring and eventually led to a breakthrough, seven-nation nuclear deal.

Is the State department lying about the Iran nuclear deal? Jerusalem Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell weighed in on Facebook LIVE.

Then-spokeswoman Jen Psaki responded at the briefing: ""There are times where diplomacy needs privacy.""

But the exchange wasn't on video the department posted on its website and YouTube, even if it remained in the official transcript and backup video for broadcasters. Fox News discovered the discrepancy last month.

On Wednesday, the State Department's current spokesman John Kirby said someone had censored the video intentionally. He said he couldn't find out who was responsible, but described such action as unacceptable.

""Deliberately removing a portion of the video was not and is not in keeping with the State Department's commitment to transparency and public accountability,"" he told reporters.

Kirby said he learned that on the same day of the 2013 briefing, a video editor received a call from a State Department public affairs official who made ""a specific request ... to excise that portion of the briefing."" The video editor no longer remembers the name of the person who called, he said.

As a result, ""we do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made,"" he told reporters.

While the State Department previously suggested a ""glitch"" occurred, the sensitivity of the removed portion raised questions.

The reporter, Fox News' James Rosen, started his inquiry by referencing an earlier Feb. 6, 2013, briefing in which State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said no intermittent conversations were occurring between Obama administration and Iranian officials in one-to-one format, outside of larger multilateral gatherings.

Eight months later, those gatherings had become public after reporting by The Associated Press and other media. And Rosen asked Psaki if her predecessor was speaking truthfully.

Upon learning of the video's editing, Kirby said he ordered the original video restored on all platforms and asked the State Department's legal adviser to examine the matter. He said no further investigation will be made, primarily because no rules were in place against such actions.

Kirby said he has ordered new rules created to prevent a recurrence.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.",REAL
"at 2:52 pm 2 Comments 
For a long time now, I’ve felt that no matter who wins this election, the U.S. is in for extremely difficult times over at least the next 4 years. The reason is twofold. First, when you combine Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters (the latter didn’t just disappear), a majority of the population is in full on revolt against the status quo. This mood isn’t going anywhere. Combine this backdrop with the very high likelihood of an economic downturn, and you have a recipe for mayhem. This isn’t even taking into account the possible end to a multi-decade secular bull market in sovereign bonds, the ramifications of which represent a financial extinction-level event for much of the Western world. 
When I look at the financial markets and note that they appear totally unwilling to even flirt with the very real possibility of a Trump victory, I conclude that the current status quo assumption is not only that Hillary will win, but that after she wins, the social mood will get better. I, on the other hand, think it will get far, far worse, as disgusted Trump and Sanders supporters push back relentlessly from day one. As I noted earlier today on Twitter: Sorry but if Clinton wins country becomes completely ungovernable. I don’t mean gridlock. I mean total madness. 
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) November 1, 2016 
Of course, I’m not the only one. Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote an excellent piece earlier today published at The Week titled, The Clinton Presidency is Going to be a Miserable Slog , which is my must read of the day. 
Here it is: Being on the cusp of electing the first woman president, and defeating a snarling, newly crass, and nationalist Republican Party should feel energizing for the American left. But it’s been tiring. The Democrats aren’t just electing a woman. They’re stuck electing this woman, Hillary Clinton. It’s been a slog . Clinton could not easily put away her socialist challenger Bernie Sanders. She would not release the transcripts of the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street banks. She could not name her accomplishments as secretary of state. She could not quite escape her own role in managing the political fallout from her husband’s affairs, or the appearance of corruption in the Clinton Foundation’s pioneering work in the field of do-gooder graft. When FBI Director James Comey gave us a healthy reminder of Clinton’s email scandal last week, liberals must have realized: It’s not just the campaign. The Clinton presidency is going to be a slog , too. The Clinton standard of political behavior has always had a lawyerly slipperiness to it. When the scandals come, it depends on your definition of “is.” When the headlines erupt, suddenly we discover that all of Clinton’s friends signed an affidavit contradicting the latest accuser or whistleblower. And, really, what difference, at this point, does it make? Partisans will note that Clinton’s ethical lapses and faults are minor compared to Donald Trump’s. Those comparisons are not going to matter in a few days. Some may object. They’ll reply that the only problem is the aggressive prosecutorial zeal of the Republicans. And it is true that Republicans have an ongoing grudge against Clinton. But let’s posit the existence of a vast right wing conspiracy that hates President Obama just as much as it hates the Clintons. Why is it only able to turn up news-driving scandals on the latter? Could it be that Obama, however detested by conservatives, conducts himself with higher ethical standards than Bill and Hillary? Clinton’s scandals and misdeeds often have little to do with the Democrats’ battle with Republicans. Clinton played fast and loose even with the Obama administration’s own rules. Obama had forbidden Clinton from giving a government job to the Clinton’s on-demand schemer Sidney Blumenthal — yet Clinton kept him on the payroll of her “charity” and kept up correspondence with him about Libya, even as he had business interests in a post-Gadhafi state. Despite explicit rules set by the Obama administration, the Clinton Foundation continued to operate as a bank in which foreign leaders and governments could deposit their quids, while Clinton was at the head of the State Department, able to distribute pro quos in return. Beyond the propensity to generate scandal, there is a larger reason that Clinton’s administration will be a slog. The 2016 election has been characterized by a demand for great change. And Hillary Clinton has run as the defender of the way things are, the way they’re going, and who they’re going for. Hillary Clinton received a vigorous challenge from a left wing that isn’t afraid to label themselves socialists. America’s center-right party ditched its commitments to establishment doctrine on free trade and liberalized immigration, and challenged the wisdom and justice of America’s post-Cold War political order. But Hillary Clinton will enter the White House as the caretaker for the status quo in American political life. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were not the men to carry forward this message of discontent to real political triumph. Both candidates represented their cause poorly. Trump was at once too crude and unethical himself. And Sanders had none of the political instincts and savvy to really go after Clinton in the primaries. Clinton is the face of a prosperous, grasping establishment that won’t bear challenge from the left or right. Her ability to survive scandal after scandal will not be received as some testament to her political canniness or some deep integrity. It will be received as just the system defending its own from attack. Her survival and her ability to win is a a tribute to the power and self-regard of our political class. And this class has no plausible solution for the nation’s foreign policy, for its immigration system, or for an economic system that abets the elite’s secession from their own nation. Clinton’s presidency will be a slog because she is exactly like the system she defends. She can point to the great wealth this system produces for its top clients. But neither she nor her cheerleaders can really claim that it looks like wisdom or justice to anyone else. Well done, Mr. Dougherty.",FAKE
"LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog II ‹ › GPD is our General Posting Department whereby we share posts from other sources along with general information with our readers. It is managed by our Editorial Board Iraqi Army: US Hindering Advance on Mosul By GPD on October 31, 2016 TEHRAN (FNA)- The Iraqi army blasted the US for troubling its Mosul liberation operation through electronic jamming to disrupt the communication among various army units. “The US army troops have disrupted communication among Iraqi forces participating in the Mosul liberation operation,” the Iraqi army reported. Iraq’s joint military forces, including the Hash Al-Shaabi (popular forces), started their military operation in Western Mosul on Saturday to recapture Tal Afar and also prevent terrorists from fleeing to Syria. The Iraqi parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, meantime, confirmed that the advances of the Iraqi volunteer forces to the West of the city of Mosul has foiled the US plot to help the ISIL terrorists to flee to Syria. “Hashd al-Shaabi’s efforts in the biggest military operation in Mosul city blocked the US aid to senior ISIL commanders’ escape to Syria from the Western part of Mosul city. The parliamentary committee underlined that Washington intended to repeat the Fallujah scenario and help the ISIL commanders to escape to Syria. Earlier on Monday afternoon, the first units of the Iraqi army entered the strategic al-Karama region Southeastern Mosul. Al-Karama is the first region of Mosul city that the Iraqi army has entered after the city fell to the ISIL terrorists in July 2014. Earlier on Monday, Iraq’s joint military forces kicked off a new round of military operations from three directions towards the Eastern parts of Mosul after seizing control over a vast swathe of land in the surrounding areas of the city in Nineveh province. “The Iraqi forces started moving towards the Eastern bank of the Tigris river near Mosul city,” the Arabic-language media reported. The military operation towards the Eastern part of Mosul started on the 15th day of the Mosul liberation operation. Meantime, the Iraqi sources disclosed that the ISIL has laid mines and stationed snipers on the Eastern bank of the Tigris river. On Sunday, Spokesman of the Iraqi Volunteer Forces (Hashd al-Shaabi) Ahmad al-Assadi announced that the country’s joint military forces had seized back tens of villages since the start of the Mosul liberation operation about two weeks ago. “Iraq’s joint military forces have seized back 100 villages from the ISIL on the West of the city of Mosul,” al-Assadi said. He noted that a sum of 20 bomb-laden vehicles of the ISIL have also been destroyed to the West of Mosul over the past 12 days. Also on Sunday, local sources said ISIL has broadly planted bombs in toys and other attractive objects for children and civilians in areas they leave as Iraqi joint forces continue their advances in the military operations to liberate Mosul from the terror group grip. “ISIL used toys because they know the Peshmerga will not touch it, but children will,” said Colonel Nawzad Kamil Hassan, an engineer who says his unit has cleared more than 50 tons of explosives from areas once controlled by the militants. In the areas where ISIL rules for, the group has attempted to plant bomb before its retreat. A toy, a playing card and an abandoned watch are all detonators designed to spark the acquisitive curiosity of a returning civilian, who would be maimed or murdered by the explosion. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by GPD on October 31, 2016, With 148 Reads Filed under Investigations . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"  Hillary Clinton Appears Disoriented And Confused At New York Airport Day Before Presidential Election A few seconds later, her handlers become aware that she's having a Parkinson's freeze moment, and immediately swarm around her pushing the video cameras backwards. But not before video of her is recorded showing she doesn't know what she's supposed to do.   After Hillary Clinton posed for photos with the media covering her, she was confused about whether she needed to board the awaiting plane or get in the motorcade that had just dropped her off. 
Hillary Clinton was at the White Plains, New York airport about to start her day, when she exhibited some startling behavior . It was the very beginning of her day, so presumably she was rested and alert as she prepared to hit the campaign trail. Yet when speaking with the loud mob of reporters, she appeared to speak gibberish mixed in with her sentences, and laughing awkwardly even though nothing funny was being said. Then it got really weird. Shocking Video Footage Of A Confused Hillary Clinton Mumbling Gibberish On Campaign Trail 
As she walks in the direction of her personal campaign plane, she suddenly freezes and is not sure whether she needs to get into the motorcade which had just dropped her off, or board the plane like she was supposed to do. 
A few seconds later , her handlers become aware that she’s having another Parkinson’s freeze moment , and immediately swarm around her pushing the video cameras backwards. But not before video of her is recorded showing she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. Hillary’s Health: More than just a cough 
The cameras capture her saying “where am I going”? and then “what am I doing”? before she disappears into the protective huddle of her watchers. 
This stands is very stark contrast to am energized Donald Trump, making nearly a dozen stops in a 24 hour period and speaking for almost an hour wherever he goes. Hillary Clinton barely has the energy to get out of her car, and when she does get out, she has no idea what to do after that. 
This deceitful woman is not only hiding her crimes and scandals , she and her people are also hiding the fact that she is very ill and physically unfit to serve for 4 years as president of the United States. SHARE THIS ARTICLE  ",FAKE
"(CNN) Matt Bevin, the controversial Kentuckian who attempted to dethrone Sen. Mitch McConnell last year and has vowed to eliminate the state's Obamacare programs, orchestrated a remarkable political comeback on Tuesday to win the state's governorship.

In an upset victory by a surprisingly large margin, Bevin bested Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, a Democrat, in the contest.

Bevin, a Republican often at odds with more mainstream elements of his party, solidly beat Conway 53%-44% in a race that Bevin was not expected to win by any significant margin.

The wealthy businessman has pledged to shutdown the state's healthcare exchange and he's also expressed concerns about the expansion of Medicaid in Kentucky under the Affordable Care Act.

In Mississippi, incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Bryant easily won his re-election against Democrat Robert Gray, a truck driver. The contest was pushed to the background, however, by a clash over a constitutional amendment that would allow voters to sue the state to boost funding for public schools.

In Virginia, Democrats failed to capture control of the state Senate, where Republicans maintained the same narrow 21-19 majority they held before the election. Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe had campaigned aggressively in the run up to Tuesday's elections, seeking to flip control of the senate in order to advance key parts of his legislative agenda, in particular an expansion of Medicaid, and to build support for his longtime ally Hillary Clinton before 2016.

Meanwhile, heated debate surrounding an effort to defeat a LGBT rights law in Texas could become hot fodder for the presidential candidates, a billionaire is backing a major effort to protect big game, and voters in Seattle are weighing a unique answer to the problem of money in politics.

Here are some of the issues being decided Tuesday and that are sure to be dissected in the aftermath as pols, pundits and the press look for clues to what the results all mean in the 2016 contest for the White House:

In Ohio, which was weighing a series of ballot initiatives that could have paved the way to the legalization of recreational marijuana, voters turned down the measure, CNN projects. Issue 3 would have effectively given a few businessmen a monopoly on cultivating the drug, which would have been sold at a limited number of places for sale in the state.

Nick Lachey, the onetime lead singer of 98 Degrees, and other investors are behind ResponsibleOhio, the group that was pushing an initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in the Buckeye State.

""The people of Ohio have understandably rejected a deeply flawed, monopolistic approach to marijuana reform that failed to garner broad support from advocates or industry leaders,"" said one of those advocacy groups, The National Cannabis Industry Association. ""This debate has shown that there is a strong base of support for legalizing, taxing, and regulating marijuana.""

Also on the pot front, Colorado voters are deciding what they want to do with the millions in revenue raised from its sale -- return the funds to taxpayers or use it to pay for school construction and other things.

CNN projects Houston voters will reject the ""Houston Equal Rights Ordinance,"" a measure designed to protect lesbian, gay and transgender people. The ballot issue drew national attention, with conservative opponents claiming the law would allow troubled men to go into women's restrooms and locker rooms.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Clinton campaign joined the fray, responding to a baiting tweet from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, that urged Houston to ""vote Texas values, not @HillaryClinton values.""

The law passed by the city last year to protect lesbian, gay and transgender people, but Tuesday's vote repealed it.

In recent months, the campaign to undo HERO has become a focal point for the right, which has spent millions and recruited an assortment of local celebrities to their cause, including former Houston Astros star outfielder Lance Berkman.

""My wife and I have four daughters,"" Berkman said in an ad paid for by the Campaign for Houston PAC, which is seeking to repeal HERO. ""Proposition One would allow troubled men to enter women's public bathrooms, showers and locker rooms.""

Supporters of the ordinance bristled at the claim, calling it fear-mongering against transgender men and women.

How would you like some coupons to spend on your favorite candidate?

That's what Seattle voters will now receive after the successful passage of the ""Honest Elections"" referendum, which was introduced to diminish the influence of money in politics.

""Initiative 122"" will radically transform the financing of local campaigns. Under the measure, voters will each be given $100 in ""democracy vouchers"" -- four each, at $25 per -- to be shelled out to the candidates of their choice.

It will also lower donation caps, ban contributions from corporations with significant city business interests, increase transparency and increase fines for electoral wrongdoing. Furthermore, officials who leave office will be required to spend three years on the sidelines before becoming eligible to register as lobbyists.

This one's for Cecil the Lion, the big Zimbabwean cat killed in July by a dentist on safari from Minnesota.

Washington state's Initiative Measure 1401, which was resoundingly passed by a greater than 2-to-1 margin Tuesday night, criminalizes ""selling, purchasing, trading, or distributing certain animal species threatened with extinction,"" raising the bar beyond where laws already on the books in New York, New Jersey and California have previously gone to protect big game.

The measure is the brainchild of billionaire Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, who has sunk millions of dollars of his own money into the campaign.

Opponents, including the ""Legal Ivory Rights Coalition,"" had knocked the proposal for going too far. The group's website blared ""It's Not What They Say It Is!"" warning that grandmas looking to pass along their ""antique"" ivory will be made into criminals under the measure.

Not complaining about the initiative's passage: Elephants and rhinoceroses -- often hunted for the ivory in their tusks and horns -- along with lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, marine turtles and sharks that are among the threatened species that supporters say would be helped by the referendum.

On the other hand, Texans with a taste for ""hunting, fishing and harvesting"" got a constitutional boost on Tuesday, as voters there resoundingly passed Proposition 6.

The amendment makes it more difficult for activist groups to push through new legislation or regulations aimed at expanding protections for animals or delicate ecosystems. The NRA lead the way in lobbying for its passage, with groups like the ""Dallas Safari Club"" also boosting the cause.

With the measure's passage, Texas became the 19th state to guarantee its residents a constitutional right to hunt and kill almost all manner of wildlife and the freedom to catch and ""bag"" as many fish as they can haul back home.

Airbnb, a vanguard of the so-called ""sharing economy,"" won a decisive victory in Tuesday's elections when San Francisco voters rejected a measure that would have critically limited the company's ability to operate in the city following a furious lobbying effort from proponents of both sides.

Referred to as ""Prop. F,"" the defeated measure proposed a citywide ban on what are known as ""short-term rentals."" If successful, Prop. F would have effectively crippled Airbrb, the profitable hub for homeowners and renters who profit from leasing out rooms or houses to travelers for below market rates, in its hometown.

The company had locked horns with the left over the measure, which activists supported amid growing tension over the lack of affordable housing in a city wracked by skyrocketing real estate prices. Rent and home sale prices in San Francisco have shot up in recent years, along with evictions, and critics say the fault lies, at least in part, with wealthy buyers who purchase housing for the express purpose of leasing it out for a quick profit.

But for now, at least, Airbnb will be able to remain in its home.",REAL
"After a week of horrible headlines, Paul Manafort abruptly resigned as chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign this morning. So much for a Friday news dump.

Trump’s second campaign chief had already been effectively booted from his top role after Trump decided to bring in Breitbart News boss Stephen Bannon as his new campaign CEO and Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager over the weekend.

The trouble for Manafort, who replaced first Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski earlier this summer, really began in earnest with Trump’s attacks on a Muslim American Gold Star family. Manafort, a longtime Republican player who has spent the last couple of decades lobbying on behalf of foreign dictators, was brought on by the campaign to deal with a possible contested convention. But the less than star-studded affair featured the prominent non-endorsement from former rival Ted Cruz and was bested by a Democratic convention that set-off a days long attack on the Khan family. Hardly a good look for Trump, by nearly all accounts.

Manafort’s days reportedly grew numbered as Trump became enraged that his campaign was unable to mobilize Republican support over his attack on the Khans.

As reports of Manafort’s connections to the Kremlin through his work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Victor Yanukovych grew more troublesome, Trump moved to undercut the veteran political operative. In one week, there were reports that Manafort was listed on a secret ledger as having received $12.7 million in under-the-table payments, that he played a key role in fomenting pro-annexation sentiments in Crimea ahead of the Russian invasion, and that he illegally funneled foreign cash towards pro-Putin lobbying efforts in the U.S.

Trump thanked Manafort for the contributions he made during his three months leading the campaign in a statement Friday. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success,” Trump said. MANAFORT RESIGNS, per two sources briefed. Rick Gates remaining so far.",REAL
"James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top... James Bond wouldn’t make the grade in modern MI6, says Britain’s top spy By 0 41 
Fictional super-spy James Bond’s lack of a moral compass would quickly rule him out of the intelligence services today, the head of MI6 said in a rare public statement. 
In a question-and-answer session for the Black History Month website, spy chief Alex Younger said 007’s lack of an ethical core would have seen him rejected from training. 
“ We know that if we undermine British values, even in the name of defending them, then we have failed. Our staff are not from another planet ,” Younger said. 
“ They are ordinary men and women operating in the face of complex moral, ethical and physical challenges, often in the most forbidding environments on Earth .” 
Read more 
“ In contrast to James Bond, MI6 officers are not for taking moral shortcuts. In fact, a strong ethical core is one of the first qualities we look for in our staff, ” he added. 
Younger insisted that Bond’s erratic individualism would certainly have rendered him unable to “get through our recruitment process.” 
“ Whilst we share his qualities of patriotism, energy and tenacity, an intelligence officer in the real MI6 has a high degree of emotional intelligence, values teamwork and always has respect for the law… unlike Mr. Bond, ” Younger said. 
Some, however, would contest claims that MI6 is a bastion of ethical conduct, not least during the UK’s heavy involvement in kidnap and torture in the post-9/11 world. 
A Libyan kidnapped and delivered to the Libyan regime for torture recently questioned the commitment to morality of a previous MI6 head. 
In July, Abdul Hakim Belhaj said former MI6 chief Mark Allen was mistaken if he thinks a recent article he wrote for a Christian magazine means his “account is settled with God.” 
In 2004, Abdul Hakim Belhaj was kidnapped in Hong Kong with British complicity, along with his pregnant wife, and rendered back to his native Libya. He was then held and tortured by the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for six years. 
A note faxed from Allen to the Libyan authorities told the regime’s spy chief Moussa Koussa: “ I congratulate you on the safe arrival of… the air cargo. ” 
On August 4, a day before the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided it would not press charges against Allen, the ex-spook published a piece in the Catholic Herald on “ Christian ” approaches to terrorism. 
Belhaj’s response, which had been offered to the Herald, was published on the website of the Reprieve human rights charity. 
“ His words on the power of faith to see us through bloodshed are too rich to swallow, ” the torture victim wrote in reference to the now infamous ‘ air cargo ’ fax. 
Via RT . This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.",FAKE
"The British security firm Serco has moved a step closer to entering the controversial but lucrative immigration detention market in the US, as the company successfully lobbied public officials in a small Texas county near the Mexico border to propose that the federal government open a family detention centre in the jurisdiction.

The billion-dollar company, implicated in numerous immigration detention centre scandals in the UK and Australia, has been lobbying the US government for more than a year in an effort to win detention contracts, sparking sustained criticism from immigrant rights groups.

The firm is now proposing that a shuttered nursing home in Jim Wells County, Texas, be reopened as a family detention centre, which could hold up to 600 detainees and would become the third privately managed centre in the United States.

The Obama administration’s use of family detention centres that hold children and mothers has become one of the most contested elements of America’s border protection program.

Serco representatives first approached officials in the county last month, as the company ramped up its lobbying efforts, following an open pitching invitation announced by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in April. On Monday, following a closed-door session between Serco lobbyists and the county’s five commissioners, the local government body voted to partner with Serco and pitch the proposal to Ice.

The company has employed a number of experienced lobbyists in America, including a former senior Ice staff member, Kate Mills, and has already listed a job opening for a communications and logistics staff member close to the proposed centre “in the event of a contract award”.

Judge Pedro Trevino Jr, the presiding member of the Jim Wells commissioners court, told the Guardian that Serco indicated up to 200 local jobs could be created at the centre. The county, with just over 40,000 residents, has had a spike in unemployment following the decline of the oil and gas industry in the region with the poverty rate climbing to 20%, according to census data.

“People are most interested in the jobs it would create,” said Trevino, of the county’s reaction to the proposed deal, adding that county attorneys were continuing to research the proposal, wary of the controversy it could bring.

“We know family detention centres are highly controversial and we want to put all our ducks in a row and gather facts before we make our final decision.”

Although Ice opened an “information” pitching round designed for “market research” purposes, it has not yet confirmed if it will move on to receive formal proposals from potential family detention contractors.

“There are several formalities that have to transpire with the [request for proposals] before we can begin to discuss,” an Ice public affairs officer told the Guardian.

About 38,000 people were apprehended crossing the US-Mexico border in April alone, including more than 10,000 unaccompanied children and “family units”, according to US Customs and Border Patrol. This is the highest number since a surge in arrivals in June 2014, and will add pressure to the already strained detention network.

Reports have also indicated that the Obama administration is planning raids that could lead to the detention and deportation of more Central American mothers and children who entered the country illegally.

Serco has operated the Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in the UK since 2007 and endured a string of abuse allegations, including that members of staff sexually assaulted female detainees. In Australia, where Serco operates all of the country’s mainland immigration detention facilities under a multibillion-dollar contract, the company has suffered sustained criticism after riots have broken out in centres on Christmas Island, dozens of detainees have self-harmed and others have made sexual assault allegations against staff.

“Their actual track record is very different to what they say to people here in the US,” said Mohammad Abdollahi, director of advocacy for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services not-for-profit group in Texas. “There is no ‘right’ way to detain families, but they have shown, around the world, everything that is wrong with how you do it.”

“Serco has international experience of managing immigration facilities. We are committed to looking after all those in our care with trust and respect,” said a US spokesman for the company in an emailed statement that confirmed Serco’s presence in Jim Wells County.

The centre would be the corporation’s first in the United States, completing a triangle of family detention centers in south Texas, where Geo Group operates the 679-bed Karnes County Residential Center, and Corrections Corporation of America runs the 2,400-bed Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. The only family facility outside of the state is a 96-bed facility in Pennsylvania that is operated by Berks County under an agreement with Ice.

Most of the women and children held at the three facilities are seeking refugee status and asylum amid a humanitarian crisis in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, which operated a pilot “alternative to detention” program last year, says it found that housing the families in a less restrictive setting was a more cost-effective way to ensure they attended their immigration court hearings.

“We saw that people seeking asylum have a huge stake in finishing the process that could give them a chance to potentially rebuild their life and live here in safety,” said Brittney Nystrom, LIRS director for advocacy. “We are creating additional trauma and pouring money down the drain.”",REAL
"Merrick Garland has the opportunity to become not only the newest member of the Supreme Court but also its most influential, taking a spot at the court’s center now reserved for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

If the 63-year-old Garland is confirmed by the Senate — and there is no bigger if in all of Washington politics — he would help fulfill President Obama’s goal of remaking the court and become a part of a five-member liberal majority chosen by Obama and President Bill Clinton.

Garland’s replacement of conservative icon Antonin Scalia would be the most significant shift on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991 to replace the liberal civil rights giant Thurgood Marshall.

But more than that, Garland could occupy the pivotal role as the court considers the most controversial cases­ of the day: affirmative action, abortion, gun rights, campaign finance regulation, the death penalty.

For a decade, a version of that role has been played by Kennedy, the most powerful of the nine justices and the one who most often casts the deciding vote when the court’s conservatives and liberals deadlock.

Just as Kennedy is to the left of the rest of the court’s Republican-nominated conservatives — and thus the justice most often in play — most scholars of the court think that Garland would probably be just to the right of all of the court’s liberals.

No one knows for sure. But a review of his record on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and interviews with those who have watched him for years as a prominently mentioned Supreme Court hopeful see someone whose instinct is for the middle.

“If confirmed, he’ll surely become the swing vote in most of the highly politicized cases, but more because he is a centrist than because he vacillates between more progressive and more conservative ideals,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law who watches closely the work of the D.C. Circuit, of which Garland is chief judge.

Like others, Vladeck is most struck by the lack of controversy in a judge who has been on the bench nearly 20 years.

“Chief Judge Garland’s jurisprudence is the epitome of centrist, case-by-case adjudication — not because he lacks deep methodological commitments, but because he’s never been prone to go out of his way to wax philosophical about those commitments,” he said. “He has a remarkable dearth of separate opinions, and even his majority opinions tend to be fairly efficient, technical resolutions of the legal questions before him.”

Moreover, Garland is well known to the Supreme Court. More than 40 of his clerks have gone on to clerk for the justices, about a quarter of them for conservative members of the court. Such cross-pollination is increasingly rare.

“Many fine Supreme Court justices took time to get their bearings,” said Justin Driver, a University of Chicago law professor who clerked for Garland and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen G. Breyer.

“That would not be him,” Driver said. “He would hit the ground running.”

Garland is known as a technical craftsman, with careful opinions that follow rather than push back at precedents either at his own court or the Supreme Court. He ranked in the top 10 percent of judges appointed in 1997 or after in a measure of both the quantity and quality of their work, according to an analysis by Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics start-up.

Despite nearly two decades on what is often called the second-most-important court in the country — its judges often are nominated to take the next step to the high court — he has relatively few controversial rulings.

The court often hears important government and regulatory cases but is rarely called upon to decide dramatic social issues such as affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage or the death penalty. Those have become staples at the Supreme Court.

Conservatives acknowledge they have come up with a limited list of complaints. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank that is normally a scourge of liberal jurists, acknowledged in a conference call with reporters that “the only criticism I’d make of him is that he’s a liberal.”

Carrie Severino of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network criticized Garland as anti-Second Amendment. In 2007, he voted with the losing side on whether the entire D.C. Circuit should review a panel’s decision that struck down the District’s restrictive gun-ownership laws.

She and Brian Rogers, executive director of the Republican group America Rising Squared, said Garland may be the “most anti-gun nominee” in decades.

But a Republican judge joined Garland in saying that the landmark ruling about the Second Amendment’s protection of individual rights should be reviewed. The whole court did not take up the merits of the panel’s decision. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court in a dramatic 5-to-4 decision, with the majority opinion written by Scalia.

But it would probably be just as accurate to describe Garland as the most conservative Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president in decades. His prosecutor background and some of his rulings on the D.C. Circuit indicate that he would not take uniformly liberal positions on criminal justice issues; on the circuit, he is more likely to side with the government than his liberal colleagues.

He is also deferential to government agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, and his rulings on labor issues are supported by unions. Liberal groups that might have wanted a more outspoken champion nonetheless say privately that they are confident that Garland would move the court in their direction.

That was Whelan’s point, too: When it comes to the Supreme Court, a “supposed moderate liberal” is as good as any other kind of liberal.

Garland has always been seen as the “safe” nomination that Obama kept in his back pocket. The president acknowledged that he considered Garland twice before and, with a Democratic-controlled Senate, opted instead for Sonia Sotomayor and then Elena Kagan.

Garland looks more like a left-leaning version of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.: a Midwesterner with double degrees at Harvard who clerked for the same circuit judge, moved on to work for Supreme Court justices, served on the D.C. Circuit and made friends on both sides of the aisle.

No one seriously doubts that Garland would move the court to the left and that his presence holds the promise for a reversal of the court’s trends on issues such as voting rights, environmental issues and, perhaps, campaign finance regulation.

That is why the fight over his nomination is likely to be so fierce.",REAL
"| December 1, 2015 at 6:38 am | Reply 
This group of demented, destructive, abusive people is the world’s karma for kicking God out of their consciousness, being and world. If mankind maintained their love and reverence for their creator God, I believe this would not be happening and this people would already be contained and stopped. For America, Obama, Jarrett, Soros and their minions, who’re in agreement with this savage group, are the ones bringing America’s karma to her doorstep for kicking God out. The Godless liberals/communists are begging for these savages to destroy them by taking on the ways of evil, such as, abortion, perversions of sex and marriage, drugs, child abuse, etc. Do liberals really expect a positive outcome from having absolutely no morals and standards? They are probably quite a few of the same souls from the time of Pompeii, Soddom & Gomorrah, Roman and Greek Empires, Atlantis and Lemuria – review history and note where they and their country ended up. Atlantis & Lemuria crumbled and sank and now lies deep within the bottom of the ocean. We can still see the end result of Pompeii. What will it take to wake up these people from their hedonistic, anti-self thoughts and feelings??? How many lifetimes will they put themselves and the rest of society through this total destruction of their hearts, minds and souls? “You get what you give” and “whatever energy you put out into the universe returns to your doorstep” is truth. Hedonists are lost, lost, lost in their world of destructive unreality, and only God can pull them out of it. Pray for them and Earth to return to God reality.",FAKE
"Donald Trump made his most direct appeal to African Americans on Friday, asking ""What do you have to lose?"" while slamming longstanding Democratic policies that have destroyed inner cities and sent manufacturing jobs to Mexico and other countries.

""We cannot fix our problems by relying on the same politicians who created our problems in the first place,"" Trump told a rally in Dimondale, Mich., a suburb of Lansing in the southwestern part of the state. ""A new future requires brand-new leadership.

""Look how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control,"" he continued in his appeal to the party's longtime base. ""To those I say the following: What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump? What do you have to lose?

""You're living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed.

""What the hell do you have to lose?"" Trump asked before predicting, ""at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote — because I will produce.

""I will produce for the inner cities and I will produce for the African-Americans.

""One thing we know for sure is if you keep voting for the same people, you will keep getting the same — exactly the same result,"" Trump said.

""Hillary Clinton is a throwback to an ugly past where politicians preyed on our poorer citizens while selling them out for personal gain.""

The Republican presidential nominee's speech comes after a bruising week that saw a major shake-up of his campaign staff, including a new chief executive, Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon, and Friday's resignation of campaign chairman Paul Manafort amid reports of lobbying ties to Ukraine.

Trump has been referencing African Americans in speeches — mostly in suburban or heavily white communities — since last week's racial unrest over a police-involved shooting in Milwaukee, but Friday's comments marked his most direct appeal to date.

He cited the contributions blacks have made to the country throughout history, hammered Democrat Hillary Clinton for backing policies that have ""harmed"" African-American communities over the years and said that his jobs plan would restore manufacturing to cities like Detroit and other Midwestern states.

""The African-American community has given so much to this country,"" Trump said. ""They fought and died in every war since the Revolution. They've lifted up the conscience of our nation in the long march toward civil rights. They've sacrificed so much for the national good.

""Yet, nearly four in 10 African-American children still live in poverty, and 58 percent of young African-Americans are not working. They cannot find a job.

""We must do better as a country.""",REAL
"WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to name Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a senior Defense Department official said late Monday.

Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, currently the leader of U.S. Transportation Command, will be named vice chairman, said the official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Dunford, a widely respected and well-liked officer at the Pentagon, has extensive battlefield experience, including as commander of all allied forces in Afghanistan. He will replace Army Gen. Martin Dempsey who is expected to retire later this summer after his second term expires. Selva would replace Adm. James Winnefeld.

A formal announcement from the White House is expected Tuesday, the official said.

Dunford quickly received support from one key member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the panel's top Democrat.

""I have come to greatly value General Dunford's counsel and insight, and I particularly appreciate the concern he has for our men and women in uniform under his command,"" Reed said.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, hailed Dunford as well suited to the job. ""He is a brilliant choice,"" O'Hanlon said. ""Smart, wise, creative, pragmatic, calm, affable, experienced.""

Dunford has been commandant since last October. Prior to that, he had led U.S. and NATO forces from February 2013 to August 2014 in Afghanistan and oversaw the withdrawal of tens of thousands of American troops from the country.

An infantry officer, Dunford followed Gen. James Amos, a pilot, as commandant of the Marine Corps. He holds a master's degree in government from Georgetown University and a master's degree in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

As chairman, Dunford will be the military's most senior officer and adviser to the president. The Senate must approve the nomination of Dunford for the two-year term. Most often, chairmen serve two terms.

Among the primary challenges he'll inherit: the ongoing war against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria; Russia's increasing belligerence in Eastern Europe and the threat of automatic budget cuts known as sequestration.

He'll also have to deal with China's increasing ambitions in the Pacific and the military's long-standing desire to shift its resources toward that region, O'Hanlon said.

Selva's choice marks the return of airman to one of the top two slots for the first time since Gen. Richard Myers retired as chairman in 2005. Transportation Command lacks the visibility of some of the military's other top spots, including Central Command, which oversees the turbulent Middle East. But Transportation Command's function of moving troops, weapons and supplies around the globe is critically important.

A cargo plane pilot, Selva also has extensive experience inside the Pentagon. He served as assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2008 to 2011.",REAL
"Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called Wednesday for an international peacekeeping mission in his nation’s war-torn east, a stark admission that his nation can no longer fend off pro-Russian rebels after a major battlefield defeat.

Any international force on the ground would harden the battle lines after 10 months of fighting, forcing Ukraine to give up for now its attempts to reunify the nation. But it would also halt Russian-backed rebels from pushing onward toward Kiev.

The suggestion came hours after thousands of Ukrainian troops fled the encircled railway hub of Debaltseve, where fighting only intensified after a cease-fire ostensibly took effect Sunday. Nearly a year after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, the fresh loss threatened tough political consequences for Ukraine’s pro-Western president amid questions of how the troops became surrounded in recent weeks.

Soldiers described a chaotic nighttime retreat over eastern Ukraine’s frozen steppe, with shells raining down on them from two sides.

The prospects for a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine were not immediately clear. Any U.N. Security Council mandate would be subject to a possible Russian veto. Poroshenko said he hoped for a European Union police mission, although what such a plan would entail on the ground remained unclear. Any E.U.-only plan appeared likely to be rejected by Russia, which has said that it views NATO’s encroachment on its borders as a security threat.

“I invite you to discuss an invitation to a U.N. peacekeeping mission,” Poroshenko told a late-night meeting of his top security advisers, according to Ukrainian news outlets.

The violence may increase pressure on President Obama to supply Ukraine’s military with weapons, a decision he said would be made only after the peace effort. E.U. leaders, meanwhile, said they would consider more economic sanctions against Russia.

Elsewhere in Ukraine’s war-torn east, violence was abating as rebels announced that they had begun pulling back heavy weaponry in accordance with the cease-fire agreement. But the advance on Debaltseve suggested that the Russian-backed rebels had the strength to push forward when they wished.

Poroshenko has staked his office on reuniting Ukraine and quelling Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Earlier in the day he called the retreat a “planned and organized withdrawal of certain units from Debaltseve.”

The defeat was sure to stir a political cauldron over the prosecution of the war in Kiev, where charges of incompetence and even betrayal were lobbed at Ukraine’s military brass in the aftermath. The thousands of Ukrainian troops who were in and around Debaltseve represented a significant portion of the nation’s battle-ready soldiers.

Ukraine’s flatlining economy is fueling even more anger toward Ukraine’s leaders. Natural gas prices are set to nearly triple under the terms of a bailout plan from the International Monetary Fund, sure to be politically radioactive. Ukraine’s currency fell to record lows on Wednesday.

One of Poroshenko’s coalition allies in parliament called for criminal charges to be lodged against top military leaders.

“There were enough forces and equipment. The problem is coordination and command,” Semen Semenchenko, a lawmaker who is also a volunteer militia commander, wrote on Facebook. “The head of the General Staff should be brought to liability. Period.”

Western officials said Wednesday that the fighting called into question the viability of the peace deal, reached in Minsk, Belarus, last week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and European leaders.

The situation in Debaltseve “is a massive violation of the cease-fire,” a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Steffen Seibert, said in Berlin. “It is a heavy strain on . . . the hope for peace in eastern Ukraine in general.” He said Germany was poised to push for further sanctions against Russia if fighting escalates.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also said he was “deeply concerned” about the fighting.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the fighting was inevitable after Poroshenko’s insistence at last week’s peace negotiations that the troops were not surrounded. But he said it must stop.

Last week’s peace deal left a 60-hour window before the cease-fire was set to go into effect. That stipulation almost certainly led to an increase in fighting, as both sides sought to maximize their positions before the truce. No official explanation was given for the delay, although Ukrainian and European officials said at the time they were ready to have an immediate cease-fire. The window for continued fighting has led to speculation that rebels may have been seeking to seize Debaltseve before the truce took effect.

Six Ukrainian soldiers were killed in the pullout, according to Poroshenko, although the real number seemed likely to be significantly higher, based on Ukrainian soldiers’ accounts of sustaining heavy fire during the late-night retreat. Many said they had only 10 minutes’ notice to grab what they could carry and flee, piling onto tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks as they sped toward the staging city of Artemivsk.

It was not immediately clear how many troops escaped and how many remained in and around the town. Top military officials said that 85 percent of the troops had escaped as of Wednesday evening. Others may still be in hiding or were killed or captured, they said. Some soldiers said that many corpses were left behind.

Front-line troops questioned on Wednesday why it took so long for the retreat to be ordered, saying that their situation had long ago become hopeless.

“It’s not about Debaltseve as a city; it’s about Putin showing he can do what he wants,” said Lt. Viktor Kovalenko, the acting deputy commander of the battalion that had been charged with protecting railroads into Debaltseve. He said several people in his convoy were killed during the retreat, which began at 3 a.m. Wednesday, and that at least 50 troops were captured as they tried to flee.

Kovalenko said supplies had run so low that one Ukrainian position was captured earlier this week simply because it ran out of ammunition.

Another soldier described a harrowing early morning escape, speeding over pitch-black fields that had been hardened by frost.

“We came under shelling, and we prayed to God to let us get out. There are a lot of wounded and killed people,” said Ihor Sevastyan, 47, who drove out of Debaltseve Wednesday in a green radio truck. The vehicle was riddled with large bullet holes, and one of the tires had been shot out. They kept pushing forward using the truck’s rim.

Other than in Debaltseve, both sides said Wednesday that they were holding to the agreement. Rebels said they had begun to pull back heavy weaponry from the front lines, as stipulated by the cease-fire deal, and relatively little fighting was reported elsewhere in the region.

Birnbaum reported from Moscow. Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow, Alexander Pustovit in Artemivsk, Ukraine, Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin, Daniela Deane in London and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.",REAL
"A research division of the World Health Organization announced Monday that bacon, sausage and other processed meats cause cancer and that red meat probably does, too.

The report by the influential group stakes out one of the most aggressive stances against meat taken by a major health organization, and it is expected to face stiff criticism in the United States.

The WHO findings were drafted by a panel of 22 international experts who reviewed decades of research on the link between red meat, processed meats and cancer. The panel reviewed animal experiments, studies of human diet and health, and cell processes that could explain how red meat might cause cancer.

But the panel’s decision was not unanimous, and by raising lethal concerns about a food that anchors countless American meals, it will be controversial.

The $95 billion U.S. beef industry has been preparing for months to mount a response, and some scientists, including some unaffiliated with the meat industry, have questioned whether the evidence is substantial enough to draw the strong conclusions that the WHO panel did.

In reaching its conclusion, the panel sought to quantify the risks, and compared to carcinogens such as cigarettes, the magnitude of the danger appears small, experts said. The WHO panel cited studies suggesting that an additional 3.5 ounces of red meat everyday raises the risk of colorectal cancer by 17 percent; eating an additional 1.8 ounces of processed meat daily raises the risk by 18 percent, according to the research cited.

“For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed,” says Kurt Straif, an official with the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, which produced the report. “In view of the large number of people who consume processed meat, the global impact on cancer incidence is of public health importance.”

About 34,000 cancer deaths a year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meats, according to figures cited by the panel.

[WHO says hot dogs, bacon cause cancer. Does this mean we should all become vegetarians?]

 

 The research into a possible link between eating red meat and cancer has been the subject of scientific debate for decades, with colorectal cancer being a long-standing area of concern. But by concluding that processed meat causes cancer, and that red meat “probably” causes cancer, the WHO findings go well beyond the tentative associations that some other groups have reported.

The American Cancer Society, for example, notes that many studies have found “a link” between eating red meat and heightened risks of colorectal cancer. But it stops short of telling people that the meats cause cancer. Some diets that have lots of vegetables and fruits and lesser amounts of red and processed meats have been associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer, the American Cancer Society says, but “it’s not exactly clear” which factors of that diet are important.

Likewise, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the U.S. government’s advice compendium, encourage the consumption of protein-containing foods such as lean meats as part of a healthy diet. Regarding processed meats, though, the Dietary Guidelines offer a tentative warning: “Moderate evidence suggests an association between the increased intake of processed meats (e.g., franks, sausage, and bacon) and increased risk of colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease.” The Dietary Guidelines do not assert that processed meats cause cancer.

Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, which is updating the Dietary Guidelines with the USDA, have not yet reviewed the WHO report, a spokesperson said.

[95 percent of the world's people may be wrong about salt]

For consumers, the WHO announcement offers scant practical advice even while casting aspersions over a wide array of foods. Red meat includes beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton and goat. Processed meat includes hot dogs, ham, sausages, corned beef and beef jerky — or any other meat that has been cured, smoked, salted or otherwise changed to enhance flavor or improve preservation.

How much of those is it safe to eat? The group doesn’t offer much guidance: “The data available for evaluation did not permit a conclusion about whether a safe level exists.”

Should we be vegetarians? Again, the group does not hazard an answer.

And how exactly does red meat and processed meat cause cancer? The group names a handful of chemicals involved in cooking and processing meat, most of them nearly unpronounceable, and some believed to be carcinogenic.

“But despite the knowledge it is not yet fully understood how cancer risk is increased by red meat or processed meat,” the group wrote.

Despite the voids in the science, the WHO findings might cast a pall over diners and those who serve them.

At The Pig Restaurant on 14th Street NW in Washington, where the menu includes an array of pork products - kielbasa, prosciutto, pork cheek, etc - a worker sweeping the tables outside encouraged a reporter to look elsewhere for comments about cancer and red meat. Around the corner, outside the Whole Foods grocery, shoppers evinced a weary of fatalism regarding authoritative diet advice.

“It makes some sense,” said Nassrin Farzaneh, a development consultant, carrying a bag out of the store, said of the WHO finding on processed meat. “But they say one thing and then two or three years later they something that contradicts it. It goes on and on.”

“Everything causes cancer,” said Caroline Rourke, an energy policy analyst, also on her way out of the grocery. “Life causes cancer. Who cares what food does? Life is terminal, isn’t it?""

[Another food to worry about? Honey not as healthy as we think.]

In recent years, meat consumption has been the target of multi-faceted social criticism, with debates erupting not just over its role on human health, but the impact of feedlots on the environment and on animal welfare. The public debate over the WHO’s findings will probably play out with political lobbying and in marketing messages for consumers.

An industry group, the North American Meat Institute, called the WHO report “dramatic and alarmist overreach,” and it mocked the panel’s previous work for approving a substance found in yoga pants and treating coffee, sunlight and wine as potential cancer hazards.

The WHO panel “says you can enjoy your yoga class, but don’t breathe air (Class I carcinogen), sit near a sun-filled window (Class I), apply aloe vera (Class 2B) if you get a sunburn, drink wine or coffee (Class I and Class 2B), or eat grilled food (Class 2A),” said Betsy Booren, vice president of scientific affairs for the group.

“We simply don’t think the evidence supports any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer,” said Shalene McNeill, executive director of human nutrition at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

But at its core, the issue revolves around science, and in particular the difficulty that arises whenever scientists try to link any food to a chronic disease.

Experiments to test whether a food causes cancer pose a massive logistical challenge: they require controlling the diets of thousands of test subjects over a course of many years. For example, one group might be assigned to eat lots of meat and another less, or none. But for a variety of reasons involving cost and finding test subjects, such experiments are rarely conducted, and scientists instead often use other less direct methods, known as epidemiological or observational studies, to draw their conclusions.

“I understand that people may be skeptical about this report on meat because the experimental data is not terribly strong,” said Paolo Boffetta, a professor of Tisch Cancer Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who has served on similar WHO panels. “But in this case the epidemiological evidence is very strong.”

[Why the Bureau of Prisons stripped pork from the menu for federal inmates]

Some scientists, however, have criticized the epidemiological studies for too often reaching “false positives,” that is, concluding that something causes cancer when it doesn’t.

“Is everything we eat associated with cancer?” asked a much noted 2012 paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

That paper reviewed the academic studies conducted on common cookbook ingredients. Of the 50 ingredients considered, 40 had been studied for their relation to cancer. Individually, most of those studies found that consumption of the food was correlated with cancer. But when the research on any given ingredient was considered collectively, those effects typically shrank or disappeared.

“Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak,” the authors concluded.

Although epidemiological studies were critical in proving the dangers of cigarettes, the magnitude of the reported meat risk is much smaller, and it is hard for scientists to rule out statistical confounding as the cause of the apparent danger.

Moreover, some skeptics noted that two experiments that tested diets with reduced meat consumption, the Polyp Prevention Trial and the Women’s Health Initiative, found that people who reduced their meat intake did not appear to have a lower cancer risk. It is possible, though, that the reductions in animal flesh were too small to have an effect.

“It might be a good idea not to be an excessive consumer of meat,” said Jonathan Schoenfeld, the co-author of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article and an assistant professor in radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. “But the effects of eating meat may be minimal, if anything.”

Was it wrong that the government steered people away from whole milk for decades?

How Coca-Cola has tricked everyone into drinking so much of it

What Americans do with fish is shocking

Why Americans are falling out of love with one of their favorite fruits

Whole milk, butter and eggs are now okay to eat. What's next?",REAL
"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
Privacy Policy 
By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
"Some people believe that Kentucky—or even all of America—should be subject to biblical law rather than constitutional law. They believe public servants like celebrity clerk Kim Davis owe their highest allegiance to the Bible, which means they shouldn’t be forced to give out unbiblical marriage licenses—like to gay couples. The issue is contested by a host of liberals, secularists, Satanists and moderate Christians. But assuming that Bible believers and religious freedom advocates carry the day, public servants will need to know their Good Book. The following 15-item quiz can be used to screen applicants for county clerk positions or as a guide for those already on the job.

If Kentucky issues only biblical marriage licenses, to which of the following couples should a county clerk grant a license?

1. A man with a consenting woman, but without her father’s permission. No. Numbers 30:1-16 teaches that a single woman’s father has final authority over legal contracts she may enter.

2. A man, a nonconsenting woman, and her father. Yes. According to the Law of Moses a female is male property, as are slaves, livestock and children. (See Exodus 20:17, Exodus 21:7.) Her father can give her in marriage or sell her to a slave master. Female consent in the Bible is not a prerequisite for marriage or sex.

3. A married man and three other women. Yes. The Old Testament endorses polygamy, and the New Testament does not reverse this—except for church elders (1 Timothy 3:2). (See Biblicalpolygamy.com)

4. A childless widow and her husband’s reluctant brother. Yes. Genesis 38:8-10 makes it clear that a man has a responsibility to seed children for his deceased brother. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus doesn’t alter the tradition but does say it will no longer apply in heaven. (Matthew 22:24-28)

5. Two men. No. Leviticus is clear. Two men having sex is an abomination, just like eating shellfish, getting tattoos, shaving your beard, or wearing blend fabrics. (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13, 11:9-12, 19:28, 19:27)

6. Two women. No, not even with their fathers’ permission. Paul’s epistle to the Romans (1:26) makes it clear that this is degrading and unnatural.

7. A Christian and a Hindu. No. The Apostle Paul calls this being unequally yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14). If the applicants balk at your refusal, you might respond gently with Paul’s own words: “What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion has light with darkness?”

8. A soldier and a virgin prisoner of war. Yes, but you should provide written instructions on the purification ritual required before bedding her. The soldier must shave her head and trim her nails and give her a month to mourn her parents before the first sex act. Also, remind him that if she fails to “delight,” he must set her free rather than selling her. (Deuteronomy 21:10-14)

9. A rapist and his victim. Yes, with qualifiers. The woman’s consent is not an issue, but her father should be present as he is owed 50 shekels (approximately $580) for the damage to his daughter. Also, the contract should have an addendum stating clearly that no divorce will be allowed. The rapist must keep her for life since, obviously, no one else will want the damaged goods. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

10. A man and his wife’s indentured/undocumented servant. Yes, although you might remind the man that in this case a marriage license is not a prerequisite for sex, since community property laws apply. However, should God bless this union with babies, any offspring will belong to the man and his wife, not the indentured woman. (Genesis 30:1-22)

11. A man and his mother, sister, half-sister, mother-in-law, grandchild, or uncle’s wife. Probably not. Although God’s law is timeless and unchanging, He does seem to shift on this one. In the book of Genesis, God rewards marriages between siblings—for example, the patriarch Abraham and his half-sister Sarah. But later texts specifically prohibit a variety of incestuous relationships (e.g. Lev. 18:7-8; Lev. 18:10; Lev. 20:11; Deut. 22:30; Deut. 27:20; Deut. 27:23). 12. A black woman and a white man, or vice versa. Absolutely not. Scripture is full of verses prohibiting interracial marriage (Gen. 28:6; Exod. 34:15-16; Num. 25:6-11; Deut. 7:1-3; Josh. 23:12-13; Judges 3:5-8; 1 Kings 11:1-2; Ezra 9:1-2, 12; Ezra 10:2-3, 10-11; Neh. 10:30; Neh. 13:25-27). 13. A gentile and a Jew. No. If the Jew should appeal to the Anti-Defamation League, remind them of how dangerous such a union could be: “Thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4) 14. A man and a pregnant woman who claims to be a virgin.Yes. You may feel personal misgivings about a marriage that is based in deception from the get-go, but judge not that ye be not judged. One in 200 American women who give birth say they have never had sex. Rather than plaguing this young couple with your corrosive doubt, you can encourage them with the biblical virgin birth story, while taking care to avoid any sex-negative implications that might harm their marriage. 15. A man and a goat. Don’t be ridiculous. Can a goat sign a marriage license? 16. A man and a sex-trafficked teen he bought from a gangster. Yes, but not until Kentucky legalizes sex trafficking. Sexual slavery is quite common in the Bible, well regulated (Exodus 28:8), and frequently sanctioned or blessed by God. However, the New Testament teaches that we should pay our taxes and be law-abiding, even under a secular/pagan government. (Titus 3:1; 1 Peter 2:13-17) 17. Two zombies. Only if they are not Christians. Jesus states clearly that there will be no marriage for Christians in the afterlife (Matthew 22:24-28). Otherwise, marriage between the undead is not addressed in the Bible, and you should default to whatever the Supreme Court may have ruled on this matter. Note: Some liberal Christian license seekers may complain to you or your supervisor that these guidelines come mostly from the Old Testament, which has been replaced by a New Covenant under Jesus. Ask them if the Old Testament is still part of their Bible. Remind them that the Ten Commandments are in the Old Testament—all three versions. Lastly, quote the words of Jesus: Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5: 17-19). Stand firm. If the Bible is the perfect Word of the living God, your detractors are up against the Almighty himself. And, as the spiritual warfare hymn reminds us, the hordes of (liberal, gay, atheist, feminist) darkness cannot quench your light.",REAL
"The Modern History of ‘Rigged’ US Elections   Robert Parry, Consortium News 
The United States is so committed to the notion that its electoral process is the world’s “gold standard” that there has been a bipartisan determination to maintain the fiction even when evidence is overwhelming that a U.S. presidential election has been manipulated or stolen. The “wise men” of the system simply insist otherwise. 
We have seen this behavior when there are serious questions of vote tampering (as in Election 1960) or when a challenger apparently exploits a foreign crisis to create an advantage over the incumbent (as in Elections 1968 and 1980) or when the citizens’ judgment is overturned by judges (as in Election 2000). 
The harsh truth is that pursuit of power often trumps the principle of an informed electorate choosing the nation’s leaders, but that truth simply cannot be recognized.Strangely, in such cases, it is not only the party that benefited which refuses to accept the evidence of wrongdoing, but the losing party and the establishment news media as well. Protecting the perceived integrity of the U.S. democratic process is paramount. Americans must continue to believe in the integrity of the system even when that integrity has been violated. 
Of course, historically, American democracy was far from perfect, excluding millions of people, including African-American slaves and women. The compromises needed to enact the Constitution in 1787 also led to distasteful distortions, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation (although obviously slaves couldn’t vote). 
That unsavory deal enabled Thomas Jefferson to defeat John Adams in the pivotal national election of 1800. In effect, the votes of Southern slave owners like Jefferson counted substantially more than the votes of Northern non-slave owners. 
Even after the Civil War when the Constitution was amended to give black men voting rights, the reality for black voting, especially in the South, was quite different from the new constitutional mandate. Whites in former Confederate states concocted subterfuges to keep blacks away from the polls to ensure continued white supremacy for almost a century. 
Women did not gain suffrage until 1920 with the passage of another constitutional amendment, and it took federal legislation in 1965 to clear away legal obstacles that Southern states had created to deny the franchise to blacks. 
Indeed, the alleged voter fraud in Election 1960, concentrated largely in Texas, a former Confederate state and home to John Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, could be viewed as an outgrowth of the South’s heritage of rigging elections in favor of Democrats, the post-Civil War party of white Southerners. 
However, by pushing through civil rights for blacks in the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson earned the enmity of many white Southerners who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party via Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy of coded racial messaging. Nixon also harbored resentments over what he viewed as his unjust defeat in the election of 1960. 
Nixon’s ‘Treason’ 
So, by 1968, the Democrats’ once solid South was splintering, but Nixon, who was again the Republican presidential nominee, didn’t want to leave his chances of winning what looked to be another close election to chance. Nixon feared that — with the Vietnam War raging and the Democratic Party deeply divided — President Johnson could give the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a decisive boost by reaching a last-minute peace deal with North Vietnam. 
The documentary and testimonial evidence is now clear that to avert a peace deal, Nixon’s campaign went behind Johnson’s back to persuade South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to torpedo Johnson’s Paris peace talks by refusing to attend. Nixon’s emissaries assured Thieu that a President Nixon would continue the war and guarantee a better outcome for South Vietnam. 
Though Johnson had strong evidence of what he privately called Nixon’s “treason”— from FBI wiretaps in the days before the 1968 election — he and his top advisers chose to stay silent. In a Nov. 4, 1968 conference call , Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford – three pillars of the Establishment – expressed that consensus, with Clifford explaining the thinking: 
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.” 
Clifford’s words expressed the recurring thinking whenever evidence emerged casting the integrity of America’s electoral system in doubt, especially at the presidential level. The American people were not to know what kind of dirty deeds could affect that process. 
To this day, the major U.S. news media will not directly address the issue of Nixon’s treachery in 1968, despite the wealth of evidence proving this historical reality now available from declassified records at the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas. In a puckish recognition of this ignored history, the library’s archivists call the file on Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks their “X-file.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ LBJ’s ‘X-File’ on Nixon’s ‘Treason. ’”] 
The evidence also strongly suggests that Nixon’s paranoia about a missing White House file detailing his “treason”– top secret documents that Johnson had entrusted to Rostow at the end of LBJ’s presidency – led to Nixon’s creation of the “plumbers,” a team of burglars whose first assignment was to locate those purloined papers. The existence of the “plumbers” became public in June 1972 when they were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate in Washington. 
Although the Watergate scandal remains the archetypal case of election-year dirty tricks, the major U.S. news media never acknowledge the link between Watergate and Nixon’s far more egregious dirty trick four years earlier, sinking Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks while 500,000 American soldiers were in the war zone. In part because of Nixon’s sabotage — and his promise to Thieu of a more favorable outcome — the war continued for four more bloody years before being settled along the lines that were available to Johnson in 1968. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ The Heinous Crime Behind Watergate .”] 
In effect, Watergate gets walled off as some anomaly that is explained by Nixon’s strange personality. However, even though Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, he and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who also had a hand in the Paris peace talk caper, reappear as secondary players in the next well-documented case of obstructing a sitting president’s foreign policy to get an edge in the 1980 campaign. 
Reagan’s ‘October Surprise’ Caper 
In that case, President Jimmy Carter was seeking reelection and trying to negotiate release of 52 American hostages then held in revolutionary Iran. Ronald Reagan’s campaign feared that Carter might pull off an “October Surprise” by bringing home the hostages just before the election. So, this historical mystery has been: Did Reagan’s team take action to block Carter’s October Surprise? 
The testimonial and documentary evidence that Reagan’s team did engage in a secret operation to prevent Carter’s October Surprise is now almost as overwhelming as the proof of the 1968 affair regarding Nixon’s Paris peace talk maneuver. 
That evidence indicates that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey organized a clandestine effort to prevent the hostages’ release before Election Day, after apparently consulting with Nixon and Kissinger and aided by former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, who was Reagan’s vice presidential running mate. 
By early November 1980, the public’s obsession with Iran’s humiliation of the United States and Carter’s inability to free the hostages helped turn a narrow race into a Reagan landslide. When the hostages were finally let go immediately after Reagan’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981, his supporters cited the timing to claim that the Iranians had finally relented out of fear of Reagan. 
Bolstered by his image as a tough guy, Reagan enacted much of his right-wing agenda, including passing massive tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, weakening unions and creating the circumstances for the rapid erosion of the Great American Middle Class. 
Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration signed off on secret arms shipments to Iran, mostly through Israel, what a variety of witnesses described as the payoff for Iran’s cooperation in getting Reagan elected and then giving him the extra benefit of timing the hostage release to immediately follow his inauguration. 
In summer 1981, when Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes learned about the arms shipments to Iran, he checked on their origins and said, later in a PBS interview: 
“It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment. … [This operation] seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration. And I understand some contacts were made at that time.” 
Those early covert arms shipments to Iran evolved into a later secret set of arms deals that surfaced in fall 1986 as the Iran-Contra Affair, with some of the profits getting recycled back to Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government. 
While many facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were revealed by congressional and special-prosecutor investigations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the origins of the Reagan-Iran relationship was always kept hazy. The Republicans were determined to stop any revelations about the 1980 contacts, but the Democrats were almost as reluctant to go there. 
A half-hearted congressional inquiry was launched in 1991 and depended heavily on then-President George H.W. Bush to collect the evidence and arrange interviews for the investigation. In other words, Bush, who was then seeking reelection and who was a chief suspect in the secret dealings with Iran, was entrusted with proving his own guilt. 
Tired of the Story 
By the early 1990s, the mainstream U.S. news media was also tired of the complex Iran-Contra scandal and wanted to move on. As a correspondent at Newsweek, I had battled senior editors over their disinterest in getting to the bottom of the scandal before I left the magazine in 1990. I then received an assignment from PBS Frontline to look into the 1980 “October Surprise” question, which led to a documentary on the subject in April 1991. 
However, by fall 1991, just as Congress was agreeing to open an investigation, my ex-bosses at Newsweek, along with The New Republic, then an elite neoconservative publication interested in protecting Israel’s exposure on those early arms deals, went on the attack. They published matching cover stories deeming the 1980 “October Surprise” case a hoax, but their articles were both based on a misreading of documents recording Casey’s attendance at a conference in London in July 1980, which he seemed to have used as a cover for a side trip to Madrid to meet with senior Iranians regarding the hostages. 
Although the bogus Newsweek/New Republic “London alibi” would eventually be debunked, it created a hostile climate for the investigation. With Bush angrily denying everything and the congressional Republicans determined to protect the President’s flanks, the Democrats mostly just went through the motions of an investigation. 
Meanwhile, Bush’s State Department and White House counsel’s office saw their jobs as discrediting the investigation, deep-sixing incriminating documents, and helping a key witness dodge a congressional subpoena. 
Years later, I discovered a document at the Bush presidential library in College Station, Texas, confirming that Casey had taken a mysterious trip to Madrid in 1980. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the congressional inquiry was taking shape. 
Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown,” Beach noted in a “ memorandum for record ” dated Nov. 4, 1991. 
Two days later, on Nov. 6, Beach’s boss, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992. 
At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation. The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it , the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” 
Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President ,” Gray declared, according to minutes . [Emphasis in original.] 
Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings. 
Timid Democrats 
But Bush’s White House really had little to fear because whatever evidence that the congressional investigation received – and a great deal arrived in December 1992 and January 1993 – there was no stomach for actually proving that the 1980 Reagan campaign had conspired with Iranian radicals to extend the captivity of 52 Americans in order to ensure Reagan’s election victory. 
That would have undermined the faith of the American people in their democratic process – and that, as Clark Clifford said in the 1968 context, would not be “good for the country.” 
In 2014 when I sent a copy of Beach’s memo regarding Casey’s trip to Madrid to former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, who had chaired the October Surprise inquiry in 1991-93, he told me that it had shaken his confidence in the task force’s dismissive conclusions about the October Surprise issue. 
“The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he [Casey] did make the trip” to Madrid, Hamilton told me. “Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.” 
Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation. 
“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests. But that trust was at the heart of the inquiry’s failure. With the money and power of the American presidency at stake, the idea that George H.W. Bush and his team would help an investigation that might implicate him in an act close to treason was naïve in the extreme. 
Arguably, Hamilton’s timid investigation was worse than no investigation at all because it gave Bush’s team the opportunity to search out incriminating documents and make them disappear. Then, Hamilton’s investigative conclusion reinforced the “group think” dismissing this serious manipulation of democracy as a “conspiracy theory” when it was anything but. In the years since, Hamilton hasn’t done anything to change the public impression that the Reagan campaign was innocent. 
Still, among the few people who have followed this case, the October Surprise cover-up would slowly crumble with admissions by officials involved in the investigation that its exculpatory conclusions were rushed , that crucial evidence had been hidden or ignored , and that some alibis for key Republicans didn’t make any sense . 
But the dismissive “group think” remains undisturbed as far as the major U.S. media and mainstream historians are concerned. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative or Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery or Consortiumnews.com’s “ Second Thoughts on October Surprise. ”] 
Past as Prologue 
Lee Hamilton’s decision to “clear” Reagan and Bush of the 1980 October Surprise suspicions in 1992 was not simply a case of miswriting history. The findings had clear implications for the future as well, since the public impression about George H.W. Bush’s rectitude was an important factor in the support given to his oldest son, George W. Bush, in 2000. 
President George W. Bush is introduced by his brother Florida Gov. Jeb Bush before delivering remarks at Sun City Center, Florida, on May 9, 2006. (White House photo by Eric Draper), if the full truth had been told about the father’s role in the October Surprise and Iran-Contra cases, it’s hard to imagine that his son would have received the Republican nomination, let alone made a serious run for the White House. And, if that history were known, there might have been a stronger determination on the part of Democrats to resist another Bush “stolen election” in 2000. 
Regarding Election 2000, the evidence is now clear that Vice President Al Gore not only won the national popular vote but received more votes that were legal under Florida law than did George W. Bush. But Bush relied first on the help of officials working for his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, and then on five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart a full recount and to award him Florida’s electoral votes and thus the presidency. 
The reality of Gore’s rightful victory should have finally become clear in November 2001 when a group of news organizations finished their own examination of Florida’s disputed ballots and released their tabulations showing that Gore would have won if all ballots considered legal under Florida law were counted. 
However, between the disputed election and the release of those numbers, the 9/11 attacks had occurred, so The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other leading outlets did not want the American people to know that the wrong person was in the White House. Surely, telling the American people that fact amid the 9/11 crisis would not be “good for the country.” 
So, senior editors at all the top new organizations decided to mislead the public by framing their stories in a deceptive way to obscure the most newsworthy discovery – that the so-called “over-votes” in which voters both checked and wrote in their choices’ names broke heavily for Gore and would have put him over the top regardless of which kinds of chads were considered for the “under-votes” that hadn’t registered on antiquated voting machines. “Over-votes” would be counted under Florida law which bases its standards on “clear intent of the voter.” 
However, instead of leading with Gore’s rightful victory, the news organizations concocted hypotheticals around partial recounts that still would have given Florida narrowly to Bush. They either left out or buried the obvious lede that a historic injustice had occurred. 
On Nov. 12, 2001, the day that the news organizations ran those stories, I examined the actual data and quickly detected the evidence of Gore’s victory. In a story that day, I suggested that senior news executives were exercising a misguided sense of patriotism. They had hid the reality for “the good of the country,” much as Johnson’s team had done in 1968 regarding Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris peace talks and Hamilton’s inquiry had done regarding the 1980 “October Surprise” case. 
Within a couple of hours of my posting the article at Consortiumnews.com, I received an irate phone call from The New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of impugning the journalistic integrity of then-Times executive editor Howell Raines. I got the impression that Barringer had been on the look-out for some deviant story that didn’t accept the Bush-won conventional wisdom. 
However, this violation of objective and professional journalism – bending the slant of a story to achieve a preferred outcome rather than simply giving the readers the most interesting angle – was not simply about some historical event that had occurred a year earlier. It was about the future. 
By misleading Americans into thinking that Bush was the rightful winner of Election 2000 – even if the media’s motivation was to maintain national unity following the 9/11 attacks – the major news outlets gave Bush greater latitude to respond to the crisis, including the diversionary invasion of Iraq under false pretenses. The Bush-won headlines of November 2001 also enhanced the chances of his reelection in 2004. [For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Gore’s Victory ,”“ So Bush Did Steal the White House ,” and “ Bush v. Gore’s Dark American Decade. ”] 
A Phalanx of Misguided Consensus 
Looking back on these examples of candidates manipulating democracy, there appears to be one common element: after the “stolen” elections, the media and political establishments quickly line up, shoulder to shoulder, to assure the American people that nothing improper has happened. Graceful “losers” are patted on the back for not complaining that the voters’ will had been ignored or twisted. 
Al Gore is praised for graciously accepting the extraordinary ruling by Republican partisans on the Supreme Court, who stopped the counting of ballots in Florida on the grounds, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, that a count that showed Gore winning (when the Court’s majority was already planning to award the White House to Bush) would undermine Bush’s “legitimacy.” 
Similarly, Rep. Hamilton is regarded as a modern “wise man,” in part, because he conducted investigations that never pushed very hard for the truth but rather reached conclusions that were acceptable to the powers-that-be, that didn’t ruffle too many feathers. 
But the cumulative effect of all these half-truths, cover-ups and lies – uttered for “the good of the country”– is to corrode the faith of many well-informed Americans about the legitimacy of the entire process. It is the classic parable of the boy who cried wolf too many times, or in this case, assured the townspeople that there never was a wolf and that they should ignore the fact that the livestock had mysteriously disappeared leaving behind only a trail of blood into the forest. 
So, when Donald Trump shows up in 2016 insisting that the electoral system is rigged against him, many Americans choose to believe his demagogy. But Trump isn’t pressing for the full truth about the elections of 1968 or 1980 or 2000. He actually praises Republicans implicated in those cases and vows to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. 
Trump’s complaints about “rigged” elections are more in line with the white Southerners during Jim Crow, suggesting that black and brown people are cheating at the polls and need to have white poll monitors to make sure they don’t succeed at “stealing” the election from white people. 
There is a racist undertone to Trump’s version of a “rigged” democracy but he is not entirely wrong about the flaws in the process. He’s just not honest about what those flaws are. 
The hard truth is that the U.S. political process is not democracy’s “gold standard”; it is and has been a severely flawed system that is not made better by a failure to honestly address the unpleasant realities and to impose accountability on politicians who cheat the voters. 
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).",FAKE
"Rubio, Cruz, Christie Improve Their Standing In Third GOP Debate

The Republican presidential race entered a new phase Wednesday night as the outsider candidates, who dominated the first two debates, were upstaged by several of their office-holding rivals — and by a budding controversy over the conduct of the third debate itself.

Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina were all on hand and all had their moments. But the featured performer of the night was Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who, at 44, is the youngest contestant in the field. Also acquitting themselves well were his Senate colleague, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Chris Christie, the oft-embattled governor of New Jersey.

Christie's much-maligned campaign had barely qualified for inclusion in this debate, but he seemed revivified by the questions and the interchange — especially the contretemps with the CNBC moderators.

""Even in New Jersey what you're doing would be called rude,"" said Christie, referring to CNBC moderator John Harwood.

Rubio became the debate's focus largely because of tough questions from the CNBC moderators that he deftly turned into recitations of his talking points. When other rivals tried to probe the same vulnerabilities, Rubio was quickly able to flip the polarity and deliver a put down in response.

Questioned about his missed votes in the Senate (the most of any senator this year) and his stated lack of interest in that position, Rubio noted how many votes had been missed by senators in both parties pursuing the presidency in the past.

When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor sometimes described as Rubio's mentor, renewed the criticism (""What is it in the Senate, a French work week, where you only have to show up for three days?"") Rubio wondered why Bush had never spoken out about such things before.

""The only reason why you're doing it now,"" Rubio charged, ""is because we're running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.""

Bush was not able to establish much momentum after that, finishing near the bottom of the list in speaking time. It was his third flat performance in the debate series to date, and the most damaging in its timing. His campaign had highlighted the evening, calling it Bush's chance to rebut suggestions he lacks real enthusiasm for this campaign. In recent weeks, he has seemed diffident and off-message at times in public appearances. He has laid off staff, as his standing in the polls has continued to decline.

Rubio, by stark contrast, was both sharp with a cutting remark and adept at the charming aside. Talking about a program for older people, he beamed boyishly as he said, ""I'd never vote for anything that would hurt my mom.""

Rubio has been locked in the single digits in national polls and surveys in the early voting states as well. But many who watched the third debate expected that to change. And if the current front-runners should fade, leaving their voters up for grabs, the contest could become between Rubio and Cruz.

The night's peak energy point came when Cruz fielded a typically truculent question from one of the CNBC moderators and hit it out of the park.

""The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media,"" Cruz said.

The debate audience, clearly a sympathetic crowd, roared its approval, nearly drowning out Cruz as he continued.

""This is not a cage match,"" Cruz added. ""And, you look at the questions — 'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?' 'Ben Carson, can you do math?' 'John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?' 'Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?' 'Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?'""

Cruz contrasted these questions with those at the Democratic debate, even though that event was put on by CNN. He said all the Democrats were asked was, ""Which of you is more handsome and why?""

Several of the other Republican candidates tried to get in on the crowd's appetite for media criticism before the evening was over. Their staffs were also complaining about the in-your-face tone of the CNBC crew. After the debate, Carson's campaign manager talked about renegotiating the terms of the remaining debates.

Reince Priebus, the GOP national chairman who took control of the debates this year and made deals with the various news outlets, also expressed dismay after the debate and said changes would be made to future formats.

Meanwhile, the man who has been proud of leading in polls among Republicans since July, Donald Trump, held his own Wednesday night despite a disappointing slide to No. 2 in some of the most recent tests both nationally and in Iowa. Trump delivered his stock lines about taxes, immigration and badly negotiated deals on trade and foreign relations. But the Trump presence was a measure less effervescent than on the stump or in earlier debates.

The new leader in some polls, Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, reprised his role as the quiet man on stage. He had less speaking time than almost any other candidate, and when he had the spotlight, he did little to hold it. Asked for a weakness, he cited his failure to think of himself as presidential material (""until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it""). He also seemed unsure of his footing at times when describing his tax rate plan and other economic matters.

But Carson, too, took the opportunity to push back on the CNBC journalists. When Carl Quintanilla asked about Carson's association with a controversial maker of nutritional supplements, Carson flatly denied any involvement and called the assertion ""pure propaganda.""

In fact, Carson starred in a promotional video for the company and may face more questions about his statement in the days ahead. But when Quintanilla tried to follow up, the crowd booed and Carson took the out: ""See,"" he said, ""they know.""

Carly Fiorina, regarded by many as the standout performer in the Sept. 16 debate, managed to get more speaking time this time than any of her rivals — in part, by resisting the moderators. But while she came across as self-assured and offered one of her best defenses of leadership at Hewlett-Packard a decade ago, Fiorina did not have a memorable exchange with Trump or any of the candidates.

The other four candidates who took part may have experienced more frustration than fulfillment. Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky, was one of the three candidates with fewest minutes of airtime. His efforts to climb into the tax debate were largely unsuccessful. Mike Huckabee had his usual moments of folksy humor but few scoring opportunities.

The man who had the highest hopes for this round may have been John Kasich, the governor of Ohio who has tried to go after the non-politician front-runners, attacking the unrealistic promises of lower taxes and an end to illegal immigration. Kasich kicked off the evening with thinly veiled criticisms of Carson and Trump as potential occupants of the Oval Office.

""My great concern is that we are on the verge, perhaps, of picking someone who cannot do this job,"" he charged, adding, ""We need somebody who can lead.""

Trump promptly fired back with a withering rebuttal about Kasich's Ohio success being a windfall from oil produced by fracking, and about Kasich's partnership at Lehman Brothers shortly before that Wall Street firm collapsed and set off the worst of the 2008 financial panic.

Kasich had a comeback, but his offensive came up short.",REAL
"Since last year, Americans have grown increasingly positive about jobs, the direction of the country and even the president -- but they're not yet willing to extend the same goodwill to Congress.

Just 16 percent of Americans approve of Congress, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. That's up from a 9 percent low during the 2013 government shutdown, but virtually unchanged since the end of last year.

""Congress' poor track record notwithstanding, there is reason to believe this Congress will at least be rated more popularly going forward than the last two divided Congresses,"" Gallup's Andrew Dugan wrote. ""Typically, elections that hand control of Congress to one party provide an initial uptick in support for the new Congress.""

A new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that most Americans think Congress is worse than it used to be, with a majority saying it is less civil and more divided than it was a decade ago.

A 52 percent majority of Americans say congressional debates are less civil than they were 10 years ago, and 58 percent say Congress is now more divided along party lines. Americans 45 and older were the most likely to say things had devolved.

Ironically, the woes of Congress are something partisan Americans can agree on: Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to say Congress is worse today.

But while ratings for Congress remain low, Americans feel at least relatively warmer toward their own representatives. Twenty-six percent of Americans approve of the member representing their district, while another 26 percent disapprove and the remaining 47 percent are neutral or unsure.

Republicans were by far the most satisfied, giving their representatives a net +17 approval rating, compared to a net -8 among independents and a net +3 among Democrats.

Americans historically have been much more positive about their own representatives than about Congress as a whole, although the percentage who said they felt their own member should be re-elected dipped to a near-historic low in 2014.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted Jan. 6-8 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here.",REAL
"More than 50 individuals and entities have shelled out at least $1 million apiece to big-money groups backing presidential candidates — with close to half of the big donors giving to a super PAC aligned with former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

With 15 months to go before Election Day, donors have already contributed $272.5 million to independent groups supporting the large Republican field, more than four times the $67 million raised through their official campaigns, according to a tally by The Washington Post.

In all, 58 million-dollar donors together were responsible for $120 million donated to GOP and Democratic super PACs by June 30 — more than 40 percent of the total amount raised by those groups.

Never before has so much money been donated by such a small number of people so early. The massive sums have empowered outside groups that face no contribution limits and are now serving as de facto arms of many campaigns.

[How campaigns and their super PAC backers work together]

“Clearly the action is with the super PACs and with people who can write seven-digit and bigger checks,” said Henry Barbour, a veteran GOP fundraiser based in Mississippi who is informally advising former Texas governor Rick Perry in his run. “It’s amazing, but a handful of people really can have a material impact on the race.”

Topping the list of mega-donors on the right is New York hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who donated $11 million to a super PAC aligned with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Houston private equity investor Toby Neugebauer gave $10 million to another Cruz super PAC. Kelcy Warren, a Dallas energy executive and the national finance chairman for Perry’s campaign, gave $6 million to two pro-Perry super PACs.

Half a dozen donors have made $5 million contributions to Republican hopefuls, including Florida car magnate Norman Braman, who is backing Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida; Dallas tech entrepreneur Darwin Deason, who is supporting Perry; and Wisconsin roofing billionaire Diane Hendricks, who is supporting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

While more money is flowing to Republican-allied PACs than to the official campaigns, the situation is the reverse on the Democratic side: 80 percent of the money raised to support Hillary Rodham Clinton and her rivals went directly to their campaigns.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has said he does not want the support of a super PAC.

But Clinton is flanked by her own wealthy allies who have the means to pump tens of millions into independent groups on her behalf. Already, eight have given $1 million to Priorities USA Action, one of her allied super PACs, which raised $15.6 million in all. The big backers include hedge-fund investor George Soros, media executive Haim Saban and film director Steven Spielberg.

For the first time, nearly every presidential contender is backed by a deep-pocketed ally — and, in many cases, several. The groups are run by longtime advisers and former aides to the White House hopefuls, who have edged closer to their aligned super PACs than previous candidates dared.

“There is now a new norm in how presidential candidates will run for office,” said David Donnelly, president of Every Voice, a group that advocates reducing the influence of the wealthy on politics. “It’s not about how much support they get from voters in Iowa and New Hampshire as the first benchmark. It’s about how much they can direct to these huge super PACs.”

Bush spent most of the year headlining high-dollar fundraisers for his allied super PAC, Right to Rise, helping it collect a record $103 million while maintaining that he had yet not decided whether to run.

The group hit its expected $100 million goal on June 30, the last day of the fundraising period, when it cashed 82 contributions totaling $3.5 million. Among them was a $1 million donation from Shahla Ansary, wife of former Iranian diplomat Hushang Ansary. He had given $1 million in February.

[Racing to reach $100 million, Bush super PAC fundraising spiked in last three weeks of quarter]

In all, 20 individuals and four companies donated at least $1 million to Right to Rise, with the largest sum coming from Coral Gables health-care executive Miguel Fernandez, who gave the super PAC more than $3 million.

Fernandez told the Wall Street Journal that he was not looking for any favors from Bush.

“I am sure there’s at least one [donor] that wants a solar power business and another who wants to build submarines,” Fernandez joked, according to the paper. “I have only given to Jeb because I think he has the right values.”

The super PACs supporting Bush’s rivals for the GOP nomination were largely financed by a few wealthy patrons.

Four groups called Keep the Promise that are supporting Cruz together raised more than $37 million, but 95 percent came from just seven contributors, including $15 million from the Wilks family of Cisco, Tex., which made billions designing hydraulic fracturing trucks.

Half of the $20 million raised by Unintimidated PAC, which is supporting Walker, came from two women: Hendricks and Marlene Ricketts, wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.

Rubio’s allied super PAC, Conservative Solutions PAC, brought in slightly more than $16 million.

Nearly a third of it came from Braman, a longtime patron of the Florida senator. Another $3 million came from Lawrence Ellison, the chief technology officer of Oracle, while Laura Perlmutter, wife of Marvel Entertainment CEO Isaac Perlmutter, donated $2 million. Besilu Stables LLC, a Florida-based horse-racing operation owned by Florida businessman Benjamin Leon, gave $2.5 million.

America Leads, the super PAC supporting Chris Christie, raised $11 million. Hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, gave the group $2 million, and another $1 million came from the Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada, owned by former Reebok chief executive Paul Fireman.

A super PAC supporting former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee brought in a total of $3.6 million — $3 million of which came from Little Rock agribusiness ­executive Ronald M. Cameron.

Half of the $3.45 million raised by CARLY for America, which is backing former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina, was donated by former Univision head A. Jerrold Perenchio.

The number of seven- and eight-figure checks flooding into the race alarms veteran party strategists, who worry that the power is moving away from the candidates to independent and unaccountable groups.

“You do not have a level playing field any longer,” said Fred Malek, a senior Republican fundraiser. “In my humble opinion, it pollutes the process. But since the law permits it, everyone is going to do it until the law changes.”

Almost everyone, that is. At the moment, the GOP field is led by a candidate who has said he doesn’t need a super PAC: real estate impresario Donald Trump, who claims to be worth more than $10 billion.",REAL
"Tweet Home » Gold » Gold News » Currency Crisis: Alasdair MacLeod On The Vexed Question of the Dollar There is little doubt that the rapid expansion of both dollar-denominated debt and monetary quantities since the financial crisis will lead us into a currency crisis. We just don’t know when, and the dollar is not alone… 

From Alasdair Macleod : All the major paper currencies have been massively inflated in recent years. With the dollar acting as the world’s reserve currency, where the dollar goes, so do all the other fiat monies . Until that cataclysmic event, we watch currencies behave in increasingly unexpected, seemingly irrational ways. The fundamentals for Japan are not good, yet the yen remains the strongest currency of the big four. The Eurozone risks a systemic collapse, overwhelmed by political and financial headwinds, yet the euro’s exchange rate has proved relatively impervious to this deep uncertainty. The British economy is strongest, yet sterling is the weakest of the four majors. If nothing else, today’s foreign exchanges are evidence that subjectivity triumphs over macroeconomic thinking. Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds beats computer modelling every time. Furthermore, any official attempt to establish a rate for the dollar has to address two separate questions: the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, and its purchasing power for goods and services. The chart below indicates how the dollar has behaved against other currencies over the last five years, both on a trade weighted and on a predefined currency basis (DXY). It should be noted that the dollar has risen on both these measures by roughly 18% since early 2014. At the same time, the Chinese yuan has fallen against the dollar by about 12%, so it has actually risen slightly against the DXY basket as a whole, particularly against the euro component, where it has gained 12% since early 2014. This matters, because far from devaluing, which is what we are routinely told by dollar-centric analysts, the yuan has been relatively stable over time against a basket of currencies. It has been weak against the dollar and yen, but strong against both the euro and sterling. We should look at this from the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee’s point of view. America runs a record trade deficit with China, and the only major economies where China’s terms of trade have improved are with the US, excepting Japan . Therefore, the Fed is bound to be very sensitive to the dollar’s exchange rate with China’s yuan Furthermore, on two occasions when the Fed had signalled it was going to raise the Fed Funds Rate, it backed off when the Chinese lowered the rate at which it had pegged the yuan to the dollar. Chinese devaluation against the dollar is obviously a prime concern for the Fed. The situation becomes better understood when the Peoples Bank’s position is taken into account. The bank has been selling US Treasury stock in large quantities, stockpiling commodities and oil with the proceeds, though it has been diversifying into Japanese Government bonds as well. China’s dollars have been welcomed by markets, which are short of both quality collateral and raw currency. However, China’s supply of both has failed to stop the dollar rising against the yuan. Furthermore, China isn’t the only Asian and Middle Eastern state selling American paper, so the demand from other international players on the buy side has been immense, enough to determine the underlying direction of the dollar’s exchange rate. The situation is being exploited by the Peoples Bank. In effect, the Peoples Bank is in a position to dictate Fed policy by adjusting the rate at which it is prepared to supply dollars into the market. So long as the dollar remains fundamentally strong, it only has to slow the pace of Treasury and dollar sales for the dollar to rise, and therefore the Fed’s planned interest rate rises to be deferred. This is not understood properly by western commentators, who erroneously think China is being forced to defend a declining yuan. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will be interesting to see whether this happens again ahead of the December FOMC meeting, when for the umpteenth time we have been promised a rise in the Fed Funds Rate. A major consideration behind China’s foreign exchange policy is the outlook for the euro. The Eurozone represents a market as large as the US, with the added importance of being tagged onto the Asian continent. There can be little doubt that China sees her own long-term future being aligned more with Europe than America, despite Europe’s current troubles. It is, if you like, a situation that is primarily of strategic importance. Europe’s economy will need rescuing at some stage, and is therefore a future opportunity for China’s intervention. That plan is for the long term, and becomes increasingly valid the deeper the hole the Eurozone digs for itself. A disintegration of the EU would also be beneficial for Chinese ambitions. Meanwhile, in the short-term the euro has broken a crucial trend-line against the dollar, having completed a continuation head-and-shoulders pattern, targeting the 1.0600 area, which is the previous low seen in March and November 2015. This is our second chart. Neither the Peoples Bank nor the Fed need to be chart experts to see what’s happening. Brexit was very bad news for the euro, because it is a racing certainty that the event will turn out to be just the start of a new round of political and economic trouble for the Eurozone. The Italian economy in particular is imploding, with a non-performing loan problem that is roughly 40% of private sector GDP. So China can for the moment steer a course for the yuan between the euro’s devaluation and the dollar’s rise. The Fed sees in euro weakness an increase of currency-induced deflation for the US economy, and a loss of competitiveness for US exports. Chinese exporters are obvious beneficiaries as well, so the blame for deflation will be on China’s foreign exchange machinations. Anyway, China probably cares less than she ever did about the long-term consequences of her actions on the US economy. China has been selling her US Treasuries and reducing her dollar exposure to add to her stockpiles of raw materials and oil. She wants to keep her over-indebted businesses trading by maintaining a favourable exchange rate with the dollar, particularly given the developing train wreck that’s the Eurozone. And there’s not a lot the Fed can do about it. Gold and commodities The principal driver for the gold price is the prospect of monetary inflation transmuting into price inflation, and the inability of central banks to respond to this threat by raising interest rates sufficiently to control the balance of consumer preferences between goods and holding money. We are, of course, measuring gold in dollars, because the latter is the reserve currency for all the others. But, as stated above, there are two exchange considerations, the first being the dollar against other currencies, and the second the dollar against a basket of commodities. And here, we should note that over the long-term, the prices of commodities measured in gold are considerably more stable than the prices of commodities measured in fiat currencies. China has behaved as if she is thoroughly aware of gold’s pricing attributes, and has a deliberate policy of dominating the market for bullion. This is very different from the US’s domination of gold paper markets. Not only has China invested in unprofitable gold mines to become the largest producer at about 450 tonnes annually, but the state monopolises China’s refining capacity. She also imports doré for refining from other countries, and without doubt since 1983 has accumulated substantial quantities of bullion not included in monetary reserves. Furthermore, it is the only country that has encouraged its population, through television and other media, to accumulate physical gold. Make no mistake, for the last thirty-three years, the Chinese government has made a credible attempt to gain ultimate control over the physical gold market, and to extend gold’s protection to her own citizens. China does not manipulate the gold price. Instead, as described earlier, she is manipulating the dollar by regulating the exchange rate and by discouraging the Fed from raising interest rates. It is a temporary balancing act that only continues so long as desperate banks and their indebted borrowers continue to scramble for dollars, and China knows it. The Fed, for the moment, appears to be powerless to manage economic outcomes and is firmly trapped by China’s currency management, with interest rates stuck at the lower bound. And to make it worse, the weak euro, against which the dollar index (DXY) is very heavily weighted (57%!), threatens to force the DXY index even higher. The result, inevitably, is that monetary policy cannot be used to address future price inflation, which virtually guarantees there will be a higher gold price in 2017 and beyond. This is why, despite American wishful thinking, gold remains at the centre of the financial system. It is central partly because China’s ensures it is, and it is also China’s ultimate money for commodity and trade purposes. China most likely has enough gold to fully compensate for her reserve losses from the destruction of the dollar and the other fiat currencies on her reserve book. She is deliberately selling down her dollar exposure anyway, while she can. Lest we forget, communist economists in China were taught that capitalism destroys itself. For them, there is no clearer proof than the performance of the US economy and the dollar, and they do not intend to get caught up in its demise. Understand this, and you understand all. While the monetary role of gold in the future has yet to be determined by China, and it will be China or the markets that make the decision, for the moment it can be regarded as the ultimate insurance against global currency failure.",FAKE
"KATHMANDU, Nepal — Nepali citizens frustrated and angered by their government's chaotic and bureaucratic response to aiding earthquake victims are doing it themselves. They've hired their own trucks and stuffed vehicles with plastic sheets for shelter and bags of rice and lentils for food.

Yet as each day passes since the magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit April 25, this self-help effort is becoming more complicated. Youth belonging to various political parties are putting up impromptu checkpoints on the road to the hardest hit areas or just chasing down vehicles with their motorbikes on narrow, isolated mountain roads and demanding the aid be handed over to them for distribution.

Such political maneuvering is not uncommon, but it is angering many Nepalis.

""I have nothing left. One daughter is buried under my house. my other daughter was sent to a hospital,"" said Bhampagiri, 72, who lives in the hamlet of Pawachok, a two-hour drive from this capital city. ""I have no food. Nothing. My house has collapsed so I sit here by the road and wait hoping someone will pass and help me,"" said Bhampagiri, who goes by one name.

In the past week, the Nepali government has delayed customs clearance of international aid at Nepal's only international airport in Kathmandu and has been levying duty on truckloads of tarps being bused in from India by Nepali Good Samaritans. At the same time, the Nepali government has asked international donors to help with an additional 400,000 tents and tarpaulins, as well as blankets.

The death toll is above 7,000 and is expected to rise significantly when hard hit but remote areas are reached. This week, the airport in Kathmandu received some much needed help from about 150 U.S. Marines.

Commanded by Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy, the Marines are helping to ease the piled up backup of aid material. They have brought in a UH-17 helicopter and four MV-22 Ospreys capable of short landing and takeoffs with a maximum load of 20,000 pounds of cargo so they can access remote rural areas.

The Ospreys should help break the logistics bottleneck. They will be used to deliver food and plastic sheets to drop off points in the mountains, where relief teams will distribute them.

""Nepal is the worse case scenario,"" said Kennedy, who has worked on natural disasters and knows Nepal well. ""It's landlocked, it's high altitude, it is going to tax even our military assets.""

Access to food and shelter is critical in the coming days for hundreds of thousands of Nepalis in the mountains. The epicenter of the earthquake is an area with just a few narrow and unstable dirt roads carved out of sheer mountain sides, making access exceedingly difficult. Mud and brick houses are perched on tiny terraced fields with meandering goat trails leading to them.

The earthquake not only flattened villages, hamlets and towns but it also cut them off from the rest of the country with massive landslides. Many now can only be accessed on foot or by helicopter.

Before the arrival of the U.S. aircraft, Nepal had been using for relief operations 27 helicopters — seven belonging to the Nepal army, six from private companies and 14 from the Indian government. There is also a critical need for more trucks that can carry relief goods as far as the roads go into the mountains.

This is just the beginning of what disaster experts call ""the sexy phase,"" the first response period when the world is focused on the disaster and donations pour in. It is very important to get this phase right so that reconstruction can take off, said Bill Berger the head of USAID's Disaster Assistance Response Team .

""There is not enough capacity in the world to get everything to all the people of Nepal right now,"" Berger said. ""It has to move out based on need. We also have to plan the long-term.""

Nearly all the Nepalis in the mountains are farmers. Every village has lost most of its young men to the Middle East and Malaysia, where they go for years to work as menial migrant workers, leaving behind parents, wives and sisters who now must fend with the overwhelming recovery challenges ahead.

Sindhupalchok, Nepal's hardest hit district, is a scene of total devastation. Some houses are just mounds of bricks, others are missing walls and roofs, and concrete buildings have fallen on their sides. While some aid has reached the devastation in the district's capital, Chautara, no one has stopped to help the villages and hamlets along the way.",REAL
"Comments 
I learned exclusively tonight that the Democratic Coalition Against Trump is being joined by University of Minnesota Law Professor Richard Painter in a non-partisan joint campaign to mount a public campaign against an expedite a response to their parallel complaints against FBI Director James Comey for his partisan witch-hunt of Hillary Clinton. 
Painter is a former Bush Administration White House Counsel who served as ethics counsel to the President. 
“Richard Painter and I connected this evening, and we are sending out the message clearly that the FBI Director’s behavior is a non-partisan issue, and we will be sending out a joint press release tomorrow morning accordingly,” said Scott Dworkin, Senior Adivsor to the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. 
Both parties seek to prevent future political interference by America’s top federal law enforcement agency into partisan elections. 
“We plan to make joint television and other media appearances together with Professor Painter,” said Dworkin who plans to participate in the broadcasts, “or alongside other members of the DCAT.” 
Each independently made similar complaints to Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel’s ruling about the FBI Director’s recent memo . 
Because the memo has intruded on this year’s presidential election, DCAT and Painter are alleging that FBI Director Comey’s violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits pernicious partisan use of office by federal employees or officials. 
The FBI Director ignored Justice Department policy guidance which proscribes public investigatory actions within 60-days of an election. It’s a policy that has been respected across parties and administrations for decades to keep justice and elections un-entwined. 
Justice officials specifically advised Comey of the policy . 
He sent a mea culpa letter to other FBI agents just hours after the election-impacting memo. 
The Democratic Coalition Against Trump filed the first reported Hatch Act complaint against FBI Director Comey in the wake of his unusual memo Friday afternoon. 
Yesterday, Professor Richard Painter filed his own Hatch Act and ethics complaint against the FBI Director and an ethics complaint over the same memo, which is also drawing the ire of the career professionals at the top federal investigatory agency.",FAKE
"Washington (CNN) The Republican Party is waking up -- but it might already be too late.

Donald Trump's stroll toward the GOP presidential nomination is starting to turn the denial evident for months among key party power brokers to desperation. The mood of some in the party was aptly summed up Thursday by Republican lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber on CNN's ""The Lead"" with Jake Tapper.

""All of a sudden, everybody is saying 'Oh My God — the house is burning down we should have done something before it got this far,'"" said Weber, who is supporting John Kasich in the presidential race and is calling on the party to unite behind the Ohio Governor.

Sen. Marco Rubio, who pulled out of the presidential race on Tuesday after failing to take down Trump, had a grim assessment of the Republican Party's state of play on his first day back at work in the Senate on Thursday.

""Hopefully there's time to still prevent a Trump nomination, which I think would fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement,"" Rubio told reporters.

Anti-Trump forces are getting a sense of the backlash they'd face if they deny him the nomination. Trump warned earlier this week on CNN's ""New Day"" that the convention could deteriorate into a ""riot"" if he is blocked from power.

And on Friday, a top Trump aide threatened to give up his credentials as a convention delegate and leave the Republican Party in a stark warning to the GOP about the ""consequences"" if Trump is blocked from the nomination.

""I will tell you this, if the Republican Party comes into that convention and jimmies with the rules and takes away the will of the people, the will of the Republicans and the Democrats and Independents who voted for Mr. Trump, I will take off my credentials, I will leave the floor of that convention, and I will leave the Republican Party forever,"" Sam Clovis, a national co-chair for Trump's campaign, said Friday on ""New Day.""

The deepening anxiety in the GOP was underscored by a meeting in Washington Thursday of prominent conservative leaders dedicated to finding a way to prevent Trump from securing the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.

Trump's failure to win Ohio on an otherwise successful night of primaries Tuesday opened a narrow window for opposing forces in the Republican Party to wrest the nomination from him because it lengthened his odds of winning a majority of delegates. If he does fall short, Trump could face an acrimonious contested convention in Cleveland in July.

Conservative activist Erick Erickson raised the specter of a ""unity"" ticket to stop Trump in a statement he issued after the meeting, noting that the party's revered icon Abraham Lincoln was not nominated until after the third convention ballot.

""We believe that the issue of Donald Trump is greater than an issue of party,"" the statement read. ""It is an issue of morals and character that all Americans, not just those of us in the conservative movement, must confront.""

One person at the meeting, Deborah DeMoss Fonseca, a former aide to late Sen. Jesse Helms, said that there was ""definitely a consensus of not wanting Donald Trump.""

""I think there's still several scenarios that could play out. And I think this particular group will look for whatever it is that's going to do it,"" she said.

Thursday's meeting was especially intriguing because it appeared to be the most concerted effort yet by the conservative movement, many of whose adherents view the New York real estate mogul as a political apostate, to stop Trump.

But it remained unclear whether the initiative would be any more successful than previous attempts by the Republican establishment to thwart Trump.

After all, a scorching speech by former GOP nominee Mitt Romney did nothing to slow the outspoken businessman. Nor did an extraordinary indictment by National Review, which devoted most of an issue to debunking Trump's conservative bona fides. And Trump boasted at his victory party on Tuesday night in Florida that he had won the Sunshine State despite a multi-million dollar negative ad blitz attacking him.

And every candidate who tried to destroy Trump by hammering him on policy, his past business deals or his sometimes vulgar outbursts — including Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal -- only succeeded in sinking their own presidential prospects.

The conservative uprising on Thursday was not the only eye-opening example of the Stop Trump movement.

Former GOP candidate Lindsey Graham, who once said choosing between Trump and Cruz would be like picking between being shot and poisoned, made his choice. The South Carolina Senator told CNN's Dana Bash that he was now lining up behind the Texas Senator and would help raise money for him.

Graham admitted that Cruz was ""not well liked"" among his peers on Capitol Hill, but implied he was the lesser of two evils.

""I have doubts about Mr. Trump,"" Graham said. ""I don't think he's a Republican, I don't think he's a conservative, I think his campaign's built on xenophobia, race-baiting and religious bigotry. I think he'd be a disaster for our party and as Senator Cruz would not be my first choice, I think he is a Republican conservative who I could support.""

The most fundamental weakness in any organized effort to stop Trump in the remaining contests in the Republican nomination is the math after more than half the states have voted.

The billionaire only needs to win 55.5% of the remaining delegates to be awarded, according to a CNN estimate.

Although he has only won 47% of the delegates awarded so far, the field, now consisting of just Trump, Cruz and Kasich, is much narrower than before and some contests are now winner take all affairs and do not hand out delegates proportionally as was the case in many previous contests.

Republican political strategist Phillip Stutts said the next six weeks will be crucial in defining whether any attempt to deprive Trump of the nomination would even be possible.

""If Trump is not slowed down, there is not a convention fight to be had,"" Stutts said, pointing to a set of northeastern primaries on April 26 in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as critical to foes bent on stopping Trump.

Another complication for the anti-Trump forces is that the billionaire could be the strongest force in a string of coming primaries. To slow his march, Kasich must show he can harvest more than the single victory he has so far -- on his home ground of Ohio.

Alternatively, Cruz, who is Trump's closest rival with 418 delegates to the billionaire's 678, according to a CNN estimate, would have to show an appeal outside conservative heartland states that he is yet to demonstrate on a large scale.

The strength of Trump's position has some of his allies warning that any attempt to snatch victory from his grasp would not just be unfair, it would be futile.

Hopes that a compromise candidate could emerge at a contested convention also took a blow on Thursday when House Speaker Paul Ryan ruled himself out — though he admitted that a delegate showdown was becoming more likely in Cleveland.

As the idea of the first contested convention in decades is gathering steam, the institutional leadership of the Republican Party finds itself in an unenviable position.

Any attempt to deprive Trump of the nomination would not just cause uproar in a year in which establishment politicians have been toppled. It would effectively mean the disenfranchisement of 7.5 million voters who have backed Trump in the primary process so far -- voters who the GOP can ill afford to lose at a time when national demographics give Democrats an easier route to the White House.

That's why officials like Republican National Committee Communications Director Sean Spicer say that the process of selecting a nominee must be inviolate if a candidate reaches the magic number of 1,237 delegates.

""Our job is to wait until the voters decide who that nominee will be,"" Spicer told Wolf Blitzer on CNN's ""The Situation Room,"" calling on Republicans to unite to fight for the ""bigger prize"" -- depriving the Democrats of the White House.

If the latest attempts to thwart Trump fail, and party power brokers decide they cannot stomach the Republican nominee, there may be a third option by embracing the final stage of grief — acceptance — and trying to limit the damage that they believe having Trump at the top of their ticket would unleash.

That could mean striving to ensure that even if Democrats win the White House, they are unable to boost an incoming president by making significant gains in Congress.

""Keeping the majorities in the Senate and the House is for us where the donors should be putting their money,"" said Stutts.",REAL
"Leave a reply 
Selwyn Duke – Sex crimes with children, child exploitation, money laundering, perjury, and pay to play, reads the partial list of crimes that, say New York City Police Department sources, could “put Hillary and her crew away for life.”Shocking evidence of such criminality has been found on ex-congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, say the sources, which was seized from him by NYC officials investigating his allegedly having sent sexually explicit texts to a 15-year-old girl. Moreover, Hillary Clinton’s “crew” supposedly includes not just close aide and confidante Huma Abedin and her husband, Weiner, but other aides and insiders — and even members of Congress. Reports True Pundit : 
NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: • Money laundering • Sex crimes with minors (children) • Perjury • Pay to play through Clinton Foundation • Obstruction of justice • Other felony crimes 
NYPD detectives and a [sic] NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. 
“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.” 
These revelations would explain why Director Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, a move that shook the political world and caused Comey to come under fire. As the NYPD chief put it, the new e-mails contents truly are “alarming.” 
True Pundit also reports FBI sources as stating that Abedin and Weiner are both trying to cut immunity deals with federal officials and that, if they didn’t cooperate, they’d face long prison sentences. Abedin’s turning state’s evidence would no doubt be devastating for Clinton, as the two women have for years been joined at the hip. Abedin has at times been like Clinton’s shadow, has been called her “body woman,” and has even been rumored to be Clinton’s lesbian lover. So Abedin likely knows where, as is said, the bodies are buried. 
Of particular note, the new e-mails allegedly contain information revealing that Hillary, Bill Clinton, Weiner, and numerous congressmen took trips to convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, where he is said to pimp out underage minors of both sexes to prominent people. The trips were taken aboard Epstein’s Boeing 747, dubbed the “Lolita Express”; the pedophile’s island, in the US Virgin Islands, has been called “ Sex Slave Island .” 
These revelations would also explain why Clinton used powerful software called BleachBit to scrub damning information from her private server. According to BleachBit’s website, its program gives criminals and others the ability to “shred files to hide their contents and prevent data recovery.” 
Yet it can’t scrub bumbling perverts from your personal life, and Weiner’s laptop also contains incriminating e-mails revealing the mishandling of classified information by Abedin and Clinton, say the sources. Both women “sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts,” and this information could have been “accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers … of unknown individuals,” writes True Pundit . 
Consequently, FBI sources say the new Clinton investigation has been broadened and now includes matters such as how, informs True Pundit : • Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email • Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails. • Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records • Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents • [a] private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts. 
This story just adds more intrigue to a presidential campaign that is truly unprecedented, with a torrent of WikiLeaks and Project Veritas revelations and now Clinton’s Weiner woes. From vote fraud to inciting violence to child sex abuse to pay-for-play to perjury, it’s becoming clear to many that the Democratic Party — and the Clintons in particular — are essentially a criminal syndicate. 
As former assistant FBI director James Kallstrom said in a Sunday interview, “The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically. It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool…. God forbid we put someone like that [Clinton] in the White House.” And now we know better why, as I wrote Sunday, this “appears standard FBI sentiment. I personally know of an ex-agent — someone with knowledge of Clinton ‘crime family’ dealings — who I’m told is having trouble sleeping at night due to the prospect of a Clinton presidency.” 
All these revelations raise important questions: How could Hillary Clinton and her cohorts have bumbled so badly that they appear a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Boss Tweed ? 
And if Clinton is so careless with her own personal survival, how can she be trusted with national survival? 
Part of the explanation is general incompetence, yet there’s another factor: Both Clintons have engaged in continual criminality over the decades — and have been allowed to skate at every turn. This lack of accountability has led to complacency and ever-increasing brazenness, just as with a child never punished for wrongdoing. 
So, finally, perhaps, Clinton corruption has reached critical mass. And with Donald Trump ahead 10 points (according to one respected poll) among the 88 percent of voters who have definitely made up their minds, maybe, come late Tuesday evening, some tossing and turning FBI agents will finally be able to enjoy a good night’s rest. SF Source The New American Nov. 2016 Share this:",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Backdoor Survival October 29, 2016 
The topic of using expired prescription drugs comes up frequently in survival and preparedness circles. Although there are many articles detailing with the efficacy of outdated meds, one question I get over and over again is “what do I do when the meds run out?” 
Whereas there is no single clear answer, one thing we can all start to do now hangs on to our old, unused meds. For the most part and with very few exceptions, they will be viable for two to twelve years beyond their expiration date. The secret is to keep them in a cool, dark, location that is not too dissimilar from your food storage. 
In another exclusive article for Backdoor Survival, Dr. Joe Alton, a medical doctor who is well versed in survival medicine, is here today to give us an update on the use of expired drugs in a survival setting. In addition, for those of you that have asked, he is providing us with links you can use to initiate your own research on this important topic. 
Of course, as with anything preparedness related, let your own good judgment prevail. 
An Update on Expired Drugs in Survival Settings 
In normal times, replacing expired medicines isn’t a major issue. You call your physician and get a refill for “fresh” meds. Medicine bottle descriptions and those in print and online sources tell you to discard any drug that has gone expired, a recommendation so common that it’s considered standard. 
You might be surprised to know, however, that expiration dates have only been government-mandated since 1979. The expiration date is simply the last day that the pharmaceutical company will guarantee 100% potency of the product. In other words, you won’t grow a horn in the middle of your forehead or another ill effect if you take the drug the week after it expires. Indeed, it is rare for expired drugs, especially in pill or capsule form, to be any riskier than the non-expired versions. 
This is an important issue to those preparing medically for survival scenarios. If you believe that some disaster will take society to the brink, then you should also understand that such a scenario also means that it’s unlikely that pharmaceutical companies will be functioning to manufacture drugs. Therefore, at one point or another, a well-supplied survival medic will have to make a decision regarding the use of an expired medication. 
This is a decision that also must be made by government agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Defense. Federal warehouses store tens of millions of dollars’ worth of drugs meant for use in peacetime disasters. When these drugs expired, the forklifts came out and huge quantities of life-saving medicines were discarded.",FAKE
"in: Natural Medicine Bitter melon is a fruit that grows abundantly in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Traditionally it has been used to treat diabetes and other more mild diseases or illnesses. More recently, bitter melon juice was shown to kill pancreatic cancer cells in vitro and in mice in a study done by the University of Colorado. Considering the results were seen in both in vitro and in vivo tests, the effectiveness of bitter melon juice in treating pancreatic cancer, and potentially other cancers, at a clinical level are promising.[ 1 ] “IHC analyses of MiaPaCa-2 xenografts showed that BMJ (Bitter Melon Juice) also inhibits proliferation, induces apoptosis and activates AMPK (adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase) in vivo . Overall, BMJ exerts strong anticancer efficacy against human pancreatic carcinoma cells, both in vitro and in vivo , suggesting its clinical usefulness.” Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat due to the fact that it is often discovered late, leaving very little time to treat. Since traditional therapies (chemotherapy, radiation, surgery etc) were not showing promising results and littler advancement was being made, researchers have been looking elsewhere to find treatment. Interestingly, cannabis, specifically cannabinoids, have been shown to induce apoptic (programmed) death of human pancreatic cancer cells in vitro and stop pancreatic tumor growth in vivo.[ 4 ] Cannabis is perhaps one of the most popular treatments being aggressively pursued right now given its promising results both in labs and anecdotally. Many cancerous tumors have insulin receptors which move glucose to cancer cells helping them to grow and divide. Studies have shown that insulin encourages pancreatic cancer cells to grow in a dose dependant manner, since bitter melon has been shown to help regulate insulin levels, this could help prevent pancreatic cancer over the long-term. The Colorado University study was led by Dr. Rajesh Agarwal. They examined effects of bitter melon on 4 different lines of pancreatic cancer cells (in vitro) and in mice. For the in vivo studies, mice were injected with pancreatic tumor cells and were randomly divided into one of two groups. One group of mice received water, which was the control group, and the other group was given bitter melon juice for six weeks. [6] Researchers studied the tumors at the end of the study and results showed that bitter melon juice not only inhibited cancer cell proliferation but also induced apoptosis (programmed cell death). Compared to the control, tumor growth was inhibited by 60% in the treatment group and there were no signs of toxicity or negative effects on the body. With toxicity and negative effects being a huge role in traditional mainstream treatments, this was positive to see. Diabetes A number of clinical studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of bitter melon for treating diabetes. Since it is believed that diabetes is a precursor for pancreatic cancer, researchers felt bitter melon could treat diabetes as well after seeing pancreatic cancer results. In 2011, results of a four week long clinical trial were published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology that showed modest hypoglycemic effects and significant fructosamine management for those taking 2000mg/day of bitter melon. As published by the study: “Bitter melon had a modest hypoglycemic effect and significantly reduced fructosamine levels from baseline among patients with type 2 diabetes who received 2,000 mg/day. However, the hypoglycemic effect of bitter melon was less than metformin 1,000 mg/day.”[ 3 ] Another study published in 2008 in the international journal Chemistry and Biology indicated that compounds in bitter melon improved glycemic control, helped cells uptake glucose and improved overall glucose tolerance. This study was done in mice and led to promising advancements in treating diabetes and obesity with bitter melon.[ 4 ] In contrast, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 2007 did not show significant benefit of the treatment of diabetes by bitter melon but 2 years later in the British Journal of Nutrition it was stated that “more, better-designed and clinical trials are required to confirm the fruit’s role in diabetes treatment.” Since that 2007 study, more studies have been done to show beneficial effects which perhaps was a result of better design. Conclusion When it comes to bitter melon juice, the current research available is showing strong results for specific types of cancer cell destruction, diabetes treatment and potential prevention of pancreatic cancer. Further research and clinical trials would be helpful to better understand how effective this plant can be and in what specific cases. It remains a very promising option that could be explored under the correct supervision. Other Uses of Bitter Melon Bitter melon has been used as a traditional medicine for a long time. It has been used to treat: colic, fever, burns, chronic cough, painful menstruation and skin conditions.[ 5 ]",FAKE
"JS Mineset’s Bill Holter is back to help document the collapse. Bill says that the United States is becoming a banana republic right before our eyes. As Donald Trump recently stated,
“The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this firsthand with the Wikileaks documents in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret, with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty. The Clintons are criminals.” 
And still, the CIA mockingbird media targets Trump while giving Clinton a free pass.
The fix is in. 

Source: Silver Doctors 
",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"Email 
“The Arizona market is the poster child for the problems the [ObamaCare] exchanges are experiencing nationally,” Milliman Inc. actuary Tom Snook told the Wall Street Journal . 
It would be difficult to argue with Snook’s contention. While individual-insurance premiums are rising by an average of 25 percent across the country next year, Arizona’s premiums are set to grow by double or triple that, with some locales experiencing rate hikes topping 100 percent. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, Arizonans have but one insurance carrier from whom to purchase coverage, and one county nearly ended up with no carriers at all. 
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Arizona was originally the poster child for the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) success. The first year the ACA exchanges opened for business, the state had eight insurers offering a wide variety of plans at low prices, in part because of an expectation that the federal government would bail them out if they suffered losses. “A 2013 Society of Actuaries report suggested that the Arizona individual-insurance market could more than double, growing to 570,681 consumers, with more than 80% of them buying through the exchange,” wrote the Journal . “The health-care costs of the newer customer base would be around 22% higher than the old one, it suggested.” 
Instead, as has been the case throughout the nation, Americans made health-insurance decisions based on their own needs rather than following the best-laid plans of politicians and bureaucrats. Those with pre-existing conditions took advantage of the ACA’s mandates that insurers cover them at rates comparable to those of their healthy neighbors, while those neighbors balked at buying coverage that was more expensive and less generous than they desired. The result: Enrollment fell well below expectations, with only 203,000 people buying exchange plans this year, while the cost of covering those enrollees was vastly greater than expected — “around 250% higher on average than individual members before the health law,” Jeff Stelnik, senior vice president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, told the Journal . 
To make matters worse, the bailouts never came through. The federal risk-corridor program was supposed to transfer profits from successful insurers to unsuccessful ones, but so few insurers made money on the exchanges that the program could only cover 12.6 percent of losses. Congress refused to make up the difference from general revenues. 
In Arizona, as elsewhere, this could only have one outcome: fewer insurers and higher premiums. Although the number of insurers increased to 11 in 2015, it returned to eight last year. Insurers were forced to raise rates each year — Blue Cross Blue Shield hiked premiums by 35 percent in 2014 — but it still wasn’t enough to break even, let alone turn a profit. The state’s ObamaCare co-op went under in 2015, and major insurers began pulling out of the state en masse this year. UnitedHealth Group and Aetna left entirely. Blue Cross Blue Shield and Health Net both announced they would exit the exchanges in Maricopa County, home of Phoenix, and Pinal County. That, in turn, would have left Pinal County without a single exchange insurer; but “after state and federal regulators ‘expressed their concern for Pinal residents,’” Blue Cross decided to remain in Pinal County after all, Stelnik told the Journal . 
For 2017, every Arizona county will have only one insurer on its exchange, save for Pima County, home to Tucson, which will have two. However, according to the New York Times , only Health Net is offering a full range of plans in Pima County, while Blue Cross is solely selling catastrophic plans for people under 30. Considering that the ACA also allows people to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, it seems likely that few will take advantage of Blue Cross’s offer. 
“There are no choices, really, for anybody in Maricopa County,” Phoenix resident Ken Hoag told the Arizona Republic . “The lack of choice is like having empty shelves (and) no food in a third-world country. Do I live in Cuba?” 
Of course, with mounting losses and no competition, it’s hardly surprising that premiums for individual plans are skyrocketing. Blue Cross Blue Shield is raising its rates by an average of 51 percent, Health Net an average of 75 percent. In Phoenix, premiums are going up a whopping 145 percent. Republic columnist Laurie Roberts notes that a typical 27-year-old Arizonan “buying the second lowest ‘silver plan’ will see premiums soar by 116 percent. If that 27 year old makes $35,000 a year, he’ll pay nearly 10 percent of his gross income for insurance even with an Obamacare subsidy. If he makes over $47,000, he’ll pay a jaw dropping $422 a month for insurance, up from $196 this year.” 
That subsidy, as usual, is the ace ObamaCare supporters always have up their sleeve. The rate hikes, while huge, aren’t so bad because the subsidies will cover most of the extra cost, they argue. “That may be so,” Roberts observed, “but how sustainable is a system in which insurance premiums rise by 116 percent in a year? Or even 25 percent a year?” 
Besides, subsidies don’t cover all the added expense. Hoag’s wife had to buy a new plan for 2017 because her old one is being discontinued. While her new plan’s benefits are comparable to those of her old plan, she is going to be stuck for an extra $50 a month in premiums despite her subsidy. 
And what of Arizonans who earn too much money to qualify for subsidies? For them, the Times admits, “the price increases will be excruciating.” The paper cites one example: Leslie Rycroft of Scottsdale, who works in human resources, is paying $1,100 a month this year for a United Healthcare plan that has a $13,000 deductible for her family of four. Their income was a little too high to qualify for a subsidy, she said. When she looked at her options on HealthCare.gov last week, she said she was “absolutely horrified” to see only one insurer, Health Net, offering plans that started at $2,200 a month. “It’s beyond ridiculous,” she said. “All of a sudden you are paying $26,000 a year,” Ms. Rycroft said, “just for catastrophic health insurance.” 
Thus, the Grand Canyon State has the unfortunate distinction of serving as the latest example of the great chasm between progressives’ pipe dreams and reality. As always, though, ordinary Americans, not the politicians who created this monster, are the ones suffering as a result. Is it any wonder that over half of Americans tell pollsters they disapprove of ObamaCare, and the number who say it has hurt them continues to rise? 
The only wonder is that politicians, who normally live and die by opinion polls, haven’t done anything to address their concerns. Perhaps the upcoming elections will change that, but don’t hold your breath. Should you pass out and injure yourself, you might not be able to afford the medical bills with your ObamaCare-approved insurance — if you can even pay the premium. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment 
Thank you for joining the discussion at The New American. We value our readers and encourage their participation, but in order to ensure a positive experience for our readership, we have a few guidelines for commenting on articles. If your post does not follow our policy, it will be deleted. 
No profanity, racial slurs, direct threats, or threatening language. 
No product advertisements. 
Please post comments in English. 
Please keep your comments on topic with the article. If you wish to comment on another subject, you may search for a relevant article and join or start a discussion there.",FAKE
"Share on Twitter The Wildfire is an opinion platform and any opinions or information put forth by contributors are exclusive to them and do not represent the views of IJR. 
In a campaign ad for Donald Trump, Laura Wilkerson talks about her horrific experience of her son being doused with gasoline and set on fire by an illegal alien. In the ad called “Laura,” she explains why Hillary Clinton's policies are harmful for America. ",FAKE
"How WiFi & Other EMFs Cause Biological Harm Professor Martin Pall, PhD – professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Science at Washington State... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/10/how-wifi-other-emfs-cause-biological.html Professor Martin Pall, PhD – professor of Biochemistry and Basic Medical Science at Washington State University, Pullman, says that WiFi & other EMFs can cause biological harm. In 2014 he said “I think this is going to be one of the major issues in the next few years. Most people are not aware of this, and the people who are mostly know the old data and there’s a lot of new stuff on this that’s extremely, extremely important”. According to some governments, it is not possible for microwaves from mobile phones, WiFi, ‘smart’ meters , etc. to cause harm, that research in the field is inconsistent and that there is no proof that such radiation can cause health issues. But Prof Pall who is an eminent physicist, geneticist and cell biologist, says they are wrong on all counts.In this video (below), Pall argues that research results showing harm are not “inconsistent” as is sometimes claimed, and that the health of the public now urgently needs to be protected. Pall’s extensive research over recent decades (some of his peer-reviewed studies on this subject are listed in the final two minutes of this presentation) shows that: Microwaves damage humans at levels far below present radiation limits, through mechanisms at the cellular level These biological mechanisms can – completely or partially – be behind growing “unexplained illnesses” like sudden cardiac death, ME, weakened immune system, fibromyalgia, post-traumatic stress, and increased DNA breakage, etc. The effects can in principle affect all multicellular animals, and is proven, for example, in mussels You need neither New Age, tendentious science or conspiracy theories to justify this. The conclusion to be drawn from Pall’s findings is that we face a new and increasingly present environmental pollutant. Some have called it the “21st century environmental bomb”, with implications for the environment, human health, construction of mobile towers, computers in schools, and handling of individuals presenting with symptoms of EHS. Martin Pall, prof. Em. at Washington State University, has an impressive body of work. His first article on EMFs and their role in VGCC activation earned a place in the “Global Medical Discovery” list of the most important articles in medicine in 2013. The video is footage from Arne Naess seminar 18th October 2014 Oslo: Source & reference: Yournewswire.com ; Video by Stop Smart Meters! (UK)  ",FAKE
"Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr 
Two stunningly depressing things happened in America on Thursday evening that demonstrate just how differently the country treats its citizens based on race – and they happened more or less at the same time. 
In North Dakota, police driving armored vehicles (yes, like tanks) and armed with rifles, sound cannons, and shotguns loaded with “nonlethal” beanbags marched in formation to shut down peaceful protesters opposing an oil pipeline. A few states over in Oregon, a jury found that the violent militia group which led an armed occupation of a federal wildlife reserve was innocent of all charges and free to go . America is two countries with two different sets of rules, and Thursday evening highlighted that fact in stunning detail. 
On Twitter, user @theshrillest put the juxtaposition in all its glory in a single screengrab. His twitter feed was a mixture of stories about the violent suppression of a peaceful protest led by a Native American tribe directly affected by the environmental impact of the oil pipeline and news of the release of the Bundy militia – a group of out-of-state rabblerousers who believe the federal government should be disbanded. 
— 🇺🇸 (@theshrillest) October 27, 2016 
This is the second time the Bundy family threatened to kill federal agents and expressed a desire to lead a revolution only to see zero charges stick to them. The group will now get to return to Nevada, just in time for an election in which many conservatives are openly stating that they plan on taking up arms if Trump loses. On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. 
On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. 
You in? 
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 
In short, it’s a scary time to be a democracy. An Oregon jury just gave every white male in the country a not-so-subtle nod that violence against the government will be met with a look the other way when it comes time to a trial. 
Featured image via Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office/Getty Images Share this Article!",FAKE
"Most of the headlines from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech at the American Constitution Society on Thursday were, understandably, about her attacks on Donald Trump.

Highlighting Warren’s rapid succession of fusillades against Trump makes sense. After all, outside of this election, you don’t often get sitting US senators publicly calling the other party's presidential nominee a ""racist bully"" who has ""never risked anything for anyone and who serves no one but himself.""

But Warren’s speech did much more than go after Trump. In her high-profile address, she pivoted from attacking the likely GOP nominee to attacking Republicans more generally, accusing the party’s leaders of orchestrating a prolonged ""assault"" on the independence of the federal judiciary in order to serve the wealthiest Americans.

For instance, when Warren highlighted Trump’s racist attacks against Judge Gonzalo Curiel, she said they were born from the same essential motivation as other mainstream Republican initiatives like the blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination and the Citizens United decision on campaign finance: to help the richest of the rich.

""Donald Trump chose racism as his weapon,"" Warren said. ""But his aim is exactly the same as the rest of the Republicans: to pound the courts into submission for the rich and the powerful.""

Now, it should be noted that many leading Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, have condemned Trump's remarks about Curiel. So it doesn’t seem entirely fair to blame them for what Trump has said there.

But the line does give us insight into how one of the leading progressives sees Trump, and it suggests how a Warren-led Democratic Party might respond in 2016 and beyond.

Many Democrats have said that Trump’s rhetoric against Curiel amounts to proof that he’s uniquely unfit for the presidency, as a sign that he goes far beyond even what other Republicans are willing to say.

Warren didn’t take this approach. Over and over, she insisted that Trump’s comments about Curiel reflect the Republican attacks on the courts — the only difference being that they’re done with less tact.

Where do you suppose that Donald Trump got the idea that he can personally attack judges, regardless of the law, whenever they don't bend to the whims of billionaires and big businesses? He's a Mitch McConnell kind of candidate … He is exactly the kind of candidate you'd expect from a Republican Party whose script for several years has been to execute a full-scale assault on the integrity of our courts, blockading judicial appointments so Donald Trump can fill them. Smearing and intimidating nominees who do not pledge allegiance to the financial interests of the rich and powerful. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell want Donald Trump to appoint the next generation of judges. They want those judges to tilt the law in favor of big businesses and billionaires like Donald Trump. They just want Donald Trump to quit being so vulgar and obvious about it.

Warren connected Trump’s attacks on Curiel to Republican obstructionism against the judicial branch going back years, citing their unwillingness to confirm appointees like District of Maryland nominee Paula Xinis.

She began the speech, for instance, by citing her Senate office’s new report, ""Going to Extremes: The Supreme Court and Senate Republicans’ Unprecedented Record of Obstruction of President Obama’s Nominees."" And she said wealthy corporations have flooded the political system with cash in an attempt to corrupt the judiciary.

""The purpose is also to hamstring the president's ability to protect consumers and workers, to hold large corporations accountable and promote equality,"" Warren said. ""In other words, to undermine the fundamental principle of equal justice under law.""

It seems pretty questionable whether obstructing federal judicial appointments is really comparable to Trump’s attacks against a judge’s heritage.

But whether you buy Warren’s interpretation or not, as a partisan political strategy it has distinct pros and cons.

On the one hand, attacking Trump by calling him a mainstream Republican is probably not going to be particularly devastating to Trump himself.

Hillary Clinton's best shot at a landslide victory might be peeling away centrist Republicans turned off by Trump. If that's the case, comparing Trump's most outlandish attacks to the policy decisions of the party’s leaders may not prove particularly convincing.

On the other hand, though, it could help Democrats in their effort to ensure that it’s not just Trump who goes down to defeat, but rather the Republican Party as a whole.",REAL
"Hillary Clinton made the case for her presidential bid in a rare interview with Fox News Sunday, reaching out directly to the conservative show’s primary audience: older Republican voters, many of them distrustful of her liberal politics and her conduct as secretary of state, but even more terrified by Donald Trump’s unpredictable temperament and seeming coziness with Russia.

“We know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin, whether it's saying that NATO wouldn't come to the rescue of our allies if they were invaded” or “his praise for Putin—which is, I think, quite remarkable,” Clinton said, when asked by Fox host Chris Wallace about the recent hacking attack against the Democratic National Committee, which is widely believed to have been carried out by Russia in order to benefit Trump. Clinton didn’t go so far as to suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin would prefer to see Trump in the White House, but she said it “raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy.” Trump’s history of praising Putin also “raises national security issues,” she argued.

The sit-down interview, Clinton’s first since becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party, and her first with Fox News Sunday in five years, was unusual for the veteran politician, who is often criticized for her sporadic interaction with the press. (Unlike Trump, who bombards the media constantly, Clinton hasn’t given a press conference in more than 200 days.) More unusual was what Clinton was trying to do: win over conservatives like George Will, who have been driven from the Republican Party by its decision to nominate as its standard-bearer a former reality TV star with little history of conservative principles.

Clinton faces a steep uphill climb, however, in convincing Republicans that she is trustworthy and won’t overstep her bounds as president on the issue of immigration, both issues that Fox News—which re-aired the 10 A.M. Fox interview—has repeatedly hammered her on over the last year. Confronted with the fact that two-third of voters say they don’t trust her, the former secretary of state acknowledged she had to do more (“I have work to do to make sure people know what I have done and what I will do”) but argued that Americans’ impression of her is a caricature, not reality. “When I left office as Secretary of State, 66 percent of Americans approved of what I do,” she told Wallace. “I think that it's fair for Americans to have questions. I hope you'll ask Donald Trump why he is so untrusted by the American people.”

The Democratic nominee also sought to allay Republican voters’ fears that she would take away or limit access to guns as president, a major obstacle to winning over uncertain conservatives who are worried about Trump. “I'm not looking to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not looking to take people's guns away,” Clinton insisted, repeating what she had said in her Democratic National Convention speech last week, during which she had accepted her party’s nomination for president. “But I am looking for more support for the reasonable efforts that need to be undertaken to keep guns out of the wrong hands,” she continued. “The vast majority of Americans including gun owners support the kind of common sense reforms that I'm proposing.”

Clinton’s interview with Wallace was the latest in a series of moves by the presidential nominee to expand her voting base beyond liberal and centrist Democrats to include more conservative voters. Days before, right-leaning pundits had watched with some concern as the Democratic National Convention gleefully co-opted an iconography and vocabulary traditionally belonging to Republicans: giant American flags, patriotic chants, and a parade of high-ranking military officials, police officers, former Reagan officials, and even Michael Bloomberg, once a Republican himself. The spectacle was, they fretted, more American than their own convention, a weeklong celebration of Trump.

Clinton’s interview augurs potential difficulty on the horizon as she seeks to unite believers of old-fashioned, Reagan-era conservatism, with the ideals of a socialist from Vermont and his legion of scrappy supporters. But if anyone can scare more people into the Democratic Party’s big tent, it’s Donald Trump—and Clinton is holding open the doors. Already there are suggestions that the Democratic nominee could soon receive the endorsement of high-profile dissenters within the Republican ranks, even if it risks alienating some portion of her liberal base. Fox News itself may soon be shifting toward the center, as Rupert Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan move to reinvent the network in the wake of Roger Ailes’ departure amid a sexual harassment scandal. If there’s anyone who can capitalize on the coming shakeup with a carefully-tuned strategy of triangulation, it’s another Clinton.",REAL
"By midmorning, the line of taxpayers outside the IRS office stretched along the marble wall, past the elevators and water fountain, back to the metal detectors near the entrance of the Earle Cabell Federal Building.

Andrew Concha came out into the hall holding a purple sign. He checked his watch — 11:04 a.m. — then calculated how many people could be seen before the Taxpayer Assistance Center closed at 4:30 p.m. He placed the sign behind the 17th customer, signaling to the other 30 or so in line that their chance of seeing a specialist that day was slim.

“I’m not technically turning them away yet,” Concha explained. “I’m letting them know it may not be in their interest to wait three to four hours to see someone.”

With Tax Day approaching, it was the best the IRS could offer.

Five years of budget cuts by Congress have left the agency so cash-strapped that Commissioner John Koskinen doesn’t bother sugarcoating the state of customer service. “It’s abysmal,” he said.

Nationwide, only 4 in 10 callers to the agency’s toll-free help line are getting through to a real person. The number of “courtesy disconnects” — a euphemism for an overloaded system hanging up on the customer — has reached 5 million so far this year, the agency reported.

When callers do get a real person, they can forget about asking questions that require expertise. These are now considered “out of scope.” The customer-service agents have been instructed to only tell callers what tax forms they need, where to get them and where to look for online information. Staff can no longer offer line-by-line assistance, provide guidance on tax planning or tax law, or help make payment arrangements.

And with 5,000 fewer agents than four years ago to go after tax cheats, officials estimate that $2 billion in revenue will go uncollected.

At the Dallas tax assistance center, there’s an empty space where the office printer sat before it was yanked out. The maintenance contract was too expensive. The shelves in the Forms Room are mostly bare. The 40-page P-17, the bible of tax-return preparation, now costs $23 and must be ordered online.

Overcrowding at the Dallas center came to a head in February when the fire marshal showed up and notified its manager, Johnny Holiday, that he couldn’t have customers sitting on the floor and blocking exits and walking space. So now, no one gets in the door unless the person has a seat in one of the 40 chairs in the waiting area.

Late last month, Holiday called security officers when a man lunged at an employee, cursing, after waiting two hours to drop off documents for an audit.

Holiday spends his time devising strategies to bring order to an office that, this being the IRS, should thrive on order. Twenty minutes before the doors open at 8:30 a.m. on a recent morning, he’s making sure that the Line Elimination Team is in place. Its job is do triage on the line, pulling customers out of the queue who have straightforward requests, such as asking to make a payment or to get a copy of an old return. Employees move along the line, handing out paper tickets as at the deli counter, asking customers in Spanish and in English why they are here.

This task takes three of his specialists. That leaves only eight others to meet with taxpayers and answer their questions.

As money has gotten tighter, the demands have grown. Two years ago, another walk-in center in DeSoto, 16 miles south of Dallas, closed, leaving the IRS office in the Earle Cabell building to absorb the business.

With its gray carpets, dropped ceilings with fluorescent lights and keypad-coded doors five blocks from where John F. Kennedy was shot, the 16-story building in downtown Dallas built in 1968 is a monument to a time when there was more optimism about the federal government.

Since 2010, Republicans on Capitol Hill have slashed the IRS budget by $1.2 billion, or about 17 percent, adjusting for inflation. Just this fiscal year, $346 million was cut.

By contrast, cuts across the rest of the government have been far more modest and concentrated. Between 2012 and 2014, automatic spending reductions shrank non-defense spending, as adjusted for inflation, by 1.3 percent, while IRS spending was chopped 5.6 percent, according to Scott Lilly, a budget expert at the Center for American Progress.

Even in an era of shrinking government, conservatives’ antipathy toward the tax-collection agency stands out. It is punishment for a string of missteps: an extravagant conference for employees in Anaheim, Calif., the targeting of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, $1 million in bonuses given to agency employees who didn’t pay their federal taxes.

“We deliberately lowered IRS funding to a level that will make the IRS think twice about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it,” Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.), who chairs the House panel that sets the agency’s budget, said at a hearing last month. The IRS, he said, should “focus on core missions providing taxpayer services.”

Leslie Paige, vice president for policy and communications at Citizens Against Government Waste, said every government agency could sustain deep cuts and in particular the IRS.

“I think taxpayers and their representatives need to think long and hard about throwing more money at an agency that has proven that it persistently mismanages and wastes the money they have gotten in the past,” she said.

As funding has declined, the agency’s workload has grown. The IRS is helping to administer subsidies and compliance under President Obama’s health-care law and dealing with other new wrinkles in the tax code. It is also battling an epidemic of identity theft and new, sophisticated cheating schemes. Since the budget cuts, employees have processed 11 percent more returns, the IRS said.

Koskinen, hired to restore trust in the IRS, is also looking for money to upgrade a system that still runs on COBOL, the computer language that debuted half a century ago. He needs more revenue agents. In Dallas, they only go after people who’ve cheated the government out of $1 million or more.

“At this point it is a little frustrating when people say, ‘We keep cutting your budget so you’ll be more efficient,’ ” Koskinen said.

When Jerry Reed finally made it to a cubicle inside the Dallas center, Andrew Concha apologized for the long wait. Reed just shrugged his shoulders.

Reed’s tax return had been flagged because it reflected a refund of more than $10,000. The IRS suspected that Reed was a victim of identity theft. In reality, Reed was due the refund because he had taken a large business loss when his consulting business failed.

He tried to resolve the confusion online but couldn’t figure how to proceed. He called the toll-free line, waited on hold for 90 minutes and hung up. Then he drove to the federal building one day after work, but he was too late to get a ticket. In the past, IRS employees would work as late as midnight during tax season, but now, with the elimination of overtime pay, they go home at 4:30 p.m.

“Because of the cuts, people have really lost patience with us,” Concha said.

In the high-rise building next door, money ran out for 200 seasonal employees a full month before the April 15 deadline, and they are being sent home, agency officials said.

“They know the minute we say, ‘I’m going to have to transfer you to someone who can answer your question,’ they’re going to be on hold for a number of hours,” said Donna Miller, an agent working for the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Just then, an announcement came over the loudspeaker inviting all employees to Room 212 at 1 p.m. for a retirement party for a woman named Peg. Peg was not being replaced because of an IRS hiring freeze.

No choice but to wait

It has fallen to Chris Caroll, the operations manager, to buck up his beleaguered staff. Bald with a goatee, he walks the seven floors of cubicles every day, urging employees to e-mail, call and knock on his door if they need to talk.

“We knew we had to be empathetic versus the typical management style,” he said. Yet he cannot even order them calendars, calculators or rulers.

Back downstairs, Laurence Zeigler had figured out that he wouldn’t get to see anyone at the IRS on this day. All he needed, he said, was to give them his correct address. Near the exit, his credentials in a faded gray folder that long ago carried his vo-tech diploma, he vented to a friendly security guard.

“Man, I just got laid off,” he said. “It’s like, I really need that money.” His $400 refund had been held up by an incomplete return.

“I would just call them,” the guard offered. Waiting on hold did not sound like a great idea to Zeigler.

Concha had come back out to check on the line.

“If you get in this line, the wait will be two hours,” he told an anxious woman, who wanted to make sure her automated tax payment went through after her bank changed. “If you get inside, it will be another two hours.”

“Did you say, another two hours?” someone called out. It was Kim Garrett, on her fifth visit to clear up the matter of her Social Security number, which she said the IRS didn’t have.

“You can’t call,” Garrett said, to anyone who would listen. “You can’t get online, and you can’t see anybody. What are your options?”

The others in line nodded in agreement.",REAL
"Email 
CNN made it official Monday, firing commentator Donna Brazile (shown) for giving Hillary Clinton questions in advance of debates with Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. The avidly pro-Clinton network was virtually forced to sever ties with Brazile by the new revelations from the latest WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s hacked e-mails. Podesta, the longtime adviser/crony/fixer for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and currently chairman of Hillary’s election campaign, has now seen over 39,000 of his e-mails released by the WikiLeaks hacktivists, and they have been very revealing indeed, exposing the corruption, dirty tricks, and criminality of the Clinton political machine . 
Brazile, a veteran Democratic Party hack, has been serving as interim chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) since July, when then-DNC chair Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign in an e-mail scandal that exposed Wasserman Schultz and other DNC officials blatantly taking sides with Clinton and sabotaging Sanders, in violation of DNC rules to maintain neutrality in primary campaigns. 
As the Podesta e-mails reveal, Brazile was involved in those same ethics violations, extending to violating the rules for the televised debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which sponsored the debates, states on its website : “All debates will be moderated by a single individual and will run from 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time without commercial breaks. As always, the moderators alone will select the questions to be asked, which are not known to the CPD or to the candidates.” 
However, that obviously was not the case, as Brazile was providing Team Clinton with a heads-up of debate questions in advance. The first Brazile e-mail to leak out concerned the televised CNN-TV One Town Hall event on March 13 of this year. The day before, Brazile sent an e-mail to Clinton’s director of communications, Jennifer Palmieri, saying she’s worried about “HRC” (Hillary Rodham Clinton) facing a question on the death penalty. The subject heading of her e-mail was: “Re: From time to time I get the questions in advance.” 
Here is the e-mail, as provided by WikiLeaks: On Mar 12, 2016, at 4:39 PM, Donna Brazile <   >; wrote: Here's one that worries me about HRC. DEATH PENALTY 19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty? Sent from Donna's I Pad. Follow me on twitter @donnabrazile 
The following day, on the CNN-TV One Town Hall, co-moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper and TV One’s Roland Martin, Hillary Rodham Clinton was indeed asked a question about the death penalty, by audience member Ricky Jackson — and HRC had a scripted answer ready and waiting. We, the public, did not find out that the game had been rigged until months later, when WikiLeaks released the incriminating e-mail on October 11. Nevertheless, even after the WikiLeaks release, most of the establishment media ignored the Brazile-Podesta-Palmieri skullduggery in favor of bashing Donald Trump over unsubstantiated, sensationalistic charges of sexual harassment. For nearly two weeks, Donna Brazile was allowed to wave off the e-mail evidence with diversionary tactics and charges that the e-mails are fabrications by WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence. 
However, on October 20 Brazile was skewered on Fox News by a relentless Megyn Kelly, who refused to let her weasel her way through another interview. Not that the DNC chair didn’t try; Brazile kept going to script, using every diversion she could muster to avoid answering the direct, careful questions put to her by the Fox anchor. 
She tried the Christian/persecution diversion: “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted,” Brazile told Megyn Kelly. 
She tried the “poisoned fruit” diversion: “Podesta’s emails were stolen. You’re so interested in talking about stolen material, you’re like a thief that wanna bring into the night the things that are in the gutter.” 
She tried the motor-mouth/repetition diversion, the total innocence diversion, and much more. 
It was still more of the same patently absurd denial and rehearsed propaganda by Brazile when Kelly confronted her with the undercover video stings of top Democratic dirty tricks operatives Scott Foval and Bob Creamer, who were caught red-handed boasting of rigging elections and admitting to inciting violence at Trump rallies . 
Incredibly, Brazile insisted to Megyn Kelly that “I always play ‘straight up’ and I’m going to be ‘straight up’ with you.” However, it was painfully clear by the end of the Fox “interview” that “straight up” Donna Brazile is as weasely and deceitful as “Crooked Hillary.” 
It is noteworthy that during her Fox News interview, when Megyn Kelly repeatedly asked her where she got the advance debate questions, Brazile fatuously insisted that she had “never” received any questions from CNN. She continued repeating the same lines even when Kelly asked her directly if the questions had come not from CNN itself but from Roland Martin, the former CNN commentator who now works for TV One and co-moderated the Town Hall event. 
In the same e-mail thread of March 12 cited above, Brazile responded to a reply from Jennifer Palmieri. Brazile told Palmieri: “I'll send a few more [debate questions]. Though some questions Roland submitted.” That would seem to be a very solid “clue” that Roland Martin was the source and Brazile was the conduit to Podesta and the Clinton Campaign. 
Politico reporter Hadas Gold reported on October 12 that Politico had obtained an e-mail of March 12 from Roland Martin to CNN debate producers with the identical death penalty question that appeared in Brazile’s March 12 e-mail to Palmieri. What’s more, it was Roland Martin who introduced Ricky Jackson, the pre-selected, pre-scripted “audience” member who asked the rigged question about the death penalty. 
As Gold reports, Martin initially denied that he had shared his questions “with anybody.” However, after being confronted with the fact that Politico possessed e-mail evidence to the contrary, he began walking the denial back to more ambiguous ground. 
Media “Uncomfortable” but not Outraged — Deceit, Propaganda Continue 
In an October 13 interview, Jake Tapper said he has “tremendous regard” for Brazile, but said the WikiLeaks revelation was “very, very troubling.” “It’s horrifying,” the CNN anchor said. “Journalistically it’s horrifying, and I’m sure it will have an impact on [CNN] partnering with this organization [TV One] in the future.” 
The following day, on October 14, CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas stated that CNN hadn’t given Brazile the debate questions in advance and announced Brazile had resigned from the network. “CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate,” Pratapas said in a written statement. “We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.” 
The October 30 WikiLeaks release contains another Brazile-DNC-Podesta debate revelation, concerning the March 6 debate in Flint, Michigan, where Democrat Party operatives and their media allies have transformed lead poisoning into a false national issue with which to clobber Republicans. The Clinton-Sanders Democratic primary debate was hosted by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper. (See the full debate here .) 
The event was held in Flint at Clinton’s request, as she herself pointed out during the course of the debate. A Brazile e-mail from March 5 of this year to Podesta and Palmieri, is entitled: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.” 
“Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint” Brazile’s e-mail goes on to alert Hillary’s debate coaches. Sure enough, the lead poisoning question came up on cue, and HRC slammed in another easy homerun answer. 
Yes, many in the pro-Clinton media industry are “uncomfortable” with the WikiLeaks revelations, but, judging from their continued overwhelmingly slanted coverage, the discomfort comes from being exposed, not from being disgusted with the serial cheating and lying of the Clinton camp and their media allies. There has been precious little outrage expressed by the pro-Clinton mainstream media elites of the kind and volume that would have gushed forth if the same rigging had been perpetrated by the Trump Campaign. There have been no media-orchestrated calls for TV One to fire Roland Martin, nor for the DNC to fire Donna Brazile, nor for Hillary Clinton to fire John Podesta and Jennifer Palmieri. 
The Brazile-Podesta-Palmieri debate e-mails are damning, but, arguably, not as serious as the many other revelations concerning the Clinton family’s rampant criminality on national security matters such as Uranium One, and the “pay-to-play” wheeling-dealing at the HRC State Department and the Clinton Foundation. However, the WikiLeaks e-mails released thus far have shown an alarming willingness and ability of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her DNC-Big Media allies to rig the election debates. And the ones we’ve seen may be only the tip of the iceberg. If this is the case in the primaries, are Donald Trump’s charges about rigging the November 8 election really all that outlandish, as the pro-Clinton media choir would have us believe? 
Related articles :",FAKE
"Assad Says The ""Boy In The Ambulance"" Is Fake - This Proves It 
Did the viral photo feature a child actor who has already been photographed 'being rescued' before? Donate! Originally appeared at The Moon of Alabama 
From an interview with the Syrian President Bashar Assad by the Swiss SRF 1 TV Channel published October 19 2016: Journalist: This young boy has become the symbol of the war. I think that you know this picture. 
President Assad: Of course I saw it. 
Journalist: His name is Omran. Five years old. 
President Assad: Yeah. 
Journalist: Covered with blood, scared, traumatized. Is there anything you would like to say to Omran and his family? 
President Assad: There’s something I would like to say to you first of all, because I want you to go back after my interview, and go to the internet to see the same picture of the same child, with his sister, both were rescued by what they call them in the West “White Helmets” which is a facelift of al-Nusra in Aleppo. They were rescued twice, each one in a different incident, and just as part of the publicity of those White Helmets. None of these incidents were true. You can have it manipulated, and it is manipulated. I’m going to send you those two pictures, and they are on the internet, just to see that this is a forged picture, not a real one. We have real pictures of children being harmed, but this one in specific is a forged one. 
Assad was half wrong. The picture, printed on page 1 of newspapers all over the ""western"" world, was not ""forged"". It is a real picture from a White Helmet ""rescue"" video distributed by the Aleppo Media Center (AMC) (which is funded by the French French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). But the scene was carefully staged and we immediately recognized it as staged when it appeared. It was staged like many other ""rescue"" scenes with ""kids saved"" by the U.S./UK/D/J/NL financed White Helmets and their associated media. 
Look for yourself, trust your eyes. 
The ""boy in an ambulance"" scene features two identifiable kids. Omran and his sister. 
Below are pictures of what we believe are the same kids in different scenes. 
Here is the girl at another occasion. We will call this scene 1: 
The Houston Chronicle reported about this scene and the picture carries this caption: An 8-year-old girl named Aya calls out for her father after an airstrike in Syrian on Monday, Oct. 10, 2016. 
This combined one is captioned: Left: 8-year-old Aya in her everyday life in Syria. Right: 8-year-old Aya after an airstrike in Syria. 
Notice the age as well as the girl's favorite colors - light turquoise and pink. Compared to the left picture the hair on the right looks powdered and artificially teased. While there is trickle of ""blood"" on her face and on her dress no wound is visible. 
The Chronicle story is sourced to CNN which includes a short (staged) video and adds: The video and images were posted online by a pro-opposition activist group, Talbiseh Media Center. 
It shows an 8-year-old girl in a medical facility, her hair and body covered with dust. There's blood tricking down her forehead, her nose. She looks confused and scared and keeps calling out for her father....Aya was pulled from under rubble along with her family members when an airstrike hit their home in Talbiseh on Monday. Talbiseh, a large town in northwestern Syria, is about 10 kilometers north of Homs. 
A screenshot detail from the video: 
The ""blood"" looks remarkably glossy, unlike natural blood which dries and looks dull pretty fast. The uni-color shirt the girl wears has no arms. 
Now the same girl in a different ""rescue"" scene. We will call this scene 2. 
whstatist1-1.jpg 
The truck in the background has a ""White Helmets"" logo on the door. 
A detail of the above picture. It is the same girl as in scene 1. The hair again seems powdered and teased: 
Notice: Same habitus, same appearance, same wild hair as in scene 1; no visible wounds; turquoise shirt but with short arms; jeans with glitter 
Here is the girl at scene 2 in an ambulance: 
Same shirt and pants as above, no wounds, no pain and not attended to by anybody. Compare this with the video capture of scene 1 the Chronicle and CNN reported on. We strongly believe it is the same girl. 
Now what seems to be a different take of scene 2. A ""White Helmet"" carries the girl and a boy. Notice the same clothing as in the other scene 2 pics above. The pic as well as some of the above from scene 2 was running in the Daily Mail on August 27. The incident is claimed to be the aftermath of a ""barrel bombing"" in the Bab al-Nairab neighborhood in east-Aleppo. 
Why would two different men carry and ""rescue"" the girl. She, like the boy, looks fine - same cloth as above, no wounds, no damage to the extremities, no crying - just curiosity. 
A detail of the faces in that picture: 
A detail of the boy's face: 
Now to the ""boy in an ambulance"" scene. The boy and the reportedly 8-year old girl on August 17 in the Qaterji neighborhood in east Aleppo introduced as ""Omran Daqneesh and his sister."" (pic source ): 
The just ""rescued"" kids sit quietly but completely unattended to in a brand-new €100,000 ambulance. No shock therapy was initiated, no Trendelberg position or at least laying down flat. No one talks to them despite half a dozen photographers being around them. 
Details of the kids - here the boy has the powdered and teased ""wild hair"" look. 
Are these the same kids as in scene 2 above? 
President Assad believes they are. 
We agree. We also believe that all three scenes above are staged. The girl is the same in all three scenes. Her younger brother appears in scene 2 and 3. The White Helmets apparently ""rescued"" the girl in three different incidents on or about August 17, August 27 and October 10 in three different locations. 
Isn't that a remarkably elysian miracle? 
Or is it all part of the serial production of elaborately staged anti-Syrian propaganda? Delivered by a marketing organization (vid) funded by ""western"" governments and various similar financed opposition ""media organizations"". 
Trust your eyes.  ",FAKE
"How do you solve a problem like Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team is trying to figure that out with an effort that can best be described at the moment as “throwing a forest full of mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.” Which is fine this far from the election, especially with Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primary still out there campaigning hard for the nomination despite the math being against him. For Team Clinton, there is nothing wrong at the moment with trying out some different lines of attack on Trump, finding those that resonate, and then fine-tuning them.

But until either the campaign finishes fine-tuning or figures out a way to beam these moments from the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner speech directly into voters’ brains 24/7 for the next six months, they have Elizabeth Warren. The senator from Massachusetts is already showing herself to be the most effective Clinton surrogate out there. This is partly by default, as there are not a whole lot of high-profile Democrats yet making the case against Trump. But does anyone think Harry Reid can make a more persuasive case to motivate voters to turn out in November?

It is hard to understate how smartly Warren is playing this game, even if you cynically assume her recent attacks on Trump are solely about positioning herself to become the leading candidate to run as Clinton’s vice president. (Which is not an assumption I’m making.) But so far, she is doing a better job of drawing a contrast between what the two parties stand for, or at least could stand for in terms of fighting for economic justice for working- and middle-class Americans, than any other public figure. Including Bernie Sanders, whose campaign in recent days seems to have devolved mostly into arguments about process and flipping superdelegates at the convention in Philadelphia this summer.

Warren’s genius lies in her ability to take big concepts and distil them down into simple goals for Americans, such as being able to buy their own homes, send their kids to college, and participate in what used to quaintly be called the American Dream. She’s not stoking anger in service of demanding we overturn the established order. What the people want, she seems to say, is their own share, for which they have worked and saved and fought. What they want is their own little corner within the system, with reasonable economic security and access to the tools that help make that possible.

Donald Trump can still have his penthouse in Trump Tower and his estate in Florida and who cares? Just so long as he’s abiding by the implicit social contract the nation has long followed, which says that we empower policies that ensure future generations can have it just as good, or even better, than we do. She seems incredulous that anyone could want otherwise. As she told the crowd in a speech at a gala honoring the Center for Popular Democracy on Tuesday: Donald Trump was drooling over the idea of a housing meltdown because it meant he could buy up a bunch more property on the cheap. What kind of a man does that? Root for people to get thrown out on the street? Root for people to lose their jobs? Root for people to lose their pensions? Root for two little girls in Clark County, Nevada, to end up living in a van? What kind of a man does that? Watch the speech and you can nearly see the contempt dripping from her lips and splattering on the lectern. This could be a remarkably effective counter to Trump’s jingoistic, chest-pounding promises to “make America great again,” which explicitly tend to exclude certain groups and elide the fact that many of his policies, such as upper-end-heavy tax cuts and repealing the Dodd-Frank banking reforms, would really only make America great again for people in a certain racial and economic strata that have quickly recovered their equilibrium after the financial upheavals of the last decade and a half. It’s a call for community and justice that does not actually demonize any citizens except one: Donald J. Trump. Of course, Warren will want to be careful, to dole this stuff out in small bursts and avoid over-exposure. But she can weave the story of America’s economically left behind into a morality play that takes aim at the villain nominated by the GOP, and do so without demagogy better than anyone else on the Democrats’ shallow bench right now. Better than Sanders or Clinton or the Big Dog, or maybe even Joe Biden, who is going to stay on the sidelines until later in the summer anyway. She’s the party’s best weapon for harnessing the energy of the left wing and the disaffection of average citizens, if it can keep using her effectively.",REAL
"Republican Pat McCrory is trailing in a tight race, but his campaign is challenging votes.",REAL
"Erdogan Checks in with Obama Before Bombing Syria October 27, 2016 Erdogan Checks in with Obama Before Bombing Syria 
Turkey's military operation in northern Syria will target the town of Manbij, recently liberated from ISIS by Kurdish-led forces, and the jihadists' stronghold of Raqqa, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday. In a speech in Ankara broadcast live, Erdogan said he had informed U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama about his plans for the operation in a telephone call. Syrian rebels, backed by Turkish warplanes, tanks and artillery, launched an operation dubbed ""Euphrates Shield"" in August to push Islamic State and Kurdish militia forces away from the border area of northern Syria. In a speech in Ankara broadcast live, Erdogan said he had informed U.S. President Barack Obama about his plans for the operation in a telephone call on Wednesday. Before Manbij and Raqqa, the operation will target the town of al-Bab, he said. 
(ANKARA) - Turkey has been angered at Washington's support for the Kurdish YPG militia in its battle against ISIS in Syria, with Ankara regarding it as a hostile force with deep ties to Kurdish militants fighting in southeast Turkey. 
A top U.S. military commander said on Wednesday YPG fighters will be included in the force to isolate Raqqa. Arab forces, and not Kurdish ones, are expected to be the ones to take the city itself, U.S. officials say. 
READ MORE: ONLY RUSSIA CAN SAVE THE WEST FROM ITSELF IN SYRIA 
Defence Minister Fikri Isik told state broadcaster TRT on Thursday that Turkey had asked the United States not to allow the YPG to enter Raqqa, saying it was ready to provide the necessary military support to take over the town. 
Erdogan also said that the Iraqi region of Sinjar, west of Mosul, was on its way to becoming a new base for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants and that Turkey would not allow this to happen. Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news 
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories",FAKE
"A long-term highway bill, passed by the House Thursday, took years to work its way to the surface of a Congress that was never designed for the quick fix.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin smiles during his news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on Thursday. The House has voted to continue transportation programs for six years with no significant increase in spending.

In the new House of Ryan, where lawmakers have been promised a greater say in legislating, members burned the midnight oil this week as they worked through scores of amendments to overwhelmingly pass a six-year, bipartisan highway bill on Thursday.

It was the first long-term bill in a decade to repair America’s crumbling roads, bridges, and transit systems, and members jumped at the new opportunity to give their input.

“There’s a lot of pent-up, legislative energy around here, and when a real piece of legislation comes along that impacts every district in America dramatically … then a lot of people have a lot of ideas,” says Rep. Peter DeFazio (D) of Oregon, the top Democrat on the House Transportation Committee and lead co-sponsor of the bill.

The past few days have taught a lesson: patience. But ask Congressman DeFazio, and he'll say the patience needed to bring this bill to reality has been measured in years, not hours or days. He’s been working toward this day since he was named a subcommittee chairman in 2007. His own president resisted his efforts. Then the House changed hands.

Even now, he acknowledges, the bill isn't what he wanted, since it keeps spending flat and is funded for only three years. But after such a long slog, he's pleased. “I’ve never really stopped working on it.”

In life, patience is a virtue, and on Capitol Hill, doubly so. Congress was never designed for the quick fix. The Founding Fathers deliberately created two very different chambers so that there would be an opportunity for “second thoughts,” as former Senate historian Don Ritchie puts it.

Turning ideas into a workable form and winning backing for a bill as big as this requires educating members, hearing them out, negotiating, and working with outside interests. It can take years to get to yes.

Yet that’s easily forgotten or dismissed by some newcomers. This is especially true in the age of Twitter, when voters know instantly what their senator or representative did – or didn’t do – and then make their demands for instant results immediately known.

Consider freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida, a man in a hurry to become president. He got fed up with the slow pace of the Senate, where in his first year in 2011 he asked in a floor speech, “Do we just stand around and do nothing?”

For lawmakers who were once top dogs at home – Senator Rubio was speaker of the House in Florida – it’s frustrating to arrive as a pup in a slow-moving Congress that values seniority.

In his early years, Rubio was left to author symbolic resolutions such as one that congratulated the Miami Heat for their NBA championship. He got his big break when he joined the “Gang of Eight” senators who pushed bipartisan immigration reform through the Senate in 2013. Then he watched it die slowly from neglect in the House.

If he’s elected president, “we can begin to fix some of these issues that I’ve been so frustrated we’ve been unable to address during my time in the Senate,”  Rubio told NBC’s Matt Lauer recently. Has the Floridian talked to President Obama – himself a sprinting former senator – about the frustrations of working with Congress, even when your party controls both houses?

John Boehner underscored the need for patience when he gave up the speaker’s gavel to Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin last week. “Real change takes time,” the outgoing speaker said to a packed chamber, as he reflected on his accomplishments. “Freedom makes all things possible. But patience is what makes all things real.”

A subtle dig at the hard-line, rebellious Freedom Caucus, who drove him out of the speakership?

“When you get people who are impatient and ideologically driven, they feel like fish out of water” in Congress, says former House historian Raymond Smock. “The truth of the matter is, they are, because ideology is the opposite of pragmatism.”

A functioning Congress requires its members to want to govern, Mr. Smock says. Many people have many ideas on how to fix things, but the country is a big, wide place and the world is complicated. “Things are not so simple, and ideology tends to make things simple.”

He quotes former Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill: “If you want efficient government, get yourself a dictatorship.”

Frustration with the slowly turning gears of Congress is not new. Howard Shuman, an aide to former Sen. Paul Douglas (D) of Illinois during the civil rights fights of the 1950s and ’60s, told historian Ritchie in an  oral history about his “seven-year principle.”

That’s how long he found it took to get from the inception of a significant legislative idea to its passage.

“Most of the major legislation I worked on, that was new, forward looking, which started out heavily opposed and without a mandate, after seven years of convincing, of publicity, of talking, of arguing, of hearings, finally made it.... It took that much time, and that much effort, and that much struggle to come off. ‘Struggle’ is the word.”

In truth, the battle over the highway bill isn't even finished yet. It could get full, six-year funding when House and Senate negotiators come together to hammer out the final version.

At points, Congress has tried to make itself more efficient. After World War II, for instance, it tried joint committees, so witnesses wouldn’t have to testify twice. It didn’t work, mainly because the House and Senate are such different bodies – one controlled by the majority, the other designed to operate more by consensus.

Crises, such as wars and economic catastrophes, can speed up action. And when things get really stuck, lawmakers try changing the rules – such as Speaker Ryan says he wants to do. Ironically, by opening up the process so that his members – particularly the Freedom Caucus – have more say and fewer gripes, it will take longer to get things done. On the other hand, it may also give him the buy-in he needs to move bills forward.

“Everyone wants to feel part of the process and have their proposal considered,” says Rep. John Mica (R) of Florida, the former chairman of the Transportation Committee, in an interview. Speaker Boehner, too, opened up the process when he took over, but power eventually massed back at the top – partly for greater efficiency.

This goes in cycles, says Congressman Mica. “Now that there’s been a rebellion, we’ll go back to this open process and see how it works.”

DeFazio, on the other side of the aisle, thinks it could work well.

“This is the way it used to be. We got more things done back then, even though it was more time consuming.”",REAL
"The families of 17 service members who died fighting for the U.S. demanded an apology from Donald Trump on Monday, accusing him of ""cheapening the sacrifice made by those we lost.""

They said the Republican presidential nominee's suggestion that the Muslim mother of a U.S. soldier who died in Iraq had not ""been allowed"" to speak at the Democratic National Convention was akin to ""attacking us.""

A letter signed by the Gold Star families — the term for those who have lost loved ones during military service — also called Trump's comments ""repugnant, and personally offensive.""

""When you question a mother's pain, by implying that her religion, not her grief, kept her from addressing an arena of people, you are attacking us,"" the letter added. ""When you say your job building buildings is akin to our sacrifice, you are attacking our sacrifice.""

The letter was organized by Gold Star Mother Karen Meredith from VoteVets.org, an advocacy group that calls itself non-partisan but which has been described in the past as allied to Congressional Democrats. The Center for Responsive Politics says VoteVets.org is fueled ""largely by social welfare organizations aligned with Democrats and millions of dollars given by unions.""

Over the weekend, Trump questioned why Ghazala Khan stood by quietly as her husband Khizr Khan talked about their son Humayun at the DNC.

In the speech, Khan criticized Trump's policies and statements about Muslims. The real estate magnate ""sacrificed nothing and no one,"" Khan said, and questioned whether the Republican had even read the U.S. Constitution.

The Khans' son, a U.S. Army captain, was killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding the gates of his base in Iraq, saving the lives of his fellow soldiers and civilians. He was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Related: Father of Fallen Soldier to Trump: 'You Have Sacrificed Nothing'

Trump, who has called for Muslims to be barred from entering the country, responded to the speech by saying that maybe Ghazala Khan had ""not been allowed to have anything to say.""

Trump's comments go ""beyond politics,"" according to the letter. ""It is about a sense of decency. That kind decency you mock as 'political correctness.'""

It added: ""We feel we must speak out and demand you apologize to the Khans, to all Gold Star families, and to all Americans for your offensive, and frankly anti-American, comments.""

The letter's signatories were 10 families whose loved ones died in Iraq and one that lost a father in Vietnam.

And one of the nation's most prominent veterans groups -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- added its voice to the controversy Monday, calling Trump's criticisms of the Kahn family ""out of bounds.""

""Election year or not, the VFW will not tolerate anyone berating a Gold Star family member for exercising his or her right of speech or expression,"" said organization chief Brian Duffy in a statement. ""There are certain sacrosanct subjects that no amount of wordsmithing can repair once crossed. Giving one's life to nation is the greatest sacrifice, followed closely by all Gold Star families, who have a right to make their voices heard.""

Trump did not immediately respond to Monday's letter from the families. He previously hit back at criticism from the Khan family, saying he had ""made a lot of sacrifices ... I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs.""

However, he tweeted about Khizr Khan on Monday morning.

Trump also took to Twitter Sunday to defend past statements about Islam, terrorism and his record on the war in Iraq.

Trump's comments have sparked a firestorm on social media and forced some GOP grandees to criticize the Republican nominee.

His own running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, issued a statement Sunday saying he and Trump ""believe that Capt. Humayun Khan is an American hero and his family, like all Gold Star families, should be cherished by every American.""

Other Republican leaders have also weighed in.

""'Unacceptable' doesn't even begin to describe it,"" said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who unsuccessfully opposed Trump for the Republican nomination.

""This is going to a place where we've never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen,"" he said in a statement. ""There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics — that you don't do — like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier even if they criticize you. ""

Ghazala Khan also addressed Trump's comments in an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, writing: ""Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart.""

She added: ""Donald Trump said I had nothing to say. I do. My son Humayun Khan, an Army captain, died 12 years ago in Iraq. He loved America, where we moved when he was 2 years old.""

The emotional piece recounts how she and her husband worried about their middle son's safety when he was called to fight in Iraq.

""We asked if there was some way he could not go, because he had already done his service. He said it was his duty,"" she wrote.

She also addressed his comments about Muslims and sacrifice, stating: ""When Donald Trump is talking about Islam, he is ignorant.""

Ghazala Khan added: ""Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn't know what the word sacrifice means.""

On Friday, she explained to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell that she was anxious during her husband's speech, knowing her son's photo would appear behind her.

""It was very nervous, because I cannot see my son's picture and I cannot even come in the room where his pictures are, and that's why when I saw the picture on my back, I couldn't take it. And I controlled myself at that time, so it is very hard,"" she said.

Khizr Khan told O'Donnell that he could not have appeared at the DNC without his wife's close support.

Speaking to NBC's TODAY on Monday, Khan said he was also grateful for an ""outpouring"" of support he had received in the wake of his speech. He had received many emails ""full of assurances that I am right — that we are right.""

On Sunday, Khan told ""Meet the Press"" that ""we have a candidate without a moral compass, without empathy for its citizens.""

""We don't take these values lightly,"" he said. ""We are testament to the goodness of this country. We experience the goodness of this country every day.""

He also responded to a Trump campaign statement saying the candidate he believes Capt. Khan is ""a hero to our country.""

While he appreciated the clarification, Khan added that ""it sounds so disingenuous because of his policies, because of his rhetoric of hatred, of derision, of dividing us. And that is why I implored him to read the Constitution.""",REAL
"Oregon Live 
Juror 4 vigorously defends the across-the-board acquittals of Ammon Bundy and his six co-defendants, calling the rulings a “statement” about the prosecution’s failure to prove the fundamental elements of a conspiracy charge. 
The full-time Marylhurst University business administration student was the juror who had sent a note to the judge on the fourth day of the initial jury’s deliberations in the case, questioning the impartiality of a fellow juror, No. 11, who the judge bounced from the jury a day later. 
“It should be known that all 12 jurors felt that this verdict was a statement regarding the various failures of the prosecution to prove ‘conspiracy’ in the count itself – and not any form of affirmation of the defense’s various beliefs, actions or aspirations,” Juror 4 wrote Friday in a lengthy email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. 
He expressed relief that he can now speak out freely, but he wasn’t ready as of Friday morning to drop his anonymity. He said his studies have suffered since the trial started, and he’s not ready for the attention revealing his identity would bring but felt it was important to defend the verdict. The judge withheld jurors’ names during the jury selection process and trial, instead referring to each by number. 
The jury closely followed U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown’s instructions on how to apply the law to the evidence and testimony heard during the five-week trial, he said. 
The jury returned unanimous verdicts of “not guilty” to conspiracy charges against all seven defendants. Each was accused of conspiring to prevent employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management from carrying out their official work through intimidation, threat or force during the 41-day occupation. 
Juror 4 noted the panel couldn’t simply rely on the defendants’“defining actions” to convict. 
“All 12 agreed that impeding existed, even if as an effect of the occupation,” he wrote. 
“But we were not asked to judge on bullets and hurt feelings, rather to decide if any agreement was made with an illegal object in mind,” the Marylhurst student wrote. “It seemed this basic, high standard of proof was lost upon the prosecution throughout.” 
Prosecutors had argued that the case, at its core, was about the illegal taking of another’s property. The heavily armed guards that manned the front gate and watchtower during the 41-day takeover, in and of itself, was “intimidating,” and prevented officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management from carrying out their work, they said. 
They argued that the alleged conspiracy began Nov. 5, when Ammon Bundy and ally Ryan Payne met with Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward and promised there would be extreme civil unrest in the community if he didn’t step in and block Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond. The Hammonds were slated to return to federal prison on Jan. 4 and serve out a mandatory minimum five-year sentence for arson on federal land. 
Defense lawyers urged jurors in closing arguments not to mix-up the “effect” of the occupation – which undoubtedly kept federal employees from doing their jobs – from the “intent” of the occupiers. 
Five of the seven defendants, including Ammon Bundy, testified. Many said that they were there to protest in support of the Hammonds and federal government overreach because they received absolutely no response from state or local government officials to their previous efforts to spur change. 
The defense lawyers’ arguments, coupled with the jury instructions on how to apply the law to the evidence, resonated with jurors, Juror 4 noted. 
“Inference, while possibly compelling, proved to be insulting or inadequate to 12 diversely situated people as a means to convict,” the juror wrote. “The air of triumphalism that the prosecution brought was not lost on any of us, nor was it warranted given their burden of proof.” 
Juror 4 plainly stated that fellow Juror 11, during the initial round of deliberations, “had zero business being on this jury in the first place.” 
Juror 11 had worked for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as a ranch tech and firefighter “more than 20 years ago,” he had said during jury selection. Asked by the judge during voir dire if that experience would impede his ability to be a fair and impartial judge of the facts, he said, “Not really.” 
Juror 4 explained why he didn’t alert the court immediately after he had heard Juror 11, on day one of deliberations reportedly say, “I am very biased.” 
It wasn’t until the fourth day into deliberations that Juror 4 sent a note to the court, asking if a juror who had worked previously for the federal land management agency and outright told the panel he was “very biased” could be an impartial judge. The court, flummoxed by the development, a day later dismissed Juror 11 for “good cause,” after the prosecution and defense teams agreed to the dismissal. At the time, parties to the case weren’t sure which way Juror 11’s alleged bias fell. 
Juror 4 said he “resisted the impulse” to send the question sooner in an effort to give his fellow juror a chance to explain himself. 
In his email to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Juror 4, for the first time, also contended that Juror 11 “violated” the judge’s explicit orders “by hearkening to ‘evidence’ that was never admitted in this case, refused to consider the defendant’s state of mind and used imaginative theories to explain key actions.'” 
Juror 4 said, though, he wishes that he “had sent the letter on day one, since it would have alleviated much stress for all of us.” 
The Maryville business student said he is “baffled” by what he described as observers’“flippant sentiments” in the wake of the jury’s acquittals. 
“Don’t they know that ‘not guilty’ does not mean innocent?” he wrote. “It was not lost on us that our verdict(s) might inspire future actions that are regrettable, but that sort of thinking was not permitted when considering the charges before us.” 
The jury, he said, met with Judge Brown after the verdicts were announced and after the U.S. Marshals’ physical confrontation and arrest of Bundy lawyer Marcus Mumford. 
He said many of the jurors questioned the judge about why the federal government chose the “conspiracy charge.” He said he learned that a potential alternate charge, such as criminal trespass, wouldn’t have brought as significant a penalty. 
The charge of conspiring to impede federal employees from carrying out their official work through intimidation, threat or force brings a maximum sentence of six years in prison. 
“We all queried about alternative charges that could stick and were amazed that this ‘conspiracy’ charge seemed the best possible option,” Juror 4 said. 
— Maxine Bernstein",FAKE
"Boaty McBoatface II? P&O bravely asks the public to name its new... Boaty McBoatface II? P&O bravely asks the public to name its new ferry By 0 50 
The cruise company P&O has taken the plunge and decided to ask the public to name its new ferry. This comes in spite of the Boaty McBoatface debacle earlier this year. 
A 2016 attempt by the public to name a £200 million ($243 million) arctic research vessel Boaty McBoatface was foiled when the fun police decided it was just too daft. 
In a tweet posted on Wednesday, P&O threw caution to the wind, saying it is “ proud to announce that the name of our new ship… will be decided by you our guests! ” 
Read more 
Within minutes, Boaty McBoatface was reprised as a suggestion, alongside Cruisy McCruiseface and Shippy McShipface. 
Other suggestions ranged from Hard Brexit to Bryan Ferry, after the 1980s pop star. Sensing a deliberate cry for attention, another tweeter branded the ship HMS Social Media Gimmick. 
The original ‘Boaty McBoatface’ was eventually named RRS Richard Attenborough after the famed BBC explorer and zoologist. 
Earlier this year, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) asked the public to choose a name via the internet competition ‘ Name Our Ship, ’ but after the exceedingly popular moniker ‘ Boaty McBoatface ’ won the poll with more than 124,000 votes, the builders overruled the decision. 
In the face of public outcry, a small yellow submersible that will operate from the Richard Attenborough was christened Boaty McBoatface. 
The BBC naturalist attended the traditional keel-laying ceremony in Merseyside in October. 
The vessel will cost an estimated £200 million, and is the largest commercial shipbuilding project in Britain in over 30 years. It is expected to set sail to Antarctica in 2019, sending the most advanced research on the world’s oceans and climate change back to Britain. 
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today program, Sir David confirmed that the infamous moniker will be put to use for an autonomous submarine serving the ship. 
 ",FAKE
"Email 

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — More than 100 of Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors crowded into the home of Casey and Laura Wasserman here on Thursday night, each having written a check for at least $33,400 to snag a ticket. The Hollywood glitterati in attendance — Elton John performed on the piano; Barbra Streisand mingled in the crowd — were sending her off for the home stretch of the campaign with north of $5 million in fresh funding. 
It was a fitting capstone to a remarkable 18 months for Clinton on the lucrative California fundraising circuit, this final event anchored by a host committee of billionaires, Hollywood executives, media moguls and tech investors — Sean Parker, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Haim Saban, Chris Sacca — that each directed $416,000 to Clinton’s efforts. 
Clinton calls them her “Hillblazers,” campaign bundlers who have given or raised at least $100,000 for her campaign. And she has erected an unparalleled and unprecedented infrastructure of 1,133 such people — nearly double the number of any past presidential candidate, including President Obama four years ago. 
While Clinton and her advisers like to tout her small online donors, it is these bundlers in more than 40 states and four foreign countries who form the true backbone of her financial operation. Combined, this elite $100,000-and-up club has amassed a minimum of $113 million for Clinton and the Democratic Party — and the actual figure is likely far, far higher than that. (The biggest bundlers typically collect millions for campaigns.) 
“We had the best base of donors and bundlers and raisers ever in 2008. It was even better in 2012. And it’s much better in 2016 than 2012,” said Wade Randlett, a San Francisco-based Democrat who has raised money for Clinton, Obama and Democratic causes for decades. “The Obama people basically 100 percent in are favor of Hillary. There’s really no loss because of ideology or bad blood. And she has added an enormous number of people, especially women.” 
Among her bundlers are celebrities (Will Smith) and sports stars (Earvin “Magic” Johnson), Hollywood directors (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and corporate executives (Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg), Wall Street-types (Marc Lasry), media executives (Haim Saban and Anna Wintour) and members of Congress, including her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, who helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton before he joined the ticket in July. 
The Clinton campaign said 45 percent of its bundlers are women. 
There are also federal lobbyists, from whom the Democratic Party under Obama refused to accept money, a prohibition that has since been rolled back. 
This club has expanded to the point where Clinton would now struggle to fit all of these bundlers into a single ballroom. As of the end of June, she counted 496 such individuals and couples. By the end of July, it was 871. On August 31, it was 1,133. 
It includes billionaires George Soros, Warren Buffett and Tom Steyer, super lobbyists like Steve Elmendorf and bold-faced names like Calvin Klein and J.J. Abrams. There is also a sprinkling of longtime Clinton family advisers, such as Vernon Jordan.",FAKE
"“We obviously spoke about my passion and his passion, which [is] veterans and veterans issues,” he said.",REAL
"There’s no clear consensus as of yet whether the emails were sent by Clinton herself, to Clinton, whether they were from her private server, or even whether any of the emails were new. 
Here’s a breakdown of what has been reported thus far: Los Angeles Times : “The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.” The Washington Post : “The correspondence included emails between Abedin and Clinton, according to a law enforcement official.” CNN : “The emails in question were sent or received by Abedin, according to a law enforcement official.” The New York Times : “Senior law enforcement officials said that it was unclear if any of the emails were from Mrs. Clinton’s private server.” ABC News : “These emails were not sent by Hillary Clinton, and the FBI has no evidence of wrongdoing by her, according to a source familiar with the investigation.”",FAKE
"Radio Tuesday 8 November 2016 by Spacey If you think our media is racist, wait till you meet my grandfather, Prince Harry tells Meghan Markle 
After calling out media ‘racism’ over coverage of his girlfriend, Prince Harry has warned Meghan Markle to brace herself for a meeting with Prince Philip. 
The prince released a statement in which he said reporting of his relationship with the American actress had ‘crossed a line’ that was similar to suggesting you’ll get slitty eyes if you spend too long in China. 
He went on to add that he understands there is curiosity about his private life, but he’s developed a tough skin that’s capable of dealing with an elderly gentleman asking if you work in a strip club. 
The statement also raised concerns about Ms Markle’s safety after receiving anonymous warnings that some foreigners ‘still throw spears at each other’. 
Prince Philip has revealed that he is looking forward to meeting his grandson’s new girlfriend. 
“I’m not bothered where she’s from, as long as she can cook,” he said. Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently ",FAKE
"At 10:16 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman culled through data collected by the super-powered ""Big Ear"" radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio.

And there it was.

Staring back at Ehman was something SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) investigators had never found before or since. The data transcript collected by the Big Ear revealed an astonishingly strong, non-terrestrial signal which didn't even originate in our solar system. The anomaly lasted for 72 seconds. Experts believe it emanated from the constellation Sagittarius. Scientists contend the event observed by Ehman is the best candidate for a non-organic, extraterrestrial signal ever documented on Earth.

A computer chronicling the episode spat out a vertical, alphanumerical series onto a dot matrix printer: 6EQUJ5.

Ehman quickly circled the sequence and scribbled but a single word: ""Wow!""

The aberration became known as the ""Wow! Signal."" Scientists have struggled to replicate Ehman's finding or locate a similar beacon there or anywhere in the cosmos. All efforts ended in failure. Ehman's episode stands alone.

When it comes to ObamaCare, congressional Republicans find themselves in a similar bind. They're like scientists trying to locate the Wow! Signal. For six years now, congressional Republicans have made an effort to take out the health care law. Better yet, lay low the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and replace it with something else. Remember the GOP's old ""repeal and replace"" mantra from the Pledge to America, circa 2010?

But there are two problems: Republicans have yet to come anywhere close to repealing the health care law. More importantly, they have yet to craft any legislation which would replace ObamaCare.

Congressional Republicans are a lot like scientists. If they could, they'd staff the Very Large Array radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico or take shifts at the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Six years since a Democrat-led Congress first toiled on ObamaCare and five years since the president signed the bill into law, Republicans still scour the frequencies for the health care equivalent of the Wow! Signal. A legislative transmission from above that would fundamentally tilt the ACA.

However, even Jerry Ehman detected the ""Wow! Signal"" once. ObamaCare opponents just keep coming up empty.

Something big has to happen soon for Republicans. ObamaCare is the law of the land. And if a ""Wow!"" transmission is out there, it could come from an intergalactic source as mysterious as that perceived extraterrestrial source in Sagittarius: the U.S. Supreme Court. In just a few weeks, the high court will render its decision in King v. Burwell, a case evaluating the qualification of subsidies for the health care law. The Supreme Court could impale the ACA, ruling subsidies unconstitutional for some ObamaCare beneficiaries. Such an outcome could be catastrophic for the law. It also means that Republicans -- having talked a good game for years with little to show for it -- had better turn up their dials to capture that ""Wow!"" broadcast. The onus is on them.

A working group of key House members has prepped for Supreme Court scenarios for months. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn., and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., are the players here. They want to give states the chance to sidestep mandates which compel people to purchase insurance and void requirements that companies provide care for their employees. The trio also wants states to have the option to back away from ObamaCare.

House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., is also crafting a package of tax incentives and tax credits which consumers could use to buy health coverage.

It's anybody's guess, though, if these members will get the traction necessary to move a bill on the floor. Then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., and House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., spearheaded a working group a few years ago to find an ObamaCare replacement plan. No accord ever materialized. The reason Republicans never put an ObamaCare replacement bill on the floor is because the GOP rank-and-file never coalesced around a plan which could pass.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., faces a potentially tough re-election in a swing state next year. Mindful of the policy calamity which could upend Capitol Hill after the Supreme Court ruling, the Wisconsin Republican authored a bill to maintain the subsidies for health care -- but only for a few more years. In exchange, the Obama administration would have to end the individual and employer mandates for insurance.

But past is prologue here. It's anyone's guess if Johnson's idea could vault two parliamentary hurdles and secure supermajorities just to get the bill on the floor and stave off a filibuster. And no one knows what the appetite is for such legislation in the House. Republicans aren't going to get help from Democrats. It's unlikely that staunch conservatives would vote for anything short of a full, unvarnished repeal.

Hence, the continual sky sweep by the legislative stargazers, searching for the ""Wow! Signal.""

Health care is front and center Thursday in Washington. Last summer, the House of Representatives voted to sue the Obama administration over taking ""unilateral actions"" in administering the ACA. The GOP-led House charged that President Obama couldn't arbitrarily tweak and adjust deadlines and provisos in the law without the consent of Congress. Those allegations go before a federal court Thursday.

The House alleges that the administration waived the employer mandate when it shouldn't have. Ironically, most conservatives want to dump the employer mandate. But they didn't like it when the administration altered the terms of that mandate without congressional action. Moreover, the House says the law spends money which Congress never allocated toward implementing the law. The House contends that subverts the Constitution.

""Time and again, the president has chosen to rewrite the law whenever it suits him,"" said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, in a statement. ""No president is above accountability to the Constitution and the rule of law.""

The House's lawsuit certainly does a lot for the GOP base and energizes Republican members -- eager to demonstrate that Obama extends his reach beyond constitutional parameters. That may be so. This exercise extends the conversation about ObamaCare. But it doesn't cut to the root of the problem facing Republicans when it comes to unraveling the law. This is a separate track which still doesn't dial in the ""Wow! Signal.""

A definitive plan that can react to King v. Burwell (presuming the case goes the way GOPers want it to go) remains elusive. But until that happens, congressional Republicans sweep the legislative frequencies, searching for that interstellar health care solution.

If and when they finally get it, they can mimic the penmanship of Jerry Ehman and his finding on a hot summer night in 1977. ""Wow!,"" they can write, having discovered a legislative path no one detected before on health care.

Capitol Attitude is a weekly column written by members of the Fox News Capitol Hill team. Their articles take you inside the halls of Congress, and cover the spectrum of policy issues being introduced, debated and voted on there.",REAL
"Editor's note: The following column originally appeared on the website US Defense Watch. It is reprinted with permission.

I, like millions of Americans saw your speech at the DNC on Thursday night.

I wish to offer my sympathy for the death of your son, Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq.

As a former US Army officer, and a veteran of the Gulf War, I can certainly understand the pain and anguish that you and your wife endure every day.

Your son died saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. As Jesus told his disciples, according to the Gospel of John, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Captain Khan is a hero. I am sure the soldiers he served with regard him as one. I know you and your wife do. Rest assured that millions of veterans regard your son as a hero as well.

To paraphrase from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, your son’s name liveth for evermore.

Your son made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, a country that was new to you and your family and one which you openly embraced and certainly love.

When you and your family arrived to America from Pakistan, you assimilated into our country. You adopted American ways, learned our history and apparently you even acquired a pocket Constitution along the way. Good for you sir.

But, there are many Muslims in America who not only have no desire to assimilate, but wish to live under Sharia Law.

That is unacceptable to Americans. There is only one law of the land. That is the U.S. Constitution.

As you well know, Mr. Khan, we live in violent times, dangerous times. Muslim madmen from ISIS and other radical Jihadi groups are on a murder and terror spree across the globe.

Your religion of peace, Islam, is anything but that in 2016. That is a fact that is confirmed every time a Muslim shoots, bombs, beheads and tortures innocent men, women and children. This does not mean that every Muslim is a terrorist, but most terrorists, sir, are indeed Muslims.

A Muslim terrorist attack has become the sign of the times.

Regardless of what the feckless, naïve, leftist ideologue Barack Obama and his dimwitted colleagues John Kerry, Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel state, the United States and the West are at war with Radical Islam. It is the job of the president of the United States to protect his nation from all enemies; foreign and domestic. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama romanticizes Islam and refuses to accept reality, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people across the world.

Groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda have one goal, the complete destruction of the Judeo-Christian culture, our religions and our way of life.

Many Americans have families that have been here for decades, even centuries. Many families like mine have relatives who fought in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm. Some families have relatives who fought in the American Revolution.

We don’t plan on letting our country be devoured by Muslim maniacs. We are Americans sir, and not unarmed, socialist European zombies. We will do what is necessary to protect the United States. While many Democrats and liberals see the world through rose colored glasses, conservatives understand that there is good and evil in this world. Evil must be destroyed before it destroys us.

Strong measures, wartime measures, must be taken to protect this country from those that wish to annihilate us and our way of life.

Mr. Trump’s plan to temporarily halt immigration from Muslim countries that are known to either support terrorism or harbor terrorist groups is not only pragmatic, but indeed it is constitutional. It is the constitutional duty of the president of the United States to protect this nation.

There is simply no way to vet hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from war zones like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Europe is being destroyed because reckless leaders like Angela Merkel have opened the continent’s doors to a flood of over one million undocumented Muslims arriving with nothing more than a bad attitude and a haversack of Jihad.

Do you think Americans are stupid? While the left lives in a dream world, the right does not. Mr. Trump understands the threat to his nation and the threat, sir, is not from Swedish Lutherans named Anna and Lars. The threat, sir, is from radical Islam.

How in God’s name are U.S. immigration authorities supposed to know the true intentions of a 22-year-old Syrian man? It is impossible. You know it is impossible.

How in God’s name are U.S. immigration authorities supposed to know the true intentions of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and thousands of other sundry Muslims who wish to arrive on our shores?

It is impossible. You know it is impossible.

Whether you, your wife, the Muslim world and millions of Democrats are offended by Mr. Trump’s realistic view of the world is irrelevant.

Whether you, your wife and son would have been prohibited from emigrating from Pakistan to America under Mr. Trump’s wartime plan is irrelevant. The security of this great land supersedes your desires and the desires of others who wish to come here now. The United States of America has no obligation to open its doors in order to placate foreigners and liberals in our government.

To adopt any other course but Mr. Trump’s would be a cause for further endangering the lives of Americans every day. That, sir, is unacceptable.

You attacked Mr. Trump in front of a worldwide audience, yet you can’t understand the fact that he defends himself against attacks from you, Hillary Clinton and the left. What else is one to do sir?

We must live in a world of reality, not a world of denial, delusion and fantasy the Democrats inhabit every waking day of their lives.

Radical Islam is the enemy of everyone on this planet who believes in freedom and justice. Until it is destroyed, this nation must protect itself from enemies both foreign and domestic.

Ray Starmann is the founder of US Defense Watch. He is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and veteran of the Gulf War, where he served with the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Armored Division “Spearhead!” Mr. Starmann was a contributing writer for several years at SFTT.org, founded by the late Colonel David Hackworth.",REAL
"Protesters in Arizona briefly blocked access to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rally Saturday morning in Arizona, kicking off a full day of campaign events in the border state, which holds key primaries Tuesday.

The protesters blocked a highway leading to Trump’s outdoor rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, near Scottsdale, before sheriff's deputies removed them and towed their vehicles.

“We’re not going to let demonstrators intimidate this forum and this sheriff. Now we’re going to have a nice, nice rally for Donald Trump,” said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who led the effort to remove the demonstrators and who has endorsed the GOP front-runner.

Arizona has long been ground-zero for the politically-charged illegal immigration debate, with roughly 368 miles of border with Mexico and more border fence than any other state.

Roughly 30 percent of Arizona’s population is Hispanic. And in 2010, the state passed one of the strictest anti-immigration laws in American history.

“So much crime and drugs passing through the border. You know what? We’re going to build a wall, and we’re going to stop it,” Trump said at the rally, returning to his early and oft-repeated campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border and have Mexico pay for it.

Arpaio – the self-described “America’s toughest sheriff” – said at least 10,000 people were kept waiting in the Arizona heat for about an hour as a result of the roadblock, which resulted in three arrests.

Trump supporters and protesters exchanged words at the rally, but there were no initial reports of physical violence.

Trump, who early in his campaign visited the border, leads the GOP field in Arizona with 34 percent of the vote, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 21 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 13 percent.

Trump held a larger rally later Saturday at the Phoenix Convention Center.

Trump said protesters at his rally are ""taking away our First Amendment rights"" and vowed to take the country back if he's elected president.

He called one protester at his Phoenix rally, who wore the Klu Klux Klan hood, ""disgusting."" Another group, carrying a ""Black Lives Matter"" sign were also kicked out.

The rallies and protest follow a local border patrol union of Friday supporting Trump.

Local 2544 said Trump asked for the endorsement and that officials responded by saying he is the only 2016 White House candidate to “publicly expressed his support” of the Border Patrol’s mission and it agents and that he has been “an outspoken candidate” on the need for a secure border.

However, Art Del Cueto, president of the Tucson-based union, made clear that he would adhere to the larger National Border Patrol Council’s practice of not endorsing presidential candidates.

The Supreme Court later upheld the most controversial part of Arizona’s 2010 law -- commonly referred to S.B. 1070 and that allows police to try to determine the immigration status of anybody arrested or detained if they have “reasonable suspicion” the suspect is in the U.S. illegally.

However, the law also sparked widespread opposition including businesses threatening to leave the state.

Trump and Cruz essentially call for those living illegally in the United States to return to their home country, while Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders want to allow them to stay.

Several thousand miles away in New York, demonstrators also took to the streets to protest the Republican presidential hopeful.

The protesters gathered Saturday in Manhattan's Columbus Circle, across from Central Park, with a heavy police presence. Demonstrators chanted: ""Donald Trump, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay.""

They marched across south Central Park to Trump Tower, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper where Trump lives. Then they marched back to Columbus Circle for a rally.",REAL
"The political world was obsessed last week with Jeb Bush’s problems in saying whether he would or wouldn’t have ordered the invasion of Iraq. But a more provocative statement about projection of American power actually came from a fellow presidential contender, Marco Rubio, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“As president, I will use American power to oppose any violations of international waters, airspace, cyberspace or outer space,” Sen. Rubio declared. “This includes the economic disruption caused when...",REAL
"We Are Change 

Fierce battle for the city of Mosul continues to shock Iraq and the whole Middle East with no significant results. The leading role belongs to the assault of the Iraqi army and Kurdish Self-Defense Forces—which still lack experience and skills—to capture the city in the shortest time.
However, 500 elite commandos of the U.S. Special Forces, which had been transferred this week at Mosul should give new impetus to the assault. U.S. combatants are supported by Apache and Chinook helicopters.
According to the Inside Syria Media Center , the U.S. Special Forces are located at the forefront of Iraqi and Kurdish combat formations. Military experts believe these combat conditions are atypical for the special operation forces which are aimed to carry out reconnaissance and other specific tasks.
Elite combatants in Mosul actually perform the functions of infantry soldiers, resulting in inevitable great losses, which are going to be covered up and silenced by the Washington officials in the usual manner.
Although the U.S. officials have repeatedly stated Mosul should be liberated from terrorists to eliminate the Islamic State, the decision to use U.S. Special Forces looks unjustified at first glance. However, the protracted nature of the assault on the city is forcing the Pentagon to take extreme measures to complete the operation before the U.S. presidential election. Therefore, the White House uses this situation, first of all, as a large-scale PR-campaign to support the candidate of the Democratic Party Hillary Clinton.
In this context, it becomes clear why the U.S. Government refrained from active struggle against terrorists for so long choosing an opportune moment strangely coincided with the end of the presidential elections in the United States.
Liberation of Mosul should also demonstrate to the world community the importance and crucial role of the American nation in the fight against the Islamic State. It is even more regrettable in the light of the recent Wikileaks’ revelations, which confirmed the United States and American tycoons’ role in the creation and funding of the Islamic State terrorists.
The post U.S. Special Forces Join Fight For Mosul appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"The White House has revised existing plans to withdraw the majority of troops from Afghanistan by the end of the Obama administration.

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

Uber in court: Is it a digital service, or an unlicensed taxi company?

Why are authorities slow to call the Ohio State attack 'terrorism'?

President Obama returns a salute prior to boarding Air Force One before his departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Md. Oct. 9. Obama will keep 5,500 US troops in Afghanistan when he leaves office in 2017, according to senior administration officials.

President Obama will announce Thursday plans to slow efforts to bring US troops home from Afghanistan, and instead maintain the current level of 9,800 through much of 2016 before attempting another drawdown effort, senior administration officials said.

""Our mission won't change,"" an official told Reuters.

US troops will keep training and providing oversight to Afghan forces, while working to prevent Al Qaeda from threatening US security, the officials said.

The Obama administration originally aimed to bring all but a force of about 1,000 troops for American embassy officials' security based in Kabul before leaving office in January 2017. Officials are now saying troops will be brought down to 5,500 starting sometime in 2017, under a new administration, and based out of the cities of Kabul, Bagram, Jalalabad, and Kandahar.

Maintaining a presence of 5,500 troops in four places will cost about $14.6 billion per year, a marked increase over the original plan to keep a smaller force at the Kabul embassy for an estimated $10 billion, the official said.

The decision involved months of negotiations between Washington, Afghan leaders, and commanders in the field about how to support Afghan forces, senior US administration officials said.

At the end of 2014, Obama announced an end to the combat mission in Afghanistan, which spanned 13 years following 9/11. Since that proclamation, Afghan troops – supported by US and NATO forces – have led national security for the country.

But late last month, Taliban militants overtook the northern city of Kunduz. For 15 days insurgents sent civilians fleeing their homes, destroyed government buildings, freed prisoners, and hunted officials. The city siege was the first since US troops have been engaged in Afghanistan, and signaled that Afghan security forces are not well equipped to handle the Taliban on its own.

""Certainly we're watching and seeing how the Afghan security forces engage quite tenaciously in the fight in Kunduz,"" an official told Reuters.

NATO allies are also considering a continued presence, the official said. More than 6,000 non-US forces are now in Afghanistan as part of the ""Resolute Support"" mission.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and chief executive Abdullah Abdullah have advocated for a continued US military presence and last March discussed a slowed-down timeline with US military and administration officials while on a visit to the White House, according to officials.

""The Afghan government is very comfortable with this commitment. They've been indicating a desire for this commitment for some time,"" an official told Reuters.

This report contains material from Reuters and The Associated Press.",REAL
"While the United States sits on the edge of its collective seat as Donald Trump gains an electoral vote majority in his bid for the White House, its neighbor to the north seems to be getting a little cheeky. 
Via Unilad 

Reminding America of the Great White North’s cultural acceptance and freedom, the country’s official Twitter account wrote on Tuesday evening: “In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with fellow citizens.”
In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens. pic.twitter.com/MOuStZbSX7 
— Canada (@Canada) November 9, 2016 

As a Canadian, I can attest to this. It’s a stark contrast to much of what Trump has proposed in the last 16 months: A border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and racial profiling.
But it looks like most Americans are taking it as an invitation: 
@JasonABowman Maybe they meant that as an invitation to join them, just in case?
— Jaimie Michelle (@JaimieMichelle) November 9, 2016 
@Canada do you mean Americans too?
— Stephen Whyno (@SWhyno) November 9, 2016 
"" @Canada : In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens."" pic.twitter.com/162lvBnKaN 
— bonafiedhoe (@pettyyonceh) November 9, 2016 
"" @Canada : In Canada, immigrants are encouraged to bring their cultural traditions with them and share them with their fellow citizens."" pic.twitter.com/162lvBnKaN 
— bonafiedhoe (@pettyyonceh) November 9, 2016 

The tweet comes just after Canada’a immigration site crashed in light of the now-looking-very-likely possibility of a Trump win.
This is what it used to look like: 

And this is what it looked like Tuesday night, as the US election results rolled in, with Donald Trump in the lead: 

Searches of ‘how to move to Canada’ surged starting at 6 p.m., according to Google Trends. And Quartz published a list of jobs in Canada that would be easy for Americans to apply for if they wished to relocate, Oregon Live reports.
Looks like Canada’s population is going to double soon…
",FAKE
"“Senator Johnny Isakson fought President Obama’s reckless deal with the Iranian regime. Now Iran is already violating the agreement — illegally testing ballistic missiles, threatening Israel and supporting terrorism in the Middle East.”

This ad begins with Isakson, who is running for his third Senate term, saying: “I voted against the nuclear deal with Iran for a ton of reasons.” Then, a narrator claims that Iran is already violating the agreement, which the senator opposed, by illegally testing ballistic missiles. (We spotted this ad on the website of our partners, Political TV Ad Archive.) Is that really the case? We did some digging.

The formal name for the deal reached in July between Iran and world powers, including the United States, is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly called the “Iran deal.”

Isakson, member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, opposed the deal. But Senate Republicans failed to advance legislation that would have allowed them to reject the agreement.

The agreement was aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. After the deal was reached, the United Nations Security Council — which had imposed sanctions on Iran to pressure it to negotiate — adopted Resolution 2231. The resolution endorsed the deal and outlined conditions under which sanctions are to be lifted. Under the resolution, ballistic missile restrictions expire after eight years.

This is an important point in the context of Isakson’s ad: The Iran deal is not the same as U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231.

The nuclear agreement was officially implemented this January, after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) certified that Iran had complied with all the nuclear-related measures it agreed to in July. Yet Iran has continued to test ballistic missiles and said it will not stop.

The deal does not prohibit the testing or development of ballistic missiles. But the U.N. resolution does contain restrictions relating to ballistic missiles. So how is Iran able to continue its testing? Experts say the resolution’s language allows Iran to argue that its ballistic missiles do not fit within the restrictions laid out in Resolution 2231.

Previous U.N. resolutions had stated that the council “decides that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.” The new resolution states “Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

The language change from “decides that Iran shall not” to “Iran is called upon” represents a softening in tone, signaling a more non-legally-binding appeal. This change was made precisely because the Iran deal does not contain any limits on the country’s missile programs, said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.

“It is perfectly respectable for opponents of the agreement to object to the Iran deal on these grounds — the JCPOA removes missile-related sanctions without requiring Iran to limit its missile programs,” Lewis said. “This was the hardest part of the agreement for me to accept, even if that sanctions relief only occurs after eight years.”

Further, the new resolution refers to missiles “designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons,” rather than “capable” of such delivery. So Iran now argues that its missiles are not “designed” for such capability.

“If one finds that the missiles used are designed for nuclear weapon delivery, it appears to me that there will evidently be also a problem with the compliance with the JCPOA, which bans weaponization activities,” said Olli Heinonen, who led the IAEA’s safeguards section during the 2003-2005 talks between Iran and three European powers (Britain, France and Germany).

That argument is possible but will be difficult to prove, experts say. A legal determination hasn’t been made one way or the other, meaning that the testing is not yet a violation of the Iran deal.

The Isakson ad claims that Iran is “already violating the agreement” through these missile tests. The citation in the ad is an op-ed in U.S. News and World Report that Iran’s missile tests highlight weaknesses in the nuclear deal.

The senator’s staff pointed to news articles describing the tests as a violation of the U.N. resolution. They noted that President Obama had accused Iran of going against the “spirit” of the nuclear agreement, as he did at an April news conference:

But the ad itself does not say that Iran’s actions violate the “spirit” of the deal or that it violates the U.N. resolution. It says Iran is violating the agreement that Isakson opposed. That agreement would be the Iran deal, not the U.N. resolution.

“There’s frustration [over the testing], and we have to look for effective policy tools to impede Iran’s missile program. But none of those tools, unfortunately, is the ability to say this is a violation of the Iran nuclear deal,” said Robert Einhorn, senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former special adviser on arms control and nonproliferation at the State Department.

Einhorn added that it’s difficult to use the Security Council resolution as a policy tool, because Russia and China are reluctant to view missile tests as a violation of, or inconsistent with, the resolution.

Isakson’s ad is about the Iran deal and his opposition to it. It claims that Iran is “already violating” the nuclear agreement by illegally testing ballistic missiles. Yet the actual deal did not have restrictions on ballistic missiles testing. Instead, the U.N. resolution that implements the deal contains the language. A range of experts we consulted said that the testing could be argued as violating the Iran deal but that it will be difficult. It’s an important technical distinction that is not reflected in the ad, ultimately misleading viewers. Moreover, it’s a matter of interpretation as to whether the testing is “illegal” under the resolution.

We understand that it’s probably not as catchy for a narrator in a campaign ad to say, “Western leaders view Iran’s missile tests as a violation of the U.N. resolution passed in tandem” or that the testing is “inconsistent with the spirit of the Iran deal.” But both of those phrases are accurate, and are certainly preferable to the sweeping, inaccurate claim in the ad.

Send us facts to check by filling out this form

Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter",REAL
"Get short URL 0 0 0 0 Saudi Arabia’s government needs to stay focused on fiscal adjustment and find ways to increase revenue, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a statement Wednesday. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The IMF chief praised Saudi Arabia’s economic-policy shift in response to falling oil prices as ""very welcome."" © AP Photo/ JOHN MOORE Saudi Arabia GDP Growth to Slow to 1.2% in 2016, Budget Deficit to Narrow to 13% ""These efforts should continue over the medium-term including through further increases in energy prices which are still low by international standards, further revenue-raising measures including from the planned introduction of excises and the VAT [value-added tax] at the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] level, and further spending restraint,"" Lagarde stated. 
Global oil prices plunged to a 13-year low of under $30 a barrel in January of this year from $115 in June 2014 due to a production-and-supply glut that has posed major challenges for energy companies and oil-producing countries. 
So far in 2016, the Saudi government has introduced a series of reforms intended to diversify the oil-reliant country's economy. ...",FAKE
"‘McCarthyism’ Rides Again. And It's Again Poisoning the Foundations of a Free Society in the US 
Smears and intimidation vs. free debate, civil liberties and peace Originally appeared at Anti War 
I’m often taken to task by some of my readers for characterizing the current anti-Russian hysteria as “McCarthyism.” After all, they say, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was right – there were, indeed, high-ranking individuals in the US government covertly sympathetic to the Soviet regime. And, yes, we now know that many of these were working directly for Soviet intelligence. 
This was the predictable result of our wartime alliance with Russia: combined with the left-wing proclivities of the Roosevelt administration, and the “Popular Front” politics of the Communist Party USA during this period, it’s surprising that Soviet penetration of US government circles wasn’t more extensive than it turned out to be. 
In any case, what we are seeing today with the revival of the cold war mindset is in many ways the complete opposite of the “old” McCarthyism: the target may be the same – Russia as the bogeyman de jour – but the methods and sources of the neo-McCarthyites are quite different. 
To begin with, the “old” McCarthyism was a movement generated from below, and aimed at the elites: the “new” McCarthyism is a media construct, generated from above and created by the elites. 
The average American, while hardly a Putin groupie, is not lying awake at night worrying about the “Russian threat.” The fate of Ukraine, not to mention Crimea, is so far from his concerns that the distance can only be measured in light-years. And when some new scandal breaks as a result of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, Joe Sixpack doesn’t think “Oh, that just proves Julian Assange is a Kremlin toady!” WikiLeaks is merely confirming what Joe already knew: that Washington is a cornucopia of corruption. 
The Acela corridor elite, on the other hand, does lie awake at night wondering how they can pull off a regime change operation that will eliminate the “threat” represented by Putin once and for all. Ever since the Russian leader started mocking Washington’s hegemonic pretensions, criticizing the US invasion of Iraq, and pointing out how US-funded Syrian “rebels” are merely jihadists in “moderate” clothing, Putin has been in their crosshairs – and the propaganda war has been relentless. 
This barrage has gone into overdrive with the launching of the Clinton campaign’s effort to smear Donald Trump as a Kremlin “puppet. ” You have to go all the way back to the earliest days of our Republic, when pro-British supporters of Alexander Hamilton were sliming the Jeffersonian Democrats with accusations that they were agents of the French revolutionaries, to come up with the historical equivalent of Hillary’s “you’re a puppet” charges directed at Trump. And the media, being an auxiliary of the Clinton campaign, has been filled with even more virulent screeds purporting to “prove” Trump is the Manchurian candidate . 
One way in which the new McCarthyism is very much like the old is that it threatens to poison the intellectual atmosphere in this country, endangering the very foundations of our free society and academic standards of free inquiry and debate. Emblematic of this trend is a tweet authored by Dan Drezner , professor of international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a foreign affairs columnist at theWashington Post, in which he commented on a talk he heard at the Valdai conference, a regular event held in Russia focusing on Russo-American relations: 
“At Valdai, John Mearsheimer says the Chinese and Russians love his realism. ‘I’m much more comfortable in Moscow than Washington!’"" 
Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of Chicago, the author of six books, and the leading theoretician of the school of international relations known as “offensive realism.” He is, in short a scholar of some renown – and yet Drezner, considerably lower on the academic totem pole, feels empowered to slime him as somehow disloyal. How did we come to this sad state of affairs? 
The poisoning of a society with propaganda used to take some time: today, the process is much faster, due to technological innovation, and especially the rise of the Internet and the growth of social media. In the old days, the McCarthyites had to rely on print media and radio to smear those “pinko college professors” and drive them out of academia. Today, someone like Drezner can sign in to their Twitter account and snark about how John Mearsheimer is more at home in Moscow and Beijing than in the good ol’ US of A, and his thousands of Twitter followers get the idea – that Mearsheimer is somehow anti-American – in an instant (and in only twenty words!). 
The “old” McCarthyism was dangerous because, in some cases, people were targeted unfairly: anybody with dissident views was suspect, and especially anyone with vaguely left-wing opinions. And McCarthyism, which in its original form saw the main danger to America to be internal, soon morphed into something else entirely: a movement that sought a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was McCarthyism that was the bridge that allowed neoconservative interventionists to invade the conservative movement and displace the “isolationism” of the Old Right. 
The new McCarthyism poses new dangers that are, perhaps, more virulent than the old version and will have more immediate consequences. The above-mentioned smear of Prof. Mearsheimer encapsulates what the dangers are to academia: in the 1950s, left-wing professors had at least some protection from populist McCarthyites in that academics tended to jealously guard their turf and protect their own from outside incursions. Today, with the elites pushing Russophobia, those protections fall by the wayside. 
Furthermore, the political class, where the new McCarthyism is rampant, has power – that is, it can translate its prejudices into policy more readily than any mass movement such as the one led by “Tail-gunner Joe.” If Hillary Clinton and her advisors really believe that Putin is out to defeat her and elect her opponent, then what can we expect will happen to US-Russian relations if and when she’s elected? 
And while the American people aren’t exactly up in arms over the prospect of a “Red Dawn” scenario unfolding in the streets of America’s cities, the “mainstream” media’s longstanding anti-Russian crusade is clearly having an effect. A Pew poll shows that anti-Russian sentiment in the United States rose “from 43% to 72% from 2013 to 2014.” The “trickle down” effects of war propaganda work just as effectively as the “trickle-up” model, if not more so. 
The real world consequences of a conflict with Russia, a nuclear-armed state, are fearsome to even contemplate: the political class in this country is playing a dangerous game of chicken, and they’re playing it with our lives and the lives of every person on earth. 
Aside from the prospect of World War III, the effects of the new McCarthyism will be to distort our politics, infect our culture, and threaten our constitutional rights as Americans. It is entirely possible that a new witch-hunt will be launched by the Russia-haters in our midst, with a revived “Un-American Activities Committee” replete with congressional hearings, as well as “investigations” by law enforcement of “pro-Russian”“subversive” activities. With the media acting as a cheerleading section for these official and unofficial arbiters of political correctness, our future as a free society will be increasingly in doubt. 
Finally, the new McCarthyism underscores the cynicism, opportunism, and downright viciousness of our political class, and especially the media, which has done nothing to question and everything to bolster the Russophobic propaganda put out there by self-serving lobbyists and politicians. It truly is a sickening sight, made all the more so by the self-professed “liberalism” of those who are in the vanguard of this revolting trend. 
What these folks should remember is that the “old” McCarthyism was in large part a reaction to the “ Brown scare ” of the Roosevelt era, when “isolationist” conservatives were smeared as “agents of Hitler,” driven out of their jobs, and in some instances charged with “sedition.” This bout of war hysteria was driven, first of all, by the Communist Party and its media contingent, which had become more-patriotic-than-thou when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Communist line on the war changed overnight. However, when the world situation changed again, and the Soviets were in Washington’s sights, the tables were abruptly turned – and Sen. McCarthy’s crusade took off. 
The same thing can happen again. If the consequences of the new McCarthyism come to fruition in an armed conflict with Russia, or even a nuclear exchange, as Americans emerge from the radioactive wreckage they’ll be looking for someone to blame – and scapegoats won’t be that hard to find.  ",FAKE
"As Democrats Grow Nervous, Clinton Tries To Appeal To Party Leaders

Hillary Clinton has spent much of the summer fending off questions about her private email account during her time as secretary of state. Bernie Sanders is gaining on her in the polls. And there's a looming possible challenge from sitting Vice President Joe Biden.

That's a far cry from the beginning of this campaign when she was seen as an almost inevitable Democratic nominee.

Now, she's trying to regroup and make the case before the very people who will choose that nominee — not voters, but her base: the party establishment.

""I have been fighting for families and underdogs my entire life, and I'm not going to stop now,"" Clinton said at the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis Friday. ""In fact, I'm just getting warmed up.""

She vowed that she is ""not taking a single primary voter or caucusgoer for granted.""

But party leaders are growing concerned that Clinton has not wrested control of the storyline of those emails. It's made many bite their nails, and it's given the other four candidates currently in the race some hope that there's an opening for someone else.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, got a boost Saturday night from an Iowa poll showing him gaining on Clinton, just 7 points behind the front-runner.

He underlined — in a not-so-veiled shot at Clinton — that ""politics as usual"" and ""same old, same old"" is not going to work in firing up Democratic voters to get out to the polls.

Making a parallel argument to the one conservatives make on the Republican side, Sanders blamed the party, in part, for major losses in the 2014 midterm elections, because liberal base voters didn't have something to vote for.

""We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people, and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home,"" Sanders said.

He added, ""With all due respect — and I do not mean to insult anyone here — that turnout, that enthusiasm will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not work.""

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley also took aim at the party's establishment, repeating his criticism of the Democratic debate schedule, which begins in October. He described it as a ""rigged process"" and ""a cynical move to delay and limit our own party debates.""

O'Malley, who trails in the polls, wants more debates.

""Four debates, and four debates only, we are told — not asked — before voters in our earliest states make their decision,"" O'Malley said, making for a rather awkward moment with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz as he left the stage.

Biden did not attend the meeting in Minneapolis. But in a conference call last week, the vice president told DNC members that he has been talking with his family about whether or not to enter the race. He said if he runs, he wants to give the campaign his whole heart and soul.

""And right now, both are pretty well banged up,"" Biden said. His son Beau, a rising star in the Democratic Party, died of brain cancer in May.

Ahead of her speech, Clinton released a series of memos highlighting her organizational strength in the four early voting states. She campaigned in Iowa last week with Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor. Vilsack was asked if his endorsement of Clinton, while Biden is considering a run, will make for awkward Cabinet meetings.

""I love Joe Biden — just like we all do. He's a wonderful man,"" Vilsack said. But he said campaigns require difficult choices, and he and his wife are supporting Clinton.

It may already be too late for Biden in the minds of many DNC members, who have backed Clinton by now. Take, for example, Florida committeeman Jon M. Ausman, who said this to Politico in Minneapolis:

By rolling out early endorsements, Clinton is wise to try to make a show of strength now to ward off a Biden run, says Mo Elleithee, executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. Elleithee is also the immediate past DNC communications director and worked for Clinton's 2008 campaign.

""[Biden] will not have oxygen in the room if she has locked people down,"" Elleithee said. ""I think he is probably looking at the field and saying, 'OK, at this late date in the process, can I build the organization? Can I raise the money? And can my message break through?' ""

Asked about Biden, Clinton said she believes the vice president is facing a tough decision, and she wants to give him the space and time to make it. She told reporters in Minneapolis that she's also learned some lessons from her primary loss to President Obama in 2008.

""I got a lot of votes,"" she said, ""but I didn't — I didn't get enough delegates. And, so, I think it's understandable that my focus is going to be on delegates as well as votes this time.""",REAL
"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
"Donald Trump is on track to win more black votes than any time since 1960. In the past month, the number of black voters for Donald Trump has increased significantly. These black Trump supporters from Chicago don't want anything to do with #CrookedHillary #TrumpPence2016 #MAGA pic.twitter.com/8JRRR7Ai1l 
— RSBN TV (@RSBNetwork) July 29, 2016 Gateway Pundit If Democrats lose 25% of the black vote they would lose Virginia, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina. Black Likely Voters for TRUMP @Rasmussen_Poll Oct 3 – 9%",FAKE
"He has been roundly condemned for these statement by key GOP figureheads like Senator Lindsey Graham, who called him a “xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot.” But the GOP should understand Trump’s popularity as a case of their chickens coming home to roost. The modern Republican Party has secured its base by pandering to the worst impulses of white male, working class, and white Christian fundamentalist rage. Only Trump doesn’t use a dogwhistle. He barks. And every time he does the GOP base responds by replenishing his poll numbers.

Although this doesn’t seem like a viable longterm strategy, the short-term effects are important to watch. The responsiveness of the American public to his rhetoric of keeping white people safe reminds us again of the extent to which narratives about white safety drive U.S. social policy particularly on the right. For the cause of white safety much of the American public finds it reasonable to restrict the movement of Muslims both inside and outside of the U.S. But we don’t restrict conservative white men on the grounds that they disproportionately commit mass shootings at public places – churches, schools and colleges, movie theaters, and health care facilities.

Another major effect of Trump’s rhetoric is the increased threat of violence that Muslim Americans face, because a front-running candidate for the presidency is using reckless discourse to substantiate the legitimacy of Islamophobic views. Since the Paris attacks last month there has been a sharp uptick in vandalism and violent rhetoric against mosques in the U.S. and abroad. My Muslim colleagues and friends have described feelings of heightened anxiety and fear as they move through public space and send their children to school. In New York, a young school girl was attacked by classmates who called her “ISIS” and tried to rip off her hijab.

The GOP base is not merely racially ignorant; they are also prone to violence. By Trump’s logic, we should be placing tracking devices on all socially conservative white men who own guns. We should be interrogating the source of these white men’s radical views. We should understand the Church, particularly the conservative evangelical church as a breeding ground for white terrorism. White evangelicalism is the fundamentalist ideological arm of white social conservatism and of white American male terrorism.

The story of 21st century U.S. state violence is not only a story of anti-Blackness. It is also a story of state-sanctioned Islamophobia that uses the tragic terroristic acts of 9/11 as a framework to mistreat Muslim Americans, and other Americans who appear to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent. (There is no acknowledgement that not all Arabs are Muslims.)

Using the extreme acts of a few to condemn the peaceful lives of the many is a hallmark of the American script of racism. White Americans do this to Black people when they suggest that Black intraracial violence justifies the overpolicing of all Black people. Americans do this to Muslims when we demand that key Islamic religious leaders step forward to quickly condemn the violence, so that we will not mistake lack of censure for allegiance.

Yet, we did not require or expect conservative white male politicians and religious leaders to issue statements after the Planned Parenthood shooting affirming that Christian social values are anti-violent and condemning the actions of the shooter as an egregious mischaracterization of Christian values and principles. We did not ask all white men to feel shame over the actions of the shooter. The myth of white individualism absolves white people of a collective reckoning with the ways that white fundamentalism breeds violence against people of all colors and social backgrounds. This is why we must begin to understand whiteness as a kind of violent fundamentalism, one at the heart of the American project. Fundamentalism is always a struggle over values and an attempt by those who feel marginalized to order the universe through a set of moral absolutes that not-so-coincidentally also concede power to their particular worldview. Donald Trump is not particularly religious, despite his meeting with Black pastors. But he deploys whiteness as ideology with the fundamentalist zeal of the worst kinds of religious zealots and proselytizers. His rhetoric about protecting the U.S.-Mexico border—rhetoric that has been unfortunately taken up by two misguided Black female Trump enthusiasts—is just one more example of the kind of power laden demands for purity that adhere to fundamentalist ideologies. Whiteness as a fundamentalist ideology frames all others as enemies of the project of white supremacy. It authorizes violence against all who divest from the project of whiteness. It uses a narrative of marginalization and the need to regain power (to take America back) to justify aggressive and violent acts towards non-white groups. And it values and seeks to perpetuate whiteness as a way of life. Until we dismantle white fundamentalism, no people of color will be safe. All fundamentalist belief systems view other belief systems in zero-sum terms. Evangelical Christianity believes that the truer it is, the less true every other belief system is. White/American fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism also engage each other in zero-sum geopolitical terms. They will be locked into an endlessly violent battle of wills. To make it more plain, on the homefront, white Americans respond so strongly to acts of Islamic terror and with such fear, because they recognize this same capacity for fundamentalist rage in themselves. In a zero-sum battle of fundamentalism, either we are invading their shores or they are invading ours. Game recognize game. But terror and violence are not a game. People of color frequently become casualities of war in these internecine battles of competing fundamentalisms. Reinscribing whiteness and pedaling white fundamentalism as an ideology befitting of the 21st century will cause innumerable harm to all people of color. As a case in point, Trump used the Japanese internment to justify his current ideas about Muslims. And this is perhaps one of the most fundamental lessons that this Black Lives Matter moment can teach us: a nation that is wholly adversarial to Black life is not a nation fit for any non-white lives to inhabit. In America, Islamic fundamentalism is not our biggest threat. White fundamentalism is. And it is long past time for us to do something about it.",REAL
"A UN meeting aims to coordinate financial efforts against the Islamic State. It can't deliver a knockout blow, but it can make an impact.

How SNL's 'the bubble' sketch about polarization is all too true

Smoke rises as Iraqi security forces and allied Popular Mobilization Forces shell Islamic State group positions at an oil field outside Beiji, Iraq, 155 miles north of Baghdad last month. The United States and Russia are going after the Islamic State group’s oil industry, destroying refineries and hundreds of tanker trucks transporting oil from eastern Syria in a heavy bombardment in recent days aiming to break the extremists’ biggest source of income.

The finance ministers set to meet at the United Nations can’t put the Islamic State in a financial vise. But they can deliver some critical blows to an organization already showing signs of financial strain.

And for a UN Security Council often at odds, the meeting of its finance ministers next week comes at an opportune moment, when terrorists attacks worldwide have created a sense of shared purpose – even, it seems, between the United States and Russia.

The core of the Islamic State’s wealth is, in many respects, beyond the reach of next week’s meetings, hosted by the US. Only Turkey can shut its borders to the smugglers who carry Islamic State oil and other contraband, and only military force can deprive the group of the territory it uses for extortion and taxation.

But a more coordinated effort at targeting the Islamic State’s finances can pay dividends. The US and others, for example, have used bank reports of suspicious financial transactions to more effectively target locations where the Islamic State is producing and loading oil products.

Ramping up this coordination is akin to “squeezing the balloon” of Islamic State finances – though “not yet hard enough to pop it,” says Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism and intelligence program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

And it is vital to defeating the Islamic State, he says. “Any opportunity to get this level of attention and cooperation on an issue that will be central to destroying ISIS should be seized and built upon.”

Terrorist attacks linked to the Islamic State in Beirut, Paris, and San Bernadino, Calif., appear to have galvanized the international community.

“What is reassuring is how much the nations of the world are taking this threat more and more seriously and working together with greater unity,” said Farhan Haq, a spokesman for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to journalists earlier this week.

Particularly promising are indications the US and Russia “agree that the effort to dry up ISIS funding can and must be toughened up,” says Mr. Levitt, using another acronym for the Islamic State.

Both the US and Russia are pushing for a new council resolution on terror financing and could agree on one text by the Dec. 17 summit.

Already, there are indications that the Islamic State is feeling a financial pinch.

Holding the finance ministers summit at the Security Council underscores the importance world leaders are placing on both terror financing and the coordination of financial, intelligence, and military efforts. The summit will mark the first time that a council session will be chaired by a financial official – US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

The finance ministers can work to apply greater scrutiny across the board – from financial transactions that offer crucial clues about the Islamic State economy to money brought into the Islamic State by foreign fighters and donors around the region.

But the summit can only do so much.

Half or more of the Islamic State’s financial resources are generated from taxation or extortion within the territories the group controls in Syria and Iraq. That means that successfully cutting Islamic State funding is directly linked to the international military campaigns aimed at shrinking its territory.

“There are a number of actions that can be taken to reduce the financial streams, but one thing is clear: If you want to deprive ISIS of cash, you deprive it of territory,” says Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington.

Moreover, the Islamic State trafficks much of its oil and antiquities across Turkey’s border with Syria, experts say. The US has been pressing Turkey for months – mostly behind closed doors – to do more, while Russia has been much more public with its accusations.

Next week’s meetings are an opportunity for the international community to get on the same page to tackle some of these bigger funding streams.

“We’re not going to get anywhere on a critical issue like terror financing if it all sinks into a lot of finger-pointing and recriminations,” says Levitt. “If you can get beyond the bickering, then a lot more good can be done if you focus on helping Turkey shut down that border.”",REAL
jewsnews © 2015 | JEWSNEWS | It's not news...unless it's JEWS NEWS !!! Proudly powered by WordPress — Theme: JustWrite by Acosmin Join the over 1.4 million fans of Jews News on FB…It’s NOT news unless it’s Jews News!,FAKE
"The budget deal was crafted by outgoing Speaker John Boehner behind closed doors. Hard-line Republicans don't like that, and neither does Ryan.

Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., right, walks from a meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, Oct. 26, 2015. The bipartisan deal announced by House Speaker John Boehner seems to be great for many in Congress, but Ryan has some beef with the proposed budget.

The bipartisan deal announced by House Speaker John Boehner appears to be a win-win-win – for the White House, Republicans, and Democrats.

The two-year pact not only averts a federal debt default next week, but also sidesteps a potential government shutdown in December.

It beefs up both defense and nondefense spending. It heads off deep cuts in Social Security disability payments. And it prevents a significant increase in certain Medicare payments (Part B) for seniors.

So then why is the presumed next speaker, Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, expressing such anger about it? Also, why are political observers rather downcast as well?

Much of it has to do with the way the deal was put together – highly dependent on one man who is leaving the scene and highly reliant on a secretive negotiating process involving only a few key people and their staffs. Such a closed-door process is how Congress has gotten things done for decades. But the hard-line House Freedom Caucus has been demanding a different way – a bottom-up approach, which could actually complicate dealmaking for a future Speaker Ryan.

Political observers have not trumpeted the deal because they see it as a one-off solution, created by Speaker Boehner’s pending exit. That coming departure has freed him up to negotiate directly with Democrats in Congress and with President Obama, unconcerned about another eruption on his right flank from the Freedom Caucus.

“This is not a good sign for the budget process. The only way we got this done is for a speaker to resign. Is that what it's going to take to get a deal the next time?” asks Stan Collender, a federal budget expert in Washington.

As for Representative Ryan, he took issue, at least publicly, with the process surrounding the deal. Legislation for it was filed very late on Monday night, and it will hit the House floor for approval on Wednesday. It’s expected to pass with heavy support from Democrats. Then it will head to the Senate, whose Republican and Democratic leaders were also in on the private negotiations.

“I think the process stinks,” Ryan said Tuesday morning.

“This is not the way to do the people's business,” he said. “We are up against a deadline – that's unfortunate.... As a conference, we should've been meeting months ago to discuss these things to have a unified strategy going forward.”

That should be music to the Freedom Caucus’s ears, and Ryan would need that group’s support as speaker.

The nearly 40 Freedom Caucus members, many of whom came to Congress on the tea party wave of 2010 or after, want to devolve power from the speaker’s office. Their preferred approach would empower committees, and themselves, to a much greater extent.

“Putting together a very complex deal and giving members less than 48 hours to read it, study it, and vote on it with virtually no input – it’s about as bad as the process gets around here,” said Rep. John Fleming (R) of Louisiana, a member of the Freedom Caucus.

Ryan was apparently not involved in the talks. That absolves him from the deal – which has elements of one he negotiated with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington to resolve a budget crisis just two years ago.

“He wasn’t down there. He wasn’t even invited. He’s been trying to figure out if he’s going to be speaker this week, not if he’s cutting a debt ceiling deal,” said Freedom Caucus founder Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R) of South Carolina, sticking up for Ryan. “We believe him” when he says he’s frustrated by the process.

Representative Mulvaney acknowledges that deals like this, in the end, have to be negotiated by the key players on both sides. It’s not possible for all 247 Republican members to be negotiators. The problem for him was that the chief negotiator was someone who is on his way out – someone whom the right wing had pushed out the door.

Mulvaney and other Freedom Caucus members have big problems with the deal itself, not just how it was put together. They don’t like that it busts budget caps of the 2011 Budget Control Act by $80 billion, even as it raises the current $1.8 trillion debt ceiling.

“That’s two strikes, and there are plenty of other third strikes in there,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R) of Kansas, another Freedom Caucus member. One of them is a change that he says would “destroy” crop insurance, of vital interest to his state.

The budget increases are being offset by cuts elsewhere, including small-scale reforms to Social Security and Medicare – long sought by Republicans. But Representative Huelskamp is skeptical about whether those reforms will ever pay off, while Mulvaney says Boehner is “merely moving the deck chairs.”

Some observers say that even by “cleaning out the barn” for his successor, Boehner hasn’t really made it easier on Ryan. The Freedom Caucus is even angrier at how this deal was handled, and it will insist that Ryan not follow such secret, last-minute negotiating.

“The Freedom Caucus will not make it any easier for Paul Ryan to make similar concessions once he is in power,” writes Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, in an e-mail to the Monitor. ""Without the crisis atmosphere that results from budgetary differences, there will in many ways be more room for the parties to fight over issues.""

“Paul is going to be in better shape than he would have been because a lot of the overly contentious issues will be off the table,” says Rep. Peter King (R) of New York, a moderate, in an interview. “He’ll be able to actually start working toward governing as opposed to going from crisis to crisis.”",REAL
"Get short URL 0 2 0 0 The US military killed five suspected members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in an October 21 airstrike in central Yemen, the US Central Command said in a press release on Friday. 
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Earlier, US Central Command stated the previous airstrikes killed eight suspected members of al-Qaeda. 
The first strike, on October 6, killed two people while a second strike conducted on October 19 killed six people. Both strikes were conducted in remote parts of the Shabwah Governorate. 
""The United States military conducted a successful strike against members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on October 21, in a remote area of Marib Governorate, Yemen,"" the release stated. “Five AQAP enemy fighters were killed in the strike."" ...",FAKE
"The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself Nov 11, 2016 0 0 
“We are not here to save the world. We are here to save ourselves, but in doing so, we save the world.” ~ Joseph Campbell 
As I write this, some shit is probably going down at Standing Rock . For anybody awake to the tyranny at hand, the events of the last few months have weighed heavily on our hearts. But the thing people need to remember is this: We’re all Native Americans. If you were born in the USA, and you love the land you were born on (which includes the entire fucking planet, by the way!), you are a Native American. You are a Native Earthling, for shit’s sake. It’s all connected. Their fight is our fight. Skin color is irrelevant. Where you were born or where you migrated to is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is this: are you for freedom, life, cooperation, and love; or are you for statism, profit, divisiveness, and violence? As Derrick Jensen said, “We are the governors as well as the governed. This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not.” 
The media (even the alternative media, mind you) is trying to spin this as a land issue, or a Native American issue. But it’s not. This is a freedom versus tyranny issue. This is an anarchy versus statism issue. This is a life versus entropy issue. All land is free. We just need to quit focusing on imaginary lines and think cooperation first, competition second. All human beings are free. We just need to quit being obsequious to state-driven authority and start asking (and answering) the tough questions. 
The only way to save the world is to save yourself. The only way to save the land from being poisoned is to save yourself from being poisoned (and from poisoning the land, yourself). The only way to save the environment from pollution is to save yourself from pollution (and from polluting the environment, yourself). In other words: The only way to save the Crashing Plane that is the Human Race is to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before attempting to put it on anybody else, and especially before attempting to right the plane. The oxygen mask, if you haven’t gathered already, is a metaphor for health, awareness, and truth. Save Yourself 
“Only the individual can rise to the heights of consciousness and awareness. The more you belong to the crowd, the deeper you fall into darkness.” ~ Osho 
Saving yourself is putting on the oxygen mask of health, awareness, and truth. But what does that mean? It means questioning yourself to the nth degree , to the point of self-interrogation, and then questioning some more. It means psychosocial upheaval. It means getting uncomfortable. It means admitting you are wrong. In short: It means pain, existential pain of monumental proportions. 
Why is it so painful? Because much cognitive dissonance must be navigated. Everything that you’ve taken for granted as a fundamental truth must be turned inside out and given proper scrutiny. After such scrutiny, you will likely find that you were wrong about a great many things. But the only tool you need to weigh yourself against your deep questioning is the following anonymous quote: “When an honest man realizes that he is mistaken, he will either cease being mistaken or cease being honest.” 
The question is: Do you have the courage to be honest with yourself? Because if you honestly choose the moral side of freedom, life, cooperation, and love, then you’re going to have to admit that statism provides none of these. It only sells the illusion of these. 
Statism is about profit, ownership, divisiveness, and violence. It steals people’s freedom by enforcing, and profiting on, outdated and unjust laws (but only if the person believes in the law). It stifles life and human flourishing through calculative debt slavery and by convincing people into believing in an illusory debt. It creates physical divisiveness by drawing imaginary lines in the sand and declaring them “borders.” It creates psychological divisiveness through xenophobic nationalism and conditioned flag worship, setting up an us-versus-them mentality. When, really, the only us-versus-them mentality that holds any moral weight and intellectual validity is the freedom versus tyranny position. 
Statism is tyrannical. There’s simply no way to wiggle out of this fact. It teaches authoritarianism and oppression. It teaches the individual to oppress and to tyrannize him/herself and others. It teaches people to blindly follow and obsequiously respect authority. It teaches extortion and violence. For if the authority of the state is not obeyed, or its many outdated and immoral laws are not followed, the individual is forced, violently if need be, to acquiesce. Comply or die, is what it comes down to. Either that or your freedom is taken away from you. 
So, when it comes down to it, saving yourself is, first and foremost, waking yourself up from the spell that statism has over you . And then it’s breaking that spell. Break that particular spell, and freedom is at hand. Break that particular spell, and ( your ) life begins. Break that particular spell, and you free yourself to learn how cooperation and love actually work, because you will finally begin taking responsibility for your own shit. No Masters. No rulers. That means taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions as a social creature on an interdependent planet. No more leaning on the crutch of authority. No more codependence on the state. Saving yourself is choosing freedom. Save the World 
“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so, every one of us shares the supreme ordeal––carries the cross of the redeemer––not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.” ~Joseph Campbell 
So, you’ve saved (freed) yourself from the grip of the state. What comes next? Freeing others, of course. But not so fast. Just because you’re free from the state, doesn’t mean the state isn’t still there, rearing its ugly head. It is still there, oppressing and extorting. It is still there, tyrannizing and destroying the planet under the guise of progress. It’s still there, trying to suck you back in. It is still Goliath and you are still David. And just because you recognize statism as tyranny and oppression, doesn’t mean that others do. Remember: most people are devoted statists who don’t even realize they are statists. Yes, the ignorance is that thick. But, I digress… 
You’ve secured your “oxygen mask” on the crashing plane that is the human race. Now it’s time to start helping others to secure their own masks. The problem here is: you can’t control other people. And, really, you don’t want to. You want people to be free, after all. That means you’re going to have to convince them . You’re going to have to be creative. You’re going to have to use your imagination and come up with novel ways to persuade them into being healthy. Yes, sadly it has come to that. The only way to bring health to those who are all-too-well-adjusted to a sick society, is to sell it. 
The real kick in the pants is: most people don’t want to hear what you have to say. People are wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance. People are caught up in their own state driven conditioning and brainwashing. Those cops “serving and protecting” the enforcement of the unhealthy, unsustainable, climate changing (game ender) North Dakota pipeline , are all wrestling with their own cognitive dissonance, conditioning, and brainwashing. They’re simply losing their own inner battle and coming up with the only thing they know: the cowardice and violence of a statist. 
So, it comes down to this: What do we (those who are already free and have their oxygen mask securely fastened) do against the cowardice and violence of the inured statist? We teach. We use our imagination to persuade them away from the unhealthiness of the state and toward the healthiness of freedom. We lead by example, influencing them with our courageous words and our actions. We coax them into freely putting their own oxygen mask on. For we know that volition is paramount if freedom is to be had. Force is the way of the state. Violence is the way of the state. A free human being helping others to be free must never use force or violence, lest they wish to be a tyrant. An authentically free human being wishes other human beings to be just as authentically free. 
But, and here’s the rub, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Your right to waive your fist ends one inch from my nose.” 
This means that when our health and freedom are under attack, we are morally justified to defend ourselves. And so, the most important thing we can do as free people, as individuals who have our oxygen masks securely fastened, is to stand our ground. To protect ourselves. Which, by extension, means protecting that which immediately sustains us: water, and the land that grows our food. The worst thing we can do is back down and play the pacifist. Like Derrick Jensen said, “ Love does not imply pacifism.” The Goliath that is the state will trample all over pacifism. Indeed, the road to an unhealthy, unsustainable, immoral, and violent world is paved with pacifism. It’s paved with people turning a blind eye. It’s paved with the inaction of people who recognized evil and did fuckall with it. 
At the end of the day, Goliath (the state) is going to be Goliath. But Goliath is only Goliath because people believe in it. We dismantle goliath by convincing people not to give into Goliath’s unhealthy and unsustainable song and dance. First, we extract ourselves from being Goliath by transforming ourselves into courageous Davids. Then, we attempt to extract others from being Goliath. And if we cannot, we stand our ground and point out their cowardice and violence as unacceptable. We draw a line in the sand. We stand our ground. We protect our water. We declare, right in the face of the Goliath state, these courageous words by Thoreau : “I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.” 
About the Author 
Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world. This article ( The Only Way to Save the World is to Save Yourself ) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary ‘Z’ McGee and WakingTimes.com . Vote Up Gary Z McGee Gary ‘Z’ McGee , a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man . His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.",FAKE
"This is now becoming the norm. Just yesterday, I reported on a Muslim migrant who anally raped a 10-year-old boy and had his conviction overturned because “he didn’t know the boy didn’t want to be raped.” 
Islamic supremacism in the West. 
“No jail time for asylum seeker who dumped baby in road,” The Local, 19 Oct 2016: 
A man who was furious at being thrown out of an asylum centre grabbed his own child and dumped her in the middle of a busy road – and has been given a nine-month suspended sentence. 
The 27-year-old had been living in an asylum centre in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and had already been given several warnings for being drunk and violent. 
So when he turned up again intoxicated with a beer in his hand and was told to leave, he flew into a furious rage. 
Spotting his baby daughter in a pram nearby, he grabbed her and ran into the busy road, and put her in the middle of a traffic lane. 
The man’s lawyer denied however that he wanted to cause the child any harm, saying he wanted to take a photograph of her to indicate that they had been thrown out onto the street. 
The child was saved when police officers arrived a short while later. 
The court heard that",FAKE
"Schools All Over America Are Closing On Election Day Due To Fears Of Violence By Michael Snyder, on October 27th, 2016 
Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News , “voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.” Just a couple days ago , I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th. 
Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News … 
Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. 
The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the school hallways, endangering students. 
“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town. 
And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters … 
“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “ What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” 
All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything. 
Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that. 
Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania … 
“We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places .” 
And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats… 
Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. 
Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. 
“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” 
In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog , then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . 
Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation … 
According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. 
The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? 
Either way, it doesn’t look good. 
After everything that we saw in 2012 , I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines. 
But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters… 
“It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that ,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “ Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America ,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.” 
Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier. 
But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country ? 
If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed. 
About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*",FAKE
"“I’ve got my six-month, regular cancer checkup in June, and so I’m saying I hope they don’t come out with any kind of decision, just in case it’s bad news, until after,” Hines said. “You always get nervous, usually a day before or day of, going for a checkup. But I think I started a little more on the worrying ahead of time.”

Hines, 59, has been relying on health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces to help cover the costs of those checkups. But she has the misfortune of residing in a state, Virginia, where the federal government is operating that marketplace. Because of that, she could end up losing her tax subsidy to help purchase coverage right at the time her health takes a dive for the worse.

The Supreme Court will issue a ruling this month on a lawsuit engineered by conservative activists alleging that a brief phrase in the law -- “exchange established by the state” -- means subsidies can only be provided to individuals residing in states that set up their own health insurance exchanges. Should the justices side with Obamacare's critics, Hines would be one of an estimated 6.4 million people in 34 states whose subsidies will disappear. Many will be forced to drop their health insurance because of heightened cost.

For someone like Hines, who has had breast cancer three times, most recently in 2009, this presents a Hobson's choice. She considers health care coverage essential and must get screenings twice a year to ensure her cancer doesn't come back. But she has little money to afford insurance on her own. A former public relations professional, she’s devoted her life to caring for her ailing, octogenarian mother, and currently works part-time as an educator at the aquarium near her home in Virginia Beach. Her low income qualifies Hines for a subsidy that cuts the price she pays by about half, to $200 a month.

“I could probably manage another year,” Hines said when asked if she could afford the coverage without the subsidy. She would have to draw down more of her retirement savings to pay for health care. But doesn’t have enough money to hold on to health insurance until she turns 65 and becomes eligible for Medicare, she said.

Hines was one of six people the Huffington Post featured in a report this March on the case surrounding Obamacare's subsidies. At the time, the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the case and the prospect of those subsidies potentially disappearing was becoming less abstract for those in states with federally run exchanges. The clock is ticking even louder now. And so, we decided to catch up with those we interviewed to see how their circumstances, health and mental well-being has changed.

Lucas had an aortic aneurysm in 2010, so he has to keep monitoring his heart condition. Even though his most recent tests came up clean in May, Lucas knows the computed tomography (CT) scan he needs as part of his checkup every two years would cost him $11,000 without insurance, instead of $50 now. He also knows his prescriptions would run to $2,600 every three months rather than $65 with insurance. Lucas, who is self-employed, earns $25,000 to $30,000 a year, he said.

Lucas might be shielded from the ramifications of a ruling against the subsidy if Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) persuades the GOP-majority state legislature to go along with his proposal to set up a state-run exchange. But as Lucas takes stock of the court decision to come, he's struck by what he sees as dramatically misplaced priorities among lawmakers in Washington.

“Billions of dollars in corporate welfare to oil companies and whatnot, you know, and that’s not a problem for them, but I’m a person who gets $2,400 a year in subsidies to help pay for my insurance -- and I pay almost three times that much in taxes, so it’s not like I’m taking them on the negative side,” Lucas said.

Blitz turns 33 on Monday. Since birth, he has dealt with aortic valve stenosis, meaning he has a heart valve that is too narrow. He recently received good news from his cardiologist that he can delay an expensive major operation he thought he’d need this year. But he will have to undergo a less serious procedure at a later date.

All this would be difficult to handle on its own. But it's compounded by the problems Blitz has had in navigating the health care law. He ended up with a plan he doesn't recall picking. He lost his subsidy of $30 a month even though his income level should qualify him for some tax credit. And he assumed that his home state would get rid of all Obamacare exchanges entirely if the court ruled against the subsidies (in fact, state Republicans have passed a bill saying that Arizona won't set up a state exchange. The federal one will remain regardless).

Were he to ultimately lose the subsidy, Blitz would figure out a way to pay for his insurance. He calls himself ""fortunate"" in that regard, compared to those who don't have savings to dip into or expenses to cut or friends to rely on. But Blitz's fortune -- if you want to call it that -- comes at a cost, and it underscores how the damage from a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs extends beyond those who currently receive tax credits.

Without the subsidies, most of the low- and moderate-income people using the health insurance exchanges will exit the exchanges, leaving those with the greatest health care needs -- people like Blitz with medical conditions -- as an increasing share of the market. Because people with greater medical needs generate more medical bills, that would increase expenses for insurance companies, forcing them to increase premiums. Those higher premiums, in turn, would lead more people to drop coverage. In the industry, they call this a “death spiral.”",REAL
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"RBTH Daily , army , military , arms The Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system. Source: Press Photo 
On Oct. 21, on the day the Russian army received its new military technology, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that in October 2016 half of all the military hardware in the Russian armed forces now consisted of new models. 
Shoigu, who also holds the rank of army general, noted that in accordance with a presidential decree, by 2020 70 percent of the army's technology will consist of updated models. The first Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system in the Russian army 
One of the main ""gifts"" for Russia's army was the Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missile system. Shoigu said that the armed forces had received the first division of Buk-M3s. 
""This is not only the modernization of the air defense system that the Russian army already has. Basically, this is a new model with old dimensions,"" explained Valery Yarmolenko, director of the press service at arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey. 
He noted that the Buk-M3's key particularity is the location of the missiles in the launching containers, just like in the S-300 systems, which are simultaneously transport and launching containers. 
Thanks to developments made by Russian manufacturers, the missiles can be fired from the 12 cylindrical containers 20 seconds after the system is set up. Unlike its predecessor, the new system can strike missiles and enemy planes not 15 but 70 kilometers (45 miles) away. 
The Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper confirms that the Buk-M3 anti-aircraft missiles can strike surface and ground radiocontrast targets – that is, they can be used as tactical-guided missiles and not only defensive weapons. What else has the Russian army received? 
In the last three months the Russian armed forces have received a series of defensive systems. Among them are the following: 
- two regimental kits of S-400 anti-aircraft missiles systems and six combat Pantsir-S machines; 
- the Bal and Bastion missile systems for the Western Military District; 
- two divisions of Buk-M2 anti-aircraft systems; 
- three intercontinental ballistic missiles; 
- 100 Kalibr winged missiles and Onyx anti-missile systems for Russian Navy ships and submarines. 
A BUK-M2E surface-to-air missile system on display during the International Aerospace Salon in Zhukovsky near Moscow / Source: Mikhail Voskresenskiy/RIA Novosti 
Sergei Shoigu noted that during the Army-2016 Military Technological Forum near Moscow in early September Russia showed the world most of the new technology that the armed forces are now acquiring. 
""Defense ministry representatives and foreign and Russian military experts could appreciate Russia's combat possibilities during the demonstrations,"" he said. Problems with rearming the army 
""The modernization and development of the Russian armed forces program, which costs 22 trillion rubles ($343 billion today), can fully guarantee the country's security by the time it terminates in 2022. However, there is a series of problems that must be solved,"" said Viktor Yesin, former director of the General Staff of the Strategic Missile Forces. 
In his words, the modernization of the defense industry, in which three trillion rubles have already been invested ($48 billion), is failing. 
""This is due to the sanctions and the fall of Russia's economy. The process of import substitution in the defense enterprises is getting practically nowhere,"" said Yesin. Russia designing new ‘aircraft carrier killer’ torpedo to boost naval power 
According to a source in the Russian defense industry, the main problem lies in the fact that Russia will not be able to substitute imported items in a series of key sectors in the upcoming years. 
""One thing is the modernization of enterprises. But creating from scratch certain units that will produce the technology is another. The enterprises will be able to produce the ship and helicopter engines that were imported from other countries by 2018. However, there are many electronic systems accompanying these machines that Russia will not be able to produce independently,"" said the source. 
According to Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, the financing of the defense industry has diminished due to the crisis, a trend that may continue in 2017. 
""Defense industry enterprises have long-term contracts to build ships, missiles, aviation and space satellites. There will be no sequestration here. During crises purchases of secondary technology – armored personnel carriers, engineer machines and so on – are reduced,"" explained the source. Why is Russia spending so much on modernizing its army? 
According to Yesin, the share of defense expenses is unquestionably very big. But if Russia wants to feel secure and not worry about tomorrow, then money must be spent today in order to avoid a repeat of the 1990s and 2000s. 
""In terms of nuclear weapons, we are on par with the U.S., but in terms of conventional weapons, we trail significantly. If we want to avoid war, we must make up for what we lacked in the 1990s and 2000s,"" said Yesin. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook",FAKE
"In a landmark move, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced Tuesday that it is changing its posture toward gays. The church has decided to support anti-discrimination legislation for gays and lesbians in the realm of housing and employment. The church also announced that it it comes with the condition that no one can be forced to perform actions if he or she has religious objections. One example, a doctor who refuses to artificially inseminate a lesbian couple. Utah is facing two bills that protections for each group. Political watchers in the state have noted that both measures would be likely to pass if the LDS Church got behind it.

“When religious people are publicly intimidated, retaliated against, forced from employment or made to suffer personal loss because they have raised their voice in the public square, donated to a cause, or participated in an election, our democracy is the loser,” said Elder Dallin Oaks, a member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles. “Such tactics are every bit as wrong as denying access to employment, housing, or public services because of race or gender.”

However, this month, the church was in hot water for planning to excommunicate a prominent critic of its same-sex marriage stance for the apostasy.

",REAL
"Small Stocks Threaten Breakdown – Can They Hang On? by IWB · October 27, 2016 
by Dana Lyons 
The Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index has violated (for now) the 2 key uptrend lines that we recently identified. 
A main theme recently among both our posts and our quantitative risk analysis has been the battle between weakening market internals and resilient price averages. Despite deteriorating breadth and momentum, most of the major averages had been able to hold above the key levels that we’ve identified. For example, just 9 days ago , we highlighted 2 Up trendlines on the chart of the Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index (RUT). These lines (e.g., the post-2009 and post-February Up trendlnes), we suggested, were the key in determining whether the RUT would maintain its upward trajectory (above the lines), or see an expansion in potential downside. Recently, the RUT had been able (barely) to hold the top side of of the trendlines and maintain its path of least resistance to the upside. That path may have shifted today. 
As these updated charts show, the RUT closed below the 2 key trendlines today – albeit by a fairly slim margin. 
Wide Angle: 
Close-Up: 
While the winds may have potentially shifted following today’s action, the overall message here is the same as it was 9 days ago. Thus, we will repeat what we stated in that post: 
If the RUT should “Continue to hold above the trendlines, the bulls will remain in control and the intermediate-term rally in small-cap stocks can persist further. Should the level give way, however, the bears may have their chance to finally deliver a more serious blow.” 
Absent a quick recovery of the broken trendlines, the bears would appear to have their chance now, especially given the elevated status of our broad market risk assessment. The question is will they finally follow through, or will the small stocks manage to narrowly hang on once again?",FAKE
"Pinterest 
In the war between police and Black Lives Matter, the cop-hating race-baiters are losing. 
A new study shows a dramatic increase in respect for law enforcement among all Americans, including blacks, who have been repeatedly told they were the victims of a racist, white-supremacist-supporting police force. 
In just the last year, Americans who say they have a “great deal of respect” for police has jumped from 64 percent to 76 percent — the highest level since 1968. Those saying they have “some” respect for police is down to 17 percent and those claiming to have “hardly any” respect for police is down to 7 percent. 
The Gallup survey flies in the face of the narrative of leftists and Black Lives Matter. They’re trying to convince Americans – especially black Americans – that the police are on a racist rampage and that they have nothing more to fear in this country than a man in uniform. 
But the public doesn’t buy it. 
With both whites and “non-whites,” respect for police is up sharply. Four in five white Americans say they have “a great deal” of respect for the police in their area, while just over two in three “non-whites” also say they have a “great deal” of respect. 
Respect for police is highest among Republicans, at 86 percent, but even 68 percent of Democrats claim a “great deal” of respect. 
Adults 55 and older (81%) have the most respect, but even those 18-34 had high levels of respect at 71%. 
There is a moral to this for the BLM Social Justice Warriors: You can paint our cops as racist thugs, but we know better. Police risk their lives every day to protect us and deserve our utmost respect. And judging by this poll, they’re getting it. 
From the Gallup Poll: 
The sharp increase over the past year in professed respect for local law enforcement comes as many police say they feel they are on the defensive — both politically and for their lives while they are on duty — amid heated national discussions on police brutality and shootings. After an officer was killed by a gunman in Harlem last year, then-New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton warned that the U.S. has fostered “an anti-police attitude that has grown” and that the national dialogue on police-community relations needs to discourage individuals who “exhibit anti-police behavior or attitudes.” 
Louisiana became the first state to pass a bill that treats acts targeted against police officers as a hate crime. Other states are discussing passing similar laws. It’s unclear whether the spike in respect for police will have staying power or if it reflects mostly a reaction to the retaliatory killings against police officers last summer. 
Although confidence in police varies among subgroups, majorities of all groups say they have a great deal of respect for their local police. And the percentage of national adults who say they have “hardly any” respect for local law enforcement remains small.",FAKE
"We Are Change 
Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump joined forces to disrupt a Hillary Clinton rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday evening — causing the former First Lady to snap.
Pro-Trump heckler escorted out of Hillary rally by police. Goes out shouting ""Trump 2016"" pic.twitter.com/d3GQjSFHHz 
— Jeff Poor (@jeff_poor) November 2, 2016 

In the video, a protester is heard shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist,” before a weak chant of “Hillary” begins from her low-energy crowd. This lead to groups chanting “Donald Trump” and other groups chanting “Bernie Sanders.” 
In the video, as the Gateway Pundit notes, you can hear a Clinton supporter telling security, “there’s a whole bunch of them.” 
Hillary Clinton gets protested in Ft Lauderdale by #Trump Street Team and others yelling Bill Clinton's a Rapist @charlespm777 @o_soflagrl pic.twitter.com/Cr9lBPNvwe 
— Trump Street Team FL (@ChatRevolve) November 2, 2016 

As this was going on, Clinton appeared to reach her limit and snap. 
HILLARY LOSES IT! Goes Off On ‘Bill Clinton Is a Rapist’ Protester at FL Rally #HillaryForPrison screech voice?? pic.twitter.com/S6mkxvPSTh 
— J.C. (@Hashtag1USA) November 2, 2016 

The candidate began taking shots not at her opponent, but his supporters, you know, the ones she has also called “irredeemable” and “deplorables.” 
“I get sometimes a little overwhelmed by the fact that I love this country,” Clinton shouted. “I think we already are great. I think we could be greater, and, you know, I am sick and tired of the negative, dark, divisive, dangerous vision and behavior of people who support Donald Trump. It is time for us to say, ‘No, we are not going backwards. We are going forward into a brighter future.’ So how do we do that? For the next seven days, we focus on what is important, do not get distracted or diverted – focus on the kind of country and world that we want to help create.” 
She also urged her supporters to stage an “intervention” for anyone who would dare to vote against her corruption and frighteningly hawkish stance. 
“I want you to do me another favor, if you know anybody who says they are thinking of voting for Trump, I want you to stage an intervention,” Clinton said. “And I want you to talk to this person because unless they are a billionaire who avoided paying taxes for 20 years and lost a billion dollars running casinos, they do not have anything to gain from Donald Trump.” 
It’s funny, since it seems to be only her billionaire friends who benefit from her being in any position of power — just ask the people of Haiti . 
Buy the new We Are Change t-shirt because you will enjoy shredding the Clinton News Network in public!

The post Clinton Snaps as Bernie and Trump Supporters Join Forces to Disrupt Rally appeared first on We Are Change .
",FAKE
"Politics Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (Photo by AP) 
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will pay an official one-day visit to Russia for talks on the Syrian crisis. 
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Wednesday that the top diplomat is due in Moscow on Friday. 
He said that Zarif is scheduled to attend a trilateral meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem on regional developments, including the conflict in Syria. 
According to Qassemi, Zarif will also hold a separate meeting with Lavrov to discuss Tehran-Moscow relations. 
Meanwhile, Russia's RIA news agency, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry, reported that Zarif and Lavrov will also discuss the situation in Iraq. 
Muallem's scheduled visit on Friday had earlier been announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry. 
Iran and Russia have similar stances on the ongoing deadly crisis in Syria. Moscow and Tehran reject any foreign interference in the affairs of the war-hit country, stressing that only the Syrians are entitled to decide their own fate. 
Iran has been providing military advisory assistance to the Syrian government in its campaign against terrorism. 
Russia has also been carrying out airstrikes against terrorists' positions in Syria since September last year at the official request of the Damascus government. 
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. Over 400,000 people have so far been killed in the conflict, according to estimates by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura . 
In neighboring Iraq, the Arab country’s army is also pressing ahead with a massive operation aimed at recapturing Mosul from Daesh Takfiri terrorists, who captured the strategic city in June 2014. 
The army has been liberating more areas aroundMosul, with the Iraqi Joint Operations Command announcing that counter-terrorism units were only two kilometers away from the city. Loading ...",FAKE
"November 12, 2016 348 Ads on Craigslist reveal that paid anti-Trump protesters and Soros-sponsored staged demonstrations are continuing to fuel hate and division. Share on Facebook 
It was reported previously on The Duran that MoveOn – a George Soros controlled NGO, is behind the organization of anti-Trump protests across the country. As the protests continue, however, Craigslist has become an important recruitment tool for some of these organizers, and here is what it reveals: 
Fight the Trump Agenda! We’re hiring Full-Time Organizers 15/hr! – reads a Craigslist ad from Washington CAN in Seattle . Activists are promised Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), Paid Vacation, Paid Sick Days, Holidays, and Leave of Absence . 
Washington CAN claims to be the state’s oldest and largest grassroots non-profit with over 35 years of organizational experience. It is unclear whether it has any direct ties to Soros’s MoveOn, but it certainly wouldn’t be a wild assumption to make under the circumstances. 
In another instance, a Craigslist ad exposed paid Anti-Trump protesters being recruited for a staged event in Los Angeles. And this time the Soros link is quite clear and in the open. TruthFeed reports: 
In this case, a Craigslist ad in Los Angeles shows that activists are wanted to block traffic in the heavy traffic intersection of Highlands and Hollywood. 
Here’s an example of a Soros employee literally “posing” as a protester. Not all that “grass roots.” 
Obviously, no one is disputing the fact that there are millions of people unhappy with the election results. Neither is there any doubt that thousands across the the country are protesting genuinely out of emotion and desire to express their discontent. What’s important is that these people realize that they are playing right into the hands of an establishment agenda that doesn’t have America’s best interests in mind. 
The election is over and we have a clear winner. The losing side has conceded, admitting that the election was fair and calling for a peaceful transition of power. For all the smart folks out there this is a clear indication that it’s time to go home, back to school, back to work, back to your daily routine and stop trying to prolong the division and hate that has been eating away at this country for far too long. ",FAKE
"Islamic State suicide bombers brought terror, chaos and bloodshed to the city at the heart of European unity on ­Tuesday, detonating their nail-spewing bombs at an airport ­departures hall and on a subway train in attacks that left at least 31 people dead and prompted authorities to launch an intensive manhunt for at least one suspected accomplice.

The wanted man accompanied two of the bombers to the airport, along with luggage heaving with explosives. Authorities were also hunting for a suspected Belgian bombmaker who trained in Syria with the Islamic State and later sneaked back into Europe. On Wednesday, Belgian state broadcaster RTBF identified two of the attackers who targeted Brussels as brothers Khalid and Brahim Bakraoui.

Tuesday’s mass killings add this city to an ignominious but growing list of European capitals that have been struck in the past year by deadly attacks either perpetrated or inspired by the Islamic State, including Paris and Copenhagen.

Authorities had been bracing for an attack in Belgium for months as the country has struggled to stem a tide of homegrown extremism and as the Islamic State has repeatedly threatened to hit Europe in its core.

But when the attacks finally came, the magnitude was stunning. The day’s violence represented the worst on Belgian soil since World War II.

“What we had feared has happened,” said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. “This is a black moment for our country.”

[‘People who died weren’t whole anymore. They were in pieces.’]

The apparently coordinated explosions created a renewed sense of threat that spilled far beyond Brussels, as authorities boosted police patrols in cities such as Paris, London and Washington.

The targets appeared to have been chosen for their symbolic value and for their ease of access.

The attackers first struck

 with twin bombings at the international airport, where early-

morning travelers were preparing to board flights linking Brussels to cities across the continent and around the world. An hour later, a subway car transiting beneath the modernist glass-and-steel high-rises that house the European Union burst with smoke and flame.

In addition to the dead, about 250 people were injured, Belgian officials said.

Many of the injured lost limbs as shrapnel from the blasts radiated through packed crowds. Cellphone video recorded in the minutes after the airport blasts showed children cowering on a bloody floor amid the maimed and the dead. Footage from a subway station revealed desperate scenes as people dressed for a day’s work stumbled from the mangled wreckage into a smoke-drenched tunnel.

Authorities acknowledged that they had been readying for an attack. But nothing like this, they said.

“We never could have imagined something of this scale,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon told Belgian television station RTL.

And even as the country tried to recover from the trauma of Tuesday’s strikes, there was evidence that more could be on the way.

[How the Brussels attacks could force Obama to betray his policy instincts]

The man being sought by police accompanied two of the bombers to the airport, according to a senior Belgian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details of the case. The taxi driver who transported them said they were hauling particularly heavy luggage that investigators believe was packed with explosives.

At an apartment in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels, investigators later found explosive devices loaded with nails and chemicals, along with an Islamic State flag, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

“It was exactly the same type of bomb as at the airport,” the senior official said.

Belgian police released surveillance images of three men pushing luggage carts at Brussels Airport. The prosecutor’s office said two of them — dressed in black with black gloves on their left hands, probably to conceal detonators — had blown themselves up. But the third, dressed in white, was on the loose. His identity was unknown, and despite a nationwide hunt — with heavily armed officers combing the streets and checkpoints at Belgian borders snarling traffic for miles — the suspect remained at large Tuesday night.

Across the continent, authorities were also hunting 24-year-old Najim Laachraoui, a suspected Islamic State bombmaker, according to two European security officials.

Laachraoui, a Belgian who was born in Morocco and raised in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, is believed to have trained in Syria and then returned to Europe. His DNA was found on one of the explosives belts from November’s Paris attacks, and he is thought to have traveled at one point with Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving suspect believed to have played a direct role in the Paris massacre.

Tuesday’s attacks came only four days after Belgian counterterrorism authorities cheered the arrest of Abdeslam, 26, who was the most wanted man in Europe for the past four months. Abdeslam was discovered hiding in a Brussels apartment building in the Molenbeek neighborhood, near the center of the city. After the raid, officials said they had uncovered a web of suspects much broader than they previously imagined.

Within hours of Tuesday’s assault, the Islamic State asserted responsibility for the attacks, according to a statement posted on the Amaq Agency, a website believed to be close to the extremist group. The message said Belgium was targeted because of its participation in an international coalition battling the group in Syria and Iraq. U.S. and European security officials said they believed the claim to be credible.

The latest bloodshed made clear that European capitals remain perilously vulnerable despite attempts to dismantle the militant network that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Paris in generations last November.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said U.S. citizens were among the injured, but he would not say how many. No Americans are known to have died in the attacks, although that information may change, he said. The State Department also issued an alert on traveling in Europe, urging Americans to avoid crowded places and to exercise caution during religious holidays and at large festivals or events.

Europe has struggled mightily with spillover from the churning conflict in Syria. Thousands of European citizens have traveled there to fight in a war that has become a focal point for jihadists around the world. Many have returned to Europe radicalized. Europe has vowed to confront them.

[Why is Brussels under attack?]

“We are at war,” said French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”

In Havana, at the end of a landmark trip, President Obama urged “the world to unite” to fight terrorism, and he pledged to “do whatever is necessary” to aid the investigation in Belgium.

The assaults brought Brussels to a virtual standstill. The subway and the airport were closed — the latter will remain so on Wednesday — and Belgian leaders warned residents to stay indoors. Foreign governments, including Britain, issued advisories warning against travel to the Belgian capital.

In France — where 130 people died Nov. 13 in attacks on a stadium, a music club and restaurants — Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that an additional 1,600 police officers were deployed and that security was boosted at border posts and major transportation hubs.

On social media, an image soon appeared: a figure draped in the colors of the French flag embracing another tearful figure in the black, yellow and red of Belgium’s banner.

At a news conference in Jordan, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, choked back tears after learning of the Brussels attacks.

Belgium, a nation riven by ethnic rivalries among French, Dutch and German speakers, has struggled to address radicalization in its cities. A complex patchwork of security and police agencies is responsible for keeping an eye on potential threats. Many of them view one another as rivals rather than as colleagues.

Still, security analysts said attacks on unsecured, high-traffic targets such as subway stations are extremely hard to defend against — even when authorities are focused on foiling such plots.

“This is a kind of scenario every capital in Europe feared since the November attacks last year. A mixture of foreign fighters coming back with experience, local sympathizers on the other hand,” said Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University who has advised the Belgian government on how to fight radicalization. “You have such a large number of soft targets, and you cannot secure all of them.”

Birnbaum reported from Moscow. James McAuley and Anthony Faiola in Brussels, Daniela Deane and Karla Adam in London, and Brian Murphy, Carol Morello and Matt Zapotosky in Washington contributed to this report.

Live updates on the death toll, attack scenes and reactions around the world

Why is Brussels under attack?

At NATO headquarters, alert status raised just miles from attacks

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world",REAL
"The FBI is now “actively and aggressively” probing into Clinton Foundation corruption. The Clinton campaign is going down. The FBI seems to be sick of the DoJ’s favoritism. 
Via YourNewsWire 

Two separate sources have told Fox News about serious new breaks in the investigation. The fact that this is being reported on an MSM site is huge, bigger than huge.
Did you catch that? The laptops that everyone THOUGHT the FBI destroyed were NOT, in fact, destroyed. Anyone who is caught lying has voided their immunity deals. (cough, Cheryl Mills, cough) There are new, not-seen-before emails, even though Clinton said she disclosed them all. It’s goin’ down. Right now. All of those people who were prepared to take one for Team Clinton might want to reconsider. It’s hard to imagine even Teflon-coated Hillary Clinton getting out of this mess.
Watch this video and try to keep from jumping up and down with excitement: 
",FAKE
"Keywords: Acupuncture , baby eczema , cure baby eczema , eczema cure , eczema treatment , heal eczema 
There was a time when my son’s eczema became so severe I was willing to try any natural healing method. My baby was 5 months old when he developed eczema. We tried the usual dose of steroids and over-the-counter creams from our family doctor. It got so bad that his scars were not healing. He wasn’t sleeping. And I wasn’t sleeping. As a child, my mother took me to an Acupuncturist for migraines. And the migraines stopped after a handful of visits. I remember it being a pretty relaxing experience with the smell of incense and herbs and the quietness of the room. So, I took a leap of faith and booked us for an appointment with a Traditional Chinese Doctor who specialized in skin disorders, allergies, and asthma. Why Try Acupuncture & Traditional Chinese Medicine? Reason 1: Acupuncture has been practiced for almost 4000 years in China. 
With that much history, it’s worth a try. It is a method of relieving pain or curing an illness by placing needles in the patient’s body at precise points along the 12 meridians in the body. Meridians are energy pathways that are associated with different organs within the body. The World Health Organization lists 300 ailments that are treatable by Chinese Medicine & Acupuncture. Reason 2: Acupuncture has helped children with eczema 
In a study of 37 children who were treated with Chinese Medicinal herbs, the treatment reduced eczema symptoms by 90% in 18 of the children (see Sources). Although it was a small study size, the benefits seem to far outweigh the risks. When my son was a baby, even a 10% improvement in his symptoms would have been amazing for us. Reason 3: Acupuncture does not hurt babies 
Many people worry about the needles hurting. But the needles that Acupuncturists use are about 1/100 th of a syringe needle. My son was a baby when we started the treatments, and he never cried out when getting the needles in him. Reason 4: Acupuncture relieved my baby’s eczema by 80% 
Acupuncture healed the eczema to the point where we could figure out his triggers. Our doctor stabilized the eczema. Best of all, flare-ups only occurred when my baby was teething. His skin was softer than it had been in months. Acupuncture needs to be done on babies for a minimum of 3 months in order to see an improvement. This is because the treatment is trying to alter the immune response, which is a long process. But sometimes babies will respond quicker than that. We used a topical herb powder given to us by the doctor, and applied it to his skin. This topical mix had a similar effect as hydro-cortisone cream if I applied it 3-5 times per day with a cotton ball. Reason 5: Acupuncture is affordable 
This is true especially if you go to a student clinic. You can pay the affordable price and yet the students are supervised by very experienced doctors. For child and baby treatments, it is even more affordable. It cost us about $15-$30 per visit on average (we tried a few different clinics). Some health plans will cover Acupuncture, so check with your health plan to see if yours covers it. To keep it affordable, I suggest trying to find a specialist in Acupuncture & TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), not a practitioner who does many different types of treatments. Tips for Helping Your Child While Getting Acupuncture 
Bring a favorite stuffed animal, a book, or some toys. Try nursing your baby while they are receiving acupuncture. A baby only needs the needle in the acupressure point for a second and then they are pulled out. Adults typically have needles in for 45+ minutes for each treatment, because our bodies do not respond as quickly as babies’ bodies do. Check out my YouTube video for more tips! Find an Experienced & Accredited Acupuncturist 
Make sure to look for an Accredited Acupuncturist or TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Doctor. Be sure the Acupuncturist has some experience in your condition. Chat with the people in the waiting room. And see if they’ve had success with your doctor. I met a few moms in the waiting room that swore by the Chinese Doctor we were going to see. That made me feel more comfortable. 
Find a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) Doctor who offers Certified Organic Chinese herbs. “Certified Organic” means the herbs were never sprayed with toxic pesticides and herbicides. As well, there have been some reports of heavy metals residue in Chinese herbs. Herbs are just as powerful as prescription medications and can have adverse effects if used improperly. Make sure to ask about the testing done on the herbs that you or your baby are prescribed. Every Condition Has Different Treatment Needs 
Check with your family doctor to be sure you don’t have any conditions that would prevent you from using Acupuncture or Chinese Medicine. All the information in this article is provided for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical counseling. 
Rosemary Hansen is a published author and devoted Mama. She is passionate about healing eczema naturally. Rosemary is a self-taught organic, whole foods chef. Her lifelong dream is to have a flock of pet dairy goats. Get a copy of her free e-book: “10 Natural Remedies for Soft Skin” at www.NaturalEczemaMama.com. 
Sources:",FAKE
"Ted Cruz is daring Donald Trump to sue him over an ad running in South Carolina that questions his record on abortion, rejecting the billionaire businessman’s complaints and vowing instead to run the ad “more frequently” because voters “deserve to know the truth.""

""You have been threatening frivolous lawsuits for your entire adult life,"" Cruz said Wednesday. ""Even in the annals of frivolous lawsuits, this takes the cake.""

The Cruz campaign adamantly defended the ad after the Trump campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding the campaign stop running it. Trump earlier this week also threatened to sue the Canada-born Cruz over his eligibility to run if he does not “take down his false ads and retract his lies.”

Their feud has only escalated since then, with Trump regularly calling Cruz a liar – and the Texas senator now ridiculing Trump over his lawsuit threat.

At a press conference in South Carolina on Wednesday, Cruz read from the cease-and-desist letter, calling it “one of the most remarkable letters I have ever read,” and challenged Trump to go through with his threatened suit.

Cruz, who graduated from Harvard Law School and previously worked as Texas's top lawyer, said he would like to take Trump's deposition himself and that a lawsuit against the ad has no chance.

The ad in question features footage of Trump in a 1999 interview saying he’s “very pro-choice.” The ad makes reference to the current debate over the vacancy at the Supreme Court and says, “We cannot trust Donald Trump with these serious decisions.”

Trump's attorney sent Cruz a letter on Tuesday saying the ad was ""replete with outright lies, false, defamatory and destructive statements"" and Cruz could be held liable for damages if it's not taken down.

In its own letter, the Cruz campaign called the threats “laughable” and said: “Are you seriously suggesting that the voter should not be allowed to hear what Mr. Trump has said or know what Mr. Trump has done?”

Trump, though, stood his ground and reiterated that he is now pro-life.

“I have been clear about my position on this issue for years. … If I want to bring a lawsuit it would be legitimate. Likewise, if I want to bring the lawsuit regarding Senator Cruz being a natural born Canadian I will do so. Time will tell, Teddy,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

Cruz is also feuding with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio over alleged dirty tricks leading up to Saturday’s South Carolina GOP primary.

Cruz on Wednesday denied being involved with anything untoward and called for anyone with evidence to come forward.

Rubio was asked Wednesday to come up with evidence that Cruz's team was behind a fake Facebook page wrongly claiming that U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy had switched his endorsement from the Florida senator to Cruz.

""It's just a pattern of people around his campaign that have continuously done things like that,"" Rubio said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"""We ask that everything be done with dignity. There will be no backpacks, fanny packs or cameras. This is for security purposes,"" a man doing crowd control at the church told the swarm of people assembled near the door.

Church members were given priority among a crowd that included mostly visitors and press. Women were allowed in first in a show of chivalry but also for security. ""We will be checking pocketbooks,"" announced one usher.

Before long, the organist began playing ""Amazing Grace"" followed by ""What a Friend We Have in Jesus"". The choir, dressed in all white began the service, by singing ""Total Praise"", a gospel song that brought the crowd to its feet.

""We are reminded this morning of the freshness of death. It comes like a thief in the night,"" said Norvel Goff, reverend and presiding elder of the African Methodist Episcopal district that includes Emanuel. Goff called congregants to the altar to pray. ""Many of our hearts are still broken. Many of us are still shedding tears. But we must take our burdens to the Lord and leave them there.""

Goff continued, ""As we try to make sense of nonsense, pray for our children. We pray that God will give us the clarity of thought to share with them what God has shared with us.""

One man erupted in tears on the way back to his seat repeating over and over, ""This is just an unthinkable tragedy. Help us, God.""

Calvary preaches many things, including the inevitable rapture, the second coming of Jesus, and the “monogamous marriage between male and female as the foundation of the family.” The majority of the few dozen in attendance on Sunday were white.

“This is what anger and hate against the church looks like,” Pastor Richard Perea said of the killings. “The liberal media must now care about church in a way they have not before.”

Sunday’s sermon focused mostly on Bible study, going line-by-line through Biblical verses much in the same way ""The Beautiful 9"" at Emanuel did before alleged mass murderer Dylann Roof turned a gun on them.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with religion, not at all,” Ashworth said, adding that in this time of tragedy, more people need to pray.

“It was obviously a race issue in his heart,” Perea told HuffPost. “But why he went into a church versus down in the street, in my opinion, is something that was demonically influenced.”

“After everything that’s happened in the past week, coming to church means that God is still sovereign,” Brooks said. “He still gives us this freedom to come and not be afraid even when people are prejudiced with hate in their heart.”

When service was over at Emanuel A.M.E., parishioners were greeted by a sea of support from members of the community. Some people handed out bottles of water and cookies to churchgoers as they left the building. Others just shared kind words and hugs.

Jack Logan, 52, the founder of a Put Down the Guns Now, a nonprofit based in South Carolina that is dedicated to reducing gun violence among young people, said he attended the service at Emanuel A.M.E. for that feeling of connection.

 

 “This was a tragedy for South Carolina, and America,” Logan said. “I wanted to come down here, show love and take part in this great church service today.”

Another visitor, 28-year-old Ryan Shepard, a court clerk, drove to Charleston from Atlanta just to be at Emanuel’s first church service since Wednesday’s tragedy.

 

 “I think we’re in an important point in American history as it relates to race relations and facing some of the darker chapters of our nation’s past that we haven’t reconciled,” Shepard said. “I wanted to be present and a part of this mourning process, to witness and support the community here.”",REAL
"Many sexual assault activists worry that fallout from the Rolling Stone story will put a chill on the coverage of sex crimes. But transparency and thoroughness in reporting can lead to better outcomes, media experts and others say.

Rolling Stone is pledging to review its editorial practices after a leading journalism school issued a blistering critique of how it reported and edited a discredited article about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia.

The report from the Columbia Journalism School on the discredited Rolling Stone article about an alleged campus rape at the University of Virginia reads like a treatise on how not to conduct journalism. ""The [journalistic] failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking,"" says the Columbia report, which was commissioned by Rolling Stone.

As fallout from the story continues (on Monday, the fraternity at the heart of the discredited rape allegations announced plans to pursue legal action against Rolling Stone), many sexual-assault activists worry that it will put a chill on the coverage of sex crimes – journalism that activists say is crucial to bringing rape out of the shadows and addressing it.

""I think the worst-case scenario would be that journalists don’t want to cover this topic,"" says Tracy Cox, communications director for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC).

But the authors of the Columbia report itself say they hope their critique of the Rolling Stone story is taken as a lesson to reporters and editors about how to do better, rather than as a discouragement to journalists against wading into such a fraught topic.

Ms. Cox and media experts urge reporters to take the time needed to gather an array of facts and talk to a range of individuals. And they emphasize the importance of transparency – which includes disclosures about what reporters don't know and why. Also, no matter how sensitive journalists may be to a source, they can't suspend all skepticism, media observers say.

""It would be a really unfortunate outcome if journalists backed away from doing this kind of reporting as a result of this highly visible failure, because this is important work. And it’s hard work,"" said Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and one of the authors of the report, in a press conference Monday. ""This kind of reporting environment, this kind of subject – it’s a new frontier for serious accountability journalism.... This is an area where we have got to have a conversation amongst ourselves about how to get better.""

The Columbia report cites numerous instances where appropriate journalistic procedures should have raised red flags with the Rolling Stone story. A prime example: Editors should have insisted that reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely contact the three friends whom ""Jackie"" said she met with after the alleged rape.

""We want [journalists] to see that despite the complexities and difficulties [in reporting about sexual assault, it] can be done well, can be done accurately, and can have widespread positive impacts,"" Cox says. ""Through their reporting, they’re telling victims' stories. They can help to contribute to widespread societal change.""

Cox and media experts agree that there are many ways reporters can step into the murky territory of sexual-assault reporting – where reporters may be relying on non-adjudicated testimony and trying to find a delicate balance between being sympathetic to someone dealing with trauma while still exercising due diligence – and still avoid the mistakes that Rolling Stone made. The NSVRC has worked with the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., which teaches writing and media ethics, to develop a free online course for journalists who write about sexual assault.

""If a story isn’t quite where it needs to be, it’s OK to hold it and flush out those facts and do more interviews,"" says Cox. ""It’s better to have the right story than go with something that’s wrong and in the end causes more harm than good.""

One major problem with Ms. Erdely's story, note the authors of the Columbia report, may simply have been the way she approached it initially – her determination to find an illustrative example that corroborated the story she wanted to tell, and her decision to go with the one that seemed the most lurid and shocking, even though other, more verifiable accounts existed.

""When journalists write stories, they usually start looking for one or two things when looking for examples or anecdotes. One of the things we look for is the thing that represents a larger reality. You can’t just pick out the easiest one to report,"" says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at Poynter. Reporting about something like campus rape, or how institutions respond, may indeed call for occasional anecdotes to illustrate the story, he adds, but ""I think it also calls for tools now available to us like data analysis.""

The Columbia report also talks about the problem with the reliance on pseudonyms – something Rolling Stone did for ""Jackie"" as well as the three friends and the date who she claimed instigated the gang rape.

""Pseudonyms are inherently undesirable in journalism. They introduce fiction and ask readers to trust that this is the only instance in which a publication is inventing details at its discretion,"" says the report, which goes on to suggest that Rolling Stone consider banning them or allowing them only in very rare instances.

""There’s this tremendous tension now between anonymity and verifiability. And this particular example of journalism malpractice has made it a lot harder,"" Mr. Clark says.

Clark isn't convinced that granting automatic anonymity to sexual assault victims – which many media outlets routinely do – is a best practice, either for journalism or for addressing sexual assault.

""Are you going to try to humanize [the victim] by giving her or him a false name? Are you doing that to protect their privacy? If you do that, will you be tempted to change other details to create a disguise that protects the person?"" he asks. ""All these moves we make to protect the vulnerable are a kind of form of the journalistic equivalent of witness protection, but they’re also a gateway drug for fabrication or exaggeration.""

Cox at the NSVRC disagrees, noting that privacy is a huge issue for many victims and a reason they may not come forward, and that some fear for their safety. ""I don’t think abolishing all pseudonyms is the answer. I think you have to do it on a case-by-case basis,"" she says.

Ultimately, media observers say, a lot of the Rolling Stone problems can be avoided with proper transparency.

In certain cases, it may be impossible for some details to be corroborated – but when that's the case, the lack of corroboration should be made clear, the Columbia report says.

""Transparency is a more important virtue than ever in journalism,"" says Clark. ""I think there was so little transparency in the Rolling Stone story that it should be a harsh reminder of what happens when we’re unwilling to tell our readers what we know, how we know it, and even more importantly, what we don’t know. And why we don’t know it.""",REAL
"WASHINGTON -- In a move that could alter the minimum wage debate and improve the image of the world's largest retailer, Walmart announced it will raise the baseline wage of its current store employees to $10 per hour, bringing pay hikes to an estimated 500,000 workers.

The company said in an announcement on Thursday that it would raise its wage floor to $9 in April, followed by a second boost to $10 by next February.

The decision follows similar moves by other major retailers such as Gap and IKEA, but the sheer size of Walmart sets the company apart. The Arkansas-based retailer is the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., with an estimated 1.4 million employees, and it is largely seen as a trend-setter in the retail industry.

""Overall, these are strategic investments in our people to reignite the sense of ownership they have in our stores,"" McMillon said. ""As a result, we firmly believe that our customers will benefit from a better store experience, which can drive higher sales and returns for our shareholders over time.

""Right now we want to make sure everybody is crystal clear [on] how vital our store experience is for our future,"" McMillon added in a later CNBC interview. ""Customers need to be served, and associates need to be happy and love their job.""

According to a Walmart spokesman, the new wage floors will apply to current employees. New hires next year will be earning at least $9, but will be bumped up to at least $10 per hour after roughly six months of training.

In the CNBC interview, McMillon suggested that the improving U.S. economy -- with unemployment falling recently to 5.7 percent from a peak of 10 percent after the recession -- was also pressuring Walmart to raise wages.

""It's great to see the job market getting better, and the market works, so we're adjusting to that market,"" he said.

Walmart has long been saddled with a reputation as a low-wage employer, and its battles with labor unions -- in particular the United Food and Commercial Workers union -- stretch back decades. In recent years, labor groups have organized high-profile worker strikes to coincide with the company's Black Friday shopping events, pillorying the retailer over its pay practices.

The across-the-board pay hikes should help rehabilitate that image. They will probably also help Walmart improve customer service in its stores. Over the past two years, bare shelves in Walmart supercenters have become a common sight. A report from a research firm last year traced the troubles in part to a lack of investment in the company's labor.

""We know that this wouldn't have happen[ed] without our work to stand together with hundreds of thousands of supporters to change the country's largest employer,” Emily Wells, an OUR Walmart member, said in a statement Thursday from the group. Wells said she's currently earning $9.50 per hour and will now see a raise, though she added that workers still face erratic scheduling.

A $10 wage would still leave many workers and their families below the poverty line, but it's well above the $7.25 federal minimum wage that still prevails in states without a higher one.

The fact that Walmart is raising its base wage could help lawmakers in Congress in their push to raise the federal wage floor, which hasn't been raised since 2009. Democrats have proposed hiking it to $10.10 per hour and tying it to an inflation index, but Republicans in both chambers have blocked the measure from moving forward.

""It is encouraging that the nation’s largest employer, Walmart, has recognized what Republicans in Congress fail to acknowledge: that $7.25 is significantly too low an hourly wage for any American worker,"" said Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). ""We hope that this move will help convince Republicans to stop blocking efforts to raise the wage.""

With Congress gridlocked, many states have moved ahead with raises to their own minimum wages, with a slate of ballot measures passing in the November elections. For the first time ever, a majority of states now have a higher minimum wage than the federal level.",REAL
"As you gentlemen undoubtedly know, Week 1 of the 2016 NFL season concluded with its usual and unusual fanfare: roaring crowds, jammed parking lots, overserved fans, heartfelt renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner” (with some players kneeling, others raising their fists and an entire team locking arms) and several exciting games decided by just one point.

While each contest this past weekend had its own series of questionable plays, viewers were at least assured a baseline sense of accuracy and “truth” in the outcome. That’s because there’s a system in place to examine and confirm every score, turnover or controversial play. The NFL has tweaked its instant-replay rules over the years in an effort to offer a sense of transparency to fans, casual fantasy players and big-time bettors following the action in Vegas. Although there probably always will be some plays that will generate partisan debate, the NFL has basically brought “fact-checking” into its games through the use of instant replay.

Doesn’t the most important contest in the country deserve the same treatment? After working in Silicon Valley for the past decade, I have learned that digital technology can take democracy to a new level. Today facts, videos, photos and public documents are all readily available online for anyone to see. When presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appeared on last week’s prime-time forum with NBC’s Matt Lauer, America’s collective BS detector started to sound — loudly.

Almost immediately, the electorate and the media began to question whether the moderators of the upcoming presidential debates can hold the candidates to a basic standard of truth.

Therefore, since the future of our country and the world is at stake, I propose that the Commission on Presidential Debates change course and reform a clearly antiquated debate system and bring it into the information age. Specifically, I urge you, as heads of the commission, to leverage the technology built in this country by immigrants and the children of immigrants to perform real-time fact-checking on stage during the debates.

Here is my proposal: During the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, the moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, should go about his business as usual, sitting in front of the candidates and posing questions — but be joined by a team of fact-checkers from Factcheck.org, a project run by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center (itself part of Donald Trump’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania). Just like in professional football games, each side would be given two challenges. The candidates could then use them over the course of the 90-minute debate. If one heard a “lie” during the other’s response, he or she could press a button that would illuminate a red light at his or her podium. Once the other side finished its response, the moderator would allow the candidate who “threw the red flag” to explicitly challenge the statement at issue.

Members of the fact-check team would then go to work to determine the veracity of the answer and relay their findings to the moderator. If the challenger were to be correct, then he or she would still have two challenges and the candidate whose statement was found false, well, would be shown to be a liar in front of the whole country. If, however, the challenge were to be unfounded — and the speaker’s statement is determined to be factually sound — then the challenger would lose one of his or her challenges and be shown as ill-informed.

The candidates wouldn’t be the only ones who could issue a challenge, however. Just like how the NFL automatically reviews plays during the last two minutes of a half, the debate moderator and the fact-checkers could weigh in on any possible mistruths after the closing remarks and make the call without a candidate’s being able to respond.

So careful what you say, Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton, because under this scenario you would not have the final word — the truth would.

Although it’s no game-show gimmick, this new format would make for riveting political theater and has the potential to bring in more than the 100 million expected debate viewers. Most important, though, those who tune in could expect to hear verifiable facts, even if only on a few nights.

I have bounced this idea off a few colleagues and business leaders and their response has been the same: They love it but it would take way too long! This seemed to be a fair point, so I decided to test it. I took the subject of immigration and the proposed Great Wall of Mexico. I wanted to see what each candidate’s record or position was on securing America’s southern border. Trump has changed and restated his proposed policy of deporting 11 million immigrants in dizzying fashion. During his Fox News discussion with Sean Hannity, his proposal to grant amnesty came back on the table. Yet during his speech days later in Phoenix, it wasn’t. Sourcing these facts required mere microseconds in a YouTube search. It took me 0.75 seconds to find on Google what Secretary Clinton had said during her acceptance speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: “We will not build a wall.” A second search that took another 0.54 seconds, however, turned up a Senate roll call vote on Sept. 29, 2006, when then-Senator Clinton voted for what is known as the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This bill authorized the allocation of $7 billion to build and fortify a 700-mile fence across all of Arizona’s border with Mexico, as well parts of those of California, New Mexico and Texas. So basically, this fact-check took about 1.2 seconds of searching and a few more seconds of reading. Given what happened last week at the Commander in Chief Forum hosted by NBC News (my former employer) in front of a live audience of veterans and families of veterans, I decided to focus on the much-scrutinized topics of email servers and Iraq. Secretary Clinton’s assertion that she took her use of the private email server “very seriously” and “did exactly what I should have done” stood somewhat in contradiction to what FBI Director Comey said on July 5, when he clearly observed about Clinton’s staffers, “There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” In other words, if challenged, Secretary Clinton would have lost this round of fact-checking. Trump has claimed that he was against the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. In this case, I consulted Factcheck.org, which described a Sept. 11, 2002 appearance by Trump on “The Howard Stern Show” when the host asked Trump if he supported a war with Iraq, and Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so.” The YouTube video of this segment is like the replay that clearly shows that the ball came out before the knee touched the ground — it doesn’t lie. Working in media and technology, as we do here at Salon, I fully recognize that this concept, like any innovative idea, needs beta-testing. A director at Factcheck.org told me, “Holding candidates accountable for making false statements is an admirable goal, but live fact-checking is a dangerous thing to do.” He cautioned, “I would be wary of it and, in general, use it only if the statement in dispute already has been thoroughly researched and proven clearly false.” That’s a high bar, of course, and perhaps that’s just as well. The 2016 debates are only a couple of weeks away and we have some more work to do to get this concept ready for primetime. But an interim step could be taken immediately. Both CNN and MSNBC have begun using a fact-check crawl at the bottom of the screen during their coverage of speeches. This is a great first step, one we would like to see the commission mandate for all the networks carrying the debates, so that the viewing public could see the record set straight in real time. I am not naive enough to think that these actions would stop the deceptive remarks, but it would certainly make the candidates think twice about it — for once. Note: A phone message left yesterday to the commission was not returned.",REAL
"A 36-year-old U.S. man diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in March of this year is now being forced to confront the likelihood of losing his job should he choose to use marijuana for the purpose of relieving symptoms caused by his cancer and cancer treatments.
John Doe is a married father of one. He spent at least ten years as a biologist and environmental protection specialist and planned large scale projects to minimize environmental impacts. He also directed the cleanup of solid waste sites and oil spills for several federal agencies. (We granted him anonymity because if he is suspected of using marijuana he will be fired.)
He told Shadowproof that he hoped to move to the private sector in the months leading up to the diagnosis to be closer to his wife’s family or his own family. “But the diagnosis changed that, since a stage IV cancer patient can’t get life insurance on the private market and the health insurance available to federal employees was a better deal” for him than what was available under the Affordable Care Act. “It’s gotten worse since then.”
After experiencing complications with the prescribed medicines for his cancer, the doctor recommended medical marijuana, “which is required to get a card in the state I had been living in and also in the state in which I live now.”
Since marijuana is listed under the Controlled Substances Act as a schedule 1 substance by the DEA, doctors cannot prescribe it. “Dronabinol/Marinol gets around that by being a synthetic analog— apparently it’s okay if you pay a pharmaceutical company for it, but not okay if you grow it yourself,” Doe said.
Doe was never offered a prescription for dronabinol. Instead, it was recommended he use medical marijuana should he need nausea relief and appetite stimulation, and he used it when he needed it to function, “which was typically for the several days following chemo so that I could stop the nausea. It’s constant, by the way, readers should know that it does not come in waves, and there is no relief.”
But Doe had to hide his medical marijuana use from everyone. “Federal employees are barred from using any illegal drug and can be fired even if the use is on their own time away from work.”
“All federal employees receive a memo each year from their agency solicitor or DOJ reminding them specifically that medical marijuana is not recognized as valid by the DEA, and since all marijuana (except dronabinol) is listed as schedule 1, it’s use is ‘inconsistent with federal employment’ and employees can be fired if they are caught using it or if they test positive during a drug test.”
Unfortunately for Doe, drug testing is likely to expand from law enforcement, firefighters, commercial drivers, and seasonal employees to his position at the agency. Any employee may be forced to submit to a test if there is “reasonable suspicion” that employee is using drugs. “I’m not sure the threat of a lawsuit for discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act would help me forestall a drug test. I’d like to point out as well that my use has been limited to edibles, and that I do not work under the influence. When I use, it is after work so that I can eat.”
Back in August 2015, Doe suffered bouts of constipation and diarrhea, symptoms he assumed were triggered by all the stress brought on after having his first child. While the constipation and diarrhea diminished, the issues did not entirely go away.
Doe mentioned these symptoms to his doctor in October, who noticed that Doe had also lost around five or six pounds. “He then asked how the baby was doing and said that I was probably just dealing with stress and asked me to track how I feel and report back to him if things didn’t improve in a week.”
Things did not improve, and he found himself having to use the bathroom more often than usual. After another doctor’s visit, he was asked to make some dietary changes and prescribed a laxative and stool softener with instructions to call back after a week or two if things didn’t improve.
In November, after Doe’s symptoms continued to worsen, he made an appointment for a colonoscopy. Unfortunately, the hospital was booked so he had to wait.
By mid-January, he used the bathroom nearly 10 times a day. “[The doctor] finally ordered a thorough set of blood and stool tests to look for a range of disorders, parasites, etc. Results that came back in mid-February were all in the middle of reference range for blood chemistry and negative for parasites. According to the doctor, I was healthy as a horse, and he gave me a large stack of literature on irritable bowel syndrome. It was at this point that the hospital finally found time to get me in for a colonoscopy.”
In March, Doe finally had a colonoscopy. “I fell asleep on the gurney fully expecting to wake up and hear that it was IBS.” After waking up in the recovery room, the doctor came in and told him that she had some bad news. They found and removed a polyp in his sigmoid colon, which was the good news. He was then shown a picture of an obstruction a few inches further into his sigmoid colon.
“There was a obstructing tumor so large that she couldn’t push the scope beyond that point. Preliminary diagnosis was colon cancer,” he shared. They had to do a CT scan immediately to see if the cancer spread, and he needed surgery within a week to install a colostomy bag to bypass the blockage.
“I remember thinking, ‘Well, if they’d been able to get me in for a routine colonoscopy back in November I might not be in this situation,” followed by “I guess this means I can eat onions and garlic again since it’s not IBS.”
Days after having a CT scan, Doe went in to work to fill out several forms, “mostly making sure my designations of beneficiaries were current and submitting an open-ended sick leave request.” While he was there, he received a call from the gastroenterologist. “My CT results were in, and they weren’t good. In addition to the tumor in the colon I also had numerous tumors in my liver and lungs. That was…hard to hear.”
The doctors put off the consultation for surgery to install the colostomy until Wednesday of that week, but he didn’t make it that far. “My digestive tract was not happy after a full week of nothing but clear liquid, and I had trouble passing anything. My wife and I went to the emergency room on Tuesday and after waiting several hours had surgery to install the colostomy. That went well. Then we met with the local oncologist.”
Doe was told they would focus on palliative care with drugs, and that surgery was not an option. “I give you about a fifty percent shot at living another two years.”
He sought second opinions and got two, one at the University of Wisconsin and another at the University of Iowa. “Those doctors were more encouraging. Despite a stage IV diagnosis and spread [of cancer] to more than one distant organ, they held out hope that if my cancer responded well to chemotherapy perhaps we could consider surgery given my age and otherwise great health.”
As of publication, Doe has done one course, or twelve rounds, of FOLFOX plus Avastin. FOLFOX is a chemotherapy regimen for colorectal cancer, and Avastin is a cancer medicine that is supposed to disrupt the growth of cancer cells.
“I also took and continue to take several supplements my doctors have suggested to me: curcumin, vitamin D, vitamin E, etc. The tumor marker CEA in my blood samples dropped precipitously each time I went in for the next round of chemo, and CT scans at various points during treatment documented shrinkage of the tumors in the liver and lungs.”
While comparing his most recent CT scan to the first scan, doctors have pointed out just how much the tumors had shrunk and noted that some of the tumors in the liver appeared to be mostly dead. “They also said that given my response to chemo, they’d like to give me a shot at surgery. To do that, they need to grow the unaffected lobe of my liver before surgery and then the surgery, assuming it happens, will be a great big invasive procedure to remove the tumor in my colon, some lymph nodes, and the still-affected part of my liver, and burn out the remaining tumor tissue in my lungs. I am looking forward to that, believe it or not.”
Despite undergoing a series of traumatic symptoms, medical treatments, and consultations, Doe continues to work full time, and on a number of occasions he has worked during chemotherapy sessions in the hospital.
At first, the only side effects he felt from the chemotherapy were fatigue and nausea. He told Shadowproof that each chemo session involves receiving an IV drug that helps minimize nausea, and that he was also prescribed prochlorperazine, which is to be taken every 8 hours and scopolamine patches to wear behind his ear to prevent motion sickness.
The prochlorperazine worsened his fatigue, and after a few days of struggling to stay awake on prochlorperazine, he asked if there was anything else they could prescribe. “They gave me ondansetron, which also was to be taken every 8 hours. One doctor mentioned dronabinol, AKA marinol, synthetic THC (and approved by the FDA for treating nausea), but said that would be a last resort if nothing else worked.”
“I wondered why, since I had been researching the hell out of my treatment options and a lot of patients strongly suggested that marijuana was by far the best thing to prevent nausea and stimulate appetite. The ondansetron worked to a degree. By six hours into a dose, I would feel nauseous, and my appetite wasn’t good for several days following treatments. This worsened over time, such that my nausea and suppressed appetite would last longer and longer after chemo sessions.”
“I still continued to work but there would be long stretches of feeling uncomfortable when my nausea wasn’t controlled.”
Should Doe lose his federal employment because he is taking marijuana to help him through cancer treatment, it will mean he also loses the life insurance policy he has through the government. If he loses that, he would be unable replace it, “as no insurance company will underwrite a new policy for a stage IV cancer patient.”
“Being fired would cost my family dearly in the event that I die sooner rather than later, and losing the health insurance virtually guarantees that I would die sooner rather than later.”
The cost of Doe’s chemotherapy runs between $10,000 and $20,000, depending on the hospital. “The insurance for families has quite a few copays and an annual $11,000 deductible for the family, $5,000 for the first family member to reach that number. I hit $5,000 pretty quickly after my diagnosis so while I still make copays for my family’s medical care I haven’t had to pay any for myself since May of 2016.”
“I will have to start paying the deductible again on January 1 until I hit whatever deductible the insurance company sets for next year, which I assume will be higher than it was this year. I pay something like $350 a month for this insurance and the government pays an additional $900+ as part of my compensation package.
Doe continued, “I haven’t seen how much the premiums in my state of residence will be going up for 2017, but I know the number of providers has dropped to one or two and those providers have limits on office visits, larger copays, and higher deductibles that I currently pay. Were I to be drug tested and fired, I would have to make do with one of those plans that carries larger costs and offers fewer benefits.”
Right now, Doe has friends writing letters to the White House, their Representatives, and their Senators asking for either executive action to modify the 1986 Reagan Executive Order regarding off-duty drug use and to recognize state laws regarding medical marijuana. They are also helping him push for congressional action to grant marijuana the same exemption from the Controlled Substances Act “enjoyed by the alcohol and tobacco lobbies.”
“I’d like to note that the White House responses so far have been tone deaf, and that while the responses have focused on a supposed lack of any therapeutic use of marijuana—despite the FDA approval for dronabinol, lots of state laws, and lots of very sick people saying it works—to avoid action. I’d like to know what therapeutic use alcohol and nicotine serve.”
The White House’s response to these letters is distressing. It shows little concern for those impacted by blanket drug testing and zero tolerance drug policies. It reads in part:
“This Administration opposes marijuana legalization, and our policy approach focuses on improving public health and safety through prevention, treatment, support for recovery, and innovative criminal justice strategies to break the cycle of drug use and crime. A considerable body of evidence shows that marijuana use, especially chronic use that begins at a young age, is associated with serious health and social problems. Studies also reveal that marijuana potency has tripled since 1990, raising serious public health concerns.
At the same time, we share public concerns about ensuring limited Federal enforcement resources are dedicated to pursuing our highest enforcement priorities, such as preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors, preventing the sale of marijuana by criminal enterprises and gangs, preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana, and preventing drugged driving and other adverse public health consequences. We will also closely monitor implementation of marijuana legalization in individual States and prevent the diversion of marijuana to States that have not legalized its use, sale, or distribution. Outside of its highest enforcement priorities, the Federal Government has traditionally relied on State and local agencies to address marijuana activity through enforcement of their own narcotics laws.”
Attorney Stefan Borst-Censullo, Counsel to Hoban Law Group, who specializes in cannabis legislation, explained that the federal government “defined the idea that employers have the right to terminate for off work drug use, and they’ve continued this tradition, regardless of state laws for medical marijuana.”
Borst-Censullo told Shadowproof that this applies to “everyone,” as there is no existing marijuana law in the states which offers worker protection to patients, “and most state courts that look at the issue side with federal supremacy.” When it comes to whether or not medical marijuana users should be hopeful that they will see any changes, Borst-Censullo says no.
“The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against a man with [multiple scoliosis] who was being blatantly discriminated against due to his ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act] status. But because marijuana is federally illegal, ADA doesn’t apply,” Borst-Censullo added.
Doe hoped more exposure will pressure the President and Congress “to step into the 21st century” because “that is apparently what it will take to allow people access to medicine they need without fear of punishment for simply trying to control nausea or pain.” This isn’t just for him, he said. “This is for anybody and everybody in my situation.” He added, “And there are many of us.”
The post Federal Employee With Stage IV Cancer May Lose Job For Taking Medical Marijuana appeared first on Shadowproof .
",FAKE
"WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced Tuesday that gay and lesbian troops for the first time will be protected from discrimination by the same equal opportunity policy that protects other servicemembers.

Carter announced the change at the Pentagon's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride event.

The change ensures that gay and lesbian troops' complaints about discrimination based on sexual orientation will be investigated by the Military Equal Opportunity program, the same office that handles complaints based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

""Discrimination of any kind has no place in America's armed forces,"" Carter said. The military needs ""to be a meritocracy.""

The Pentagon rescinded its ""don't ask, don't tell"" policy in 2011. Under it, gay and lesbian troops could be kicked out of service if their sexual orientation became known.

""With this policy revision, we are now ensuring that servicemembers are afforded protection against discrimination in the department's military equal opportunity program, provided to all military members,"" said Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman.

Previously, gay and lesbian troops were required to register discrimination complaints with inspector general offices.

Carter called diversity critical to developing the troops the Pentagon will need for future battles. Excluding qualified troops, he said, is ""bad defense policy.""

Carter spoke before a standing-room-only crowd of troops from each service, from enlisted personnel to general officers and top civilian officials.

Amanda Simpson, the highest-ranking transgender official at the Pentagon, told the audience she has her Army post not because of her gender but ""because I happen to be the best person to do the job.""

The military still can kick out transgender troops for what it terms health reasons. However, the Army and the Air Force have made that process more difficult by requiring senior civilian officials to approve the discharges. The Williams Institute, a think-tank at the UCLA Law School that concentrates on issues regarding sexual orientation, estimates there are 15,000 transgender troops serving in the military.

A review of military health policies, including the transgender ban, is underway, Christensen said.

""The current periodic review is expected to take between 12-18 months; it is not a specific review of the department's transgender policy,"" Christensen said.

Before dumping the ""don't ask, don't tell"" policy, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, the Pentagon conducted a nine-month study on the effect of rescinding it. That effort, led by Army Gen. Carter Ham in 2010, determined that the risks of repeal were low and manageable.

Army Brig. Gen. Randy Taylor, who emceed Tuesday's ceremony, said he had to conceal his sexual orientation for most of his career, which included deployments to Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Taylor singled out his husband for his sacrifice, and Carter shook his hand to loud applause.",REAL
"Language can obscure as much as it reveals. It’s important, now more than ever, to be clear, to call things by their proper name; to do otherwise is to risk confusion where none exists. What happened in Charleston was terrorism. Period. And terrorism, whatever else it is, is not senseless; it’s precisely the opposite.

Terror is a tactic, not a cause. This is a crucially important distinction. Terrorists are calculating: they do what they do in order to inspire fear. If Dylann Roof had decided, on a whim, to gun down the first people he encountered – that would be senseless. But Dylann Roof was no nihilist. He believed in something. He was a racist. And he was propelled by specific ideas – about history, about black people, about white supremacy, and about various other cultural mythologies. “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” he remarked just before filling that church and those bodies with holes. These are not the words of a mentally ill person committing a senseless act; they are the cold, clear thoughts of a man on a mission, a man who knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. And this is why Dylann Roof is a terrorist.

It’s been troubling to watch the media vacillate in their coverage of this story. Was it a hate crime? Was it terrorism? If there’s clarity about anything at all here, it’s about the motivations of the killer. He’s a terrorist, and he told us so. He wanted to send a message. Was he motivated by hate? Sure. But the act itself was terroristic by any measure.

As many have pointed out, the media is unsure about what constitutes terrorism only when white people are the perpetrators. White men with guns are “lone wolves” or “mentally ill” or depraved criminals. Brown men with bombs are very obviously “terrorists.” This is a double standard with consequences. “Terrorism” is a word that resonates; it inspires urgency and collective action, both of which are needed if we’re to deal with the underlying problems. If white people can’t, by definition, be terrorists, then the term has no practical meaning; it’s about the actor, not the act. If terrorism is something only brown people do, then we should be honest and admit that. We should say that terrorism is about the color of the criminal, not the intent of the crime.

Equivocating about the nature of the crime has an additional consequence: It diminishes the role of ideas. We can think of the human brain as a piece of hardware, and of ideas as software motivating behavior. Rather than focusing on the mental state of the murderer, we should be talking about the ideas that inspired the murders. Dylann Roof believed his country was under assault by black people. He walked into that church and killed those people under the delusion that he was a soldier in a war. The question is why did he think this? Where did he get this idea?

We can’t know for sure, but here’s what we do know: Everyone saw this coming. In 2013, the DHS released a report warning of a growing danger from right-wing extremists. Indeed, officials believed domestic terrorism to be a greater threat than Islamic militants. Echoing this theme, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that domestic hate groups, often under the guise of “patriot groups,” have increased significantly since 2008, the year Obama was elected. I don’t know whether Dylann Roof was an active member of any of these groups, but it’s clear that he believed in and espoused their ideology. These findings ought to have inspired concern from the political and media establishment. However, because of the confusion about what terrorism is and who terrorists are, there was nothing but outrage on the right. House Republican Leader, John Boehner, dismissed the report as “offensive and unacceptable.” Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis called it “political and ideological profiling.” Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin wrote that it “was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read.” These people failed us. They failed, in part, because they were too consumed with foreign enemies to notice the presence of internal ones. They failed because they refused to see what was right in front of their faces. And they failed because they remained blind to the power of ideas, of rhetoric. For years, right-wing demagogues have propagated this myth that the country was under siege by black people and immigrants and communists and radical liberals and so on. Much of the Tea Party movement was motivated by this ideology. Conservative leaders decided, for political reasons, to indulge this, to capitalize on it. Perhaps that was wise as a political strategy, but there are consequences: You whip people into a frenzy for long enough, someone, eventually, is going to cross that line. Dylann Roof crossed that line. He was a homegrown terrorist. And he was the product of a nativist ideology of white supremacy, the flag of which flies still over the state capitol of South Carolina. Perhaps now we can reckon with the roots of this truth. That starts with calling it what it is: racially-motivated terrorism.",REAL
"Pinterest 
There have been plenty of stories of voter fraud across the country, but a photoshopped picture has taken the internet by storm. In it, Donald Trump’s name is left off of the ballot whil Hillary Clinton’s is listed twice. 
The doctored photo hit Twitter and has since been re-tweeted tens of thousands of times. Take a look at the picture for yourself: 
— Hatrick Penry (@Hatrick__Penry) October 24, 2016 Hey guys, seriously? How is this not viral yet? Are we going to be taken as that stupid and let it go? This is an Oregon Ballot. pic.twitter.com/4eSSrK3aaB 
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) October 27, 2016 
About an hour after John Laussier started the hoax, he took responsibility for it and admitted that it wasn’t real: “In case its not super obvious that last tweet from me is a hoax. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet folks.” Is Trump on the Oregon ballot? YES. But a hoax grabbed a lot of retweets today. Official sample ballot >>> https://t.co/LR1smKW2pO pic.twitter.com/WvMIhyzUHz 
— KVAL News (@KVALnews) October 21, 2016 
“I’m hoping people figure out soon this was fake, and, in the future, look at what they’re passing on,” Laussier told KATU . “We’ve got to act responsibly. Get out your ballots, take a good hard look, and vote with some research!” 
Laussier told KATU that it was “irresponsible of me to post the tweet,” and he apologized. LawNewz reported : 
The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office told KGQ that they are evaluating whether the hoax violated election law. Spokesperson Molly Woon emphasized to the television station that the Oregon Secretary of State is “confident” in the election process. 
While Laussier makes a good point about people being discerning about what they share on the internet, there are a couple of important points here. 
First, there is good reason for people to be vigilant about voter fraud . There are numerous reports of the problem across the country and it’s good that people are paying attention. 
Second, the mainstream media is largely in the tank for Clinton and operates as a propaganda machine. Most people don’t have the time — or if they do, don’t have the resources — to thoroughly vet something they come across. You know who has both? The media… but they refuse to do so because of their bias. 
If this ballot was real, people may have been able to force change by bringing light to what would have been a serious problem. 
That certainly doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be discerning or that they should repost or re-tweet everything they come across. There’s something to be said for people being vigilant, paying attention, and forcing those in the media and those in positions to do something about it to take a look. 
Now, that doesn’t mean that people should automatically believe that something’s true and adjust their beliefs/voting decision because of it; it just means that it’s good that people are paying attention and forcing those in a position to check it out to do so. 
While Laussier’s tweet was an interesting experiment, the timing was poor given the rampant voter fraud going on throughout the country. This was a hoax, but there are plenty of instances where it isn’t, and people shouldn’t be discouraged from being vigilant about it.",FAKE
"Oct 26, 2016 3:50 PM 0 
Submitted by Claudio Grass via Acting-Man.com, The U.S. Elections: The Latest Crack in the System 
The 2016 U.S. presidential elections are unprecedented: I don’t believe we have ever witnessed before a campaign year so toxic, so dangerously divisive and full of ad hominem attacks. Both camps have vilified the opposition and their followers, creating a schism in society. There has been no rational dialogue on the issues that truly concern the American public. 
The schism 
Instead, we have witnessed personal insults and petty attacks, rumors and gossip. At this point, as a result of this catastrophic campaign, the public will not vote in favor of the candidate they agree with the most or the one they like, but against the one they hate! 
In this article, we do not focus on comparisons between Clinton and Trump; enough has been said and written about the candidates themselves. Here, we look at their supporters – the crowd behind the candidates, those that will in fact shape American policy making in the coming four years. 
Hillary Clinton: The Establishment Remains in Control 
The most important and formidable group within those backing Clinton belong to the upper echelon of society: Wall Street’s movers and shakers, big business, the top of the political pyramid and the servants and profiteers of the public sector. In one word: the establishment. 
Clinton’s support base includes therefore practically everyone who profits from government regulations and government corruption – they have everything to lose if Hillary doesn’t win. It is the same group that advocates and leads the political correctness movement ; they are those state-bred and fed intellectuals who poison the university campus and mass media circus with their belief that they can transform the U.S. into a “utopia”. 
The candidate anointed by the Deep State 
In reality, this “utopia” will be created through intense centralization, endless wars and plundering, only to create a totalitarian government where the political elite enforces its will and instructs the public on how to live a happy life, which only benefits the top strata of society that designed it in the first place. Years ago, Jewish American philosopher Hannah Arendt summarized the toxic impact of political correctness as follows: 
“There is no thought process without freedom. To deprive man of his liberty is to deprive him of his own ideas, and if one is not allowed to think, only subjugation and slavery remain.” 
This can only be achieved through a strong foothold on the centralized state and its propaganda engine, the mass media, operating under the doctrine of Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, better known as public relations. 
Then there’s the other extreme of Clinton’s supporters: the artificially created underprivileged minorities. These groups have come to depend on the state for support and protection, which has also made it easy for the state to indoctrinate them and reset their mindset to its advantage. 
Those are the people who have fallen in the trap of thinking that only the state can provide them with what they need for a good life, when in reality it only disempowered them. The globalist Clinton herself accuses Trump of “populism”, casting “nationalism” in a negative light, but she is actually the one promising free lunches for everyone: lenient immigration laws, higher minimum wages, universal healthcare, etc. 
Clinton also preaches against income inequality and condemns Wall Street greed in her speeches, while her campaign cashes in from Wall Street’s finest: JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. 
Under those circumstances… what can you possibly do? Ms. Clinton’s top five donors are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, DLA Piper, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Somehow we don’t think Wall Street has reason to fear her much. Trump – the Greatest Politically Incorrect Shock in Decades? 
Whenever people are forced by the government to accept and pay for things they do not want, the outcome is discontent and opposition, typically suppressed and downplayed by the mainstream media in accordance with the state’s agenda of political correctness. This further escalates the situation and things often take unpleasant turns, including the fostering of racist and bigoted subsections that we see within the Trump voting base. 
But they are not the majority, not by long shot! One might get this impression, because the mainstream media tend to focus exclusively on this sub-set of supporters through footage and interviews at Trump rallies, because they are considered “interesting” material; after all, they say outrageously horrible things and are therefore great for TV sensationalism. 
What does Donald Trump stand for? From my perspective, for anything and everything! He stands for everyone who is sick and tired of the current system and the political elite who have grown out of touch with ordinary American citizens. You will find them among the working class, small business owners, and the segment of society that used to be known as the middle class before the crisis; they all harbor grievances against the establishment. 
There have been a few halfhearted attempts to paint Trump as part of the establishment because he is rich and has always hobnobbed with the elite as a result of his social status, but they have generally failed. For one thing, he is not a politician. For another thing, his consistent political incorrectness and the list of his political enemies (which includes many Republican Deep State zombies) has simply made it impossible to lump him with the establishment. 

These are people who understand that the slogan “the Union and the Constitution forever” has been under attack and downgraded to nothing more than an empty phrase by the power elite and the Deep State. We see first hand how the Patriot Act directly violates not only the first amendment’s guarantee of free speech, but also the fourth and fifth amendments, thereby tearing apart the very foundation of a country once based on respect for civil liberties. 
There is no doubt that the second amendment will be crushed under Clinton as well, “regulating to extinction” the natural right to self-defense and personal sovereignty. We must never forget that we are born with inherent rights, that can neither be granted nor taken away from us by the State. As Judge Napolitano once put it: 
“Natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government. As our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. 

A natural right is an area of individual human behavior – like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy – immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.” 
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face to face in the last of three presidential debates under the banner of “The Union And The Constitution Forever” 

Even though polls suggest that Trump is trailing nationally, they probably underestimate exactly how big the Trump wave is, and it is significant: between 74% and 83% of Republicans said they will support him (according to polls conducted between Oct 9 th -11 th ). But there is also the silent majority that has been present at his rallies. This silent majority does not necessarily consist of Trump fans, but they do not want to see the country falling into the abyss of state centralization and political correctness. A sign often seen at Trump rallies these days – which continue to attract lots of people. Only recently, 20,000 deplorables came to see Trump at a rally in Tampa, while Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine motivated a grand total of 50 people to come and hear him speak in West Palm Beach (reportedly they weren’t particularly enthusiastic; we don’t know how many of the 50 were from the press). 

They want to discontinue the economic system that has taken them from bad to worse – they are the American version of the European anti-establishment movement. They are well aware of Trump’s coarse character and crude remarks, but feel they can overlook that, for the sake of his main strategic advantage: Trump’s promise that he does not want America to be controlled by the establishment anymore. 
A Tale of Two Hatreds 
“Politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching… then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.” Hillary Clinton, National Multi-Housing Council, April 2013 
One key reason behind the peoples’ hostility towards Clinton is that she personally embodies the hypocrisy and the hubris of the U.S. federal government itself: a government that maims and kills millions with its war on terror, it arms and supports murderous regimes and ideological fanatics and it is known to deploy chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And yet, it somehow pretends to hold the moral high ground and lectures others on human rights. 
Just as America is an “exceptional” country, for which normal standards don’t apply, Clinton is its “exceptional” candidate. She accuses her opponent of populism, when her own platform is entirely based on crowd-pleasing promises. 
She calls Trump’s policies fascistic while her own would put the final nail on the coffin of free speech. She claims to stand up for the little guy, while she funds her campaign with Wall Street money. She positions herself as the defender of minorities’ and women’s rights, while her Foundation accepts donations from the most oppressive regimes on the planet. 
Defending the rights of women isn’t cheap, so obviously one can’t be too picky and choosy about one’s donors. 

At the same time, the American electorate also feels hostility for Trump; that hate is not equivalent though, as few would argue he is trying to hide who he is. The reason why so many dislike him is very different, and it has to do with the identity he projects. He is the ultimate “anti-intellectual”. 
Of course the term “intellectual” is quite broad these days, and many intellectuals dislike Trump solely because of what it would say about who they are (in the eyes of their like-minded peers). But these people share a common denominator: they are educated beyond their intelligence and critically depend on repeating what other “intellectual” people say, as they feel (consciously or not) their ignorance would be exposed if they dared to express an original idea. 
Trump’s world, according to a recent NYT cartoon. The statist intelligentsia certainly feels threatened by Trump. 
The Day After: The Legacy of a Bitter Campaign Year 
Unfortunately, whoever wins, the nation will pay a price for this “divide and conquer” rhetoric. Americans today are too polarized and the tensions that are brewing in the background will not just go away the day after the election: racial and social divisions, as well as the split caused by the choice between a planned vs. a free market economy, a big or a small government. 
Under Trump, we can only hope that America will be given time to heal and to overcome these divisions. Free speech is key: Society can only heal if it returns to a culture of debate with a willingness to agree to disagree. 
From what we know from modern American history, we shouldn’t be surprised that the financial markets appear to prefer Hillary over Trump. Wall Street, the bankers and the military industrial complex are expected to continue to thrive under President Clinton. The establishment will live on. Right now the establishment is seemingly pushing for war against Russia and Clinton is undeniably on board with this aggressive narrative. 
And then we have Trump, who is certainly far from perfect. His objectification of women, his comments about Muslims and minorities, his crass demeanor: All these have made it very hard for him to find support for his genuine policy points. Will the “silent majority” be able to actually swing the election for Trump? Although the mainstream media seem to be of one mind regarding the election outcome, we certainly wouldn’t rule it out. If ever there was a candidate provoking the “Bradley effect” in polls, it is surely Trump. Moreover, thanks to Wikileaks it is by now public knowledge that the polls are indeed rigged . Readers may recall that we have expressed doubts about the accuracy of poll sampling methods already some time ago. 

Even if the actual net effect of his policies were to benefit women, he won’t get them on his side by calling them pigs – there is a difference between free speech and just being plain rude, uncivil and vulgar. We may disagree with his infamous “wall” with Mexico and demands for “a new budget to rebuild our depleted military” (which makes him no different from Clinton). But he is an outsider, a businessman, and most importantly, a crack in system! 
He challenges the status quo, and that’s why the status quo attacks him, by trying to ridicule both him and his voters, by painting them as extremists, or as ignorant and racist. The question is, why don’t we just let Trump be Trump? 
As he himself said: “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to!” . Consider the boldness of this statement – regardless of whether one agrees with him, he stands confidently for his principles and ideas, even against his own party’s leaders (many of which have withdrawn their support). This is a clear projection of power and independence; it says that no one can dictate their demands to him. It says that he is unafraid to speak his mind. 
I say, we should trust his followers. It seems clear that most Trump voters are striving to defend the essence of the constitution and its original intent – to be the basis of a free society. And for me as a believer in civil rights and sovereignty, this is enough to give him or let me rather say, his voters, the benefit of the doubt.",FAKE
"MI5 Chief Gives First Ever Interview to Press, Hypes 'Aggressive Russia' 
The first time an active MI5 chief has spoken to the press   Antiwar.com 
The first time a top British spy has ever given a newspaper interview, MI5 chief Andrew Parker has spoken with the Guardian , playing up the “growing threat” posed by Russia against British interests around the world. 
Parker claimed a “whole range of state organs and powers” in Russia are being brought to bear against Britain and the US, claiming that the advent of cyberwarfare has increased the number of ways in which Russia can move against them. 
Parker went on to claim that Russia defines itself by opposition to the West and, despite being a “covert threat for decades” has been increasingly hostile, citing their operations in Ukraine and Syria as proof that they are acting to just spite the West. 
This has been a common western talking point, but in practice Western (read: US) policy in both Ukraine and Syria appears to have itself been built with an eye toward being on the opposite side from Russia in the first place, and Russia is then condemned for acting in their own interests. 
This was particularly glaring in Syria, where Russia’s interest was obviously in the survival of a friendly Syrian government to host their naval base, and where “countering” Russia has brought the US “anti-ISIS coalition” into increasingly overt support for al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front, simply because they’re the ones most directly fighting against Russia.",FAKE
"Home / Be The Change / Antiwar / Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies Russia is Hoarding Gold at an Alarming Rate — The Next World War Will Be Fought with Currencies Jay Syrmopoulos October 26, 2016 1 Comment 
Moscow, Russia – With all eyes on Russia’s unveiling their latest nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which NATO has dubbed the “SATAN” missile , as tensions with the U.S. increase, Moscow’s most potent “weapon” may be something drastically different. 
The rapidly evolving geopolitical “weapon” brandished by Russia is an ever increasing stockpile of gold, as well as Russia’s native currency, the ruble. 
Take a look at the symbol below, as it could soon come to change the entire hierarchy of the international order – potentially ushering in a complete international paradigm shift – and much sooner than you might think. 
The symbol is the new designation of the Russian ruble, Russia’s national currency. 
Similar to how the U.S. uses the dollar sign ($), the U.K. uses the pound sign (£), and the European Union uses the euro symbol (€), Russia is about to begin exporting its symbol internationally. 
After the failed “reset” in U.S./Russian relations by the Obama administration, and the continued deterioration of the countries relationship, Washington began targeting entire sectors of the Russian economy, as well as specific individuals, meant to impose an economic burden so severe that it would force Moscow into compliance. 
Instead of decimating Russia, what it precipitated was a Russian response of gradually weaning themselves off of the hegemony of the U.S. petrodollar, and working with China to create an alternative to the SWIFT payment system that isn’t solely controlled by Western interests (see Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank , New Development Bank). 
According to the Corbett Report : 
New reports indicate that China is ready to launch its SWIFT alternative, and for those who have their ear to the ground this is the most significant move yet in the unfolding process of de-dollarization that is seeing the BRICS-led “resistance bloc” breaking away from the financial stranglehold of the US-led “Washington Consensus.” 
For those who don’t know, SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is shorthand for the SWIFTNet Network that is used by over 10,500 financial institutions in 215 countries and territories to transmit financial transaction data around the world. SWIFT does not do any of the clearing or processing for these transactions itself, but instead sends the payment orders that are then settled by correspondent banks of the member institutions. Still, given the system’s near universality in the financial system, it means that virtually every international transaction between banking institutions goes through the SWIFT network. 
This is why de-listing from the SWIFT network remains one of the primary financial weapons wielded by the US and its allies in their increasingly important financial warfare campaigns. 
Recently, financial guru Jim Rickards, author of the book “Currency Wars,” wrote that “Russia is poised for a major comeback in its economy. Russian bonds and stocks and the Russian currency, the ruble, will all benefit.” Rickards believes a “strong turnaround” is coming within Russia, and that this comeback will benefit the ruble. 
While still suffering from the economic warfare being waged by the U.S., Russia has realized that as long they are subservient to the petrodollar, there remains a clear and present danger of the Russian economy being devastated by the whims of Washington. 
The Bank of Russia, that nation’s central bank, is extremely clear about its mission, and monetary policy declaring on its website: 
Monetary policy constitutes an integral part of the state policy and is aimed at enhancing well-being of Russian citizens. The Bank of Russia implements monetary policy in the framework of inflation-targeting regime, and sees price stability, albeit sustainably low inflation, as its priority. Given structural peculiarities of the Russian economy, the target is to reduce inflation to 4% by 2017 and maintain it within that range in the medium run. 
In layman’s terms, that means that monetary policy, similar to nuclear weapons and the military, are “an integral part of the state policy” in Russia. While many analysts have noted the increased build-up in Russia’s military arsenal, seemingly few have highlighted the massive build-up of Russian gold reserves over the past decade. 
Below is a chart showing Russian gold reserves between 1994 and last year, 2015: 
Since 2006, there has been a year-on-year increase that reveals a significant upward trend. The chart clearly reveals that Russia’s state policy of increasing state monetary assets, in the form of gold. Additionally, the Russian government has been converting state rubles into gold assets. From 2006 to 2015, Russia’s state holdings of gold tripled. 
Within just the past year Russia has substantially increased its gold holdings 
According to the Business Insider : 
In July of this year, the central bank of Russia added 200,000 ounces of gold to its reserves. The one-month uptick in Russian gold reserves — 200,000 ounces — is approximately equal to the entire annual output of Barrick Gold’s Turquoise Ridge gold mine in Nevada. 
At that same rate — 200,000 ounces per month — in a mere five months, Russia would add to state gold reserves the equivalent of the entire annual output of Barrick’s massive Goldstrike mine in Nevada. 
Currently, Russian gold reserves rank seventh in the world. It’s clear that there is a concerted effort by Russian authorities to build up the country’s gold reserves as part of a national strategy to negate the effects of economic warfare waged by the United States. 
Rickards, in his 2011 book “Currency Wars,” theorized that Russia and China could combine their gold reserves to form a global gold-backed currency to compete against the U.S. dollar. Currently, Russian reserves stand at roughly 1,500 tonnes, with Chinese reserves totaling over 1,800 tonnes (according to China — it’s likely more), which would amount to a combined total of roughly 3,300 tonnes of gold. 
The U.S. is about to lose overarching control of policymaking within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), thus the U.S. lockup on global gold is about to vanish, according to Business Insider. 
Imagine for a moment the distinctly real possibility that Russian-Chinese alliance could exercise indirect (or even direct) control over the IMF’s gold reserve of over 2,800 tonnes. Russian, Chinese and IMF gold combined would equal roughly 6,100 tonnes, and would allow for direct competition with the U.S. gold reserves, estimated at 8,100 tonnes. 
Russia and China have realized that the petrodollar is wielded by Washington as it’s weapon of choice when opposing a well-armed state, and clearly see the writing on the wall – thus working together to create a new global financial paradigm. 
The reality is that the United States is $20 trillion dollars in debt, and eventually the time will come when the U.S. economy begins to implode — and all the fiat currency people are stuck holding will essentially be worth nothing more than the paper it’s printed on. Hard assets, such as gold and silver, should be bought and taken custody of while there is still an opportunity to do so, as a means of hedging against the potentially disastrous results of the U.S. using the petrodollar as a “weapon.” 
It’s not Russian nuclear weapons that people should fear, as the policy of mutually assured destruction essentially voids any benefit of a state launching a first-strike nuclear attack. The true threat to America is our economic house of cards, built upon the back of a neoliberal trade policy that puts the “rights” of corporations over that of people . 
Ultimately, the United States, Russia and China are all controlled by centralized power-hungry tyrants attempting to command powerful global bureaucracies like the IMF, the World Bank, SWIFT, New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Share Google + T. Mohr 
Tell the Red Queen and her arms manufacturing friends that. Bullets and bombs will never go out of style with these murderers. Social Trending",FAKE
"Sustainable salt water battery won't corrode and can power your home for 10 years Nov 14, 2016 0 0 
A new home battery has been developed and released that runs off of salt water instead of acid, making for a sustainably created piece of technology that can charge your home for years . 
Conventional lead-acid batteries use two lead plates, submerged in a solution of sulfuric acid and water. The sulfuric acid is highly toxic and can burn and damage the environment if the battery leaks. These batteries use a solution of salt water instead of acid and the results are astounding. 
As opposed to lead-acid batteries, which can only be discharged to about 50% of their capacity, these salt water batteries can be discharged to 90%, meaning they can utilized 40% more of their energy per charge. 
Each battery can handle 3,000 discharges, meaning they can last 3,000 days and nights. They are also stackable, useful for increasing your power needs. 
Another awesome feature is that these batteries won’t catch on fire like lead-acid batteries. 
If you’re interested in purchasing one, you can, through Aquion’s website . They are sustainably sourced and built and they don’t corrode. 
Legit.",FAKE
"Home / Be The Change / Filming Cops / Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results The Free Thought Project October 26, 2016 Comments Off on Ever Google Yourself? Do a “Deep Search” Instead, but brace yourself for the results 
12 – sponsored content by 
Ever try Googling someone only to come up with basic information and maybe a link or two to an outdated social media profile? There’s a new website going around that promises to reveal much more than just a simple google search can show you. 
Been issued a speeding ticket? Failed to stop at a stop sign? What about your family members? And friends? If you are like most of us, the answer to at least one of those questions is “yes”—the vast majority of us have slipped up at least once or twice. 
An innovative new website — Instant Checkmate is now revealing the full “scoop” on millions of Americans. 
Instant Checkmate aggregates hundreds of millions of publicly available criminal, traffic, and arrest records and posts them online so they can easily be searched by anyone. Members of the site can literally begin searching within seconds, and are able to check as many records as they like (think: friends, family, neighbors, etc. etc.). 
Previously, if you wanted to research someone’s arrest records, you might have had to actually go into a county court office—in the appropriate county—and formally request information on an individual. This process may have taken days or weeks, or the information might not have been available at all. With websites like Instant Checkmate , however, a background check takes just a few clicks of the mouse, and no more than a minute or two. 
While preparing this article, I decided to run a quick search on myself to give the service a real-world test. To my dismay, the search revealed several items I’d long forgotten—one of them being for the possession of a fake ID I was (embarrassingly) issued back in college when I was just 18 years old. “possession of a fake ID I was (embarrassingly) issued back in college when I was just 18 years old” 
After searching myself and finding those records, my curiosity was piqued, and I began researching family members—apparently my aunt Susanne isn’t a very good driver, judging by the numerous traffic citations that showed on her record. 
One of the most interesting aspects of Instant Checkmate is that it shows not only criminal records, but also more general background information like court records, various types of licenses (FAA, DEA), previous addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, estimated income levels and even satellite imagery of known addresses—it’s really pretty scary just how much information is in these reports. 
In addition to giving information on the specific person you search for, the report also includes a scrolling list of “local sex offenders” for whatever region you’ve searched—along with a map plotting out the locations of those offenders. I started perusing the ones that showed up in my report, and I was absolutely blown away when I stumbled upon my junior high school wrestling coach’s mug shot. 
“I was absolutely blown away when I stumbled upon my junior high school wrestling coach’s mug shot.” 
His crime was listed as “Out of state offense,”” so I wasn’t able to get the specifics (you usually can—this was an unusual case), but he was definitely a registered sex offender. Scary stuff. 
I would definitely recommend this tool to friends and family. Anyone can start running background checks on Instant Checkmate within a few seconds—just click this link to get started. If you would like to search someone you know, click here . Note from the Author 
I have to warn you before you start your search, the information you find may be overwhelming and has the potential of changing your view of the search subject forever. Keep this in mind when completing your search . – Heidi R.",FAKE
By Isaac Davis How is the government going to get people to pay their taxes if the government is not viewed as legitimate? ~ Catherine... ,FAKE
"4 Fascinating Things Quantum Physics Does In Nature By Michael Danielson on November 9, 2015 Subscribe 
Quantum Physics is a subject that is often discarded by everyday people as too esoteric or too new-agey (depending on which kind of QM you read about) to be useful in everyday life. We have all been introduced to QM as “the science of stuff too small to really matter to everyday life.” But recent developments in biological science have revealed that life itself puts powerful quantum mechanical principles to use as an everyday part of its function. “Quantum Biology” is one of the forefronts of modern science. Quantum Physics in Bird Navigation 
We’ve known for decades that many species of birds migrate each year, most famously from north to south as the temperature drops in the temperate zones. But how they navigate during those migrations has always been a mystery. The magnetic field the Earth produces is terribly weak compared to the other forces that act on an animal’s body. Furthermore, biologists knew from studies that birds’ compasses are light-dependent, and that they detect magnetic fields relative to the surface of the planet, not the poles. 
It wasn’t until the rule of quantum entanglement developed that we began to develop a theory of how bird compasses worked. Without delving too far into the science, the theory is that bird’s eyes contain a protein that itself contains millions of entangled electrons. When light enters the bird’s eye, it knocks some of those entangled electrons loose, but leaves others attached to the protein molecules. 
The “loose” electrons are much more dramatically affected by the Earth’s magnetic field than the bound ones are, but the entanglement means the bound electrons move the same way. The subsequent “wiggling” of the protein that the bound electrons are attached to can be perceived by the bird’s retina and translated by its brain into a “picture” of the magnetic field it’s flying through. Quantum Physics in Photosynthesis 
Plants, it seems, use quantum mechanics for one of the most important aspects of life on Earth: turning sunlight into the power that life runs on. The biggest mystery of photosynthesis for as long as we’ve understood it is “how is photosynthesis so efficient?” Our best machines achieve efficiencies of upwards of 30% — photosynthetic transfer of energy is upwards of 99% efficient. There are so many directions a photon could travel once it gets captured by a molecule of chlorophyll that science had no idea how such a high proportion of photons made it to the “reaction center” where they were used in building new molecules. 
The answer turns out to be quantum coherence , the ability of a quantum particle to act like a wave until something “decoheres” it. The theory is that photons enter plant cells, are captured by chlorophyll, and rather than traveling in a particle-like manner, they travel as waves , and the “reaction center” has the ability to decohere those waves back into particle (photon) form. Quantum Physics In Your Digestion 
Enzymes are catalysts — chemicals that trigger other chemical creations. But for decades, scientists have been unable to determine how enzymes can speed up reactions so much: up to a trillion times faster than they would naturally occur. Recent research has shown that enzymes may be a trigger of quantum coherence — as above — using the “wave side” of the wave-particle quality to cause electrons and even protons to simply “teleport” from one atom to another, bypassing the need for time, heat, and all of the other factors that enable or speed up classical chemical reactions. Quantum Physics In Your Sense of Self 
Finally, worthy of a mention in passing is the theory being debated right now by many scientists: that quantum mechanics are fundamental to our consciousness . For centuries, humans have proposed “second processing systems” in the brain or body that run parallel to our normal neuron firings, and that these overlapping systems are what give rise to our ability to mentally separate ourselves from our circumstances — what we call “being conscious.” 
Recent evidence has come up that the cytokine in the brain — what we used to think of as the “brain’s skeleton,” holding it all together — is in fact a massive quantum processor. Laced with what the scientists call “microtubules” that vibrate at incredible speeds, the cytokine system appears to be operating on the quantum level as a “trinary” computer — able to hold values of ‘on,’‘off,’ and the quantum superposition of being both on and off at the same time. 
What exactly this would enable our “secondary processing system” to accomplish is currently being explored — but the results, if we find them, are bound to change a lot of our fundamental assumptions about what we, as human beings, are capable of. 
Featured image courtesy of Cristóbal Alvarado Minic via Flickr. Shared using a Creative Commons license. About Michael Danielson 
Michael ""Mr. Write"" Danielson is a full-time writer based in Shelton, Washington with a live-in research assistant he also happens to be married to and a live-in research dissistant who also happens to be his 7-year-old son. He's politically oriented in the same direction that a vial of Bernie Sanders' tears blessed by Pope Francis in a civil ceremony attended by Noam Chomsky and the entire administrative body of Planned Parenthood then sprinkled over the ghost of FDR by the light of the final episode of Phineas and Ferb playing on a projection TV powered entirely by kombucha and seitan would be oriented. He is not afraid of complex, run-on sentences as long as they get the point across, preferably with a little bit of poetry in. Also, he's really, intensely fond of bleeding-edge quantum physics research, and posts often on Quora about how everyone has economics all wrong. Like, all of it. Connect",FAKE
"Politics FBI Director James Comey (AFP file photo) 
Hillary Clinton’s top advisers blame FBI Director James Comey for the Democrat’s bruising loss to President-elect Donald Trump. 
Navin Nayak, the head of the Clinton campaign’s opinion research division, sent an email to senior staffers Thursday, outlining “early signals” as to why the candidate lost the November 8 presidential election, POLITICO reported on Friday. 
“We believe that we lost this election in the last week,” said Nayak’s email, which was published by POLITICO. “ Comey’s letter in the last 11 days of the election both helped depress our turnout and also drove away some of our critical support among college-educated white voters — particularly in the suburbs.” 
“We also think Comey’s 2nd letter, which was intended to absolve Sec. Clinton, actually helped to bolster Trump’s turnout,” he continued. 
The letter also highlighted several other challenges the Clinton team faced throughout the campaign, including a desire for change after two terms by a Democratic president and the reluctance of some Americans to vote for a female candidate. Hillary Clinton makes a concession speech after being defeated by Donald Trump in New York on November 9, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 
Despite those challenges, Nayak said, Clinton was on course to win until the last week, when “everything changed"" and the momentum began to shift in favor of Trump. 
“Voters who decided in the last week broke for Trump by a larger margin (42-47). These numbers were even more exaggerated in the key battleground states,” he said. 
The FBI director angered Democrats late in October by announcing in a letter to Congress that the agency had uncovered new emails connected to the Clinton email investigation. 
Just over a week later, Comey notified Congress that Clinton would not face charges over the newly discovered messages. 
Nayak said Comey’s letters encouraged Trump supporters and depressed the turnout for Clinton on Election Day. 
“There is no question that a week from Election Day, Sec. Clinton was poised for a historic win. In the end, less than 110K votes out of tens of millions cast on Election Day made the difference in this race,” he wrote. 
“In the end,” Nayak concluded, “late breaking developments in the race proved one hurdle too many for us to overcome.” 
Clinton had been leading Trump throughout the campaign in most of the polls except for the last week of the election when she lost ground to Trump.",FAKE
"Part 1: Introduction 10 Shares
9 0 0 1
For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices.
— Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter [1]
How the Interviews Came About
The Marxian thesis that the dominant culture and ideology of a society (here referred to as Social Base or just Base) are those of the dominant class (here referred to as System) is a sharp tool to probe how political systems work and how they stay in power. Does this tool work in the U.S. model? Certainly, , the relation between the System and its Social Base has been regular since the inception of the thirteen colonies. Because of that sustained regularity, System and Base acted in convergent patterns of dependency. In historical perspective, it was not possible for the System to transform those colonies into states, and thereafter expand its conquests to form a continental empire without a solid social base that shared its purpose and visions for expansion. From that time onward, an ideological symbiosis ran between the System and the Base. Not only that, but each time the System modifies direction, philosophy, or ideology, the Base would adapt by modifying its attitudes and perception.
The patterns of ideological association between the U.S. System and its Social Base extended into modern times, and the yardstick to measure them is the presidential elections. If you look at voters' turnout since 1960 , you will notice that a relative-to-large majority of Americans had voted in those elections. My interpretation of the vote in relation to Marx's thesis is the following. Voting for a system that is known for its aggressive imperialist policies, crimes around the world, overthrowing foreign governments not in line with Washington, and countless military interventions and invasions that left millions of people dead means one thing: Voting for that system while knowing its attributes, policies, and actions amounts to active sharing in its ideology, culture, and violence.
MORE... Zionism is Racism Zionism goes from bad to worse, taking Judaism with it How modern is Israel? Green Party of Canada calls to revoke Jewish National Fund charitable status Caveat! That does not necessarily mean that all voters share the System's imperialistic values of violence and destruction of foreign peoples. The pertinent meaning of voting interpreted in relation to the System's foreign policy objectives versus the objectives of the Base resides in two concepts. Discarding immediately the notion that the Base has been cohabitated by the system, the first concept has it that the Base has given a mandate to the System to carry out its ideology of empire and imperialism based on the undeclared condition to spare the people from the horrors of foreign wars. A dichotomy sets in here. The System has its way of life, and the Base has its own. The second concept has to do with the basic tenets of colonialism. Meaning, if the System could be successful to obtain unspecified benefits through wars, then the base could share in these benefits despite aversion to violence and opposition to the institution of war as a means to resolve problems between nations.
 A question: Would abstaining from voting resolve the issue of ""active sharing"" in the policies of the system? This subject is open for debate . . .
The relation between the American System and its Base was uniform up to a certain point in history (late 1920s). Until that point, the American state was still busy completing its structural transformation into a big power status. That uniformity, however, managed to keep the patterns of the political power unchanged. To be exact, despite persistent immigration that should have altered the relations between the Base and government, as well as the composition of the latter, the dominance of the traditional ruling elites was 1) not open for challenge, and 2) shaped by an exclusive American Anglo-Saxon experience.
But when Franklyn D. Roosevelt showed signs of surrender to the Zionist pressure on the issue of establishing a ""Jewish"" state in Palestine, he opened a large crack in the System. That was the first time in U.S. history where the powerful American imperialist state yielded to a foreign ideology that was not part of its basic project. With that, a movement with a limited religious social base began penetrating the files and ranks of the U.S. power. The rest is history. As a result, the unrelenting entrenchment inside the political structures of the United States coupled with accumulated changes in the configuration of the U.S. power, the dominant American System itself fell under the domination of one of its social factions—American Jewish Zionists.
When Franklyn D. Roosevelt showed signs of surrender to the Zionist pressure on the issue of establishing a ""Jewish"" state in Palestine, he opened a large crack in the System.
As a group, American Jewish Zionists have all attributes of an independent establishment. They possess efficient organizational structures, have a monolithic political presence across the American system, and they know how to finance their activities with U.S. tax money. I must note that their alignment with the global agenda of U.S. imperialism is a two-point expedient. The first is focused on being recognized as earnest operators at the service of America's interests. The second is tactical. To reap, on behalf of Israel, the benefits of alignment with slogans such as ""Israel is our only trusted ally in the Middle East"".
The American Jewish Zionist experience is agenda driven. As such, their domestic and foreign agendas have precedence over any other Jewish-related consideration.
On the domestic front, the focus could not be more evident: to consolidate Zionism and turn it into a means to 1) perpetuate Israel as an American national issue, and 2) make of them the principal factor in defining American politics. You can notice the endeavor clearly during U.S. elections when the Zionist media question whether this or that candidate is good for the Jews, and for Israel. Today, voicing dissent against the policies of American Jewish Zionism or criticizing Israel amounts to crime. Jimmy Carter experienced this firsthand. When he published his book: Palestine: Peace not Apartheid , American Jewish Zionists unleashed the fire of hell upon him.
As for the Jewish Zionist foreign agenda, this is clear-cut and leaves no space for misunderstanding. It aims to induce, control, or lead the United States to 1) adopt hostile policies toward the Arab nations because due to their rejection of the Zionist state, and 2) undertake military actions against any country that appears as posing a potential or direct threat to Israel. Equally important, it demands that the United States keep denying the Palestinians rights for nationhood through American diplomacy. What is the rationale? Recognition of the Palestinian national rights means the invalidation of the Zionist state and its claim on Palestine.
Because the Jewish Zionist control of the U.S. System is real and dominant, how does the American society figure vis-à-vis this dominance? Based on observations of the American society and its multiple cultural and ideological patterns, there can be but one answer: Zionism is not the dominant culture and ideology of the American people. It is, however, the dominant culture and ideology of the U.S. political system.
OBSERVATIONS
First, despite gargantuan Zionist propaganda apparatuses directed to the American people, Jewish Zionists have consistently failed to create interest or sympathy for Zionist issues and for Israel,
Second, due to historically developed indifference to foreign issues, a majority of Americans have only vague ideas on what Zionism is,
Third, to establish roots for their political dominance, Jewish Zionist activists invariably focus not on the American people, but on ways to control the American system from inside by controlling first the institutions that matter: White House and Congress.
Fourth, this control did not happen because of elections. It is preponderantly due to the practice of appointing Jewish Zionists to important positions inside the administrations,
Fifth, among the stratagems employed by Zionists when they run for elective offices, one was particularly effective: Take advantage of the reverence of the population for the idea of election. To do that, Jewish Zionist candidates rarely, if ever, talk about Israel or Zionism. Instead, they only debate matters of interest to the voters. Once elected though, promoting Israel via American legislations becomes the top hidden agenda,
Sixth, and to conclude this particular argument, the fact that one administration after another succumbed to the diktat of Jewish Zionists (thus indirectly to Israel) in matters of foreign policy and wars proves that the culture and praxis of those administrations are those of the dominant ideology and culture—Zionism.
Another point to discuss is the expansion of the Jewish Zionist power. By all accounts, such an expansion is not a phenomenon but an incremental process. In his book, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite , Robert D. Kaplan defined the issue that I framed as a process in terms of gradual replacement of traditional diplomatic elites with new ideological elites that had no interest in the ways of the old school of diplomacy. Kaplan was unambiguous. He called these new elites by their names: Irish-Americans and Jewish-Americans.
Kaplan's viewpoint on this replacement is important to our discussion. He argued that the old elites approached the U.S.-Arab relations with an open mind and readiness for dialog, all while keeping an eye on the U.S. imperialist interests. His argument opens the door for a veritable conclusion. The two groups of post-WWII American society that Kaplan mentioned had in fact changed the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy. (It is public knowledge that both groups are known for their hostility toward Arabs and Muslims—each for his own set of religious, political, and ideological rationales.). As for the successive shares of African-Americans and Hispanics in the making of the national policy of the United States, this is another argument.
As a witness to history, in early 2012, I began drafting a comprehensive analysis on the role of American Jewish Zionists in the making of U.S. policies and wars in the Arab world. In May of that year, as my work became broad in scope, I decided to seek more views on the subject. I came up with the idea to conduct several interviews where I pose the same questions. While some of the prospective interviewees declined, and others accepted but then withdrew, three prominent thinkers acclaimed for their knowledge, scholarship, and outstanding political activism graciously gave me their views.
They are Francis Boyle, a professor of international law, University of Illinois, College of Law; James Petras, a professor emeritus, University of Binghamton, New York; Canadian writer and former co-editor of the online publication of Dissident Voice Kim Petersen. Professors Boyle and Petras answered my questions via phone conversations, and, Petersen via email correspondence.
However, in the weeks following the interviews, my work swelled up to such a length that it became unsuitable for internet publishing. In short, I was unable to honor my commitment to publish the interviews as planned. Today, as I thank Prof. Francis Boyle, Prof. James Petras, and Kim Petersen for sharing their invaluable insight, I apologize to them for the delay in putting the interviews out there to read.
INTRODUCTION
The turning point in the emergence of Jewish Zionism as a dominant American political force came about when Iraq invaded Kuwait. (Discussing the origins and strategic complications of that invasion goes beyond the scope of this introduction.) The Jewish Zionist establishment seized the occasion, mobilized its omnipresent propaganda operatives, and led colossal media campaigns to promote military actions against Iraq. To bring their war mania to fruition, they unleashed their ""experts"" in all directions. They talked about Iraq's ""formidable"" military capabilities and about Saddam's one-million-man standing army ready to invade Saudi Arabia and seize its oil. They told stories about Saddam Hussein's personal life, his bunkers, and his mortal ""nuclear threats"" to Israel. And they talked about Iraq's threats to U.S. interests and ""allies"" in the Middle East. . . . Here is a brief account of those events.
On July 25, 1990, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein met with U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. It is on record that Glaspie gave Hussein an unambiguous but indirect greenlight to resolve Iraq's problems with Kuwait militarily. On August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. On August 3, George H. W. Bush ordered the freezing of Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets and immediately placed Iraq under hermetic embargo. Considering the prompt, extraordinary anti-Iraq measures that the United States took in the first 24 hours of that invasion, one wonders what was pushing the U.S. to move so quickly on Iraq knowing that only two days earlier, this was conducting a U.S. proxy against Iran. The observation that the U.S. did not take similar actions when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, or when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 raises many questions. What were the U.S. rationales in taking such measures? Who conceived them? Did the U.S. entrap Iraq? Why? . . .
The atmosphere that followed the invasion was surrealistic. Like a lightning bolt, U.S. imperialist and Zionist forces instantly mobilized their media, talking heads, retired generals, and bogus experts on the Middle East. The deafening uproar they made and all lies they told about atrocities committed by Iraq in Kuwait hid a definite scheme: Incite for war . In the period August 2, 1990 – January 14, 1991, Israelis and Jewish Zionists from all fields appeared en mass and in every possible medium available to urge the Bush regime to give up diplomacy in favor of war. On January 15, 1991, a 30-member ""coalition"" in which the U.S. had the lion share—ninety-seven percent of the total force—attacked Iraq. By every standard and minutia of details, the war on Iraq in 1991 was an American War .
At the end of a war that destroyed one of Israel's Arab adversaries, George H. W. Bush might have thought of himself as America's ""laureate hero"". He did not predict though that his temporary freezing of the U.S. loan guaranties to Israel, would have unleashed the Jewish Zionist establishment against him. The fact that he lost to Bill Clinton (who opposed Bush's freeze, and who stated that Israel was the ""only country that paid back its debts"") indicated that American Jewish Zionists had finally reached their objective: To perfect ways to control the U.S. politics from the inside . In retrospect, it can be said that George H. W. Bush was the last non-Zionist American president. From Bill Clinton forward, U.S. presidents and their vice president became pawns in the Jewish Zionist play of power.
Now, as the United States was preparing for war with Iraq to ""liberate"" Kuwait, thousands of antiwar activists and intellectuals from a wide spectrum of political convictions spoke loudly against it. But no one could have ever beaten Patrick J. Buchanan's memorable words about how American Jewish Zionists and Israel were pushing for that war. He said, ''There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner .'' [2] With that, Buchanan hit the proverbial nail on the head. A.M. Rosenthal, a ringleader of U.S. Zionist journalism could not bear what he heard. In a rebuttal, he unleashed an acerbic attack against Buchanan. His weapon of argument, so to speak, was the stale and trite accusation of ""antisemitism"".
Whining, Rosenthal twisted Buchanan's clear words and went on to imply that Buchanan was in effect engaging in an ""anti-Jewish"" tirade. He re-interpreted Buchanan's words and cast them in a standard Zionistic fashion. He wrote that Buchanan's intention was ''The Jews are trying to drag us into war. Only Jews want war. Israeli Jews want war to save Israel's hide. American Jews who talk of military action against Iraq want war because it would suit Israeli interests. They are willing to spill American blood for Israeli interests."" [3]
By inserting the word, ""Jew"" in his reply, Rosenthal and the New York Times behind him spat on the face of U.S. political reality under the tight grip of Zionism. We need not waste our breath on Rosenthal's petty tactic. His clear objective was to distract from the central issue, which is, Buchanan's opposition to the planned war against Iraq was unrelated to the religious denomination of those who were promoting it. Rather he was unmistakably referring to their political identity.
Still, Buchanan was honest. He pointed the finger to Israel and its ""Amen corner"" because that was the truth. The fact that most Israelis and ""Amen corners"" happened to be of Jewish faith was nonissue. To conclude, it is evident that Buchanan, a dreamer of an American ""republic"" not ""empire"", could not stand by idle while seeing the United States sheepishly fastened to the yoke of Zionism and gutlessly prostrating before a tiny settler state, Israel.
Buchanan did not stop there. Truthful and resolute, he dared to describe in categorical terms the pitiful condition of the U.S. Congress vis-à-vis Israel and American Jewish Zionists. He dubbed it as ""An Israeli-occupied territory"" [4]. Buchanan powerfully hit the target in such a way that countless cowardly American politicians would dare not think, let alone say. Notice that Buchanan had placed Israel before its U.S. ""amen corner"". I view this as a statement. He clearly implied that Israel is the primary decision maker. Did that also imply that U.S. Zionist groups (amen corner) are puppets moved by Israel? Most likely, if so, which has more power in setting the U.S. world agenda and policies: Israel or American Jewish Zionists? Dialectically, the answer should be Israel by means of its ""amen corner'.
Now, in December 1991, Jim Lehrer (a former co-anchor of The Macneil/Lehrer NewsHour, and later sole anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer ) interviewed Pat Buchanan. It is important to mention, that Jim Lehrer has monopolized a significant position funded by federal tax money for over 30 years starting in 1975. Is that an issue? Yes, and to debate it, the following applies. Whenever a specific group of people, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, duopoly party apparatchiks, etc., keeps an important public post for such a long duration, the implication is unescapable: the group controls that post because of its embedded importance. . . . But more important, they have the power to keep it.
Nonetheless, when a specific group continues to hold, throughout time, important positions inside public corporations, agencies, and branches of the U.S. government, a paradigm emerges. Either the group controls said corporations directly—that is why it is able to do what they want. Or, it controls them indirectly by controlling first who appoints the board of trustees and sets corporate policies and appointees. At any rate, considering this type of control, the assumption that such group has power over the government and its public corporations is reasonable.
Additionally, the issue of monopoly of news is critical in another respect. It means that someone within the context of U.S. imperialism has decided that the U.S. public discourse must conform to predetermined patterns. In these patterns, issues such as Israel, Zionism, Palestine, U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, wars, etc., are designed to move only on linear grounds without ever touching the core of the matter.
Before continuing, I must state that Lehrer's political views are not a subject to discuss vis-à-vis his program. For one, the NewsHour program is not about the personal views of presenters—it is about information prepared for the public from a public corporation. Second, whether Lehrer had sympathies for Israel or Zionism is nonissue because most viewers expect neutral discussions regardless of who delivers them. Nevertheless, a situation such as this has a consequence affecting the special relations between the narrated news/comments, the people who deliver them, and the people who hear them.
Firstly, planning news delivery to attain specific results is a good technique for those in the business of indoctrination. Psychology and perception are the areas of expertise that news planners depend on to disseminate certain news and analyses. To be sure, these planners know that most viewers have no special or personal stakes on events happening in other countries. Still, the immediate consequence that controlled news and commentaries could generate is easy to predict. They also know they can seep to the viewers pre-conceived ideas through pleasant dialogs, affable manners, appearance of neutrality, and clever circumlocutions.
To be fair to Lehrer, he was consistent in making intelligent questions. However, he was also consistent at doing something else. He would calibrate his questions in such a way as not to reveal new truths or solicit critical replies that could go beyond boundaries deliberately conceived so as not to be crossed. It is pragmatic to say that the observance of these boundaries would nicely serve the Zionist and imperialist discourse. In essence, a practice thusly followed is a preemptive mechanism of control cloaked as a professional presentation.
Now, in his interview, Lehrer played dumb when he asked Buchanan about his bold characterization of the Congress. He phrased his question as follows, ""You have also said that Congress is an Israeli-occupied territory. Now, what do you mean by that ?"" [Italics are mine]
COMMENT: Semantically as much as politically, Buchanan's figure of speech was terse and unequivocal. He plainly meant that the Congress observes Israel's agenda and acts accordingly. There was no need for Buchanan to say anything further because what he said had (and still has) basis in verifiable facts. With a question such as, ""what do you mean by that"" Lehrer was not seeking a rational reply from Buchanan. The form and content of the question had the objective of wanting to entrap Buchanan, make him retract, or at least contradict himself to show inconsistency. In essence, Lehrer had simply tried to deny that Israel controls the Congress through its ""amen corner"" because his ""what do you mean"" indicated astonishment rather than request for explanation. [5]
To wrap up the issue, without exclusion, any denial of the Jewish Zionist control of the United States is a farce. Take Abraham H. Foxman of the infamous Anti-Defamation League as an example. Foxman authored a master‑deceptive propaganda book that he called, "" The Deadliest Lies : The Israeli Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. [Italics are mine]. First, Foxman lied. He knew very well that the Jewish [Zionist] control is not a myth but a pervasive reality. Second, but most important, the problem is not the abstract ""Jewish control"" but the specific—Jewish Zionist control. This can be explained using a current universal truth: hundreds of thousands of Jews from all nationalities actively oppose Zionism on political, religious, ethical, historical, and ideological grounds.
Foxman's denial means one of two things. Either he is a parochial charlatan when the subject is the undisputed power of American Jewish Zionism, or he is very ignorant of the history of Zionism , which is impossible. Either way, Foxman's business is propaganda, demagogy, and deception. Incidentally, Foxman's denial looks very similar to what some Arabs do in the Middle East. Villagers—but even some city folks—try to fend off ""envy"" by following an eon-old superstition. They fix a drawing on a wall in their shops or homes showing the palm of an open hand with an open eye in its center. It appears that Foxman and his associates have their own superstition. By decrying the ""deadliest lies"" against American Jewish Zionists, they try to fend off the accusation or the ""envy"" that Jews—specifically, Jewish Zionists—have power and influence.
Of substance, did Foxman not learn or did anyone inform him about what John Foster Dulles told William Knowland (a pro-Zionist senator from California) back in February 1957? In an exchange about the proposed sanctions to get Israel out of Egyptian territory occupied by Israel in the Suez War, Dulles pronounced these prophetic words, ""We cannot have all our policies made in Jerusalem . . ."" [6]. That was in 1957. Today, all those who deride or deny the charge that Israel has a say on U.S. foreign policy and wars in the Middle East must prove that those who are making this charge are misinformed or just lying.
Interestingly, years after Buchanan made that statement, the successive events proved his sharp assessment and political perspicacity. Two people vindicated his characterization of Capitol Hills as an Israeli-occupied territory"" and both used his words to make the point. The first is a former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, and the second is Philip Weiss, founder of MondoWeiss Website. In an article he wrote in 2011, Giraldi pointed to the Congress as, "" It’s Still Occupied Territory "". Weiss titled a piece he wrote in 2015 as such: "" Capitol Hill — still Israeli-occupied territory "".
At this point, do American Jewish Zionists control the United States? Do they control it as polity or only the political system? Do they have real influence in setting U.S. foreign policy and wars against the Arab and Muslim nations? Or maybe all this talk is no more than baseless allegations?
NEXT
Part 2: Discussion
Part 3: Interview with Francis Boyle
Part 4: Interview with James Petras
Part 5: Interview with Kim Petersen
NOTES
Jimmy carter, Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine , Los Angeles Times, 8 December 2006 Pat Buchanan, The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990, Quote: d in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, What They Said: Israel and Its ""Amen Corner"" , February 1992 ON MY MIND; Forgive Them Not , The New York Times, 14 September 1990 Quote: d in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Is Congress an Israeli-Occupied Territory ?, July 1995 The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, What They Said: Israel and Its ""Amen Corner"" , Feb. 1992 David Tal, editor, The 1956 War: Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, Frank Cass Publishers, 2001, p. 40",FAKE
"Paris, France (CNN) French authorities took the offensive Wednesday, raiding a purported hideout of the suspected ringleader in last week's deadly Paris attacks in an operation that ended with eight detained, two dead and potentially more bloodshed thwarted.

But what about that suspected ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud

At one point, authorities believe he was holed up on the third floor of an apartment building in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said Wednesday. Whether he was there when scores of heavily armed French police launched their assault at 4:20 a.m. Wednesday (10:20 p.m. ET Tuesday) is unknown.

Some residents in the area told CNN they saw Abaaoud recently in the neighborhood and at a local mosque.

Investigators zeroed in on the building after picking up phone conversations indicating that a relative of Abaaoud might be there. They met fierce resistance from the start, including an armored door, a woman who blew herself up and bullets flying back and forth for about an hour. The French officers even used powerful munitions, which led to one floor of the building collapsing.

That violence produced rubble that included body parts, on which investigators are conducting DNA tests.

French President Francois Hollande held up the vicious back-and-forth as further proof that ""we are at war"" with ISIS.

""What the terrorists were targeting was what France represents. This is what was attacked on the night of November 13,"" he said. ""These barbarians targeted France's diversity. It was the youth of France who were targeted simply because they represent life.""

France had already been part of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS with airstrikes. But the country has stepped up its efforts since the series of shootings and explosions in Paris last week, which killed 129 people.

Now, Hollande has proposed extending France's state of emergency for three more months -- a measure that, among other things, gives authorities greater powers in conducting searches, holding people and dissolving certain groups. To go after the Islamist extremist group, the French President also said he would appeal to world leaders -- including meeting next week with U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have been at odds on what to do in Syria.

""There is no more ... divide. There are only men and women of duty,"" he said. ""We must destroy this army that menaces the entire world, not just some countries.""

'We could see the bullets'

Whoever was inside the Saint-Denis apartment on Wednesday appeared to be ""prepared to act"" in possibly another attack, Molins said, noting their weaponry, structured organization and determination.

Some 110 police swarmed on the diverse, working-class area that is home to the Stade de France sports stadium, where three suicide bombings took place days earlier.

They first went into one apartment that had been under surveillance since Tuesday, a Paris police source said.

Telephone communications on a wiretap by French and Belgian security agencies indicated a woman at the residence was Abaaoud's cousin, a Belgian counterterrorism official told CNN.

That raid led them to another apartment on the same street. Molins described it as a complex operation. For almost an hour, he said, there was uninterrupted gunfire as police tried to get into the apartment.

The violent standoff left residents in the area, already shaken by last week's attacks, startled and scared.

""We could see the bullets,"" a woman, who identified herself only as Sabrine, told CNN affiliate France 2. ""We could feel the building shaking.""

Three people in the Saint-Denis building itself, including one with a bullet wound in the arm, are among the eight detained, according to Molins. The others include the person who loaned the apartment to the suspected terrorists and his friend. Two of the eight held were hospitalized, Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told France Info radio.

Saadana Aymen, a 29-year-old who lives one street down, couldn't believe what was happening in his neighborhood.

""When you think of Saint-Denis, you don't think of terrorists,"" he told CNN. ""I'm shocked! Why would the terrorists pick this neighborhood?""

That wasn't the only place where French authorities fanned out Tuesday night into Wednesday as they worked to find suspects tied to the attacks and cracked down on security.

The Interior Ministry announced 118 searches led to the detention of at least 25 people, the confiscation of 34 weapons and the discovery of illicit drugs in 16 instances. In recent days, hundreds of similar operations have been conducted, the ministry said, resulting in 64 people being held and 118 put under house arrest.

Authorities have not provided details about the arrests or said what connection they could have to Friday's attacks.

Molins said investigators are working to piece together where terrorists were in the days and hours leading up to the attacks -- and with whom they had contact.

They've encountered at least one piece of evidence that could help them in their search: One of the attacker's cell phones was found in a trash bin outside the Bataclan theater, where most of Friday's victims were gunned down.

A message on the phone, according to Molins, said, ""Here we go, it's starting.""

Authorities are trying to determine who the message was sent to, he said.

And they're still trying to determine whether the suspected ringleader in the attack is still on the run, or whether his remains were found in the rubble.",REAL
"This is a Daily News Brief for all of the civil servants out there who are just “doing their job”. I was (up until recently) one of those people.
I learned first hand that no matter how good you are at your job, how much you save the taxpayer, and how many times you’ve saved your boss or the “higher ups” from getting in trouble, when you need them to stick their neck out for you, they just hang you out to dry.
Huma Abedin is learning that firsthand now too… and Donna Brazile…The loyalty you feel in your heart to your country, or county is not reciprocated to you in your time of need. The Powers That Shouldn’t Be don’t give a rats patoot about you. I hope this Daily News Brief serves as a wake up call to all those who serve.

Watch on YouTube 
Sources: 
Now Huma Is Just ‘One of My Staffers’ After Close Aide Gets Left Behind on Ohio Campaign Trip While Hillary Keeps up Her War on the FBI in Defiance of White House Backing for Comey 
CNN Cuts Ties With Donna Brazile After Hacked Emails Show She Gave Clinton Campaign Debate Questions 
The Globalization Of Media: A Failing Strike Force 
Media Deception: You Are Not Getting the Truth Delivered by The Daily Sheeple 
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). 
Contributed by The Daily Sheeple of www.TheDailySheeple.com . 
This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.TheDailySheeple.com. ",FAKE
"Janet Reno, First Female US Attorney General, Dies At 78 11/07/2016 
NPR 
Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general of the United States, died early Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Reno’s goddaughter Gabrielle D’Alemberte and sister Margaret Hurchalla confirmed her passing to NPR. 
Reno spent her final days at home in Miami surrounded by family and friends, D’Alemberte told The Associated Press. She was 78. 
Reno served longer in the job than anyone had in 150 years. And her tenure was marked by tragedy and controversy. But she left office widely respected for her independence and accomplishments. 
She was not President Bill Clinton’s first choice to head the Justice Department, nor his second. But after his No. 1 pick went down in confirmation flames, and his second choice also proved controversial, Clinton finally turned to Reno. 
She was an unexpected pick. She had no connections to Clinton or Washington. But Clinton wanted a woman, and Reno was a big-time prosecutor, holding the top prosecutor’s job in Miami-Dade County, a position she had been elected to four times over 15 years. 
Jamie Gorelick, who would later become deputy attorney general, was assigned to prep Reno for her confirmation hearing. “She was the least air-brushed candidate we have ever had for a Cabinet-level position,” says Gorelick. “She was herself, and she didn’t change herself for Washington.” 
Reno arrived at the Justice Department knowing no one, and was immediately plunged into the siege at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. Four federal agents had been killed and 16 wounded while serving a warrant to search for illegal guns. Seven weeks into the siege, pressed by the FBI, Reno authorized a raid on the compound, resulting in 76 deaths, including as many as 25 children and the Davidian leader David Koresh, who ordered his followers to set fire to the compound. 
In two sets of Waco congressional hearings over the next two years, Reno would successfully quell critics on the right and left. 
“What haunted me,” Reno explained at one hearing, “was that if I did not go in, I might be sitting there 10 days [later] … when [Koresh] came out with explosives, blew himself, some agents and the entire place up.” 
Years later, however, in an interview with NPR shortly before leaving office, her regret was palpable. “We’ll never know whether it was a mistake or not, in one sense,” Reno admitted. “But knowing what I do, I would not do it again. I would try to figure another way.” 
“Waco didn’t make her hesitant: It made her insistent about getting her own information,” observes Walter Dellinger, who served in two top Justice Department jobs under Reno. 
Dellinger believes, for instance, that it may have been the Waco experience that led Reno to go personally to Miami in April 2000 to see if there was a way to avoid a forcible removal of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elián González from the home of a great-uncle so the boy could be returned to his only living parent, in Cuba. 
Elián had been rescued at sea after his mother and eight others drowned trying to get to the United States. Rescued by fishermen and brought to the U.S., he was soon turned over to his great-uncle. The Cuban community in Miami was in an uproar over the idea of returning the boy to his father, who lived in Cuba, and the furor soon bled over to Congress. 
But when negotiations with the great-uncle failed, armed federal agents, acting on Reno’s orders, raided the home, removed Elián, and turned him over to his father, who had come to the U.S. to receive his son. When the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, the two returned to their home in Cuba. 
Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. 
Barry Thumma/AP 
Over the course of time, Reno would become embroiled in many controversies. She sought the appointment of a series of independent counsels to investigate four fellow Cabinet members and President Clinton himself. But she refused to authorize an independent counsel investigation of contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign after Justice Department lawyers concluded no crime had been committed by either the president or vice president. 
The decision so infuriated Republicans that some called for her impeachment. “This is the most politicized Justice Department in the history of the United States,” railed Dan Burton, the Republican chairman of a key House oversight committee. 
At 6 feet 2 inches, however, Reno stood tall in the political crosswinds. Gorelick observes that when members of Congress, like Burton, were unhappy with a government official, they threatened to call that official to testify. But Reno, who had served as a staffer in the Florida state Legislature, always said, “Fine, I’ll be there.” As a result, says Gorelick, “eventually all those who were threatening her with a hearing stopped doing that, because she prevailed in every outing that I can recall — she just went in there and laid out her views and bested those who would challenge her.” 
The controversies that the Justice Department faced during Reno’s reign often eclipsed the many things that went well: the quick apprehension and successful prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers, for example; the pursuit of bombers of women’s health clinics that provide abortions; and the solving of the so-called Unabomber case. 
After nearly two decades of fruitless pursuit, the FBI still had no idea as to the identity of the man dubbed the Unabomber, who had killed three people and injured 23. Then, in 1995, the bomber sent a letter to The New York Times offering to cease his terror campaign if the Times or the Washington Post would publish his 35,000-word manifesto against modern industry and technology. Neither newspaper was inclined to do that initially, but Reno, the daughter of two newspaper journalists, persuaded the newspaper owners to jointly publish the essay in the interests of public safety. 
It paid off. The Unabomber’s brother recognized the style and ideas in the essay and tipped off the FBI, ending the bomber’s long reign of terror. Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is now serving a life term in a maximum security federal prison. 
In 1995 Reno was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She did not slow down, but her hands sometimes shook so hard you could hear them knocking against the table at a congressional hearing. She even joked about the disease, claiming that “shaking sometimes helps,” as in playing a steel drum or balancing her kayak. 
That combination of toughness and self-deprecating humor, plus her determination to protect the Justice Department from improper influence, made her a hero to many who worked for her. 
“Janet Reno led with her values,” says former Deputy Attorney General Gorelick, the department’s No. 2 official. “And that meant that if she decided that a certain path was the right thing to do, the people around her believed her and would charge up any hill behind her. … I’d never seen that before in quite the same way.” 
Florida gubernatorial candidate and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno speaks at the Florida Democratic Party State Conference on April 13, 2002, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. She lost the Democratic primary. 
Reno won enormous respect inside the department as well, because of her work ethic and dedication to understanding issues in the many parts of the Justice Department — from national security, to environmental questions, to the generally obscure field of Indian law. 
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch called her “one of the most effective, decisive and well-respected-leaders in [the department’s] proud history” who “never shied from criticism or shirked responsibility.” And former Attorney General Eric Holder said that “in a city where too many compromise their values for short term political gain, Janet Reno stood out as a person of integrity and of enduring values.” 
Former Solicitor General Dellinger believes that Reno was prepared for the attorney general’s job early in life by her intellect and ungainly height. “This is a woman that went to Cornell and Harvard Law School at a time when very few women went to Harvard Law School, went through junior high and high school being twice as tall as anybody else and probably twice as smart … and that’s really, really tough.” 
There were, of course, ups and downs in the eight years of Reno’s reign. But she said she always took the long view of her job. 
“If the end brings me out right, what people said about me won’t make any difference, and if the end brings me out wrong, 10 angels saying I was right won’t make any difference,” she said in an interview with NPR in 1997. 
President Clinton made little secret of his frequent displeasure with Reno and the wall of separation she erected between the Justice Department and the White House. Still, he never asked her to resign. Reno was the last Cabinet member he reappointed after his re-election in 1996. 
“It was actually quite wonderful,” said Dellinger. “She just decided to stay, and it turns out that nobody could fire her.” 
The tension between Clinton and his attorney general was apparent even as Clinton’s time in office drew to a close. In an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes , Clinton went out of his way to praise friends and foes alike, but when it came to his evaluation of Reno, he was tepid, to say the least. 
“Good woman,” he said. “Tried really hard to do a good job. She’s a good person.” 
“At least he didn’t say I was a bad person,” replied Reno, with a laugh. “I’ll take what I can get!” 
Indeed, by the end of her tenure, Janet Reno had outlasted her critics and earned such a reputation for integrity and independence that comedian Will Ferrell’s parody of her became one of the iconic skits on NBC’s Saturday Night Live . The recurring skit was inspired by reports that Reno had cut quite a figure dancing at a Justice Department party. 
On the last episode of the “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” parody, Ferrell, wearing a blue dress and pearls, reminisces about past glories and laments that the end of the party is near. Then, suddenly, the real Janet Reno comes crashing through the wall of the set, wearing the same blue dress and pearls as Ferrell, to deliver one of Ferrell’s signature lines: “It’s Reno Time!” 
“Oh, Janet,” he says to the real Reno, as he mourns the end of the skit’s run, “what do you do when you get sad?” 
“I just dance,” Reno replies, commanding the orchestra, “Now, hit it!” as she breaks out her best moves to “Twist and Shout.” It was her last day in office.",FAKE
"Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee ended his long-shot presidential bid on Friday.

""As you know, I have been campaigning on a platform of Prosperity Through Peace. But after much thought I have decided to end my campaign for president today,"" Chafee announced at the Democratic National Committee Women's Leadership Forum.

The onetime Republican turned independent turned Democrat is the second candidate to withdraw this week, following former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb's announcement on Tuesday that he was ending his Democratic bid. Webb, however, left open the possibility of running as an independent.

Both Chafee and Webb had barely campaigned, making only a handful of visits to early states. But more so than Webb, Chafee had struggled to make any dent at all in the race.

Chafee had little financial backing for his campaign, raising just $8,300 from 10 major donors during the last quarter. But his few supporters told NPR this week they liked the positive attitude he brought to the race and hoped he would remain in the mix.

The former senator, who hailed from a prominent political family in the Ocean State, had an unremarkable performance in last week's presidential debate. He spoke for just nine minutes during the two-hour faceoff.

Chafee underscored that he had been against the Iraq War from the beginning, a contrast to front-runner Hillary Clinton's controversial 2002 vote. He echoed his anti-war sentiment in his withdrawal announcement on Friday, too.

""The United States of America is so strong militarily, economically and culturally that we can take chances for peace. In fact, as a strong mature world leader, we must take chances for peace. If we have courage, if we take risks, we can have Prosperity through Peace, not just in the United States, but all over the world,"" Chafee said.

At the debate, he also tried to needle Clinton on her and her husband's past scandals, proudly noting that he had never had a whiff of any misdeeds during his decades in office. But when he tried to engage Clinton over her email server and land a blow, she declined to engage.

Chafee's most damaging answer was when he was asked why he voted to repeal banking regulations known as the Glass-Steagall Act. His answer was that he had just gotten to the Senate after his father died (he was appointed to succeed him) and that he was not familiar with the bill, making Chafee come across as even more unprepared.

Even his sparsely attended announcement in June that he was running for the White House was widely panned, having spent much of his time advocating for the U.S. to switch to the metric system.

Chafee, who like his late father, John, served as both senator and governor of Rhode Island, had an interesting life before entering politics, though. After attending an exclusive Northeastern prep school, where he was a classmate of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Chafee graduated from Brown University and then headed to Montana State University to learn to be a farrier, someone who shoes horses. For years he traveled around the U.S. working at racetracks.",REAL
"HUGE Air Drill, Over 130 Command Centers in Russia, CIS on Alert 
In addition, over 100 aircraft have been scrambled as part of the drill Originally appeared at RT Over 100 fighter jets, long-range bombers and combat helicopters have been scrambled at their bases across Russia and six post-Soviet states as the allies prepare to test their integrated air defense system in a massive military exercise. 
More than 130 command and control centers have been put on alert in Russia and six former Soviet republics – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. 
All the countries contribute to the integrated air defense system overseen by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – an alliance of former Soviet republics that emerged after the collapse of the USSR. 
The large-scale military exercise is to train high-readiness forces in dealing with “airspace violations, including by hijacked aircraft” as well as “assisting crews of aircraft in distress,” the ministry added. 
Some 100 aircraft, including Su-27, MiG-29 and MiG-31 fighter jets, Su-24 and Su-34 bombers, as well as Su-25 ground attack jets and combat helicopters provided by the allies, are expected to take part in the drill. 
Troops from electronic warfare and surface-to-air missile units are also participating. 
The exercise started at 8am Moscow time with Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 aircraft given the roles of aggressor. The planes, simulating an adversary force, were spotted over Eastern European and Central Asian airspaces, the Russian military said. 
All units are being coordinated from a Russian Air Force command center located outside Moscow. 
The joint CIS air defense system, established in 1995, currently focuses on protecting the ex-Soviet countries’ airspace as well as providing air or missile strike early warnings and coordinated responses. 
Russia contributes the bulk of the system’s early warning and air defense capacities, with short- and long-range radar stations monitoring the area. 
Notably, the system does not have a single commander. It is collectively controlled by the chiefs of the air defense forces of the member states themselves. 
Bilateral air defense systems between Russia and its neighbors have also been established in recent years. Last December, an air defense agreement between Russia and Armenia was signed by the two countries’ defense ministers, Sergey Shoigu and Seyran Oganyan, respectively. 
In 2013 Moscow signed a separate treaty on a joint regional air defense system with Kazakhstan. Russian and Belarusian anti-aircraft missile forces have already been unified into an integrated system designed to contain any security threats in the European theater. Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount 
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire",FAKE
"After Vets Fight War, Feds Demand Money Back U.S. government continues to treat troops like second class citizens Infowars Nightly News - October 27, 2016 Comments 
Thanks you for your service? 
No. After promising bonuses & education benefits to military in order to get them to re-enlist for the Afghanistan & Iraq Wars, the Pentagon is now demanding the money back from vets who can’t afford to pay. 
This is how Obama treats veterans — just like Hillary treats those who protect her in the Secret Service. 
Can anyone trust their promises? NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles",FAKE
"The former Florida governor and son and brother of presidents, a favorite of the GOP establishment, was the first Republican to move

openly toward a 2016 White House run. The Spanish-speaker has strong ties to Florida’s Hispanic community and could expand the party’s reach into an increasingly diverse U.S. electorate. His access to donors, meanwhile, could shake up financing for Republicans as the race takes form.",REAL
"The Democratic party moved a lot closer to choosing its nominee on Tuesday night. The Republican party moved a little closer to chaos.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has won at least four of the five states where Democrats voted on Tuesday, with victories in Florida, Illinois, Ohio and North Carolina. The race in Missouri against Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) remains too close to call. Clinton’s staff said they expected to increase their lead in the race for Democratic convention delegates by about 300 — requiring Sanders to stage a near-miraculous comeback in the coming states.

“We are moving closer to securing the Democratic party nomination and winning this election in November,” Clinton told supporters in West Palm Beach, Fla. Sounding hoarse, she seemed to be offering an olive branch to Sanders — who, so far, has shown little inclination to get out of a race that has given him an unprecedented national following. “I want to congratulate Senator Sanders for the vigorous campaign he’s waging,” Clinton said, giving it a try anyway. She has now won 15 states, as compared with nine wins for Sanders.

On the Republican side, GOP front-runner Donald Trump won a key contest in Florida — a lopsided victory on the home turf of rival Sen. Marco Rubio, which caused Rubio to declare he was suspending his campaign. That brought Trump all of Florida’s 99 Republican delegates, the biggest prize awarded in any state so far. Trump has also been projected as the winner in Illinois and North Carolina, two states with 141 delegates between them. But, because those are not “winner-take-all” states, Trump will likely have to split some of those 141 with other candidates. The GOP race in Missouri remains too close to call.

But Trump was denied a victory in another key winner-take-all state, Ohio, which was won by its own sitting governor, John Kasich. That victory doesn’t make Kasich a likely nominee: he has now won a grand total of one state. But, without Ohio’s 66 delegates, Trump now faces a difficult path to reach the majority of delegates he needs to avoid a “contested” GOP convention, in which no candidate enters with a majority of delegates locked up. In that chaotic situation — not seen in the GOP since 1976 — delegates could choose one of the candidates who ran, or someone else entirely. If their choice is not Trump, the party may have to face strong anger from his supporters, or even a third-party candidacy from Trump himself.

Trump spoke to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., where he savored his victory over Rubio in Florida, despite a barrage of anti-Trump advertising. “Nobody has ever — ever, in the history of politics — received the kind of negative advertising that I have…vicious, horrible,” Trump said. But then, he said: “You explain it to me, because I can’t: my numbers went up.” He told supporters that he’d seen anti-Trump commercials during a broadcast of a golf tournament from Trump’s own club, and tried to distract attendees at the tournament from watching.

Trump repeated his promise to bring the Republican party together: “We have to bring our party together. We have to bring it together. We have something happening that actually makes the Republican party probably the biggest political story anywhere in the world.”

But he also, more than before, seemed to show signs of fatigue at the long grind of a campaign. Trump spoke of missing his youngest son, Baron, while he’s been out on the trail: “Baron. I never see my Baron,” Trump said. “He said, ‘When are you going to come home, Daddy? When are you coming home?’”

Trump’s top rival, in terms of delegates, is Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — who has won no states so far, though he is running neck-and-neck with Trump in returns from Missouri. Before the outcome in Missouri was known, Cruz spoke to supporters in Houston, and essentially declared that Kasich — even on his best night of the campaign — would be a non-factor from here on out.

“Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination, ours and Donald Trump’s,” Cruz said. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever.” He praised Rubio at length, trying to win over Rubio’s supporters — and the “#nevertrump” crowd that had coalesced around Rubio. “We welcome you to our teams, we welcome you with open and welcoming arms,” Cruz said. That, in itself, was an amazing moment and a sign of how Trump has reshaped the Republican landscape this year.

A year ago, the idea that Cruz — the despised figure who led Republicans into an ill-fated effort to stop “Obamacare” and triggered a government shutdown instead — might be the best choice for the GOP establishment would have been too strange to be funny.

[Kasich wins Ohio with an eye toward a contested convention]

Kasich’s win in Ohio was celebrated by GOP operatives who launched a last-ditch campaign to thwart Trump’s march to the nomination.

“You’re not the nominee until you get 1,237 delegates, and I don’t see how Trump gets there,” said Katie Packer, the strategist helping lead Our Principles PAC, which has spent nearly $13 million on a barrage of hard-hitting ads attacking the billionaire real estate developer. “Our goal was always to deprive him of Ohio and Florida, and the fact that we got halfway, we consider a win for the American people and the Republican party and certainly us.”

Kasich has largely abstained from attacking Trump so far, but on Tuesday night – with the race narrowing, and his position improving – Kasich took a brief swipe at the front-runner. “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land,” Kasich said. He took a remarkably different tone than the bombastic front-runner, who focuses on international trade and business deals. Kasich told his audience to make the world better in smaller ways, working harder at their jobs, and being kind to neighbors. At times, he did not seem to be speaking about a political campaign at all.

“We’re all part of a giant mosaic. A snapshot in time. All of us here,” Kasich said, saying that every person in the audience had a purpose from God. “Our job…is to dig down and understand that purpose, and never underestimate our ability to change the world in which we live.”

[Rubio’s demise marks the last gasp of the Republican reboot]

Rubio, a first-term senator, had launched his campaign with a message of youth and optimism — but was unable to escape his support for a 2013 effort at immigration reform, which many conservatives believed was too lenient on undocumented immigrants. And he was unable to escape Trump, who hectored him as “Little Marco,” a tool of big donors.

“After tonight, it is clear that — while we are on the right side — this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio said on Tuesday.

Rubio eventually fired back, trying to fight on Trump’s level with insults about the front-runner’s tan and his fingers. He also called Trump a “con artist” for his involvement in a “university” that many students said defrauded them. But Rubio undercut his own message by saying that he would still vote for Trump, were he the nominee.

That odd, mismatched strategy seemed to turn off voters: his poll numbers declined sharply. He won just one state, Minnesota, along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Rubio, oddly, mocked the District of Columbia by name in his speech.

“There’s nothing more you could have done,” Rubio said, speaking in the concourse of a Florida arena – he had rented the whole thing, but the crowd was so small that he only needed a hallway. “America’s in the middle of a real political storm. A real tsunami. And we should have seen this coming.”

Even in defeat, however, Rubio could not escape Trump. A heckler shouted out “Trump for President!” The crowd booed, but Rubio shushed them. “Don’t worry, he won’t get beat up at our event,” he said, referring to alleged assaults of protesters at Trump events.

[Rubio was lifted by 2010 wave. But he was swamped by the ‘tsunami’ of 2016.]

In early exit polls reported by ABC News, Democratic primary voters had a split view of the two candidates: they tended to see Clinton as far more electable — but see Sanders as more honest. By a roughly 2 to 1 margin, Democratic voters said Clinton had a better chance than Sanders of beating Trump in a general election matchup across Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois and Missouri.

But roughly 8 in 10 said Sanders was honest and trustworthy, compared with about 6 in 10 for Clinton. Sanders has dominated among honesty-focused voters all year while Clinton has won those focused on electability by a wide margin.

According to those same early exit polls reported, large majorities of Democrats in Tuesday’s primaries would be satisfied with either Clinton or Sanders winning the Democratic nomination. At least 7 in 10 voters across primary voting states would be satisfied with each candidate becoming the party’s nominee, with slightly more satisfied with Clinton than Sanders.

Among Republican primary voters, by contrast, preliminary exit polls showed unusual hesitancy about the prospect of Trump as the nominee. Across all of Tuesday’s states, a little more than half of GOP voters said they would be satisfied with Trump as the Republican nominee against Clinton, according to early exit polls from ABC News.

Just under 4 in 10 Republican voters across Tuesday’s contests said they would consider a third-party candidate if Trump and Clinton were the nominees. Looking specifically at non-Trump supporters, ABC reported 6 in 10 would consider backing a third-party candidate if Trump became the party’s nominee.

Separately, it was clear from exit polls that the majority of Tuesday’s GOP voters supported Trump’s proposal temporarily to ban foreign Muslims from entering the United States. In all, 66 percent agreed with that idea, according to exit polls reported by ABC News.

Trump scored an early win Tuesday morning, swamping the tiny vote in a Republican caucus held in the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a tweet from the executive director of the GOP in the U.S. territory.

The win earned Trump nine delegates, only a tiny sliver of the 367 delegates at stake Tuesday. But should the chaotic Republican race lead to a contested national convention in July, the win could prove important because of arcane party rules that require candidates to have won a majority of delegates in at least eight states or territories. The win was Trump’s eighth of the nominating season.

Voting ran relatively smoothly across the country, although a frightening incident interrupted one Cleveland voting location, where police said a poll worker was arrested after pulling a gun during a verbal dispute with fellow workers.

A spokeswoman for the Cleveland Police Department said Alan Bethea, 45, faced multiple charges. Police say he pulled a .380 handgun from his backpack during the argument. No one was injured.

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Missouri officials had estimated 34.1 percent of voters would take part in the primary, nearing 2008’s record turnout of 36 percent. News reports in other parts of the country also reported lines in hotly contested races.

In North Carolina, where a controversial new voter identification law was in use for the first time, voting rights advocates were on alert for problems. A spokeswoman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections said late in the day that primaries were running smoothly.

In Ohio, some voters appreciated the job Kasich has done as governor.

“He’s done a great job for Ohio,” said Lauri Gillet, 42, a civil engineer who voted for Kasich in Westerville, the governor’s home town. “He’s the best of both worlds, from a business standpoint and a politics standpoint. And Ohio’s doing great. There’s been a ton of growth in the oil and gas industry.”

Hundreds of thousands of ballots were already cast in early voting in Florida. Turnout was light in the early morning at a polling place near the airport in Miami. But the voters who showed up sounded passionate about their choices.

Luis Joaquin Alonso, 79, said he voted for Trump, citing concerns about the deficit and the desire for someone to take on the political establishment.

“I love this country,” he said, adding that Trump does, too, and that’s why he is running.

“This guy has got plenty of money. He doesn’t need [more] money,” Alonso said.

[Early voting: Nearly 2 million people have already voted in Florida]

Florida’s primary is closed, meaning that independents, who have sided with Sanders in large numbers in other states, could not participate. The state is also home to large numbers of seniors, who have gravitated far more heavily toward Clinton elsewhere.

In Miami, Luis Caldera, 61, said he voted for Clinton. He called her “the best option” and said her experience and his familiarity with her career set her apart.

In Youngstown, Ohio, Dave Williams, 52, cast a ballot for Sanders, deeming the Vermont senator better for working people.

“I lost my house when the stock market crashed. That was before the government was doing anything to keep people in their homes. And I’ve gone from a house since then to an apartment,” said Williams, a member of cement finishers local 179. “I’m an angry voter, how ’bout that? I’m angry about the way the country is working for the blue-collar worker. Hillary gets a big, fat zero on that.”

[How Bernie Sanders is hijacking the Democratic Party to be elected as an independent]

While out for breakfast Tuesday morning in downtown Chicago, Sanders predicted he could have a good night if larger numbers of voters take part in the contests — setting up a long nomination battle in states that are even friendlier to his campaign.

“I think that if there is a large voter turnout, we are going to do just great here in Illinois, in Missouri, Ohio, and hopefully North Carolina and Florida,” Sanders said during a stop at Lou Mitchell’s, a Chicago institution. “In the states that are coming down the pike, we have great opportunities to win many of them, so we are feeling really good.”

Sanders was accompanied by Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor against Rahm Emanuel last year. Part of Sanders’s strategy in Illinois has been mobilizing those disappointed with the tenure of Emanuel, a Clinton ally whose approval ratings have dropped to all-time lows.

In North Carolina, Clinton campaigned at a polling place in Southeast Raleigh Magnet High School around midday on Tuesday, greeting supporters with hugs and selfies.

She warned that her supporters might see public polling that shows her with leads in many of the states voting Tuesday and conclude that they don’t need to vote, which her campaign believes might have contributed to her unexpected loss to Sanders in Michigan last week.

“Sometimes the reporting of polls, some might say: well, my candidate is doing so well, I don’t need to come out,” Clinton said. “But everybody should come out. There’s so much at stake in this election.”

Clinton has been eager to pivot her campaign to confront Trump more directly. But asked Tuesday if she was concerned that a protracted primary fight with Sanders would impede Democrats’ ability to wage a general-election fight against the GOP nominee, she declined to encourage Sanders to leave the race.

“He has a right to run his campaign in any way that he chooses, and I’m proud of the campaign we’ve run,” Clinton said.

Trump’s rhetoric drove some voters Clinton’s way in the Democratic contest. Tonya Massenburg, 53, voted for Clinton in Raleigh because she is primarily concerned about “violence” and “racism” in the country right now — and less concerned about Sanders, about whom she said she knows very little.

“I just hope that North Carolina pulled through for Hillary Clinton,” she said. “Because of the way this country is headed, it’s not very good.”

Also Tuesday, Clinton announced that she has been endorsed by the mother of Michael Brown, the teenager whose 2014 shooting by police in Ferguson, Mo., brought more attention to officer-involved slayings of unarmed black men.

The endorsement came as Clinton has appeared to lose ground to Sanders in Missouri, with the most recent poll showing an effective tie.

“When I lost my son, I lost my world. ‘Big Mike’ was a big boy, but he was my baby boy, my only child, and his life was brutally taken from me,” Lezley McSpadden wrote in her endorsement statement.

“This election season, we are at battle for the soul of our nation,” McSpadden said. “If we want to continue to build on the progress made by our country, we need a president who is ready to lead — and I trust Hillary Clinton.”

McSpadden was among a group of African-American mothers who met privately with Clinton last year, and Clinton has made the mothers’ stories a regular part of her political speeches, as she talks about the need for criminal justice reform and better gun control.

Helderman and Fahrenthold reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan and Ed O’Keefe in Miami, David Weigel in Youngstown, John Wagner in Chicago, Abby Phillip in Raleigh, and Scott Clement, Anne Gearan and Matea Gold in Washington also contributed.",REAL
"Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton agreed to turn over her private email server to authorities on Tuesday, the same day an intelligence community inspector general told congressional committees that at least five emails from the server did contain classified information.

The decision to hand over the server, as well as a thumb drive of all her work-related emails to the Justice Department, represents an effort to blunt an expanding probe into her use of a private email account.

Clinton, now the Democratic presidential front-runner, ""directed her team to give her email server that was used during her tenure as (secretary of state) to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her emails already provided to the State Department,"" her spokesman, Nick Merrill, told CNN early Tuesday evening. ""She pledged to cooperate with the government's security inquiry, and if there are more questions, we will continue to address them.""

After conceding the presidency to Trump in a phone call earlier, Clinton addresses supporters and campaign workers in New York on Wednesday, November 9. Her defeat marked a stunning end to a campaign that appeared poised to make her the first woman elected US president.

Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

Clinton addresses a campaign rally in Cleveland on November 6, two days before Election Day. She went on to lose Ohio -- and the election -- to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump.

Clinton arrives at a 9/11 commemoration ceremony in New York on September 11. Clinton, who was diagnosed with pneumonia two days before, left early after feeling ill. A video appeared to show her stumble as Secret Service agents helped her into a van.

Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.

Obama hugs Clinton after he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The president said Clinton was ready to be commander in chief. ""For four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline,"" he said, referring to her stint as his secretary of state.

After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""

After Clinton became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, this photo was posted to her official Twitter account. ""To every little girl who dreams big: Yes, you can be anything you want -- even president,"" Clinton said. ""Tonight is for you.""

Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.

Clinton walks on her stage with her family after winning the New York primary in April.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders shares a lighthearted moment with Clinton during a Democratic presidential debate in October 2015. It came after Sanders gave his take on the Clinton email scandal. ""The American people are sick and tired of hearing about the damn emails,"" Sanders said. ""Enough of the emails. Let's talk about the real issues facing the United States of America.""

Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Clinton testifies about the Benghazi attack during a House committee meeting in October 2015. ""I would imagine I have thought more about what happened than all of you put together,"" she said during the 11-hour hearing. ""I have lost more sleep than all of you put together. I have been wracking my brain about what more could have been done or should have been done."" Months earlier, Clinton had acknowledged a ""systemic breakdown"" as cited by an Accountability Review Board, and she said that her department was taking additional steps to increase security at U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.

Clinton ducks after a woman threw a shoe at her while she was delivering remarks at a recycling trade conference in Las Vegas in 2014.

Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.

Obama and Clinton bow during the transfer-of-remains ceremony marking the return of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who were killed in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012.

Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Clinton arrives for a group photo before a forum with the Gulf Cooperation Council in March 2012. The forum was held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.

Clinton checks her Blackberry inside a military plane after leaving Malta in October 2011. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Clinton exclusively used a personal email account during her time as secretary of state. The account, fed through its own server, raises security and preservation concerns. Clinton later said she used a private domain out of ""convenience,"" but admits in retrospect ""it would have been better"" to use multiple emails.

In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

In this photo provided by the White House, Obama, Clinton, Biden and other members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.

Obama is flanked by Clinton and Vice President-elect Joe Biden at a news conference in Chicago in December 2008. He had designated Clinton to be his secretary of state.

Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.

Obama and Clinton talk on the plane on their way to a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, in June 2008. She had recently ended her presidential campaign and endorsed Obama.

Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.

Clinton and another presidential hopeful, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, applaud at the start of a Democratic debate in 2007.

Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.

Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year.

President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.

President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999.

The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.

The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998.

Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having ""inappropriate intimate contact"" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.

The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook ""It Takes a Village"" in 1997.

The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.

The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President.

Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus.

In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.

Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of ""60 Minutes"" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992.

The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.

The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President.

Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.

Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985.

In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.

In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea.

Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.

Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School.

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party.

Merrill said in the meantime, Clinton's team ""has worked with the State Department to ensure her emails are stored in a safe and secure manner.""

The FBI, which is handling the matter, declined to comment Tuesday evening. David E. Kendall, Clinton's lawyer, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

A senior Clinton campaign aide said the server hadn't yet changed hands as of Tuesday evening and Clinton's team is working with the Justice Department to arrange the logistics of the handover. The thumb drive, meanwhile, has been turned over. And Kendall, the aide said, has followed State Department guidance on safekeeping.

Clinton's campaign believes there are no emails from her State Department tenure on the server, since it was wiped clean after she turned over her work-related emails to the State Department, the aide said.

The aide said it's the Clinton campaign's understanding that the Justice Department isn't looking to reconstruct the server's history, but is instead concerned about the security of the emails today, since some are now classified, though they weren't classified or labeled as such at the time.

For Clinton, the move -- which Republicans like House Speaker John Boehner have urged for months -- indicates her campaign sees a growing risk in the issue of her use of a private email server, which has stoked concerns about her trustworthiness.

""It's about time,"" Boehner said in a statement Tuesday night.

Since news broke in March of her use of a personal email address on a server kept in her Chappaqua, New York, home, Clinton has insisted that she's turned over all of her work-related emails to the State Department and deleted all others -- but wouldn't turn over her server to the government.

Clinton has been dogged by poll numbers showing that more Americans, by a margin of about 20 percentage points, say she's not trustworthy rather than trustworthy. A late July CNN/ORC poll found that 58% of all registered voters say it is extremely important that the next president be honest and trustworthy.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi and has pushed for Clinton's emails for months, claimed credit for her decision to turn over the server.

""The revelation that Secretary Clinton exclusively used private email for official public business, and the multitude of issues that emanated from her decision, including this most recent one, demonstrates what can happen when Congress and those equally committed to exposing the truth, doggedly pursue facts and follow them,"" he said in a statement.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Clinton waited ""a long time"" before turning the server over.

""That's a long time for top secret classified information to be held by an unauthorized person outside of an approved, secure government facility,"" he said in a statement. ""I look forward to the FBI answering my questions so the American people can be assured that everything has been done to protect our national security interests and hold accountable anyone who broke the rules.""

Still, it's clear the GOP won't stop hitting Clinton on the campaign trail, accusing her of secrecy over her decision to wait five months to turn over the server.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement Tuesday night that releasing the server does little to answer questions about Clinton's honesty.

""If Hillary Clinton believed in honesty and transparency, she would have turned over her secret server months ago to an independent arbiter, not as a last resort and to the Obama Justice Department,"" he said. ""Of course, if she really cares about transparency, she would never have had a secret server in the first place.""

Clinton's decision to hand over the server comes as the intelligence community's inspector general now says at least five emails stored on Clinton's server contained classified information. The documents were from a ""limited sampling"" of her emails and among those 40 reviewed, said the inspector general, Charles McCullough III.

On Tuesday, McCullough sent four of the emails to chairs of several congressional committees. In a cover letter, he said two of the four emails included information that has now been classified up to top secret.

One of the five emails has since been declassified because it was no longer time-sensitive. The intelligence community maintains the remaining two contained classified material, but is deferring to the State Department on whether they should be identified as such.

McCullough said in the past that ""none of the emails we reviewed had classification or dissemination markings,"" but that some ""should have been handled as classified, appropriately marked, and transmitted via a secure network."" The State Department has told McCullough that ""there are potentially hundreds of classified emails within the approximately 30,000 provided by former Secretary Clinton.""

Republicans shared exclusively with CNN Tuesday a review of those emails that the State Department had released, which they said showed Clinton and her aides sent information that would later be classified to six people's private email addresses. They include former Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns; Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton's chief of staff at the State Department; and Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton's top foreign policy adviser. Clinton also emailed information that would later be classified to close confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whose communications with Clinton about Libya have become a focus of the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks.

""The fact that classified information was sent to and from Hillary Clinton to at least six separate individuals and potentially many more demonstrates just how big of a risk her decision to use a secret server poses to our national security,"" Republican National Committee research director Raj Shah told CNN.

The probe into Clinton's email practices has now expanded to include some of her top aides as part of a larger investigation on the use of private email accounts by previous secretaries of state. The Republican chairmen of three Senate committees -- intelligence, homeland security and foreign relations -- sent a joint request in March for both inspectors general to investigate the personal emails of Clinton's aides.

""We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate,"" said Douglas Welty, a spokesman for the State Department's inspector general.

In a July 17 letter to the State Department, Steve A. Linick, the State Department inspector general, said his office is reviewing ""the use of personal communications hardware and software by five secretaries of state and their immediate staffs."" The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General is assisting in the review.

One of the emails containing since-classified information was released to the public, prompting the intelligence community to ask the FBI to investigate the possible compromise of classified material. The State Department now has a team of analysts from the intelligence community to review Clinton's emails before any more are released to the public.

Of the two top-secret emails sent to Congress on Tuesday, State Department spokesman John Kirby said they have not been released to the public and the department is ""taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately"" while the determination was made.

""Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011, and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton,"" Kirby said. ""They were not marked as classified.""",REAL
"Barney Frank became a spokesman for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality as the country's first congressman to voluntarily come out, and in a conversation with HuffPost Live, Frank had strong words about comments by Ben Carson, who recently stated on CNN that being gay is ""absolutely"" a choice.

The former Massachusetts Congressman, who has a new memoir out titled Frank, referenced troublesome mentalities like Ben Carson's as he described to host Alyona Minkovski the struggle of being a young teen who knew he wanted to go into politics but also knew ""people hated gay people.""

""For those like Ben Carson, who just announced that it was a choice, I do want to say at 14 I did not choose to be a member of what I thought was the most hated group in America. That was not a typical teenage reaction at the time,"" Frank said Tuesday.

Presidential hopeful Carson has since apologized for his comments, which cited prison as an example to back his claims. In an e-mailed statement to reporters, Carson wrote: “I do not pretend to know how every individual came to their sexual orientation. I regret that my words to express that concept were hurtful and divisive. For that I apologize unreservedly to all that were offended,” TIME reported.

Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!",REAL
"By Heather Callaghan, Editor Now that people are catching on that obesity equals toxin storage and endocrine problems – losing excess weight is more important than ever. “Meal... ",FAKE
"Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, explains how US elections are stolen:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45799.htm 
He outlines what can be done, but those in power will not do it. Revolution is probably the only solution.
The post Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at New York University, explains how US elections are stolen: appeared first on PaulCraigRoberts.org .",FAKE
"SPECIAL TO BUSINESS WEEK, MINDY KATZMAN, AUTH. EDITOR--Paul Craig Roberts in front of a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury.",FAKE
"a reply to: Violater1 She wants your vote. And she will say anything to get it. She changes her mind as fast as public opinion changes. ROFL Damm - If we could get someone in office who would change their opinion to public opinion AND FOLLOW THROUGH, they would be my hero. They spend all their money finding out what we want, then they lie. Why can't we just get a representative in office? edit on 26-10-2016 by Isurrender73 because: (no reason given)",FAKE
"WASHINGTON -- There are no shortage of culprits in the national debate over rising income inequality, but President Barack Obama's Labor Department would like to add one more to the list: on-the-job injuries.

In a new report issued Wednesday, Labor Department officials argue that workplace injuries and illnesses, coupled with an inadequate worker compensation system, are contributing to the gap between rich and poor in the U.S.

According to the Labor Department, roughly 4 million serious injuries and illnesses are reported by employers each year, though the true tally is likely much higher. Workers who suffer a serious injury earn an estimated 15 percent less, or $31,000 on average, over the ensuing decade.

""These injuries force thousands of working families out of the middle class and block many low-wage workers from getting ahead,"" David Michaels, head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told The Huffington Post. ""The studies all show that the majority of workers who get hurt never get any workers compensation, and they have to pick up the cost themselves. The workers who do [get workers comp] are never fully compensated.""

According to the report, ""Adding Inequality to Injury: The Costs of Failing to Protect Workers on the Job,"" state laws and court rulings have made it harder for injured workers to recoup money, with workers compensation now covering only an estimated 21 percent of lost wages and medical bills due to injury or illness. The rest of the tab falls onto workers, their health insurers and taxpayers in general.

While ""inadequate for the average worker,"" the system tends to be even less generous toward low-wage workers, according to the report. Immigrant workers, in particular, may be unaware of their rights, have a limited grasp of English or simply be afraid to report their injuries for fear of losing their jobs. As a result, many don't even file claims.

According to the Labor Department, less than 40 percent of workers who are eligible to apply for workers compensation following an injury actually apply for it.

Structural changes in the labor force have made workers more likely to get hurt on the job, Michaels said. He pointed to the prevalence of temp workers in warehousing and manufacturing, as well as ""independent contractors"" in the construction industry.

Temp workers have typically been on the job a shorter period of time and undergone less training, making them more vulnerable to injury than permanent workers. And when workers are misclassified as self-employed independent contractors, companies dodge the liabilities that would typically come with an injury, giving them less motivation to ensure a safe workplace.

""When the worker is misclassified, they'll never see workers compensation and they won't get unemployment insurance. They really pay a very significant cost,"" Michaels said. ""And if an employer isn't concerned [with liabilities], they have very little incentive to prevent those injuries.""",REAL
"Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama offered one of his sharpest denunciations of Donald Trump to date Tuesday, declaring the Republican nominee entirely unfit to serve as president and lambasting Republicans for sticking by their nominee.

The strong rebuke in the White House East Room came after Trump's criticism of the family of a slain Muslim US soldier, along with comments that displayed apparent confusion related to the Russian incursion into Ukraine.

""The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president,"" Obama said at a White House news conference with the Prime Minister of Singapore. ""He keeps on proving it.""

The Trump campaign responded by going after the Democratic nominee as well as the President.

""Hillary Clinton has proven herself unfit to serve in any government office,"" a Trump statement said, listing a number of policy concerns. ""Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi.""

Later Trump in an interview with WJLA said of Obama: ""He's a terrible president. He'll probably go down as the worst president in the history of our country. He's been a total disaster.""

Obama on Tuesday described his feelings about Trump as unprecedented, recalling disagreements with previous GOP presidential nominees Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney -- but never an outright sense they were unfit to serve.

""The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of our country, the fact that he doesn't appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia, means that he's woefully unprepared to do this job,"" Obama said.

Speaking alongside Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the White House East Room, Obama said there are now weekly episodes in which even Republican party leaders distance themselves from Trump.

""There has to be a point at which you say, 'Enough,' "" Obama said.

Obama placed responsibility for Trump's statements squarely on his fellow Republicans, many of whom denounced his statements on the slain soldier's family but didn't withdraw their support.

""What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer?"" Obama asked of GOP leaders. ""This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he's making. There has to be a point at which you say, 'This is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party.' ""

Obama said that denunciations from Republicans of Trump's remarks ""ring hollow"" without an accompanying withdrawal of support.

""I don't doubt their sincerity. I don't doubt they were outraged by some of the statements that Mr. Trump and his supporters made about the Khan family,"" Obama said. ""But there has to come a point in which you say, 'Somebody who makes those kinds of statements doesn't have the judgment, the temperament, the understanding to occupy the most powerful position in the world.' ""

Trump and the family of the slain soldier have been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute over Muslims in America and the nature of patriotic sacrifice.

After Khizir Khan, who lost his son in a suicide bombing in Iraq, declared at last week's Democratic National Convention that Trump had ""sacrificed nothing,"" the Republican nominee claimed he'd been ""viciously attacked"" and questioned why Khan's wife, Ghazala, didn't make her own remarks.

Criticism from Trump's own party came swiftly, including in a lengthy statement from McCain, whom Trump previously derided for having been taken captive in the Vietnam War. But he and other top GOP leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, made little indication they would withdraw support for the Republican candidate.

Trump has also taken flak for appearing unaware that Russian forces had annexed Crimea in early 2014, saying on ABC's ""This Week"" Sunday that President Vladimir Putin is ""not going into Ukraine."" Later, he argued that the people of Crimea ""would rather be with Russia than where they were"" -- an argument that Putin himself has made in justifying his annexation of the disputed Ukrainian territory.

Trump looks for better Russia ties

And he's maintained his view that fostering better ties to Putin would benefit areas of American foreign policy, including in the fight against ISIS. ""If we could get along with Russia, wouldn't that be a good thing, instead of a bad thing?"" Trump asked Monday during a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania.

Trump also took heat for calling on Russia last week to release deleted emails from Clinton if they had obtained them in a hack of the Democratic National Committee, which US officials have fingered Moscow for.

At the news conference, Obama said the alleged Russian hacking wouldn't necessarily prompt a complete freeze in relations between the the country and the United States.

Noting that the FBI was still investigating the hack, Obama said cybersecurity was just another dispute of many between Putin and himself.

""If in fact Russia engaged in this activity, it's just one on a long list of issues that me and Mr. Putin talk about,"" Obama said. ""I don't think that it wildly swings what is a tough, difficult relationship that we have with Russia right now.""

Obama's administration, through the Justice Department's national security division, continues to investigate the hack. Neither the White House nor the FBI have publicly blamed Russia for the intrusion. But federal officials said there is strong evidence indicating the breach was perpetrated by hackers working on behalf of Russia intelligence.

Trump has brushed off Democratic charges that Putin could be behind the hack in order to tip the US election in his favor, claiming he's never met the Russian leader and doesn't maintain a relationship with him. In statements from only a few years ago, however, Trump said he enjoyed warm ties with Putin.

Obama's remarks Tuesday intensify his patten of inserting himself into the rancorous presidential race. While the President has freely criticized Trump in the year since the businessman entered the race, his denunciations have come faster and harsher in the last several weeks.

At last week's convention, Obama named Trump repeatedly, arguing the candidate was ignorant of facts and intent on dividing the nation. And in June, Obama lit into Trump's response to the mass shooting in Orlando, saying he was peddling a dangerous vision.

The President is expected to play an outsized role on the campaign trail in the coming months as Clinton works to motivate the supporters who helped elect Obama to office twice.",REAL
"In a decision with profound implications, the Supreme Court asserted that under the US Constitution legal marriage may not be denied to same-sex couples, extending this right to all 50 states.

As yet another general joins Trump's team, what does the pick reveal?

From left, Annie Katz of the University of Michigan, Zaria Cummings of Michigan State University, Spencer Perry of Berkeley, Calif., and Justin Maffett of Dartmouth University, celebrate outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday after the court declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the US.

In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court on Friday ruled that gay men and lesbians enjoy a fundamental right to marry and that none of the 50 states has the power to defy that constitutional guarantee of freedom and equal protection.

In a 5-to-4 decision, the high court issued the constitutional equivalent of a grand-slam homerun for same-sex couples across the United States.

“The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

“The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry,” he declared. “No longer may this liberty be denied to them.”

The high court also ruled that in addition to issuing licenses to same-sex couples, all 50 states must recognize the legitimacy of same-sex marriages performed in any other state.

Currently, 37 states recognize same-sex marriages, while 13 states had maintained the traditional definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The high court decision represents a major advance for civil and equal rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. It marks the continued emergence of that community from its closeted, second-class existence for much of human history. And it establishes a firm legal foundation upon which gay rights advocates will push for broader freedoms, equality, and protections.

At the same time, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion marks a significant setback for conservatives seeking to maintain the federalist structure of government. Rather than allowing the contentious social issue of marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives on a state-by-state basis, the high court decided instead to constitutionalize the issue of same-sex marriage and answer the question itself.

The dissenting justices predict that that court’s actions in cutting off democratic debate over the issue will inflame opposition, rather than lead to national healing and greater tolerance. In addition, the decision sets the stage for more contentious battles ahead between gay rights activists and religious and social conservatives, they warn.

“When decisions are reached through democratic means, some people will inevitably be disappointed with the results. But those whose views do not prevail at least know that they have had their say, and accordingly are – in the tradition of our political culture – reconciled to the result of a fair and honest debate,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a dissenting opinion.

That democratic dynamic was cut short by the majority decision, the chief justice said.

“By deciding this question under the Constitution, the court removes it from the realm of democratic decision,” Roberts said. “There will be consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such profound significance. Closing debate tends to close minds.”

Kennedy dismissed such concerns. “Of course, the Constitution contemplates that democracy is the appropriate process for change,” he said, “so long as that process does not abridge fundamental rights.”

When fundamental rights are at stake, he said, the court has a duty to address the issue.

Kennedy said that marriage was a keystone of the social order in America and that it was intolerable to exclude gay men and lesbians from full participation in that order.

“It demeans gays and lesbians for the state to lock them out of a central institution of the nation’s society,” he said.

“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is not manifest,” Kennedy said.  “With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”

In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts called the majority decision “an act of will, not legal judgment.”

“The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this court’s precedent,” he said.

“If you are among the many Americans – of whatever sexual orientation – who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” the chief justice said.

“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits,” Roberts said.

“But do not celebrate the Constitution,” he said. “It had nothing to with it.”

The chief justice said the Constitution leaves to the people and their elected representatives the authority to define marriage.

“The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a state change its definition of marriage. And a state’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational,” Roberts said.

“In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a state are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition,” he said.

Friday’s decision stems from lawsuits filed by same-sex couples in four states – Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee – challenging their exclusion from traditional marriage laws.

Some couples sued to be allowed to marry. Others sued to have same-sex marriages performed in other states recognized in their new state of residence.

Lawyers for the states had argued that marriage is aimed at heading-off the societal problem of unwed mothers and fatherless children. They argued that it has existed through much of human history to encourage a man and woman to remain together as a family to raise their biological offspring.

Lawyers for same-sex couples dismissed that explanation, arguing that allowing same-sex couples to marry would in no way undercut the ability of opposite-sex couples to marry and raise their own children.

Kennedy’s majority decision comes less than two months after he commented during oral argument about the difficulty of a judge ordering the nation to change a definition of marriage that had existed throughout most of human history.

“This definition has been with us for millennia,” Kennedy said during oral argument in late April. “And it’s very difficult for the court to say, oh, well, we know better.”

But that is, essentially, what Justice Kennedy did on Friday.

In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the majority opinion represents a threat to American democracy by a majority of nine lawyers on the Supreme Court who claim the power to create liberties to be protected under the Constitution.

Scalia said when the high court wields power to revise the Constitution it robs the American people of the freedom to govern themselves.

“Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best,” Scalia said. He said the court’s decision to end the debate and resolve the issue itself was a “naked judicial claim to legislative – indeed super-legislative – power.”

“A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy,” Scalia said.

In his majority opinion, Kennedy said that if rights were defined only by those who exercised them, new groups would never be able to invoke those rights once they were denied. He said the right to same-sex marriage was part of the liberty promised in the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era,” Kennedy said.

“Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophic premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.”

“But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the state itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied,” Kennedy said.

“Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” he said.

Joining Kennedy in the majority were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

Dissenting opinions were filed by Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.",REAL
"In the way of recent attacks abroad, the White House will host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism Feb. 18 that will highlight how local committees in United States have worked to curb extremism before violence takes place.

The meeting aims to show how to prevent attacks by those prone to extremism ""in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, and Paris,"" according to a statement released by the White House press secretary.

Officials from Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul will show how they've brought social service providers, such as mental health professionals and religious leaders, together with law enforcement officials. Representatives from other countries will also showcase their most successful efforts to engage communities -- including the private and tech sectors, as well as the religious community -- on the issue.

The sessions will involve ""presentations, panel discussions, and small group interactions,"" the statement said, though it did not disclose specific participants.

The White House released a strategy in August 2011, called Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, aimed at stopping violent extremism by way of domestic initiatives.",REAL
"The Trump campaign is so desperate that they are openly celebrating the reopening of the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted: A great day in our campaign just got even better. FBI reviewing new emails in Clinton probe @CNNPolitics https://t.co/WBltG2lAK6 
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) October 28, 2016 
The problem with the idea that the emails will save Donald Trump and the Republican Party is that Clinton was beating Trump while the FBI did their first investigation into her emails. Clinton has led Trump all through the Congressional hearings into her emails. She led Trump throughout the FBI investigation into her emails. Clinton won the Democratic nomination with her emails being a story. 
The point is that Hillary Clinton’s emails aren’t a big issue to the majority of voters. The people who aren’t Republicans in this election don’t care about her emails. 
When compared to Trump sexually assaulting women, not paying federal income taxes, and being sued in two states for fraud, the emails seem like a quaint political scandal from a much simpler time. 
There has also never been a shred of proof that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. 
Republicans can’t get past the basic hurdle of needing actual evidence to back up their email conspiracy. 
Hillary Clinton is facing Donald Trump in this election, and only a moron or a truly desperate campaign manager clinging on the last bit of hope that she can find would believe that the reopening of an email investigation will make a bit of difference on election day. 
The voters are speaking, and they don’t care about Hillary Clinton’s emails.",FAKE
"Donald Trump on Monday spent part of his July 4th with Sen. Joni Ernst -- fueling speculation that the Iowa freshman senator could be on the short list of his vice presidential picks.

Ernst told Fox News they had a ""good conversation,"" adding, ""I will continue to share my insights with Donald about the need to strengthen our economy, keep our nation safe, and ensure America is always a strong, stabilizing force around the globe.""

Earlier, Trump tweeted, ""I look forward to meeting (Ernst) today in New Jersey. She has done a great job as Senator of Iowa!""

Over the weekend, Trump met with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and his wife, though a Pence spokesman said ""nothing was offered.""

The spokesman, Marc Lotter, added, ""The governor had warm, productive meetings with the Trumps."" He declined to say where the Saturday meeting was held. Pence is running for re-election against Democratic former state House Speaker John Gregg.

Trump and Pence discussed Pence's policies during his term as governor which began in 2013, Lotter said. He also declined to discuss Pence's level of interest in the position, echoing a comment from Pence last week that he did not want to talk about ""a hypothetical.""

Trump tweeted Monday about his Saturday meeting with Pence.

""Spent time with Indiana Governor Mike Pence and family yesterday. Very impressed, great people!” Trump tweeted.

As Pence and his wife arrived for a concert Sunday night at Conner Prairie, a history park in Fishers, the governor again declined to discuss whether he was interested in the position. He reiterated his support for Trump's candidacy and said the Trumps ""couldn't have been more kind and gracious"" during the meeting.

Trump has never held public office and is considering a small group of political veterans as potential running mates.

People with direct knowledge of Trump's vetting process say the list includes Pence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.

In addition to serving as governor, Pence served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 12 years.

He also at one time had his own presidential ambitions but last year ruled out a run after his popularity fell in the wake of criticism over his handling of the state's religious objections law.

Fox News' Chris Snyder and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"The roots of gridlock will never be addressed until we stop restating the problem and start focusing on the solutions. The good news is that we not only can bridge this political divide; we already are.

It’s not just young revolutionary Bernie Sanders supporters or angry-as-hell Donald Trump fans who want to “change the system.” It’s also the president of the United States of America.

The future we want “will only happen if we fix our politics,” said President Obama in his 2016 State of the Union address. “If we want a better politics, it’s not enough just to change a congressman or change a senator or even change a president. We have to change the system to reflect our better selves.”

But exactly how do we do that? The president did not say. And when William Jefferson Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 expressed the same noble sentiment, they didn’t tell us how either.

Our last three presidents did not tell us because they don’t know. They are products of the system and clearly are not going to reform much less revolutionize it. They have risen to the top of the leadership pyramid by playing the partisan game. Them telling us how to work together would be like an alcoholic telling us how to get sober: He knows everything about the topic except doing it.

On both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans are recognizing that they are in a long-term political marriage that needs help. But even if both donkeys and elephants want to repair their broken relationship, they still need to learn how. The primary causes of dysfunction that Obama identified — the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the tyranny of money in campaigns — are certainly real. But these and other causes will never be effectively addressed unless we stop restating the problem and start focusing on the solutions.

The good news is that we not only can bridge this political divide; in fact, we already are.

I have recently interviewed and profiled dozens of Americans who know how to solve problems across the divide. They are doing so in state legislatures and on Capitol Hill; in living rooms and town halls; between corporations and anti-corporate activists; with police departments and minority communities; and in almost every sector of our society. When diverse groups connect in constructive dialogue, they make progress on issues ranging from criminal justice reform to internet privacy to education reform

Literally dozens of major initiatives have had concrete successes bringing Left and Right together to break down the partisan wall and find common ground. They have succeeded where Capitol Hill has failed. This movement to reunite America is gaining momentum because it starts with four fundamental shifts that are a vital part of fixing our politics.

From Confirming to Learning. Anyone who thinks that political leadership means thinking that whatever we believe is automatically right — and anyone who disagrees with us is wrong — is not part of the solution. Simply confirming what one already knows is not leadership; it is an addiction to being right. The movement to reunite America is redefining leadership to be about learning rather than about being know-it-alls. (Check out , or as examples of this shift.)

From Control to Relationship. Particularly during elections, winning seems to be everything. “Controlling” the Congress and the White House appears to be the goal. But on the day after the election, whoever won or lost must forge a relationship with the opposition. Making relationships across the divide strong and healthy is today the key to accomplishing anything that endures. (Learn more from or the 2000-member ).

From Position-Taking to Problem-Solving. America has a surplus of leaders with rigid positions and a deficit of leaders who solve problems. It’s time to reverse that imbalance. Across the country, a host of problem-solving organizations are gaining ground. (Examples include No Labels in Washington, D.C., to in San Francisco, from in Tallahassee to the in Kansas City.

From Endless Campaigning to Effective Governance. The line between campaigning and governing used to be clear. Campaigns were brief preludes before Election Day, not never-ending tit-for-tat attacks that became a permanent part of civic life. But today campaigning is benefiting from unprecedented levels of investment, and governing is being paralyzed. Fortunately, from the offices of city mayors to state-level initiatives and even on the edges of Capitol Hill, red-blue coalitions are finding common ground on a wide range of policy issues ranging from criminal justice reform to education to defense spending. ( ’s “Next Generation” project, for example, has convened across-the-aisle collaboration in scores of state legislatures.)

So we Americans do know how to work together. But we have to get past the soaring rhetoric from the right and the left about how they alone can “save America.” We have to get down to the real business of learning and applying boundary-crossing skills. If we actually want a “system that reflects our better selves,” let’s start with what works. Let’s take to scale the scores of projects where that is already happening.

Mark Gerzon, president of Mediators Foundation, is the author of “ The Reunited States of America: How We Can Cross the Partisan Divide .”",REAL
"  The new year is almost here and it’s often a time when we all start to think about what we want to change for the next year. I’ve never been much a fan of the whole cliche of changing because of the new year, but why not embrace it as a time where we can make change?   Do a quick reflection right now. Do you feel like you have followed your dreams and passions this past year? Do you feel you got caught up in the stresses of life quite often? Did you feel judgement, negative self talk and anger were a big part of your days? Reflecting on how you’ve felt over your year and being honest with yourself about it gives you the chance to know how to adjust and move forward from this moment forward whether it be the new year or not. I’ve found in my own life that if I don’t pay attention to how I feel, what I create, what’s playing out in my life and take responsibility for it, it doesn’t change. It stays the same, I experience the same emotions or stagnant feelings, and I don’t move forward. But the moment I decide to take it into my own hands, I see how much I’m not a victim to what happens. 11 Things To Let Go of Before the New year 1. Stop all the negative self talk – It’s first because it’s probably one of the most important. The more we talk poorly about ourselves to ourselves or others, the more we disempower ourselves and empower all the things we wish to adjust about ourselves. Observe it, take note of it, and kick it. It’s not helping you. 2. Choose one bad eating habit and kick it! – Taking care of and fuelling your vessel is one of the most important things we can do in life to stay mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. Pick one of your worst eating habits and aim to cut it out completely in 3 months. Whatever it might be, be honest with yourself and make it happen. Then take on the next bad eating habit in 3 months. 3. Let go of chasing ‘success’– So often we put up goals or plans for ourselves yet have this tiny limited scope of what success is. Next thing you know we bring stress, worry and fear into the equation throughout the whole journey because we may not be totally in line to hit this pin prick point of what success looks like to us. Instead, do your best to take the steps needed to get to where you want to go, but let go of the lure of success and what it looks like and means. There’s no such thing as failure. (more)   4. Kick the idea that you cannot achieve or follow your dreams – So often we have our ideas of what we are excited or passionate about, but let it go because we think we can’t do it or because it’s unrealistic. Instead of believing every word of that, take ONE step. One step towards making your passion or your dreams happen. The one step will lead to the next and the next, but you have to take the first one. Plan out that first step and take it! 5. Let go of the idea that you should run from your problems – We often get into this mentality that we just need to “get over it.” In theory this sounds sorta good, you move on from things that happen in the past or something to that effect. But by just forgetting about it, did we really move on? No, it gets triggered again later or lies dormant as a resented event etc. Instead, let’s face our problems and truly move past them. Journal about it, talk to someone else about it. Put the cards on the table to someone who cares about you and who can help you move past it. Pick someone who will see the bigger picture and be honest with you. You have all it takes to move past what challenges you. 6. Stop comparing yourself to others – This is a big one. So often we are looking at others and using what they have, do or are to compare it against us and make up a story. This whole game can make us sad or feel down about ourselves or it can feed our ego in a big way. Let it go, respect everyone’s journey, including your own and stop the need to compare yourself to others.   7. Stop judging others – Judging other people can become a habit and an addiction. It’s like something we can’t stop doing sometimes! Take a moment the next time you judge someone and observe it. Ask yourself why you did it, how did it make you feel? Etc. Make a conscious effort to stop. (more) 8. Stop the blame game – Blaming and pointing fingers when it comes to our challenges or what happens to us doesn’t allow us to look at and observe how we might have created or aligned with an experience to help make it happen. I’m not saying there’s no such things others can do to hurt you, I’m simply saying take responsibility for how you feel and don’t even point blame, it doesn’t help us. 9. Stop worrying and trying so hard to fit in and be accepted – This is something far too many of us do just to save face and not be “the weird one.” The reality is, it’s more ‘weird’ to be a version of yourself that isn’t genuine or real simply because you want to be accepted by others. It’s a choice you can’t maintain forever and the longer it goes the more uncomfortable you will feel. Be you, accept yourself, be genuine and don’t try to make others do the same when. Let it happen. Trust. 10. Let go of the need to control everything – Sometimes we can’t take a step forward in anything because we don’t know all the answers or all the variables. This is our obsession with control sometimes. Yes, observe a situation and make the best choices available to you, but don’t worry so much about needing to control or know every detail about it. Learn to leave things up to trust and knowing that things will work out as they need to. This doesn’t mean be reckless, just that you don’t need to control every thing, person and detail. 11. Stop procrastinating – This one goes with everything on the list. Stop putting it all off. Whatever it may be. The changes listed above, the hobby you want to, the career you want to explore, or the thing you want to tell to someone important to you. Stop putting it off and just do it! 
 ",FAKE
"Hillary Clinton publicly conceded the U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump Wednesday after a surprise defeat overnight. Her concession speech was largely well received, even by her critics. 
Via Yournewswire 

She did not lash out or challenge the result. Excerpts of her concession speech Wednesday in New York. This is not the outcome we wanted or we worked so hard for, and I’m sorry that we did not win this election for the values we share and the vision we hold for our country.
I know how disappointed you feel because I feel it too, and so do tens of millions of Americans who invested their hopes and dreams in this effort. This is painful and it will be for a long time, but I want you to remember this: Our campaign was never about one person or even one election. It was about the country we love and about building an America that’s hopeful, inclusive and big-hearted.
We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.
Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power, and we don’t just respect that, we cherish it. It also enshrines other things: the rule of law, the principle that we are all equal in rights and dignity, freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values too, and we must defend them.
And let me add, our constitutional democracy demands our participation not just every four years, but all the time. So let’s do all we can to keep advancing the causes and values we all hold dear: making our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top; protecting our country and protecting our planet; and breaking down all the barriers that hold any American back from achieving their dreams….
Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will, and hopefully sooner than we might think right now.
And to all the little girls who are watching this: Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.
By Hillary Clinton 
—
Hillary Clinton addresses staff and supporters at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan.
",FAKE
"Marc Zell, co-chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel speaks as the Republican Party launches its first ever election campaign in Israel in Modiin, Monday, Aug. 15, 2016.
Donald Trump’s adviser on Israel said on Wednesday that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are not illegal, adding that he believes the candidate agrees with him, putting the pair at odds with much of the world.
Speaking to AFP at a rooftop restaurant on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion after a pro-Trump rally, David Friedman also said the US presidential candidate was “tremendously sceptical” about the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
About 150 people, including right-wing Israelis and evangelical Christians, attended Wednesday’s Trump rally outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The compound is holy to both Muslims and Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount. Located in East Jerusalem, it was occupied by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move never recognised by the international community.
Asked whether Trump viewed the West Bank as part of Israel, as many far-right Israelis do, Friedman did not answer directly.
“I don’t think he believes that the settlements are illegal,” Friedman said.
Myself and . @realDonaldTrump senior #Israel advisor David Friedman at the #JerusalemForever event that was held tonight at the old city. pic.twitter.com/2JxEWRrk8o
— Israeli for Trump (@davidweissman3) October 26, 2016
Israeli religious nationalists see the Palestinian territory as part of the country, citing Jews’ connection to the land from biblical times.
The US has intensified criticism of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank in recent months, warning that it is eating away at hopes for a two-state solution.
Settlements in the West Bank are viewed as illegal under international law and are major stumbling blocks to peace efforts because they are built on land seized in the 1967 war which Palestinians see as part of their future state.
At an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in March, Trump described an “unbreakable bond” between the US and Israel.
“When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one,” Trump told delegates, in a speech that heaped praise on Israel and derided Palestinians as perpetrators of violence.
Recalling rounds of failed peace talks between the two parties, Trump blamed Palestinian leaders.
“To make a great deal, you need two willing participants,” Trump said. “We know Israel is willing to deal. Israel has been trying to sit down at the negotiating table without preconditions for years.”
Friedman reiterated that Trump would recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US embassy there – which would break with decades of precedent and put Washington at odds with most UN member states.
There were chants of “lock her up” when Trump’s Democrat rival Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned at the rally ahead of the 8 November vote – a common refrain among Trump supporters who want to see her jailed over an emails scandal.
“I hate Hillary. She’s the same like (Barack) Obama,” said Ran Hofman, 54, who waved an Israeli flag. “They screw up the whole world.”
A brief video message from Trump of about one minute was played at the event.
“Together we will stand up to the enemies like Iran, bent on destroying Israel and her people,” Trump said. “Together we will make America and Israel safe again.”",FAKE
"Rand Paul is not like other potential presidential candidates.

The Kentucky senator, who announced his candidacy for the White House on Tuesday morning, doesn't fit neatly into the molds of either party.

Socially liberal on issues of crime and punishment — especially when it comes to drug sentencing — against a federal ban on same-sex marriage, and no foreign policy hawk, he's not your prototypical Republican.

As a fiscal conservative and an opponent of abortion rights, though, he's certainly no Democrat either.

""It's time for a new way, a new set of ideas and a new leader,"" Paul says in a Web video, with a heavy metal soundtrack, previewing his presidential campaign.

Paul fits more with libertarians. And, though he is the scion of the last carrier of the torch of ""liberty,"" he's also not quite his father's libertarian.

Paul's father, the former Rep. Ron, ran for president three times before retiring. The elder Paul, 79, was always regarded as something of a gadfly, an outspoken fresh voice in the Republican primary with a passionate following of young libertarians.

Though Paul did not win a single state in 2008 or 2012, when measured by Election Day voting percentage, he routinely finished in the top three. In fact, he finished a solid second behind Romney in the critical early state of New Hampshire.

But his band of young, engaged and determined Paul-ites proved one thing — they could organize. Ron Paul not only won straw poll after straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference and elsewhere, he also won the most delegates in several states, including Iowa. Though Paul finished third in vote total in the Hawkeye State, his campaign engineered what amounted to a takeover of the state Republican Party apparatus.

""He has a number of assets,"" said Stu Rothenberg, founder of the Rothenberg Political Report. ""He has terrific fundraising potential. He has an army of supporters who will run into a burning building to vote for him.""

Rand Paul has tried to use those supporters to help build on his father's foundation, reaching out to minority voters with an emphasis on criminal justice reform and to young audiences — like one in New Hampshire last year — with an appeal based on privacy and civil liberties.

""How many people here have a cellphone?"" Paul asked. ""How many people think it's none of the government's damn business what you do on your cell phone?""

""If I had to fill a large lecture room at my campus, I would bet a lot that Rand Paul could fill that room with young libertarian-minded conservatives,"" said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire. ""Of that I have little doubt.""

Though Rand Paul can fill a room with young libertarians in similar ways that his father could, he isn't a carbon copy of his dad. Paul has adjusted some of his policies to fit the mainstream of the GOP a bit better.

Paul has emphasized where he agrees with evangelical Christians on gay marriage, telling a group of pastors last month that the First Amendment says to keep government out of religion, not religion out of government. And, in moves that show he understands the GOP has returned to its hawkish roots since the rise of the self-declared Islamic State militant group, he has changed his tune on defense spending, proposing $190 billion more for the Pentagon. And the second day of his presidential rollout finds him in South Carolina — in front of the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Yorktown.

Those moves toward the mainstream of the party may lose Paul some diehard libertarians, but, says David Boaz of the Cato Institute, most libertarians are thrilled.

""I think Rand Paul is the most libertarian major presidential candidate that I can remember seeing,"" said Boaz, who's new book is called The Libertarian Mind, ""so it tells you that there is a constituency that wants this more libertarian approach.""

Boaz sees Paul's adjustments as necessary and practical.

""Rand Paul is trying to find a balance that reflects his own views and appeals to a plurality and eventually the majority of the party,"" Boaz said. ""To the extent that there is that constituency — skeptical of foreign intervention, skeptical of the surveillance state — he has that market in the Republican Party all to himself. Is it a big enough market? Well, that's what he's about to find out.""

Paul's anti-establishmentarian campaign slogan for 2016 will be ""Defeat the Washington Machine; Unleash the American Dream.""

That little slant rhyme invokes the memory of Paul crusading against the ""security state"" on the floor of the U.S. Senate in an old-fashioned, 13-hour filibuster two years ago. But if the goal for Rand Paul in 2016 is to emerge as the anti-establishment alternative to, say, Jeb Bush, Paul has to become more than just the libertarian candidate, Scala said.

""He has to find a way to be more appealing to the mainstream of New Hampshire Republicans while keeping his appeal to his core vote, which I would describe right now as people who voted for his dad three years ago,"" Scala said. ""That's the trick for Rand Paul.""

Paul, just as his father did with online ""money bombs,"" will likely be able to raise enough money to stick around for quite some time in the GOP primary. Analysts like Rothenberg are skeptical he will be able to pull off the improbable and become the Republican nominee, but Rothenberg wonders if Paul is laying the groundwork for a sea change within the party.

""He may be starting a process that, down the road, will change the Republican Party, will start to bring in some new kind of faces into the Republican Party,"" Rothenberg said. ""And I wouldn't be surprised if in six or 10 years, this is a more libertarian party.""",REAL
"Email 
When she stumbled across massive corruption and made-up statistics in her job at the United Nations, Rasna Warah knew she needed to act. But when she tried to blow the whistle, she was viciously attacked, publicly humiliated, threatened, intimidated, and more. Unfortunately, though, as Warah explains in her new book UNsilenced: UNmasking the United Nations' Culture of Cover-ups, Corruption and Impunity , her case is far from unique. 
In fact, the corruption and lawlessness across the UN appears to be systemic. Some of the cases described in the book and the pages of The New American magazine make the scandals she exposed and the retaliation she suffered seem mild by comparison. Indeed, in her book, she actually spends very little time dwelling on her own case, but delves instead into some of the many other known and unknown scandals to rock the global organization. 
Perhaps the most grotesque whistleblower-related story in recent memory surrounds the now-infamous case of Anders Kompass, the UN human-rights official who exposed child-rape by “peacekeeping” troops in Africa after the UN refused to act on it. But the book is filled with startling examples of corruption, mismanagement, and more, ranging from brazen theft of taxpayer money to the sexual abuse and exploitation of children by UN “peace” troops. Just the quotes from the UN whistleblowers exposing the putrid UN culture of impunity make the book worth reading. Apparently the UN did not want a “culture of snitches,” as one whistleblower put it. 
It got so bad that in 2015, as Warah explains, a coalition of nine UN whistleblowers got together to raise the matter with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. “Each of us has blown the whistle on serious wrongdoing, gross misconduct, and even criminal acts at the United Nations,” the group wrote in the letter, which is quoted in the book. “Our collective experience of reporting misconduct in the UN covers sexual exploitation, abuse of power, corruption, and other criminals activity over a period of more than a decade and a half.” 
Instead of the UN scrambling to make things right, though, it responded in every case by attacking the whistleblower instead of the crimes, abuse, and the people behind the problems. “Each of us has faced retaliation for reporting the wrongdoing,” the whistleblowers continued. “Our cases are well-known, and sadly, deter others from reporting wrongdoing. This must change.” Unfortunately for humanity, despite threats from Congress to cut funding, and increasingly widespread media attention, nothing has changed, as the book documents extensively. 
Warah's realization that something was very wrong at the UN began while she was serving at UN-Habitat as an editor of various publications, including the important “State of the World's Cities” report. Her troubles began in 2009, when she traveled to Bahrain with Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of the UN-Habitat agency that focuses on promoting “sustainable” cities. During the visit, Warah explained, some Bahrain officials asked how their money was being used. 
“The executive director did not provide an adequate response, and thinking that perhaps she had not been briefed about it, I made my own inquiries when I returned to Nairobi,” explained Warah, a Kenyan of Indian heritage. “I discovered that at least $350,000 of the $1 million donation Bahrain had made to UN-Habitat could not be accounted for. When I asked my supervisors if they knew where the money went, they descended on me like a tonne of bricks, even threatening to not talk to me any more.” 
At that time, Warah realized that “the money had probably been used on personal projects or maybe even diverted to individuals within the organization.” In an interesting turn of events, Warah later concluded that the monarchy in Bahrain did not even really care if its money has been used properly. Instead, it seems that the regime was involved in a sort of tit-for-tat agreement. 
“In 2007, the Prime Minister of Bahrain, Shaikh Khalifa, had been awarded the UN-Habitat Scroll on Honour award for ´his outstanding efforts in raising the living standards of Bahrainis,´” Warah added in an e-mail about her experiences. “This was just before Bahrain experienced its own Arab spring, when the monarchy's legitimacy was being questioned. The huge donation to UN-Habitat was probably how Bahrain's monarchy 'bought' international legitimacy through the UN.” 
Around that same time, Warah had already started to question how some of the alleged statistics used in the State of the World's Cities reports were actually being computed. “Many UN agencies deliberately exaggerate the scale of a problem or disseminate statistics that are not based on any scientific survey or research,” she wrote in the book. Many also “manufacture data,” she added, “because that is how they remain relevant, how they push their agenda on the international stage, and how they attract donor [taxpayer] funding.” 
Sometimes UN officials and other international bureaucracies make up numbers and lie to coerce governments into changing policies, she explained. The book cites a number of examples of cooked up numbers to justify bigger budgets, more power and prestige, and various policy prescriptions. Some of the alleged “famines” in Somalia, for example, appear to have been concocted by UN bureaucrats by simply inventing or massaging statistics. Clueless journalists then parrot the invented UN numbers as part of a process that Warah referred to as the “CNN effect.” 
Warah considers it a crime akin to plagiarism that should be severely punished. “When a UN agency publishes inaccurate, misleading, or unscientific statistics, it is even more unforgivable because the world's governments (i.e. member states of the UN) rely on those statistics to determine their national policies, priorities, and programs,” she continued, adding that “millions of people's lives can be affected by a single misleading or erroneous statistic.” 
In particular, during her stint editing the UN world cities report, she was concerned about the “Gini coefficient” numbers used for cities, which seek to measure income inequality. She tried to figure out how these were being arrived at. Unsurprisingly, her superiors at the UN office were not pleased with the curiosity and additional scrutiny, Warah explained. 
“My questioning resulted in several acts of retaliation, including public humiliation at office meetings, threats of non-renewal of contract, intimidating questioning during an interview for a post I had applied for and petty revenges, like forcing me to share my office with visiting consultants, even though I had made it clear that as editor of this important report I needed privacy and silence to carry out my work,” she explained in an e-mail. “I left the organization soon after due to frustration and a sense that my supervisors were hell-bent on making my life miserable.” 
In response to the retaliation, Warah filed an official complaint at the UN “Ethics Office,” which is supposed to investigate claims and provide relief to whistleblowers. The office claimed that, “while there probably was evidence of wrongdoing at UN-Habitat, they could not establish whether I had experienced any retaliation,” Warah said, adding that determining whether retaliation took place is key to getting justice from the UN's internal systems. 
The book also contains a very informative introduction by Beatrice Edwards, the international program director at the whistleblower advocacy group Government Accountability Project. Despite her general acceptance of the UN line regarding why it was founded and its alleged humanitarian purposes, Edwards highlights a number of extremely serious issues. Among those is the fact that UN personnel enjoy immunity from national and local laws, leading to a total lack of accountability that produces lawlessness and impunity. She also blasts the UN's supposed “internal system of justice” as subject to manipulation, calling its set-up “increasingly opaque and arbitrary.” 
And indeed, as the book shows, the UN's pseudo-justice system is almost tragically discredited, and totally undeserving of the term “justice.” According to the book, only between three percent and four percent of whistleblowers who sought assistance from the UN “Ethics Office” had the retaliation against them substantiated by the “Ethics” people. That means a stunning 96 percent or more of whistleblowers who reported being persecuted for blowing the whistle at the UN received no relief. 
Imagine being a UN worker who has observed criminality, and thinking about those odds. Of course, most people would simply choose to stay silent rather than jeopardize their career and livelihood for such meager odds. And so, with potential whistleblowers terrorized into submission, the widespread corruption, criminality and other horrors that plague the UN go unreported. The UN knows that, too, as it acknowledges in its reports about the drastic under-reporting of sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children by its scandal-plagued “peace” troops. 
When Warah tried to blow the whistle and seek relief, she witnessed the failures firsthand. “Since the Ethics Office could not determine retaliation, I could not take my case forward,” she explained. “Later I realized that the Ethics Office fails to prove retaliation in about 98 per cent of the whistleblower cases it receives, which suggests that it protects senior UN management rather than UN whistleblowers.” Numerous UN whistleblowers who have spoken to this magazine in recent years have made the exact same charge, and the UN has done little to dispel that notion. 
“The UN's culture of impunity ensures that those who do not rock the boat with uncomfortable truths get promoted while those who dare to speak out are castigated, ignored, demoted or fired,” wrote Warah in the book. “This is especially true in cases where the perpetrators of crimes are from powerful or influential countries that exert political pressure to ensure that their nationals' cases are not brought forward or are buried.” Think about the implications of that. 
In the case of Danish UN diplomat Paul Bang-Jensen, who blew the whistle on the deliberate sabotage of a UN probe into Soviet atrocities in Hungary, and tried to protect the identity of witnesses to protect them and their families from torture and murder, the saga ended with his suspicious “suicide.” His death came after he had told his wife and others not to believe any claims that he would commit suicide. The New American magazine will publish an in-depth story on Bang-Jensen in the coming weeks. 
There is so much more to learn from the UNsilenced book. For instance, Warah describes how international “aid” outfits bring in huge quantities of tax-funded food supplies right around harvest time, flooding the market with basically “free” food in huge quantities. This crushes prices, thereby destroying the incentive for locals to farm while perpetuating dependence on corrupt agencies funded by Western taxpayers, in addition to ensuring budget increases for global bureaucrats. 
Another interesting fact brought out in the book: The British government's tax-funded propaganda arm, the BBC, has an unwritten policy that prevents the “news” agency from “coming down too hard” on the UN or its senior bureaucrats. The reason, according to an unnamed BBC journalist cited by Warah, is that exposing UN wrongdoing and crime might be perceived as “anti-development.” Other self-styled media organs refuse to expose UN wrongdoing because the left-wing journalists fear being associated with right-of-center individuals who want to shut down the UN, Warah, herself a left-winger, acknowledges in UNsilenced . 
Some of the ideas proposed in the book to remedy the many problems include reforming the UN's internal justice system, setting up outside independent mechanisms, ensuring protection of whistleblowers, and more. Unfortunately, though, none of those recommendations get to the heart of the problem, which is that the dictator-dominated UN was flawed from the start and cannot be “reformed” enough to make it worth keeping. Surely protection for whistleblowers is needed — if only to ferret out criminals and bring them to justice, and to protect their victims, often children. But it will not solve the broader UN problem. 
If there is anything to quibble about with the book, it is that it accepts as true many of the fundamental (and false) premises upon which the UN was established — the idea that “world peace” was the goal of leading UN founders such as butcher Joseph Stalin of Moscow and Soviet spy Alger Hiss of the United States, for instance. The book also occasionally treats leftist ideological claims — the idea that governments are responsible for feeding people, as just one example — as if they were facts. The ideological lens through which Warah reports, though, is easy to discern, and does not interfere with, or take away from, the excellent and brave work she has done exposing this cesspool of corruption and crime. 
The book is well worth reading for anybody seeking information on UN corruption or the persecution of UN whistleblowers who try to do the right thing. For the sake of humanity and liberty, it needs to stop. Photos: Rasna Warah and her book UNsilenced 
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American , is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU . He can be reached at   
Related articles:",FAKE
"On Sunday, at the great Paris rally, the whole world was Charlie. By Tuesday, the veneer of solidarity was exposed as tissue thin. It began dissolving as soon as the real, remaining Charlie Hebdo put out its post-massacre issue featuring a Muhammad cover that, as the New York Times put it, “reignited the debate pitting free speech against religious sensitivities.”

Again? Already? Had not 4 million marchers and 44 foreign leaders just turned out on the streets of France to declare “No” to intimidation, and pledging solidarity, indeed identification (“Je suis Charlie”) with a satirical weekly specializing in the most outrageous and often tasteless portrayals of Muhammad? And yet, within 48 hours, the new Charlie Hebdo issue featuring the image of Muhammad — albeit a sorrowful, indeed sympathetic Muhammad — sparked new protests, denunciations and threats of violence, which in turn evinced another round of doubt and self-flagellation in the West about the propriety and limits of free expression. Hopeless.

As for President Obama, he never was Charlie, not even for those 48 hours. From the day of the massacre, he has been practically invisible. At the interstices of various political rallies, he issued bits of muted, mealy-mouthed boilerplate. Followed by the now-famous absence of any high-ranking U.S. official at the Paris rally, an abdication of moral and political leadership for which the White House has already admitted error.

But this was no mere error of judgment or optics or, most absurdly, of communications in which we are supposed to believe that the president was not informed by staff about the magnitude, both actual and symbolic, of the demonstration he ignored. (He needed to be told?)

On the contrary, the no-show, following the near silence, precisely reflected the president’s profound ambivalence about the very idea of the war on terror. Obama began his administration by purging the phrase from the lexicon of official Washington. He has ever since shuttled between saying that (a) the war must end because of the damage “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing” was doing to us, and (b) the war has already ended, as he suggested repeatedly during the 2012 campaign, with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda “on the run.”

Hence his call in a major address at the National Defense University to “refine and ultimately repeal” Congress’ 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, the very legal basis for the war on terror. Hence his accelerating release of Gitmo inmates — five more announced Wednesday — fully knowing that up to 30 percent have returned to the battlefield (17 percent confirmed, up to 12 percent suspected but not verified). Which is why, since about the Neolithic era, POWs tend to be released after a war is over.

Paris shows that this war is not. On the contrary. As it rages, it is entering an ominous third phase.

The first, circa 9/11, involved sending Middle Eastern terrorists abroad to attack the infidel West.

Then came the lone wolf — local individuals inspired by foreign jihadists launching one-off attacks, as seen most recently in Quebec, Ottawa and Sydney.

Paris marks Phase 3: coordinated commando strikes by homegrown native-speaking Islamists activated and instructed from abroad. (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo killings, while the kosher-grocery shooter proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State.) They develop and flourish in Europe’s no-go zones where sharia reigns and legitimate state authorities dare not tread.

To call them lone wolves, as did our hapless attorney general, is to define jihadism down. It makes them the equivalent of the pitiable, mentally unstable Sydney hostage taker.

The Paris killers were well-trained, thoroughly radicalized, clear-eyed jihadist warriors. They cannot be dismissed as lone loons. Worse, they represent a growing generation of alienated European Muslims whose sheer number is approaching critical mass.

The war on terror 2015 is at a new phase with a new geography. At the core are parallel would-be caliphates: in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State; in Sub-Saharan Africa, now spilling out of Nigeria into Cameroon, a near-sovereign Boko Haram; in the badlands of Yemen, AQAP, the most dangerous of all al-Qaeda affiliates. And beyond lie not just a cast of mini-caliphates embedded in the most ungovernable parts of the Third World from Libya to Somalia to the borderlands of Pakistan, but an archipelago of no-go Islamist islands embedded in the heart of Europe.

This is serious. In both size and reach it is growing. Our president will not say it. Fine. But does he even see it?

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Did you know? The human body has seven main chakras (or “wheels”), which are basically centers in which energy moves through. Modalities such as reiki work on clearing and opening the chakras to... ",FAKE
"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
"""We have a little bit of money devoted to a comprehensive, worldwide effort to deal with the threat of global warming,"" the president said. ""It is simply a matter of science and evidence. It is … necessary to reverse it to stand up for America's values and America's interests.""

Given that we've employed the standard trick of not naming the president, you may have guessed that the quote above doesn't come from President Obama's remarks at Wednesday's Coast Guard Academy commencement. In that speech, Obama linked the security of the country with the threat of climate change in the same way. But the comments above instead come from a speech about two decades ago -- by President Bill Clinton.

The most remarkable thing about Obama's Coast Guard comments, in which he argued that we must address the threat of climate change if only to decrease global instability and risks to U.S. facilities, is that it's the refrain to a long-running tune. The link between our security and our carbon emissions has been drawn time and again.

Within Obama's two terms, the drumbeat has been consistent. In 2009, the Navy looked at maritime security risks posed by climate change. In 2011, Rear Adn. David Titley gave a talk at TedxPentagon (!) that considered the issue. (That speech is below.) In 2012, a major general from the U.S. Northern Command warned that melting Arctic ice would create a new, northern coast that would enter into geopolitical considerations. And last year, the Pentagon released a report stating that ""[o]ur armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure.""

In 2003, the Pentagon drafted a speculative plan that addressed the national security threat from an abrupt change to the world's climate -- a shift of several degrees of temperature in a matter of a decade or so. It garnered a substantial amount of attention at the time, but was mostly regarded as a thought experiment. Consensus remains that such a temperature change will happen much more slowly.

But military experts under President George W. Bush were addressing the more realistic, slower effects of climate change, too. We reported in 2007 that the U.S. Army War College funded a conference to address the security implications of climate change. That was soon followed by a report from a panel of retired military leaders that was blunt: ""Global climate change presents a serious national security threat which could impact Americans at home, impact United States military operations and heighten global tensions."" DARPA started looking into military use of biofuels before Bush left office.

Under Clinton, the administration was open in its advocacy on the issue, even if the military was more reserved. Vice President Al Gore had already called climate change ""the most serious threat we have ever faced"" in his book ""Earth in the Balance"" by the time Clinton was moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. After Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, House Republicans and retired military officials at that point worried that the protocol itself posed a national security risk, given that it required the reduction of energy use -- and the military used more energy than any other part of the government. In response, Clinton exempted the military from being affected.

A link between national security and the climate even predates Clinton. In June 1988, a Senate committee addressed the problem of climate change for the first time, hearing testimony from several scientists, including James Hansen, then of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and who since has been an outspoken activist on the subject. After that hearing, Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund was asked to clarify some of his comments. In a responding letter, he wrote, ""For the U.S., continuous emissions at current levels or higher means continuous change, loss of ecosystems, and probably loss of farm productivity, wetlands, beaches and coastal infrastructure. The security of the nation depends on stabilization of the atmosphere.""

At the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, President Obama played the same tune.",REAL
" Punishment Is Violent And Counterproductive By Robert J Burrowes
 Punishment is a popular pastime for humans. Parents punish children. Teachers punish students. Employers punish workers. Courts punish lawbreakers. People punish each other. Governments punish ‘enemies’. And, according to some, God punishes evildoers.
What is ‘punishment’? Punishment is the infliction of violence as revenge on a person who is judged to have behaved inappropriately. It is a key word we use when we want to obscure from ourselves that we are being violent.
The violence inflicted as punishment can take many forms, depending on the context. It might involve inflicting physical injury and/or pain, withdrawal of approval or love, confinement/imprisonment, a financial penalty, dismissal, withdrawal of rights/privileges, denial of promised rewards, an order to perform a service, banishment, torture or death, among others.
Given the human preoccupation with punishment, it is perhaps surprising that this behaviour is not subjected to more widespread scrutiny. Mind you, I can think of many human behaviours that get less scrutiny than would be useful.
Anyway, because I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour, I want to explain why using violence to ‘punish’ people is highly dysfunctional and virtually guarantees an outcome opposite to that intended.
Punishment is usually inflicted by someone who makes a judgment that another person has behaved ‘badly’ or ‘wrongly’. At its most basic, disobedience (that is, failure to comply with elite imposed norms) is often judged in this way, whether by parents, teachers, religious figures, lawmakers or national governments.
But is obedience functional or even appropriate?
Consider this. In order to behave optimally, the human organism requires that all mental functions – feelings, thoughts, memory, conscience, sensory perception (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste), truth register, intuition – must be developed and readily involved, without interference, in our life. If this happens, then all of these individual functions will play an integrated role in determining our behaviour in any given circumstance. This is a very sophisticated mental apparatus that has evolved over billions of years and if it was allowed to function without interference in each individual, human beings would indeed be highly functional.
So where does obedience fit into all of this? It doesn’t. A child is genetically programmed to seek to meet their own needs, not obey the will of another. And they will behave functionally in endeavouring to meet these needs unless terrorized out of doing so. Moreover, they will learn to meet their own needs, by acting individually in some circumstances and by cooperating with others when appropriate, if their social environment models this.
However, if a child is terrorized into being obedient – including by being punished when they are not – then the child will have no choice but to suppress their awareness of the innate mental capacities that evolved over billions of years to guide their behaviour until they have ‘learned’ what they must do to avoid being punished. For a fuller explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/
Unfortunately, as you can probably readily perceive, this process of terrorizing a child into suppressing their awareness of what they want to do so that they do what someone else directs is highly problematical. And it leads to a virtually infinite variety of dysfunctional behaviours, even for those who appear to have been successfully ‘socialized’ into performing effectively in their society. This is readily illustrated.
Perhaps the central problem of terrorizing individuals into obedience of conventions, commands, rules and the law is that once the individual has been so terrorized, it is virtually impossible for them to change their behaviour because they are now terrified of doing so. If the obedient behaviours were functional in the circumstances then, apart from the obviously enormous damage suffered by the individual, there would be no other adverse social or environmental consequences.
Unfortunately, when all humans have been terrorized into behaving dysfunctionally on a routine basis (in the Western context, for example, by engaging in over-consumption) then changing their behaviour, even in the direction of functionality, is now unconsciously associated with the fear of violence (in the form of punishment) and so desirable behavioural change (in the direction of reduced consumption, for example) is much more difficult. It is not just that many Western humans are reluctant to reduce their consumption in line with environmental (including climatic) imperatives, they are unconsciously terrified of doing so.
By now you might be able to see the wider ramifications of using violence and threats of violence to force children into being obedient. Apart from terrorizing each child into suppressing their awareness of their innate mental capacities, we create individuals whose entire (unconscious) ‘understanding’ of human existence is limited to the notion that violence, mislabeled ‘punishment’, drives socialization and society.
As just one result, for example, most people consider punishment to be appropriate in the context of the legal system: they expect courts to inflict legally-sanctioned violence on those ‘guilty’ of disobeying the law. As in the case of the punishment of children, how many people ask ‘Does violence restore functional behaviour? Or does it simply inflict violence as revenge? What do we really want to achieve? And how will we achieve that?’
Fundamentally, the flaw with violence as punishment is that violence terrifies people. And you cannot terrorize someone into behaving functionally. At very best, you can terrorize someone into changing their behaviour in an extremely limited context and/or for an extremely limited period of time. But if you want functional and lasting change in an individual’s behaviour, then considerable emotional healing will be necessary. This will allow the suppressed fear, anger, sadness and other feelings resulting from childhood terrorization to safely resurface and be expressed so that the individual can perceive their own needs and identify ways of fulfilling them (which does not mean that they will be obedient). For an explanation of what is required, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ which is referenced in ‘My Promise to Children’. https://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com/strategywheel/constructive-program/my-promise-to-children/
So next time you hear a political leader or corporate executive advocating or using violence (such as war, the curtailment of civil liberties, an economically exploitative and/or ecologically destructive initiative), remember that you are observing a highly dysfunctionalized individual. Moreover, this dysfunctional individual is a logical product of our society’s unrelenting use of violence, much of it in the form of what is euphemistically called ‘punishment’, against our children in the delusional belief that it will give us obedience and hence social control.
Or next time you hear a public official, judge, terrorist or police officer promising ‘justice’ (that is, retribution), remember that you are listening to an emotionally damaged individual who suffered enormous violence as a child and internalized the delusional message that ‘punishment works’.
You might also ponder how bad it could be if we didn’t require obedience and use punishment to get it, but loved and nurtured children, by listening to them deeply, to become the unique, enormously loving and powerful individuals for which evolution genetically programmed them.
I am well aware that what I am suggesting will take an enormous amount of societal rethinking and a profound reallocation of resources away from violent and highly profitable police, legal, prison and military systems. But, as I wrote above, I am committed to facilitating functional human behaviour. I can also think of some useful ways that we could allocate the resources if we didn’t waste them on violence.
If you share this commitment and working towards this world appeals to you too, then you are welcome to consider participating in the fifteen-year strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ http://tinyurl.com/flametree and to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’. http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com
Punishment can sometimes appear to get you the outcome you want in the short term. The cost is that it always moves you further away from any desirable outcome in the long run.
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com",FAKE
"November 6, 2016 
Distracted by suffering refugees, confused by convoluted Brexit negotiations or just plain scared by a Trump presidency? No? Neither is your Prime Minster. Today Theresa May did what every true leader does in a crisis – which is to turn everyone’s attention to meaningless ephemera; like poppies, Grammar Schools and who should present the new ‘Bake-off’? 
Taking a break from quashing the Orgreave Inquiry, Mrs May said FIFA’s stance of not politicizing sport was ‘outrageous’. A spokeswoman explained: ‘In these times of austerity, we need cheap, meaningless gestures accompanied by hollow outrage. If over-paid under-achieving footballers are not allowed to wear a poppy – then the terrorists have won. It’s a known fact that Afghan jihadists fear the poppy…although admittedly 80% of their income is based on the opium trade…um…er…I may not have thought this through…’ 
Armed police are expected to patrol our streets, opening fire on anyone not wearing a poppy or failing to whistle the tune from ‘The Dambusters’. A Police Inspector remarked: ‘We may be perpetuating a mawkishly sentimental view of war but don’t think for a second you can get away with recycling last year’s poppy – we’re wise to that dodge!’ 
Without a doubt this is the most important issue of 2016 – whether 22 footballers can wear poppies for 90 minutes in a stadium filled with 60,000 people wearing poppies. Some cynics have suggested Theresa May’s use of misdirection in these troubled times, is the political equivalent of David Copperfield pulling an elephant out his arse. Her spokeswoman countered: ‘The important thing is to remember those who sacrificed their lives in war– rather than the reasons behind it or making sure it never happens again’. Share this story... 
Posted: Nov 6th, 2016 by Wrenfoe   Wrenfoe   Politics",FAKE
"Christian Whiton is a former deputy special envoy for human rights in North Korea for the George W. Bush administration. He is president of the Hamilton Foundation; a principal with DC Advisory, which is a public policy consultancy; and the author of ""Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War."" The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) Vladimir Putin has his man in the U.S. presidential race: Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Russian president reportedly declared Trump to be the ""absolute leader"" of the race.

Putin -- a natural if brawny showman who has posed fishing shirtless, shooting shirtless and horseback riding shirtless -- also said of Trump: ""He's a very lively man, talented without doubt.""

Thus did the man who embodies the parody of homoeroticism from the 1970s endorse one who embodies the parody of a blow-hard executive from the 1980s. But while Moscow has long been interested in American politics, what inspired the man who has essentially run Russia since 2000 to take the unusual step of commenting on the election process of an adversary?

Whether he knows it or not, Putin practices a key tenet of statecraft identified by Mel Brooks. His darkly comical musical ""The Producers"" features the number ""Heil Myself!"" (also known as ""Springtime for Hitler""), in which a campy rendition of the German dictator sings, ""It ain't no mystery, if it's politics or history, the thing you gotta know is, everything is showbiz.""

The line could be the leitmotif of the reality show that is Trump's campaign.

The Donald's approach to politics likely reminds Putin of himself and he empathizes. Not only do the two men share a love for spectacle and an appreciation of its ability to move low-information voters, but Putin also sees Trump's self-reference as something Moscow can exploit.

Putin famously began his career as an intelligence officer. One thing the young Putin would have been taught by his employers at the KGB's First Chief Directorate, the agency's center for foreign intelligence collection, is to look for character flaws that can be used to enlist a target as an agent or, short of that, an unwitting helper. It's a fancied-up version of a con man looking for his mark.

Recent American presidents have been easy prey for Putin. George W. Bush, who thought he got a ""sense of Putin's soul,"" mistook the Russian strongman for a friend. Barack Obama believed that a change in diplomatic tone would alter Putin's calculation of his nation's interests. Putin of course encouraged both vanities. The invaded people of Georgia and Ukraine can attest to who sized up whom better.

The cherry on the cake would be a President Trump. Putin has no doubt observed that flattery works well on The Donald: from his tweets to TV appearances to debate performances, Trump is a lion to those who are critical and a lamb to those who suffer his repetitive imprecisions silently.

Putin's giddiness over Trump's personal flaws shifts to outright desire when the candidate starts talking about U.S. policy toward Russia. In September, Trump said of the Russian leader : ""I will tell you in terms of leadership he is getting an 'A'..."" As Putin put warplanes and a base in Syria -- Moscow's biggest push into the Middle East and Mediterranean rim since the Cold War -- Trump said: ""Putin is now taking over what we started, and he's going into Syria, and he frankly wants to fight ISIS, and I think that's a wonderful thing.""

This means that yet another U.S. political figure has mistakenly believed Russian interests will converge with America's. In reality, Putin has forces in Syria to shore up the dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and primarily fight Assad's non-ISIS opponents. And the ""A"" in leadership The Donald awarded Putin was earned by ruthlessly suppressing domestic dissent, playing to the most base instincts of the Russian public and launching foreign wars of aggression.

Putin will happily pocket Trump's naivete. The Russian President said of the candidate: ""He's saying he wants to go to another level of relations -- closer, deeper relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that.""

When Putin sees Trump's unique combination of self-reference and self-delusion about Moscow's desire to assert itself at the expense of the West, he sees gold. Furthermore, he is assured that he could continue to expand Russia's sphere of influence -- perhaps even beyond the countries he has already invaded -- all the while saying he is doing nothing of the sort.

The mendacity brings to mind that other Mel Brooks tour de force on statecraft: the movie ""To Be Or Not To Be."" In the film, another parody Hitler sings: ""I don't want war! All I want is peace ... peace ... peace ... A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France, a little piece of Austria ...""",REAL
"As volatile and nerve-wracking as the great Clinton-Trump Slugfest of 2016 has appeared from the outside, polling data have, for months, suggested a far more stable race. Polling aggregators and election prediction markets have consistently shown Hillary Clinton with an enduring lead over Donald Trump. Then, with less than two weeks remaining until Election Day, F.B.I. director James Comey decided to get involved, firing off a maddeningly vague letter to Congress, alerting them to the renewal of an investigation into new e-mails that may or may not pertain to Clinton’s use of a private server as secretary of state, and throwing the race into chaos. The Mexican peso plunged as Wall Street started pricing in the rising possibility of a Trump win, and the media went into overdrive, hyperventilating over a spate of new polls that showed the race tightening. Now, as we head into the final weekend before America’s much-anticipated day of reckoning, the Hive offers a perspicacious overview of all the multifarious reasons to panic, no matter who you’re voting for on Tuesday.

Yes, the polls could be misleading

The Chicago Cubs had a smaller chance of winning than Trump currently does, as Kellyanne Conway is quick to remind us. That isn’t to say that the statistics showing a likely Cubs win didn’t accurately take into account everything that sports bettors and analysts knew about both teams at the time. It’s merely to say that predictions are just that—our best guess for what will happen. All polls include a margin of error, and right now, Donald Trump is pretty close to striking distance. According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump lags Clinton by just 3.3 points in a polls-only forecast; in 2012, average polling turned out to be off by 2.7 points. Even if the electoral college seems to place Clinton ahead by wider margins in certain states, “this presumes that the states behave independently from national trends, when in fact they tend to move in tandem,” writes Nate Silver . If national polls are off by 2.7 points, for example, that would be more than enough to flip Wisconsin and Minnesota into Trump’s column, Silver notes. “She has quite a gauntlet to run through to hold her firewall, and she doesn’t have a lot of good backup options.”

There’s a worrying degree of variation among polling aggregators, data scientists, and political analysts. While HuffPost Pollster, which excludes outlier polls, currently gives Clinton a 97.9 percent of victory, Silver’s model is far more conservative, giving Clinton a 68.1 percent chance to account for increased volatility. “[E]verything depends on one’s assumptions, but I think that our assumptions—a Clinton lead, sure, but high uncertainty—has repeatedly been validated by the evidence we've seen over the course of the past several months,” Silver recently told Politico.

Others are far more optimistic. Neuroscientist Sam Wang, who out-predicted Silver in 2012, has observed that while some individual polls may place Clinton narrowly ahead, Trump’s rise shouldn’t be confused for momentum:

“One thing that’s been apparent is that a major feature of voter opinion for last five elections—this is the sixth—is that voters have become entrenched,” says Wang. “The movement of voter opinion has been within a narrow range. In finance and other types of statistical analysis, we call this kind of movement a ‘regression to the mean.’ It happened in 2008, in 2012 and it’s happening this year. When things go too far in one direction, they’ll start to head back to a midpoint. Clinton is now at the low end of where she’s been this season. But if the regression to the mean holds, we should see a little movement back to Clinton. But we’ll see.”

Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium pegs Clinton’s chances of winning at over 99 percent.

The myth of the “secret” Trump voter

“The silent majority is back,” Trump declared less than a week after Clinton’s F.B.I. drama broke out into the open. He was referring to a longstanding belief, possibly backed by political science, that there exist a vast swath of Trump supporters too embarrassed to tell pollsters they plan to vote for him. “When I poll, I do fine. But when I run, I do much better,” he bragged.

Experts have thrown cold water on that idea. A POLITICO/Morning Consult study this week suggests that the myth of the shy Trump voter may be only half-right: according to the survey, Hillary Clinton led Trump by five points, 52 to 47, whereas if asked in an online poll or an automated call—two situations in which there was no possibility of social judgment—that gap narrowed to three points, with Clinton leading 51 to 48. Still, the effect was marginal, and Clinton won in both scenarios.

Nate Cohn at the Upshot has argued that the mysterious newly registered voter is actually more liberal than most pundits have assumed. While Trump may have more enthusiastic white supporters, data shows no new registration “surge” in this category, whereas more younger white voters, minorities, and women registered for the first time. Pollsters and analysts, Cohn mused, were ignoring these “missing nonwhite voters,” and that “it’s Mrs. Clinton—not Mr. Trump—who stands to gain from a surge of new voters.”

Other data also support the idea that polling is underestimating Clinton’s support. While black turnout has been soft compared to four years ago Latinos—who are usually under-polled—appear to be registering and voting at higher levels than before. Talking Points Memo reports that Latino early voting is up 100 percent in Florida, 60 percent in North Carolina, and 25 percent in Colorado and Nevada. Latino Decisions, a Latino advocacy group, told TPM that they are projecting as many as 3.5 million more Latinos will vote in 2016 than in 2012, which could help her win all four aforementioned swing states.

So where does that leave us?

The latest Clinton e-mail drama may not have caused any significant shifts nationally, outside of a brief hiccup, but it may have rearranged Clinton’s pathway to victory. A week after Comey sent his letter, Silver caught up with the recent polling and found that Clinton’s so-called “blue firewall” has started to weaken, with states such as New Hampshire and Michigan suddenly in greater danger of tilting Trump. ”It’s not clear that things are getting any worse for Clinton, but it’s also not clear that they’re getting better,” he concluded. In fact, nothing is getting much clearer than it has ever been—which, perhaps, is liberating in its own way.",REAL
"Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested Sunday that Congress would be jeopardizing national security if it withholds his agency’s funding to undermine President Barack Obama’s executive action shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation. The administration is appealing a federal court’s ruling that blocked the executive order.

“There are some who want to defund our executive actions and do it in a way that holds up the entire budget of homeland security for this nation. That is unacceptable from a public safety, homeland security view,” Mr. Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. Without congressional action, DHS funding expires Friday at midnight.",REAL
"Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs:  ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The ""Live Preview"" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:",FAKE
"Josh Fox on Dakota Access Pipeline Standoff: ‘Where the F*** Is Hillary Clinton Right Now?’   CREDIT 
Filmmaker Josh Fox has a pretty good idea where Hillary Clinton is likely to be found starting Jan. 20. But before she makes her final play for the White House, Fox has a pressing question for the Democratic  . 
“Where the fuck is Hillary Clinton right now?” Fox asked during his guest appearance on “Live at Truthdig” at the site’s Los Angeles headquarters. 
That was more of a pointed question than a literal one, since anyone with a television or smartphone can easily track down where Clinton is making her latest campaign stump speech. 
More specifically, Fox, who’s a climate activist and playwright as well as the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland,” was wondering why Clinton wasn’t anywhere near the contested grounds of North Dakota where the ongoing clash over the Dakota Access pipeline is reaching a volatile point. 
  
Remarking that “we all want to think that we would be on the right side” of history and that, for example, “if we were in Selma, we all would have marched with King,” Fox positioned Clinton squarely “on the wrong side of history right now” for maintaining a conspicuous silence about the DAPL battle. 
“You cannot stand by when a racist occupying force that is run by the government of a rogue state is operating as an arm of the oil and gas industry, is attacking natives, is attacking protesters, is attacking people and torturing them in the ways that we saw in the Iraq War,” Fox said. “It’s unacceptable.” 
Fox was equally unsparing about Clinton’s environmental credentials. “Hillary Clinton is not an environmentalist,” he said. “Hillary Clinton is not adequate on climate change. And right now, she’s standing by while human rights abuses are unfolding in America where she’s running for president.” 
The director was making the media rounds to drum up support for the activists and members   allied protesters in North Dakota, some of whom faced off Thursday with police in riot gear as law enforcement and National Guard personnel forcibly removed protesters from their encampment near one of the pipeline’s construction zones. He was also putting out the word about the plight of fellow filmmaker Deia Schlosberg, producer of his 2016 documentary “How to Let Go of the World (and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change),” who was arrested and hit with conspiracy charges earlier this month while shooting footage of activists at a North Dakota tar sands pipeline. Schlosberg has been charged with three felonies and may face 45 years in prison. 
WATCH: Amy Goodman Explains Decision to Turn Herself In to North Dakota Authorities (Video) 
“We need to drop all the charges immediately, we need her footage back—her footage was confiscated,” Fox said of Schlosberg. “We definitely need an outcry and an outpouring of support for our journalists who are facing jail time for doing what is a constitutionally protected activity.” Fox has posted a videotaped statement about his colleague’s plight, as well as information about a petition, on this promotional site for his latest work. 
Despite his robust criticism of Clinton, Fox told Truthdig’s Sarah Wesley, Emma Niles and Donald Kaufman that he was more concerned about the possibility of GOP nominee Donald Trump winning this election. Fox, who had supported Democratic candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and served on the Democratic platform committee at last summer’s party convention, said he understood Sanders’ reasons for backing the Democratic ticket: “If Bernie Sanders’ legacy was to contribute to the election of Donald Trump, I think his whole life would have been a failure.” 
As for Green Party   Jill Stein? “I’m sorry. It’s immoral what she’s doing,” Fox said. “And I don’t care if I say this on air for the very first time—I spent eight years building the environmental movement, I spent eight years coast-to-coast building the [anti-]fracking movement, I went to 250 cities. I did not see the Green Party having a significant hand in the building of that movement.” 
Watch the full interview below for more about Fox’s take on the presidential candidates, the Dakota Access pipeline crisis and how to be an effective activist (hint: Don’t try it at home):",FAKE
"U.S. military officials said Friday they were “reasonably certain” an airstrike in Syria targeting ""Jihadi John"" killed the masked British national seen in videos depicting the beheading of hostages held by ISIS.

Earlier, a U.S. military official, discussing the airstrike in Raqqa targeting the notorious jihadist, told Fox News, ""we are 99 percent sure we got him.""

Col. Steve Warren said the U.S. military is “reasonably certain” that Mohammad Emwarzi, better known as “Jihadi John,” was killed in the U.S. drone strike Thursday night.

In a Pentagon briefing Friday from Baghdad, Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, sought to downplay the airstrike calling it more a “blow to the prestige"" of ISIS than a military victory. Warren called the strike “routine” and said similar strikes against mid-to high value ISIS leaders has occurred every two days since May.

But Warren later said that Jihadi John’s death is “significant” blow to ISIS.

""This guy was a human animal and killing him is probably making the world a better place,"" he added.

Warren said the driver of the vehicle carrying Jihadi John was also killed after being struck by a hellfire missile fired from the U.S. drone.

The killing of Jihadi John comes as the U.S. military is stepping up airstrikes throughout Iraq and Syria.

Warren said Operation Tidal Wave II, a U.S.-led bombing campaign targeting ISIS’s oil infrastructure in eastern Syria near the city of Dayr as Zawr has been underway in recent days to destroy oil infrastructure controlled by ISIS.  ISIS receives two-thirds of its revenue from oil, according to Warren. Despite earlier attempts to destroy the refineries in eastern Syria, Warren said the damage inflicted earlier was repaired in a 24-hour period on average.

The first “Tidal Wave” operation dates back to World War II when the U.S. targeted Nazi Germany’s oil infrastructure, according to Warren.

Warren said the strikes going on today in eastern Syria against the oil refineries require “replacement parts that ISIS doesn’t have” and parts that, if ordered, could be tracked by the coalition.

“We wanted them broken longer,” said Warren when asked why the strikes did not occur earlier.  Warren said strikes in the past year produced damage to infrastructure that was “easy to replace.”

A senior military source told Fox News Emwazi was being tracked by the drone for most of the day Thursday while he met with other people. The source said the strike took place shortly after Emwazi came out of a building in Raqqa, when he was ""ID'd and engaged.""

Sky News, citing sources inside Raqqa, reported that Emwazi was badly hurt in the air strike but still alive when he was brought to the hospital there. Later, however, the same sources said the hospital was sealed off to the public. Locals say the hospital is usually closed when an ISIS figure is killed, which allows the group to go on social media and claim he is still alive.

A representative of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told the Daily Telegraph, ""a car carrying four foreign Islamic State leaders, including one British jihadi, was hit by U.S. air strikes [near] the governorate building in Raqqa city.

""All the sources there are saying that the body of an important British jihadi is lying in the hospital of Raqqa,"" the activist added. ""All the sources are saying it is of Jihadi John but I cannot confirm it personally.""

Emwazi, believed to be in his mid-20s, has been described by a former hostage as a bloodthirsty psychopath who enjoyed threatening Western hostages. Spanish journalist Javier Espinosa, who had been held in Syria for more than six months after his abduction in September 2013, said Emwazi would explain precisely how the militants would carry out a beheading.

Those being held by three British-sounding captors nicknamed them ""the Beatles"" with ""Jihadi John"" a reference to Beatles member John Lennon, Espinosa said in recalling his months as one of more than 20 hostages.

Emwazi is seen in videos showing the beheading of journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, and a number of other hostages.

In the videos, a tall masked figure clad in black and speaking in a British accent typically began one of the gruesome videos with a political rant and a kneeling hostage before him, then ended it holding an oversize knife in his hand with the headless victim lying before him in the sand.

A counterterror analyst told Fox News that Emwazi became so sought-after following his appearances in the beheading videos that he was shunned by ISIS leadership. The analyst said Emwazi had become the ""Typhoid Mary"" of the terror group, noting that his presence had prompted airstrikes on meetings, buildings, and other commanders.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday the drone action was ""a strike at the heart"" of ISIS, as well as ""an act of self-defense"" and the right thing to do.

Cameron said Britain has been ""working, with the United States, literally around the clock to track him down.""

""This was a combined effort,"" he said. ""And the contribution of both our countries was essential.""

Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Tunisia Friday that extremists “need to know this: Your days are numbered, and you will be defeated.”

Sotloff’s parents, Art and Shirley Sotloff, responding to the reports that Emwazi was killed issued a statement that said, “This development doesn’t change anything for us; it’s too little too late. Our son is never coming back.”

“His death does not bring Jim back,” they said. “If only so much effort had been given to finding and rescuing Jim and the other hostages who were subsequently murdered by ISIS , they might be alive today.”

 

 Haines’ daughter, Bethany Haines, told Sky News Friday that she felt an 'instant sense of"" relief"" when she heard Emwazi may have been killed. She said her feeling was because of ""'knowing he wouldn't appear in any more horrific videos.""

Emwazi was identified as ""Jihadi John"" last February, although a lawyer who once represented Emwazi's father told reporters that there was no evidence supporting the accusation. Experts and others later confirmed the identification.

Emwazi was born in Kuwait and spent part of his childhood in the poor Taima area of Jahra before moving to Britain while still a boy, according to news reports quoting Syrian activists who knew the family. He attended state schools in London, then studied computer science at the University of Westminster before leaving for Syria in 2013. The woman who had been the principal at London's Quintin Kynaston Academy told the BBC earlier this year that Emwazi had been quiet and ""reasonably hard-working.""

Officials said Britain's intelligence community had Emwazi on its list of potential terror suspects for years but was unable to prevent him from traveling to Syria. He had been known to the nation's intelligence services since at least 2009, when he was connected with investigations into terrorism in Somalia.

The beheading of Foley, 40, of Rochester, New Hampshire, was deemed by IS to be its response to U.S. airstrikes. The release of the video, on Aug. 19, 2014, horrified and outraged the civilized world but was followed the next month by videos showing the beheadings of Sotloff and Haines and, in October, of Henning.

Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson, Jennifer Griffin, Catherine Herridge, Greg Palkot and The Associated Press contributed this report.

Click for more from Sky News.",REAL
"Jesse Matthew Jr. has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of University of Virginia second-year student Hannah Graham, according to reports from local media in Charlottesville. The charges are expected to be announced at a press conference Tuesday. Graham was last seen publicly at a bar with Matthew on Sept. 13, 2014. Her remains were found on an abandoned property in Albemarle County, Virginia, on Oct. 18. Matthew has already been charged in Graham’s disappearance—with abduction with intent to defile. Officials say Matthew has been forensically linked to the body of Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student who was found dead in January 2010. He has been jailed for attempted murder, rape, and sexual-assault charges in regard to the rape and sexual assault of a Fairfax woman in 2005.",REAL
"As they went on their rampage, the men who killed 12 people in Paris this week yelled that they had “avenged the prophet.” They followed in the path of other terrorists who have bombed newspaper offices, stabbed a filmmaker and killed writers and translators, all to mete out what they believe is the proper Koranic punishment for blasphemy. But in fact, the Koran prescribes no punishment for blasphemy. Like so many of the most fanatical and violent aspects of Islamic terrorism today, the idea that Islam requires that insults against the prophet Muhammad be met with violence is a creation of politicians and clerics to serve a political agenda.

One holy book is deeply concerned with blasphemy: the Bible. In the Old Testament, blasphemy and blasphemers are condemned and prescribed harsh punishment. The best-known passage on this is Leviticus 24:16 : “Anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death.”

By contrast, the word blasphemy appears nowhere in the Koran. (Nor, incidentally, does the Koran anywhere forbid creating images of Muhammad, though there are commentaries and traditions — “hadith” — that do, to guard against idol worship.) Islamic scholar Maulana Wahiduddin Khan has pointed out that “there are more than 200 verses in the Koran, which reveal that the contemporaries of the prophets repeatedly perpetrated the same act, which is now called ‘blasphemy or abuse of the Prophet’ . . . but nowhere does the Koran prescribe the punishment of lashes, or death, or any other physical punishment.” On several occasions, Muhammad treated people who ridiculed him and his teachings with understanding and kindness. “In Islam,” Khan says, “blasphemy is a subject of intellectual discussion rather than a subject of physical punishment.”

Somebody forgot to tell the terrorists. But the gruesome and bloody belief the jihadis have adopted is all too common in the Muslim world, even among so-called moderate Muslims — that blasphemy and apostasy are grievous crimes against Islam and should be punished fiercely. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws against blasphemy and apostasy — and in some places, they are enforced.

Pakistan is now the poster child for the anti-blasphemy campaign gone wild. In March, at least 14 people were on death row in that country, and 19 were serving life sentences, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. The owner of the country’s largest media group has been sentenced to 26 years in prison because one of his channels broadcast a devotional song about Muhammad’s daughter while reenacting a wedding. (Really.) And Pakistan is not alone. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt, Turkey and Sudan have all used blasphemy laws to jail and harass people. In moderate Indonesia, 120 people have been detained for this reason since 2003. Saudi Arabia forbids the practice of any religion other than its own Wahhabi version of Islam.

The Pakistani case is instructive, because its extreme version of anti-blasphemy law is relatively recent and a product of politics. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s president during the late 1970s and 1980s, wanted to marginalize the democratic and liberal opposition, and he embraced Islamic fundamentalists, no matter how extreme. He passed a series of laws Islamizing Pakistan, including a law that recommended the death penalty or life imprisonment for insulting Muhammad in any way.

When governments try to curry favor with fanatics, eventually the fanatics take the law into their own hands. In Pakistan, jihadis have killed dozens of people whom they accuse of blasphemy, including a brave politician, Salmaan Taseer, who dared to call the blasphemy law a “black law.”

We should fight terrorism. But we should also fight the source of the problem. It’s not enough for Muslim leaders to condemn people who kill those they consider as blasphemers if their own governments endorse the idea of punishing blasphemy at the very same time. The U.S. religious freedom commission and the U.N. Human Rights Committee have both declared that blasphemy laws violate universal human rights because they violate freedom of speech and expression. They are correct.

In Muslim-majority countries, no one dares to dial back these laws. In Western countries, no one confronts allies on these issues. But blasphemy is not a purely domestic matter, of concern only to those who worry about countries’ internal affairs. It now sits on the bloody crossroad between radical Islamists and Western societies. It cannot be avoided anymore. Western politicians, Muslim leaders and intellectuals everywhere should point out that blasphemy is something that does not exist in the Koran and should not exist in the modern world.

Read more from Fareed Zakaria’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"Hillary Rodham Clinton has locked up public support from half of the Democratic insiders who cast ballots at the party's national convention, giving her a commanding advantage over her rivals for the party's presidential nomination.

Clinton's margin over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is striking. Not only is it big, but it comes more than two months before primary voters head to the polls -- an early point in the race for so many of the people known as superdelegates to publicly back a candidate.

""She has the experience necessary not only to lead this country, she has experience politically that I think will help her through a tough campaign,"" said Unzell Kelley, a county commissioner from Alabama.

""I think she's learned from her previous campaign,"" he said. ""She's learned what to do, what to say, what not to say -- which just adds to her electability.""

The Associated Press contacted all 712 superdelegates in the past two weeks, and heard back from more than 80 percent. They were asked which candidate they plan to support at the convention next summer.

The 712 superdelegates make up about 30 percent of the 2,382 delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination. That means that more than two months before voting starts, Clinton already has 15 percent of the delegates she needs.

That sizable lead reflects Clinton's advantage among the Democratic Party establishment, an edge that has helped the 2016 front-runner build a massive campaign organization, hire top staff and win coveted local endorsements.

Superdelegates are convention delegates who can support the candidate of their choice, regardless of who voters choose in the primaries and caucuses. They are members of Congress and other elected officials, party leaders and members of the Democratic National Committee.

Clinton is leading most preference polls in the race for the Democratic nomination, most by a wide margin. Sanders has made some inroads in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary, and continues to attract huge crowds with his populist message about income inequality.

But Sanders has only recently started saying he's a Democrat after a decades-long career in politics as an independent. While he's met with and usually voted with Democrats in the Senate, he calls himself a democratic socialist.

""We recognize Secretary Clinton has enormous support based on many years working with and on behalf of many party leaders in the Democratic Party,"" said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign. ""But Sen. Sanders will prove to be the strongest candidate, with his ability to coalesce and bring young people to the polls the way that Barack Obama did.""

""The best way to win support from superdelegates is to win support from voters,"" added Devine, a longtime expert on the Democrats' nominating process.

The Clinton campaign has been working for months to secure endorsements from superdelegates, part of a strategy to avoid repeating the mistakes that cost her the Democratic nomination eight years ago.

In 2008, Clinton hinged her campaign on an early knockout blow on Super Tuesday, while Obama's staff had devised a strategy to accumulate delegates well into the spring.

This time around, Clinton has hired Obama's top delegate strategist from 2008, a lawyer named Jeff Berman, an expert on the party's arcane rules for nominating a candidate for president.

Clinton's increased focus on winning delegates has paid off, putting her way ahead of where she was at this time eight years ago. In December 2007, Clinton had public endorsements from 169 superdelegates, according to an AP survey. At the time, Obama had 63 and a handful of other candidates had commitments as well from the smaller fraction of superdelegates willing to commit to a candidate.

""Our campaign is working hard to earn the support of every caucus goer, primary voter and grassroots and grasstop leaders,"" said Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson. ""Since day one we have not taken this nomination for granted and that will not change.""

Some superdelegates supporting Clinton said they don't think Sanders is electable, especially because of his embrace of socialism. But few openly criticized Sanders and a handful endorsed him.

""I've heard him talk about many subjects and I can't say there is anything I disagree with,"" said Chad Nodland, a DNC member from North Dakota who is backing Sanders.

However, Nodland added, if Clinton is the party's nominee, ""I will knock on doors for her. There are just more issues I agree with Bernie.""

Some superdelegates said they were unwilling to publicly commit to candidates before voters have a say, out of concern that they will be seen as undemocratic. A few said they have concerns about Clinton, who has been dogged about her use of a private email account and server while serving as secretary of state.

""If it boils down to anything I'm not sure about the trust factor,"" said Danica Oparnica, a DNC member from Arizona. ""She has been known to tell some outright lies and I can't tolerate that.""

Still others said they were won over by Clinton's 11 hours of testimony before a GOP-led committee investigating the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Clinton's testimony won widespread praise as House Republicans struggled to trip her up.

""I don't think that there's any candidate right now, Democrat or Republican, that could actually face up to that and come out with people shaking their heads and saying, `That is one bright, intelligent person,""' said California Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas.",REAL
"GOFFSTOWN – Chris Christie kicked off a two day swing to New Hampshire with a sober prescription for tackling escalating entitlement spending.

The New Jersey governor and potential Republican presidential candidate proposed raising the retirement age for Social security to 69, means testing for Social Security, and gradually raising the eligibility age for Medicare.

Christie outlined his proposals on entitlement reform at a speech Tuesday morning at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.

“In the short term, it is growing the deficit and slowly but surely taking over all of government. In the long term, it will steal our children’s future and bankrupt our nation. Meanwhile, our leaders in Washington are not telling people the truth. Washington is still not dealing with the problem,” Christie said.

“Washington is afraid to have an honest conversation about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid with the people of our country. I am not,” the governor added.

Christie said that Social Security should be retirement insurance, and he proposed what he described as “modest” means testing.

“Let’s ask ourselves an honest question: do we really believe that the wealthiest Americans need to take from younger, hardworking Americans to receive what, for most of them, is a modest monthly Social Security check? I propose a modest means test that only affects those with non-Social Security income of over $80,000 per year, and phases out Social Security payments entirely for those that have $200,000 a year of other income,” Christie said.

He added that his proposal would only affect 2 percent of all Social Security recipients.

When it comes to Medicare, Christie would increase the current sliding scare of means testing.

“We should expand the sliding scale under my proposal. Seniors with an $85,000 a year income will pay 40% of premium costs and increasing it to 90% above $196,000 a year in retirement income, Christie said.

Christie also proposed raising the retirement age for Social Security.

“I’m proposing we raise the age to 69, gradually implementing this change starting in 2022 and increasing the retirement age by two months each year until it reaches 69. I also believe we need to raise the early retirement age – people who take their retirement early -- at a similar pace, raising it by two months per year until it reaches 64 from the current level of 62,” Christie

And he also called for raising the eligibility age for Medicare at what he described as “a manageable pace of one month per year, so that by 2040, you’d be eligible for Medicare at 67 years old, and by 2064 would be 69 years old. Raising the eligibility age, slowly so that people can plan for it, has another advantage. It encourages seniors to remain in the workforce.”

Christie also trained some of his fire on President Barack Obama, saying the president “has left us a debtor nation. In his short time in office, he has almost doubled the national debt – increasing it by over $8 trillion.”

“It won’t be easy to turn around the fiscal mess that Barack Obama has left us either. He has avoided the tough decisions. Imagine that the straightforward discussion I’ve just had with you today, President Obama has been afraid to have with you for the last eight years -- from the day he declared for president in February of 2007 to this very day,” Christie added.

[How Chris Christie is plotting a comeback with town hall meetings]

Christie ended his speech by touting that he’s not afraid to tackle the difficult issues, like entitlement reform.

“Here’s what you’ll learn about me. I have been talking about the growth of entitlements as a big problem, at both the state and federal levels, for a number of years. Not because it is politically popular, but because it is true. And because it will affect everything we can do as a country to make this century the second American century. I will not pander. I will not flip flop. I’m not afraid to tell you the truth as I see it, whether you like it or not,” Christie concluded.

Prior to his address, Christie met with students at Saint Anselm College. After a conference call with conservative reporters who were unable to watch the speech, Christie was headed to a retail stop at Caesario’s Pizza on Elm Street in Manchester.

Later in the day he was scheduled to hold a meet and greet at the Stone Church Tavern in Newmarket, followed by a closed door Seacoast Roundtable hosted by Renee Plummer, one of the most influential GOP activists along the coast.

Wednesday Christie meets and greets voters at Chez Vachon, a breakfast spot in Manchester, before holding a town hall in Londonderry. He returns to New Hampshire on Friday to speak at the NHGOP’s First-in-the-Nation Leadership Summit. The two-day confab in Nashua’s attracting just about every declared candidate and probable Republican White House contender.",REAL
"Russian Defence Minister in India mil.ru 
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar and his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu sign protocol document after the 16th meeting of the India-Russia Intergovernmental Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation in New Delhi on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. Facebook ",FAKE
"Watch the first Democratic presidential debate Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. ET live on CNN and CNNgo ; join the conversation at #DemDebate

Washington (CNN) The shadow boxing that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have played at for months -- they've barely mentioned each other on the campaign trail -- will give way to more direct jabs Tuesday night.

That's when the two rivals line up on stage at the first Democratic debate of the 2016 campaign, sponsored by CNN and Facebook. The encounter will provide a crucial opportunity for Clinton and Sanders -- the leading Democratic contenders -- to contrast their personalities, experience and approach to the key issues in the campaign.

Though Clinton and Sanders have rarely mentioned each other's names, they are clearly reacting to each other and their rival's potential weaknesses. Sanders took aim at Clinton's Wall Street record and Iraq vote over the weekend; she put him on the defensive on guns and his poor standing with minority voters.

Until now, they have each had good reason for avoiding full contact with the other. Clinton hasn't wanted to elevate Sanders and his surprisingly strong poll numbers, while Sanders has wanted to maintain his untraditional, above-the-fray image.

On Tuesday, that calculus will change. And the distinctions they've subtly staked out on a range of issues are only likely to grow sharper.

In the weeks leading up to the debate in Las Vegas, the two Democrats have been carefully finessing their political positions in relation to each other and their party's wide coalition, offering clues about how they will spar Tuesday night.

Sanders has been signaling he will try to strike a contrast with Clinton on reining in Wall Street and on her record of support for military interventions overseas. The former secretary of state, meanwhile, is under pressure to prove to progressives who have flocked to Sanders that she genuinely cares about the middle class. She's expected to highlight her differences with her rival on gun control and to demonstrate the broad support she has among minority voters -- a key sector of the Democratic coalition where Sanders is struggling.

As he limbered up for their clash, Sanders threw down the gauntlet on the Iraq War -- a thrust that Clinton has struggled to counter in the past -- hinting that she has hawkish views that are out of step with the majority of Democratic voters.

His campaign issued a statement reminding voters that he, then a member of the House of Representatives, voted against authorizing the Iraq war in late 2002. At the time he argued that the conflict would destabilize the Middle East, kill large numbers of Americans and Iraqi civilians and hamper the war on terror against al Qaeda.

The statement did not once mention Clinton -- but it did not have to. The then-New York senator did vote to authorize the Iraq war, and that vote was one of her greatest vulnerabilities in the 2008 Democratic campaign against Obama, who also opposed the war.

The Sanders statement raised the possibility that Clinton's vote could haunt her for a second presidential campaign.

""Democrats are no more fond of the Iraq war now than they were back then. That could be a problem,"" Peter Beinart, a foreign policy expert and CNN contributor, said Monday. He added that another Democratic candidate, former Virginia senator and Vietnam war veteran Jim Webb, who was also against the war, could double-team with Sanders to cause trouble for Clinton on the issue.

Sanders has also been staking out territory to Clinton's left on Syria. The former secretary of state recently distanced herself from Obama's much-criticized policy on the vicious civil war by calling for a no-fly zone to be set up to shield refugees.

Sanders issued a statement earlier this month pointing out that he opposes such an idea, warning that it could ""get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never ending entanglement in that region.""

The statement appeared to be a clear appeal to Democrats who share Obama's antipathy toward getting the United States entangled in another Middle Eastern conflict and who are wary of Clinton's more activist instincts on foreign policy.

Sanders is not alone in seeing Clinton's foreign policy record as a vulnerability. Another Democratic candidate, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, also picked up on her Syria position Sunday -- saying on CNN's ""State of the Union"" that a no-fly zone was not advisable and warning that the former secretary of state was ""always quick for the military intervention,"" apparently referring to her previous support for military action in nations such as Iraq and Libya.

Another area where Sanders seems more in tune with the progressive Democratic base is on Wall Street, especially since he has raised most of his money from small donors -- unlike the former secretary of state, who has been relying on big budget fund-raising events with rich contributors. Even with his small-donor focus, Sanders is nearly neck-and-neck in the fund-raising race with Clinton.

Clinton has made strenuous attempts to connect with what her campaign has called ""regular"" Americans, stressing the need to raise up the middle class to feel the benefits of the economic recovery. But Sanders has said that she hasn't done enough, an argument he may expand upon on the debate stage.

""People will have to contrast my consistency and my willingness to stand up to Wall Street and corporations with the secretary,"" Sanders said on NBC's ""Meet the Press"" on Sunday.

The Vermont senator also will likely draw an implied contrast with Clinton on two other issues -- the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact the United States and 11 other nations reached this month and the Keystone XL pipeline designed to carry oil from Canada's tar sands across the United States.

Clinton now says she is a 'no' on both issues, but she took months to get there -- despite fervent opposition to both projects from the left flank of the Democratic Party.

""I am glad that she has reached that conclusion,"" said Sanders in Washington last week when asked about Clinton's opposition to a trade agreement she championed repeatedly as secretary of state. ""This is a conclusion that I reached from day one.""

Yet Sanders is not alone in curating the battlefield for the Democratic debate. Clinton, while getting in line with progressive Democratic positions on big issues, has also been preparing to strike key contrasts with Sanders.

Guns are one policy issue where Sanders is not completely in sync with the Democratic base, so Clinton is likely to exploit it on Tuesday night.

She has been promising a forthright effort to enact new gun control laws after a string of recent mass shootings. It partly seems to be an attempt to focus attention her rival's record on guns, which recently saw him express his openness to reforms that would hold gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their weapons.

Clinton has also spent the runup to the debate cementing her links to key voting blocs of the Democratic coalition -- especially in sectors of the party where Sanders is weak. She can point to broad appeal in the party, which could be key to eventually blunting the challenge from Sanders after early-voting contests in the less diverse states of Iowa and New Hampshire where he is strong.

In recent weeks, Clinton has met representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement and has even criticized Obama for not going far enough in changing immigration laws.

""Hillary has done a lot of work leading up to this debate that has pretty much gone unnoticed,"" Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's 2008 campaign manager, said on CNN on Monday.

""She's rolled out Latinos for Hillary, she has rolled out Women for Hillary, she has met with the leadership of Black Lives Matter, she has checked a lot of boxes walking into this debate,"" she noted. ""I think she is going to display tomorrow night (Tuesday) her vast support among this coalition.""

The challenge that Sanders faces reaching out to minority voters, who are a vital part of the Democratic Party voting bloc, was underscored by a new CNN poll Monday finding that only 1% of nonwhite voters in the important early voting state of South Carolina favor him.

That is a showing that Sanders must improve on if he is to come from behind and beat Clinton for the nomination.",REAL
"October 28, 2016 Susan Rice: U.S. Must Integrate LGBT Rights into Gov’t and Foreign Policy 
National Security Advisor Susan Rice told students at American University in a speech on LGBT rights Wednesday that the “United States must continue to integrate LGBT rights into our government and foreign policy,” including “creating a more diverse national security workforce.” 
“This is an issue that I’m particularly passionate about, and one that President Obama has prioritized,” Rice said, “because without tapping America’s full range of races, religions, ethnicities, social and economic experiences—without embracing people of every sexual orientation and gender identity—we’re leading in a complex world with one hand tied behind our back.” 
Rice, who once served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that “whether we are talking about race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, this fight for equal rights is what our history and values demand.”",FAKE
"GOP Presidential Contenders Stay Classy With Major Shift In Debate Tone And Pitch

After one more debate among the Republican contenders for president, the postgame conversation was once again dominated by Donald Trump's behavior.

But for once, it was about his good behavior. He did not shout or fulminate, nor did he pout or belittle his opponents or joust with the moderators.

In fact, after an even dozen of these events, all four remaining candidates kept a remarkably even keel at the University of Miami. Their previous two meetings had been rife with personal attacks that, at times, became almost juvenile, but on this night all four seemed intent on elevating the tone and tending to business.

The themes of the night were almost entirely policy oriented, with a few forays into political process and tiffs over who was doing better or more likely to win in November if nominated.

The two-hour debate was shown on CNN and co-sponsored by the Salem Media Group and The Washington Times. And although there is at least one more debate scheduled in Salt Lake City on March 21, the Miami event had the feeling of a finale.

The moderators began with a long discussion of job creation, which segued into trade, visas for high-tech workers, Social Security, the national debt, Obamacare, education policy, Common Core and, of course, immigration.

Much of the attention was on Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who have together amassed more than 800 delegates to date. But both Marco Rubio and John Kasich, who face do-or-die primaries in their home states on Tuesday, had ample opportunity to defend their place in the race.

Trump, as has been typical, got most of the air time, with more than 27 minutes. Cruz and Rubio followed with a little under 22 minutes each, Kasich with less than 19.

Rubio and Kasich delivered solid reprises of their strongest debate moments to date, as if to say that if this was going to be their last outing, they would at least be at their best. Rubio, most notably, was once again the smooth and earnest spokesman for a new American dream, sharp on the issue details and long on the idealistic overtures. It was easier to understand why his expectations had been so high than to understand his third- and fourth-place finishes.

""For over two centuries, America has been an exceptional nation,"" Rubio said. ""And now the time has come for this generation to do what it must do to keep it that way. If we make the right choice in this election, our children are going to be the freest and most prosperous Americans that have ever lived.""

Kasich had this to say near the end of the debate:

In essence, though, both Rubio and Kasich trail so far behind in the delegate count that they are at this point running for influence at the convention and a prospective vice presidential bid. Either might make a classic running mate with high name recognition and campaign experience.

Florida is the largest swing state in the Electoral College, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio.

Cruz, who has been Trump's closest competitor thus far, returned several times to the difference between talking about problems and knowing how to solve them.

""Donald is right,"" Cruz said, gesturing toward Trump. ""For example, he was just talking about international trade. He's right about the problems. But his solutions don't work. So, for example, his solution on international trade, he proposed earlier a 45 percent tariff on foreign goods. Now, he backed away from that immediately, and he may come back with a different number tonight.""

At another point, Cruz referred to his rival as ""a candidate who has been funding liberal Democrats and funding the Washington establishment,"" adding that ""it's very hard to imagine how suddenly this candidate is going to take on Washington.""

Trump was once again the man in the middle. But he was markedly different in playing the central role. He found a deft way, when discussing education, to mention that former rival candidate Ben Carson would be endorsing him the next day (an important coup given Carson's image, aura and remaining bloc of voters).

As ever, Trump pushed back when others pushed him, but without the ferocity seen in earlier debates. Questioned about how he could get tough on trade and immigration when his businesses brought in foreign workers and made products overseas, Trump responded calmly and firmly:

Challenged over a protester who was beaten at one of Trump's rallies this week, Trump said he did not condone such behavior. But he also said some of the disturbances at his events were caused by ""bad dudes"" who had been violent and disruptive, and added a salute to the local police, who he said had handled these situations well and deserved more support and respect.

The elevated tone of the Miami debate may have reflected the seriousness of the contest at this juncture. Tuesday brings the second biggest prize of the season: 99 delegates in the winner-take-all state of Florida. It is widely believed that Rubio must win his home state or fold his tent. Also winner-take-all is Ohio, where the same imperative hangs over incumbent Gov. Kasich.

But the other three states voting, Illinois, North Carolina and Missouri, rank fifth, 10th and 18th by population and size of convention delegations. Taken together, the five states on March 15 offer nearly as many delegates as were available on Super Tuesday, March 1.

At one point in the debate, the candidates were asked what they would do if none of them had the 1,237 delegates needed for a first ballot nomination.

Trump said he expected to have enough on the first ballot, adding that if he did not he would expect to support whichever candidate had the most. He called on the others to promise as much:",REAL
"Reuters 
Police arrested 141 Native Americans and other protesters in North Dakota in a tense standoff that spilled into Friday morning between law enforcement and demonstrators seeking to halt construction of a disputed oil pipeline. 
Police in riot gear used pepper spray and armored vehicles in an effort to disperse an estimated 330 protesters and clear a camp on private property in the path of the proposed $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, according to photos and statements released by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department. 
Some protesters responded by throwing rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails at police, attaching themselves to vehicles and starting fires, police said. 
“It was a very active and tense evening as law enforcement worked through the evening to clear protesters,” the department said. 
A female protester fired three rounds at the police line before she was arrested, the department said. 
In another shooting incident, a man was taken into custody after a man was shot in the hand. That “situation involved a private individual who was run off the road by protesters,” the department said in a Facebook post. 
The 1,172-mile (1,885-km) pipeline, being built by a group of companies led by Energy Transfer Partners LP, would offer the fastest and most direct route to bring Bakken shale oil from North Dakota to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. 
Supporters say it would be safer and more cost-effective than transporting the oil by road or rail. 
But the pipeline has drawn the ire of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and environmental activists who say it threatens the water supply and sacred tribal sites. They have been protesting for several months, and dozens have been arrested. 
In all, 141 people were arrested on various charges including conspiracy to endanger by fire or explosion, engaging in a riot and maintaining a public nuisance, the sheriff’s department said. 
Native American protesters had occupied the site since Monday, saying they were the land’s rightful owners under an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government. 
Video posted on social media showed dozens of police and two armored vehicles slowly approaching one group of protesters. 
Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the video, which showed a helicopter overhead as some protesters said police had used bean-bag guns in an effort to chase them out of the camp. 
North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple said police were successful in clearing the camp. 
“Private property is not the place to carry out a peaceful protest,” he said. 
Members of the Standing Rock Sioux asked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday to oppose the pipeline. She has not taken a public position on the issue.",FAKE
"By Brianna Acuesta Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about everything marijuana can do. More and more studies on the abilities of THC are being released recently, and the results are... ",FAKE
"The Hillary Clinton campaign, in an unusual late-afternoon conference call, touted an exclusive Fox News report on the origin of the FBI probe into the candidate’s server in a bid to argue it proves she did nothing wrong -- though a top government watchdog pushed back on the campaign's claims.

The report by Fox News’ Catherine Herridge, for the first time, identified emails that helped kick-start the current investigation. The emails were from top Clinton advisers and had earlier been released to the Benghazi select committee.

On the conference call Wednesday reacting to the report, top Clinton campaign aides said those emails were not marked classified at the time they were sent.

However, despite the Clinton campaign’s claims, a spokeswoman for the intelligence community inspector general reiterated to Fox News that the information in the emails was in fact considered classified at the time it was sent.

An aide to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, also issued a statement defending the intelligence community's concern. ""Just because the State Department may not think information is or should be classified, it does not have the authority [to] make that decision if it received the information from another agency,"" a Grassley spokesperson said.

Campaign Press Secretary Brian Fallon acknowledged Wednesday they have a disagreement on that point with the intelligence community inspector general. Clinton campaign officials said on the call that, at worst, this is a dispute between two agencies, as the State Department also maintains the emails were not classified.

Fallon said the campaign previously did not know which emails originally had been flagged, and called the Fox News report a “watershed” moment in understanding what led to the review. Calling the report “fortuitous” and saying they have no reason to doubt its veracity, the aides also emphasized the emails were not written by Clinton herself.

“We again would like to see the government agencies involved in this process to proceed as quickly as possible in conducting a review of the emails,” Fallon said. “We think it will vindicate all the points we made today on this whole matter.”

The emails identified by Fox News as helping spur the referral both pertained to Benghazi.

The first was forwarded by Clinton adviser Huma Abedin. The 2011 email forwards a warning about how then-deputy chief of mission Chris Stevens was ""considering departure from Benghazi"" amid deteriorating conditions in a nearby city. The email was mistakenly released by the State Department in full, and is now considered declassified.

The second was sent by Clinton aide Jake Sullivan. The partly redacted November 2012 email detailed how Libyan police had arrested ""several people"" with potential connections to the terror attack.

Abedin and Sullivan now work for the Clinton presidential campaign

Fox News understands those two emails were separate from four other emails that the inspector general flagged in July as containing classified information.

A statement from the IG’s office last month, though, referenced one of the two emails, pointing to an “inadvertent release of classified national security information” by the State Department through its FOIA process. That statement also acknowledged the disagreement between the two agencies, saying the department denies the “classified character” of the information “despite a definitive determination from the IC Interagency FOIA Process.”

Aside from that disagreement, the two emails also represent just a fraction of the hundreds of emails‎ that the IG and State Department have since flagged for containing potentially classified material.

The Clinton campaign argued Wednesday that this whole experience speaks to the government’s tendency toward classification.

“We think that this says more about the bent towards secrecy within some corners of the government. It says more about that than it does about Hillary Clinton’s email practices,” Fallon said.",REAL
"The Muslim couple who stormed an office holiday party Wednesday in Southern California, mowing down 14 people before dying hours later in a shootout with police, possessed a massive arsenal of ammo, bombs and high-powered weapons -- and investigators were hoping that computer drives and cell phones seized from their home could tell them whether they were radicalized terrorists with more targets in their sights.

Local and federal authorities - as well as President Obama - continued Thursday to resist calling the carnage at a San Bernardino social services facility terrorism, even as evidence mounted that the pair, who wore tactical gear and moved with grim precision, may have been jihadists armed to the teeth and hellbent on slaughtering innocent Americans. More than 5,000 rounds of ammunition were later found in their home, which sources described as ""an IED factory"" packed with explosives and bomb-making equipment.

""At this stage, we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,"" Obama said in an address from the White House. ""We'll get to the bottom of this and be vigilant getting the facts before we issue decisive judgments on how this occurred.""

Syed Rizwan Farook, a U.S.-born citizen of Pakistani descent who had traveled to Saudi Arabia for nine days in the summer of 2014 and had recently begun wearing a full beard, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, burst into the facility Wednesday morning and sprayed up to 75 rounds at Farook's own terrified colleagues in a conference room where his employer, the county health department, was hosting a holiday party Farook had angrily bolted only minutes earlier. The pair escaped in a black SUV after the attack, which authorities said was over within as few as 10 minutes, only to resurface three hours later and less than 2 miles away in a fierce gun battle on the city's main drag.

""They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission,"" said San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, who refuted an earlier report by Fox News that the suspects wore GoPro cameras during their initial rampage.

Farook, 28, who authorities said was born in Illinois, and raised in California and had worked as a $51,000-per-year restaurant inspector at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health for five years, was described by co-workers as a ""devout"" Muslim, who lived with his wife, child and grandmother in a home in nearby Redlands, which sources described as ""an IED factory."" Bomb squads working with robots swept the home late into the night Wednesday, and witnesses reported hearing several explosions. Malik, who had a 6-month-old baby with Farook, came to the U.S. on a K-1 (fiance of citizen) visa and had a Pakistani passport, according to authorities. It was not clear how long the couple had been together.

Burguan said Thursday he was ""not aware of any notes"" that might shed light on a possible motive. A source briefed on the investigation told Fox News Farook had been in contact with individuals who had been the subject of previous terrorism FBI investigations, but those investigations had been closed.

Meanwhile, jihadists and extremists took to social media to express joy over the American casualties, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

One user, Muhammad Abu Ubaida, tweeted: ""Allah Akbar, and thanks for Allah, the killing of at least 30 people in a shooting incident in San Bernardino in California,"" under the hashtag, “America Burning.”

Muslimah, a prominent pro-ISIS account, shared a photo believed to be of Syed Farook, and wrote: ""May Allah accept our brother & sister who were martyred after carrying out an operation against Crusaders in USA,"" MEMRI said.

At an afternon news conference, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the FBI had taken the reins of the investigation, and a bureau spokesman said a focus of the probe is digital evidence collected from their homes, including hard drives, thumb drives and cell phones. While those could be part of a terror investigation, and FBI spokesman said it was too soon to ascribe religion as a motive.

""It is a possibility, but we don't know that,"" said Assistant Regional FBI Director David Bowdich. ""It's possible it goes down that road. It's possible it does not.""

A law enforcement source told Fox News that the couple were each carrying an AR-15 rifle and a pistol when they were shot and killed by police after a brief chase in their rented black Ford Expedition with Utah plates about 2 miles from the initial shooting site. The source said the vehicle also contained so-called ""rollout bags"" with multiple pipe bombs, as well as additional ammunition.

""That's a military tactic for a sustained fight,"" the source told Fox News of the rollout bags.

The guns found on the suspects, two rifles and two handguns, were purchased legally, according to Meredith Davis, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Burguan said Thursday Farook had purchased the handguns, but he did not say who had bought the rifles.

It was unclear where the suspects may have been during the hours following the lightning-quick attack, but they did not get far. A police spokeswoman said police came across the SUV while ""doing follow-up work,"" and several reports said the car was at a nearby home police were staking out when the suspects got in and tried to flee. It was not immediately clear if that home was the one searched later in Redlands.

About three hours after the shooting, with police looking for a dark SUV, officers staking out the Redlands home after being tipped off by a colleague disturbed by Farook's exit from the party saw a vehicle matching that description. Word that police were hot on their trail came even as emergency responders were treating the wounded on the scene, and sparked a flurry of law enforcement racing to the scene just blocks away. The gunfight, caught on cellphone video by a bystander, was a furious exchange in which 23 officers fired a total of 380 rounds at the suspects, according to Burguan. Two officers suffered non-life threatening injuries.

In addition to the explosives found in the SUV, authorities discovered and detonated three pipe bombs late Wednesday at the Inland Regional Center, the complex where the initial shooting took place about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. Another source said investigators discovered a dozen pipe bombs in the house, as well as small explosives strapped to remote-controlled cars - a signature of terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, according to counter-terrorism experts. Police also found thousands of .223-caliber and 9mm rounds at the home.

""""Clearly they were equipped and could have done an other attack,"" Barguan said. ""Luckily we stopped them before that.""

 

 The initial shooting happened shortly before 11 a.m. local time at the state-run center, which includes three buildings where developmentally disabled people of all ages are treated. The conference area had been rented out by Farook's colleagues for a holiday banquet, according to authorities. Burguan said that Farook had angrily left the party before returning with Malik, however, other investigators doubted the shooting could be chalked up to a workplace dispute, due to the apparent planning behind the attack as well as the heavy weaponry used. On Thursday, officials raised to 21 the number of people injured in the attack.

Patrick Baccari, a co-worker of Farook who suffered minor wounds from shrapnel slicing through the building's bathroom walls, told The Associated Press he had been sitting at the same table as Farook at the banquet before his colleague suddenly disappeared, leaving his coat on his chair.

Baccari also said that Farook had traveled to Saudi Arabia for about a month this past spring. When Farook came back, word spread that he had gotten married and the woman he described as a pharmacist joined him shortly afterward. Baccari added that the reserved Farook showed no signs of unusual behavior, although he grew out his beard several months ago. A five-year-old profile for Farook on a dating site said he was ""religious"" and enjoyed hanging out in the ""back yard doing target practice with younger sister and friends.""

Center employees, who undergo monthly training drills to prepare for active shooter situations, initially thought the incident was a drill, according to the Los Angeles Times. But when real bullets flew, several hid in closets, barricaded themselves in rooms or fled for their lives.

The Inland Regional Center is one of 21 facilities serving people with developmental disabilities run by the state, said Nancy Lungren, spokeswoman for the California Department of Developmental Services. The social services agency administers, authorizes and pays for assistance to people with disabilities such as autism and mental retardation. On an average day, doctors at the regional centers would be evaluating toddlers whose parents have concerns and case workers meeting with developmentally disabled adults.

Fox News' Adam Housley and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.",REAL
"To become the 45th president of the United States, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump has to win 270 electoral college votes. The candidates have spent what feels like 100 years locked in mortal combat, but in the next few hours there will finally be a victor. (Well, probably. If there’s a 269-vote tie, or a mandatory recount, prepare for constitutional chaos.)

Each state is assigned a certain number of electoral votes, ultimately based on its population. California has the most, with 55. Seven states – Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming – have just three electoral votes. Washington DC gets three too.

While there are 50 states in the US, most of these are “safely” Republican or Democrat. They vote the same way every time going back at least six elections. So the presidential election boils down to just a handful of “swing states” – the 10 or 11 states that have a recent history of selecting both Republicans and Democrats.

This is why voters in places such as Ohio, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and New Hampshire are subjected to a barrage of television advertising and campaign stops. It’s also why you have not seen Clinton and Trump holding rallies in Louisiana (safely Republican) or Washington (safely Democratic).

Trump faces a much more difficult path to victory. He needs to win almost all of these swing states to become the next president, whereas if Clinton wins two or three, she wins the race.

This is because Democrats start from a stronger position. There are 18 states plus DC that have voted for a Democrat for president in every election since 1992. That batch amounts to 242 electoral votes. There are only 13 states that have voted for a Republican in every election since 1992. Those states carry just 102 electoral votes.

If Clinton simply wins all the states that have voted for her predecessors in the recent past, then adds Florida (which has 29 electoral votes), she is the next president. If she loses Florida but wins, say, Virginia and North Carolina, she will be the next president.

Trump needs to hold on to all the historically Republican states, win states such as Georgia and Arizona – which are usually Republican but where he has struggled in the polls – and then win enough swing states to tip him over 270.

Buckle in because now the real fun begins: polls close in eastern Kentucky and most of Indiana. (Parts of each state are on central time, so the polls there close at 7pm ET.)

Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, is the governor of Indiana. In the past 50 years the state has voted Democrat only once – for Barack Obama in 2008.

In some states we will know the winner almost immediately after the polls close. Most news outlets, including the Guardian, rely on the Associated Press to “call” races.

AP is able to announce the winners so quickly because it deploys thousands of people on election night to collect results from states, counties and locales as they are announced. It also uses exit polls and voting history.

Solidly Democratic or Republican states are likely to be called quickly. Swing states are likely to take longer.

Election drinking: Donald Trump doesn’t drink. But Donald Trump doesn’t have to worry about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. A nice way to toast – and mock, if you were minded to do so – the 70-year-old builder might be to mix up a “The Donald” cocktail as you settle in for the night. It’s got vodka, Goldschläger gold-leaf cinnamon schnapps and orange juice. But the most fun bit is the cotton candy on top. Doesn’t it look just like his hair?

Election fuel: It could be a long night, or a short one. But at this stage we likely do not yet know, so our advice is to fuel yourself for a marathon, not a sprint. And you can feed yourself and honour Ohio’s prominent role in US elections by preparing a Cincinnati chili. It’s a more Mediterranean take on your traditional chili, brought to Cincinnati by Macedonians in the 1920s. If you’re drinking more than one of “The Donald” cocktails, you will want to line your stomach!

Election soundtrack: Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. A perfect kick-off to election night, given that both candidates are incredibly unpopular with the American public. Trump likes the Rolling Stones and played this song at his rallies. The Rolling Stones do not like Donald Trump, and asked him to stop. He didn’t.

Voting ends in three key swing states: Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire (where a minimal number of polling stations may stay open until 8pm ET).



Florida’s 29 electoral college votes have proved crucial in the recent past. Al Gore can tell you that. He narrowly lost the state – some still believe he actually won – and the election to George W Bush, despite winning the national popular vote.

Away from the top of the ticket, Florida senator and one-time Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio is up for re-election. He has been running a bit ahead of Democrat Patrick Murphy in the polls. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who resigned as chair of the Democratic National Committee in July after leaked emails showed the party favoring Clinton’s campaign, is expected to comfortably win re-election to Congress.

Virginia was a reliably Republican state until Obama won there in 2008 and again in 2012. The state’s mix of less-educated, rural voters; wealthy suburbanites; federal government employees and military families; academics; jet-setters and so on make it difficult to read, but Clinton has been decisively ahead this year.

New Hampshire has been won by a Democrat in five of the past six presidential elections. But the Granite State gave Trump his first big primary win, and recent polling here has shown a tight race.

Other states closing at 7pm ET include South Carolina and Vermont – Bernie Sanders’ home state. Sanders won the Democratic primary in Vermont by an amazing 73 points. But now he’s with her.

Election drinking: Supercall.com has a cocktail called “Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret”. It’s a vodka martini with hot sauce in it, a reference to an interview in April where Clinton said she always carried a bottle of hot sauce. You could quip to your friends that it’s a perfect choice, as the race is “beginning to heat up!”

Polls close in West Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio. Expect the result from West Virginia very quickly – Trump should win easily.

North Carolina and Ohio are swing states and will take longer. Ohio has been seen as a reliable bellwether state, voting for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. That run might be coming to an end, however, either because of the state’s changing demographics or because of the strangeness of the current contest, in terms of the unfavorability of both candidates.

While its demographics are complicated – a mix of Rust Belt, big cities, Appalachia, farmland and more – the Ohio electorate has grown more white and less educated than the national mean. That trend appears to account in part for Trump’s strength in the Buckeye State this year.

Election soundtrack: The Pretenders, Message of Love. Because Chrissie Hynde is was born in Akron, Ohio. You could also make a point about spreading a message of love. Or of someone pretending to spread a message of love. Not that we’re questioning, in any way at all, how much politicians love the voters.



In 2012, the Associated Press called the Indiana result just before 8pm. Vigo County, which borders Illinois in west Indiana, is seen as the ultimate bellwether. It has voted for the winner of every presidential election in 30 of the past 32 elections – dating back to 1888. Keep an eye out for its result.

Republicans have long dreamed of winning Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes, based on growing support among once flourishing manufacturing and mining sectors in the south-western and north-eastern corners of the state. But Clinton has been creaming Trump in polls in Philadelphia and its suburbs, which is where most of the people live, and she has been comfortably ahead in statewide polls for months.

Pennsylvania will also be under scrutiny on election day because of Trump’s controversial claims that there has been voter fraud in Philadelphia in the past and his calls for “volunteer election monitors”.

The results in non-swing states will start to come in thick and fast. Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey and Rhode Island all close at 8pm ET, and we can expect AP to call all these states pretty much immediately.

Maine’s polls also close at 8pm. It is one of only two states – the other is Nebraska, where voting finishes at 9pm – that splits its electoral votes according to congressional district.

The state as a whole is likely to vote Democrat, but Trump may steal an electoral vote in Maine’s second district, which is made up of more rural voters.

Election fuel: There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary” page on Pinterest, a tribute to Clinton’s attempts to win the foodie vote. One of the recipes is provided by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign. It’s called Salsa di Noci and is basically nuts and pasta, but arranged into a large “H” shape.

The polls in Georgia close at 7pm or 8pm, depending on location. In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was declared the winner just before 8.30pm. A Democratic candidate hasn’t won in Georgia since proper southern boy Bill Clinton in 1992, but strong support for Hillary Clinton in Georgia counties with a high African American population, and in Atlanta, have made her a threat to Trump.

If Clinton wins Georgia, Trump might as well concede. (Don’t hold your breath.)

Election tunes: Marvin Gaye, Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler). The African American vote is in, and Trump gets a big 1%.

Polls close in two traditional swing states: Wisconsin and Colorado, and in Arizona, which is usually firmly Republican but is swingy this year.



An increasingly influential Hispanic bloc and Mormons who can’t stand Trump – not to mention a superior Democratic ground game – mean that Clinton has a decent chance of becoming the first Democrat to win Arizona since her husband in 1996.

When the polls close in New York, at 9pm ET, they will have been open for 15 hours – the longest polling window of any state. Barring an almighty upset, Clinton will quickly be declared the winner.

Wyoming, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Texas all close at 9pm too. The networks should swiftly call these for Trump … unless loose talk of Clinton taking Texas, which last went Democratic in the Watergate era, comes true? If it’s that kind of night, water the horses and go to town.

Nebraska, which like Maine splits its electoral votes by congressional district, shuts its polls at 9pm ET. Barack Obama won Nebraska’s second district – Omaha – in 2008. Clinton could do the same this year, thanks to a well-financed get-out-the-vote effort spearheaded by Susan Buffett, daughter of Warren.

Election fuel: New York cheesecake. Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago but was a senator from New York for eight years. Donald Trump was born in Queens, New York, before inheriting his father’s successful real estate business. In January, Trump claimed his popularity was such that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue [in New York City] and shoot somebody” without losing voters. Trump has been trailing Clinton by 20% in New York.

Election soundtrack: Fleetwood Mac, Silver Springs. “I know I could’ve loved you, but you would not let me,” laments Arizona’s Stevie Nicks. Might Trump be thinking the same thing when the Grand Canyon State’s results come in?

Given Clinton’s apparent strength in Pennsylvania, we may see the state called for her by 10pm (or, in a deeply troubling upset for her, Trump may win). The New Hampshire result should also come in around this time. They will offer one of the first concrete indications of how the night is going.

Nevada and Iowa are the final swing states to close their polls. In the past two elections, Iowa was called quickly for Obama. Montana and Utah also close at 10pm; both are traditionally safe Republican states, but Trump’s unpopularity means independent Evan McMullin, who’s from Utah, has a strong chance of becoming the first non-Republican or Democrat to win electoral college votes since 1968.

Utah has been called soon after the polls close in the recent past. If McMullin is declared the winner, it’s a good sign that the night is truly in uncharted territory, terra incognita, in the most exciting way. Former congressional staffer Evan McMullin: buckle up, America.

More election drinking: Yuengling brewery – the oldest brewery in the US – is based in Pennsylvania. Its owner came out in support of Trump in October, a move which has seen some drinkers boycotting the beer. You could however source some craft ale from the Victory Brewing Company, also based in Pennsylvania. We might be getting an idea of who will be victorious around this time.

Election soundtrack: Neon Trees, Your Surrender. It’s almost definitely not about conceding a presidential election, but if Trump fails to win Utah, Neon Trees’ home state, then he might want to think about surrendering to Clinton.

Polls in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington close at 11pm ET. These are all safe Democrat states that are unlikely to unexpectedly impact the outcome.

Back in 2012, the Associated Press called the swing states of Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Ohio – worth a combined 48 electoral votes – in the space of 30 minutes at around 11pm, then declared Obama’s re-election at 11.38pm.

In 2008, networks announced Obama had won just after 11pm.

We might know the outcome sooner this time. Or we might not know for a while.

If Clinton’s lead in opinion polls translates to the actual polls, then we may see states called for her earlier, on the back of strong early voting results. If enough swing states are called quickly, we could find out the result before 11pm ET. Or, if Trump proves the polls wrong, the race could as quickly run to him.

Separately, there are some individual states to look out for.

Ohio is one. Some polling experts believe that if Trump doesn’t win there, it is effectively game over. Fivethirtyeight.com gave him less than a 1% chance of winning the presidency if he fails to take the Buckeye State.

Likewise, if Trump loses North Carolina or Pennsylvania or Florida, it also becomes very difficult for him to win.

And beyond that, if Clinton can win Georgia – remember, these are usually solidly Republican – it would suggest she is in for a blowout victory that could see the election called for her very early.

In 2012, Virginia was only called for Obama after midnight and Florida was not called for four days. Clinton is polling well ahead of Trump in Virginia, and strong early voting results might see her announced the winner early.

Election soundtrack: Queen Latifah, U-N-I-T-Y. We may see the first female president, following a campaign marked by sexism and inappropriate behaviour towards women. Queen Latifah called out the disrespectful treatment of women in this 1994 hit.

Election fuel: Cuban sandwich. Florida’s signature dish is said to have originated in Cuba or in Key West, part of the Florida Keys archipelago. It’s got ham, swiss cheese, mustard and pickles in it, and might be a good way to soak up the booze.

In the early hours, we would expect a victory speech and a concession speech –though Trump has spoken of a threat that the election could be rigged and refused to say that if he loses he will accept the result.

If elected, Clinton would be the first woman to be elected US president. She has repeatedly spoken about breaking the “glass ceiling” in politics, and has chosen to hold her election night party at New York City’s Javits Center, which actually has a glass ceiling.

If Trump is elected, he will be the first person with his own vodka line to be elected president, and only the fifth president to have never held elected office.

The winner will have 73 days to set up a new government before they are sworn into office on 20 January 2017.

But if you’re concerned about post-election withdrawal symptoms, don’t worry: the midterm elections, sometimes seen as a referendum on the president, will take place in November 2018. All 435 members of the House of Representatives will be up for re-election, along with a third of the Senate and more than half the governors.

And then, in summer 2019, a whole new cast of hopefuls will announce their presidential campaigns, and the whole thing starts over again. Great!

On theguardian.com, obviously. We’ve got reporters and videographers stationed around the country. We’re liveblogging all day and night.

NBC’s coverage of the 2012 election night was the the most watched of all channels, with an average of 12.1m viewers. Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Chuck Todd will be co-hosting on Tuesday, and veteran Tom Brokaw will be involved as an analyst. NBC will be superimposing a map of the United States onto the Rockefeller Center ice rink.

Fox News has Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier lined up to anchor its coverage of the night. They’ll have Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer on hand to dissect the results. Rove didn’t have such a good time of it in 2012, when he refused to accept that Ohio had voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Let’s see how he gets on this time.

ABC will have George Stephanopoulos anchoring from New York City. Robin Roberts will be tracking Clinton, Amy Robach will be with Trump. Michael Strahan will be out in Times Square interviewing the men and women on the street and getting reaction as the votes come in.

NPR will be manned by Robert Siegel, Audie Cornish, Rachel Martin, and Ari Shapiro until 2am ET. As well as Clinton v Trump, they’ll be following congressional and senate races around the country. NPR has also commissioned an artist to live-paint a mural of the electoral college map, filling in states as they are called. You’ll be able to watch that on Facebook.

The BBC will have Andrew Neil and World News America host Katty Kay stationed in Times Square. North America editor Jon Sopel will be with Clinton and World News America Laura Trevelyan will be following Trump, and Jeremy Vine will be explaining the results as they come in.

Sky News will also be based in Times Square. Jeremy Thompson will anchor Sky’s America Decides special on election night, Adam Boulton will be in Washington DC, and Kay Burley will be out and about talking to voters and campaigners. The news channel says it is sending “more people than ever” to cover the election.

Katy Perry, Roar. Played at almost every Clinton rally over the past year. Perry is a big Clinton supporter.

Lady Gaga, Hair. There aren’t very many songs devoted to hair. This is one that is. Gaga has endorsed Clinton.

OMD, If You Leave. A lament to us losing Barack Obama as president. “Seven years went under the bridge, like time was standing still.” He’s served eight years, but you get the idea.

Yoko Ono, Sisters O Sisters. A cry for gender equality and female empowerment. What better way to ring in the country’s first female president? If that happens.

Ice T feat Jello Biafra, Shut Up, Be Happy. For the dread moment when Trump looks like he might win.

America is now under martial law.

All constitutional rights have been suspended.

Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys.

Do not attempt to think or depression may occur.

Curfew is at 7pm sharp after work.”

Simon & Garfunkel, America. For that shining-eyed moment when Clinton is heading for victory, but how you wish it was Bernie.

REM, I Believe. For that moment when the state of Georgia turns Democratic Blue.

The Delfonics, Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time). Pennsylvania turns away from Clinton? How about a classic Philly soul walk-out tearjerker.

Roy Ayers, We Live In Brooklyn Baby. Clinton campaign HQ needs a home-borough anthem. “Our time is now, we gonna make it baby...”

The Donald: It comes with a thing of cotton candy on the top that looks like Trump’s hair. What more do you want? From Liquor.com:

Pour the vodka and Goldschläger into an ice-filled Collins glass, and top with the orange juice. Garnish with an orange wheel and big puff of cotton candy.

Hillary’s Dirty Little Secret: Cocktail website Supercall.com came up with this. It uses hot sauce, referencing an interview in April where Clinton said she carried hot sauce around with her.

Put the ingredients in a shaker tin with ice. Shake it up for 12 seconds. Strain it into a coupe cocktail glass and garnish with a cornichon pickle.

Potus Punch: Thank you to Omni Hotels for this one.

It’s pretty easy to make: “muddle berries”, the recipe says, then add ice, add the remaining ingredients, stir it up and pour it over ice.

There’s a whole “Chefs for Hillary page” on Pinterest. One of the dishes is by John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s campaign.

Salsa di Noci: Use a blender to grind up 2.5 cups of walnuts to a paste. Coat a sauté pan with olive oil and toast the nuts. When they’re golden brown, add half a stick of butter and 1 cup of chopped canned tomatoes. Add 1tsp of salt and .5tsp of pepper. Stir it up then add 1.5 cups of chicken stock. Simmer, then add 3tbsp of chopped fresh basil. Toss 1lb pasta with the sauce, and add .5 cup of parmesan cheese. To finish, arrange the pasta into a “H”. For Hillary.

You can also find six of Trump’s favorite recipes here.

What’s the mood where you are? Share your pictures and views with us.",REAL
"ORLANDO — President Obama said the gunman who opened fire in a nightclub here Sunday appeared to be motivated by extremist propaganda online, while saying that investigators delving into the attacker’s background have not found anything linking him with radical groups.

Even as new details emerged from law enforcement officials about the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history — a massacre that left 49 people dead and dozens of others wounded — authorities said the widening investigation was still working to determine more about what motivated the attack.

The rampage also reverberated on the presidential campaign trail, as the leading presidential candidates offered dueling speeches Monday that pivoted off the attack.

Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, called for a ban on immigrants from any area of the world with a history of terrorist attacks against the United States, going beyond his previous calls to bar Muslims from traveling to the country. In her own remarks, Hillary Clinton, the expected Democratic nominee, said stronger gun control laws were needed to prevent suspected terrorists from having access to weapons.

While law enforcement officials were still working to determine what motivated the gunman — 29-year-old Omar Mateen — the FBI said Monday that he had been placed on a terrorism watch list during a 10-month period in 2013 and 2014 after he was investigated for inflammatory comments he made to co-workers.

During a three-hour hostage standoff with police after the shooting spree Sunday, Mateen referenced the Islamic State, and the militant group — also known as ISIS or ISIL — claimed Monday that Mateen was a “soldier” for its self-proclaimed caliphage. However, officials say that so far, no signs have emerged that he was guided by groups outside the country.

“We see no clear evidence that he was directed externally,” Obama said during remarks in the Oval Office. “It does appear that at the last minute, he announced allegiance to ISIL. But there is no evidence so far that he was in fact directed by ISIL, and at this stage there’s no direct evidence that he was part of a larger plot.”

Obama said the shooting appeared so far to be a case of “homegrown extremism.”

The comments by Obama and other law enforcement officials Monday offered the sharpest look yet at what authorities believe may have motivated the gunman who attacked Pulse, a popular gay club in Orlando.

“We’re working hard to understand the killer, and his motives, and his sources of inspiration,” FBI Director James B. Comey said Monday. “We’re highly confident that this killer was radicalized, and at least in some part through the Internet.”

Even as this information emerged, police were still revealing details about the shooting and the hostage situation that followed, while relatives of victims were still awaiting word about whether their loved ones were among the wounded or dead.

[Classmates say Orlando gunman was ‘cheering’ on 9/11]

Comey said that during the three-hour standoff the gunman had with Orlando police officers, there were three different 911-related calls. The gunman called 911 about half an hour after opening fire and then hung up the phone, Comey said. Mateen then called a second time and spoke briefly to a dispatcher before hanging up again, and then the dispatcher called him back and they spoke briefly.

“During the calls, he said he was doing this for the leader of ISIL, who he named and pledged loyalty to,” Comey said.

However, Comey said there were no signs that Mateen was tied to any kind of network, and he added that it remained unclear exactly what extremist group this attacker supported.

In addition to referencing the Islamic State, Mateen also mentioned the Boston Marathon bombers as well as a Florida man who had joined an al-Qaeda affiliate and carried out a suicide attack in Syria, leaving his specific sympathies unknown, Comey said.

Law enforcement officials in Florida, meanwhile, offered a new accounting of the shootout. Orlando Police Chief John Mina said that police first encountered Mateen shortly after the initial gunfire at about 2 a.m., when an off-duty officer working at the club — Adam Gruler, a 15-year veteran of the force — exchanged shots with Mateen.

Additional officers called to the scene soon joined in another gun battle, at which point Mateen retreated further into the building and, eventually, into a bathroom. The police then held back because there were no more gunshots, Mina said, and they tried to negotiate with Mateen to avoid any more bloodshed.

Mateen was in a bathroom with four or five people, while another 15 or 20 were in another bathroom, Mina said. During these negotiations, Mateen was “cool and calm” and did not make many demands, Mina said.

After about three hours, police said they decided to storm Pulse after the shooter referenced bomb belts or explosives. Mina said the police used explosives and then an armored Bearcat to break a hole in the club’s wall. Hostages poured out, and Mateen — armed with a pair of guns — came out as well.

During the gun battle, Mateen was killed and one Orlando police officer — Michael Napolitano, a 14-year veteran of the force — was injured when a bullet struck his Kevlar helmet. In a statement Monday, police identified Napolitano and the other officers who fired shots at the nightclub. Following state protocol, all 11 of these officers have been relieved of duty while the state investigates their shootings.

However, much still remains unclear, including whether any hostages might have been injured or killed by crossfire.

In a news conference Monday, Mina said storming the building “was the right decision to make” because police thought other lives might be in danger.

Authorities say they are continuing to explore whether other people may be connected to the case. The investigation into Mateen has expanded to look at other people, and it stretches from Florida to Kabul.

Investigators also said Monday that they had found a third gun in Mateen’s car and were working to trace its origins after learning that the two weapons he had during the shooting — a handgun and an assault-rifle-type weapon — were purchased legally.

There is now “an investigation of other persons,” A. Lee Bentley III, the U.S. attorney for much of Central Florida, said at a news conference Monday. Bentley said prosecutors have “no reason to believe that anyone connected to this crime is placing the public in imminent danger,” but he offered no other details.

“We’ve been collecting a great amount of electronic and physical evidence,” Bentley said Monday. The FBI also said Monday that investigators have processed more than 100 leads so far.

Authorities said Monday afternoon that they had identified relatives or next-of-kin for nearly all of the victims, making notifications for 48 of the 49 people killed. (On Sunday, police had included Mateen when saying 50 people were killed.) For many, the hours stretching from Sunday into Monday were filled with dread as they awaited word about whether their loved ones were among the wounded or dead.

All the bodies were removed from the club by 11 p.m. Sunday, authorities said.

[Floor plans show interior of club where 49 were killed]

Orlando Regional Medical Center, where many shooting victims were taken, said Monday that the hospital was still treating 29 people, including five who were “in grave condition.” A number of victims were in critical condition or in shock, the hospital said. Hospital officials also said local blood banks had more than 600 units on hand due to the surge in people who donated blood after the shootings.

As the investigation into Mateen moved into its second day, many questions remained unanswered — including what, specifically, might have motivated him. Bentley said investigators were serving search warrants, and the FBI asked anyone with information about the 29-year-old’s life to call 1-800-CALLFBI.

In Orlando and beyond, the investigation was still trying to determine the steps that led up to the attack Sunday.

Comey said the FBI was working to determine the role anti-gay bigotry may have played in Mateen’s choice of a target. The Islamic State has carried out a relentless campaign against gay people, releasing videos showing its members gruesomely executing people they said were homosexual.

Mateen had been on the FBI’s radar twice in recent years. In 2013, agents opened an investigation that lasted 10 months after Mateen made comments to co-workers about terrorist groups and expressed a desire to martyr himself.

Investigators interviewed him twice, but Mateen said he made the remarks in anger because he felt co-workers were teasing him for being Muslim, and the preliminary inquiry was closed in 2014, Comey said.

Two months later, Mateen again came to the attention of federal agents looking into the Florida man who blew himself up in Syria, Comey said. Mateen and this man attended the same mosque, according to Comey. Again, the FBI interviewed Mateen, looked into his possible ties to the suicide bomber, determined that there were no strong ties and moved on.

Even given Mateen’s mentions of the Islamic State, the level of possible connections between the gunman and the militant group were unclear.

The Islamic State’s al-Bayan Radio described him Monday as “one of the soldiers” of its self-described caliphate, but it offered no further details on possible contact before the attack, said the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors statements by extremist factions.

If it does appear that the Orlando gunman was radicalized from material available online, it would follow a pattern seen in earlier shooting rampages in San Bernardino, Calif., and Chattanooga, Tenn., last year.

A U.S. official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments, said that attacks inspired by the Islamic State, even when conducted without support from the group’s core operation, helped illustrate to followers that they remained a significant military force despite loss of territory in Iraq and Syria over the last year.

“In a sense, inspired attacks and attacks conducted in their name globally” allows them to perpetuate a key perception: continued expansion, the official said. Such attacks show would-be supporters that “they’re very much still alive and potent.”

Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter, speaking en route to Brussels, told reporters that the shooting should “further steel everyone’s resolve to defeat ISIL and its parent tumors in Iraq and Syria.”

[There was another terrible case of gun violence over the weekend]

As terrorism again surged to the forefront of the country’s political debate, Trump and Clinton shifted plans for events Monday to focus their remarks on national security.

Clinton, speaking in Cleveland, warned that the threat posed by the Islamic State is “metastasizing” and vowed to make “targeting lone wolves a top priority” if elected.

She also said that someone who has been watched by the FBI “shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked.” Clinton, echoing remarks Obama has made, also said the shooting was a reminder of the need for stronger gun control laws.

“It’s essential that we stop terrorists from getting the tools they need to carry out attacks,” she said. “I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets.”

Before his speech in New Hampshire, Trump made television appearances to reject calls for more gun control and repeatedly accuse Obama of being somehow sympathetic with radicalized Muslims.

“We’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said.

Orlando now joins the mournful list of terrorism-linked bloodshed — Brussels in March, Paris and San Bernardino last year, the Boston Marathon in 2013, London in 2005 and other sites — and is certain to strike deep into American debates over gun rights and how far authorities can go to track potential terrorism threats. And the shooting struck a popular gay club on its Latin night.

From around the world, condolences and pledges of support poured in. Vigils and memorials were held from New Zealand to Europe. The Eiffel Tower will be lit in rainbow colors Monday evening.

In Afghanistan, the country’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, said the Orlando attack “tells us that terrorism knows no religion, boundary and geography. Terrorism must be eliminated.”

Officials in Afghanistan — Mateen was born in the United States, while his parents were born there — also opened investigations into any possible connections between the gunman and militant groups. Yet Mateen’s father insisted his son had no Islamist terrorism ties and showed no warning signs the day before the shooting.

Mateen had legally purchased the two guns — which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said were an ­AR-15-type weapon and a 9mm semiautomatic pistol — within “the last few days,” according to Trevor Velinor of the ATF.

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the investigation, said the FBI had found nothing in Mateen’s past that would have legally blocked him from purchasing a gun. The bureau’s previous inquiries, the official said, would have been insufficient to achieve that.

Mateen purchased two guns from the St. Lucie Shooting Center, shop owner Ed Henson said at a news conference Monday.

“An evil person came in here and legally purchased two firearms from us,” Henson said, adding that Mateen had multiple security licenses and passed a full background check before he was allowed to buy the guns.

Henson said if Mateen hadn’t bought the guns at his shop, he would have been able to buy them somewhere else.

“We happened to be the gun store he picked. It’s horrible,” said Henson, who spent two decades with the New York Police Department before retiring in 2002. “I’m sorry he picked my place. I wish he’d picked nowhere.”

Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusifiy, said he beat her repeatedly during their brief marriage, and she called him unstable.

Mateen’s father, however, called his son “very dignified.” In a video posted to Facebook shortly after midnight, Seddique Mateen, who lives in Florida, called the shooting “tragic” but said his son was “a good son and an educated son.”

He said his son shouldn’t have carried out the massacre because “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality.”

“I don’t know what caused him to shoot last night,” said the father, who has hosted a U.S. -based television show on Afghan affairs and describes himself as an important figure in his homeland.

“No radicalism, no,” the father told The Washington Post late Sunday from his home in Port St. Lucie, Fla. “He doesn’t have a beard even. . . . I don’t think religion or Islam had anything to do with this.”

Berman reported from Washington. Emma Brown, Brian Murphy, Jenna Johnson, Missy Ryan, Adam Goldman and Jerry Markon in Washington; Katie Zezima, Hayley Tsukayama and Amanda Elder in Orlando; Abby Phillip in Cleveland; and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Brussels contributed to this report. Also contributing: Greg Miller, Joby Warrick, Tim Craig, Sarah Larimer and Julie Tate.

The history of the AR-15, the weapon that had a hand in the United States’ worst mass shooting

Islamic State shows it can still inspire violence as it emphasizes attacks abroad

This story will be updated throughout the day.",REAL
"Thursday, 27 October 2016 Biden and Trump to Duel 
Seeking to duplicate, if not surpass, the famous duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, and Vice President Joe Biden, agreed to fight a pistol duel. Although details of the duel have yet to be finalized, Amiko Aventurista, reports the duel will likely take place on the eve of the election. 
Three independent sources confirmed negotiations over broadcast rights are extremely tense. Trump demands the duel be the inaugural show of his new venture, Trump TV. ""It was my idea. I was the one who said I could shot someone on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would be with me. Other than Hilary, Obama, Rubio, Cruz, Jeb Bush, and a ton of others, I can think of no one better to shot than hair plug Joe. I'm the greatest shooter ever. A real sniper."" 
Biden insist MSNBC must be the broadcaster because its liberal and minority audience wants to see Trump with several gun shots. In a response to Trump, Biden said, ""There is no way I can miss. His hair glows bright orange. All I have to do is point toward the glow"". 
Megan Kelly of Fox says Fox must host the show because she wants to see ""blood"" coming everywhere out of Trump just like he said blood was coming out of her. CNN's Wolf Blitzer decline to comment. Even ESPN is making a play for the event, pointing out it regularly shows non-traditional sporting events, such as bull riding, cross bow, and bowling. 
Both sides agree Lin Manuel Mirada, producer of the hit Broadway show, Alexander Hamilton, should direct the event. Manuel Mirada said, ""I would be honored to produce the event. I know my smash Broadway hit, Hamilton, is only a show about a duel not a real duet but I think that experience qualifies me to produce a show about a real duel. After all, the only difference is the guns are real."" 
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has agreed to fully pay for and sponsor the event. NRA President Wayne LaPierre release the following statement, ""Finally we have bi-partisan agreement. I should have thought of this first"". Make Amiko Aventurista's  ",FAKE
" Russia Has Called the War Party's Bluff
A hot war is not going to break out after Nov. 8th - thanks to shrewd moves and preparation by Moscow
By Pepe Escobar
 "" RI "" - Cold War 2.0 has reached unprecedented hysterical levels. And yet a hot war is not about to break out – before or after the November 8 US presidential election.
From the Clinton (cash) machine – supported by a neocon/neoliberalcon think tank/media complex – to the British establishment and its corporate media mouthpieces, the Anglo-American, self-appointed “leaders of the free world” are racking up demonization of Russia and “Putinism” to pure incandescence.
And yet a hot war is not about to break out – before or after the November 8 US presidential election. So many layers of fear and loathing in fact veil no more than a bluff.
Let’s start with the Russian naval task force in Syria, led by the officially designated “heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser” Admiral Kuznetsov, which will be stationed in the eastern Mediterranean at least until February 2017, supporting operations against all strands of Salafi-jihadism.
The Admiral Kuznetsov is fully equipped with anti-ship, air defense, artillery and anti-submarine warfare systems – and can defend itself against a vast array of threats, unlike NATO vessels.
Predictably, NATO is spinning with alarm that “all of the Northern Fleet”, along with the Baltic Fleet, is on the way to the Mediterranean. Wrong; it’s only part of the Northern Fleet, and the Baltic Fleet ships are not going anywhere. The heart of the matter is that when the capabilities of this Russian naval task force are matched with the S-300/S-400 missile systems already deployed in Syria, Russia is now de facto rivaling the firepower of the US Sixth Fleet.
 To top it off, as this comprehensive military analysis makes clear, Russia has “basically made their own no-fly zone over Syria”; and a US no-fly zone, viscerally promoted by Hillary Clinton, “is now impossible to achieve.”
That should be more than enough to put into perspective the impotence transmuted into outright anger exhibited by the Pentagon and its neocon/neoliberalcon vassals.
Add to it the outright war between the Pentagon and the CIA in the Syrian war theatre, where the Pentagon backs the YPG Kurds, who are not necessarily in favor of regime change in Damascus, while the CIA backs further weaponizing of “moderate”, as in al-Qaeda-linked and/or infiltrated, “rebels”.
Compounding the trademark Obama administration Three Stooges school of foreign policy, American threats have flown more liberally than Negan’s skull-crushing bloody baton in the new season of The Walking Dead.
Pentagon head Ash Carter, a certified neocon, has threatened “consequences”, as in “potential” strikes against Syrian Arab Army (SAA) forces to “punish the regime” after the Pentagon itself broke the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire. President Obama took some time off weighing his options. And in the end, he backed off.
So it will be up for the virtually elected – by the whole US establishment — Hillary Clinton to make the fateful decision. She won’t be able to go for a no-fly zone – because Russia is already doing it. And if she decides to “punish the regime”, Moscow already telegraphed, via Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, there will definitely be “consequences” for imposing a “shadow” hot war.
Sun Tzu doesn’t do first-strike
Washington, of course, reserves for itself a “first-strike” nuclear capability, which Hillary Clinton fully supports (Donald Trump does not, and for that he’s also demonized). If we allow the current hysteria to literally go nuclear, then we must consider the matter of the S-500 anti-missile system – which effectively seals Russia's air space; Moscow won’t admit it on the record because that would unleash a relentless arms race.
A US intel source with close connections to the Masters of the Universe but at the same time opposed to Cold War 2.0 as “counter-productive”, adds the necessary nuance: “The United States has lost the arms race, indulging in trillions of dollars of worthless and endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now is no longer a global power as it cannot defend itself with its obsolete missiles, THAAD, Patriot and Aegis Land Based Ballistic Defense System, against Russian ICBMs, even as the Russians have sealed their airspace. The Russians may be as much as four generations ahead of the US.”
Moreover, in the deep recesses of shadow war planning, the Pentagon knows, and the Russian Defense Ministry also knows, that in the event some
Dr. Strangelove launched a nuclear preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian population would be protected by their defensive missile systems – as well as nuclear bomb shelters in major cities. Warnings on Russian television have not been idle; the population would know where to go in the – terrifying — event of nuclear war breaking out.
Needless to add, the ghastly possibility of US nuclear first-strike turns all these WWII-style NATO war games in Eastern Europe into a pile of meaningless propaganda stunts.
So how did Moscow plan for it all? According to the US intel source, “they took out almost all the military budget from their stated federal budget, lulling the West into thinking that Russia could not afford a massive military buildup and there was nothing to fear from Russia as they were finished as a world power.
The [stated] military budget was next to nothing, so there was nothing to worry about as far as the CIA was concerned. If Putin showed publicly his gigantic military buildup, the West could have taken immediate remedial actions as they did in 2014 by crashing the oil price.”
The bottom line then would reveal the Pentagon as totally unprepared for a hot war – even as it threatens and bluffs Russia now on a daily basis; “As Brzezinski has pointed out, if this is the case it means the US has ceased to be a global power. The US may continue to bluff, but those that ally with them will have nowhere to go if that bluff is called, as it is being now called in Syria.”
The US intel source is adamant that “one of the greatest military buildups in history has taken place right under the nose of the Russian Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina and the Russian Ministry of Finance while the CIA awaits what they think will be the inevitable Russia collapse.
The CIA will be waiting forever and eternity for Russia to collapse. This MGB maneuver is sheer genius. And demonstrates that the CIA, which is so drowned by data inputs that they cannot connect the dots on anything, must be completely reorganized. In addition, the entire procurement system of the United States military must also be reorganized as it cannot ever keep up if new weapon programs as the F-35 take twenty years to develop and then are found obsolete before they even enter service. The Russians have a five-year development program for each new weapons system and they are far ahead of us in every key area.”
If this analysis is correct, it goes against even the best and most precise Russian estimates, according to which military potential may be strong, asymmetrically, but still much inferior to US military might.
Well-informed Western analysts know that Moscow never brags about military buildups – and has mastered to a fault the element of surprise. Much more than calling a bluff, it’s Moscow’s Sun Tzu tactics that are really rattling loudmouth Washington.",FAKE
"Congressional leaders and the Obama administration are getting closer to a potential deal on a plan to address looming debt limit and budget deadlines, Fox News has learned -- as House Speaker John Boehner tries to avert one last fiscal crisis before handing the reins over to his successor.

Rep. Paul Ryan, the front-runner for Boehner's job in elections set for later this week, would be poised to inherit a plate of problems on the budget front unless the current leadership can resolve it.

The U.S. government faces a Nov. 3 deadline to raise the federal borrowing limit, and a Dec. 11 deadline to pass a new budget.

Fox News has learned that leaders, though, are nearing a two-year budget agreement that would also raise the debt ceiling. Tentatively, the plan would hike the debt ceiling through as far as the spring of 2017, after the presidential election. Plus, it would fund the government through at least next October.

The matter is being negotiated at the highest levels among a cadre of only about 10 officials, Fox News is told.

But multiple sources made clear this is not resolved yet -- and will need to be addressed at a series of congressional meetings set for Tuesday.

If an agreement is reached, it's unclear whether Boehner would try to push it through under his leadership or push it to the next speaker.

Without a vote to raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. government could be unable to pay all its bills, threatening benefit payments and agency operations and raising prospect of an unprecedented government default. At the same time, the routine raising of the debt ceiling -- this time, past an $18.1 trillion mark -- has outraged fiscal hawks worried that the government borrowing is unsustainable. Since President Obama took office, the national debt has increased nearly $8 trillion.

While the debt ceiling has presented a recurring crisis on Capitol Hill, this time there was not even a roadmap for raising it, until now. Republicans have been demanding budget cuts as part of any deal, but House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and the White House insist on a ""clean"" measure without strings attached.

Conservative groups have been putting pressure on allies in Congress not to give in.

""If Congress doesn't use the power of the purse, we don't need a Congress and we just have an executive with no check,"" Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, told ""Fox News Sunday.""

Needham said he thinks Ryan ""wants to use that leverage"" that comes with the debt ceiling deadline.

Fox News is told Ryan is not part of the current negotiations.

Secret-ballot GOP elections are set for Wednesday in the vote for speaker, followed by a full House vote Thursday. Rep. Ryan, R-Wis., appears to have the lion's share of support from all wings of the Republican conference.

But if the budget and debt problems are not resolved, Ryan, the GOP's 2012 vice presidential nominee, could face immediate -- and perhaps competing -- tasks: passing must-do debt and spending bills likely to be opposed by a majority of Republicans, even while he attempts to unite a badly fractured House GOP.

Conservative Republicans suggest Ryan could get leeway for how he navigates the immediate crises he inherits, including the debt ceiling, if it's not dealt with before he assumes the speakership.

""If we get six months down the road and nothing's really changed, if we get eight months down the road and nothing's really changed, then I think it's, `Everybody needs to get a helmet' time,' "" said GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada. ""There's a reason John Boehner decided to resign.""

After announcing his surprise plans last month to leave Congress on Oct. 30, Boehner expressed a desire to ""clean the barn"" of messy must-pass legislation, rather than leave it for his successor. The debt limit was at the top of the list, given the impending deadline and the reluctance of most Republicans to pass an increase without accompanying spending cuts the White House is ruling out.

Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"by Yves Smith 
This unprecedented election season is finally coming to a close. Join us for commentary and discussion as the results roll in. 
Lambert will kick off the election night live blog at 8:30 PM tomorrow evening. With the presidency and the Senate majority in play, there’s a lot to watch. The presidential and vice presidential live blogs were lively, so we expect another evening of incisive and often humorous conversation. 0 0 0 0 0 0",FAKE
"There's a sense of growing optimism among Democrats that if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket they might have a chance at what otherwise seems impossible: curtailing the GOP's stranglehold on the US House of Representatives.

The fundamental landscape is deeply unfavorable to House Democrats. They're down 30 seats and behind in fundraising with district boundaries drawn in such a way that winning a national majority of votes won't deliver them a majority of seats. They need, fundamentally, something game-changing and weird to happen. And then, like magic, along comes Donald Trump, who happens to be weak in exactly the sort of Republican-leaning suburban districts they are hoping to peel away from the GOP.

""[Trump] makes districts that would have been hard-core tossup districts"" into ones that lean Democratic, and gives Democrats ""a little bit of a push"" in Republican-leaning districts across the country, according to Kelly Ward, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In a practical sense, the DCCC's pre-Trump vision was heavily focused on the long-term planning of what they call The Majority Project, a multi-cycle effort to simultaneously improve the DCCC's field and data infrastructure while understanding which districts are being made newly competitive by ongoing demographic change.

""Data shows us that Democrats are moving into Republican districts and making them more Democratic over time, as we look between now and 2020,"" DCCC chair Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) told me just before Trump's Super Tuesday sweep. Post-sweep, Ward says, the Trump takeover ""accelerates this for us.""

For a sense of exactly how lost and forlorn House Democrats were before Trump breathed new life into their hopes, it's useful to look beyond the DCCC to the behavior of Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen. Himself a former DCCC chair, he was widely regarded as a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' leader in the House, since the top two Dems behind her in the party hierarchy, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn, are both quite old themselves.

But rather than hold on to a safe House seat and hope to sweep into the speakership, he chose to resign his seat in order to fight a tough contested primary for the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Maryland — a clear indication that he saw no short-term path to significant gains in the House.

And he's not alone. House Democrats face two serious headwinds in their quest for a majority that they are essentially powerless to cure.

The first is that the map is simply very unfavorable to them. Back in 2012, Barack Obama won considerably more votes than Mitt Romney, but Romney actually carried more House districts. This is because Democrats, through a mix of partisan gerrymandering and natural geography, are more likely to be packed into lopsided districts. To win the House, they need a landslide, not just a win.

The second is that House landslides, when they happen, almost always hurt the incumbent president's party.

The basic dilemma for a House minority whose party controls the presidency is that either people are generally happy with the status quo, in which case the president is likely to be popular but voters are unlikely to vote out tons of House incumbents, or else people are unhappy with the status quo, in which case the voters are likely to punish both the president and his co-partisans in the House.

Democrats' only real hope for 2016 is for something off-the-charts weird to happen in presidential politics. Something like, say, a vulgar real estate developer turned reality television host with scant record of involvement in the conservative movement erupting onto the scene with an under-developed policy agenda and a track-record of offensive statements and inflammatory rhetoric.

It is, of course, possible that if Trump secured the Republican nomination, he will prove himself to be an exceptionally skilled candidate who mops the floor with Hillary Clinton in ways we can barely imagine today. It is also possible that unpredictable events — terrorist attacks, foreign wars, financial crises — will impinge on the election in ways that badly damage Clinton's hope. In either of those cases, House Democrats will be dragged down too.

But based on what we know of Trump so far, he seems likely to be a weak general election nominee who is weak specifically in areas that House Democrats see as growth possibilities.

Democrats' top targets are a series of suburban districts where Republican incumbents have retired, somewhat fatigued with the incessant inter-caucus warfare among House Republicans. These kind of districts — places like PA-8, MN-2, NV-3, NY-19 — are places whose Republican voters are disproportionately well-educated and supporting non-Trump candidates. Those are the voters most likely to be persuaded to swing to Clinton or just stay home as a reaction to GOP disunity in the face of Trumpism.

Meanwhile, one crucial element of Democrats' larger focus has been on identifying areas where the Latino population is growing rapidly in ways that are likely to make them more competitive over the medium term.

But a big challenge Democrats traditionally face is that Hispanics punch below their weight in terms of actual voter turnout. Ward believes that ""turnout momentum that we could see among Hispanic voters because of Donald Trump could accelerate that competition."" In general, she notes that Democrats win when turnout is high, and the media's fascination with Trump is creating ""heightened electoral awareness"" in a way that should boost Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has, according to press reports, already privately told colleagues that his caucus will drop Trump ""like a hot rock"" if his presence at the top of the ticket seems to be hurting Senate candidates in New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

Dropping your party's presidential candidate is a tough trick to pull off for a Senate candidate, and it's not clear that it's at all possible in a House race.

Most people, after all, simply don't pay that much attention to their local member of Congress. Meanwhile, national media is overwhelmingly focused on the presidential race. Ward argues, plausibly, that the celebrity presence of Trump in the race should only exacerbate that tendency for presidential politics to crowd out everything else.

""Donald Trump will define this election as we have seen from day one,"" Ward says, ""he will dominate the attention and he will create the narrative of the election.""",REAL
"You are here: Home / US / Look What Students FORCED To Do After Muslims FLOOD Germany Look What Students FORCED To Do After Muslims FLOOD Germany October 27, 2016 Pinterest 
Is this coming to the United States? 
Children in school in Germany are being taught to chant Islamic prayers, including the phrase “Allah Akbar,” which is used before Radical Islamists commit terrorist attacks. 
The father of a girl at a school in Garmisch-Partekirchen, Germany, discovered his daughter was forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he found a handout she was given, The Express is reporting . He said his daughter was “forced” by teachers to memorize the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to a news organization in Australia. 
The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” 
It had been given to the girl during a lesson in “ethics” at the Bavarian school. 
Headteacher Gisela Herl did not confirm the incident when questioned, but said the school would issue a written statement detailing its position in the coming week. 
The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. 
The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils were Christian. 
A spokesman for Kassel explained: “There will be no Christmas celebrations, in the strictest sense. Because the majority of children at this kindergarten are not Christian the festival will not be celebrated in the way that it is at other schools.” 
Migrants now outnumber native children at many schools in Germany as the country has been inundated with migrants in recent years. 
More than one million migrants are estimated to have arrived in Germany during the last year alone. 
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimates that another 200,000 people will apply for asylum in 2017.",FAKE
"As of this month, the unemployment rate is now lower than it was at any point during Ronald Reagan's administration:

That said, the labor force participation rate has fallen since Reagan's day. That's mostly about population aging — there are a lot more retired people now than there used to be — and a little bit about more people being in college, but that doesn't fully explain it. The labor force participation rate of ""prime-aged"" men between the ages of 25 and 55 has been steadily declining for decades, and in the past 10 years the participation rate for prime-aged women has fallen slightly as well.",REAL
"Senator Elizabeth Warren has declared herself ready to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the US presidential election.

The Massachusetts senator – popular among the progressive wing of the Democratic party – made the declaration shortly after endorsing Clinton, calling her “a fighter with guts” who would keep Donald Trump out the White House.

In an interview on MSNBC, Warren was asked by Rachel Maddow: “If you were asked to be Secretary Clinton’s running mate, do you believe you could do it?”



In another interview with the Boston Globe on Thursday, Warren endorsed Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee, saying: “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”

According to the Globe she also praised Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, saying that he had run an “incredible campaign”.



Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday evening, Warren said the Sanders campaign had been “powerfully important”.

“He ran a campaign from the heart, and he ran a campaign where he took these issues and really thrust them into the spotlight – issues that are near and dear to my heart – and he brought millions of people into the democratic process,” she said.



But, Warren said, “Hillary Clinton won. And she won because she’s a fighter, she’s out there, she’s tough. And I think this is what we need.”

Warren’s endorsement came within hours of President Barack Obama formally giving his endorsement to Clinton’s candidacy. “I’m with her,” Obama said, in a video recorded on Tuesday. “I don’t think there has ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”

Vice-President Joe Biden also appeared to give his endorsement on Thursday, referring in a speech to “… whoever the next president is – and God willing it will be Hillary Clinton”.



Warren, a favourite of the progressive left who taught constitutional law at Harvard, is seen as a possible running mate who could help entice back a disaffected left that has been excited by Sanders but ambivalent about Clinton.



Warren has been especially fierce recently in her criticism of Donald Trump, attacking the presumptive Republican nominee in a searing string of speeches, setting herself up for a prominent and pugilistic role in the presidential election whether she is on the ticket or not.



Earlier on Thursday, at a speech to the American Constitution Society in Washington DC, Warren hit out at Trump as “just a businessman who inherited a fortune and kept it rolling along by cheating people”.

She described him as “a loud, nasty, thin-skinned fraud who … serves no one but himself”, and said his attacks on Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the Trump University suit, was “exactly what you would expect from somebody who is a thin-skinned racist bully”.",REAL
"Has it come to this? We’re now begging Elizabeth Warren to run for president.

Are journalists so determined to slow down the Hillary coronation that they will badger and beseech the freshman senator until she runs just to stop the media torture?

Folks, this is getting embarrassing.

How many times does Warren have to say she is not pursuing the presidency before we take her at her word? How many different ways does she have to word her denials?

Sure, a woman-on-woman contest for the Democratic nomination would be fascinating to cover in a country that has had 44 male presidents. But read my lips: Not. Going. To. Happen.

When Warren makes Shermanesque disavowals in dozens of interviews, why does each journalist think that this time there will be a different result?

This has to transcend the desire for a horse race. Some pundits’ hearts simply beat faster when the Massachusetts Democrat talks about taking on Wall Street and battling special interests. The prospect of her launching a liberal crusade in 2016 excites them in ways that Hillary’s cautious, establishment-oriented approach does not — even more so in the wake of the email furor.

Take the Boston Globe, whose editorial page has openly urged its home-state gal to take the plunge:

“Democrats would be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition, and, as a national leader, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren can make sure that doesn’t happen. While Warren has repeatedly vowed that she won’t run for president herself, she ought to reconsider…

“A presidential campaign would test Warren as never before. Her views on foreign policy are not fully formed. And on many other important issues — climate change, gun control, civil rights — Warren could struggle to articulate clear differences between herself and Clinton. That’s a risk she should be willing to take.”

Which brings us to the “Today” show. Warren has been making the rounds to promote the paperback edition of her book, and swatting away the inevitable question. Savannah Guthrie would not give up.

She began: “You didn’t think you’d get away with this interview without my asking you point-blank: Are you going to run for president?”

“No,” Warren said. “I’m not running and I’m not going to run.”

The senator said she had a great job and wants to fight for such issues as student loans, medical research and the minimum wage. But Guthrie was not to be deterred.

“Let me make sure that we underscore this and maybe bold it and put it in all caps…It has seemed you were hedging a little bit in the past. I don’t hear you hedging now. Are you saying unequivocally, I am not running for president in 2016?”

Warren started laughing. “I’m not running. I’m not running,” she said.

Guthrie tried another angle: Warren was the “perfect person” to push these middle-class issues, but her supporters are “afraid Hillary Clinton won’t give voice to these issues that you care about.”

Warren wouldn’t take the bait and didn’t mention Hillary in her answer. So Savannah tried again: Is Hillary “the right messenger”?

“I think we need to give her a chance to decide if she’s going to run,” said Warren, who obviously knows Hillary is running.

That must have been it, right? Uh uh.

“Possibly I’m beating a dead horse here,” Guthrie said, admitting the obvious, “but did you ever even entertain, consider the possibility, of running for president?”

Guthrie was doing her job, trying to prod Warren into uttering a newsworthy sound bite rather than just repeating her talking points and plugging her book.

As in romance, Warren is more desirable for being unobtainable. Mitt Romney went through the same thing, with the press badgering him about running a third time, until he said he might, whereupon the same press ripped him for being a bad candidate. And many forget that Warren had a rocky campaign when she won her Senate seat.

Elizabeth Warren’s dogged denials on “Today” should end this question once and for all. But journalists, who are in denial, will keep on asking.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"DNC Renews Lawsuit Against RNC Over Voter Intimidation (VIDEO) By Lisa Bonanno on October 29, 2016 
According to a document filed in federal court this past Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee is taking Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee to task over their plans to “monitor” the polls. 
The filing says that the RNC is violating a consent decree by: “… Supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election. Trump has falsely and repeatedly told his supporters that the November 8 election will be ‘rigged’ based upon fabricated claims of voter fraud in ‘certain areas’ or ‘certain sections’ of key states. Unsurprisingly, those ‘certain areas’ are exclusively communities in which large minority voting populations reside.” 
The document goes on to name some of the specific quotes and directives that Donald Trump has given supporters. It also mentions that: “Following the third presidential debate, Trump’s campaign manager told a reporter that the campaign was working to combat purported voter fraud by ‘actively working with the national committee, the official party, and campaign lawyers to monitor precincts around the country.'” 
This shows that the RNC is involved in this effort, which has already begun . Trump ally Roger Stone organized “Vote Protectors,” who are instructed to conduct “exit polls.” Initially, the volunteers were asked to upload video of voters, create ID badges and wear red shirts at specific polling places. After journalistic inquiry , Stone said he would change his tactics. He simply created a new website, but that’s another story. 
The Democratic National Committee is going after Trump and the RNC for violation of a consent decree signed in 1982. At that time, the RNC was involved in voter suppression in targeted areas known to vote predominantly Democrat. They hired off-duty sheriffs and police officers to go to polling places in those areas displaying a sign stating “This area is being patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force.” There were other activities, such as the challenge of individual voter registrations in certain communities. 
The consent decree forcing the RNC to cease its 1982 “ballot security” activities resulted from a successful DNC suit. The decree expires next year. In the current suit, the DNC seeks to renew it for another eight years. 
34 years later, we have an old tactic re-branded by the same party to do the same thing: intimidate minority voters. The DNC opens fire against RNC voter intimidation tactics 
Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video Connect with me",FAKE
"By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 31, 2016 
The UN’s special envoy for Syria has condemned militants’ deadly rocket attacks on residential areas of western Aleppo. 
Staffan de Mistura said, in a statement, the U-N has credible reports civilians have been killed in the attacks. De Misutra blamed the militants for the attacks, calling them relentless and indiscriminate. His reaction came after at least seven civilians, including three children died in Aleppo as a result of the shelling. 
Syrian media say several were also wounded amid relentless shelling by terrorists on civilian targets in Western Aleppo. Foreign-backed terrorists have stepped up attacks across Aleppo, bringing the total number of civilians killed in the past two days to over 40. The Syrian observatory for Human Rights confirmed 14 children are among the dead and another 250 civilians have been wounded in the terrorist shelling. Fighting has stepped up in Aleppo, with around 15 hundred terrorists massing around the western edges of the flashpoint city. Government forces and allied fighters have successfully managed to foil any advance by the terrorists. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 31, 2016, With 158 Reads Filed under World . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments 
You must be logged in to post a comment Login WHAT'S HOT",FAKE
"In a highly controversial decision, the Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic priests are not “mandatory reporters” of child abuse they are made privy to as a result of administering sacramental confessions. 
According to Patheos , the ruling references article 609 A(1) of the Louisiana Children’s Code: 
With respect to mandatory reporters: Notwithstanding any claim of privileged communication, any mandatory reporter who has cause to believe that a child’s physical or mental health or welfare is endangered as a result of abuse or neglect or that abuse or neglect was a contributing factor in a child’s death shall report in accordance with Article 610. 
The Oct. 28 ruling states in part: 
… any communication made to a priest privately in the sacrament of confession for the purpose of confession, repentance, and absolution is a confidential communication under La. Code Evid. 511, and the priest is exempt from mandatory reporter status in such circumstances by operation of La. Child. Code art. 603, because “under the … tenets of the [Roman Catholic] church” he has an inviolable “duty to keep such communications confidential.” 
The case which originally brought this issue before the court was that of a young woman who told a Baton Rouge-area Catholic priest that a longtime parishioner had sexually assaulted her when she was 14-years-old. The priest in turn did not report the abuse. 
Tell us what you think of this controversial ruling in the comments section.",FAKE
"All Brexit arguments settled by 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth 28-10-16 
ALL debates about the negative impact of Brexit have been settled for good by Britain’s 0.5 per cent third-quarter growth. 
Leading Remain campaigners, including former chancellor George Osborne, are preparing public apologies and the nation’s 16 million Remain voters are expected to follow suit. 
Joanna Kramer of Bristol said: “It’s not easy to admit you’re wrong but I don’t see I have any choice. 
“Britain is thriving with only a 0.2 per cent decline on expected growth, national pride has exploded into a proud display of healthy scepticism towards supposed child refugees, and I was a fool. 
“How could I have been so blind not to see that glory would be upon us this soon, if only we had the courage to take back control? 
“I’m sorry, everyone. I’m sorry I was a traitor.” 
Brexit voter Stephen Malley said: “What am I going to do for conversation now?” 
Share:",FAKE
"Editor's note: We also annotated the State of the Union on Medium. Follow us on Medium to see our commetary.

President Barack Obama went after his doubters in his final State of the Union address, dismissing their warnings about the country’s economy and military preparedness under his watch as ""political hot air.""

""Let me tell you something: The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. It's not even close. It's not even close,""

Yet even as he defended his seven years as commander in chief, Obama acknowledged he didn’t deliver on his to bring a more civil tone to a sharply divided Capitol Hill.

""It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency  —  that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,"" Obama said. ""There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.""

PolitiFact is fact-checking several statements from Obama’s speech, as well as the Republican response from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

A year ago, Obama used the same setting to claim the United States has seen ""our deficits cut by two-thirds"" during his tenure. We rated that claim .

During his 2016 State of the Union address, Obama raised the bar, saying, ""We’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.""

When we checked Obama’s assertion a year ago, he compared his first budget year in office, 2009, with 2014, using the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. Economists consider this a valid way to measure the size of the deficit. In fact, for most purposes, it’s the best way, since it factors in the economy’s change over time.

According to this data, the deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen by 76 percent -- almost exactly what Obama said.

If you use dollars rather than percentage of GDP, the decline is a bit smaller but still pretty close -- 70 percent.

That said, experts have told us that while Obama's math may be correct, it's missing some important caveats. It's important to note that the deficit swelled in 2009 partly because of the massive stimulus program to jumpstart the cratering economy. Also, experts have said the more important question is whether Obama has put the government on a path that will keep deficits stable.

""And the answer is no,"" said Princeton University economics professor Harvey Rosen, because entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, have not had substantial reform.

There’s no way Obama’s final State of the Union wouldn’t mention his most significant legislation. In spite of its controversy, Obama said the Affordable Care Act has led to nearly 18 million more people gaining health insurance and has helped to slow health care cost inflation. He added that the law didn’t destroy the job market, despite pessimistic predictions from critics.

""Our businesses have created jobs every single month since it became law,"" he said.

Because Obama referred specifically to ""our businesses,"" we looked at private-sector employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics starting in March 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. Of the 70 months since, Obama is correct that every single one has seen positive job growth.

There’s room for argument over what the growth would have looked like absent the health care law, but Obama’s statistic is on target.

Obama cited education as an area of bipartisan agreement, but he brought up a shaky statistic in the process.

""We agree that real opportunity requires every American to get the education and training they need to land a good-paying job,"" he said. ""The bipartisan reform of No Child Left Behind was an important start, and together, we’ve increased early childhood education, lifted high school graduation rates to new highs, (and) boosted graduates in fields like engineering.""

At first glance, he appears to be correct about high school graduation rates. But there's an important caveat. So we rate the claim .

In December, the that the rate had reached 82.3 percent, and the department billed it as a ""new record high.""

However, the department acknowledged it was the ""highest level since states adopted a new uniform way of calculating graduation rates five years ago.""

It's a key distinction because high school graduation rates can be a slippery topic and difficult to track. Different states and different school districts have used different measures over the years. For example, some states included private school students who received public funding.

The last time the rates were close to being this high was for the class that graduated in 1970, when the Education Department pegged the rate at 78.7 percent.

Yet because the current method for calculating rates is only five years old, it's not clear that the 1970 rate, or even the subsequent ones, are comparable to current rates.

Obama defended American might in the face of attacks from critics who say the United States has become a weak player on the national stage.

""We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined,"" Obama said.

We found Obama’s claim is in the ballpark. So it rates Mostly True.

One set of international military spending figures comes from the   (SIPRI), which maintains an online database of military expenditures since 1988 for more than 170 countries. By their calculation, the United States spends more than the next seven countries combined.

In 2014, the most recent year available, the United States led the world in military spending at $610 billion, marking 34 percent of the world total,  . U.S. expenditures were nearly three times higher than China, the second-highest nation with an estimated $216 billion in military spending. Russia was in third place at $84.5 billion.

But counting together military spending from the eight countries after the United States comes out to $646.4 billion, surpassing the United States’ $610. Omitting No. 9 on the list, Japan, the calculation comes out to about $601 billion.

, put together by the fiscal policy-focused Peter G. Peterson Foundation, shows the United States’ spending in stark contrast to the next seven highest spenders:

Another data set matches Obama’s claim exactly. The United States does spend more than eight countries combined according to the   (IISS), a London-based think tank that also tracks military spending. The United States spent $581 billion on the military in 2014, according to IISS, while the eight next-highest spenders combined spent about $531.9 billion.

Calculating military expenditures for worldwide comparisons is inherently challenging, in part because there is no common definition of what constitutes military spending. Further, a country’s expenditures does not necessarily correlate perfectly with its military capabilities.

In the Republican response proceeding Obama’s speech, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley praised Obama’s speech-giving but criticized his ability to deliver on the goods.

""The president's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words,"" Haley said. ""As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels.""

Six years into the economic recovery, are income levels really still in the doldrums?

For the most part, yes. Haley’s statement rates

Haley is basically correct if you look at Census Bureau data for median household income, adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted, median household income has fallen from $57,357 in 2009 to $53,657 in 2014, the most recent full year available.

That’s a decline of 6.4 percent over a five-year period once inflation is taken into account. Obama himself seemed to acknowledge this trend when he spoke about ""more and more wealth and income"" concentrated at the top and ""squeezed workers.""

Median income is lower now compared to 2009. It is, however, slightly up from its low point in 2012.

Haley’s claim is generally accurate but somewhat depends on your time frame and what you would consider a rise in income levels.

Obama repeated his longstanding request to Congress that they work with him to close the detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama campaigned on this pledge, and we’ve been on our Obameter.

During the State of the Union, Obama spoke of American leadership as encompassing ""a wise application of military power and rallying the world behind causes that are right.""

""That is why I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: It’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies,"" he said.

Because Obama is still asking for this at the end of his presidency, we’ve rated his campaign pledge as .

As for Obama's statement that Guantanamo ""only serves as a recruitment brochure"" for terrorists, this doesn't square with reporting by PunditFact, which found that the facility has never really been a key component of ISIS or al-Qaida propoganda. More often, they focus on airstrikes and the American military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama also seemed to be responding to Republican attacks that he didn’t take seriously enough the fight against Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL:

""As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands. Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.""

We explored this claim in a story without rating it on our Truth-O-Meter. We found general agreement among experts that ISIS aspires to become an existential threat to the United States. But that’s not the same thing as actually being one.

Obama presented a range of statistics designed to show his economic record in a positive light during his 2016 State of the Union address. He kicked it off with this assertion: ""The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world.""

We should note up front that many of the experts we checked with considered Obama’s claim to be vague and difficult to prove. ""This is the type of braggadocio statement that is hard to interpret in a rigorous way,"" said Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

However, many of the same experts agreed that if you had to choose one country for the title of ""strongest, most durable economy in the world,"" it would be the United States.

We turned to projections for GDP growth over the next two years released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of economically advanced countries. The group looked at 43 countries, ranging from large, advanced economies to smaller, advanced economies to large, emerging economies.

The United States ranked almost exactly in the middle of the OECD’s list -- No. 21. Experts told us, however, that a middling ranking on this list doesn’t necessarily mean the United States’ economic outlook is weak. (The full chart is at the end of this article, ranked in descending order by projected GDP growth in 2016).

For starters, many of the countries with higher projected growth rates have significantly smaller economies, making a comparison with the United States apples-to-oranges. These countries include Ireland, Iceland, the Slovak Republic, Poland, Israel, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Estonia.

In addition, a few countries have much higher projected growth rates, but they are generally considered emerging economies, making for a different but equally questionable type of apples-to-oranges comparison. These include the top three countries on the projected-growth list: India, China and Indonesia.

The most direct comparisons to the United States are probably the other six members of the elite Group of 7 economies — the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. And all of them rank below the United States when measured by projected growth for 2016 and 2017.

As for employment, the United States scores well among its closest competitors. Hoddenbagh pointed to data showing only one of the Group of 7 with a lower unemployment rate than the United States’ current 5 percent. Japan’s unemployment rate is 3.3 percent.

We rated the claim Mostly True.

This story is updated as new fact-checks are published.",REAL
"Why hydrogen peroxide should be in every home 
Sunday, October 30, 2016 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer (NaturalNews) Inexpensive, nontoxic, versatile and potent: Hydrogen peroxide is a wonder product that belongs in every home.Hydrogen peroxide is widely known as a disinfectant for minor cuts and scrapes, but many people don't understand that it works simply by oxidizing microbes to death. Hydrogen peroxide is simply water with an extra oxygen atom attached; in this unstable form, the oxygen breaks off from the water and forms a free radical solution that is highly reactive. But once it has reacted, the only byproducts are non-reactive oxygen and water. This is why, when used properly, hydrogen peroxide is so safe.Hydrogen peroxide is so safe and effective that our own immune systems actually generate it as the first line of defense against microbes as diverse as bacteria, viruses, yeast and parasites. In this context, it also appears to act as an anti-inflammatory. Natural remedies So how can you make hydrogen peroxide work for you? Unsurprisingly, many of this product's greatest uses are as natural cures or for some other health-promoting function. For example, a nasal spray made from one tablespoon of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide in a cup of non-chlorinated water can be an effective treatment for sinus infections. Toothaches caused by minor infection can be treated with a hydrogen peroxide mouthwash; the same mouthwash can also remove bad breath.If you think you're coming down with a cold, stave it off by placing a few drops of hydrogen peroxide in your ears each morning.Hydrogen peroxide is also a potent anti-fungal. A 50–50 mix of hydrogen peroxide and water, sprayed on the feet every night and allowed to dry, is a good way to get rid of athlete's foot and other fungal infections. A similar (but much more diluted) cure can be used on plants suffering from fungus; in this case, dissolve half a cup of hydrogen peroxide in a gallon of water and spray on the affected plant. Replace your cosmetics! You can also get lots of use from hydrogen peroxide around the home. Mixed with baking soda, it makes a great toothpaste. It can also be used to protect water that you expect to be standing for a while, such as that in a humidifier or steamer – a pint of hydrogen peroxide mixed in will prevent microbial growth. Similarly, you can use hydrogen peroxide as a toilet bowl cleaner; let it sit for 20 minutes and then scrub.When properly diluted, hydrogen peroxide can detox your skin by stripping away harmful environmental toxins. Just mix 2 quarts of hydrogen peroxide into a full bathtub and soak for half an hour or more.Other cosmetic uses of hydrogen peroxide include cleaning your contact lenses – it denatures proteins that build up on the lenses – or helping to remove ear wax buildup. A few drops in the ears, followed by a few drops of olive oil, will cause earwax to break up and drain out.Hydrogen peroxide can also be used as a safer, gentler alternative to bleach for lightening your hair. Household uses Hydrogen peroxide isn't just for your body; it can also be for your dog's! Hydrogen peroxide can induce rapid vomiting in dogs that have swallowed dangerous objects. Vomiting should only be induced upon a vet's recommendation, however.Finally, hydrogen peroxide can be great for your clothing. Use it instead of bleach to whiten your laundry. More carefully applied, it can take out organic stains by breaking apart the proteins causing the discoloration. This is particularly effective with blood.Use caution when applying hydrogen peroxide directly to clothing, as it may bleach or discolor some fabrics. But if you have a fresh, organic stain, you should be fine if you pour on just a small amount of hydrogen peroxide, wait a few minutes (it should foam), and then rinse it off with cold water and soap. Sources for this article include:",FAKE
"Among these, let me nominate one more: listening to Hillary partisans explain to those of us who support Bernie Sanders just how naive we are. Only Hillary, we are told, has a real shot at winning in November. She’s the only one with a realistic grasp of how Washington works, whose moderate (and modest) policy aims might, realistically, be enacted. It often sounds as if Clinton’s central pitch to voters isn’t that she has a moral vision for the country, but that she owns the franchise on realism.

Bernie, meanwhile, is just a sweet-shouting rube whose quarter-century as a congressman and senator has somehow failed to instill in him an appreciation for the twin plagues of grift and gridlock.

For us benighted hippies, the standard counter-argument at this point is that our man understands all too well the magnitude of Washington’s dysfunction, which is why he’s calling for a political revolution: to obliterate the most heinous aspects of the status quo, starting with corporate-sponsored elections.

I happen to agree with this. But there’s a sadder and more pointed response to Hillary’s reality brigade. Namely, that they need to face the reality of what the 2016 election is going to be like with Hillary at the top of the ticket.

Before I outline that particular shitstorm, let me issue a few sure-to-be-ignored (and therefore pointless) caveats. First, I myself was a Hillary supporter until Sanders entered the race. (More precisely, until I read his policy positions.)

Second, I will enthusiastically support Hillary when and if she is nominated. Years ago, I interviewed the secretary and I say now what I said then: She is a brilliant and compassionate public servant. If presidential elections in this country were based on policy positions and moral intention, on how each candidate hopes to solve common crises of state, Clinton would win going away.

Alas, the reality is that Hillary is among the most hated politicians in America. There is, to begin with, her dismal favorability rating, which stands at 53 percent, with a net negative of 12 percent. (Sanders has a net positive of 12 percent.)

But even more important is the intensity of the animus against her, and the sad mountain of baggage she carries with her as a candidate.

No matter who the GOP nominee is, the battle plan against Hillary will be the same: a tawdry and unrelenting relitigation of all the phony scandals cooked up by the “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that she identified nearly two decades ago.

Cue up the Pearl Jam, folks, because we’re going all the way back to the ’90s: Whitewater, Travelgate, Troopergate, Lewinskygate, with a little Vince Foster Murdergate, for a dash of blood. But wait—those are just the golden oldies! You’ll also be hearing about the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Pardons. Of course, what respectable slander campaign would be complete without the new material? Benghazi, the private email server, the Wall Street speeches?

The dark corporate money and talented propagandists aligned against Hillary will make the Swift Boat Veterans look like toy soldiers.

And because our Fourth Estate is driven at this point almost entirely by the desperate promotion of scandal narratives and conflict, every one of these paid attacks will be amplified by so-called free media, or what us starry-eyed hippies used to call journalism.

I’m not blaming Hillary for this sad state of affairs. I’m just trying to be—what’s the word I’m looking for? Ah yes, here it is—realistic about how it’s going to go down. Republicans tend to lose when they have to talk in specific terms about policies, priorities and solutions. They win when elections are reduced to brawls and/or personality contests. (See Reagan/Carter, Bush/Kerry, et al.) But if Donald Trump is the nominee, as seems most likely right now, he will also enjoy two genuine lines of attack against Hillary. The first is the same one Bernie just used to upset her in Michigan: the fact that free trade pacts are wildly unpopular with many Americans. Trump has been full-throated (and, as usual, somewhat full of shit) in his condemnation of free trade, and it has been one of his most successful pitches. You can bet your bottom yen that he’ll hammer Hillary on this, as if she personally whipped votes for NAFTA. He’ll excoriate various forms of crony capitalism (deals cut with big pharma, bogus military contracts, etc.) that Democrats such as Hillary either endorsed or enabled through timidity. And he’ll blast her for backing our trillion-dollar boondoggle in Iraq, too. These accusations will be framed in terms of a larger narrative: that Hillary represents business as usual in Washington, that she’s just another career pol beholden to the donor class and to the Wall Street swells who paid her millions to deliver her secret speeches. Trump may be a sexually insecure adolescent with a penchant for inciting racial violence, but the one undeniable aspect of his appeal is that he recognizes the toxic nature of the status quo and will, by sheer force of personality, bring it down. This promise is about as flimsy as a Trump University diploma. But it’s resonating with voters who feel Washington’s carnival of corruption is beyond redemption. All of which brings us back to that credulous waif from Brooklyn, by way of Ben and Jerry’s. Donald Trump can holler all he wants about how Crazy Bernie is a socialist. But he (and the super Pacs) won’t be able to distract voters by digging up scandals in his past. Nor will Trump be able to portray him as a corporate stooge. In fact, the shocking success of the Sanders campaign is predicated on many of the same essential frustrations Trump is exploiting: corporate influence, wage stagnation, trade. This is why polls consistently show Sanders beating Trump more convincingly than Clinton does. The right wing knows how to go after Hillary, because they’ve been doing so for 30 years. Within the media and a significant portion of the electorate, the neural pathways have already been carved out. Hillary is defensive, programmed, ethically suspect. They are going to have a more difficult time smearing a candidate whose biggest liabilities are his “extreme” policy positions, most of which sound more like a common sense corrective to the excesses of capitalism. Higher taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy? Healthcare as a right? A higher minimum wage? Increased funding for education and infrastructure? Good luck demonizing those positions, Big Donald. None of this is to suggest that Hillary won’t beat Trump, if they wind up as the nominees. Nor that she won’t be a great president. But if Hillary supporters want to claim the mantle of realism, they should start by accepting very real liabilities of their candidate.",REAL
"House Speaker John Boehner announced plans Tuesday to effectively push off a looming battle over President Obama's immigration policies until next year, while potentially averting a partial government shutdown later this month.

The speaker met behind closed doors Tuesday with fellow Republicans. Boehner is attempting a balancing act -- as he tries to avert a budget showdown, while also letting conservatives vent over the president's controversial executive actions on immigration.

Congress needs to approve a new spending bill by Dec. 11 to avoid a partial shutdown, and opposition to Obama's immigration approach has complicated that effort.

The plan, as of Tuesday, is a two-step approach. The House would vote later this week for a largely symbolic measure disapproving Obama's executive actions to suspend deportations for millions of immigrants here illegally. The bill would try to block those actions, but would certainly face a presidential veto, if it made it past the Senate.

The House would then vote next week on a must-pass spending bill, with a twist.

The plan would fund most elements of the government for the remainder of the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2015. But, under one proposal, it would only fund immigration-related activities until early next year -- setting up a new fight over immigration in early 2015, when Republicans control both the House and Senate.

While Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was being grilled over immigration at a Capitol Hill hearing, Boehner said Tuesday that Obama has ignored the American people.

""This is a serious breach of our Constitution,"" Boehner said.

He also said lawmakers ""have limited options and abilities to deal with it directly.""

It's unclear whether Boehner's plan has enough support.

Some conservatives want more; they circulated bill language Monday stipulating that no money or fees ""may be used by any agency to implement, administer, enforce or carry out any of the policy changes"" announced by Obama.

Meanwhile, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi put Republicans on notice last week that her party wouldn't support a plan that didn't fund the government for the entire fiscal year and also chipped away at some immigration-related activities. In the Senate, Democrats still maintain the majority and could cause problems for any plan that does not fully fund the government through next year.

Fox News' Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"After New York Wins, Trump And Clinton Look Forward To Knockout Round

A powerful wind swept across the 2016 presidential race Tuesday night as the political pendulum came swinging back with a vengeance.

Routed in Wisconsin just two weeks ago, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stormed back to take the high-stakes primary in their home state of New York in convincing fashion. Each won about three-fifths of the vote and widened their already imposing leads among pledged delegates.

In so doing, both Trump and Clinton opened a pathway to winning their nominations outright before the conventions begin in July. In recent weeks, doubts had arisen as both front-runners seemed to lose altitude and as rivals promoted the prospect of open conventions in both Cleveland and Philadelphia.

But after New York, the pressure is back on the challengers, who will find fewer opportunities to narrow the gap in delegates with every passing week. The last best chance to stop either Trump or Clinton may well be next week, when Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware hold the next-to-last round of multistate primaries. A total of 144 delegates will be available for Republicans and 392 for Democrats. There will not be a comparable package until the season's final day on June 7.

A sweep for either front-runner next week would make stopping Trump or Clinton not only daunting but mathematically infeasible. Even the chances of a second ballot at either convention would go from forbidding to remote.

So when the history of 2016 is finally written, the smashing results from New York may well be cast as the key inflection point. Trump was declared the winner shortly after polls closed, tallying 60 percent of the statewide vote. When counting ended, Trump was poised to claim all 14 at-large delegates and about 75 of the 81 delegates awarded by congressional district.

For her part, Clinton did almost as well as Trump in percentage terms with 58 percent, while she outpolled Trump in the raw vote by nearly half a million. She did not dominate the delegate count quite as much as Trump, but only because the Democrats divide their delegates proportionally — both statewide and district by district. She took home an estimated 135 new delegates to Sanders' 104. She already had 39 of the state's 44 superdelegates (who are free to change their minds).

Still, the outcomes may have been equally discouraging for challengers in both parties. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, winners in Wisconsin and in a handful of caucus states that lent them momentum in the weeks since mid-March, stumbled badly in the Empire State. Both had hoped to at least limit the damage they would suffer on Trump's and Clinton's turf, while looking to friendlier venues ahead.

But instead, the front-runners ran roughshod across the landscape. Cruz finished a weak third with scarcely 1 vote in 7, earning zero delegates. New York Republicans preferred Ohio governor John Kasich, who got 1 vote in 4 statewide and gained perhaps three or more delegates (his first since he won his home state a month earlier).

Bruising as the loss was for Cruz, it may have been just as bitter for Sanders on the Democratic side. Clinton only increased her delegate lead by about 30 in the crucial category of pledged delegates. But the real pain for her rival was the opportunity cost. Sanders' team had given it their all in New York, outspending Clinton on TV and hoping visibly for an upset — or at least a narrow loss that could be spun as a moral victory.

Trump, with his delegate lead growing again, can look to another stretch of promising ground next week. Polls give him an edge in all five contests, with 144 delegates at stake. A sweep would greatly enhance his chances of reaching the majority of delegates needed for a first-ballot nomination (1,237).

There is an active ""stop Trump"" movement, both in social media and in the higher circles of the GOP establishment. Senators seeking re-election in swing states have been advised to stay away from Trump and even to skip the convention.

Cruz has been successful in certain states in placing sympathizers in delegate slots that are committed to Trump on the first ballot. The individuals who occupy those slots would be expected to defect from Trump on later ballots.

But all that will be moot if Trump can get close enough to the magic number that a few pre-convention deals might well put him over the top. After a win like he scored in New York, such a ""last mile"" strategy looks increasingly plausible. At his victory rally at Trump Tower, Trump left the stage to the strains of Frank Sinatra singing: ""If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere, it's up to you New York, New York.""

For her part, Clinton was sounding equally sanguine just blocks away, telling a throng of her supporters that the race was ""in the homestretch and victory is in sight."" She did not say it, but Sanders now needs to win 60 percent of the delegates in every contest remaining — just to overtake Clinton in pledged delegates. He has no discernible path to turning around her advantage in superdelegates.

Neither candidate's race is over, yet. Weeks and months of pre-convention politicking remain. But after next week, it is possible that — for one or both of the front-runners — it will no longer be far from over.",REAL
"Thousands have run for president, but only one candidate has ever unrun for the office: Hillary Clinton. Ever since she finally announced her entry into the contest a couple of weeks ago, she has been unrunning with ferocity. First she road-tripped a minivan 1,000 miles from New York to Iowa to … listen.

Listening tours (or sessions) are supposed to add a little fabric softener to a politician’s starchy image, buffing their scaly reptilian exteriors down to kid-leather smoothness. The technique worked for Clinton in New York, where booking upstate listening stops helped her win a Senate seat in 2000. Listening is the epitome of unrunning, allowing a candidate to do nothing at all but remain operational. Today, Clinton is listening in New Hampshire, and a full-time physician has been assigned to her care, lest the pure calm of bland political chitchat turn her life signs negative and she unruns herself to death.

Why is Clinton unrunning? If the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination were a Little League baseball game, the party would have already recognized Clinton’s insurmountable lead and invoked the mercy rule to give the victory to her. By unrunning, she avoids the intense political debate that would only call attention to her underfunded, unannounced and relatively unknown rivals, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, Lincoln Chafee and Joe Biden, all of whom are un-unrunning at various paces.

With nine months until the first presidential primary, Clinton can’t afford to actively run for president. Indeed, if she had her druthers, she probably wouldn’t even be unrunning now. She was pressured by the constant press attention about when she was going to announce and the email controversy. That sort of press attention was positive media attention she couldn’t control, and only by announcing could she dial it down. The email controversy was negative media attention she couldn’t control without the attention-deflecting machinery of a campaign. Indeed, she may be the first politician to announce for the presidency in order to decrease attention in her candidacy.

She’s succeeded wildly. Her coffees, roundtables, discussions and “spontaneous” meetings with voters have immersed her campaign into a box of dry ice and slowed it to the lowest metabolic levels. Suspended animation would look vigorous compared to what Clinton is now doing. This is smart. Steady coverage on the inside of newspapers is exactly what she wants. I buy what Team Clinton stalwart Donna Brazile recently told BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer about the campaign’s pacing (“There’s a rhythm. She’s starting off like Beethoven, with melodies and chords that people understand. But she’s got to end up like Beyoncé”) except to my ears early Clinton sounds more like a hobbled version of the Beatles’ “Within You Without You” than Beethoven.

Actively running for president at this point would be too politically damaging for Clinton. By actively running, she would have to declare herself for or against the current administration, something she doesn’t want to do until it presents some advantage. By unrunning, she can blend passively into the background, where she can be there but not here. Depending on how suggestible the audience that is listening with her, Clinton unrunning looks like a continuation of the Clinton and Obama legacy without explicitly saying so.

Having gotten what they wished for, an official Clinton candidacy, the press must now cover the Clinton 2016 slow lane the best they can. The press already knows almost everything about her, and she’s not going to voluntarily serve any fresh meat, so reporters and editors will have to go to the freezer and the landfills where her past is stored. That’s one reason behind the press excitement over Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Even if there’s nothing damning in the book, reporters can grind out hundreds of column inches on the subject and make it relevant to the campaign. The only alternative until the campaign awakens from dormancy will be profiles of the 24-year-old staff wizards (I’m sure they exist) who are vitalizing the Clinton campaign. I shudder.

What should ordinarily follow unrunning would be running, but that won’t be possible for Clinton. Until the 2016 campaign boiler room fires up with an identity of its own, she’ll be rerunning her 2008 campaign, necessitating yet another transition in her candidacy. According to POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush, the Clinton campaign plans to spend more time generating calm and less time fighting the press than it did in 2008. We’ve got plenty of time to come up with a snazzy phrase to describe the new, yet-to-be-released Clinton method, but until we come up with a winner, how about “un-rerunning”?

Double-unrunning would mean taking an unrunning campaign several gears lower than a silent John Cage composition. Dash to your keyboard and send me emails with definitions of these variations: “triple-unrunning,” “reverse-unrunning,” “bellyfeel running,” and “duckspeak running” ( Shafer.Politico@gmail.com ). Subscribe to my email alerts before I declare my list full. My Twitter feed is like a multiverse. And, am I the last writer on the planet who promotes his RSS feed?",REAL
"Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 5 + 13 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom",FAKE
"Killing Obama administration rules, dismantling Obamacare and pushing through tax reform are on the early to-do list.",REAL
"A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder Tuesday after shooting and killing a black man following a routine traffic stop over the weekend.

The decision to charge the officer, Michael Thomas Slager, came after graphic video footage emerged depicting Slager firing a volley of bullets into the back of Walter Scott, who was running away.

Officers rarely face criminal charges after shooting people, a fact that has played into nationwide protests over the past year over how the police use deadly force. Yet this case took a swift, unusual turn after a video shot by a bystander provided authorities with a decisive narrative that differed from Slager’s account.

“It wasn’t just based on the officers’ word anymore,” said Chris Stewart, an attorney for Scott’s family. “People were believing this story.”

Authorities on Tuesday also pointed to the video as a turning point in this case and apologized to the family for the shooting.

“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” North Charleston Mayor R. Keith Summey said at a news conference. “If you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield … you have to live with that decision.”

The Justice Department said Tuesday that the FBI would investigate the shooting along with the department’s Civil Rights division and the South Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“The Department of Justice will take appropriate action in light of the evidence and developments in the state case,” the department said in a statement.

Summey and the city’s chief of police announced at a news conference that Slager, 33, would be charged and arrested. Slager, who has been fired, was arrested by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the agency investigating the shooting, and booked into the Charleston County jail shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. He faces a possible death sentence or life in prison.

“It’s been a tragic day for many,” Eddie Driggers, the police chief, said at the news conference. “A tragic day for many.”

[How the shooting reignites the debate over body cameras]

The shooting began with a routine traffic stop after 9:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. After Slager stopped a vehicle, he began chasing Walter Scott, 50, and fired his Taser, according to the incident report and city officials.

Footage of the shooting, first obtained by the New York Times and the Post and Courier newspaper, showed Scott fleeing from Slager across a tree-lined patch of grass. Slager fires a series of shots at Scott, who appears to be unarmed, striking Scott “multiple times in the back,” according to an affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

Slager told the dispatcher, “Shots fired and the subject is down, he took my Taser,” according to the portion of the report filled out by another officer who relayed what he heard.

The video shows Slager picking up an item and placing it near Scott, though it is unclear if this is the Taser or something else. Police later said that Scott was hit with the Taser at least once, because part of it was still attached to him when other officers arrived on the scene. But city officials said that Scott was clearly too far away to use a Taser if he did have it.

“I can tell you that as a result of that video and the bad decision made by our officer, he will be charged with murder,” Summey said at the news conference.

After Slager shot Scott, the officer handcuffed the man’s hands behind his back and he remained there. The police report says that “several officers” gave Scott first aid, but it does not state how long it took them to administer that aid.

This shooting comes after incidents in Ferguson, Mo., and New York, among other places, have drawn heavy scrutiny over confrontations that ended with black men dead. The unrest has continued into this year, as a shooting in Madison, Wis., was followed by lengthy protests.

[How many police shootings a year? No one knows.]

North Charleston, the third-largest city in the state, has a different demographic breakdown than the rest of South Carolina. Two-thirds of South Carolina residents are white, while North Charleston has more black residents (47 percent) than white residents (41 percent), according to the U.S. Census.

But the city’s police force does not reflect that breakdown, as four out of five North Charleston officers last year were white, according to the Post and Courier. The city’s police department announced in February that it would obtain 115 body cameras for its officers after obtaining $275,000 in state funding.

Authorities stressed that the episode in South Carolina was not indicative of the city’s entire police force of 342 remaining officers, instead calling this a singular “bad decision” made by one officer.

“I think all of these police officers, men and women, are like my children,” Driggers said. “So you tell me how a father would react … I’ll let you answer that.”

[Current law gives police wide latitude to use deadly force]

Scott’s family praised the decision to charge Slager with the shooting and was “grateful” someone came forward with the video footage, an attorney said.

“They were sad,” Stewart, the family attorney, said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening from Scott’s mother’s home. “There is nothing that can bring their son and brother back, but they are relieved that charges were filed.”

Scott’s family members had gathered at the home on Tuesday evening, including Scott’s four children and three brothers. His family and attorneys held a brief news conference Tuesday night, saying that they planned to file a lawsuit against the city and police department.

“All we wanted was the truth, and through the process we’ve received the truth,” said Anthony Scott, Walter’s brother. “I don’t think that all police officers are bad cops, but there are some bad ones out there.”

Slager was initially represented by David Aylor, a local attorney, who in a statement provided to local media soon after the shooting said: “I believe once the community hears all the facts of this shooting, they’ll have a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.”

But on Tuesday, shortly before Slager’s arrest was announced, Aylor told The Post that he is no longer representing the officer.

“I don’t have any involvement in that case moving forward,” he said. “No involvement.”

[Why South Carolina indicted three other white officers in four months.]

This was the 11th time an officer has shot someone in South Carolina so far this year, according to Thom Berry, a spokesman for the state Law Enforcement Division. Berry said that the investigation into this shooting is “still very much in progress,” so he declined to comment on details of how the agency obtained the video footage.

Although officers fatally shoot and kill hundreds of people each year, only a handful of cases result in the officer facing criminal charges. Video recordings of the fatal encounters are becoming pivotal factors in whether prosecutors and grand jurors bring charges, experts said.

“Video has changed everything because it provides documentation that was never available before,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University. “Now, everyday citizens, when they recognize there is a dispute, they start recording video with their smart phones.”

However, these recordings do not always result in officers being charged. Footage of a New York City police officer placing Eric Garner in a chokehold last summer provoked widespread outrage, but the grand jury decided not to indict the officer. That decision, like that of the Missouri grand jury that did not indict the white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, sparked a national wave of protests aimed at the way African American men are treated by police.

Officials and activists in South Carolina said they were asking the community to keep calm in the wake of the video’s release and the decision to seek murder charges against him.

“We want to ask the community to remain calm,” Elder Johnson of National Action Network said Tuesday.",REAL
"November 7, 2016 ‘We never denied Israel’s right to Jerusalem, Temple Mount’ 
Levy quizzed him about those controversial issues as well as his support for Syrian President Basher Assad and charges that his country had intervened in the US elections. 
How does Russia explain its support of the UNESCO vote “to disregard the historic connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,” Levy asked Medvedev. 
The issue had been blown out of proportion, he responded speaking in Russian, with a Hebrew translation by Channel 2. 
There have been some ten votes by UNESCO Boards and Committees on such Jerusalem resolutions, Medvedev said. 
“There is nothing new here,” he said, as he dismissed the significance of UNESCO texts that refer to the Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Al Haram Al Sharif. 
“Our country has never denied the rights of Israel or the Jewish people to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount or the Western Wall,” Medvedev said. 
“Therefore there is no need to politicize this decision,” Medvedev said, adding that such resolutions, were “not directed against Israel.” 
Similarly, he said, there was nothing contradictory in Russia’s sale and shipment of the advanced S-300 advanced surface to air missile defense system to Iran.",FAKE
"Saturday, 29 October 2016 Another clue was an arrow in the lung area. 
King William II Rufus was the son of William the Conqueror and King of England from 1087 to 1100. Described as uncouth, barbaric, lacking both morals and ethics, addicted to vice, and definitely not the most popular king, he was killed by an arrow to the lungs-probably shot by one of his own men. 
Although his body was left where it lay when he was shot in the New Forest, it was said it was later removed to Winchester Cathedral. From there, the bones were scattered around during the English Civil War and later put in a giant mortuary chest along with Kings Egbert, Ethelwulfe, and others. 
But the body of King William II Rufus was actually identified at the Motor City Museum, which is near the New Forest area where King Rufus was shot. Apparently, the king was so popular that they just dug a shallow grave in the New Forest area and tossed him in. 
The grave was discovered when the museum was breaking ground in its parking lot for a new area to display its 1895 Knight auto. The workers came upon some bones (apparently the citizens who buried King Rufus didn't bother with a coffin) and sent them to the British Museum for identification. 
Since the royal Norman DNA was on file, it was determined to be Rufus from process of elimination. And someone had carved ""Rufus"" on the femur. Make Al N.'s day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)",FAKE
"In 1960, Americans were asked whether they would be pleased, displeased, or unmoved if their son or daughter married a member of the other political party.

Respondents reacted with a shrug. Only 5 percent of Republicans, and only 4 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset by the cross-party union. On the list of things you might care about in child's partner — are they kind, smart, successful, supportive? — which political party they voted for just didn't rate.

Fast forward to 2008. The polling firm YouGov asked Democrats and Republicans the same question — and got very different results. This time, 27 percent of Republicans, and 20 percent of Democrats, said they would be upset if their son or daughter married a member of the opposite party. In 2010, YouGov asked the question again; this time, 49 percent of Republicans, and 33 percent of Democrats, professed concern at interparty marriage.

For Shanto Iyengar, director of Stanford's political communications lab, the marriage polls were yet more evidence that something important was changing in American politics.

The big institutions and broad outlines of our political system have been so stable for so long that it makes it hard for people to see when the tectonic plates of American politics are actually shifting. There's been a Democratic Party and a Republican Party for most of the country's history, and they've always bickered, so it's easy to assume — particularly in a country with a short historical memory — that the partisanship we see now is simply how it's always been.

But Iyengar was coming to believe that today's political differences were fundamentally different from yesterday's political differences; the nature of American political partisanship, he worried, was mutating into something more fundamental, and more irreconcilable, than what it had been in the past.

Political scientists have mainly studied polarization as an ideological phenomenon — in this view, party polarization is really another term for political disagreement, and more polarization simply meant more severe disagreements. But it's hard to find the evidence that the disagreements among ordinary Americans have really become so much more intense.

""If you look at Americans' positions on the issues, they are much closer to the center than their elected representatives,"" Iyengar says. ""The people who end up getting elected are super extreme, but the voters are not.""

But even as American voters remained relatively centrist, they seemed to be getting angrier and more fearful of the other side.

After every election, researchers ask voters an almost endless series of questions, creating a rich record of why Americans vote the way they do. The result is called the American National Election Survey, and beginning in the 1980s it began to show something puzzling.

What caught Iyengar's eye was a section of the survey known as ""the thermometer."" The thermometer asks people to rate their feelings toward the two political parties on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is cold and negative and 100 is warm and positive. Iyengar noticed that since the 1980s, Republicans' feelings towards the Democratic Party, and Democrats' feelings towards the Republican Party, had dropped off a cliff.

In 1980, voters gave the opposite party a 45 on the thermometer — not as high as the 72 they gave their own party, but a pretty decent number all the same.

After 1980, though, the numbers began dropping. By 1992, the opposing party was down to 40; by 1998, it had fallen to 38; in 2012, it was down to 30. Meanwhile, partisans' views towards their own parties had remained pretty much unchanged — that 72 from 1980 had only fallen to 70 by 2012.

Iyengar's hypothesis was that rising political polarization was showing something more fundamental than political disagreement — it was tracking the transformation of party affiliation into a form of personal identity that reached into almost every aspect of our lives.

If he was right, then party affiliation wasn't simply an expression of our disagreements; it was also becoming the cause of them. If Democrats thought of other Democrats as their tribe and of Republicans as a hostile tribe, and vice versa, then the consequences would stretch far beyond politics — into things like, say, marriage.

And the data was everywhere. Polls looking at the difference between how Republicans viewed Democrats and how Democrats viewed Republicans now showed that partisans were less accepting of each other than white people were of black people or than black people were of white people.

But there was no way partisanship — an identity we choose, and that didn't matter much to us 50 years ago — could possibly have become a cleavage in American life as deep as race, right? That seemed crazy.

So Iyengar decided to test it.

The experiment was simple. Working with Dartmouth College political scientist Sean Westwood, Iyengar asked about 1,000 people to decide between the résumés of two high school seniors who were competing for a scholarship.

The resumes could differ in three ways: First, the senior could have either a 3.5 or 4.0 GPA; second, the senior could have been the president of the Young Democrats or Young Republicans club; third, the senior could have a stereotypically African-American name and have been president of the African-American Student Association or could have a stereotypically European-American name.

The point of the project was to see how political and cues affected a nonpolitical task — and to compare the effect with race. The results were startling.

When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their co-partisan. This held true whether or not the co-partisan had the highest GPA — when the Republican student was more qualified, Democrats only chose him 30 percent of the time, and when the Democrat was more qualified, Republicans only chose him 15 percent of the time.

Think about that for a moment: When awarding a college scholarship— a task that should be completely nonpolitical — Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student's GPA. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, ""Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.""

It also trumped race. When the candidates were equally qualified, about 78 percent of African Americans chose the candidate of the same race, and 42 percent of European Americans did the same. When the candidate of the other race had a higher GPA, 45 percent of African Americans chose him, and 71 percent of European Americans chose him.

But Iyengar and Westwood wondered whether these results would really hold outside the laboratory setting. After all, the study's participants knew their answers were being judged by the researchers. Perhaps discriminating against members of the other party was socially acceptable in a way discriminating against people of the other race simply wasn't. In other words, perhaps people are willing to show their partisan bias whereas they hide their racial bias, and that was what was behind the results.

So Iyengar and Westwood came up with another test — a test that would be much harder to fool.

Taking an implicit-association test is a humbling experience. Your job, as the test taker, is to hit a letter on your keyboard when certain word and images flash together. The instructions are to go as fast as you can, but the fastest you can go is sluggish compared with the pace of the program. You get nervous, your finger stumbling over the keys, hitting the wrong ones. And the whole time you're doing it, you know you're being judged, and you realize, with a sickening certainty, that the verdict isn't going to be good.

The point of IATs is to measure the snap judgments your brain makes at speeds faster than conscious thought. Mountains of psychological research shows that these judgments are powerful — that much of what we consciously think is an after-the-fact rationalization for the instant judgment we made before we had time to think. IATs are meant to expose those judgments.

The test is grounded in studies of racism: Researchers will ask subjects to pair positive words with black and white faces, and see which they have more trouble doing. The underlying insight is that the task is easier to complete when it aligns with people's automatic, unconscious reaction than when it isn't — you're faster when you can go with instinct then when you have to suppress it. Study after study shows that IATs are at least somewhat predictive of real-world racial bias. They have since been extended to measure bias in gender, age, weight, and more.

Iyengar and Westwood's idea was simple: Why not use an IAT to measure partisan bias, too?

So they built one. And the results were fascinating. But before we run through them, Iyengar and Westwood kindly shared their code with us, and so you can take the test here, or at the top of this article, and see how strong your bias is.

The results showed, as you might expect, that Democrats exhibit an automatic bias against Republicans, and vice versa. What was surprising was that the bias partisans exhibited for their out-group exceeded the bias white participants showed for black people, or that black participants showed for white people. According to the test, Americans are more automatically partisan than they are automatically racist. (If you want to know your own results on the racism test, you can take a version meant to test racial bias here.)

This was, to Westwood, a bit of a shock. ""To be honest, I didn't expect this to work at all,"" he says. ""The common story is most Americans don’t care about politics, they don’t understand politics, they don’t understand policy. So you wouldn’t expect Americans to have strong preferences. That’s where I started.""

Together, the two experiments suggest that partisanship now extends beyond politics — it's becoming a fundamental identity in American life, and may well lead to discrimination in completely apolitical contexts.

I asked two other political scientists — John Sides and Danny Hayes, both of George Washington University — whether they bought Iyengar and Westwood's data. Both said they did, though they noted that opportunities for partisan discrimination are less common than opportunities for racial or gender discrimination, if for no other reason than partisanship is less visible.

Still, the impulse to discriminate against the out-party is real. ""The more partisanship becomes a social identity — and I think this is as true today as it's been in modern American politics — the more we should expect people to engage in in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination,"" Hayes said.

Iyengar's hypothesis is that partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages.

""Political identity is fair game for hatred,"" he says. ""Racial identity is not. Gender identity is not. You cannot express negative sentiments about social groups in this day and age. But political identities are not protected by these constraints. A Republican is someone who chooses to be Republican, so I can say whatever I want about them.""

You can see an example when you look at the media, Westwood observes. There are no major cable channels devoted to making people of other races look bad. But there are cable channels that seem devoted to making members of the other party look bad. ""The media has become tribal leaders,"" he says. ""They’re telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along.""

Iyengar and Westwood's research is a fundamental challenge to the way we like to believe American politics works. A world where we won't give an out-party high schooler with a better GPA a nonpolitical scholarship is not a world in which we're going to listen to politicians of the other side on emotional, controversial issues — even if they're making good arguments that are backed by the facts.

""[The media] is telling the tribe how to identify and behave, and we’re following along""

Iyengar's initial insight was that political polarization might be less about policy than it is about identity, and his research more than proves it. ""The old theory was political parties came into existence to represent deep social cleavages,"" he says. ""But now party politics has taken on a life of its own — now it is the cleavage.""

That changes the playbook for cynical presidential candidates, policymakers, pundits, and so on.

""The major take-home here is it’s relatively easy to score points by attacking the opposition and touting the goodness of one’s own party,"" says Westwood. ""If you’re trying to get the largest return from voters, it would make sense for politicians to try to activate social identity rather than focus on policy.""

Winning an argument, at least when you're talking to co-partisans, is less about persuasion than about delegitimization — the savvy move isn't to try to build a better case than the other side, but to make clear that the other side is the other side.

Westwood is quick to note that the comparison to racism doesn't mean that partisanship is somehow worse than racism, more pervasive, or more damaging. It's easier to see — and thus discriminate — against people based on their skin color than their partisanship, for instance. And as Jenée Desmond-Harris has written, political beliefs are a choice with moral implications while race is not. Judging someone on whether they support gay marriage, universal healthcare, or gun laws is far different than judging someone on the color of their skin.

What Iyengar and Westwood's research shows, however, is that partisanship is no longer just a political phenomenon. Party and ideology have become powerful forms of personal identity, and the way they inform our lives — who we listen to, who we help, even who we love — now stretches far beyond the political realm.",REAL
"Obama Authorizes Deploying Up To 450 More Troops To Iraq

Update at 12:20 p.m. ET. Up To 450 More Troops:

President Obama has authorized the Pentagon to send up to 450 additional troops to Iraq in an effort to beef up the training of local security forces in their fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

In a statement, press secretary Josh Earnest said the military personnel will ""train, advise, and assist Iraqi Security Forces at Taqaddum military base in eastern Anbar province.""

He added: ""The President made this decision after a request from Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi and upon the recommendation of Secretary Carter and Chairman Dempsey, and with the unanimous support of his national security team.""

The U.S. already has 3,100 troops in the country. They're deployed at four established training sites. The additional troops will be deployed to Anbar province, an area just west of Baghdad that is reportedly now under Islamic State control.

The Obama administration is considering sending hundreds more troops into Iraq to help train local forces to fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

NPR's Tom Bowman reports the move comes after Islamic State militants reportedly took over the provincial capital city of Ramadi in the Sunni heartland.

He filed this report for our Newscast unit:

""U.S. trainers now in Iraq have focused mostly on the Shiite-dominated Army. Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters that the U.S. would like to see more Sunnis come into the pipeline for training. ""Officials say hundreds more American trainers could be sent to Anbar province, the Sunni enclave just west of Baghdad that is now largely under the control of Islamic State fighters. ""Sunni tribal leaders have long complained of mistreatment by the Shiite-dominated government. ""The Pentagon is now working up added training options for the White House. There are already some 3,000 American troops in Iraq, either training and advising Iraqi troops or providing security.""

President Obama addressed this issue during a press conference earlier this week. Obama said he was still waiting on a finalized plan from the Pentagon.

""We don't yet have a complete strategy because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis as well about how recruitment takes place, how that training takes place,"" Obama said. ""And so the details of that are not yet worked out.""

Fox News reports that the Pentagon also plans to open another training base in Anbar province. The network quotes Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying it's still unclear whether more troops will be needed for that base.",REAL
"BREAKING: FBI Gets Search Warrant For State Department Emails On Weiner’s Computer (VIDEO) By Michelle Oxman on October 30, 2016 Subscribe 
On Sunday afternoon, October 30, 2016, the FBI obtained a search warrant for emails on a laptop owned by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. You’ll remember that Weiner was under investigation for sexting a 15-year-old girl. As it happened, the same laptop also contained emails that Abedin, Clinton’s Chief of Staff at the State Department, forwarded to her personal Yahoo account so she could print them. That’s why FBI agents got Director James Comey’s approval to seek access to the emails, as Comey told Congress (and we reported ) on Thursday, October 28. A Rather Unusual Warrant 
Now, when is the last time you ever heard about a search warrant being granted? I bet you can’t think of one. That’s because police and prosecutors ask the court to issue warrants in secret. That makes sense, even to those of us who usually err on the side of supporting civil liberties. After all, if you knew the police had a warrant to search your home or your computer, what would you think of doing? 
Why do we know about this warrant? Because James Comey told Congress there were new emails “pertinent” to the Clinton investigation. Trump supporters argued that the government must have reviewed the emails and would only have released the information if there was important new evidence. In reality, the FBI couldn’t do so legally. Why? Because the warrant to search the computer for evidence of Weiner’s contact with a 15-year-old girl could not have covered Huma Abedin’s work-related emails from three or more years earlier. There’s a helpful explanation of the legal issues relating to the search warrant in today’s Washington Post. 
Still, faced with the innuendo and implications of illegality in Comey’s vague letter, Clinton and her supporters insisted that the FBI disclose what it had. Perhaps the FBI didn’t want to admit that it didn’t know what it had. Or maybe the FBI didn’t want to admit that it had gotten its knowledge illegally. Getting a search warrant bought the FBI time, though, and left the whole mess hanging over Clinton’s head as she approaches the last week of the campaign. Violating Policy 
There seems to be no doubt that Comey’s letter to Congress violated two long-standing tradition and policies: (1) prohibiting discussion of ongoing investigations; and (2) not taking actions to favor one side or another in elections. Two former Deputy Attorneys General, one Democrat and one Republican,publicly questioned Comey’s fitness to lead the FBI because of it. In addition, others have pointed out that Comey has repeatedly gone beyond established limits in his discussions of the Clinton email investigation. The Known Unknowns 
We still don’t know whether any of the emails on that computer contain new information. We don’t know whether Secretary Clinton ever sent emails to Abedin’s personal account on that computer or received emails from Abedin via that account. We don’t know whether classified information was sent or received via this personal computer. We don’t know what any of the emails would tend to show about Clinton’s respect for classified information. After all, it wasn’t Clinton, but Abedin, who forwarded the emails. One Final Question 
Apparently, the FBI agents working on the Weiner case became aware several weeks ago that the computer contained emails that Abedin forwarded to herself while she worked at the State Department. Why did they wait until last Thursday to tell Comey? Surely they anticipated his likely reaction? Did they “play” Comey to manipulate the election results? 

About Michelle Oxman 
Michelle Oxman is a writer, blogger, wedding officiant, and recovering attorney. She lives just north of Chicago with her husband, son, and two cats. She is interested in human rights, election irregularities, access to health care, race relations, corporate power, and family life.Her personal blog appears at www.thechangeuwish2c.com. She knits for sanity maintenance. Connect",FAKE
"Putin being FRAMED at UN for War Crimes in Syria Explained 11/02/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV explains why the UN is framing Vladimir Putin for War Crimes in Syria. 11/02/2016 PRESS TV Russia's military and NATO forces are holding parallel military exercises in two neighboring Balkan countrie ... S Korea coast guard opens fire on China boats 11/02/2016 PRESS TV South Korean coast guard vessels have opened fire on Chinese trawlers allegedly fishing illegally off South ... FBI Releases Clinton Foundation Investigation Records 11/02/2016 DAILY CALLER The FBI on Tuesday released documents related to a now-closed federal investigation of an alleged pay-to ... AMTV Archives",FAKE
"To understand how dangerously extreme the Republican Party has become on climate change, compare its stance to that of ExxonMobil.

No one would confuse the oil and gas giant with the Sierra Club. But if you visit Exxon’s website, you will find that the company believes climate change is real, that governments should take action to combat it and that the most sensible action would be a revenue-neutral tax on carbon — in other words, a tax on oil, gas and coal, with the proceeds returned to taxpayers for them to spend as they choose.

With no government action, Exxon experts told us during a visit to The Post last week, average temperatures are likely to rise by a catastrophic (my word, not theirs) 5 degrees Celsius, with rises of 6, 7 or even more quite possible.

“A properly designed carbon tax can be predictable, transparent, and comparatively simple to understand and implement,”Exxon says in a position paper titled “Engaging on climate change.”

None of this is radical. Officials negotiating a climate agreement right now in Paris would take it as self-evident. Republican leaders in the 1980s and 1990s would have raised no objection.

But to today’s Republicans, ExxonMobil’s moderate, self-evident views are akin to heresy. Donald Trump, the leading GOP presidential candidate, says, “I don’t believe in climate change.”Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.)says, “Climate change is not science, it’s religion.”Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at the moment seems to acknowledge that climate change might be real but opposes any action to deal with it.

Well, you may say, Trump revels in his stupidities, and most of the presidential candidates are appealing to the rightmost wing of their primary electorate at the moment. What about the grownups in the party, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.)?

In an op-ed for The Post published as President Obama traveled to Paris for the opening of the climate talks, McConnell slammed Obama’s policy for harming the middle class without measurably affecting climate change.

Does that mean, I asked the majority leader’s press secretary, that he believes climate change is real, and are there policies he would favor to mitigate the risk?

The spokesman answered: “While the Leader has spoken often on energy and the President’s policies, I don’t believe he’ll have anything new today. And as to the President’s policies, the President says he’s for ‘all of the above.’ He got that line from us. But as to his climate proposal and the Paris proposals, I think he’s spoken clearly on that in his op-ed. I hope that helps.”

I tried once more: “So as to whether he believes climate change is real, or would favor any policies to mitigate it, I should just say, declined to answer?”

A genuine conservative, as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George P. Shultz has written, would acknowledge uncertainties in climate science but look for rational, market-based policies to lessen the risk without slowing economic growth. A revenue-neutral carbon tax, as in a bill Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has introduced, fits the description precisely.

What then explains the know-nothingism of today’s Republicans? Some of them see scientists as part of a left-wing cabal; many of them doubt government’s ability to do anything, let alone something as big as redirecting the economy’s energy use. Almost all of them, along with quite a few Democrats, would rather not tell voters that energy prices need to rise for the sake of the environment.

Their donors in the oil and gas industry encourage their prejudices. Three years ago, Grover Norquist, the Republicans’ anti-tax enforcer, said that a carbon tax wouldn’t violate his no-tax-increase pledge if the proceeds were returned by lowering the income tax, though he made clear he didn’t like the idea.

The next morning, the lobbying arm of the oil and gas industry swung into action. “Grover, just butch it up and oppose this lousy idea directly,”the American Energy Alliance said. “This word-smithing is giving us all headaches.”

For most of us, the reaction to this would have been: Butch it up? But Norquist got the message and within hours issued a clarification: Only a constitutional amendment banning the income tax could justify a carbon tax.

So the industry deserves its share of blame, and that includes ExxonMobil, which hardly trumpets its views on the advantages of a carbon tax. (Its most alarming slide, on the 5-degree temperature rise, can’t be found on its public site.)

But blaming it all on Big Oil lets the politicians off too easily. Yes, McConnell represents a coal state, and, yes, he wants to preserve his Senate majority. If those considerations are more important to him than saving the planet, let him say so to our children and grandchildren. Let’s not blame the oil companies for the pusillanimity of people who are supposed to lead.

Read more from Fred Hiatt’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"The mystery surrounding The Third Reich and Nazi Germany is still a subject of debate between many observers. Some believe that Nazi Germany, under the control of Adolf Hitler, possessed supernatural powers, and largely employed pseudo-science during the 1933-1945 period. However, some also hold that the above belief is just a mere speculation without any proven fact. Over the years, researchers have searched extensively for answers to some of the more mysterious activities associated with Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany invaded Russia (formerly the USSR) during the Second World War on June 22, 1941. At the time, the German army progressed deep into Russian territory, gaining ground close to the capital Moscow, before the Russians could counter-attack, eventually driving the Nazis back.
During the Nazi occupation in Russia, in 1942, the Nazis built a secret military base around the Arctic, code-named “Schatzgraber” or “Treasure Hunter,” which was reportedly very instrumental in the war against Russia. The base was primarily used as a tactical weather station for planning the strategic movements of Nazi troops, warships and submarines. The base also housed eminent Nazi scientists, whom conducted many experiments to help progress a German win of the war. It was widely speculated at the time that the Nazis used the base to contact aliens or extraterrestrial beings. The controversial Ahnenerbe was even linked to the base. The Ahnenerbe was an institute in Nazi Germany. Responsible for researching archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race, it is rumored to have had heavy occult influences. Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe later conducted experiments and launched expeditions in attempts to prove that mythological Nordic populations had once ruled the world.
However, the Nazis abandoned the base in 1944 – a time when the Russian army began its offensive, pushing the Germans out of the country. According to a war-time story, supplies had dwindled to dangerously low levels, and the Nazi officers stationed at the base outpost were forced to kill and eat polar bear, which ultimately, was infected with trichinosis. This caused those stationed at the base to fall severely ill and eventually they required rescue by a German U-boat. Despite Russian authors telling the story of “Treasure Hunter,” some observers consider it a myth, doubting its existence.
But Russian researchers have now announced that “Treasure Hunter” has been discovered, saying the base is on the island of Alexandra Land in the Arctic Circle, located 620 miles from the North Pole.
A senior researcher at the Russian Arctic National Park, Evgeny Ermolov said in a statement announcing the discovery : “Before it was only known from written sources, but now we also have real proof.”",FAKE
"U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon issued the ruling Monday, saying county clerks will be permitted to begin issuing gay marriage licenses on March 9.

""[A]ll relevant state officials are ordered to treat same-sex couples the same as different sex couples in the context of processing a marriage license or determining the rights, protections, obligations or benefits of marriage,"" he wrote in the order.

The Nebraska attorney general's office has already said it will appeal the judge's order. Attorney General Doug Peterson is confident the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals will grant the appeal.

Bataillon has struck down the state's ban on gay marriage before; in 2005, the judge ruled the ban unconstitutional, but the Eight Circuit reversed his decision in July 2006.

The news comes just after the state lifted a 20-year-old ban on gay people becoming licensed foster parents. The policy barred unmarried, unrelated adults who live together from fostering children. Included in the restriction were same-sex couples and people who identify as gay -- even those living without a partner.",REAL
"David Franzoni, the writer of Gladiator, announced that he wants to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Rumi in an upcoming bio-pic about the medieval Persian poet . Franzoni has also suggested casting Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Rumi’s mentor and dear friend, Shams of Tabriz. White liberals, ‘people of color’ and others partial to de-colonial theory are at it again claiming that white people have misappropriated something – or in this case, someone – of their own. Hurling accusations of “whitewashing” at Franzoni and Hollywood, they are trending the hashtag #RumiWasntWhite . 
In fact, Rumi was white. He was an ethnic Persian who wrote the vast majority of his world-renowned poetry in his native language. The Persians are the cultural-historically dominant subgroup of the ethnic and linguistic grouping of Iranian peoples, which also includes the native peoples of the Caucasus region (especially in Azerbaijan and Ossetia), the Kurds, Pashtuns, and Balochis among others. The so-called ‘Tajiks’ of Central Asia (present-day northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and part of Uzbekistan) are simply Persians who have been given another name by 19th century British and Russian colonialists who schemed to colonize this area of Iran. 
It is not just any area either. Known as “Khorasan” or sunrise land in Persian, this is where the majority of native Persian scientists and poets of the so-called ‘Islamic Golden Age’ hailed from. It is also Rumi’s birthplace. Stan means province in Persian. Afghanistan and the rest of the stans in that region are totally artificial nation-states, which is partly why they are so dysfunctional. The Persian spoken in the stans is referred to as “Dari” (Parsie Darbari or “Tajiki”) because it was the courtly (Darbari) language of the Crown (Taj). 
The Persians and other Iranians never called their realm “the Persian Empire” or referred to their country as “Persia.” This was an ancient Greek designation that caught on in the West. When, in 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked Westerners to refer to his country by its proper name he meant to remind the West that “Iran” is shorthand for Iran Shahr, a middle Persian form of the ancient Persian Aryana Khashatra or “Aryan Imperium.” To this day, many natives of the part of Khorasan that Rumi hails from refer to their land as Aryana. The first recorded usage of the term “Aryan” is in the rock carved inscriptions of ancient Persian Emperors such as Darius and Xerxes, who used to sign their decrees: “I am a Persian, son of a Persian… an Aryan of Aryan lineage.” 
These men were white and they established the most tolerant, humanitarian, and constructive form of government in pre-modern times, which at its zenith counted nearly 1 out of every 2 people on Earth among its subjects. I am not even counting the realms governed by Scythians and Sarmatians, northern Iranian tribes who refused the Empire, and rode freely in an area from the Ukraine to the Gobi. Their warrior women became the basis for Greek legends about the Amazons. The Persians and their northern cousins were phenotypically identical to modern Europeans, having all descended – ethnically and linguistically – from the same Indo-European or Caucasian community of prehistory. 
It is only beginning with the catastrophic Arab invasion of Iran Shahr in the 7th century AD that Iran’s ethnic composition began to be forcibly altered. (The Hellenistic colonization of the Persian Empire did not have this effect, since the Greeks were fellow Aryans.) Consistent with their messenger’s mandate in the Quran, after burning libraries, mutilating art, and massacring urban populations, these half-savage desert tribesmen took to enslaving and selling Persian women at public markets. Two centuries of Persian insurgency, especially in the Azerbaijan and Mazandaran regions, ended in defeat. The Zoroastrian mystics who led this Khorramdinan (“those of the Joyous Religion”) insurgency – a continuation of ancient Persia’s Mazdakite sect – donned the cloak of Islam in order to survive. They were badly persecuted nonetheless, since the idea of esoteric (Bateni) interpretation (Zand) is declared heresy by the Quran itself – which insists that its legal injunctions are clear, perfect, and unalterable. These Batenis or Zandiqs were the nucleus of the Sufi movement whose epitomizing voice Rumi eventually becomes. 
When he was born in 1207, Khorasan was still ethnically white. Some of the region’s illustrious scientists were forced to pen their treatises in Arabic, rather than in their native Persian, because their research was being commissioned by Arabs (who at first just tried to wipe out Persian science). However, Persian remained the language of poetry and the Persian poets of Khorasan, especially Ferdowsi, actually saved the Iranian national identity by maintaining the linguistic structure that enfolded an Aryan modality of thought within itself, and by fostering the kind of living tradition of ancient Indo-European lore that we see in the Shahnameh. The poets, and even the Iranian scientists forced to write in Arabic, effected a Persian Renaissance of sorts that both inspired and reinforced regional revolts that came to the brink of liberating large parts of Iran from the Arab Caliphate by the 11th century AD. 
Then the Turks and Mongols poured in from Asia in the 12th and 13th centuries, respectively. During Rumi’s adolescence, the Mongol hordes rushed into Khorasan forcing his family to flee from Balkh in 1219 and head westwards across Iran, moving each time the Mongols advanced further. Entire cities were razed. Ultimately the Mongols would be responsible for a genocide of half – yes, half – of the Iranian population. The half that survived was subjected to plunder, rape, and forced miscegenation. Rumi ultimately wound up in Anatolia, which is where Mowlana Jalaluddin Balkhi picked up his nickname. Rum (pronounced Roum) is the Persian name for “Rome”, including the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium – so Rumi means “the Roman”. Konya, where Rumi settled, was hardly Turkish when he arrived there. 
Easternmost Anatolia, the home of the Kurds, has always been ethnically and linguistically Iranian. This region, and the more central part of Anatolia in which Rumi’s family settled, had only been conquered by the Seljuq Turks (which the Ottomans broke off of later on) for a little over a century. It was a conquest as bloodthirsty as the Mongol one (in fact, the Turks and Mongols are ethnically related), the most catastrophic consequence of which was the miscegenation of the population of Azerbaijan – itself a Turkicized appellation for Azar Padegan or “Fire Stronghold”, that province of Iran in the Caucasus mountains that was thought to be the birthplace of Zarathustra (one reason why the insurgency against the Arab-Muslims was based there). From Baku to Tabriz, Azerbaijan was demographically white and it took centuries of Seljuq Turkish occupation to change this before Iranians re-conquered the area. So there is no reason whatsoever to think that Shams, the mentor from Tabriz that Rumi met in 1244, was other than a white man. He was certainly a native Persian speaker, and a newly arrived Seljuq Turk in Azerbaijan in those days would have spoken Turkish. 
The worst thing about the Turkish and Mongol invasions was not that they represented a second wave of miscegenation in a white nation already under Arab occupation, it is that both of these Asian conquerors adopted an orthodox form of Islam. Largely nomadic and illiterate tribes, unlike the highly-civilized Persians, the Mongols and Mongoloid Turks felt at home in the worldview of the Quran. One wonders how Rumi’s mystical philosophy would have taken shape had he grown up in an Iran where the Persian Renaissance of the generation before him were to have continued. Iranians say, Masnavié Mowlavi ast Qorân be zabâné Pahlavi, meaning “the Mathnawi of Rumi is the Quran in Pahlavi.” The term Pahlavi refers to the middle Persian language of Pre-Islamic Iran, so that the saying suggests Rumi made out of Islam something tolerable to the Persian ethos. Of course, as I suggested above, Rumi only represents the culmination of this process, which I would describe as a kind of Sufi Stockholm Syndrome. A brutally colonized and terrorized population of ‘very understanding’ white folks come to identify with their hostage taker and begin to make excuses for him that are so good that he would never have been able to dream them up himself. So if there is any whitewashing going on, it is Rumi who whitewashed Islam. 
Some of the less vile people who have jumped on the #rumiwasntwhite bandwagon have tried to say that his ethnicity really does not matter, since his message is for all mankind. The fact is that a “message for all mankind” (women included) is an Aryan idea in the first place, and a specifically Persian one at that. Ancient Greek writers and thinkers, like Herodotus and Xenophon, who lived under the Persian Empire knew that the opposition to slavery, religious tolerance, a humanitarian concern for the welfare of all peoples, and a Cosmopolitan openness to learning from other cultures were Persian ideals. They were grounded in the worship of Wisdom preached by Zarathustra and became state policy under Cyrus and Darius. This tradition survived the vicissitudes of centuries of history, influencing Roman Europe through Mithraism and guiding the statecraft of Khosrow Anoushiravan – one of the late great Persian Emperors in the century before the Arab-Muslim Conquest of Iran. There is an agenda to erasing this heritage: it allows de-colonial theorists to claim that only non-white people can be colonized, and to demonize white colonialism by excluding the benevolent Persian Empire from the history of the white world. Iran’s glorious history – that of Rumi’s folk – puts the lie to their claim that Caucasian superiority in science, technology, and the arts always came at the expense of exploited non-white peoples. 
Despite Rumi’s best efforts to whitewash Islam, anyone who has seriously studied Islamic scripture and law knows – as he should have – that this is apostasy: “Love’s creed is separate from all religions: the creed and denomination of Lovers is God.” “Love’s valley is beyond all religions and cults… here there is no room for religions or cults.” What these verses sound like are the teachings of the Nizari Ismailis, better known as the Order of the Assassins, who actually did and still do claim that Rumi was secretly a preserver of their movement. The Nizaris adopted Persian as their liturgical language. They were the Sufis who remained truest to the Khorramdin teachings after the failed insurgency against the Arab invasion. In fact, they renewed the insurgency by waging a winning war against the Caliphate – until the Turks and Mongols descended on Iran. 
#RumiWasWhite and so were all Persians and other Iranians before being colonized, genocided, raped, and plundered by Semitic Arabs and Asiatic Mongols and Turks – half-savage peoples who parasitically appropriated the greatness of Iranian (i.e. Aryan) Civilization in the name of Islam. 
Besides even if Rumi wasn’t white, what about 100% white roles played by black actors? Why the hell do we have movies with black vikings? Why is the heck was Heimdall played by a black actor named Idris Elba in the Thor movie? Where is the uproar there? Of course there’s no uproar because there is an agenda in which whites are labeled “evil” no matter what they do.",FAKE
"Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Donald Trump gave victory speeches Tuesday night in New Hampshire after winning their parties vote in the state's primary.

Each took the top spot after second-place finishes in the Iowa caucuses. It's a boost for their standing in a highly competive election season.

 

Trump's first victory of the 2016 White House race means he's no longer a political rookie but the front-runner for his party's presidential nomination.

CBN News' David Brody will share his insights on the outcome of the New Hampshire primary on Wednesday's The 700 Club.

Trump started out his speech by thanking his wife, family and other supporters.

""We are going to make America great again, but we're going to do it the old-fashioned way,"" Trump said. ""The world is going to respect us again, believe me.""

""We're going to make the deals for the American people,"" he said. Trump went on to talk about repealing Obamacare, making trade deals, rebuilding military, creating jobs and protecting the borders.

Dr. Paul Bonicelli, professor of government at Regent University, breaks down the numbers from last night’s New Hampshire primary. Watch below:

""We are going to make our country strong again. We are going to start winning again. We are going to make America so great again. Maybe greater than ever before.""

John Kasich grabbed the second spot, with 16 percent of the vote.

""There's something that's going on, that I'm not sure that anyone can quite understand. There's magic in the air with this campaign,"" Kasich told supporters. ""We see it as an opportunity for all of us, and I mean all of us, to be involved with something that is bigger than our lives.""

Cruz, Bush and Rubio had a tight outcome, with Cruz narrowly winning third place.

The overcrowded GOP party shrank after the Iowa caucus, and more candidates could end their campaign following the evening's results.

Ben Carson, bringing in only 2 percent of the votes, is already on his way to South Carolina to prepare for the next round, his campaign team reiterating that he has not dropped out of the race.

Chris Christie won't reveal whether his campaign will continue. When asked what place he needs to come in at a minimum to continue he responded, ""I don't get into that stuff. Next!"" he said, calling on the next reporter.

 

And the win for Sanders completes his rise from presidential long shot to legitimate challenger for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton.

""When we stand together, we win. Thank you, New Hampshire!"" Sanders celebrated on Twitter.

""Nine months ago we began our campaign here in New Hampshire,"" he said. ""And tonight, what appears to be a record-breaking turnout, because of a huge voter turnout - we won!""

Sanders encouraged his supporters to maintain their excitement and commitment for the November election.

Hillary Clinton used her concession speech to rally her supporters. She referenced equal pay for women, racism, LGBTQ rights, and poverty.

""When people anywhere in America are held back by injustice that demands action,"" she said, admitting she has work to do to win the millennial vote. ""Even if they are not supporting me, I support them.""

It was a higher turnout than in 2008, and one thing voters on both sides agreed on in exit polls was they feel betrayed by the government and their parties.",REAL
"Monica is having a media moment—courtesy of the same press pack that once pilloried her.

When it comes to Lewinsky, apparently, there is some journalistic guilt coming to the fore.

David Letterman has expressed remorse for mocking Monica, saying it was a “sad human situation.” Bill Maher says, “I gotta tell you, I literally feel guilty.”

New Republic writer Rebecca Traister says: “Whether it’s guilt, or sophistication, or thinking a little harder about sexual power dynamics, I think people have started to think: ‘Oh right, she probably does have a right to tell her story. And that’s a good thing.’ ”

These observations come from a New York Times piece in which Lewinsky shrewdly allowed reporter Jessica Bennett to follow her around, producing a largely sympathetic profile timed to her TED talk.

At 41, says the piece, “she is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control…

“She is also very, very nervous. She is worried about being taken advantage of, worried her words will be misconstrued, worried reporters will rehash the past.”

But, of course, Monica herself has to rehash the past in order to get people to pay attention to her future. That’s what she has to merchandise.

I’ve long felt that the media crucified Monica for her mistakes as a young White House intern, while being more than happy to resuscitate the boss who took advantage of her, Bill Clinton, as a global statesman. After dropping out of sight for a long time in the wake of Clinton’s impeachment, she keeps reintroducing herself to the public, with a Vanity Fair essay and other media forays. Lewinsky is smartly trying to become a crusader against cyberbullying, even though her humiliation took place in the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter era.

In the TED talk, she said:

“Now I admit I made mistakes — especially wearing that beret — but the attention and judgment that I received — not the story, but that I personally received — was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo and, of course, ‘that woman.’ I was known by many, but actually known by few. I get it. It was easy to forget ‘that woman’ was dimensional and had a soul…

“In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. … I lost my sense of self,” Lewinsky continues. “When this happened to me, 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it cyber-bullying.”

It does seem like getting trashed and humiliated is a daily occurrence now, at least for people in the public eye.

Jonathan Capehart, the black Washington Post columnist, writes a brave piece concluding he was wrong about Ferguson and that the hands up/don’t shoot narrative was a lie. He gets slimed from the left on Twitter, with people calling him a “house Negro” and accusing him of trying to get white folks to like him. For those who disagree, he had to be attacked as a racial traitor.

Ashley Judd was trash-talking about sports when she was flooded with online rape threats and misogynistic messages.

Judd, describing herself as a survivor of rape and sexual assault, is fighting back.

""I read in vivid language the various ways, humiliating and violent, in which my genitals, vaginal and anal, should be violated, shamed, exploited and dominated,"" she writes. Judd is threatening to sue her online harassers.

So this is very fertile territory for Monica Lewinsky. She is a flawed messenger, to be sure. She is using the issue for personal rebranding, to be sure.

But it’s a worthy cause, better than peddling handbags. And perhaps Monica finally has the guilty media on her side.

Click for more from Media Buzz

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"It can be toilsome getting children into one cleaning habit. Nevertheless, there are seven that will show off the splendors of the treats and tricks exclusive to Halloween. Children of all ages can help clean up the house every day, unknowingly.
7 Halloween Treats That Trick Children Into Cleaning:
1. LolliPop Ghosts You will need:
Lollipops Fast food napkin Roll of black ribbon Black marker This is a resourceful way to recycle fast food napkins. To make lollipop ghosts for Halloween, fold one at a time over an unopened lollipop, tie black ribbon beneath the candy and draw two eyes and a mouth to get a unique ghost expression.
2. Spooky Village Deluxe You will need:
Empty Milk Cartons (the cardboard kind) Empty Cereal Boxes Black and White Construction Paper Stapler Scissors Cereal boxes and milk cartons can quickly be turned into a Spooky Village background. Cut the cereal box in half and gluing black construction paper to either side causing a dark and gloomy effect. Do this by coating washed and dried milk cartons with glue, white construction paper can be used to cover all logos and wording on the containers. Cut-outs of rectangles, squares and triangles can be used to the houses for the roof, windows, and doors. Excess pieces of the construction paper can be transformed into haunting ghosts throughout the spooky village.
3. Pumpkin Jar Lights You will need:
Orange paint Paper plate Newspaper Candles Empty Jars Black marker Empty jars sitting in the recycling bin can become resourceful Halloween light jars. Begin placing the orange paint on the paper plate. Then roll the jars in the paint, then place on paper to dry. Once dry, insert a candle, and add slits for eyes in black magic marker.
4. Soda Can Mummies You will need:
Soda cans Masking Tape Black magic marker Rinse soda cans thoroughly before setting out to dry, then wrap layers of masking tape around the whole can covering all designs, lastly add eyes with the black magic marker.
5. Halloween Eggs You will need:
Eggs Large pot Bowls Food Coloring Assorted colored markers Boil eggs in a large pot of water for 30 minutes, let cool in cold water for 10-15 minutes, dry off eggs with a paper towel, then dip eggs into bowls of food coloring for the desired coloration. Lay eggs on a napkin to dry, once dry, add scary designs using assorted colored markers.
6. Monster Leaf-Filled Bags You will need:
A Rake Leaves Halloween trash bags or Black trash bags Whiteout Children will not even realize they are cleaning up the yard when gathering leaves and stuffing them into Halloween decorated or black trash bags. Whiteout can accent the eyes and mouth on the black trash bags. Tie a knot in all bags once filled, and place them throughout the front and back yards for decoration.
7. Halloween Tye-Dye T-Shirts You will need:
Old T-shirt (stained okay) Food coloring Circular aluminum pan Water Fill the bottom of the aluminum pan with water, just to cover the surface, and then roll the t-shirt up and bend to fit into the pan. Apply desired food colors in swirls above the shirt. Next spin the pan and t-shirt by placing dominant hand in the middle of the pan, moving hand in circular motion. Count to 20 and unroll shirt to hang and dry.
All seven treats that can trick children into cleaning during Halloween may be store bought or substituted with household items inexpensively.
By Jhayla D. Tyson
Edited by Cathy Milne
Sources:
CNN: Halloween Crafts Made From Household Items
Times Leader: Be Scary but Safe this Halloween
Top & Feature Image Courtesy of U.S. Army Garrison Red Cloud’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
First Inline Image Courtesy of Alice’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Second Inline Image Courtesy of Greg Goebel’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License crafts , halloween , recycling , spot",FAKE
"SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Five days — that's how many sick days Tom McLaughlin took to lose his job at a carton manufacturer.

McLaughlin was in the hospital for three of those days, being treated for a potentially life-threatening flare-up of an infection in two sores on his right leg.

His doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., pleaded last week with Bell Inc. to keep McLaughlin, saying his medical care was necessary. He had ignored her advice and returned to work once already in April, even as his daughter pleaded with him to stay in the hospital.

It was no use. The 49-year-old was two months shy of his one-year anniversary with the company — too green to qualify for Family and Medical Leave Act benefits. Bell told him he had to go, that he didn't quality for medical leave.

""Our world fell apart in a week,"" said his wife, Kristi McLaughlin, who works part-time as a pastor at a small Mitchell, S.D., congregation about an hour west of here. ""He was the primary income. He was the primary breadwinner. He provided the insurance. We're looking now at food stamps. We're looking at moving.""

The McLaughlins' situation is not rare.

Under state and federal law, few legal protections are ironclad for employees who miss work for illness. If attendance is deemed essential, employers have little obligation to extend leave to employees on the job less than a year.

Bell's chief executive, Ben Arndt, would confirm only that Tom McLaughlin had been a night supervisor for the Sioux Falls-based folding packaging manufacturer.

""We respect our employee's privacy, and our policy is to not discuss employee's personal matters with anyone other than the employee,"" Arndt wrote in email. ""We would encourage anyone who can meet the requirements of an open position to apply or to re-apply.""

Those who work for companies with 50 or more employees can apply for unpaid time off under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, but they qualify only after a year on the job. Hospital stays count, but not every sort of illness does.

If an illness qualifies, a covered employee is eligible for job-protected unpaid leave of up to 12 weeks.

Even with a doctor's note — or call, in this case — employers are fully within their rights to terminate an ill worker go if that person hasn't been on the job a year. An employer in South Dakota doesn't need a specific reason to fire an employee, a legal concept called termination at will.

South Dakota has had a constitutional amendment that prohibits joining a union as a condition of employment, what supporters call a right-to-work law, since 1946, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Union contracts often provide additional protections for ill workers; 6% of the state's workers are represented by unions and 5% are members.

Only Connecticut, California, the District of Columbia and Massachusetts have state- and districtwide paid sick leave laws, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families, a Washington-based nonprofit. At least 18 cities also have such ordinances, and California's and Massachusetts' laws aren't effective until July.

It's unclear which, if any other, states require employers to provide unpaid time off for illness. So how a worker who's sick is treated largely depends on where the person works.

Those who believe they've been discriminated against because of a disability, as Tom McLaughlin does, can file a complaint with the state, i.e. the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation.

Even then, the hurdles to overcome for an outcome in a worker's favor are significant, said James Marsh, the department's labor and management division director. Claims about job loss because of illness or disability make up about a fifth of the claims each year.

""We get calls about that every day,"" he said.

Only a fifth of all claims are substantiated. Employers can terminate someone who is disabled because of poor attendance if attendance is considered an essential job function.

Marsh gave an example of a police officer who has to be on the beat.

""If they're not showing up, they're not fulfilling an essential job requirement,"" Marsh said.

If South Dakota's lone claims investigator finds discrimination, which takes about six months, the resulting document can be used to file a civil lawsuit or a claim with the state's Human Rights Commission.

""It's the difference between a cop pulling you over for speeding and a judge deciding you've committed a crime,"" he said. ""We're the cops. … You're not going to be guilty of discrimination by virtue of the fact that we've found probable cause.""

The state isn't the only avenue for claims of discrimination, of course. Federal discrimination claims about sex, race, age and disability go through the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

If the federal agency finds that a company has not made reasonable accommodations, the EEOC can take action itself, fining employers for a violation regardless of potential lawsuits. Mediation is possible through the EEOC, as well.

Tom McLaughlin believes that he was discriminated against but realizes that proving it could be an uphill slog.

The company told Tom McLaughlin that he needed to be there on the floor as a supervisor, he said. But Tom McLaughlin knew that Bell had been without a night supervisor for years before he started in June.

Operations at the packaging-materials plant had been re-worked with him in the night supervisor's role, McLaughlin said. But the work had been done without one.

""They said, 'Our hands are tied. We don't have any choice,' "" Tom McLaughlin said. ""I said, 'Bell has a choice.' They didn't have much to say about that.""

Even if he had a job, he could not return to work tomorrow. Even with the hospital care, the infection is nowhere near gone.

He wears a wound vacuum over his shoulder that pulls fluid at a steady drip through a tube connected to the black-bandaged, plastic-wrapped divots in his leg.

A nurse comes to empty the bag three times a week. Antibiotics are pumped into his arm daily.

He can't work on light duty for at least a few more weeks, and full healing is at least three months and thousands of dollars away.

He wants to work. He just can't, not yet.

""I can't remember the last time I haven't been able to work,"" Tom McLaughlin said.",REAL
"Posted 10/31/2016 10:54 am by PatriotRising with 0 comments 
This last Friday it became public record that FBI Director James Comey reopened the Hillary Clinton email server investigation after repeatedly testifying before Congress and the world up to last July that he’d closed the case , after in his words not finding sufficient evidence of “any criminal wrongdoing ” to indict her in spite of her four years as Secretary of State egregiously breaching our national security , committing obstruction of justice and willful tampering with evidence, deleting 30,000 emails after receiving a court subpoena constituting destruction of evidence, not to mention repeatedly engaging in perjury before Congress and the FBI. 

But obviously, a federal investigation still in process in late June never stopped serial rapist-crime boss Bill Clinton’s illegal ambush at the Phoenix airport of Comey’s boss US Attorney General Loretta Lynch “clearing” the way for Hillary to proceed without consequence to be anointed as the next US figurehead puppet president by the ruling elite. Because it’s so blatantly obvious to the entire world that Hillary is guilty as sin, Comey’s whitewash didn’t go over well with either Americans or longtime FBI agents who reacted angrily to Comey’s over-the-top corruption. Subsequently, in recent months Comey has had a virtual mutiny on his hands as in the FBI boss has lost all credibility, respect, and moral authority. 

A former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. The former DC attorney added that the FBI investigators discovered more emails on a phone confiscated from the former New York Congressman and separated husband Anthony Weiner that also included his wife and longtime Hillary’s right-hand woman Huma Abedin’s communications that allegedly bear pertinent relevance to the Hillary case. Funny how things have a karmic way of coming full circle – the Clintons first introduced Weiner and Abedin 15 years ago and they married a half dozen years ago. 

In a separate FBI investigation involving Weiner’s alleged sexting messages with a 15-year old minor , the phone in question was handed over to the FBI. The investigating teams of both the Weiner and Hillary cases compared notes and apparently additional emails not already issued by WikiLeaks or already in FBI possession recently came to light on Weiner’s phone . The legions of rank and file FBI agents were already fuming over Comey’s complete ethical and legal lapses in his choice not to indict Hillary. Joe diGenova believes that FBI personnel forced Comey’s hand to reopen the investigation after giving him the ultimatum that if he failed to do so, the FBI defiantly would. According to diGenova, this latest plot twist only proves that: 

The original investigation was not thorough, and that it was an incompetent investigation. 

Otherwise, had a real investigation been conducted, that Weiner phone used by both Anthony and Huma would have been picked up by the FBI and its contents thoroughly scrutinized long before now. 

In addition to stating the obvious, that the higher-up feds had already made the decision to not consequence Hillary for her crimes, speculating on why that phone was not already submitted to the FBI as evidence, the former DC attorney concluded: 

There could be one explanation: Huma Abedin may have denied that any other phone existed, and if she did, she committed a felony. She lied to the FBI just like General Cartwright , and if she did, she’s dead meat, and Comey knows it, and there’s nothing he can do about it. 

Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity , were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash. Additionally like their boss, Hillary’s aides also sent classified material using private servers. On top of that, longtime aide Cheryl Mills on multiple occasions has perjured herself lying under oath for the Clinton crime family, tasked with “cleaning up” (aka covering up) their countless scandals over the past several decades. Indeed the whole Clinton entourage not already “mysteriously” winding up in the growing Clinton dead pool are all unindicted criminals protected by the corrosively corrupt DC cronyism where backroom deals (a la Bill’s airport ambush) are brokered based on whatever dirt’s been gathered and used as bargaining blackmail chips against all parties involved. That’s how the Washington crowd stays immune from any and all accountability as well as stays alive. Violate that crime syndicate code of conduct and you lose your life as more recent victims earlier this year have. 

In a “leaked” memo to his FBI that surfaced on Fox Friday night, Comey outlined his reasons for reopening the case in light of the new information the director believes would have ultimately been leaked to Congress and the public anyway. So in full damage control/CYA mode, the beleaguered director now going public really had no choice in the matter. His underlings were chomping at the bit to both out and oust him. In an obvious attempt to weakly claim some moral high ground, Comey wrote in his memo: 

I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. 

Though his leadership and character are perceived by the vast majority of both FBI personnel as well as American citizens to presently lay in ruin as a pathetically shameful stain and humiliating joke on both the FBI organization and Washington in general, James Comey appears to be feebly attempting to save his own career and reputation for appearing now to “come clean.” But make no mistake, his moral turpitude displayed throughout this Hillary debacle from early 2015 to now has over-exposed him as a total lackey and fraud, so at this late stage of the game, redemption is not even an option. But the criminal misconduct, rampant corruption and diabolical evil committed by those at the highest puppet levels of federal power, and especially the elite puppet masters controlling them, their sins produce far more devastating consequences than this morally lacking man in the middle of this latest controversy. 

Because there is no way that the FBI will properly conclude this part 2 of the Hillary investigation saga before the November 8 th election, Hillary, and her Democrats are predictably crying foul , demanding that the FBI immediately disclose what it has, which of course is a moot point that won’t happen. It seems highly unlikely that the email texts from Abedin and Weiner found on his phone would not contain clear criminal evidence that implicates Hillary. Since Hillary was the globalist choice after Obama was selected in 2008, it seems unlikely that the puppet masters would not permit this latest development to even occur. But then perhaps the ruling elite is pulling the plug on Hillary, concluding that she simply carries too much liability baggage with her deteriorating health condition and never-ending scandals, maybe the globalists are rethinking an alternative replacement like her obnoxiously aggressive VP candidate, the Jesuit-trained and educated Tim Kaine. 

That said, there are some cynics who believe that this recent odd turn is the last ditch desperado attempt being staged to overturn Trump winning by a landslide. This conjectured scenario goes something like this: a few days prior to the election the FBI will once again “clear” Hillary of all charges. This, in turn, would offer her the last minute much needed boost being able to cash in on her worn out persecution complex , plagued forever by her “right wing conspiracy” theory against the “much maligned” woman of destiny. 

In response to all her scandals, Hillary’s M.O. has always been to falsely blame some villainous sinister force. This year it’s been Putin hacking into her emails, and Trump, Putin, and Assange colluding and plotting behind her back. She’s always been as paranoid as Richard Nixon , attempting to deflect the heat she draws from her own skullduggery lies by constantly pointing fingers to externalize blame onto others. It’s a deeply rooted pathological complex that certain tightly screwed sociopaths possess. 

This latest sudden turn of events obviously has James Comey incurring the wrath of Hillary Democrats as well as the Justice Department. By disclosing the reopened investigation so close to the election date that undoubtedly casts some influence on the potential outcome, Comey is defying his AG boss while clearly violating DOJ written policy . Lynch herself even tried to quash Comey’s letter to Congress. But as diGenova alluded, by Comey’s own past misdeeds (and those of his boss and Obama as well), the FBI director placed himself between this rock and a hard place by his own slipshod, half-ass probe failing to acquire Weiner’s phone the first time around. 

The entire sordid affair of this year’s totally rigged political election – pre-fixed in Hillary’s favor – blatantly reveals to America the gross misnomer of the US “justice” system being two-tiered, one for elitist crime cabal bosses like Hillary and the other for the rest of us 99% no longer protected in a totalitarian police state by our once rule of law the US Constitution. Regardless of what happens in the future, the truth genie’s already been let out of the bag, and for eyes open enough to see, it’s floating in the Washington cesspool of filth, debauchery and deception regularly perpetrated by our “entrusted perps” we have as our so called leaders. 

Moreover, this year’s unending batches of Wiki-leaked DNC/Hillary emails and Project Veritas undercover campaign videos confirm that the entire US political, as well as economic system, is morally and financially bankrupt, irreparably broken and in need of complete overhaul. Voter fraud and election fraud are rampant. Soros funded electronic voting machines that are preprogrammed to vote for Hillary are operating in 16 key battleground states. America’s internal house now is in total disarray, badly in need of a deep cleaning purge like never before. Mainstream media is strongly biased against Trump in its blind support for Hillary . As Secretary of State she treasonously sold out our nation, placing us all at high security risk and under foreign interest control at the hands of high rolling bidders so she and her fat cats can get richer as fellow partners-in-crime from places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, destroying our once sovereign country while aiding, abetting, financing and supporting our enemies the global terrorists around the world. She helped create ISIS and plans world war against Russia, China and Iran. The traitors in our government and their globalist puppet masters – the Rothschilds, Rockefellers , the Bushes and Clintons all need to be rounded up, imprisoned and tried at The Hague for both treason and their endless crimes against humanity. 
The Best of Joachim Hagopian 
Joachim Hagopian [ ] is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com . Previous article by Joachim Hagopian: Another US False Flag? Do you enjoy reading Patriot Rising?",FAKE
"Posted on October 28, 2016 by DCG | 2 Comments 
Ain’t multiculturalism grand? 
From Daily Express : The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. 
He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24. 
The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” 
It had been given to the girl during a lesson in “ethics” at the Bavarian school. 
Headteacher Gisela Herl did not confirm the incident when questioned, but said the school would issue a written statement detailing its position in the coming week. 
The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils were Christian. 
A spokesman for Kassel explained: “There will be no Christmas celebrations, in the strictest sense. Because the majority of children at this kindergarten are not Christian the festival will not be celebrated in the way that it is at other schools.” 
Migrants now outnumber native children at many schools in Germany as the country has been inundated with migrants in recent years. More than one million migrants are estimated to have arrived in Germany during the last year alone. 
The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees estimates that another 200,000 people will apply for asylum in 2017. 
DCG",FAKE
"Charlie Hebdo will not go away. And in the wake of unspeakably hideous tragedy, that's very good news.

The attack Wednesday that killed 12 members of the staff, including editorial director Stephane Charbonnier, was bad enough. Allowing the thugs who carried out the massacre to kill the French satirical weekly would have been catastrophic.

Despite the deaths of most of its senior journalists, the show will go on, Richard Malka, the paper's lawyer, told Le Monde. And the newspaper plans to print 1 million copies, a figure that dwarfs its usual print run of 60,000.

In an interview on French television reported by the Guardian, Patrick Pelloux, a doctor who also writes for the paper, put his finger on why this decision is essential.

""It's very hard,"" he said. ""We are all suffering, with grief, with fear, but we will do it anyway, because stupidity will not win.""

If Charlie Hebdo were simply to go away, he said, the death of his colleagues would have been ""for nothing.""

Charlie Hebdo stirred up controversy with its irreverent, sometimes crass take on the world. It particularly offended Muslims with its treatment of the prophet Mohammed.

Extremist zealots, not known for their senses of humor, hope to control the conversation through fear. Whether it's shooting up Paris newspaper offices, beheading journalists in the Middle East or ruthlessly and relentlessly persecuting reporters and editors in despot-ruled nations, the goal is the same: Kill the messengers and make the message go away.

But it can't.

The pen is mightier than the sword, the saying goes. But it certainly doesn't always seem that way. The power of evil people who kill without conscience can make the pen (or the keyboard) seem frail indeed, completely overmatched.

Years back, giving a commencement address at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, humorist Gene Weingarten brandished a mammoth scabbard and a tiny pen. Gene was on to something.

But the way truth continues to emerge is that there is often someone to pick up the shield of the slain colleague. Despite the sharply escalating anger of covering international flashpoints, for example, journalists continue to bear the enormous risks.

In Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid) talks about why he believes the Nazis will never prevail: ""And what if you track down these men and kill them, what if you killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast.""

I can't say I'm quite as sanguine as Victor was. But I'm very glad to see that Charlie Hebdo will go on.",REAL
"WASHINGTON — President Obama said Sunday that his administration will walk away from negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program unless the United States can verify that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons.

""If we cannot verify that they are not going to obtain a nuclear weapon— that there's a breakout period so that even if they cheated we would be able to have enough time to take action — if we don't have that kind of deal, then we're not going to take it,"" the president said in an interview onCBS' Face the Nation.

""If there's no deal,"" Obama said, ""then we walk away.""

The United States and its allies have until March 24 to reach an agreement with Iran. Obama wants to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons while still allowing the country to enrich uranium to use for energy production.

""Over the next month or so, we're going to be able to determine whether or not their system is able to accept what would be an extraordinarily reasonable deal if in fact, as they say, they are only interested in peaceful nuclear programs,"" Obama told correspondent Bill Plante. ""And if we have unprecedented transparency in that system, if we are able to verify that in fact they are not developing weapons systems, then there's a deal to be had, but that's going to require them to accept the kind of verification and constraints on their program that so far, at least, they have not been willing to say yes to.""

He said talks with Iran, which have been going on for more than a year, have not cost the United States anything. Iran has been abiding by an interim agreement not to advance its nuclear program, the president said.

""We're not losing anything through these talks,"" Obama said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also appearing on Face the Nation, said he and Obama have the same ultimate goal in trying to ensure that Iran does't develop nuclear weapons. But Netanyahu said he doesn't trust that inspections will prevent the Iranians from cheating and developing weapons.

""I do not trust inspections with totalitarian regimes,"" Netanyahu said. ""What I'm suggesting is that you contract Iran's nuclear program, so there's less to inspect.""

Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress last Tuesday, warning U.S. lawmakers against a deal with Iran.

The Senate must weigh in on whatever deal is reached, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said.

""The Iranians are fomenting trouble in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen,"" McConnell said on Face the Nation. ""All over the Middle East, they're on the march. They've had enhanced influence in Iraq. We can't ignore all of their other behavior in looking at the potential nuclear deal. What we do know about the deal is it looks like it will leave the (nuclear) infrastructure in place with one of the worst regimes in the world.""

McConnell said he is working to put together a veto-proof majority to support a measure giving Congress the authority to approve or disapprove of any deal.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreed that Congress has a role in whatever deal may be reached.

""Congress passed the sanctions itself, so Congress has very much an interest in the sanctions,"" Schumer said in a separate Face the Nation interview. ""I pushed that it shouldn't be done before there's an agreement...but after that, yes, Congress has a right to weigh in and I support it.""",REAL
"The addition of Carly Fiorina (not a white man) and Ben Carson (not a white man) to a Republican 2016 field that already includes Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul means that the 2016 Republican field will likely be the most diverse from either party since at least 1992. Given how the country has diversified -- and given how many non-white-men are already in the GOP field -- it's likely that the current class is the most diverse ever. With one caveat.

We pulled data on the major presidential contenders from each election since Bill Clinton first won the presidency. What constitutes a presidential contender is admittedly subjective, so we focused (but not exclusively) on those who actually made it onto ballots and those who won delegates. Giving us this:

For 2016, we included a number of people who aren't yet actual candidates, including Martin O'Malley on the Democratic side and Republicans Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. (Why didn't we include Trump? Because: Who is that? Who is ""Trump""? Also.) Those likely candidates are the faded icons on the chart below.

Even once we add in all of those mostly white-male Republican maybes, the party's 2016 field is the most diverse on either side. One more white male, though, and the balance tips to the 2008 Democrats, with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson in a smaller field. (In terms of the sheer number of non-white men, the giant 2016 GOP field will be hard to beat.) There's only one non-white woman on our chart: 2004 Democrat Carol Moseley Braun.

Since 1990, the percentage of the country that is white has dropped from more than 80 percent to just above 70 percent, according to Census Bureau data. That increased diversity is reflected in the candidates that the parties field. We'll note, though, that the percentage of women in America has always been a bit above 50 percent, but the percentage of women that have run for president since 1992 has been below 10 percent.

Which is something that at least one of this year's candidates will probably point out.",REAL
"Pundits and politicians have been shocked by the Trump phenomenon, startled that so many Americans could be so enthusiastic about his anti-democratic style proposals.

But Trump is not that original. His actual proposals are in keeping with longstanding trends in U.S. history and society, with the rejection and nativism that have erupted after each immigration wave. His style is reminiscent of populist and fascist leaders who’ve succeeded both in Europe and Latin America during periods of economic stress, including such recent champions as Hugo Chávez and Silvio Berlusconi, authoritarians who elevated themselves and their supporters rather than building party structures or democratic institutions.

Some observers believe – or, perhaps, hope — that Trump’s followers misunderstand or don’t believe in what he represents. They’re wrong. We will explain.

The Trump movement cannot be dismissed as one of frustrated moderates

Some observers, including President Obama, suggest that his voters are misguided. Here in the Monkey Cage, Doug Ahler and David Broockman argued that Trump is a textbook example of an ideological moderate. Still others portray Trump followers as working-class outcasts of the changing economy that see his candidacy as a way to channel their frustrations. And many U.S. pundits—such as George Packer in The New Yorker—explain all this by saying that voters on left and right are “angry” with Washington, and that both Trump and Sanders represent a new wave of populism.

But Trump and Sanders must not be conflated. Sanders wants to politicize inequality. Trump, rather, is advocating for anti-politics, by which we mean that Trump’s language, and his followers’ celebration of his speeches, primarily express a rejection of politics in a democratic key. Trump’s stance represents the antithesis of Sanders’s call for political change. Trump’s narrative insists that he is above the fray of politics. This is, of course, an ideological and political claim. Returning America to national and international anti-democratic traditions it is just a different kind of politics.

And Trump’s followers explicitly agree with what he says. In December, seven out of 10 republicans believed that Trump “tells it like it is.” As Sarah Palin suggested when she endorsed Trump in Iowa, Trump stands against politics as usual as represented by “establishment candidates” who are “wearing political correctness like a suicide vest. And enough is enough.” While the establishment hears random insults, his followers hear a list of the enemies of a homogeneous America.

Many studies have revealed the link between resentment toward blacks and immigrants, on the one hand, and support for Trump on the other. In other, words, his supporters like Trump not despite his anti-democratic qualities, but precisely because of them. His campaign rallies often include incidents of physical violence against perceived outsiders. At a rally in Las Vegas, according to NBC News, one man shouted “Sieg heil.”

We believe racism and charismatic leadership bring Trump close to the fascist equation but he might be better described as post-fascist, which is to say populist.

From our research, let’s take a definition of populist post-fascism. This is a political style which has an extremely sacralizing understanding of politics. The leader understands politics as a theology in which he or she is the only who knows what is best for the nation. Populists consider people as formed by those who follow a unique vertical leadership; political antagonists are conceived as enemies who are potential or actual  traitors to the nation.

Populists want leaders to be charismatic embodiments of the voice and desires of the nation as a whole. They argue for a strong executive and the discursive, and often practical, dismissal of the legislative and judicial branches of government. Toward that end, they engage in radical nationalism and emphasize popular culture, as opposed to other forms of culture that do not represent “national thought.” Finally, populism is an authoritarian form of electoral democracy that nonetheless rejects dictatorial forms of government.

Modern populism arose from the defeat of fascism, as a novel post-fascist attempt to bring back the fascist experience to the democratic path, creating in turn an authoritarian form of democracy that would stress strong leaders and caudillos such as General Juan Perón in Argentina and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

In populism, political democracy is strained but never eradicated, as it had been with fascism. Modern post-fascism pushes democracy to its limits but, generally, without breaking it. Trump’s vision of America is the latest example of this attempt to redefine democratic theory and practice.

Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Trump does not have a real party. He wants to be the Republican candidate, but party officials and ideologues reject him. In contrast, fascist leaders were often founding members of movements and then emerged as their leaders.

As we mentioned earlier, Trump’s leadership is more akin to that of Hugo Chávez and Silvio Berlusconi. While Chávez – who started his own government reality show — invoked a vague ideological platform to gain power, in practice he centralized decision-making, attacked freedom of speech and dismantled the division of powers, always by invoking an external threat.Berlusconi denigrated institutions; used his billionaire status to prove he was a political outsider; and channeled the new European populism’s anti-migrant sentiment to hold power.

Trump uses anti-immigrant sentiment more often than Berlusconi and other leaders like Chávez’ successor Nicolas Maduro, bringing his rhetoric closer to that of other post-fascist politicians like Marine Le Pen in France.

The Republican leadership rejects Trump. Indeed, many conservatives call him a fascist. But Trump embodies many of the party’s views on immigration, Islam, climate change, women’s roles, minority voting, and so on. Trump and his followers differ not in kind but in the clarity and radical way in with which they express some of the extreme consequences of the tea party agenda.

If we consider a longer historical process in which the Republican Party in particular has been traveling steadily farther toward populism, Trump and his followers might very well be showing us the future of U.S. right-wing politics.

Federico Finchelstein is professor of history and department chair at The New School in New York and author, among other books, of The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth-Century Argentina and Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945 .

Pablo Piccato is professor of history at Columbia University and author of The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere and City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931.",REAL
"Joint Way Forward Deal Does Not Lead to Peace or Progress for Afghans   Nazifa Alizada Afghans protest in Stockholm against the Joint Way Forward deal with signs that read: “Do not sell us for money.” (Shahmama and Salsal National Association (SANSA)) 
I was born in Ghazni province of Afghanistan but have no memories of my birthplace. When I was 3, the Taliban took over and forced me and my family to flee the country. I was too little to realize any of this. I still have a blurred image of an old orange bus, a loaf of bread, and rugged, dusty mountains. 
As I grew older, my mother explained that the bus belonged to my father, and we did not attempt to migrate to Iran at first. The Soviet invasion and the Afghan civil war taught people of my village how to protect themselves when crises get heated. The men would move their women and children to the dark, moist undergrounds immediately and make them stay there until the situation calmed down. We were not lucky enough to fit in the underground this time. We passed two days in a mountain—the blurred mountain, in my mind—and hopelessly moved toward Iran. 
My Afghan identity took my precious childhood from me. In Iran, I refrained from playing with other kids since they would mock my Afghan accent. I preferred to stay home to avoid hearing “Afghani kesafat,” or “Afghani Ashghal,” literally meaning “the garbage Afghan,” on the street. 
  
When I turned 7, schools refused to let me attend because I was an undocumented Afghan migrant. I enrolled in a school run by refugees for refugees and did my primary schooling there. But the school lacked human and capital resources to offer classes beyond seventh grade, and an undocumented Afghan refugee could not get any further education. Constant insults, seclusion and deprivation of the right to a quality education were the gifts Iran provided me in my childhood. 
In 2001, upon the fall of the Taliban regime, my family and I returned to Afghanistan. At first glance, Kabul resembled anything but a city. Crumbled walls, broken glass, burned buildings, dusty roads and bullet shells on the streets all were evidence of the war. We did not expect a war-weary city to be any better. Yet one thing lured us into returning: safety and the hope for a better future. The Joint Way Forward deal between the European Union and Afghanistan misses this crucial point. 
In early October, the Afghan government and the EU signed this bilateral deal, which facilitates deportation of thousands of Afghan asylum seekers. In return, the EU promised to continue its generous aid package to Afghanistan. The deal promises job creation for returnees, emphasizes reintegration and resettlement programs, and ensures the safe return of vulnerable groups, in particular unaccompanied minors and women. 
None of these factors are enough to prevent hundreds of thousands of Afghans from taking the perilous journey toward Europe without a guarantee of security. After the fall of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families returned to the war-torn country despite being aware of the existing limited opportunities. 
Peace, hope for the future and stability were the factors which drove Afghans back to their homeland for the first time since 2001. The irony is that the lack of these very notions in 2015 made thousands of others abandon the country. With more than 11,000 civilian casualties, 2015 is the worst year in terms of security since the fall of the Taliban. 
The Joint Way Forward is based on the illusion that Afghanistan is safe. Kunduz, one of the country’s major cities, fell into the hands of the Taliban for the second time this year. The war forced hundreds to flee the city, while hundreds of others remained defenseless and stuck. 
In Badghis, a northwestern province, at least 60 police officers surrendered to the Taliban with their guns and resources. Three districts of Farah, a western province, already are ruled by insurgents. The Taliban rules many districts of Helmand province, and active war goes on in the city every so often. 
Nengarhar, Paktia, Paktika, Ghazni, and most other provinces are no better. Even the shortest highways—such as the Kabul-Ghazni, or Kabul-Wardak, routes—are controlled by the Taliban. Unknown numbers of people are being kidnapped or killed based on ethnic and religious reasons, or for having ties with foreign or government officials, on a regular basis. 
At least three bombs have exploded in different areas of Kabul since the deal was signed. By considering Afghanistan safe, despite the ongoing turmoil, the EU flinches from its humanitarian responsibility. 
Afghans have fled uncertainty, insecurity and the abusive policies of their government with the hopes of establishing a better life for themselves in Europe. They never imagined they would risk their entire lives to be sold back to the government they just escaped. More than a mere failure of security in Afghanistan, the EU-Afghan deal is a failure of humanity. 
Most EU countries warn their citizens against travelling to Afghanistan and mark it unsafe on their Foreign Affairs website. If it is not safe for EU citizens to spend a few days in Afghanistan, how is it safe for Afghans to live their whole lives there? Such deals reinforce double standards and spotlight how differently people’s lives are valued in today’s world. 
Europe’s decision to deport Afghans is hasty, unconstructive and shortsighted. People’s lives are being endangered for a second time. Statistics show that a great number of previous deportees already have attempted to return to Europe through Balkan routes. Many others lack social support to stay in Afghanistan after migrating to Europe from Pakistan or Iran. 
The deal is also unproductive for Europe, since it could lead to a repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis. 
The current bilateral EU-Afghan deal will be a colossal failure unless the EU forces the Afghan government to prioritize security. Dealing with corruption and regaining people’s trust is the next big move to push people back to their homeland. 
The developed world should not use aid as a negotiating tool to pressurize poorer nations. 
People’s lives are not political capital. 
Nazifa Alizada of Afghanistan is a graduate of the Asian University for Women. She currently works with the National Secretariat for Gender Research at Gothenburg University in Sweden. TAGS:",FAKE
"Dakota Pipeline Protests Are Working! One Bank May Pull Funding of Pipeline Build 
While all eyes have been on the recent election results, protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline achieved a quiet victory. One bank may be pulling its investments in the project, leaving the Dakota Access Pipeline with very little money to continue its build. 

DNB, Norway’s largest bank, has reportedly loaned $350 million to Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) for the construction of the pipeline.The bank is worried that Indigenous rights are being overlooked by Energy Transfer Partners. 

DNB states that it will take initiative and use its position to try to find a constructive solution to the conflict. If the bank finds that these initiatives do not give appeasing answers or results, DNB will consider ending its involvement in financing the project. 

Violence by police against protesters drove the bank to review its investment in the controversial pipeline. 

As knowledge about what is going on in North Dakota reaches international countries, corporations are forced to question their own involvement in the pipeline build. 

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members, Indigenous peoples from First Nations around the planet, activists, and even well-known reporters and move stars are all speaking out against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters have occupied several camps along the Missouri River near Cannon Ball, and North Dakota. 

The protests have a history of police violence against peaceful protesters. ETP hired private security mercenaries who were untrained. These employees unleashed vicious dogs on crowds of unarmed protesters and at least 6 were mauled. 

Since then, militarized police with tanks have replaced mercenaries. Activists have been pepper-sprayed, maced, beaten, shot with bean bag projectiles and rubber bullets, tasered, blasted by LRAD and sound cannons, and have been strip-searched, detained in dog kennels, had their arms marked with numbers, and more. 

Police violence and tactics have been so bad that even representatives from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues have been amassing testimony from witnesses and victims about excessive force, unlawful arrests, and mistreatment in jail. 

Amnesty International USA brought human rights observers to monitor the situation. 

ETP has brazenly ignored requests by President Obama and several federal officials for ETP to halt construction until a tribal lawsuit and permit reviews conclude. 

During the chaos of Election Day, ETP announced it will be moving forward with drilling to begin installation of the pipeline beneath Lake Oahe in only two weeks, hinting that it would do so with or without appropriate permits. 

DNB views these acts as unacceptable and will likely revoke its financial support if ETP continues to ignore Indigenous requests. 

If DNB withdraws its financial support, the bold move could inspire other major investors to follow suit, especially if the public continues to apply pressure. 

Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram.",FAKE
"Legislators in the 24 states where Republicans now hold total control plan to push a series of aggressive policy initiatives in the coming year aimed at limiting the power of the federal government and rekindling the culture wars.

The unprecedented breadth of the Republican majority — the party now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers — all but guarantees a new tide of conservative laws. Republicans plan to launch a fresh assault on the Common Core education standards, press abortion regulations, cut personal and corporate income taxes and take up dozens of measures challenging the power of labor unions and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Before Election Day, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record in the modern era, set after special elections in 2011 and 2012.

Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to seven.

Republicans in at least nine states are planning to use their power to pass “right to work” legislation, which would allow employees to opt out of joining a labor union. Twenty-four states already have such laws on the books, and new measures have been or will be proposed in Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Missouri.

Democrats and union officials warn Republicans against going too far, just a few years after bills targeting public-sector employee unions sparked protests in Wisconsin and Ohio. “These bills have proven time and time again to decrease wages and safety standards in all workplaces,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO.

A new round of the culture wars is also inevitable in 2015. Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony List, said she expects that measures to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy will advance in Wisconsin, South Carolina and West Virginia. Missouri, too, is likely to take up some abortion-related bills.

In Tennessee, voters gave the legislature new powers to regulate abortion, and state House Speaker Beth Harwell (R) has said her chamber will take up three measures requiring mandatory counseling, a waiting period and stricter inspections of clinics.

Conservative activists also are targeting Common Core, the national education standards adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia over the past few years. Opposition from parent and community groups has become a hot political issue on the right over the past year, leading three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina — to drop out of the program.

Some states will attempt to join those three in leaving the program altogether. Others will try to change testing requirements or prevent the sharing of education data with federal officials. In recent interviews, several Republican governors who support Common Core say they expect debate in their forthcoming legislative sessions.

“The biggest concern and opposition you hear from conservative legislators is, ‘We don’t want Washington dictating curricula,’ ” said Utah state Sen. Curtis Bramble, a Republican.

Republicans also are likely to take up measures diluting the power of the EPA, which has proposed state-by-state targets for reducing carbon emissions. A dozen states have challenged proposed EPA regulations on power plants in federal court.

New Republican governors in states such as Arkansas and Arizona and legislators in North Carolina, North Dakota and elsewhere will prioritize cutting personal or corporate income tax rates. States that have experienced a revenue boom from energy taxes will have to contend with falling receipts as the price of oil declines. Tax revenue in other states is coming in slower than expected, presenting a challenge in many of the 49 states that require balanced annual budgets.

“With the increasing costs of Medicaid and education, balancing the budget is going to be a challenge,” said South Dakota state Sen. Deb Peters (R), who chairs the Appropriations Committee.

But Republicans also caution that they have to use their newfound political power to govern effectively and avoid overreach.

“If [Republicans] go too far, they’re not going to be the speaker and the majority leader two years from now,” said Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), whose party took total control of the state legislature in November. “There’s a very narrow window to demonstrate that they can lead, that we can lead.”

Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said, “Democrats are going to articulate an agenda that’s forward-thinking.” Republicans, especially those considering possible presidential bids, such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, “are worried about taking on some of these fights, because [Democratic constituencies] are going to fight back,” he said.

So there will be exceptions to the coming conservative juggernaut. Despite conservative opposition to Obamacare, some Republicans are debating whether and how to accept federal Medicaid expansion. Republican governors of Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, North Carolina and Tennessee have said they will try to persuade their legislators to accept federal funding, while Democratic governors in Montana and Pennsylvania will work with Republican-controlled legislatures in a similar vein.

“We were one of the states that sued on [the Affordable Care Act]. I thought it was both bad policy and I thought it was unconstitutional. The courts said I was wrong,” said Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead (R), who is advocating a modified expansion plan. “Even though I have serious disagreements with the law, this is the current law. How do we as a state make the best of it?”

Legislators said they are closely watching the Supreme Court, which will decide this year whether health-care subsidies under the ACA are constitutional in states that did not create their own health exchanges. “If the Supreme Court decides the Obamacare subsidies and employer penalties do not apply in states with federal health-care exchanges, then that will generate a huge new discussion in state legislatures,” said Tennessee state Sen. Brian Kelsey (R), who chairs the Judiciary Committee.

Legislators also will debate myriad less-partisan issues that have arisen as technology advances, including cybersecurity policies, regulations on electronic cigarettes and ride-sharing services. And the daunting specter of growing pension liabilities is likely to lead to contentious confrontations amid stretched budgets.

Lawmakers in a handful of states are considering how to regulate and tax the electronic cigarette industry; so far, three states have banned e-cigarettes from smoke-free workplaces, and Minnesota and North Carolina levy taxes on them. The e-cigarette industry, eager to avoid lawsuits and public relations disasters, has encouraged at least some regulations.

Several states are grappling with the rise of ride-sharing services, such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. Outgoing Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is likely to sign a measure regulating the emerging industry, and Uber is negotiating a similar agreement with Nevada regulators.

Some legislatures will debate “right to try” legislation, which would allow people with terminal illnesses access to experimental drugs before those drugs win final approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana and Missouri already have versions of such laws on the books.

And as marijuana legalization takes effect in two more states, in addition to the two where the drug was already legal, legislators in most states are expected to debate a rash of drug law revisions. Pure legalization bills will be introduced in 18 states, while decriminalization bills will be introduced in 15, according to a tally maintained by the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project.

States will lobby the new ­Republican-led Congress on a handful of issues that impact budgets. A bipartisan group of legislators has urged Congress to pass the Marketplace Fairness Act, which would allow taxation of online sales, though GOP control in Washington makes passage unlikely. Thirty-nine governors — Democrats and Republicans alike — have encouraged Congress to extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides states about $13 billion for medical coverage for about 8 million children from low-income families. And states want Congress to pass a long-term extension of the Highway Trust Fund, which top Republicans in Washington have said is a priority.

“State legislatures need a long-term funding solution for their transportation infrastructure. If Congress does not act, states will have to look at other funding solutions,” said Mick Bullock, a spokesman for the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.

Mounting budgetary challenges from earlier years will dominate legislative attention in a handful of states. About half of all states are operating at or above their maximum prison capacity, according to corrections experts, putting pressure on legislatures to alleviate crowding. Some states will have to deal with increasingly underfunded pension plans, which could threaten to swamp state budgets over the long term. In Illinois, where the state pension is funded at less than 40 percent, Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R) made pension reform a cornerstone of his campaign this year.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative organization that helps Republican legislators coordinate measures among states, supports moving public pensions from a defined benefit system to a defined contribution system. ALEC considers Oklahoma, which passed a pension reform bill in 2014, to be the model.",REAL
"With the Democratic presidential primary in its twilight, frustration within the ranks over the party's handling of the primary process spilled out this week as Bernie Sanders supporters lashed out at party leaders, arguing that their candidate has been treated unfairly.

The public outpouring of anger began last weekend at the Nevada Democratic Party convention, where Sanders supporters who said Hillary Clinton's backers had subverted party rules shouted down pro-Clinton speakers and sent threatening messages to state party Chairwoman Roberta Lange after posting her phone number and address on social media.

That led Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other top party leaders to demand an apology and publicly ruminate on the possibility of violence at the Democratic National Convention in July as they prepare for a general election battle with Donald Trump.

Obama administration officials on Wednesday played down concerns about escalating tensions, likening the race to the 2008 primary fight between Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

But Sanders isn't backing down. A campaign spokesman said Wednesday that the campaign was ""looking into"" whether to ask for a recount in Kentucky, where Sanders narrowly lost on Tuesday night, and he fired up his crowd in Southern California Tuesday night by calling out the Democratic establishment.

The Sanders campaign on Tuesday did condemn unruly behavior from supporters and those who made threats to party leaders, but made clear it is sticking with its stance that the party is subverting the process in a way that benefits Clinton.

""These claims that our campaign is sort of fomenting violence in some way are absolute nonsense,"" Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday night, adding that the campaign ""absolutely, categorically"" condemns any threatening behavior.

The breakdown in civility comes after what has otherwise been a comparatively polite campaign season for Democrats, but the frustration exposes a rift in the party and undercuts the notion that Clinton will be able to march into the Democratic convention this summer with a party unified behind her.

""The problem is that there are long-simmering concerns about unfair treatment out in the Nevada Democratic Party,"" Weaver added. ""We are not going to allow the millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders to be sort of rolled over in places like Nevada by the way they handled that convention.""

Earlier on Tuesday, Sanders released a statement suggesting that his supporters were justified in feeling like the party has given them a raw deal.

""If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned,"" Sanders' statement read. ""Unfortunately, that was not the case at the Nevada convention. At that convention the Democratic leadership used its power to prevent a fair and transparent process from taking place.""

In an interview with CNN, Wasserman Schultz said that statement wasn't enough.

""I was deeply disturbed,"" she said. ""The senator's response was anything but acceptable. It certainly did not condemn his supporters for acting violently or engaging in intimidation tactics and instead added more fuel the fire.""

The DNC chairwoman, however, said she has not spoken directly with Sanders, but that her staff has been in touch with the Vermont senator's campaign. She also pushed back against Sanders' accusation that the party had rigged the system against him.

""We've had the same rules in place that elected Barack Obama. These rules were adopted for state parties all across the country in 2014,"" she said. ""They were followed and even if the Sanders supporters were frustrated, there is never, under any circumstances, a place for violence and intimidation to be resorted to in response.""

On CNN's ""New Day"" Wednesday morning, Weaver accused the DNC chairwoman of ""throwing shade.""

""We can have a long conversation about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and how she's been throwing shade on the Sanders campaign,"" Weaver said.

""I gotta say it's not the DNC,"" he added. ""By and large the DNC has been very good to us, but not Debbie Wasserman Schultz.""

Wasserman Schultz brushed off Weaver's comments later in the day.

""My response to that is hashtag SMH (shake my head),"" Wasserman Schultz told Blitzer on ""Wolf."" ""We need to focus on one thing: get through this primary and work to prepare for the general election and make sure that we can continue to draw the contrasts between either one of our really fine candidates who are focused on helping people reach the middle class and make sure that we get equal pay for equal work and create jobs and not let the Republicans take health care away from 20 million Americans.""

'He should get things under control'

Speaking to reporters in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday afternoon, Vice President Joe Biden said if such disruption happens again, ""He's going to have to be more aggressive in speaking out about it.""

""But here we are in May, as was pointed out,"" Biden continued. ""Hillary was still in this in May, in June. I'm confident that Bernie will be supportive if Hillary wins, which the numbers indicate will happen. So I'm not worried. There's no fundamental split in the Democratic Party.""

Leading congressional Democrats also pushed Sanders to rein in his supporters. Reid called Sanders' response ""a test of leadership"" for Sanders, and a source in his office told CNN that the Nevada senator is waiting to hear from the senator himself on the matter.

""The convention was Saturday. It's now Wednesday afternoon. And he hasn't spoken about it,"" the source said.

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, who spoke on behalf of Clinton at the Nevada convention, condemned the behavior.

""He should get things under control,"" Boxer said. ""We're in a race that is very critical. We have to be united.""

""This is a character moment for Bernie Sanders. He's got to figure out how he's true to his values and his ideals fully,"" said CNN political commentator Van Jones.

""I think Hillary and Bernie both misunderstand this movement. I think Hillary just sees it as just a bunch of rowdy kids that at some point will just calm down and fall into line,"" he said, later adding, ""I think Bernie actually only sees the good in his followers. I think Bernie really misunderstands there is a nasty edge to his following that he's not taking seriously enough.""

Sen. Tim Kaine criticized Sanders' responses in the wake of reports that Democrats felt threatened at and following the convention.

""What he did yesterday was sort of say it's the party's fault,"" Kaine told CNN. ""That deflection of responsibility is not leadership.""

Kaine added that the angry protests could be ""dirty tricksters in the crowd"" and not just Sanders' supporters.

""I don't think we should assume that all of the people raising hell are Bernie people,"" Kaine said.

Sanders goes after the establishment in fiery speech

Speaking in Southern California Tuesday night, Sanders fired up the crowd by calling out the Democratic leadership.

""The Democratic Party is going to have to make a very, very, profound and important decision. It can do the right thing and open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change. That is the Democratic Party I want to see."" Sanders said.

""I say to the leadership of the Democratic Party: Open the doors, let the people in! Or the other option for the Democratic Party, which I see as a very sad and tragic option is to choose and maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy,"" he said.

The crowd responded by chanting, ""Bernie or Bust!"" the equivalent of the Republican #NeverTrump slogan for the Democratic race.

His speech barreled through his list of Clinton contrasts, comparing his stances with her (and criticizing those stances) on minimum wage, fracking, breaking up the big banks, and her use of super PACs.

In response to the chaos in Nevada, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook simultaneously praised the passion and participation of Sanders' supporters while adding that Clinton believes that ""no one should be intimidated, harassed or threatened in this process."" He called on them to focus that energy on unifying the party, a task that could be difficult given the raw feelings many Sanders supporters have for Clinton after the primary.

""Supporters of both Clinton and Sanders deserve respect for the work they have put into their campaigns,"" Mook said. Ultimately, we are confident that the passion and energy from the primary will be united in a common purpose -- to move forward the ideals of our party and keep the White House out of Donald Trump's hands.""

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday downplayed any tensions between the two campaigns.

He recalled a similar ""tenor"" to the 2008 contest between Clinton and Obama, saying those tensions were ""no less intense"" and didn't lead to a negative result in the general election.

""I think one of the lessons of 2008 is not to confuse passion in primary for disinterest in the general election,"" he said, adding that ""highly motivated"" supporters were good for democracy.

While the spotlight this year was on the Republican primary and prospect for a contested convention and protests at the national convention in Cleveland, some Democrats now worry about that happening at their convention in Philadelphia.

Wasserman Schultz said the incidents in Nevada would result in the DNC reviewing its procedures for Philadelphia.

""As a result of this happening this weekend, we will have conversations both at the staff level as well as my having conversations with the candidates so that we can make sure that both campaigns are focused on making sure that we can allow this process for the duration of the primary to play out in a civil and orderly way,"" she said.

But the DNC chairwoman said she wasn't worried about violence happening at the convention.

""This was absolutely a serious concern, which is why I said what needed to be said yesterday and others have said that there was real concern,"" Wasserman Schultz told Blitzer Wednesday afternoon. ""But it is important and I am confident that the candidates take the messages to heart about making sure that we respond and conduct ourselves in a civil and orderly way.""

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, however, warned that Sanders' intention to take his candidacy to the Democratic convention could spark unrest similar to the chaotic 1968 convention in Chicago and the riots surrounding it.

""It worries me a great deal,"" Feinstein told CNN's Manu Raju. ""You know, I don't want to go back to the '68 convention, because I worry about what it does to the electorate as a whole -- and he should, too.""

And Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois also said he's concerned about violence in Philadelphia.

""We saw what happened at the Trump rallies, which broke into violence, people punching one another. I don't want to see that happen at the Democratic Party,"" Durbin told CNN. ""I call on Bernie to say to his supporters: be fervent, be committed but be sensible. Don't engage in any violence.""

Weaver pledged Tuesday night that the convention will be peaceful.

""There's not going to be any violence in Philadelphia, Wolf, I guarantee you that,"" he said on CNN. ""We hope for a fair and orderly convention.""",REAL
"Share This: BY NILE BOWIE T he outcome of strangest and most consequential election cycle in recent American history will soon be upon us. Regardless of who becomes the next president, this election will forever be synonymous with the rogue candidacy of Donald Trump and the demographic shifts that have emboldened the right. Though it may be a close election, it is widely presumed that public antipathy towards Trump – the first major party candidate who is near-universally opposed by both major parties – will tilt the odds in Hillary Clinton’s favour. Nonetheless, Trump’s support base of primarily white, blue-collar Americans will be a major factor for the political establishment to contend with in the years ahead. These voters are frustrated by their economic marginalisation wrought by neoliberal trade deals and economic policies and are contemptuous of traditional political elite, their internationalism and liberal identity politics. For these voters, fear of immigration is entwined with the precarity of being working class, their troubling prejudices notwithstanding. Economic disempowerment and political disenfranchisement have accelerated under President Obama, to the detriment of the American middle class. White, blue-collar Americans have witnessed the offshoring of their jobs and the erosion of their status in society, and Trump has masterfully stroked their resentment and discontent by playing on their fears of Muslims, immigrants and minorities. Trump’s views often contain unusual contradictions and seem to be delivered impromptu. What remains consistent are his authoritarian views on crime and justice, vows to close the borders to refugees, Muslims and economic migrants, scepticism of overseas ‘democracy promotion’ and America’s role in international alliances, foreign policy views both isolationist and belligerent and of course, his distinctive megalomaniacal hubris. Trump’s real problem with the Washington establishment is that he isn’t part of it. His campaign represents an insurgent faction of the oligarchical class that aims to displace and replace the standing political elites. Bipartisan opposition to Trump is grounded in the belief that he would be an unreliable proxy and a liability, someone too narrow and unpredictable to manage the common affairs of the ruling class and the US deep state. Moreover, the US establishment is not interested in being led by such a contentious figure, who would draw protest and public opposition in a way that more conventional establishment candidates largely do not. For example, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration seems to engender more public outrage than the immigration policy under Obama, who has deported more people than any other president in history. That being said, Hillary Clinton is a more dangerous candidate in many ways. Trump understands that the political system is rigged and the economy is oriented to serve various elite interests, a message that resonates across the political spectrum, even with anti-Trump segments of the electorate. As a hated political outsider not tied directly into the power and the money structure of the political system, there would be no shortage of gridlock and checks on the authority wielded by Trump in the unlikely event that he becomes president. By contrast, Clinton wields enormous political influence inside the corridors of political and corporate power through personal relationships and connections. Policy and legislation shaped by donor money, lobbyist groups and special interests have been a hallmark of the Clintons’ time in public office. The very fact that she is standing for office while being investigated by the FBI, having committed actions that would have ended the careers of other politicians and government employees, speaks for itself. It has been reported by various sources that the FBI’s recent decision to reopen the investigation into the Clinton email scandal less than two weeks before election day has been motivated by an internal backlash within the agency’s rank and file, forcing FBI director James Comey’s hand as a means of addressing internal critics who believe he buried the Clinton probe for political reasons. Clinton’s email scandal is not the real issue. She has spent her political career ruthlessly advancing the interests of high finance, the military industrial complex and corporate America, with dramatic repercussions for minorities and the marginalised inside the United States, and the civilian populations of countries targeted for US military intervention and destabilization during the her time as an influential first lady, senator and secretary of state. Clinton has spent her long career advocating hawkish US military supremacy and banking deregulation, expanding the private prison industry to the detriment of impoverished African-American communities, dismantling the social safety net that marginalised families rely on, and enabling the consolidation of corporate power through secretive trade agreements. On the campaign trail, she has characterised her work as advancing the interests of women and families. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. The Clinton campaign has repeatedly evoked the historic struggle for civil rights and aspirational rhetoric of ‘breaking glass ceilings’ in the interest of a faux-feminism which prioritizes the equal opportunities of women to lead the nation’s highest office, while at once tone-deaf to the consequences faced by women and families on the receiving end of executive policies. The Democratic Party has become a parody of moral posturing, self-relishing its candidates with rhetoric that has no connection with policies in reality. It is the party of establishment insiders and corporate donors who openly engineer the presidential nomination process to favour their preferred candidate by virtue of the undemocratic super-delegate system. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign inspired millions of Americans for good reason, has proven himself to be tepid and cowardly in the face of practices that have proven beyond doubt that the Democratic Party establishment conspired against him. Bernie’s campaign centred around a rather modest, comparatively tame centre-left progressive platform that did not seriously question US militarism and the values of American exceptionalism. For the Democratic Party at large, the Sanders campaign represented a concession too far. The Clinton campaign even had the impudence to directly hire disgraced Democratic chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after leaked emails exposed her partisanship. Rather than addressing the political substance of revelations uncovered by WikiLeaks, the Clinton campaign, backed by Obama administration officials, has reverted to neo-McCarthyism by labelling opposition voices as surrogates of Russia, explicitly accusing Moscow of meddling in the US election process. Accusations of Russian interference without accompanying evidence are at best a short-sighted means of deflecting responsibility for the corrupt actions of the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party insiders. The next American president will have to confront the realities of strained relations with Russia. Clinton is known for her public enmity toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and would at best perpetuate the status quo of mutual distrust and limited cooperation. At worst, her policies could risk a military confrontation with Russia should she pursue the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace, which she publically advocated during the presidential debates. Trump is the most prominent American political figure to advocate détente with Russia, openly breaking with his neoconservative running mate Mike Pence. Trump has criticised Clinton for supporting anti-government insurgents in Syria and called for jointly targeting ISIS with the Russian, and by extension, Syrian militaries. Trump, being very critical of Iran, also signalled he was willing to fight against ISIS on the same side as Tehran. He has also offered support for the establishment of a safe zone inside Syrian territory, potentially in cooperation with the Syrian government and its allies. Both candidates would pursue a different policy approach from the incumbent administration in Syria, but Clinton’s no-fly zone holds greater potential to deepen military hostilities between major powers. Clinton has generally been critical of Obama’s foreign policy in Syria and elsewhere for not asserting US power strongly enough. Despite the differences in style and demeanour, the range of policies offered by the entrenched two-party system is limited to varying shades of centre- to far-right. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the least trusted and most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. Despite the public disillusionment with major party candidates, it remains to be seen whether American voters will cast ballots for third parties such as the Libertarian Party or Green Party, which are seeking to garner 5 percent of the popular vote to become eligible to receive public campaign funding. More likely than not, American voters will cast their ballots ‘against’ Trump by voting for Clinton and vice versa, fueling the cyclical politics of the lesser evil that have been a feature of American presidential elections for decades. More than any other US election in recent history, the candidates represent the rot of an American political establishment marred by scandal, hypocrisy and the relentless pursuit of hegemony. To advocate one over the other is ultimately defeatist. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nile Bowie is a columnist with Russia Today (RT) and a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), an NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com 
We apologize for this inconvenience. 
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own propaganda? =SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.= free • safe • invaluable If you appreciate our articles, do the right thing and let us know by subscribing. It’s free and it implies no obligation to you— ever. We just want to have a way to reach our most loyal readers on important occasions when their input is necessary. In return you get our email newsletter compiling the best of The Greanville Post several times a week.",FAKE
"Site Map 
Select Page After terrorizing America with Zika scaremongering, Washington Post now admits Zika virus doesn’t cause brain deformities after all 
Posted by Madeline | Oct 26, 2016 | 2016 , Daily Blog | 0 | Thanks Nancy!
Natural News 
(NaturalNews) The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably stupid and ill-informed about nearly everything in the natural world. Today, after months of printing fear-inducing “Zika terrorism” stories that scared America half to death while convincing the government to funnel billions of dollars into Zika vaccine research for Big Pharma, the Washington Post now admits it had no idea what it was talking about . 
But rather than admitting its own science writers were scientifically illiterate propagandists pushing quack narratives as news, the paper now blames other scientists for the gross error by publishing a headline that’s once again dishonest and deceptive: “Scientists are bewildered by Zika’s path across Latin America,” it proclaims. 
Bewildered about “Zika’s path?” The story headline should actually read, “Zika HOAX revealed… it doesn’t cause brain damage after all.” (Read it at this link .) Washington Post has been shamelessly pushing the Zika HOAX for months… with no apology to readers 
In the story, writers Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff essentially reveal that what the Washington Post has been writing about the Zika virus has been based entirely in government propaganda and pandemic lies pushed by the CDC, which of course has close ties to the criminal vaccine industry: 
Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. 
But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. 
Yes, the Washington Post now says the scientists are “bewildered” that their apocalyptic scare stories that caused female athletes to skip out on the Rio Olympics and scared tens of millions of Americans into poisoning themselves with DEET (a neurotoxic chemical) turned out to be total hogwash. DEET, by the way, combines with carbamate class pesticides to cause neurological dysfunction in humans , which coincidentally increases the number of people who watch CNN or read the Washington Post. 
For the record, no one who reads Natural News is surprised by this revelations that has left mainstream scientists “bewildered.” It’s not bewildering to me. I called Zika a total hoax from day one, pointing out that the brain deformities were caused by larvacide chemicals dumped into the water supply , not by Zika. See some of my stories that clearly spelled all this out months before the Washington Post had any clue what they were writing about: 
March 2, 2016: Zika PAYDAY! Obama wants to funnel $1.8 billion for vaccine research and more 
I even published a mini-documentary revealing the published science that shows how DEET insecticide causes brain damage in humans. You can watch it at this link or view the video below: 
If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects… 
Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. 
Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. 
Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post’s own graphic: (partial list) 
Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections… ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections… TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects 
From the WashPost article: 
Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” 
Gee, really? 
The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). 
So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil 
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. 
Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. 
Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . 
“…[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,” says WashPost. 
Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that’s the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. 
Apparently, there isn’t a single “official” scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW… Let’s throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don’t deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They’re all so incredibly stupid, they couldn’t survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren’t giving up hope just yet… science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right 
Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults . Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can’t wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: 
Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) 
And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika “scientists” goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief . Via the WashPost: 
“Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. 
Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn’t even make any sense. 
Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: 
“Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. 
Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I’m a real scientist saying all this 
As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world’s leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that’s the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. 
I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It’s all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science 
As you’ve also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn’t interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. 
Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They’ve got an agenda to push, and it doesn’t matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there’s no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. 
So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official “science” was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health “officials” were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child. 
Red more unintentional scientific comedy at this Washington Post article . Share:",FAKE
"President Barack Obama said the U.S. and its allies must strip away any legitimacy that Islamic State and al-Qaeda claim by portraying themselves as religious movements.

Obama, who has come under criticism from Republicans who say he avoids acknowledging the Muslim roots of extremist groups, said terrorists use religion as a recruiting tool by portraying the U.S. and European nations as being at war with Islam.

“We must never accept the premise they put forward, because it is a lie,” Obama said Wednesday in Washington on the second day of a White House summit on combating extremism. “They are not religious leaders. They’re terrorists. And we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

Deadly attacks in Paris, Sydney and Copenhagen by individuals of Muslim background and possibly inspired by the brutal tactics of Islamic State, along with the group’s spread in Syria, Iraq and now Libya, have raised alarms in Europe and the U.S. about the danger of lone-wolf terrorists, driven by extremist ideology and difficult to detect before they act.

At the summit, the Obama administration is convening representatives of Muslim organizations, law enforcement officials and local political leaders to swap ideas about how to stem root causes of extremism. It also has invited leaders from overseas to take part.

Obama said civic leaders must recognize that Islamic State and al-Qaeda “deliberately target their propaganda in the hopes of reaching and brainwashing young Muslims” through videos, social media and other online outlets. He said the one way to counter that is to alleviate the alienation and poverty that are the extremists’ best recruiting tool.

In the U.S., he said, local and federal authorities must make sure that Muslims aren’t isolated and that they are welcomed and integrated into society.

“Muslim Americans feel they have been unfairly targeted,” he said. “We have to be sure that abuses stop, are not repeated, that we do not stigmatize entire communities.”

Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who is chairman of a political action committee aimed at electing Republicans, called the conference a “farce” in a statement and said the administration should be targeting terrorists rather than offering “pie-in-the-sky social welfare programs” to Muslims here and overseas.

The administration’s strategy is also aimed at drawing in the domestic Muslim leaders who Obama is leaning on to identify and isolate potentially violent extremists. Yet some groups say they remain suspicious about the administration’s motivation.

The Muslim Advocates, an Oakland Calif.-based group that that was invited to a White House meeting earlier this month, expressed concern that Obama’s requests for “partnerships” with Muslim community and religious leaders is code for requiring leaders to play a law enforcement role.

They also blasted Obama for focusing too narrowly on Muslims, a decision that the group says reinforces a negative stereotype that Islam and terror are linked.

“This whole day is focused on American Muslims, frankly,” Farhana Khera, the group’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. “It strikes at the core of what we are as Americans.”

Obama is speaking on the topic again tomorrow at the State Department during a session that includes representatives from overseas, including France, Belgium, Mexico and Japan.",REAL
"Why NATO is put on war footing against Russia 07.11.2016 Jens Stoltenberg claimed that given growing tensions in relations with Russia, hundreds of thousands of the NATO military men would be brought to higher level of readiness. Before that he stated that there's no danger and constructive relations with Moscow should be built. Now, according to him, the NATO authorities intend to prepare significant ground forces, which would be capable of containing 'Russian aggression'. What for are these acts?Andrey Koshkin, Ph.D. in Political Science:'First of all, it should be noted that we've caught the US at double standards in politics, and policy of the NATO military political alliance is the same. They react to Washington's order, which says that they should build-up potential, as Russian aggression is to be shown constantly. And how can it be shown? In order to show Russia's aggression, its own residents and armed forces should be shaken up. How can they be shaken up? Just switched to a more high level of readiness. That is what they are doing. If the Armed Forces are switched to a more high level of readiness, common residents of the Western states will react immediately. Yes, the danger is real if the Armed Forces are put on a war footing, and these are funds after all. The funds should be taken from taxpayers, that is why a new wave of anti-Russian hysteria has been set off in the mass media. Pravda.Ru",FAKE
"Behind the headlines - conspiracies, cover-ups, ancient mysteries and more. Real news and perspectives that you won't find in the mainstream media. Browse: Home / Top five donors to Clinton campaign are Jewish Essential Reading The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part II By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Former City of London insider reveals that the depopulation program would begin with a planned war between Israel and Iran. More importantly, he goes onto to describe how we can derail their plans for global dominance Coming Clean By wmw_admin on April 29, 2004 
Chemtrails are not the product of some ‘Conspiracy Theory’. They are real. We get the low down from an aircraft mechanic who has done his own investigating US ‘backed plan to launch chemical weapon attack on Syria, blame it on Assad govt': Report By wmw_admin on June 15, 2013 
This report appeared in January, 2013, but was subsequently removed from the Mail’s website. Fortunately some observers copied extracts, which we repost here The Advent of the Anti-Christ By Rixon Stewart on August 2, 2010 
A few words on the market meltdown and how it may assist the debut of a truly sinister figure The Anglo-Saxon Mission Part I By wmw_admin on March 1, 2010 
Bill Ryan talks to a former City of London insider who participated in a meeting where the elite’s plans for depopulation were discussed. The meeting, which took place in 2005, also discussed a planned financial collapse Dov Zakheim and the 9/11 Conspiracy By wmw_admin on April 23, 2010 
Our web hosts were threatened with legal action after lawyers representing none other than Dov Zakheim himself claimed this article was “defamatory.” Due to an oversight the article was not fully removed so read it before Zakheim gets us shut down The Lady, The Queen and what it really means By wmw_admin on December 28, 2009 
Every picture tells a story and with some photos and a few words Paul Powers shows us what was hidden in the background when Queen Elizabeth II met pop sensation Lady Gaga They Live By wmw_admin on August 19, 2012 
Considered by some as prophetic, many will find eerie echoes of present day concerns in John Carpenters 24-year-old ‘They Live’. View the cult classic here The Life of an American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel Part II By wmw_admin on October 27, 2006 
Written nearly twenty years ago, Jack Bernstein’s words now have a prophetic ring which he paid for with his life Al Qaeda – The Database By Wayne Madsen on May 15, 2009 
Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, tells of the origins of Al Qaeda and its ultimate purpose",FAKE
"Dragging on for an excruciating eternity, this election season has demeaned democracy, elevated mediocrity and insulted and embarrassed us all on just about every level imaginable: Intellectually, with regard to the lack of focus on policy and substance; ethically, with a complete disregard for integrity and character; and morally, driven by a disgraceful descent into racist and xenophobic vitriol.

Given that our country has consistently climbed down the educational attainment ladder, and that inane and banal reality TV shows draw more eyeballs than books and opera , it should not surprise us that a growing swath of the electorate is more enthused by a coarse, bullying celebrity than by an awkward policy wonk.

But what's doubly disappointing -- as we head into the crucial presidential debates -- is that this lack of intellectual depth is enabled not only by the candidates, but also by the topics they gravitate to, which the media frenzy then exacerbates.

These are topics that don't matter when it comes to making a difference in the future of our country: the size of a candidate's hands (and therefore other body parts), the now-moot birther issue, the Monica Lewinsky and Marla Maples scandals, the name-calling and finger pointing about who is more racist than whom, who is healthier than whom.",REAL
"Via TruthAndAction SPONSORED LINKS 
The location of the tomb is inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The tomb has been sealed since at least 1555 A.D. and was opened briefly as work progressed in restoring the site. 
It’s the location where the body of Jesus is said to have been placed after his crucifixion 2000 years ago. This tomb within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem was opened for only 60 hours as renovation work progressed on this site that is holy to Christians. And a remarkable discovery was made. 
After removing the marble slab that encased the tomb, scientists at the University of Athens and National Geographic were stunned to find a limestone burial shelf intact and a second marble slab with a cross carved into its surface. Researchers were given the unprecedented access as part of restoration work. 
The team were shocked to find portions of the tomb are still intact today, having survived centuries of damage. The original surface was exposed during the restoration work being done at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, according to National Geographic. 
Until then, marble had encased the slab since at least 1555 AD, and likely centuries earlier. When work first began the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of material underneath the marble slab. 
But as researchers continued their work over the course of 60 hours – and with just a few hours left before the tomb was to be resealed, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. Highlighting the sensitivity of the tomb, scientists were given only 60 hours to view the site before it was sealed again. 
‘This is the Holy Rock that has been revered for centuries, but only now can actually be seen,’ said Antonia Moropoulou of the National Technical University of Athens, who is leading the restoration of the Edicule. 
The burial slab was enclosed in an 18th century shrine structure known as the Edicule – a word derived from the Latin term aedicule meaning ‘little house’. The team cut a window into the southern interior wall of the Edicule, exposing one of the cave walls. 
The tomb has now been resealed and will probably not be opened again for hundreds, possibly even thousands, of years. But before it was resealed, the surface of the rock was extensively cataloged. 
There is considerable support for this being the actual place where Jesus’ body was placed, although that cannot be known for certain. The evidence for this is not definitive, however, according to Dan Bahat, a former district archaeologist in Jerusalem and in Galilee. 
‘We may not be absolutely certain that the site of the Holy Sepulchre Church is the site of Jesus burial, but we certainly have no other site that can lay a claim nearly as weighty, and we really have no reason to reject the authenticity of the site,’ Bahat said. 
Given that the site might not be reopened for hundreds or thousands of years, this 60-hour window into the ancient past has given researchers as well as Christian believers an unprecedented opportunity to study the origins of the faith.",FAKE
"Six men in green ties took the stage in the House television studio Tuesday, and House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, a slight leprechaun of a man with silver hair and dark eyebrows, approached the microphone.

“Good mor — top o’ the mornin’ to ya!” Price announced. “Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all.”

It was altogether fitting that Republicans rolled out their budget during a festival of inebriation in honor of the man who magically (and apocryphally) banished snakes from Ireland. What Republicans have done with their budget is no less fantastic: They have employed lucky charms and mystical pots of gold to make them appear more sober about balancing the budget than they actually are.

“We do not rely on gimmicks or creative accounting tricks to balance our budget,” the House Republicans say in the introduction to their fiscal 2016 budget.

True, the budget does not rely on gimmicks. The budget is a gimmick.

It pretends to keep strict limits on defense spending — so-called “sequestration” — but then pumps tens of billions of extra dollars into a slush fund called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” That means the funds count as emergency spending and not as part of the Pentagon budget.

It assumes that current tax cuts will be allowed to expire as scheduled — which would amount to a $900 billion tax increase that nobody believes would be allowed to go into effect.

It proposes to repeal Obamacare but then counts revenues and savings from Obamacare as if the law remained in effect.

It claims to save $5.5 trillion over 10 years, but in the fine print — the budget plan’s instructions to committees — it only asks them to identify about $5 billion in savings over that time.

It assumes more than $1 trillion in cuts to a category known as “other mandatory” programs — but doesn’t specify what those cuts would be.

It relies on $147 billion in additional revenue from “dynamic scoring,” a more generous accounting method.

It doesn’t account for the $200 billion plan now being negotiated to increase doctor payments under Medicare and to extend a children’s health-care program.

The difficulty concealing all these sleights of hand might explain why Price was in such a hurry to leave his news conference Tuesday. His predecessor, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), liked to give lengthy seminars on his conservative budgeting theories, but Price took questions for just six minutes before an aide hollered “last question.” The chairman was gone a minute later, and reporters gave chase to the leprechaun. “Can your budget pass?” one of them asked.

“I think so,” Price said, before locating his confidence. “Sure. Absolutely.”

It was the latest instance of the Republicans discovering how difficult it is to govern now that they have unified control of Congress. In the past four years, budget debuts were academic exercises because there would never be agreement between the Republican House and Democratic Senate. But now the budget might actually mean something, and the firebrands elected in the past three elections need to show how they would handle the country’s finances. It turns out they govern much like those who came before them — with legislative smoke and mirrors.

Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.), one of those on the stage, observed that “folks are playing with the opportunity for the first time in my short congressional career to actually bring a budget to the United States.”

“Playing” is a good verb for the occasion.

Price, a Georgia Republican who ran the conservative Republican Study Committee, delivered a long statement, imparting his assurance that “we believe in America.” At least three times he held up the 43-page budget for the cameras. But after the 10-minute preamble, the questioning quickly got tricky for Price.

Why didn’t he ask committees to come up with more than $5 billion in savings?

“That’s a floor, not a ceiling,” Price said, adding something about “an opportunity to provide a positive solution that the American people desire.”

Andy Taylor of the Associated Press asked him about the $900 billion tax increase and the Obamacare revenues assumed in the budget.

“Because we believe in the American people, and we believe in growth,” replied Price, predicting higher-than-expected economic growth would boost tax revenues.

Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times asked Price if he would detail the $1 trillion in mandatory cuts that the budget doesn’t identify.

“Take a peek at ‘A Balanced Budget for a Stronger America,’ ” Price replied, holding up the budget again for the cameras.

“I’m looking at it,” Weisman said. “It doesn’t specify.”

It didn’t — and that’s the sort of trick Republicans can no longer get away with now that they’re in charge.

Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.",REAL
"President Obama is banning local police departments from receiving a range of military-style equipment from the federal government -- from grenade launchers to bayonets to certain armored vehicles -- as he implements the recommendations of a panel that examined the controversial gear giveaways in the wake of the Ferguson riots.

The White House announced Monday that Washington would no longer provide some military-style gear while putting stricter controls on other weapons and equipment distributed to law enforcement. The details were released in advance of an Obama visit to Camden, N.J., Monday afternoon where he met with youth and law enforcement.

Nine months earlier, scenes of heavily armed police in riot gear dispelling racially charged protests in Ferguson touched off a debate about federal programs that let local law enforcement apply for such equipment. The White House initially suggested Obama would maintain those programs, but an interagency group found ""substantial risk of misusing or overusing"" items like tracked armored vehicles, high-powered firearms and camouflage could undermine trust in police.

Speaking in Camden, Obama said the use of militarized gear by police can give the public the feeling that law enforcement is like ""an occupying force.""

In previewing the president's trip, the White House said that effective immediately, the federal government will no longer fund or provide armored vehicles that run on a tracked system instead of wheels, weaponized aircraft or vehicles, firearms or ammunition of .50-caliber or higher, grenade launchers, bayonets or camouflage uniforms. The federal government also is exploring ways to recall prohibited equipment already distributed.

With scrutiny on police only increasing in the ensuing months after a series of highly publicized deaths of black suspects nationwide, Obama also is unveiling the final report of a task force he created to help build confidence between police and minority communities in particular.

In addition to the new equipment-transfer bans, a longer list of equipment the federal government provides will come under tighter control, including wheeled armored vehicles like Humvees, manned aircraft, drones, specialized firearms, explosives, battering rams and riot batons, helmets and shields. Starting in October, police will have to get approval from their city council, mayor or some other local governing body to obtain it, provide a persuasive explanation of why it is needed and have more training and data collection on the use of the equipment.

The issue of police militarization rose to prominence last year after a white police officer in Ferguson fatally shot unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown, sparking protests. Critics questioned why police in full body armor with armored trucks responded to dispel demonstrators, and Obama seemed to sympathize when ordering a review of the programs that provide the equipment. ""There is a big difference between our military and our local law enforcement and we don't want those lines blurred,"" Obama last in August.

But he did not announce a ban in December with the publication of the review, which showed five federal agencies spent $18 billion on programs that provided equipment including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night-vision devices, 5,235 Humvees, 617 mine-resistant vehicles and 616 aircraft. At the time, the White House defended the programs as proving to be useful in many cases, such as the response to the Boston Marathon bombing. Instead of repealing the programs, Obama issued an executive order that required federal agencies that run the programs to consult with law enforcement and civil rights and civil liberties organizations to recommend changes that make sure they are accountable and transparent.

That working group said in a report out Monday that it developed the list of newly banned equipment because ""the substantial risk of misusing or overusing these items, which are seen as militaristic in nature, could significantly undermine community trust and may encourage tactics and behaviors that are inconsistent with the premise of civilian law enforcement."" The Justice Department did not respond to an inquiry about how many pieces of equipment that are now banned had been previously distributed through federal programs.

The separate report from the 21st Century Policing task force has a long list of recommendations to improve trust in police, including encouraging more transparency about interactions with the public. The White House said 21 police agencies nationwide, including Camden and nearby Philadelphia, have agreed to start putting out never-before released data on citizen interactions like use of force, stops, citations and officer-involved shootings. The administration also is launching an online toolkit to encourage the use of body cameras to record police interactions. And the Justice Department is giving $163 million in grants to incentivize police departments to adopt the report's recommendations.

Ron Davis, director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the Department of Justice, told reporters he hoped the report could be a ""key transformational document"" in rebuilding trust that has been destroyed in recent years between police and minority communities.

""We are without a doubt sitting at a defining moment for American policing,"" said Davis, a 30-year police veteran and former chief of the East Palo Alto (California) Police Department. ""We have a unique opportunity to redefine policing in our democracy, to ensure that public safety becomes more than the absence of crime, that it must also include the presence of justice.""

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.

The notion of an evolutionary process broader than life itself is not entirely new. Indeed, there’s evidence, recounted by Eric Havelock in “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics,” that it was held by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers, who also first gave us the concept of the atom, among many other things. But unlike them or other earlier precursors, England has a specific, unifying, testable evolutionary mechanism in mind.

Quanta fleshed things out a bit more like this:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

It doesn’t mean we should expect life everywhere in the universe — lack of a decent atmosphere or being too far from the sun still makes most of our solar system inhospitable for life with or without England’s perspective. But it does mean that “under certain conditions” where life is possible — as it is here on Earth, obviously — it is also quite probable, if not, ultimately, inevitable. Indeed, life on Earth could well have developed multiple times independently of each other, or all at once, or both. The first truly living organism could have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of siblings, all born not from a single physical parent, but from a physical system, literally pregnant with the possibility of producing life. And similar multiple births of life could have happened repeatedly at different points in time.

That also means that Earth-like planets circling other suns would have a much higher likelihood of carrying life as well. We’re fortunate to have substantial oceans as well as an atmosphere — the heat baths referred to above — but England’s theory suggests we could get life with just one of them — and even with much smaller versions, given enough time. Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1600, was perhaps the first to take Copernicanism to its logical extension, speculating that stars were other suns, circled by other worlds, populated by beings like ourselves. His extreme minority view in his own time now looks better than ever, thanks to England.

If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show — that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.

Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo — a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course. There are various equivalent ways of stating the law, one of which is that energy cannot pass from a cooler to a warmer body without extra work being done. Ginsberg’s theorem (as in poet Allen Ginsberg) puts it like this: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t even get out of the game.” Although creationists have long mistakenly believed that evolution is a violation of the Second Law, actual scientists have not. For example, physicist Stephen G. Brush, writing for the American Physical Society in 2000, in “Creationism Versus Physical Science,” noted: “As Ludwig Boltzmann noted more than a century ago, thermodynamics correctly interpreted does not just allow Darwinian evolution, it favors it.”

A simple explanation of this comes from a document in the thermodynamics FAQ subsection of TalkOrigins Archive (the  first and foremost online repository of reliable information on the creation/evolution controversy), which in part explains: Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder. However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more usable energy still? That passage goes right to the heart of the matter. Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here. The driving flow of energy — whether from the sun or some other source — can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well — cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example. Without explicitly using the term “dissipative structures,” the passage above went on to invoke them thus: Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature? In a very real sense, Prigogine’s work laid the foundations for what England is doing today, which is why it might be overstated to credit England with originating this theory, as several commentators at Quanta pointed out, noting other progenitors as well (here, here and here, among others). But already England appears to have assembled a collection of analytical tools, along with a sophisticated multidisciplinary theoretical approach, which promises to do much more than simply propound a theory, but to generate a whole new research agenda giving detailed meaning to that theoretical conjecture. And that research agenda is already starting to produce results. (See his research group home page for more.) It’s the development of this sort of detailed body of specific mutually interrelated results that will distinguish England’s articulation of his theory from other earlier formulations that have not yet been translated into successful theory-testing research agendas. Above all, as described on the home page mentioned above, England is involved in knitting together the understanding of life and various stages of life-like processes combining the perspectives of biology and physics: Living things are good at collecting information about their surroundings, and at putting that information to use through the ways they interact with their environment so as to survive and replicate themselves. Thus, talking about biology inevitably leads to talking about decision, purpose, and function. At the same time, living things are also made of atoms that, in and of themselves, have no particular function. Rather, molecules and the atoms from which they are built exhibit well-defined physical properties having to do with how they bounce off of, stick to, and combine with each other across space and over time. Making sense of life at the molecular level is all about building a bridge between these two different ways of looking at the world. If that sounds intriguing, you might enjoy this hour-long presentation of his work (with splashes of local Swedish color) — especially (but not only) if you’re a science nerd. Whether or not England’s theory proves out in the end, he’s already doing quite a lot to build that bridge between worldviews and inspire others to make similar efforts. Science is not just about making new discoveries, but about seeing the world in new ways — which then makes new discoveries almost inevitable. And England has already succeeded in that.  As the Quanta article explained: England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab. “He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.” Creationists often cast themselves as humble servants of God, and paint scientists as arrogant, know-it-all rebels against him. But, unsurprisingly, they’ve got it all backwards, once again. England’s work reminds us that it’s scientists’ willingness to admit our own ignorance and confront it head on — rather than papering over it — that unlocks the great storehouse of wonders we live in and gives us our most challenging, satisfying quests.",REAL
"CNN columnist John D. Sutter is reporting on a tiny number -- 2 degrees -- that may have a huge effect on the future. He'd like your help. Subscribe to the ""2 degrees"" newsletter or follow him on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram . He's jdsutter on Snapchat.

(CNN) Update: This poll is now closed and the results are in: Readers selected food and meat's impact on climate change as the next topic for CNN's Two° series. Thanks to everyone who voted! Sign up for the Two° newsletter to get updates about that story and this series.

Every story needs a villain -- and climate change is no exception.

Knowing which countries and industries contribute to climate change, and in what proportions, is key to understanding how we can fix this problem and avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming , which is what policymakers regard as the threshold for ""dangerous"" climate change.

Plus, this story is complicated by the fact that nearly all of us -- certainly those reading this column on a mobile phone or computer -- contribute to climate change in some way.

We're all partly to blame.

I'm going to be exploring this idea of ""climate villains"" for the next month or so, as part of CNN's Two° series , which looks at that threshold for dangerous warming. That's the point at which some island nations are expected to be submerged , drought risks go up considerably and water availability goes down.

I'd like your help in deciding which bad guys to target.

Below, you'll find a Facebook poll that lists four of my favorite climate villains, all of which came from your suggestions. Pick the one you find most interesting and I'll go out into the world to report on the winner. The poll closes at 5 p.m. ET on Sunday, August 16.

I've met people -- smart people, reasonable people -- who think that climate change is caused by aerosols from hairspray (it isn't) or that it's just part of a natural warming cycle (it's not). Burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat, as well as chopping down rainforests, contributes to climate change.

Here's a breakdown of global greenhouse gas emissions by sector, according to 2012 data synthesized by the World Resources Institute. This is kind of a ""blame"" chart.

On Wednesday, I asked people on Facebook to identify their preferred climate villains . Among the most interesting (and sometimes humorous) responses you submitted: dinosaurs (""they turned into the oil that we want to get at, right?""); millennials (""It is always millennials' fault for everything ...""); parents (""the process of procreation ... results in increases in demand of the earth's resources and is the driving force for most of our planet's woes""). I was mentioned by name (""John Sutter. I bet he's double secret super villain. No doubt.""), as was Willis Carrier , the guy who commercialized the modern air conditioner, and James Watt, who invented an efficient steam engine

You also identified more nebulous bad guys, like apathy, greed, ignorance and consumerism. Geography found its way into the mix, too. China, America and the ""3rd world"" all made your list.

Some countries are more to blame than others, sure. But it turns out that the most industrialized countries -- the United States, European countries and, increasingly, China and India -- are among the biggest contributors to climate change, because they burn the most fossil fuels.

Those are the countries most responsible for the warming we're already seeing, as well as for much of the warming that we will seen in coming years. According to the World Bank, the atmosphere already has warmed 0.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times , and about 1.5 degrees of warming is already ""locked in"" to the atmospheric system because of how much carbon we've burned.

All of this data is a rough guide to help you vote. Each of the four topics you suggested for this poll is a worthy candidate. Our diets, our reliance on fossil fuel reserves, our willingness to turn precious forests into farms and our addiction to gas-burning cars and other dirty modes of transit -- all of these contribute to climate change. And each is worth exploring in depth.

I don't want to play the blame game forever. I agree with those of you who said we need to move past finger-pointing and toward solutions. I do think, however, that by exploring who and what's causing climate change, we'll have a better sense of how to solve this urgent problem.

So, please vote. Tell your friends. And thank you for helping decide where I'll focus my energy.",REAL
"When a U.S. special operations team suddenly surrounded the car carrying the Islamic State's second in command, he was given the split-second option of surrendering. Instead, he began firing.

Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, also known as Abu Ala al-Afri and Haji Imam, died in a hail of bullets early Thursday morning on an isolated road in eastern Syria, a location described by U.S. military officials as being ""in the middle of nowhere.""

Defense Secretary Ash Carter told a press conference Friday he was ISIS' finance minister. But the terror leader also was considered the man most likely to take over for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, if he were captured or killed.

Details of the takedown emerged Friday, including descriptions of the elite U.S. assault force arriving in helicopters as drones flew overhead, tracking him.

When al-Afri refused to surrender, he and all those with him were killed. If he had been captured, he would have been interrogated and then handed over to Iraqi authorities.

The U.S. team had been practicing the mission for weeks. ""It was a really good mission,"" one source familiar with the developments told Fox News. ""It was precision and went as planned.""

""We are systematically eliminating ISIL's cabinet,"" Carter said at the news conference.

“The removal of this ISIL leader will hamper the organization’s ability to conduct operations both inside and outside of Iraq and Syria.""

Carter described the target as responsible for funding ISIS operations and involved in some external affairs and plots.

He said this was the second senior leader successfully targeted this month, in addition to the group’s “minister of war” Omar al-Shishani, or “Omar the Chechen,” killed in a recent U.S. airstrike.

A U.S. official told Fox News that the Brussels terror attack earlier this week prompted the raid in Syria.

Al-Afri is a former physics professor from Iraq who originally joined Al Qaeda in 2004. After spending time in an Iraqi prison, he was released in 2012 and traveled to Syria to join up with what is now ISIS.

On May 14, 2014, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated him as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” for his role with ISIS.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joe Dunford, also said at the press conference that more U.S. troops might be headed to Iraq soon.

""The secretary and I both believe that there will be an increase to the U.S. forces in Iraq in the coming weeks,” Dunford said. “But that decision hasn't been made.""

He added that despite a number of high profile strikes against the terrorists, “by no means would I say that we're about to break the back of ISIL or that the fight is over.""

Fox News’ Lucas Tomlinson and Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.",REAL
"Home / Blue Privilege / Deputy Shot and Killed by Fellow Deputy While Having a Conversation on Weapon Safety Deputy Shot and Killed by Fellow Deputy While Having a Conversation on Weapon Safety Matt Agorist November 2, 2016 1 Comment 
Fresno, CA — A 20-year veteran deputy of the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department was shot and killed Monday by his fellow officer. Officials immediately ruled it an accident and began the narrative that the gun somehow just went off on its own. 
“We do not know yet the mechanics of how the weapon discharged,” Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said. “So far, we have absolutely no reason to believe this was anything more than a tragic accidental shooting.” 
Deputy Sgt. Rod Lucas was having a conversation near the Fresno Yosemite International Airport about how to carry backup weapons when one deputy’s weapon was discharged striking Lucas in the chest. 
Lucas was in the room with two other deputies, and, according to Mims, there was no dispute at the time — ironically, just a conversation about weapons safety. 
“The detective had his weapon out. During this discussion, the detective’s weapon discharged,” the sheriff said. “Sgt. Lucas was struck by the bullet in his chest, and he dropped to the ground.” 
According to FOX, Mims did not disclose the type of firearm involved in the incident, calling it “an improved secondary weapon for the detective.” She said all witnesses have been interviewed except for the detective, who was not identified, due to his mental state which she described as extremely upset. 
“We’re giving him the time he needs,” said Mims, who declined to identify the detective by name. “We’re taking care of him.” 
Imagine for a moment, that a non-cop ‘accidentally’ shot and killed another man. Would they be allowed this same opportunity to not be investigated? Would a person who just killed someone in a room be ‘taken care of’ if they simply used the excuse of the gun accidentally going off? 
Sadly enough, this is the third such incident in only a week in which a cop’s firearm ‘accidentally discharged’ and put the lives of others in danger. 
At a Halloween party over the weekend, a cop in North Carolina shot and severely injured her own daughter as she showed off her service weapon. She has not been charged. 
Prior to that shooting, a cop in Ohio fired his weapon into a daycare center — while it was fully occupied. 
Despite the officer clearly admitting to committing the misdemeanor offense of discharging a firearm within city limits, police have yet to charge him. 
Imagine if the people in these incidents were not police officers. The double standard is glaring. 
Aside from the above the law treatment of these officers, the excuse of the weapons accidentally discharging is nothing short of asinine. 
Guns do not fire themselves. 
Weapons companies spend a significant amount of time and money making sure their guns don’t simply ‘go off.’ While it is entirely possible for older single action revolvers, which required the hammer to be cocked, to go off when dropped, the idea of a modern pistol accidentally firing without someone pulling the trigger is simply absurd. 
There are more guns than people in the United States. It is estimated that Americans own around 357 million firearms. If these weapons were so prone to accidentally firing, there would be a lot of dead Americans. However, that is clearly not the case. 
The reality is that these cases involve police, who are entrusted by the public to responsibly carry weapons, failing miserably at their jobs. You could rest assured that if a mere citizen were to shoot and kill another person while ‘discussing backup weapons,’ they would be cast out by the anti-gun crowd and plastered across the mainstream media. They would also be in jail. 
However, if your job is to carry a firearm for a living to ostensibly protect society and you kill your own colleague while doing this job — you are immediately presumed innocent and given special treatment. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter and now on Steemit Share Google + Phil Freeman 
Improved backup weapon means it’s been to the gunsmith for modification, reduction in trigger pull is the most common. So my guess is detective kojack was showing off his new play pretty and the hair trigger spring he just installed and shot this cop. Well done safety meeting I say. One less gangster in Fresno. Social",FAKE
"JANESVILLE, Wis. — None of the three remaining Republican presidential candidates would guarantee Tuesday night that they would support the eventual GOP nominee for president, departing from previous vows to do so and injecting new turmoil into an already tumultuous contest.

Mogul Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich were each given a chance during a CNN town hall in Milwaukee to definitively state they would support the nominee. All three declined to renew their pledge. As recently as March 3, in a Fox News debate, all three said they would support the nominee.

“No, I don’t anymore,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, when asked if he remains committed to the Republican National Committee pledge he previously signed. Trump said that he would instead wait to see who emerges as the nominee before promising his support.

The GOP presidential candidates talked about the charges against Donald Trump's campaign manager, Muslims in the U.S. and more, and backed away from past pledges to support whomever becomes the nominee during the CNN town hall on March 29. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

“I have been treated very unfairly,” Trump added.

Trump and his team have braced for the possibility of a contested convention in recent weeks, as opposing forces have set their sights on denying him the nomination by preventing him from crossing the necessary delegate threshold.

Trump said that he believes establishment Republicans and the RNC in particular have not treated him with respect.

“I’m the front-runner by a lot. I’m beating Ted Cruz by millions of votes,” he said. “This was not going to happen with the Republican Party. People who have never voted before, Democrats and independents are pouring in and voting for me.”

Cruz was asked three times by Cooper whether he would support the nominee. Each time, he declined to pledge to support the nominee no matter what.

""I'm not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife and attacks my family,"" Cruz said, referring to Trump.

When Cooper followed up, Cruz replied: ""Let me tell you my solution to that: Donald is not going to be the GOP nominee.""

Cooper pressed him a third time. Cruz responded: ""I gave you my answer.""

Kasich said he would have to ""see what happens"" in the race before he could answer the question.

Trump pointed to strategic maneuvering in Louisiana that could result in Cruz capturing more delegates from the state despite the fact that Trump won the statewide vote.

“I call it bad politics. When somebody goes in and wins the election and goes in and gets less delegates than the guy that lost, I don’t think that’s right,"" he said.

On the question of supporting the ultimate party nominee, “I’ll see who it is,” Trump said. ""I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I love the Republican Party.""",REAL
"Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday endorsed the three-year expiration date in President Obama's request to Congress to authorize military force against the Islamic State -- backing off his position from just last week.

The newly sworn-in Pentagon chief testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in support of the president's new proposal for war powers to target ISIS militants.

He said it gives the military the necessary authority and flexibility to wage this campaign, and specifically addressed the three-year sunset.

""The president's proposed authorization affords the American people the chance to assess our progress in three years' time, and provides the next president and the next Congress the opportunity to reauthorize it, if they find it necessary,"" he testified. ""To me, this is a sensible and principled provision.""

But just last week at a similar House hearing, Carter said such a timeline would be ""political.""

He said the three-year sunset ""is not something that I would have deduced from the Department of Defense's necessities, the campaign's necessities, or our obligation to the troops.""

However, he said at the time that he understands why it was included. Carter said last week -- and reiterated on Wednesday -- that he still ""cannot assure"" that the fight against ISIS will be over in three years.

Congressional Republicans and other critics of the president's plan argue that an expiration date on such a military effort tells the enemy the U.S. military's plans. Republicans also have expressed unhappiness that Obama chose to exclude any long-term commitment of ground forces, while some Democrats voiced dismay that he had opened the door to any deployment whatsoever.

Carter and other top administration officials adamantly defended the terms of the request at Wednesday's hearing. Carter said the request does not include a long-term commitment of ground forces because ""our strategy does not call for them.""

He spoke alongside Secretary of State John Kerry and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he hopes the hearing would help start a process where both parties can reach agreement on a new authorization to fight ISIS militants, who have seized territory across Iraq and Syria. Obama sent his draft to Capitol Hill last month.

""As we have received that authorization for the use of military force, what we have come to understand is that -- and this is not a pejorative statement, it's an observation -- we don't know of a single Democrat in Congress, in the United States Senate, anyway, that supports that authorization for the use of military force,"" Corker said.

Obama's proposal would allow the use of military force against ISIS for three years, unbounded by national borders. The fight could be extended to any ""closely related successor entity"" to ISIS, which has overrun parts of Iraq and Syria.

The 2002 congressional authorization that preceded the American-led invasion of Iraq would be repealed under the White House proposal, a step some Republicans were unhappy to see. But a separate authorization approved by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks would remain in force, to the consternation of some Democrats.

The struggle to define any role for American ground forces is likely to determine the outcome of the administration's request for legislation. The White House has said that the proposal was intentionally ambiguous on that point to give the president flexibility, although the approach also was an attempt to bridge a deep divide in Congress.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.",REAL
"Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday that he is indebted to America for welcoming his Cuban immigrant parents, while he continued to back away from his 2013 legislation that would have allowed illegal immigrants to become U.S. citizens.",REAL
"Anderson Cooper was, mostly, the model of a good debate moderator: focused on issues, well-prepared, quick to follow up, only occasionally lapsing into stupidity—as when he asked Bernie Sanders about his past as a conscientious objector, a topic relevant to exactly nobody—and generally keeping things moving.

Granted, Cooper had a vastly different situation to contend with than his predecessors who dealt with the Republicans. There were only five candidates onstage, and none of them were eager to go to war with each other. All that was left to do was talk about actual policy. In fact, the moment that drew the biggest round of applause from the Las Vegas audience was when Sanders growled that he was bored with all the mishegoss around Hillary Clinton’s emails. Refusing to attack Hillary? The crowd ate it up.

And what about Hillary? All eyes had been trained on her—would she crumble under the weight of the email scandal? Would she tremble as Bernie barked his applause lines? Of course not. The debate provided her with perhaps the most sustained platform she has had so far to show off her policy chops, remind everyone that she is a fearsomely polished debater and bask in the warmth of a crowd that was truly on her side. There was nothing especially new about anything she said—time and again, she took a more cautious, more hawkish approach to the issues thrown at her—but she made no major errors and even landed a few surprising and effective blows, as when she took Sanders to task for his record on gun control. Her biggest potential pitfalls—like her disastrous foreign policy record, her close ties to Wall Street and those nagging emails—were mopped up far more easily than they might have been. In one of her smarter lines, she defended her vote to invade Iraq by noting that President Obama had asked her to serve in his cabinet—an answer that managed to both shamelessly evade the question about her judgment and win over the debate audience all at the same time.

Sanders has been one of Clinton’s top headaches, but his resolute unwillingness to go after her too much meant that he didn’t pose a real challenge for her during the debate. Instead, he stuck to his core themes, belting his messages about inequality and bankers out like Ethel Merman trying to hit the back of the balcony. Bernie Sanders knows how to work a crowd of liberals, so this strategy worked. It’s tough to see how that will change the dynamic of the race, though. If Sanders is serious about winning the nomination, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s through Hillary Clinton. As she showed, she won’t be shy about taking him down if she has to. As for the other three people in the race… well, they were also present. Martin O’Malley made an intermittently energetic appeal to be the alternative Bernie Sanders. It was an appeal that mostly fell flat. Jim Webb spent the majority of his time either whining about how he wasn’t being allowed to speak more or giving what sure sounded like sentences but didn’t quite seem to end up as sentences. And Lincoln Chafee gave what is likely to go down in history as one of the worst debate answers of all time when he explained his vote for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act by saying that he had just gotten to the Senate, didn’t know what was going on, and, oh, his father had just died. Nice knowing ya, Linc! One last thing: CNN desperately needs to rethink how it uses its journalists in these debates. Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Juan Carlos Lopez were quite literally tokenized, pressed into service only when a topic relevant to their particular demographic came up. Under the circumstances, it would have been better not to have them there at all. Or maybe—gasp!—CNN could have someone who is not a white man lead a debate for once?",REAL
"October 28, 2016 112 While the Western press continues scaring its public of ""Russian aggression"" and blaming Russia for influencing the 2016 American presidential elections, Vladimir Putin just made a speech that is unlikely to appear in any mainstream media. Share on Facebook 
At the meeting of experts at the Valdai Club in Sochi on October 27, Putin said about the U.S. elections: “a look at various candidates’ platforms gives the impression that they were made from the same mould – the difference is slight, if there is any.” 
Putin called U.S. stories of “Russian hacking the U.S. election” as a “mythical and imaginary problem” and “the hysteria the USA has whipped up over supposed Russian meddling in the American presidential election,” instead of focusing on the domestic issues: 
“The United States has plenty of genuinely urgent problems, it would seem, from the colossal public debt to the increase in firearms violence and cases of arbitrary action by the police. You would think that the election debates would concentrate on these and other unresolved problems, but the elite has nothing with which to reassure society, it seems, and therefore attempt to distract public attention by pointing instead to supposed Russian hackers, spies, agents of influence and so forth.” 
“Does anyone seriously imagine that Russia can somehow influence the American people’s choice? America is not some kind of ‘banana republic’, after all, but is a great power. Do correct me if I am wrong.” 
Putin reminded us who the real rulers are: 
“The expanding class of the supranational oligarchy and bureaucracy, which is in fact often not elected and not controlled by society, or the majority of citizens, who want simple and plain things – stability, free development of their countries, prospects for their lives and the lives of their children, preserving their cultural identity, and, finally, basic security for themselves and their loved ones.” 
Referring to the Western elites’ downplaying the growing gap between rich and poor, Putin said: 
“It seems as if the elites do not see the deepening stratification in society and the erosion of the middle class, while at the same time, they implant ideological ideas that, in my opinion, are destructive to cultural and national identity. And in certain cases, in some countries they subvert national interests and renounce sovereignty in exchange for the favor of the suzerain.” 
Putin reminded everyone that current situation of instability in the world is a direct result of the choice made by the United States after the end of the Cold War to take “the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.” By taking this course, the U.S. missed a chance to make globalization “more harmonious and sustainable in nature.” 
In their euphoria of winning the Cold war, the United States “essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organisations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, and not for all. But far from everyone was ready to agree with this.” 
This victorious attitude led to the system of international relations where “rules and principles, in the economy and in politics, are constantly being distorted and we often see what only yesterday was taken as a truth and raised to dogma status reversed completely. “ 
On the Western hypocrisy and double talk, Putin said: 
“If the powers that be today find some standard or norm to their advantage, they force everyone else to comply. But if tomorrow these same standards get in their way, they are swift to throw them in the bin, declare them obsolete, and set or try to set new rules.” 
Russian president reminded about the U.S.-led decision “to launch airstrikes in the center of Europe, against Belgrade, and then came Iraq, and then Libya,” and turning the UN into a tool of U.S. foreign policy: 
“The operations in Afghanistan also started without the corresponding decision from the United Nations Security Council. In their desire to shift the strategic balance in their favor these countries broke apart the international legal framework that prohibited deployment of new missile defense systems. They created and armed terrorist groups, whose cruel actions have sent millions of civilians into flight, made millions of displaced persons and immigrants, and plunged entire regions into chaos.” 
In the global economy, multilateral institutions also became a tool to promote the interests of few: 
“We see how free trade is being sacrificed and countries use sanctions as a means of political pressure, bypass the World Trade Organization and attempt to establish closed economic alliances with strict rules and barriers, in which the main beneficiaries are their own transnational corporations. And we know this is happening. They see that they cannot resolve all of the problems within the WTO framework and so think, why not throw the rules and the organization itself aside and build a new one instead.” 
Always referring to the U.S. as “some of our partners,” Putin stressed that they “demonstrate no desire to resolve the real international problems in the world today.” Instead of making OSCE, “a crucial mechanism for ensuring common European and also trans-Atlantic security,” it was shaped into “an instrument in the service of someone’s foreign policy interests.” 
About constant vilification of Russia and trumpeting of “Russian aggression,” Putin said: “they continue to churn out threats, imaginary and mythical threats such as the ‘Russian military threat’. This is a profitable business that can be used to pump new money into defense budgets at home, get allies to bend to a single superpower’s interests, expand NATO and bring its infrastructure, military units and arms closer to our borders. 
Of course, it can be a pleasing and even profitable task to portray oneself as the defender of civilization against the new barbarians. The only thing is that Russia has no intention of attacking anyone. This is all quite absurd. 
It is unthinkable, foolish and completely unrealistic. It is simply absurd to even conceive such thoughts. And yet they use these ideas in pursuit of their political aims. 
The question is, if things continue in this vein, what awaits the world? What kind of world will we have tomorrow? Do we have answers to the questions of how to ensure stability, security and sustainable economic growth? Do we know how we will make a more prosperous world?’ ",FAKE
"Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. 
Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. 
Privacy Policy 
By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter 
Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!",FAKE
"In retaliation for the gruesome killing of Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya, Egypt sent its air force on the attack against Islamic State targets there Monday, in a move that threatened to ensnare Egypt in a regional conflict with the militants.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry on Monday called on the U.S.-led coalition striking Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq to broaden its scope to North Africa and take action against the extremist group in Libya. Italy said it would weigh a military intervention in its former colony across the Mediterranean to thwart the Islamic State.

Libya’s air force also said that it had launched raids against militants in eastern Libya in coordination with Egypt and that the strikes had killed more than 60 fighters. The chief of staff for Libya’s air force told Egyptian state television that the raids would continue Tuesday.

Egyptian fighter jets targeted Islamic State training camps and weapons stocks in Libya in a wave of dawn airstrikes, according to a statement from the Egyptian armed forces. Egypt’s military did not specify where its strikes took place.

“We must take revenge for the Egyptian blood that was shed,” said the statement from Egypt’s military, which was posted along with a video of a warplane taking off at night. Later, the army posted footage of four strikes it said were carried out on “Libyan soil.”

“Seeking retribution from murderers and criminals is our duty,” the army said. “Let those far and near know that Egyptians have a shield that protects them.”

The statement marked the first time Egypt has publicly acknowledged military involvement in Libya, which has been torn apart by political chaos since an uprising that ousted longtime dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. In August, U.S. intelligence officials said Egypt was carrying out strikes against Islamist groups in Libya in joint operations with the United Arab Emirates. Egypt denied those claims, however.

Islamic State militants released a horrific video Sunday of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians who had been taken hostage in the Libyan city of Sirte in two separate incidents in December and January.

In the video, masked jihadists marched the Christians, who were from Egypt’s Coptic minority, onto a sandy beach and forced them to their knees before sawing off their heads.

The brutal killings were portrayed as retaliation against what the video referred to as “the hostile Egyptian church.” Captions refer to Kamilia Shehata, an Egyptian Coptic woman who in 2010 was rumored to have converted to Islam before police and the church clergy isolated her. The Coptic Church in Egypt said Sunday that it had identified the men in the video as the missing Egyptians.

The footage was the first propaganda video from the Libyan branch of the Islamic State, which in Iraq and Syria has declared a caliphate over a wide swath of territory under its rule.

At the Vatican, Pope Francis paid tribute to the victims.

“The blood of our Christian brothers is a testimony which cries out to be heard. It makes no difference whether they be Catholics, Orthodox, Copts or Protestants. They are Christians. Their blood is one and the same,” he said.

In Beirut, the leader of the Hezbollah movement, which has been fighting the Islamic State in Syria and now Iraq, condemned the beheadings.

At least three militant groups in Libya have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, announcing “provinces” of the caliphate in the south, east and around the capital, Tripoli, in the west. Libya’s turmoil has allowed the extremists to make inroads into several cities.

A political crisis has split Libya’s leadership and the armed groups that proliferated after the uprising into two vying governments — one in Tripoli led by Islamists and another in Tobruk that is recognized by the international community.

In the fracturing of the country since the removal of Gaddafi, Egypt has backed more-secular forces aligned with former Libyan general Khalifa Hifter, who launched his own offensive against Islamist militants in the eastern city of Benghazi last spring. Egypt shares a porous 700-mile border with Libya.

In Rome, officials said Italy would weigh participating in a military intervention to keep forces from the Islamic State group from advancing in Libya should diplomatic efforts fail, the Associated Press reported.

Defense Minister Roberta Pinotti has said Rome could contribute 5,000 troops to lead such a military mission. But Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Italy would defer for now to the U.N. Security Council.

Reports in Libyan media said Monday that air raids in the eastern city of Derna, a jihadist stronghold, had killed a number of people, but those reports could not be immediately verified.

Videos posted on social media purported to show destroyed buildings in Derna allegedly targeted in the strikes.

The Tripoli-based branch that claimed the beheadings also claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed 10 people, including one American, in a luxury hotel in the capital last month.

“The Egyptian people are shocked,” said Safwat al-Zayyat, a retired general in Egypt’s military. “But there is an attempt [by the jihadists] to drag Egypt” into war in Libya, he said.

“We must be cautious, as the Americans say, of putting boots on the ground.”

Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report.",REAL
"Paul Joseph Watson Senior British army officer and former deputy supreme allied commander Europe Gen. Sir Richard Shirreff warns that NATO faces “nuclear war with Russia in Europe,” and that America is already technically at war with Russia. In a hawkish article for CNN , Shirreff asserts that the west faces the biggest threat from Russia since the Cold War and that Vladmir Putin plans to “re-establish Russia’s status as one of the world’s great powers” by marching into the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Comparing the west’s policy towards Putin to the appeasement of Hitler, Shirreff claims that Moscow, “may have already lit the fuse that could lead to the unthinkable: nuclear war with Russia in Europe.” Under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, an attack on one NATO member country represents an attack on all member countries, meaning the United States would be at war with Russia if Russian troops set foot in Baltic countries. “A Russian attack on the Baltic states puts America at war with Russia — meaning nuclear war, because Russia integrates nuclear weapons into every aspect of its military doctrine,” writes Shirreff. He also states that “Russia is at war with America already,” recycling the claim, which remains unproven, that Russia is behind the email hacks that led to Wikileaks’ publicizing of Clinton campaign emails. “And don’t think Russia would limit itself to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Any form 
FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK",FAKE
"Puerto Rico defaults on a $422-million debt payment Sunday, but Congress can't agree on a rescue plan with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers wary of any bailout bill.

A member of a labor union shouts slogans while holding a Puerto Rico flag during a protest in San Juan September 11, 2015. Thousands of public sector workers demonstrated on Friday against an austerity plan to help pull Puerto Rico out of a massive debt crisis, saying the private sector should take more of the pain. The island's government is calling for shared sacrifice, and concessions from citizens and investors alike, as it tries to lift itself out of a $72 billion debt hole.

Puerto Rico’s May 1 deadline on a $422-million debt payment has arrived, and US lawmakers are no closer to finding a solution for the island’s financial woes.

Most of Sunday’s payment is principal and interest due from the Government Development Bank, Puerto Rico’s main bond issuer and fiscal agent.

“That deadline is imminent, but Republicans in the House and Democrats in the administration are still haggling over the terms of a bill to rescue Puerto Rico,” writes The New York Times. “Missing the payment risks further destabilizing its shrunken economy. And there are concerns that the passage of any legislation could be delayed until the island nears the tipping point of its debt woes: a $2-billion debt payment due on July 1.”

Before Congress left Washington Friday for a weeklong recess, legislators were deadlocked over any plan that could be seen as similar to bailout bills of the 2008 financial crisis. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is leading a draft of a tentative rescue plan in the House, but it has faced opposition from legislators in both parties who see the bill as nothing more than a bailout.

“For me, I think to any human being, ‘bailout’ means you’re going to get money to solve your problem,” said Representative Bishop. But the bill would “give Puerto Rico access to a court-enforced debt restructuring in exchange for the imposition of a federal fiscal oversight board,” so the island would get no direct money out of the deal. “So to say it’s a bailout, it’s obviously not just a stretch of the meaning of the word, there has to [be] an ulterior motive.”

Puerto Rico’s Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla is frustrated with Washington’s inaction because he has warned about a default on Sunday’s deadline for months. And while Washington may be at a standstill, the financial crisis has everyday implications for the 3.47 million people who call Puerto Rico home.

The island’s unemployment rate was 11.8 percent in March, more than twice  the overall US rate of five percent. Tens of thousands of government workers have been laid off since 2009 to cut costs and 10 percent of the island’s schools have been closed since 2014.

These personal hardships along with others have led to Puerto Rico’s largest mass exodus in the last 50 years. The island county has witnessed a 9 percent population decline in the 21st century, with almost seven percent occurring between 2010 and 2015.

“Population growth was once the norm in Puerto Rico,” explains Pew Research in a March study of population data from the US Census Bureau. “The island’s population grew by 10% from 1980 to 1990, and by 8% from 1990 to 2000. But as the effects of a decade-long economic recession have mounted, Puerto Ricans – who are US citizens at birth – have increasingly moved to the US mainland, with many settling in Florida.”

According to the Census Bureau data, economic opportunity is a primary driver for the mass outmigration: 40 percent of the island-born Puerto Ricans moving to the continental US say their main reason for moving was job-related, and another 39 percent cite ""family and household"" reasons.

But the continental US is not immune to Puerto Rico’s financial ills.

“A massive default from Puerto Rican bonds can create a financial contagion in the US municipal bond market,” Jose Caraballo-Cueto, Director of the Census Information Center at the University of Puerto Rico, writes for NBC News. And the new influx of Puerto Ricans to the continental US will further strain our country’s public services, adds Dr. Caraballo-Cueto, as the majority of islanders moving to the mainland are very poor. “Moreover, U.S. exports – especially agricultural products – to Puerto Rico will be reduced even further if the Great Depression of Puerto Rico deepens.”

And regardless of future side effects of the island’s bankruptcy on the overall US economy, the US government has “a shared responsibility” on Puerto Rico’s crisis, notes Caraballo-Cueto. Not only has the US banned Puerto Rico’s access to federal and local bankruptcy laws that could have restructured 70 percent of the country’s debt, but it has also upheld a marine law from 1920, the Jones Act, that cripples the country’s international trading by essentially only permitting US ships to enter or leave Puerto Rican ports as all other foreign vessels are subject to absurdly high customs and import fees.

“Most people think July 1 is atomic bomb day,” Sergio Marxuach, public policy director of the Center for a New Economy in Puerto Rico, tells The Washington Post. “ May 1 is still significant.”",REAL
"Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the senator from Texas vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic. “It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”

Trump added: “I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Cruz responded to Trump’s comments on Twitter later Tuesday evening by referring to an iconic episode of the sitcom “Happy Days,” in which the character Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis. The image has become a symbol of something shopworn and overdone.

Trump’s remarks — part of a backstage interview before a rally here Monday night — come as Cruz is rising as a serious threat in the presidential campaign, especially in Iowa, where some polls have shown Cruz eclipsing the billionaire mogul. The two have had a cordial and at times even friendly relationship over the past year, but they are competing intensely for the support of conservatives as the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses draw near.

There have been recent signs of tension. At a rally last month in Iowa, Trump told voters of Cruz: “Just remember this — you’ve got to remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, okay? Just remember that . . . just remember.”

In the interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he was providing a candid assessment of his leading opponent rather than initiating a personal attack and reviving the “birther” debate that he once led against President Obama. He repeatedly said he is hearing chatter on the topic among voices on the right. “People are bringing it up,” he said.

Trump has veered from shrugging off the issue to raising more questions himself. In an interview with ABC News in September, Trump said he did not think Cruz’s birthplace was an issue. “I hear it was checked out by every attorney and every which way and I understand Ted is in fine shape,” he said.

But months earlier in Iowa, Trump told reporters that it could be a “difficult problem.”

“He’s a friend of mine. I have great respect for him. . . . certainly it’s a stumbling block, and he’s going to have to have it solved before he goes too far,” Trump said, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Speaking late Tuesday in Sioux Center, Iowa, Cruz laughed off questions about Trump’s comment, saying he would let his campaign’s “Happy Days” tweet speak for itself.

When pressed, Cruz turned it back to the media, saying the focus should be on substantive issues.

“And one of the things that the media loves to do is gaze at their navels for hours on end by a tweet from Donald Trump or from me or from anybody else. Who cares?” he said. When asked why he would tweet a video clip, he said: “Why do it? Because the best way to respond to this kind of attack is to laugh it off and move on to the issues that matter.”

Despite this, Cruz maintains he still likes Trump and doesn’t intend to throw insults.

The Constitution requires a president to be a “natural-born citizen.” Anyone born to a U.S. citizen is granted citizenship under U.S. law, regardless of where the birth takes place, as long as the citizen parent has resided in the United States or its territories for a certain period of time. At the time of Cruz’s birth, the required period was at least 10 years, including five years after the age of 14.

Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born in Calgary in 1970; his father was born in Cuba. Cruz has long said that because his mother is a citizen by birth, he is one as well and fits under the definition of a natural-born citizen. Since his election to the Senate, Cruz has released his birth certificate and renounced his Canadian citizenship.

Legal scholars agree that Cruz meets the Constitution’s natural-born citizenship requirement, though it is untested in the courts.

Several previous presidential candidates have run for office with similar backgrounds, such as Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 Republican nominee, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone to U.S. citizens.

In the interview, Trump alluded to an ongoing lawsuit in Vermont, where a man is trying to keep three Republican presidential candidates, including Cruz, off the ballot. According to the Rutland Herald, the lawsuit names state officials as defendants.

Trump has long flirted with “birtherism,” questioning Obama’s love of country and legal claim to the presidency. He supported efforts to investigate Obama’s birth in Hawaii and often suggested that the president was born outside the country.

Trump’s crusade reached its zenith in 2011, when Obama felt obliged to publicly release his long-form birth certificate. The president then mocked Trump over the issue at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year. Since then, Trump has quieted his speculation about Obama’s birth, while still declining to accept Obama’s legitimacy as president.

Katie Zezima in Sioux Center, Iowa, contributed to this report.",REAL
"Syrian President Bashar Assad says that his government has received information about airstrikes carried out by a U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State terror group, but has denied any direct coordination between the parties.

Assad made the claims in an interview with the BBC that was broadcast Tuesday. He said that messages about the airstrikes were conveyed to Damascus by third parties, including the Iraqi government.

""Sometimes they convey [a] message, [a] general message, but there's nothing tactical,"" Assad said. ""There is no dialogue. There's, let's say, information, but not dialogue.""

Many members of the coalition, which includes four Arab countries, have urged Assad to relinquish his position since the beginning of Syria's bloody civil war in 2011. However, Syria's ruler has clung grimly to power despite heavy fighting that has caused the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people.

Now, coalition jets share the skies with Assad's own air force, which also targets the terror group, commonly known as ISIS. However, Assad told the BBC that he would not formally join the coalition, which includes Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

""No, definitely we cannot and we don't have the will and we don't want, for one simple reason -- because we cannot be in an alliance with countries which support terrorism,"" Assad said, in an apparent reference to the moderate Syrian rebels, which are supported by the United States. Assad also said that he would refuse to discuss action against ISIS with U.S. officials because, he said, ""they don't talk to anyone, unless he's a puppet.

""And they easily trample over international law, which is about our sovereignty now, so they don't talk to us, we don't talk to them.""

Assad also dismissed efforts to arm and train a force of moderate rebels to fight ISIS on the ground in Syria as a ""pipe dream.""

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the program to arm and train Syrian rebels, run by the CIA, had been beset by issues, including weapons shipments that were between 5 and 20 percent of what was requested by rebel commanders.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates launched airstrikes Tuesday against ISIS from an air base in Jordan, marking its return to combat operations against the militants after halting the strikes late last year.

The Gulf federation's official WAM news agency quoted the General Command of the UAE Armed Forces as saying that Emirati F-16s carried out a series of strikes Tuesday morning.

The fighters returned safely back to base after striking their targets, the statement said. It did not elaborate, nor did it say whether the strikes happened in Syria or Iraq. The militants hold roughly a third of each country in a self-declared caliphate.

American officials say the Emirates halted airstrikes in December after a Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, was captured when his plane crashed behind enemy lines. Al-Kaseasbeh was later burned alive by the militants.

The Emirates had not commented on the suspension, and Tuesday's statement was the first confirmation it had restarted combat operations.

There was also some good news from the region Monday, as coalition officials said that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters had seized three bridgeheads on the west bank of the Tigris River from ISIS fighters north of Mosul. The attack was supported by four coalition airstrikes that had provided close air support.

""This most recent Peshmerga operation is yet another example of how Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] can be defeated militarily using a combination of well-led and capable ground forces,” said Lt. Gen. James Terry, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve.

However, a senior U.S. official told Fox News that any campaign to retake Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, from ISIS was not ""weeks away"", contradicting statements made over the weekend by Gen. John Allen, President Obama's special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition.

""We don’t want this to be a fair fight, we need to build up the Iraq military first,"" the official said.

Elsewhere, Reuters reported, citing Syrian activist groups, that ISIS had withdrawn some of its fighters and equipment from areas around the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo, a hotbed of anti-Assad feeling. The U.K.-Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that ISIS had redeployed some of its forces to do battle against Kurdish fighters and mainstream rebels further east, but had not completely withdrawn from the area.

The Observatory estimates that approximately 70 ISIS fighters have been killed in an escalation of coalition airstrikes since the group released video last week of a Jordanian pilot being burned alive.",REAL
"Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:29 UTC The United States has called for a special meeting with Russia over alleged violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty - a landmark Cold War-era agreement. Washington wants the Special Verification Commission (SVC) to discuss the problems related to the treaty's compliance . The event is expected to take place in mid-November. The INF set up the Special Verification Commission as a way to deal with disputes surrounding the treaty. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan can also attend the meeting because they housed intermediate range missiles before the disintegration of the Soviet Union and remain parties to the treaty. No SVC meeting has been convened since 2003. Russia welcomes the United States' offer. «We have responded positively», said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of Foreign Ministry's Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department. The treaty, which bans testing, producing, and possessing ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 to 5,500 kilometers, eliminated an entire class of missiles from Europe, and set up an extensive system of verification and compliance. Two years ago, the United States first asserted that Russia was in violation of the treaty , by developing a missile system that fell within the INF prohibitions. Last year, Rose Gottemoeller, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said that Russia risked provoking «military and economic countermeasures» if it continued to stonewall the INF issue. The US has not released any specifics about which exactly Russian missile is the source of the violation. It should be noted that if Washington cannot present compelling evidence of the Russian non-compliance, the United States could be seen by the world as the party that killed the INF Treaty . The only thing the State Department has said is that an unspecified Russian ground-launched cruise missile breaches the agreement. The issue has been in focus of US media outlets recently. For instance, an article published by The New York Times on October 19 said « Russia appears to be moving ahead with a program to produce a ground-launched cruise missile». According to the article, «the concern goes beyond those raised by the United States in July 2014, when the Obama administration said that Russia had violated the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces». On the very same day, The Wall Street Journal chimed in saying «The US is escalating a dispute with Russia over its accusations that Moscow possesses banned missile technology» . On October 17, two top House Republican chairmen - House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (Texas) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (Calif.) - wrote a letter to the US president saying «It has become apparent to us that the situation regarding Russia's violation has worsened, and Russia is now in material breach of the treaty» . Russia, in turn, has accused the US of violating the pact. According to Russia's officials, the Aegis Ashore missile defense system that the US has activated in Romania and plans to install in Poland represents a violation of the treaty. Aegis Ashore uses the naval Mk-41 launching system, which is capable of firing long-range cruise missile. This is a blatant violation of the INF Treaty provisions. The treaty bans launchers capable of firing intermediate range missiles. Mk-41s deployed in Europe may launch short and intermediate range cruise missiles deep into Russian territory . A US intermediate range weapon launched from Romania or Poland would require only a short flight time to reach beyond the Urals. Russia has also said that American armed drones violate the treaty. The US plans to arm tactical aviation in Europe with modernized B61-12 guided warheads will virtually nullify all the benefits of the INF Treaty from the point of view of Russia's security. The aircraft could fly from bases in Lithuania, Estonia and Poland to Russia's largest cities in 15-20 minutes - not that much longer than the flight time of the missiles scuttled by the INF treaty. If the US really wants the talks to produce a positive result, all these concerns should be part of the agenda. The SVC meeting will take place against the background of Russia's withdrawal from the plutonium disposal deal with the US because of Washington's non-compliance , recent movement of nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad , rising tensions over NATO's ground forces to deploy near Russian borders in 2017, US withdrawal from the agreement over Syria and apparent disintegration of arms control regime. Only political unity among the major global powers can reverse the disintegration process. Non-compliance, technical or material, is not the only problem the INF faces. Russia and the US adherence to the treaty's provisions does not prevent other countries from efforts to acquire ground-based intermediate range nuclear capability. The treaty should become multilateral. Russia and the US could cooperate in an effort to reach this goal with the help of the United Nations. It may be kind of forgotten today as so many things have happened since then, but in October 2007 Russia and the United States issued a joint statement to call on all countries to join a global INF Treaty addressing the First Committee (Disarmament and International Security) of the UN General Assembly. Setting the existing differences aside, the parties could revive the process in an effort to involve other states. The SVC meeting may become a venue for addressing other issues related to arms control. The concerns are there. Candid talk is the best way to address the burning problems of mutual interest. The US has demonstratively refused to discuss the host of problems related to the ballistic missile defense in Europe. This stance is erroneous. The US should change its approach to the problem. The two great powers do need a venue for arms control dialogue. The reached agreement to restart contacts within the framework of SVC against the background of US presidential election gives hope that the tide may gradually turn. Comment: As usual, the U.S. blames Russia for what the U.S. is doing. And as usual, they provide no evidence or argumentation. They can't even say which Russian ""missile"" violates the treaty! Thankfully, these talks will give Russia the opportunity of bringing up the issue of the U.S.'s very real violation of the INF treaty.",FAKE
"Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review, and a former CNN producer and correspondent. Follow her @FridaGhitis . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Hillary Clinton roared to a clear victory in the Iowa town hall Monday night , coming across as energetic, articulate, knowledgeable and experienced. I never thought I'd find myself commenting on the clothing choices of female political candidates (men have almost no choices to make) but in this case, Clinton's red top underscored her fiery presentation. For once, the men may have wished they had worn red jackets!

There was, however, a downside for Clinton in her triumph -- the once seemingly inevitable Democratic nominee opted to tie herself ever more closely to President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Indeed, come the general election, Clinton's full-throated defense of the controversial Iran deal and other foreign policy choices will make it that much harder to distance herself from the broader historic catastrophe of the unraveling of the Middle East that has unfolded during Obama's watch.

Still, with a surging challenge from the left in the form of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton may have felt she had no choice but to embrace Obama's legacy more closely in an effort to earn the vote of party activists and other committed Democrats. The polls show Democrats, by massive majorities , have backed Obama's performance throughout his presidency. To secure the nomination, then, Clinton may need to become Obama's candidate, even if in the fall campaign she faces a general public among which less than half the voters are satisfied with the current administration.

Fortunately for Clinton, the task of drumming up Democratic support by aligning herself with the President was made easier just hours before the town hall began when Obama gave an interview that sounded close to an endorsement, ""[The] one thing everybody understands is that this job right here, you don't have the luxury of just focusing on one thing,"" the President said, in what sounded like a dig at Sanders, who has made the fight against income inequality the focus of his campaign.

Sanders, of course, showed why he has excited so many voters. The event format was not designed to produce blockbuster ratings by creating clashes between the candidates. Instead, it looked like a series of job interviews for the presidency; a fitting format for Iowa's voters, who take their democratic responsibilities very seriously.

In Sanders they, and viewers at home, saw a man who displays a singular level of unrehearsed honesty and a clear commitment to fighting against a wrong that troubles him (as it undoubtedly does many Americans). As Sanders reminded everyone, in the aftermath of the multibillion dollar bank bailouts that followed the subprime lending and the widespread pain of the Great Recession, it is nothing short of infuriating that the people who created the mess received millions of dollars in bonuses. This even as life became harder for many Americans and as inequalities continued to grow.

Sanders declared ""we need a political revolution."" And, when asked to explain what it means to be a democratic socialist -- a label not normally embraced by voters in the world's most successful capitalist economy -- Sanders did a convincing job of explaining that democratic socialism means ""economic rights, the right to economic security, should exist in the United States of America,"" adding that ""it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1% in this country own almost 90% -- almost-- own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%.""

When questioned about his lack of foreign policy experienced compared with Clinton, Sanders pointed to his vote against the war in Iraq. On the question of how the next president could get anything done in the current climate of partisanship, Sanders said his track record in government proves he can get legislation approved. But it was difficult not to notice that Clinton offered a more extensive explanation about why her foreign policy expertise mattered, explaining how results comes down to relationships, and adding that she knows how to find common ground and build ties.

The time in the spotlight for the third Democrat in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, amounted to little more than a break between the two halves of the main event. O'Malley may be hoping that the complicated rules of the Iowa caucuses will produce a miracle for his campaign, but it was difficult to see what he offers that is more compelling than the two alternatives. He certainly tried to look the part, even taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves in a moment that seemed right out of an old ""West Wing"" episode -- clearly rehearsed and by now something of cliché.

Unfortunately for the governor, the more ""mature"" candidates offered plenty of dynamism of their own, even if it came packaged under more wrinkles.",REAL
"When Friday began, there were 14 states where same-sex couples still could not legally marry. By the afternoon — after a confusing day of orders and counter-orders by governors, attorneys general and county clerks — couples had married in all of them but one.

The holdout was Louisiana. There, Attorney General James D. “Buddy” Caldwell (R) condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, as “federal government intrusion into what should be a state issue.”

What’s more, Caldwell said, he had read the text of the decision. And he’d found no specific line saying that Louisiana had to obey it.

“Therefore, there is not yet a legal requirement for officials to issue marriage licenses or perform marriages for same-sex couples in Louisiana,” he said in a statement. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who announced Wednesday that he is running for president, criticized the justices’ decision but said his state will comply with it once an appeals court officially gives the order.

Across the country, some conservatives called for “resistance” to the high court’s ruling, which they said tramples on the Bible and the Constitution’s protections of states’ rights.

[The GOP candidates are split into two fields over gay marriage]

In most places, that didn’t happen Friday. But in several states, conservative officials did try to delay or block the implementation of the decision.

In addition to Louisiana, there was Mississippi, which blocked almost all same-sex marriages, saying it needed a lower court’s permission to proceed. A few same-sex couples in Mississippi did get married in the window between the Supreme Court’s ruling and the state’s order to stop.

In Alabama, two officials announced another method of resistance: If they couldn’t stop same-sex marriage, they would stop marriage itself. They said they would no longer issue marriage licenses to anyone, gay or straight, ever again.

“I will not be doing any more ceremonies,” said Fred Hamic (R), the elected probate judge in rural Geneva County. The other was Wes Allen (R), the probate judge in Pike County. Both said that state law doesn’t require their counties to issue marriage licenses at all. If people want to wed, they can go to another county.

“If you read your Bible, sir, then you know the logic. The Bible says a man laying with a man or a woman laying with a woman is an abomination to God,” Hamic said. “I am not mixing religion with government, but that’s my feelings on it.”

And then there was Texas, where confusion reigned.

Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) had warned county clerks not to issue same-sex marriage licenses until he could give them orders.

Then the decision came.

He denounced the ruling in general terms but never told clerks how, or whether, to implement it. That left county officials on their own.

At the Williamson County clerk’s office in Georgetown, just north of Austin, officials said they were not issuing same-sex marriage licenses Friday, pending a review of the justices’ decision by county officials.

“We’re good lawyers, we have to read the whole thing and then issue guidelines,” said Brandon Dakroub, first assistant county attorney. The forms would have to be updated, for one thing: The old ones are meant for one man and one woman.

In the meantime, officials had posted a sign in the hallways, telling same-sex couples what to do if they couldn’t wait. “Bexar, Travis and Dallas [counties] are issuing if you cannot wait for our software changes,” the sign said.

That was true: Clerks in more liberal, urban Texas counties had begun issuing licenses anyway, without waiting for guidance from the state capital. But that wasn’t always easy. In Harris County, which includes Houston, the county attorney actually ordered the county clerk to begin issuing them. But the clerk refused.

“We were told if we use the wrong form it will be null and void,” a deputy clerk told the Houston Chronicle. Later in the afternoon, Harris County began issuing same-sex marriage licenses after all.

Adding to the confusion in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a memo that required state agencies to respect the “sincere religious beliefs” of people who don’t agree with same-sex marriage. But his memo didn’t say anything about when or how same-sex couples could get married.

Texas state Rep. Cecil Bell Jr. (R) — a leading voice of resistance to same-sex marriage — said he hoped the state’s leaders would try to stop the implementation of the ruling.

Somebody would sue, he said.

But a lawsuit would take time. And, Bell said, time is their best hope now.

“Hopefully it takes long enough to where we have . . . a situation where the [Supreme] Court changes,” because a Republican president appoints new justices who see same-sex marriage differently, he said.

In the remaining states that had not permitted same-sex marriage — Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee — state officials said they will carry out the court’s ruling.

“Recognizing that there are strong feelings on both sides, it is important for everyone to respect the judicial process and the decision today from the U.S. Supreme Court,” Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) said in a statement. The possibility of a backlash to Friday’s ruling was anticipated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In a dissent, he said that same-sex marriage already had a lot of political momentum — but that the court’s decision could short-circuit that. “Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage,” he wrote.

[The Fix: The Supreme Court did Republicans a favor]

Some conservatives — mainly without political power themselves — said that the only correct response was to resist the decision.

“I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch,” said former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R), who is running for president. “We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat.”

Huckabee did not say what, exactly, he meant by “resist.” In Arkansas, at least one county began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Friday.

In other cases, the call was for a kind of second-order resistance. Private citizens couldn’t stop the marriages, perhaps, but they could refuse to bake wedding cakes or provide services for receptions.

Or leaders of larger institutions could risk their bottom lines by refusing to treat same-sex unions like other marriages.

Rick Scarborough, the leader of a Texas-based group that gathered 55,000 signatures to “defend” marriage, said that, for instance, a Christian school could fire an employee for being married to another man.

“That’s what we mean by civilly disobeying. We’re not going to change our practice or our pattern to fit the whims of the Supreme Court,” he said. “If you sue us, we’ll face the lawsuits, and we’ll continue until bankruptcy . . . or jail time, if required.”

Scarborough is a minister, but he doesn’t have a church of his own to put on the line. Still, he’s encouraging others to do so, reminding them of a song about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego — Old Testament figures who were cast into a furnace because they would not renounce God.

“The song we teach our kids is, ‘They wouldn’t bend, they wouldn’t bow, they wouldn’t burn,’ ” he said. In this fight, Scarborough said, Christians may not be that fortunate: “We are not going to bend, we are not going to bow. If necessary, we are going to burn.”

But Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said the church should not seek legal confrontations — but rather should focus on a spiritual message, describing the value of heterosexual marriage.

“If the government were to force Christian churches . . . to perform same-sex marriages, then yes, we couldn’t do that,” Moore said in a conference call with reporters. “That does not mean, though, that . . . we can’t obey laws, including bad laws, that we don’t agree with.”

Bishop Joe S. Vasquez of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Austin, the largest diocese in Texas, counseled a similar message.

“This causes confusion among those who are faithful to the Gospel and erodes rights of persons in each state,” he said, adding that “Jesus taught that, from the beginning, marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman.”

“Regardless of the court’s decision,” he said, “the nature of the human person and marriage remains unchanged and unchangeable.”",REAL
"Some of the rhetoric on the left about the awful shootings at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado is troubling.

 

 Some of the rhetoric on the right after such cases has also been troubling.

 

 I say this to pundits and politicians after each tragedy: Don’t demonize the other side because some crazy guy goes on a shooting spree. But it’s a temptation that many are unable to resist.

 

 Words matter, of course, and rhetoric can be incendiary. But it’s still unfair to draw a link between media and political debate and some violent sociopath who doesn’t value human life.

 

 Inevitably, we’re left with a wave of finger-pointing over which party is “politicizing” the situation, which unfortunately diverts attention from the victims.

 

 It didn’t take long after Friday’s shooting in Colorado Springs, which killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others. Democrats rushed to put out statements, and Republican presidential candidates were mostly silent.

 

 Hillary Clinton, after a supportive “we #StandWithPP” tweet, said: “We should be supporting Planned Parenthood, not attacking it…And it is way past time to protect women’s health and respect women’s rights, not use them as political footballs.”

 

 President Obama, as he has after other mass shootings, turned to gun control, saying that if we truly care about this, “we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”

 

 Both statements could be called “political,” but were relatively restrained in tone.

 

 I get that the GOP candidates are staunchly opposed to abortion and have been sharply critical of Planned Parenthood, especially after the deeply disturbing videos in which staffers spoke cavalierly about the harvesting of fetal organs (which prompted an apology from the group’s president and a change in its practice).

 

 But three people--including an Iraq war veteran, a mother of two--are dead because they were at a clinic that provides a legal service.

 

 Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich put out statements of sympathy for the victims in the 36 hours after the attack. Would the others have acted differently if the police officer had been murdered at a Starbucks instead?

 

 Still, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president, Dawn Laguens, ratcheted things up significantly by declaring “it is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create. Even when the gunman was still inside of our health center, politicians who have long opposed safe and legal abortion were on television pushing their campaign to defund Planned Parenthood.”

 

 Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, said those opposed to abortion ""have ignited a firestorm of hate"" and ""knew there could be these types of consequences."" So the murders are ""not a huge surprise,"" she told the Washington Post.

 

 Sorry, but linking the actions of a mentally disturbed gunman to the “toxic environment” that Republicans “helped create” is the old blood-on-the-hands argument. So is ""firestorm of hate"" language. Opponents of abortion and critics of Planned Parenthood are in no way responsible for this terrible crime.

 

 On “Fox News Sunday,” Carly Fiorina reiterated her opposition to Planned Parenthood and said while the attack was ""obviously a tragedy,"" “anyone who tries to link this terrible tragedy to anyone that oppose abortion or opposes the sale of body parts” is engaging in “typical left-wing tactics.”

 

 Mike Huckabee, on CNN, called the attack “domestic terrorism” that is “absolutely abominable, especially to those of us in the pro-life movement because there’s nothing about any of us that would condone or any way look the other way at something like this.” He then likened the murders to what goes on inside Planned Parenthood clinics, “where many millions of babies die.”

 

 Cruz denounced ""some vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life…The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that.""

 

 But sometimes the guilt-by-association allegations fly the other way.

 

 When two Ferguson police officers were shot in March, Front Page magazine ran this headline: “Obama and the Media Have the Blood of Cops on Their Hands.”

 

 When a sheriff’s deputy was killed in Houston in August, Cruz said: “Cops across this country are feeling the assault. They're feeling the assault from the president, from the top on down, as we see — whether it’s in Ferguson or Baltimore, the response from senior officials, the president or the attorney general, is to vilify law enforcement.”

 

 I understand that passions run high in these life and death cases. But partisan blame-shifting doesn’t help the situation and simply becomes one more political brawl in the wake of senseless violence.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of ""MediaBuzz"" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.",REAL
"We are just one week away from the Iowa Caucuses. The presumed front runner last year at this time? Jeb Bush. Or rather “Jeb!” as his campaign has dubbed him, hoping to add a little excitement to the mix (and possibly to underplay his famous last name.)

But after one year of failing to rev up voter enthusiasm, is it time for Jeb to pack up his attack ads and go home?

Not only are his poll numbers far from where his supporters thought they would be by now, Jeb is also acting as spoiler, destroying the candidate most likely to beat Hillary Clinton. In doing so, it appears his nasty campaign against Marco Rubio has wrecked his own chances. In clobbering his popular rival and one-time mentee, Bush has shown himself either incapable of bucking the operatives running his Super PAC, or full of baloney.

After eight years of Barack Obama, the last thing this country needs is another weak-kneed leader. Or a hypocrite.

For months, Jeb Bush publicly agonized over whether he should run for president.  Bush worried that he would be forced into the political gutter, claiming that he would only run if his campaign could focus “on the issues.” He was eager to lay out his prescriptions for solving the country’s ills, to push education and tax reform, for instance, but not keen to engage in a cage match with the other contestants.  He wanted to run “joyfully” because he thought the country needed a candidate who would “lift the country’s spirits.”

The head of Bush’s Super PAC apparently sees the campaign differently. Since Right to Rise (R2R) has raised ten times the money brought in by the campaign, it’s easy to imagine who’s calling the shots. Mike Murphy, according to some, is on a personal vendetta against Marco Rubio, whom Bush loyalists consider disloyal for having entered the race. As a result, R2R has spent an astonishing $20 million on ads attacking the Florida Senator – about one third of the Super PAC’s ad spending to date, and more than the group has spent undermining any other candidate.

Some of the ads target Rubio’s attendance record in the Senate, and his numerous missed votes. Some paint him a flip-flopper, changing positions with the shifting political winds. And then there was a cheesy ad mocking Rubio’s boots, of all things, which surely was another rung down into the gutter. (In fairness, the New York Times ran no less than four pieces on Rubio’s boots.)

That poke was, as Rob Garver described it in The Fiscal Times, supposed to be funny but instead came across as “awkward and uncomfortable, like a Dad joke told in a car full of teenagers.”

Has the assault on Rubio helped Bush? Certainly not in Iowa, where R2R has spent $8.5 million blasting Rubio. In that state, Bush is languishing in fifth place with only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 14 percent going to Rubio and 37 percent to Trump. In more moderate New Hampshire, a state where the Bush-Rubio rivalry is critical to both campaigns, the Bush Super PAC has spent $7.5 million attacking Rubio.

The gap between Bush and Rubio has narrowed, but most polls show Marco leading by a few points. The ads appear to have hurt Rubio, who was comfortably in second place in early January, with 14 percent of the vote. But, they haven’t helped Bush, who has been stuck since the beginning of the year at 8 percent.

Perhaps more important, the attack ads haven’t helped Bush nationally. Back in September the former Florida governor claimed an almost 10 percent support amongst GOP primary voters; now he’s under 5 percent. In terms of how voters see Bush, the news is not good. Some 54 percent have an unfavorable view of Jeb compared to 32 percent who see him more kindly.

The gap has widened in recent months. Ditto for Marco Rubio, who during most of the past year had a net favorable rating; he is now upside down, with the unfavorable/favorable ratio at 41/36.

Jeb Bush has disappointed followers who expected him to run as he had promised, on solving the nation’s issues. As a successful governor of a successful state, Bush brings gravitas and stature to the race. He has also disappointed those who expected Bush’s ability to raise huge early money to put him and keep him out front; Donald Trump upended those expectations, and every other aspect of the race.

Jeb has also disappointed those who expected him to be a better campaigner. After all, he has run for office successfully in the past; people wonder now, how did he win?

The most likely answer is that he won by being himself, not the puppet of his Super PAC. Though there is supposed to be clear distance between the campaign and R2R, Murphy’s influence is undoubted. Murphy and Bush have worked together on campaigns since 1997; Murphy claimed in a Bloomberg interview, “I understand what Jeb wants, I understand what kind of campaign he wants…”  So, was Bush’s promise of a “joyous” campaign utter bunk, or has he been hijacked by his operatives?

The most cringe-worthy moment of Jeb’s campaign came during the CNBC debate, when he challenged Rubio over missed votes. The moderator had already raised the issue and Rubio had successfully parried it, making Bush’s attack superfluous and awkward. Jeb had clearly been instructed to go after Rubio, and he did as he was told.

That was not Bush’s only awkward campaign moment. Like Hillary Clinton chastising the banks that pay her so well, the more inauthentic Jeb becomes, the more likely he is to flop.  Perhaps that’s why he can barely deliver a sentence that doesn’t include a verbal hitch. In his head, he is thinking one thing, but his directors have him saying another.

Jeb could come back, but to do so he has to campaign as himself – showing voters the serious but also personable candidate they see in small gatherings.

Take back control of the campaign, ditch the nastiness, and he might have a shot.

The sooner the better.

Liz Peek is a writer who contributes frequently to FoxNews.com. She is a financial columnist who also writes for The Fiscal Times. For more visit LizPeek.com. Follow her on Twitter@LizPeek.",REAL
"Washington The Democratic candidates for president gathered in Des Moines, Iowa, for their second debate Saturday, and CNN's Reality Check team spent the night putting their statements and assertions to the test.

The team of reporters, researchers and editors across CNN selected key statements and rated them: True; Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It's Complicated.

Previous CNN Reality Check coverage of the Democratic and Republican candidates can be found here . This story will be updated throughout the night.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threw her support behind a $12 hourly minimum wage at Saturday's debate. That's lower than the $15 an hour minimum backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, as well many progressive activists nationwide.

Clinton defended her stance, saying: ""If you go to $12, it would be the highest historical average we've ever had."" That's the ""smartest"" way to move forward, she added.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, ""When you talk about the long-term consequences of war, let's talk about the men and women who came home from war, the 500,000 who came home with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.""

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said, ""The Muslim nations in the region -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan -- all of these nations, they're going to have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground. They are going to have to take on ISIS. ... Those Muslim countries are going to have to lead the effort. They are not doing it now.""

Launched in September 2014, the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS consists of more than 60 coalition partners, including more than a dozen Muslim-majority countries. All of the countries Sanders mentioned are part of that coalition -- with the exception of Iran, which has been countering ISIS in separate initiatives that include training, advising, and supporting Iraqi and Syrian forces fighting ISIS.

The actual contributions of each member of the U.S.-led coalition vary widely. As of October 2014, Saudi Arabia's contribution consisted of warplanes and training for Syrian rebels fighting ISIS. They also donated $500 million to UN humanitarian efforts in Iraq. Turkey has allowed foreign troops to launch attacks against ISIS from within its borders, and in July, began launching its own airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. Jordan launched airstrikes against ISIS early in the campaign, but later suspended its participation when one of its aircraft went down in Syria and one of its pilots was taken hostage. Jordanian strikes resumed after ISIS announced it had killed the Jordanian pilot.

Few of the coalition's members have contributed active ground troops. In 2014, Egypt sent forces to Libya to bomb ISIS positions there. In late October, the United States authorized the deployment of about 50 special operations forces to northern Syria to fight ISIS. The Obama administration is also considering a special forces task force to fight ISIS in Iraq.

In June of 2014, Iraqi officials said that Iran had sent about 500 Revolutionary Guard troops to fight alongside Iraqi troops against ISIS. The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied this, but Iran's president said Iran was prepared to help advise Iraq if asked.

Sanders is correct that, at present, the primary coalition fighting ISIS is led by the United States. But several of the Muslim countries in the coalition have lost soldiers and civilians in the battle against ISIS.

Former Gov. Martin O'Malley said, ""The truth of the matter is net immigration from Mexico last year was zero."" He then challenged viewers to fact-check him, and we couldn't resist.

Additionally, the actual number of Mexicans living in the United States consistently declined throughout 2014. The U.S. Border Patrol also reported that in the 2014 fiscal year, the number of Mexicans apprehended along the border decreased 14% when compared to the 2013 fiscal year.

The information we have suggests that the net immigration rate is negative -- which is actually not zero -- but it is close, and probably still supports O'Malley's point.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley often goes back to his record as governor to explain how he would best shepherd the nation's economy in the White House. But he went a step further than he typically does during Saturday night's debate and took credit for Maryland's high median incomes.

O'Malley was answering a question of how precisely he would freeze college tuition around the nation and whether his blueprint from Maryland would work across the U.S.

""The blueprint in Maryland that we followed is we raised the sales tax by a penny and made our public schools the best public schools in America for five years in a row with that investment. And yes, we did ask everyone -- the top 14% of earners in our state -- to pay more in their income tax and we were the only state to go four years in a row without a penny's increase to college tuitions,"" O'Malley said.

The answer, nationwide, is paying for priorities by taxing capital gains income like normal income, he said.

""I believe capital gains, for the most part, should be taxed the same way we tax income from hard work, sweat and toil,"" O'Malley said. ""And if we do those things, we can be a country that actually can afford debt-free college again.""

But in the exchange he also took credit for the state's median income level -- long the highest in the nation.

""So while other candidates will talk about the things they would like to do, I actually got these things they would like to do. I actually got these things done in a state that defended not only a AAA bond rating, but the highest median income in America,"" O'Malley said.

There's no question that Marylanders have done, on average, much better than those in other states since the recession. It's actually had the highest median income every year since 2006, when the median income was $65,144, to last year, when it was $73,971.

In his answer, O'Malley did not explain how his economic plan kept high-wage jobs in Maryland.

But President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush may be better able to make that claim because of the large share of federal employees in Maryland. A ""Governing"" magazine analysis of federal employment statistics from 2013 determined that Maryland had the largest share of federal workers for the total workforce of any state, something that the governor has nothing to do with.

Maryland had 145,300 people working for the government, equal to 5.5% of the state's total non-farm employment. Virginia had more federal employees -- 172,500 -- but they only accounted for 4.6% of the total state employment.

And a Washington Post review of federal salaries found that federal workers do quite well compared to many other industries -- earning an average salary of $78,500 as of 2012.",REAL